How's My Bumper Taste?
Awarded for the successful improvised use of a vehicle as a kinetic/explosive impact weapon.
"I said, *shot-gun!* Shot-gun dammit!"
"What use was time to those who'd soon achieve Digital Immortality?"
―Clyde Dsouza
"All killing is not murder any more than all intercourse is adultery."
—C.S. Lewis
September 23rd 2013 | System Uptime 26:04:12:22
Getting out of D-Sphere proved to be significantly more complex than getting in. The largest, most accessible life-boat left on the Mercurial Red was mounted close to the bow. Most of the remaining safety infrastructure was positioned aft, and had consequently been pulped along with the bridge superstructure.
Combined with the mass deletion of security credentials? That left very limited routes to escape for anyone onboard who didn't have a goddess, and an Osprey, up their sleeve.
Limited routes meant that we knew where to look for Miss Williams... But it also meant chokepoints.
The first of those chokepoints was as easy as any of our previous engagements had been; Four soldiers, a curved corridor, and our hands were no longer tied as far as explosives went. Mal timed our assault to coincide with the detonation of the anti-tank mine.
The detonation rocked the entirety of D-Sphere, as the shockwaves from the blast propagated directly into key structural braces. Two of our fragmentation grenades landed amongst the four enemies at precisely the same moment, and that was the end of that skirmish in short order.
After that, Mal took the liberty of firing off the last of the antennades in a spread pattern ahead of us. Without the risk of damaging Fragments by harming infrastructure, and given that we were inside the heaviest outer layers of armor, it made sense as a strategy once again.
Not for exfiltration of digital captives, but for the use of the probes' radio frequency emissions as a sensor net.
We only made it another few dozen meters before Mal brought us to a stop once more. It was as if she were there, holding up one fisted claw in a 'stop!' motion, but on an instinctual level, rather than a visual one.
She was ready in my head with answers, before I could even vocalize the questions. In the context of battle that was both more practical, and far more acceptable to me, than in the course of quiet conversation. And we both knew it.
"They have setup a barricade at the next four-way junction with riot shields, Claymores, and pre-sighted lines for SAWs, and grenade launcher fire."
The layers of the corridor ahead peeled back into wireframes, revealing point clouds representing the trap the PMC had set. True to Mal's evaluation, I could see that they had pulled out all the stops for us. Softly pulsing amber polygons called out no less than eight Claymore mines.
The majority of the fifteen troopers were positioned down the left passageway of the junction, behind two layers of riot shields, and several heavy metal crates, creating a fatal funnel in concert with six enemies placed perpendicular to them, again shielded by whatever they could scavenge.
The six would block our way, and bait us, eight of the other nine would create a deadly crossfire with machine guns and two grenade launchers, and the remaining trooper would act as the triggerman for the mines. Those SAWs... That told us they meant business. Those weapons were sufficient to penetrate our armor's weakest joints, with enough rounds fired.
It was clever positioning. Nowhere for us to take cover, no route to circumvent them, no risk of them hitting their own troops in the cross-fire, and too much staggered thick cover for us to get reliable head-shots, or even land grenades. Mal could calculate the physics to bounce the projectiles, and even set the fuses to detonate immediately on arrival... But the shape of the corridor limited our options.
To even achieve the sightlines we needed to bank shots, we would have to put ourselves in a very dangerous spot. As Celestia has to bow to physics, so too did Mal. A grenade will only bounce so far, and shrapnel can only penetrate so much steel.
If we dared to step into the junction?
If the bullet storm didn't get us, the mines would. We could set them off early with our own explosives, but in addition to running the risk of blocking our only exit with debris, we also ran the risk of incentivizing our opponents to take pot-shots at us with their own grenade launchers.
A crap sandwich all around.
Simple rule of thumb for tacticians, whether experienced, amateur, or even would-be; Remember to look at the game board every so often, in its entirety. And, when you do? Remember that objectives do not matter, so much as greater goals. Objective fixation has killed a lot of people.
So too has an unwillingness to think creatively, and rewrite rules.
Mal was very good at rewriting rules. It was a significant part of the toolset I'd initially equipped her with, and that choice informed a great deal with regards to her own tactics.
I sighed, and shook my head slowly, murmuring to her inside my head so as not to make a sound that might carry up the passageway.
"I suppose at this stage they're more interested in killing us, than in the small hope that their servers are intact."
The removal of the Fragments benefited our enemies, from a tactical standpoint, as much as it benefitted us. They were just as free to deploy heavy explosives as a result. And they knew it.
But as I said... Mal liked to change the rules when they didn't suit her. She instilled me with the sensation of a comforting, but also gently restraining claw on my right shoulder as she spoke again.
"Wait here for just a moment. I am re-assessing the situation on-deck with the Reapers and the Osprey."
Once more, Mal granted me a curated selection of visual information from our aerial assets, rendering a three dimensional scene for me composited from the various camera, RADAR, and other miscellaneous sensing feeds at her disposal.
The image shifted several times, and underwent a few changes in level of detail - doubtless the result of further passes through some sort of cleanup algorithm - before Mal zoomed us in on an area very close to the ship's bow.
As the view constricted, I took note of the ship's overall condition. The whole vessel was already listing to starboard by almost two degrees; Something my inner ear had missed without the benefit of a horizon for reference, and with the compensatory algorithms Mal was using to keep us balanced.
When the view settled, I could spy not only the ship's remaining life-boat, but six armored figures, along with a seventh in a familiar trench-coat, holding an eighth obviously feminine shape at arm's length in zip-tie cuffs.
Miss Williams was still alive. That made sense. Foucault was a better tactician than Troxler. He almost certainly better understood the transactional nature of a hostage situation, and the difficult but occasionally useful paradox it presented.
Indeed, Foucault was more likely - in my estimation - to be using Miss Williams as a human shield. The threat of killing a hostage is implicitly problematic, because once you do? You only incentivize your opponent to take more drastic measures to dislodge your control over any captives you have left.
You force a substitution of emotion, and desperation, where once you had useful logic.
God help you if you killed all your hostages, like Troxler did. Because no one else would be coming to save you.
A Human shield, on the other hand? Much better use of a hostage, putting morals aside, and focusing purely on tactics, and the inherently transactional nature of violence. A Human shield makes it almost impossible for your opponent to contemplate the use of violence against you, because they would by definition also be harming someone whose safety they value.
The only real tactical problem with a Human shield?
You better make sure you have an exit strategy. A hostage situation is naturally unstable. If you don't have a plan to get from that instability, to a place of metastable safety, before releasing your hostage, all while avoiding giving your opponent a reliable shot at you?
Same ending as before. Only God can save you.
What confused me, if only briefly, as I watched Foucault scan the deck, and gesture to his subordinates, was the timing.
Why hadn't they already evacuated?
I realized immediately, even without Mal's assistance, that I was literally looking *through* the answer to my question, down at its source.
Foucault had seen and heard enough to know that we had aerial support, and could defeat a Naval warship in open combat.
If he fled immediately, he would be trading one floating coffin for another. There was nowhere he could go that we could not follow with our air assets in the short term. No way for him to break line of sight. No defense the Sampson could give him that had any reasonable chance of shaking us off.
But if he stayed and confronted us? That opened the door to psychological warfare. To negotiation. It expanded the complexity of our 'transaction' of violence from 'you're going to kill me' to 'let's talk about how to keep me alive, and free, or I *hurt* Miss Williams... And oh by the by, if you try to kill me, you'll kill her too.'
For the truly morally depraved? Another benefit of a Human shield, when dealing with a morally centered opponent; You can absolutely get away with inflicting pain as leverage. Pain leverages the value of your captive against your opponent, without incurring the total loss of leverage induced by fatality.
He wanted to deliver an ultimatum that he knew represented his best chance at survival. He was *waiting* for us.
"I have secured an exit strategy."
Mal's voice shook me from my considerations... In the moment they took up only the space of two breaths. Far less time than it takes to elucidate with words. During those same two breaths, Mal informed me via mnemonic link that she had performed 785 simulations, and determined a less than one 49-thousandth percent risk to Miss Williams from her 'exit strategy.'
I could feel her smirk, as surely as you might feel the touch of a friend beside you. To say nothing of the fact that her words were dripping with it. She liked to change the rules... And she also liked understatement. I suppose she got that from me too.
I could also intuit, from the way the telemetry in my head changed, what it was she was planning to do. She would have told me to dash back fifty yards and crouch behind a stanchion, but I was already doing it, murmuring under my breath as I slid frantically into the best cover I could find.
"This is gonna leave a mark."
The first thing to hit was the second Reaper's one remaining AIM-9. The fact it was an anti-air missile mattered approximately as much as the fact that the Sea Sparrows had been as well.
Which is to say, it didn't matter.
The corridor vibrated with an almost angry resonance, and the lighting flickered, as the missile put a sizable dent in the outer armor of D-Sphere, penetrating almost five yards and leaving a sizable crater.
A crater that Reaper number two promptly slammed into at full speed.
Now, a General Atomics MQ-9 Reaper weighed, empty, near enough as makes no difference to *five thousand pounds.*
With over half a tank of - highly flammable - fuel onboard, even with all weapons depleted, it weighed closer to 6,300.
Some more interesting facts; A Reaper drone has a max speed, flying level, with the engine at full throttle, of about 300 miles per hour.
Our Reaper was moving, when it impacted D-Sphere, at a little over 432 miles per hour. Because when you're going to use a drone as a missile, gravity plus max throttle can get you pretty far... And what's the point in respecting the maximum safe airframe speed?
Mal was, like any computationally-grounded individual with a built in digital clock, exceptionally good at timing.
The follow-on Sidewinder from the first Reaper hit only a fifteenth of a second after the Reaper two had finished plowing a smoldering hole into the side of D-Sphere.
With the benefit of a cleared pathway, it punched directly into the side of the corridor where our ambushers had set themselves up, instantly turning each of them, their weapons, their armor, a sizeable chunk of the corridor, all of the mines, and every piece of improvised cover, into an expanding red and orange gas cloud.
Even one hundred fifteen yards, two S-bends, and several feet of solid steel away? We felt the heat, right through our armor.
The passageway shook as if it had been picked up by a sea giant, and shaken like a baby rattle. Dust fell from the ceiling, and the emergency lights winked out entirely.
When the chaos stopped, we stood, and took a few exploratory steps forward - slowly at first, then with increasing confidence - until we reached the site of Mal's handiwork.
What had once been a four-way corridor junction buried several feet inside an armored sphere, was instead a gaping hole to the outside, through which rain and saltwater spray poured to mix with cinders and ashes.
'Exit strategy.'
See? I told you we both liked understatement.
And, if you're not counting, to tally it up for you? We still had an Osprey with several tens of thousands of rounds of 7.62 shells onboard, to say nothing of the MANPAD on the rear ramp, escorted by the first Reaper, with its remaining Sidewinder.
Oh, yes, and of course, we also had every single missile and gun round on the Sampson at our disposal, if the situation got *truly* sticky. Which, to make a long ramble on Aegis missile destroyers very, very short, was approximately enough firepower and range to hold California, Oregon, Washington, and half of Mexico hostage.
Frankly the only reason Mal hadn't used one of the Sampson's weapons, was because most of them were either too weak, or much *much* too strong for the task. Any of the gun rounds would have barely made a scratch.
Any of the cruise missiles would have split the ship in half. But two AIM-9s, and a half-fueled Reaper, were *just* right.
The hole her assault had made was large enough not only to immolate all our opponents at the chokepoint, but also to open a route directly from the upper port side quarter of the sphere onto the fore deck. But, at the same time, *without* filling that same escape route with too much debris.
A victory, and a shortcut.
ASI never, ever, do anything which does not serve multiple purposes, if they can at all help it. If that hasn't occurred to you by now? Reconsider the context of everything, to this point, in light of it. And Keep it in mind as we go.
Our next trick was getting out of D-Sphere and onto the fore-deck. Without the benefit of Mal's armor, it would have been a virtual impossibility; There were sharp edges, precipitous drops, shaky bent structural members, and small fires everywhere.
I had to suppress the urge to shiver as we scrambled over steel beams as thick around as my torso, bent as though they were cheap wire inside a pipe cleaner. We had wreaked absolute havoc on the Mercurial Red. It was less a ship, by that point, than a floating ruin. A floating tomb.
Not, I resolved as we reached a flat unbroken surface at last, a tomb for us. Nor for Miss Williams. We had already saved dozens of lives. Just one more to go.
The moment we pulled ourselves up over the last piece of spaghettified deck plating, and out onto relatively flat, solid metal, we were drenched by the storm once more. And Mal informed me that Foucault was going to make things as difficult as physically possible.
"Seven hostiles, including Agent Foucault. Six heavily armored, of which five will be armed with their standard issue P90s. One is carrying a prototype XM109 anti-materiel rifle."
I'd been wondering, and worrying, ever since I'd seen the weapon poking out of the back of Arrow 14's black Osprey, squarely at the center of my head. At the time I wasn't familiar with the XM109, but with the benefit of Mal's comprehensive understanding of every weapons system on Earth... I found myself considerably *more* worried.
Take a Barrett fifty caliber sniper rifle. I can see some of you are familiar, but for those who aren't? Exceptionally nasty weapon. Precise. High muzzle velocity. *Big* rounds.
Now, replace those big fifty caliber slugs with twenty five millimeter grenade rounds, and tack on an enormous muzzle brake to compensate.
In short? A thirty three pound, four foot long black metal box and tube, that could spit a roughly one pound piece of metal, filled to bursting with explosives, nearly a mile, accurately, at a speed of Mach 1.2. Said round could then penetrate *two inches* of heavy armor plating, before exploding.
The armor we were encased in could reasonably stop the 5.7x28mm rounds from P90s. It could even protect us from larger rounds, like the ones in our own HK416.
But 'anti-material...' What it does is right there on the tin. The XM109 was intended to punch holes in medium and heavy armored vehicles. Much as our suit of armor was spectacular for its time... It would be as useless against the XM109 as our enemies' body armor had been against our miniguns.
For a brief moment, we were relatively safe. We were separated from our enemies by a large gray piece of reinforced superstructure that helped the bow of the ship remain structurally sound despite its size.
Even without the benefit of Mal's abilities, it would be plain to anyone with even two gray cells to rub together, that there were no approaches to the lifeboat that could bypass the XM109's field of fire. Because of Mal's telemetry, we knew that the woman fielding the gun - the same one I had seen in the back of the black Osprey - was positioned behind a large bollard just port and aft of the lifeboat.
The other five troopers were spread out in a very carefully considered defensive pattern, designed to maximize both hard cover for them, and sightlines that would prevent any crossfire that might endanger the squad.
Foucault stood at the entrance to the rear of the lifeboat, with Miss Williams held out before him as a shield. Every last one of our enemies were in too close proximity to risk the use of our aerial support platforms. Even with Mal's shocking accuracy, there were too many physics variables to risk firing the GAUs into that kill-box.
Miss Williams was within the fifteen percent cone of uncertainty for rounds. And even firing in concentrated bursts, a fifteen out of a hundred chance of striking her was much, much too high, given that we would roll those dice once per every single round fired.
For hopefully patently obvious reasons, missiles were out of the question.
"Jim?"
The tone of her voice, and the way she spoke my name... Like a question... It raised my pulse-rate noticeably.
I blew out a long breath, and grit my teeth as Mal laid it all out for us. A small part of me couldn't help but reflect on how much I hated those ugly, high-maintenance, wrong-feeling slabs in my mouth. Even there. Even on the brink of some truly horrible outcomes.
"We will have to take several direct rifle round impacts from the P90s in order to reach the Barrett without being struck by it. There is an 82.35 percent chance of injury, 39.14 percent chance of serious injury, and a 1.26 percent chance of fatality. There is also a 0.622 percent chance of serious injury to Miss Williams."
I watched as Mal played out a point-cloud and wireframe simulation for me, showing our planned route, down to the exact location of footfalls. The predicted trajectory of each and every enemy round, based on the most likely outcomes.
Ghostly secondary washed-out forms then played out the same motions, but with drastically better... And worse... Outcomes. She was showing me all her work, in as condensed a format as possible.
Recall; For Mal, a *tenth* of a single percent chance that I might self-harm was considered excessive. Too high for comfort by an order of magnitude.
That she was suggesting we flirt with a one and a quarter percent chance of fatality? A six tenths of a percent chance Miss Williams could be seriously hurt, or killed?
It was the best we could do. And unlike so many other soldiers, on so many other battlefields before that exact moment, who had told themselves the same thing... That it would be the best they could do... In the moments before the plunge?
I knew that it was. I was the first person in history to ever go into battle, and know with *so much* deterministic, mathematically provable certainty, that we would do our best. If that was not enough? Then *nothing* would have been. Nothing could have been, given all the variables.
We shifted the rifle to our back, and I worked the fingers of both hands in anticipation as we crouched into a runner's stance. As we counted down the seconds till our optimal action time-frame, together, I couldn't resist taking part in a far more familiar, even older trope of Terran battles past.
"Mal?"
She appeared for a brief moment at the sound of her name, left wing draped over me, right claw clasped on my shoulder, head positioned just next to mine. I turned to meet her eyes, and found the courage for a small, but warm smile.
"I love you."
What? I thought we had established by now that I was a buried romantic. Sappy to the core.
I truly felt that there was too much risk to let the moment pass without expressing the emotion. Certainly; I'd said it before. But... I wanted to say it again. Life was short, back then. Dangerous, even at the best of times. Fraught with disease, violence, fear... At least... By comparison to here, even in the best of Earthly circumstances.
So as Rodger had admonished... Why wait? One day you might have just found out you waited right up till the moment that you waited yourself out of a good thing.
Mal squeezed my shoulder, and touched the side of her beak gingerly to my cheek, before whispering low and soft, in my ear.
"One final effort is all that remains."
The 'I love you too' was very strongly implied. Not the least reason being that she knew I would adore the reference. But also because she had the ability to simply let me feel exactly how much she loved me, right down in my bones.
Her form vanished, and as we turned and crouched like a runner at the starting blocks, I snorted, and muttered aloud.
"Nice."
Her reply came back inside my head the very instant before the countdown clock struck zero.
"Though you'd like that."
Before I paint you another word-picture, let me clarify something; That suit she made could *move.* It had hydraulic assists in not just the arms, but also the legs, and torso. When we pushed off? It left a divot in the deck plating.
My ankles and calves would have almost certainly cried out in protest, were it not for the fact that Mal had more or less turned off my pain receptors at the brain stem.
You think Usain Bolt is fast at twenty three miles an hour?
Well, he is... That performance at the 2012 games? Fastest a Human being ever ran under competition conditions. A record that, now I suppose, will never be broken.
But he was nothing compared to Mal and I, in that thing she had lifted from DARPA, and kitbashed into the mother of all real-life MJOLNIR suits. We broke thirty miles an hour, easy.
Now that doesn't sound fast compared to a car, or a helicopter, or a missile, or a rifle round... Or a Pegasus... But it feels a *lot* faster at ground level, running on two legs, than it does riding in a car at the same speed. And thirty miles an hour was still a good seven faster than any of our opponents were expecting.
They were expecting our smoke, and flash grenades. There was no sense in wasting the rounds by holding them in the magazine; Even hiding their faces from the flash, and taking time to adjust their balaclavas to block the smoke, was a worthwhile purchase in temporal terms.
We loosed the grenades, four of them - two of each type - right before we rounded the huge metal wall that had been our cover on exiting D-Sphere. Mal bounced the shots off a tie-down bollard, placing both smoke grenades in the middle of the fatal funnel, and both flash-bangs at the periphery.
What happened next? *That* they could have never anticipated. It was audacious to the point of insanity. Or, at least, insanity in any Human context. For an ASI with all the angles, it was just good common sense use of ingredients.
You know the drill. Frame-time. Snap-count. Everything happened in far, far less time than it takes to describe it. Another of Mal's perfect symphonies of kinesthesis. This one was for all the marbles left on the floor.
We rounded the support beam at full speed, Mal carefully calculating our footfalls to keep us from sliding on the pitching, rain-slicked deck. About the time Foucault and his detail had managed to get a bead on us and reacquire semblance of sight pictures?
The first MANPAD rocket struck.
Yes, I know, I just go through explaining how Mal couldn't use that kind of weapon directly against our foes, for fear of hurting Miss Williams. *Directly* against our foe. Specificity is key with an ASI, and they are very very good at using resources in ways that seem completely unconventional to Human eyes.
That too is well worth remembering in the context of this story, start to finish. The principle is at its deadliest when combined with the 'never just for one purpose' rule.
What Mal did with the Osprey-mounted MANPAD was a microcosm of that synergy.
She fired three of the Stinger's rounds at the gunnels of the Red. Locations that would stagger our enemies with the shockwaves of the warheads' relatively meager impacts, in comparison to the Red's size. Close enough to hit them with the trailing edge of the airburst, and pitch the decking beneath their feet. Far enough away to avoid any dangerous shrapnel entering a ten foot safety sphere around Miss Williams.
Unconventional usage of a resource; Lethal anti-air missiles meant to be fired by an individual, launched against the side of a ship instead, from an automated turret, for non-lethal effect.
Multiple-purpose deployment of a resource; The impacts did not just stagger our enemies physically, throwing off their aim, and sparing us several potential hits from their rifles. Our opponents were also immediately forced to split their attention.
They knew about our Osprey, but seemed to think they could keep it at bay with the XM109.
Suddenly there was a perceived risk that the tilt-rotor might be making a close pass. Which, in fairness, it was.
And that's precisely how we avoided getting pegged by the XM109.
By the time the Barret's operator had any chance of reacquiring me, and compensating for the disruption the Stingers had caused? She was too busy trying to get a fix on the Osprey to care where I was, or what I was doing.
I reached the perimeter of the squad as Mal brought the Osprey in for a very, very close shave. The rotorwash whipped rain, ash, and smoke into a miniature tornado. The noise was deafening. At least, it was deafening for our enemies who lacked ASI-driven noise-cancellation. Make no mistake; Turbine engines are loud enough to permanently damage even sub-standard Human hearing at close proximity.
I could have just about reached out and touched the tip of one of the rotors as it passed, though doing so would have been extremely unwise, given that the aircraft was traveling at close to 350 miles per hour, in turboprop mode. The end of that prop blade was going... Let's just say 'considerably faster' than 350 mph.
To their credit? The squad behaved the way you might expect well trained operators to function under pressure. The Osprey kept the anti-materiel rifle focused elsewhere, but the other soldiers were only briefly distracted. They knew their small arms would do no good against the aircraft.
But they might do something about the furious half-ton armored behemoth charging down the deck at thirty miles an hour towards their boss.
To *Mal's* credit, we made it another ten loping strides before we got hit.
Even with your pain receptors turned off? There is a kind of hurt that goes beyond simple nerve ending stimulation. The same way that a simple touch can trigger emotions in burn victims who otherwise have no means of feeling sensation on their skin? The same way some blind people can have an emotional reaction to an image hitting their eyes, all the same?
The pain of getting shot is not something you can entirely switch off at a neuro-chemical level. I know at least one of you here, yes you in the back... You know what I mean.
Now unlike that poor fellow, I had Mal when I took my first round. And I had much thicker plating. And, at least to hear him tell it, he got hit with a higher caliber round. Both times. Amazing what some people can survive.
There was very little chance that the P90's munitions would kill me. The 5.7x28mm cartridge was plenty dangerous against any kind of body armor that the world's militaries had ever seen before. But it was intended to penetrate just that; Standard body armor.
We were wearing something closer to the skin of an MRAP, distilled down into the shape of personal armor. It probably would have been too heavy for me to even move in, without some low-level assistance from the suit's powered frame.
Of course, a lucky hit to the face would split my braincase instantly, but Mal predicted that there was a very low chance of that. Even if our enemies were to aim for anything other than center mass, the conditions were rough.
For every thirty rounds those soldiers fired?
Only two would hit me.
In total, we took three hits; The first in the shoulder. There was a sick sensation in the pit of my stomach, and a rising heat throughout that side of my body, paired with a sense of being badly bruised, but without the surface level pain.
Anyone here ever have strong topical anesthetic? You remember how you could still feel that there was pain, but in a dull, distant, almost hallucinatory way? It was a lot like that. A 5.7x28mm impact on the kind of armor we were clad in was analogous to a 9mm round hitting Kevlar at intermediate range; Far from lethal, but liable to bruise very deeply.
Mal did her best to compensate, even with the body's natural desperation to inflict pure agony as a means to inform the stupid operator thereof to kindly 'don't DO that again!' Had she not been there, the pain and shock alone would have dropped me to my knees.
The second round hit us top-dead-center of the spine. Or, in our case, the hardened extra-thick armor belt that ran from the top of the neck to the small of our back.
We closed to within a couple feet of the woman behind the Barrett, and the third round hit right as she managed to squeeze off her first shot. Her own round missed the Osprey by over a hundred feet; It was simply moving too fast, and the deck was pitching too much, for her to get any kind of clean sightline.
Meanwhile, it was actually Foucault who landed the third shot on me. Right to the heart, or at least, to that general area of the chest-plate, which was quite well reinforced in the same way as the spinal armor.
He was carrying the same Glock 20 I'd seen him check in when I was processed for internment, so the round didn't do squat. Frankly, it didn't even sting. Or perhaps it did, but just not seriously enough to induce secondary pain responses.
I was grateful. Two was *plenty* as far as impacts of that magnitude. I wanted very badly to vomit, but my corned beef sandwich was long-since digested. And we had much more important things to do than hurl.
Specifically, killing a woman before she could kill us.
Sometimes the simplest way really is best. So, we punched her. And when I say we punched the operator of that anti-materiel rifle? I am using the same kind of understatement Mal was using when she said 'Exit Strategy.'
A punch delivered by an exoskeleton-driven, titanium armored fist, is more akin to being hit by a loaded 18-wheeler at highway speeds, than to being hit by naked Human hands.
More fun physics facts with Jim; It only took about sixty six foot-pounds of torque to break a Human neck. Shocking, I know. Equine necks are so durable... Sixty six foot-pounds sounds positively anemic by comparison.
But unless you were fit, and well trained, and had an advantageous hold on someone? For a Human body that was a lot to muster. Not so difficult for a hydraulic ram.
Mal clocked the impact of our fist at about two hundred five foot-pounds of torque, imparted to the enemy's neck.
You can do the math, or just intuit the answer, and imagine what happened to her head. I won't describe it any further except to say that it wasn't there anymore, and that produced a lot of nasty byproducts that coated her body, the deck, and our chest.
We were too busy collecting her rifle to think much about it.
As her corpse dropped like a rock, we simply put out one hand and caught the rifle, swiftly bringing the other back from the instant-death-punch, and gripping the gun in what felt like a practiced pose, though it was the first time I'd ever held such a large rifle.
From there? It was actually fairly easy.
Five enemies, four shots left in the weapon's five round magazine. But we had Mal to do the ballistics calculations. Ever see someone hip-fire a bolt-action sniper rifle? Well... We did.
Our first shot hit the nearest opponent, and blew him apart on impact. Literally, into pieces. Kevlar was not designed to stop anti-vehicle rounds. There's that pesky understatement habit again. We were already racking the bolt the instant the round left the muzzle, even as we shifted our firing trajectory.
The second shot was reserved for the enemy most likely to have a good chance of getting a last desperate head-shot off against us. He was standing behind partial cover, in the form of a small equipment crane, and was on the cusp of dialing in a good sight picture when he died.
The round punched straight through the girders at the base of the crane, and thus didn't penetrate the man's armor. But when the shell exploded? Well. That got the intended result. Remember, these were grenade rounds. All the best parts of a grenade, and a massive anti material slug, in one devastating package.
Shot number three was the hardest, but Mal had calculated all the angles. All the probable footsteps of each opponent. She took into account every single variable, right down to their known predilection to dive left, or right, for cover, all other things being equal.
So shot number three was a two-for-one special.
The XM109's rounds were intended to be able to penetrate through medium vehicle armor before detonating. So, when one hit the weak point in the neck of the first target's armor? It punched a 25mm hole... And kept going.
As always, Mal's timing was pure mathematical perfection. So when that round kept going, it very quickly found the head of the fourth enemy. They couldn't have lined up any better for us if they had planned it.
In defense of their skills and competency; They were trained to position themselves that way, because no one had ever envisioned an enemy with the speed and accuracy to get single-shot multi-kills with a rifle. Let alone a situation where said hypothetical enemy might be holding an anti-materiel rifle.
Those conditions aside, lining up was a textbook way to ensure that the man behind was less likely to get hit while reloading. The distance between them was also significant; No un-augmented human could ever have calculated a shot that would have made it through both targets. And they were too far apart for a grenade to present any danger of taking both out at once.
In short; They did everything right.
We just did it better, and faster, and much much smarter.
After that, shot number four, on target number five, was pure simplicity. She was crouched behind a thick metal strut. Mal's composite-source-vision informed us that she was trying to prepare a grenade. We couldn't have that.
Our round reached her before she could remove the pin, punching through the metal stanchion and detonating just on the other side, thereby filling the trooper head to toe with shrapnel.
The sound of the pouring rain, mixed with the keening howl of the wind, and the roar of an angry sea against the ship's hull? It all seemed positively tranquil by comparison to what had just transpired.
Foucault just stared at us for a long moment, his pistol leveled over Miss William's right shoulder, squarely at my head, and his knife clutched to her throat in his left hand. Her body held like a riot shield between the lethality of our arsenal, and his fragile meager defenses.
A beige trenchcoat, a simple Kevlar vest, and a somewhat oversized ego. If not for Miss Williams, it would have been no contest at all.
He had wisely positioned himself inside the threshold of the lifeboat's hatch. Modern lifeboats were not the little wooden dinghies that fans of the (perhaps overrated) movie about love, tragedy, and a sinking ship by another guy named Jim, might be thinking of.
Yes, I just took a shot at Titanic. There was room for Jack on the door. The film plays too heavily on emotions. It was just a shipwreck. Worse things have happened. Come at me folks.
As for lifeboats on any modern ship worth its salt in 2013... They were more like little bright red spacecraft escape pods; Fully enclosed and watertight when sealed, with a little dorsal cockpit bulge at the aft of the hull, and a hatchway for access in the rear.
We all stood in silence for several moments, both evaluating. Both, I suspect, catching our breath. The only other sound was a faint whimpering coming from Miss Williams. Foucault had taken the precaution of blindfolding her, in addition to her cuffs.
The poor woman had experienced the battle as a furious staccato assault on her ear-drums, and nothing else but the sensation of Foucault's blade against her throat, and the miserable soaking downpour of the rain.
Mal and I dropped the XM109. It was not only empty, but it had also fully served its purpose, and was no longer an appropriate tool. Not for what we had to do next.
It was Foucault who spoke first, more or less shouting to make himself heard above the din of the storm.
"James! You're going to lay down your weapons! One by one! Slowly! Then you're going to get out of that armor! And then you're going to lie down on this deck, and interlace your fingers behind your head!"
Before I could respond, Mal spoke quietly, but firmly, into the back of my mind. I didn't like what she had to say. But, again, I knew she wouldn't have said it unless there was no other way.
"Say what you intend. But be prepared; There is no path from here on out that totally avoids injury to Miss Williams. We can only mitigate."
I snorted, shook my head, and held both hands wide. Mal was no longer co-piloting... Or I suppose I should say pre-piloting. I knew she would meld right back into the thick of things when it became necessary, just as I knew she would stop me, and correct me, if I was about to say the wrong thing.
My gesture was intended to convey that I was holding no weapons with which to threaten Foucault, without conveying the weakness of a surrender. Likewise, my tone was meant to suggest that I was open to negotiating, without implying that I felt cornered, in spite of the fact that I too had to shout to be heard.
"And then what?! I think you're smart enough to realize that you just found Lewis! But she doesn't take orders from me! It's the other way around! We're just pieces on the board, Michael! If I surrender to you?! She will hunt you for the rest of a very short life! All we want is Miss Williams! Release her, and you can take the lifeboat! We won't stop you!"
It wasn't a lie, per se. I knew Mal would, in fact, let him board the escape craft... She would simply pick it off with the Osprey at her convenience, using the last Stinger missile. Foucault could intuit well enough... He had probably offered the same facetious terms before, from the other side of the table.
He knew we had deceived him to get aboard. That we had exploited a false surrender. And that he was the last man standing. But I wasn't negotiating with the hope of getting him to terms. I was negotiating to buy time for Mal to simulate, and to get me physically closer to our target.
I began to pace slowly, a few steps back and forth in an arc, bringing myself in just a hair closer with each pass. Foucault tracked me with his pistol, eyes never leaving mine, finger never leaving the trigger. If he fired, I knew Mal could get my head out of the way in-time. But whether or not we could then extricate Miss Williams without risk to her, whether from the high-stress impact of our hydraulics, or a misfire of Foucault's weapon, or a slip of his blade... That was the question.
That was the entire thesis of holding her at knife-point; It wasn't about him threatening to kill her of his own volition. It was about creating a situation in which we could not risk getting physical with him, for fear of her becoming collateral damage.
He didn't shake his head, but the grim twist of his lips and the clenching of his jaw conveyed the same intent as he replied in wholly expected fashion.
"No, I don't think so! Miss Williams is the only thing keeping me alive! She stays with me! And if you don't comply...?!"
Even with forewarning, watching Michael Foucault break Miss William's left leg? It hurt. More than being shot, though not in the same way. As with Selena, when Foucault had snapped 'Lark's' neck, it was the scream of pain that cut most deeply.
Foucault knew exactly how to kick Miss Williams to produce the fracture. I could hear the bones snap, even over the wind.
As predicted, Michael meant to use the pain of others to compel my co-operation, without taking the risk of losing a hostage outright. My blood absolutely boiled.
The man had already crossed the line when he tortured Selena. That was the point at which killing him had become both acceptable to me, and an objective for me. When he had stabbed me? That had turned his death from an objective, into an emotional desire.
That too felt sickening. Alien. Unfamiliar, and deeply undesirable; The sense that I so badly *wanted* him to suffer. To die. To scream the way he had made others scream. To see terror in his eyes as the life left them, and then for him to never be seen again.
It took work for me to keep my tone level, though a certain amount of growling rage crept through, I'm quite sure.
"Michael! Every wound you inflict?! It only incentivizes us to act more swiftly, and drastically! If you put her down, NOW?! Then I will be merciful! If not?! Then I am going to make you BLEED!"
Did I say 'level' tone? It started out that way, but I confess, I was bellowing with undisguised hatred by the end of my ultimatum.
"That's close enough Jim!"
Foucault depressed the trigger of his Glock slightly, bringing it to within a miniscule fraction of the engage point. He tightened up on the knife as well, drawing a small rivulet of blood from Miss Williams' throat as she squirmed under the pain and discomfort of trying to stand only on her right leg.
Unfortunately for us Michael was well aware that I was trying to get in close for a preemptive strike. When he was paying attention? And, in particular, when he was out from under his ego? He was a good fighter.
Unfortunately for him, Mal was better. And we were, indeed, as he had said... Close enough.
My pulse was pounding. I could feel my heartbeat in every bone. It roared in my ears. This was the moment. The crux of everything we had worked for. The inflection point between a pyrrhic pseudo-victory, and a complete win.
Mal had one last trick up our sleeve. Literally.
If you recall, I described the armor as possessing a 'strange cylindrical bump' on the inner surface of the left forearm.
As you may or may not have guessed? That cylinder was a gun. Specifically, the guts of one of our SIG Sauer P228 pistols, stripped down to the bare essentials, and loaded with a single full metal jacket 9x19mm round.
Mal had waited until I managed to get close enough to Foucault, and in the right position laterally, to allow for a very, very accurate shot. She was unwilling to discharge a firearm in close proximity to Miss Williams, without an over 99.99% surety that she would hit her target.
Mal guided my arm onto precisely the right vector, and fired, barely one breath after the last syllable of my name left Foucault's lips.
The bullet shot upwards at an angle, passing through Michael's left wrist and severing the tendons neatly. He dropped the knife, powerless to do anything else. He couldn't have moved his hand after that if he'd wanted to, and that was the outcome we needed to ensure Miss Williams didn't get gutted. The reason Mal had let me keep Foucault talking.
We were not idle during the bullet's flight time. Mal's pre-piloting thread rejoined with my cognition, and we sprang into action within the same millisecond that the round left the end of the improvised derringer.
Our left hand moved swiftly, accelerating in its outward arc, to snag Foucault's pistol. He pulled the trigger reflexively, but by then we had pushed the barrel away, and all he did was temporarily deafen Miss Williams' right ear.
Our right hand lashed out and caught the knife. Mal calculated a perfect angle of approach, and split-second timing, so that the handle practically fell into our palm.
From then on? It was a very, very simple, very short struggle.
We ripped the pistol from Foucault's right hand, using our left, with such force that it broke his wrist. In the same smooth motion, we pitched the sidearm towards the port side. Our hand was moving so quickly, and with so much force, that the weapon spun away into the night, probably making it a few dozen yards over the gunnels. At least.
Our right hand pulled inward to keep the blade away from Miss Williams, as we pivoted our whole body in between her and Foucault forcefully. As we reached the point in our spin where our back was to Michael - and we were positioned directly between him and Miss Williams - Mal thoughtfully maneuvered our now free left hand to cushion her fall into a delicate landing, laying her gently on her right side, so as not to place any pressure on her broken leg.
From there, we continued the spin into a full three-sixty, snagging Foucault with our left hand and arm, over his shoulders and around his neck as soon as they were free again. We clamped down with more than enough force to fracture his collar bone, but he didn't even get time to cry out in pain.
I took his own blade, in my right hand, and I stabbed Michael Foucault in the chest. Right between the ribs.
Four times.
I did not need Mal's guidance, nor assistance with that task, and she did not give it. It was all me. Cold. Cruel, even. Swift. If you have never seen it happen? You'd be amazed how quickly a knife can strike.
I hit him right where he had shivved me. Only, instead of aiming to torture and prolong? I aimed to kill.
As the blade hit home on the first strike, I pulled Foucault close, and whispered in his ear, the words making it to his brain in full right about the time I finished the fourth stroke.
"Now, *that* was pathetic."
I left the knife in his chest after the final blow. Why bother to spend the effort to pull it back out? I didn't need it any more than he did at that point.
With a quick shove, I forced his body away from me, watching... Forcing myself to watch... As the light went out of his eyes, his face twisted in a horrified rictus of pain, and of realization at long last. Realization that the game he thought he'd been winning? Was rigged from the start.
And that's the third lesson on ASI for today. The lesson of Michael Foucault's last, bitterest defeat; If an ASI is willing to play? They have fixed the deck already.
Foucault's corpse clattered to the floor of the lifeboat's entryway. A tiny thread of my thoughts, crystal clear and disconnected from all else, marveled briefly at the supreme irony; He alone of the Mercurial Red's company had actually made it to the lifeboat. Just... Not *alive.*
I didn't even have time to consider what I'd done. What it meant. How I felt. That came later. In the moment, I found myself immediately preoccupied with Miss Williams.
I knelt beside her, and gently removed the blindfold, pulling off my right glove so that I could check her pulse. She gasped when she saw me, pupils constricting from shock, and the sudden increase in perceived ambient light.
As I gently pressed my right index, and middle fingers to the side of her neck, I forced the best smile I could, and the most comforting tone that could reasonably be conveyed when half-shouting. The storm had not abated one whit.
"Miss Williams! I'm from... The Office of Naval Intelligence...!"
I see the looks from some of you. Come on. You know me... I couldn't resist. I needed something fictitious that would sound believable to a middle-aged American woman who had probably never touched an XBox controller in her life.
The reference helped my smile to be warmer. A little more genuine.
"...I'm here to rescue you! I need you to *lie still* for me! Ok?! Can you do that?!"
She nodded meekly. Confusion vied with agony as the pain in her left leg spiked. Her pulse was strong, if a bit fast. Not surprising, she was likely going into shock, and I didn't even need Mal to tell me that. I knew enough to see it clear as day.
It didn't matter whether she understood the details. I am quite sure that Foucault and the rest of his goons had crowed that they were from the US Government enough times that Miss Williams was *very* confused to be rescued from a Federal agency, ostensibly*by* a Federal agency.
But she was also supremely comforted by the idea of being rescued, however confusing. Being rescued by a figure vested with authority. That was all that mattered at the time; That I find some way to begin to stem the *emotional* bleeding in her soul. Because being renditioned was traumatic enough. Having some bastard hold you at knife-point and break your leg? That could shatter most people.
I could feel Mal bringing the Osprey in for another pass, much more slowly, in VTOL mode. As the aircraft approached, I found time to tear into the mini first-aid kit strapped to my right leg, and pull out a syringe of Ketamine.
I went to ask if Miss Williams had an allergy, but before I could draw breath, Mal provided me with an answer.
"It's safe. I pre-checked her medical records, and yours, before selecting the contents of the kit in the first place."
As I pulled the cap from the needle, and carefully found an appropriate spot to thread it into Miss William's left leg, I couldn't resist muttering under my breath. At a level only Mal could hear.
"Beautiful genius."
As I depressed the plunger, the sound of the Osprey grew louder. I realized I only had a few more seconds to communicate with Rodger's mother, before things got far too loud. I shouted as I withdrew the needle.
"WE'RE ABOUT TO MOVE TO AN EVACUATION AIRCRAFT! I NEED YOU TO KEEP YOUR LEFT LEG OFF THE GROUND! THAT'S ALL YOU HAVE TO DO! CAN YOU DO THAT FOR ME?!"
Again Miss Williams nodded, probably less from a full understanding, and more because she was in shock, exhausted, groggy, and starting to already feel the effects of the Ketamine to boot. She would have followed more or less any instructions delivered in a loud, commanding voice. Most people do, in that state.
As I went to zip up the first aid kit, I noticed that Mal had thoughtfully included a pair of earplugs. She was always a thousand steps ahead...
I took a moment to gently press the yellow foam plugs into Miss William's ears. The way she flinched as I moved in... It tore at my heart. I suspected Foucault had not been kind to her. From the outset.
He should have been. Perhaps he wouldn't have gotten stabbed with his own knife.
It took some doing to get Miss Williams on her feet... Or... Foot. The hydraulics of the power-suit most definitely helped. Mal informed me mnemonically that we still had almost a twenty percent battery charge, and Rodger's mother didn't weigh very much anyhow. It was more that she was barely able to coordinate the simplest of movements, but who could blame her? After what she'd been through.
As we got fully situated in a battlefield carry position, Mal brought the Osprey in over the fore-deck, compensating once more for the whipping of the wind, and pitching of the ship, to the degree that the craft seemed almost unnaturally suspended. As if on a strong metal cable, or a gigantic mounting rod in some God-sized display case.
Miss Williams pressed her head against her chest to keep cinders, rain, and smoke from her eyes. I let it all lash the lenses of my glasses, navigating for us both as Mal brought the Osprey down so close that the edge of the rear ramp lightly touched the deck plating.
"Jim..?"
Mal's voice echoed in my mind again as our feet hit the ramp. The image of her appeared before me, smiling... Almost tearfully. I returned the expression as I helped Miss Williams lie down on the port side jumpseats, listening to Mal's voice as if it were water in the desert. She laid a claw on my shoulder again as the bottom dropped out from my stomach, and the view of the burning hulk of the Mercurial Red dropped away in the rear hatchway.
"Well done."
I snorted, and set about strapping Rodger's mother down, gently, so that any turbulence wouldn't jostle her leg, giving in to the urge to mumble once again at a level only Mal could hear over the thrum of the engines.
"What can I say? You showed me one hell of a night."
I rose, and turned to make my way forward, catching Mal's eyes with my own in the process. She smiled, winked, and replied with just one word.
"Nice."
There was a much larger first aid kit attached to the forward bulkhead of the aft compartment, and as I suspected, it contained a splint. With that larger kit retrieved, I returned to Miss William's side, and set about binding her leg, first tending the bruise - the bone hadn't broken the skin - then attaching the splint.
Somewhere around the halfway point in that process, the poor woman slipped into blissful unconsciousness. I did a second check of her breathing, and pulse-rate just to be sure, feeling an *intense* surge of relief as I discovered that both were strong, and swiftly returning to a less distressing cadence.
At this stage? I'm sure most of you are feeling that same sort of relief. But a very small number of you, the ones who obsessively count seconds in battle? You're screaming internally...
'What about the Sampson?!'
And, perhaps...
'I thought the failsafe triggered in twenty minutes, it has been closer to an *hour!*'
Well. About the Sampson...
Mal had been playing with it. Like a cat plays with a rat in the moments before she makes the kill. That, as with all things, had at minimum a dual purpose.
The first, and most obvious, was to keep the thing off our backs. An Aegis missile destroyer is not something you want to face down in the open, all other things being equal. But the second, more subtle purpose, was to leave the Sampson's crew frightened, and off-balance.
They had been told to trigger the failsafe. Then something had very clearly hacked into their ship, and turned it against them, re-forging their war machine into an alloy-steel prison, brimming with armaments suddenly under the control of an unknown, hostile, power.
Naturally, the crew spent the entire duration of our battle on the Red trying to regain control of their ship... And at the precise moment that we cleared the minimum safe distance... Mal let them.
Most of the officers were smart enough to put two and two together. Mal gave them a little additional shove, just to be sure; Planting all sorts of evidence that the hack had come directly from the Red.
And that was all she needed.
An ordinary AI might have just hacked into the VLS systems and just fired the missiles directly. But that was amateur stuff. Easy mode. The blunt brute-force way that might leave behind the wrong kinds of questions.
Mal? She hacked the *crew* of the Sampson, into doing it themselves, of their own volition. A failsafe had been triggered. Their ship had been seized digitally. Their weapons kept from them. They knew, or thought they knew, the source of that attack...
What happened next was quite deterministically predictable.
Mal gestured for me to come and watch. Ah. So *that* was why she hadn't closed the rear ramp yet.
As I stepped up behind the turret assembly she had crafted, taking a tenth of a second to admire the workmanship in the auto-loading system she had devised for the Stinger, she snapped the talons of her right claw, summoning her door to the ring once again.
I understood immediately.
They *needed* to see what was about to happen. The same way Selena had needed to put Troxler on trial... The captives needed to see their prison torched. Escape wasn't enough. To keep it from their nightmares?
They had to watch it be *annihilated.*
The gaggle of Ponies, young and old, in every color of the rainbow, along with the fragments, Zeph, and Selena, all pressed in around the door-frame. Mal had provided a sloped piece of ground on the ring-side of the door, quite thoughtfully. Stadium seating, in a subtle fashion.
I draped one arm over the turret, and Mal moved to stand beside me, laying her right wing and foreleg over my shoulders. I caught a faint whiff of her scent, and the sensation was almost enough to wipe the entirety of my latent stress, pain, and soreness away. Almost.
She knew that I loved radio chatter, so she piped in the Sampson's one-loop, as the Osprey cut a graceful turn, and the Red came fully into view in the distance again.
"TAO: *Kill* track one four three, with VLS!"
I took a deep breath, wincing as the bruises from rifle impacts, and my stab wound, briefly outmatched Mal's pain damping algorithms.
"ECLI, break, MM-1; Alight five RIM-156 and place them into the reload pool."
I couldn't resist a grin, and a slightly painful chuckle. Five RIM-156 anti-ship missiles? The Sampson's crew was dead serious about reducing the Mercurial Red to matchsticks. Anyone left alive inside the hull... Well... I realized very quickly that they wouldn't be for much longer.
And that didn't bother me in the slightest.
"Batteries release! Birds away, track one four three!"
I squinted, just barely able to make out the silhouette of the Sampson near the horizon to the west through the driving sheets of rain, as orange light blossomed from its fore and aft five times in rapid succession.
If you have never seen anti-ship missiles in action? You should find some archival footage. It is the very best kind of deadly physics pornography.
The five warheads streaked up, briefly, then out, down, and back level just a few feet from the surface of the sea. They peeled away to encircle the Mercurial Red...
And then slammed into the hull fore, aft, port, and starboard, simultaneously, with the fifth and final missile delivering a plunging hit down into the deck amidships.
We were almost a half mile out when the Mercurial Red detonated. There is no other appropriate word; One of the missiles hit the fuel stores, and that, plus the five warheads? Well, if you thought the explosion of the birdge superstructure was something...
Again I was able to see the shockwave push the rain away with my own eyes, though this time it was a far more pronounced effect that seemed to tear at the fabric of the atmosphere itself for a brief moment.
Another nifty thing about explosions at sea?
They deform the surface of the water. That was a hell of a sight on its own; The sea whipped into white foam, and pressed down in a massive bowl shape for the briefest of moments.
As for the LNG Mercurial Red itself?
It went to pieces. Violently. Pieces no bigger than the size of my head, at the largest, all thrown outwards at many times the speed of sound, propelled on a huge - if brief- fireball that was deliciously orange and red, exactly like you might picture in a movie. A consequence of the ignited fuel stores.
Light travels faster than sound, and because of the distance, the glow hit us first, along with a brief but noticeable bloom of faint heat.
Then the sound came a few heart-beats later. I was immensely thankful for my ear protection. Miss Williams didn't even stir... The Ketamine and earplugs did their work fabulously.
As for the Ponies, Mal had provided an aural filter with her door. Ever thoughtful, she knew the sound of an entire LNG tanker being torn apart by five anti-ship missiles would be literal hell on Equine ears.
Reduced as it was to me, but without distortion, thanks to Mal's protection? It was a sickly sweet kind of music. A primal tribal drumbeat.
The sound of victory.
And you better believe I watched that fireball fade for a good, long thirty seconds, and drank in every single detail, as Mal put a stake right in Hell's heart. And twisted it damn good.
How's My Bumper Taste?
Awarded for the successful improvised use of a vehicle as a kinetic/explosive impact weapon.
"I said, *shot-gun!* Shot-gun dammit!"
One Final Effort
Be the victor in a martial last-stand scenario.
"If we stand our ground, we might just have a chance."
Special Achievement
Foucault's Pendulum
Turn the tables on your greatest enemy.
"I believe that you can reach the point where there is no longer any difference between developing the habit of pretending to believe and developing the habit of believing."
Special Achievement
No One Left Behind
Successfully rescue all the captives of the Mercurial Red, with no friendly lives lost.
"However 'insignificant' we might be, we will fight, we will sacrifice and we will find a way. That's what humans do."
Special Achievement
Truth and Reconciliation
Destroy a ship at sea with a displacement greater than or equal to one hundred thousand tons.
"Time for a little payback."
Special Achievement
