Ghost in the Shell: Ascendance [ GitS / ME AU ]

[Sevoris]

A/N: Now that I had Togusa and Batou talk about human stellatography for a lot, an introduction to the rough shape and terms of human space is probably overdue.

Galactic cartography /Human space
Basic stellatography of human space​

For the average reader from Citadel Space, the cartrography of human space may be a bit confussing at first - Unfamiliar and new land as it is.

Human space is organized around the core Relay Hub of "Arcturus", located 36 lightyears from the human home system of Sol and their home planet Earth. Arcturus is one of the few "Alpha" Relay hubs documented galaxy-wide - It boundles a whole three secundary Relays and a, by normal standards, staggering seven Primary Relays in a singular star system. These seven Relays form the base of the "arms" that extend from Arcturus, and also form the seven "branches" (technicaly more, but all branching routes come from these seven) of human space.

The "arms" of human space were defined by the early, national exploration, colonization and general space control efforts of human nations during the 2600s [ACF] forward [2100 A.D. human gregorian calendar). Several major superpowers soon established, once sufficiently expanded away from Arcturus in terms of primary Relays (one to two primary relay transfers from Arcturus was the norm) their own controlled spaces. As humans explored the Relay network of their space during their First and Second Expansions, these first systems expanded into "arms" on the galactic maps - Which gave these former (now technicaly defunct through in some capacity still existing) national territories in space. Major arms are the Chinese Arm (which was later split into the inner and outer arm after The Bridge became enforced international space), the European Arm, the American Arm, the Indian Arm, the African Arm, the Indonesian Arm, the South African Arm, the Pacific Arm, and the Russian Arm. Other minor arms exist.

Other minor and major powers also created smaller and larger "pockets" of national space - These form "clusters" and were esepcialy found around Sol, Arcturus and other systems, including more open junctions such as Dejong Hub, New Kopenhagen or York Sentry. The densest concentration of Clusters can be found in the human Core, followed by the Orion Spur, which form the core and by now largely most developed areas of human space.

The "rings" refer to structures also encountered in Citadel space, especialy in the proximity of important Relay hubs. These lateral connections of primary and secundary Relays connect major Relay routes, ringing around Hubs in certain distances, and thus provide shortcuts between important arms. They also serve to branch of further Relay connections.

Human space technicaly has four rings, though only two of these rings are complete and are both located in the Orion Spur. The third and fourth ring are incomplete due to the separation between Orion Spur and the Orion-Cygnus arm. The second arm also serves as an important spin-trail connection path on the coreward side of human space.

 

[Sevoris]

When CEDT-698422 had been cartographed by a UIAS survey mission under System Alliance supervision in 2156, it had not garnered much attention - It was a 600km dwarf planet of surprisingly dense silicates and minerals wrapped in a shell of ice, a supersized Ceres-like dwarf planet which existed surprisingly often wherever human surveyors and explorers had gone, orbiting around a nearby gas giant on a far orbit.

Soon after, the first people moved in to colonize the rock. American settlers from the Belt and outer system mostly, mixed with waves of earth emigrants seeking to make a new live in the wider galaxy. CEDT-698422 becamde Cedatis Station, and it stuck; soon spray-painted all over the surface installations that grew on the surface of the asteroid, and the docking bays embedded into it. The population steadily climbed, rising as humans, bioroids and AGI joined together to tunnel out the rock and build a living infrastructure into it.

Over time, Cedatis Station evolved into a largely unremarkable hub of colonial culture - Offering harbor to hundreds of mining vessels, convergence of mass driver lines that crossed light minutes of space and months of time, and home to about a million people. With most of the traffic and activity going down in the inner system in whose outskirts Cedatis Station and its parent gas giant went on their merry way around the G-class main sequence sun, the station fell largely off the radar of the public, with only the occasional capital freighter running to the station to pick up cargo.

When CSQB/IIS-161 SSV Huginn decelerated into cee-frac cruise around two light minutes from Cedatis Station, its importance for the outer system however was readily apparent. A cloud of 400- to 800-meter contacts was circling the station at a variety of parking orbitals, interspersed with smaller 100-meter shuttles and tugs and a few 1000+ meter superheavy contacts, large mobile asteroid pushers or freighters.

Batou was watching the hybrid sensor fusion of Huginn's forward sensors on his in-head ARO, the 600-kilometer, round dwarf planet a semi-sharp pinhead in the center of the image, surrounded by drive flames and the white slivers of spacecraft, growing larger as Huginn decelerated to hundreds, then only dozens of kilometers per second and closed the distance with the asteroid.

"Infiltration party, stand-by for deployment in T-minus 5 minutes… mark", Operations Supervisor Lian Yu chimed in from Huginn's CIC.

Batou blinked his acknowledgment light and shifted slightly inside the crash couch of the Tachikoma's "pod"; the armored backpack unit containing part of the processing unit, secondary motive systems and some weapons but primarily the armored capsule that housed the human passenger/operator.

Due to the size constraints of the Tachikoma, the crash couch wasn't the most comfortable thing, or so a part of Batou's mind insisted. His cybernetic body could sit with the knees bent, head and torso forward and arms angled at the sides position without getting cramped or limbs getting sleepy; the only thing that could get on your mind was the lack of space to really move, not helped by the acceleration restraint netting that had wrapped itself around torso and limbs.

Batou pitied Togusa; the man was probably feeling far more uncomfortable in his own Tachikoma, despite his Medichines. Even medical nanobots could only do so much about blood vessels being physically pinched.

"You ready?", he asked the Tachikoma, voice contained inside the armored space combat helmet.

"Yes, Mr. Batou!", the cheerful reply came. Batou suppressed the involuntary grin that came to his face. The damn AGI was actually growing on him, despite its demeanor being rather… opposite to military AIs he had worked with in the past. They were either calm to the mechanical, dry-wit serious, or had a warm camaraderie. The "childish" approach to personality design was certainly unique.

"T-Minus 4 minutes. Stand-by rollover execute."

Maneuvering thrusters banged through the hull, the distant thunder of "hot-mode" plasma engines as they expelled superheated xenon into space mixing in with the quiet hum of the fusion engines forcing Huginn into a new vector against its own inertia and millions-ton real mass, forced down by the cee-eem into percentages.

Now Huginn had rolled in a manner so it would present its relative "upper side", as defined by the ship's main gravitics direction, to Cedatis Station once they entered their 100-kilometer parking orbit.

"Infiltration teams, final checks. Stand-by for Airlock evacuation at No-Abort in 30 Seconds, mark."

Batou gave his equipment one last, final electronic check, working his suited Shell as well as he could inside the command couch, and confirming the oxygen feeds to his helmet. They had padded each other down and given themselves a thorough check-up when suiting up, when entering the airlock, and before entering the Tachikoma's pods inside Huginn's spacepool.

But, as Batou had been drilled repeatedly during the Rangers Spaceborne Operations Training, triple-checking everything in person was how you kept your Shell intact in space. It didn't argue with you, it didn't cut deals - If you weren't prepared and relied too much on the AIs to feather you, you could suffer bodyloss - or die for real.

"No Aborts. Evacuating moonpool airlock. Launch window is T-minus 3:20"

On the immersive Synthetic Vision System feed generated by the Tachikoma for its Operator, the external environment indicators began to drop. The already chilly air of the moonpool, cooled down together with the Tachikomas outer hulls for the tense 15-minute Low Thermal Emission Space Operation they were about to conduct, was now sucked out of the room efficiently, sweeping Kiggs fields forcing the air towards the gravitics-assisted pump inlays in the walls.

Now the interior of the spacepool was entirely empty of air; swept as clean as modern technology allowed, and nearly as perfectly empty as the depth of space. Then the lights on the wall and ceiling cut out, and they were plunged into perfect darkness.

Batou glanced at the heatsink readouts and the schematic of the TMS coolant flow. They were ice-cold, the lithium within chilled as cold as it was possible, ready to sap the heat generated by actuators and life support away for precious minutes of low thermal signature. It was tried and tested tech that worked in slipping below detection and identification thresholds, especially around a "hot" target like this one where engine emissions and the heat sapping into the asteroidal rock from the station within created a higher-temperature background to blend into, but it was nerve wracking every time.

With the Rangers, Batou had become used to the indefinite operative capabilities of thermoptic camouflage. The ability to smoothly and always blend into his environment.

Compared to that, stealth in space lacked the air of smoothness and slowness he associated with stealth on the ground. Every move was rehearsed, machine-controlled, timed to precision, and the clock was always counting down, your window always closing with the brutal crushing fist of thermodynamics.

He hated it, and had no problem handing it over to the AIs to execute.

"T-Minus 2 Minutes."

"Do you think we will kill bad people today?", the Tachikoma asked.

"Maybe? Right now you", Batou padded one of the manual control joysticks "are just an Insertion vehicle, but we wouldn't mount guns and launchers onto you if we weren't expecting trouble, now would we?"

"Probably true," the AGI said thoughtfully. Batou shook his head inside the rest.

Then sometimes again, the AGIs could appear really naive, and he wished back the dry wit and expert soldiering of the Eth3N units of his Ranger days.

--- | 01010011 01010000 01000001 01000011 01000101 | ---​

Huginn had been approaching Cedatis Station under the Q-ship cover, slowly working itself into a parking orbit position from which it could deploy the first infiltration party.

Captain Jonathan "John" Steward had given himself as the grizzled old captain who immediately began working the young belter in Cedatis approach into shape so they got exactly the parking orbit they desired, and had prevailed with bravado.

The LAIs and CASIE had certainly helped with that.

Now they had made their first pass, and were approaching the infiltration site. "Infiltration team, stand-by to deploy. Ops, crack the spacepool."

On the upper side of Huginn, a medium-sized hatch opened, exposing the Tachikomas, braced and secured on the deck of the pool in two rows. Their thermoptics were already engaged, and a trigraphic system did its best to camouflage the opening to visual sensors.

"10 seconds to Separation", the Ops AI announced. "9... 8... 7... 6... 5... 4… 3… 2.. 1.

"Separation."

On cue, all Tachikomas ramped their CM fields up to full, reducing themselves from near 1-ton war machines to specks of dust in terms of mass, then simultaneously pushed themselves of the deck in a precise vector.

The entire maneuver happened in the span of two seconds. Cold Gas RCS fired in rapid staccato, bleeding velocity and forcing the trajectories down towards the asteroid, then reduce approach velocity, all the while the CM generators bent the laws of physics into shape to accept that the Tachikomas really only weighed minuscule percentages of their true weight at the moment.

Then the units touched the hardened rock of Cedatis Station as gentle as a feather falling in terrestrial atmosphere, and immediately extruded nanomotile attachment creep from their feet to secure themselves against the gentle but existent 1m/s centripetal force that threatened to catapult them away from the station.

They were down.

Above them, the second team departed slightly more flashy; a 60-meter shuttle separating from one of Huginn's parasite bays, clearing in a cloud of white RCS emissions, then igniting secondary engines to make the approach to Cedatis Station's docking bay.

Silently, under total com blackout, the Tachikomas headed for the manned structures that dotted the dwarf planet 500 meters ahead, jutting out of the even surface, walkways hanging into the black sky above.

Batou's own Tachikoma unit was following the lead element of the Major, Ishikawa and Borma, who were responsible for forcing their entry into the utility ducts that lined this part of Cedatis Station outer layer and were accessible through the structures ahead. Slowly, they were making their way over the dark grey substance of space rock; hammered by millions of years of debris impacts, porous but surprisingly strong - If you watched were you stepped.

Not that he was seeing much, the thermoptic camouflage eliminated their visual footprint. The only pointers, a light blue outline, was transmitted via simple fibreoptic cables that ran from unit to unit and ended in the Major's lead Tachikoma, a tiny low-bandwidth avenue of communication.

Above them, the dance of starships continued unabated against the rotating lights of the starfield and the half-visible marble of the gas giant the station orbited, lit in its exotic blues, violets and streaks of green. It was a strange image, the starships sometimes seeming to freeze into place as they plunged, actually accelerated upwards into the docks of Cedatis Station, sometimes with the assistance of yellow TugBots that had attached themselves to their hulls. Other times they screeched across the rolling heavens insanely fast, and that their positions weren't necessarily nose prograde only made the visual image more confusing.

So Batou forced his view back to the ground, and the approaching monoliths of impact gel, thermal isolation and metal foam superstructure that jutted out of the rock, and the heavy angled heatsink stacks next to them that pumped heat from some internal system into the depth of space. The Tachikoma's sensors detected no movement. No people in big, heavy hardshell suits or vacuum shells were working outside, no vacuum crabs were crawling across the structure to check integrity and replace debris-riddled components.

When they reached the utility walkway they would use to proceed to the airlock, they were forced to cut the fibre-optic lines so the Tachikomas could twist, use their multi-prehensile feet units to grab the ledges of the broad walkway, and lift themselves over and onto it using a little CM assistance. It was a fast, confusing move of machine acrobatics, and then the gentle tug he had felt for the last 5 minutes finally pulled everything down again, and he didn't feel like he was hanging of the tallest cliff in existence.

Batou sighed a relieved breath he didn't realize he had held. "Proceeding to Airlock," his Tachikoma AGI informed him, and now they proceeded remarkably faster, not at the slow crawl enforced by the nanomotile attachment creep and the cautious walk that had kept them from ripping loose rocks out of the surface of Cedatis Station, but a fast walk that carried them along the magnetic walkway at a good pace.

They circled around what was some form of surface extension of a vertical service shaft, including a cargo airlock at the bottom, following the ⟽AIRLOCK⟽ signs and red lines on the wall and finally reached the big pressure door marked with another massive "AIRLOCK" printed onto the insulated metal just underneath the central vision slit.

A big, sealed manual control pad was embedded into the outer wall, with a big red "Emergency Entry" button presented at both sides. They weren't going to touch those.

Ishikawa's Tachikoma simply pressed a manipulator limb against the wall next to the pad. The integrated omnitool immediately went to work, nanoprobes infiltrating the panel superstructure, creating minuscule breaches as they accessed the circuit boards within, creating physical bypasses and opening access for Ishikawa into the software of the airlock control.

2 seconds later the cyberwarfare expert had taken control, and the outer airlock door obediently slid open on its hydraulics, exposing the long airlock space able to circulate maintenance bots in and out. There was enough space for four out of the eight Tachikomas, and Saito, Paz, Togusa and Borma pressed in immediately - Ishikawa, Kusanagi, Batou and Raven waited outside.

After five minutes of cycling, and close to running out of heatsink capacity, all eight personnel of Team Shadow were inside of Cedatis Station, and the Tachikomas immediately proceeded with venting the stowed-up heat. Discreetly of course, and after Ishikawa had inserted more worms into the environmental controls to subvert the temperature sensors and any monitoring algorithms without outright disabling the system.

At the same time, their human operators were extracting themselves from the pods, and retrieving the equipment they couldn't carry while sitting inside the acceleration couch to refix it onto their SmartPacks. Finally, weapons were unfolded from storage mode without a sound, and they all re-vanished into the invisible mantle of Thermoptic camouflage, splitting up and heading out into the low-gravity innards of Cedatis Station.

--- | 01010011 01010000 01000001 01000011 01000101 | ---​

Bureau of Military Robotics
Kenbishi Heavy Industries QPPCS-90X "Tachikoma"

[ Current Status: Prototype Test Deployment ]
[ Hardware Units in System Alliance Inventory: 500 ]
[ Units in Testing: 100 (50 Earth, Sol, 30 Sol proper, 20 Arcturus) ]
[ Deployed Units: 350 with System Alliance Paramilitary and Special Forces Units ]

The Quadped Combat System 90 "Tachikoma" has been developed by Kenbishi Heavy Industries from 2228 until 2230 and was introduced into experimental deployments with the Systems Alliance in the same year.

The QPPCS-90X has been specifically designed as a next-generation all-purpose quadpedal Tankette for operations in wide open, urban, enclosed and space terrain, with an advanced locomotive system, nanodynamic chassis, four heavy-articulated propulsion legs and two primary actuator limbs, and enabled to carry one transhuman operator of humanoid shape inside a backpack-attached pod.

The Tachikoma is powered by a dual-source Fuel cell/Ultracap storage system with multi-hour battle endurance and days of locomotive operation; a Helium-3 Microfusion Pulse system was not installed due to space considerations and the fact that the Tachikoma is not intended for endurant operations independent of Supply lines. This fact aids the Tachikoma in reducing its thermal footprint significantly. Both systems are distributed throughout the primary chassis and the Pod system to reduce "headshot" capability to vital systems, instead only suffering partial reduction in power supply and storage capability.

Command and Control is driven by a Kenbishi-issue AICOS-9660 AGI(n), situated on six NPU primaries running in dual-mirror mode, integrated into the main chassis. Secundary processing operations and standardized OS operations are handled by a dual-redundant DCE with triple- and quad-redundancy in places.

The chassis of the Tachikoma supports semi-full nanodynamic reconfiguration with a semi-flexible armor system. While the chassis superstructure is not dynamic, hull and actuator configuration can be chosen relatively freely. Furthermore, this enables the units to quickly patch and repair even major damage; a nanorepair system takes care of more delicate damage.

For offensive systems the Tachikoma offers five primary weapon mounts - One gimballed central-line weapon mount, two actuator-mounted weapon mount, and two weapon pods extruding from the backpack pod.
The centerline mount supports either a GAU-920 7mm Kinetic Payload Gatling Driver or a 40mm Grenade Launcher system, with two standard M632 4mm Kinetic Energy Drivers mounted in the Actuators together with an M4201 Sluggun/Launcher system.
The Pod mounts are intended for loading Seeker and other launcher systems; standard load-outs include dual Micromissile boxes and two Anti-Armor Seeker launchers.
This gives the Tachikoma a solid mix of Anti-personnel, Anti-PA, Anti-Armor and Anti-Material firepower.

Defense is provided by a two-layered Kinetic Barrier system with optional Tech Armor reinforcement and Omniplating as "Frontman" and "Lockdown" settings, six-emitter Anti-Projectile lasers, and full-chassis ceramental/diamonoid armor plating.

Utility systems of the Tachikoma include all-limb mounted milspec Omnitool systems, an integrated vacuum/microgravity propulsion system, RCS, Jump Jet units, an MHDI propulsion system, vehicle-grade CM, grappling line extruders, a nanomotile surface attachment system, integrated drone fabbing, Battlefield ECM and Cyberwarfare capability, a recon sensor suite with extensive wall-penetrating capability, and thermoptic camouflage with 15-minute RTESO rating.

Final operational areas of the QPPCS-90 are urban and space pacification and operation, paramilitary intervention, and as a fully unmanned chassis with increased combat capabilities, as support for HPA and ACPA combat units.

 

[Darik29]

Just want you to know that your writing is Amazing and incredibly spot on with what I recall from the GiTS movie and anime.

Your quality is incredible.

Eagerly awaiting for next update. Especially since given what the informant said, it looks like Puppet Master is finally getting built!

 

[Sevoris]

Just want you to know that your writing is Amazing and incredibly spot on with what I recall from the GiTS movie and anime.

Your quality is incredible.

Click to shrink...

Thank you very much!

it looks like Puppet Master is finally getting built!

Click to shrink...

 

[MaHaL]

Tachikomas make me happy. Rarely have they failed to provide large amounts of amusement.

That personality and function seems to have been captured pretty well, keep on mate I'm excited for the next one.

 

[Sevoris]

Tachikomas make me happy. Rarely have they failed to provide large amounts of amusement.

That personality and function seems to have been captured pretty well, keep on mate I'm excited for the next one.

Click to shrink...

They're honestly challenging to write with their cheefull, childish character within the context of this universe because AGI is already so well established, so it's really wonderful to have a positive reception.

But yeah, who doesn't like them? Cheerfull little Murder Bots who are far more clever than it would seem. And well, with Mass Effect around they got some upgrades. They work suprisingly well as Vacuum infiltration/exfiltration units.

 

[Sevoris]

The Sol Aérospatiale STS-30 Shuttle from Huginn came in on a regular approach inside one of the approach corridors, matching the light rotation of the station and coming to relative rest next to the docking bay. Then it turned to thrust upwards and force itself onto a solid mating trajectory into one of the Hangars of Cedatis Station. Using cee-eem to indirectly boost the thrust power of its maneuvering engines, it penetrated the outer Kiggs field, held its position there for a second. Four heavy-duty docking arms extended smoothly, caught the craft, and pulled it through the inner Kiggs field, into the 0.2 g gravitic field of the bay.

Once the shuttle was level with the two-level boarding gangway on both sides, the arms locked in position, and pressurized walkways began connecting.

Miriam Walker and her team of three departed as soon as the personnel airlock was connected; wearing the sleeves of Belters and Vacuum Shells inside of personal counterpressure suits adorned with personal equipment, linear frames, and secondary life support, collapsed rapid-deployment helmets attached to the collar seals.

"Oye", she greeted the young belter working on something inside the docking airlock.

"Oye", the young man replied, busy working with a Transopter and some effector elements from his arm-mounted omnitools on some internal mechanics. Several small scarab-esque maintenance bots were assisting him.

Behind her, Miller took a respectful step around the young men, maneuvering the bulk of his Vacuum Maintenance Shell through the narrowing corridor; Clodovea Quinn Pinagpala Talavér and Israel Fekadu Bahta had no such problems, though Talavér had a massive Mars-born build of a body only exaggerated by later genetic modifications and almost scratched the ceiling with her bald head. Dust-red facepaint clearly portrayed her allegiance to the Red Void. Bahta's own face paint was heavier on other reds, creme light red, and dark blue; the colors of the Jovian system.

Walker herself had complex tattoos instead of face paint, the intricate silver on black facial tattoos of the Kuiper Republics on proud display, the constellations on her jaw, cheeks and temples showing the long hauls through the deep black of Sol and Arcturus; the two dusted Half-moons of the Sol-Arcturus Kuiper Belts connected by the thick double lines of the Mass Relays dominating her forehead.

They blended right into the mass of Spacers and Belters that populated the Docking Bay lobbies and loading zones, many of whom wore similar gear and facial decorations.

The hair was uniformly cut short or had been removed entirely; others had complex head-hugging weaves of hair and colored threads, but long, free-flowing hair was completely absent.
Pistols and Carbines were common; sometimes people wore bulky Pulse Lasers or heavyweight low-velocity Slugguns, less likely to crack especially thin hulls compared to the hypervelocity ammunition of modern mass drivers; a few shotguns were intermixed. No explosives or heavier weapons to be seen, however. Not that any would be needed here; these weapons were as much if not more for show than actual use. Ports like Cedatis Station were enforced zones of peace. Nobody liked shootouts in here.

After some 5 minutes of strolling, they found a nice café in one of the main avenues, and sat down at one of the tables, dropping orders into the café mesh. Walker and Talavér both produced thick portable terminals, and retrieved jacks to plug themselves in.

Internally, a Beta took over playing Walker as a Belter engaged in serious talk in Mandachreol; externally, nothing changed. Just four Belters on shore leave, enjoying a good talk while waiting for their drinks.

Inside the confines of her PAN, Walker activated her internal comps, booted the interface software, and joined a small personal Vir environment, just a comfortable chair of light lines and surfaces hovering in the black. Then she kicked in the hacking systems, and dove straight into Cedatis Station's internal network.

She oriented herself. Her terminal had established a civilian link with the local mesh, which was distributed by an eclectic mixture of nodes worked into the walls and furniture of the station. It also picked up several ports of the stations own maintenance network, and almost immediately, she isolated the tunneled and encrypted network traffic that was definitely part of the hab infrastructure.

Activating the Eidolon, she branched of several exploring fingers, mapping out the internal network. Quickly she located two network switches and compromised both, reading out their network configuration files, and thus locating a more important server hub and its ports.

Now she would have to get more tricky. They had several objectives. One would be to locate the hostile cell physically inside Cedatis Station the teams would move to assault. The other was to get the team a discrete communications channel by piggybacking on the local com grid, which would also open the doors for the AIs aboard Huginn.

The later was easy. It took her around 20 subjective seconds to worm her way through the attack and defensive barriers around the server ports, another ten to fully compromise the firewall's discrimination capability, 5 to insert a proper coms package inside the server and then close down her insertion route, covering her tracks smoothly as she went.

Inside the main attack barriers, getting into the utility, maintenance and administration network was easier; she tunneled through the barriers in four seconds flat. Then she opened the second connection to let Talavér in, who concentrated on snooping out traces of the OFIF cell while Walker went to work subverting the com system.

Using a hidden administrator account, she executed a network ping and trawled the list of returns. The com system was run by a network of separate server systems, but directly connected at the user and administrator level by a series of pots; accessing it and installing the Section 9 com software inside a shell of camouflage and search deterrence programs was easily done in a few seconds, all the while playing decoy-and-hacking with the snooper software, ICE, and their supervising LAI functions.

She opened a new connection and pinged. Almost immediately, 20 new connections sprung up and answered. She inserted the one-time key and booted up the TacNet, synchronizing the dozens of Data Streams on the hijacked server.

[All callsigns, Ghost-One, Com and TacNet check.]

[This is Shadow-Six, confirming good TacNet, good Coms. On-site intel and sensor sync?]

[Hold one, Shadow-One. Ghost-Two, Intel feeds?]

[Standby on that,] Talavér replied. [I'd suggest you open the space-side connection in the meantime.]

[Check.] She launched an additional program in the com server, and switched over to the Extranet and SSTS com server; she ordered a new connection established with the Huginn using the same data connection used to sync the local extranet for the craft as well as Cedatis Station Approach and SysCon data, thus allowing the AI and Operations Department in the CIC to also link into the growing digital network.

[Huginn Ops, confirm good connection?]

[Confirming good connection], the Ops AI, callname Matheria, confirmed. Her field routines immediately transferred through the new connection, branching out and deploying virtual fingers deeper and deeper into the server network of Cedatis Station.

[Shadow, Mesh feeds are going live now. Local feeds to your BDIS, and we have IRWDs running on the Spimes. You will get a ping as soon as something is moving. ...Maintenance bots are also subverted, sending you IDs for spoofing.]

[Copy all. Status on location of OFIF cell?], Motoko Kusanagi asked.

[Sorry, that's a negative so far, Shadow-Six. No good on the network trace. I'm letting Matheria run a second one, but we might need to resort to other means.]

--- | 01010011 01010000 01000001 01000011 01000101 | ---

Inside a vertical maintenance tunnel full of physical cables and pipes, Motoko Kusanagi stopped her climbing ascend for a second. [Repeat that, Ghost. You have no ping on our Target?]

There was a moment of silence on the TacNet. [Ah, yes, Shadow-Six, sorry. But physical imaging of network node locations and Mesh structure shows no deviation from standards. No unexpected nodes, to unannounced rooms, nothing. Snoopers are all running empty.]

[We expected this,] Batou said on the TacNet. [They'd have to be mighty stupid to make it that easy for us.]

[I know!] she snapped back, planting her next hand a little bit more forcefully on the girder.

[Shadow-Six, Athena-Actual. I must confirm the assessment of Ghost-Two. There is no network traffic, and I have not been able to confirm any easy backdoors. There are several now-closed ports, but I cannot identify where they connect. There is a marked lack of protocols and logs that points towards this having been the OFIFs connection into the Extranet.]

[Well, at least something. Physical connection?] She continued climbing up the shaft, the next level and the blue walkway platform there already in sight.

[Unable to extrapolate. The designated ports are part of the standard mesh and extranet backbone in your area, maintenance pathway 062.]

A visual overlay popped into Kusanagi's vision, outlining a shaft that ran the curvature 600 meters into the crust of the planetoid. That would make it outer maintenance, life support and support industry level, right? Next to some major avenues and habitat expansion, and in relatively easy reach of the docks and storage areas?]

[Yes. But there is no data on the official blueprints for a space of sufficient size.]

[That has to be them. Now, how to confirm?]

[There is one possibility.] Matheria suggested. [Installations like Cedatis Station have to conduct regular corrections of their spin due to imported and reduced force produced by the shifts, gain, and losses of mass through moving personnel, cargo, and spacecraft. The management system has to have been aware of the mass distribution generated by this illegal construction activity, even if it is hidden from regular purview of Operators not loyal to the OFIF cause. Forensic reconstruction of a nominal burn maneuver with real burn maneuvers, or hacking of the real Mass Distribution archives, could give is the exact location of the OFIF installation, its layout, and major mass distributions and equipment, depending on the level of detail and scrubbing they applied to the data before entering it.]

[Get on it. We're moving into the general area.] Kusanagi switched channels as she easily pulled herself onto the walkway and re-deployed her carbine. [Stalker-Six, disembark and complete the perimeter. I want you in the industrial area, ready to move in and open a second front when we storm the place.] Behind her, Batou easily lifted himself up onto the walkway in his armored Ares Enterprises MO-2-Niner Warrior Shell Suit, then helped Togusa up as she took point and began sneaking down the walkway, carbine up and scanning.

[Check, Shadow-Six. Stalker is moving now.]

[Ghost and Athena, you are cleared to hack those records. Get me positions, layout and as much other data as possible, and pipe it into the TacNet as you get it. We are moving into the area now.]

[Copy. Moving to hack.]

--- | 01010011 01010000 01000001 01000011 01000101 | ---
​

Walker knew something was up as soon as she began inching forward into the propulsion management system and dipped her metaphorical toe in the water. Her warning software went off at once, and virtual cages snapped shut around two guardian LAIs that have almost detected her, inserting subversion code to shut the virtual watch dogs up.

[Athena-One…]

[I see it.] The Ops AI sent its own digital watchdogs into the system, cracking the firewalls open as she did. [Deploying forensics and… oh, that's nice.]

Walker saw it herself. The software was indeed diverting them to another file server for the mass profile; an incredible fast move but noticeable when you looked for it, waited for it.

[Isolating address.] The AI threw a file over to Walker. Well, would you look at that. Trying to access the file, she triggered and isolated more programs. [Definitely something hidden here. Ghost-One is encountering enemy infosec non-compliant with Hab standards.] Analysis results from decompiling the software dropped into the network. [Aaand that's confirmed OFIF coding. Breaching the files.]

Alarms went off in her head almost immedately. Another piece of software had just waited for this, and almost simultaneously a data package escaped from her grasp, slipped through the quarantine cordon they had erected to prevent just that by triggering hidden-away functionalities in the OS code, and into the wider net. [SHIT!] She and Matheria immediately moved to contain it, but it slipped through their grasp, transferred itself from node to node. Capable of greater multitasking, Matheria retrieved the file and immediately used her AI cognitive capabilities to dissect it, running an LAI swarm over it to quickly isolate deviations.

[Got it. Shadow-Actual, Stalker-Actual, I have isolated the OFIF installation. Sending you now. Be aware that we tripped an enemy alarm and are only able to delay it; short of a full netcrash the enemy becoming aware that something is up - Estimated window is 1 Minute 30 Seconds.]

Inside the TacNet, the digital wireframe of the enemy installation was unfolding. Someone had gone through years of work, carefully excavating large rooms out of the dwarf planet's rock beyond the supporting district, creating caverns which were subsequently isolated, reinforced and tied into their own life support and power supply. All connected to the station through tunnels officially designated either as maintenance tunnels or avenues for later expansion.

"That is way larger than we expected," Batou remarked.

"Yeah. That's a volume of several cubic kilometers. No way they dug that out without local support", Ishikawa supplied.

Kusanagi took the layout in with the aid of analysis implants. Judging by the blueprint, they would be approaching the upper layers of the OFIF facilities - A series of one- and two-story rooms that would probably include the servers, judging by the mass distribution in the file, who listed heavy, high-dense objects as part of the room. They were connected by a series of tubes and corridors, one of which would be ending into the maintenance avenue they were approaching due to the clue of the hidden network switch that had been the installations avenue into the Extranet.

Underneath those room was, connected by several staircases, a second layer of two-story rooms, connected by what also seemed to be cargo elevators. Storage maybe, or maintenance. Beyond and around wrapped two living sections, and beyond that lay large three-story caverns probably serving as storage.

Alright then. They could handle that, between their equipment and gear. [Tachikomas, close up, prepare to force in with us. Stalker, I want you to breach on what seems to be the storage level, lowest avenue, through access tunnel 116. We will pincer them between us.]

[Understood Major!]
[Roger.]

[All callsigns, be advised we are moving in to breach. Time to alarm is 1 minute. The enemy will be aware something is up, so expect heavy opposition. Avoid computers and stack damage, but fire for direct shell neutralization.]

She picked up the pace, hurrying down the corridor towards a T-junction, picked up the run as she grabbed behind to her backpack to retrieve a cylinder with spherical recon drones. She slammed into the cover of the corner, took a quick gaze beyond, then gave Batou the lead and hurried on behind him, using her boot-mounted attachment strips to enable a fast pace in the low gravity, twisting the drone container she had finally retrieved open with one hand. Their heavy feet banged on the girder walkway, but that was irrelevant. Stealth was secondary now.

[Huginn Ops copies. We will stand-by to assist as able. Also, be advised that Party Crasher is on standby to deploy if necessary. Will now advise Muninn that Operations commences shortly.]

[Copy. Shadow is approaching breaching site.] The lid open, she rolled the already active drones out onto the floor, letting them drop, catch themselves on thin spider legs, and skitter off immediately. The TacNet flooded with Drone signals as the rest of the squad deployed their own drones, her ARO filling with more and more data and graphics.

[Understood. Alarm packet has reached the isolated network, a set of hidden mesh nodes just went live in one of the connecting tunnels. I am seeing spiking network traffic, watch hounds entities and ICE; secondary entities are erecting Attack barriers. Moving to intercept and contain.]

Kusanagi allowed herself a smile inside her helmet. It was a toothy, bloodthirsty smile. [Doesn't matter now, Athena. It is far too late.]

--- | 01010011 01010000 01000001 01000011 01000101 | ---​

A/N: And that is it. Our second, and far larger Operation is about to go hot... in the next chapter.

 

[MaHaL]

Oh dear, someone gon die today.

I like how you're giving the op setup it's own thing rather than just throwing in a paragraph or two about it.

 

[Sevoris]

Oh dear, someone gon die today.

Click to shrink...

You mean, suffer bodyloss. OFIF cells aren't religious radicals and have stacks. Unless you fire into someones neck with something really heavy and score a direct hit, wrecking a Stack is hard.

I like how you're giving the op setup it's own thing rather than just throwing in a paragraph or two about it.

Click to shrink...

I think the thinking part of a Section 9 Operation deserves its own mention, pun not intended.

These are experts in Infowarfare in a world that is extremely heavily connected. They're going to do their homework if they can before they go in.

Also, the original GitS did the same, especialy SAC.

 

[MaHaL]

You mean, suffer bodyloss. OFIF cells aren't religious radicals and have stacks. Unless you fire into someones neck with something really heavy and score a direct hit, wrecking a Stack is hard.

Click to shrink...

Colliqual. Though it was also not really thinking about it from an in-fic perspective.

I think the thinking part of a Section 9 Operation deserves its own mention, pun not intended.

These are experts in Infowarfare in a world that is extremely heavily connected. They're going to do their homework if they can before they go in.

Also, the original GitS did the same, especialy SAC.

Click to shrink...

Which is why doing it is good. It really does help this give me the same feels a lot of parts of SAC did, and I loved SAC.

 

[Sevoris]

Which is why doing it is good. It really does help this give me the same feels a lot of parts of SAC did, and I loved SAC.

Click to shrink...

Yeah.

Though we're about to go a bit more Mass Effect. The first major fight scene is coming along nicely.

 

[Sevoris]

"The modern soldier does not rule the battlefield by skill, or fitness, or even by determination.

All of these things can be made, added, removed, and tweaked as desired.

The modern soldier rules the battlefield through coordination, information supremacy, and the right combination of tools and capabilities for the right job.

Diversity is paramount for success."

SenseNet LiveStream Motoko Kusanagi
2215.09.26 09:36 Hours Local
FOB Himeiji, [REDACTED]​

--- | 01010011 01010000 01000001 01000011 01000101 | ---​

At first glance, the maintenance corridor seemed just like another of the thousands of tubes that had been dug out of the rock over decades of construction activity by an autonomous tunnel digger. Sharp teeth and hydraulic breakers had cut into the rock, used precisely tuned gravitic fields and an oil-based washing fluid to remove the loose detritus efficiently inside the 1 m/s spin gravity field, then coated the newly formed corridors down with high-tensile dual-component polymer, isolation and sealant foam, and anchored light composite lunacrete (that is, just light foamed silicate made from the excavated rock reinforced with binding fibres) panels against the new walls.

Then ConstructoBots and Shells had moved in with their many-limbed bodies to install blue alloy scaffolding and life support, bolting in air exchangers, heating mats, gravitic generators, then the spimes and mesh nodes and the power and cooling support for all of it. Lastly, thousands of kilometers of support pipes, data cables, superconductive power leads, coolers and heaters were moved in, the future utility feeds to power, heat, cooling and drive machinery in rooms that would be dug out of the surrounding rock.

The T-intersection 250 meters down the corridor however, was a deviation from the plans. Someone had smoothly expanded the corridor, rebuilding cabling and piping on the left wall as they went, rerouting feeds over the ceiling and through the floor while branching off a few for himself.

From the scanner feed of the Recon bot that had crawled 100 meters in front of them to establish an LSP, the T-intersection ended in a thick, standardized bulkhead as they were found in regular intervals; internal pressure seals that served to section off one part of the system off from the next, designed to slam shut and form small airlocks in case some section lost pressure… for whatever reason. The only accepted way for damage to occur this deep inside an asteroid habitat, under 500 meters of solid rock, was a relativistic impact (which would crack the station open anyway, 600 kilometer-diameter and billions of tons of mass notwithstanding) or weapons fire; in short, man-made violence. But then, that happened.

The door was almost certainly spimed; preferably they would have avoided it entirely and tunneled in through the wall or ceiling, but the conduits made that impossible.

Her right gauntlet omnitool produced a tiny disk that was shoved into her waiting hand; she threw the Dazzler unit into the T-corridor junction. One laser pulse later, the device had acquired the reflections of tiny Spime-standard Microlens arrays and hit every one with a holographic laser projection. From one second to the next, the spimes weren't able to image the real corridor anymore. Some VI within was probably going off this second and warbling about ECM, but they'd be breaching in seconds anyway. And Kusanagi had already expected and accounted for a breach through hostile fire.

"Breach plan Bravo-Four. Stack up." She bypassed the T-junction and the door directly behind it, sealing of the smooth curves of the junction, and pressed herself against the round wall of the junction, carbine up and pointing at the door, slapping another dazzler against the ceiling. Batou held position behind her, allowing Togusa to enter the junction in his heavy-duty Calisto Munitions ETOPA-60R Power Armor. The unit had a visibly bulky linear frame underneath the outer armor plating, with flexible weave and trigraphics-covered Omniplating covering the synthetic muscles and joints.

Togusa slung his Seburo ETC-5R combat carbine left low, where it attached to the frontal SmartPack via magnetic attachment points, and procured a nondescript black polymer device from his backpack SmartPack while slapping another dazzler onto the left corridor wall, then stepped forward and attached the device to the door before pulling a physical strip of the device, exposing a fat red mark underneath.

"ETDD is set."

He stepped back and shouldered his carbine with only the right hand, bringing the left, outer gauntlet forward and up. The breaching shield's physical framework unfolded smoothly from its storage unit mounted onto the armour, until it had expanded into an octagonal shape and arrested. The black surface material visibly stiffened as the internal ballistic material was electrified.

At the same time, Kusanagi pressed in, Batou following her, setting up slightly staggered in front of the bulkhead. Ishikawa came fourth, then Borma and Paz on either side of the T-junction; Saito and Raven brought up the back in the same formation.

"Set."

Kusanagi threw a last glance at the Squad Realtime Status and the Strategic Situations display, both expanding in her vision and third eye. Stalker had managed to set themselves up in record time, and were approaching the second breach position guns up.

The enemy was now aware of their intrusion for maybe 30 seconds, less than 10 seconds that something was happening at this bulkhead, as signaled by the scramblers. Enough time for automated defenses, but not for stacking up layered defenses. Waiting for Stalker however would give them even more time to do that.

Analytics implants juggled percentages and probabilities for a few milliseconds. Decisions were made and introduced to the Ego they were serving.

A cool calm overcame her, and she kicked on the squad-wide Battle Mode. Every single combat implant, every psychoaugment, every combat system would be running into high gear now, the complex battletrance of the modern transhuman soldier settling in.

"Shadow is breaching. In three… two.. one."

= Chapter 2 - "Knock-knock" =
-| May 17th, 2232 |​

It all happened within the span of a single second.

Integrated T-Ray and Microwave radar transopters in the Victus Munitions ETDD-4008 pinged; reflecting off the interior of the first bulkhead - And the second one two meters behind it, forming yet another airlock.

The LAI running on the aftermarket control module of the demolitions device queried its breaching instructions and tripped Case 2 "Long breach", configuring the geometries of its projectors and pinging the TacNet with the information its sensors had recovered.

The CM field snapped into place in an instant, base geometries of complex dark energy patterns extending from the complex lense array set into the device's bottom. Then the geometry deteriorated, and atoms began vibrating as they became lighter and lighter. The crystal structure of both bulkhead doors melted, then vaporized in milliseconds under subject of altered mass. To the human eye, the door flashed from cherry red to orange to blinding radiant white for a single second.

Then the gravitic field cut in, and catapulted the hot mass of metallic, composite and conductive materials that had made up the bulkheads away from the breaching device - straight into the muzzles of a Hahne-Kedar HKR-2 quad-legged sentry gun that had propped itself up before the airlock, ready to fire its KED minigun through the material of the inner door. The vaporized door material, rapidly turning back into hot dust as it left the influence of the degenerate countermass field, clogged the accelerators shut, and coated everything inside the X-junction behind the airlock in a grey blanket.

As Togusa stormed forward through the fresh breach into the airlock, the sentry gun exploded in a small but spectacular fireball as its railguns short-circuited, the far more electrically resistant metal dust inside the accelerator superheated, and flash-vaporized with destructive results. Shrapnel pinged ineffective against the outer kinetic barrier field of the breaching shield, and Togusa simply shoved the gun's wreckage aside with his now-500 kilograms of armored mass.

The sentry had propped itself up in a small X junction - the corridor ahead was cut off by another bulkhead door some 50 meters downrange. To the left and right, open archways offered a surprising view of rooms beyond. The walls were barebones, cable conduits still exposed.

[Going left]. He rotated in slightly to face the left access, a launcher snapping up on his left shoulder and flinging a Multi-Band Flash disk grenade into the room. "Grena…!" someone inside managed to shout out of wired reflex before the primary scatter charge went off, followed by a cacophony of bangs and bright optical flashes together with a squelch across the EM frequencies.

Togusa pushed in, combat shield still up, using its sensors to take the room in at a burst of 12x cognitive acceleration.

He was on the second level of a two-story room, a long U-shaped platform with an open space in the far middle. A single broad staircase formed an in-cavity connection between the two levels. Several thick metal pylons with matte black finish formed a vertical structural element and also served as anchors for the platform and the bases for massive cable channels filled to the brim with CATX-7 cables that ran across the ceiling in thick but orderly bundles.

The endpoints of these cables rested on large, electric work-rated tables - massive black cases full of computer hardware, massive holographic and trigraphic display rigs, hardware interfaces, and comfortable chairs with integrated interfacing hardware.

The probable users of these workstations had all gathered in two groups along the lower part of the U around large equipment cabinets and had been in the process of getting weapons and linear frame-equipped armor out when Togusa burst through the door. Only two were fully armored up and had their helmets on, managing to shrug off the cluster flashbang. Even so, the grenade had had a far reduced effectiveness.

[> Threat Assessment - 10 Shell targets. All equipped with Anti-Flash equipment. Light Combat Augs highly probable, expect more augmented capabilities. <]

Argraphic data sprang up as data analysis systems noted more details - Equipment, weapons, heatsink and ammunition packets, the signs of visible arm and neck augmentations, but Togusa's attention was now lighting-focussed on the welcoming committee.

Two Saber Robotics General Infantry Units had been stored in wall creches, close to the entryway Section 9 had just breached through, and both had deployed once the ECM alarm of the door spimes had gone off, shouldering heavy Combat Robot-issue NR-99 Heavy Assault Rifles and aiming them squarely at the access door .

With a clear view of the threat before them, both machines immediately cut loose, and Togusa grit his teeth as shots slammed into the shield's reinforced barriers, kinetic feedback hitting his arm as if someone was bombarding him with a flurry of angry fists. And that would be Threat number 1. He sighted the digital crosshair on the unit's torso through the AR-graphic that made his shield look transparent and fired anti-materiel rounds on Burst Auto.

His fire chewed straight into armor as the unit lacked shields (not unsurprising given eezo was relatively hard to come by; armor was not), and the machine began evasive actions, trying to spread out his fire over its chest armor - a notion Togusa counteracted with AI-assisted precision, keeping his aim true. With a slight click his assault carbine switched to another of the small secondary ammunition blocks, and several 6mm explosive payload flechettes buried themselves into the chest of the GIU. It dropped with a massive bang as it lost power, the other following a second later as Batou's own LMG ripped the unit to shreds with dozens of ultra-dense depleted uranium kinetic flechettes fired over Togusa's shoulder.

The red outline figures of the two GIUs dropped off the Local Threat Window with flashes of blue and turned grey the same instance Togusa's HUD confirmed the kills with the same animation, a blue outline and filling running down the formerly orange outline of the units.

The target indicators of the Tactical Directory System jumped to the right and directed his attention to the 10 OFIF fighters who had used the time it had taken Togusa and Batou to take down the GIUs to get themselves back up to speed. Fourteen mass accelerators cut loose, and Togusa and Batou both dived into cover, letting cee-eem assist them in getting out of the firing line as fast as possible, squeezing off bursts from their weapons as they fell, pinging into barriers, Togusa collapsing his combat shield just in time to catch his fall with the now-open left hand. A nice thick series of reinforced polycrete slabs that had probably been intended as somewhat sloppy screening for the defenders gave them enough cover to eject heatsinks and load new ones from the integrated reserves and both primed their omnitools in a move already executed dozens of times.

Togusa launched a dual set of ECM/Overload grenades from his right Omnitools ready-launch mag, the tiny units arcing up and about into the room proper. "EC…" another voice pressed out before both devices squealed junk data into the electromagnetic spectrum and detonated into "shrapnel" of active release elements and electro-conductive nanodust. Lightning arced through the air and forced kinetic barrier emitters into Save Mode, and Batou's own units arrived only a second behind. The incendiary devices went off with dull thumps of plasma-flash explosions, and both men popped out of cover, squeezing off short bursts aimed at heads or center-mass as they moved to the right and deeper into the room. Togusa's three burst felled one fighter, missed, then hit another OFI fighter with downed barriers, spraying blood and cyberbrain casing across workstation monitors and sending them into protesting flickers of concussion damage and optical projection faults.

Batou's LMG-primary cut a literal swathe of destruction across one table island; cutting down the three other OFI fighters in a bloody mess of dozens of center-mass hits and destroyed computing equipment. [Watch your fire!], Togusa snapped out as he flipped back into cover with his suit barrier tanking hits, another GIU from the far end of the room taking a bead on him with its NR-99.

Outside in the corridor, a DMR boomed like distant thunder through the audio filters, temporarily blocking out the sounds of the firefight from the room across the corridor currently being stormed by the Major and Ishikawa. Down the far side of their room, something flashed and debris and smoke flew into the room together with a loud explosion through another access on the room's long end. [Corridor turret is down!] Saito reported, [I am moving left.]

He rolled into the cover of the arch out of the settling cloud of metallic dust, a spectre under thermoptic camouflage, and brought his rifle up in an instant. Someone noticed the faint motion and drift of the dust and began to open his mouth before Saito's first three-round burst breached his barriers and took his head off with surgical precision. He switched targets and dropped a second OFI fighter before popping an on-armor smoke charge and breaking cover for a new position, return fire from a hostile with two handheld heavy machine pistols shredding the air behind him.

Time to take out that bot on the far side. Togusa thought-clicked through his secondary weapon options and selected the Micromissile launcher mounted in his right pylon. A secondary window in his HUD plotted the trajectory based on TacNet data and one of the "ears" mounted on his heavy helmet, and Togusa took a deep breath, waited out the next suppressive burst from the HAR, before throwing himself forward out of cover and turning around, giving the launcher space to deploy and the heading to fire. It popped out and over his shoulder with an electronic whir, and ejected two Micromissiles only an instance later.

The two solid-propellant missiles jetted through the air in a slight arc before diving down into their targets. The GIUs lacked active laser defenses and kinetic barriers to intercept the missiles; their AIs thus resorted to trying to shoot down the missiles with fire from their assault rifles. The targeted unit shot down one missile, which died in a squelch of ECM, which gave the second one enough time to reach effective fusing distance, impact the chest of the GIU, and blow its main power unit in the chest apart with a HEAT warhead. The robot dropped with a heavy bang of metal on metal, smoke curling from its chest before an electrical fire erupted in the ruined power cell.

A group of four fighters took the window of opportunity the suppressive fire by the GIUs had created to charge Batou's position, with one of them lobbing a heavy, classical grenade over the cover. The charge broke as soon as Batou's own Defense Management Suite detected the approaching explosive device and used a shoulder-mounted emitter on the MO-69 Warrior to propel the explosive right back at the fighters.

"Oh fu…" one managed to curse before the simple-fused explosive detonated and ripped the front two, including the thrower, to shreds. The other two losts their barriers completely while Batou's were only weakened, and fell to 10-round bursts from the LMG. [Let's end these idiots. Athena, get the bots off our back. Mem-tac out!]

Batou plucked a hand-thrown multi-mission tactical payload grenade of his own from his belt, primed the device with a flip of the arming cap and a deep depression of the button underneath, and lobbed the device into the room with an underhand toss.

The cluster flashbangs went off with a cacophony of sounds, but this time, a heavy load of solid-state smoke pellets and Recon Microbots joined them. The workspace filled with dense IR-scrambling smoke and ECM, and the fire of the GIUs suddenly cut off as their systems were bombarded with cyberattacks from the team's portable NetWar nodes.

Togusa vaulted his cover, slid over the table, and ran almost straight into the highlighted enemy. His carbine's over-barrel shotgun barked three times, finishing at extreme close range, and the Shell collapsed, his chest opened up in a bloody crater to expose the artificial organs underneath the armored ribcage within.

Next to him, Saito vaulted his own cover with the left hand free, a violet-blue corona flaring up around his shoulder and traveling down his arm. With a mnemonic gesture, he ripped three enemies out of cover and suspended them in mind-air inside a lift field, then shot down the middle enemy who helplessly flailed in mid-air down with a single aimed shot into the chin guard, stopping only for an instant to steady himself in a low hunch, left leg stretched out forward.

In advance, Togusa angled right and shot the left-most enemy out of the air; an opening a hardsuited woman in cover in front of him used to pop up, blast Togusa with an arm-integrated shotgun that decompacted from her arm guard, and then charge him with her right hand balling into a first.

The trigraphic pop-up around the quick-forging carbide Omniblade alerted Togusa half a second after his Threat Assessment AI; instead of swinging around the carbine for a potentially blocked burst at close range, he dropped it with both hands, not bothering to sling it, and brought his left hand up, own omnitool priming its effectors, right hand dropping towards the massive holster for his revolver strapped to the right thigh.

The omniblade unfolded, and the woman came in for a textbook stab into the chest. The omnitool would negate any barrier formations at such close range, and the ultrathin carbide would have no issues piercing through his chest armor and stabbing into his heart, where it would shatter into equally sharp shrapnel.

Just like in training. Trust your skills.

His left hand dove towards the hot-orange shape of the blade, omnitool discharging. The trigraphic stayed in place, but underneath it, the carbide blade shattered as negating mass effect fields pierced the suspending envelope of the hostile omnitool. From one second to the next, the woman attacking Togusa was disarmed.

His left hand latched onto her fist, and he caught her in the iron grip of the Power Armor Suit, artificial muscles squeezing tightly, and he sidestepped around her left, twisting the arm into a lock as his right drew the revolver.

He rammed the heavy weapon right into the now-exposed armpit, where only armored weave and none of the mainline barrier emitters were protecting her from penetrative hits, and fired a quick double-tap. The woman went limp, and he shoot her once more in the side of the helmet. Ceramic armor material sprayed everywhere from the close discharge, and an ugly-colored mix of blood, brain tissue and white ceramic partially splashed on Saito, who had moved up as Togusa performed his CQB execution.

On the right side, Batou was less sophisticated, simply hosing down two OFI fighters in chest and leg hardsuit armor with his LMG, shouldered a third out of the way before slamming an right foot down on his chest and caving it in, ejected a heatsink as he did so, then switched his fire to more GIU units on the far side of the room. The robots actually ducked into cover, and Batou moved up to flank the last group of fighters in the middle of the room.

The same group was straight in the path of Saito's advance. Saito realized he had overextended himself a bit, and cursed himself. No time to backpedal now. He took the burst of fire that broke his barriers, threw his heavy DMR straight into the face of the enemy, increasing its weight with his biotics as it impacted, then quick-drew his Carnifex and shot the human in a classic Mozambique drill. A dirty kick to the right leg brought the second one to his right down on his knees, and Saito shot him in the face almost off-handedly.

The third and last fighter had completed his own transition to an even heavier sidearm than Saito's Carnifex when Togusa simply bashed him over with the butt of his carbine, then fired a burst into his downed form.

With all human fighters taken care off, Batou contented himself with finishing off the robots. Under a renewed cyberattack by the supporting AIs, the units froze up. Batou simply sawed them into pieces through the flimsy cover of the desks.

[Sound off, R-L1!] Togusa said.

[Clear Center!]

[Clear Right!]

[Major, how are things on your end?]

[Encountering resistance in transition to R-R2. Watch your doors, you might have incoming any second!]

[The corridor is locked down,] Borma reported. [Tachikomas are in in 10 seconds.]

A loud audible explosion, muffled through the distance shook the metallic foundations.

[Stalker, report!], Kusanagi asked in alarm. [What was that?]

[Sorry Shadow, Stalker has engaged and disabled an enemy quadped on the storage/garage level. That was the power cell going.]

"Speaking of which, someone get that GIU out," Batou remarked. The robot downed by Togusa's micromissile was by now a happily burning bonfire of plastics and electrical components, fueled by the still burning power cell.

Saito bowed down to retrieve his DMR.

Togusa screamed as he was ripped off his feet, and new fire scythed through the room.

--- | 01010011 01010000 01000001 01000011 01000101 | ---

A/N: In the words of a heavily armed and armored chainsmoker: "Hell, it's about time!" ​

 

[Sevoris]

"...what the fuck is even going on?..."

"...we got intruders in the garage, engaging the security mechs..."

"..something on the external Mesh is fighting us, I think we have an enemy AI in play…"

"...reboot the attack barriers' secondary execution. Switch them to dual-vote mode. I want the core systems uncompromised and the barriers tight!..."

"...repeat, we're getting overru-[Connection Lost]"

"...something's attacking our Security Bots, we're losing effective fighting capability and our Spime Network is dropping out; uh, I think we can call that confirmed subversion in progress…"

"...I WANT REINFORCEMENTS IN THE SPINWARD CORRIDORS AND I WANT THEM NOW!..."

"...working on that, we got jumped!..."

"...uh yeah, we kind of need them out now…"

"...start scrubbing those terminals. Flash, then destroy. Not the other way around! Flash! Destroy! Don't give them one quantum of data to work with!..."

"...wait a second, what's that package doing there? Terminate that, and FUCKING REBOOT THE FIREWALLS!..."

[ INTEL FEED SUBVERSION WORM ID 5a4df210-ca60-4517-9244-6368293513b7 FEED LOST ]

--- | 01010011 01010000 01000001 01000011 01000101 | ---​

Matheria's sentient systems were reveling in the situation at hand, PAWLOW scores skyrocketing as she multitasked a dozen different tasks at once, sub-components chattering and recombining like a small patheon, in turn directing harems of LAIs and VIs, who controlled conventional software; a complex, interconnected hierarchy of pieces that hungrily devoured every piece of data to assess the situation inside Cedatis Station and assist the assault teams.

Using the team's own mobile nodes and the station's communication network as backbones, she and the other AIs of the Huginn were the invisible force working in the background that processed and analysed data, identified threats and opportunities, trawled tactical profiles, and coordinated team movement in coordination with the in-field commanders using subtle neural nudges.

As such, they were also the first who became of a somewhat uncoordinated counterattack on Team Shadow, arriving first at Room Right 02, then at Room Left 01, relative of the breaching point.

The predictive onboard TEIRESIAS suite immediately devoured the tactical picture and neatly spat out possibilities and weighted option trees scant milliseconds later. The enemy had deployed three biotics among the reinforcements, two into R-R02, one in R-L01. The counterattack in 02 had been largely unsuccessful, on account of Ishikawa making liberal use of explosives and field engineering with his omnitools to barricade the only viable entrance, which had seen one of the biotics being hit with a Phase Nullifier head-on and thus fizzling out his biotic move; the other was now engaged in a heavy CQB duel with Motoko Kusanagi and was, so far, holding his ground. Ishikawa and Raven were struggling with the conventional reinforcements, including a lance of heavier combat robots that now sported shields, and were slowly being pushed back across the room. Raven in particular had suffered a leg injury after over-extending with a charge, and was now dragged into cover by Ishikawa while the medigel patching went into effect.

Over in R-L01, the situation wasn't much better. Togusa had been hit with a lift field and a hard vector and was practically being thrown through the room, Saito had been caught bowing down retrieving his DMR, and Batou had been forced away from his position near the doorway by a similar group of heavy combat robots.

She assessed her progress in compromising the enemy network. The total subversion percentage was only slowly climbing, and the enemy leveled heavier and more clever defenses against her, but the first major play was almost in place.

Furthermore, the Tachikomas were only seconds away now - but the Section 9 Operators would have to survive those few crucial seconds intact.

--- | 01010011 01010000 01000001 01000011 01000101 | ---​

"Shitfuckdammit!" Batou cursed as he dodged left and away with the assistance of his jump pack, ducking as low as he could behind the computer tables to avoid the fire of the sudden reinforcements which had announced themselves by flinging Togusa across half the room, his body dropping onto a table group at the left end close to the archway they had entered through at first, and landing with the sound of breaking display glass and spalling wood.

Batou brought his SMWS-06HR Werewolf back up, switched over to the Seeker launcher, and risked a discharge straight through the relatively flimsy edge of the table, triangulating using the enemy fire and data from the recon bots to guide his fire. One of the robots finally dropped after three seeker rounds had blasted through its barriers, armor and burrowed into the chest unit, spitting small shrapnel, black hydraulic and white CF fluid from under the edges of its torso armor; the other fell after Batou sacrificed three of the ball-shaped recon drones on the one which just rounded the corner, blowing its backpack unit up with the drones onboard suicide charges. Only 4 left, he huffed and activated a Shield booster, refilling his KBCs. With a thought-click, he switched over to Railgun mode, letting the weapon shift over to the other weapon module. Time to stop playing games. They want to roll heavy, happy to oblige.

The weapon cycled a fresh heatsink and the first of the six heavy sabots in the ready-use magazine, and signaled readiness with a cheerful beep in his head. He vaulted out of cover and sighted in on the first robot who had taken the lead, a heavy three-barreled automatic shotgun in metal hands. Batou fired.

Saito saw Togusa go flying out of the corner of his eye, and felt the sympathetic harmonies of the edges of a biotic sleight on his own nodules in the same moment. The DMR was forgotten. Against a biotic, it would be largely useless, moreso because he wouldn't get the chance to get enough range to effectively use it.

The best option now was CQB. An option he did not look forward to at all. He had had several clashes with batarian, Asari and Turian biotics during his Blue Suns days, and each one had been an ugly experience in every aspect. When two sophonts with the ability to bend the universe to their whims clashed, the results tended to be messy, for the combatants and their environment alike. Then his eyes fell on the Tactical Overview Window, and he had an idea.

He dove towards the biotic's legs using only his bio-augmented legs and some minor CM, feinting an attack that would rip the legs out from under him. His reaction was to bring the left leg back for a biotic-assisted kick, and raise his arms in preparation of more mnemonic gestures, most likely another lift field followed by a push into an environmental object, intended to wind Saito.

He had waited exactly for this moment of vulnerability, and used his maneuvering thrusters and a flare of the cee-eem to recover from the low lunge and turn it into a high grab around the biotic's torso, hitting himself and his opponent with a lift field simultaneously. They both spiraled off the ground, apparently weightless without the influence of gravity, and Saito whirled the biotic around with another pulse of his maneuvering thrusters.

Then the biotic suddenly detonated the lift field. Saito screamed, and so did his counterpart, as the field flared from the destructive interference, self-reinforced in a harmonic reaction of dark energy waveforms, and caused feedback into the eezo nodules that permeated his nervous system. Saito's Medical Suite tripped the safety feedback and slammed implanted cut-outs shut at the same time as nano swarms converged on inflamed nerve tissue; the lift field collapsed as his biotics were momentarily surgically amputated, and they both dropped to the ground, barely managing to catch themselves on their feet.

"You should be fighting with us, brother, not with the oppressors!", the other biotic suddenly shouted over the sounds of the still-continuing firefight, grabbing both of Saito's arms and struggling, his biotics flaring with emotional boil-over and mnemonic bleed.

Around them, the room got further demolished as Togusa rejoined the firefight and hosed down the OFI fighters at the other end of the room, bombarding them with Overloads, burst fire, and an underbarrel seeker, then jump-jetted across the gap in the U-shaped second floor and flanked the entrance together with Batou. An explosive-cored omniblade was sunk into a combat robot and detonated with a muffled bang; elsewhere metal tore as Batou ripped two units who had tried to rush and bind him apart with augmented strength. Pistols barked, and servos whirred.

"I. Am not. YOUR BROTHER!", Saito shouted and jammed a biotics-infused and barrier-covered knee into the enemy's abdomen, who took the blow with his own barriers, but still staggered. "And you most certainly aren't MINE!" His left fist hit the biotic straight in the head, and slammed him to the right. A balled right fist channeled a grip field, and the man was abruptly stopped mid-stagger, an opening Saito used to bring in another reinforced right - Which the man caught with his open hand and a catch field, Saito's hand running into something that felt like air turned syrup.

"THEN YOU DIE WITH THEM!", he shouted back and tackled Saito. Over his shoulder, Saito saw the light blue friendly outline enter the room at high speed, already turning to face the room.

He grinned. "No, 'brother'. I won't."

[NOW!] He slammed the biotic with an overhead vector field, temporarily fixing him in place, and dove out of the way.

[Yes, Mr. Saito!]

The GAU-920 spun up with a shrill noise and cut loose.

Inside the confined quarters of the room, the anti-material gatling gun was like the thunderstrike of Zeus. Its high-hypersonic rounds ripped the air in half in a massive, laser-like flash of ionized air, and 100 rounds connected with the exposed biotic in the first second alone.

The explosive payloads were really just overkill.

The man was shredded into fine bits in the first 50 hits, his barrier flashing and collapsing helplessly and his biotic aura flickering with the harsh protest of the photon fields of eezo nodules - then his torso was torn apart. The gun stopped firing for a miniscule moment, the Tachikoma tracking a new target before opening up again.

The world seemed to vibrate even inside Saito's cushioned and isolated helmet, and nothing else was audible over the sheer noise the weapon made.

Then, from one second to the next, there was silence.

The far wall of the room was a slaughterhouse. Blood and mechanical fluids were sprayed everywhere, dozens of craters had been punched into the isolation and regocrete panels. The access door was a flimsy remnant of its former self, and beyond lay several more combat robots and the corpse of another OFI fighter. Through the far door, several shells were just vanishing, in a full rout. "Fuck, they got Quads, they got Quads!", someone could be heard before the door slammed shut.

"Everyone alright?", the Tachikoma asked.

"Yeah." Batou helped Togusa back to his feet. "Let's go." He nodded towards the shell of the door. Saito finally retrieved his DMR, checking the weapon over and noting it had cooled down on its own, then keyed his com, speaking: "Shadow-Six, we are ready to proceed."

[Copy. We more in three columns. Tachikomas on all three. Togusa, Batou and Saito are left, Borma and Paz are center, Ishikawa, Raven and me are right. Move out!]

--- | 01010011 01010000 01000001 01000011 01000101 | ---​

[ NEW INTEL FEED - DECRYPTION ENEMY ENCRYPTED MESHCOM 852 NOW ONLINE ]

"...Sir, uh… we lost the counterattack, and the second line's..."

"...In retreat, I know. They deployed Quadpeds. Which ones?"

"Looks like a new model….And we just lost that feed. Spimes are dropping out, we're losing the bandwith war."

"...So, AIS, N7 or Section 9."

"...How did… did they find us?"

"Doesn't matter. Reinforce the second cordon and fall back to the mid levels. Get everything out, and prepare…"

[ FEED LOST - STARTING NEW DECRYPTION CYCLE ]

--- | 01010011 01010000 01000001 01000011 01000101 | ---​

Their advance into the next rooms was unopposed. Togusa retrieved a new tube of Recon BallBots from the Tachikoma's left-side Pod Supply cache, opened it and rolled the devices out onto the floor, before going left and carefully covering his corners, looking under every table and into every crevice, transopters and scanners turned up to full.

Nothing.

"Where the fuck's everyone? They can't have retreated that quickly. Athena, there aren't any alternative escape routes, right?" Batou asked, having ripped open a closet door without finding anything inside but wrapped packages, neatly stowed away.

[Confirming that, Shadow-Two. The Mass Distribution file does not show any hidden docks or surface accesses. Team Stalker has the other entrance blocked.]

Togusa lowered his carbine and took in the room before him.

Unlike the previous room, this one was less hacker den, more workshop. The devices on the tables didn't look the part of high-tech fabrication and manufacturing systems with their simple plastic-composite panels and pragmatic blocky shapes, but his ARO nearly overflowed with AR-graphics and analytical conclusions of top-of-the-line machinery, potentially fabricated in-situ by excellent mechanics, capabilities and an eye for functionality over shiny, presentable looks.

Projects had been abandoned in various states of assembly on the workbenches, though a few assembler robots were still continuing their work. "Sloppy information control, should have slagged it all", Saito remarked as he looked at one project, a heavy robotic chassis someone had been fitting electrical components into.

"It's certainly not your standard-issue bombshop", Batou agreed, gazing upon a row of Weapon Printers, each the size of a human coffin, still humming with activity. The trigraphic-holographic interface cleanly displayed the weapon being printed, and the cue of next products. "They were producing enough weaponry for an entire army here. High-end stuff as well."

The Tachikoma took sentry by the next door. "I can see no one up to 50 meters beyond this door!" it announced. "There seems to be some kind of room and then a staircase downward."

"Check. Let's go." Togusa shouldered his carbine again, leaving a table with various explosive devices behind, and jogged to the door, setting up on the right. He glanced at his map. The other assault teams had reached similar positions close to them, and they would be entering into the same room. "Major, we're ready."

"Copy. In three… two.. one."

The Tachikoma used its manipulator-mounted effectors to simply blast the door out of the way with a surgical application of warp field at mechanical weak points, then forced in, Togusa right behind it with his Carbine up and using the armored bulk and vehicle-grade kinetic barriers for cover.

Again, there was nothing. No trip mines set off detectors, no return fire from sentries, not even a squad of cheap GIUs.

Something clicked in Batou's head the same instant as it did with the Major, the pieces falling into place. "They're concentrating forces in…"

"...a more defensible and vital location. This up here are just workstations, the servers and storage are somewhere else, and they're trying to deny those." they said.

"Oh fuckshit, and we're taking our time." Ishikawa lobbed a tiny one-use omnitool-fabricated recon drone down the staircase. The device was blown to bits by sentry fire, only managing a single snapshot before it failed.

"Gloves off." Kusanagi broke into a rapid jog to the staircase, flinging five recon drones over the railing with both hands. This time they got a better picture, and the ARO presented a tactical snapshot of the situation downstairs.

A literal firing circle of sentries and combat robots was awaiting them, heavy machine guns, miniguns and Munitions Launchers as well as four Assault Cannons pointed at the staircase. "Bingo. Ishikawa, Shield Boost on the Tachikomas, everyone else, ECM! Over the railing and at them!"

Seven overload mines arced over the railing and into the lower level, followed by three dazzlers and the first Tachikoma, its shielding reinforced by the portable support generator on Ishikawa's backpack.

The human team stood off, at the ready at the top of the staircase, as a literal apocalypse of firepower was unleashed on the lower floor. Enemy fire punched against the outer bubble shield of the Tachikoma, which fell after a second with the kinetic bleeding field depleted and collapsing in on itself, projectors unable to compensate; but the inner, hugging shielding held, flechettes blasting themselves apart on the field in a strange vibrating sequence of bangs.

The answering fire of the GAU-920 slammed into another dual set of bubble shields by portable shield pylons - In reaction, the Tachikoma switched to Disruptor ammunition, cut through the leftmost barrier with a localized overload followed by global collapse, sawed the covering combat robots in half and then blew the generator to bits in a detonation of overloading high-powered electrical and eezonic systems.

The Tachikoma used the thus-created opening in the robots protection to launch several grenades with the dry "thump! thump! thump!" of its low-velocity gauss launcher at the top of the pod, and more explosions ripped through the lower level.

Then the GAU-920 cut back in, and a second Tachikoma dropped down besides the first, adding in its own firepower. "Perimeter is up, Major!"

"Go!"

The organic team pressed down the stairs, Togusa and Ishikawa taking the lead with both their shields back up to provide cover from enemy shrapnel, using the broad staircase to descend in pairs. Saito and Borma hung back to provide fire support, and more Tachikomas jumped down in front of Togusa and Ishikawa, who were the first into the new level.

The firepower of the leading Tachikoma and the enemy emplacement strategy had left the entrance area largely in ruins. Dividing walls had been spalled and the floor paneling had been ripped away, revealing damaged structural elements, exposed electrical conduits, and a damaged gravitic generator which cut out. Togusa and Ishikawa only kept themselves moving fast using Van der Waals strips on their boots and power armor strength, collapsing their shields and half-diving, half-pushing themselves into cover in the now AR-graphically indicated 0.1 g zone. A move that paid off when more fire peppered their cover and slammed into the shields of a Tachikoma from beyond.

Then something loud cracked, and a massive red glowing furrow lanced into the port armor.

"Alpha-Alpha-Romeo-Charlie!" Ishikawa cried and threw himself aside. A second later, a hypervelocity sabot slammed through his cover, ripped the lower leg off a Tachikoma, and buried itself into the floor in a massive crater and a cloud of pulverized lunacrete.

An Anti-Armor-Railcanno… oh shit, move Christian!

He threw himself out of cover as fast as he could, muscles protesting the strain of the emergency-overclocked linear frame system, and felt the shockwave of a passing round through his boots. A second round punched through the wall over his head and holed the crew pod of a Tachikoma, burying itself into the wall on the other side.

[That's a Titan Armories EMR-210 with T-Ray Electroptical aiming,] Borma helpfully supplied, [stay on the move and spread out! He can only follow one target at a time.]

"Small fucking mercy!" Togusa cursed as he dived into the open, fell on the floor carbine up and burst down two OFI fighters he had incidentally flanked in his bid to outrun the Railcannon. He worked himself back up with a hand as both men dropped dead on the floor. Then he saw the muzzle of the Linac in question swing towards him, and an alarm warbled in his head. Oh shit!

His jetpack carried him out of the path of fire just in time. [Would someone please ensure I don't lose a leg?!]

Kusanagi double-tapped two OFI fighters on the move with her pistol, ran up a wall and pushed herself off towards the point where a heavy, HPA-suited enemy was lugging around the bulk of the EMR-210. [I'm on it!]

[> Calisto Armories Power Armor System 5, modified. Increased neck guard, heavier front armor, add-on linear frame and supportive arm for Railcannon. Slow, heavily protected. Can't turn fast. Anti-Armor Explosive Attachment device suggested. <]

A new graphic unfolded in her HUD.

[> Fabrication time: T-Minus 5 seconds. <]

I will reach him in three. Stall for time.

She thought-clicked her pistol to Full-Auto, and fired the rest of the thermal clip and the integrated heatsink as far as she could, smacking an enemy aside with a hit to the head that destroyed his neck.

The heavily-suited enemy swung towards her, raising his left arm and showing her the hefty weapon snapped to the HPA there. Annoyance flared in her mind. It was a goddamn Microgun, a whole four barrels, and would be murder at close range.

Her response was to drop below his line of fire, sliding on her knees, then catapult herself over his head, short-bladed omniblade scratching across his helmet but failing to penetrate. He turned around and deftly swung his long weapon after her, managing to connect and smack her into an unstable spin that ended with her impacted nearly head-first into the ground. She rolled out of it, and thus barely managed to avoid the close-range shot - which served to unbalance her enemy as he had not braced properly and forgotten to dial down the power to more manageable levels.

[> Charge ready <]

She rolled to the right, got her hands under her torso, and pushed herself up so she could catapult herself at the head of the Power armor. She managed to catch a right hand on his shoulder, ducked under the slow swipe trying to push her off…

...then he suddenly let himself fall backwards, and she got halfway crushed under the heavy weight of the power armor and the support backpack for the railcannon. Floor paneling splintered and even with combat supression online, it hurt. Teeth gritted, her right hand closed around the warm flat cylinder of the Penetrator charge, and slapped it to the side of the helmet.

It went off with a damped "Kwomp" and the suit fell still.

[Railcannon is down!]

With the biggest threat neutralized, the team moved down the remaining fighters in seconds, bringing the firepower of the Tachikomas into play once again.

"Batou, Borma…"

"On it Major!" The two cyborgs grabbed the power armor by the arms and torso and lifted it off her armored body. [Thanks] She took Batou's offered hand and vaulted back to her feet.

[Stalker, your progress?]

[We've fully secured the storage level and subverted several combat robots stored there for our support, Ma'am. Ground entrances are locked down, they won't escape there.]

[Copy. Hold position. We'll begin crushing them against you.]

[Copy, we… ah fuck, hold that, we've got another breakout attempt.]

She cut the link and followed the team.

[Alright, prepare to force in…]

There was a distant muffled sound, somewhat like an explosion.

"What was that?" Togusa asked, carbine snapping up and scanning the room for any approaching danger.

[Shadow, Stalker, Athena here. I have maintenance alarms going off in Corridor 045, adjacent to you, severe cable damage on the right installations. Safety interlocks are cutting in and… Spimes just dropped off the network. I have a network cascade crash in progress, containing with some success.]

[Athena, repeat that.]

[Shadow, hurry. You have a breach in the perimeter on your floor, some 75 meters away, on the far side of the big area in front of you. And I have confirmed several humanoid targets fleeing the scene.]

[Shit! They had an alternate escape route and just blew it open!]

[Affirmative. I suggest you initiate pursuit as fast as possible, I am loosing hab-side surveillance assets, and fast. I do not know how long I will be able to successfully track them or infer their position.]

"Right, let's…"

The door hissed open, and a dozen cylinder shapes flew through with dry "thumps".

[ ⚠⚠⚠ GRENADE ⚠⚠⚠ ]

Move!

The world shock. Bright lights, concussion, too much sound. No sound. No up or down.

Darkness.

--- | 01010011 01010000 01000001 01000011 01000101 | ---

A/N: ...Ooooops.​

 

[Sevoris]

Motion.

[> 45 Tactical Theater Threats identified. 12 immediate threats identified. 4 threats assigned for neutralization. Engaging. <]

Light.

[> Incoming CQB Attack… Predictive actions plotted. Counteraction selected. Executing. <]

Darkness.

...he caught the fist with his hand, blocking the strike, twisted with augmented strength.

[> Threat neutralized. Engaging Threat #02 with sidearm. <]

A weapon boomed, something slammed.

Darkness.

[> Enemy #02 neutralized. Plotting engagement Enemy #03. Ballistic calculations… done. <]

Motion in the distance. Sounds, hushed yet painfully loud.

...his revolver clicked empty.

What the hell is going…

His wife and children, smiling, on a meadow of Arcturus Station.

...on?

[> Threat! Threat! Threat! <]

...his armored fist hit plating with a heavy thud, and the kinetic barrier "knuckles" detonated.

More flashes, pressure against his forehead.

A piercing flare of pain.

[> Compensating… <]

...the quickloader connected, and the six new sabots slipped into their chambers.

Hey there! His cheerful self was grinning at him.

...What?

How is it going Christiaaaaaaaooooo….. It melted away like plastics, flowing into water...

...The fresh heatsink clicked into place, and the carbine barked, the shouldered weapon swinging from target to target with machine precision, his finger pulling through the trigger smoothly.

[> Engage, Engage. Engage. <]

It was like a dream.

...Was it a dream?

It certainly felt like one…

They were storming some large room filled with server racks and workstations, and other computing equipment. Black boxes connected with various cables, racks the size of krogan or small cars. OFI fighters and combat robots were making a desperate last stand against the scorched shapes that cut them down, barriers taking their uncoordinated fire with impunity, planting visual false-flags, and outflanking them, Togusa among them. ECM and Incendiary devices whirled through the air, cryo-bursts detonated, overloads arched through the air. Machines jolted, twitched and turned, blown up, electrocuted, subverted and turned against their own masters.

He snapped back into reality.

⟨| NEURAL INTEGRITY REINSTATED |⟩
❮ Transferring Shell Operations to Primary Ego ❯​

With a stumble, he fell on his face. A minor burst of pain flared in his head, and suddenly he realized just how shitty he felt. His entire body was bruised and felt inflamed; warm spots biting like ants on his skin indicated curing medigel patches.

He rolled around and brought his arms up to cradle his head instinctively. The arm that came up was scorched and deep furrows marred it, as if someone had thrown him into a fire and then sandblasted him.

...Why would that…

Something clicked, and he felt the calm water of his implant net pouring back in, cognitive processes speeding up. The grenades the OFIF had fired through the door as the opening moves of their last breakout attempt, a bid to buy whoever was escaping as much time as possible.

He had just suffered what Power Armor operators called "being a Lobster" - cooking inside the shell of your Power Armor, far more resilient than yourself. The full-body armor plating and trinary barrier system had caught most of the shrapnel and neutralized the plasma, but it could only do so much about the shockwave. First the cut-offs had snapped in and isolated Togusa from the massive sound and brilliant light of the detonations; then his shell had tried to protect him. Togusa's brain was encased in a milspec-grade braincase, an update he had been given when he entered Section 9, but in the vector chaos that multiple detonations easily caused, the control system of the tiny inertial unit installed in the braincase had simply failed to account for every vector, and his brain had been accelerated inside the braincase, causing him to black out and suffer neural failures, and probably suffering some minor damage as well.

With him out of the game, the automated systems had cut in, and an AI riding in his PAN for just this purpose had slipped into suddenly vacated gloves and driven him like a puppet while his medical systems worked on kitting his brain and body back together.

I just survived several grenades at close range. Fuuuuck….

He gritted his teeth and stood up, letting his implants compensate as his brain worked itself back into full working order.

"Right, what now?" He paused, thought for a moment. "Right, stay here, secure the evidence, hold this room.

"Ishikawa, how's it looking?", he asked as he joined the infowarfare expert.

"They've got a wiping program running! Get moving and disconnect those servers. Pull the drives, rip out the blades, whatever, don't let the flashing complete!"

"Fuck!" Raven had just done the first, and dropped the 3.5" holographic storage device which had just burst into flames. "They're rigged! This one at least!"

"Cut the power!" Ishikawa said and pulled a simple handle from his backpack, unfolding the base of the omnicutter with a flick.

"Where?" Togusa asked as he procured his device.

His HUD filled with indicators of power cables, then the massive overlay compressed down into six marked points highlighted with thick yellow boxes, and bracketed three of them orange.

Ishikawa thumped his omnicutter into a simple sharp axe, the device humming to live, and hacked the first bundle of thick power cables in half smoothly. One column of servers… didn't fall silent. "They got UPS!"

"Pull it, pull it, pull it!", Ishikawa shouted and ran for the next strand.

Raven simply ripped the UPS out of their slots without fanfare, the heavy power storage devices slamming into work islands and the floor as she went to work.

Togusa hacked his first power line in half - mercifully, this server fell silent immediately. "No UPS on this one!"

"Okay!"

Another cable stack was cleaved apart. Sparks flew on this one, and Ishikawa simply resorted to shooting the actual UPS in their casings to buy himself time. Behind him, Raven ripped the units out, and he hacked the first strand apart with two quick strokes.

Then he ran to Togusa's side and began pulling the units there.

After 10 more seconds, the room was strangely silent, with no whirr of coolers or the beeps of the servers they had just shut down the hard way. Ishikawa took a deep breath and gazed at a clock on his HUD which had stopped counting down. 25 more seconds to a total data purge. "Shit. That was close."

He dropped into one of the interface chairs and actually popped his faceplate, using an armored hand to swipe across his face before he noticed the residues of soot it was leaving on his sweat-soaked skin. He slammed his faceplate back down and turned to the still-running workstation, retrieving a simple datastick from an armored pocket, and dropping it on the interface-enabled surface, where it produced a circular graphic. "Right. Let's see what we can still get."

--- | 01010011 01010000 01000001 01000011 01000101 | ---​

Kusanagi, Batou, Saito and Borma had taken up the pursuit even before the last OFI fighter had fallen, aggressively pressing forward and parting the defense in their wake, leaving wrecked Shells and Robots behind.

She dove through the doorway in an aggressive combat roll that would allow her to cover the sides of the door without getting herself shot, found nothing in her sights, then flipped around and started running again. Ahead, a charge similar to their ETDD had blasted a human-wide entrance clean through a thin layer of rock and the tunnel wall. The corridor was still filled with hot steam and her environmental sensors warbled warnings about free cooling fluid.

A big AR-graphic arrow pointed right, and she followed it. Up ahead, a foot just vanished around the corner. She didn't even bother bringing the carbine up, stowing it on her Smartpack and drawing a pistol as she sped up, running after the fleeing OFIF members as quickly as she could.

The first obstacle was a proximity mine one fighter up ahead had dropped almost right around the corner. She shot the fuse apart with two precise shots, then fired several times after the fleeing men. A kinetic barrier absorbed each shot, and she ejected the heatsink, slapped in a fresh one from a dispenser unit on her chestplate.

Then the men vanished through a bulkhead, and slammed it shut. It locked with a beep and a visible red flash around the outer ring.

"Batou!"

She jumped aside, allowing him to pass. The huge cyborg rammed through the pressure door with a thruster-assisted charge; the 700 kilos of armored cyborg with a kinetic barrier up front and high velocity ripping the composite alloy panel out of its seal. The next door two meters behind had more resistance, but not nearly enough.

Another prox-mine exploded.

Batou emerged unscathed and opened fire of his own, using an arm-mounted SMG to hose down the fleeing men before they vanished around a corner.

[Those fuckers are fast!]

[Stay on 'em!]

They turned left, turned right, then stormed out of the tunnel and into a larger cavern filled with loud machinery. Evidently this section was part of the heat management system of the habitat, with the quadruple kiggs field airlocks, massive warning signs for toxic substances, alternating warnings of extreme heat or extreme cold everywhere, and the heavily insulated pipes. The environmental readouts also jumped upwards, and the noise of massive pumps was deafening. [Hold your fire!] No sense risking a shootout in here, where highly pressurized, either near-cryogenic or extreme hot and gaseous coolant would leak from any damage they could do to the machinery with just a single shot.

Their charges at least, had the same sensibility not to drop prox mines or open fire backwards. Their passage was easily tracked however; the loud noise of booted feet on metal catwalk a high-frequency banging in the low-frequency sea of noise.

Saito launched six tiny fly drones from his left gauntlet, the recon drones buzzing into the air. They had left the recon perimeter of the main group long ago, and had not seeded a new swarm to provide them with forward intel.

"Got eyes on", Saito reported. Four orange human outlines appeared through the heat haze produced by the machinery. "They've reached the far side of the room."

"What's beyond?", Kusanagi queried the Ops AI.

[ Fluid Utility Storage and Loading. This includes a loading avenue for tanks towards the spacecraft docks.]

"That's their goal. Everyone, to the right! Let's intercept them through another connector tunnel!"

They turned right, running towards the second connector tunnel that dug through solid rock and underneath several larger tunnels and rooms, the doors hissing open as the Ops AI predictively cleared their way. A yellow maintenance bot shot out at velocity to make way for them, and they entered the tunnel proper, lightstrips blurring as Kusanagi picked up speed in the higher gravity.

Ahead, there was the loud screeching of wheels on polymer floor. [Shadow-Six, I tried delaying them with an empty loader. Semi-successful. They have at least one hacker and all have Class-IV Augments in their legs.]

[Check, Athena. Tell the Captain to warm the engines. I do not want these bogeys escaping!]

[Copy. You will close with them to around 15 meters.]

On cue, four human shells raced as fast as they could from left to right in front of them.

"I see them!" She picked up speed in the open space of the room, using thrusters to keep herself steady as she rounded the corner and pelted down after the men along the larger loading tunnel.

[> Distance to Docks: 500 meters. <]

[This is gonna be tight...]

The four running shapes were coming closer and closer. She calculated engagment options.

[> Arm-mounted engagement options non-viable. Shoulder-mounted forward-launching options only viable option; no engagement clearance for backpack mounts, too high speed. No effective munitions in forward-launching shoulder mounts. <]

The four targeting boxes on her HUD turned into crossed-out boxes.

❮ No viable engagement ❯

Frustration flared, and she pushed herself further, bringing the prosthetics to the "yellow line" of enhanced performance. The hostiles rounded a corner.

[MAJOR, YOU HAVE INCOMING!]

Large red shapes appeared on her HUD, showing her…

[> Combat Acceleration x12 <]

….Several heavy-duty war robots, including a Salarian IVGV-952 Kasarvvir War Mech. Her exocortex helpfully supplied details.

Hexaped. Designed for urban warfare. Full environment Surround Sensor Suite. CQB Vector Field Defenses. Heavy-duty barriers designed to resist not only weapons fire but explosions and heavy debris up to several tons as well.
PTVXR-54Q Rotary Mass Driver. 15mm, Mach 22 firing velocity. Secondary Munitions Launcher system, four secondary turrets with rotary shotguns with Shot/Slug capability. Close-In Claymore Defense System.
Designed to kill krogan during the rebellions and updated ever since. Very good track record in Anti-Cyborg Usage.

[COVER!]

She broke her run as hard as she could, finding some grip on the polymer floor, and threw herself into the cover of a thick structural archway. The first burst of 15mm flechettes from the Kararvvir narrowly missed her, hammering into the structural archway, chipping it away.

❮ Cover viability T- 00:02:0652 ❯

[Athena, I don't care how you do it, just do it!]

She slammed combat cybernetics into full boost, focused her attention to slamming a barrage of cyberattacks into the Kararvvir for two seconds, forcing it to assign just that one flop more to its own defenses instead of attacking her, and switched cover.

A round hit her in the leg, and alarms went off, her left lower leg lighting up red, then turning grey on the diagnostic schematic. All feeling from the area cut off.

"Chikushō!"

She managed to make cover just so, trailing CF fluid and nanorepair paste all the way. [Party Crasher, roll out and deploy! Get these fuckers off our backs!]

[Rolling out now.]

She ducked deeper into her cover, and reached for the M-96 Mattock-RH she had compacted as a backup to her carbine on her back for the eventuality. If those fuckers were going to kill her, she'd lose her Shell fighting.

"They're advancing!" Saito remarked as he fitted together his Titan Armories EMR-400SRS, connecting the pieces of the main unit and the long barrel it had been stowed as in his backpack.

"You think?!" Batou asked sarcastically as he removed any safeties on the railgun module and fired as fast as the weapon feasibly could in redlined mode. Each shot thundered in the tunnel, the sound as loud as the PTVXR-54Q - and he ran dry after two shots. "Reloading!" Batou stepped back into cover just in time as a heavy burst of fire slammed into his position, retrieving another magazine with six railgun sabots from a pouch as he ejected the empty magazine with an off-hand motion of his weapon and a mental command.

On the other side, Borma was laying down a thick field of fire with his portable MMG, and actually downed first one, then another of the War Robots with focussed barrages that walked the available targets and forced them to slow down, getting into cover to actively vent the massive heatsink unit under the barrel and allow his barrier capacitors to recharge. [We're pinned, and in 2 minutes they're gonna scrap the Major,] he concluded. [My weapon's not going through that Heavy without him pulping me before I down his barriers.]

[Just… keep them suppressed. Party Crasher is rolling out, and they have the weaponry to take those... bastards down.]

"Major, are you okay?"

[NO?!]

Batou flinched. She was having one of her episodes. And it was a stupid question.

[Party crasher, ETA?]

[Vanguard is off the boat, Shadow-Six, main force close behind. One minute out.]

[Hurry!]

[Roger]. The voice of the bioroid was ice-cold and collected.

Saito joined in by leaning out of his cover and firing into the joints of one of the warbots. His own 10mm Disruptor Pulsar Sabot managed to punch through the barrier and into the hip joint of one, and the machine fired wildly as it fell.

Two more rapid shots into its head, and another into its right arm fixed that - only for the machine to use instructions from some other robot to grab its weapon with the left, steady it, and commence firing once again. "Now that's the good stuff!" Saito wheezed as he threw himself back into cover, kinetic barriers deflecting shots.

"Very funny." Batou got one shot off before he had to throw himself back into cover. "Major, you still there?"

"Yes."

"Oh, good. Could you stay that way?"

"Maybe."

Batou snorted, and fired the railgun twice again in rapid succession before switching back to the LMG and his armor-piercing rounds.

[Party Crasher, Drone Perimeter Contact with enemy units. Indirect fire capability in 5 seconds.]

"About fucking time." Batou blew the entire magazine of his seeker launcher dry, only to see it shatter against interlocked kinetic barriers without much of an effect.

[Party Crasher 4-1, Fox Five, Fox Five, Fox Five!]

[Party Crasher 4-2, Fox Five, Fox Five, Fox Five!]

The Drone Missile barrage arrived with the screech of rocket engines, diving around the corner, a veritable swarm of mutant super hornets diving down onto their enemies. Defense lasers flashed brightly and some missiles died; more were stopped cold by kinetic barriers.

Enough got through.

The barrage was devastating, around half of the war robots falling in a single second of high-explosive firepower. The rest turned around, the new avenue of the threat obvious - just in time for Party Crasher to arrive.

The Section 9 Strike team of two Poseidon Biotech bioroid Commando Fireteams, another eight Tachikomas in their HAV-chassis variant, and four Boston-Akamashu SFCS-1X squads fell onto the robots like an invisible fist of god under their thermoptic camouflage, heavy ECM masking their positions as their own mobile nodes launched a renewed cyberwarfare attack onto the enemy platforms.

They weathered the return fire without flinching, heavy gatlings cutting down war robots and bioroids, but the attrition rate was squarely in Section 9's favor.

After seven seconds, the guns fell silent, and the bioroids moved to take care of their wounded and dead with the same efficiency they had applied to their soldiering, applying Medigel and bandages, removing armor plating, all in total silence.

Two medics headed for the Major and Batou, who was kneeling next to her and taking a look at the leg damage using his omnitool transopter. "Ma'am", the left said, "we've got a mobile field unit with us. Let's get you out of the shell suit and that damage repaired."

Kusanagi nodded. "Agreed." She keyed her com. "Huginn Actual, they slipped away. I really hope you got eyes on their shuttle."

[Affirmative, Shadow-Six. Huginn has a talley on the enemy shuttle, and we are moving to intercept.]

"Captain, whatever carrier they dock with - do not allow it to escape. Interdict, disable and board aggressively. How copy?"

[Solid copy. Huginn is moving to interdict, disable and board.]

--- | 01010011 01010000 01000001 01000011 01000101 | ---

For Captain Jonathan Steward, CO of CSQB/IIS-161 SSV Huginn, the day had been pretty uneventful so far, only filled with the regular rigor of covert military spaceflight. For the time being he had been perfectly fine with playing support mothership for the operation on the asteroid, circling it while pretending to be an innocent civilian vessel on a visit at Cedatis Station.

Then the breakout had happened, and Steward had started to get a sinking feeling in his gut.

Then the Ops AI opened a Com.

[Sir, I regret to inform you that the four enemy Tangos have slipped their pursuers and are boarding a shuttle for emergency departure. They were granted immediate clearance. Feed is on the glass.]

The central point of the Ops Vir for Steward was a massive virtual trigraphic battlespace graphic, currently filled with the bulk of Cedatis station and the traffic around it. Now the trigraphic expanded and zoomed in, highlighting a yellow render of an STS-42 Shuttle that was dropping out of a docking bay, RCS thrusters firing. "And there it goes," he murmured.

He turned to his CO, Alena Davidson, who was sitting in her own chair. "XO, Set Condition SS-1. Mr. Fan, prepare Synchronicity Event, and wake the Warminds. I think we're about to go to battle."

"Aye Sir." Chief Neurotech Officer Fan Xiaoming replied and opened his own configurations. "Prepare for switchover to SS-1 Mode on Shift neural links."

The ship wide automated announcement on the 1MC began: "All hands, set condition SS-1. All hands, set condition SS-1. Secure your stations for acceleration and vacuum exposure immediately. Set Condition SS-1, secure your stations for acceleration and vacuum exposure immediately."

A new connection opened with a chirp, coming from the ops team and their commander, Major Motoko Kusanagi: [Huginn Actual, they slipped away. I really hope you got eyes on their shuttle.]

"Affirmative, Shadow-Six. Huginn has a talley on the enemy shuttle, and we are moving to intercept."

[Captain, whatever carrier they dock with - do not allow it to escape. Interdict and disable aggressively. How copy?]

"Solid copy. Huginn is moving to interdict, disable and board."

Stewards thought-clicked the Battlespace graphic to an overview, and threw the predicted plots and likely intercepts for the enemy shuttle onto it. Bogey-Parasite 1 was likely heading for an intercept with a group of 600-meter craft. One among them stood out as blocky but still… rather aerodynamic.

[Stand-by SS-1 mode. Bandwidths are opening, War AIs are seeded and initialized, feeding tactical picture], Fan reported. [Tactical Fusion in ten seconds… mark.]

[All Stations, this is the Captain. SSV Huginn has acquired and tracked an enemy parasite bogey heading for a ride out of here. We will not allow them. We are moving to intercept and disable their mothership at this time. That is all. See you in the Warmind.]

[Initializing in 5… 4… 3… 2.. 1.]

As SSV Huginn lit up its engines and descended upon the shuttle and the cluster of starships like a bird of prey, spreading thermal radiator wings, its crew too transformed. Isolated minds, trapped within the confines of their own Egos, expanded, connected, intertwined and melded. Personalities flowed away, personal memories temporarily extinguished, brain activities modulated.

And in their place and out of them, the Warmind of Huginn grew, the wrathful raven of Odin descending upon its prey.

--- | 01010011 01010000 01000001 01000011 01000101 | ---

A/N: Heh. heh. heh. Did you really think a few grenades at close range could terminate a military transhuman, even if he isn't a full-body cyborg, in this day and age? You are mistaken.
Oh, also, Space battle ahead.

A shoutout goes to Hobb's Tuna and his story "The Cross of Iron", which inspired the modern spacecraft control system employed by SA military spacecraft - The minds of its crew and AI, merged into one through the power of modern Cognotech.
​

 

[BF110C4]

A shoutout goes to Hobb's Tuna and his story "The Cross of Iron", which inspired the modern spacecraft control system employed by SA military spacecraft - The minds of its crew and AI, merged into one through the power of modern Cognotech.

Click to shrink...

Also reminds me, in a much less polished form, the way Concordiat warships work in the Bolo series connecting all of the officers' minds in lieu of a Bolo grade AI.

 

[EmperorArthur]

This is quite a good read. You really should add an Eclipse Phase tag. I mean, the main difference is the TITANS never found the exsurgent virus.

Keep up the good work. Oh, I know what a Beta fork is, but non EP readers may not be as aware. Might be worth expanding on it.

 

[Sevoris]

Also reminds me, in a much less polished form, the way Concordiat warships work in the Bolo series connecting all of the officers' minds in lieu of a Bolo grade AI.

Click to shrink...

And even though it'll be a bitch to write, one poster over on SB had a point that this is really the logical endpoint of such tight neuro-computer integration. Thee just isn't a point to keep the crew separate entities when every reduced millisecond and increased bandwith aids warship coordination and combat capability.

This is quite a good read.

Click to shrink...

Keep up the good work.

Click to shrink...

Thank you! We're keeping up the work to improve it. Maybe slowly, but steadily.

You really should add an Eclipse Phase tag. I mean, the main difference is the TITANS never found the exsurgent virus.

Click to shrink...

Slighly unsure if I really want to. In many cases, this is more referential term borrowing than anything else.

Technicaly this all resulted out of extrapolation from Tech trends we saw in Ghost in the Shell - Uploading and subsequent cognitive technology, ASIs and their use in military warfare seemed as logical endpoints. So calling the SA ASI system TITAN is more of a shout-out than anything else. They're quite different from Canon, shackled for one, far more expansive for another, and the System properties and architectures are also different.

Keep up the good work. Oh, I know what a Beta fork is, but non EP readers may not be as aware. Might be worth expanding on it.

Click to shrink...

Will be.

Right now I am still keeping many of the detailed Tech explanations somewhat back because we're approaching the point where new viewpoint characters get introduced and in-universe exposition gets more feasable. Then such things can be explained (and also their implifications explored) in more detail.

 

[EmperorArthur]

Thinking about it, have you read the GITS mangas? In No. 2 the reveal is that

Spoiler: Spoiler

the Major had Alpha forked herself quite a few times

.

It's easy to see that the TITANs aren't like EP titans at all. You can't just look at the original source code of a self-modifying intelligence and know what it currently is doing. On a more meta level, writing things and people that are smarter than the writer is hard. EP TITANS are damn near Dues Ex Machina levels of advanced.

On the other hand, you're really blending the different settings techs together extremely well. The last story I read that was somewhat similar was Trancendent Humanity. Except, the only thing they really share is humans having Stacks.

I really am curious to see non human viewpoints. The Geth are always interesting, though I feel that ME3 really tried to whitewash them. On the other hand, resleeving and cortical backup tech straight up flips the board. Even excluding the combat implications, the socilogical changes of functional immortality are huge. Just think of the population boom that would happen if Solarians kept their (required) cannon breeding numbers while not dying of old age in their 20s. I mean, one of the main problems with the Krogan was exactly that issue.

As for the fic itself:
The combat and action scenes are pretty darn good. Some of it had so much going on at once that it was hard to remember who was doing what, but the overall action came through clearly. The part where Togusa was lobstered was absolutely great. The infowar stuff is also pretty entertaining.

 

[Sevoris]

On the other hand, resleeving and cortical backup tech straight up flips the board. Even excluding the combat implications, the socilogical changes of functional immortality are huge. Just think of the population boom that would happen if Solarians kept their (required) cannon breeding numbers while not dying of old age in their 20s. I mean, one of the main problems with the Krogan was exactly that issue.

Click to shrink...

Yeah, though this is kind of complicated.

Transhuman cognotech was developed for transhuman minds - A human stack system is completely unable to fit an alien ego or an alien ghost into it (here, Stacks developed out of the Canon capability to upload and download Ghosts between heavily cyberized brains, though in this 'verse it took a longer time until they managed to make it work well and en-masse, and for a long time uploading from an organic brain was one-way; you needed a heavily cyberized brain as a new Ego Executive Medium) That extends to a lot of the other tech, such as memory up- and downloading, skillsets, neurolearning, exocortex systems, and what you all have. At this time, humans are the only ones who really have cracked functional inmortality - Though here, the Salarians already managed to effect live extension and some limited, if very expensive, uploading into normal-level infomorphs (but that's mostly a sociological thing.) Regaridng the population growth problem... the Dalatress have that under control.

As for non-human viewpoints: They'll come, and we hope to have some really unique perspectives on the matter. Also, ever thought about the massive culture shock the Asari are just going through? Between humans looking very similiar to them, and the transhuman technology humanity commands these days, they're going through more than one sociological upheaval.

On the other hand, you're really blending the different settings techs together extremely well. The last story I read that was somewhat similar was Trancendent Humanity. Except, the only thing they really share is humans having Stacks.

Click to shrink...

Thanks! Mind, we basicaly reconstructed parts of the new universe from the ground up for this story. I don't know if you checked out the timeline already but there were some substantial changes to humanities backstory, for one, and we also adjusted backgrounds and tech developments on the side of the Citadel. The salarians and turians of this universe have quite some post-cyberpunk developments of their own, though their AI and Cognotech is still lacking.

The combat and action scenes are pretty darn good. Some of it had so much going on at once that it was hard to remember who was doing what, but the overall action came through clearly. The part where Togusa was lobstered was absolutely great. The infowar stuff is also pretty entertaining.

Click to shrink...

Thanks. Writing the Infowar scenes is always a bit challenging but IMO it deserves its own representation besides the physical action, same way the preparations, AARs, reviews and our characters personal lives deserve.

Also, my first discussion here on SV with a reader over this story that didn't die after one post! Yeah!

 

[Sevoris]

In spaceflight, a "cold separation" was a rare occurrence. Everyone tried to ignite their fusion reactors on-station, where one could draw on the purposefully constructed banks of ultracap arrays ready to provide the jolt for this specific purpose, conserving onboard ignition resources for emergency use.

But when you wanted to separate fast it was a viable option. Fusion reactors were always designed to be ignitable in the field, between dedicated ultracap arrays and backup fission piles (commonly gas-cooled pebble-bed reactors), and close to a station the sheer power output and plasma of a fusion reactor wasn't needed anyway; an MEDC could run off the Ultracaps for a few minutes, and cold-plasma maneuvering thrusters were similarly not particularly energy-hungry devices.

Withdrawing from the reach of the station assault, the crew and passengers of STS-42 ETRRF-985412 Belle Voyage XXIV relaxed, leaning back in their acceleration chairs, the pilot AI turning the craft around and burning for a rapid rendezvous with their mothership, only a few hundred kilometers distant.

Unfortunately for them, Huginn had them in its sights already. The Ops AIs had encountered no problems with pulling the entire registry of the shuttle from under the nose of the OFIF-sympathetic traffic controller, and while they could not block his order due to safety interlocks, getting ID and vector from Cedatis Station Approach was easier.
The deviant thermal signature produced by the shuttle, byproduct of its cold fusion reactor, was the dead give-away that differentiated the shuttle from its peers.

Huginn initiated pursuit stealthily, firing its powerful primary RCS plasma thrusters to begin phasing its orbit; as the apogee fell relative to Cedatis Station, Huginn seemed to "pick up" speed relative to its unknowing target, publicly squawking that it was adjusting its parking orbit around Cedatis Station in preparation for eventual departure on the dedicated subchannel of its transponder. The other traffic AIs noticed, found no conflicts, and approved silently, some messaging acknowledgements.

As soon as approach LADARs lighting up between STS-42 Belle Voyage XXIV and a 600-meter, 45 million tons Boeing DSCV-400 freighter with the hull number MKUUT-8500299 identifying as SCAS Oliver, Huginn knew its target. Tactical Analysis confirmed as Huginn's civilian navigational LADAR and the transponders of Belle Voyage XXIV confirmed the transfer shuttle was indeed coming in for a zero-zero intercept and a docking maneuver. At the same time, SCAS Oliver squawked its intention to engage a transfer vector for eventual departure into FTL.

《 Designate Contact 00851 as Bandit-01. Prepare to interdict. 》
《 Engagement mode: Offensive. Military power: Engaged. Deploying Systems... 》

Huginn ramped up its onboard fusion reactors to combat power and extended the booms of its droplet radiators, hull plating shifting aside to reveal military systems telescoping to level with the outer hull.

As military-grade barriers snapped into place and the radiators began cycling hot, Huginn announced its intentions with a scream of ECM and the stabbing fingers of military LIDAR. The game was on.

= Chapter 3 - "Two ravens" =
-| May 17th, 2232 |​

As soon as the sensor AIs alerted the bridge crew of SCAS Oliver to the commotion behind them and the blinding power of military LIDAR, its captain made the snap decision to accelerate with the shuttle only halfway retrieved, just captured using the external arms of the parasite craft bay.

Security alarms protested, and were silenced with switchover to military capabilities. Cranking up its globular cee-eem and lighting the fusion engines at 0.5g in-field acceleration, SCAS Oliver began to burn clear of Cedatis Station, ignoring the sudden protests by the traffic management AIs and the flight controls of other spacecraft alike, official overrides to seize acceleration and limit velocity failing at suddenly existing bypasses.

Huginn fell behind as it limited its own acceleration to somewhat safe levels, only burning as hard as it reasonably could without endangering other flights within the tightly packed sphere of parking orbitals. The Warmind accepted this fact; time and tech were on its side. Once Huginn had burned clear of the inner parking sphere, it would be able to accelerate with heavier mass suppression and deploy its AKVs, nailing down SCAS Oliver sidereal-side and able to catch up without burning half the traffic behind it out of the sky with the military-grade main propulsion systems.

As such, SCAS Oliver drew ahead, cranking up its magcoil-boosted fusion engines to 5g in-field acceleration and effective acceleration under cee-eem field to 50g. The crew breathed small, mental sighs of relief - It seemed their pursuers weren't willing to haphazardly disregard the rules of safe spaceflight just to catch them.

+United Aerospace Technologies Type-47 Raider Autonomous Kill Vehicle // Deployment Sequence Initiate… Checking Systems+

Inside Huginn's largest magazine, eight vehicles woke from electronic slumber, restrained inside total darkness inside a web of restraint platforms. They had been tended to by swarms of maintenance robots checking and replacing components that had broken down inside the cold vacuum of the outer hull outside of the pressure body, endured the G-forces tugging at them as Huginn accelerated through space on its missions. Their systems had been silent, cooled below 0°C by inactivity, with only the kindling cores of the nuclear piles and stand-by computer cores flickering as flames in the darkness.

As power surged through superconductive feeds and into drained ultracapacitors, like sleeping dragons, they roused from their rest. System after system flickered alive as computer cores powered up and linked into the intranet, heating mats coming alive to warm up components to functional temperatures. Isolated pipes croaked as slush hydrogen and De-He3 mix coursed through them to fill fuel and remass tanks for duty, and inside dual torri coils and masers hummed as they began heating deuterium-helium 3 gas to millions of degrees and compress it to thousands of bars of pressure.

+Power… check+

With independent power flowing through the superconductive power grid and into the central ultracapacitors, more systems woke. The Thermal Management System began pumping chilled lithium around heating components and into the support feeds from Huginn, the Mass Effect Drive Cores and Field Generators cycled into readiness, and weapon systems were dry-fired.

+Thermal Systems… check+
+Mass Effect Systems… check+
+Weapons… check+
+Stand-by to receive munitions…+

Bays opened as new arms delivered Space-to-Space Missiles and feeds with Mass Driver ammunition, setting them into place.

+Ammunition Load confirmed+
+Special Missions Module loading…+

Two more set of arms and one massive cradle, gliding on magnetic rails along the ceiling and bottom of the AKV hangars, delivered two flat attachment modules; all eight AKVs opening armored hatches at their broad sides to expose mechanical attachment points. The SMMs were settled into place and secured.

+Initiating AI control; Handover from SIOS complete+

Eight digital minds booted and began receiving instructions from the Warmind congruence aboard Huginn, the assigned AKV operators downloading mission briefings, situation files and Reaction Options into the AIs, which assimilated them at machine speeds.

+Ready to deploy+

Clearing the shell of the inner parking orbits, Huginn throttled up its own engines, revealing the power of its four Rolls Royce-Lockheed Aerospace EFAD-40X Kairon Mk.III engines. It sped after the receding engine flares of SCAS Oliver, throttling up further and further as it went, drawing kilometer-long trails of hot engine plasma after itself, a new star in the night sky of Cedatis Station. By now the parking orbitals were in uproar, everyone trying to evade the hot mess and radiation zones generated by two sets of drives operating in deep-space propulsion mode, the traffic control AIs tasked to capacity as they tried coordinating new orbitals without spacecraft scorching each other or colliding in the dense parking orbitals which took ill to disruption as that caused by the two spacecraft hurling away into darkness.

Aboard SCAS Oliver, the crew prepared for the drop into FTL with barely 20,000 kilometers of clearance.

Behind it, Huginn played its first card.

《 Deploying AKV Flight Raider. Separation underway. 》

On the central body of Huginn, four plates of ablative armor telescoped inwards and slid away to reveal the first four AKVs, pylons folded to their squared bodies, loaded into the launchers. Magnetic coils flexed and pushed the first four AKVs out. Huginn fired its RCS, rotating, then ejected the second half of Raider Flight into space.

+Separation complete+

Raider-01 unfolded its four maneuvering pylons and the attached "wings" of thermal radiators away from their storage positions flush with the hull, then powered its CM and shot away on dual antimatter-catalyzed fusion drives, accelerating away with thousands of outfield g. In a single second, it and its eight brethren were nothing more than blue stars against the backdrop of space, racing after SCAS Oliver 15,000 kilometers away.

On the bridge of the Oliver, the second helm officer began the jump: "Beginning FTL plotting. Charging MEFGs. Stand-by for drop…" Ahead of SCAS Oliver, the navigational sensors began testing local space, powerful LIDARs scanning ahead for obstructions in the planned FTL path.

"Hornet! Hornet!", a sensor operator shouted, "We have eight AKVs in the black, closing… uh, negative, breaking away, no direct intercepts…"

+Establishing Interdiction Sphere at 2000 kilometers stand-off+

The eight AKVs curved their flightpaths, rotating and thrusting in maneuvers unseen inside an atmosphere, negating and adding vector with burns of their mains and maneuvering thrusters and pulses of heavy mass suppression, flinging themselves about.

Then all eight powered their Special Mission Modules, and SCAS Oliver's escape route slammed shut.

"Roadblock, Roadblock, we have Interdiction Jammers!"

With the navigational sensors thoroughly jammed, the FTL plotter's safety systems activated and locked out the jump; unable to assess the local space ahead of SCAS Oliver and getting conflicting reports of objects within the departure vector, the system simply denied the activation of the FTL Field Generators.

And behind them, Huginn was closing, vectoring its thrust to pull over "above" SCAS Oliver and force down for a zero-zero intercept ahead of its psoition.

The communication system opened with a general call on UHF: "MKUUT-8500299 SCAS Oliver, this is SSV Huginn. You have been interdicted. Shut down all drives immediately and go to zero thrust; power down your main reactors and drive core without delay. Hold your orientation and prepare for zero-zero intercept and boarding. "

SCAS Oliver's reaction was to cut out its main, fire up the retro thrusters, and try to rapidly change vector, rotating around, bleeding velocity off its existing vector rapidly, then entering an almost lateral new vector and accelerating anew. For a second the Plotter began computing the course again, then it locked out as the AKVs reacted and changed their own vectors, refocussing the ECM emitters of their Special Mission Modules.

"I repeat. SCAS Oliver. You have been interdicted. Shut down all drives immediately and go to zero thrust; disable your main reactors and power down your drive core without delay. Hold your orientation and prepare for zero-zero intercept and boarding. This is your second warning."

Huginn "banked" smoothly on sideburner drives, flaring its mains and the cee-eem field, changing vector easier using its military-grade propulsion suite, matching the new vector and angling in for a high fly-by before coming around for the new zero-zero intercept.

"SCAS Oliver, comply with our instructions. This is your third warning."

The pursued craft banked anew, desperately skew-flipping under thrust, trying to make the AKVs overshoot - a hasty maneuver not thought through, as Huginn simply closed the hole in the jamming emissions with its own systems as the AKVs skew-flipped on their own and switched on their antimatter "afterburners", main drive flames flaring and heat radiators burning, forcing the AI-driven vehicles onto new trajectories.

《 Warning Shot. Computing Firing Solution… Done. Executing Firing Mission… 3… 2.. 1. 》

A single off-angle shot raced from Huginn's main co-axial mass driver. The 0.03 cee 1 kg projectile zorched across the bow of SCAS Oliver with barely 200 kilometers stand-off at its closest point. Had the shot been placed even one micro-degree further left, the 10-kiloton kinetic energy of the small projectile would have opened up the bow of SCAS Oliver.

Finally, the com connection from SCAS Oliver opened from the other side: "You damn Inners want to play? Happy to oblige!"

The Oliver suddenly whirled around, far faster than before, and a barrage of shots slammed out at 0.01c, intercepting Raider-03 and blowing the AKV apart in a barrage of 15-kiloton impacts. At the close distance, the AKV had no chance to evade the cloud of projectiles, its barriers overloading on the first connecting shot.

"SCAS Oliver, this was your final warning. You will be engaged with mission-killing force."

"Go ahead, try it!", the spiteful answer came back in the same instant as the forward surfaces of Huginn spit a cloud of Anti-Ship Plasma Missiles into space, angling away from their launching craft, then coming around to box in the Oliver from all sides.

Long-range GARDIAN lasers reached out and picked one, two, five missiles out of the black; each one detonating in flashes of failing ultracaps which would have pumped the plasma warhead. Then more lasers joined the interceptor fire as the missiles closed in, blasting them apart one after another.

《 Missile Swarm 01: 26 Missiles remaining. 》

The missiles angled down onto the maneuvering Oliver, angling for its largest aspect and the engineering areas and reactors at the end of the craft.

《 Missile Swarm 01: 14 Missiles remaining. 12 Remaining. 9...8 remaining. 》

The four missiles which managed to breach through the inner GARDIAN zone and its dozens of emitter turrets blew themselves apart on the kinetic barriers guarding the engineering area and fusion drives.

《 Prepare Harpy Flight for Separation. Moving for close engagement. 》

The Oliver blew another AKV, Raider-08, into the flashing oblivion of antimatter containment loss, ejecting glowing debris and clouds of excited hydrogen everywhere in a cloud of glowing streaks and cooling white-blue particles, flipping and turning as it tried to aaquire another AKV, the swarm reacting with complex evasive action to the enemy fire.

SSV Huginn passed the 8,000 kilometer mark.
《 Fire Mission - Locked. Execute. 》

The main accelerator barked at full military power, flinging 20-kilo heavy-duty sabots at 0.02cee, the pressure hull filling with the sound of capacitors discharging and the massive accelerator recoiling inside its cradle, the counter impulse engine at the back pulsing to offset the kinetic impulse the shots were transmitting.

SCAS Oliver twisted through some of the shots, deflected others with its long-range, more powerful GARDIAN lasers, took what managed to bypass both with its kinetic barriers, and maneuvered to keep its distance and acquire another killshot on the maneuvering AKVs.

Raider Flight was now stuck in a massive dilemma. Upholding the jamming corridor required the AKVs to hold a line of sight with the bow of the ship, so they could angle their precisely modulated and shaped beams towards the navigational sensors. It also placed them in a far faster fire mission envelope that was harder to avoid and predict. Evasive jinking was only possible for so long and tasking the available heat capacity to keep the MEDC and the Field Generators cooled and powered at high output levels. They could have increased the distance and made it harder for the Oliver to target Raider Flight, but that would also have made it harder for themselves to maintain the jamming that kept the craft pinned in STL. At the same time, the closer approach was overheating them, slowly but steadily reducing their capability to maneuver, defend themselves, and generally stay operable.

In short, and in agreement between Raider Flight's control AI and the Warmind congruence aboard Huginn, they were working on limited time. They were ablative armor, giving Huginn the time it would need to close, blast apart the enemy protection, and neutralize it.

《 Projected time to enemy FTL Disengage: 3 minutes 》

The Warmind accepted it with cold, calculating intellect.

3 minutes was more than enough time.

Huginn pressed in, launching more missiles to box in the Oliver, limiting its maneuvering options as HVMs screamed past it, denying vectors, and slowly forcing the Oliver into thermal overload. Already, analysis of the GARDIAN returns showed the infrared and green lasers starting to break up, losing coherency as their generators and emitters heated up.

The main co-ax fired again on burst mode, more shots connecting with SCAS Oliver as the distance between the two decreased despite the former's efforts, the ventral barrier flashing brighter. The kinetic barrier was starting to lose coherency, the field generators being strained, thirsting for power that could only be supplied so quickly. Huginn was cracking open SCAS Oliver's protective shell.

Which was the perfect moment for Murphy to join the party and tap everyone on the shoulder.

《 Aspect change on Bandit-01 - Analysing... 》

On SCAS Oliver's ventral surface, a pod cracked open, and the Haliat Armories Particle Beam cannon rotated on its mount, angling to follow Raider-6. One second later, a 8-kiloton kinetic beam blasted the AKV out of the sky when it hit the engine.
Then the craft fired a barrage of missiles from ventral and dorsal VLS cells which revealed themselves under folding armor doors, and Huginn's own GARDIAN suite flashed as it worked to intercept the swarm, all the while losing another AKV, with two forced into evasive action and out of the jamming sphere.

One more shot from SCAS Oliver's own co-axial, and another Raider blew itself to heat death.

《 Separating Harpy Flight 》

Huginn deployed its last 8 AKVs, and locked torpedos at 4600 kilometers. Serial escalation, one card after the next.

Counter-missile missiles spewed from turreted box launchers on SCAS Oliver's forward nose section, and space filled with missile contrails as the attacking swarm from Huginn went evasive, laser beams slashing in between drive contrails, blinding, damaging and destroying missiles; ECM hacked through space from the other side, confusing counter-missiles and their interceptor sub-munitions, feeding them false contacts detonation orders and disrupting their cohesion.

Cold fire bloomed in the darkness of space.

Disruptor torpedos raced through the detonation residue, parting hot gasses in their wake, descending upon SCAS Oliver. GARDIAN lasers locked, fired; kinetic defense cannons joined them, firing miniscule slugs at extreme velocities, laying down fields of non-viable vectors.

Again, the majority of the missiles and torpedos did not manage to connect with their target.

But three torpedos came through, and Disruptor Pulsars detonated with blue flashes of photon fields, kinetic barrier fields flaring up, suddenly livid like a thrashing storm see.

Then the first shell from Huginn bore dwon, punched through the depleted KB fields, and broke itself on the armor, merely a 1 kiloton impact.

In response, SCAS Oliver turned around to face Huginn nose-on, and cut loose with a full weapon release.

A barrage of missiles burst forth from every single cell array on the surface, hunting for half of the remaining AKVs and Huginn alike, a series of torpedos close behind. Then the main co-ax linac cut loose, and did not stop firing, one shot after the next, a bright muzzle flash every second, 20-kiloton shells hunting for SSV Huginn. GARDIAN flashed, sideburners lighting up to push the Huginn away while keeping its nose locked onto its target, counter-missiles and interceptor drones flying from rotary launchers, flung into space on centripetal force. A rippling wall of fire approached Huginn, slammed into its barriers; then the barrage arrived, and alarms wailed on Huginn, its barrier desperately flashing to deflect and absorb each shattering impact.

And just as suddenly, the playing field was leveled once again.

SCAS Oliver turned around, faced the now-open breach in the AKV jamming sphere, and engaged its plotter again, countdown racing to disengage…

A flash of blue, and a trio of bright blue stars appeared in the night sky, offset from the Battlespace.

[Sorry to be late to the party! SSV Munnin, Influx successful, Target Bandit-01 acquired. Moving to engage.]

The second raven flashed into sidereal space at 150,00 kilometers and approached at C-fractional speeds, its three retro engines burning to illuminate the three obsidian-black faces of a Philosopher-class cruiser, turrets deployed and gun ports open, approaching the battlefield.

--- | 01010011 01010000 01000001 01000011 01000101 | ---

Technology / Space Combat
GARDIAN​

The General ARea Defense Integration Anti-spacecraft Network is the integrated hardkill interception system of a military spacecraft. Consisting of a network of interception-dedicated weapon systems ranging from long-range lasers and particle cannons and projectors to short-range kinetic cannons, "sandcasters" and "Shrapnel cannons", the GARDIAN provides active interception for numerous threats, ranging from projectiles to missiles to torpedos and, at close ranges (below a few thousands of kilometers), other warships.

Lasers are the mainstay defensive systems of the GARDIAN; projected through a selection of emitter turrets mounted on the warships outer hull, these lasers can engage at up to thousands (and even ten thousands) of kilometers with the largest emitter units, which can maintain laser focus at long range. This, however, limits available emitters and thus targetable laser beams.
As such, GARDIAN unfolds its true power only at closer ranges of hundreds of kilometers for mainline laser defense systems; at this range GARDIAN lasers can intercept hundreds of contacts per minute.
The weaknesses of GARDIAN lasers are mostly due to heat - as the laser generators, beam guides, and turrets heat up, coherency is lost, and the lasers become less and less effective at longer ranges; furthermore overheating laser generators decrease laser power and rate of fire.

At shorter ranges, hyper-velocity kinetic mass drivers also become a viable option, commonly used for laying down "fields" of kinetic projectiles which prohibit enemy contacts from passing through the resulting fields without destructive head-on impacts. These are, due to their speed, only effective at very close ranges, but absolutely lethal and useful for "herding" enemy contacts into the firing fields of lasers. Smaller vessels use their kinetic defense weapons as secondary close-in weapons as well.

Particle beams are another secondary option for equipping a GARDIAN, mostly found on larger spacecraft. Able to project kiloton KE-equivalent beams without the need for the long barrels of kinetic mass drivers with solid projectiles, particle beams have a slower fire rate but higher effective distance. At mid-ranged distances, these weapons are extremely effective, but can be repulsed by kinetic barriers. As such, they are mostly used on the larger ships that can mount and power these few turrets to intercept torpedos and thin out missile swarms, especially high-velocity, high-maneuverability hunter-killer missiles.

Particle Cannons​

Kinetic mass drivers face one ultimate obstacle - the accelerator length that permits high velocities yet still retains a solid projectile to fire out the other end. In a bid to increase the range of turret-mounted kinetic weaponry, particle cannons bypass the acceleration limitations of solid projectiles. However, beam coherency limits the effective range where particle cannons can engage, and modern kinetic barriers can defend against particle beams not only through repulsive fields coupled with absorption and reflection of kinetic momentum, but also disrupting fields with chaotic vectors. Alternatively, counter-fire from "interceptor" particle beams, offer another avenue of defense against particle cannons, which has kept them from proliferating as the main co-axial weapons of Ships of the Sword and Ships of the Plane.

Still, at medium ranges, particle beams have become a mainstay of turreted cruiser and battleship combat, and some frigates employ particle cannons as their main co-axials, eschewing kinetic firepower at close range for medium-range "sniper" capability.

Autonomous Kill Vehicles​

Hybrids between a starfighter and a heavy cruise missile, Autonomous Kill Vehicles are battlespace drones originally developed as autonomous missile buses equipped with more expensive but high-performance drive systems.
AKVs fell out of galactic use with the advent of modern, high-speed space combat involving tactical FTL maneuvers, limiting the weapons utility to recon and utility purposes as rapidly shifting battlespaces and increases in engagement distance forced AKVs out of effective control range.

The quarians and humans both re-developed and improved the concept of the modern AKV through the use of far more advanced control systems, turning AKVs into viable, long-range threats. Equipped with high-performance drive cores and engines, the modern AKV became a viable tool for swamping GARDIANs in multi-vector missile attacks, barraging enemies at close range, and providing battlespace support in the forms of ECM, jamming, and longscan capability.

The heaviest modern user of AKVs is humanity and its System Alliance Space Force, which employs the most advanced, AI-driven AKVs to date. The second-largest employers are the Salarians, who re-developed the Carrier Destroyer for their own, VI-driven and thus operator-dependant AKV swarms.

On a technical note, AKVs are smaller than fighters, and regarded as potentially expendable - ramming an AKV into a target is as much a viable engagement option as retrieving and re-arming it.

FTL Plotter Jamming​

Since the advent of the FTL drive, the fact that parties can easily disengage from a given Battlespace using FTL once sufficient clearance has been achieved has been a major problem of space combat tactics and strategy.

FTL plotter jamming was developed as an early-to-mid Council era method of binding an opponent in a desired battlespace at least for more time. The nature of the modern FTL plotter and its sensors demands that the jammer plattform conduct a directional transmission straight into the apertures of the forward (or otherwise facing) sensors of the spacecraft to be interdicted, to lock up the FTL plotter.

Secondly, FTL jamming is defeatable in a variety of ways. As with normal jamming, rapid switching of used frequencies and sensors as well as improved analysis and filtering algorithms can defeat the jamming. The jamming platform itself may be destroyed or its jamming beams outmaneuvered. Military spacecraft, especially capital ones, have FTL plotter sensors in multiple locations, enabling maneuvers such as the infamous "backward disengage", accelerating into FTL on the retro thrusters.

Lastly, there remains the option of spoofing or overriding the FTL Plotter - which, while hard, is far from impossible, but puts the ship at risk of fatal collisions as it drops into its FTL bubble.

In the history of space engagements, whenever FTL Plotter jamming has been used, it failed in the overwhelming majority of cases to indeed "hold" an enemy in the battlespace - Commonly, after only seconds of maneuvering, the craft can disengage into FTL successfully, and the best cases of FTL jamming had durations of minutes at most - forcing spacecraft to engage in lethal knife-range fighting in a desperate bid to disable the jammed spacecraft before it can disengage into FTL.

--- | 01010011 01010000 01000001 01000011 01000101 | ---

A/N: And onto Space battles...​

 

[EmperorArthur]

Interestingly, FTL safety in cannon Mass Effect is stupid. Ships traveling at or near FTL speeds only deal damage equal to a nuclear weapon. Second, the plotter is apparently so black boxed that even the governments couldn't bypass the restrictions, or spoof a good trajectory. It's stated that only one person could, and he was promptly executed.

This is what happens when writers try to handwave why ships aren't used as FTL suicide bombers. They really didn't think through the implications. I mean, FTL being that black boxed for thousands of years...

 

[Sevoris]

Interestingly, FTL safety in cannon Mass Effect is stupid. Ships traveling at or near FTL speeds only deal damage equal to a nuclear weapon. Second, the plotter is apparently so black boxed that even the governments couldn't bypass the restrictions, or spoof a good trajectory. It's stated that only one person could, and he was promptly executed.

This is what happens when writers try to handwave why ships aren't used as FTL suicide bombers. They really didn't think through the implications. I mean, FTL being that black boxed for thousands of years...

Click to shrink...

Yeah, we treated that segment carefully.

In the end, we decided to aknowledge that the FTL plotter can indeed be overriden - But it's a last-ditch measure you only make when it is "do-or-die" and you really don't have anything to loose anyway, because collisions during Out- and Influx can be really unhealthy for you.

 

[Sevoris]

Muninn began up its own contribution to the battlespace with ripple fire from its uneven-faces missile banks, dual VLS rows cold-launching Anti-Ship Missiles into space in between the still-burning fusion candles, black spears oriented with puffs of RCS before shooting away on blue plasma drives.

Then the Muninn opened up with its main driver, and began long-range bracketing fire, exploiting the remaining c-fractional velocity it was bleeding to help the rounds pass into the target area quicker, continuing to fire as it decelerated.

In response to the new threats, the Oliver turned, bow-forward, into the fire and went to full burn, GARDIAN tasked forward and launchers spitting 12 interceptor drones into space. Then, still presenting the smallest aspect, it began evasive action, ECM at full power as it lured the incoming fire with false positives and dazzled their sensors, particle cannons swinging aft to engage Huginn, invisible lances streaking out to slam themselves into the barriers in flashes of blue and white.

Relativistic travel speeds meant that their sensors were degraded - and with limited ability to make effective course corrections, the missile barrage from Muninn missed entirely. None of the missiles made it into the main GARDIAN envelope, and the Huginn was forced to abort a new gun-run on the Oliver to skew-flip and burn about, evading a swarm of missiles as they streaked away and out of the battlespace before detonating in flares of blue, a drive's star extinguished in a nova.

Having evaded the first salvo of guided missiles, the Oliver turned out of the path of the next barrage from the Muninn that followed close behind, letting the streaking rounds flash overhead and into the depths of space at some 0.22 cee. The Oliver then evaded the next salvo, AI-controlled weaves sending the ship through the incoming fire, turning at the outer ranges of the ship's safety envelope and constantly swinging the nose around to apply new vectors with its main engines.

The Huginn followed close behind in a circling arc, using predefined holes in the bracketing fire coordinated between the two Warmind congruences to minimize its own evasive actions,then throttled up its cee-eem and engines in synch, "jolting" to c-fractional speeds and blitzing across the battlespace. The Huginn skew-flipped, killings its velocity and coming about to herd the Oliver into a killzone between itself and the Muninn.

The Oliver twisted out of the first envelope attempt using its RCS, flipping in a complex maneuver only made possible by AI-coordination of the thrusters to keep adding "upwards" velocity while flipping end-over-end; entering a c-fractional cruise of its own, angling down and underneath a barrage from Muninn, the Oliver spun and burned to evade the next barrage from the Huginn, its own GARDIAN firing as it came about to throw 20- and 30-kilo slugs off their paths. Then, it spit another barrage of missiles, light Anti-AKV Hunter-Killers mounted on first stage delivery buses.

The AKV envelope went evasive, burning hard and fast to overcome the missiles and deplete their Delta-V reserve.

And then it "slipped", the heat systems of the AKVs overtaxed, and the last five remaining AKVs, four of Harpy Flight and one of Raider Flight, fell behind, unable to maintain their acceleration for the immediate danger of catastrophic overheating of core systems.

The Muninn responded immediately.

❰ Launching Wyvern Flight. Separation underway. ❱

RCS spun the ship; then it switched from the main retros to smaller, bow-mounted secondaries, clearing the launch bays of the indiscient hot plasma streams above them. Twelve more AKVs launched in waves of three, and raced towards their target.

The Oliver's reaction was an aggressive, equally brilliant and desperate maneuver. With the Muninn deploying its AKVs from 60,000 kilometers stand-off range, they were not angling out immediately to reform the jamming sphere, nor had they launched as one coherent group, spacing them out by effective one-thousand kilometers. It was an opportunity the Oliver exploited.

Spiking its cee-eem bubble, the craft accelerated hard and fast at the edge of what the engines could provide, redlining them as the MEFGs provided their best field gradient. From the Huginn's perspective, the enemy spacecraft seemed to shoot towards the incoming AKVs, weapon blisters tracking, lashing out.

Wyvern 1, 2 and 3 were all blown apart by a mixture of main co-ax, particle beam turret and laser fire, the Oliver flashing past the plasma clouds they left behind in the wake of their detonation seconds later.

Wyvern 4, 5 and 6 initiated immediate evasive action, skew-flipping around to bleed fatal velocity - an action which only increased the engagement options to the missiles SCAS Oliver carried, forcing them into evasive action. 4 managed to complete a daredevil maneuver and blew its pursuing missiles to heat death with its own co-axial, Wyvern 5 zorched away at cee-fractional speeds and simply outran its pursuing munitions, 6 managed to slip its own in a similarly daredevil move to Wyvern 4, though it lost one maneuvering pylon and immediately shut down systems, overheating under the thermal load of hyper-velocity maneuvering.

Forced to hold its fire as the Oliver positioned itself before Cedatis Station, the Muninn was forced to hold the fire of its most lethal weapons, discharging its forward torpedo accelerators as the only armament it could viably use.

Wyvern 7, 8 and 9 flashed past the Oliver, forced to jink as Particle Beams were shunted into their vectors. They overshot completely, only able to begin turnaround burns after they had completed their high-thrust evasive action.

By the time Wyvern 10, 11 and 12 approached, the Oliver was reaching over 0.15 cee in velocity, and all AKVs made the same unanimous decision.

Wyvern 10 missed, blasted onto a new vector at the last second as the full ventral GARDIAN network converged on the drone, managing to breach the fusion reactor despite heat-induced coherence loss.

Wyvern 11 was shredded by the kinetic point defenses before its debris slammed into the Oliver's barriers at an oblong angle. 120 effective kilotons of kinetic energy transferring themselves into the fields.

The barriers of SCAS Oliver broke in a massive photon field flash of decoherent field collapse; The Oliver flipped and turned, making last-microsecond maneuvers to dodge the last viable threat.

Wyvern 12 ripped one of the radiator wings off in a white impact flash and caused the Oliver to spin, though it did not knock the craft off its escape vector. RCS flared hard as the craft began to stabilize, fighting the imparted force, damage alarms wailing in the CIC of the OFIF ship. Countermissile launchers flashed, and blew the torpedo barrage diving in behind the last AKVs completely out of the black.

The corvian Warminds coordinated. Their jamming screen was gone. At the closing ranges, missiles would be unviable - the Huginn's missiles were unable to pick up enough speed to intercept the still-accelerating Oliver and the bad angle of the head-on engagement by the Muninn would result in direct destruction of Bandit-01 from the impact of the missiles alone. The same applied to full-powered barrage shots which had a low RPM, for which the target had too much speed and a too small interception window.

That left one last chance to disable Bandit-01 before it could disengage into FTL.

The warminds took it.

Diverting all cooling power to its GARDIAN lasers, the Muninn narrowed down its head-on intercept with the Oliver, whose own radiators were glowing bright-hot, close to overloading under the heat of combat systems and its main drives.

SSV Muninn's main co-ax cut loose, a massive burst of light breaking out from the nose, slow rounds with only one kiloton of power that overrode all safeties and brought the accelerator rails into ablative temperatures, each fast shot after the next chipping material of the rails, degrading their use. Four shells connected with Bandit-01, blowing craters into the armoring and leaving long, white-glowing grooves.

The Muninn turned to present its broadside, lasers slashing at close-range, as the white flashes of their impact points turned into volcanoes of vaporized foam and plating; deep glowing scars etched themselves into the hulls.

Bad luck had it that the laser turreted intended to destroy the Oliver's main fusion reactor's ventral side and abort its escape was hit by a laser from the Oliver 256 milliseconds before it could lock and fire, a megawatt beam intended for far longer-ranged engagements burning through the di-electric reflectors and collimators before cutting and melting the turret mechanism. Safety interlocks cut in, and Muginn's laser emitter fell silent, the Oliver's main fusion reactor untarnished.

Just as quickly as the intercept had begun, it had passed.

Free of jamming, the Huginn racing after it at the outer edge of its acceleration envelope while flinging shells and missiles in a last desparate fire mission, the Oliver's navigational sensors kicked in.

Two seconds later, it accelerated to cee-fractional speeds in a blur of blue and a flash of engines, mass effect fields approaching the Capachelly point, gaining in distance. 10,000 kilometers. 50,000 kilometers. 100,000 kilometers. 0.8 cee. 0.99 cee.

Transition.

SCAS Oliver was gone, its light trail slowly creeping away, a last mocking goodbye to its pursuers as the source of the light raced away at increasing FTL speeds, heading for deep space.

The Huginn and the Muninn both kicked in their retros, cycling down from combat mode. Hatches opened, and emergency heat radiator sails unfolded from storage mode, beginning to glow with heat from onboard systems.

In the distance, a few clusters of undetonated munitions flared as they self-destructed, pinpricks among pinpricks, visible only for an instant.

Drone craft launched from both combat starships as they deployed their Search and Clean robots, sending them out after major vectors of their co-axial and point defense fire. In a few hours, the craft would nudge the projectiles onto harmless intercepts with planetary bodies and the local star using low-yield lasers; by the time the spacecraft could expect to head back home, the robots would have redirected every single piece of kinetic ammunition. A public debris warning for the local SysCon and its traffic buoys would complete the clean-up, keeping other craft clear of the marked trajectories.

Then both turned around, slowly, and burned, heading back for the white dot of Cedatis Station, and the Mission teams. Now there was no cause to run the engines hot, no reason to be somewhere fast; they let field generators and containment coils cool down, and withdrew weapons and closed hardpoints.

Inside the CIC of the Huginn, Captain Stewards turned to his XO, then made visual eye contact with his crew, as they came out of the congruence. Their thoughts were etched into their faces and body expressions, Shells restrained inside the thick acceleration webbing pressing them down on their interfaces couches.

Once again, FTL had been the trump card.

They had failed. The enemy had escaped.

--- | 01010011 01010000 01000001 01000011 01000101 | ---​

The space around Cedatis Station was still in uproar when both spacecraft returned, now flashing their System Alliance transponder codes in the open and running blue-on-white livery on their hulls for everyone to see.

The open channels filled with curses and insults rather quickly, Captains Stewards and Xiolen listening to them all passively, the crews taking the backlash with detached professionalism.

One small freighter got cocky and kept going on a dangerous trajectory, before the SSV Muninn simply presented its broadside and made a stern, low-power laser-assisted warning to back off. The craft complied, still spitting half-hearted insults in the open net.

Captain Xiolen leaned back in his interfacer/acceleration couch, digesting what had just gone down in barely 4 minutes of space combat action. Bandit-01, SCAS Oliver, had been far too tough for a simple refitted freighter. Its kinetic barriers had been heavy, top-of-the-line models, its lasers had not been cutting-edge but still very effective, and whomever had stood at the helm and commanded it knew how to stand his ground against two other spacecraft trying to interdict him.

The entire affair smelled of ex-military personnel and overall, fishy in the extreme.

He turned around to his XO, Jane Dacosta: "Any word from the Ground teams?"

"Nothing for us, so far. They're talking with the Huginn and preparing the inspections and forensics teams for transfer, but nothing in the line for us."

"Then let's just keep next to the Huginn and keep an eye on the salvage and clean-up ops in the meantime." His throat suddenly felt dry.

"Aye Sir." She opened a private channel: [ ...Sir, if I may suggest you get some rest? I know the congruence and the consequences got to you, maybe you should clear your mind now.]

He smiled, suddenly tired but thankful for the care of his XO. [Thanks.]

"XO, you have the conn."

"I have the conn, aye sir."

He unbelted himself and headed aft, for his personal quarters and his terminal, where his Vidlog and a cup of good tea would already be waiting for him.

--- | 01010011 01010000 01000001 01000011 01000101 | ---​

"What do you mean, Cedatis Approach blocked your parking orbit and denied permission for the teams to come a-station?"

Motoko Kusanagi was picking up her pace, now out of her Shell suit and wearing only her light undersuit one-piece. Her left trouser had been removed so a gunmetal black, bionic replacement leg could be anchored to her Shell, replacing the damaged one she had lost to a Mech only minutes ago.

At this point, she was about ready to start shooting people.

First her assault operation had nearly fallen apart.

Then she'd lost a pursuit to a lance of war robots.

THEN the escape craft had slipped through the grasp of two military spacecraft - not fitted with the latest tech, sure, but still cutting edge!

And now Traffic control was throwing a tantrum too. Some part of her was expecting a headache right about now.

At the moment, she was heading back to the OFIF hideout, two bioroid escorts at her side, to debrief.

"It's exactly what I'm telling you," XO Dacosta's voice said in her ear, clearly exasperated herself by the turn of events. "Some of the traffic controllers are locking up, citing our 'wild-west behavior' as a reason to deny us a parking orbit or the permission to transfer shuttles."

"You told them this is a Section 9 Op?" She reached the lower parking bay, and the mission teams of Alpha-01 and Alpha-02, gathered in circles around the Tachikomas, doing post-mission patch-ups, tending to wounds and damage and doing small-talk.

"Yes, Ma'am, I did. Didn't sway them."

"Fine by me. Stand-by." She turned to the room at large: "Hey! Get moving, we got more work!" The Mission team members looked up, then got on their feet and picked up weapons and helmets.

She turned around, and drew her service pistol.

If you want to cover them - Fine. By. Me. Now suffer the consequences.

10 minutes later, 2 traffic controllers leaned, ghost-locked and handcuffed, against a wall inside Cedatis Traffic control. Severa more had been subdued non-lethally and then herded into a corner, under watch by Williams and Antoine from Alpha-02. The room was open and airy, its walls completely lined with massive holographic screens, and similar massively sized screens for the traffic operators.

"You can't do this!", a young kid at his station shouted, flipping his mike up to mute it. Batou opened his visor and turned to face the young man.

"Supporting a terrorist group, impeding a System Alliance law enforcement operation, resisting arrest.", he listed. "Yes, we can."

"Law enforcement?!" another Operator complained, voice cracking with anger: "You fucking shoot up a starship out there, cause massive havoc by lighting up antimatter-catalyzed fusion candles within 10,000 kliks off the station and near traffic and call that Law enforcement?!?" His fist landed on a railing with a bang.

Batou turned to face him, tone hostile: "Last I noticed we were arresting a dangerous terrorist cell which has several dozen counts of real death and property damage in the billions on their chest, or rather, we were trying to arrest them, before they slipped us because of those two a... men."

Raven placed a hand on his shoulder: [Batou, let it rest. We harshed the local color enough as is. Last we need is you burning the ashes.]

Two bioroids moved go pick up the two arrested traffic controllers.

"Get them moving to the docks. They're getting shipped over to the Muninn together with the OFIF prisoners on the next available shuttle", Major Kusanagi ordered, then turned around, a forced cheerfulness in the voice: "Which, by the way, I would really appreciate being granted clearance right about now."

The senior Supervisor, clearly older and more experienced and himself disgusted at what had happened under this nose, agreed: "Yes, Ma'am. We'll get it done immediately."

"Thank you." Kusanagi turned to leave.

"Bitch", someone mumbled under his breath.

He punched himself in the face a second later.

Batou and Paz managed to contain their snickering long enough for the doors to close.

--- | 01010011 01010000 01000001 01000011 01000101 | ---​

The OFIF cell's former hideout had turned into an almost literal hornet's nest.

Mirroring drones were everywhere, scanning every micrometer of the rooms with lasers, light field cameras, sonar, MRI, and T-ray scanners. Everything was photographed from every available angle by "Hummingbird" drones, before Molly drones turned to scanning every inch for molecular and atomic residue of any kind.

Behind them, the humanoid forensic teams moved in to bag everything once it had been thoroughly documented; corpses were tagged, their stacks and other cybernetics extracted on the spot where possible and locked away separately in armored cases, before body bags were rolled out and the shells transferred over and sealed inside.

Meanwhile, evidence was being bagged from tables; computers were located, dug out of walls and furniture, and secured for more thorough data analysis back at HQ. Personal belongings were bagged and indexed alongside working equipment, half-finished project, and finished devices. A group of weapon and explosives specialists moved about removing all of the weaponry, sealing it up separately and shipping it out as soon as possible.

Above it all, more monitoring drones held vigil, documenting every activity for archiving and legal use.

The Mission Teams stood aside from the commotion, slowly storing their own equipment and locking it inside the passenger pods of the Tachikomas. By now, the post-battle stress was etched into nearly everybody's face, brains and bodies recovering from the stress of combat augmentation.

In many ways, Kaz had noticed once, getting off battle augmentations was similar to after a drug trip. Between hormones, combat drugs, and neuronal augmentations, the return to normal cognitive operations caused all sorts of grinding gears, especially for those not used to the Battle trance. Himself included, as he had sardonically remarked, massaging his scalp.

[Miss Kusanagi, you have an incoming communication from Director Aramaki. Encrypted, full-body ARvatar conference]

[I'll take it here.]

She turned around and faced an open space of the garage floor.

Inside her ARO, Aramaki materialized in full body render, as if he stood two meters in front of her. His arms were folded at this side, and he has his usual stratified body posture.

[Sir.]

[Major. What is the situation at Cedatis Station? The Opfeed intercepts I've been feed paint a mixed picture.]

[I'm afraid that's true, Sir.. The assault on the OFIF hideout was largely a success - but four people managed to slip our perimeter via a prepared escape route that involved using an unstable 'field to burrow through solid rock, then slipped our pursuit on foot by using a war robot squad as cover. The spacecraft they used to escape with managed to slip the Huginn and Muninn after a prolonged space engagement with medium damage but full interstellar flight capability.]

[Hmmm.] Aramaki telegraphed his unhappiness with the situation minute, but clearly to her augmented perception. [Alright. We will deal with the larger fallout of this later. Do you have any information on what they were doing yet?]

[No sir. The first files were just transferred over and Athena is doing a mirror analysis on the recovered data to get as a preliminary assessment, but it hasn't come in yet.]

[Okay. I'll be offline, working the political gears. I suspect the real shitstorm's just about to cut loose.]

[Could be, Sir. There's indication of… extensive support of the OFIF cell by the local population and authorities. Don't know how deep this one goes.]

[...Chikushou. I will take care of this, and get the AIS on board. Clean the situation up, authorities will be on site to take over in a few hours. Get your team ready to ship out by then.]

[Yes Sir, I will see to it. And sorry Sir.]

[Major, bad luck is the trade of every commander and director. I will deal with this, as I have dealt with everything else. Good evening.]

[Evening Sir. I'll drop anything important into your contacts.]

[Do that, Major. Aramaki, out.]

The connection closed.

"Everything alright Major?", Togusa asked behind her. She turned around and took his armor in; scorched grey, white and black by plasma, and the armor plating thoroughly roughened up by shrapnell.

"I will manage just fine, thank you." She produced a confident, friendly smile with just a touch of authority: "Everything alright with yourself?" She prodded his armor experimentally.

"I'll live. Shock's still sitting pretty deep now though that everything's over. This was the closest call I ever had." He closed his eyes for a second. "I… had another flashback to my wife and children, during the greyout." His eyes didn't reconnect with hers.

She patted him on the back reassuringly and nodded Batou, silently signaling him that Togusa needed some more support. "But you lived. Your shell is intact, your wife and children are fine and you will see them again in this life. Everything is okay."

"Yeah, yeah… thank god it is."

She handed Togusa over to Batou and Raven, who had joined her Second-in-Command in taking care of Togusa, and keyed a voice communication with Huginn: "Athena-Actual, what is the preliminary on the data we recovered?"

The Ops AI connected after a second: "Looks like your Intel from SILVER THROAT was spot-on. I indeed recovered a large data file of suspicious content, which included lots of executable files.

"Based on preliminary analysis, the data package you recovered is a Ghosthack weapon. A new one. Custom-written language, extremely sophisticated code."

"A good knock-off?", she asked.

"Negative. My analysis has revealed few carry-overs from known old attack software. By indication, this is a completely new development."

"...Continue." So it was even worse than Ken indicated.

"Based on finished analysis, the weapon is definitely a sophisticated Ghosthack - To be precise, the vector tool. I have identified several file formats and interfaces for loading a payload file into the weapon program. None of your recovered files fit the payload format itself.

"Far more worrying is the vector tool itself. While I have identified DNI subversion software, it is modular."

Kusanagi stopped her pacing, listening intently: "Modular? There is more than one delivery vector?"

"Yes. A system only known to me to be in System Alliance Armed Forces possession - A basilisk hack system, seems to form the other major, or indeed the major, delivery vector of the Ghosthack. I have identified visual and auditorial vectors in the basilisk attack package, based on output analysis and comparison as well as comments on the code.

"Thirdly, the software is coded for several neurological architectures. So far I have identified two separate sets of configurations and separate individual software subtools that are loaded depending on the target parameters and seem to govern fundamental vector executive processes. Whatever this new Ghosthack weapon is intended for, it can subvert more than just transhuman egos - and it does not require a DNI to do so."

Silence.

"Major Kusanagi?"

"Shit!"

--- | 01010011 01010000 01000001 01000011 01000101 | ---

A/N: ...I guess that's bad.

Upcoming after all the action and revalations is a larger personal interlude chapter as the team heads home and relaxes from their last OP, diggesting what has just happened. At the same time, other things are set into motion...
​

 

[Tactical Tunic]

dual VLS rows cold-launching Anti-Ship Missiles

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VLS... do you mean vertical launch system?that is atypical terminology for space combat. You need a glossary, only found that definition by finding a news article on a military tech themed news site where they still explained what the acronyms were.

puffs of RCS

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Huh?

invisible lances streaking out to slam themselves into the barriers in flashes of blue and white.

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Pretty sure that kinetic barriers don't affect lasers.

launch bays of the indiscient hot plasma

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That's not a word.
Iridescent?

 

[Sevoris]

that is atypical terminology for space combat.

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It fits the form of the launcher, however. I could write "VLS-like", but it explains the terminology and functionality well enough.

Huh?

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Reaction Control System. Propulsion-based spacecraft altitude control.

Pretty sure that kinetic barriers don't affect lasers.

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Those are particle beams.