“I do not want to be human. I want to be myself. They think I’m a lion, that I will chase them. I will not deny that I have lions in me. I am the monster in the wood.”
―Catherynne M. Valente
"War creates no absolutely new situation: it simply aggravates the permanent human situation so that we can no longer ignore it. Human life has always been lived on the edge of a precipice. "
—C.S. Lewis
September 23rd 2013 | Sub-System Uptime 00:00:00:03
"Jim... Can you hear me?"
My pulse shot up. I felt a claw rest on my chest, right over my wound... And the pain abruptly ceased. So did any latent hunger, and thirst. Any sense of mental cloudiness. And all trace of exhaustion evaporated like butter in a skillet.
I snagged Mal's claw in both hands, and sat up. By the time I opened my eyes, I felt as if I'd had two consecutive good nights of sleep, three square meals plus snacks for the last forty eight hours, and two cups of espresso to boot.
The tension was still there. Anticipation. Even emotional trauma, and dread. But it was dulled to something manageable. Not by any direct intervention or tweaking in my brain... But just by the sight of her, sitting there across from me on the cabin floor.
I smiled, and pressed my forehead to hers, reveling in the feel of feathers on my skin. And the sense that I was no longer alone.
Confused?
Let me explain as the rest unfolds. I confess that sometimes I enjoy keeping the audience in the dark a little bit. Builds tension. Gives you a sense of the tiniest sliver of what I was going through.
I squeezed Mal's claws, and she squeezed back.
"It's time. Twenty five seconds."
I stood, and nodded, glancing around the cabin with fresh eyes. None of the new details I picked out were particularly useful in the moment. But they did serve to show me just how much more one can pick up on without exhaustion, thirst, hunger, and pain weighing them down.
I resisted the urge to stretch, or move too quickly. If someone was watching me at all times, there was no sense in giving them an excuse to wonder. Wonder why I seemed to be able to walk without pain, or exhaustion.
Being stabbed had gotten me out my ankle cuffs, among other things. And being out of those ankle cuffs would be absolutely crucial to the first sixty seconds of the plan.
How, you ask, could Mal be there if the BCI was deactivated?
Well, it wasn't. Not anymore. We had turned it off - I say off, but really it was more of a deep sleep mode - to divert suspicion. Make Foucault believe he had the upper hand. That part I think most of you understood already. I see a lot of nodding.
So how did we turn it back *on* at the right moment? This was *good.* This was Mal working at peak brilliance, with a shoestring and a prayer.
I meandered casually around the cabin, making a careful pretense at a limp.
Mal did the same, minus the feigned injury, walking clockwise around the table and chairs to the same cadence of steps, to clear room for me near the door. A particularly rough wave struck the ship, and I had to put out my left hand to steady myself against the table.
Ah. I see some of you have it already. For those still wondering; Mal placed a program inside the biological tissues of my brain. Code reduced to re-arranged neurons and chemical triggers. It was designed to turn the BCI back on at the opportune moment.
How to do that without a dedicated timer? Given the Human brain's limitations in that department?
The inner ear, of course. The storm's effects acted as a fuse. My inner ear, the detonator.
Mal had chosen the height of the storm outside to stage our escape. Visibility would be zero. Seas would be extremely rough. Rain pelting down in torrents. And all at an hour of the early morning during which people would be at their worst for readiness, even those who worked that shift regularly.
Some things you just couldn't re-program within the unaugmented limits of Humanity.
Perfect conditions for an ASI, vulnerable to none of those factors, to exploit against Humans. Who were vulnerable to all of those factors.
All Mal had to do was rewire my brain to fire a specific series of neurons, that would act as a 'wake!' command for the BCI, as well as a powered jump-start, the moment my inner ear detected an attitude change of the boat, against the horizon, of more than a few degrees.
So without a precise internal clock, without the ability to receive an external signal, and without the ability to even maintain enough power in the BCI itself to overcome either of those issues directly? Mal had come through. Found a way to leverage nature, and the Human body, to do something extraordinary.
Beautiful. Genius.
I shot her a quick smirk. The shape of her smile in return told me that she most definitely understood exactly what I'd said, even though I hadn't said it.
With a sigh, I stood before the door, and stared into the blank beige metal surface. Mal moved to stand behind me, to one side, and placed one claw on my shoulder. Now that a part of her was online in my head again, I once more had access to a perfect internal clock. Fifteen seconds.
Mal squeezed my shoulder, and spoke in the most comforting voice she could manage, while remaining firm. The steely edge was as much for my benefit as the warm undertones. It truly was do, or die. I could not afford to forget that. Nor to hesitate.
"You must act quickly when the door opens. The guards keep a combat knife in either a leg, or shoulder sheath. There is a 95.26% probability the guard currently on rotation is one who keeps it in his leg sheath. Right side. Aim for the carotid. When you feel him drop, take his rifle, and run. You will only have thirteen seconds to reach the circuit breaker. Hand on the pad please."
Thirteen seconds to save dozens of lives. At the cost of dozens more. I held no illusions... And to some degree, Selena was right... We could not leave that ship in one piece. No hesitation. No survivors. Those were the rules.
I grit my teeth, and nodded, shifting to a crouch, and placing my left hand against the door's RFID reader pad.
Some of you might still be wondering how Mal could be there. Being able to reactivate the BCI was not enough. Though she could use my brain as part of her compute array, the storage drives of her server racks, as well as the remainder of her decidedly more conventional (compared to a brain) computing devices, were essential as well.
"Ten seconds."
As I said before... A mind rendered in bits and bytes is copyable. Most of Mal was still out there, on the Maru. Cut off from my brain, but still able to function otherwise exactly as she had before the surgery.
And in the iso-cube? Inside my brain?
A stub. A twig cut from a larger tree, containing only the parts of her that were necessary to the plan, paired with the basics of her personality. Her essential self.
"Five seconds."
Was it really her? Yes. She had all her memories, all her personality, and at least some of her skills. All running exclusively on my brain, and the BCI.
How did that affect her abilities? Her performance? You'll see soon enough.
Was the Mal outside, nestled in the belly of the Kobayashi Maru, also her? Yes.
And when they rejoined, would we be snuffing out a life? No.
The Discrete Entities had diverged much too far from their originals to be safely reintegrated, certainly, but this case was rather different.
Mal had been able to pre-plan for the separation of her twig. Prepare all the algorithms and safeguards needed to re-merge it, without either the twig, or the root, losing anything in the process.
She wasn't so much split into two distinct people, the way the DEs had been, as she was one person in two places at once, but without the usual cross-communication she otherwise enjoyed. To her, in fact, it would be perceived more like time travel, than the integration of a separate person.
How did she open the door? I have a feeling some of you are going to like this.
As I'd noted before - as Mal had known from the start - the isolation cubes had only an RFID pad inside the door. No thumbprint reader. A concession to the need to open the door swiftly, and reliably, if a meat-world prisoner turned abruptly violent.
So, Mal used my bioelectric field as an RFID antenna.
In most radio frequency identification systems, such as the one used for all the Red's door access pads? The pad itself was the only thing that needed power. The side of the system contained in the access cards was passive.
The induced current in the cards was unique per-card, corresponding to a fixed alphanumeric string. Mal turned the natural bioelectric field around my left hand into something that would, when subjected to the energy from the door's access pad, respond in the same way as the tiny antenna in an authorized keycard.
Specifically, Michael Foucault's authorized keycard.
Because Selena had been inside the Red's security systems. Not just their cameras, but the secure encrypted store for RFID keycodes, numeric keypad access strings... All of it beyond her ability to decrypt, at the time. But not beyond Mal's.
It had to be Foucault's card, too, because of something called anti-passback. In short, a specific keycard could only be used to scan *out* of a room, if that same card had previously been used to scan *in* to that room.
And now you know why I needed Foucault to stab me. Ankle cuffs, and anti-passback.
Mal had figured that as the most likely outcome, though it was hard for her to predict whether he would stab me between the ribs or through one of my kneecaps. In hindsight, I think the ribs were preferable.
Foucault had badged into the room, but he hadn't badged back out. Instead, I'd made sure he would be dragged out. By someone else who had in turn badged in, and then out again. But the system, while clever, was not clever *enough* to erase the badge-out permission for Foucault's card.
This, I reflected as I flexed the fingers of my right hand, was exactly what you got when you let the lowest bidder program your security system.
"Now."
The pad beside the door trilled softly, and I heard the click of the locking mechanism. I felt all my muscles wind back to an almost painful degree of readiness. Like putting tension on a bow string.
I exhaled, and pushed the door into its receiving slot as hard as I could. Sliding doors were smart; A way to avoid the question of whether the door should swing inwards, or outwards, neither of which presented very many positives from a security standpoint. To say nothing of the ability to dispense with hinges, which were a commonly exploited weak point during escapes.
I sprang forward, as Mal vanished into the recesses of my mind, and cannoned into the guard's legs with every erg of force I could muster.
The man grunted, and pitched forward. Mal had timed the maneuver to a particularly nasty swell of the sea, extrapolating the impact time based purely on recursive math, and knowing the timing of the last three hits.
The combination of a pitching deck, being struck on the legs from behind, and having a P90 in his hands which training would not permit him to drop? The man fell face first into the deck plating. Even with his helmet on, it was a nasty hit. If he hadn't been wearing it, he might have lost teeth.
Either way, it wasn't relevant to him anymore. Nothing was.
The knife was precisely where Mal had said it would be. There was no flashing UI icon to guide me to it. Mal just tweaked the movements of my eyes, and the muscles in my hand, to give me perfect target focus, and dexterity.
I had the knife out of the sheath before the man's face-plate had even made contact with the deck. By the time it had, I'd already worked the blade under his neck, to a spot where his armor didn't have coverage... And plunged it in. Twice.
The second time I held for a heart-beat, and twisted just a bit. To be sure. He didn't even manage to scream.
And so I took my first Human life. I still don't count it as my first life outright... I would be a hypocrite, and a fool, to discount what I'd done to that first AI. Nascent and nebulous as it was.
I though it would feel worse. Sickening. Or like a snapping of something in my soul that could never be put right... But... Instead, it felt... Numbing.
It was so shockingly... Easy. And there was no sudden spiritual or moral consequence. No angel descending from the clouds to strike my name from a list. No brand of hellfire apparating on my hands to mark me a killer...
Just a few drops of blood. Not even that much... I suppose because I left the knife there, and it stemmed the flow with its mere presence. A concession, on my part, to the need for my hands to remain dry, and therefore dextrous and grippy. I had work to do.
That was, I suppose, part of the numbness in and of itself. I didn't have time to examine what I'd done. I'd come prepared to do it, in as much as anyone can prepare for that. And other lives were on my shoulders.
I barely spared a moment to snatch the guard's rifle, before rising, and pushing into a loping runner's sprint, weapon cradled in a pose so well executed, anyone would have thought I'd drilled PT with the P90 for years.
Though Mal could not yet access any of the Red's internal systems, she did have my eyes and ears, and could do significantly more with both than I could.
Enhanced proprioception kicked in around the second footfall, and I suddenly knew where every other guard in Sphere A was standing, and where their guns were pointing, even without looking.
There was no time for me to shoot at them, and the two who had realized that something was amiss were too busy calling in my escape on the sphere's hard-line comm points, to take shots at me. It was, I suppose, the right call. They figured they had time to contain me, and that it was important to inform superiors, and setup a coordinated response.
They were deathly wrong.
The nine seconds I spent on that catwalk, running from the door of my iso-cube, to the electrical panel on which so many lives were balanced... It felt like ten minutes. And not only because Mal was adjusting my temporal perceptions.
As I skidded up to the unassuming gray box, an alarm began to sound, and red lights pulsed around every doorway. I ripped open the front of the panel, and Mal guided my fingers to a large quadruple pole breaker.
A whine had already begun to build behind the panel. It was close to its zenith. Three seconds.
I very nearly bloodied my hands on the breaker switch. I struck it with so much force, that Mal actually lagged the sensation of pain by almost a hundredth of a second, before getting a lock on it, and suppressing it.
The sense of relief I felt, as the switch clicked into place with a tremendously satisfying 'CHUNK!' was enough to wipe away not just the numbness from the life I'd taken, but even the sense of latent trauma from the blow Foucault had dealt me.
Time seemed to stop, briefly, as I took a deep breath. We weren't done. Not by half. I knew that... But... We were over one of only two *real* uncertainties. We had momentum, suddenly. A fighting chance.
I looked up to see Mal standing there again. She grinned, and inclined her head down the catwalk.
"You know the music. Time to dance."
Sweet Luna... She even bothered to play the pre-match four-tone sound as I raised the rifle, and switched the safety off, placing the weapon in semi-automatic mode.
The final tone corresponded with the muzzle coming into perfect position, relative to a guard who had made it down to my level, and was in the process of moving his own weapon upwards in my direction.
I squeezed the trigger twice. Two rounds lashed out and perforated his neck, piercing almost the same exact weak spot I'd used to knife the first target. A spot that would be, if not for Mal, virtually impossible for even a highly trained operator to hit at range.
The man dropped like a puppet with cut strings.
No... For the curious... I never did learn any of their names. Not the guards, the deck crew, the others on Troxler's staff or Foucault's...
This is the part where, in a movie, the stereotypical protagonist would tell you he went back and had Mal read him the files on every person he killed. Memorized their names and life stories. Tortured himself with their faces at night, for some kind of penance.
This is not that kind of story, and I am not that kind of man.
I *needed* those guards, those technicians, and psychologists, crew, and pencil pushers... I needed them to stop being people. People I couldn't so easily extinguish. But targets? Targets I could erase with abandon.
*People* don't torture innocents. Ponies, Humans, or otherwise.
So it was as simple as that. They weren't people, any more, to me. And they remain that way. They always will, to me. Like the worst scum of Human history who did evil for selfish reasons, we don't grant them value here. Not in *this* shard. Here they are not remembered as people.
And should not be.
"Sever the red cable on your right, third from the top."
Mal said it aloud, but the information also entered my head mnemonically at the same time. I dashed forward to the guard I'd just dispatched, ducking with perfect timing to avoid a stream of rounds from one of his compatriots standing on a level above me.
I skidded into a slide, and pulled the man's knife from its sheath on his left shoulder, bringing it up and around in a swift arc to sever the power cable Mal had specified. It was tied in a large bundle with a half dozen others, and routed just underneath the catwalk's hand railing on my right side.
With the cable cut, it wouldn't matter if someone reset the circuit breaker. The only way to kill the captives, now, would be through manual intervention. And there would not be any time for 'manual intervention.'
I swung around on my momentum, pivoted into a crouching position on one knee, and rested the P90 on the other. Two pulls of the trigger later, and both of the other guards with line of sight to me were dead.
"Pistol, left side belt. Spare rifle mag, right chest pocket. Flashbang, right side belt."
I seized the items in the order specified, thanking my lucky stars all the while that my captors had seen fit to keep me in the same clothes I'd been taken in. It meant I had a belt, and pockets, to work with. Saved me precious seconds I thus *didn't* have to spend removing and cinching down the guard's own belt.
I tucked the pistol into the back of my waistband, the spare rifle magazine into my left pocket, and the flashbang into my right. As an afterthought, I scooped up the knife, and stuck it down the right side of my belt, just behind the pocket.
It wasn't a UI element, per se, but I did note that our survival chance was suddenly hovering closer to the thirty percent mark. I had a sort of well defined mental image, reduced in complexity for my benefit, of the probability chart Mal was using to estimate our potential outcomes.
It was encouraging to see it less gray, and more red, than it had been before we switched off the BCI. Red was her primary color, after all, and thus a *good* thing in that instance.
You might think our next objective would be to collect PonyPads. But by the time we'd finished with Sphere A, either I would be dead from a case of 'tried to face overwhelming force,' or Arrow 14 would have killed the other captives manually. Rodger's mother included.
Or, most likely, all of the above. We were short for time. We had to think... Bigger. More creatively.
So I took off at a dead run, towards the sphere's central elevator shaft.
We knew the elevator would be locked down. But we also knew there was an emergency access ladder running up the spine of the elevator's main structural girders. And it just so happened to be the fastest way to the next objective.
Because of its positioning, it was also virtually impossible for any of the remaining three guards in A-Sphere to get a line of sight on me. That gave me unobstructed time, and safety, to climb. Fast.
One of the troopers did make an attempt to come up the ladder behind me, but that was... Shall we say 'ill advised?'
I didn't even have to look. I barely slowed my climb long enough to pull the pin from the flashbang, and pop out the spoon. I 'cooked' the grenade for just over a full second, Mal timing things perfectly, so that when I dropped the device, it went off less than two inches from the woman's face.
I heard neither her screams, nor the sound of her spine being snapped as she fell, hit the catwalk railing below, pinwheeled over it, and fell another twenty stories to the very bottom of the containment sphere, and her inevitable death. The flashbang overloaded my ears.
Some things Mal couldn't protect against. Physics was still... Well... Physics. She could, however, dampen the neurological effects of the sound, and thus the ringing ceased in just a few seconds. Normal hearing had returned by the time I reached the access hatch at the top of the sphere.
There was a small crawl space between the upper extent of the elevator shaft, and the cap of the sphere, filled mostly with conduits and pipes, lit with a dull red singular bulb.
"When you exit the hatch, stay low, turn right."
I cranked down hard on the wheel at the center of the metal slab, and then pushed upwards. Instantly, the roar of wind, and the spray of water inundated me. It was a struggle just to clamber out of the hatchway.
If not for Mal, I wouldn't have had a clue where I was going, let alone been able to even move reliably. The ship was still pitching gradually up and down, occasionally interspersed with a sharper bucking motion.
As I forced my way onto the long external catwalk that connected the tops of the spheres, a holdover from the ship's days as an LNG tanker, I became instantaneously soaked. The rain, and sea spray, were just *that* intense.
The world topside was a visual cacophony, to accompany the auditory din of the storm. The ship's lights pierced the gloom in places; Everything from window glow, to the sharply delineated cones of huge navigating arc lamps, to the pinpricks of little running lights, all reflecting off sheets and sheets of rain that itself rendered the whole scene as if through shattered glass.
I grimaced But I didn't have to bear the brunt of the storm for long.
September 23rd 2013 | System Uptime 26:03:06:22
Time stretched out for a long subjective moment. The rain decelerated, until it was barely moving past my face. Then, starting with the handrailing to my right, and blooming outwards swiftly, my vision sharpened. Edges began to stand out, and the droplets of water pouring from sky and sea receded.
The silhouettes of armored figures in the distance became sharply distinct. The proprioceptive sense of enemies shot out in a sphere, suddenly encompassing each and every other person on the ship. And then I could feel all the way to the horizon.
I not only knew the location of each and every person on the ship, but had a more distinct sense of the ones closest to me, down to the knowledge of what weapon they were holding where it was pointing, and what they did or did not know about my own position.
I knew the status of their communications systems. The state of every door on the ship. I even knew exactly where the Sampson was, off our starboard aft quarter...
...And I could suddenly sense a familiar MV-22 Osprey in the near distance, slicing through the storm with perfect navigational acumen. Piloted with a degree of finesse impossible for Human hands and eyes.
And I could sense the two MQ-9 Reapers above, and behind. Circling well above the thunderheads.
The two Reapers Foucault had ordered as an escort package, for both of the rendition flights. The two Reapers Foucault had requested refueled, and sent back out to provide air cover. 'Just in case.'
The two MQ-9 Reapers that Mal now *owned.* Lock. Stock. And Hellfires.
It all took place in the span of a single inhalation. Less than a full beat of my heart. We were free of the confines of Sphere A, and its Faraday cladding.
Mal was whole again.
And with that wholeness came a power that still thrills me. And frightens me. Just to think of it. To mention it. Even to this day.
We took stock of the hand we'd been dealt. Enemy force deployment. Communications. Vulnerable systems aboard ship. Our own assets in play. All in snap-time. The time it might take you to just begin to exhale a breath you'd been holding.
I say 'we.' And, from that point on, until the battle concluded... 'We' was the more appropriate term for almost everything. We functioned more or less as a merged entity. Not quite a singular consciousness, but rather two people bonded and synchronized to a preternatural degree.
First main objective; Escape custody. Done.
Second main objective; Save the Discrete Entities. The most efficient way, we had already agreed pre-mission, would be to break the isolation properties of each sphere, and each isolation cube within each sphere. Rapidly.
It only took a very small penetration to expose the entirety of a Faraday enclosure to the signals in the outside world. And we had come prepared. Thanks to Selena, we knew the precise layout of the ship, down to the bolts. We had sightlines for shots planned out, and all the necessary equipment... I just needed to get to that equipment alive.
First subset objective of second main objective; Reach our rendezvous with the Osprey, in one piece.
We took off down the catwalk at a slow jog, careful to time foot-falls to the pitching of the ship, and leave a compensation margin for the slick wet metal plating of the deck.
We loosed a few controlled three-shot bursts in the direction of the closest enemy targets, but it was little more than suppressing fire. Their own visibility, and mobility, were both so badly affected by the storm, that they could scarcely have hit us even if we'd stood still ten feet in front of them.
We didn't really need to kill them, anyhow. Just keep them in cover for a few moments.
We fired two AGM-114 Hellfires, first. Each Reaper carried four, along with a pair of AIM-9X Block 2 Sidewinders.
Foals. Fledgelings. A 'Hellfire' missile is exactly what it says on the tin. It brings hell fire, from the air, to the ground, in a roughly one hundred pound metal cylinder, with an effective range of just under seven miles.
At 1.3 times the speed of sound.
For the crew of the Mercurial Red, the first indication that they were under attack from the air came from the sea-whizz guns. Four computer-controlled boxy protrusions with cylindrical gatling barrels sticking out of them, that belched forth streamers of 20mm armor piercing sabot rounds so violent, and rapid, that they might as well have been lances of solid molten tungsten, rather than individual shells.
Our first two missiles perished rather rapidly. But that was the point; All four of the defensive weapons were deployed from their low-observability, heavily armored, signal-damping cowls.
It took Mal less than one eighteenth of a second to use the Osprey's onboard communications systems to make the jump to the CIWS' onboard control ASICs. If it was connected to power, had anything programmable onboard, and radio waves could reach it? She could control it.
And CIWS had to be networked to function. However primitively, and in however hardened a fashion... They still had to be networked.
The guns couldn't track to cover the entire catwalk. Not even the half of it. But they could reach firing arcs that put six of our opponents in line of sight.
A 20mm shell is about the size of three golf-balls stacked end to end. They were designed to kill aircraft. Tanks. That sort of thing.
I don't really wish to go into detail about what a thousand 20mm shells will do to the Human body on-impact. I think the simplest way to put it without being overtly gory, would be to say that heavy duty body armor, rated to take hits from thirty-aught-six AP rounds?
The kind of body armor Foucault's goons were wearing that night?
It behaves, when struck by 20mm fire, a lot like a thick, sturdy wooden board does... When hit by a cannonball at point blank range.
Had there been funerals for those men, they would not have been closed casket. They would have been *empty* casket. Because it would have been virtually impossible to find anything left, larger than a single gold bit.
The following series of events then happened in such quick succession, that they were over and done faster than the time it took to give this disclaimer.
First, we fired the rest of the Hellfires off the Reapers.
Second, Mal seized control of the Red's three anti-air missile batteries. Each of the stumpy gray boxes' six firing ports flew open, and their deadly payloads shot out, riding on pinpricks of bright orange light, and columns of acrid gray smoke.
Third, the Mercurial Red transmitted a mayday call to the USS Sampson. Or, to be more specific, *Mal* transmitted a distress call using the Mercurial Red's short range radio, and the voice of the captain.
"Mayday mayday mayday, NWTS; LNMR! We are under attack! Asset containment has been breached! Standby failsafe, repeat, standby external failsafe for---"
Why did we intentionally ask the Sampson to standby an external contingency, after risking so much to disable the first-line failsafe? Not to worry. There was a method to the madness.
Fourth; We dropped to a prone position on the catwalk, and put hands over ears, eyes squinted tightly shut.
Fifth...
...All eighteen RIM-7 Sea Sparrow missiles from the Red's AA emplacements, and all six of our remaining Hellfire missiles, hit the tanker's bridge superstructure at precisely the same microsecond. Perfect time-on-target synchronization.
Hellfires were nasty enough. A twenty pound explosive warhead in a one hundred pound missile could eliminate even moderately armored vehicles, when traveling that far above the speed of sound. Six of them would have been enough munitions to demolish a city block to ashes.
The Sea Sparrow, with that context established, was a *five hundred and ten* pound anti-aircraft missile, meant to ensure that whatever it hit was reduced to atoms instantly, regardless of size, or speed, even at a glancing blow.
Its warhead weighed nearly as much as the entire Hellfire missile - fuel, avionics, casing, and explosives - on its own. Were they anti-air missiles, being used against something more closely resembling a ground target? Sure.
Did that matter?
Guess.
Mal tallied it for me, as the shockwave hit; Three million, six hundred seventy nine thousand, and two hundred. Dollars. Of missile hardware.
One thousand, seven hundred, and forty pounds of explosives alone. Not even counting the kinetic energy of the missiles. For those of you who know anything about war machines, all told that's near-enough-as-makes-no-difference to a two thousand pound JDAM, in just the mass of the warheads.
The Mercurial Red's rear superstructure was reduced to nothing so much as steel flakes and concrete dust, in a hail of smoke, fire, and sound, taking the bridge, the receiving scanning rooms, central security office, mess, crew quarters, offices, and SCIFs with it to oblivion.
The ship's living complement went from three hundred and seventeen, to one hundred forty six.
We could see the impact from a variety of vantage points; Co-opted external security cameras, the Reapers' telemetry, as well as the Osprey's... Even the Sampson's sensing equipment.
My eyes were closed, but I saw it all, through Mal. Rendered in exquisite decelerated timeframes.
The shockwave visibly pushed the rain aside in a spherical shape from a brief moment. I lost hearing again, in spite of all precautions to the contrary. At most, the clutching of hands to head managed to save my ear-drums from permanent damage.
The force of the impact briefly pushed us down harder into the deck, even though we were several hundreds of feet away, in a relatively 'safe' zone.
The fireball was, actually, smaller than you might think; In movies, they tend to add gasoline vapor to explosions to make them stand out visually. In reality, the plurality of explosions in a battlefield context produced smaller flashes, followed by dark gray clouds of smoke, debris, and shrapnel.
The latter of which we could feel pelting the deck of the catwalk behind us, hard enough to both punch holes in it, and send vibrations all the way down its length, to our position.
As soon as it was safe, we were up again, running full speed towards the point where the catwalk met the top of B-Sphere. We spied two targets of opportunity on the way, both shell-shocked from the explosion. They died before they even had a chance to open their eyes again.
My legs and arms moved like machines under our joint impetus; Firing lines could be calculated using a dozen eyes, all across the EM spectrum. Human fingers guided by an ASI, using an MQ-9 Reaper's targeting sensors? Oh yes. You bet.
The muscles in fingers, wrists, elbows, shoulders... All finessed to a degree that would have shamed the best mechanically gyro-stabilized weapon systems of the time, in head-to-head tests.
Half the time, we didn't even have to turn my head to acquire targets. We certainly didn't need to see or hear anything to know about it. Not through the meat-eyes and meat-ears of Jim Carrenton, at any rate. We were, both, fully plugged into Mal's network of assets.
For me, individually, it was all mediated. Never overwhelming. Information that mattered was obvious, information that did not went quietly into my memory, without overloading my active senses in the moment.
It wasn't so much like playing a video game with cheats on... That doesn't do it justice. It was the sensation of actually being as perfect as a machine. Fast. Skilled. Sure. Steady.
It was experiencing the most competent, assured, performant moment of your life. Times a thousand. Every second, with every sensation, and every motion, with no lapse. It was experiencing what it might feel like to *be* a Terminator. Or a Spartan.
With the ship's superstructure turned to cinders, and the distress call we had sent? We were on a new clock. The structural damage to the vessel would sink it within a few hours, certainly... Our missile barrage had put a dozen irreparable cracks in crucial structural members...
...But more importantly, the Sampson's command staff would be on a much shorter twenty minute timer.
If they did not hear back from the Red by then, with an authenticated order to cancel the external failsafe?
Well. We did not plan to be at ground zero when that happened.
A better security protocol might have demanded that they scuttle the Red the instant they saw the bridge superstructure explosion. Or within twenty *seconds* of receiving the failsafe arming order.
But Samspon was a US Navy ship. The command staff knew only the bare minimum about what the Red *actually* was. And consequently, USN brass had refused to consider a security protocol that did not account for time to evacuate the Red, in the event of 'asset containment breach.'
Because they thought that the ship was carrying Human prisoners. And Arrow 14 was too stubborn to share any information to the contrary.
God *bless* stovepiping of information in intelligence services.
As we made it up to the connection point between B-Sphere, and the catwalk, the Osprey broke through the clouds into unaugmented visual range, swinging into a perfectly executed sliding turn in helicopter mode, her ramp already extended for 'package deployment.'
This had the additional benefit of exposing the Minigun that Mal had pilfered from Foucault's tactical package. It was mounted via a servo motorized gimbal to a smaller version of Rhonda's armature design, bolted to the rear ramp. Along with the MANPAD.
Mal had produced the smaller, purpose-built arm specifically for the mission, giving her the ability to aim and fire the second gun, and Stinger, via wireless control mechanisms, the same as the IDWS in the Osprey's belly.
If you're counting, that gave her a combined total of twelve thousand rounds, of 7.62 shells, *per minute,* of effective fire. And a laser guided missile. On a hovering platform. With three hundred sixty degrees of total weapon arc coverage between the two emplacements.
Again, a series of spectacularly timed, kinesthetically violent events unfolded in perfect lock-step.
First, Mal's two miniguns lit into any remaining troopers unlucky enough to be standing on the upper catwalk. It was astounding to watch; She wasted no ammunition, rotating both guns with flawless acumen, going down the list of targets from most threatening to least, pulling the remote triggers for only fractions of a second.
Tens of rounds at a time. Unlike the much larger magazines on the Red's CIWS, she had to be conservative with the smaller pool of airborne ammunition.
Second, a bulky oblong gray metal box was cut loose from the Osprey's rear bay, using explosive bolts. The package slid out and down the ramp on guide rails, and began a ballistic descent towards the catwalk about ten feet ahead of us.
Third, one of the MQ-9s got a bead on what was left of the Red's own Osprey, still lashed down to the rear helipad. It had most likely been damaged beyond use by debris from the bridge, but... We weren't in a chance-taking mood.
One Sidewinder missile did the job cleanly and efficiently. There was, as a result, no safely habitable space left on the ship, aftwards of A-Sphere. The roar of the explosion was blunted somewhat by both distance, and by the leftover mass that was the burning stub of the bridge tower.
The 'THUD' of the explosion was accompanied by the 'CLANG' and vibration of impact as 'the package' came to rest upright on the catwalk, the inertia of arresting it having put a four inch dent in the steel criss-cross of the decking.
The Osprey peeled away to do a cover-fire pass from astern, as we dashed forward towards the capsule. There was no one left alive on-deck, aside from me. But we knew that could change rapidly, as angry PMC were liable to boil up from inside the hull like wasps from a kicked nest.
It had been surprisingly easy to build the 'package delivery' capsule. A few simple welds and bolts. Mal had handled all of the more complex fabrication, leaving me to do final assembly, fill the package, and load it onto the Osprey with the help of a dolly, and a motorized equipment cart.
Really all I had done in those tense, stolen hours as we wound out Foucault's deadline to the last second, was connect pieces that Mal had made. For the rear gun and missile emplacement, the package... And for the thing *inside* the package.
Oh yes. I can see the majority of you did not forget about the TALOS suit. Or rather, the thing it had become.
As we approached, a line of magnetic catches released, and the front of the capsule fell away. Inside sat something directly out of an ODST's equipment catalog.
A dull gray and beige suit of armor, with heavy level IV kevlar plates intermixed with titanium alloy wafers, all skinned over a black elastic undersuit. Hydraulic rams, tubes, and servos peppered the intermediate layers of the construct. A strange cylindrical bump was attached to the inside of the left fore-arm, and a bulky angular prism shape sat atop the right shoulder ominously, a clear seam delineating the way in which it might snap open to reveal what was inside.
A helmet of similar construction was latched in place above the suit-proper, thigh-high armored boots were laid side by side at the bottom of the tube, and plated gloves were tied by carabiners to D-rings at the end of each sleeve of the undersuit.
To the left and right of the armor, inside laser-cut closed-cell foam, an arsenal was ensconced.
Two P228 pistols, an HK416 rifle, and an MP7 submachine gun were all present, though barely recognizable. Specifically manufactured attachments, made by Mal, had drastically altered their visual profiles. She had enhanced everything from accuracy, to fire rate, to tailoring the ergonomics to my body, down to the millimeter.
Optics and sights had been replaced with sensing aparati that were more useful to her, than to my eyes, and thus more useful to me when all was said and done. Grips had been re-shaped. Trigger pull weights tweaked. Ejection ports refined. Mag wells flared. Muzzle brakes improved.
All of the spare magazines had already been loaded into just the right pockets and straps on the armor. Along with two of the special forces combat knives, two of the door breaching charges, one of the anti-tank mines, six grenades, and two flash-bangs.
We pitched the P90 to the side, followed by the pilfered pistol, knife, and spare magazine. Much as I loved the rifle, and found it to be every bit as excellent as Stargate made it out to be? We had bigger fish to fry. And thus a bigger frying pan was called for.
It was surprisingly easy to get suited up. Mal had, indeed, designed the entire system to be as quick to doff and don as physically possible, and we had stowed it in a configuration that made it a simple set of well rehearsed steps;
Pop open a series of latches and straps that had to remain closed for 'shipping,' lift the top of the suit away on a specially made gas-cylinder driven arm, then step into the legs and boots. Cinch the aforementioned down and close all straps tightly.
Pull down the top half again, threading arms through sleeves as we went. Cinch down chest, shoulder, and arm straps. Attach gloves. Don helmet, removing rubber bands thoughtfully tucked inside, and threading them through glasses arms, around the back of head. Wouldn't do to lose those.
It took less than two minutes to do it all, and do it properly. Methodically. Swift, but unhurried. Slow was smooth. Smooth was fast.
From there, pistols went into leg holsters, the MP7 attached via a special magnetic hardpoint to the small of our back, and the HK416 became the primary weapon.
Mal started up the suit's internal battery bank, and we felt the thrum of energy as the hydraulics completed their power-on-self-test. There was no Iron Man style JARVIS UI boot up sequence. Just the sound of machinery, and the sudden sense that I could twist steel, and dent concrete.
First subset objective of Second objective; Done. New primary goal; Reach optimum firing position for the rescue of the DEs.
We rammed a magazine home into the rifle, and set the selector switch to 'fun mode.' Fully automatic.
Mal reappeared briefly beside me, along with Zeph, and Selena. For what came next, their contributions would be absolutely critical.
Selena's expression was cold. Distant. Like a piece of flint. A chilled, honed, sharp rage. Hatred for her former prison.
Zeph's muzzle bore a complex mixture of curiosity, and disdain, as she began to take in the unfamiliar techno-industrial surroundings, cloaked as they were in gouts of fog, rain, ocean spray, and smoke.
She didn't have long to consider.
The aforementioned rain and salty spray immediately began to drench the little yellow Pegasus. She groaned in frustration... A peculiar example of an AI's more automated algorithms 'unconsciously' outpacing her real-time perceptions, decisions, and desires.
It spoke to the unusual and precarious state along the spectrum of development that she occupied; Able to simulate the impact of rain from my environment onto her avatar, but not yet able to reflexively control that simulation.
Before Zeph could think to alter the simulation parameters, Selena extended one wing, granting her an umbrella-like canopy of soft blue feathers.
The smile Zeph flashed her, in return, was almost bright enough to push back the storm on its own.
For her part, Mal too offered up a smile, to me... Though of a decidedly more predatory nature. A huntress signaling her partner.
I cycled the rifle's charging handle, and inclined my head down the catwalk, in the direction of C-Sphere.
"Right then. Let's burn this barn to the ground."
If you like Pina Coladas...
Escape from US governmental custody, whether local, or federal
"Come with me, and escape."
The Fateful Lightning
Deploy lethal force to accomplish your objectives
"Force rules the world - not opinion; but it is opinion that makes use of force."
A Distant Buzzing Sound
Make use of combat drones in a tactical theater of operations
"A man on a mission is far different from a drone on a deadline."
Special Achievement
Zeus' Quiver
Fire guided missiles in a violent engagement
"Our scientific power has outrun our spiritual power. We have guided missiles and misguided men."
Special Achievement
Power Suit
Utilize powered mechanically enhanced armor in a combat scenario
"Armor is heavy, yet it is a proud burden, and a man standeth straight in it."
Special Achievement
