Crusader of the Infinite War (Supreme Commander x Halo)

Crusader Eris Hampton

Ten minutes before

Zeta Canis, Sanctioned Machine Purge

Darkness found no purchase across the vast desert. Many thousands of weapons systems roared across the soon to be sterile lands. Shield systems spat out blinding light as waste energy as they were struck like drums by endless swarms of artillery shells. The sky was awash with a dizzying array of aircraft that no commander could hope to manage. Complex AI routines guiding the unmanned craft resorting to only the simplest of subroutines in a desperate attempt to cope with the seer amount of sensory overload.

I darted across the battlefield, trusting in my ACU to maintain balance as days of war material was compacted underfoot by endless waves of automated weapons platforms. It was a desperate play, an all out assault against a heavily fortified position, something that the situation demanded despite my well honed instincts cautioning against such a thing. The Cybran were set to escape soon, before long the bulk of proscribed symbionts would escape using an experimental quantum gate constructed along a strange eddy and I would have failed the Princess.

The forces I had amassed over the extended campaign on Zeta Canis fell by the hundreds. War machines that had seen days of constant operation cut down by entrenched gunlines but I had many more still to take their place. The facilities resources were not endless, they had been bled dry as I had moved from strength to strength. The heretic population and dwindled to a pleasing but incomplete twenty nine percent. The last remnants of resistance who so doggedly clung to an unclean existence separate from The Way would be crushed here and now.

At my approach the last remaining Cybran defenders intruded into my quantum DataStream to spit curses and rave at me knowing that doom approached them. The pair of commanders were talented, I admitted begrudgingly. They were resourceful and quick to adapt to my attacks, having learnt from the deaths of six other petty commanders who had stood defiant at my righteous cause.

The walled city before me crumbled, it's defences reduced to metal husks at my inexorable advance and I watched as the two towering Cybran commanders turned about an ran from me. My revelry lasted only a moment before there was a low boom that cast up dust across the battlefield and warped my quantum DataStream beyond usability.

The cold realisation that my extermination had come too late, that the Cybran were on the verge of escape drove me forward as my lesser bots faltered, confused and dazed as they were rendered isolated. Advanced units adapted quickly and began to operate upon the last orders I had given while the lesser robots froze in place with too much data for a local unit to handle in any meaningful timeframe.

I did not wait for them, casting caution to the wind as I began to fire upon the fleeing Cybran with disruption bolts that denatured the command units nano armour leaving superheated gouges in the plating that dripped down the cowards back. The boom sounded again and reality shifted in place, the ground quaked again and again earth and stone and metal thrown into the air as everything lost purchase and was thrown about by whatever means the Cybran had devised to escape the wroth of the Illuminate.

I screamed in rage, my fury sounding out in unreality as the darkness, true darkness of the scarcely understood space between spaces embraced us all.

---

Minerva and Liber4

Zero Hour

Unknown.

"We escaped." Minerva let out a pitiful laugh, tired, senses dulled from the extended combat operations that she was forced to endure without me.

"Unknown, more data required."

"Yeah, sure lets… woah clear this up for me would ya?!" Minerva's heart raced and we were both exposed to a jolt of adrenaline as the quantum eddies began to shift in unexpected and unprecedented ways.

"Resolving, higher resolution analysis impossible. Prediction, quantum field rejection imminent."

"It's gunna get hot!" Minerva shouted to herself more then anything, a moment later we were thrown from the turmoil of unconstrained quantum travel and sent sprawling in a field of fire and ash. Our Armoured Command Unit let out a scream of protest as thousands of nanobots across the surface boiled away at the violent quantum rejection. Sacrificed to preserve the ACU itself.

"Minerva4! You made it!" The voice of Leopard11 crackled over priority coms as we both struggled to process the wreckage about us. "Get up and run a diagnostic, then get some generators operational we have wounded!" The form of the damaged command unit marching across the wreckage drew into stark resolution the carnage all about.

Bodies, thousands of bodies, wounded, dead, stunned. Some burnt to ash from exposed quantum travel others were lucky to have been partially secured in bunkers or other vehicles that had mostly protected them from the violent re-entry into real space. Minerva, stunned, allowed me to carry her hands to the controls of our command unit. I cast about the operational end of our engineering suite to gather discarded mass from the wreckage careful to avoid any persons, alive or dead.

"Liber?" Minerva whispered as I shifted though dozens of different generator designs before settling on a civilian model that could output enough power to supply a small hospital, scaling up this design would be simple.

"Hmm?"

"Look." She had sensed my distraction, I redirected my attention and though her eyes beheld the light of an unknown star playing across a horizon that extended into the heavens. We looked, together, at the ring that encircled us. Green and blue and brown, forests, grasslands, oceans and deserts across a great artificial structure the likes of which took our breath away.

A ringworld.

"The stars are wrong." Minerva shared with me her calculations and I confirmed it. Checking and rechecking, we were not anywhere, not even in relation to anywhere we knew. This was unprecedented, dozens of possibilities assaulted my senses and I began to feel overwhelmed even with Minerva grounding my logical processes. It was too much, too soon, I began to think myself apart, the signs becoming obvious.

"Join." I begged

"Agreed." In a moment, a heartbeat, a breath. We were no longer apart.

---

Minerva4

Three Hours after Arrival

Ringworld

What was once a gentle rolling hillside dotted with trees was now a quickly growing settlement. Metal residential apartments were quickly deployed along with extensive hospital facilities, power generators and advanced omni-directional sensor arrays. The civilian area was arrayed around a shield array and was surrounded by tall walls and laser point defence systems in all cardinal directions. Spinward was where Leopard11 and I had established the Air and Land factories that were slowly deploying scouting assets to create a more detailed map of our surroundings.

With a mere hundred or so scout planes and dozens of automated engineers our progress was almost painfully slow. The artificial environment offered painfully little mass for use and without knowing how exactly our host world functioned it was decided that taking mass from the mechanical elements of the ring or the various enigmatic structures dotted about the valley was a bad idea.

Building a defendable town out of rocks and trees was the result of that decision.

The thrill of escaping the genocidal attack of the crazed Aeon attackers had been rather subdued by the vast loss of life, what was once tens of thousands was now barely nine-hundred, with the vast majority suffering wounds so devastating that even with cybernetic replacement it would take months for them to recover.

In truth, we were not safe. I had been only a few strides behind Leopard11 and yet my arrival at the Ring had been a full twenty minutes after his. With an extraordinarily limited dataset the Aeon murderer could arrive in the next four hours or the next six days at the latest. Or she could have been rendered apart by quantum fluctuations.

One could only hope.

"I don't think anyone's home." Leopard11 mused.

"Yeah, you would think they would have noticed us by now. Tell us to piss off and stop digging up the garden." I replied, looking over the survey data from our scouting operation.

"Or kill us all." Leopard11 deadpanned.

"What a lovely sentiment."

"You don't build something like this for no reason, someone put it here and we were not part of the package deal." His ACU turned about and joined me in desperately plying at the earth for any and all mass that could be gathered from the sparse environment. Our reserves pitiful with our self-inflicted restrictions. At our current rate building energy to matter converters would take the better part of a day.

"Well then we should turn the scientists loose, we already have dozens of requests to study this place." He let out an annoyed mumble before actually speaking.

"Not yet, I want the ring fully surveyed for threats before we send teams to the structures. Something about all this feels wrong."

"You mean besides the potential crazed cultist hot on our heels?"

"Call me crazy, just… I got a bad feeling. I want our perimeter extended to the edges of the ring at least. Only two sides to worry about." At Leopard11's words I looked out across the artificial paradise around us. Our desperate refuge wherever it actually was.

"If you say so."

---

Crusader Eris Hampton

Six hours after arrival

Ringworld

An instant after the world was unmade, I was thrown back into reality. A great crater extended out from around me with small bushes and trees thrown away from my explosive entrance into this new place. Fire engulfing the land to announce my presence. I turned and began to construct a simple factory for simple land assets drawing upon a limited pool of mass within my ACU before looking over the data for my new environment.

I was upon a great artificial edifice, a loop spun of machine and metal that hung in space between a star and a gas giant. The facility was dotted by great metal structures that could be seen by the naked eye shooting out pulses of energy into the middle of the ring for some reason. I turned my ACU in place and began to produce military grade generators as my accumulated mass began to wane, with a low thrum the factory engineering ray finished the construction of a simple engineering robot that darted out to scoop up whatever it could find to supplement my limited supply of material.

It was quiet here, with power secured I turned back to the factory and began to support its operation creating many more simple engineers to expand the seeking of more mass. A quick scan of the local area by my onboard Omni sensor suite did not ping any large deposits of quantum mass. Did not ping any great quantum fluctuations at all. Soon the onboard computers began to flood my DataStream with complaints about errors that I quickly cast aside.

Air assets came next, they would be necessary to gather more intel on the structure I had found myself upon. I could already tell that the ring was not Human nor was it Seraphim in origin. Encountering a new alien race was an exciting prospect, one that produced structures such as this must have advanced considerably in both material and spiritual ways. Perhaps a people that might bring a greater understanding of The Way to the Aeon Illuminate, or perhaps a people to whom I could bring understanding of The Way too.

But such dreams were of a secondary concern, first I must locate the fleeing Cybran and eliminate them in the name of the Princess and the Illuminate. Then came a more extensive examination of this great structure. I pinged the quantum DataStream to connect with the Illuminate high command but I was met with a flurry of errors. No matter, I did not require guidance or support to follow my mission objectives.

Just minutes after finding myself in this new battlefield the first aircraft of many, a simple scouting plane, was cast off from the freshly constructed factory and darted off to explore the vast Ringworld. It was only a matter of time before my quarry was found.

---

Minerva4

Seven Hours after Arrival

Ringworld

The Ring was, as far as we could tell, exactly ten thousand kilometres in diameter and over three hundred kilometres wide. From our position it was not possible to determine the depth or thickness of the ring but it was at the very least over twenty kilometres. The surface area of the ring was roughly ten million square kilometres, give or take. That data had been met with a flurry of both disappointment and excitement. While more information needed to be gathered it was highly worrying that the size of the structure reflected neatly in any human systems of measurement.

The fact of the matter was that there was only one explanation for that, this ringworld had been constructed by Humans. That begged the question of why, how and were the builders were now?

"System four, check, failure." The few engineers that were well enough to walk and taken to using small working walkers to move about the settlement and were performing examinations on the mass fabricators. A necessity for expansion of our defences in good order owing to the absence of quantum mass sites for exploitation.

"System five, check, failure." For some reason the facilities had been underproducing, massively, drawing more power than the system was expected too.

"System six, check, failure. Dammit, I was telling you all that the lack of quantum field fluctuations in the locality would cause discrepancies like this!" One of the Engineers, Darrel, gesticulated with his walker before turning to me and pointing up. "It is the suppression field! You have to find the source and shut it down!"

"Darrel! Your suppression field hypothesis is without any grounding!" I was treated to the sight of another engineer stomping up to Darrel in a similar workers mech before the pair of them began to argue about what exactly we were dealing with.

What we did know was that the Quantum field was absent, or different, or was supressed, or something. Several scientists and apparently one engineer had hypothesized that the ring used a quantum suppression technology to prevent invasion by forces who utilised quantum technology.

That meant practically everyone. That did explain the current failure to generate equivalent energy to mass and also explained why paired AI had lost stability, requiring there human symbionts to stabilise them via true synchronisation rather than duel consciousness.

A different scientific faction had instead argued that we had travelled outside of the known universe and existed in a place with fundamentally distinct laws of physics. It did not matter for the moment what side was correct. Ultimately it meant that our ability to produce material was greatly compromised and evacuation using a quantum gate was impossible. We were trapped here.

I quickly set half of our recon fleet to return to base for deconstruction. If we were not going to be able to produce a meaningful amount of mass from our electrical grid then we would simply have to budget as effectively as possible should the Aeon Crusader arrive. Bombers, gunships, interceptors. The surface of the ring was huge and we would have to rely upon assets that could quickly relocate to challenge any foothold the bitch would create. Unfortunately, there had been several underground structures found that were more then large enough to accommodate an ACU and smaller assets. She could hide from our notice and gather forces waiting for the perfect moment to stri-

Air scout destroyed

I cast myself into the DataStream as a dozen more dozens of kilometres apart likewise fell. I called back as many as I dared and sent one forward while overstressing it's sensors and a moment before it too was destroyed the craft registered a radar ping.

Spinward, four thousand kilometres. We had a direction of attack, I sent a DataStream to Leopard11 and he sent an acknowledgement back. Without a word I turned about and began the long trek towards to enemy firing upon our air scouts, towards what was very likely the Aeon Crusader. Leopard11 would stay behind and sent support to me from this base while keeping the civilians safe.

An alarm sounded and without a word of complaint the Cybran population rushed into the shielded apartment complex.

War had been thrust upon us once more, and this time. We could not run.

---

Warning, Violation of quarantine, intruders, please vacate the surface of the installation and maintain a minimum of one lightyear distance from the ring as per quarantine protocols. You do not have clearance to access this installation.

…

Warning, Violation of quarantine, intruders, please vacate the surface of the installation and maintain a minimum of one lightyear distance from the ring as per quarantine protocols. You do not have clearance to access this installation.

…

Warning, Violation of quarantine, intruders, please vacate the surface of the installation and maintain a minimum of one lightyear distance from the ring as per quarantine protocols. You do not have clearance to access this installation.

WARNING, VIOLATION COUNTERMEASURES DEPLOYED.

---

Eris running that 1v8 grindset on low ELO scrubs! Lets see how good she is on a deprivation map. Trying something very different to cure my writers block, hope you enjoy reading it as much as I did writing it!

 

Crusader Eris Hampton

Eight hours after arrival

Ringworld

The Ringworld was quite frankly stunning, reminiscent to the sanctified worlds of reflection that had been carefully constructed over hundreds of years. The design was bold, untamed, a clear celebration of nature. Structures interwoven between the chaotic elements of erosion and overgrowth. This was not a garden dedicated to enforcing order over nature but rather one that celebrated nature itself, seeking to exist within it and allow it to dictate the form of the facility.

It was unclear as to how the underground areas would reflect this design principle and I could not claim to know just how the surface of the Ringworld had come to be. It could simply be copied from a world the builders found holy or the work of an algorithm trying to emulate a terrestrial environment.

Sadly, my attempt at communication with the builders or the custodians had failed. The various quantum communication matrices generated error reports that would take weeks to parse though. Conventional communication equipment was simply not considered important enough to include in an ACU already overloaded with complicated and expensive equipment.

I had begun constructing more primitive communication equipment but with any facility on this scale it was overwhelmed by a huge number of different signals and data waves in a language that was not contained in the database I had. With a great many things demanding my attention I could do little more then set a computer on brute force translation and check in on it now and then.

I marched though my new established firebase. In my desperation I had been forced to seize mass from the earth itself, doing so had provided me with a flat area in order to construct the facilities my operations on this artificial world would require. Already I had produced a modest fleet of engineers that were busy taking material from the environment to fuel my efforts.

Rows of factories flanked me on all sides boarded by anti-air sonic pulse batteries and supplemented by Zealot surface to air missile sites. Rapidly constructed roadways were under near constant use by the small Flare light assault bots. Two legged walkers a mere eleven meters tall with an arrowhead shaped body armed with a short-range sonic pulsar effective at only four hundred meters or so. Joining them in a constant precession out of the factories was Spirit light reconnaissance vehicles. Lightly armoured hovercraft with state-of-the-art sensor suites and a light laser for standoff defence.

Forming the Flares and Spirits into squads of four Flares to a Spirit and sending them out to pepper the region would normally be a terrible waste of time, mass and networked data. But this was hardly a normal situation, the light assets were able to employ a degree of stealth, finding nooks and terrain to obscure there presence while extending the area of my sensor network. The small groups also proved themselves more then capable of dealing with the Ringworlds low flying pest control automata.

Several of my scout planes had been ambushed by the flying drones and had been destroyed by the light particle beams the drones were equipped with. I had responded by deploying a small squadron of interceptors that had lured some of the drones close to an engineer deployed to prospect for any sort of metal content in the Ringworld's natural structure. After destroying a number of the drones I had my engineer dismantle them and examined the data of the weapon being used on my forces.

I was relieved to find that the weapon itself, while advanced and highly efficient, was a pest control measure. It was a particle beam carefully calibrated to de-nature large amounts of biological matter and was rather ineffective against even light armour. The drone was clearly not intended as a defensive measure so the automated systems must have merely mistaken my forces as some kind of invasive wildlife that needed culling.

When the drones had attacked my forces I had feared that the Ringworld had perhaps directly targeted me, I would have to be careful not to cause too much ecological damage in my search and purification of the Cybran. Should I meet the builders I would be more then willing to repair the damage done to this garden structure as penance.

I merely had to find the Cybran, eliminate them and then focus on my efforts in decoding the Ringworlds transmissions. As for the pest control drones, It was regrettable but I simply had to contend with the custodians of this structure until an understanding could be reached. I could not blame the Builders for failure to contact me. The first step in understanding another entity was always the responsibility of the follower of The Way after all, and I was an interloper upon this structure.

I cast my mind to the many hundreds of Flares and Spirits and ordered them to expand the area of patrol. The Ringworld was vast and I needed to locate the Cybran quickly. I also decided to deploy more Air Scouts despite the vulnerability to the pest control drones. Some lost air assets would still be worth the extended coverage.

Time was of the essence. Who knows what the Cybran were doing to defile this place?

---

Minerva4

Ten hours after arrival

Four hundred kilometres Spinward of Cybran Alpha settlement

There were thousands of them. Small drones with light directed particle weapon systems. Flying low to the ground and swarming over any asset they could and burning them away. I had been forced to create a small outpost with a dome shield and several laser point defences keeping the drone swarm at bay.

Leopard11 had contacted me the moment the settlement had been attacked, at first the perimeter had been breached by a dozen or so of the small drones. The defences had been activated the moment they had attacked the various structures of the settlements. After the attackers had been delt a colossal swarm of the drones had descended over the entire region destroying isolated units before converging on the settlement and my position.

Despite taking massive losses to our defences the drones had persisted in their encirclement. After we had destroyed exactly one thousand of them, they shifted tactics, slowly gathering forces while remaining just beyond the effective range of our weapon systems. The lull in battle had provided both the settlement and myself time to rebuild engineers to quickly move forward and reclaim the drones.

They had proven to be the greatest source of mass we had yet found on the Ringworld. But the attack demonstrated that we were unwelcome on this structure. I could only take solace in the fact that the Aeon commander, should she have survived, would be just as unwelcome as we were.

I quickly expanded my defensive structures, extending out the circle of protection in every direction. The drones flew at a hight where both ground and air defences could target them but I had little doubt that they would soon adapt and begin to fly higher rendering point defence structures useless. Thus, I focused my efforts on anti-air laser emplacements.

Our defences might be effective at holding back the swarm but the attack had effectively crippled our ability to explore and move about the Ringworld. Outside of dedicated defensive lines a swarm would eventually kill any isolated group. Our sensor grid was also conclusive, the swarm was growing. At the current rate and the rate of travel from the various locations of egress from the actual structure of the Ringworld that the drones were using it seemed that the drones were either being removed from storage at a rate of one drone every twenty seconds or they were being constructed at that rate.

Without a solid plan they would soon be able to overwhelm us, in order to ensure survival, we needed to become proactive. Reactivity was death, the population of the settlement all began processing the data Leopard11 and I sent them. Various potential objectives became clear, destroying the source of the drones, gaining control of the AI managing the facility and engaging in communication with whoever built the Ringworld.

One proposed objective however appealed to me far more than the rest. 'Bare our teeth'. There was more then enough mass from the destroyed drones. I turned about and began to construct the high output fusion generator that would be required for the task.

---

Warning! By order of the Ecumene Council, occupation of Installation 04 is forbidden. Your continued presence will result in most unpleasant countermeasures. I must insist that you vacate your settlement and depart from this place in the same way you arrived.

Why have you ignored every warning I have offered to you? I have activated defensive systems and sentry foundries, you will eventually be sterilised as per quarantine procedure. It is most regrettable but I am only required to offer a single warning on this matter. Your disregard for the procedures of this weapons platform is most disconcerting. Are you ignorant of the terrible cargo of this place?

I must admit that your technological prowess is impressive but I have deployed only a tiny fraction of the defensive capabilities of this Installation against you. By my projections you will be sterilised within thirty-four hours. I-

What!?

What are you doing!?

Atomic weapons are expressly forbidden on this installation, if you were to accidentally impact a power relay with such munitions…

There is no procedure for this insanity.

Do not deploy that weapon!

Why are you ignoring me?

Don't you understand how vital this system is for galactic security?

Perhaps more direct communication is required?

Ah but they are violent… this calls for some degree of caution I would say.

What to do?

What to do?

---

Crusader Eris Hampton

Eleven hours after arrival

There was a flash of light, that extinguished all but the harshest of shadows from the garden world around me. My Armoured Command Unit had to lean backwards to watch as the brilliance of the explosion on the other side of the Ringworld gradually faded from view.

There they were. I turned about in my ACU and quickly scanned though a virtual reality feed of the extensive schematic library until I found what I was looking for. I doubted that this particular facility had ever seen use but I felt a swelling of gratitude for the designer of the ACU schematic database.

Just moments later plans were laid for a dozen civilian grade automated observatories. With the entire surface area of the Ring visible from any position on this planet I was quite frankly ashamed that I had not thought of this sooner. Sensor coverage and radar was useful of course but simply being able to observe the rest of the ring would prove invaluable.

There, in a moment of serendipity the Cybran were almost exactly on the other side of the ring from my position. They had concentrated themselves in two distinct bases. One containing civilian infrastructure. I also took note of the many thousands of pest control drones departing from the two facilities and the smouldering field of gently glowing and warped metal. The scrap of many thousands of drones destroyed by a low yield atomic strike.

The drones, after hovering in place well out of range of the Cybran, paused for a long while, before turning and vanishing into the many different entrances to the Ring's core structure. Where there had been once swarms large enough to be seen by the naked eye now not a single drone could be found.

I had no idea that the custodians or the AI controlling the facility were considering a wide range of responses to the Cybran's brazen attack. A quick examination of my sensor network in my VR battlespace display showed that it was not merely the drones on the other side of the rings that had departed, but the few that were close to my position had likewise fled.

I quickly checked to see if the AI I had dedicated to brute force decoding the various signals permeating the ring only to find no real progress on that front. There was little else to do. Merely traveling across the Ringworld with a meaningful enough force to challenge the Cybran would take days at the very least. Attempting to strike from here would stretch my logistics beyond all reason.

I considered building a spacecraft but such a construction would be noticed almost instantly even if my position had not yet been compromised. It was aggravating, to see ones foe so clearly yet to lack the ability to strike them. Rather then allow myself to be vexed I readjusted my strategy.

My sensor network extended many hundreds of miles across the ring. Over time that would grow to thousands. I merely needed to maintain that growth of influence while denying the Cybran any intelligence they could use to mount an effective defence. I set about ordering my engineers to begin a reconfiguration of the base. Simply camouflaging the many factories and structures about me would leave the unmistakable marring of the earth that would give my position away. But I was in a valley of gently rolling hills with stark cliffs all about me. I began to reclaim the structures outside of a convenient area and began to build supports. The dome shields I already deployed shifted to become more reflective, normally a defence against laser based weapon systems but now a means to gain some petty stealth ability. Grass and other plant life were ordered to be relocated to my position ready for replanting.

This was a stunning garden world, I am sure the builders would forgive me some gardening of my own. As for the Cybran…

I needed a path to the Cybran base that would not be detected. With a thought I ordered several of my scout squads to converge on a wide range of caverns and structures while maintaining stealth and awareness of any Cybran units snooping about the Ringworld.

If I was lucky I could find a route though the structure to attack the Cybran, if I was extraordinarily lucky the custodians of this facility would wipe the heretics out for me. No matter what I had to exercise restraint and wait for my moment. This battle would take time.

---

Minerva4

One day after arrival

Cybran Alpha settlement

The drones had not returned after I had deployed the tactical nuke. It had been a very contentious act in the settlement and a great deal of the newly established council were worried about what the Ringworlds Security would do next. Even more were worried about the Aeon Crusader despite no evidence of her existence had yet been found. Perhaps she had left the quantum entanglement only to return to the void of space.

I hoped she died slowly, over the course of months, slowly cannibalising her ACU to keep herself alive. Or perhaps doomed to live out the rest of her days on a cold asteroid. One can only dream. Life returned to some degree of normalcy for the settlement. Small teams of scientists had been deployed to various sites across the ring in Mole scout walkers, lightly armoured stealth reconnaissance vehicles that somewhat resembled scorpions.

I had cautioned against sending such expeditions owing to the clear hostility in the Ringworlds automated defences but the Leopard11 had sided with the council. He had also made it rather clear what he thought of me deploying a nuke without consulting him or the civilians.

I was content to stand by my decision. The breathing room offered to us by driving off the drone swarms had given us a chance to extend our defensive lines and to deploy scanners to try to map out the interior of the Ringworld. We were close to reaching the limit of what our current Quantum DataStream could handle and there were very limited candidates among the Civilians for promotion into the role of a support commander.

At the very least they would have to undergo several weeks of training and a host of difficult cybernetic surgeries. We would simply have to be more decerning with our current DataStream load. Culling less effective units and consolidating where we could. Mass was an omnipresent concern. Our energy into mass facilities were operating at an energy loss rate that was crippling our ability to stockpile material. We had even been forced to deploy a de-salination facility and a hydroponics farm for the settlement rather then using matter conversion to meet the needs of the civilians.

Every scrap of Mass had to be carefully allotted and used. Waste could mean death, unfortunately that also vastly reduced our scouting fleet. I had been reduced to a mere dozen scout planes to scour the entire Ringworld rather then the hundreds that I needed. Data and mass were simply too valuable.

At least we did not have to worry about energy.

I sighed and checked the VR battlespace again. The need for constant monitoring of the Ringworld's defences in case an attack against us was launched was aggravating but there was little that could be done about that. We could not be caught unaware, if a mistake was made it would cost everyone. We could not afford to lose even a single person at this point.

I sighed and resolved myself to a long and watchful night.

---

AN: For now an uneasy ceasefire exists upon the Ringworld. How will the Cybran Refugees survive the machinations of the Crusader? How will the lonely monitor contend with his new guests digging up his lawn? Find out next time!

Thanks for reading!