His radar sweep located metal deposits behind the hill that the Galactic Gate was perched on, though they were weak. He thought of trying to climb back out of the ravine, but decided against it, since he would then also have to battle the rest of the Core K-bots. Instead, he turned his D-gun on the ravine wall and fired, sloping upwards, using it as a digging tool. He waited a few seconds before climbing into the hole to let his solar collectors gather more energy before going underground, then he climbed in, crawling upward.
He had to recharge from his internal fusion reactor and fire the D-gun twice more before emerging on the far side of the hill on a gentle slope. He conducted a visual, radar, and broadcast sweep and found nothing. The K-bots on the other side of the hill hadn't followed him, so he put them from his mind for now. He drew out two specters from a compartment in the command suit's leg and, glancing once up at the clouds skidding across the sky, drove one into the hillside until the entire shaft was buried in the dirt. With a tough of his finger and burst of nanobots, a command was given to the object. Explosives in the base launched the upper portion into the sky, where the protective shell split in two and dropped to the ground. A diaphanous shape spread out of it and stiffened as the wind caught the spreading wings. The tiny wire paying out from the base of the object went taut, and the entire kite stopped moving downwind. The wings turned toward the sun and a small propeller began spinning in the wind, and both wings and propeller began pumping energy back down the cable. Maritius smiled up at the kite - an design of the Second Commander - then planted and launched the second. The second deployed as well while Maritius poured his nanobots onto the ground, where they skittered and maneuvered into the foundations of a mine.
Three days went by while Maritius built up the base, laying down solar collectors and light laser towers. He had his computer make an electronic, three dimensional map of the base he was building, and when it was completed, his spent a few hours laying down nanobots to serve as a backup wire power grid, to run electricity between his points of production and his defenses and metal mines. He placed mines where he could, but metal was rather scarce.
Maritius began to miss sleep around his sixth day. His mind drifted into daydreams while he was nanolathing the K-bot factory, but his eyes remained fixedly, stubbornly open. He thought of the planet, and what he knew of it - not much. The Galactic Gate here had been closed for centuries. He had decided to call it Adriata, in honor of his mother. He would find out later from a Core consciousness what the Core designation of the planet was, but until then - and probably after - it would be Adriata. He wished he could just close his eyes to pass the time.
He didn't need to sleep, of course, not biologically. Before each Commander went through a Gate, they were given a soup of nanobots, benevolent viruses, bacteria, and drugs, which meant that they would stay awake for three weeks straight, Standard time, and the revolution of Adriata took slightly under twenty-five hours. He wouldn't be able to sleep for another two weeks, at the earliest, and he had the drugs to keep himself awake for another two months after that, although tissue degeneration would begin after five weeks of being awake.
It was simply the price of being a Commander. His flesh was blurred until it was almost mechanical in some respects. The jack that let him talk to the commander's computer was set in the base of his skull, and microprocessors to monitor his body functions were installed in arms, legs, heart, head, and gut. A tube ran into his armpit to pump drugs into his system which kept his performance at peak and his brainwaves regulated and efficient. And, the one that bothered him most, was the tube in the base of his ribcage where his food went. He would be too busy for a long time to come to feed himself, and therefore, he hadn't tasted food in six days. He could eat, of course, but to eat would be to disrupt a carefully planned diet, which he couldn't afford to do for a few months to come. Once the beachhead was firmly established, he could relax. But for the moment, he had to be more disciplined than most humans - regardless of age - thought they ever could be.
Of course, the price of being a Commander, being nearly non-human, was paid for by any clones that were made for specific vehicles. The standard clones (not the so-called 'natural' clones) were simply a stunted human body topped by a brain, in all respects, equivalent to a person's. They lived their lives in a life support tank, floating in a soupy mix of chemicals and preservatives. Their limbs were those of their machine, their senses, the electronic signals sent from sonar, radar, and camera. But they were conscious, and intelligent. Where does sentience truly live? In the body? The mind, more likely? Would an exact copy of the mind still be sentient? The Core thought so. But this wasn't a problem for Maritius to worry about. He simply needed to keep fighting, to ensure that if someone wanted to worry about it, they would be free to do so, not wired in the Central Consciousness.
He spent the seventh day conducting a sweep of the surrounding area, outside the sweep of the radar tower he'd set up just behind the Gate. He crossed far to the west and south to sneak up behind any units still lurking south of the Galactic Gate, where he'd first been ambushed. He picked up a small group of AK's and Storms on his radar and could tell by their electric signatures that they were damaged. His first good news since arriving, this told Maritius that there wasn't a base nearby, most likely, and that if there was, it was too damaged to see to fixing its units. He surprised them and destroyed three of them with a single D-gun blast. Whoever was commanding them was skillful, though, and the AK's formed a defensive wall and drew fire while the Storms targeted key points of Maritius' commander. He fought back with his laser and occasional D-gun blasts, the battle raging fierce and quick, wandering over the terrain, and ended up with 500 units of metal salvage and a solar collector blown off. He had to hold the collector in place while his nanobots self-repaired him, but he was soon back at peak efficiency and headed towards the Galactic Gate.
By the seventh day, Maritius felt confident that he'd cleaned the area enough and developed an infrastructure that would allow him to begin the true colonization of Adriata. He began 'lathing the cloning facility, the structure that took care of producing the biological bodies which would pilot his first vehicles. His commander carried a brainwave sets on board, a few thousand or so, and millions of DNA sets in cold storage. The brainwave sets were not Patterns. Certainly not, because if they were, Maritius would be fighting for the Core, not the ARM. They were not Patterns because they did not feel, or think, or even react to anything. They were simply a snapshot of a brain that, when decoded by the cloning facility's computers and fed into the biological body built from the corresponding DNA set, allowed the computers to 'install' a fully-functioning, adult, human consciousness into an adult human body.
Maritius entered a few rudimentary instructions for his commander and set it on autopilot, again wishing desperately that he could simply go to sleep to pass the time.
* * *
Maritius crouched in the second-growth redwood rainforest, the product of a long-defunct program to seed appropriate planets with Earth-like flora and fauna. The trees, smaller and less developed than first-growth redwoods, let in more light and allowed for undergrowth on the forest floor. Of course, though Maritius fancied that he was as stealthy as a jungle cat, he in fact stood out like a tropical fish in a school of salmon. The twelve Peewees marching near him managed at least to crouch behind boulders and trees, but he could barely keep his huge commander frame from sticking out the forest canopy when he stood.
The first deployed Peepers had found a small outpost to the north, apparently a gathering of Core units that had banded together after whatever had caused the disarray of nearby Core forces. A group of solar collectors and wind generators, too far away to capture, but too large to leave producing power, had been the only thing in a radius of two-days' foot travel that had caught Maritius' attention. So he had brought the entire fighting force of the ARM outpost, twelve Peewees, to destroy it.
The repeated Peeper sweeps had found no trace of radar equipment, but had also apparently alerted the Core units to the ARM presence. And while Maritius knew that the group manning the outpost was made up of civilian Patterns, Crashers, and Thuds, he didn't know how many of each there were, or any of their typical reconnaissance and patrol patterns. Both sides were fighting blind.
"Units two and three, both head north, and see what you find. There should be a small rise with the wind generators on it. Do not engage, and avoid any patrols."
Affirmative replies came twice, once from each unit leader. The eight Peewees trundled off through the forest, EMG cannons swinging at their sides. Maritius then sent the four Peewees still with him forward through the trees to scout, accepting, at least tactically, that he was not as sneaky as he would like to be.
The first of the Peewees, farthest forward, reported back within a few minutes. "There's a bunch of Thuds and Crashers milling around the center of the compound," she reported. "A few Crashers patrolling farther out, I think, judging by the pattern of radio chatter. Maybe . . . twelve Thuds, eight Crashers in the compound? There might be more, I can't see around a few larger buildings."
Reports confirming the pilot's statement came in from the other three advance scouts, and were corroborated and added to by the eight Peewees once they circled into a position where they could see.
"Well," Maritius said aloud, "nothin' to it but to do it. Shall we?" He stood and began running, the heavy Commander suit lumbering up to full speed as it crashed through the small trees. Even before he was fully out of his crouch, sensors began wailing in Maritius' mind as Thuds and Crashers tracked him.
He brought his D-gun up and fired quickly, the recoil slowing him slightly and the shot barreling through three Crashers before disappearing into the ground. He was even with the four Peewees around him when he saw the other eight burst out of the forest from the north, firing on the Crashers.
"Primary target Crashers," he said as he raised his D-gun to fire again. Three missiles wound their way into the side of a Peewee at his feet and he watched it fall. The reticule in his cockpit told him the damage was severe, and that the K-bot's heavy armour generator was giving up the ghost. Flicking the laser in his left hand shut, Maritius began streaming nanobots from his backpack onto the Peewee where they would begin repairing the damage. Another volley of missiles impact Maritius' leg as he placed it in front of the K-bot.
The agile Peewees were making good use of their speed as they moved among the buildings of the Core compound, playing hide-and-seek with the enemy K-bots where they couldn't use their superior range to their advantage. Other Peewees rallied to where Maritius stood in the field in the center of the compound as he stood over the wounded ARM unit, unable to move, being fired on by most of the Thuds and a few remaining Crashers. He was absorbing hits alarmingly fast, but had plenty of armour left.
Some tactician in the Core forces decided that the Commander was no longer the major target, and that they would try to take any of the Peewees with them they could. Maritius was standing directly in front of two of the already-wounded Peewees, and so a new target was chosen. A dozen Thuds turned in unison to train on the unit leader of the second squad.
"Problem!" she said. Maritius looked up to see the Thuds trained on her. He stumbled two steps forward and dove, keeping his left arm aimed back to pour shining green nanobots onto the injured Peewee that was now wobbling to its feet. He crashed to the ground, landing with a heavy thump on his right side and firing a D-gun shot that climbed out of the underbrush towards the Thuds as over twenty plasma shots screamed toward him. His adrenaline and the combat computer once again kicked in, seeming to slow time itself, and he felt the heat of the plasma shells for long agonizing seconds before the shots finally impacted, one by one, against his armour. The Peewee unit leader crouched behind his antimatter backpack as the shots pelted the large commander frame.
Three Peewees, one missing a cannon, rounded a building behind the Thuds as the D-gun blast ripped through two of them; Peewees on two sides opened fire, tearing into the Thuds. They spun around, only to stop halfway and spin back, seemingly undecided about their next target. Eventually, another D-gun blast from Maritius, aimed to avoid any friendly units, took out the last organized resistance from the Thuds and allowing the ARM K-bots to begin sweeping up. Two squads of three crashers each returned from patrol close to each other, but that battle was short-lived and one-sided. Maritius was even reclaiming a building with one hand while firing with the other, and still easily defeated the Core units.
After reclaiming all the metal he could carry and calling in a Peeper sweep to look for leftover Core units, Maritius looked around at the carnage of the battle, declared it over, and began shepherding the Peewees back to base.