2-64: Power Armor Heroics
I thought of multiple objections to Varis going down into the shit with me. The problem with those multiple objections being that all of them involved her not getting to go down and have fun in an active combat zone while I was going to be doing the exact same thing.
It really wasn't responsible for either of us to do the Kirk thing and go down there in the middle of the shit in the first place. Much better to do a Picard and send a Riker down there to do the dirty work for you while you were running everything from behind.
But I was a history dude. I couldn't help the feeling that coursed through my blood as I thought about getting down in there and monitoring everything directly.
I wasn't going to be an armchair Patton. I was going to be a Patton getting down there and mixing it up.
"Fine," I said, grinning at her as the heads-up display started feeding me information that was totally unnecessary because I could see that same information in the other half of my head that was being beamed in courtesy of the computer chip and the Combat Intelligence who was assisting me.
"We going to do this?" I asked, reaching a hand out.
Varis reached out to take mine. Because of the way the armor worked, I could feel her hand as though it was brushing against mine flesh to flesh. Which was an interesting side effect of this armor. But I wasn't going to complain. They certainly didn't have anything neat like that in human space.
"Let's do this," I said, hitting her with a grin.
"Yes, let's," she said.
I didn't even say anything about how she was using her helmet on her armor even though we weren't going into a radiation situation. Maybe some of my Terran practicality around not getting her ass shot off was starting to rub off on her. Maybe she just didn't want to take a chance of getting shot in the face.
"What's happening to me?" the Spider moaned, rocking back and forth.
I turned to look at her, and then I looked at the soldier I'd assigned to keep an eye on her.
"We probably want to go ahead and get a medic out here to have a look at her," I said. "She doesn't look like she's doing very well."
"We'll get on that, sir," he said.
"And nobody is allowed to shoot her," I said, glaring at everybody who stood all around us as the battle raged down below.
Some of them were holding their weapons and looking at the Spider like they'd love nothing more than to do that. I searched my brain, trying to think of something I could say that would hold more than the weight of an order, and then finally I hit on something that would get through to the livisk.
"If anybody's going to shoot her, it's going to be me," I said, glaring at each of them in turn. "Am I understood?"
They finally nodded at that. Some of the twitchy trigger fingers started to move away from their triggers. It wasn't much, but I'd take it.
I turned to Varis and grinned, making sure my plasma sword was at one side and my blaster was at the other side. She did the same, though I noted her armor had a massive plasma rifle attached to the back. The kind of thing that even a livisk wouldn't be able to lift on their own. But she had the power armor assisting her, so she'd probably have no trouble with it.
The fact that we were wearing power armor at all was another interesting wrinkle. Maybe she really was starting to understand that there was no force better than overwhelming force. Or no honorable combat where you had a chance of losing.
It was a very Terran approach to livisk combat, and I could only hope that it didn’t catch on with our enemies. I was more than happy for them to keep engaging us in honorably futile glorious charges to their untimely deaths.
"Let's go," I said.
And with that we both turned and ran off the edge of the building and leapt. I could feel where she was planning on going before she even made the move. The link was already working more than overtime helping us to figure out which way we needed to go.
I wondered if part of the reason why the livisk had such a good neural interface compared to some of the stuff we used in Terran space was because the people who designed this shit had the example of the battle link to go on. Or maybe I was just trying to search for some reason why they seemed to be better than humanity in this one small area of technology.
I pushed all those thoughts out of my head as we landed on a street in front of the detention center and found ourselves in the middle of a small firefight.
I checked the tactical situation in the simulation. I looked back and forth between it and what I saw in the real world.
"The drone feed is telling me this is a hot area that has some of the Spider’s people pinned down," I said.
"Isn't that what we want?" Varis asked.
"Maybe," I said. "But then again, it's probably a good idea to make friends with the underworld element."
"Are you sure about that?" she asked, turning to hit me with a quick glance.
It wasn't that she was questioning me. She no doubt simply wondered at the change of plans, but that was the thing with any plan I made when I was in combat. They were always an amorphous thing. The alliances all around us were constantly shifting. I might look like I was winging it, and from a certain point of view that was true, but I was also trying to figure out a way to accomplish some goals down here.
Even if those goals were shifting almost as often as my plans.
"It's going to be good PR for us if we save their asses," I said. "So why don't we save some asses?"
"You say so," she said with a shrug, as though it didn't matter to her. Like she was totally trusting me in the planning.
"Is there a reason why you want to save them, William?" Arvie said. "It would be much easier dealing with the Spider if you didn't have to worry about any of her forces continuing to exist when this is all over."
"I'm well aware of that," I said through gritted teeth. "But we don't want to get through this by simply letting all the people who are inconvenient to us die. We’re supposed to be better than that.”
"You say so, William," he said, giving a shrug in the simulation.
I looked up to a rooftop where there were Imperials who’d set up a repeating plasma blaster that was pinning down a lot of the Spider's people. They'd taken up refuge behind a crumbled building facade that had fallen down into the street below. Finally, I looked over to where there were even more Imperial troops moving in on them to do a pincer move.
"Okay, who gets the fun of taking on the repeating plasma cannon?" I asked.
Varis turned and hit me with a grin. "Do you want to do that stone-paper-scissors thing you seem to enjoy so much?"
"It's rock-paper-scissors, but sure," I said.
I'd never mentioned adding lizard or Spock into the equation. She'd already been talking about putting in several livisk things like atomic weapon or plasma blasters. I'd pointed out to her that a plasma blaster or an atomic weapon would be more than enough to obliterate rock, paper, and scissors, and she'd merely grinned and said that was the point. There was no point in using force if you weren't using overwhelming force.
Okay. Now that I really thought about it, my notions about overwhelming force and using every advantage you possibly could really did seem to be rubbing off on her.
I shook my head as I held my hands out. We did it on a three count, just like I'd taught her when we were deciding something far more mundane like who was going to clear out the dishes.
It had surprised her the first couple of times I'd insisted on clearing out the dishes myself. It was as simple as picking them all up and putting them into a cleaning unit, but even that had surprised her.
Now it was part of our routine.
We finished. I came up with paper, and she came up with rock. I figured there was a metaphor there somewhere about paper beating rock. She frowned as she stared.
"I win," she said.
"Wait, you know the rules, and so do I.”
“Yes. Atomic weapon beats paper."
"You know atomics aren't allowed in this. Paper beats rock."
She let out a grunt, and then she pulled her hand away.
"We really need to revise this game of yours so it has more options. The simple three element makes it too easy to game the system."
"You're just a sore loser," I said.
"Maybe so," she said. "I'll go and take out the troops. Have fun with the repeating plasma cannon."
"Oh, I will," I said.
I consulted the tactical display in the simulation one final time. There were other hot spots all around us, but a lot of them were Imperials going up against Varis's people, and I wasn't quite as worried about the Imperials going up against Varis's people as I was about the Imperials going up against a bunch of idiot outlaws with no training who I’d dragged up here.
Maybe they didn’t deserve to eat at my conscience like that, but it wasn’t going to stop my conscience from pinging overtime.
So I turned my attention to the repeating plasma blaster going off up above. They were firing into the debris down below that was barely covering the Spider's people. I said a quiet prayer to any gods that might be listening - hopefully the livisk gods liked someone pulling some audacious combat bullshit, regardless of what planet they came from, since I was on their territory - as I leapt into the air.
The combination of my strength and the reinforced power armor meant it was easy enough for me to leap through the air and reach almost to the top of the building. I'd hoped I’d be able to leap a tall building in a single bound.
I'd always wondered about that phrase. A tall building back in Depression era America was pretty tall, but it was nothing on even the low-lying buildings down here. So I guess this really did make me sort of like the man of steel. The original incarnation, at least.
I grabbed the side of the building. The reinforced power armor meant I didn't have to worry too much about gaining a hold. Localized antigrav generators went into reverse and suddenly I was doing my best impression of everyone’s favorite wall crawler rather than the man of steel. I pulled myself up, leaping up the building on all fours.
I was probably a sight to behold from down below. Again, the kind of thing that would've belonged firmly in the realm of superhero stuff on Earth even 500 years ago. But it was amazing what technology allowed people to do.
Finally, I reached the top and I paused for a moment, peeking over the edge.
I had a bird's-eye view of everything going on, of course, but I also wanted to get a good look at everything up close.
They'd set up a repeating pulse cannon that was being fired repeatedly down into the street down below. There was a cooling unit next to the thing that was blowing as loud as a traditional turbine-driven jet back in the old days, or an antigrav unit that had hit a pocket of non-Einsteinian space and was having trouble keeping up with stuff.
None of that mattered to me. I didn't even care about the shielding unit that protected the front of the thing. No, the only thing I cared about was they were so preoccupied with firing down into the streets below that they weren't paying attention to anything on either side of them or behind them.