34: Constructive Burning
Two weeks pass. Wing 80 stays home – the others need training, and I need to make progress on the conditioning Lathe assigned me. For ten or so hours, four days a week, I live in the simulator.
The conditioning is one of those things that you can learn, and do, if you do it enough times and for long enough. Like catching flies with chopsticks. Difficult? Sure. Possible? Yes.
Especially possible if you’re a modified, refactored Human capable of dosing yourself with mental accelerators.
Instead of catching flies, I learn to dodge bullets. Slugs, missiles, Remass beams – everything can be evaded if you’re good enough, and if your fighter is capable enough. The Mantis Shrimp is capable. I am still catching up.
Over at Dance’s dojo, Charger Knight beats on us for a week. I exchange quite a few words with him, but only afterwards do the important exchanges start to stand out.
“Why do you insist on trying to cut a man in Ironwood armor with a Planar?” he asks me after an exchange.
“Because I know I can cut it.”
The next day, I am asked to demonstrate. Knight presents me with an old armor chestpiece, set onto a target Ghoul.
When I worked the forest, I would take many minutes to set up in front of a tree, getting the perfect angle for a cut. Since then, I’ve worked hard – practiced endlessly – to drill that pause of myself.
I walk up to the target, and seamlessly transition from a walk into a lunge, tearing my Planar sword out of its scabbard. The Planar clears out of the side of the scabbard, not from the top, released from the length of its magnetic housing without an awkward drawing motion. My leading boot strikes the floor just as the Planar connects with the right flank of the breastplate.
Ironwood is, in essence, a very complex, dense wood. As most one-living matter, its structure is wildly complex, and that gives it a unique strange that something like sheet metal can’t replicate.
When petrified into armor, Ironwood turns into a fiber-reinforced fuse of ceramic and metal. The crystals of the metals and ceramics follow the Ironwood’s fibers and voids, forming into woven strands that would otherwise be impossible to manufacture.
This makes for a material that is a nightmare to get through. Ceramic flakes resist heating. Metals give it flex and strength against cracking. The fibrous nature makes it omnidirectionally strong.
An activated Planar is a fairly finnicky thing. At the right speed, at the right angle, it does not care about what it’s cutting. It shatters ceramic and flashes through metal. It doesn’t care for crystal, grain, or fiber orientation. But that’s only true under very ideal, very specific conditions. At a slight deflection, the blade slows, catches, and sinks in armor – which is why Planar shrapnel doesn’t usually get through our armor.
This, however, is a skill I’ve practiced. A lot. Like catching flies with chopsticks.
When I hit, my vertical motion is non-existent. The blade moves only horizontally, only down the blade’s plane, and only with the speed I permit it. It flashes into the armors side, and instantly digs into the Ghoul’s flesh underneath.
The moment I feel the blade slow, I pull. The additional speed of the rapid pull-cut keeps the edge moving and sawing long enough to escape the armor’s trapping properties.
I recover out of the lunge and step away from the target, leaving it with a cut that goes about a third of the way through the torso’s diameter. A killing blow, if far from a full bisection.
Charger Knight takes of his helmet. If Dance is modeled to be classically beautiful, Knight is just flat out dramatic. His skin is the same color as his armor, with what seems like silver scales on the cheeks and forehead. His eyes are silver instead of white, right up to the rainbow pupils. Gray hair, of course, with unnaturally sharp metallic teeth that show when he speaks.
“Interesting.” He looks over the bleeding Ghoul flesh under the armor. “Very interesting.”
The next day, at the start of training, he hands me a new Planar.
“Try this.”
I look at the new sword. It’s longer than standard, and curved. I draw it, and note that instead of a central structural core, this curved planar has a dull ridge on one side, with a much wider edge on the other.
Not a saber. Not a katana, either, given the guard, pommel and balance on display. Something odd between those two.
I clear away from others, and give it a swing.
Right away, I like what I feel. A Planar longsword was always a weapon for slaughtering under-armored masses – two-edged, straight, meant to let me operate like the blades of a blender full of mice. This new sword is something else – not as fast on the re-direct, but with a much better potential against real armor.
It’s not standard practice to try to fight peer armor with Planars. This is what Estocs are for. But Knight seems to think I should work on it… and so I will.
After four days of Charger Knight, I arrive at the dojo to find the red Charger there.
She has a very different vibe from Knight.
“Hey! You’re Axeford, right? I’m Mary!”
Mary wears matte, gray-red armor. Mary’s skin is also, perhaps unsurprisingly, a darker red. White hair packaged to fit under the helmet, black eyes up to the rainbow irises.
That’s 3-for-3 on the ‘attractive-to-Charger’ ratio, though 2 of the 3 are so only in a very exotic manner.
Lightning rods. That’s what Chargers are. An irresistible target that pulls attention from waves of barely visible Legionnaires in adaptive camouflage. Characters – recognizable individuals – for the enemy to focus on and humanize.
“Right,” I replay to Mary.
“What did Knight do with you?”
I pat my new, curved Planar.
Marry leans to look at the sword on my side, and raises an eyebrow.
“Interesting. Did he get you to try cutting Ironwood?”
“Yes.”
“And?”
“I had been practicing.”
“Interesting. Did he correct anything else?”
“Some tells he worked out of me.”
“Good.” She slaps me on the shoulder. “When your turn comes, give me everything you have. For now, warmups.”
Another four days go by, with Mary occupying Dance’s dojo with her own style of education. At the end of the 8-day stretch of guest Chargers, I am uniquely worn down. Even my new body can’t withstand that amount of violence – not yet.
The day after, I find myself mindlessly staring at the wall at Wing 80’s office. The body commands the mind to be still, and I find myself a willing mental blank.
“Axe.”
“Yes, Wing Leader.” I forcefully focus my vision and lean back to look at Lathe.
“We’ve a new planned operation next week.”
“Oh yeah?”
“Yeah. We’ll be burning out abominations.”
I blink, then tense my body and ramp up my Crystal generation. The day’s slow thoughts scatter as I focus.
“We are? Why?”
“The strategists identified a stretch of land that borders 4 nations, where abomination infestations have taken over large areas of viable land. Those 4 nations would benefit massively from a cleanup.”
I un-scrunch my face. “Lathe, what did you do with my notes from 2 weeks ago?”
“I gave it to the lazy fools on the strategic team. I was hoping they’d give an analysis the next day. They did not.”
“I can’t possibly be the first to come up with this idea,” I protest.
“You’re not. But you started discussion, then debate, and eventually I suspect the strategists decided to just give it a try.”
“Okay…” I nod. “Ok!”
“Problem,” Lathe continues. “Flame and Night Legions heard of the op. They’ll be participating.”
“Why is this a problem?”
“Because Black Fleet heard. They want in on the burning.”
“And…”
“And Guard orbital defense sites noted Black Fleet maneuvers, asked questions, found out, and want to get some field experience as well.”
“Aw hell,” Five whispers.
“So,” Lathe continues, “our respective leaderships are currently ‘discussing’ sectors of responsibility. This will be… extremely competitive amongst the legions, with an emphasis on ensuring there are no casualties, especially from the Guards. The Guard contingent will be all the youth from all the Guard families across the whole valley, which means we really don’t want any incidents.”
“We don’t want incidents,” Press says. “In an operation involving all 3 Legions, the Black fleet, and the Guard?”
“Correct,” Lathe says.
“And if there are incidents?” Press continues.
“Then it’s a good thing I took the cover page off of Axeford’s notes,” Lathe concludes.
I begin to sweat.
A week passes. I live in the simulators, drilling and conditioning in preparation for the op.
Dance, having returned to her dojo, tells me not to come to regular training, except for 2 hours after the usual training hours. This opens up 6 hours of my evening – time that I shift my gaming and lunch hours into, to give myself more simulator time in the morning.
Then, the operation begins.
They call it ‘Operation Constructive Burning’.
Wing 80 deploys with Remass Direct Feed beams on our heavy hardpoints. Bombers full of firebombs rise from the Legion Home along with our exterminator wings. 3 command airships gain altitude.
My Mantis warns me as low-orbiting Black Fleet units flash past in space overhead.
The Legion air force pivots, and begins to swarm west.
In the Mantis, my vision approaches proximal omniscience. I see the Guard infantry and armor convoys below as they set up in the mountains. I see Flame Legion airships cruising in from the south. I don’t see Night Legion – but from what I heard, they won’t be recognizable, even if they’re seen.
Black fleet begins the operation – as they tend to, with Remass fires from the skies.
Needle-thin beams stab from above, igniting air and shattering land. Literal grids of fire segment the zone of operation into multi-kilometer rectangles separated by burning strips of land.
Aircraft dive in next. Wings armed with sensors sweep their assigned gridsquares. My mental map updates as the ground swarms with billions of… things. Abominations. They crawl out of the ground, out of caves and borrows and hives. In range, they swarm, blindly throwing themselves into the borders of fire.
It’s our turn, now. Wing 80 falls on our assigned square, and opens with Remass fire.
I sweep the land, bouncing my aim from one hotspot to another, killing Abominations in their thousands. My beams dig in, and most of the energy is released tens of meters under the soil. I till the land, throwing up metric tons of dirt, exposing the hives and tunnels dug beneath the now-burning forest.
Something tears its way out of the ground beneath my beams. I focus on it, only to see more and more of it writhe clear of the soil. Its tens of meters across – a root, or a limb, that leads to something much greater.
The literal mother of all abominations, a creature several kilometers across, begins to thrash out of the ground. It looks like the roots of a tree without a stump. Black, porous, and incomprehensibly large for a living being.
Wing 80 receives the order to withdraw. We clear away, and circle as Black Fleet lays in from space, segmenting the horror. Millions of abominations tear their way out of the thing’s black skin, fleeing the fire. Black fleet draws a circle of light around the scene, trying to block the swarm from escaping. The abominations ignore he heat, dying in the molten dirt until they form bridges of corpses across it.
Black Fleet completes its pass, and the air wings dive back in, accompanied by the bombers. The exterminators till the soil with our beams. The bombers soak the turned dirt with liquid fire.
Flame Legion loves this. The excitement in their comms, movements and strikes is undisguised and pure.
I love this a bit less. I suffer sensory overload. The hull of my Mantis – an organ in its own right – is bombarded with light and heat and smoke from every direction. I can’t see, and yet I see too much.
For the first time in a long time, I’m forced to reduce my Crystal dosage mid-battle. I’m left operating on training and reflex, processing inputs reflexively rather than intellectually. It how we, Legionnaires, deal with situations like being surrounded and shot with overwhelming firepower – when the world is a tin can and you’re a mouse inside of it, you need to filter out the noise to escape the hammer.
We refuel 6 times at a nearby base – a Guard staging point stuffed full of Remass for the vehicles in action. The Guards slowly grow desensitized to our landing practices – vertical, like a rocket, with full thrust to the very moment of contact with the ground.
Our mission transforms. Now that most of the swarms are dead, the infantry and armor begin their sweep. They cross the burning border, and sweep downwards from the mountain slopes. A wide line of tanks and infantry combs the burning landscape. Waves of gunfire ripple across the line as the surviving Abominations charge on sight.
I get a good look at what a Charger does, in an operation like this.
Lone Legionnaires, towering and graceful, walk a solid 200 meters ahead of the advancing Legion line. They trigger the Abomination survivors, and they cut down the enemy by the thousands. They take the brunt of the attention, and they come out of the brawls untouched.
They don’t shy away from summoning us, though. A flare, or a laser comm occasionally strikes our vision, and we maneuver to burn down some strip of land the Charger doesn’t like the look of.
The Maxwells moving with the ground wave occasionally erupt with fire. They use Old-Earth age-of-sail combat logic, signaling when they are about to fire, and firing in single salvos to avoid permanently blocking everyone’s vision with Remass exhaust and dust. When they do fire, it’s an every-barrel, every-emitter salvo that clears out just about every non-Legion moving object in their line of sight.
At the end of hour 6, Wing 80 goes off-shift, relieved by another Blood Legion wing.
We fly home, land, and just sort of sit in our aircraft as we cool down. It’s hard to move – to force myself to move – after all that.
I see Lathe wander over my way. It’s hard to see him through the ash-laminated cockpit dome. He waves, and I force myself out of my Mantis.
“Go home. Rest. Do nothing but rest. And no matter what, do not admit this was your idea.”
I have my orders.
I go home, to my cabin, fireplace, and bed.