View Flat HTML
View Metadata
Search Post
There is a bar. The bar is quite pleasantly outfitted, with booths and tables and a lovely fireplace with couches in front of it. The couches must be quite comfortable, because a young woman is sleeping on one of them as though it were the grandest featherbed. Or perhaps that's just exhaustion. She—and the other woman in this currently otherwise-empty establishment—are both plenty the worse for wear. To an inexperienced eye, it might seem only as if they had been out camping for a while, from the roughness of their clothes, but if you know how to look—that's the sleep of one who's found decent sleep a precious commodity for a long time. And her sister, the one whose eyes you can see—those are the eyes of someone who's found an unanticipated path out of Hell, an unexpected part in the Red Sea.
"I got that impression. But...better question. What's your particular spacefuture like, compared to...well, you might not be familiar with twentieth century technology levels, but compared to there just being Earth?"
"There are... more planets? Well. I presume your world also contains multiple planets, but in mine they are inhabited and mutually accessible."
"Varied. It's hard to find a... point of entry, a place to start explaining. Um. Mars has people on it now?"
"That's cool. It's just--Earth is one of my options, sure, but...I'm not at all sure familiar is better, in this case. So I'd like to know what my other options are. Is why I'm asking."
"There are about two hundred habitable planets and stations in the galaxy. You can get from Earth to any of them in a couple of months, tops. Back on my flagship I could easily conjure you up the tourism pamphlets of the top fifty or a hundred most interesting ones, but out here I have fewer resources available."
"That's fair. Also, it's been about seven years since I had to make small talk with a stranger, and I'm not very good at it anymore I don't think."
"If there's anything else you'd like to ask me I'll answer to the best of my ability and otherwise I suspect we'll probably stand in slightly awkward silence until it's time to leave."
"Well, then, if you'd like to discuss your historical and tactical situation you can do that, and if you'd prefer the awkward silence, maybe I'll wander around and take in the sights of this bizarre location."
"I'm happy to discuss history and tactics. I can tell you quite a bit about Sentinels on my own cognizance but you're going to have to steer me a bit on the history part."
The gist of it is--they're a terror to fight. Back when there were more than just the two of them, that they knew of, a group of five or so well-trained mutants taking on a much larger group of Sentinels could almost certainly take down several of them before the Sentinels adapted to whatever their powers were--heat against cold, cold against heat, absorbing and mimicing exotic materials. The one saving grace was that Sentinels seemingly couldn't share adaptations between each other. They're built like humans. They move like humans, except when they don't. A baseline Sentinel can be damaged by so many newtons of force especially when applied to these particular areas, but one that's undergone significant adaptation is often different. They adapt to direct uses of power significantly faster than indirect ones. They can't fly, but they do have ranged attacks. They can detect mutants at an ever-increasing range, and will automatically target them over nonmutants, so if one's about to kill some genotypicals flying just into their range and playing keep-away until the original victims have gotten away is a valid, if often lethal, strategy.
"I can think of some things to try on them," says Admiral Naismith. "Some of them I have to rule out because some weapons should not be fired inside the atmosphere of an inhabited planet, but there's plenty more. Do you know how many there are, how wide an area they cover?"
"As of the last time we were able to get any news from the rest of the world--about five years ago--they had covered the entirety of the continental United States and were being sent to Alaska and Hawaii, but had yet to invade any other countries. I wouldn't be surprised if this had changed since then, but I don't know that it has. As to how many there are...according to the numbers as projected six years ago, probably somewhere between one and two hundred million."
"That will make it... annoying to clean them up with a force of five thousand," he says. "But still potentially doable. If they'd overrun the planet, I'd start to worry."
"Judging by their observed density in the areas I've been in, it's possible that someone decided to, say, invade Mexico, but unless the current number is a lot higher than projected they couldn't possibly have overrun the planet."
"Promising... of course, it's unclear how I'm going to get my fleet there in the first place, so perhaps I should be planning for them to have spread out more by the time I get there."
"Bar claims that as long as my sister and I go back there someday time will be paused in the meanwhile."
"I'd be slightly less cavalier about leaving if there wasn't a decent chance it would mean that no one else dies in the meanwhile."
"And then, of course, there's the matter of what to do with the country after. I'm pretty sure the faction of government with the murderbots just straight-up overthrew the rest of it."
"I don't carry around a stable governmental system in my back pocket, unfortunately..."