>>Man, Big Fe, my headaches were back! Did the every leave?>>
But, wait, instead of worried or anxious, I felt great, like really great. My head hurt but I was relaxed and calm. It was amazing. I mean I survived a near death experience yesterday. None of my friends got hurt. For some reason, I didn't check out my synths. But we collected all of them. And if I can turn slag military drones into my synths I am sure I could effect repairs from some wanna be Neaman calvary posse. My Squad Leader was okay and Gretta was amazing. She confronted a full army and a massive plasma discharge.That last part might have been self inflicted. But still impressive overall.
>>Gosh, Big Fe>>, yesterday was surreal.
It felt more like a dream than the nightmares I had been having before. But, I felt so different, my mind felt a warm and comforting glow now, familiar and protective. It felt awesome. I don't remember clearly but this attitude seemed different from yesterday. I wasn't going to complain about the good turn of events. Afterall, we needed to get this show on the road again. I spent the remainder of the night cleaning up the cockpit and organizing. Amazing how near death experiences could stink up a place. I was sad the basket of burgers didn't get put in the microfridge, but oh well I would have to snag some of Molly’s cooking soon.
I suited up and scrambled down the side of my rig. The vehicles were all clustered tightly together, with our cargo in the middle and the other vehicles in a protective surround. The 2 large RVs were on either side of me and the cargo in the 18m long Kombi-Max was in the front. It seemed like only Alexandria’s RV was awake, the lights were on at least. As I walked to their vehicle cum home, the early morning sun was painting the vast skies of the abandoned West a rosy yellow. I didn't often see the sunrise. I signaled to the door and walked in. Sunny and Alexandria were at the kitchenette bar and Molly was making scrambled eggs.
“Good morning everyone!” I declared. “That smell’s great Molly, please tell me you have kaf.”
Alexandria looked shocked, Sunny looked confused but very happy, and Molly gave me a small but genuine smile.
Molly nodded and pointed to a carafe. I grabbed a mug and sat down next to Alexandria who continued to stare at me. “Impressive job Molly, I mean the cooking sure but also the sniping yesterday. That thing was a beast. What was that? A Plasma Shoulder Cannon?” She smiled again and nodded, “Yes it is a RGE DP-86H. Lady Alexandria bought it for me.”
Lady, huh, wasn't going to touch that one.
“Very cool.” I said as I looked at the eggs that were almost done being scrambled.
Sunny smiled at me and reached around Alexandria to pat my shoulder, with his longer upper bionic arm. “You go ahead and eat my eggs. I insist. I don't really need that much food at all, I just like to eat for the fun and taste, I can get by on next to nothing.” He was smiling as he gruffly continued “And you had a heck of a day yesterday, so take it.”
I wasn't going to argue if Sunny was in a sharing mood. Molly served up three plates with toast, scrambled eggs, and some pretty fruit garnish. I devoured the food as Alexandria picked at her eggs and Molly daintily ate hers. As soon as I was finished, I jumped up. “Welp, we have to get to Neu Ca?on today. I remember something about one of the Roundabouts being shot up?”
Sunny nodded and quickly explained the status of our fleet, the cargo, and even my synths. I said thanks and gave my leave, as Alexandria began whispering in Sunny’s ear.
I hurried back to Gretta and flew up the ladder, … hand over hand,... manually. >>Telekinesis, Big Fe, one of these days.>>
The weather remained partly cloudy but warm, with bright sun shining down on the landscape. The cacti and scrub brush was giving way to grasslands and forests along the edges of the horizon. We had another 515 km to go today. At 50 kilometers an hour, we should get into Neu Ca?on before dark, which is always good. Sunny checked in with everyone over the convoyNET and got us on the road. He shared that originally we were going to stop at a halfway house between Phoenix and Joseph City, but yesterday kinda derailed our plans and we all wanted to get a giant canyon and city walls between us and the wilds, at least for a while.
Operating Gretta in a non-stressful situation was as easy as breathing. It became a literal autonomic function for me. I used the time on the road to review the status of my synths and the wealth of combat logs.
My dad used to watch old aviation vids with dogfights and space battles, as he would have said, “what a harry furball yesterday turned out to be.” My dad was a dork. Like me. My favorite vid series was when a military group would travel to strange new worlds and investigate archaeological sites or alien monsters.
As I reviewed the logs, I was amazed at how much occurred on the battlefield simultaneously. As soon as I saw the dinosaurs coming at me, I struggled to see anything else. The convoy continued diving forward, luckily none of the synth’s were hit that were piloting the vehicles.
I fired up the combat longs and began to review them on my ocular implant. Sunny’s knockoff Power Construction Corp? multi-dozer 2070-C began the engagement by spinning around, and he reversed direction and began crawling toward the charging monsters. Eventually he squared off against several of the large nodosaurus? dinosaurs. His large bright green dozer must have appeared as an appealing target for the dumb monsters and apparently dumber handlers. From what I could tell from the logs, he didn't do much lethal damage, but he managed to knock down two of the giant dinosaurs and trip up another eight. Which was enough to remove them for combat for crucial seconds. Luckily the dozer was up-armored too, because it was gored, scored and shot up. Several holes in the windshield meant Sunny probably got hit as well. Given he was the toughest of us all by far, as a fully converted mining cyborg, I worried the least about him. ‘course I still worried. He looked, however, none the worse for wear this morning.
The squishiest on our side was Molly. I had to assume she had cybernetics given who she hung out with, a top tier Black Market cyber-doc and a professional miner ‘borg. But I had never seen her use anything and I wasn’t going to pry. Their enormous 35m long luxury RV peeled off from the convoy as well. Molly had suited up (In what I realized was excellent quality black market knock-off American Empire body armor), and wielded the giant cannon bigger than she was. She didn't exactly sling it around, however. She mostly stayed prone on the roof of the Gecko RV. She took her time lining up shots but it looks like every single shot, save one, removed a rider from the larger dinosaurs. The lone exception, was a powerfull Neaman warrior who had a magical talisman that prevented the damage from turning into insta-death, the follow up shot had no problem taking him out, however.
Her accuracy was 100%, her effective range exceeded the range of the conflict which started at 1,500m. She however wasn't on-deck of the RV until 1,000m distant. I'm not sure how she would do at longer distances. Her damage per attack was higher than anyone else, even my dual plasma casters.
Well not the missile salvo but that’s not a fair comparison, anyone can push a button.
Even with her slower and more deliberate rate of fire, she managed to out damage everyone on the field every round. I really needed to upgrade the weapons on my poor synths.
Grrr, it seems like everyone seemed to know to target the riders, except me. I didn’t even think of targeting the Neamens with the menace of the slobbering giant monsters that were underneath them. I was really disappointed in my martial prowess. Actually wading into battle was a very eye opening experience. The fuzzy warmth from last night still lingered in my head. I feel like there was almost a scab or bubble over my memories from yesterday. It was far easier to review the synth logs and evaluate the dry numbers and values than think about the event from my own perspective.
Returning to the other RV, Miles must have turned over piloting of the shorter but still impressive 25m long RV to Estéril.
If you come across this story on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.
But who was counting size BigFe, neh?
He quickly joined the battle in his magitecha armor. Miles was raised classically as an elven sorcerer, or whatever his space elves called their magic users. But as he shared with us, he left his home on one of Elfhiem’s celestial sunships and traveled through the galaxy for a while before enlisting in the Galactic Concordat Assembly armed forces. It seems to be a bit of a finger to his parents and upbringing to join the military services. But I didn't even pretend to understand, or care about elven politics. And neither did he. I am not sure how long he served in the military, he did mention the Explorer Corps later? But he eventually retired and began his private scientific exploration.
As long as I have known him, he has studied magic, but from a totally biological, chemical and scientific perspective. He wanted to answer how cybernetics interacts with magic potential- he said he knew why it doesn't prevent powers like mine, but I never learned the details. He was currently studying magical abilities in machine-life or inherently technological lifeforms. His knowledge in biology and human machine interactions was sometimes helpful in my research, which was the excuse he gave to tag along with our group. Not to mention his role as our resident group physician.
His combat contributions were an interesting combination of magic and technological firepower. His commercial armor, a Pirimid Magica Ubique? (PMU?) magitecha Gorge ? suit, allowed him to fly and run a chameleon cloak, if he provided the magical power. He began to assault the middle of the charging army with some sort of trap spell. He cast an adhesive spell that instantly rooted 2 big dinosaurs (and sent their riders flying), and nearly a dozen of the smaller dinosaurs. The magically imbued narrow strip trapped the monster's feet, the riders as they fell, and tails and limbs as they tried to tear themselves free. He followed up with a few more magical nets that entrapped two to three Ostrosauruses and their riders whenever he caught them bunching up. In between his entrapping he would float above the melee and use his military issue combat energy rifle. When he opened up on the burst selector he was able to take out Neaman riders almost as effectively as Molly! To be fair, he was a lot closer to the fight. In addition to being inhumanly beautiful, evidently space-elves were superhuman tough as well. He could take a plasma pistol shot to his head without flinching, but I would be a depressing red mist. No-one on Earth thought life was fair, but supernatural things like that were a bit much sometimes. I expected that from a cyborg sure, but an alien dinosaur, or superhuman elf were less expected. Our arcane-techno-biolologist managed to hold his own in the fight, far better than I would have thought. But clearly what did I know about battle? I targeted the dumb beasts and dropped bombs on myself.
Big Fe had generated some very rough figures for Molly and Miles’s combat contributions:
- Molly, had an effective damage of 116% per attack. Six deaths per round were attributed to Molly! Crude estimate of 70 damage per attack (DPA).
- Miles, had a much more variable damage output, because magic. He was doing no damage on some attacks and lethal on others. His effective damage was 88% with a crude estimate of 52 damage per attack (DPA). He was responsible for two to four deaths per round and a lot more chaos and crowd control.
Finally I turned my attention to the synths. I decided I didn't even want to look at my own battle contributions. I started by looking at the synth in the Big Fe collected combat logs. First, I was floored at how fast the conflict concluded. Once they got into short range the entire fight was less than 3 minutes. Mostly less than two.
And second, wow, did my Squad Leader learn on the fly! The battle was fast and frenetic, but the Squad Leader was constantly observing, reacting, and adapting.
Quantitative numbers were impossible at this point. But Big Fe, used his big iron brain to estimate a framework and values for the entire conflict. He would continue to refine as we go. We were dividing combat into a standard round of 15 seconds. Big Fe said there were different models at 1, 3, 6, 10, and even 60 second time slices, but 15 second chunks seemed manageable for wrangling my synths. Additionally, Big Fe had devised a qualitative measure for damage as well. If you posit that for one average target, say a Neaman rider as our reference model, the total damage capacity was assumed 100% any attack less than that could be measured as a percentage. If a big gun did damage equal to the armor or target ‘health’ we would call it 100% damage. If another gun was only half as much damage as the armor it would be 50%, and if we combined 2 50% shots, we would of course get back to 100% damage again. If another target was twice as strong you could give in 200% or you could recalculate your weapons to be half as effective, either way the proportion of damage vs defense over time was maintained. I began to scroll down the detailed log files:
- Round 1: Prime to Squad-Leader#001 && Road-synth#1-#10 && Hopper-synth #1-#10 Maneuver: Active Engagement. Authorized to return fire and attack at will. Target Damage standard, against unknown values.
I disliked how they labeled me as Prime. >>I swear I didn't do that, right Big Fe?>>
- Round 2: Squad-Leader#001 to Road-synth#1-#10 && Hopper-synth #1-#10 REPEAT Maneuver: Active Engagement. Target Damage range Alpha 33%, Beta 22%, and Gamma 14%
- Round 3: Squad-Leader#001 to Road-synth#1-#10 && Hopper-synth #1-#10 Engage Target type Alpha-rider. Target Damage increased to 33% RECALCULATING maneuver
- Round 4: Squad-Leader#001 to Road-synth#1-#10 && Hopper-synth #1-#10 Engage Target type Alpha-rider-RB. Target Damage steady 33% RECALCULATING maneuver
Damage of 33% meant it took on average 3 shots to down a target with the weapons and conditions the synths were fighting under.
He began targeting dinosaur riders here:
- Round 5: Squad-Leader#001 to Road-synth#1-#10 && Hopper-synth #1-#10 Continue Alpha-rider-RB target, pair Road-synth and Hopper-synth share target. Target Damage increase 66%
He figured out 2 synths per target here.
- Round 6: Squad-Leader#001 to Road-synth#1-#10 && Hopper-synth #1-#10 Continue Alpha-rider-RB target, pair Road-synth and Hopper-synth share target. Target Damage steady 66% INEFFICIENT 2 rounds required for 100% effective kill RECALCULATING maneuver
He wasn't happy with the incomplete damage. Another attack in a follow-on round from both synths would finish the rider but would waste the extra damage.
- Round 7: Squad-Leader#001 to Road-synth#1-#10 && Hopper-synth #1-#10 Continue Alpha-rider-RB target, Road-synth and Hopper-synth 3.5 synth share targeting, alternate teams. Target Damage increase 100%
He figured out an efficient firing solution. Where a rider was being killed in a single volley in a single round.
- Round 8: Squad-Leader#001 to Road-synth#1-#10 && Hopper-synth #1-#10 Continue Alpha-rider-RB target, Continue 3.5 synth share targeting, alternate team. Target Damage steady 100%. Local maximum EFFECTIVE
- Round 9: Squad-Leader#001 to Road-synth#1-#10 && Hopper-synth #1-#10 Continue Alpha-rider-RB target, Continue 3.5 synth share targeting, alternate teams. Target Damage steady 100%. Steady
It was here that I might have started to worry.
- Round 10: Prime to Squad-Leader#001 && Road-synth#1-#10 && Hopper-synth #1-#10 && && synth#*-* Maneuver: Fullbore. All active synths engage.
>>Fine Big Fe, you are right, I began to majorly panic and pulled out all the stops.>>
- Round 11: Squad-Leader#001 to Road-synth#1-#10 && Hopper-synth #1-#10 && && synth#*-* REPEAT Maneuver: Fullbore. All active synths engage. Target Damage increasing 133%. RECALCULATING maneuver
- Round 12: Squad-Leader#001 to Road-synth#1-#10 && Hopper-synth #1-#10 && && synth#*-* Update target variable Aggressive Alpha, Beta, and Gamma. Target Damage range Alpha 33%, Beta 22%, and Gamma 14% RECALCULATING maneuver
- Round 13: Squad-Leader#001 to Road-synth#1-#10 && Hopper-synth #1-#10 && && synth#*-* Maneuver: Picket & Screen && Render assistance
- Round 14: Squad-Leader#001 to synth*.* Continue as assigned.
This looks awful. What a wall of text.