Estergebirge: Welcome to Hell [RP Thread]

The Duma was clear in their plan to establish a mining camp in the Ugam Range and Chief Engineer Rebecca Jameson was stunned when she looked at the plans that she had been sent. The Coalition's plan was gigantic in terms of manpower. The beginning stages did not consist out of a few hundred experts and heavy machinery, but out of brute force and human labour. Not hundreds but many thousands of workers would be transferred planetside once the necessary infrastructure to house and supply them would be present.

"Insane... do they really...?" she shook her head secretly wishing for such manpower on her Guild projects. She tried to imagine what 12.000 workers could do in their excavation projects on the Falkland asteroid, but then just shook her head. It was impossible, not economically feasible. But in the Coalition's society it was. It opened new horizons and possibilities in transforming this planet, breaking nature's will and forcing it to comply with human demands.

It had taken weeks for the Coalition pioneer teams to blast a large enough landing zone to transport goods and equipment to the planet's surface, but the use of military grade weaponry proved very expensive as they lacked penetration. Having a lot of experience in how to shape a landscape, an IMG team had drafted a suggestion and sent it to the Duma, and they had managed to get the permission.

"Mountain Top Capping" as a method to open up seams holding resources was nothing too special, however doing it for the Coalition was special and Rebecca could not help feeling excited and somewhat afraid when she was shown the amount of explosives that her team was provided with. The Guild would have arrested and tried her for handling these explosives, but this was not a Guild operation. Together with 200 trained Coaliton Army Pioneers, serving under Commander Vasily Rykov - a bald, 5' 9" short veteran officer without a sense of humour - and 500 helpers of the People's Assistance Brigade, they went to work to drill holes and place the charges.

Coordinating with the military experts, especially with Rykov, who was detail-fixated to an extent unknown to Jessica, was not easy for a civil engineer. It was even harder than adjusting to the much more powerful explosives, which proved to be nearly impossible as all her automated modelling attempts were literally blown apart by the capacity of the ordinance they brought to this 'fight'. It was a fight against nature that the Commander was determined to win. Within a week of climbing the mountain sides, drilling more than 20.000 holes into the solid rock, and placing the explosive charges, the cultural differences had been fading away and she had come to love the way the SCRA leadership did things: on a huge scale, without regard to the cost, and with the mentality of 'whatever it takes'.

The moment of truth had come when all crew were evacuating the blast area. Rebecca and her team had calculated a minimum safety distance of 5 kilometers, but the Pioneers insisted on staying at 2,5 km. For a last moment they all looked at the top of Mount Rujan. Then the mountain top vanished in thousands of detonations and rocks and dust were thrown hundreds of meters into the air. The ground was shaking, and the sensors registered an earthquake of a 2,4 magnitude that quickly translated into rockslides on the hillsides. An inexperienced IMG engineer lost his balance and fell - and he was not the only one. Moments later, everybody was taking cover when small rocks started to drop everywhere. The hail of small stones left the vehicles pockmarked with hundreds of little dents. There must have been injureds, if not deaths somewhere, but Jessica was too fascinated by the pillars of dust that were hovering over the mountain top. It reminded her of volcanic erutions, just that it was man-made.

It would take another 6 weeks to completely clear the million tons of rock that once had been the mountain top. Workers did it by hand at first, until a landing patch had been created to ferry in heavy machinery. For weeks, explosions would keep rocking the area, sending fountains of dust and rocks into the atmosphere, but with more and more landing zones springing up and more and more heavy equipment being ferried in, the mountain top started to finally be transformed into what looked like a table mountain - just that it had not taken hundreds of million of years to erode it but brute force.

When the survey drone snapped the picture of the terraced white chalk rock surface, the first stage of this mission was completed, and the real work to prepare the development could start. This would be the entrance for large airlifters and transport shuttles that would bring in the material to create barracks to shelter the crews that would be doing the prospection work. She was one of the first to move into the first container that was airlifted in and many others followed fast. While she was planning the first excursions to map, measure and prospect the ridge, explosions would keep rocking the area, making the tables shake and the lamps swing.

The Coalition pioneer squad would continue capping adjacent mountain tops for other projects that Jessica could not get any information about even though she tried to. The only thing scientific curiousity was able to find out was that these actions were of military purpose and that she was better advised to think about her own mission and not waste any thoughts on this that were of no interest to her - in very clear words that were spoken to her by Commander Vasily Rykov after she had made a few too many inquiries. It was true what his soldiers said: he really had no sense for humour. But he was good at what he was doing here, she could respect him for that and she hoped he respected her for what she was doing here.

While the rocks were still being cleared away, it became clear that the Coalition was constructing defenses on capped mountain tops all around the airstrip and their slowly evolving mining camp. Air defense platforms were springing up, their guns pointing into the sky aiming at the deterrence of potential threats.

"Nature isn't our only enemy here... I guess..." Jessica realized with a grim expression when she saw the heavy turret of the ground-to-air battery being airlifted in by a Storm gunship while tiny creatures barely visible from her position with her binoculars were working to get it working. For a moment she thought whether she should call Commander Rykov, but she decided against it. Either his short temper would cause another argument about military security, or he would not pick up and she would feel annoyed.