Following the purple light into the laboratory, Ridge quickly passed through the decontamination room and, walking through the now fully built hallways, he found one of the scientists, Lind, transfixed, looking through a window where the purple light was shining the brightest. Even his intentionally loud footsteps didn't break her concentration. Finally, coughing to get her attention, she turned towards him.
"Commander."
"What's going on with this purple light?" he replied while walking up towards the window. Looking through, he saw the crystal that they had found when they first arrived. "More importantly, what's going on with this thing?"
"After a good amount of theorizing and analyzing of the crystal, we managed to find out that it is somewhat radioactive after being agitated and, to a certain degree, produces its own heat. Meaning, if we could find out a reliable way to keep it active, it can function as a reactor similar to the ones built on our ships. Even just using it to power the base would be much more convenient and possible given its size. When it's agitated, it also turns a purple color, which is why you see it glowing so much right now. Don't worry, though we ran quite a few simulations before actually trying anything crazy, so it should be fine," Lind replied after turning back to the glass, keeping a close watch on the data displayed on the window tracking the crystal's status.
"Should be fine?" he asked, concerned. "It won't blow up the base, will it?"
"Of course not, it has a crystalline structure within it that sort of self-contains it, so no need to worry about big explosions, even after being broken apart," Lind chuckled.
Ridge kept an eye on the crystal for about a minute longer, but seeing no changes, he nodded and waved to Lind while deciding to go back to base. "Keep me updated on this thing and the progress of the research on it."
"No problem, commander," Lind answered while continuing to concentrate on the data.
Leaving the laboratory and returning to his room after grabbing dinner, Ridge began to exercise. Although he spent quite a bit of energy today, he always made sure to keep in shape no matter what. After all, a good body condition could save his life one day. Taking a quick shower after finishing, he got into his bed and closed his eyes for the day.
Outside, the darkening sky turned pitch black, and the stars began to shine brightly. Patrols of soldiers around the outskirts of the base went in circle after circle, and the dark sky began to brighten. Eventually, hours had passed, and beeping sounds woke Ridge up once again. It was a new day.
Following familiar routines after shutting the alarm off he left the room to eat breakfast at the cafeteria and then made his way on over to a breifing room. It was just a small part of the base that was used by the leadership of the base to plan out the next steps and, of course, share information that was deemed important.
Walking in, he spotted Merphi and his group of seven soldiers, as well as Caroline, Yayha, and George.
"Great, looks like everybody's here. Let's get started then. Merphi I would like you guys to start and re-tell your story infront of everyone this time," Ridge said while gesturing for the others to take a seat with him.
"Got it, well, to begin with, we were assigned an escort mission with a merchant fleet from Molara to Vunvion. They weren't transporting anything out of the ordinary so for the most part it was just a standard mission that we occasionally got from command when the higher ups wanted to make a bit of extra income on the side. I would say we were halfway done with our journey when out of nowhere this portal or wormhole somehow appeared in front of our ship. All of our sensors were perfectly normal and didn't seem to react, so we ended up going straight through with no time to manually pilot the ship away," Merphi explained while taking a sip of water.
"Once inside this portal, we ended up in a completely different location within space. An unknown region not recorded on the federations charts, the one thing we did notice on our long range sensors was this planet in fact. So I had ordered the navigator and the crew to take us here when our of nowhere, the ship began to shake. We attributed it at first to some kind of turbulence in space, though after some time it seemed to only continue," he continued.
"Eventually the alarms began to go off, and the power on the ship began to fluctuate, so taking some soldiers with me and heading down from the bridge, we made our way over to the engine room when out of nowhere the power shut off. Of course we had backup batteries so it eventually returned, but during that time something must have happened, because not long after that when we went to the engine room we noticed the colored fungi growing on the walls of the ships and blocking the enterance.
Adding on to that, we noticed a few crew members who had presumably gone to check on the engine room now lying on the floor. Naturally, we had no idea what was happening, so we checked on them, but just as we turned them over, they lunged up from the ground and began to attack. Luckily, we were carrying a few guns on us, so we quickly shot them up when we were able, though unfortunately the attacked soldiers were also blocking our shots. At some point, we had begun to feel a bit drowsy, so we retreated before we could take them all out.
Leading to the spread of the entire ship getting infected is my guess. By the time I got back to the bridge with the others, the sensors had finally managed to detect that there was some sort of large craft in space attached to us and steadily ripping apart the hull. We still couldn't see it with our own eyes, but it was there. Using the guns on the ship, we managed to somehow hit whatever it was and break free. The damage was extensive so I ordered the ship to move fullpower towards this planet and after who knows how long the infected seemed to have finally taken over the rest of the ship and steadily made their way to the bridge, where we bunkered down and fought for how many hours before finally crashing and meeting you guys, of course we also experienced some loss of life during that period of time from that sense of drowsiness that seemed to affect a few of us at a time. Some had fallen asleep and never woken up. Though a key feature I noticed from them is that if they didn't wake up, they began to bleed from their eyes and ears."
Letting out a long breath, Merphi finished his retelling of the story, and the room settled in silence before Ridge broke it.
"Wow, that's quite a story; in fact, there were many more details than I expected. For instance, that invisible ship that seemed to attach to you guys is the likely culprit for many of our problems in the first place. A detail that I can relate to, in fact, is that drowsiness effect as well. In fact, I hadn't told the others this, but I had experienced this firsthand. I had somehow fallen asleep while checking the food inventory, and I began to dream or something like that of the ship and the people on it, before eventually I managed to wake myself up and kill whatever it was that seemed to attack me," Ridge said firmly, " Another detail that is lost on me though is this ship didn't seem to stay attached to ours, afterall we made it over to this planet relatively safely after elimanting the infected and making sure the ship was clean of them."
"Perhaps we weren't an attractive enough prize?" questioned Caroline.
"We didn't have any sort of cargo besides the standard materials and rations that most battleships have," Merhpi said while rubbing his head in confusion.
"Perhaps something else had happened at the time of our attack that attracted that thing's attention elsewhere," George said.
"Maybe, anyways, it's all in the past, what's done is done, what I want to discuss now is the crashed ship on the beach. I'm afraid of that thing spreading from the ship and onto this planet if it hasn't already, and then attacking our base," Ridge said in an attempt to clear the air of confusion.
"Good point. The mining outpost will be finished by tomorrow afternoon at the latest, and using another 100 metal units as well as 200 wiring units, we are currently constructing a refinery for the raw material at the outpost. This way we should be able to recoup our metal units used in the process within a few days. This will give us the materials needed to start constructing the wall or even create turrets, though we don't have many targeting chips left for that so we can make maybe five at most," Caroline replied.
"Merphi you can have your soldiers return to normal patrol activites for now, come back when thats settled though, I imagine we still have plenty of ideas we can cook up," Ridge ordered.
Although he didn't mind that the group of seven soldiers were present listening to their plans and progress, in reality he figured it was best to be safe that not every single person knew the future plans of the base. At any rate he had no idea what those fungi things could do, esepcially if they could induce people into a dreamstate and kill them in their sleep.
Merphi nodded to this and left the room with his soldiers to have the join the existing patrols before he quickly made his way back into the room.
"Now then, let's continue," Ridge said.
Nodding at his words the group then began to come up with a series of plans and protocols on what to do in regards the base and especially when it involved the crashed ship.
George had advocated for the base to just gather up a majority of the soldiers which numbered around thirty-two people and using the kinetic rifles as well as the plasma rifles to just assualt the ship and kill off any of these creatures. Eliminating the threat before it actually became a real one. The group shut this down simply because it involved too much risk and was quite reckless when they had no recon on the enemy whatsoever. It could easily lead to an ambush or something along those lines.
Caroline insisted that they instead focus on defense and focus their efforts on building up the base. In time, they would be able to stockpile plenty of resources to create weapons and fight continuously. By growing their own capabilities first, they could deal with any threat that came to them.
Yayha on the other hand came up with something that Ridge himself actually agreed with on the surface and this was to simply take the H.C. Heart battleship and simply use its cannons and guns to blow the already downed ship to smithereens.
Merphi also agreed with this plan, though he also brought up the point that by now the fungi had likely already spread out from the ship itself onto the planet, so they would also need ground troops or drones to clear up the area after the fact.
With three of the five agreeing on a plan, the meeting finally came to an end.
"That settles it; we'll simply use the battleship to blow that wreckage to smithereens, and then we can utilize the small drones that we have stored to scout the location with a small group of soldiers," Ridge said while stretching his neck and back after sitting for hours.
"Got it, I'll pick out some of our most capable and well-rested soldiers for this mission," George replied while saluting and then leaving the room.
Caroline also got up. "We'll have to plan for this to happen tomorrow then so we can run a quick diagnostics on the ship, which could take a while, and I imagine you don't want to attack in the dark," she said.
Nodding to her words, Ridge agreed and left the room himself, with the others trailing behind, eventually splitting up to get back to work. As important as clearing up this enemy was, Ridge also felt the battleship could take care of it just fine, so the urgency he had first felt was slowly fading.