by Aer-ki Jyr
“Four, but this is just the tip of the iceberg. Most of the outpost is below our feet.”
Greg and the others exchanged glances. “How much more?”
“I’ll show you,” he said, gesturing off to their left and leading them to a large freight elevator the size of a tennis court. Once they were all inside the perimeter Heston walked over to the control platform and triggered their descent.
The large section of floor detached and sunk below, exposing another huge room broken up only by support struts. The ceiling was flat, unlike the dome, but it still rode several stories above the floor. The adepts remained silent until the elevator dropped down through the floor again, exposing a third gigantic chamber.
“How many levels are there?” Greg asked.
“Sixteen.”
Leo whistled appreciatively.
“All the same size?”
“Save for the bottom three, which get progressively smaller,” he said as they passed down into the fourth level.
“Can you stop here?” Roger asked.
Heston hit a switch and the elevator leveled out even with the floor.
“Give us a moment?” he asked, pointing off into the massive chamber.
“Sure,” Heston said, waiting at the controls.
The four adepts walked off into the emptiness, noticing several other elevator shafts around the perimeter, until they were out of earshot.
“I think this could work for us,” Greg said immediately. “It’s a bit of a delay getting here, but there’s plenty of room to build whatever we need.”
“And maybe they could even connect our private lines so we could have a straight shot here,” Leo added. “And I’m pretty sure our pods can travel faster than those cars.”
“They did seem slow,” Lens agreed. “But all this isn’t going to be enough.”
Greg’s eyes narrowed. “He did say there were three others like this.”
“That’s not the point,” Lens argued. “We need to build hardened structures. This dome is designed to protect against the pressure, not attack. The water will protect us to a point, but we’re going to have to bury any structures we build under meters of armor, if not the seafloor itself.”
“Lens is right,” Roger said after a moment of thought. “This facility will work as a transitional training center, but long term we have to be thinking ahead. If we’re going to build a sanctum, it needs to have all the bells and whistles. Until then, we can make use of this facility and the others if adequate transport can be arranged.”
“I see your point,” Greg said. “Does anyone have any idea how long it would take them to build a full blown sanctum?”
“Assuming we even had blueprints made up…several years minimum,” Roger answered.
“Is it worth it to build up this place for only a few years?”
“How big a sanctum are we talking about?” Lens asked.
“Like Paul said, something akin to the Jedi temple.”
“Then it’ll have to be huge, and given that it takes longer to build underwater than it does on the surface, or probably even in space, we could be looking at more than a decade,” Lens laid out for them. “We can’t wait that long for adequate training facilities. Once the second class graduates we’re going to be overcrowded, so I think we need to build here as both an overflow and a trial run for the main sanctum to be built later. There’s a lot of ideas still sitting on the drawing board for lack of room in Atlantis. Let’s explore those before we start deciding what we want to make for keeps in the true sanctum.”
Greg nodded. “Transitional it is then. These rooms are also big enough to begin testing our mech designs, and no one will even know we’re here.”
“Good point,” Roger added.
“What about his water navy?” Leo asked, gesturing to Lens.
Greg exchanged glances with the three of them. “This probably isn’t the only world with water on it. If the V’kit’no’sat can fight underwater we need to learn how as well…if they don’t, then we need to even more so to develop an advantage over them, or at least to give us a place to run to. Problem is, I’m not sure where to start. Will lasers even work underwater?”
Lens shook his head. “Not well. I think the more power we put into them the more it will vaporize the water and refract the beam. They might work at point blank range as cutting tools, but I wouldn’t count on more than that. It’s something we need to look into though.”
“Alright, lasers are out,” Greg said. “Rail guns won’t work in the water at the speeds that make them lethal, so I guess we’re left with missiles?”
“Torpedoes,” Roger corrected. “Sluggish, bulky torpedoes.”
“Which means we need other options,” Greg pointed out, looking to Lens. “Think you’re up to the challenge?”
He smiled. “Always.”
“Water navy it is,” Greg decided, knowing he wouldn’t get any argument from the others. “We can have one of the outposts reconfigured as a naval research base and start learning what does and doesn’t work in the water.”
“Sounds like a plan,” Roger agreed. “Let’s get back to Atlantis and have Davis kick his engineers into overdrive. We’ve got a lot of building to do.”
7
July 24, 2047
Cora felt her balance slipping backwards again, unable to do anything about it strapped inside the mech. In a vain attempt she threw out her arms in front of her, but the initial momentum only pushed her back further. As she fell backwards she brought her knees up to her chest, buckling her legs to diminish the fall, but she still hit hard, jarring her to the bone despite the cushioning springs in her harness.
“Ow,” she said to herself, staring up at the domed ceiling of the underwater outpost through the ribcage of the mech. The high set floodlights had become an all too familiar sight.
Stretching out her legs, and those of the mech, flat to the ground, Cora twisted her hips and brought her right leg up over the left as she pushed off with her right arm, flipping her over onto her side. From there she pulled her right knee up and flipped over onto it, bracing herself with her arms in a low hunch position.
Hanging from inside the protective cradle in the chest of the mech, but otherwise exposed to the open air, Cora maneuvered her arms and legs about, working the mech’s feet back under it and standing up slowly, cautiously. It took her more than two minutes to get back into a standing position, and that choreographed routine had taken her more than a month to learn.
Now fully righted, Cora could see out through the support beams crisscrossing around her and spotted the pair of automated mechs on the other side of the giant room, walking about on slow, predetermined paths. Boris and Dan were taking them through their paces with the onboard computers handling the walking calculations while they did the ‘driving,’ providing data and feedback for the crew of techs working out of a small booth as they constantly upgraded the movement programs, making the awkward machines a bit less stupid each day.
At the moment they were doing better than Cora, but she knew that in the end the computer controlled mechs wouldn’t be good enough in combat against the V’kit’no’sat. They had to be agile and quick, which meant the movements of the machine had to exactly mimic the movements of the pilot, otherwise they really were just drivers and not super-sized warriors.
To make that dream possible, Cora and the other adepts self-assigned to the mech division had painstakingly designed a control system that should have given the pilot the ability to maneuver the mech around with no computer control. They knew as a prototype it would be a work in progress, incredibly crude in the beginning, which they would have to suffer through, but that that struggle would be a necessary prerequisite in creating an adequate system down the road.
The system they created was based on the skill of the pilot rather than the engineering, using her balance for the mech’s balance, requiring Cora to be strapped in at the back, so that her vertical orientation exactly matched the mech’
s. Her arms and legs hung free inside the orb-like cradle, encased in plates and straps that matched the pieces of the mech’s arms and legs. If the machine’s leg got caught on something and pulled backward, the plates around Cora’s leg would similarly be pulled back, though not with enough strength to potentially snap her bones, but enough to give her a crude ‘feel’ for the machine instead of having to rely on vision alone.
Likewise, whenever Cora pushed against the straps and plates, the machine’s servos would activate and move its arms and legs. In theory, that meant she should have been able to learn to walk around in the giant suit that right now looked like a birdcage of machinery with her being the canary inside.
Their first attempt was an utter failure. Neither she nor the others could even take a single step without falling off balance. They quickly realized this was because they hadn’t allowed for the pilot’s hip movements when walking. A Human can lift their leg a couple of inches straight up using only their hips, but the machines fixed legs couldn’t, so they’d had to redesign the mech’s structure not once, twice, or even three times, but a full six revisions, making the machine more Human-like before Cora had finally been able to walk a few steps.
Since then they’d been tweaking the control systems, foot pads, and other small details as she worked to learn the machine, knowing that her own improvement as a pilot was going to be the deciding factor, and given the awkwardness of the controls Cora knew she had a huge learning curve to overcome.
Meanwhile the others worked on parallel research, exploring the possibilities of traditional computer-controlled mechs as seen in many scifi franchises. That wasn’t going well either, but at the moment they were having the greater share of the minimal gains recorded, with a full basic obstacle course completion run to their credit.
That obstacle course was little more than a lot of twists and turns, none of the ramps, inclines, or objects to walk over that had been created for testing. Both groups were having enough trouble just walking in a straight line, so there was no point in throwing anything even mildly challenging at them yet.
Cora had to be constantly vigilant just to keep standing, even with the wide feet of the mech that seemed to almost balance itself. Oddly enough, the mech could stand up fine on its own when ‘parked,’ but when Cora was inside she had a tendency to fall backwards. They figured it was part of the acclimatization process as Cora incorporated the mech’s movements with her own and ‘unlearned’ how to move as a Human.
Even with all the design changes, the mech was incredibly stiff compared to Cora’s body, and the slight, natural balance movements that she made when walking or even standing didn’t translate into the mech, which was why she often tipped over backwards without realizing it until it was too late…which meant for now she was better off moving constantly, even if it was just shifting her feet in place, rather than standing completely still.
So once she got the mech back up into a standing position, yet still slightly bent forward at the waist, she took a step forward, over-twisting her hips to keep the leg’s movement from throwing her off balance. The foot came down hard on the ground, and Cora’s own foot felt like it hit a brick when the plate underneath her heel suddenly stopped moving, simulating the pressure of the ground beneath the mech’s foot.
She pushed forward and shifted balance between legs, then quickly snapped the other forward, all the while keeping slightly bent forward, afraid of falling backwards again.
Her foot came down and she followed it with another step…then another…then another, ending with her arms coming forward and impacting the crushable barricade surrounding one of the dome’s support structures. Using the mech’s arms she leaned against the pads for balance and shuffled her feet, awkwardly turning the mech to the right before staggering off with heavy steps again.
She didn’t make it to the next barricade, falling forward about halfway there. As the floor came rushing up towards her face she jabbed her ‘hands’ down in front of her and caught her fall, then pulled her knees up underneath her and slowly got back to her feet, then walked on until she hit face forward into the next pillar cushion.
Originally, the protective pads around the support pillars hadn’t been designed as walking aids for the mechs, but Cora needed the extra help turning so she was improvising, knowing that each step she took brought her a tiny bit closer to adapting to this frustrating machine, so she wanted to get in as many steps as possible, which meant staying on her feet, so she’d use as many crutches as were available…in this case meaning the support pillars in the otherwise empty section of the room.
Off on the other side of the testing yard Dan’s backwards legged mech walked forward quickly and tried to turn through a wide arc at speed…resulting in the computer controlled steps dumping the top-heavy machine over mid turn. It hit hard and skidded several meters, eliciting a small laugh from Cora. At least she wasn’t the only one falling today.
After three hours of the mech step workout Cora was thoroughly sore, and knew she needed at least a short secondary workout to mitigate the damage before she got to her core workouts the next morning, so after traveling back to Atlantis along with a carful of miners she hit the track and got 3 miles of running in, having to relearn her own steps the first couple laps as her mind was still in mech mode.
After her body smoothed out she clipped off her laps at 95 seconds each without using a pacing light. Cora watched her splits but didn’t have to make many adjustments, her body being very familiar with the stride length and cadence required, giving her a quick, soothing run that left her feeling refreshed and hungry, glad to be back in an efficient body rather than the cumbersome mech that needed massive redesign…but she knew that that redesign would come from her gaining experience in the machine and telling the engineers what to change, so she was going to have to tough it out for a while longer.
There were other adepts ready and eager to start learning to pilot the mechs, but until she could get something workable for them to use they were going to have to wait. It was up to her to trailblaze this piece of their military puzzle, even as others frustratedly worked through their own problems, setting up the groundwork for those that would follow.
Cora hoped the second class would appreciate that, though in all honestly they wouldn’t even have a clue. It was still a matter of some discussion amongst the adepts whether or not they would pass the Final Challenge…and what Wilson would do with them if they didn’t. If they did pass, then they’d have to incorporate them into their command structure, which was virtually nonexistent at this point. All of the adepts worked together so well that there was no need for ranks, and they’d been dragging their feet on establishing any, even as the potential graduation date for the newbs was growing close.
Once Cora finished her run she hit the showers and headed over to the cafeteria before coming back to their quarters block, grabbing an ambrosia wafer and crashing in the main lounge along with a few dozen of the others. She grabbed an overly stuffed chair and pulled it up in front of one of the dozens of video screens and pulled up a movie from the hundreds of thousands that Star Force had on file as she checked the daily news updates on a small data pad.
She flipped through the general Star Force updates, noting a festival announcement for next month and a new cruise package available that would take tourists from low Earth orbit out past various pieces of Star Force infrastructure and make a loop around the moon, offering a short stopover for ‘shore leave’ in a small surface resort.
None of that really interested Cora, other than to keep herself in the loop of what the corporate side was up to. After she got through those notices she pulled up the classified reports of all military activities, including progress reports on all divisions, including her own. With their busy schedules, the adepts had almost no knowledge of what everyone else was doing, save for random discussions during downtime. The team leaders tended to stay better informed, but nowadays even they were busy with side projects, so the new
s updates were their primary method of keeping everyone in the loop.
One permanent entry was the training scores of the trainees, which Wilson was letting them monitor now that they were close to graduation and they would have to give them assignments based on their skill sets. Cora had to admit that there were a few promising individuals, but as a group none of their teams were even approaching the score of the 3s, which had been at the bottom of their own rankings.
She was afraid that even if they did pass the Final Challenge, they’d have to spend a lot of time breaking them in, and Cora did not feel like becoming a teacher. The trailblazers helped each other all the time, but all of them were really self-taught, requiring only a nudge in the right direction or some key piece of information and after that they’d be good to go. If that wasn’t the case with the newbs, then there was going to be a ruckus, because she and the others weren’t going to waste time babysitting them…which they’d communicated quite loudly to both Wilson and Davis, who had assured them that wouldn’t be necessary.
Cora flipped away from their scores and ran down the last few new items on the list as the opening credits of the movie ended, then she set the data pad aside and blew out a relaxing breath, closing her eyes for a moment and washing away her worries.
At least they didn’t have to share quarters with them…Davis had acceded to them on that request, so their refuge here, away from the rest of Atlantis, would remain untainted.
8
October 3, 2047
“Ok, you’re good to go.”
“Copy that,” Paul answered the voice piping through the worktable speakers. “Remote linkage just kicked in.”
“Take it easy until you clear the dock. I don’t want the backwash scorching the equipment in the berth.”
“Thrusters at 10%,” Paul said, allaying the yard master’s fears. “Confirm umbilicals have retracted?”
