“Battlenet is all lit up, apparently it’s pretty hairy.”
“Anti-air?”
“Everything. We’ve got in-atmo ships trying to flee up into orbit and it’s just piling on from there. One captain even opened a rift in-orbit in her desperation, against every protocol – risking a nuclear reaction from split atmospheric atoms. Bit of a clusterfuck, actually. I don’t know how the Guardians manage to keep any of these planets from The Black Armada.”
“How long until we rift, Al?”
The briefest of pauses from the secondary voice of the A.I. lurking in their shared head. They’d been experimenting recently with speaking to each other aloud to better define themselves as individuals, despite sharing one true body.
“Nice timing. Here we go, actually. Just got the fleet signal from Admiral McKinnis for rift generators to start spinning up in one minute.”
“Can you check the Jackhammer and do a quick systems scan?”
“I’ve done five already, three at your request.”
“Run one more.”
A few seconds passed.
“Done. We’ll be fine. We were literally built for this, remember?”
“Yeah.”
They settled in, one digitally, and one in the physical sense, adjusting the harness inside the cramped, drop shield. It was uncomfortable, narrow, and the chest bar barely dropped below the shoulders. These tin cans were built to be disposable after all – more armor plating and heat shielding than anything else. Designed for Seraphs at best, but only on larger ships.
They definitely weren’t designed for someone over eight feet tall and weighing the same or more than a piloted suit of Chayot power armor in mass. Every time he shifted their weight, the whole damn drop shield creaked on the restraining bar, giving the illusion that it might dislodge early and leave the pair drifting out in empty space with a rapidly dwindling air supply. And no matter which way the cyborg shifted or turned, there was simply no comfort to be found whatsoever in the spring-loaded plastic and foam bucket seat that was pressed right down against the floor bolts, with little to zero suspension left over. Knees were pulled up, of course.
The tiny porthole window peered out into the well-lit hangar where dozens of other drop shields were hanging to the left and right in two staggered rows, all suspended on mechanical arms – dangling the pods half in, half out of the atmosphere shielding. They were still somewhat within the ship’s gravity generated well across the bottom hull of the ship. Naval crews bustled between the rows of fighters, transports, and other armor or dropships across the hangar floor, checking cold fusion engine fuel levels, targeting computers, life support, and a myriad of other systems. The many types of machines would be sent out into combat after the initial drop shield wave had cleared out a section of anti-air defenses. Each sat with engines at a low-throttle idle upon their individual yellow-boxed landing pads.
Creator’s Grace.
A frigate.
Frigates were the smallest military class ship. But it suddenly felt like the smallest ship in the fleet, not that they would be stuck on it for very long, being about to drop planetward.
“Here we go. Rift generators spinning up across the support fleet.”
The whining, rumbling, and humming noises were unmistakable even through the heavy metal armored exterior of the capsule, at least on the half still inside the ship’s atmosphere. The ship’s enormous generator was joining the rest of their siblings in beginning the process of rifting. It consisted of brute-forcing two points in spacetime together through sheer expenditure of physics-manipulated energies and the compression of spacetime. Failure mid-transition through the glowing white portal was usually lethal to most involved as the ship was guillotined in two. The possibility of the edge of the rift splitting an atom in the wrong way within any environment with atmosphere and causing a nuclear explosion had established travel norms and common practices or protocols across space centuries ago.
“Rifts are up, here we go.”
There was a sudden lurch from the side, as the propulsion engines took the excess energy produced from the rift generator and used it via the engines and thrusters to push the frigate through the jagged white hole of glowing meshed reality against the backdrop of stars.
Perfectly parallel, for safety’s sake.
“I’ll pull up a bow-facing feed. You know the drill.”
Xex Project One closed his left organic eye, as having two different viewpoints at once sometimes made them a bit dizzy. Picture in picture was easier. Adjusting to the shifting of the frigate as it moved, they watched the feed delivered from the Frigate’s own equipment in silence as it was streamed through their shared cybernetic right eye and optical nerve. The bow disappeared, as the white hole enveloped the ship within itself like a hungry maw.
The bow slipped through the glowing portal, getting larger and larger as it approached the camera mounting. As even a small frigate like Creator’s Grace was a good half-kilometre wide to accommodate hangars and other facilities, the rift rapidly enveloped that point of view. The feed distorted, blurred, and then disconnected due to rift interference across the compressed spacetime for a brief moment, flickering and restarting once clear into stable space on the other side.
Chaos awaited.
Creator’s Grace immediately slowed, then increased in acceleration, pushing through a cloud of light ship debris. The camera was obscured almost entirely as the small frigate started plowing husks and scraps of destroyed fighters and mechs in a halo around and behind it, in a slowly spreading and oscillating ring of destruction.
The Captain and Pilot deftly avoided the larger pieces of ship remains.
Clumps of variously damaged machines of war drifted in loose patches, silhouetted here and there against the infinite stars of the Milky Way. The quiet of space, interspersed with the motionless drifting shells of scuttled or holed battlecruisers, frigates, destroyers, and other forgotten or abandoned ships of the earlier conflict. Not to mention the hundreds if not thousands of Harbingers, Justices, and other heavy equipment, fighters, or transport craft in however many shattered pieces. Both scuttled ships and otherwise were already in the process of decaying in their orbits, to burn up or crash somewhere far below.
All dancing with each other in orbit for now according to the whims of gravity.
At least the artificial meteor showers planetside would be pretty for a while.
The fleet broke formation at the orders of Admiral McKinnis, weaving through this gruesome evidence of this earlier point in the fighting. Clearly the battle had been going for quite a time already, judging by some of the free-floating freeze-dried bodies.
Ebullism was a bitch.
From inside the drop shield, in their shared body, the two could feel the rumbling and rattling of it all clattering along the armored hull of the frigate, as the ship’s artificial gravity pulled it back towards the bottom of the hull and it ricocheted again and again before spinning out aimlessly behind the engines somewhere. A few bolts or pieces of shrapnel even clattered along the outside half of the line of staggered drop shields.
The camera feed, once clear of the larger debris field, opened up to a bright view of the familiarly marbled oceans and continents of Grossenburg and it’s two tiny moons with weak overlapping tidal forces. If not for the shapes of the landmasses or continents, one might mistake it for Earth at first glance. Green fields and rocky yellow plateaus stretched across enormous open plains below along most of the continents. The tiny shapes of at least a dozen different ships hung in the skies around several of the cities, tiny silver bricks and cylinders dangling above the greens, whites, and grays.
Even the largest of the battlecruisers, destroyers, or carriers providing air support were mere pinpricks above the landscapes. Grossenburg wasn’t much for geological activity, having a rather weak magnetic field itself outside that of the moons, so the pathetic excuses for what constituted mountain ranges allowed the duo to see most of what there was to view from up here across this hemisphere, highlighted with lines and markers by Alfred across the HUD via the Friend or Foe system.
It was a strange target for the Black Armada to attack and invade, as it mostly just served as a world devoted to livestock production and genetic engineering endeavours towards similar industries. Many of the neutral groups had a local presence – The Conversion Corporation, Sunbelt Supply Co., The Junk & Rumblers Guild, and even The Unitary Mercenary Guild.
The loudspeaker in the drop shield crackled simultaneously with a click just before a voice projected across the battlenet. All channels shifted automatically over to the fleet command channel.
A fleet-wide communique.
“Alright folks, they know we’re here. Captain Duke, you have Division one, cut off that carrier’s escape route above the capital and engage any other remaining Armada up here. Blinsky, you’re running cover on our ground forces as they make the approach, you’ll be covering the friendly ships’ escape vectors coming up from below. Thor’s Hammer Protocols, green light to engage.”
“Contacts sir – coming around Grossenburg now. Orders?”
“All pilots, one minute. Ground teams, your individual LZs are in and around the capital as assigned by your commanding officers. Assume all zones are hot with both air and ground defenses. They’ve had forty eight hours to settle in already. Primary objectives are to take back Firebase Dragon in the commerce district of downtown Jalahad. After Dragon is secure, we work to establish a beachhead from there and we begin the push to take back Jalahad from The Black Armada. We’ll be supporting as best we can from orbit while we take on the Armada’s Naval assets. Once we have the capital, we push outwards from there after establishing full orbital control.”
“You sure about Thor’s Hammer, sir? Rail gun rounds from orbit could result in civilian casualties. Even with our onboard Class 6 doing the targeting math…”
“That’s an order, Captain Blinsky. Green light to engage. I’ll leave it up to each Captain’s individual discretion after that.”
Blinsky started barking orders and the comms link cut him off abruptly, pruning the rest of the Naval fleet from the local ship bridge conversation.
At the briefest pondering, Alfred brought up the FoF overlay, and suddenly every ship in the formation around the bow camera as well as the smaller craft in formation were each highlighted with a neon green box, circle, diamond, or triangle indicating their name, a shorthand faction acronym, and their commanding officer in capital letters.
A number of red boxes and smaller triangles representing Black Armada ships and units, barely visible as a cluster of grey specks, each peeked just over the horizon in a similar formation. They were coming fast, and rapidly growing larger on an approaching intercept trajectory, marked with transparent blue lines stretching out across the void of space. It wouldn’t be long before it became a full Naval shootout when the two sides reached fire-accurate railgun range.
Some enemy ships were already beginning to unload their massive bow-mounted railguns even at this enormous distance, most resulting in wasted shots that were quickly pulled down into the gravity well to burn up harmlessly in the atmosphere, or which sailed off out into space at odd angles, doomed to travel onwards forever through empty space until hitting something.
Perhaps the moons would catch stray rounds in their orbit?
The Friend or Foe system overlaid atop the scene and the planet below them slowly populated even further over the course of fifteen seconds or so from the full G.O.D. battlenet reaching out and making connections to friendlies. It made the scene even more chaotic, as it rapidly devolved into something resembling piles of green and red confetti, with various FoF boxes scattered and interspersed across much of the main continent below.
Two theatres. One up here, and one down below. Ground. Orbit.
The G.O.D. was clearly not doing very well in defending Grossenburg over the past week or so, based on the enormous plumes of black smoke coming from open wildfires raging across much of the grasslands and the similar smoke trails from cityscapes below. Plasma weapons were well known to be ecological fire hazards in terraformed forests or grasslands. Red confetti also criss-crossed the majority of the cities, with only tiny patches of green interspersed in smaller portions, or stranded out in the green plains away from the heaviest fighting and moving desperately towards the population centers.
“We’re dipping through the gravity well, drop position in thirty seconds. Are you ready?”
“Ready as I’ll ever be.”
They adjusted again in the bucket seat, reaching behind to lock their helmet on the peg above the headrest. In reply, the drop shield creaked and groaned in metallic annoyance at the immense weight shift again.
Through the tiny porthole in the hangar proper, Rows of cold fusion engines were roaring to life, each with the same blue-orange light pulsing from the various thrusters and engine outputs. Each Agatha and Sophie transport was packed full of Guardian forces – Seraphs, Chayots, Judicators, Sentinels, Shocktroopers, and even the rare minor god, ready to take the fight planetside. Nearby each transport was a Tabetha or Justice, often in pairs, warming up to escort the dropships to each intended landing zone and provide air support across different squads and companies.
The full myriad of The Guardians of Destiny Army & Navy.
The combat briefing had been simple enough, even without the Admiral’s reminder – secure or take back the firebase, reclaim the city, and then push out the Armada fully from Grossenburg from there once they could establish a proper beachhead for reinforcements to land.
All while praying the fleets above could ensure that they didn’t get annihilated from orbital strikes and win the fight for air & orbital support…
“Doesn’t look good down there. You were right about the anti-air guns. And looks like Captain Blinsky is already taking Thor’s Hammer Protocol to heart. He’s softening up the AA for us, albeit sloppily and inaccurately.”
“Well, let’s hope they miss when they shoot back, huh?”
Alfred turned their focus to the HUD countdown.
“Dropping in three, two, one…”
There was a loud clang, and in unison, each drop shield in the row swung back completely from the energy barrier, the two mechanical arms pulling at them precariously from where they were attached at the twin bars mounted on top. It swung and locked with another clunking noise, yanking it out of safe position and moving the dangling capsule out over empty space in a full one hundred and eighty degree turn.
Full weightlessness far enough outside the safety of the hangar shielding combined with the immense weight of the figure within pulled an unhappy groan from the two clamps as they reached max extension, making an already precarious situation even more tenuous.
Engines lighting up the aircraft hangar were now at a full roar, not that they could be heard as much more than a dull metallic vibration through the clamps above.
The fleet channel clicked on in the pod. Alfred already provided a constant comms feed.
“Drop shields, dropping you on my mark… Inbound on Jalahad drop trajectory… Five. Four. Three. Two. One. MARK!”
The mechanical arms of each drop shield pushed downwards, shunting their mostly weightless cargo down towards Grossenburg. Inside their own capsule, they were flung upwards against the drop bar with the inertia almost immediately. The g-forces were immense, amplified with the extra weight of the half-mechanical occupants.
Thank fuck for the weightlessness of space!
Alfred cut the bow camera feed and restored normal vision, as the pods fell out of orbital space proper into a lower orbit. The planet loomed up below them. Gravity of the planet pulled downwards towards their feet more and more, the tinges of atmosphere more visible now outside as a hazy cerulean in all directions around the curve of the planet.
Peeking out the porthole and back up towards the rapidly shrinking Creator’s Grace, lines upon lines of transports and fighter craft were deploying from a dozen different ships as tiny specks outlined in green boxes, filling the space behind them in formation to follow up their drop shield sneak-attack with proper reinforcement and armor. Within a minute the edge of the horizon was gone, replaced only by that hazy blue-white of the descent through lower orbit. It was slowly getting hot.
The gray specks and visibility of space disappeared.
Alfred’s concern prickled in the back of his mind.
“So running some quick math… These things really weren’t designed for our weight. We’re dropping too fast.”
“And?”
“I can’t correct it without blowing our thrusters too early.”
“I know you can just jump around the network, buddy, but don’t leave me hanging here.”
Such a joke could only be for Alfred, as they both knew how trapped the Class 7 was in their shared physical body. The countdown clock to impact had popped up in his HUD, populated by Alfred via the inorganic right eye. He couldn’t help but notice that the five minute timer skipped further down every few seconds as Al recalculated the distance to impact quicker and quicker
An altitude number dropped in sync just below it on the HUD.
“Ah, Commander One, you’re breaking formation. Can you reduce your speed?”
Lieutenant Yorke’s voice – tuning into their predicament.
“I know, we’re working on it. Too heavy. Stand by.”
The drop shield was already uncomfortably hot, as friction from the capsule moving so quickly through the atmosphere prickled orange flames to engulf the bottom of the shield, and lick at the portholes. They had experienced re-entry a half dozen times, but never in a drop shield before.
One was still in training, technically.
Usually they were riding in the cushier Agatha or Vera transports behind them. Someone had clearly miscalculated, or perhaps this was all just another weapons test. How many tests had they been forced through already in the short time since they had first woken up?
“Okay, I have a plan, but you’re not going to like it.”
“Beats burning up on re-entry or dying on impact.”
“Yorke, this little trick will likely mess with our trajectory. You’re in charge of the squad on the ground should we miss the LZ or splatter on impact.”
“Sir?”
“No time to explain, Lieutenant.”
Yorke, their ever-faithful handler and second in command out in the field. Another brief pause as Alfred crunched some more numbers. The heat was sweltering at this point, and they had clearly fallen much faster than the rest of the drop pods. They were just starting to crest into the stratosphere, and the FoF system was beeping loudly as a slew of anti-aircraft guns and intercept fighters loomed to meet the waves of drop pods and transport craft descending down like a massive swarm of flies. Being the first to fall into range, Alfred had his hands full trying to block targeting systems and missile locks as well.
Peeking down through the flames outside the porthole, the blue sky all around them was filled with the incoming white and orange streaks of stray railgun rounds, intercept missiles, and vibrant yellow sprays of flak. Each effort was soaring upwards at the formation of drop shields behind, most aiming for the main cluster of aircraft somewhere above them on descent – having failed to get a proper lock on their lower drop shield. Aside from the railguns, they were mostly far outside the appropriate range, but all of it proved dangerous for the drop nonetheless.
“Okay, pull the air brake when I tell you to.”
The massive hand reached over and settled on the lever that would engage the four-pronged flaps of the metal air brake system, the one designed to slow the final descent. In the simulations, they wouldn’t even touch it normally until the drop shield crested the Troposphere.
Via Alfred’s directions, the hematic plates had already started to recalibrate and reassemble themselves in layers via the nanites, assembling the armor through the channelled pressure gates on the outside of the body suit. Even a thin hematic layer on top of the skin itself. The microscopic swarm of technology inside the host weapon worked fast, locking and assembling each dark reddish-gray plate into place in webs of gray, like an amoeba swarm or slime mold. The tiny robots were layering it on thicker than they normally would, even against the standard formations for heavy caliber weaponry or concussive blast force.
Alfred clearly had some sort of plan concocted. One was getting whiffs of it across the shared layers.
“Ready on that air brake… Aaaaaaaaaand… NOW!”
He pulled the lever. A loud bang, and then they were spinning.
“Oh shit.”
“Don’t tell me, the air brake failed.”
“How’d you know?”
“Because we’re spinning all over the fucking place?”
The briefest of pauses. The comms chatter trickled in bursts over the battlenet as the channel rapidly switched to each active feed input as most relevant. The only silver lining was that the brief slowdown and wild spinning helped to dissipate some of the re-entry flames cooking the exterior.
They wouldn’t burn up on atmospheric entry. That was good.
“Okay, new plan, even stupider, but pretty much our only shot. I’m going to use the rest of our thruster fuel in one go to stabilize and slow us just enough to avoid breaking up when we hit the Troposphere, and when we hit do, you’re bailing out. God damn I wish these things didn’t have the same outdated operating system as a fucking century-old Harbinger.”
“Whelp, best few months of living a superweapon could have. See you in the afterlife buddy.”
“Not yet. Here we go.”
Alfred’s timer had dropped down to just below two minutes to impact. The portholes were spinning wildly, with the faint blue of sky one millisecond, and the greens, grays, blues, and whites of the surface below the next – beyond the fading orange-red flames outside.
The ground was approaching at an intimidating pace.
It was unbearably hot, and even the flesh on their face where the bodysuit ended at the neck was starting to redden and blister ever so slightly, despite the immaculate genetic engineering that rendered them tougher and more resistant than normal humans to extremes.
“Test locking your joints until we’re stable.”
It was strange, feeling the clicking of each joint freezing in place with each mechanism that locked. He could still flex the organic and artificial muscles, and couldn’t help but tense most of their body with the surge of adrenaline.
“Here we go. I’ll unlock you until you get stable again, but before impact.”
The capsule jolted and hit weightlessness for a few seconds, slowly coming to right itself as stabilizer thrusters on all sides fired at Al’s command to turn upright the drop shield and slow it as much as possible. The locked joints prevented whiplash, but it still felt like being launched from a slingshot the size of a tank. The jolting and vibrating lasted about ten seconds before the limited fuel ran out, with flames still licking lightly up the porthole. The shitty plastic bucket seat rocked on its springs wildly in protest the whole time, squeaking and groaning, fighting the thrusters.
“Alright, unlocking our joints, throw your helmet on. You’re blowing the door seal on this thing in the next five seconds.”
There was a mad scramble to grab the helmet from the lock, and after two pulls failed to dislodge it even with their strength, the cold fusion engine in his back wound up and he ripped it free of the storage post completely, breaking the lock with a savage chop from the flash-energized wrist blade on the Hazard Gear of the other forearm.
“Door seal, now. And get away from the drop shield as best you can once clear, it’s going to start breaking up the minute the pressure integrity is gone. These are designed to be cheap and single use after all.”
The weapon reached over to the heavy crank that would blow the door from the drop shield with pneumatic force, and yanked the arm, the fusion engine in the back roaring. Almost immediately there was the shrieking and whistling of open air, and they were pulled out along with the ejecting door – still holding the crank, as it punched out from the drop shield with abrupt, violent force.
Sky.
Ground.
Sky.
Ground.
It took a good dozen seconds to stop the spinning and spiralling with the skydiving instructions Alfred shunted to the forefront of their brain and systems. Alfred threw up a horizon compass, helping to adjust themselves into the star position. They watched as the drop shield falling slightly faster below them began to fragment and spin itself apart into pieces. The door, crumpling into a “U” shape from the force of pneumatic ejection, was falling sideways, occasionally flipping itself wildly like a leaf as the wind caught the underside.
“Captain!”
“Still here Yorke. Definitely off-target. You’re in charge.”
A quiet pause from Yorke.
“See you at Firebase Dragon, Sir.”
Trust.
“You bet.”
The freefall was stabilizing, with the enormous skyscrapers of Jalahad rising up off to their left – Northeast.
Most of the glass, steel, and concrete towers were hundreds of stories tall.
“One minute to impact.”
No words, just thoughts racing back and forth across the bridge between digital and organic. Data storage to grey matter and back again.
“Try to ignore how hot your back is going to get in a few seconds.”
The roaring of air was accompanied by a second sound, the cold fusion engine seated just behind their spine suddenly winding up to full power. He could feel the strength flow through him, boosting his artificial muscle fibers and various organs and subsystems.
“Definitely wasn’t designed for this, but it’s all we got.”
The plasma shielding flared into existence around them. Normally it was only a dull neon blue, fading with each projectile impact to green, orange, yellow, and then sputtering out shortly after red if the fusion engine couldn’t keep up to recharge the ionized bubble.
It was almost white now, clearly cranked on overdrive. The two sources of heat from both the roaring cold-fusion fusion engine and the overcharged shield itself were prickling up the spine and flesh like goosebumps.
“What’re you doing?”
“Airbag.”
Made sense.
“Hey, so I was explicitly told not to activate some of these modules yet as per protocols, but seeing as we have about forty-five seconds before you pancake into the fields outside Jalahad…”
The HUD lit up, and there was a flood of information as Alfred forcibly shunted simulation data into the weapon’s partially cybernetic brain. Flight experience, physics data, power output levels, and a half-dozen other minor systems hidden away, secrets only to be unlocked under direct orders.
“I can use those jump thrusters?!”
“They’re only designed to give you short boosts of about twenty feet horizontal in-atmosphere, and free-movement and directionality in zero-g space. They’re for copycatting Seraphs. They can’t keep our weight properly airborne, just assist us with jumps and sprints.”
The two inside One leaned back together, dropping two feet towards the rapidly approaching ground. The cold fusion generator was searing hot, the two feeling the sizzling of it against the other sets of organs, both organic and artificial. The exhaust poking from the back of the bodysuit and Hematic Plating was flaring blue-hot like an afterburner.
“Careful, we’re maxing out the reactor. Need to split what we have between thrusters and shielding. Still gonna be rough, make sure you tuck and roll as best you can, like in parkour training to disperse the kinetic vertical force horizontally in dissipation.”
The HUD overlay cut out, as did any awareness of the weapons systems hidden within the rectangular boxes locked on top of each forearm. In unison, the limbs also became sluggish and heavy, with only the gene-engineered organic muscle fibres to move them. Comms chatter too, died to silence, broken only by the howling wind – crossed as it was with the distant sound of explosions and gunfire. The body locked up again, in preparation for impact.
Even the connection between their organic and machine mind slowed, as Alfred shunted as much power to the two roaring systems as possible. Shared thoughts that normally would be instantaneous seemed to float hazily for a second before truly landing, like being inebriated, sedated, drugged, or fatigued.
The reduction in thinking speed sans Alfred’s help was disconcerting and mildly terrifying.
Two small main thrusters, definitely not online or accessible to him before, were tucked up on either side against the left and right of the reactor’s exhaust afterburner. The apparatus distended slightly from between the shoulderblades, with the two slots now serving as open channels. Both were now roaring right alongside the fusion engine exhaust now, itself flaring a dangerously hot blue-white in lieu of the normal orange. Each toggled up and down slightly like the afterburners on a fighter jet, directing propulsion. Several smaller thrusters flared across the legs and hips. They were located similarly to where a Seraph’s might be.
Each thruster was directed as far downwards as possible, cooking the weapon’s back even through the bodysuit, and blackening the hematic plating further from a normal rust and dark grey coloration. It even started sizzling the edges of the black-iron-compounds as organic and mechanical nanites within the superweapon struggled to keep up with the epidermal damage of superheated armor plates against bodysuit and flesh.
The ground was closing fast, and without a HUD counter anymore, all that was left to do was trust in the partnership. They tensed their organic muscles in the same way as the locked artificial black muscle fibers woven around and between them.
The plasma shield flared up even further a good ten seconds before impact, heat billowing out from both the thrusters against the bottom inner demisphere of the shield itself. The plasma projector angled the entirety of the shield into a white-hot half-sphere, bubbling and sizzling angrily below their feet unlike the normal neon blue hum. The burning sensation was nigh intolerable, both via the heat rising up from the overcharged half shield below, as well as from the dangerously overloaded cold fusion reactor and thrusters burning at maximum output.
But the descent was slowing?
Not enough. But…
“Brace!”
The lazy thought came two seconds later than Alfred had intended, and the superweapon curled up into a fetal position to roll within the range of the body lock, legs slightly extended for the tuck and roll to come. Despite having made sure to angle themselves towards the skyscrapers marking the commerce district in Jalahad’s city center, lush green fields were rising up to meet them instead.
Some random farmer’s field on the outskirts of the metropolis capital.
A softer landing than concrete or asphalt, at least.
There was no more time to think, especially slurred and slow as it was.
The plasma shield connected with the ground first, at Alfred’s intended forty-five degree angle, with Al forcing the bubble of energy down and out in reaction, to dissipate as much energy from the impact as possible. Normally the plasma shield was designed to slow or stop incoming projectiles. This time the ground itself was being treated as one such projectile. The long green grass of the field vaporized and caught flame instantly as the white-hot circle of plasma billowed out in a blue-green ring around the impact, the shield rapidly losing integrity from blazing white down to red in half a heartbeat.
The shield continued to explode outwards as it failed the rest of the way, lighting the grass on fire in a circle for a good twenty feet of rolling roiling fireball. It also spewed blackened dirt in a second halo, sinking and digging into the soft, rich, loamy soil a good three to five feet and forcing most of the ground below them upwards and outwards in an impressive spray of charred earth as force, energy, and ionized plasma all displaced matter.
A half second later, the joints locked fully as the boots themselves connected, the weapon trying their best to roll with the extra momentum upwards of the thrusters into the side of this small new crater like a ramp.
From there it became a fetal-position ragdoll.
The reactor whined, high-pitched and angry, then cut out entirely as the heavy, mostly metal figure bounced, first out of the initial impact crater, and then three or four more times, furrowing the grass and dirt where their rag dolling form free-plowed. The left knee lock failed, and the next several bounces were accompanied with a loud cracking sound as the metal and pneumatics-reinforced femur in that leg failed and produced a gruesome compound fracture.
The sharp end of bone with various cracked synthetic reinforcements jutted through even the inside of the armored bodysuit.
The weapon finally came to rest a good fifty feet from the initial impact point, laying on their back, trying not to scream at the pain rippling out from their left leg and the sections of failed armor and body suit. Flesh and skin in different swaths and areas had been grated or sandpapered off by dirt, rocks, and plants after the bodysuit failed. Behind them, burning grass, a small initial impact crater, and then a long staggered line of plowed field in a rough bouncing line.
The reactor and thrusters still hissed, and the sounds of systems cooling down across their body slowly faded over the course of a few minutes. Smoke billowed in hazy wispings from across the blackened form. Many Hematic Plates were shattered, cracked, or had been forced inwards via blunt impact into their skin and body, doing even more accidental damage.
The body was already swarming with tiny microscopic waves of grey nanites as the various repair systems went to work almost immediately; healing and fixing.
Alfred was already readjusting.
“Holy shit. I didn’t think that would work!”
One had no energy to reply to his artificial intelligence partner. Everything hurt. The world was still spinning. Alfred knew about the pain via various sensors and scans, but didn’t feel it like One did, seeing, hearing, and feeling nothing but data points or analytics.
As the grass smouldered beneath the fusion reactor’s exhaust port, blackening the patches between the shoulder blades further… The reactor slowly cooled down, then after a long pause spun back up again at a normalized output. The various systems, as well, slowly began to reboot one by one over the next fifteen minutes as they lay motionless in the grass, nursing their wounds with the help of Al’s internal pain medication injections and the steady hard work of the nanotech. Cows were moving in, curious, skittish and yet wanting to know the source of the commotion. Luckily none dared approach too closely.
Comms chatter finally prickled back into existence in staccato.
The HUD flickered to life soon after.
The hum of weapons and dozens of other subsystems slowly kept clicking back on, one by one.
One even finally forced the femur pieces back into proper place beneath the skin with a grunt of muffled pain, to allow their millions if not billions of tiny internal microscopic repair crews to rapidly get to work, healing the skin where it broke through beneath the body-suit, and reconnecting the edges of bone back together to bond back in place with both fresh bone and other synthetic reinforcements.
Hematic plates, many of them blackened and smouldering even still, lay strewn amidst the grass, plowed dirt patches, and cow patties the full fifty feet between the initial impact point and the charcoaled patches of grass beneath them.
They lay there for another full thirty minutes as Alfred and the nano-machine network at his command slowly pieced the weapon back together into fighting shape. Injecting painkillers, running diagnostics on primary as well as artificial backup organs, and keeping an eye on comms chatter and FoF tags.
“Good news or bad news first?”
“Neither. Just give me a second.”
The weapon waited another minute, and then with a wheeze, rolled over and stood up slowly on the hastily fused femur, somewhat shakily. Pneumatics whined to support the still bonding bone structure and take weight off it for continued nanite healing.
“What’s the bad news?”
“It’s a long walk to Jalahad.”
“Fuck. On a freshly broken leg no less. And the good news?”
“I think I can fix the shield generator over the next few hours of walking? We blew a few fuses I’ll need to fix or replace with our swarm.”
“Great.”
The bioweapon rose, and slowly began picking up scattered hematic plates, pressing them back onto the bodysuit, then waiting for the tiny machines to fasten them back to the frame to be reused or broken down for materials as they traveled.
The Jackhammer gatling gun previously strapped to their lower back was useless, dislodged during the ragdoll tumble with the barrels now bent sideways like a split banana peel from where it had come loose from the magnetic clamps behind the hips.
It was left where it lay, a G.O.D. trophy for the local farmer and his cows to find and inspect later.
“How long will it take to reach the nearest fireteam?”
“Walking speed? Three hours give or take, plus traffic. Then we’ll need to push with them across the outskirts to link up with Lieutenant Yorke and the squad.”
There was no reply, just a long, exasperated sigh, punctuated with a wheeze of pain and the subsequent hiss of another internal painkiller injection somewhere.
The weapon turned Northeast to face the nearest patch of neon-green FoF tags – lit up as various primary shapes on the HUD somewhere within the labyrinth of Jalahad’s towers.
They paused for a moment to watch the explosions of flak bursting over the skyscrapers and across the skyline, swatting upwards at diving G.O.D. specks, and popping like fireworks. The distant cracks of railguns sounded with associated bright streaks upwards.
They gave a brief wave goodbye to the herd of assembled, mooing dairy cows.
Then the two in One began the long trudge back along the highway towards Jalahad.
To find Lieutenant Yorke.
