Things That Go Bump in
the Night: The Royal Army Veterinary
Corps Experimental Combat Unit in New Even in the midst of
the Kafer War, even on a planet occupied by the most dangerous aliens known to
man, there are some jobs that suck worse than others. The foetid slime dripping slowly down the back of my neck said that this was one
of them. Evade the Kafer
patrols in the Westmark – yawn… Penetrate the outer
perimeter of the Do it with a sack of bogles hanging around my neck - what do I look like, a pentapod? I was crawling throught a ventilation shaft barely bigger than I was,
feeding handfuls of the drooling, squirming, nibbling little buggers into every
cross-shaft. Imagine the offspring of a particularly scrawny mouse with the
worst case of scabies known to medicine, crossed with an incontinent, cow-pat
brown slug, then double the ick
factor. The ‘pods have never mastered human aesthetics, but this time I was
sure they'd done it deliberately. The bogle's only
saving grace was that the one thing they lived for was following Kafers down tunnels. Given my druthers I'd
have dumped the whole sack into the top of the shaft and high-tailed it out of
Dodge, but each of the damned things was prepped with a pixie-dust dispenser
that couldn't be activated until the last minute, and while the bogles made handy-dandy relays for the pixie-dust they
still couldn't boost its signal enough to penetrate
out of the tunnels, which meant stringing a fibre-optic
the length of the shaft and wiring in receivers every few yards. I'd be lucky if I was
out before dawn, if I didn't then I was stuck in the shaft until nightfall,
just me and my slimy little friends. It made for one hell of an incentive to
get the job finished. Combat Vets: The ECU in New Corporal Menzies MacNiece,
RAVC ARVS Publishing, Heorot, 2312 Introduction The Royal
Army Veterinary Corps (RAVC) has not traditionally been regarded as a combat
unit, but off-world service has occasionally seen them dragged into
non-traditional taskings. Originally charged with
looking after the army’s horses and dogs, a role which has never gone away no
matter how much the futurists might predict it, over the past several centuries
the RAVC has added burrowvargs and several other non-Terran creatures to those it routinely cares for, and
advising on bug-hunts to its traditional roles. For all of the changes, it
remains the case that where there is a military base there will usually be
guard-dogs, and a RAVC detachment looking after them, or in many cases actually
providing the handlers. New Africa was no different to that rule, notable only for
being the home of the Military Burrowvarg Training Centre,
but the presence of the military vets was to prove an unexpected bonus when the
Kafers came calling and the RAVC personnel have found
themselves taking on some very unexpected roles, ranging from inter-species
ambassadors to jungle scouts. The RAVC Experimental Combat Unit The initial
assault found the RAVC personnel on New Africa scattered throughout the various
surviving units, often serving as substitute doctors or combat medics. The
senior surviving RAVC officer on-planet was Major Morag Euart,
formerly commander of the Burrowvarg Training Centre,
who found herself attached to the HQ of 1 Light Division to handle any and
every animal related concern as the division staged its fighting retreat down
the Morag
hadn’t trained to deal with sentient clients, whether they came with two feet
or five, but she had an ability to empathize with her new charges, and the
self-confidence to organize them secure and
comfortable quarters that met their particular requirements. As they grew
familiar with each other, Morag became aware that the ‘Pods, who for unknown
reasons now insisted on being referred to as ‘Pod 13’, apparently wanted to
help in the struggle against the Kafers, while in
their turn the Pentapods became aware that their
‘keeper’ was an expert on the use of animals in military service. A plan was
born. Morag managed
to talk fast enough and persistently enough to her superiors to get her plan
approved and the RAVC Experimental Combat Unit was formed. The initial
intention was solely that the unit should develop Pentapod
bio-technological devices for use by regular combat units, but as Morag pulled
in RAVC survivors from all over the continent she found herself with a core of
personnel who were actually combat-hardened and quite capable of field-testing
the unit’s products without any help. Although
many of Major Euart’s superiors had quietly hoped
that the ‘Pods would simply produce an anti-Kafer virus and be done with it,
Pod 13 refused to even consider producing anything that might be considered a
weapon of mass destruction, and in fact their ‘take’ on producing weapons has
been as disturbingly unexpected as many Pentapod
mass-market products. Naming the products of the unit was something the ‘Pods
were happy to leave to Morag, and given the less than aesthetic nature of many
‘Pod projects she has named them for creatures out of nightmare and legend, while
her habit of referring to them generically as ‘wee beasties’ has become
universal within the ECU. Developing
new weapons systems has traditionally been a rather slow process, but the Pentapods work quickly in the bio-sciences domain and their
initial constructs were available by late in the Occupation. Since the
Liberation there has been a definite shift in the unit’s priorities, with new constructs
tailored for use in the K-Zone. It has also slowly become apparent that there
are two sets of Pentapod ‘weapon system engineers’ at
work in New Africa, Pod 13 and the ECU are the open source of Pentapod technology, but it is now clear that a second team
is at work in support of special forces and the black world of intelligence
agencies. Where this second team is located and where they
came from is unclear, but their technology is much more overtly lethal, although
very rarely seen. The Experimental Combat Unit The ECU has
grown steadily to its current size of around fifty personnel (not counting Pod
13 members), organized as a single platoon and reporting directly to HQ II
(Commonwealth) Corps. Number 1 Section is charged with close protection of the
‘Pods and its NCOs include several RMP personnel with formal training in the
role. No 2 Section is responsible for technical support of Pod 13’s work and
includes both RAVC veterinary officers and technicians and several personnel
who were civilian scientists before the war. No 3 Section is both the strongest
section and the one charged with field evaluation of the constructs flowing out
of 2 Section. Several of the constructs are now technically operational, rather
than experimental, but their support requirements are still specialized enough
that there has been no move to transition them out of the unit into more
general use. Major Euart exercises direct control of 3
Section as well as overall command of the ECU. In her absence from base, unit
administration devolves down onto Colour Sergeant
Jason Anichebe and the small staff of HQ Section. Colour Sergeant Anichebe is
out-ranked by the two commissioned veterinary officers in 2 Section, but both
are better suited to the lab than to command and they are under standing orders
from Major Euart to defer to Colour
Sergeant Anichebe in any operational matter. ECU teams
normally deploy into the field as four man bricks under a corporal or sergeant,
but operations have ranged from single personnel up to a full multiple of 20
troops. Operationally they are mostly tasked in surveillance/recce roles, operating as specialist teams in a similar
manner to the Tracker Combat Units, with whom they have a rather strained
relationship. The Trackers view them, accurately, as amateurs in the jungle,
but the Trackers can only follow Kafers, ECU can have
those Kafers announce where they are for anyone to home
in on. ECU troops in the field are equipped as standard British infantry, but
usually carry several extra pouches containing ‘wee beasties’. The ECU also
deploys a mixed force of military dogs and burrowvargs.
The dogs, Alsatians and Wee Beasties Bogles A Bogle is a small, rodent-like creature around 5 to 7 centimetres in length with a sickly yellow-brown coloration
and an affinity for Kafers (the cues that attract it
to Kafers appear to be largely scent-related). Bogles will follow any Kafer within scent range, but will
stay in the deepest shadow available to do so. If forced to cross brightly lit
areas they have a surprising turn of speed. Bogles
have no offensive or defensive weaponry, but are so unpleasantly slimy that few
people, human or Kafer, are inclined to pick one up. On its own a bogle is fairly useless, but they have a small pouch on
their dorsal surface which can be used to carry small, self-powered items of
electronics, such as short-range targeting beacons, surveillance equipment or
Pixie Dust relays. Bogles can feed on Terran or BCV-native vegetation and usually live for from
three weeks to a month. They appear not to sleep. Bogles are
produced by bogle-mothers. The bogle-mother
is a ‘Pod construct around 0.5m in length and half that wide and high, it
weighs around 15 kilos and is predominantly grey-green in colour,
coated with a translucent slime. Immobile and mostly featureless, the bogle-mother will absorb any food placed on its upper surface;
apart from that and some limited excretion its only observable activity is to
occasionally extrude a new-born bogle through its
sides. The bogle-mother needs 250 grammes
of Terran or BCV-native vegetation a day to support itself and around another 250 grammes
for each bogle it produces. The maximum observed rate
of reproduction has been six bogles in 24 hours, but
most bogle-mothers appear to peak at four per day. Bogle-mothers live for around three months
Boggarts A boggart is a bogle with attitude.
Averaging 10 centimetres in length they are similar
in gross structure to a bogle, but with a much
heavier jaw. Like bogles they are drawn to follow Kafers in the shadows, but given the opportunity they will
dart from cover, deliver a stinging bite and then retreat, hopefully before
retribution can find them. The attacks trigger Kafers
into smart-mode, which might be seen as less than useful, but prolonged,
repeated transitions into smart-mode without any ‘down-time’ to recover appears
slightly debilitating to Kafers and they have been
observed to become somewhat slower to enter smart mode after the first 24 hours
of stimulation. Like bogles, boggarts
have a lifecycle of from three weeks to a month. A boggart-mother is almost indistinguishable from a bogle-mother in size and texture, but has a distinct
reddish tinge to its covering of slime. Like the bogle-mother
it requires 250 grammes of food per day, but each boggart produced requires around 400 grammes
of food and peak reproduction is typically three boggarts
in 24 hours.
Redcaps The fact
that Redcaps actually have a red cap is taken by some members of the ECU as
evidence that the ‘Pods are designing constructs to entertain Major Euart’s sense of whimsy. A redcap is the ECU’s grenade
equivalent, designed to allow an ECU trooper surprised by Kafers
to distract them while he escapes from the immediate vicinity. The beastie is a
multi-part organism consisting of the child’s-fist sized cap, which is covered
by a hard, bright red carapace which can crack across the middle to feed, and 20
to 25 small, grey-green ‘finger-rats’ who spend most of their life suckling
from the soft underbelly of the cap. The redcap is activated by squeezing the
cap until its carapace cracks (a sensation described as extremely unpleasant),
after which it is usually hurled towards the enemy. Approximately five seconds
after the carapace is cracked the finger-rats will release themselves from the
dying cap and immediately attack any Kafer in the vicinity. Their attack is so
rapid that they are usually described as exploding away from the cap. The finger-rats
are too small to do serious damage under normal circumstances, but their bite
attacks are extremely distracting and a limited allergic reaction has been seen
in some cases. Unlike the other active Pod 13 constructs, redcaps cannot feed
themselves and need to be fed a small protein or chocolate bar daily. Given
regular feeding a red cap will last approximately 10 days in good health, after
which the cap acquires a grayish tinge and the finger-rats begin to die off at
around four to six per day. Because of the squirming finger-rats, redcaps are
unsuitable for directly attaching to combat webbing and are normally carried in
pouches. The redcap-mother
is similar to most other Pod 13 mothers, but the complexity of producing two
separate ‘species’ of creature means that it is rather larger, averaging a metre long and 30 kilos in weight. It needs approximately
500 grammes of food per day for its own metabolism
and can produce up to four red-caps per day, needing around 250 grammes for each. Redcap-mothers have the typical three
month lifecycle of a mother.
Gremlins Gremlins
are another construct that appears closely related to the bogle
and boggart. They are approximately the same size as
a bogle, but a mottled brown-black in colour and feature a jaw similar to the bogle.
Unlike the bogles, boggarts
and other constructs they have no affinity for Kafers,
but they are intensely attracted to the scents of Kafer lubricants and
plastics. A gremlin in close proximity to a stationary Kafer vehicle will find
some tight, dark place to conceal itself and if possible fasten onto wiring,
piping or plastics with its teeth. For every gremlin infesting a Kafer vehicle
there is around a five percent change that it will be rendered immobile or will
suffer some similar malfunction, Locating every
gremlin in an infestation is time-consuming and irritating to Kafers and is not helped by the poor accessibility and
maintainability of Kafer vehicles. Gremlin-mothers
are indistinguishable from bogle-mothers but for
their predominantly black colouring.
Banshees The largest
of the common Pod-13 constructs, banshees appear to have a considerable amount
of Terran primate in their make-up,
unfortunately this seems to be mixed with equal amounts of bull-frog. Banshees
have been described as looking like a 30cm high satanic howler monkey,
something not helped by their pale, ghost-like colouring.
They dislike being on the forest floor, spending most of their time in the
canopy, but like bogles, boggarts
and finger-rats they are strongly attracted to the scent of Kafers.
Unlike the other constructs, banshees will not venture into close proximity of Kafers, but they will trail them from above, and while they
trail them they are compelled to wail. The banshee’s wail is actually inaudible
to both humans and Kafers, being a subsonic rumble
produced deep in the chest, however some other jungle creatures appear to be
aware of it and their alarm calls will usually warn the kafers
that something is wrong. Despite its inaudibility to human ears, infrasound
travels well and can be detected by standard TISS sonic sensors. All TISS sets
on Beta Canum have now been updated to add banshee
wails to their threat libraries. The wail is typically strong enough for
direction finding within 10Km and detectable out to 15Km. Banshees typically
live from a month to six weeks, feeding on local vegetation. Banshee-mothers
are around the same size as a redcap-mother and have a similar metabolism.
However each banshee gestation requires around four kilos of food stuff and the
reproduction rate is one new banshee every two days.
Barghests Most humans
to have encountered them have found Barghests to be
extremely disturbing. Their core genetics are very obviously that of the Terran Dog. After the Pentapods
were done with their DNA the Barghests that emerged
from the Barghest-mothers were the size of a small
pony, weighing in at around 250 kilogrammes with huge
claws and extremely powerful jaws, comfortably outsizing
the prehistoric Dire Wolf as the largest canid ever.
Jet black, with greasy hair and red eyes, the barghests
are difficult even for experienced dog handlers to manage and the best tactic
so far determined for their use seems to be to locate a wyrm
scent trail, using dogs or burrowvargs, then bring in
a caged barghest and release it directly onto the
trail. It is believed that barghests will also follow
a banshee wail and that they are capable of tracking Kafers
directly by scent if they are not wyrm-infested, but
neither of these points has been conclusively proven. The lifecycle of the barghest has not yet been accurately determined, but they
are assumed to have an average lifetime measured in years. Each barghest requires around 20 kilos of raw meat per day, fortunately for field logistics they are capable of
digesting both Terran and Beta Canumite
proteins. Pod 13 has
produced only two barghest-mothers, each weighing
around 500 kilos and the size of a large cow. They are too large to deploy away
from base camp and with a three month gestation time there would be little
point. Each barghest mother requires 30 kilos of
vegetable matter per day for basic nutrition and around a tonne
more for each barghest delivered. The barghest is generally considered the least successful of
the Pod 13 constructs.
Wyrms Wyrms are
perhaps the most disturbing Pod 13 construct of all, particularly as Pod 13 appear not to have told anyone, even Major Euart, that they were incorporating them into their plans until
after they had been deployed. A wyrm is a small hermaphroditic
parasite approximately 20 millimetres in length and 1mm in diameter, and
large numbers are passed in the faeces of all Pod 13 constructs. It can be assumed that any
water source that a Pod 13 construct has been close to
will contain significant numbers of wyrms.
Fortunately wyrms appear to be limited to six
generations of reproduction after which they become asexual. Combined with a
lifecycle of around two days, with reproduction occurring after the first day,
this means that any infestation will die out within a week of the last Pod 13
construct leaving the area. However, each wyrm gives
birth to ten young each time it breeds, meaning that
within a week one wyrm will potentially become one
million. Equally fortunately, wyrms are a
Kafer-specific parasite. In water they feed on microscopic plant-matter, but if
they detect a Kafer in the water, even as fleeting a contact as one stooping to
drink as it passes, they will rapidly attach themselves to it, preferring folds
in its skin, under the edge of the carapace and similar locations. A wyrm which attaches itself to a Kafer will immediately
enter its asexual phase, followed by the rapid onset of further metabolic
changes. Attached wyrms develop a chameleon-like
ability to mimic skin-colour and their digestive
system becomes optimized to subsisting on Kafer skin secretions and skin cells.
In addition their lifecycle appears to become indefinitely extended. Wyrms are not a serious parasite to a Kafer, although it is
extremely difficult to remove all of them. However they are an immediate danger
to any Kafer because the final part of the change is for the attached wyrm to start pumping out large quantities of a pheromone
detectable by both burrowvargs,
dogs and barghests. Dogs and barghests
typically appear able to track the scent trail of a wyrm-infested
Kafer up to two days after it has been laid, while burrowvargs
appear to be able to follow one up to a week old.
Major Morag Euart Morag Euart was born into a crofting
family on North Uist in the Western Isles of Scotland
and is a native Gaelic speaker. She excelled in the sciences at school, if not
always in other subjects, and was accepted to study at the prestigious Faculty
of Veterinary Medicine at the Morag Euart never expected to be a combat soldier, but the Major Euart is a fairly short, solidly built woman with the gingerish complexion often seen in Scots. She is rarely
seen without her huge Doctor Tom Jeffers Tom Jeffers
is a civilian New African scientist ostensibly drafted in to support 2 Section
from one of the disbanded New African Commandos. In reality Jeffers is Mark
Stein, an agent from the Fleet Scientific Intelligence Unit planted in the ECU
to monitor its activities and those of Pod 13. A competent geneticist, Jeffers
is logging all of the constructs produced by Pod 13 and monitoring them for any
suggestion that they might be usable against humans as well as Kafers. So far it appears that none of the constructs could
be turned against the people they have been produced for as is, but Jeffers is
quietly certain that they could be re-targeted within weeks and has reported as
much to Catherine Duchesne, the Director of Scientific Intelligence. He has
also reported that he is absolutely certain that Morag Euart
knows exactly who he is and what he is doing. Pod 13 Pentapods
have always been one of the most enigmatic alien species encountered. Pod 13 is
now one of the most closely integrated and studied Pentapod
groups ever, and is still almost a complete enigma. To the best that anyone can
judge, the two dozen or so ‘pods of the group appear completely happy with
their work, but no one, not even Morag Euart, is
certain whether the aim of their work is vengeance against the Kafers who massacred their enclave, or to study how the
humans of the ECU react to their work, or something else entirely. What is
certain is that a scientific group supposedly focused on agronomy-oriented
bio-engineering was able to re-task themselves to producing militarily useful
bio-constructs even after suffering over 90% casualties during the assault on
the enclave and without any appreciable delay to grieve or reorganise.
The level of basic competence with genetic modification that this suggests had
already been hypothesized, but is nonetheless startling. Equally the lack of
reaction to the losses is a reminder of just how alien Pentapod
psychology is. Pixie Dust Pixie Dust
is an obsolete surveillance technology that has been brought back into use by
the Kafer War. The basic technology relies on micro-machining basic sensors
onto a tiny chip, the ability of nano-technology to
turn out those chips by the millions, and the ability of the chips to network themselves into a dispersed sensor in which the whole is
much greater than the sum of the parts. Pixie Dust chips are invisible to the
naked eye, but are powered by ambient light, heat and vibration, and are capable
of listening on EM and sonic frequencies and of interlinking with each using
several different EM bands (including UV and IR as well as broadcast RF). A
single chip can report almost nothing, but en masse and with sufficient
computer support to integrate their results they can map a building and provide
real time audio and even visual coverage of what is happening within it. Pixie
Dust can be delivered by a myriad of means, everything from someone walking
through the building to dust inside parcels sent through the mail to mass
dispersal upwind of the target. For a while in the early 21st century
it was thought that Pixie Dust might render the concept of privacy functionally
obsolete, but its initial success was built on novelty rather than any real
difficulty in neutralizing it. With Pixie Dust an omnipresent threat, Pixie
Dust countermeasures also became omnipresent. The minute size of the chips made
them impossible to harden in any meaningful manner against EMP attack, even at
pulse densities too low to damage any other electronics. When a major lighting
firm began selling office lighting with inbuilt counter-Pixie Dust pulse
generators the era of the Pixie Dust threat was over and the technology largely
faded into history. The Kafer
threat has brought Pixie Dust back into use, Kafers
simply do not have the background in ELINT to identify the threat that Pixie
Dust poses and any 24th century computer can handle the integration
of a Pixie Dust network with ease. The only real difficulty in deploying the
system has been the near universal presence of human-manufactured lighting, with
the result that throughout Kafer-Occupied Space perplexed resistance cadres
have received instructions to ‘smash the lights’. Pixie Dust
does have limitations. Each chip’s communications link has a range of barely a metre and while this does make their signals nearly
undetectable and the chips can relay for each other it also creates severe
problems in relaying the signal out for analysis. Relays are readily available,
but installing them in the needed locations is often the most difficult part of
deploying a Pixie Dust network. Pixie Dust Dispenser (Sufficient for
200M3) Weight
0.002Kg Size: 2cm3 Cost: 250L Pixie Dust Relay (Range 100m) Weight:
0.005g Size: 1cm3 Cost: 25L Duration:
30 days Pixie Dust Network Integration
Program Cost 1000L
Copyright 2009, David Gillon
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