Embers After Flames, Chapter 8.7 (Patreon)

8.7

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January 1, 47 years post Fires of Ibis

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This year started the same way that the last year ended.

Balam and Arquebus went to war with each other, both groups attempting to sabotage the other. The RLF stayed holed up in their fortresses, continuing to add more and more defences to them as time passed. Strategic stockpiles built up, even as new luxury and civilian products continued to flow into the cities. Despite the war going on outside, this was the longest period of quiet that most of these people had experienced... probably since the PCA arrived, to be honest.

It wasn’t just a matter of surviving against overwhelming odds, anymore. Now, people were living and thriving- and all the while, their support enabled the RLF to continue their buildup unimpeded. Technical training was spreading at a pace that was limited only by the need to make sure it was actually useful.

BAWS, Elcano, and Furlong continued their work in the background. BAWS was still chewing on the supply of battle data that the RLF had supplied them in bulk- and even now continued to supply in smaller amounts. New machines were still being developed, old ones still being refined, and the RLF made sure that the new stuff was properly tested by putting it on the frontlines before passing that data back. Smaller data sets, but still very useful.

Furlong was doing about the same thing, but focused on missiles and internal systems rather than the actual machines. The two companies were pretty symbiotic, to be honest, so it was a good deal for them both.

Elcano was the odd one out for the three, being focused more on artisanal and specialist designs for Armored Cores than they were on general purpose units that BAWS and Furlong handled. That wasn’t to say that they weren’t appreciated, though. A decent chunk of the RLF’s AC Pilots made use of Elcano’s designs, and pretty much all of them except Dolmayan was using something that they’d manufactured. This differing focus made sure that they weren’t at odds with BAWS, who also made ACs, but typically lent towards medium and heavyweight physically-focused designs compared to the lightweight, agile, energy-focused designs of Elcano.

They weren’t competing in the same market, in other words. Because of that, BAWS and Furlong had no problems working alongside Elcano, and that meant that all three could make a neat mint.

Now that the PCA had backed off to go focus on Raven and Branch, the attention of all three had split a little.

Furlong wanted as much information as they could acquire on Balam, their old rival. Their history was pretty old by this point, the Jupiter Wars now a few decades old. G1 Michigan had once been the commander of Furlong’s Armed Fleet, before his retirement from Furlong and subsequent recruitment into Balam to lead the Redguns. It had been a war with only a technical victor, Balam achieving their objectives, but Furlong had savaged them and been savaged in return.

These days, Furlong had turned away from the old style of corporate warfare, preferring this joint partnership with BAWS that they now enjoyed. That didn’t mean that they didn’t have problems with Balam, especially since Balam was continuing its investment into rival products. For that alone, they would have helped the RLF. That the RLF was so consistently capable of supplying battle data both for their own products and also the enemy’s products was a grand bonus.

Elcano, on the other hand, desired everything from Arquebus. Unlike Furlong and Balam, Elcano had no particular history with Arquebus. What they did have, however, was an overlap of product categories.

Arquebus focused on advanced technology, meaning that it preferred energy weapons, fast warmachines, and a variety of situational problem solving equipment. In other words, pretty much all the same shit that Elcano focused on- except Arquebus was a giant in comparison to Elcano, and this had only been made worse when Arquebus acquired Schneider as a subsidiary, because that was another group that prioritized lightweight frames with a good focus on energy.

Elcano’s cooperation with BAWS and Furlong was, by this point, almost as much about self-preservation as it was continuing development. Their bespoke Units were of truly high quality, but Arquebus wasn’t going to lag behind forever, and that quality came at a cost both in time and in COAM.

BAWS was the easiest part of this entire little fluffle. They just wanted everything they could get their hands on, the data about their own stuff rating the highest at the moment.

There was plenty of it coming in.

January saw a three-way engagement between Arquebus, Balam, and the RLF in the same battle. It had been quite a mess, because the only one of the three which had been expecting the battle was the RLF. It hadn’t been that large a battle, all considered. Just MTs for everyone.

That meant the RLF won the battle pretty handily, since the pilots were qualitatively superior and their machines weren’t exactly lagging behind.

February saw a string of deployments of mercenaries, both sides hiring people all over the place. A few of those even involved Walter’s Hounds, and the constant engagements against other ACs quickly earned the surviving two Hounds a reputation on the battlefield.

In turn, that applied another reputation to Walter himself. Gen Fours were not usually... like that, after all.

Alas, all good things had to come to an end. In April, the duo got into another battle, and right after they completed their objective, they were ambushed by Sulla.

615 died, which left 617 all alone. The arrival of supporting forces onto the battlefield saved 617’s life, but they had lost the rest of their squad now.

It said something about the nature of Gen Four Augmentations that I couldn’t say definitively whether or not this would actually bother them. Reduced empathy was a common side effect, alongside a reduced ability to care about other people. If they were in their right minds...

Well, they wouldn’t be a part of Walter’s Hounds then, would they?

Fully anticipating that Sulla was going to continue being a problem, Walter elected to take a brief break from his handler duties while he replenished the Hounds. That took Walter, and 617 by extension, out of the conflict for a number of months.

In the meantime, he left things to Carla.

Carla, at least, had been doing better than Walter’s Hounds had. Without the Dosers, she lacked the manpower she would have had, but with the contacts from the RLF, they were able to side-step that problem. Her group reformed themselves as a black market tech group, filling a similar role that Reuse and Development originally had, but this time with a veneer of unrestricted mad science as their guise rather than purely profit-motivated arms dealing.

They refrained from selling to Balam and Arquebus, both of whom were rather more likely to simply take what they had and turn it into something else rather than actually use it. Instead, they ended up supporting the mercenary markets that sprung up around the RLF’s own supported mercs. They also sold to ALLMIND, but everybody did that. ALLMIND offered good deals and had been reliable for literal centuries, after all.

Carla’s efforts were twofold. They continued to pull more and more information from the RLF, slowly beginning to piece together the picture that had remained obscured to the Institute. The second thing they did was more immediately useful; preparing new ACs for Walter’s Hounds.

At the moment, the Hounds were using standard SORA models, which, yes, were good, but there was still room for improvement. Carla got a few new ones set up, using the LUNCH Frame since it was in the middleweight category yet upgraded in most of the ways that actually mattered in AC combat.

Hopefully, that would let the Hounds survive a bit longer. Three of them hadn’t even made it a full year, after all. With a mortality rate like that... Well, either he was going to need a lot more ‘stock’, or Rubicon was going to see 621 a lot earlier than they previously would have.

While Walter was gone and Carla was busy, things simply continued as usual. Arquebus and Balam had, by now, come to the conclusion that life on Rubicon actually somehow sucked more than they thought it would, and as corporations do, they chose to react to this by frantically upgrading in hopes of catching up.

Here, the infrastructure they’d brought with them proved its worth, spitting out newer and ever more cutting edge weaponry as each month passed. At first, it was just minor things; a bit more armour here and there on their MTs, but it quickly started to evolve beyond that. A new gun every month, an optimisation for an old weapon at the same time. Balam stuck to the same old stuff but bigger, rifles scaled up even further even as the missiles became larger and more dangerous.

Arquebus, on the other hand, pivoted into more experimental technologies. Plasma cannons, arc throwers, stun needles... The last were especially annoying.

It was a shift towards quality, away from sheer quantity. A recognition, perhaps, of their current situation. The PCA outnumbered everyone, while the RLF had an army of universal Augments. The megacorps had been stuck somewhere in the middle, yet worse in both ways.

Even more problematic for the both of them was that they had expected to at least be able to recruit from the locals. They had brought in some rather considerable numbers on their own, but there were no more reinforcements coming after the PCA rebuilt the Closure Satellite and finally sealed the planet again. Neither would have really trusted the locals, but they would have made decent enough cannonfodder... if there were any of them to recruit, that is.

But, no. That vast majority of the planetary population were sequestered away into a number of zones, happy, healthy, and defended by enough force to turn away even the Megacorporations. Even if an assault didn’t break them, it would leave them perilously exposed to their rival, and that wasn’t something they could risk.

... I suppose that means that Arquebus’ little brainwashing program was going to have a bit more difficulty this time around. Good. If that particular subject happened to show up, I was going to drop C-Weapons on it, damn the consequences.

Well, anyway, aside from the Megacorps, Walter, and Carla, there was also the PCA.

They were still doing rather poorly, all considered. Raven was a slippery motherfucker, and despite all the effort they continued to put into it, the PCA was still failing to pin them down. Their gimmicks had changed a bit with every failure, though. First it was hordes, which Raven outran. Then it was Cavalry, which Raven reduced to scrap metal. Then came the Ekdromoi, which Raven hunted in turn. I had thus far seen the deployment of even more shit, from the simple things like AH12s to the fancier things like Warships, to the newer toys on top of that, like BALTEUS.

Raven had broken at least three of those units. Two had been in the same battle.

From my examination, they were in the process of refining something to kill Raven. The CATAPHRACT, from what the data raiding we’d been doing indicated.

I didn’t have technical specs yet, but I’d made a point of passing the data to Raven regardless. I didn’t really expect Raven to have problems regardless, but a bit of friendliness never hurts and I was certainly not above tipping the scales even further in the direction I favoured.

I expected it would be here in the next year or so. It was already pretty far into its late stage, so there wasn’t that much work left to do. I did find myself wondering whether or not it would be deployed against someone else first, though, as a test of its capability. Obviously, if it couldn’t handle some other scrub, it certainly wasn’t going to work against Raven.

Ah well.

We’ll get there when we get there.