JB CCXII: Let The Past Die
Stupid stupid stupid. Why am I doing this?! Henriette fights every instinct in her body, ignoring the
entirely rational fears that tell her she should shut up and
stop being stupid. She shouldn't be arguing with a killing machine about Ling. About someone who tried to kill her. And yet-she needs to do this. She holds her emotions down, concentrates on the meditation techniques Jamelia taught her. She forces herself to be calm, using her BLO to keep her body language completely locked down until she can get a handle on the turmoil roiling inside of her. Stay calm. Think about how the other person would be thinking. Try to read his body language-except nothing really shows, because he's a war machine, about as human as the Interceptor or the TENNO she's piloted. How can she best persuade Piero Dominici, a one-man weapon of mass destruction and apparently surprisingly competent military commander, to not kill her one-time rival? "She's... an asset. If we take her in alive, she should know things about the enemy. And she's an emoneut, so if she's given valid orders I'm sure she'll spill everythin-"
Piero looks at her, mildly amused. Henriette guesses that most people who mildly amuse Piero don't survive for every long, which means that she's probably setting some kind of world record here. "A brain trawl would allow us to extract all the information we need."
Henriette doesn't pale--but only because her blood is already artificial, and her BLO is keeping her emotive responses suppressed. "That's..." she starts, before Piero cuts her off.
"There is something you are not telling me. Satisfy my curiosity." Piero says, gaze fixed on Henriette as he lazily lifts one arm to the side to shoot some unseen target. An explosion resounds in the distance. "And make it quick. I have a battle to oversee, and every second is precious."
Henriette mentally cycles through plausible sounding excuses, logical reasons to spare Ling, and one look at Piero's eyes tells her he won't buy any of it. She's not an expert liar like Jamelia is. And Piero is designed to read people very well, entirely as a side effect of his combat augmentation. Rose has talked about her brothers and sisters a lot-and so Henriette knows that the Progenitors saw the combat EXEMPLARS as a holistic project. Rose has talked about her own role, and how she feels inadequate for it, a lot. So Henriette knows that they're designed to read the smallest tics of human physiology, catch the smallest signs of movement or deception. So Henriette decides to spill everything, and hope the truth will be enough. "I was a terrible bitch to her and she doesn't deserve to die like this."
"Oh?" Piero raises an eyebrow.
"I was a stupid teenager at the time, but that doesn't excuse it. We were classmates, and I treated her awfully because she beat me this one time in the sims, and because she was an emoneut and so never acted like a normal person would and I found that disturbing, and because I was j-jealous. She didn't deserve any of it, and she doesn't deserve to die now." She looks pleadingly at the demigod who could kill her with no more than a finger right now, if so he wished.
"So you wish to absolve yourself of your own guilt by saving your former rival. Amusing." Piero says, but he makes no moves. Not that Henriette would be able to see anything in time, if he really intended to kill.
"She's just an emoneut. You know how they are. They can't tell a good order from a bad one, as long as it's legitimate. And they may be misguided and taking orders from traitors, but we're still fighting U-Unionists." Henriette says. "We shouldn't be so quick to needlessly spill the blood of our brothers and sisters in arms. If they can be spared and shown the e-error of their ways, it will make patching over the wounds easier in the aftermath." She stops speaking, and hopes.
Piero takes less than second to mull things over, but the moment seems to stretch out for an eternity to Henriette. His face looks like it's come to a decision. He looks at Ling... almost sympathetically. And then Piero's hand moves in a blur, and the edge of his hand snaps Ling's neck.
"What are you doing?" Henriette asks as Piero puts his hands on the back of Ling's head indelicately, the shock and horror overwhelming her fear for a moment.
"She is a full conversion combat cyborg.
Excellion chassis, slight modifications. Standard issue for any combat cyborg chassis is an independent life support system for their cyberbrain, which is contained in an armored, shielded case with up to 72 hours emergency survival. Internal decapitation will automatically put her into emergency survival mode, rendering her unconscious while still preserving body integrity. In the event that she has some additional self-destruct or electronic warfare threat..." Piero trails off, "...she would not be a threat to our facilities or personnel. Furthermore, her body will now consider her a casualty, and that means that someone with the proper codes," Piero says, "will be able to remove her cyberbrain and place her in a body which does not provide her with the tools to make escape easy. I have been talking to Major Clarent. She has the emergency retrieval codes."
Henriette looks sick when Piero starts to peel the back of Ling's head open like a coconut, the back of her head splitting into multiple segmented plates, and comes out with a silver casing in the rough shape of a human brain, which says "
PROJECT CLARENT" on one side. On the other side, a simple digital timer, counting down from 72:00:00:00. On the bottom, multiple interface, drug intake, and life support ports dot the casing, currently sealed. Piero hands the brain to her, and Henriette takes it delicately. She knows, consciously, that the casing is armored as well as a Security HITMark, and you could bounce a NATO or Soviet machine-gun round off of it without issue. But it still feels like she has something impossibly delicate and fragile in her hands.
"She is your responsibility." Piero says. "We have nearly secured the surface battlefield. One of the medevac pilots has been informed, and will be coming to retrieve you and your prisoner of war. I will need to lead the breach."
The medivac can't come early enough. Her ADEI is giving her a medical diagnostic which looks... not great. Severe neck trauma, multiple fractured bones-and they were reinforced, even-
-And then her kinesthetic enhancers go, and she falls to the ground as the world spins around her. She gags, and only the fact that she hasn't eaten for several hours keeps her from vomiting in an ugly fashion. Something of that last death dive and everything that has happened must have done some damage to her augmented balance, and now the world is spinning like a top, horizon and sky and the sensations of gravity blending together into an agonizing mess. She hits the ground, barely managing to hug Ling to her chest tightly, and closes her eyes. It doesn't help much.
"Thank you." She manages weakly, but Piero is gone. Off to another crisis situation, Henriette thinks, listening into the tactical bands.
***
There is no organized resistance left on the surface. The autoguns and drones have been shattered by air support or tanks. Burning Abrams and Type 90s litter the battlefield. The New World Order and Syndicate will be extremely busy covering this up as an 'emergency military exercise' which coincided with a minor earthquake.
Piero places the shaped-charge plasma bomb on the heavy hangar doors, and detonates them. His soldiers have moved to breach positions to the side, shielding themselves from the blast despite their armor. He does not need to. His EDE-hybrid physiology can take the backblast of the bomb without flinching. The Iteration X built breaching charges are designed to focus over 98% of their force directionally in a brutal cutting jet, capable of cutting through reinforced Primium or Thaumium or other exotic metamaterials. The other 2% creates a backblast still sufficient to subject everyone behind them to hurricane force winds and heat and force instantly lethal to humans.
Piero powers through the blast unfazed, setting upon the initial defenders of the hangar and the second line of defense even as they suffer from the shock. They have not put any forces within the guaranteed kill radius of the breach, which is unfortunate. Even so, the directed spray of Primium and other exotic materials inward has cut a bloody swathe through improvised fortifications and the soldiers manning them. Most of them are made of low-tech materials, which indicates to Piero that his plan has succeeded. At the accelerated speed of combat time, Cross sends him a very resigned message, conceding that his plan has worked. Piero grins, even though nobody can see it, under his custom-built armor and the annoyingly stylized commander helmet which he's sure exists primarily to draw more fire towards him.
The enemy is moving their forces out of the sewers and tunnels and back into the facility, but they have not had enough time to move and reposition the heavy defenses, and the breach has come as an unpleasant surprise. Most of the initial row of defenders are low-end Progenitor constructs, covered in cancerous growths from fast-change retrovirals, subjected to dosage levels of combat drugs like NoShock and ReflexUp that will kill them within hours, equipped with hastily improvised pseudo-chitin armor and armed with heavy weapons. A Bob on the right drugs and armed with a grenade launcher can threaten even an Enlightened shock trooper if they get lucky, and with enough of them, they can get lucky quite often.
But Piero is not a mere exojock or full combat cyborg. He is through the smoke even before it clears, past the minimum arming distance for 40mm thermobaric and HEAP grenades, and hits the first defense line in an eyeblink. He drops his Omnigun, letting the weapon's integrated AG motors move it to the back holster, and goes for his blade and the heavy pistol on his hip, a weapon which is to the Mjolnir what the Mjolnir is to a derringer, a handgun that runs off of a spatial warp to fire rounds with the punch of a heavy autocannon, using electromagnetic feeding and extraction systems to accelerate its rate of fire to one which would be uncontrollable for Masses-tech vehicle mounts without the integrated compensators.
A heartbeat later, a creature finishes ejecting from its life support cradle. The creature is clearly an experiment of some sort. It looks incomplete, with intake feeds for nutrients, and still-implanted test probes. Its flesh is bleeding and raw, with clear attachment points for armor coatings that are currently unused. A militarized dracoid base, Piero understands. Not an uncommon Progenitor tool, but he doesn't recognize the make and model, and his AI minder's heuristics ponder the problem for a moment before giving up and telling him that he is facing an [UNKNOWN THREAT PLEASE USE CAUTION].
The dracoid opens its maw, and plasma washes over Piero. Piero is unsurprised-the reason the rapidly modified Bobs and Lauras and other remaining test subjects are there because they are expendable. Unlike Vanessas or homonculi, they are cheap and easy to replace. The temperature in his armor increases, and he can hear his sweat sizzle and boil. He dodges away from the blast and towards the creature itself, even as he gives new orders to his forces to spread out and avoid giving the dracoid easy kills, and the creature slaps at him. The first few blows are slow, but it increases in speed with every attack, muscles reconfiguring painfully, bulging in odd places and skin tearing before it regrows around gray-blue tissue. One of the blows hits him, and he stops it dead with an upraised forearm. Even as he does so, he can hear it adapt, its bones snapping painfully. And suddenly he is no longer superior in strength, and the next one sends him flying into the rampart, a blow which he doesn't even notice.
More and more assets-combat homonculi, mostly, start to flood in from their original defensive positions to reinforce Izanagi's ace in the hole.
"Ah." Piero says, voice suddenly calm, temporarily drained of all passion. The combat pauses as both sides take stock of the other. Piero's forces moving in, using their armored vehicles as cover and support. Weapons readied in nervous hands. The defenders of Izanagi, outnumbered but heavily armed and armored, high-end combat homonculi and exhuman Damage Control personnel and expendable clones and a dragon, a bulging primium tumor on its back where nerve-interface cockpit is. "A dragon. Excellent."
Happy 2018, people.
Yes, Kylo Ren's quote guest-stars here. I thought it was pretty fitting, both as a misleading suggestion that Ling was going to die, and because this is Piero stepping away from his past as a kill-crazy berserker. Oh, don't get me wrong, he's still a horrifying murder machine, but one who can occasionally show quarter.
Slay the Dragon
There is a dragon in your way. Piero would like it dead. He is going to kill it via...
[ ] Overwhelming Firepower: Piero has tanks, a variety of light armored vehicles, heavy powered armor, and way too many guns. They have a couple of highly augmented security officers and a dragon. He thinks that the other side got the short end of the stick.
[ ] The Power of Delegation: Okay, you're not the scienciest person. Fortunately you have a lot of people who are. You can figure out a scientific solution to this problem. It might involve applied physics, but efficiency is a virtue, just like brute force.
[ ] David and Goliath: The most obvious trait that hangar-sized mutant dragons have is that they're big. Piero is very small, but quite strong for his size. If you use your forces cautiously and have them act as distractions, they can be very, very potent.
[ ] (x0.25) Play The Objective: Hold it off, breach the inner doors, and just force your infantry assets through them. The dragon can't chase you through the complex itself.
[ ] Write-In
