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Chapter 614   A Mayonnaise Jar on Stilts

The beauty of it was that it was a completely analog system; mechanical altimeters would detect when the pod or cargo container reached a set point—usually a hundred meters before impact—and trigger a valve that would allow two binary agents to mix. The resulting chemical formed a foam that expanded, bursting the relatively fragile containment tanks it was mixed in and allowing it to expand to fill whatever space it was in. It had a ridiculously high shock tolerance and would rapidly decay and sublimate into a gas composed primarily of nitrogen, helium, sulfur hexafluoride, and other trace elements.

After verifying the marines’ biometrics, Cerberus mulebots woke to life and grabbed cargo sleds in their teeth before digging in their mechanical paws and dragging the tons of materials that had taken the short journey from orbit with the bots out of the containers on heavy duty runners. Each container held five cargo sleds, and each of those weighed eight tons.

All in all, the cargo that had just come down from the Farsight would be enough to build a reasonably decent sized, semi-permanent research base. And the constructor swarm queens included in the drop set about doing just that as soon as the cargo had been unloaded and consolidated in one stockpile.

Their initial jobs completed, the Cerberus mulebots took up a complex patrol in the jungle surrounding the clearing the lander had come down in, outside the perimeter the marines were guarding.

“Okay, guys, gals, and undecided pals, time to get to work. This base ain’t gonna build itself!” the platoon sergeant announced at the top of his lungs, as platoon sergeants all through history had been wont to do. “By squad, first and third squad fall out of the perimeter and follow the assigned tasks in your HUDs. Four-hour shifts, second shift will be squads two and four. Squad five, continue overwatch on perimeter duty!”

A smattering of scattered acknowledgements followed the sergeant’s orders and the marines began moving like oversized worker bees, unloading this, carrying that, and so on.

“Man, I wish the fat kid was here. He’s got a gravity power and this would be SO much easier with that to help,” a marine grumbled as he picked up a large piece of reactor shielding for the fusion reactor that would power the research base. It was unwieldy to carry and so heavy that it strained even the reinforced musculature of his battle armor.

“Not only is he a brat, but he’s a coward and lazy, to boot. But he’s still valuable to the PTB—do you really expect them to send him down with grunts like us?” another marine grumbled back at the first.

“I saw him practicing once, I think. Or maybe he was just doing some weeb shit with his superpower. He was putting... something... together using it and juggling like fifty pieces at once. I didn’t know whether to be impressed or shit my pants at the thought of what he could do if he really unleashed his ability. Every supe I’ve ever seen is monstrous in some way or another, and our kid is apparently pretty high up in the power pyramid,” the first marine continued.

“I’m pretty sure there’s scarier people than doughboy in the navy. A buddy of mine saw one on a reaper team attached to TF Trappist and... he went white just thinking about it. Apparently the guy can just decide things aren’t allowed to exist anymore and reality does what he says. Our pet supe is downright tame in comparison, like one of those yappy little piss machines that old ladies carry around in their purses. And the guy on the Trappist is a giant hunting mastiff with anger issues.” The marine shuddered as goosebumps popped up all over his body. He was equal parts envious and terrified; he envied the awakeners their powers, but was terrified that they had them.

Especially since they were all so young. He remembered the dumb shit he had done when he was younger, before he’d joined ARES, and couldn’t help but think how much more dangerous a rebellious teenager would be when they could just... wink things out of existence.

The two marines continued their discussion as they lifted, carried, and—gently—put things in various piles to make it easier for the swarms the constructor queens were building to assemble into a base like a giant 3D puzzle. It was tiring and back-breaking work, but their HUDs made it easy, as all they had to do was line their loads up with the silhouettes in their field of view, and once the shape turned from yellow (or whatever other color they had chosen when customizing their displays to fit them) to white.

The cycle of lift-carry-drop-repeat continued as the marines, who felt safe thanks to their “archangel” on overwatch from ten kilometers above them, proceeded from here to there in the clearing, handling the initial grunt work of construction with relative ease. Nôv(el)B\\\\jnn

......

Twenty-four hours later, the initial phase of construction was complete. Each of the constructor swarm queens had assembled their entire swarms and had gotten to work, building what looked very much like an opaque mayonnaise jar on stilts in the very center of the clearing. The “stilts” were deceptively small and were actually each about a meter across; they only looked small because the “mayonnaise jar” they were supporting was so big.

The order came down to evacuate the clearing and take a quick jaunt back up to low orbit, as the fusion reactor the swarms had built was about to come online. And since it was the first time that a reactor had been assembled from parts, rather than printed, nobody knew if it would peacefully generate electricity or go supercritical and turn into a second, brighter star that was much, much closer to Proxima Centauri b’s surface.

But it turned out they had been worried for nothing as the reactor came up to temp, ignited, and settled into producing a steady stream of power that ran through cables strung inside the stilts that supported the reactor and held it above the ground. Those cables split, some of them going to converters that converted the output from electricity to unaspected mana, and others passing through step-down transformers that lowered the voltage to something that regular hardware could handle.

The marines returned to the surface, where they continued hauling cargo around for the constructor swarms to assemble, and soon, the research base had taken shape. Surrounded by a spherical mana shield, the base’s completion marked the moment that research could begin at full speed, instead of the fits and starts it’d been proceeding at while the researchers had been stuck in orbit.