[T-K War Fiction] Knights in Powered Armor

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Artemis
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[T-K War Fiction] Knights in Powered Armor

Post by Artemis »

KNIGHTS IN POWERED ARMOR
A story of the T-K War


1

“Armorers!” the authoritative voice of the Sarge-in-Charge echoed metallically through the prep bay. “Sew 'em up!”

Sergeant Solomon Diego settled down in the cracked leather seat that covered the nuclear fission reactor of his Sleipnir suit, popped the joints in his neck and back enough that the cracks bounced off the walls like rifle fire, then held out his arms, crucifixion-like.

“Anything itches,” a woman in orange and gray armorer's fatigues said, “scratch it now, Marine.” She pulled behind her a bulky steel and ceramic limb that only resembled an arm in the most abstract fashion. The arm probably weighed thrice what as she did, and there was no way she could have picked it up in an Earth-normal gee. Fortunately for her, the prep bay was located at the USS Indiana's central foremast, and unlike the rest of the battlewagon, wasn't spun for gravity. The armorers, supervisors, and Sleipnir pieces floated and spun in the prep bay like flakes in a snowglobe – a very well-orchestrated snowglobe.

Sol stuck his tongue out at the woman. “Scratch it for me, Lucy,” he said, and wiggled his hips. “Got one right around here.”

Armory Sergeant Lucille Warren mimed punching Sol in the groin with her free hand, using the other to maneuver his Sleipnir's right arm into place. “Try me. I'll make sure you never itch there again.”

Sol turned his head away, squeezing his eyes shut. He knew what was coming next. Some marines liked watching themselves get sewn up, or were at least morbidly fascinated by it. Sol wasn't crazy about the idea, and a horror story he'd heard back in basic armor training, when he and his squad were still practicing with stilts and buckets of water, about one marine who'd caught an errant bolt with his right eye, flashed under the black and red of his eyelids.

He felt the sharp thunk of contact as the high-powered magnets in the Sleipnir's torso connected with the ones in the arm, and heard the high-pitched whirring of Lucy's micro-bolt gun. A teeth-chattering vibration ran through the suit as thousands of nano-carbon-weave bolts, each more than a foot long but less than half an inch thick, punched into the suit's shoulder joint at over 40 bolts per second. When the vibration ended, the arm's hydraulic tendons and muscles activated with a hiss.

“Right arm good!” Lucille called. “Donnie, pass me the glove!” Two seconds later, then more whirring sounds and vibration. Sol did his best to let his hand relax while they fitted the gauntlet, but it wasn't easy.

The process repeated itself over his left arm, and Sol opened his eyes and put the arms through their paces. He flexed his nuclear-powered biceps, made a pair of three-fingered fists that could have delivered a haymaker to an assault tank, and opened the gun ports on his forearms to make sure both .45-calibre barrels slid out of their armored casings smoothly, then went back in them the same way. Everything checked out. “Arms are both green,” Lucille remarked, and motioned her assistants to haul over the torso piece. “How're your tacts?” she asked Sol.

Sol touched his three fingers to his thumbs, and rubbed the palms together. With a sensation he still wasn't used to after three years in the armored infantry, he felt steel slide over both palms – his real palms. The gauntlets were easily the size of his head, with fingers reaching out almost as long as his real forearm, giving the Sleipnir a creepy, Freddy Krueger look, but he could feel an approximation of tactile sensation at certain contact points in the gloves. The same was true of the suit's footpads, which resembled kangaroo feet more than anything else.

The sensation was sent via wireless transmitters in the suit directly into the nerves in his hands and feet, giving him greater spatial awareness of the Sleipnir and it's surroundings. It was like a tactile version of the 3D glasses used by film makers to fool their audience into sensing depth on a flat screen, back before the advent of true holographs – he'd never mistake it for the actual sensation of touching with his own hands and feet, it was convincing enough to work with. “They're good,” he said.

Lucille nodded in approval as the junior armorers brought the torso component of the suits over, and the three of them slid it into place and then went to work bolting it in. Sol didn't have to close his eyes this time – he was protected from any errant bolts by the suit itself, now. He saw a tiny red light come on inside the suit, letting him know the camera and microphone set-up was connected to the Sleipnir's nuke-fish reactor, and was watching and listening for his commands.

Sol blinked four times in rapid succession and, notified by the visual cue, hundreds of thumb-tack-sized cameras covering the Sleipnir's steel body activated, and suddenly his vision of the inside of the suit dimmed and then disappeared, covered by a holographic overlay of his suit's surroundings. A network of low-powered lasers beamed the image directly over his corneas, which were protected by the contact lenses he'd fitted himself with before stepping into the suit. The lasers tracked his eye and head movement, and fed him information from the networked cameras, which worked somewhat like an arthropod's super-positioned compound eye, giving him a wide range of vision no matter which way he turned to look. The only blind spots were the ones he normally had walking around in his own skin and on his own legs – and when he was doing that, he couldn't switch to night vision or infrared, perceive the ultraviolet spectrum, zoom in as much as 50x or grant himself a 5x wider visual range.

He looked over at Lucille, who was bolting the suit's external coolant tank over his ribcage. He flicked his tongue out twice, like a snake tasting the air, and the suit obeyed, turning on the external speakers. “Suit's reading me just fine,” he said, hearing his own voice booming out in a basso growl into the prep bay.

Lucille looked up at him – or rather, looked up at the middle of the suit's torso. It didn't have a head, just an armored dome inside which the suit's radar sat. “Good,” she said, the audio sensors in the suit picking it up with minimal interference from the other sounds in the prep bay. “We're almost done out here. We got the weapon load-out sheet from the Cap, you've got two optional shoulder slots. Pick your poison.”

Sol “Hmmm'd” which over the speakers sounded like an old engine turning over. “Gimme a 'nade chucker and a missile pod. Might need to knock over some furniture today.”

Lucille nodded, and turned to her assistants. “You heard the man. Donnie, get me a Mk. 80, even mix of frags and incendiaries, Kwai, go grab a pod of GAM-IXs.” As she said it, another armorer floated by, riding a cart laden down with gauss rifles and passing them out. “Thanks Ed,” Lucille said, taking one of the weapons that was as long as she was tall in one hand, a crate of ammo easily 150 kilos in the other, and carefully maneuvering them in front of Sol's suit.

Sol reached for the grip-less gauss rifle, fingers of his right hand extended, and four skinny rods shot out of ports in the suit's wrist, attaching to matching ports at the rifle's back. Magnetic clamps on the rifle swung back and thunked into place around his glove. As he did so, Lucille clamped the ammo pack to the suit's back and unspooled the chain-like feed enough to load it into the rifle. Sol wiggled his pinky, slotting the first ball-bearing-like round, then made a “halt” motion, confirming the safety on. His hand never touched the rifle – the command rods linked to the tact sensors in his glove, and fed the information to the gun's onboard computer. Sol slid the rifle into it's holster at the small of his back, and pulled his glove out, flexing the fingers.

Lucille loaded the ammo for the .45 holdout sidearms into their slots on his elbows. Donnie and Kwai bolted his optional heavy weapons onto the two shoulder hard-points. The suit activated his HUD, which, traveling with his wandering vision, showing all his weapons were networked, loaded, and functioning. A translucent disc appeared at the bottom of his vision and quickly filled with blue and white pulsing dots – his motion tracker and radar had come online, and was identifying friendly transponders, the other Sleipnir suits in his squad and the “unidentified or unconfirmed” motion of the armorers and other technicians.

Lastly, Sol detached himself from the magnetic harness that had held his Sleipnir in place in the microgravity prep bay, and, with a grace that belied the suit's weight and power, he floated over to what looked like a pair of armored stilts. His legs and pelvis were covered in a steel wireframe, but the suit's true legs, the ones that made his stand more than fifteen feet tall and contained everything from jump jets to meter-long boot knives to handholds for squishy infantry to grab onto and catch a free ride, still had to be connected. He grabbed the bars over the legs, and slid his feet and calves into them as one would a pair of pants. More magnetic clamps connected the legs to the the wireframe covering his knees, and Lucille bolted them over.

The suit's legs were set up like a horse's, with another joint where his real feet ended that connected to the longest part of the leg, where the metatarsal and pastern bones would have been on a horse. This gave the Sleipnir greater running speed, a higher vantage point, and incidentally made it resemble it's namesake, Odin's steed from Norse mythology.

Donnie brought over the groin plate and clamped it into place, and Kwai did the same for his thigh plates, completing the sewing-up process. “Check for holes,” Lucille said, nodding as she examined her handiwork. The assistants did so, taking a minute to make sure no bolt had been missed, no armor was out of place, and no accidental punctures had formed. They waved tiny handheld sonars over the suit, checking for pitted surfaces or unwanted humps in the armor. They both gave a thumbs up, which Sol returned, then made two fists. The assistants both grinned, and tapped the steel fists with their own. “Good to go,” Sol said.

“Wait,” Lucille said, snapping her fingers. “I almost forgot. Donnie, go get the stencils. Kwai, get the mirror.”

Sol almost raised a questioning eyebrow before remembering the suit would read that as a command to zoom in, which would have given him a fantastic, not to mention panoramic view of the pores and freckles on Lucille's face. “What stencil? We already got the unit number on, don't we?”

Lucille rolled her eyes, crossed her arms and floating a foot above him. “Approval just came down from division command,” she said. “'Personalized decoration and customization of equipment is permitted unless considered contra-survival. See updated handbook file for details.' Donnie and I made you a little something last night. Might want to close your eyes.”

Sol chuckled to himself and blinked five times. Protective sheathes slid over the suit's tiny cameras, temporarily cutting off his vision. He heard a hissing sound outside the suit. After a minute or so, Lucille said “OK, take a look.”

Sol blinked five more times, and saw his three armorers holding up a vanity-size mirror in front of him, all three of them grinning like fools. Sol saw his Sleipnir in it's full armored glory, headlights smoldering a soft orange, reactive paint reflecting the drab blue-gray that was the predominant color on the Indiana. However, spray-painted in ivory white on the armor's front, was a set of shark's teeth, probably life size. Circling around the teeth, in jagged but readable font, was the phrase “You're Gonna Need a Bigger Boat.” Around that was more text, in a stubby, blocky language Sol could only read a few words of.

Sol laughed, a truly demonic sound coming from the Sleipnir's speakers. “Duh-nun,” he started chanting. “Duh-nun, duh-nun, duh-nun!”

“Go get 'em, Jaws,” Lucille said, banging three times on the suit's torso plate. “You're dropping in five.”

Sol turned and walked carefully along the prep bay's deck, anchored by magnetic boots. He lined up with the rest of his four-man squad, who had all received their own bits of art and bravado. Yvonne, the squad's heavy weapons suit, sported a mostly naked specimen of masculine beefcake riding a missile, cowboy hat flying off his head, yelling “Yee-haw!” from a word balloon; Roger, the sniper, had a stylized Eye of Ra painted on his four-meter-long sharpshooter variant gauss rifle; Sarge-in-Charge had an Uncle Sam with a cyborg eyepatch, matching the old man's own replacement.

“Look at us,” Yvonne said, her North Texan twang somehow sounding even more flirtatious and rowdy over her suit's speakers. “All dolled up and nowhere fun to go.” She twirled her six-barreled HELLSAW in one hand, like a character in a western movie.

“Ain't so, cowgirl,” Sarge-in-Charge said. “We're going to the funnest, happiest, most heart-warming place in the galaxy, so we are.”

Sol grinned. Not everyone would describe a blasted desert covered in hostile Klashies as any of those things. But to be fair, not everyone was a powered armor infantryman in the United States Marine Corps.

“Move out, Marines!” Sarge-in-Charge yelled, marching his squad towards the opening bay doors that held the T-28 Tiger dropships. Dozens of other units, everyone from light infantry to engineer detachments to a pack of Hu-Hum combat trucks, all were headed in the same direction. All were headed to the same place – the equatorial desert of Avalon. “Let's go save a world!”

“Yeah,” Roger said in his flat midwestern drawl. “For liberty and justice and puppies an' shit.”

“Hoo-ra!” Sol and Yvonne yelled together.
"The universe's most essential beauty is its endlessness. There is room and resources enough for all of us. Whether there is room for all of our passions is the question, and the problem that we work tirelessly to find a solution to."

-Qhameio Allir Nlafahn, Commonwealth ambassador, during the signing of the Kriolon Treaty.
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Re: [T-K War Fiction] Knights in Powered Armor

Post by Booted Vulture »

Hoo-rah! Semper fi! :D

Cool stuff, Arty. And this was just him putting on the suit.
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Re: [T-K War Fiction] Knights in Powered Armor

Post by Artemis »

Exactly. Just wait 'til you see it in use :D
"The universe's most essential beauty is its endlessness. There is room and resources enough for all of us. Whether there is room for all of our passions is the question, and the problem that we work tirelessly to find a solution to."

-Qhameio Allir Nlafahn, Commonwealth ambassador, during the signing of the Kriolon Treaty.
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Re: [T-K War Fiction] Knights in Powered Armor

Post by Artemis »

The Minstrel Boy

The Minstrel Boy to the war is gone
In the ranks of death you will find him;
His father's sword he hath girded on,
And his wild harp slung behind him;"
Land of Song!" said the warrior bard,
"Tho' all the world betrays thee,
One sword, at least, thy rights shall guard,
One faithful harp shall praise thee!

The Minstrel fell! But the foeman's chain
Could not bring that proud soul under;
The harp he lov'd ne'er spoke again,
For he tore its chords asunder;
And said "No chains shall sully thee,
Thou soul of love and brav'ry!
Thy songs were made for the pure and free,
They shall never sound in slavery!

The Minstrel Boy will return we pray
When we hear the news we all will cheer it,
The minstrel boy will return one day,
Torn perhaps in body, not in spirit.
Then may he play on his harp in peace,
In a world such as Heaven intended,
For all the bitterness of man must cease,
And ev'ry battle must be ended.


Lyrics by Thomas Moore. Official song of the Knights Militant, United Kingdom of Avalon
"The universe's most essential beauty is its endlessness. There is room and resources enough for all of us. Whether there is room for all of our passions is the question, and the problem that we work tirelessly to find a solution to."

-Qhameio Allir Nlafahn, Commonwealth ambassador, during the signing of the Kriolon Treaty.
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Re: [T-K War Fiction] Knights in Powered Armor

Post by Artemis »

2

There was a storm crackling and rumbling overhead.

It was a kind of storm Avalon had probably never seen in it's natural history, though Knight-Captain Carpathia Jones was not planetologist and couldn't be sure of that. The sky pulsed a strange blue color, not the even, light shade she was used to, but a flickering cyan-white that waved and rocked back and forth all across the sky, from horizon to horizon. Weird reverse droplets and ripples formed in the sky's surface, like giant raindrops were falling upwards into a blue-hot pit of lava. Over Carpathia's head, a bank of sky-plasma bucked, abruptly opened, and loosed a cohesive bolt of lightning as thick as a tree trunk onto the ground, less than thirty feet in front of her. The crater it left smoked and glittered with glazed soil.

It had stormed like this once before, when the Klashnoi had first come to Avalon. No one had been sure what it was at first, and some had taken it as the worst of ill omens. Now they knew it was a meteorological effect brought on by the use of orbital bombardment, specifically the use of particle cannons. The abuse heaped upon Avalon's skies had resulted in an atmosphere full of atoms suddenly stripped of their electrons, and turned the sky, sometimes for forty miles in any direction, into one flat sheet of lightning that could persist for days, stabbing wrathfully at anything and everything.

Another bolt of lightning crackled down from the sky, a titanic roar of thunder following it, headed straight for Carpathia's head.

The base camp's rating-6 electrical shield caught the bolt and dispersed its energy more or less evenly over a twenty-meter-radius dome. Carpathia still smelled the burnt-roast ozone of the strike, but it hadn't done so much as ruffle the creases in her uniform. She raised her eyes to the hellish sky, and wondered how long this was going to last.

In a way she was not entirely comfortable with, Carpathia was thankful for the storm. The allied forces in the equatorial desert, mostly Knights Militant from the United Kingdom of Avalon, with a handful of Morganian divisions and what was left of the Kurdish resistance in the southern hills, had been notified that they'd see something like this soon, and that it would herald the coming of allied reinforcements and a swift kick in the whatever-the-Klashies-used-for-mating. The bombardment had probably started to the north, Carpathia judged, knocking out the communications arrays in the occupied city of Tunirkut, scrambling the Klashnoi networks and making way for the dropships that were surely on their way. So if the storm was indeed an omen, it was a good one this time.

Probably. Hopefully. Maybe.

Carpathia shook her head, and turned back to the tents and crack-board structures she and her unit had set up. The shield generator, cables and array dishes exposed and betraying it's jury-rigged origins, hummed steadily in the middle of the camp, and the hairs on the back of her neck and arms bristled as she got closer to it. She was met by her second-in-command, Knight-Lieutenant Richard Alms. “Won't be getting a wink of sleep tonight,” the man said, his voice on the gravelly end of the highlands brogue most UKA citizens spoke with. “Not with that damn thing trying to cook us.”

“I'm sure I can find something for you to do, if you're not suitably tired,” Carpathia said, her own voice of more even pitch than Alms', but with the same sing-song lilt to it. “Run laps around camp, dig a new latrine trench, sand-wash my suit for me...”

“I get it, I get it,” Alms grunted, rolling his eyes. “Don't tell me it doesn't bother you, though, Cap.”

“Didn't say anything like it,” Carpathia said. “But we're useless if we're not rested, and as soon as that curtain goes down, we're on the move. We'll have to hope as much as it's keeping us awake, it's keeping the Klashies jumping.”

“I prefer my Klashies not jumping, with all due respect ma'am,” Alms said. “I like 'em real still, myself.”

Carpathia smiled, and nodded. “Aye, point made, Lieutenant.”

They passed the row of twelve Bucephalus powered armor suits in use by the 112th Suited Cavalry Division, Squadron Galahad. The suits were missing the torso plating, so that they could be climbed into at a moment's notice, but other than that the suits were whole, ready to have a Cavalryman stuffed into them, sewn up, and moved out. Keeping them in a two pieces unpowered like this wasn't good for the suits, the engineers said, it put too much pressure on the joints without the servos and hydraulics to support them. So Carpathia had ordered the suits to be kept at 10% power, their exposed reactor cores venting soft white coolant fog. She wanted to be ready to fight as soon as possible. As they passed, Carpathia smoothed a wrinkle in her suit's ballistic cape, fifteen kilograms of thick, flexible nano-carbon mesh hanging from the shoulder plating to cover the back and sides of her Bucephalus, guaranteed to stop a gauss round, if not the force such ammunition would impart. As tough as it was, to her touch it felt like rough but comfortable linen.

“How are we doing on dust checks?” Carpathia asked, kneeling and taking a small brush out of her fatigues pocket. She wiped a layer of dust out of her suit's left ankle joint.

“I've got Mitchell, Dorrigan and O'Keeffe taking turns checking the suits and the truck, and the fans are still running fine.” Alms said. “It's at... acceptable levels.”

Carpathia sighed. The electrical shield would stop the lightning strikes, not to mention a lot of the primitive but effective energy weapons the Klashnoi used, but it didn't do squat against the sand and dust that ruled the desert. If anything, it made it more likely to stick to static-prone surfaces, such as electronics and nano-carbon meshes. The suits' powerful hydraulic joints probably wouldn't be bothered much by the grit, but a powered armor suit was useless if it had a gunked up computer, and the whole squadron was dead in the sand if the armory and command truck's computer had a fit. Even the shield generator itself was at risk, and if that went down, it could kill them all – the ion storm simply wouldn't be able to resist the smorgasbord of conductive surfaces that made up an army camp. “Keep it that way. Go, get some sleep, Lieutenant.”

Alms nodded, and saluted, hand flat to the side of his face, palm out slightly, Avalon style. Carpathia returned the salute, and continued cleaning out the grime and dust on her suit.

After a minute of that, she grabbed onto the hand grooves on her suit's side, and scrambled up them with practiced ease. Swinging herself into the suit, she pulled her field computer out of it's place under the suit's seat, unfolding the infoparchment screen panels and synching it's wireless power source to the suit's reactor. It flickered to life after a few audible clicks. Carpathia frowned. Was the slow start-up because she'd flicked the screens on cold, without the full power of the fission reactor that they were used to? Or had the dust already started to infect her equipment?

Whatever the reason, the screens finally booted up, glowing a faint amber, awaiting her orders. Before giving any, Carpathia reached out of the suit's seat and grabbed a handful of the ballistic cape, pulling it into the suit's core with her, and laying it out over her legs. It was beginning to get cold, as it always did in the desert at night – not that one could tell what time of day it was with the ion storm going – and the cape's heavy, warm presence was one of the rare comforts Carpathia allowed herself. Holding the cape in place with one hand, she waved the other in front of the screens, waiting for the computer's camera to detect her movement. It did, and a a small cursor followed the track of her index finger across the screens.

She selected a file on the computer by tapping it's paper-like screen. The video file opened, with an option appearing on the screen asking her if she would prefer flat or holographic imagery. She selected flat, and pushed the play button.

“Carrie,” a good-looking young man with Black Irish features said on the screen, standing a little too close to the camera so that his face took up almost all of the screen. “Someone wants to say hello.”

In the video, Fidelay Jones moved back from the camera to sit in a comfortable-looking chair, and picked a small person in corduroy coveralls up from the floor. “Kay,” Fidelay, her husband, said to the child. “Say hello to mumma!”

The child, who was not quite a year old looked in the general direction of the camera, seemed to consider what would have looked like a floating plastic orb shining a red light in his face, and made a disapproving face – and noise.

“Well that's not very nice at all,” Fidelay said, patting the child on the back to get the rest of the burp out. Watching the screen, Carpathia smiled, shaking her head. “He's a little camera-shy, I think,” Fidelay said. “I wonder who he might have gotten that from.” The man narrowed his eyes suspiciously at the camera, pointed at himself and mouthing “Not me.” Carpathia laughed quietly.

Kay reached his arms into the air and made a noise that, charitably, might have been interpreted as “Down, want down.” Fidelay sighed and let the child down, keeping an eye on him as he went tottering away into the kitchen, probably looking for Gwen.

“Oh dear,” the girl said in false exasperation. “Here comes trouble.” Carpathia watched Fidelay's teenage daughter from his first marriage carry her son back into the room. “You talking to mum,” the girl said, nodding at the camera.

“Was just about to call you in,” Fidelay said. “Wanted to see if I could get the little thing to say hello on his own.”

Gwendolyn Jones rolled her eyes, looked down at Kay, and said “say hello, little beastie you!” and looked at the camera. “Like this: hi mummy!”

The boy's watched his step-sister, then mimicked her almost exactly. “Ai-ee mumma!” he said.

Fidelay shook his head, defeated again. “Sometimes,” he said to the camera, “I think Gwen here actually had the kid, and you just got fat for nine months to cover for her.”

Gwen looked at her father disapprovingly, sticking her lower lip out. “You're horrible,” she said.

Fidelay chuckled. “Well, look,” he said to the camera. “I know you're busy, and I'm not sure when this will get to you, but, uh, just wanted to tell you to keep safe – not that you need the reminder, I'm sure – and that we all miss you here.” Carpathia's husband nodded once, rocked back and forth on his heels, then made an expression of astonishment. “Oh, right, damn I forgot, Cheryl and Galen were just married! Had the wedding in the field, if you believe it, full military dress and all. Had to wear that damn kilt, that's the third time this year. If this war keeps going, people are gonna keep getting married and half of Avalon's gonna be exposed to my-”

“Oh please, dad,” Gwen said, covering Kay's ears with one arm while supporting him with the other. “No one needs to hear any details.”

They went on like that for another twenty minutes, as first Fidelay and then Gwen would remember something they wanted to tell her, some bit of domestic news, or asking her to confirm stories they'd heard on the news or just rumors, knowing she probably couldn't say anything about most of them. Gwen showed Carpathia her report card, under protest, and at her father's insistence she disappeared for a few minutes to change into a blue and orange dress that she would be wearing to the Equinox Formal in a week. “She's going with that Roy Dawson boy,” Fidelay said, sticking his tongue out. “You know how I feel about that one, Carpathia – can you see if you can talk her out of it next time you call?”

Gwen blushed on screen, and Carpathia rolled her eyes. The “Roy Dawson boy” had been introduced to the Jones family after rear-ending Fidelay's brand new SoMoCo convertible with his hoverbike. He and Fidelay had exchanged insurance and, when they thought Fidelay hadn't been looking, he and Gwen had exchanged Grapevine accounts. No accounting for taste, she supposed, but her daughter was happy, and the dent had been fixed, so as far as she was concerned, all was as well as teenage romances could ever be.

“Alright, we should let you go-” Fidelay started.

“For real this time,” Gwen interjected, and Kay insisted “dis bime.”

“Yes, of course,” Fidelay said. “Love you, Carrie.”

“Love you, mum,” Gwen said, gently taking Kay's hand and waving it at the screen. “Say buh-buh, Kay. Speak, boy, speak!”

Kay remained silent – he was probably worn out from a hard half hour of being held and gurgling.

Fidelay reached forward to the camera and, with one last smile and a quick air-kiss, he switched it off.

Carpathia had fallen asleep a few moments before, having seen the video message close to a dozen times already. The field computer went dark to conserve power, then folded itself up and closed into a book-sized pad of infoparchment on top of the ballistic cape and blanket, rising and falling in time with the Knight-Captain's snores.
"The universe's most essential beauty is its endlessness. There is room and resources enough for all of us. Whether there is room for all of our passions is the question, and the problem that we work tirelessly to find a solution to."

-Qhameio Allir Nlafahn, Commonwealth ambassador, during the signing of the Kriolon Treaty.
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Re: [T-K War Fiction] Knights in Powered Armor

Post by Siege »

I love this, but especially the gung-ho attitude of the USMC. Particularly the war paint, which really gave the suits remarkable flavour. Also, you never explicitly describe how big they are, but from the description of bolts slotting into holes I'm getting the impression these things are pretty gosh-darned massive. That was a nice way to go about it. Also, and amusingly, as I recall you used the 'hand signals translated to suit systems' technique for controlling combat armours also for the giant Zaibatsu mechs in OF, so that's a pretty consistent approach if ever there was one. Not so sure about gearing up in a zero-g bay myself when there's lots of heavy equipment floating around though... Remember: zero gravity might render weight more or less moot, but it certainly does no such thing for inertia (quite the opposite in fact). You can still get flattened pretty easily by a heavy weight that you might think weighs nothing.

Anyway, I rather like the atmosphere of Avalon you've created. Initially it struck me as a bit too deliberately anachronistic, what with the kilts and the knight-captain bit, but then I considered that if I wanted to colonize a world and make a culturally more or less homogeneous group out of all the disparate colonists that might be arriving, it could very well be a very smart strategy to adopt such seemingly out-of-time things in order to create a deliberately distinct culture which people can identify with...
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Re: [T-K War Fiction] Knights in Powered Armor

Post by Artemis »

Oh, microgravity definitely has it's hazards - the fact that the armorers are working with the constant threat of decapitation by ammo pallet makes them that much more badass.

I have to admit to having stolen the idea of hand and head motions controlling the powered armor from Heinlein's Starship Troopers - but then again I stole a lot of things from Heinlein when creating UC :p
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-Qhameio Allir Nlafahn, Commonwealth ambassador, during the signing of the Kriolon Treaty.
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Re: [T-K War Fiction] Knights in Powered Armor

Post by Magister Militum »

I for one love powered armor and the notion of them being future knights in shining armor, so I fully approve of this story.
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Re: [T-K War Fiction] Knights in Powered Armor

Post by Shroom Man 777 »

I can't believe I procrastinated for so long! Arty you must continue this! It's awesome.

NUCLEAR POWERED BICEPS. JAWS. HELLSAW! And then, contrasting to that, we see the tender loving care of a mum fightin' on Avalon. Seeing her hubbie and kiddies' message in the cockpit of her nuclear-powered death machine! Very nice stuff. Gyrenes! Let's get tactical! HOO-RAH!
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Re: [T-K War Fiction] Knights in Powered Armor

Post by Booted Vulture »

Damm it shroomie! You got my hopes up! I thought there'd been an update.
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Re: [T-K War Fiction] Knights in Powered Armor

Post by Artemis »

Ask, and ye shall receive.

3


The Tiger carrying Armored Fireteam USA-280 floated out of the Indiana's launch bay, propelled by simple inertia. It was joined by more than five dozen others of its kind, as well as a quartet of massive Hyung-class landing craft, big ceramic-bottomed bricks with stubby rocket boosters arrayed seemingly randomly over its hull. The Hyungs would be carrying tanks and Army grunts, but they'd also be carrying supplies for the entire American contingent, so Sol decided not to hold it against them.

The Marines got the rocky rides down, of course. They wouldn't have it any other way.

Sol braced himself in the suit for the sudden plummet into gravity, and, triggered by the violent vibration as the dropship hit atmosphere, his suit offered him a mouthguard to bite down on. He did, ignoring the stale, rubber taste. The ceramic disc bolted to the Tiger's ventral plating would protect the ship and it's occupants from burning up on entry, but that just meant they were in danger of being shaken down into elementary particles before they got through.

Trying to distract himself, Sol linked his vision to the Tiger's external cameras, and looked out at the vast armada around and behind him.

The United States military had committed enough people, gear, and supplies to fill three Neptune-class Battlewagons, the USS Indiana, the USS North Virginia, and the USS Hidalgo. The ships, looking somewhat like five kilometer-long double-barreled shotguns strapped onto a fusion torch and dotted with antennae blisters, were awe-inspiring all by themselves, without even looking at their escort. Of course, Sol did. Two Saturn-class Carriers, the USS Veracruz and USS Colorado, and their combat patrols of hundreds of fighters, hung back a few hundred klicks, keeping a watch out for a Klashie counter-strike from the other side of Avalon. The USA's pride and joy for this operation, the Jupiter-class Battleship USS Puerto Rico, took the opposite position, practically falling into the gravity well for how close it was to the planet, its massive weapons ports pointed at the surface, ready to blast anything that even remotely looked like a surface-to-space weapon system. The Puerto Rico winked its starboard running lights at the drop fleet, and Sol saw a few other ships winking their port lights back. Squid and turkey light-slang, Sol figured.

And that was just the Americans.

Past the fleet he'd rode in with, Sol could see the faint outlines of the combined British and Russian fleet, also launching their forces, and behind that the Australian, Utopia Martian, and Jovian fleets, which were still getting into position. Hovering over the whole operation was another British fleet watching Avalon's northern hemisphere for activity, and the Titanic fleet watching the south. The Asgard fleet could barely be seen over the planet's curvature, a swarm of glinting, flickering lights, duking it out with a Klashie strike force that they'd caught trying to sneak around Merlin, Avalon's smaller moon. And at the center of the whole op, painted green and white, was the Jupiter-class Ifrit, the flagship of Fleet Admiral Maumud of the Enceladan Caliphate, the man who had made the counter-attack that had liberated Avalon's skies. This whole shebang was under his watch.

Altogether, a grand total of 17 million warriors and their hundreds of millions of tons of war-making equipment was about to fall on Avalon's occupied zones, a good-sized nation's worth, to say nothing of the starmen supporting them in orbit. It would be the largest single invasion ever undertaken in Terran history, leaving the Crusades, D-Day, and Operation: Blunderbuss in the dust, and its success or failure would determine the fate of an entire planet, and possibly the war, depending on how the Eden campaigns went.

Facing them, according to the most optimistic intelligence reports, was something in the neighborhood of 40 million Klashnoi, already entrenched in New Kurdistan and the Argos Mountains, all of them veterans of the initial invasion and possibly the Klashie civil war before that, with as much heavy gear as the Terran liberators were packing, and there were always more being shuttled down from occupied Alfred Bester SSC and its starlift. Sol shuddered at the thought – if he was really lucky, he'd live long enough to try and help re-take the orbital colony, and no one had even thought about how they were going to do that yet.

Sol closed his eyes and switched off the external view. No sense psyching himself out before they'd even properly entered atmosphere.

“Hey Sol,” Roger said over the intercom. “You OK, Marine?”

“A-OK, duderino,” Sol said, grateful that Roger couldn't see his face and see how very not A-OK he was. He wasn't even sure Z-OK was accurate.

“Man, what is it with you and drops?” Roger said, sounding like he didn't believe Sol no matter which letter he used as a prefix. “Little advice. Don't think of it as a drop. It's more of a ride. Like on a roller coaster, you know? Space Mountain, Tundra Twister, shit like that?”

Sol's stomach did something unpleasant. “Rog?”

“Yeah, Sol?”

“You're not helping.”

Roger “heheheh'd” and lightly elbowed Sol's suit. “Relax. It'll all be over soon.”

“Dio, man, don't say that,” Sol grumbled.

There was a cataclysmic roar and shaking, and all of Sol's instruments starting going completely whacko. They'd expected this – the ion storms across the equator had been abating, at least the meteorologists had been saying they had, but they were still strong enough to bitch-slap the Tigers and Hyungs as they passed through the planet's ozone layer into the stratosphere. Sol had no idea what was happening to their Tiger's avionics. He didn't really want to know.

Perhaps inevitably, that's when the flak started up.

“Hold tight,” the aw-shucks voice of the Tiger's pilot came over the intercom. “We're getting fish-hooked.”

The Klashies on the ground knew they couldn't hit the broad side of a barn with the storm boiling over their heads – even if they could see through it, any missile's guidance system would be fried within a second of launching. So, they had decided to take saturation or accuracy, and had started throwing God-alone-knew-how-many gauss rounds into the sky, hoping that some of them would hit. It was a pretty desperate tactic, and Sol knew it, but the thing about desperation was that it managed to work sometimes – if it didn't, sentient beings wouldn't get desperate.

There were what sounded like forty or fifty “pings!” on the Tiger's hull, most of it caught by the re-entry shield, but a few rounds punched through into the Tiger's troop bay. No one got hit, but Sarge-in-Charge's favorite Old Glory got a few new holes punched through it.

“Shit in a can!” Sarge-in-Charge bellowed. “Yvonne, did you bring your sewing kit?”

“Sir, blow me, sir!”

“Damn, I was gonna raise that on top of Pierson's Peak, too.”

The Tiger's main engines screamed louder, and then were joined by the heavy pulse of the scramjets. The flak continued to pepper the hull, but now it was less than two pings a second. They were moving out of the cloud, toward their appointed DZ. Suddenly, there was a violent “thunk!” and Sol felt himself and his suit pressed into the floor of the dropship. For a moment, he thought they'd had something shot off, an engine or a stabilizer or something, before he heard the laugh of the pilot.

“Relax kids,” the genderless growl over the intercom said. “Just dropped the burn-up shield. If my math is right, it should hit the ground with enough force to blow a nice, big crater in the ground, about where that flak was coming from. Forty seconds to dirt, so pick yourself up, and dust yourselves off.”

Sol gritted his teeth, and accepted Yvonne's hand up. “You ready, cowboy?”

“Drop's almost over,” Sol said, more to himself. “Soon as we're on the ground, I'm good to go.”

“Good,” Yvonne said, and he could hear the predator's grin in her voice. “Cuz I'm gonna be keeping score. Least kills buys the first round.”

Sol grinned back, knowing Yvonne wouldn't see it, and knowing she'd hear it in his voice. “You're on, cowgirl.”

Fifteen seconds to dirt.
"The universe's most essential beauty is its endlessness. There is room and resources enough for all of us. Whether there is room for all of our passions is the question, and the problem that we work tirelessly to find a solution to."

-Qhameio Allir Nlafahn, Commonwealth ambassador, during the signing of the Kriolon Treaty.
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Re: [T-K War Fiction] Knights in Powered Armor

Post by Shroom Man 777 »

LAST ONE TO KILL THE BAD GUY GETS TO BUY THE BEER!

Gotta love landing scenes. The anticipation, mang. And I love the Coalition in Space thing you've got going. Normally that'd be typical fare in sci-fi, everyone does MURRICA IN SPACE or UN IN SPACE or WORLD NATIONS IN SPACE or OLD NATIONS IN SPACE bit. But that's because when it works, it works, and if you're a good writer, it works and works well. If you're not a good writer, then it doesn't.

You're a good writer, Art. Not only does it work, but it's got your flavor in it too. And let me just say that you taste good. :twisted:
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Re: [T-K War Fiction] Knights in Powered Armor

Post by Artemis »

Thanks, man :) It's such a good kick in the ass for you guys to read this and the rest of UC - it's really taken over my brain, and it's great to know its getting out there!
"The universe's most essential beauty is its endlessness. There is room and resources enough for all of us. Whether there is room for all of our passions is the question, and the problem that we work tirelessly to find a solution to."

-Qhameio Allir Nlafahn, Commonwealth ambassador, during the signing of the Kriolon Treaty.
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Re: [T-K War Fiction] Knights in Powered Armor

Post by Shroom Man 777 »

It's also good to see one of the great old ones still in action!
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Re: [T-K War Fiction] Knights in Powered Armor

Post by Booted Vulture »

Cool stuff Arrty. The build-up is killin' me. :P
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