Chapter 614 A Mayonnaise Jar on Stilts

Chapter 614 A Mayonnaise Jar on Stilts

Two of the five squads of marines left their places on the perimeter of the landing zone and headed to the “decorated” containers. One by one, the containers cracked open, small clouds of fog drifting out of them and pooling in the low areas on the ground. The fog was the remains of the shock foam that researchers in Lab City had developed to allow for higher-speed impacts in yeet pods or cargo launched from mass drivers.

The beauty of it was that it was a completely analog system; mechanical altimeters would detect when the pod or cargo container reached a set point—usually a hundred meters before impact—and trigger a valve that would allow two binary agents to mix. The resulting chemical formed a foam that expanded, bursting the relatively fragile containment tanks it was mixed in and allowing it to expand to fill whatever space it was in. It had a ridiculously high shock tolerance and would rapidly decay and sublimate into a gas composed primarily of nitrogen, helium, sulfur hexafluoride, and other trace elements.

After verifying the marines’ biometrics, Cerberus mulebots woke to life and grabbed cargo sleds in their teeth before digging in their mechanical paws and dragging the tons of materials that had taken the short journey from orbit with the bots out of the containers on heavy duty runners. Each container held five cargo sleds, and each of those weighed eight tons.

All in all, the cargo that had just come down from the Farsight would be enough to build a reasonably decent sized, semi-permanent research base. And the constructor swarm queens included in the drop set about doing just that as soon as the cargo had been unloaded and consolidated in one stockpile.

Their initial jobs completed, the Cerberus mulebots took up a complex patrol in the jungle surrounding the clearing the lander had come down in, outside the perimeter the marines were guarding.

The two marines continued their discussion as they lifted, carried, and—gently—put things in various piles to make it easier for the swarms the constructor queens were building to assemble into a base like a giant 3D puzzle. It was tiring and back-breaking work, but their HUDs made it easy, as all they had to do was line their loads up with the silhouettes in their field of view, and once the shape turned from yellow (or whatever other color they had chosen when customizing their displays to fit them) to white.

The cycle of lift-carry-drop-repeat continued as the marines, who felt safe thanks to their “archangel” on overwatch from ten kilometers above them, proceeded from here to there in the clearing, handling the initial grunt work of construction with relative ease.

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Twenty-four hours later, the initial phase of construction was complete. Each of the constructor swarm queens had assembled their entire swarms and had gotten to work, building what looked very much like an opaque mayonnaise jar on stilts in the very center of the clearing. The “stilts” were deceptively small and were actually each about a meter across; they only looked small because the “mayonnaise jar” they were supporting was so big.

The order came down to evacuate the clearing and take a quick jaunt back up to low orbit, as the fusion reactor the swarms had built was about to come online. And since it was the first time that a reactor had been assembled from parts, rather than printed, nobody knew if it would peacefully generate electricity or go supercritical and turn into a second, brighter star that was much, much closer to Proxima Centauri b’s surface.

But it turned out they had been worried for nothing as the reactor came up to temp, ignited, and settled into producing a steady stream of power that ran through cables strung inside the stilts that supported the reactor and held it above the ground. Those cables split, some of them going to converters that converted the output from electricity to unaspected mana, and others passing through step-down transformers that lowered the voltage to something that regular hardware could handle.

The marines returned to the surface, where they continued hauling cargo around for the constructor swarms to assemble, and soon, the research base had taken shape. Surrounded by a spherical mana shield, the base’s completion marked the moment that research could begin at full speed, instead of the fits and starts it’d been proceeding at while the researchers had been stuck in orbit.