Once the ship was loaded, it immediately made its way to orbit and transferred the cargo to the waiting space station that had been moved over for the effort. From the look of things, they were going to hold everyone from the surface here while they rebuilt everything that was damaged, and as a precaution against the Arisen Army returning to finish what they started.
[That's everything, Commander Keres. We have it from here. Thank you for your assistance. The Anomaly station will be ready to receive you at any time. Please feel free to relax until the next alarm is sounded.] The Koleska traffic controller informed them.
[Thank you, Control. We will be on standby at the station.]
The trip back was a quiet one as both Max and Nico tried to make sense of the battle that they had just experienced. The fighting was abnormal enough since he was fighting someone who was already familiar with his tactics, but the ending was just flat-out bizarre.
Once they were back aboard the Santa Maria, they both got to work analyzing all of the data that they could get, trying to determine where the Arisen had gone and how they could follow them. Failing that, if they could at least determine where they were going to show up more than a few seconds in advance, it would be a huge benefit to the defence forces.
As it was, they barely had time to get into position most of the time, and that was extremely stressful for everyone involved.
"I think that we will do better after a night of proper sleep. Who knows when the alarm will go off again? It's better if we're rested and ready to go again, and if we aren't needed in combat, then we can keep looking for answers." Max suggested.
"That sounds like a plan to me. I'm getting a whole lot of nowhere today. There just isn't enough information to actually come up with a reasonable answer. Perhaps that is the secret to their success. They eliminate their opponents before they can understand the nature of the enemy." Nico agreed.
Surprise attacks were the deadliest of tactics, and an enemy that could appear at random and disappear when they wanted to leave was the master of that sort of warfare, so Nico might be right. The Arisen might only be winning all the time because they always had the advantage of surprise.
Max collapsed into bed with the issue of the Arisen on his mind, right up until Nico crawled in beside him and dropped her shell temperature to comfortably cool, then wrapped herself around him like a four-legged octopus.
"Hmm, that is nice. You feel extra warm when I drop my temperature." Nico nearly purred as she settled into sleep.
Max smiled at the little cyborg and gently patted her head as she fell asleep. If she wasn't so tired, she would have likely objected to that, but a sleepy Nico was a cuddly Nico, and it made her much more easygoing than usual.
When he woke up in the morning, Nico was still wrapped around him with the blankets tightly rolled into a burrito around them, as if she had forgotten that she could set her own temperature if she was feeling cold.
"Are we getting up now? I'm rather enjoying this nap." Nico murmured as Max began to move a bit to loosen the tightly wrapped blanket before it tore under the strain that Nico had put on it.
"I'm just adjusting the blanket, you little burrito. You can go back to sleep and wait for the messages to come in. I don't think we're going to get anywhere with the Arisen issue today anyhow." Max whispered so he didn't wake her up completely.
"Mmm, burrito," Nico mumbled before passing out again.
Max woke up a few hours later to the smell of fresh burritos from the Replicator, drawing him out of bed to join Nico at the table.
"So, was there any news while we slept?" He asked, knowing that she would have checked her messages already.
"A whole lot of nothing. Commander Yuri wants to have dinner tomorrow to talk about training some more students with the teaching programs, and there was an efficiency report from the battle that was interesting but not interesting enough to wake up early for. It looks like today's attacks are all further across the Koleska planets. There hasn't been anything near the station all day." Nico replied with a shrug.
"Everyone gets a quiet day now and then. Were there any repairs that needed to be done to the Mecha before we finished anything but eating breakfast?" Max asked.
"I'm sure there is something. We should go over them either way, but the diagnostics didn't pull up anything urgent. My repair skill can fix up most of the little things in only a few minutes without actually breaking out the tools, so it's a lot faster than everyone else. But neither of us took too many solid hits during the battle.
The closest there is to real damage is your shield, but I fixed the overloaded circuitry before we went to bed so that it was ready to go again in case of emergency." Nico explained.
"Good thinking. I'm hoping that the last battle was enough to give us a couple of days off. We might be alright, but I don't think that the locals can train warriors fast enough to replace the ones that are being lost at this rate. They took a lot of casualties since we arrived." Max sighed.
If the anomaly led to a species fighting a losing battle, their home Galaxy would be in a lot of trouble once the Arisen made it through. They would do their best to keep things working smoothly until reinforcements arrived, but Max was beginning to think that they might be better off spreading knowledge rather than fighting directly.
The Koleska had heart, but it was clear that all of their technology was newly developed, and they didn't have the long history of combat or the range of adaptive techniques that the humans did.
That was something that he could fix. Max just needed to get them to approve of it.
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