B3-26 - Rammstein (Patreon)

“An army marches on it’s stomach,” Maya said, leaning back in her chair. “Who said that?’

“Patton?” Hanna answered.

“No, seriously. I don’t know who said that,” Maya responded.

“Oh. Yeah, I don’t know much about history, but let me tell you about the wonderful world of chemistry and biology,” Hanna began.

“Sorry, I was making a point here,” Maya sat up straight, looking at the gathered men and women in her privy council, as Hanna called it. Bell, Yosi, Roci, Tender, Nan, George, Hanna, and back from the Big Sig, Inez.

Maya had invited Veskari and Zoya, but the pair were running the tesseract barge every hour on the hour. It was giving Zoya a lot of flying experience and was also keeping them barely covered in mana power. As things were, they were still in the red for mana and that didn’t look to be rectified anytime soon.

Scotty was making black goo netting as fast a his manufacturers could make them, but there were still bottlenecks in the operation. Getting the nets out into space was the major bottleneck, there was already a stockpile of black goo netting forming within the Cage. They needed more shuttles and pilots and a method to get the netting out there and the mana back into the Cage.

Maya shook her head and pushed that problem aside. She had called the meeting of her group for a reason.

“Any reason this dude is here?” Hanna asked, gesturing to Chu. The man waved at her. “I didn’t know we were letting our boy toys in on privy meetings now.”

“I’m not a boy toy,” Chu said. “I’m a man toy.”

“He’s not a toy,” Maya said. “Honestly, he’s an American spy out to steal our secrets and try to woo me into pillow talk where I’ll spill my plans of world domination.”

“Oh, salacious,” Hanna said.

“I think I missed a lot of what was going on here,” Inez said, wearily. “When did America have to send spies?”

“Yesterday,” Hanna said. “There’s been a lot of developments since you were exiled to the Big Sig.”

“I was not exiled. You forgot about me,” Inez snapped.

“You’ll be heavily recompensed for your emotional distress and Hanna will give you the details later,” Maya said. Inez only sighed, rubbing her eyes. “But now, we have some news.”

Maya opened up a window and it showed the Tarvana army. Instead of marching, they were just sitting around near a trash pile, their camp was haphazard as if they feared no attack or had no ability to plan out anything.

“Looks like shoddy work,” George said. “Any officer worth their salt would be screaming at a sight like that.”

“It appears,” Maya said, “that the Tarvana are not great planners. They have run out of food and are awaiting resupply.”

“That’s great,” Chu said. “We can fuck up their logistic lines and boom, they’re toast.”

“We?” Hanna asked archly.

“They’ll just cannibalize the weaker of their army,” Maya said. “Or that’s what Bad Blood stated.”

“Cannibalize?” Chu asked. “They’ll eat their own.”

“I told you, they’re cannibal death cultists,” Maya said.

“I thought that was just hyperbole, y’know to prove they’re a real problem.”

“Nope. They eat their own.”

“Gross.”

“Anyway, they’re stuck there for the time being, that gives us more time to coordinate the retrieval of these ships and the rescuing of American troops stationed overseas,” Maya opened more windows and showed them the same images she had shown the President. “Sadly it looks like more than half of the bases have either been abandoned or overrun. There are a few places where they have become the linch pin of defenses and communities hosting survivors and refugees.”

Maya displayed the naval vessels that she had George find. “The naval ships, for the most part, have come through all of this unscathed. The crews have faced their own challenges, but unless its a kraken or a giant ass Whalewalker, like in Nigeria, they’ve been left alone. A couple of hundred tons of warship tends to dissuade being fed on.”

“That sounds about right for the Navy,” Chu said, he grinned at George who nodded back.

‘They’ll be one of the first priority,” Maya said. “We’ll need the crews and captains of each boat and ship, then we’ll get them to launch the armaments for us.”

“Cool, we’ll be blasting missiles from the Cage?” Hanna asked.

“Yeah. We’ve got a line on storage areas where there have extra munitions, in case of war or need. I’ll be having Tender and Roci use the ants to secure those areas and strip them clean. We’ll have to move fast, since things are still dicey in Russia and the Suds are having some difficulties getting the railguns up and running.”

“How are we doing this?” George asked. “Those naval ships and bases have been out of contact since Integration. They don’t know there is a new president and will not know if what she says is true. It’s a lot to take on faith, that the pride of American military arsenal has been sold for cheap.”

“It doesn’t matter what they think,” Maya said. “They’ll be given a message about what is going on in America. The president has recorded it and we already sent the messages to the places we are hitting first. They’ll be given an hour MVT time to brace themselves and then we’re moving in.”

‘How?” Chu asked.

“I’ve been working with Tender on how big I can open up a dimensional threshold,” Maya said. “My personal best was a kilometer wide and five meters tall when we gobbled up the landsharks. We’ve got it to about a kilometer and a half wide and half a kilometer tall now, before I gotta go visit Nan for healing. I’ll be opening the threshold under the ships, fill it with water, and then close it, bam, done.”

“That is a terrible idea,” Inez said. “You can just suck in those ships. It’ll kill everyone on board.”

“I’ve got that handled,” Maya said. “Force fields, mana fields, and a little something I like to call a tractor beam.”

“You should have just got a nuclear sub and nuked all those creatures,” Chu said.

“Nukes don’t work,” Inez said.

“What?”

“Nuclear power is frowned upon by the System, it seems,” Maya said. “I think I had this conversation a long time ago with Yosi or someone. But yeah, nukes are nuked. We can’t use them.”

“That seems impossible,” Chu said.

“There are literally people who can fly and punch holes through steel,” Maya said. “Nothing’s impossible anymore.”

“With all these ships that need to be gathered, the crew also repatriated, this will eat up a lot of our mana reserves,” Yosi said. She pulled up a screen, showing everyone how they were dipping into their savings to even keep the lights running. “We have twenty-nine C5 cores creating 1 Megagen an hour and five C6 cores that are making 2 Megagens an hour. That’s 39 Megagens and we’re burning 40 just to keep the Cage operating and another 20 Megagens on top of that to keep everything working as it is. These new thresholds we’re opening up each cost 1 Megagen to form and we can form two at a time now.”

“What about the…” Hanna looked to Chu. “The PM.”

“PM?” Maya asked. “Oh, right. That. Yeah, no progress on that front.”

“The search for mana lakes have also been unfruitful,” Tender said. “The probes we sent out have run out of mana without finding any, therefore the liquid mana we have on hand is all that we will have.”

“If it comes down to a firefight around the Hangy, we estimate that there is only enough power to maintain a thirty minute battle. Then we will be tapped out,” Maya said. “If that happens, then we might have to shut down the Cage and take a hit on the PM and everything we’ve built in here.”

That brought silence to the table.

“I’ve seen that Mana Stripper thing,” Chu said.

“Yeah?”

“What happens to the mana it strips off of people?” he asked.

“It just gets released back into the Cage as ambient mana,” Maya said.

“But you can, like I don’t know, condense mana right? You said you can pull it out of an area. So can you push it together? To make an area with a hell of a lot of mana?”

Maya frowned, a thought niggling in her mind. “Yes…”

“Then why not grab up a ton of people, force them through the Mana Stripper, pull the mana they have condensing around them off of them and then condense that mana into something usable. I hear your mana cores can condense mana and that black goo you’re talking about.”

“Holy shit,” Hanna said. She looked at Maya. “Marry this man, right now!”

“I’m keeping my options open,” Maya said, she furrowed her brow. “I think you might be right. We’re going to have to test this and the Mana Stripper isn’t pleasant at all, from what I hear.”

“What’s a little pain if it means they can contribute to keeping the Cage open?” George asked, excitement rising in his voice.

“A SIL’s mana aura is dependent upon their levels,” Bell said. “If we strip SIL of their auras, it might not be all that much considering the low-grade status this early into Integration. It might not even be cost effective, if we have to open two doors at a million gens each, one to enter and one to leave.”

“We’re going to have to strip all the troops we bring back of their mana auras anyway,” Yosi said. “We might as well run some tests on them and see what we could be obtaining.”

“Eh, using US soldiers as Guinea pigs, how corporate America of us,” Inez said.

“Hey, hey,” Chu said grinning. “See this is how I earned my way onto this round table. I was totally gonna sleep my way to the top too.” He winked at Inez who rolled her eyes.

“If this pans out, you’ll be compensated,” Maya said.

“I’d be cool if you called it the Chu Maneuver,” he said.

“Chu Mover?”

“Chu Maneuver.”

“Alright, Chuver it is.”

“So where are we going to start first?” Hanna asked. “I like Hawaii, can I be an ambassador there, bring the good news to the people? Then spend a few days answering questions they have? Preferably on a beach hotel with a giant pineapple in my drink?”

“I’ve already decided on where we will go first,” Maya said. She opened a window and it showed a military base.

“Where is that?” Inez asked.

“Rammstein, Germany,” George said.

***

Rammstein, Germany

Day 31

The cool night air was a comfort for Marcus Sullivan as he crouched low in the brush. He raised his rifle and peered through the scope. A humanoid figure scurried through the open field, it’s doglike face sniffing and growling.

A Doggotaur, one of the Integration’s messed up creations. From what Marcus knew, it was a dog that had been fused with another dog. But the upper portion had been turned into a humanoid dog, with the bottom part being a regular dog. Basically the original head of a dog was replaced with the torso of a humanoid dog creature.

They were a terrible scourge in this part of Germany. They weren’t all that dangerous to fight one on one, but where there was one, there was a pack. The brush across the clearing shook and shuddered as more of the doggotaurs loped out into the clearing. They sniffed and growled at one another, but didn’t move.

A large female emerged from the brush. Marcus held back a whistle of appreciation at her size. She stood nearly six feet at her human like shoulders and her head was more wolflike than dog. Her dog parts were a massive muscular breed, Great Dane maybe as it was a shorthair and dark grey.

“Damn, she’s got some big ass tiddies,” a voice whispered beside him. “Real human up top, huh?”

“Shut the fuck up, Hansel,” another voice hissed.

“Stop calling me Hansel, fucker,” Hansel said.

Marcus held back a smirk. The first week of Integration, Hansel had been lost in the woods around the base. He had been lured into a trap by a mutated tree. The trap had been a sweet and intoxicating aroma that smelled like candy or warm hugs, depending on the person. Hansel had said it reminded him of the candy his grandmother use to give him and had followed it, nearly dying in the process before he was recovered.

“I can’t believe we’re on Paw Patrol again,” Private Stiles said. He was the third member of their little recon group. “These god damn dogs just keep coming around don’t they?”

“My Pops used to say,” Marcus said, “that to get rid of a pest, you capture and sterilize the animal, then release it back into the same spot. That way they don’t breed. But if you take them out of there, then others of their kind will take over that territory.”

“Oh, lordy, another sermon by Pops Sullivan,” Hansel remarked.

“Eat a di-“ Marcus stopped as he heard a shout. He panned the clearing to see a man in battered medieval armor storm into the clearing. He carried a longsword and shield. Behind him, came several others, also carrying medieval weapons.

“Aw, fuck,” Hansel muttered. “It’s the god damn Larptards. I thought the General and the Mayor kicked their asses after they nearly died two days back?”

“They’re not afraid of a fight, I’ll give them that,” Marcus said. He watched as one of the men shouted something in German and their leader pounded his sword against his shield.

The big mama of the pack snarled and her little minions surged out of the brush. The doggotaurs began barking and snarling, posturing before they attacked. Their upper arms had long retractable claws that were no joke and their bites had to be pried open with a crowbar and the jaw broken to get them off whatever they latched onto.

“Five hundred credits says the dude in the robes buys it,” Hansel said.

“Make it real money,” Stiles said. “I’ll go for a hundred ration scrip.”

“Shit, I ain’t parting with my scrip, buddy.”

“Shut up,” Marcus said. “Those puppers are low leveled, but that big mama is probably in her early or mid teens.”

“Just like my girl back home,” Hansel grinned.

“The cannon fodder will go after the Larptards, once they’re engaged we’ll go in and take mama to pound town,” Marcus said.

“It’d be an honor to have my first four-way with ya’ll,” Stiles said, wiping away an imaginary tear.

The doggotaurs began howling and the three men watched as the Larptards deployed against them. Soon the sounds of fighting began filling the clearing.

“Let’s rock and roll,” Marcus said.

***

“Fucking. Fucking kill stealers!” the leader of the Larptards snarled at the three soldiers. “Fucking fuckers!”

“You kiss your daddy with that mouth?” Hansel asked. “From our point of view, we saved your sword swinging asses with our amazing marksmanship.”

“We got bounty!” another man yelled. He pulled out a badly copied bounty sheet and waved it in front of them. “Bounty. Dog monsters. Pay double for bitch.”

“General de Boise does not recognize the authority of the Guild Hall or the legitimacy of the ‘quests’ they give out,” Marcus said slowly and loudly. “We soldiers are here to ensure that this area is safe for civilians like you. If you wish to file a complaint, then there are channels you must go through.”

“Fucking fuckers!” their leader shouted again.

“Good night, gentlemen and lady. It has been the pleasure of the United States Armed Forces to help our fellow allies in need.” Marcus tipped his helmet at the lone woman in the group. She glared at him.

“Pardon us as we take our kill and turn it in for proof of our awesome bravery,” Stiles said as he and Hansel threw big mama’s corpse into a canvas tarp and they all carried it back to base.

“Fucking fuckers!”

The three chuckled as they left the group behind. Some people like the Larptards took the changes Integration had created to think they were now in an RPG of somesort. Marcus figured they’d lost a few screws during Integration. Although he had seen their brand of crazy beginning to spread to the locals and some of the soldiers. It had grown enough that a Guild Hall had been started up and they were handing out quests for people to do.

With the massive military presence in Rammstein, the area was considered one of the safest spots in Germany. Sure, they had suffered and a lot of people had died, but the tales of the bigger cities were horror stories. The relative peace of the area allowed the crazies to get crazier.

If people were willing to go out and fight monsters, then General de Boise had wanted to draft everyone into a fighting force to defend the city and the surrounding areas. That solution hadn’t sat well with the Mayor and whatever bit of government was left in the area. Everything was half ass measures and sporadic attempts to get people trained up and fighting, but at their own pace.

For the military it was frustrating, but people were shelled shocked at seeing nearly six out of seven people die in horrific ways. Marcus didn’t blame them, but he always figured that efficiency was a German strong suit, instead they were twiddling their thumbs, hoping somehow things got better.

Torches and oil lanterns lit up the outskirts of the Rammstein Air Base, guards patrolled the area and had already spotted Marcus and his two companions.

“Private Sullivan,” Sergeant Owens called out. “You’re wanted by General de Boise. Get your ass there now”

“What?” Marcus asked, glancing at his friends. They shrugged and Hansel ran a finger across his neck. “What for?”

“Does it look like the General confides he secret desires in me?” Owens snapped. “Get your ass there and be quick about it. This order came over an hour ago and they’ve been tossing the base looking for you.”

“Shit,” Marcus muttered. His palms were sweaty and already he was feeling sick to his stomach. What was he being called to the General’s office for anyway? He hadn’t done anything wrong.

His fear was legitimate. There had been more than a few cases of people losing their crap due to Integration. Dereliction of Duty had become a crime worthy of being killed over for. The General was a bit of a psycho, insisting that it was his hands that did the killing. Some weird Game of Thrones shit about the person passing judgement had to do the killing or something.

Marcus raced across the base.

The Rammstein Air Base had contracted in size since Integration. Due mostly to security reasons and the fact that all the big and shiny planes, tanks, and guns they had were useless. Their rifles and artillery worked fine, but anything with a chip in it was dead. A lot of the extra warehouses and other places had been turned into refugee housing.

The surrounding cities, villages, and hamlets had all moved into the Air Base as well. A few weeks later all the surviving military bases in central Germany had made their way to Rammstein along with whatever bits of the Germany military that had survived.

Things had been changing in the last weeks. Anyone who was in the armed forces was turned into an infantry grunt. That hadn’t been a change for Marcus, but he had seen the airmen and other folks bitch and moan about their new status. It was how General de Boise rose to lead the Air Base, he commanded the most troops and threw his weight around.

“Private Sullivan!” a man called out. Marcus stopped and saw five armed men suddenly surround him. “Where are you running, son?”

“I was told that the General requested my presence,” he said, gasping for breath.

“Over an hour ago,” another man snipped.

“I was on patrol, sir,” Marcus said. “Out in the woods.”

“Come on, we’ve kept the General waiting,” the leader of the group said and with iron grips, they hauled Marcus off.

Marcus felt in another life and time he would have struggled against the manhandling of the men. But with the levels and abilities gained by people, trying to fight back sometimes was a futile thing. He was half dragged through the remainder of the base and through security checkpoints; they stopped long enough for Marcus to see that the base was in high alert. Soldiers were moving around, weapons carried, and he could almost see some kind of light coming out of a distant warehouse. That struck him as strange since all the light they had now were lamps and torches. What was going on?

The men continued pulling him along, toward a large office building, then up several flights of stairs and finally they deposited him outside of an office. For all the power that the General seemed to have, he still worked out of a fairly small office. Even this late in the night, he was still at work.

“Know what this is all about?” Marcus asked the secretary behind the desk. She was dark haired woman in a impressively clean and well washed professional attire.

“Things have been crazy for a while now. Apparently something big is happening,” the secretary said.

“What’s it have to do with me?” he asked.

“Shut up,” one of the men who brought him there snapped. “You, sexy-tary keep your trap shut.”

The woman glared at the man and raised her middle finger to him. The man chuckled in return.

“The General will see you now,” the secretary said, seemingly communicating via some kind of telepathy. “Only you.” She added as the men who brought Marcus prepared to move also.

“Wish me luck?” Marcus grinned at the woman. She rolled her eyes and resumed her work.

General de Boise was a salt and peppered older man. He was dressed immaculately in a pressed shirt and trousers, his face freshly shaved and the smell of Old Spice or some aftershave lingered in the air. Marcus snapped into a salute, waiting as the General seemed to be finishing up some kind of paperwork.

“Marcus Sullivan?” he asked without looking up.

“Yes, sir,” Marcus said, his mouth dry and tongue thick.

“Where do you come from, son?” the man asked.

“Uh… we moved around a lot when I was growing up. My pops was a sergeant,” he said. “But we settled down in Dallas after my pops got out.”

“Dallas, huh.” The man flipped through some pages. “It appears a dimensional instability appeared in that city, quite a few it seems. From what we know, the city is dead.”

Marcus felt a sudden icy grip on his soul. He didn’t move, for fear that is he did, he would just collapse. “Sir?”

“We have gained some intelligence reports from back home,” the General said, sighing. “It is as bad as we feared.”

“Yes, sir…”

“This does not, of course, mean your family has perished,” the General added.

“Why… why are you telling me this?” Marcus asked. “Sir.”

“You have an older sister, correct? A,” he checked a file, “Maya Sullivan. Twenty-one years old.”

“Maya? Yes, sir. She’s my sister, sir.”

“Over an hour ago, we received communication from an unknown source. It came in the form of a disc, a holographic disc that appeared in my office,” the General sighed. “It is a message from the new President of the United States. It seems they have made arrangements with some other power to repatriate us back to the United States.”

‘We’re going home, sir?” Marcus asked.

“It appears so. We cannot yet confirm if this information is true or not, but half an hour ago a strange doorway has opened up in one of the lesser used warehouses.”

“The lights,” Marcus said.

“Indeed. It appears whomever this power is, they have access to technology that can work post-Integration.”

“What, uh, does this have to do with me and my sister, sir?” Marcus asked.

The General set a silvery disc on the desk before him. He waved his hands over it and a window appeared, like the System announcements and screens.

A woman sat in the center of the frame, she looked at the camera and then off to the side.

“Hey, Roci, quit messing around over there. I’m recording!” she snapped.

“I want to be in the recording too!” a voice answered, it sounded young, like a teenage girl’s.

“Later. This is grown up business.”

“That’s bullshit,”

“That’s the majority of grown up business,” the woman responded.

Marcus felt strange feeling crawl through him. He saw the woman and he recognized her, he knew her, but some part of him looked at her and only saw something strange and terrifying. The woman, no Maya, his sister looked back into the camera and smiled.

“Hey, Marcodickius, you still owe me forty dollars. I’m looking to collect,” she said. “Your bossman says you’re still alive over there, causing mischief and breaking toilets. If you’ve got the time, get your butt to the Wall and enter the Cage. We’ve got some things to discuss.”

The video ended and Marcus felt weak and dizzy. He took a breath and steadied himself.

“What is this, sir?” he asked.

“You have been summoned to the Cage by Maya Sullivan, a Tier 2 entity that has access to a type of dimensional space that allows her to connect to any part of this world,” the General said.

“Maya does?” Marcus was confused. His sister was a big mouth, highly opinionated pain in the ass. The woman he saw on the recording was her, but something was off. Like she… Marcus couldn’t find the words. Like she grew up or something.

“You will be escorted to the Wall, as she calls it and allowed to enter. We have already sent in recon squads and they say that it is safe. This Maya Sullivan is real and what she had told us is true.”

“Yes, sir,” Marcus said the only thing he could manage.

“Dismissed,” the General waved him off and Marcus snapped to another salute. He backed out of the room and immediately sat down in one of the waiting chairs.

“Get up, kid. We’ve got orders,” the men who dragged him there snapped.

Marcus got to his feet, feeling wobbly. The iron grips of the men grabbed him again and they pulled him out of the waiting room.

“Come back again,” the woman called after them.

The men repeated the route they entered the building, hustling Marcus down the flight of stairs, across a parking lot, and through more check points, pass more armed soldiers, and toward a distant warehouse that once held guns or tanks or parts. The amount of soldiers in the area showed the severity that the General was taking this message.

He skidded to a stop as he saw a robotic creature that looked like an ant walk by, carrying a pallet of something. He stared at it, the other soldiers and the men with him seemed disinterested in it.

“What the fuck,” Marcus said.

“Move it,” the leader said as they pulled him forward. They dragged him into the warehouse and then Marcus saw it. A freestanding metallic wall that seemed entirely out of place in the middle of the warehouse.

“Maya’s Emporium,” he read out loud. “What the hell?”

“In you go,” a man said.

‘What?”

The man pointed to a door. “The door says Pull, but its actually Push. I think it’s meant to be a fucking joke or something.”

“What?” Marcus asked again.

‘Just toss him in,” another man said.

Two men grabbed him by the arms and once again half carried him to the door. They pushed it open and Marcus saw a person standing inside of a large room. The men walked in and deposited Marcus into the room, then backtracked out.

Marcus nearly stumbled to the floor. He caught himself and stood up. Blinking at the strangeness before him. The room was bigger than the warehouse. Where the hell was he?

“Hey, little brother,” a voice said.

Marcus focused on the lone figure in the room. A woman in purple coveralls who was leaning against a counter in a very relaxed manner.

“M-Maya?” Marcus asked.

“In the flesh.”

“I d-don’t have forty dollars,” he said.

Maya grinned and laughed. The laughter was her to the core, it broke through the strangeness of the situation and Marcus felt an immense relief dislodge the weight one his shoulders. He laughed too and then they closed the distance, Marcus grabbing her and lifting her into the tightest hug he could.