'...Okay, yeah, different group of aliens.'

"They were created by the aliens as weapons. They're hostile because they're trying to take the planet for themselves."

"Aliens you say?" That would be a first. The only aliens that empire even theoretically knows of, at least as far as House is aware, are the hypothetical creators of the Spheres, if they aren't just some sort of natural phenomenon. "Do you know why they want the planet?"

Honestly, the four of them are beginning to wonder whether the empire would want this Earth. A proper invasion force could plausibly take it, but it's quite possible that these two androids make up only a tiny and less-than-representational fraction of this YoRHa's capabilities, which are apparently being matched by this enemy alien force, so the alternative seems well within possibility. The local exmatter technologies are interesting, but so far at least don't seem revolutionary in comparison to the empire, and not worth becoming embroiled in what may, in the worst case, actually be the prelude to a true transuniversal war.

"They don't answer comms, so no, we don't."

Houses sighs dejectedly. "Fair enough." Maybe Steam and Doll would have some luck digging into one of the machine's minds, if they could capture one and make sure it wasn't broadcasting anything.

"I understand if neither of you are historians," Braid speaks up, "but I think the thing we most need is some understanding of what happened since our creche was first made. The world was invaded by aliens, apparently, and now it's being...patrolled?" She gives a questioning look to the 13B and 5S. "By combat androids. Did any other human settlements survive? Is there any lasting instructions for what we should be doing, aside from staying alive and trying to rebuild?"

"It's being fought over. There's human settlements, the locations are classified. Our instructions are to win the war while keeping the planet inhabitable."

"There's no point in rebuilding yet."

Braid harrumphs a bit at that. "We need to build a generator or else we'll run out of our exmatter reserves, at which point we'll be essentially powerless, but after that I suppose we can focus on moving to somewhere more defensible and fortifying in-place there."

"Do you have any suggestions on where might be best for us to go?" House asks.

"Or whether there's anything we can do to help beat the machines?" Doll adds, having started to feel a bit left out.

"With powers as extensive as these you might be better served staying near your generator..."

"And 'what to do to help' is a question for Command, not for grunts like us."

More evidence for 'a tiny and less-than-representational fraction' hypothesis, House supposes. Caution is certainly warranted here.

"Very well," Braid says, letting go of some of her frustration. "If we can ask it, please send word of us to your Command. If we move from this location before we hear back from you, we'll leave a message here indicating our target location."

"Would you happen to have any sort of encryption that you could share?" Steam quickly adds. "So that we don't need to leave the message out here as raw text, just waiting for the machines to read."

"Just use a one time pad for something like that," she says. "Any of us can generate the key."

"Fair enough, we'll just need to make sure there's a good buffer in case we need to communicate anything unexpected or if you need to securely reply," Steam admits, promptly working with 5S to generate as long a one-time pad as seems practical.

...Her memory for a key is almost certainly greater than Steam's. And she doesn't need an actual copy of the key; she'll store it in her memory banks (and back those up promptly). 

True enough, at least until they get the generator up and running. Maybe a few gigabytes then, just in case of the slim chance that encoding a meaningful length of video proves necessary.

Once the key-sharing is done, Braid speaks up, "With that settled, is there anything else you'd like to ask of us? And, once you depart, would it be safe for numbers 3 and 4 to continue scouting out the area?"

...Worth a shot: "What kinds of abilities do you have?"

And: "Scouting depends on your risk tolerance. However, there are no known goliaths nearby, and you will see machine lifeforms coming."

The team's telepathic backchannel briefly flares as they collectively review all of the abilities they've already shown. "We have two broad categories of ability, each with an inward and outward aspect. One we call psychokinesis, which involves sensing and applying energy directly through exmatter appendages. The other we call telepathy, which involves interfacing with reified abstractions of the systems which are embedded in concrete physical space."

"Now that we know that our veils aren't going to do much, we can focus on being ready to run instead," Doll comments.

"How did you spot us earlier, by the way?" Steam asks. "If there's some obvious hole in our stealth toolset that it might be good to try and fix it.:

She confirms with 13B that it's permitted to tell them, then: "...You're using energy. You can't hide using energy by using more energy. That's not how it works."

Ah, they have some sort of passive exmatter detection, that doesn't itself have enough of a noetic signature to show up to shallow telepathic scans. That sort of thing is only barely even in the realm of theory, but House has at least heard of the relevant theories, so it doesn't sound like complete nonsense. It's impressive that the locals have that advanced an understanding of exophysics and haven't started experimenting with rift technology. More evidence that there's more going on here than meets the eye.

"Fair enough. If it comes down to, we'll make sure to stick with more...low-tech methods of camouflage, I suppose." 

That's all the team has to say at the moment, since it seems like getting more information from the locals needs to be filtered through their command structure, which is probably going to take some time. They won't rush the androids if they have more questions, or want to continue observing the base-building.

5S would like to observe! But she doesn't have many questions just yet. 

Braid and House continuing to work on the generator doesn't look like much, visually, aside from the two of them standing or occasionally walking around the base. Viewing it through maso spectra, however, reveals a whole invisible dance going on. It's mostly steady at the moment, but going from the data provided earlier, they should have enough resources to begin construction in just a few hours, at which point things are liable to get much more dynamic.

In the meantime, Steam and Doll head back out to do some more scouting, this time with minimal psionics usage. They're considerably slower for it, what with not flying around and not having the sheer strength and agility of the androids to compensate, but they're still competent for traversing rough terrain. Even if they're no longer shining like a bonfire to maso detectors, they still have heat signatures and other biosignals, so they'll do their best to stay out of the sight-lines of the local machines as they explore.

The machines do seem curious about them anyways! There's enough of the small stubby ones that staying entirely out of their sensory range is difficult, and there's a small swell in the continuous transmissions between them as one of the red-eyed ones catches sight of them. Its eyes flicker, almost like it's blinking.

That is a bit disconcerting! But probably not that much more weird than all the other strange activities Steam and Doll have seen the little tin-can machines bumbling through. Still, they'll mention it along with all the other newly observed behavior back to home base. Braid will note it down for future reference, but for now the orders are just to keep exploring, still maintaining a low-profile.

And so it goes, for a few days (going from the passing of ours, rather than the motionless sun). Then, suddenly, the character of the dancing maso in the base camp changes. The streams of atomized stone and ore stop abruptly, the storage piles all feed into the fabrication areas, which then feed into each other, the whole clearing steadily cleaning up as it sort of folds in on itself, a cloud of dust collapsing in on itself, taking the shape of simple, shiny metal cube with various ports and slots in each of its sides only in the last instant. It feels like it should be accompanied by a flash of light, like the birth of a star, or perhaps a thunderous boom, but aside from the brief exmatter burst it is otherwise quite sedate.

"The only thing left is to actually spark and stabilize a rift inside the containment chamber, which we'll be waiting until Steam and Doll come back to do," House explains to 5S.

"Can you explain more about how rifts work?"

They haven't been here constantly - they have a wide variety of assorted things they seem to be doing in the area - but they swing through multiple times a day, and they'd made a point of sticking around for this. 

House, given prompting, will happily launch into a detailed (and thoroughly redacted of potential implications of the existence of the multiverse) explanation of how rifts work.

The broad gist is that by compressing the right species of exmatter particles to the correct density, they can sort of open a 'hole' in the spacetime fabric, through which more exmatter particles will naturally be emitted. These holes, when very small, naturally collapse under their own gravitational fields (which, due the fabricial structure of the rift, do not actually extend outside the volume of the rift itself), but once they pass a critical ratio of volume to surface area, they will begin to naturally expand instead of collapse. Once this critical point is reached, additional exmatter constructs can be merged with the surface of the rift, which will channel a portion of the exmatter the rift emits and use it to suppress further growth. The rest of the rift's output is then captured by the capture foam, where it can be safely harvested and moved to long-term storage.