517 517 More Threats
The five vessels spread out in a wide fan space to gather the maximum amount of data about every system they passed, with the findings relayed both to the Reavers and the passengers aboard Terminus. This was exactly the sort of thing they had hoped to find when they booked their vacation here.
They got to be the first to collect data on inhabited planets that hadn’t been seen by the naked eyes of any outsider in time immemorial, thousands of years at the minimum. They had watched as the Commander of Terminus had met a lost colony that had adapted their genome to a hostile planet, and now they were going to see more forgotten star systems, ending with a battle against aggressive aliens that might have descended from the Giants that they knew at home as a peaceful and tolerant species.
Even if the stay had cost fifty times as much as they had paid, they would have been more than satisfied with this experience. Disregarding the cost, just the exclusivity of the experience put it at the very top of the bucket list of events they could have been privileged to enjoy.
Nico’s voice was narrating the details of random stars and phenomena that they were passing as they raced toward the planet where the humans and the Hunters were fighting against the Narsians, giving Max a surreal feeling, like he was watching a movie of his own exploits, but in real-time and not played back to him.
Instead of dwelling on that, he linked the Command Ship that the Hunters were traveling on to find out where they wanted his troops, who were currently anxiously waiting aboard their Cutters for deployment.
Well, metaphorically.
Realistically, most of them were playing cards or sleeping while they waited for the one-hour notice to sound that would tell them to get prepped and return to their Mecha for an imminent battle.
[Commander, I have excellent news for you.] Nico informed Max just as he had finished the deployment orders.
[Please don’t tell me we need to change the drop sites. I just finished arranging them with the Hunters so we weren’t interfering with each other’s prey.] Max responded.
[No, this is way better than that. The planet we’re headed for is the neutral zone between the Narsians and the Klem territories. We have 48 hours to clear the Narsians before utter chaos descends in the form of a Klem wave ten times anything we have seen attacking human space.]
Max rubbed his temples in an attempt to defeat the headache that he could feel coming on.
[And how exactly is that a good thing?]
[Well, you don’t have to be bored, and you don’t have to intervene on the surface. You can go with the Cutters and the Hunters’ interceptor ships for space battles to deal with the Klem. If my readings are right, this isn’t just a wave of pods. It is an actual attack fleet, like real ships, with living stuff in them.
I would play with you, but the deployment orders you sent out have me dropping with the First Battalion near the Commander of the Hunters forces so I can join her for a mission.]
The leader had been quite adamant about that. Their challenge had ended in a draw, and she was determined to regain her title, as she put it, by defeating Nico in a Narsian hunting challenge. They would be taking their Mecha, and Max had insisted on that point, as he couldn’t take losing Nico again, so the challenge would be the total number of Narsian dead within the first twenty four hours while hunting together.
[Back up a bit. The Klem force has space vessels?]
[With a 92 percent certainty, yes. There is a chance they are giant pods, but the energy signals suggest that they are actually ships that were assembled by sending pods to a moon and having special creatures assemble a vacuum-resistant ship and then stock it with all the needed aspects for life. The sensors detect plant life aboard the largest signals, though it might be a biomass slurry, like they use to grow more pods.]
Many Klem could use an organic toxin or even an electrical charge to attack, and both of those could theoretically work in space just as well as their projectile spikes did, so a Klem ship would be a fearsome force if it actually existed.
Even more disturbingly, if it existed, it likely also contained the ability to send out attack Klem in space, the way that pods were dropped on planets.
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[See, being stuck on the ship sucks. At least you get to go out after the plans are made, and the drones are deployed.] Nico reminded him.
[Your joy isn’t because you found out that new enemies existed, is it? It’s because you finally got a reason to complain about having to lead the drone forces and supply drops, isn’t it?]
[No Comment.]
Max laughed as he ordered the deployment of the drones to assist himself once the rest of the force was on the planet and informed the Hunters that he would be dealing with it as well as he could but that the fleet was an unknown force, which might be well above the capabilities of a single Mecha, even a Titan Class one.
They were just as happy as Nico to hear that and informed him that they would redeploy forces if he needed backup but that their current main force was occupied on the planet, hunting Narsians.
The signals were hard to decipher because of the abundance of small objects and pods, but Max didn’t think they had a ship bigger than a cruiser. The real question was if it was a Cruiser-sized pod or a Cruiser-sized attack Klem in space because the second option was terrifying.