Chapter 79: Death from Above
“And how quickly do you think we’ll be able to make the switch?” the navy rear admiral asked from the main viewscreen.
The quality of the feed wasn’t great, but it was good enough for Derek to see that the man had some kind of orange fibers clinging to much of his uniform, though the orange cat held fast in the arms of a sailor in the far corner of the escape pod left him believing he knew just how that had happened.
“There won’t be any delay on our end. We can launch as soon as you’re aboard, and you can be on the bridge before we’re anywhere near the zone of engagement. The Dragonfly’s a small ship,” Derek replied.
As for what they were discussing? It was a plan that had to be made relatively last minute, with a mere three hours left on the clock, because they’d both realized the landing zones might need some orbital fire support, and the only vessel capable of providing that even theoretically was his own.
With a little over two thousand survivors, they needed to spread out to avoid calling The Error down on their heads, and no one knew how many regular monsters that many people would attract.
But the main issue was the distance between camps. Two hundred kilometers. A distance specifically chosen to make mutual support effectively impossible.
Which looked like a truly terrible idea on the face of it, and in many ways, it was … but even after going through all available historical documents, twice, and a thorough scan of those same documents via the computer just in case all four of them had somehow gotten brain damage, they had no concrete idea as to how close different settlements had to be to count as “one” for the purpose of population.
And since any group larger than a thousand would call down the World Boss they had quite definitively learned they couldn’t beat with their current resources … they’d have to err on the side of caution and deal with the consequences, whatever they may be.
Hence, the idea: bring a bunch of naval personnel with the appropriate [Skill]set aboard, and use their abilities to help them exist “safely” in orbit, and use the railgun to blow apart any large concentrations of monsters.