“This is my daughter Onslaught,” Karth said, kneeling before Perry’s throne. At his motion the curtains were drawn away from the cage, revealing a stunningly attractive eight-foot-tall troll dancing seductively.

“When she was born a midget and deformed, I despaired, because that is a muzzle only a mother could love, and if any of my subjects learned that I had spawned such a thing, that would be reason enough for them to kill me.”

“Uhuh?” Perry grunted, barely tearing his eyes away from Onslaught’s mesmerizing jiggles.

They’re bigger than I am!

“But now that you’ve become our king through contrived means because you have some power that took you absolutely no effort to achieve, I have realized that Onslaught is the perfect gift to you. A wife that can cement our alliance and unite our races.

The eight-foot girl in the cage spoke in a beautiful, lilting voice with an exotic accent.

“My people told me I’m ugly every day of my life, so I have no self-esteem and am also completely ignorant of both human customs and sex,” Onslaught said, still wiggling seductively. “You can teach me everything I need to know.”

Time out.

“Okay,” Perry said, burying his head in his palm. “There’s two problems with that Karth, Obviously this is a dream, indicating that I’ve either been hanging out with trolls too much, or reading too many shameless male wish-fulfillment novels recently. Or both.”

“The second problem is I’m already perfectly happy with my current relationship situation, and I’m not quite far enough gone to fall for a walking cliché, so I’m just gonna bail on this dream.”

“But-“

****

Perry opened his eyes, revealing the wall of his bedroom, the nightstand with the glass of water and the death ray on it, just in case someone tried to break into his lair in his sleep. He finished off the last of the water, double-checked the safety on the death-ray and left the bed for the bathroom.

2:00 AM? Jeez, he thought as he climbed back into bed.

On one hand it was a bit of a pain that he’d been waking up in the middle of the night so often recently. The stress of a war looming over his head made it difficult to stay asleep, as if his body was urging him to do something productive, even though sleep was it.

On the other hand… Perry lay on his elbow, studying the way the moonlight accentuated the lines of Natalie’s face as she softly breathed, the darkness that pooled in the hollow of her neck, and the sharp line of shadow that followed the curve of her chest.

What did I do to deserve this? Perry wondered in awe.

“Ehehe,” Nat giggled through her relaxed jaw. “Of course, I’ll teach you everything,” She mumbled. “Lesson one. Mmm. Mmm.”

Apparently, Natalie didn’t mind the cliché, as soft clicking noises began emanated from her mouth, where her tongue was moving back and forth behind her teeth.

Perry sighed.

What did I do to deserve this?

“Dorks,” Heather muttered in her sleep, her brows knotted. “All’ o ya,”

Perry patted Nat’s head and lowered himself back down into the bed.

*****

“Alright, first long-range drone coming off the assembly line,” Perry said, walking around the machine.

When most people thought ‘drones’ they thought of those little four-rotor thingies built for remote control for the casual enthusiast.

Other people thought of the military drones, which were basically planes without pilots.

Perry’s was much more of a…proof of concept type plane.

Using his bonuses to carbon, Perry had made the structure of the drone criminally thin, shaving tens of pounds off the weight of the non-super world record, while still being far more durable.

The entire thing was made of black carbon fiber, unpainted to allow it to breathe, and save some weight.

Similar to his armor, it was able to self-repair, and housed all of its battery and processing power in its criminally thin frame.

It was thirty feet long and eighty feet wide, with tail fins for the bare minimum stabilization.

It almost looked like a flying wing.

There were two sets of powerful rotors on the front, each upgraded with Spendthrift to overperform for the same power cost. Since Perry intended it to stay in the air nearly indefinitely, it made sense to have spare rotors, so one nearly-indestructible set could self-heal while the other set worked.

The solar panels lining the top of the machine were more efficient than anything that could be made by modern science, providing enough juice to run twenty similarly sized machines, and at night, the stars provided enough light to run three of them.

The built in battery frame could hold fifty MWh, which was way more than the drone needed to stay in the air indefinitely. It was also light as a feather, almost lifting off the ground from a gentle breeze.

Which was good, because Perry was planning on stuffing it to the gills with surveillance equipment and other niceties.

The wings were hollow, with the custom-built surveillance equipment, defense lasers, capacitors, magical spells and thermite slotting in nicely, bringing the total weight up to five hundred pounds.

Now, you can’t just launch a drone into the stratosphere and expect it’ll spy on your enemy for you indefinitely. Because of The Tide, the only thing you could really count on was for Weird Shit to happen.

Like giant birds hunting your giant drone like a pigeon…

Or in this case, communal, nest-building insects floating along in the upper atmosphere.

“Well, that’s interesting,” Perry muttered, leaning over the drone operator’ shoulder to inspect the still image of a termite nest held together with lighter-than-air mucus, dotted with bright green algae, which seemed to be growing on the mucus itself, serving as food for the colony.

“Okay, that’s just cool,” Perry mused. “What about the land to the west of us?”

“Haven’t found anything yet, sir,” the drone operator said. “Hey, you think I could do a barrel roll with this thing?”

Perry glanced down at the twelve-year old behind the wheel of what was ostensibly a multi-million-dollar, one-of-a-kind, prototype surveillance equipment, and realized exactly how bad his ‘teach kids to use them’ idea had been.

“You’re fired.”

“What, WHY!?”

“Ask your parents. Better yet, get your mom and dad to come fly this thing instead of you.” Perry said, turning on the auto-pilot and shooing the kid out of the seat.

“Barrel roll indeed,” Perry muttered, shaking his head, waiting until the kid was completely gone before trying it himself.

Yep, it can do a barrel roll.

In the time it took Perry to teach adults to fly the machines, he got another three drones in the air.

Teaching boomers straight out of the seventies how to operate a computer and a flight simulator was a nightmare, but it was better than the ‘hey, check this out’ attitude that their kids had.

It took a week after getting the four surveillance planes in the air before they found what they were looking for.

The megastructures he made over the seven days were as follows:

1: Fish butchering plant #4

2: electric motor, large vehicle and tool factory.

3: Large-scale concrete recycling facility

4: Kaiju Defense installation

5: Indoor farm Mk. 2

6: Chicago Divine Influence control tower. (Nicknamed the ‘temple of sin’ by stuffy Christian androids who still pay the God of Travel for half an hour off their commute.)

7: Autoturret Production plant for securing land.

“Zoom in on that.” Perry said, tapping the distant signs of civilization

“Zoom in?” the operator asked with a frown.

“Use the scroll wheel on the mouse. The one in the middle. No, don’t click it scroll it. scroll. It spins, spin it UP, with. Your. Finger.” Perry said, trying his damnedest not to lose his cool.

Maybe I should just make troll-sized computers and have some of Gna’kis’s zealots operate the damn things, it would be easier.

“Oh wow, the picture got bigger!”

Perry’s eye twitched, but he didn’t say anything, instead turning his attention to the tiny little dots in the middle of the continent.

“We got people in what used to be…” Perry consulted his 1970’s map. “North Dakota,” Perry muttered to himself, studying the distinctive shapes of farms, newly built houses, heavy machinery and roads spreading eastwards, following the troll’s path of devastation.

Like he’d thought, they’d taken the path around the desert, spreading through the many hundreds of lakes afforded by the northern routes and establishing hundreds of small townships as they pushed eastwards.

That doesn’t make any sense though. Small towns aren’t really…a thing anymore.

The shape of the roads might be a hint about the settlement’s ‘pop-up’ nature. There was a massive super-highway running down the center, leading back to the west coast of Washington before the curvature of the earth occluded their view. The highway had offshoots branching off of it into the farmland like veins, pumping labor out and food back in.

Each farm seemed to have a massive truck the size of a building designed to fit on the megaroad. It seemed if the towns needed to abandon their land at a moment’s notice, they could pack up their whole lives and retreat along the twelve-lane highway if they had to, and that was how they bypassed the risk of megafauna:

Running while their neighbors got eaten.

Interesting. It was a bit more of a fast-and-loose strategy with people’s lives, but it was viable enough on the whole if the land had been pre-cleared. It would make the total casualties tolerable from a sheer mathematics standpoint. It placed a higher priority on expansion and total output than safety, giving people the opportunity to claim land and make a mint, but without offering them the kind of support that cities like Franklin did with their autoturrets and armed responses to major attacks.

A rapid expansion across America, trying to get a foothold before the indigenous life can recover from the one-two punch of robots and trolls. ‘Manifest destiny’ comes to mind.

Out of idle curiosity, Perry had the drone operator follow the mega-highway back to its source, which was suspiciously close to where Perry had calculated Gna’kis had been summoned over a year ago.

Hmm, Perry mused to himself, telling the operator to zoom in further as they followed the road closer to San Francisco.

Pretty damn good evidence that Gna’kis’s summoner was connected to this eastward expansion, but was he the one behind everything or just a cog in the machine angling for-

-Pop!

The computer died.

“Umm…Sorry?” the drone operator said, looking guilty.

“I made a cover for the power button a couple days ago,” Perry said, flipping it up and restarting the computer. “You didn’t do anything.”

When he booted the computer back up he saw that the connection was missing. Perry checked the log and saw that the drone had reported a fatal overload before it shut off for good.

It was currently falling to earth in a shower of burning bits of thermite, designed to light itself up rather than give other people access to his secrets.

“You think it ran into some…weather or something?” The operator asked.

It was fifty thousand feet in the air. Far above just about everything someone could consider to be ‘weather’.

Who knew, it could’ve run afoul of some kind of magical lightning elemental living in the upper atmosphere, but Perry was doubtful. The fact that it got destroyed at the exact moment he was scanning San Francisco, and that it took out the computer too…

That implied some kind of magical sympathetic effect following the connection to the drone and crashing the computer. An automatic anti-scrying defense could accomplish that.

A magical lightning-creature could not.

Perry let out a long breath.

I’m gonna have to crash another drone to confirm this, aren’t I? He thought sourly.

In the meantime…

Perry needed to go visit the people setting up pop-up farms to the northwest and see what their deal was.