Schlock Mercenary

I thought this was the racist militia, and the real army was planning to stay the hell out of everything (but accidentally threatened the Toughs due to terrible timing).

Iafa had started blowing up the military spy drones

The tiny militia got completely routed. These guys are the real military - the cruiser is packing some proper annies and they even have uniforms.

They were trying not to escalate it into a proper fight because Breath Weapon is still a scary monster of a ship (reminded of the classification - she is one step smaller than an Ob'enn superfortress, but has more bite relative to her weight class).

But she has been moved out. Cindy is the only Toughs' warship left in the system.

So, shortly after the "enemy" military appeared to make a threat that someone else carried out, Tagon's crew appears to be doing a teraport-based version of what Batman does to mooks... the Disaster Dominoes are starting to fall.

Elf might be a little too ready to die.

Babylon Abbey spoilers.

That may be even more ominous than it sounds on the surface.

She has Long Guns, if she tracked Putzho's hypernode connection to his ship, she could have shot that down too, rather than just his avatar he stationed in Eina-Afa.

I love how fanfic has apparently just become daily entertainment in the future. I would watch the HELL out of that show.

I think Elf is less "ready to die" and more "not ready to give up her ship".

I think Elf's reason for seeming eagerness to die goes back to https://www.schlockmercenary.com/2018-02-03 - if she can't have "The husband who apologized", perhaps she would prefer to not remember that he did.

Survival traits.

@3658 What do you mean, "of the future"? Fanfic has been a major part of pop culture since, well, at least the Roman Empire. Maybe not called as such, sure, but such as it has been, such that it will be.

Speaking.

Can't keep the ship, but can also make life difficult for when it's reclaimed.

Be careful about the pieces you drop in the black water.

Also, ew. The imagery.

Padding the resume.

Well why not share a shitty deal?

I can't help but think that if circumstances crop up at the last minute where they DON'T have to evacuate that ship, Elf is setting herself up for a bad time.

The only "bad time" is if Cindy gets blown up. In which case, she'd be screwed regardless.

And Petey continues to the aggressively helpful. I'm kind of hazy on how good the communication between remote areas is, so I'm wondering if this is a gestalt working independently of what's going on with Chinook or if this is a direct result thereof.

Petey is a conglomerate of hundreds of AIs in the first place, splitting up like this is zero effort at all.

edited 25th Feb '18 12:50:02 AM by Adannor

The impression I got is that even super-long-range communications are fast enough to be near-instant in human terms. So any portion of Petey in the galaxy should be aware of important situations unless they're sitting inside a Faraday Cage or something. It's just that "near-instant in human terms" is not fast enough when you have to outfox another AI.

Going back a few pages, it occurs to me to be curious what "scuttling" a spaceship looks like. It's not like putting a hole in the hull is going to render it unrecoverable. Maybe you do it by rigging the annie plant to explode?

I thought Petey had subdued and re-educated the Ob'enn. He was most of the ways done with that campaign before the whole time travel hullabaloo. How is there still an angry faction with at least two Thunderheads?

Uh, no. He was a giant pain in their ass, but reeducation was not going smoothly during the time Toughs were in his employ, and he was not anywhere near a crushing victory.

Once he got the Core, he had bigger stuff to deal with in Andromeda, so he couldn't just crush them with the unlimited power.