Asteroid Blues

"You comfortable giving up command?" asked VV,

"You are aware of how I died, correct?" replied Omar.

"Libyan history isn't exactly my specialty," said VV, "And I've never really considered Recreations their inspirations."

Omar Mukhtar turned away from his the command console he was configuring, giving V an odd, unsteady look. That of a man trying to figure out whether or not he was just insulted. "Dare I ask?" he said.

VV shrugged. "Saladin's a glorified diplomat using the wrong name, Jean's a blond sociopath with a broadsword, I'm not convinced that Musashi's literate," they say, "And they existed! How could anyone claim real continuity between Achilles and Achilles?"

"And me?"

A long, tense pause passes. V stretches, languid, borrowed muscles from his current lhost writhing under their skin. There's a flash of aggravation and jealously. At the delay, At the topic of conversation. At the simple fact that VV was their own person, free to define their own life, beholden to no tragic forebear whose shadow they would never leave.

And then the feeling passes.

"The freedom fighter was a professor in a shitty situation, fighting a war he'd never win," said VV, "If he had the chance, I'm sure he'd have left. You're a careerist. Even if the fighting stops, the EI finds something else to do, and the Sphere stabilizes, you'd fight pirates until someone forced you to retire. Pretending you're the same person because you share a name and a reputation, well..." V shrugged. "It's a lie."

"And why would that stop you?" replied Omar, and after a long-suffering glance, V merely shrugged, and the two sat in an easy silence until their Ikari counterpart called, signaling that he was ready to begin the wargame.

We were practicing Frontline as it was one of the missions I was worried about in an upcoming tournament. Orpheus was testing out Ikari company, while I was testing my zone controlling HaqqIslam list. He got first turn.

The first turn was relatively uneventful. Yuan Yuans fail their drops, one gets shot by the Lasiq, the other scatters off the table. Desperado (I think?) ran up the table and dropped Smoke. Rui Shi ran up and shot the Lasiq but didn't knock her down, Desperado sprinted up and shot the Lasiq but also didn't knock her down, and the Mutts failed to kill the Desperado. His core link maneuvered to see my Fiday and discover-shoot it, but I dropped a land mine as he did so, pinning his link leader in place on pain of land mine. On the other side of the table, a lone Wu Ming panzerfaust blasted a baggage bot.

"Alright, I've checked you," calls Tanjiro, "Drop."

Majnu, a short fiday wearing a paper mache mask with 'Kaneda' scrawled across the front, looks back at him. "No you haven't," he objects.

"I've got five dudes to cross-reference against! You're in the open! I've got you! Come on," says Tanjiro.

"My disguise is great! Look, ask me something only Kaneda would know," replies Majnu.

"What's my mother's name?"

"Martha! Your family immigrated from America and she-"

"Hah!" crowed Tanjiro, "We all fucking hate Kaneda, he doesn't know my mother's name!"

Majnu gave Tanjiro a deeply aggrieved glare, and then fetched a plastic contraption labelled 'landmine' from his belt and slapped it onto the ground next to him. Tanjiro popped him twice in the chest with the training rounds, but the mine lit up as it armed itself anyways. Majnu did not flip Tanjiro the bird as he left the training field to rejoin the garrison, but the idea was there.

"Jackass," muttered Tanjiro.

My first turn primarily revolved around trying to handle the linked Missile Launcher and the Marksmanshipped Rui Shi. I lost all of my Mutts killing the Desperado and failing to kill the surviving Yuan Yuan. After some abortive attempts to figure out how to handle the Rui Shi, I blitzed the Mukhtar forwards and engaged the ML and Rui Shi simultaneously through a saturation/low-vis zone (The green acrylic holo-planters). I dropped the Rui Shi and hit the ML, but failed to wound the Tanko because, hey, red fury against in-cover HI. The Lasiq then popped the exposed, link leader Keisotsu, breaking the link entirely and ensuring it couldn't reappear.

This was all pretty brutal on my order pool, so Mukhtar retreated slightly and went into suppressive, covered by a camo token.

On his turn he tried to leverage a Yuan Yuan to pop the mine and threaten the Mukhtar, losing it and revealing that the mine was actually a Liberto minelayer, who just put down another mine. Then he tried to leverage a Brawler MSV2 in Haris, but got crit off the table. Then he tried to run forwards a pair of Tanko who were linked to that Brawler a minute ago. I revealed a Tuareg assault hacker who failed to do anything and got killer hacked off the table by the Ninja, who promptly re-camod. One took a wound and got stopped in its tracks. The other got pretty close, dropping the Liberto to Dogged and spraying shotguntemplates onto the Mukhtar through it, but also took a wound and ran out of orders before it could finish my Mukhtar. Then he revealed a Ninja, which blitzed the Mukhtar for a melee suicide run, but it got crit out of existence due to extremely poor luck.

At the start of my turn my Lasiq dashed across my backline, miraculously surviving an unfortunate missile hit to the face, and fired at the Shotgun Tanko, failing to kill it though successfully goading it to dodge towards me. Then my Khawarij jumped forwards, killing his Wu Ming on overwatch with a Panzerfaust, then killing the Shotgun Tanko, allowing the Mukhtar to kill the remaining SMG Tanko.

There we called the game, as he didn't have a meaningful way to contest zones.

It's a wargame. Practice and camaraderie building, a reinforcement of ties between allies. Still, it's no excuse for slacking. So when Omar Mukhtar gets the order, he executes with the catastrophic force he's been trained to.

He sprints through the beaten streets of Novyy Bangkok, heart racing, visor scanning for threats, clearing his view of the battlefield as it's obscured. He doesn't even see the holographic greenery between himself and his targets, just the clean, outlined silhouettes of his foes. The Rui-Shi doesn't even manage to turn before he sinks a burst of rounds into its sides, eyes turning red as it decides that the hit was solid enough to 'count' for the purposes of the wargame. A faux-rocket thuds against a nearby building, and he sinks a burst into the watching Tanko that gets him little more than a friendly middle finger waved in his direction before he retreats.

Then new targets, a sniper, a pirate, a squad of heavy infantry. Solid, well-trained troops. None good enough. Round after round sinks downrange, trooper after trooper walks away from the battlefield, declared Dead, declared Injured, or simply unable to put him down. A spray of shrapnel wings him, but even that isn't near enough. He is death on two legs. The pinnacle of the recreation program, of Haqq's supersoldier science, of simple, murderous human skill. Nothing thrown his way is quite enough to change that.

Then he sees the shimmer. A bare glimmer against polluted, artificial atmosphere, and fires a single round on reflex.

The ninja materializes out of thin air, sword raised to strike, a single practice round embedded in her helmet.

"That was horseshit!" she says, "How'd you know to shoot?"

"I didn't!" replies Omar cheerfully, "I shot anyways."

The ninja throws her hands up in frustration and sits down on a nearby planter. A nearby Liberto, finally declared dead after extended fire, offers her an energy bar as the wargame winds down.

Roundup!

That went pretty well due to some great strokes of luck and the simple fact that Orpheus was testing a new faction. My Lasiq placement was pretty aggressive and didn't accomplish what I wanted it to during my first reactive turn. It turned out useful later but hey. My S4 blocking of my Mutts failed comprehensively, I should've been more conservative with the Mutt placement and just ran the Khawarij up earlier. Using the Liberto to guard my Mukhtar lane and leaving the mine by the Liaison officer was needlessly risky, especially as the Liberto's tall enough to guard both from near the LO's position.

On a more general note, we've been using those holo-planters as saturation/low-vis for a while and that proved a poor decision here. They locked too much of the board behind saturation/low vis penalties, overly rewarding visors and hurting long range AROs.

Still, can't complain too much. Even without the surrender that was looking like an increasingly clear 10-0.