I believe it is increasingly apparent that the latest developments in personal reflex enhancements (colloq: speedware) have changed the face of warfare - and consequently, required a response from the R teams under my command. This document is intended to summarize our efforts to date.
The suit-based reflex boosters, intended to work in tandem with the pilots, are certainly capable - however, developing something to counter recent developments in human enhancement is currently beyond the capacity of our technology. I will explain further after I elaborate on these new developments.
Previous iterations of Sandevistan and Kereznikov technology operated by bypassing the relatively slow and inefficient neurons of the central nervous system, allowing a marked increase in reaction time. The current models, both in development and in production, are so advanced they honestly qualify as completely new approaches to cyberware entirely. Both, however, utilize the same general model of operation. Rather than merely being content with overruling the nervous system, these new variants utilize a carefully programmed nanite-decon-recon method toreplacethe human nervous system, with the exception of the brain itself, down to the carrying of signals to individual muscle fibers. This produces a tremendous strain on the body and mind, but allows the wielder to move at speeds that match our currentmentalacceleration capabilities.
They can, with a sufficiently advanced processing unit, quite literally dodge bullets.
The current models of production ACPA, if equipped with a high-end reflex booster system,can be capable of reacting to such things, but they cannotacton the information quickly enough.
This leaves us with three avenues to attempt to emulate this development in our conventional ACPA forces, and two avenues involving the reworking of our current force-projection strategies. I will elaborate on both approaches.
[SECTION REDACTED: CLEARANCE CASE CHARTREUSE HOMBURG]
With the results of these avenues of research clear - representing the culmination of a year of extensive research, development, and testing - we are left with more conventional, palliative options with regards to countering speedware.
High-powered laser systems and broad-spectrum area-of-effect weapons are already effective in human hands, and ACPA can carry heavier and consequently more lethal options than any less-equipped soldier, as well as mounting more weapons overall. Current Active Protection System software, for example, could be updated to engage lightly-armored targets utilizing speedware - however, they are limited by the speed of their mounts even when computer controlled. More conventionally carried and mounted weapons will suffer the same issues, ones inherent to attempting to target an opponent moving fast enough to avoid bullets.
Standard self-defense packs share a similar issue: while being easier to trigger and sufficiently indiscriminate enough to potentially catch a speedware-using combatant unawares, they are by necessity a limited resource - while a useful tool or surprise tactic, they are likely not sufficient for sustained combat or any fight where an opponent isawareof their presence.
Given these incontrovertible facts, simple truths become clear:
ACPA will soon become outdated as a vehicle for human pilots, and confined to brushfire wars. Cyborg infantry, with the development of these new implants, will almost certainly become the norm for heavy assault tactics in the years to come. While ACPA are still an overwhelming presence against infantry and armor in the correct conditions, these conditions will necessarily become rarer in the years to come, and less cost-effective compared to other options.
The future lies in reflex enhancement and cybernetics. For all its applicability and low threshold to operate for the common soldier, ACPA cannot and will not be able to compete in its intended role against the enemies of the future.
-Militech Internal Memorandum #556-2058
—-
Tumble's suit had taken a beating from the cyberpsychos that'd been dropped on their heads, but not enough of one for her to back down from this fight. Even so, she didn't rush in - while Jacob did, laser cannon cycling up and blasting the place where Greaves had been standing to slag. The near-borg juked to the right, ducked another blast, and closed to melee range in the blink of an eye. A kick tore the laser cannon out of Jacob's hand, ripping the connecting power cables out of the suit entirely.
That wasn't normal for most sets of chrome - an implanted linear frame? He was huge enough, a behemoth of chrome nine feet tall - still shorter than all the suits save poor Donny's, but gigantic for anything that wasn't a high-end combat cyborg. And clearly he didn't need speedware to move quick enough to match the reflexes of an ACPA, as he and Jacob fell into a close-quarters brawl, sheer mass against the near-borg's agility and power.
She juked to the side, trying to get around the brawl - she didn't have an angle for a clear shot, and she snapped orders to the others via text comms to do the same.
Greaves ducked another textbook straight from Jacob, and slammed a chrome fist into the backup viewport, cracking the bulletproof glass. Jacob staggered, and Greaves pressed closer before she could line up a shot - fingers dug into gashes in the armored plating, and the near-borg heaved, lifting the half-ton suit off the ground and tossing it straight at her.
She dropped her auto-shottie and braced herself - the impact tore one of her waldo-shields right off its mount and sent her skidding back, but she caught the poor bastard and broke his fall.
You okay? she texted instantly.
KILL THE FUCKER, Jacob responded.
Ah, right, he liked Ana.
She was still alive, at least, suit telemetry confirmed that.
In the seconds it took to put Jacob down, Troy and Shiro closed in. The grenade launcher on Alecto burped, launching a shimmering tangle of electrified wires that forced the near-borg to dodge.
Right into the sights of Alecto's laser cannon.
Fast as the near-borg was, he wasn't fast enough to dodge light, and the beam took him right in his armored chest, skin and hair burning as he went hurtling into another cargo container. He didn't get up.
Shiro limped over, raising his blade. Good call, always confirm the kill.
"When I raise this blade, so may this poor sin-"
Greaves's optics blazed back to life, and the bastard moved. A kick faster than the unaugmented eye could follow slammed into the wrist of Shiro's suit, and the two-handed, nine-foot-long blade went pinwheeling upwards as its owner staggered. The near-borg - no, the full-borg, the skin had been nothing more than an affectation - followed up, right arm unfolding to reveal a grenade launcher that blasted into Shiro's plating at point black, cracking armor and sending crazed readings through his suit telemetry.
The railgun on Tumble's shoulder cracked.
Greaves dodged.
How the fuck-
There was an upwards blur of motion. Shiro's sword vanished, and Shiro was hurled into the ground.
Shiro's suit telemetry cut off.
Her Sandevistan kicked in, and the faint blur resolved into the full-borg mid-jump. His speedware was still active. Ana had short-circed it, how the hell - it didn't matter.
She couldn't move as quickly as she thought, but she didn't need to.
Tumble's suit thrusters roared. Three of the eight were nonfunctional, one was half-functional, it didn't matter - the quick and dirty rocket boost hurled her right at the fucker at speeds matching his, and no matter how fast you were you couldn't move in midair without something to kick off of. She slammed into the fucker and cratered the concrete wall behind him, shattering more of the wall with the uncontrolled fall. Greaves screamed, and an arm-mounted blade sprouted from his left hand to slam into a seam in her suit's hip, sending damage warnings blaring as it cut through plasteel myomer and control lines. Her leg folded under her as she hit the floor, Sandevistan timing out: she ignored both it and the pain in favor of punching for the bastard's head - he caught her wrist mid-blow, diverting it just enough that her pile bunker punched into concrete rather than his partially slagged face. He threw her off a second later, forcing weight onto her bad leg to wriggle free and get himself back out of grapple range.
"Auto-repair nanite systems, you fucker," the fullborg growled. "Can't keep me down for l-"
Jacob's railgun cracked, and smashed the fullborg into the wall again. Greaves roared in pain, coming up with a left arm shorn off at the elbow, and flickered into motion again - fucking auto-repair, let a quickhack kill your speedware you bastard.
Tumble forced her own on again, and snapped warning messages to the others as Greaves arrowed straight for Shiro's corpse, wrenching the sword free with his one functional arm and leaping straight for Troy. Troy wasn't fast enough to raise his shield to block, but both laser and grenade launcher didn't need to be.
She was in a Militech Commando 9C. Command variant, with command overrides, and they'd plugged her into the tac-net with those permissions. Including being able to shoot her lancemate's weapons for them.
The laser fired, carving a shallow groove in Greaves' left leg - he jumped rather than dodging, avoiding the followup net and coming down with the massive blade cutting into both shield and armor, before being stuck fast as it hit the interior layer of 'bone' in the suit's upper shoulders.
Her Sandevistan timed out. So did Greaves'.
Troy turned on the electrification in his suit, and the fullborg screamed, optics flickering as enough voltage to cook a stock human coursed through his frame. He ripped his hands free, twitching violently, and Troy's spear-arm sliced through the rest of his left arm and into the fullborg's chest as he hurled himself back.
Mistake.
Cranson's last four rockets slammed into the ground around the fullborg the second he was clear, blowing the already damaged left leg clear off the borg's body as the blast hurled him right at the heavyweight. Four arms backed by CCPL myomer slammed the bastard into the ground with an earthshaking blow that reduced the concrete beneath them to rubble.
Greaves bounced back up on his remaining leg, Sandevistan active again, trying to get away - but he couldn't dodge anymore, and as she rose her APS locked on and blasted the fucker mid-hop. Right leg gone at the knee, he left gouges in the floor as he crashed at Jacob's feet.
"FUCKING RELICS!"the killborg roared. "GONNA-"
Jacob set him on fire.
The sound Greaves made as he burned sent feedback through her suit systems. She ignored it, walking to the near-corpse that was still twitching and trying to move even as the napalm cooked it alive.
She held out her hand.
Troy handed her Shiro's sword.
What was that thing he'd always said?
Right.
"When I raise this sword, so may this poor sinner receive eternal life."
She brought the blade down.
—-
In the end, they hadn't been able to outrun the sandstorm. The damn thing had moved a bit faster than they'd predicted - not that weather prediction was really worth anything these days - and they'd been forced to bunker down.
Not that that stopped her people from celebrating.
They'd lost eight people to the fighting, six of them on the charge and only two on clearing out the base, and a dozen wounded, most of them pretty lightly.
Panam knew it'd have been a lot worse without the Junkerknights. Hell, it'd have been impossible without the Junkerknights.
Twelve cyberpsychos and a killborg, all of them loaded with high-grade chrome and speedware, and the killborg with a linear frame that let him throw hands with honest-to-iron power armor.
The Aldecaldos would've been butchered. Her people were good, but they weren't that good. You fought that kind of enemy with sniper rifles, mortars, and traps. Not head on.
But yeah, some of her people died. That was the fact of the matter when you fought Wraiths - and now a lot fewer of her family would go missing in the desert.
So they partied. Music blared through the warehouse, loud enough to drown out the sandstorm outside, and beer and nomad wine flowed like water.
A damn good time. Even a couple of the Junkers, and all of their backup, had been roped into participating, which mostly meant getting shitfaced and mourning their own dead.
The other three survivors, on the other hand, weren't. They'd congregated at the back of the warehouse, hauled in some gantries and enough tools to impress even the most hardened techie, and set to work repairing their suits.
What really caught her eye was the way they moved. They'd laid out the suits of the dead with almost…reverence, and set to work with the motions of a crew that'd done this a thousand times before. They'd cut the massive rigs apart and begun transplanting parts with professional skill.
So she brought them some beer. Not enough to get drunk on, you didn't want to do delicate work while buzzed, but enough to take the edge off.
Also, she wanted a good look at that hardware.
The ACPA were fucking huge - none of them less than ten feet tall and one nearly eleven, they were big enough that the operators would probably have to crouch a little to fit inside most rooms. Heavy armor, big engines, bigger guns. What more could a girl want?
Their leader, the ex-nomad, looked up at her approach. An expression Panam really couldn't recognize flitted across the middle-aged woman's face. "Yeah?" she asked.
"I come bearing beer, and a lot of questions."
Tumble snorted. "You're lucky I'm easily bribed." She took the beer. "Troy, Ana, you want any?"
"None for me," the tiny (teenager?) girl with the bloodied bandage wrapped around her head grunted, without turning away from her tinkering with her suit's arm servos.
"Painkillers?" Panam asked, nodding to the head wound. She'd heard she'd gotten a cargo container tossed at her. The suit had taken most of it, but she'd still gotten concussed. Apparently she'd puked all over that other kid, Jacob, when he'd peeled her out of her ride.
The girl grunted noncommittally, while Troy swaggered up and took both of the remaining beers with a smile.
"So," Tumble asked, taking a swig of the beer and turning back to work on repairing a waldo-arm attachment. "What do you want to know?"
"You always strip the dead for spare parts?" she asked, nodding to the partially disassembled suits laid out in front of them.
Tumble nodded. "Whenever we have the time," she answered. "Their bodies go however they wanted to - their suits go to the rest of us. CCPL, frames, upgrades, armor. We strip it down and reuse anything we can." She began assembling the new socket for the broken waldo-arm on the floor - some tremendous impact had ripped it off, judging from the tear, but the arm itself and the shield it carried both looked intact. "Nothing we've got is exactly industry standard, really. Some people build new suits, or steal them. Some others get them from the ones who actually live long enough to retire. I know both of the kids built theirs from salvage at first." She hefted the completed armature, and walked over to her suit, plugging the thing in with a grunt of effort. "You either take on the parts from the others or you end up spare parts," she said quietly. "That's just the fact of things." She gestured to her suit, and waved Panam over. "Come on. Take a look."
Panam moved carefully, stepping over the sea of mechanical parts and tools until she stood right in front of Tumble's suit.
Yeah, she could see most of the nomad-clan markings that Saul had talked about - some were obscured by battle damage and wear and tear, but others she recognized. Dead clan-sigils in white, arrayed in a circle on the chest-plate. And beneath them, a long list of names in tiny, almost unreadable script, the last two freshly painted.
Trista Flynn. Rider Two.
Fenn Galagos. Rider Three.
Tommy Vasquez. Rider Four.
Tina Vasquez. Rider Five.
Grond Jackson. Rider Six.
Akami Tsunemori. Banshee.
Jorge Santos. Noble.
Howard Phillips. Lovecraft.
Jenny Dean. Bunnyhop.
Ernest Faust. Panzerbrick.
Henry Martini. Ferrarian.
Anung Hughes. Beast of Megiddo.
Aki Higashiyama. Gunfiend.
Tito Capone. Rattler.
Jacob Holler. Bladerunner.
Maria Scott. Guinevere.
Blake Williams. Rockerknight.
Boris Vasilyevich. Commieblock.
Adam Torres. Overwatch.
Mattias Torres. Gunhead.
Arnold Cartwright. Hammerhead.
Kishioki Shiro. Chevalier.
Donny Johnson. Churchill.
Oh.
"You've been at this for a while, haven't you?" she said quietly.
"Sixteen years, next month," Tumble confirmed. "Longer than pretty much anyone else in the Round Table. Or most corporate and national jockeys, for that matter. Been piloting for longer, though."
She looked at that list of names again, at the battered and mismatched collections of parts that made up each of the suits.
Very…nomad. It didn't matter if it was ugly, so long as it was functional, and where you got it didn't matter, so long as you knew how it was put together.
"Do you need a hand?" she offered. "I'm good with machines."
Tumble smiled - very slightly, but still a smile. "Yeah, sure. Let's get to work."