Risen: Shatterverse - The God War

Best Laid Plans of Mechs and Men

I frowned as the weapon then collapsed into a cylinder no bigger than a smoke grenade. Glancing at my waist for a place to put it, I spotted a matching space on my right leg. Touching it there, the weapon became part of the armor. Which, with a thought, became a flat rectangle on my waist. Damn. Maybe I should change Hugo's name to Jarvis.

"Holy shit!" Teal breathed in amazement. "What the hell was that?"

A hum of the omni-field and I had a dozen copies in my hands. I then stepped to Teal and her comrades, which included Colonel Griff in civilian clothes, and a man that I recognized as Colonel Mayhew, the Ranger colonel that I jumped into on my very first shatterverse vision. Handing her one, I smiled.

"Mark I GK intelligent armor and weapons system," I said.

Looking at the flat rectangle for a moment, Teal slowly nodded. Then she put it on her waist where she had just seen my armor shrink to. And, in a flurry of motion and energy, she was sheathed in the powerful suit. A motion on her thigh extruded the smart weapon which, once she put it into her hand, expanded into the long gun I had just been wielding.

"Huh," she said. "The gun just introduced itself to me!" She looked up at me. "Are these smart weapons??" I nodded.

"Made from combining your Stormbreaker armor with our Risen N'vorn heavy assault armor, Demdagon and T'sang Progenitor tech," I explained further before smiling wryly. "My gun Hugo told me we had nothing powerful enough here to truly test them against so we won't know how effective they are until we actually go into combat. So I'm thinking a quick trip back to the world with the stone sentinels for a test run after this might be in order."

"Ha! You'll be taking me along with you, if you do," Teal said before looking down at her own weapon. "By the way, what does GK stand for?"

"God Killer," I said over my shoulder as I handed out the rest of the rectangles to her comrades.

Naveaia and a handful of Risen arrived a minute or two after that, each one getting a rectangle. Then I began the impromptu brief by sharing what intelligence we had about the t'sang and its control spire, including the various security fields, booby traps, and heavy G conditions. That included the video from both my Lux-assisted scouting trip, then our actual extraction of the bio-essences trapped in the holding cell deep in the spire's heart.

That was followed by where we thought the Collector was physically located on the spire that included the caveat that any attack in any location would draw it there to directly address. So we decided the graveyard was the best site for our initial attack, drawing Garolan to a spot where we had resources to either utilize, or hide amongst should its counterattack prove too powerful for us to directly withstand.

With that out of the way, we moved on to methods of egress, including hard burn through extra light to launch landing craft, to a high altitude drop, and finally a pinpoint move via extra space to put us right on the surface. Since our intel told us exiting via extra space gave us a few moments before the Collector could sense us, we decided to go with that method, using landing craft so we could extract later through space if needed, if the extra space portal was collapsed.

By the end, just as it was with the Vanguard troops, both the Risen and the Ascendency were on board.

"We've got a tight plan here," Griff indicated, the rest of the terran command group nodding in agreement.

"We just need practice to get our timing down," Mayhew noted, his gravelly voice both familiar and different from the one I remembered hearing while in his mind.

"We're still a couple days from the fleets being refitted and armed with the Progenitor tech," Griff said, looking around the relatively small circle. "Do the Risen have any more of those world entities they'd like to have implanted in available worlds? That would make an excellent exercise for our teams, and get us used to these new armor and weapons systems Specialist Two has so kindly provided for us."