Thank you to everyone reading my story (over 24k views, 250 favs and 360 followers! You're all awesome!), but I'm going to slow down the rate that I post new chapters. I simply can't keep up with a chapter every 2 weeks. So, next chapter will be a month from now. See you all next time!
Enjoy!
Chapter 10: Domo arigato, Mr. Roboto
Before I even thought about trying to crack the data-cores of either ship I had kilometres upon kilometers of hallways, rooms, hangars and armouries to plunder- I mean, look through. The Man of Iron ship that I had named Ironmonger for lack of a better name was equally trashed as Bold Wolf. Where the human ship had cut down soldiers in wrecked power armour, the AI ship had robots of all sorts of shapes and sizes strewn about to such an extent that I could only call the whole thing a scrapheap.
I had feared that it had all been too destroyed for me to learn anything from, but that was surprisingly not the case. Everything I had found had been brought back to my still expanding stronghold. It had taken a lot of work, and more often than I liked I was doing more archeology than reverse engineering, but with every piece scanned, lost parts modelled and replaced from others of the same type the hundreds of wrecked robots and power armours had given me enough clues to put some back together whole.
Looking at the holographic representation of a Federation power armour I couldn't help but be both impressed and appalled. Impressed, because anyone wearing one of these could have singlehandedly wiped out a small army back in the 21st century. The only reason one of these couldn't have conquered the whole planet was because a direct nuclear strike still would have killed them. I was appalled with how much had been lost by the time the Imperium came around. If I had correctly put this thing back together, then I was pretty sure that a Federation marine would easily blow past Imperial Space Marines. The real kicker came in that I was sure that these marines weren't special forces, they were normal shipboard guards. Looking at the way the wreckage was laid out, I was pretty sure that there had been one squad of true special forces onboard. Those guys had self-destructed if I interpreted the craters correctly, with nothing now recoverable.
That there were no grenades left on any of the corpses, with most even having emptied their ammunition and having their melee weapons broken in hand when they died showed how vicious the fighting had been. I only knew that the soldiers should have grenades because of the craters everywhere and a surviving inscription in one of the more intact armouries. Whoever had come in after these humans had certainly payed an incredibly heavy price, as everyone I found had sold their lives dearly. Unfortunately, in both Ironmonger and Bold Wolf there was no sign of the attacker having left anything at all behind. So, I was just going to hope that I wasn't going to meet whoever that was before I had a lot more troops and several fallback positions.
On the subject of more troops, I had a bunch more very effective tricks to deploy. It had taken half a day, but with the engineered engineering tendencies of a Huragok I had done in that half a day what entire planets of Mechanicus adepts laboured over for centuries. And, not to brag, I had done it better than them. There was no praying or incense required for the tech I now had the blueprints for.
To start with, the reason that I had seared through the armoured hull of a Dark Age starship so easily. It hadn't only been because the composites that made it up had been twisted out of the careful alignment that I had found other, whole, pieces were normally in. Federation armour, from that worn by the brave marines to the pieces cladding the hull of Bold Wolf, was a many layered system meant to be used together. Every layer, both passive and active, added to the tremendous strength Federation armour was meant to have. Of course, whatever calamity Bold Wolf had gone through turned that masterpiece into cardboard that I could punch holes into with my souped-up flashlight.
The least impressive part was the armour itself. It was a very tough metal alloy matrix, much better than what the Imperium ship had. It wasn't quite up to Forerunner standards, despite what I'd first thought. Forerunner structures were normally made to last at least several hundred thousand years, and that needed very strong armour even to simply withstand the pressures of time let alone enemy action. In this case, I would simply keep what I had extracted from my databanks. The Men of Iron ship had nearly the same style of armour. Curiously, both ships had been in the process of refitting bulkheads, doors and armour panels with some type of combination of their normal armour and simple iron. I had no idea why, but it was intriguing. Maybe I'd find out when I managed to crack the datacore I had recovered.
Going from the most passive to the more active layers, the foam was next. Indeed, each armour piece was a double layer of metal sandwiching a compressed foam. It was very energy absorbent, perfect for dissipating weapons fire. It hardened when it came into contact with vacuum, or air, or really anything but the metal it was stuck between. Any damage to the outer plate saw the foam expand to cover the newly formed hole before hardening into a barrier only slightly less strong than the original armour.
The outermost armourplate was also more of a meta-material, fluidly shifting from ablative layer to reactive armour and slowly filling up any holes that may have formed. It wasn't remotely as fast at that as the foam, taking minutes what it did in seconds, but it meant most light weapons had no effect at all and any minor damage just fixed itself as if it never was. These were impressive, even by the ridiculously high Forerunner standards, and certainly something I was going to use going forward. The tattered remains of similar layers clinging to the hulls of both the Dark Age warships upped my wish not to meet whoever was responsible even more.
Where the meta-material needed only a trickle of energy, the tech build into the thick inner plate needed a lot. And my investigations into how much bigger the energy conduits were than even that needed said that overloading in case of extreme danger was expected. I spoke of course, of what I termed the Reinforcement Field Node. It was a sort of forcefield that melded with the atomic bonds holding the armour together and made them stronger. Much, much stronger. So much so, that I could have fired my laser cannon at that armour plate all day every day, and barely caused it to glow before the heat was spread out and negated. I had versions of the Nodes all the way from the size of a coin to one the size of a car. Basically every defensive structure had at least one Node, with most having several working together to increase the strength even more. Like the powerfield, this was a technology that the Forerunners had no equivalent to and so was of incredible value to me.
All this together made the armour of Federation-era constructions incredibly tough, and it was only the fact they they were now all unpowered that had allowed me to get through them so easily. While my Drones and Cicadas could chew Imperial structures for breakfast, lunch and dinner, powered Federation armour was strong enough to break their teeth upon. I could forget getting passed something that strong with just those systems. This did not foresee good things for if -when- I came across the ridiculously though necrodermis armour of the Necrons, or the psychically reinforced wraithbone of the Eldar. Still, I doubted the ramshackle and slapdash nature of Ork 'Konstruktion' would be a problem.
The next layer of armour was energy shielding. Here the first difference in design and tactical ideas between Federation and Men of Iron became very obvious. The human power armour had intricate, layered shields focused on the head and chest. The robots inside Ironmonger had either one bubble shield or none to protect themselves. Quality versus quantity. Seeing the way that the Federation troopers had fought to the last, and more often than not seen their defiance ended either by suicide-with-grenade or massive holes burned through them, or getting slashed to pieces with some sort of burning blade, quality had not been enough. Quantity, unfortunately, hadn't been enough either. Where the men had fought to the last, the far more numerous robots had been summarily destroyed. My simulations pointed to a group armed with the same swords as in Bold Wolf hacking their way through horde after horde of killbots as fast as possible. Good for me, as there was more left of the bots than the men to salvage now, but not good for those that were in that situation then.
Still, I had shields now. More importantly, shields that were far stronger than my sad attempt on the Mantis. They came in all sorts of types and sizes, too. The shields of Ironmonger's bots joined together when several were close to each other, severely increasing their strength. The outer shield of Federation powersuits had the nasty habit of returning incoming fire back to sender. Under that was sectional shielding, what I was quite sure were the ion shields I remembered being one of the rarer type of shields the Imperium sometimes used. With a separate ion shield on each limb and a front and back central one, this meant that you needed a lot of firepower to take one trooper down. Under all that, a couple of suits had conversion shields, focused on the torso and head. A conversion field turned incoming energy into light, somehow. I could take those things apart, and after looking at several, even put them back together. I could make small and big versions, but how they truly worked? I had no idea. It was very frustrating and really showed how high humanity had risen here, which made me proud again. Thinking about what happened to that civilisation made me sad and angry.
Blegh, this universe was not good for your emotional stability, and I hadn't even really met anyone here yet. I shoved that whole emotional rollercoaster aside and focused on the job at hand. There were shields to figure out!
Going from the small to the large, the two ships had different shield set-ups as well. Both had what I was sure were void shields, the massive piece of gravity-manipulating machinery couldn't be anything else. Well, what had once been fine pieces of engineering. Now, of course, they had all the signs of a catastrophic overload and consequent blowback. Energy conduits were vaporised, delicate pieces had been fused together or outright melted and cooling vents were seared through. I could only piece together what it had been by comparing all the banks set up throughout the two ships. And since the Federation ship had the same shield system in sets of three per bank and the Man of Iron had them in doubles, I was pretty certain that the humans had triple void shields and the AI focused their strength into a double layer.
Had I only found the void shields, I would have been very impressed with the engineering behind them. The Forerunners used gravity more aggressively, as the data in my head described the mechanisms behind the torsion driver; a gravity weapon capable of doing anything from nudging a fighter aside to ripping capital ships into pieces. With most ships in this galaxy shielded by gravity I would have to see what sort of effect a torsion driver had on those. Of course, in the case of Dark Age ships, there were more layers of shields to get through.
Just next to each void shield bank was another shield set up. A surviving inscription on Bold Wolf made me name these 'flare shields'. Utilising directional electromagnetic flux to form a field that deflected or diffused incoming fire, this was clearly a secondary addition to protect the ship. Bold Wolf had it set up to form outside of the void shield to dampen attacks before they were fully stopped, while on Ironmonger the flare shield was set between the double void shield and hull. This wasn't their last line of defence, each section of armour had not only a triplet of Reinforcement Nodes but a dedicated ion shield.
All those different systems really let me know how serious humanity and their creations took space warfare. Certainly compared to Forerunner systems that had just the one energy shield to protect their ships, which felt really deficient now. Oh, I was sure that it was plenty strong, but it didn't have the backups upon backups that I had just trawled through. I almost had to thank the bots, I'm sure suddenly having to fight a galactic war had inspired massive improvements in military technology on both sides.
Now I just had to apply everything I'd learned. At least I will, after I crack the security on those datacores. No sense in upgrading my forces and then having to do it all over again if they, hopefully, contained more neat tech.
