RidOv Chpt-43

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==Ridiculously Overboard!! (A Captain Roberts Tale!!)Chapter 43 - Fighting the Robes==
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===Demanding Answers===
Newgrange Class YardShip, SLS Erinyes - Tresspass Star System, Outworlds Wastes, Periphery
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o/~ "Yo...ho..yo...ho...
...it's a pi-rate's life for Me!!" o/~ she called out in a sing-song. o/~ "Here I come...raise the black flag!"o/~ she skipped under the ship's gravity thrust, armored boots slamming deck plates.
Old men in white uniforms groaned, struggling as the acceleration started to taper off. She squatted, and grabbed one, lifting him to eye-level with her faceplate open, "Hi...you're not him."
The oldster quailed at what he saw.
"Awww...it's your friends' work! Aren't I pretty now?" she asked. "What you idolized, where is he? Were is the angel? I'm here to get his answers."
The man's heart stopped.
"AWww, you're not him. You don't have my answers." she tossed the corpse at a younger man in field gear that was getting to his feet. 
To his credit, the man managed to get his carbine untangled enough to try and aim.
Amanda/Desmond pumped a two-pulse burst into his face, ending another life.
[ "I have your answers." ] the voice was metallic, male, and coming from ahead.
"Goody." her boots magnetized to let her walk among the mess.
Clack, Clack, Clack. the flickering lighting revealed him, hulking, massive, armored.
"How did you do it? how did you sabotage my ship?" he demanded.
"I, am the Great Pirate Roberts." she said, "How do you think I did it....I'm the greatest you'll ever see! But you know that, you said you have my answers!!"
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===Sanity is a Trick Word===
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Cyber-psychosis. It was as evident to him as if she had a display sign hovering over her. "Implantation Failure!" he barked, "You're broken!! Mal-FUNCTIONING!!"
"I like to think of it as keeping more options open." she tossed the nearly-depleted M&G 920 aside, and drew her cutlass one-handed, and the enormous Sternsacht with the other. "Sanity's only a one-trick stunt, all it gives, is rational thought. Madness?? that opens all the doors."
The hatches in the compartment slammed shut, "Or closes them. You claim to have answers, so riddle me this, Angel...WHY??"
Her remaining frail-eye was an expression of madness that somehow matched the hollow where her synthetic eyeball would go, the leakage of blood was smearing the side of her face from an unhealed wound where some of the implantation had been done, but hadn't been properly sealed.
"Because we need more of you...more of us. To elevate mankind." he said, "to overcome the cursed Clanners."
"Twelve of us." she said, "Your friends took us from homes, and parents and lives, eleven died. WHY?"
"You weren't supposed to remember."
"I remember all of it!!!" she screamed at him, "Everything they did to us, everything!! All of it!!!" The vibroblade activated.
He fired the man-portable anti-armor TASER unit, and she...sidestepped it, the darts striking the bulkhead where he was sure she'd been.
Somehow. it didn't make sense!!
He barely got his own vibro-claws up to block her swing.
The fight, was on.
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===When Cyborgs quake in Fear===
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Fanaticism dating back decades...
...plus the finest enhancements the Master and the Manei Domini could install, versus the unleashed rage and insanity of a violated child-combined with the nastiest modifications the Cameron Dynasty could install in a killer covert-operative and the combined residues of those operatives that had borne the previous generation of the Desmond type implant.
it shouldn't even be a contest. Ananiel's technology was superior, stronger, better armored, and complete, with no known flaws and no failures in implantation.
Amanda Roberts was a damaged meat-suit with damaged tech, able to drive past rational limitations due to the simple expedient of not knowing, or remembering what those limits might be, and being unable to care what those limits are.
She was a broken thing, but in that brokenness she was better integrated. The skillwires didn't need to be activated, they were already going. The adrenal boosts didn't need conscious choice, they simple were. The processor enhancement didn't need to apply to her conscious memory-it had, over the last four years in 'the wild' integrated and copied through the plasticity of youth and developing brain-matter, become her reflexes.
The human brain stops growing around 25 Terran years, when the skull's plates finally finish fusing together. This is why child-soldiers tend to be more messed up after their war, than adults-they have a harder time reintegrating back to civilian status, to peacetime. the Trauma becomes 'normal'.
The Manei Domini officer she is facing, has the brain of an old man, who was an adult and a young man, but still an adult when he was converted.
Despite the physical differences, then, the fight was horrifyingly even...and he was beginning to feel a visceral sensation he had not felt since the Battle of Tukayyid.
He was feeling visceral fear. The sensation that he was not the one in control of the fight, not the one certain of victory, not ordained to save humanity from itself.
This insane child was the result, and she was here to bring the sins of the Manei Domini to them in the flesh-and-steel.
In a mix of terror and desperation, He threw a punch with all his enhancement...
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he lashed out and she felt the breastplate of her suit shatter, and a pressure in her chest, mixed with lancing pains that sent her spinning into the bulkhead, he remained anchored, and lashed at air with his other fist, as she struggled to reorient, pulling her cutlass from a bulkhead.
She coughed blood, but it hurt less than the surgeries.
<<"He's still using his cybernetic eyes to track you, I can't spoof them for much longer">>
"Keel-Haul..." she coughed, "Make him walk the plank..." She kicked with both feet, and used the velocity and her unbalanced spin, the swipe brought the edge of the cutlass against where a human's windpipe would be.
He gurgled, suddenly clawing as she drew her knees up against his massive back, roughly shoving the vibroblade through his reinforcements of myomer, endosteel, and artificial bone. Sparks flew.
His flailing actually made it cut deeper and she grabbed the top of his head, wrestling the powered blade through a neck that could take shots from a 12.7mm machine-gun.
The head came free in a spray of pink mist, coating the chamber in not-quite-enough-blood for a body that size.
the machine was all that was left, lashing out independent of the severed head in her hand.
She drove her blade down, into the opened torso.
Stirring like a butter-churn, until he stopped moving.
"I...want...my...answers, Erin." she hacked up more blood with each word.
//"You will have them....could you perhaps do me a favor, and convince your Snow Raven allies not to kill me, Please?"\\
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===Scene of Horror and Victory===
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Samuel found her struggling up a passageway...
...to CIC. It wasn't that hard to find Captain Roberts, he just had to follow the trail of bodies to a section filled with an armored computer core installation and the headless corpse of a cyborg the size of a Clan Battle Armor with Elemental inside...only what was inside, was chopped plastic and what was left of a brain hidden in the chest of a cyborg.
from there, it wasn't hard to catch up.
"Captain!!"
"I feel terrible." she mourned. Her Nighthawk Power Armor was wrecked, there were pieces of it broken and missing and she had a cyborg's head in her left hand. "I need to get to CIC..."
He helped her using his maneuvering pack to reach the access shaft.
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