The Tech Center was a short walk from the Command Center, and Hans took the access road instead of calling a vehicle. Kimmy walked on his left. Yunera stayed on her other side and hadn’t said anything since they left.
The entrance doors opened before anyone touched them. Yunera stopped half a step after the others, looked at the doors, then at the strip of lights running down the center of the ceiling, and came in without a word.
Kimmy slowed at the threshold. Her head tilted slightly, the way it did when she was reading a space through her spatial vision.
Hans didn’t ask what she found.
The corridor was longer than anything in the Command Center, and quieter than both women expected for a building packed with equipment.
They had gone past two side halls when Johannes and Evelyn came around the corner, a hard case under Evelyn’s arm.
"Commander." Johannes stopped. His eyes went to Kimmy and Yunera, then back to Hans. "Oh. Miss Kimmy, Miss Yunera. Finally getting yourselves integrated?"
Hans furrowed his brows. "What do you mean by finally?"
"Nothing, Commander." Johannes cleared his throat.
Evelyn rolled her eyes.
"Marcus needs some additional help, Commander. We’ll be on our way."
She nodded once toward Kimmy and Yunera as she passed. Johannes followed her toward the Research Core, already talking about some of the recovered drives Marcus was working through.
Hans kept walking. Behind him, Yunera was looking at the ceiling again.
...
Reechard was waiting at the entrance to the Integration section with three assistants and a tablet he wasn’t looking at.
"Commander." He smiled at Kimmy and Yunera in turn. "Miss Asters. Miss Weiss. Your pods are ready."
The pods stood in two rows of four. Two at the near end were open and lit, and the rest were dark. Hans had walked past them enough times that they looked like furniture to him.
Yunera stopped in the doorway.
She looked at the pods first, then the readouts along the wall, then the lids rising on their own as an assistant touched a panel. She walked to the nearest pod, bent to look inside, and put her hand flat on the rim.
"It’s warm."
"Please keep your hands off the display, Miss Weiss," Reechard said, still smiling.
She had already touched it. A line of text slid across the screen and reset itself. Yunera pulled her hand back and looked at Hans, who was looking at the wall.
"I know what I’m doing. You don’t need to be smug about it."
Kimmy stopped beside the second pod without being led to it. She read the shape of it first, then the machinery in the floor beneath, cold and dense and quiet.
Nothing in the room was alive except the people. She could tell what all of it was made of, but not what any of it did.
She didn’t say anything. Hans watched her turn toward the sound of the assistants, then back to the pod.
He opened the registration panel for both of them.
The content was short. This time he read all of it.
------
[ Personnel Integration — Candidate Registration ]
[ Candidates ]
Kimmy Asters / Yunera Weiss
[ Allegiance Condition ]
Acknowledged
[ Proceed ]
Yes / No
------
"Last chance to walk out," Hans said.
Kimmy was already stepping toward her pod.
"Do I take my boots off?" Yunera asked.
"That won’t be necessary, Miss Weiss."
The assistants helped them in, but the lids remained open. Hans selected Yes.
Reechard returned to the controls.
"I need final confirmation from both of you before the assessment begins."
He looked toward Kimmy first.
"Do you voluntarily consent to Personnel Integration under Commander Hans Flemmens?"
"I consent."
Yunera answered before he could repeat the entire question.
"Yes. I consent too."
A tone sounded from both pods.
------
[ Candidate Consent Confirmed ]
[ Kimmy Asters ]
[ Yunera Weiss ]
[ Personnel Integration Eligibility Assessment ]
[ Initializing... ]
------
The lids lowered one after the other.
"The active process should take around two hours, Commander," Reechard said. "The recovery cradles will handle the rest."
Hans watched the readouts a few seconds longer, then left them to Reechard’s crew.
Hans checked the readouts once more from the door, though there was nothing left to check.
He expected both of them to pass, but he had just told Yunera that the pod could still reject her. There was no point pretending otherwise now just because he wanted both of them through.
Reechard and the System could handle the rest.
He had barely stepped into the corridor when a panel opened in front of him.
------
[ Strategy Center ]
[ Construction Complete ]
[ Awaiting Commander Deployment ]
------
Hans stopped. He had been checking that timer for days, and somewhere between reports and Kimmy’s very serious acceptance, it finally finished.
He wondered if this Strategy Center would look anything like the one he remembered from an old RTS.
"Time to give me a surprise, System."
He left the Tech Center on foot again.
The road to the Command Center passed the Engineers’ holding yard, where the six trailers from PCL-1 sat in a row.
Engineers walked between them with scanners. One of the screens was still lit, but Hans didn’t stop to check the progress.
They could wait until the Strategy Center was up.
The inner line began where the road bent toward the Command Center.
Two wall lines ran side by side, with Watch Towers standing above both of them.
A Garrison Post was built into the wall on each side of the gate, a squat armored block with a ring of firing ports along its face. The ports reshaped themselves around whatever weapons the soldiers inside carried.
On the roof, a heavy support cannon sat on a raised mount, turned outward. It was built to break up dense swarms rather than single targets, and it couldn’t fire inside two hundred meters.
Anything closer belonged to the Pillboxes.
The gate scanned Hans while he was still a good distance away and slid open before he reached it, and the soldiers inside the posts didn’t bother to look up.
Past it, Pillboxes sat in staggered rows across the approach, each one covering the dead ground of the next.
Behind them, the SAM Sites stood in a loose ring around the Command Center.
Each one was a stabilized platform carrying a multi-tube launcher, tilted toward the sky, with the missile storage and reloading mechanism built into the housing beneath it.
The missiles corrected their course after launch, but every site needed a short reload after firing. Hans had learned that lesson in enough RTS games, so he never placed one alone.
Their coverage overlapped so another site could take the next engagement while one reloaded.
A cluster of Sensor Towers and the Physical Radar Facility fed targeting data into the defensive network, cutting down the time between detection and launch.
It had all been added one piece at a time, and he had never looked at all of it at once. Any RTS player would have called it overbuilt.
Hans called it a decent start.
The Strategy Center wouldn’t bring any defenses of its own, so the Engineers graded the plot inside the inner line, next to the Command Center.
Survey markers ran around it in a long rectangle, and there was nothing on it yet but bare ground.
The cleared area was much larger than he expected.
Prepared service lanes ran along two sides, while buried power and data connections surfaced at several marked points around the plot. Even the Command Center beside it suddenly looked smaller than Hans remembered.
Whatever the System considered a Strategy Center, it needed a lot of space.
Hans walked in until he stood about where the middle of the building would be.