A Displaced Samurai

A thing I had been thinking about was the Type 21 laying a few hundred meters down the riverbed. The one I had relieved of its eye by means of explosive Type Four. It was otherwise intact. I also had three incomplete or broken Type 21s in the base, plus an undamaged eye of a Type 21 I had collected after the emergence in early June.

Perhaps I could build a complete 21 from that and find something out by experimenting a bit.

“Elya, I’d like to dig into the Macks’ teleporting systems a bit deeper. Either by analyzing the captured tech or otherwise spying on them.”

There are sensors available that can measure various kinds of hyperspace activity, including the signature of teleportation events. These could help you detect Mack units teleporting around and maybe even decypher some of their communications.

“What items would you consider useful?”

The Skitter you already know about have developed hyperspace technology some time ago, and they managed to do it with relatively low tech manufacturing. Your fabricator would be well suited to emulate their manufacturing methods.

From their tech base, I suggest the Arcane Feeler Mark I, a Hyperspace disturbance detector that can give you direction, strength and estimated range of a wide variety of hyperspace phenomena. It would be a strictly passive form of observation though, you would have to wait for the Macks to try some kind of invasion again. As an analogy, think of listening-only submarine sonar.

The price is 1000 points for the detector blueprint. I will throw in an ethernet data interface.

Also, a general purpose computer for logging the sensor data in your absence would not go amiss. Suitable blueprints are in your General Electronics catalog.

I quizzed Elya about other options for a bit, but finally I went with her recommendations. For the logging of the sensor data I went with a thing called the Personal DataSilo Mark II. The computing part of the DataSilo was mediocre, but the storage capacity could be quite good, depending on how much fabber time you had for manufacturing.

Elya presented me with the total shopping list:

Item

Point cost

Description

Arcane Feeler Mark I (blueprint)

1000 points

Versatile sensor for hyperspace phenomena

Personal DataSilo Mark II (blueprint)

500 points

Network attached storage with some additional computing capability

“I think that is OK, Elya, I’ll take it”

Purchased: All items in the table

New balance: One token and 1567 points.

Next I learned it would take two days to print on Herbie’s fabricator, as the Mack fabricator missed some critical capabilities and the print was a delicate affair. Herbie had to sit still for the process too. Well, it could not be helped.

I did some general housekeeping in the meantime, such as reconnecting the electrical grid. With that I also got most of the lighting back, and the Mack maintenance drones could fix the rest. Finally I had lighting again that was not dependent on LED lamps running off Mack batteries.

The power grid of Styx Base currently ran off a 1500 kW Mack fusion reactor that would normally only power a Type Three. In effect a small backup power supply. But as long as most of the grid was offline, it would suffice.

I also ordered a DataSilo from the Mack fabricator, with as much storage space as the fabber could produce in a day. I ended up with a capacity in the three digit terabytes.

Then the Arcane Feeler was ready. Taking it from the fabricator, I looked at a black, vaguely mushroom shaped ceramic item the size of a waste paper basket, surprisingly light and with silvery metallic lines all over its surface. The power supply and ethernet connectors at its foot looked banal by comparison, almost desecrating the alien beauty of the design.

I installed it in an unused room deeper in the complex, next to the HyperPhone and the DataSilo. Now Styx Base could listen to the noises of hyperspace and log them.

I spent another day building more Type Four guards, a few explosive ones among them, and a new Type Four knockoff with lighter armor but an Avian Eliminator on top, called Type 4AE.

August, Friday 14th, 2048

As I was surfing the internet over my new hyperspace connection, an emergence warning went out on Haven, the fortress city on Vancouver Island. Regular internet and phone connection were disabled as usual. But Elya managed to hack into the security forces network, also as usual, and show me what was going on. That might be our opportunity to correlate the movements of the Macks with the log data from the AF.

“Elya, please log the recon data from the fighting in detail, and also the sensor data from the Arcane Feeler!”

I had a closer look at the map. This time the Macks tried in the north, mostly between Nanaimo and Courtenay. Victoria seemed largely unaffected, but I still landed at my shelter rather than overflying the town. For driving up to the front or sending a Spectracopter to observe it was a little too far. So I watched the show on my augs instead.

It was still early in the emergence, but the Macks were coming thick and fast this time. At Nanaimo they were getting slaughtered, and my points for kills with my equipment went up. By now, I had received over 1300 and rising. But another twenty kilometers up the coast the Macks had established a beachhead near Parksville.

The Magical Girls were already fully deployed as far as I could see, presumably because they had transportation priority. HANAF reinforcements were moving up the coast by ground vehicle, but it would take another hour until they reached Nanaimo.

In parallel, I looked at the sensor data. Every minute, one or two new Macks appeared out of a Type 21. It seemed that the portals in the 21s were indeed gateways for enemy reinforcements.

At the same time, I would see a blip on the sensor data from the Arcane Feeler. No, two blips. One from the direction and approximate distance of the Type 21, the other and stronger from a location further north. The resolution of the sensor was not enough to be quite sure, but the northern blip seemed to always be from the same place. Did the Macks maybe have a base there where they launched their invasions from? And how did the Type 21s get to the beaches of the attack targets?

Meanwhile, the fighting went past Nanaimo and focused on the Mack beachhead at Parksville. The Macks were by no means out of small units to send, but at Nanaimo they lacked Type 21s by now that could act as gateways. Further to the northwest near Courtenay, they were stuck on the beaches and being contained for now.

At Parksville the fighting was much more even and brutal. The Macks had summoned Type 32s by now who plowed through the lines of the Hanaf soldiers. Their usual tactics of “secure the vicinity and let the Magical Girls handle the steel monsters” worked not so well when they were under attack themselves.

The girls did their best, but also had difficulties when they were up against more than one Thirty-Two in a place.

One group of flying MGs was setting up an attack on a Type 32 from above, but overlooked that they were in the firing arc of another Thirty-Two two hundred meters away. Cannons thundered and one unlucky girl took a direct hit. RIP - Rest In Pieces.

Another girl died in what was more of an accident. Her team had climbed a Type 32 with some sort of grapples that bit into its hull and started to cut it open. Then their involuntary mount suddenly braked. She lost her balance and fell off the huge machine. When it started to move again, she could not scramble away fast enough and was crushed under the tracks.

Behind the advancing Thirty-Twos, smaller units followed. Against those, the mortars I had delivered to HANAF were more effective. I only received ten percent of the points I would get for a personal kill, so the way my balance rose suggested the smaller Macks were dying in the hundreds from my mortars.

But I had no eyes for that, as the video from one drone showed the elite MG team Fruit Fighters at work.

I recognized them as the team that had taken apart the Thirty-Two at Saxe Memorial on the first of June. They had a supporter type in yellow costume on the team, who immobilized the enemy behemoths under a magnetic field of crushing strength. Nearby smaller Macks were often drawn in and shattered against the bigger machine.

The two strikers in red would then rush the metal monsters and carve them up with their melee weapons.

The team medic in pink did not have all that much to do, she mostly fought off lesser units so her team could focus on the Thirty-Twos.

As the Type 32s died one by one to the attacks of the Fruit Fighters, the inland push of the Macks came to a halt. Then the MGs and HANAF started to push the machines back. The perimeter of the Mack beachhead shrank more and more until the Type 21s at the shore were in comfortable range of the mortar teams. At that point, the Twenty-Ones became the primary target and were covered in a deluge of mortar grenades. Burning and shattered, they lost their function as gateways for reinforcements.

Eventually, they were decimated to the point that HANAF forces could push past Parksville and help eliminate the Mack units further northwest. I got 2882 points out of that emergence, bringing my total to 4479 points.

I knew that even SHOCKS would need a bit of time to recover, so I did not bother them for the rest of the week. Instead, I worked on my base some more and organized the construction of a miniature sewage treatment plant and the next floor of my new base. I stuck to the massive build style with granite blocks and fibercrete, but also prepared some turret emplacements. Which were still empty because I did not have the weapons blueprints yet, but that might change.

Monday, August 17th, 2048

As I still wanted to minimize my use of the HyperPhone, I flew to Victoria before I called B.S.O.D.

“Hello, today I have some interesting sensor data to share, plus the sensor tech behind it. But I want something in return. Namely, whatever intelligence you have about the Type 42. Capabilities, weaknesses, details on the built-in weapons in their bodies. I know that you captured and analyzed some of them.”

“What do you have to offer, and why do you want our intel?”

“A good guess at the location of another Mack base. Plus the blueprints for the sensor I used to gather the data. I want the intel to prepare for a possible personal clash with a Type 42. One on one the Mack girl is probably the superior fighter, I need something to even the odds.”

Actually I wanted the info to set a trap. I did not have the slightest intention to fight fair. In case things went wrong though, I might be dragged into an open fight with a stronger opponent. A possibility I dreaded.

I was lucky it hadn’t happened to me, but as a young school girl I had observed two bullies beating up a younger kid. The little guy had done his best to fight back, but all of his attempts had failed. For every kick he tried to land, he received two punches from the bigger and stronger boys, until he was beaten bloody and could barely limp home.

The best I had been able to do was secretly film the incident on my phone, then take it directly to the police. The teachers at that school were cowards who did nothing, but the police were more willing to act. If I was caught alone by a Type 42, there would be no police to help me in time.

B.S.O.D. said “If your data are convincing, I will give you the intel and take responsibility when Palace Athene asks about the leak. But those data better be really good."

I pulled out the USB stick with the whole shebang on it. At first I showed her the recon video and the data from the Arcane Feeler side by side, then went into the tech itself. I ended by saying “You can grab the blueprint right here from the stick and build the AF in your fabricator. It takes two days of fabber time though.”

B.S.O.D. was visibly irritated about me somehow grabbing the data from her net, but mollified by the importance of what I just gave her. That sort of intel was huge and she knew it. I knew that she knew it. Finally she said “Raiding our network makes me not happy, but giving us both the sensor data and the blueprint makes up for it. I will compile the intel on the 42 and send it to you.”

I had what I wanted, B.S.O.D. was not completely mad at me and Haven’s defenders had received a valuable tool to gain reconnaissance data on the Macks. It was a good day.