Chapter 387 Oops
As the retaliation strike was underway, huge troop movements were taking place back in Avalon Island and on each of the Edenian carriers in the fleet. The Aeolus Air Force had mobilized its entire transport fleet and was even printing more; massive ET-14 Argo transport jets, based on the Antonov An 126 airframe, were rolling out of the hangar one after another. They only stopped to load full complements of troops in each jet.
After the jets were loaded, they immediately took off and headed toward the carriers in the distance, where they landed, disgorged their troops, and immediately returned to Avalon Island to pick up another load.
At the same time, amphibious landing craft were also loading up and bringing full complements of troops to the enormous aircraft carriers. The fleet was still relatively close to Eden, at only roughly 500 kilometers away, so the trip was short enough that the landing craft were heavily overloaded for the trip.
As the troops were being transported, a major operation was underway inside the carriers. The carriers were overengineered, and the researchers working on them in Lab City had designed them so as to take advantage of the low crew count. Thus, most of the space inside them was actually empty and could be set up in a number of configurations. Requiring only two hundred sailors to crew each carrier at full capacity, the remainder was dedicated to engines, capacitor banks, reactors, and the configurable cargo area.
The cargo area could be switched at any time to one of three primary configurations: aircraft hangars, fleet transport and drydock, or troop transport. Currently, they were set to the “default” configuration, with cavernous aircraft hangars occupying most of the space.
An alarm suddenly rang out on the EV Beowulf. Three long horn blasts were followed by a repeating announcement by the ship’s AI: [All hands, prepare for reconfiguration. Repeat: all hands, prepare for reconfiguration. Sixty seconds to reconfiguration. Fifty-nine... fifty-eight....]
As the announcement repeated on the 1MC, the crew of the Beowulf headed to designated safe zones, where they wouldn’t be affected by the atomic printers that were about to sweep through each hangar, decomposing everything down to the decks and bulkheads. Once the printers finished their sweep in one direction, they reversed course and headed back the way they came, printing angular teardrop-shaped objects at precise intervals on every deck inside the newly cleared cargo area.
On deck, the landings and takeoffs continued, a synchronized aerial dance where one jet would land, disgorge its complement of 400 troops, then take off again. All four of the flight lines were in continuous operation, averaging one jet landed on each flight line every minute. Over the course of the next hour, each carrier loaded almost 100,000 troops by air alone.
The remainder were in transit in their amphibious landing craft, which were estimated to arrive in about five hours.
Those five hours weren’t wasted, either. The atomic printers were hard at work printing the equipment the troops would be issued. Power armor, pulse carbines, rail rifles, fusion torches, atomic decouplers, back-mounted drone systems and rocket launchers, pulse shotguns, plasma projectors, multirole grenades... the list goes on. Every weapon designed by the mad geniuses in Lab City was at every soldier’s disposal, and they were experts in all of them after the vicious training Athena put them through in VR.
Once the transport ships reached the carriers, enormous doors slid back, exposing the newly configured troop transport decks for the landing vehicles to unload their troops into.
Altogether, each of the enormous carriers now held almost 250,000 troops.
Once the troops were loaded, the enormous exterior doors slid closed and each teardrop-shaped object on every deck simultaneously opened like a blooming flower, the walls becoming ramps that the infantry marched up squad by squad, taking their places and preparing for transport.
After the drop vehicles were loaded, a siren sounded on the carrier’s 1MC and through speakers on the flight deck. [All hands, prepare for liftoff. Repeat: all hands, prepare for liftoff. Liftoff in 60 seconds... 59... 58....]
Once the countdown reached zero, the ship’s AI announced, [Liftoff.]
A deep, groaning rumble sounded throughout the Beowulf and the lights flickered as the capacitor banks emptied themselves and the reactors went to full military power. Deep within the ship, the ballast tanks were being pumped empty and filled with air, increasing the buoyancy of the vessel.
Soon, four enormous, stubby wings appeared above the water as the increased buoyancy lifted them out of the briny sea. After they breached the surface of the sea, they lifted up on tracks and locked in place level with the flight deck.
Each stubby wing had a ducted six-blade rotor that spanned fifty meters in diameter, and each rotor was rapidly spinning up to speed. As the rotors spun up, the enormous carrier finally broke free of the ocean’s grasp and began gaining altitude.
1000 meters... 5000 meters... 10,000 meters.... The Beowulf, joined by its nine sister-ships, halted its ascent near the far edge of the stratosphere at 60 kilometers above the ground and the struggling reactors dropped to normal safe output and the capacitor banks began charging again.
Once the carriers reached their cruising altitude, they broke off and headed in different directions. Their main initial targets were China, Russia, India, Pakistan, Israel, France, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Eight of the carriers headed to those countries, while the ninth headed to Central Africa, and the tenth headed to South America.
The unification was about to begin.
......
In the ARES Virtual Command Center.
[Oops,] Nova giggled.
Aron raised an eyebrow and glanced at her. "What happened?"
[I may have 'accidentally' let a satellite feed of our carriers launching slip through the jamming we've been filling orbit with,] she snickered.
"Why?"
[I want them to know what's coming for them, and know that they can't stop it. Besides, there's no hiding our carriers anyway, so a visual won't really matter.]
Aron grunted his assent and turned his attention back to the main viewscreen.
