(Rewritten) Ch. 124 – The Auxiliant

"Targets: stationary and vulnerable. Guidance locked.

Distance to target area: 12331 meters.

Bearing: twelve degrees.

Altitude delta: negative two meters.

Firing parameters: horizon-blind. Planetary curvature calculated. Trajectory selected. Guidance activated.

Firing mode: indirect hypersonic. Smoothbore. Stage one: sabot, self-propelled, fin-stabilized. Stage two: ballistic, guided.

Wind: strong current detected between distance markers five and six. Offset updated.

Ballistic drop: point two meters per one thousand meters. Drag factor: three point one four. Offset updated.

Power cells: nominal.

Coils: set to boost.

Rails: primed.

Safeties: one, unlocked. Two, unlocked. Three, unlocked.

Warheads: one, armed. Two, armed. Three, armed.

Impact timer: nine point six five seconds after primer ignition.

Mission prognosis: one hundred percent annihilation of primary target.

Side Mission prognosis; annihilation of secondary target: one hundred percent. Annihilation of tertiary target: thirty percent—mission kill.

Projected collateral: zero percent.

Projected mission success: three hundred percent.

Status: I am battle-ready.

Please take the shot, user."

– Auxiliant-class weapons platform prototype, developmental branch of the shooter's support AI, action-movie variant

***

"One moment, Tynea," I said, and whisked my attention back to the battlefield. Time still ran thicker than molasses, seconds stretched into hours. Nothing much had changed—our shells and missiles were the fastest bits around, and they'd progressed a few meters here and there. But even their flight times were measured in real seconds.

Satisfied, I returned to the simulation.

"What have you got for me?" I asked. Then I looked down at my naked boobs. Non-Quantized Tinea would probably be titillated by the Chrysaora's fluffy jiggle shelf. Because Leah was around. And non-Quantized Tinea rather liked Leah's appreciations. Beyond the reach of most hormones however, I just figured that the lack of support wasn't very suitable for combat. "And we still need to do something about the exposure, Tynea."

A black top suddenly hugged me, skintight and just, well, snug. It wasn't as abyss-black as Leah's goopsuit, but it did hide my protrusions well enough. It came with the same crushed diamond filigree as the Chrysaora, and those further helped conceal the lines of my chest in the more naughty areas, and highlighted them in the merely feminine ones. The top reminded me of the attire those pretty dancing ice skaters wore. It also stopped the jigglies from jiggling.

"Much better."

Then thick, gray fluff added itself to the collar around my throat and neck. It plunged a little in the front to ride my cleavage in that luxurious model way. The stuff felt like the moth-based fluff on my tail and, again, I thought emotional Tinea would love it. It was like getting hugged, after all.

A display window popped up in front of my eyes, showing a rear view of myself. The top kept most of my upper back free. It copied the dip of the belt and flipped it upwards to reveal my spine and created a graceful symmetry with the skirt.

That's the undergarment for the Class II Auxiliant. It's technically rather stab-resistant, but truly just serves as a decorative accent. The Auxiliant is a Moonsinger Esoterics weapons platform that complements the Chrysaora Plenum with hi-vee offensive and kinetic defensive capabilities.

"Hi-vee?"

High velocity. Hypersonic and beyond. Were the notion not ridiculous, I'd claim that it would be easier to flash-boil the air with every shot than to use subsonics.

"Ah, the instant pain the Myriad was lacking?"

Yes, the Myriad, and also the Chrysaora. I'll add the functional bits to the simulation now.

My upper arms, shoulders, and part of my upper back were encased in a sleek frame of machinery. The ensemble resembled one of those tiny jackets that were pure fashion statement, but with a little more…metal to the material, and a lot more ultra-tech. The shoulders were slim pauldrons of more machinery, lots of little parts copying my belt's crystal cube aesthetics.

Then they reconfigured themselves once more, and in a flash, I had small autoguns sitting on each shoulder, mounted in miniature gimbals on miniature robot arms, fed by miniature belts.  The pauldrons themselves had given most of their substance to the weapons, and left were only fine wireframes housing newly exposed machinery ticking away as it extruded the ammunition belts. All of it glittered from glimmering diodes.

These two cannonettes are part of the Auxiliant-Chrysaora defensive combination. They're meant to repel melee attackers in particular, though they can also shoot down anti-personnel missiles, self-propelled grenades, and similar projectiles relying on targetable controls.

"Oh? Like the old CIWS gatling guns the military companies use against flying aliens and snooping drones?" Although the cannonettes on my shoulders didn't have their awkward cylinder-bulges full of radar instrumentation on top—just smooth lines and clean edges, and miniaturized sensors within the wireframe pauldrons.

Yes, just like those, but single-barreled and a massively increased rate of fire.

"Simple physics?"

Yes. Smaller parts make lighter parts, lighter parts make for a faster cyclic rate. The change in volume is cubic.

"And these cannonettes are…hundreds of times smaller than a proper cannon. The distances each part has to run during the cycle might as well be microscopic, by comparison. How fast is the cyclic rate?"

Tynea chuckled in my mind. When the rate is set to maximum, the next dart goes into the chamber before the first one evacuates the barrel. Tynea waited a moment's beat. Then she continued, almost smug. The darts go hypersonic.

My Quanta did the math. There was a lot of wiggle room depending on the darts' acceleration, the way the charge burned down—"Wait, is it still a conflagration? No way, it has to be an actual explosion for the projectiles to reach hypersonic speeds. And there have to be geometric tricks involved in the flow of the expanding gas. Like…temporary rocket motors created from nothing but fluid dynamics?"

You're touching on the miraculous nature of Class II equipment, Tinea. Technology sufficiently advanced may as well appear magical, and all that.

"And just because a bullet goes into the chamber doesn't mean there isn't a lot of time spent waiting for the propellant to be set off, but…"

Depending on how it all worked out, each bullet might be exiting the barrel in times best measured in millionths of a second. Several hundreds of them, sure.

But that was the kind of unit scientists used to measure the speed of light. Light went about three hundred meters per microsecond. My darts wouldn't really go anywhere close to that. And the delay in firing would be measured in milliseconds, too. But…

"Fuck me," I whispered, disturbed even in the frozen waters of the Quanta.

You'll never actually use that sort of cycling rate—it's too expensive per second, and the limiting factor is in fact the fabrication speed of your pauldrons, not the guns' cycling rate. But it is hilarious to think of. It wouldn't be possible without some…Class II fuckery, as your fellow samurai like to call it. It's set up to mess with conventional physics, and humanity will not reach that level of technology for a very, very long time.

"Thousands of years," I whispered.

At minimum.

"What the fuck are the Antithesis?"

…Many things I can't explain in a way you'd comprehend without centuries of education, Tinea.

And we were fighting them. Effectively, too. As Vanguard. Because we were Vanguard.

Ten plug-tanks appeared and floated in front of my face. These were small. Tiny little thimbles barely as thick as my pinkies and only half as long. Tynea highlighted a row of spots at the front of the pauldrons, close to the dip of my shoulders above the swell of my chest. I let the little cylinders snap into place, and in moments, tiny bullets were being loaded, two millimeters in diameter, backed by, for the caliber, insanely oversized charges.

"Let's test them," I said, letting calm logic lap against my unusual excitement, erode it like oceans erode shores.

Certainly.

I simulated a cloud of simplistic model Ones above my head, and the two little guns snapped upwards instantly, their gimbals extended out beyond my shoulders on their robotic arms to get around my antennae, and started firing. The insane firing rate created a constant, nasty, tinnitus-inducing, high-pitched whine that I instantly muted.

Your mufflers will make that bearable, Tinea.

"Thank fuck."

Unwilling as I was to spend extra resources on rendering real damage, the model Ones just turned into stationary objects utterly riddled with tiny holes where the darts went through them—the belt-fed birdshot was more aggressively saturating than any shotgun I'd ever used, and their hypersonic darts burned hot lines into the air that had my antennae twitching well free.

"Effective little buggers, aren't they?"

Quite. The Auxiliant can also defend you against kinetic ammunition types the Chrysaora's energy fields are ineffective against.

"How?"

Tynea highlighted the two biggest panels on my back, covering my shoulder blades, These produce miniaturized versions of those teleporting and spatially locking hexweaves you're familiar with. They'll work most effectively against explosive payloads, especially ones that use plastic, non-metallic shells, or metallic shells too thin to be deflected via the Chrysaora's electromagnetism. But the hexweaves can also block heavy calibers by layering themselves one after the other.

"I'm guessing that'd be expensive in materials?"

Yes, and energy—about five points per hexweave in total. The cannonettes are incomparably cheaper to use.

"Energy?"

The Chrysaora and the Auxiliant require a lot more power than the Myriad did, and particularly intense use drains them even quicker. They come fully charged, but you'll need to buy energy crystals from me to power the gear after that, and energy is expensive. But there are upgrades for improved independence and most samurai eventually construct their own generators for economic reasons anyway.

"Understood," I returned, and watched as Logistics noted the option for the future.

Next item, then.

"Go ahead."

The machinery inside the pauldrons' wireframes pulsed green.

These nanofabricators supply the cannonettes with caseless cartridges. Pure kinetics and powder only; the barrels are too short to make use of railgun technology.

"Caseless?"

The charges are an advanced design that directs the heat away from the cannonettes and into the darts themselves. Unfortunately, that means the darts' bottoms and fins must be made of ceramics and other alloys that do not deform or expand noticeably under heat.

Caseless ammunition reliable enough to be used in belted munitions…a gunsmith's wet dream, chased for over a century by militaries and corporations alike, and utterly littered with failed prototypes. Even in 2057 they simply could not match the good old brass case for reliability. But perhaps it made sense that ceramics were part of the solution if one could rely on the Protectors' atomically perfect fabrication technology.

"How fascinating…"

The pauldrons, Tynea went on, have medical ports meant to let you inject nanites into your own body handsfree—but you could also supply bionites to be loaded into darts instead. Or virii, bacteria, toxins, paralytics, whatever your bionites can carry.

"Bionites for healing darts, hmm? The dosages would be quite small, wouldn't they? Might have to, uh, go full auto for it to matter. What's the guns' effective range?"

That depends entirely on the ammunition. The oversized loads make for hypersonic projectiles that can travel quite far, but their minimal mass makes them prone to tumbling and thus inaccurate at range. Class II ammunition can fix that. But even low-powered Class I darts would deliver their payload at fifty meters—and a shallow prick is enough for your bionites to enter the bloodstream. You could even unlock upgrade modules that allow you to craft low-v darts made of a material designed to break up inside your target's body.

"Again, they're not just dinky little toys, huh?"

The Auxiliant is Class II gear, after all. Ready for the main element of the Auxiliant? It'll come with another AI.

"Class I, again? Can I upgrade them to Class II?"

Yes, and yes. For another token, which you won't have until this battle concludes.

"Ah… Sure, go ahead."

A block of cuboid geometries appeared in front of me, like a bismuth geode the size of my torso. It was mostly black like obsidian, but the edges of each of the hundreds of cubes and squares had a faint rainbow shimmer to them. Impellers spun up with a quiet whirr and stabilized the transforming object in the air.

Familiar twinkling LEDs kindled across the entire structure, a wave of reconfiguring puzzle-motion played across its surface. It continued flattening out until it looked a little like a tiny, futuristic stealth bomber, with aerodynamic lines and a pair of curving delta-wings, with the impellers integrated.

The flat muzzle-brake of a gun formed the nose of the stealth-bomber-spaceship-drone-thing, and the vehicle twitched around to match my line of sight. A screen at its rear with crosshairs showed its aim.

It pinged my Quanta, much like the Chrysaora had done. I accepted and the starlight diodes across the drone pulsed in time with a fresh voice.

"Greetings, dear user! I am Auxiliant, and I have activated and adjusted my default profile as instructed by your personal assistant. I am keyed to listen to your voice. If you wish to alter our method of communication or otherwise change my settings, please indicate so at your leisure. I am currently lacking a selected role and type of ammunition, and am not ready for battle. May I assume a generalist configuration and produce a basic loadout?"

Very familiar.

"Hello, Auxiliant. Do so, please, and copy applicable settings from the Chrysaora Plenum."

"Understood, dear user. One moment please."

The screen at the floating drone's back was replaced by a window projected into my HUD, along with a row of three renders of myself using a different Auxiliant.

The left pictured me running, holding a stubby, handheld submachine gun at the hip. Very light, very agile.

On the right, I flew in tandem with a longer, slimmer version of the hovering drone. The long rifle supported itself on hover-jets, but it had a buttstock and optics. A mobile anti-materiel configuration.

And the middle render was tagged the General Configuration, and in it I held a belt-fed assault rifle. It was beefy in that video-game spec-ops way, belt-fed from a fabrication unit in a small pack on my upper back.

These are the basic configurations that you will have access to, Tinea. More advanced ones will require the purchase of upgrades in the form of additional modules the Auxiliant can integrate.

"Modules?"

Tynea loaded a new set of renders of me holding a variety of bullpup shotguns, grenade launchers, light and heavy rifles, a heavy belt-fed machine gun mounted on a massive tripod, and even a huge Flak cannon reminiscent of the venerable German 88, complete with platform and gunner's seat.

The simulated Auxiliant in front of me transformed between each model as Tynea switched the renders, with parts appearing from or swallowed by violet-limned portals.

The Auxiliant may store unused modules in a shunted space, Tynea explained.

"That makes adaptability easy, huh?"

And upgrades. Stored modules are inactive, though—you'll need to upgrade to Class III if you want fabrication in the shunted space, not just parts storage.

"Gotcha."

After the Auxiliant returned to her generic configuration and finished forming a butt- and forestock, she announced, "Settings adopted, Tinea. Readying basic loadout. Please grab my handles if you prefer to handle me manually."

Oh my. How could I not accept such an invitation?

I grabbed her by her stocks and slung the small pack with the munitions factory to my back, where it attached itself to my tiny machine-jacket. A belt carrier snaked along the inside of my arm, beneath my shoulder, to hook to the factory. Another robotic limb peeked out from beneath my shoulder with a number of easy-to-reach plug-tank slots popping open. But, it being a simulation and all, Tynea had already loaded them up and the receptacle just folded away again.

Seconds later, as the belt filled up with cartridges, Auxiliant chimed exactly as Chrysaora had done:

"I am battle-ready!"

Non-Quantized Tinea would probably find it quite endearing. I suspected Auxiliant's default settings had been adjusted by Tynea for exactly that effect, but I disregarded the mildly manipulative nature of it. It was a continuation of the personalization of provided gear, and Class II merely offered new avenues for such.

My analytical moment attracted the attention of Sonde. I felt her scamper across my mind, towards my current thoughts, and shared my conclusions with her. She wasn't complex enough yet to grasp the implications of my ruminations, but she eagerly integrated it all as more data. It was a huge package and she froze in place as she wove connections.

I watched for a moment or two and appreciated the development she showed. Sonde was growing very quickly and would soon become a bud. I suspected she'd begin to analyze the emotional being of hormonal Tinea, and access my amygdala before the day was over. How long it would take her to form an identity thereafter was something entirely beyond my ability to gauge…but it probably would be measured in days and weeks, rather than months and years.

Auxiliant's voice broke into my thoughts.

"Would you like to test me, Tinea? I have many assets to explore and will strive to be a delight during use."

…

Default settings. Yes.

***