Star Ship Girl Era: My Shipgirls Are Too Overpowered

Chapter 109: Construction In Progress

Now, most of that old structure was gone anyway.

Many senior leaders had been killed, either by the Kharov or by the collapse that followed the infection.

A number of countries had lost any real ability to command, leaving only a few surviving military pockets. Some had simply vanished.

And because Caelan’s homeland had survived better than most, and because so many of its upper leaders were dead, he himself had effectively become the highest remaining authority in the strongest surviving human bloc on the planet.

Aurelian had not expected to arrive and find someone like that waiting for him in the wreckage.

It was useful.

Very useful.

More than once, he found himself thinking that luck had favored him in a very specific way here.

Caelan himself was intelligent enough to understand the situation.

He had seen Aurelian seize orbit, reorganize the battle for the system, and begin stabilizing the world below in a matter of days.

He also knew that if Aurelian turned hostile, there was no force left on Larkspur Haven capable of resisting him in the short term.

That made his cooperation more practical than sentimental.

He wanted his world to live.

Aurelian wanted the world to become his.

For now, that was enough overlap.

Once the immediate chaos eased, Aurelian finally made a few decisions that had been waiting behind everything else.

He contacted the triplets and sent one of the engineering blueprints back through secure channels for family-assisted processing and construction support, along with instructions to begin gathering the materials needed for infrastructure expansion.

He did not ask them to activate all available engineering options at once, nor did he dump every burden on them.

He only wanted one proper engineering line started first, because building too much too early would only create another kind of problem.

Having too many hands without any work to do.

This is because he is not at a stage where he can wage a full-on war with the Kharov or even the person whom he destroyed the fleet of, so being proactive towards building structures outside the system without strength is not a good idea.

At the same time, he began preparing for fixed extraction and industrial support on Larkspur Haven itself.

Ship-mounted source extractors could work, of course, but using only ship systems on a world he planned to hold permanently would be wasteful.

If the territory was going to stay his, then proper planetary-scale facilities had to be introduced sooner rather than later.

Factories.

Ports.

Extraction stations.

All of that.

Over the next two weeks, the planet entered a strange period of transition.

The surface monsters were largely reduced to cleanup targets and strongholds instead of a tide that could drown continents.

Several major cities entered early reconstruction.

Caelan almost worked himself sick, though he never admitted it.

Astra made sure to keep everything under control.

Astercourt also used this time to develop plans to administer this planet with Caelan’s assistance.

Neris kept the fleet fed and supplied without complaint.

Elowen remained busy almost every hour, either with the Whiteheart, the ecological spread, or the recovery of planetary life zones pushed to the brink.

The Kharov did not appear again.

As far as their rear knew, perhaps everything had gone according to plan, or perhaps they had only started to notice that one fleet after another had failed to report.

Either way, no new hammer fell during those days, and that was enough.

Aurelian used the breathing room.

He purchased the remaining ship clues available in the region before they expired.

The results were mixed but useful.

One cruiser clue pointed to an intact ship stored in another forgotten facility. It was in good condition, almost like Lysara’s case, and could be awakened with relatively little trouble once he made the time to retrieve it.

The battlecruiser clue was more troublesome. The hull existed, but it required substantial repairs before activation would be worth the effort, and Larkspur Haven did not yet have the facilities to handle them properly.

The battleship clue turned out not to be an existing ship at all, but a one-use construction blueprint. Valuable, certainly, but for later, not now.

He also went on several short archaeological runs with Lysara to nearby systems once she returned from escort duty, though those expeditions were less dramatic than the earlier ones.

They found some usable records, some technical remnants left by the old Vhaloric Directorate, and a few lesser artifacts, but nothing that matched the scale of the heavy cruiser find or the haul from the Kharov ambush.

That did not bother him much.

Peripheral worlds usually did not keep their best things in open reach.

According to Vaeren and some of the others brought back with the captured fleet, the truly rich ruin the Kharov had been exploiting was much farther away: an old fortified world filled with surviving defensive systems and much deeper salvage.

That alone explained why the archaeological fleet had been so heavily guarded.

It also explained why the return trip had carried such worthwhile cargo.

Aurelian marked the coordinates and left them alone for now.

Even with his current fleet, that was not the kind of site he intended to poke casually. It was too far, too armed, and too likely to turn into its own campaign if handled carelessly.

Later, perhaps.

When the timing was better.

For now, Larkspur Haven was enough.

More than enough.

By the end of those two weeks, the world still bore scars everywhere, but it no longer felt like a dying place.

It felt like a place being forced into a new shape.

And Aurelian, standing in Black Crown’s command section while the latest planetary reports scrolled across the display, understood that the first phase had ended.

The planet had not been lost as orbit had been taken under their control; the surface had been stabilized, and the first structure of the rule was forming.

But now came the harder part, as it will take a lot of time and effort to keep it and build it.

And making sure that when the Kharov finally realized what had happened here, they would be facing something much stronger than the half-dead colony they thought they had already poisoned into submission.