Star Force: Ghostblade (SF67) Read Online Free Page A

could keep up with her.
    Eventually the first was filled and it signaled to her
with a departure ping. Sophia shut down the feeds and lifted the arm up and out
of the way, then pinged the truck back that it was clear. It floated off
slowly, carrying a huge load, with the empty one sliding in right behind it to
waste no time. Sophia began loading it immediately while the first truck headed
for the forest edge where it lifted up over the treetops and carried the
material several kilometers away to another clearing that a pair of mechs were
in the process of expanding upon. Infantry units were in play and visible on
the construction version of a battlemap, locating and chasing off any wildlife
in the area so they wouldn’t get chopped to bits in the clearing process.
    The truck passed over them and headed for the small
open section that had been cleared and leveled, then it opened its bottom doors
and dumped the full load in the center of it. The vehicle shot into the air a
moment before the anti- grav compensated, then it
closed its doors and headed on the return trip as a third mech woke from its
statue-like stance and headed over to the pile, intending to work it down into
a meter thick bed, compacting it with a series of rollers in order to lay the
base for an artificial mountain they’d be constructing.
    In the future that mountain would be cannibalized and
eaten away by processing machines for raw materials, but right now those
facilities hadn’t been built yet and wouldn’t be coming online for weeks at the
minimum. Right now the digging crews from multiple sites needed somewhere to
put the dirt, and this would be it.
    Over the next 24 hours there would be more mechs and
trucks coming into play as the influx of personnel arrived to run the machines,
which would also be added to by subsequent orbital drops. It would be awhile
before surface factories started making any useable projects, meaning that
right now it was all about earthmoving and setting up some basic, permanent
facilities built from materials being shipped down from the jumpships sitting
in orbit around the enormous moon.
    And there were sites like this all across the island,
most of which were just getting up and running. Sophia really had gotten here
at the outset, and while this planet was definitely still on the frontier and
very wild, with every bit of dirt she moved was helping to make it into their
new home. The feelings of unrest at having to abandon Arwen would never totally leave her, but now having a hand in the construction of
this world she was able to put aside the constant worry and dive into the work,
for helping her Clan was her foremost priority, and if this was the course that
Oni wanted for them, then so be it.
    It might still be a stupid move but it was the
trailblazer’s to make, and the Snowstorms would make it work eventually, no
matter how much they lost in the transition.

 
 
    3

 
 
    December 2, 2783
    Frost System (Bsidd Region)
    Flake

 
    Marquis Sheen sat at her workstation onboard the jumpship Polar Veil , a Clan cargo ship that
was already half empty after only a week of unloading, which was
quite a feat considering its size. It was a product of Clan Humungousaur
and had been traded to Sheen’s Clan along with a lot of other equipment and payment
promises going forward for part of their territory on Titan. The cargo ship
design was the largest within Star Force, but had a disproportionate amount of
its bulk dedicated to engines, making it more maneuverable and a touch faster
than your traditional jumpships.
    It wasn’t cheap, by any stretch of the imagination,
and economically speaking you could have built 5 Mammoth -class cargo ships for the same amount of resources, which
was why Mainline and most of the Clans had never bothered to go that route. As
more technologies were unlocked from the pyramid the size of Star Force’s ships
was getting larger and larger, but the Humungousaurs had taken the leap