"Are you certain he is no longer aboard the ship?" the chancellor asked spinning to face the eidolon.
"More than certain. I have spotted him helping the hybrids as they transport cargo across our homeworld."
The chancellor smashed his hands against the work station he had been using, crushing it. "I knew something was off about him. Send a gunship after him. Do not let him shame himself anymore."
"I understand. As for the rest of my report, the next set of growing chambers was also faulty and the possessed are progressively getting larger. They will soon break out of their containment pens."
"Send the possessed after the hybrids. We can destroy the possessed once we retake the mother crystal."
"As you wish."
The eidolon stood and walked back toward the bridge. Once there he triggered the ship to eject the possessed eidolons and their containers. A gunship tethered itself to the containers and started heading for Loyd's convoy.
xX Now to look back at that convoy Xx
"Alright, I've got the lines secured but you're not going to roll all that well," Jim called to Loyd.
"Good, and don't worry about the tracks, I'm almost done fixing them," Loyd replied, disconnecting the final bolt. "Alright, I've gotten the tracks off. Ready whenever you are."
"Then, let's hit the road, or the sand dune equivalent," Jim joked.
Jim's crawler lurched forward; snagging when the cables lost the last of their slack. Jim pushed the accelerator even harder and the damaged crawler began to move. Its tracks came off the wheels used to drive them, increasing the pressure of the crawler on the ground but also allowing it to roll.
"We are moving. Everyone please make yourselves comfortable while we travel to the other side of Mars. It's going to be a long drive." Jim paused. "Loyd, why did you decide on Greeley? There are plenty of other plantation colonies with access to a space elevator. What's so special about Greeley?"
"It has direct access to Phobos. We can jump off the elevator halfway up and use the booster rocket to slingshot ourselves out of orbit, shortening the otherwise six-month-long voyage to Earth," Madeline pointed out. "It's rather genius and we get to stop by the most awesome place on Mars on our way. The far point crater is along our planned route."
"Yeah, I'd kinda wanted to check out the crater. I've been getting interference from its direction ever since I first got the neural link to start up," Loyd said.
"Well we can stop for about two hours once we reach it but after that, we won't be able to stop again," Charlette said entering the airlock to Jim's crawler with Loyd and Sara.
"Sweet! That means we can take samples of the ground around the crater," Linda said excitedly, her face almost glowing with delight.
"Now we just have to wait for the next attack, right?" Tiny asked, scanning the sky.
"Pretty much. The humans have tried and failed to stop us already and the swarm takes too long to get here, so we only need to worry about the Crystalids," Griffon said, sitting at a work station. "Hey, Loyd. What's the portable habitat you're bringing for?"
"Check out the most recent images from Hubble of Africa," Loyd said sitting behind him.
Griffon turned back to his terminal and brought up the images. "Why is Africa all white? Wait, is that?!"
"That's the largest lightning bolt the Earth has seen in all of human history. We can expect larger ones with the changing of the seasons into summer. The wind will pick up all the sand from every landmass and unless our habitat is capable of surviving being sandblasted with electrically charged grains of sand moving nearly three-hundred kilometers an hour, we won't survive. Oh, and that's not even mentioning that the oxygen in the atmosphere is nearly depleted," Loyd said as everyone realized what they had signed up for.
"Where did you say we were going to land?" Griffon asked.
"I was thinking we would land somewhere near the old Russian nuclear waste dump sites, to avoid an early attack. Our other option was on the other side of the planet on top of the primary swarm body, to try and cause as much damage as possible soon after landing," Loyd paused so everyone could pitch in their own thoughts.
"I'm thinking we need to get our infrastructure up first, then we can go on the offensive," Jim suggested.
"Yes, but we will need to collect large quantities of biomass before we can do that. I say we go with the Russia site and get ourselves set up for a long siege," Griffon pointed out.
"We can take out anything near the landing site before we arrive with a kinetic strike. That should give us a few extra days if we're lucky," Charlette said.
"Why don't we stay in orbit? We can have a mobile platform with a crystal tether that stretches down into the atmosphere like the elevator near Greeley. We'd have to make it retractable but it offers us the most protection," Madeline pitched in.
"But that limits our ability to gather resources and forces us to stay around the equator if we set up anything on the ground," Sara noted.
"All of your ideas are good but there's yet another option," Loyd said, taking over at the computer. "We can have a sort of mobile land base using the crawlers and an orbital station. The station will mostly just be cameras and radio equipment, so we can see any attacks before they reach us. We need to also have mining equipment set up so we can make more crystal. We have enough energy crystals to generate all the power we'll need to set everything up but getting more should be our first priority. The next thing we need to worry about is going to be setting up defensive platforms. Since I don't think anyone wants to fight the swarm with just us, an orbital strike will be used to clear all the Swarm from around the landing site and allow us to get everything set up. Additional strikes will be waiting in orbit to uncover specific ore deposits," Loyd sat back with his plans laid out on the screen in front of him. "So, what do you guys think?"
"That is the least complicated way you could think of to demonstrate your plan?" Sara asked, confused by the spinning globe with lines drawn on the screen.
"We start here," Loyd said, pointing at the landing site. "We set ourselves up and move to the first ore deposit here. We mine everything we possibly can and then move to this one. I don't think we'll mine everything out but we will come back here later, so that's fine. This crawler will be used as our mobile home and manufacturing center. We can use the other crawler as a mobile mining and refinery platform so we can pack up and go at a moment's notice. By the time we get to the third ore spot, we should have enough materials for a third miner. We'll use it as a second mining and refining platform. We should be able to make a fourth crawler by the time we reach the fifth ore location. I don't know what we'll need to use it for yet but that should get us closer to the mid-eastern oil fields which we need to drain if my plan on taking out the Prime Sentience is going to work."
"What is your idea on taking it out?" Sara asked, already knowing the answer.
"We kill it with fire," Loyd said cheerfully.
"So, what if we made the fourth crawler into a second attack force and went separate ways?" Tiny asked. "I can make more eidolons like myself and we can attack this Prime Sentience from two directions."
"I thought your growing chambers were broken?" Linda said.
"They are but I think I found a way around that. Loyd when you made your newest CTAS you did exactly what our growth chambers accomplished. I can use that same effect to make another army to attack with. Not to mention being metallic makes us Crystalids excellent miners," Tiny joked, becoming more human-like by the hour.
"That might work," Loyd said thinking. "It'll slow down both parties but will make us stronger by the end. Give me till we reach the Far Point crater to work on this and we'll get back together after we check it out."
"Alright, that gives us time to come up with strategies on how we can defeat the swarm," Jim said, handing everyone except Tiny a tablet. "Can't you just connect to the computer system like when you were helping Griffon?"
"Yes, I can but it was rather rude last time. I would also like to see how these tablets of yours work," Tiny explained holding his hand out.
"Fair enough," Jim handed him the last tablet. "Now, let's get to planning out this war!"
A cheer rose up from the crawler as it traveled through the Martian desert.