Maty, Aer-ki Jyr [top 20 books to read .txt] 📗

everything short of reproduction in the biological sense. Technologically they could plant the seeds necessary to fabricate at a rate to match or exceed the Hadarak, but that was not the mission here.

Kyra watched as the pods disgorged more drones that bored their way into the Hadarak living structure surrounding the relic, attempting to carve passageways, but were unsuccessful as the surrounding mass swelled to seal them. That meant heavy excavation was needed, and the carving out of entire chasms began with more units being sent down from orbit to assist, though they wouldn’t arrive for some time.

Meaning the orbital battle continued, and Nevantha had to delay the Hadarak from arriving at the bore hole from above…with his weaponry being used to snipe units that began to encroach into the devastated surface area around it. Kyra had time to work. The Elloquim would make sure of that. But she didn’t have an unlimited window here. They needed to find an entrance, for they could not cut through the relic in any conventional means, and the larger weaponry that Nevantha possessed could not reach it in its buried position. The cutting beam was designed for rock, not armor of this magnitude, and the more potent weapons required closer contact than a ship in orbit could manage.

He could come down to the surface if needed, but the small hole that was only a few hundred meters wide didn’t allow many firing options. If Kyra failed entry by any other way Nevantha would try it, but such imprecise firing could destroy whatever was inside when a surgical entry was needed. Fortunately, the Hadarak infestation could also be hacked, and one of the drones manage to patch into an exposed neural tendril and map out the circumference of the very large relic…which was larger than Nevantha and extended well below the magma layer like a root tapping down into the center of the planet.

The Hadarak had an infestation wrapped around it like a coiled snake, but the general parameters were enough to estimate its size…as well as the access points to the interior. All 7,139 of them.

The carving teams were immediately retasked to the closest one, and after a modest amount of waiting Kyra’s pod was finally able to move into position. The doors opened and the bipedal attack drones detached from their rack mounts along with Kyra’s body. She was dumped to the ground, landing in a crouch then springing into a run along with the much larger machines…though she was mostly one as well, with her internal Human body encased in thick battle armor that covered her head to toe and kept her alive in the ghastly dome dripping with Hadarak liquids from the evisceration above that had not fully removed all of it. Just enough to create a landing zone around one of the entry portals that formerly had a tendril sticking down into the small shield dome being produced by the relic itself.

The carvers were already clearing that out, with a tube of Hadarak parts shooting out into another elevated shield column that carried out beyond the landing area and eventually back up to the surface where it would be dumped. Tovi was orchestrating all of that, along with the laying of defensive emplacements on the relic’s hull, securing their foothold a bit while Kyra was tasked with going inside, for Tovi’s pod would not fit. Access to the relic appeared to be designed for small units only, not just here but everywhere else. Cargo access must have been in larger areas not open to the Hadarak…or else the purpose of this relic was something else entirely.

Kyra ran across the exposed surface of the relic, seeing its black/red surface gleam in the lights of the many PanNari machines flying or running around, and now cleaned pristinely of all Hadarak material, with the drippings from above being scooped up and removed by dedicated units that were working in conjunction with cauterizers that were burning the drip points above into silence.

The armor beneath her feet was unknown to the PanNari, and Star Force had given them a copy of their database as well…at least as much as they would admit to. They most likely kept some secrets for themselves, but their database was far more extensive than everything the QuipNari had put together on their own, and nothing in it was even remotely close to this reddish material.

The entry point was not a cupola, merely a cavity that led to sunken stairs capped by the shield dome to secure it against falling debris most likely, for they were under several miles of planetary rock, with a few support spires visible in the distance where the Hadarak infestation had been cleared out all the way to the rocky walls. Meaning the stone in this area had either been excavated by the Hadarak, or by those who had built this relic…or a combination thereof.

Whoever had built it had left these access points for a reason, and as Kyra passed through the shield without resistance, she got a very biological foreboding as to what lay inside. Something that Nevantha commented on as she descended inside following a stream of attack drones that would spring any traps well ahead of her before she could get to them and endanger herself…

3

There were Hadarak infestations everywhere, reaching into the facility like the roots on a tree, and where each root went it ended in an interface terminal. The Hadarak were actively using the facility and were plugged into it by a means that was not readily apparent until Nevantha’s drones cut apart and dissected the interface tissue.

Somehow they had grown mechanical components into their biological tissue in order to establish a hardline connection…but that was easy enough to remove on the node Kyra came to first as many were being cleared out simultaneously. No Hadarak minions were present. Just the tissue growths.