10ebbor10
DON'T PANIC
- Location
- Present
TBH, I'm not sure?
Like, the "no killer AI" thing seems be a constraint widely respected on both sides, and if it was, you wouldn't go admitting that breaking that is what you were doing.
Buried in Steel
- Thread starter open_sketch
- Start date
- Original Novel Sci-Fi
Like, the "no killer AI" thing seems be a constraint widely respected on both sides, and if it was, you wouldn't go admitting that breaking that is what you were doing.
7 - Truncated
New
- Location
- Ottawa
- Pronouns
- She/Her/Whatever
The sound of the tanks moving was both much louder and much quieter than one would expect. The electric engines were silent, but the sound of the tracks tearing up the concrete was a constant, awful rumble. There was also conversation, incomprehensible, between the tanks and between the operators and their AI.
Traffic management drones hovered above the ground, smoothly sorting out the vehicles as they funneled up the narrow ramp and out of the blast pit. Near enough to the back, Mira and her group waited for some time for their turn, the sun visibly moving across the sky.
"The days here are fucked," the tank next to her muttered, a smooth, masculine voice with the same rehearsed perfection as her own. She swirled her cameras over, but nothing about the tank stood out. Just another grey, angular box. "So how come you get the special paint job, friend?"
"Huh? Me?" It took Mira a second to remember she did stand out, her armour tiles black instead of grey. "I dunno. I got installed a day early, maybe they marked the test vehicle?"
"Huh, makes sense. What were you before?"
"Infantry. 98th," she explained.
The other tank was silent for a moment. She tried to read emotions into the way the camera turrets moved, but even though there was some kind of reaction, it was too alien.
"Fuck, I'm sorry," he said finally.
"It's fine. Mira Hayes, from Moss Valley," Mira said, trying to press past it.
"Spark Mandlate. I was a larty driver with 220," he said. The cameras all looked away for a moment before he continued, another unreadable emotional cue. "How'd you end up here?"
"Loitering shell," Mira said simply, not wanting to bring her old unit up again. "You?"
"I got counter-tagged at Annador a month ago."
"Counter-tagged?" Mira asked. She didn't know larty slang.
"My Feddie doppleganger hit us first when we were in the defensive blind," he said. "Flechettes killed my WDO and took my legs off, but she'd hardlocked them by nanoguide and the autotrack lit them the fuck up."
The drone zipped over and flashed lights for Spark, drawing him forward before darting off to the other side of the formation.
"Seeya friend!"
"You understand any of that?" Rosa asked.
"Is there a way for us to talk privately?" Mira asked in a whisper, or as close as she could through the speaker.
"You could talk with your physical mouth into your mask and I'd pick it up on the microphone. That's what most of the recruits are instructed to do. However, in your case, I don't recommend it," Rosa said.
"Yeah. Uh, I barely understood it. The defensive blind is when you lose local drone supremacy during an enemy swarm push; the attacker knows more than the defender. Larty is vulnerable to enemy larty in the defensive blind because they can't see but they can be seen, but Spark's WDO, uh, Weapon Designator Operator I think? managed to target the enemy larty was because a nanodrone managed to spot them. Larty shooting is all done by NLAs and you just tell it where, so even though the WDO was dead the gun could still shoot."
"Ah. Illuminating, except I still do not know what 'larty' is. And it's your turn," Rosa said. Mira was suddenly aware of the drone over here, drifting backward with the green links blinking, and she set herself into motion and up the ramp, following another vehicle. They locked cameras for a moment in a strange sort of greeting.
"Larty is artillery you can't intercept because it's just, like, big tungsten darts. It's short for low altitude or low arc or something like that," Mira explained. "They go right through swarm drones, and lasers just warm them up a bit, but they have to hit dead on and they burn out their barrels fast, so they're short ranged."
"And this tank is lartillery too, so I suppose you have that capability," Rosa observed. Mira pivoted her cameras to look at the giant railgun protruding from the hood-like mantlet in the superstructure.
"I think technically any tank can be larty in a pinch, but they won't be as good. And if we're an interceptor, I guess we have lasers," Mira muttered, searching herself and the tanks ahead of and behind her for signs of them. She didn't see any of the characteristic ball-shaped turrets she knew from the Sentinels she'd trained to set up, but she knew that not all lasers looked like that; she'd biked past the enormous theatre interceptors outside Moss Valley every day for school, and those looked like big flat radar dishes with thousands of little glittering panels.
Now that she looked, there did seem to be something small, round, and reflective embedded in each of the armour panels. Interesting.
"And what's a thresher?" Rosa asked.
"Oh. NLA robot tanks with lasers and MGs. They're too stupid to reliably IFF, so they just shoot anything humanoid looking until it isn't."
"Did the Federation invent those?"
"I think we did."
She crested the top of the ramp and fell in on the road, joining the convoy rumbling toward the training track and falling in beside another tank.
"I'm Mira, you?" she greeted it, watching the cameras swivel.
"Wolność. Mira like peace?" the tank replied, a rumbling male voice with distinct disdain shining through, especially in that last word. The synthesizer carried all the infections of a Schodenicker, though something sounded off, not replicated correctly.
"Nono, Mira like miracle. I'm from Moss Valley," she protested quickly.
Wolność muttered something that did not sound like 'goddamn ignorant Landfallers', but which registered to her brain with that meaning. It was only afterward that she realized it was said in Polish, a language she had zero proficiency in (despite 11 years of mandatory classes). He then switched back to Offline. "Right, yes. I don't think I've been."
"I've been to Schodenick! For a class trip. It was really pretty," Mira said, hoping to extend some kind of olive branch. It felt stupid that she had to; it didn't make much sense to her to be bitter about Old Earth stuff that happened hundreds of years ago, especially with the war on.
"It is."
Wolność didn't say anything more, and Mira didn't want to push it, so they drove in silence to the track. Each group was broken in half again to five-tank teams; Mira's had Wolność, Spark, somebody named Chris with a very strong accent that reminded of how Feddies spoke Offline ('Unglis', she supposed) on TV, and…
"Defiance," the last tank said. Her new voice didn't fit right; it lacked the cutting edge in the tone she'd come to associate with her. "Hey Mira, you look good, girl."
"Thanks, friend. You too," Mira replied. Defiance's cameras looked away.
"Yeah."
An LUV rolled up with a Deputy Tactician poking out of the top hatch, relaying their instructions by radio, and they began. It seems they were cycling everything through different exercises; some tanks were running the track, others practicing manoeuvring, and some others like hers clustered up for the closest thing they had to desk work.
The next ten hours passed in a blur, alternating between the speed and joy of movement and the deluge of new information about the vehicle's capabilities. It was nothing like her training in Infantry School; after the initial, brutal stretch, it had almost felt slow, methodical, carefully teaching them everything they could possibly need and emphasizing how important it all was.
Mira had spent the last two months largely resenting the six she'd spent in training, how worthless it had all been. Six months of training and she'd taken maybe three steps on Port Angel's soil; they may as well have just scooped her up out of graduation and sent her straight there.
But here, they did in two hours what felt like she once would have covered in two days. It felt stripped down, reduced, summarized, like somebody had taken a real tanker program and told an NLA to summarize it. Nothing was clarified, repeated, or explored; it was just fact, instruction, slides on a rollout sheet before they were shuffled off to practice driving and the next set of tanks took their place.
The five 'classes' they covered that day felt chopped and out of order, being repeated by instructors with one eye on the clock. The day covered their basic non-weapon capabilities and functions; she was powered by a reactor, but had capacitors for high energy functions. There were technical details about the quick-start reactor, but it was covered at such a breakneck pace she didn't feel like she understood much of it beyond how to start and stop it.
A whole class was devoted to cooling systems; she had three. In regular operation, fans drew air in and over a series of internal radiator baffles and out the vents she'd seen in her flanks. Those could kick up so high that it'd legitimately be dangerous for unarmoured infantry to be around her; at full bore they said it would be like standing in front of a blast furnace.
She could 'hold her breath' and let the heat build up in the liquid heat sinks instead; if she put the reactor in standby and ran off the capacitors, she could keep her thermal signature down for stealthier movement for as long as a few hours.
Finally, in an emergency she could vent the heat sinks directly into the air to rapidly cool down. She had an alarm she was told to sound first, because it was basically filling the air with all kinds of toxins and carcinogens, then she'd be a sitting duck once heat started building up again, but if it was that or die, the choice was obvious.
There were short films about the basics of non-combat movement and convoys, the kind that usually had classes afterward to discuss but instead were just shown back to back here. The videos showed A6 and A7 tank crews and were clearly made for them; often had instructions for when to get out of the tank.
One class was just about how the tank was keeping them alive, that there were food and water reserves in the tank and even a septic tank. She had three days' operation without somebody refilling her water supply, food would last a week, and if for whatever reason she couldn't use her air filters there was an air cycler that meant she could breathe indefinitely on stored air.
It was emphasized over and over that they should have mechanics and support crew check them over as often as possible, every single day if they could; an A6 had half a dozen or more crew who could do all that stuff, but they were dependent on outsiders.
Each tank would have a dedicated support crew with their own medium utility vehicle, and they'd dig a kind of tank dugout everywhere they went. an example had been hastily carved into the soil, a sort of ramp into the earth that had a multi-part canvas shell around it to hide from thermals.
In between was the driving, the same course she'd done yesterday in stages. That was the best part; she got to show off a little while everyone else was still sliding around on their casters. There was some formation driving instruction, but mostly it was just about acclimating them to basic movement.
There were no breaks and no let-up, even into the night, though the dark proved to not be much of an obstacle. Her cameras had true-colour night vision much like her suit, and the colour of heat stood out much more clearly without the sun painting the landscape with it.
By the end she felt utterly wrung out, barely able to pay attention to the last lesson, which was about evacuation protocol if something went wrong. Given that most of them had limited to no mobility, this meant it was largely things they needed to tell whoever was trying to rescue them after they popped the bolts on the hatch but before they opened the pod and performed an emergency disconnect.
Even those desperate instructions felt overly optimistic in Mira's case. In a program so clearly constrained by time, this felt like a particular waste of it. There was no realistic way they were getting her and all her vital medical equipment out if she got hit, and she was at peace with that. Better die a Mustang, able to move and fight and scream, than live out there as what was left of Mira Hayes.
And as coffins went, fifty tonnes of steel would be pretty spectacular.
They wrapped up and drove back one section at a time. Being fairly late in the order gave them the only break they'd had all day, Mira pulled up next to Defiance, making a point to rock back on her suspension to emulate leaning back and relaxing.
"The fuck are you doing?" Defiance asked, with just a hint of amusement.
"You know. Kicking back. Chilling," Mira said.
"Jesus, you dork," Defiance jabbed, then a moment later did the same, the front of her tank popping up with a hiss of actuators. "How you been?"
"I've been a tank, which is pretty cool," Mira said. "It's nice to be able to talk again, more than a few sentences."
"They fucked up my voice, I don't sound like me," Defiance complained. "I kinda hate it."
"Yeah, it's not right. Though it doesn't seem that far off to me; maybe it's like hearing a recording of yourself?" Mira offered. She didn't know if that was actually true, or even how the speech synthesiser worked; Rosa had speculated it was an adaptation of an existing tech that predicted what sounds the geometry of your vocal cords and mouth would produce.
"Yeah. That might be it. You seen Hope yet?"
"Not yet. It sucks we're all getting parked separately, I wish I knew why they were doing that." Relaxing together in the barrack didn't feel like a vital part of training until you faced the isolation of not getting to do so.
"I dunno, this whole program seems kinda jank. It almost feels like home," Defiance joked.
"How do you mean?"
"Cities are the fossils of quick fixes," Defiance quoted. Mira hadn't heard the phrase before, but it had the cadence she associated with Easteuro humour. "I dunno, my experience is the Militia's been, like, real Landfaller shit, AI run and smooth the way people aren't. This is a real Iron Coast project; you can see the seams."
"Is this a good thing?" Mira asked, tactly avoiding bringing up that she was what people called a Landfaller, and to her the Militia wasn't smooth at all; it reminded of the lakeside summer camp she'd attended as a kid that had forgotten to do half their paperwork.
"Fuck no. It's a good way to live but a bad way to get shit done. We're all gonna fucking die," she said matter-of-factly, then laughed. It was a strange kind of bark through the speakers. "How'd things get this bad this fast?"
Mira didn't have an answer. She didn't have the context for it, she felt like she didn't know anything, but it must have gotten bad.
"What do you think will happen if we lose?" she asked finally. "To our families and stuff?"
"I mean, our families will probably be okay. Shit, we might get resident status to keep the peace. Well, not us, but… you know."
"Yeah."
"Then again, maybe they'll just call us all migrants and put us in camps. Depends on how bad we lose, and if we're losing this bad they're gonna make us into fucking fertilizer," Defiance swore. "We'll make them bleed for Horizon though. I dunno what your folks will do, but they'll have to burn Solidargavan to the ground, and they'll choke on our ashes."
Traffic management drones hovered above the ground, smoothly sorting out the vehicles as they funneled up the narrow ramp and out of the blast pit. Near enough to the back, Mira and her group waited for some time for their turn, the sun visibly moving across the sky.
"The days here are fucked," the tank next to her muttered, a smooth, masculine voice with the same rehearsed perfection as her own. She swirled her cameras over, but nothing about the tank stood out. Just another grey, angular box. "So how come you get the special paint job, friend?"
"Huh? Me?" It took Mira a second to remember she did stand out, her armour tiles black instead of grey. "I dunno. I got installed a day early, maybe they marked the test vehicle?"
"Huh, makes sense. What were you before?"
"Infantry. 98th," she explained.
The other tank was silent for a moment. She tried to read emotions into the way the camera turrets moved, but even though there was some kind of reaction, it was too alien.
"Fuck, I'm sorry," he said finally.
"It's fine. Mira Hayes, from Moss Valley," Mira said, trying to press past it.
"Spark Mandlate. I was a larty driver with 220," he said. The cameras all looked away for a moment before he continued, another unreadable emotional cue. "How'd you end up here?"
"Loitering shell," Mira said simply, not wanting to bring her old unit up again. "You?"
"I got counter-tagged at Annador a month ago."
"Counter-tagged?" Mira asked. She didn't know larty slang.
"My Feddie doppleganger hit us first when we were in the defensive blind," he said. "Flechettes killed my WDO and took my legs off, but she'd hardlocked them by nanoguide and the autotrack lit them the fuck up."
The drone zipped over and flashed lights for Spark, drawing him forward before darting off to the other side of the formation.
"Seeya friend!"
"You understand any of that?" Rosa asked.
"Is there a way for us to talk privately?" Mira asked in a whisper, or as close as she could through the speaker.
"You could talk with your physical mouth into your mask and I'd pick it up on the microphone. That's what most of the recruits are instructed to do. However, in your case, I don't recommend it," Rosa said.
"Yeah. Uh, I barely understood it. The defensive blind is when you lose local drone supremacy during an enemy swarm push; the attacker knows more than the defender. Larty is vulnerable to enemy larty in the defensive blind because they can't see but they can be seen, but Spark's WDO, uh, Weapon Designator Operator I think? managed to target the enemy larty was because a nanodrone managed to spot them. Larty shooting is all done by NLAs and you just tell it where, so even though the WDO was dead the gun could still shoot."
"Ah. Illuminating, except I still do not know what 'larty' is. And it's your turn," Rosa said. Mira was suddenly aware of the drone over here, drifting backward with the green links blinking, and she set herself into motion and up the ramp, following another vehicle. They locked cameras for a moment in a strange sort of greeting.
"Larty is artillery you can't intercept because it's just, like, big tungsten darts. It's short for low altitude or low arc or something like that," Mira explained. "They go right through swarm drones, and lasers just warm them up a bit, but they have to hit dead on and they burn out their barrels fast, so they're short ranged."
"And this tank is lartillery too, so I suppose you have that capability," Rosa observed. Mira pivoted her cameras to look at the giant railgun protruding from the hood-like mantlet in the superstructure.
"I think technically any tank can be larty in a pinch, but they won't be as good. And if we're an interceptor, I guess we have lasers," Mira muttered, searching herself and the tanks ahead of and behind her for signs of them. She didn't see any of the characteristic ball-shaped turrets she knew from the Sentinels she'd trained to set up, but she knew that not all lasers looked like that; she'd biked past the enormous theatre interceptors outside Moss Valley every day for school, and those looked like big flat radar dishes with thousands of little glittering panels.
Now that she looked, there did seem to be something small, round, and reflective embedded in each of the armour panels. Interesting.
"And what's a thresher?" Rosa asked.
"Oh. NLA robot tanks with lasers and MGs. They're too stupid to reliably IFF, so they just shoot anything humanoid looking until it isn't."
"Did the Federation invent those?"
"I think we did."
She crested the top of the ramp and fell in on the road, joining the convoy rumbling toward the training track and falling in beside another tank.
"I'm Mira, you?" she greeted it, watching the cameras swivel.
"Wolność. Mira like peace?" the tank replied, a rumbling male voice with distinct disdain shining through, especially in that last word. The synthesizer carried all the infections of a Schodenicker, though something sounded off, not replicated correctly.
"Nono, Mira like miracle. I'm from Moss Valley," she protested quickly.
Wolność muttered something that did not sound like 'goddamn ignorant Landfallers', but which registered to her brain with that meaning. It was only afterward that she realized it was said in Polish, a language she had zero proficiency in (despite 11 years of mandatory classes). He then switched back to Offline. "Right, yes. I don't think I've been."
"I've been to Schodenick! For a class trip. It was really pretty," Mira said, hoping to extend some kind of olive branch. It felt stupid that she had to; it didn't make much sense to her to be bitter about Old Earth stuff that happened hundreds of years ago, especially with the war on.
"It is."
Wolność didn't say anything more, and Mira didn't want to push it, so they drove in silence to the track. Each group was broken in half again to five-tank teams; Mira's had Wolność, Spark, somebody named Chris with a very strong accent that reminded of how Feddies spoke Offline ('Unglis', she supposed) on TV, and…
"Defiance," the last tank said. Her new voice didn't fit right; it lacked the cutting edge in the tone she'd come to associate with her. "Hey Mira, you look good, girl."
"Thanks, friend. You too," Mira replied. Defiance's cameras looked away.
"Yeah."
An LUV rolled up with a Deputy Tactician poking out of the top hatch, relaying their instructions by radio, and they began. It seems they were cycling everything through different exercises; some tanks were running the track, others practicing manoeuvring, and some others like hers clustered up for the closest thing they had to desk work.
The next ten hours passed in a blur, alternating between the speed and joy of movement and the deluge of new information about the vehicle's capabilities. It was nothing like her training in Infantry School; after the initial, brutal stretch, it had almost felt slow, methodical, carefully teaching them everything they could possibly need and emphasizing how important it all was.
Mira had spent the last two months largely resenting the six she'd spent in training, how worthless it had all been. Six months of training and she'd taken maybe three steps on Port Angel's soil; they may as well have just scooped her up out of graduation and sent her straight there.
But here, they did in two hours what felt like she once would have covered in two days. It felt stripped down, reduced, summarized, like somebody had taken a real tanker program and told an NLA to summarize it. Nothing was clarified, repeated, or explored; it was just fact, instruction, slides on a rollout sheet before they were shuffled off to practice driving and the next set of tanks took their place.
The five 'classes' they covered that day felt chopped and out of order, being repeated by instructors with one eye on the clock. The day covered their basic non-weapon capabilities and functions; she was powered by a reactor, but had capacitors for high energy functions. There were technical details about the quick-start reactor, but it was covered at such a breakneck pace she didn't feel like she understood much of it beyond how to start and stop it.
A whole class was devoted to cooling systems; she had three. In regular operation, fans drew air in and over a series of internal radiator baffles and out the vents she'd seen in her flanks. Those could kick up so high that it'd legitimately be dangerous for unarmoured infantry to be around her; at full bore they said it would be like standing in front of a blast furnace.
She could 'hold her breath' and let the heat build up in the liquid heat sinks instead; if she put the reactor in standby and ran off the capacitors, she could keep her thermal signature down for stealthier movement for as long as a few hours.
Finally, in an emergency she could vent the heat sinks directly into the air to rapidly cool down. She had an alarm she was told to sound first, because it was basically filling the air with all kinds of toxins and carcinogens, then she'd be a sitting duck once heat started building up again, but if it was that or die, the choice was obvious.
There were short films about the basics of non-combat movement and convoys, the kind that usually had classes afterward to discuss but instead were just shown back to back here. The videos showed A6 and A7 tank crews and were clearly made for them; often had instructions for when to get out of the tank.
One class was just about how the tank was keeping them alive, that there were food and water reserves in the tank and even a septic tank. She had three days' operation without somebody refilling her water supply, food would last a week, and if for whatever reason she couldn't use her air filters there was an air cycler that meant she could breathe indefinitely on stored air.
It was emphasized over and over that they should have mechanics and support crew check them over as often as possible, every single day if they could; an A6 had half a dozen or more crew who could do all that stuff, but they were dependent on outsiders.
Each tank would have a dedicated support crew with their own medium utility vehicle, and they'd dig a kind of tank dugout everywhere they went. an example had been hastily carved into the soil, a sort of ramp into the earth that had a multi-part canvas shell around it to hide from thermals.
In between was the driving, the same course she'd done yesterday in stages. That was the best part; she got to show off a little while everyone else was still sliding around on their casters. There was some formation driving instruction, but mostly it was just about acclimating them to basic movement.
There were no breaks and no let-up, even into the night, though the dark proved to not be much of an obstacle. Her cameras had true-colour night vision much like her suit, and the colour of heat stood out much more clearly without the sun painting the landscape with it.
By the end she felt utterly wrung out, barely able to pay attention to the last lesson, which was about evacuation protocol if something went wrong. Given that most of them had limited to no mobility, this meant it was largely things they needed to tell whoever was trying to rescue them after they popped the bolts on the hatch but before they opened the pod and performed an emergency disconnect.
Even those desperate instructions felt overly optimistic in Mira's case. In a program so clearly constrained by time, this felt like a particular waste of it. There was no realistic way they were getting her and all her vital medical equipment out if she got hit, and she was at peace with that. Better die a Mustang, able to move and fight and scream, than live out there as what was left of Mira Hayes.
And as coffins went, fifty tonnes of steel would be pretty spectacular.
They wrapped up and drove back one section at a time. Being fairly late in the order gave them the only break they'd had all day, Mira pulled up next to Defiance, making a point to rock back on her suspension to emulate leaning back and relaxing.
"The fuck are you doing?" Defiance asked, with just a hint of amusement.
"You know. Kicking back. Chilling," Mira said.
"Jesus, you dork," Defiance jabbed, then a moment later did the same, the front of her tank popping up with a hiss of actuators. "How you been?"
"I've been a tank, which is pretty cool," Mira said. "It's nice to be able to talk again, more than a few sentences."
"They fucked up my voice, I don't sound like me," Defiance complained. "I kinda hate it."
"Yeah, it's not right. Though it doesn't seem that far off to me; maybe it's like hearing a recording of yourself?" Mira offered. She didn't know if that was actually true, or even how the speech synthesiser worked; Rosa had speculated it was an adaptation of an existing tech that predicted what sounds the geometry of your vocal cords and mouth would produce.
"Yeah. That might be it. You seen Hope yet?"
"Not yet. It sucks we're all getting parked separately, I wish I knew why they were doing that." Relaxing together in the barrack didn't feel like a vital part of training until you faced the isolation of not getting to do so.
"I dunno, this whole program seems kinda jank. It almost feels like home," Defiance joked.
"How do you mean?"
"Cities are the fossils of quick fixes," Defiance quoted. Mira hadn't heard the phrase before, but it had the cadence she associated with Easteuro humour. "I dunno, my experience is the Militia's been, like, real Landfaller shit, AI run and smooth the way people aren't. This is a real Iron Coast project; you can see the seams."
"Is this a good thing?" Mira asked, tactly avoiding bringing up that she was what people called a Landfaller, and to her the Militia wasn't smooth at all; it reminded of the lakeside summer camp she'd attended as a kid that had forgotten to do half their paperwork.
"Fuck no. It's a good way to live but a bad way to get shit done. We're all gonna fucking die," she said matter-of-factly, then laughed. It was a strange kind of bark through the speakers. "How'd things get this bad this fast?"
Mira didn't have an answer. She didn't have the context for it, she felt like she didn't know anything, but it must have gotten bad.
"What do you think will happen if we lose?" she asked finally. "To our families and stuff?"
"I mean, our families will probably be okay. Shit, we might get resident status to keep the peace. Well, not us, but… you know."
"Yeah."
"Then again, maybe they'll just call us all migrants and put us in camps. Depends on how bad we lose, and if we're losing this bad they're gonna make us into fucking fertilizer," Defiance swore. "We'll make them bleed for Horizon though. I dunno what your folks will do, but they'll have to burn Solidargavan to the ground, and they'll choke on our ashes."
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bookwyrm
Doom of Public Libraries
- Location
- Wichita, Kansas
Seems like the Militia is still very much in the process of ruthlessly cutting away everything but the minimum necessary for successfully producing efficient mech-tanks, still finding their feet on how to smooth everything into one industrial line- like Soviet production only a month or two into the evacuation beyond the Urals.
- Pronouns
- He/Him
this chapter, like the last few, fuckin' ruled.
I love the cloying desperation that comes through between the lines, and how the new technology of this future war has both made it very different and very similar to lots of modern wars - good speculative fiction and character storytelling!
Also, tanke
tonke...
I love the cloying desperation that comes through between the lines, and how the new technology of this future war has both made it very different and very similar to lots of modern wars - good speculative fiction and character storytelling!
Also, tanke
tonke...
TortugaGreen
Constantly out of the loop
- Pronouns
- She/Her
I wonder if it'll turn out that Mira got a super prototype. The fancy unique paint job suggests it's unique at least, but a unique prototype is also often just worse than the production model. I was vaguely under the impression that she wasn't the first schmuck to be canned like this even if she was the first of the batch, so maybe there's other tanks out there already with similar unique paint jobs. That said, if Mira got a variant design due to being early, there's no way those even-earlier designs are going to be very consistent between eachother.
I guess we'll see.
I guess we'll see.