It took us less time than we’d expected to actually carve ourselves out of the tunnels.

Less time, but still almost an hour, enough time for our Reaver’s to have made their rounds back to base and returned. Reaver One and Two bore the ‘Screw-Missiles’ as our Legion on the ground decided to call them. Much less of a mouthful than what RR&D tried to sell them as, which was ‘Rotational Anti-Armor and Secondary Reconnaissance Smart Missile’ which didn’t even have a good acronym, which, apparently, was a big deal among my people.

All I knew was that they were incredibly useful, even more so as we tasked them with aiding in our hunt for the other Carriers. Of all eight that attacked us, only four had managed to escape, limping the whole way. One had been immolated, one destroyed by me, another by Strauss’ team, and the last having been damaged too much by the Raijin Field and artillery fire to move. That last one was of particular interest, still curled up on itself, the bulk of its reproductive organs shredded.

I almost pitied it, but this was also an opportunity for us to see how these things ticked. A pen had sprouted up around it, some of the Raijin field repurposed to mount into the walls. It had proven to be needless, the thing hadn’t moved an inch since it had taken internal damage.

“I just told you,” I listened to the frustrated report of the medic, “You’re not letting anyone in this facility walk out of here until I give them the all clear.”

Somehow, I managed to suppress and aggrieved sigh. “If they’re not in terrible condition, then I’d like them to begin exploration of the city. I don’t see why this is such a problem.”

The medic in command crossed her arms in front of her chest, glaring at me. The nearest patients to us, especially those with less critical injuries, were silent yet pleading. They wanted to get moving again, at the very least those ones should be allowed.

“Sir, are you a medic? Did you go to school for ten years to become a doctor?” She asked, every comment prickled with annoyance, “I am, and did. We all came here with a job to do, but it’s not going to help anyone if half of these idiots manage to reopen their injuries and manage to get them infected. If I had my way, they’d have been shipped back to Gilramore the moment we had the all clear. Ask any doctor here, hell, even check your medic drones in here and they’ll tell you that a minimum of six to twelve hours of rest is suggested after any major puncture injuries.”

“And,” Sasha Grouse, the most senior doctor on the expedition continued, “We’re not in any immediate danger anymore. If you could point out a biotic for six square miles now, I’d be more than happy to let some of these guys out. But there ain’t, so I’m not.”

I opened my mouth to speak but found that my words were failing me. I was acutely aware of the gazes of the patients, but I could feel the apologetic stares of the other staff even more so.

A sigh escaped my lips, “Dr. Grouse, in light of that fact I’ll defer to your expertise then. But-” I quickly transitioned, seeing the glimmer of triumph in her eyes, “-I want as many people as possible ready and rested for tomorrow. We’re receiving a larger number of people and need to get true forward operating base up as soon as possible.”

She nodded, “Of course, I’m glad we could see eye to eye.”

I managed to keep from snorting at that, “I’ll let you get back to it. I’ve patients to visit for the time being.”

We parted, many of the patients nearest now resigning themselves to a very boring day of rest. I couldn’t necessarily say that all of them were in top condition, but at the same time I also didn’t believe that they were so wounded as to require them to stay here.

However, it was a fact that I wasn’t a doctor. Many of these people had deep puncture wounds from spikes. It was taken care of now, but those were the kinds of injuries that - as I was aware of it - were the most likely to get infected. Without the space-age looking gel wraps that clung to limbs, or the braces that did likewise over abdomens, it would take much longer for those injuries to heal. As it stood, the gel helped let oxygen to the wound as necessary, facilitated cellular regrowth, provided support, and even self cleaned. It would decompose off of the wound after a few days on its own, and until then would be all the patient would need, unless complications arose.

It wasn’t technology that we’d extensively tested in field conditions, hence the presiding doctor decided to keep them here for observation for the day.

As I walked up to Alice and Richard, I couldn’t help but notice that, perhaps, that was a good thing.

Alice was speaking with Richard animatedly, her stomach region affixed with a brace to keep her from moving over much. For the most part, the woman seemed to be telling a story, and for my part I could see something very interesting. Richard was relaxed, the tension had left his body entirely, half sunken into a chair next to the cot, and half leaning on the cot as well, not far at all from Alice.

I wondered if they were just very close friends, or perhaps something more.

Maybe they would be something more in the future, I mused, they would certainly make an interesting pair. Though, they both seemed to be quite embroiled in their own air, so I found myself detouring around, evading notice. There was someone else that I wanted to check on.

Daniel was, to my chagrin, awake and busily being playfully shoved back down onto the cot by the blonde haired woman that I’d known since all of this had begun.

“You,” Fran said, “are going to listen to the doctors orders and stay right here.”

“Hun, I feel fine, I’m great.” He petulantly responded, “I just wanna walk around a bit.”

One of the doctors paused as he walked by, a glint in his eye as he stared at Daniel.

“Funny, I thought I told you to stay put. Do you want a sedative, Mr. Drake?”

Daniel rolled his eyes, “You can’t just do that.” He then turned his attention to Fran, seeing the bemused look on her face, then looked back to the doctor and his now lifted eyebrow. “Right, you can’t just do that, right?”

“I basically just gave Dr. Grouse the ‘OK’ to do just that,” I stepped forward, the doctor smirking and nodding to me. “Thanks for your work,” I told him, shaking his hand.

“A pleasure. Just make sure your friend stays put,” the man chuckled, “I’d hate to have to restitch anything.”

Daniel helplessly threw his hands up, wincing as the motion proved too much and gently settled back in. “So, how did everything go? I heard that the Carriers were hightailing it?”

I nodded, “It went well, I’ll send you some footage of the Reavers and the cave systems. Matter of fact, I’ll just route that to everyone here to give them something to do.” I quickly put together the video from my onboard system, packed it, and sent it to several individuals nearby.

“We’re definitely going to want to get our weapons systems updated and diversified quickly, though.” I sighed, sitting down in a seat nearby, “Those Carriers were something else. Took direct cannon fire without a problem. Chemicals worked well enough, too bad we don’t have an abundance of people using them.”

“It doesn’t help that it can be toxic to us at the same time, and nobody wants to deal with an acid burn,” Fran chuckled, “I’ll need to look at some options for punching through harder targets as well. Something to look into for the future.”

“While we’re at it, unconventional weapons might be good to look at,” Daniel grunted, “Didn’t feel great to have my guns do almost nothing.” I nodded, the three of us sitting in comfortable silence for almost a minute.

Daniel started, “Oh, right, so I heard you crawled out of one of the Carriers earlier.”

“That’s not a pretty picture.” Fran commented dryly, “say that literally any other way in the future.”

I chuckled, “I cut my way through, I couldn’t think of anything else. If you can’t kill it from the outside, kill it from the inside.”

“Yeah, that sounds about right. We might need to actually invest in more people going melee now that I think about it.” Daniel sighed, “that ain’t me, though. I definitely need to modify my mech though.”

“Oh?” I idly thought over a few things he could do, “new weapons, or something else?”

He shook his head, “A complete rebuild. I don’t like the way it’s going right now. The conventional weapons I’ve got are all well and fine, but I get the feeling that the further this all goes on, the worse off I’ll be. So, I’ll help out RR&D with mech stuff for a while, I think.”

“Weren’t you already doing that?” I frowned, confused at the comment.

Fran snorted, “He barely let them touch the mech.”

“Hey, that’s my baby, there,” Daniel defended, but also had a lopsided grin on his face, “but, I figure that I can get a little time off and we can work on making a-”

“Daniel Drake,” Fran smiled, a precipitously dangerous tingle running down my spine at the sight, “is this something we should talk about here?”

He looked suddenly abashed, “Uh, nope. I, uh, I blame the drugs.”

I shook my head, “Well, you guys have fun. I need to go check on our captive biotic out there and figure out what I want to do with it.”

“Have fun and see you later,” Fran said to me as she glared at Daniel. He gave me a pleading glance, but I very quickly vacated the premises, helplessly smirking at that. Today was an odd day, indeed.

As I walked through the base, I saw people working on various projects, the fabrication yard cranking out parts of structures in pre-fab conditions to be placed in a secondary layer around the first wall, the Raijin Field having been moved out a considerable distance now. The base was springing up, and I found myself feeling sentimental over that, and the fact that the people around me were smiling, laughing, and giving a sense of camaraderie to the growing outpost.

There were several of the volunteer teams that were moving in parallel to my Legion teams, and vaguely I wondered if they would join the Legion, or decide to make their own groups. Honestly, I wasn’t sure what I felt on the matter. On the one hand, this whole expedition was to clear out Damond, but the side goal was to check these people to see who had what it took to leave Gilramore’s day to day maintenance to. If I didn’t have to dedicate so many Legion resources to keeping Gilramore secure, then all the better. Bulwark wouldn’t do much out here, Damond had no population other than our Legion. However, I had plans for this base, and one of them involved one of the five hive cores that I now had on hand.

That would be for later, though, I had other things that needed doing right then. I approached the cage, five meter high walls humming with the power that flowed through it. There were six Determinators, three on the walls and three outside of them that kept the pen safe and secure. I ascended the ladder, glaring down over the edge with my own two eyes. I could have easily just tapped into the video feed that one of the machines had, but something told me that I’d want to be here, to see this in person.

The biotic was as immobile as it had been, curled up on itself almost like a dead bug. Nothing unusual was happening visually, and it seemed as though this was all I could expect from it. Perhaps it couldn’t regenerate without the hives, if it even could do so in the first place.

But there was something else that was drawing my attention, here, a mild tug on my senses, insistent and yet subtle.

I glared onward, scathing eyes searching for anything amiss.

Then I saw it, just the slightest flicker, but a tinge of silver flowed down a limb, hidden beneath all of the mass. I grit my teeth, deactivating the Raijin walls and hopping onto the carapace of the Carrier. It didn’t move in the slightest, utterly unresponsive in whatever task it was performing.

I pulled out one of my blades, just in case I needed to duplicate my exploits from before and cut my way out of this thing. A cradle of limbs, thick and sharp, surrounded a glowing silver orb, hidden away by the bulk of its body. From this close, it was impossible not to tell what this was.

“A hive core… you’re making a goddamned hive core…” I shook with equal parts excitement and anger. “Well, this changes the game.”

I grinned as I reached out to touch the mass. If I couldn’t interact with a complete hive, I wondered what might happen if I were to tamper with one in the making?