This is from last weeks game. The Andriods have been defeated. Darkside base, on the far side of the moon, was destroyed, and the Andriod Thinkers destroyed. But Rifts Earth is full of menace. And not all of it comes from the Rifts.
Major Sam Elliot, formerly of the NorAm Defense Intelligence Agency, hit the back thrusters on his Starscream SAMAS and dropped to the ground, the exoskeleton easily taking the shock of the forty foot drop to the rich soil of southern Colorado. Behind him his five men followed his action, the roar of the airborne power armor filling the forest and causing small animals to scurry off. The photoreactive coating on the armor blurred for a moment, moving from flat gray to a mottled green and brown within seconds as the suit's camouflage systems did their job. Major Elliot checked the systems, flexing a muscle that didn't exist in order to pull the SAMAS wings in close to the body for infantry mode. The cybernetic link made the suit more responsive, almost part of his own body, and he couldn't understand why anyone would choose not to pilot a suit like that.
The roar of engines cut out suddenly as the entire six man team cut their jets and quickly moved into a star formation, kneeling on the ground and facing outward, using the sensors of their suits at maximum sensitivity to check for any possible ambushes. The Tartarus SAMAS popped up a communications relay, and then did a full sensor sweep, looking for anything out of place.
"This is six." Came over Major Elliot's radio implant, which was hooked into his SAMAS' internal radio.
"Go, six." Elliot said, checking his zone of coverage.
"Just background scatter. No EM emissions, no power sources, no radio scattering, just heavy metal debris background, like usual. We're currently downtown Pagosa Springs, so embedded metal debris is to be expected. No sensor sweeps detected, and atmospheric disturbances are negative, once you account for our own armor suits." Mars Six, the pilot of the Tartarus SAMAS suit, told Major Elliot. "I think we're clear. Six Out."
"Roger that." Elliot answered, then switched on his command channel so that all five members of his team could hear him. "OK, men, the SOS call came from this area. Triangulation puts the signal origin about a half mile north of us, just outside the Colorado Baronies territory. Durango is about thirty miles to our east, so stay sharp. We're going to go in, sweep the area, and engage any hostiles. The caravan is out of Hope, and we have a non-aggression pact with them, so stay sharp but stay off the triggers."
Icons on the right side of his perephial vision blinked one right after another as his team signaled their acknowledgment of the quick mission reminders. Elliot raised his fist and then pointed two fingers in the direction that the distress call had originated from. The caravan had got lucky, one of the stealthed signal repeaters that the Pheonix Republic scout teams had laid out had picked up the signal and routed it into the information network, and Colonel Hawthorn had ordered Major Elliot's SAMAS team, on manuevers, out to check out the signal.
The team moved forward, the Tartarus pilot taking point to keep his sensitive sensor systems clear of his comrades. Major Elliot took the third place, watching to the right side and trusting his men to keep an eye on the left flank and the rear. His railgun was loaded with APDSFSDU 20mm darts, the barrel temperature was well within limits, and the backup capacitors were fully charged, enabling him to fight even if the power conduit was cut. His suit integrity was at 100%, and his jet thrusters were rapidly cooling off, reducing his thermal signature.
The forest made noises around them as they moved almost silently, their suits on full stealth mode. Some of the sounds were strange, alien, to Major Elliot's ears, and he knew that the other two popsickles in the squad were probably feeling the same way he was. The deep throated chuckle of a gargantuan shelled creature that often had moss and flowers, and sometimes even small trees on its back rumbled through the woods, and 1LT Carson swung his weapon in line to where his armor reported the sound as having come from.
"Easy, Lieutenant, it's just an animal. Pretty docile one too, you don't mess with it, it won't mess with us." Elliot told the other man, patching through a private signal.
"It's just so weird out here now, sir." The LT told him.
"No weirder than our world would have been to them." Elliot answered, "Don't worry unless you get hostile contact." The other soldier's icon blinked twice, and Elliot smiled inside his armor. LT Carson had been a member of a Cold Warfighter team, frozen in cryogenic stasis just like himself, sleeping while the world changed and the centuries marched on. This was only his first sweep outside of Groom City, so he was understandably nervous about the sounds of alien flora and fauna.
"Contact, non-hostile, relaying video." Appeared in text on the bottom of Major Elliot's vision as the pilot of Mars Six radioed back. Major Elliot activated a data window in the upper right of his field of vision, and the scene opened up.
There were several patched cargo trucks, two of the post-Cataclysm power armors, and a bunch of bodies clad in the remains of unpowered body armor. The vehicles were still burning, and the power armors were on their back and torn apart. The sad shapes of the defenders who had been wearing unpowered body armor, or worse yet, completely unarmored, were scattered about the sight.
Major Elliot activated the text-squeal feature on his radio and blinked twice at the Mars-Six icon. "Any live contacts?" He asked, and waited for the commo comp to turn his words to text, compress the signal and burst it to Mars Six.
"Negative. Thermal and EM scans show nobody around, not even bots." Scrolled under Mars Six's icon.
"Mars three and Mars five, you're with me, Mars Six, Mars Two, check the perimeter, Mars One, launch a drone." Major Elliot ordered, and led his men on slow advance into the ambush sight.
The men and women who had been defending the convoy were dead, and Major Elliot knelt next to the first body, scanning the brutalized environmental body armor. Ion packet hits, powerful ones, had shattered the plating and torn the body inside up pretty badly. In addition, someone had thrust a force blade, nicknamed a vibro-blade in this harsh new world, into the faceplate and given it a quarter turn. The ion packet hits were precise, and consistent with ion rifles.
"I want a post battle analysis quickly, gentlemen." Elliot said, standing up and moving over to the next body, kneeling down to scan and record the dead woman. "We're exposed out here, and I don't want to get caught out here like a bunch of ground pounders."
The icons blinked, and the two other Starscream SAMAS suits began moving from body to body, recording visual spectrum and sensor scans of the bodies and their equipment.
"I've got some armor shards here, looks like the spalling from an EFP." Scrolled by under Five's icon.
"Gather them up. The Ma'am will want to see them." Elliot told his team. "Make sure you get the battle-ROM's from the suits, I want to know who hit these people, and why."
Elliot looked around, paying close attnetion to his composite display. The power armors and vehicles had been hit first, then the armed defenders, and finally the unarmed defenders had been chased down and killed.
"Check for any looting on the vehicles or the bodies." Elliot ordered, moving over to check out the armor. His suit tagged it with the ID of "NORTHERN GUN SAMSON-NO THREAT" as he approached, and Elliot snorted. The suit had been blasted apart with armor piercing rockets and heavy ion packets, and then a finishing blow of a force blade into the visor, once again with the quarter twist. Elliot knew it took a lot of force, and that twisting a force blade while it was embedded in duraplast was asking for the blade to snap, which meant that either the wielder knew exactly how much force they could apply, or that the force blade was designed to be twisted. Either one was bad news.
Strangely enough, the reactor had been pried open and the uranium micropellets stolen. Nothing else, as far as Elliot could see, just the reactor fuel. Elliot took close scans of the marks around the breached reactor armor, noting that they were either the marks of some kind of power armor or robotic claws. Human hands couldn't generate that type of force, and the supernatural creatures he'd encountered would have a different print, the finger tips would be more dug in.
Friggen demons. This is our world, not theirs. Elliot thought savagely. He hated the creatures that spawned from the blue zones and their intersections. Invaders from other realities, other dimensions, other planets, and sometimes, even other times.
And I thought the Outsider War was bad. He thought to himself, remembering the vision of the UNSS Belgium slowly plunging into the gravity well of Jupiter as the heavy guns of the Outsider mothership pounded the battlecruiser into junk. Unbidden, the image of the Outsider mothership pounding Tripoli into a crater with massdrivers fired from Earth Orbit.
Stay sharp. Elliot reminded himself, shaking his head to banish the images of that horrible war.
The site wasn't even looted. Just base, childish destruction.
What had gone on here?
"No survivor's, enough vid for VR replication." Scrolled under Mars Five's icon. Major Elliot pumped his fist in the air, and made a circle. He stood up with his whole squad, flex the muscle to extend his wings, and as one the entire SAMAS team launched into the air, the roar of their turbines quickly receding as the air mobile power armors headed back to the south, back into New Mexico. Back to Groom City.
* * * * *
Colonel Hawthorn, PhD, MD, formerly of NADARPA, popped loose her VR linkage and stretched to cover the slight vertigo that always accompanied a disengagement from enhanced virtual reality. Her eyes still insisted they saw the neon afterimage of the DNA strand she had been examining, despite the fact that her cyber-eyes had been offline while she worked. She brought her eyes back online, sitting patiently through the startup procedure and the function check, until it had flickered through the options to check them. She squeezed her eyes to allow it the cybernetic implants to finish, then opened them again. The view of her laboratory was slick, to her trained mind the result of computer enhancement, and her implants quickly catoloqued and registered everything within her view before reporting: "LOW THREAT" in the lower right of her vision. Hawthorn stood up, yawned, and stretched, feeling the slick, squishy feeling of her spine slipping back into place.
"Seven hours, ma'am." Came the monotone from behind her. SFC Elliston had been assigned to watch over Hawthorn after the 3R had tried, unsuccessfully, to kidnap her, and had stopped another three attempted snatches and two assassinations. Even though it had been centuries, and the governments involved were gone, SFC Elliston never let the other woman out of her sight unless there were at least two trusted guards to keep an eye on "The Ma'am."
"I think I have it licked. It looks like a problem in the nitrogen fixing lattice." Hawthorn answered, turning around and looking at the other woman. Elliston had been diagnosed with Electromagnetic Sensitivity, commonly called the EM Shakes, which had given her less than 2 years to live. So the short and stocky woman had volunteered for the recently reopened "Individual Amplification and Enhancement Program" and had been Hawthorn's guinea pig. Elliston looked like a short, stocky young woman with clear blue eyes, and slightly chunky, but looks were ever so decieving. Hawthorn had rebuilt her from the ground up, using everything at her disposal, including things outlawed after the Amplified War and the First Global Rebellion. She'd added three new glands that didn't exist in normal humans, increased the amount of other glands, or their output ability, had laced the woman's nervous system with biological superconductor, embedded cybernetic systems, rebuilt her skin, her muscle, and even her bone marrow.
She looked like a chunky woman in a set of Digital Camoflauge Uniform, maybe harmless, and certainly not a threat in fight. The reality was, she was the prototype Type IV Juicer with limited M.O.M. enhancement, heavy experimental bioware, and serious cybernetic enhancement. When Hawthorn had been attacked by four modern Juicers, even with cryodamage, Elliston had killed all four in less than 30 seconds without getting scratched.
You're my triumph. slithered through Hawthorn's brain, as pride and satisfaction filled her. You asked for life, and through science, technology, and innovation, I gave you life. I am more your mother than your freebirth mother. The life she gave you was flawed, imperfect, and you were dying. Now that I have rebirthed you, you are faster, smarter, stronger, and tougher than a Type One Xeno.
"Your education, your dedication, the professionalism of your assistants, and gifts given to you by luck of the genetic lottery let you do that to her." Hawthorn heard her own voice tell her. The ego-control cyberware did it's job, and brought her back from thoughts of god-hood, from power, and from omnipotence. She'd been implanted with it after her trial for crimes against humanity, after her part in the Trevell-9 retroviral attack. She'd toyed with having it removed, but after what she had seen, first hand, what total power had done to the people of this world, how the power of magic and science drove people mad, she had decided to leave it in.
"So the agri-bots can plant that wheat in the lake?" Elliston asked, stepping forward and steadying Hawthorn.
"Yes. It'll grow in sand now, and instead of a small root system, I've altered the wheat so only the bud of the grains extend above ground. The majority of the stalk plunges into the ground, and I..." Hawthorn began to lecture.
"Major Elliot is coming back in. They finished their patrol, and he has data for you." Elliston interrupted. You had to cut off The Ma'am quickly, or you'd end up sitting through an eight hour lecture on the genetic changes to wheat to make it grow in a desert.
"What did he find?" Hawthorn snapped back to reality, the image of the grain's DNA/RNA complexes shattering away in her mind to be replaced with intense curiosity.
"Mars Team is operating under radio silence. Not even sat-com. We didn't account for all of the Thinkers." Elliston reminded her.
"Right, right. When they return, I'll be waiting in the main briefing room." Hwathorn said. "You can go wait for them topside, I think I'm safe in here."
"We thought that about Site Tango-Seven, Ma'am, and we both remember what happened." Elliston reminded The Ma'am. The sight had been suddenly breached by multiple hostile Xeno-Portals, which the locals called "Rifts", which had allowed hundreds, maybe even thousands of Type-One and Type-Two Xeno's into the facility. Brodkil and Gargoyles, get it right. Elliston reminded herself.
"Fine. We'll wait together." Hawthorn told her, opening the door. Outside the door, the two cybernetic UN Marines, both pre-Cataclysm cryostasis survivors like the two women, snapped to attention, their armored hands holding tight to the 4.2mm Guass Rifles.
"C'mon boys, we're going to the shed!" Hawthorn quipped. The Marines simply fell in step, one ahead the two women, one behind, wordlessly, as they all walked down the ferrocrete hallways.
"YOU ARE ENTERING A RESTRICTED AREA-ONLY G-34
NASA Red-Nine/TS-SSBI Gold-Seven Beyond This Point" in bright red holographic letters hovered a few inches before the heavy neo-tungsten blast door, and Hawthorn waved her hand containing her implant ahead of her.
"Welcom Dr. Hawthorn and security." Came a woman's voice. The small group waited silently as the 10 ton blast door slowly moved out of the their way. Hawthorn lost her patience and ducked underneath it, and her guards ducked through too.
"Greetings, Dr. Hawthorn. Can I assist you?" Batallion, the facilities AI, which Hawthorn had debugged, and brought back online sane, asked. His voice was low and mellow. "Will you require access to the Outsider Program Section?"
"No, Batallion, we're going to the war room, thank you anyway." Hawthorn told the AI, sighing inwardly. The old gent was dedicated to the containment of the Outsider corpses, as well as the hardware recovered after the brutal 45 day war.
A glowing line appeared in mid-air, generated by the ever-present nanites in the atmosphere of the facility. Hawthron, Elliston, and the Marines knew what Batallion was going to say before he said it.
"You have been cleared for Warfare Operations, Dr Hawthorn and Security, please follow the green line. Do not deviate from the path unless an emergency occurs, or notifying me." Batallion told them. "Groom Lake Warfighter and Outsider Research Facility is a secure area, and lethal force is authorized."
"Thank you, Old Man." Elliston said to mid-air, smiling. It never hurt to be polite.
"You're welcome, Sergeant First Class Elliston."
* * * * *
"What do you think, Ma'am, andriods?" Major Elliot asked, watching as The Ma'am moved through the EVR holographic reconstruction of the ambush site. She'd been looking over it for over an hour, and hadn't said a work, although both Elliot and Elliston had seen the small lights on the sides of her cranial implants flickering as they operated at overtime. Once the green lights had moved into yellow as she engaged all of her facilities, and even though Elliston had watched closely, none of the pin-prick lights had moved into the red to warn of possible information overload. He stood watching The Ma'am along with Major Guy and Major Franks. Both men were highly trusted modern men, enhanced into far more than human, and educated farther than they knew was possible when they had surrendered after attempting to hijack the convoy of rag-tag elements that had left the remains of Tango-Seven.
"No. But you knew that already, didn't you?" The Ma'am didn't wait for an answer she already knew. "After fighting them for six months, you know as well as I do that they would stripped the sight. No. This is something new. Notice that nothing was taken but fuel pellets." Both watchers nodded. "Notice the burst patterns, the precision, and the pattern of attack. While it might appear as andriods, it isn't." She moved over to the Samson power armor. "Andriods and most other intelligent attackers would not have bothered with the force blade coup-de-grace. Non intelligent attackers wouldn't have bothered either. Whoever did this, did so because of either training, hardwired reflex, or because their programming told them too."
"Robots, ma'am?" Elliston asked, moving into the image and moving down.
"Not articulated motor limbed ones. Not even tracks. Notice the lack of tracks, the complete lack of markings except where the armor was pried open." She waved her hand again, and the handprints from where the attackers had pried open armor and broken weapons by twisting them lit up with a faint whitish glow. "All in all, it's a hover-capable bot, more than likely using anti-gravity technology. No independant intelligence oversight, or if there was, it was observation only." She waved her hand again and the scene disappeared, vanishing into the data-cores of the facility.
"They were bots, advanced for this world, not so much for us. Anti-grav is fairly standard once you understand the theoreum, and I according to the Tartarus' sensors, there wasn't the typical energy residue or tachyon disturbance of advanced anti-grav. Judging by the armor fragments you found, it's a 22nd Century composite, looks like molecular bonded aluminum sandwiched with neo-plastic laminates. The weapons are Class III ion weapons, probably light cannon by the size of the packets, but without advanced focusing and compression arrays, by the light damage by packet size, and the residual energy left behind." She looked thoughtful for a moment, and green lights twinkled at her temples and her brow, under her hair.
Elliston and Elliot waited silently. Major Guy looked anxious, as a native of "Rifts Earth" he knew that unknown meant dangerous. Major Franks watched with undisguised fascination of the high technology displayed, his cybernetics, far more advanced than what the Coalition Army had put into him, working in tandem with The Ma'am lecture to provide relevant data, expand on some of the esoteric terms, and to provide up close windows of the places she had highlighted. It had taken him weeks to get used to the information load his rebuilt body had provided him, but it had been well worth it in his opinion.
"The pressure exerted by the robotic claws indicate substandard superhydraulics or flatware motors. It's signifigantly underpowered compared to Major Franks cybernetics, but within range of his old body," Major Franks saw his old body appear, next to an image of his current one, appear in his vision, the hands highlighted, and data on pressure capabilities hovering above the hands. He dismissed them, and focused on what The Ma'am was saying. "The weaponry is basic ionic weaponry, late 21st Century design, only build larger, by my examination of effect, short range, energy intensive, and only moderately effective, while the armor contains several interesting anomolies."
The armor fragments appeared, broken down by composition, molecular examination, tensile ratings, conductivity ratings, and impurities listed.
"It's a very nice picture, Ma'am, but what does it mean?" Elliston asked.
Hawthorn stopped in mid-wave, and turned to face the only four she fully trusted.
"It means, Mary, that these were built recently, using local materials, judging by the impurities in the armor fragments, scavenged materials. It means, because they didn't scavenge the area, that whoever did this thinks they have enough raw material, or finished equipment, to carry out their plans. It means that we have a new foe." Hawthorn told them, walking out of the holotank and moving to a chair. She sat down, crossed her legs, and faced the others.
"Could it be Coalition scouts?" Franks asked. He dreaded the day he would face down his old countrymen.
"No way. If the Coalition could build stuff like this, and deploy it all the way out here, they would have 'demonstrated' their ability." Hawthorn answered.
"Andriods?" Elliot asked.
"Nope. We only missed a single Thinker and two Drones. Even with a degree of error, it will be years until they are a problem, and without Darkside Station for manufacturing, they can't make any advanced models, and now that I managed to adjust the carrier wave signal for the Mat-Trans, any andriod who gets in it will have their nueral wiring shorted. So, not andriods." Hawthorn smiled.
"Something from your past?" Guy asked, squinting his eyes and moving his stare away from Elliston, who'd started to blur as her built in ECM systems began fuzzing his cyberoptics.
"Something from our past. Someone who has been asleep since before us." She steepled her fingers, setting her chin on her fingertips, and stared at the four in front of her.
"Or something imprisoned."
This is going to be a nice little thread, describing what went on in the game I run over the last few months. Don't worry, the Pheonix Empire, Starscream SAMAS, Tartarus SAMAS, and the rest will all be explained.
Please keep this story going! It is very cool!