Part 1

Dear Dad...
Life is much as usual. Certainly not what I expected when I signed up! We've only had one fight so far, and that was a minor skirmish. I didn't even get to do anything.

David sighed and erased the last sentence. His father was a pacifist, and he wouldn't approve. He looked at the flatscreen, sucking thoughtfully at the end of his stilo. He couldn't think of anything to write. He started to write.

It is muddy here.

He stopped again. Huh - he was right. This was boring. David threw the pad away from him and swung his legs onto his bed, resting the heavy army-issue boots on the cold plastic bedframe, the door of his sleep-cubicle still open.
"Do you mind? Someone around here wants some rest, thank you!" said a head that had appeared out of the door of the top cubicle. It continued. "David, if you're going to bang about, I might as well get up."
The head disappeared and a pair of boots replaced it, hanging for a moment before thumping into the hard metal floor. He looked out of the cubicle door at a tall, trim woman, Sarah Fervent. She was one of his best friends, and a rookie like him. They'd both come from Empyrrean, and they had lived in the same city, only a few doors away from each other. When David had decided to move away and get a job in the Army, she had been the first to join him.
David and his parents did not get on well. They weren't really the kind of people suited to parenting - they were well-off, but his mother was constantly working and his father disagreed with him on almost everything. So David had decided to move, and as soon as he could, he took a post in the Galactic Arm Government Army. He got shipped out to this miserable little backwater.
David's mind wandered off. Very watery, he thought. Mud, mud and more mud. And more than a little backside, as well. The swamps stank. The planet was called Pearl - about the least appropriate name it could have. The only pearly thing about it were the clouds, and then only from the outside. Whoever said it never rained but it poured probably didn't know about here, but he could have been a native.
Outside, the downpour continued, adding even more water to the already saturated landscape. Surprisingly, heather flourished here, and some evergreen trees. In a way, it was very like the old Scottish Highlands - wet, craggy - but when it dried off, it could be breathtaking. Literally breathtaking, when the rocky outcrops provided cover for enemies.

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This was just a taster. I'll be coming up with more soon!

Part 2

David and Sarah had both been assigned to the base's Jeffy squad, Gamma-1. They were going on a scouting mission, aiming to find a CORE base that had been launching attacks against them.
 The twelve Jeffies sat in the garage, engines already on as the drivers and gunners piled through the garage door and into the Jeffies. The little scout vehicles thrummed gently as their large engines processed the fuel produced by the mini nanolathes mounted behind the driver. Each had a tiny laser turret, controlled by AI, and a few new additions - a smoke machine, a grenade launcher (for incendiary grenades) and also hardpoints for hand weapons. The drivers locked their laser rifles into the hardpoints, then climbed into the cockpits.
David was excited - this was his first mission, and he was looking forward to it.
As he slipped the direct input jacks into the sockets in his upper arm and the back of his neck, the garage door opened. Twelve engines whined as studded tires scraped the metal floor and twelve sleek shapes sped out into the rare sunlight.
David was not surprised when, as he plugged the jacks in and activated the driver link, his vision blanked out and was replaced by another image. He'd undergone all this in training. David 'moved' his head and the nerve signals to his neck were intercepted at the brain stem and directed to the mainframe of the scout. The camera whined as servos moved it, looking around the landscape.
It turned to see one of the vehicles speeding alongside him, kicking up mud and stones as the four-wheel-drive took it over a small hill and it bounded into the air. He could see the thermal signature of the exhaust, the tiny amounts of X-ray, gamma and UV radiation glinting off or passing through the laughably minute amount of armour on the hull. David flicked the multi-spectral view off and sat back to enjoy the ride.

Twenty minutes later, and they were forty miles away from the base, doing a steady 120 mph over the mud slicked plains, metal spiked tires gripping nicely. Every so often, the light vehicles would come across a stream, and they would either cross - the Jeffies were watertight and could cross water as long as it did not cover their turrets - or, if there was a bank, they would simply gun the engines and jump over, momentum carrying them most of the way, then crash down on the bank, suspension creaking.
The voice of Gamma-1's lead driver came over the radio, crystal-clear because of the close proximity.
 "OK folks, we're fifty miles from the base - we can split up now. Peel off in five seconds."
Eleven voices acknowledged the leader. Soon, all twelve Jeffies were following different paths. David headed towards a distant lake, Sarah racing along a few miles from him. He could see the glitter of sunlight reflecting off her windshield every so often. The sunlight was not destined to last. Soon, towering thunderclouds filled the sky, and lightning speared down, hitting the earth again and again. David let the AI take control of driving and gazed at the clouds.
Suddenly there was a flash, and he saw a flicker of flame through a gap in the clouds. He zoomed in, and saw a missile.
"Gamma-1, Driver 4 reporting... I think there's a heavy rocket launcher somewhere over the horizon. Be careful! Coordinates transmitted."
Every Jeffy received the coordinates, and nanoseconds later, the Comm Center got them as well. Suddenly David noticed the scale on his zoom.
"What the... hang on..."
He called up a 3D hologram of a heavy rocket from the mainframe and superimposed it onto the picture, scaling it. His heart sank - the rocket was at least five times larger than any heavy rocket. With a gulp, he called up more holos and projected them.
David cursed. It was a nuke.
"G-1D4 here - that's no heavy rocket, that's a godd@mned nuke!"
"G-1 Leader - all troops disperse. G-1 leader to base - come in base."
"Base here - what is it?"
"There's a nuke on the horizon. Tracking... Coordinates transmitted."
"Received. We'll get it."
David heard the exchange and was relieved. The ABMs at the base would intercept. He turned his vehicle to get out of the nuke's blast zone in case it exploded instead of just crashing.
"G-1 Leader here - all of G-1 meet at navpoint Beta-Pi-339. Now!"
As David sped towards the meeting point, hundreds of miles away from him, he saw the massive missile enter the atmosphere. He continued driving.

Soon, he was joined by Sarah, and they drove as fast as possible towards the meeting point. As they topped the rise in front of the nav-beacon, he saw a column of CORE units marching along the road to the base. He saw a column of smoke and followed it. He could see wreckage... he zoomed in. Jeffies... Ten smoldering wrecks of Jeffies. He closed his eyes.
A few seconds later, he ordered a mild stimulant from the medicomp and professionalism took over. As the drug arrived through his arm jack, he radioed base.
"G-1D4 here - All G-1 units apart from Driver 5 and myself are dead. They ran into a column of CORE units coming your way. Coordinates transmitted."
"Received. God... isn't a nuke bad enough for those metal-heads? Base out."
As he watched from the brow of the hill, there was a shrill whistle, and twenty globes of plasma whistled past, impacting squarely just in front of the lead vehicles. The top layers of the road were vaporised, and the rest blown out of the hole formed, landing on the unfortunate units. Seven Raiders could not stop and fell into the hole, and a Reaper followed. The sound of tortured metal came from the hole as the Raiders' heavy armour generators failed and the Reaper suddenly disappeared from view. Twenty A.K.s running at the side were next to go, simply vanishing as the ten million degree plasma turned them into gas. Unexpectedly, there was a massive, ground shaking explosion, and a thin pillar of flame shot up into the air. David was blinded by the pure white light that came after, but as he regained his vision he could see a rolling cloud of flame that deformed the clouds on the horizon. As he watched it flatten out into the classic mushroom cloud, he noticed the horizon shaking, and braced...
Just in time. A scorching wave of heat rushed towards him, burning through his heavy armour and obliterating the painted Gamma-1 design on the hull. The shock wave that came soon after flipped both the Jeffies over and sent them rolling down the side of the rise, thankfully away from the CORE troops. As the light vehicle bounced and slid down the muddy hill, the metal dented and scraped now the heavy armour was not protecting it, David passed out. His last thoughts were "Thank God they intercepted it in time..." before everything went black.

He awoke to find Sarah lying beside him, still unconscious. He would later find out that her last act was to get out of her Jeffy and pull him out of his burning vehicle before passing out on the ground, but for now all he could think of was to get back to base. The rain was still beating down, but it had not yet extinguished the fires around him. He looked around and saw wreckage - Sarah's Jeffy was hardly functional, and his was... well, his wasn't any more. A wheel here, flame flickering at the tough rubber, over there a single barrel of the laser, over there his laser rifle, bent almost double.
He tried to turn over the nearly whole Jeffy, but it was too heavy, so he dragged Sarah over and inside through the empty door frame. The door itself was lying fifty feet away, half-way down the hill.

A few hours later, she awoke to find David feeding her cold rainwater from a piece of curved metal, probably a piece of mudguard. At the moment, though, she didn't care about dirt, and she took a deep drink from the improvised cup. David smiled at her and she groaned.
"What the hell happened?"
"A nuke - they intercepted it, probably... [his stomach sank as he thought of the alternative] ...and the shock wave blasted us down a hill."
"Oh... is that all?"
David laughed and crawled over to the door to collect another cupful of rainwater. He gave it to her, then fetched the medicomp and the emergency nanolathe, linking them together to make medical nanobots.
"We've hardly got any energy left - the reactor won't work at the moment, but I think I've got it..."
He put the two objects down, and the medicomp bleeped at her. She painfully jacked it in to her arm, and it started to diagnose her, spraying nanobots over her bruised body. David went back to the rear of the scout, and started tinkering with the reactor block. After half an hour, Sarah felt better, and David still hadn't got the reactor going.
"Here... let me try."
She crawled over and took the multi-lathe from him. It was a specialised nanolathe, very accurate but it only dispensed a tiny amount of nanobots at a time. She looked at the reactor and pressed a few buttons on the 'lathe, looking at its diagnostic screen every so often. Then she aimed the nozzle and sprayed the reactor for a second. After she flicked a switch and punched in a sequence, there was a hum, and the reactor restarted, the dark screen flashing to life and displaying the status.
"Alright? Now let's have some heat in here!"
She slid over to the main console and jacked herself in, adjusting the heat and setting the reactor to produce repair nanobots while David hung a blanket over the door and plugged the emergency nanolathe in.
"Very cosy this, isn't it?" Sarah said, and grinned.

Part 3

David couldn't sleep. He looked down at the slumbering form of Sarah, huddled up under a thin foil utility blanket, used for anything from sleeping under to repairing solar panels to splinting legs. He sat up and pushed his own blanket aside, then he crawled to the door and pushed aside the thin sheet of foil covering it. In the darkness he could see a few flashes and explosions lighting up the horizon. He took out his terminal and set its compass in the general direction of the explosions. Then he went back in and went back to sleep, never questioning what was attacking and what was being killed...

Sarah turned over, and pulled the blanket over her eyes, temporarily blinded by the dim sunlight. Outside, it was drizzling lightly. She removed the blanket and rolled into a sitting position. David was still asleep, his head on the emergency backpack. She looked at what she had been sleeping on, something hard, she thought. It was David's feet.
David yawned and opened his eyes.
"Morning, David. Lovely day!"
"Mmm... yeah..." he said, sitting up and looking around. He looked at his feet for a moment, puzzled.
"Uh... what happened to whatever it was that fell onto my feet in the night?"
"Oh, that was me. Sorry!"
David laughed. "Well, not your fault. Let's see, what have we got for breakfast?"
Sarah replied instantly. "Ration bars and whatever else is in the kit."
"Um. Very nice - wholesome, filling... but it lacks a little something. I think I've got something here," he said, rooting around in his backpack. He held up a flat object. "Here we are - I packed this before we left. I thought I might need it."
He opened the flat box and looked at the contents. "A little squashed, but as unhealthy as ever." He took out a packet of chocolate pieces and another of sandwiches. Finally, he extracted a small flask, opening it and sniffing the contents. "Genuine, 75% alcohol, Empyrrean whisky."
"Do you think we'll need it?"
"Need it? Why do we need to need it?"

A few hours later, both the drivers were hard at work restoring the Jeffy-cum-shelter. First, they used bits of wreckage to lever it upright, flipping it over onto protesting suspension. Then, while Rachel charged the nanolathe and got to work on the hull, crumpled and smashed from its encounter with the rocks at the bottom of the hill, David wriggled underneath and started to tinker with the engine, getting it running again. The engine converted hydrogen into electricity, producing water which was recycled into the atmosphere. The electricity drove four wheel motors, and also provided power to the light laser mounted on the roof turret.
David tinkered around for a few minutes, then slid out and tried to start the engine with the manual controls in the cockpit.
"D@mn! It's still not working!"
Sarah stopped 'lathing the hull.
"Here," she said, throwing the 'lathe to David, who caught it heavily. "I'll have a go. How many times do I have to show you that I'm a better mechanic than you?"
David chuckled, turning to the battered hull while Sarah pulled herself under the light vehicle, lying on a utility blanket.

Sunrise next day revealed two figures walking through the debris left by the bombardment of the CORE army.
"Hey, over here!" shouted Sarah. David ran over to her as she started to climb into the large hole she had been looking into.
"What's up?"
"There's tanks at the bottom here. I think one's still active - it's a Reaper, so I don't think it'd be crazy enough to fire at something right on top of it."
David looked down. At the bottom of the hole, a badly damaged Reaper, bearing the CORE insignia, glared back at him with its turret mounted camera.

Inside the crippled tank, DA-002983, its driver, looked out through Camera #23, the turret camera. He saw the two humanoid figures standing on the edge of its pit and felt a surge of loneliness. He had not meant to join the CORE - he had been a reserve pattern, taken from a planet captured by the CORE.
He was a Dgureg, a vaguely humanoid species that had once thrived, a pacifist species which had developed space flight by the time the CORE had arrived. They had dealt damage to the CORE, using ancient nuclear weapons, kept at Comet Watch stations around the planet in orbit. The CORE had been surprised to see 600 nuclear tipped warheads heading towards them, but they hadn't thought for long. The radiation from the nuclear devices had wiped the patterns, before the ships were violently torn apart by the force of atomic reactions. But eventually the CORE managed to capture the planet and all were patterned.
He was called David in his language, and very soon he would be dead. And he didn't plan to go down quietly.

There was a boom, and David jumped back as a plasma round whistled by his ear, the tiny fraction of the intense heat scorching his skin.
"Whoa... let's get out of here!"
Both David and Sarah ran for cover as the tank started its self-destruct count-down. An explosion rocked the area as the tank's reactor walls gave way and the anti-matter/plasma mix expanded rapidly and vaporised the walls of the pit. Now the hole was a lot larger.
David ran back to the crater, and looked down. All that was left now was a puddle of molten metal, the remains of seven Raiders and a Reaper. As he watched, the white-hot metal started to cool, solidifying and forming a solid cap on the bottom of the hole, perfectly flat and shiny. Fascinated, David gazed at the remains of eight once-people until Sarah pulled him away, snapping him out of his trance.
"What is it?" he asked.
"Come and see... you'll be surprised."
They both walked over to what at first looked like a solid lump of metal but resolved as they got closer into four tanks and a Can. They were all nearly intact, but they had crashed into each other when a plasma globule burst nearby.
Sarah activated her laser rifle and started to slice the lasers off the Can, while David scrambled over an Instigator, jumping lightly onto the hull of a Raider and carefully prising open the inspection hatch.
"It's no use," said Sarah. "The turret's too well-armoured."
She gave up and joined David, who by this time had got the hatch open and had managed to avoid the shaped charge fragmentation charge placed inside. The spray of metal fragments had peppered the hatch door which he'd propped up behind him full of holes.
Now Sarah watched as he removed the bulky reactor backpack which he'd been wearing, and started to wriggle into the hole. All of the CORE tanks had hatches big enough for the CORE's Technicians, who wore human sized bodies, to use. This meant they were just large enough for a small human, like David.
Half an hour later, Sarah had taken the backpack and was busy reclaiming some scrap, storing it in the pack for later use. She finished one piece and pointed the heavy nanolathe at an Instigator, putting it on the ground once it started to break down the metal. The nanolathe was too heavy to hold all the time. Suddenly David started to wriggle back through the hatch, but he hit his head and cursed for a second before continuing.
As he got out, he shouted to Sarah. "I've got it!"
"What?"
"Our salvation. It's a heavy armour generator, still working, too!"
"Yeah, and?"
"Well, we can use it, can't we?"
"Um... hang on..." said Sarah, who had by now taken the small object from David. She examined it carefully, noting the jack-in ports.
"Yep, we can use this - it's got all the right ports. I just need to reconfigure it, or we'll end up armouring the air around us instead of our vehicle. Or, even worse, we could end up slicing something in half - ourselves, if we're not careful. I'll plug it into the mainframe to reconfigure once we get back."
"Looks as if we should be going pretty soon. There's nothing much else to get."
"Yes there it - we need weapons, remember? Ah, here we go!"
She looked carefully at the turret of the Instigator they were standing next to, before discarding it. She turned to another Can, this time almost melted to slag.
"Yes, this'll do. No heavy armour, see."
She picked up the 'lathe, which had finished reclaiming, and punched in a few commands.
"Turns it into a cutting tool," she said as she switched on. A green reclamation beam sliced out of the machine, breaking down the air with a squealing sound, and Sarah adjusted the controls to turn it into a tight, narrow line in the air. She walked to the Can and started to reclaim the narrow layer of metal between the body and the turret, which soon fell off. Sarah then started to dissect the turret with the beam, cutting off tiny slices until only the laser cannon was left.
"There. Now could you take that? I've got the backpack."
David picked up the gun - with difficulty, as it was about the same height as him - and strapped it to his backpack before following Sarah back to their camp.
 
Part 4

The following day, the duo had managed to get the Jeffy ready to run. David had taken it for a spin around the plain, and though it had run out of power after five minutes, this was only because its fusion plant was being used to power Sarah's nanolathe as well, busy reclaiming scrap from David's old Jeffy. The new Jeffy now had a top mounted heavy laser as well as its own light laser. The laser was almost too heavy to turret, and David had had to rebuild the turret after it exploded due to the AI deciding that there was another unit on top of it. As well as this, the heavy armour generator was also working well, though it malfunctioned at first, trying to armour the air inside the cabin. David almost suffocated before he managed to turn it off. Now, though, the sensors were working and only the outer layer of metal was armoured.
Sarah was now busy building a shelter for them with the nanolathe, using one of its many   blueprints. She had already used the 'lathe to build a storage hut for their tools, as they obviously could not use the Jeffy any more. The shelter, now almost built, was a simple waterproof hut, about 6 ft high, 15 ft long and 6 ft wide with a slightly sloped roof. Now it was finished. She stepped inside and quickly 'lathed a lavatory shelter - or at least a hole with a screen around it - as protection from the elements. The shelter would be easily reclaimed when they needed to move on, but first they would rest.

As evening wore on, David tried to raise the base on radio. There was no response, just a crackle. But when he tuned the radio across the frequencies, he could hear something on the emergency band. Radio was an outdated technology, but it still survived, as it was cheap, didn't use much power and was easy to use. That was why all emergency beacons used a scrambled, frequency agile radio signal to transmit. That was what he was getting now.
"X-9938882 here... calling base... calling base... help... help..."
He suddenly realised what he was hearing. This was a CORE emergency signal! But where? He began to do a directional trace, as the message was obscured by static.
A few minutes later, it came back.
"X-9938882 here... someone help me... Arm, CORE, anyone... help me...
Xavier here... please... come... help... pain..."
The signal faded, and David guessed the transmitter had run out of power. He'd got a trace now, but he switched off the radio. Nothing could be done.

In the morning, Sarah reclaimed the shelter, and they both climbed into the adapted Jeffy. It now had two seats, and they'd scavenged an extra reactor from a tank, more than capable of running the heavy armour generator with plenty to spare for the lasers. They'd also taken spare motors from Weasels. The wheel motors were now running at four times their proper power rating, to compensate for the extra weight. Sarah had blueprinted any weapons she could find, as well as three different vehicles, just in case they ever needed spare parts. But the motors didn't look like failing, and they sped across the landscape, a plume of water following them.
David set the controls for base and gazed out at the sodden terrain. Suddenly a black shape sped past his view. It was a disabled Storm, with thousands of scorch marks all over its frame. He guessed it had been the victim of an EMG attack. Slowly, it turned its rocket pods to face them, and tried to fire, but the weapon system overloaded and the torso sparked for a while before falling over, lying still in the mud.
After an hour's travel across the desolate landscape, they stopped to replace a burnt-out wheel motor. As they got going again, David turned on the craft's radio, just out of interest. He tuned it in to the distress band, and was almost deafened by the signal.
"X-9938882 here... someone help me... Arm, CORE, anyone... help me...
Xavier here... please... come... help... pain..."
He stopped the vehicle, ignoring Sarah asking him what was going on, and used the camera to scan the landscape. Directly in front of them lay a CORE Kbot.

Sarah spoke first.
"It must be dead - how could it have survived that?" she said, pointing at the scorch mark all down the side of its body where lightning had obviously struck. It was badly damaged, the legs melted beyond repair, and it was only just recognisable as an A.K.

Xavier activated his one remaining visual sensor and gazed out of his twisted frame. He opened the panel that covered his jackplugs and internal speaker and tried to speak, but the speaker was fused. Instead, he settled for flashing his lights to attract attention.

David turned from Sarah to see that the A.K. had opened an access panel and was flashing a ring of lights around a port.
"Uh... Sarah?" he said.
"Yeah?"
"I think it's trying to get attention. Hang on... leads!"
He dashed to the Jeffy and drove it over to the Kbot. David jumped out, dragging a long cable with him.
"This should work..."
He put the block on the end of the cable near to the Kbot's port, and nanobots streamed out. After a while, the universal cable was firmly linked to the port. He clicked a switch.

Xavier detected the connection, and dumped his rescue signal through the link, then inserted a probe cautiously.
Inside the Jeffy, the speaker crackled for a second, before repeating the very same signal that had nearly deafened David earlier.
"X-9938882 here... someone help me... Arm, CORE, anyone... help me...
Xavier here... please... come... help... pain..."
Then it stopped, and restarted, a mechanical, obviously synthesized voice.
"Hello. My name is Xavier-9938882, and I am an A.K. I was hit by lightning. I can see that you are the Arm, but I do not mind. I will not harm you if you do not harm me."
Xavier performed the mental equivalent of a sigh - he could not have hurt the humans even if he had tried. Both his lasers had overloaded and exploded as he was electrified. Heavy armour may not be very vulnerable to electric charges, and he thanked God that was so. But it could not stop everything, and one of the things it could not stop was a few million volts.
"Please could you help me? I am in a bad state of repair. My self repair circuits are damaged. If I get repaired, I aim to surrender."
He sighed again. Wishful thinking - A.K.s were not deemed important enough to have a self repair. He just hoped the humans were kind-hearted.

Sarah and David stared at the damaged A.K.
"Well?" said David. "What are we going to do?"
"We've got to do something... I'm going to repair him," replied Sarah. "Even if he is CORE, he doesn't deserve to be just left."
She got the emergency nanolathe from the Jeffy and trained it at the A.K.
"Hang on... I can't rebuild him like this! I need his blueprints for the legs."
The speaker crackled again. "I can provide blueprints."
As if to prove the point, the nanolathe beeped. A light showed that a new blueprint had been uploaded. Sarah began playing the nanobeam over the A.K's body. It would take several hours.

Part 5

Xavier sat up, immediately waking up from his dream filled sleep. If he was fully human, he would have been tossing and turning, but he had powered his suit down to go to sleep. Xavier's brain had been badly damaged by the lightning strike, and it had not been properly rebuilt by the nanolathe. Portions were missing, including the part that dealt with Central Consciousness which had self-destructed as soon as it detected the nanobots, thinking he was being captured. This was the section which contained loyalty protocols, along with CC linkups and strategic info. So at the moment he was feeling rather confused. Xavier was a Polledian, an inhabitant of one of the planets in a solar system near to Core Prime. He had been patterned early on in the CORE's wave of expansion and had served in hundreds of units, from tanks to planes to ships. This was the first time his pattern had ever seen an un-suited human, but he felt a wave of nostalgia for the 'old days' when he himself was human, too.
He got up, servos whining and memcomposite creaking as his suit responded to his commands. He had been sleeping beside the Jeffy that held the people that had rescued him. He thought back to what they had done the day before, racing over the muddy plains at high speed, his suit hanging on to the rear of the Jeffy. After a while, he had wanted a better view, so he had climbed onto the roof and lay there, enjoying the view. If he had a face, he would have been grinning.
Soon, they would start again for the Arm's base, the only major one on the planet. All others were firebases or were metal farms, and there were a few radar outposts, serving only to detect enemies. He shuddered briefly as he remembered that, once, he would have been one of those enemies. But the mood soon passed as he sat comfortably against the Jeffy, watching the sun rise.

David rubbed his eyes to clear them, and unfolded from the chair where he had been sleeping. Behind him, Sarah stirred, the bright sunshine causing her to blink sleepily. David looked out of the scout, parked in the middle of no-where, two people and a Kbot lying in or around it. Peace itself, apart from the lasers. David jacked in to use the camera, looking at the horizon. For as far as the eye - and the camera - could see, there was nothing... until the camera spotted a blob on the horizon...
David zoomed in. It was a Sentinel! The base! Quickly, he activated a holo map and entered the coordinates from the laser ranger. Yes, it was the main base alright.
"Morning, David," said Sarah, uncurling her body painfully. She yawned and stretched, then leaned out of the window to say good morning to Xavier.
"Morning," said David with a grin. "Come on everyone, we've got to get back to base. Looks like they beat off the attackers. Let's go!"
As Xavier climbed into position on the roof, his slender frame allowing him to lie underneath the heavy laser turret, David jacked in again and gunned the engine. The studded tires slipped for a moment, then caught, and the scout started to speed off.

As they neared the base, David began to signal.
"G-1 Driver 4 to base... come in base..."
There was no answer, only static. David repeated the hail, but again, static.
"Sarah, can you see anything?" he said. Sarah was acting as observer and gunner, jacked into the cameras and the laser cannon.
"Um... not yet. Get closer."
David sped up, eager to get to base...
As the small vehicle sped towards the base, more and more defenses came into view... and then David gasped. Sarah cursed.
"D@mn!! I didn't spot it before... David, Xavier, all these are dead. See?"
The defenses were skewed and a few had fallen over. Set a little back was an Annihilator, turret skewed and useless.
"What the hell happened?" said David. They got closer, and the nearer to the base, the more damage done. Realisation crept over the trio, and dread began to enter.
"Oh..."
Only one thing could have caused this damage... a huge explosion from inside the base... A Commander...
"I guess that nuke hit, after all," said David, lamely. The Jeffy stopped on a small rise, and as the sun rose into the sky, the three survivors gazed out over a desolate landscape.

Three hours later, the trio had picked their way over debris to the centre of the base, the epicenter of the explosion. Obviously the nuke had hit a fusion reactor, one of the twelve in the base, and the Commander had been somewhere nearby. He would have been instantly vaporised, his matter/antimatter backpack going up like a huge bomb. Here, the crater was nearly fifty feet deep. They had had to use the Jeffy's grappling hooks to lower it into the basin, smooth and glassy from condensed metal vapor. There was nothing here - everything would have instantly vanished from view, melted then turned to gas by the incredible heat. The three turned away from the scene and started to leave.
On the outskirts of the base, the carnage was visible. Structures had been knocked down or shredded by the shock wave. Here, a Big Bertha lay on its side, half the turret melted to slag by escaping plasma. Over there, against the cliff, units had piled up and fused into a lump. Behind the cliff, the damage was not as obvious, but when David looked inside a tank, the evidence was still there - the tank was a hollow shell. Finally, they came to a piece of the base that was badly damaged but still seemed functional. A Sentinel swung to track Xavier, even though his IFF was transmitting, but there was no power to operate it. A LLT was repeatedly shooting at a rock, convinced it was an enemy. The rock had melted under the energy, but the laser kept firing. Suddenly, over the horizon, a small shape leapt and skidded. The silhouette got closer, and Xavier was the first to identify it.
"It's a Flash... well, at least that's someone else living."
The Flash screeched to a stop, skidding sideways towards the trio, its treads demolishing the LLT. As it shuddered to a stop and the dust cleared, the hatch opened and a small woman vaulted out, walking over to them. David could see seven kill bars on her jumpsuit - a veteran.
"Hi! My name's Samantha Murphy... call me Murphy. Uh... what happened?!" she said, her original grin turning to a frown as she noticed the destruction. "I was out trying to hunt down some CORE @ss, and I just got in... now I know why Base wasn't replying to hails."
"Yeah," said David. "I think a nuke landed here. I saw it going over and exploding, but I thought the ABMs got it and it self-destructed."
"Well, I can see that it definitely didn't get shot down. Commander Martin gone, then?"
"Probably," said Xavier. Murphy seemed to notice him for the first time.
"What's an A.K. doing here, anyway? Not being impolite, though."
"I got hit by lightning," said Xavier. "They rescued me."
Murphy looked at the Jeffy in wonder. "Wow... that's pretty obviously not a standard Jeffy, or I'd be clamoring for one right now! What's that? A Can laser? Cool... good armour, too?" she said, wandering over and inspecting the scout with a critical eye. "Hmm... that could do with a bit of work. Come on - let's find us a nanolathe!"

They wandered through the base, Murphy in front. Occasionally, she stopped to look at a part, then discarded it.
"Here, Sarah," she said. "You an engineer?"
"Well, not really..." replied Sarah, "but I'm quite handy with a wrench, or a 'lathe. Why?"
"Well, I need someone like that. I'm rubbish at the engineering. I just need someone to look for a decent nanolathe... Ah!" she said, dashing off into the rubble. The other three looked at each other, shrugged, then followed her.
"Great!" said Murphy, her voice indistinct. She was underneath a sheet of debris, part of what used to be an Advanced Vehicle Plant. Xavier tossed the debris out of the way, exposing the huge nanolathing equipment underneath.
"Right..." She walked over to the Flash, parked next to the Jeffy. From it, she took a large emergency 'lathe unit, and activated it, then started cutting the nanolathe free. "In the absence of a Commander, we're just going to have to build this base ourselves, aren't we?"

As the sun went down, they had the rudiments of a Construction Vehicle. David had discovered the chassis of a Samson in a small crater. Without the missile pod, it made a good truck. They mounted the nanolathe on the back, downloading the nanolathe programs that Sarah had stored. Within a few hours, they had managed to build their first structure - a solar collector. Standing proud above the debris, the solar panel collected the last rays of sunlight as the nanolathe pumped materials into more facilities, setting up a small base. Xavier was chosen to be the pilot of the new 'construction truck' as he didn't have anything of his own apart from an A.K. suit.

The next day, at sunrise, more survivors arrived. Three vehicles and a lone KBot wandered into the base at the same time, having traveled together. The vehicles coasted to a stop near the rebuilt base, and the KBot followed soon after. The KBot was an Eraser, and the vehicles were a Seer, another Flash and finally another Jeffy. Three hatches slammed open and drivers jumped out, then the KBot - powered down because of lack of energy - pilot cracked his seal and stiffly climbed out. They looked for the people, gazing in wonder at the destruction around them. Finally, they were found by David, out riding in the Jeffy.
"Hi! Welcome to our base," said David. "What kept you?"
"Hi there," said the KBot pilot. "I'm Milo Kerrian, and these are Saul Fintry, Fraser McKinven and Fiona MacShaw. We're Alpha-Gold."
The tall, dreadlocked man introduced as Saul waved and smiled, displaying dazzlingly white teeth. "Hi," he said, in a broad Glasgow accent. Even cloning sometimes failed to eliminate accents. Fraser said hello as well, then Fiona came over to David.
"What happened here?"
"Well, I think the base was nuked. Twelve fusion reactors all together... you can picture. The Commander's gone, too."
"And you've set up a new one?"
"Yep. We've got four people so far, one of them an A.K. so don't be surprised when you see him. He's the guy in the CT."
MacShaw looked puzzled. "CT?"
"Oh, sorry. Construction Truck. In other words, a missile-less Samson with an advanced nanolathe."
"Cool... well, what are we waiting for? Let's meet everyone!"

Part 6
 Note: Sorry, but I forgot to tell you Murphy's first name! It's Samantha Murphy. OK? She just likes to be called Murphy, kinda like a nickname.
----------------------------------------------------------
All eight of the survivors sat around a blazing campfire, ignited with the help of a laser pistol. In the driving rain, each person was soaked through, apart from Xavier, but no-one seemed to mind. When a few more solar collectors had been erected, Kerrian had activated his radar jammer, so there was little chance of CORE finding them. Anyway, why would CORE come back to a nuked base which they had subsequently attacked and almost wiped out?
Sarah had used the 'lathe truck to build a larger version of the shelter that she and David had used, and after a while, everyone found a spot to sleep. Blankets were dished out and very soon everything was quiet save for quiet breathing.

In the morning, David woke and stretched. He sat up, sore eyed, and peered around the dark shelter. He walked over to the door and opened it, blinking in the flood of brilliant sunlight that poured in. Outside, the plants were dripping, crystal-like droplets of water collecting on their leaves. The ground was gently steaming with the evaporating water, and the warm sun beat down through a cloudless sky. The tall radar jammer suit stood just outside the shelter, humming gently as the pylons rotated. Beyond it, the vehicles were parked, glistening in the sunlight.
Inside the shelter, David could hear Sarah getting up, disturbing the tranquility. She came and stood beside him in the doorway, pulling the blanket round herself. Although the sun was hot, there was a slight wind, enough to chill. But soon the base was bustling with the work of eight people.
Xavier was sent out in the Construction Truck to find more metal, while the rest scavenged for anything they could find. Despite the size of the zone blasted by the nuke, there was still a sizable portion that was almost whole, but simply deserted. The first time they came to a corpse, skin blackened and hardened from the heat, No-one could speak. Everyone turned away, and Murphy began to retch.
After she recovered, she said, "I may be a veteran, but I've never seen anyone dead before. People just... disappear, and we feel the loss, but I've never seen anything like this before. Killing the CORE doesn't feel the same - you know they can live again in another place, so you don't feel anything."
After that, they avoided the corpses.

"Hey, over here!" yelled Saul. "Guess what I got!"
David and Milo, who were near him, picked their way over the rubble to a large rock which Saul was standing behind.
"What's up?" said Milo.
David walked round the rock, and gasped. A nearly whole Construction Kbot! It was in quite bad repair, but this was the only one they could find. All the paint had been completely burnt off, and there was a grotesque reminder of the person who had once been in the KBot. A slightly lighter area on the top, near to the hatch, marked the place where a person had been trying to escape, stopping the heat wave for a fraction of a second before they were incinerated. Saul was prising open the access hatch to get inside. As the hatch creaked open, David took a look inside. The cockpit was a mess - most of it had been made of plastic, and was melted beyond repair. But the most important thing was intact. As David and Saul climbed down, Murphy screeched to a stop in her Flash, having flattened a path through the debris. They loaded the KBot onto the top of the Flash, fastening it down, then Murphy drove back to base, Saul, David and Milo hanging on for dear life.

Minutes later, the blueprints were downloaded to the Construction Truck, and Xavier started to build a Vehicle factory, so they could start to rebuild the base. Xavier left the nanolathe running, and leapt out of the cabin, thumping heavily to the ground. He ran over to the seven people gathered around the shelter, and sat with them.
Murphy started. "We've got to do something about this. How can we just let the CORE away with what they did?"
The others nodded. This was not the first time they had thought of revenge, but no-one had seriously considered it.
David spoke. "What are we meant to do, then? I mean, what've we got? Two Jeffies, one with a heavy laser that can hardly fire, two Flashes, a radar jammer, a mobile radar and an A.K. in an adapted truck. Great."
Milo frowned. "Don't be so defeatist, David. You'd be surprised what a few people can do. Also, I'm not just a radar jammer guy - I actually trained in guerilla warfare when I joined. I only got this suit because my support suit was damaged. The pilot had evacuated, but the suit was fine."
"Same here," said Fraser. "I'm no guerilla, though. I usually drive a minelayer, but you can probably guess what happened to it."
"Anyone else going to admit to some hidden talent?" said David.
"Hey, I'm pretty handy with a wrench. That any good?" asked Saul, pointing to the portable precision 'lathe he had propped up against the shelter.
"Great. Well, we've got a right little force here. Well, what we need to do is get this base up then go on the attack." He smacked his palm with his fist. "We're not going to let the CORE away with this."
"What are we going to call ourselves?" said Fraser. "We need a name."
The best suggestion came from Xavier. The team were to become known as "Tiger Company".
Everyone stood up and walked away, a flame now burning in their heart. Despite the unimpressive speech, David had kindled a passion within them, a passion which was not going to let a few hundred tons of armour get between it and victory.

Fiona pored over the nanolathe blueprints, jacked into the Construction Truck's console. Xavier had wandered off to get in some target practice, so she could do what she did best. Fiona was a brilliant mind, but her Commander had never noticed this. She had been stuck in a succession of light armoured vehicles, not deemed a good enough fighter to do anything much.
But this was her forte: designing the things that would bring the team success in battle. She thought for a second, then spun the hologram of the Flash with virtual 'fingers', letting the view rest on the turret. Removing the puny EMG turret, she replaced it with two heavy Gauss cannons. Now the Flash was too slow; she added larger motors and increased the armour, finally redesigning the shell to fit the components. She named the tank 'Slammer'.
Now she closed that blueprint, the holo vanishing into the black, featureless background, and called up another: a long-forgotten blueprint for a bio-support frame, the predecessor to the KBot. This would do for Milo - it  was light enough for him to use his learnt tactics, and made of a carbon-plastic material which had the same radar signature as common vegetation. She fitted a slim backpack with a reactor block, and added two holsters with combined-operation EMP cannons. She spent a few minutes designing spikes for scaling cliffs, and grappling hooks, before fitting them into the suit. Finally, she saved the blueprint, naming it the 'Golem'.
The next blueprint was a completely new one, that of a light scout hovercraft to be built by its own factory. She deleted the factory and assigned the hovercraft to the vehicle plant, the only plant that would be built. She copied the file, to make two separate variants, then started work, rolling up mental sleeves, and started to strip the vehicle down. Soon, all that was left was the wireframe of the propulsion system. She added a layer of armour over this, then built a cockpit on top, finally adding a low-power, long ranged nanolathe. As an afterthought, she mounted a light shockwave rocket launcher behind the cockpit, designed for minesweeping and anti-aircraft. It would knock out an aircraft's engines or the trigger devices of a mine, letting them be captured by the nanolathe. This would be Fraser's vehicle, the 'Planter'.
The last vehicle was also based on the hover scout, like the Planter, but this time it was completely different. This one was for David and Saul, a heavy hit-'n'-run unit, equipped with twin turbojets from a heavy bomber, and two steering rockets at the front. The weapons list she called up looked formidable - Fiona chose three of the most versatile weapons on the list, giving the new hovercraft an anti-air missile pack, two heavy Gauss cannon and two linked-fire heavy lasers. The cannons were too heavy to put on a turret without seriously downgrading the turn speed, so she slung them at the sides of the hovercraft. Finally she looked at the statistics to find out how much armour she could put on the vehicle. The answer was almost zero. Fiona sighed, and saved the unit, naming it the 'Cheetah'. The pilots would just have to be quick...

Part 7

Fiona jacked out of the truck's interface and shook her head to clear her blurred vision, then opened the door and jumped to the ground. She looked up at the large nanolathe mounted on the Construction Truck, still pumping out green nanobots which were washing over the almost-completed Vehicle Plant. Fiona had modified the blueprint to make it smaller and partly underground. Only the exit ramp protruded, and the rest was disguised under heaps of debris. This was going to be the team's main strategy - secrecy would be vital. A little way away, Sarah and Saul had taken their handheld nanolathes, Sarah building concealed lasers while Saul built a radar network.
Saul had taken a novel approach to the radar network. His nanolathe was too small to build things quickly, so Fiona had come up with an unusual type of unit - a dispersed radar scanner. Thin strands of plastic with passive radar sensors which could be laid out all over the ground, combined with active radar transmitters spaced evenly along the wires. The passive sensors received the signals bounced back from solid objects by the active transmitters, and could receive enemy radar, pinpointing their location through triangulation. Saul had taken the stealth radar and run with it - at the moment he was using a hastily built climbing set to scale one of the towering cliffs surrounding the base, his arm mounted 'lathe spraying the strands onto the cliff where the plastic solidified, melting into the rock. So far, half of the base had been covered by the short ranged radar, and Saul was working at an incredible pace.

As Fiona watched, the last few nanobots fused themselves into the structure of the vehicle plant, and a low whine filled the air as its energy and metal storage came online. The construction truck moved away and started to build an underground geothermal plant near to a plume of yellow, sulphurous smoke emanating from a hole near to the base of a cliff.
The armoured door covering the exit from the factory closed and the factory came online, beginning to produce its very first vehicle, a Cheetah. Unfortunately, since the clone records had been stored on a central computer which had been built near to one of the now non-existent fusion reactors, there was no way of cloning new pilots. Even if the DNA had been available, the databases that dealt with conditioning of the clone's mind were lost. So only the people already at the base could be used. Soon, they would find more.

Daniel trudged over the wet, muddy hills that seemed to be the largest part of the landscape on this godforsaken planet. Why in Prime's name had he ever been assigned here? He supposed it was not as if he had much choice, being a CORE 'citizen'. He gave a contemptuous snort at the word, or would have done if he had been human. Instead, he was immortalized inside the frame of a Freaker, a despicable little thing regarded as the lowest form of 'proper' life apart from the A.K.
He looked down at his muddy, creaking body, with its woefully inadequate laser pistol holstered by his side. Suddenly, Daniel whipped it out of the holster and aimed it in a classic gunfighter pose, blasting a rock to pieces. The effect was somewhat spoiled by the sound when he twirled it and put it back into the holster, a muddy squelch. Daniel rolled his 'eyes', removed the pistol and peered into the depths of the long automatic holster. He clicked the hatch off and found the culprit: about three pints of greenish mud that had gathered there over his many scrambles, slips and falls as he tried to find his way to a base. Setting the pistol to a low setting, he blasted the mud into dust, which crumbled away.
This was depressing. Sitting down wetly on the top of a hill, he removed the cumbersome jetpack which allowed him to sprint along with great leaps. However, it had been malfunctioning recently, and the best he had managed was a weary shuffle. He guessed the omnipresent mud had got into it. With a sigh, he got up and threw the useless pack away from him, using all the strength in his metallic arms. It flew for a little way then landed in a puddle, sinking to the bottom. For a little while, Daniel tried to use his leaping action to go a bit faster, but he fell flat on his face too many times, so he went back to the trudge.

It was raining again, and it was now dark, with clouds blocking out all light. Well, at least it cleaned him up a bit, thought Daniel moodily. With his suit's headlights on, he could see... what, about 20 feet in front of him? There, the view stopped thanks to the never-ending curtain of rain, not just falling but being dropped with a vengeance by some unseen god. He felt like he was being hit from above by a water cannon, and the deep footprints that he left were rapidly turning into small lakes.
Daniel took out his pistol and tried to clean it in the rain, still walking. Suddenly, from no-where, six shafts of light speared through the darkness, illuminating the miserable KBot. Then there was a shout and he was suddenly flying backwards at what felt like an enormous pace. He was sliding over something metal, rain-slicked and shiny, then he hit what felt like a metal bar and grabbed it with one hand, while with the other he searched for his pistol, but he had dropped it as he was hit. Daniel looked down with horror as he realised just what he had grabbed onto. He gazed at the glowing coils surrounding the armoured bulk of a heavy laser turret...

Saul shouted as his headlights illuminated a shadow a little way ahead of him, then he felt a 'thunk' as something slammed at speed into his turret. The Cheetah shook for a few seconds, then steadied - he saw something flying into the distance behind him and guessed whatever it was had bounced off. He drove on with his test run, out to the target range that he had set up for himself, a little way away from the base. In the driving rain it would not be much use, but since this was the main weather of Pearl, he might as well get used to it.
As Saul's Cheetah neared a section of cliff, three Can-sized targets sprung up out of a small box, projected by a holo-generator. He was going to test out the speed hit-'n'-run tactic that David had proposed a few days earlier.
One of the Cans activated headlights and swivelled its turret towards the hovercraft. Inside, a targeting reticule blinked onto Saul's vision as the targeting computer activated. The bucket seat dropped into combat configuration, light flak shields swinging into place to protect the pilot, and cushions inflating to protect Saul against the high-G turns and maneuvers that would be needed to survive the 'attack'.

Clinging on in terror, Daniel watched as the covers on the triple barrels of the laser turret irised open and the coils began to pulsate with barely suppressed energy. Below him, he heard a whine as two outrigger-like pods on the sides of the vehicle hinged open and two long barrels emerged, covered in rings of a dark material. Daniel recognized the Gauss cannons immediately, but before he had a chance to look, he was flung off the turret by a hatch opening beneath him.
Six red-tipped missiles in a rack emerged, and rotated out onto the top of the turret. As Daniel fell, he twisted round and managed to hook one leg and one arm onto the pod that the Gauss cannon had been in. He realised that the vehicle was going into combat configuration, then realised with a lot more fear that the vehicle was going at about 150 mph and he was going to hit the rocky ground if he didn't hang onto something other than the retracting pod.
Doubtfully looking at the long Gauss cannon three feet away, David extended an arm and tried to grab hold of a coil. His foot slipped and he started to trail along the ground, rocks striking sparks from his long metal legs. Soon, the pod was almost retracted and Daniel desperately swung his other leg up, managing to hook it over the Gauss cannon's support pylon. He dragged himself up onto the deadly-looking gun, and sat there, paralyzed with terror.

Saul swore as the Cheetah swung violently round. Something must have hit the Gauss cannon as it extended. He activated a side camera, and swivelled it round to look at his cannon. An alarm sounded as one of the 'lasers' hit his hovercraft and the holo-generator registered the hit. He mentally punched the cutoff for the projector and the three Cans shrunk and turned into intense white dots before disappearing. Sounding like a machine-gun, Saul spat out a string of oaths in several different languages as he realised just what was causing his craft's problems. There was a friggin' *Freaker* sitting on the left cannon, for God's sake!
He aimed the triple lasers at the thing, then realised that it was sitting perfectly still. He zoomed the turret camera in, and saw the damage - about a quarter of one foot gone, no back-pack, no pistol. Gently, careful not to throw the Freaker off, he fired the retro-jets and slowed the Cheetah to a manageable speed before engaging autopilot and jacking out of the interface.
Saul shook his head to clear his vision and saw the seat dropping back into normal driving position, which allowed pilots to drive without jacking in. As the flak shields retracted, Saul levered himself out of the padded chair and walked to the back of the cramped cockpit, to the access door. He unlocked it and flipped the hood of his bio-suit up, before swinging out of the small door. From here he could just about see the Freaker sitting astride the gun. Thankfully it was light enough not to have caused any damage. As Saul climbed out, the autopilot jinked the hover to avoid a boulder, and he swore again, as he lost his grip.
Suddenly he was looking up at the sky, but he could feel the cold wet metal of the hover against his back. He looked at his foot and saw that he had managed to catch onto the lip at the top of the catwalk between the engines. He jacked into the biosuit's control system to access its full muscles - usually it operated as a simple exoskeleton - and shot a mini grapnel into the door, catching the edge and pulling himself back up.
"Godd@mned Freaker," he said as he leapt onto the Gauss cannon, using the memcomposite muscles of the bio-suit in addition to his own. As he jacked out, he walked down the wide gun, avoiding the rings which generated the Gauss field and supporting himself on the side of the hover. Finally he stood just behind the scared Freaker. He sat sideways between two rings and tapped the Freaker on one spiked shoulder.

Daniel nearly lost his grip as he felt a touch on his shoulder which woke him up from his trance. He turned round to see an unfamiliar being, holding a tiny laser pistol to his face. The being lowered its hood to reveal a frowning face surrounded by sodden dreadlocks.
Daniel would have laughed at the pistol if he could have, but he was too terrified to do so. He looked down at his battered foot, which had been crushed by a particularly large rock. Finally he looked back up.
"Do you want to surrender?" questioned the large person.
"Do I have a choice?"
 
 Part 8

CORE Commander CX-23 remembered the feeling he had felt when finally he had slaughtered his ancient enemy, Commander Horeus Martin. Martin had been fighting him for almost one thousand years, in various forms. They had in fact been best friends, back on Earth when Patterning had first been initiated, when CX-23 had not been called that. His name had been David Kalomar, before the CORE had come. He sat back in his chair to remember.
Martin had been his mentor when he had joined Nuclear War Command in what had once been known as America. The huge underground building had responsibility for any nuclear exchange between the Pacific Federation and anywhere in the world. Back then, the Pacific Federation was one of the most dangerous threats to world peace, an artificial country made up of all the malcontents and breakaways from the Planetary Government scheme, which united the top leaders from the most influential countries in the world. Almost every country had joined, except for a select few, such as Iraq. Iraq's leader, Qali Hussein, a direct descendant of the infamous Saddam, had politely declined to join the group, but had decided to make peace with the world.
But there were people who didn't subscribe to the friendly, peaceful Earth, people who were all too prepared to make war.
Kalomar had been promoted to the elite group of military minds and strategic geniuses that made up War Command. Martin had been promoted a few years ahead of him, and he was well known. Already a top general, he was the master of tactics. Every battle he ran in the simulator, his army came out tops. He was respected in the War Command, but he kept himself to himself in those days.
Kalomar and Martin had met in David's second year there, and they had immediately made friends. They both shared an interest in fishing, a rare sport in a world spoiled by previous generations. As they said, Commander Kalomar thought, the rest was history.
But there was more...
When the government had finally decided to implement the Patterning scheme that had generated so much controversy over the years. Compulsory Patterning was to be introduced to Earth. Those who didn't want it, went. Those who wanted a shot at immortality stayed. Martin had gone, but Kalomar, by then old and ill, had jumped at the chance for new life... little did he know what he would get...
Kalomar smiled sadly and looked down at what he was now. He had built himself a 'civilian' body, like so many other Commanders over the years, but it could never make up for the lack of things the humans took for granted... food, drink, love... He envied his once-nemesis Martin, now only existing as a scrap of DNA and a back-up brain recording in Arm HQ on Empyrrean. How he wished he could be human again...
Though he was in fact a lot more human than the ARM thought. It was as if they were robots or something, he thought. Robots that could not make choices, that were feelingless. He was not feelingless, any more than the Arm were inhuman. Kalomar, tired of remembering, got up from his chair, the floor creaking as he stood up to his full eight feet. He sat down again. What could he do? He was built for war, he existed only to serve, he must not do anything that might let the Arm win, he must remain loyal to the CORE. He existed only to serve... and had done so for two thousand years...

Hours later, Kalomar had not stirred from his seat. He had been thinking, dangerous thoughts that should not have been thought. But he thought them anyway... A little side voice in his head said to him, so this is what depression is, is it? but he brushed it aside and continued thinking...
...about how people should have freedom...
...about how the war was useless...
...about what he could do...
...about what he *would* do...
Commander Kalomar stood up and walked out. Now he knew what he should do...

"Let's see now... you're sitting on a side cannon of a hovercraft going at, oh, I'd say maybe 150 mph, you've got three heavy lasers and a laser pistol pointed at you, and I've got a pattern scrambler in this suit...
"Let's say you don't have too much of a choice."
Daniel looked up and, yes, the triple barrels of the laser were pointed at him. He gulped. "Uh... surrender?"
The man relaxed. "That's better. Now can you explain what the HELL you are doing sitting on my left hand cannon without your jetpack?"
"Well..." David sighed. "It's a long story..."

As the hovercraft sped back to the base, Daniel sat down on a handy ledge while Saul parked himself in the bucket seat.
"So you got lost? Great. Now we've got *two* light CORE Kbots to worry about." Saul sighed for the fourth or fifth time. "But how did you end up here? I suppose that was you that smashed into my hover a while back."
"Yep, that was me," said Daniel. "Did I cause any damage?"
"No, luckily for you. If you had, you wouldn't be here now."
Daniel gulped. "What would you have done?"
"Well, probably dropped you off somewhere..."
"Phew."
"...like into a volcano, or maybe into the ocean. Somewhere where you could think about what you did... although if it was the volcano, the thoughts would be quite brief." Saul grinned.
"Um. So where are we going?"
"Well, since you've surrendered, I may as well tell you. But first I've got to do something." He whipped out a lethal looking snubnosed weapon from a holster and aimed it at Daniel's head.
Daniel would have swallowed his tongue if he had had one. "Uh... could you *not* point that at me, please?"
"Wait a moment... there. You're now permanently disconnected from Central Consciousness. I don't know how it works - something to do with short-ranged tachyon phase shifts or something. Anyway, you're now free to think."
"OK... now where are we going again?"

Part 9

Commander CX-23 transferred into the magnificent bulk of his Command Suit. He flexed his muscles, glad to be back... yet strangely sad that what he was about to do would be totally against the principles of the people who made it. CX-23 - better known as David Kalomar - looked out of the massive empty hanger, dim light streaming in through small high windows, at the bustling base outside. He checked his systems, making sure that the mini-galactic gate that teleported nanobots and energy into his system was shut off and that his energy supplies were high.
The massive backpack, almost twenty feet high and as wide and thick as the Commander's own battlesuit, contained enough energy for thirty shots of the ultimate weapon: the D-Gun. Warming it up, Commander Kalomar stepped into the sunlight, polarised shades dropping over his eyes to compensate for the light. The D-Gun's yawning mouth cast a baleful orange light across the dimly-lit ground as Kalomar strode towards the vehicle hangers. Again, he checked the D-Gun's power supply, aimed towards the hangers...and fired.

JD-229938, a Reaper captain, gunned the engines to take 'Hilda', his tank, out for her daily run. Tank engines and treads tended to seize up in this godforsaken climate when left lying, and he loved to drive anyway. JD-229934, once called James Day, had been an inhabitant of Core Prime, one of the original citizens.
He had been killed when an Arm terrorist drove a tank into a busy street and let loose a barrage of fire, killing hundreds of citizens. Now he hated the Arm for what they had done, and his pattern, in all 253 of its incarnations, had racked up almost a thousand kills. James was the leader of Epsilon-5 squad, better known as 'Grim' because of the fact that the whole squad was composed of Reapers.
Now as he skilfully piloted Hilda around the other tanks, he saw a shadow falling across one of the high windows. He gulped - had the Commander come to make an inspection? Obviously the other tanks drivers thought the same, for those that weren't going out had already started to move about, trying to line themselves up with the parking spots. James continued to drive Hilda, but as he came to the open hanger door, a massive three-toed foot thudded down, almost snapping his twin cannons.

Commander Kalomar stopped momentarily as a Reaper tried to get out of the door before planting his foot squarely in front of the entrance. He raised his D-Gun arm and paused for a minute. Well, it will be quick, he thought. They won't feel any pain...
"Sorry, but this is for your own good," he said aloud, his voice reverberating around the tank complex. The orange glow intensified and his arm suddenly jerked back as a stream of light spiralled out of the gun with an incredible sound. No matter how many times he had used it, Kalomar never quite got used to the D-Gun's awesome destructive potential. The orange bolt made a screaming sound as it ripped the atoms of the air apart in front of it, leaving only hydrogen, deuterium and free energy.
As the bolt ploughed into the hanger, Kalomar fired again, and again, the streams of energy ripping through the thick walls like a plasma stream through ice. He could see through the ragged, gaping holes left by the bolt, and the long trenches it left as it ploughed through the ground, creating ten-metre-wide tunnels through the metal floor. Finally, he turned the D-Gun to a lower setting and began to spray the hanger with shafts of orange light, the noise almost deafening him before his sensors compensated.
Then it was done - the hanger was no more, and the ground had been ripped up and torn. It was obvious he didn't want anyone intercepting him.
Right, he thought. One down, thirty-nine to go...

As James hastily reversed out of the entrance-way, another foot thudded down squarely, blocking his escape. It left a five-foot-deep crater in the ground. Suddenly, outside, he could hear the Commander's distinctive voice boom out.
"Sorry, but this is for your own good..."
Somehow, James didn't think this boded well for him. "Computer, download pattern to Core Consciousness - NOW!"
"Downloading...5...4...3...2..."
James just managed to hear the word "Completed" before the bright energy bolt, orange tipped with yellow, hit Hilda and he screamed for a brief microsecond before being cut off.

Finally, it was done. With methodical ruthlessness, David Kalomar had completely cleared the base of anything that could have intercepted him. Defenses were taken offline with his own personal code. He thanked God he was a Commander - the defenses would not be usable for around forty-eight hours, thanks to a nano-virus inserted into general systems. Kalomar walked over to the transport hanger and ripped off the steel door, memcomposite tendons hardly flexing. He left fingermarks in it as he tossed it over his shoulder, bouncing it off a low hill. There was no sound as he walked into the hanger, deployed his nanolathe and started to capture a transport...

Private Murray Hill stomped angrily out of the flight sergeant's office and took the lift up to the hanger level. He was tired of being chewed out for disobeying orders. The truth was, he thought, he just didn't like the CORE. After all, what were they but a bunch of robots? It seemed as if everyone was striving to be less emotional, less human...what a joke, he thought bitterly. We are human, after all. It's not like we don't feel anything... well, not at the moment anyway. If CORE Consciousness gets its way, anything could happen. As he stepped out of the lift, he continued his mental diatribe. I mean, the Commander's the worst, he thought. Forever loyal, an example to his troops, blah blah blah. Murray opened the door and stood stock still.
"Um...who's that there?" he asked? As he spoke, he though, stupid question. After all, who else is thirty-five feet tall and carries a nanolathe?
"Commander CX-23? What're you doing here?"
The shadowy figure turned its head to face him. "Oh..."
For a moment, the Commander seemed to be at a loss. Then, still 'lathing, he activated his laser and fired straight at Murray's head.

Kalomar turned as he heard the door begin to open, and decided to wait until he saw who it was. A pilot in a civilian body entered, and stopped.
"Um...who's that there?"
Who else could it be? Hmm...hard choice.
"Commander CX-23? What're you doing here?"
God! How was he going to explain himself capturing one of his own transports?
"Oh..." As he spoke, he had an idea...he needed someone to help him, after all. He aimed his laser at the communications equipment in the pilot's 'head' and fired a short low-power burst, enough to disable the tachyon-pulse emitter, a fragile piece of equipment.
"I'm about to kill you if you do anything, that's what I'm doing here." he said, still aiming the laser. Finally, the capture was finished. The Valkyrie hummed to life. "How'd you like to be my personal pilot? Oh, and what's your name?"
"Uhh....Murray Hill, sir... why do you need a pilot?"
Kalomar silently clapped him on the back - the man hadn't even commented on the laser. "Well, I'll have to tell you. I suppose you're one of those who is undyingly loyal to the CORE?" he said, with an audible sneer.
"No, sir. I mean..."
"You'll do. I need a pilot to get me the hell out of here. Now get in, please."
As he watched, Hill's scorched body went limp and fell to the floor. That won't do, he thought, picking up the body. Kalomar looked around for a hiding place, then realised what was literally up his sleeve. He extended the nanolathe and reclaimed the body in a matter of seconds.

The Valkyrie lit up its engines and rose wobblingly off the hanger floor, scorching the metal. Hill extended the transport's four arms, the jet engines mounted on them flaring. The Commander stood still as four clamps engaged with mountings on his battlesuit, and the arms creaked as Murray increased the power, slowly lifting the transport off the hanger floor. He was about to push the button to open the hanger door when he noticed that it wasn't even there any more. He piloted the Valkyrie out, avoiding the ragged edges of the door as he gained altitude and sped away from the base.

Part 10

As Kalomar woke up, blinking as the rain spattered off his head, the transport vectored its engines to the vertical and started to descend. In front of the Commander was a giant flat plateau surrounded by cliffs. Excellent locatiion for a base, he thought.
"Private Murray, could you set down here please?"
"Already doing so, sir. I thought you'd like it."
"Thank you Private."
As the transport reached the ground, massive engines cracking and drying the muddy earth, Kalomar surveyed the terrain. He ignored the thunks as the transport disengaged its clamps and he sank a few inches into the soft ground. Commander Kalomar zoomed into a large lava spire in the middle of the plain. It was flat-topped and looked the ideal location for an anti-air fortification. The plateau looked over flat plains on all sides, down steep cliffs. There was only one access route, a narrow winding riverbed the spiralled down the cliff at a steep angle.
Kalomar walked over to the grey granite cliff, noting the mud that slipped off the edge as he approached. He activated his laser and started to methodically strip away the soil all around the edge of the plateau.

The next day as the sun came up, Murray woke up with a yawn and transferred into the Valkyrie's avatar body. He stretched, getting used to his new home, before walking over to the Commander, still lasering away. Now he could see the Commander had stripped the earth down to the bedrock around the edge, revealing black granite, sparkling in the light drizzle. As he stepped closer, the Commander noticed him and looked up.
"Good morning, Murray. What do you think? This will be the defensive perimeter here. This is going to be virtually impenetrable - neither Arm nor CORE will be able to reach me here."
As Murray watched, the Commander finished his lasering and started to walk over to the central spire, almost a mile away. The plateau was roughly circular, formed by an ancient volcano, erupting through a hole in the soft stone that surrounded the plateau. Over time, the stone had eroded away, leaving only the black, hard granite pillar, a testament to mighty forces at work. Soon, there would be other mighty forces at work, but of a completely different kind.

Kalomar lifted the nanolathe and used it to take a soil sample from the ground. He let his computer analyse the results and moved onto a different location. The computer squawked at him, reporting an extremely high concentration of rare minerals in the soil. Kalomar went back to the spire and started to nanolathe a metal extractor, his nanolathes reclaiming a long narrow shaft into the ground before pouring metal into it to form the drill shaft of the extractor. Finally the shaft was capped and he turned the extractor on, the rotor spinning and driving the shaft further and further down into the soil. He opened his resource teleporter, channeling a little enrgy into the portal. Kalomar could feel the flood of metal coming into his system, and he diverted a small amount to his nanogenerator.
Turning round, he activated the nanolathe and a stream of metallic nanobots spewed out, slowly forming a skeletal frame which took the shape of a solar collector. More and more nanobots joined up, minute flashes appearing as the robots fused themselves into the structure. As the nanolathe moved up and down the structure, Kalomar sighed contentedly. He was free at last from the claustrophobic CORE, free to do whatever he wanted. A treacherous part of his mind said, Yes, free to die in thousands of different ways, freedom to oppose two different armies at once, freedom to sink into oblivion without anyone knowing. But I am free, he told the voice. No more orders, no more dead-end posts, no more being used as bait. The voice was silent, but in a corner of his mind, it settled in and became self-doubt.

Finally, the first part of his base was complete. Metal extractors ringed the central spire, where the metal was incredibly rich. Solar collectors surrounded them and sparkled in the weak sun. Atop the spire, a radar dish ceaselessly rotated, gathering information about the empty plains surrounding him. A D-Gunned ramp led from behind a rocky outcrop round the cliffs, ending up at a cluster of light laser towers concealed by boulders. Finally, six factories were operating sporadically, producing construction Kbots, vehicles and aircraft to help defend his stronghold.
Kalomar sat his battlesuit down near the spire and deactivated it, retreating into the electronic domain that was his command network. The network flashed up as a grid of pulsing lines, each one signifying a single link between one unit and another. So far, the net was small, most of the links leading to him, but he could see a twisted, scorched line in the distance, which was what had once been his link to Central Consciousness.
Years ago, he had found out how to disable it without CC noticing, and he had only opened it to give status reports. Now he walked over to it, his virtual avatar body responding to every command. Kalomar hunched down near the link, feet resting on black polished nothingness, reflecting the links which hovered a few feet above it. His hands moved through a complicated sequence of motions, seeming to pass through one another a few times.
Watching from a few yards away, unnoticed by the Commander, Private Murray's avatar gasped as he realised what the Commander was doing. He, too, started motions, and seconds later his avatar flipped into a glowing point of light which flew over to the Commander and attached itself to the avatar's head. He wanted to find out exactly why the Commander wanted a high-priority, super-user class, invisible link into the heart of Central Consciousness.

The Commander watched in satisfaction as the link glowed and straightened out before fading into almost nothingness. The Commander nodded his head and a dark shape folded into the view from no-where, the Commander getting onto its back. The shape glided off, following the line, and the view faded.
In the real world, the shape was a clump of super-light tachyons pulsing across space to Core Prime, coded as a simple high-priority message. They would be able to slip unnoticed into the mainframe brains of CC, Commander Kalomar's mind - and Murray's - accessing any data he wanted.
As the single line shot into the darkness ahead, straight as the edge of an infinite plane, it did not curve or disappear. Magnify it enough and it would be visible to infinity. The dark shape gathered itself up, smokelike, and sprang along the line. Every so often a junction flashed past, the bright glowing lines interrupting the monotony. The dark shape swung past other shapes, from bright, slow human users to flashing data transfers. Now the dark shape stopped at a routing junction where the faded line split up, and slid through a solid wall.
When it got to the other side, Murray froze in shock. The web of interconnections was the actual brain of Central Consciousness! But the Commander did not touch anything yet. He dismounted the dark shadow that was his transport and walked over to a databank that pulsed with activity. As Kalomar passed through a red glassy wall, a voice sounded in Murray's ears.
"Pattern Bank. No access to non-Commanders."
What about him? He suddenly realised that the Commander was invisible to the system - a virus in a massive body, tiny compared with the processes going on around him. As he watched, Kalomar moved his hands again, and sparks of light sped out, creating lines of searing brilliance leading to the Commander. A second later, the lines winked out and the Commander returned to the transport.

Commander Kalomar was content. He had retrieved the Patterns he wanted, and he had got away with it. Kalomar thanked the CORE silently for teaching him, so long ago, how to hack into the Arm's computers and take them over for his own cause. The knowledge had served him well. He swung a leg over the indistinct shape of the virus carrier and sped off into the distance.

"OK guys - remember Saul brought Daniel back? Well, from Daniel we got info about where the next CORE attack's going to be," said David, jacked into the virtual conference system Fiona had rigged up through the Construction Truck. Everyone was there, including Xavier and Daniel, and a holographic map floated in the middle of the 'room'. David continued, getting up and pointing to a spot on the map, his arm passing through a range of mountains. "This pass is very narrow and the sides are steep. Around half-way down it, the Arm established a small metal farm - just extractors covered by heavy lasers and two missile turrets. Daniel says there will be a heavy CORE attack, tommorow - Sumos, Cans, and Morties, mostly. A few Crashers but the need for air cover was not felt as gunships can be knocked out by heavy lasers and there is no room for missiles. Or that's what they think.
"Fraser, you'll take the Planter and lay high explosive charges on the walls of the canyon mouth, then I want a dense minefield - precision mines - about half a mile from the base. I also want a radar net spread over the canyon walls for close-in coordination.
"Milo, you'll be waiting about half-way down the canyon, up a tree. It sounds silly, but your suit blends perfectly in with organic materials. Your backpack's 'lathe will be configured for limpet mines using armour-piercing explosives, and I have assigned you a sniper rifle as well as your regular weapons. Use it with care.
"Saul and I will be waiting in the Cheetahs in caves we blasted from the canyon a few days ago. The caves will be camoflaged and radar-jammed. Murphy and Daniel will be using the Slammers, also hidden in the caves. They will come out a few minutes after us. Xavier, Sarah and Fiona will be standing by in the Ravens, Fiona's new aircraft. I haven't seen it yet, but Sarah tells me it is very good indeed."
Fiona interrupted him. "The Raven is a fast attack gunship, fitting in with our Blitzkrieg strategy. Blitzkrieg means 'Lightning War' and is just what we will use. Anyway, the Raven has a layer of tank armour, and twin rapid-fire light Gauss rifles. It also has facilities for bombing - it can drop three advanced bombs or one high-explosive mine. We have been practising for two days."
"Thank you Fiona," said David. "Well, I think that's all for now." He blinked out with a flash, and the rest followed soon after.

MA-0018273, or Michael Adams, stood in the shadow of one of the massive, slow-moving Sumos and aimed his mortar tube at an imaginary target on the horizon. The Morty suit was not the hardest hitter ever, but the range was impressive. Michael nodded at one of the Sumo's 'passengers', a Freaker sitting on the Sumo's huge foot. As he watched, the Sumo lifted the foot and swung it forward, before setting it down with a thud that jolted the Freaker into the air for a second.
The Freaker spoke. "Hey, Mike, I have a feeling we might have trouble here. Just a feeling, but this canyon doesn't really feel right."
"We'll be OK, Kim. We'll sweep the floor with them," he retorted. Kim Gallacher was one of his best friends, and a fierce fighter. She was from New Terra, from a city called Pricetown, which she frequently talked about. Kim had racked up more than nine kills in battle, running rings around the larger Arm units.
"It's *wipe* the floor with them, Mike," she said. "And I still don't feel good about this."
What's there to worry about? he thought. I mean, where are the Arm going to get soldiers from - we nuked their miserable base, remember? But a little voice inside his said, Well, what about Kim's famous intuition? What about that time you bet her six hours of sim-time that we'd win the battle of the Hellfire Plains? We lost miserably. And what about when she guessed there'd be an attempted air attack on the base - in exactly twenty days, three hours and fifteen minutes? She was right, down to the very minute. How accurate does she get? He told himself she'd have to be wrong *sometime*...but what if this time wasn't it?

Part 11
Author's note: the Raven has changed into the Pterodactyl, thanks to the fact that the Raven is in fact Cameron's invention, an anti-AA plane. D'oh! I thought I'd heard the name somewhere. Well, on with the story!
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Kalomar slid to a stop a long way away from the pattern database where he had started. Murray was suddenly frightened - he could see the flashing red shapes of anti-intruder patrols flickering across the links, but several had passed through them without triggering. Where the hell are we? he thought. The looming bulk above them was featureless and seemed to have no entries or exits...but as he watched, flickers of light shot into the structure, creating ripples on its surface. His senses distorted for a moment as the virus, together with Murray and Commander Kalomar, changed into something more suitable, leaving a small blip of white light where before the smoky black shape had hovered.   The blip sped into the sphere and Murray's vision filled with gray as the wall dissolved in front of him. He could hear a curiously eerie litany going through his mind...
"Holt, William, WH-2888377, pilot, Vamp, stationed Core Prime sector 002893787829."
"Danby, Foran, FD-9928889388, KBot, A.K, deceased."
"Samuel, James, JS-00000001, Commander, Commander frame, deceased."
"Hill, Murray, MH-7266735726, pilot, Avenger, stationed Pearl sector 0000027, currently AWOL."
Murray shivered as he heard his own name. Suddenly the blip stopped and Murray heard the Commander's name.
"Kalomar, David, DK-001118836, Commander, Commander frame, stationed Pearl sector 0000027, currently AWOL."
The blip of light that was the Commander shifted and suddenly blurred. There was a screeching for a second, then the record was re-read.
"Kalomar, David, DK-001118836, Commander, Commander frame, deceased."
Then the blip shivered and was gone.

Now they were nearing the mouth of the canyon. Michael shifted uneasily, taking his turn at sitting on a Sumo's foot. For the fiftieth time, he ran a diagnostic on his mortar tube, and practised aiming. Beside him, Kim was absorbed in a group simulation run by the Sumo's mainframe. The Sumo, Foran Danby or FD-9998829980, was a keen racer in the ancient sport of bike racing, and enjoyed riding the lumbering, hydrocarbon-guzzling machines of the twentieth century. He had invited both Kim and Michael into his simulation, but Michael had declined. Now he was beginning to wish he had joined - he was nervous. Kim's intuition was getting to him bigtime, and he felt as if he was itchy under his suit's skin.
The Sumos slowly lumbered through the entrance to the canyon in single file, the towering shadows obscuring the sun. A bird of some sort flew across Michael's vision, and he jumped. God, this was no use. He was too nervous to do anything. The Sumo he was sitting on stopped to let another past, and Michael slipped off the foot and started to walk. Suddenly, ahead of him, a huge explosion sounded, the shockwave even managing to move the behemoth he was standing beside. Kim jerked into animation and pushed herself off the Sumo's leg. As Michael watched, horrorstruck, thousands of tons of rock started to move...

MS-2991729874, or Mark "Mole" Staunton, turned his upper body to look at the commotion behind him and was shocked to see what was happening. He swore violently to himself and ran towards the canyon wall. Two simultaneous rockslides on opposite sides of a canyon, just when CORE forces were passing through, was far far too much of a coincidence to be simply chance. He stumbled into a shallow cave, covered with vines, and hunched down, his rocket pods fully retracted. The Storm KBot he was in provided some armour but not enough to deal with the attack that was abviously about to start. Behind him, a draught blew through and he huddled down even further, even though he wasn't cold - Storms were designed to operate in extreme sub-zero conditions...wait a minute. He was *facing* the entrance. The draught had come from *behind*...
He turned and looked behind him, just as six headlights lit up from the darkness and illuminated him brightly. By the time he looked again, a rather unusual hovercraft was pointing its turret at him. He didn't care what was on the turret - it looked lethal enough to assure instant death if he tried to move.
"Umm...I surrender?"
A voice boomed from the speaker of the hovercraft. "Get out of the d@mn way! I'm trying to run an attack here! Jump up here. I could use some fire support."
A spotlight turned to indicate a small platform on the back of the hovercraft. Still shivering, Mark climbed on and locked himself down. He had the feeling it would be a bumpy ride.
As he strapped on, the hovercraft powered up its thrusters, and he saw the tongues of flames licking out of the massive turbofans, and felt the heat on his body. He was in fact sitting right between the exhausts. As he stared, he heard a whine. Looking round, the hovercraft seemed to have *grown*, strange protusions and lumps around it. Before he could think, six rapid blasts from the topmounted lasers cleared the vines from the cave and the hovercraft roared to life.

Inside the second Cheetah, David jacked in and switched on the lights as the signal from Fraser came through his helmet speakers. As his vision cleared, he could see the silhouette of a Storm in front of him. It looked as if it was cowering. His impression was reinforced a moment later when the Storm activated its speakers and stuttered, "Umm...I surrender?"
David chuckled. The Storm could easily have wiped him out with a few rockets - the Cheetah's armour was negligable to say the least. "Get out of the d@mn way!" he said, jokingly. "I'm trying to run an attack here!" Then he thought for a second. Any extra guns were always welcome and the Storm didn't seem to be the kind of person to turn traitor. He reactivated the speaker. "Jump up here. I could use some fire support."
David felt the hovercraft dip slightly as the Storm climbed on, and he extended the locking clamps for it. He sent a thought to the hovercraft's systems to switch to combat mode, and as he dropped into the pilot's armoured pit he could hear the whine of the guns unfolding. When the hover was in full attack configuration, he fired a low-powered blast from the lasers to clear the vines and gunned the jets.

On top of the canyon's side, Fraser shifted his sand-coloured goggles and scratched his nose. His job was almost over - he had planted the charges, detonated them and he was now entitled to watch the fun. He lay down, head just sticking over the clifftop, his sandy suit perfectly blending in with the canyon side.
Beside him, the Planter was parked, powered down but with the minelayer's side door open. It was almost invisible thanks to camoflage sheets colored in the omnipresent sandy brown, and the weak radar spoofing helped, too. As he glanced over, another brown cylinder rolled gently out of the hatch and Fraser added it to the pile beside him.
He glanced below and spotted the perfect target - a Sumo. There was still a few seconds until David went past from his attack run further down the canyon, the tanks would be nowhere near, and the 'Dactyls were currently on the other side of the canyon, waiting for any calls for help.
Fraser lugged one of the cylinders over to the canyon's edge at a place where the rocky wall overhung the middle of the canyon. He had tested this with blanks - oil drums, in fact - and it worked perfectly. He lay the cylinder on its side and looked straight down. The Sumo was advancing slowly and was now right underneath. Fraser pushed the cylinder off the cliff and took out a small handset.

Francis May, pilot of Sumo 16, shuffled ponderously forward, eager for combat. She was virtually invunerable in her combat frame, and she could dish out as good as she got, thanks to heavy lasers. Suddenly, as she gazed out of heavily-zoomed cameras at the distant dust-cloud, an object flashed past her vision. She flicked out of zoom and looked down. An anonymous brown cylinder lay a metre in front of her. What the hell? she thought, then realised, just as a small light started blinking on the cylinder...

Fraser pulled the plastic guard from the trigger and pushed the large red button. He braced himself against a large rock - it would never do to fall over the cliff, and the Planter was already locked down by drill-braces, which drilled into the ground before clamping into the holes.
3...
2...
1...
Fraser saw a bright flash, then felt the explosion, just before it registered through his muffled ears. He looked in front of him to see three CORE units flying into the air. An A.K. smashed into the opposite cliff, parts flying as sparks ran over the generator backpack. Suddenly there was a small crump as the reactor imploded and the A.K. was gone, replaced by a pathetic crater.
Further down, a Can had been toppled by the explosion, landing on a Pyro which ruptured its plasma tanks. All the units for metres round had been vaporised by the plasma expanding, enough for two minutes of solid fire from the flamethrower.
Right below him, the Sumo was in trouble. Its laser control AI had overloaded and was busily blasting the Sumo's leg off. Electricity crackled and arced from a ruptured conduit, the pattern dead from power loss. As he watched, the leg gave way under the solid fire and the Sumo starfished, each leg going a different way, and the heavy body crushing a Morty who had been sheltering underneath.
Fraser noticed a flash of metal below him - a Freaker had started to climb the cliff to get away from the carnage. It was on a slight slope, right in front of the pile of explosives, and Fraser grinned. The poor thing had saved him a lot of trouble. Quietly, he pushed an explosive charge to the edge and it rolled down, gathering speed as it went.
The Freaker only noticed as the charge thundered down on top of it, its upraised arm smashed off and the Freaker punched backwards by the weight of the explosive. The arm bounced, twiching with random signals, down to the canyon floor, and the Freaker followed soon after, colliding with a squad of four Morties. The explosive charge rolled into the center of the five unfortunate KBots and Fraser pulled the instant release trigger.
A millisecond later, all that was left was a large crater and a mortar tube that had been blown off by the force of the explosion. Behind him, Fraser heard a clatter as a body part made touchdown. He looked behind him and saw the scowling head of a Freaker, gently rocking in a small depression. Sparks leapt over its surface before the glowing eyes dimmed and a small wisp of smoke puffed out. It was a gruesome sight, wires dangling out of the neck, silvery and glittering.

David spotted a Can in the distance through the dust kicked up by his fans, and pushed the throttle to the stop, the hovercraft roaring down the canyon, a huge cloud of dust obscuring the view behind it. As he neared the Can, David set the Gauss cannons to autofire, the hovercraft slowing slightly as twin titanium-capped uranium bolts were accelerated to Mach 10 by Gauss fields, booming as they smashed the sound barrier. The red-hot rounds created a tracer effect as the guns shifted slightly to correct the aim as David swerved round a rock.
Closer in, the lasers activated, the coils glowing as energy was poured into the lasing chamber. Streams of green light poured out, the lasers cycling fire as they heated and cooled. In the distance, the Can started to turn its turret as two TCU bolts slammed into its body and ricocheted off with a screech, leaving a furrow in the white armour. The armour quickly blackened as laser bolts slammed into the metal, vaporising dust and scorching the metal through the Heavy Armour.
David started evasive maneuvers as the Can's laser started to fire. He was way out of range, but there was no sense in being foolhardy. The Gauss cannons swivelled through their ten degree firing arc, frantically trying to keep up with his jinking. Behind the Can, a Voyeur caught a TCU bolt in the chest and was knocked over, stubby legs waving as the radar dish screeched against the ground. It vanished in a white ball of expanding gas a moment later as its gyro systems overloaded the management AI, letting the reactor fields collapse. David swerved as the radar dish came flying out of the debris like an oversized, red-hot and extremely lethal frisbee.

The Cheetah burned past the Can, stirring up dust which blocked the Can's lasers for a crucial moment. Mark stood up on the back, exhilarated. He wasn't the kind of guy who did this - he was more at home standing behind a large rock, lobbing his rockets at enemies. But he was enjoying it! He ducked as an AA missile screamed over his head from the pod next to him, grounding itself on a Morty. He followed it up with two rockets, toppling the Morty and detonating its ammunition. The squat KBot exploded, sedning a cloud of shrapnel flying.
Overhead, grey clouds boiled over the sky and the sun had begun to set, casting a pinkish pallor over the scene. Lower down, black smoke erupted from wreckage, filling the sky with wisps of soot and smog. Sparks crackled from twitching wrecks, and over near the canyon wall a Can was repeatedly waddling at a snail-like top speed into the rock. As Mark watched, a cylinder landed on top of it, unbalancing its already battered frame and toppling the obese KBot. Seconds later, the Can was turned into a cloud of plasma by a huge explosion. Mark guessed the cylinder was a bomb.
Curoiusly, he felt no qualms at all about fighting his own army. The hover thundered on and he spotted a Morty lying struggling on the ground. It shattered into thousands of pieces moments later, the pattern activating the self-destruct and letting the reactor overload. He disarmed two rockets and lobbed them at a Can, the rockets landing just in front of it. Two more joined them, then two more, and they were crushed under the Can's armoured foot five seconds after, the anti-matter containment fields collapsing and letting the huge amount of anti-matter mingle with regular matter. There was a white flash and the Can suddenly only existed as particles of plasma and a slab of armour which had escaped the explosion.

Fiona gunned the Pterodactyl's heavy VTOL engines and the wedge-shaped aircraft rose, flamebillowing around the black armour. From the outside, the 'Dactyl looked like an elongated armadillo, sections of armour overlapping and sweeping backwards. At the last minute, Fiona had added a light AA turret cannon and a light laser, plus heavier engines. The 'Dactyl now took even longer to build, but that didn't matter so much as performance. The heavy black plane was fifty percent faster than the CORE's Rapier and could take the ugly gunship on any time.
Fiona checked the weapons systems before throttling up and dropping the seat into combat mode, armoured shutters thunking down over the flight couch which had dropped into the horizontal position. She was jacked in to the plane's systems and she could see the nanolathe busily creating fuel for the engines. Outside the plane, two panels opened on the 'Dactyl's sides and the short-barreled Gauss rifles emerged. With four barrels apiece, the rounds were not as fast or as powerful as the Cheetah's Gauss cannons, but the 'Dactyl more than made up for this by sheer volume.
The plane wobbled to a point fifty feet above the ground and shot forwards as Fiona pushed the throttles to the maximums, lighting all four afterburners and sending the gunship into a steep climb.
When the three gunships reached a high enough altitude, thin metal covers flicked over the weapons ports for aerodynamics and the gunships accelerated straight downwards, towards the battle below. As she dived, Fiona reflected on the odds of the battle - fifteen Sumos, twenty Cans, thirty Morties, about fifteen Freakers, ten A.K.s - all against seven combat vehicles, a sniper and a minelayer who was presently dropping high explosives on the battle.
The daggerlike ships tore the air at Mach 3, engines flaring white-hot now. As they sped down to the battle, the covers unfolded and the wind screamed through the weapons pylons as the Gauss rifles came online and spun up to 600RPM. Slugs started to feed into the rifles and were accelerated to Mach 6 instantly. Coupled with the speed of the aircraft, they were going at almost Mach 9 - a hurricane of twelve inch long red-hot TCU bolts, firing at 2400 rounds per minute, or 400 per second.
Fiona marvelled at the sight - it looked like one constant stream of bolts going through the air. Every now and then, a bolt went off course as it hit one in front that had been stalled by flying debris. Below, a Sumo withered in the fierce hail, eventually exploding in a shower of debris which hurtled past the 'Dactyls with a whistling noise.
The 'Dactyls pulled out of the dive, exerting almost 12 gravities on the craft, still spraying the battlefield with slugs. As the planes went into a forty-five degree climb, the cannons spat out high-velocity armour-piercing shells which peppered a group of Freakers with holes, turning them into animated colanders. Finally the fire stopped and the 'Dactyls turned for another attack run...

Part 12

William "Shadowfox" Holt loaded two freshly-made missiles onto the Vamp's missile racks with a small 'thunk'. He checked the stealth fighter's systems and fired up the engines, hypergolic fuel streaming into the combustion chambers and igniting immediately. Blue flames streamed out of exhaust nozzles, scorching the already-black metal of the landing pad. Nanolathe arms retracted to get out of the way of the jets, and ten Vamps slowly rose into the air, streaks of white-hot flame spurting from each plane's four VTOL jets. The Vamps eased up on the rear jets to tip the planes skywards and, in unison, the pilots gunned the two massive jet engines that propelled the streamlined fighters.
The marbled black of Holt's wings glinted in the pinkish sun, the two white missiles flashing like overlarge tusks from the underside of the stubby wings. Clouds were torn apart as the Vamps accelerated past the sound barrier and plunged into the clear empty space above the weather, sun glaring down on the speeding planes, filtered and reddened by the air. A lone bird lost control for a moment as ten black shapes streaked past, creating turbulent ripples in their wake. The eagle regained its wings and watched with gimlet eyes as the shapes sped over the horizon.
"Eagle Lead to Eagle squad - target at heading 010, angels 2, engage at will. Mind your metal @sses out there!"
The Vamps split up and armed their missiles, the black and glossily tipped missiles winking in the sun while inside, microscopic computers worked out velocities and launch vectors. One Vamp, its pilot eager for the fight, launched its twin missiles at once, the white streaks shooting ahead of the craft and curving over to the right. The missiles signalled lock-on, then their signature disappeared, but without signalling detonation. They would have run out of fuel and self-destructed in mid-air, letting the volatile payload spiral down to earth before bleeding the anti-matter off in stages.
The CORE had conceived the payload-dump method after too many planes were lost to missiles self-destructing in flight, and bases had been decimated by missiles falling to earth from a raging dogfight. Holt waited until the targets were well within range before firing his missiles, and he watched the white smoke trails speeding past, tipped by a gout of flame from the missile's engine.
The Vamps were almost on top of the target now - five miles from the canyon. All the Vamps suddenly took a turn downwards, plunging almost vertically through the darkening clouds. There would be thunder soon, thought Holt moodily. Both his missiles had missed and self-destructed. Two more slid onto his rack as he flew, and armed. As the Vamps came out of the clouds, he could see what they had been sent to attack - a raging battle below.
For a moment Holt was confused. It seemed as if his side were fighting nothingness. He turned his perception rate up, using the mainframe's resources to bolster his own brain's, now thinking at ten times normal speed. As his Vamp crawled closer, he could see four flickering shapes in the dust clouds - two looked like planes and two were definately tanks. As he watched, he caught a glint of light on a wing and turned.
There was a plane bearing down on him! He flipped the VTOL nozzles forward and gunned the engines to lose speed. The Vamp plummeted like a stone and flipped round, trying to avoid a hail of shells which had come out of no-where. He cursed as the shells ripped through a wing, tearing it off. He recognised the classic sound of a Gauss rifle - a cannon would have ripped him apart by now. He pulled the Vamp round in desparation and blind-launched both missiles in desparation, just as the tracers found his engines.

Sarah winced as the Vamp exploded right in front of her and the 'Dactyl passed through the debris, shutters instantly flipping over to protect the Gauss rifles and cannons. Two smoke trails led past her right wing, too close for comfort. She told the medicomp to inject some relaxant - she was shivering with tension - and she thought she felt the liquid flowing through her arm implant socket, calming her down.
She turned the 'Dactyl, which had already racked up fourteen kills, and started to strafe a Sumo, diving rapidly to get rid of the Vamps circling above. A lucky shot hit on the Sumo's  visual sensors and the twin laser cannons swung up and started firing. The laser beams formed an ionised pillar in the air above Sarah, and a beam passed through a stray Vamp, melting the wing. Moments later, the reactor overloaded and melted the Vamp into a solid lump of metal which hurtled down to the battlefield.
Suddenly a laser shot found her gunship, blasting a wingtip off. Her headset was blaring a warning at her. "WARNING! HEAVY ARMOUR AT 0.01%! EJECT! EJECT! EJECT!" When she didn't react, the computer acted for her. Sarah felt a sudden jolt of acceleration as the armoured flight couch dropped through the ceiling of the 'Dactyl, now flying upside-down and loping towards the ground, all control lost together with the wingtip.
The capsule righted itself and fired six one-time rockets, hurtling the escape pod straight up through the cloud of Vamps. A Vamp was sent spinning out of control by the capsule, its armoured shutters smashing through an engine and being briefly washed by jet engine exhaust. As the rockets burnt out, the capsule fired an underslung jet booster, sending the capsule flying across the cloud-floored landscape. It arced down, through the clouds, and started to drift down.
The capsule was programmed to land softly and deploy the parachute at the last possible moment to avoid detection by SAM radar. The capsule dropped towards the side of the canyon at over Mach 2.

Milo dropped agilely from his tree hiding place and flipped the visor over his eyes. The biosuit picked up his nerve inputs through his neck socket and moved the suit accordingly, letting Milo move with giant leaps towards a Sumo still lumbering down the canyon. He glimpsed an A.K. running under the behemoth and frisbeed a small flattened disc over to it. The disc opened to reveal a one-shot medium laser.
The miniscule turret aimed at the A.K. and fired, taking the Kbot out in one burst. Seconds later, the wreckage was turned into a metallic pancake by the Sumo's massive foot. The laser exploded weakly, causing the Sumo to scan the canyon for attackers, while Milo leapt onto the foot and started climbing. As the Sumo swept its laser turret over the empty ground, Milo scaled the weighty leg with ease, using minute magnetic crampons to stick to the leg. He took a limpet mine from his pack and attached it with care exactly at the Sumo's neck joint, the weakest point on the body. He released the crampons and pushed away, falling the forty feet with ease and rolling to absorb the shock. The suit stiffened to protect Milo's body then relaxed, its powerful muscles propelling him over the ground.
As Milo hid again, the thunderclouds which had been building overhead started to swell. There was a light pattering and it started to rain. He watched the Sumo closely, and before long he was rewarded with a loud 'crack' and the sight of the massive machine stopping dead in its tracks, its four legs sprawling over the ground.
"Milo to Fiona - can we have a bombing run over here? There's some junk in the road." He chuckled and shut off the radio link before running as fast as possible away from the Sumo, electricity crackling over the downed frame. A few bombs should get the Sumo's already weakened armour to fail - and cause a nice display of fireworks. As he watched from a safe distance, a Cheetah roared past him, firing at a Can in the distance. He recognised Saul's tiger-painted hovercraft, and far away there was an explosion as the Gauss rounds hit their mark.
A roar overhead and Fiona plummeted straight down, releasing three heavy bombs before pulling up sharply. The bombs fell and stuck in the armour for a few seconds, a klaxon warning friendlies away from the site, before exploding violently. The bombs were designed to clear rubble and channeled the explosion through a small field conduit, literally smashing the debris. A piece of metal hit the cliff just above Milo's head and he ducked to avoid the minature mud-slide it caused.
He recognised the distinctive shape of a Pyro against an explosion and raised his sniper rifle, chambering a round into the long Gauss rifle. He aimed the rifle, the sniperscope feeding the data into his suit's visual circuit. A square window below his view showed the 20x zoomed picture from the scope, and he aimed at the Pyro's plasma tank and waited. The Pyro wandered into a group of A.Ks and Milo sent out a thought. The rifle kicked as the armour-piercing round was accelerated to Mach 5.5 and impacted moments later, the Kbots disappearing in a cloud of smoke and plasma. When the smoke cleared, only a crater was left.
He swung the rifle round and chambered another round. Now there was a Morty in his sights. He braced his shoulder against the rifle and fired, then cursed as the shot ricocheted off the Morty's armour. It turned towards him and fired, the mortar whistling as Milo scrambled out of the way. The tree he had been sitting in was buried under a mudslide and the Morty turned to track him. It had probably alerted its colleagues as other KBots swung their turrets to follow his IR signature. Lasers and shells hit where he had been a moment ago, and he scrambled over to a Sumo which tried to track him as he ran.
Milo ran behind one massive leg and engaged his magnetic crampons, locking onto the underside of the leg and climbing up it. He locked six clamps onto the underside of the Sumo's torso and attached his suit to the clamps. From here he could just see the attack force, and he sent a message to Tiger team giving the Sumo special status. He twisted and unholstered an EMP pistol, before sending a scrambler signal through the torso. The Sumo stopped dead and he was able to climb higher, to the Sumo's access panel.
He locked himself beside the panel and took out a small gadget from his backpack. Milo affixed the device to the door's interface and punched a code in, then waited. The device was a nanohacker, which worked to unlock any doors or hatches needed. It simply scouted out the hardwired circuits of a chip with nanobots before changing the matrix to allow universal access. Seconds later, the Sumo's hatch fell open and Milo climbed inside.
It was cramped inside the Sumo and Milo had to use his head-mounted torch to find the technician jack-in point. He inserted a probe from his suit and his world dissolved.
He was looking out from the fifty-foot viewpoint of the Sumo, and he could just see the two black laser cannons projecting underneath his vision. A targeting reticule appeared in his vision, and targeted a Cheetah. He switched the target to the Morty next to it and fired six times. An explosion marked the death of the mortar KBot, and he swivelled the turret round to target a Can. The first shot might have been a mistake but this would be the clincher. He left it at that and started to move. He didn't want to get shot up, even in a Sumo - the things weren't absolutely invunerable. He himself had proved that.
Leaving the Sumo moving, he jacked out of the system and lowered himself through the hatch on a short line. Taking out the twin EMP rifles, he fixed them to the sniper rifle and plugged them together. The EMPs now worked as light lasers and complemented the rifle. The Sumo's power lead went in next, and the EMPs powered up with a low hum.
Aiming at an Informer, he loaded a high explosive round into the Gauss rifle and fired it, knocking the radar dish of the vehicle flying. The lasers burnt into the midsection of the vehicle, vaporising the thin metal. When they reached the Informer's small reactor, it disappeared in a cloud of expanding plasma.
As he targetted a Can, it suddenly vanished in a cloud of smoke. He looked up to see the cause - a 'Dactyl diving at high speed, cannons and Gauss rifles firing like crazy. The Can reappeared seconds later, as a cloud of gas.

Murphy gunned the engines of the Slammer, skidding as the tank juddered its way over the battlefield. The tank was one of the sturdiest she had seen - its capability for taking rough driving was awesome. The Flash chassis went perfectly with her driving style - in other words, skidding, jumping and driving as dangerously as possible, she thought wryly. Up ahead, a Can had splintered into parts, leaving only a huge sheet of armour behind. Murphy drove the Slammer at full speed along the armour, up to the ridge at the end. The tank reared up over the ridge, travelling at almost thirty miles per hour, and leapt into the sir, crashing down on the other side with a bone-rattling thump.
Murphy grinned - this was perfect! But where were the 'baddies'? Her question was answered as she topped a ridge, Daniel following her, and saw the battle below. An IFF signal from a Sumo beeped at her, standard CORE with an added signal...Milo! God...the guy was riding a *Sumo*?! Near the Slammer, Daniel drove his tank a lot more cautiously, the turret camera sweeping the battlefield.
"Murphy, we can stop here. The Gauss cannons are well in range now," he said.
"Hah! I'm going in," said Murphy. "I wanna kick some metallic CORE butt." The Slammer painted with her colours revved up and shot over the ridge, bouncing over the rocks and stones. Daniel groaned. He activated his cannons and targetted a Can which was lumbering towards Murphy, lobbing six TCU javelins its way. The long rods smashed into the Can, knocking it over, and Murphy finished it off with a few shots of her own. Suddenly Daniel spotted a Pyro behind Murphy's tank. She obviously hadn't noticed it, and it swung round to look for following tanks just as Daniel fired both his cannons at once. The tank rocked backwards, perched on the hill, and one javelin smashed the Pyro full in the face. The other went lower, and disappeared inside the flamethrower.
The Pyro exploded with a fiery blast that smashed the lightweight tank driven by murphy against a rock. The turret splintered, a cannon flying out of the wreckage. Daniel gunned the engines and rattled over. "Shit..."

Inside the tank, Murphy was trapped inside her armoured cockpit, the shutters hard and unyielding. She ripped the jack-in plugs from her neck and arm - the tank was dead now, and they were no use to her. As her vision brightened she could see the dim red emergency lighting flickering. The reactor was down.
Murphy swore. If the reactor was failing, she'd better get out fast. An alarm sounded, warning her of plasma containment failure. It would be five minutes before the plasma ate through the tank's wall, but the main danger was over - the antimatter core of the reactor had been jettisoned. She hammered on the blueish metal shutters, and picked up a spanner to try and force her way out. A seperate Heavy Armour generator protected the armoured capsule, and the ejection mechanism had jammed, thanks to the rock that she had felt hit her just before the systems died. The armour was unyielding and she tried the radio. It was dead, and as she punched the button the red lights flickered and died.
Murphy could feel the bulkhead behind her getting hot - Heavy Armour was vunerable to heat, which was why plasma weapons were used in the first place. She squirmed in the cramped cockpit and could see her combat suit's wrist readout telling her the temperature was 35 degrees. She sweated in the heat, pushing herself away from the now boiling bulkhead. Experimentally she touched it and the skin of her fingertips blistered away from the flesh. A string of expletives echoed around the cofffin-like space, and the heat increased.
Suddenly Murphy remembered the 'last resort', a system which designers had built into all combat suits. She flipped open a panel and punched in a short code. The auto-euthaniser activated and within twenty seconds Murphy was dead.

Part 13

Daniel swore as he saw the metal of Murphy's tank turning red-hot. She had to be dead by now - there was no point in rescuing her. His tank skidded to a stop a hundred feet from the shattered Slammer, just in time to miss a plume of plasma that shot out of the turret as the Heavy armour failed and the tank splintered into pieces. Only the interior was left now, and that was soon consumed by the hungry plasma, all the armour and metal simply vaporising. The ground cooled eventually, rain pouring down on an unidentified grave.
In the end, the canyon lay deserted, only the occasional thundercrack lighting up the dark shadows and revealing the rivulets of water that cascaded down the pieces of wreckage and discarded components. At the end of the canyon, a pathway had been melted out by Milo's Sumo lasers and now nothing moved inside the canyon now floored by shrapnel and junk.
A sole vulture flapped over, harsh cry disturbing the silence, the moonlight glinting down through heavy clouds. Far off, thunder rumbled...

Outside the shelter, rain poured down in a constant stream, drumming on the camoflaged roof of the shelter. Inside, Xavier and Daniel were being fitted up for their biosuits. The suits were in fact human-body replicas, identical in all respects to the standard CORE bodysuit. The enhnaced human frame was fitted with mini medical nanolathes and stiffened with memcomposites, and it could do anything the humans could do and more.
As Xavier transferred to his newly-'lathed body, the A.K. frame folded slowly to the ground and the pinpoints of light in its eyes faded. There was a clatter as the body toppled over. Suddenly the seemingly human body on the table lifted its arms.
"I....LIVE!!" it said in booming tones. Then Xavier's voice returned. "Sorry, being a bit melodramatic there. Wow - this is *cool*!"
The body got up from the table and the towel that had been covering its torso fell down. Xavier hastily grabbed for it, his arms falling short and the body unbalancing. He fell over onto Fiona, who caught the towel a second after.
"There you go," she said.
"Uh...thanks." Xavier blushed. Even living in a metallic body for thousands of years had not stopped him from being embarrassed about body parts. Fiona grinned at him as Xavier hastily wrapped himself in the towel. He staggered over to a seat, still unsure of the new body. Somehow, he kept trying to grasp things with hands that weren't there - the arms were a lot shorter than he was used to, and the legs were more flexible. He sat down and slumped back with a sigh.
Daniel was next. He took the precaution of sitting down this time, and his suit slumped forwards as he transferred to the new body which sat up - clutching the towel - and joined Xavier. Both had designed their own bodies from what they had used to look like. Xavier was tall and slim with chestnut hair and brown, warm eyes while Daniel was tall, muscular, with red hair and green eyes like Fiona.
As Xavier sat down he felt unfamiliar emotions emerging, telling him something about Fiona. He dismissed them as simple settling-in.
"Do you have anything we could use as...uh, clothes?" he said. Milo handed both Daniel and Xavier a small parcel and they took out clothes. A T-shirt, denim trousers and a sweatshirt each. Xavier and Daniel both went to change.

Mentally, Fiona was slightly shocked. She actually *grinned* at him?! What happened to the usually shy and retiring Fiona she knew? She found herself thinking about him and immediately erased all thought from her mind for a moment. She looked around to find Sarah looking at her, smiling.
"You were blushing," she said.
"Uh..." said Fiona and reddened again. What was she thinking of? But her mind returned to the shy Xavier.

Inside the shelter the lights flickered off one by one as the members of Tiger team went to sleep, sleeping-bags tightly closed against the night-time chill. The only sound was the gentle hum of the generator and the noise of breathing. Unknown to Fiona, Xavier was thinking of her. Her expression as he toppled into her lap... Man, that was embarrassing, he thought to himself and smiled in the darkness. He closed his eyes and replayed the moment, but then a cold thought hit him. What if she just thought he was a friend? Even worse, what if she just didn't notice him? If only he could ask her... but what if she did say yes? Troubled, Xavier rolled over and tried to go to sleep.
In the sleeping cubicle next to him, Fiona was thinking much along the same lines.

Daniel yawned and opened bleary eyes, before wriggling out of the sleeping-bag and deactivating its thermal circuits. He struggled into his clothes and opened the door of the sleeping-capsule to reveal the sunlight slanting through the high windows of the shelter. The light made patterns on the floor of shadow, tree branches making shaky lines across the rectangles. He wandered out of the bedroom with its lines of cubicles, and almost bumped into Fiona and Xavier talking near the door. Fiona looked up and blushed. She tried to walk away nonchalantly and tripped over a spanner which Saul had left there.
Xavier reddened. "Sorry to disturb your peace," said Daniel. "Do you want me to leave you?"
"No, it's OK. We were...just about to have breakfast."
Daniel smiled. Maybe, but it didn't really look like that. He played along anyway. As they sat down at the improvised table he couldn't help noticing the seemingly random glances the other two always managed to sneak at each other. He knew Xavier was really about seventeen, but he had told Daniel he never had a girlfriend before. Fiona didn't look the type who was experienced in love, either. Daniel decided to leave them to it and walked outside, carrying his plastic breakfast tray.
In the open air it was a beautiful, if slightly chilly morning, the blue sky showing only a wisp of cloud here and there. He strolled over to Saul's open-air workshop, and pulled the camo-netting off a chair before sitting down. While he was admiring the view and munching on his cereal, Saul joined him and sat down.
"Have you seen the two lovebirds?" he said with a grin. "Ahh...once I was like that."
"Aren't you still like that?" shot back Daniel.
"No - those times have sadly passed."
For a moment, Daniel thought he saw a flicker of sadness come over Saul's face before it resumed its normal grin. He decided not to continue and pursued a different line of inquiry.
"How's the Cheetah coming on, then?" he asked. Saul was personally modifying his Cheetah, 'hot-rodding' as he called it.
Saul laughed. "Not bad! You've seen the paint, haven't you? Well, I'm going to..."
He was cut off by a roar overhead. Saul swore and dived face-down onto the ground, pulling the camo-net over his chair. Daniel did the same. The Fink could not have seen them going at that speed, but it would come back for a second look as soon as the pilot analysed the pictures. Both men scrambled for the shelter and got the door closed as the Fink roared overhead again, lower this time.
"Why didn't we just use the anti-aircraft?" asked Daniel.
"Well, they'd know where we are then," replied Saul. "That's not a good thing."
"What about the 'Dactyls?"
"Well, Sarah's asleep and both Fiona and Xavier are...otherwise occupied." Daniel chuckled. "Well, I suppose they've got a right to it. Relieves the boredom, anyway."
Saul's face grew serious. "On a different subject, we really need new team members. We've got six people so far and we really need more. We've only got one person - that's you - who drives a Slammer, and two hovertanks really doesn't cut the mustard. We're really going to have to do something about it. If only we had a Commander here..."

Commander Kalomar studied the photographs, absent-mindedly running his hand through his long brown hair as he looked at what seemed to be a seat. There was a bright person-shaped blur next to it on the IR photo, someone who had been sitting there until recently. He looked up at the rookie Fink pilot and smiled.
"Good work, MacLean. I'm not going to attack. We need allies in the Arm who can help us against the CORE. I can only find a few people in the Pattern database who don't like the 'freedom' CORE gives," he said, almost spitting out the 'freedom', "and we need more. I really don't like the unscrupulous methods CORE uses. Even worse are the people who think - and try to think - like machines. They're as good as dead on the battlefield, and they all hate me for trying to be more human. It's all the fault of godd@mned Central Consciousness.
"Well, come tomorrow, I'm going to go over there and offer them assistance."

Part 14

The morning sun glinted weakly off the wet armour of Commander Kalomar's battle suit as the Valkyrie roared through the air. They were flying above cloud level to avoid detection, but the valkyrie had had to dip into the clouds several times to avoid patrolling fighters from both CORE and Arm. The battlesuit was dripping wet and the torrential rain that was pouring down hadn't helped his state of mind, either. Finally the Valkyrie pilot radioed him.
"Sir, the base is in sight. I've got a signal from the navbeacon, and we can land out of sight of the base."
"Good work, Murray. Remind me to promote you when we get back."
"Thank you, sir."
The Valkyrie rotated its huge engines to face the vertical, slowly sinking through a layer of fog to the muddy ground. Kalomar's feet sunk into the earth as the Valkyrie released its clamps and settled to the ground beside him, the massiv black transport more than dwarfed by Kalomar's thirty-foot frame. He turned and started walking the mile's distance to the base, covering the ground in long, easy strides, and creating small pools of water wherever he stepped.

Fiona yawned and smiled. She could see the morning sun through the window in her cubicle, and she could hear Xavier up and about already. She sat up in bed and started to get dressed.

Xavier by now was fully at home in his new body. He was busy cooking breakfast on the electric stove, the aroma of sizzling local vegetables and synthesized sausages floating through the base. He enjoyed cooking, even though the food nanolathe was only two feet away. It was relaxing - and the reward afterwards was nice. He tipped the vegetables out of the grill and checked the sausages as Fiona walked in, stretching.
"Mmm...what's that smell?" she said, smiling.
Xavier laughed and gave her a plate of the orange vegetables, spearing two sausages and adding them, too.
"Thanks, Xavier. Lovely." Fiona went over to the table and sat down, just as there was a knock on the door. Xavier went over and opened it. Who on Prime could be calling right now? There was no-one for miles around - this was a warzone, after all.
The door opened and a tall, black-haired man stood there, looking slightly unsure of himself.
"Uh...good morning. I am David Kalomar. Uh...could I speak to whoever's in charge here?" he said, shuffling his feet slightly. Xavier smiled.
"Come on in. I think you mean David - I'll get him for you." He turned and went into the bedrooms to get David, while Kalomar chatted to Fiona.

David yawned as Xavier's voice came through the thin door of his cubicle. He couldn't hear Xavier so he rolled out of bed and pushed the door open.
"Pardon?" he said.
"Oh, sorry. Well, there's a David Kalomar to see you. He's just in the kitchen now - tall guy, black hair. You know him?"
"I don't think so...did he ask for me?" replied David, rubbing his eyes.
"No, he didn't. He just wanted the person in charge."
David grinned. "Glad you thought of me first!" he said, pulling on a pair of trousers over his shorts as he got out of the cubicle.

Kalomar walked over to David and shook his hand.
"Well, you've got a nice little base here, I must say. I'm here to offer you help. How many people have you got?"
"Well, there's me, Sarah, Fiona, Xavier, Saul, Milo...six. That's it, really."
"You look as if you could do with a few more."
David laughed. "Definately. But not too many. We specialise in blitz warfare - striking fast and hard, even with only six people."
"Sounds good. I'd like to discuss this at my base."
David nodded and followed the man out. He blinked as he saw the Valkyrie waiting outside, its passenger door open. CORE? Or captured? The man walked in, and David climbed the ramp, slightly worried.
When the ramp folded up, the door closed and both David and Kalomar sat down in the spacious interior of the transport. It had obviously been modified - David had seen the inside of a crashed one and it was nothing like this. The engines rumbled as the Valkyrie slowly lifted off.

David stepped out of the transport two minutes later, after a low-altitude flight. He turned round to talk to Kalomar and saw exactly what they had landed next to. He blinked. A Command Suit stood, thirty feet tall and deactivated, outlined against the horizon. He turned to Kalomar, who was walking towards the suit, and ran towards him.
As he got to the man, Kalomar laughed and said, "Welcome to my humble home."
A hatch opened in the leg of the battlesuit and Kalomar beckoned David in before following him into the small elevator. It rose rapidly, and David felt his stomach drop before the lift stopped and they got out at a circular platform.
"You are now in the Commander's head. You may have been wondering why I am walking around in a Comander suit?"
David nodded in mute agreement.
"Well, the simpe reason is that my whole rank is Commander David Kalomar."
David found his tongue and asked, "Why didn't you telll us before?"
"Hey, I didn't want to frighten you away. What would you do if you saw a Commander walking up to your base?"
"Oh. Right. I get the point. Well, you've managed to kidnap me, now what?"
"No, not kidnap you. I was only offering to help."
"Excuse me? We're Arm, you're CORE, and you're offering to *help* us?"
"Yes. Help us fight against the people I so recently left. I mean left - I destroyed half my base and walked out."
"So you're...what? A renegade? Fighting against your own cause?"
"Yes." With this last word, Kalomar slumped in a chair and the battlesuit came alive. A voice echoed through speakers in the platform.
"Now watch this!"
The platform started to shake as the Commander walked over to the Valkyrie and David hurriedly took a seat. He could feel the clamps locking onto the Commander, just as the Commander's voice came through the speakers again.
"Feel free to watch!" he said as a jackplug whirred out from a wall near another seat. David walked over and jacked in.

The sensation of being suddenly thirty feet tall with attack capability that could destroy a base in seconds and enough energy to build up an entire military complex. The feeling of wind whistling through sensors and past massive arms at the sides of the body. A feeling of helplessness as the control links are suddenly deactivated. Clamps lock onto shoulders and feet slowly lift off boggy ground, mud dripping from between claw-like feet.

David almost jacked out at the strange sensations but he willed himself not to, and watched, fascinated, as the Vlakyrie sped off carrying the Commadner - *him* - to somewhere unknown. A mental voice, seemingly belonging to Kalomar, spoke.
"Well, how do you like being a Commander?"
"Wow..." was the only thing David could say. Then he rocovered. "But how do you stand going so slowly? It's weird."
"What do you pilot, then?"
"I started in Jeffies, then moved to the Cheetah - that's our new fast attack hovercraft."
"I see your point. Think you could design a craft for me?"
"Not my job," laughed David. "Fiona thinks up all the designs. We just ride in them."
They spent the hours going to Kalomar's base chatting about the Tiger team and Kalomar's rejection of the CORE. Finally the transport touched down inside a massive bustling base.
"Your *humble* base?" said David, awestruck.
"Well, compared to...Empyrrean or CORE Prime, maybe," replied Kalomar, with humor in his voice. "It's quite cosy, really. Come on, we've got a lot to see."

Outside the battlesuit, the access hatch opened and both Kalomar and David stepped out, their footsteps clattering on the hard granite surface. A woman walked up and gave Kalomar a status report and looked questioningly at David.
"Mary Taylor, my personal assistant. Mary, this is David."
"Oh yes," she said. "Right - that's the latest report on the Mohorivicic project. We're almost through, and we should be there soon."
"Great," replied Kalomar. He turned to David. "Well, do you want to look around the base?"
They turned and started the tour.
 
Part 16

A flash of lightning illuminated the bleak landscape, rain pouring down on the muddy ground. Thunder followed soon after, echoing off the rain-soaked cliffs. Fiona lay in the capsule, listening to the rain drumming down, reading. It was only an hour after she had woken up, but the rain had forced her into the capsule. She wondered why there was no sign of rescue - she had checked that her rescue beacon was working, but she had not seen or heard anything since she had crashed.
Fiona put down her book on the thin pillow and rolled over, her wet clothes rucking up under her armpits in the confined space. She straightened the clothes and keyed the computer screen on, jacking into the system. Just as she jacked in, she remembered something. She pulled the plug out and turned to the door, locking it before jacking in again.
The drab grays of the operating system flashed up into her vision, and she noticed the status report that showed the beacon transmitting. Suddenly she realised something. What was the range of the beacon? She thought the question to the computer, and the answer followed: 10 miles. She thought for a moment then requested a map of the area, from whatever data they had. The computer worked for a while before flashing a 3D map into her vision. Request map grid, spaces 1 mile, she thought. A white grid faded into view, making a wireframe of the terrain. Fiona dived, her virtual body floating closer to the map, homing in on a flashing beacon...

Sarah was worried about Xavier. He was completely silent now, and he hadn't said anything for the last hour since they took off. They'd had no luck at all finding the capsule, though they'd circled the site of the dogfight several times. She keyed the radio on.
"Xavier, we've got to go home. There's no sign of the beacon." She didn't mention Fiona. The radio stayed stubbornly silent.
"Xavier?" Still nothing.
"Xavier? Come in Xavier?" The radio was quiet. Sarah slammed her fist on the cockpit wall in frustration, before opening a computer-computer link with Xavier's plane. She put her own plane on autopilot before flicking into the mainframe's systems. She found herself wishing Fiona was here - she was much better at this, but Sarah had enough experience to...
There it was - the link to Xavier's mainframe. She slid along it, passing through the boundary of her mainframe. She surfaced, in Xavier's operating system. She was surprised to see almost nothing there, flat greyness. For a moment she almost lost control and jacked out as she saw the twisted, grey body of Xavier. Dead. The word echoed in her mind. With a shudder she gave the command to dock with her plane before jacking out of the control circuits. She shook her head to clear the image of Xavier's body. A clunk as the other gunship locked onto her dockring, the autopilot holding the two planes steady. They flew back to base.

Sarah silently cursed her insensitivity to Xavier. She should have got to him in time, before he got to the auto-euthaniser. They still had his pattern, taken just before they went out, but she didn't feel like activating it just then. She forced herself to switch on the computer and access the blueprint of Xavier's body, creating a virtual model. No time to make a proper one - she had to get to Xavier while she could. She channeled Xavier's pattern into the mainframe, the body shimmering and coming alive as she formed her own avatar in the virtual space. She could see Xavier's depression on his face as he dropped to the featureless floor in a heap.
"Xavier?" she called. He did not respond. She went over to him and shook him. "Xavier? You have to get up. There might still be a chance."
At last he responded. "No. There isn't a chance." He smiled cherubically. "She's dead. And so am I. You reactivated me. I am dead."
"No, Xavier. There *is* a chance. Fiona designed the capsules, remember? She knew this might happen."
"Well, so what?" he said, his face falling again. "I saw her plane. It was hit by twelve missiles. She couldn't have survived."
"Yes she could. Look at me. I crashed my plane and the capsule saved me. Why not Fiona?"
Xavier sighed. "Well, I'll take you at your word. Search then. You won't find her."
"I'll channel you into a 'Dactyl. We'll do a sweep."

Murray was surprised. There was a frequency-agile signal playing across the radio bands. He called the Commander.
"Commander Kalomar? We've got a signal."
The Commander, in the passenger compartment of the Valkyrie, apologised to David and transferred his consciousness from his body into the Valkyrie's system. He could see the signal, blinking up and down the frequencies.
"Murray? Can you get the signal?"
Murray concentrated for a second. "Yes, I've got the sequence. Hang on..."
Suddenly the sound of static came through the virtual space. It resolved into an emergency broadcast.
A computerised voice spoke. "This is an emergency broadcast on clear-code agile frequency band, from pilot Fiona McKay of Tiger Team. Location is," a string of coordinates which Murray fed into the computer. "Status, operational. Please respond."
Commander Kalomar transferred back into his body. "David?"
David looked up. "Yes?"
"I think I've got one of your pilots."

Fiona looked up as the Valkyrie roared over the horizon. She noticed the blue-green markings of Commander Kalomar's personal transport, and jumped out of the capsule, waving her hands. The Valkyrie slowly settled to the ground, a ramp opening in the side. David jumped out, followed by Kalomar.
"What happened to you?" said David. "I thought you were at base!"
"We were on an intercept mission. Two CORE fighters, new ones. I got shot down, but Sarah and Xavier made it home. We wasted the fighters."
"No sign of rescue?"
"No, no-one's been. I think I'm out of transmitter range, but they should have done a sweep by now."
David frowned. "Well, we've got to get back to base. Come on," he said, jumping into the transport. Kalomar looked up from examining the capsule and followed Fiona in.

Murray fought  to regain altitude as two jets streaked underneath the Valkyrie. They turned and came back, orbiting the massive transport. A radio channel opened, coded. Murray activated the cabin speakers.
"David, Fiona? You got a radio decoder on you? I think it's one of your planes."
David held up a slim card.
"Here you go."
Murray thought for a second. "What's the code on the card?"
David looked at it. "2-2-34-10."
"Yeah,  OK. That'll be it, then. Hang on...put it into the card slot."
A panel in the wall folded back and extruded a small card reader, which David put the card in. A message came over the speakers.
"...llo? Hello? This is Sarah of Tiger here. Can you hear me?"
Murray replied. "Murray Hill of Commander Kalomar's base here. I'll patch you through to David."
Sarah sounded surprised. "David's here?"
Murray laughed. "Not only David, your pilot Fiona's here, too. Were you looking for her?"
A new voice came over the radio. "Fiona's *here*? She's alive?"
"Yes, she's here and healthy. Hang on...you're patched through."
David stood up and addressed the wall speaker. "Sarah? Is that you there?"
"Yes, this is Sarah. I've got Xavier here, as a Pattern."
"A pattern?"
"I'll explain later. Now we need to get Fiona home."

Xavier sat up, slipping his new body into the familiar clothes. He ran out of the bedroom and hugged Fiona, stepping out of the transport, almost crying.
"God, Fiona. I thought you were dead. God..."
Fiona didn't say anything for a moment as she hugged Xavier back. Sarah ushered them back inside as the clouds cleared from the sky and the sun shone through, lighting the sodden landscape.

Part 17

Shawne Davies checked the systems of his massive Goliath tank, booting up the internal AI systems. He heard a rumble through his external microphones as the tank's small fusion power plant came online, hydrogen feeding into the reaction chamber. Plasma trickled into the storage container, slowly bled off from the reactor, and the Goliath's plasma containment fields hummed into life. Finally, the massive motors that powered the Goliath's steel tracks whined and the mighty tank rolled out of the garage into bright sunlight, followed by nineteen others. The platoon of tanks rolled towards the hulking transport hovercraft near the base. Shawne activated the radio link to his Commander.
"Sir? We're ready to roll. Boarding transports now, sir."
"Good man," came the reply. "The next group will be along in a few seconds. Commander Tallman out."
As the Goliaths clanked up to the hovercraft, the transport's magnetic clamps loading each one into the cargo bay, forty vehicles skidded to a stop nearby. Looking round at the units, Shawne didn't recognise them. The units were large, with six large tyres, and they looked as if they were mounting heavy lasers on top. Zooming in, Shawne could see the turret clearer. A blueprint scan confirmed that the guns were heavy lasers, and the vehicles were called Strikers. Shawne checked the techspecs and gasped.

"...finally strike! This strategy will hopefully let us win as many victories as possible, now we are equipped with the new unit I am about to tell you about.
"The Striker is our new fast support vehicle. It is armed with the heavy laser from out Cans, and travels about as fast as a Weasel. It has the advantage of being able to climb much steeper cliffs than its direct counterpart, the new hovertank that we have seen in the Arm. Also, it has a large amount of armour for something so lightweight - almost as much as a Raider. The Striker is manned by two patterned individuals, one driving and one gunning.
"Please use these units well, Commanders. I forsee it being very useful. Against our general strategy it may well be, but we will not fall to the lousy, weak Arm."
The General blinked out of the virtual meeting, transferring from the simulator back into his 'real' body. The designer he had used was a genius - he made a mental note to use more of her designs. What was her name again...ah yes, that was it. Fiona McKay.

The observation gallery was crowded, the virtual room with its impossibly massive 'windows' each showing a different view. It was simply too costly to build passenger space into transports, so the CORE had gone for the only real alternative: installing the massive, ultra-fast real-time simulators. Shawne marvelled at the amazing technology - he could remember when he was actually alive, before Patterning, when the computers were massive and slow. 233 UHz was considered fast, and those units were about the size of a sleeping cubicle. But even worse was the period called the 20th century.
Shawne had taken Century Studies at school, and he had been especially interested in the 'technological age', the period from the eighteenth to the twenty-first century when so many discoveries were made in such a short time. Technologies which seemed impossible one day were commonplace the next, and lifestyle revolutions happened overnight. Look at the telephone, he thought. One chance discovery and the whole world's suddenly chatting. Or computers, maybe. The whole cause of this war, in fact, he thought sadly.
Shawne was jolted suddenly, jerking him out of his thoughts. He looked round to see who had jostled him and saw his friend, Kaz.
"Hey there! What's up?" said Kaz. He was actually named Charles, and came from...had come from New Glasgow, back when Earth still was habitable. Shawne grinned widely.
"Well, we're out on the open...sand...and everything's going fine," he said, glancing down through the 'glass' floor at the view from below the hovercraft. "Anything special going on?"
"No, not yet. But we've got something planned for this evening. Want to come to the observation gallery at about twelve?"
"Fine by me - I really don't need sleep!" he said. Sleep was just the thing he did need, he thought sourly. Fifty hours of solid patrolling gives a person one mighty headache. "Well, I'll see you there."
Shawne blinked out of the simulator, returning to his tank 'body' in the deep, dark hold of the hover transport.

"Incoming transmission! Incoming transmission!" squawked the console next to Saul, and he punched the 'receive' button. A holographic image shot up from a flat grey panel on the slim console, a woman in uniform and also in distress. The whole left side of her face was scorched, and her biosuit was responding stiffly. From outside came a massive explosion and she winced. For a moment the room she was in was lit by fiery light, but nothing happened.
"This is an emergency transmission," said the woman. More explosions came from outside. "We are Secondary Base 3, on the Northern Landmass at these coordinates." As a row of coordinates appeared on the screen, Saul scribbled them hastily down.
"We were attacked twelve minutes ago, by a small CORE force. We expected our defenses to deal with them, but they blasted through. I'm the only one left - Sub-Commander Janet Falkner. Please help... Even if you can't help, wipe the CORE from here. There's something about this site we're meant to..."
She was cut off as a Pyro marched through the door and sent a short stream of plasma towards the SC. Her face was momentarily lit by the sun-hot plasma before it was blackened and shrivelled under the intense heat. Half a second later she was gone.
Saul punched the cutoff as the screen dissolved into twisting static and swore as he rushed inside.

"David, we've got to do something about this base. Look at this." Saul accessed the transmission and played it to David, who looked on in silence. Finally, he spoke.
"What about Commander Kalomar?"
"What about him?" said Saul. "Ahhh yes. He's just been waiting for this, hasn't he?"
"Well, yes. That's about it, really."
"Revenge, huh?" Saul looked thoughtful. "Well, I think revenge is what he'll get. Do you think that a small CORE attack team could bust a base's defenses?"
"Hell, no."
"See what I mean? There must have been something else - fire support or something. And why would CORE want the base, anyway? Remember she said there was something about the site..."
"And I'd bet Kalomar would do almost anything to get his hands on that something."

The hovertransport threw up a trail of spray behind it as it roared towards the beach, massive jets flaring. The sound was deafening as the transport powered up the wet sand of the narrow beach, finally coming to rest near to a rocky outcrop from the pass beyond. The sun was just setting behind the range of mountains as the huge cargo doors opened and the hovercraft sighed onto the firm beach.
Anti-aircraft were the first to emerge, scanning the sky for any sign of the enemy. After them came the mobile radar jammers, then the radar trucks. A low hum echoed across the darkening beach as radar dishes rotated, scanning the sea for invaders. KBots poured out of the hovercraft's side access ramps while tanks were lifted, ten at a time, by the powerful magnetic clamps of the loading arm, their tracks sinking into the yielding sand.
The last things to come, set down in a circle of Goliaths, were six Construction KBots and two Advanced Construction KBots. They started work on reclaiming the transport, stripping away the reactors, engines, the outer skin, until all that was left was the skeleton. Nanobots ate away at that, too, returning engorged with metal to their hosts. Finally the skeleton disappeared, and nanolathes flicked off as the invasion force started to move slowly up the beach, radar jammers setting the pace and leaving deep tracks in the sand.
Soon, the beach was empty, lit only by silvery moonlight, and the only sound was the sea lapping on the sand. In the mountain pass, the glow of headlights could be seen...

Shawne rumbled on ceaselessly, rolling at the head of the crocodile of units. The twenty Goliaths surrounded the fragile units on the inside of the group, the radar and radar jamming units innermost. Around them were arrayed anti-aircraft units - Crashers and Slashers, together with two Copperheads - and one Hedgehog mobile anti-nuke. The Hedgehog had been working constantly while begin transported, building its vital protection. Currently it was closed up, but the computers inside it were analysing radar data to find the energy signature of a missile.
But the radar jammers spun on, undisturbed by anything except night birds and scurrying animals, and the CORE units advanced.

Twenty Pterodacyls stood on the launch pad in moonlight, waiting to take off. Their pilots ran to the waiting planes, climbing into the small cockpit atop the body bristling with weaponry. Two missile racks and a rocket/torpedo launcher had been added, together with even heavier jets. The reactor had been upgraded to deal with the raw power needed to move the behemoth of a plane, so the body had swollen in size, now three times the length and twice the width of the original.
Canopies opened silently and pilots in biosuits vaulted into the cockpits, biosuits boosting the jump. Eighty jets of flame scorched the launch pad, disturbing the silence of the night, and twenty shadows rose, almost hidden by clouds of smoke lit from within by jet nozzles and landing lights. As the aircraft rose, the four main engines came online, tipping the planes back for an instant before a roar split the sky and the aircraft were gone. The silence was pierced only by the scream of far-off engines, and soon even that was gone.

The last Cheetah sighed into life and floated, almost ghostlike, off the hovercraft platform. Fans whirring, it glided past the rest of the hovercraft and came to a gentle stop, its jets still unlit. In response to a silent signal, forty hovercraft stopped engines and sank slowly to the ground, as a roar indicated the arrival of air transports. Heavy clamps extended, the transports washed flame over the scene as engines roared to compensate for the weight of the Cheetahs. When all hovercraft were in the air, the transports rose, engines screaming under the load. Flames sputtered out of the engines as they tilted towards the horizontal and pushed the transports onwards.

Elsewhere in the base, three advanced vehicle plants shut down and their units rolled out of them, waiting Valkyries picking them up and gliding off with white-hot jets of flame illuminating the scene. Ten huge barrels were visible under a group of transports - Pillagers. The other transports held Diplomats, their rocket launchers closed to the cool night air, while four transports carried advanced construction vehicles. A rumble of jets announced the arrival of ten construction aircraft, nanolathes retracted and jet engines glowing. The bulbous aircraft followed the Valkyries over the mountains while black dots that were Vamps rocketed overhead...

Part 18

The Valkyries cut engines one mile away from the chokepoint and unloaded each unit, the Cheetahs roaring into life before concealing themselves behind boulders and in caves. The Pillagers and Diplomats were dropped off on top of the high mountains, locked down by drillclamps, while the planes hid behind the hills. Radar jammer arials rotated, spinning silence into the air while radar dishes scanned for enemies.
There was no sound in the narrow valley apart from a low hum from the jammers. Reactors had been shut down and cooling systems concealed IR signatures as the forces waited...

Three hours later a rumble in the distance echoed through the clear, cool night and through Milo's binoculars he could see the lead tanks rolling over the stream that marked the beginning of the chokepoint. He looked around and silently signalled the nineteen troops behind him to move out. Twenty dark shadows, invisible to radar and IR, ran swiftly out of hiding and moved into position behind boulders and trees. Milo hid behind a scrawny bush as the lead Goliath moved into the clearing, sensors scanning. He dropped to all fours and scrambled out of cover, the Goliath only twelve feet away. He lay on his back in front of the tank, holding magnetic clamps out above him. He closed his eyes and steadied himself...here it comes...

Shawne couldn't sense anything out of the ordinary. He adjusted his steering slightly to compensate for a tree near him and rolled on, his treads crushing small rocks and bushes. There was little scenery, bushes and trees looking grey in the moonlight...

He heard the thrum of the tank's motors directly above him now and opened his eyes to see the armoured underside of the tank. Raising his hands to touch the grey armour, the clamps attached with a 'clang'. Milo looked frantically round but no-one had seen him. He jerked his feet up and the climbing magnets thunked onto the tank's hull as he slid towards the access hatch at the back of the tank...

Xavier watched the image from the Fink flying high overhead and gasped. The army was not huge but he had never seen anything so large before. The Fink put a targetting spot on the Hedgehog, flashing a high-priority message. Orders scrolled in from the Commander, his transport less than three miles away. They were to attack the anti-aircraft first, then the radar jammers. After that, they were to simply serve as ground support and airborne spotters, but they were free to fire at anything except the Hedgehog. That was all the orders they got, as the connection closed.
As the display flashed a countdown, every unit in the ambush warmed up at once. The countdown started at 10...
9...
8...
7...
   Xavier pushed his throttle up, spinning the massive jets to operational speed...
6...
   Behind him he could hear the scream of Vamp turbothrusters, and his vision was illuminated by the white-hot engines...
5...
   On the radar map he could see signals flicking up briefly to indicate tanks warmed up. The biosuited guerilla warfare soldiers radioed an "A-OK" as the countdown continued...
4...
3...
2...
1...
0 - EXECUTE!
Every pilot pushed their throttle through the detents into afterburner, jets of flame gushing out of flared exhausts and turning night into day. The Vamps shot off over Xavier's head as the Pterodactyls lifted off with ease, weapons arming. Xavier's flight couch sank into its armoured capsule as he extended the weapons pods. His targetting AI reported OK and the anti-aircraft cannons spun briefly. His laser unfolded, coils glowing with energy. As the four turbofans came online, they pushed the large black planes to full speed. Shadows sped over the hills as thunder echoed through the air. The trap had been sprung...

The guerillas scrambled back into the undergrowth as forty explosions signalled the end of the Goliaths. TCU javelins punched through the reactor cores as limpet mines detonated, the white-hot plasma fountaining out of the tanks through ragged gashes. The fireball swept surrounding units down, but from the expanding gases rushed forty vehicles, illuminated by the hellish light from the explosion. Laserfire erupted from the vehicles, as they bounced over the terrain with ease. In the distance a unit exploded, parts flying and glowing shrapnel clattering to the ground.
But the ambushers were not going to be defeated that easily. At a signal, camoflage nets fell off twelve squat Guardians half-way down the valley, plasma fire ringing out as shells sped towards the invading units. Fiery explosions pierced the cool night air as plasma splashed over the units, buring through armour and electronics. Firing ceased for a moment as three guerillas rushed into the group of units, dashing round vehicles with long strides. Rolling underneath the Hedgehog, Milo blew the access hatch off with a small shaped charge, climbing into the shady space inside. Around him he could hear screeches as anti-aircraft missiles lifted off, and booms echoed out from tanks. He looked around the cramped space inside the Hedgehog, grinning as he saw the utterly useless missile launcher above him, two massive missiles on a rail next to it.
Then he turned back to his main task, taking out a slim nanolathe from his backpack and aiming it at the control computer. Nanobots streamed out, the first wave blasting minute holes in the mainframe's tough casing before the second wave crawled inside. The nanolathe stopped, its program over. Now he plugged two leads from the computer into his nanolathe, the nanobots activating the pattern storage utility and downloading the pattern into his own computer. As the pattern download ended he jacked in himself, his view swtiching to that of the external camera. He quickly radioed the Commander, sending him the Hedgehog's IFF code. Fire stopped around the bulky vehicle as it rolled out of the group.

Sarah put the 'Dactyl into a vertical dive, her bomb-bay opening as the wind screamed past. A large dart-like object slipped out, the wind buffeting it as Sarah pulled up sharply. The 'Dactyl shot up at an angle, barrel-rolling to avoid a flak shell. It shot past her and exploded, a red-streaked Vamp disappearing in a cloud of shrapnel. The bomb landed on the single Copperhead, shaped charges in its nose punching through its layers of armour. Finally the main explosives detonated with a rumble and the flak vehicle was ripped apart by the explosion, its Heavy Armour disintegrating under the blast. Sarah swerved around a rapidly rising gun barrel before looping round again.
Her Gauss rifles spun up, a stream of TCU darts erupting from the clusters of barrels. Sonic booms bounced off the mountains as the darts sped towards a Crasher, ripping through its missile pods. An explosion rocked the 'Dactyl as a mobile artillery exploded below, but the Crasher was already dead as stray rounds pockmarked the ground.

Saul swung his laser turret round and fired at one of the laser vehicles, shearing off a wheel. The vehicle ploughed into the ground, sparks flying as the axle skidded along bare rock. Lasers ripped into the light armour and the vehicle turned into a cloud of gas. Saul ignited boosters and spun the hovercraft round to rake another vehicle with metre-long Gauss rounds. The TCU bolts passed straight through the laser turret atop the thing, sparks running over the hull as the reactor malfunctioned. Seconds later it detonated, leaving only a crater behind.
As Saul sped backwards, he pushed the throttles to full, toasting a Slasher that had driven behind him. The hovercraft smashed into the wreckage at a hundred mph, the engines screaming as flames licked the scrap metal.
He swore violently as the Cheetah rocketed off again, spinning wildly as it impacted with shrapnel. He steadied the vehicle and sent a hail of Gauss rounds into three mobile artilleries. A chain reaction took them out with a boom, fragments spanging off the outer hull of the Cheetah. Saul looked at his virtual readouts as a klaxon sounded in his mind. The hovercraft tilted alarmingly as he roared off into the distance, a construction aircraft coming to meet him with nanolathe extended.
As he slowed, Saul looked at the battle raging in the distance. In front of him, he could see the captured Hedgehog sitting still and lifeless, a Valkyrie maneuvering into position over it. Clamps extended and gripped the sides of the bulbous vehicle, the transport's engines whining as it took the strain. Then he was at full heath again and he pushed the Cheetah to full speed again.
Speeding back to battle, Saul wondered about the new vehicles he had seen. What the hell were they? he thought. They look like they're meant to counter the Cheetahs... I bet Milo managed to get one back here, thought Saul with a chuckle. A shape loomed up in front of him and he saw one of the laser vehicles bouncing off the battlefield, slightly damaged. He checked the IFF and laughed. It was Milo!
Saul opened a radio channel. "Hey there!" he said.
The radio crackled for a moment then Milo came on. "What do you think of my new toy? Very nice and fast, too."
Saul laughed. "Do you need an escort? I'm free at the moment."
"Not really - Kalomar wanted one of these to study. I've got to take it to the firebase to load up."
"OK, then." Saul closed the link and sped back to the skirmish.

Sharon Wright sped towards the Cheetah, readying her laser. She touched the suspension control, boosting the left side. Her Striker leapt sideways, balloon tyres narrowly missing the two Gauss rounds that sped underneath her as she crashed down again. She fired the laser as she skidded to a stop in front of the Cheetah, her vehicle rocking as the hovercraft slammed into it. The Cheetah flipped over and flew overhead, landing twenty feet away, upside down and with twelve holes in it. She sped over and fired the lasers until her reactor beeped a warning at her.
 As she raced away she could see the Cheetah's jets flaring as it skidded along the rocks, finally smashing into the hillside. A rock landed on top of it, finally ending the pilot's torment as an explosion erupted from the middle of the hovercraft. Sharon bounced over another wrecked hovercraft as a heavy rocket thundered down behind her, the explosion making the suspension creak in protest as the Striker's nose touched the ground. A Gauss round punctured one of her reinforced tyres, exiting through the other side of the wheel-pod. As the Striker fishtailed along the ground, she saw the Cheetah topple into the crater left by the rocket, exploding as it reached the bottom.

John swore shakily as he fired the braking jets. His Cheetah slowed just in front of the massive hole, and it slewed round, finally stopping just on the edge. He released his pent-up breath in a gasp and activated his jets just as a red-hot gun barrel flew out of a nearby explosion and he toppled over the brink, his escape pod activating just as the hovercraft exploded. He blacked out as the armoured capsule shot out almost horizontally, bouncing off a cliff before coming to rest inside the firebase...

Part 19

John crawled out of the capsule, his leg broken and fiery, agonizing pain flashing his vision red. He could see the polished white bone sticking out of a tear in his trouser leg, blood around it looking dark grey in the moonlight. He had used the medilathe on it but it had only enough to stop bleeding and start healing the wound - the energy had run out as it started to nanolathe new bones. In the distance he could see the battle. Despite the superior units and pilots of Kalomar's attackers, the battle was being lost as the light fast units were swatted by lasers from the vehicles.
 The new laser vehicles were a success - too much of a success - for the CORE. They simply downed the Cheetahs like flies. The air units were still there, but almost all the 'Dactyls were gone now, knocked out of the sky by lasers or plasma fire. Vamps circled like vultures or buzzing flies, swooping occasionally to loose missiles into the raging fight below. He just managed to register yet another explosion as he blacked out from the pain.

He came to on the back of a Reaper, his pain gone. He looked down, his head leaden and heavy, and his leg was healed. Had reinforcements arrived in time or was this the other CORE? He was confused. He was fighting for CORE and against CORE... As he thought about this he passed out.

He awoke to the sound of laserfire. The laser vehicles were circling the battlefield and mopping up. As he watched, there was a sudden massive explosion and he could see a fireball erupting from the other end of the valley. He remembered the captured Hedgehog and grinned. Only it could have made that blast... set off by the laser vehicles, no doubt. Well, good luck to them, he thought as a radar jammer was bowled over by the shockwave, its arial breaking off and bouncing away. A construction Kbot lumbered over to repair it, as the laser vehicles returned from their task.

 Only six Strikers came back out of the forty which had left the transports, and these six were battlescarred and dusty, their hulls no longer reflecting the moonlight. One had a TCU javelin through its hull, electrics sparking around the metre-long metal rod. Another drove up minus its turret and a wheel, the mud-guard-like wheelpod scraping along the ground. Finally the last Striker limped up, trailing a dead soldier behind it. Brown dried blood was spattered on its hull and half of the front end had been sliced off. Shrapnel had pierced the bodywork and sparks skittered over the hull as motors smoked and whined.
And it was over. Trailing black, oily smoke, the column of units, now greatly shrunk, moved on past wreckage, to its final goal...

The only Galactic Gate on the planet sparked and sputtered, ragged holes in the massive structure showing huge coils, glowing with energy. It was fully charged, the energy stored almost a thousand years old. The Gate had been built far underground, near a geothermal vent capped by a generator. Only now had the energy built up to such a degree that it could be used, and even then the damage caused by a rockfall years ago would almost guarantee something went wrong. But now someone was daring to use it...
Lights lit up on the control panel and the Gate started to hum as long-forgotten circuits energised. The Gate had been a direct link to Empyrrean, built by the CORE for a final assault on the planet. But it was discovered and surrounded with defenses - pop-up cannons first, then Annihilators, then a lone Vulcan - by the Arm. Still, the Gate had not been destroyed just in case the Arm ever needed it.
Peter-29984, the Gate's resident Pattern, woke up slowly and did the mental equivelant of a stretch. He had 'slept' in the Gate for more than two thousand years, never awakening. His organic avatar body had decayed millenia ago, but over the years his system had accumalated information. Things like nanolathe blueprints, information about projects and assaults, all sent by tachyon pulse from HQ to his system and from there by hyper-space pulse to CORE Prime. He had stored things over the years that even Commanders had not heard about. But for now the first thing to do was to get back into shape.
Peter called the Construction Kbot over to him, the squat form waddling over and extending its nanolathe. It sprayed nanolathes over Pater's 'body', soothing and cool, and he relaxed under the greenish glowing stream. He idly flicked through his memories, looking at what amounted to the news. He took in CORE's decision to enforce pattern limitations, their conquest of the galaxy, the thoughtless wiping out of alien species. He looked at everything. Then something caught his eye. It was a nanolathe blueprint... for something called a General...
As the repairs stopped he opened the blueprint and looked at the specifications. The General was to have been the replacement for the Commander battlesuit, together with three other suits, never made, called the Admiral, the Sub-Commander and the Air Commander. All four were to be built in a structure called a Battlesuit Gantry - Peter scanned the records for this but didn't find anything - and were essentially upgraded Commander suits.
The General was just a Commander with the nanolathe, cloaking device and D-Gun but with a medium plasma cannon instead of light laser. The Sub-Commander was a smaller, lighter Commander without a cloaking device but with all the other trappings. The Admiral was a naval-series Commander, designed to be able to swim, but otherwise the same as a General. Finally, the Air Commander was a 'flying Commander suit', more like an aircraft with the Commander's capabilities built in and much lighter armour.
While he read the blueprints he scanned the records for any sign of these four suits. In an ancient file, lodged deep in CORE Prime's archives, he found them - nanolathe blueprints for a Commander Gantry. It had a note attached - "See Krogoth Gantry". Peter, curious, looked up the Krogoth Gantry and gasped at the sight.
Aboandoning all attempts at clever strategy, the CORE had just gone mad. They had designed a massive KBot, about three times the height of the Commander and with an incredible amount of armour, and they had given it as much weaponry as possible. Peter called up the model. It looked even scarier now he knew what it could do. The Commanders which had looked so imposing now looked positively weedy by comparison. As for the A.K., which Peter had inhabited years ago, well, it looked like a gnat compared to this behemoth.
Peter went back to the news again, satisfied there was nothing else to look at. Finally he saw an item from the international news, attached to a note saying it was to be censored and the writers terminated. He read it with disbelief.
"CORE the merciless?
"Today the CORE achieved an all-time record. It wiped out twelve planets in one day, each one with a small population of anti-patterning campaigners. The rest of the inhabitants were blameless civilians, slaughtered in the name of eternal life. When asked, an unnamed source in the CORE blamed the recently-built Central Consciousness for the increased brutality of the CORE. Later this source was found to be dead, when the CORE found out his comment..."
Peter cut off the report and turned to the messages he had compiled. He looked for any mentioning 'planet' as well as any word meaning 'destroy'. As the search results came in he was almost overwhelmed. 227 planets in the last 10 years alone were destroyed by the CORE, only 2 having an entire population objecting to Patterning. Maybe one case of setting an example might be acceptable, he thought, but *227*?
He sighed. Now I see the viewpoint of the Arm, he thought sadly. Why can't I do anything? He replied to himself as he realised. Well, *why* can't I do anything? There's no reason why I can't simply join the Arm...
But a bit of his mind longed to do it in *style*. Calling the Construction KBot over, Peter started a project which would eventually become legend...

Commander Tallman looked again with disbelief at the orders which had just come through for him. Now he knew why they had taken so many units to somewhere in the middle of no-where.
"Commander Tallman - your orders are to build a base at the coordinates which will follow. Build as large a base as possible, with the best defenses you can get. Once your base is built - and no earlier - drill down at the second set of coordinates."
Two sets of coordinates were provided with the message. But it was the second part that sent him reeling.
"When you have drilled down, capture the Galactic Gate and repair it to full strength. Raise it to the surface - we are going to invade Empyrrean.
"General Martin out."
 
Part 20

A base was beginning to take place above what Tallman knew to be the only surviving CORE gate to Empyrrean. He aimed his nanolathe at a half-built GAAT gun and started to assist in its construction. He looked at what was soon going to be the site of an invasion, at the cleared ground on which buildings were taking shape. As he watched, a vehicle factory came on line and started to churn out construction vehicles to help the sole construction KBot that had survived the ambush. It rolled over to a clear piece of land and sprayed nanobots into the air, the miniscule robots fusing together to form a glowing skeleton of an advanced vehicle plant. More nanobots crawled over the structure, solid surfaces spreading inwards from the thin supporting wireframe. The metal built up from the bottom up, the vehicle moving round the structure and spraying nanobots as it went. Finally the laser tower was finished, its turret scanning the horizon as Tallman walked over to assist the construction vehicle with the advanced vehicle plant.

Almost a mile below the surface, Peter had set up something almost resembling a base. Using prototypes for underground units, he had designed support pillars and props to stop the roof falling, while the lone construction Kbots built an advanced KBot lab. Not very long ago it had hollowed out a gigantic hollow with its nanolathe, extracting metal and minerals from the rock and storing them. A network of concrete pillars stretched from ceiling to floor, and more geothermal plants had been constructed over the myriad geothermal vents that shot through holes in the rock.
As the advanced KBot lab came online with a rumble, the CKBot moved off to create an aircraft plant, while the AKL unfolded to nanolathe an advanced CKBot. Peter would have smiled, had he had a face, at the way things werea ll going so well...

The three Pterodactyls that were left slowly cruised back to base, thick black smoke pouring out of damaged engines. The large aircraft flew next to twenty Valkyries carrying Pillagers and Diplomats - all of the fire-support vehicles had come back alive - and a single Vamp which was perched atop a Valkyrie. The Vamp was minus one wing and all of its tail, and was scorched by fire. Somehow it had managed to crashland on the Valkyrie's hull, skidding to a stop on the wide back of the transport. The fires were now out and a construction aircraft was spraying the aircraft with nanobots, almost building a new plane, there was so little left of the original.
The plan had failed miserably. The new laser vehicles had not been anticipated. Commander Kalomar could have kicked himself for not realising the CORE would dream up a counter for the Cheetahs. Now so many people had died, Arm and CORE alike, real people and not 'just' patterns. Real flesh and blood soldiers, vaporised, crushed, ripped, slashed and mutilated by an everlasting war. Kalomar sighed as he thought of the origins of the war - an invention which was intended to stop suffering, to grant eternal life and to solve all of humanity's problems. A bit of misplaced business sense on someone's part and suddenly Patterning was an outrage...
Then Kalomar knew what he had to do. He had to stop this war, once and for all...

Peter looked back on the speech he had written, his first address to the survivors of a war that had begun millenia ago and would rage for millenia unless he stopped it. "I come in peace," his voice boomed, the avatar's voice deep and resonant. He laughed silently at the old phrase, but he meant it. "People of the war, you must not fight. You will simply destroy yourself in the end. You are all creations of a war fought over kindness, a pointless war. The war has ravaged almost the entire galaxy, yet you still fight. The war has slaughtered countless billions, has consumed the resources of a million worlds, and all for what? All to support what is now a feud - without meaning. You simply fight because you were created to fight.
"But we must have peace! Or very soon nothing will be left of us. Peace is the only solution to any conflict - peace or utter destruction. Which will you choose?"
As he finished, he sensed a radio link opening to him. The sound of clapping came through, and he could hear someone whistling. It sounded slightly mechanical, and Peter suddenly realised that everyone in the underground chamber was looking at him. He laughed. "That's it, then!"
All the construction units went back to work, but the radio link stayed open. "Good speech, Peter," came a voice. "If they don't blast you into dust, you might just win them over!" It was Paul, his best friend. He was a construction Kbot, but he had left his Kbot with a queue of build orders and transferred into a regular avatar. "Since when were you a speech-writer?"
Peter smiled. "Ever since I had to do a lecture in front of the class at uni! The lecturer was fed up with me playing around and not paying any attention. He organised for me to deliver a lecture to the class - see how hard it was. I enjoyed it, too."
It was Paul's turn to smile, now. "Well, I hope you have success. Just try not to get killed."

Through real-space the bulky ship ploughed, seemingly coming out of nowhere, on its way between the solar systems. The rent in space that had oopened behind it closed with a soundless flash of pure white light as the ship slowed from its headlong plunge through not-space. As it paid a brief visit to the real world, a scoop unfolded and collected interstellar hydrogen as the ship's FTL-drive engines shimmered, not looking quite as solid as they should.
The engines glowed and if you could have heard them through the vacuum, they would be whining as energy built up and two beams of utter nothingness shot ahead of the ship. The beams met at a point some twenty miles ahead of the spacecraft, a tear opening up in space, almost two-dimensional, seeming to have no thickness.
Nothing swirled or pulsated inside the gaping maw, only the absence of anything - somehow much scarier than anything existing in the universe. The ship plunged towards the infinite blackness of the hole in space and disappeared with a burst of energy, soaring like an overgrown bird through hyperspace...

A scream in the atmosphere and a glowing streak plunged with terrifying speed towards the swirling clouds below. Prehistoric-looking airborne animals scatter, petrified, out of the way of the object hurtling through the air, some not quite quick enough. The rushing wind roared as it rattled the frail-looking conical craft, hull glowing red-hot as friction created massive heat.  Shrieking, the capsule spiralled towards a jet flying on a recon mission, turbulence buffeting the lightweight fighter.
The pilot looked up...then down as the capsule shot by, simply a blur of motion past the aircraft's nose. He activated the base radio...

A single Fink, flying in the clouds in preparation for an airborne sweep, detected a fast-moving object on its long-range radar. The patterned mind was surprised for a moment then read the heat-signature. Typical of a meteor, said the Fink pilot's databases, so she let it go and kept on flying. The pilot recorded the object and prepared to dive for a photo mission, over a piece of terrain supposedly containing a renegade Commander's base. As the aircraft roared out of the clouds it suddenly disintegrated into shrapnel, the engines detatching and continuing on the plane's original course as the reactor core exploded below.
The capsule continued on its way...

The ship's AI minds, three of them, registered the capsule's collision. A signal came back from the computers inside the capsule - in reality a landing craft - noting a very small amount of damage. The AIs authorised the release of nanobots for repair, and seconds later the computers reported damage repaired. Statistics showed the capsule was almost landed, the heat-shield all but burnt away from the re-entry. The AI responsible for piloting the landing craft activated a control and six high-temperature alloy 'wings' folded out from the capsule's hull, catching the air and slowing the glowing craft. As the lander slowed to a manageable speed a parachute deployed, then another, then finally retro-jets emerged, slowing the capsule to a lazy few hundred mph. The AIs sat back, pleased with their work, as the capsule swung slowly towards the muddy ground below...
 
Part 21

The capsule lay hissing, the hot metal slowly cooling, in a boggy forested area. It had crushed trees under it, and now the capsule was on the ground, the scale of it could be properly seen. The capsule was easily fifty feet long and twenty feet high, conical for the least air resistance. As the muddy water of the bog splashed and spat off the sides, twelve balloons inflated, bouncing the capsule upright. As it tottered and steadied, the point of the cone aiming towards the sky, explosions could be heard inside it and one whole quarter of the cone blew out, the ends of explosive bolts clearly visible. Inside, more bolts blew and the capsule shook as something inside it freed itself. From the dark inside of the capsule emerged a massive thick arm with a light laser mounted on it, before the gigantic bulk of an Arm Commander stepped into the patchy sunlight...

Its function fulfilled, the spacecraft started to consume itself from within, nanolathes working to reclaim metal and other minerals, the drive cores being jettisoned into space where they disappeared in a flash of white light. After three hours, most of the external spacecraft was gone, only a skeleton left. One hour later, the only thing remaining where the spacecraft had been was a small asteroid, made entirely of metal and with a small specialised construction vehicle stored inside for whenever it might be needed. Finally the AIs shut down, safe in the knowledge that the Commander was on Pearl at last...

The derrick was fully upright now, its structure just cooling. The thick energy-landlines from the local power sources were in place and the energy was flowing freely. Commander Tallman activated the drill with a thought and turned away from the rattling derrick. He walked to the top of a small rise, his battlesuit responding well today, and gazed over his based. Only a day or two ago, this had been simply waste ground. It was a testament to the power of the nanolathe that the waste ground had been transformed into a massive, fully self-sufficient base.
Goliaths passed him on a patrol, their armour gleaming in the sun as their steel treads squeaked and rattled by. The Commander battlesuit wasa n imposing sight, seen against the bright sunlight...

The Arm Commander sent out a Flea scout unit, built from a mini-factory he had built with the remains of the capsule. It was equipped only for Fleas, but would come in useful. The tiny KBot bounced out of the clearing, camoflage rendering it invisible as it scuttled into the undergrowth, its laser folded away.
The Commander smiled inside his case of metal and force-field armour, his body weakened but kept alive by the support systems inside his suit. The Commander had not been out of this suit for more than eight hundred years, his frail body too fragile to support itself without a lot of help.
Through the faceplate his wrinkled eyes stared, defects cured by medical nanolathes and skin kept healthy by growth hormones and chemical stimulants. But this would be his last mission before he was 'retired' into peaceful senility somewhere on Empyrrean.
For the 225th time, he checked his D-Gun and his light laser, sighing at the inadequacy of the weapon. He was in the most powerful battle system in the universe, equipped with the largest nanolathe and the most destructive weapon ever, and able to build a military complex in a matter of hours...yet he was equipped with only a light laser for his personal defense?
He thought he had heard about something called the 'Commander Project', something to do with the CORE. That was it, the CORE had been working on promoting Commanders - special, better frames. How he'd love to be CORE...
But the hatred in his chest overwhelmed his desire and he bent to his task, erasing all traces of thought from his head. Better to be mindless, unthinking. Thoughts lead to emotions and emotions lead to betrayal, repeated his mind, the far-off words of his tutors still echoing there.
Back when they still had tutors...
Commander Alsen Hargerard was almost fifteen hundred years old - he would be celebrating his one thousand, four hundred and eighty-first birthday tommorow. Alone, of course... all the people he knew were dead or in the CORE now. Including all his family...
That was why he fought for the Arm. His family. His poor family... Him...

"Mole 5 here, Peter. The tunnel's about half-way there, and we should be completed by tommorow. What's things like down there?"
"Fine, John. Just fine...I've almost got my new body now!"
"Great. Any chance that I could get one?"
"Yes, there is, actually. There's a Sub-Commander suit that's available...it's really just a smaller, lighter Commander suit without a cloaking device. You've got the D-Gun, though - I think that's enough to get you jumping for joy!"
"Definately! When can I get it?"
Peter laughed. The former Galactic Gate commander was about to become remembered as the only person to succeed at stopping the war. He closed the radio connection to Mole 5, John Brave. John was another of his friends, an old pal from school. They had met ages ago and hit off immediately. Now John was due to be another sub-commander, his fourth. He broke off his chain of thought as a note told him that the General suit was now built and ready to go. The Gantry had already built 3 Air Commanders and was starting on the Sub-Commander suits. The Naval Commanders would not be built until needed.

"What's that noise?"
Peter looked up, the massive head of the General tilting towards the roof of the cavern. He could see the ceiling shaking now. There was something up there.
"Peter! Help...something..." It was John. As Peter keyed the radio link open he heard a scream then a wet gurgle. The cavern vibrated as John's Mole exploded and trickles of earth and debris poured from the roof.
"Moles 1 through 4, go put up some roof supports. Sprayers 2 and 3, get working! I want that ceiling re-polymerised in ten minutes." Peter did not pause in his work as he silently mourned for his friend. That was the end of trying to keep the peace, he thought. He was going to *war*...

"What's that, Sergeant? I thought I heard something."
The sergeant in command of the drill looked up at Commander Tallman. "Nothing much, sir - the drill bit hit something. A metal deposit, I think. Slight damage from underground gas, the nanobots are working their way down as I speak, sir."
"You sure? And I mean absolutely sure?"
"Yessir."

"Are all the Air Commanders ready? And the transports?"
"Yes, sir. All Air Commanders ready, energy at full operational level. Enough for 100 D-Gun bolts per second, sir."
"Let's go..."
200 massive bolts of pure, concentrated energy leapt from the D-Guns of Peter's Commanders, the uncontrolled energy ripping apart the atomic structure of the earth above them. The entire ceiling disappeared, billions of tons of earth and solid rock turning into hydrogen, deuterium and free energy. The Sprayers immediately jumped in, nanolathing a superhardened polymer mesh onto the ceiling with long-range nanolathes as roof supports took shape.
Ten Air Commanders activated jet engines and roared into the air, strafing the ceiling with orange-hued bolts, creating a massive tunnel. The Sprayers kept going as the Air Commanders advanced, and Peter looked on in satisfaction, a frown on his face as he remembered his dead friend...

"SERGEANT!" yelled Tallman over the din of the derrick. The drill was shaking and rattling, and he could see flames erupting from the top of the motors as they overloaded.
"SIR? WHAT'S HAPPENING?"
"THAT'S WHAT I WANTED TO KNOW! COME ON!" The Commander led the bewildered Sergeant away from the derrick, sprinting along the flat rocky ground. The Sergeant's Tech frame flailed behind him, held by its torso by the massive Commander battlesuit. Behind Tallman, the derrick collapsed in a shower of sparks, the energy conduits crackling with sparks before bursting into flames. Far off on the other side of the base, the transformer and energy buffer for the derrick exploded violently, showering the base with shrapnel from it and the structures surrounding it. The air was filled with black, greasy smoke as the Commander dived for a trench.
Just in time, as a fusion reactor exploded, containment field weakened by flying shrapnel. As Commander Tallman looked on his base, the ground crumbled and out came the unimaginable...

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A Soldier's Life was written by CamTarn / Andy Walker

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