The House of the Reaper has opened its arms to welcome:
Novices Clm1022, Andres919, Frank Contreras, Myrdvang, Roseta Azmair, and Jeff.
Operatives shishus, EternalCosmos, Blank602, Seraquel, Justin Bennett, Melnik5, and Dvalin Prime098.
Their contributions and dedication to our cause will be honored through the Net and through the Stars.
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AN: Apologies for not uploading yesterday. I forgot what day of the week it was and just remembered today when I woke up and saw it said Wednesday on my phone....
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The extraction of the five-ton, armored space-buffalo was a breeze for Marcos's heavy-lifter drones. As a synchronized swarm, these were the exact same specialized drone units Marcos had been controlling and had used to haul massive sections of starship hull and assemble the eighty-meter wind turbines. A single alien water buffalo, no matter how large, was a fraction of their maximum payload capacity.
When the half-dozen units arrived from the city, their powerful miniature thrusters hummed smoothly against the humid atmosphere of the riverbank. Slung beneath them was a massive, reinforced S-Alloy cargo flatbed. Dr. Corven's makeshift tranquilizer, delivered via a specialized, high-velocity pneumatic dart, had been fired by Valerius, which dropped the massive beast within minutes. It lay in the crushed purple mud, its chest heaving with slow, sedated breaths, its shattered hind leg resting at a weird angle.
Securing the animal was the only really brutal part of the process. Mark, Valerius, and the five Vanguard mercenaries waded knee-deep into the muck, hauling heavy-duty carbon-weave tow cables around the beast's mossy dermal plating.
"Valerius, grab that secondary cable and get it under the forelegs," Mark grunted, his boots sinking another two inches into the purple, foul-smelling mud.
The massive Elite stared down at the muck, his usually stoic expression cracking into a grimace of pure disgust. "Commander. I am a genetically engineered instrument of war. My purpose is to dismantle enemy fortifications and break the lines of hostile armies."
"I didn't ask for your resume, Val," Mark said, straining as he heaved the thick carbon-weave cable under the beast's armored neck. "Consider this a tactical pivot. Now grab the damn cable."
Valerius let out a long, suffering sigh, stepping into the mud. It immediately sucked at his armored calves with a wet, squelching sound. "I am currently knee-deep in feces and prehistoric sludge, attempting to lift a sleeping cow."
"Let's call it character building," Mark said, grinning behind his faceplate. "Now lift!"
The physical exertion required to simply roll five tons of dead weight onto the lowered flatbed left the men drenched in sweat, their armor caked in the mixture of mud and shit.
"Alright, take it up," Mark grunted into his comms, stepping back and wiping a smear of the sludge from his visor. "Slow and steady, Marcos. If that flatbed tips and drops this thing from two hundred feet, Corven will have our heads. Or at least attempt to."
"Yeah, yeah. Ascent vector locked and stabilized," Marcos replied casually over the comms. "I am detecting elevated stress levels and a mild spike in cortisol from Valerius's biometric feed. Would you like me to broadcast a motivational sea shanty over your external speakers to assist with the manual labor?"
"Don't you dare, you clanker," Valerius growled, his muscles bulging as he pushed himself out of the deep mud.
"Noted," Marcos said, "Withholding 'The Wellerman' for a more dire emergency. Try to keep up, Mark."
The half-dozen drones didn't even change the pitch of their hum. The tow cables pulled taut, and the flatbed lifted from the riverbank with smooth, effortless mechanical grace. They lifted the sleeping giant into the bruised violet sky without so much as a stutter.
The journey back to the city was a steady, cautious escort. Mark and his detachment followed on foot, their weapons raised, moving through the eight kilometers of dense jungle beneath the low-flying cargo flatbed. By the time the towering, slatted ten-meter walls of the colony came into view, the red dwarf suns had begun their slow descent, casting long, bloody shadows across the basin.
The automated gates of the southern perimeter hissed open, revealing the brightly lit avenues of the city. But they weren't heading for the residential grid. Marcos had directed the drones toward the newly established agricultural sector, nestled safely within the arc of the perimeter's laser turrets.
As the Vanguard detachment cleared the gate, Mark laid his eyes on the preparations. A massive, specialized enclosure had been rapidly printed. It was a wide, open-air pen constructed of solid S-Alloy reinforced beams, standing fifteen feet tall to ensure the beast couldn't simply batter its way out. In the center of the enclosure sat Marcos's newest experimental masterpiece: a scaled-up, heavily modified medical stabilization frame. It was an open, heavy-duty diagnostic bed surrounded by a ring of widened emitter arrays and cellular stimulators, glowing with a soft, ambient blue light.
Waiting impatiently at the entrance of the enclosure, her white lab coat completely at odds with the dirt and grime of the construction sector, was Dr. Corven.
She wasn't alone. Standing rigidly beside her, looking profoundly uncomfortable and entirely out of his element, was Severus. The aristocratic Elite was clad in his jet-black armor, his arms crossed over his chest, clearly wishing he was anywhere else on the planet.
As the heavy-lifter drones gracefully lowered the cargo flatbed into the center of the enclosure and gently rested it on the experimental medical frame, Dr. Corven practically vibrated with excitement. She didn't wait for the drones to detach their cables before surging forward, a handheld diagnostic scanner gripped tightly in her hand, her eyes wide behind her wire-rimmed glasses. The pure, unadulterated curiosity of a brilliant scientist who had spent years caged by the bureaucracy of being a dean at a prestigious academy had been slowly breaking loose since they had arrived on this planet, and it seemed like they had finally slipped off.
"Absolutely magnificent," Dr. Corven breathed, stepping right up to the slumbering behemoth. She ran a gloved hand over the thick, interlocking plates of mossy armor covering its sides. "The ossification density is staggering. Look at the structural curvature of these horns, Mr. Shephard! The evolutionary adaptations required to support this much mass in a high-gravity, high-predation environment... it's a biological goldmine. The nutrient conversion ratio in its digestive tract alone could revolutionize our composting cycle."
Mark walked up to the edge of the medical frame, the mud flaking off his boots. "I'm glad you're happy, Doc. Just tell me it tastes good, won't kill us, and can pull a plow in the case we ever need it to."
Dr. Corven shot him a withering glare over her glasses. "You have zero appreciation for the biological arts. You look at a marvel of evolutionary engineering and see a piece of steak."
"What can I say? I'm a practical guy," Mark shrugged. "Now, can Marcos actually fix that leg, or did we just haul five tons of dead weight across the jungle for your personal science fair?"
Dr. Corven didn't even look back at him, her eyes glued to the data streaming across her scanner. "The internal bone structure is heavily calcified, but the marrow density suggests an aggressive cellular regeneration rate. Marcos's scaled-up emitters should bridge the fracture just fine, provided we can keep it immobilized and flooded with nutrients." She suddenly spun around, pointing her scanner at the Elite standing near the gate. "Severus! Stop brooding and get over here. I need you to manually align the secondary laser emitters along the fracture line. The automated servos aren't calibrated for this much dermal interference."
Severus blinked, his pale face tightening. He looked at the massive, sedated beast, then at the manic doctor, and finally turned his gaze to Mark, his eyes silently pleading for a reprieve. Sure, he had a medical background, but he was starting to get tired of being a veterinary assistant.
Mark met Severus's gaze, let out a quiet sigh, and simply shrugged, as if to say, "You're on your own, buddy."
"My lord," Severus said, his voice remarkably flat, "I respectfully request to be reassigned to the perimeter guard. I will fight the giant armored bears naked if I must. Please do not make me do this."
"You're doing great, Sev," Mark said, patting the Elite's armored shoulder, leaving a thick smear of sludge on the black plating. "Think of it as cross-training. You already know the medical field and have done 2 dissections. How about continuing to broaden your horizons even further?"
"Yes, Doctor," Severus muttered through gritted teeth. He uncrossed his arms and marched stiffly toward the medical frame, kneeling in the dirt to adjust the blue laser arrays near the beast's shattered leg.
"Commencing experimental tissue regeneration," Marcos's voice echoed from the enclosure's localized speakers. "Flooding the localized area with broad-spectrum anesthetics. I suggest you step back, Mark. If the sedative wears off before the bone fuses, we are going to have a very large, very angry problem inside the walls."
"Severus," Marcos added, smoothly shifting who he was having a conversation with. "If you shift your grip three degrees to the left, you will avoid singeing the beast's remaining fur. Burnt hair smells terrible, and the ventilation in here is currently suboptimal."
Severus closed his eyes, inhaling deeply. "Thank you, Marcos. Your guidance is, as always, infuriatingly precise."
Mark nodded, stepping backward toward the gates of the enclosure. As he turned, his optics caught a flicker of movement just beyond the city's perimeter.
Through the one-meter gaps in the slatted wall, standing perfectly still at the very edge of the dark, untamed tree line, was the giant wolf.
Its dark fur blended perfectly with the approaching twilight. It was simply sitting on its haunches, its glowing, intelligent eyes locked directly onto the medical enclosure. It watched with an eerie, calculating stillness as the blue lasers of the healing frame flared to life, bathing the broken water buffalo in a restorative glow. The massive predator had tracked them all the way from the river, silently observing the humans as they hauled a dying creature not to a slaughterhouse, but to a place of healing.
Mark stared at the wolf through the metal slats, and the wolf met his gaze. They simply acknowledged each other's presence in the quiet dusk before the beast turned and vanished into the shadows.
The next week passed in a blur of progress.
The experimental healing of the evolved water buffalo took exactly four days. The scaled-up medical frame, forced to project its cellular stimulators over a massive surface area, lacked the instantaneous, miraculous efficiency of the medical pods, let alone the chairs Anahrin had initially created. But it worked. Day by day, Dr. Corven and a perpetually exhausted Severus monitored the beast. They kept it heavily sedated, feeding it a specialized nutrient slurry synthesized by Dr. Corven to fuel the rapid bone growth.
On the morning of the fourth day, Dr. Corven finally ordered the sedatives flushed from the animal's system.
Mark stood on the reinforced catwalk of the enclosure, looking down with Lyra, who gripped the metal railing with boundless excitement. Below them, the massive beast groaned as it shifted its five-ton bulk, its head slowly rising from the dirt. It let out a deep, confused bellow that sounded like grinding stones before planting its front hooves into the earth.
Slowly and tentatively, it pushed itself up. It tested the back right leg, the limb that had been shattered beyond repair just days prior, and realized it could now support its immense weight perfectly. It took a single step forward, then another, shaking its massive, sweeping horns as it realized the blinding agony was entirely gone.
"It's walking, Papa!" Lyra cheered, bouncing on her toes. "The big cow is walking!"
"Yeah, Bug," Mark smiled, resting a hand on her auburn hair. "It's one tough old cow."
For the latter three days of the week, the enclosure had become Dr. Corven's primary laboratory. She, along with Severus and a handful of civilian staff with backgrounds in veterinary science and biology, studied the animal closely. To their profound surprise, the beast was remarkably docile. Having been stripped of the terrifying pain of its injury and removed from the brutal, high-stress environment of the jungle, the creature displayed a calm, almost sluggish temperament. It eagerly consumed the genetically modified crops the agricultural sector was beginning to yield, allowing Corven's staff to approach and take blood samples while running continuous neurological scans.
"The domestication potential is astronomical, Mr. Shephard," Corven reported to Mark over the comms later that week, her tone conversational but brimming with scientific vindication. "Its herd instincts are deeply ingrained, and if we can capture a few more, preferably uninjured ones, we can establish a breeding population within a year. We can have high-yield protein, secondary biological resources like the armored hide and bone, and become completely self-sustaining. We're looking at the foundation of our livestock industry here. No one in the history of mankind has done what we are looking to do. Domesticating alien life? Who would've ever imagined it?"
But Corven wasn't the only one who noticed the miracle in the agricultural sector.
2 days earlier, Mark had been conducting a routine perimeter check along the southern wall, walking the elevated catwalks between the manned outlook towers. The red dwarf suns were burning high overhead. He paused near the section of the wall overlooking the agricultural grid, watching the massive buffalo happily grazing in their reinforced pen.
A sudden, familiar shift in the air pressure made Mark turn his head.
Standing atop a printed storage container just outside the city walls, easily twenty feet off the ground, was the giant wolf.
It had returned.
The beast stood entirely exposed in the daylight, its massive paws gripping the edge of the metal container. But its attention wasn't on Mark. Its glowing eyes were locked onto the water buffalo. The wolf stared at the massive herbivore, watching it walk smoothly on the leg that had been shattered just a few days ago.
In the wild, a broken leg was a death sentence. It was a universal law of nature. Yet, here was a creature, stolen from the jaws of the jungle, prancing around after being fully restored.
The wolf watched for a long minute, processing the impossible reality of what the humans had accomplished. Then, it slowly turned its massive head, locking eyes with Mark on the catwalk. The beast let out a low, resonant rumble that sounded like an acknowledgment. It had seen the power these strange, metal-clad beings possessed. They didn't just possess the ability to kill, but they also seemed to wield power over death itself. With a powerful leap, the wolf bounded off the storage container, disappearing back into the safety of the tree line.
While the agricultural and biological milestones were being achieved, the city's infrastructure continued to expand rapidly.
The sewage treatment plant, located five kilometers to the west near the mountain ridge, officially came online, completing the city's closed-loop sanitation grid. But Mark knew that simple survival wasn't enough to keep a population of displaced humans sane. They would need purpose once the construction phase was all over.
The nanoprinters were capable of fabricating virtually anything they needed, from clothing to tools to furniture to giant feats of engineering. But a society built entirely on the magical extrusion of a machine bred complacency, boredom, and eventual psychological decay. The people needed to sweat. They would need to keep the ball rolling and make them feel the weight of their own survival in their hands.
So, Mark ordered the construction of a sprawling industrial sector just east of the residential grid. Marcos printed the massive, empty shells of factories, warehouses, and food processing plants. Mark provided the raw materials, Marcos created the blueprints, and the printers created the complex internal machinery, but they opted against fully automating them, just as they had done with the water and sewage treatment plants.
Instead, Aurelia managed the workforce, organizing shifts of civilian laborers. In the food processing plants, men and women who lacked essential skills for the community stood on assembly lines, some overseeing and others manually controlling the machines that sorted, cleaned, and processed the first yields of the rapid-growth crops. In the factories, they operated presses, assembled hand-tools, and wove textiles from synthetic fibers.
It was, strictly speaking, entirely unnecessary from a logistical standpoint. After all, Marcos could have done it all in a fraction of the time. But as Mark walked through the factory floors, listening to the roar of machinery, the shouts of the foremen, and the lively, exhausted banter of the workers, he knew it was the most vital thing they had built.
The people weren't just surviving under Mark's protection anymore. They were tired, they were dirty, they were working, and most of all, they felt important. They were building the things that would inhabit their homes with their own hands.
Simultaneously, the military footprint of the colony was drastically expanding. What started as a simple barracks for the Vanguard mercenaries and the Peacekeepers evolved into humanity's first true military installation on Rubrion Prime.
Located on the northern edge of the Timgad grid, just past the city hall, a massive compound was erected. It featured training yards, live-fire ranges with automated target systems, and reinforced armories holding hundreds of rifles and heavy ordnance that they had begun to produce using the ammunition stowage of the 3 mercenary frigates.
Valerius and Cassius ran grueling drills from dawn until dusk, whipping the mercenaries into a cohesive, disciplined fighting force capable of repelling whatever horrors the continent threw at them.
But Mark's vision extended far beyond the city's immediate survival. He was looking at the long game. And the long game required power on a scale that wind turbines could never provide.
On the final night of the third week, Mark stood in the grand, dimly lit library on the second floor of his manor. The table in the center of the room was glowing with a detailed holographic projection of the basin, generated by the projectors hidden in the ceiling.
"Alright, Marcos," Mark said, leaning over the table, his eyes tracing the glowing blue lines of the tactical map. "Walk me through the northern expansion."
The holographic map shifted, panning rapidly eight kilometers to the north, zooming in on the jagged, towering foothills of the northern mountain range, the very mountains where the Horizon had crashed.
"So I compiled all of the data of the comprehensive subsurface geological scan of the northern ridge, which the scout drones had provided us with when they were initially released," Marcos's voice echoed smoothly through the library. Glowing red and green pockets illuminated deep beneath the holographic mountains. "Overall, the results are promising. As you know, the drones previously detected massive, concentrated veins of an unknown, dense alien metal deep within the crust. However, resting in the shallower strata surrounding that anomaly, they have mapped vast and easily accessible deposits of raw lithium ore."
Mark crossed his arms, staring at the green pockets of lithium. "And we can use that."
"Precisely," Marcos confirmed. "I have already finalized the blueprints for our next major infrastructure project. We are going to build the first nuclear facility on this continent, nestled directly at the foothills of those mountains."
Mark nodded slowly. "Walk me through the science on this. I may have some scientific knowledge, but I'm not a quantum physicist. How do we get from raw rocks in the ground to a functioning reactor without having to refine uranium?"
"We'll just bypass traditional fission entirely and move straight to advanced fusion," Marcos explained, the hologram shifting to display a complex, rotating schematic of a massive industrial refinery. "The facility we will build at the foothills will not be a reactor itself, but an enrichment plant. We will extract the raw lithium ore and process it through a series of automated chemical and isotopic separation cascades. The goal is to isolate and enrich Lithium-6."
The schematic morphed again, showing the glowing blue portal of a nanoprinter.
"Once we have a stockpile of enriched Lithium-6," Marcos continued, "we feed that directly into the nanoprinters as a base material. The printers bombard the Lithium-6 with neutrons, initiating a controlled transmutation process. The result is the direct fabrication of Helium-3."
Mark let out a low whistle. It was what powered all of humanity's ships, and through magical sciency fuckery he didn't quite understand, they were going to print it out of dirt.
"So let me get this straight. We mine the lithium, enrich it to Lithium-6, print the Helium-3, and feed that into a fusion reactor," Mark summarized. "That gives us a practically infinite, completely stable energy grid that could power a city of millions with that."
"Correct," Marcos said. "However, there is a bottleneck in our current logistical paradigm. You."
Mark raised an eyebrow. "Well, McFucking-Excuse me?"
"Your system inventory, Mark," Marcos clarified easily. "It is vast. The millions of tons of materials you had purchased before departing have allowed us to build this city at an impossible speed. But it is finite, and according to my calculations, we'll soon be burning through all the strong alloys suitable for construction in your reserves. Furthermore, you do not possess the specific, raw geological materials required for the advanced aerospace manufacturing we will eventually need to lift ourselves off this planet."
Mark looked down at the glowing map. Marcos was right. They had built a fortress. They had water, power, food, and soon, they would have a fusion reactor. They could survive on Rubrion Prime indefinitely.
But Mark didn't just want to survive, not after the shit Gregorio Volanti had pulled on him. He wanted to get his daughter off this rock. He wanted to build a fleet. He wanted to punch a hole through the sky and take the fight back to the bastards who had attacked him. He had the desire to create his own empire, to rise from the ashes, exit from the void, and come back with his chin held high.
To do that, they couldn't rely on the magic pockets of his inventory anymore. They needed to rip the resources directly from the planet.
"We need to start mining," Mark said quietly.
"We need an entire industrial supply chain," Marcos corrected. "The lithium is eight kilometers north. The unknown dense metal is even deeper. We cannot rely on heavy-lifter drones to ferry thousands of tons of raw ore back and forth every day. It is too slow, too vulnerable to the weather, and highly inefficient."
"So, what's the play?" Mark asked.
The hologram on the table zoomed out, showing the sprawling eight-kilometer stretch of dense jungle between the city walls and the northern mountains. A glowing, solid line began to draw itself from the northern gate of the colony, cutting a straight, brutal path through the wilderness, ending directly at the proposed site of the enrichment plant.
"We build a maglev network," Marcos declared. "An automated, heavily armored magnetic levitation cargo line connecting the city directly to the foothills. We establish a massive, fortified mining outpost at the base of the mountains. We print subterranean boring machines, automated extraction crawlers, and a fleet of armored maglev haulers."
"A maglev line," Mark said, rubbing his jaw. "You want to build a floating rail system through eight kilometers of apex predators and dense foliage."
"Not just a rail line," Marcos corrected smoothly. "An automated, heavily armored cargo artery. The haulers will be equipped with the downsized laser turrets we mounted on the perimeter. We make a path through the jungle, and by eliminating physical track friction, we drastically increase our tonnage yields and travel speeds."
"Making a path is putting it lightly," Mark muttered, tracing the glowing line with his finger. "Valerius is going to have a stroke when I tell him he's doing perimeter security for a logging crew."
Mark tapped his comms. "Valerius, you there?"
"I am here, Commander," the Elite responded instantly in a deep voice. "And before you ask, I have scrubbed my armor three times, and I can still smell the shit."
"Well, skip the fourth scrub, because tomorrow you're taking the Peacekeepers and marching north," Mark said. "We're going to be building a maglev line to the mountains."
There was a long silence on the line. "A transport line. Through the northern sector. Commander, we've barely spent an hour or 2 in that sector, and that was after we landed, trying to find any survivors of the horizon. If the river down south threw a pack of fourteen-foot-tall armored bears at us, God only knows what the northern foothills are hiding."
"That's the job," Mark said easily. "Marcos is going to print automated logging crawlers and magnetic rail-guide extruders. You and the boys just need to keep the bugs off them while they work."
"Understood, Commander," Valerius sighed, the metallic fatigue evident in his voice. "I will begin drafting the deployment rosters."
"Kenji, you listening in?" Mark asked, switching channels.
"Ah, Mark, you finally remembered I exist," the engineer's voice crackled, accompanied by the clinking of metal tools in the background. "I'm looking at Marcos's schematics right now. The magnetic track extruders are beautiful."
"I need you to double-check Marcos's designs," Mark instructed. "Make sure they actually work in the uneven terrain. Marcos calculates perfect physics. This planet doesn't care about perfect physics."
"Hey," Marcos protested smoothly. "My physics models account for a standard twenty percent deviation in topographical stability."
"I'll add another thirty percent just to be safe, Marcos," Kenji laughed. "Don't worry, man. I'll make sure the magnetic repulsion on the haulers can handle a few bumps and maybe a stray raptor carcass on the guide-rails without derailing."
"Let's get to work, then," Mark said, cutting the comms and turning away from the table.
As he stepped out onto the third-floor porch, the cool night air washing over him, Mark looked out over the sprawling, brightly lit expanse of the city. The warm-spectrum floodlights pushed the darkness back, illuminating the neat, orderly rows of residential modules, the towering, slatted perimeter walls, and the distant, spinning blades of the wind turbines on the ridge.
It was no longer a desperate camp clinging to the shadow of a crashed frigate. It was a beacon. It was a declaration of existence.
"Papa?"
Mark turned to see Lyra standing in the doorway, rubbing her sleepy eyes, her stuffed bear dragging on the floor behind her.
"Hey, Bug," Mark said softly, kneeling down as she padded over to him. "What are you doing up?"
"I heard you talking," she mumbled, leaning against his chest. "Are we going to space again?"
Mark wrapped his arms around her, lifting her up so she could see over the railing and look back out at the stars. "Not yet. First, we have to build a really big train to go get some rocks from the mountains."
"A train?" she asked, looking up at him, her blue eyes reflecting the city lights. "Like the ones in the stories you tell me?"
"Well, kind of like a train, but it floats on magnets," Mark smiled, the memories of his past life in New York City rising to the surface. "Where I used to live, a long, long time ago, we had trains that ran under the ground. Millions of people rode them every single day. They were loud and smelled like hot garbage, but they connected the whole city. This one will be a lot faster and a lot cleaner."
"Will it help us go up there?" she asked, looking up at the sky.
Mark looked up with her, tracing the glowing ribbons of the nebula.
"To conquer the stars?" she whispered, repeating a phrase he had mumbled a few nights ago when he was lost in thought about their future.
Mark's smile widened into a slow, predatory grin. He held her tighter against the cool night air. "Yeah, Bug. We're going to carve a piece of it for ourselves."
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