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Grass Eaters 3 | 08 | Deorbit
🕑 Added 2024-11-11 16:47:01 +0000 UTCTRNS Nile, Clauns (1.4 LY)
POV: Skhork, Znosian Dominion Marines (Rank: Six Whiskers)
“Infantry, front, dugout!”
“I see them. Firing coax.”
Rat-at-at-at-at-at-at.
The machine gun roared, wiping out the squad of predator infantry emerging from the trench in front of them.
“Oh shit! Resistance tank, three o’clock high! They’re in the hills, two-four-zero high, next to the red rocks… C’mon, c’mon, where are you looking?”
“I don’t see anybody there!”
“Your other three o’clock, dumbass!”
There was a high pitch whirr followed by the sound of loud metal grinding. The scene in his VR headset went pitch black.
You’re dead.
Skhork winced. “But you said three o’clock—”
“I did, because they were at our three o’clock. Check the results.”
And sure enough the round aftermath interface showed exactly where their armored vehicle was penetrated before they boiled up in a ball of plasma fire. Skhork lifted the device gingerly off his head, scowling at Kara.
“Figures— your clock goes the wrong way?” he asked as he gestured in a circle with his paw. “Three o’clock is on your right?!”
“Our clock goes the exact right way,” Kara retorted. “Your species is the only one in the galaxy that uses the wrong clock direction for everything.”
“Yes. Another sign that we are better than everyone else,” Skhork said smugly.
“Not at this,” Kara said, pointing at her gaming headset as they waited for the next round to start. “Even John is a better tank gunner in Titan Assault than you are. Wasn’t this like your actual job before we bagged you on Datsot—”
“I am a Longclaw Commander, not a gunner. It is completely different,” he said, turning his nose up proudly. “And I was bred for it. Whiskerborn.”
“Well, they need to like update your genetic code or whatever, because this version of you stinks in a tank. Are you sure you’re not one of those whose breeding was glitched— what do your people call it?”
“A Longclaw is not a tank! For one, the Longclaw was named after a ferocious species of extinct predators on Znos, not some silly water carrier,” Skhork explained.
Kara waited a moment. “Okay. And?”
“And what?”
“You said, for one. So I thought maybe you’d think of more than one difference. Something other than just the etymology.”
Skhork thought harder. “And— and… Longclaws have an extra Engineer, unlike your tanks.”
“Same with the old Resistance tanks on Titan, back when they had tanks,” Kara countered. “Because they don’t have a combat robot attached to the armored unit.”
“Bah. Extra machinery,” he snorted. “More strain on your logistics network. Inefficient waste of resources. Classic predator mistake. You guys never consider the logistics thing; that’s why you guys are losing all the time with your machines breaking down all—”
Kara shook her head. “Not at all. Our armored crew robots have total parts commonality with our infantry combat robots. They slot in perfectly in our logistics system, and an extra real person is much, much more expensive to supply than a robot. The robots don’t even need air.”
“Bah! Your overreliance on robotics and thinking machines will get your people destroyed,” Skhork predicted. “Our people will find one design flaw or another, and we will cripple your entire military in one fell swoop.”
Kara guffawed. “Were it that easy! Smarter people than your own have tried… The Resistance, for example. This shit is right up their alley. And if that is the only difference you can think of between a Longclaw and a tank—”
He shook his gamepad, just a little too big in his paws, at her angrily. “And this control device… it must have been designed by defects!”
“Yeah, yeah, blame the controller. I bet some of the Puppers could do better than you with some training.”
“The driving physics — completely unrealistic!” Skhork ignored her taunt as he continued with his list of grievances with the video game. “And by the Prophecy, don’t get me started on the supposed Longclaws they put in there!”
That was a new thing they added in Titan Assault 14: a completely new faction, the Znosians, featuring the Longclaw MK4 — Skhork’s old command. When he was given a go at it, Skhork complained about literally everything: the turning radius was too wide, the cannon was too weak, the armor was too thin, the engines were too loud, the room inside the vehicle was too spacious, and even the sound of the air conditioner was wrong!
The most outrage came when Skhork discovered that the game was designed such that a light railgun shot from either a Resistance or a Republic tank would blow it sky high, without a symmetrical result on the other end. He’d chucked his controller at the screen when he figured that out.
Kara snickered, “It’s not our people’s fault you guys are as bad at designing tanks as you are at operating them… As for authenticity, I’m pretty sure the people who made the game faithfully reproduced the Longclaw model from one of the trophies the Malgeir captured on Datsot!”
“Must have been a defective one,” Skhork insisted, his pride re-surfacing. “And… merely scanning the hardware misses the point: the true power of a Longclaw is in its crew. A well-trained, well-bred crew, commanded by a Servant of the Prophecy from a superior genetic bloodline like mine…”
“Oh yeah, superior stock. Tell me something, Skhork, if your Dominion’s bloodline are so selective and carefully bred, then why did they allow someone as ugly as you to be hatched?”
“What?! That’s— No— no, you’re the ugly one!”
“No, you!”
“No—”
“What— what are you guys doing?” They both paused as Guinspiu’s large figure peeked into the lounge room. The Granti High Councilor glanced at the screen and furrowed her brow. “You guys are still playing your video games?!”
“Yeah, we’re on the ship’s network if you want to join us.”
Guinspiu sighed. “Which game?”
“Titan Assault 14. The new one just came out before we shipped out. You wanna join our tank crew?”
“No, thanks,” Guinspiu said with mild disdain. “I don’t know how you Grass Eaters can play… war for fun.”
“What’s wrong with that?” both Kara and Skhork asked at once.
“It’s— it’s just wrong. How is conflict and war fun?!”
“How?” Kara asked rhetorically. “It’s just a setting. It’s a video game. A video game based on the results of hundreds of millions of credits in psychological research, designed to repeatedly press on the pleasure centers in your brain as rapidly as it can. It’s not that different from… a game about fishing or flying or basketball.”
“Still…” Guinspiu said. “Of all the things in the galaxy to play? A game of… war?”
Kara shrugged. “Before the Republic, in World War Two, one of the victor nations consistently found it easiest to train tank drivers for the war. Do you know why?”
“Because their hatchlings played the most Titan Assault?” Skhork guessed.
“Hah. No. Because unlike in other nations at the time, most of their people already owned their own motorized vehicles and there were many tractors. So the transition to driving tanks was much easier than in the less industrial nations.”
Guinspiu looked at her skeptically. “So your government now prepares cubs for war by giving them video games… to teach them?”
Kara tilted her head. “That… is actually a common conspiracy theory about the TRO: that part of our black budget money goes towards funding these kinds of things. That our video games are designed to look similar to our actual gear and hardware… so our recruits already know what buttons to press when they’re issued their first set of Marine armor. Or the first time they touch their gunship controls.”
“Are— are those theories true?”
“Of course not!” Kara rolled her eyes. “It’s the other way around. We design our military hardware to look and feel as similar to the video games as we can, and we sometimes even use the same control devices to save money.”
“That’s— what— how is that different?” Guinspiu sputtered. “The result is the same: your cubs are taught to fight war through… entertainment from the moment they’re born.”
“What’s wrong with that?” Kara and Skhork asked simultaneously again.
Kara added smugly as she put her headset back on, “Maybe this is why you guys were losing the war before we joined, Guinspiu. Because your kids didn’t play enough Titan Assault when they were growing up.”
Skhork mirrored her with his own device, muttering, “This time, I’ll be the driver.”
“Fine by me. Just don’t steer us into a methane lake like last time. You’re ruining my stats.”
++++++++++++++++++++++++
TRNS Nile, Grantor (1,200 Ls)
POV: Gregor Guerrero, Terran Republic Navy (Rank: Captain)
Gregor examined the battlemap plot displaying the plethora of ships and defenses in the system. He clucked indecisively a couple times. “That’s quite a few more ships than we expected coming in.”
“They’re probably gearing up for another offensive somewhere,” Mark said. “Stoers or Gruccud.”
“Figures,” Gregor shrugged. “What about us? Is your team prepared for insertion? I feel exposed this far into their new sensor net and they’ve got that new radar ship… I don’t want to be here any longer than I need to be.”
“Don’t worry, we won’t make you go much deeper,” Mark replied. “You can let the stealth shuttle off about two light seconds out from the planet itself.” He pointed at an empty spot on the map. “We’ll glide in and find the derelict satellites we need to cover our atmospheric entry. Then, park anywhere in the system you want, as long as it’s got line of sight with the planet itself once a day.”
“Any specific rules of engagement for us while you’re down there?” Gregor asked.
“We’re in the wild-wild west. Use your own judgment,” Mark said. “We don’t expect you to bail us out when we get in trouble. And if you don’t hear from us for more than a week… well, it seems like it’d be a little wasteful for you to have lugged all those missiles out here for nothing.”
Gregor nodded in understanding. “Right.”
++++++++++++++++++++++++
POV: “John”, Terran Reconnaissance Office
“Oh. Huh.”
John grunted in surprise as the cover of the electrical paneling in front of him came off easily in his armor’s servo-assisted grip.
Dangling in low Grantor orbit next to Kara, they’d matched velocity with one of the derelict orbital habitats the Granti stopped using years ago. In its heyday, it was big enough to house over a thousand Granti, who were slightly larger than Terrans with higher maintenance requirements. From the looks of it, they’d all been evacuated when the planet itself fell to the enemy… or worse.
“I thought it’d be a lot harder to open, given how old it is,” he muttered as the cover went flying off into the dark.
“How long has it been since your last space op?” Kara asked on the radio. “Things don’t rust in vacuum, genius.”
“A couple years… Why don’t we just use the robots for these?”
“More fun this way,” she replied as she handed him the connector end of a cable wire. “And more practice in the field for us.”
He plugged it into the service port, and looked over at Kara. Reading off the tablet in her hands, she shook her head. “Nothing. Must be a bad port.”
“This is the third one we’ve tried. Maybe it’s just fried on the inside.”
“There’s still power,” Kara countered, pointing at one of the modules with its external lighting still powered on. “So one of these exterior service ports must still be working.”
“How many more do we try before we give up?” John asked.
“Give up? And go into the station manually?”
John looked at the half-broken derelict. Some of its compartments had been breached and were exposed to vacuum. Some exterior lights were flickering on and off. It looked like a monstrosity right out of a 21st-century horror film. “Now, that’s definitely something we’d send a robot to do.”
“Chin up, John, let’s try a couple more. If not, I’ve always wanted to see the inside of one of these things with my own eyes.”
Luckily for his sanity, the next service port they found actually connected.
“Nice!” Kara exclaimed. “I’ve got telemetry!”
“They just let anyone patch into these stations, huh?” John commented.
Kara ignored him, just working on the tablet for a few minutes. “Ok, I’ve got control of the main flight systems… and… looks like it’s got just enough for what we need.”
“Great. Can we get out of here now?”
“Hm… looks like for security, we need to deactivate one of the hard-locks manually from the control center inside—”
John sighed. “You’re kidding.”
“Yup, I was,” Kara said, nodding in her helmet. “Literally zero security measures. What a trusting and friendly people these cuddly Teddies are. Alright, I’ve set up the program. We’re good to go now.”
++++++++++++++++++++++++
POV: Guinspiu, Granti (Head Councilor)
Guinspiu greeted them in the hangar bay as they shed their EVA suits. “Are we ready to go down there?” she asked excitedly. Dangerous and crawling with Grass Eaters as her homeworld was, she just wanted to breathe the air of Grantor once again. Her home…
“Nope,” Kara shook her head. “That was just station number two. We’ve got a few more derelicts to go.”
“Why are you trying to find our old derelicts in Grantor orbit?” she asked.
“Because…” Kara replied, “if we deorbit our shuttle now, we’re going to show up as one big trail of fire and smoke in the sky for everyone on the ground watching us land. And that would defeat the whole point of this secret mission being a secret from the Buns. And they’ll be even more suspicious when they find nothing where we’re supposed to touch down.”
“And how do these derelicts help us?” Guinspiu asked, still not understanding.
“Your people have a lot of stations around Grantor, and some of them deorbit all the time. When they go into the planet’s atmosphere, they create a massive fireball as they burn up in the atmosphere. So, we make one of them fire up its thrusters to deorbit, and we follow it in. Our big fireball looks like the falling station’s bigger fireball, and when we’ve slowed down enough in the atmosphere, we just eject from our heat shield and fly away from the crowd. The radar-absorbent skin on our lander does the rest. It’s much easier to hide in atmosphere compared to in space, so we’ve got that covered. Even if the Buns suspect something is wrong when they see all these derelict stations fall out of the sky for no apparent reason, they won’t find anything concrete when they check the crash site.”
Guinspiu visualized that in her head a few times before nodding. “I see. And why do we need more than one station?”
“We only need one to deorbit us,” Kara explained patiently. “But unless we plan on living off the land, we’ll need resupplies from the Nile. Every time we resupply, we’ll need one of these to fall out of the sky to cover our incoming supply load.”
The Granti High Councilor sighed. “How many more of these stations do you plan to deorbit?”
“Planned mission length is at least twelve months. To be extra sure, we’ll go for twenty. Twenty stations.”
“Oh, twenty. No big deal,” Guinspiu deadpanned. “Just deorbit trillions of credits worth of orbital infrastructure so we can play Paws and Peeks with the Grass Eaters occupying our planet.”
Kara nodded. “Sounds about right. Unless we’re done quickly. Then, we’ll leave the stations we’ve compromised in orbit. For next time.”
“For next time?” Guinspiu echoed.
Kara grinned. “Yeah, I don’t know. Maybe if you’ve got a side piece you want us to rescue too?”
