Embers After Flames, Chapter 7.4

7.4

+++

One thing you don’t realize about combat between two or more Armored Cores is that it is deceptively quick.

For all the power that those warmachines possessed, they were not equally durable. Speed was the best defense that there had ever been, and every AC ultimately relied on it in the end. Against MTs, or the larger, stranger machines, battles extending into tens of minutes or more wasn’t uncommon. Against other ACs, however, any battle that went on for a few minutes was bound to be a strange one.

It hadn’t been any different here. Most of the mercs had come in expecting MTs, Generic Weapons, emplacements, and, if they were particularly unlucky, a single AC. 

And then all but one of them had received at least two, with the one supported by what may as well have been an Arms Fort.

For all of them except Zone Three, the group fighting Paramaz and the Strider, their battles had ended within two and a half minutes of their assaults. 

For Zone Three, it had ended after six minutes and eighteen seconds.

To be slightly more detailed:

Zone Three had seen the Strider engage the group of four at long range. One mercenary had falling to the Strider’s Eye, and had died. The other three had continued, facing constant harassment all the while from the Strider’s artillery weapon complement. All three had received at least minor damage, and arrived to face Paramaz with close range support from the Strider. Paramaz had chosen defensive fighting, preferring to let the Strider deal the actual damage, while not letting the three enemy AC’s actually handle the Strider. One had fallen, at which point Paramaz had become more aggressive, and then another, ultimately leading to the last to engage in melee combat where the Strider’s guns posed as much a threat to Paramaz as it did to them. Paramaz had gone through significant damage, but was alive and well aside from that. Three mercs had died, and the last had been captured.

Zone Five had seen Dunham, Messam, and Sahag engaging in a three on four. However, while the three of them had been fully capable of working together and supporting each other due to long training and comradery, the mercs were just being paid to be on the same side. One merc fell, Sahag was forced to eject after a lucky strike rendered her AC inoperable, another merc fell to the Gallia Dam Complex’s defences, and then Dunham and Messam defeated the remaining two. Two mercs dead, one had ejected and escaped, and the last had been captured.

Zone Eleven was the Wall. The Wall’s defences were so heavy that the mercs were not able to approach the area without an absolutely withering amount of firepower coming their way. One had abandoned the mission. Another had ejected and successfully escaped. Both of the other two were dead. Garabed had not been forced to deploy.

But, that was just the mercenaries.

For the corps, nothing had happened in Zone Nine, because, again, Marzan’s army had been destroyed enroute.

Arkvidavat’s battle in Zone Eight took the longest amount of time just from the sheer amount of things that they had committed to this event. Unfortunately for them, everybody involved was going home in armoured coffins, because between Dolamayan and Freddie, an army without any real AC equivalents assault a fortified position that also happened to include one of the best pilots on Rubicon and his personal attendant who brings an arsenal of almost nothing but mass MT killers in the form of a hell of a lot of explosives?

Yeah. Bad day for them.

Total engagement time had been a little over thirty six minutes. I had, after the first ten, given my approval for the Firekeepers to engage in their missions. It had only taken another ten before, as predicted, the PCA had decided to crash the party.

And when they did... Oh boy.

It turned into a cluster fuck real fucking fast. They came down from the skies, radios blaring about how they were ‘taking control of the situation’, commanding that everyone shut the fuck up, surrender, and accept getting shot. The usual shit, really. Obviously, the RLF fought back.

And, yes, they showed up in all four locations that had been attacked. Despite the fact that three of them had barely been busy for more than a few minutes.

At least some of their readied forces split off from all of that to go deal with the Firekeepers, fortunately. Not a lot, but some.

Hah... By the time it was all over, we had a lot of broken MTs, numerous destroyed emplacements, and a ton of destroyed drones. Casualties were a bit on the lower side, thanks to the by-now nearly universal augmentation procedures and all the knock-on effects that came from that.

By material estimates alone, the RLF was looking at a two-three month long replacement period. The PCA had lost more than the RLF had, but also had an easier time replacing them, so it ended up about the same.

At the least the salvage was solidly in the RLF’s favour. The battlefield had been their bases, after all, and none of them had fallen. 

It certainly made for much easier AC recovery efforts. Some of those mercs even had some pretty good equipment on them, and that’s an easy justification for the continuing upgrades to the RLF’s arsenal.

Anyway, the major cleanup itself took a few days, MTs swarming over the areas like a horde of ants. Flatwell stayed busy the entire time, and I leant him a hand by running all the calculations and scenarios he normally did himself. That saved him a few weeks- and it also meant that, when he had a day free, I’d already arranged for Dolmayan to be there as well.

Then I infodumped on both of them.

“A mercenary against the PCA?” Flatwell seemed to be considering that.

“And one of such skill.” Dolmayan noted, leaning back in his chair. “For them to even be in that position in the first place... None in the Liberation Front had anything to do with it.”

“It speaks of a considerable information network, or blind luck. I’ll admit that I’m not currently sure which.” I spoke. “Even aside from that, however, that merc was much too ready to engage PCA forces. They had no fear of them whatsoever.”

“Unusual for a mercenary.” Flatwell’s head tipped to the side. “But not unwelcome.”

“Those driven by mere greed would never follow such a course of action.” Dolmayan stated, with the authoritative voice of long experience. “This one has an ideology. Combined with their skill, that could be quite dangerous if their interests cross ours.”

“And, that could be quite helpful if they don’t.” Flatwell finished. “This meeting was a good decision to make.”

“If they actually choose to meet, that is. If not...” Well, really, I hadn’t given that much away here. Even if Branch had knowledge of the SEA SPIDER’s full history and their status as fully autonomous weaponry, the only thing my communication attempt would tell them was that the SEA SPIDER had either been modified, or remote piloted. Yes, this was useful information- but it was hardly an indication of anything critical, such as the existence of Coral Minds.

Nothing lost. Nothing gained, either.

“I trust your judgement.” Flatwell spoke, shifting in his chair. “If you believe the effort is worth the result, I won’t raise any objections.”

“And you have my thanks for that. If we’re lucky, we’ll come out of this with new friends.” I hummed. 

I did hope that would be the case. I’d settle for not having new enemies, but if I could build a working relationship with Raven, and Branch as a whole?

That would be spectacularly useful to us.

“I’ll report back once the meeting happens. Good luck to the both of you.”

+++

The next week and a half passed quickly, but relatively quietly. I spent most of it throwing together everything I needed in order to actually do the meeting, preparing a trio of machines that hadn’t been associated with the Firekeepers, and which also weren’t Antigens, in order to not give away that particular piece of valuable information.

To that end, I had dipped back into the Institute’s catalogue. I needed something that had Coral in it, obviously; they already knew I was using C-Weapons, and swapping to something that had more conventional signalling technology was pointless in the face of that. Unfortunately, manufacturing any of the C-Weapons, while theoretically possible for at least the ones that weren’t, say, the ICE WORM, would take too long- any of them, that is, except for one in particular.

IA-05. WEEVIL.

The WEEVIL was a C-Weapon by not much more than technicality, to be honest. Where any other machine that had been classified as a C-Weapon got the designation through its utilization of Coral in its weaponry, defenses, or mobility, the WEEVIL used it only for the purposes of power generation and control. It was, in all truth, just an MT- except that these weren’t just MTs.

No, WEEVILs were MTs as designed by the Rubicon Research Institute. They had mobility profiles that fell short only compared to ACs, thanks to their unique leg parts that incorporated treads into the legs and back of the machine, which combined with the boosters of its core and legs. They could ‘kneel’, shifting onto those treads, and accelerate to extreme velocities very easily, and then they could stand up in order to enjoy the full advantages of bipedal movement modes. The Core/Legs joint area also incorporated an independent, three hundred and sixty degree swivel, allowing full upper body rotation no matter what direction the legs were going in. They had armour that was actually worth a damn and they had some very dangerous missiles incorporated into the ‘shoulders’ of the machine, which could, would, and had caught out a lot of ACs who hadn’t been prepared for them.

They could even fucking kick. 

Despite all of that, though, they were only armed with simple kinetic and explosive weaponry, not even making use of Coral. This would seem like restraint on behalf of those mad scientists who’d invented it, or perhaps a simple oversight, but I knew better than that.

WEEVILs, for all of their surprising effectiveness, hadn’t been much more than a test bed in the first place. That’s why they were equipped mostly with standard, for RRI that is, MT weaponry.

The upside to this? They were much more easily manufactured than any other C-Weapon.

At a size of not much larger than an AC, my own nanotech manufacturies were required only to handle the high-precision parts, which only consisted of a small proportion of their internal components. Everything else could be handled by the more normal assembling processes, which meant that I could throw the entire group together in only a couple of days, most of which was spent waiting on the nanites to get shit done. I did make sure to properly kit them out, providing them with some upgraded weaponry that enhanced their lethality significantly.

I didn’t expect them to actually join in on combat, and I had no real intention of making use of them, either, but this was Rubicon, and since the production capacity existed and I had no reason not to do so, I elected to lean on the safe side.

After that, it was a simple matter of transporting them to their destinations; one for each set of coordinates that I’d sent Raven. They arrived three days before the time I’d sent. A few camo tarps would see them go unnoticed to long-ranged detection, and from there?

Nothing but waiting.

It rained at one of the locations for a bit, and that was the only interesting thing that actually happened. 

And then, on the third day, a mere minute before the appointed time...

At the first location, Raven’s AC crested over a hill, flying low enough to the ground that the desert sand was caught in their wake. That close, I could sense the secure channel, an encrypted data flow, that linked the AC to something further afield. The Operator, no doubt.

Raven had actually accepted the invitation.

Most excellent, that.

Now, time for a chat.