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After Gamma I had gained sufficient clout in our ad hoc command structure to participate the conference that the brass was holding to determine our near future plan of action in this conflict. Tim Gladstone, one of our most experienced and clever scientists, proposed an intriguing, if slightly daffy, plan to use the local pre-humans, colloquially called ‘Apemen’ who inhabited the surrounding regions. Grudgingly, the brass agreed, since it was a low risk, high gain project, although many thought that he might be wasting a lot of time and effort. Since I seem to get all of the screwball jobs around here, I was less than shocked when I got tapped to lead the mission. I was to escort Gladstone back to Gamma, since a large concentration of Apemen lived to the north-west of there. When we arrived at Gamma, I appointed a temporary commander, outfitted a unit, and headed off with Gladstone to the north-west. Soon, we came to the edge of a jungle, something of a surprise at that point, since we’d only seen savannah up to that point. I began construction of a new base, called Delta, when we found a good spot in the new area. We constructed a few basic buildings and a laboratory for Gladstone and his assistants. After setting them to work on some plans for a solar power plant, the soldiers and engineers were set to work constructing defenses and locking the base down. Unfortunately, before they were able to fully construct the base defenses, a patrol of unknown enemy soldiers happened upon us. They were dark skinned and speaking a language which none of us understood, which could have made them Turkic people from the south-western Russian states, but they were wearing unfamiliar uniforms, and Lawson even said that she heard one of them speaking German, so we decided to treat them as part of an unknown force for the moment. After we had made short work of them, I decided that more things were afoot here than I had anticipated, so I decided to increase security to an even higher level than I had anticipated before, so I added some additional bunkers and other defenses. Once the defenses had been finished and the solar power plant built, we were deciding what to do next when we received another surprise, although this one was much more welcome. Dennis Peterson (I.), a missing opto-electronics specialist, wandered into the base, saying that he had materialized even farther into the jungle, and had been wandering, lost and hopeless, for days, when he had finally heard the sound of the firefight. He was very dazed and disoriented, so it took a while to get that much out of him. However, once he had eaten and rested, he was pretty much back to normal, and was a very welcome addition to the team. After that excitement, we got down to the meat of the mission, which was researching the Apemen, Peterson and Gladstone thought that it would be best to start with their rudimentary language, and work from there, so I let them go at it. Although we had some initial trouble with the apes, we managed to socialize a few of them to accept humans, which greatly facilitated our research, and made it easier to socialize some of the others. There were a few, unfortunate losses among the Apemen, but a couple of aggressive individuals ran out of control, attacking the scientists, and had to be killed for our own protection. We found out fairly quickly, after running some tests on an individual that the Apemen were fairly intelligent, and could be taught to do much of the manual labor around the base. I’d make some wry comment about the patterns of colonialism being constant throughout the ages, but they really weren’t smart enough to do much else, and we had something of a crucial manpower shortage. Around that time, Peterson said that he had an idea for an experimental radar for better advance warning of attacks, so I gave him the go ahead and the resources to pursue his ideas, which involved building a factory with some specialized sub-parts, the radar outbuilding among them. Since the radars were expensive, I chose to have one mounted on a patrolling vehicle, rather than several on watch towers around the base. During all of this, we had to build another power plant, as occasional brownouts were causing problems and a lot of slowdown in production. After this, we radioed back to Alpha to get an update on the mission situation.  |
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Introduction Mission 1 Mission 2 Mission 3 Mission 4 Mission 5 Mission 6 Mission 7 Mission 8 Mission 9 Mission 10 Mission 11 Decision Mission 12 Mission 13 Mission 14 Mission 15 |
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