Just for the Taste of it

“When you were fighting the Invid, you used whatever tools you had at hand. And if you didn't have much, you learned to get creative.”

“I was one of the handful of survivors of the 101st CDU. We'd been based in Panama City before the invasion, helping what little was left of the UEG keep control of the canal. Myself and a couple of others had survived the invasion and made our way south, eventually hooking up with a group of irregulars in the old Venezuela Quadrant. We all wanted to fight the Invid, but we had a chronic lack of equipment with which to do so.”

“I had the team's only Mecha, being the CDAC that I'd been piloting since before the Invasion. It wasn't much, but it was still better than most people had, and I wasn't about to give it up. Fortunately, I had Dave Rodriquez, one of my army buddies who had escaped with me had a support truck. That meant I could at least transform it in the field, even if I still was dependent on the truck to do it. The rest of the group had a pair of trucks and some small arms, but nothing that was going to do a thing against a swarm of angry Invid scouts.”

“But boy did we come up with some wild ideas.”

“One of our best scams was the stunt we pulled in Rio Lindo. It was a real dump of a town; most of it was run down and poor, but there was this huge mansion up on the hill, overlooking the whole place. That was the home of the local boss, Donny Latham, a pompous, self-important fatass who had been one of [Aaron] Rawlings' goons back in the day. Guy was surrounded by his personal police force who spent their time oppressing the people and turning over anyone that Donny disliked to the Invid. You say a single thing against him and you'd end up on a slave farm.”

“But Donny had one weakness besides his ego. Guy liked soda, and I mean, really liked it. He'd somehow set up a deal with a place that had a functioning soda bottling plant for a regular supply. We did some digging and found out that the place had deals with a couple of other communities, like Norris Town, to keep them supplied. No, I have no idea where they were getting their ingredients from, but I'm not going to ask questions, because I had an idea.”

“We found out that the bottling plant had a fleet of mismatched vehicles that the used to supply the towns they had deals with. There was no real standardisation, as it was a ‘whatever we can find that works and carries soda' kind of a deal. Now one of the good things about the CSV [CDAC Support Vehicle] was that from the outside it looked like a mundane, everyday truck. So we spent some time mocking up logos for it so that it actually looked like a soda delivery van, as long as you didn't open up the back. Yeah, it didn't look like the truck that normally did the Rio Lindo run, but we figured that nobody would question it either. After all, nobody got between Donny and his soda.”

“We waylaid the regular delivery truck while it was outside of the town, with Donny taking its place. His CSV rocks on up to the front gate of Donny's mansion, and then the guards ask to check in the back. Only then I make my move, with my CDAC transforming and popping out of the truck instead, opening fire on the mansion and the goons around me. They panic, but they quickly recover themselves enough to rally and try and stop me. Thing is, they've only mostly got small arms, so while they're scuffing the hell out of the paint, they're not doing much to me. Dave has of course driven off, but everyone was more worried about the huge-ass robot stomping around.”

“The police send every man they can up to the mansion to try and stop me. Now I'm not trying to kill them, but I'm also not going to risk one of them taking me out either. So I'm jetting all over the place, making a nuisance of myself and using the mansion as a shield. I swear, they probably put more shots into it then I did. I can only assume that Donny was crapping himself in fear all the while. I did blow up the two police cars that were sent up there, but that was more about preventing pursuit than anything else.”

“And then while all this is happening, the rest of the team drive their trucks up to the police armoury and empty it out. The cops aren't there to stop them, as they're all trying to deal with the giant robot attack. Once they're done they signal me, and I get the hell out of there, vanishing into the treeline. I rendezvous with Dave, get back into the van and we drive off. Then we meet up with the rest of the team who now have a huge pile of guns. And even if we weren't going to use all of them, we'd made sure the bad guys definitely weren't going to.”

“We drove like the wind as we knew that sooner or later the Invid were going to be on to us. But by keeping to the trees and off the roads, we were able to avoid any further engagements. We eventually stopped at an abandoned farm after dark, figuring that we'd gotten away clean. And, after taking stock of all we'd taken, we celebrated with some soda.”

“It's like I said, you rarely got much of a choice over what you had to use, but you also learned to be smart with it.”

- Raoul Ortega, 101st CDU, Army of the Southern Cross