A high-pitched whine began to mount. Falling alongside us, several of the jets' engines started to glow.

"King Apollo, we have reached sufficiently dense enough atmosphere. My kin and I will now take flight."

The Ifrit fighters began to pull out of their dives and turned their noses toward the approaching devils. Without crew or life support equipment, the nimble deltas could exceed the limits of a human (or goblin) pilot. The G-forces of such a maneuver would have probably made a goblin's head collapse. But to Ifrit, it was nothing.

The formation of Ifrit fighters split into three groups, each one headed for one of the approaching null devils. In response, the devils shifted their own courses, angling to pursue this new source of magic that had so willingly served itself up. Missiles shot out of the fighter groups, blasting against the armored hides of the null devils. The creatures roared, surging towards the fighters.

At the last second, the Ifrit banked hard, peeling away from the null devils and circling around the less-nimble leviathans, pouring on throttle in the opposite direction. The creatures snapped and swiped and roared in frustration before turning their massive bulks and giving chase to the fighter wings.

"We have their attention, King Apollo! We shall endeavor to hold it as long as possible."

"Thanks, Taquoho!" I answered into my radio. Below us, the ground was coming up quick. The spot I'd studied with Cla'thn was directly below. It was a depression in the landscape between two sites of unusual volcanic activity, and I could see the steaming geysers north of the site and hissing vents far to the south. To the west, the diminished inland sea continued to drain into underground cavities, leaving a deep set of chasms in the landscape each at least as large as the Grand Canyon. We were landing at the eastern edge of those chasms where the terrain was still flat. Though I suppose landing was maybe not the right word.

The first bits of debris started to impact the landing site, kicking up pink dust clouds from the Raphinian turf. Larger pieces started to hit, and then those of us goblins thrown free from the falling modules began to impact. I landed on my head, losing my helmet as I bounced several times before coming to a stop. My first breaths of Raphina's atmosphere were mostly comprised of dirt.

I pushed myself upright. I didn't have time to savor my first steps on Raphina or the completion of my lifelong goal of walking on the moon (or a moon, in any case). Debris was still raining down, and Armstrong immediately tackled me out of the way as a piece of module the size of a truck crashed into the dirt where I'd been standing.

"Got ye, boss!" he said.

I coughed out even more dirt and scrambled back upright. Holding a hand against the sun, I stared above us. The sky was a sea of white canopies and small gliders as the rest of the modules continued to descend. 15 rockets worth of preparations and planning—less Eileen's high-altitude airships and the small station, Spinefish, that we'd left in orbit.

Thump-thump

I felt a vibration through the ground, resonating up through my prosthetics and rumbling in my bones. I waited, and a few seconds later, another one subtly shook the ground.

"Armstrong, you feel that?"

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"Wot was it?"

Thump-thump

A grin spread across my face. "It's a heartbeat! Come on, let's focus." I raised my voice to the nearest sparker. "Do we still have contact with Pufferfish, Spinefish, or Mission Control?

The sparker pulled his helmet off and fanned his whiskers out, tilting his head one way and then the other before vigorously shaking it.

"That's priority one. Priority two, salvage anything we can from these crashes." I looked around until I spotted Buzz. "I want your boys getting every piece of equipment we can set up. Dig in."

"Aye, boss," he said.

I turned to Chuck and Armstrong. "Neil was going to organize the defenses. With him gone, it falls to you two. Can you get this site defensible?"

Armstrong flexed his arms, though the effect was diminished somewhat by the bulky space suit and his wide face being squashed into the bubble helmet. "You can count on us, boss," he said.

Chuck nodded, pulling off his own helmet and replacing it with his lower skull mask. "Poachers are itching to bring down some devils."

Promo finally joined us on the ground, having scrounged a scrap of drogue chute to soften his descent. He waddled over.

"Promo, the rest of the modules are coming down. I need you to gather your team and get prepped. As soon as everything is set up, we're starting. Will you be ready?"

"Count on it, hoss." He saluted and ambled off, stripping out of his bulky space suit as he went.

I looked up at the sky. So far, it was clear. Of the null devils who had come to investigate, we'd killed one and lured the others off. But they wouldn't be the last, and they wouldn't be long in coming.

As the intact modules started to land, my taskmasters and their teams went to work. Hatches were cracked open, spilling forth more and more goblins that had been trapped in the modules. Equipment, gas vehicles, tools, and building supplies were pulled out. Within the next hour, we had a bivouac going up with several gas-powered cranes starting to assemble our defensive measures. Eight smaller, Mark-II railguns rested on rotating platforms, each with a bank of capacitors powered by a gas turbine generator and with a crew of poachers to man them. The scrappers and wranglers with the subjob had their stat bonuses turbo-charged by over 100,000 kilochooms between us and Bluff Apollo. They were each the equivalent of a creature five times their level, by my math, and could have gone toe-to-toe with an Ifrit paladin.

Inside the defensive perimeter, a balloon was being inflated to loft a radio antenna and racks of surface-to-air magic-seeking missiles were primed with goblins waiting for targets. What was left of the command module after the null devil attack had been torn apart and repurposed to act as a comm station. And inside that, yet a new modified version of the Big Hoss Rig. Still with its tilting, telescoping payload, this one contained a high-torque screw drill that we'd be using to excavate a tunnel down to where System slept beneath the surface. So, ok, yeah, it was like that movie. Only, we weren't dropping a nuke down the hole. We were trying to keep the moon from exploding. We'd brought something else, instead.

I'd only been on Rava a few months. Maybe as much as a year. But I already missed the voice of System in my mind and the reassurance of its menu and messages, its notifications, and even its occasional snark that seeped in around the edges of the rigid protocols with which it bound itself. The silence was deafening. It had been replaced entirely by the slow-paced heartbeat reverberating through the hard-packed dirt and dust beneath my blades. What would the creature do if we managed to wake it up?

Not every piece of equipment made it to the ground intact. Two of the railguns, several tanks of fuel, ground equipment, a kilochoom of foodstuffs, the redundant air supply, and more had been casualties of the sudden attack during our landing. But we would make do. Just us. I looked around the base camp. Surrounding me were several hundred goblins. Just goblins. No Ifrit, no orcs with their shamans or Midnighters with their sorceresses. Inert goblins and their inert tech tree devices using that one principle to mask ourselves from the notice of the null devils as long as possible. But it wouldn't last.

Armstrong jogged up to me with Buzz in tow. "Big guns are up an' chargin', boss, an' the buggies are fueled. Chuck's runnin' the show, so I'm looking after you."

Buzz nodded along. "Everything we could pull out, we pulled out. This is wot we got."

"Alright, good job," I said. "What about comms?"

"Coming online soon as we float the wire. Trust."

I scratched a hand through the blue fur atop my head. "What about Promo?"

"His team's ready."

"Alright then," I said. I rubbed my hands together. "No time to waste. Let's reboot the System."

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