Chapter 2099: The Briefing

A truth came out a few weeks later.

It arrived at the hub in the form of an urgent briefing, called without warning in the middle of a training day. Every pilot on the station was ordered to the large briefing hall near the central spire, and Ning, now formally a pilot candidate, was ordered to attend with them.

The hall was crowded when he arrived. Pilots from every squadron on the hub had gathered, along with officers from the station’s command staff, and the atmosphere was tense. Nobody seemed to know exactly what the briefing was about, but everyone had their suspicions.

Ning found a seat near the back beside the broad-shouldered pilot, whose name he had since learned was Harlan. Dorn sat a few rows ahead, his arms folded and his scarred face unreadable.

An intelligence officer stepped up to the front of the hall a few minutes later.

She was a slight woman with sharp features and dark circles beneath her eyes, as though she had not slept properly in several days. She waited until the hall had fallen completely silent before she began.

"Some of you have heard the rumors," she said. "Over the last several months, a story has been spreading through the Federation that the Mekharans have captured one of our planets. Command has neither confirmed nor denied it until now."

She paused.

"As of this morning, we are confirming it."

A low murmur ran through the hall.

The intelligence officer brought up an image on the large display behind her. It showed a planet seen from orbit, a world of gray mountains and brown plains, with a thin, pale atmosphere.

"This is Corvessa," she said. "A mining world on the edge of Federation territory, with a population of a little under two hundred thousand. Eight months ago, Corvessa stopped responding to all communications. Our first reconnaissance vessels sent to investigate never returned. The second wave confirmed what we feared. Corvessa had fallen to Mekharan forces."

The murmur grew louder, and several pilots exchanged grim looks.

"The public will be told today that Corvessa has been lost to enemy action," the intelligence officer continued. "They’ll be told that the population was evacuated in time, that the planet holds little strategic value, and that our forces are preparing a response. Most of that is true, or close enough to true that it makes no difference."

She looked out across the hall.

"But what the public will not be told is what the Mekharans are actually doing there. You need to know."

She changed the image on the display.

It showed the same planet, but closer now, the surface magnified through reconnaissance sensors.

At first, Ning did not understand what he was looking at. The gray mountains and brown plains of the first image were gone. In their place were vast, raw scars torn into the planet’s surface, enormous pits and trenches stretching for hundreds of kilometers in every direction.

Entire mountain ranges had been hollowed out, their peaks collapsed into craters, and the plains between them had been stripped down to bare, broken rock.

And everywhere across that ravaged surface, Ning could see movement. There were countless tiny shapes, too many to count, swarming across the pits and trenches like insects.

"The Mekharans have not settled Corvessa," the intelligence officer said. "They haven’t fortified it. They haven’t built defenses or established bases or made any attempt to hold the planet in the way we would expect. Instead, they are mining it."

She gestured toward the image.

"Intensely. Every metal deposit on the planet is being stripped. Not just the ones we were mining, but every vein and every scrap of ore, down to deposits so poor that we never considered them worth extracting. They are taking everything, and they are doing it at a pace we have never seen before."

The hall had gone silent again.

"That alone would be concerning," she said. "But it’s not the worst of it."

She changed the image once more. This time, the display showed a series of planets side by side, each of them scarred in exactly the same way as Corvessa, with the same vast pits and trenches and the same hollowed-out mountains.

"After Corvessa fell, Intelligence began searching for similar activity elsewhere. We found it. These are planets on the fringes of Federation space, worlds we had written off as worthless, or abandoned long ago, or that we had simply never noticed at all. Barren rocks, failed colonies, uninhabited moons. None of them were defended, because none of them were thought to be worth defending."

She looked across the hall.

"Every single one of them has been quietly stripped of metal. Some of this activity goes back years. Some of it goes back decades. And until Corvessa fell, we never noticed any of it."

For a long moment, nobody in the hall said anything at all.

Then the arguments began.

They started almost as soon as the intelligence officer stepped back from the display, and they spread through the hall within minutes, pilots turning to one another in their seats and talking over each other in low, urgent voices.

"They’re building more bodies," Harlan said beside Ning, his voice tight. "That’s all it is. They need metal for their bodies the way we need food. The more metal they have, the more of them there are. They’re building an army."

"An army that size would need a lot more than metal," a pilot in front of him argued. "Bodies need souls. You can’t just build more Mekharans out of ore."

"How do you know? Nobody knows how they make new ones. Maybe they can."

"And if they can, why haven’t they done it before? Why now?"

"It’s something bigger," said the tall woman who had once told Ning he looked like a first-year. Her name was Vessa, and she was sitting a few seats down from him, her expression grim. "Look at the scale of it. Planets. Dozens of them, over years. You don’t need that much metal for bodies, even an army of them. They’re building something."

"Building what?"

"I don’t know. That’s what worries me."