Alan drove as fast as he could without putting too much stress on the weakened left track. The sun had gone down and he would have had to take it slow, anyway. Predators were encountered more often. None seemed to want to entangle with Alan’s rover, though. Curiosity was staved off with Sara replaying the predator roars at amplified volumes. She pushed the limits of the speakers, nearly blowing them out. Alan put in ear protection to keep it from becoming overwhelming for him.

Nearly an hour into the trip, Alan thought he saw something unusual ahead of him. He turned to the right to go around whatever it was. The night forest came alive with several red laser bolts showering around the rover. Wood fragments scattered the scene as some of the bolts hit trees. Dirt went flying as the ground was hit around him.

Alan swore and jerked the controls to go further right and put more distance and obstacles between him and whatever the aggressor was.

A large bolt of red struck the left side of the rover down low. The track snapped. The right track, still running full force without any traction from the left, spun the vehicle in a circle. As the vehicle spun and faced the enemy, Alan noted a massive centipede looking creature. It was about 15 meters long and about 160 centimeters in diameter. Its head was reared up and firing a couple small lasers mounted on either side. On either side of the centipede was something that resembled a scorpion like creature. They were smaller than the centipede but much more heavily armed.

“Sara, conserve ammo, but slag the escorts. Then work on the big guy.”

Alan let the rover spin until the cab was facing away from the fight. He grabbed his rifle and magazines off the charger and got out of the cab. He climbed up on the front section of the rover and used the last remaining cargo box as cover.

The cannon zipped spewing its rounds. One of the scorpion escorts exploded. Alan was pumping rounds from his rifle into the centipede as best he could and still not getting shot himself. Laser fire struck the rover all over the place. Alan figured they must not know where to hit yet as they probably have never seen this kind of vehicle before.

Sara had to shower more rounds into the second scorpion vehicle than Alan liked. It seemed to soak up the rounds more than the first to get it put down. It made Alan nervous. The rover had to be running out of rounds soon.

The second scorpion attacker fell silent in a smoking heap. Alan slapped in his last magazine into the laser rifle. He decided to wait. He watched as the centipede took a face full of steel rounds. The head to the centipede fell to the ground, and the forest was quiet for the moment. With the light show over, Sara turned on the back lights of the rover that still functioned.

As the lights came on the midsections of the centipede popped open. A dozen smaller creatures bailed out of the centipede thing. They were about 90 centimeters tall. The creatures had a back half that resembled a very large ant Abdomen with eight legs attached to it.

The front half of the body was humanoid in form with a torso, one pair of arms and clawed three-fingered hands, and bulbous insect like head. Their eyes were massive black bulb on the head. The creatures were at least half cybernetic. Two of them looked like they could be nearly all cybernetic. Every one of them had a rifle.

“It’s a transport! Shoot’em!”

Alan fired off several rounds with his laser rifle. The damn things could take a good hit. Small laser fire came back at him. The rotary cannon fired, then abruptly stopped.

Alan felt the needle like sting in his side followed by the smell of burnt flesh. “Shit!”

Three of them still remained. They had taken cover behind the wreckages of their own vehicles. Alan dropped the rifle, having exhausted the magazines for it. He drew his pistol.

Two of them must have thought they downed their prey when Alan stopped firing and dropped the rifle. They came out in the open eagerly. Alan emptied the pistol’s magazine on them both. Both of them went down. One of them slowly dragged its wounded body back towards cover.

Breathing was painful. Alan was holding his side where he had been shot. Not that it really did any good. Alan stopped firing and looked for the last one to pop out of its cover. He changed out the magazine of his pistol. He caught a glimpse of movement off to his right.

You sneaky little bastard! Alan turned and fired on the creature that was charging at him. The creature's weapon has something like a 3 cm vibroblade attached to the end of it. It died hard, taking 5 laser pistol rounds to the chest and abdomen. Even after it collapsed, it dragged itself onward to inflict destruction on its prey.

“Damn things are relentless.” Alan put a laser blast to its head. It finally stopped moving. Alan decided to go around and make sure they were all dead. He put a round in six more of the creatures that still moved.

He stopped at that point and looked into the darkness. He felt like he was being watched. “Sara do you detect any movement around us?”

“Not at the moment. The wildlife fled the party a while ago and seem to be keeping their distance.”

Alan couldn’t shake the nagging feeling. “Maybe I’m just getting paranoid.”

“I don’t blame you for feeling that way.”

Alan looked at the all too familiar scene. “I really thought I was done with this kind of lifestyle.”

“Is that why you initially signed up with Paragon Prefabrications? For a typical engineering job?”

Alan coughed after getting a whiff of smoke. “That was the intent. Didn’t seem to last long.”

“Maybe it could be said that the warrior either finds the war he was meant to fight, or the war will find him.”

Alan smiled and shook his head. “I’m no warrior, just an engineer. My past is done and over with. I only helped those who were the real fighters do their deeds.”

“Look around you. Would it not be fair to say that a warrior uses whatever weapons are at their disposal to win the day? Is that not what you have done here? Is it not what you have been doing?”

Alan looked around him. He saw the dead creatures that had tried to kill him. The bodies of those he had gone around to and made sure they were dead. Executing survivors when he found them. He looked at the smoking wrecks. “I’m not looking to fight in another war. I’m just trying to survive this and get back to something that is more normal.”

“I hear you. What I’m telling you, is that you have the heart of a warrior whether you believe it or not. You fled from fighting war, and so war has now found you.”

Alan just stood there and thought about it. “Damn it,” he said as he kicked the nearby scorpion wreck. “Aren’t you just full of encouragement. I don’t like these kinds of talks. Keep it to something more productive.”

Alan salvaged a number of parts from the wreckage and made enough parts to fix the track. It took longer than he wanted. He didn’t want to get entangled in another fight tonight. Surely someone would come to find out what happened to this group.

“Large dinos roaming all over this planet and I get caught in the middle of a war between midgets.”

With the track repaired, Alan set off again. The fix wasn’t perfect, and it rattled the rover every time that track pad came around to the drive wheel. The track also had a twist in it that he couldn’t fix out here. It threw things out of alignment enough that the track popped off the front idler wheel a couple of times when he had to turn.

It had already been a long, disappointing and costly day. His temper was short and getting shorter with the mounting problems coupled with fatigue. His food and water had been in a small refrigerated cargo box in the back. So now he felt starving on top of everything else.

When he finally pulled the rover back into the cavern that served as home base, it was near dawn the next day. The day/night cycle was so long that Alan knew he would never really adjust to it. He dragged himself out of the cockpit and over to where he kept some basic medical supplies.

He tended to the wound in his side and took a painkiller. He then dragged himself to his bed and crashed out for several hours.

He woke up with his side still hurting. If he was going to be engaged in fights like this, he was going to need something better than basic medicine that he had on hand. He needed a medical bed. Alan got up and setup Bob for the task of building one.

“Alan, I don’t have the programing to run that.”

“I know. It's one of the modules I was hoping to recover yesterday. I can still use it for really basic things for now. I’m hoping that when I go to Aurora Outpost, there will be medical modules there. They should have at least that much.”

“Would they also have advanced weapons system modules for outpost defenses?”

Alan thought about it. “They might. I wouldn’t put it past Paragon to force them to make do with simple rotary cannons either. Hard to say if they went cheap or practical.”

After entering in the specifications for Bob to build the medical bed, Alan went to the bench to work on blueprints for drones. Training and experience told him the chances of survival dropped exponentially the more the numbers stacked against you. He wondered if that took in to account size of the opponents.

He worked up several designs for drones and started the work of building them. He made some for flying, some for ground work. He took into consideration the insect like cyborgs he had recently fought. Their advantage was in numbers. If he kept the design simple enough, Sara should be able to control a larger number of drones at once.

He considered the thought. Drone control was something he had a lot of experience with. With Sara’s help, he could put together an advanced drone control module that would expand her ability. With the proper module, she could probably control an entire army of drones.

The thought of how much destruction she would be capable of made him shiver. Would this be another manifestation of past mistakes that lead to mass deaths? Could Sara one day turn on him and kill him?

The insects killed whatever got in their way, provoked or not. Alan had no sympathy for them. The fuzzy cyborgs he didn’t know well enough yet. He suspected it might be these two fighting each other is what he saw yesterday, or was it the day before? He found it really hard to keep track between the planet’s cycles and his own internal one.

He thought about what Sara had said after the fight with the insect creatures. Maybe there was some truth in it.

He turned his focus back to the task before him. Yes, he would develop the advanced drone module. It would take a lot of time to put together, but in the meantime he could build a group of 40 or so she could control now.

He questioned the wisdom of himself continuing to go out into the wilds and potentially getting seriously wounded or killed. Locking down in the shelter of the cavern was a safer approach. Accomplishing work in the wild would be more difficult than just doing it in person. The risks however were skyrocketing. Sara was a significant help, but there was only so much she could do.

He decided to make some drones for his direct control. His could be more advanced. He would need to do a redesign of the rover as well. Having all these projects got him excited. He wanted to be well prepared before he ventured off to check out what had happened to Aurora Outpost.