Like any good Mechanicum member you worked hard to grow the body of Knowledge known by the whole. This means in small part having a well equipped workshop and laboratory to work out of. However such facilities do not just exist in the physical, the neurosphere added an entirely new dimension to the forgeworld and any other facility with such capacity. A nearly seamless weaving of the informational world where perception is all.
One such example was your own work with what you had gained unexpectedly from that first meeting, your latest assignment now weighing on you. Looking through the splicer code you begin to see the intricacies involved in it. While you would not be able to reuse it as is, you are starting to build your own independent foundation with the methods you found. It will only work on a martian derived neurosphere network with a great deal of built up server history, quite limiting but.... It is a piece of beauty from the most unlikely of chance encounters. The program code was spiraling around you in a 3-d visual formation, a celestial river of golden dust in fractal form. Was aesthetics part of how this was made? Did such a methodology actually have a cause and effect relation or was it simply an unrelated correlation? You thank the Motive Force and the Machine God for such an act of benevolent occurrence as you tear through the source code to learn more. While heavily limited you could perhaps make something of this. Now to the next set of concerns you had.
Deciding to on your own file a request for a mobile forge module seems to work. After some administrative cycles and copious amounts of forms you receive an implant form nanite forge. Frankly you were stunned by such a device being granted to you, the documentation seems legitimate though and you could backtrack the device to its origin. Frankly this is a grand outcome for you that you would not as the saying goes look a gift horse in the mouth. You have received quite a bit of material overall for yourself at the very least from this expedition, makes up for the fact that you are not getting paid beyond your upkeep and a set experiment budget.
Of course you would be a foe to not be busy maintaining and gaining familiarity with your equipment. An unfamiliar piece of kit can get one killed in a battle, you know this from experience. Looking through the items you received you realize rather just what sort of problems could have come up. The first and most dramatic is the nano forge,specifically the reason you managed to gain an otherwise precious nanite forge. Though it seemed just another of a series of beneficial occurrences this seemed a little too suspicious for your taste. Your analysis of the machine itself indeed confirms your suspicions.
While not your area of expertise you still managed to find issue with the device. It is a 'refurbished' model, one that has not been tested extensively after all the attempts at repairs on it. Backtracking a few of the reports that you 'acquired' on this specific model tells you that it was the attempted repair job of an intraining technician, one that obviously failed somewhat but was not revealed. Working through the actual machine and performing simulations you find out the extent of the changes to it. Here you could use your knowledge of nanoscale energy transmissions to diagnose a few problems and the solutions to them, the new scanner also helped. That implant was much more trustworthy for your use, you had it swiftly installed after checking for any defects.
But back to the nanite forge. As long as you 'keep' to the exact tolerances then it will work fine, for a very limited lifetime. Frankly the amount of maintenance it would require would rapidly outstretch the usefulness of such a device. Thus you work to lock down the more advanced options within and otherwise gutting the operating system. It is hard work but you whip up your own program to force the machine to be safe to use. This consists of ripping the original CAD database and program to use hardcoded Standard Template Constructor blueprints of what you already have. This means nothing larger than a meter in diameter, you could create smaller individual parts of a larger whole for assembly though this would be both wasteful and time consuming.
The real prize of the entire debacle was that you managed to save the proprietary CAD database and program rather then have it be deleted by the anti-tampering measures. In a burst of ability that even you did not know was in you you managed to first isolate the needed code and then extract it safely onto a virtual archive. Rather than hardcoded STC blueprints you had a lite model STC library capable of taking STC designs and rearranging them on the fly. Now you have access to the data that this nanite forge had before and anything it was ever used on, and this was an old and well used implant.
A wealth of knowledge you know you should not have as it breaks so many different NDAs and restrictions on things like arms to restricted and prohibited goods. This could burn you deeply, but you have to keep it. It was yours fair and square to tinker with and you refuse to let such information be taken from you. Perhaps those old theologians back on Mars would disdain you as would their barristers, no their barristers would be gleeful at such an open and shut case. Regardless you were keeping this to yourself for sure.
The next few issues somewhat fed into each other. First was the power armour request you put out for requisition, that was rather firmly rejected on the grounds of safety and ill required need. Something that truly shows the somewhat automatic nature of the requisition system considering they gave you a military grade set of volkite weapons with power armour attachments just earlier. Which is an issue as without said power armour you cannot safely use the weapons as is, part of their militarized nature being a significant degree of thermal radiation directly next to the user. There are lesser suits of armour that can allow you to use the weapons but none you have except the civilian armour. That you at least tried to use and technically it was a success, but its a civilian armour set and is thus not configured. Your almost drunken attempts at shooting tell you that using weapons is not a good idea as is right now. Not much you could do to fix it as its a fundamental problem of the joints in the set of armour and other such issues.
After those ups and downs you were rather pleased to be able to go out for what is... not it is simpler to just plainly say it. You took the transport for a spin at a set of proving grounds and had fun. It was a blast to drive the transport around the rough terrain at rapid speeds. The tread lined limbs were surprisingly maneuverable and capable of many a grand trick. Doughnuts had nothing on what you managed to accomplish. Of course normally there would be a larger crew on the transport when it would deploy but your neural uplinked control alongside a few synthetics for automatic systems let you experience a much more personal degree of control. You could almost feel the vehicle, its cogitator systems giving you a great deal of feedback as you pushed the limits in it. While quite a joy you still had to eventually stop and so went back to your quarters to further relax by checking over the more familiar of your equipment. A soothing exercise rather then the more physical you had just completed, you were already familiar with everything and so did not need to seriously worry about it.
You have often been called married to your work and you admit there is a great deal of truth to it, but you have your own little hobbies to keep your sanity together. Even if your intellectual successes have been good that does not mean you have not been feeling frustrated on other ends. Sadly as you would soon learn, this was the easy part of your work.
AN: Congratulations on getting your first few crits that are not critical failures. Sadly.... well that would be a spoiler to continue that line of thought. Lets just say I had fun with and already laid out most of the next update.
It was meant to be an in depth briefing on the condition of the fleet. Not exactly a short meeting but one that would allow all elements to air their concerns and get a better idea of the overall situation and its effects on them. Instead of the professional meeting though it quickly devolved into hmm is the term sitcom the correct one? You suppose it gave you a bit of a change to the more dry routines of life. Still the fact that the meeting was conducted entirely in person led to some.... Liberties being undertaken.
"By the One! What bullshack is this!!! Why in the world did they send us bicycles? Not even military grade bicycles but civilian bicycles, with pedal power only!! What do they want us to do with them on a ship. Organize exercise tournaments? And then watch everyone fucking float and crash in the low g environment? And this? Ploins? They shipped us ploins instead of grenades. This is not even someone being malicious and shipping us ploins in a grenade box, no its a literal refrigerated crate clearly labeled as coming from a fucking farm under the shipping manifest for grenades. And the actual MREs have been replaced with toilet paper"
The rather large woman takes a moment to breathe and then goes right back into it, her face quite red as she used her clearly augmetic arms to point to the different diagrams on the hololith display. Her points highlighted and moved around to showcase her words exactly. The amount of disturbed grumblings from around show that the other quartermasters are not treating this matter lightly.
"The worst part is the guns.. We have NONE!!!! Just fucking powerpacks for militia lasguns, the kind of shit any backwaters hickster farmer uses to fend off varmints. A fucking FLASHLIGHT!!! The worst part is that we are going to need to use the armories on the ships to get militia lasguns built anyway as we don't have enough manufacturing capacity to get anything better. Even the fucking feudal levies are all using reservist lasguns, those we can use in an actual battle. Nope the proud Dobarian military is being issued militia lasguns. This is an embarrassment, we are on a fucking FORGEWORLD!!! Dear Lord above!!"
Well this was certainly an interesting event watching the quartermaster captain responsible for the Dobarian IBCT rant. Her comrades from the Taranis forces and the naval sections are however soon brought out of their foul mood and are stuck not knowing how to express themselves. Some are laughing, others just stiffly smiling. The reason being that one of their number is literally crying in sympathy, look he is now trying to hug the ranter as well. Which is not doing much considering the amount of augments that particular individual has while the empathetic one is only an improved baseline human. Still it gets the job done in not risking damage to the machinery here.
Thankfully you do not need to seriously get civil services to break this up as it looks like Mrs Nazahah Sawsan Fakhoury as the name ident shows is only looking for someone to listen to her. She eventually calms down before carefully setting the more excitable of her compatriots down gently and putting her somewhat disheveled uniform back in order. She looks at your rather emotionless form standing before her and begins laying out what she has done to solve the.... Issues already laid out. For once your rather admittedly vehement hate of speech helping diffuse a situation.
The logistical issues for the ground troops is actually solvable as you help her rubber stamp new requisition orders and use your own private contacts to supply the expedition. Since the dobarian sources seem to be in some... flux you looked to the rather wide Martian business network you are a part of. This gets you results as you manage to get some replacements for all the equipment that was missing or otherwise.....misplaced. That will solve the daily consumables and other sundries while you make great use of the expedition's discretionary funds to replace the lost military equipment. It will take time and the readiness of the IBCT is not going to be great for a good while. It should hopefully be sorted by the time the expedition arrives at its destination.... Yes that will be a source of headaches.
Speaking of headaches the situation with the IBCT's knight contingent is.... Worse. Just worse. In this case it seems to be a particularly grand snarling of the logistical systems, something that Mrs Fakhoury has not been silent about. One enough to severely damage several knight suits. Apparently one of the cargo mag trains derailed and caused an extreme level of damage to its environs. Oh reading that again still gives you the shivers. Those types of military cargo transports are massive, for one to derail is enough to destroy entire hab blocks worth of the planet. Thankfully those knights are durable and can be both salvaged and repaired, not in time for the expected departure and likely even the arrival of the fleet over Notera. But they are not lost at least. That sort of damage is not something easily fixed. Here you sadly cannot be of great help in solving this particular disaster whether personally or otherwise. And there is yet another installment in the saga of problems.
The Strength of Creation which is currently housing the 34th IBCT has not escaped its own share of administrative mishap, which is concerning. The supply chains for those two forces do indeed share some similar parts but not enough to explain the issues currently ongoing. The Strength is running into both a serious level of teething issues that should not be occurring and having supply mishaps. Considering the grumbles from on high up for getting this expedition moving you face the unenviable situation of being unable to depart in good condition. Here you try to pull strings to help through the naval procurement side but you cannot even begin to help on the other sides. As is seemingly the usual case for the Taranis forces the Flame of Emotion which houses their forces is mostly fine, supply issues that its sister ship has had yes but otherwise nothing of note. This applies to all the Taranis associated forces in general. Which is strange considering the majority of the levy came from Dobera itself even if it is the Taranis holdings on the world.
Thankfully a simple enquiring about your escort unit shows that there are none of the problems plaguing the rest of the expedition. In fact that group of destroyers is doing just fine, the crews even being engaged in training exercises and fleet maneuvers to improve coordination as a protective force. Something easily simulatable with the issues the Strength has been having. From what the various quartermasters have been remarking this at least shows that not all your supply chains are cursed. Just those associated with the ground teams that are not Taranis. Which makes the silence about the survey teams you are supposed to have worrying, the quartermasters do not know anything about it despite sending out notices on missing paperwork and registration. All these problems have had you be somewhat.... Paranoid. You will need to be checking why these things are occuring. Twice is too much already. And you know what they say about a third time in the military.
Having heard everything you could from the logistics side of things you decide to try sounding out the Knights of House Taranis for how they have managed to maintain themselves. Also to ensure they are not snubbed, considering their mix of feudal and professional military customs this is more important then the dobarian military which is used to a less personal touch.
Taking transport to the assigned enclave on the forgeworld you make sure to carefully read the different courtly protocols required. There are not too many as Taranis prefers their history over elaborate customs to maintain their dignity. The etiquette is interesting enough for you to not be bored as you eventually make your way to the finely decorated meeting room. It seems just like any other high grade corporate boardroom with the integrated photonics. Stepping inside you find my host for the day, Knight Captain Luca Bar. His records show that he is a veteran of multiple campaigns and has his fair share of accolades as a leader and knight. Besides him are several valets and other staff who are waiting patiently for the meeting to begin.
Initial pleasantries are quickly expressed followed by a ceremonial exchange of blades as is one of the customs the house has. Freshly forged blades for the beginning of a relation between groups. Your own gift is a set of gravitic forged blades from the famed forges in orbit, the blades are almost impossibly dense but still sharp enough to flay any modern unshielded armour to shreds. The adamantium used is high quality and almost guaranteed to outlast the one who owns it. The outer layer of the sheaths are made from some of the finest natural leather you could source worked with compounds to make them able to last through most conditions. The inside layers are a type of synthetic foam and fiber that naturally cleans the blade when inset.
The sword-bayonet you gain in return is.... It feels strange. As if it is anathema to something else. The faint almost there whine of generator static from a warp engine but not, as if it was the opposite. The blade itself is some strange shade of white, on the hilt is a pommel that has a switch like a power blade. You get the feeling that activating it will not be pleasant for anyone around. The pommel, crossguard, and blade itself however are engraved in the iconography of the Mechanicum, swirling adamantium made in a Damascus style is beautiful to view in its fractal mirage. However further analysis is going to need to wait, you have the meeting to attend to. Bringing your subjective time back in synch with the rest of the world you go back to the pleasantries.
Thankfully the Knight Captain does not attempt to push you to have in depth conversations though you do note the somewhat stilted dialogue. However the conversation surprisingly turns much more smoothly as the topic of the expedition's purpose and its expected encounters is brought up. The need to gather information from such an important historical period, not to mention the expected technological finds and combat seems to draw the Knight Captain to a more eased state. Though you also note that as is typical of those that come from the Martian dirt itself he is a more expressive in his religious views. Idioms and metaphors abound in his speech. He is even kind enough to speak of the still emergent tenet of the Omnissiah and the need to create a trinity of the faith. Its echoing of past religions is also brought up for a reasonably interesting debate. You may not consider yourself particularly expressive but you did enjoy the discussion. Which brought the next business oriented matter as a clear break.
The Knight Captain admits that part of the reason that the discussion came up was the need to sound out the nominal leader of the expedition. He admitted some fear at having to deal with a more secular authority and that having one that was raised and schooled on the martian soil itself soothed his worries. Thus he bent to one knew and swore himself and his knight scions to your service for the duration of the expedition. A surprisingly open ended pledge though you knew that such feudal remnants were going to be backed by hard corporate like bindings at a later date. As it is you admit to needing a moment to recover and accept the pledge of service.
The discussion soon draws to an end and you have sadly have to reject an invitation to a meal at the current date due to the work you need to get back to. However you do manage to schedule one for later, it will be one of those grander scale meals that serve as a place of petition and social discussion by noble houses. Others will be attending as will the entirety of the house Taranis contingent both the newly arrived group and the more established cadet branch.
Departing for your own chambers for some reason you felt a hint of unease but shake it off as simply nerves at having to get outside of your comfort zone so much lately. That and the litany of duties you will soon be undertaking for the foreseeable future. Still you make a note of this for later. Heh a challenge indeed.
Gain Trait: Expanded Business Contacts
Variable, Tracker trait
+2 Influence
-House Taranis Nobles
-Dobarian 34th Independent Battalion Combat Team Command Group
-34th IBCT Knight Force
-Light Cruiser Task Unit Kistna
-Destroyer Task Unit Clarence
-Naval Squadron Quartermaster
-Groundside Quartermaster
-Expedition Survey/Research Unit
-Etc
Vote
One Priority Meeting, same group of options as last time
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Ever since the beginning of this expedition you had had a metaphorical fire lit under you. Rather then the slow but sure methodology you had been undertaking you instead are rushing full force to attempt to improve yourself in various ways. However this quickly showed just why people can take years to gain proficiency in various prospects. For example you attempts to improve your personal martial abilities. There is a reason you were a researcher and not a main or even second line member of the Mad Foxes back in the day.
You received the bare basic training to be trusted with having a gun on you and not expected to ever fire it again. Partly since you were the most inexperienced of the group and mostly because you were simply not naturally cut out for fighting. Your implants let you at the least not fall behind any common civilian but even with training you were never expected to be good at any combat. That was what your aptitude was judged to be. This attempt at going beyond what you had before highlighted that even your meager skills had grown rusty. You knew how to maintain your gear and how to use them but even your memories of fighting are not exactly brought to the fore as you are within a firing range. There you plugged away at holographic targets using a training lasgun, nice simple weapon that you had a minimal degree of worry about recoil to deal with.
Your results were still subpar, barely above the cut off point and that is a low bar. This was the same when you went to the practice room to try out your melee skills. You find yourself having to use the stock self defense protocols to a degree more than you are comfortable with. The lack of personal initiative in actually fighting does not sit well with you, too much like a souless construct. You do not feel any improvements but you feel that you can at least begin to try to improve your skills.
On the flip side your intellectual endeavours have continued to flourish. In this case it was the study of sociology, something you had already had some experience in from your undergraduate days and then from your business endeavours. Getting a refresher of the basics was simple though purposely vague considering that to really study sociology one must deviate into various other fields but also that one must have a target audience. Getting too indepth will become useless or even worse counter productive on the many worlds of human space. So you go through various frameworks such as social network analysis, agent-based modelling, institutional functioning, societal stability, and other such methodology. That data is also stored within your implant buffers for later perusal.
Back to your more directly expedition focused work however. First up was your attempts to recruit a crew or barring that get a bunch of vehicle crew for your new command transport. Your synthetics could in a pinch do so but that was not a good idea considering they are not built to military spec. Sadly on both counts you failed. Your feelers for the military force did not garner anyone that you felt had the right degree of potential loyalty and competence to be signed on. The market is somewhat drained thanks to the recent military build ups and expansions so it is mostly the sub par that are left. As for a bunch of synthetics you found a few prospective sellers but they turned out to not be built to the specs they promised and you had to go through the return policy and/or suing them for mislabeling their products. Whichever was more productive. That at least narrowed the market down for you to be able to get a crew on for your vehicle. You may have to make do with them if you do not get anyone experienced to accept your contracts.
Now on to the rather serious fact that as of the past planetary week your ground survey team has been... the military term should be AWOL though whether this applies when the persons mentioned had never arrived in the first place.... That may be desertion..... Oh the headaches if that was the case. Considering their task was EOD and the canvassing of the wreckage for other unstable devices this is going to be a significant problem. One cannot exactly survey a shipwreck without knowing whether it will go boom in a week. That and all the undoubtedly dangerous still functioning wrecks that will be around the site.
Now the issue is whether you involve the military police since according to your expedition roster the two teams are supposed to be military survey teams. Well considering your standing amongst the military is not the best from a legal standpoint intervening in person may be an issue. Sending a notification to the 1st Survey Corp which is supposedly the group that the team is supposed to come from gets you a response eventually. The reason the survey teams were not reporting to duty is that their entire barracks was down with a serious bout of illness. The group is expected to recover in time to join the expedition. Your complaint at the lack of notification and dubious nature of the excuse is noticeably brushed off by the comms officer who gave you the response.... Which is an issue considering the potential charge of desertion you could have sent due to this mishap, the excuse also sucks. At least state what illness and how long the convalescence period will be.
Deciding that this issue is not exactly something that should be so easily swept under the rug you meet digitally with the Military Judicial division to lodge a complaint at such conduct. There your response is rather quickly processed and you are eventually notified that a quick inspection has indeed revealed a number of violations which were uncovered. Specific details were sparse though considering this was an official investigation you knew not to try anything. While your name was not mentioned in any official report you get the feeling that someone noted the manner in which you reported and approved of it judging by the tone of the message ending the case. That and the fact that you were not supposed to have two measly teams, no you were supposed to be deploying with a battalion sized detachment. That is a significant change in numbers, and the resulting logistics. Still you will be getting your survey crew on time which is at least one problem solved.
Now for the other component of the ground crew. Here you have a reported five different ground crews from the undergraduates demographic of both the academic and the military academies of the forgeworld alongside a professional academic hazards survey team. The undergraduate's purpose being to gain experience out in the field in preparation for their later careers, a rather dangerous field school indeed. Specifically the Orosco Hurtado Espinal Military Academy and the Charchester Glade University were the ones meant to contribute personnel. They will be processing matters for research after all the dust has settled, hopefully. It seems ill advised to have them in your eyes, especially the academic undergraduates but orders are orders.
Your notification to the military academy is thankfully processed quickly and you receive the revelation that it had been presumed that their need to contribute had been canceled due to other circumstances. Your work in straightening out this blunder was tiring but a matter that was conclusively solved. You would receive the two undergraduate level teams they were meant to contribute. Most of the paperwork involved the various legal waivers that was due to essentially joining a military expedition that expects active combat no matter how much it is viewed as a training exercise. This would be the easier of the two groups as those two teams counted as ordained military cadets. Which put them in the military chain of command that would be someone else's problem till it becomes your problem. You were not looking forward to asking about this matter to Charcester Glade.
Sure enough your call there had to run the rigamore of responsibility shifting between different departments of the university. An issue but not one unfamiliar to you. Frankly you expected it to take even longer but in this case the stars for once seemed to align. The buck passing occured in a very straight line, one to another without too much departmental slowdown. All the paperwork was prefilled, there were no tedious new forms to fill out, and most of all you would not be responsible for corralling the group together for departure. Instead it was a simple show up to the terminal if not then they were written off. Harsh but with the amount of danger they will soon be expected to be near even if from orbit that is good. You even managed to get a closer look at the dossiers of the different groups. Mostly student academics looking to get a bit closer to the military side of matters without joining a military track career. All covered legally, which speaks to just how much they either read the fine print or more likely none at all.
That herd of cats for later you go to the more serious matter of the hazardous conditions crew you were expecting from the university. They would be the ones who you expected to contribute to the overall expedition just like the military survey crews. Sure enough you got a crew of thirty academics from fields such as high energy particle physics to engineers specialized in reactors and communication systems. A think tank and field crew that would be of great aid. Also a group you felt some sympathy to as they were the equivalents to your baptism by fire as a combat researcher. But for now that seemed to cover the issues with the ground crews. Which left the rest of your 'responsibility' to herd around. Oh and that impending meal, cannot forget that one.
Details
Style: Semi-Formal
Expected Audience: High Ranking Martian Mechanicum affiliates, Various Knight Houses, other officials and politicians from Dobara, etc
Expected Agenda: General Politicking, Prospective business negotiations, etc
Vote
How will you handle the Taranis Meal? Objectives, approaches, etc
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This is just if anyone wants to make a specific plan, I can write based off teh character without any significant issues. Also you might want to check contacting the Omnissiah, in christian terms that is jesus.
This is just if anyone wants to make a specific plan, I can write based off teh character without any significant issues. Also you might want to check contacting the Omnissiah, in christian terms that is jesus.