Mirror Tactics

From the northern stretch of the walls, rushed crews of engineers erected several tripods bearing recording equipment and were transferring their feeds straight back to Directory Control.

At the moment, there was little more than a staticky, undetermined differentiation in color between the horizon and a small, grainy layer moving forward at a sluggish pace. The wave was neither as small nor slow as it appeared from a distance, and seeing it placed a chill in every serviceman. The Prime Beacon set his jaw, pushed away from the pillar, and marched back to the island supporting his head generals.

He reached it right as one of them dashed down to meet him. Two was smaller than Four but compensated for his size with a custom-padded vest. "Come, sir, come. We're waiting for visual confirmation from every cardinal direction before we activate the fur scanners."

He found a spot between Four and Two, nodded to the officers operating the consoles, and looked up at the overhead screens. They had to wait three more minutes for confirmation to come from the west, then east, then finally south.

Unaware of her assigned position on the southern stretch, he couldn't avoid imagining her staring out into the empty rock plains with dead eyes as the first glimpses of the beasts that mauled her emerged at the far edges of their sensor and surveillance capabilities.

Four muttered an order under his breath while rubbing his temple, and a distant cluster of techs exploded into action in response. A second later, he looked over at the Prime Beacon.

"They're turning on the fur scanners now." Unlike with weapons systems, most scanning systems were the same effectiveness at twenty meters or their maximum ranges. This included fur scanners, which had such an extraordinary stretch to it that the Nyx Breaker had surveyed dozens of kilometers of tunnels in every direction while attempting to locate a single person. This bespoke well of its ability to locate small details in the background as well.

Waiting for the fur scanners did not feel like an eternity, because so much other data was already collected, refined, organized, and submitted to the islands for review or dismissal. He contributed his HUD and mind to the effort, searching through a file of the different seismographic tremors detected denoting the estimated numbers present in the visible vanguard.

He marked points of interest, then discarded it to move to the awaiting data archives, a digital behemoth of data he could feel connected to the fringes of his mind thanks to his HUD and microchip reader.

He could feel the progress of the others around him too. Four and Two were the fastest and most efficient among his head generals, clearing away more collections of data than him per minute. But they too paled in comparison to the officers stationed on the suspended platforms behind them.

Those carrying extensive cranial cybernetic augmentations relied upon their semi-digitized minds and associated cognitive abilities to clear dozens in ten seconds, each so fast that all it took was thinking of them to turn him dizzy.

Four and Two chuckled together, gesturing for the Prime Beacon to halt his activity before transferring a new file. "It appears we weren't the only ones who planned to withhold our best for the first confrontation."

Its contents made him frown. The amassed Aud army had little more than a million in total. There were white-furs, orange-furs, yellow-furs, green-furs, and blue-furs.

But from all the collected data humanity had on the Aud population, there should've been far more green and blue-furs present, should they all have found their way to the Last Light. And he didn't need to spare much consideration for the absence of the purple-furs.

"We're testing them, but they're also testing us. The question is, are we up against many intellects or a single one?"

"Excellent inquiry, sir. But it's not one we can answer with our current means."

One of the other head generals added her thoughts. "What if they're not testing us, but conserving the finest of their soldiers, as it were? It may be that the Aud are not as numerous as we had thought until now. There's a chance they could even have numbers close to our own."

"I don't think so." He chewed on the inside of his cheek, feeling the flesh fold and bend around his teeth.

"From the action report He-6 compiled, I developed the impression that the Aud had no qualms tossing their numbers around with as much boldness as they had before. And before that, Io was a greater extreme. They were dropping from a height that should've killed at least their weakest, which are still their greatest populated demographic like the servicemen are for us."

"We should assume they can bring to bear at least four armies of similar or greater size to the one at our doorstep now." This came from Four, aiming to bring the conversation back to its roots.

But the Prime Beacon was still mulling over his own words. The Aud hadn't suffered as many casualties at Rhea and Io as they had at the first two forts, since their initial methods of ambush were effective and novel enough for Aud that the human defenders had never expected it. Effective, cost-averse, and still new enough to the playing field that recycling those kinds of attacks in a repeat performance may produce dividends a second time…

His eyes stretched wide.

"Have the techs activate the shielding array!" he choked out in his impassioned alert. "And turn our ground penetrating radars and seismographs to the ground itself!"

"Why would we begin so…" Understanding flashed in Two's eyes. "You genius man!" He and Four split their attention between the tasks. Outside, two major changes were occurring in tandem with each other.

One took place deep below the ground, in a chamber molded from scutumsteel and located in the vicinity of the Chamber of Meet. Inside, engineers and techs that had remained idle until then and waiting moved with a frenzy. Some operated a long wall of consoles, flicking switches, adjusting knobs, and calling out numbers from readout panels to their watching superiors.

The majority of this chamber, which was by no means small, remained occupied by the largest shielding generators humanity had ever built, the upscaled and more developed cousins of the shielding nodes every serviceman carried on their person. And as the first whirred online, it emitted a blue aura in the vicinity far around it. Outside, the space above the highest ceilingscrapers distorted.

Though no drastic visual changes occurred, the ashy cloud layer high above took on a magnified look and tinted a shade darker. After the others finished warming and contributed their energy to the struggle, a flash lit up the Gaiss Hollow's sky.

For a single second, a dome became illuminated, as yellow as a stripe and clear as ice, stretched from its peak at the top of the residential scraper to its rounded base, suspended several dozen meters in the air above and beyond the city's walls.