CthulhuTech: Brave New World

Simon_Jester · Post by **Simon_Jester** » 2010-06-27 03:21pm

Me, I'd be happy with just an up-or-down, yes-or-no on whether he ever intends to come back to SDN in the Sea of Time. We're close to the climax of our story arc there, and we can't start a new one without, at a bare minimum, his input.

Though since the thing's already at novel length, we can do well enough just closing up that arc, I think.

Academia Nut · Post by **Academia Nut** » 2010-07-01 05:43pm

Lieutenant Timothy Hartmann was one of the few humans that piloted a Nazzadi mech, but that was because he needed the incredible speed offered by the Nazzadi designs to do his job properly. A member of the OSS since he was nearly out of high school due to some rather poor decisions he had made in his youth that had left him with the choice of working for Special Services or disappearing down a hole somewhere. Finding that such a decision was really no decision at all, Tim had come to learn that the OSS always had need of people with the right combination of not existing and expendability. Fortunately for him, he had survived long enough to exit the latter category.

Simply put, he was an assassin, piloting an Eclipse in stealth mode along the edges of battlefields to get in and eliminate select targets, which was not that unusual a mission for the small mech, except for the fact that his targets were often NEG officers deemed compromised by the OSS. Most of the time it was easier to just let the OIS reel them in, but sometimes Tim’s superiors wanted someone removed without letting their allies know that the NEG was on to them. An ugly business, Tim had needed little prompting to join in with Victor and his crew.

The fact that he got to keep his Eclipse with its custom modifications was just a bonus in Timothy’s mind. Flying above an alien world as the primary sun rose in the distance, Tim could not help but just enjoy himself and put his mech through a series of complex acrobatics, tumbling across the sky like some sort of trapeze god. Life was good.

Of course his partner in the Hurricane recon mech, or Kameni as the uptight bastard insisted on calling it, was not the sort to let Tim just go showboating and not bitch about it. Before Tim could get into any of his fancy moves, Warrant Officer Khara barked over the comm. channel, “Stop showing off, we have a mission to do.”

Stabilizing out, Timothy clucked disapprovingly and replied, “That is ‘we have a mission to do sir’.”

Khara grumbled a bit before he replied, “Sir, yes sir.”

“Better. Not that I particularly deserve the rank, but who am I to argue with the deluded brass? Of course, I’ll probably screw up and ended up busted down a dozen ranks or so, but for today we’ve got to observe the formalities,” Timothy noted rather flippantly.

Timothy could just hear Khara gritting his teeth over the radio before he replied, “Sir, yes sir.”

Chuckling lightly at the expense of his tightly wound partner, Timothy lets his senses sweep over his instruments for a moment, taking it all in and processing what he is experiencing for a second before making his analysis. Distant contacts indicating heavy rain clouds moving in from the west where they were certain an ocean lay, endless tracts of forest just like yesterday, and…

His voice now serious, Timothy demanded, “Khara, south-east twenty hundred klicks, are you getting a strong radar return?”

Khara was silent for a moment before he replied, “I see it sir. Looks like a large, flat, highly reflective surface on the ground. It could be a metal rich cliff face, but the terrain does not really support that.”

Bringing up a tight beam communication signal, Tim signalled to the base, “Second Star, this is Ranger-1. Ranger-2 and I have an anomalous signal approximately two hundred klicks south-east of the base, possibly mineral resources, possibly an artificial structure of some sort. Please advise.”

There was a brief pause before the operator on the other side replied, “Ranger-1, this is Second Star. Direction is similar to vector of last night’s attack, so investigate but proceed with caution.”

“Roger that Second Star. Ranger-1 switching to stealth mode, passing communication handle to Ranger-2,” Tim declared before he told his wingman, “Khara, I will be going silent here, so keep an eye out for me while I get close to the signal.”

“Sir, yes sir,” Khara replied, this time actually meaning the words that came out of his mouth.

Dropping to half speed while shedding altitude, Timothy travelled on a near ballistic arc toward the jungle canopy below. With active camouflage panels, heat baffles, noise cancellers, and radar absorbers all now active, Tim’s Eclipse was nearly impossible to spot without either specialized equipment or extremely keen eyes at point blank range. Despite that, he still flew as close to the tops of the trees as he could as fast as he could to minimize his chances of detection.

Flying at maximum stealth speed put him on top of the target in a little over twelve minutes, during which time the target came into visual range. Rising from the jungle was a massive obelisk, at least thirty metres high, composed of some dark stone with the rather odd optical property that it could not seem to decide if it was glossy or matte, the difference determined by the slightest change in viewing angle. Already Tim could feel the hairs on the back of his neck start to rise up, and he began to prime his Eclipse’s weapon for combat.

As an assassin, Tim had felt that the lightning gun that came standard was insufficient for his mission profile and had demanded that it be swapped out for something with a bit more kick. Getting his wish, he had received a charge beam, which he had used to great effect over the years, rather gleefully at times when pointed at those who were not on the NEG payroll. Of course, the problem with the charge beam, and the lightning gun for that matter, was that it took some time between shots and it was not safe to hold a charge in the gun for more than a few minutes, so they took some preparation that made them the worst sort of weapon to get caught in an ambush with.

Fearing such an ambush right now, Tim settled his mech down on the ground and carefully picked his way through the jungle, his Eclipse’s LAI devoting all discretionary computing power to monitoring the sensors. It was quiet… dangerously quiet. They had seen few examples of large fauna thus far, but there were still things that moved and made noise, and they all were conspicuous in their absence. Some of it might be his presence, as stealth did not mean total undetectability, but even the whine of things too small to notice him did not appear on his audio receivers.

Using a large tree for concealment, Tim carefully peeked out his primary sensor boom at the obelisk. Five metres across at the base, it sat in a deformed square clearing where nothing grew despite the thick layer of detritus on the ground. A quick but careful measuring via laser rangefinder showed that the edges of the clearing were all about five metres away from the closest surface of the obelisk. Additionally, and most ominously, there were square openings into the obelisk around the base, each set in the centre of a face and approximately two metres across on all sides, whatever lay beyond the threshold concealed by total darkness.

Taking a careful step out into the clearing, Tim nearly had his Eclipse swallowed up by the loose detritus and loamy soil of the clearing, but he quickly diverted power to his A-pods, reducing his apparent weight while not quite taking off. Carefully adjusting the energy flow so that he had a ground pressure similar to that of a human foot, he stepped out again, and despite a little bit of sinking he could walk around easily enough. Good. If forced out of his mech he would not be swallowed up by the ground.

Carefully circling about the edge of the clearing, Tim directed all of his sensors at the obelisk and received very little information back in return. The thing was reflective to radar frequencies but the shorter the wavelength used the more intermittent the return, until when he tried to use his X-ray scanner he got nothing at all back, no matter what face of the obelisk he examined.

Approaching more carefully, intent on seeing how the obelisk responded and possibly getting a scan of the interior via one of the openings, if he could get close enough. Half-way across the clearing Tim took a step and found his foot sinking into the soil. Making a quick motion to boost power to the A-pods, he discovered to his horror that nothing happened. Checking his diagnostics, he found that power for all his systems were fading, including the alarms that should have warned him of such a power failure. Guessing that the obelisk was somehow responsible, he tried to back away from it, but with his A-pods failing his legs had sunk too far into the soil to retreat under the reduced power conditions he was suffering.

Gritting his teeth, Tim reached around to trigger the ejection system, but his emphatic yanking on the lever elicited no response from the mech. Scrambling now, he unclipped himself from his harness and frantically worked the manual override for the hatch while his mech sank further into the ground and began to tip forward. Opening it up just in time, he leapt down to the ground with his Eclipse pitching forward to land with a thud, sinking into the soft earth a few centimetres before settling in, quite thoroughly stuck.

Checking his breathing gear and that it was still intact, Tim checked his surroundings for a few moments before he reached around to the survival pack attached to his flight suit and pulled out a miniaturized, single shot flare gun. Raising it into the air, he fired off a bright red flare that rose nearly a hundred metres into the air and would be painfully obvious to anyone with sensor equipment trained on the area, like Khara.

Returning to his downed mech, Tim began to pull out a few additional pieces of survival gear that were too bulky to fit into the survival pack. Considering that the Eclipse was designed to eject the entire cockpit as a life pod, he was lucky he had the survival pack and an independent air supply. Working on a hunch, he pulled out a length of carbon fibre rope, a low-light add-on for his helmet’s AR goggles, a sub-machine gun, and clear glass bottle filled with a transparent liquid slightly tainted yellow by the herbs drifting at the bottom.

Sitting on the back of his Eclipse with his gear assembled, Tim waited until he could see Khara’s Hurricane approaching, at which point he waved for his partner to land outside of the clearing. Walking over to the edge, Tim said to Khara, “My mech abruptly lost power on approach to the obelisk, probably some function of the structure. We’re going to need another mech or two to haul it out of here, and that is only if the damn thing starts once outside the radius of effect of the obelisk.”

Ensconced within his mech, his features concealed by layers of steel, ceramics, and plastics, Khara’s expression was unreadable, but Tim knew that the uptight bastard was rolling his eyes at him. After a few moments, Khara responded, “Second Star has been informed; they will divert another recon group to assist in recovery, sir.”

“Good. Now to test a hunch,” Tim replied while pulling out the glass bottle and giving it a bit of a swirl.

Khara was silent for a moment before he exclaimed aghast over his loud speakers, “You’re going to waste time drinking?”

“Technically,” Tim said with a shrug before he lifted up his mask and chugged the contents of the bottle. Shoving his mask back down and checking the seals, he then took a breath before coughing hard at the burn of the alcohol going down his throat. He then had to blink a few times to adjust to the influx of new information. After a moment he said, “Yup, there is definitely some sort of arcane field about this thing.”

“What did you just do sir?” Khara demanded.

“Sorcery, still a bit experimental, but still sorcery,” Tim explained, before looking back at Khara and knowing that he was giving him the mother of all inquiring glares behind the emotionless faceplate of his mech. “The products of a misspent, and classified, youth,” he added on.

“Wait… if you had some sort of arcane sense spell available, why did…?” Khara began before Tim cut him off.

“Look, until the hydroponic herb garden is up and running, arcane ritual supplies are in short order so I have three uses of that spell and I would rather not have to use them up if I don’t have to. I had no indication that there was any sort of danger until it was too late, and I had already been taking what I thought were reasonable precautions,” Tim explained, eyeing Khara with annoyance over having his competence questioned.

Khara was silent, to which Tim just nodded before he said, “Okay, now that we have that out of the way, it is time for the constitutionally mandated stupidity.”

MysteriousDarkLordv3 · Post by **MysteriousDarkLordv3** » 2010-07-01 08:04pm

I haven't played the SMAC game in a long while but that don't sound like a Monolith to me. Unless my memory is playing tricks on me.

So maybe this isn't the SMAC reality? It's someplace else? Obviously a game-world, though.

Post by **LadyTevar** » 2010-07-03 10:31pm

"Constitutionally Mandated Stupidity" means "you hold this end of the rope while I walk over to the Monolith, ok?"

JonB · Post by **JonB** » 2010-07-04 01:32am

Now I want to build a Faction file for this fic, but my copy of SMAC/SMAX went walkabout. I already PM'd the guy who may have it *cough* but could someone PM me a copy of one of the Faction files so I can start playing around with it?

Biggest problem I have right off the top of my head is how much of a PLANET penalty would these guys have with their paranoid anti-xeno culture. I was thinking a -3 PLANET given how much of a leg-up they have in other fields.

barricade · Post by **barricade** » 2010-07-05 04:33am

JonB wrote:Now I want to build a Faction file for this fic, but my copy of SMAC/SMAX went walkabout. I already PM'd the guy who may have it *cough* but could someone PM me a copy of one of the Faction files so I can start playing around with it?

Biggest problem I have right off the top of my head is how much of a PLANET penalty would these guys have with their paranoid anti-xeno culture. I was thinking a -3 PLANET given how much of a leg-up they have in other fields.

I'd either push it to -4 PLANET, which would be painful down the road unless they lighten up. Or I'd only give it a -2 as the planetmind & mindworms, when compared to some of the nightmares of Aeon Earth, are almost rat level annoyances at most. Especially if the new colony can figure out how to construct some of the nastier things available to them.

On that note, considering the 'mechs have what's basically a Shoggoth in them, has anyone considered what the Planetmind might go through upon seeing one of those after the armor is breached? No offense, but that scares the hell out of me more then the fact there's a Shoggoth inside the armor.

If this is the canon SMAC universe, then its likely the UNS Unity is currently on its way with its bundle of joy and insanities, known as the various faction leaders, so if you do want to incorporate them into this, you might want to give this faction a +4 PROBE (maybe even +5) due to paranoia levels that make the Human Hive, or Cult of Planet, look like pikers in comparison. That and when these guys say 've hav vays uf making yu talk', they really mean it. Might want to also give them the hidden Firixian faction's bonus, and let them start with either the fusion reactor tech and/or the antimatter/quantum reactor tech, to roughly match their aeontech. Possibly also give them a -1 MINERAL considering to offset the higher engines due to the 'oddity' of their creation. I call it up in the air for how their GROWTH or MORALE stats are, and the latter would likely be very important considering what they're using.

One thing is likely for sure however - this group will never take the Ascent to Transcendence route. They know what's out there, and have absolutely no desire to go that way and end up becoming that which they'd previously fought. On the other hand, allowing the planetmind on its own to develop fully, without being submerged into it, and having it on very friendly terms (much like how it was with Dierdre Skye) with humanity, might suit their plans.

JonB · Post by **JonB** » 2010-07-05 12:15pm

The problem I keep running into (lack of CDs doesn't mean lack of stuff like the manual or the nice glossy poster with the techtree on it) is that this faction wouls *start* with late to end-game technology at their disposal. Seriously. At the very least, Social Psych, Secrets of the Human Brain, Advanced Mil. Algorithms, Fusion Power, Doctrine: Air Power (due to A-pods and the like), Retroviral Enginnering, Supertensile Solids, Matter Editation (F'n Nano Factories + D Engines), Self Aware Machines (LAIs), Nanometallurgy, Singularity Mechanics....

If this faction was to be balanced, they would either need to be repeatedly hit with planet-busters for an early-gme start or start in the late-mid game with just a single base to allow the other factions to use their established infrastructure to counter their inherent advances on the Tech Tree or to give this faction murderous penalties - ECONOMY is broken with the D-Pods to the point of a +3 or +4. EFFICIENCY is a tossup, we haven't seen much of how they adapt to Planet to see how good they are at managing their resources. But given the source material, probably a +1 or +2. SUPPORT is something I want to ding them on badly as many of the materials and like that they use to support themselves may not exist outside their nano-facs. MORALE is heavilly in their favour. They know how to handle AWS, so this should be a +3 or even a +4. POLICE is the same thing, so we're looking at +1 at the least. GROWTH is a narrative thing, but the thought of these guys building The Cloning Vats in their spare time makes me want to hit them with a penalty here. PLANET we agree on, but my manual only goes down to -3.

PROBE would be +2 given that +3 means auto-failiure of any Probe attempts against them. INDUSTRY - D Pods + Nano Facs = "we need to mine?" Well, for the most part anyways. I may combine this as some sort of penalty with the SUPPORT due to the exotic or just plain extra-universal materials that cannot be found naturally on Planet. RESEARCH - ugh, they already start with so much tech anyways that a bonus would be redundant while a penalty can be easilly overcome.

I really think balance for this Faction would have to be narrative in nature rather than Mechanical. Acadamia can write issues, problems and scenarios that exceed the programming of the games to create a decent challenge for his protagonists.

Oh, auto-war with the Aliens. No question about that.

barricade · Post by **barricade** » 2010-07-07 12:25pm

Actually with the faction editor built-into the game you can make factions with as much of a -9 or +9 in any one of the fields, and play merry hell with their starting tech(s) as well.

I'm not sure about giving them Singularity Mechanics as while they're starting to understand them, its by no means a direct comparison to what the SMAC factions have available to them after mastering it. In this case, the SMAC factions would have the advantage if/when they catch up and get it. As for Industry, the faction landing pods had built-in micro-factories/refineries, and drilling/mining equipment ready on hand. This new colony, while having D-pods and the like, didn't seem to have the heavy equipment needed to do said mining. Or at least large scale mining that will shortly be needed in order to both expand, and simply survive. Mostly because mindworms and Locusts of Chiron can bore through armor that is so tech'd out it starts laughing at both time & space (the final three armor types). That's one insanely powerful lifeform.

And yeah, definite agreement in that they'll got to war with either the Manifold Caretakers or the Manifold Usurpers. Doesn't help they look, at least partially, like Deep Ones or at least a face only a Tager could love. But as mentioned as the planet itself is more like a newborn infant that doesn't know anything yet - blank mental slate - they might just be able to grab 'control' of it to a degree that only Gaia's Stepdaughters or the Cult of Planet were ever able to achieve. One thing that's damn nice about mindworm boils bred in captivity is that once they're bonded to someone, the boil is loyal unto death. That, a free mental link to the planet overmind (insert shades of Zerg here), and that they're subservient, and you don't have to worry about losing your sanity when mixed up with them, unlike Aeontech stuff.

The main thing I'd worry about is the other factions managing to sneak in probe teams and making off with a few items and unleashing a minor armaggedon upon the planet by messing around with things that usually result in things worse then Cenobites showing up. *eyes Proktor Zaharkov & the Spartan Federation very very warily* Although I pity anyone attempting to have diplomatic relations with the Lord's Believers, especially any veterans of the Aeon War. That....won't go down well.

JonB · Post by **JonB** » 2010-07-08 02:28am

I talked to Acadamia Nut on Monday, and he pointed out to me that in his notes, this faction would have a -7 or -8 PLANET, just so that even if they got the Manifold Nexus and maxed out their PLANET, they would still be stuck at -3. We looked at the tech tree and also came to the realization that the CTech group has *huge* holes in thier knowledge that the SMAC factions would naturally develop into.

Acadamia also suggested that his faction would not use ENERGY as a resource due to the D-Pods and that they would bring a new Tech-style with them - Arcane - to go along with Build, Discover, Conquer and Explore.

But at this point, I can only suggest waiting for his next piece before we make any further conjecture. Maybe he'll even explain what he sees his basic infantry have in terms of tech.

Academia Nut · Post by **Academia Nut** » 2010-07-08 05:14am

Read the doctor's lines with Christopher Lee's voice for maximum effect.

---

Timothy lay on his bed back in his room at the base. Very clearly a component in a prefab structure, it was a neutral, not-grey box lacking any warmth or character, more a cell than a living space. In fact, only the privacy afforded by a solid door and a separate washroom really distinguished the lifeless space from a prison cell. Staring up at the smooth, flat, not-beige ceiling discontinuity…

Stuffed into such a dull cube, Tim could not help but have his thoughts drift like a bit of flotsam caught in a slow tide. Boredom filled his mind like an opiate and numb thoughts turned from contemplating the listless area to nothing in particular. Idly, he reached up to scratch at the palm of his right hand discontinuity…

Tim recoiled in pain as something pricked at his skin where he went to scratch it, and pulling away his left hand he found his fingers smudged with blood. Cursing, he got up off the bed and went to the washroom while clutching at his hand. Pushing the slightly ajar sliding door to the side, Tim went to the sink and turned on the taps, smudging blood over the acrylic fixtures.

Cool water hit his flesh and came away pink as it mixed with the blood streaming out of the wound, and swirled into oblivion down the drain. Tim held it like this for a time, but the water just went from pink to crimson towards rust, thickening like custard, piling up instead of going away. His hands now coated with congealed blood that clung like napalm ready to ignite, Tim grabbed a towel and ran discontinuity…

Having arrived at the infirmary, Tim lay woozily on an examination table, his right hand wrapped in a towel while his left pawed at the absorbent fabric in a futile effort to clean it of the blood on it. The nurse had said that the doctor would see him shortly, but Tim felt like he had been here for an hour, his life slowly draining away due to the apathy of those supposed to care for him.

Finally the door swung open and a man in a lab coat walked in, a peculiar look on his face. Vision starting to swim, Tim tried to place the man’s face, tried to remember where he knew the man from. With only a thousand people in the conspiracy, they were a tight knit group and everyone was at most two steps separate from each other. Tim knew this man from somewhere.

“Ah, Mr. Hartmann, here for your check-up I presume?” The doctor asked in a strange tone of voice.

Blinking and trying to focus, Tim shook his head only to nearly collapse completely from the wave of vertigo that action produced. His words slurring, he attempted to reply, “No… my hand… my hand is… is bleeding…”

The doctor looked at the sticky, sopping wet towel about Timothy’s hand and shook his head before he said, “Mr. Hartmann, you and I both know that a paper cut is not why we are here.” Moving closer to Tim, he reached over and tore the back of his shirt off.

Lashing out, Timothy fell off the examination table to the floor, landing with a sick plop as his right hand hit first, the towel wrapped about it bursting like a blood blister struck by a hammer, spewing viscous black fluid like oil across the ceramic floor. Rolling on his side, Tim looked up to see the doctor had picked up a scalpel, looming over him, clucking disapprovingly as he said, “You’ve let your condition deteriorate Mr. Hartmann, we’ll have to excise the contaminated area…”

Discontinuity

Timothy ran, the halls spinning around him as he tried to cling to the scalpel simultaneously made slick and sticky by the blood that drenched his hands and forearms. Sweat ran down his face, dripping into his eyes and making it hard to see, but any attempt to wipe it away just made the problem worse by the introduction of worse fluids. His back burned like fire from where it was exposed to the air, and half in pain and half in panic to try and conceal himself, he slammed himself against the nearest wall.

Instead of the meaty thud he expected, he got set of wet, crunchy pops, like a string of firecrackers wrapped around beetles going off. Each little burst also sent a stab of white hot pain through his back, and Timothy staggered away from the wall, falling to his knees. Glancing back drunkenly, he found the wall where he had hit had a large splotch of rotten custard spread across it. His mind taking a few moments to process the data, he reached around to his back, groping about with his free hand.

Something came loose and Timothy screamed from the sensation of his body coming apart. Collapsing to the ground, he thrashed for a few moments before he regained enough control to squint through the pain at the mass of flesh that had come away in his hand. Resting in his left hand was a flap of squamous, green skin coated in jellied yellow pus swarming with bloated, thumb sized maggots.

Vomit swelled within Timothy’s throat before overflowing into his sinuses and erupting from both his mouth and nostrils, nearly choking him as it filled the section of floor where he lay. Rolling over while clawing at his face, Timothy landed on his back and more of the squirming maggots burst, each one like a bullet slamming into him, causing him to buck and thrash about, bursting more of the infernal worms. Puke still swirling in his mouth, Timothy tried to scream but only a gurgle came out as the acrid fluid flowed back down his throat, toward the lungs this time.

Discontinuity

The corridors were dark and unending, the smooth hallways enveloped by blackness that held nothing to trip him but his own two feet, something that Tim stumbled over repeatedly in his mad dash from

Discontinuity

He could see the aged yet unbowed profile of Dr. Cross up ahead, and he picked up his pace, trying to get his leaden legs to move even as he gasped and coughed for air, saliva and vomit mixing in his mouth to bubble and foam with his exertions into a vile froth that ran freely down his chin and throat. He tried to cry out for help, but no sound but a gooey gurgle escaped. Moving closer, he extended a hand to get help from Dr. Cross, but just before he reached the man’s shoulder he turned about, and the elder sorcerer staring back at him was not Victor Cross.

“Hello son.”

Discontinuity

He was strapped to a chair, covered in cables and tubes, his eyelids stapled open and his mouth wired shut. Numerous needles connected to reservoirs filled with unclean liquids pierced his skin and a screen in front of him displayed atrocities and nightmares so inhuman only a human could think them up.

The doctor from before leaned into view and said, “Very good Mr. Hartmann, your responses so far indicate that there might be something still human left in you.”

Discontinuity

He had been holding the scalpel, he knew that, but he did not know where it had gone in comparison to the verdigris stained bronze blade now lodged in Dr. Cross’ throat, the old man’s eyes staring accusingly up at him with just a hint of disappointment. All around other bodies lay strewn like dolls scattered in a temper tantrum; men and women, all slain by his hand.

A soldier, his face concealed by a mask and his body consumed by mucus covered maggots walked up next to Timothy before he said, “Good job… traitor.”

Timothy did not even resist the stun gun placed against his neck that took him down.

Discontinuity

Helping hands pulled him out of the cockpit of his Eclipse, radiological alarms chattering away at the particle radiation streaming off his charge beam, the weapon fired so repeatedly the barrel had become an irradiated hazard. Someone removed the battered, leaking mask from his face and replaced it with a medical-oxygen one. He could hear people around him talking, but the words were all a mingled together mush without meaning.

Head lolling to the side, Timothy saw technicians working on Khara’s Hurricane being worked on, the crew frantically scrambling to extract the pilot. In a daze, Timothy smiled at that. He did it, he got…

The back of the mech opened up and the limp body of Khara fell out, head landing on the ground to burst like an overripe melon dropped from the second floor of a building onto concrete. From the hollowed out ruin emerged a swarm of mottled worms long as Timothy’s hand that began to squirm and crawl for the now panicking technicians.

With gunfire erupting all around, Timothy still managed to hear someone say, “Quickly, get Mr. Hartmann to medical at once!”

Turning his head toward the voice, Timothy looked up at the greying visage of Dr. Morton Angelis, the same man who had overseen his vivisection and execution all those years ago when first brought in by the OIS.

The nightmare was still going.

Timothy screamed until someone stabbed him with a sedative.

Discontinuity

MysteriousDarkLordv3 · Post by **MysteriousDarkLordv3** » 2010-07-08 05:34am

Oooo!

Nicely horrific, wonderful fuzzing of the lines between reality and madness. Well done!

So this is the SMAC reality? How far along? Have the human factions arrived yet?

If one of the preexisting factions is already on the Path to Transcendence - and Cross & Co. already know what being "One With The Universe" really means - wouldn't that mean war? (After all, if one wants to Transcend, Lovecraftian sorcery is a perfectly valid way of doing it. Faster, too.)

xt828 · Post by **xt828** » 2010-07-08 12:07pm

Interesting style of chapter, I enjoyed it.

HSRTG · Post by **HSRTG** » 2010-07-08 01:52pm

I have new respect for my high morale guys in SMAC now. Withstanding that and continuing to fight is incredible.

So I'm guessing the monolith unleashed a mind worm boil?

Academia Nut · Post by **Academia Nut** » 2010-07-09 06:36pm

Cold water splashed upon warm grey skin and Ruth stared into her face, examining her features carefully, looking for any hint that her nightmares were coming true, but all she saw were the same features that had stared back at her in the mirror for nearly three decades. She had one of the more peculiar fears of her subspecies, the creeping dread of some amlati that they might slowly transform into a sidoci. So far her pigmentation remained the smooth mix of Nazzadi and human melanin, but since her eruption of psychic powers she had grown more suspicious of her own appearance.

Of course, being put on the sidelines for five days while the colony experienced its first growing pains and attack by alien life forms had not improved her psychological outlook on life, especially while dealing with the influx of new sensations. Fear and anxiety hung over the colony like a thundercloud just waiting to burst, and Ruth could feel it in her mind as a constant pressure that threatened to give her a migraine if she let it. A lesser person probably would have cracked already. Ruth had been raised by Victor, which by definition made her not a lesser person.

Towelling off her face, she moved back into her living quarters and began to get dressed, picking up the new badge she had been issued to show that she was a parapsychic with an intrusive power, although so far she could only really pick up random thoughts projected by others rather than actively shuffle through another’s mind. She ran a thumb over the smooth plastic and idly wondered how long such things would remain necessary. She had used her time off to review the genetic map of the populace and by the third generation anyone not a parapsychic would be a sorcerer, and a few generations after that both Homo sapiens sapiens and Homo sapiens nazzadi would cease exist as distinct subspecies, blended together by interbreeding.

There had already been suggestions to abolish the badges in favour of more symbolic and artistic tattoos, something being pushed by the Nazzadi members of the colonies. Considering that everyone in their new, nascent culture would understand what the tattoos meant, the idea definitely had some merit, although Ruth always had to laugh whenever someone suggested she ‘get in touch with her Nazzadi side’. Considering that her ‘Nazzadi side’ had been a war criminal who had her ovaries harvested during dissection so that Ruth could be made to confirm the hypothesis that the black-skinned aliens were in fact genetically related humanity, she found the idea rather funny. She had been raised by humans as a human, so she found any suggestion otherwise rather insulting.

At least she had a culture she could call her own.

Shaking her head at the internal diversion, Ruth settled the badge over her left breast and then put on a light helmet rapidly becoming popular within the base. While bulkier than just AR glasses, the helmets were also much lighter than the helmets of the full pressure suits and had an open face while still providing the ability to quickly add an airtight breath mask in the event of an emergency, something everyone was anticipating.

Once the AR lenses in the helmet synched up with her PCPU, Ruth immediately got a request from Victor to join her in the science lab. It seemed that the much anticipated emergency was still being researched and now that the doctors and other psychics had confirmed her uncompromised status it was time to play catch up.

Quickly an efficiently moving through the complex, Ruth arrived at the science labs where even before she went through the doors she could feel the wards in place around the room, the sorcery like a blanket wrapped around her head, cutting off light and sound, only instead of such mundane sensory input it was the psychic ones that were muted out. Of course, with only marginal control and nearly a thousand anxious minds around her, it was like a blanket wrapped around the head to smother out the blare and glare of an alarm that refused to turn off.

Flipping up her lenses, Ruth leaned forward to let the retinal scanner on the door do its job, waiting a few moments before the outer door opened. The science lab had even more security measures inside, but just the single lock was all that was necessary at this stage. Once the door slid to the side, Ruth stepped in to find Victor sitting at a desk in the outer ring of the lab, staring inward. Glancing over at her, he said, “I read the report, but I would prefer to hear it from you. Full bill of health?”

Nodding her head, Ruth replied, “Yes, mind probing found that whatever mind is out there has not compromised my psyche, and is in fact highly unlikely to be able to do so.”

“Excellent. It is trying in the best of times to have your aide and protégée sidelined, but during the frantic early days and during a time of crisis? My poor old heart could barely take it,” Victor answered with a playful smile on his face.

Taking a seat next to him, Ruth demanded, “Okay, sappy moment is done with, so now fill me in on all the classified details I’ve missed so I can a load off your frail old body.”

Smirking, Victor pressed a few buttons on the keyboard for the desk and Ruth immediately found the relevant files forwarded to her PCPU. Dropping her AR lenses down into the active position again, she began to pull up the information and go through it all, rapidly skimming to find the most salient bits.

“We’re calling them mind worms. Nasty little creatures, we have to keep them in a ward of seclusion or they hone in on the nearest bit of psychic energy, which is to say the nearest sapient brain, and attack. Dissections and vivisections have proven… interesting so far,” Victor explained, quickly filling in.

Bringing up an anatomy file, Ruth pursed her lips while she examined the report before she asked incredulously, “Nanodiamond? Seriously?”

“Yes, their beaks are quite tough. We had quite a scare before we set up the wards when they started chewing out of their transparent aluminium cage. Fortunately we had them well isolated just to stay away from their psychic attacks so we filled the room with nitrogen and triggered hypoxia induced unconsciousness in the live specimens. Of course, that is not the worst part. We knew from examining the armour of attacked mecha that they can burrow through much faster than their beaks alone would imply. There was something else at play there,” Victor detailed out.

Coming across the relevant file, Ruth opened it up and found a video file of a robotic arm bringing a D-Cell into close proximity with a restrained worm. When the cell was brought to within about three metres of the worm, two things started to happen. The first was that the power indicator on the cell started to drop, and the other was that the air about the worm began to ripple as it thrashed about, increasingly agitated. At the two metre mark the experiment was called off as the steel restraints appeared to be deteriorating.

“Some sort of psychokinetic reaction to the dimensional disturbance of the D-Cell?” Ruth asked.

Nodding, Victor said, “That is our hypothesis. It explains how the worms penetrated Sergeant Vena’s power armour and Warrant Officer Khara’s mech, even with their beaks. It would also explain why the technicians found what they thought they had a railgun strike on Vena’s PA instead of bite marks. Ironically if that is true then the friendly fire incident probably saved Vena’s life as the flames incinerated the mind worm burrowing into his suit toward his head before it could reach him.”

“It also explains why situational control resumed so quickly after Vena was hit by the flamethrower,” Ruth commented while going back over the reports. She then asked, “Is the energy drain effect related to this incident with Lieutenant Hartmann?”

Shaking his head, Victor replies, “No, mission logs show that it was fully an hour before the mind worms showed up and both mecha were capable of fighting during the attack, so that is some other phenomenon.”

Quickly flicking through the files back to the mission report, woefully incomplete considering that one pilot was dead and the other still in a medically induced coma; she did discover that both mecha had been in combat. A quick scan over the combat statistics resulted in a disbelieving gasp and a more thorough perusal of the material.

“You noticed the charge beam inconsistency, didn’t you?” Victor noted dryly while glancing over at his screen and tapping a few buttons to continue with whatever experiment he was helping to run.

“These numbers don’t make sense; they indicate a firing rate consistently 8.3% faster than should be possible with that model of gun, even with the cooling safeties disengaged,” Ruth said incredulously.

“The mech is consistently a little bit faster, more responsive, and generally all around better than it was when it left the base. From the audio and biometric logs, we think that this had a positive effect on Lieutenant Hartmann’s morale during the times when he was lucid of his situation, especially when combined with the Operator Effect. We’ll need more data on that damn monolith because our best guess is that it was upgrading Hartmann’s mech. A pity it started ‘upgrading’ his gear while he was actually inside the thing, because we have no idea what he actually did for the hour he was out of contact,” Victor said, shaking his head regretfully. He hated not having information.

“So where do we go from here?” Ruth asked.

“Study. Lots and lots of study of these things. Firstly how to kill them as efficiently as possible, secondly more general research into their telepathic and psychokinetic abilities and how we can apply such findings to our own parapsychics. This brings us to your role, unfortunately,” Victor noted with significant distaste.

Ruth glanced through the layers of transparent aluminium windows, security checkpoints, air locks, and guards to the little cocoons where the live specimens were being kept, and she felt a little stab of fear in her heart before she quashed the emotion.

“You want me to try and communicate with those things?” Ruth asked.

“You always were quick on the uptake, but nothing so dramatic. Even when it was confirmed that you were not a parapsychic or at most just latent you’ve always had a knack for getting inside the heads of others, even alien others, which is why you were so good at military analysis of the Migou or even the Storm. You could read their needs and wants and determine how they might behave, as insane as they might seem from our perspective, and could then give analysis pointers to the military about how to exploit those needs and wants with maximum efficiency. We need that sort of analysis now,” Victor said while tapping a few things on his own PCPU.

With a final keystroke he sent a file with a maximum level security tag to Ruth’s system. After a minute of unlocking everything, she pulled out an aerial IR scan of the terrain around the base, time lapsed over the past five days, showing the massive orange-yellow thermal bloom spreading through the jungle toward the base.

“We’re lucky we got a cold rain recently, it makes the targets stand out more,” Victor said dryly enough to make one question the word ‘lucky’ in his statement.

Ruth pursed her lips as terror tightened in her stomach while fighting to keep the panic down. She had faced worse before… with far more resources, to be fair. She had faced things that could break the morale of all but the hardest of soldiers, and she had the hardest soldiers with her now. Glancing back at the medical report, she also admitted that she had never faced anything capable of nearly causing an aneurysm via sheer terror.

Looking at the thermal data again, Ruth went over the estimations appended to the side before she got up out of her chair and declared, “So with no training in my abilities I have a week to examine a hostile, non-sapient alien life form so that we can concoct a defence plan before approximately forty to fifty thousand of these things show up at our front doorstep, and we have no strategic weapons available. We had better get started.”

“That’s my girl.”

MrCIA · Post by **MrCIA** » 2010-07-09 07:27pm

40-50 thousand mindworms? Ah hell, if I'm reading this right a single mindworm almost managed to breach their perimeter. Under any normal circumstances I would tell them to put their heads between their legs and kiss their asses good bye. But now I'm simply looking forward to the fight.

MysteriousDarkLordv3 · Post by **MysteriousDarkLordv3** » 2010-07-09 07:38pm

Mindworms ... ick!

Always hated those things!

The concept of upgraded arcanotech, though, gives me cold chills. After all, considering the source of those advances, do you really want them upgraded?? At what point does a D-Cell hatch into a Gibbering Nameless Horror?

And we still don't know if there are any humans on the planet!

Skyfox120 · Post by **Skyfox120** » 2010-07-11 10:15am

MysteriousDarkLordv3 wrote:Mindworms ... ick! Always hated those things!

The concept of upgraded arcanotech, though, gives me cold chills. After all, considering the source of those advances, do you really want them upgraded?? At what point does a D-Cell hatch into a Gibbering Nameless Horror?

And we still don't know if there are any humans on the planet!

To say nothing of the LAI systems in the mech...

"umm should be worried that its singing 'Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer true'?"

barricade · Post by **barricade** » 2010-07-14 06:13am

MrCIA wrote:40-50 thousand mindworms? Ah hell, if I'm reading this right a single mindworm almost managed to breach their perimeter. Under any normal circumstances I would tell them to put their heads between their legs and kiss their asses good bye. But now I'm simply looking forward to the fight.

Well, there's one small benefit to this. The Colony (does it have a name yet?) still has airpower available to them. They also have plasma flamethrowers. That's going to make killing Mindworms vastly easier. Or at least deliberately making some VERY large firebreaks for open/flat ground overlapping fire postions to make it easier. Would be interesting to see if they create a few shallow if very wide moats in order to channel the mindworms into several killzones. That's one nice thing about arriving fairly early on prior to the planetmind really kicking in - its still dumb as a post and will just resort to wave tactics. Even the Rapine Storm problems had 'smarter' ideas. Well, depending on your definition of 'smarter' compared to 'driven to batguano insanity but with firearms'.

Academia Nut · Post by **Academia Nut** » 2010-07-14 09:58pm

Rain pattered down in a constant, unending deluge, the patter of the droplets against the surface of the dome forming a steady, ceaseless beat that allowed Ruth some measure of calm and relaxation. The last week had been hellish, her mind slowly being squeezed between a rock and a hard place… or possibly more appropriately a tsunami and a pyroclastic floe. She could feel the mind worms approaching, an inevitable wave of psychic energy building up into a terrible crest that would crash down on them all. The buzz of communication between the primitive minds of the creatures was always there, even in the warded areas it was growing so strong, and Ruth could feel their overflow of thought scratching at the back of her eyeballs, almost like she already had an infestation of worms in her skull. Another parapsychic had already clawed his eyes out, screaming for someone to make it stop. The poor bastard would be in a medically induced coma until they dealt with the worms, although despite best efforts he still showed signs of brain activity indicative of dreaming.

Such things formed the pyroclastic floe in opposition to the tsunami. Tension within the colony was slowly building to the point of eruption, and people were beginning to beg for the worms to come, for an enemy to attack. The growing pressure of the psychic hive minds approaching was driving the population ever so slowly insane. Everyone, not just the telepaths, reported things like constant hums that would not go away, itching in places that could not be scratched like the crowns of teeth, and many considered latent parapsychics occasionally even reported indistinct whispering or visual hallucinations. There had been incidents of people tearing apart rooms, screaming that there were worms inside and no amount of reassurance could get them to calm down.

Ruth wanted to think she could manage it better than others, that she was stronger than those who cracked, but close exposure to the worms in the experiments in the past few days had shown her just how damn powerful and insidious the little monsters were. They had two modes of operation. The first was a sort of autonomic ‘field’, whereby each worm produced a bubble of psychic energy around itself that interfered with the operations of the brain at a low level, producing anxiety and fear. The second mode of operation was a targeted one, a directed blast of psychic energy that flooded the mind. The only mercy was that while in the second mode the first was attenuated, so if the worms were occupied frying someone else’s brain then they would not have the same strength on those around the primary victim. Of course, considering the number of worms they were up against that was not particularly good news. One could immobilize a single person, and there were fifty worms for each human being in the colony.

The most horrifying trick to it all was that the worms had no idea what they were doing. The hallucinations that took over the senses and could leave a man a drooling wreck were all formed by the victim’s mind. Via telepathic observation of attacks under controlled conditions, it had been determined that there was no exchange of information between the worms and the victim. The worms simply found the weakest mind in a group, poured in psychic power, and determined when the target was sufficiently immobilized to physically attack. The psychic onslaught activated neural pathways, dredging up memories and fears, spilling from the unconscious to the conscious mind until all available neural activity was devoted to the creation of a perfect nightmare world. The worms even slackened off their assaults to focus on other targets as the attack became self-sustaining in the mind.

Ruth knew all too well how insidious such a brute force simple method was. She had been sitting in another room monitoring an experiment, trying to gauge how the worms reacted to various other stimuli when she had felt a sudden empathic spike of fear from one of the test subjects. In that moment, she experienced a spike of her own terror that she was the one under attack, and the next thing she knew she was paralyzed in her seat, everyone else around her oblivious to her predicament.

Hands trapped at her side, she watched in terror as the worms slowly squirmed out of their restraints and began to chew through their containment cells, and she could do nothing. She focused all of her effort into just moving her hand a centimetre so that she could press the emergency lock-down button, but no matter how hard she tried, her muscles refused to budge an inch. She wanted to scream, to cry out a warning, but everyone around her just kept going about their business, even as the mind worms drew close enough that the power systems started to flicker, D-Cells draining out and leaving everyone in total blackness. Trapped immobile and blind in her chair, Ruth had then felt something begin to wind its way up her leg, eager yet patient in knowing that its prey could not resist.

It had been at about that point that Ruth had been snapped out of her nightmare by the application of pharmaceuticals to her bloodstream and hypoxia to the mind worms. Her own fear of fear itself had been enough to trigger an attack and worse yet the nightmare crafted by her mind had been so close to reality that she had not been able to recognize the illusionary nature of it. While massively shaken by the experience, at least they could recognize this new vector of attack. Maybe.

Then of course there was the rain. So far, of the twelve days they had been here they had experienced ten of rain, the last week being almost constant in the deluge. The same thing that was letting Ruth focus on something other than the constant pressure of the mind worms or the colony was playing merry hell with their defensive plans. Deforesting the jungle meant that when combined with the constant rain the ground turned into a semi-liquid slurry that made movement for anything not equipped with A-Pods rather difficult, thus restricting the mobility of 90% of their heavy weapons. The rain also meant that any fires started to clear the jungle to provide kill zones was not self-sustaining, so producing open ground to fight with was severely hindered. In fact, the heavy rains seemed to promote extremely rapid growth and areas that had been cleared just two days ago had developed waist-high, line of sight impairing tangles of brush already.

“Ruth?” The familiar, distinguished voice of Victor asked from behind her.

Blinking a few times to clear away the cobwebs of her mind, Ruth turned around to look at the old man and asked, “Yes Victor?”

She had to pause and blink a few times, for Victor’s person wards had faded enough to let Ruth actually get a glimpse of his mind, and what she found there was simultaneously terrifying and exhilarating. She could feel the prickle of the mind worms against his mind and how the pressure seemed to wash off of him like rain upon nanodiamond coated plasma steel armour. He had not spent fifty years studying magic; he had spent twenty-five studying magic and twenty-five turning his mind into an impenetrable fortress to the point where his ability to remain calm bordered on the inhuman.

Seeing the expression on her face, Victor smiled and said, “Ah yes, there have been other spells demanding my energy of late. Personal privacy wards are quite useful for blunting the worst of the mind worm attacks, so the men and women who will be operating the personal flamethrowers need the magic more than I do.”

Taking a quick glance over Victor, Ruth noted that he had switched out of the robes he had been wearing almost non-stop for the past week in favour of body armour. Absorbing this, Ruth said half despairingly, half eagerly, “Is it time?”

He nodded. “Our last aerial recon before we pulled our men back for fear that they would get swatted from the sky by the worms’ psychic attacks indicates that the first wave should arrive in an hour. I know that you have been rather stressed what with dealing with your abilities and the research so I let you meditate a little longer, but it is time to get ready,” Victor explained.

Rising from where she had been staring at the outside world, Ruth nodded and replied, “Then it is time to get ready.”

Half an hour later and she was standing outside along with nearly everyone else in the colony atop a raised firing line as part of a sort of scratch militia composed of those who had made soldiering a secondary profession rather than their primary one. With an assault rifle at her shoulder, a pistol at her hip, and the weight of body armour and additional magazines distributed about the rest of her body, the only component missing was true familiarity with the others in her squad.

A canopy above kept out water for the most part, but in front of them stretched a sea of mud constantly disturbed by the patter of rain. For a moment Ruth almost let her mind slip, falling into the nightmare of what would happen if she fell into that green-brown soup when it was swarming with worms, but she crushed the thought as quickly as it formed. They were as prepared as they were ever going to get, and that would have to be enough.

To her right the pair manning the squad’s machine gun had bunkered down and they were carefully making sure that moisture stayed away from their ammunition as much as possible. To her left was her squad’s flamethrower operator, the battle hardened Nazzadi woman the lynchpin of their defences if – no, when – the mind worms got past the line of fire thrown up by the PA and the recon mecha. It was Ruth’s job to make sure she kept firing, along with the man to her left who was…

Ruth paused as she looked over the man and then had to ask, “Are those fucking swords?”

Turning slightly to Ruth, the man with actual swords, plural, strapped to his back tilted his armoured head at her and she could tell that he was grinning beneath his masked helmet. Tapping the side of his head, he said, “I have a method to my madness mademoiselle, so do not worry about my idiosyncratic weapons choices.”

“And what the hell are they supposed to do on a modern battlefield, especially one where getting close to the enemy means almost certain death?” Ruth demanded to know.

“Back up of course,” the man said before pulling out a pair of submachine guns, one for each hand.

Ruth thought about commenting on the idiocy of dual wielding but decided that the poor bastard had to be somehow competent to have been invited on the expedition, although he had probably cracked under the strain of the last week and now was now living out the delusion that he was an action hero from a bad holo vid. They had so few people that they could not turn down the only marginally insane, and perhaps he had been cleared for combat because it was thought that his delusions would offer some sort of buffer against the mind worm attacks.

Ruth did have to admit that the insane confidence radiating off of him was helpful in some ineffable way, and Ruth felt a bit calmer in knowing that she was unlikely to be the first one to die today.

Before she could re-evaluate her position on not demanding the idiot being removed for the safety of everyone else her AR display chirped a warning. The sensor arrays of the colony had been networked to the defenders so that they could fight in the rain, and motion sensors and IR detectors, their range cut to a fraction of full by the incessant rain, showed that the first wave was approaching the perimeter of the kill zone. Already her display was starting to take on a less real tone as her goggles polarized and relied on sensor data in response to the lasers of the mecha being fired, their passage through the rain filled air attenuating them somewhat and causing all sorts of back scatter.

Ruth could feel the hive mind of worms recoil as the first members of the assault died, dozens of worms burned to a crisp by coherent light or sun hot plasma or particles moving so fast they left bow shocks of blue light in their wake. Even a miss could be deadly as the mud boiled and created scalding waves of steam or trees exploded into slivers of supersonic shrapnel. Ferocious and animalistic, the primitive collective boiled with rage and retaliated by throwing a psychic assault like a meteor strike at the defenders.

Ruth was not the primary target, but the mental impact of the retaliation even at the periphery knocked her on her feet. Scrambling up, she found that she had not been the only one affected by the attack, and people were starting to quake around her. The fire from the PA had slackened off as the pilots fought off the worst things their brains could think up, but already some had started firing their assault rifles to try and slacken the assault on those with the really heavy weapons.

Gritting her teeth, Ruth took aim with her own assault rifle and pulled the trigger, only to discover that nothing happened. Examining her weapon, she found the magazine missing from the receiver. It must have fallen out when she stumbled. She frantically searched her webbing for another box…

pop

Gritting her teeth, Ruth fought off the nightmare and returned to reality. A simple stumble and fall would not cause the magazine to come loose from the receiver; the guns were far too well designed for that. Taking aim at the squirming IR signatures in the distance, Ruth gently squeezed the trigger and was rewarded with a burst of 6mm jacketed white phosphorous fragmentary rounds. With so many enemies, even a miss hit something and sent burning chunks of Willie Pete skipping into the horde. Seven hundred other guns joined in with her and the space in front of the colony became a burning wall of tracer fire.

The jungle was now burning in earnest, so many incendiaries and energy weapons having ripped it to kindling and then ignited it, but in the rain it burned inefficiently and thus produced a thick white smoke that obscured visual detection while the heat and the smoke from the WP obscured IR detection. With the worms now concealed behind the burning mess of their comrades, the fire from the base slackened down along with the psychic pressure as the worms burned.

Before the defenders could be said to have taken a breath, the psychic pressure crested again as the next wave of worms crashed into the stalled advance of the first wave and pushed them through, the smoking remains of their compatriots shielding them from detection so they could get closer in to better use their abilities. With the gnawing panic increasing, many shots started falling short or going wild as people let fear overcome them and create the illusion that the worms were closer than they really were. Already commanding officers and sergeants were screaming at troops to stop behaving like green recruits, but already the damage was done. Ammunition had been wasted and areas ahead of the advance had been covered in concealing fog.

A red line was interposed on Ruth’s display, the ten metre mark at which point an individual mind worm’s abilities could start to seriously affect a human being. So far the worms had needed many of their kind to attack at a distance and the difference in numbers had yet to become telling. If they crossed that line then the colony would be in a catastrophic amount of trouble. The forward elements of the worms were now less than fifty metres away.

The indicator on her assault rifle blinking empty, Ruth ejected the spent magazine and let it carelessly drop to the ground while she grabbed a fresh magazine, such was her hurry. In those few, focused seconds while she reloaded Ruth noticed that the barrel of her gun was steaming profusely with the droplets of rain that made their way under the canopy to fall on the overheating weapon. She did not care.

When she raised her gun again, the worms were now at forty metres and closing. Someone screamed in agony nearby and began to claw at his mask, his comrades trying to get him to settle down, but before they could restrain him he pitched over the parapet in his frantic struggling and hit the mud three metres below, the sound of his impact lost in the swirling cacophony of the massed gunfire from the defenders.

Sensing vulnerable prey, the mind worms surged forward in a massive, mad rush, their psychic assault forgotten in their need to close the distance with the fallen man feebly struggling in the sucking mud. Right as they hit the thirty metre mark the fifteen Mk-5 Crusaders armed with flamethrowers opened up. White hot arcs of flamer fuel streamed out into the masses of mind worms and consumed them.

Most people outside the military thought that the flamethrowers used by the NEG were the simple hydrocarbon and atmospheric oxygen devices of nearly two centuries ago, but that was totally false. In order to do damage against modern armour capable of resisting lasers capable of cutting steel or sun hot plasma, much hotter fuel was required. These flames were metal-oxide powder complexes suspended in long-chain nitrate gels and burned hot enough to very nearly boil iron if left in contact long enough. Nothing organic could survive that.

Ruth nearly ground her teeth to the point of fracture as the terrible agony of the mind worms struck her mind. Those directly hit were instantly incinerated, but on the periphery of the flames bodies were slow cooked in a second, feeding their suffering back into the hive mind, which recoiled from the loss of thousands of members the same way a human would respond to the loss of a limb.

Even from thirty metres away Ruth could feel the heat radiating against her armour, and the automatic cooling systems kicked in to try and wick the excess thermal energy. She doubted they would do much as already a sauna hot blast of steam wash over her position, impelled onward by the plasma and laser cannons disturbing the flames like artillery strikes in the midst of a firestorm.

The AR system beeped a warning and Ruth shifted her attention from the conflagration so close by to the new threat detected. Having turned the region directly between the main path of the worms and the colony into a raging firestorm the worms had diverted to the side, not much, but just enough that Ruth was no longer on the left flank of the defensive pattern but at the centre of the new attack vector. With the fires now burning intensely, the entire right flank of the defensive formation would not be able to get clear firing solutions to the new swarm. It would have been brilliant if not for the fact that the worms had probably lost a good fifth of their forces in the push so far.

Between switching from her fourth to fifth magazine the machine gun next to Ruth suffered some sort of jam and when the loader went to clear it from the chamber the phosphorous core cooked off just as it was being ejected, spraying the man with burning WP. Ruth watched in fascinated, paralytic horror as the man’s armour burned away to reveal flesh that was starting to sizzle and buckle like overcooked bacon, the fat beneath beginning to leak out as yellowy tallow. All around everyone stared as he screamed and gurgled, greasy smoke rising from a dozen points like a medieval candelabra.

Ruth wanted to do something, anything for the man, even draw her pistol and end his misery, but she was locked into an empathic overload with him. Her own skin burned along with his, ten thousand fire ants crawling across her naked body, chewing and stinging their way inside to where they began to turn her organs into steak and kidney pie. Toxic smoke mingled with her own burning flesh got in underneath her compromised mask, eroding her eyes and filling her lungs with phosphoric acid even as precious oxygen escaped through the leaks, letting in the choking native atmosphere.

Why wasn’t anyone helping?

pop

It took a few precious seconds to distinguish between the dream and reality, for everyone was standing around and staring at the twitching, smouldering near-corpse with horror, but the source was not rookie inexperience with what happened in battle. In that instant where everyone had glanced at the ruin of the man in front of them, the mind worms had overwhelmed their minds and let the horror of the moment take over, especially as more and more guns went silent to stare in a psychically induced stupor.

Even in the low visibility of the current battlefield Ruth could see the masses of squirming worms surging forward through the mud like schools of fish breaching the water in the frantic chase of predator and prey, although in this instance the wriggling swarms were the predators. Grabbing the flamethrower operator, Ruth shook her until the woman snapped back to her senses and triggered a blast of orange flame into the advancing horde.

The lone flamer not enough, Ruth raised her rifle and was rewarded with a resounding click. Cursing and thinking she was still trapped in the nightmare, Ruth then remembered that she had been reloading when the disaster struck. Chambering the first round, she pulled the trigger again and felt the reassuringly savage kick of the assault rifle in her shoulder. Even with the extra padding there she knew she would have a bruise there if she survived this.

The burn of the flamer against the worms killed dozens of them in a single sweep and broke their hold on the dozen or so on their section of the parapet that had fallen under their dread spell, especially as they saw others around them firing again. Reinforcements were also on their way to support the beleaguered position, and once the PA with the heavy flamers fired again this wave of worms would be wiped out.

Had the machine gunner not been paralyzed by terror, he probably would have seen what happen, especially if he went around the gun to help his partner as the angle was better there. Had he seen it he could have called for help from someone else, or if too late he could have taken defensive actions. As it was, he did not see what was wrong until he went to check the ammo belt to his gun and noticed that smoke was curling out of the ammunition canister that was open for feeding. A tiny piece of WP had managed to bounce into the canister and had sat unattended next to the propellant section of a 20mm case less incendiary round for a little over thirty seconds, just long enough to melt through the plastic casing.

Instead of fishing out the little piece of burning mineral or tossing the canister over the parapet, the gunner just had enough time to reach out a desperate hand and begin to shout out half a warning when the canister went up like a psychotic fireworks display, propellant and incendiaries cooking off in a chaotic tumble of rounds bouncing around within the armoured case. Despite the destruction, the canister did its job and kept the rounds going out the top of the box instead of in every possible direction like a frag grenade.

Well, it mostly did its job.

A stray round, a ricochet or possibly one that cooked off after it had been kicked out of the canister by the kinetic mayhem within, struck the flamethrower operator a glancing blow along the top of the head. Ruth could not tell if the impact was fatal or not, just that it caused the woman to begin to thrash out, the cone of fire coming out the end of her weapon straying in her direction.

A wash of flame, fortunately not mecha grade, engulfed Ruth’s left side before her frantic, instinctive, and amplified need to get away from the fire sent her accidentally tumbling over the parapet. For a second she tumbled through the air, her side burning with the real agony of the flame burning through her armour while her stomach lurched at the sensation of free fall, before she smacked into the mud with a breath stealing belly flop. The splash of mud coated her burning side and suffocated the flames in clinging muck.

With the machine gun and flamer taken out of commission and the riflemen frantically seeking cover from the disaster of flames that had consumed their section, the worms had an open path to surge forward through, and their first target was Ruth. She could see them, wriggling towards her through the semi-liquid mud like a pack of ravenous sharks. In the slow motion of something so horrible no false nightmare could be worse, Ruth could even make out her soon-to-be killer, a worm distended with larvae, its shrieking maw opened wide enough that Ruth could swear that she could see the squirming young waiting for implantation down that terrible gullet.

There was no time to scream, no time to even blink. A shadow started to pass over Ruth just as the worms arrived.

LionElJonson · Post by **LionElJonson** » 2010-07-14 11:03pm

Aren't Tagers highly resilient to fear? I could totally see a Tager jumping off the parapet to rescue her, especially if it's one that could fly. I could definitely see the Eldritch Society sending a pack of their best along with this sort of expedition; canonically, there's about a million or two Tagers worldwide (and about four times as many Dhohanoids), so losing four or five would hardly be any great loss, and Special Services are the only part of the NEG that's aware of them.

Also, once they encounter a Sealurk, they'll totally make an Engel out of it. They've almost definitely brought the genetic sequences for the other Engels and whatnot with them, and the psychic-controlled mini-Engel technology would probably give them a head start on making tame mindworm boils.

Post by **LadyTevar** » 2010-07-15 12:24pm

Please tell me that was a "Pop"

Please?

Singular Quartet · Post by **Singular Quartet** » 2010-07-15 03:27pm

LadyTevar wrote:Please tell me that was a "Pop"

Please?

Depends on the shadow, methinks.

Academia Nut · Post by **Academia Nut** » 2010-07-16 04:34pm

When it came to family mottos, ‘Alea iacta est’ left something to be desired in all but the category of classical wittiness, especially if used in the sense of guiding life philosophy. This was why the Ĕvrard family had additional guidelines to behaviour not on the family crest, such as ‘weight the die in your favour first’ or ‘live life to the fullest’ to help explain the primary motto. Then of course there were the more peculiar family rules such as ‘miscegenation is an ideal, not an insult’, which had resulted in both a number of fights for family honour over the years and ultimately why Lucien had obtained his position in the OIS in the first place.

For Lucien, he had thought that his moment to cast his die and see the results, be what they may, had come when he had committed himself to the conspiracy Dr. Cross had been masterminding. It should have been a once in a lifetime thing, to take such a gamble with his life and future like that. It should have, but as he jumped atop the parapet, his perception of time slowing down, he had the feeling that gambling with his fortunes would become something of a pass time if current events continued.

In open air, he could count the individual rain drops falling past him, the whole world moving too slowly for his perception of things. He would rather quickly go insane and die if he kept this ability on too long, the psychic signals required to coordinate his neural impulses at speeds greater than ionic conduction would allow quite capable of cooking his grey matter at the speeds and intensities they occurred at. He could keep it up for maybe a minute without harm, something he rarely ever did because even if he could think at lightning fast speeds he could not move that quickly.

He could see the cycling of his submachine guns as he fired them while falling through the air, the path of the bullets travelling unerringly toward their targets, Lucien having from his perspective all the time in the world to produce a firing solution. Worms exploded in slow motion as the bullets struck them, disintegrating into dozens of burning fragments that ripped apart the innards of not just the primary target but everything around it, slashing open insides and igniting flesh.

His trajectory now taking him over the woman that was for all intents and purposes the daughter of the guy in charge of the colony, Lucien had to hold his fire against the worms getting too close to Ruth lest the scatter from the WP rounds fragmenting catch her along with the worms. One worm in particular was lunging for her, a big fat monster suspended in mid-air by the peculiarities of perception, and Lucien would pass over it.

On the other hand, one of the swords he had telekinetically drawn would pass through it.

Most people who looked at Lucien in full battle gear thought he was a lame imitation of a bad action hero and he had to admit that the dual wielded submachine guns and quad swords were pretty over the top, although most people only thought he had a pair slung over his back because four was too ridiculous to contemplate. It was not his fault though that his genetics gave him telekinesis strong enough to hex-wield but insufficient coordination to do much more than spin his weapons really fast. He had pushed his abilities about as far as he could go, but unless he wanted to tire himself out in a few seconds by juggling PA this was about as efficient as he could get.

Of course, at a certain point he had just plunged into the stereotype forming about him so that he could keep people off balance. Others looked at him and thought they saw an idiot try hard and tended to miss the badge that indicated that he was a dangerous parapsychic, and he did not even have to wear a badge for being hyper-cognitive. Dual wielding SMGs was probably a bit much, but he could actually pull it off successfully and with telekinesis he had a practical solution as to how one was supposed to reload with one’s hands full.

The mind worm lunging for Ruth was hit by a spinning blade three times before Lucien hit the ground, and instead of sinking into the mud like a lawn dart he telekinetically supported himself so that the semi-liquid muck responded more like a gymnastic mat. Rolling with his momentum, he was back up in a second, his swords obediently following, forming a whirling wall of razor sharp steel and ceramic around him and Ruth. Dozens of mind worms died in a second as their headlong charge brought them into the living blender that was Lucien.

For perhaps three seconds Lucien had it all his way, his swords death incarnate and his guns blowing apart clumps of worms too far away, his perception keyed up enough that he could shoot through his spinning blades like he had a Fokker interrupter gear installed. The ichor of worms cut to ribbons splattered everywhere and the spinning blades cut apart the falling rain drops, producing a halo of mist and alien blood that was strangely, grotesquely beautiful.

The worms realized that their prey was being protected by death incarnate and they retaliated. A thousand minds screaming out in unison, primitive and uncomplicated, their psychic assault shut him down as his mind overloaded. However, while it just accelerated the rate at which he was cooking his brain, Lucien had an escape. While his hyper-cognition was active he did not think entirely with his brain, and while the theory escaped him due to the words involved suffering from an over-propagation of affixes, he knew just enough about how his powers worked to have figured out how to think without his brain.

More than one girlfriend who he had told that to had made the comment that most men knew how to do that anyway.

Still, despite the fact that he did not slip into a nightmare filled coma, he had to stop firing his guns as the effort to keep from collapsing and to stay standing atop the mud and keep his swords spinning overwhelmed him. He could feel in a detached sort of way what the worms were doing to his mind, could feel the unimaginable terror, but so long as he thought faster than his own brain he could tell the unnatural impulses from the regular ones and think around the fear. If he survived this, he was going to have nightmares for weeks though.

Hundreds of worms swam through the mud like tiny, fat snakes and leapt at him only to die by the gross per second. He felt surprise that he at first thought was his own before he traced the source of the signal and found that it was coming from outside his own skull and behind him. Ruth must have finally noticed him and was broadcasting her emotions. Then it occurred to Lucien that the surprise was not the intellectual surprise of a person prepared for death that had suddenly been saved, but the pained surprise of an animal that reached for a tasty bit of food only to discover an electrical shock. Ruth had to be reradiating the surprise of the worms at dying en mass attempting to attack the two of them.

Distracted as he was, it took Lucien almost a full objective second to figure out what was going on before he realized that with their senses being primarily psychic in nature the worms probably detected that he was a viable target but could not sense the fact that he was still up and dangerous. Little bastards expected a free lunch and got their fingers cut off.

Still, even with all of this it was not going all Lucien’s way. So many bodies crashing against his swords were causing them to lose velocity and he had to keep pumping more and more energy into them to keep them spinning just below their structural limits. That energy had to come from somewhere, and Lucien started to slowly sink into the mud. He was also starting to take a battering as the rain of diced worm parts smacking into him was like standing on a driving range with a ‘Hit me and get a free set of golf balls!’ sign, although his armour was absorbing the worst of it.

Of course his armour was now starting to become something of a problem, as while he had learned to dump waste energy from his abilities outside his body as much as possible, he could not move it very far so his helmet was now acting like an oven, cooking his grey matter even faster. A simple telekinetic push punched out the top and back of his helmet, killing his AR feed but exposing his head to open air and the rain, which flashed to steam in a halo around him, bringing much needed relief. He would still fry if he kept this up, but not as quickly.

Lucien quickly assessed his situation: unconscious mind overwhelmed by alien induced terror, forcing him to rely upon hyper-cog to not fall into a mewling heap; too distracted to fire his guns; too distracted to keep from sinking into the mud; head currently hot enough to boil water; AR system offline to deal with aforementioned boiling head; oxygen levels unknown due to aforementioned lack of AR display but probably being consumed at a highly accelerated rate; worm guts piling up around him that would soon force him to push his swords further out lest they get their motion fouled by the thick mounds but that would open up holes in his defences.

If he did not make it he hoped that the afterlife was of the Valhalla sort so he could compare notes with his ancestors to see who had been in the worst situation. Fortunately he had thus far avoided commentary on how it could be worse.

Falling from the sky like thunderbolts, the nightgaunts arrived.

Damn it.

Simon_Jester · Post by **Simon_Jester** » 2010-07-16 05:03pm

This is great, Academia. You managed to take one of the most idiotic heroic combat stereotypes, combine it with a setting that is normally grim death on heroism... and make it work.

Congratulations.

The Vortex Empire · Post by **The Vortex Empire** » 2010-07-16 05:34pm

As someone who is not that familiar with Cthulhu mythos, I assume by the name that nightgaunts are bad?

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