The lessons of history
Prologue - Teachings of the ancients
Mariam suppressed a yawn and tried once again to rub the sleep out of her eyes. It wasn’t that professor Scott’s conference was boring, but rather that she wasn’t used to sitting idly in a comfortable recliner after lunch while someone gave a long speech: she was more at home with listening to recordings from the Outer University of Tunguska while she worked maintenance on the mothership, or while she wrote code - both options were of course out of the question, respectively for lack of a mothership and of a discreet way to open an hacking interface without her Wildcat helmet on.
The mellow voice of the professor carried on, illustrating the endless possibilities of evolution for dangerous life forms in an hostile habitat like that of the Human Edge:
"...The perfect organism. Its structural perfection matched only by its hostility… its purity. A survivor - unclouded by conscience, remorse, or delusions of morality. Would there be room enough in space for us and it?”
The sudden burst of applause made her jump on her seat. The conference was over, apparently.
She grabbed the little eight-legged ochre plushie they were given at the start of the talk - the representation of the first evolutionary stage of an hypothetical aggressive organism - and got up, stretching in Huey’s artificial zero-point-seven g’s of gravitational acceleration.
A bit too much to be comfortable - she mused, idly examining the strange alien doll while she waited for the crowd to flow away towards the “Food and drinks” area. The thing resembled a pale arachnid of some sort, with a long tail and bulbous glands - for reasons she couldn’t quite place, it looked both familiar and vaguely obscene.
“Did you like the lesson?” Zuri had reached her side from the seat she had found two rows behind her, while they could see Lily and Edward struggling to go upstream against the heterogeneous mass of geologists, political representatives and technical personnel pushing towards the exit.
“Yeah, it was cool.” she answered, as they started to make their way towards the two - someone had mistaken Lily for Jazz and was asking for a picture. “Apart from Shriek Tardigrades, they don’t really teach you much about dangerous space creatures in the EVA courses on Corregidor, don’t they.”
Zuri mimicked a skittering motion with her own plushie “Yeah, now if we find a colony of these in some drifting wreckage we can forgo fighting and just let them kill us, since they are perfectly adapted organisms and all that.”
Mariam smiled sarcastically at her “Sure, I can already see you just dropping the flamethrower and accepting your sorry fate.”
They recovered Lily from her enthusiastic fan - saving her the need to explain the misunderstanding for the presumably one thousandth time - while Zuzu was doing her best impression of dramatically surrendering her life to the superior crab-spider from the stars.
When they finally reached the double doors of the Geology room, across the long corridor another conference was drawing to a close, the recording of a resonant male voice barely discernible over the buzz of conversation around them
“... I am a martial artist, I am a healer, and I am a warrior, and those are the three kind of components that really make up Toshirô Mifune’s kind of character, you know? So I particularly relate to that movie on a very deep level.”
What was that about? She read something about Mixed Martial Arts, but that sounded more like a class on historical cinema.
Okiro motioned for them to stop at the intersection “Dinka and Ekwensi should be in that one, we’ll wait for them and regroup.”
“Ekwensi…?” Lily looked at him for a moment, confused
“Sorry, I mean Oni - He really doesn’t use his surname much.” He corrected himself.
The lieutenant was clearly a bit awkward in that civilian setting - even his NMF officer uniform looked never-worn-once pristine - and seeing him without the bulk of the Brigada armor was indeed rather weird.
They didn’t have to wait for long: after a couple of minutes, the enthusiastic faces of Olujimi and Oni emerged from the crowd of attendees. They were speaking animatedly with a huge man, as tall as them even when slightly hunched forward, with a bald head and a bodybuilder physique under some sort of red work overalls; even Oni, who was as fit and imposing as a former Maras gang enforcer could be, looked like a twig next to him.
“Bro!” Began Olujimi as soon as they were within earshot “This thing was a banger, Steven Seagal is straight fire!”
“He can’t miss.” Added Oni, nodding solemnly.
“What’s with the twenty-twenties slang?” sneered Mariam under her breath, while they went on chaotically recounting the Teachings of the Ancient Lama. The guy with them, a mining prospector called Dean Viesel, thoroughly shared their enthusiasm - with fewer, louder words and striking flexing poses between sentences. Fortunately, Okiro was the main target of their onslaught of fanboying, and soon the conversation veered towards the reason Mr. Viesel had joined them:
“Yes Sir, I was speaking to Dean here, and he has some real interesting intel, no cap.” introduced him Dinka with a pat on the massive arm
“Aye, I heard in the locker rooms after practice - I’m in the MMA tournament tomorrow, y’know - that some goons signed up, paid their fee and deposit to FZX’s lady-what’s-her-name and then got wreck’d - like, for good - in some paramilitary op or somesuch. Point is, their cash is still sitting around in a server bank not far from here, and some Yu Jing dude goes ‘yeah we gon nab them Bit Creds tomorrow’ and I’m like ‘nah bro’ and he’s like ‘bet’ so I was about to tell my mates at Rocaworks, but they’re a bunch of wusses, so I thought maybe some Nomad brothers were up for the gig.”
“Hmm, that’s interesting indeed - we could trace back those Bit Creds in the hyperledger, see if anything adds up with our suspicions about who’s hiring mercs around here.” conceded Edward, pensively stroking the two-weeks beard on his chin “Lily, see if you can find some more details on this - and check if our Imperial Service friends are nearby; surely their cruiser can’t move around unnoticed, and if this operation is theirs we could drop by to have a word or two about what they did to Luisa.”
The Spirit of the Forge had in fact entered stable orbit around Huey half an hour prior with regular communication to the Porto Interplanetario traffic control center - they would probably wait until after the end of the conference day to send a strike team, to let the situation around Averroes Campus quiet down before making their move.
Arrangements were quickly made with the rest of the crew aboard the Bring Guns to Bear, and, after tearing Obasanjo away from the pastry table - where he had been stationed for most of the day - the group jogged out of the main Haqquislamite facility, which hosted the conference rooms, the hospital wings and the staff accommodations.
They were in the most populated area of HuEOS, the many pressurized domes visible on the icy planetoid surface only hinting at the real extent of the subterranean construction, where the problems of cosmic radiation, extreme temperature and lack of atmosphere were far more easily solved.
Practical Learning
A few minutes later, they met up with the other three available 404 operatives in one of the huge cargo elevators that connected the various levels of the Pioneer Capsule District. Their mark was two floors below them: a series of data centers and terminals connected to the FZX hyperledger in the middle of a commercial zone, full of shops, restaurants and some of the larger habitative units.
Civilians had already been evacuated from the elevator platform, and the five Wildcats, Dean, Okiro and Lily joined with Salvador, a Moran Masai that was maneuvering a hefty unmarked crate with a maglev pallet mover, and his two Jaguar bodyguards.
The heavy metal doors closed groaning behind them, and the noisy machine slowly sputtered in motion. Okiro immediately stepped forward to help Salvador open the metallic cover of the container, from which unfolded the mechanical limbs of three Zonds: a stubby quantronic support Salyut unit, a Reaktion heavy weapon platform and a small cubic remote that quickly waddled by Lily’s side.
“Everyone, get kitted out. The sooner we secure the area the better.” Beckoned them Edward: lining the sides of the scan-proof casing, weapons, helmets and a suit of Mobile Brigada armor were tightly packed together, leaving just enough space for the REMs to fold into.
While Mariam and the rest of the team hastily changed into their tactical gear, the elevator came to a rattling stop - she moved half walking and half jumping on one leg towards their assigned position, fighting to fit one of the combat boots over her VacSuit, while Zuri held her rifle.
“Why are we even hurrying so much?” she huffed, managing to finally get her foot into place “The ISS won’t be here for another hour at least, right?”
“They could have some scouts already on site, like that ninja guy from last time; if that were the case, we could expect company much sooner.”
Mariam grimaced inside her helmet - she remembered the Ninja far too well; she hoped the woman they had taken from Porto Interplanetario was alright, even though the Imperial Service wasn't really known for its good care of prisoners.
They clambered onto the roof of one of the Deluxe Apartments - at least, that’s what it said on its digital patina, even though the small home unit could be considered to be “luxuriously spacious” as advertised only by the most spartan Corregidoran dwelling standards - where they took point behind a parapet together with Obasanjo and the Reaktion unit, that was already eagerly swinging the barrel of its CineticS heavy machine gun back and forth looking for a valid target to engage.
.jpeg)
Oni and Olujimi were below them on ground level, taking cover behind an autonomous service vehicle they had put in emergency stop, while the few civilians on the streets were quickly leaving the area following the evacuation order Lily had uploaded on the local net; her, Edward, Salvador and Lottie the Jaguar were covering their right flank from a building under construction, while the other Jag and the Salyut approached the closest data terminal, embedded into one of the nearby public transportation streetcars.
Wriggling a bit on the hard concrete surface to try and find a more comfortable position, Mariam initialized her hacking interface, connecting into an unusually crowded network: beside Lily, the Salyut’s EVO device was providing them with a far more stable connection and lending processing power to the Reaktion to optimize its firing solutions, while Salvador, hidden on a rooftop ahead, had already activated his repeater. Another quantronic presence she didn’t recognize, marked with the ID B11^3e, was providing more network extension from somewhere to their left - she pinged it with a question mark and Lily immediately activated their voice channel
“Hey Takeshido, that’s my little helper B-cube, I figured that since today we have so many remotes we could use the extra network coverage.”
“Good thinking. I don’t remember ever seeing it on the ship though?”
“No, I finished fine tuning its systems only last week, and today it left the engineering bay for the first time - you’ll see, it’s a fun little robot.”
B-cube’s LAI chimed in with a happy sounding chirp and an (˶˃ ᵕ ˂˶) message.
“Everyone in position?” sounded Okiro’s voice in the main tactical channel “We are getting movement from a workshop elevator four hundred meters from us - planimetry says it goes directly to the surface level, it’s possible we have hostiles inbound.”
“Just point me to‘em boss, WOO I’mabout to make a name fo’myself ‘ere.” loudly commented Dean - who had insisted to get the callsign Riddick “I’m gonna find that GraveDigger guy from the locker room and show’im a thing or two.” Mariam could almost see him flexing his biceps in the brief silence that followed.
Luckily, the dry artificial voice of the Reaktion Zond’s LAI intervened before he could go on:
“Identified target: ISC Authorized Bounty Hunter - firing solution ready - requesting permission to engage.”
“Here we go people, let’s get this show on the road” quickly answered Edward “Permission to engage granted.”
“Santa Muerte, they’re here already? These guys sure are efficient.” whispered Mariam, as the HMG on her left started pouring a long, deafening burst into a building in the distance. Zuri crawled beside her making a “told you” gesture with her hand, while Obasanjo, on the opposite corner of the roof, was already complaining in the squad channel:
“Maaan this spot stinks, why does the dumb robot get the best angle? Bro, I can’t see any… Oh shit, contact at two o’clock!” The howl of rockets stressed his last words, as a hail of bullets started hissing over them and thumping against their cover - then a scream, accompanied by a barrage of profanities.
“Uzoma, are you alright?” Zuri’s voice was a little worried, and more than a little tired
“No, I’m not - this is so unfair… Fuck, my hand… Launcher’s busted, and now I can’t even flip the bastard off - say, they do replace fingers at that Haqq hospital right? Man, this hurts like hell, I almost liked it more when they shot me in the spleen.”
He trailed off, then resumed, even more annoyed “Yeah, yeah, I know, ‘press on the wound and shut up’. This job fucking sucks, and we need to get a squad medic.” He muted his audio feed, while Zuzu shook her head.
Meanwhile, a similar scene was playing in the main channel: after the Reaktion Zond had taken down the mercenary sniper, Dean had charged through a shopping gallery, and, in his own words, “kicked some major ass”;
.jpeg)
however, his black market subdermal implants couldn’t completely absorb the enemy return fire, and now he was desperately calling for backup:
“Please boss, the GraveDigger’s coming here to teabag me, I jus know it - I can’t move, my leg’s all fucked up, you have to get me out, you have to… Bro, no, wait we can talk about th-”
“Connection to callsign Riddick lost!” cheerfully announced B-cube in a chipmunk voice “Moving to secure forward position.”
They waited for a couple of seconds - everything around them was silent, and the quantronic proximity scans were returning no detections. Both their remotes had marked the left flank as secure up to one of the target data caches, right in front of the local FZX office.
“Lily, can your REM extract the Bit Creds on its own?” asked Mariam over their private connection
“No, its geist is too basic for that, we’d risk losing it to any security measure.”
“Then I guess we’ll need to move over.”
She rapidly informed Zuri; the squad leader nodded, preparing to leave their position, then froze:
“Wait, someone has to stay here with Obasanjo, and to fix the Zond if something happens to it.”
“Hey, it’s your turn this time.” she replied, already climbing over the parapet
“Yeah, I figured as much. Take Dinka and Oni, and… be careful, ok?”
Mariam smiled under her helmet while she lowered herself to street level
“Don’t worry Zuzu, we’ll be fine.”
The three Wildcats quickly covered the distance that separated them from the terminal - a simple automated dashboard for cryptocurrency operations - around which B-cube had planted various concealed EMP gizmos, highlighted in green on their AR overlay.
She immediately got to work, isolating the cache from the network and bypassing its security measures to be able to download the unique hyperledger IDs of the BitCreds, and then create valid transactions to her profile. She rebooted the tampered device, and the accredit notification immediately appeared on her holodisplay.
That was the easy part done.
She realized in that moment that Oni and Olujimi had been talking to each other - she was so focused on her work that she had tuned them out - and they apparently had some kind of plan going on:
“Bro, deadass, I’m going to drop a repeater on those NPCs - coast is clear up to that wall there, it will be based asf, just let me cook.” was saying Oni, gesturing towards the far side of a thick support wall.
“Stop with the slang already!” interrupted them Mariam “Half of what you’re saying is incomprehensible, those memes have been dead for more than a century, and I don’t care which dumb Arachne streamer dug them up last week.”
“Bruh.” they responded in unison.
“Your idea’s great though” she quickly added “we could use some network projection in that sector: Salvador is still pinned by the REM that shot Obasanjo, and we’re too far for Lily’s pitcher. Set up the repeater and come back, we’ll start retreating towards our lines.”
They started cautiously withdrawing, keeping an eye on Oni’s tall figure moving towards the corner of the wall. He crouched, and pulled out something from his backpack - the additional hacking range immediately popped up on Mariam’s comlog, and she gave a thumbs up to his squadmate.
Now they had a ton of targets in range, but she immediately noticed that a Zhanying hacker was already setting up a quantronic line of defense in support of their advanced firewall.
“Are we good?” Asked Oni, still squatting beside the little portable antenna he had installed
“Yeah” she replied, “It’s just that we have an enemy hacker around the corner, and he’s entrenched behind all kinds of countermeasures - it will take a bit of effort to dig him out.”
“Bet.”
“I said stop with the… Oni what the hell are you doing?”
The wildcat had suddenly stood up, and jumped right past the corner, shotgun shouldered
“Buenos dias, fuckboy!” he screamed, firing two shells in quick succession, before an explosion of shrapnel sent him flying back. He hit the ground hard, his vitals instantly lighting in bright red as the Zhanying’s quantronic signature dropped from the network.
“Damnit, estúpido idiota!” cried Mariam, starting to call in a medevac team while at the same time trying to mount a cyberattack against the nearest enemies before they could collapse on Oni’s position.
“Come on, we have to get to him!” Of course, Olujimi wouldn’t think twice before running off to his friend’s side - but he was too far forward, too close to enemy positions…
“Medical support’s unavailable Takeshi, you both have to get out of there. Now.” Zuri’s voice on comms was clear and commanding, only the faintest tremble showed the effort she was putting in to sound calm.
He cursed, hesitating - Mariam looked at him from behind her helmet and softly shook her head. They couldn’t run in like that; Oni would have to hold on until they had reinforcements, or the Imperial Service had retreated.
Olujimi’s shoulders slumped. He knew it too.
They started doubling back, while she methodically launched every offensive program at her disposal to disrupt the enemy systems she had in range, cutting communications, jamming sensors and flooding every channel she found with misleading and conflicting information.
They quickly arrived back at the habitational units, the Reaktion Zond still peeking unphased from the bullet-ridden parapet on the rooftop. She sat down with her back to the wall, while Dinka covered the approach with his spitfire.
At least, sitreps from the other units were pretty encouraging: The Salyut had just finished downloading its share of BitCreds, and even though one of the farther data terminals had been emptied by a camouflaged enemy operative - Lottie was swearing that it was the same ninja they almost met in Porto Interplanetario, but of course there was no way to be sure - the Jaguar was hot in his pursuit.
Despite not suffering heavy losses, the Imperial forces were decidedly on the back foot: they were forced to deploy ahead of schedule, and had been under fire from the moment they had set foot in the zone of operation; on top of that, now the compromised datasphere was hindering their coordination - maybe because of this, Lottie managed to run past their defensive perimeter undetected, ending up catching both the fugitive ninja and a Pheasant Agent in the deadly spray of her shotgun.
At that point, the situation had become unsalvageable for the State Empire forces, and the survivors retreated in orderly fashion towards the maintenance workshop that housed the elevator they had used to reach the subterranean level.
Drawing Conclusions
The last dregs of resistance were quickly neutralized: Edward reached and decommissioned the stubborn heavy weapon remote that had wounded Obasanjo, while their other Jaguar incapacitated a tall armored mercenary that was lobbing grenades from across the street screaming “Face the wrath of the GraveDiggeeer!”
As soon as the area was secure, emergency services started arriving from the nearby Averroes hospital, quickly transporting the wounded: Obasanjo and Lottie were both conscious and not in life threatening condition, even though the woman had lost a lot of blood from the wounds of a chain rifle blast. The most worrying was by far Oni: his situation immediately appeared critical, and only the extreme proximity of the hospital gave him even the slightest chance of survival; he had multiple punctured organs, and severe internal bleeding - it was immediately brought in for emergency surgery, and the doors of the operating room stayed closed for several hours, while his four teammates anxiously waited outside.
Obasanjo - still working through the effects of the anesthesia - had collapsed in one of the uncomfortable plastic benches, his hands covered by a tangle of sweet-scented bandages; Olujimi was alternating nervous pacing back and forth with compulsive eating from the hospital’s automatic vending machines - naturally all one-hundred-percent healthy Haqquislamite snacks, of which he loudly complained - while Zuri and Mariam got a seat in the long row of chairs facing the ominous-looking door, whose red “surgery in progress” light had been on for what felt like ages.
At some point during the long night, Zuzu, exhausted, had dozed off, her head softly resting on the other woman’s shoulder - for her part, Mariam was wide awake, and wouldn’t be able to sleep even if she tried; she felt her insides tangled in a knot, worry eating at her as much as the guilt for the warm and fuzzy feeling that was radiating from her right arm to her cheeks.
[Zuri drawn by my wonderfully talented GF CrazyKoala]
She tried to divert her mind from both present and future reading Lily’s reports on the HyperLedger analysis - maybe the girl wasn’t Jazz, but she was working tirelessly for sure - that showed the transaction path of the various BitCreds they had acquired. Most of them passed through shell companies and figureheads, but a name on the long list instantly caught her attention: Reap&Sow agricultural machinery and transportation, a Paradiso-based medium scope farming company of no particular interest, except for the fact that its name also appeared in the halo of the suspected Speculo Agent that eluded them in Porto Interplanetario weeks prior.
She immediately flagged it and linked to the scan they had managed to make at the time - the presence of the Combined Army in the Human Edge was overt, as was its alliance with Aleph, but there were no visible ties to this company for either of them. It could be one of the many twisted plans of the Evolved Intelligence, acting behind its allies' backs - or maybe it could be the work of an independent faction inside the Combined Civilization. Was that too much of a stretch? Something didn’t seem quite right in how the tampering with the dakinis had taken place -
She suddenly lost her train of thought: the light of the operating room had turned off, and a bearded, exhausted-looking haqquislamite doctor was emerging from inside.
She gave Zuri a light shake to wake her up, while Olujimi already besieged the poor physician with a barrage of questions - some of them in spanish, some of them in english.
“He’s out of danger.” he managed to say “We had to replace some organs, and he’ll need a long time to recover - maybe never completely, it’s too early to say for sure - but he’ll make it through. Your friend’s a tough guy, there aren’t many people that would survive a shock like that in the first place, let alone the resulting injuries.”
Dinka turned towards them, arms open and a big smile on his face, as Zuri breathed an heavy sigh of relief
“Told you, my bro’s way too goated to croak like that.”
Mariam chuckled, wiping away a tear.
“Yeah bro, no cap.”
This narrative follows a game of Bidding War, my Corregidor versus Drop Bear’s Imperial Service. If you want a more accurate look on what happened (and more photos!), check out his battle report:
https://dropbearslog.blogspot.com/2024/09/bidding-wars-report-operation-edgelord.html
Here are the table setup, and the list I used for the game:
Comments
Post a Comment