Humans run every which way, carrying papers and digital devices in their arms. Your drone walks through the chaos with a steady stride as it enters the war room on Odin station. It is filled with screens showing various Union news stations, local intelligence reports, and numerous astrographic data of the region. Most of the news feeds are either lifeless, or are showing some obvious filler story involving local politics or a rerun of the previous few hours of coverage. A select few, the ones not muted, show various buildings belonging to the Union BFI as agents rush in and out of the buildings.
“It is as yet unclear what the root cause is, be it a Commonwealth attack deeper into Union space than the recent strike, a more robust incursion from the machine intelligence of the Unity, or some other event.” One news caster says. “We as yet have no indication supporting or refuting any specific theory at the moment, however there is a compete media blackout. The government has shut down almost every interstellar communication relay available, and there are reports of fleet assets moving to high alert across the system. The PDF has already secured major spaceports and are ordering an evacuation of all buildings within a ten block radius of local anti-orbital defense installations.” The reporter continues. Behind her is the entrance to the Parliament building, swarming with local PDF troops as barricades raise up from the street at regular intervals and a hovering tank slowly props itself up on several hydraulic legs. A PDF trooper shouts at her and several of them quickly move in, batting away the camera that cuts to static.
Some mood music to get us in the mindset of slaying eldritch horrors
Colton Price
Drones stream into the facility, cutting down guards as they fire into the seething swarm of chitin and blades surging towards them. You are growing closer, the source of the psionic signal and the gravitational distortions both coming from the pit in the center of the chamber before you. The readings become stronger, gradually but steadily, and with it, your connection to your drones begins to feel fainter, their minds struggling to hear you through the growing static of psionic interference.
Elizabeth stands on the bridge of your ship in orbit, watching the complex mosaic, given meaning only by the context provided by her own mental connection, and listening to the silent, mental battlecries of your warriors.
"Whatever he's doing, he's trying to speed it up. I'm not sure if the drones will be able to keep their connections at this rate." She says. You are unsure, but your drones are indeed slowing down in the mild confusion of the interference. "I should get to the surface. At the very least I can help organize things."
>Allow Elizabeth to enter the facility under drone escort >Refuse, keep your drones moving forward as they are >Refuse, have your thinker-brained ghost beetles lead the charge in >Other
Jacob Brooks
>Allow Elizabeth to enter the facility under drone escort
The dubs command it, we must not let things go bad.
Henry James
>Allow Elizabeth to enter the facility under drone escort
Samuel Watson
>>Refuse, have your thinker-brained ghost beetles lead the charge in
Logan Morgan
>Refuse, have your thinker-brained ghost beetles lead the charge in
Jacob Baker
>Allow Elizabeth to enter the facility under drone escort >have your thinker-brained ghost beetles as backup
Carter Harris
>>Allow Elizabeth to enter the facility under drone escort Wish we had some of those quantum brained hybrids.
Ryan Clark
This! This is exactly why I wanted those humans in there. We seriously need to get our own loyal human marines, that stay loyal even without little drone connected to their spine. Anything that can cut our connection to drones is our biggest weakness.
>Allow Elizabeth to enter the facility under drone escort > have your thinker-brained ghost beetles lead the charge in meantime
Nolan Hughes
Supporting
Ayden Brooks
>Allow Elizabeth to enter the facility under drone escort
Grayson Peterson
Dude, there were only like four marines, up to 12 at best.
Bentley Jenkins
>>Allow Elizabeth to enter the facility under drone escort I hope the doctors meet face to face soon.
Lucas Carter
Enough to do work on the reactor. Drones will have trouble, I think.
Gavin Wilson
We have those. They're called quantum brains, geez user. Ghost beetles have them.
Gavin Baker
I could support such a plan.
Wyatt Collins
>Refuse, have your thinker-brained ghost beetles lead the charge in
Brayden Jenkins
this
Jonathan Cooper
Could we have our drones communicate by radio signals?
Hunter Turner
QD did our 99 do anything there?
Connor Robinson
Drones may have trouble this close to the crystal. Hopefully Theseus will be more competent if our drones start failing.. Of course, Big Momma may be able to help out our drones significantly depending on our rolls. I still think (and presumably agree) we have under-utilized human and hybrid brains. For example, non-psionically connected brains would have been able to detect the invisible natives on refuge. If we equip more drones with the ability to independently deal with problems (even beyond what a quantum thinker may be capable of), it could greatly increase our ability to pursue independent projects and rely on non-thinker insights.
Good idea for the future. In areas with crystal contamination we can have certain drones sever their connection to the hive and only respond to radio commands. It would greatly lower the rate of (or risk of) void god contamination.
>>Allow Elizabeth to enter the facility under drone escort It's a risk, but may be necessary without humans on scene. Let's clean up this mess.
Jordan Evans
We made it through basically all defenses effortlessly.
Only problem is if our drones lose contact with queenie, won't they start mindlessly attacking everything around them?
Evan Davis
I'm actually a bit glad the marines did not witness our drones becoming disoriented and confused by exposure to the artifact and psionic interference. It could give the Union some very dangerous inferences about what our weaknesses are and why we actually decided to intervene. They may have thought that we only intervened to keep the Union from discovering a weapon that could effectively break down the hive order as opposed to for its destructive potential. However, if containment really is lost, I will certainly greatly regret not having decided to keep the marines on hand.
Gavin Parker
No they'll shutdown.
Sebastian Ward
I'm recalling the feral drones we've encountered in the past that washed against us like a mindless wave in the past because of no leading mind.
Lincoln Reed
Assuming our drones have basic animal intelligence then they probably have basic swarm mechanisms they'll do what the drones next to them do so they'll try to complete thier last known task but will loss tactical flexibility and focus
Levi Kelly
Those were because of the thinker dumbass. They were never actually feral.
Ayden Allen
So polite, cunt.
Adrian Jackson
No, those were with thinkers. Without thinkers, drones just shut down. With thinkers, they'll try to accomplish their last order given to them.
Parker Hill
That's not how it works you dumb-dumb.
Drones that were given the standing order of Defend Thing For Mother attacked? No shit.
Thinkers were controlling those probably.
Brody Fisher
Gotchya.
Ethan Rivera
You can always try spacebattles if you want a hugbox where people don't insult each other like they're on Veeky Forums or something.
Julian Perez
>Allow Elizabeth to enter the facility under drone escort
"Have the drones push as far as they can until the interference becomes too much. I'll lead a swarm in myself." She says as she runs a wall that flexes open for her, and makes her way to a waiting shuttle filled with heavy warriors, wasps, and ghost beetles.
On the planet below, your drones continue to push forward, the warriors struggling to process everything around them through the haze of the interference. As they continue to press into the growing meat grinder, you have more of your ghost beetles move in along the flanks, scaling the walls and ceiling as the guards fall back to the choke point of the inner facility's entrance.
"I don't like the idea of you being so vulnerable." Elizabeth says as her shuttle departs. You feel dumbstruck at the comment.
"I'm fine. My alterations are more than just implants. I could hardly be considered human anymore with how much alterations my genetic structure has undergone. I have some theories I'd like to test out in that regard, but you, if whatever Emmerich is doing takes hold, your fleet could turn into a lighting rod. You have way too many relays here. Any mental attack would have a direct route to you."
"The fleet must be controlled." You say.
"Then keep one in the flagship of the fleet." She says. "But you don't need to do everything yourself."
>Disable the relays in your fleets, save for one >Keep your redundant relays >Other (write in)
Owen Parker
Thanks anyways, cunt.
Justin Jones
You're welcome, dumbass.
Michael Phillips
>>Disable the relays in your fleets, save for one She has a point. A sudden mental attack could be debilitating.
Owen Wilson
>>Disable the relays in your fleets, save for one
Michael Gray
>Other (write in)
Disable all relays. Allow Theseus to send commands to our ships via radio and to transmit data and images by the same medium. There is no need for us to risk relays in this arena.
It minimizes risk to us. We have far more fleets even if Theseus were to use his monopoly over communication against us (which he wouldn't do).
Noah King
>Disable the relays in your fleets, save for one
Adrian Moore
>Disable the relays in your fleets, save for one
Kevin Watson
>>Disable the relays in your fleets, save for one
Asher Perez
>>Disable the relays in your fleets, save for one Didn't even know that possible. >>Send in a medium relay equipped drone to aid Elizabeth.
Lucas Cox
>Disable the relays in your fleets, save for one
Jonathan Smith
If we do disable all relays in our fleet except for one, can we please have our thinkers assigned to accept radio command relays from Theseus in the event of a worst case scenario and we have to destroy or disable our remaining relay?
Justin Jenkins
We can put drones into hibernation stasis. Simple enough.
Michael King
If you really are scared about losing control of drones while approaching these crystals, that's what quantum brains are for. And the AI allies.
>Keep your redundant relays
Isaiah Roberts
>Disable the relays in your fleets, save for one I have a question do we have enough drones to over power the crystals psychic field I know our Drones can limit their tachyon emissions but can they do the opposite and increase thier tachyon emissions so instead of whispering thier screaming till thier sore
Julian Sullivan
sure
Jordan Davis
>Disable the relays in your fleets, save for one This works
Jonathan Hall
Sounds like something a reasonable queen would do
Nathaniel Hill
>A Queen ever giving control of her children to another I'm disgusted.
Adam Long
I like this.
Desperate times call for desperate measures.
Anthony Hernandez
You know, Elizabeth makes a good point. We've put way, way too many relays in our ships, when operating as a fleet that is nothing but a crippling weakness considering our enemies. All it takes is a single ship to get caught in a takyonic jamming field and our entire network goes down, everywhere.
Thomas Young
Hey now we can trust Uncle Theseus to watch the kids for a little bit.
If that smut is canon would it be step dad Theseus?
Jackson Jones
"MOM, she's my friend and she's helping me stop the void god" "Jeez, you're so old fashioned."
Matthew White
Maybe we should just start including quantum relays in our fleet flagships just to address the possibility.
Alexander Ross
That's why we reinvented White Crystals.
They operate as fuse boxes on relays to shut it down in jamming events. Dat psionic fortification.
Brandon Walker
We aren't giving control were telling our thinkers to accept military data from Thesus the thinkers our still operating to our orders
Chase Reyes
We can include a time limit. They will only do this for 12 hours before returning to Mother.
And this is just the kind of thing FTLComms with Thinkers on the other end are useful for.
They're the ultimate backup. No trust required in a third party.
Dylan Robinson
Sadly, that is not biologically possible, as drones recognize their queen or friendly hive intelligences by the hive network. Radio, or any other non-psionic transmission method can send the fact ammount of data that is processed by a drone as it exports its higher brain functions to the rest of the hive. A thinker could be ordered to recognize a person and follow their commands, but such a command structure would be difficult at best, as the non-thought based communication lacks the detail the thinker otherwise uses to establish its standing orders.
Your drones cannot be hacked or tricked into serving anyone else, but they also can't be made to directly accept orders through non-psionic means. Thinkers can carry out orders without a queen's constant presence, and be told to follow the mental orders of another friendly, related queen or, in your case, psionic individual, but they would still struggle to parse out the details of anyone's verbal commands due to a perceived lack of detail and context.
Bentley Miller
This is a good thing. The slow crawl towards merging society with the non-hives must stop.
David Foster
Which thread are you linking to?
Bentley Sanchez
Which is way I said we just allow them to take information and not orders
Henry Gray
Then the only answer is Thinker-couriers that travel out of range of Mother and into range of other, jammed Thinkers, to convey Mother's orders?
In that case I suggest we can give thinkers standing orders to GTFO unless countermanded by Elizabeth. Elizabeth herself can probably hitch a ride with Theseus if needed (I doubt he'd abandon his Mom to the void god), so even if her psionic abilities are disrupted we won't lose her abilities or resourcefulness altogether.
Luke Moore
That or just find away to have the stronger psychic powers so it's the other guys that have to worry about it
Connor Baker
The problem there is that jammed drones can't even communicate with each other without a physical link like in the parts of out ships.
Asher Diaz
from >Psionic fortification A strange mixture of organic components assembled into a crystalline matrix, the strange white crystals not only can serve as a kind of memory storage device, but also as a component in a psionic relay. When incorporated into a drone, it replaces the portion of the brain maintaining the psionic link to the queen and serves as a mixture of fuse and signal booster, allowing the relay to broadcast to drones suffering from psionic jamming, and can protect itself from jamming by cutting off its ability to receive thoughts. The process of installation does not cost anything, but requires a white crystal be implanted into the selected relay to function.
Isaiah Diaz
>A strange mixture of organic components assembled into a crystalline matrix, the strange white crystals not only can serve as a kind of memory storage device, but also as a component in a psionic relay. When incorporated into a drone, it replaces the portion of the brain maintaining the psionic link to the queen and serves as a mixture of fuse and signal booster, allowing the relay to broadcast to drones suffering from psionic jamming, and can protect itself from jamming by cutting off its ability to receive thoughts. The process of installation does not cost anything, but requires a white crystal be implanted into the selected relay to function.
Cool. I had forgotten about that. Aren't white crystals (a necessity for psionic fortification) a highly limited resource, though? Do we have enough to equip our entire fleet with them.
Luis Morales
Not true. Their range is shortened. Otherwise several options QD gave us wouldn't have made sense. Like
>Activate your psionic disruptor and send in ghost beetles under thinker command
Not to mention he explained this. > Thinkers are able to command drones to a very, very limited extent while being jammed, and such commands are iffy and unreliable at best as it essentially just tries to shout over the jammer at the other drones, typically with mixed results. Moderate relays will have greater success, but are limited to tactical range, essentially, and can only effectively communicate with drones within the immediate area. Advanced relays become largely non-functional, and essentially shut down to avoid spreading the jamming signal to the rest of the hive.
So a Thinker with a moderate relay is decent at controlling a squad of drones.
Lucas Ward
>Disable the relays in your fleets, save for one
"If you think anything bad is about to happen, destroy the relay." Elizabeth says. "I can get back to the ship and even if I can't get through the interference the ship's should return on their own."
You ponder the idea of giving over your forces to your shipboard thinkers, and simply watching the events unfold from Theseus's server ships, although doing so would make you blind to the psionic signals within and render you ignorant to the vast majority of the events unfolding. As Theseus continues to have his own mechanical drones systematically purge the facility, you become keenly aware of his blindness to the true danger of this base. An ignorance that likely ensures his safety for the moment, but prevents him from being able to offer any real assistance at the moment, his drones being unable to sense or interact with the mounting danger. You don't like the idea of watching, being unable to interact with the battle or even witness the most critical parts of it, but it may at least offer some additional insurance in the event of failure.
>Destroy your last relay, and give control of your drones over to your thinkers >Keep your one relay for now, and destroy it only in the event of mental attack >Other
Jayden Long
They aren't valuable we learned how to make them the limited resource our void crystals since you need them to fire the superweapon
Isaiah Gonzalez
>>Keep your one relay for now, and destroy it only in the event of mental attack We've already got the failsafes, we need to see this ourselves.
Actually at this point I think we can manufacture our own white crystals.
James King
>Keep your one relay for now, and destroy it only in the event of mental attack
Keep the relay ship some distance away from the planet, have Theseus beam updates via lasercomm to it.
Jeremiah Young
>Keep your one relay for now, and destroy it only in the event of mental attack
We're going to turn into the Zerg Overmind->Cerebrate->Overlord hierarchy, aren't we?
John Perez
>>Keep your one relay for now, and destroy it only in the event of mental attack
Luis Jenkins
>>Keep your one relay for now, and destroy it only in the event of mental attack
I assume we already have those in all our advanced relays, as we have long since learned how to make our own memory crystals and they cost little.
Luis Butler
>Keep your one relay for now, and destroy it only in the event of mental attack
Lincoln White
>Keep your one relay for now, and destroy it only in the event of mental attack
There's such a thing as acceptable levels of paranoia. Doing otherwise goes past the threshold.
Jason Fisher
>>Keep your one relay for now, and destroy it only in the event of mental attack
Joshua Rivera
>Keep your one relay for now, and destroy it only in the event of mental attack Or if Destroy your last relay, and give control of your drones over to your thinkers wins go see what the Commonwealth is thinking about
Ayden Barnes
No, ya fool.
That defeats the entire point of keeping it, that's no better than Theseus sending us updates over his A-grade FTLComms.
The whole point of sticking around is to be connected to what's going on in the heart of the facility, for as long as we're able to keep our eyes open here.
There's no benefit if we're not at least barely within range to cover the facility.
Grayson Watson
>Keep your one relay for now, and destroy it only in the event of mental attack
Give thinkers standing orders to destroy the relay unless they receive a countermanding order every 10 seconds. A temporary disruption shouldn't lead to a total loss of command and control, but anything longer and we risk the entire relay network potentially.
Aaron Peterson
>Keep your one relay for now, and destroy it only in the event of mental attack
Gavin Mitchell
>Keep your one relay for now, and destroy it only in the event of mental attack
The doors to the shuttle flex open, and Elizabeth leaps out in the low gravity, quickly carrying herself along with her weaver limbs as her escort charges in with her. A moment later, the marine shuttle lifts off nearby, quickly accelerating into orbit.
Your drones struggle to reach your mind, their vision cloudy to you as they charge into the inner facility. It is a brightly lit room, filed with various instruments and devices, but the details are lost to you as your drones struggle with the guards. Your ghost beetles are poised to strike as your warriors have reached the edge of where their minds remain competent, and await your command to dive into the dark, lonely void outside of their mother's guiding mental influence. You can feel it. A twinge of fear in their thinker minds. Injury, death, the unknown, all of them meaningless concepts, but to leave the queen, even for a moment, is the only thing that could ever make your children hesitate. They steel themselves for that loneliness.
>Have your ghost beetles attempt to find an alternate way in and flank the humans inside with Elizabeth >Have your ghost beetles charge in through the door ahead of Elizabeth >Other(write in)
James Myers
>Have your ghost beetles attempt to find an alternate way in and flank the humans inside with Elizabeth
They spooky for a reason.
Bentley Brown
>>Have your ghost beetles attempt to find an alternate way in and flank the humans inside with Elizabeth
Matthew Peterson
We could split them. We brought enough.
Kevin Ross
>>Have your ghost beetles attempt to find an alternate way in and flank the humans inside with Elizabeth
Aiden Evans
>Have your ghost beetles attempt to find an alternate way in and flank the humans inside with Elizabeth
