Facet 4

Facet 4

...
Commissioned by Shaderic

Wordcount: 2500

…

The only good Facet is one that’s focused on speed. Against Gegner, whose most basic form of attack are hypersonic projectiles, anything besides speed when conducting assaults is idiotic. Hitting hard, getting out, and rearming is the best policy for any pilot. 

Putting on armor is asking for trouble at best and a death sentence at worst. 

Armor does nothing against Gegner directed energy weapons. Even when not in a force of thousands, with all their minds working together as a biological supercomputer, all it takes for a Gegner to take down a pilot is a lucky shot, one shot to turn a Facet, and a pilot who had to be trained for years and received cybernetic upgrades that cost millions, to molten slag.

And, there’s always a handful of laser-based Gegner in every raiding party.

The thing is the higher ups downplay how clever the Gegner are. They’re touted as self-replicating robots that need massive numbers to equal one human being in intellect. If that human being is a genius, I’d agree. However, most people aren’t geniuses. I’d say a dozen or so Gegner is as smart as an average human being. Given how a bell curve works, a dozen Gegner are pretty much smarter than nearly fifty percent of humanity with just a handful and they’re all as smart as one another. There’s no weak links in a group, they coordinate instantly with one another, and don’t hesitate.

Tactically, technologically, and in terms of manpower, humanity is holding on because we have the orbitals and enough firepower to waste the entire planet. Orbital strikes on Gegner are routine. Wherever they’re entrenched is smashed by tungsten rods, glassed by plasma arrays, and saturated by clean fusion bombs on a weekly basis.

And, they’re still pushing and breaking through our defensive line. 

Yet, even after decades of war, people still freaking insist on putting armor on Facets. 

I understand. It worked when we were killing each other. Facets against Facets meant that armor meant something, but there’s something about that logic that’s easily forgotten: Facets fought Facets because Main Battle Tanks with fuckoff, huge guns were too slow to respond to them. A big enough caliber gun, with a decent targeting system, is all the deterrence you need to take down a Facet. If a Facet stayed in a combat zone, when an armored column rolled in with five tanks with giant guns, they died unless they were speedy and had a big gun of their own. 

Movement is life, holding fast is death, and for the life of me I didn’t understand why no one did what I asked and ripped all the fucking armor off the Facet I was taking off to war!

…

While the rest of the squadron was making small talk, I was looking for a way to blast the armor plating off my unit without damaging it. I was looking at the design schematics of the newest mass production model, while we soared over desert sands at 2.5 kilometers for second. What I found told me a very shitty, terrible story. 

The armor modules didn’t have blasting caps, nor a manual means for in-Facet removal, ergo I couldn’t remove it at a press of a button or by using the janky controls to remove each segment. At least without damaging the limbs. It was ablative armor in the sense that it’ll come apart when the enemy hits it, but only when the enemy hits it, because both the blasting camps and manual removal modifications--get this hilarious fact--would’ve weighed down the Facet by ten percent more due to all the armor one or the other would’ve had to upgrade.

I wouldn’t be moving along with the rest of the squadron, if not for the fact that I had an AI that could do SOMETHING about the software, even if the hardware was beyond saving.

All I needed was time--

“Last known enemy position coming up in thirty seconds.” Ah, fuck me. Sometimes, I hate the fact that Facets are so damn fast. “Gayle and Fran, look after the newblood. Keep him and yourselves alive. This is one hell of a first day to have.”

“What’re we looking at, boss?”

What the fuck? We’ve spent all this time traveling over safe, unmolested territory and you haven’t read the briefing? I read it while trying to make the best out of the moving coffin I’ve found myself in. If you need to know, I wasn’t looking at the user manual made for people who think crayons are for snacks. My source of information was the manufacturer blueprints and engineering notes. Top secret, national security shit that the upper brass don’t feed to the grunts, because the grunts would be up in arms about getting weapons manufactured by the lowest bidder to minimal specifications. 

I’d found out how fucked I am, while reading about how fucked we are, and you don’t have a clue how fucked everyone is!?

“We have a sizeable enemy incursion. They bypassed the perimeter defensive wall by tunneling underground. Seismographs didn’t catch them until they were a ten kilometers in, because they were going low and slow.”

Blah, blah, blah. Gegner are smart. They avoided a scary defensive line, entered somewhere they couldn’t get hit by strategic weaponry, and wrecked the minimal drone patrol sent their way. Tl;dr: we have a raiding party that can devastate an Arcology on our hands, because this is a backwater posting that doesn’t have any notable congregations that need more supplies and bodies thrown on it. 

“Huh, is it me or are they getting smarter?”

“Smarter or not, they still die to enough bullets.”

“Roger that!”

Insert generic, feel good phrases to overcome terror and dread from the machine gun monkeys. 

This is going to be a slaughter.

…

Everything went better than expected.

Only sixth-eighths of the squad died in the initial attack. Well, technically, Sarge was just out-of-commission since his Facet’s legs, arms, and head got blown off, but the fact remains that only I and my two new squadmates were in fighting shape. 

Meanwhile, the enemy force had just a little over fifty percent left. 

Gegner never wasted opportunities. If they made a tunnel that bypassed a major defensive barrier, and their location has been compromised, it’s only natural that they’d go all-in to utilize their advantage before it was destroyed. Though I’m talking with the advantage of hindsight, as well as experience no longer focused on stressing over my only means of survival, I should have known that the Gegner wouldn’t retreat and abandon their project, but instead funnel as much of their forces in the region to establish a beachhead within human territory. 

Most of the enemy force in the region was now trapped underground and being eradicated by subterranean charges, which is a strategic victory for humanity at the mere cost of a single, Facet squadron. 

Really, if the squadron has focused on just dealing with the enemies in front of us, not venturing into the massive tunnel to set up explosive charges and set them off, it was likely that there wouldn’t have been any casualties. I found myself in a rather capable squadron, so capable in fact that I wished they’d all be alive instead of the two I had with me now, so that I could have more meatshields between me in the enemy.
However, the past is the past and now I have to deal with the present.

When my AI has finally finished overhauling all of my current machine’s software. 

Right, time to be the hero and save the day-

“You only have two minutes of functionality if you activate the system you’ve asked me to create.” Goddammit. Why can’t anything go right? My vacation from the front is literally another front. The commanding officer I’m supposed to have support me is a bitch with a stick up her ass. And, finally, the piece of shit I’m running around in can’t function for more than two minutes, if I try to do anything with it besides the absolute, bare minimum. “I suggest you rely on your two, last teammates, if you wish to survive.”

So, I had to decide between a glorious death where I charged the enemy and went out like a hero, bravely holding up the middle finger to all the chucklefucks who landed me my current situation, or I’d have to talk to two regular people. 

Regular people who’ve stayed alive for a long time in deathtraps, but still regular, normal people. 

“Pick a number.” I asked my supercomputer, sentient companion after much consideration, self-reflection, and internal debate. “1 or 2.”

“You cannot be seriously considering making such a decision with such an inane-

“1 or 2.” I insisted, carefully, while holding my finger over the overdrive program that a meticulously waited for this entire battle and had expected to not be complete shit. “I want a number. That’s all.”

“...1…”

“Fuck.”
I would rather die, but I stopped tuning out my last two allies and spared a moment to look at their ranks.

“Tell me what you both have now.” Naturally, over the din of battle, it takes time for people to respond. However, when they both said nothing for five seconds, I took matters into my own hands. “Fine. Give me their ammo counts and equipment. If they don’t listen to me, take control over their Facets.”

Corporal Gayle was outfitted for long-range bombardment, which was probably the reason why we were still alive. She was using the first generation of humanity’s own portable directed energy weapons, a massive plasma cannon that replaced her Facet’s left arm. It was fragile, required her to lock down and turn off other systems before firing, but it was the reason why fifty percent of the enemy was dead instead of ten. It carved through Gegner, since there’s little anyone can do against being hit by a small star. Unfortunately, she was now running at ten percent in ammunition and half the enemy remained, while having no conventional weaponry to her name.

Corporal Fran was the direct opposite. She was touting as many missiles and bullets a Facet could carry, while also having enough barrels to spit them out at a steady rate. The amount of firepower conventional weaponry required to defeat Gegner units used to be obscene, until explosives and ammunition as a whole got upgraded to a decent level, but such was not the case now. In fact, if her ammunition stock was full, our chances of surviving would’ve increased exponentially. Unfortunately, she was running lower than the girl with the latest, best mass produced weapon available to humanity. She only had five percent of her ammunition remaining, while half the enemy still remained.

My loadout is utter shit. There’s no particle cannons, no tactical warheads, no railguns, and no plasma-based point-defense weapons. My previous Facet can be in front of this and kill everything in less than a second. Would it be a waste of a tactical, fusion warhead, but when is it ever bad to use excessive firepower against Gegner? It’s not like overkill against them will have me tried for war crimes in the future, and they have no problem using hypervelocity munitions on civilians, so the more firepower I could bring to bear the better.

What was I talking about again?

Right.

My current, shitty excuse for a Facet is armed with two autocannons, explosive charges that have to be thrown, and missile tubes a decade old. It was the sort of gear you’d give to a pilot you wanted dead. Two close-range weapons and one long-range weapon that could get picked out of the air. Even though I could certainly kill, it wasn’t efficient, and that’s without even considering the fact that I might have to go into melee, against a technologically-advanced opponent, to kill the last five or ten percent of the enemy. 

So, the only reasonable option is to take what I could from the dead.

“Cover me”.

“Got it.”

“Don’t die, kid!”

I was talking to my AI, but I wasn’t about to complain about getting two veteran pilots looking after me, especially after they outlived everyone else in the battle.

…

The first five seconds of a fight decided everything. It’s the moment where everything came together, reacted, and the conclusion was reached. Like a math problem with set digits, there’s always only one conclusion to two formulas being added to one another. Every moment of preparation beforehand, from simple logistics to the most cunning of strategies is combined with manpower and equipment, then sent on a crash course with the enemy’s own preparation.

No matter how perfect your preparations for battle are, your opponent will do their best to be perfect as well, thus the outcome can only be known after two forces collide.

The moment I stepped out of cover, I was immediately targeted by my opponents. A barrage of firepower that would’ve melted my regular Facet saturated the area of my warmachine. Impact after impact collided with armor after the first step I took. I broke down each second of battle, unaided by any of the advanced software that I had in my previous battle, and computed it against what I knew of my current Facet and the amount of firepower hitting my person.

After a second, in which my cockpit lost tertiary systems and rose in an instant, I hit the boosters.

The ablative armor on my unit’s right side was shredded, and after my boost forward, it shed off as the dead weight it was.

Turning my machine’s left side, just as I finished the boost, I presented the left side to my opponents.

A few systems sputtered and died, some of my munitions ripped themselves off as they detected they were about to explode, and emergency fire systems erupted in the cockpit to put out a fire that didn’t exist. 

Then, I boosted forward again, faster this time around, as my unit was bereft of all the armor and weapons that I didn’t need.

In the first five seconds of the fight, I had a skeleton, a frame of Facet, and was only a few minutes from heatstroke and/or being suffocated by a deluge of fire-suppressant foam. My allies had empty magazines, and a cursory glance at my sensors showed me they only knocked out ten percent of our enemy… but they knocked out the ones with energy weapons. 

And, miraculously, even when fucked to absolute shit our Sargeant’s Facet met me halfway with weapons offered. The mountain of a muscle of a pilot, probably wounded beyond saving in his cockpit, with a legless Facet that got to me only by using the last of its fuel, got me the weapon I needed to pull myself out of this shitty situation.

The others too, if I could.

But only if I could. 

Though, admittedly, with an energy shield against enemies that only have hypersonic weapons and a Facet-scaled warhammer?

I definitely could.

That was the first five seconds, so I just had to live up to my own words thereafter.

…

A/N: Wrote this with old notes initially, so Facets became Striders for a bit. They were the original name for the mechs.