“Yes, Chief. But if someone does that to me for real, I’m going to kill him.”
“That’s the spirit, kid. Yeah, that’s exactly what you should do. With millions of colonies in known space all fighting for survival you get some crazy people out there, building shit that would turn anyone’s stomach. The best way to discourage the sickos is to terminate them with extreme prejudice whenever you find them.”
‘Extreme prejudice’ meant ‘nuke them till they glow, and don’t worry about bystanders’. Usually I was a little hesitant about going that far, but not this time.
The weirdness got worse instead of better, though. Humanity has had nanotech for four hundred years, and when you can theoretically build any crazy thing you can think of people try out a lot of exotic ideas. To hear the chief tell it there were whole schools of military thought that focused on winning by throwing so many surprises at the enemy that he can’t cope.
“That’s why exotic enemies are part of the basic curriculum,” he explained. “We’re only scratching the surface of what people have come up with over the years. But conventional forces outperform everything else if you know how to use them correctly. That’s why the major powers all build conventional bot armies, instead of something like utility fog or transformer swarms. Once we’re done you’ll have at least seen every major category of hardware that’s out there, and have some idea how to react to it.”
He hesitated. “Well, every category but one. I think you’re a little young to deal with eromorphs, and that’s an optional module anyway. Hardly anyone uses them.”
I looked up the word, and blushed. “Sex monsters? People really do that?”
“Not anymore. Stuff like that doesn’t work on bots, and these days the troopers are always in powered armor. The main thing to watch out for is infiltrators, like that elf you ran into back in Hoshida. That type will surrender the first chance they get, and then try to seduce you once they’re a prisoner. It’s an easy way to get a trooper alone to use mind control tech on him, and even professionals can fall for it sometimes.”
“I’ll keep that in mind, Chief.”
I was doing a lot better by then. I could make my bots do any standard maneuver with just a few clicks in the virtual UI, and when that fell short I knew how to get what I wanted with a minimum of instruction. I was finally getting decent at keeping track of what the enemy was doing, and I was starting to get a feel for Chief West’s tactics. I’d won a couple more missions, and the ones I lost were a lot closer than before.
On day seven Chief West finally stopped with the weird tricks, and instead set me up as a platoon leader in a station defense. That was a huge scenario compared to anything we’d done before. The battlefield was a massive colony station, thirty kilometers in diameter with a defensive layer two kloms deep. At the start of the scenario a lot of that had already been destroyed by the bombardment and initial landings, but my sector was still ten times the volume of the Square Deal.
As the first wave of enemy troops encountered my perimeter minefield I thought over what I knew about station assaults. This kind of battle is always a meat grinder. The enemy would expect to lose millions of bots, and a lot of people too. But they were doing this because they wanted to capture the station instead of destroying it, so they wouldn’t throw too many nukes around. Mostly it would be overwhelming numbers of bots, with as few humans in the mix as they could get away with.
Hmm. Bots are stupid, and they have trouble coping with the unexpected.
I kept one focus of attention on the battle, but pulled my command group back towards the interior of the station. There was a damage control room full of friendly techs who weren’t doing anything right now. I commandeered some of the fabricators, and started a set of builds going.
It takes hours to fabricate a proper warbot, but small objects are faster. Like, say, those utility fog weapons Chief West had used on me yesterday. They looked like normal smoke, until they landed on a target and blinded its sensors. Back them up with a few dozen little bird-sized suicide bots full of hyperacid…
It worked like a charm. I took out a whole platoon of enemy bots without a single casualty, and pushed them back long enough to lay down a fresh minefield. On impulse I grabbed the enemy wrecks too, so we could break them down into feedstock.
That was the start of the longest battle I’d ever fought. The sim was running at four times normal speed, stretching my six hours of afternoon training into a full day of nonstop combat. I abused the damage control facility relentlessly, fabbing one weird threat after another to confuse the enemy. I had access to the same libraries the chief did now, and I hit him with a lot of the stuff he’d been using on me. One platoon after another of enemy bots fell, and my own forces were actually growing.
But the rest of the perimeter was retreating, and the enemy was endless. I was forced to fall back when the front shifted enough that I was in danger of being cut off, and again when a full battalion assaulted my position.
By then I was starting to suspect this was one of those no-win scenarios, but I had to be doing pretty well. I pressed on, making the enemy pay for every inch of ground they took. The next time I found myself in danger of getting cut off I was ready, and used my ‘exposed’ location to launch an attack deep into the rear of the enemies on my right flank. I bagged an enemy commander in that fight, and if my allies hadn’t been a bunch of dumb simulations we probably could have launched a counteroffensive while they were off balance.
Instead I ended up being forced back again. Step by painful step I retreated, as the hours dragged by. But I didn’t let them keep me completely on the defensive. I launched counterattacks, and left assassins behind when I had to pull back. I faked my own death, and then crushed the enemy when they tried to exploit their ‘victory’. I killed a second enemy commander, and a third, and then my assassins got a fourth.
Finally, after a full day of nonstop combat, the scenario timed out.
I sagged in relief, and looked around at the frozen scene. “Whew. Now that was a fight. The after-action is going to take all night, though.”
“No analysis on this one, kid,” Chief West said, his avatar materializing next to me. “That was your final exam. Congratulations, you pass.”
“I did? We’re done?”
“For now,” he said. “I’m sure you’ll be back for another cert at some point, right? But for now you can pat yourself on the back, and take it easy for a few days.”
My file pinged me with an update. Alice long, Certified Warbot Commander. Wait, what kind of score was ‘100% +Ir’?