Solar Warden

Delay Part 62

Two combat drones were left behind to cover the facility area. Another one was from the Icarus sent down serving as cave scanning relay and stayed as long as needed. The other three surface scout drones were already in the cave and scanning. In there they flew much slower to get all details. It was about 15 kilometers per hour. The cave was very big at the entrance. It got a bit smaller later on and there it was visible that some kind of drilling had produced the further tunnels leading very deep into the mountain and also split up in multiple tunnels. Still they found no entrance door at the live stream analysis. The drone went deeper in and were not enough to relay the signal further. So one drone disconnected to scan further and flew back to transmit the records. There was a time limit of 10 minutes. It did it with all tunnels. Where it could not reach the end it increased the limit to 20 minutes and then 40. Finally, the drones had finished everything and headed out again. They found the mining vehicles at the end of three tunnels. It was an advanced system using laser and gravity control to form balls of ore which it mined. This all was fully automatic. No alien was spotted there.

The returning drones were close to the exit, now in a more accurate scan mode and flying 10 kilometers per hour. Then out of a cover behind some rocks, the turtle faced aliens appeared with rifles and started to fire at once.

The drones tried to accelerate through automatic heat signature threat detection which defined a threat situation. But the acceleration was too low. 12 aliens fired continuously till no signal was coming out of the cave.

Five minutes later the relay combat drone headed automatically back to the Icarus.