The thing that was surprising to me when we assembled for the first time was that every single person there except me was a veteran, at least an E4 third class petty officer, several of them were E5, and there was even an E6 first class petty officer, a baseline named Monk who lived up to his name by having a round shiny head that was as bald as an onion. I was the only tin in the class, and the rest were all coppers except for the E6 who was a bronze, and not one of the others was wearing a conscript UI.
Surprisingly enough, after a glowing speech about the valor and righteous honor of being part of the fleet, and holding the line against the 'scourge of the Chaos Lords' by a professional talker, our primary instructor showed up. A Warrant Officer who looked like he had fought on more than one hell world, based on the scars, advancement that permeated his body, and even his aura.
Admittedly, the guy was incredibly appealing. Part of the reason full genemods had been outlawed was that we were SUPPOSED to bond to powerful veterans. I wasn’t old enough yet for a proper bond, but the guy was at least silver, which made me pay close attention to his every word, like it or not. Maybe to the other students he looked like a scarred baseline near basket case, with several system mods, most of which were tech six or below, but to me he looked like a shining beacon of light in the darkness.
Dangerous, definitely dangerous. I’d have to work hard not to catch his attention for the three months we were in J-school. Bonds did not have to be sexual, they often were not, but I didn’t want my future and will subsumed by the needs of a stronger personality, no matter how much he looked like he could find the holy grail singlehandedly.
“I want each of you to head out of the school’s primary lock, at some point, and survey the beautiful artwork some of our former graduates decorated the passageway with. Look at it, study it, and if possible, enjoy it. Why? Because it’s scrot. Every last line. If you ever see something like that in reality, you are looking at a bunch of dead people just before they get eaten.”
He chuckled, “My name is Warrant Officer Wasserman, my friends call me Warrant Officer Wasserman. I have been part of the invasion of six hell-worlds, and done over two thousand rift dives. I have never been a drop pilot, and I never will be… but I have been sent here because my primary rating is Paladin, and I have seen more mistakes, deaths, and poorly executed drops that resulted in wasted metal, dead troopers, and pilots getting digested than any three decorated pilots put together. I am also a sworn scion of the church, which makes the fleet uncomfortable to keep me around when I’m not on a drop.”
“I am not one of your teachers, but I'm one of your instructors. I KNOW how the enemy thinks, and in simulated drops, I WILL be hand-guiding them to give you as realistic an experience as possible, and I'll also be evaluating your performance. We are not looking for fleet commanders, heroes, or young geniuses. What we ARE looking for is cowards… cowards that are just brave enough to make their drop under enemy heat, complete their mission, and then run like hell until we call you back to fetch any people or hardware that survives.”
“One thing you need to remember… Meat is meat, metal is metal. EVERY trooper that dies on the ground or in the air is a victory for the Chaos Lords. Your commanders may not agree, pointing at the tactical value of a full unit of high-intensity drones versus the life of one green trooper or tech. They are LYING. That is their job. In the end, while metal may cost a commander a thousand times more than training a troop, losing an entire mech battalion isn’t a victory for the enemy… losing a life is.”
“If it were up to me, and it isn’t, we wouldn’t waste a single life reclaiming real estate that’s already been lost. Each of you has a much stronger tech gift than usual… you can coordinate drone strikes in person, in the form of the minor node each of your drop pods possesses. You can stand back in your shuttle to control your units at least semi-remotely once you have dropped rather than relying on stupid antonymous SI to take charge or leaving it to the ground techs who may already be overloaded tending to their own troopers.”
“Piloting can be handled by SI’s. They are better fliers, better navigators, and better in static situations than you could ever get close to until you are at a much higher level, that’s why troop pods don’t even have a pilot. The chair in your control pod exists to give you a place to sit your ass while you handle the drone units, and if you can, keep them active and repaired. It’s also decently useful for holding snacks and energy drinks.”
“What you will be learning here is not piloting. You will be learning to expand your gifts and think tactically, controlling your drone squads and fighting for control against ME. I am an aura master, and if you give me the chance, I WILL take your units away from you and force you to fail every exam. You will be learning to keep control of your units out of my hands, while at the same time exploiting their use at every possible moment to help keep troopers alive. If you can win a battle for them? Wonderful! That means fewer men die. If you have to throw your ARC tier Seven artillery launcher into a hopeless battle with a bore worm to keep a unit alive, it doesn’t matter that the artillery could help take a primary objective… so can those troopers, your ten million credit drone is better used as a scrap metal shield.”
“Several of you are sorcerer trainees with a specialization in Golems.” He nodded at a lone E5 charlotte male who was sitting next to a beautiful red-haired baseline girl, presumably flirting with her. “Your job is a little harder because golems cannot carry the same kind of destructive hardware that high-end drones do, but it also makes it easier for you, because you will be provided with cores for some of the highest-end golem bodies the fleet can afford. Your control will be almost perfect, so I can promise you that your tactical ability and flexibility will be tested and taught far more intensively.”
“Most of you will have already played drone or golem support, either in fleet logistics or as part of a trooper squad’s support. Those of you who have delved with a team of troopers and survived? Congratulations, you already know three-quarters of the problems you're going to be dealing with and double your chances of survival until retirement by qualifying for this J-School.
“How many of you can do remote repairs?”
Several hands went up, including mine after a moment to see I wasn’t standing out.
“I notice many of you are goblins. Remember, almost all of the team techs you will be defending on the ground are goblins just like you. EVERY erg of energy you spend taking the burden off of their shoulders, from the relative safety of your pod, is a life you can potentially save, a goblin life just like yours. They have to split their attention and energy between their team, any team drones they might have, and trying to keep their own asses alive in essence-conductive light armor. You will need to split your attention twice as much as any other assault pilot, and by the time you finish this training, you will either be able to do that, or you will be back on the ground with them, got it?”
All of us nodded. I was confident that I could do so, but if Chief Wasserman was actively contesting my drone control, I’d have to interact with his aura regularly, and that would add a hell of a burden. My people were CREATED with the instinct to submit to strong personalities with powerful auras, and real human auras were a totally different creature from the hostile, oppressive auras of the Chaos Lords. I would never be swayed by one of those monsters, but the fight would be on to avoid instinctively submitting if and when the chief decided to directly oppose my drone control.
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It probably helped enormously that he considered me a goblin. Goblins were not objects of interest or respect and often were considered barely better than vermin. That total lack of consideration would be an important feature for shoring up my defenses against instinctive bonding, and it didn’t help that, looking at his ‘upgrades’, I knew I could do a thousand times better or even restore him to pristine upgraded baseline with very little work.
My mother would have demanded I help restore him to the Paladin he was instead of languishing in a broken body filled with third-rate replacements and upgrades. Yes, my primary control was only tech six, but there was a world of difference between a juttering, sparking tier six neural implant and a smoothly-functioning magitech update, and I knew that as my control improved, so would my eventual tech and sorcery cap.
I hated to do this, but… I couldn’t stand it. No, I wouldn’t bond to this guy, but… I couldn’t just sit there and watch someone suffer. I raised my hand.
He peered at me, “You have a question, Spaceman ahh… Reynard?”
I nodded, “Yes, Warrant Wasserman. As I am sure several others have noticed,” I nodded to one of the other goblins, a face-scarred fellow that nodded back, “You have a cross-wired Macguffin in your secondary neural net that is ahh… sending occasional surges to your motor cortex.”
He raised an eyebrow, “MacGuffin? Is that the technical name?”
I shook my head, “I don’t know the technical name. It’s a tricatalyst reductive capacitor, magitech, and most of that won’t ever appear in a tech manual with a label.”
“Did anyone else notice it?” he asked, and two hands raised, both goblins.
“Yes, it’s magitech. As you have probably noticed, a lot of my meat is metal. That’s because I have three burnt meridians. The MacGuffin, as you so eloquently put it, allows me to control a force blade, which is pure magitech, even with both of my hand meridians wrecked. It cannot be replaced, since all magitech, as you know, is either a legacy of the technomancers or a rift reward. It stings occasionally, but it’s both the price I pay for still being able to take a chaos beast my rank as well as a useful test to see how many of you can actually spot magitech fluctuations.”
“So you don’t want it repaired?”
He laughed and shook his head, “More like can’t. There are supposedly ways to restore meridians if… you know… your family happens to own a planet, and magitech can't be repaired by traditional means. If I let a medic dig around in my neurology to try and fish it out, not only am I likely to be permanently paralyzed unless I can find a similar reward, but the medic would have to have a set of gifts that would make every minute cost more than I bring home in a year.”
I looked at the other goblin, who shook his head. “I am sorry, Chief Warrant, but I have to disagree. All it would take would be someone trained in both spiritual and tech, or a cross-discipline trait like sorcerous tech, who also knew micro-active repairs. Reward magitech is MADE to be easily fixed or reverse-engineered, it’s not even got any obfuscated subroutines, since rewards are intended to help boost tech levels and encourage chain innovation.”
“The software?”
I shook my head, “No, sir. Any halfway competent software tech with a remote programmer could update it to fix the power differential in like ten seconds… I mean, after it was fixed. You’d have to have a mindhealer available to keep you from going into toxic shock from neural deprivation, but even the lowest-ranked shaman or empath could do that easily, while you waited for the software to get rebooted. Half the people here would probably be capable of doing that, and Spaceman apprentice… uhh,” I looked at the charlotte’s nametag, “Learine here probably can set up at LEAST a minor empathy refractor to keep you safe from toxic shock while the software reloaded.”
He looked at me closely, “And I should let GOBLINS fix something that some of the best technosurgeons in the fleet warned me would probably turn off my lights for good?”
Taxon, the scarred goblin who nodded at me, grinned broadly, showing off his sharp teeth. “Warrant Officer Wasserman, what’s the rule for a ship with goblin techs?”
He chuckled, “It might not come home in one piece, but it will come home.” He nodded, “You are a nerd, and looking for nerd things to fix. I like that. Tell you what, prove that you have the skills, and I will let you, Taxon, and Learine give it a shot since I will be done after this training gig anyway. The system rewards those who take risks to improve themselves, right? I’d rather go jumbled than spend the rest of my life in a floater banging on a holobox.”
“Me sir?” I gulped, “I was just pointing out that merged disciplines…”
He grinned, “You. You spotted the problem, came up with a solution, and figured out how to implement it. Which brings me to another point.”
“Many of you are goblins. Goblins have very little trust because you have been trained since birth to make the best of bad situations, but you aren’t very good at handling GOOD situations. And some of you have come from some amazingly scrotty situations.”
Snickering went around the room, not just from the goblins, but from the Dwarves as well.
“This means, even though goblin primary manufacturing is unsafe crap, you can fix ANYTHING. Many commanders don’t understand that about you. The morans will get some respect for innovations and upgrades, but goblins? Even if you save a ship, people will take one look at your solutions and turn green… especially since you guys don’t give a scrot about environmental hazards or safety as long as it works.”
“That which does not kill us makes us stronger?” Taxon offered, “Chief?”
Wasserman chuckled, “No. You are known for not being loyal, not even to your own, much. That tends to paint a poor military picture. But the goblin service DOES notice. Have you ever heard the expression it’s better to ask forgiveness than permission? Well, the dwarves can get permission. The elves can get permission. The baselines, weebs, and most of the other genemods can get permission… you can’t. Take your licks for wasting money if it keeps you, your ship, and your troops alive… You WILL gain advancement, and while you might never get rank, the MGC WILL watch your back, and you are not expendable, even if you tend to breed in the dozens.”
More chuckles, and the warrant continued, “Just remember that the troopers will appreciate you even if your command doesn’t. Even if you never advance beyond third class petty officer in military rank, if you can stick it out you are going to be the baddest motherscrotting gold-core or twin-core petty officer around, with stories to tell your hundreds of grandkids and a nest egg that would constipate an ostrich. You will make friends, and allies, and gain life debts by the score. Just remember that living is the most important thing, and you should be good.”
He shrugged and looked me directly in the eye, making me wince, before he said, “Now I am going to turn the time over to your control instructor, Sensei Ramuel. He is a civilian, but he’s a twin core master, which means he has forgotten more about psychic combat than most of us will ever learn. He is a lepan, so he may look unexpectedly… furry, but respect him or you will be getting demerits while you recover in the infirmary.”