JB CCX: Angels One
The cockpit of the multiped tank is a a smooth walled, primium-lined sarcophagus, filled to the brim with oxygenated nanogel. There are no displays made for unaugmented eyes, no controls that could be used by a baseline pilot. The only imperfections in the perfectly machined surface of the cockpit interior are the emergency ejection handle, the DNI jack-in point, and the escape hatch. Only an augmented Iteration X pilot--one with the implants that would allow them to interface directly with the vehicle's systems--could pilot such a vehicle.
Ling Clarent's physical body floats motionlessly inside the coffin-like cockpit, like a lifeless doll. Right now, the tank is her body. Its sensors are her eyes, its weapons her claws. She understands her orders. A heavy vehicle like the one she piloted would be of limited use within the confines of Izanagi, so she had been instructed to take control of the topside defenses.
She assigns Spektr-3 targeting perimeters, ordering it to open fire on one of the remaining Rolands, but microseconds before the UGV's railgun can finish its cooling cycle a figure smashes into the vehicle, bisecting the railgun's barrel in a lighting fast stroke. The next strike pierces all the way to the AI core, and she triggers the vehicle's self destruct microseconds before the telemetry feed cuts off. Ling watches from a different feed as the figure emerges from the burning wreckage completely unscathed, and tags it with a high priority marker. The alien auxiliaries and re-purposed test subjects are mostly operating without her input, her implants intended for managing dumb AI-piloted vehicles rather than commanding a mixed force like this.
Her commander had opted to hold many of her heavier assets in reserve inside the facility, erroneously predicting that the vehicular assault was merely a diversion. It is apparent that this was a miscalculation. More forces are being scrambled to reinforce the above ground defenses, but caught out of position they are being expended inefficiently. Li Yinzheng. The unpleasant feeling she gets whenever she thinks about the Operative is especially strong at the moment, now that it is clear that the enemy has tricked them, that she failed to correctly predict the enemy's primary assault. The feeling is almost as strong as the one she gets when she sees the white haired woman conversing with Pilot Langara. She especially dislikes those feelings, but she doesn't know how to make them go away. She switches over to one of the tank's remotes, firing its flamethrower in a three second burn that rakes over a squad of Damage Control operatives. It does not kill them, but it gives her enough time to collapse the entryway they were attempting to use with a volley of smart grenades.
Her feelings for Pilot Langara himself are even more convoluted. She has many memories of associating with him, perfectly preserved by her ADEI.
"Why don't you try smiling more?" That had been one of their earlier interactions, when they were still pilot cadets.
"I don't even understand why you're wasting your time on her; she's a damned emoneut! Look, she doesn't even care that we're right in front of her!" She remembers the flushed, angry face of Henriette Langley, shouting at Sanjeet Langara.
Ling has reviewed her memories hundreds of times. She does not understand why she has been getting strange feelings about these particular memories recently. She feels conflicted about how the current Pilot Langara is colder and less warm than the one in her memories, even though logically she knows it is more efficient that he does not spend his time trying to be "nice to her", as he had put it. It must be a side effect of the treatments Director Belltower has been ordering her to undergo, she thinks.
The tank's own AI alerts her to several new contacts in line of sight. Multiple VTOLs, ARC Is and ARC IIs. Strange, Ling thinks. Standard operating procedure is to use stealth systems in concert with low-observability ECM, not broadcast one's position via a heavy haze of jamming. She modifies the ECCM and sensors parameters of the tank to fight them. And then she identifies one of the ARC IIs, radiating in all spectra like a nova. She knows that flying style. Can see the quirks in the canard rotor/wing gunship's movement, and understands the risks they're taking and why. Henriette Langley, Ling identifies. She unconsciously shifts that ARC II's target priority up-way up. She feels like... like beating Henriette Langley is important. Like it's as important as her mission objectives. She doesn't understand why. An ARC II is threatening, yes. But no more threatening than any other ARC II. It must be because she knows Langley is an elite pilot, she considers. Someone who was sent on the Autochthonia mission and could successfully pilot DSS-03 against several equivalent machines is the most dangerous target there. And she believes her own lie.
By reflex, she reconfigures the multiped tank's own minimissiles to anti-air targeting, and launches the entire spread of them, as well as her HVMs, at the incoming VTOLs. Ling knows this will empty her magazines and leave her vulnerable for precious seconds, but the possibility of eliminating Henriette Langley now makes up for it. She doesn't expect that the missile swarm will eliminate the enemy. But it will leave them vulnerable. Predictable. Easy to eliminate.
***
Henriette Langley's list of piloted vehicles would be the envy of any Shock Corps pilot. She's driven cutting-edge Iteration X variform mechs. Combat walkers of all stripes. Even an Etherite's atomic-powered battle fortress of a mecha. And of course, she's been the pilot of two literal deus ex machina, gods made from machines. But yet, she feels comfortable in the ARC II's cockpit. Her father few something like this, Henriette remembers. His was an ARC I, not the later, meaner-and-leaner ARC II, but it still feels like coming home. Unlike her ARC II, his probably had manual controls and multifunction displays, looking more like a modern Masses-tech fighter jet's cockpit than the VR cockpits of modern Iteration X designs. This ARC II was designed for Shock Corps use, not one of those the Iterators built for the NWO, with throttles and control sticks and smart-screens. An eVDNI cockpit gives none of that feedback. She can feel the ARC II's status at a subconscious level-why would she need to have ammunition indicators or power readouts or armor integrity graphics when she just knows them, at the level of unconscious reflex?
Which means that her conscious mind is free to contemplate the incoming cloud of micromissiles while her unconscious mind finds a solution. Even so, she's not scared of them. Not anymore. They're standard models, with sensors heads and explosives and engines all better than Masses tech, but they're still only micromissiles and you can still only pack so much of a brain into something small enough some Iteration X rifles can launch them. She sends traitor code into their swarm intelligence, seduces several of the missiles into fratricide. Her point defense weapons fire, and she tasks several of her own micromissiles for defensive use, switching their multi-mode warheads to proximity-fragmentation, the launchers switching their jackets to tight coils of monowire.
Most of the surviving missiles seek out the holoechoes, but not enough-and she can't protect every airborne at once. A single ARC I takes multiple hits and corkscrews into the ground. She doesn't know if there are survivors-but the chances are high. Some of the X-PROG-311s take damage as well, their gunship-styled camouflage/applique armor breaking and shedding to reveal engineered flesh, rotors ejecting as the revealed EDE-hybrid cephalopods switch from turboshaft flight to reactionless levitation. Several of the missiles seek her out, and she switches to Limiters OFF by instinct, putting the ARC II into a sustained series of 20-G maneuvers that crush the oxygen from her lungs. But Henriette is seeing through the ARC's sensors, directly spliced through the optic nerve. The only sign of the maneuver is the gut-wrenching, bone-breaking feeling in her body as she punishes it, and the icons superimposed on her vision.
[DIRECT BRAIN OXYGENATION ACTV]
[TRAUMA MANAGEMENT ACTV]
The interface armor she's wearing has taken over cardiovascular function for her, cut off pain feedback from her body. It's post-99 tech, tools designed specifically to bring a baseline or near-baseline pilot to the abilities of a dedicated piloting full-conversion. Like her old body. It's useful, because it lets her do the maneuvers that buy her point-defense lasers just enough time to take out the missiles chasing her, before she needs to juke again at another absurd number of Gs to dodge an AA flechette package deployed by the tank's main railgun, causing the impossibly durable airframe of the ARC II to groan in protest. Clever. Henriette thinks. Get her to kill herself evading, then finish her off when she can't dodge. Fortunately for her, she has the inertial damping systems and protection of the interface cockpit for that. An X-PROG-311 is just slightly too slow to avoid the Sky Sweeper package, and vaporizes in an instant, no survivors. Another is winged, losing several tentacles and an eye.
The next step will be to hit her with direct line of sight weapons, she knows, and she's already slideslipping to dodge when the plasma cannons come into play. The pilot's probably some high-end emoneut, Henriette thinks. Technically and tactically skilled, but predictable, with reliable responses in crisis situations. The pilot's technically skilled, modifying the discharge into a continuous-beam rather than a relativistic toroid, and the sweep hits with some, but not all of its energy. With Mari's help, she had plated her own ARC II with armor designed to survive the attentions of things like the AAMV-1998's railgun, explosions that could level a city block, or in this case, a plasma lance. The replacement modular armor takes the hit, dispersing its penetrative power via superconducting fibers, melting to carry away the apocalyptic heat from the energy weapon impact. She knows that multiple hits to a single location will breach it, as will a direct hit by enemy tank's railgun on full power. But against fifty milliseconds of a continuous-beam plasma weapon? It holds up. Henriette notes minor damage to the smart skin, mimetic camouflage disruption. No significant damage. And by firing continuous-beam to hit her, rather than using the standard firing mode, the tank has given her a chance to fix its position more accurately through the fuzz of sensors jamming and the stealth of cloaking.
Maybe not an emoneut, Henriette thinks then. That was the kind of tactical decision an emoneut wouldn't make. And it was a mistake, because it let her run a pattern-matching equation and localize the cloaked spidertank to a very small set of possible locations. The ARC II's turret swivels to the pattern and fires. It wouldn't hurt the tank. No, it wouldn't even scratch the paint. It existed largely so that the expensive and powerful railguns and plasma cannons wouldn't suffer wear and tear if they were dealing with shapeshifter kinfolk with stolen rocket launchers or Reality Deviant cultists with Masses-tech weapons.
But she doesn't care about hurting it at this point. No. The reason she's using a minigun with explosive rounds is because she knows exactly what it takes to crash an Iteration-X built thermoptic camo system. Divots of earth gout up, and she watches for anomalous disappearances as they enter the cloaking field. She sees it after the third burst, and starts to hammer the tank itself with a hundred explosive rounds a second. A second later and the tank's stealth systems crash, its cloaking field failing and the mimetic armor flickering brown-green-blue-white-brown-red-orange chaotically.
"If you can see it, you can kill it." Her instructor had said, years ago. Now she can see it, but killing it might be a bit harder. The weapons she has are somewhat under par for the job. Smart missiles, if she can get them through the AAMV-1998's defense grid, will hurt it. There are weaknesses in the maintenance hatches which could be exploited if someone gets close. She lines the ARC's plasma cannon up on the target and overcharges it, firing a spread of smart missiles to mask it. But the enemy she's facing is dangerous, and the multiped tank jumps away, on its own thruster system, pulling its own bone-breaking maneuvers. That narrows things down, Henriette thinks. Whoever that tank's pilot is, they're either running it from remote, or they're using a similar cockpit arrangement to her, or they're in a high-end dedicated pilot body. A normal, near-baseline tank crew would be killed by either the initial thruster burst, the midair one used to break her targeting lock, or the no-cushioning impact which might be within parameters for the hyperalloy chassis of an AAMV-1998, but would wreck any masses-tech vehicle's suspension.
Yes, Henriette thinks. This is going to take a while. Unless she uses her ace in the hole. The ARC II is carrying a pair of heavy, hypervelocity missiles in internal bays. She didn't ask for them-she had wanted a heavy railgun instead-but IBM had no heavy railguns to spare but did have these specialist munitions. She knows that having the option to use them was better than not having the option, given that they were perfectly safe to handle and could be used as standard HVMs in a pinch. Even so, she remembers the churning in her gut when she saw the heads of the sleek weapons, a simple black and yellow band, with the radiation trefoil on top as a badge. Technically, Henriette knows, she's qualified for tactical fusion warhead deployment. She's been qualified for a while. She took the psych tests and proficiency qualifications after... Brighton? Yes. After Brighton. But she thought it would just be another credential on her list, not... something she might consider using. But the Technocracy had tactical fusion warheads for a reason. Sometimes, you just had to kill an Etherite supertank or mecha. Or a high-end, pre-99, Iteration X spidertank. And you didn't have the time to do it the slow way.
Anti-Shipping Missiles, Part I:
Henriette and Ling are having a happy reunion. That is to say, Ling is happy about being able to smash in Iterator Langley's bitch-ass face. Henriette would not like having her face ruined. She's just recovered from all her traumas and would like to continue being able to think of herself as pretty, tyvm.
[ ] Subtlety Is For The Weak: Henriette has two sub-kiloton fusion warheads, giving her a handy-dandy Forces 4 focus to ruin someone's day so bad. They are foci, not Devices (because not everyone can use them, and they take a while to initialize and program), but that means she can end this fight pretty easily if she takes her time to use them. Surprisingly, this is not actually Vulgar, at this point, because of the North Korean nuclear scare and everything. They're just Implausible.
[ ] Called Shots: An Iteration X spidertank's armor is proof against anything short of repeated hits by Iteration X weapons, Reality Deviancy of similar power, or a point-blank nuclear weapon hit. But not everywhere. You can take out sensors, weapons, and joints more easily-although if the pilot knows how to use its nano-repair systems well, they can take care of that too.
[ ] Tag-Team: Why do this alone? Damage Control has the X-PROG 311s, and more importantly Damage Control has Piero. The target seems to be focusing on Henriette. Show her that emotions were a mistake by distracting her long enough/disrupting her sensors so a cyborg can have her arms torn off after an attempt to tear off a cybertank's hatch. By which I mean that Piero will be removing Ling from the equation. Terminally.
[ ] Write-In: If you have a suggestion, I'll take it.
Anti-Shipping Missiles, Part II:
Does Ling contact Henriette?
[ ] Yes: She needs to know she's being beaten. And as a non-emoneut, telling her what's about to happen might... get her to make a mistake. Yes. Ling is not mad. Not mad at all.
[ ] Write-In: What does Ling say?
[ ] No: That would be inefficient.
