Today's musical suggestion is anything from Saurian Meditation by Karl Sanders, particularly
The Elder God Shrinewhen you hit the final bit. If you know anything about Karl Sanders and who he is, you may already be saying 'Oh shit'.
Chapter Sixty-five: School
Ashley tapped her pen impatiently while she considered her options for the upcoming simulation in the afternoon against her bastard of a rival, Scipio. She had made their first fight look easy, but that was because she had been ordered to ham it up at the debriefing, something she had gone to with gusto to keep from freaking out due to the fact that she nearly had to change her plug suit after the tank had
blown up a fucking mountain! The fact that it could do
that had not been part of her mission briefing.
Unfortunately, once Scipio had accepted that the impossible was possible and that the improbable was probable, he had responded with alarming acceptance and then began to kick Ashley’s ass in the simulations.
Bored, she stopped tapping her pen and started doodling an impression of one of her earlier encounters with Scipio. She had a little super deformed Bolo wearing a leotard with a cute little angry face atop one of the posts of a wrestling ring, preparing to leap down on top of an equally cute version of her Eva, also in a leotard, with a dazed look while it lay helpless on the mat.
When he had his anti-gravity drives functional the giant bastard was surprisingly agile and adroit for a battleship with treads, and trying to engage Scipio in hand to tread combat resulted in Ashley getting crushed, flipped into the air and picked off by a Hellbore, or ground to a paste by his tracks about half the time.
But getting close to the Bolo was the only way to actually have a hope of beating it as trying to engage at long range was a losing proposition. Scipio would just bracket her with three Hellbores and she couldn’t physically dodge fast enough to avoid getting hit by one of them, at which point even if her Void Shields and AT-field kept her from dying she would get blasted again two seconds later while still trying to recover at which point she would be dead.
Of course, any individual trick to get to close range would only work once, aside from sitting on top of something Scipio didn’t want turned into an irradiated cloud roughly the shape of a mushroom.
Her latest trick had been to use a planar AT-field to hide beneath a section of ground and then drop Scipio into a dead fall while firing her plasma cannon at his belly. The problem there was finding the sort of terrain that wouldn’t look out of place after she burrowed in. Scipio had to have seismic sensors to determine what terrain he was mobile in, so now that he knew the trick he would look for it and AT-fields produced a peculiar reading that he would now know to look for…
Ashley interrupted her train of thought as she flipped her page back to the assignment at hand, away from her doodling as she felt the attention of the teacher coming towards her. She then flipped back to her doodling once it was safe to do so. While active psychic abilities were disallowed and there were sensors to check for that sort of thing, Ashley was one of the most gifted precogs of her generation.
One of the less painful reasons why she was a pilot…
junior cadet pilot irritatingly enough, despite the fact that the Eva was useless without her.
Just three more months and she would be out of this frustrating nightmare, this endless make-work project. The names of every Eva pilot were engraved alongside those of the gods and many were worshipped as ascended daemons. Fuck, the Evas were often
called god-machines. But Ashley was under a strict gag order not to leak the nature of her ‘extra-curricular’ activities. Not until she was eighteen and thus legally an adult.
She wouldn’t get the full title of Eva pilot until she finished a post secondary degree and her officer training, but at least she would be able to drop the irritatingly contrite ‘junior’ part of her title and actually tell people about it.
Although the past few weeks she had been appreciating school just a little bit more because it was a few more hours each day where she wasn’t getting her ass kicked by Scipio. She’d dropped to the bottom of the leaderboard from first place amongst all of the cadets, junior
and senior.
There was something she
didn’t want to gloat about.
Her mind drifted a little as she tried to think of ways to trounce Scipio, only to be broken out of her reverie by her instincts telling her to look up right away. Cheryl Henderson was looking her way with a catty smile on. That usually meant that she had something up her sleeve for tormenting Ashley. Stupid bitch…
Stupid high school politics drawing the bitch’s attention too. So her family had money and connections because her mother was a member of the Agricultural Output Committee and her paternal grandfather had been a minor industrialist who survived Third Impact and provided the followers of the gods with guns early on. Big whoop. Ashley would get to have a chat with the gods
in person on graduation. But until the blessed day when she could actually show off just how awesome she was, she just had to grit her teeth and bear it.
It had all started over a boy too, although one neither one would willingly touch with a twenty foot pole. Most youths had no strong affiliation for any of the gods, but most kids in high school had a thing for Mislaato, with some of the more aggressive types going for Asukhon or Tzintchi, depending on how their ambition manifested. There were very few teenage worshippers of Reigle as she was seen as more suited to old people.
Alan’s family were hardcore Reigle worshippers and thus he had gone so far as to gain a couple of minor gifts. Gifts were pretty rare, and two on a teenager were incredible, unfortunately when they came from Reigle this made Alan the least popular kid in a school full of the cut-throat politics of horny teenagers in a permissive culture.
Unfortunately his gifts while gruesome and slightly obnoxious, were extremely useful in that he didn’t get bored and he didn’t need to sleep, so he could just plough on in life, steady and unceasing. As the diligent worker he was, he used all that extra time and attention to study endlessly, giving him the best test scores in the class. He was considered a major loser, but when you needed extra tutoring, he was the guy to turn to.
Ashley missed classes fairly frequently, and while she had the cover of psyker training, occasionally legitimate, she was only given so much slack. The consequences of letting her grades slip were dire, and the majority of her pay as a pilot was put into a trust fund, so she couldn’t hire a private tutor. So she went to Alan for help.
She didn’t really
like him per say, but he had helped her out enough that when she heard Cheryl bad mouthing Alan’s more unpleasant aspects, Ashley had asked blithely, “So do you think Mislaato will reward you with a clit on your tongue for all of your worship?”
Despite the fact that Cheryl was quite proud of her skills and activities, she had not quite liked the insinuation that her ability to suck cock was less attention getting for the gods than Alan’s ability to collect acne and psoriasis. Especially since it was
true.
Thus a covert war of rumour and bitchiness between the two of them began, and it was unfortunately asymmetric warfare. Cheryl’s family had power and wealth, which meant that she had attracted a gang of sycophants and gophers seeking for some of the gilding to rub off on them. Ashley had few friends due to her Eva training taking up much the time outside school that could be devoted to socializing.
Cheryl had launched the first barrage by spreading the rumour that Ashley had slept with Alan. The few opportunities for dickings Ashley had been cultivating had vanished in an instant. Worshippers of Reigle
prevented the spread of disease by acting as massive repositories for the unpleasant side of biology, but that didn’t prevent human instincts from kicking in. No guy wanted to stick his dick in poon contaminated by Alan’s day old street vendor wiener.
While the temptation to just slug Cheryl had been present, picking a fight would probably get the bitch’s family involved, and if it came down to a legal battle, Ashley’s employers would be forced to step in and bail her ass out, something that would have rather
dire consequences for Ashley. So she had decided to turn to the most dangerous faction in the school.
The Tzintchians.
In earlier generations they would have been considered a strange blend of nerds and preps, a bunch of overly ambitious and scheming bastards who loved the latest innovations in technology and sorcery. They were a secretive group that liked to pry, liked to gather knowledge, and who had their own bizarre schemes, traits that made them unpopular. Going to them for help was risky because that was like a fly walking into a tangle of competing spider webs. And while they generally all went on to become successful scientists, engineers, officers, politicians, businessmen or the like, they were still generally considered losers in school for consistently trying to get good grades and other things instead of trying to get as much pussy or dick as possible.
This of course meant that Cheryl avoided them and tried her best to stay out of their machinations. So Ashley had gone to them and through her secret military connections managed to get a few of the de-classified but harder to find files to some of the military nuts, which was upgrade her status from ‘pawn’ to ‘useful pawn’. She wanted something to use against Cheryl and she knew she could bargain it from them.
Through the close knit ties she had moved into the notice of the intelligence nuts, a truly creepy trio who waged a clandestine war with the administration of the school by constantly trying to set up their own monitoring networks. It had turned into a bit of a ‘Great Game’ as neither side would actually let out their activities even to retaliate for the actions of others because it would be publicly embarrassing for everyone involved to have their actions made public.
The three of them had cameras set up all over the school that they used to gather information for their own purposes… one of which was a minor voyeur porn ring that they ran amongst the students, although they kept the juiciest bits squirreled away, awaiting the perfect opportunity to use. They were particularly fond of petty blackmail.
From there Ashley devised a rather roundabout plan, mostly because it helped secure her position amongst the Tzintchians as they appreciated that sort of thing. Then she secured a deal with a budding future entrepreneur who had a longstanding rivalry with Cheryl over her family connections and some break that Ashley hadn’t known about at the time. One rather depraved sex act “caught” by a hidden camera, some military grade time stamp editing, and a “blackmail” attempt that went south later and Ashley had managed to purge herself of the rumour that she had slept with Alan and replaced it with the rumour that she was really,
really kinky and that Cheryl was just a jealous bitch afraid of someone usurping her position as the best ‘net worker’ in school.
That had been the peak of Ashley’s offensive actions as Cheryl had an unpleasant tendency to escalate rather faster than even most berserkers found prudent. Smarting from the blowback in the rumour mill, Cheryl had somehow convinced one of the teachers to start unfairly grading Ashley. Ashley strongly suspected that the trading of sexual favours was involved, and while encouraged between the students it was
highly illegal between students and faculty. Whatever Cheryl had done though had been out of the prying eyes of the surveillance cameras.
Of course, while the military wasn’t particularly compassionate about social problems or personal struggles with algebra, they took very poorly to attacks of that nature on one of their pilots. So after a few weeks of investigation the teacher suddenly discovered that he was being called up for militia duty for six months due to an error on his training records that indicated that he had not properly completed a training module and thus he would have to retake basic and a portion of his initial stint in the military.
The appeal process took seven months to get to tribunal.
Let it not be said that the military was not without its sense of humour.
Unfortunately this seemed to enrage Cheryl all the more despite the fact that Ashley had only brought up the concern of unfairness in marking to her rather aggressive guardians, and she had to spend the next two months staying low under the blistering assault of petty invectiveness until the year ended.
Two months later and Cheryl had calmed down to the level of ‘non-apocalyptic’ but she was still incredibly pissed at Ashley and so the past seven months had been spent putting up with Cheryl’s petty bullshit, mostly Cheryl wrecking Ashley’s chances at getting laid. Ashley occasionally retaliated by releasing the latest bit of dirt her voyeuristic allies had dug up, but she kept it low to avoid escalating the situation to the point where the military had to step in again.
Of course, since the past few weeks when her training had really stepped up with Scipio, she barely had the time to think about anything but how to beat that damn Bolo. Who the fuck put treads on a thermonuclear battleship anyway?
Eventually Ashley just ignored Cheryl and went back to her doodling, not quite sure why her senses pricked up at that time. Maybe the bitch was planning something…
About an hour or so later as she was heading out of the school to get picked up and taken to the military base where her Eva was stored, a peculiar thing happened. In a series of events that could not be coincidence, two of the Chaos rules football jocks were horsing around and shoved a first year with an excessively large slurpee in hand. Iced syrup went flying everywhere, just in time for a third jock that was running to catch the ball the other two had been fighting over to step in it and slip.
Standing at the top of the stairs and forewarned by her precog Ashley adroitly side stepped and watched as the overly muscular idiot who had probably been rejected for Space Marine training five years ago went down the quick and painful way. She really had no pity for him as he tumbled down, saving that for the pair of second years who had no idea what hit them when the human avalanche struck.
As students rushed to the aid of those fallen, Ashley quietly seethed. It would be damn near impossible to prove that this had been an “accident” and not an actual accident, and Cheryl was keeping the worst of her plotting off campus these days, but her superiors would want to know immediately about any sort of possible attempts on life or limb.
Ashley turned away. Her guardians didn’t take excuses for being late that didn’t involve police reports.
Ashley slid on her plug suit, a non-descript military issue black one that she tragically could not show off to all the horny boys out there. While, like the naughty nurse or the slutty policewoman the uniform of the Eva pilots had exaggerated fetish forms, the gods kept exclusive right on the military version of the plug suit and thus while far less revealing than the novelty versions, actual plug suits were considered far sexier due to their rarity.
Aided into her entry plug by her team of technicians, who she only absentmindedly nodded to in thanks while she plotted her strategies and tactics against Scipio. For some reason they always gave her the mission briefings for these sorts of simulations after she was in the Eva, probably to better prepare her for rapid deployment later. She had to think fast when thrown into a scenario, had to already be prepared for anything.
As the entry plug filled with LCL and she felt the psychic amps connect to her brain, feeding her sensory data from her Eva, which in this case was faked by an extremely sophisticated array of computers that could simulate a real world combat scenario quite accurately. Right now her Eva was secured in its throne and the sensory data was a real feed, letting her see the three Eva bays where the shattered hulk of Scipio lay.
One thing that Ashley had never begrudged Scipio for was the fact that the bastard was fucking
tough. When he had first been hauled in it had taken a month to scrub and strip out all of the radioactive parts of the Bolo. The treads had been all missing when they found Scipio and the drive wheels rendered down to mangled stubs by the AI tank’s refusal to stop moving. Multiple direct hits on the glacis plate by Hellbores or their equivalents had drilled a ragged, melted hole nearly to the command centre. The rear was almost completely shorn off, only a slight indication of the rear Hellbore, apparently by a shaped charge thermonuclear warhead that made skin contact.
Analysis indicated that Scipio had ceased function due to
running out of fuel and then he slowly succumbed to brain death as the ionizing radiation that flooded his hull ate away at his electronics until only a nub at the centre of the survival core remained viable.
The other Bolos they had discovered on that radioactive wasteland had apparently been in worse shape and most were unsuitable for even parts salvage, a testament to their ability to keep going. Hell, technically Ashley had only ever mission killed Scipio, and had never actually succeeded in outright destroying the implacable war machine, while he had vaporized her multiple times.
Then the face of the base commander, Brigadier General Stuart Scott, an ironically very Indian man whose family had been tied to Britain since sometime around the late 19th century who still managed to somehow pull off an impressive Scottish accent. If he was giving the briefing that meant that they had something special cooked up.
“Aw reit noo kiddies. We’ve decided ‘at yoo’ve performed weel enaw in tryin’ tae kill each other fur th’ time bein’, sae the-day wer’re daein’ somethin’ a wee bit different. The-day yoo’re gonnae wark together tae try an’ hauld back a simulated coonter lat at tae repulse a planetary invasion. Tae simplify things fur the-day th' only objectife oan th' field will be th' enemy forces, but in future missions ye will also hae tae protect friendlies,” General Scott explained.
Ashley ground her teeth but said, “Of course sir.” Damn it! Scores were only posted on the leaderboard if they involved competition
between pilots. If they began a cooperative training schedule then Ashley might never recover from the savage thrashing Scipio had given her in the rankings.
“We're uploadin' th' mission profile an' th' simulation noo,” General Scott said before the transmission ended and data began to flood Ashley’s mind.
She always had to repress the urge to gasp a little in the LCL whenever they fired up the Eva, although in this case they were just feeding the data that she would get if there was an actual activation. The experimental and Series One Evas had apparently been much more feral than the current Series Five Evas, but the fact that they lacked S2 engines and plasma reactors meant that the surge of god-like power must have not quite been the same.
At her heart power was drawn from the void, a slippery, exotic source of limitless energy, enough to power her Eva long past the age of the universe… hell, with the AT-field the Evas could theoretically last past the age of baryonic matter. The S2 engine powered mobility, the AT-field, regeneration, and in more evolved models more esoteric things like flight. It was a cool, obedient, yet devious energy, almost like a trained snake.
Meanwhile at a point between her shoulder blades a star burned, the plasma reactor flooding her nerves with an intense fire that was almost erotic. Whenever the reactor first started up it was like an orgasm in her spine. Hot, arrogant energy, it was kept well confined and thus was more trustworthy than the S2 energy. There was also more of it, if limited in duration due to fuel supplies. The plasma reactor powered the plasma blaster and the void shields, which while nowhere near as versatile as the AT-field, were much better at dealing with huge amounts of energy.
Then the mission profile data hit her mind and she nearly lost control of her excretory system. This wasn’t a mission against other possible targets like the Goa’uld, the Ori, the Federation, the Klingons, or even actual competent ground forces like the Imperium, Eldar, the Orks or other such beings. No, this simulation was against the
Necrontyr.
Everyone knew that they would face the Necrontyr one day, but everyone assumed that it would be a future generation that would bring down the sixty million year old empire. They were bogeymen used to frighten children and the justification for the ever increasing military build-up. As far as she knew, Ashley had never heard of a simulation against them.
A cool male voice entered her head. “Ah, junior pilot cadet Ashley, you are more familiar with the laws of physics in these conditions I am, but can you confirm the numbers?”
It was Scipio. Scipio was asking her if this was bullshit or not. He was probably confirming elsewhere while she waited, but considering that she had been the one screwing with physics when fighting with him before, he wanted to hear it from her mouth.
Adrenaline having flooded her bloodstream, her mouth only kept moist by the LCL that surrounded her, Ashley said, “This information is normally classified, but I have no reason to suspect it is false.”
“That would imply that their personal infantry weapons could eventually destroy us without our shields up, given time,” Scipio pointed out.
“It would,” Ashley whispered in horror.
The basic infantry unit was a tall, thin alien with, dour, sunken features and oddly elongated proportions, especially about the face. They were wrapped in thin, segmented shells of metal that clung to them tightly, not needing the bulk of servo assisted power armour as the metal was both protective and mobile. In their arms they carried long rifles set with eerily glowing green tubes: gauss flayers.
Just the weapons used by the infantry were enough to give Ashley the willies in her Eva as they could theoretically eventually drill through her armour given enough time, and then there were the units equipped with phase shifting armour that could probably just fly through her armour and rip her apart in her plug if her AT-field went down. It was what the infantry was supporting that really scared her though.
Their primary target was not anything as simple as a monolith or an obelisk tank, oh no. No, those would be support units. No, their primary target was a
Khufu-class mobile oppression barge. Basically a small warship incapable of getting any higher than orbit, it was a two-hundred fifty metre long floating fortress, its main section a broad, flat blade with two smaller triangles jutting out at the sides along the rear quarter. Along the rear section where it broadened out there was a massive gold pyramid set with a dreadful green crystal at its apex on the top side and a somewhat more modest ziggurat on the bottom side. The pyramid contained the command centre and a particle whip while the ziggurat contained a portal capable of bringing in reinforcements from across the galaxy. The top front section was a carrier deck for four monoliths and a dozen obelisk tanks and had turrets for arrays of quadruple heavy gauss cannons. The bottom front section was studded with more cannons and extensive gauss flux arcs.
It was a floating grim reaper, a relic from a war sixty million years ago that had been crewed by unimaginably many generations of Necrontyr and it was their job to kill it.
By the time the tactical data download finished and the simulation began, Ashley had to exert all of her self control keep from trembling in her seat. This was just a simulation, but that didn’t mean it wouldn’t
feel real. Worse yet, seeing the numbers and knowing that there were millions of worlds out there dominated by the Necrontyr it suddenly made their position seem all the more precarious. If one of those things landed on Earth it was all over for everyone. Everything would die, their molecules stripped apart layer by layer until there was only dust and sand blowing in the wind of a dead world.
Ashley had forgotten all about her ranking on the leaderboard, she had forgotten about wanting to defeat Scipio, and she had most definitely forgotten about Cheryl.
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I decided to cut it off here as the battle deserved its own chapter. I think I'll call it Lesson, or possible Object Lesson.
