The Materials Printers only took a few minutes to make a collection of plows for the Mecha to drag around the area, pulling the remaining corpses into piles so that they would burn off completely and make the battlefield a bit more tolerable to stay in.
Over the next few hours, while the Mecha worked to clear the battlefield, the Landers from the other Battalions all assembled on the outskirts of the battlefield, on the smoothest terrain that they could find among the craters.
That was no easy task, for the Thunder Guns did a magnificent job of rearranging the terrain over the course of the battle, and the closest thing to a flat spot on the ground was the places where the corpses had been piled so deep that they absorbed most of the damage.
The terrain was still only a secondary concern for the staff inside the Landers though. Their major concern was that something was still alive inside those piles of corpses, and would rush out to eat them when they emerged to supply and repair the Mecha from their Battalions.
The Mecha had already done multiple sweeps of the area and were starting to send out the undamaged units to double-check the zones that they had advanced through for survivors, but the thought of being eaten by an enormous cockroach was still very high on the list of bad ways to die.
Three more pods came down that evening, with munitions, rations, and repair materials, which gave the Pilots the impression that they would be staying here for an extended duration. What they were going to be doing was a question that nobody had answers for, since they couldn’t fit in most of the tunnels that the Klem were going to be hiding inside, and could only target the ones that came to the surface within the mountains, but they were still glad to have a bit more fresh food instead of ration packs.
Fresh was a relative term of course since almost all of it had been preserved in some way, either canned or vacuum packed, but it was still decent food compared to the Emergency Rations.
[Colonel Max. All Mecha of the First Battalion have been resupplied, and repairs are underway, currently showing 49 units in need of some level of repairs.] Major Miller reported, proving once again the value of his supply and management experience.
The repairs continued through the night, even with four landers all equipped with repair racks, it was not a short process to repair four dozen Mecha with the sorts of torn and mangled parts that an interaction with the Klem left behind.
Out of everyone, Third Battalion had gotten the luckiest. Not only did they not lose any pilots, but they also only had thirty-two Mecha damaged, and most of them only lightly. Their zone had been very heavy on the smallest of the Klem, and incubation pods that hadn’t hatched yet, so they mostly rolled over the enemy but had to spend significantly more time hunting down the hiding spots where the next wave was likely already growing and waiting to attack.
Their only complaint was that clearing waves of the smallest Klem wouldn’t earn them nearly as much merit and glory as an hours-long artillery bombardment against the combined strength of the main strength of the infestation.
When morning dawned the next day, the fires were burned out, and the majority of the bodies were removed from the area, making it a bit less unpleasant to breathe in the area around the Landing Zone where Max was stationed, overlooking the work being done to get the experimental Mecha back into pristine shape for their next engagement.
Normally the army would let the little things slide until after the mission, but there was an entire sector of the ship devoted to the researchers gathering Combat data, and that data wouldn’t be accurate if the force wasn’t at full function when a data set started. Numbers could be accounted for, but hidden damages and limited individual capabilities were unknown variables that would skew the outcomes.
[Regimental Command to All Units. Reinforcements are reported to be incoming. Hold for further instructions.]
The message from General Yaakov took everyone by surprise. Their Mecha were supposed to be a top-secret military program. Would the Kepler Military really risk exposing them by sending them to fight alongside other units at this point in their testing, especially on a battlefield that wasn’t even technically part of the Empire, as it was uninhabited and outside the borders?
That didn’t make any sense at all to Max, but none of the Battalion Commanders were in any position to question the orders that they were given, so he could only hope that this decision was vetted by General Tennant and those above them so that it wouldn’t turn into a total disaster for Kepler’s Public Relations department.
Inaccurate reporting of the capabilities of their new designs could turn out very differently than what the Emperor had intended, depending on what the leaked information said and how it was interpreted.
“Should we bring the entire force back aboard and claim an urgent response to another threat within the Empire’s borders? It would give us leeway to keep the secret while not causing much disturbance.” General Yaakov suggested.
“The Klem are a Category 1 threat. Unless there is a full-scale military invasion somewhere inside the Empire, we couldn’t retreat from the planet without orders from the Emperor himself.” General Tennant disagreed.
“Can we silence them? They are mixed Mecha regiments and infantry, so none of the three ships are likely to have anyone aboard from Central Command who outranks you.” Yaakov tried another path to keeping the Mecha Project a secret.
“Normally I would say yes. Let them come and then we can put a gag order on them and stop all communications, but I suspect it is already far too late for that. We are outside the borders, on an uninhabited planet. Kepler doesn’t monitor this area of space, nobody else should know that the Klem landed here. Even we wouldn’t have noticed if we weren’t right in the vicinity.
So the question is, where is the leak, and who are they trying to tip off about our expanded Mecha capabilities.” General Tennant countered.
A defector, spy, or traitor in their midst would be the worst-case scenario for the mission, and both Generals knew that very well. But neither could deny the possibility that they had one or more security breaches since making planetfall, the arrival of the three transport ships full of soldiers was too strange to be a simple coincidence.
“Let me contact the Imperial Command. If they can’t shed any light on the situation, they can likely tell us what the backup plan is for this situation. There is no way that they didn’t at least plan for the possibility that the secret would be exposed early on.” General Tennant decided, then nodded to his counterpart and left the room.
Once he was in a secure office, protected against bugs, data intrusions, and all forms of external spying, General Tennant turned to his Adjutant, a woman in her late fifties, apparent age, and frowned.
“Keep an eye on Yaakov, and especially that idiot assistant of his. I want to know how a signal got out of this system without us noticing.”