I can't help but wonder if Faith is trying to convince us or herself...
Faith in Superior Firepower [Planetary Annihilation Multicross SI]
- Thread starter Faith
- Start date
I can't help but wonder if Faith is trying to convince us or herself...
Actually, I was thinking Halo. Frankly, I'm not seeing the upside to deliberately importing a species that is literally called The Plague to your habitat.
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Tourism?
It helps that you have multiple options to turn this horror movie into a annoyance.
- Location
- Near Freiburg in South-West Germany
Needs to be threadmarked.
vyor
KITTY! \o/
Faith
Some idea of what I'm doing.
- Location
- Land of Waves and Warmth
Oh, right, yeah. That makes more sense.
The upside? It's easier to do SCIENCE! safely on an orbital ring, where individual segments of the ring can be separated, locked down, purged with
Even if the Plague do the impossible and escape from their cages (bearing in mind that the 'habitat ring' is really more science lab than wildlife preserve), then the station can just jettison them. That's not an option planetside.
Remember kids, practice safe SCIENCE!
*Faith Foundation is not responsible for any injuries incurred in the process of SCIENCE!
Nah, just SCIENCE!
Although an actual zoo-like habitat as well might be fun(ny). Hm...
Fixed, thanks for the reminder.
Rossum
Not a Cyberman
- Location
- Earth
Well, for one thing, the name "Plague" seems like something that humans named them. They probably call themselves something else.
Second, while I haven't played Red Faction, a quick look at the wiki mentions that they likely aren't native to Mars, with the tech keeping them in hibranation being very advanced. There's also something about getting nanotech and stuff from them.
If that's true, these aren't just mindless monsters. At the least, they are heavily modified monsters that some precursor race engineered, spread to Mars (and possibly other planets) and kept them on ice. Or, they could have been a race of intelligent insectoid aliens who started improving themselves via gene modding and cybernetics, but it went horribly wrong (or horribly right) and their decendents mutated into these weird techno-organic bugs.
If I'm getting this right, there were also mutated miners or something who got turned into human-plague hybrids. That... should be pretty difficult due to alien chemistry and genetic compatability, unless these things are kind of like the Borg or Zerg and they had grabbed some otherwise normal races and 'improved' them to make these killer cyborg things.
Point is, something made these and if they aren't native to Mars, there could be loads of them sprinkled around the galaxy. This could just be the first clue to learning about some massive precursor war like what happened with the Halo Flood, or Mass Effect Reapers, or the SPAZ Zombies.
If that's the case, could be worth looking at them to see if they were programmed with a "sleep" button like the Borg in that TNG episode with Locutus, or if you can rig up that three-button control system like in ME3 (with one button saying "just stop rampaging"), or something similar.
Or, find a way to engineer them into fuzzy wuzzy pets that make honey, or fix stuff like what the... those things on the Citadel. Keepers? I forget. Anyway, it's always a good idea to get info on your enemies, especially the possibly mindless (or intelligent ones). Or find a way to make friends out of them.
Or, you know, get info on who made these things and equip humanity to deal with them if they find more space monsters on other planets.
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If I heard that in universe, I wouldn't be reassured at all.
If the aliens have named themselves you've got other problems, like sentient-rights abuses. Faith has the morals and safety-margins to avoid XCOM style SCIENCE.
- Location
- Arizona
What Faith is "failing" to remember is that the plot-bullshit weakness the Plague have is actually a lethal reaction to our/humanity's preferred atmosphere. Whether Oxygen is poisonous to them, or if it's something intrinsically linked to the Terraformer's operations is up to your interpretation. Basically, Faith insta-wins if she fixes the Terraformer. But she's "forgetting" it so that the story can be more interesting.
...when I say Faith is "forgetting", I am saying that the Author knows full well about, but is choosing to make the SI forget about it in the interest of prolonging the plot.
EDIT: Oh. Ha! I just figured out how commander faith is gonna figure out the weakness. Hope is going to take a Plague to the science station, expose it to a Earth norm atmosphere, and be very confused when the thing keels over and dies.
...when I say Faith is "forgetting", I am saying that the Author knows full well about, but is choosing to make the SI forget about it in the interest of prolonging the plot.
EDIT: Oh. Ha! I just figured out how commander faith is gonna figure out the weakness. Hope is going to take a Plague to the science station, expose it to a Earth norm atmosphere, and be very confused when the thing keels over and dies.
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AH! You've done it now. You taunted fate. Now Fate is going to stab you in the back when you least expect it, and BAM! You were just minding your business and Flood. Flood everywhere. And nobody wants Flood. Lowers the local property values like nobodies business.
Just whatever you do, don't make a taco cart.Faith said:
Aw, man. I looked at "Flood" funny and now all I see is "fluud", like food with an 'L'.
This is the worst possible thing.
You have doom us all (to great entertainment when the beasties take over the automated systems somehow.)
FormlessAlien
Allergic to lightbulbs
- Location
- A humanoid body
But they need to kill all of the scientists before they take over the base!
- Location
- Arizona
...Was there a fork named Fate? I'm pretty sure not. Just to be safe, make sure that none of your forks call themselves Fate. Or Murphy.
ltmauve
"Excuse me?"
- Location
- Earth
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Hmm, what other names could Faith Forks come up with?
Lazurman
This is fine.
- Location
- Classified
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Murphy is the fork designed for that rainy day when she needs to give absolutely every-last-fucking-body a BAD TIME.
Glitchrr36
Slick's Short Company, CEO
- Location
- The Wastes
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Charity
Mercy
Trust
Penitence
Humility
Just trying to keep with the theme.
Amor
Fidem
Caritas
Misericordia
Spera
Latin versions for the Forks that want to associate as Male.
P.Hominoidea
A Briming Glass Of Spiders And A Mouthful Of Bees
- Location
- Canada
You guys missed the most obvious one, Love.
Ever heard the proverb
"Faith
Hope
Love
And the greatest of these is Love."?
Ever heard the proverb
"Faith
Hope
Love
And the greatest of these is Love."?
- Pronouns
- she/her
Faith
Some idea of what I'm doing.
- Location
- Land of Waves and Warmth
Unfortunately FiSF happened before I played Undertale, else I would make a reference of that sort.
61 - Cave-In
Faith
Some idea of what I'm doing.
- Location
- Land of Waves and Warmth
Double post but fuck the rules! I AM THE OP! I DO WHAT I WANT! MUWHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.
*Ahem*
Story post, because hospital is boring.
61 - Cave-in
Team 1, the group of five NeoAvatars I had sent to rescue Darius Mason from the Marauder Ruins, were in quite the spot of bother.
Nine Behemoths. Nine.
It took concentrated fire from two NeoAvatars to kill one of the damn things. I was starting to regret not sending them some heavier firepower, but there was just no way the Braves - or any of my other units, really, - were going to be able to fit down the cargo elevator, and finding a path through the tunnels would have taken ages…
So, I'd have to make one.
FABRICATORS! Overpowered as shit!
Of course, the speed at which a fabricator could dig through solid rock was limited, and there were probably better options.
Like, say… a giant drill. If it was made of tough enough materials, and powered by a sufficiently advanced motor, it would be able to absolutely rip through rock like it was nothing.
Hm.
Making a point not to look at the blueprints for the Vehicle Fabricator - or any of my other tanks, - I opened up the design program and started working.
First, I needed a body. Resource transfer system, CPU core, and internal generator all neatly lined up, surrounded in a layer of Progenitor alloys. At the front of that roughly cubic mass, a single, high powered Progenitor motor.
Attached to the motor, a drill big enough to make most miners envious. Exactly three metres in radius, with that weird corkscrew thing to… push dirt out of the way or whatever. Made entirely out of Progenitor alloys, completely removing wear and tear as something I needed to worry about. Heh.
The vehicle had four treads, set out in the same way as Halo's Scorpion Tank, but set at a slight angle to better deal with being in a circular tunnel. The rear treads mounted backwards-facing Fabricators, which would in theory allow the vehicle to harvest the dirt it was processing, or construct things in the tunnel behind it, such as supports to stop the roof collapsing.
I figured two Fabricators probably wouldn't cut it, so I stuck six more on the back of the vehicle's body, cutting into the armour a little to make room. Not that it would matter, since any enemy wanting to make use of that little vulnerability would need to be behind the tunneller in the first place.
That complete, I queued up one of my bot factories to build one. It would take about fifteen seconds to build… which was absolutely unacceptable.
Why did the factories only have four fabricators anyway?
I made a note to refit them, which Hope almost immediately answered. "Yeah, I thought the same thing back on Hub. Here -" a set of blueprints floated across the Command Network. "I call it the Land Factory… because, you know. It's a factory for land units. Vehicles, Bots, and Infantry-Scale stuff. Well, except NeoAvatars, you'd need a specialised building for that. What with needing the Engi Medical Nanobots and all."
"You know, you probably should have mentioned that you did that. It would have been nice to build them in this base, instead of the regular bot factories."
"Oh, yeah. Sorry. I'll just start saving new designs straight to the Command Network, instead of my AI core… hey, what did you need refitted factories for, anyway?"
"To build these new Mining Fabricators."
"Oh….kay. Why did you need Mining Fabricators?"
"To dig a tunnel to the Plague's hives so I can flood them with robots? Duh."
"Uh… but you already know where the hives are."
"Yes, so I built the Mining Fabricators so I could access them."
"But if you know where they are, why not just Teleport there?"
...
I didn't really have a good response for that.
---
The five NeoAvatars making their way slowly through the Marauder Ruins found their progress significantly easier once reinforcements arrived, in the form of half a dozen three metre tall spider bots with laser cannons.
They'd been able to hold back the Behemoths by sheer volume of fire, but with the Friendship Laser Spiders on their side, they were able to push against the pressing horde, the aforementioned lasers making quick work of anything larger than a standard humanoid.
They didn't have to push very far, though. After only about two hundred metres of bug-filled tunnels, the NeoAvatars found themselves at the lip of a huge pit that lead down into a cavern below. At the bottom of the pit?
A mining exosuit, formerly-yellow paint faded dull by the rigors of time, and shitty Martian weather.
Yoink.
More importantly, though: the owner of the mech, the currently unconscious Darius Mason, possessed a handy little device called a Nanoforge - like my own Fabricators, only on a much smaller scale, possibly more efficient, and capable of utilizing nanobots in several fun ways, such as energy pulses, shields, and… some other things? Don't remember, don't care.
Yoink.
Most important of all, though, the exosuit's weapon.
The single best weapon in Red Faction Armageddon. The only one I'd ever used in my more recent playthroughs of the game.The single most fun weapon in gaming history (at least, in my opinion).
YOINK!
---
The Anti-Bio Bombs the Red Faction grenadier had been using were known locally as Pulse Grenades - a handy piece of Marauder tech that resonated on a frequency that annihilated most organic matter, and did bugger all to rock, metal, clothing, or other technology (barring some of the more expensive, specialised, sensitive and/or fragile equipment, I suspected).
Naturally, I stole that, too. It took a while for me to smuggle in a small amount of nanobots without them being noticed, but once they got to the gun's internals it was a matter of seconds.
As the last of this particular wave of Plague made it into the open and were subsequently slaughtered, the Red Faction leader, and one of the other guards, made their way over to Troopers 21 and 23, who were taking cover behind a pile of crates near one of the Braves.
"God damn, son, what the hell kind of firepower you Faith boys packing? Your dinky little SMGs are outclassing our machine guns!"
Tempted as I was to be an asshole about it and reply with something along the lines of 'nanomachines, son', it would have been grossly inappropriate. Firstly, nanomachines had nothing to do with the firepower of the weapon. They were responsible for its fabrication, yes, but that had nothing to do with its power level. Second of all, the Red Faction universe was not unused to nanomachines, and probably wouldn't buy my shit.
Third, and most importantly, I'd used that joke at least twice already and I was pretty sure Hope would have less reservations about slapping me than I would about slapping myself.
"Well you see, sir, when you give a bunch of easily excited military engineers a huge budget and a state-of-the-art facility, you get a lot of fun toys. This just happens to be the newest, funnest toy. Rapid fire, thermal charging, high energy handheld plasma repeater."
The Red Faction guards looked at each other with barely restrained awe.
"Alright then. Question number two. What the fuck were those bugs?"
Ah. Right.
"Well, remember those Ultor bioweapons were were talking about? I think that was them."
The Red Faction guards looked away from the two NeoAvatars, staring across the formerly-empty cavern now flooded with slowly disintegrating corpses. "Well, damn."
"Yeah. This… could be problematic. Command's digging through Ultor's files, trying to find something that they're weak to, but…" Trooper 21 shrugged. "Slow going. Not to doubt the capabilities of your defenses, but I think it would probably be best if we held position here, at least for now. Once the storm dies down and we can get in touch with Command again, we'll see about moving out."
The sergeant looked at his comrade, and then out across the field of dwindling corpses again. "Damn, you keep killing bugs like that, you can stay as long as you like."
---
The Dimensional Gate lit up with a flash of blue light, a flat pane of energy forming inside the ring. After a couple of seconds, the cerulean light faded away, leaving a vision of a totally different world. A city of blocky green buildings and shining orange lights.
Hub. Or rather, Moon One. Which… needed a better name. Ah well.
As soon as the shimmering field became stable, and the link between dimensional gates opened, my resource network began positively overflowing with metal and energy.
Hope's Osiris stepped through the portal, followed by her small train of containment pods, but this time, the connection between us was not lost.
"Alright, so, for future reference," Hope began, "the easy, efficient two-way travel only works when you have gates both sides. Now we know."
"Yeah, that's good, I guess. Now, you get back to your wildlife preserve or whatever. I'mma crush some bugs."
Hope glared back at me through the portal. "Yeah, have fun. Don't forget to hack the-"
"Red Faction and Marauder computers, I know. I'll even send some units to Earth to see what I can yank from there. No promises, though."
Hope's Osiris shrugged - I didn't even know the frame supported that, but apparently it does, - and turned away from the Dimensional Gate. "Well, I should have enough of these dumb bugs to do science on and stuff. I'll see if I can find that stupid weakness of theirs."
"Yeah, thanks."
And I too turned away from the portal.
---
Team 1 emerged from the cargo elevator covered in dust, sand, and alien goop. One of the five carried Darius Mason, slung over one shoulder in a fireman's carry, the other four constantly scanning the environment with their SMGs.
Once they returned to their vehicles, I had them all mount up, - the still-unconscious Mason riding shotgun in the second car, - and begin the journey back to Bastion, the largest and most central of Mars' underground settlements.
Four of the Friendship Spiders accompanied them, the remaining units descending further into the tunnels to continue their search-and-destroy mission.
The Braves and their escort made quick work across the surface, encountering very little in the way of resistance - which was odd, because I seemed to recall a fair few missions on the surface in Red Faction: Armageddon and the bugs had quite a presence there.
Must have been due to the fact that I'd arrived fairly shortly after the bugs had been freed. They must not have had time to spread yet - and if I had anything to say about it, they were never going to get that chance in the first place.
Now that all the colonies were largely secured, and the majority of the civilians were safe within barricaded areas, I didn't have to hold anything back.
Time to meet the tide of flesh with a tide of metal.
---
Hope's NeoAvatar stared through the 'glass' into the room containing the Plague Creeper, imprisoned in its confined cell. The ugly beast had four long, spindly legs, covered in spines or spikes of some kind, a thin coating of fur or really small spines, and a wide maw, framed below by some kind of tusk or mandible, and above by a quartet of glowing eyes.
In short - creepy as all fuck.
Hope frowned as the intense levels of beta-radiation continued to have an incredibly minimal effect on the damnable bug. Flicking a mental switch, the emitters shut down, sliding back into recesses in the wall before being replaced by a pair of high intensity UV lights.
Which… also did nothing.
Hope double checked that the containment cage was not blocking the radiation (it wasn't) and then slumped backwards against the corridor wall with a sigh.
Their weakness was so stupid, so arbitrary… why couldn't she remember it?
The girl-turned-AI-turned-cloned-AI was dragged from her musings by an alarm, activated due to facility damage in one of the nearby labs. She sighed and activated the station's teleporter, moving herself to the cell in question.
The Plague Behemoth, the truck-sized acid spitting brute, was repeatedly slamming its forelimbs into the floor of its cell in slow motion - a reasonably smart move, all things considered, since it was the location of both the power supply and the slow-field generator. If it could break that… well, its prospects of escaping wouldn't really change, honestly. But still.
A pair of turrets descended from behind ceiling panels as the Behemoth continued to struggle, and Hope waited for the monster to break free. Finally, a blast of acid from one of the bulbous protrusions on its shoulder melted through the thin cover of the slow-field generator, and then the generator itself, melting the kinetic dampener into slag.
Suddenly the brute appeared to triple in speed as the dampening wore off, and it began throwing itself at the wall of its cell with renewed vigor.
After about seven minutes of alternating between acid spid and kinetic impacts, it finally managed to cause damage, creating a minute crack in the cell's transparent wall. Hope tensed, the turrets charging their weapons…
The glass shattered as the Behemoth rammed it once more, a full body charge that put it straight through the glass and across the room.
The Behemoth let out a keening scream, and then keeled over and died.
"Huh."
*Ahem*
Story post, because hospital is boring.
61 - Cave-in
Team 1, the group of five NeoAvatars I had sent to rescue Darius Mason from the Marauder Ruins, were in quite the spot of bother.
Nine Behemoths. Nine.
It took concentrated fire from two NeoAvatars to kill one of the damn things. I was starting to regret not sending them some heavier firepower, but there was just no way the Braves - or any of my other units, really, - were going to be able to fit down the cargo elevator, and finding a path through the tunnels would have taken ages…
So, I'd have to make one.
FABRICATORS! Overpowered as shit!
Of course, the speed at which a fabricator could dig through solid rock was limited, and there were probably better options.
Like, say… a giant drill. If it was made of tough enough materials, and powered by a sufficiently advanced motor, it would be able to absolutely rip through rock like it was nothing.
Hm.
Making a point not to look at the blueprints for the Vehicle Fabricator - or any of my other tanks, - I opened up the design program and started working.
First, I needed a body. Resource transfer system, CPU core, and internal generator all neatly lined up, surrounded in a layer of Progenitor alloys. At the front of that roughly cubic mass, a single, high powered Progenitor motor.
Attached to the motor, a drill big enough to make most miners envious. Exactly three metres in radius, with that weird corkscrew thing to… push dirt out of the way or whatever. Made entirely out of Progenitor alloys, completely removing wear and tear as something I needed to worry about. Heh.
The vehicle had four treads, set out in the same way as Halo's Scorpion Tank, but set at a slight angle to better deal with being in a circular tunnel. The rear treads mounted backwards-facing Fabricators, which would in theory allow the vehicle to harvest the dirt it was processing, or construct things in the tunnel behind it, such as supports to stop the roof collapsing.
I figured two Fabricators probably wouldn't cut it, so I stuck six more on the back of the vehicle's body, cutting into the armour a little to make room. Not that it would matter, since any enemy wanting to make use of that little vulnerability would need to be behind the tunneller in the first place.
That complete, I queued up one of my bot factories to build one. It would take about fifteen seconds to build… which was absolutely unacceptable.
Why did the factories only have four fabricators anyway?
I made a note to refit them, which Hope almost immediately answered. "Yeah, I thought the same thing back on Hub. Here -" a set of blueprints floated across the Command Network. "I call it the Land Factory… because, you know. It's a factory for land units. Vehicles, Bots, and Infantry-Scale stuff. Well, except NeoAvatars, you'd need a specialised building for that. What with needing the Engi Medical Nanobots and all."
"You know, you probably should have mentioned that you did that. It would have been nice to build them in this base, instead of the regular bot factories."
"Oh, yeah. Sorry. I'll just start saving new designs straight to the Command Network, instead of my AI core… hey, what did you need refitted factories for, anyway?"
"To build these new Mining Fabricators."
"Oh….kay. Why did you need Mining Fabricators?"
"To dig a tunnel to the Plague's hives so I can flood them with robots? Duh."
"Uh… but you already know where the hives are."
"Yes, so I built the Mining Fabricators so I could access them."
"But if you know where they are, why not just Teleport there?"
...
I didn't really have a good response for that.
---
The five NeoAvatars making their way slowly through the Marauder Ruins found their progress significantly easier once reinforcements arrived, in the form of half a dozen three metre tall spider bots with laser cannons.
They'd been able to hold back the Behemoths by sheer volume of fire, but with the Friendship Laser Spiders on their side, they were able to push against the pressing horde, the aforementioned lasers making quick work of anything larger than a standard humanoid.
They didn't have to push very far, though. After only about two hundred metres of bug-filled tunnels, the NeoAvatars found themselves at the lip of a huge pit that lead down into a cavern below. At the bottom of the pit?
A mining exosuit, formerly-yellow paint faded dull by the rigors of time, and shitty Martian weather.
Yoink.
More importantly, though: the owner of the mech, the currently unconscious Darius Mason, possessed a handy little device called a Nanoforge - like my own Fabricators, only on a much smaller scale, possibly more efficient, and capable of utilizing nanobots in several fun ways, such as energy pulses, shields, and… some other things? Don't remember, don't care.
Yoink.
Most important of all, though, the exosuit's weapon.
The single best weapon in Red Faction Armageddon. The only one I'd ever used in my more recent playthroughs of the game.The single most fun weapon in gaming history (at least, in my opinion).
YOINK!
---
The Anti-Bio Bombs the Red Faction grenadier had been using were known locally as Pulse Grenades - a handy piece of Marauder tech that resonated on a frequency that annihilated most organic matter, and did bugger all to rock, metal, clothing, or other technology (barring some of the more expensive, specialised, sensitive and/or fragile equipment, I suspected).
Naturally, I stole that, too. It took a while for me to smuggle in a small amount of nanobots without them being noticed, but once they got to the gun's internals it was a matter of seconds.
As the last of this particular wave of Plague made it into the open and were subsequently slaughtered, the Red Faction leader, and one of the other guards, made their way over to Troopers 21 and 23, who were taking cover behind a pile of crates near one of the Braves.
"God damn, son, what the hell kind of firepower you Faith boys packing? Your dinky little SMGs are outclassing our machine guns!"
Tempted as I was to be an asshole about it and reply with something along the lines of 'nanomachines, son', it would have been grossly inappropriate. Firstly, nanomachines had nothing to do with the firepower of the weapon. They were responsible for its fabrication, yes, but that had nothing to do with its power level. Second of all, the Red Faction universe was not unused to nanomachines, and probably wouldn't buy my shit.
Third, and most importantly, I'd used that joke at least twice already and I was pretty sure Hope would have less reservations about slapping me than I would about slapping myself.
"Well you see, sir, when you give a bunch of easily excited military engineers a huge budget and a state-of-the-art facility, you get a lot of fun toys. This just happens to be the newest, funnest toy. Rapid fire, thermal charging, high energy handheld plasma repeater."
The Red Faction guards looked at each other with barely restrained awe.
"Alright then. Question number two. What the fuck were those bugs?"
Ah. Right.
"Well, remember those Ultor bioweapons were were talking about? I think that was them."
The Red Faction guards looked away from the two NeoAvatars, staring across the formerly-empty cavern now flooded with slowly disintegrating corpses. "Well, damn."
"Yeah. This… could be problematic. Command's digging through Ultor's files, trying to find something that they're weak to, but…" Trooper 21 shrugged. "Slow going. Not to doubt the capabilities of your defenses, but I think it would probably be best if we held position here, at least for now. Once the storm dies down and we can get in touch with Command again, we'll see about moving out."
The sergeant looked at his comrade, and then out across the field of dwindling corpses again. "Damn, you keep killing bugs like that, you can stay as long as you like."
---
The Dimensional Gate lit up with a flash of blue light, a flat pane of energy forming inside the ring. After a couple of seconds, the cerulean light faded away, leaving a vision of a totally different world. A city of blocky green buildings and shining orange lights.
Hub. Or rather, Moon One. Which… needed a better name. Ah well.
As soon as the shimmering field became stable, and the link between dimensional gates opened, my resource network began positively overflowing with metal and energy.
Hope's Osiris stepped through the portal, followed by her small train of containment pods, but this time, the connection between us was not lost.
"Alright, so, for future reference," Hope began, "the easy, efficient two-way travel only works when you have gates both sides. Now we know."
"Yeah, that's good, I guess. Now, you get back to your wildlife preserve or whatever. I'mma crush some bugs."
Hope glared back at me through the portal. "Yeah, have fun. Don't forget to hack the-"
"Red Faction and Marauder computers, I know. I'll even send some units to Earth to see what I can yank from there. No promises, though."
Hope's Osiris shrugged - I didn't even know the frame supported that, but apparently it does, - and turned away from the Dimensional Gate. "Well, I should have enough of these dumb bugs to do science on and stuff. I'll see if I can find that stupid weakness of theirs."
"Yeah, thanks."
And I too turned away from the portal.
---
Team 1 emerged from the cargo elevator covered in dust, sand, and alien goop. One of the five carried Darius Mason, slung over one shoulder in a fireman's carry, the other four constantly scanning the environment with their SMGs.
Once they returned to their vehicles, I had them all mount up, - the still-unconscious Mason riding shotgun in the second car, - and begin the journey back to Bastion, the largest and most central of Mars' underground settlements.
Four of the Friendship Spiders accompanied them, the remaining units descending further into the tunnels to continue their search-and-destroy mission.
The Braves and their escort made quick work across the surface, encountering very little in the way of resistance - which was odd, because I seemed to recall a fair few missions on the surface in Red Faction: Armageddon and the bugs had quite a presence there.
Must have been due to the fact that I'd arrived fairly shortly after the bugs had been freed. They must not have had time to spread yet - and if I had anything to say about it, they were never going to get that chance in the first place.
Now that all the colonies were largely secured, and the majority of the civilians were safe within barricaded areas, I didn't have to hold anything back.
Time to meet the tide of flesh with a tide of metal.
---
Hope's NeoAvatar stared through the 'glass' into the room containing the Plague Creeper, imprisoned in its confined cell. The ugly beast had four long, spindly legs, covered in spines or spikes of some kind, a thin coating of fur or really small spines, and a wide maw, framed below by some kind of tusk or mandible, and above by a quartet of glowing eyes.
In short - creepy as all fuck.
Hope frowned as the intense levels of beta-radiation continued to have an incredibly minimal effect on the damnable bug. Flicking a mental switch, the emitters shut down, sliding back into recesses in the wall before being replaced by a pair of high intensity UV lights.
Which… also did nothing.
Hope double checked that the containment cage was not blocking the radiation (it wasn't) and then slumped backwards against the corridor wall with a sigh.
Their weakness was so stupid, so arbitrary… why couldn't she remember it?
The girl-turned-AI-turned-cloned-AI was dragged from her musings by an alarm, activated due to facility damage in one of the nearby labs. She sighed and activated the station's teleporter, moving herself to the cell in question.
The Plague Behemoth, the truck-sized acid spitting brute, was repeatedly slamming its forelimbs into the floor of its cell in slow motion - a reasonably smart move, all things considered, since it was the location of both the power supply and the slow-field generator. If it could break that… well, its prospects of escaping wouldn't really change, honestly. But still.
A pair of turrets descended from behind ceiling panels as the Behemoth continued to struggle, and Hope waited for the monster to break free. Finally, a blast of acid from one of the bulbous protrusions on its shoulder melted through the thin cover of the slow-field generator, and then the generator itself, melting the kinetic dampener into slag.
Suddenly the brute appeared to triple in speed as the dampening wore off, and it began throwing itself at the wall of its cell with renewed vigor.
After about seven minutes of alternating between acid spid and kinetic impacts, it finally managed to cause damage, creating a minute crack in the cell's transparent wall. Hope tensed, the turrets charging their weapons…
The glass shattered as the Behemoth rammed it once more, a full body charge that put it straight through the glass and across the room.
The Behemoth let out a keening scream, and then keeled over and died.
"Huh."
StrangerDanger51
Novice Writer
- Location
- New Zealand
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Silica Weakness?