Useful

For a while I'm at the army meetings with Ichirou and Kyoshi and Rei. They seem to think I should be there, and its where the tent Zip and I are staying in is. But soon its pretty clear that I'm not really helping much. Rei is talking about digging chevrons in the ground to channel infantry and force-multipliers and bulwarks and I don't even know what. She's some kind of genius or something. Maybe its all the minds she ate.

So pretty soon I just wander around the city for a while. People sort of collect around me, and I talk to them, and they tell me about Stardown and ask about where we've been and what we've done. They ask about Zipporah, and we try to explain about Prill. I know there are some of them, maybe a lot, that think...that think we're unnatural. No one says anything where they think we can hear but...Zip has those big ears. They're nice, you know, but they are big. Foxy. I say I don't care but I do.

There are too many people here. Its too open. I get headaches every day sometime in the afternoon now, ever since Eris...well, ever since she blew my brains out of my head so they had to grow back. And that scar.

Its so crowded, so I get to thinking. I ask some surveyors about the area. What's the bedrock like? How deep is the soil? How deep is the lake? How is it fed? Seepage? That kind of thing. I talk to as many people as I can - Jin-Kalys, the lizard - er - Anakarix even follows us around. He talks about...I think its math, but I'm not sure...and talks to Zipporah a lot. He seems really happy to have another Karian around to talk to besides Sloan and the scary Jevumm we haven't really seen since...well, the incident with HighDive.

She sure does enjoy being a hero.

I'm sort of done with it, so when I get the chance, I start digging tunnels. Its tiring work because, to get them done faster, I call on my Kata to grow almost as large as I can when I put everything into it. This doesn't last, so I have to rest after, but while I'm like that I get a lot of work done. I burn through a good bit of Blackrock, but when all those people from Geneva Prime start arriving, we'll have all the Blackrock we'd ever want.

It takes a long time, but I find a lot of Mechified who are good at this kind of stuff to come and shore up the tunnels where they need to, to brace and to reinforce. They get into digging themselves - it turns out, there are loads of them with similar upgrades to what I've got. I dunno...thousands. They're not large enough for all these people, but its all we have time for. And when the heat bombs start falling, they're better than tents.

There's now a big network of tunnels, a few meters across, with some larger rooms cut out and air vents cut down to them and that kind of thing. Some drainage for, you know, waste and stuff like that. They're dry because I cut them into the hills, so they're above the lake and don't get any of the seepage from that. Some people are already living up there because there just aren't places to live that have anything like walls or a roof anymore. The city keeps bursting over and over again. Some arrive and have thought things through, but others...haven't.

A few of the Mechified said that there's enough room in those tunnels for maybe a million people. More if they're just crammed in there for shelter when the fighting starts.

A lot of refugees keep coming, and a lot of them won't be fighting even if they wanted to. I had hoped...well, I had hoped that things would be better, but they aren't, so you make do. I can do enough work, while I'm here and its a bit quiet, to make up for not having enough time to do things right.

And then, all of a sudden, everything goes straight to shit.