Players Invade Cyberpunk

"Shut up, you dumbasses. My six guns have already fired a thousand shells today! Today’s quota is used up. Wait until tomorrow if you want more. If you’ve got the balls, go talk to Rheinmetall!"

The two sides were cursing each other out on the channel, spittle flying through the ether. The infantry commander practically wanted to rush over and strangle that son of a bitch Boris.

The frontline has its own kind of misery. As support units trickled in, today the players’ side actually managed to outgun the Europeans, and the only reason was this damned howitzer control software slowly knocking more and more European artillery out of action, so they had to rely on the Cubans’ old-school towed guns to patch the firepower gap.

"Uh... I’m applying to Rheinmetall’s engineers for a maintenance key and low-level code access."

The technician pointed at the page on the terminal.

[Requesting customer-service support, online, waiting, urgent]

[In queue, please wait]

[We’re begging you here, expedite it, expedite it, we’re in a war]

[We’ve received your issue. You can top up 50 Orokin to enter the priority human-service channel ahead of time]

[Can you issue an invoice? I need it for reimbursement from my superiors]

Boris: "...."

Inside the military–industrial system, the profit from selling a single weapon actually isn’t that high. The real cash cow is the long tail of maintenance and service fees.

So the maintenance rights to these weapons are completely controlled by the manufacturer. Soldiers have no right to perform maintenance; doing so violates the contract and gets you dragged into court. Even if a fighter jet’s engine flames out midair, the pilot still has to beg the factory’s engineers for help; otherwise he can just wait to crash.

And so Boris could only hunker down with his artillery crew in this mountain hollow, squatting there for hours.

They weren’t slacking off; Rheinmetall simply didn’t have enough engineers. They’d never anticipated this situation in advance, so the customer-service AI couldn’t give a solution and could only transfer them to a human agent.

However, in an informationized war, leaving an artillery unit parked in one spot for a long time is suicidal.

At any moment you might get spotted by enemy special forces, drones, or radar, then hit with a raid and sabotage.

[I’ve authorized your ID for this number. You can start replacing the sensors now, but hurry up—you’ve only got fifteen minutes, then the lock goes back on.]

The technician let out a long breath.

[Thank god. Actually, forget it.]

[Oh?]

Now the German engineer was puzzled.

[Why? Aren’t you in the middle of a war? I figured you’d be in a rush.]

The technician glanced at the gun pressed against his own forehead, then at Captain Boris squatting to the side, and spoke very kindly to the brand-new German engineer who’d just been dug out of a sewer, still wrapped in oiled paper:

[Because we’ve fucking been captured, you dumbass! Fuck your mother!]

"Well, well! What an opening act."

Jingluo Ecstasy, lollipop in mouth, walked past Boris, happily patting the barrels of the howitzers.

"I told you Sky Net was right—there had to be big loot over here. See? First thing we do is hook a big fish. Six guns—worth a shitload of money."

"So why were you just sitting here not firing and not running? What the hell were you doing?"

Boris felt that admitting they’d been sitting around waiting for howitzer maintenance was way too humiliating, so he stiffened his neck and said,

"I have no obligation to answer your question."

Jingluo Ecstasy pointed at Boris and laughed in his face.

"Heh, still trying to act tough. Better than those Missouri bandits who fold before the first punch."

As the first reinforcement unit, they’d been ordered to sweep local forces around Da Haguai. Jingluo Ecstasy and his crew, a hundred-man vanguard, dove straight into the encirclement.

They followed the enemy artillery positions’ movement routes calculated by the counter-battery radar of the artillery detachment, then fed that into Sky Net’s map simulations to estimate the location of the next enemy gun line—and swept their way along.

Seamless cooperation with a swarm of AIs to achieve an ultra-high level of informationized combat—that’s Horizon Corporation’s edge over European units. Europeans would never hand AI usage rights down to the grunts on the front line, but Horizon Corporation has more AIs than they can even use up.

If they don’t have enough, they just go into Cyberspace and grab some.

War is all about using your strengths to hit their weaknesses.

"Take them all. Luolei, get these howitzers under control. We’ll settle the score when we get back and give the brothers a fat chunk of points."

Jingluo Ecstasy was all smiles. It was their first time going up against Europeans, and they’d taken heavy casualties to wipe out the infantry units around this artillery group and successfully capture the artillery platoon.

A bunch of fake Romans, green Romans.

Bah!

Ever heard that the legitimate Rome is in Tokyo University?

Tremble before the orthodox majesty of Great Qin Rome!

"Hmph..."

Boris sneered with disdain.

Think you can steal the guns?

Dream on.

Without him and the technician’s control permissions, any unauthorized person plugging into the driving system will hard-lock the entire vehicle.

If they try to force a startup, it’ll brick the whole thing.

Of course, if they begged him, and promised to let them go in exchange, he could temporarily grant access—then blacklist that IP afterward.

Boris, full of confidence, was already waiting to watch them make fools of themselves.

Except he seemed to have forgotten that the people in front of him had literally hijacked Cuban fighter jets and flown off with them.

Luolei pulled out his terminal, yanked out a data cable, and plugged it into the control panel interface on the gun truck.

[Nero, get ready to wipe their system, then overwrite it with a fresh control suite.]

[Leave it to me.]

Watch closely,

you Europeans.

This is how you’re supposed to use your gun trucks!