CthulhuTech: Brave New World

[LadyTevar]

Holy shit.
I do hope that Lucien survives this, that kind of heroic badassery does not deserve to die in a mudpuddle devoured by worms.

[MysteriousDarkLordv3]

As someone who is not that familiar with Cthulhu mythos, I assume by the name that nightgaunts are bad?

Insofar as every-bleepin'-thing in the Mythos is bad ... although the nightgaunts aren't too bad compared to some of them. Unless you want to stay where you are - they have been known to pick people up and carry them off to other planets or universes.

[Academia Nut]

“You know, I can read the monitors you’re hooked up to and your brain wave patterns indicate that you’re not sleeping, so you might as well stop pretending,” a strong, feminine voice noted from somewhere in the darkness to Lucien’s left.

“If I’m awake how come my eyes aren’t open?” Lucien asked in a rather cottony voice. He was not quite sure if he was actually awake or not at the moment, but he supposed even if he was dreaming that was better than the alternative.

“Actually, they are open, rather terminally at that too,” the voice replied.

“Oh. Oh. You would think I would remember that,” Lucien mumbled out.

“Considering the core temperature of your cranium when the medics got to you, you’re lucky you’re not relearning the alphabet via flashcards. The current theory is that your animaneural waveform was sufficiently transcendental to compensate for gross physiological damage until reparative therapy could be applied,” the voice explained.

“Okay, I’ve studied the theory a little bit, but no one could ever explain to me adequately the difference between all the different ‘waveform’ stuff that was bandied about, especially since the kept adding prefixes to everything. So what the hell did all of that just mean?” Lucien demanded.

There was a slight pause and a thoughtful hum before the voice replied, “Well, the best description is that a neural waveform is a purely physical mental structure such as with most lower life forms, while an animaneural waveform contains both a physical and higher dimensional structure such as in humans and a few other beings. A purely anima waveform is one without any physical components and is used by almost all non-human aliens and definitively by all Outsiders.”

Lucien absorbed this and asked, “So crudely speaking, you’re saying that my soul kept me from going brain dead?”

“Crudely, yes. Even then, that implies a few things that are not just imprecise but completely inaccurate since your case is rather special considering the extent of your anima structure. Suffice to say that your powers saved you about three or four times over during the attack,” the voice explained.

“Interesting,” Lucien mused. “Of course, while that explains why I can’t remember what happened, that does not explain the particulars of why I cannot see, or for that matter blink.”

“Ever looked at a military grade laser firing in atmosphere without AR polarization filters?” The voice asked rhetorically.

Lucien was about to answer before he thought about the question and answered, “I suppose I have. Bit of a one time thing really.”

“Don’t worry, you’re getting a new set cloned up at the moment, but the damage extends all the way to the optic nerve, so you’re in for some extensive reconstructive surgery and arcanotherapy,” the voice noted.

“Do I get enhanced eyes?” Lucien asked.

The voice considered for a moment before responding, “Are you willing to undergo the necessary chemical, nano and arcane treatments to restore sufficient neuroplasticity to your brain that you can teach your brain to interpret the additional data, at the risk of other parts of your brain being forced to atrophy in order to make room?”

“That involved huh?” Lucien asked in a disappointed tone.

“Well, even if you don’t qualify for a Mark Three Eyeball, we won’t give you the Mark One either. Your replacements will be based on your DNA but have the structures altered to have the retinas wired the right way around and a couple of other tweaks so that you should have improved visual acuity under all conditions,” the voice explained.

“Ah. Something to look forward to then,” Lucien replied.

Beat.

“You’re terrible.”

“I try,” Lucien answered with a shrug that caused him to realize that his face was not the only thing to take damage. He managed to keep his wince down to a pained hiss.

“Careful there. You have extensive scalding across the upper part of your body. Boiling water got into the hole in your helmet and leaked down to your neck, shoulders and upper back,” the voice explained.

Lucien was quiet while he pondered just how much he had overdone things, before he finally responded with, “I’m on a considerable amount of synthetic opiates, aren’t I?”

“Bit of an understatement there,” the voice replied dryly.

“Ah, the wonders of modern medical science,” Lucien opined.

“Tell me about it, my burns are even worse than yours,” the voice replied sadly.

“Wait, aren’t you my nurse?” Lucien asked.

“Nope. Bored roommate. Welcome to the arcanotherapy ward, although at the moment it is more of a burn ward considering you’re about the only person in need of sorcerous healing who isn’t in her entirely because of burns. Battle casualties tended to fall into four camps: heat exhaustion, mental exhaustion, instantly fatal, or friendly fire, emphasis on the fire part, and of the four only one needs extended care,” the voice explained.

Wincing at the sound of things, Lucien asked, “Ouch. I take it that you…”

“You saw what happened, it’s the ultimate reason you’re here in the first place,” Ruth replied.

“Ah… well, if you want to go to ultimate reasons then we can probably talk about the Big Bang. Or possibly about how the Peninsular War by Napoleon’s forces nearly three hundred years ago produced a misbegotten child too French for the Spanish and too Spanish for the French to take up a peculiar philosophy to life. A philosophy that led him to join the French Foreign Legion, sleep around a lot, marry an Algerian woman and then encourage his sons to thumb their noses at the rest of society by continuing to fight, party, and have sex with as many people outside their ethnicity as possible,” Lucien pondered aloud.

“Ah… that would explain the physique,” Ruth noted a touch mischievously.

Smirking through his bandages, Lucien answered, “Generations of aggressive out breeding do a bloodline wonders. I have genes from every human inhabited continent. Also, due to racist selection pressures, outcasts are over-represented in my family tree, which is where we’re pretty sure we picked up the parapsychic thing from. Ah, mon grand-père was the first to discover such things while on a trip to the Americas, accidentally set a group of racist hicks on fire with his mind.”

“Hmmm… you appear to use French as familiar terms, which I do believe you applied to me the first time we met,” Ruth pointed out.

“Ah, well, there are two reasons to that,” Lucien stated a touch nervously.

“They are?” Ruth inquired coolly.

“Well the first is that I have the appearance of a walking cliché to maintain and I had to leave my trench coat back on Earth…” Lucien had to stop because Ruth chose that moment to break out in a fit of giggles.

“You… you had a trench coat?” Ruth asked, unable to hold back her mirth.

“I had an image going, okay? I worked as an enforcer for the OIS and I would stand back and glare behind dark AR glasses with my arms folded across my chest with my swords sticking out from my back, the collar of my coat turned up,” Lucien explained. He then added on, “I couldn’t bring myself to use katanas though…”

Ruth was now clearly laughing so hard it was causing pain and she said, “Oh sweet mercy stop! I’m covered in bandages and it really hurts to laugh this hard.”

Really grinning now, Lucien said, “Well the joke was always on the criminals and cultists who saw me and assumed I was the least competent guy in the group, making a beeline for me. Worked like a charm most of the time. The rest of the time they either bought it and were intimidated by my badassery or were inhuman monsters… except for this one repeat offender who caught on after the first time and told his friends.”

“That is simultaneously the most brilliant and most idiotic thing I have ever heard,” Ruth replied with a chuckle.

“Hey, I got the cards life dealt me and found that I had to bluff with them, so why the hell shouldn’t I go all out?” Lucien opined.

“Okay, so if you were going for the casual, cocky badass with an outrageous French accent out of habit as your first excuse, what is your second?” Ruth demanded while still letting out an occasional titter at the thought of Lucien channelling a full century of bad pop culture into his appearance.

Humming for a long moment before shrugging, Lucien replied, “Well considering that you’re a telepath and the second most powerful person politically on this base, lying really wouldn’t help me, so I will admit to slipping up and using a familiar term by reflex.”

“By reflex?” Ruth asked blandly before she demanded, “I thought that was the first reason.”

“No, this is a different reflex. You see, women dig the French, especially now that is no longer a common language of communication. It’s exotic and sexy. And well, to be bluntly honest, when I first saw you the thing that was running through my head was ‘Faisons l’amour’. My family has a genetic disposition toward that sort of thing,” Lucien admitted with a shrug.

Lucien could hear Ruth purse her lips in consideration before she replied, “I’m not actually a full telepath yet and I thus could not have discerned such a thing.”

“Yeah, but if I do want to get in your pants I figure I should start off with honesty,” Lucien answered while mentally kicking himself being too honest.

“And I suppose that jumping down to save me was all part of some elaborate scheme to forward your objectives?” Ruth asked.

“Mademoiselle, I may play the role of a brooding bad ass, but I am no dummy. The heroic knight who saves the damsel in distress but needs her to reveal his heart hidden away from the world is a ploy that only works on damsels in distress, not intelligent, strong willed, mature women who worked for the OSS. Besides, such relationship do not tend to last long because they are based off of false perceptions, so politically speaking it would not be very smart of me to sleep around and then inevitably break up with the personal aide of the most powerful man in the colony,” Lucien explained.

“So leaping into insane danger had nothing to do with getting into my pants?” Ruth asked, and once again Lucien could practically hear her facial expression.

Shrugging, Lucien said, “I saw a comrade in peril and it is better to regret something you did than something you failed to do, and any regrets I had for leaping over the parapet would only be with me for the rest of my life. That said, I’m not saying no if that’s how you want to thank me.”

“In your dreams pal,” Ruth replied.

“You know, I would be disappointed, but considering that I’m probably going to need pharmaceuticals to sleep for the next couple of months I would say that dreams of you would be a blessing I am unlikely to receive,” Lucien mused.

“Unless it’s of me being devoured by mind worms,” Ruth pointed out.

Lucien was quiet for a long time before he replied in annoyance, “Congratulations, you just managed to cross the streams of my dreams and nightmares and I now have an image in my head that would only the Japanese could appreciate.”

Ruth gagged a little and said angrily, “Thanks for sharing!”

“It’s punishment for putting that image in my head in the first place. I will in fact now have to consider cooking my brains again to get it out. Speaking of which, the last thing I remember is the arrival of a pack of nightgaunts, so how exactly did we get out of there?” Lucien asked.

Ruth made a disapproving tone before she said, “Those nightgaunts were summoned by the sorcerers. Apparently there was some testing that was kept secret that indicated that nightgaunts were resistant or possibly even immune to the psychic attacks of the mind worms while simultaneously drawing their attention even if there was a terrified human around.”

“We summoned them? I know we had to traffic with inhuman things to get here, but…” Lucien replied a bit uncomfortably.

“I know. Victor isn’t happy either, but he defends what he did and we’ll accept it. The gaunts did little damage on their own, but they drew the worms into nice convenient piles. You were blinded by a PA laser shortly after they arrived and passed out shortly after that, but they creatures swarmed the gaunts by the thousands so when the heavy flamers arrived that was basically the end of the battle,” Ruth explained. She added on happily, “We got the gaunts too.”

“Well that’s good I suppose,” Lucien noted.

“Glad you agree, which is probably why everyone else is okay if uncomfortable with using them. Distracting the worms while getting to roast Outsiders is a win all around,” Ruth said cheerily.

“I can’t disagree with that assessment. Ever killed a gaunt before?” Lucien asked.

“No, I was more of an investigator, analyst, and researcher and most of my front-line experience was against the Migou,” Ruth said.

“Ah. Well, I ran into gaunts on a few occasions while investigating cults. Bastards take some killing to go down, but their lack of ranged attacks means that they have to close to melee, which is my specialty even if I would prefer more range myself. Does the soul good to slice and dice the things from beyond, makes them seem less unbeatable,” Lucien mused cheerily, remembering less disastrous missions.

“Why did you join up on this mad venture anyway?” Ruth asked.

“Well, how I see it is that I could spend my life struggling against impossible odds with a system that seems like it was deliberately designed to fail, or I could roll the dice and see if I could make a new start on a new world and ensure that something of humanity survives. Again, better to regret actions taken than not taken and if the results of actions taken leave little time for regret…” Lucien finished with a shrug.

“Lucien, while I know implicitly and explicitly that you are clearly smarter than you let on, I still have to wonder how you have survived this long,” Ruth said in exasperation.

Lucien shrugged and offered in explanation, “Darwinian selection against stupid risks has been pretty brutal in my family. We take calculated risks and are really good at weighing and weighting the odds in our favour. For example, right now I am calculating that since I’m pretty sure Victor is both heterosexual and uninterested if I wish to sleep my way to the top my best bet is the sexy, charming, intelligent, strong willed woman at his left hand.”

“Who’s at his right hand then?” Ruth asked, amused.

“Let’s be honest here; Victor is so terrifyingly powerful that he doesn’t need anyone at his right hand. He is in effect his own right hand man,” Lucien explained.

“Fair enough. And to be completely fair Lucien, you are not getting into my pants today,” Ruth said.

“For my own curiosity, may I inquire why?” Lucien asked.

Somewhere in the darkness to his right, a smile formed on Ruth’s face and she said, “Because I’m wearing a hospital gown.”

Lucien was quiet for a long time before he replied, “Of all the days to be covered in burns and blind.”

“Sweet dreams Lucien.”

[LadyTevar]

I'd rather hoped the NightGaunts were summoned critters, once I figured out what they were.

And what a GREAT battle wrap-up. "Sweet Dreams" indeed

[MysteriousDarkLordv3]

Oh dear, poor Lucien ... I don't know whether to laugh or cry.

Actually, if he had brought the trenchcoat, I would have laughed. The poor boy was worried enough about how silly he looked. I think the mindworms would have laughed, too, if he'd shown up with katanas and machine guns and a trenchcoat.

[Manthor]

Bravo.Really enjoyed that chapter and how you subverted that stereotype.I thought that Lucien was going to be the first to die.If you kill off his character then I will definitely stop reading as it has become so interesting.I'm already shipping him and the girl in my mind. A cunning badass like that deserves to live and get the girl.

[LionElJonson]

Heh. Lucien's awesome. Hopefully he'll go far. Might annoy the geneticists who have it all planned out, though. It'd probably become a moot point once they meet up with the other human factions, though.

I hope the Tagers get a suitably badass introduction, as well. If they're willing to summon nightgaunts to help with the mindworms, they'd probably be willing to summon relatively friendly Outsider symbiotes.

[Academia Nut]

Addendum: Lucien's themesong

Bonus points if you can discern the twisted, tangential relationship to the story (not the reason it was picked by the way) without me having told you beforehand.

[LionElJonson]

Addendum: Lucien's themesong

Bonus points if you can discern the twisted, tangential relationship to the story (not the reason it was picked by the way) without me having told you beforehand.

Let's see... four people going out and killing loads of alien monsters in the desert with machine guns. Hmmm. Could he have fought against the Rapine Scourge, perhaps?

[LadyTevar]

Heh. Lucien's awesome. Hopefully he'll go far. Might annoy the geneticists who have it all planned out, though. It'd probably become a moot point once they meet up with the other human factions, though.

Honestly, the best genetics would occur if women had a child by more than one man, to spread the diversity a bit more. At the stage they're at technologically, in vitro fertilization would work very well.

[MysteriousDarkLordv3]

The best genetics would actually involve "genetic colonists" - a refrigerated bank of thousands of embryos chosen to have no genetic commonality with anyone who's actually going on the trip. No pair of colonists would be allowed to have any kids themselves until they've spawned one or more of the stored embryos. This provides a lot more genetic variety without having to haul more colonists along.

But I saw no indication that Cross had such a set-up in place. So that will have to be considered speculation.

[Academia Nut]

Reports scrolled down in front of Victor, the light cast from the holo projector on his desk creating sinister patterns on his face in his darkened office. The reports all around were not looking good. The colony was under an enormous amount of stress in the aftermath of the attack, in almost all imaginable ways. They were running the nanofactory as hard as they dared until they had sufficient parts to build another one, which was actually the top priority job. If something in the nanofactory broke that they could not replace then they might as well all eat a bullet.

Of course, eating bullets segued nicely into the fact that right now ammunition and spare parts for weaponry were the second highest priority for their manufacturing, above the third and final priority: food and air. Fortunately the water here was potable with simple filtering, and if you were crazy enough to go outside and remove your mask when it was raining you could drink straight from the sky without trouble. Fortunately in another week their stockpile of ammunition would be back up to full capacity and they could ease off on the weapons production.

Then again, the Chief Medical Officer was making demands to up the dosages on pretty much everything again. They had burned through sedatives, anti-psychotics, and mood stabilizers at a rate that rivalled front line troops against the Storm. Everyone needed medication after the battle and stores that had almost been deemed overkill before they set out had been completely depleted by the catastrophic demand. On top of the psychiatric pharmaceuticals, there were also others needed to deal with the environment, the biggest being the ones that would increase bone and muscle mass to deal with the increased gravity of this world. While not crushing, the additional weight was increasing fatigue all around and they needed to compensate.

Now of these demands even scratched the surface of what was on Victor’s plate though. Everyone wanted things that they could not afford to do right now. They ranged from the sensible, like a proposal for teleoperated perimeter defence turrets that would receive fab time once they had a second nanofactory built, to requests for prototyping new weapons to combat the mind worms that would have to wait several months. Then there was the suggestion that they should just lift off to orbit and avoid mind worms altogether.

Victor had acknowledged that it was a good idea… other than the fact that not only did they not have the A-pods for that, but if they wanted to build sufficient lift capacity to do that then they would have to first set up mining and processing facilities to extract minerals for the production of metals and ceramics since organic polymers would not cut it in space and you needed rare earths for D-Engines and A-pods. If they did that, then assuming that they devoted all industry to increasing their capacity then they would have the infrastructure to get everyone into an orbital habitat in about ten years… assuming they did not divert resources to things like making bullets and flamer fuel and neither the main settlement nor the mining facilities were attacked by mind worms and that their population did not increase. If they had children to transport to orbit then it would take even longer to build the infrastructure because they would have to rely entirely on A-pod propulsion to get them up rather than use rocket boosters. Also, if they did it that quickly then they would have to abandon all their ground based industry because they would not have the resources to return if they left orbit, not for probably another ten years.

All of which assumed that it was safe to move their entire population into orbit. Institutional paranoia about the hive ship controlling orbit was hard to shake, and since they had maybe one clear night in the past two weeks they had not been able to make any sort of stellar survey. All they knew was that they were in a binary star system and that the planet they were on had three small moons in orbit.

Of course, musing on the logistical difficulties of getting a thousand people into orbit brought Victor’s mind to the one bright point of the attack, in that the larger clusters mind worms had absorbed rather large quantities of certain rare earths into their husks. The clean up teams were finding bonanzas of all the hardest to find resources needed to build the cores of arcane technology. While a welcome addition to their manufacturing efforts, Victor was the sort of suspicious man who saw this in the worst possible light, and the question of why the worms were accumulating such elements was the critical one in his mind.

A slight buzz from his computer indicated to Victor that his next interview was here, and with a wave of his hand he dismissed the disheartening reports from his view and had the lights turned up. Composing himself, he pressed a button on his desk and said, “Come in Lieutenant Hartmann.”

The door to the office slid to the side and Lieutenant Timothy Hartmann walked inside, looking a good thirty years older than he really was. His experience with the mind worms had left him haggard and exhausted, deep bags under his eyes from sleepless nights and his hair prematurely starting to go grey at the roots from the stress. He was not the only one, although he was the first and if Victor had to guess, grey and white hair would become the dominate colour in short order.

Nodding at Timothy after the man saluted, Victor gestured for the man to take the seat in front of his desk, and Timothy sank in with perhaps too much relief. Victor took a few more moments to continue assessing him before he asked, “Lieutenant Hartmann, do you know why I have called you here today?”

Shaking his head, Timothy replied, “Sir, no sir.”

“Care to speculate?” Victor asked.

Timothy winced and said, “Sir, considering that there is only one reason…”

Nodding, Victor cut him off and said, “You know that this is about what happened at the obelisk, but you are unsure why I would bring you here after you have already been debriefed by others more experienced in that sort of thing.”

Timothy nodded his head and said, “Sir, yes sir.”

“Well Lieutenant Hartmann, let me look at what we have been able to piece together. After your mech was shut down, you proceeded to explore the interior of the obelisk and were generally out of communication for an hour, a period of time you are still suffering amnesia about. Logs indicate that Warrant Officer Khara then called for back-up when he was attacked from the direction of the jungle. Do you know what happened then?” Victor asked.

Timothy remained silent.

Giving Timothy a rather blank look, Victor said, “From what we have been able to piece together from the fragmentary logs, you then proceeded to, as the kids of my father’s generation would put it, ‘open a can of whoop ass’. In a semi-lucid state while under the effects of the psychic attack you managed to fight, firing repeated bursts of SMG fire into clusters of worms and judging from the damage to your flight suit, you had worms on you and still managed to survive. You then somehow discovered that your mech had regained functionality and managed to begin a fighting retreat, somehow using a weapon designed for long range fire support in close combat, disabling safeties to keep it firing even after it had become radioactive from repeated particle bombardment. Again while semi-lucid at best but more likely in a full sensory hallucination. You then managed to get both yourself and Warrant Officer Khara back to base.”

The description of his deeds seemed to make Timothy sick, and he said, “Please sir, I didn’t…”

“Timothy, I know that you feel you haven’t deserved anything good that has happened to you in the past decade, but lighten up on yourself,” Victor chastised.

“I… uh… I screw up sir, and…” Timothy began.

Cutting him off again, Victor pressed on and said, “Look, you were on recon and someone had to explore that obelisk, and anyone we did send probably would not have had more resources than you did aside from their mech being functional. You decided that your time was better spent doing your job of exploring that sitting around with your thumb up your ass, a call I approve of considering the resources we have.”

“Sir, I got Khara killed. I got two technicians killed…” Timothy stated almost desperately.

“Bullshit. The worms killed them, and you had no idea that they could penetrate our armour. As far as you knew, you were evacuating a wounded comrade from a combat zone. Even when you brought them back to base while the loss of life was regrettable we got live samples of our enemy and who knows how many lives were saved in the big battle because of the information we gleaned from them? You’re a hero, Hartmann,” Victor said with almost vicious praise.

Timothy squirmed.

Sighing, Victor said, “Look, I’ve read your files. I know what your life has been like, but for over ten years your behaviour indicates that you don’t think you have earned anything. Your often flippant attitude comes from the fact that you refuse to respect yourself. You think you should have died long ago and that your continued existence is some unfair twist of fate, your own life being extended at the cost of others. Well, guess what kid, the universe doesn’t care about you, me, or even our enemies. It’s a cold, heartless bastard that takes great pleasure in being utterly apathetic. Your continued survival is not some sick joke; it is because you are just that good. You hold yourself to standards most people can’t, physically can’t, hope to meet, and that is why after the disaster that was your youth you were chosen for the missions the OSS threw you into rather than outright execution.”

“It was because I was expendable and a coward who feared for his life…” Timothy practically moaned.

“Yeah, in the beginning you had a bomb in your mech in case you decided you did not like the deal that had been made for you. But the bomb was eventually taken out. Your mech was personalized and upgraded. We don’t do that for expendable assets. We also don’t give commissions to potential traitors. We give them to loyal, intelligent men and women with education and the stuff to be leaders. You actually went out of your way to get a degree by correspondence, which is why you were put into the officer program,” Victor explained.

“I got the degree in arcane physics to correct my incomplete sorcerous knowledge…” Timothy pleaded.

“That doesn’t matter, because not only did you complete that, but you completed the officer training. You earned everything you have, and had your life gone a little differently you would probably be a major by now,” Victor pointed out.

“Or a fucking cultist…” Timothy muttered.

“Or a fucking cultist, yes,” Victor admitted before he attacked, “But you’re not. You knew what your family was doing was wrong and you did the right thing rather than the easy one. You saved an innocent life at the cost of your family. If you could go back and do it all again, would you?”

Timothy went silent for a long time and bowed his head before he said, “Sir, yes sir.”

“That’s what I wanted to hear. Which is why not only are you being decorated for bravery… once we figure out what our decorations will be… but you are being promoted to captain and will lead our recon forces,” Victor announced.

“What?” Timothy asked in shock.

“You heard me. Also, I suggest you capitalize on the fact that you are thus far the first man of precisely two to have engaged the mind worms in CQC and survived, and you did not have the advantageous parapsychic abilities on your side. Finding a woman or six who appreciate the strong protector type should not be that difficult considering how everyone is scared of those damn worms,” Victor said encouragingly.

“But… but…” Timothy protested.

Victor brought up a trio of fingers and said, “Three things. One, I’ve known about you for a while now, so I wouldn’t have brought you along in the first place if I thought this was going to be a problem. Two, I had to traffic with worse things to get us here. Three, if your ability to keep fighting even while trapped in a psychic worm induced nightmare is heritable, I want it in the gene pool.”

Timothy gulped, but nodded, a fire kindled behind his eyes. Victor knew from the psyche evaluations that Timothy’s primary problem was that family was central to his well being and he had killed his own and been denied a chance to start a new one. This should get him motivated.

Nodding at him, Victor said, “Dismissed. Captain.”

Standing, Timothy saluted and then left, looking considerably twenty years younger than when he walked in.

Sighing, Victor shook his head at that before he sealed his office again. He had an hour free before his next meeting, and he intended to fill it with a conversation of a different sort. Pressing his palm on a biometric scanner on his desk, he did not even twitch as a blood sample was drawn while his palm was scanned. After a few moments a door hidden in the wall behind him opened.

Stepping out of his office and into a special antechamber, Victor quickly changed into simple cotton fibre robes and then subjected himself to an automated process involving ultra fast precision laser bursts to achieve a physical cleansing that would have taken a full day had he done it the old fashioned way. He had put more than a little effort into figuring out the why for the components to a number of rituals, and if you could achieve the same effect faster that was a plus in his book.

Thoroughly purged of various particulate matter and aromatic chemicals that would interfere with what he was about to do, Victor went through a small air lock into an evenly light box three metres in each spatial dimension, the walls crafted of plasma deposited glass doped with yttrium, tantalum, and molybdenum. Intricate patterns had been cut into the glass with lasers and thin wires of silver deposited onto the surface. On the floor, ceiling, and walls adjacent to the one with the door large circles had been made and filled with arcane writing and patterns, while on the wall opposite the entrance there was a large flat panel of atomically smooth gold surrounded by seven single-crystal Tanzanite gems connected into a heptagram by lines of platinum-iridium alloy. This had all been prepared before they had left Earth, but it had taken two weeks to get set up and safety tested properly.

To those with the proper background, the chamber was part circuit board, part ritual circle, and part D-Engine. For ten minutes, Victor just seemed to stand in front of the circle on the floor while the entire set-up silently powered up, taking mental commands from the sorcerer in charge of the ritual. This was his magnum opus, an incredibly powerful ritual that had excised all the unnecessary elements of chanting, waving arms about, extra materials and additional participants.

Finally after ten minutes of silence an almost sub-sonic hum like a massive bell being tapped filled the room, vibrating everything atom within at once to a single note. The surface of the gold mirror began to ripple, and Victor quickly lost sight of his own reflection in the distortion. Ancient instincts started to rise up, to tell Victor that all of this was wrong, but not only did he have the willpower to control this ritual but he had censors into the ritual to keep the worst of the universe away from him. Still, a lesser man would have run screaming already.

The distortions on the mirror hit a point where the scatter had gone beyond matte and the entire surface began to darken, began to blacken. At this point in less refined versions of this ritual, which had also involved Victor being as far as possible from the experimental site as possible, colours outside the normal spectrum of light would have started to pour out from the mirror. Here though he had managed to channel such unnecessary wastes of energy back into the ritual array, strengthening the wards that were controlling this and keeping Victor safe. He had also tied the secondary energy distribution array for the protective wards into the primary summoning grid. If the wards overloaded then they would burn out the rest of the spell first in a controlled manner, shutting things down safely.

Victor had to smirk. This was so much better than using chalk.

Finally the mirror was a perfect void of black, a window into another part of the cosmos that he had made sure to paint over so that he could not see through it, and so that things could not see through to him. Distant, weird music like piping played to his ears, but he began to slowly adjust the parameters of the spell via subtle mental commands, moving his point of observation through the eldritch orchestra on the other side until he started to pick up a sound reminiscent of strings.

It was time to have a chat with their patron.

[MysteriousDarkLordv3]

Any long-time fan of Lovecraft knows where that leads ... And the only entity that lives there that would be anybody's "patron" ,,,

The Big "N" Hisself.

AAAAAAAAAA!!

BTW, excellent scene with the promotion.
And superb description of the ritual - true techno-magic.

[LionElJonson]

I dunno. Yog-Sothoth's a pretty cool guy when you're meeting him in person, and there are all the archetypes there as well (including the being-that-was-Randolph-Carter).

[LadyTevar]

nodens?

[Simon_Jester]

So now we know what getting "upgraded" by a monolith looks like...

[MysteriousDarkLordv3]

nodens?

Nope, the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nyarlathotep Big N ... the one who doesn't mind giving "help" to humans.

[Agent Sorchus]

Doubt it is Nyarlathotep, the piping that is mentioned is classic Azathoth. Of course N is subserviant to A so... Good times.

[Manthor]

I'm thinking Nodens due to his having mutual interests in opposing the deities preying upon humanity and his opposition to Nyarlothotep who is already in the process of corrupting humanity via the Chrysalis Corporation. He is also called the God of the Great Abyss which could refer to many things but here I am thinking the great gulf between universes. Similarly they also summoned Nightgaunts which are creatures of Nodens and serve him.

Alternatively it could be Vorvadoss, the 'Lord of the Universal Spaces' whom they may have dealt with in traversing the gulf between universes as well.

Hastur is a another possibility but the fact is that most of the Old Ones/Elder Gods are attempting to destroy humanity from within and without,as seen from the Rapine Storm and Esoteric Order of Dagon and Chrysalis Corporation.

[LadyTevar]

The NightGaunts is one reason I thought Nodens, yes.

[Academia Nut]

The engineer in me demanded this chapter. Sorry.

---

Five months of rain. Five months of mud. Five months of building. Five months of waiting. Five months of training. Five months of research. Five months of anxiety. Five months of living.

They had been the best five months most of the colonists had ever experienced. Victor was perhaps the only one old enough to remember times before the Arcanotech Wars, when humanity was still at its peak, a bold and vibrant young species that had yet to be stepped on by the universe. The ancient spark was back, the need to stretch human dominion across the face of a planet and beyond, the imperative of life to expand. Only this time it was tempered with something else. This time the colonists knew what waited out amongst the stars, and this time they wanted to be the ones who got the drop on their enemies.

Five months in the rain, surrounded on all sides by life rather than sterile arcology walls, burnt out battlefields or hellscapes from transdimensional xenoforming had a profound effect on the population, and buds concealed by the killing frost of the Aeon War were starting to bloom in the monsoon rain.

Strolling through the engineering bay, Victor found it filled with various projects. One of the largest structures in the colony, it had become something of an impromptu common room as those who were off duty would gather here in their spare time to work on one of the secondary projects with their friends and colleagues. Well disciplined, they kept from interfering with actual primary work, but the whole area had taken on the air of a university machine shop from Victor’s day: clean if scatterbrained.

Finally after five months one of the side projects that had shown enough promise to warrant fabrication time was ready to show off for the rest of the colony. Along the way to the demo, Victor had to stop off at something of personal interest to him. While he preferred the scientific paradigm for sorcery, very few rituals had reached that ideal yet and most still at least partially followed the older mystical traditions, which demanded the use of a variety of organic components.

Hence why there was a small but expanding collection of hydroponic pods that housed tiny growing shoots of various plants the yielded materials useful for ritual magic. When Victor arrived, the only one tending to them was Recon Captain Hartmann, something that caused Victor to raise an eyebrow. Walking up, he found Timothy carefully pruning a few scrubby herbs used in divination rituals. Clearing his throat, Victor asked, “Aren’t you a little senior for this sort of thing?”

Looking up, Timothy smiled and said, “Gardening is a great way to relax, plus there are all sorts of interesting plants out in the jungle so it helps my work to be able to tend to them more carefully.”

Victor looked blankly at him.

Timothy grinned a little sheepishly and said, “Plus whoever actually prunes these gets first dibs for spell components. I’ve actually been able to maintain my divination reliably of late.” Timothy then blinked and his eyes took on a lighter shade, almost glowing faintly. He also winced and blinked away before adding on, “Little thick with the warding there sir.”

Smirking, Victor replied, “If you dealt with what I do on a daily basis you would think it a touch light.”

Timothy frowned at that before leaning in and whispering conspiratorially, “Sir, I know that most of what you do is secret for a reason, but the other sorcerers are talking and…”

“They are different; we’ve confirmed that via comparison to files. Whether this is merely a factor of distance, what they serve, or something else has yet to be determined. I trust you can keep this quiet until we have more definitive answers?” Victor said, the last part taking on a threatening tone.

Nodding, Timothy said, “You know I’m good at keeping secrets sir. A statement to the sorcerer’s might help diffuse rumours though.”

“Do you think I would have told you if I had not already planned on doing just that?” Victor smirked before patting Timothy on the shoulder reassuringly. He then suggested, “You want to see what Theodore and his gang have been cooking up?”

Timothy shrugged and said, “Sure, why not?”

The two of them did not have to look very hard for the demonstration area considering that there was a large collection of interested onlookers crowding around one of the observation windows to the outside world. Victor easily glided through the crowd, people parting in deference to him while Timothy broke off but had the rank and reputation to muscle his way to the front with little protest.

A man in his thirties with somewhat messy hair, extravagant mutton chops, a day’s worth of stubble on his chin, and the wild eyed look of someone who really got into their work stood atop a crate and was gesturing at a display screen above the observation window. He had evidently already started his spiel to the crowd, which Victor did not mind considering that he had already heard it months ago.

“…thus in the aftermath of the battle with the worms we found ourselves in a quandary. Against such large waves we need weapons with enormous ammunition capacities, thus leading the mind immediately to energy weapons powered by a D-Engine, which for all practical purposes has infinite ammunition. However, all of our energy weapons are designed for anti-armour work, making them rather overkill for the task while possessing inadequate ROF to make effective anti-worm weapons. The obvious solution is to reduce the individual power of each shot while increasing the cycling speed, but just because something is obvious does not make it correct,” Theodore explained to the crowd, eliciting a number of sagely nods from who worked with the various energy weapons of some sort.

Up on the screen there were several simple animations that detailed some of the problems with increasing the rate of fire for energy weapons. “Of the weapons that it would make sense to adapt to anti-worm work, each has their own problems. Plasma weapons were of particular effect against the worms because the energy density of the individual plasma packets were sufficiently high to reliably cause auto-ignition of organic material even in damp conditions, making them the number two killer behind the flamers, which of course have the deficiency of ammunition limits and dangerously short ranges. The problem with plasma weapons is that while a plasma bottle can pulse out charges at nearly arbitrary rates, the magnetic confinement fields in the barrel that transform the pulse into something that does not immediately dissipate into the air have a much slower reset rate.”

The image above showed the magnetic lines within the barrel of a plasma cannon being forced to reset too often, eventually collapsing into a fouled mess such that the plasma pulse immediately bloomed into nothingness. The image then switched to that of the interior of a laser cannon. “Now we come to lasers. Stolid, dependable lasers. While lacking the punch of plasma weapons, lasers are much less delicate and more reliable, and while it is possible to lower the power of an individual laser shot to increase ROF, they run into their own problem. Namely that unlike plasma weapons where the plasma is magnetically confined in a vacuum and thus releases relatively little heat into the weapon, a laser weapon absorbs a lot of energy into its lasing material and optics. The faster you fire a laser, the less time for cooling and thus the temperature rise becomes nearly quadratic with a linear increase in ROF.” Up on screen the laser cannon melted down to nothingness as its rate of fire increased.

“With little time and fewer resources, we sought to find a way to overcome these limitations using only the technology currently available to us. Looking to the past for prior engineering solutions to similar problems, we found the obvious, brute force solution: more barrels. Dr. Richard Gatling originally solved the issue of how to load, fire, and eject early rounds by making it a multi-step process spread over several barrels. Nearly a hundred years later aviation engineers solved the problem of needing higher ROF from their guns to properly engage enemy air craft at high speed by using multi-barrel weapons spun by electric motors to overcome the wear and heat issues. We now continue that tradition with the Anti-Worm Laser System, or AWLS for short,” Theodore exclaimed at the end, and in the loading dock outside that the viewing window peered out on workers pulled away a canvas sheet to reveal an ugly, misbegotten mass of wires, cables and tubes that terminated in a blunt series of cylinders vaguely recognizable as four military lasers arranged in a circle with a rather nasty looking set of spikes jutting up from above the topmost barrel. The view screen also switched over to a video feed from another angle so that everyone could see.

Grinning in a self-depreciating manner, Theodore explained, “While the AWLS-1 is just a proof of concept design at the moment, we already have designs in the CAD for more elegant versions that could be carried by light mecha. This version could also theoretically be placed in a stationary turret mount if necessary, but we are certain that once we start collecting test data our next set of prototypes will be far superior.”

Victor took this moment to interrupt and ask, “Those spikes on the front, they were not in the initial design given to me. May I ask what they are for?”

Theo looked over it for a second before he said, “Ah yes, that was an addition we had to make after modelling showed that there would be a slight problem otherwise. When we fire it we will see if our predictions were accurate.”

“Ah, good. I thought maybe some fanboy had thought that the addition of some sort of bizarre bayonet would be necessary,” Victor replied with an amused tone.

“This gun would not make a very good melee weapon, although at close range… yeah,” a morbid sort of look crossed over Theodore’s face and then he waved to the test crew and spoke into a radio, “Okay boys, begin with 180 RPM.”

Outside warning lights came on and then the machine began to move, the barrels starting to spin while lighting up the air in front of them with the characteristic crack of a military laser being fired. The speed it was spinning at was perhaps three-quarters of a turn a second. Theodore said at that point, “This is the listed maximum ROF for a standard anti-armour laser for a baseline comparison. However that is per barrel. Step it up to 720.”

The rate of rotation quadrupled, and now every barrel was firing three times a second, producing a stream of fire that some in the audience could distinguish the pulses of while to others it was all starting to blur. After a few seconds the rotation ceased, steam from the moisture in the air outside rising off the entire contraption. Theodore said, “We could probably push that even further, but this is an experiment as much as it is a demonstration so we want some time to let it cool off a bit before stepping up the ROF again.” Into his radio he said, “When ready you can begin the initial T/ROF analysis test.”

After about half a minute where the audience quietly chatted amongst themselves in anticipation, the warning lights came back on and the weapon began to spin and fire again, starting off slow but quickly picking up speed. A graph on the display screen showed real time temperature measurements plotted against the increase in rate of fire. Underneath about three-hundred sixty RPM there was no appreciable increase in temperature with time or increase in rate of fire, something the people who were watching were very appreciable of. Being able to bring a massive, continuous barrage of fire on the worms would be extremely useful even at a relatively low ROF.

The RPM continued to climb past 720, and the stream of laser fire plunging out into the jungle became a continuous thing while the temperature started to rise steeply. All the eyes watched it climb toward the red line on the chart that indicated when the automatic shut off would kick in. Just before it got there at 2000 RPM there was a massive bass roar from outside that shook the foundation of the entire area and massive plume of steam could be seen ejecting out the back of the device. Instead of shutting off, the temperature actually dropped sharply and the RPM continued to climb. At 3000 RPM the end of the chart was reached and the weapon shut down, shrouded in a massive cloud of steam.

Grinning ear to ear, Theodore said, “And that ladies and gentlemen was one of the effects we were hoping for. You see, we realized that with our motors and D-Engines, we could do something our ancestors had not done: we could not only spin the barrels but cool them by the addition of air scoops to turn the interior into a turbine. The moisture in the air probably added to the cooling effect while also being a pain in the ass for other reasons. Of course, we will need to do more proper experiments to account for time, but it appears that we could sustain 2000 rounds per minute for as long as the machinery will hold out. 3000 RPM is also the engineering limit of how fast we can spin things before it starts to fail.”

There were a lot of impressed noises from the crowd, and then applause broke out. The idea of a pair of those mounted on the teleoperated turrets surrounding the base with the support infrastructure for additional cooling; maybe even a D-Fridge… a wave of worms would be cut apart before they could even get into range of their psychic attacks. Theodore took a theatrical bow to the applause, producing a round of good hearted cheering.

This also meant two things for those with their own projects in the room. The first was that they would have fewer resources to play around with as the AWLS project was bumped up to official research. The second was that investment into experimental projects was likely to go up as other people tried to find their own slice of success.

Also, for Victor he found Ruth sliding up next to him and whispering into his ear, “If we can fund this…”

Victor briefly scowled at her while still clapping for Theodore and replied, “This was all using proven science and engineering, nothing new.”

“Well we’ve already proven everything we’re ever going to do in the labs without taking the next step…” Ruth pointed out.

Victor’s scowl deepened before he said, “Get me the proposal by the end of the week. If you’re going to do this I want it done properly and safely. And you’re sure it has to be you?”

“I’m the only candidate until people start having kids,” Ruth replied.

“An even worse idea of course. Fine. Just get me the proposal, okay?” Victor replied.

“You won’t regret this,” Ruth replied before walking off.

Once she was out of earshot, Victor muttered, “Oh, I very much doubt that.”

[Simon_Jester]

The engineer in me demanded this chapter. Sorry.

The image above showed the magnetic lines within the barrel of a plasma cannon being forced to reset too often, eventually collapsing into a fouled mess such that the plasma pulse immediately bloomed into nothingness. The image then switched to that of the interior of a laser cannon. “Now we come to lasers. Stolid, dependable lasers. While lacking the punch of plasma weapons, lasers are much less delicate and more reliable, and while it is possible to lower the power of an individual laser shot to increase ROF, they run into their own problem. Namely that unlike plasma weapons where the plasma is magnetically confined in a vacuum and thus releases relatively little heat into the weapon, a laser weapon absorbs a lot of energy into its lasing material and optics. The faster you fire a laser, the less time for cooling and thus the temperature rise becomes nearly quadratic with a linear increase in ROF.” Up on screen the laser cannon melted down to nothingness as its rate of fire increased.

...With respect to your inner engineer, are you sure about the underline bit?

[Academia Nut]

...With respect to your inner engineer, are you sure about the underline bit?

Real world? No idea, although I do know that sustaining the big chemical lasers being worked on for military application produces a hell of a lot of heat rather quickly. I was even going to say exponential, but I decided to go with a more conservative quadratic. But in the context of the near magitech world of CTech it seemed a reasonable eyeball.

[MysteriousDarkLordv3]

Lovely bit - appealed to the tech-geek and gun-geek in me.

Heat will always be a problem in combat lasers. The best ones are not very efficient (someone once described a laser as a blast furnace that produced coherent light as a byproduct).

So what does Our Ruth have in mind? Something with spooky ramifications? (In a Cthulhu Mythos universe, going out for a burger has spooky ramifications, but still ...)

[LadyTevar]

I think Ruth is going too talk to The Planet