After the battle, the Station's district fell into the same strange silence that they had been seeing before the nomads arrived. There were battles all over the Koleska Empire, but nothing within their assigned territory.
"Do you think we scared them away?" Nico pouted as she updated the combat reports that she had been mapping on the projection inside Santa Maria.
"I think we unbalanced their calculations, and now they're attacking the easier targets while the Koleska train a new wave of Pilots with the Learning Machines. They're doing their best, but it's hard to argue that they're doing as well as the Station is with us here.
They took heavy casualties, got ambushed twice, and lost a number of ships. That simply doesn't happen to the Arisen anywhere else. So, I think that they're saving us for last." Max countered.
"Or they could think that we have taken over, and they're disregarding the area as no longer under Koleska control." Nico laughed.
It was feasible. They had the firepower to take the Station and the planet below it if they really wanted to, so he couldn't blame the Arisen Army if they had come to the conclusion that the humans were in charge here after Santa Maria chased them away from the Station with extreme prejudice.
That would look like the defensive actions of an occupying force to outsiders. Their ship hadn't taken action before and had left it to the two Mecha, but the ship was so similar to the Knife Ears vessels that it would be hard for the Arisen Army to mistake it for Koleska.
After the first week, they were sure that something was bound to happen. It was almost time to graduate another class of students who had been using the learning machines all over the Koleska battlefront, but still, no Arisen forces attacked the Station.
"Maybe we should start some sort of competition to keep the Pilots' skills up? I know that a lot of the new ones are practicing with the learning machines, but the others are only doing basic drills." Max finally suggested on day ten without any action.
"If we don't start doing something, they're going to get lazy and out of shape. Wait, can the Koleska get out of shape? I mean, with the chitin shell, they don't get fat." Nico asked.
That was a very good question. Max didn't know the answer, and nobody was thinking about it on the Station, so he would lean toward it not being possible, but perhaps some of the larger Koleska were simply fat, and their chitin compensated for it?
Nico's mind had already moved on from the topic of Fat Koleska, and she was thinking of making them VR pods to practice in when they weren't fighting. There was no VR arcade on the Station, so it would be a fun new feature for them, and she could introduce new games since their basic shape was similar to humans.
More limbs would have made the pods difficult to adapt, but with two arms and two legs, the Koleska could use them as they were without reprogramming.
"Want me to send for Commander Yuri so we can start working on something?" Max asked while Nico planned what they would need to keep themselves in top shape.
"Please do. I will have the software updated for the current engagement by the time you two work something out. I'm sure he won't turn it down, and we can send a whole bloody shipload of them if he really wants them for everyone."
That wasn't a bad idea. They could send a ship around and drop off upgrades for every Koleska station that they passed until the Reavers could be sure that the locals were capable of defending the Anomaly and keeping the Arisen out of their Galaxy.
It would likely require more paperwork and patience than he was willing to expend, though, so he would start by proposing an Arcade full of educational games for the Station. If they needed, they could convert a cargo hold on a Cutter and send it here to do the job. But the Koleska could likely find a spot that could be used as the Arcade.
Max sent off the proposal for the Arcade, complete with diagrams and sizes for the machines, so that the Koleska could think it over, and then went back to trying to find more meaning in the patterns of the Arisen attacks.
Theirs might be one of the situations where they abandoned an attack and returned to it later, so it was best if he knew everything that there was to know about past events so that the Koleska around him didn't become complacent, but they had wiped out all the species involved in the previous events, so perhaps the past wasn't the best guideline on how to deal with it.
Then it came to him. The timing was the key. What they had done was switch attack forces for one with different experiences and possibly different equipment to finish off the attack while the failed fleet moved on to another target.
Telling them apart was the problem since the War Walkers and ships all appeared to be identical, without major differences except between categories like they were all made from the same template. Until he saw another attack fleet, he couldn't know for sure if that held true between forces, but once you learned to deal with each of the units in an Arisen force, you only needed to learn how to deal with their formations, which were so familiar to Max and Nico that it had only taken them a few minutes to adjust.
[Commander Yuri, I think I have made a breakthrough in how to deal with the Arisen threat. If you have time to come discuss it and the Arcade proposal that I recently sent, I would appreciate it. Any time is fine, so please don't let it mess with your sleep schedule.] Max sent to the other Commander.
[In that case, I will see you for breakfast at the usual restaurant at 0700 Station time.]
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