《Cosas Perditas》 Ch. 1 *** On the road Day 1, NV The morning sun oppressively shone down on the alien saguaro and dying barrel cacti that covered the desert landscape as far as I could see. Well what I assumed was alien and dying. The Water Wars had not been kind to any of the local lifeforms. In this southern portion of what was once called Arizona State; there wasn''t much growing any more. Arizona, my dad had explained, was a name used prior to the rise of the American Empire, before I was born. It was a good enough label for those who were left scratching an existence in the area. This landscape was both alien and familiar at the same time. I had spent most of my life underground, in a very unique shelter, but the past few years had been spent out here working and staying alive. At our last dig site we had managed to find a complete small town library saved in a freak lava tube bubble. Not sure what happened to the rest of the small town, we weren''t able to find anything else of note, but the library itself was beyond valuable. Especially to a historical junky like my dad, before he died a few years back. Of course, we needed to sell it all to pay off the loans and debts that kept our crew fed, alive, and away from the clutches of the Black Market, as much as it was possible to avoid my own loan sharks. My history with the Black Market and specifically its subsidiary BDwerks is a long and sordid past, hopefully in the past is where I can leave it. Snapping back to the present, I looked toward the horizon in front of us, and eventually our next camp site, I wondered if I had made the right call. I have had mixed luck using my psychic abilities to find new sites to salvage and explore. While I might be a prodigy with machines and electronics, my divination skills were far more modest, and I was currently batting at a 40% success rate. Hopefully this new site could even up my average a bit more. Not that I was keeping score, but my uncle Sunny definitely was. Glancing over our crew I saw our vehicles making a dusty procession as we slowly crawled over the land. I sent a telemechanic message to my own personal super computer, >>I gotta say Big Fe, I am proud of what our crew had accomplished in our last dig. >> Our caravan snaked its way along a dead riverbed, the sun glinting off of our collection of trucks & trailers, hovercraft, and mechs. We had found enough pre-war material to pay for the entire outing, and quite a bit more, at our first stop. We were an eclectic group, me with my black market funded robotics research, uncle Sunny salvaging and mining to his heart''s content, and our family friend, Miles, the mysterious elf scientist always searching for supernatural animals¡­ and something about technology, I didn''t alway understand his research, or pay all that much attention to it, to be honest. I strode to the side of our lineup in my pride and joy, a towering 11m tall Provender 54r from New Toronto. This mechanized behemoth was perfectly adapted for exploration, mining, and even combat. My green and gold color scheme was ridiculously dusty, but the mech, as with all my equipment, was in tip-top shape. Bipedal with an aftermarket missile pod on each shoulder; I was the tallest vehicle around. And also the most comfortable in my air conditioned 4 person pilot compartment. I had received this from my dad after his major promotion with BDtech and the local Black Market. It was also my biggest connection to him left. >>No I didn''t mean that literally, Big Fe. >> My super computer did talk much, but I always got a sense I could feel what it was thinking. I was blessed with telemechanic abilities at a very early age. I could understand and take apart anything with electricity. Did you know this text is from a different site? Read the official version to support the creator. In the front of our convoy, we had my uncle Sunny in his BDwerks Multi-dozer, of course it was a knockoff of the Power Construction Corpo design, but he loved that machine. That was most of BDwerks these days, cheaper knock-offs, and shadily licensed remanufactured goods; at least their tools were quality. Sunny was currently trail blazing a path for the rest of our dozen assorted rigs. Around these parts, there were no roads, and hadn''t been for years. I was a bit of a packrat. If I wanted to hear the truth, a lot of a packrat. Hauling around more than a few trailers worth of stuff. But you never know when an ancient treasure or old world item might transmogrify from junk to credits, or be the crucial piece needed for a field repair! Well at least that is what I keep telling myself. Sunny didn''t help with his collection of heavy equipment, mining and construction gear. Our Kombi offroad trucks and trailers were full of looted cybernetics, synthetic soldiers, and salvage equipment. Rounding out our lineup, at the end of our convey were the 3 hover RVs, and my portable engineering lab. Crawling, running, and flying around was our protective screen, and my reason for conducting Artificial Intelligence and robotics research on the move. Inside each truck cab, suit of power armor, or behind every cyborg body armor was a synthetic intelligence of my creation. Don''t tell the remnants of the American Empire but I had salvaged their fully automated drones, and remnants of their fallen cybernetic soldiers, as well as the corpses of the opposing corpo¡¯s own cyborgs and mechs. We never did learn who the third party was in that conflict, and their equipment was all destroyed or off the shelf garbage. But when 3 major powers go to war over desalination tech and water access, there is a lot of carnage left lying around. With all the battlefield salvage we acquired, I had then masterfully adapted them, err hacked them, or at least gyvered them into some semblance of functionality. I created my own custom reasoning compute core for each newly created synthetic intelligence. I then outfitted them in disguised body armor, cyborg armor, and even power armor. We currently had half of my complete platoon providing realistic (aka sufficiently random) deterrence and hopefully protection to reduce the chance of alien, bandit, or idiot encounters. I had programmed them with a standard Picket & Screen maneuver for our entire convoy. My synths were currently performing at a basic level and could be counted on to shoot attackers and move in the right direction, almost all the time, now. I was still working on the finer details. Cruising along at 50 kph, we would reach the leeward side of the distant mountains by mid afternoon, assuming no breakdowns, dust clogs, or other calamities. While some of our vehicles could fly or cruise over 200 kph, you didn''t want to get out ahead of your situation awareness out here in the west, and you definitely didn''t want to get separated or break down in these parts. I toggled my radio headset, ¡°Gretta to Dozer, over?¡± I liked using vehicle names on the radio. I saw it in the old vids I watched with my dad as a kid and thought it was cool. Not my problem Sunny hadn¡¯t named his Dozer. Sunny replied, a smile in his voice ¡°Little Sunny in Dozer to Gabby in Gretta, I read you, waddya want?¡± ¡°I was just checking in and seeing how the crew is doing.¡± Sunny sighed a bit over the radio line, ¡°Gabby, you know you could talk to them directly too.¡± ¡°I know, I know, but you are better with people, and it always feels awkward the way they look at me and talk to me. Your wife means well, I think, and Miles does mean well, but I don''t know how to relate to an elf that owed my dead dad his life. I mean come on, I like machines not people,¡± I ended up yelling. ¡°Okay. okay. I get it Gabby, didn''t mean to strike a nerve, you just need to try.¡± Sunny gently admonished. ¡°And I heard that¡­, you know Trella cares for you.¡± ¡°I get it, I really do, just not now ok. So really are we on track to make it to the next site this afternoon?¡± I replied. Sunny took a moment to think, and check in with the others. ¡°Yeah everyone is fine with pushing ahead and getting there early, no need for a stop.¡± Ch. 2 *** Mt Graham Day 1, NV We had set up camp like usual last night. Our 3 RV homes in the center, the trucks, engines and mining equipment in the middle, and the cargo boxes and buses forming a circular perimeter on the outside. I had just finished hanging our camouflage net so that it would cover the engineering trailer. Primarily, I liked to get it up right away because the shade was much appreciated when working outside, but no need to make it easy for any flyers to get too nosey from a distance. I was excited to finally work on the broken mining power armor, cleverly called ¡®Power Construction Corp? Prospecting and Subsurface Mining Power Armor (PCC PSM-PA).¡¯ I had picked it up for a song at the Neu Ca?on merchant and mercenary market. The poor thing had seen better days, when I reached out and touched it with my hand, and in my mind, I was able to tell the main and backup controller was totally fried: sensors, movement, comms, and environmentals were shot. The entire left side looked like it had been chewed on by some metal loving monster. Even the mining mod¡¯s and attachments were slag, and worth only their material salvage. As I said, it was a work in progress. ¡°Sunny, have you seen my sonic multi-tool, I had it right here.¡± I yelled across the yard. Sunny was setting up the crew for initial excavation, entrenchment, and mining. Both Sunny and the crew bear some explaining, however. ¡®Little Sunny,¡¯ was a full conversion mining Cyborg. 85% of his entire body had been replaced by machinery. Cybernetic components, and bio-synthetic systems gave him life, and enhanced abilities beyond anything he had before. Of course he had to indenture himself to a corp for 11 years to pay off the mods, but he was set for life, a very long life, as he liked to say. His systems were a bit more unusual, he had 2 treads instead of legs, making him shorter than most full conversion ¡®borgs (and hence his appellation), and about even to most humans. But he was nearly as wide and deep as he was tall. He also had 4 arms, all with modular attachments for mining, and more. He kept multiple limbs on a platform behind his humanoid torso. And at this moment he was smacking the side of one of our dumb mining drones. His ¡®crew¡¯ was composed of 4 synthetic bipedal mining machines. 2 were retrofitted cyborg based chassis in cyborg armor called miner-synths that I had created, and 2 ¡®reconditioned¡¯ Heavy Labor drones trained for mining and excavation that I had¡­ liberated. We called them dumb drones, or labor drones if you are feeling less petty. >>I know Big Fe, if someone heard what I was doing it would sound like a macabre necromancer playing with dead body parts. But to me, it was all unused technology. Any ¡®ganic got augs in the first place, to be better than flesh, right? Well with my synths I was just removing all the flesh and ¡®repurposing¡¯ battlefield scrap, neh? >> >> Bah, what do you know? You are a stack of servers in a trailer!>> Walking slowly toward Sunny I shook my head and said, ¡°You know Sunny, hitting the machine never makes it do what you want any faster. Right? What is going on?¡± Grumbling under his breath Sunny said, ¡°Yeah but it makes me feel better.¡± Taking a deep breath he continued. ¡°This hunk of junk won''t respond to my radio or voice commands, I got the other three ready to go, but this guy is toast.¡± Looking over the machine for a moment, and using a quick telemechanic ping, I could tell that he had forgotten to initialize the machine for Excavation Prep. ¡°Sunny, you need to initialize it into the right behavior template. It doesn''t know what sort of activity you want it to do yet.¡± ¡°Well I didn''t have to do that with the other big guy.¡± I quickly interrupted, ¡°yeah because you had already used the other guy at the previous site. Remember? You said you didn''t need both because the library was so small.¡± ¡°Harumph¡± Sunny snorted as he turned back to his preparations, after surreptitiously adjusting the physical control panel with his lower arm. We had made our camp at the base of several steep foothills right next to another dried out riverbed. Sunny was going to send out the 4 miner-synths, who were running modified black market (or pirated Power Construction Corp? (PCC) if you want to be pedantic) mining and salvage skills packages. I was proud of that; the brute force retrofit had worked and been quite stable, the downside is they had no combat aptitude left. I had been able to completely retrofit the miner-synths with the full mining and heavy labor skills that we needed. My Squad Leader synthetic soldiers were quite a bit less¡­ functional at times. I had several bugs I needed to stamp out. But back to the mining crew, Sunny was instructing them to deploy and begin to scan with magnetometers and ground sonar to find open spaces or equipment that might indicate a hidden cache, pre-war military depot, farm equipment, or really anything worth recovering, salvaging and repairing. As the two cybernetic based miner-synths set off-- >>Big Fe, do I need a better name for those>> -- the PPC-d7 Heavy Labor Drones, at almost twice the size of a cyborg, began to prep the camp site for salvage, sorting, and collection. Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings. I decided to return to my paying work. I kinda promised the head of BDwerks?, the slightly more mercantile arm of the black market, a working unmanned robot platform based on cybernetic systems, by the end of the season. I wouldn''t call anything I created a drone, as there was no remote control or digital overwatch from the NET. This was far more versatile. But the idea of an autonomous laborer, skilled worker, and even a combat robot would hopefully encourage quite a few folks to fork over their hard earned credits, or gold, or whatever they had. The megacities back east are chock full of smart drones and killer robots, but they are always connected and managed by corpo, or government mainframes from the NET. Out here, we had no connectivity we didn''t bring ourselves. But, not only did I have no idea if I could actually figure out how to reverse engineer, isolate, and improve the entire combat profile, but I wasn''t getting a salary, I only got a loan deferment for my massive ¡®investment¡¯. But I guess when you borrow from the guys who invented busting kneecaps, one shouldn''t be too picky about loan flexibility. Heading back to the engineering trailer, the Prospector mining power armor sat in bay 1 of the 8 bays in my top of the line mechanic¡¯s dream. This was one of the fancy purchases I made with that loan. A fully self-contained portable field shop for engineering, drone, power armor, mech, and even limited cybernetic development and repairs. The trailer splits down the middle as it unfolds and houses all the tools, lifts, and infrastructure needed for field repairs and refits, or in my case, research and engineering. 4 bays ran along each side of the trailer when fully deployed. I usually only worked on one side, with the Prospector power armor in bay 1, and my, currently broken, cybernetic based borg-synth squad leader in bay 2. Bay 3 and 4 were for any urgent repairs on equipment the camp needed me to look at. Of course, most of my work on the cyborg based synths was programming, AI training, and techno-therapy to create a stable, albeit smarter and more capable platform. The problem was, everything worked fine for 12 hours and then the leader synth overloaded and crashed, or worse. I laid my gloved hand on the machine and started with a quick telemechanic probe to make sure nothing had changed. I then sat in my comfortable hover chair and delved deeper into the bot¡¯s mind. Don¡¯t get too excited, my chair hovered through the mighty powers of electro-magnetism, not magic or anti-grav, not yet at least. With the crazy alien things coming through the Doorways it''s just a matter of time before we get antigrav, via magic or advanced tech. Time flies when you are coding, and a metal hand on my shoulder broke me out of my lazer focus on squashing bugs. And a glance at the head-comp display in my left eye made me realize nearly 10 hours had passed by. ¡°Want to join the team for a campfire dinner.¡± Sunny asked hesitantly. His hulking frame, 4 arms, and treated locomotion on his lower body belied a gentle and downright friendly man who had been like an uncle to me my entire life. Sunny was close friends with my mom and dad before I was born and was always around when I grew up on the hidden underground base that shall not be named. You know the one that the Black Market found, retrofitted and ran their North American operations out of. Yeah that one. Sunny was hired to continue the excavation and exploration even some 20 years after the ancient pre-war underground bunker/ manufacturing plant turned R&D lab had been discovered. They always had more tunnels and rooms that needed to be exhumed. He did such a fantastic job, he was able to pay off his cyborg body and rack up some serious upgrades before his indentured term was done. He left to strike out on his own doing salvage and mining, but when dad died, he came back and wouldn''t leave my side. I also think he was missing his cyber-doc girlfriend/ and eventual wife, as well, the ever lovely and slightly creepy Alexandria. She was an incredibly beautiful and wealthy Black Market cyber-doc who had retired and joined Sunny in his babysitting quest. At least a few more women were in camp, but she was the furthest thing from a mother figure as anyone could be. And their ¡°assistant¡± Molly was another strange one. Always silent, doing whatever Alexa, or Sunny, asked, instantly. She seemed preternaturally fixated on serving them no matter what. The few times I saw Molly wearing a Maid outfit inside their luxury Toyota-Daimler-Bilaindand Gecko class RV was enough to make me glad I didn''t have to deal with dating, family, or attachments of any kind. I removed my helmet which was sticky with sweat, even with the full environmental sleeve the Under All Inc. ? body armor provided. ¡°Thanks Sunny, I think I will just eat in Gretta and turn in.¡± Sunny lifted the armored faceplate covering his biological face and shook his metal head. He turned and looked toward my towering 11m beauty. ¡°At least stay in the RV trailer we bought. It has everything you and 7 of your closest friends need out here, and yet you still stay in a hammock in your giant mech?¡± I replied, ¡°I don''t need all that Sunny, I am more comfortable there anyway. So how did the search go today?¡± ¡°Meh, we got bupkis today, but that¡¯s not unusual. We will have to continue to widen our search for a few more days before I call this area a bust, and another loss for your psychic record.¡° He finished with a smile. Ch. 3 *** Mt Graham Day 2 The morning light streamed into the cozy reinforced cockpit through the armored viewport. Being over 8m in the air gave me an impressive view of the camp and the surrounding area. Even if it was through the backup manual viewport. I don''t know what Sunny was talking about, the hammock I had strung between the rear 2 passenger seats was beyond comfortable. And a stack of instant readi-meals ? meant I didn''t need to worry about cooking or cleaning. I grabbed my armor and gear, opened the top hatch and crawled down the steps built into the back and legs of my mech. It looks like Sunny and the mining drones were already out and at it. He always did get up early. Gretta, my mech, stood behind the engineering trailer. In the inner circle was Alexandria¡¯s hover RV, my unused RV trailer, and Miles¡¯s hover exploration home/ RV. All three of them formed an equilateral triangle in the middle of camp. We had set up a campfire and seating area next to an outdoor kitchen. I moseyed to the campfire and outdoor kitchen and grabbed myself a cup of synkaf, no point in suffering without stimulants on account of my social anxiety. With the caffeine starting to rush to my veins, I reviewed the progress I had made yesterday as I walked back to my workstation. The PPC engineering trailer computer reported that all systems were nominal on the Squad Leader borg-synth unit. ¡®Course I had to hack the interface to even get it to recognize scavenged cybernetic equipment from half a dozen manufacturers, so I wasn''t going to put that much faith in the simple computer¡¯s analysis. The problem was, that while I refactored the primary and backup control logic on my synth yesterday, I had a sneaking suspicion that it would still crash after 12 hours of operation. Welp nothing to it but to get onto field tests. I closed my notes to Big Fe and got ready for a field trip. I sent a quick ¦Ìwave RF message to Sunny and Miles and told them I was taking a squad east to test out the new software. They didn''t love it when I wandered away from camp but usually the fact that I took 10 fully kitted out synths with upgraded armor and weapons, mollified their fears. Plus I wasn''t dumb enough to turn the tracker off in my armor suit. I issued mental commands (being born a psychic in this post war world had its advantages), and the doors on Kombi-bus #1 opened. Five BDwerks? Chaparralito Roadrunner suits of power armor and 5 Under All Inc. ? Grasshopper Interdictor suits tramped out in unison. The armor was primarily used to disguise the cybernetic based syths that we had captured or salvaged over the past 2 years. The great unpleasantness around California was a target rich environment for treasure hunters and salvagers. With a bit of the local Black Market help, we might have availed ourselves to a lot of post war ¡®surplus.¡¯ From the outside it would look like a professional squad of soldiers or adventurers. The Snyth has a ¡®ganic setting that made them move and react in a somewhat natural manner. The Chaparralito Roadrunner power power suits were sleek, moderately armored and built to keep up with most land vehicles over reasonable terrain. They were dusty brown camouflage in color with sharp angles to, frankly, make it look faster. Alternatively the Grasshopper Interdictor suits were designed to mount full size jet packs and provide aerial support and cover. While I great idea I could only afford the version with jump packs, so these suits could hop, and hover only momentarily. But it was enough to provide better visibility and considerable mobility. We had refurbished and turned over most of the gear we found to our BDwerks? Black Market sponsors. But we kept enough to provide a nice revenue stream, if needed, and camp security for the foreseeable future. >>But that adventure is for another time. Right Big Fe?>> The Grasshopper synths were equipped with modern Rosatom General Energy? Pulsed Particle Guns (RGE PPG) in 10mm rifle configurations. These Hopper-synths - I know, great name right Fe? - were designed for scouting and picket screening. The Chaparralito -not at all a black market knock off of a commendable Under All Inc. ? suit that I cannot legally mention- equipped synths were armed with older but reliable 20 gram gauss rifles. These synths were designed to guard & protect the camp 24/7. Another squad of 10 of them patrolled the outer camp ring constantly. That brought my fully functioning numbers to 20 combat synths with 2 additional ¡®smart¡¯ squad leaders. As we set out heading east, I ordered the Hopper-synths to range ahead and search for, but not engage, any prey. I ordered the Road-synths to primarily protect me, and secondarily follow any commands from the Squad Leader synth. The idea, of course, was to have a more intelligent synth leader manage and order the more typical, dumb basic synths, and increase the lethality and survivability. It didn''t help that I had no direct combat experience, but it did help that I had the best software that the various corps, the American Empire, and the Black Market had created. It didn''t matter if I salvaged, borrowed, or purchased it, the combat routines were mine to tinker with. I hacked together a leader synth that would assess, prioritize and adapt to changing battle conditions, at least in theory. We continued our trek east, a direction I picked for no good reason, and began to walk through the rolling foothills of the old Sonoran Desert. The skeletal cedar and mesquite trees provided minimal cover but added a morbid splash of necrotic color on the otherwise monochromatic rusty brown landscape. We patrolled for 2 hours before the squad leader issued a pause-all command. I knew that he had received a heads up from the Hopper-synths that ranged ahead, but I didn''t peek at the payload, I wanted to observe and take notes. I would upload my field notes to Big Fe when I got back to camp but for now I began to record and watch. A loud grunt echoed from the next ridge line as the Grasshopper equipped synth sprung into view. A few blasts struck the face of a massive 4 legged monstrosity. It towered over 6m tall and nearly 12m long. It had 4 massive legs, a giant knobby shell on its back, and a massive tail that ended in a pair of fearsome spikes. The head was tipped by 3 massive spikes. ¡°That¡¯s a Tyrannosaurus ¡± I involuntarily gasped. ¡°Hostile engaged,¡± my Squad Leader announced, >>Note: perhaps unnecessarily chatter Big Fe? Do we really want to proclaim our intentions out loud?>> The lead Hopper-synth continued to lope, jump, and run across the depression in front of the ridge. I stepped back several steps behind the line of road-synths. The hiss from the luring synth continued for a few rounds before the remaining 10 bots all opened fire on the front right leg of the monstrous dinosaur. The snap-boom sound of the accelerated slugs joined the sizzling hiss of plasma as 10 weapons opened up as one. To be honest, it looked like only 60% of synths were able to hit the called target but at least 90% hit the beast. >>Note to Big Fe, need to work on individual and collective targeting.>> The tyrannosaurus dinosaur limped slightly but was fixated on the fleeing Hopper-synth that had been antagonizing it. As soon as the fire stopped and the Hopper-synth had continued past the ridge line, it jumped and continued to hover well above the monster.The jets of air buffeting the dust and ground beneath the machine. A burst of plasma pulses began to hit the rear of the dinosaur and it immediately whirled around. Another, identical Hopper-synth was weaving low to the ground and continued to fire. The dinosaur shook its head and charged the synth on the other side of the firing line. As soon as the giant monster thudded across the chewed up terrain the synths again collectively opened fire: plasma fire, and larger but supersonic slugs raked the head of the charging beast. After fire analysis indicated a reduction in accuracy. It looks like 40% managed to hit the designated head, but this time 100% of all fire hit the beast, at least somewhere. The genuine version of this novel can be found on another site. Support the author by reading it there. >>Big Fe, I will need to correlate burst fire, hip shot, and aimed accuracy performance.>> As the second Hopper-synth to play lure surged up and flew out of reach, the dinosaur reared up on its 2 hind legs, and pivoted toward the firing line where the Squad Leader, Road-synths, remaining Hopper-synths and, gulp, I were standing. The beast hit the ground, lowered its head, and charged the ridge line. I began reversing perpendicularly away from the possible carnage. All the Hopper-synths took to the air, and 4 out of the 5 Road-synths managed to get out of the way. Their slick power armor greatly boosted their already cybernetic strength and 2 jumped down the ridge, 3 ran up the hill. The last to move was about to roll out of the way when the wounded leg of the dinosaur gave way, and the 12m long beast shoulder checked the 2m synth. It went flying right toward me! The road-synth¡¯s legs closelined me, even as I stood back 5m from the scuffle. I went down and the air was knocked out of me. From my suboptimal vantage point I could see the beast lower its head, the giant bony battering ram was heading straight toward my Squad-Leader! And the synth appeared to be completely frozen. I was more bummed by the pending damage to my hard work than any minor injury I might have incurred. I can heal after all, and I was deadening the pain, psychically, anyway. The leader-synth¡¯s left shoulder was sheared in half as the leading spike pierced clean through the machine. The dinosaur threw its head into the air and my precious synth flew straight up. As I continued to lay on my side clutching my ribs, I couldn''t help but wonder if I should have made the Squad Leader a flyer synth instead of a ground ¡®bot to start. With a muted crunch the synth returned to earth, the limbs all pointed in different directions. But it looked like the sensors in the head and the control modules in the spine were still intact. More amazingly the synth began to issue orders. The two synths picked me up by my arms and dragged me further down the field away from the rampaging monster. After 4 more rounds of continuous fire, this time pulses of plasma fire, and bursts of kinetic slugs and the dinosaur breathed its last. The beast had been furiously running back and forth between the flying Hopper-Synth and the quickly running Road-synth who were leading it away from me. It hadn¡¯t been able to score any more direct hits on my synths. While others might complain that shooting from the air was unsporting or inhumane, I was more worried about the tactical changes that contaminated my data collection. Going Fullbore allowed the synths to go for full potential strength, speed, and weapons fire, things any humans in power armor or even partial-cyborgs likely couldn''t match. I would have to evaluate the results back at camp¡­, after I had my chest checked out. As the Hopper-synths fell to the ground to cool their ducted jets, I ordered the Road-synths to return to the corpse. I had limited need to butcher the beast but I know a few key pieces were worth our time. The synths quickly swarmed the body, using nano-knives they removed the 3 horns and several sections of less damaged hide. As they were wrapping up, I hobbled over to my experimental subject, and inspected my poor Squad-Leader. The damage seemed to be structural and, thankfully, could be easily repaired. The freezing behavior, however, was well ahead of the 12 hour window and as such was atypical, warranting further study. I might have a clue buried in its logs, somewhere. I ordered 2 Road-synths to carry my Squad Leader, and *ahem* one Road-synth to fireman-carry me back to camp. >>Big Fe, promise not to tell anyone please.>> The Hopper-synths resumed their screening picket and we tromped back to camp, arriving uneventfully at lunchtime. I knew Sunny and Miles would be worried if I didn''t check in, and mad if I didn''t tell them I got banged up. So, I decided to head over to Miles¡¯s home/ lab. With a thought I had the squad of synths drop off the Squad-Leader in bay #2, the dinosaur parts at the end of our largest Kombi-max truck, and return themselves to storage on the bus. They would stand down and run a self diagnosis that I could check later. Miles¡¯s RV/ home/ lab was out of this world. Literally. The sleek hover vessel was clearly alien and clearly far ahead of anything we could create on Earth. If he wasn''t in the middle of this Quad-forsaken wasteland he might have to worry about corpo espionage or worse. He explained that he got it back where he originally came from, the so-called Concordat Assembly not to be confused with the Elven Kingdoms. Frankly it sounded a lot messier, and crazier than home here. ¡®Course as a country girl, I couldn''t imagine a city with a million people let alone nearly a billion! Being a long lived elf, Miles has served in the Assembly armed forces. After he had done his time, he returned to his research of bio-mechanical life and its disinclination to magical aptitudes, I think. Evidently, he was a bit of a rebel, his parents wanted him to follow in their prestigious magical lineage, but after a few years, he up and left, joined the military and never went back. But that was ancient history, as far as I know. He met my father on one of my dad¡¯s field operations, when he wasn''t busy leading the BDwerks? power armor division. So, yeah, my dad created all the original knock off¡¯s as well as a few original suits of power armor that DBworks sells. People who say reversing engineering is easy and cheating, has clearly never done it. >>You know how proud of my dad I am, Big Fe, don''t you.>> It was on one field op that daddy saved Miles¡¯s life. They adventured together, for a while, and Miles will do some work for the Black Market on and off. He isn''t a full member like the rest of us, but he does gig medical and scientific work, from time to time. As I walked up, painfully, to the port-side airlock I keyed the call button. ¡°Uh, Dr. VanBright, err, Miles. Can I come in? I got a little banged up and wanted you to check me out.¡± I knew they were going to scold me, but really I was careful, and we all survived. Ish. Both inner and outer airlock doors slid open and a tall blond-haired elf in a lab coat looked at me over his scientific multi-glasses. His skin was the lightest shade of green- orange, it really looked like tanned skin most of the time. And he was gorgeous for a supposedly viridiplantae based lifeform >>Yes Big Fe, I know it''s pretentious to say viridiplantae and not plant like, but it¡¯s more accurate, okay!?>>. ¡°Ohh Miss Gama, come in come in! What happened?¡± Without pausing, he turned and yelled back into the ship, ¡°Est¨¦ril join me in science bay 4 please.¡± As soon as I walked into the ship the cool air soothed my face but my head felt a flash of pain. I started to panic. A concussion or worse was the last thing I needed. The flash went away quickly, but a dull, aching presence remained. We made our way through the living room and kitchen area, past a library and master bedroom and into 1 of 4 labs. The two labs down the hall looked off-line and/ or closed but the lab we entered was clean, bright, and entirely too sterile. ¡°All right Miss Gama, go ahead and get out of your armor and lay down on the table, your suit liner is fine.¡± As soon as he said that, the clomping from the hallway resolved into a beautiful cyborg Minotaur. Miles¡¯s assistant, Est¨¦ril, was a cyber-Minotaur. A polis of fully cyborged Minotaurs from Miles¡¯s homeland. Evidently they were a very authoritarian polity but she didn''t talk about it much. Est¨¦ril had been Miles¡¯s assistant since before he came to Earth. ¡°Hey Gabby, what did you do this time?¡± She asked with a smile. While the most dissimilar in looks- she was cybernetic, beautiful, had horns - Est¨¦ril was my closest friend in the camp, if I had any friends, which I don''t, get off my case Big Fe. Shaking my head, before realizing even that movement hurt, I finished removing my armor and slid onto the table. ¡°Oh you know, field trials. Needed to see how my latest synth behaved.¡± ¡°Oh¡± she said with a gasp, ¡°Did your creation do that to you!?¡± She asked. ¡°What, no, no, well, I guess yes, err no, but not deliberately.¡± I quickly explained my outing as Miles ran his multifunction medical probe over my body and murmured to himself. Est¨¦ril automatically handed him his tools and equipment before he needed it and in a few minutes he had finished his diagnosis. ¡°Well Gabriela, you are lucky, as usual. Nothing broken, a few bruised ribs and a kidney contusion. I would order bed rest but I know you wont listen to me. But please sleep in the RV trailer so you don''t have to climb up that dang giant mech of yours. And stay around camp for a few days so you can heal. I could give you a few nano-knitters, but frankly it would be a waste, you just need time to heal.¡± I managed to look sheepish and say, ¡°Thanks Miles, I really appreciate it. And what about my head?¡± The throbbing had continued consistently during his inspection. Grabbing his data pad, he looked at it and his multi-glasses and said, ¡°What about your head, activity is nominal, no swelling, blood screen looks fine. Why, what are you feeling?¡± I stuttered, ¡°Oh nothing, I feel fine, I just wanted to make sure, it¡¯s my livelihood afterall.¡± I lied and smiled lamely. ¡°Huh. Well if you feel worse or anything send me a message right away. Est¨¦ril can you help her back to her bed, please.¡± The cyber-Minotaur gently reached out to help me sit up, and grabbed my gear. ¡°Sure doc, I will make sure she takes it easy.¡± Ch. 4 *** Mt Graham Day 2, afternoon We slowly walked out of the hovercraft and after a breath of desert air, my head started feeling much better. It really must have been my nerves or something. Est¨¦ril started to guide me back toward the RV trailer, and I balked.¡°No, no Est¨¦ril. It¡¯s only noon, there is so much daylight left.¡± She stopped and looked at me expectantly, ¡°Ok, I tell you what, if you promise to sleep down here, and have dinner with me. You can go back to work, but no heavy lifting or moving, please!¡± I quickly promised to comply and rushed, or in this case, shambled back to my Squad-Leader. ¡°Fe, initiate data transfer.¡± Big Fe was my most audacious project, ever. I was attempting to create a full on transhuman Artificial General Intelligence, a being smarter than any human, a true post-singularity learning and thinking machine. Of course I was years from completing it, but these logs, and most of my conversations really, were directed toward the AGI, I affectionately called him Big Fe. A classic name for a unique thinking machine. I had big plans for my Big Fe, it just might take a lot of time, effort, and money, but it will be worth it. He was currently housed in a massive computing core inside the engineering trailer. Nothing like the systems in my Squad Leader and not even related to the relics inside the vanilla synths. But I was due to give him an upgrade soon. Second hand computers weren¡¯t exactly common, but you cobble enough of them together and you start to get something. Gingerly sitting down into my hover chair I reviewed the damage and status reports from the 11 synths that went on patrol. Several of the machines had new scratches on the armor, and 3 had strained servo motors, not to mention the mess that was my test subject, Squad Leader. I decided that I would inventory this synth first, repair the others and come back to the Squad Leader tomorrow. A quick telemechanic operation and some judicious applications of my auto-hammer and I had the cyborg armor off the core chassis. >>See no lifting required eh Fe?>> The remaining machine was clearly a cybernetic construct but it was far from factory fresh. I had doubled the computational core capacity, reinforced the skeletal-musculature, and rerouted several of the sensors. It all added up to a wiring mess, but a very functional, wiring mess. It turns out the dinosaur horn had destroyed the left shoulder-joint and upper arm. Both legs were cracked and bent, and the right arm was out of socket. A quick diagnostic reported that the primary and secondary controllers had no detectable faults. Well, this would be easy enough to fix, tomorrow. I turned my attention to the rest of the squad and I ordered the other damaged bots to the 3rd bay. After a physical, and mental inspection, I quickly got into a groove of fixing and filling armor and recalibrating the servos. Unauthorized reproduction: this story has been taken without approval. Report sightings. A polite throat clearing coincided with my last repair, ¡°Oh hey Est¨¦ril, perfect timing. I just finished repairs on the last bot.¡± She smiled politely and pointed at the wreckage of my disassembled Squad Leader. I laughed, ¡°Oh yeah I haven''t even started on that, it will take a bit more work, but I have time as a campbound invalid right?¡± It was her turn to laugh as she asked, ¡°Your place or mine, for dinner.¡± I glanced at the campfire, it looked like Sunny & Alex, Molly, and Miles were all around the fire getting ready for dinner. ¡°Actually, I should set up my RV for habitation, would you mind eating there?¡± I responded. She barely even paused, ¡°Sure Gabby, that makes sense.¡± We headed over to the RV trailer. I hadn''t even deployed the slideouts yet. With a mental command the 2 full length slides began to spread out from the 10m trailer. I turned the AC and lights on for good measure. ¡°Huh I should have turned the AC on a while ago, but at least it''s cooler out here than our previous campsite.¡± I remarked as we climbed up the steps into the RV trailer. The higher elevation of this site made for all around cooler weather, for a desert. ¡°So, Gabby, why don''t you hang out with us at the campfire, I don''t get it.¡± Est¨¦ril wondered out loud as we explored all the rooms. The RV was a typical setup, 4 double bedrooms, 2 full baths, a living room, dining room, and kitchen. I walked into the kitchen and toward the fridge, ¡°I dunno, everyone is fine, I guess. I just don''t see the point. I mean it''s like hanging out with my parents but you know, they aren¡¯t my parents. After we lost mom, I clung pretty close to dad, but now, I rather just work, sleep, repair and focus on the job. I mean I know Sunny means well, and Miles cares but, I guess, I feel like a kid still around them.¡± Est¨¦ril was quiet as I grabbed the top two Monsantech? branded readi-meals ? and threw them in the microwave. ¡°First, readi-meals ?, really? Second, you know you are supposed to microwave them separately? And third, that''s on you honey. They don''t treat you like a child, they give you full autonomy, respect the heck out of your work and synths, and damn you are still in your teens.¡± It was my turn to be quiet. As the quiet whir of the microwave and the louder fans of the AC trying to pull out a day¡¯s worth of heat provided a background humm, I shrugged my shoulders. ¡°Yeah I guess, I mean sure that sounds right but I don''t know, ok. I gotta do what works for me. Ya know? And hey I am eating with you so that is something right?¡± The microwave chimed and Est¨¦ril replied under her breath, ¡°If you can call this eating.¡± I threw the silverware and plate at Est¨¦ril as I grabbed the two ready meals. ¡°See nice and hot, and half the time, ish.¡± We sat down at the dining room table, after moving a few chairs for Est¨¦ril. Dinner was a nice respite and I enjoyed talking about nothing with Est¨¦ril, but more than half my mind was still thinking about the Squad Leader and its weird behavior. I might have remotely issued a few debug scripts. After dinner, Est¨¦ril stood up on her massive legs and said ¡°Thanks for the meal Gabby, and thanks more for the chat. Try not to be a stranger ok. Oh and take a shower, you really stink.¡± Giving her a rude gesture with my fist, as she left, I did manage to take a whiff. I was a bit ripe. I guess deploying the RV with its full size bathroom did have its perks. The shower was a bit painful, lifting my arms was going to hurt for days, but the big bed was admittedly quite nice as I drifted off to sleep. Ch. 5 *** Mt Graham Day 3 I woke up with a start. Either I had a dream about my weird headaches or my headache came back during my sleep. But as I sat up in bed, my head cleared quickly and the pain disappeared. Just my sore back and ribs, oh joy. I got ready, suited up, and headed to the camp to grab some synkaf. Sunny was still at the campfire. ¡°Morning Sunny¡± I said with fake cheer. He watched me over the rim of his giant kaf mug. His human face looked at me with an indescribable expression. ¡°Heard you got banged up yesterday.¡± Avoiding his eyes I replied, ¡°Yeah but it was no biggie, just a little bruising. My synths took out a Tyrannosaurus dinosaur! And I more importantly, think I have a lead on the malfunction.¡± His face changed into an amused smile. ¡°You are so much like your dad kiddo. Glad you are ok. I can see you got the better of the beastie. Be sure to put those hides and horns away, don''t want to attract any critters. I worry about you, but I am not going to give you a lecture, sounds like you did all right. Please call us if you ever get over your head, ok?¡± With that he slammed the burning kaf back, closed his helmet and rolled away in a trail of dust, his dual treads zipping him out of camp and up the gulch in record time.He paused at the top of the trail and turned back to me, ¡°Oh and that was a Nodosaurus variant, not a frakking Tyrannosaurus Rex!¡± He chuckled as he continued on his way. ¡°Huh?¡± I responded eloquently. I didn''t even get a chance to ask him how the prospecting was going. Staring at my synkaf mug for a while, I wasn''t sure what to do next. Eventually the malaise evaporated, and I ordered a few of the Road-synths to collect the harvested parts and put them in a sealed bin in our primary hauler, the top of the line Kombi-max, again courtesy of BDwerks?. This mega-hauler on wheels has full environmental isolation, integrated storage, and advanced transportation features. Everything you need for the post-apocalyptic wastelands of my homeland. We were far from full, but the pre-war artifacts combined with whatever minerals or salvage we found here would be enough to return to town and sell off. Not that I was looking forward to town, I much preferred to be out in the wilds away from everything. Shaking myself out of my reverie, I headed back to the engineer trailer. Cracking my knuckles I got to work on my Squad Leader. First, I removed the primary and secondary controllers and isolated them. I wanted to rule out common mode failures. After hooking the primary controller up to the trailer, and therefore Big Fe, I reviewed the log files from the fight. Amazingly, the main combat sequence only lasted a minute and a half! The Squad Leader coordinated with all 10 other synths. It assed the threat, devised a plan to ambush, executed, froze, and then adapted to the threat and finished off the monster. The small group tactics seemed simple but effective. The accuracy was disappointing but precise shots were tricky for anyone in combat conditions, and the synths could use more calibration inside the newer, larger armored bodies. The Road-synths and Hopper-synths were straightforward cybernetic hacks. Royal Road is the home of this novel. Visit there to read the original and support the author. The Squad Leader however was a major upgrade. It was far more customized than the other Power Construction Corp?drones or even the American Empire cybernetics, with a bit of Black Market (bootleg CyNet?) sensor and communication software thrown in. And all made possible courtesy of Gabby Co. Not that I had even a fake corp at this time. Back to the hardware, the Squad Leader was throwing a kernel level 0 error after 12 hours of continuous field operations, but now after about 2 hours it had thrown the same error. Something had changed. Level 0 was the resilient operations and safety protocols. This was the heart of the operating system. Essentially, if a drone or synth couldn''t trust itself to operate it would shut down, the resilience protocols were adaptive and capable of self monitoring and would initiate shutdown if the synth wasn¡¯t confident it would operate inside of given parameters. I had used the basic scaffolding from the PCC unmanned drones. While I had tweaked it extensively, I mean what researcher worth her salt, wouldn''t, it didn''t make sense. I began to run several parallel simulations to see what behavior would trigger the fault and what wouldn''t. My psychic powers allowed me to predict minimally into the future, for me it worked best on computational executions, and less well in meat space.Combined with the raw computing power of Big Fe I could tackle innumerable different scenarios and rule them out quickly. I kept going around in a circle, the resilience logic seemed sound. I compared the diff from the primary and backup controllers and they were identical! So nothing out of whack when they failed over or voted together. I spent an entirely too unproductive day banging my head against the software with nothing as progress. As the day was winding down, I gave up. Tomorrow I decided to fix the frame and armor, that at least I could do. Sunny waved from the campfire and Est¨¦ril smiled at me. I nodded back to everyone but headed back to the RV. The extra space was nice, but I already missed my hammock and layout in Gretta. Gretta was home, this was like staying at a hotel, the few times I went on travel with dad and we had to go to other surviving locations around the West. A quick meal and I was ready to turn in, my body still ached and I knew tomorrow could be as frustrating as today. I woke up around 3am, my head had the same stabbing pain and nagging ache that I got the night before and when I first got injured. No, not when I got injured, but when I returned to camp. In any event, it wasn''t excruciating as much as an abrupt and sudden jolt of fear of the unknown which transitioned into a nagging ache. As I looked around the bedroom, eventually the feeling went away, again. I got up and walked into the RV¡¯s kitchen, the motion lights turning on as I made a glass of Citrus myx ? from the powder. I chugged the drink and decided to try to get back to sleep. I lay in my bed for several hours, worried about what injury could be the source of my headaches before finally drifting off into a fitful sleep. Ch. 6 *** Mt Graham Day 4 Feeling even more tired than usual, I still was eager to get back to my synth and its mysterious shutdowns. I quickly got ready, grabbed a meal bar and headed out to get my usual morning synkaf. And again, Sunny was waiting at the campsite. ¡°How ya doing Gabby,¡± he greeted me. ¡°Meh, didn''t sleep great but I''m looking forward to getting back to my broken synth. I meant to ask yesterday. How is the salvaging going?¡± He put his empty kaf mug down, ¡°Eh you know how it goes. Three days and no salvage or material identified. I am going to give it one more day and then transition to prospecting and mineral testing. I will drill some deeper pilot holes and see what minerals are laying around. After all there is gold in ¡®dem hills!¡± He ruefully laughed. The life of a miner is one of hope springs eternal. I replied, ¡°Well my premonition really did seem to indicate a worthwhile find was in this area, but who knows how long ago, or what kind of ¡®worth¡¯ it meant.¡± He nodded and said, ¡°I am glad to see you taking it easy, you got all the time you need to keep working on those drone, err ¡®bot, ... things. After we finish with this site we can head back to Neu Ca?on proper and see what we can get for the stuff we already found. Cya at dinner kiddo.¡± With that he rolled back and left the campfire heading back up into the foothills. I grabbed a thermos and mug of kaf and headed to my engineering trailer. ¡°They are called synths, Sunny¡±. I muttered to myself. My Squad Leader was right where I had left him, in pieces. Sighing, just a little bit, I put my mug on my hoverseat and grabbed my tools. Today I was going to get the body up to snuff and ignore the freezing and reset bug. With that goal in mind, I began to remove the broken arm and shoulder. In a few hours I had the broken limbs (two legs, the shoulder joint and arm) removed and set out on the workbench. The shoulder and arm were slag and would need to be scrapped. The two legs had clean breaks and could be repaired but that would require time to fill, reinforce and reconnect the telemetry and control lines. Instead I opted to throw the legs on a future work pile and went to my junkyard for repairs. And by junkyard I meant my kombi-buses. Bus #2 specifically. I hobbled over to the second of three buses and managed to force the door open. Inside was an utter mess. Wall to wall, floor to ceiling the bus was jam packed full of broken drones, cybernetics, battlefield salvage and equipment. Fortunately, I had the mostly intact cybernetic parts located toward the front of the bus. After 30 minutes of looking, and shoving piles around, I managed to find two matching clean legs, from two different cyborgs, of course. A quick psychic inspection and I was sure these legs would work. I had trouble finding a left arm and shoulder that wasn''t already damaged. But an hour later I had everything I needed. I asked a Road-synth from bus #1 to come and carry the somewhat macabre pile of robo-limbs back to my engineering bay. I took an unusual break for lunch and said hi to Est¨¦ril before getting back to the synth. She was cooking a delicious vegetable stew and the smells might have been the real reason I stopped for lunch. I ate quickly and headed back to the engineering trailer. I had the legs swapped in record time, they were just plug and play. The shoulder joint was smashed and I took my time reshaping and linking the articulation before I could replace the arm. In the end, it was nearing evening before I had a complete synth again. I was hoping to calibrate the movement for my Squad Leader today, but that wasn''t going to happen. One of the challenges I had to overcome with my modifications was the body identity for each synth, an artificial sense of proprioception. A cyborg, and the overlay kinematic processor knows exactly how long their reach is and how far they can move their limbs. But when I place them in Roadrunner, Grasshopper, or cyborg armor, their length, height and weight changes. Essentially, I give the synths a case of body dysmorphia. I need to retrain and calibrate each synth to adapt to their new ¡®bodies.¡¯ I need to redo calibration and training for the Squad leader because it had new limbs installed. I debated having the Squad Leader run by itself overnight, but I decided a zombie-like drone wandering around camp might not be the best of ideas, even if the camp Road-synth guards would recognize it. This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there. I decided to risk climbing Gretta and I headed toward my mech which was towering behind the engineering trailer. My dad gave me Gretta on my birthday nearly 2 years ago. He had just finished the entire design run of the newest flying power armor suits and was given a nice bonus. He surprised me with the ¡®Power Construction Corp? 54r Provender Mecha.¡¯ The PCC technology was well ahead of anything we could manufacture locally, including Black Market resources, even if the 54r was an older model. It was solid, dependable, and perfect for me out here in the wastelands. It stood 10m tall upright, add another meter for the shoulder mounted missile pods. The thick arms were capable of combat as well as digging, forestry, and construction. It wouldn''t win any races with a top speed of 100 kph, but our normal cruising speed was a sedate 50 kph to make sure the entire convoy could stick together. In addition to the two medium range missile pods, the other weapon of note was an arm mounted dual plasma caster. Capable of dealing with smaller and closer targets, the twin casters were a nice back up, especially when I didn''t want to waste the serious credits with launching missiles. I debated switching out one of the medium launchers for a more versatile energy based weapon but I hadn''t got around to doing that yet. My custom green and gold paint job didn''t really blend in with the environment, but to be fair, a 11m battle mech doesn''t really blend in much, period. I gently began to climb the footholds up the left leg. My chest still smarted far more than I would have liked, but I persevered. I palmed the bio-lock on the top hatch and fell into the small pilot compartment. 2 passenger chairs were raised and behind the pilot and copilot seats. A water tank with fresh chilled water, and a mini-food reefer rounded out the amenities. There was enough room for 4 lockers that were supposed to contain a full complement of body armor, rifles and ammo for the 4 occupants. But at this moment I only had a pilot jumpsuit, which only got used on longer trips, my city clothes, and my body armor. After my dad sprung for the Provender, I thought I should get some PCC body armor to go with it. The utilitarian Field Engineer Body Armor ? had called my name. While not available on the open market, at least for non-corpo civilians, a few Black Market contacts found a brand new suit that fell off the back of a hover-truck, convenient enough for me. I thought about augmenting the suit with an exoskeleton to increase speed, strength, and endurance, much like Power Construction Corp? had done for their exo-power armor troops, but it was yet another thing on my list. And my broken power armor was calling my name more than modifying my body armor. For now it was a vanilla suit with a suite of sensors in the helmet- with a wide central band multi-sensor in the middle of the chest. It made me look like a mega-city cyberpunk, but I didn''t care. It had additional sensors built in for a mechanic like me. The integrated plasma torch, micro disassembler, and autodriver rounded out the mechanic focused features. I had a belt of various tools and a pistol attached to its waist. Where did I put my sonic multi-too? Sunny had recommended a simple plasma pistol courtesy of BDwerks? and our massive loan (a PGE knockoff platform, naturally). This suit had become my daily wear out on our travels. After I finished hanging my armor in its alcove, I grabbed a self warming readi-meal ? and reviewed my repair logs. Gretta was in fine shape and ready to go, the micro-fusion power supply was in perfect order and the internal body sensors were all within normal ranges. The squad of 10 Road-synths and 10 Hopper-synths were all in the green as well. I finished up my report to Big Fe and turned in. My hammock swayed gently back and forth as I drifted off to sleep, concerned my nocturnal headaches would return. Ch. 7 *** Mt Graham Day 5 I woke up with the sunrise shining into the cab again, my headache had returned but not, perhaps, with the same force as the night before. I was glad to see the trend was heading in a positive direction, as I got ready for day five at this campsite. I almost slipped on the middle rung as I clambered down the mech, but I managed to catch myself in time. Looking around quickly, I was relieved to see no one, but a few Road-synths were around to see my slip. I repeated my routine and headed to the campfire for kaf. Sunny had left already, but I saw a message waiting in my queue in the peripheral of my eye via my head-comp. Sunny¡¯s message let me know that he and the mining synths had switched to drilling deeper pilot holes and mineral assays. Yesterday they didn''t find much of note other than some trace iron deposits and no salvage. They were going to continue for 2 more days and then we could decide if we wanted to pull up stakes here and move on. This news meant I had at least 2 more days to work on the errant Squad Leader, and win my bet to boot. I headed back to my usual station and sank into the hover chair with a comfortable sigh. Cracking my knuckles I returned to the reinitialization setup for my prized pupil. I would need to run several calibration tests to ensure the new physio-mechanics has been internalized by the Squad Leader¡¯s controller. I decided to finish replacing just the backup controller and button the synth up again. I would continue to poke and prod the primary controller on my bench as the backup relearned how to walk. When it was fully configured I could copy its profile into the primary controller and the synth would be good to go, minus the fatal system crashing, of course. The cyborg armor/ disguises were the easiest to remove and replace, and in less than 45 minutes I had the synth walking laps around the engineering trailer. I queued up a series of more progressively difficult physical challenges, running, climbing, jumping, rolling, crawling, dodging, etc for the synth to perform this morning. I wish I had mobile drones that could film and follow, but that was something else to put on my list. Instead, I tasked a Hopper-synth to follow and record the performance. The video feed could be sent directly to the Big Fe mainframe here in camp, at least. I turned my attention back to the controller logic. Sinking my consciousness into the primary controller for my Squad Leader synth, I began my work. I rarely needed a tablet or portable computer, I was the user interface after all. I pulled up the operating system kernel for the primary controller. I had spent an entire day troubleshooting this bugger two days ago and couldn¡¯t find any problem with the resilient operations protocols. I decided to give it a go again and reinitialized my simulation for even crazier parameters to figure out what state would cause the synth to freeze, crash, and reset. The Squad Leader controller and therefore synth would come online fairly quickly after a reset (from a human perspective at least), but as we saw with the previous battle, the reset could occur at the worst possible time and lead to a total party wipe, or worse. I began launching the simulations in Big Fe and varied time, terrain, proximity, sensor inputs, anything I could think of to trigger the fault. As I sat back and reviewed the progress, a thought began to niggle at the back of my head. Something about one of the runs had made me think I was off track. Proximity. What was different about this outing versus all the other outings? This was the first time I had accompanied the synths on a combat trip. The synths had engaged in combat before, and had gone on longer trips, which is when I learned of the 12 hour reset. But this time I was directly involved in combat. The safety protocols! I had assumed the synth was failing to adapt to some new parameter or condition and the resilience subroutines were crashing. But perhaps it was the safety protocols in kernel level zero instead! Pausing the simulations, I pulled up the logic for the safety protocols. It was all very vanilla stuff. It hadn¡¯t been tweaked much at all, which is why I overlooked it at first. The resilience operations stack is where I had done some major hacking to kick this synth up a notch and start it on the path to a true self-aware neural mesh machine. The safety protocols were a cut and paste with variable names changed. Where the original drones had a ¡®do no harm¡¯ to American Empire officers unless directly ordered by a superior officer, and a ¡®avoid harm if possible¡¯ to humans in general, I had hardened the commands to ¡®do no harm¡¯ to all camp members and an active command ¡®prevent harm¡¯ via a Guard Target mode, to make sure I didn''t get hurt. But this seemed all straight forward. It''s not like that sort of command hasn¡¯t been used before in artificial intelligence. This emergent neural mesh I was building was one of many that had this sort of prime directive to not allow any harm to key staff. I wasn¡¯t trodding new ground here so I couldn''t figure out how this was different. Humm. I leaned back in my hoverchair and watched the fully clad cyborg-synth Squad Leader climb up and over the 3 buses, jump off, and roll to the back of the bus to continue climbing and jumping all over. I remember running through the labyrinthine tunnels of the underground complex and climbing on the various research equipment when I was a child, but at what age did that sort of thing stop being fun? ¡®Prevent harm.¡¯ It was based on a standard Guard Target profile. It''s possible the active command to prevent harm wigged out when the synth decided it had directly or indirectly caused me harm when the tyrannosaurus dinosaur, err whatever it was, had charged at the scrimmage line. But at most the synth should have asked for new orders from me or moved onto the next most pressing directive. It makes no sense to freeze because you are worried you did a poor job! You know what a poor job is? Freezing in combat! So if I had a tentative reason where the synth was failing in the control logic, I still had no idea why it was doing it predictably after 12 hours on patrol. What was so special about 12 hours away from camp? Thinking back to the conditions normal subjugated drones operated in, I knew they went on short, but also long-term patrols, sometimes for weeks at a time. Heck they mass produced them enough to consider them disposable pest eliminators. Where pests are, of course, intelligent aliens, humans that happened to be born without corpo or Empire sponsorship, or anyone who disagrees with the fascist government. >>Not that I was bitter, Big Fe.>> But it was rumored that dad was killed by the American Empire, not that I know what to believe any more. So if the drones were used to long-range operations, why was my modified one crashing after 12 hours? The other modified synths weren¡¯t doing that. I reached out to a vanilla drone in bus #2, one of the ones I haven''t got around to modifying or suiting up in a disguise. The legs were gone but the spinal mounted core controller and sensors were intact. I remotely fired up the drone and reviewed the protocols for long range patrols, searching for 12 hours. A ha! Phone home. The ¡®bots were required to at least attempt to phone home every 12 hours. But if they cannot, due to damage, range, or interference they would continue with their prime directives, no muss no fuss. So why was my one Squad Leader choking? My other synths were fine. So if it wasn''t the resilience operations, and it wasn''t the safety protocols, what did that leave? Reaching for my kaf mug, I realized 1) it was empty long ago and 2) it was well after lunch. I looked forlornly back at the campfire and outdoor kitchen, but it looked like everything had been cleaned up. I debated heading into the trailer RV to get a drink other than water and decided to go for it. I stood up and stretched my aching back. After a stroll to the RV trailer to loosen up my limbs, I grabbed a Citrus myx ? and made a big batch to take back to my workstation. Returning with the pitcher in hand, I filled my mug and sat back into my chair. Eyes glazing over I began to review the logic again for the two protocols. Perhaps it wasn''t one or the other, I realized, it could be an interaction between the two. The other synths had a much simpler resilience operations protocol as compared to the Squad Leader. And the drones didn''t have a resilience suite of protocols, they had a standard adaptive learning protocol that was quite limited, as anyone who had ever fought a drone could attest. But fast and lethal, I had to hand it to their designers for that. At this point in my investigation, signs were pointing at some sort of emergent behavior in the interactions between the two protocol stacks. I didn''t have a strong desire to recreate the circumstances by putting myself in harm''s way again. I decided to create a simulation and run it in Big Fe. After stepping through a recreation of the attack I noticed the function calls to the safety protocols from the resilience operations. As soon as the call was placed, I traced it to the safety protocol. What was interesting is that in the simulation the exception was caught, as it should be, and advanced to the next primary directive. In this case, ensuring my security by ordering the other ¡®bots to recover me. If Big Fe¡¯s simulation didn''t reproduce this particular error we might have a hardware defect after all. The author''s tale has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon. I had ruled that out because my telemechanics inspection hadn¡¯t found anything failing or broken. I blinked my eyes and came out of my coding trance. After a few sips of my drink I picked up the primary controller and inspected it with both my helmet micro-lense and mental probes. In its current state, there was no fault anywhere! But part of my resilience protocol actually adapts the controller hardware on the fly. The software can recombine and organize the hardware to optimize the needed operations, especially the prioritized ones like safety and resilience operations. I fed the simulator into the primary controller as a hardware-in-the-loop setup and the crash occurred! It looks like this error was a unique combination of the generic safety protocol, my modified resilience operations protocols, and the specific controller hardware that I had added for this Squad Leader. I reached back to the other drone I was inspecting earlier. Now that I knew what I was looking for, it looks like there was a small deficit in the transmorphic hardware for the Squad Leader. Stupid corpo quality control; I purchased name brand CyNet? systems. They used these compute fabrics for everything. I purchased 4 top of the line kibi-compute nodes for my squad leaders, and this is the fekking result?! Of course I had missed it too, because whenever I was testing the hardware it was not self adapting on the fly. I would need to change my testing routines going forward. I made a note and sent it to Big Fe to propagate. Back to the Squad Leader, I bypassed the section of corrupt hardware on the primary controller. I psychically called Squad Leader to return to my workstation and the borg-synth trotted back toward me. I had it stand up into the harness and I cracked its chest to get access to the secondary controller as well. After inspecting the secondary controller that I had reinstalled inside the synth, I discovered the exact same hardware failure. What is the point of backup controllers if they suffer from the same flaw! 2 processors with poor hardware, just my luck. I bypassed the damaged portion of the transmorphic processor in the compute cluster and cloned the physio-mechanic profile and copied into the primary controller. I then reinstalled the primary controller. And for good measure I crafted an exception handler that would look for future errors in the neuromorphic hardware¡¯s response to the resilience operation protocols. Hopefully future hardware, no matter how flawed, would catch and recover without crashing. Faster than a human could perceive at least. I was buttoning back up the Squad Leader when I received a message from Sunny. Sunny to Gabriela, come to our location at once, we found¡­ something. I was excited. Before I went to check it out, I sent the Squad Leader and 5 Hopper-synths and 5 Road-synths to accompany it on a 12 hour tour. Its mission was to observe and evade, but not engage, it should survive the night that way. I set up a maneuver tree sequence: Patrol & Observe ELSEIF Surreptitious Evade ELSEIF Active Avoidance. In other words, run away if you see anything. I looked around the campsite, I didn''t want to hoof it the 8 miles to the dig site Sunny had sent, and we had a decided lack of hoverbikes or small craft no matter how much I complained. I spied an extra jetpack I was going to refit and install on one of the synths. The electric battery was full and I slapped it onto the hooks on my back, Gabby engineering at its finest. I sealed my helmet and took off toward the mining site. As I looked back to camp I saw two Hopper-synths from the bus take off in pursuit. I didn''t remember ordering them to accompany me but I was glad I had summoned them. The 8 mile flight took 5 minutes. Better living through technology indeed, eh Big Fe? As I flared the jets, Sunny rolled out a dig shaft cut into the side of the hill. He waved at me excitedly. ¡°Gabby, great to see you! I don''t know what we have here but it''s something unusual.¡± he spoke quickly, his excitement spilling out. ¡°As you know, we were drilling deeper pilot holes looking for varying mineral concentrations. In this one spot the miner-synth hit something and didn''t know what to do. It called me over and I checked it out. At first I thought it was a false alarm, lots of random stuff underground. The thermal, optical, and sonic sensors see nothing below us. But I didn''t understand what the drill bit had hit. So I ordered the big boys to start digging. As soon as they got here the two Heavy Labor drones began creating this tunnel down 15 steps or so. Come look.¡± Sunny immediately rolled back down the tunnel. I could see the pilot hole 20m further up the hill. As we descended, I could hear the miner-synths still reinforcing, digging and moving earth.We came upon a small outcrop in the tunnel and found a dull black metal tube running from above us in the ceiling down into the floor. ¡°So what is this?¡± I asked. Rapping it with my knuckles. ¡°Exactly!¡± Sunny said excitedly. While I couldn''t see his face under his helmet I could tell he was beyond excited. ¡°It¡¯s an old pipe?¡± I answered him. ¡°It''s an old, invisible, advanced material pipe that goes¡­somewhere.¡± He retorted. ¡°Run that by me again,¡± I asked. ¡°Right, so I told you, that when the miner-synth¡¯s drill hit something, it was this pipe above us. I ran my scans and didn''t see anything. And ¡®nothing¡¯ was more suspicious than something. Here look, I will use my hand scanner and you can see what it reports.¡± Sunny explained as he raised his secondary left hand and moved it over the pipe slowly. He sent the sensor feed directly to my head-comp. The feed scrolled across my left eye. I understood about half of it, but what I did see looked like rocks and dirt. But not a pipe or man made material. ¡°Now it''s not super strong or anything. I was able to dill the top with a bit of force, but I didn''t want to damage it until we figured out what this was. It''s transparent to all the sensors that I have. I have the big drones tunneling a switch back so that the path will be stable and we can keep going lower and see where this pipe leads. I hope it¡¯s not a fancy pre-war septic tank. Though, you might be able to sell ancient shit to the right buyers.¡± ¡°I could give it a look around, if you want?¡± I offered. He looked at me for a moment and said, ¡°Sure why not.¡± I returned to the surface as Sunny followed me. I sat down, cross-legged, a bit harder in body armor than you might think. I closed my eyes and let my mind wander. I eventually felt the out of body experience trigger. I looked around the ephemeral world that I co-existed in, and walked back down the tunnel. I wasn''t fully in the Astral Plane, or Dreamtime as others called it, but I wasn''t fully in the Material Plane either. I could phase through material but I didn''t want to get lost. I made my way back to the pipe as the drones and everything ignored my presence. I placed my immaterial hand on the pipe and willed myself down. I sank, and sank and sank. It is very hard to tell distance in the ephemeral halfway world. But I could tell something had changed. The density and composition had changed radically. There was a wall of some sort, surrounding a small space. It was pitch black of course, so I couldn''t see anything. But I could tell there was a room of some shape. I paced back and forth for a while trying to get a sense of the size. It seemed to be roughly cubic perhaps 8 paces wide and deep,and perhaps a bit longer tall? Say 3m x 3m x 5m. If I had to guess. I walked a few concentric circles of increasing diameters around the room, and again below it. But frankly, I was afraid of getting lost and not getting back to my body. There was a silver thread I could follow back to my body, and I began to return directly. I walked up toward the surface and came into the light 15m uphill from my body. I sank back in and opened my eyes. I blinked a couple of times and spoke, ¡°well there IS something down there. I don''t know how deep, another 8 or 12m? But there is a small bunker or room. About 3m x 3m x 5m in size. I think there is something inside, but I have no idea what. I looked around for other rooms but couldn''t find them either. I didn''t have a great sense of perspective but I could tell there was a hollow void, for the most part. Anyway, how long was I gone?¡± The sun had moved a bit lower on the horizon. Sunny responded, ¡°Almost an hour. You seemed to meditate for 45 minutes then go still for 15 minutes. And great to hear about the room down below. We should be able to excavate it by tomorrow morning. I think I will stay up all night and work with the drones to get as far as we can. Go tell the rest at camp. Hopefully tomorrow morning we can see what we found!¡± I gave Sunny a smile, and nodded. ¡°Sounds good. I will return and see you in the morning!¡± I fired up my jetpack, signaled to my escorts and returned to the campsite. The flight was easy and the lowering sun bathed the foothills and gully in glowing reds and yellows. The desert has a breathtaking beauty all to itself. Miles and Est¨¦ril, Alexandria and Molly were setting up for dinner. I landed, and managed not to fall down or stumble, too badly. I joined them around the communal fire pit. I quickly filled them in with the exciting news and let them know that hopefully we can peek inside tomorrow morning. They invited me to dinner, as usual, and I declined as usual. This time I had a real excuse. That much out of body travel without much practice left me exhausted. I could play with drones and machines all day, but a premonition, out of body experience, or aura reading would tucker me right out. I left the campfire and headed back to my castle in the sky. Or at least my hammock in a head. I flopped through the hatch and managed to strip my armor off before I drifted off to sleep. Ch. 8 *** Mt Graham Day 6 I woke up with a languid stretch. My body was still sore but my mind was clear as a bell. I must be on the mend, the panic and pain has subsided! My nightmare was gone. I was excited for my good health, and for the mystery of what could be in our bunker in the ¡®basement.¡¯ I grabbed my breakfast bar, donned my gear and slid down as fast I could to the ground. I was working on my telekinesis to make the ascent and descent easier, but I had never gotten quite the hang of it. >>I guess I should throw that on the list too, eh Big Fe?>> I had never met someone quite like me before. Magic and esoteric powers weren¡¯t uncommon these days, in the bunker where I grew up or in a city like Neu Ca?on. But my specific skills seemed unique, just like me, my dad used to say. My Squad and Leader had returned overnight, and I was eager to review their status, but first I needed to check in on the dig site. I headed to the central campsite and saw Alexandria and Molly puttering in the kitchen. And by puttering, I mean Molly was preparing breakfast and synkaf and Alexandria was watching and ordering Molly around. Shaking my head I sat down in a camp chair. I will never understand adults like that. The smell from the stuffed battered toast and sausage was heavenly. ¡°So has anyone heard from Sunny? Are we ready?¡± I asked excitedly. Alexandria tore her eyes from Molly and favored me with a smile. ¡°Yeah, he actually came back 2 hours ago. He was taking a nap but told us to wake him when you got up. Miles said we could go ahead and investigate without him. He was working on something important in his lab. Grab some food and I will wake Sunny.¡± I looked at the warm plates of food, looked at Molly and grabbed a serving of food and a mug of kaf. I just had a breakfast bar but the food looked amazing. Molly was a shockingly good cook, not that I cared about that. But man, if she was doing the cooking more often, I might be missing out. >> Oh come on, You don''t know what a good meal is like, Big Fe.>> I smiled at Molly as I cleaned my plate. ¡°That was great Molly. Thank you!¡± She gave me a small smile and what almost looked like a curtsy. As I was loading my plate and mug into the cleaner, Sunny rolled toward us. ¡°Alright gang, gather up. Gabby, grab one of the trucks, we can all head out together. I will ride in the back and you 3 can sit in the cab. That way we all get out there together. Molly, thanks for the grub as usual, but save some in the warmer for me when I get back.¡± Sunny was clearly excited to get on the road. I ran over to our vehicle line-up and grabbed one of our electric trucks. We had a few dirt cheap Roundabouts for towing and moving equipment around. I went with electric because I knew I could alway charge ¡®em, but flex fuel was an option as well for those who liked messy internal combustion. They obviously didn''t have the range of the nuclear vehicles like the wheeled RV that Alexandria had or the hover setup that Miles owned. Or my mech, at that, but the Kombi-buses were electric too so we didn''t lose any range in our convoy. And I alway kept everything fully charged in camp. After jumping into the cab of one, I returned to the group. Sunny dropped the tailgate and drove up into the bed of the Roundabout. The others loaded up and we set off for the mining site. It only seats 2 comfortably but Molly crammed on Alexandria¡¯s lap and they seemed to do just fine. The drive took 20 minutes as we followed the switchbacks a bit up the dry creek bed and over the ridgelines and gullies. We didn''t see any wildlife or flying critters the entire time. The Sonoran Desert really can be a vaste and desolate space. The sparse trees (both alien and native) provided minimal protection or shade for any prey animals that might be out and about in daylight. The 2 miner-synths stood at attention outside the camp. And the 2 larger Heavy Labor Drones continued to push dirt away from the entrance and tamp down the path. Before I rolled to a stop Sunny was out of the truck bed and treading toward the entrance. ¡°Hold on there lover boy,¡± Alexandria said as she got out of the cab. She handed a burly rifle to Molly, that I hadn¡¯t seen her grab, as she sauntered after Sunny. Molly quickly followed the pair, any meekness seemingly fled as she held the rifle like she knew how to use it. Well, better than I could, in any event. >>Huh, as I said Big Fe, some adults are weird.>> We joined together and headed down into the mine shaft. Portable lights were embedded every 20 ft and Sunny¡¯s shoulder lamps lit up like a small star. We went down 2 switchbacks before we came to the treasure box. It, however, could not have looked less like a treasure if it tried. The same dull black metal had been excavated on all 3 sides. The left, right, and top all went back the full 3m. I guess my estimates were not that far off. I summoned the miner-synths with a thought. ¡°So Sunny, how do we want to crack into this,¡± I asked. ¡°Well, do you think you could do your magic and open the door?¡± He replied. Sighing, ¡°You know it''s not magic, and I guess it wouldn''t hurt to try.¡± I reached out and placed my hand against the wall facing us. There was one seam running down the middle, but we had no idea if that was a door, or a weld. I tried to reach any electro-mechanical door lock, computer, sensor, or even switch. But I felt nothing. I could still tell something was inside, but I couldn''t get a read on what. And at this close a range, I should have easily been able to if there was any tech at all. ¡°I got nothing. It might be a bunch of food, or books, or dust, for all we know.¡± I said. Nodding as if he expected that. ¡°Right well, nothing to do but try.¡± The 4 miner-synths walked into the small passerway but Sunny waved ¡®em back. ¡°I will give it a try to start.¡± Sunny proceeded to spin around, grab a large arm attachment, use his 2 lower arms to swap his upper right arm and replace it with a massive circular saw. I gotta say having the right tool for the job made any craft go that much more smoothly. I am sure chefs or musicians felt the same way. Or not, I had no idea how they even did their jobs. The grinding sound soon filled the mine shaft. Sparks began to fly into the ground and bounce around. Alexandria stepped back but Molly and I stayed where we were. While it was slow going the blade was obviously having an effect. It took Sunny four separate sessions of grinding, cooling the blade, and grinding again before he had a line cut through the wall. After that two more cuts and he had the outline of three-fourths of a door. At that point he stepped back and ordered two of the miner-synths to grab the leading edges and peel the door open. The synths muscled into place and began to pull the door. Their drone musculature was impressively strong for the size, I would know, having rebuilt dozens and dozens of them. I still was surprised when the synths began to fold the door open. The metal gave a tortured screech and opened enough for Sunny, let alone the rest of us to get inside. I gave Sunny a questioning glance. He shrugged and said, ¡°And that is the difference between stiffness versus hardness¡± referring to the material properties of the treasure box. Alexandria stifled a giggle and Sunny rolled his eyes. He continued, ¡°Right. So I am going to go in there first, we could send a synth but I don''t want them to break anything fragile.¡± I was a bit worried, but Sunny was experienced. And he was a full conversion borg, if anyone could survive he could. I peeked around Sunny as he rolled into the unearthed room. His light shone across a tall figure and a coffin shape both covered in tarps. Sunny slowly panned his lights around the room. There was nothing else in the space. The covered figure and the covered¡­ coffee table? The figure was 4m tall and the object on the ground was nearly that long but much narrower. Sunny began to approach the figure and reached out to the tarp. You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author. I gasped! The tarp had fluttered from Sunny¡¯s movement or a breeze from our tunnel, but I had seen what lies beneath. Sunny froze instantly, ¡°Gabby¡± he hissed. ¡°What did you see!¡± ¡°Oh sweet Light, Sunny, it¡¯s a Mach 1!¡± I all but screamed. ¡°What!¡± He, Alexandria, and Molly responded in unison. ¡°Open it, it¡¯s a lost generation suit. You know a real life Mach 1!¡± Sunny grabbed the tarp and threw it behind him. His shoulder lights blazed off the revealed figure. The humanoid shape was nearly as tall as the room, A matte black non reflective surface covered every inch of the legendary suit of power armor. The legs, arms, chest and even head seemed to absorb the very light that shone on it by its default configuration. It had adaptive camouflage as the least of its capabilities. But the vantablack color was as famous as the suit was rare. Sunny stared at the machine for a moment and pivoted to the tarp covered object on the side. He pulled that away to reveal a companion drone. One of the most sophisticated camouflage systems this planet had ever seen, before or after the coming of the aliens and the doorways to hell. Legends say Mach 1 suits were created before the war and the coming of the doorways in a secret multi-corp collaboration. It was more similar to a full mech with neuro pilot controls, than a generic suit of power armor that followed a user''s movements. The suits were never put into production, they were too expensive, and corpo backstabbing scuttled the deal. Figure corpos couldn''t be helpful to save their own lives. Not only was the Mach 1 a combination of the best technology and innovation the corps (and their, at the time, government sponsors) could come up with. But it was also the one example of wide scale corporate collaboration. The best system and technology, from each company deftly integrated into a whole. The best Earth could offer. Until it utterly failed and the program died an ignoble death. Secrecy surrounded the entire program, but it was rumored less than 200 were made globally. But they were, and are the most advanced manned stealth combat system ever created. Most of the few Mach 1s you might ever come across were stolen and well worn or damaged. Often with broken camouflage systems. But this one seemed brand spanking new! We were speechless for several moments before Sunny snapped us out of it. ¡°Gabby, full systems check, is this the real deal? Molly, head to the tunnel entrance and keep a watch. I don''t want to lose this to anyone or anything.¡± As Molly left, I snapped out of my stupor and approached the suit, twice the size of me. I placed my hand on the hip and sank my conscience into the suit of power armor. Dang, this was pristine. The micro-fusion powerplant was on cold standby, so would need an external source to jump, but it appeared fresh as the day it was manufactured. The motive control, sensor telemetry, and environmentals seemed ready for a user. I performed a deep dive and got a sense of disuse and purpose unfulfilled. A few emotions of fright, inevitable resignation, and purpose lingered after all this time. This was a new in box RGE-UA-BADS-PCC Mach 1 Adaptive Camouflage Clandestine System!¡¯ I quickly checked out the areal companion drone next to it. And it appeared to be in order as well. Unfortunately this drone was the dumb kind, and was completely slaved, and inseparable from the main power armor. There was no intelligence or automation that I could ¡®leverage¡¯ for my own designs. The camouflage system, however, was causing me to drool and get turned on as the same time. >>Eww Big Fe, never you mind that.>> Sunny and even Alexandria stared at me with bated breath. ¡°Well?!¡± Sunny all but screamed. ¡°Amazing! Yeah, umm, this is the real deal as far as I can tell. Hot damn. See, now you can¡¯t knock my clairvoyant premonitions for another year now at least, after this find. I am now batting 43% baby! I mean most people haven''t even seen a picture of a Mach 1 and we have one in our hands!¡± I gloated. After a few more minutes in awe, we snapped into the professional salvage crew that we played on the vids. Wait! >> How cool would it be if they made a vid series about us eh? Fe, make a note.>> Anyway, I had the miner-synths carry the drone companion up to Molly but kept it inside the tunnel entrance for now. I also summoned one of the larger heavy labor-drones so I could attach the suit to charge and fire it up. I had to run up to the Roundabouts and grab its charging cable, but I was able to cross connect the two machines in no time. As the drone was charging the suit I checked in with Sunny. ¡°So how do you want to transport this back to camp? I could possibly remote pilot it or we could load it onto the Wagon?¡± I asked Sunny. He paused for a moment and said, ¡°I would prefer to strap it down to the bed of the Roundabouts and then take it back down. But I am not sure we can get it to fit as is. Perhaps, we could have you walk it into the bed and sit it down?¡± ¡°Do we want to wait until dark to load it up? We are in the middle of nowhere, but this is an invaluable prize. I think I can get it into the bed on my own.¡± I responded. ¡°Also do we want to salvage any of the sensor proof material?¡± Sunny was shaking his head, ¡°I want to get it loaded up and out of here as soon as we can, we can cover it with a tarp. I think we need to get it, and us, back to camp, ASAP. As for the transparent material, I grabbed a small sample of the material. It''s impossible to read, but not that strong so it might have limited applications. Still, I will share it with a few of my friends and we can come back if they think it¡¯s worth their time.¡± It took over an hour of trickle charge from the Heavy Drone to the nuclear reactor before it could fire up, but it started flawlessly. It really was the pinnacle of what corpo engineering could accomplish. >>Someday, Big Fe, you and I, will make it happen.>> I informed the crew we were ready to go as I shimmed out of my armor. No way was I going to pass up the opportunity to pilot a Mach 1! I didn''t have the advanced training for all the combat features, but I definitely could pilot and operate it. Especially with my Telemechanic connection, it was as intuitive and easy as walking. I sealed up the power armor hatch and turned on the lights and sensors. I had to stoop a bit to get through the cut door in the wall, but I managed to get out without scraping any edges or the pristine armor. I walked, very, slowly up the reinforced dirt tunnel through the switch backs. I came to a stop at the mouth of the tunnel. Molly had backed the truck back up to the entrance and 2 of the Heavy Drones were draping the tarp over the bed of the Roundabout. I turned around slowly, confirmed with Sunny that I would clear the sides and slowly sat down in the bed of the truck. The drones, under Sunny¡¯s direction, draped the tarp over me and began to strap me down. It felt weird to be stuck in an ancient suit of armor, covered in a tarp, strapped to the bed of a truck, but I wouldn''t trade it for anything. We had a hurried radio conversation. Sunny couldn''t drive the trucks because we hadn¡¯t yet adapted the cab for a full cyborg body, like we did their Gecko RV and the Dozer. Molly could drive it, but needed to stay here at the site with the companion drone. Alexandria could drive, but well, we decided, I would shut down the Mach 1 and then remote Telemechanic Operate the truck, from inside the Mach 1, in the bed. >>Being a master of machines did have its advantages, I gotta say Big Fe.>> I relinquished control of the power armor and took control of the Roundabout. Driving a truck was nothing compared to the power armor but I took it slow, Sunny carefully followed me back to the campsite. It took us nearly twice as long to return, but we didn''t want to risk our precious cargo. I slowly rolled into camp and parked the truck near our main cargo trailer, with the Pre-war artifacts, and seemingly inconsequential dinosaur parts. I shutdown and double checked the brakes on the truck before I then resumed my control of the Mach 1. Sunny had a few of the borg-synths I had summoned remove the tarp and unstrap the suit. As soon as Sunny gave me the all clear, I stood up. All in all, this salvage operation was flawless. I froze for a moment, worried I had jinxed it. After looking around camp and at Sunny, I walked up the open ramp into the Toyota-Daimler-Bilaindand Kombi-max. The massive truck swallowed the armor and most of our precious cargo. I did not have to bend over, in here, at least. The trailer was 5m x 5m x 15m. In the end, it took Sunny and I an hour to figure out how to safely and securely store the suit. We ended up placing a tarp on the ground and lying down face first so I could exit the suit. We strapped it down and double checked everything. I had sent one of the synths to drive the truck back to the dig site. By the time we were done Molly and Alexandria had returned with the truck and the covered areal drone companion. We had the borg-synths carry the flyer into the trailer and we secured that load as well. When we were all finished and swung the doors closed, we still had more room in the cargo area if we needed it even with the waste of space around the Mach 1. I sent the extra synths back to the kombi-bus and we all gathered around the campfire. Miles and Est¨¦ril joined us as the sun set and we regaled them with our incredible find. Miles seemed happy for us but not very impressed, Est¨¦ril at least was excited. I imagine Miles has similar marvels back home. We eventually got around to eating. Molly had managed to take leftovers and turn it into another fantastic dish. We were all quiet through dinner and in our own thoughts. After dinner we sat around staring into the fire. It has been an exciting and exhausting day for most of us. Finally as the stars shown brilliantly in the cooling desert sky, we could see a shimmer of hawking radiation coming off of the various temporary doorways spanning the horizon. It was a rare sight and hopefully a good omen. I bid everyone good night and returned to Gretta to sleep. As I was drifting off to sleep I instructed Big Fe to double check the synth guards all night long. Ch. 9 *** Mt Graham Day 7 My nocturnal headaches had returned and morphed into a nightmare where I was running, constantly being chased by shiny faceless metal monsters, and I could never seem to get away. I woke up grumpy until I checked in with Big Fe. Our camp guards had detected no intruders, the Kombi-Max showed that its status was unmolested. It seems like our precious cargo was safe! I hurriedly got dressed, forgoed my usual breakfast bar and hurried down Gretta. I ran to the camp site to find Alexandria and Molly savering a cup of kaf. They both smiled at me: Alexandria, with a big and appraising grin, Molly with a small smile. ¡°So, where is Sunny, what is the plan, are we going to head back to sell everything and become filthy rich? Or at least less in debt?¡± I asked the pair. Alexandria put down her mug and responded, ¡°Sunny wanted to close up the dig site. He said he was going to fill in the tunnels and rough up the ground in a larger area. Because the bunker was undetectable by you guys, hopefully no one else can find it either. It is empty but he didn''t want to leave that to chance, either.¡± I was chomping at the bit to leave, but that sounded like a reasonable precaution. I nodded my head. Alexandria continued, ¡°He thinks it will take at least all morning, but we can begin to break up camp and be ready to go this afternoon or first thing tomorrow?¡± I winced and said, ¡°yeah I guess that makes sense, I wish we could leave sooner. I will pack up the RV trailer, double check the charges on all the vehicles, and disconnect the power-interconnect for camp. I assume you guys will break down this campfire and get your RV ready.¡± Alexandria looked at Molly and gave a sharp nod. I quickly interjected, ¡°But I suppose we don''t need to tear down the kitchen and campfire right away.¡± Alexandria smiled knowingly and nodded her head. ¡°Molly, please feed Gabby and then join me in the RV, we have packing to do!¡± I will never understand the desire to shop and pack, at least for typical things most women find interesting. But I wasn''t going to pass up on Molly¡¯s food either. This morning Molly had a chile verde egg dish that was better than anything my parents or I ever made. Or even mis abuelos. >>But don''t think of telling them that Fe>> ¡°Thanks Molly,¡± I said with my mouth full. She nodded, quickly cleaned up the kitchen, and headed to their RV. I slowly finished breakfast, had a second cup of kaf, and placed my dishes in the cleaner. I had of course considered reverse engineering the stealth armor. It was an incredibly complex combination of materials sciences, active optical projections, sonic and RF cancellation, and a host of other capabilities I couldn''t list, let alone understand. While I know it would be amazing to have a full squad of stealth synths at my beck and call, the reality is that if the best corpos couldn''t create it in a cost effective manner. Than I had little chance of that in my makeshift camp. Plus a squad with a brain dead Squad Leader was a worthless one. I was mature enough to realize it was far better to sell this treasure than keep it to collect dust, or worse. I eventually decided to get back to work. I began issuing orders to the available synths to begin camp breakdown. I remotely instructed the RV trailer to begin closing up. I hoped I didn''t leave anything lying around, but I am sure it will be fine. I returned to my comfortable station and reached out to Big Fe. >>Double check the charging status of all electric vehicles, please. Also run a query on the synths¡¯ readiness.>> Issuing commands with a thought really saved time. I summoned my Squad Leader and reviewed the logs from all 11 of the synths that left yesterday. Seems like fauna was identified in several instances, but nothing appeared hostile. One other Nodosaurus was identified. >>gosh Big Fe, I hope it wasn''t a mate to the first one>> But the Squad maintained distance and did not engage. At the magical witching hour of 12, the Squad Leader suffered no faults or freezes. ¡°Yes,¡± I screamed out loud. That issue had been bugging me for 3 months! I would want to run several more tests and finish my second Squad Leader but it looks like we were finally on the path to a stable, and more sophisticated synthetic creation. The American Empire and even the preeminent Power Construction Corp? (PCC) could kiss my butt. Gabby was a force to be reckoned with! I wanted to get started on my second Leader synth right away, but I knew I should wait. This content has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere. Instead I turned to the broken Prospector mining rig in bay #1. It stood 3m tall, and was a top of the line power armor suit like the Grasshopper or Chaparralito. The key difference is that a robot vehicle like my Gretta and the amazing Mach 1 are piloted and controlled via a variety of vehicle controls or more often direct neural jack. Power Armor on the other hand is worn and augments and magnifies the user¡¯s own motions. So when a person, or in the case of my synths, and their cybernetic harvested -parts-, moved their left and then right legs, the larger more powerful power armor suit would do the same. Today the Prospector mining suit looked even more damaged and broken. I am not sure the suit was a good deal even at 75% off. I was about to start removing the damaged armor when Miles came over to my engineering trailer. ¡°Morning Miss Gama. How does life treat you this day?¡± He greeted me. ¡°Good Miles, how about you?¡± ¡°I have no complaints. I heard that we will be leaving camp soon? I just wanted to double check our plans and paths.¡± I responded, ¡°Yeah Sunny is cleaning up the dig site and then we can hit the road this afternoon or tomorrow. It should be about a 2 day drive to Neu Ca?on in the northwest.¡± He nodded his head, ¡°Ah, that is as it should be then. I have need of your assistance with one of my experiments, but we will have to wait until we leave Neu Ca?on for another campsite. There are a few items I can acquire in Neu Ca?on so I would like to accompany you there as well.¡± ¡°Of course Miles, I am not sure how long it will take for us to sell the loot and resupply but I am eager to get back on the road again as soon as we can. Do you have a preference for our next camp site?¡± I asked.Miles never seemed to care where we went, or what we did really, but it didn''t hurt to ask. I suppose. He shook his head. ¡°Not at the present time. My current efforts do not require much local flora or fauna. That might change but for now any remote site is as good as any other. Thanks for your consideration.¡± He turned as if to leave and continued ¡°And how are you doing Gabrialla? Any pain or mysterious headaches?¡± I quickly nodded no. ¡°My chest is still sore but I think it¡¯s normal for the damage I suffered. My head is just fine, thanks for asking.¡± He paused to look at me. ¡°Good, indeed. And how is your mental health as well?¡± Shifting awkwardly, I stammered, ¡°Uh, I guess as good as it¡¯s ever been?¡± ¡°Of course. Keep in mind it is not healthy for you to numb your body¡¯s signaling of pain. The mental trick you used to avoid pain is useful short term in an emergency, but it can be a very dangerous crutch if you over use it. Pain is your body¡¯s way of telling you something is wrong and needs attention. Do you understand?¡± He explained. Rolling my eyes, I replied ¡°Yeah that makes sense, I don''t want to ignore a bleeding wound or broken limb.¡± ¡°Yes, something like that.¡± He replied, bowed briefly and returned to his hovercraft. I was no longer interested in fixing the Prospector power armor and wished I had not yet closed up the RV trailer. I could use a shower before we hit the road. I thought about asking Alexandria to use theirs, but I didn''t want to intrude. Instead I had a few of the synths run a hose to our reserve water tanks. I quickly stripped out of my armor and bodysuit and took a lukewarm shower behind the engineering trailer. I hosed out my suit and had the synths place it on the roof of the engineering trailer. I climbed up to the roof as well, burned my feet on the hot metal and quickly dispatched a synth to find a semi clean tarp or cloth for me to lay on. A few minutes later a Hopper-synth jumped up and I laid down on the roof to dry off. I woke up disoriented to the sound of the Large Labour Drone clomping into camp. Two Hopper-synths were standing next to me. I peeked over the edge of the roof. It sounded like Sunny and the team was back. I cannot believe I fell asleep, at least It didn''t look like I got a nasty sunburn. My light hair color belied my latina tanned skin complexion and I don''t sunburn easily. Not that I had much cause to lie around sunbathing. I quickly slipped on my suit liner and armor before heading down to the ground. I ran to join Sunny, acting nonchalant as I could. ¡°Sunny, you all finished at the dig site?¡± I asked. He replied, ¡°Yup we tried to restore the tunnels and grade the surface to distract from any potential visitors after we leave. Not sure if there is anything else down there or not, but don''t want to make it too easy for others.¡± I asked him, already fearing the answer, ¡°You think we can get out tonight or should we wait until tomorrow? We could make it? Six hours to the outskirts of Phoenix. If we left now we could get in before midnight?¡± While that was less than half way to our ultimate destination, it was better than nothing. He shook his cyborg head, ¡°I don''t want to travel in the dark if we can help it Gabby. Better to go slow and get there safe.¡± I cast my eyes down and nodded my head. ¡°Ok we can leave first thing in the morning. I am going to go double-check the synths and engineering trailer.¡± I turned and walked back toward the deployed Engineering trailer. I sat down on my hoverchair and stared at my Squad Leader. I get what Sunny was saying. It made more sense to stay another night, I was just antsy to leave. If we had a place to go, we should get moving and not wait. Oh well, nothing to be gained. I went about stowing the Squad Leader and Prospector suit on the flatbed trailer that one of the trucks would pull. I then instructed the Heavy Labor drones to get on as well. The miner-synths strapped everything down before joining the other synths in kombi-bus #1. Looking around camp it seemed like everything was buttoned up and ready to go. With a sigh I instructed the Engineering Trailer to close up shop. The scaffold, workstation, various tools and cables for each of the 8 bays began to retract and fold in. After they had been stowed the entire ground floor on both sides began to rise and come together over the centerline. The entire trailer closed up like a clamshell and was ready for transport. That mechanic shop and robotics upgrades had been worth every cent. The camp guard of 10 borg-synths continued to make their around-the-clock patrols. But other than them, all of our stuff was good to go. I retired to my giant mech for one more night in camp before we hit the road. Ch 10. *** Traveling Day 1 I work up again with the return of my headache. The throbbing pain had transformed into strong feelings of anxiety and concern. I had plenty of things to worry about on my own, but this didn¡¯t feel like my issues or feelings. I couldn''t explain it. It seemed to be connected to the nightmare I had experienced previously. I could try to channel my psyche into a more receptive state so I could experience the emotions more vividly, but you couldn''t convince me to do that with a crowbar. I wanted to get out of here and on to our next site where I could focus on my synths for another week or two. I debated climbing down to check in with everyone but decided against it. ¡°Gretta to Sunny, what¡¯s your status?¡± I called directly over the radio. ¡°Well good morning Gabby, you raring to go I see?¡± He replied. ¡°You know it. Can¡¯t wait to get Gretta moving again. So the same travel order as last time?¡± Sunny explained, ¡°Yeah. I will take point in the Dozer, you can come alongside or behind me. Then we can have the 2 RV¡¯s: Miles¡¯s Explorer, and Alexandria in the Gecko RV. Hopefully less dust for them to eat if they are toward the front. Then we can alternate your buses, the Kombi-Max with our cargo, and the trucks with flatbeds hauling our equipment.¡± I continued, ¡°I will have my 2 squads spread out and protect the convoy. We are big enough, we shouldn''t be a target for anyone.¡± It took us 45 minutes but I assigned borg-synths as drivers to the various vehicles (two kombi-buses, one Kombi-Max, two Roundabout pickup trucks, and the hacked together salvaged bus and trailers) and the entire convoy began to roll toward the outskirts of Phoenix. A few humanoids scrabbed out a hard luck life there, but it seemed no mythical bird wanted to rise from those ashes. We could skirt the town, then hook up with the Maricopa Corridor and make our way to Neu Ca?on in the north. It was 1200 or so kilometers, given the winding path we had to take to avoid the toxic wastes, destroyed cities, and haunted sites. Whether it was folklore, aliens, or monsters we didn''t mind an extra drive if we got there safely. As we came down from the foothills of Mt Graham, the weather turned to a spectacularly summer day. The sun was shining but distant clouds provided occasional shade, and the wind blew softly through the shrubs and hardy, albeit alien flowering plants. Toward the north, new and genetically modified grasses and prairies would start to appear. And brave or desperate cowboys would ranch a variety of exotic and native animals for trade. Piloting my precious Power Construction Corp? 54r Provender ¡®industrial¡¯ mech was a very meditative experience. I was able to pilot manually with the foot and hand controls, directly with a neural-jack, or mentally via my telemechanic link. I always felt a bit superhuman, able to observe more, process thoughts faster, and react quicker. The performance of these technological giants still took my breath away. I drifted into a meditative trance as our convoy slowly rolled along the bottom of gullies or riverbeds. There were no roads, or even paths out this far, and Sunny blazed a trail in the Dozer, maneuvering around the more egregious roadblocks. After a few hours of walking, driving, hovering, and rolling, I spotted a large herd of alien dinosaurs on the horizon. It was always amazing to see the giant animals traversing the post-apocalyptic West. Whether it was the herbivores seeking new grazing grounds, or the carnivores that inevitably followed, the violent cycle of life was reflected in the crazy reality of life in this wild frontier. The herd moved slowly but continued east barely visible with my mech¡¯s image magnification. I knew of some brave souls that ranched dinosaurs as well. But most people left them alone. The dinosaurs that appeared with the coming of the dimensional doorways were incredibly tough and resilient, and all too often deadly. Sunny asked everyone if they wanted to stop for lunch, and I voted no, and thankfully everyone else was fine with pushing through. We will find a temporary campsite for this evening, and if all goes well, we will reach our destination tomorrow afternoon. 500 kilometer a day might not seem a lot for those used to flying or high speed chases, but given our load and location I felt we were making good time. My mech continued to place one giant foot in front of the other as I rotated to look at the convoy, the Dozer in the lead was pushing light brush or rocks out of the way. The two RVs would often run parallel to the Dozer to avoid the dust trail. The Gecko was equipped with 6 adaptive hub powered wheels. But Miles¡¯s Explorer hover RV was a marvel. Unlike conventional hovercraft no massive jets thrust billowing dust clouds into the air. The slow pace did not generate any dust. When it kicked into high speed it was another story. But then it would leave everything we had in the dust. I suspected it could reach orbit but Miles never confirmed that. My kombi-buses and four trucks with trailers were piloted by the converted drones. Luckily driving was a task that they could easily accomplish, combat flying or power armor operations, on the other hand, were more challenging. The Kombi-Max was safely located in the middle of the cargo vehicles. Four Road-synths were perched on top of the vehicle, the other six were spread out on top of the rest of the convoy. The 10 Hopper-synths roamed free, using the jet assisted hopping, loping, and running in their unusual gait. A method of travel that could eat ground eight times faster than we were traveling, but I didn''t want to push the synths to the limit. While I had gotten them to understand and control the Chaparralito and Grasshopper power armor suits, they only functioned at a basic level. They could control their bodies and use the built in thrusters as a pseudo jetpack, but they could not take advantage of the special features or capabilities at this time. >>Big Fe, another chore to add to the list, but I was already planning to work on this one, eventually.>> I remembered how funny it was to watch the first trials I conducted with the drones in the suits. It was like watching a human baby walk for the first time, a drunk human baby. Well what I assume a drunk human baby would look like, at least. I didn''t understand the predilection adults had with kids anyway. During the early tests, the synths continued to take tentative steps forward, jerk their legs back and then fall down. They kept doing this for hours. It was a lot of trial-and-effort before I was able to subvert their normal body templates and suborn my own, resilient learning templates, into place. Now, I was focused on the Squad Leader development but I would need to return to the normal rank and file, the vanilla Squad member synths as well. Messing with higher learning and advanced decision making was more fun, and more messy. >>Unfortunately, I needed to do all of that before I could return to developing solutions that would work on you, Big Fe. >> Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings. I also wanted to explore other Squad roles like calvary, armor, and true arial synths, but I needed to demonstrate some progress, really any progress, to the Black Market before things turned south. Well souther. I continued to day dream about my future design builds, deployment methods, skeletal modifications, and even cost reduction ideas, for an hour more. The sun was shining bright but the clouds had started to thicken, the outside temp was likely cooling off as well. My musings were interrupted by a message from my Squad Leader, its ears must have been burning because I was just thinking about it, but my heart ran cold and my stomach plummeted when I heard its report ¡°Unknown targets 2,000m behind the convoy and closing. Potentially hostile.¡± My Squad Leader was tied down to the flatbed trailer, and it was doing a better job guarding the convoy than I was! I spun my mech¡¯s upper torso around as my legs continued forward and I almost froze still at what I saw. A blanket of dinosaurs were cresting a hill directly behind us. The monsters were following us! I wasn''t sure if they were the same herd I saw before or a different one but over 100 alien dinosaurs were running directly toward us! As I zoomed in, I saw they were not acting alone, each dinosaur had a rider. Neamans! Why on earth would they attack us? Did they know what we have? Were they desperate or just ornery? I guess it didn''t matter. I didn¡¯t know the specifics and didn''t care, but we had a major problem on our hands. ¡°All hands, we have Neamans approaching our rear, fast. They don''t look friendly, I guess about 100¡­¡± I started to explain on the group convoyNET. My Squad Leader cut into the group channel, ¡°I have identified 62 Ostrosauruses analogs and 35 nodosaurus analogs. Each being ridden by at least one armed Neaman.¡± ¡°Thanks Squad Leader, so we have that to deal with. Can we outrun them? Can we negotiate? What should we do?¡± The panic was starting to take control of my mind. Should I turn and confront them directly? Could I? Can we flee? What do we do about the cargo? I was starting to shake, glad I was hidden in my battle mech. Crap, why did this happen to us, we shouldn''t be out here. My dad shouldn''t be dead and I should be at home. Sunny¡¯s voice brought me back down to earth, ¡°Oh here is what we are going to do people, we will have a running gun battle. Keep all the vehicles moving north, we might get crazy lucky and run into another convoy or friendlies. Gabby, have your squad engage when they can. You use your mech as well but stay safe, you will be a big target. Molly, Miles, if you can help, we just might need it to get through this. I will use the dozer to draw some of the bigger beasties.¡± With that, Sunny immediately turned the dozer around and began to trundle to the back of the convoy. I froze for a second, or 10, but I managed to unstick and follow after him. We would play a delaying action and see how this goes. I reached out to Squad Leader and my deployed synths. I told them to return fire and attack at will. Use Active Engagement maneuvers, I mentally ordered. I should have used more sophisticated tactics, heck I should have developed more sophisticated tactics, but that was alway something for the future, damn. I hope this is a lesson that I can survive to learn. The driver¡¯s synths would keep operating the vehicles and move the convoy toward our original evening rally point. The Neamans were armed with a combination of melee weapons, bows, and rifles. Neamans are the most common aliens that have been gated to our world that started the emergence of the Doorways, more than 100 years earlier. They looked like a cross between neanderthals and orcs. At least what most people thought a cross would look like. It seems they shared genetic ancestry with us humans, somehow. As a race they were straightforward and blunt. Their focus on physical pursuits and family ties did not often put them in conflict with corps or governments, but in cases like this, it would put them in conflict with natives, like us. Fekko! The rifle wielding aliens were already firing madly at us. The ones with bows had drawn beads on their targets but were holding off until they were close. And the ones with melee weapons had an assortment: nano-blades, nano-axes, and even a few more exotic weapons made for alien creatures. They were around 700m out and my stomach was an endless pit, somehow a dimensional doorway had opened up inside my body and was sucking me slowly into another dimension. I should probably have that looked at by a doctor or exorcist, if I survive this. Sunny was facing off against a pack of four charging nodosauruses and their riders on the left flank. I moved to the right side and faced the charging dinosaurs and monsters there. And there were a lot of them. Running right at me. ¡°Okay, you can do this Gabby. You are in 30 tons of super-steel, weaponry and awesomeness, you can do this.¡± I don''t know who I was convincing because it wasn''t me. Maybe I was trying to cheer up Big Fe safely stored inside the engineering trailer, at least until they kill us all and ransack the trailer. Snap out of it! I pivoted the top of Gretta¡¯s body and opened up with the dual plasma casters on her left arm. They were out of range but I heard suppressive fire is a good thing? It felt like a good thing melding into the operations and moves of Gretta as the arm cannons fired both blasters repeatedly. Behind me, I was aware of the two manned RV¡¯s pulling out of line. They were further away from us, and continuing to follow the convoy but slowing down perceptibly. On the Gecko RV, Molly was out in full body armor, covering every inch of her in BDwerks?¡¯ best, it even looked shiny and new. The rifle she was holding was distinctly a Rosatom General Energy? product. They had cornered the market on nuclear generation, energy design, and directed energy weapons. And this rifle was a preem example of their superiority. It was massive, taller than she was as she lay prone on the roof of the RV. She began to carefully line up shots. Even back further away than I was, I could tell each time she fired, she was dropping a rider or a dinosaur. She couldn''t fire very fast, but as far away as she was that girl had some skills! On my side, Miles¡¯s RV was similarly taking position. While their elven Explorer hovercraft was fully featured, it had no weaponry either. But out of the top hatch an armored figure appeared. Given that the figure had two legs and two arms and no horns it had to be the elf, Miles. It looked like he had picked up some magitecha armor in Neu Ca?on. The magitecha Gorge powered armor was quite popular and fairly inexpensive for magic crap. I shouldn''t judge it, but technology seemed to win most arguments, look at the recent American Empire steamroll of the independent cities formerly known as the Northwest Free States. As Miles jumped into the air he began to silently hover. Soon his entire body was changing color and fading indistinctly. It was less invisibility and more a chameleon¡¯s camouflage ability. That was pretty cool, I had to admit. He had his old service rifle from the Assembly but he seemed to be relying on some childhood magic at the moment. I slapped myself, literally. It hurt and didn''t help, I needed to get my head into gear, the monsters were now 300m away and close enough for me to engage with actual accuracy. I took aim at the closest nodosaurus and continued to fire at it for several rounds. My accuracy was pretty good inside my Provender battle mech and I managed to score direct hits every single time. The monster was clearly hurt, but still on course for me and the convoy! I seemed to draw more than my share of exploding arrows and rifle shots. I know Gretta could take the abuse but she was an older mech and didn''t have the most modern armor around. But co?o, I also didn''t plan on taking her into battle against an army either. Ch. 11 *** Traveling Day 1 part 2 I managed to send another round of plasma blasts and the giant beast began to tumble, the nodosaurus fell down and rolled right over the rider. I hoped they were both down for the count. At this point, I could see the steaming breath coming out of these monstrous beasts. Facing them directly, it was far more scary than when my squad of synths had taken them down in front of me on our field test. I felt less in danger in my body armor there, than I did in my giant mech here. But here I had to rely on my own skills to attack and defend us all. The remaining three large beasts lowered their heads and aimed for my legs! I turned my body sideways at the last minute and lashed out with my leg. I made solid contact with the beast on the right, but it barely moved! And I almost face planted my mech on the ground. That would have been very embarrassing, and lethal if they managed to gore me from behind. At least I dodged the charge. I pivoted and stopped messing around. I began to sequentially target the dinosaurs, 2 full rounds, half a minute, of me doing nothing but shooting was enough to to take down a charging monster. That was two of the big ones down and only 30 more to go? I was ignoring the smaller dinosaurs and their riders, even though they would try to stab or shoot me, constantly. I did step out of the way of the charging dinosaurs. I saw what that horn did to my armored Squad Leader synth and I didn''t want Gretta to get that kind of damage. In the back of my mind I could feel that the Squad Leader was issuing orders to the protection detail. We had 21 synths, a Bulldozer, 2 crazy friends, and me against 100 monsters and riders. 8 to 1 did not sound like good odds to me when they had rampaging beasts. As I continued to shoot at dinosaurs, I noticed that Squad Leader was indeed changing tactics, learning on the fly. At first I had ordered everyone to engage, weapons free. The Squad Leader had repeated that command to every synth. They were each identifying targets and engaging with local discretion. Within a few attacks however, the tempo began to change. The Squad Leader began to designate priority targets. First the riders were identified. The synths began to pair up and go after the same targets in teams. They were able to take out riders twice as fast, with their silent and near instantaneous communication. Given the number of Ostrosauruses the Leader adapted again and shifted the priority to the riders of the nodosauruses. After a few of the riders had been killed the dinosaurs didn''t leave the battlefield but they became a lot less effective and didn''t menace us or charge the trailers or my mech. Dang it. Why didn''t I think to target the squishy riders instead of the giant, scary, beasts. I began to shift my targets and go after the riders around me. Now after a full round of firing, sometimes even more quickly, I was able to knock a rider off their mount. My Squad Leader noticed that with 2 synths targeting every rider they were able to knock them off nearly as quickly as I was. It seemed like their smaller plasma pulse rifles and Universal Gauss Assault Rifles didn''t have great range. They had to wait for the attackers to get closer. And while flexible they didn''t have the sustained damage output that even some of the attackers had with their eclectic rifles. Shaking my head again, I moved away from the trailers and convoy and attempted to draw several of the larger attackers with me. The buses had holes punched straight through them, the Kombi-Max was further back but it had nano-blade score marks and a few plasma scorches from the smaller riders that got around us. The RVs were floating over, and into the smaller dinosaurs. The flatbeds, well, they were fine, but our equipment on both of them looked singed as well. I noticed several of my synths had fallen off the vehicles and were lying still on the ground. Crap, this was not going well as my stomach dropped out of the pilot compartment and onto the ground 10m below me. The monsters seemed disinclined to follow me at first. But a few shoves and kicks from my giant mech got their attention, and then some. Ten of the riders of the big beasts screamed at each other out the din and somehow were able to communicate. They all turned and began to charge right at me. I knew I could dodge three or four at a time, but I had no idea how I could miss an entire warband of them charging and surrounding me! Then to make matters worse 15 Ostrosauruses and their riders began to race toward me as well, peppering my head and shoulder mounted missile launchers with their exploding arrows and rifle blasts. That probably wasn''t good for the missiles. I began to panic. Well panic more. I decided to go for broke. I told my Squad Leader to utilize Fullbore maneuvers. They would max out their strength, speed, and endurance, they would use full auto and all resources to defeat their targets. I then ordered every single drone in my buses to grab a weapon, get out and fight. I probably should have done that, at the beginning, but this was my first battle. Oh and before those commands, I launched four medium range missiles, traveling at 700 m/ s, with a range of 70 km, to target the 10 nodosaurses that were 30m in front of me. I didn''t know if they could launch due to the damage, I didn''t know if they could target lock that close, I didn''t know if they could hit targets even if they were that close, and I especially didn''t know which medium range missiles I had launched. It took the missiles ~0.0487 seconds to reach their target. The acceleration of these missiles was unearthly. The fiery explosion that followed was ungodly. The plasma sphere that resulted from the four medium missiles simultaneously detonating completely blinded me. Gretta engaged my RF and optical filters. I was blind and deaf for several seconds. But I was also alive, and more terrified than I had ever been in my life. Perhaps four missiles was too much? As my optics came online I saw ash and devastation. The plasma fireball had blown up in an elongated ovoid shape. Thankfully the oval was perpendicular to me and not any closer. There were no bodies left. The riders were gone, the smaller Ostrosauruses were gone. Parts of the bones and horns and hooves were left from the 4 ton, 7m tall, 13m long dinosaurs. But nothing identifiable as a once living creature, monster or otherwise was left. I threw up, a lot, in my copilot¡¯s seat. I stared at the circular depression that was once level ground. The ash from the flash vaporization had covered a circle 500m in diameter all around me. The entire front of my mech had microfractures. I could feel them more than I could measure or see them. The pretty green and gold paint scheme was completely gone from the front and sides of my mech. It was vaporized and boiled off in an instant. I was lucky to be alive. I was especially lucky none of the horns or shots had pierced my armor before the explosion. The plasma would have entered my robot vehicle and liquified the insides, instantly. That one was one expensive trigger pull, 60,000 cred for the four missiles and who knows how much death and damage liability. Plus the cleaning fee for my co-pilot seat. I shouldn¡¯t be joking, but even I could tell I was in shock. >>What do I do, Big Fe?>> I don''t know if the battle was still going on, I didn''t know if we had won or lost. I felt the image of a giant fireball seared into my eyes. I know mentally that was impossible because even as fast as the explosion was, the automatic filters and protection screens had engaged. I wasn''t blind. But I could still tell, burned into my eyes, and into my soul I would always be able to see the plasma cloud fireball when I closed my eyes. Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere. I heard voices coming over the convoyNET, but I couldn''t make out what they were saying. I felt that my Squad Lead was still issuing commands, but at a less frequent pace. I was glad to know he made it at least. The cooler breeze continued to stir up the ashes and dust that swirled around me. The sun periodically shining through gaps in the clouds lit up the battlefield in stark relief, only to cloud over and plunge the entire area into shades of gray, ashes of gray. A knock on my top hatch startled me. I used my external video feed, which amazingly still worked, and saw that Miles was hovering over my vehicle ¡®bot. I got up and opened the top hatch. I stared at Miles. He opened his helmet. His striking elven features were streaked with sweat, but he still looked unearthly beautiful. ¡°I just wanted to make sure you were ok Gabriela,... Gabby. Are you ok? Did you suffer any harm?¡± He asked me slowly. His voice sounded far away like the radio voices, but at least I could make out the words he was using. ¡°I am fine, all good in here.¡± I responded, staring at the armored hatch lid. He paused and assessed my face, my body and the interior of Gretta. ¡°Okay Gabriela, very glad to hear you are not harmed. Currently, the Neamen riders of dinosaurs have fled after your additional troops joined the field and your giant explosion landed on their right flank. Landed almost on you.¡± He paused to look at me for a response. Hearing none, he continued, ¡°But be careful, we are not out of the woods yet, as you say, several of the giant dinosaur analogs continue to roam free and the Neamen could return at any moment. We are trying to effect repairs so we can get underway again. One of the Runabout trucks was shot up and we are not sure if everything else is still safe to drive or move yet.¡± Pausing to observe me even longer. I stood there and absorbed the silence and the strong smell of ash in the air. I hadn''t been able to smell that before. Piloting mech vehicles is the best, but the sense of touch and smell is not captured at all. Unless you open the hatch or step on a boulder. Miles bid me farewell and flew back toward the convoy. I stared at the hatch until the breeze distributed me again and I closed it with rote muscle movements. Convoy. I wonder how the convoy had fared. I wish Miles had said something about that. Oh well. I could look it up at the pilot console in a moment. I sat down on the floor in front of my closet and stared at the door handle. I really have to hand it to the PCC engineers, even their hinges and latches were efficient, effective, and well built. I opened and closed the closet to my armor, over, and over again. Really great engineering. The radio continued to drone on in the background for an hour. But I was fine where I was. Eventually I heard my name being called, repeated on the radio. ¡°Sunny to Gabby, Gabby are you there? Gabby. Gabby? Gabby!?¡± I walked over to the radio and keyed my helmet mic. ¡°Yeah Sunny I am here, no need to repeat yourself.¡± ¡°Oh thank Quad. Repeat myself? Gabby, it''s been¡­ never mind. We are all set. Everyone survived. We have all the cargo stowed and vehicles secured. And Gabby I didn''t forget your synths. We collected every single one and put them back on the kombi-bus.¡± ¡°Oh, okay Sunny, sure.¡± I responded; not sure why he was telling me this. He continued, ¡°We are all set to hit the road. We hope we can connect with another convoy or even hire some merc¡¯s for extra protection, are you ready to roll out?¡± ¡°Sure, ready to go now.¡± I responded. The next hour, or four, I wasn''t sure, went by peacefully. I fully submerged myself into Gretta. One foot in front of the other. I followed the rearmost trailer. Tracking the taillights and thermal signature. Keeping pace with it was child''s play. Every so often Miles¡¯s RV would fall out of line and slow down next to me for a spell, and then return to the front. Later Alexandria¡¯s RV would do the same thing. They must have had leg cramps or something. Seemed they couldn''t use the auto-pilot or throttle correctly. Gretta was an amazingly complex piece of art. I usually focused on the hardware software co-design, firmware, and higher complexity systems. But the mechanics, the servos, fiber-optics, hydraulics, conduits, sluices, and transceivers were magnificent. Each had a function and purpose. Each was measurable and quantifiable. It was operating in specification for the given conditions and age, or it wasn''t. Mechanical engineering had a cleanliness that I hadn¡¯t noticed before. I began to survey every single mechanical component, starting with the feet that rhythmically struck the hardpack dirt of the dusty road that eventually appeared beneath them. Moving sequentially up the chassis reviewing every, single, component. The trailer in front of me had stopped minutes ago. Gretta¡¯s legs had stopped moving too, which was good. The radio voices had been impossible to hear the entire trip, and I couldn''t make it out now. I guess I would have to fix that. I reached out with my telemechanic abilities to diagnose the radio hardware, and nothing was wrong. Huh. I guess the others needed to speak louder then, when they were using their radios. Another knock on my hatch disturbed my thought processes. I saw a familiar face and opened the hatch. Est¨¦ril was clinging to the ladder. She gave me a smile, and asked ¡°Can I come in, please?¡± I didn''t know Minotaurs could climb. ¡°Of course,¡± I replied. She carefully climbed through the hatch and into the pilot¡¯s compartment. Her nose wrinkled for a moment. She must have had an itch. ¡°I brought you some dinner, Molly made burgers.¡± She said, trying to sound excited. ¡°Miles and I were hoping you would come down and have dinner with us below? None of us have eaten yet. But Sunny thought you wouldn''t want to. So I brought this.¡± She indicated a nicely wrapped basket with food, presumably burgers inside. I nodded my head. She looked and me waited, and then asked, ¡°So will you come down?¡± I smiled at her, ¡°Oh no I am good. I have lots of work to do up here. No time to come down.¡± She paced around the pilot¡¯s compartment, no mean feat given the tiny hallway leading to the hatch with the four closets on either side. And the four seats in the cockpit. That and her robust size as a Minotaur cyborg. She nodded her head. ¡°Sure, we should get to Neu Ca?on tomorrow afternoon. Hopefully no more encounters and we get there safe¡­¡± She stopped talking and looked at me. ¡°Frell, I mean, nevermind. Your grandmother and grandfather, on your dad¡¯s side; they live there?¡± She asked. ¡°Yes.¡± I responded. ¡°Great, I am sure they are excited to see you and you are excited to see them?¡± ¡°No.¡± ¡°No?¡± Gabby why would you say that about family?¡± ¡°Bad memories,¡± I replied. The totally normal silence dragged on for minutes. She continued, ¡°Okay, well I am going to get going. And Gabby, we all care for you, okay. We are worried and you did a brave and amazing thing. Sunny wishes so much he could come up here but, well, treads and size. So please be okay and talk to Sunny. Deal?¡± Not hearing anything, she continued to herself ¡°Okay.¡± She turned and gingerly, but lithely, climbed out the roof hatch and down Gretta into the night. Her hooves could somehow grab ladder rungs. Huh. It was night now, I guess. That means it was bedtime. I walked past a basket. A basket I had no idea how it got there, or why I kept in the pilot¡¯s compartment, and set-up my hammock for bed. Ch. 12 *** Traveling Day 2 night time I woke up in the middle of the night, my head throbbing. >>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 Est¨¦ril. If you come across this story on Amazon, it''s taken without permission from the author. 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: 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: I disliked how they labeled me as Prime. >>I swear I didn''t do that, right Big Fe?>> 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: He figured out 2 synths per target here. 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. He figured out an efficient firing solution. Where a rider was being killed in a single volley in a single round. It was here that I might have started to worry. >>Fine Big Fe, you are right, I began to majorly panic and pulled out all the stops.>> This looks awful. What a wall of text. Ch. 13 *** Traveling Day 2 spreadsheets Big Fe, reformat into a tabular visualization, please.
RND CMDR Recipient Target Order Caveat Observation/ BDA Response/ Resilience
1 Prime Squad-Leader#001 && Road- synth#1-#10 && Hopper-synth #1-#10 Hostiles Maneuver: Active Engagement Authorized to return fire and attack at will. Target Damage standard, against unknown values. -
2 Squad-Leader#001 Road- synth#1-#10 && Hopper-synth #1-#10 Hostiles REPEAT Maneuver: Active Engagement Authorized to return fire and attack at will. Target Damage range Alpha 33%, Beta 22%, and Gamma 14% DPA 21 ideal DPA 17 current RECALCULATING maneuver
3 Squad-Leader#001 Road-synth#1-#10 && Hopper-synth #1-#10 Target type Alpha-rider. Engage Change target Target Damage increased to 33% RECALCULATING maneuver
4 Squad-Leader#001 Road-synth#1-#10 && Hopper-synth #1-#10 Target type Alpha-rider-RB. Engage Change target Target Damage steady 33% RECALCULATING maneuver
5 Squad-Leader#001 Road-synth#1-#10 && Hopper-synth #1-#10 Target type Alpha-rider-RB. Engage pair Road-synth and Hopper-synth share target. Target Damage increase 66% DPA 34
6 Squad-Leader#001 Road-synth#1-#10 && Hopper-synth #1-#10 Target type Alpha-rider-RB. Engage 66% INEFFICIENT 2 rounds required for 100% effective kill RECALCULATING maneuver
7 Squad-Leader#001 Road-synth#1-#10 && Hopper-synth #1-#10 Target type Alpha-rider-RB. Engage Road-synth and Hopper-synth 3.5 synth share targeting, alternate teams. Target Damage increase 100% DPA 60
8 Squad-Leader#001 Road-synth#1-#10 && Hopper-synth #1-#10 Target type Alpha-rider-RB. Engage Continue 3.5 synth share targeting, alternate team. Target Damage steady 100%. Local maximum EFFECTIVE
9 Squad-Leader#001 Road-synth#1-#10 && Hopper-synth #1-#10 Target type Alpha-rider-RB. Engage Continue 3.5 synth share targeting, alternate teams. Target Damage steady 100%. steady
10 Prime Squad-Leader#001 && Road-synth#1-#10 && Hopper-synth #1-#10 && && synth#*-* Hostiles Maneuver: Fullbore All active synths engage.
11 Squad-Leader#001 Road-synth#1-#10 && Hopper-synth #1-#10 && && synth#*-* Target type Alpha-rider-RB. REPEAT Maneuver: Fullbore. All active synths engage. Continue Alpha targets. Target Damage increasing 133%. RECALCULATING maneuver
12 Squad-Leader#001 Road-synth#1-#10 && Hopper-synth #1-#10 && && synth#*-* Aggressive Alpha, Beta, and Gamma. Engage Update target variable Target Damage range Alpha 33%, Beta 22%, and Gamma 14% RECALCULATING maneuver
13 Squad-Leader#001 Road-synth#1-#10 && Hopper-synth #1-#10 && && synth#*-* Maneuver: Picket & Screen && Render assistance Change maneuver
14 Squad-Leader#001 synth*.* Continue as assigned
That was a wall of text if I had ever seen one. The table was barely better. Perhaps a graphical representation or an animation next time? I wont be analyzing combat that way ever again. I will have to automate more analysis with Big Fe. But it was fascinating to see both how the Squad Leader began to calculate damage effectiveness, and also revised targeting. At first, I thought what he was doing was called shots like he did with the first dinosaur a few days ago. >>Quad Almighty, was it just a few days ago, Big Fe?>> It feels like weeks ago. Anyway, he wasn''t attempting to target weak or vulnerable attackers or locations, he was trying to maximize effective damage per round so that there was no over, or worse underkill. He figured out how much damage each target could take, roughly. And he already knew how much damage the synths could dish out. The Squad Leader then divided the targets amongst the synths so that there was as little wasted damage while still keeping the pressure on. His other adaptation was to quickly go from targeting the monsters, the Ostrosauruses and larger Nodosauruses, to directly hitting the Neamans. Seems like everyone got that message but me. He then prioritized the Nodosaurus riders because they were doing serious damage, and had the ability to trash our cargo (and I was ashamed to admit, me). He started with 2 synths per target and determined while better it was still not as ideal. So he divided the 21 synths into 6 teams and was able to have a complete knock out each attack. This really ratcheted up the pressure when almost every attack we were delivering was an instakill. I assume that tactic will not work for everything, these Neaman had homemade and cheap armor, but it sure worked here. The addition of my backup and spare synths simply increased the rate. Unauthorized usage: this narrative is on Amazon without the author''s consent. Report any sightings. When the battle was in its final stages. The Squad Leader adapted again in round 12, he began to leave wounded and retreating targets alone, and only had the synths target aggressive hostiles of all types, monster or rider. If they didn''t approach our convoy, the synths didn''t attack. Eventually he adapted one last time and had the synths adopt a watching and guarding behavior. The typical formation they were using before this ambush. In the end, this was just a stand there and shoot fight. I couldn¡¯t help but think that with tactics and preparation the numbers could have been much better. I just didn''t know how to go about doing that. Big Fe was cleaning up the statistics a bit for me. Uncertainty in measurements due to synths being under active fire made extrapolation and estimations less accurate. Post mortem analysis was limited because we wanted to get out of dodge and be on our way. In general we calculated that overall ranged and melee accuracy was approximately 75% for attackers and 80% for defenders. I imagine some of that was Miles and Molly pulling up our average a bit. It wasn''t all rainbows and full e-mags. By round 9, four synths were out of commission. One synth got clobbered in round 3 and was totally knocked out. In round 7, we lost two more, and a final one in round 8. That was 20% of our synth fighting force. What is worse, two of them are totally offline and not responding to any remote communication. Coming back to the present, I reached out with my mind. But I am too far away to try detailed telemechanic introspection, at the moment. The other two were online, but had major structural damage, and would never walk again. At least until I rebuilt or replaced their limbs. I double checked Squad-Leader. He had extricated himself from the travel straps that were holding him down. I had him with the other mining drones, synths and equipment. Not sure in hindsight why I secured him that way, but I didn''t want him to get hurt in shipping I guess. Glad he was riding in the back and spotted the Nemans when he did, though. His armor would need a complete overhaul, but because I put him in generic heavy cyborg plate body armor, he had better protection than the other synths. I was going to majorly increase that protection as well. I hope Alexandria could help me design and install top of the line ¡®borg armor for protection on my Squad Leaders. My back up and other various synths had little to no armor beyond their cybernetic frames, and the various modifications I added. Said modifications which most actually made them weaker and less protected, but it was a work in progress right? There were about 2 additional squads worth there, and given the price and effectiveness I would probably place all them in cyborg armor as well. This will match the mining, driver, and other miscellaneous synths running around in light borg armor. The synths that did survive were quite banged up. Less servo damage this time, as it was a ranged battle, but several cracks and penetrations in their synth frames and cybernetic limbs. I realized it must have been a pretty macabre sight. Seemly undead cyborgs bereft of any human flesh were running around shooting and attacking 2.2m tall aliens riding on mutant dinosaurs. In addition my up-armored synths weathered quite the abuse as well. They were the front line for this conflict. Most of the Chaparralito Power Armor equipped synths have between 12-22% armor left, total! And the Grasshoppers fared a little better with 25-31% armor remaining. Not a single synth escaped without a scratch. The repair and maintenance would take forever. At least I knew I could be productive doing that compared to my fighting ability. Turning to my ride, I was scared to look. Gretta had 46% of her armor integrity remaining! I was somewhat shocked it wasn''t worse due to the explosive plasma bath, but looking at her took my breath away, for a different reason now. Spiderweb cracking marred the entire front facing surfaces. Pressure and heat damage had deformed the supersteel due to the medium range plasma missiles. Furthermore, various gouges and scratches surrounded the knees and shins. A few of the larger dinosaurs had scored direct hits on her thighs but no through and through penetrations, thank Quad. And the cockpit and missile pods had a variety of explosive, kinetic, and even plasma caster burns. Not to mention, no let¡¯s mention it, Big Fe. My beautiful birthday paint job was gone. No trace of the paint could be found anywhere on the entire 11m tall Power Construction Corp? (PCC) 54r Provender Industrial Battle mech. My breath caught in my throat. Even the back was flash burned completely bare of paint. I was just glad that I survived in her, and she held it together. I was conservatively targeted twice as much as anyone else, and we pulled through. She deserved the solid reputation the Provender¡¯s had, and she deserved as much cleaning, repairing, and upgrading that I could do. I needed to figure out how to help in a fight without dropping missiles on anyone, ever. I could add another weapon platform, there was plenty of room, I could use a handheld giant sized weapon, or even a melee weapon. I was pretty mean with a wrench myself. I would figure it out in Neu Ca?on. I checked the logs on the BDwerks? Kombi-Max heavy transport. Its armor had not been breached and the cargo should be safe. Sunny said he checked on it, so I wasn''t worried, too much. I asked Big Fe to show me the rest of the convoy. It looks like the second Roundabout was down for the count. The kombi-buses were shot to pieces but were still moving! Everything else seemed beat up but fit enough that I could plan my repairs and triage. Rest of convoy
Vehicle name Estimated Armor remaining Measured evidence Notes from Big Fe
Toyota-Daimler-Bilaindand? Kombi-Max 60% 180/300 Cargo is intact; pulling RV trailer & engineering trailer.
Toyota-Daimler-Bilaindand? Luxury RV trailer 100% 240/240 Nominal
Power Construction Corp? Mobile Repair Station ¡°engineer trailer¡± 50% 100/200 Nominal; currently houses me, Big Fe.
BDwerks? Roundabout #1 37% 70/190 Pulling flatbed #1 & #2
BDwerks? Roundabout #2 0% 0/190 Immobile! Engine and main body damaged. On flatbed #2.
Gabby Co Salvage Flatbed #1 78% 78/100 Load: Mining drones, mining borgs, mining equipment
Gabby Co Salvage Flatbed #2 40% 40/100 Load: Additional mining equipment and open air salvage. Formerly Squad Leader, currently Roundabout #2
BDwerks? kombi-Bus #1 60% 120/200 Still mobile! Rider area damaged. Load: Spare Synths, cybernetics, drones and parts.
BDwerks? kombi-Bus #2 80% 160/200 Still mobile! Passenger area compromised. Load: Random parts, weapons, and salvaged equipment.
Gabby Co Salvage Bus #3 52% 120/250 Custom Gabby design is better than commercial! Load: special Gabby junk and Treasure bus.
BDwerks? Gecko RV 71% 292/412 Alexandria¡¯s RV home
Elven Explorer Hover RV 33%-99% 120/360 Miles¡¯s RV home and lab. Less confident of remaining armor due to alien design, 100% estimation error
Knockoff Power Construction Corp MultiDozer 50% 150/300 Sunny¡¯s mining workhorse.
The sun was just starting to dip toward the horizon when I noticed the spires and arches of the sprawling Grand Canyon. In 20 minutes or so, we would arrive at the southern rim staging area. Neu Ca?on was a modern and growing city. It was truly a product of post-war Earth, conventional plumbing ran alongside aether cables, fueled by the myriad of loci that ran through the Grand Canyon complex. The crazy magitechists of Neu Ca?on had even created a fleet of floating barges that would ferry passengers, vehicles, and even large cargo across the vast divide. After my dad made it big at his work for BDwerks? and the Black Market, he didn''t retire but he did buy a home in Neu Ca?on, he would commute and spend more time here. He even brought his parents here from Colorado right before he got killed. I had loved spending weekends with Dad in that house, watching movies, cooking bad food and window shopping. He would show me sketches for various robot ideas. I would dream of joining him in his lab and showing him what I could create, someday. A day that would never arrive now. The Black Market had seen my potential, at least, and they had funded this little escape venture and tasked me with creating my synths. But they had their hooks all over me too, and I wasn¡¯t any more free than my Dad was. I guess we had that in common. On the other hand, he was happy back then. It was weird for me though, Dad was different when Abuelo and Abuelita had moved in. They lived with us for six months, and dinner time was different, my hobbies had to go, and chores became a thing. But what was worse was Dad changed too, he loved his parents but he was always more reserved and, I guess deferential was the word, when he was around them. It just wasn''t the Dad I knew. Then 6 months later he was attacked on his ¡®commute¡¯ to work. We were told an American Empire Warthog squadron of 12 had attacked him and killed him before local response forces could muster to protect him. This happened somewhere over Lake Mead. Far way from any American Empire outpost, if you ask me. No one cares about the wasteland of the American south west. That''s why it''s called the wastelands. The Black Market said they had no idea how the AE knew he was there running low to the ground, in a stealthed black market flying power armor suit version called a Super Cheetah. He was following all the safety and security protocols to approach his ¡®work¡¯ and no other recorded AE attacks have ever occurred anywhere in the area. Not even close! I called BS but no one was going to tell a 15 year old girl anything. Someone had tipped them off, or something must have happened! Back to the present, the staging area on this side of the Grand Canyon was pretty minimal. It had a few large open air buildings that had roofs to protect the various caravans. Traders, adventurers, prospectors, and refugees that traveled up and down the Maricopa Corridor from Phoenix, through Joseph City to Neu Ca?on, here, and on into Utah and then Colorado, ending at New Telluride. We had started well west of the ruins of Phoenix, and were supposed to join the Maricopa Corridor earlier, but our diversion caused us to cut more directly toward Neu Ca?on and miss that part of the route this time. Most caravans were used to sleeping out in the open and guarding themselves. Three other groups had already staked out their spot in the afternoon sun. They might be heading further south and wanting to start in the morning, or going north into Neu Ca?on like us. At least on this side of the rim there was a little shade, and a common area to gossip and swap intel before hitting the trail. And a ticket booth to pay for the various hover barges to get you across if you cannot fly yourself. Everything of note for Neu Ca?on, was on the other side, on the North rim, twelve kilometers as the crow flies from the southern embarkation point. The city proper had the skyport, the shopping, houses, government, and even farms that were built directly into the northern rim. The tired levels, embedded buildings and techno-magical architecture made the city a marvel to behold. Too bad the the southern portion of Nevada had the Toxic Wastes, demons, aliens, dinosaurs, and *ahem* Neamans, and even scarier creatures whispered about in the night. >>Those walls and full time mercenary force was sounding good to me right about now, Fe.>> Sunny had parked the Dozer and was getting out to schedule a ferry transfer over. I began ordering the various synths to line up our convoy in a typical ring arrangement. We would need to figure out who was staying here, and who was going over to the city. After the 3 buses, 2 trucks and trailers, 2 RVs, and our Kombi-Max and its two trailers all got situated, I parked Gretta overlooking the southern rim of the Grand Canyon. This view never got old. I was, however, excited to turn our unearthed treasure into credits. Credits I needed to pay off the debt. And creds I needed to continue working on my synths. Perfect creation is never done, and I needed to keep tinkering. Sunny was rolling toward the manned building that housed the only periment presence on the southern side. The various ferry companies had representatives, or if they were cheap, vid-phones to hire them. Given that we were going to take the Kombi-Max across, all 18m of it, we needed the biggest magical barge they had. I want to keep our treasure secure and underwraps. The Mach 1 armor and pre-war books, (and don''t forget the single hide and horns from the first dinosaur kill *ahem*) were valuable and I didn''t want it out in the open. I got out of Gretta and began to descend. By the time I got down both RV¡¯s were deployed and set up, and Sunny was rolling back to our staging area. I intercepted him and accompanied him to the parked RVs. Miles¡¯s elven RV was organic, alien, and impressive with its fanless hover capabilities. Alexandria¡¯s RV was a beast, over 35m long, glossy white and tan paint, leather and wood interior, it was like stepping into a fancy vid. I have no idea what it cost, but it must have been tens of millions. And they drive it around the wilderness with all of us. I snorted at the thought and turned to Sunny, ¡°We all set to cross over tonight? Or tomorrow?¡± Sunny messaged Miles, and Alexandria, who both joined us outside quickly. Sunny explained to us all, ¡°I arranged for a ferry to take us over. I reckon it would be best for us to head over tomorrow. We can set up camp here. Figure out who wants to go over, and then catch the first ferry north.¡± I was surprised that Sunny, and moreover Alexandria, didn''t want to check into a hotel immediately but I agreed that we needed to figure out what to do with our loot and set up a guard. ¡°I need to head over to sell our salvage findings with Sunny, shop, and check in with folks. Who else wants to head over?¡± I asked the group. Miles surprised me by wanting to head over, before I remember him mentioning something earlier. He said, ¡°I would like to accompany you all tomorrow morning. I have a few shopping items I need as well. Est¨¦ril will stay behind, to mind the experiments and camp, if that is agreeable.¡± ¡°I would like to head over as well, likely for at least a night perhaps longer,¡± Alexandria explained. Sunny nodded his head and said, ¡°Yeah we plan to be here for two or three days, we can all rest in town and take turns staying out here with our convoy. This should give us plenty of time to shop and get what we need done.¡± I was starting to nod when Alexandria added, ¡°It sounds like Est¨¦ril will be staying here and I will have Molly stay here as well. That way we will have at least two folks, in addition to your creations Gabby, here at camp.¡± That honestly sounds good to me, I was a bit worried about how I could split my time between the convoy, town and selling our treasure. I replied, ¡°All right. That¡¯s a good plan. The four of us and Squad Leader will head over tomorrow morning in the big Kombi-Max. I can arrange to sell our haul first then split up to do shopping.¡± Everyone looked at me for a moment before Sunny asked ¡°You want to take one of your synths into town?¡± I looked affronted, ¡°Of course, no better back up. I also need someone to guard the Kombi-Max when we walk around town. And they need to learn to socialize if they are going to advance their synthetic individuality.¡± Clearing his throat, (did he still have a throat?), Sunny continued, ¡°Is there a risk to the town, I really don''t want to get kicked out of here, or worse.¡± ¡°Oh come on guys. You trusted them to guard you at camp all night long, every night. They protected me from a charging dinosaur and they were a major help in the ambush. They did not go robo¡¯ crazy and kill everyone in the end, when they could have. They are safer than most ¡®ganics!¡± I was getting frustrated. ¡°Yeah but this isn¡¯t something we can gamble on Gabby, this is Neu Ca?on the only real city for 1,000km or more.¡± Sunny looked less concerned but still wasn''t letting this go. ¡°Amigazo Sunny, this is my job, they are paying me to do this. One, I have to show them the progress, and two, if I cannot do this then we have no hope of paying off the loans for a very long time, if ever. They are prepared to pay major money for new product lines. Especially ones that give them a competitive advantage and helps them stick it to the PCC, UAI, RGE or the other corps.¡± I said with a grin. I didn''t mind working with the man, if we could stick it to the other man. Seeing as how they couldn''t convince me to change my mind, they eventually gave up. Who said old people cannot learn new tricks? Miles is over a hundred, Sunny is older than my dad, and Alexandria, well it''s not polite to ask, but she has had some quality work done. ¡°Good night all.¡± I bade everyone farewell and did a quick walk around the minimal camp we had set up. Most vehicles were parked but ready to leave. We didn''t need to deploy and set up much, we weren''t going to be staying here long. The vehicles and gear seemed to be in good locations and all set. The Kombi-Max was ready to roll out tomorrow. As a last stop at the engineering trailer, I reached out my hand to communicate directly. I directly connected with Big Fe, to make sure the synths on guard had sufficient coverage to continuously watch the entire site. We had 4 Hopper-synths on overwatch on roofs and briefly in the air, and 6 road-synths making rounds and watching the perimeter in addition to the normal borg-synth drivers who were temporarily filling in gaps in the camp guards. Nothing would be stupid enough to attack in range of the Neu Ca?on defenses, but I wasn''t going to be lulled into a sense of complacency either. I headed back to Gretta and climbed up. As I got ready for bed, I didn''t really understand the appeal of a motel room. I get that a big bed is nice, but it wasn''t home and it wasn''t safe. Curling up into the gently swaying hammock, I felt secure and comfortable inside my armored giant.