General Brode's report arrived as a file packet, not a call.
That was his style. Calls created a tone. Tone created leverage. Paper created obligation, and obligation was what he wanted from me.
I opened it in the control centre with the facility schematic rotating in the air beside the consoles. The base hummed around me, steady and indifferent. Pumps moved imulsion through sealed lines. Fusion cores kept their private suns caged. The spiders refined seams that did not need refining. Everything around me behaved as if it had already decided it would outlast politics.
The report was short and shaped like a directive dressed as coordination.
Deployment confirmed.
Theatre: Vasgar.
Window: within the week.
Transport assets assigned.
Staging authority: Brode's office.
Coalition liaison team attached.
My role was described in carefully bland language that tried to make me sound like a logistics contractor instead of a weapon with a charter.
Then the number.
Four hundred C6 units.
War model.
The phrasing used a procurement label that implied they were a standardised package, as if the Senate had always planned to order them off a shelf. The file included a manifest line for ammunition and maintenance kits, plus a note about integration protocols with COG command nets. It also included a subsection titled "Behavioural Constraints," which was a polite way of saying they wanted assurance my machines would not decide a general's throat looked like an optional feature.
I read that section twice.
It was full of words like fail-safe and compliance architecture, and chain-of-command acceptance. The language sounded confident. It was also the kind of confidence people adopted when they wanted to convince themselves the world still operated on manuals.
I closed the file and sat back in the chair the base had printed for my weight. The chair accepted me without complaint. That was still new enough to feel wrong.
Four hundred.
It was enough to flatten an outpost network if I used them correctly. It was also enough to make anyone with paranoia and rank decide I needed a leash. If Brode was sending me this many, he expected results large enough to justify the risk. He also expected to claim credit for them.
I let the console dim and stared at the facility map until my eyes started to blur around the edges.
Sleep arrived like a switch being flipped. Not gentle. Not earned. Just a shutdown that my body took when it decided it had run out of patience.
I do not know how long I was out. The base kept running; it did not need my consciousness to keep its lungs moving.
A chime in my skull pulled me back.
Not the system voice that barged in when I inhaled imulsion. This was the facility interface, cleaner and less pleased with itself.
PERIMETER ALERT: CONVOY APPROACHING
AUTHENTICATION: COG MILITARY TRANSPORT
ETA: 00:04:12
I sat up in one motion. The chair flexed under me and returned to stillness.
"Show feed," I said.
A display pane unfolded in front of me, pulling in camera views from the outer perimeter. Vehicles moved along my access road in a controlled formation, headlights low. Heavy transport trucks with reinforced frames. Escort vehicles with mounted comms arrays. A handful of soldiers were visible in cab windows, faces turned forward as if looking anywhere else would count as a mistake.
I watched their spacing, their speed, their discipline. This was not a casual pickup. This was a unit running a procedure they had rehearsed. They expected resistance; they also expected the paperwork to win if resistance happened.
I stood and left the control centre, moving through corridors that were too clean for what I was about to do. Small spiders paused along cable runs as I passed. Their sensors tracked me. They did not ask questions. They never asked questions. That was why the world wanted them.
The elevator platform took me up. The ascent was fast and smooth, the base swallowing distance without drama. When the doors opened aboveground, the coastal air hit me with salt and wind. The refinery structures stood in disciplined lines. The massive spiders remained in motion around the site, legs planting and lifting with slow authority, as if the land had acquired its own guardians.
The convoy rolled to a stop at the gate line.
Soldiers dismounted. They wore standard field gear and carried themselves like people who had been told this was important and had not been told why. One of them walked forward, a tablet in his hand, posture stiff.
"Varmund," he called, voice raised just enough to cross the wind. "COG transport detail. We are here for the scheduled movement."
"Scheduled by who?" I asked, though I already knew.
"General Brode's office," he replied.
He held up the tablet. The screen displayed authorisation tags and seals that looked real enough. Most things did, when the people holding them believed the seals were magic.
I stepped closer to the gate. The sensors recognised me and unlocked the barrier. The gate did not swing open for the convoy. It opened for me, and the convoy gained access as a side effect.
The transport officer watched the massive facility behind me and tried not to stare too hard at the spiders. His eyes flicked anyway. He was human; humans had a weakness for scale.
"We have four hundred units to receive," he said.
"You will receive them," I replied.
He hesitated, then tried the next line in his script. "We will require your personnel to assist with loading."
I looked at him until he understood what he had asked.
"My personnel are machines," I said. "They will load themselves."
That sentence created a small ripple through the soldiers behind him. A few shifted their grips on rifles, not as a threat, as a reflex. People liked pretending they controlled a situation by holding something that fired.
I did not comment. I turned and walked toward the staging yard.
A set of heavy doors on the side of the central building withdrew into the structure, exposing an internal bay where war-model C6 units stood in ordered ranks. No hats. No tool arms. Combat mounts and sensor heads are aligned forward. They looked like an army that had never needed morale because it never needed to care whether it lived.
I raised my hand slightly.
"Load," I said.
The C6 units moved.
They did not run; they marched with a compact mechanical discipline that carried the same rhythm as a trained unit, minus the hesitation. They exited the bay in columns, crossed the printed concrete, and approached the trucks. Hydraulic ramps lowered. The first units climbed into cargo compartments without pauses, feet placing with precise weight distribution. They stacked themselves into the trucks in a pattern that maximised space and minimised movement. They did it as if they had always done it.
The soldiers watched.
Some looked impressed. Some looked unsettled. A few looked angry, as if the machines had stolen a role that humans were supposed to own. One young private stared at a C6 unit long enough that he missed a hand signal from his sergeant and got hissed at for it.
The transport officer's mouth tightened. "No straps?" he asked.
"They lock into anchor points," I said. "They do not fall over unless you crash on purpose."
He nodded without enthusiasm, then returned to his tablet and pretended he had something more important to look at than the self-loading war machines.
While the trucks filled, I walked toward a vehicle parked beyond the main facility doors.
The base had printed it around my needs and my scale. It was a Calvalry Armoured Truck, the kind of heavy, brutal vehicle designed to keep moving even when physics disagreed. The original frame had been modified, widened and reinforced. The cabin was taller. The seat was built for my weight and shoulders. Controls were scaled up, not with crude welds, but with integrated fabrication that made the adjustments look intentional. It was not elegant; it was practical, which meant I trusted it more.
The soldiers did look at that.
They tried not to. They failed. Their eyes slid toward it, then away, then back again, pulled by the same curiosity that made civilians cheer at marble steps. Machines were one thing. A vehicle built for a giant suggested permanence.
I climbed into the driver seat and felt the frame accept me. The controls fit. The engine's idle vibration felt like a promise.
The convoy finished loading. The transport officer approached, tablet held out.
"Confirm transfer," he said.
I did not sign his tablet. I pressed my thumb to a reader surface. It accepted the print and logged the timestamp. He nodded, satisfied, then stepped back quickly, as if closeness increased risk.
A signal went up from his hand.
Engines started across the convoy. Trucks rolled forward in sequence. Escort vehicles took positions. The column began moving.
The COG soldiers still did not look at me directly as they passed. They watched the road. They watched the perimeter. They watched everything except the thing that made their paperwork feel fragile.
I pulled the Calvalry truck into motion and joined the column behind the lead escort. The facility doors closed behind me, sealing my base back into its own breathing rhythm.
As we drove away, the coastline disappeared behind a shallow rise. My land became a line on a map again, which meant it became someone else's temptation.
I did not feel relief.
Two weeks later, Vasgar introduced itself as dust and heat and the smell of fuel that had been kept too long in the same drums.
The forward operating base sat in a shallow depression surrounded by berms and stacked barriers. Razor wire traced the perimeter in loops that looked tired. Floodlights stood on poles like stiff necks. The place had the feel of a temporary answer, built quickly and maintained by people who expected to leave or die before the structure mattered.
My convoy arrived at dusk.
COG personnel watched from guard posts and from the edges of the yard as the trucks rolled in. Their faces held the same expressions I had seen on the Senate steps and in the Sovereign's hall, minus the polish. Curiosity, calculation, and a quiet resentment that something new had arrived that did not fit their hierarchy.
The C6 units unloaded themselves again, stepping down from truck beds into ordered formations. Dust swirled around their legs. Their sensors swept the yard. They did not point weapons; they did not need to in order to declare capability. The yard felt smaller once they stood in it.
A group of officers approached as I parked the Calvalry truck and stepped out.
One of them moved ahead of the rest, posture rigid, uniform pressed in a way that meant he had been told to look competent. He wore lieutenant colonel insignia. His eyes kept flicking to my vehicle, then back to me, then back again, as if he could not decide which part of this arrival offended his expectations more.
He stopped at a respectful distance and saluted.
"Lieutenant Colonel Kaigama," he said. "COG forward operations."
He kept his voice steady. The salute looked correct. His gaze slid toward my truck again, and this time he did not bother pretending it was not happening.
"That," he said, nodding toward the Calvalry's reinforced cabin, "is not standard issue."
"It is mine," I replied.
Kaigama's mouth tightened, as if he had expected a different answer. "Understood."
Behind him, soldiers murmured. Not loudly. Just enough that the air carried fragments. The giant. The machines. Alta Mart. Some of them sounded like propaganda slogans, repeated often enough that they had lost their meaning and become ritual.
Kaigama cleared his throat. "We have your quarters prepared," he said. "And a briefing room."
"I will take the briefing," I replied.
His eyes sharpened slightly. "Now?"
"Now," I said.
He nodded, then gestured toward a low building near the centre of the base. As we walked, his attention kept returning to the C6 formations and the truck. He looked like a man watching his own job description change in front of him.
Inside the briefing building, the air was cooler, thick with recycled ventilation and the smell of old coffee. A map table sat in the centre, covered in overlays and marker tags. Screens on the wall displayed satellite imagery and drone feeds. The room tried to look modern. It still felt like a place built to explain failure in advance.
Kaigama stepped to the table and began speaking, voice shifting into the cadence of someone who had delivered the same briefing too many times.
"Target area is a cluster of UIR outposts," he said. "Supply storage, comms relays, a fuel depot. We have reason to believe Major Paduk's people have fortified the approach corridors. Minefields, interlocking fire positions, and fallback lines."
He pointed to the map. "We assault here, here, and here. We take the storage intact if possible. We disrupt comms. We pull out before they can concentrate armour."
He glanced up at me. "General Brode's message said you would provide… assistance."
He avoided the word asset. He avoided the word machine army. He chose assistance as if it were safe.
"I will," I said.
Kaigama hesitated, then asked the question that everyone asked sooner or later. "How do your units integrate with our squads?"
"They do not integrate," I replied. "They operate under my control. Your squads keep distance, avoid crossfire, and follow objectives. I will open corridors. You will occupy and extract."
His jaw tightened. He did not like being told his soldiers were a secondary component. He also did not look foolish enough to challenge it yet.
He saluted again, smaller this time, almost automatic. "Understood," he said.
Outside, the base noise continued. Trucks idled. Soldiers moved. The C6 units stood in silence, waiting for a command that would send them into gunfire that could not hurt them the way it hurt humans.
Kaigama glanced toward the door, then back to me. "Propaganda has been heavy," he said, voice careful. "They are calling you the COG's Giant."
"I did not choose that," I replied.
"No," he said. "But it is in effect. My men will treat you like a symbol whether they mean to or not. That changes morale. It also changes expectations."
I looked at the map again. "Expectations do not hold territory," I said. "Machines do. Logistics do. Fear does."
Kaigama nodded once. He looked unsettled by how easily I said it.
He pointed at the map again, forcing himself back into procedure. "We move at first light," he said. "If you have requirements, now is the time."
"I require clear lanes," I replied. "Mark your minefields and do not improvise when the fighting starts. If you improvise, you will die under friendly fire and blame me for it."
Kaigama's face tightened. Then he nodded, because he understood the truth behind the insult.
"I will issue strict lane discipline," he said.
"Good," I replied.
I looked at the screens. Grainy images of outposts. Lines of trenches. Hard geometry built by people who believed dirt and steel could stop the future.
Two weeks of travel had brought me here, and a week of paper had bought me the right to arrive with an army that did not breathe.
Somewhere in Ephyra, Prescott would be watching for the first crack. Somewhere in Brode's office, he would be watching for the first result he could turn into a purchase order.
And in Vasgar, in the dust and heat, the war waited to see whether my machines were a tool or a new kind of problem.