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Subject: "(EX) Operation Archangel 4: Trojan Horsemen"     Previous Topic | Next Topic
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Nov-27-12, 08:21 PM (EDT)
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"(EX) Operation Archangel 4: Trojan Horsemen"
 
  
Saturday, November 9, 2289
71 Centauri system
Centaurus sector_

Bu-55C 33a94c8f and the rest of its squad stood in formation at the Avenger's central docking bay entry port and waited for the ship's automatic capture systems to finish their work on the Minuteman Nine. Like all the Boomer® brand bioroids in Needa's force, 33a and its squad had never been allowed to develop true sapience or emotional responses, so they couldn't be said to be anticipating the operation to come. Like the automatons they were, they were just waiting until the signal to proceed.

EXCERPT FROM JANE'S FIGHTING STARSHIPS, Spring 2289: Though there are sapient Boomers within the Corporation, none are to be found in the Military Arm. For reasons known only to the Master, they're deemed unsuitable for such tasks and restricted to the strictly corporate side of the operation. This means that of the thousands upon thousands of Boomer crew members who pack the ships of an average MILARM task force, not a single one has ever gone more than two weeks without a memory wipe and a careful screening for any positronic anomalies whatever. A positive result on this screening would lead immediately to the scrapping tanks, where the unit's mass would be recycled into (most of) the raw material for a replacement.

On the flip side, all this robotic manpower means that the fleet requires only a handful of actual sapient beings to operate it. The officers and a few key crewmen on each vessel are organics, mostly humans. Everyone else is a Boomer - competent, efficient, requiring no medical attention, and completely without the capacity to complain or shirk, their situational awareness enhanced by an instantaneous subether intranet that links every crewbot to every other in the fleet. In this way, Largo managed to build and staff his company's enormous space navy in almost complete secrecy: secrecy that would have been impossible if the hundreds of thousands of crew the enterprise required had had to be recruited and trained in the normal way.

The Central Command System of GENOM's largest vessels and the task forces whose flagships they are is a marvel of modern military automation. It makes GENOM's ships and fleets the most easily managed, most tightly coordinated combat units in space. Early on, a few of us in the aerospace press speculated that this same centralization might be a weakness as well, but after considering the security measures in place aboard GENOM flagships, we're forced to discard the possibility. By the very nature of the medium, the subethernet is completely unbreachable from outside the system. In order to compromise the computers of an Imperator-class Star Destroyer, the attacker would have to be on board already - and with nearly ten thousand armed and armored Boomers ready to hunt down and exterminate any intruder, that is clearly a ridiculous idea.

As the Avenger's tractor array moved the Minuteman Nine into position, the Star Destroyer's universal docking capture arm swung out and sought the corvette's docking collar. Like all GENOM ships' docking arms, the Avenger's was designed much more robustly than the civilian versions, intended as it was to dock with ships whose crews might well not want a Star Destroyer to dock with their vessel. It locked into place around the CR90's entry port, articulated claws deploying automatically to grab hold of hardpoints.

Inside the collar itself, the Avenger's computer systems linked up with those of the Minuteman Nine through a pair of hardline connectors. Like the arm, these were part of the standard docking hardware of almost all ships in the civilized galaxy, though - again in anticipation of capture by force - the Star Destroyer's hardline plugs were a pair of hardened data spikes driven by pneumatic rams, to defeat the common practice of smugglers to shield their ports with removable or retractable armor. The software the Avenger ran to manage the connections, too, was different from the standard; instead of simply exchanging useful information with the ship's computer in a friendly way, the GENOM docking command system was designed to overwhelm the smaller ship's systems and take control of everything.

Outside, 33a and its squadmates received a signal from Central that the ship had a hard dock with its quarry. Command override was in progress, and the CCS estimated that the Minuteman Nine's hatches would be open in five seconds.

Four seconds later, the system went into a catastrophic cascading failure and the Avenger lost all power for 1.498 seconds.

When the lights came back on, a thunderous drumbeat erupted from PA speakers on every deck and all hell broke loose.

/* Pop Will Eat Itself
"PWEI Is a Four Letter Word"
This Is the Day... This Is the Hour... This Is THIS! (1989) */

In the docking bay, the gravity went out. Before 33a and the other Boomers had a chance to respond to that in any meaningful way, Central Command began bombarding them - and indeed all the Boomers aboard the ship - at high speed with conflicting or meaningless instructions, overloading their command processing buffers and temporariy immobilizing them. Then the hangar deck's atmospheric containment fields shut down, causing an instantaneous explosive decompression which flung most of the paralyzed units there into space.

All over the ship systems went haywire as the CCS went berserk. Doors opened and closed, environmental systems converted compartments into freezers or ovens, the lights strobed crazily. Only the reactor control system in the engine room seemed exempt from the chaos. On the bridge, the few human officers scrambled to try and figure out what was going on as their Boomer crewmates either froze, collapsed, or walked jerkily in circles, their logic systems hopelessly confused.

And, of course, the ship's deflector shields went down, which was just what the crew of one very small spacecraft nearby were waiting for.

/* Pop Will Eat Itself
"Preaching to the Perverted"
This Is the Day... This Is the Hour... This Is THIS! (1989) */

On Deck 5, at the base of the bridge tower, an exterior corridor bulkhead suddenly burst inward, as though someone had driven a giant chisel into the skin of the ship. The point of the chisel, its shining alloy surfaces scraped absolutely clean by its passage through the duranium hull, divided like the petals of an opening flower and spread out on all sides, clamping backward against the inner plating.

By this time the Avenger's automatic safeties were going into action. After severing the hardlines to the Minuteman Nine's poisoned databank, the safety computers started resetting affected systems and regaining control of the ship piecemeal. Unable for the moment to stop the cascade in the Boomer control subsystem, the CCS shut it down altogether, causing all the Boomers aboard the Star Destroyer to fail over to autonomous mode. This reduced their awareness of the bigger picture enormously and their efficiency considerably, but it was better than complete paralysis - and it meant that the dozen or so in the immediate vicinity of the hull breach were able to react, however sluggishly and without coordination, to the intrusion.

The opening wave of the assault was designed to counter that, though. First out of the boarding craft was the five hundred or so pounds of muscle, bone, shotgun, and telekinetic fury that was the last of the Battlemasters of Tuchanka, Urdnot Wrex. Less than a second behind him came Gunnery Sergeant Sir Ashley Williams SC KCOV RSMC, holder of the Shiva Cross for Valor and Knight Companion of the Most Ancient and Exalted Order of Victory: one of Salusia's most decorated soldiers. Eight years of battle alongside - often literally one on either side of - Commander Virginia Shepard of the Normandy had forged the two into an armored spearhead few forces could stand against. A disorganized, disoriented gang of production-model combat Boomers stood no chance at all.

Sixteen seconds after her boots hit the Avenger's deck, Williams ceased firing and cried, "Clear!"

"Clear," Wrex concurred. The two stood at either side of the boarding craft, covering both ends of the corridor, while the rest of their tiny strike force disembarked.

"You OK, Joker?" Alenko asked as he and Liara helped their fragile pilot down the boarding craft's slightly canted ramp.

Joker nodded gamely, wincing slightly as he limped down the ramp. "Couplea broken toes. Nothing serious."

Garrus unracked his sniper rifle and took point as the squad formed up to move into the ship. They'd all studied the Imperator-class deck plans Kevirin'Zorah had scrounged up during the long flight to the Flotilla from Halstead. They all knew exactly where they had to go.

"Kev - time," said Garrus.

Kevirin consulted his helmet's internal chron. "One hundred forty-four seconds," he reported, meaning the time remaining before the Avenger's automatic safeties finished resetting everything and normal service was restored.

"Move out," Garrus said.

Pressed for time but never hurrying, the squad moved through the corridors like a machine, in a variant of the formation they'd used when they stole the Minuteman Nine: Wrex and Williams in the van, Kevirin and Liara covering Joker in the middle, Alenko and Garrus as rearguard. Every corner was reduced, every door breached, with surgical precision. With the Avenger's internal comm system still in disarray, the enemy couldn't coordinate a response, couldn't even realize (as a corporate entity) that the ship had been invaded. Up on the bridge, officers cursed and slammed fists on control boards, helpless to act until the CCS had finished resetting.

One deck below the base of the bridge tower, the three officers of the Command Operations Center hunched over their consoles - Supervisory Lieutenant Carmody at the master console on the upper level, Lieutenants Nelyn and Mogel down in the work pits to his right and left - and struggled valiantly with their malfunctioning systems.

"Whatever it is, it's not in the subether systems," Nelyn reported. "Operations in the rest of the fleet are normal."

"Comms are back," cried Mogel.

"Shut off that damn music," Carmody snapped. "Nelyn, confirm reset of environmental controls."

"That's affirmative, ECS is reset. We lost pressure on the hangar deck, but everything else is - "

"Internal surveillance is back online," Mogel interrupted her. "I've got an anomaly on Deck 5 aft."

"Show me," Carmody said. Mogel put the most relevant holocam's view up in the central display. Carmody frowned thoughfully at what it showed.

"What in the galaxy is that?!" he asked no one in particular.

"I've got Boomer coordination back," Nelyn reported, then looked up from her work to see the holoimage for the first time. With a startled look on her face, she bolted up out of her seat. "Covenant boarding craft!"

Carmody blinked. "Blast! Damned quarians never throw anything away, do they? They must've hit us when the shields reset. Mogel, pattern-rec that image on the rest of the cam net. How many more of them are there?"

Mogel's fingers flew over his keyboard; he frowned at the result, ran the search again just to be sure, then reported, "None, sir. The rest of the ship is clean."

Carmody swiveled to face him. "What? That's absurd. That craft can't have carried more than a squad of marines at the - "

He was interrupted by the sharp crack of a breaching charge blowing the locking mechanism in the center of the Operations Center's upper-level blast door. A moment later the doors parted and slightly less than a squad of marines burst into the room.

Nelyn, already on her feet, drew her sidearm and pegged a round at the nearest of the intruders, but her light blaster pistol was no match for Salusian ODST armor. The bolt glanced off Williams's right shin plate and fizzled against the far bulkhead even as Wrex gunned the tech officer down. On the other side of the room, Mogel made it halfway to his feet and had his weapon halfway out of his holster before a burst from Williams's rifle made him all the way dead.

Carmody, a little too canny to go after the heavily-armored nearest intruders with his little sidearm, took cover behind the central console and fired instead at the man in the middle of the second group to enter the compartment. His ill-fitting, standard-issue armor vest and the limp in his stride as he did his best to keep out of his squadmates' way marked him out as a noncombatant - possibly some sort of tech specialist in his own right - and Carmody figured taking him out might at least slow these maniacs down a little.

His first shot missed high. He didn't get a second. The person to his target's right, an asari wearing a suit of the light CVR armor until recently favored by Wedge Defense Force recon personnel, narrowed her eyes at him, and the next thing he knew an invisible truck had plowed into his body, the impact plucking him from behind the console and slamming him against the COC's after bulkhead. His blaster flew from his hand; by the time it stopped skittering across the room and spun to a halt in the far corner, he had peeled away from the wall and crumpled in a senseless heap on the deck.

"Thanks, Prof," said Joker with a wan smile. "I think that guy mistook me for somebody who knows what he's doing... "

"Defensive positions," Garrus ordered. As the rest of the squad moved to comply, Kevirin vaulted the central console and sat down at the controls. The poisoned apple he'd left for the Avenger's boarding override computer in the Minuteman Nine's main computer was never meant to do more than it had done: temporarily paralyze the ship's defenses and enable them to get this far. Now that he was sitting at the flagship's master console, the case had altered.

"Bad news, team," he said. "As we suspected, the automatics and these three were able to get everything working again." He put up a schematic of the ship on the center display; it teemed with the red dots of Boomer transponders, and a truly startling percentage of them were flooding aft and up toward the pulsing blue dot that served as a You Are Here marker.

"Among other things," Kevirin went on, "that means there's a security response heading this way that may give you flashbacks to Operation Alamo. I'd appreciate it if you'd keep them from getting in here and killing me before I can finish explaining a few things to this computer."

Wrex made his people's equivalent of a grin. "I think we can manage that." Chuckling but otherwise declining to comment, Williams reloaded her MA5, then reached to bump fists with the krogan again.

Joker slid into the seat next to Kevirin, as much for the cover as anything else. "Showtime, eh, buddy?" he said.

Kevirin nodded. "Yes, indeed," he replied. Then, his voice still soft but with a distinct edge in it, he added, "Time to show these assholes what a quarian information specialist can really do."

At which, cracking his knuckles, he tuned out everything around him and got down to some serious work. For him, as for nobody else on the squad, getting this far was the easy part.

Garrus, kneeling by the blown blast door they'd entered by, saw them first through the scope of his Viper, at the far end of a central corridor so long he had a hard time believing he was really aboard a starship - and he wasn't even on one of the decks that went all the way to the bow. Nearly 200 yards distant, they were just an indistinct blue blur to the naked eye - but closing very, very fast.

"Heads up - here they come!" he declared, then - as he had in the Halstead shipyard - shot the lead one.

/* Pop Will Eat Itself
"Wise Up! Sucker"
This Is the Day... This Is the Hour... This Is THIS! (1989) */

The upside of their situation, if there could be said to be one, was that the Imperator-class COC was designed to be easily defended. Had the Boomer coordination system been working properly when they arrived, there was little chance that the Minuteman Nine team would have gained entry. Armored half-bulkheads were arranged in staggered echelon across the central corridor leading to the ops room's single entrance, both to provide cover for defenders and to prevent anyone from attempting to ram the doors with a vehicle. The corridor itself tapered gently to the doorway, turning the whole area into a sort of kill funnel.

So the Minutemen were cornered, but they were in a place where that was probably the best position to be in, and they made the most of it. Williams and Wrex laid down interlocking fire that made the central lane almost unapproachable while Garrus picked off outliers with elegant, lethal precision. From a bit further back, Liara used a technique she'd developed with Shepard back in the good old days and employed her telekinetic abilities to throw grenades much further than her arm could propel them. Once they reached the point where they could do the most good, Alenko - easily the old firm's deadliest pistol shot - would detonate them with a round from his trusty Ares Predator IV.

"This does remind me of Alamo," Williams remarked over the roar of her rifle as return fire from Boomer particle beams and blaster carbines laced the air around and above her.

"Yeah, well, holding a choke point against an army of robots, there's only so many ways to vary that theme," Wrex replied.

The problem - as it had been on Salu II, when they had held that line against the geth invaders - was that no matter how many they scrapped, the Boomers just kept coming, pouring up the central corridor and in from branch hallways, up from under the deck and down from the ceiling through emergency hatches and J-tubes, as though they'd kicked over an anthill and the whole colony was rushing to the defense. They'd run out of bullets before GENOM ran out of robots at this rate.

Back inside the COC, Joker sat and watched nervously as Kevirin silently worked, alternating between the console and his omni-tool as he patiently, methodically, but quickly broke all the massive system's security measures down one by one and pushed them aside. The din of gunfire and explosions from the hall was like a physical beating, and that was from this far back - he could only imagine what it must be like to be out in that hell. Well, OK, Wrex was probably loving it, and Ash, too, she had that weird sort of ancient-Salusian-warrior-chick vibe going on when things got really busy, but...

He caught movement out of the corner of his eye, turned, and saw to his horror that

a) Supervisory Lieutenant Carmody was back on his feet because
b) he was a Boomer.

"Aw, hell no," said Joker as the lieutenant burst out of his synthetic skin into attack mode and charged.

"Trojan Horsemen" - Part 4 of Operation Archangel, an Exile Mini-Serial by Benjamin D. Hutchins
Based on characters from Mass Effect by BioWare
Special to the Eyrie Productions Discussion Forum
© 2012 Eyrie Productions, Unlimited_



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