All the manpower and equipment assigned to Outpost No. 12 of the New Jade Gate Governor's Guard were, in theory, supposed to be as follows: an infantry platoon of 35, equipped with C10 electromagnetic rifles and personal armor; two combat teams, eight mobile infantrymen in total, along with 15 AS40 powered exoskeletons, the extras naturally being spares; three squad Thunder autocannons, two small phase cannons, and a Hive missile carrier, along with two 20-person weapons teams to operate them; five Panther III multipurpose infantry fighting vehicles, with a 12-person repair and driving crew; a low-altitude airship, two pilots, and five dedicated ground crew; a three-person communications team; a three-person medical team; and a five-person administration team.
If they'd actually had all of that, even three times as many bugs could have been completely torn apart in their layered field of fire.
Unfortunately, we'd all seen the reality... The airship had vanished without a trace, supposedly taken by its pilot to do a private job. Only two of the five infantry fighting vehicles were intact, and the others had barely enough power to get from the building out front to the overpass for lamb spine hotpot. The weapons teams and their weapons existed only as some kind of paper fantasy. As for the so-called mobile infantry, well, not a single professionally trained elite soldier with an exoskeleton pilot's license existed. Lieutenant Monderson and Miss Ina had been thrown in at the deep end.
The communications team consisted only of Sergeant Cindy, a dazed-looking signalman who seemed like he couldn't even repair the equipment. The medical team was just Doctor Banks and Nurse Belinda. And as for the administration team... hadn't Yoyo been the one frying the steaks before we got here?
The infantry platoon was at least close to full strength, but more than half were green recruits who'd never seen blood. Quite a few had been put on duty without even completing the usual three months of basic training.
That wasn't surprising. Even Lieutenant Monderson, the commander of this outpost, hadn't completed basic training.
After such a battle, fewer than thirty people were still able to move. The outpost was half-destroyed, its walls had collapsed, and only one sentry gun remained, with most of its ammunition already spent.
Here we go again with that line I'd said for some reason so many times already: this place wasn't safe to stay.
This time, at last, nobody questioned it.
After passing along the orders to "gather the wounded" and "collect all ammunition and supplies," Ina and Baka hurried off with the soldiers to carry them out. Yu Lian followed Mechanic Uncle Carl to the garage. Only then did he realize things were even worse than he'd imagined. Aside from the two vehicles that had provided fire support at the gate, the autocannons and radars on the roofs of the other three Panthers were damaged. One of them was even missing a section of side armor. Another had engine trouble, one had a broken stabilizer, and the last had a dead engine, stabilizer, and hover system.
At least the vehicles had been well maintained—on the outside, anyway. That proved the mechanics hadn't given up on them.
"I can fix them. At least get them running," Uncle Carl said.
"Then why didn't you fix them before?"
"Uh... Second Lieutenant Russo said there was no need. Said if these vehicles were in working order, it'd be hard to fudge some of the accounts upstairs. I didn't really understand." Uncle Carl seemed reluctant to speak ill of the dead and was a little evasive.
Senior Chief Petty Officer Carl Johnsen was the oldest and most respected person at the outpost. He'd supposedly once been an engineer at a major corporation. Why he'd ended up here was probably a long story.
Whatever the reason, Yu Lian's memories from military school told him that the old man was competent and could be trusted.
"How long will you need? I mean, to get them running." Yu Lian looked over the old mechanic and his crew. The maintenance team was supposed to have twelve people, but only half remained. One of them was so ferocious that he'd lost an arm in the battle.
"Two hours?"
"You have one."
"All right." The old man didn't waste words. He clapped his hands, and his crew immediately got moving: removing covers, fetching materials, grabbing tools. They worked in an orderly, practiced fashion. Watching them, it was clear they'd been ready to go for a while. Yu Lian suddenly felt he'd given them too much time.
"But I can only get them running. There's a big problem here..."
"The power packs? I know. I'll figure something out!"
Yu Lian sounded certain, but Uncle Carl wasn't reassured. The biggest problem now was power. Without it, even if Carl Johnsen himself had three heads and six arms and could overhaul all five vehicles in minutes, then wax their hulls, he still couldn't make them move without the battery packs Second Lieutenant Russo had sold off!
"Can I use the workbench here?"
The old man nodded, still eyeing Yu Lian suspiciously as he left the garage. A minute later, his eyes went wide. He stared dumbly as Yu Lian led a group of people in, dragging the Drac lizard's torso.
It was a genuinely horrifying sight. Everyone working in the garage stopped, and a crowd followed them in from outside.
The Drac lizard had been a colossal, sky-darkening beast, but its body was typical of a reptile. Its wings had been chopped off, its tail and limbs broken, and two of its hook-claws torn away. All that remained was a torso a little over three meters long, small enough to fit on the workbench. Sergeant Yoyo and several strong soldiers lifted it up with considerable effort. Yu Lian casually fastened on a face mask, picked up the chainsword Lieutenant Monderson had left behind, and went to work. Sparks flew as he sawed into the carcass.
The old engineer backed away a few steps. The others retreated even farther. They felt as if they'd been dragged onto the set of a horror movie to watch a mad scientist assemble a stitched-together monster at close range.
"Besides dragon crystals, Drac lizards have some aetherstone in their bodies, usually hidden in the gallbladder." Yu Lian plunged both hands into the incision and fumbled around for a while before pulling out several black stones. He nodded, satisfied. "Good. This is an old one. The stones are decent in both purity and size." He handed them to Yoyo.
The Black sergeant held the stones, which were coated in foul bodily fluids, and nearly threw up. He quickly dropped them into the large bucket they'd prepared.
"Also, if you boil its liver down completely, you can extract a trace amount of high-energy dust." Yu Lian pulled out a lump of viscera about as big as his head and handed it straight to the nurse who'd come over to help.
"Go boil some water. Keep it at a rolling boil, and add a liter of desiccant. The liver will dissolve in ten minutes at most. Pour out the water, then scrape the blue powder off the sides of the pot and bring it to me."
The nurse went off to do it, looking utterly distraught.
Yu Lian moved on to the next step. He pulled out all the Drac lizard's intestines, stretched them out, and washed them clean. Anyone watching might have thought he was making sausages.
"What are you..." Uncle Carl couldn't bear to watch anymore. He was worried their new commander had gone mad.
"Drac lizard intestines are very tough." As he spoke, Yu Lian took out a knife and cut them into five equal-weight pieces.
...It wasn't clear at all what made them tough.
"I mean in terms of energy. Their intestinal membranes are highly flexible and resistant to heat and pressure. They can even be used to make... Well, in short, they're perfectly suitable as containers for power packs."
They could even be used as the shell for a small energy shield, though that wasn't a technology anyone would develop for years... Hmm, could he find a way to make it now? And even if he did, in the doomed little country that was the Commonwealth, the Alliance and the Empire's financial conglomerates would probably snatch it up. How could he prevent that?
Yu Lian decided that once he had some free time, he'd find a notebook and record all the future knowledge he could use. He'd been reborn, after all. The protagonists in all those rebirth novels he'd read before transmigrating did the same thing.
His mind turned over the thought as his hands kept working. He explained, "Put aetherstone and high-energy dust into an electrolytic solution together, and they'll react chemically, producing energy and electricity. But the process generates a lot of heat, so we have to use these intestinal membranes to make an insulated container. Put simply, the principle is like..."
"Komina biobattery technology!" Uncle Carl exclaimed, suddenly understanding.
"Right, that's what I mean. It's actually pretty easy to understand, isn't it? In a way, their biotechnology represents a different evolutionary path." Yu Lian glanced at the old mechanic, thinking, This guy really knows his stuff!
"But... But that's impossible! The Kominans went through countless rounds of genetic adjustment to get perfect biological materials, and they're still improving them. The genetic maps and chemical formulas for all their biological materials are their most closely guarded secrets. They've kept their mouths shut no matter how much the Alliance offered or how hard the Empire pressured them..."
And that was why they'd gone under! Their homeworld had been turned into a mine. Half their people and biologists had been taken by each of the galaxy's two poles. Of course, the greater part of their research had actually ended up with the Swarm Queen, and that was how the future saw those few—no, those Leviathans that could fight Titan ships head-on... If I hadn't really fought the Queen and robbed her, I wouldn't know any of this.
"But why would you know..." The old mechanic looked even more confused, with a touch more fear in his eyes.
He really was an expert, almost too much of one. Why would someone this talented be working as a mechanic at an outpost on a remote colony? That had to be a very sad story, too.
"Aetherstone and high-energy dust can react—that's in the alchemy textbooks." The important part was that it was an alchemy textbook, not a chemistry textbook. But as a "moon-dweller," it wasn't unreasonable that he'd seen semi-classified materials.
"I heard that Drac lizards had both substances from an old ranger when I first went to Tulong to see what the black market was like. Of course, I didn't pay it any attention at the time. It only came back to me when I noticed its energy breath had a distinct electromagnetic pulse effect."
That was even harder to verify, but at least it sounded like a reasonable explanation.
"I understand!" Uncle Carl nodded. In a sincere, somewhat respectful tone, he said, "Commander, give me forty minutes. I'll have these tanks running, no question!"
"Oh, all right..."
So what exactly did you understand?
Before you continue