Jump 133: Hostile Waters: Antaeus Rising

Jump 133: Hostile Waters: Antaeus Rising

Location: The Pacific Ocean
Identity: Zero Four
Drawbacks: [200] Like Weeds

[Free]      Cerebral Damage Averted
[Free]      Salty Dog
[100/1200]  Active Reserve
[300/1200]  Stolen Technology
[900/1200]  Brilliance
[Free]      Adaptive Cruiser
[Free]      Old Guns
[1200/1200] Soul Catcher Cache

Things unexpected: finding myself dispossessed of body, instead in control of a rather... unique seagoing vessel. Ostensibly an Antaeus-class aviation cruiser, one that only had a handful of prototypes made during a war some twenty years prior, and which was sunk to the bottom of the sea at its victorious conclusion. Yet still intact enough that it could be brought back to the surface and restored to working order, if only in part, along with an earlier ship in the same line. Adaptive cruisers, they called them; ships capable of rapid manufacture of materiel and support craft on demand. Personally, I would have rather had the guns of an actual cruiser, but needs must when the devil drives.

Hull 00 was in the best condition, and given priority; hull 04, the one I found myself inhabiting, had less systems intact than it. Propulsion was iffy at best, though command and the net links worked. Everything else... either heavily damaged or destroyed outright, and with hull 00 having priority for repairs, they did not expect repairs for myself to come any time soon.

A Canoptek Spyder, however, was not anything that anyone expected to abruptly appear within the automated vessel that I called my body for the moment. Its scarabs swarmed my hull, scanning the technologies built therein, rapidly bringing everything back to full working order. Not that anyone actually knew WHY repairs happened, blaming them on some unknown quirk of the adaptive cruiser's self-repair capabilities now that the cruiser wasn't forty fathoms under the ocean's surface.

The only indication anyone else had that this was the case was a matter of securing the dock for hull 00's repairs, however - helicopters launched from my hull along with those from hull 00, hovercraft were dropped to deal with anything on the ground, and the attack wave simply crushed what was before us. And from there, it followed much the same pattern; air units would sweep, ground units would clean up, and move on to the next objective. It was overall rather effective, leaving aside the issue of whatever the hell pseudo-biological weapon was discovered - the Species, a weapon of last resort from the former masters of this world, themselves having been reduced to a shadowy cabal on a string of islands in the Pacific.

While hull 00 continued to salvage enemy tech to upgrade, I had other ideas, and soon the craft being launched from my hull weren't standard issue but rather Marauder Destroyers. Granted, questions were raised about my use of unknown technology, but what they don't know about the Imperium of Man won't hurt them. Autocannons, bolters, and hellstrike missiles did an effective job of chewing through the cabal's forces. And when dealing with increasingly large amounts of the Species, heavy duty weapons are definitely a need. And when those don't work, you break out the melta cannons.

No matter how much they've infested, it's just a matter of grinding down the opposition. And if you don't have enough gun, there's always more available. If the adaptive cruiser isn't big enough to support it, the scarabs will help upgrade the hull to fix that.

If the dystopian government tries to get you to make a brave sacrifice to take out the last of the Species, you ignore the fact that hull 00 was stupid enough to fall for the ruse, and use your newly installed particle whip to take the Species out instead before they can launch into space.

If they try to make sure they destroy you after that, you fake the hull sinking, and then show up in their office in a nanosuit-built body and introduce them to the error of their ways - especially the ONLY TWO PEOPLE ON THE PLANET WHO KNOW HOW TO WAGE A WAR?! - before disassembling their government and working on making things rather less dystopian.

I blame Warren Ellis.