The robots moved at once, snapping old weapons back into place.
Wyatt tallied the count.
Besides the handful he’d sent with the convoy, forty-one units remained.
Nearly half of them were patchwork builds—thrown together to meet a deadline. Their combat rating was… optimistic.
While the others armed up, Wyatt led the noncombat-capable units belowdecks and relocated the two batteries. He hid them under a heap of wreckage and canceled the original detonation countdown.
In its place, he set a new trigger condition.
Then he returned to the workshop.
By the time he stepped in, the armed units were waiting for orders.
Wyatt linked into their cores and wiped the past few days of memory clean.
If Phantom Forge captured any of them, there would be nothing useful to extract.
With that done, he led more than thirty robots out into the valley and split them into firing pockets along the slopes—positions chosen to overlap, to crossfire, to die buying seconds.
***
The search team arrived.
A mixed unit squad, heavy weapons included, stepped into the valley that held the Sunflower. They were less than five hundred meters from the hidden entrance.
After Wyatt’s earlier raid, their alert status had been cranked to maximum. They spread into a line and advanced slowly, scanning every meter, refusing to assume anything was empty.
It didn’t take long.
A Hyena scout returned with the report: an “unusual entrance” lay ahead.
On the commander’s signal, the squad flowed around it and sealed the area.
The passage angled down into the earth, blocked by a crude door. The corridor was wide, but sand had collapsed into it—either from the Goliath blast, or as deliberate camouflage.
Hyenas drove probes into the ground. The readings came back fast: an enormous hollow space below.
The lead CBG compared the shape against mission data and reached the obvious conclusion.
This was the target.
The Sunflower.
The commander took a hundred-plus units down into the ship. The rest stayed topside to guard the mouth.
***
Wyatt watched from his ambush point, counting.
By his estimate, more than a hundred units had entered the ship. Aside from roughly ten Nether units, the rest were small bodies—Exilers, Hyenas, and similar light types.
He waited, timing it to the second.
About three minutes later—
The ground erupted.
A violent double boom kicked the valley. Stones jumped. Rocks rattled down the slope.
Above the buried ship, the sand bulged into a rising mound.
Then the blast tore the Sunflower in half.
After a thousand years underground, the ancient hull surged upward like a waking beast, rearing out of the earth. The center of the valley split open, fire and smoke punching into the sky.
The ground collapsed outward in waves.
Enemies scattered, scrambling back.
Many didn’t make it. At least half of the units outside fell into the sudden sinkhole.
That was Wyatt’s signal.
He fired a rocket into the densest cluster. It detonated in a hot bloom—
And every ambush pocket opened fire.
Micro-missiles, laser bursts, physical rounds, grenades—different colors stitched the night and slammed into the confused mass below.
For a few heartbeats, the enemy was simply torn apart: burning, shattered, tumbling into the collapsing earth.
Then they recovered.
Return fire surged up the slopes, and Wyatt’s advantage evaporated in an instant.
He had barely thirty-some units, and their ammunition stores were thin.
The enemy had three to four hundred.
Worse—many of them were medium bodies: Bloodthirsters, Rampagers, heavy frames built to take punishment and keep moving.
One firing pocket after another was swallowed by overwhelming fire. Flare signals shot into the sky as the enemy called in air support.
Even without the flares, the blast had done its work. Through the Shadow Falcon’s feed, Wyatt saw nearby aircraft pivoting toward the valley.
That was what he wanted.
The bigger the noise here, the safer the convoy would be.
He wanted to buy more time, but he knew the truth: his scattered ambushers wouldn’t last five minutes.
This place was already a grave.
Forty minutes since the convoy left. At their speed, they should be thirty kilometers out.
Safe—if luck held.
Before the air units arrived, Wyatt emptied what ammunition he had, discarded the spent weapon, and ran for the ridge.
He crested the hilltop just as the valley-gunfire fell silent.
All his firing pockets were gone.
Below, the enemy spread out, sweeping the rocks and shadows, searching for survivors. Smoke still boiled from the collapsed section of the Sunflower, and units that had fallen in began clawing their way back out.
Above, Punishers poured in. A frigate hung at distance and poured down a single harsh beam, turning the valley into daylight.
Wyatt stared one last time at the ship’s raised bow—
Then turned away.
He crossed the ridge and sprinted after the convoy.
He ran straight over the mountains for thirty kilometers, then dropped into the winding valley road and followed it hard.
Ten kilometers.
No convoy.
Another ten.
Still nothing.
The dark was too quiet. Too empty.
Where were they?
Wyatt stopped, uneasy.
The route had been planned in detail. He couldn’t have missed them.
Their speed couldn’t have exceeded sixty kilometers per hour on this terrain. With Wyatt’s pace, he should have caught them long ago.
Had they left late?
It was possible. The “one hour” departure time had been Dorian’s estimate.
If they started late, Wyatt might have run past them.
He regretted cutting straight across the ridges. If he’d followed the planned route, he would have seen them.
He turned around and ran back.
Ten kilometers.
Another ten.
He returned to the point where he’d dropped into the road.
Still nothing.
Had the TBM’s stealth been so perfect he’d missed them?
No.
The valley road was narrow. Even blind, he couldn’t have passed a sixty-meter convoy without noticing.
He didn’t like the only remaining explanation.
Something had happened to them.
He stood for a full minute, listening to the silence, then pushed on—searching back along the route.
His legs’ circuits were heating. His joints were starting to complain. He couldn’t remember how far he’d run tonight.
And then, only two kilometers later, he heard it.
A faint engine rumble.
Gravel crushed under heavy treads.
Relief surged—until his instincts snapped warning.
A single red dot appeared in the dark.
Then two. Then three.
Wyatt dropped behind the nearest rock and switched to the Shadow Falcon’s view.
What he saw punched static through his mind.
A Destroyer tank was crawling along the road.
And the red dots weren’t isolated.
They were enemy units—dense, swarming—almost filling the valley wall to wall.