"Alright... hold on. Jaruna, how's the HUD integration?"

Wichen looked up at the towering Cannidor, her tail swishing eagerly even as Jaruna tapped a toe with irritation.

"It's fine. Can we get this show on the road already? I haven't gotten to dump a couple mags down the range in a week! A girl has needs, you know!"

"No! This is for testing, not just playing with your new toys. Anyway, Hold still, the armor integration's the most important part of this whole thing!"

The Feli engineer clambered up Jaruna's back, making her way up the power armor with a few tools jammed into her belt and jumpsuit. She quickly started tearing into the wiring around the integration mount on the new auto cannons themselves.

The ports to connect were standard enough but making sure everything was wired right on the end of the new weapon could be a bit fussy, especially with bespoke power armor like the unique, customized suits built and made by the Cannidor.

Merging all the related subsystems from the mechanical integration actuator, the mixed mechanical and software targeting system, back around to the weapon itself. Routing all the controls you needed to make it function right to the power armor’s control surfaces. Then finally making all of the above play nice with the armor’s computer was a daunting task, but once you had it down for one mark of power armor, generally adapting it to other power armor was relatively easy.

A small charge of electricity makes Jaruna tense, and Wichen quickly reaches into an exposed access panel and triggers a fuse, killing power to that part of the armor.

"Oops. Sorry Jaruna, didn't expect it to do that!"

Jaruna resists face palming, clearly taking a second to consider reaching back to smack the feline alien.

"Whatever. Just get it done so I can start smashing targets up. Hubby. Talk to me about something."

Jerry looks up from the tablet he'd been reading.

"Mhmm. Anything specific?"

"What are you reading so intently?"

"Notes from one of the Chainbreaker's crewmen. He had part of the surgery I'll be having tomorrow to get ready for power armor. Apparently it's barely what a human would consider a surgery. If that. Might be a bit weird since everything is along or next to the spine I suppose, and the actual interface itself is a bit disorienting, but you can be using it effectively and efficiently within minutes it seems. Impressive if true, which I must assume it is considering Commander Engel got his work done on a pirate station with whatever passes for medical care out there. I've got the top of the line power armor implants from the Cannidor home world lined up with an expert surgeon."

Jaruna nods. "Just like I told you to get. Good. No sense fucking around when you already command hundreds of troops. Going for lower grade gear is for when a girl's working her way up, and even then most clans spring for as good as they can afford for their daughters. No sense limiting combat potential... and they're really not that expensive in the grand scheme of things. Heh, this is kinda fun though. Like you're hitting puberty in the Cannidor clans, I'll have to bake you a cake for when you get out of surgery. Always a good event to celebrate when a girl or one of our rare menfolk is armor ready. What's that about surgery though? What's so different about human surgery?"

"Well we don't have axiom normally. So most of human surgery consists of using sharp things ranging from knives made of a special kind of volcanic glass called obsidian and high quality metal to what amounts to a circular saw, and all manner of other implements to force your way into the body, do what needs to be done, and put it back together again. Then we heal over a period of months that are relative both to differences in natural healing factors between individual humans, and the severity of the surgery. To handle the pain we have a variety of drugs ranging from topical painkillers to anti-inflammatory medicines, to full anesthesia, which more or less consists of putting someone in a medically induced coma... and always carries the risk of being lethal. That's pretty recent in our history though. We were doing surgery long before we had any painkillers more potent than alcohol."

Jaruna's eyes widened slightly as Wichen pulled herself up over the other woman's armored shoulder to stare at Jerry.

Of the two, Wichen spoke first.

"You gotta be fucking with us."

"Nope."

The Feli gracefully drops to the metal deck and slides up against Jerry before nuzzling him with a happy purr.

"Lover mine, father of my kittens, warrior-man god from the darkest hell of this universe."

"Yes darling?"

"Please tell me you're messing with us about human surgery basically consisting of a mechanic that works on meat going to town."

"I'm not."

Wichen considers that statement and all that it implied for a moment.

"...I guess that explains why that human doctor's such a terminal bitch all the time."

"Doctor McCoy has been patching up Marines and sailors for a long time. I am reliably informed however that she was a massive bitch even when she was a brand new Navy Corpsman before she got out of the service for a few years to go to medical school. So don't blame the delicate art of surgery."

"So she was born with a stick up her ass." Jaruna snorts with laughter. "I'd say she needs to get laid, but she smells like she's got a man. I bet she's a freak too. All the weird kinky shit like hand holding. The works!"

"Wait, Bones is seeing someone?" Jerry gapes at Jaruna a bit. "How do you know?"

"Smells like man. Like any other woman after she's spent the previous evening getting the good D. Old battle ax might play a hard ass but she's getting dicked. Bet it's one of the junior types too. The ones that are normally off limits from what you humans tell me. Anyway, enough bullshitting. Wichen? Are we good?"

"Yep! Should be! Try the new mental control and load FMJ into the left autocannon, and you should find the... yeah perfect, the sequence to get the rotary autocannon spooling itself up!"

There's a series of mechanical noises as the chain cannon on Jaruna's left shoulder loads ammunition through its link-less feeding system.

"Nice and easy, looks like I've got APSE, FMJ and APDS right?"

"Yep! The AD rounds are a little expensive for just range fun, we already know they work and cycle appropriately. Can you see how many rounds you have in each ammo supply?"

"Yes, nice and clear on the HUD. Looks like I've got two hundred FMJ, one hundred APDS, one hundred APSE, whatever those last two are. Also got five hundred of the mix for the rotary autocannon. Three FMJ to two Raufoss. Again, whatever that is."

This content has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

Jerry stepped forward. "APSE, or Armor Piercing, Special Effects ammo is armor piercing rounds with explosives. APDS is Armor Piercing, Discarding Sabot, commonly just sabot, or silver bullet, it fires a high velocity dart made of extremely dense, self sharpening metal that will rip through any armor you can damn well dream of. We're working on a cheap way to ensure they can rip shields a new asshole too. Probably a trytite tip. Raufoss is an armor piercing high explosive round that also carries an incendiary compound. FMJ, also called "ball" ammo, is lead with a "full" copper jacket. We don't normally use FMJ rounds in cannons, but they make for affordable training ammo, and the galaxy doesn't have many options for dealing with kinetics, so in the immediate term at least they can get work done in the anti personnel role. Your combat load in the field will be as is for the rotary cannon, 200 FMJ, 200 APSE, and 100 APDS for the standard cannon. We also have an air burst projectile in the works, but it's not ready yet, so that'll be an option for you in the future."

"You humies really are just full of surprises. Can I carry more ammo for the rotary? This shit ain't weighing on me too much and 1000 rounds would give me more than a couple heart beats of breaking things and killing people."

Jerry looks to Wichen who does some quick math on her claw tips and nods.

"Yeah we can probably rig that up. Either a bigger ammo drum or secondary ammo drum. Not like a big brute like Jaruna can't take the weight."

"I suspect I'll use only one of these cannons at any one time and mix'em with a laser cannon and plasma cannon. Probably throw the plasma cannon on my tail. Plus whatever I'm carrying in my hands. Got some ideas about that actually Wichen. Found this cool shotgun in one of the games Jerry gave me that apparently used cut down anti aircraft cannon barrels. I want that, but bigger and mag fed with all the bells and whistles a girl can ask for from that sort of thing. I like shotguns in theory but those 12-gauge pop guns ain't doing it for me."

That got a laugh out of Jerry. He forgot to appreciate just how damn big Jaruna was at times. She didn't even notice the recoil of all but the most powerful human weapons, and now she'd discovered the KS-23. He held up a hand to forestall any response from Wichen.

"Save it for later girls, we're burning daylight. Ears on. Range is going hot!"

A bright red light flashed and a siren screeched into the open air. An axiom field shimmered to life to act as their backstop. Down range, targets had already been placed, vehicle grade armor plate over the local equivalent to concrete.

The destructive potential against infantry targets wasn't in question. This kind of cannon was for pulverizing vehicles and aircraft... or ensuring that receiving infantry have an incredibly bad week.

Jaruna's faceplate lit up a bit as the suit went from standby to combat ready, the full suite of sensors going live and picking out the various ‘hostiles’ in front of her by a variety of methods.

The sheer complexity of the display set up for power armor was always impressive to Jerry. Numerous layers of detection, surveillance, observation. Wind speed, atmospheric pressure, the ballistics of the weapons system. All of it blended into a smooth, clean and easy to use visual interface that needed nothing more than a thought to control. Of course the really impressive part was the effect on moving targets, but they'd get to that testing eventually.

"Alright. Here we go. Fuzz tail. Your ears on yet?"

Wichen empowered herself with Axiom and bounced her way up towards a catwalk above, normally for maintenance, but today repurposed for Wichen's observation post.

"Ready when you are, big girl."

"Right. Gonna start with the single barrel, indexing FMJ. Stand by... firing!"

The rhythmic thud of a chaingun cycling mixed with the brutal report of the actual round firing that was akin to god slamming a car door heralded a stream of rounds heading down range, hammering home into the heavy armored slabs of concrete they were using for their light artillery testing, denting metal and shattering stone alike.

Without a word, Jaruna switched to APDS rounds, and the slightly "faster" sounding sabot rounds screamed down range and slammed through the block Jaruna was targeting, leaving some visible holes Jerry can see through.

Then Jaruna switches to APSE. The armor-piercing explosive rounds finished the job the other rounds started, pulverizing the block and reducing it to scrap metal and chunks of masonry with a series of hard hitting explosions deep in the slab. Finally, Jaruna let off the trigger.

"Hot fucking damn! This kinetic shit's great! And look at the range! I was thinking Wichen was messing with me when I saw that on the targeting software but damn!"

Jerry nods. "It'll hit further than that by a long shot, but this is weapons testing not long-range marksmanship practice. We'll have to get you set up with a space for that before we start putting power armored troopers through their paces, it'll be good data for developing our training program."

"Speaking of training."

Jaruna turns to face Jerry, the cannon barrel smokes gently from the heat of sustained firing as the weapon swings back up over her shoulder and locks into its carry position.

"When do Ghorza and the girls start boot camp?"

"They're going live tomorrow. Gonna have to get dressed up for "Black Tuesday" ceremonies."

"Black Tuesday?" Wichen hops back down, joining them on the deck before she pulls up a holo display and goes to work on fine tuning part of Jaruna's new system.

"Right, it used to be that all boot platoons would be picked up by their drill instructors from the receiving company on Tuesday, never a good day for the recruits involved, so it became known as Black Tuesday over the decades."

"Sounds like fun, almost sad I'm missing it. Bet Ghorza will be mad she can't smash your pelvis if you're breaking out your dress uniform for that one. I'll just have to take care of you on her behalf."

All three of them chuckle. It wasn't really a joke, more a promise, but sexuality was casual when group sex with any number of your wives was a daily affair as opposed to a special event.

"I think Ghorza will be too focused to actively want to ride me in my dress whites. This is a big deal for Horchka, so I imagine she's just as keyed up for this test as the rest of her girls. And everything I hear from the barracks is that they're so eager they're practically chewing on the bulkheads."

Wichen sticks a hand up for attention.

"Should be good to go, we were seeing some slight accuracy issues, but the armor should be learning properly now and will develop an appropriate profile for the individual weapon and its different ammo types."

Jaruna smacked her breast plate and settled back into her firing stance.

"Alright, enough chatter. Now the rotary cannon. You fuckers wouldn't let me see this one in testing. And you told me not to search for it on the ‘net. So this better be damn good to make up for all the anticipation."

"No sense delaying, you remember the control set up?"

"Yep, different levels of pressure for different results. Little latch under my thumb can flick the settings through various burst limiters, starting at a five-round burst and going up in increments of five to twenty five round bursts. The sixth setting is full rock and roll where this thing will go till the ammo pod is dry or I let up on the trigger. Shame about the whole ammo thing, laser repeaters are a hoot specifically because you can just hold the trigger down and go till whatever you're aiming at changes shape or catches fire."

"Sounds like you’re ready to go then. Let'er rip!"

Jerry calls out, excited to see how Jaruna would react to what he considered to be the most fun you could have with your pants on.

"Wait! I gotta get... yowch!"

BRRRRRRT

Wichen dives clear of a shower of brass as Jaruna laughs like a maniac.

"Oh hell the fuck yes."

BRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRT

BRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRT

The bursts of rapid cannon fire grew longer as Jaruna grew more confident with her weapon, the shells violently erasing the remaining targets down range from a mix of high explosives and pure kinetic force until the ammo drum ran dry. It only carried around eight seconds of firing for the rotary cannon's slightly slower rate of fire than was common for such a weapon.

Jaruna shucks off her helmet, clearly thrilled with her new toy. The Cannidor warrior woman announces her triumph and joy with a bone shaking roar as she surveys the damage.

"I hope you know I'm going to fuck a daughter out of you tonight after foreplay like this."

Jerry glances up at his spouse, he'd planned for this, but it didn't make his odds of survival any better.

"No, that's my line. You're going to get on your back, spread your legs, and I'm going to spank that muscular ass, call you a good girl and make a MILF out of you."

The room went silent, Wichen's jaw hit the floor and bounces slightly before it finally settles. Jaruna just grinned.

"I'm going to put you in a goddamn wheelchair if you don't impregnate me properly, and you can consider that a promise."

"Challenge accepted."