NationStates Jolt Archive

OOC: Based on 2005 Spielberg rendition. Enter as humanity or one tripod crew - or BOTH. After maybe 30 posts (if it gets that long) aliens start to fail. NS Earth.

IC:

The five hundred spacecraft, each about seventy meters long, formed up around a spherical craft eight hundred meters in diameter. They began their slow entry into an orbit that would keep them at the far side of the Earth moon as nanomachines within the onboard atmospheres awakened thousands upon thousands of tentacled figures, quite groggy after some three months in biostasis.

The first to awake had a name incomprehensible in our language, but let us call him Thane, for this was effectively his title. Thane came up and turned on the artificial gravity on his ship, plopping unceremoniously to the ground as his atrophied muscles struggled to adapt to restored functionality.

"All right, people, we're here!" he broadcast over the neutrino communications streams. "Subject planet's got a dominant atmospheric mix of oxygen, nitrogen, argon, and carbon dioxide. Not bad for a change; I hate those damned space suits we used back in Ares."

Another being, we shall call her Fixer, had just checked out a computer console. "Running internal diagnostics...all communications, life support, drives, and deployment systems are at normal capacities. This is surprising; most of our equipment was made in Cerian factories."

Thane rebuked her last statement. "I'm from Ceria, mind your tongue. Labor's cheap but we make it well."

Fixer groaned, and continued reciting data readouts. "Local militaristic strength analyses indicate dominance of projectile weaponry. Not very fast and heavy. Rare cases of directed energy weapons. Explosives, endothermic chemical and nuclear. Not a bit of antimatter anywhere visible. Orbital weaponry drops tungsten rods - but the planet's gravitational strength coupled with air density and consequently air resistance do not let these weapons effectively penetrate the shields dictated in the specifications for our assault units."

"But they're organized?"

"That's what makes it funny. They're warring about each other. Lots of factions seem to be technologically advanced, and are using their power to force themselves upon smaller units."

"How did you get all this shit in five minutes?"

"I accessed the ground feeds from our buried units. Most sensors have been active for 90,000 planetary cycles."

"How long's that, our time?"

"Something like 30,000 of our cycles."

"Made in Ceria for you. This is good. All right, let's get no delays here. People!" Thane switched back to universal communication. "Operation Crimson Root Crop begins now. Objective is terraformation and colonization. Details to follow. Are the drop pods all right, Circumlabs?" This latter term referred to the huge sphere, which was an energy projector as well as a field generator for alien mass-and-radiation stealth.

"Circumlabs has checked out status on all auxiliary ships. We are at 99.54% capacity. Some people will have to be left behind on the fun, therefore, and some assault units need to be AI controlled. Otherwise, let's begin Operation CRC. Greenlight signal sending out now."

"Good job. Start up the EMP sequence to disable initial attacks, and to allow drop pods to ride the kinetic converters."

"Deploying breakers now..."

***

Mimosa was a Perimetrian city composed primarily of the Maxtopian immigrant minority, in Locality 12. As Maxtopians were fond of education, it was so no surprise that many educators and institutions were situated in this place.

James Kallsburg was a student of Assington University, who had just met up with his girlfriend for a good quickie in the gender-neutral locker rooms of PhysEd Sector. They parted ways with a short kiss as intense exams were to follow tomorrow, and rigorous studying was necessary to pass the absurd Assingtonian tests that were said to approach postdoc in first year college.

He was on his cellular phone with Karina, his girlfriend, and was walking down the street to his nearby home when a spark occurred at the phone's DSP and earpiece, causing some pain on his part. After recovering from both the pain and his strong scream, he looked back at the phone to notice that it was dead. And weren't the streetlights on just moments ago?

He looked around, and in the sudden darkness of the ensuing evening, he saw figures of people from their houses shuffling about, trying to figure out what had just happened to their electricity. And then, one by one, they all turned their heads to the same sight in the sky - what appeared to be a miniature, silent hurricane with much light and lightning embedded in the sky.

The lightning struck then at a point just meters away from Kallsburg, knocking him off his feet - but not so that he couldn't see a rapidly falling object appearing to ride the forked bolt of energy slicing into the ground---

***

Thane rubbed his head from the shock of impact. His three crewmates - the earlier mentioned Fixer, and two more named Jester and Headstrong - were just as disoriented as he was, having just spent three months without moving only to slam into hard, heavy gravity just minutes later.

"Okay, let's get this thing moving. Assault unit...someone look for the manual on - ah, here it is." With a long, slender tendril, Thane pulled out, from a corner of the remarkably clean control room, a small PDA that used organic reactive picture elements. This was a fallback that needed very little power. Manuals needed no such conveniences as holographics or mental projection except when visual representation necessitated such trappings.

"Let's see, now..." He "flipped" through the various pages of the thing. "Fixer, start up the container unlock using the key at inputs 54 to 59, would you?" She did, and a lot of rumbling was what happened next.

"Is that supposed to happen?" she asked.

Thane's response came with a grunt. "No shit. We're under tons of rock."

"But the cylinder apparatus hasn't started moving yet."

"There's a tip-of-the-iceberg damage effect on the surface before actual 'unscrewing'. Psychological weapon against waiting attackers, if there would be any."

"I see- okay, sequence is starting now. Reading a lot of movement appearing on the container's external sensory array. Looks like- whoa. We're in an urban center, people."

Jester poked his head out from a card game with Headstrong: "More stir-fry for us?"

"Shut up," Thane said. "Although you're right. We need to do firing tests on the dominant indigenous species. See how long it takes for them to be desiccated."

"I bet 0.42 seconds."

"Very specific number. You're on." Just then a massive sound, like a rocket motor or some extremely powerful machinery charging, was audible in the chamber of the vehicle. "Fixer - is that the warm-up?"

"It is. Sounds big, eh?"

"Old machine. Our new versions aren't quite as dramatic."

"30,000 planetary cycles old...daymn," Headstrong spoke up.

"Okay, controls are online...whoa." Lights flickered in the cockpit chamber as holographic displays appeared all over the otherwise empty room. These filled up sensor console positions, weapons controls, communications, and others.

"Holographic controls? This stuff is pretty old. We switched to neural interfaces ages ago."

"This was revolutionary back in the days..."

The four aliens felt a wave of vertigo pass over them as their "tank" began to rise up. It first lifted a massive leg over the crevice its container had formed, and then its warm-up sounds were exposed to the world above as it awoke from its ancient slumber. Hundreds of people, who had gone to observe the lightning strike point and the rumbles beneath, now ran in sheer terror as the thing emerged from the ground on three spindly legs.

"This tripod is pretty tall," Fixer said as she looked down below, in the cockpit that had suddenly gone transparent from its original shiny black metal appearance. "Okay, I'm looking at background radiation emissions...damn it, their dominant communication systems are microwave- and radio-based. We'll need to fall back to the acoustics if we don't want them to listen in on our transmissions...hey. Looks like air density is high enough. We won't need to make any special modifications for a long bellow. Thane, what's our start message?"

"Put 'Operational Commander' in the identification tag, and send out objectives in our data package, maps of the city, and request tight-beam gamma rays towards Circumlabs."

"Gotcha," she said as she typed out the message on the holographic projections with many-tendriled fingers.

And in an instant, whether alien or human being the observer, the menacing tripod that stood tall over Mimosa gave out a 113Hz bellow, an acoustic data carrier that gave out 54kbps of bandwidth - the identifier tag - followed by a 136Hz sound of the same timbre that, at 1mbps, sent out information to other tripods in the vicinity.

To whose who didn't know what the sound was, it was just plain scary.

"It's getting dark," Thane said. "Fixer, status on the visual enhancers? Nightvision and radar beams."

"Still working on it, Thane. Machines infinitely prefer use to disuse, really. Stupid things."

"Made in Ceria," Jester repeated the old stereotype.

"I'll put you down on the streets where the natives can gang up on you, if you say that again."

"Sheesh. It was just a joke."

"Right. Fixer, get the headlights on."

"Headlights? We have headlights?" Fixer seemed genuinely baffled.

"Well, the manual said we do."

"Wow. Okay, umm...headlights, headlights..." Fixer used all of her arms to search the control setup for something that read "headlights."

"Oh, here we go," she said after almost a minute. The three bright beams emanating from the forward "eye" lamps were almost blinding for a moment. Fixer adjusted their focus and pointed them at the oddly silent humans on the ground, who were staring up at them stupidly, as though simply waiting to be destroyed.

"Took you long enough. Headstrong, shields?"

"Shield generators appear to be functioning right. Only way we can test them safely though is if the locals start firing at us with projectiles."

"Let's try to make sure the shields work before doing that. The manual says these tripods aren't that well-armored at all. I'd have preferred a layer of boron fullerene armor or transperiodic stuff, but those weren't exactly around when we buried these things. Looks like we'll just have to keep those shields active for the rest of the campaign."

The shield generators of the tripod were actually a massive distributed network of biological nanomachines, and as were all of the nanites of this race, were based upon their own physiology. This made them very strong on their own environments - but made them susceptible to the same diseases and inherent instabilities of their archetype creatures.

"Fixer, start up the weapons arms. This is where our bet's tested, Jester. 0.42 seconds, you say? I'll bet on anything that isn't 0.42 seconds. Jesus, you're wasting creds on this."

"Ya never know, man," Jester scoffed, while snickering under his breath - he'd snuck in a human body that had fallen victim to the passive defenses of the tripod, perhaps only a decade or two ago; a powerful anti-biological agent would be dispersed against anyone who came across the tripod's shell, and this particular man bore silent testimony to this defensive system's effectiveness. Jester, meanwhile, had subjected the corpse to a number of tests and made a good conclusion on the desiccation time of such a carbon-based life-form.

"Weapons arming," Fixer said. The tripod had been silent after its data-transfer "horn," its warm-up sequence having been completed in due time. Now, however, its ancient weapons modules, mounted on flexible arms, began charging up with a deafeningly loud sound that seemed to be the sum of every high-energy device on the planet.

"Heat-rays ready. I hate that name. So cheesy." Fixer said.

"Well, would you rather have called them 'columnar anisotropic particle localization field projectors'?"

"Is that what they're really called?"

"No, but it's close enough to what they'd sound a few thousand cycles ago." At that time, some 90,000 earth years ago, nomenclature for all sorts of equipment was popularly disassembled into constituent scientific apparatus names. This made things highfalutin but nearly incomprehensible. No one but the geniuses of language and the scientists who built the devices could divine a purpose from the name of a machine. That fad took centuries to dissipate; eventually, the reverse trend occurred, as instant clarity in naming took center stage.

"So they're ready then. Okay, let's do range tests. Jester, come over to the screen and let's see how effective your shit is. Fixer, start with 15 meters, from emitter to target, and move out."

Blue beams of powerful energy lashed out from the deployed arms of the tripod, and it was then that the people of Mimosa ran in the opposite direction and never stopped moving - unless they were hit by the rays, in which case they were instantly turned to ash and dust, their clothes flying about as their particles dispersed into the air - in 0.42 seconds.

"Damn it, Jester..." Thane punched a few commands into a console that represented a transfer of 100 credits to Jester's account back on Circumlabs. "How did you know that?"

"It's called intuition, Thane. You should try it."

"Never mind. Fixer?"

"Fifteen meters, twenty-five meters, forty meters, sixty meters, all confirmed good ranges. And there's one hundred meters. God, these urban structures are mostly made of local plant life or cement. It's almost-" she stopped as she manually guided a beam across a huge, lovely house, sending its cedar shingles flying and its wood splintering into thousands of pieces. "-too easy."

"Definitely is too easy. Hey, look there. Elevated roadway. Take that out; defensive vehicles may use it to take a position." Fixer directed the beams with a flick of a finger towards the on-ramp on a skyway, which collapsed onto houses below and caused no small amount of destruction. She continued hitting more civilians below as they appeared. The heat-ray targeting system was quite accurate.

"The weapons are awfully weak, though," Headstrong said. "Lots of kinetic blast damage and heat, but nothing entirely impressive. The focused antimatter projectors and superstring breakers back home do wonders."

"Well, we signed up for the backwater job, didn't we? No surprise that we got the pre-advanced tech shit."

"Well, at least some of the continents here seem to have fusion reactors. Those'll make life easier when we've conquered."

"Yeah- hey, are those military vehicles down there?"

***

Major Jonathan Fong of the Locality 12 Homeland Defense Forces, 4th Armored, was the leader of his tank pack and made sure everyone knew it. The thin-eyed, sturdy-looking man with many decorations on his chest was the bane of his subordinates, but at least he was a decent leader with efficiency written all over his record. When he heard of giant machines surfacing all over the world, and when he heard that something came up in Mimosa, he immediately prepared seventeen AM1 tanks - variants on the M1A2 with less armor but more speed and much larger cannons - to combat the things if they displayed hostility. But he knew they would, that the "if" was only for posterity's sake; xenophobia was a bad thing to be accused of nowadays, really; special thanks to the millions of dead Larrusso tribesmen and Native Lassitrian Civilization's total eradication many centuries ago.

His tanks had not been disabled by the initial EMP blast; they were stored in a subterranean armory that was basically a gigantic Faraday cage, even though the surrounding rock would have been ample protection against even the strongest of EM pulse. When they came out, they were the only fast-moving things on the road - or anywhere, for that matter.

He arrived at the emergence point in question and found the place in ruins, with a tripod standing amidst the destruction. A lone man crawled out of a burning house, to be slain by the heat-ray of the tripod rapidly, converted to dust in a fashion never before seen by the eyes of humanity. At this, Fong gave no second thought and ordered the no-holds-barred attack on the offending machine, each shot causing a shockwave of human ash that had settled on the road.

Again and again the depleted uranium rounds flew off towards the direction of the massive thing's "head" - only to be stopped completely and falling to the ground with heavy thuds.

Fong grew nervous as his shots proved totally ineffectual - but nothing was as frightening as the glows that appeared on the weapons arms of the tripod after some minutes of being fired upon...

***

"They're using endothermic reactions to propel the sabot rounds," Fixer observed. "If they were doing shit with electromagnetics, they might have had a chance against the shields, seeing as they're using really massive slugs...but as it is, shields are holding at 99%, with 0.0004% reduction per strike, and regeneration actually outpacing shield expenditure. Looks like we came really early in their offensive capabilities. May not have a bad time at all here."

"This is good. But we can't keep sustaining damage; our power supply is still running on the old reserves after all, and we'll need to get to the rendezvous point for full reactor activation. Kill those tanks, and send out a message to-"

A distant bellow was heard. The low hum of the identification tag coincided with holographic projections of the identity of the sender, followed by the data channel and various text appearing all over the place.

Jester read aloud the most prominently displayed message, colored green as opposed to the other blue ones: "This region is badly populated. Dangerous surface activity has caused a lot of assault units to self-destruct over the past few decades. To make matters worse, some of the satellites which we missed in our space assault are aligning for an attack on us. Better move fast to these coordinates. Regards, Commandant."

"Commandant? Isn't he the guy who suggested glassing the planet?"

"Yeah. What a fucktard. But he's right for now. Fixer, those tanks?"

Fixer looked out the viewport and tapped a zoom command, showing the smoldering remains of seventeen tanks. "Taken care of."

"Good. Let's move!" The tripod's leg lunged forward, its powerful gait leaning ahead as it moved at...

"...a rather slow pace this is," Thane commented. "We really couldn't make things big and fast back then, eh?"

"Beats me, Thane," Jester said idly. "Although outside of Ceria there were things as big as these tripods that could make 32 meters a second."

"I see some native infantry with assault rifles down there, Jester. Maybe you'd like to taste some of the local metal without the benefit of a shield?"

OOC: Bump.

OOC: Secondary bump, with a reservation for another post.

OOC: i would love to join, but as finals weeks is coming and my nation's civil war, i may not be able too