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The grownups are all very busy, but the children are all bored.
Bored or having nightmares. But Tasárinon was not on a ship and did not see the people dying and has only heard it thirdhand and can't exactly have nightmares about the look in his mother's eyes - well, he probably could, but he hasn't - so he's bored, and he is drawing on the floor. It is an absurdly intricate drawing. He has been embellishing it for three days.
"That seems definitely good," Maitimo says. "You good enough to stop one of those active fights in a way that doesn't entail taking a side in it?"
"If I were there, maybe, I could just wreck all the weapons. It's a lot harder to target through a drone especially for purposes other than indiscriminate destruction."
"I can get you shields that should hold up against even a fairly concentrated barrage of this stuff but it'll be a bumpy ride," Cam says.
"We came here for this fight. And not expecting to have the capabilities to win it - we thought we'd just have to find someone friendly, land on them, offer to be reinforcements."
"Yeah, I just mean, warn the pilots. I can at least splice in the control mechanisms they're used to on the landers."
"Okay then."
The landers just need to move people, everything else can wait or be replicated on the ground. They're pretty uncomplicated: shields, seats with seatbelts, more shields, engines, place for the pilots to go. He runs the design by the Elves and asks if they want them appeared docked to the existing ships?
The Elves are giving the orders to move everyone onboard. "Yes, that's perfect. Are these safe enough to take civilians down with or should we leave them in orbit?"
"I do not expect people on these ships to die in descent but do you really want your civilians down there? I can take them to my planet."
"If I can't separate children from their parents - and I can't, cultural thing - and I send everyone with underage children to your planet I lose half my forces. If we can build them something safe on Endore that's better. If things go badly we're going to need to pull... looks like nearly a billion people off the planet, an additional three hundred thousand doesn't complicate that nightmare much. But you've fought wars, or at least heard of them, and you know more about your capabilities. If you think I should send half these people off I can do that."
"Heard of," Cam says. "I think what I wanna do here is an undersea bunker, I can displace water much more easily than soil and being under stuff is good for all kindsa defensive purposes, does that work for you?"
"All right then."
And Cam gets to designing an undersea bunker. Elves are welcome to contribute input.
They have lots, at least about the aesthetics. Maitimo's eyes are closed as he coordinates people to load onto landing ships.
Cam can aestheticize the heck out of this bunker. It will be so pretty. But not lit with basement Silmarils.
When it's designed, he puts surveyor robots underwater to find a good defensible bit of seafloor, and then puts in the foundation, nice and slow - doesn't want to create a tidal wave - then the bunker, section by bulkheaded section.
And now when everybody's ready they can go land - well, sea - these landers should float just fine, and then transfer into submarines and move in!
The Elves are pretty fiercely delighted by this turn of events. A beautiful safe undersea bunker. Everyone's ready.
They encounter only a handful of rockets on the way down.
And there is a remarkably orderly settling of their underground city. Cam will mostly not recognize the people heading through the halls, though he'll notice there are three variants on the uniforms. And at one point Findekano will cross paths with them.
Cam nods politely but doesn't exactly have a conversation topic. Let's see what else will this place need. Hydroponics, it probably wants hydroponics, they can't really farm under the ocean and Cam's going to be on his planet - is anybody else coming to his planet, by the way, not all the civilians but any?
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