USD: 4 Days after the Arrival to MIL-1A

Location: Nu Crateris, Dedia IV, The Great Nest

Heeler was sore, despite his nanites repairing his body rapidly. The Queen had ridden him roughly. Yet, that did not displease him. Although he was unsure how she would make use of his genetic material, he was sure that she would surprise him with her future creations of star children.

Heeler made his way into the new habitation zone for the human colony. The design was his own, a no-nonsense series of straight lines with service areas centrally located for easy access. They had created different zones for habitation, commerce, product delivery, education, bureaucracy, and the military.

The military level was segregated, and he had secured it with safeguards, but he had plans for enlisting the aid of what humans he could once they had acclimated to their new home. The soft sk… The humans were very useful for some tasks, and he was sure he would need at least a few to help command future battalions of star children once he worked out an interface to allow them to do so.

Likewise, he had no desire to stop at one battlecruiser, and a fleet would need captains at the very least. A fully automated fleet of warships was unrealistic unless he wished to reduce his computronics production to create many subcores, and that would weaken his ongoing efforts to build up enough nanite control to fortify the planet properly.

Vast caverns deep in the earth were being hewn for the rare resources needed to produce them en masse. For now, it was enough, but the resources around the strange moon of Hades were a clarion call for his spaceward efforts.

He kept the star children away from the human section for safety reasons. Heeler was unsure if the humans would attack out of fear, but he suspected the civilians would have poor reactions to the sight of them, even if he made sure that any present were conditioned to consider humans as part of the nest.

His suspicions were confirmed when he heard many of the small humans emit shrieks at the sight of him emerging from a secret entry point. Those shrieks attracted the attention of some larger ones who drew weapons and opened fire on him.

The projectile rounds were of too low caliber to damage his nanite hardened carapace, so he ignored the human’s attempt at dominance despite its breaking of law by attacking another member of the colony.

Heeler made for the government building at the center of the corridor. The mayhem and disarray of the humans he saw displeased him greatly, and he was reminded of his earlier promise to avoid them personally, which he had forgotten. He had only been prompted to enter their new nest because of a desire to confirm their progress on settling in, but already he was deeply regretting it.

Heeler clittered down the corridor to the secure elevator to leave the human section. His conversation with the Governor-turned-Mayor Tyler had been useful for clearing up several misconceptions about the human’s food supply. Despite H32’s projections that the humans would object to an efficient food source, Heeler had hoped that they would adapt.

The Mayor became ill upon learning about the method of food production and what went in it. Heeler carefully informed him he would devote some resources to allow the humans to produce their own food supply once some industrialization drones became available.

His machine mind clicked with satisfaction at him, and Heeler clittered faster in annoyance. As he began the climb back up to the main nest, a transmission arrived from beyond orbit.

A frantic video of Daniel Ashburn broadcasting a distress signal appeared on Heeler’s video feed. Triangulation of the location put him much closer than Heeler had thought the Hades station could have made it toward Dedia. It was only hours from reaching orbit, but the reason for distress became apparent as sensors detected both the proto-station and a Corpo cruiser light off their Linear drives.

Heeler immediately spun up the fast response shuttle on the surface. H32 re-arranged work priorities across the planet. He sent a brief mind caress to Szizsielia, informing her of his departure.

Sending a brief message to maintain a fastest course approach toward the planet, Heeler examined the rest of the information available. Ashburn’s station was barely functioning after running silent and on skeleton supplies for so long. Some refugees had already perished from nutritional deficiency.

A small subset of drones was dispatched in order to prepare medical and nutritional support at the space elevator.

Events slowly revealed themselves as thus: The proto-station had been on the brink of power failure and an energy spike had been required to jumpstart an overtaxed and failing life support. The EM signature created had been large enough for the Corpo cruiser that had been running silent near the planet to begin an intercept.

Heeler growled in annoyance. Both the Cruiser and the proto-station were diving now as hard as they could toward the planet. The defenses were still in a poor state, and it was questionable whether they could hold off the Corp Cruiser without assistance from the still out-of-play ground-based laser defenses.

That left him with only one decisive option.

The sub-orbital flight took twenty long minutes.

It took some time longer for him to reach the command center of the SR-01 Heaven’s Fire. The cockpit was small for such a massive vessel, but now that it had been modified for his uses, it no longer needed a massive command staff that the humans preferred.

Checking the status of the support units who had been given the orders to evacuate during his flight, Heeler confirmed that most had either retreated into the ship itself or fled underground.

That was wise, because from the projections H32 was feeding him, there was no time to waste.

Cables tied to the exterior of the massive battlecruiser hull snapped as the pinions released. Smoke billowed out of warming thrusters, and then the surface around the ship exploded in fire as Heeler throttled the ship’s massive Linear drive system to maximum.

The absolute power of the Linear drive pushed out exhaust that incinerated and peeled away the earth for kilometers. A momentary second passed as the ship hung in the air and then it launched itself toward orbit, the massive pressure on the bow of the ship causing the hull to groan in stress. A billowing mushroom cloud of dust was left behind, raising up into the atmosphere.

The vessel cleared the densest part of the atmosphere so fast that there had not been time for any heat-build up at all.

Alarms told a story that the ship hadn’t escaped the violent rush to space entirely, however, as structural elements failed and the triangular bow of the battlecruiser had blunted itself into a mass of crushed steel.

The ship was built for hellacious abuse, however, and performance was uncompromised as Heeler set course directly for the Corpo Cruiser. Heeler was pleased when he saw the response as the hostile ship turned away towards the outer system almost immediately.

The hunter had become the prey and the thrill of the dance filled Heeler.

“Daniel Ashburn, this is SRS Heaven’s Fire. We are moving to assist. Cut your acceleration and begin orbital insertion to Dedia IV elevator for medical and emergency assistance.”

There was a momentary delay, but then the video feed activated. The haggard face of a man that had been pushed past his limits looked back at Heeler with a nearly expressionless look. His hair had grown out, and a beard had appeared.

“Roger that SR01. Hades Orbital making for a rendezvous for elevator.”

Heeler growled in satisfaction, not wasting time considering the manager’s state, rather leaving a sound of approval and cutting the feed as he focused on the enemy.

The Cruiser’s speed was lower than normal, confirming to Heeler that it was still damaged from the battle over Dedia. Mother’s corvette had likely crippled the ship heavily, but he suspected that while it was limping, it still could bite back.

He had designed the battlecruiser with a different focus than the humans had envisioned it. Its previous armaments had taken considerable space and had enormous energy requirements to power. The arrays of missile racks had been removed to make room for armor.

And boarding pods.

Thousands of Rexxor waited in the ship’s belly, while the triangular bow had been encased in heavy plates of armor, entire sections that had been previously dedicated to berthing and other human things replaced with chunks of heavy metal alloys and ceramics.

The drive had been completely rebuilt, with an eye for speed, allowing the ship to not only effortlessly leave the planet’s surface, but to accelerate faster than even the nimble Shrike II had been able to.

It wasn’t quite as agile, the ship could only burn that quickly in a straight line, but it was purpose-built to run down fleeing smaller ships.

And it worked beautifully, as the Heaven’s Fire ran down the Corpo cruiser. The chase only took an hour before the Cruiser came into weapons range, and an anemic weapon duel ignited the space between the two ships.

Lasers gouged into the battlecruiser’s prow, but ECLWS launchers flung chaff cannisters into the space between the two ships, degrading their performance. The ship either did not have any or did not wish to risk a missile launch, and the stern chase through the chaff continued until the ships entered railgun range.

The first shot nailed the Heaven’s Fire on the bow, digging deep into inert internals. The damage ultimately did not affect the larger ship meaningfully.

The reply was a thunderous launch of a thousand boarding rockets. Heaven’s Fire hurled munitions out of magnetic launchers before the small projectiles gyro’d toward and ignited their drives, flinging themselves toward the Corpo cruiser in a spiraling cloud.

The chaff canisters degraded the PDC-L effectiveness, and a desperate PDC-K fire did its best to swat down as many of the projectiles as possible, but hundreds of the short-range missiles impacted the cruiser’s hull.

The young nestlings inside had been chosen for their durability rather than intelligence. Shrieking Rexxor emerged from the pods, launching themselves throughout the ship in a frenzied bloodlust encouraged by the loss of the thought minds of their kin in the assault.

Heeler would have preferred to have boarded with them, to taste the fear and weakness of the dying prey himself, but such a thing was much too risky for that kind of luxury. Maybe someday in the future when he was more expendable, with many replacements, he could enjoy the taste of the charge as he had once done with Mother against the enemy fleet.

Heeler watched through the eyes of the armor, and weaponry mounted to his brothers, storming the hostile ship. Although his thought organ was smaller than a Queen's, he could still help guide their progress along with assistance from the telemetry the weaponry transmitted.

Two smarter than regular nestlings had special devices that detached from their weapon packs and sought connections to the ship’s network. Segregation of the ship’s networks and systems prevented outright control of the ship, but Heeler was able to quickly disable the ship’s weapon systems.

Partly because the nestlings tore apart the operators working them, and partly because of the connection to the weapon network by the hacking devices.

The crew of the ship did their best, passing out weapons and attempting to repel the boarders, but the outcome was never in question as the nestlings breached compartment after compartment with their steel shredding claws and teeth.

Automated turrets and defenders felled nearly two dozen of his brothers, but the ship quickly became a tomb of Corpo marines and sailors.

The heavily armored bridge was taken last, completing the takeover of the ship. The carnage had flowed throughout the ship so quickly that the Captain had not realized he should have scuttled the ship, and Heeler growled in satisfaction as he realized the prize was theirs.

Now he needed to devise a method of towing the cruiser back to the planet.