"They'll kill themselves if you off him, you know." Grim told me, picking at the bones of the chicken we'd saved for him.
"Is that confirmed or a rumor?" I asked, my own meal put away a good while back. In the background, the other soldiers were having a much needed shower.
"At least the inner circle is, they didn't use amnestics on me for that one." An ethnically Russian man said, resting his assault rifle on our table.
"That's a couple hundred people then. The man is lazy, I very much doubt he'd devote the time to giving everyone the same commands if he didn't need to." I replied, looking at the latest sat footage of the target.
"The majority of his thralls are given a canned speech. They're to avoid doing him harm, follow his instructions interpreted in good faith, and ensure his orders are followed by others." A grizzled veteran said. He had the largest facial scar I'd ever seen, his face tilted into a permanent grimace. As intimidation went, it worked, albeit he could have it fixed overnight if he actually wanted it.
"Not the worst short geass I've heard. Noam, you worked in Alignment at Turing didn't you? Any obvious loopholes jump out at you?"
Corporal Noam chewed over my words, sharing one of my cigars. He was the youngest in the team, barring Alia of course, he'd had more theoretical grounding in how AIs might circumvent their programming.
"His voice isn't privileged. The only way a thrall knows for sure they're talking to the real EP is to try to disobey and fail as the geass kicks in. They normally operate in epistemic uncertainty, if they can be convinced that EP has personally relayed them an order, they're going to obey unflinchingly until they can be convinced they're fooled." He said, scratching the chin of the stray dog that Alia had taken under wing at the villa.
"I thought of a deepfake, can you whip up a convincing one?" I asked him, throwing a bone to the same dog. He had a bit of lab in him I bet, and he made my heart ache for Gator.
"Audio-visual, certainly. I've already got a model cooked. The problem will be that he's likely got validation codes, we're not the first people to try and impersonate him I'm sure." Noam said.
"Grim, if your powers are being cooperative, head out into the city and look for any high ranking thralls, especially military officials ranked Major and above. We might need to kidnap at least a couple to test our methods on." I ordered him. He nodded and went to confer with Alan.
I ended up taking Em and going for a walk into Santa Clara to view the city for myself.
It was a charming place, kept spotlessly clean, with hordes of utility drones pruning trees, sweeping the roads and overall ensuring that foreigners got the best possible impression of EP's rule. The faces of the people nearby told a slightly different story if you knew how to look, everyone seemed just a tiny bit on edge, especially around military patrols.
Older electronics such as AR glasses and smartphones were common, as both civilians and military alike were forbidden from using laces. You could spot the tourists just by their lack of the same. And there were plenty of them, unlike Havana, which had thrown itself headfirst into a modernization campaign before El Presidente had taken power, Santa Clara retained most of its old colonial buildings, with their pleasing pastel colors and air of genteelness.
It seems that people could eventually get used to anything, given enough time, and truth be told El Presidente would have been unremarkable among authoritarian dictators half a century back. The ability to command loyalties with just a word made re-educating the recalcitrant significantly easier, leaving less need for performative brutality. Any serious crimes usually entailed a chat with the man himself, after which criminals were let loose, outright unable to commit crimes even if they wanted to. Only severe cognitive impairment or external influence could overrule that, which is why such individuals were forbidden from getting drunk or installing laces. All that went out the window if you explicitly rebelled against him of course, he was hardly kind.
I spotted a few Marines loitering here and there, likely on R&R from the multiple bases dotting the islands. Equipment had significantly advanced since my stint in the Army, back when I had to do the qualifiers we weren't even allowed to use the standard exoskeletons, and these jarheads had full power armor on. Probably more to keep themselves cool than anything else, barring the need to smuggle large amounts of liquor back to the barracks.
A couple of them were playing soccer with a few kids, only for one of them to kick the ball into the stratosphere when they didn't calibrate their legs properly. I left them profusely apologizing and offering to buy a new one, but the kid was inconsolable, apparently the ball had been signed by some big name player from Brazil.
We wandered as close as we were allowed to the presidential palace, a structure set rather incongruously into a hill. I believed it was the work of a metahuman, because the older topographic maps showed no such structure.
From the outside, it took cues from old Spanish forts, with rock walls manned with guards placed more to look imposing than any real utility. I brought up my surveillance gear, and managed to spy a few car-sized drones patrolling overhead, hidden behind adaptive camouflage and the glare of the sun itself.
The inner walls were more advanced, made of reinforced materials and with plenty of ports for what I had no doubt were autocannons, lasers and the like.
The palace itself was beautiful, resembling a governor's mansion from a by-gone era. Trellises of vines kept it in shade, and there were multiple large fountains spraying into the muggy air. A hospital meant for El Presidente and his kin was partially embedded into the hill, with some discreet blisters on the top suggesting anti-air defenses. There were a few armored vehicles dotting the grounds, alongside luxury cars and utility vehicles.
A building was covered up by plastic sheets, likely to hide bullet holes. It hadn't been all that long ago that he'd flipped out and ordered the execution of his family after all.
A gigantic billboard broadcast propaganda extolling Dr. Augusto Rodriguez's many virtues and the advances he had brought to Cuba. I spat when nobody was looking, El Presidente had been a homeopathic 'doctor' before he went into politics. I was willing to wager that half the reason he was in such poor health was because he was drinking his own extremely dilute Kool-Aid.
I received a ping from Grim, he'd managed to sneak by mostly unobserved to the outer perimeter, and had been able to observe a rather high ranking official while he received personal orders from El Presidente. As expected, important commands came with encryption signatures validating them as originating from El Presidente, which in combination with the previous instructions left by his geass meant that the thrall had no choice but to obey as if they'd been instructed directly.
I sent the recording to our Lithium AI, and set it to code breaking. Luckily, it was a rather outdated form of the RSA encryption protocol, and I borrowed time on the massive quantum computers in Atlas to begin making headway.
With 4 low level supes, 6 cyborg supersoldiers and yours truly being all I had in play, I had no intention of picking a fair fight. We had to hit him with the majority of his soldiers distracted, kill him and be long gone before they wizened up to the ruse. To that end, I drew up a map showing the latest sites of rebel activity. None of them had dared strike Santa Clara in months, but it wasn't a very big island. I'd dismissed the idea of contacting them myself, if EP had any brains, they'd be absolutely riddled with sleeper agents immune to standard interrogation methods.
I handed Alan a bag full of plastic explosives. He'd TP to any unsurveilled targets we found, plant them on a timer and keep on moving, Grim would head out with his buddies, the others would be using optical camo to stay out of sight, but he'd be fine waltzing into any place that didn't have machine surveillance and planting charges.
I was torn regarding how to employ Alan next. He could TP Emily into the fight, attempt to hunt down our target himself, or coordinate an ambush on the QRF forces headed out to respond to the explosions. We'd have a great deal more success in drawing out troops if we could make them think they were dealing with a large number of guerrillas.
After some deliberation, I settled on the last option, at least for part of the attack. We needed them to bring out the big guns, and if I gave him a booster shot to resensitize his arms, we'd be able to move some of our Israeli buddies around to add to the volume of fire.
On examining the map, I had little doubt that the hill his mansion was built on was a warren filled with bunkers and hiding spots. I half suspected that the hospital was a hardened structure too, though we had no intel on if El Presidente was the only one it catered to.
I looked at the pile of supplies we'd managed to smuggle into the country and wished once again that UNSEEN had thrown their full weight behind us instead of half-assing things. I almost became lost in my own thoughts, dreaming of all-devouring nanite swarms, antimatter spewers, graviton bombs and the like before Alia recognized the look on my face and poked me, bringing me back down to Earth. It was hopeless fantasizing about those, all the good Crafter stuff ended up shipped off to Alpha Centauri, or squirreled away for a rainy day.
However, we didn't have a bad haul with us. Two SPIKE missile launchers, an outdated Israeli design but still more than capable of giving any armored vehicle a bad time. I'd be using a gyrojet gun. In appearance, it resembled a scaled up pistol since barrel length wasn't a concern for the projectiles it fired.
I still handled the ammunition for it cautiously, I'd seen enough Most Dangerous Explosives Tier Lists (Gone Sexual! 😱) to be careful with octanitrocubane. I didn't know how it was stabilized enough to be fired out of a gun, but back in the day it had been considered impractical since the stuff would blow up if you looked at it funny.
Still, you didn't just use it like a normal rifle cartridge, a gyrojet was closer to an RPG in terms of function, igniting a booster jet so the projectile accelerated (relatively) gently out of the barrel, picking up more speed as it traveled to the unfortunate target.
This stopped the ONC charge from making your day as bad as the enemy's, and overall it made for a comparatively compact weapon that still had some punch.
WARNING USER DEFINED COGNITOHAZARD DETECTED
Do not call it a Bolter, you never know when the James Workshop telepaths are listening. Even your high(er) explosives won't be enough to put down the notorious Copyright Troll their greensmiths can produce.
I dismissed the joke I'd programmed in and looked at the rest of our kit. They wouldn't use telepaths after all, not even the lucrative plastic crack industry was that wealthy.
The Israelis had brought their usual, black market weapons with their serial numbers removed. They took the deniable ops thing seriously. With their augments, what might have once been deemed vehicle-grade weaponry was lugged around with ease.
And finally, we broke out exoskeletons. Or skeleton, because I was the only person wearing one. Most of the supes barring Grim wouldn't be able to use their powers properly wearing them, and he had enough augments that it was largely redundant. But I was quite minimally augmented myself, and it would significantly improve my agility, speed and strength.
[https://imgur.com/Ou2pixJ]
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Adat [https://imgur.com/a/l9AbPUR][https://imgur.com/Ou2pixJ]
It was a comparatively cool morning when we prepared to kick it all off. On the road east from Santa Clara was an isolated checkpoint and watchtower.
A soldier barely out of his teens sat up in the tower, trying to shade his eyes from the rising sun while he whiled away time playing some inane gacha game on a phone. I hoped he'd achieved a high score, because he wasn't achieving anything else after Alan teleported next to him and stabbed a monoblade through his eye socket.
Below, one of his comrades looked up on hearing the disturbance, and was dropped with barely a whisper as Grim shot him in the neck with a silenced subsonic pistol. Not that he'd have noticed if Grim had just walked up to him and stabbed him, but we weren't in the business of taking unnecessary risks.
Unauthorized reproduction: this story has been taken without approval. Report sightings.
The bodies were frisked and we struck paydirt. A tactical tablet keyed into their systems, not much in the way of permissions, but we could track troop movements significantly easier.
I climbed up the tower with Alan, my exo making it feel effortless, and we settled in with eyes on the city. I checked the wristwatch on my wrist, an affectation from my civilian guise that I had forgotten to remove. And bingo, the clock struck seven in the morning.
I had to wait several seconds to hear the massive explosions go off behind me, indicating Alan's timed explosives detonating. The soldiers at a nearby motor pool and fuel depot were having a pretty bad time of it.
I looked at the Spike launcher and the couple spare missiles I'd lugged up here, and nodded to Alan. He acknowledged the gesture by TPing away, and I could hear distant gunfire from where the Israelis were taking out the disoriented survivors.
We'd kicked the hornets nest, and in the city, the swarm was preparing to fly out. I watched a Mi-24 Hind spooling up, the outdated helicopter still packing quite a punch with its cannons and rockets. The garrison below the town was moving out, with an APC rolling out with a bunch of armored cars heading our way.
I swiped to accept a call on the tablet, using the voice spoof we'd prepared by observing the sentries talking. A small speaker relayed our falsified news with breathless but flawless Spanish, copying the voice of the unseeing corpse next to me to a tee. We'd called in a guerilla attack, reporting multiple casualties and stating that the rebels were trying to escape further south and east. Alan and a few of the SpecOps were doing their best to imply a much larger force, and honestly, with the firepower we were packing, it wasn't much of an exaggeration.
The officer on the other end seemed to believe our story, and ordered us to stay put and cover the approach of the convoy now leaving the city. I was more than happy to oblige.
The helicopter stuck to flying just over the convoy, seemingly unwilling to venture forwards when there were reports of rockets and heavy weapons being employed. As the column rolled down the open expanse towards us, the first smart mines detonated, blowing an antiquated humvee straight off the road and into the treeline.
In the commotion, I launched the first Spike missile, it flew up like a dart, and then accelerated towards the helicopter scanning the fields for targets. Thanks to it being an IR-guided fire and forget weapon, any antiquated missile warnings on the heli didn't activate, and it was blown out of the sky to smash down into a field of golden tobacco.
Grim fired at the same time, his own missile hitting the APC after flying straight up and then swooping down to hit the weaker roof. It exploded, showering the soldiers who had just dismounted in burning shrapnel.
The convoy was cut off, with the lead vehicle a burning wreck, and the APC blocking the way back. Having run all the way back or caught a lift with Alan, the SpecOps boys began engaging the distraught men taking cover, picking them off from the sides in a textbook L-shaped ambush.
Without any heavy targets worthy of the remaining Spikes, I threw down the launch unit to Grim, and then jumped down myself, the exo absorbing the rough landing.
Together, we ran forwards, Grim firing his assault rifle in bursts while I let loose with my bolter.
It was surprisingly quiet, you had the initial whoosh of the rocket motors engaging, the crack as it flew out and accelerated to supersonic speeds, and finally the boom as it hit some poor bastard and blew him to bits. With the relatively chonky size of the individual bolts, it was easy enough to do some terminal guidance and I had brought plenty of semi-guided rounds that could interface with my lace to get targeting data. While they wouldn't quite chase targets around corners, it compensated for my shaky aim as I ran and fired one-handed, shooting a man who was trying to reverse a truck right in the head.
We reached the burning humvee without issue, and a few bullets pinged harmlessly off my armor as I hit the deck and returned fire. The Cubans were in full retreat, leaving their dead and wounded behind as they ran for the safety of the distant buildings. Few made it, with the others picking them off as they ran.
Alan detonated more explosives he'd snuck into the city as we confirmed that most of the civilians were leaving the area. The survivors from the QRF had barely linked up with more reinforcements from the town when the barracks beneath El Presidente's mansion exploded, showering them with more rubble and debris.
As expected, El Presidente was still in the habit of sending out disposable fodder while keeping his best troops close at hand, so several hundred soldiers still remained garrisoned in Santa Clara.
Some of the more disciplined survivors made it to another traffic checkpoint, this one armed with several high caliber machine guns. They began sending bursts of rounds down the avenue, shooting through buildings and panicked civilians without a care in their desperation to shoot the elusive smears of motion that were the Israelis using their optical camo. Even knowing where they were, I had a hard time keeping track of them as they picked off more targets from unexpected angles.
Alan apparated onto a balcony overlooking the street above their line of fire, and fired an RPG he'd scavenged straight into the bunker. The guns fell silent, and on cue, Noam breached through the back entrance. There was a short burst of gunfire and then he emerged and gave the all clear.
The inner section of the city was highly militarized, as we approached we saw bollards and blast walls rising out of the ground to cut off approaches. On the other side, some of EP's elite had mobilized, with their own exos and cyborgs. I heard the buzz of an agrav drone loitering on the other side, likely one of the two that had been guarding the palace. It sounded like hell's biggest hornet, and breaching here was inadvisable.
For us.
"Emily, go." I ordered.
She'd been blocking off approach routes, but now lumbered into sight, looking like the world's squattest mech. She wore half a suit of power armor around her torso and shoulders, not because it would augment her superhuman strength, but because it had hardpoints where armaments that wouldn't have looked out of place on an attack helicopter were attached.
She fired a volley from a grenade launcher attached to her shoulder, the explosives rained down the street prompting panic from the entrenched opponent. She then ripped the engine block out of a parked car and tossed it through the side of a building, providing an alternate means of access.
We smashed through what had been a restaurant of some kind, and were just approaching the exit when a fire team of cyborgs pushed in in search of us.
Gunfire turned the place into a storm of glass and fragmented wood, and I caught a bullet in my gut that was a sufficiently high caliber to smash through the armor and embed itself in the non-Newtonian fluid that lay below. I doubled over in agony before Emily managed to move herself to block the fire.
WARNING: MODERATE TO SEVERE INTERNAL TRAUMA
EVALUATING..
SPLENIC RUPTURE DETECTED
# of 10th RIBS
INTERNAL HEMORRHAGING DETECTED
ETA TILL SHOCK ~20 minutes.
She returned fire with the rest of our team, blowing away the cyborg who had been hefting what was nominally a vehicle autocannon. No wonder it hurt so fucking bad.
I ordered my lace to activate autoinjectors in my suit and enable some emergency response features. I shuddered with relief as painkillers and synthetic adrenaline derivatives flooded my system, making the world seem sharper than reality itself. Simultaneously, internal nanites were swarming the damaged organ, coagulating where needed, blocking bleeding arteries from the inside and shunting blood away from the leaks. I couldn't take proper breaths with my broken ribs, so I authorized the release of modified RBCs, the cells packed with an alternative to hemoglobin that greedily sucked oxygen out of my bruised lungs and then released it in response to electric signals from the nanite clusters where they detected hypoxemia from the damage.
I recovered enough to get off the floor and return fire, but by then all but one of the cyborgs was dead. He emptied his magazines and then bullrushed Em, deeming her the biggest threat. He swung down a monoblade at her head, and she took it on her chin. It sliced through the power armor with ease, but bounced off her leaving a small gash. She grabbed the soldier by his head and lifted him off the ground like a toddler. Vertebrae cracked under the strain, and she finally crushed his head like a Faberge egg, throwing his limp corpse aside with finality.
I struggled to my feet as she lent me a hand before I saw something rather alarming. As one, the metal visors that covered the eyes of the dead cyborgs slid down with a snick.
Depending on your understanding of the available energy density of modern powerpacks, ultracapacitors and micro-fission batteries, you might be wondering why man-portable lasers weren't more common. I assure you that it's not an issue of powering them, far from it, in space and on the colonies, they were the premier weapon.
You know what most such battlefields lack that Earth has in abundance? An atmosphere.
Any laser beam in atmosphere scatters off air and dust, which is why you can see the line made by a laser pointer in a dark room. A pulsed or continuous laser powerful enough to blow holes in armored targets almost certainly blinds anyone nearby from the scattered reflections, regardless of how smooth the surface is. And even looking at the beam from a distance is a hazard, with errant laser bloom still enough to dazzle or blind.
"Filters on!" I yelled, forcing myself down on the ground again, activating my own visor. I didn't have time to see if the others had done the same before there was an explosion blowing out the side of the building followed by God himself flashing us. With a torch of course, get those prurient thoughts out of your head.
Paper and wood ignited, my exposed skin burned and sizzled. Emily screamed, clutching the exposed side of her face.
Grim staggered to his feet, his armor steaming as coolant vaporized to carry away the blast of heat. I caught a glimpse of Noam, or rather what was left of him.
He was charred black, sad and bent like an ant beneath a magnifying glass. He must have caught the brunt of the beam and been torched alive. I only hoped it was quick.
We had no time to waste, the agrav drone would only take a little longer to charge up its ultracapacitor, so we followed behind Em as she smashed through another series of walls before we ended up in a more palatial building that had a staircase leading down into the wine cellar.
We stomped down there and I surveyed the damage. Emily turned to face me, and I grimaced as I saw her face. The right side of her face was blistered, her eyelid swollen and puffy while covering up her blinded eye that wept a mixture of tears and aqueous humor. Her other side appeared mostly intact, but I had no doubt she'd suffered flash burns to her retina.
"Can you see?" I asked her while doing the classic move of raising fingers on my hand before her.
She nodded blearily. "There are black lines in my vision, and everything around the sides is blurred, but I can still make out most things."
Her skin was impervious to standard needles, so I'd have needed a diamond drill to do the standard task of cutting her open to re-route her optic nerves. She couldn't even take normal injections, so I settled for handing her painkillers and spraying a healing solution of stem cells, steroids and some nanites that could squeeze through tissue on her red eye.
The others weren't doing much better. Grim and the other SpecOps had 3rd degree burns, but their own internal med dispensers kept the pain at bay. They'd still taken damage from the fight with the other cyborgs, but a perk of being more metal, graphene and ceramic than flesh was that you kept on trucking till something put you down for good.
My own wounds would keep, I told myself, spitting out a small mouthful of blood.
I ordered Alan to re-engage from a distance. Hopefully, his teleportation would confuse the enemy and draw some of the heat away. I was wagering that the agrav drones were under strict orders to stay near EP, because we'd badly underestimated them.
I set Emily to smashing through a wall that separated us from a storm drain, and we piled on through, heading as straight for the palace as we could.