930: 930 It Pours

930 It Pours

Over the course of the next few hours, the rain turned from heavy to downpour to a nation-sized waterfall. Khan's predictions of what the rain might be like were proving to be woefully inadequate, and only the fact that they had used Hunter technology to build a reinforced retaining wall behind the trenches was keeping the camp from completely flooding.1

The lightning was constant and seemed to be getting worse, but they couldn't detect anything above cloud level with their sensors, so it was making it very difficult for Nico and Khan to do a proper analysis.

The scene looked a bit familiar to Max, though. When the Rebel Fleet had committed to a large-scale orbital bombardment while Max and his team were guarding a bridge, there was lightning and rainfall like this.

It had flooded everything around him to the point that even the Line Mecha were in danger, and anything downhill from his position became completely impassible thanks to the current and depth. 

The only problem was that if there was an orbital or high atmospheric battle going on, they had no way to detect it and no way to defend against stray attacks that might be coming their way.

"You know, multiple technologies deploying energy weapons in the upper atmosphere would also cause lightning like that." He suggested to the two more focused people in the room.

Khan turned her smooth, golden-masked face to look at Max. "We're trying very hard not to come to that conclusion. Because that conclusion isn't an answer, it's the start of a whole new series of questions. Ones like [What species can travel between planets without a Warp Drive] and [Who the feth is fighting above our heads], and those are questions that we really don't want to deal with either now or later.

So, we're trying to find an atmospheric answer and some sort of proper prediction for how much rainfall we are going to get.

The Myceloids didn't even expect this much, and the camps, which are still in sensor range, are all building up earthen bulwarks to prevent flooding, except for that one with the stone wall where I fought the leader. He built a secondary earth wall as soon as we left."

The water running down out of the hills was turning into a raging river and not anything that Max would associate with traditional runoff. A lot of it was flowing down the sides of the ridgeline, but the force of it was carving out the top of the hill and sending even more water their way.

"Should we have artillery dig a trench to divert the flow into the lake? There are no more camps left down there. They've all either left or flooded." Nico suggested.

"I think that's for the best. Let's keep the camp as dry as possible. I would rather not test the durability of our construction materials today when I know that the flood waters are perfectly capable of undercutting them since we didn't build down to bedrock. We just set the structures on the ground." Khan agreed.

With the constant booming of thunder, Max barely noticed when the artillery started. But when he looked at the sensor feeds around the camp, he could tell that the bombardment was working after only a few minutes of artillery fire.

The waters flowing toward them were beginning to recede, and the moat around the camp was no longer inching its way up the inner wall.

For a few minutes, it seemed like they were going to have to activate the barrier around the camp to keep the water out, which would attract a lot of unwanted attention. Well, there was a chance it wouldn't, but that would mean that the ships in orbit were too busy to notice, and that was a possibility that they were doing their very best to ignore right now.

The waterfall that formed when the rainfall was diverted by the artillery was a thing of beauty. They had chosen a nearly vertical section of hillside since the rock was more stable there and wouldn't cause an avalanche or completely change the topography once the water started flowing.

So, for fifty metres, a massive amount of water fell straight down into the lake, carving out a portion of the lake bottom and leaving much of the surrounding area under less water than it had been only minutes earlier.

[Mission Accomplished. Artillery, you may return to your storage areas.] The base intercom informed them, and Max noticed that even that had a distinctive crackle.

It was in time with the lightning, even though the technology was far more advanced than anything that should have been influenced by such a thing unless it was incredibly close.

"Did you hear the crackle in the speakers? I think we're getting a magnetic field buildup in the camp due to all the metallic alloys in our equipment. If we don't start to disperse it, we're going to end up as one huge lightning rod." He reminded them.

Nico ran some quick calculations and then gave him a thumbs up. 

"Fear not, I have a solution. A very low emission blast from the Disintegrator will fix the energy buildup, and then we shouldn't have to worry as much about the storm. We can repeat it as necessary if the rains don't stop tonight."

Before she could put her plan into action, the first strike hit the camp, followed by a second. Both impacted on Super Heavy, 20-metre height class Hunter Suits, whose shields held against the surge.

Khan checked the damage reports and then brought them up on the screen.

"There is some damage to the ground around them, but both were standing in the open, and the strikes neutralized the buildup. The lightning here is strange, but it was no worse than an Ion Destroyer blast, so the Hunter Suits won't have any trouble dealing with it. 

There won't be a need to raise a full barrier over the camp as long as they keep working as our lightning collectors." She announced.

"I think we will owe whoever is inside them a drink though."

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