JB CCXIII: Unchained Evolution
They are hunters. They are monsters. Invisible, they circle in the airspace above the Izanagi construct. The multispectrum datafeeds supplying them with positional and targeting data swell with sensor readings as
greatest-hunter-monster breaches the walls of the traitor-enemy construct.
They are hunters and monsters, but if that was all they were, the Union would have had no use for them. Purple tendrils worm through the air as the squadron amplifies its tactical network link, seeking consensus.
X-PROG-311B(c) craves the death of traitors. Hunt-kill. (C) wants: Variable Launcher: Micromissiles (HE-AP), staggered salvo.
X-PROG-311B(d) craves the obliteration of traitors. Hunt-destroy. (D) wants: FLYWHEEL ultra low-level formation for deployment of primary plasma projectors.
X-PROG-311B(b) craves the suffering of traitors. Hunt-hurt-burn. (B) wants: Variable Launcher: Micromissiles (Geneva Noncompliant) Sarcolytic/Pyrophoric Micromissile Barrage.
More data filters into their thoughts.
Greatest-hunter-monster biofeeds indicate his consuming kill-urge at the sight of the traitor draconid warform. Threat analysis heuristics from supporting staff outline enemy combatants, grading them for threat factor. Squadron X-PROG-311B cannot assist directly in the hangar. Not without rendering themselves unacceptably vulnerable to ground fire.
X-PROG-311B(A-FL) craves the victory of the Union. Hunt-support-destroy. (A-Flight Lead) chastises (D). Primary projector friendly fire rate unsustainable, traitor base shielding too thick for secondary breach with primary projectors in acceptable time. (A-Flight Lead) orders: Variable Launcher (Micromissile): Barrage, suppressive, variable munition. Smartlink active.
(D) is contrarian: Craves primary projector strike after Union casualties mount. (A-Flight Lead) chastises (D) again, orders: 311b Squadron to use mass-reactive explosive warheads after opening salvo, focusing draconid warform. (B) exults: Sarcolytic/Pyrophoric secondary munitions? (D), chastised, acquiesces. (C), mocking: info-package burst of missile salvo targeting solution. (A-Flight Lead) stern: Repeats order for suppressive barrage with follow-up strike.
X-PROG-311B Squadron achieves consensus. Launchers cycle to attack position.
Launch orders received by command. Command authorizes synchronized launch.
All air support datalinking. X-PROG-311 Squadron requests permission for synchronized launch. All units confirm. Launch authority delegated to Sledgehammer Lead. FQ-35 drone squadron slaves JASSM targeting to X-PROG-311 Squadron.
Sledgehammer Lead grants launch authorization.
Union forces securing the outside of Izanagi construct hear the menacing staccato crack as a hurricane of guided munitions leap out of rails and slam out of their launchers, combining into a nearly invisible stream, corkscrewing through the flames of shattered vehicles and the steam of flesh melting under broad-spectrum carnophagic agents.
***
A dragon. Piero Dominici has won glory and acclaim in his deployments, but no man - no matter how far beyond mortal norm - can look upon a dragon without craving the glory of slaying it. Some men can look upon dragons without the fear of fighting them, and he is one of them.
"Soldiers of the Union!" His sword swipes a fleshborer annelid out of the air.
"KILL."
The wall of incoming ordinance curves around him in that moment, the damn crest of his helmet whipping dramatically in their passage, even as the order to attack is subvocalized and the forces of the Union surge forward. The deployment is danger-close, but every one of them is in heavy armor or in hardened vehicles. The blast and shrapnel is not sufficiently dangerous to consider. Expected casualties from friendly fire are minor, deaths even fewer.
The few clones between Piero and the dragon, mewling from the agonies of their flash-grown acidic cysts, fall apart under his gun and blade before they can even conceptualize their explosive self-destructs. The greatest warrior of the EXEMPLAR project wants this dragon dead, to rip the head off of the pilot embedded in the primium cyst on its neck.
He's crossed half the hangar in the heartbeat between the missiles roaring through the door and their thunderous impact. The exhuman Progenitor scientists that choose to make their stand here reveal the full horror of their true forms: Nothing human, nothing of mortal ken, not even remotely. Thought-quick things of teeth and claws that crash into the ORIONs that serve as Piero's
myrmidones. One of the traitors throws itself at Piero, leading a handful of enhanced, stabilized creatures, warrior-clades of the Izanagi lab.
They die. Everything that approaches a three-step radius around him dies as he continues his advance on the dragon. Hacked, hewed, sliced, diced, hyper-regenerative tissues, bonded ceramo-morphic shells and all the other fruits of traitorous Enlightened Science falling to literal pieces in his wake, so swift that their suicide-explosions do nothing to him. Things that are alive come across him, and they very quickly stop being alive.He rips the mono-molecular scythes off of a monstrous creature that might have once been a man, decapitates the Progenitor-engineered thing with its own weapons. The Tacnet finishes disseminating orders he started giving at the beginning of his dash. Piero can feel the frisson of excitement from X-PROG-311b (D), as close as that creature can come to the warrior's excitement that burns in his own chest.
All eyes - and eye-analogues - in the hangar are on him as he leaps at the dragon. Railguns fire over his shoulder, plasma arcs limn him in blue-white light, and the glory of immortality at the tip of his sword. The creature is crippled. Its body is open in multiple places, revealing gray ropy muscle strands that are even now evolving protective coatings-reminiscent of how his own muscles have been treated and modified. It bleeds, caustic orange fluid that he identifies as a biohazard and corrosive threat, and as the dracoform swipes at him with its arm, he notices that it's smart fluid, as it jets out in a deadly arc. The liquid splashes on the hangar, eating through the floor, killing a handful of unfortunates-friend and foe-who didn't get out of the way in time.
Piero twists in midair, using the AG implants in his body and his own preternatural agility to dodge most of it, overshooting the dracoform and using his powerful legs to kick off the wall. Even that tiny amount would be fatal to most creatures. Piero's armor, though, is the finest hybrid of Iteration X brute force and Progenitor adaptability. Its immune system combats the virulent extremophiles and disassembler nanotech living in the caustic soup, its chemical reservoirs deploy counteragents through capillary systems to neutralize the molecular acid. Additional information and resources are fed to him through the micro-width link in his armor, raw materials that his body and his equipment use to add additional muscle mass and ablative armor. He lands on the dracoform and stabs into it, uses the blade as purchase, scaling the monster even as it swipes at him.
And then he is on the creature's back, next to the piloting pod. The pod itself is a durable sarcophagus of molecular-reinforced Primium, designed to protect against the stresses a god-monster will fight through. In a production design, Piero knows, it would be fully sealed into the torso of the monster, but here it's external, for easy access, above the test and resource umbilical ports.
His blade comes down on it with force enough that the fighting in the hangar momentarily stops from the hurricane force of the blow. He uses all his strength in the blow, strength enough to open tanks and shatter bunkers. His weapon punches through the armor, at the molecule-thin seam between two segmented plates. The god-monster staggers for a moment, then the dracoform and its pilot recover, roaring in anger. Piero slides off as the hand- and foot-holds on the creature become nearly frictionless. He uses his inertials and fields to recover, scrabbles back up the dragon even as spines grow and eject from its back, trying to tear into him. A few penetrate his armor and attempt to inject toxins into his body, but his own internal defenses hold against them.
Hands and feet on the pod, he puts his fingers into the gap his blade made in the piloting pod, and tears, levering the pod itself open in a spray of breathing liquid. He sees the pilot for a moment through the enlarged hole, a slight young man with similar augmentations to Ling, interfaced with the dragon through link cables. One of the shoulder launchers on his armor flips up, and he launches its entire current magazine of HEAP and HE-FRAG into narrow breach as internal defense fields activate to protect the pilot. One of the missiles gets through, and Piero blows Sanjeet in half.
A fatal blow for an unaugmented man, but only a minor inconvenience for the dracoform's augmented pilot. Piero is almost impressed at how it only momentarily stumbles, rather than staggering or falling. The dracoform screams, channeling its pilot's anger and pain. It would burst the eardrums of someone less augmented, but Piero still holds on, readying another attack. The fields around the dracoform increase in intensity, but Piero holds on. He draws his fist back, to overload the internal generators and yank the pilot out. The growing scales around the back of the creature then surge up the pod, and they look different now. His augmented senses notice the prestressed lines in their metallic composition, and he realizes that the dracoform has evolved explosive reactive armor a heartbeat before he is sent flying from the shaped charge jet, sent slamming into a wall hard enough to cause him to grunt in pain and to dent the hardened armor of the hangar walls. Piero's blade darts out from its resting place on AI control, seeking the weakened pod, but the creature brings up a now-bulky, hardened arm, and it embeds in the meat. Some sort of fast-hardening bioresin coats it, jams it there, preventing the life-seeking weapon from surging into the body and activating Heartseeker Protocols.
"You're only delaying the inevitable." Piero declares, as the creature's plasma-breath seeks him out again. It is not a threat. Piero does not threaten. His statements of imminent violence are declarations of inevitability. If the dragon's pilot hears him, he gives no indication.
***
The dragon roars, its scream felt more than heard in a high-power discharge of burning plasma. Rose takes cover behind one of the ruined Rolands. Unlike Piero, she's not indestructible. Just very hard to kill. The damage the barrage has done is significant, but still not enough. It has been torn open in multiple places, exposing glints of black-glass hypercarbon bone that thickens even as the creature heals from the barrage. The creature's skin has transformed, this time by transforming its skin into microscopically smooth armor scales. She's guessing that there's some primium in them-that would explain the sheen and their resistance-which means that whoever made this was a real artist at building bioweapons. But not infallible. Everything has a weakness. Even gods can be defeated.
She's faced one down for months in the Demise, and they eventually won that victory. Here she's not the leader but she doesn't need to be. All she needs to do is help her brother kill the dragon. She flicks her eyes through multiple vision spectra as she does her analysis, lets the biosuit's olfactory sensors supplement her with chemical data. The energy consumption of that regeneration must be prodigious, Rose thinks. It almost certainly must be running on near-empty. Intellectually, she's rather intrigued. Her energy storage mechanisms are unbelievably efficient to allow her to look the way she does and sustain high-tempo combat operations for extended periods, but whatever solution this creature uses must be an order of magnitude more efficient than even that.
"It's evolving defenses like the Apocalypse Canceller." Rose sends to Piero. "It adapts to the attack methods used against it, and it has a very broad library to choose from."
"That man you call your brother is an interesting figure." Thorn says, her image in one of the glassy craters, posing in a way which suggests contemplation. "I think he's more like you than you think. Just like you, he wants to prove himself. That he can be everything they designed him for. And just like you, he's going to keep throwing himself at bigger and bigger foes until he dies of it." She concludes, in an almost admiring tone of voice.
Rose knows this. And that's why she's not going to let him do this on his own. She's not as fast, or as strong, or as tough. But she knows a lot more about biotechnology than Piero does. And she takes the time to scan the dracoform with augmented eyes, clinically evaluating the beast and its adaptations.
The dracoform's current adaptations have drawn deep into its library of gods and monsters found in its DNA. Its skin has taken a refractive golden sheen, and it has now grown its own anti-DEW defenses, an ablative coating of eternally regenerating scales. But more interestingly to Rose's eyes is how the thing has changed internally. The epidermal modifications have changed it, made it harder to see its organs. But whatever is inside it has shifted and become dimensionally active. She can still feel the changed space tensors which deflected the attack, shunting some of it into alternate phase spaces, sending the rest of the force curving harmlessly around it. Whatever technology has gone into it is beyond standard chimerical combat constructs. Even these evolutions aren't enough to render it invulnerable, but she watches as ablative scales shatter and the oversized, exaggerated musculature of the dracoform shows through. Its skin has twisted around fiber groups, transforming them into corded tendrils. As she watches, a few of them seek out targets. The fibers slash out like tendrils, their heads transforming to hardened bone blades that can pierce even tank armor. One of them seeks her out, and she jumps over it as it stabs deep into the floor with the force of an artillery shell. In a single smooth movement she ejects Henriette's customized blade, cutting the thing in half, dodging as the caustic blood of the creature spatters onto the floor and burns through concrete. A few others are less lucky. The handful of surviving allies the dracoform had, and a few Damage Control constables, are pierced and sucked dry, their material being consumed to fuel the dragon's transformations.
She notices even its feet are almost... plantlike, roots tearing into the floor of the hangar for nutrition. She sends that information to Piero. They are vulnerabilities. Threats. The dracoform's allies have long since been killed, consumed, or forced into retreat, Rose notes. It's just them and the dragon. So long as she can get close-and Piero and the X-PROG-311s and the remaining ARCs are doing a good job continuing their barrage-she can hurt it.
She takes her blade, cuts her own wrist open. The biosuit notices the breach, but the suit is self-repairing. Her blood, brilliant red, moves across the weapon. Her HUD displays that she has suffered minor blood loss, and the armor is injecting its own supplies into her to compensate. As good as the blade Henriette gave her is, any wound she could inflict with it would be a mere pinprick. And unlike Piero's melee weapon of choice, hers isn't designed with the capability of burrowing through a monster and tearing its heart out without external help. So she has to hurt it in another way.
She accelerates herself, hyper-adrenaline coursing through her system. She dashes across the hangar in a blur, feet spattering molten concrete and glass and roughly stepping over corpses without any time for niceties or politeness. For her, friendly fire is more dangerous than the enemy, and she stumbles once from a deflected missile landing a bit too close, takes some shrapnel in her side from another-but she can't ask for the barrage to be diminished lest the enemy notice the feint. Rose reaches the dracoform and sinks the blade hilt-deep into one of the dracoform's root-like tendrils.
It immediately reacts by roaring in what has to be agony, as her blood does exactly what it's programmed to do. Cause massive, wanton genetic damage. Erase templates. It roars. She can see cancerous growths festering inside its flesh and organs, crawling up its leg. And then she's flung away from the dracoform with force sufficient to grievously damage even her augmented body. The dracoform is now missing its foot, which is still bubbling and steaming as it wildly mutates. She can see it start to regrow the damaged area. As expected, it has rapid regeneration and high levels of redundancy. It staggers, but doesn't fall. The pilot is skilled. The DNA feedback from the barrage and nanotoxin and the forced limb serverance would have driven anyone insane-mad. She thinks it's only made this dracoform's pilot angry-mad.
Rose hits the ground, covering the wall in a smear of her own blood. Spine broken in three places. Femur shattered. Arm dislocated. Torn muscles everywhere, significant organ damage. One rib broken, a punctured lung. But she's had worse. She can already feel herself heal. Piero is on top of her in an instant, shielding her with his armored body. "Are you all right?" He asks, dragging her roughly into cover. Anyone would believe that such an action showed coldness. But Rose knows that being willing to ask that question in the first place shows he cares. They know that they're engineered tough, engineered fast and strong. Being thrown into a wall, having her spine broken-that's a minor inconvenience. She grabs his hand when he offers it, lets him help her up. A small gesture that, from him, means so much.
Both she and the dracoform see injury as temporary inconvenience more than anything else. Both of them heal fast. She can feel and hear her bone grinding in her body as it realigns itself and starts to heal. The dracoform's leg starts to bud and grow toes, and it tentatively, almost gently puts its foot down.
But her attack was never intended to take the dracoform's leg or kill it via teratoma. It was intended to cripple the dracoform's ability to operate independently. Rose knows that any high-end combat construct with the capability of long-term independent operation needs to be provided a killswitch of sorts. And because of Ethical Compliance, she has the tools needed to reverse-engineer one. If she had tried to shut down the dracoform entirely, it would have realized the killswitch was false and reject it too quickly. But its self-sustaining capabilities were another matter entirely.
Rose sees the dracoform's tendrils grow gray and crack. The dracoform has been permanently lessened-or at least diminished for hours if not days, long enough for some damage to be done. Yet, she expects that the enemy will find some workaround, and they do. One of the hangar walls slides open and a test umbilical interlinks with the back of the dracoform. "ENHANCED VERSATILITY ADAPTIVE DRACOFORM TEST FEED UMBILICAL" is stenciled on its head in big block letters. The X-PROG-311s cut the umbilical near-immediately with smart missiles, but another deploys out of the walls. And she knows they're running low on high-yield ammunition, and the umbilical is quite heavily armored.
"Thank you." Rose says kindly. "I know you want to kill the dragon."
"I do." Piero grates. "But to do that, I need to know how to kill it. And I suppose that would be a question you or Alexander should answer, and I prefer talking to you." Piero says. He's saying it through voice comms rather than through the neural subnet, giving her a chance to mull over the question in accelerated cognition. She knows that it hasn't tried to engage the X-PROG-311s and the ARCs because it probably isn't rated for extended combat operations in this state. They'll have to pump a lot of power into it to keep it viable, now that it's evolved the same adaptations as the Apocalypse Canceller.
It starts walking forward, slowly, inexorably.
***
Alexander Cross exits the sewer and starts his sprint to RIKEN with the forces he's taken as a distraction. The biosuit's skin is already absorbing the sewage-it's not just for vanity, but being able to rapidly neutralize a scent trail can be a critical tactical advantage. There's a dracoform on the loose, some sort of hyper-adaptive superweapon he's pretty sure was officially canceled or otherwise stuck in funding limbo, and he has a possible solution to the rampaging behemoth.
The antimateriel rifle on his back was intended for situations like this. The chunky black weapon is designed for particularly specialist ammunition, ammunition that Damage Control has reserved for desperate situations and has recently broken out at the orders of Professor Li. On his hip, in a specialized magazine, were six rounds, each of which cost more than a good-sized warship. "Ghost bullets." Cross has never fired them. But he knows what they do. After firing, they simply stop interacting with most forces. Until the high-caliber, explosive-cored, biotoxin-coated rounds reach their destination and become solid masses moving at hypervelocity through the target.
The Primium covering on the dracoform's piloting pod would normally protect it, render it immune to ghost bullets. But there was a breach in the dracoform's piloting pod. A breach which, much as he's annoyed about it, is entirely due to Piero.
The ARC I touches down, out of the line of sight of the hangar exit. A woman in a stealth power armor suit that is currently set to neutral black and with her crimson hair perfectly styled, expression neutral. She's carrying a similar rifle in one hand and her helmet in the other. Cross has been paying attention to the tactical feeds and knows that she's taken out more than her share of traitors-and two of the Izanagi tanks-with that rifle.
"Major Clarent." Cross says. His hand moves to his hip and grabs the magazine of ghost bullets, and he draws his rifle, loading a single round. He hands the rest of the magazine to the cyborg. "Want to kill a dragon?" They only need one round each. Either they'll manage to get the shot into the breach that the dragon has sealed with its own materials, and kill the pilot, or they're going to need a new strategy. He doesn't expect that they'll need a new strategy.
"Ghost bullets should do the job if our data is good." Clarent sends back via DNI. Cross notes that she didn't even pause to download specifications. She's used them before. "I suppose Dr. Leon was too smart for his own good. If he had stuck with a standard suite of protection instead of making his pet dinosaur adaptive to everything, we'd need a different plan." She's already looking at the rosters to see if anyone else has compatible weapons and the augmentations to make the necessary shot.
"One to the pod, one to the head. Simultaneous shots. You should make the call." Piero probably doesn't want to hear him ask.
"Kingslayer1-1 requesting permission to engage dracoform." Clarent says. "We have ghost rounds loaded and can eliminate the pilot."
Well That Could Have Gone Better: When radical exhuman Progenitors base their technology off of the DSS, EXEMPLAR, and the Avatar Slaying Enhancement, they tend to do a pretty good job protecting them from basic forms of attack like "what happens if we drop a nuke on it." But as you can see, it has some pretty significant weaknesses. How is Piero going to deal with them?
[ ] (0.75x) Starve the Beast: Play it slow and safe. Keep attacking the umbilical, which is hardened but not nearly as tough as the dracoform. Get your support operations to try to hack Izanagi and stop them from deploying backups. The Apocalypse Canceller had 60 seconds of independent operation at max power. You're pretty sure the dracoform can't have more than 20 before it needs to cannibalize itself.
[ ] (0.5x) Spoopy Scary Sniperdudes: Piero has to admit, grudgingly, that Cross is a better shot than he is. Not that it's practically worth anything so long as the engagement's taking place within 1.5 kilometers, but this is one of the rare exceptions. And technically they wouldn't be able to kill the dracoform's pilot if it wasn't for the damage he did to the piloting pod and how his orders have forced it to slow down and become sluggish. So it's still his kill. More or less. So long as he can kill the pilot, it should either shut down, or become much, much easier to manage.
[ ] The Long Climb: Yes, it's grown reactive armoring and a frictionless coat. Yes. This makes it hard to scale. But if someone was to temporarily neutralize that armoring... he can breach the pod again. And this time he won't only get a partial kill.
[ ] Scorched Earth Policy: They're literally feeding the dracoform from their own base. That means you've literally been given a direct connection with a lot of very sensitive systems. There's a lot of things you can do with the right kill switches and a reactor...
[ ] Survival of the Least Inadequate: Piero knows now that he can force it to evolve in ways that might be dangerous to it. Force it to make trade-offs. Then exploit those trade-offs. (Partial write-in: What tradeoffs does he inculcate in the dracoform and how?)
[ ] Write-In
