Chapter 404: 404 Not Found

The days of propaganda and subliminal messaging were doing their job, and the first few attacks by the drones when they turned on the civilians were enough to convince most of the resistance forces that were still active to surrender to the mercy of their fellows.

In the end, only the one group of Grax that they had found within the mobile city had survived the initial assaults, and from what Max could tell, they weren't talking, but they were trying to influence his troops.

Like the Vampires and the Illithid, they had some mental manipulation ability, but theirs wasn't evolutionary. The scans by his Pilots indicated that it was actually an implanted device in their brains that was used specifically to target the humans and convince them to worship the Grax.

After a somewhat inelegant disassembly procedure, a sample of the device was sent back up to Terminus so that Nico and the technicians could examine it and counteract the effects.

The Grax seemed somewhat horrified by the raw brutality of the Human forces after experiencing that particular surgical procedure, but Max made sure that only his own men would be able to see what went on in that holding cell. They were doing a decent job of impressing the Innu with their morality and letting them film the soldiers torturing and beheading an alien for ease of study would not help their case.

[Once that device is analyzed, send out the message that the planet is pacified and request for payment. Cygnus should have an enforcement team prepared to take over from us.] Max ordered once the sample was safe aboard Terminus and into a lab.

[We're on it. The device seems to be incredibly simple. It works similarly to Illithid mental communication, but on a lower level that might not be perceived by the human consciousness, so it would be like a constant indoctrination message playing in their subconscious.

Just removing the Grax from their presence was enough to begin undoing the damage, but a bit of a tweak to the subliminal messaging won't hurt anything and will undo the damage faster.] Nico replied.

No sooner than Nico had finished speaking, a message came from the Cygnus Military.

[Lord General Kirkland had high praises for your competence, so we sent the enforcement team in anticipation of your timely victory. The estimated time of arrival is seven hours and nine minutes, with sixty thousand peacekeepers and administrators bringing the planet back under human control.

We are analyzing the data that we have been sent now and will adapt our technique to compensate for the former status of the citizens. Your payment is prepared, and you may relieve your troops as soon as we make landfall.

Glory to Cygnus.]

[You have to love that bureaucratic efficiency. It might have been a mess if we hadn't finished on time, though.] Max sighed over the radio.

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[I don't think that they expected us to take so many of them alive. Sixty thousand administrators is not a lot for an entire world when the administrative work wasn't done by anyone still living on the planet. They've got their work cut out for them, training a whole new planetary logistics department.] Colonel Klinger laughed, realizing immediately that the Cygnus force would have a much harder time rebuilding things than they had to break them.

The propaganda changed from battle reports to assurances that everything was being brought back in order and that human help would arrive to assist them in getting everything working properly again and the supplies moving to where they needed to be.

That part turned out to be easier than Max had expected. Like Terminus, they had a very basic form of replicator, one that only needed raw biomass. So, once the fighting was over and they started bringing truckloads of raw grains and vegetables into the cities again, their food shortages were quickly solved by citizens carrying on their daily duties.

In fact, they were so well trained to do their assigned tasks that they brought most of the factories and industrial facilities back online on their own, even without directions.

The military was gone, so there was some chaos in the streets, which was being taken care of by newly minted neighborhood watches made up of former building security staff. Even with the Grax brainwashing them, the theft had still been an issue, so there was plenty of civilian security in place, and not all of them had been killed.

In some cities, the damage was fairly crippling, though. Max saw complaints that over half the population in one city had died because the Military moved before the Terminus Mecha had and had gone on a killing spree to eliminate the civilians who were rioting for food.

Max remained at the mobile city, the last bastion of the Grax, while the staff on Terminus worked on a device to counter the mind control devices. They had come up with a handheld tool that would block the signals and lead them directly to the source. The technicians planned to give them out to their Mecha forces in case there were still some Grax hiding and biding their time, waiting for the Mecha to leave so that they could reassert control over the population.

They would also be useful against similar attacks, and Nico added a function to interpret and identify the Illithid communications so that others without Max's talents could hear them from a distance and not force the creatures to come to stand next to them for verbal communication.

For the moment, it was one way, translation only, but the Illithid thought it was a great advancement, letting them broadcast to humans like a radio station so they could get their point across to everyone at the same time. Individual communications were mostly deemed inefficient by the species used to collaborating on everything they did.

He would soon learn that not all great advancements are great ideas. Max had gotten used to the constant chatter, but the device wasn't capable of being selective, and it broadcast every thought and sentence that the Illiithid wished to share with everyone around them, which with twenty of them on the ship, meant that there would be about five thoughts broadcast at any given time.

In the mental realm, the Illithid were incessant chatterboxes.

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