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SCL Chapter 9: Whiskey Tears and Power Armor Fears
🕑 Added 2025-04-07 03:28:43 +0000 UTCMost of the recruits in Augustus's group were trying Whiskey Number 8 for the first time, including Augustus himself and Raynor. This was a distilled liquor with a concentration of more than 40 degrees. In the fringe worlds, whiskey imported from the core planets through interstellar docking ships was even considered a high-end liquor.
Augustus couldn't bribe Tavis, the virtual mechanical sergeant who managed the dormitory access control, so they still had to return to the dormitory before half past ten.
The atmosphere at the party table was lively. The recruits drank whiskey, beer, and cocktails while cursing the rations and the training camp commander. Until a recruit named Connor Ward got drunk and suddenly started sobbing.
Connor Ward was an outlier in the second platoon, first class. He had short light blond hair, light blue eyes, dark and healthy chocolate skin, and a tall, strong build. Although he was only 23 years old, his melancholy eyes and sad expression made him look much older than young men like Augustus.
Ward never smiled, and he didn't talk much. Augustus once noticed him silently looking at a family photo.
It was a picture of a small river with blue waters and lush green surroundings. Connor held a beautiful woman in his arms, and three blonde children stood at his feet. His smile was bright and sunny, as if he were a different person.
A happy husband and father.
When Ward cried and told everyone how his wife and lovely children were killed by the Kel-Morians, the sadness and pain captured in the photo became even deeper.
A Kel-Morian assault company attacked the defenseless refinery on the planet Tyrador VIII in the second year of the Guild Wars.
This should have been just an operation to destroy local military facilities, but the mining areas, gas refineries, and even underground transportation pipeline nodes where a large number of civilians and workers lived and worked were attacked.
Ward worked in one of the gas refineries. His wife warned him before the attack that he should flee their house and hide in the open, but he thought it was impossible for the Kel-Morians to penetrate the core world of the Federation.
Moria was quite far from the Tyrador system. Before disaster struck, all men and women were saying: We are still far from war.
The Kel-Morians were merciless. They used incendiary bombs and laser weapons, turning all the factories into bright pillars of fire. Hundreds of feet-high dust columns made of debris, glass, and people rose into the sky. Ground-penetrating missiles struck deep into the mines, killing hundreds of workers through shockwaves, scorching air, and cave-ins.
At that time, the entire gas refinery was burning, and the fire engulfed the residential area where the workers' families lived, including Ward's wife and two young children. Ward only had time to rescue his youngest daughter.
She did not survive.
A Kel-Morian fighter plane swooped down and strafed the unarmed civilians. A laser beam struck Ward's two-year-old daughter, and he watched as she was torn to pieces.
Ward's alcohol tolerance was low. He was not good at drinking and got drunk easily. Perhaps he had been suppressing his emotions for too long and needed to vent. He cried for a long time until Augustus and Raynor carried him back.
After that, Augustus decided not to let Connor touch alcohol unless necessary and to observe and record his suicidal tendencies, which had already begun to surface. On the battlefield, this could get them all killed.
...
In the third week, Augustus' class began to formally learn how to operate and use CMC-200 power armor. To be honest, the first attempt made them feel extremely disappointed.
The power armor used for training consisted of old models eliminated from the battlefield. The surface of the armor was covered with scratches and traces left by shrapnel. Some parts of the armor were seriously damaged, and the internal servo and padding were coated with a layer of frost-like ash.
The damage to the armor was so common that the recruits could understand the fact that some suits were missing arms and legs.
These tattered power armors were very different from the bright and beautiful steel armor on the recruitment posters, as if they were antiques from centuries ago.
After Augustus received his power armor, he had to clean the oil and ash inside and use perfume to cover up the foot odor and sweat left by the previous user. If this was disgusting enough, someone also found dried vomit and other indescribable substances in their helmet.
The power armor of the Federal Marine Corps is maintained by specialized armor technicians. Usually, each platoon is equipped with an armor technician and two assistants. The main force and special tactics teams have more professional technicians, but there is only one technician in the entire boot camp.
The maintenance of armor and weapons is a compulsory subject for recruits, even if all they can actually do is polish and oil the armor.
The first thing Augustus learned was that he had to build a good relationship with the armor technicians in the team.
On the battlefield, power armor is the only guarantee of a Marine’s survival, and no one wants it to malfunction. If there is only one technician in his unit and they have a conflict, then no one will know whether the life support system of his power armor will suddenly fail.
Or more simply, there could be an electromagnetic grenade directly in the battery unit of the power armor.
Compared with the latest experimental special-purpose armor such as the 230, 230F-X series, and 250E, as well as the CMC-300 that will be mass-produced by the Marine Corps in the future, the stability of the cold fusion filter used by the CMC-200 to power the servo system is very problematic, with a failure rate fluctuating around an astonishing 0.9%.
For the unlucky soldier trapped in this iron prison due to the shutdown of the armor power system on the battlefield, such a failure rate is a nightmare that will happen 100% of the time.
This power armor still has many defects from the old era. For example, the connection gaps between its armor plates are a fatal flaw. The joints at the knees lack strong protection, and the several-inch-thick cables of the servo system, along with the Marines' environmental combat suits, cannot withstand bullets accelerated to supersonic speeds.
As long as the angle is right, broken shrapnel and bullets ricocheting off the armor may enter the joint from above, cutting the Marine’s legs in half.
At the same time, the cooling tower on the back of the CMC-200 still uses mid-century technology, which makes its efficiency far inferior to the latest products from Tarsonis Brubaker Military Industries.
Despite these defects, power armor remains an epoch-making weapon of war. Its solid armor can withstand all light weapons firepower. Rifles and shotguns of all calibers from the Earth era can only leave scratches on the armor.
They can also resist chemical and biological weapons as well as nuclear radiation. These iron cans must be dealt with like tanks and heavy armored vehicles, using anti-tank guns and heavy weapons to target the relatively more fragile helmets of the Marines and blow up their skulls.
In the territory of the Terran Federation, local armed organizations in marginal areas usually still use weapons inherited from their grandfathers’ grandfathers for hunting, and even the most powerful automatic rifles are not enough to penetrate the Marines’ armor.
In the logs of local security officers, a company of Federal Marines can easily defeat a large-scale rebel army, resulting in a one-sided massacre.
It will be the next century before Marines become the most common combat force in the Science Zone and power armor technology flows into the hands of private armed forces, mercenaries, or pirates.
In 2488, such a technological barrier was enough for the Terran Federation to suppress the Kel-Morian army, which lacked power armor, and gain an advantage in the war.
Before handling these power armors, the sergeant in the training camp gives each recruit a power armor training manual. The compiler of the training manual is an army general.
The general kindly tells the recruits at the beginning that operating the CMC series power armor is not much more difficult than using their father’s exoskeleton harvesting robot.
However, every recruit seems to have returned to infancy and lost the ability to walk when they first put on these iron shells. Beginners with uncoordinated hands and feet can't even crawl on the ground. Even the best-performing recruits can only stagger a few steps.
Of course, it won't take long for the recruits to adapt to this change.
CMC power armor has a complete built-in skeletal system, which bears the burden of the armor’s weight, preventing Marines from being crushed by their own gravity. The use of ceramic composite armor makes the armor itself lighter. Even the heaviest full-body plate armor of the Middle Ages on Earth was not heavier than these power armors powered by fusion energy.
The tactile feedback system inside the power armor ensures that the Marines can operate flexibly. It accurately transmits the Marines' movements and other operations to the entire power armor through the servo system embedded under each piece of armor and connected by cables, ensuring that the Marines do not suffer dislocations or sprains due to the lack of coordination between the various parts of the power armor and their human reaction.
Marines must undergo continuous training to make the power armor truly a part of their body, so that the hundreds of pounds of armor become as easy to use as their own skin.
This is not an easy task for Federal recruits who have just been introduced to these new toys, but fortunately, they still have a full eight weeks to learn how to operate the power armor proficiently. According to experience and data, even the slowest recruits can integrate with the armor within two weeks.
The training manual and the virtual sergeant in charge of recruit training emphasize the same point: if you can't make the power armor your external organ—your third and fourth hands and feet—in a short period, it will become your grave.
Augustus had never touched any harvester robots. His only impression of the power armor of the Terran human Marines in the Koprulu sector came from Tychus in the CG version of StarCraft 2: Wings of Liberty.
Like all other recruits, Augustus moved like a drunk duck when he first put on the power armor.
Although Augustus did not believe that veterans were born knowing how to operate power armor, they were still scolded by the instructors who supervised them: “My 80-year-old grandmother can dance ballet in this!”
In the eyes of the instructors, the recruits' clumsy performance was as incredible as a newborn fish that couldn't swim. Any complaints were seen as defiance toward superiors. The only words the recruits could say were “Yes, sir. Yes, sir.”
If “Yes, sir” was not shouted loudly enough or with sufficient enthusiasm, they would immediately be questioned by the instructors: “Why, can’t I hear your voices, you maggots?”
At this point, Augustus and his comrades could only respond in unison over and over again:
“We love the Marine Corps! Being a soldier is the most glorious!”
“We are weapons of war! We pray for death! We long for war!”
In the next three weeks, the first thing the recruits did every morning was to quickly tidy up their bunks before boarding military transport trucks with their personal identification cards.
The transport trucks would take them to the power armor assembly platform in the barracks, where modularly programmed robotic arms would assemble the armor piece by piece.
The training lasted the entire day, until the recruits were too exhausted to move, or Coronel Mybika made a surprise inspection of the Marine Corps' ideological training results, at which point they could finally get a short break.
