ShadowArxxy - OMFG - Part 2
Omake: OMFG, Part II
“I can’t believe they brought us all the way out here to dig latrines.” whined Alex disgustedly.
Callie rolled her eyes. “Weren’t you just saying yesterday that anything would be better than continuing to sit around on that DropShip?”
“Okay, but….dammit, they didn’t even give us time to unpack!” Alex flailed his spade theatrically. “And I reiterate, what are we even here for?”
“Holy shit.”
“Oh ha ha, very clever.”
“No. I mean holy fucking shit.” Callie grabbed Alex’s shoulder and levered him around.
“Hey, ow, what’s with the. . . holy fucking shit!”
Having been scattered around the perimeter of the encampment to “dig latrines”, the students turned in twos and threes and fell into awed silence, staring poleaxed at the herd of massive sauropods wandering placidly through the area.
------
“Now that you’ve seen the local fauna, you understand the importance of following safety procedures.” declared Scary Agent Lady, whose suit was somehow perfectly immaculate despite the semi-tropical conditions. “First and foremost, no one is to be alone or unaccounted for at any time.
We are currently expanding the encampment with an outer ring of observation towers, which you will be assigned to in groups of nine, three rotating watches of three. You are to maintain line of sight with each other at all times and to immediately report any unusual behaviors to base.
You are to be suited and carry an issued sidearm any time you are outside the main palisade, which also means that you are required to pass personal armor and small-arms qualifications before you are permitted in the field.”
The students collectively gulped -- they couldn’t imagine her being anything but unyieldingly stringent, and somehow that instantly took all the fun out of carrying a gun.
To my satisfaction.
-----
“Pan-pan, pan-pan, pan-pan. This is Tower Five. Alex stepped outside to, ah, relieve himself five minutes ago and he has not come back, nor is he responding to radio calls.”
“Base to Tower Five, we have his suit beacon. Rapid reaction force is moving out. Remain calm and stand by.”
Whereas the students and other civilian scientists were fitted with the power armor equivalent of WorkMechs, the site’s protection consisted of actual Griffon Army ‘Mechs augmented by private security guards in light battle armor. The rapid-reaction squad arrived in less than five minutes, their jump-jet equipped armor providing a very literal take on “bounding overwatch”.
They found the unfortunate Alex flat on his back in the mud with an adorably aggrieved-looking four-foot raptor standing on his back. The little predator hopped off and chirped inquisitively at the incoming battle armor troopers, apparently willing to surrender not-a-meal-anyway without a fight.
Needless to say, Callie never let Alex hear the end of that.
After that initial encounter, raptors were often spotted around the outer perimeter towers and stalking -- but never actually attacking -- the transport groups rotating to and from the main encampment, which was quite fascinating because they hadn’t ever been seen in the area at all.
----
“Mayday, mayday, mayday! There’s a T-REX APPROACHING THE TOWER!”
“Base to Tower Three. Calm down. We have your camera feeds and the T-Rex does not appear to be hostile.”
“It’s a motherfucking T-Rex and these motherfucking towers are at eat-me height! GET US OUT OF HERE!!!!!!!!”
Somehow, inch-thick endo-steel armored shutters over the tower’s panoramic windows did not feel so comforting with one of the most iconic superpredators in human history making an appearance right at window level.
Still, the massive dinosaur wasn’t roaring or charging the tower; it simply ambled out of the surrounding forest with the relaxed ease of something that knew full well it could eat anything that bothered it, regarded the tower with evident curiosity, sniffed intently, and then decided that the external balcony/catwalk around the perimeter of the tower was an ideal backscratcher.
The camp’s automated aerial surveillance drones were generally able to track the tyrannosaur once they they had been programmed with appropriate recognition profiles. It was soon determined that the encampment happened to lie in a border zone between the territorial ranges of a single large male tyrannosaur and a younger mated pair. All three displayed the same “scratch-themselves-on-the-towers” behavior whenever they happened to wander through.
No one would admit who first started calling the observation towers “scratching posts”, but it quickly caught on with everyone. Even Scary Agent Lady used it in her reports.
-----
The surprisingly non-aggressive behavior of the raptors and rexes stood in dramatic contrast with the next major dinosaur the teams encountered, which was essentially an allosaurus. The appearance of a Jurassic-era theropod on the same world as Cretaceous-era ones cemented the paleontologists’ belief that these were clearly dinosaur analogs and not actual dinosaurs; nonetheless, the name persisted.
Analog or not, the allosauruses were roughly three-quarters the size of a T-Rex, roamed nomadically in irregular packs of up to a dozen, and were observed to attack everything that wasn’t either a T-Rex or one of the biggest sauropods. . . which they would still attack if they had sufficient numbers massed. They even went after the Battlemech patrols, completely undeterred by the standard measure of lasers set to barely-less-than-lethal. The 'Mechs were forced to actually engage them with flamers and battlefists, and even then the allosauruses only retreated when their numbers were severely depleted.
While the presence of these aggressive predators was incredibly inconvenient in terms of requiring all movement outside the perimeter to be closely escorted by ‘Mechs, it did provide a major data point in the ongoing observations of the ‘regular’ dinosaurs of the region. It had previously been observed that the raptor pack territories throughout the region roughly corresponded to T-Rex territories, which was highly unusual since smaller predators should normally run in much smaller territories. When the allosaurus threat surfaced, it became evident that the raptor territories matched the T-Rex territories because the packs were actively following the T-Rexes, with closer observation revealing not only co-hunting tactics but also outright mutual defense.
-----
As weeks turned into months, the students’ responsibilities expanded from manning the scratching posts to ‘low risk’ field studies. Counting raptor eggs qualified as low risk because the raptors were willing to let suited humans come relatively close to their nests as long as they stopped at warning chirps, and couldn’t easily breach a suit even if they did attack.
But as it turned out, there was a reason the raptors zealously guarded their nests. . .
“Mayday, mayday, mayday! This is Count One-Six, a giant snake just grabbed me!” Callie was trying very hard not to panic. She had managed to get her pistol out of its holster before the snake got a coil around her midsection, but she could barely hang on to the weapon with her prosthetic hand as it dragged her through the dense underbrush. Despite being big enough to neatly snatch her battlesuit, it had moved so fast that she hadn’t seen much more than a glimpse of terrifyingly thick loops of snake body tripping and yanking.
Her reflexive snap shot went uselessly high as four raptors blurred at -- past! -- her with warbling shrieks.
------
“Miss Morgan, what part of no contact with the dinosaurs under any circumstances was too difficult to understand?” demanded Secret Agent Lady icily.
“The part where I didn’t contact them, they contacted me.” Callie was very tempted to add that a titanoboa was not a dinosaur anyway, except Secret Agent Lady already sounded like she wanted to invent a prison just to throw her in. She probably didn’t look like anything, though. They’d never seen Secret Agent Lady have the slightest hint of an expression under her dark glasses.
“That is not what I am referring to. You used your antivenin auto-injector on one of the raptors after the snake attack, in direct contravention of policy.” Somehow, ‘direct contravention of policy’ was pronounced as clearly synonymous with ‘high treason’.
For all that Secret Agent Lady was terrifying-in-calmness, the sheer unfairness of the accusation filled Callie with indignant fervor. “If the raptors hadn’t intervened, that snake would have eaten me! My suit diagnostics says I’ve got multiple cracked ribs right through my midsection armor, and that’s with the raptors forcing the snake to stop clamping down so it could fight! They went after the snake for me, helping the one that got bit bad just made it even!”
“Be that as it may, Miss Morgan, you do notice that you’re still outside the camp without medical care because there are eight raptors in close proximity to you, they are too close for us to operate the entry locks, they won’t let anyone else get near you without an aggression response, and they show no signs of leaving.”
“Uh, ooops?”
“I can’t believe they brought us all the way out here to dig latrines.” whined Alex disgustedly.
Callie rolled her eyes. “Weren’t you just saying yesterday that anything would be better than continuing to sit around on that DropShip?”
“Okay, but….dammit, they didn’t even give us time to unpack!” Alex flailed his spade theatrically. “And I reiterate, what are we even here for?”
“Holy shit.”
“Oh ha ha, very clever.”
“No. I mean holy fucking shit.” Callie grabbed Alex’s shoulder and levered him around.
“Hey, ow, what’s with the. . . holy fucking shit!”
Having been scattered around the perimeter of the encampment to “dig latrines”, the students turned in twos and threes and fell into awed silence, staring poleaxed at the herd of massive sauropods wandering placidly through the area.
------
“Now that you’ve seen the local fauna, you understand the importance of following safety procedures.” declared Scary Agent Lady, whose suit was somehow perfectly immaculate despite the semi-tropical conditions. “First and foremost, no one is to be alone or unaccounted for at any time.
We are currently expanding the encampment with an outer ring of observation towers, which you will be assigned to in groups of nine, three rotating watches of three. You are to maintain line of sight with each other at all times and to immediately report any unusual behaviors to base.
You are to be suited and carry an issued sidearm any time you are outside the main palisade, which also means that you are required to pass personal armor and small-arms qualifications before you are permitted in the field.”
The students collectively gulped -- they couldn’t imagine her being anything but unyieldingly stringent, and somehow that instantly took all the fun out of carrying a gun.
To my satisfaction.
-----
“Pan-pan, pan-pan, pan-pan. This is Tower Five. Alex stepped outside to, ah, relieve himself five minutes ago and he has not come back, nor is he responding to radio calls.”
“Base to Tower Five, we have his suit beacon. Rapid reaction force is moving out. Remain calm and stand by.”
Whereas the students and other civilian scientists were fitted with the power armor equivalent of WorkMechs, the site’s protection consisted of actual Griffon Army ‘Mechs augmented by private security guards in light battle armor. The rapid-reaction squad arrived in less than five minutes, their jump-jet equipped armor providing a very literal take on “bounding overwatch”.
They found the unfortunate Alex flat on his back in the mud with an adorably aggrieved-looking four-foot raptor standing on his back. The little predator hopped off and chirped inquisitively at the incoming battle armor troopers, apparently willing to surrender not-a-meal-anyway without a fight.
Needless to say, Callie never let Alex hear the end of that.
After that initial encounter, raptors were often spotted around the outer perimeter towers and stalking -- but never actually attacking -- the transport groups rotating to and from the main encampment, which was quite fascinating because they hadn’t ever been seen in the area at all.
----
“Mayday, mayday, mayday! There’s a T-REX APPROACHING THE TOWER!”
“Base to Tower Three. Calm down. We have your camera feeds and the T-Rex does not appear to be hostile.”
“It’s a motherfucking T-Rex and these motherfucking towers are at eat-me height! GET US OUT OF HERE!!!!!!!!”
Somehow, inch-thick endo-steel armored shutters over the tower’s panoramic windows did not feel so comforting with one of the most iconic superpredators in human history making an appearance right at window level.
Still, the massive dinosaur wasn’t roaring or charging the tower; it simply ambled out of the surrounding forest with the relaxed ease of something that knew full well it could eat anything that bothered it, regarded the tower with evident curiosity, sniffed intently, and then decided that the external balcony/catwalk around the perimeter of the tower was an ideal backscratcher.
The camp’s automated aerial surveillance drones were generally able to track the tyrannosaur once they they had been programmed with appropriate recognition profiles. It was soon determined that the encampment happened to lie in a border zone between the territorial ranges of a single large male tyrannosaur and a younger mated pair. All three displayed the same “scratch-themselves-on-the-towers” behavior whenever they happened to wander through.
No one would admit who first started calling the observation towers “scratching posts”, but it quickly caught on with everyone. Even Scary Agent Lady used it in her reports.
-----
The surprisingly non-aggressive behavior of the raptors and rexes stood in dramatic contrast with the next major dinosaur the teams encountered, which was essentially an allosaurus. The appearance of a Jurassic-era theropod on the same world as Cretaceous-era ones cemented the paleontologists’ belief that these were clearly dinosaur analogs and not actual dinosaurs; nonetheless, the name persisted.
Analog or not, the allosauruses were roughly three-quarters the size of a T-Rex, roamed nomadically in irregular packs of up to a dozen, and were observed to attack everything that wasn’t either a T-Rex or one of the biggest sauropods. . . which they would still attack if they had sufficient numbers massed. They even went after the Battlemech patrols, completely undeterred by the standard measure of lasers set to barely-less-than-lethal. The 'Mechs were forced to actually engage them with flamers and battlefists, and even then the allosauruses only retreated when their numbers were severely depleted.
While the presence of these aggressive predators was incredibly inconvenient in terms of requiring all movement outside the perimeter to be closely escorted by ‘Mechs, it did provide a major data point in the ongoing observations of the ‘regular’ dinosaurs of the region. It had previously been observed that the raptor pack territories throughout the region roughly corresponded to T-Rex territories, which was highly unusual since smaller predators should normally run in much smaller territories. When the allosaurus threat surfaced, it became evident that the raptor territories matched the T-Rex territories because the packs were actively following the T-Rexes, with closer observation revealing not only co-hunting tactics but also outright mutual defense.
-----
As weeks turned into months, the students’ responsibilities expanded from manning the scratching posts to ‘low risk’ field studies. Counting raptor eggs qualified as low risk because the raptors were willing to let suited humans come relatively close to their nests as long as they stopped at warning chirps, and couldn’t easily breach a suit even if they did attack.
But as it turned out, there was a reason the raptors zealously guarded their nests. . .
“Mayday, mayday, mayday! This is Count One-Six, a giant snake just grabbed me!” Callie was trying very hard not to panic. She had managed to get her pistol out of its holster before the snake got a coil around her midsection, but she could barely hang on to the weapon with her prosthetic hand as it dragged her through the dense underbrush. Despite being big enough to neatly snatch her battlesuit, it had moved so fast that she hadn’t seen much more than a glimpse of terrifyingly thick loops of snake body tripping and yanking.
Her reflexive snap shot went uselessly high as four raptors blurred at -- past! -- her with warbling shrieks.
------
“Miss Morgan, what part of no contact with the dinosaurs under any circumstances was too difficult to understand?” demanded Secret Agent Lady icily.
“The part where I didn’t contact them, they contacted me.” Callie was very tempted to add that a titanoboa was not a dinosaur anyway, except Secret Agent Lady already sounded like she wanted to invent a prison just to throw her in. She probably didn’t look like anything, though. They’d never seen Secret Agent Lady have the slightest hint of an expression under her dark glasses.
“That is not what I am referring to. You used your antivenin auto-injector on one of the raptors after the snake attack, in direct contravention of policy.” Somehow, ‘direct contravention of policy’ was pronounced as clearly synonymous with ‘high treason’.
For all that Secret Agent Lady was terrifying-in-calmness, the sheer unfairness of the accusation filled Callie with indignant fervor. “If the raptors hadn’t intervened, that snake would have eaten me! My suit diagnostics says I’ve got multiple cracked ribs right through my midsection armor, and that’s with the raptors forcing the snake to stop clamping down so it could fight! They went after the snake for me, helping the one that got bit bad just made it even!”
“Be that as it may, Miss Morgan, you do notice that you’re still outside the camp without medical care because there are eight raptors in close proximity to you, they are too close for us to operate the entry locks, they won’t let anyone else get near you without an aggression response, and they show no signs of leaving.”
“Uh, ooops?”