But again, there were tradeoffs. A secret installation so close to a habitable planet meant Maunhouser couldn’t station a fleet to protect it, nor could they send out regular resupply ships or drop off new personnel. Hence, the base had to be small, which meant its defenses were equally small. How Quatra got the data tap set up in the first place is beyond me, since I only managed to get in thanks to the Essta’s active stealth field.
We had to move slowly through the rocks and debris. If too many of those rocks vanished into the stealth field, their absence would reveal our presence just as surely as if we had no stealth field at all. So, I was careful to dodge the larger rocks until we’d made it close to the surface of the asteroid they’d built the base upon. There, Kyrshaw maintained th
