If you're not familiar with the Nanosuit, you'd think what I'm doing now it something out of a god damned scifi movie; I'm holding a giant robot off the floor one handed and tearing off its weapon arm like its rotten cheese.
How to say… It's the ultimate heuristic weapon of destruction, even the Ceph were pissed scared of it and it uses their tech. See, the basis is like the Americans using German tech to make the first A bomb; the Nazis knew the tech, they knew exactly what had happened when it went boom, but they never thought for a second anyone could possibly be stupid enough to do it.
My own suit is one of the most advanced piece of hardware Hargreaves even shat out and the second most expensive model ever created, after the Delta N2, but what really set it apart from Ceph tech, because the squids have much better suits than we do, is the human operator; the muscle frame, the shape of the body, the way our arms and legs are meant for powerlifting, the advanced bone structure. We're not the fastest, meanest or strongest fuckers around, but we're built on the same frame as gorillas, who do qualify as badass of the week.
So the Ceph built exo-skeletons to try and go toe to toe with Post Human Warriors around the world and, to some extent, succeeded, but they still lack one thing we have:
Brains. Or spare brains, to be precise, a lot of that hardware in your skull is just there to receive and send signals, the rest of the time, it doesn't do squat. SECOND makes use of all that wasted potential to store information, run diagnostics, calibrate simulations, analyze data and retransmit the whole package to the wearer in the form of hunches, ideas, decisions and illusions of choices.
I'm being mind controlled by a computer which is, essentially, my own brain turned up to eleven. You think it's horrible? You are being mind controlled by your own, limited, meat sauce-flavored bag of misfiring fuses and chemical cocktails.
All of this to say, I knew that fucker would take a swing at me before he did. And by did, I mean before he knew he would.
My suit was built by my former boss for active sampling of Charybdis tech, but the samplers seem to recognize nanotechnology in that flayed skeleton I'm holding up and immediately start data collection while the victim tries to pry my arm off.
No such luck; suit power is still at fifty percent.
The suit also begins 'Deep Layer Disruption Protocoles'. No clue what it is, but I see what it does; I break the fucker down. The skull melts and drips to the floor, the legs rot off and fall, followed by the mechanical eyeballs and some of the liquid silvery good it's turning into crawls up my arm like the suit itself did the first time I tried to take it off, soon covering my whole body.
Then, SECOND groans something about insufficient common code and my new chrome skin falls right off.
Additional sampling will be required to build effective bio-code bridge.
I don't need the AI to voice it, I know it before it can produce a sound, but the voice is reassuring so it keeps talking.
One enemy downed four Koreans, flayed alive, leaving only scarred skeletons, and a fifth PHS; the last man standing. The suit and skin of the NK was torn right off under knee level and his NOM adaptor is still jacked to the station's nuclear reactor. Whatever hit him rip the shit out of his suit in armor mode.
I get a video feed from the injured soldier. It shows the robot thing, now merely a pond on the floor, shooting that twisted gun at his pals, sucking their suit energy dry and skinning them alive in a few more hits. He managed to throw off its aim and hold it back by plugging his K-Volt straight to his suit's power capacitors.
Which mean he must have hit this guy with enough voltage to power a small town and still it wasn't enough.
Well, we know our suit's cyber and bio warfare suits are capable of killing the things quickly, that's at least something. Whiskers, to the right, picks up the discarded axe-gun and tries it on the wall, punching a round, head-sized hole right through the biosteel.
The KPA commando's leg soon gets covered by yellow honeycomb-like substance that replaces his skin and begins to excrete pitch black nanofibrils, effectively rebuilding the armor before our eyes,
Regen isn't usually that fast, but the suit seems to use the liquefied robot for raw materials.
Then, we take the commando with us to the next checkpoint, where the China People Army, led by some hardcore Sergeant nicknamed Hei Gui, are holding position quite splendidly, drawing foes to close combat and taking the on at knife range before stealing their weapons.
Two of them agree to a trade with two of my own men, exchanging our Gauss rifles for alien weapons.
In the main corridor, the team is getting very little opposition, which is odd, seeing as the alien 'bots we encounter seem to be coming in from that area.
Black Ghost… I mean Hei Gui… Whatever, means the same thing, SECOND is just trying to translate stuff for me when I don't really need it.; I'm quite fluent in Mandarin, although I must admit, these guys are hyped up on adrenaline and using military slang, so I only get one third of what they say.
SECOND knows I need translation before I do. Ain't he man's best friend?
Truth be told, I miss SANTA, that Ho Ho Ho thing he did on boot up was one fuck of a way to start a high risk mission, and the way he tagged friend and foes as Good and Naughty always cracked me up. And don't get me started on the 'Steady, Rudolf!" thing he randomly did when there was stuff shooting at our helo. SANTA felt like a friend, SECOND feels more like a tool… Maybe once I get enough samples from these aliens to turn them into nano-catalysts, I can find the SANTA protocols in the suit's deep layer and bring the old man back…
That's just a flash, a thought run through the suit's quantum processors and brought to a term before I finish blinking.
The Chinese are holding on quite nicely, so we move on to the next checkpoint, held by a collection of KPA and PLA troops. Those two, brought together, seem to kick a lot of ass. They jammed the four bulkheads halfway down and use them as cover while using every trick in the book to outsmart the robots laying siege.
A dozen of them are cloaked and maneuvering around the attackers to thrust deeply into their rear guard in a maneuver more commonly known as Rapid Assault and Precise Extermination, RAPE, for short, and since this is done using Advanced Suit Systems, this is ASS RAPE, and the robots are getting positively pounded by small Asians with big calibers, so we move on and let them have their fun.
Next set of checkpoints are all very well off and quite bored. I distribute a few sit reps to those with com failures and collect samples from whatever goo piles I can find, reaching an alien tissue vector of eighty percent before reaching the elevator shaft.
Main team has not encountered a single hostile on the whole god damned way, but Vendetta's boys racked up more kills that the whole KPA, PLA and CELL put together, but then again, that's not really fair; they found the enemy staging area.
Scratch that; they found the enemy's former staging area, burned it to the ground and stocked up on so much gear they had to drop a nav point on the spot for later pickup.
I send the marker to Psycho and he confirms reception. A bunch of Jarheads and S.A.S. are Oscar Mike, they found a possible entry to the alien ship –I didn't know there was a ship- and are stocking up for an assault.
And they don't want my men on board. Bullshit, we're some of the hardest fuckers in this station, all handpicked by Jack and the CryNet board to serve both as field researchers and shock troopers. We're not washouts like those mall cops CELL uses as canon fodders, we're the best mercs money can buy!
But, hey, they want me to find a sniper? I'll find them a sniper, then I'll see what happens and if I don't like it, I'll let them play war and go my own way, do my own shit.