The year is 2197 A.D.
Over a century ago, the discovery of alien technology on Mars...
Over a century ago, the discovery of alien technology on Mars...
Interference Points [ Ascendance'verse | GitS / ME AU ]
- Thread starter Sevoris
- Start date
- Crossover
- Created
- Status
- Ongoing
- Watchers
- 53
- Recent readers
- 0
- Threadmarks
- 9
-
Statistics (8 threadmarks, 15k words)
User Total Sevoris 8 -
Loading…
Sevoris
Nerd, Writer, Illustrator, Mad Scientist
- Location
- Server Stack 65412B
The year is 2197 A.D.
Over a century ago, the discovery of alien technology on Mars catapulted then-mankind to the stars.
Now, a transhuman civilization stretches across thousands of Lightyears, from the spinward chinese and european frontiers to the far arms of the United Interstellar American States, finally at peace again.
For Lieutenant colonel Daisuke Aramaki, the assignment to the frontier colony of Xin Shanxi is a routine assignment, part of the regular security reinforcements of the SAAF Colonial Guard in preparation for the opening of a nearby Relay.
Nobody expects an actual incident…
...until the CFSC Wuxei returns to Xin Shanxi with heavy damage, and decades of wargames and worst case scenarios suddenly turn into harsh, unforgiving reality.
The First Contact War has begun.
-----/| W/A\R |\-----
INDEX
The main Story of Interference Points:
Prologue - Waveforms
January 2197
I - A discovery is made and a battle begins
( MORE TO COME )
Waveforms - I.1
Sevoris
Nerd, Writer, Illustrator, Mad Scientist
- Location
- Server Stack 65412B
[DTPNT 2195:02:25::9741551.5846]
[DTPNT 2197:01:16::0541259.6414]
The world tilted backwards.
Against the howling cacophony of the plasma engines at military power, the shout would have been inaudible.
The TacNet transmitted it clearly: "Where the fuck are the dampeners?!"
"Combat approach!" was the only reply given over the banging hiss of the point-defense lasers discharging their capacitors.
Outside, something slammed into the barriers, exploding like rapid thunder as it turned into plasma.
The response was the ripping tear of the port minigun firing a long burst, tracking as the TALV leveled out.
[10 seconds to DZ.] The Dropmaster AI was machine-calm, courier of the jacked-in pilots inside the cockpit bringing the Dragonwing in as hard as possible, spitting ECM and countermeasure pods.
With the tilt went the G-forces that had tried to rip the soldier out of his webbing, tearing at his Shell.
"Final dropsuit checks!"
His outer backpack clicked as it tested itself, components within humming to life, joining the ambient vibrations of life support fans, linear frame servos and the all-dominating constant of his breathing inside the padded confines of his helmet.
Inhale… exhale... inhale...exhale...
[Sound off Ready drop!]
"Ready", he shouted into his microphone.
[5 seconds! Good drop, and good luck!]
Behind him, the drop bay doors shook his seat as they unlocked and prepared to hinge open.
[3!]
With a jolt, the doors began hinging open, his seat folding away to leave him hanging over the opening abyss of 250 meters free air, and the grey-red urban landscape below.
The thrum of the plasma engines turned into a howl, as the Dragonwing throttled down and switched into semi-hover, engines angled at 30° off-verticality, it's bright plasma turned into a dull red by the stealth baffles mounted on the exhausts.
[2!]
They hang exposed, swinging in the remaining crash webbing, swinging aft as the dropship bleeds velocity, then…
[1!]
The last moment before the drop. The last breath. The rush of adrenaline, flooding in, mixing with the combat drugs, breaking on the calm core of the combat autism, resonating in the Tactical Fusion that linked the squads together somewhere deep.
[Drop.]
The seats released their hold on the soldier's armor, and they fell, staggered, into the gloom below.
He looked around. The air shimmered in the enhanced vision render of his visor, rebroadcast ECM micromachine swarms glittering like fog in the mixture of light enhancement and semi-active infrared vision, pulled into twists and tornados by the air currents of hypersonic munitions, high-hypersonic mass accelerator fire and the exhaust of aerial vehicles.
In the distance, the main battle etched itself into the night, the CFA's 52nd Frontier Armored exchanging fire with an enemy tank formation, a stroboscopic light show of plasma, fire, and photon field glows.
Letting yourself fall inside a dropsuit was an art in itself, transported by the skillset linked into his brain. The pack that wrapped around the backpack underneath and locked into the armor with struts at armored shoulders and hips exerted just enough eezonics-driven velocity reduction to keep him from reaching terminal velocity in the local gravity field, but he had to avoid tipping over or flipping backwards; instead he had to keep his feet aligned with the ground and use the arms for keeping himself stabilized in concert with the gyroscopes of his armor, part artificial skillset - part AI augmentation keeping him inside this fine balance point.
He risked turning his head. Around him, the remaining soldiers and drones were falling, marked by blue and green hexagons in the center of their entoptic outlines and glowing stripes on their bodies and chassis.
Another Dragonwing raced by overhead, ejecting yet more combatants like a seedpod into the night; in the distance the last two of the four-flyer squadrons are still approaching, blasting their way through the last remaining Anti-Air, splitting flares as they come with thermoptic camouflage still engaged, muddying their signature.
[Drop's hot! Weapons out people!]
The dropsuit pulled the entire suit up as it opened its hatches, extended its four main plasma engines, and fired them in synch with the main CM field surging, turning 200 kilos of augmented soldier into effective outfield 20 kilograms. Below, the ground populated with red targeting outlines and their telemetries. Aramaki's armored hand closed around the grip of the IM-96A2 Mattock, easily taking it off the chest SmartPack rig, the mass accelerator unfolding in his hands, thin heat-radiation fins standing up like hair on a predator about to pounce its prey.
One of the enemy outlines looked up, and raised a weapon.
Aramaki didn't give the articulated clearance; the Know of "weapons free" raced through the tactical fusion and into the minds of the two squads, and fingers smoothly pulled through triggers. The accelerator of the Mattock deflected slightly as it corrected for the unstable platform of an aerial soldier in a dropsuit; the next moment, the internal ballistic computer released the accelerator, and a 2mm sabot began its travel down the sequences of coils and CM field emitters.
The armor-piercing high-explosive projectile drew a bright red-white trail of ionization and ablation behind itself, turning into the white haze of condensed air, racing downwards at high-hypersonic speeds. The butt and grip of the Mattock slammed back upwards, and Aramaki felt the momentary imbalance before the dropsuit compensated with a stack of maneuvering thrusters spread all over his combat suit firing. He held the weapon in strong hands, let the suits linear frame and his compensators take the still painful-feeling recoil in a smooth motion, then fired again.
Below him, the alien's barrier flashed even as it tried to evade, bringing its own weapon up, the 10kJ shots of the Mattock turning into plasma as the bright blue pseudosolid "surface" of the kinetic barrier and its sharp gravity gradient crushed the long flechette flat in microseconds.
The return fire from its own assault rifle reached upwards, and into Aramaki's own kinetic barrier, producing a minute audio feedback and causing the big blue shield bar that occupied the upper edge of Aramaki's HUD to drop.
The analytically-augmented part of his mind noted that the drop in barrier capacitor energy and field cohesion was no less than usual when engaged by the XM-Type-4 and thanked the paranoid Ego that ensured his kinetic barrier covered every aspect of his suit equally.
The soldier part ran the numbers - the Mattock would win out, and it did. Around the falling alien, spraying bodily fluids everywhere from the holes in its head, shoulders and back, the entoptic graphic indicating his landing point shifted as the dropsuit AI refined his touch-down point.
Around him, the other soldiers sent kinetic rounds and seekers of their own downwards, some of them spiraling and "exploding" in bursts of harsh ionized particles and enhanced radiation, destroying the enemy nanorobots that filled the local air. Others homed in all the way and exploded into segmented robots the enemy used as a mixture of heavy and shock infantry, blasting their subcomponents apart and destroying them; the shotgunners restricted themselves to their onboard, less guided but more destructive micro-RPGs and slug rounds.
Two of the humanoid figures got hit hard, had their barriers broken, slumped in their packs, began spiraling out of control, tumbling towards the muzzle flashes before. They stabilized, flipped head-down, and streaked into two dense clusters of enemies. All of their onboard explosives and power cells exploded in painfully bright white flashes turned into dull embers by the visor filters, flinging wood panelling, armor pieces, glowing slag and ripped corpses everywhere. In the dull lighting of flickering OLED strips and fiery embers, he could see several alien soldiers tumble over the edge of the building towards the ground below.
There were no screams. Silenced by the same sound-suppressing, airtight helmet designs the Alliance soldiers used.
The last forty meters passed in a blur, and he slammed into the wooden deck, the material splintering under the impact. He bent his legs in a trained motion, letting the muscle fibres absorb the impact and feed the electric power into reserve capacitors, bringing his shouldered weapon up and ready at a left angle even as he did so.
Around him, the rest of the two squads were landing, bringing weapons up in the same shouldered position, firing on new targets as they came up into the low, predatory hunch that held itself completely on skeletal muscles, ready to spring into action at a moment's notice.
[All Striker personnel are on the ground, establishing sensor perimeter. Cargo Walkers inbound, 15 seconds.] At his legs, dispensers clicked as the parasite SneakBot Recon drones disengaged and dropped to the ground, scuttling off into the night under thermoptic 'flage.
[Move out!]
They rose, holding themselves on the balls of their feet, sighting down the weapons sights properly as they began to secure the terrace chosen as their DZ.
Akae Taira directed her fireteam out towards the staircase, M7 Lancer raised, letting the fireteam's assigned Sneakbots and airborne Guardian drones be the first-in scouts. [Perimeter contac down stairwell!], her pointman Ikari Xu neurovocalized in turn with blinking orange warnings on their AROs.
[Engage, engage!]
He fired a burst down the stairwell, spinning out of the way of the return fire that scythed up, touching the perimeter of his barrier before he slammed into cover next to it. His assigned Partner robot blasted two slugs down the stairwell, detonating below in showers of shield-and-armor-piercing flechettes. Taira took the other side, Lancer dropping down by the single shoulder sling guided by the left, right hand retrieving a big grenade from the tactical webbing and ripping it from the embrace of the smart fabric straps that had held it there.
[Frag out!] She lobbed the Multi-payload grenade down the stairwell. There was a flicker of EM down there, picked up by the two 'flaged Sneakbots that had crawled down the stairway on the wall and glass railing, Xeno-communications, followed by the sparking sound of the first payload initiating; conductive nanodust reaching out, currents arcing through the air, shorting out the barriers. The short, poignant double detonation of the fragmentation-thermobaric charges was a dull "thump" they all could feel in their mind-linked suits, sensors on the surface transmitting the vibrations to the Body Image Interfaces of their augmented brains to splice into the bodily sensations.
Their AROs, already helpfully having highlight the trajectory and damage radius of the grenade and the targets thus created, now threw out the ARgraphic Post-Grenade assessment - all targets had been downed. At least that still works.
She commanded two of her squad's combat robots to hold the center of the demolished doorway, it's silicon-carbon sandwich glass smashed long ago by some weapon. The bulky, humanoid robots advanced from their covering position and pointed their heavy QRM-99 Breakdown's down the stairs, sensor phalanxes in the bulky head hunting for targets.
[Stairwell is locked down!] On cue, she and Xu pointed their Lancers down the stairs as well, fingers on the trigger, scanning.
[Tick it and prepare to move out!], Aramaki ordered, using hand gestures as a third channel of communication besides his Neurocom and Implants.
He received a non-verbal, green double-blip on his HMD in confirmation as the troops tossed 'flaged Tic smart mines down the stairwell, where they attached themselves in good places and waited for their intelligent prey to blast into oblivion.
The Cargo Carriers of the two squads made their successful landing, and were now standing up on their four legs, their own Dropsuits having keppt the machines just long enough for the soldiers to clear the DZ sufficiently that they could land and deploy without getting unacceptably damaged. The two robots were long, blocky, and squat, already extending their selection of gimballed and articulated weaponry, ball point defense lasers hunting for missiles in their mounts as the big, top-mounted miniguns swung about like a bloodhound's nose.
[This is Striker 1-2, engaged South, requesting back-up!]
[1-4, back 1-2 up], Aramaki delegated while opening up a three-dimensional tactical map on his HUD, planning his next move.
[Sir.] They ran past them, letting Gunnery Sergeant Xao and his Reaper Shell take the lead, stalking on four flexible legs and extending the heavy weapon mounts. The heavy Synthshell was one of the few Aramaki had for this operation, with experienced users to drive them; forming his one Rapid Reaction Fireteam with heavy weapons and artillery, to shift around as required.
[Drop status on Stalker?], he asked Kisa.
[Inbound just now Sir, advise we clear the DZ for them.]
"Striker, push out, secure Points Alpha and an extended perimeter." Speaking, after that first moment of combat trance, felt strange, slow. An experienced user could neurovocalize far faster than he could truly vocalize, without the shackles of vocal cords. His Battle Management Assistant devoured the order, checked asset disposition and combat situation, and began disseminating detailed orders.
"Understood," someone else replied verbally on the Command Network.
[This is 2-1, laying turrets and sensors.]
[2-2, same.]
[How's it looking on the perimeter?] He turned his attention back to Kisa, leading his own Striker team out and towards Point Alpha, their jump-off point towards the next building.
[No further infantry contacts, Sir, Striker is engaging drones at the outer perimeter, time to clear is 10 seconds.] Kisa informed him. [Confirming Point Alpha is still solid for the hop, enemy sensor resolution is degrading on schedule.]
[Very good, consolidate for execute shortly.]
[15 seconds.]
He nodded in response, looking down his own axis at the perimeter, finding cover behind a plantation pod already marked with projectile holes. [Lynx, be advised we are holding the DZ and awaiting Second Strike.]
[Understood. Second is inbound,] a cool, concentrated voice answered his report.
Splitting his awareness, he followed as the team set about creating a small automated perimeter, seeding a selection of mines while the engineers of the fireteams set up four automated turrets to cover the stairwell, the glass window, and the sides of the terrace, quickly and efficiently spraying down cover foam as they went. Above, some of their additional drones launched from the TALV had already been tasked for sentry duty, several of them flying airborne patrol routes further outwards, combining their sensors and altitude to see further than the ground-based sensor pods.
"Okay, that's it, we're set. Get moving people!" Engineer Kaio Tanaka waved his people back, collapsing his now-entoptic omnitool controls (in order to avoid the normal trigraphic interface setting of enemy sensors) he has used to set up and check the collapsable turret.
[We're good Captain.]
[Solid, Tanaka. 1-1, 1-2 on the bounce, 1-4 and 2 to cover! Secure that other side!]
[Copy. Engineers, crack that window!]
[Stand-by.] Another engineer, Kamuzu Mubarak, took his left hand from his weapon and went for his chest rig, retrieving a big 40mm Gauss Grenade. He was one of the few in his Squad who had a heavy 40mm Gauss Accelerator mounted as the Multi-Mission Accelerator System, designed to launch heftier munitions and Minimissiles instead of the Micromissiles, Seekers and Minigrenades the rest of the squad had access to.
The breach of the accelerator snapped open on its own, weapon computer noting that Mubarak was bringing up the stubby 40mm munition, and the engineer feed it home with practised easy, pushing firmly with his thumb until the "caseless" projectile hit the catch in the rim of the accelerator tube. He slapped the breach closed, then took careful aim, using his entoptic ballistic computing overlays to place the payload squarely on the still-intact window.
"Firing!" Mubarak smoothly pulled through the second trigger of his weapon.
The accelerator made a dry "choonk!" sound as the gauss coils, assisted by the integrated countermass projectors, accelerated the grenade, riffling adding spin to stabilize the projectile. As it passed the muzzle, tiny lasers in the barrel transmitted fuzing information to the grenade.
The shell fell apart in mid-air, spilling submunitions into the night. With no white-grey propellant smoke to mark the grenade's trajectory, the millisecond-long process would have been almost invisible; the BattleNet drew it out in extreme entoptic detail, relaying shot telemetry to anyone who was looking with the right overlays. The eighteen submunitions contained within the magnetic shell of the grenade airbust at just the right moment, spreading out over the glass controlled by tiny unfolding fins of smart material. They impacted the glass spread out in a complex, carefully selected pattern, plastic explosive heads squashing across the laminate by the impact energy.
Then the microscopic fuze units within the plastic explosives, wired together by thin fibres to the coordinator chip in the base of the projectile, initiated.
The explosions weren't especially bright- more akin to muted flashes that lasted far too short even for an outdrawn light under the influence of combat boosting. Their consequences, however, were much more visually impressive. The laminate broke into hundreds, then thousands of shards, cracks spreading like a nanoswarm over the surface; then the entire window disintegrated under the power of eighteen synchronized detonations of Nanotex, the lights of the battlefield sparkling as it fell into the chasm below, breaking on the paving of the sidestreet.
[Go, go, go!]
At the same time, Striker 1-1 had taken several steps back. As Mubarak whirled out of the way, they broke into a hard sprint, working augmented legs and armor assist, getting as much speed as possible before they tensed and jumped.
Their jump packs cut in with a short burst of CM and a spurt of the main thrusters, firing them across the cap and into the other room, four combat robots up front, then two in behind, then the other two, catching their footing with the smoothness of boosted, computer-augmented psychology.
[Spread out and secure! Move it!]
Aramaki held himself at their metaphorical shoulder, switching from helmet cam to helmet cam all the while holding the Battlespace Overview Render in his third eye, the artificial visual space his cyberbrains DNI created somewhere in his visual cortex.
Shit. Too early.
"Stalker, deal with them!", Commander Fullara Sen came through on the network.
"Aye Sir," Korovin Vasilievich from Stalker answered her order, turning to address his unit: "Hold for the initial Tics, then give it to them!'Bots front, heavies besides them, grenades at the ready. You, you, 'flage, get on the windows!"
[2's,] Aramaki turned back to his own troops, [reinforce the stair-ward perimeter angle. We have to get across the bound before they get eyes-on! Engineers, scramblers and Counterswarms, seed them now!
[1-3, get across, reinforce the other side. Take the Walkers with you!]
[Sir.]
Behind them, the Tic mines detonated. This time, there were screams.
Bestial screams.
"Fire, fire! Heavies, on the Berserkers!" Fire broke out as the entire Stalker Platoon pumped rounds into the stairwell access, bringing their own not inconsiderable firepower into play. There was a repeated "choonk-boom!" of grenades as the Grenadiers brought their heavy launchers into play, mixed with the "thu-screeeeeeoooow-whamp!" of seekers.
"Fuck, they got Berserkers?", Private Edris Štěpánek blurted, his exclamation routed by the Communications AI.
"Yes. Get moving!", Aramaki ordered. "2, collapse the perimeter, get your ass across."
"Secure over here, advise you get moving as well Sir!", 1-1-6 shouted.
"Coming!" Aramaki positioned himself, and jumped into the sprint, working his legs hard and fast to build up speed, watching his HUD as it counted his speed and gave him the clearance to jump.
He flexed, and began the leg-powered begin of the arc, cutting in his jump pack by neural control to flatten his arc and increase his forward velocity, allowing him to sail through the window frame and hit the floor smoothly, once again letting his legs absorb the impact energy.
Behind him, the two heavy robots of his platoon, squat bulky humanoids with digitigrade legs and bulky weapons in robotic hands, made the transfer, immediately spreading out and sighting the other rooftop.
"Lynx, First Platoon almost across."
"Copy that Aramaki. Third and Fourth are dropping just now. We'll held here. You cut across to Objective Alpha. Com silence from now on, will reconnect once local CIJ assets are degraded."
"Understood. Good luck." Kisa automatically closed the connection.
Striker 1-4 was now arriving, jetting across the cap with heavier pack assistance due to their sheer mass creating a bit too much momentum for a jump in the tight quarters of the second building complex. Behind them, 2nd Squad was getting ready to jump, already collapsing inward in stages, covering each other as they went, before the fireteams began jetting across the gap.
Aramaki turned around after another moment, heading deeper into the building and with the perimeter of 1st Squad, already pushing out and securing their infiltration route towards Alpha.
"You sure about this?"
The noise of a keyboard in the background, followed by the feedback sounds of a haptic interface.
"Yeah. This here, this… is another relay. Based on parallax dimension measurement from the LIDAR, and the secondary superstructure configuration, the software makes it a Secondary-Alpha."
"That's… how far from Xin Shanxi?"
More feedback noise. Someone is opening a new window, zooming. A haptic keyboard sounds, something is selected.
"2 lightyears, roundabout. Orbits a red dwarf just outside of what you could call the habitable zone. Seems it's grav-locked to a rotation-locked planet inside the outer 'zone."
"Yeesh. Xin Shanxi's gonna turn into quite the area, isn't it?"
"Maybe. Gods knows it looks like that primary arm has dried up. One Primary and the most promising secondary chain down, and still no other Prim."
Sounds of drinking.
"You know, some call it the big end of the chinese arm."
Snorting from the other speaker.
"Still pays off handsomely. You looked at the specs for Xin Shanxi? Class-A garden world, my man. And only about a day's travel from Xin Beijing. Three at top speed from the core all the way out there."
Whistling. More haptic feedback sounds, social media noises mixed with an official Telecommunication program.
"Well, I'm gonna call this in right now."
A chair turns around.
"Are we in a hurry? Expecting aliens to burst out of that Relay any minute, and hope the Colonial Guard gets a few light years closer before it happens?"
The noise of the interface stops as its user does.
"Har har har. No. I mean, c'mon. We're now… 25,000 lightyears from Sol. And we still haven't made any hard contact. Look, we haven't even seen stuff so far. No megastructures, no stellar engineering, not even massive EM chatter or artificially modulated Gravity waves or neutrinos or some such advanced stuff. If you ask me, there's nothing beyond that Relay but more empty space."
Rustling of clothing.
"I guess we'll see."
=[ PROLOGE - WAVEFORMS ]=
-| January 2197 |-
The noise of a keyboard in the background, followed by the feedback sounds of a haptic interface.
"Yeah. This here, this… is another relay. Based on parallax dimension measurement from the LIDAR, and the secondary superstructure configuration, the software makes it a Secondary-Alpha."
"That's… how far from Xin Shanxi?"
More feedback noise. Someone is opening a new window, zooming. A haptic keyboard sounds, something is selected.
"2 lightyears, roundabout. Orbits a red dwarf just outside of what you could call the habitable zone. Seems it's grav-locked to a rotation-locked planet inside the outer 'zone."
"Yeesh. Xin Shanxi's gonna turn into quite the area, isn't it?"
"Maybe. Gods knows it looks like that primary arm has dried up. One Primary and the most promising secondary chain down, and still no other Prim."
Sounds of drinking.
"You know, some call it the big end of the chinese arm."
Snorting from the other speaker.
"Still pays off handsomely. You looked at the specs for Xin Shanxi? Class-A garden world, my man. And only about a day's travel from Xin Beijing. Three at top speed from the core all the way out there."
Whistling. More haptic feedback sounds, social media noises mixed with an official Telecommunication program.
"Well, I'm gonna call this in right now."
A chair turns around.
"Are we in a hurry? Expecting aliens to burst out of that Relay any minute, and hope the Colonial Guard gets a few light years closer before it happens?"
The noise of the interface stops as its user does.
"Har har har. No. I mean, c'mon. We're now… 25,000 lightyears from Sol. And we still haven't made any hard contact. Look, we haven't even seen stuff so far. No megastructures, no stellar engineering, not even massive EM chatter or artificially modulated Gravity waves or neutrinos or some such advanced stuff. If you ask me, there's nothing beyond that Relay but more empty space."
Rustling of clothing.
"I guess we'll see."
=[ PROLOGE - WAVEFORMS ]=
-| January 2197 |-
[DTPNT 2197:01:16::0541259.6414]
The world tilted backwards.
Against the howling cacophony of the plasma engines at military power, the shout would have been inaudible.
The TacNet transmitted it clearly: "Where the fuck are the dampeners?!"
"Combat approach!" was the only reply given over the banging hiss of the point-defense lasers discharging their capacitors.
Outside, something slammed into the barriers, exploding like rapid thunder as it turned into plasma.
The response was the ripping tear of the port minigun firing a long burst, tracking as the TALV leveled out.
[10 seconds to DZ.] The Dropmaster AI was machine-calm, courier of the jacked-in pilots inside the cockpit bringing the Dragonwing in as hard as possible, spitting ECM and countermeasure pods.
With the tilt went the G-forces that had tried to rip the soldier out of his webbing, tearing at his Shell.
"Final dropsuit checks!"
⦑ Final Dropsuit Check ⦒
〈 Power Supply… OK 〉
〈 Mechanics… OK 〉
〈 Field Generators… OK 〉
〈 Reaction Propulsion System… OK 〉
〈 Flight Control Surfaces… OK 〉
〈 Power Supply… OK 〉
〈 Mechanics… OK 〉
〈 Field Generators… OK 〉
〈 Reaction Propulsion System… OK 〉
〈 Flight Control Surfaces… OK 〉
His outer backpack clicked as it tested itself, components within humming to life, joining the ambient vibrations of life support fans, linear frame servos and the all-dominating constant of his breathing inside the padded confines of his helmet.
Inhale… exhale... inhale...exhale...
[Sound off Ready drop!]
"Ready", he shouted into his microphone.
[5 seconds! Good drop, and good luck!]
Behind him, the drop bay doors shook his seat as they unlocked and prepared to hinge open.
[3!]
With a jolt, the doors began hinging open, his seat folding away to leave him hanging over the opening abyss of 250 meters free air, and the grey-red urban landscape below.
The thrum of the plasma engines turned into a howl, as the Dragonwing throttled down and switched into semi-hover, engines angled at 30° off-verticality, it's bright plasma turned into a dull red by the stealth baffles mounted on the exhausts.
[2!]
They hang exposed, swinging in the remaining crash webbing, swinging aft as the dropship bleeds velocity, then…
[1!]
The last moment before the drop. The last breath. The rush of adrenaline, flooding in, mixing with the combat drugs, breaking on the calm core of the combat autism, resonating in the Tactical Fusion that linked the squads together somewhere deep.
[Drop.]
The seats released their hold on the soldier's armor, and they fell, staggered, into the gloom below.
He looked around. The air shimmered in the enhanced vision render of his visor, rebroadcast ECM micromachine swarms glittering like fog in the mixture of light enhancement and semi-active infrared vision, pulled into twists and tornados by the air currents of hypersonic munitions, high-hypersonic mass accelerator fire and the exhaust of aerial vehicles.
In the distance, the main battle etched itself into the night, the CFA's 52nd Frontier Armored exchanging fire with an enemy tank formation, a stroboscopic light show of plasma, fire, and photon field glows.
⦑ 200 meters to ground ⦒
Letting yourself fall inside a dropsuit was an art in itself, transported by the skillset linked into his brain. The pack that wrapped around the backpack underneath and locked into the armor with struts at armored shoulders and hips exerted just enough eezonics-driven velocity reduction to keep him from reaching terminal velocity in the local gravity field, but he had to avoid tipping over or flipping backwards; instead he had to keep his feet aligned with the ground and use the arms for keeping himself stabilized in concert with the gyroscopes of his armor, part artificial skillset - part AI augmentation keeping him inside this fine balance point.
⦑ 100 meters to ground ⦒
He risked turning his head. Around him, the remaining soldiers and drones were falling, marked by blue and green hexagons in the center of their entoptic outlines and glowing stripes on their bodies and chassis.
Another Dragonwing raced by overhead, ejecting yet more combatants like a seedpod into the night; in the distance the last two of the four-flyer squadrons are still approaching, blasting their way through the last remaining Anti-Air, splitting flares as they come with thermoptic camouflage still engaged, muddying their signature.
⦑ 75 meters to ground ⦒
[Drop's hot! Weapons out people!]
The dropsuit pulled the entire suit up as it opened its hatches, extended its four main plasma engines, and fired them in synch with the main CM field surging, turning 200 kilos of augmented soldier into effective outfield 20 kilograms. Below, the ground populated with red targeting outlines and their telemetries. Aramaki's armored hand closed around the grip of the IM-96A2 Mattock, easily taking it off the chest SmartPack rig, the mass accelerator unfolding in his hands, thin heat-radiation fins standing up like hair on a predator about to pounce its prey.
One of the enemy outlines looked up, and raised a weapon.
Aramaki didn't give the articulated clearance; the Know of "weapons free" raced through the tactical fusion and into the minds of the two squads, and fingers smoothly pulled through triggers. The accelerator of the Mattock deflected slightly as it corrected for the unstable platform of an aerial soldier in a dropsuit; the next moment, the internal ballistic computer released the accelerator, and a 2mm sabot began its travel down the sequences of coils and CM field emitters.
The armor-piercing high-explosive projectile drew a bright red-white trail of ionization and ablation behind itself, turning into the white haze of condensed air, racing downwards at high-hypersonic speeds. The butt and grip of the Mattock slammed back upwards, and Aramaki felt the momentary imbalance before the dropsuit compensated with a stack of maneuvering thrusters spread all over his combat suit firing. He held the weapon in strong hands, let the suits linear frame and his compensators take the still painful-feeling recoil in a smooth motion, then fired again.
Below him, the alien's barrier flashed even as it tried to evade, bringing its own weapon up, the 10kJ shots of the Mattock turning into plasma as the bright blue pseudosolid "surface" of the kinetic barrier and its sharp gravity gradient crushed the long flechette flat in microseconds.
The return fire from its own assault rifle reached upwards, and into Aramaki's own kinetic barrier, producing a minute audio feedback and causing the big blue shield bar that occupied the upper edge of Aramaki's HUD to drop.
The analytically-augmented part of his mind noted that the drop in barrier capacitor energy and field cohesion was no less than usual when engaged by the XM-Type-4 and thanked the paranoid Ego that ensured his kinetic barrier covered every aspect of his suit equally.
The soldier part ran the numbers - the Mattock would win out, and it did. Around the falling alien, spraying bodily fluids everywhere from the holes in its head, shoulders and back, the entoptic graphic indicating his landing point shifted as the dropsuit AI refined his touch-down point.
Around him, the other soldiers sent kinetic rounds and seekers of their own downwards, some of them spiraling and "exploding" in bursts of harsh ionized particles and enhanced radiation, destroying the enemy nanorobots that filled the local air. Others homed in all the way and exploded into segmented robots the enemy used as a mixture of heavy and shock infantry, blasting their subcomponents apart and destroying them; the shotgunners restricted themselves to their onboard, less guided but more destructive micro-RPGs and slug rounds.
Two of the humanoid figures got hit hard, had their barriers broken, slumped in their packs, began spiraling out of control, tumbling towards the muzzle flashes before. They stabilized, flipped head-down, and streaked into two dense clusters of enemies. All of their onboard explosives and power cells exploded in painfully bright white flashes turned into dull embers by the visor filters, flinging wood panelling, armor pieces, glowing slag and ripped corpses everywhere. In the dull lighting of flickering OLED strips and fiery embers, he could see several alien soldiers tumble over the edge of the building towards the ground below.
There were no screams. Silenced by the same sound-suppressing, airtight helmet designs the Alliance soldiers used.
The last forty meters passed in a blur, and he slammed into the wooden deck, the material splintering under the impact. He bent his legs in a trained motion, letting the muscle fibres absorb the impact and feed the electric power into reserve capacitors, bringing his shouldered weapon up and ready at a left angle even as he did so.
Around him, the rest of the two squads were landing, bringing weapons up in the same shouldered position, firing on new targets as they came up into the low, predatory hunch that held itself completely on skeletal muscles, ready to spring into action at a moment's notice.
[All Striker personnel are on the ground, establishing sensor perimeter. Cargo Walkers inbound, 15 seconds.] At his legs, dispensers clicked as the parasite SneakBot Recon drones disengaged and dropped to the ground, scuttling off into the night under thermoptic 'flage.
[Move out!]
They rose, holding themselves on the balls of their feet, sighting down the weapons sights properly as they began to secure the terrace chosen as their DZ.
Akae Taira directed her fireteam out towards the staircase, M7 Lancer raised, letting the fireteam's assigned Sneakbots and airborne Guardian drones be the first-in scouts. [Perimeter contac down stairwell!], her pointman Ikari Xu neurovocalized in turn with blinking orange warnings on their AROs.
[Engage, engage!]
He fired a burst down the stairwell, spinning out of the way of the return fire that scythed up, touching the perimeter of his barrier before he slammed into cover next to it. His assigned Partner robot blasted two slugs down the stairwell, detonating below in showers of shield-and-armor-piercing flechettes. Taira took the other side, Lancer dropping down by the single shoulder sling guided by the left, right hand retrieving a big grenade from the tactical webbing and ripping it from the embrace of the smart fabric straps that had held it there.
[Frag out!] She lobbed the Multi-payload grenade down the stairwell. There was a flicker of EM down there, picked up by the two 'flaged Sneakbots that had crawled down the stairway on the wall and glass railing, Xeno-communications, followed by the sparking sound of the first payload initiating; conductive nanodust reaching out, currents arcing through the air, shorting out the barriers. The short, poignant double detonation of the fragmentation-thermobaric charges was a dull "thump" they all could feel in their mind-linked suits, sensors on the surface transmitting the vibrations to the Body Image Interfaces of their augmented brains to splice into the bodily sensations.
Their AROs, already helpfully having highlight the trajectory and damage radius of the grenade and the targets thus created, now threw out the ARgraphic Post-Grenade assessment - all targets had been downed. At least that still works.
She commanded two of her squad's combat robots to hold the center of the demolished doorway, it's silicon-carbon sandwich glass smashed long ago by some weapon. The bulky, humanoid robots advanced from their covering position and pointed their heavy QRM-99 Breakdown's down the stairs, sensor phalanxes in the bulky head hunting for targets.
[Stairwell is locked down!] On cue, she and Xu pointed their Lancers down the stairs as well, fingers on the trigger, scanning.
[Tick it and prepare to move out!], Aramaki ordered, using hand gestures as a third channel of communication besides his Neurocom and Implants.
He received a non-verbal, green double-blip on his HMD in confirmation as the troops tossed 'flaged Tic smart mines down the stairwell, where they attached themselves in good places and waited for their intelligent prey to blast into oblivion.
The Cargo Carriers of the two squads made their successful landing, and were now standing up on their four legs, their own Dropsuits having keppt the machines just long enough for the soldiers to clear the DZ sufficiently that they could land and deploy without getting unacceptably damaged. The two robots were long, blocky, and squat, already extending their selection of gimballed and articulated weaponry, ball point defense lasers hunting for missiles in their mounts as the big, top-mounted miniguns swung about like a bloodhound's nose.
[This is Striker 1-2, engaged South, requesting back-up!]
[1-4, back 1-2 up], Aramaki delegated while opening up a three-dimensional tactical map on his HUD, planning his next move.
[Sir.] They ran past them, letting Gunnery Sergeant Xao and his Reaper Shell take the lead, stalking on four flexible legs and extending the heavy weapon mounts. The heavy Synthshell was one of the few Aramaki had for this operation, with experienced users to drive them; forming his one Rapid Reaction Fireteam with heavy weapons and artillery, to shift around as required.
[Drop status on Stalker?], he asked Kisa.
[Inbound just now Sir, advise we clear the DZ for them.]
"Striker, push out, secure Points Alpha and an extended perimeter." Speaking, after that first moment of combat trance, felt strange, slow. An experienced user could neurovocalize far faster than he could truly vocalize, without the shackles of vocal cords. His Battle Management Assistant devoured the order, checked asset disposition and combat situation, and began disseminating detailed orders.
"Understood," someone else replied verbally on the Command Network.
[This is 2-1, laying turrets and sensors.]
[2-2, same.]
[How's it looking on the perimeter?] He turned his attention back to Kisa, leading his own Striker team out and towards Point Alpha, their jump-off point towards the next building.
[No further infantry contacts, Sir, Striker is engaging drones at the outer perimeter, time to clear is 10 seconds.] Kisa informed him. [Confirming Point Alpha is still solid for the hop, enemy sensor resolution is degrading on schedule.]
[Very good, consolidate for execute shortly.]
[15 seconds.]
He nodded in response, looking down his own axis at the perimeter, finding cover behind a plantation pod already marked with projectile holes. [Lynx, be advised we are holding the DZ and awaiting Second Strike.]
[Understood. Second is inbound,] a cool, concentrated voice answered his report.
Splitting his awareness, he followed as the team set about creating a small automated perimeter, seeding a selection of mines while the engineers of the fireteams set up four automated turrets to cover the stairwell, the glass window, and the sides of the terrace, quickly and efficiently spraying down cover foam as they went. Above, some of their additional drones launched from the TALV had already been tasked for sentry duty, several of them flying airborne patrol routes further outwards, combining their sensors and altitude to see further than the ground-based sensor pods.
"Okay, that's it, we're set. Get moving people!" Engineer Kaio Tanaka waved his people back, collapsing his now-entoptic omnitool controls (in order to avoid the normal trigraphic interface setting of enemy sensors) he has used to set up and check the collapsable turret.
[We're good Captain.]
[Solid, Tanaka. 1-1, 1-2 on the bounce, 1-4 and 2 to cover! Secure that other side!]
[Copy. Engineers, crack that window!]
[Stand-by.] Another engineer, Kamuzu Mubarak, took his left hand from his weapon and went for his chest rig, retrieving a big 40mm Gauss Grenade. He was one of the few in his Squad who had a heavy 40mm Gauss Accelerator mounted as the Multi-Mission Accelerator System, designed to launch heftier munitions and Minimissiles instead of the Micromissiles, Seekers and Minigrenades the rest of the squad had access to.
The breach of the accelerator snapped open on its own, weapon computer noting that Mubarak was bringing up the stubby 40mm munition, and the engineer feed it home with practised easy, pushing firmly with his thumb until the "caseless" projectile hit the catch in the rim of the accelerator tube. He slapped the breach closed, then took careful aim, using his entoptic ballistic computing overlays to place the payload squarely on the still-intact window.
"Firing!" Mubarak smoothly pulled through the second trigger of his weapon.
The accelerator made a dry "choonk!" sound as the gauss coils, assisted by the integrated countermass projectors, accelerated the grenade, riffling adding spin to stabilize the projectile. As it passed the muzzle, tiny lasers in the barrel transmitted fuzing information to the grenade.
The shell fell apart in mid-air, spilling submunitions into the night. With no white-grey propellant smoke to mark the grenade's trajectory, the millisecond-long process would have been almost invisible; the BattleNet drew it out in extreme entoptic detail, relaying shot telemetry to anyone who was looking with the right overlays. The eighteen submunitions contained within the magnetic shell of the grenade airbust at just the right moment, spreading out over the glass controlled by tiny unfolding fins of smart material. They impacted the glass spread out in a complex, carefully selected pattern, plastic explosive heads squashing across the laminate by the impact energy.
Then the microscopic fuze units within the plastic explosives, wired together by thin fibres to the coordinator chip in the base of the projectile, initiated.
The explosions weren't especially bright- more akin to muted flashes that lasted far too short even for an outdrawn light under the influence of combat boosting. Their consequences, however, were much more visually impressive. The laminate broke into hundreds, then thousands of shards, cracks spreading like a nanoswarm over the surface; then the entire window disintegrated under the power of eighteen synchronized detonations of Nanotex, the lights of the battlefield sparkling as it fell into the chasm below, breaking on the paving of the sidestreet.
[Go, go, go!]
At the same time, Striker 1-1 had taken several steps back. As Mubarak whirled out of the way, they broke into a hard sprint, working augmented legs and armor assist, getting as much speed as possible before they tensed and jumped.
Their jump packs cut in with a short burst of CM and a spurt of the main thrusters, firing them across the cap and into the other room, four combat robots up front, then two in behind, then the other two, catching their footing with the smoothness of boosted, computer-augmented psychology.
[Spread out and secure! Move it!]
Aramaki held himself at their metaphorical shoulder, switching from helmet cam to helmet cam all the while holding the Battlespace Overview Render in his third eye, the artificial visual space his cyberbrains DNI created somewhere in his visual cortex.
〈 Sensor Perimeter Contact! 〉
〈 Enemy Infantry Contacts in lower structure, approaching COA 〉
〈 Enemy Infantry Contacts in lower structure, approaching COA 〉
Shit. Too early.
"Stalker, deal with them!", Commander Fullara Sen came through on the network.
"Aye Sir," Korovin Vasilievich from Stalker answered her order, turning to address his unit: "Hold for the initial Tics, then give it to them!'Bots front, heavies besides them, grenades at the ready. You, you, 'flage, get on the windows!"
[2's,] Aramaki turned back to his own troops, [reinforce the stair-ward perimeter angle. We have to get across the bound before they get eyes-on! Engineers, scramblers and Counterswarms, seed them now!
[1-3, get across, reinforce the other side. Take the Walkers with you!]
[Sir.]
Behind them, the Tic mines detonated. This time, there were screams.
Bestial screams.
"Fire, fire! Heavies, on the Berserkers!" Fire broke out as the entire Stalker Platoon pumped rounds into the stairwell access, bringing their own not inconsiderable firepower into play. There was a repeated "choonk-boom!" of grenades as the Grenadiers brought their heavy launchers into play, mixed with the "thu-screeeeeeoooow-whamp!" of seekers.
"Fuck, they got Berserkers?", Private Edris Štěpánek blurted, his exclamation routed by the Communications AI.
"Yes. Get moving!", Aramaki ordered. "2, collapse the perimeter, get your ass across."
"Secure over here, advise you get moving as well Sir!", 1-1-6 shouted.
"Coming!" Aramaki positioned himself, and jumped into the sprint, working his legs hard and fast to build up speed, watching his HUD as it counted his speed and gave him the clearance to jump.
He flexed, and began the leg-powered begin of the arc, cutting in his jump pack by neural control to flatten his arc and increase his forward velocity, allowing him to sail through the window frame and hit the floor smoothly, once again letting his legs absorb the impact energy.
Behind him, the two heavy robots of his platoon, squat bulky humanoids with digitigrade legs and bulky weapons in robotic hands, made the transfer, immediately spreading out and sighting the other rooftop.
"Lynx, First Platoon almost across."
"Copy that Aramaki. Third and Fourth are dropping just now. We'll held here. You cut across to Objective Alpha. Com silence from now on, will reconnect once local CIJ assets are degraded."
"Understood. Good luck." Kisa automatically closed the connection.
Striker 1-4 was now arriving, jetting across the cap with heavier pack assistance due to their sheer mass creating a bit too much momentum for a jump in the tight quarters of the second building complex. Behind them, 2nd Squad was getting ready to jump, already collapsing inward in stages, covering each other as they went, before the fireteams began jetting across the gap.
Aramaki turned around after another moment, heading deeper into the building and with the perimeter of 1st Squad, already pushing out and securing their infiltration route towards Alpha.
- Location
- Canada (We're Sorry)
Sounds like an interesting start. Watched
"25,000 Lightyears" - Xin Beijing (Orion-Cygnus Arm)
Sevoris
Nerd, Writer, Illustrator, Mad Scientist
- Location
- Server Stack 65412B
25,000 Lightyears
The Guide To The Transhuman Sphere
(An OpenInfo Foundation Iniative)
Xin Beijing
Gate to Orion-Cygnus
The solar system now known as Xin Beijing was discovered in 2159 during the Third Expansion, as The Bridge was mapped out in detail and the first available routes of the Orion-Cygnus Arm were opened up and explored.The Guide To The Transhuman Sphere
(An OpenInfo Foundation Iniative)
Xin Beijing
Gate to Orion-Cygnus
Then known as ISC/PRCS-2156/39, the system was quickly identified as the fourth major Primary Relay hub of the transhuman sphere, following Arcturus, New Kopenhagen and York Sentry that were identified during the same expansion, and the second-largest of transhuman space; only surpassed by Arcturus enormous count of Relays and its overall advantagous position and connectivity. This discovery, adding onto the already politics-impacting affair that was control of The Bridge relay connection between the Orion Spur and the Orion-Cygnus arm, led to a colonization and control race of ISC/PRCS-2156/39; ultimately China and India, the regional powers of the arm, managed to lay the most claims onto the ISC/PRCS-2156/39 system, securing future expansion along the primary relay arms; Europe and Africa were the secondary powers present in the ISC/PRCS-2156/39 system.
In 2160, the Chinese People's Republic of the Stars officialy began colonizing ISC/PRCS-2156/39, claiming the naming privilige of the system for themselves, and naming it Xin Beijing. In the new chinese colonisation strategy, rejuvinated with the discovery of The Bridge and the promise of access to the Orion-Cygnus Arm and its massive Relay network, very likely in a similiar density as the Orion Spur and the Core systems and thus a massive area of to-be development for the CPRS, Xin Beijing was to become a core piece; becoming the major shipping and regional control center of the CPRS, from which new colonies would blosom and to which the trade routes would run. Under the interstellar economy of the time, the opening of many new colonies, and the potential to liscence colonial development under CPRS authority, this indeed promised a major growth spurt; economic experts predicted that the development of Xin Beijing would herald a new economic development phase, from colonial shipping to aerospace material extraction and construction (an economic codename for the mining of element zero and fusion fuels, and the construction of new interstellar spacecraft) to bioroid decantation to datanetwork establishment and colonial economic developments in dozens of areas. Pre-emptive bids for future colonial development slots filled the CRPS coffers, and thusly empowered, the Republic also managed to claim the primary habitable planet of the system, Xin Chaoyang (named after the largest administrative district of the city that gave the system its name), for itself.
Other powers, which were also invested in the development of Xin Beijing for their own, guaranteed access to the Orion-Cygnus arm through fait acomplis, were thus forced to divert to secondary locations. The Indian Union managed to secure various moons for its own interest, bringing the Jovian Republics and Inner Belt Alliance in as partners; the European Stellar Federation and African Union instead chose to focus entirely on space habitats and a "Counter-tail" expansion sceme, with most of their colonial infrastructure located around, beyond and on the other side of the claimed relays, supporting operations in Xin Shanxi space through the Relay connection.
The biggest breakaround point for Xin Beijing was arguably the First Interstellar War, which began during Xin Shanxi's secondary colonization efforts; as late as summer of 2164, when the war broke out over colonial differences and Relay arm control in the coreward fringes of the Orion Spur and spread from there through the super- and hyperpowers like a wildfire, Xin Shanxi turned into a battlefield of its own.
Ultimately, the First Interstellar War saw the chinese control of Xin Shanxi broken, and established in different ways. The CRPS broke appart over maintaining cohesive control of the vast chinese expansion; and while warfare in the Orion-Cygnus Arm was inherentiley limited as The Bridge was the only known accessway of the time and hard fought over, ultimately Xin Shanxi was opened up to more colonial powers. With the end of the war, the Orion-Cygnus Treaty turned The Bridge and Xin Beijing into new international territory; while planets, moons and orbital habitats retained national sovereignty, access to the larger Orion-Cygnus arm was opened for everyone. The new Chinese Federation opened Xin Shanxi to further development by all powers (including the Xin Shanxi Asteroid Treaty of 2168 which gave various powers, including the UIAS, garuanteed claims on the asteroid belt as a development region) and Xin Chaoyang turned into an international planet. The Systems Alliance moved in in large in the same year, beginning the construction of its own Xin Beijing Station for military and security purposes, and stationing the newly created 6th Army of the SAAF Frontier Guard in the system.
The modern Xin Beijing System has developed into a flourishing international system, sometimes called "The Arcturus of the Orion-Cygnus Arm", and with due claim; few other systems have sparked so widespread international development as this once exclusive domain, and Xin Beijing forms the beginning of "The Arc" of densely developed systems that reaches to Arcturus and beyond. Xin Beijing forms the anchor point of the Chinese Arm as it extends further spinward along the Orion-Cygnus Arm, and the Indian Arm also extends further from here, creating a colonial cluster equal to the Indian Bulk and the Indian Stubble in the Orion Spur. The System Alliance 2nd Fleet, Wolfes of the Void, are also stationed at Xin Bejing (specificaly the Xin Bejing Station Military Deep Space Anchorage), as are the Chinese 4th Stellar Fleet and the Indian 6th Fleet.
With New Kopenhagen facing a long-extension dead-end, and the trailward expansion facing a similiar problem for the time, Xin Beijing is expected to experience further growth; some analysts speculate that, for the sheer density of colonial space accessable from Xin Beijing and it being a bottleneck into The Bridge, that the system might one day out-grow Arcturus and its sorounding space and become a center of interstellar civilization rivaling The Core itself.
---/| I/N|T|E\L \---
A/N: The "codex" and other worldbuilding material in Interference Point is writen from the perspective of civilization during the 2190s A.D., in contrast with the post-contact world of Ascendance. Interference Point will also focus more on flashing out the Pre-Contact World created since the discovery of the Archives and the Charon Relay.
A/N: The "codex" and other worldbuilding material in Interference Point is writen from the perspective of civilization during the 2190s A.D., in contrast with the post-contact world of Ascendance. Interference Point will also focus more on flashing out the Pre-Contact World created since the discovery of the Archives and the Charon Relay.
Last edited:
Extrapedia Excerpts - "The Expansions of the (Trans)human Sphere"
Sevoris
Nerd, Writer, Illustrator, Mad Scientist
- Location
- Server Stack 65412B
The Expansions of the (Trans)human Sphere
Modern transhuman space has been shaped primarily through the exploration of the Mass Relay network and the thus-uncovered shapes. While exploration continued essentially unabated, colonial development efforts happened in several major intervals of intense colonial expansion and development, now defined as The Expansions, beginning in 2100 A.D. and continueing to this day with the fifth expansion. [...]OVERVIEW [EDIT]
THE FIRST EXPANSION (2100-2115)
The First Expansion is defined by settlements around Sol and Arcturus and the systems beyond the primary and secundary Relays, largely focussed on the STL-accessable locations due to the scarity of Eezo for use in interstellar drive cores. The discovery of several eezo-rich planetoids in Arcturus small Kuiper Belt and beyond Arcturus Primary Relay 01 during the second half of The First Expansion finaly provides the ressource relief that has hampered serious eezo developments for years. In consequence, FTL-accessable colonies around Arcturus and Sol surge.
THE SECOND EXPANSION (2120-2140)
The Second Expansion begins in 2120, enduring for a whole two decades. Transhumanity expands over around 7,000 lightyears around Sol, discovering the "First Ring" that bridges the Relay connection "arms" that extend along several primary Relays away from Arcturus. Over a hundred Solar systems are settled with small colonies during this period; the demand for unaltered Bioroids, technicaly just artificaly grown humans, and AGI surges as the colonial powers seek to expand their colonial holdings. The first true interstellar armed forces appear during this era, and the new hyperpowers emerge. The System Alliane implements its first First Contact QRF units inside 2nd and 3rd Fleet and stations the first Colonial Guard units.
THE THIRD EXPANSION (2143-2167)
Pushing up to 15,000 Lightyears and transiting into the Orion-Cygnus Arm proper, the Third Expansion begins almost as soon as the Second One has ended. A burgeoing colonial industry demands regular exploration, expansion and colonial exploitation to remain stable, and even the greater and greater expanses of Space are unable to seriously inhibit mapping and expansion of the Relay network under human control. Control over "The Bridge" into the Orion-Cygnus arms and the fact that the Chinese People's Confederation, European Stellar Federation and United Interstellar States of America control the major expansion arms leads into the First Interstellar War, the first and last true "World War" among the stars, and humanities sixth civilisation-spanning conflict. Nontheless, the Third Expansion continues as the powers search for new terriotirs and Relay avenues, in desparate bits to change the economic and strategic picture.
THE FOURTH EXPANSION (2170-2193)
The Fourth Expansion pushes human boundaries into more organic shapes; many previous Relay avenues "dry up", leaving only a few primary arms to expand along. The full Internationalization of The Bridge from the Orion Spur into the Orion-Cygnus arm and the discovery of The Log, a small but effective route from the Arcturus Core into the Orion-Cygnus Arm trailward of The Bridge, heralds the colonization of the Orion arm proper, which swallows up most of humanities colonisation efforts. Many development efforts begin to focus inwards as the major powers seek larger internal consolidation before pushing onward. The breakout of the Outer Fringe War and an associated massive flare in colonial independence movements stiffle, then stop the fourth expansion, and its final resume before 2193 is a weak twitch of a once powerful force. Internal stability and growth is regarded as more important than sheer expansion.
THE FIFTH EXPANSION (2196-TODAY)
The fifth Expansion began only a short time ago, and is still ongoing; focussing on growth in the Orion-Cygnus Arm but primarily the Orion Spur, the Fifth Expansion breaks the pattern of the previous expansions, as expansion across the Relay network has slowed in favor of internal development of FTL-accessable colonies. This is generaly understood to be a response to the internal instabilities and consolidation issues experienced by the Hyperpowers, though Relay expansion is still ongoing. The fifth expansion is expected to reach into the Perseus Arm and closer to the galactic core.
A/N: If you are interested in any worldbuilding or details, feel free to ask questions or leave suggestions!
Extrapedia Excerpts - The SAAF Colonial Guard
Sevoris
Nerd, Writer, Illustrator, Mad Scientist
- Location
- Server Stack 65412B
SAAF Colonial Guard
The official Insignia of the SAAF Colonial Guard
The System Alliance Armed Forces Colonial Guard, also simply known as the Colonial Guard, is a semi-separate military brach under the SAAF, with the task of forming a first line defense force against potential hostile alien contact. Founded in 2124 with the McArthtur-Kiyokov treaty, the organisation is one of the nine uniformed armed services of the Systems Alliance own armed forces, and is
The official Insignia of the SAAF Colonial Guard
subordinated to the System Alliance Department of Defense. The organisations motto is "Against the Unknown, a Shield".
Within the SAAF, the Colonial Guard occupies an awkward position, sharing this position with the Aerospace Force, the Marines, and the Navy. Most of the Colonial Guard operations are of planetary nature, ensuring the safety of frontier colonies in case of a hostile first contact, which would make it part of the Army. However, frontier operations also include starhips and space stations and installations operating on the frontier, which have additional security provided by the Colonial Guard as well, a position normaly occupied by the SAAF Espatiers service branch, which deals with spaceborne infantry operations. Overall, the Colonial Guard is understood as a fully functional separate branch that is ultimately subordinate directly to Alliance Strategic Command and cooperates tightly with the Space Force, which operates the Colonial Guards starlifting operations, logistics, and space combat and support aspects.
The Colonial Guard operates a whole of 16 Field Armies, distributed across the entire human frontier, with another four Field Armies held in Rapid Response Reserve. The Armies are internaly rotated between stations, with six months field station near the frontier and six months training and reserve on the Colonial Guards major bases closer to The Core. The Colonial Guard also maintains the Extended Allied Command Corps; entirely consistent of Liasion personnel and headquarters groups, the EACC is supposed to create the rapid foundation of a unified military force under Article 64 of the Systems Alliance Charta.
Within the Colonial Guard, Battalions upward maintain a full combined arms policy; equipped with infantry, armor, artillery, air combat and support, an extended headquarters and intelligence group, and logistics. The Colonial Guard entirely echews air capability; every vehicle used is aerospace-rated. Similiarly, Colonial Guard Infantry and Armor are extensively trained in multi-vector insertion by air, space, land and sea, extended infiltration and gourillia warfare, field reconnaisance and intelligence gathering, and every Squad contains one trained expert in xenolinguistics (commonly the assigned communications and signal intelligence tech), one in xenobiology, one in xenopsychology and one, commonly the commanding officer, in xenotactics (the later is a special theoretical school of alien militay tactics and strategies). All soldiers and officers are extensively augmented, and the Colonial Guard enjoys access to equipment otherwise retricted to Special Forces; ranging from Infantry power armor over advanced, bleeding-edge weaponry, to the latest in prometheus tech. In general, the Colonial Guard is understood to only recive the best in personnel, training and equipment, due to the enourmus risk associated with the Colonial Guard; realisticaly, these soldiers expect to fight to the last Ego against superior alien forces on inferior terrain and with a numerical disadvantage.
Due to this, the Colonial Guard also trains and drills extremely intensive; immersive combat simulations against hypothetical alien opponents in all imaginable (and several impossible) scenarios are conducted daily, with larger exercises conducted bi-weekly and several very large exercises every rotation; combined with regular training drills, neuro-learning, and theoretical education in a large selection of fields.
The Colonial Guard recruits exclusively from the other branches of the SAAF; outside of bioroids and AGI with appropiate créchée backgrounds, only veterans of the regular SAAF training program are permitted to join. Selection is hard, with a 90% washout rate of recruits (extreme compared to regular armed services, especially the SAAF Army), mostly due to psychological issues. Afterwards, the new recruits undergo a year of intense training before being assigned to their new units, where they commonly drill another six months before a field rotation comes up.
Service with the Colonial Guard is challenging on several aspects. The Guard demands uncompromizing service and endurance; its initial fighting results could decide the fate of transhumanity. The Guard also accepts its mortality and inmortality far moreso than other soldiers or armed forces of any nation; soldiers are expected to deal with rapid bodyloss, instance-loss, resleeving, and redeployment (with several real bodylosses incured during training to steel soldiers) seamlessly and under combat stress, without mental duress (this is also what is among other things responsible for the high washout rate.)
This intense training process has also garnered the Colonial Guard the reputation of a hardy, elite branch of service; expecting only the highest standards. Many hold the Alliance's Advanced Special Forces program under the Interstellar Combatant Iniative, especially it's high-number N-units, as the only military service with higher standards.
Waveforms - I.2
Sevoris
Nerd, Writer, Illustrator, Mad Scientist
- Location
- Server Stack 65412B
[DTPNT 2197:01:16::15565.051266]
[Coming up on the first floor now.]
They were inching up the stairwell, sensor perimeter pulled in close to minimize their EM footprint.
Corporal Davidsen and Cole from Striker 1-2 leading behind their assigned Partner Androids with Tactical Carbines up and scanning, Xao behind them, the rest of 1-2 following behind.
They were back to full combat suspension, minds steeled by combat drugs and regulatory implants, neurovocalizing instead of slow speaking, Shells humming with capacitor energy ready to send them into superhuman action. By now they could hear the signs of enemy activity outside; the sounds of wheels and treads on asphalt and rubble piles, the stomping of their heavy combat walkers, and the whine of plasma engines, mixed with the thrumming, chopping sound of the few helicopter-like craft the enemy employed.
Now, they could also see the lights reflecting through the empty first floor, breaking on glass surfaces, shelves and counters, the desolate bakery illuminated by the white-orange headlights the enemy forces used. Every time it happened, they froze, and waited out the terrifying subjective minutes under combat acceleration before crawling forward further. When deep in enemy territory, even though they were all effectively-invisible shapes under their thermoptic camouflage, one took every precaution. The active camouflage, even the high-tech KillRay XQLTS-1260 that had been sprayed onto armor and equipment, always had had a problem with bright lights against dark backgrounds, and given the fact that the enemy also employed AIs, the tiniest difference in contrast, a near-invisible shadow cast by a 'flaged object could betray them now.
Before them, the two androids reached the end of the stairwell, carefully scanned for a second, then lowered themselves into a crouch and starting to sneak across the floor, slowly. Davidsen and Cole followed them, equally cautious, slowly scanning around the room and watching the corners.
The dedicated recon specialists from Striker 2-2 filtered by, already switching carbines and shotguns for under shoulder-slung DMRs and sniper rifles, two of them pulling out dedicated handheld binoculars stuffed full of imaging systems.
Sergeant Karis Parker led her team towards the storefront slowly, switching from a deep crouch to crawling forward on their arms, pulling themselves slowly into position. At her side, two of her fireteam's androids had their long-range weapons out, crawling just as carefully. When she reached the rim, she carefully extended her arms and the optics package within, connected with a thick isolated cable to the pouch on her chest, pulling up its feed large and central in her HUD.
The render was in perfect 3D, with superior depth perception similar to that achieved by her own ocular implant system and visual cortex augmentations, and extreme resolution, allowing her to pick out even small details.
[2-2 has eyes-on Objective Alpha.]
On the right of the visual feed window, she could see the window which showed how her Muse routed the data feed into the wider BattleNet. Aramaki and his XO switched in immediately, and so did several fireteam leaders.
Somebody whistled. [That's…impressive.]
They had all seen the location before them during the planning session for this operation, had force-integrated the spatial memories of their future battlefield into their minds. They literally knew this place and what lay at its center like their own backyards.
It still didn't dampen the impression when one laid real eyes in the field on it.
What had once been Zhongshan Park was now entirely transformed by conventional construction machines, flash-fabrication, and nanotechnology. The trees had been cleared out, the staircases flattened into ramps, and concentric rings of fortification had been drawn up. Then the aliens had erected their truck-mobile jammers and interceptor rigs, put up tactical shields and Anti-Air weapons around it, and assigned a garrison force of-
-the analytical software finished its count. [That's a reinforced company at least. Probably more in those IFVs. And a QRF will be on us in minutes. We sure we can take them?]
[If the rest of the company are in position, yes. Between the snipers and the seekers, we can take more than half of them out of the game.]
She glanced at the mission clock, its window expanding as her gaze shifted to it. Numbers were shifting as the individual clocks counted up and down: General Military Time, the Mission Clock, and the Timeline clock. The latter was just now hitting the 3 minute mark. Another two minutes after that, they would have to commence their assault on the enemy. So far, they had fared well on their tight schedule; but there just was no means of discretely communicating so close to this objective and its sensitive sensors. Not until they brought their relay drones into the air at the beginning of the actual assault. Installing relays before the battle began had been ruled out as too time-consuming; they would have to trust their support gear to coordinate the strike in the milliseconds of the opening ambush.
She took a deep breath. "Okay then. Set up, people." She placed the optics package aside, and fumbled for the tiny smart tripod that would turn the set into a small SpotterBot, an automated imaging package many snipers prefered these days. With another AI running on her PAN sorting the imagery, she would not require a dedicated separate infantryman as spotter; everyone of the six Egos here qualified for sharpshooting could perform that duty.
She screwed the tripod to the bottom, and set it up roughly on the rubble of the counter they were using as cover. Then she popped back into cover, and began retrieving her heavy-duty coilgun sniper rifle, settling the muzzle on the edge of the counter and retrieving a magazine from a pouch on her chest rig.
For a moment, she eyed the magazine and its top rounds carefully; the sabots slightly gleaming with the thin copper jacket that covered most of their surface. Then she inserted the magazine into the well and reached for the manual charging handle, slowly pulling it back to chamber the first round. As a rule of thumb, the heavy weapons would stay mostly switched off until the moment the ambush began; unlike mass effect firearms, which were self-contained, low-key and moreso when baffled and shielded for stealth operations, the payload coilguns and heavy railguns were far less subtle to the enemy sensors.
Around her, the rest of the platoon was readying for the ambush. External power cells were swapped out, bringing internal ultracap percentages back into the 90% range; more than enough power for what was about to come, as well as the retreat to the extraction zone. The Cargo mules were being unpacked, large pouches strapped to their bellies and sides being removed, and the long tubular devices were now carefully set up. Two of them were 88mm Seeker Mortars; two others were Micromissile Seeker launchers, built off the same launcher platform with integrated batteries, computers, and collapsable bipods and nano-moulding baseplates. The remaining tubes were self-contained, disposable M-74 Streaker Anti-Tank Missiles, wired up to a separate fire control unit by fibre-optic cable together with the other launchers.
In the meantime, the engineers were busy wiring up the rest of the perimeter; setting more turrets, two shield pylons with attached theater projectors able to cover the front with a heavy-duty, vehicle-grade field for over fifteen minutes; and mining the back approaches while also setting down aggressive military nanohives, ready to seed the air with attackers, defenders, support ECM rebroadcasting swarms and microbot recon assets.
It was frantic work under the oppressive overwatch of the mission clock ticking down second by second, interrupted every time more vehicles came past. By now, several were actually returning from the frontlines with regularity, APCs mostly, mixed with IFV types.
Aramaki was actually considering postponing the strike, pushing out his robotic sensor perimeter as far as he dared using fibre-optic extenders and a few SneakBots in both directions of the road, reconsidering his options and eventualities by the seconds. His AIs were crunching down the probability manifold, and inside the storm of options and probabilities, the final choice crystallized out…
[Striker, Delay plus thirty seconds.]
[Sir?]
[Delay plus thirty seconds on strike execution,] Aramaki confirmed. The platoon exchanged aside glances, then steeled themselves again. The Ape had never let them down, and he wouldn't start now.
[Is that wise?], his XO Takahashi Yoshikuni asked on a private channel.
[It's the best option we have left, Taka], Aramaki replied and sent him the tactical prediction plot automatically generated in the symbiotic brainstorming between his mind, his implants, and the assisting AIs.
There was silence on the other end.
"...Agreed, though I don't like it. There's a chance the manifold drifts too much with the others. 30 seconds…. if Lagarde or Sen think we're not in position and start the attack on their own..."
"They see the vehicle activity as much as we do. Delays in case of heavy vehicle activity were planned in. We're supposed to start the ambush. They will hold."
[Let's fucking hope so.] Aramaki shot his XO an angry gaze for the expletive slip-up. Right now, discipline and unity in action was everything. Cursing was the last thing they needed, and it hinted that Yoshikuni had deactivated his emotional regulators completely.
[45 more seconds, and we'll know for certain if they'll hold for us], Yoshikuni comed.
Aramaki held his own breath. The mission clock went through the final ten seconds.
He realized his heart was beating faster when the biomonitors cut in and sent a wave of implant-enforced calm through his Shell. The tension was getting to him through the dampeners. His virtual hand hovered over the controls in his third eye, considering jacking up the regulatory systems… then stopped himself. He was no good completely drugged to the gills.
5 seconds.
2.
1.
First Platoon did not fire at this instant.
Aramaki held his breath.
One second, two seconds, three seconds, four seconds, five, six...
Still nothing.
He exhaled deeply. Good so far. 20 more seconds to go.
He wondered if in this very second Lagarde and Sen were wondering if First Platoon had reached their position. Maybe one of their snipers had caught one of the minute signs Huayuan Road 77's bakery wasn't as desolate as it seemed. Probably they were debating why he had held his fire, for how long he would delay - or maybe they had caught on as well, and their forecasts matched his own closely enough that they had come to the same conclusion.
15 more seconds.
He peeked from his cover, getting eyes on on the square. Still nothing.
"Snipers, has anyone seen signs of friendly activity?"
"No sir. They're as good as we are. No flickers, nothing."
"Got something that could be a missile tube on the other side of the square, second floor, but can't say for sure. My ImRec comes up empty."
10 more seconds.
"Prepare to engage. Snipers, coordinate targets. Assault teams, prepare for sprint." Aramaki was in the second wave. The Colonial Guard gave nothing for the Espatiers "Officers lead from the very front" motto. First came the robots, then the androids; then the sophont soldiers, and an officer, with his command and control networking and powerful servers, stayed back from the very frontline where there weren't several layers of point defenses to blast any fire heading his way.
It was heartless, in many ways a symptom of the ways modern, networked and augmented warfare treated even sapient soldiers.
But especially now, it was necessary. The BMA AI at the center, Aramaki could control and direct this entire platoon with extreme efficiency; melded together at a deep and a high level, his two platoons were amplified in combat effectiveness several times over compared to old infantry.
5 seconds.
[Ready. On my mark…]
The snipers sprang out of cover, bipods unfolding and extending as they did so, smoothly shouldering the guns and sighting in. Besides them, the heavy gunners did the same, sighting in machine guns, grenade launchers and their singular Infantry Support Plasma Accelerator, dismounted from the cargo carriers and hooked up to its power supply and heatsink. The weapon was a terrific anti-armor device, and would make short work of shield-stripped infantry.
Their HUDs took over the final countdown.
Parker zeroed in on her assigned target, an alien sentry stalking the perimeter in attendance of three sentry robots. The alien was in a second-line security shell, digitigrade legs ending in squat feed instead of the armored claws so often found with frontline forces, its long head turning slightly as it walked, hunched over, cradling the smooth, almost organic lines of the weapon in its hands.
She rested the crosshair straight on its head, where she knew the alien shell housed its Ego Executive Medium, and held on target, pulling through the trigger. A message flashed above the crosshair:
The weapon would fire the very moment the countdown hit zero, on its own, with her giving the onboard computer the "weapons free" command by pulling through the trigger.
She calmed her breath, and activated the cardiovascular regulators. Awareness and being focussed down into a small tunnel, a zone of precise, murderous intent.
Aramaki held his breath. Now they would see if all the others had made it. If this plan would work. Besides him, First Platoon assumed sprinter positions, gazing towards the three break-out points they'd chosen and the Ultravibe demolition mines attached to them. Some of the soldiers worked their hands on the grips, psychosomatic residue of the trainings without emotional suppressors and battle trance inducers.
This is it, Aramaki thought. The moment of truth.
He exhaled.
Let's get it done.
Many things happened at once, slowed down by him kicking his awareness acceleration all the way to twelve times normal speed, the world slowing down around him.
The snipers came first, over half a dozen heavy accelerators discharging in synch, switching targets, firing again. Seven contacts dropped off the threat board the same moment (with one shot splitting the heads of two alien sentries who had positioned themselves in a spot of luck), and Aramaki waited…
An instant after the first round of shots had lit up the night with their contrails and the breaking of barriers, two dozen other rifles opened fire from two other buildings near the square-
Yes!
- and joined the withering barrage his own Sharpshooters were laying down, felling more alien sentries, automated turrets and combat robots by the second, firing as fast as their weapons would allow.
The same second, the Ultravibe units initiated with a rising cadenza that would have hurt if not for the adaptive smart audio filtering in the helmets. The crystal resonators within configured as they found the destructive resonance of the surrounding materials, then began the self-reinforcing process.
Within half a second, the storefront at three points was reduced to splinters, ash, and debris, and First Squad stormed out, running as hard as they could, jumping across debris on the sides of the road where it had been roughly cleared to by alien dozers, vaulting over the first, outer series of barricades and the downed Shells of the security forces within.
Their first target was the theater shield, a surprisingly fragile design. Eight infantry-launched seekers, fired inside the focal range of the projectors, ensured the upper projection dome was utterly trashed, and the first line of the point defense was destroyed.
[Go for missile launch!] Aramaki broke from cover. On his tactical overview, new symbols were appearing, in friendly green of allied forces, as the com drones launched and connected with point-to-point laser relays. Several enemy perimeter turrets exploded as they were hit by missiles or seekers; one mass driver turret was catapulted through the air and crashed into the front of an adjacent building in a cacophony of destruction.
"Samurai, Lynx, you had us hanging there for a second," Sen's voice came through immediately on the Company command grid. Aramaki broke out into an involuntary grin, even as alien machine guns zeroed in on the attacks, cutting down a fireteam at the front before they were silenced.
"And you know why."
"Copy. Let's finish this. Perimeter, Triple-A, then the jammers."
"1st Platoon is engaging now," Aramaki confirmed, following the remaining fireteam into the fray. Behind him, the sharpshooters stood up, preparing to move themselves; soon the only thing remaining in the buildings would be their expendable launcher gear.
The missile tubes discharged with a sharp crack, catapulting entoptic orange arrows over dark, blurry into the night atop of dim flames and minute exhaust; they rose into the air, locked onto targets (represented by the connecting lines turning from dashed to full lines) then dove down. The first warheads detonated on the barriers; the following warheads went off, demolishing armor and the interior alike.
With multiple missiles converging on a singular vehicle target, full kill effectiveness was effectively ensured; in the tight spacing, the remaining laser-based point defenses, not configured optimally against such attacks, could not track and disable enough of the missiles before they hit, penetrated the barrier fields, and destroyed the vehicle underneath in more dull flashes and muffled explosions.
[Perimeter Triple-A is confirmed down, Theater shield disabled.]
[Get on the jammers.]
"Ah fuck, we got counterattack-" The exclamation cut off mid-sentence, and Aramaki's Platoon Monitor screamed with a "Man down" warning.
"Watch your shields, people!", Aramaki reminded them, slamming into cover and deploying a fibre-optic cable to watch over his cover. Over his head, the drones came under fire; one caught a heavy enemy slug and broke apart in a flash of failing ultracaps.
[Got two enemy snipers in there!]
[Copy! Flush them out!]
One more signal dropped off the 'net, an alien mass accelerator firing a burst. [IFV!]
[Missile on that!] One, two, four screeched in, joined by one more from the infantry in the square, angling for the alien IFV. First one, then another missile flared bright white as point-defense lasers locked on and burned them out of the sky; the remaining two got through, one punching out the barrier almost completely, the second breaking it. [Shit!]
[One more!]
Someone from another platoon dropped onto his knee, missile tube on the shoulder. [Shot!] The weapon screamed from its tube, and the IFV rocked from the impact. A second later, the back hatch opened; someone fired a grenade into the slit, where it detonated. Wet alien tissue slapped against the hinging hatch, now broken, wet with blue blood. [Good kill!]
[On the jammers, on the jammers! Get the covering infantry!] Aramaki dropped mortar seeker markers as fast as he could, coordinating the fire support from his platoon. A few seconds later, the first rounds screamed in from up high, detonating in airburst mode and showering the enemy infantry with shrapnel. Two were exposed in the same instant, and fell with their barriers broken.
"Enemy heavies, three o'clock!" A lightweight gatling gun spitting particle packets cracked, connecting with two androids and one trooper, sawing them apart before they could find cover.
"Snipers, support guns, take them." Two heavy anti-material rifles roared, then the Plasma Support Guns flared with brilliant white light for a millisecond. Still-glowing slag splashed everywhere as both heavy robots toppled, guns falling silent. One discharged a last time as its user fell, spraying molten concrete around.
Aramaki checked their reserves. The Seekers were halfway dry, the prepared missile tubes expended on wrecking the outer perimeter and anti-air artillery. About as expected, even though he'd have preferred to take out the jammers as well, but completely slagging them took a lot of ammunition. So far, only one antenna array had been thoroughly wrecked by missile hits, with the others suffering at least mobility kills, which left wrecking the arrays and onboard electronics.
"Striker, get missiles on ECM-2, then press in for Demo!"
[Order confirmed,] the Battle Management Assistant replied.
Two fireteams bracketed the alien defenders between them, loading fresh disposable heat sinks while others lobbed grenades into the cover positions around the vehicle, before cutting down the aliens as they burst from cover. [Let's finish this and withdraw!], someone from 2nd Platoon comed on the general net.
"No need to fucking ask twice! We're getting casualties here, the surprise is burning up."
Aramaki snapped his gaze towards another AROW, and winced: Third Platoon had taken casualties from two IFVs and a round of grenades fired into their rear position.
"All Callsigns, Perimeter contact. Alien QRF approaching from the north. Looks like a two Platoons in IFVs and two walkers."
"Lynx…", Aramaki began.
"I know. They'll cut us up. Time's up everyone. Set the charges and blow! That is all that counts now."
And that was it for a clean withdrawal. No chance I'm getting my Platoon out of here in full.
"Missiles, to the road, lay them an ambush!" Wish we had had the chance to lay mines. Aramaki got ripped out of his musings by the combat implants, and turned around when a warning blazed on his HUD.
[COVER ABOVE!] Aramaki threw himself into the shadow of an alien wreck.
Around him, the world exploded, and half of the platoon board just… greyed out, as their transponders were decisively extinguished by the alien smart rounds. An artificial arm (formerly attached to Corporal Danis Lee, according to whatever transponder in there responded to his PAN) slammed into the wrecked hull, mixed with a grisly pudding of flesh, implant weaves, bone fragments, and red blood, already clotting as the biomods and nanotech in it responded to the exposure to air and removal from the host body. His helmet filled with the insistent beeping of broken barriers, the bar flashing as the barriers recycled. The seeker had barely missed him and proximity-detonated, showering him with shrapnel. In a dozen lower places, the sharp fragments had cut into his armor and undersuit, but the hardsuit had sealed quickly and properly, and the shards were already coated in a layer of friendly nanobots; he wasn't at a risk of ABCN contamination just yet.
[Reform people, reform!] He turned to his AIs. [How many missiles?]
[Six.]
Shit. That is not enough.
[Are the support troops still here?]
[Yes. Plasma Accelerator and MGs are still up, no serious casualties.]
[Good. They're to reposition under smoke and ECM cover. Set the drones to dazzling. I'll need them to take down the vehicles.]
[On its way.] To his right, dense smoke spread as grenades were launched out of the building and from the square.
[Missiles, take the forward IFV! Forget the walkers, block that road while we still can!]
[Sir! Shot out! Ah, fu…"] Another person dropped off the Network, in synch with the booming discharges of an enemy autocannon. But he had fired his missile, and something detonated with a massive bang, a turret spiralling into the sky.
[That's a hard kill!] The voice sounded immensely satisfied.
[Machine guns, get on the walkers, disruptors, break their shields. Stick and move, watch your shields and exposure, those bastards have armor-piercing linears! Don't let them get a hard lock! Plasma gun, once the shields are broken, take out their legs and their gun pods.]
[What about the IFVs?]
[You got any anti-vehicle missiles left?] Aramaki asked rhetorically as he retrieved the six-round cylinder with Anti-Vehicle seekers and ejected the other one slotted into his Mattock. [Once they dare kangorou over the downed transport, we'll shoot them with seekers and AMRs, priority in the guns and mobility systems.]
[Understood.]
[Okay then.] The machine guns cut in, staggered. Return fire from the walkers boomed across the square, and a message popped up in Aramaki's situation feed.
"We've got a man down! I've got his gun!"
Another bang, another person dropped off the network. Damn. [All robots, frontal engagement, all guns, full attrition.]
[Implementing now.]
He moved to switch cover. [Aram-]
His gaze snapped to the left. One of the walkers… stood right there, with line of sight to him, and he had not seen it, still relying on his heavily degraded BattleNet to warn him. Oh f…
The right gun pod flashed.
Darkness.
Discon-
No discontinuity? Wait a…
[Coming up on the first floor now.]
They were inching up the stairwell, sensor perimeter pulled in close to minimize their EM footprint.
Corporal Davidsen and Cole from Striker 1-2 leading behind their assigned Partner Androids with Tactical Carbines up and scanning, Xao behind them, the rest of 1-2 following behind.
They were back to full combat suspension, minds steeled by combat drugs and regulatory implants, neurovocalizing instead of slow speaking, Shells humming with capacitor energy ready to send them into superhuman action. By now they could hear the signs of enemy activity outside; the sounds of wheels and treads on asphalt and rubble piles, the stomping of their heavy combat walkers, and the whine of plasma engines, mixed with the thrumming, chopping sound of the few helicopter-like craft the enemy employed.
Now, they could also see the lights reflecting through the empty first floor, breaking on glass surfaces, shelves and counters, the desolate bakery illuminated by the white-orange headlights the enemy forces used. Every time it happened, they froze, and waited out the terrifying subjective minutes under combat acceleration before crawling forward further. When deep in enemy territory, even though they were all effectively-invisible shapes under their thermoptic camouflage, one took every precaution. The active camouflage, even the high-tech KillRay XQLTS-1260 that had been sprayed onto armor and equipment, always had had a problem with bright lights against dark backgrounds, and given the fact that the enemy also employed AIs, the tiniest difference in contrast, a near-invisible shadow cast by a 'flaged object could betray them now.
Before them, the two androids reached the end of the stairwell, carefully scanned for a second, then lowered themselves into a crouch and starting to sneak across the floor, slowly. Davidsen and Cole followed them, equally cautious, slowly scanning around the room and watching the corners.
The dedicated recon specialists from Striker 2-2 filtered by, already switching carbines and shotguns for under shoulder-slung DMRs and sniper rifles, two of them pulling out dedicated handheld binoculars stuffed full of imaging systems.
Sergeant Karis Parker led her team towards the storefront slowly, switching from a deep crouch to crawling forward on their arms, pulling themselves slowly into position. At her side, two of her fireteam's androids had their long-range weapons out, crawling just as carefully. When she reached the rim, she carefully extended her arms and the optics package within, connected with a thick isolated cable to the pouch on her chest, pulling up its feed large and central in her HUD.
The render was in perfect 3D, with superior depth perception similar to that achieved by her own ocular implant system and visual cortex augmentations, and extreme resolution, allowing her to pick out even small details.
[2-2 has eyes-on Objective Alpha.]
On the right of the visual feed window, she could see the window which showed how her Muse routed the data feed into the wider BattleNet. Aramaki and his XO switched in immediately, and so did several fireteam leaders.
Somebody whistled. [That's…impressive.]
They had all seen the location before them during the planning session for this operation, had force-integrated the spatial memories of their future battlefield into their minds. They literally knew this place and what lay at its center like their own backyards.
It still didn't dampen the impression when one laid real eyes in the field on it.
What had once been Zhongshan Park was now entirely transformed by conventional construction machines, flash-fabrication, and nanotechnology. The trees had been cleared out, the staircases flattened into ramps, and concentric rings of fortification had been drawn up. Then the aliens had erected their truck-mobile jammers and interceptor rigs, put up tactical shields and Anti-Air weapons around it, and assigned a garrison force of-
-the analytical software finished its count. [That's a reinforced company at least. Probably more in those IFVs. And a QRF will be on us in minutes. We sure we can take them?]
[If the rest of the company are in position, yes. Between the snipers and the seekers, we can take more than half of them out of the game.]
She glanced at the mission clock, its window expanding as her gaze shifted to it. Numbers were shifting as the individual clocks counted up and down: General Military Time, the Mission Clock, and the Timeline clock. The latter was just now hitting the 3 minute mark. Another two minutes after that, they would have to commence their assault on the enemy. So far, they had fared well on their tight schedule; but there just was no means of discretely communicating so close to this objective and its sensitive sensors. Not until they brought their relay drones into the air at the beginning of the actual assault. Installing relays before the battle began had been ruled out as too time-consuming; they would have to trust their support gear to coordinate the strike in the milliseconds of the opening ambush.
She took a deep breath. "Okay then. Set up, people." She placed the optics package aside, and fumbled for the tiny smart tripod that would turn the set into a small SpotterBot, an automated imaging package many snipers prefered these days. With another AI running on her PAN sorting the imagery, she would not require a dedicated separate infantryman as spotter; everyone of the six Egos here qualified for sharpshooting could perform that duty.
She screwed the tripod to the bottom, and set it up roughly on the rubble of the counter they were using as cover. Then she popped back into cover, and began retrieving her heavy-duty coilgun sniper rifle, settling the muzzle on the edge of the counter and retrieving a magazine from a pouch on her chest rig.
For a moment, she eyed the magazine and its top rounds carefully; the sabots slightly gleaming with the thin copper jacket that covered most of their surface. Then she inserted the magazine into the well and reached for the manual charging handle, slowly pulling it back to chamber the first round. As a rule of thumb, the heavy weapons would stay mostly switched off until the moment the ambush began; unlike mass effect firearms, which were self-contained, low-key and moreso when baffled and shielded for stealth operations, the payload coilguns and heavy railguns were far less subtle to the enemy sensors.
Around her, the rest of the platoon was readying for the ambush. External power cells were swapped out, bringing internal ultracap percentages back into the 90% range; more than enough power for what was about to come, as well as the retreat to the extraction zone. The Cargo mules were being unpacked, large pouches strapped to their bellies and sides being removed, and the long tubular devices were now carefully set up. Two of them were 88mm Seeker Mortars; two others were Micromissile Seeker launchers, built off the same launcher platform with integrated batteries, computers, and collapsable bipods and nano-moulding baseplates. The remaining tubes were self-contained, disposable M-74 Streaker Anti-Tank Missiles, wired up to a separate fire control unit by fibre-optic cable together with the other launchers.
In the meantime, the engineers were busy wiring up the rest of the perimeter; setting more turrets, two shield pylons with attached theater projectors able to cover the front with a heavy-duty, vehicle-grade field for over fifteen minutes; and mining the back approaches while also setting down aggressive military nanohives, ready to seed the air with attackers, defenders, support ECM rebroadcasting swarms and microbot recon assets.
It was frantic work under the oppressive overwatch of the mission clock ticking down second by second, interrupted every time more vehicles came past. By now, several were actually returning from the frontlines with regularity, APCs mostly, mixed with IFV types.
Aramaki was actually considering postponing the strike, pushing out his robotic sensor perimeter as far as he dared using fibre-optic extenders and a few SneakBots in both directions of the road, reconsidering his options and eventualities by the seconds. His AIs were crunching down the probability manifold, and inside the storm of options and probabilities, the final choice crystallized out…
[Striker, Delay plus thirty seconds.]
[Sir?]
[Delay plus thirty seconds on strike execution,] Aramaki confirmed. The platoon exchanged aside glances, then steeled themselves again. The Ape had never let them down, and he wouldn't start now.
[Is that wise?], his XO Takahashi Yoshikuni asked on a private channel.
[It's the best option we have left, Taka], Aramaki replied and sent him the tactical prediction plot automatically generated in the symbiotic brainstorming between his mind, his implants, and the assisting AIs.
There was silence on the other end.
"...Agreed, though I don't like it. There's a chance the manifold drifts too much with the others. 30 seconds…. if Lagarde or Sen think we're not in position and start the attack on their own..."
"They see the vehicle activity as much as we do. Delays in case of heavy vehicle activity were planned in. We're supposed to start the ambush. They will hold."
[Let's fucking hope so.] Aramaki shot his XO an angry gaze for the expletive slip-up. Right now, discipline and unity in action was everything. Cursing was the last thing they needed, and it hinted that Yoshikuni had deactivated his emotional regulators completely.
[45 more seconds, and we'll know for certain if they'll hold for us], Yoshikuni comed.
Aramaki held his own breath. The mission clock went through the final ten seconds.
He realized his heart was beating faster when the biomonitors cut in and sent a wave of implant-enforced calm through his Shell. The tension was getting to him through the dampeners. His virtual hand hovered over the controls in his third eye, considering jacking up the regulatory systems… then stopped himself. He was no good completely drugged to the gills.
5 seconds.
2.
1.
First Platoon did not fire at this instant.
Aramaki held his breath.
One second, two seconds, three seconds, four seconds, five, six...
Still nothing.
He exhaled deeply. Good so far. 20 more seconds to go.
He wondered if in this very second Lagarde and Sen were wondering if First Platoon had reached their position. Maybe one of their snipers had caught one of the minute signs Huayuan Road 77's bakery wasn't as desolate as it seemed. Probably they were debating why he had held his fire, for how long he would delay - or maybe they had caught on as well, and their forecasts matched his own closely enough that they had come to the same conclusion.
15 more seconds.
He peeked from his cover, getting eyes on on the square. Still nothing.
"Snipers, has anyone seen signs of friendly activity?"
"No sir. They're as good as we are. No flickers, nothing."
"Got something that could be a missile tube on the other side of the square, second floor, but can't say for sure. My ImRec comes up empty."
10 more seconds.
"Prepare to engage. Snipers, coordinate targets. Assault teams, prepare for sprint." Aramaki was in the second wave. The Colonial Guard gave nothing for the Espatiers "Officers lead from the very front" motto. First came the robots, then the androids; then the sophont soldiers, and an officer, with his command and control networking and powerful servers, stayed back from the very frontline where there weren't several layers of point defenses to blast any fire heading his way.
It was heartless, in many ways a symptom of the ways modern, networked and augmented warfare treated even sapient soldiers.
But especially now, it was necessary. The BMA AI at the center, Aramaki could control and direct this entire platoon with extreme efficiency; melded together at a deep and a high level, his two platoons were amplified in combat effectiveness several times over compared to old infantry.
5 seconds.
[Ready. On my mark…]
The snipers sprang out of cover, bipods unfolding and extending as they did so, smoothly shouldering the guns and sighting in. Besides them, the heavy gunners did the same, sighting in machine guns, grenade launchers and their singular Infantry Support Plasma Accelerator, dismounted from the cargo carriers and hooked up to its power supply and heatsink. The weapon was a terrific anti-armor device, and would make short work of shield-stripped infantry.
Their HUDs took over the final countdown.
> 3 seconds to strike <
Parker zeroed in on her assigned target, an alien sentry stalking the perimeter in attendance of three sentry robots. The alien was in a second-line security shell, digitigrade legs ending in squat feed instead of the armored claws so often found with frontline forces, its long head turning slightly as it walked, hunched over, cradling the smooth, almost organic lines of the weapon in its hands.
She rested the crosshair straight on its head, where she knew the alien shell housed its Ego Executive Medium, and held on target, pulling through the trigger. A message flashed above the crosshair:
< FIRE MISSION AUTHORIZED >
The weapon would fire the very moment the countdown hit zero, on its own, with her giving the onboard computer the "weapons free" command by pulling through the trigger.
She calmed her breath, and activated the cardiovascular regulators. Awareness and being focussed down into a small tunnel, a zone of precise, murderous intent.
> 2 seconds to strike <
Aramaki held his breath. Now they would see if all the others had made it. If this plan would work. Besides him, First Platoon assumed sprinter positions, gazing towards the three break-out points they'd chosen and the Ultravibe demolition mines attached to them. Some of the soldiers worked their hands on the grips, psychosomatic residue of the trainings without emotional suppressors and battle trance inducers.
> 1 seconds to strike <
This is it, Aramaki thought. The moment of truth.
He exhaled.
Let's get it done.
> EXECUTE <
Many things happened at once, slowed down by him kicking his awareness acceleration all the way to twelve times normal speed, the world slowing down around him.
The snipers came first, over half a dozen heavy accelerators discharging in synch, switching targets, firing again. Seven contacts dropped off the threat board the same moment (with one shot splitting the heads of two alien sentries who had positioned themselves in a spot of luck), and Aramaki waited…
An instant after the first round of shots had lit up the night with their contrails and the breaking of barriers, two dozen other rifles opened fire from two other buildings near the square-
Yes!
- and joined the withering barrage his own Sharpshooters were laying down, felling more alien sentries, automated turrets and combat robots by the second, firing as fast as their weapons would allow.
The same second, the Ultravibe units initiated with a rising cadenza that would have hurt if not for the adaptive smart audio filtering in the helmets. The crystal resonators within configured as they found the destructive resonance of the surrounding materials, then began the self-reinforcing process.
Within half a second, the storefront at three points was reduced to splinters, ash, and debris, and First Squad stormed out, running as hard as they could, jumping across debris on the sides of the road where it had been roughly cleared to by alien dozers, vaulting over the first, outer series of barricades and the downed Shells of the security forces within.
Their first target was the theater shield, a surprisingly fragile design. Eight infantry-launched seekers, fired inside the focal range of the projectors, ensured the upper projection dome was utterly trashed, and the first line of the point defense was destroyed.
[Go for missile launch!] Aramaki broke from cover. On his tactical overview, new symbols were appearing, in friendly green of allied forces, as the com drones launched and connected with point-to-point laser relays. Several enemy perimeter turrets exploded as they were hit by missiles or seekers; one mass driver turret was catapulted through the air and crashed into the front of an adjacent building in a cacophony of destruction.
"Samurai, Lynx, you had us hanging there for a second," Sen's voice came through immediately on the Company command grid. Aramaki broke out into an involuntary grin, even as alien machine guns zeroed in on the attacks, cutting down a fireteam at the front before they were silenced.
"And you know why."
"Copy. Let's finish this. Perimeter, Triple-A, then the jammers."
"1st Platoon is engaging now," Aramaki confirmed, following the remaining fireteam into the fray. Behind him, the sharpshooters stood up, preparing to move themselves; soon the only thing remaining in the buildings would be their expendable launcher gear.
The missile tubes discharged with a sharp crack, catapulting entoptic orange arrows over dark, blurry into the night atop of dim flames and minute exhaust; they rose into the air, locked onto targets (represented by the connecting lines turning from dashed to full lines) then dove down. The first warheads detonated on the barriers; the following warheads went off, demolishing armor and the interior alike.
With multiple missiles converging on a singular vehicle target, full kill effectiveness was effectively ensured; in the tight spacing, the remaining laser-based point defenses, not configured optimally against such attacks, could not track and disable enough of the missiles before they hit, penetrated the barrier fields, and destroyed the vehicle underneath in more dull flashes and muffled explosions.
[Perimeter Triple-A is confirmed down, Theater shield disabled.]
[Get on the jammers.]
"Ah fuck, we got counterattack-" The exclamation cut off mid-sentence, and Aramaki's Platoon Monitor screamed with a "Man down" warning.
"Watch your shields, people!", Aramaki reminded them, slamming into cover and deploying a fibre-optic cable to watch over his cover. Over his head, the drones came under fire; one caught a heavy enemy slug and broke apart in a flash of failing ultracaps.
[Got two enemy snipers in there!]
[Copy! Flush them out!]
One more signal dropped off the 'net, an alien mass accelerator firing a burst. [IFV!]
[Missile on that!] One, two, four screeched in, joined by one more from the infantry in the square, angling for the alien IFV. First one, then another missile flared bright white as point-defense lasers locked on and burned them out of the sky; the remaining two got through, one punching out the barrier almost completely, the second breaking it. [Shit!]
[One more!]
Someone from another platoon dropped onto his knee, missile tube on the shoulder. [Shot!] The weapon screamed from its tube, and the IFV rocked from the impact. A second later, the back hatch opened; someone fired a grenade into the slit, where it detonated. Wet alien tissue slapped against the hinging hatch, now broken, wet with blue blood. [Good kill!]
[On the jammers, on the jammers! Get the covering infantry!] Aramaki dropped mortar seeker markers as fast as he could, coordinating the fire support from his platoon. A few seconds later, the first rounds screamed in from up high, detonating in airburst mode and showering the enemy infantry with shrapnel. Two were exposed in the same instant, and fell with their barriers broken.
"Enemy heavies, three o'clock!" A lightweight gatling gun spitting particle packets cracked, connecting with two androids and one trooper, sawing them apart before they could find cover.
"Snipers, support guns, take them." Two heavy anti-material rifles roared, then the Plasma Support Guns flared with brilliant white light for a millisecond. Still-glowing slag splashed everywhere as both heavy robots toppled, guns falling silent. One discharged a last time as its user fell, spraying molten concrete around.
Aramaki checked their reserves. The Seekers were halfway dry, the prepared missile tubes expended on wrecking the outer perimeter and anti-air artillery. About as expected, even though he'd have preferred to take out the jammers as well, but completely slagging them took a lot of ammunition. So far, only one antenna array had been thoroughly wrecked by missile hits, with the others suffering at least mobility kills, which left wrecking the arrays and onboard electronics.
"Striker, get missiles on ECM-2, then press in for Demo!"
[Order confirmed,] the Battle Management Assistant replied.
Two fireteams bracketed the alien defenders between them, loading fresh disposable heat sinks while others lobbed grenades into the cover positions around the vehicle, before cutting down the aliens as they burst from cover. [Let's finish this and withdraw!], someone from 2nd Platoon comed on the general net.
"No need to fucking ask twice! We're getting casualties here, the surprise is burning up."
Aramaki snapped his gaze towards another AROW, and winced: Third Platoon had taken casualties from two IFVs and a round of grenades fired into their rear position.
"All Callsigns, Perimeter contact. Alien QRF approaching from the north. Looks like a two Platoons in IFVs and two walkers."
"Lynx…", Aramaki began.
"I know. They'll cut us up. Time's up everyone. Set the charges and blow! That is all that counts now."
And that was it for a clean withdrawal. No chance I'm getting my Platoon out of here in full.
"Missiles, to the road, lay them an ambush!" Wish we had had the chance to lay mines. Aramaki got ripped out of his musings by the combat implants, and turned around when a warning blazed on his HUD.
〈 ⚠ SEEKER LOCK ⚠ 〉
[COVER ABOVE!] Aramaki threw himself into the shadow of an alien wreck.
Around him, the world exploded, and half of the platoon board just… greyed out, as their transponders were decisively extinguished by the alien smart rounds. An artificial arm (formerly attached to Corporal Danis Lee, according to whatever transponder in there responded to his PAN) slammed into the wrecked hull, mixed with a grisly pudding of flesh, implant weaves, bone fragments, and red blood, already clotting as the biomods and nanotech in it responded to the exposure to air and removal from the host body. His helmet filled with the insistent beeping of broken barriers, the bar flashing as the barriers recycled. The seeker had barely missed him and proximity-detonated, showering him with shrapnel. In a dozen lower places, the sharp fragments had cut into his armor and undersuit, but the hardsuit had sealed quickly and properly, and the shards were already coated in a layer of friendly nanobots; he wasn't at a risk of ABCN contamination just yet.
[Reform people, reform!] He turned to his AIs. [How many missiles?]
[Six.]
Shit. That is not enough.
[Are the support troops still here?]
[Yes. Plasma Accelerator and MGs are still up, no serious casualties.]
[Good. They're to reposition under smoke and ECM cover. Set the drones to dazzling. I'll need them to take down the vehicles.]
[On its way.] To his right, dense smoke spread as grenades were launched out of the building and from the square.
[Missiles, take the forward IFV! Forget the walkers, block that road while we still can!]
[Sir! Shot out! Ah, fu…"] Another person dropped off the Network, in synch with the booming discharges of an enemy autocannon. But he had fired his missile, and something detonated with a massive bang, a turret spiralling into the sky.
[That's a hard kill!] The voice sounded immensely satisfied.
[Machine guns, get on the walkers, disruptors, break their shields. Stick and move, watch your shields and exposure, those bastards have armor-piercing linears! Don't let them get a hard lock! Plasma gun, once the shields are broken, take out their legs and their gun pods.]
[What about the IFVs?]
[You got any anti-vehicle missiles left?] Aramaki asked rhetorically as he retrieved the six-round cylinder with Anti-Vehicle seekers and ejected the other one slotted into his Mattock. [Once they dare kangorou over the downed transport, we'll shoot them with seekers and AMRs, priority in the guns and mobility systems.]
[Understood.]
[Okay then.] The machine guns cut in, staggered. Return fire from the walkers boomed across the square, and a message popped up in Aramaki's situation feed.
"We've got a man down! I've got his gun!"
Another bang, another person dropped off the network. Damn. [All robots, frontal engagement, all guns, full attrition.]
[Implementing now.]
He moved to switch cover. [Aram-]
His gaze snapped to the left. One of the walkers… stood right there, with line of sight to him, and he had not seen it, still relying on his heavily degraded BattleNet to warn him. Oh f…
The right gun pod flashed.
Darkness.
Discon-
No discontinuity? Wait a…
Last edited:
- Location
- Hug the Moebot; Save the world
Thats what it seems like to me. The 'alien' tech is too wrong. The Citadel species abhore robotics and nanotech. Plus the aliens themselves have yet to be named in story.
Sevoris
Nerd, Writer, Illustrator, Mad Scientist
- Location
- Server Stack 65412B
I was wondering when someone would connect all the clues.
Waveforms - I.3
Sevoris
Nerd, Writer, Illustrator, Mad Scientist
- Location
- Server Stack 65412B
[DTPNT 2197:01:16::00841.653310]
He opened his eyes just as the roar of the engines subsided.
"Ladies and gentlemen, this is your pilot speaking: We have now completed orbital insertion and will shortly begin our powered intercept and docking with SASV Cicolluis. Our arrival time is, as per schedule, 1036 Hours New Earth System Time.
As a reminder, we are a military shuttle operating under general space lifting conditions; as such please keep your helmets on and seatbelts fastened, though you may open your visors at this time. That is all."
Why do I keep coming back to my old exercises? He inhaled deeply inside his helmet, leaning back into the surprisingly comfortable contours of the padded acceleration couch, and raised the polarized visor with one hand.
[Welcome back, Daisu.] His muse sounded happy as usual; he send her a silent mental greeting in response. The Power Nap app he used when not in the field (where it was forbidden due to cybersecurity concerns) popped up in the center of his ARO, reporting he had slept through the good 20 minutes of waiting and a calm orbital insertion. Still, some sweat had accumulated on his scalp, and he raised a hand to remove it, clicking the app away after fieling another quick feedback report about complications with unwanted dreams.
The glove of the pressure suit didn't really make for a great sweat remover, and he stopped after a second. Wiping your face was hard when you wore a suit whose outer surface had been treated to not absorb fluids at all, and had a rough texture designed to enhance grip. He dropped the hand into his lab and looked around.
The cargo hold of the TALV-320 Kawia had been filled with six rows of seats, with a central passageway. All of them were occupied, lifting 100 people spaceside, Aramaki and his command staff of the 2nd Battalion among them. They all wore "Blue suits" - the basic military mechanical counterpressure suits underneath light anti-debris armor material and space isolation, with thin backpacks holding short-term life support systems and a SAFER emergency reaction propulsion rig. Most of the occupants had now raised their visors, with the exception of a few new spaceborne infantry officers in the back - they uniformly had their visors closed, though obviously talking to each other over com judging by the orientations and movements of their helmets.
And off course the Espatiers never open their visors. He rolled his eyes.
"How was the sleep?", Major Karen Strand, his Battalion XO, asked from his right, a slight smile on her face, eyes sparkling with mirth.
"Pretty well, all things considered, Number 2", Aramaki joked back. "How was the ride?"
"Oh, I'd still say the 16th Jegerkommando has better transatmospheric wings than those guys, but it was… acceptable." She leaned back in her seat.
Aramaki only rolled his eyes in response. Strand had a sharp tongue and a strange mixture of pan-european humor, showing both her British and Scandinavian roots ast times; and her pride of the first unit she had joined as Aerospaceborne Infantry showed to this day, even three years and two massive stations further into her career; first the ESFs contribution to the SAAF, then in the Colonial Guard, where she had eventually managed to make XO of 2nd Battalion.
He liked the woman, even though in his opinion her tongue has a bit too sharp for the military; she had a tendency to snark a lot at superiors and the situation in general, and he didn't doubt that if not for him joining the SAAF as soon as he could, his heritage from the stratified structures of the JSDF would have seen Karen Strand demoted or even kicked out in relatively short order. And even without that, it had not helped her career, a fact the woman accepted. "If the old farts can't handle some harsh words, what good are they against sharp weapons? Which is probably why they're up there and not down here." When she had voiced that argument on an evening at the bar, every officer in hearing range had jolted together, some of them squirming.
Aramaki had reprimanded her carefully later that day. Trust in the leadership was vital, moreso for the Colonial Guard, which also prided itself with a no-nonsense altitude when it came to its officers, and her words had the potential to torpedo the esprit de corps.
She had backed off since then, "and thank fucking god so", as Battalion Intelligence Officer Captain Nhung Lang had remarked once.
"Of course they would be", Aramaki replied, finally.
"What? These guys don't even have begun the burn yet-", she stopped as the ambient sounds changed.
Next to her, Sergeant Major Hui Lang snorted. "And there are the fuel pumps." Behind them, the sound of the pumps reached a dull screaming crescendo, and a second later, the engines fired again, subtle pressure pressing them into the couches for a second before the engines ramped up to their destined power and the inertial compensation system stopped its own ramp-up.
Strand gave off an indignant, throaty rumble. "Maybe they're a bit better than the average. I mean, that's what you should expect, right?"
"They ain't Colonial Guard flyers, you know that right?" Lang had a nasty "Got you!" smile on his face. "Those are Aerospace Force pilots up there."
"So what?"
"Oh, nothing."
The conversation broke apart, and Aramaki leaned back into his seat, opening a music app and trawling its long selection of playlists, finding the collection he had accumulated over the years to pass the time during the frequent spacelifts.
Outside of necessary training exercises and hard combat lifts, shuttles flew relatively relaxed flight plans; climbing to orbit slowly, entering the atmosphere under reverse power, turning what could under combat conditions be a two-minute affair from high-orbit (or transorbital) release to boots-on-the-ground into a longer transfer flight.
Soon he was humming away to the tunes of The Void Tones Japan Space album, shamisen tunes mixing with synthetic pads, switching his ARO to space immersion, and allowed his mind to drift again as the long shape of SASV Cicolluis and her sisters from the 456th Starlifting Flotilla drew up ahead, nexus of a moth of various shuttles and tugs.
The Phobos-class Troop Supercarrier had originally been a purely American spaceframe design before the Systems Alliance adopted the it for its own usage, as a massive supercapital starship designed to starlift several regiments across the entire transhuman sphere.
She was massive, 1.3 kilometers from the front of her bow shield to the aft engineering section, her superstructure clearly not designed as a primary combat vessel, but for carrying capacity. Her outside was bristling with dozens of docking clamps for shuttles and the airlock doors of the interior flight decks; mantling the interior habitation drums for the housing of thousands of transhumans during transfer, and the interior cargo bays holding equipment, Synthshells, and vehicles.
For the next five days, she would be Aramaki's homestead, until she had made her way from New Earth, one primary Relay away from Arcturus, along The Arc to Xin Beijing, and from there to Xin Shanxi.
"Huh, would you look at that." He reduced the ARO for a second, returning himself to the cargo hold of the Kawia. "The Cicollius is on a good orientation; looks quite nice."
"Partially sunward, so the light and shadows play over the superstructure?", someone asked behind him.
"Yes."
"Hmm. It's pretty rare. I had it on my return from field station; but no surprise really considering we launched in the evening and our flight profile. By the time we catch up, she's just in the right orbital position to catch the sun around the planet. Consider yourself lucky, and speaking of which:" the officer turned around, "anyone but the vacuum breathers might want to get their AROs on the outside view."
"I don't get what's so special," Strand murmured, just loud enough to be heard by those around her. "High-alt Atmo's way cooler light than space."
And that would be only something aerospace infantry would say. They don't go to orbit, much less beyond, so they insist atmospheric lighting is the best you can get. Aramaki supressed a smile.
The pilot chimed at this very moment, over the banging sound of manouvering thrusters engaging at high power: "We are now on final approach; please close your helmets and ensure your seatbelts are fastened, and prepare for docking."
He opened his eyes just as the roar of the engines subsided.
"Ladies and gentlemen, this is your pilot speaking: We have now completed orbital insertion and will shortly begin our powered intercept and docking with SASV Cicolluis. Our arrival time is, as per schedule, 1036 Hours New Earth System Time.
As a reminder, we are a military shuttle operating under general space lifting conditions; as such please keep your helmets on and seatbelts fastened, though you may open your visors at this time. That is all."
Why do I keep coming back to my old exercises? He inhaled deeply inside his helmet, leaning back into the surprisingly comfortable contours of the padded acceleration couch, and raised the polarized visor with one hand.
[Welcome back, Daisu.] His muse sounded happy as usual; he send her a silent mental greeting in response. The Power Nap app he used when not in the field (where it was forbidden due to cybersecurity concerns) popped up in the center of his ARO, reporting he had slept through the good 20 minutes of waiting and a calm orbital insertion. Still, some sweat had accumulated on his scalp, and he raised a hand to remove it, clicking the app away after fieling another quick feedback report about complications with unwanted dreams.
The glove of the pressure suit didn't really make for a great sweat remover, and he stopped after a second. Wiping your face was hard when you wore a suit whose outer surface had been treated to not absorb fluids at all, and had a rough texture designed to enhance grip. He dropped the hand into his lab and looked around.
The cargo hold of the TALV-320 Kawia had been filled with six rows of seats, with a central passageway. All of them were occupied, lifting 100 people spaceside, Aramaki and his command staff of the 2nd Battalion among them. They all wore "Blue suits" - the basic military mechanical counterpressure suits underneath light anti-debris armor material and space isolation, with thin backpacks holding short-term life support systems and a SAFER emergency reaction propulsion rig. Most of the occupants had now raised their visors, with the exception of a few new spaceborne infantry officers in the back - they uniformly had their visors closed, though obviously talking to each other over com judging by the orientations and movements of their helmets.
And off course the Espatiers never open their visors. He rolled his eyes.
"How was the sleep?", Major Karen Strand, his Battalion XO, asked from his right, a slight smile on her face, eyes sparkling with mirth.
"Pretty well, all things considered, Number 2", Aramaki joked back. "How was the ride?"
"Oh, I'd still say the 16th Jegerkommando has better transatmospheric wings than those guys, but it was… acceptable." She leaned back in her seat.
Aramaki only rolled his eyes in response. Strand had a sharp tongue and a strange mixture of pan-european humor, showing both her British and Scandinavian roots ast times; and her pride of the first unit she had joined as Aerospaceborne Infantry showed to this day, even three years and two massive stations further into her career; first the ESFs contribution to the SAAF, then in the Colonial Guard, where she had eventually managed to make XO of 2nd Battalion.
He liked the woman, even though in his opinion her tongue has a bit too sharp for the military; she had a tendency to snark a lot at superiors and the situation in general, and he didn't doubt that if not for him joining the SAAF as soon as he could, his heritage from the stratified structures of the JSDF would have seen Karen Strand demoted or even kicked out in relatively short order. And even without that, it had not helped her career, a fact the woman accepted. "If the old farts can't handle some harsh words, what good are they against sharp weapons? Which is probably why they're up there and not down here." When she had voiced that argument on an evening at the bar, every officer in hearing range had jolted together, some of them squirming.
Aramaki had reprimanded her carefully later that day. Trust in the leadership was vital, moreso for the Colonial Guard, which also prided itself with a no-nonsense altitude when it came to its officers, and her words had the potential to torpedo the esprit de corps.
She had backed off since then, "and thank fucking god so", as Battalion Intelligence Officer Captain Nhung Lang had remarked once.
"Of course they would be", Aramaki replied, finally.
"What? These guys don't even have begun the burn yet-", she stopped as the ambient sounds changed.
Next to her, Sergeant Major Hui Lang snorted. "And there are the fuel pumps." Behind them, the sound of the pumps reached a dull screaming crescendo, and a second later, the engines fired again, subtle pressure pressing them into the couches for a second before the engines ramped up to their destined power and the inertial compensation system stopped its own ramp-up.
Strand gave off an indignant, throaty rumble. "Maybe they're a bit better than the average. I mean, that's what you should expect, right?"
"They ain't Colonial Guard flyers, you know that right?" Lang had a nasty "Got you!" smile on his face. "Those are Aerospace Force pilots up there."
"So what?"
"Oh, nothing."
The conversation broke apart, and Aramaki leaned back into his seat, opening a music app and trawling its long selection of playlists, finding the collection he had accumulated over the years to pass the time during the frequent spacelifts.
Outside of necessary training exercises and hard combat lifts, shuttles flew relatively relaxed flight plans; climbing to orbit slowly, entering the atmosphere under reverse power, turning what could under combat conditions be a two-minute affair from high-orbit (or transorbital) release to boots-on-the-ground into a longer transfer flight.
Soon he was humming away to the tunes of The Void Tones Japan Space album, shamisen tunes mixing with synthetic pads, switching his ARO to space immersion, and allowed his mind to drift again as the long shape of SASV Cicolluis and her sisters from the 456th Starlifting Flotilla drew up ahead, nexus of a moth of various shuttles and tugs.
The Phobos-class Troop Supercarrier had originally been a purely American spaceframe design before the Systems Alliance adopted the it for its own usage, as a massive supercapital starship designed to starlift several regiments across the entire transhuman sphere.
She was massive, 1.3 kilometers from the front of her bow shield to the aft engineering section, her superstructure clearly not designed as a primary combat vessel, but for carrying capacity. Her outside was bristling with dozens of docking clamps for shuttles and the airlock doors of the interior flight decks; mantling the interior habitation drums for the housing of thousands of transhumans during transfer, and the interior cargo bays holding equipment, Synthshells, and vehicles.
For the next five days, she would be Aramaki's homestead, until she had made her way from New Earth, one primary Relay away from Arcturus, along The Arc to Xin Beijing, and from there to Xin Shanxi.
"Huh, would you look at that." He reduced the ARO for a second, returning himself to the cargo hold of the Kawia. "The Cicollius is on a good orientation; looks quite nice."
"Partially sunward, so the light and shadows play over the superstructure?", someone asked behind him.
"Yes."
"Hmm. It's pretty rare. I had it on my return from field station; but no surprise really considering we launched in the evening and our flight profile. By the time we catch up, she's just in the right orbital position to catch the sun around the planet. Consider yourself lucky, and speaking of which:" the officer turned around, "anyone but the vacuum breathers might want to get their AROs on the outside view."
"I don't get what's so special," Strand murmured, just loud enough to be heard by those around her. "High-alt Atmo's way cooler light than space."
And that would be only something aerospace infantry would say. They don't go to orbit, much less beyond, so they insist atmospheric lighting is the best you can get. Aramaki supressed a smile.
The pilot chimed at this very moment, over the banging sound of manouvering thrusters engaging at high power: "We are now on final approach; please close your helmets and ensure your seatbelts are fastened, and prepare for docking."
Waveforms - II.1
Sevoris
Nerd, Writer, Illustrator, Mad Scientist
- Location
- Server Stack 65412B
[DTPNT 2197:01:17::95001.9801172]
The weather was overcast, thick white clouds covering the sky and illuminating everything below in a diffuse white; the sun only peeking momentarily whenever turbulence from the high-altitude winds tore a hole into the cover.
Gusts ripped through the forest, pulling on leaves and trees, sending the bushes weaving back and forth, old wood cracking with strain as the old trunks protested the yearly torment. Soon, the woods would be filled with old trees cut down by the yearly storm season, crashing into the young wood and onto the dirt roads. Most of them would be left to rot, as the decomposers moved in, multiplied, and broke down their biomass for their own nourishment; the few that had fallen on the roads would be slowly cleared away, getting cut into pieces and pulled off the road by the colonists as they came by.
The rats didn't care much for either of that; they were busy gorging themselves fat, nibbling off the indigenous fungi and the first, early berries that thrived in this zone.
One of the adaptable, endurant rodents scurried through the underwood, stopping to sniff. It's small beady eyes looked about, searching; then it lowered its nose anew and sniffed, turning its head from left to right.
It found a trail. Another deep inhalation. Then it scurried on, nose to the ground, after the interesting smell.
It rounded a bush and-
-ran into something with a dull sound as it hit an invisible mass of composite material.
The thermoptic camouflage of the Sneakbot flickered in protest over the hard impact and compression of its complicated nanotechnical layers, and the robot itself weaved on its eight multi-jointed legs as it compensated.
The control software of the Sneakbot wasn't particularly "clever", limited by the low-signature computing system, but it had its modules for dealing with wildlife, powered by an extensive catalogue and several of its machine vision neural networks. After a few milliseconds of deliberation, it concluded that what had bumped into it was just a normal wild rodent, and filled the event for a later review data dump, writing it into its long-term memory.
The rat was too busy scampering away scared, scuttling into the undergrowth as fast as possible.
The Sneakbot returned to its regular surveillance cycle, sensors scanning the landscape from its low position, streaming data into a small tightbeam network with dozens of its crap-like brethren hidding in the brush or clinging to trees.
50 meters beyond its position, the person it was vigilantly guarding wasn't informed of the small incident, for it didn't care.
It was a camouflaged hulk, standing 3 meters tall on folded digitigrade legs, half-leaning against a large native tree for cover, bracing the massive weapon in its metal arms. Its proportions were skewed; the hips were massive and braced comparatively skinny legs, attached to a bulky torso with a large hump; the forearms were longer than the upper arms, ending in mechanical hands with big, armored fingers, and its head was an inhuman sensor turret instead of a true helmet.
Equipment was strapped to the Intermediate Powersuit in a selection of places; large cloth pouches reinforced with interlocked polymer scales were strapped to the chest, belt area and upper thighs; a massive upscaled handgun with a second, underbarrel accelerator was locked inside a holster on the right mechanical tigh.
Inside the chest cavity, Lieutenant Cai Rhys Cai 's attention was focused on the piped feed from his scope system occupying the center of his HUD, colored dots from the image recognition running across the image as the holographic light field lenses and parallax analytics, first stage of the advanced machine vision spotter, hunted for targets for him. Ballistic readings mixed in, fire mission tracks snapping to possible target points, and at the perimeter of his vision hovered the always present HUD elements of his Type-155 Houyi IPS.
"Possible contact." His War-AI Hoyi spawned a yellow diamond into the augmentality that layered itself atop of the world, and Cai swung his heavy Type-9660 Gunpod slowly to the right, feeling the synthetic muscles of his suit stretch around him, overlaid with the distant hum of the joint servos. To his left, the readouts of the "Toc" flickered as the system moved to adapt smoothly.
As a Recon Sniper, slow and methodical movement was everything. Every form of multisensoric active camouflage or stealthing system ever developed was detectable - It had imperfections that were, while minute, could be sorted out of the chaotic backgrounds by the supporting LAIs, using massive neural networks and quantum computers to crunch down the raw sensory input. They were his raptors eyes.
And right now, Cai was on the hunt.
The crosshair settled on the site, and he watched, cut through the data overlays to what lay beneath.
Something was just slightly off; a parallax edge near an automated shed that shouldn't be there.
Got you.
"Target."
"Confirmed. Fire solution locked." The ballistic data collapsed down into a single trajectory. "Hold scope, fire when ready."
He flipped away the entoptic safety over the trigger and breathed out, feeling the recoil compensators and aim support spin up from stand-by and how they narrowed down his aim to the milli-degree.
"Possible ID is a Type-155."
[What a surprise,] he commed, and pulled the trigger.
Inside the Gunpod, ultra-capacitor banks dumped their charge into the main weapon. Magnetic coils constricted around a long rod of metal, and catapulted it backward. At the same time, a lightweight magnesium projectile wrapped in pre-fragmented tungsten and iron was fired out of the centerline railgun at high-hypersonic velocity, and a crack echoed through the forest, sending birds flying everywhere as the brilliant flash of the disintegrating round illuminated the landscape.
In the same instant, an emitter inside the optic send out a coded laser beam. The coherent infrared beam passed the 700 meters to the target in microseconds, and hit the active detector elements of a thermoptic camouflage skin.
Cai was already moving as fast as he could, working the long digitigrade legs, as the thermoptic camouflage of the "hit" Type-155 erupted in bright blue flashes, widely telegraphing it had been killed by a simulated 10mm Anti-armor sabot being driven through its center torso cavity, fatally injuring the pilot and coring the main power systems in the back. Following its training protocols, the IPS locked down and toppled over, crashing into the ground next to the shed with an explosion of mud, covering the now-visible dark green skin.
"Ah fuck", the com network cut in on the general circuit. Cai allowed himself an amused smile as he tried to get as much distance between his point of shot and himself. Around him, simulated fire was slashing through the forest, the ACISNet substituting AR-based rounds for the non-penetrative infrared beams the system also used.
"A word of advice Hai", Platoon Combat Manager and Infomorph Xiang Jia cut in, "next to a tool sheet with textured walls, in the open, doesn't make for a good position."
"Get him to the rendezvous point, if you would?", Cai asked as he took cover behind a tree, taking the time to check his surroundings.
Nothing so far. No drones, no guided munitions, no mite swarms. Good.
"Hoyi, new position please."
"Plotting waypoints; on your HUD", the War-AI confirmed, and a set of chevrons appeared in his vision with audio cues. "Extending mobile perimeter to 250 meters. Wait 10."
Cai took the time to take in his surroundings, holding still and not moving his sensor turret, pretending to be a simple volume of Xin Shanxi atmosphere.
"Perimeter is set," Hoyi called in, temporarily overlaying the mobile sensor perimeter components large and clearly visible on Cai's HUD.
Cai nodded, pulling his arms up and cradling the Type-9660. "Let's move. 7 down, 13 to go."
The weather was overcast, thick white clouds covering the sky and illuminating everything below in a diffuse white; the sun only peeking momentarily whenever turbulence from the high-altitude winds tore a hole into the cover.
Gusts ripped through the forest, pulling on leaves and trees, sending the bushes weaving back and forth, old wood cracking with strain as the old trunks protested the yearly torment. Soon, the woods would be filled with old trees cut down by the yearly storm season, crashing into the young wood and onto the dirt roads. Most of them would be left to rot, as the decomposers moved in, multiplied, and broke down their biomass for their own nourishment; the few that had fallen on the roads would be slowly cleared away, getting cut into pieces and pulled off the road by the colonists as they came by.
The rats didn't care much for either of that; they were busy gorging themselves fat, nibbling off the indigenous fungi and the first, early berries that thrived in this zone.
One of the adaptable, endurant rodents scurried through the underwood, stopping to sniff. It's small beady eyes looked about, searching; then it lowered its nose anew and sniffed, turning its head from left to right.
It found a trail. Another deep inhalation. Then it scurried on, nose to the ground, after the interesting smell.
It rounded a bush and-
-ran into something with a dull sound as it hit an invisible mass of composite material.
The thermoptic camouflage of the Sneakbot flickered in protest over the hard impact and compression of its complicated nanotechnical layers, and the robot itself weaved on its eight multi-jointed legs as it compensated.
The control software of the Sneakbot wasn't particularly "clever", limited by the low-signature computing system, but it had its modules for dealing with wildlife, powered by an extensive catalogue and several of its machine vision neural networks. After a few milliseconds of deliberation, it concluded that what had bumped into it was just a normal wild rodent, and filled the event for a later review data dump, writing it into its long-term memory.
The rat was too busy scampering away scared, scuttling into the undergrowth as fast as possible.
The Sneakbot returned to its regular surveillance cycle, sensors scanning the landscape from its low position, streaming data into a small tightbeam network with dozens of its crap-like brethren hidding in the brush or clinging to trees.
50 meters beyond its position, the person it was vigilantly guarding wasn't informed of the small incident, for it didn't care.
It was a camouflaged hulk, standing 3 meters tall on folded digitigrade legs, half-leaning against a large native tree for cover, bracing the massive weapon in its metal arms. Its proportions were skewed; the hips were massive and braced comparatively skinny legs, attached to a bulky torso with a large hump; the forearms were longer than the upper arms, ending in mechanical hands with big, armored fingers, and its head was an inhuman sensor turret instead of a true helmet.
Equipment was strapped to the Intermediate Powersuit in a selection of places; large cloth pouches reinforced with interlocked polymer scales were strapped to the chest, belt area and upper thighs; a massive upscaled handgun with a second, underbarrel accelerator was locked inside a holster on the right mechanical tigh.
Inside the chest cavity, Lieutenant Cai Rhys Cai 's attention was focused on the piped feed from his scope system occupying the center of his HUD, colored dots from the image recognition running across the image as the holographic light field lenses and parallax analytics, first stage of the advanced machine vision spotter, hunted for targets for him. Ballistic readings mixed in, fire mission tracks snapping to possible target points, and at the perimeter of his vision hovered the always present HUD elements of his Type-155 Houyi IPS.
"Possible contact." His War-AI Hoyi spawned a yellow diamond into the augmentality that layered itself atop of the world, and Cai swung his heavy Type-9660 Gunpod slowly to the right, feeling the synthetic muscles of his suit stretch around him, overlaid with the distant hum of the joint servos. To his left, the readouts of the "Toc" flickered as the system moved to adapt smoothly.
As a Recon Sniper, slow and methodical movement was everything. Every form of multisensoric active camouflage or stealthing system ever developed was detectable - It had imperfections that were, while minute, could be sorted out of the chaotic backgrounds by the supporting LAIs, using massive neural networks and quantum computers to crunch down the raw sensory input. They were his raptors eyes.
And right now, Cai was on the hunt.
The crosshair settled on the site, and he watched, cut through the data overlays to what lay beneath.
Something was just slightly off; a parallax edge near an automated shed that shouldn't be there.
Got you.
"Target."
"Confirmed. Fire solution locked." The ballistic data collapsed down into a single trajectory. "Hold scope, fire when ready."
He flipped away the entoptic safety over the trigger and breathed out, feeling the recoil compensators and aim support spin up from stand-by and how they narrowed down his aim to the milli-degree.
"Possible ID is a Type-155."
[What a surprise,] he commed, and pulled the trigger.
Inside the Gunpod, ultra-capacitor banks dumped their charge into the main weapon. Magnetic coils constricted around a long rod of metal, and catapulted it backward. At the same time, a lightweight magnesium projectile wrapped in pre-fragmented tungsten and iron was fired out of the centerline railgun at high-hypersonic velocity, and a crack echoed through the forest, sending birds flying everywhere as the brilliant flash of the disintegrating round illuminated the landscape.
In the same instant, an emitter inside the optic send out a coded laser beam. The coherent infrared beam passed the 700 meters to the target in microseconds, and hit the active detector elements of a thermoptic camouflage skin.
Cai was already moving as fast as he could, working the long digitigrade legs, as the thermoptic camouflage of the "hit" Type-155 erupted in bright blue flashes, widely telegraphing it had been killed by a simulated 10mm Anti-armor sabot being driven through its center torso cavity, fatally injuring the pilot and coring the main power systems in the back. Following its training protocols, the IPS locked down and toppled over, crashing into the ground next to the shed with an explosion of mud, covering the now-visible dark green skin.
"Ah fuck", the com network cut in on the general circuit. Cai allowed himself an amused smile as he tried to get as much distance between his point of shot and himself. Around him, simulated fire was slashing through the forest, the ACISNet substituting AR-based rounds for the non-penetrative infrared beams the system also used.
"A word of advice Hai", Platoon Combat Manager and Infomorph Xiang Jia cut in, "next to a tool sheet with textured walls, in the open, doesn't make for a good position."
"Get him to the rendezvous point, if you would?", Cai asked as he took cover behind a tree, taking the time to check his surroundings.
Nothing so far. No drones, no guided munitions, no mite swarms. Good.
"Hoyi, new position please."
"Plotting waypoints; on your HUD", the War-AI confirmed, and a set of chevrons appeared in his vision with audio cues. "Extending mobile perimeter to 250 meters. Wait 10."
Cai took the time to take in his surroundings, holding still and not moving his sensor turret, pretending to be a simple volume of Xin Shanxi atmosphere.
"Perimeter is set," Hoyi called in, temporarily overlaying the mobile sensor perimeter components large and clearly visible on Cai's HUD.
Cai nodded, pulling his arms up and cradling the Type-9660. "Let's move. 7 down, 13 to go."
Modern Military - Combat Exercise
Sevoris
Nerd, Writer, Illustrator, Mad Scientist
- Location
- Server Stack 65412B
Modern Military
Entry 165 - 21.07.2196
Combat Exercises
Despite all the modern means of providing skills without learning: Skillsofts, Neuro-integrated Skillsets, neuro-Capability Software, external Skill and Memory devices and others, exercise is still invaluable for the modern military. For one, as any user of Skillsofts or NISS knows, while these methods are very intuitive and easily accessible, skillset integration and accessability, especially on an instinctual level, still takes actual use and practise of these downloaded skills. Furthermore, very advanced skill levels, combined use of many skills, and higher reasoning do not develop as easily. For soldiers, these disadvantages have to be trained out through more classical learning - Provided through a selection of training and excertise methods.Entry 165 - 21.07.2196
Combat Exercises
I. Simulation
Modern Virs are functionaly and effectively indistinquishable from reality, allowing the creation of live scenarios without physical field excercise. While unpredictability is still an issue in these scenarios (and one of the reasons for real-world exercises), the lack of real equipment deterioration or munition expendature makes Simulation training desirable for especially logistics-heavy training with lots of expendable assets being used, i.e. heavy firepower, demolition, or vehicular warfare. It also allows the creation of any training enviroment without physical movement. Lastly, bodily injuries and shock can be simulated to an extreme degree without actual physical enjury - Inside a Vir, there is no "blank" fire.
In many ways, this has elevated military training compared to earlier training methods - Most transhuman soldiers have experience with simulated injury, death, and the use of heavy weapons in life enviroments. While also responsible for a higher washout rate and psychological trauma (though this depends on the actual exercise regimes, which are commonly customized for varing degrees of realism and shock) it is also regarded as producing more effective soldiers from those that can wheather the reality of the modern battlefield.
I.I: Immersive Simulation
This method is a big notch up from just Simulation training inside a virtual enviroment - The participants awarness of the artificial, simulated nature of the exercise is suppressed for the duration of the Sim. IST is essentialy only practised by elite units - Military psychology regards the immersive factor of IST as dubious for general use, as the awarness of a possible IST induction can lead to soldiers suffering from doubt over the reality of their operation - A potentialy fatal, in any case risk-increasing attitude during real-life combat situations.
As such, IST is mostly used by elite formations, special forces, and the like - Most soldiers will only experience one or two ISTs during their tour (~3-4 years.)
Both types of computer simulation also have another advantage: They allow units to train together despite physical separation, using the Extranet Virverse on secured sub-universes to bring the units together into a shared simulation space. This way, entire theater-scale actions involving entire armies on a planet can in theory be simulated; practically the sheer Simulation Control (SimCon) aspect sets real borders to this kind of training method.
I.II Simulspace
Interesting for its use of time dilation in order to vastly accelerate in-simulation time compared to the outside (at least to a certain limit), Simulspace hosting of exercise is especially interesting for training during wartime scenarios. Feed with combat data from the field, Egos can be rapidly retrained for new combat enviroments, enemy combatants, and operational scenarios.
However, Simulspace insertion is for the most part only interesting for dedicated, long-term training - Simulspace hosting under hard dilation requires hosting on a synthetic Ego Executive Medium, and as such both ab uploading and a downloading procedure, with associated mental trauma and distress for many soldiers.
II. Real life w. augmented reality.
The other, still commonly used method (averaging at around 50/50 to 40/60 depending on the military, with some going as far as 30/70) is real life training. This eliminates a certain subsconcious sense of detachment many soldiers are known to develop inside Virs, and can still be augmented with a selection of methods.
The most common option here are a selection of augmentality networks (the common standard Augmented Reality Immersive Simulation Network, short ARISNet, is widespread with all militaries as the Systems Alliance uses it for its training exercises) that simulate munitions exchange, injuries and cosmetic terrain changes and even virtual terrain, structures and some weapons created through entoptic integration. The biggest limit here is that while many things may seem very real, things like the weight of a weapon, its recoil, or injuries, cannot be trully created, only faked (and sometimes to such a bad quality it is impossible.)
Another aspect of training commonly conducted in real life are shooting exercises, equipment instructions, and maintenance.
Also, major excercises are conducted in the field - The frequency of this depends on the force in question. Major outfits like the Alliance Colonial Guard or UIAS Marines are known to conduct larger training exercises often in real life, while normal military units prefer to use the somewhat more accessible mass Virs for this purpose.
III. Physcial Simulator
For vehicle and spacecraft crews, the last option are physical simulators - Mook-ups of the actual vehicles, rigged with physical emulators and entoptic AR suplementation, to create realistic conditions inside the vehicle and train the crew in the use of equipment. Other simulators also exist for practicing equipment maintenance, from handheld weapon simulators to full-on mock replicas of major spacecraft systems.
The largest bottleneck with this kind of training is, that while simulators cause less logistic footprint and wear than actual use of the vehicles on excercise, simulators cost money on their own; and are subject to wear and tear and thus, separate maintenance by trained specialists.
IV. Experience Playback
This form of training is limited, Experience Playback has... experienced (Pun not intended) some popularity, as it still triggers neurological association, mirror neuron activity and a process of learning, even though it lacks the action-reaction feedback loop of normal exercise. As such, Experience Playback is mostly used in assistance, also showing soldiers both proper conduct and misstakes; including Xps from their earlier exercises to demonstrate changes in their experience and skill.
Addendum: The impact of the modern military games
At this point, another word should be said about the impact of military Virs and XPs on training soldiers, and how it has also caused militaries to not completely abstain from real-world exercise.
It's undeniable that many people today enter the military service with a certain expectation of already "understanding" combat and the life of a soldier. That is not true, however.
Games have always taken breaks from reality, and short of a very few very dedicated games with equally dedicated player communities, various liberties with reality, combat pacing, killing power and protective capability of modern military gear as well as the tactics and strategies of a military are taken in order to give the player the feeling of control and invincibility (s/z)he desires. As such, while games improve some qualities such as reaction time, and various gamers install quasi-military augmentations (improving reaction time, natural aiming and pattern recognition, for example), this is not comparable to a modern military in any way.
This also results in that recruits have to have a certain sense of "video gaming" knocked out of them inside military sims. Using real exercise and training helps with this, as it eliminates the virtual separation one experiences inside a Vir.
Last edited:
Sevoris
Nerd, Writer, Illustrator, Mad Scientist
- Location
- Server Stack 65412B
Question for all readers here after a discussion over on Spacebattles: Do you guys want more on-the-nose/general philosophy written into the story? Do you find that as a weakpoint?
I'm out for honest feedback and improvement here, which is why I am asking.
I'm out for honest feedback and improvement here, which is why I am asking.
Interference Point on Hiatus pending more planning
Sevoris
Nerd, Writer, Illustrator, Mad Scientist
- Location
- Server Stack 65412B
So... it turns out Interference Point needs a whole lot more of planning before I can take this story further. The number of characters keeps growing, and so does the timeline of events, and between both the complexity of the story.
A long elaborate story short, writing this story out smoothly will require a lot more intrical planning than Ascendance itself.
So, with that in mind, I am putting the story of Interference Point on Hiatus until further planning work has been done, and the character timelines and events of the Relay 314 Conflict/First Contact War are set a bit more solidly and down into the details.
This does not mean that I will abbandon Interference Point, or will reboot it. Updates for Ascendance will continue in the meantime, and I also have a new original setting to check out, if you are interested.
For everyone who has followed the story so far, I am sorry, but I promise that this will resume in due time. I do this for you so you can enjoy Interference Point and its tale of a keystone event in the timeline of the Ascendance universe in full, and I also want to say thank you for your support.
A long elaborate story short, writing this story out smoothly will require a lot more intrical planning than Ascendance itself.
So, with that in mind, I am putting the story of Interference Point on Hiatus until further planning work has been done, and the character timelines and events of the Relay 314 Conflict/First Contact War are set a bit more solidly and down into the details.
This does not mean that I will abbandon Interference Point, or will reboot it. Updates for Ascendance will continue in the meantime, and I also have a new original setting to check out, if you are interested.
For everyone who has followed the story so far, I am sorry, but I promise that this will resume in due time. I do this for you so you can enjoy Interference Point and its tale of a keystone event in the timeline of the Ascendance universe in full, and I also want to say thank you for your support.