Cataphractoi

  ‘Getting the fabber put in’ turned out to be a bit more complicated than I’d expected. In the areas we’d visited previously, it was fine to just repce the rooms and structure of the building with our new facilities. For the hangar, though, we were pcing the fabricator in the storage level- which happened to already be occupied by spare parts and ammunition.

  Since we didn’t want to lose the items in storage, we’d been forced to move it all aside before putting in the fabricator. It had been tedious but not particurly difficult; there was a cw running the length and width of the ceiling that we were able to use to move the crates stacked all over the room. Technically we could have gotten someone else to do it, but we were already here.

  “And…there,” Ana said as the fabricator popped into pce. It took up a rge portion of the floor and the shutter finished products emerged from was positioned to dispense them directly onto the elevator leading up to the hangar. Along the side was a massive hopper for raw materials.

  “It’s even bigger than the mech fabricators,” I commented, surprised by the scale of the thing.

  “Technically it’s not,” Ana denied. “I just realized I could ask Dylta to sheath the entire thing with an outer wall so that it looks like a single unit instead of a fabricator and an assembly machine.”

  “…why?” I asked, giving her an odd look. It didn’t seem very important whether it looked like one machine or two from my perspective.

  “Huh. You know, I hadn’t actually thought about it,” Ana replied, taken aback. “Because I could and it looks better, I suppose.”

  If she ever realized everything I designed was ripped from fiction and asked about it, I was repeating that back to her verbatim.

  “Well, anyway, now that that’s done…” I said, transferring a file over to Ana. “This is my repcement for the gunships. It’s called a Sparrowhawk.”

  Unlike the ground vehicles in Halo, the air vehicles were occasionally designed well enough to use. The Sparrowhawk was a akin to an attack helicopter with the entire fusege forward of the tail tilted downward, with stubby wings emerging just before the tail containing Vertical Takeoff and Landing lift fans. Those would have been vulnerable to Model Ones, so I’d repced the VTOL fans with the same technology used in hovercars. Between that and the craft’s jet engines it could achieve a pretty respectable speed while being extremely maneuverable at low velocities.

  Each wing had a 20mm autocannon for engaging ground targets and a missile rack for dealing with air targets, while the nose was equipped with a ser cannon that would burn a hole through just about any Antithesis I’d fought so far. Vehicle-mounted weaponry could afford to be a lot more powerful than anything man-portable, so that main weapon was a threat even to Model Twenty-Threes. It didn’t fire fast enough to have stopped the horde of them that the Mountaineer had sin from overrunning the walls of Boone and murdering most of the defenders, though, even if I’d known how to operate something like this at the time.

  Beyond the modifications to the Sparrowhawk’s VTOL gear, the other change I’d made was that it was a bit bigger in order to accommodate a small troop compartment- just rge enough to hold a full squad. It needed to be able to repce the existing gunships, which doubled as transports, after all.

  “…enough of these and we wouldn’t have even needed the Mountaineer,” Ana observed after reading over the specifications. “Not that we had enough pilots for that many of them, though. This is seriously just Css I?”

  “It…has its drawbacks,” I admitted. “It’s not much better armored than the gunships we already have, and the main ser cannon would probably need a direct headshot to kill something the size of Model Twenty-Three in one hit.”

  “It is also so maneuverable that it might be hard to control!” Juny added.

  “Well, that st part is nothing training can’t fix. I’ll have Dylta draft up a training pn and I’ll start having people train on it the minute one comes off the assembly line,” Ana decided, apparently having taken a liking to my proposed repcement. “So, that’s…the mechs, reactor, armory, hangar, and teleporter taken care of. Am I missing anything?”

  “The industrial fabricator for building supplies, I think,” I pointed out. Then a thought occurred to me. “Oh, and we might want to look into getting some combat drones. My mom will never let me hear the end of it if I forget about those again.”

  “Your mom?” Ana asked in an amused tone.

  “Yeah…she had some things to say about how I didn’t utilize my drones effectively after unlocking them,” I said with a tinge of embarrassment.

  “I already have half a dozen new Eyebot patterns designed and ready!” Juny volunteered.

  “You do realize we’ll be building things other than Eyebots, right…?” I asked the AI. Ana ignored the bypy.

  “We can probably squeeze another fabricator into the basement for those…hm. That really should have occurred to me sooner.” Ana frowned and a frustrated look came over her face.

  “I wouldn’t worry about it too much. I can’t help much with running this whole operation, so you’ve got way too much on your pte for anyone to expect you to think of everything,” I assured her. In the end, I was mostly a fighter and didn’t know the first thing about running an organization. My only subordinates in the past were AI artist which, next to a Samurai AI like Juny, hardly qualified for the name. “Anyway, I didn’t think of it until just now, so I don’t have anything ready, but I’ll add that to my list.”

  I was probably going to be going with the Sentry Bot for this. It had a mass equivalent to a Wolverine but in a squatter package, so it would fit indoors more easily. More importantly, it was heavily armored and its wheeled tripod design could operate on all sorts of terrain. I would need to decide what weapons to give it, though- while I could always change those ter, I would probably need to pn for a decent bance between lethality and colteral damage on the standard loadout.

  “In that case, I’ll install the fabricator ter so we don’t need to head all the way back down. Now that you mention it, though, we can probably clear that mountain of rubble faster if we mass produce construction drones. I think the industrial fabricator is generalist enough that it should be able to make those…” Ana fell into thought for a moment, trailing off. “It may not be a bad idea to get more scout drones either. We still haven’t figured out how those security forces got into the city.”

  “Still? You have Dylta looking into that, right? I’ve had Juny trying to trace back who sent them, but she’s convinced that Appachian Ventures’ entire executive team weren’t aware of the deployment,” I replied, shifting topics. Given that I’d spent the entirety of the previous week wary of an attempted kidnapping or assassination, I was eager to know more about what was going on there.

  “Correct! According to electronic correspondence between executives and the board, they are currently searching for the culprit themselves! While it’s possible someone is feigning innocence, my analysis points towards a near-certainty that their responses are genuine, with a lower but still significant chance those forces were not from Appachian Ventures at all,” Juny expined more thoroughly. It was vexing; we knew who the attackers were affiliated with, but the company was so rge and possessed so many subsidiaries that the two of us would need months of dedicated assaults to go through them one by one.

  We needed a pce to start.

  “It unfortunately is a possibility that they were working for another company and using Appachian Ventures’ uniforms as a disguise, though I wouldn’t rule out them being from one of that company’s subsidiaries. That, or they were organized entirely using analogue methods so there wouldn’t be an electronic trail to follow. If we can figure out how they got in we might be able to find more evidence- currently, Dylta has managed to use camera footage to trace them back to a single city block, but if there’s a tunnel beneath it then it’s well-shielded against scans,” Ana shared.

  “Well enough to stop Samurai-grade sensors?” I asked, concerned. Sensing my train of thought, Ana was quick to shake her head.

  “Yes, but I don’t think there’s a Samurai involved. It’s more likely that it’s hidden using reverse-engineered tech. Samurai are usually pretty quick to shut down projects like that, but occasionally you get someone smart enough to hide their operations well and keep all the information on local servers,” she assured me. “Which isn’t surprising. If they weren’t at least that intelligent we’d know who we were aiming at by now.”

  “We could ask the execs directly,” I suggested. Maybe under duress they’d be less able to fake ignorance, assuming any of them knew anything.

  “I’m holding that back for a st resort. Mostly because I agree with Juny- they don’t know shit,” Ana replied, shooting me down.

  “Why so sure?” I asked.

  “A company that shady would have a fake board to take the heat when a Samurai rolls up. It’s the sort of thing everyone in my line of work knows but doesn’t talk about. No…we need to figure out who’s really in charge. Right now I have Dylta trying to trace back the identities of the guys who attacked us. The ones that were recognizable, anyway,” Ana replied, shooting me down. I didn’t have to ask why that was difficult and Ana was nice enough not to mention it.

  “If you’d had any luck with that I imagine you’d have mentioned it, so…” I said, prompting her to continue.

  “The bright side is we’ve identified some of them and Dylta has figured out where they came from. Problem is, all it can figure out is that they all came from the underworlds of a variety of megacities. I’m not even sure they were hired- they were all people that the corpos would consider ‘undesirables,’ so they might have been press-ganged. It’s not like the lower levels have great surveilnce, so it’s like they just disappeared one day and showed up on our doorstep,” she compined in frustration, one fist clenching and unclenching.

  “Mmgh,” I groaned, pressing a hand to my forehead. “If I’d known it was going to be this much of a pain I would have taken some alive.”

  “That was never an option. There were bombs pnted in their heads. Some of them actually survived when you dropped that ceiling on them, but their brains were soup by the time we got to them,” Ana revealed with disgust. “Between that and their weapons, I think they might have been trained to kill Samurai. They had guns powerful enough to punch through Css I armor, and equipment like that definitely isn’t standard issue. Just another reason to think they wouldn’t have made a stupid mistake like wearing official company armor.”

  “Did Thompson have a bomb in his brain?” I asked, letting the rest pass. I’d already more or less suspected that my Css II power armor had been a wrench in our enemy’s pns, so that part didn’t come as a surprise.

  “That bullet you fired pretty much obliterated his augs. There wasn’t enough left to determine if he had the typical military-grade augmentations or if there were…add-ons,” Ana expined. Juny probably knew, but if she wasn’t speaking up, it was because I wasn’t going to like the answer. I decided to just move on.

  “I’m guessing they escaped the same way they got in?”

  “Yeah. But it’s a retively low-css residential district and was one of the first to go up when Boone was rebuilt. Any cameras around there were broken years ago and never repced.” In other words, we couldn’t figure it out remotely and we’d be dispcing a lot of people if we used more destructive methods.

  Fortunately, I had an alternative.

  “I’ll go find their escape tunnel myself,” I decred confidently. For that, I got a look that said ‘what on Earth is this moron talking about?’ Which was fair- I was just a graphic designer a few weeks ago.

  “You’re free to try, but…how do you pn on finding it?” Ana asked hesitantly, probably praying I wasn’t pnning to just blow the pce sky-high.

  “My father was a corporate executive. Back before my parents divorced, he made sure I knew all the escape routes in any pce we frequented. Execs like him are paranoid- they know any Joe off the street would shank them just for the satisfaction of killing a parasitic fuck living off their bor and a Samurai with a chip on their shoulder could roll up and off them with no repercussions at any time.

  “Which is all to say that I know how they liked to hide their secret passages around the time those buildings were constructed and shielding them against sensors won’t stop me from finding it.”

  My sperm donor was a bastard of a man and I delighted in having used his life insurance money solely on things he would have hated, but maybe in death he could be useful one st time.

  Cataphractoi