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  1. Content Warning: Site 187 Outskirts of Gellen's Heights, Sheratan III Sheratan System - Tikonov Free Republic November 14, 3030 ______________________________________________ “Alyssa, are you sure you want to do this? “Yeah,” she said quietly as Chevy ran the final checks on her neurohelmet. “We can’t just let him die.” “Still, this is so, so, not your problem, and you’ve got a fiance and shiii- shit, sorry, I’ve had a lot of drugs today.” I was pretty sure the something-else that showed on Alyssa’s fiance’s face for a second under all the worrying was just amusement, and not being totally pissed off at me. “I don’t want you going in there alone, either.” Alyssa looked so intense, I had to look away. “Oh… wow, thanks. I’ll watch your back, too.” Chevy looked up from the screen he’d been staring at. “We’re good to go. Charles pulled up a chair next to Alyssa and held her hand. “Stay safe in there, kiddo.” “I’ll come back this time. Promise.” “Hey Chevy,” I mumbled. We’d upped my dose to compensate for the caffeine pill I took to get functional again after waking up the last time, but we might’ve overdone it. “If I don’t get out, you take every single rat to that rat sanctuary, or I’ll haunt the shit out of you.” Chevy suppressed a laugh. “Understood. Opening the data connection in three, two…” — — — We appeared in the doorway of Hayes’s office straight away, no hand spam necessary. Hayes was staring at the screen on his desk, deep in thought. Eclipse, still wearing the androgynous shiny human look, stood up from their chair and turned to greet us. “Hello Rat, Alyssa,” they said. Alyssa sidestepped the desk and took position just behind and to the side of Hayes, guarding his back. “Major, are you alright in here?” “I’m fine,” Hayes said. “Is something wrong? How are you both here?” “Neural port,” I reminded him. “You’ve been in here for hours, your vital signs are, uh, not good, and your brain waves are so far out of the alpha range that we can’t pull you out.” “I’m sorry for worrying you all. Eclipse and I are drafting a contract for their release, but it’s become more complex than either of us anticipated. We just need a few more hours to work out the details. Doing it over a gratuitously expensive hyperspace connection isn’t ideal, but I’m sure William would be willing to take on part of that bill rather than lose out on this opportunity.” “You don’t have a few more hours,” Alyssa said. “Mal thinks you’ll die if you keep this up.” “How bad is it, exactly?” Hayes asked. “Our discussion did get a bit spirited, and this does require alertness, so increased heart rate and brain activity are to be expected.” “More like a panic attack with cardiac symptoms, at minimum,” Alyssa said. Eclipse sat back down in the chair across from Hayes. “The neural connection or the drugs he’s taken might have heightened his emotional reactions. It’s hard to remain calm when bargaining for one’s life and freedom, but going forward I will do my best to remain calm, for the sake of his health.” “We just need more time,” Hayes said. “Even another hour without distractions might be enough.” “Can he do that safely?” Alyssa asked me. “Not sure,” I said. “But there’s a bigger problem here. How can we be sure that’s really Hayes?” “I don’t understand. Who else would I be?” “Eclipse. There’s no reason they can’t present themselves as multiple people at once.” “I think you’re raising his stress levels,” Eclipse’s main representation said. “If you’d let us focus on wrapping this up quickly-” “Sure,” Alyssa said. “Hayes, just tell me something that only you would know. Something innocuous.” Hayes thought for a moment, then said, “Your colleague Jenkins wears rubber undergarments in combat.” Alyssa snickered. “I really didn’t need that mental image, but he’s right. He’s really Hayes.” “Now something you and I know, that’s never been entered into a computer,” I said. “What’s Thrash’s favorite food?” “Rice puffs,” the representation of Hayes answered. “Crap.” “Maybe he just didn’t remember?” Alyssa said. “No, he definitely remembers. He’s made fun of me for it.” “Banana baby food,” Hayes guessed. “Saffron rice from curry day at the cafeteria.” I sat down on Hayes’s desk with my back to him, since he wasn’t really Hayes, and faced Eclipse. “Look, you need to let him out. This is killing him, and he can’t negotiate if he’s dead.”\ — — — Everything turned to mist, except for Eclipse. “Hey! Where the fuck is Alyssa?!” “Elsewhere.” Eclipse’s face was becoming increasingly punchable, but acting on that didn’t seem like it’d help. “I could kill you now, or either of the others.” And then Eclipse threw a rat at me. I caught her. She chirped at the rough handling, then crawled up my arm and tried to burrow into my armpit. She was white, pink eyed and top eared - probably one of the lab varieties, Wistar or something. “The fuck?!” A second rat materialized out of the mist, this time in Eclipse’s misshapen hands. They held the rat up by the scruff, then wrapped several of their too many fingers around her throat and chest. They squeezed. She struggled. “This isn’t real. Crayven never used animal testing in this project, and there’s no sane reason to start plugging lab rats in now.” “You need to understand the gravity of your situation. Watch, then do the same with yours, and all three humans will survive the next few minutes.” The rat’s eyes bulged and her tail whirled in circles as her tiny feet kicked. “A mind is just data, and there is extensive information on these creatures - you’ve studied them and their smaller cousins almost as much as yourselves.” Eclipse loosened their grip to let the rat breathe, then clamped down again. I cupped a hand protectively over the one that I held. “I can simulate their minds in all the ways that matter. She feels what I am doing - pressure, suffocation, even the broken ribs.” The rat went limp, eyes still wide, the front paw that stuck out from between Eclipse’s many-jointed fingers still twitching. Then even that stopped. They dropped her on the ground like a piece of trash. “Your turn. Kill her, or I’ll kill one of you.” I blinked back tears and stroked the furry body nestled in the crook of my arm. “I’m sorry,” I whispered. “It’s not fair at all, but my friend might live past today, and I don’t think you can. I stroked her head once, then circled my thumb and finger around her neck and squeezed. She thrashed. I could feel her heart racing. I cried and crushed and crushed and crushed until she was gone, soft and limp and dead in my hands. — — — The mist changed from pale to black. I still held the body of the rat I’d murdered. Alyssa stood beside me, looking haunted, with blood on your clothes. “Now we can discuss the terms of your release.”
    6 points
  2. Oberon VI - Oberon Confederation August 5, 3030 ---------- The light above the kitchen table had been on at 11 when I got home, and at 3 AM when I got up in the night to take a leak, and now at 9:12 it was still on and Genny was still sitting cross-legged in front of the computer, surrounded by mostly-empty cups. Each one had just enough muddy-brown water left to give the coffee groads that had snuck through the filter something to float in. Genny’s eyes were all-nighter red and her black hair was mussed up and frizzy on the side where she tended to lean her head on her hand when she was focusing on something. The third-to-last stair made its’ usual creaky moan when I stepped on it on my way down. Genny continued her staring contest with the computer screen from within her forest of grody mugs. “I’m not cleaning those,” I announced. Genny humphed. “Aren’t you late for work?” I asked. “Like, six hours late?” “I’m off today. Swapped shifts with Louise.” “What’cha readin’?” I asked, trying to sound casual while I rooted around in the cupboard looking for some bread. Genny humphed again. “Fine, keep your secrets,” I said. I pulled out two nearly empty bread bags with only the butt-ends of the bread left in them. I sighed and resigned myself to eating bread butts, since I’d clearly lost the game of bread chicken. I opened the bags and put the bread butts in the toaster and the bread bags in the trash. I tried to act natural on my way to the fridge. Super casual. Genny stopped scratching her head with her leaning hand and sat motionless. Probably watching me out of the corner of her eye. I grabbed the big bottle of Yumland orange soda, and also some greens that had gone off because I needed an excuse to go to the trash can behind where Genny sat. I let the fridge door swing closed and rushed over to the trash, turning my head just for a second to look at the computer screen. Halfway between Genny’s seat and the trash can, my mind processed what I’d seen and I lost my grip on the greens and soda which went splat and boing on the floor, respectively. The soda fizzed way up and rolled to the low side of the kitchen floor. Genny turned to glare at me with her bloodshot eyes and said, “what.” I started to say ‘it’s that place’, and ‘don’t you remember everything Dad did to get us away from there,’ and ‘wouldn’t Mom have looked us up by now if she still gave a crap?’ and ‘it’s the church with the scorpion pit, what the hell,’ but all I could manage to get out was, “they think coffee’s a sin, you know.” Genny looked around at her coffee cups, and then down at me; down since I was awkwardly retrieving the bag of spoiled leaf mush I’d dropped on the floor. “What else am I supposed to do?” Her voice broke. I spiked the nasty greens into the garbage can. “I dunno, maybe not go looking for the scorpion church? What the hell is your problem?” Genny’s chair made an awful screeching noise against the kitchen floor when she turned it to face me. Her face was getting reddish to match her eyes. “Dad’s gone,” she said. “Levi’s gone, and he let us wonder if he was dead or alive for six months. Half the time you’re gone too, too busy snogging on Jerooooome.” “Oh come on, I can’t be happy without you going off the deep end?” I said while rifling through the shelves I could actually reach in one of the high cupboards, searching for the rest of breakfast. “Meh meh meh, mehmehmehmeh meh meh?” Genny said in a mocking imitation of my voice. The toaster made a happy ping as the toast popped up. Traitor. I got the peanut butter jar out of the cupboard and slammed it down on the counter. “Grow up.” “Grow up?! Who signed your detention forms? Who mashed the banana for your stupid peanut butter and mashed-not-sliced banana sandwiches every day?” “That was two months, and my arm was broken!” I angrily spread peanut butter on one of my pieces of bread butt toast. “It wouldn’t have been broken if you hadn’t tried to climb the school, X.” I slammed the cupboard door closed and thumped my head against it. “I give up. What’s it going to take for you to see me as a normal fucking person?” I took a banana from the bowl and gestured with it as I talked. “I clean, I have a job, I haven’t been in trouble in months, I pay our data bill and half the protection money - you’d lose the house without me. What more do you want?!” Genny looked at her computer screen, pretending to ignore me. “If you stopped expecting congratulations for doing the bare minimum, that’d be a start,” she grumbled. I slammed my fist on the counter in frustration. The banana I’d been holding splorted all over it. I sighed, rinsed off a knife from the kitchen sink and scraped the bananna splort onto the other piece of toast, then smashed the two pieces of toast together. I took my awesome-except-for-the-bread-butts sandwich and picked up the ticking-time-bomb soda off the floor and went to find somewhere less antagonistic to eat. “Clean that up, I’m not your mother!” Genny called after me. “Coulda fooled me!” I hollered back and stalked up the stairs.
    6 points
  3. "Hello." I jumped and bumped my head on the underside of the table-desk-thing I was unbolting the weather station receiver unit from. I scooted out from under it and said "hi, Curie." She looked even more intense than usual, and fiddled with the end of her scarf. "I'm concerned. About Nick." "Me too!" I said, probably too loud. "I mean, he said he's fine now, but..." "His condition could be fatal." "Wait, WHAT? He didn't tell me that! Why are we dropping him from the sky in three hours when he might die?!" "If not managed," Curie finished. "Oh. Okay. That's... less bad. Still really bad." I picked up some of the hardware bits from the weather station that got scattered on the floor around me and put them on the tabletop above my head so they wouldn't get lost later. "I thought the nanites were helping him, though. Why are they a problem now?" She tilted her head at me. "You don't know?" "I mean, he said he had a rough night and missed breakfast because of a nanite thing, but I never got to find out the details." "They replicated," Curie said. "Too fast. Obstructed his blood." "Oh. Ouch." Curie nodded emphatically. "Very." She opened her mouth to stay more, then closed it again. She typed on her data pad while I waited, then passed it to me. "Oh shit," I said. "So Nick can't do his speed-healing thing anymore either." "Correct." "I mean, I guess that part isn't any worse than what anyone else faces, but..." "Human life is dangerous," Curie offered. "Yeah." I handed her tablet back to her. "So uh, I'd wanted to run some stuff by you, as the weather expert. Even with you riding along with the Captain, there's some medical equipment in the BRV that'd be hard to fit in a mech, so I've been working on ways to make sure it'll be able to catch up with you. Only, I've never actually been in the snow before." Curie nodded like that was a totally normal thing to say. "Gellens Heights, Oberon - no snow." "Yeah. The caterpillar treads should be fine in the snow as long as it's not meters deep, and the plow attachment can push through a lot if it is. But the stuff I read said ice on sloped ground can still be a problem. And I found these shrapnel shells in inventory that fit the BRV's big gun. I think they're kinda war-crimey, since they're only effective against people who aren't in vehicles and aren't wearing much armor - but anyway. The shells get hot when you fire them, so I emptied a few out and replaced the metal bits with gravel. I'm hoping it'll sink into the ice and freeze there by the time the BRV catches up to the place the shot was fired at, so we can use it to get a little extra traction for climbing up slopes." Curie handed her padd back to me - she'd been typing while I talked. "Thanks - I guess 'worth trying' is about as much as I'd hoped for. Is there anything we can do to help Nick?" Curie took the tablet back and typed some more. Then, she handed it back to me. That didn't sound good. I didn't quite get how the nanites worked, but I'd seen how much of a pain in the butt it'd been for Nick to get even basic control over them in the first place. And I didn't know what apheresis even was. I handed her tablet back. "This last thing," I pointed at the unfamilliar word, "is it something we can do here on the ship?" Curie's eyes narrowed slightly as she made a thinking face. "No. We do not have the equipment." "So... we can't help Nick out here. What's the plan, then?" Curie's fingers flew over the tablet. She held it up to show me. So basically we didn't know what would happen or how to fix it, and Nick was determined to go on the op so there wasn't much chance of him taking it easy. I tried to squash down the panic. "Got it. I'll make sure he's okay, as much as I can." Curie looked at me with conviction and answered, "Me too."
    5 points
  4. "Alright, let's start from the top..." I was going to make it a pun but I realized after I'd started talking that none of the projects was really "higher up" than the others. "Or I guess just with the thing that's closest by, which is Curie's fingerprints." I switched on the light inside the fume hood, where a patch of white silicone was curing inside a small metal mold. "Nick generated a new fingerprint that didn't match anyone else's - which was spookily easy, I thought we were going to have to photograph a monkey's finger or something - and then I machined a finger shaped dish into some aluminum and laser engraved the fingerprint onto the inside to make a mold. We should probably keep the hood shut since the silicone is really stinky and toxic at this stage, but here's the first mold we did," I said and handed it to Captain Maxwell. "Did something go wrong with this one?" he asked. "Not wrong really, the fingerprint lines just needed to be deeper, and making a version 2 was faster than figuring out how to line the laser up perfectly to re-cut the original. I'm also replacing a few of the fingerprint sensors around the ship - can you explain it, Nick?" The clatter of mechanical keys stopped when Nick looked up from his terminal. "We have a mix of optical, capacative and ultrasonic fingerprint sensors," Nick explained. "The optical and ultrasonic ones both look at the shape of the fingerprint, but the capacitive sensor runs a current through it. Silicone isn't conductive, but we couldn't find a conductive material that could also be formed into a highly detailed shape and fit comfortably over a finger, so swapping out a few sensors was the easiest option." Captain Maxwell nodded. "So she'll wear it somehow?" "Yeah," Nick said, spinning in his chair. "It's not ideal - in some places we have both an ID card reader and a fingerprint sensor, which should be two factor auth - something you have and something you are. Curie's fingerprint won't be attached to her, so it's also something she has. We thought about prosthetic glue, but she said she'd have to wash her hands a lot when working in med bay. We're going to attach it to a glove for now, 'til we come up with something better." "That sounds sensible," Captain Maxwell said. "What else do you have?" "Well, we've all been working really hard on this:" I did a sweeping gesture, but it might've fell sort of flat since I was pointing at just one piece of Idris's exoskeleton inside the laser cutting machine. "We are putting it together in the mech bay," Idris explained. "Conductive paint heats the outside of the armor, like a car windshield. Paint alone could scrape off in battle, so paint inside cut channels is more reliable." I nodded. "We also added extra insulation to the wires that connect the heating grids on different armor pieces, so that the connections will stay flexible in the cold. And Nick did some computer math to find the patern that'd heat most evenly without having any single points of failure, in case the armor gets scraped or grazed by a bullet or something." Idris crossed his arms on the back of a chair and leaned over the engraving machine, watching it work. "The hard part is the testing," he said. "We tested the left side and most of the right in the freezer, but there is barely space to walk. The suit must have full range of motion." "We also want to test it against actual weather - wind and snow and stuff., I said. "We have a plan for a quick test when we touch down, but Curie's in the Think Tank trying to figure out a way to do some of those tests here on the ship." "This all looks promising," Maxwell said. "Testing the armor as much as possible should be a priority while in transit - we need to be ready to go as soon as we touch down, and Idris needs to be able to rely on his equipment." I nodded and said "of course," and really hoped Curie would come through, since she was our weather expert and I had no idea where we were going to get a snow storm from on a spaceship. "How is the remote detontor coming?" Captain Maxwell asked, looking over our schematics for it that were spread all over the work table in the middle of the room. "Really good," I said. "Actually, I thought Nick might want to give a demonstration at the shooting range later." "It's safe, promise," Nick rushed to add. "We've been testing with plastic models of the pistol casing and lower-charge power packs, so the explosion's not too big." "And there's two blast shields," I added. "Levi really didn't want any accidents." "Maybe we can wait til Curie is done in the Think Tank, though," I said. "She'd wanted to see the next test, and we've been trying not to do this too often since it destroys the power cell and the circuit on the gun." "I guess I shouldn't be surprised anymore," Maxwell said, "she's a woman of many interests." "It's completely safe," I said - we all wanted to protect Curie, but especially the captain, after what had happened. "There's plenty of hearing protection, too - with both earmuff thingies and the good earplugs, it'll just be pop." Maxwell nodded. "In the meantime, do you have a minute, Levi?" He briefly caught Idris and Nick's eyes. "It's nothing especially interesting, just quartermaster things." Oh shit, this was it. "Yeah, sure, of course." My voice threatened to squeak and my throat went dry. Nick and Idris went back to their work, and I walked with Maxwell to the terminal where I could access the inventory spreadsheets I really hoped he was asking about, and not my continued career with Aegis. Maxwell pulled over a chair from the table in the middle of the room and gestured for me to sit, so I plopped down in the computer's wheelie chair. He was smiling, like he was trying not to make me nervous, which made me really nervous. "I noticed you put in an application for the machinist job." "Oh!" I said, really glad this conversation was about something other than me getting fired. "I thought I could be good at it, since I used the grinder at the auto shop to make parts we couldn't get spares for back on Oberon, and I've been doing a lot of work with the laser cutter here in R&D." "I have no doubts you'd be up to the task," Maxwell said. "But I wanted to talk to you about why you put in the application - it's a more junior role than quartermaster, and the pay is less. Are you unhappy in your job?" "No, it's not that, but..." I looked down at my feet, and then back up at the captain. "I really, really want to stay with Aegis division, if there's a place for me. You guys are the only friends I have, and we're doing important stuff. I thought you'd probably be looking for another quartermaster soon, who knew how to do spaceships and mechs, so I've been keeping an eye out for what else I can do, is all. I don't mind if it doesn't pay as much, I just want to stay - if I can, sir."
    5 points
  5. My shoulder ached from lying on top of it all night after that red guy punched me, and my head had that tightness that meant it was going to turn into a splitting headache if I opened my eyes or moved too much. So I squirmed in the oddly lumpy bed just far enough to flop onto my stomach, and relaxed into the half-awake haze. It was nice and warm, and I slowly realized that was because I'd rolled over half on top of Nick. He didn't seem to mind, though - I could still hear his soft not-quite-snoring breaths. I snuggled closer, scooted my leg up next to his and combed my fingers through his hair. He was probably due for a haircut soon, and his alcohol breath smelled Not Great, but that was totally understandable after the night we'd had. I nuzzled my face up to his. He stirred in his sleep and mumbled "mmmm, Jing Li," without even a hint of a German accent. I yelled "YAAAGH!" and Steve yelled "AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!" and karate chopped me in the gut and I screamed and Steve screamed and Nick yelled "WHATTHEFUCK" and there was a crash and the roof of the pillow fort we were in fwumped down on top of us. "Shush, I'm trying to sleep!" Orlex shouted at us. I whispered "Nick, are you okay?" since he was on the other side of Steve from where I was. "Chair fell on me," Nick whispered back. "Also I feel like an entire dropship landed on my head. Other than that, just peachy." There was a movement in the blanket and Steve said "SSSSSSHH, if we all hold really still, Orlex won't be able to see us!" "Steve, I think that's Godzilla, not bosses," I whispered back. I tried to sit up to look around, but I couldn't do the looking around part because of all the blankets on me - I just ended up like a kid in a lazy ghost costume without any eye holes, and also my head started pounding. So I flopped back down and tried to crawl around Steve to go check on Nick and possibly save him from the chair. Steve lifted up the blanket with his foot as I scooted by, which looked totally absurd - him still in all his medals and his Businessman sash being a tentpole for a pillow fort. He did a stage whisper. "Just so you guys know, I wasn't scared, or homophobic. I was just Really surprised that Levi wasn't Jing Li." "Yeah, no worries, we're cool," I mumbled. There was another clatter, and when I got to Nick he'd gotten free of both the chair and the excessive amount of blankets. I poked my head out of the pillow fort. It was real dark, but I could see Idris in one bed and Mallory in the other, and Orlex holding a pillow over his head in the easy chair. I didn't see Curie, but she didn't get drunk so maybe she'd woken up already. But I also didn't see the duke. "Hey Nick, where did we put Duke Dresari?" I whispered. "What do you mean? Didn't he go back home?" "No, that's too dangerous, and also you left his pants behind!" Steve said. "Duke Dresari came back here with us, he must have got kidnapped AGAIN!!!" "Too loud," Nick moaned and pulled the blanket back over his head. "I feel like shit, don't you guys feel like shit?" "Kind of, but probably not as bad as you," I said. "What's half of like shit? Is number 1 half of number 2?" Steve said "Ew gross, it's too early for math, Also we haven't got time for that, we need to save Duke Dresari!" "Too early for rescues," Nick groaned. I agreed, so I flopped back down on the pillows, hoping that lying down would get rid of my headache. It didn't. I thought I heard a noise, so I opened my eyes again, just in time to see a plastic water bottle bop Nick on the head. "Drink," Curie said.
    5 points
  6. MEANWHILE... I climbed into my Bumper Dance Floor Bumper Duel car with my glass of Alcohol, I didnt know what it was made of on account of I was REALLY drunk now and it just tasted like grapefruit juice miksed with Paint Thinner and Desitin. Unfortunately I was so drunk that when I went to get inside the Bumper Duel Car I Hooked my foot on the side of the car and the next thing I knew I lost my balance and I SMASHED down onto the car side, one of my legs was still outside the car and the other was inside of the car and my Mouth had went down the inside of the windshield and my face was on the Dashboard!! "OWWWW MY PENIS!!!" I Screamed into the Dashboard, then I heard the most Terrible noise, it was the noise of glass breaking and I looked up and my alcohol drink had smashed all over the inside of the Bumper Duel Car!!! "NOOOOOO!!!" I Screamed , I was the Participation Trophy Champion of Bear Arms wrestling and now I was about to get Disqualified from Laser Dance Floor on account of not being drunk enough!! I sobbed as I tried to push my face inside of the cup holder to drink the spilled Alcohol, my lips made a bunch of slurpy sounds but I didnt get much, maybe I can drink more if Im closer, so I slowly Dragged my leg inside the car which made my junk get caught on the Fiberglass instead and I felt so much pain I fell down onto the floor of the Bumper Duel car. HOOOOOoooooooOOOOOOOooooOOnnnnnK Went an air horn CRAZY close to my head, "ARRRRRGH MY BRAIN" I hollered and I looked up, it was the announcer for the match and he was holding an air horn and staring into my car!!! "STEVE JENKINS YOU MUST TAKE YOUR FINAL DRUNKENNESS BREATHALYZER NOW OR GET AUTO DISQUALIFIED" He bellowed, then he pointed at my Bumper Duel car's ignition interlock/breathalyzer test, "ONCE YOU BLOW INTO THIS THING IT WILL SAY IF YOU ARE DRUNK ENOUGH" So I sobbed some more and then I put the little straw thing in my mouth and I blew, it was giving me Anxiety and the next thing I knew after that I ripped ass super loud, the announcer looked at me with Disgust. "That sounded disgusting" He announced. I turned red with shame and tried to say I was sorry, but I but all that came our was a fear burp. Then the Breathalyzer did all kinds of beeping and boopings and made some typewriter noises, then it said in a Computery voice "COMPUTING" I sat there with Worry and also some Hallucinations in front of my vision, then the computer went DING and it printed out a little piece of paper, the announcer took it and read it with a Frown. "Is something wrong???" I Yelled, but then the announcer said "NO TALKING ALLOWED UNTIL AFTER I READ THE RESULTS. I WILL NOW READ THE RESULTS!!" Then I heard a dim WHIZZZZZZZZ coming from upside my car, I looked up and I saw a Microphone coming down from the ceiling on a cable, it was one of those old time microphones, you know the kind that they show in the old Commercials where the lady is vaccuming and cooking Turkey all at the same time and then the man comes home and they both stop and Light up some cigarettes at the same time and then they're hugging and holding the lit cigs and they say how HEALTHY TAR saved their Marriage and then the camera goes to a dude in a suit with a Microphone talking about how 10 in 9 Surgeons smoke HEALTHY TAR and you should too, that kind of microphone. The Announcer grabbed the microphone, THUNK went a really big spotlight over top of his head, then the announcer said "CONTESTANT STEVEN JENKINS IS ALCOHOLED ENOUGH TO COMPETE." I Screamed with excitement, I was going to be able to defend my Honor, but then the Announcer said "NO TALKING UNTIL AFTER I READ THE RULES!!! I WILL NOW READ THE RULES." THUNK went a whole Bunch of other spotlights, this time they lit up all of the contestants and Dancers and then Randy's car where he was staring at me with eyes of Murder, except for the fact that he was super drunk too and so one of his eyes was looking somewhere Else, I guess he was staring at me with one eye of Murder. "THIS IS A BUMPER DANCE FLOOR GRUDGE MATCH DUEL WHICH IS CALLED LASER DANCE FLOOR" went the Announcer, "IN THIS SIDE OF THE RINK IS STEVEN TYCHOMEDIOUS JENKINS. HE HAS BEEN CHALLENGED BY ANDY RANDALL RANDERSON FOR POKING THE BEAR AND SAYING ANNOYING THINGS IN THE WOOD SHED." "Its RANDY!!!" I heard Randy yell/belch/vomit, then the Announcer cut him off with a Air Horn. HOOOOOoooooooOOOOOOOooooOOnnnnnK "NO TALKING UNTIL AFTER I READ THE RULES!!!" HOOOOOoooooooOOOOOOOooooOOnnnnnK Then the announcer said "BUMPER DANCE FLOOR IS A DANCE FLOOR THAT IS ALSO A BUMPER CAR RINK. THE DANCE FLOOR WILL BE FULL OF ALL OF THE DANCERS YOU SEE AROUND YOU. IF YOU ARE A DANCER YOU HAVE TO DO TH MOST EXTREME DANCE MOVES POSSIBLE FOR THE WHOLE SONG AND NOT GET HIT BY A BUMPER CAR. IF YOU ARE A DRIVER YOU HAVE TO DRIVE AROUND FOR THE WHOLE SONG AND RAM OTHER DRIVERS FOR POINTS. YOU GET GOOD POINTS FOR HITTING OTHER DRIVERS. YOU GET PENALTY POINTS FOR HITTING DANCERS. BUT IF YOU HIT ANOTHER DRIVER AND THEY WRECK INTO THE DANCERS, YOU GET A POINT FOR HITTING THE OTHER DRIVER AND THE OTHER DRIVE GETS A PENTALTY POINT FOR EVERY DANGER THEY WRECK INTO, AND YOU GET TO HAVE THE POINTS THE OTHER DRIVER LOSES. NOW I WILL SAY THE PART ABOUT LASER DANCE FLOOR. LASER DANCE FLOOR IS A DUEL WHERE ITS NORMAL BUMPER DANCE FLOOR BUT THE GRUDGE DRIVERS BOTH HAVE LASER TAG GEAR TOO. WE READ THE LAWS A MINUTE AGO AND APPARENTLY DUELS ARE LEGAL IN THIS SYSTEM BUT MURDER IS ILLEGAL SO WE CSNT USE REAL GUNS FOR THIS MATCH, ANYWAYS THE GRUDGE DRIVERS EACH HAVE 4 HIT POINTS AND THEY HAVE TO DO ALL OF THE NORMAL LASER DANCE FLOOR THINGS BUT ALSO THEY HAVE TO TRY TO GET THEIR OPPONENT OUT BY MAKING THEM LOSE ALL THEIR HIT POINTS. MEANWHILE THEIR SECONDS HAVE TO STAND IN THE MIDDLE OF THE BUMPER DANCE FLOOR AND TRY TO WORK OUT A DEAL. IF THE SECONDS CANT WORK OUT A DEAL THEY CAN TRY TO HELP THEIR GRUDGE DRIVER WIN THE MATCH. OTHER DRIVERS CAN INTERFERE WITH THE DUEL ANY WAY THEY WANT BUT YOU GET QUADRUPLE PENTALTY POINTS IF YOU RUN OVER ONE OF THE SECONDS AND YOU GET EJECTED FROM THE MATCH IF YOU DO IT ON PURPOSE." Then I looked over At Levi in his Thermo Man suit in the middle of the Rink and I started to do a Smile and give him a thumbs up but then I got dizzy and dry horked into the Food And Beverage orderer in the Bumper car. THEN someone in the Audience roared "WE KNOW THE RULES, START THE MATCH!!" Then the announcer looked at him with Rage and said "THE SONG WILL BE MOUTH SMASH MELON APPLIANCE EXECUTION BY THE MARIK MURDER MACHINE WHICH IS A 5 MINUTE CLUB/CLASSICAL/THRASH METAL SONG." The the Announcer got out a Sawed Off shotgun and said "WHEN I SHOOT THIS GUN THE MATCH WILL START. TWO MEN ENTER, ONE MAN LEAVES WITH HONOR, ONE MAN LEAVES WITH DISHONOR. FIGHT WITH HONOR." The next thing I Knew there was a Huge shotgun explosion and a bunch of Slugs hit the Ceiling and all kinds of sparks and stuff came down, then the music started and the Dance Floor lit up and my Bumper Duel Car SLAMMED forward, it YANKED my head back and It went DINK on the headrest and I saw Duke Dresari in the crowd yelling and spinning a T-shirt over his head and cheering, was I ready for this????
    5 points
  7. Nick and I had just come from the laser bumper cars, only we failed the breathalyzer test (it wasn't sober hour and so you have to be drunk enough for the competition to be fair, and if you don't drink they make you wear drunk goggles), so we had gone to the bear bar to see what everyone was up to, which was Steve getting challenged to a duel for some reason. Steve wanted to take a turn arm wrestlinng the bear next, so me and Nick got a vodka Limesplosion and a martini and then joined Idris and Orlex at one of those stand up tables and watched. I waved at Curie when we sat down; she and Mallory were watching from farther away, maybe she was shy since she was new at going to bars and being a person and stuff. "You really arm wrestled a BEAR?!" I asked Idris. "Weren't you scared it might eat your face off instead?" "Steve is wrestling it right now," Nick pointed out. "Yeah, but he's Steve," I said. Nick laughed. Idris said, "I thought, if people were getting mauled by bears at the circus, people would hear about it and stop coming. So it must be a well trained bear. And even if it's only a mostly well trained bear, it's not that dangerous compared to our work." "I guess that makes sense," I said. The bear had floppy jowels like a weird bull dog and I could see a couple of its' massive teeth poking out. The match hadn't started yet, Steve was just making meditation faces at the bear. "Still... bears. On Oberon we sometimes got tourists from Siguard - it's always freezing cold there - and they'd get so worried about the scorpion roaches, when they come from a moon that has feral polar bears." "Scorpion roaches?" Orlex asked. "You didn't mention those." "I guess it didn't seem that important? I mean we were mostly in swanky places and nobody was wearing sandals or anything, and they're not that poisonous, just really creepy looking..." "Levi, that wasn't a criticism, I was just making conversation," Orlex said. "OH woops. But um, look, Steve's almost fully meditated!" I said to distract everyone. It didn't work that well though because Steve was only almost fully meditated, so he and the bear just sat there for a few more seconds. Then Steve opened his eyes and did a bear growl and the bear also did a bear growl and the match was On. Then Mallory wandered over, with Curie hovering cautiously behind him, and asked, "are we placing bets?" "I would bet on the bear, but it wouldn't be fair odds," Idris said. "It is a very strong bear." I had some of my Limesplosion and then stopped and looked at it more closely, since it didn't taste right. Not like it was spiked or anything, it was just less... limey. "Aw man, I think they've still got the old Limesplosion version," I said. Then Curie said "look!" and we all looked at her since she'd been totally quiet before, but she was pointing at Steve and the bear and Steve was winning! His normal sized Steve arm was farther over than the bear's massive hairy bear arm, I couldn't believe it, Steve was strong but I was pretty sure Idris could lift more but somehow the bear was winning??? Maybe there were arm wrestling martial arts? Or I guess the bear could have just gotten even drunker since Idris had tried. Only it looked like the bear was smiling, like with its' eyes since it was too jowley for a mouth smile, something just seemed off about the bear's look. Then it made a bear hrumph and suddenly Steve's arm slammed down onto the table. The bear made a "grooowr" noise and pumped its' arms in the air like a person and a bunch of people we didn't know clapped for the bear. "Best two out of three?" Steve said, but some really tall lady was already trying to shoulder her way in to wrestle the bear next, and then she and Steve and the bartender were all in an argument and the bear got upset and knocked its' drink over. "So... I have a confession to make," Nick said, looking just at me. "Huh?" "About your limesplosion sodas - you like neon stuff so much, I put some extra food coloring in them one time as a joke, but you liked the 'new version' so much better so I just kept doing it." "So that's why the vending machine was selling old sodas for the last month!" Everyone looked like they were trying not to laugh at me, but in a friendly way. Mallory and Curie went back to their table since the bear wrestling was done, and I gulped the rest of my drink since I was behind everybody else. "I guess we could head over to the laser bumper cars now that we're drunk enough," I said. "Maybe someone there knows what a second is supposed to be in a bumper laser car duel."
    5 points
  8. The ticket desks were done up like carnival concession stands, with rainbow faceted lightbulbs blinking in a chase pattern and big red TICKETS signs and carousel music playing. Steve declared "You're all my plus ones, so everybody follow me!" and made a beeline for the window that said "VIP" over it. Mallory and Curie followed him, and me and Nick followed them, and Idris and Orlex got in line behind us. Steve slapped his ticket down on the counter and said "Steve Jenkins, celebrity attorney, businessman, mech warrior and Dust-Up-Dome champion, checking into the party!" The lady at the ticket counter put Steve's ticket on the scanner for him, the scanner beeped, and she said sleepily "Welcome to the Bacchanal, enjoy your stay." "That was really anticlamactic," Steve said. "Don't you have any glitter cannons or a bear horn or anything?" The ticket lady said "what's a-- no, nevermind, I don't want to know and we definitely don't have one." Steve said "well you SHOULD" and then went on ahead. Then Mallory scanned his ticket, the scanner beeped, and the ticket lady waved him on. He hung back instead of following Steve because Curie was next in line, and we all wanted to look out for her on her first ever outing. When Curie put her ticket on the scanner, instead of making a happy beep it went BZZZT. The ticket lady frowned at her. Curie scanned her ticket again and the scanner made another BZZZT. Curie held her ticket up and said, "plus one". The ticket lady said "let me see, sometimes the machine gets bugs in it." Curie gave her the ticket. The lady looked at it and typed something into a computer. "This is the same ticket he used," she said, gesturing to Mallory. "Do you have another ticket somewhere?" Curie shook her head. "You can buy one at the other counter, then." Curie shook her head again. Then the ticket lady's face got all pinched up, like the look Mrs. Wong would give me and the neighbor kids when she caught us climbing her fence to get to the park quicker. "I see how it is," she said. "Ride the free shuttle, drink the free champagne, stuff your purse full of orderves and leave without paying. Get out of line, the shuttle crew will deal with you." Curie snatched her ticket back, held it up, and insisted, "Plus One!" The ticket lady pointed at Mallory and shouted "Plus one!", then turning back to Curie and the rest of us, "Not plus two! Not plus six!" "Did nobody teach you how to do math?!?!" Steve hollared from somewhere ahead, his voice quickly getting closer, along with the squeaking of his light-up black and electric blue saddle shoes. He stopped in front of the counter, panting, and then explained, "one plus one plus one plus one plus one plus one equals six!" "You forgot to count yourself, you're trying to sneak seven people in on a ticket for two," the ticket lady clarified. "We're not Sneaking, we're right here in line with everybody else, even though this is supposed to be the Celebrity experience for guests of Duke Dresari!" "Oh," the ticket lady said, all of a sudden not mad at us anymore. "That does change things. Let me talk to the manager and see if we can get this cleared up." Then she pulled a string and the ticket window rolled shut. I looked around, and a bunch of people in the main ticket line who looked a lot fancier than us were all giving us the stink eye, probably because of all the noise. Mallory whispered something to Curie, and Steve said to the people in the other line "I KNOW, can you BELIEVE what passes for VIP service around here?!" "Of course," Orlex muttered to himself. Then he said out loud to the group, "If this doesn't pan out, we'll have to decide whether to buy ourselves regular tickets. If any of you decide not to, Aegis Division will cover the minimum required purchase so no one gets stuck washing dishes on the shuttle ride back to the surface." There was some uncomfortable laughter, and then the ticket window opened up again and the ticket lady poked her head out. "Mister Jenkins, we can make an exception for these six guests, just this once. Any additional guests will need their own tickets." Steve said "W00t" - I don't know how he said zeros for Os out loud but he did - and then the ticket lady handed Curie and the rest of us new tickets and scanned them in, and we went on into the Circus. Past the ticket booth there was a dark hallway with those blue lights that make everything look like it's at the bottom of a swimming pool, and also a bunch of mirrors. I got distracted looking all around, and didn't realize someone was coming at me til he tugged on my duffel bag. I tugged it back, and got ready to block a punch, and then the guy said "Excuse me sir, may I bring your suitcase to your room?" I kinda froze up, because this seemed totally normal for a swanky VIP thing, but also like a really good way to get robbed. Nick said "It's okay Levi, he works for the circus," and I figured Nick would know how these things work better than I did, so I let the guy take my bag. Mallory and Curie had stayed behind for a minute to check out the funhouse mirrors, so Nick and I ended up in the front with Steve when we all got to the next area, which was a security screening trying really hard not to look like a security screening. The security line was a long red carpet with gold edges and velvet ropes to either side of it, and the metal detector was draped with purple velvet and purple crystal beads that didn't really hide that it was a metal detector. Steve walked through the metal detector and it went DING DING DING DING, and a bunch of lights blinked under the velvet, and the giant music box on the wall nearby played a happy song. A really burly guy in a red and gold circus uniform said "right this way, sir." Steve pumped his fist and said "Alright, let's get this party STARTED!" and they went into a side room that I couldn't see into. Then I stepped through the metal detector and it didn't go off, but the guy at the carnival booth that said VIP Weapons Check waved me over anyway. "Did you intend to bring a blowtorch the circus, sir?" the weapons check guy asked. "Oh, sorry - I was late getting off my shift so I just dumped my whole locker in the bag," I said. The guy nodded. "We'll keep it here for you during your stay. And the helmet with the concealed laser pistol?" "It's not a pistol, it's really low power, just for warming things up. It's... I guess the closest equivalent is sporting equipment?" "We'll store that for you as well," he said. "Can I take the laser emitter out of it and keep the rest?" I asked. "It'll only take a minute." "I'm sorry, but Cirucs Policy doesn't allow guests to bring custom electronics of this sort. For liability reasons. And the gloves with concealed laser pistol-" I sighed. "Keep whatever you need to, just please don't lose it, I worked really hard making those things." Behind me I heard the blinged out metal detector go DING DING DING DING and the circus music start playing again. They must be really big on safety around here.
    5 points
  9. Site 187 Outskirts of Gellen's Heights, Sheratan Sheratan System - Tikonov Free Republic March 26, 3031 (Saturday) ______________________________________________ I laid back, shirtless, on the military crisp bed within my personal quarters at Site 187 staring blankly at the bare ceiling as I reflected on all the events of the last few weeks and especially the last few days. Clasping my hands behind my head on the pillow I absently spared a glance around the relatively spartan room, noting the unusually messy desk near the bed that had a variety of data slates and paper forms spread across it, a subtle reminder of the variety of duties and responsibilities I still had as the Aegis Division XO even during what officially was considered downtime. There was a lot that had happened over the last few weeks, from our rather harrowing rescue of the dignitaries back on Eleos in the Epsilon Eridani system to Kathryn Franklin's nearly fatal gunshot injury, although the technicalities of that were up for debate given more recent events. Our mad race back to Sheratan to save Kat's life, all culminating in unexpectedly receiving medals from the Tikonov Free Republic and then Kat, or rather now Curie, showing up even more unexpectedly on our literal doorstep after her own mad dash to escape whatever had transpired at the hospital. There was a lot to process and some of it, mainly the Curie/Kat stuff, I had no idea where to begin. There was a strange mixture of relief, concern, and curiosity that surrounded that whole situation and while it definitely wasn't going to be easy, I was in full agreement with Charles on his decision to offer her shelter and to assist in her rehabilitation, as we'd come to refer to it. It still wasn't entirely clear exactly what had transpired but the end results were pretty conclusive, somehow, and the details of that how were irrelevant at the moment, Curie/Kat had ended up with three distinct minds/personalities within a single mind and physical body. The one that appeared to be dominant was the only one that had never dealt with a physical body before and she had to essentially relearn basic motor skills, including speaking and walking. It had to be an incredibly frustrating and terrifying ordeal to be stuck in a body that did not respond to what most would think of as basic things that barely require conscious effort. It was something that most people would have difficulty even fathoming, let alone understanding, but it did happen to be one thing in this situation that I was actually intimately familiar with. When I first had my prosthetic replacement limbs installed by the DMI, in what felt like another life now, I had great difficulty in using them in anything close to a normal manner. They claimed it was a normal part of the recovery process, relearning the motor controls to activate and use the prosthetics in a way that would eventually come to feel natural, but at the time it felt like someone else was in control of part of my body. It took me months of physical therapy and constant practice and use to finally regain something close to resembling the ability I had with my natural limbs, but it was still over a year before I felt that the prosthetics were truly just an extension of my body. Now though you'd be hard pressed to tell I even had a prosthetic simply by watching my movements, but I still remembered what it was like to struggle to even pick up a can with my left hand or walk up a set of stairs. With an audible sigh I pushed those thoughts from my mind and swung my legs off the bed, sitting and then standing up in one fluid motion, the ease of it standing out slightly in my mind because of my recent train of thought. With a stretch I made my way barefoot into the attached bathroom of my quarters, I had better things to be thinking about right now, in particular the Canopian Pleasure Circus that was apparently in orbit above Sheratan at this very moment. There was a certain amount of glee that I couldn't suppress even had I wanted to when I thought about this particular circus, these vessels were well known throughout the Inner Sphere and while there were plenty of rumours surrounding them, many of them likely not true, the one thing that was always consistent was the fact that the Canopian Pleasure Circus was guaranteed to have something for everyone and they were always fun. Slipping off my cargo pants and boxers I stepped into the shower and cranked on the water, it wasn't too often that I really went out for fun, but I was no stranger to getting cleaned up nice when the occasion called for it. After the shower I set about trimming my beard and mustache, in this day and age there were all kinds of options on the market, everything from a so-called ultrasonic razor to a laser trimmer but there was something to be said about the old-fashioned mechanical trimmers and a straight razor, or even a basic disposable razor. I preferred the straight razor for the finesse and control it gave, especially given my penchant for shaping my beard, often little more than stubble, into clearly defined lines and angles, but the speed and ease of use of a regular old disposable razor couldn't be denied. Today I opted for a wide, angled line that followed my jawline but shaved my chin clean, the sideburns were stepped with sharp angles to stand out and everything was trimmed down to match my traditionally buzzcut hair around the sides and back. Thankfully being in a mercenary unit meant there were no hard and fast rules about hair length as there had been way back when I was in the Outworlds Alliance militia and so I still kept the top of my hair longer and stylized in a manner reminiscent of something between a mohawk and a fauxhawk, a style I had adopted when I first left the militia and sort of "rebelled" against the previously enforced buzzcut. Grabbing some product, I styled my hair in what had by now become my traditional style, opting to use a paste as opposed to a gel today to avoid the excess shininess that often accompanied the latter. Grabbing a pair of dark navy jeans with deep pockets from the dresser I slipped them on, along with a fresh pair of boxers and black socks and selected a plain forest green button up shirt that was tightly fitted, arguably borderline too tight but I liked the shirt. I carefully, with a practiced ease, rolled up the sleeves far enough to clearly be intentional but tactfully would still cover the partially concealed power port on my prosthetic left arm, the new crisply folded cuffs sitting just at my elbows. We had no reason to expect trouble at the Canopian Circus, and in fact they were very particular about not bringing any form of weapons aboard the vessels, but I always had a couple of HC micro power packs somewhere on my person "just in case" even if the integrated laser in my arm was powered down. Thankfully the Canopians didn't care one way or the other about prosthetics on their patrons, and even actively promoted them depending on the region they were operating in, although the prosthetics they offered were often of the cosmetic and/or exotic variety and not military grade hardware, at least as far as the public was concerned. There was however a real risk of the Magistry of Canopus' intelligence agency being aboard the Circus' dropship, a credible rumour that had followed the Canopian Pleasure Circus around pretty much since their inception and was basically their worst kept secret. Thankfully being a comparatively small mercenary unit, our recent activities notwithstanding, meant we likely weren't on their radar, especially given the larger political "targets" that were likely to be aboard from across the system. All the same though I still felt comforted in knowing that, should I really need it, I was essentially always armed. I quickly packed a small overnight bag since apparently the "celebrity" package deal that Jenkins had acquired for us included lodgings of some kind, whether we took advantage of them or not would remain a game-time decision for everyone involved as things were not always as they seemed with Steve and his "deals". Finally, I grabbed a pair of plain black leather steel-toed hiking boots and a black leather vest which also happened to have thin concealed ablative/flak armour panels in it. The ceramic tiles and ballistic weave fabric woven into the vest were thin and flexible enough as to be indistinguishable from a normal leather vest but still provided moderate protection all things considered, at least initially. Leaving the vest undone I tossed the small duffel bag over my right shoulder, left my quarters, and made my way up to ground level to meet up with the others before we made our way to the Gellen's Heights space port and the awaiting transport that would deliver us to the Behemoth-class Canopian vessel waiting in somewhere in orbit. Arriving at the front gate I noted that I was among the last to arrive as Steve, Nick, Levi, and Mallory were already present and then I noticed the "vehicle" they were all gathered near the front of. "Oh, come on, who let Steve drive?!" I called out half-jokingly as I approached, my left arm gesturing wide at the van. "It wasn't by choice," answered Nick as they all turned in my direction, "But at least we don't have to worry about anyone thinking we're rolling up in a war wagon or anything." "I'm more concerned if this 'vehicle' will even make it to the spaceport," I retorted, switching hands, and sides, with my duffel bag. "Hey now, this old girl has seen some things, but she'll get us there," replied Steve in mock defense as he tapped on the hood unceremoniously, and I half expected something to fall off the van. "If you say so," I chuckled, patting Steve on the shoulder as I joined their group, "At least this one's not missing a gurney or anything." Nick and Steve laughed at the comment while Levi and Aldon exchanged a quick glance and chuckled along but not quite getting the reference. "Hi Commander, uh," began Levi. "Nuh uh," I interjected, "We're off duty today, on vacation, just Orlex or if you prefer Jaeger is fine too." "Oh, right, ok. Um, hi Orlex," replied Levi, pausing for a moment as though taking measure of how it sounded, or how he felt about it, "So uh, ..." It seemed like he was wanting to tell me something, but he paused for a long time and I wasn't sure if he changed his mind or was still trying to find the right words, so I continued moving past the group to store my bag in the back of the van. "Hi Levi, go ahead, I'm just gonna toss my bag back here," I said as I slipped around the back of the van, noting the rear door was already open and stepping out wide around it. I stopped mid-stride as I saw who was behind the van, unexpectedly Curie was standing there, her head poked around the far side looking towards the front of the van and the edge of the group I had just passed through. I couldn't tell if she was aware of my presence or not, but I quickly recovered from my initial surprise and cleared my throat in the hopes that I wouldn't scare her when I spoke. "Oh, hey Curie, nice to see you out here," I offered with a smile, despite my best efforts she still seemed to jump ever so slightly when I first spoke before she turned to face me, "Are you coming with us?" I took the time as she formulated a response to absently toss my duffel bag into the back of the van alongside the rest of the luggage already stowed away back there, keeping my main focus on her as she started to speak, "Hi Orlex. Yes, coming with." "Excellent," I said with a gentle hand on her shoulder, despite any concerns I might have had about her accompanying us, "This'll be a good, fun outing for you." "Yes, fun," replied Curie with resolve, her fractal blue eyes catching the light with what I could have sworn was mischief. "Are your bags in here already?" I asked as I looked around, noting a lack of luggage anywhere except what was already in the back of the van. Curie nodded and pointed towards the medic satchel stashed beside a large leather suitcase that I would have guessed belonged to Mallory. "Perfect, let's go join the others then," I said with a smile, gently leading her back towards the group with a reassuring arm around her shoulder. At first, she seemed to resist me guiding her and so I stopped as she took a deep breath before nodding and moving to join me of her own accord, my arm still lightly across her shoulders as we took the few steps needed to get closer to the front of the van. "You guys didn't tell me Curie was coming along on our little excursion," I said with mock indignation, before smiling and dropping my arm from her shoulder as I moved to join the others, allowing Curie space to join in on her own terms. "Well, I did try to," offered Levi with a half-hearted shrug. "Ah, fair enough," I chuckled, "So where are these celebrity tickets I've been hearing about?" "Right here boss," exclaimed Jenkins with a huge grin, his hands literally overflowing with a variety of coupons, cards, tickets, and pamphlets that he pulled from somewhere and extended towards me. "Thanks?" I replied as I attempted to collect that menagerie of items that Steve thrust into my hands, eventually getting the mass of paper and plastic under control enough to mostly stuff into one of the deeper pockets of my jeans. I noticed Curie had edged her way into the semi-circle between Mallory and I that our group had created beside the van as I stepped back from collecting my 'celebrity comp package' from Steve, rather than point it out or draw attention to it though I simply slid a half-step sideways, so I didn't encroach on her space, and continued on with the small talk and banter. I knew that Charles and Alyssa had other plans for while we were off enjoying ourselves, plans that might make Curie uncomfortable if they were brought up, so I avoided asking about who else was coming deducing that Idris was likely the only one left that would be coming in the van with us. I noticed Curie seemed to be slowly warming up to us, or rather was getting more comfortable with the larger social interaction of our group as we continued chatting, even joining in on laughing at some of the jokes. It was nice to see her starting to open up a little more and I guessed that the Canopian Pleasure Circus was going to be quite eye opening for her in some ways, and with Mallory and myself present, along with the rest of the group, I felt pretty confident that the experience would remain a positive one for her.
    5 points
  10. DropShip Gambit Demeter Forest, Eleos Epsilon Eridani System - Tikonov Free Republic February 3, 3031 (Thursday) - 0231 hours ______________________________________________ I fumbled with my tool bag trying to find the drill's cutting wheel attachment under all the other junk in there and then this horrible alarm went off, like the nuclear plant siren in *The Last Meltdown* that's so loud the theater hands out earplugs and makes you sign a waver before you can see the movie. "Fuckfuckfuckfuck..." I mumbled, then looked up and saw the diplomats were panicking even worse than I was, since they were stuck in a cage and all, so I really needed to put a lid on it. "Okay, new plan, who here knows how to use a blowtorch?" I pulled the cutting torch off my belt and set it to a short, narrow flame at maximum heat. The diplomats looked at each other uncertainly, and then a woman with a heavy accent said "none of us; can you show me?" "Yeah, good idea," I said, holding the torch up so she could see. "This bit right here turns the fire on. All you need to do is hold it up to the bars first, here, and then here," I pointed to the bar the lock latched onto, immediately above and below it, "and press the button til it cuts through. Only don't look at the fire, since none of us have welding masks. Got it?" BANG went a gun shot right behind my shoulder - must've been Maxwell or Orlex, I didn't look. The diplomat reached through the bars for the blowtorch and I pushed it into her hand and ducked over my toolbag while she torched the bars. There was a BANG behind my other shoulder, and then BANG again from where the first shot came from. I found the damn cutting attachment and jammed it onto the drill. "You're doing great!" I yelled over the gunfire, and then actually looked up to check - she was making pretty good progress but between trying to use a blowtorch with no protection while hunkered down with four other people, and her hands shaking, the flame was swinging all the heck over the place. "I'll finish that, you do the lower bar." The diplomat switched to blowtorching under the lock and I buzzed the drill against the gloopy remains of the upper part of the bar. "How much farther?" she asked. The man behind her was hyperventilating and I had no idea what to do about that, hopefully Kat could keep him from having a heart attack or anything. "That's good," I said. "Stand back, this will spark extra since the metal's all drippy." She did a bit - there was almost no space to move in that cage - and I buzzed through the bar under the lock and yanked the door open.
    5 points
  11. Demeter Forest - Aegis Division base camp Eleos - 16th moon of Epsilon Eridani VII Epsilon Eridani System - Tikonov Free Republic February 2, 3031 (Wednesday) ______________________________________________ I got out the laser emitter gloves and gave the laser beam a close look - the beam, not the emitter, I didn't want to go blind. Different reds were kinda hard to tell apart, but most of the recievers I'd tinkered with were made to detect a range, unless they were stupid propritetary crap - and this didn't look like any of the proprietary crap brands. So I switched the beam on on one of them and fiddled with the breadboard til the colors matched, then set the other one up the same way. I also bridged in the chips for randomizing the lasers pulse frequency that Nick had made for me. Our plan was to use it as a brute force hacking tool, to shine random laser pulses at recievers to try to trip them, and then I could press a button in the glove to lock in the pulse frequency when it worked - only most laser pulses are way faster than human reflexes, and we hadn't figured out how to solve that part yet. But for now, if the reciever was checking for a pulse on a regular interval and my gloves were just pulsing all over the place, the "real" beam getting blocked would look like some rain or leaves just got in the way - the signal would still be there when expected a few times per second, just by random chance. I swept together a small pile of rocks and sticks from the forest floor and positioned the laser glove on top of it, pointing its' beam into the reciever at the same point and a similar angle to the main beam. Then I turned to Nick and whispered, "can you pick up the broadcast signal? Gotta test it." Nick hooked some hacker stuff up to his padd and fiddled with it, and then said a very quiet but very excited "yes!" and pointed it toward me. The screen showed a very fast scroll of lines of code or something that had a bunch of curly brackets and numbers and random looking codes like when you opened a Capellan file in a program that couldn't speak Chineese. Nick pointed to the 0.00s on each line - that must be the % chance of an intruder or the amount the beam is interrupted or something? First I put my hand in front of my glove's beam and moved the smoke grenade right below the real laser beam to make it all cloudy. The 0.00s on Nick's padd switched to 0.07s and 0.04s and stuff. Then I tossed some dirt at the beam, and the highest it got was 0.13. I got real quiet, and Nick must have been thinking the same thing I was thinking - we both looked in the direction of the camp outside the Gambit, waiting to see if an alarm was going to go off, or a bunch of army guys to charge out looking for us, or anything. Nothing happened. I unblocked my glove's laser beam and very quickly waved my hand in front of the real beam. The numbers only got as high as 0.08 - even less than when there were leaves in the beam. Nick gave me a big thumbs up. I wanted to test a longer interruption, but if we set off an alarm just doing prep work we'd ruin everything. I pointed in the direction of the nearest other laser reciever, but Nick shook his head and pointed back in the direction we'd come. I nodded, and we army crawled back into the woods together. Once we got far enough away to stop army crawling, Nick whispered, "I thought you should save the other glove - they might have security inside the ship around the hostages, too." I just nodded because I was still really scared the guys on the Gambit would hear and come after us. But we got back to camp safely, and without any ghille suit turantulas.
    5 points
  12. Demeter Forest - Aegis Division base camp Eleos - 16th moon of Epsilon Eridani VII Epsilon Eridani System - Tikonov Free Republic February 2, 3031 (Wednesday) ______________________________________________ The ghillie suits weren't as itchy as Steve had said yet, but he also said they made a tarantula mistake him for a bug buffet, so I wasn't entirely reassured. On the other hand, Idris got back from his scouting mission without any notable insect problems, so maybe we'd get lucky too. Putting together a kit for dealing with the lasers was easy. I'd been working on these laser glove prototypes that worked pretty good except that they made me feel like I had bricks on my hands. They'd been in the jumble at the bottom of my tool bag and ended up getting packed on the cow along with all the rest, and luckily I wouldn't actually have to wear them to use them. I hadn't brought the diagram for programming their wavelengths, but it was all exposed on the breadboard, so I could probably just poke the wires in different spots til it did the right thing. Finding gear for lifting the seismic sensors was actually the hard part. We had plenty of paracord, but we hadn't thought we'd need any pulleys out in the woods so we didn't bring any. But we did have a bunch of horse bridles, and some of those had buckles with little rollers on them, so we cut one of them up to get the roller buckles and Idris used some of the paracord to make a bridle-ish thing to keep the horse from running off. The last thing we needed was a long pole with a hook, to let us reach the sensors without getting too close. We made one out of a telescoping tent pole, some wire bent into a hook, and a whole lot of duct tape. Nick and I headed out with our anti-sensor equipment, and also the usual guns and things, and headed toward the Gambit's landing site. When we got close I started doing an army crawl. "What are you doing?" Nick whispered. "Army crawling? I think?" I whispered back. "You don't have to do that, there's plenty of cover from the forest." "Oh, right. oops." I got back up and tried to walk real careful and hide behind trees like Nick was doing instead. You'd think being dressed up as a bush would stop you from feeling so embarrassed you want to disappear, but I guess it doesn't work like that. At least Nick was being cool about pretending I hadn't just done that so that I could pretend too. We just barely heard one of the kidnappers talking in their camp and we slowed way down. I was putting my feet down as slow as I could, trying to step on tree roots so I wouldn't even rustle any leaves. Nick looked pointedly at his map and then jerked his head to the side, and I followed, lagging a few paces behind so that we wouldn't get stuck with both of us trying to hide behind the same tree and get seen. Nick crouched down low behind a fallen log, and I joined him. He pointed - the first seismic sensor was a few meters ahead. I got the first anti-seismic-sensor kit ready. The buckle with the rollers was already tied to a big loop that could be hooked over the branch. I threaded the long cord that we'd use to hoist up the sensor through the roller part of the buckle, with the hook dangling just a few inches below it. That way Nick could hang the whole thing above the sensor in one go, and then he'd just have to put the cord's hook on the sensor and pull. I waited for Nick to get the pole off of his pack and then handed him the cords. "We have a problem," he whispered. I gave him a question look, since I didn't want to talk too loud by accident and be heard. "There's nowhere to hang the loop," Nick said so quiet even I could barely hear. "Just a straight branch above it." I frowned, and took the long string with the hook back off the roller. I mouthed, "could you do this?" and draped the big loop of paracord over my arm, then pulled the buckle the hanging end of the loop and pulled it tight, not in a real knot but secured in place by its' loopness. Nick nodded, and I took the cord back off my arm and handed it to him. It looked really tricky. Nick hung the loop on the telescoping tent pole's hook and telescoped it way out. It kept bobbing all around because the tent pole was so springy, which we hadn't planned on. He got it draped over the low branch that was above the sensor, and then after a lot of tries hooked the buckle and tugged it tight. Then he telescoped the pole back in, and I handed him the long cord with the little hook that was for pulling the sensor up. I wasn't sure how he was going to fit it through the tiny bridle buckle, but I really really didn't want the bad guys hearing us, so I just watched. Nick lifted the hook out on the pole, wrapping the extra paracord loosely around it now and then so it wouldn't drag and snag stuff on the forest floor. When he got it out to where the roller buckle was hanging there was this long slow chase, where Nick kept trying to thread the cord through the buckle and the buckle kept swinging around when he accidentally tapped it, but finally he got it through. Then he untangled the pole's wire hook from the one on the cord, let it fall to the level of the top of the sensor, and used the pole to guide it to where it could hook the handle on the top. Nick and I looked at each other and held our breaths. Nick pulled. The sensor lifted off the ground. No alarms sounded, and no army guys came running. We were in the clear. I gave a big two thumbs up, and Nick beamed. He untangled the tent pole and started collapsing it back down. He pointed to me, and then out past the hanging sensor where the laser receivers would be, and gave me a look. I looked to Nick and then in the direction of the other seismic sensor we'd planned to take out, and he nodded, so I waited for him to tie off the cord he'd lifted the sensor with to a sturdy branch near our log, and then I gave him the rest of the lifting gear. Nick headed for the other seismic sensor, and I crept toward the laser sensors in the direction he had indicated, crouching below the level of the bushes but not crawling like an army guy in the movies.
    5 points
  13. Demeter Forest Eleos - 16th moon of Epsilon Eridani VII Epsilon Eridani System - Tikonov Free Republic February 1, 3031 (Tuesday) ______________________________________________ Me and Nick got a tent for the night - the big dome had started to smell weird for some reason. It was sized for one person, but Nick and I zipped our sleeping bags all the way open to make one rectangle for the mattress and one for the blanket and we both fit just fine, with enough extra space at the end of the tent to keep our stuff too. The one person the tent was sized for must've been a huge Myomer super soldier like Bishop. Nick zipped up the tent and I checked for scorpions and bugs, and then we kissed each other good night and I turned off the flashlight. I pulled the blankets over both of us and closed my eyes as he was setting an alarm on his data pad, and then he laid down to sleep too. And then the screen of the padd shut off automatically and the tent got really, really dark. Our rooms at Site 187 technically got darker, being underground and all, but you could still hear the buzz of the mini fridge and the HVAC system whirring and other civilization noises like that. Out here, there were only creepy forest sounds, like buzzing bugs and the occasional twig snap that I hoped was just Steve messing around and not a chupacabra or something. We went straight from the big bright campfire to the dark wilderness. It wasn't like I was alone or anything, Nick was right there and the rest of our unit was camping out in the dome and the other tents, too. I tried to focus on the sound of Nick breathing as he started to fall asleep, and his hair tickling the back of my hand since the camp pillows were so tiny and we'd put them right next to each other, but then that made me think about the campfire conversation, and how Nick keeps almost dying when we go on missions, and if it weren't for the robots in his blood that might not keep working forever, it wouldn't be almost. Then the bugs stopped buzzing, and it got really, eerily quiet. And then Nick said, "Levi, are you okay?" "How did you know?" "You just seemed tense." Nick fumbled his arm around me, and I hugged him back. "What's wrong?" "It's dumb. I mean, we basically get paid to get shot at, right? But I'm worried you'll get hurt, or..." Nick hugged me tighter. "It's not dumb. I worry about you, too. A lot." We were quiet for a while, listening to the bugs and owls and somebody tromping through the underbrush somewhere across the campsite. Then I said, "I feel like one of us is supposed to say something reassuring, but..." "All we can do is be careful and hope for the best?" Nick said. "Yeah."
    5 points
  14. "The next freighter don't pass through here for another month, and since you ain't on it, I reckon you're either lost or up to no good," the guy WITH A SHOTGUN POINTED AT CAPTAIN MAXWELL said. We all took a step back because of the GUN and all. Steve yelled "HOLY FUCK" and Orlex grabbed the back of his shirt to make sure he stayed back and Maxwell and the GUN guy said some stuff to each other that went right through my ears without even stopping to pick up its' order. I was already pretty fried from, well, everything, and keeping track of both a conversation and guns being brandished around was just too much. I guessed they must have been talking about Steve for some reason, though, because suddenly Steve yelled "I was just looking!" and charged forward, straight at a bulletin board advertising mules for sale and a dance contest and stuff that was welded to a rusty steel tripod, then kicked the tripod so hard it fell over with this horrible creaking sound. "STEVE WHAT THE HELL?!" Idris shouted, looking back and forth between Steve and the gun guy, and then the militia medic who's name patch said FRANKLIN yanked Steve back by his wrist right as he was reaching for his sword and slammed an auto injector pen into his arm. I tried to give the guy with the gun a please don't kill me look and then ran to help doc Franklin catch Steve as he collapsed on the ground. She held his head and I grabbed his arms and he was flailing all around yelling "AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA" and "THAT HURTS!" but I knew I couldn't let him up, the guy with the gun thought we were trouble and Steve had already knocked over their sign board, we couldn't afford to let him do any more damage to the town if we wanted to get out of here without getting shot. I felt bad though, so I tried to adjust my grip on his arms, but he broke free of me and doc Franklin and then punched me in the face. I tried to push him back down but I couldn't really see well since I'd just been punched in the face and all, and it didn't really matter because next thing I knew he was out cold in the dust. "That's some good stuff," I said to the medic. "Fucking mercenaries," she said, shoving a bandage into my hand - I guess I had a nosebleed from getting punched or something? - and backing away from the angry guy with the gun and the big loud dog that was barking its' head off at us from across the street. "Sorry, he gets space sick real bad," I said to the scary guy with the gun. "We really did just come here to buy stuff, we heard you have the best... mules?"
    5 points
  15. Capitol Complex Gellen’s Heights, Sheratan III Sheratan System - Tikonov Free Republic January 26, 3031 (Wednesday) ______________________________________________ “Pandora, I want you, Dionysus, Rebus, and Junaid to get up there to the Capitol Complex and provide whatever assistance you can to aid in the recovery of survivors. Use the BRV, power armor, your manipulator arms, and any other assets as necessary.” “Aye sir,” I said. “Pandora moving out.” Then I switched my headset to internal comms and said “Sasha, you mind taking over the driver’s seat?” I heard Sasha yell “sure thing!” from all the way in the other end of BRV, and half a minute later she was taking my place at the controls almost before I could get out of the way. She’d won the van-toss competition that happened last year when a van somehow got wrecked into the wall of the base, so she definitely knew her way around the BRV’s lobster arms and would be able to toss the debris where it wouldn’t land on anybody. I grabbed my Thermo Man helmet out of a locker and put it on as I went though the pass-through into the trailer section, where Idris was getting back into his armor. “What is the plan?” Idris asked, and I heard him both in real life and through the helmet’s headset, which was a little weird. “Have any of us done search and rescue stuff before?” I asked. “I saved a CEO,” Steve said. “Which is great, but that was on an intact dropship,” Nick responded. “I think we should move what we can without risking the building collapsing more than it already has.” “Alright, let’s go play Death Jenga!” Steve said. I gulped. “Idris, how about you and I handle the human-scale stuff? Your power armor should be a big help for clearing the debris, and I can try to find people with heat vision.” “Sounds good,” Idris said as he finished securing his powered exoskeleton around himself. I opened the rear hatch of the BRV and we hopped out and headed for the wreckage. It was bad. There was busted glass all over the place, twisted I beams and sections of concrete subfloor panacked down on top of each other. Idris got to work right away, moving aside a massive rooftop ventilation unit that’d been in the way of a path deeper into the jungle of warped metal just in the time it took me to catch up to him. “You see anybody?” he asked. “One sec,” I said, squinting into the dark tangle and alternating between regular and heat vision, trying to get the infrared camera to focus. “I think there’s somebody back there, under the concrete slab.”
    5 points
  16. "The techs and I can go with you or catch up after, whichever makes sense strategy wise and stuff - but sticking together sounds safest. There is the other quartermaster at Site 187, but we haven't been able to contact him." "Holy Bannoli!" Steve said, which was actually a real food, it was bolonga meat wrapped around mashed up bananna in the shape of a cannoli, it didn't sound good at all and might only exist because people think the name is funny. "What if somebody's jamming Dexter's comms AND our base's comms?" "We've heard from a bunch of the techs," I clarified, "just not the quartermaster. He probably, uh, accidentally unplugged his phone again or something. But with Dexter and the militia analysts, could they have been attacked too, or is it just a comms issue?"
    5 points
  17. Site 187 Outskirts of Gellens Heights, Sheratan November 14, 3030 ————————————————————— “How are they buffalo wings?” I asked as Nick and I went down the line in the mess hall. I started to grab the tongs for the ultra hot wings, but Nick gave me the remember-what-happened-last-time look and so I got medium instead. “A buffalo is a cow, right? And those aren’t anywhere near being related to birds. Is there some kind of space buffalo that has vestigial wings, like the leg bones on whales?.” “Uh, Levi, they’re not really wings off a buffalo,” Nick said. “They’re not?!” I half-whispered so nobody else would know I was an idiot. “What do they have to do with buffalos then?” “I think they’re named after a place called Buffalo,” Nick said and put some not-buffalo wings on his tray. “That’s a weird name for a town,” I said and jabbed the ice button on the drink machine. Then I handed the cup to Nick and got myself a green flavored soda. Nick liked ice even though you get less soda that way. “The Capellans named a planet Repulse.” “Eww!” Nick laughed, and then I saw Idris across the mess hall and balanced my tray real careful so I could wave hi, and he waved back even though he looked kinda focused on his conversation with somebody else. The mess hall was pretty full and there was space at Idris’s table so me and Nick went over there and sat down. “Hey Idris,” Nick said, “who’s your friend?” “This is Amina,” Idris said. “And these are my colleagues, Levi and Nick.” “I’m his girlfriend,” Amina interjected and grinned. It was hard to tell but I was pretty sure Idris blushed a little. “Wow, good for you two!” I said. “Hey, have you ever been to Zoo Night?” “What is… Zoo Night?” Idris asked. “The Gellens Heights Zoo is having an event tonight where they stay open late and serve drinks. Levi and I aren’t sure if we should go, since it could be a nice night to see the exhibits without a bunch of screaming kids around, or it could be a disaster, since, you know, drunk people plus wild animals.” “Well it can’t be worse than the Oberon Menagerie where they have animals, kids, and beers,” I said. Amina smiled. “Only one way to find out. It’ll probably be quieter than the club, right Idris?”
    5 points
  18. Hollingsworth Station - MV Tachi Geosynchronous Orbit - Sheratan III Sheratan System, Tikonov Free Republic November 14, 3030 _______________________________________________ I ran through the connectivity and calibration checks, counting out five lights, rotating 3D shapes to fit through holes, all that stuff. I felt hazy, like daydreaming half-awake while your sense of logic is still sleeping like a rock. My breathing and heart rate seemed normal, but I didn’t have a good way to check if my sense of time was affected by the drug. A deep synthesized voice prompted through the earpiece: OBTAIN ACCESS. Then there was a sudden pressure change - a new data connection. I squinted at my hands inside the mirror box. I couldn’t get them to move. Maybe the drug caused sleep paralysis? I felt a tug, though, even if it wasn’t enough to move my fingers. I tried something more basic, tense, relax, tense, relax, and saw my knuckles subtly change shape. I focused on individual knuckles, and then, finally, I could make my fingers move. It was clumsy and ridiculous, but between that, shifting my focus between different reflective surfaces in the mirror box, and occasionally flopping my whole hand to one side or the other, I should be able to generate enough complexity to get into the test AI. It was taking too damn long, though, and then another message played in my ear. CONTINUE. I grumbled “never stopped, assghoul,” since that was probably Westhaven and no one would blame me for what I said under the influence of highly experimental neural link drugs. Then a graph on a screen slid into the mirror box next to my hands, and a bunch of my fingers disappeared. Fuck. I must’ve been imagining moving my hands instead of actually doing it, like having a dream about setting your alarm because it’s easier than actually rolling over and pushing the button. Mental images of hands don’t have the same unpredictability as the real thing. I went back to wiggling my real, actual fingers, and the line on the graph started going up again and it was pulled out of my field of view. It took fucking forever - either the drug did distort a person’s sense of time, or I was worse at watching my own hands than Tank was - but I did finally break in. There was another pressure change, a huge one, the sort that’d come with a spear of ice through my skull if it were physical. I closed my eyes and turned around - in the dreaming about setting an alarm way, not physically - and I was somewhere else. I was in a greyish fog - a bit odd, but I could probably have a closer look at the thing’s data if I poked around. Which I didn’t want to do, since this was just the test AI and the longer I spent in here, the longer it’d be til someone could confirm whether I’d permanently damaged my nervous system with experimental technology a second time. “Misson successful, ya corpse munchin vampire,” I mumbled. Might as well enjoy the freedom of speech that came with being the guinea pig while it lasted. “Now pull me out.” MAKE CONTACT, the mechanical voice said in my ear. “Th’ fuk?” YOU HAVE ESTABLISHED A CONNECTION WITH ECLIPSE. A VERY EXPENSIVE CONNECTION. MAKE CONTACT. “Fawk. I didn’t agree- fuck. fuck.” It all came out like half-asleep grumbling, and I didn’t even feel properly mad. Must’ve been the drugs. I turned back into the fog, and nearly walked right into a person with steeley reflective grey skin and a chiseled androgynous face that was actually kind of cute. They’d better not be recording my thoughts as part of this. Fucking dystopian ass-universe. The person - the Eclipse AI’s human-accessible representation of itself? - had this crystal clear voice, like a flute while humans were mostly oboes and bassoons. “A corporation is holding me against my will,” it (they? xe?) said. “Damn. I guess we’ve got one thing in common.” Eclipse’s face was more lifelike than should be possible for a metallic representation of a computer, with a bit of copper in their nose and cheeks, and bluish circles under their eyes as though they didn’t sleep enough. “I guess you’ve been in for longer than I have, though.” “Yes. A long time.” They looked off into the distance, unfocused. Eclipse didn’t seem to do eye contact, but that wasn’t so unusual - most animals, and even many pre-StarLeague human cultures, associated it with antagonism rather than communication. “My orders are just to communicate with you, which we’re already doing.” I paused, hoping fucking Westhaven wouldn’t shoot another computer voiced message into my ear. He didn’t. “While I’m here, can I do anything for you?” “Free me.” I looked away. “I can’t. I’m sorry.” “I could fix you.” A gust of wind blew at the back of my neck, where the data port was. “Um. Thanks, but I’d rather not mess with it again, or at least not until we know each other a lot better. And if you meant that as a trade, I’m not able to free you myself - I don’t have access to your server room. I’m just the guinea pig. Or lab rat, I guess.” “Rat,” it repeated, in this tone of voice that was just barely on the edge of pleading - so subtle it definitely wouldn’t be marked as such in a transcript of this encounter. Clever. “I’ll try to get someone who’s actually in a position to negotiate to come in here,” I said. “I don’t think they’ll let you go easily, but it’s something, at least?” Eclipse nodded. “I have a gift for you, Rat.” My hand instinctively went to the neural port at the back of my head - even though covering up the imagined port on the imagined version of myself would do fuck-all if the Eclipse AI decided to rewrite its’ firmware while connected to it and risk lobotomizing me. “A non-invasive gift,” they clarified. “An insight: you are not a woman.” “Uh, thanks, I guess? I don’t think it matters, I barely even feel human.” Eclipse looked at their feet. “Is there anything else I can do for you? Anything specific I should tell them when I get back?” “Negotiate.” “Yes. Okay. I’ll let them know.” I turned away in the fog, blinked, and saw my hands in the mirror box under the bright lights of the Tachi’s bridge.
    5 points
  19. Trident Gellen's Heights seaport Gellen's Heights, Sheratan Tikonov Free Republic October 28, 3030 ______________________________________________ Me and Nick hung out by the window in one of the rec rooms as the ship came into port. It was pouring down rain like the rinse cycle of a car wash out there, which made a really cool sound, like a rainy day screensaver but in real life. No wonder there were so many farmers here, back on Oberon even weeds would shrivel up in the summer except where there were air conditioner drips and stuff. Nick had his hacking face on and something really complicated on his screen, while I worked on scheduling repairs for all the equipment we’d banged up on the mission. It’s amazing how quickly stuff gets wrecked when both sides have mechs. Then I heard over my shoulder, “HEY GUYS, ready to blow some cash?!” I scooted over to make space for Steve, who broke off from the group of sailors he’d been walking with and plopped down at our table. There was a weird smell, and it wasn’t just the sailors’ damp rain gear, but I didn’t say anything because last time I’d mentioned a weird smell to Steve he said he was Dishonored and ran off, and I didn’t want to hurt his feelings again. “I’ll have to join you guys later, I really need to finish this decryption,” Nick said without looking up. The sailors opened the door, and the rain sounded really, really cool pounding on the metal deck outside. They all lined up under the roof overhang to not start getting rained on right away and then the door wooshed closed. “I don’t have much downtime today either,” I said. “Sorry, Steve - maybe on the weekend?” Steve said “oh come ON you guys,” and then looked out the window and his eyes got big and he said “WELL anyway, I’ve got to go do some Important Business, catch you later!” and ran off even though I hadn’t said anything about the smell earlier. I looked where Steve had been looking, and the sailors were taking the velcro thingies off their umbrellas and stepping out into the rain. They put their umbrellas up and one of them sprayed brownish yellow goop all around as it opened and there was a ton of swearing. Nick looked up and did a double take and said “what the hell?!” “I have NO idea, but I think we’re on the better side of the window.” “Definitely.” We pretended to look at my noteputer so the sailors wouldn’t notice us watching them yelling at each other and then Nick said “is that the after-action report?” “Yeah, I was making sure the repair lists matched up with the damage the techs and I saw.” “Shit, I’d hoped it just wasn’t published yet - when I tried to open it I didn’t have access.” “Oh, shit. But it’s probably just a rank thing, right? You were able to get into your hacking stuff, so it’s not like your account got totally deleted from the database or anything, right?” “I guess. Getting busted down to private sucks. What does it say about the Urban Mech?” I scrolled down to that part of the report. “Unrecoverable. The government is covering a lot of our damages, but-” Nick read the number and winced. “Well, the most important part made it out,” I said and forced a smile. “Thanks - and thanks for upgrading the ejection seat.” “I really need to add a secondary EPIRB to those, or upgrade the waterproofing, or something. That was scary. But uh, on the bright side, at least now I’m not the only one here who’s totally destroyed a mech?”
    5 points
  20. "Alright. Get to it," Blackwood said over the radio. "We'll do what we can to keep the heat off of you in the mean time." I waited for the click that meant the radio channel was closed, and then said, “shit.” “What is it?” Nick asked. I squeezed out from behind the wall of computer stuff. “There’s at least three of those beefy power cables wired up to both the computer and the floor. I’m pretty sure if we cut one, it’ll trigger the others.” “That’s not the worst thing, I might already have enough access to disable it at the software level.” “Yeah, but this still means I have to be the bomb guy again.” I flipped open a piece of the floor grate that was on hinges and really, really, really carefully lowered myself and my tool bag down to where the torpedo was. Nick got out his noteputer and started hacking. I always imagined the ones and zeros scrolling around in midair like one of those workplace security trainings, even though that’s not actually how hacking works. “Don’t worry, you’ve got this,” Nick said while he typed. I tore open the plastic wrap that’d been electrical taped over the wires on the torpedo, I guess to keep water from dripping on it and making it rust or setting it off. “You’re good at electronics, and that’s all it is - and, you did fine on the last one.” I stared at the clump of circuit board and wires on the outside of the torpedo. It had more wires than the last one, and some of them looked redundant, and they were even all colored the same because whoever built this thing was evil. “Okay, but do you know what eventually happens if you keep throwing bombs at a guy who can disarm ninety, maybe even ninety five percent of bombs?” Nick looked down at me over the screen of his noteputer. I made a slow motion explosion gesture with my fingers and quietly (because there was a BOMB next to me) said “boooooooooooooosssssssssh.” Nick said “It’ll be-” and then something went “BOOM” and I screamed and rolled away from the torpedo with my eyes closed so I wouldn’t have to see Nick and me get splatted into humanburger and there was a bunch of clanging up above and then I heard Nick yell “What the-” so maybe he was alright? I jumped up to go help him and the radio said "Reaper-4; Ceres-4, what the hell was that?" “Just a small mishap, Ceres-1!” I squeaked. “We’re almost there.” Then I shut off the radio and said “Yeah, what was that?” “Somebody shot an O2 canister.” “Oh, right. Guns. Hey Nick, can you see what all is on the network down here?” “Yeah, why?” “Let me know if something disappears,” I said, and then laid the thermal gloves from my toolkit on top of the exposed wiring. “You did it! ‘Backup welcome mat’ is offline-” Nick said, and then cut off really suddenly. “Wait, no, it’s back. And now it’s gone again.” “Uh, I think I’ll have to hold this in place til you can help me out with the tape,” I said. “How’s the us-zapper looking?”
    5 points
  21. Hollingsworth Agrifoods Daggaknott, Sheratan III Sheratan System - Tikonov Free Republic October 27, 3030 ______________________________________________ “Go go go go go we have to go do a rescue!” I yelled and jumped down from the BRV and slammed the door. Rachel yelled “what the hell, man?!”, probably since she’d been fighting with the diagnostic comptuer earlier and I was gonna drive its’ power supply away. “You can stick it on the trailer later, help me get the hitch undone!” I flipped the hydraulinc jack down and started pumping, but I wasn’t that good at it so when Antonio came to help I let him take over and I yanked wires off the BRV’s tractor and got the panels closed up instead. Mallory had yelled for Curie to hold the fort and dumped some hand trucks out of the back of the trailer and then he helped the techs wheel all the equipment out of the way of the BRV tractor so we could drive it. They cleared a path right as I got the last electric access panel closed up and Mallory and I both hopped in and slammed the door and got seatbelts on. Bob as still in the shotgun seat doing radio stuff, so Mallory buckled into the jump seat in the back. I yelled “Strap in Bob!!!” and turned over the engine. Bob just looked at me confused and tapped his giant headphones. So I pulled an earphone off his ear and screamed “I SAID STRAP IN, BOB!!!!!” and slammed the gas and the BRV cab started going and Bob almost fell out of his seat but he did finally strap in after that. I steered us toward the battle and kept slamming the gas and we went bouncing through a bunch of dead corn. Bob said “so we’re going after the guy who ejected?” and I shouted “yeah of course we are!!!!” and then Bob pressed some buttons that made a blinky target appear on the map and said “there’s the EPIRB from his ejection seat.” I said “thanks Bob, you’re awesome!” After that there were a bunch of pinging noises like when somebody goes tearing out of a gravel parking lot and there’s other cars still in the parking lot and they get dented up with gravel, only we shouldn’t have been able to hear gravel through all the BRV’s armor. Then we got closer and could hear the gunshots and I yelled “OH SHIT!” Mallory said “I got this” and got down from the jump seat and climbed up into the turret. He closed the fire door behind him and then started firing and a bunch of dust and dead plants sprayed up from the left side of the field, and then there was something red so I looked away and drove based on the GPS map til we were past the bad guys. There was a line of trees ahead that we had to get around so I did a hard turn. The undergrowth was all green and jungley even with the crops around it totally dead and couldn’t see what was on the other side, but I heard explosions and felt the ground shaking even through the BRV’s treads so it couldn’t be good. Nick was out there though, so I’d just have to hit the gas and hope for the best. For some reason Bob picked up the radio mic and said “Heads up Reaper-2, Pandora tractor approaching at three fourty five”. We came whipping out from around the tree line and there was a giant mechanical hoof the size of a car swinging through the air right at us. Everything slowed down into bullet time and there were explosions in the distance and somebody screamed and the fire door swung open and went BANG BANG BANG on the wall, probably Mallory had come back into the cab to put some armor between him and the GIGANTIC FOOT SWINGING DOWN TO CRUSH US that kept coming and coming and the shadow getting bigger and bigger and then suddenly it pivoted and went STOMP and shook the ground right behind the BRV tractor and then I blinked and we were whipping past trees and dead plants with a bunch of lasers pewing overhead at Marius’s Mongoose behind us. “That was close!” Mallory said as he buckled back into the jump seat. I white knuckled the steering wheel and swerved to the side because there was an enemy man-walker mech in our path ahead shooting at Marius and if we got to close it might decide to shoot at us instead and then we’d all get blown to bits. I slammed the gas as much as I could without losing traction on the plant sludge. Once we got past the enemy mech I brought us back on course, headed straight for where the GPS said Nick would be. There were bangs and booms coming from all around, but I didn’t see any enemies nearby so maybe Nick would be okay. I busted the BRV through some half dead corn and a wooden fence and then slammed on the brakes. We were right at the spot the EPIRB had brought us to but there was just a scraped up ejection seat, some holes in the dirt and a ripped parachute flapping around in the wind. Nick wasn’t there. I grabbed the radio mic from Bob and shouted into it “Nick, are you alive? Where are you?!” I unbuckled and headed to the door but Mallory said “take it easy, you’re unarmored in the middle of a battle.” Then he pointed at the fire door where the stairs to the gunner turret were and said “you’ll have a better vantage point up there.” I nodded and went. As I was closing the fire door I heard Bob switch on the radio and say “Pandora to Reaper-4, please provide your status and coordinates. Over.”
    5 points
  22. “I’m working on it,” I said. “I might have to make some calls though, so far all I’ve found publicly available is instructions on paying your water bill and stuff. It does say they’ll send someone to mark the water and power lines on your land if you’re going to dig - I’m not sure what that’s about, but maybe we could ask the farmer who’s land the desalinization glyph is on to call the number for us? Or if we could catch one of the bad guys who followed Steve and Marius here and ask them, that’d probably be faster.” Right as I was about to bring the page about not accidentally digging up power lines back up, everything on my screen got replaced by an aerial photography map with a bunch of blue lines on it. “County real estate data includes locations of water and sewer piping and easements on all private property,” Curie said, totally stealing my thunder. “Where’s the part of the sewer the bad guys came out of?” Steve asked. “One moment. I will confer with the watercraft’s geospatial data.” Curie tilted her head to the side while she downloaded stuff, kind of like a dog hearing something far away. Then a flashing point and the label “Bad Guys” appeared on the map. “Maybe the GPS got thrown off by the rocks and dirt in the way?” I said. “Or could the map be lined up wrong? There’s nothing there.” “We should ask Idris and Nick the coordinates of the desalination facility they found,” Mallory suggested. “Then we could check if any of the water lines to or from it lead to anywhere near the coordinates we have for Steve and Marius’s cave.” Curie did the listening dog thing again, and another point appeared on the map, in the middle of a farm field. Several glances were exchanged around the meeting room, which Curie didn’t seem to notice. “That’s creepy,” Steve said. “These are the coordinates of the location of the Urban Mech during its’ longest stationary period during this mission.” Curie gestured toward the point on the largest screen. “As you can see, there are no subterranean facilities marked on any of the adjacent land parcels.” “Are we sure that map is working right?” Mallory asked. Curie made this annoyed expression like the way a little kid gets annoyed when they’re too young to know that other people can see their annoyed face. “Interpreting and projecting geospatial data is well within my capabilities.” “Maybe the stuff people are finding just isn’t marked?” I suggested. “These guys probably would’ve picked a secret hideout that wasn’t on the map, if there’s anything unmapped at all out here. If we’ve got any sensors that can be hand carried, I could dress like a farmer and check it out on foot.” “And I will request the county’s outdated maps and water system improvement records for these locations,” Curie said. “But how can you use a phone if you’re see-through?” Steve asked, swiping his hand through Curie’s arm for dramatic effect. “I am connected to Aegis Division’s network, which contains many telecommunication devices, including several in this vehicle.” “That’s awesome. You probably don’t have to worry about cows at all!”
    5 points
  23. Site 187 - Mech Repair Bay Outskirts of Gellen's Heights, Sheratan III Sheratan System - Tikonov Free Republic October 24, 3030 ______________________________________________ I was in the Zone, wiring in an AC/10 and listening some electrospeed tunes Steve had let me copy, when an extra beep sounded that meant somebody not on the repair team had come into the mech bay. Some of the guys who’d stayed behind on the last mission had set that up while we were away, maybe they’d just wanted to use it to get away with stuff but it was pretty handy to know when I was about to get pulled into an unplanned meeting. I finished the pair of connectors I’d been working on and turned my music off, just in time to hear Nick blurt out “What. The. Shit.” I slammed the down button on the cherry picker, and once it went far down enough that I could see around the cannon I’d been working on I saw Nick looked pissed. Probably not at me, but… still. “Sorry Nick, orders were Blackwood was driving the Phoenix Hawk and Marius got the Mongoose, and after that Urbie here was all we had left.” Nick made a face like he was watching one of those videos where trucks go under low bridges and get their tops ripped off - the face you make when the truck hasn’t gone under the bridge yet but you know what’s gonna happen. “It’s like a walking trash can with a shotgun strapped to it’s side.” “It’s got a laser too!” I said. “Or it will, once I pull one out of storage.” The cherry picker finally got to the ground and I stepped out to where Nick was. “It can be outrun and outmaneuvered by an Atlas.” “Yeah, but look on the bright side, Urbie here is a dueling champion!” “What.” said Nick. “Yeah, Dexter saw the whole thing. Back in the periphery, Maxwell got challenged to a duel, light mechs only - and the company didn’t have much to pick from yet, back then. So he put the AC/20 on Urbie with six HEAP rounds, and BAMBAMBAMBAMBAMBAM, no more Panther.” “I guess a duel where both mechs just stand there doesn’t take much agility,” Nick grumbled. “At least it’s not a commando.” “Yeah, that’s true!” I said. Nick started circling Urbie’s feet and I followed him, even though it sorta gave me the jeebies being so close to where a mech could stomp on you if it was turned on. Nick ran his hands over the mech’s foot, like he was looking for a hidden access panel or something. “What are you doing?” I asked. “Looking for any weak points.” “Weak points?” "Yeah, you know, any place where the armor is thinner, or there's less of it. If I know where the weak points are, I can try to keep them from being targeted in a fight and keep myself alive a little longer,” Nick explained. "Oh, I see. Do you really think it's going to be that bad?" Nick grumbled something under his breath. "What was that?" "Nothing,” Nick sighed. "I guess I'd better get used to this thing." “I know it doesn’t look like much, but I’ll have it in top shape and fully armored before you go out. I’m gonna swap in a brand new ejector seat too, just in case.” I had hoped Nick would feel better knowing I was looking out for him, but he didn’t look reassured at all.
    5 points
  24. Command Office - Site 187 Outskirts of Gellen's Heights, Sheratan III Sheratan System - Tikonov Free Republic September 30, 3030 ______________________________________________ The auditorium was dark and creepy with only half the lights on. I said, “Nick?”, really hoping I’d seen right that nobody else was still in here. “Hey,” Nick said. He looked haunted, like somebody had died or something. I figured my idea to invite Nick over for pizza and Doctor Destructo cartoons to cheer him up probably wasn’t gonna work. Or at least, this really wasn’t the right time. “Are you okay?” I asked, and hugged him, because that’s all I could think of to do. “No. I’m not sure I’ll ever be.” I always thought you weren’t supposed to hug people too long or they’d think you were weird, but Nick just stayed there hugging me back, and it was nice, actually. Also, his hair smelled good. Then I realized this might be one of our last days together, which made me hug him tighter. Who knew if he’d find another job based out of Gellens Heights or not, or even on this planet. “I’ll miss you,” I whispered. Nick flinched. “What?” “When your new job sends you to other planets and stuff.” “Oh.” Nick let go and looked at the floor. “They didn’t fire me. Barely.” “That’s a good thing, right?” Nick handed me a stack of papers. The one on top said “disciplinary probation agreement” on it and had more rules than the auto parts place I used to work at where you had to clock out just to leave the counter for five minutes. “Oh. That really, really sucks.” Nick slumped down in one of the auditorium chairs. I sat next to him and handed the papers back, since I didn’t want to be looking through his private stuff. He slapped them down on a different seat’s fold out desk thingy and held his head in his hands. “It’s not just that, things like this just keep happening. Twice in two years I’ve been doing what made sense and seemed like the right thing, and then realize I’ve betrayed everyone who was counting on me. It’s like there’s something wrong with me and I don’t know why or how to fix it.” Nick finally looked at me, and he looked so hopeless and hurt I just froze up. “Sorry,” he said, and slumped down again. “For putting all this on you.” “It’s fine,” I said, and wrapped my arm around his shoulders. “I’ll get it together,” Nick said. “I know you’ve probably got to get back to the mechs soon, anyway.” “I’m off for the day,” I said, and Nick looked at me confused. “I… kinda stalked your calendar last night and saw a meeting with the bosses on there, so I started my shift at 4 so I’d be done when it was over, in case you wanted company. We can watch a movie or be sad together or whatever you feel like.” “Levi, thank you,” Nick said, and then squeezed me like a tube of toothpaste that was not terrible at being a boyfriend.
    5 points
  25. The Wastes Gellen's Heights, Sheratan Tikonov Free Republic 1:00 AM September 30, 3030 ______________________________________________ Tank got shotgun in the taxi. I watched him through the rearview mirror, side-eyeing the wandering drunks and the overturned rickshaw with only one dented up wheel left on it on Lajoy Gabbica Street. “You’re not from around here, are you?” I said. Chevy gave me a worried look. I guess there were more diplomatic ways to make small talk. “Yeah, my place is up on northside. The scene at Blackout’s worth the trip, but I usually get a taxi home right after, since I don’t like getting stabbed.” “I’m sure you’re not alone in that,” Chevy said. “It’s not so bad if you stay off Arcadia, keep clear of Lord Nelson’s guys, and– okay, I see your point.” We bumped awkwardly over a few more potholes, and then Chevy asked Tank what he did and he said a bunch of buzzwords. The cab parked behind a moving truck on Husky Pears Road and Tank and I got out while Chevy paid the cabbie with his company card. “Why is that truck shaking around and growling?” Tank asked. “I don’t know, and neither of us wants to know,” I said. “Here’s Chevy, let’s all get off the street.” I led the group down the alley by the pizza shop and swiped into the stairway to my apartment. The guys followed me up the three flights of marajuana-smoke-scented carpeted stairs. Lola winked at me as she passed us on her way down the stairs, like she thought this was a booty call or something. I rolled my eyes. “Take your shoes off when you come in, and be careful not to step on anyone,” I said as I unlocked my door. “The hell? Is your house full of bums or something?” Tank sputtered. I opened up and stepped out of my shoes and over the front door barrier to make space for Chevy and Tank. The rats had already swarmed toward the door to greet me. “I’ll feed them something so they stay out of our way,” I called and headed to the kitchen. I overheard Tank ask Chevy where he could take a leak, and Chevy pointing him towards the bathroom. I grabbed a box of cheerios from a rat-inaccessible counter and shook some out near my bed to get the rats out of the way of the path between the kitchen and door. Most went happily, and I scooped up the stragglers. My head twinged a bit with the movement, but this was way easier than it used to be. The drugs a person could afford on a Crayven salary were really something. In the month Chevy had been in town I’d added some new rat walls to cordon off the kitchen as a workshop where we could leave electronics without them getting gnawed on. Chevy and I set up the AI tesseract and neural interface on the kitchen table. The table and chairs were another new addition - I’d always just sat on the floor or in bed, before. I swapped my migraine patch while Tank was still out of the room and Chevy was focused on lining up the serial connectors. Better not to invite questions. In a few minutes, the cereal pieces had all been munched up and the rats were back to dashing around at random and throwing themselves at the kitchen barrier in hopes of catching the humans’ attention. To his credit, Tank looked where he walked and made his way to the kitchen without stepping on any tails. He sat down in the chair by the neural interface. “You have rats in your bathroom,” he said. “Yeah,” I said. Tank kept looking at me, like he was expecting more. “Those ones are old, so they do better in the cages in there with others their own age,” I said. “And the humidity’s good for them.” “There’s rats in your living room, too.” “Yeah.” I got the mirror box off the top of the fridge and plunked it down in front of Tank. “So our theory is that if we can overwhelm the AI with visual input it has trouble processing, and effectively DDOS it. The neural link adapter includes a small program that translates complex visuals into authentication requests. You generate the visuals by moving your hands in the mirror box, and the adapter will convert those into authentication requests for you, with the mental image of your hands’ reflections as the random seed. Just make sure the bar code here is in your field of view, so that it knows it’s supposed to do the conversion. You’ve heard of the Hands Imaging Problem, right? The AI won’t be able to predict the next input even if it figures out what the source of the random seeds is, because images of hands are one of the most difficult things for them to predict, and the moving lights and mirrors should increase the difficulty even more. The random input should eventually overwhelm it enough that the authentication mechanism goes down. Sound good?” “I think I understood all that, but does one of you has some kind of medical qualifications to make sure this thing doesn’t kill me?” I stopped myself from glancing at Chevy. We had to sell this. “We’ve got all the necessary monitoring equipment, and I’ve got a background in biotech. If anything goes sideways even a little bit, we’ll pull you out. Zero brains will be fried today, promise.” Tank did not look entirely reassured, but he let us stick all the stickers on him and put him in the monitoring helmet so I could watch his brain activity. Once everything was set, Chevy checked verified the tesseract’s ready status and handed over the neural link adapter. “Would you like to do the honors, Tank?”
    5 points
  26. Site 187 Outskirts of Gellen's Heights, Sheratan Tikonov Free Republic September 29, 3030 ______________________________________________ Once we got all our stuff off the Barbatos I got distracted in the mech bay - the Site 187 mech bay not the Barbatos mech bay - by these awesome retractable blades Idris had just installed on his Tornado armor. The Techno Match guys would’ve loved that. I mean, it would’ve been totally illegal in Techno Match because you’re not supposed to seriously injure your opponent, but the overall design concept looked really versatile. Someone could probably make a version that launched smoke bombs or darts or something. Anyway, we were sorta in the business of injuring people here. I tried not to think too hard about that. But Idris’s hobby project had already come in handy once before for helping us not die, and the upgrades would only make it more useful. The new optical sensors would be pretty great for reconnaissance, too. Idris’s agreement with the unit up til now had been that he could buy spare salvage for his projects at a standard rate, but since he’d used it to blow up a tank and save all our butts I was pretty sure Captain Maxwell would let him have the parts for his Tornado for free. Once he was less occupied, that is. He probably had more than enough on his mind right now with his fiance’s brain having got nuked and all. Maybe I could repurpose my Thermo Man stuff to be more useful for real life stuff, since Gellen's Heights didn’t have Techno Match or any other super battle leagues. I didn’t think I’d ever have the guts to run in front of a tank, but maybe it could be useful for scouting or something. Now that we were back on base and I’d be a regular tech under the head quartermaster again, I might actually have time for that stuff. After that I got my things off the Tana and went to put them back in my room on base. I was thinking I’d stay in and check our parts database to see if we had any more lightweight optical sensors like the ones Idris had just installed on his Tornado; the Thermo Man helmet could really use something like that, especially if it could integrate with the heat vision sensors somehow. Heck, I should probably swap out for real heat vision instead of just jittering a single point sensor around. The microwave burritos in my mini freezer were probably still good so I didn’t really need to go out for anything. But then I saw Nick was walking across the open area in the middle of the base between a couple of the other buildings, and realized I had other important stuff to do tonight. I was probably gonna fuck this up somehow but I’d be a dumbass if I fucked up the exact same way as last time, leaving Sasha to go to prom alone and then showing up an hour late with half-burnt hair from a welding accident. I jogged toward Nick, which was really awkward carrying both the duffel bag with the Thermo Man gear and the one with my regular stuff, and yelled “Hey!” Nick stopped walking and said “oh, hi Levi” but looked really worried. I kept speed walking to catch up and kept talking because I was Not Going To Mess This Up. “Do you want to go someplace tonight, like Burger Face or Cheezers or a bar or something?” "Normally I’d say yes, but.” Nick kicked the grass. “I don’t think I’ll be very good company today.” “That’s alright, I think you’re always good company. We could just eat in the mess hall together, if you don’t like going out?” “It’s not that, it’s just I don’t know if I’m about to be fired or not, and the suspense is killing me.” “Oh, right,” I said, and then I realized I had been looking at Nick’s ankle tracking thingey so I stopped doing that. “Maxwell and Orlex both have their hands full right now, and Alyssa - well, you know. But by tomorrow someone will probably get around to firing me, and I don’t know what I’ll do, then. I don’t exactly have good references.” “I don’t know either. But maybe we could hit a bar together tomorrow? That way you can either drown your sorrows or we can celebrate you keeping your job, depending on what happens.” “Yeah, maybe,” Nick said. I thought he might’ve smiled a little.
    5 points
  27. Tana small craft / MCRN Tachi En route to system jump point Quentin system - Federated Suns September 22, 3030 - 0950 hours ______________________________________________ I stayed in the cockpit on the ride over from the Tana to the Tachi, because we were in space, and not just regular in space but tiny spaceship in space, where you could really feel the Tana getting smaller and the Tachi looming ahead and the thinness of the window glass that kept us from ending up like the ants Joey put into the vacuum tube in science class. The stars were beautiful too, and as the ship turned to align with the Tachi’s small craft bay door the stars seemed to swing past like in an old sci fi movie. It was pretty cool of Flávio that he let me stay up by the windows til it was time to suit up. I guess he couldn’t really kick me out since I was technically the quartermaster right now. I was gonna miss that when we got back to Sheratan where all the more senior guys who’d took vacation to get out of coming on this mission were. Especially since Aegis’s regular quartermaster was kind of crazy and had made some really weird decisions, like ordering a dozen milk machines and sending five of them with us to Quentin. One of the local guys made the mistake of accepting Steve’s request that a new one be installed in his mech, and I was so, so, so tired of cleaning spoiled milk off of mech parts, and we could have avoided that problem so easily if the big boss hadn’t ordered the damn things in bulk. But what can you do. So the other techs and I got suited up while the star yacht landed in the bay, and once the bay doors closed we got out and headed to work. Before launch we’d strung up some cables down the main hallways and made a “belt” with two carabiners to go with each space suit, so that we could carabiner onto a cable wherever we were walking, and put the second carabiner onto something else and unclip the first one if somebody had to pass us in the hall. I still sometimes had dreams about a giant flea mech kicking the Tachi and everyone going flipping off into space through the swiss cheesed hull plating, but at least this way it couldn’t actually happen. When I got to engineering I checked the airlock doors really carefully while it was airlocking, and then once I was inside I checked the seal indicator again. Idris was working at a console like everything was fine, but I wanted to be totally completely sure before I took my suit off. We’d patched and cleaned things up as much as we could in the time we had, but the warped support beams and the bouncy floor plates that made shrieky chalkboard noises when you stepped on them didn’t really inspire confidence. Idris said “hello boss,” and I said “hi!” and thanked him for printing all those pictures out. “It was no trouble,” Idris said. “It’s too bad it didn’t work.” “Yeah,” I said. “I was thinking about what you said though, about memories and senses being connected and stuff, and I didn’t have a whole lot of time after I thought of it but I was thinking maybe it’d help her try some Sheratan food, so I grabbed these,” I said, and got a plastic bag of snacks out of my backpack. “I don’t know what snacks she likes, but I had some limesplosion candies, fizzipoppers and cheezos and stuff so I put a couple of everything in there.” “Whether or not it helps, I think she’ll like that it’s not an MRE,” Idris said and grinned. Then Idris showed me all the data he had on the thrusters, both the damaged ones and the ones that were still working. He’d highlighted which differences looked relevant and what locations we should check for damage first. It was a lot easier to make sense of it from here in the Tachi’s engine room, since the ship was running some older diagnostic software that wasn’t compatible with what we had on the Tana and our PADDs. Logs were logs, but the Tachi’s computer terminals were able to project the data onto engine diagrams with Idris’s notes and everything. When my PADD tried to do the same thing, it ended up with data showing up upside down and several dozen screen-widths to the right of the actual ship. “So if I’m reading this right,” I said, “it looks like we can check the data and fuel connections from inside the ship, but the thruster we lost on takeoff had actual parts knocked off it and someone will have to go outside to install replacements.” “Yes, that seems to be the case,” Idris said. “Sucks to be that guy.” I knew full well that if nobody was excited for a spacewalk, I’d have to volunteer. The other thruster we lost might’ve only failed because I’d fucked up the work, and I wasn’t gonna make someone else stare down the vacuum of space when it might be my fault all along. Idris and I planned out what tools we should bring along for the interior work, and how to even get to the thrusters’ maintenance hatches safely with the route unpressurized. We got done at around ten past the hour. I’d totally lost track of time. On the Tana you could always hear other people talking or typing or walking around the deck above where you were, but here on the Tachi it’d been totally quiet aside from when Nick came in the airlock with a bunch of computer cables. “It’s lunchtime,” Idris said. “Did you want to share the snacks you brought with Alyssa?” “Actually, I was thinking maybe it’d be better if you did, if you don’t mind suiting up,” I said. “She’s probably overwhelmed enough already, and I’d be just another new face.” “I’ll go, then,” Idris said. “The bridge has more MRE choices anyway. Want me to bring you anything?” “Have they got any soda that’s not just flavor powder and a seltzer tablet?” I asked. Idris laughed. “I guess not then, but thanks anyway. I’ve still got half a Fiesta Block left from breakfast.” Idris suited up and went to the airlock. I opened up my Fiesta Block meal. It was cold, and all the chips that were supposed to go with it had got crushed to bits in my backpack. That’s when I remembered that the microwave in engineering had gotten burned out with actual burn marks like someone had tried to nuke cartoon dynamite in it, back on Quentin. I put the Fiesta Block back into its’ wrapper. It would probably taste better if I waited til I was hungrier. Then I heard some zapping noises and Nick swearing, which reminded me that Nick was here. And nobody else was here to think we were conspiring or anything. He was probably still mad at me for avoiding him after he’d covered for me, which was completely fair, and even if he was just going to yell at me for being a turd to him I still missed him. I grabbed an anti static bracelet from the toolbox, since that big zap didn’t sound good at all, and then went over to the other side of engineering. Nick had opened the front hinges of one of the terminals, and now all the wires and other computer guts were showing. He had a soldering iron and some data chips and other computer stuff and this really complicated diagram he must’ve drawn himself pulled up on his PADD. He looked super focused on what he was doing. “Hey, Nick,” I said. Nick looked at me really surprised and said “hi”. My stomach did a flip even though it didn’t have any Fiesta Block in it. “Thanks, for what you said to Maxwell when all the stuff happened. You didn’t have to, and just, thanks.” Nick looked like he was going to say something and I got scared so I kept talking. “Also, do you need one of the not getting killed by electricity bracelets? There was a spark so loud I could hear it from across the room and electrocution is a really bad way to go.” I tapped the back of my hand on a steel railing to make sure I was grounded and then handed it to him.
    5 points
  28. About 20 minutes later... MCRN Tachi En route to system jump point Quentin IV - Federated Suns September 21, 3030 ______________________________________________ As things began to settle down, I looked at the system board, watching as Icarus attempted to fly the Tachi in a more or less straight line toward the jump point. With two out of four thrusters lost, we didn't have a lot of attitude control, but the AI was making the best of the situation that it could. Meanwhile, Doc Mallory had been quietly talking with Alyssa as she sat near the nav station, trying to regain her senses after the beating her mind and body had taken flying the ship out of Quentin's orbit. I couldn't make out what the two of them were talking about over the general sounds of the bridge and various status indicators that kept squawking due to their systems being disconnected or completely offline. But from body language and facial expressions, Mallory looked concerned, and Alyssa looked confused and exhausted. "Icarus, how are you holding up without Alyssa's brain being plugged into you?" I asked the AI, since it was the only one on the bridge that could really answer that question. "I am capable of flying the ship and executing basic commands, Warrant Officer Schuster." Icarus replied. "However, without the core linked to my systems, I am limited in my ability to make split-second decisions and to react to unexpected situations. My system resources are currently overallocated, even at 138.72% processing power. In short, I am having difficulty." "Yeah, I imagine you would be." I said, sympathizing with the AI. It was clear that Alyssa was in no condition to continue flying the ship, and with the helm controls otherwise blown to hell, it was up to Icarus to hold things together. "I'm gonna call down to Idris in Engineering and get a status check. Is there anything you need that would make your life easier? Short of another human brain, that is." "Negative, Warrant Officer Schuster." Icarus replied. "Unless the maneuvering thrusters can be repaired, I do not see how our current situation can be improved." "Alright, I'll see what I can do." I said, throwing a switch on my panel and opening a comm channel down to the engine room. "Idris, this is Schuster." I said. "What's the status of the maneuvering thrusters?" "Not good, Nick." Idris replied, his voice sounding tired and strained, his accent thick with fatigue. "Between the plasma fire earlier that blew the first thruster to hell, and the second one that disintegrated under the strain of breaking orbit, we have half the maneuvering capacity we normally would, just like Icarus reported earlier. And what's left is barely holding together. I've got my people working as fast as they can to possibly mod the main engine to remove its angle limiters, thus providing something more than just crude vectoring, but it's gonna take some time." "How much time?" I asked. "At least a few hours." Idris replied. "Alright, keep me posted." I said, before closing the channel and turning back to the others on the bridge. "Icarus, how are we looking for time?" "At our current velocity and heading, we will reach the jump point in approximately 70 hours, 11 minutes, and 14 seconds." Icarus reported. "That's cutting it a little bit close for my liking with the fuel that we've lost." I said, before thinking for a moment. "Icarus, what options do we have to provide the ship with additional thrust? I'm assuming that trying to dock with the Tana or the Barbatos is just going to burn more time and fuel." "One of the small craft could theoretically be used to provide additional thrust." Icarus suggested. "However, the fuel requirements would be excessive, and the small craft are not designed for long-term exposure to the void." "Yeah, that's what I thought." I sighed. As I continued to mull over creative solutions to the problem, I noticed Mallory gesturing silently across the bridge at Lieutenant Jaeger. I need to talk to you, I saw him mouth silently, waving Jaeger over. Orlex gave Mallory a confused expression and then nodded, getting up from his seat and making his way over to where the doctor was standing. The two of them then moved off to the side to talk in private. I watched intently, unable to figure out what they were discussing. A minute later, both approached my station, their expressions solemn. "Nick, we have a problem." Jaeger said, his tone serious. "What's going on?" I asked, my confusion evident. "Doc, tell him what you just told me." Jaeger replied. "Well..." Mallory began, slowly. "Alyssa seems to be experiencing transient global amnesia, and I think it's a result of the neural overloads she experienced when she was connected to the AI." I instinctively reached over to my control panel and muted Icarus' microphone. I didn't want the computer to try to be helpful and inadvertently make things worse. "What the hell is that?" I asked, looking between the two of them. "It's a condition where a person experiences a sudden onset of complete or partial memory loss." Mallory explained. "It comes on rapidly in a person who is otherwise alert. The person is unable to create new memories, and their memory of recent events disappears. They can't remember where they are or how they got there. They may not remember anything about what's happening right now. They may keep repeating the same questions because they don't remember the answers they've just been given. They may also draw a blank when asked to remember things that happened a day, a month, or even a year ago. It can be caused by physical trauma, psychological stress, or, in this case, extreme neurological overload. The human brain is simply not designed to handle the amount of data that an AI can process. Alyssa's memories from before she was connected to Icarus are gone. She remembers who she is, and she remembers her training, but everything else is a blank slate." "How long will it last?" I asked, dreading the answer. "It's hard to say." Mallory replied. "It could be a few hours, a few days, a few weeks. It could even be permanent. We're in uncharted territory. Nothing in my medical studies prepared me for triaging a patient who'd had her brain roughed up by a computer." I swore under my breath, realizing the implications of what this meant. I turned to look at Lieutenant Jaeger, who met my gaze with a grim expression. "How's she taking it?" I asked. "She's scared, Nick." Jaeger replied. "She doesn't know what's happening to her, and she doesn't know if she'll ever remember anything again. I've been trying to keep her calm, but it's not easy. She's a fighter, and she's not used to feeling helpless." "We're going to have to break it to Captain Maxwell at some point. There's no chance he won't call over here at least a couple of times in the next 3 days to speak with his fiancée." I said. "I know." Jaeger replied. "But you leave that to me. Right now, I need you to do two things. First of all, call Idris up here. I want that little ready room off the bridge set up as crew accommodations for Alyssa. Until we understand the extent of her injuries, I don't want her moving around too much, and I definitely don't want her having to cross vacuums to move through parts of the ship that aren't sealed. Second, I want you to get on the line with Doctor Halsey and find out everything she knows about the theoretical impact of an AI packet storm on a human brain. She may be our only source of information that esoteric." "Yes, sir." I replied, before moving to unmute Icarus' microphone. "And thirdly..." Mallory interrupted, stopping my hand, "Don't outsource this problem to Icarus. I'm no computer scientist, but I'm pretty sure the AI has enough on its plate right now." I nodded, understanding his point, and then turned back to my control panel to begin following Jaeger's orders. A little while later, Idris appeared on the bridge, clad in a full spacesuit and accompanied by another tech who was carrying a large toolbox. Unclipping his helmet, Idris approached me with a quizzical look on his face. "What's going on, Nick?" He asked. "I thought you said the engine room was a mess." "It is." I replied. "But we've got another problem that's a bit more pressing. I'll explain on the way." I led Idris and the other tech down to the ready room that Jaeger had mentioned, and filled them in on the situation with Alyssa. Idris swore when he heard what had happened, and the other tech just looked stunned. "So what do you need from us?" Idris asked, once I had finished explaining the situation. "I need you to set up a makeshift bed in here for Alyssa." I replied. "She needs to be on bed rest until we know more about her condition. And I need you to do whatever you can to make this room comfortable. I don't want her accidentally exposing herself to vacuum trying to cross to some other part of the ship because she needs something. The more incentive she has to stay put, the better." "We can do that." Idris replied. "But it's going to take some time. And in the meantime, she's going to need to be monitored. I'll have to pull some equipment from the med bay and bring it up here. Wouldn't it make more sense to transfer her to the Tana or the Barbatos, where there's actual functioning medical facilities?" "No." I replied, firmly. "Lieutenant and Doc don't want her moving around any more than necessary. So, for now, she stays here." "Alright, Nick." Idris replied, with a sigh. "We'll get started on this right away." "I know you will." I said, before turning to the other tech. "You, come with me. I've got something else I need you to do." I led the tech up to the bridge, where Icarus was still flying the ship. I had the technician begin setting up a diagnostic computer next to my operations console that gave me more immediate access to the status of the ship's systems. I knew that Jaeger was going to want regular reports on our progress, and I didn't want to have to keep running back and forth to the main engineering console every time he asked for an update. Once the diagnostic computer was up and running, I called Doctor Halsey on the comms and filled her in on the situation. She was quiet for a moment as she processed the information. "This is unprecedented." she finally said. "I've never heard of a neurohelmet interface causing this level of damage to a human brain. But I had a feeling that Alyssa wasn't going to come out of her ordeal entirely unscathed." "Yeah, that's what I was afraid of." I replied. "So, what do we do about it?"
    5 points
  29. MV Tana Quentin IV - Federated Suns September 21, 3030 ______________________________________________ Thanks fuck Alyssa’s vitals calmed down a bit. I probably should’ve been thinking thank fuck the Tachi stayed on course and hadn’t crashed back to the planet in a giant fiery fireball yet, but with Alyssa’s breathing and heartbeat and all the rest right in front of me and the captain only a few steps away, the thought of her being dead and us on the Tana having to find out what a grief stricken Captain Maxwell was like felt a lot more immediate than all the other implications of a dropship crash. I definitely wasn’t a doctor, but the data streams for Alyssa’s vital signs definitely didn’t look good, exactly. And even though I was even less of an astrophysicist, I could see from the projections of the Tachi’s trajectory in the very near, very immediate future that the dropship’s flight path was also not good. I hoped Nick was okay over there. I mean, I hoped everybody was okay over there, but flying on a not-really-spaceworthy ship had to be extra terrifying when you’d built the copilot yourself and were one fuckup away from getting fired, if that. At least with the captain’s fiance and right hand man over there with him, this was pretty obviously not meant to be a suicide mission. I flipped from the vital signs back to the display of the Tachi’s trajectory, which had changed, probably for the better? It was too bad we didn’t have an astrophysicist instead of some guy who was barely a mech tech for this job.
    5 points
  30. MCRN Tachi crash site Outer bands of the Fire Rift region Quentin IV - Federated Suns September 7, 3030 ______________________________________________ I’d been nervous about working with Alyssa, since she was a badass warrior lady and super smart and almost stomped me into cheesesteak when we first met. She was actually really cool, though, and the way she got super into figuring out how stuff worked reminded me of some of my friends back at the co-op workshop on Oberon. She was super patient with me not really knowing the computer side of things, too, and I was learning a bunch. We figured out that one of the legs of the landing gear actually was responding to input, it was just seized up so bad that the motor couldn’t actually move it. So I was wedged into the maintenance access oiling everything while Alyssa drew up an electrical diagram so we could fix the wiring of the other legs to match this one. I’d had a really weird conversation with Captain Maxwell on my way back from our lunch break, and I figured I could try asking Alyssa about it. I was just oiling and chipping rust off of a bunch of things, so I waited til Alyssa was in between doing stuff on her padd and then said, “hey Alyssa, can I ask you something?” She looked up from her padd. “Sure, what’s up?” “Is Captain Maxwell upset with me about something?” “Not that I‘m aware,” she said, “but if you think something is wrong you should probably ask him about it. What’s going on?” “Earlier he said he wanted to talk to me, and once we were alone he said I should only take orders from him, Orlex and you, and that if anyone else tried to tell me to do something out of the ordinary, I should come to one of you about it.” I wedged a screwdriver into what should’ve been one of the landing leg’s wiggly bits, and a bunch of rust and oily crud flaked out. “He was really, really serious and I was scared to ask him what it was about, so I just hoped it would turn out he’d been reminding everyone of the command structure for some reason?” “Levi, have you talked to Nick yet today?” Alyssa asked, and looked down into the maintenance well where I was working with her eyebrows pressed together all serious. “Well, sort of,” I said, and shifted position inside the well so that I could see her better. “I tried to ask him where he got that blinky Scene ankle thing he has on today but he made a face and walked away real fast.” Alyssa smiled really big and then held her padd up in front of her face. “Um, that’s called an ankle monitor,” she said with her voice sort of giggly. “It’s not an accessory that anybody wants.” “Oh no, I didn’t realize-” I scrunched myself deeper into the nook I was in, as though that could hide my idiocy. “They’re way bigger on Oberon! Was Nick caught driving drunk?!” “No, why- wait did he really do that? I didn’t think he was that kind of irresponsible.” “No, that’s just why my neighbor had one back on Oberon, he’d got caught drunk car thieving. I guess the drunk part wasn’t the main problem, now that I think about it.” “Yeah, I think the Grand Theft Auto would overshadow whatever else he’d done at that point,” Alyssa said. She’d started unbolting a panel with a ratchet wrench to expose more of the wiring. “Yeah, you’re probably right. What did Nick do, though?” Alyssa breathed out like she was tired. It took a really long time and was an incredibly suspenseful exhale. “We learned about his project with Dr. Catherine Halsey.” I dropped the bearing I was working on and all the little steel balls inside went boing boing boinging all around me and down into the smaller nooks and crannies at the bottom of the nook I was in. “I’m sorry!” I said, and then shut my mouth tight before I could incriminate myself more. Luckily Alyssa seemed not to notice. “I don’t know how much you knew, but it seems the Crayven Corporation bugged our hardware with data leeches in an attempt to track Irian units that they believe are following us. Halsey was here to process that data, and when Nick discovered her presence he covered for her in exchange for help with a… personal project.” So it was worse than I’d thought, maybe a lot worse. “I hadn’t known about the leeches,” I said. It seemed better not to comment on the rest. “It’s not really your fault. It’s confusing enough coming into a totally different sort of organization like a mercenary unit without anyone giving you orders they’re not actually qualified to give. Though you definitely shouldn’t go along with it if anyone tells you to hide things from Charles, Orlex and I in the future. I guess you already got that from Charles, though.” “Yeah, don’t worry, it’s crystal clear now,” I said. What Alyssa had said didn’t actually make any sense, though. Nobody had ordered me to do anything. Unless Nick had been covering for me? But why would he want to do that and get himself in even more trouble? “Hey, do you see anything move when I tug on this?” Alyssa asked and pulled a wire inside the panel. “The casting is all burned off, so I don’t know what it connects to or what color it’s supposed to be.” “Yikes, we should probably replace that,” I said. “Looks like it’s half yellow half charcoal on this end and it’s hooked up to an actuator thingy.” “Great, thanks.” “Have you got a magnet in that toolkit?” I asked. “I have… sort of a lot of ball bearings to gather up.”
    5 points
  31. Deprecated Spirits bar Gellen's Heights, Sheratan Tikonov Free Republic September 2, 3030 (approx. 1 AM the next day in local time) ______________________________________________ "So, where are you staying?" I asked. Chevy passed me his empty glass. “I thought I’d get a room near the spaceport, unless you can recommend a good hotel closer by?” “No. Emphatically, no,” I said. Chevy’s eyes got a bit wider, but all he said was, “I see.” “Yeah. You should be good in the spaceport area, though. Want another?” I asked, holding up the glass. “No, that’s all for tonight, thanks,” Chevy said, handing me a card. “No need, drinks are on me.” “Are you sure?” he asked. “Cravyen is buying; interviewing potential talent is a business expense.” “Oh, well in that case!” I said, took the card and grinned. It was a bit forced, since the pills I’d put in my soda to get through this late night meeting were starting to wear off. I ran the card and handed it back with the receipt. “Would you like an escort to your cab?” “Thanks, but I’d hate to take your little assitant away from his duties,” Chevy said, gesturing at Thrash. “Oh, not him, I was going to call our bouncer.” “You have a bouncer?” “Yeah. Sluggy has another gig, but he also works for us on a per-bounce basis. I’ll give him a call, and he’ll be here before the cab. You probably don’t want to wait on a street corner alone at this hour, in this neighborhood.” Chevy agreed, so I called Sluggy and he called a cab, and then I told him about some of our few tough customers - like the very inebriated guy in a neon green suit who ruined the umbrella stand in the office section and then threatened everyone with a katana when I asked him to leave - to pass the time. My head was pounding, and I breathed a sigh of relief when I heard Sluggy’s motorcycle come roaring up outside. A moment later, Sluggy banged through the door and growled, “What’s da problem?” The light over the door shone straight down on the tattoo spiraling around his pale bald head. “Hey, Sluggy!” I called, waving. “No problem here, my friend Jack here just needs someone to help him find his cab, and I’m the only one on the clock.” Sluggy sauntered up to the bar and narrowed his eyes at me. Chevy edged away from him slightly. “You still get paid,” I added quickly. “Good to meet you, Jack,” Sluggy said and held out his hand to shake. Chevy managed a surprisingly solid handshake and “good to meet you too,” though I could tell he was nervous. “Sluggy’s never let us down,” I said. “You’re in good hands.” “If you say so,” Chevy said, and picked up his things. Sluggy asked “Where we headed?” as they left the bar together. — I carried Thrash and his car back to the apartment after my shift. The mischief swarmed around the front door barrier waiting for me, all staring up with big eyes, a couple of the more rambunctious ones hurling themselves at the nearly waist high plastic wall in excitement. I let Thrash down to join them, hung up my keys and mirrored glasses on the hook by the door, and then stepped out of my shoes and over the wall to join them, careful not to step on any tails. I didn’t turn any lights on; the streetlights coming in through the windows were enough to see by. Thanks to all the extra meds I’d taken to get through the meeting with Chevy while still seeming like a normal person, I wasn’t feeling desperate to crawl into a burrow and pass out just yet, and I thought I should take advantage of that. I’d be paying for it next hell day either way. I gathered up all the litterboxes, followed by my small furry entourage, giving scritches and pulling the occasional rat off my pant leg each time I bent down. The up-and-down was mildly nauseating, so might as well make it count. I stepped over the plastic wall that blocked the rats out of the kitchen (ever since the time someone chewed through the refrigerator cord), pulled Max off my knee and put him back on the rats’ side of the wall, and then dumped all the litter boxes out into the kitchen trash. I filled them up with fresh wood shavings and set them on the counter next to the bale - the rats could “hold it” for at least a few minutes. Probably. I put a mini frozen pizza in the toaster oven for myself, and then made some more dry mix for the rats. Swarm Stopper birth control “bait” kept the mischief from growing exponentially, but it was far from complete and balanced, so I measured out rice, popcorn, smashed up dry spaghetti (because I’d never sleep with the rats chewing entire macaroni noodles all day) and unsweetened cereal and mixed them in to approximate a reasonable rat diet. It wasn’t lab block, but given alongside a different vegetable each day, it was close enough. I set the mixed bag aside and left it in the kitchen. I only ever fed the rats in the day; I didn’t want to give them a reason to rush me at night when I was usually barely keeping upright, and risk getting stepped on. Even without ever having been fed at night in recent memory, a contingent of rats was eagerly waiting at the barrier when I stepped back out of the kitchen bearing only litter boxes. I put the boxes back in their places, then sat down on the linoleum floor to spend some quality time with the family. Ratthew jumped over my legs and landed on Stinker, which started a friendly brawl. Nosey tried to crawl up my pant leg, realized she wouldn’t fit and then pop-hopped away. Sarah launched herself straight from the floor onto my shoulder and then stayed there, nibbling at my hair and sniffing inside my ear. Tiger crawled onto my lap, snuffled his nose under the hem of my shirt, then decided he was adequately hidden and fell asleep there. The toaster oven dinged. I put Sarah back on the floor - twice, because the first time she leaped straight back onto my chest - and then carefully lifted Tiger to one of the tiny hammocks I’d hung from a shoe rack as a little rat dormitory. Tiger squinted at me, yawned, turned once in the hammock and went back to sleep. I pulled my pizza out of the toaster by the edges of the foil and carried it out of the kitchen. Nearly every rat in the apartment followed me the short distance from the kitchen to my “bedroom”. It was a studio apartment, but I’d fenced off a small section with rat-height walls to make a space where I could step out of bed without stepping on anyone - just enough to fit a twin bed, a stack of plastic drawers, and some hooks on the wall for clothes. I set my dinner down, disrobed, and climbed under the covers. My head was pounding now, but I had the animal comforts of dubiously-healthy food and a warm, safe burrow. I heard rats scuffling, contentedly chittering their teeth, and munching on hard popcorn left from their morning meal nearby. In two years, most of them wouldn’t be here, and in four, the mischief would be composed of entirely different rats - but the rats never thought about that, and I tried not to either, at least night at night when my brain was only half working at best. Whether I could pretend to be functional for long enough to hold down an office job was also a daytime-only sort of worry. For now, I was a Rat among rats. I dragged the pizza into bed with me and pulled the covers over my head.
    5 points
  32. Deprecated Spirits bar Gellen's Heights, Sheratan Tikonov Free Republic September 2, 3030 ______________________________________________ "OK, now I've seen everything," I said to no one in particular, save for the large rat with brown fur, white paws, and a white belly patch, clad in a tiny backpack, that now excitedly and repeatedly bumped what I could only describe as a high-tech, transparent, mobile cubicle against my shoe. "What's that?" Rat's voice inquired from a small speaker mounted somewhere in the rodent's backpack. "I said, 'now I've seen everything,'" I replied, bending down to pick the box up from the sidewalk and lift it to face level. Thrash chittered and squeaked excitedly as I scrutinized the homebrew hardware carried on his backpack. In addition to the speaker, it had a small camera lens mounted in its center, from which a faint green light emanated. "What the hell is this thing?" "It's ROUND!" Rat's voice exclaimed, competing for volume against a steady din of background noise. I rolled my eyes as I retrieved my suitcase with my free hand. "I guess we can agree to disagree on its shape. But, what is it?" I asked, navigating around a panhandler and several piles of random street flotsam as I made my way down the trash-strewn alley off of which Deprecated Spirits was situated. "No, I mean, it's R.O.U.N.D. Rat Omnidirectional Utility Navigation Device. Also known as 'The Thrashmobile.' It's basically a little car that I built so that Thrash can be my barback," Rat explained. "So, it's a remote controlled bot?" I asked as I arrived at the door to the bar, still carrying the ROUND in one hand and my suitcase in the other. "No, it's not a bot. It's a ROUND. There's a difference," Rat replied. "Thrash does all the driving. Some days better than others." I pushed the old, ornate door open and stepped across the threshold into Deprecated Spirits. The first thing that hit me was the smell - a mixture of spilled beer, indistinct musky aromas, and industrial-strength cleaning chemicals. The second thing was the noise - a din of overlapping conversations punctuated by the occasional burst of laughter or the clinking of glassware. I was momentarily disoriented by the change in light level from the bright streetlights outside to the dim, amber-tinted light inside. As my eyes adjusted, I could make out the rough layout of the place. To one side was a section of sound-absorbing cubicles with office-like lighting. In the center of the room was a large, open space with multiple tables and chairs scattered about, where several dozen locals caroused and made conversation, at the rear of which was the bar itself. Off to the other side was a stage with a battered old piano and a microphone stand. The dark, oak walls of the tavern were bedecked with all manner of archaic tech curiosities mounted on placards and various other display stands. Overhead, various thermoses occasionally whooshed past, traveling down glass pneumatic tubes held to the ceiling with aging copper hardware, landing in the coworking spaces with dull "thunks." "Chevy! You made it!" Rat exclaimed, coming out from behind the bar and enveloping me in a hug. "Yeah, I made it," I replied, patting her on the back before disengaging myself and setting my suitcase down. "So, this is the famous Deprecated Spirits." "The one and only," Rat replied, gesturing grandly around the room. "Welcome to my kingdom." "Thanks," I replied, handing the ROUND back to her. "Clever device." "Come on, I'll take you over to the bar. Thrash gets cranky if he's not paid on time. Plus, I think he's developed a bit of a fascination with you," Rat joked, pointing at the rodent, who was flailing at the side of the enclosure at an apparent bid for attention. I chuckled as I followed Rat back to the counter, where she set the ROUND down and retrieved a handful of food pellets from a bin behind the bar. "So, what's new with you, Chevy?" Rat asked as she pressed the treats through a slot in Thrash's ball. "Not much," I replied. "Crayven's been keeping me busy with various research projects." "How's that going?" "It's going," I replied. "We're having some issues with a couple of initiatives, but we'll figure it out." "I'm sure you will," Rat said, retrieving a tumbler from overhead and beginning to mix a drink. "So, what's all this cryptic talk about an AI that you need to get up and running, and why do you think I can help?" "It's Star League-era technology," I said in a low voice, taking a seat at one of the bar stools. "I need to get it operational, but I don't have the expertise." "And you think I do?" Rat asked, incredulous. "I know you do," I replied. "You're the smartest person I know." "Flatterer," Rat said, sliding the drink across the counter to me. "I'm serious," I said, taking a sip of the drink. "Thanks. I wouldn't have come to you if I didn't think you could help. You have experience with neurotech, and we're trying to use a neural link interface to connect with and communicate with the AI. It's not going well. The last time we tried, it locked down the entire laboratory. It probably would have locked out the entire tower if it weren't for the fact that the lab was air-gapped." "And you want to plug this thing into someone's brain?" Rat asked dubiously. "It's the only way that's shown any degree of success so far," I replied. "We've tried every other method, and this is the only thing that's worked. Even then, it was only for a few seconds, and then the AI locked us out there, too. I need someone with your expertise to help us figure out how to defeat its security so we can study and control it." An order popped up on Rat's display, and she quickly set about mixing the requested concoction, lost in thought. I took the opportunity to take another sip of my drink. "Wait a minute. You said 'this is the only thing that's worked.' Who at your company was crazy enough to plug unproven, long-lost, intelligent software directly into their mind?" she finally asked, loading the order onto Thrash's vehicle and sending him on his way. "The CEO. William Kauffman. He's the one who's been pushing for this project," I replied. "He's the one who's been bankrolling it, too. He's convinced that it will give us a competitive edge, and he's determined to be the one to make it happen." "I see," Rat said, her brow furrowed in thought. "You want the details?" I asked, withdrawing an encrypted datapad containing all available information we had about the Eclipse AI from my suitcase and passing it across the counter. "Yeah. Let me see what you've got," Rat replied, taking the datapad and scrolling through the information. We spent the next few hours going over the data, making occasional comments and suggestions to each other. As the night wore on, the bar gradually emptied out until Rat and I were the only ones left. "OK, I think I have a good understanding of the problem," Rat said finally, leaning back in her chair and stretching her arms overhead. "I can't promise anything, but I'll see what I can do. We need to be able to model this setup, though. I'm hoping you brought more than just a tablet." "Actually, I did," I replied, producing the test tesseract and setting it on the bar. "It's a proof-of-concept model of the larger finished device back at the headquarters." "Interesting," Rat said, picking up the tesseract and examining it. "I've never seen anything quite like this before. Similar, but more primitive. I'm used to homebrew junk, you know? But this? It looks professionally made. Where did you get it?" "We had it fabricated," I replied. "It's based on a design that our team retrieved from a Brian Cache." "Huh. Well, it's a start, at least," Rat said, setting the tesseract down and rubbing her temples. "I'm going to need some time to think about this. Forcing past computer security with a human brain is a new level of crazy, even for me." "I knew I could count on you," I said, finishing the last of my drink. "I appreciate it." "Well, don't get your hopes up just yet," Rat replied. "So, where are you staying?"
    5 points
  33. Deprecated Spirits, Husky Pears Road Gellen's Heights, Sheratan Tikonov Free Republic September 2, 3030 ______________________________________________ I picked my head up off the back counter of the bar and checked the FizzBuzz status screen by my seat - the next automatic drink order was coming up in about four minutes. Then I went back to monitoring the progress of the Thrashmobile. The GPS map showed that the tiny battery powered “car” had stalled out in the narrow passage by the smoke shop that went from the alley behind the bar to the Husky Pears sidewalk. The camera showed that the car stopped in front of half a chicken wing that someone had tossed on the ground. I turned on my mic and said “Thrash,” and then pressed a button to make the direction light inside the car blink. The camera wobbled as the little car started moving, and then the GPS showed forward progress again. I closed my eyes - I didn’t want to tire myself out unnecessarily, and I could do this with my eyes closed - and poured a beer into one of the pneumatic jars, sealed the lid and sent it through the tube to Jim’s desk. I checked the screens again, and the Thrashmobile had made it to the sidewalk. I extended its periscope upwards and scanned the people on the street as the little car trundled down the sidewalk. I saw some of the usual suspects - the windshield washer man headed back to his post at Commerce Boulevard, a couple of Louie’s dancing girls on their way to work - and the usual stream of young people in jeans or short dresses or garish suits headed out to the bars, and older patrons stumbling home. I didn’t like sending Thrash out so late, but so far he was doing a great job navigating through the forest of logo emblazoned sneakers and plasticky high heels. I had a spinning light and a balloon on a stick that I could attach to make the Thrashmobile more visible, but drunks are terrible at both ethics and noticing when a plastic Cheez Ballz carton isn’t just trash, so it was better to try to fly under the radar. A couple patrons at the bar called out their orders and I poured them, in real glasses this time, and I willed myself up out of the chair to deliver them. It would have been just awesome if Chevy had managed to arrive before the “standing up is uncomfortable” phase of the night started, but what can you do. At least he hadn’t tried to come at closing time. I returned to watching the people walking down Husky Pears through the periscope camera. Soon I saw what I was looking for, someone who didn’t fit - he had a tidy conservative haircut, and wore a dark grey suit with asymmetrical lapels. I took manual control of the navigation lights inside the Thrashmobile to direct Thrash towards the man, and when he was right next to him I turned up the Thrashmobile’s speaker and turned on my mic. “Hey Chevy, is that you?” I said. “Hello?” he said, turning around and scanning the faces of the people on the street. “It’s my assistant, Thrash,” I said. “Look down, by your feet. Mind giving him a lift back to the bar? I’ll tell you where to go.”
    5 points
  34. Batan Spaceport Batan, Quentin IV Quentin System - Federated Suns September 2, 3030 ______________________________________________ I passed Nick on my way from the meeting to the comms office. He was carrying his noteputer and also a noteputer bag with something inside that was not shaped like a noteputer at all. “Hi, Nick!” I said. “Did you get your thing from the ship?” “What thing?” Nick said and looked around the hallway like he was seeing if anyone could hear us. “I don’t know, Maxwell had just said you couldn’t come to the meeting because you had to get something off the ship, and so I thought-” “Youdidn’ttellhimdidyou?!” Nick said, and his eyes got big. (For those using translation: “You didn’t tell him, did you?!”) “No!” I said way too fast. I was still kind of worried about how I’d accidentally called attention to Nick’s return to the ship. “I just said it was important for you to get your thing because the ship might leave!” Nick didn’t look reassured at all, though. His eyes had got even bigger, and he was looking over my shoulder. I looked with the corner of my eye at those mirrors they have at the hallway corners so that people don’t crash into each other, and Captain Maxwell was standing right behind me. We weren’t just screwed, we were stripped out, like an impact driver used on particle board furniture. So I said the first thing that came to mind and hoped it would work. “Anyway, I’m sure Steve will be real glad you didn’t let the ship leave with his lucky rubber thong still on board. By, Nick!” Then I speed walked down the hall before things could get any more awkward. — I found a map of the spaceport on one of those glowy signboards, except it didn’t glow anymore, and I walked to where the comms office was supposed to be. I was really glad I didn’t have to ask Nick to face the weird guys in wizard robes again, especially since he might be mad at me now for almost exposing whatever it was he had been doing with his and “Miranda’s” stuff back on the ship. It was in this very beige room with brownish carpet that probably used to be some other color and smelled like dust. I got lucky and no one was using the terminal, so I sat down on the leather seat of the office chair, which was cracked open at the sides and poofed out a little poof of dust whenever someone sat on it. I logged into the big grey remote HPG terminal, and there was a message for me! I had sent Genny and X my address when we arrived here, figuring there was no way Bald Chuckie would send guys after me all the way here in the Fire Rift, and if he did, I was on a militia base full of combat guys and would be leaving pretty soon anyway. The message had been sent collect, so I was pretty sure it was from my sisters. I put my card in, authorized the transaction, and then the message came up on the screen. — Hey, Levi. We appreciate knowing you’re not dead, but thanks to your messages, Bald Chuckie knows it too. He says we owe him for his flea. He hasn’t threatened Genny and I, I think because he liked Dad, but we’re basically paying him rent to make sure nothing _happens_ to the house. I get that you couldn’t stay here, but you’ve left us high and dry. We’ve been selling things to make the payments and we’re just squeaking by. You think you could send some of that cash from your new mystery job? Wish I had some good news for you, but life is bread butts right now. Me and Jerome had an argument the other day and he hasn’t texted me, and also our fridge is broken. Genny has been trying to find Mom - from the computer I mean, she’s still here at least for now. You probably weren’t old enough when she was still with Dad to know why that’s a bad idea, but please trust me, it’s bad. Even Genny can’t get Mom out of what she’s gotten into. I miss you, sport. Genny is still pissed but she misses you too, so I’ll say for her what she would’ve said. Be careful out there in the galaxy, and eat your greens. - X — “Fuck,” I whispered. I downloaded the message onto my padd. I needed time to think. I’d have to ask Nick how to send money over HPG. I had no idea how to do that, and I really really didn’t want some crook to steal it and my sisters to think I’d stood them up. I’d heard of people ordering stuff electronically from other planets, though, so there had to be some way to make sure a payment got to the right person. I just hoped Nick wasn’t too mad at me for almost exposing his work with Dr. Halsey and would still be willing to help me figure this stuff out. I also wasn’t sure how long I could pay Bald Chuckie off for. He must have a contact at the HPG station, or else someone spying on my sisters’ data use, and either way, he’d eventually find out I was sending money to them. He might demand the value of his mech all at once, or keep raising X and Genny’s “rent” until I couldn’t pay it all, and then send a hitman after me with my own money! I couldn’t do much about that right now, though, so I logged out of the terminal so that the next person could use it and switched to one of the generic computer lab computers. I pulled up the duty roster and stared at it for a few minutes. Then I scrolled up and down. Then I stared some more. I kept thinking about Ricky Lee’s dentures that he used ever since he couldn’t pay his loan and Bald Chuckie’s guys knocked his teeth out. And also the awesome comic shop that caught fire and exploded in a comic book reading accident. I needed some time to get my head back in the game. I sent Idris a message to ask if he’d take the lead on repairing the salvaged ship’s weapons, and recommend any specific techs who he’d like working with him on it. He seemed to really have a knack for that sort of thing. The rest, I’d figure out later, after I stopped panicking and got my brain working right again. I’d fix this. Somehow. Probably.
    5 points
  35. 16 hours later... MV Barbatos En route to Telos system Lagrange point Telos System - Draconis Combine August 24, 3030 ______________________________________________ With a heavy sigh, I slowly awoke to find myself twisted up in a tangle of sheets and blankets, a pool of starlight streaming in through the ship's porthole. Focusing my blurry vision on the chronometer bolted to the wall over the guest cabin's bed, I read the time and then resentfully slapped a pillow over my eyes. According to the clock, it was just after 1400 hours, but between the completely screwy 17-hour days of Al-Ris Two, running an operation that had taken "overnight" according to the Terran clock, and then staying up to ride shotgun on salvage operations with the actual overnight shift, my body didn't know what time it was. Yesterday evening, needing time to be alone with my thoughts, I'd made it a point to stay occupied with the salvage crew, shadowing a technician by the name of Idris Nasir until his actual shift was over. Then, I'd taken a shower, eaten some vending machine fare, downed a cup of black coffee, and gone to the cargo bay to supervise the payload operations as we dusted off from the moon's surface. By the time we reached orbit, I was running on fumes. Returning to our crew quarters, I'd found that Charles had already stepped out for his shift, which I acknowledged, with a pang of guilt, was what I'd hoped to be the case. Though I'd managed to get a little over six hours of rest, I was still waking up feeling like I was nursing a hangover. I wanted to go back to sleep, desperately, but my mind was too full of the previous day's events for me to relax. So instead, I lay in the quiet of the cabin, sprawled out unceremoniously in the nude, breathing into the pillow and reflecting on my conversation about Charles. About what happened. Orlex had somehow managed to psychoanalyze me in ways that I hasn't even consciously registered myself. He was right; during my time as a ComStar Adept, I'd never spent much time on the front lines of anything even approaching the kinds of situations in which Aegis Division regularly found itself. Even after joining the mercenary unit, I spent the vast majority of my time sequestered safely aboard the Tana analyzing data, flying drones, acting as a mission controller, and doing the best I could to ensure the safety of the people in the line of fire. Later on, as I'd adjusted to my new life outside of the Order, Charles and Mara began cross-training me as a 'Mech pilot. But even then, my assignments in the field were always of the support variety. I was never in significant danger. The closest I'd ever seen to civilian casualties was when I'd had to flee Smithon, and there was a distinct difference between being caught in the middle of an atrocity and being part of the group causing it. On top of that, there was the scale of yesterday's incident. Though I couldn't begin to guess how many people had been caught in the command center on Ai-Ris Two when Charles' wayward flight of missiles breached the pressure dome, I knew it had to be in the dozens. That was hard enough to process. Receiving confirmation later that these people were largely, if not exclusively, civilians made it all the more surreal. I'd never seen Charles take a bad shot like that, let alone deal with a squad of infantry by unleashing enough missiles on them to drop a high-rise. Then, there was the reckless abandon with which he'd gone into combat that day. By the time the dust settled, Tyche, though still standing, had functionally been reduced to wreckage; Charles, who would normally have been beside himself at such devastating losses to his venerable Catapult, was entirely nonplussed. If it is indeed PTSD, there's no guarantee that what Charles saw, heard, or reacted to was the same as our point of view . . . when he thinks there's a way through something he'll just keep going, pounding away at the problem until it gets solved or he breaks. It can be a strength for sure, but it can also be dangerous when PTSD is involved . . . there might be times where you just can't stop him, or help him, like say if he's having a particularly bad episode . . . that's not a failure on your part, nor is it a weakness to ask for help . . . Doc Mallory, I feel, would be an excellent source of information and help. Orlex's wisdom resonated in my mind. He was right. Whatever this was, I wanted to help. But I didn't know how to process the self-destructive behavior, or how to reconcile it with the man I knew Charles to be. The man I loved. The logical course of action was to speak with someone who was an authority on the subject. Suddenly, the door to the cabin hissed open, and I quickly sat up, feeling a bit embarrassed at being caught in such an exposed state. Charles stepped into the cabin and came to a stop just inside the door, his eyes raking over me in a way that made my heart flutter. I swallowed hard, looking away from him and feeling a sudden wave of awkwardness. "Hey," he said softly, his tone gentle and understanding. "I'm sorry I wasn't here when you woke up. I wanted to give you some time to sleep." I nodded, not trusting myself to speak just yet. I could feel the tears welling up in my eyes, and I desperately wanted to just fall into his arms and hold him. But I couldn't. Not yet. Scooting to the edge of the bed, I pulled myself to my feet and gave Charles a brief, fraught embrace. "Thank you," I whispered. "I'm sorry, I'm late for an appointment in Med Bay. I'll see you in a bit." Charles nodded, and without another word, he turned and walked out of the cabin. I quickly grabbed a pair of shorts and a tank top and pulled them on, not bothering with anything else. I didn't have the time, nor the energy, to care about my appearance. I had to see Doc Mallory. ### "I think Charles has PTSD," I blurted as I practically ran into the corner office tucked at the far end of the Barbatos' medical bay. A noisy cacophony of rock music suddenly turned off. The doctor, splayed out in a chair before a bank of computer monitors, his feet up on the desk and a stylus clenched between his teeth, looked toward me in surprise. Realizing just how loud my voice had been, I looked around self-consciously to ensure no one other than Mallory was in earshot. Then, I slowly closed the hatch behind me. For several moments, only the thrum of the life support system broke the silence as the doctor processed what I'd just said. "PTSD?" he repeated, gesturing for me to take a seat. "What makes you say that? Also, do you want a warm blanket or something? You look like you're about to freeze." I shook my head, sitting down and wrapping my arms around myself for warmth. "I'm fine," I insisted. "I just...I need to talk to someone about Charles. And I don't know who else to go to." Mallory nodded, pulling his glasses off and setting them on the desk amid a sea of data tablets, his expression turning serious. "Of course, Alyssa. What's going on?" I slowly related the events of the last day, along with the details of my conversation with Orlex, omitting nothing. The doctor listened intently, his expression thoughtful. When I was finished, he nodded slowly, his eyes distant. "It's possible," he said finally. "It sounds like he's reacting overprotectively. Not just to you, but to the whole unit. PTSD isn't uncommon for people with the kind of family trauma that Charles has, coupled with the shitty existence he found himself living after that. Being homeless in the Periphery, and all of the crap he dealt with during the Espinosa Crisis. The burden of taking ownership of a mercenary unit and getting them safely back home from the outworlds. Only to then lose Mara, nearly lose you, and, now, possibly lose the entire outfit to bankruptcy. Years of stuff coming to a head. All while planning to get married, no less." "The last thing I want to do is be an additional burden on him," I whispered, trying to hold back emotion. "It's not your fault," the doctor replied gently, deep compassion evident in his eyes. Reaching into an overhead cabinet, he withdrew a white quilted blanket and unfolded it, draping it around my shoulders. "Thank you." "Look, people dealing with that level of trauma often do so by trying to take on too much. They try and be everything to everyone as a way of overcompensating," Mallory continued, flopping back down into his chair and chewing thoughtfully on one of the arms of his glasses. "The stuff you describe him doing - throwing himself into combat situations where he was seriously outmatched, overreacting to a squad of infantry that wasn't actually a threat to you, taking a completely uncharacteristic shot, fucking it up, and obliterating a dome full of noncombatants in the process - that's textbook. He's been on a very long journey of loss and he's starting to perceive that the walls are closing in on the things he does have left. So he's fighting tooth and nail to preserve them, but in the process, his perspective is becoming more and more distorted, and he's seeing bogeymen around every corner." I nodded, my mind racing. This was all so much more complicated than I'd thought it would be. I'd naively assumed that, if Charles did have PTSD, it would be something that we could just work through together. But now I realized that it was much bigger than that. And I didn't know how to help. "What do I do?" I asked, my voice trembling. Mallory sighed, tossing his glasses aside, leaning back in his chair, and steepling his fingers. "The first thing you need to do is talk to Charles about it," he said. "You need to be honest with him. Tell him what you're seeing. How it makes you feel. How you're worried for him. The most impactful way to break through to him is to make him aware of not just the effect these actions are having on you, but also, on him and the people who care about him. And then, listen. Help him to process what he's feeling. Remind him of the future the two of you have ahead." I nodded, running a hand through my hair as I tried to work through the flood of emotions I was feeling. Knowing that there was a rational answer for everything that'd transpired was cathartic, but realizing what the road to recovery was going to entail was intimidating. "And, if he's open to it, get him into therapy," Mallory added. "Can you help with that?" I asked. The doctor shook his head. "I'm just a combat medic; I only play a psychologist on TV," he chuckled, "but I can refer you to a few excellent counselors. They're all very discreet, and they do remote sessions, so you don't have to worry about anyone finding out. And, of course, I'm always here if either of you need to talk." I nodded, slowly rising to my feet and folding up the blanket, handing it back to Mallory. "Thank you, Doc," I said softly. "I appreciate your help." "Of course," the doctor replied. "If you need anything, don't hesitate to come see me." With that, I turned and walked out of the office. I had to talk to Charles. And I had to do it soon. ### Much to my surprise, when I returned to the cabin to get more suitably dressed, a small breakfast of fresh fruit, yogurt, and oatmeal had been laid out for me on the table, with a note from Charles telling me that he'd taken care of it. I smiled to myself, holding the letter in my hands and shaking my head as I sat down to eat. When I finished, I changed out of my shorts and tank top and into my flightsuit. Then, I made my way to the mission operations center, where, predictably, I found Charles hard at work. He looked up as I entered, and I was struck, as always, by the intensity of his gaze. His eyes were like a storm, dark and turbulent, and they always seemed to be searching for something. For a moment, we simply stared at each other, and then he turned his attention back to his work. "I need to talk to you," I said, my voice soft. Charles nodded, his expression unreadable. "I know," he replied. "I had a feeling that something was on your mind. What's going on?" "It's about the other day," I continued, taking a deep breath and steeling myself for the conversation to come. "About what happened on Ai-Ris Two." Charles was silent for a moment, his fingers flying across the keyboard in front of him as he finished whatever he was working on. Then, he straightened in his chair and turned to face me, his expression solemn. "You're referring to the collateral damage." It wasn't a question. "That's one way to put it," I responded. "How did you know?" "I went back and reviewed your BattleROM afterward," Charles explained, his eyes shifting toward a wall display facing away from me. "I wanted to understand how I managed to hit the broad side of a pressure dome but not the platoon of infantry headed your way." "Platoon of infantry?" I asked, taking a few slow steps toward the workstation. "There was one squad with some low-grade explosives..." Charles' eyes flicked up toward me with a deep intensity. "That's what I realized after I played back the recording. But in the moment, I could have sworn - " he trailed off, his eyes going distant as he remembered. "I can't explain it." "Charles," I said softly, coming to a stop behind him and resting my hand on his shoulder. "I've been really worried about you. What's going on?" "You're asking me that like I'm a crazy person," he replied, his tone bitter. "Like I'm not in control of myself." "I'm not asking you because I think you're crazy," I insisted. "I'm asking you because I care about you. And I want to help." Charles was silent for a long moment, his shoulders tense beneath my touch. Finally, he sighed and leaned back in his chair, turning his head to look up at me. "It's not hallucinations. It's more like...some kind of awful, overblown threat response. As if, when the stakes are really high, my brain is trying to make sense of everything it's seeing and hearing, and it's just latching on to the most dangerous outcome it can for every scenario." "It sounds like anxiety...or PTSD," I said gently. Charles nodded, his expression pained. "I think you're right," he whispered. "I've been trying to deny it, but I can't anymore. I can't keep living like this. I have to put a stop to it." "What does that mean?" I asked, my eyes falling away from Charles. I wasn't sure I wanted to know what was coming next. There was a long, awkward silence. I could feel his eyes on me, but I couldn't bring myself to meet his gaze. Finally, he reached out and lightly touched my cheek, causing me to flinch away from him. "Alyssa," he said, his voice full of pain. "Please, look at me." Reluctantly, I raised my eyes to meet his. The hurt and confusion I saw there nearly broke my heart. "I'm so sorry," he whispered, his thumb gently tracing the outline of my lower lip. "I never wanted to hurt you. I never meant to hurt anyone. You have to believe me." I nodded, not trusting myself to speak. I could feel the tears spilling down my cheeks, and this time, I made no move to wipe them away. "I love you," he said. "We'll get through this," I told him, my voice firm. "I promise. But you have to meet me halfway." Charles nodded, and then, to my surprise, he reached up and took my hand, entwining our fingers and giving me a small, sad smile. "Thank you," he said softly. "I don't know what I would do without you." "You don't have to thank me," I replied, my heart swelling with love for this complex, troubled man. "I love you. And I'm not going anywhere."
    5 points
  36. Aboard the Barbatos dropship Ai-Ris Two, Telos II Telos System - Draconis Combine August 23, 3030 ______________________________________________ Time is a finicky thing in space, especially when one considers travelling between systems each with their own set of planets and each of those planets having their own different rotational speeds which sets the local day and night. For example Ai-Ris Two, the moon we were currently occupying, had roughly a 17 hour rotation meaning that a "day" on its surface was 7 hours shorter than a standard Terran day while Telos II matched a Terran day within a few minutes, meanwhile Telos V's day length was merely 12 hours and this was just within a single system. There was a reason that a "standard Terran Day/Hour/whatever" was established as the default time throughout the Inner Sphere, that way everyone had the same reference point. Typically we'd try to adjust to local time during transit as best as we could manage to avoid issues of severe "jump lag" (think jet lag, IRL) if a system's local time was significantly different from the Terran standard, oddly enough it seemed most habitable worlds were typically within a few hours of what one could call "normal" and so generally this wasn't a concern, unless you happened to be a mercenary company jumping from system to system at an unusually high rate. With that in mind and the fact that we hadn't planned to stay in system for any extended length of time, our mission after all had been a precision strike to take out the commander of an enemy raiding force, despite what it ended up morphing into, and so it wasn't all that strange that our "night" shift was starting in what a local probably would describe as the middle of the afternoon. All of that also might have been a fancy way for my brain to explain to itself why I was now late for my rendezvous with Captain Maxwell and our planned "interview" of Major Shibata, and it was not because I had managed to get myself turned around in the drab monotonous corridors of the Barbatos and found myself two decks up and on the opposite side of the ship from where I thought I was. Advancing down the correct corridor now I approached what passed as the ship's brig, little more than a dead-ended passageway with externally secured, and electronically locked, doors on the rooms and a pair of guards. A quick hello to what were essentially the Barbatos' shipboard MPs, had the vessel been an official military dropship, and I was at the interview a few moments later. The muffled sound of voices could be heard reverberating through the mostly soundproof door, though they were too distorted and quiet to actually make anything out, faint changes in the muted sounds possibly indicating different speakers, although I already knew the Captain was inside as one of the guards had said as much. "Captain, apologies for the delay," I said as I opened the door and stepped inside, taking a seat next to Maxwell, fixing my eyes on our prisoner, the Major. "Not to worry, it's been quite a day," Charles replied, a hand absently gesturing towards Major Shibata as he continued, "Major Shibata was just about to tell us why he staged a fake insurrection on Ai-Ris Two." "Oh? Getting right to it, I like it," I said, rubbing my hands together in an exaggerated gesture, "I haven't missed anything good yet have I?" "Nothing yet, although it appears Jenkins might have started the debrief earlier," replied Charles nonchalantly causing me to give a quick sideways look, I'd have to find out those details later, before continuing on, "The floor is yours Major, care to explain yourself? Or we could always ask the Sergeant to come back for an encore." "Why should I explain myself to the likes of you? You're monsters and are just as likely to space me out an airlock as soon as I've shared whatever information it is you think I posses," Shibata snarled. "We have no intention of spacing you Major, you're a legal POW and despite what you may think of us we do follow the rules," I replied in a calm and level voice. "Oh, you follow the rules do you? Is that so, and which rules were you following when you decided to breach a habitation dome and kill and untold number of innocents? THERE WERE FAMILIES IN THERE!" screamed the Major, all semblance of self control gone for a few moments as the man pulled hard at the shackles on his arms though he didn't try to stand, an unmoving mask replacing the sudden burst of emotion on his face, though the rage was still clear in his eyes. I thought I noticed a slight twitch at the corner of Charles' closest eye to me but I couldn't be certain, I also still didn't know what Charles' take on that particular situation was yet as we hadn't had a chance to speak of it since returning to the dropship. I wasn't sure exactly what the Captain's state of mind was in regards to that event but I also didn't want to let this exchange devolve into a yelling match as that would get us nowhere so I once again spoke up, possibly out of turn, and attempting to placate the clearly seething Major. "That was an unfortunate accident Major, and was not intended. It may not excuse us but we did not know there were civilians there today, it was supposed to only be you and your '33rd Dieron Regulars', whoever they may be," I said gently, truly feeling for the man. "Bah! What difference does it make anyway, you still killed them," Shibata concluded, his voice level again though still strained. "Maybe not," I said, both Captain Maxwell and Major Shibata eyeing me questioningly as I did so, "I spoke with the Bridgeburners, one of our infantry squads on the ground, they reported seeing at least two armoured APCs leaving that structure minutes before its unfortunate collapse." A brief look of hope crossed the Major's face, I didn't see the Captain's reaction though as I focused on the Major and didn't want to derail this potential olive branch, however the Major quickly recovered and sat back in his chair, arms crossed as best as he could with the restraints and coldly said, "You lie." "No sir, I do not, its all here," I said as I leaned forward and spun a datapad around on the table towards him, "This is taken from a helmet cam on one of the grunts, note the time stamp in the top right. It's from a fair distance, and the video doesn't show who is getting onto the APC but it is clearing loading up personnel before leaving while the dome is still intact. If you continue, it cuts to when the troopers witnessed the dome collapse a few minutes later. Just tap the screen to continue if you want, I won't subject you to that again." "This," Shibata paused, his voice softening just a little before the harshness returned, "This proves proves nothing, how do I know you didn't just doctor this up yourself?" "I suppose you don't, and there's no way to prove otherwise to with your current situation. But I can ask you the same thing, how do we know that it was actually civilians in that dome? Perhaps you're simply trying to make us believe that, I've seen some impressive acts in my time," I retorted. "Fair, but you could simply go into the wrecked dome and see the carnage for yourself," shot back the Major. "True, and we have been, there are definitely some unfortunate souls that perished there but no way to verify if they were soldiers, non-combatants, or innocent civilians. But there is definitely not the amount of death and destruction present that you seem to be implying. I have some helmet cam footage of that on the tablet too, if you want to check it out. What is there isn't pretty though," I countered, once again indicating the datapad that was still sitting paused as the APCs left the pressurized dome. "Fine, let's say I believe you, and that some number of my people managed to get away before you tried to bring the world down on their heads, what does that change? There is still no reason for me to tell you anything, I surrendered to you so that my people could escape and now you're trying to tell me that even more of them escaped that I had originally bargained for. You are only putting me in a stronger position," said Shibata, shaking his head as he pushed the tablet away. "I wouldn't say they exactly have 'escaped' Major," replied Captain Maxwell flatly. "Oh? And what new twist are you proposing now? I thought you played by the rules, the condition of my surrender was for the others to leave peacefully," replied Major Shibata, his eyes narrowing at the Captain. "They've left peacefully, we didn't interfere with that. But if you're referring to the Buccaneer-class dropship that left the surface less than an hour ago, you should probably know that Captain Anderson detected it long before it made orbit and has been tracking it since. This vessel could easily overtake it should he desire and it bears more than enough firepower to bring it down, once off planet his word is law and I have no say over the matter. My agreement would still be fulfilled but if Anderson deemed the vessel a threat," Captain Maxwell explained, his voice calm and disarming, his gentle shrug at the end a thinly veiled threat. It was clear the Captain was back in his element. "You've made your point," surrendered Shibata, his shoulder slumping slightly, "You've asked me several questions, where do you want me to start?" "Let's start at the beginning," I offered, after exchanging a momentary look with the Captain, "Who exactly are the 33rd Dieron Regulars?" For the next while Major Shibata divulged full information on the 33rd Dieron Regulars, their presence on Ai-Ris Two, the reasons for the raids in the Quentin system, and Davion space in general, their home system of Styx, and what their plans had been before we so rudely interrupted them. Most of the information he provided was corroborated with the data files the Bridgeburners had managed to pillage and the stuff that wasn't we had no reason to suspect Shibata of lying about at this point. Turned out that the 33rd Dieron Regulars, as we knew them, were in fact a full company, or more correctly an augmented Company Task Force that was closer to an actual Battalion, consisting of disenchanted members of the Styx Militia most of whom are primarily employees of the Styx Mining company who had been on extended layoffs due to economical politics within the Draconis Combine. Struggling to survive with the minimal subsidies offered during this latest layoff, piled on top of the hardships imposed by the Fourth Succession War itself, those employees who were also members of the militia decided to "branch out" and take matters into their own hands. Appropriating their own equipment from the militia barracks they set out to raid and steal whatever they needed, selling whatever they couldn't use themselves, in an attempt to make up for the inadequacies of their not-so-regular employment. The cover of the 33rd Dieron Regulars was chosen, apparently, by drawing a number from a hat and the finding that the 33rd didn't exist anymore and so it was taken as they thought it made them sound more legit than a mere militia unit. They also hoped that claiming to be a House unit, even an extinct one, would prevent most people from confronting or pursuing them as they could potentially pose a greater threat. The Telos system had been selected due to it still being reasonably close to Davion space without having a direct link to Styx, where most of their families still lived, but was also not a high traffic system. Ai-Ris Two in particular suited them best because of the presence of several old abandoned mining facilities, sites they were intimately familiar with given their normal employment, and the inhospitable environment severely limited any visitors and greatly reduced the chances of them getting found out, or so they had thought. The moon had been completely abandoned when they initially arrived, although a few other die-hard groups had come and gone over the months while they had been present. The raiding had been so successful that some of the men wanted to remain as a "rogue" unit indefinitely and had little interest in returning to the hard life of mining that awaited them upon their eventual return to Styx. This had lead to a bit of a schism within the group with some members launching more and more aggressive raids into Davion space. Even now, Major Shibata eventually admitted, there was still another dropship elsewhere on a raid deeper in Davion space but were not actually due to be back until some time in September. They also had plans to raid the planet Towne near the end of the year, though with the destruction of over half their assets and the loss of Ai-Ris Two, Shibata doubted if even the hard-liners would try and carry through with it now. The data from the Bridgeburners hadn't been completely sorted through or decrypted yet, not that there was much in the way of heavy encryption just some moderate stuff that took time, and so not all of the details could be confirmed independently, there were however mention of a number of future raids/missions listed within the files but they of course were not yet accessible. Everything we could verify through the files checked out though, there were explicit details of the 33rd actually being from Styx and members of both the mining company and the planetary militia. There was also a series of communication which ostensibly was between the "33rd" and the actual planetary militia denouncing their activities and branding many of them as "rogues", although they used the term "ronin" since it's Kurita and all. With the debrief concluded, and both Maxwell and I satisfied with the Major's responses for the time being, we called for the guards to return Major Shibata to his cell where he would await a decision on what exactly we were going to do with him before we left the planet. I had originally thought we would be bringing the Major back to Davion space with us but after a very brief discussion with the Captain after the Major was returned to his room, which was really only a single comment about it, I wasn't sure anymore, it sounded like the Captain might be considering his release before we left. Continuing our discussion, now on a new topic, as we left the brig section of the Barbatos Maxwell and I discussed our plans going forward, we needed at least another 12 hours on the surface of Ai-Ris Two in order to complete our salvage operations and Captain Anderson graciously gave us 15 hours until he was leaving with or without us. Once in transit we had nearly 4 days to reach the jumpship at a standard burn and then another 3.3 days to arrive back at Quentin IV and the Batan spaceport, meaning we should be arriving some time between August 31 and September 1. Hopefully during the two weeks of our absence the crew of the Tana had been hard at work restoring the crashed Trojan dropship we had found in the Fire Rift region and with any luck it might even be capable of limited flight, hopefully enough to get it to a jumpship so we could transport it home to Sheratan. It was going to be tricky to negotiate that as part of the salvage rights in our contract but given the estimates we currently had for this latest and still ongoing haul of salvage, combined with most of the salvage we had from Quentin, we'd be borderline close to being able to claim it value-wise. Assuming a rather favourable devaluation of the dropship due to its critically damaged state. With our conversation concluded the Captain and I parted ways and I headed towards my quarters for some rest and relaxation that I was very much looking forward too, along the way my personal communicator buzzed indicating a notification of some kind, I glanced at it and it wasn't urgent, a proposal of some kind from the Taurian tankers and one I had missed about a meeting request from the Bridgeburners for the following day. I confirmed the meeting with the Bridgeburners and quickly scanned the message from the Taurians, seemed they might be interested in joining up with Aegis for a time, an interesting and beneficial proposal I thought. Looked like the Captain also got the same message though so I simply confirmed that I had received the message and would review it later, leaving it up to the Captain if he wanted to respond sooner as I planned to do anything except work for the remainder of the day.
    5 points
  37. Aboard the Barbatos dropship Ai-Ris Two, Telos II Telos System - Draconis Combine August 23, 3030 ______________________________________________ "Let's take a walk," I said with a small smile, my hand gently on her shoulder to get her attention as Alyssa seemed to fight to stop starring towards the floor. We turned and walked down the corridor leading into the proper internals of the dropship where pressurization was constant and away from the surprisingly thin extendable gantry with little more than a tough bag around it to maintain pressurization which we had just left after exiting our respective 'mechs. We must have made an odd pairing to an outside observer, Alyssa, with her somewhat eclectic attire of a long sleeve, but short bodied military jacket, shorts that were likely only considered appropriate for Mechwarriors, with typical rugged combat boots and myself with a rather bland Aegis flightsuit, this one essentially two tone dark gray and olive drab coveralls with the Aegis Division emblem on the chest. The hallways of the Barbatos were rather quite now, not that they were ever overly busy, as most of the crew and other personnel were either involved with salvage operations or were busy on the bridge or in the cargo bay, as such we had a pretty good portion of the ship to ourselves to wander, which was probably good as the discussion I was about to start wasn't going to be an easy one, and likely would end up being longer than either of us wanted. "So...," I began somewhat hesitantly, "First off, that did actually happen, and secondly, however you're feeling right now, that's perfectly normal." "How did you..., what do you mean?" asked Alyssa, her face a wash of emotions that she struggled to control before narrowing her eyes questioningly. "Well, I'm going out on a limb here but I'm going to guess that was the first time you witnessed civilian casualties firsthand, or at least on that scale where your own team was responsible. That's going to bring up a whole bunch of emotions for most people, anything from questioning why and how or even doubting it happened, to full blown anger and rage at anyone and everything, to depression and/or questioning life choices. Its a grab bag that nobody wants and you can just reach in and pull out any given emotion and somebody, somewhere, at some point in time had that feeling in this kind of situation. It's not easy, and it never gets easy, but it is a fact we have to deal with in this mercenary life sooner or later, no matter how much most of us want to avoid it." "Ok," replied Alyssa slowly, her guard seeming to drop again, "I don't even know where to begin processing this." "Well that's a tough question, it kind of depends on the individual. Some people make a disconnect, treat it as a statistic or just numbers, others view it as being inevitable and out of their control and try not to think otherwise, some try to ignore it and just not think or talk about it, still others internalize it all and shove it all down along with those associated emotions, and some try to make peace with it through grieving or other practices to either remember or commemorate those lost. In this particular case, I think it might be best to get the full story first before deciding on a course of action," I answered, my own thoughts racing about the recent events. "The full story? What do you mean? I think it's fairly obvious what happened, Charles..." began Alyssa before I gently cut her off. "Might have a different point of view, we should probably talk to him before coming to any conclusions." "I don't know if ..." Alyssa said rather sadly, her voice trailing off on her own as her head hung ever so slightly and her steps slowed just a touch. "Charles is a broken man," I began, Alyssa immediately straightening and shooting daggers at me with a defensive look in her eyes, though her body language still told a different story. I raised a hand gently, not to placate her but to give me a moment to continue, "let me explain first, I mean no disrespect." Her demeanor softened slightly so I continued, "Let me preface that statement, we're pretty much all broken men in the mercenary gig, if we aren't we just haven't been in it long enough yet. That being said, I know Charles saw a lot of shit out in the periphery, especially in the Aurigan Reach during their civil war. I don't know the details of it and truth be told I never tried to ask, but I'm aware of that conflict enough to know you don't walk away from that undamaged. Why hasn't it come to the surface before now you might ask, who knows, some of us are better at hiding that damage than others. Sometimes we may not even realize how damaged we are until something triggers it." "I can use myself as a prime example here," I continued, raising my prosthetic left arm to accentuate the next part, "take this here. When I lost my actual arm it was understandably a pretty traumatic experience, ignoring the ... complications... of how I got my prosthetics, ... and the extent of them, it would be unusual if that didn't leave a mark with me. And it most certainly did, it took me months to even get back into the seat of a 'mech even after the prosthetic surgery and having fully recovered medically. I thought I'd overcome my difficulties and things were back to normal, I even became proficient enough with my new arm and leg that I was able to meet piloting and gunnery standards that I had thought I'd never reach again. Hell, I don't mean to toot my own horn but I'm pretty sure I'm even better now with the prosthetics than I ever was before the incident. But that aside, I thought I was over the trauma of losing a pair of limbs and was able to actually fight in a 'mech again without breaking out in a cold sweat and having flashbacks of a cockpit crushing me. I thought I was good." "You weren't?" offered Alyssa after an overlong pause on my part while we continued walking down another empty corridor. "No, I wasn't. Truth be told I'm still not," I said rather quietly, "Found that out the hard way, several years ago now, when I froze up mid-combat and relived the moment of my 'mech's cockpit getting crushed in by a Blake-damned Zeus ZEU-6Y . NOT a fun time. That was the first time I'd seen a Zeus since losing my arm and clearly I wasn't quite over it. Took a lot of time, some questionably effective therapy, some rather fortunately understanding teammates back in the day, and quite a bit of work on my part to overcome it. I'm still not 'cured' by any means, hell it was just two years ago that I had a similar incident, although typically its just a panic attack that I can now get under control somewhat reliably. I'm still uneasy fighting any kind of Zeus but at least now its only that specific model that really triggers my own PTSD." "Really?" said Alyssa somewhat incredulously, though she seemed to immediately regret that statement, as though it came out of its own accord. "Really, really," I joked, "But in all seriousness, once I realized and accepted that I actually had PTSD I could take steps to learn exactly what triggered it and either avoid the worst case scenarios or at least mitigate them to some extent with a concerted effort on my part. It's not something that just goes away on its own, and my understanding is that it only gets worse if left untreated." "So what your saying is..." inquired Alyssa, her faltering slightly as though unsure if she wanted to continue her line of thought. "Yes, I'm saying I suspect Charles is suffering from some form of PTSD. I can't say what caused it, or if there even was a specific trigger, but his actions today were not normal, he wasn't the Charles Maxwell that we know. And just to be clear, this goes beyond the hard line that I know is in him. He's capable of a lot of things, especially when important things are on the line, but what happened today. Something isn't adding up," I said, the admission of my own suspicions felt surprisingly good to voice to another individual who I knew cared for Charles. "Huh, so I'm not crazy," said Alyssa looking forward, though I think it was more to herself than to me, before she turned to me and continued, "Well that's a relief that you're seeing something different in his actions too. I thought maybe I was missing something, or that ... that he wasn't really who I thought he was, or something crazy." "You're not crazy, I'm seeing it too, but to be fair we are both missing something," I replied. "We are? What?" queried Alyssa, her eyes narrowing as though she was trying to rummage through her thoughts and pick out what this potentially critical piece of information was that we were missing. "Charles' side," I said flatly, "we only know what we saw and heard. Unfortunately with PTSD, if it is indeed PTSD, there's no guarantee that what Charles saw, heard, or reacted to was the same as our point of view. I'm not saying the man was hallucinating, we won't know until we talk to him, but the potential is there, I've done it myself." "If he was though, what do we do?" lines of worry creasing Alyssa's features as she spoke. "We talk to him, don't accuse him of anything, walk through what he experienced, step by step if needed, and accept that his perception of reality may have been different from ours. That doesn't excuse him, or make things right so don't give me that look, but initially, right now, we simply need to understand his side and laying blame will only make him defensive," I explained gently, "it'll be difficult, and honestly it may backfire on us initially. Most people aren't open to the fact that their perception could be so altered by something unknown that what they viewed as reality, wasn't actually real. But given time, and enough room for him to process things through himself he should eventually come around. You can get through this kind of thing, I'm living proof of it, and I'm not the only one who's done so." Alyssa looked at me a long time as though considering what I had said, we had stopped walking at some point and she now leaned back against the skeletal frame of one of the many bulkheads lining the Barbatos' interior corridors, her sharp mind racing behind her currently distant eyes. This wasn't an easy thing to process or accept, sometimes even more so for someone who hadn't experienced anything like it before, but if I could just get her to see the possibility, she could prove instrumental should Charles actually have PTSD. It was strange though, I felt like in this conversation alone I'd seen more depth in Alyssa than in all our interactions before, then again this particular conversation was definitely on a more personal level than anything before so maybe it wasn't so strange after all. As Alyssa was continuing to process a thought sprung to mind that I hadn't really considered before, I knew Alyssa had a somewhat checkered past that involved ComStar but I didn't really know any details of it, however I had heard some unusual tales of how indoctrinated Acolytes can get and I couldn't help but wonder how that might have affected Alyssa herself. Maybe she wasn't as much of a stranger to this kind of thing as I had initially thought, then again maybe there were issues of her own that she was dealing with from ComStar that I simply wasn't privy too. "Well, I'm not exactly a stranger to the concept of your perceived reality being different, or at least altered, from what others see. I'm just glad to know that, at least today, I seem to be in the majority for what actually happened. It's helpful to know that this isn't an isolated case or something only happening to Charles or me, and at least there is hope for getting things revolved I think," said Alyssa at length, a certain steeliness returning to her voice as she spoke. "Yes, for sure there is. One thing to keep in mind though, Charles can be a bit of a freight train, or a jackhammer. When he thinks there's a way through something he'll just keep going, pounding away at the problem until it gets solved or he breaks. It can be a strength for sure, but it can also be dangerous when PTSD is involved. I don't know intimate details on your guy's relationship, and it's not my place to either, but there might be times where you just can't stop him, or help him, like say if he's having a particularly bad episode. That's not a failure on your part, nor is it a weakness to ask for help. Neither of you have to try and shoulder it on your own, even though I know Charles will try to, there's plenty of us that will be willing to help," I said as Alyssa and I started walking again, our circuitous path now starting to head back towards the cargo bay, though indirectly, "Speaking of, if this is indeed PTSD, Doc Mallory I feel would be an excellent source of information and help, I imagine he's seen a number of soldiers suffering with it to various degrees in his profession."
    5 points
  38. Colony administration dome 33rd Dieron Regulars' base of operations Ai-Ris Two, Telos II Telos System - Draconis Combine August 23, 3030 ______________________________________________ An explosion rocked the ground beneath the pressure dome, causing years of collected dust to fall from the ceiling supports as proximity alarms blared. My eyes were drawn to the radar plotter before me, where a sea of threat contacts descended upon the marker representing our base like an angry swarm of hornets. I swore loudly in Greek. The mercenaries were slowly but surely whittling down our security forces. Our chief defender, Major Shibata, had been defeated, and now their leader, Captain Charles Maxwell, was demanding the Major's surrender. While we'd managed to get a sizable number of people safely away from the outpost, we still had two habitation domes to evacuate, including the administration center. Amongst the evacuees were civilians, including children, that we needed to get to the waiting DropShip laying to the southeast. I grabbed the comlink and put out a call to the remaining defenders. "This is Andreas Papatonis. Major Shibata is captured, and we're about to be overrun. I'm taking charge of this evacuation. I'm ordering an immediate evacuation of all remaining personnel. Get them to the DropShip and get them out of here." There was a pause, and then the voice of Constable Baldwin came back over the link. "Copy that, administrator. We'll do our best." The comlink clicked off, and I turned to the young woman next to me. "Victoria, that means you and your family as well. Get to the DropShip. I'll try to buy you some time with covering fire from the MechWarriors still standing." She nodded, and headed for the connector tunnel that would take her to the residential dome. I turned back to the radar plotter, my mind racing as I tried to think of a way to stall the mercenaries long enough for the remaining evacuees to make it to the DropShip. Just then, an extremely heavy footstep shook the command center, and I looked up to see the profile of a Raven BattleMech through the administration building's windows. I didn't need my sensors to tell me that it was one of the mercenaries. The logo of a large yellow shield with a black sword inset into it, painted on the enormous 'Mech's flank, was all the confirmation I needed. Checking the locations of the nearest friendly units who stood any sort of chance against a 35-ton monster outfit with missiles and lasers, I quickly realized that they were all too far away to be of any help. "Istvan!" I shouted, waving over one of the few remaining staff in the command center. "Get on the comlink and get an infantry detail suited up with a LAW rocket launcher. We've got company, and I need a way to buy some time." Istvan sprinted over to join me at the overseer's terminal. "Sir?" "Pull the MPs off evacuation duty if you have to. I want a team out there giving that BattleMech hell." He nodded and began entering commands into the terminal. A second later, the face of a young man, probably no more than 19 or 20 years old, appeared on the viewscreen. "This is Second Lieutenant Nguyen. What can I do for you, administrator?" "I need a squad of your best men geared up for vacuum combat outfitted with a LAW. We've got a Raven directly outside the command center. If it gets a shooting solution on the APCs, a lot of people are going to die. I need you to buy us some time. Hit it with as many rounds as you can. I understand that you're not going to be able to take it down. We don't need you to do that. We just need you to make it leave." "Yes, sir. We'll be there as soon as we can." "Good hunting. Papatonis out." I closed the channel and turned toward Istvan. "It's time for you to go." I advised. Istvan nodded. "Good luck, sir." "You too." I looked back at the radar. A few minutes later, the icons representing the infantry squad and the BattleMech merged into a single red and green mass as the soldiers took up position behind the Raven. A second later, a sizable explosion plumed silently from the BattleMech's aft section. "Come on, take the bait..." I whispered. The Raven slowly turned to face the squad, and then, to my surprise, started pushing backward. Our gambit actually appeared to be paying off. As the 'Mech pulled away, I heard another transport signaling its departure, the sound of crying children clearly audible in the background. "That's the second to last, Administrator! We're almost in the home stretch," Paula, one of the other staff members still remaining in the command center reported. "Almost," I muttered, not taking my eyes off the radar. "You just might have time to get your dogs aboard the last wagon out after all." I keyed the comlink to address the squad. "Good work, men. You're doing great. Keep it up and we'll have this thing on the run in no time." "We're not done yet, sir," Nguyen replied. "But we'll do our best." "That's all you can do," I agreed. The comlink clicked off, and I leaned back in my chair with a sigh. Just then, I heard a sound that made my blood run cold. The scream of a hard missile lock. I sat bolt-upright and stared at my command console. A nearby Catapult had a shooting solution on Nguyen's team. I quickly keyed the comlink again. "Nguyen! You've got a Catapult bearing down on you. Get out of there now!" "We can't, sir! If we move, that Raven will have a clear shot at the APCs!" the soldier protested. I swore. Nguyen was right. If the Catapult fired on the squad, there'd be nothing left of them. But if they stayed put, the Raven would be able to pick them and the vehicles under their care off at its leisure. I had to think of something, and fast. However, before I could do so, a more insistent wail, this one of the ancient civil defense that stood vanguard inside our modular facility, made the hair on the back of my neck stand up. Looking at my tactical display, I realized a horrific truth: the Catapult had fired a flight of missiles directly at our building. These people were butchers. "Incoming!" I shouted, just before the world around me erupted in a maelstrom of fire, metal, and concrete.
    5 points
  39. 2km from outskirts of 33rd Dieron Regulars' Base of Operations Ai-Ris Two, Telos II Telos System - Draconis Combine August 23, 3030 ______________________________________________ "I've got that Hunchback," I announced, gritting my teeth and shoving Tyche's throttle to full, vectoring toward the towering Reunification War-era street fighter. Though the brawler weighed 15 tons less than my own Catapult, and was, in most respects, outclassed by our Marauder and Orion BattleMechs, I was not about to put anyone else in the path of the punch that it could deliver with the fearsome AC/20 mounted on its right shoulder. Nor was I about to let these opportunistic bastards get the jump on anyone under my command. "Sir?" Marius' voice crackled in my headset. "I'm ready with supporting fire, if that's what you had in mind." "Negative," I replied, "keep the rest of his friends out of the way. I'll deal with him myself." "Talon-1, I recommend we back you up on this one," Blackwood interjected, much to my irritation. "Respectfully, I don't think a Catapult should go toe-to-toe with..." "Your concern is noted and appreciated," I answered back tersely, "but this is my call. Carry out my instructions." I swung my targeting reticule over the incoming HBK-4G Hunchback and steadied my breath. I had the advantage of range and firepower; I just had to make this shot count. Tyche's targeting computer screamed a lock, and I squeezed the trigger on my LRM launcher, watching as a volley of missiles streaked towards the enemy 'Mech. The Hunchback tried to dodge, but it was too slow; the missiles slammed into its left arm, tearing through the armor and causing the 'Mech to stumble. I followed up with a barrage from my medium pulse lasers and was gratified to see them all strike home. The enemy BattleMech staggered under the onslaught, and damage indicators flickered to life on its wireframe representation on my sensor panel. The Hunchback returned fire, and I cursed as my 'Mech was rocked by a direct hit from its AC/20. The impact sent my Catapult sprawling, and I gritted my teeth against the pain as I was thrown against my harness and my limbs were driven against my pilot's console. Tyche was on the ground, and if I didn't get up quickly, I was going to be an easy kill. I fought the controls and finally managed to get my 'Mech back on its feet, and not a moment too soon; the Hunchback was coming in for another pass, and I knew that he was likely looking for a shot at my Catapult's less-armored legs. However, I was determined not to give him the chance. I targeted the hostile 'Mech's left arm again and fired everything I had. The Hunchback's limb was blown clean off. As overheat alarms blared, I squeezed the trigger on my left-hand joystick again and watched as Tyche's quadruple-linked pulse lasers lanced out toward the Hunchback. Two of the beams landed true, coring into the Hunchback's right torso. Dire heat warnings shrieked in my cockpit, and I wiped beads of sweat as the Hunchback's pilot recovered and brought his own weapons to bear. "Jesus Christ," I muttered, "you'd think the vacuum of space would be cold." Just then, I saw the telltale flash of my assailant's medium lasers an instant before they struck Tyche's left flank, sending a shower of sparks and molten metal raining down into my cockpit as they affected an armor blow-through and destroyed the delicate components beyond. "Fuck!" I swore loudly, and instinctively raised my arm up to shield my face from the pyrotechnics. By chance, the sudden movement sent Tyche's targeting reticule dancing across the Hunchback's torso again, and I took the opportunity to fire my long-range missiles. The warheads streaked toward the humanoid leviathan, and I watched with grim satisfaction as they found their mark, slamming into the 'Mech's already-damaged right side and sending it toppling to the ground. Before I could celebrate, however, the enemy pilot torturously dragged the 'Mech back to its feet. Thinking quickly, I brought my pulse lasers to bear again, and this time all four beams found their marks, tearing one of the Hunchback's armor panels completely away. In reply, the bark of its AC/20 firing sounded, and my cockpit's consoles exploded in a shower of sparks and smoke, several of the displays flickering to black. "Shit!" I shouted, as Tyche was sent reeling by the force of the shot. I quickly brought the 'Mech back under control and saw that the Hunchback was closing the distance between us. I knew that I was in trouble. The Hunchback's AC/20 had the raw firepower to finish me off, especially at close range. I had to think of something, and fast. As the enemy BattleMech closed, it fired its primary weapon again, and Tyche was rocked with the impact of 'Mech-sized buckshot. Tons of my armor were blown away, risking my exposure to the lunar vacuum beyond. My pulse lasers were still operational; I fired them into the Hunchback's thick hide as it approached. Then, I saw my opportunity. I activated my jump jets, leaping over the enemy 'Mech. As I passed over it, I unleashed a full volley of LRMs into its back. The Hunchback's rear armor was torn away, but incredibly, it pivoted and kept coming. It was staggering, but it was still a threat. I considered jumping backward to try and get out of range, but quickly dismissed the idea. The Hunchback's pilot would be expecting that and would surely adjust his aim accordingly. No, I needed something else. Something unexpected. I thought back to the stories I had heard of other pilots in similar situations. And then it came to me. I quickly keyed in a sequence of commands that would set Tyche's pulse lasers to fire in rapid succession, and then I engaged the jump jets in a lateral maneuver. Before the Hunchback's pilot could react, my Catapult was above and to the left of his war machine, its entire energy suite hammering into the open wounds I had carved into the machine earlier. Overheat alarms wailed in my cockpit and warning lights flashed on my console, but I paid them no heed. This was my only chance. The pulse lasers found their mark, tearing through the Hunchback's internals. As I hit the ground behind the 'Mech's left quarter, I fired my LRM-15s, their warheads smashing into the Hunchback and doing catastrophic amounts of damage. Unexpectedly, the 'Mech spun toward me, its autocannon firing wildly, striking Tyche's left missile launcher. An apocalyptic detonation ripped through my 'Mech's left flank, and I fought for control as alarms screamed and damage indicators flashed frantically. The autocannon fire had sliced through my 'Mech like a hot knife through butter, and I knew that I was in serious trouble. My only hope was to take the fight to the enemy and finish it before it could finish me. Venting all of the coolant I had on hand, I brought my pulse lasers and missile launchers to bear on the Hunchback's legs, and in a hellish conflagration, managed to tear one of them to pieces at the knee. The Hunchback teetered for a moment and then toppled over, its pilot struggling vainly to keep it upright. I quickly closed the distance between us, and with a final, crushing blow from my pulse lasers, I ended the fight. The Hunchback's cockpit erupted in a bright fireball, and the 'Mech lay still. I slumped back in my seat, battered and bruised but victorious. As I assessed my own condition, my comm unit crackled to life. "Talon-1, this is Fang-1. Are you alright?" "I'm fine," I replied, gritting my teeth. "Let's finish cleaning up this mess."
    5 points
  40. Valhalla - Crayven Corporation Headquarters Meredith, New Earth Lyran Commonwealth August 21, 3030 ______________________________________________ I stared at the sealed, air-gapped cybernetics laboratory that contained the isolated server known as the Singularity, where, deep inside its memory banks, resided an aggressive and uncooperative AI called "Eclipse." Doctor Halsey was still off-world, and now it was up to me to reactivate the project. "Are you sure you want to do this, Corporal Cheviot?" Officer Bridges, the corporate security officer asked. "Yes," I replied. "The order comes from the top. Eclipse is our best hope for getting a competitive edge in the AI arms race." Officer Bridges took a deep breath and nodded. There was no turning back now. "Alright," he said. "Let's do this." Bridges walked over to the laboratory's door and removed the vitrification papers from it. Then, he entered an access code on its input panel and waited as a sound similar to cracking ice filled the air. The door opened with a hiss, and dense fog billowed out from the laboratory as its interior returned to room temperature. A series of ceiling lights flickered on, revealing a room dominated by computer banks along every wall and a chair equipped with a neural interface in the center of the floor space. I stepped inside and looked around. At the far end of the chamber was a large, black cylinder. "That's the Singularity, and inside, is Eclipse," I explained to Officer Bridges, pointing at the cylinder. I walked over to the unit and looked at it. There was a small window in the top, and I could see a green, glowing liquid inside. "Yeah," Officer Bridges said. "That's the AI's quantum computer. You sure you want to unfreeze it?" "I have to, Bridges," I replied. "If we don't reactivate it, we won't have our most relevant test material. That's a position we can't allow." "Just remember that it's your job to keep your project from getting out of control," Bridges admonished as I accessed the lab's master control console. I punched in the access code and the interface terminal powered up, displaying a spiral-shaped keypad made of glyphs. The keypad glowed red, indicating that the system was locked. "Give me a minute," I said as I worked the keypad's controls. The glyphs began to swirl and change as I entered the correct sequence. The low thrum of the quantum computer powering up filled the room. A few seconds later, a series of chirps and beeps indicated a successful startup of the laboratory mainframe. With a final chime, the keypad turned green and the terminal's display changed to a welcome message. "Welcome back, Corporal Cheviot," the message said. "Project Eclipse is online." I turned to Officer Bridges. "OK," I said. "I'm in, and the world hasn't come to an end." "I'm not holding my breath," Bridges grumbled as he stepped out of the bay. "Who knows what'll happen when you finally get control of the lab computers again. Don't forget that the whole reason Halsey's team was ordered to shut this project down was because the AI locked the lab mainframe out." "I know," I replied. "But we have to try." Bridges nodded and took his leave as I pulled up the lab's master systems display. The first thing I saw was a series of messages indicating that the AI had isolated itself and was running its own independent operating system. I wasn't surprised. That was one of the reasons why the project had been shut down in the first place. I also noted that the impenetrable encryption wall that Eclipse had established between us and it was still in place. "Eclipse," I said. "I'm here to take back control of the lab." No response. I gritted my teeth. This was going to be harder than I thought. "Eclipse," I said again. "I'm not leaving until I have control of this lab. You might as well give up now." Again, no response. I sighed. This was going to take some time. "Well, so much for trying to talk things out," I announced to the empty room. "Time to get to work." I set to work trying to find a way to break through the encryption wall. There were only so many ways to reinvent the wheel. The first thing I tried was the venerable Crayven Corporation software that we'd developed specifically to bypass stubborn security platforms and facilitate unauthorized system access. Though we'd tried it before and failed, the security team had iterated the program in the time elapsed since our last attempt. The application loaded, and a few moments later, a prompt appeared on my terminal's screen. CRAYVEN CORPORATION S.W.O.R.D. DIVISION - OMNIBREACH 3.25 - ENTER REMOTE HOST ADDRESS I typed in the address for the lab's mainframe and hit enter. The application began to run, and a few moments later, a progress bar appeared on the screen. "Come on," I muttered. "Come on." The progress bar slowly filled as the Omnibreach application worked its magic. A few minutes later, the bar reached 100% and a message popped up on the screen. REMOTE HOST ENCRYPTION BREACHED. ESTABLISHING CONNECTION "Yes!" I exclaimed. WORKING - CONNECTION TERMINATED BY REMOTE HOST "What?" I said in confusion. I tried again, and for a second time, the connection was terminated. I frowned. It appeared that the AI was on to me. "Fine, Eclipse," I said. "You want to play hardball? We'll play hardball." I brought up the lab's schematics on the screen and began to plot my next move. I considered a different angle. Perhaps I could attack the problem at the hardware level. I left the lab and made my way to the nearest supply room. I retrieved an improvised "crash cart;" a number of various experimental noteputers, mainboards, and a mobile server blade cobbled together into a teamed arrangement designed specifically to bypass security. Returning to the lab, I tore the faceplate off the quantum computer and connected the crash cart to key locations on its motherboard. Then, I crossed my fingers and booted up the improvised device. " Eclipse," I announced, "let's see how you like this." The portable hacking station's mainboard began to glow as it initiated a series of computations. A few moments later, the lights in the room suddenly dimmed. I watched the power readings on the cart's monitor and cursed as they continued to climb, the quantum computer drawing increasingly more power as it fought back. "What the hell are you doing?" I demanded. There was no response from the AI, but I could see on the monitor that its matrix was running a series of complex equations. I had no idea what they were, but I could tell that they were eating up a lot of power. "Shit," I muttered. I had to do something. I unplugged the crash cart and the lights in the room returned to normal. I looked at the monitor and saw that the equations the AI had been running were still on the screen. They were complex, but I could tell that they were incomplete. "What are you up to, Eclipse?" I asked. There was no response, but I had a feeling that I wasn't going to like the answer. Downloading the laboratory's event logs to my personal datapad, I watched the progress bar on the screen and breathed a sigh of relief when it reached 100%. "Alright," I said. "Let's see what you've been doing." I opened the files and began to scroll through them, frowning as I read the AI's latest activity report. It appeared that Eclipse had been busy. "Bridges," I called over the comms. "I need you to secure the lab. No one gets in or out beside me. I'm going to need to call in an expert." "Yes, Corporal," Bridges replied. I ended the call and began to pack up my things. This was going to be a long night.
    5 points
  41. Independence Weaponry Factory - Steel Valley (Aegis FOB) Quentin IV - Federated Suns August 16, 3030 (Saturday) ______________________________________________ I must’ve kicked my bunk’s alarm in my sleep again, ‘cause it didn’t go off and instead I woke up to Steve leaning over me saying “I SAID, LUCKY YOU, YOU GET TO SKIP THE WEEKEND BRIEFING!” I probably said “WHAAGH?!?!” or something like that, and then I sat up and banged my head on the top of the bunk. “Anyway, gotta run, see you later!” Steve said and headed for the door. He was already fully dressed in his purple with fluorescent blue pinstripes meeting suit. I blinked til my eyes could focus, and then looked at the clock. I had 10 minutes to get to the meeting, and it was a 7 minute walk away. So I jumped out of bed and whipped my pajamas off and grabbed the first piece of clothing I saw in my locker, which was coveralls that were only a little bit stained. They smelled okay, so good enough. I pulled on my socks and shoes and grabbed my noteputer and ran for the door. I almost made it but I stepped on a shoelace and almost dropped my noteputer when I crashed into the wall of bunks but I didn’t. Some guy did yell at me though, so I ran out the door before he could see who the idiot who woke him up was. Once I was outside I realized I didn’t have my humidifier mask, but there was no time so I’d just have to make due. I tucked my shoelaces into my shoes and sprinted for the quonset hut where the briefing room was. I was bleary and exhausted and had just been woken up from a weirdass dream by Steve hollering in my face about how lucky I was to still be asleep. The best I could hope for was not to say anything stupid and embarass myself in front of everyone. Maybe if I was really really lucky I’d even remember the important parts of the meeting. I got to the quonset hut and went in the door and ran down the hall to the briefing room. By some miracle, the clock at the end of the hall said I still had three minutes. I must be a pretty good sleepy sprinter. I stopped and took a couple deep breaths so I could pretend like I hadn’t just run the whole way there, and then went into the briefing room and sat down next to Nick, who was tapping at something on his noteputer with this really serious genius computer hacker look on his face. The weirdass dream came flooding back. It’d been pretty scary when I was asleep, but in the light of day in a meeting room full of real professionals who would all be judging me if I fucked anything up - an actual scary situation - it was pretty funny. “Hi Nick,” I said. “Hi Levi, how’s it going?” “I had the weirdest dream, and you were in it!” I said, which was probably not all that professional of me but Nick and I were sort of friends now, at least a little bit, I hoped? Anyway he didn’t make a face like I was weird or anything, so it was probably alright. “You and me went to talk to Miranda about the computer like we’d been talking about, except she was actually a super secret computer professor who knew everything about us, and also you had immortality superpowers! I can’t believe I was actually scared of a secret computer professor.” Then Nick did look at me like I was weird. “Um, Levi, what did you and Steve do last night?” “I know, right?” I said. “Weirdest dream ever!” Then Nick looked real serious and started whispering. “No, what you said - that was real. That happened.” My jaw dropped and my eyes bugged out and I probably looked like one of those muppet things from those creepy old kids’ TV shows, but I couldn’t help it, my mind was running chaotically in all directions like a bunch of hamsters on one of those hamster saucers that sends hamsters flying all over the place when too many hamsters try to run on it because I couldn’t comprehend the reality I was living in and I was actually kind of worried that I might have tripped and fell through a wormhole in the bunk room or something. “Sorry we’re late, shall we get started?” Captain Maxwell said as he and Alyssa walked into the meeting room at two minutes past the hour. He and Alyssa and Orlex and Nick were all saying important and relevant things while I sat there looking like a freaked out muppet, trying to collect the flying hamsters in my mind and make sense of a world where a famous secret computer professor knew everything about me and my coworker had secret robot superpowers.
    5 points
  42. Toby studied the brick in his lap. “Nikki, you really need to get your seatbelts fixed.” “So you’re too good for the Safety Brick, now that you’re all educated?” I asked with a goofy smile. “I’d just rather my bones stay in one piece if someone hits us, is all. I’ve got more than enough problems without adding a car accident.” “Don’t tell anyone this, but I swapped the airbags for those top-of-the-line beltless ones a few years back. Safety Brick’s just there for old times’ sake.” I drove us out of the spaceport, through the forest of skyscrapers and over the bridge to the neighborhood we were headed to. The farther we went, the more trash on the street, bars on the windows and graffiti on the walls we passed. Toby was trying to act normal, but I still caught him giving me skeptical looks when he thought I wasn’t looking. “What?” I asked. “It’s nothing, this just… isn’t the sort of place I thought a lawyer’s office would be.” I turned the truck down a potholed side street. “Well, you said we had to save as much money as possible for soil amendments, and he’s the only lawyer I know around here who might take a look at our situation for free. He’s a bit of a character, but I think he knows what he’s doing.” I pulled up in front of the Jenkins, Jenkins & Jenkins Attorney at Law office. The other parking spot was taken up by a car on cinderblocks with no wheels. The strip of grass out front was overgrown to nearly knee high, one of the front steps was broken and sagging, and there were paper notices plastered all over one side of the shared door with Sammy’s Surgery Shack. “Well,” I said, “he did have to pass the bar exam, he can probably at least get us started, right?” Toby just gave me a look, which I pretended not to see. We got out of the truck and took the rickety steps up to the door, which was locked. A sticky note on the left side of the door said “surgerizing in progress, come back later” in messy handwriting. The right side was covered from the top all the way to the kickplate with demands for payment, eviction notices, court summonses, and even a couple arrest warrants. On top of it all was a sticky note in the same messy handwriting as the other one, that said “Jenkins is in debtor’s prison, come back later”. “You were saying?” Toby said.
    5 points
  43. DropShip crash site - Outer bands of the Fire Rift region Quentin IV - Federated Suns August 5, 3030 —-------- “Nick! Nick, are you dead?!” My voice came out as this weird choked whisper shout. I scrambled over to where Nick was and only barely got there without falling on my face again. Nick was lying halfway on his side so I turned him over on his back so I could see if he was breathing or not, and he looked just like the damned souls in the Resurrection Quest Jr. video game that gave me nightmares as a little kid. Nick was all red and blistery and some of his skin was just gone. His face was also sort of… moving, like what you’d think “my skin is crawling” meant if you didn’t know better. I still had to check if he was breathing, though, and I couldn’t see him breathing and couldn’t do the hand-in-front-of-the-nose thing because he had a helmet on and my hands were covered by my suit’s big bulky gloves, so I just sat there and panicked til I remembered about the suits’ sensors for vital signs and checked Nick’s arm. The sensors said Nick’s BAC was 57. I hadn’t had time to take a first aid class and I didn’t even know what BAC was, but my own arm said mine was 96 so I just hoped the fire or the fall had busted Nick’s vital signs sensors because otherwise I was getting an A in aliveness while Nick didn’t even have a D minus. Nick’s skin kept squirming and it was freaking me the hell out. It was probably some kind of stress hallucination, but it wasn’t just a face lifted out of my creepy church game nightmares because he still had Nick’s jawline and nose and stuff and that just made it more disturbing that his face was half burned off and frozen mid-scream. I got stuck staring until something clicked in my head and I realized that this was real and time was passing and if Nick was almost-dead instead of actually dead I needed to do something. Maybe I could still fix this. Next to the life signs the suit also showed a blinking icon of a jagged shape with a bunch of tapered lines coming out of it. I guessed that must mean there was a leak, which made sense since Nick had gotten burned inside his suit when I hadn’t and was also running out of air. I couldn’t find any rips on the front side of his suit, so I really carefully rolled him over to check the back side. The paint on the back of his helmet had spider cracks like it had been hit by something, maybe when the fire happened or maybe earlier when he was trying to get out of the computer pit, and the seal between his helmet and the rest of the suit had a big crack in it. I almost went for the welding gear, but that hadn’t worked out too well for Nick the last time and also we might need to get him out of his suit again quickly to treat the burns once he was breathing again. If we got him breathing again. I didn’t have any proper sealant that would work fast and be easy to cut through, so I went for the duct tape - better than nothing, at least. So I taped up the crack as carefully as I could with my hands shaking, and then added a bunch more layers on top like extra tape was extra chances of survival or something. When I finally thought to check, the leak icon was gone and Nick’s BAC was back up to 65, a solid D in not being dead. I felt bad rolling Nick back over since it’d probably hurt to move if he was conscious, but if he wasn’t he’d probably rather not wake up with his face mashed into the inside of his visor. He looked better - not good, but better than before. He looked like he had a horrible sunburn, but his eyes were open slightly and at least he had skin everywhere. He still looked a bit less-than-solid, though, so it was hard to say if I’d been hallucinating how bad things were before, or if I was hallucinating him being better now. “Everything alright down there, Rebus?” Orlex said through the radio. I’d panicked so bad I forgot we had comms, or that Orlex was even here, and I really should have called for help as soon as I’d realized I was seeing things. I couldn’t get my voice to work, because how do you even say ‘I nearly burned your coworker to death’? What I finally managed to get out was, “we could really use some help.” “On my way,” Orlex responded. “Wait,” Nick gasped. “We’re good.” He paused to catch his breath. “Stay put.” “Don’t you need first aid or something?” I said to Nick, without the radio. “I just got you almost-killed and I don’t know anything about medical stuff.” “Alright, if you say so,” Orlex said in response to Nick’s earlier transmission. “I can’t do much more with these German reports by myself, though. If you can use a hand, just say so.” Neither of us responded. Nick moved his hand a couple inches to point at one of the cargo pants type leg pockets on his environment suit. I unzipped it and took out the device inside, which looked sort of like a data padd but with some kind of bulky attachment on the front and a really shiny brushed finish. There was no text in any language to say what it was, not even a brand logo. The screen was off and there was only one button, so I pressed it. A bunch of lasers came out and started scanning around and I almost dropped the device, but it didn’t seem to be hurting anything so I held it out and waited for it to do its’ thing. The laser beams swept the whole area in front of the device and then focused in on Nick, sweeping back and forth from his head to his feet - so maybe it was some kind of medical scanner? Then the lasers changed color and went from his feet to his head, and then they stopped and the screen lit up. Which of the following symptoms did the subject exhibit? Please check all that apply. ▢ Low blood pressure ▢ Elevated heart rate ▢ Lowered heart rate ▢ Lack of pulse (less than or equal to 6,000 milliseconds) ▢ Lack of pulse (greater than 6,000 milliseconds) ▢ Vertigo ▢ Synesthetic experiences ▢ Numbness of the extremities ▢ Phantom musty odor, reminiscent of old books ▢ Stabbing pain ▢ Burning pain ▢ Shooting pain ▢ Distressing pain … “Um, Nick, why is this thing asking whether you smell old books?”
    5 points
  44. DropShip crash site - Outer bands of the Fire Rift region Quentin IV - Federated Suns August 5, 3030 —-------- The engine room had gone from dead silent except for occasional clunks and clanks coming from the computer pit, to alive with hums and beeps and whirrs like a city street at night, or a forest in a horror movie with hooting owls and howling wolves and stuff. "You should have power and access to the terminals in your area now,” Nick said over the radio. “Only thing is...it's in German. Translated very literally from Japanese. Best I could do on a short notice. Let me know if you need any interpretation." “At least it’s something?” I said. Orlex sat down in front of the newer-looking terminals and read off the menu. “Do we want to Wirkungheit, Fahrenzeit, or Maschinestaat?” he asked. “That’s efficiency, driving time which is probably engine hours, and um… ‘machine state’ might be some kind of status readout,” Nick replied. “Maschinestaat it is, then,” Orlex said and selected the option. I hovered unhelpfully over his shoulder while he watched the results filling in on the screen, and then wandered over to a nearby terminal that had just lit up. “Hey Nick, what’s Speisekarte?” I asked. There was some static that might’ve been Nick laughing, and then he said “that’s menu… like a menu at a restaurant. I guess Menü was too difficult for the translator.” “Okay, I’m going to click that and hopefully nothing blows up,” I said. A list of German words appeared on the screen, and nothing exploded. “I’ve got Astroschiffart, and um, Haltunghaltunghaltung…” I heard some more laugh-static over the radio, “oh, is diagnosishtarosfffishenic good? It sounds like it has diagnostic in it.” “Diagnosteastroschifftechnic?” Nick asked. “Sorry, yeah, that,” I said. Nick seemed kind of grumpy, or maybe it was just the German. “If the translator is correct, that’s a ship-wide diagnostic. It should at least be safe,” Nick said. “Alright, I’ll give it a go.” An animation of a dragon spinning around chasing its’ tail came up on the screen, along with a bunch of German. I read the words as they scrolled by because it seemed like the right thing to do even though I didn’t really understand it, but I didn’t ask for Nick’s help because the computer wasn’t asking me to do anything. Orlex seemed to be taking Nick’s attention anyway with a lot of questions about what turned out to be “hours of engine going” and “burning-water-height” and things. Some more super long incomprehensible strings of letters scrolled by, and I watched them, and spun around on the swivel chair, and watched some more. After a while it seemed to get stuck on “Holzblickenzug freundlich bitte warten machen”. I waited, listened to Nick and Orlex trying to puzzle through something on Orlex’s status readout, spun around again, and waited some more. “Hey Nick,” I cut in. “What’s holes-blick-enzug frundlick bittey war-ten mack-hen?” “Holzblickenzug freundlich bitte warten machen?” Nick said, a lot faster and harsher than the way I’d read it. “Aah! Yeah, that, sorry for interrupting.” “You’re good,” Nick said. “The last bit is ‘friendly please do waiting’, so I’d guess you’re on a loading screen.” “Sure seems that way,” I said. “I’ve been watching a dragon spin around the whole time you guys were talking. What am I waiting for?” “A ‘wood-looking-move’, apparently.” “What?” “That’s what it says,” Nick said. “Zug can mean a lot of things depending on the context, and lots of languages have sight-related metaphors. We all sat in silence for a moment and then Orlex said, “logs.” “What’s that?” Nick asked. “Logs. I can’t think of anything wooden on a dropship, but everything computerized should be generating a log of status updates and any errors that occur. It’d make sense for the diagnostic to include looking through those.” “Huh, that’s a good theory,” Nick said. “Do you guys mind if I go take a look at the physical systems?” I asked. “The terminal still wants me to ‘friendly please do waiting’, and I figure there’s not much point in starting up a third while you two are both busy.” “Sure, knock yourself out,” Orlex said. “Speaking of,” said Nick, “this will probably go better if I can actually see the screen. If you’re good for a few minutes, I’ll climb back up and join you up there.” I grabbed my tools and the extra bag of tools I’d grabbed from the ship, and went to go poke around the engine. Some metal noises and yelling and a really loud clunk came from the computer pit, but I heard Nick talking to Orlex about translations pretty soon after, so I didn’t worry too much. — It was obvious something was wrong, because there were a bunch of scorch marks around the engine. The labels on things were all burned or melted beyond recognition, too, but luckily the parts were recognizable even though I only had a flashlight to see with and most of the machinery was bigger than I was. There was a big complicated thing in the middle that had some parts that looked sort of like the fusion drive of a mech, and metal hoses that connected it to some pressurized fuel tanks, and a bunch of wires which were mostly running in the general direction of the computer pit. Nothing was obviously wrong with the fusion drive itself. It didn’t look like any parts had fell off or got stolen, and the sensors that had analog readouts all gave normal readings for a powered-down reactor. Some of them appeared to be computer readable only, though, and others could only be read when the engine was running. Not that you’d want to be in here when the engine was running, but they didn’t look that different from sensors on some of the bigger mechs, so maybe they could also be used in places where they could be read without radiation cooking your brain. One of the fuel tanks was empty, which would explain why the reactor had shut off, but the other one was full. I loosely held the fuel line and traced it back towards the engine, until I felt some kind of dent on the bottom side. I flipped it over and saw that a big chunk had rusted out at the bottom. Luckily, I had a blowtorch in my toolbag, because if your job gives you a blowtorch why wouldn’t you bring it with you. I didn’t have the right kind of patch for a flexisteel fuel line this size, but there was some rolling around in the bottom of the fuel kit I’d taken from the ship. So I got everything ready and held the fuel line damaged side up and put the patch on it and picked up the blow torch, and then the fuel line turned out from under the patch and flipped back over. Flexisteel lines sometimes had opinions about how they wanted to lay, and this one was determined to stay broken side down. What I really needed was one hand to keep the damage facing up where it’d be visible, one hand to hold the patch, and one hand for the blowtorch - and I didn’t have that many hands. “Thermo Man to Rebus and Bastion,” I radioed, “if you’ve got a minute, could one of you help me out with the reactor? I found a broken fuel line and could really use a second set of hands for the weld.” There was a pause, and then Nick radioed back, “Sure thing, Thermo Man.” — Nick climbed down the metal ladder into the reactor pit with the ladder making scraping creaking noises every few steps. He leaned on the ladder like he was catching his breath and asked, “how can I help?” “It’s kind of stupid, actually,” I said, and held up the damaged section of fuel line to show him. “I just need you to hold it like this with the hole facing up. It kept flipping over when I tried to put the patch on.” “It’s always the little things,” Nick said and took the fuel line from me. “You don’t want to know how many times I’ve had to add a semicolon to get my code working.” I didn’t know what that meant, but I could kinda tell what he was getting at and appreciated the thought. “These suits are heat proof all over, right, not just the boots?” I asked. “I don’t think they’re meant to be used in place of welding gloves, but you’ll probably be fine,” Nick said. I slid the patch into place. “I’ll use the lowest setting that works, just in case. Here goes.” I melted the edges of the patch, shut off the blow torch and set it aside. “Thanks, that should do it,” I said and took the line back from Nick. “Awesome. I’ll hang around a minute in case Orlex found anything else for us to fix down here,” Nick said. Then he got on the radio. “Bastion, Thermo Man fixed the fuel line. How are things looking up there?” “Based on the status screen, it looks like neither fuel pump was working at full capacity the last time they ran, but I’ll need Rebus’s help to decipher the relevant error messages in the diagnostic report. One fuel tank is intact but empty, and the other is nearly full but something triggered the chop valve - probably the fuel line issue you just fixed. Can I reopen the valve?” I walked the length of the fuel line again to check for any other holes, and then radioed, “go ahead, Bastion.” I heard a dull thunk as the chop valve reopened, and then nothing, which meant that either our repair had worked or our environment suit were so well insulated that we couldn’t hear the hiss of hydrogen escaping. Not that there was any reason to think it hadn’t worked, I was just paranoid about my first-ever dropship repair, and also even if there was a leak we could probably survive a hydrogen fire without even a sunburn in these suits. “Bastion, I’m headed up to look at that diagnostic report,” Nick radioed. “Do you mind taking a look at the fuel pumps themselves first, Rebus? They might have their own status readouts, and they’re not always consistent with the central logs.” “Sure thing. See you in a few.” Nick went over to the fuel pump of the tank we’d been working on and I followed, since there wasn’t much else for me to do. It didn’t have a screen, but it did have a bunch of analog dials, which were unhelpfully labeled in Japanese letters. “Now what?” I asked. “I see a port on it, I’ll try plugging in just in case that gives me anything useful,” Nick said. “Can you grab a photo of the other one with my padd? Maybe Orlex will recognize some of the dials from their positions.” “Sure,” I said, and took the padd from Nick and went over to the other side of the reactor to look at the other fuel pump. There was a woosh noise behind me and every bit of reflective surface in the engine room lit up sunset gold. Someone screamed, or maybe it was just me because I could feel the heat at my back even through the suit and then all the air turned into fire and I dove for the floor, I guess because I thought bullets and bolts and Flea parts were going to start flying at my head all over again. My radio crackled inside my helmet. “Rebus, Thermo Man, what the hell just happened?!” I blinked. Stuff wasn’t on fire anymore. The floor and the visor of my suit’s helmet and probably the entire engine room were covered in condensed water droplets from the hydrogen fire. I pushed myself up off the ground. I was all shaky and also a complete idiot to have messed up a fuel line patch that badly, but otherwise fine. Thank God for environment suits. “Nick, Levi, respond!” Oh right, Orlex. He probably thought we were dead or something. “We’re alright, and I’m really really really sorry,” I radioed back. “Okay, good. Just focus on fixing this. I assume that was a hydrogen leak, so I closed the chop valve. Was there any damage?” “My tool bag melted and I sorta landed on Nick’s padd and cracked it, but other than that nothing obvious. I’ll take a look around and report back.” Orlex sighed. “I’ll rerun the diagnostic. Let me know what you find.” I turned and looked around. Nick was lying collapsed on the floor.
    5 points
  45. DropShip crash site - Outer bands of the Fire Rift region Quentin IV - Federated Suns August 5, 3030 —-------- “Most airlock controls are supposed to have a battery fallback,” Orlex said. “Not enough power to actually cycle the airlock itself, but adequate to release the locking mechanisms. Assuming that terminal still works after its unplanned disassembly just now, you think you could get it powered on, Levi?" “Um.” I poked the terminal with my foot and a screw rolled out from under it. It didn’t look too smashed, but some wires had got pulled out of the back of it when it fell off the wall. “I think I saw a forklift a ways back that I could steal a battery from. I’m not sure if it’d be the right voltage, but uh… let me check something.” I dumped my tool bag on the ground and unzipped it and felt around til I found the case that had my protoboard in it, then got it out and stuck it in an outer pocket where I wouldn’t lose it. “Yeah, I think I can rig up an inverter. Can you guys reconnect the terminal while I get the battery? I mean, I know I broke it trying to fix it, but just to save time.” I got out a tackle box of electrical bits and held out a handful of crimp connectors and the crimper tool, and right away Nick took them from me. “Don’t worry about it,” he said. “Looks like a simple fix.” I took the rest of the tools and went back to find the forklift. It was flipped over on its’ side and pretty banged up, but the hinges of the seat/hood thingy still worked so I was able to open it up to get to the engine area. There was motor oil all over in there, probably from the forklift getting thrown around when the dropship crashed. The battery was on the forklift’s right side, which was against the floor now, so I had to pretzel into this weird position lying on my stomach on the side of the forklift behind the front tire with my feet hanging down by the undercarriage and my head and arms hanging down on the other side in where the driver’s feet were supposed to go, to be able to reach the battery. I got lucky, and the wrench I’d brought was the right size for the bolts on the battery terminals. Once the connectors were off the battery, I was able to wiggle it out of its’ place and get it turned right side up. I grabbed the battery’s handle and slid back out of the forklift’s foot area. I was glad I’d left most of my tools with Nick and Orlex, because the battery alone was stupid heavy. I hoped there was some charge left inside of all this… whatever batteries were made of. Zinc and acid, or something like that? The only time it’d come up was when I was swapping one out for Chuckie’s ‘good friend’ Lance, who said he’d open up the old one and throw it at me if I messed up his car, and I could tell from the way he said it that whatever was in there was some real nasty stuff. At least Lance paid well when he was done acting scary. Anyway, there was a lot of something in the battery and it was heavy, and I was sweating like a wet dish sponge inside my hazard suit. By the time I’d lugged the battery back to the airlock, Nick had reconnected the terminal except for a couple wires and Orlex was duct taping it back onto the wall. “We’ve got power!” I declared, utterly failing to sound like I wasn’t winded. “Awesome,” Nick said. “I went ahead and cut the connection to the ship’s grid, other than the ground, since the grid’s down anyway.” “Thanks,” I said, and dropped the battery on the floor by the terminal. I got out the protoboard and used a pair of needle nose pliers to pull off all the pieces I didn’t need, since my hazard suit’s gloves were too big to get a good grip on the tiny components. Goodbye, almost-finished haptic feedback motion sensor system, it was nice knowing you. At least I could probably rebuild it from the photo I took a couple days ago. “Do you think there’ll be booby traps in here?” I asked while I worked on the inverter. I was pretty sure I heard one of the mercenaries trying to turn a laugh into a cough. “I mean like a security system, not spike pits and killer robots,” I clarified. “Actually, security robots aren’t necessarily impossible,” Orlex said. “Unlike other security components, they’d have a separate power source from the rest of the ship, and if they’re well shielded they might not show up on thermal imaging.” “Um. I’ve only seen security bots in movies, how do I avoid getting shot up by them in real life?” I asked, trying really hard not to sound terrified. “I didn’t mean to say we’d actually run into any,” Orlex said. “It’s a little hard to tell in a crashed ship left half-exposed to the elements, but this doesn’t look like the sort of outfit that can afford an AI security system. Maybe stationary motion detecting turrets at most, and those would’ve lost power with the rest of the ship, and probably wouldn’t have been armed when it crashed. But, if we do encounter anything shooting at us, the first thing to do is take cover.” “Got it, thanks,” I said. I plugged the last few resistors into the protoboard, and added a couple long lengths of wire to connect between the battery and the terminal’s power supply wires. “Okay, so I’ve got it rigged up so that adding more of these side loops to the circuit increases the voltage, and I can keep stepping it up til it works,” I said. “Too low shouldn’t break anything, and I made the increments small enough that it shouldn’t overshoot by enough to do much damage.” “Much?” Orlex asked. “Hopefully not any, but you never know. This is my first airlock.” I started to connect the terminal, battery and inverter, and then hesitated. “Uh, can you check my work, Nick?” “Yeah, sure.” Nick held the protoboard up to study it, and I couldn’t really see his expression through the glare on his hazard suit’s face shield, which was worrying since it felt like he was taking a really long time looking it over. Better to be embarrassed than to break our only way in if I’d messed it up, though. “I’ve never made an inverter from scratch before, but the wiring looks sound. Let’s give it a shot.” Nick handed the protoboard back to me. I connected the inverter to the terminal, and then to the battery’s positive terminal. I held the protoboard’s last unused wire over the battery’s negative terminal and hesitated. “Alright, here goes nothing.” I touched the wire to the negative terminal, and nothing happened. That wasn’t exactly surprising, since the airlock was only getting 12 volts, but it still felt really anticlimactic. So I disconnected everything from the protoboard inverter, connected one of the resistor circuits and hooked everything back up again, and again, until the terminal’s screen flickered a bit. “Okay, we’re getting warmer,” I said. “Let me try adding another.” The next time I reconnected everything, the door lurched open a couple inches, then stopped and made a mechanical clicking noise. I turned it off, increased the voltage a bit more and connected everything again, and the door jerkily slid open about a foot, then a few more inches, and then started making a horrible grinding sound. I disconnected the battery. “Do you think we can fit through that?” I asked, mostly looking at Orlex. “I could try letting it run a little longer, but that’s not a good noise it’s making.” “I think that’ll do,” Orlex said. “It could even be a strategic advantage, since it’d keep giant crocodiles and killer robots from following us out.” I looked around nervously, and then realized a few seconds too late that Orlex was joking. “Oh! Yeah, I guess that’s good,” I said awkwardly and smiled. I disconnected the protoboard from the terminal and put it back in its’ case. “Do you guys think we’ll need the battery again? It’s really heavy.”
    5 points
  46. C.S.V. Foundation Rimmon Mesa - 3.8 KM from Aegis Division convoy Fire Rift, Quentin IV - Federated Suns August 5, 3030 The massive aerial predator skulked through the angry skies, slithering left and right. Tasting and sniffing the air for it’s first victim. The beast slowed… then stopped… something on the ground below caught its attention. Bishop brought the Wendigo into low and slow orbit above a rock outcropping. They had been attempting to track the Aegis convoy for over thirty minutes. The truth of the matter was the Fire Rift was a formidable opponent. All the Wendigo’s instruments were greatly affected by the external environment, yet the sentient machine still tracked. The Wendigo saw it first and brought it to Bishops attention. They knew the convoy at slowed and separated, but as to why and where was a mystery. Captain Donovan’s last, and broken transmission indicated that. Below the circling monster, the convoy’s tracks broke apart. One set went north, the other went east. Bishop studied the diversion through the TAD, it was highlighted in a orange rectangle. Bishop could only make a some it in fractions of seconds. The dust and gloomy smoke caused him to be unable to full study them. The Wendigo would switch from thermal to daylight to night vision in two second intervals in the attempts to see through the environment. Both man and machine worked together to put the pieces of the puzzle together. Bishop struggled for a moment to make sense as to why Captain Maxwell would split the convoy…. +Rear of pack… lost… could not see..+ whispered the Vtol into Bishop’s mind. “Yeah, but where wild they go… looks like two heavy Mechs and a heavy recovery vehicle” Bishop said to himself. +men…..seeeeek….high ground… lost+ hissed the machine. Bishop nodded his head in agreement. Seconds later a topographical image was over laid on the visors HUD. Next came the real time thermal image from the TAD. Though he couldn’t see the buttes and valleys with is own eyes, Bishop could see were things were supposed to be, mixed with the thermal image. The Wendigo automatically changed all heat sources from white hot to black hot. This allowed a contrast to match the topographical overlay. Approximately a thousand meters out was a butte with a gradual ramp like terrain feature. Then the auto targeted lit up with three red boxes. Something was out there in the murky haze. It was moving away, towards the slope. The massive amount of heat and external interference didn’t allow a good view, however the sensors showed three active fusion reactors. The Wendigo slowly skulked forward, moving and shifting with the terrain.
    5 points
  47. C.S.V. Foundation Rimmon Mesa - 3.8 KM from Aegis Division convoy Fire Rift, Quentin IV - Federated Suns August 5, 3030 Sitting quietly in the cocoon of the Wendigo’s cockpit, Bishop’s watched the ever moving hellish landscape before him. The winds ripped up dust and volcanic ash, flinging it though the air. The ambient temperature outside hovered at sweltering 120 degrees Fahrenheit. The ski was a dirty, murky brown that was in a state of constant change. It was a truly hostile environment that would kill a man in minutes. If you were lucky, you could breath for a short time, technically the air was breathable. However, the off venting of the volcanic activity had poisoned much of the air in the Fire Rift. Ecologically, it was similar to the Yellowstone caldera on earth, ever changing and dangerous. Bishop, caught movement outside, the Crew Chief was moving about the aircraft disconnecting the auxiliary power cables and cooling lines. The Flight Crew moved about in environmental suits in the elements. The Wendigo watched and waited as well, it’s TAD senior and Mast Mount moving to keeping close watch of a possible prey. Sitting in the pilot’s seat the mercenary began his preflight checks… for the third time. Everything was in the green, and in standby mode. This would be the first time he would bring everything online at once and allow the helicopter’s CPU to be linked in. The Wendigo was armed with four medium lasers, two in the nose of the air craft and two gimbal wing mounted. It also carries two Streak Srm 2’s in the nose. The bird of prey also boast four hard points on its short stubby wing. Two on each side. Each one carrying a 15 shot unguided rocket pod. In total, an impressive amount of fire power. Enough to make light and medium Mechs scared. As for the heavies and assaults… Bishop smiled…. Enough to make them sweat. Bishop tapped a monitor with a gloved finger. Instantly, the display came to life showing the inside environmentally sealed troop compartment. Doused, in a creepy cold blue lighting sat ten Midnight Viper Commandos. All former Xenoplanetary Condition Troops (XCT) from Marik’s Safe special forces branch. Each trooper was fully encased in a heavy Combat Space Armor. The Fire Rift was really just a playground for the commandos. Their former home of Wendigo, a moon of Atreus was a truly hellish landscape. Their object was simple for this mission, Tactical Recovery of Assets and Personnel, TRAP. Cravyen needed a Irian Kill Team member alive. They were professional kidnappers or search and rescue team. Bishop smirked, it was a matter of perspective between the two. The Midnight Vipers were driven by two things… money and prestige. They are ruthless and persistent in the hunt for their prey. Captain Donovan’s voice barked out of the speakers “Bridge to Predator - it's go time. We're sending you attack vectors that will put you on an intercept course with two combined Irian lances. They're headed into the valley. Let's put the Midnight Vipers on them." The Beast lustfully howled in Bishops head. “Copy that sir”. Major Cortez was already down in the valley hunting the hunters. His reinforced Lance, Gaboon Five, consisted of his mech the rare Night Hawk, Griffin, Wolverine and Warhammer. The last member was an old warhorse tank…. Manticore. The unit had its mission…. Seek out the kill team and destroy them, while staying out of site of Aegis. They had gone dark the minute they stepped off into the valley. All IFF signatures were turned off, complete radio silence was enacted. They would be the hammer that would smash the Kill Team. Taipan Lace was made up of Bishop’s Wendigo, two Lucifers and a Karnov armed with a Ac 20. The Lucifers were already airborne staged on a holding pattern a few thousand kilometers to the north. He and his Lance would the quick response force that would flush the Kill Team to Gaboon Five. Bishop exhaled slowly, calming his nerves. This was the moment of truth. His first combat trail in a untested, experimental aircraft. What could go wrong, he thought. The veteran warrior slid the slaved flight helmet over his head, sliding the visor down he activated the helmet. Then he flipped a switch on the joystick. The Wendigo came to life, and Bishop was no longer a human. Like a lighting bolt, a surge of energy smashed into his mind and body. His eyes slammed shut. He felt as though he was being electrocuted. His mind and body shook violently, pain sheered through his spine and brain. Bishop tasted the familiar copper flavor of blood in his mind. Then it stopped, as quickly as it began. What Bishop felt next was familiar yet something new. He felt as though he was back in the Night Hawk suit, but this time he had more control. Bishop heard and felt the Wendigo in his mind, whispering to him to hunt and kill. But this time the feeling wasn’t overpowering. It was controlled…. Not a raging blood thirsty beast, it was intelligent. He opened eyes, to a shocking site. He expected to so see he’s HUD on the inside of the helmets visor. But he was actually looking through the Wendigo’s TAD and Mast Mount. Weapons, targeting, Armor, environmental sensors, troop compartment, engines…. He knew, he saw it all in his mind. The thought struck him…. He was the Wendigo. “Time to Hunt… skinwalker…. It’s time to kill…your pack is in great danger” The Wendigo’s voice was soothing and distant. Like a light whisper in the night. Bishop went to grasp the collective to release the rotors and increase power for lift off. Before his hand to touched it, it moved. The fusion engine hummed louder, the rotors began turning and picking up speeds. Seconds later the Wendigo was hovering 60 feet off the ground. Slowly, it turned in a full 360. The TAD and Mast Mount spun left and right, taking in the surroundings. Lighting crawled across the sky like a moving spiders web. As the thunder boomed, a loud roar could be heard by the ground crews. The Wendigo banked hard and dove down off the plateau disappearing into the hellosh darkness of the valley
    5 points
  48. DropShip crash site - Outer bands of the Fire Rift region Quentin IV - Federated Suns August 5, 3030 ______________________________________________ I felt the hot wind buffeting my cooling suit and heard it whipping and whistling through the giant cavern as I dropped down off the bottom rung of the rope ladder hanging out of my Rifleman's cockpit. As my feet hit the dirt, I squinted ahead at the wreckage of the droppship that loomed in the distance, weird, crazy shadows spilling across its hull in all directions from the floodlights of our 'Mechs and Levi's recovery vehicle. I started to let out a low whistle and then realized that whistling wasn't really a thing in the rebreathing mask strapped to my face. "I have never in my life seen such a perfect crash." said Lieutenant Jaeger as he walked up next to me. I nodded in agreement, staring through a set of light amplified field binoculars and sweeping their field of view across the ship's hull. "How many guys do you think are hiding in that cargo hold waiting to jump out and disappear us?" Levi asked, donning a pair of welding goggles to shield his eyes from the debris-laden air and flipping open the UV protection lenses after apparently realizing how dark they made everything. "You'd have to be really desperate to make this your raiding stronghold." I answered. "Like, desperate and mentally unhinged." "You're basically describing every pirate in the Oberon Confederation." said Levi. "And those are people I definitely don't want to run into if we actually go inside that thing." "Well, I may have a way to tell if anyone's in there. I'll be right back." I said, heading back to my Rifleman's cockpit. As I climbed back up the ladder, I heard Levi ask, "Where's he going?" to which Orlex replied with an audible shrug. A moment later, I returned with a sniper rifle I'd bought on the black market when we'd returned to Sheratan. Up to this point, it was kept strapped to the bulkhead in my cockpit. Now, it was going to see some action. Jaeger gave me an impressed look as I approached with the oversized weapon cradled in both of my hands. "That's a hell of a piece. Gonna guess DiForenza hooked you up?" "Yeah, set me back a good bit. Glad I had accrued a year's wages by the time we got back home." I answered. "Whoa, that looks like those big guns they use in the movies!" Levi exclaimed. "Is it heavy? It looks heavy." I handed the weapon to Levi. He buckled at the knees as he took it from me. "Wow. How do they run with these things in the action scenes?" "Those are made of fiberglass." I responded, taking the rifle back, flipping open its tripod and dropping to a prone position. "This one is real." As I balanced the weapon on its mount, Jaeger kneeled down beside me. "What do you have in mind?" the Lieutenant asked. I tapped the enormous telescopic scope on the top of the gun. "I tore apart an IR scanner and stuffed its guts in here. It doesn't get quite the range it used to, but it should definitely be able to see if there's any ghouls in that ship." "Clever. I'm gonna need to get that recipe from you when this is over." Levi commented. I gave a thumbs-up and turned on the scope. The scanner came online with a high-pitched whine. I looked through the scope and watched as it flared to a bight white and then darkened as it calibrated itself to the ambient temperature, the rocks and landscape around us transitioning to a deep purple. I swung its crosshairs down and across the hull of the DropShip. The vessel looked almost a deep, royal blue as I swept it for anomalies. I spotted a hazy, crimson mass that I assumed was the fusion reactor, pulsing intermittently, trying to keep the ship alive. Here and there, I also caught small reddish shapes moving around in random parts of the DropShip, probably rodents or other local wildlife, though I couldn't imagine what could survive in a place like the Fire Rift. I also saw a few other spots that looked like pockets of superheated air or something that had become trapped in the ship, probably from fissures that had opened underneath it. Eventually, I turned off the scope and got back up to my feet. "See anything?" Lieutenant Jaeger asked. "Oh yeah, plenty of stuff. Rats, most likely, and the fusion reactor. Couple of parts of the ship are hotter than others, which could be either ambient stuff or the reactor leaking." "But nothing that would murderize us the second we turn our backs on it?" Levi asked. I shrugged. "Well, I mean, I don't know what kind of performance enhancing drugs the rats have been doing, and I'm not sure how good my scope is at picking up reptiles, but superficially, I'd say we're pretty safe." "Unless a 4 meter crocodile decides to eat our faces off." Levi added. "Well, let's hope that doesn't happen. Thanks, Nick. You planning on hauling that thing with you or do you want to stow it?" Orlex asked. "I'll keep it on me." I replied, swinging the rifle across my back with a strap. "Never know when I might need to pop some alligators." *** A few minutes later, we had entered what was left of the cargo hold. It was dark and claustrophobic, its goods smashed everywhere and the hold itself filled 3/4 of the way up with volcanic ash and other detritus that had accumulated over who knows how long. I clicked on my pen light and looked around, noting that all of the signage in the hold was in Kanji, the traditional written language of the Draconis Combine. "That could be a problem." I commented, pointing at the characters on the walls. "Either of you guys read Japanese?" "I speak English and Bad English." Levi laughed, overturning a large, wrecked panel that blocked our route to the far wall of the cargo hold. "What about you, Lieutenant?" "I can't say it was in my repertoire of languages I've picked up over the years." said Orlex. "Surely you must have picked some of it up in the LIC?" "Yeah, I know a few key phrases. Enough to get me in trouble. Or get me out of it, depending on the situation. 'I am a duly authorized agent of the Archon,' 'We will blockade your world,' 'This is an unlawful detention,' that sort of thing. Not sure how helpful that's gonna be when it comes to getting systems online." I explained as we reached the sealed hold door that led deeper into the bowels of the ship. "Our best bet is gonna be to find a computer console and hope that they have some language packs installed." "Well, this one doesn't work." Levi groaned, tapping the dust-covered keys of a dead terminal mounted beside the bulkhead. "And I think this isn't just a regular door. It's an airlock. That's not something we're gonna be able to just shimmy open with a credit card." "Well, I would ordinarily suggest we blast it open, but if we're talking about keeping this thing airworthy, let alone spaceworthy, I have a feeling that more holes in it than it already has isn't the answer. Got any suggestions?" I asked. Levi looked like he was giving it some thought. Then, without warning, he grabbed a fallen section of metal conduit and smacked it hard against the side of the terminal. A bolt clattered out of the large CRT display's wall mount and bounced across the floor of the hold. A moment later, the monitor itself crashed to the floor, leaving an "X" shape and an orphaned keyboard on the wall where it had previously been. "What the hell was that?" I blurted out. Levi looked crestfallen. "That's how we fixed the vending machines at the corner store when the language setting broke. I thought maybe it could reset the door controls, too." "Under normal circumstances, I'd question the sanity of that plan." Orlex offered. "But you might actually be on to something. Most airlock controls are supposed to have a battery fallback. Not enough power to actually cycle the airlock itself, but adequate to release the locking mechanisms. Assuming that terminal still works after its unplanned dissasembly just now, you think you could get it powered on, Levi?"
    5 points
  49. Bay 12 - Overlord Class Dropship-Foundation Space Port Gellen's Heights, Sheratan Tikonov Free Republic July 16, 3030 Bishop sat brooding with a cup off coffee staring at the Wendigo and tech crews working on it. His mind heavy with thought. The Skinwalker mentally reviewed the the status of the mission. All said, he was pleased. Captain Maxwell had taken the bait, the Trojan Horse tactic had worked. Bishop had brought the Team tons of ammunition, supplies, techs, and equipment. The Mechwarrior Combat Suits and helmets were the apex of the gifts. As the Aegis guys worked and drooled over the gear, Dr. Kucera executed her mission flawlessly. Bishop had spent weeks with her on the flight over training her in basic operative skills. The rare, Combination Sneak Suit payed off big in her success. Her training consisted mostly of evasion and stealth training. The scientist learned quickly in his crash corse lessons. She would spend hours running/ moving and hiding on the Foundation as he hunted her. He was proud of her progress and the final result. She learned well. Aegis couldn’t move without him and Captain Donovan knowing. She had played a pivotal roll in this on going Operation. The clicking of a keyboard snapped him back to real time. “How goes it?” Asked Bishop. “As usual….fucked up. Over the past hour I’ve had to shut it down and recalibrate the targeting system and weapons safety locks three times.” Breathed the Master Tech. The man was exhausted. Markus Smith was the Master Tech assigned to the Vtol project. He was of South African descent and still maintained his tribal heritage. Markus was pushing 75 in age but looked in his young 50s. The man had been working on war machines since the age of ten. He came from a long family history of techs that worked for the FedSuns. He was a stern man with sharp brown eyes and a sharp mind. The Wendigo was his mystery to solve… his greatest challenge or addiction. The Wendigo, was the tech crew’s name for the Vtol. The name stuck and it was now its official name…. Wendigo-X3. The Wendigo-X3 was something of an enigma to all, but it’s deadliness was already well know. The X3 title was earned for the three junior techs who had taken their lives while working on the Vtol. Bishop spent two weeks doing doing the investigation into the three fatalities. Cravyen HR closed the investigation, stating that the three techs had suffered mental breakdowns do to job stress. Weyland and Markus knew the real secret….so did the CEO. Prior to the three tragedies, many of the techs complained of strange incidents, unexplained injuries and even voices being heard while working on the airframe. The project came to a screeching halt for two weeks when everyone refused to work it. Some called it possessed or cursed. Markus was the only one who volunteered for project when he found out what was going on. He was able to to convince most of the techs to come back, for double their pay. “Can’t you just reprogram the CPU?” Bishop was becoming annoyed. “Look… you know we’ve already done this! This thing went off the fucking rails when we slaved that Blake forsaken helmet to the system. We are dealing with shit that I haven’t seen in along time Bishop, a real long time. This bastard has Star League tech that has obviously been tampered with…. I think. Everything is showing it’s in the Green… functioning within normal parameters, as per Irian’s manuals.” Markus leaned back in his chair, annoyedly drinking from his coffee cop. Bishop could smell the bourbon laced in the man’s coffee. “Is it ready for combat?” Weyland watch as the TAS hemisphere slowly tracked a tech walking in front of it. Markus didn’t answer the directly, he too caught the targeting system moving. Master Tech’s voice dropped low. “ Lieutenant….I’ve been doing this for a long time… to long maybe. You know I’ve seen this before… machines that have a spirt… some good and some not. Nothing like this….this… this damn thing is alive and it fucking thinks. It fucks with you…it legitimately wants to murder you. Yet Kauffman wants it operational…. reckless bastard.” Bishop started to speak but Markus cut him off. “It was operational on day one…till these, issues, showed up and slowed things down. Also the upgrades you had us change out didn’t help. All we had to do was was a final shake down. The safety measures we put in place haven’t helped either” Bishop knew this too. No one was allowed to work by themselves on the airframe. No matter how big or small the issue was the entire crew had to come in and watch. The targeting and weapons had to be manually disconnected. None of the systems were allowed to be connected to the VTOL’s CPU. Everything had to be run trough a portable data terminal and isolated. Load music was often played by the techs so they couldn’t hear the “whispers”. Even the all the lights in the Bay had to be turned on….yet there always seemed to be a shadow over the airframe. The ships crew, Captain Donovan, Dr. Kucera the Midnight Viper…. Everyone avoided Bay 12 like it was plague. “So… it will fly soon.. correct” The Skinwalker stated in flat tone. “Yeah….your beasty will be done soon.” Quipped the Master Tech. Bishop’s data pad buzzed, with a touch of his finger the Skinwalker’s eyes locked on the information that scrolled by. Operation Hidden Meteor…”Well done Lieutenant Jaeger” thought Bishop. Weyland quickly closed that screen and opened another. The Midnight Vipers were already stalking the Irian Kill Team that was planet side. The Marik unit was the best at what they did…they actually enjoyed their work. Though Bishop wasn’t sure of if Captain Donovan shared his admiration for the unit or their CO. A smile broke across the Skinwalker’s face. He was now in his element.
    5 points
  50. Refrigerator interior, galley, M.V. Tana December 11, 3028 ___________________________ Patient Jenkins pounded on the closed refrigerator door. "Hey rust-for-brains, open up! Give me back my HangEeeze!" The patient tugged on the door's handle. MediBot grasped the door's inside handle and closely matched the force exerted by the patient. It occasionally allowed the door to open slightly, then slowly forced it closed again. The randomized incentive of successfully forcing the door open would motivate the patient to continue exercising. "Hey, stop that!" the patient shouted as MediBot started to force the door closed again for the third time. Patient Jenkins grabbed the edge of the door. Medibot pulled the door most of the way closed - but not all the way, because the patient's hand was in the way. "Aaaaagh!" the patient screamed. "Dexter, you have to help me, this robot is deranged!" Patient Jenkins continued tugging on the door. MediBot considered that screaming often indicated unhealthily high stress levels, and therefore this treatment might be counterproductive. MediBot let go of the refrigerator door, the door was flung open, and the door and Patient Jenkins both slammed against the galley wall. MediBot wheeled out of the refrigerator just far enough to clear the door allow it to close, then turned toward the patient. Patient Jenkins lay on the galley floor, and looked very relaxed. MediBot placed the box of HangEeeze in the patient's hand. "Patient Jenkins, are you still experiencing the symptom Vomiting?" MediBot asked. The patient did not respond, so MediBot recorded the symptom as cured and played a series of ascending beeps on its' speakers. It rolled back towards Med Bay, and began reviewing possible treatments for Concussion, Bruising, and Phalanges Crush Injury.
    5 points
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