I had honestly been expecting some kind of issue to arise during the whole process of getting the drillship across the ocean. A broken bulkhead, the drill not working the way I wanted to, something in the water picking me up and coming to visit.

As it turns out? No. Everything went pretty much exactly according to plan. The only hiccups were the entering/leaving the ocean parts, mostly because the transition from solid matter to liquid required... some very finicky field shape transformations to make sure it actually worked quietly.

It worked, though, and that was the important part.

I would have liked to say that it had been fun and interesting, but honestly... Part of the deal about 'silent running' is that you reduce emissions and noise as much as possible. In turn, that means you're relying on passive or extremely low-powered sensors. Rubicon's oceans were, for the most part, pretty dead. There's not a lot going on in there that isn't algae and things that feed on algae, both of which had been seeded as part of the colonisation efforts and both of which had been subsequently devastated by the Fires of Ibis, barely recovering since.

As such, it was a whole bunch of nothing.

In any case, the drillship had arrived at western Belius.

"What do we do now?" Ezra asked.

"There's a couple of options, actually." The efficacy of them all was in question, though. "Unfortunately, we're complete unknowns on this side of the planet, so we can't exactly just go and request a meeting."

"Can we even talk to them if we wanted to?" Ezra asked.

"I am reasonably confident in my ability to at least send a text message or something." Audio programs are so annoying to work with. For some reason, damn near all of it has the 'personal assistance' baked into the core programming. It's not an option that I can just turn off, usually. I don't know why that was the case, but it certainly made things unnecessarily difficult for me to actually synthesize my own voice to send out over a speaker. Coral communication was of course nothing like the sound waves that they employed, so it wasn't like I could run a translation there. "The thing is, even if we did get to talking, there's one particular being we need to talk to, and I don't think anyone other than Dolmayan and maybe his inner circle is aware of them."

"And requesting a meeting with them would be too suspicious." Ezra considered.

I smiled. He was getting it really quickly.

"For the moment, I think we should see about establishing ourselves locally. Get ourselves some resources and production going. Everything else can come a bit later."

"There's plenty of options there."

Indeed there were. Belius may have been the more active continent, but that additionally made it the continent with more options. There were hundreds of Grids all over the continent, and quite a few extra bases and sites of interest all over the place.

Locally, and by 'locally' I mean 'within a couple days of travel', I had pretty much the entirety of the Grid 060 through to Grid 090 range as options. Most everywhere else would edge into central, northern, or southern Belius, which... Well, generally speaking, those were more active areas, or they were RLF areas.

In western Belius, most of the locals were Dosers, whom I was likely not going to care about the opinions of. RLF presence in the region was on the lower side, which was directly attributable to Subject Guard being active at the northwestern bay area.

BAWS Arsenal maintained a few facilities throughout Belius. One of them was in western Belius, but that was a generally quiet place. As arms dealers, they sold guns and weapons to everyone, but they were most beneficial to the RLF while not provoking the civilians unnecessarily. That would have earned them the ire of their most consistent customers in the region, and in turn, dropped their bottom line.

BAWS was a megacorporation. It was an old megacorporation, at that. It had been founded before Humanity had actually become an interstellar power. It was older than any government outside of Sol, and also a decent chunk of the governments inside Sol.

But BAWS wasn't a twenty-first century company. Megacorps were powerful, but Pax Economica had never been achieved in more than a few systems, and most of those had later fallen and been revolutionised, despite the best attempts of the corps in question to the contrary. Superluminal travel and communication were possible, but they weren't easy. Building governmental systems larger than a single planet was a hell of a mess. There were all of three polities in the Human sphere that laid claim to more than ten systems, and those polities were not nearly as united as they liked to say.

Megacorps, In this day and age, had to actually have some foresight for the future. The galactic community was a pretty big place, and unhappy customers tended to result in rivals, mercs, and rebels causing problems. BAWS may have been regarded as the galactic minimum standard, but it was regarded that way across all of Human space. Nobody else had such reach.

One only had to look at the fact that they were still operating on Rubicon to see that. Even the PCA didn't have the full legal capacity to tell them to get bent.

"I'm thinking southwestern Belius." I spoke. "It seems the best place to be at the moment."

"That's a very active area." Ezra noted, starting to go through the data again. "A large amount of Dosers. Relatively few civilians."

"A lot of Dosers, yes." I agreed. "Most importantly, competing ones."

That made him start to consider the data more carefully.

Southwestern Belius was a bit of a warzone, currently. There were seven competing Doser groups there. Conflicts were messy, continuous, and had a habit of spilling out into other places around them. Subject Guard had visited the place multiple times, and the RLF had launched close to a dozen retaliation attacks on the Dosers after they'd raided and stolen food, materials, and Coral.

"Grid 097." He spoke. "That's a quiet spot at the moment."

"You had the same thought I did." I grinned.

Grid 097 was pretty far south, but it was still in Western Belius. It was outside the typical areas that the RLF monitored, and Subject Guard visits tended to go either further north or further east. As far as Grids went, it was nothing special. It had all the normal Grid facilities; plenty of industrial tools and other processors, which, combined with all the stuff my drillship had brought with it, meant I'd be able to set myself up and grow pretty quickly.

More important than any of that, though?

It had been the site of a fairly large battle a while back. A battle that had seen multiple competing ACs. Several had been shot down in the area.

I wanted to see if I could salvage one of the wrecks.

The facilities I'd bought with the drillship were high quality things, but building an AC from scratch was always time consuming. If I could refurbish one of those wrecks, then I'd get my hands on one hell of a force multiplier.

Even the shittiest AC was worth dozens of MTs. A good pilot would make them worth an entire army.

"We would inevitably come into conflict with the local Dosers." Ezra spoke. "But that can be made to work in our favour "

"The local Doser factions aren't liked by anyone." I agreed. "Causing trouble with them won't earn us problems with anybody we care about. Subject Guard would try to get rid of us no matter what, but if we do well enough dealing with these Dosers..."

"Then the RLF will likely make overtures regardless." Ezra concluded. "These groups have made themselves constant enemies of everything the RLF has stood for. Although, considering their history and our lack of it, would they not be suspicious?"

"Oh, almost certainly." I chuckled. "But that's fine. We only need a small in, I think. We just need what we want to say to reach the right ears." I might even be able to get away with just a single sentence.

"Well, why not?" Ezra asked.

"That's the spirit."

Alright. That was a fairly long trip, but I could make it in a couple days. Course... thataway, and off we go.

"... Can I have one of the mechs?"

"Sure, kiddo. We all dig giant robots."

"Nice."

The drillship arrived some three days later. I did some brief scanning, and when I didn't find any traps near the bottom of the Grid, I had it surface near to one of the vertical catapults at one of the bases of the structure.

Grid 097 had clearly seen better days. Visible rust crawled up the side of the base, any markings that might have once been there worn away by time and dust. The catapult itself was still online, at least, which was really nice because otherwise I'd have to find a way to get them four kilometres into the air.

Breaching the local security took about thirty seconds. I didn't have anything even remotely close to administrator control or whatever, but a quick glance through the network didn't reveal any major or out of the normal traffic. There were a lot of damage readings, though, and an alert that production had ground to a halt because no resources were available.

Something to look into later.

The back hatch of the drillship opened up, and Ezra took the first MT out on his own. His control over the mech was quite fluid, honestly. On the trip over, I'd run him through all the simulator programs I'd managed to salvage, and he proved rather adept at using them.

While I arranged to deploy the rest of the mechs, Ezra piloted the MT towards the vertical catapult. It hissed as the steam cylinders filled, but it fired upwards as it should have, the metal grinding as it went. After a few seconds, it reached the top, and the platform springs activated, launching diagonally.

The MT flew through the air as gracefully as a brick, but Ezra activated the thrusters and corrected the angle. More thrusters bled its speed, and it touched down on one of the upper passageways as gently as a machine that weighed nearly fifty tons could.

"Nicely done." I said, and felt the glow of pride run through him.

He moved on, boosters igniting and sending it off. MTs may as well have been snails compared to an AC, but they were still deceptively fast for their size.

While he was up there, I was getting the catapult ready again down here. They were rated for about seven hundred tons per operation, but it would have been difficult to actually fit something that large on there. Most Heavy MTs topped at two hundred at most, and they were pushing the size envelope.

Fitting two Light MTs would have been a little difficult, but I didn't need to do that. Instead, I had the maintenance drones divide themselves into groups, and then stack on top of each other. Packed up, they were basically disks, so putting them in a column was an easy way of getting them stable. I had a Light MT join them, and hold them steady by putting an arm on top.

The catapult activated again, and the entire set went up in the air. When the spring activated, the maintenance drones were scattered, but they had enough thrusters on them to do some respectable, if short termed, hovering, so it wasn't too hard to correct that and have them all land on the passage.

The catapult went back down, the next group already waiting for it. Every bot was already out, so I had the drillship reseal, and then I sent it back underground.

I'd have to get the equipment out later, but that could wait until after I had control of the cargo elevators and cranes. I was definitely not catapulting those.

By the time everything was upstairs, Ezra had already reached the local network hub. It took him three full minutes to breach it and install himself as an administrator. Another two minutes passed as he checked all the cameras he could access, and then went over the log files.

"There's still a few blindspots, but as far as I can tell, we're clear." He reported. "I'm pretty sure I've located an AC wreck, too."

"We'll take a look around and make sure we're in the clear. After that, though?" I smiled. "We'll be in business."