38 Poseidon Megarig
Over the next handful of weeks, The Brotherhood of Steel came online with 90 percent of those signed up graduating from the basic training program. Those without the common decency to finish the six-week program within the given eight weeks got the boot and I only had to shoot two of them before the rest ran off.
Those who finished in the standard six weeks had already recovered from the basic augmentation process, having received optic and auditory cyberware, basic skin and muscle weaves, and low-power Sandevistans. All of it rudimentary military chrome. Rebecca received a far more invasive and quality upgrade, getting access to 'cutting edge' Welles Arms Biotech and Cyberware for being the first to complete basic. Everybody else that took the full eight weeks to finish basic was shit out of luck as I'd already accepted our first mission from Sacramento.
SoCal reactivated the offshore mega oil rig, Posiedon, off the coast of Santa Barbara. Biotechnica went completely ape shit at this decision and funded a half-billion eddie mission to see it destroyed. Normally this kind of job would go to Arasaka or Militech - who hold the private military world by the balls - but Arasaka isn't supposed to officially operate in North America due to post-Forth Corporate War treaty and Militech is the enemy.
So the contract was put to Sacramento who kindly passed it along to me as they currently are neck deep in 99 problems but the return of fossil fuels ain't one. It took me a week to get the equipment ready for the mission, consisting of Mk I stealth suits and Welles Arms Smart Weapons for the operatives, long-range SEAL Delivery Vehicles with climbing gear, heavy assault helicopters, and automatic mortar systems.
The Posideon Megarig was built with the kind of corporate espionage escalation that the Cyberpunk world is known for, so going in with six guys and some explosives to take out some structural supports doesn't hack it when the specs on the building are anti-nuke. We needed to storm the place and kill everyone on board to shut down the 500,000-ton off-shore oil rig, at which point Biotecnica engineers will come aboard to decommission the facility until the next time someone renovates and repairs the beast.
Honestly makes me wonder who paid SoCal to do this. Probably someone looking to take a chunk out of Biotecnica, knowing those guys would go full spaz the moment it looks like fossil fuels are making a comeback, and fracking… good God, half the board must have had seizures when that got revealed.
It's honest-to-goodness genius.
The mobilization and reconnaissance for the mission took an entire week in which we used and abused the synergy in stealth technologies between Fallout and Cyberpunk to scan and map out the defenses of the rig both above and below, identify personnel, and finalize the plans for the assault. Most members had never seen anything like this operation, save for the few veterans of corporate black ops. Night City combat is fast and loose, often completely random, separating the quick and the dead long before Judgement Day.
Basic covered this topic, but learning and doing are typically separated by a great divide.
I'd kept my people close at hand rather than disperse them through the Brotherhood as squad leaders. There were enough experienced Solos on hand that I didn't need to, and I'd rather have them on hand in case anything goes wrong rather than have them too far away to assist. Selfish of me, but fuck letting Jackie and V die cause I wanted the notoriety of leading a special forces for hire organization.
I sat in the belly of a helicopter with them, Big Ned Kenworth, and most of the Edgerunners team. The giant chromefiend became a personal project of mine, my very own Adam Smasher. He completed basic almost as fast as Rebecca, but I'd already been working on the man's cyberware before he finished. I didn't hold back much on his construction, and the man was now a brain operating 1.12 tons of war machine and currently was the most intimidating thing loaded onto the helicopter.
"Damn choom, you really do have the connection to Adam Smasher!" Rebecca sang under her black Stealth Suit helmet.
"Fake News." Kenworth growled as he sat in the center of the helicopter with a Gatling laser cannon leaning on his right knee.
I'd let the man keep some of his more interesting choices in gear, such as the jagged power jaw that opens and closes when he talks like a real mouth. He had an admirable range of flexibility and sensitivity in his robust shell. Like Smasher himself, he doesn't require a Behavioral Inhibitor Chip to prevent a deep dive straight into dissociative cyber psychosis. By the luck of the draw, I found a guy with an Empathy score of 'Yeah, right…'
V and Jackie got Mk III Stealth Suits made for them when I tailored mine to my new svelte frame. The Semi Powered Armor systems provided a slew of benefits without the need for dedicated Power Armor training, something a fair bit more tricky than the few throwaway lines that taught the Lone Wanderer how to suit up in Fallout 3. The Mk III was intuitive, completely ready for civilian markets, no specialized training needed. Increased Stealth, assisted movement, increased lifting and striking strength, automated combat narcotics dispersal, and disruption of smart targeting systems.
Jackie stacked his combat carry with Power Guns that linked up with the ballistic coprocessors in his hands for some wild trick shots and a pair of saturnite blades in the forms of a machete and a long serrated knife. V took that love of blades further, and with the string of augments she's undergone she fought like something out of a Falcmaan video. Bouncing between enemies with a mono powerblade and chucking throwing knives at people like a message from God to get wrecked. It was genuinely awesome and gave me a fear stiffy like no one's business. The smoothness in the way she moved with lethal intent linked up with that primal part of my brain that translates motion to sex appeal, helped along in no small part by vivid memories of her sexual appetite and performance being akin to a human-shaped leopard.
An alert went out to the entire brotherhood to begin the operation and the helicopters took off into the night sky, piloted by a mobile AI core housed in my unit for maximum evasiveness without fear of the aircraft crashing into each other. I had the core inside my specific chopper so that if I die, he dies. It's the same deal with a human pilot, but human error is a mean son of a bitch when rockets and machine cannons are blasting away at you.
The Welles Arms Stallion is a bit of a beast with coax rotors and aerodyne engines for additional speed and mobility. Wing-mounted rocket launchers and multiple machine cannons provided anti-armor and personnel clearing. All of which we needed as we bum-rushed the Poseidon Megarig, tripping all of its automated defenses which quickly deployed and filled the night sky with cones of fire and missile trails.
Our helicopters fired flares and began evasive action when our counter trap activated. The machine mortar systems we slowly installed throughout the week launched their payloads, forcing the defenders to choose between pulling the defense systems back and shielding them till the bombardment ended or keeping up the anti-air fire to prevent us from touching down on the rig.
They chose the former, and the defenses quickly retracted as armor plating slammed shut to weather the high explosive onslaught. By the time the mortars ended we were in position to drop boots on the rig and did so, leaping down from the helicopters as they dumped their rockets to keep the AA defenses shelled up and pulling back swiftly to best minimize damage as they returned to action.
"You chose poorly." I muttered as Nuestra Senora unleashed a charged shot down range that tore a squad of SoCal soldiers and their cover to shreds.
A continuous release of red lasers accompanied the whir of Kenworth's Gatling laser cannon, the quad-barreled system sending performance feedback directly to the operator for real-time improvements, linked to the internal processors of his Sandevistan for completely automatic adjustments. The squad followed behind him as the man turned everything that tried to bar our path into slag and ash.
With the team of killers around me, I barely needed to do anything at all, so I focused on hacking the rig's defenses to create additional chaos on the routes of the other teams that landed in separate parts of the facility as I poked holes in the rig's ICE.
The underwater assault scrubbed against the station's underside defenses, pulling back after dealing minimum damage and sustaining moderate losses, but we only needed one vector of attack to succeed, and they pulled defenders away from our end of the equation, and in true Welles fashion I gave no fucks about balancing that equation as we hammered the defenders with maximum effort.
Or drive to the command center ended at a pair of blast doors covered in enough ICE to freeze a team of netrunners solid. Rather than spend the time combating this beast through the net, I took my chainsword off my back and rev'ed that monster up. The blade sank into the thick blast door like butter, absolutely no bounce back as it cut a section out of the doors. The men on the other side gaped in horror before getting hosed down with unfriendly fire.
"Damn, hermano." Jackie slapped me on the back as I jacked my portable Cyberdeck into the main frame and set the automated defenses to suddenly switch sides, "I didn't see anything like that on the catalog."
"I love you, Jackie." I grinned under my helmet as I wrapped up my work and sent the signal for Biotecnica to come take ownership of the rig from us, "But I don't chainsaw sword love you."
"But you apparently laser cannon love Kenworth!" Rebecca laughed as the near android stalked off to continue hunting down SoCal soldiers.
"Hell yeah, I do!" I shouted back, "Do you have any idea how much people are going to be jelly of me owning that guy? Freaks like that are worth mountains of eddies."
"Is it safe for you to talk about him like that?" Maine asked as he kept his head on a swivel and his smart shotgun shouldered.
"He knows what kind of contracts he signed." I waved it off, "He's technically not a person anymore, property of Welles Arms. He gets top-shelf hardware, maintenance, and services for as long as he lives, and gets to live out his dream of being an unstoppable murderbot. I get an unstoppable murderbot to throw at anybody that bothers me. Slavery at its very best."
"Sector clear of ganic filth…" Kenworth said over coms, "Except what we brought with us."
"Fuck! That sent chills down my spine, hermano." Jackie cursed as he shook out the heebeegeebees.
"That's what I was going for when I built him. Unstoppable murderbot body with a core of 86 billion microprocessors directing it." I leaned back against the big overseer-style desk at the center of the command center with Nuestra Senora resting against my shoulder.
"So I was thinking of some new hands." interrupted Pilar right before his sister and he started a shouting match.
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This is my first ever chapter reviewed with Grammarly. I would always here about people getting Grammarly and then their grammar still being shit, so I never bought into the hype, but the Google Docs spell check and grammar system took a major shit recently and the Webnovel system is passable at best. Grammarly seems super hyphen happy, but we'll try it out. Let me know if you think the hyphens improve readability or not.
This chapter is the first of three planned battles I have for the Brotherhood of Steel. Kudos if you can think of the other two. Bigger Kudos if you recommend something that is even better than what I was planning.
Ultimately they are all going to be attack-type situations as they are special forces for hire, not security forces for hire.
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