Of course they give us camo sticks to paint our faces with. What's the fuck-fuck circus without the clowns. - SFC Bit.nek, 12th Telkan Marine Division, 35 2PW
Vak-tel and the rest of the Kilo Company were advancing with long loping strides that allowed the armor to clear five meters a step without their heads popping up too high, something they'd learned well until it was burned into muscle memory during the intense eVR training.
The air only ten meters up was full of flickering coherent energy, hyper-velocity kinetic rounds, missiles, rockets, chaff, and just about everything else that the modern battlefield so generously supplied to troops.
Vak-tel stumbled on a chunk of ferrocrete, making an odd looking hop that was almost instinct in order to regain his balance before he landed on his face and skidded. Moving at just shy of seventy kph meant he had to be careful.
BACTACNET saw something and fired two rockets from the pack he was wearing.
--jamming picking up-- 621 said from inside the engineer protective housing that was part of the combat pack Vak-tel was carrying.
"Quantum compromised?" Vak-tel asked.
--negative standard band compromised magic band partially jammed-- 621 reported.
Behind Kilo Company two more Chernobog class cyborgs had joined in ripping apart the BOLO, which had decided to engage its tracks and start to reverse.
Which didn't help when you were the size of a small stadium and your foes were standing on your forward and back decks.
NETWORK OVERRIDE appeared in his vision and he cursed as his power armor went unresponsive and sluggish feeling. The bounding arcs started going up higher, speed picked up. Vak-tel noticed that suddenly all the channels were locked out, preventing him from speaking to anyone at all, even his squad member. The company spread out, the gaps between the armor getting larger as it went from a single double-arm interval skirmish line to a four deep checkerboard formation.
No word for why from the Kilo Company chain of command.
His rocket launcher started chuffing out rockets that kicked in their solid fuel boosters a few meters from the launch, creating a white streak in the air. His grenade launcher started kicking out rounds straight up, a steady thump of them.
His armor wasn't telling him what it was doing.
"Buddy, what's going on?" he asked.
--tac-net override on launchers rockets who knows maybe point defense grenades participating in drone saturation attack-- 621 said. --heat and slush rising fast orders coming too fast not able to deploy cooling fins due to ir blackout--
"Great. Keep me posted," Vak-tel said.
Kilo Company was spreading out and passing another set of drop pods that were all reconfiguring. At first Vak-tel's armor was telling him that the occupants of the drop-pods would be merging with Kilo Company's checkerboard advance line but then his HUD blinked and the reticles vanished.
This shit better not get me killed, Vak-tel thought.
0-0-0-0-0
Major Shimmering "Bobby" Drop-Tables was a Digital Sentience, hashed and raised in the Hamburger Kingdom's code arenas. She had trained to be electronic warfare until she was lean and mean, a electronic warfare killing machine.
She was proud as hell to be part of the task force heading into Ornisplap space to assist them against someone using her people's technology.
Which is why she was standing just on the safe side of the task force's 'firewall' and watching the EW battlefield take shape.
Gravity and radiation and radio signals created the terrain of the battlefield, with the polar solar winds of the stellar system forming the sky above and molten rock beneath. The magnetospheres of the planets were storms. The surge of gravity and radiation created hills and valleys.
Ships moved through the terrain, each of them a platform for attacks and defenses.
The planets were mostly cold, dark, and dead, just their radiation and electromagnetic output creating storms on the battlefield. The Van-Allen Belts were bands of instant death that howled and pulsed.
Electronic warfare systems lit off, filling the battleground's terrain in her vision with firing arcs, artillery shells, rockets, missiles, even slow moving tanks. Warbois flooded from the Solarian Iron Dominion vessels, screaming their warcries as they charged across a battlefield that was no less real even though it had no physical presence. Attack programs loaded into drones to get them closer were launched from the Confederate vessels.
Electronic Countermeasures began spinning up, fog and smoke beginning to obscure the battlefield. Enemy ships and the massive amount of EW platforms on the fourth and fifth planets started to flicker and vanish as the counter-measures began to take effect.
Major Tables watched as the Electronic Counter-Counter-Measures went active. Searchlights spearing through the smoke and fog, ranging pings of electronic 'sonar' were visible concentric circles spreading out, the tight beam of radar, LIDAR, and even more esoteric systems.
Major Tables noted that the Confederate ships used completely different bandwidths, that they had more powerful and more sensitive sensor systems. The enemy's ships were getting pinged and attacked and Major Tables noted that it looked like the enemy ships were trying to spoof out old Confed codes.
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Missiles were reaching broadcast range, the subspace communications systems that allowed for instant communication were switched into attack/defend mode, and other esoteric systems were coming online.
Squinting slightly, Major Tables watched as the enemy's active warfare daemons and smartframes erupted into existence and came in hot against the 'firewall' put up the by the fleet.
"Here they come," she warned her subordinates.
She narrowed her eyes when three things happened.
The dumbframes shattered on the firewall or were eliminated by counter-measures.
The lower end daemons and the smartframes hit the firewalls and stopped. Rather than attacking, probing at the ports and firewalls, they turned into either orbs or little nodes full of spikes.
The high end daemons hit the firewall and stopped. Rather than chew on it, rake at it with claws, or skitter around looking for an opening, they stopped.
She vanished and reappeared next to LT(JG) Recursive Strobing Sunset, who was watching the firewall's algorithm and countermeasures. On the other side of the glittering wall were orbs, spiked little objects, and the daemons.
"Fence me in. There's something weird and I want a look at it," Tables ordered.
LT(JG) Sunset nodded, bringing up a datafence around Major Tables.
Tables opened a thin pipe from an orb she held in her hands to the firewall, pushing the pipe through. One of the spiked crystalline objects sucked through the pipe and into the orb she held.
It was a smartframe. She looked it over. Standard Old Confederate coding. The attack algorithm was strange, almost like the core strings were randomly generated.
Those values actually mean something, you can't just use random generation, she thought. She looked it over.
She found it deep in.
PROPERTY OF BOBCO MILITARY SOFTWARE DIVISION (8639 PG)
She armored the orb and tossed it to MILINT.
"Get counter-warfare on that," she ordered. She extended the pipe again and pulled in an orb.
It just sat there, jiggling and shivering, and she carefully looked it over.
SYNTEK EW DIVIONS (8721 PG)
She tossed that one too.
"OK, cover me," she ordered.
The four digital combat troops nodded and LT(JG) Sunset looked uncertain, but still nodded.
She widened the pipe, shortening it. She kept the globe in one hand as she created a one-way opening in the firewall next to an enemy daemon program.
It was hugging the wall, rubbing its face on it, its eyes closed, its mouth full of sharp jagged broken-off teeth open in a dim-witted smile, its claws just rubbing the firewall.
She shifted the opening.
The daemon saw it and hopped through.
It's a warboi! she thought.
It came straight at her, hopping up and down and screeching.
hi hi hi hi hi hi hi
She saw that its claws were retracted. The screeching was happy rather than the code shivering scream of an attack.
hi hi hi hi hi hi wheeeeeee
It jumped at her and she caught it, pushing away the reflex to smack it away.
It rubbed its face on her.
mommy mommy mommy mommy
She cradled it, knowing she was risking getting gutted if it went feral. She rolled it over and looked at its face.
sissy mommy sissy mommy sissy mommy hi hi hi hi goodboi goodboi goodboi mommy mommy mommy
She tickled its belly and it squirmed and giggled. She saw snarled code and tickled it, making the warboi giggle. The code straightened out.
Random code strings for algorithm detection. Junk code in the system.
"Aw, you got a tummy ache?" she asked, tickling it again.
mommy mommy mommy mommy
She found it. The hash strings. The ID of the ship where the warboi had been fast-grown in EW baked salted carmel rainbow hash table, and the ID of creche-lab itself.
She looked at Sunset.
"He's one of ours."
mommy mommy mommy
0-0-0-0-0
Vak-tel was half asleep when the BATTACNET suddenly released his armor.
Half of Kilo Company went ass over tea-kettle as the network let them go with no warning and put the suits on manual control.
Vak-tel had been skipping along, literally, at nearly seventy miles an hour. He tripped on his own feet, landed on his face, and skidded nearly a hundred meters before coming to a stop behind a small pile of dirt and broken ferrocrete he'd pushed up out of the ground with his face.
--huh wazz-- 621 asked.
"I..." Vak-tel started to say, beginning to raise his head.
The hump of dirt saved his life as the 30mm solid-rocket fuel cored ring penetrator round hit the dirt and exploded, throwing a rooster-tail of dirt over him as half the mini-berm was thrown into the air by the impact.
"SHIT SHIT SHIT!" Vak-tel yelled, grabbing a grenade off his harness and short arming it to the side.
The channels were open, unlocked, and everyone was yelling.
"CHERNOBOG!" came the roar over the command channel, a deep bass roar that made Vak-tel's visor vibrate.
The commo-headers were all trashed, all garbled.
The grenade went off with a crack, blowing a hole in the dirt and shattered ferrocrete asphalt. He rolled, instinctively, into the hole, huddling down.
--button up-- came across the engineer channel.
A hexagonal field appeared above Vak-tel as 621 hit the emergency shielding.
A striker whipped by, dropping napalm, covering the entire battlefield in fire.
Heat alarms wailed as the napalm burned on the interlocked hexagons of energy. He could see his reactor load climb and see the heat spike inside his little bubble.
Rounds were hitting his shield, someone raking him with quick five rounds burst of 30mm, each burst different ammo as the gunner probed for a weakness.
"What the hell happened?" someone yelled over the channel. The ID said "Captain Mewmew Wowstien, 5th Meme Division" before it shifted to "Major Minor Miner" and then "Colonel Yummy Fried Bird".
Then the whole damn digital ID system crashed out.
Drones got a look and broadcast what they were seeing in the clear. Vak-tel's armor tossed it into his HUD just to the right of the edge of his unaugmented peripheral vision.
At least a battalion of tanks, mixed in with armored vehicles and Terran sized power armor, as well as smaller power armor and what looked like Treana'ad and Mantid armors mixed in.
Vak-tel could see the heat levels, which were low, the energy signatures, which were high, and the jerky way the armors were moving, even the way the armor was moving forward in fits and starts instead of the smooth coordination he'd seen before.
"Kilo Company, dig in!" the voice was recognizable as Lieutenant Colonel Riltepop despite the crackling and snapping over the channel. "You're facing armor!"
--freq agile system hop skipping bad codes trying to compensate-- 621 said.
"Belay that, Marines!" came a shout over loudspeaker.
Captain Kemtrelap's voice. Vak-tel looked over to see the Captain waving one arm.
Of course he's not hiding under an inch of burning napalm with some jackass trying to make my day, Vak-tel thought.
"HHC platoon, back fifty meters, take cover! First platoon, break right. Third platoon, break left. Second platoon, up the middle!" the Captain yelled.
Vak-tel could remember when the Captain had hid behind a wrecked vehicle with his arms over his head screaming as artillery hammered down.
Not that Vak-tel held it against him, Vak-tel had been hiding in a pipe that went under the road and had been doing plenty of screaming of his own during that six hours of constant shake and bake courtesy of some asshole rich artillery unit.
The Captain fired a holodrone, which clawed for air even as it threw out a hologram of the unit guidon, the colors bright in the dusty air.
"OVER THE WALL!" the CO yelled, coming up.
Vak-tel lunged up, bursting out from under the hexagon grid. The last of the napalm coated him, just like half the platoon, coating him in burning red and yellow flame.
"DO YOU IDIOTS WANT TO LIVE FOREVER?" the CO bellowed.
Vak-tel and Kilo Company charged the armor.
Close with and destroy the enemy.
They only exist to be destroyed.