"Are you saying we're supposed to conduct a full inspection of all our equipment and weapons over the next few days?" Brigadier General Gore, commander of the New Lushun garrison and head of the Commonwealth Marine Corps' Eighth Division, stared at the engineer beside him as if he suspected the man was pulling his leg.
The brigadier already knew that, young as he was, the engineer named Summers was a remarkably capable tech whiz. In fact, there wasn't a better engineer anywhere in the New Continent colonies. Otherwise, the hot-tempered general might already have had him shot.
Even so, he still looked as if he thought he was being made a fool of. "There are twelve thousand automated sentry guns in this system, in twenty different models. And three fortresses... Uh, they're converted civilian starports, but I suppose they still count as fortresses. Then there are the planet's surface, the sea, and all the islands. They've got more than ten thousand combat robots of various types, too."
"That's why we need to do one final calibration. Don't worry, we don't have to inspect everything ourselves. We just need to run a check through the central information terminal," Summers of the Engineers' Guild said.
"It's... it's that simple?" General Gore couldn't help sounding doubtful. He was an old-school soldier, and to him, maintaining equipment meant wearing protective gear, hauling a hammer, and clambering over a broken-down tank under enemy fire. This business of sitting safely in the rear and tapping away at a keyboard seemed almost too easy.
Old hands like him believed that if it was easy, it couldn't be any good.
"This system was reverse-engineered from ancient technology found in New Jade Gate One. It can take control of every automated weapon in the system, remotely check their condition,