The Bay of Gorda didn't stay wild for long.
Fields that had been nothing but overgrown weeds and drowned ruins a week ago were now unrecognizable. The jungle fought, of course but steel and fire won more often than not. And Libertalia had plenty of both.
The dozers had chewed through the tall grass first, grinding flat what had once been streets and fields. From the ridge, Rus watched the blades push entire mounds of soil and stone into neat rows, carving roads into ground that hadn't seen wheels in decades. The jungle resisted in little ways, roots snapping cables, branches clogging intakes, mud swallowing treads, but every morning more machines arrived, and by nightfall another line of earth was turned.
By the third day, prefab walls were being dropped into place. Heavy plates, interlocking, raised by loaders and sealed with welds so fast you'd think they were building a city made of toys.
And in a way, they were.
Boxes stacked on boxes. Modules clipped to modules. A whole fortress unfolding like someone had just tipped over a crate of Lego onto the grass.
Rus leaned on the barrel of his rifle and watched as a squad of engineers guided a massive slab into position, swearing every few seconds as the loader operator overshot the mark.
"Left! Left… LEFT! Goddammit, stop!"
The construction mech froze mid-motion, slab dangling like a guillotine. The engineers threw their arms up in disgust.
Bertha, standing next to Rus, snorted. "I'll never understand why we give robots bigger toys than the grunts get."
"Because they don't complain," Rus said.
She grinned. "You just don't listen hard enough."
Rus rolled his eyes. She had a point. If you stood close to the loaders, you could hear the hydraulics groan like they hated the work as much as the humans did.
Out on the landing strip, the real spectacle unfolded.
VTOLs came in steady waves, sleek black hulls cutting across the horizon, kicking up dust as they hovered, dropped crates, and pulled back out without ceremony. Helicopters followed, heavier and slower, rotors chopping the air into a deafening roar. The airships were last, massive, looming things that cast shadows over half the bay when they drifted overhead, their undersides packed with shipping containers.
One by one, the containers were lowered to the ground, the cables unhooked, the loaders dragging them into the grid that was slowly forming into supply rows. Each box had numbers stenciled in bold black, from fuel, ammunition, rations, medical, construction. Everything a war machine needed to keep grinding forward.
The ground crews were fast, he'll give them that. They'd swarm the moment a crate hit the dirt—cutting locks, scanning manifests, shouting over one another to get everything tagged and sorted. Rus watched one kid climb halfway up a stack just to hammer a label onto the side. He slipped on the way down, landed flat on his ass, and everyone within twenty meters laughed.
Dan muttered from behind him, "Bet the box weighs less than his ego."
"Shut it," Gino shot back, but he was grinning.
Rus let the chatter fade into the background. It was always the same with soldiers filling silence with noise so they didn't have to think too hard about what was really happening.
By noon, the bayfront was a skeleton of steel. By night, it was flesh. Floodlights were raised. Generators hummed. The air buzzed with power lines stretching across half-cleared fields.
It wasn't pretty. It wasn't clean. But it was effective.
The funny part was watching soldiers pretend it was all casual.
A group of newbies had been assigned to perimeter watch near the southern gate. Instead of focusing on the treeline, they were arguing about who had to stand closest to the swamp trench. One kid swore the frogs had teeth. Another swore he saw eyes in the water.
"Monsters don't hang out in ditches," the squad leader said, exasperated.
"Yeah? Tell that to the swamp in Damasa," one of them shot back.
They all went quiet at that. Nobody liked remembering Damasa.
Bertha leaned over and whispered, "I should go over there, give them something else to think about."
"Don't," Rus said.
She grinned wider.
A little further down, Foster was watching two counters, new arrivals, fresh armor still scuffed from transport argue with a logistics officer about tent placement.
"It's ours," one Counter was saying, jabbing a finger at a patch of mud where three crates had been stacked into makeshift seats.
"You're not special," the logistics guy snapped. "You get assigned like everyone else."
The Counter scoffed, clearly used to getting his way.
Foster turned to him, eyes gleaming. "Want me to go settle it?"
"Settle it how?" Rus asked.
He shrugged. "Fists. Fire. Whatever."
Rus shook his head. "It'll burn itself out."
And it did. Ten minutes later, the counters were sulking inside a tent that wasn't theirs, and the logistics officer was cursing at a forklift that refused to start.
Everywhere he looked, there was something happening. Prefab barracks rising from nothing. Watchtowers sliding into place. Field kitchens belching steam as some poor souls ladled gray stew into tin bowls. A medical tent already full of soldiers with minor cuts, burns, or just excuses to lie down.
Life... military life.
It was ugly, loud, and full of banter.
He had gotten used to it
He walked the perimeter once, just to stretch his legs. The fences were half-finished, razor wire strung like drunken handwriting across metal posts. Spotlights weren't calibrated yet, and one kept flickering straight into the treeline, like it was winking at the darkness.
"Sir," Amiel's voice crackled through comms.
"Go ahead."
"Sector twelve. Minor heat signatures. Probably animals."
"Probably?"
"Unarmed. Non-hostile."
Her voice never changed. Flat. Clinical. Still, he trusted her read.
"Keep watching," he said.
"Already am."
Rus stopped at the ridge again and looked out across the bay.
The water reflected the floodlights now, broken into shards of silver across the ripples. A week ago, this place was just swamp and silence. Now it was a fortress in the making.
Part of Rus respected the efficiency. Humanity's knack for turning chaos into outposts of order. For taking dead ground and making it beat again.
Another part of him wondered how long it would last before something came crawling out of the dark to remind them who really owned the night.
Behind him, Bertha was making a spectacle again. She'd dragged a chair into the open, sat with her legs crossed, armor half-unzipped just enough to make the recruits stutter.
"You're terrible," Stacy told her, not even looking up from her meal.
"I'm educational," Bertha corrected.
Kate just sighed. Gino laughed so hard he choked on his food.
Rus rolled his eyes, leaned back against the railing, and lit another cigarette.
It was all noise. Necessary noise. Banter to keep the edge dull.
But as the VTOLs roared overhead, as more containers slammed onto the dirt, as the fortress kept rising one piece at a time, he couldn't shake the thought that they weren't just building a base.
They were building a beacon.
And beacons draw attention.
*****
But for once, nothing happened.
No Gobbers leaping from pipes. No Riftborne shadows sliding across the treeline. No greenhorn firing off a round by accident and getting chewed out by three sergeants at once.
Just silence.
The kind of silence that meant the only enemy they had that day was bureaucracy.
Rus spent most of the morning buried in forms.
Supply requests. Patrol logs. Fuel consumption reports. Ammunition tallies. A stack of paperwork thick enough to choke a horse, handed to him by a logistics officer with all the charm of a rusty nail.
He slapped the bundle down in front of him and said, "We need this reconciled by sixteen-hundred."
Rus looked at the stack. Then at him.
"You've got hands," he said.
He blinked, clearly not expecting pushback. "This requires an officer's approval."
"Then approve it yourself."
"I'm not an officer."
"Then pretend. Nobody will know the difference."
That earned Rus a glare, but not a retort. He left, muttering something about chain of command.
Rus sat down at a folding table inside the command tent, the kind of table that wobbled if you breathed too hard, and started sifting through the mess.
Half the forms contradicted each other. One listed twenty crates of rations when they'd only received twelve. Another claimed they had six thousand rounds of 5.56 in storage, when he'd watched Foster personally burn through half of that "storage" during a sweep three days ago.
By the third page, he was ready to take his HF blade and use it as a paper shredder.
Instead, he grabbed a pen, scrawled "bullshit" across three separate lines, and shoved the stack aside for later.
That's when Bertha wandered in.
She wasn't in armor. Just her undersuit, rolled down to the waist, tank top stained with sweat and grease. Axe slung lazily over one shoulder like it weighed nothing.
She leaned against the doorway and watched Rus for a long moment before speaking.
"You look like you're about to cry."
"Paperwork," Rus muttered. "The true enemy of mankind."
She smirked. "At least Gobbers die when you shoot them."
"Exactly."
She sauntered over and perched on the edge of the table, knocking half his neat piles onto the floor.
"You know what your problem is, Rus?" she asked, leaning close enough that he could smell gun oil and nicotine gum.
"Enlighten me."
"You get cranky when there's no fight."
Rus raised an eyebrow. "And what's your excuse?"
Her grin widened. "When there's no fight, I crave… other things."
Rus sighed. "Here we go."
She leaned back, stretching deliberately, and said it as casually as if she were asking for a drink.
"One of these days, you need to bend me over and fuck me silly."
Rus dully stared at her.
She stared back, smirk never fading.
There was a beat of silence where his brain tried to decide whether to laugh, argue, or just hand her more paperwork.
Instead, Rus looked at her like the pervert she accused him of being, then shifted the topic before she could enjoy the silence too much.
"Carrier's almost here."
She blinked, then glanced toward the open flap of the tent.
Sure enough, out past the bay's horizon, a dark shape was moving slowly but steadily across the water.
The aircraft carrier from Libertalia.
Bigger than anything we'd seen in weeks. A floating fortress, crawling with aircraft, bristling with guns, its silhouette cutting through the haze like a knife.
Bertha whistled low. "Now that's foreplay."
Rus rubbed his temples.
Outside, the base went about its business.
Stacy and Kate were running perimeter drills with the new recruits, barking orders and correcting stances. Dan and Gino were cleaning weapons with almost religious focus. Foster was helping unload another shipment of containers, looking like he wanted to throw each one at the logistics crew just for fun.
Cyma, as always, stood watchful near the comm towers, silent and steady as a steel sentinel.
And Rus was still buried in reports, scrawling corrections, crossing out exaggerations, and telling logistics, politely, in writing, to fuck off and fix their numbers before he signed anything.
By midafternoon, he'd managed to wrangle the mess into something resembling order.
"Rations: twelve crates. Ammunition: three thousand usable rounds, two thousand in need of inspection. Fuel: half of what they promised, double what they'll admit. Medical: fine, if you like expired bandages."
He dropped the finished stack on the logistics officer's desk, hard enough to rattle his coffee.
"Here's your reconciliation," he said. "Don't lose it. Or do. I don't care."
He opened his mouth to protest. He left before he could.
Back outside, the air had shifted.
The bay wasn't quiet anymore.
The carrier was closer now, close enough that you could hear the distant hum of its engines, see the helicopters circling above it, watch the waves break against its armored hull. Soldiers stopped what they were doing just to stare.
It was a sight.
A reminder that they weren't just a scattered army chewing through mud and ruins. They were part of something bigger. Something heavy. Something that could crush continents if it wanted to.
Bertha sidled up next to him, hands on her hips, eyes on the horizon.
"Think they'll let us on board?" she asked.
"Doubt it."
"Shame. Would've made a great honeymoon spot."
Rus rolled his eyes.
She laughed.
And the carrier kept coming.