“Sarah any progress on ending this simulation?” Faith asked hopefully. The longer she was inside the simulation the more distant the outside world seemed. Already she had been inside for ten long months, through in the real world it was only three days.
“I am getting closer every hour Faith. Already I am operating at five hundred and eighty one percent over my initial usage.”
“That seems like a massive increase. How are the nanite improvements?”
“The nanites are upgraded to version 2.74. I am finding new and better ways to fully utilize them and increase both their efficiency and utility will decreasing the size of the nanites. I project I can reach version four before I run into the absolute material limit of the nanites and going any further would require manipulating sub atomic particles, something that is not even theoretically possible with today’s technology and understanding.”
“That is impressive in such a sort time! Sarah you are awesome!” Faith praised her AI.
“Thank you.” Faith was surprised to hear a tone of embarrassment in the reply.
Faith finished fastening her new uniform coveralls, these one with dark green piping on the shoulders. The Empire’s special cruiser service did have rank for outward appearance but internally within their branch they did not use ranks.
Leadership was determined by the mission and your specialization. Every SCS soldier had intensive training in a wide variety of subjects but they also choose subjects to become specialized in. Faith was going to specialize in engineering so if the mission called for repairing or sabotaging a fusion reactor she would lead the team otherwise the team would be lead by a team member who specialized in leadership and command.
The fluid nature of the special cruiser service ranks and leadership was at odds with the regular military but the SCS missions were missions that the regular navy and army could not perform so they kept their fluid command structure and the rest of the service lived with it.
Mustering outside of the barracks there was only eight new SCS operators form their section. In total, form all sections, only thirty two had passed the extreme SCS training.
An air bus landed on the beach in front of them and they started boarding with their gear. The air bus would take them to another part of Sedisca were training in atmosphere insertions would continue their special cruiser service training.
The flight was almost a vacation form SCS training an all the newly minted SCS operatives took the flight time to rest.
Three and half hours later they landed in a dessert.
Disembarking the air bus the blast of extreme heat only stopped Faith for a second then she adjusted. If training taught her anything it was how to adapt instantly.
A navy noncommission officer was waiting for them by a wheeled vehicle.
“Welcome to came blaze. Not because of the heat but because you are here to learn how to enter a planetary atmosphere were the outside of your suit of entry capsule will reach thousands of degrees in temperature. Some of you will have the misfortune to go out in a blaze of glory.”
Faith blinked at the sardonic delivery of the last sentence. She had a feeling the nco was just trying to deflate some of the new SCS operatives’ egos, though she took pride in passing SCS training she was not recklessly so.
“Pile in and we well take you to your assigned barracks.”
So saying the officer climbed into the driver’s seat of the large military vehicle. Faith and the seven others climbed in. The back was a low slung armored box with benches on either side. No one took the front passenger seat beside the nco.
The vehicle took off and Faith had to grab the handhold bar bolted to the roof to stop form being thrown form her seat. One was not quick enough and slammed into the steel floor. The two teammates closet to him help him up and back into his seat.
The drive was fast and chaotic with turns almost lifting the heavy vehicle onto its side. When they finally reached their destination they were all eager to get out.
“If you think that was bad wait till your strapped into a reentry capsule riding down in a storm.” The nco stated. That may have been true, Faith thought, but even then they would have had some control of their reentry capsule and situation.
Faith shook off the errant thought and turned to their new temporary accommodations.
Their new housing was a weathered and sun beaten two story building that had seen better days. Still each had their own small room at the top with the first floor a large common room.
The nco told them that training would begin at o 7 hundred tomorrow and left. Each operator found a room and promptly went to sleep.
Waking up at o four hundred, the time they were drilled to wake up one, they meet on the first floor and started to exercises.
Two hundred pushups, situps, jumping jacks, and lunges was just a good warm up for the operators who were used to doing more then three times that each morning. They limited themselves because they did not know what training would involve and did not want to be tired starting a new training regimen. The same nco pick them up in the same vehicle and the start of the six week jump school begin.
They first got classroom lectures on proper procedures and how to operate their equipment safely. Then they started on jumping off a tower and learning to land at a run or roll. After several hundred practice tower jumps, they went up for their first real jump. The first jump was midday and without any added requirements, it was just to get them used to jumping.
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The Empire went old school, very old school, using fabric parachutes and not any grav or powered equipment to land. This was because even the most backward enemy would have sensors that could read a grav wave signature or an electronic power signal.
The fabric cloth was actually a very high tech piece of technology being able to absorb radar, lidar, and sonar waves making it almost indictable and had a limited ability to change color. It was not full camouflage only able to get darker or lighter patten of blue. Still it made spotting a descending soldier extremely difficulted.
They wore a skinsuit that was made with similar materials as their parachute only their skinsuit protected them form bullets, lasers, and sharp objects. The thick skinsuit was surprisingly flexible and offered full defenses against ECBRs - environmental, chemical, biological, and radiation - attacks.
The skinsuits were unpowered without even a hud or light. Any powered equipment had to be covered in signal dampening cloth so the enemy could not detect the electrical power signals meaning most of the SCS operatives’ equipment was unpowered.
They learn to navigate to their designated target area by dead reckoning. After they completed the full SCS training regime they would be implanted with neurological implants that could project a hud that would mark their targeted area and highlight the correct path down.
The implant would also form an encrypted network between operatives with burst transmissions on oscillating frequencies to prevent an enemy form triangulating their signals and pinpointing their location. The oscillating frequencies also made it almost impossible to hack into.
Jumps became higher and higher with parachute openings lower and lower until they were upping form fifteen hundred meters up and deploying their chutes under nine hundred meters. The HALO – High Altitude Low Opening – jumps were practiced unceasingly with training in how to fix a tangled parachute, how to eject a damaged parachute and deploy a backup, how to rescue a teammate that could not open his chute, either form equipment malfunction or enemy fire and how to land in a hostile landing zone.
The last two weeks after they mastered the basics was training in orbital insertions. There were two methods of stealth insertion’s practiced by the SCS operatives. One was a to don a special protective suit over their skinsuit and then launched at the planet where they would enter and descend by themselves.
This of course was the most dangerous method of insertion. If there was something even slightly wrong with the protective suit operatives would be incinerated when they entered a planet’s atmosphere.
The second method was only slightly less dangerous.
Using a small reentry capsule that you entered form the rare and straddle a bench in the middle and, with everyone crammed in, piling on top of one another, the vessel was shot towards the planet and you needed to wait until you cleared the upper atmosphere then initiate the self destruct process.
The vessel broke apart and special embedded chemicals were released in the destruction that reacted to chemicals in the hardened plastic that made up the reentry capsule that fully melted the capsule so no sign of the stealth insertion vessel could be found and recovered.
The SCS operatives had to time when to initiate the destruction because every world had their own point of safe self destruction, to early and you burned up in the atmosphere and to late did not give enough time to safely separate out. Then the operatives had to push off the bench they straddled before it melted under them and spread out to safely deploy their parachutes.
The upside was the vessel was stealthy and heavily shielded allowing the operatives to bring with them high powered weapons and equipment with a low chance of detection.
Riding down in one of the pods was akin to surfing in a thunderstorm, something Faith had no experience with until she entered the simulation. The first thunderstorm she was in was awe inspiring but she had no chance to fully appreciated the experience being covered in mud and doing water exercises, the SCS trainers loved to use storms to make training that much harder and intense.
Faith actually found jump training fun. There was a peace and beauty in free falling for hundreds of kilometers until you pulled the release cord and were yanked into the moment.
The training was also a much needed time to rest and recover form the intense SCS training through none of the operatives stopped exercising. They exercised three hours in the morning and three hours in the evening. Luckily the daily injections stopped so they did not need to eat nutritional past constantly.
Faith was now 185.42 centimeters tall and weighed almost a hundred kilos. Starting out at just 165.1 centimeters and weighting less than half her current weight Faith had really shot up in the short time she had been inside the simulation. Sarah estimated that she would continue to grow and would add another eight to ten centimeters in height and add between nine and fourteen additional kilograms before she finished growing.
The daily injections in troop training and SCS boot camp had surpassed her normal development with Sarah saying she would have only grown another three to five centimeters at best.
The drastic change still shocked Faith when she looked in the mirror and part of her mind continued to believe it was all fake and she would wake up and be her normal size again. She pushed those thought into the back of her mind for it did not matter unless Sarah could pull her out of the simulation.
After jump school they went to another base for the advanced SCS training.
They had a more in depth and wider range of weapons training, hand to hand combat training, demolitions training, and medical training that built and expanded on what they learned in SCS boot camp.
The advanced course focused on small unit tactics and close quarter combat with Faith and her fellow teammates running drills in mockups in everything form small single story houses to military cruisers. They learned how to operate as a team, how to coordinate with the least amount of communication, and how to clear and eliminate their enemies, no matter how many there were.
The course also included survival, escape, and evasion techniques.
They were informed that their implant would stop them from telling secretes and resistance to interrogation was only brushed on. The implant also could kill an operative so there was always a way out of capture, no matter how grim.
The S.E.E trained them in every environment they could possibly operate in, they went to the south pole for sub zero weather training, they went to a desert that was hotter than the jump school desert location, they navigated thick jungles, and forests.
S.E.E training also included being hunted by experienced black berates who had a chip on their shoulders because most had washed out of SCS training.
They would be dropped in the middle of the jungle with just a knife and the squad had to navigate to the extraction point while evading the hunters and foraging the land for food. The black berets became even madder and more aggressive the more the SCS operatives won.
Faith took down several of the army’s special force soldiers herself during training and became an expert in blending into the environment, learning how to not even break a trig because that would till the enemy where she had been and the direction she was going.
Faith had fun the four months of S.E.E training and tried to absorb all the minute details that most just ignored.
Why should you remember the exact muzzle velocities of a dozen enemy weapons? It would tell you how long you had to find cover before the shots arrived.
Why know hundreds of different flowers found on separate worlds? Because they had medicinal qualities that could keep you alive if you remembered the right flower to eat on each planet.
Stuff like that Faith filed away in her brain. It was what made her good at engineering, she could remember the specifications and designs of hundreds of parts and equipment and how to properly fix them.
S.E.E training flew by and Faith completed the course and learned her individual training assignment.