SCMR Chpt 35

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==Chapter 35 - Self Configuring Modular Robot==
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Every technical advance...
...becomes inevitable if it's been done before. Rifled cannons existed when 'gonnes' were literally built like barrels, from straps of wrought-iron bound in hoops. Indeed, that's where the word 'Barrel' comes from-they used to all be built like...well, barrels. Breechloaders can trace back nearly as far, examples of match-fired breechloading weapons long predates reliable black-powder and the Corning process.
Comstar suppressed technology for nearly three hundred years, and the Terran Hegemony's 'mother doctrine' slowed development outside the Hegemony to maintain technical superiority by way of crippling the neighbors before that.
This sort of suppression is a bit like burying a murder victim in a shallow hole in a region prone to sand-storms-eventually it surfaces anyway.
If a thing has been known, or can be known, it will, eventually, be found out. usually in a way that the forces that initially suppressed the knowledge find uncomfortable.
Hilariously, such things are very much a thing stumbled upon, as opposed to concentratedly pursued. Among the Clans, Scientific pursuits have been reduced to re-engineering and refining immediately-useful weapons, or tweaking the human genome following an almost Lamarckian fallacy that genes can replace skill and experience. This has mostly turned out varying levels of sociopathy coupled with the best combat training in human space.
Jaime Wolf reflected on this, as he studied the damage to the world that used to be New Earth, safely, from the deck of the former-and-soon-to-be SLS Nelson.
The power struggle inside the Dragoons ended when Natasha Kerensky demonstrated that the scientists were PARTLY right-but with the difference being skill and experience, and perhaps a certain loss of the sociopathy in favor of being focused on the deeper mission of the Warden cause in the face of a silicon plague.
Natasha's plan was flat better than his had been-better in that it fit the immediate circumstances better than his, and he...
Chose to submit to the Trueborn he'd worked with for DECADES as a mercenary, because grand designs in the face of a silicon apocalypse kind of looked vain and foolish instead of cunning and brave.
The 'spore hunter' machines made the hull rumble. What they were doing on the surface was almost visible. 
Machines, warring on Machines, in the graveyard of a human planet.
"How are Elizabeth's Snakes doing?" he asked after an hour of not speaking.
"Five percent of the former capital cleared." Cheryl Lerner was the 'intern' loaned to the reconstituted SLDF from NAIS. She was here to do a single job; tracking the progress of the Lyran-built machines sent to fight the self-replicating disaster down below.
"Only five percent??" He asked.
"Well, we only dropped two pods... she said apologetically, "..and it was less than a day ago. That infestation was building for months before they even knew there was a threat."
He sighed, his shoulders itched. "Right..."
The other pod had been needed to clear a beginning infestation on the Nelson.
"What about our problem??" he asked
"They're still detecting attempts," she said, "but the hull's interior is clear and the Terry-Crabs are working the outer hull."
Lizzie snakes, Terry Crabs, each of the machines were named for their primary designer. "When are we going to be ready to drop the more...aggressive...models?" he asked.
Cheryl broke out a set of cards, and checked them over, "When the city hits ten percent, we can drop the Pennys and the Sierras, sir-the LZ will be clear enough for those by then, and they'll have raw mats to work from."
The Arthurs weren't units you 'drop', they're a planned evolution step, and the Yvonne design was going to be...interesting. a machine designed to fill broken gaps in the ecosystem and as a terraforming solar powered oxygen/water generator that decays into a soil substitute, to restore a broken or annihilated ecology-not a proper weapon, really, just something to deal with the aftermath of the Inner Sphere's terrible wars.
"I'll be in the simulators if the situation changes, Cheryl." He finally said.
"Yes sir."
Jaime Wolf made his way off the command deck. Those kids don't know they've rewritten the book on warfare. Not yet anyway... he grimaced, "No, they didn't, whoever built the plague did...they just took up the gauntlet."
Natasha doesn't really recognize it, but the Clans might not be ready for Davion's 'kids'. , he thought.
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