It eventually hits me that I'm actually an alien bug, and doing pretty well at that.
Now, I'm under no illusions that the last battle was a fluke. I'd had the Three Keys to Military Victory handed to me from the get-go: Intelligence, Surprise and Speed. If what I'm guessing is correct, I'm pretty much a near-perfect mirror with LEGION, what with the incredible processing capabilities and reaction speed of being a Giant Biomechanical Brain. He probably wasn't expecting to be Tactical Genius'd (CREEEED!!!) straight out the gate with precision only foreknowledge can provide, if he'd built any Disruption Towers at all I'd be stuck. I'm probably going to be considered a high-threat target by Nod for that, in addition to my shiny piece of loot here.
Still, if things are as I remember, this should've been the grand intro (and pathetic exit) of the Traveler-59 faction. Most likely nobody knows what's up with this particular troupe of bugs or their differences with normal Scrin, that Ichor Vapor Bomb even had the decency to dispose of the few Cultists I had on the field. I.E, the poor dear doesn't yet know of our pinnacles of douchebaggery: high-speed Devastator strikes and the almighty teleporting Hexapod.
I can use this. I can definitely use this.
Well then, survival first. Navel-gazing can wait (through the magic of mental partitioning!) until I'm not about to choke on the very air
War Of The Worlds style.
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The Giant Enemy Crab pings me a few hours into our trek, the Assimilator brain within signalling that it's managed to crack the first few Nod databanks within. Pretty convenient, that.
The Hexapod rumbles to a halt near a particularly juicy glacier of Ichor as five D-Ships embed themselves into the land in unison, Warp Transmitters firing up even as the flower-like structures settled into the unstable ground. Within minutes, a healthy industry of Reactors and Refineries are springing up to feed off the ridiculous bounty of green crystals around us, all safely hidden from prying eyes by the ever-present Ion Storm above. Even so, the odd flash and pillar of deadly light lancing down onto what I guess is the frontlines every so often keeps me from making too big a base here. No sir, that'll have to wait until I get to the Tower and its umbrella of Ion Disruption Towers. Until then, time for loot.
[Acknowledged, Foreman. Retrieving preliminary analysis of assimilated technologies.]
Thanks. Also, before I forget: are you sentient by any chance?
[Negative, this unit is an industrial Foreman Intuitive Control Interface rated for Drone Platform vessels. Sentient AI are reserved for Mothership-class units and above.]
…right, so a VI then. You won't be going Geth on me anytime soon, are you?
[Error: "Geth" entity not recognized.]
…never mind.
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Right, first thing on my agenda is gobbling up all that Nod lasertech. With a helpful walkthrough from my now-identified VI companion, I rip the compressed files straight from the banks and unzip them to the tune of five Drone Platforms working in unison, completely bypassing the need to construct the actual Tech Structures for now. Immediately, juicy juicy blueprints of the ever-useful Spitfire lasers fills my "mind", giving us a step-by-step guide in the construction and installation of the nifty pocket-lasers. Cheap, mass-producible laser modules that are light, power-frugal and disposable enough to mount on Raider Buggies of all vehicles? I'm sticking that to everything I can manage. In fact, the Raider Buggy itself is so ridiculously simple that it's hardly a chore to cram in a basic remote-control system on the thin, that I promptly replace the powerplant with one of Scrin make and armor up the bugger to make a cheap and surprisingly tanky EMP rammer. Just to top it off, I replace the single chaingun with two Shock Trooper proton cannons on each side of the frame, the infantry-scale weapons barely making a dint in the miniature Fusion Core's output.
The damn things even fire on full-auto now. I hereby christen it the Rioter.
Second on the list is the Transformer-esque modular systems on the Avatar. The damn things are both tanky as heck and moddable to the point of stupidity, I wouldn't be surprised if the Avatar can tote Scrin tech with just a few tweaks in the design. I promptly gut the control systems of the Avatar and stuff an Assimilator in there, making sure to up-armor the doombot with Ichor Armor taken from the Annihilator Tripod. Pulling up the designs of the Mechapede and transplanting the toxin sprayers onto the Avatar is a simple enough job, turning the hulking war machine into a viable combat/repair unit, one that probably will fit better with Tripod defensive blockades than the squishier Corruptors.
Looking over the final designs, I belatedly realise that the concept of a giant doombot with a cannon-arm and sprayer-arm is starting to remind me of a certain franchise. With that in mind, there's no way I wasn't calling it the Colonel Warmech.
The rest of the tech, like the Obelisk of Light and all the support powers, take a little while longer to crack open so I limit myself to unit-scale designs for now. Stealth generators from the Stealth Tank and Specter Artillery are promptly ripped out, overcharged with superior Scrin energy systems and slapped onto pretty much everything I can get my hands on. Invisible Harvesters, Invisible Seekers, Invisible Stormriders, the works. The Stealth Tank and the Specter themselves might be good additions to my arsenal as-is in all honesty, if only I had a way to crew them.
Fortunately though, a quick check with the Drone Platforms reveal that my predecessor was quite the collector. Stashed in the "caches" of the Warp Gateway as "research samples pending extraction", there's a whole bunch of Black Hand Cultists milling around and waiting for orders. A quick Portal has them marching back out into existence, chanting and cheering like the brainwashed alien abominations they are. Luck has it that these are the eggheads and vehicle crews of the Nod subfaction, having been too valuable to waste leashing Black Hand troopers back in Africa. No, we just used civilians for that.
I have to resist the urge to put the lot of them out of their misery as they start hailing me as a Great Alien Overlord with religious fervour, but they're way too valuable as the only way I can crew and maintain all this Nod tech. A simple command sends them scurrying into the freshly-unpacked Giant Enemy Crab and manning the autofactories currently working on a Nod Refinery, the giant waldoes in the cave-like structure busy forging the beginnings of the Ichor containment units out of prepacked materials within. Hopefully that'll keep them out of "sight" for a few hours at least.
On the Scrin side of things, our five Platforms start queueing up Foundries en masse. An unfortunate fact that I've discovered about my new species is that the Scrin are cheating bastards, depending wholly on warping in premade troops from Ichor Hub and having near to no on-site production capability at all. What GDI and the Brotherhood do in seconds take minutes for the Scrin as the little Foundries slowly knit together refined Ichor poured into their depths with their spiderlike articulators, delicately forming the sensitive alien technology with painstaking slowness. Soon enough however, the many Construction Drones I have flitting around my base are banding together in long daisy-chains to dredge up the first of my Colonels.
And it's
quite a sight.
Modelling the exterior of the Colonel after an upsized version of the
Lume Walkers from Sanctum 2 fits surprisingly well, the pale grey hues of the Annihilator carapace coupled with the Avatar optics makes it a dead ringer for the plant-based alien and gives it a more organic look. The quick additions of two Harvester tendrils gives it the capacity to scavenge Ichor straight off the battlefield for both self-repair and refilling its Ichor glands, with the potential to fuel a Conversion Beam off of it should I manage to finagle the tech from my compatriots. For now, the Obelisk-inspired laser cannon it already has will do.
Six Colonels land on the Ichor-crusted dirt with heavy thuds and shuffle off towards the perimeter of our sprawling base, gingerly stepping past rows of scattered Foundries as they link up with the 10 or so Tripods standing idly around. With the Tripods and the Colonels working together, the 16 or so walker force should repel almost any armored force coming down into these parts. The Rioters on the other hand finish building much quicker, barely two minutes per remote-controlled car bomb. These go straight into the Warp Spheres for later deployment, their small size and simple design making them excellent rapid-deployment assets. Rounding up the group with a convoy of Invisible Seekers, it's time to plan our next move.
It's currently the beginning of year 2048, that means that the Battle of Ayers Rock is already done and Qatar's been dusted. In all likelihood the European campaign's coming up for the GDI, in which the Scrin's weaknesses to sonics are revealed and GDI gathers for a big push into Italy, the endgame theater of TW3. Now, assuming that the following battles don't take too long, I'd be in position only to affect the Battle of Berne, or Turning Back the Tide in the GDI mission tree and most likely the first and last chance I'll be able to communicate with them without a backdrop of constant gunfire. If I miss this chance, GDI High Command's likely to decide that they'll be fine on their own and not need my help, and that they would very much like me dead instead.
I'd better pack up and hoof it to Deutschland then, while I still hold some bargaining power.
With a mental twitch, Foundries begin dematerialising en masse as the Drone Platforms lift off, the combined force of Colonels and Tripods snapping to attention before stumbling into motion. Four of the Drone Ships and all of the walkers make a beeline for Threshold 19 as my personal ADP, the Giant Enemy Crab and the convoy of Stealth Seekers peel off towards the distant shores of Germany as soon as the storm lifts, the many Harvesters scuttling around and polishing my little message to the humans before slipping into rapidly vanishing Warp Spheres.
I had a Mothership to intercept.
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GDI Central Command
Washington, DC
Blue Zone B-2
"Sir, InOps just flagged something on the satellite scans we've got over North Africa. Pardon me sir, but you've got to see this."
"What is it, soldier." Lieutenant General Jack Granger snapped as he rubbed his tired eyes, the wizened Commander-in-Chief of the Global Defence Initiative worn out after a harrowing few days overseeing the counterattack against the alien invaders all throughout Europe. Even as he turned away from the tactical readouts detailing the developing battlefield in the Stuttgart region, a tinge of pride filled his chest as he thought of the stellar performance of the GDI field commander in charge. The man may not have had the best of beginnings to his military career, but his protégé had pulled on through the chaos rising from the Philadelphia's destruction and the subsequent Nod uprising magnificently. Even the appearance of a hostile alien force had barely daunted him and his men, the young Commander keeping a steady hand and driving the invaders back inch by inch with unrelenting resolve. The world needed men like him, Jack mused, for both today and the days to come.
Striding briskly over to the intelligence officer's terminal, the Lieutenant General's mood soured as he gazed upon the widescreen display. "Right. Mind telling me what the devil is this, good man?" he rumbled, pointedly ignoring the confused glances and harsh whispers the other terminal operators in the command center were exchanging.
"InOps received reports of an Alien taskforce clashing with a Nod strike group a few hours earlier and retreating into North Africa, they sent over a spy sat to check it out. Lost track of them in an Ion Storm that kicked up for a couple of hours, they were preparing to send in a ZOCOM squad to take out a potential stronghold there when the storm dispersed. The aliens scooted, and it looks like they left us a message." The officer dutifully recited, his voice quivering with nervousness as he went on. Turning towards his superior, the man wiped off some sweat off his brow and cautiously ventured. "If I may, sir? What the hell is going on?"
"Focus, trooper. I want eyes on those alien ships and their predicted trajectories and I wanted them yesterday. Get to work people, there's still a war going on!" Jack commanded, a sweeping glare sending the operators scurrying back to their terminals. Jerking in his seat, the original communications officer about-faced and quickly busied himself to avoid incurring the Commander-in-Chief's wrath. No more words were said.
And as he looked upon the captured images of a solitary Drone Ship of unusual make and the perfectly sterilized swathes of land carved out in the middle of Red Zone R-1 forming the GDI insignia and ringed with the repeated word "BERNE", Jack Granger wasn't sure he had an answer.
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Author's Note: Whew. This took a while, bit here's the obligatory SCIENCE! chapter. The new Colonels are meant to be frontline support units that sync well with walls of Tripods, covering up the defensive aspect in the Traveler-59 arsenal that the loss of Devourer Tanks left. The brand new Rioter Buggies are something that I foresee will be pretty useful in the coming days as a high-speed recon/raiding party and the nightmare of any armored column, possessing more than enough punch to shred IFVs and knock out their larger cousins until a dedicated anti-armor asset can swing by to take them out. With all the epic battles queued up ahead in the coming days, speed will be vital.
This segment felt a little bit rushed to me, but Act 5 of the TW campaign was always on a surprisingly short timetable. As always, reviews and criticisms are always appreciated.