Chapter 929 929 When It Rains
Just after that battle finished, thick black clouds rolled in, turning day to night in an instant before torrential rains began to fall.
[Everyone, get to elevated positions. The maintenance team on duty is verifying the integrity of the drainage trenches.] The camp's intercom announced.
"Is it that bad?" Max asked Khan, who sighed and double-checked the door of the modular building that they were sitting in.
"It's much worse in some areas. But we are on top of a hill here by the Anomaly, so it's not as bad as it could be. This whole region is known to flood when the rain continues for more than a day or two.
If you check the locations of the Myceloid camps, you will find that they are all on hills as well. It's not for defence against attacks but against the weather. When these storms start, electromagnetic interference is so strong that communications become difficult, and rains over ten centimetres per hour for periods of over a day are common.
There really isn't much to do but sit it out in safety, so you might as well stay here in the Command Room. Your Mecha are right outside if you need them, and there are beds and replicators in here, so we don't need to go anywhere until the skies clear up." Khan explained.
"What about the defence lines? The front line is in a trench outside the walls." Max asked.
"That's part of the drainage system. They get relocated behind the wall when it rains, and the trenches become a fast-flowing moat. It's very effective at repelling invaders, we have found, so it's not really a loss to our fortifications to move the Mecha out of it during heavy rain." Huntress Khan explained.
Max checked the topography of the area and noticed that this area wasn't really a hill but actually part of a ridgeline that drained from higher nearby hills and down into a lake only a few kilometres away.
If his rudimentary calculations were correct, not only would that lake be a valuable sink to absorb all the excess water when it fell, keeping the groundwater tables high, but it would also be incredibly dangerous in the days surrounding a large rainfall.
A matter of hours could change the water level by multiple metres, and there were some Myceloid camps that weren't all that far above the current lake level in elevation.
But that, too, would be an important test of leadership for the Myceloids now that they were building permanent structures. A leader was expected to bring their people to safety. If they couldn't even pick a spot well enough that they didn't get flooded out during the first major rainfall, it would be a complete failure on their part and possibly enough to see them challenged if their group survived the floods.
"How are the winds? Should we call back the Drone Bombers?" Nico asked as she adjusted the patrol patterns of the small aircraft.
"They're not usually too intense for military equipment. But they often get over eighty kilometres an hour. I think that the Drones should be safe to remain in the sky mechanically, but the interference from the lightning is going to make it hard for them to keep flying under remote control."
Khan had a point. The drones were running on a basic computer program to identify routes and targets, with operators who scanned the data and directed the camera feeds as they became relevant. So, they were likely to lose control of them in the storm, and without oversight, there was no telling what they would determine was an attack.
A group of bodies being washed down the hills by the rain might trigger a full-scale bombardment, even though they were weeks old. It was better to bring them back until they could be certain that the Drones were under proper control.
One after another, the small planes returned to the hangar where they were created and parked for the duration of the storm, leaving the camp to rely on the sensors of the Hunter Suits for their information.
The lightning started as quickly as the clouds had formed, lighting up the sky in a hundred shades of purple and blue, with a bit of green. Then the rains began, muting all the colour with a torrential sheet of water that hammered down on all of the structures and everything left outside.
"I hope those tents they built are stronger than they look. The rain here is strange, and it doesn't seem to be following terminal velocity as I understand it." Max muttered.
Nico chuckled and sent him some data. It wasn't that the rain was behaving abnormally. It was the gravity on the planet. It was nearly twice the Kepler standard, and Max simply hadn't noticed the change because the effects on his own movements were so slight that they hadn't drawn his attention.
"Well, that explains it. With twice standard gravity, of course, the rain would hit harder. Now I am genuinely curious about how the structures of the Myceloids are going to hold up."
Khan shrugged. "They might look crude, but they are made with the same thing that makes Myceloid bones, so the structure of them is really quite durable. They might not be completely waterproof in this level of downpour, but if they're well placed, there is no reason that they should be destroyed by the impact of rainfall, even if it's falling as densely as this.
"I've been in showers that didn't have this sort of flow rate. But it's not as bad as you had feared it would get yet, so I guess we will have to wait and see whether this is going to be a bad storm or just a flashy one." Max agreed.
"Personally, I'm more interested in the lightning. It should all be uniform colours at uniform altitudes within the same storm. It shouldn't change colours like that as it arcs between clouds unless there is an imbalance in the atmospheric composition. We should run more tests to see if there is something about this place that we missed." Nico suggested.
It was better than just sitting around and waiting.
"Grab a seat, and let's pull up the sensor data we already have." Khan agreed with a smile.
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