The dignitaries watched as the drones fought off the attack on the refugees, then began to relax as they realized that the small drones were capable combatants, as good as most of the alien infantry, and much more durable.
"How many of those can you have active at once? It would really help cut down on casualties if they could be deployed to more cities." The General asked as he watched the last of the aliens retreat away from the road.
"We can have a fairly large number, but usually a large group needs to be overseen by a more powerful Artificial Intelligence and not just one of the more powerful drones. Without that, they get uncoordinated, and their objectives can clash." Max explained.
The Golden Legion representatives sighed as they realized that it wouldn't be as easy as they had hoped to spread those drones through the entire zone. There were ten major seats in the zone, and another twenty smaller cities, all of which were in bad shape after the attacks, and most of which were still under attack.
They hadn't known how bad it was until the drones started sending in data for them, but now that they knew, it looked like they didn't have the remaining allies to deal with the invasion.
The General carefully considered his next words. "You said a fairly large number. Would you be able to provide and control enough of them to guard the thirty cities of the zone? It might not be much in the grand scheme of a planetary invasion, but if we can stabilize even one zone, it will give us somewhere to recover and regroups to push out and start helping the other zones around us."
Max turned to Nico, who was more of an expert on the topic, but he was pretty sure that even if they sent five hundred to each city, it wouldn't cause issues. That would be especially true when the groups were working independently within the cities and not coordinating in a larger group.
Nico pretended to be considering it, as if the suggestion was stretching their capability, and that they hadn't sent tens of thousands of drone fighters into combat without an AI before. But after a few seconds, she reluctantly nodded.
"As long as they're working in smaller groups, like city defence, it should be fine. If we tried to coordinate them into a larger push, it might become an issue." She informed the room.
Of course, the Androids were capable of leading them in an organized manner, so they could just send a Mecha Company with each drone group to work as the tactical squad, but the Golden Legion needed to do some of the saving for themselves, the planet was too large to be sending drones everywhere.
But what they could do was to send a few of the delivery shuttles into low orbit and work on re-establishing communications so that the Golden Legion's cities could at least communicate again. First, Max wanted to get a better picture of the situation around the planet, but ironically, that wasn't possible until he sent something to orbit so that it could survey the situation.
They could use the existing shuttles to head to orbit, but the altitude needed to survey the whole planet would make them useless as a relay for shortwave communications. At least they would be able to see if the whole planet was in this situation, and if it wasn't, they could relay messages to the undamaged portion of the surface about what was going on here, and have the Golden Legion request for assistance from other cities.
Now that the drone bombers were working as a high-powered relay station for local communications, and spreading out to cover the whole district, the Golden Legion soldiers were already becoming more coordinated. They were battered and caught off-guard by the initial attack, but even though it was their first battle, a lifetime of training was kicking in and getting them into fighting shape.
"What were you using for communications that they took so much more damage than most of your infrastructure? I know that the power is still on in the city, the shelter that we released the cats from still had power when the drones arrived." Nico asked.
"Oh, here, I've got one with me. It's trashed, but it might be repairable." One of the men offered.
The device he handed over appeared to be like any other high-tech piece of equipment, most of which was still working, but as she inspected it, Nico nodded in understanding.
"It's a crystalline transmitter, but the crystals are polarized. Give me a second." She muttered as she took a toolkit out of her flat space storage.
It was a miniature replicator, something that the Golden Legion didn't have, but Max was reasonably sure that they could come up with a way to make the repairs without it. They did invent the devices after all.
Nico repaired the device, and it turned on, then immediately filled the room with a harsh squealing noise of static.
"Perhaps I didn't fix it right." Nico apologized, then started to tweak the device as she worked.
She spent a few minutes on it, then suddenly dropped the device and stood up with an annoyed look on her face.
"I've got it. The problem isn't with the devices. Yes, they were broken. But the lingering energy in the air from the destroyed portals is creating so much interference that they can't pick up anything but the static. It's like a jamming signal, and it will have shut down all communications on the planet." She explained.
"Then why do your communicators still work?" The General asked, confused.
"They're using an entirely different technology and range of frequencies. Between that and the noise dampening function, we can still communicate somewhat normally. Our greatest limitation is that the majority of our propulsion systems won't work here, so we're low on both power and mobility.
It's lucky for us that we had a functional alternate option to get things working again." Nico informed him.
That brought a bit of hope to the room. If the humans could just pull out an alternate technology to get their weapons back online, surely the Golden Legion had some old tech in storage that might work in this emergency, just like the shortwave radios had.
