The House of the Reaper has opened its arms to welcome:
Novices Nicholas Robeson, Rokfour, Yantu, Tron Woods, The_Slumbering_One, and JustPassingBy
Operative Aramando Valencia
Their contributions and dedication to our cause will be honored through the Net and through the Stars.
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Mark stood on the third-floor porch of his manor for forty-five minutes, watching through his polarized engineering goggles as the colossal nanoprinter on the western ridge whined and hissed, its internal extruders working at an accelerated pace. The machine looked like a glowing, semi-circular portal. Out of its blinding blue light, the wide, treaded chassis of an ultra-heavy crawler-crane was slowly extruded. It emerged inch by inch, resting on a heavy-duty conveyor belt that moved the massive machine forward in perfect, synchronized rhythm with the printing process, soon to be followed by four stabilizing excavators.
"Alright, boys," Mark called out over the comms channel, stepping away from the railing and making his way back through his bedroom, pausing to pull the duvet higher over a still-snoring Lyra. "Playtime is over. The assembly toys are ready on the ridge. Get your armor on and get your asses up there. We have a power grid to build."
Over the course of the next two weeks, the entire landscape of Rubrion Prime's basin underwent a radical transformation. The hastily assembled refugee camp of the first few days was systematically and ruthlessly erased, replaced by the humming, highly structured foundation of a true, functioning city.
The assembly of the wind turbines on the western ridge was supposed to be a straightforward, one-day operation. But the planet had other plans. As the red dwarf suns rose over the basin, the typically calm air currents funneling off the jagged topography didn't maintain their breezy consistency. Instead, the winds picked up into howling, unpredictable gales, turning the elevated ridge hostile. The crawler-cranes Marcos had printed were made of S-Alloy, but even they struggled to stabilize their loads against the escalating wind speeds.
Mark, Valerius, Severus, Cassius, Titus, and Octavia acted as the world's most overqualified riggers. Clad in their armor, the five Elites and their commander scaled the eighty-meter towers, fighting against the intensified winds that threatened to tear them right off the metal if it weren't for their magnetic boots.
Every attempt to manually guide and bolt the twenty-ton, ultra-thin swept blades (compared to the average wind turbine blades) into the intricate generator hubs became a battle against the elements. Because of the severe weather shift, what they had planned to finish by sundown stretched into an agonizing process that consumed an entire extra day. But by the end of the second day, twelve towering turbines finally stood proudly along the ridge, their impossibly long blades spinning with quite some speed.
The moment the first turbine achieved optimal rotation, the modified Hellfire battery banks buried in their reinforced S-Alloy bunkers at the base of the towers flared to life. These energy storage units functioned flawlessly as a localized grid buffer. Built specifically for high-capacity energy storage and managed release, they captured the erratic, violent energy of the wind, banked it, and stabilized the output into a smooth flow of raw alternating current.
With the residential and future industrial sectors completely decoupled from the Shepherd's reactor, Marcos immediately routed the heavy frigate's massive, stable energy output directly to the perimeter.
From day one, they had planned to install a high-intensity lighting grid directly into the crashed ship, mounting warm-spectrum floodlights at the corners of every residential module and along the main thoroughfares to drive back the deep shadows cast by the trinary red dwarf suns.
The colonists hadn't really feared the night because they had lighting to drive out the darkness. Well, not at least until Mark and the Elites were ambushed by a fucking evolved dinosaur. But before that, they just held a grim readiness for whatever the forest might spit out at them.
But now, that readiness was backed by serious, automated firepower. The ten-meter-tall bases of the old cracking towers that ringed the colony were fitted with the downsized laser turrets. Because they no longer needed to punch through ablative hull plating, the beam width had been scaled down to the size of a human fist, drastically lowering the Megawatt draw per shot.
When the perimeter grid came online, the turrets whirred to life with a low, menacing hum, their targeting optics burning with a sharp, ruby-red light that cut through the darkness of the tree line. They were lethal, accurate, and, thanks to the exclusive draw from the Shepherd, they would never lose power. At least not for the foreseeable future.
The colony finally had a way to defend itself.
With the power grid stabilized and the perimeter secured, another wave of engineering began in earnest.
A city could not survive on rations and chemical latrines. They needed to complete the remaining infrastructure. They needed plumbing. But Mark also knew he and his seven super-soldiers couldn't build an entire city by themselves. He needed the civilians to step up. They couldn't just be terrified refugees leeching off the protection of the mercenaries, Mark's forces, and the miracles he and Marcos were making. Aurelia had already done a census a few days ago, but they needed to be active members of the community, contributing to the very walls that kept them safe.
Mark instituted a colony-wide labor organization, assigning people jobs according to their skill sets. Former construction workers, cargo haulers, and structural engineers were immediately drafted. Marcos unlocked the driving consoles of the massive excavators and automated trenchers, turning them over to civilian operators. For days, the colony vibrated with the relentless, bone-rattling thud of heavy machinery churning up the alien earth, driven not by an AI or a select handful of soldiers, but by the people themselves.
To minimize the sheer volume of excavation, Marcos mapped out the basin perfectly. The colony sat right in the middle of a massive ten-by-ten-kilometer clearing with mini-forests spread throughout. A colossal utility trench drove straight south through the wilderness, cutting an eight-kilometer unfinished path to the roaring, turbulent river. Thousands of meters of heavy-duty, corrosion-resistant S-Alloy piping and thick bundles of insulated electrical wiring were laid into the dirt to serve as the main water intake.
Mark tasked Aurelia, Lucius, and Kenjiro with leading a large detachment of Peacekeepers and civilian engineers to assemble the water treatment plant and complete the water pipeline to the river. Rather than building it near the wind turbines, Kenji and the two Elites oversaw its construction directly along the southern pipe route. The sprawling compound of centrifugal filters and chemical purifiers was designed to intercept river water, refine it through automated processes overseen by civilian engineers, and then pump the clean water into the residential grid.
The sewage treatment plant was built safely downwind, five kilometers to the west, near the mountain ridge, ensuring that citizens wouldn't be bothered by noise or smell.
Retrofitting the residential modules was complex, but Marcos had already planned ahead when designing them. He created a group of 50 automated builder drones, and they swarmed the housing sectors, drilling into prefabricated structures and physically connecting the underground water mains to the homes' internal plumbing systems, with automated pumping systems.
Everything in the city was hooked up and placed on standby. The hardware was ready; the only missing piece was the source itself. By the end of the two weeks, the water treatment plant was ninety percent fully operational, and the sewage facility was three-quarters of the way there.
While the heavy machinery ripped the earth apart, the colony's first agricultural initiatives started to take root. Mark handed control of the tilled land south of the city to the colonists with farming, botanical, or agricultural backgrounds. Under the supervision of Dr. Corven's scientific staff, they utilized automated tillers to churn the dark, rich loam, planting the first rows of genetically modified, rapid-growth crops and turning the fertile alien dirt into a grid of vibrant, hopeful green.
Above them all, far beyond the reach of the naked eye, the scout drones continued their expansion.
The initial swarm of high-altitude reconnaissance drones had been flying nonstop since their launch, pushing thousands of miles out from the colony. The data they streamed back to Marcos's servers fundamentally altered their understanding of the planet. They already knew that Rubrion Prime was not a world of sprawling oceans and that the continent was dominated by an endless, labyrinthine network of massive rivers that served as the planet's churning veins.
But the most alarming data came from deep in the untamed wilderness, where the drones had discovered massive water reservoirs. From a high altitude, they appeared entirely natural. But when Marcos directed the optical lenses to push in and magnify the footage, they captured the unmistakable, jagged silhouettes of very old alien architecture. Huge, deteriorated metal structures, long abandoned and swallowed entirely by God knows how many years of overgrown greenery, sat half-submerged in the reservoirs. They were not the first intelligent beings to try to tame this world.
The scale of Rubrion Prime and its implied buried history was terrifying, but the tactical mapping gave Mark a distinct advantage. However, the most interesting discoveries were not thousands of miles away, but right in their own backyard.
Toward the middle of the second week, Aurelia and Lucius's engineering crews finally finished the primary trenching for the main water intake pipes, reaching the banks of the sprawling, turbulent river eight kilometers to the south.
The moment the massive intake valves were secured and the system was flushed, the grid would come alive. For the first time since they had crash-landed on the meat-grinder of a planet, the colonists back at the camp were about to experience the profound, morale-boosting luxury of turning a metal handle and watching clean, pressurized water flow into a sink.
Mark stood near the water's edge, his polarized goggles shielding his eyes from the crimson glare of the three red dwarf suns hanging low in the sky. Behind him, civilian operators were running the three massive excavators, their hydraulic arms holding the final section of the intake pipe. A large detachment of Vanguard mercenaries and Peacekeepers formed a tight, heavily armed perimeter around the construction site, their assault rifles raised, their eyes scanning the thick foliage in a state of vigilant readiness.
The river was a chaotic ecosystem in its own right. Under the light of the trinary stars, the water looked dark, churning, and frothing over massive, smooth stones. The river banks were teeming with life. Mark watched as herds of strange, multi-legged herbivores with thick, bony plating drank cautiously from the shallows, while massive, serpentine amphibians glided silently through the dark currents. It was a delicate, brutal balance in which some lived in harmony while others hunted each other with ruthless efficiency.
But the noise of the civilian-operated excavators and the sheer, disruptive presence of the humans churning up the soil and placing weird metal things in the ground had drawn unwanted attention.
"Commander," Valerius's voice crackled over the comms, tight and urgently calm. "We have possible hostiles coming through the bush from the North-east quadrant."
Mark turned his head, his hand dropping to the new magnetic rail-pistol he had holstered at his thigh.
Pushing through the dense, violet foliage were hulking shapes that moved with silent grace that completely betrayed their sheer size. They looked like colossal bears but were perfectly adapted to the warm weather of the jungle-like forest. They easily stood fourteen feet tall on their hind legs, their musculature thick and corded. Their relatively short fur was a mottled mix of dark purple, rust-red, and deep brown, acting as a natural camouflage against the alien grass and the shadows cast by the red dwarf suns. Their skulls were thick and heavily armored with bone plating, and their claws looked like serrated scythes capable of tearing the front off an armored personnel carrier.
There were five of them, and they had begun to move toward Mark and the crew, dropping into low, predatory stalking stances. They dropped to all fours, their massive heads lowered, their lips peeling back to reveal rows of jagged, bone-crushing teeth, then fanning out to flank the human perimeter in a textbook predatory formation.
"Get your weapons ready!" Valerius barked, the Peacekeepers and Vanguard mercenaries instantly raised their rifles, settling into a tense, aggressive readiness for a fight as the distinct, metallic clacks of safeties disengaging echoed over the roar of the river.
Mark drew his rail-pistol, his muscles tensing for the inevitable brutal slugfest. Standard ballistics wouldn't do shit against that bone plating, but the high-velocity depleted uranium slugs made from some of the Shepherd's own ammunition in his magazine should punch clean through their skulls.
The lead bear was a scarred brute with a chunk of its bone-plating missing. It let out a deep, chest-rattling roar and kicked up a massive clod of dirt, preparing to charge.
But, contrary to expectations, the massive bear froze, its front paws slamming into the dirt. The other four instantly halted their advance, their ears pinning back flat against their heavily armored skulls. The aggressive, predatory stance vanished, replaced by a sudden, overwhelming posture of complete submission. They lowered their massive bodies to the ground, their chins resting in the purple grass, bowing their heads.
They weren't bowing to Mark, but to the shadow that had slowly covered him from behind.
Mark didn't turn around because he felt the sudden shift in air pressure caused by an apex predator entering the field of play. A low, vibrating growl began to hum through the air, a sound so deep and resonant that Mark could feel it rattling the very bones in his chest.
Mark slowly turned his head to see that standing less than ten feet behind him, completely dwarfing everyone who was now staring in stunned vigilance, was the giant wolf. It had only made its appearance twice before, both times during the night, but here it stood in the bloody daylight, its teeth bared, slowly releasing a growing growl that commanded absolute subservience.
The bears didn't hesitate. The massive, fourteen-foot-tall flesh and blood machines of destruction scrambled backward, whining like beaten dogs, before turning and retreating back into the dense underbrush, fleeing for their lives.
The clearing fell deathly silent, save for the rush of the river.
The giant wolf snapped its jaws shut, the terrifying growl cutting off instantly. It stood up to its full, staggering height, easily towering over Mark.
Mark slowly holstered his rail-pistol, raising his hands, palms open, in a universal gesture of non-hostility. He took a slow, measured step forward. The wolf watched him, its gaze calculating and intelligent.
"Easy," Mark murmured, his voice a low, soothing rumble over his external speakers. "Just saying hello."
He reached his armored hand out, slowly attempting to touch the thick, coarse fur of the massive beast's shoulder.
The moment his fingers were an inch away, the wolf simply pulled back. It didn't snap or growl. It just fluidly shifted itself out of reach. It lowered its head slightly, letting out a sharp, rapid succession of exhales through its massive nose, doing exactly what dogs do when they let air out of their noses rapidly to show annoyance.
The giant wolf turned its massive body away, taking a few slow, deliberate steps back toward the tree line.
As it moved, the brush parted, and the two small wolves Mark had seen while fighting the raptors stepped out from the shadows of the purple grass. They were no longer as small, and in just under two weeks, they had grown about a foot in height and 2 in length, their fur a darker, sleeker grey.
But they weren't alone.
Tumbling and bounding out from the foliage behind them were seven even smaller pups. However, these pups were different, their fur was wildly diverse. A few of them were a deep, rich dark burgundy, blending perfectly with the shadows of the suns. Others were a mottled, striking mix of dark burgundy and white, and the last two were completely, blindingly white as the snow of the mountains.
The seven new pups yipped and tumbled over each other, all of them trailing behind the massive wolf as it walked past them, as if following their father or mother. The giant beast led them back into the dense, dark foliage of the jungle as if they owned the very earth they walked on.
The wolves would make their appearances more often, bit by bit, especially the giant one, as if actively observing what the humans were making.
The perimeter of the city was no longer just marked by a trench and some turrets since the nanoprinters had been working overtime to extrude the colony's primary physical defense: a massive, ten-meter-tall barrier. However, it wasn't a solid slab of metal since that would require too much raw material. Instead, Mark had decided on a slatted, heavily reinforced fence-like structure.
A single meter of solid, dense S-Alloy rose from the ground. Above it, a one-meter gap of empty space. Then, another massive, horizontal extrusion of S-Alloy spanned the pillars. A one-meter space, an extrusion, a gap, rinse and repeat until the structure hit the ten-meter mark, resulting in five colossal, horizontal metal extrusions per wall section. The gaps also allowed the wind to continue on, passing through harmlessly while giving the defending forces unobstructed lines of sight to fire into the jungle, while the sheer, brutal density of the metal extrusions prevented any large-scale predator from simply charging through.
Positioned at strategic intervals along the wall were heavily armored, manned outlook towers, elevating the Peacekeepers to provide overlapping fields of fire with the automated laser turrets.
The city was a fortress. Or, at least, Mark thought it was.
One morning, when they officially began the final construction phase of the sewage treatment plant, Mark stepped out of his home during the early morning. The sky was still a bruised, deep violet, the shadows clinging to the brightly lit streets of the residential grid.
Mark raised his coffee mug to his lips, taking a slow sip, and then froze.
Walking with slow, confident, quiet steps down the very center of the main avenue, right in the heart of the colony, was the giant wolf.
It had somehow completely bypassed the ten-meter-tall fence-like walls, the laser turrets, and the manned outlook towers. It was casually strolling past the identical, pristine residential modules, sniffing at a structure with mild interest.
Mark slowly lowered his coffee mug, his heart hammering against his ribs, but he didn't reach for his weapon. He had come to the understanding that if the beast wanted to slaughter the sleeping colonists, it would have already done so.
The giant wolf stopped, sensing Mark watching it from the porch. It turned its massive head, its glowing, intelligent eyes locking onto Mark from down the street.
Instead of fleeing, it let out a soft huff and literally pranced its way down the street, its strides eating up the distance in seconds until it stood directly face to face with him, just below the balcony.
Mark leaned over the railing, looking down into the creature's eyes. The wolf stared back up at him. It tilted its massive head to the side, its nose twitching as it actively analyzed him, taking in his clean scent, the smell of his coffee, his posture, and his total lack of fear. They stayed locked in that quiet, surreal standoff for a long minute.
Then, the voices of the waking community began to echo from a few streets over. The faint sound of civilian laborers chatting and doors hissing open bled into the cool morning air.
The wolf's ears twitched as it decided it had seen enough and that the noise meant it was time to leave.
Without a sound, the massive beast turned away. It casually approached the nearest two-story residential module (10ft elevated off the ground, 10ft ceilings = 20ft tall structure, technically a 2-story structure). With a sudden, terrifying display of explosive power, the wolf leaped. Mark watched as the beast swiftly jumped on top of the housing modules, its massive paws touching down silently on the S-Alloy plating before it launched itself again, clearing the entire residential sector in three massive bounds and vaulting effortlessly over the ten-meter fence, retreating back into the forest.
"Way to blow the wind out of my sail," Mark said while letting out a long, ragged breath, taking another sip of his coffee.
These sorts of events became increasingly common as the days went by. The wolves weren't just observing the humans anymore. It kind of felt as if they were patrolling them. The giant wolf was actively walking the perimeter and casually entering the city, as if it was claiming a stake over the humans, marking them as its people.
By the end of a third week, the colony had achieved a brutal, functional equilibrium.
Mark, Valerius, and a detachment of civilian engineers were once again eight kilometers south, working near the river's banks. But this time, they were positioned significantly further downstream from their pristine water intake site. They were putting the final touches on the massive release pipe system for the water treatment plant. The heavily purified, processed water was routed from the plant, sent down the massive subterranean pipeline into two newly excavated water reservoirs before being sent to one last newly excavated water reservoir they had created near the riverbank, and then the overflow was safely and cleanly released back into the dark currents, ensuring no contamination of their own supply.
As Mark turned to head back toward the heavy transports, a sharp, sudden crack of a breaking branch echoed from the dense brush downstream.
Mark and the five mercenaries accompanying him instantly raised their weapons, pivoting toward the sound in practiced unison.
"Hold your fire," Mark ordered, his optics piercing the shadows cast by the crimson suns.
Lying half-submerged in the mud, thrashing weakly against the thick, glowing roots of an alien willow tree, was a massive creature. It looked like some sort of evolved water buffalo. It was easily the size of a truck, its hide covered in thick, interlocking plates of dark, mossy armor. Its massive, sweeping horns were jagged and lethal, but right now, it was entirely helpless. As they moved closer, they noticed the animal had a broken leg, the back right limb bent at a sickening, unnatural angle.
"Looks like it took a nasty fall down the embankment," one of the mercenaries muttered, lowering his rifle slightly, though keeping his finger near the trigger guard. "Should we put it out of its misery, Sir?"
Before Mark could answer, the comms in his ear crackled to life. Dr. Corven, who had apparently been monitoring the expedition's helmet feeds from her laboratory back in the city, spoke up, her voice trembling with intense, fanatical scientific greed.
"You will do no such thing!" Dr. Corven practically shrieked over the channel. "Mr. Shephard, look at the ossification on those horns! Look at the dermal plating! That is a highly specialized, heavy-load herbivore! If we can study its biology, we might be able to domesticate the species for high-yield protein farming and livestock breeding! I demand you bring it back to the city immediately!"
Mark sighed, pinching the bridge of his nose. Transporting a terrified, five-ton armored space-buffalo with a shattered leg eight kilometers back through a hostile jungle was not exactly on his to-do list for the afternoon. But at least they had machines for heavy labor and didn't need to be the beasts of burden. But Corven's insistence was hard to ignore, and she was right about the meat. If they were going to survive in the long term, they couldn't just rely on synthetic polymers and MREs. They needed local agriculture, which they had already begun, and they needed livestock.
"Alright, Doctor," Mark grunted. "Keep your lab coat on."
He didn't even need to switch channels as he knew that Marcos was always listening.
"Marcos, you catch all that?" Mark asked, tapping the comms headset resting over his right ear.
"Loud and clear," Marcos replied instantly.
"Change of plans for the afternoon," Mark said, watching Valerius emerge from the valve bunker covered in mud. "Send a half-dozen drones and a reinforced cargo flatbed to our coordinates. And have Corven whip up whatever passes for a tranquilizer in her lab and load it on the drones."
Mark looked back at the thrashing beast, his eyes locking onto the shattered, unnaturally bent leg. "Actually, Marcos, a question. Can the healing pods be scaled up? Can we apply it to something this big, maybe even an animal?"
"Theoretically, yes," Marcos replied, processing the variables. "I can extrude a scaled-up stabilization frame and widen the emitter arrays. However, increasing the surface area means it loses a significant amount of its instantaneous healing efficiency. Furthermore, applying human-calibrated cellular stimulators to an unmapped, alien biology is entirely experimental. I cannot guarantee the tissue will react positively, or if it will react at all."
"But it might work," Mark countered.
"I guess there is only one way to find out," Marcos agreed, a hint of genuine curiosity bleeding into his digital voice. "I am already clearing a space and prepping a specialized healing enclosure near the agricultural sector."