Nimbus

Noble Arms: The ASEAN War - Thread Three, the Darkest Hour

Energy flooded Callie, and energy was information, and information was something she could process. Encode. Channel. To one purpose.

Mirage Space had collapsed. People she cared about were now on that ship; one of them was barely conscious, their foe looming over her. They, within her sight and by her hand, would be safe: such was the pact, the Charter, that she had made with reality a decade ago. The Arm was the anchor and symbol of that pact – but the identity was hers, and that made Caroline Lidmann as capable a focus as it was. More.

Near every fibre of her being expressed that identity now, bent to imposing upon the world without the world within. Callie felt her whole self afire, her nerves screaming in exultation, horror and pain. Still, she drew forth the power and sent it on, shaped in her image, surging, knowing that she would not fail them.

(In a dark and buried recess of her mind able to consider anything beyond that which pertained to manifesting her fundamental desire through a semi-instinctual connection to the base code of the universe, cries resonated that this was unjust; that hundreds, thousands were currently dying by her hand; that saving only those she liked would not absolve her. In that moment, it did not resonate loudly enough.)

(Its echoes would remain. She was only human.)

On the sinking Guandong-class, where once was peril, a path was made. There was the deck of BRP Jose Rizal just behind Task Force Obsidian, a portal offering them their way back. It called to them, quiet, clear and undeniable, asylum promised with the assurance of truth. For he who had harmed them – beaten them bloody and worse, done so with that which made them themselves, torn away and subjugated – and would do so again? A clarion loud enough to deafen, pressed upon his soul:

YOU ARE NOT WELCOME BEYOND!

Noble Arms: The ASEAN War - Thread Three, the Darkest Hour

“Sir,” Callie intoned rapidly, even as she continued to gather power, “target is in Mirage Space and Obsidian have not re-emerged for evac! Requesting preparations for through-portal cover fire and to receive hostile antiquarian on deck if necessary!”

She shuddered at the possibility, giving a glance to the helicopter pilot and a quick gesture to find a new position in the thick of the clouds. A piece of her subconscious had been watching the flurry of violence throughout, working on dissecting their opponent’s abilities. If there was any chance that his power copying wasn’t based entirely on proximity to the Arms Master and he could, in fact, copy from her portals themselves – meaning he could, at least theoretically, reach her position… Well, better to keep it ambiguous, in any case.

Unsummoning as a counter? Major risk… Last resort.

May need it if he gets onto the Rizal…

Charter tugged at her vision. She needed to see something. Someone she’d missed in the chaos.

Nil. Swept away. Clawing desperately for air and buoyancy.

A woman, thrashing at the water, watched from safety on the lakeshore.

She cared now more than she ever did then.

Callie wrenched at her power, will exerted, redirecting its prior momentum and calling it, urging it to her command, fear and duty and hope united and compelling in a way that had only ever manifested once in her life. It gripped, it surged, it subsumed her.

STEADY. NO HESITATION. YOU ARE SO MUCH MORE OF YOURSELF NOW THAN YOU WERE.

“Relay message: incapacitated Obsidian member incoming! Prepare to repel any who follow!”

No room for doubt, not after everything, not when she was needed. She directed energy in a torrent, more than she ever had before, prior limits pushed back and back in the face of that need. Even as her will exerted itself, her mind worked: observing Nil’s surroundings and keeping the power from truly coalescing for as long as she could to preserve flexibility in the portal’s ultimate location; shaping the aperture to be as small as reasonably possible while accommodating Nil’s slight form; timing the manifestation, revising her estimate downwards faster than the passing seconds – 32.3, 29.6, 26.1…

Not fast enough. PLA boats. Nil hauled aboard, sodden, shivering, retching.

One of the soldiers reaching over with a syringe. Callie flinched, her eyes screwing near-shut…

NO HESITATION.

NO FEAR.

…and opening again, ablaze.

The torrent became a cascade. Was she or Charter the conduit, now? The power cared not, funnelling through one and both, building connection, bridging not merely physical space but there and here, danger and safety. It flowed strong and true, intense, burning in its clarity.

Time shrank to nothing. How could it remain, in the face of her will to protect?

When space folded open on the Chinese rescue boat, it did so with an intensity that drove back all about it – all except one. And so, with an irresistible gravity, Nil fell through the portal on the deck of the Rizal, tumbling and gently settling with providential surety, as if written upon the universe: in this moment, she would return unharmed.

NOW: THE REST.

@Gerlando

Noble Arms: The ASEAN War - Thread Three, the Darkest Hour

For just an instant, Callie screwed her eyes shut. “Solid copy, HQ; relaying.”

No sense in risking comms interception, plenty in the tank – same as before. Another small portal out, to Cristina and her radio. “Obsidian, warning: ship’s about to lose stability. Portal medevac is ordered and inbound; confirm collection point.” They just need to get close enough together. They’ll manage that, Callie affirmed to herself in a worried corner of her mind, even as she waited the precious moments for the response.

The rest of her went through the mental preparations to bring down two titans of war and, likely, kill thousands.

If it deepened the conflict, forced the Chinese to lean further into Arms Masters and the organisations that found or made them, in place of the ships and tanks and soldiers that those Arms Masters could so easily lay low… Perhaps many, many more.

No other option – direct order. Plus, the Navy’s here now; China need conventional forces to face them. Can’t rely on AMs alone. This won’t change that.

So she thought. Echoing and resonating across it: a prayer, its forms and tones half-buried and half-remembered, that those thoughts were true.

Letting the communication portal fall shut, Callie redirected her gaze and focus, the need to give her team as much chance as possible dictating the order of operations – namely, starting to sink the ship they weren’t on first. Charter picked out the details around CNS Liaoning: the aircraft, the technicians rushing about to prepare them for their duel against Lotus Squadron, officers standing behind toughened glass on the bridge… The waters stretching out beneath its visible hull.

And in those waters, ahead of the sections of hull that laid beneath them, formed a wide, net-like lattice of atom-width portal, bowed slightly upwards at either edge.

Two hundred kilometres away, Callie took a breath. Then, with the tiniest motion of her hand, she slammed it back into the ship’s bow.

Steel came apart, diced into neat parallelograms that fell away into the sea and let the sea, in turn, rush in. Where Callie met resistance, the result of the lattice finding some poor soul on the ship’s lowest decks before the explosion of oncoming water and rending shards knocked them out cold or worse, she adjusted fractionally downwards and carried on, dragging it along the length of the ship from front to back, ribbons of cleanly cut metal left in its wake…

That was the first second. In the next, with a horrifying satisfaction and finality, she adjusted her wrist’s angle and dragged it back the other way.

By that next second’s conclusion, the Liaoning’s hull no longer had a base.

Even under those circumstances, a ship the size of an aircraft carrier does not sink quickly. (Callie knew that – the agency’s techs back at home did computer simulations testing exactly this application of her powers.) The water simply has too much to subsume and push out of the way to swallow the hulk in an instant. Nonetheless, as she dismissed the lattice and turned her focus away, Callie was aware that it was only a matter of minutes before the multi-billion-dollar construct, seaworthy moments ago, was consumed by the ocean.

Her sense of dread did not ease as she formed another, then did exactly the same to the hull of the carrier on which her teammates stood.

“Good effect on enemy naval assets,” Callie intoned quietly, gathering her energy once again to summon the portal that would, would, return said teammates to safety. “Admiral… Requesting broadcast to hostile fleet so they can task vessels for search and rescue as soon as possible.”

They, after all, were but a fraction of the lives aboard.

@Digmata

Noble Arms: The ASEAN War - Thread Three, the Darkest Hour

Above the BRP Jose Rizal, hovering in a patrol helicopter enshrouded in clouds, Callie loosed the energy that had just allowed Cristina to fall a couple of hundred kilometres in a second and let the marrow-deep chill born of divesting herself of that much energy at once melt into her rising adrenaline.

She scanned the battlefield, Charter bypassing the vapour and distance to let her see the deck of the carrier clearly – Obsidian’s operatives exploding out from Mirage Space, Cao Bao’s façade falling away entirely as anticipated, the expected trap sprung… Her current vantage point gave her all of the visibility she needed, the free-falling and launching of the Mischief Reef mission, there used to seek angles into the tower windows of altogether too many ships, unnecessary for this strike.

Instead, she placed her focus clearly: a portal in the shape of a lattice of arches, each element wide as an atom and invisible to the eye, that with the movement of the carrier slashed at and severed the series of radio antennae attached to the end of its flight deck. Theoretically, that would make it profoundly difficult, if not impossible, for the flagship to communicate with the rest of the fleet… Unless Cao Bao was here to repair it.

…and, apparently, the mayhem that Nil had elected to unleash on her surrounds.

Smoke won’t last on a moving ship but Chinese positions are ineffectual for now, thanks to Mikey, she affirmed, a slight smile forming in the back of her mind. Comes down to the antiquarians, then – Cao Bao if he’s here plus the Wukong cosplayer. Seems unserious but that’s a pattern with Zodiac and doesn’t –

Awareness. Horrifying, visceral awareness.

Occam; likely him – could be misdirection – enemy almost certainly doesn’t know of this ability to try deception – alert them now!

Callie knew that their air support would be able to chain communications from the strike force to the Rizal and from there, with the ship’s powerful transmitters to pierce the cloud, up to the helicopter – that was how she was going to get the team’s evac orders. She knew that it might work in the other direction, too. But she didn’t know how much clarity the message would reach them with and right now they needed clarity.

Instead, she simply joined space a couple of hundred kilometres apart once more – a far smaller portal this time, opened in an instant – and spoke directly into Mikey’s handheld radio.

“Obsidian, imminent threat from your own Arms! Sergeant Janssens, you are unaffected – neutralise that antiquarian, now!”

@Chiro

Noble Arms: The ASEAN War - Thread Three, the Darkest Hour

Callie nodded. “Sir, requesting permission to disrupt the carriers’ take-off procedure as Lotus Squadron are on approach to their targets.”

Kind way of putting it.

“Cutting their regular patrols off from reinforcements without time to prepare will leave Lotus a free hand and, assessing what we know of Cao Bao and his abilities, should force him and any Arms Masters guarding him to respond and allow us to pounce.”

How many pilots will they send screaming into the flames before he intercedes directly, d’you think?

“Gives us the initiative and them less time and ability to set whatever trap they have in mind,” Callie concluded, adding a look towards Griff that spoke of understanding and surety regardless.

And with it, she caught Mikey’s gaze.

She doubts you.

Rightly.

Just a flicker of surprise and fear and self-loathing and weariness passed across Callie’s face, only a fraction of a second in all – before she smothered it. Summoned the determination necessary of the leader that circumstance had made of her. Charter hasn’t failed me. Won’t fail me now. Won’t fail them.

Just have to be worthy of it.

Noble Arms: The ASEAN War - Thread Three, the Darkest Hour

Mikey reached up, absentmindedly fiddling with her sunglasses. "Well," she finally said, "question one: do we have a plan to get aboard the Guangdong yet?" She pointed at the map, tracing the distance between the two fleets on the battle plan. "They're going to have, like, at least six ships of dudes there who want us to not do that, and I don't think asking nicely is going to work."

@ctrlsaltdel

“I could drop us onto their bridge from a couple hundred klicks away if we needed to,” Callie pronounced, trying to maintain her focus on the part of her mind that hadn’t heard Qingshe’s name in the same space as their foe’s and tightened her grip on Charter, “just the same as the Mischief Reef operation. In fact, if I could get any kind of visual on Cao Bao at distance, we could launch a decapitation strike – deliver Sergeant Janssens right to him, neutralise his Arm and eliminate him before he can react. Then we could either return the same way and rest before the battle proper, or try to push that advantage and see if we can cripple their assets while our own move in.” She glanced at Henri, grimacing. “Only issue I see besides the uncertainty of when the target appears is deploying anything like a meaningful force so you’re not totally isolated, sir. Activating Fighting in Shade means you shut down any portal close enough for the ambush to work, and I can’t maintain one wide enough to let several people through at once at those distances. Either we don’t deploy enough to neutralise the target or we give the target too much time to be sure of…”

Callie trailed off as her mind snagged on something – then snapped her fingers. “Cristina. How many people do you think you could take with you, either by blinking with them or in your pocket dimension? If you could transfer them through the portal, that’d solve the problem handily – enough members of TFO to maintain a perimeter, even just special forces if we’re being conservative…” She leant back, folding her arms. “And then… I’ve been working on something and I think I can entirely sabotage their carriers’ take-off architecture without compromising my other capabilities. I’d imagine our Lotus flyboys would take air superiority with even less difficulty than usual if we could completely cut off Chinese reinforcements in the skies.”

Not even too big a lie – just that the things being worked on were US politics and Chinese escalation, not her own abilities…

She turned to Yi, clasping her hands behind her back. “Admiral, sir, if these charts are accurate, I could theoretically have us there or disrupt enemy air power now, barring however much time preparations took. Practically, we’d need to wait for a moment that Cao Bao’s on their flagship’s bridge or top deck, if he’s there at all, but if he makes that appearance then we could strike at any time from now ‘til fleet-to-fleet contact, if you felt it tactically sound.”

@Digmata @Chiro

Noble Arms: The ASEAN War - Thread Three, the Darkest Hour

Comms linked already – makes things simpler.

“Understood,” answered Callie, even as she flicked through the channels on the radio module linked to her earpiece. She allowed herself a smile down at Mikey. “Chin up, soldier – wrapped up soon enough.”

Liar. You of everyone know how fast complications can reach out to throttle you.

Callie shoved that thought to the back of her mind, replacing it with thoughts of lines of sight and hard cover as she retreated towards the centre of the roof. Another part of it focused on the portal she was conjuring; another, instinctive, secured Charter and her rifle; and yet another finally found the right channel.

That she had the right channel for Manila’s branch of the Philippine National Police would hopefully be put down to her training and work with the Philippine Army and then Task Force Obsidian rather than anything more surreptitious.

“This is Private Lidmann to the police tasked here,” Callie said, resisting the slight chill and bluster of wind as the portal snapped open to a couple of hundred metres above the camp, simultaneously she unclipping her current magazine to fit a new one, entirely filled with red-tipped bullets. “I’m your eye in the sky; move in on the targets I mark. Primary weapons neutralised but they may still have sidearms.”

Thank the refugees for turning the undergrowth and soil to dust; little risk of grass fires… He just punched a truck. Callie blinked as she settled herself into position, gazing through Charter to assess the battlefield below. That route’s gone. Good.

Though. A quick adjustment to her spyglass to zero in on a man crouched behind the corner of a building, the wreck of his motorcycle behind him, clearly hoping to make a run for it around the beached technical. Callie tutted, then expanded her view again. They’re already moving to cut it off; makes this easier. “West, a dozen metres from the perimeter breach.”

She squeezed the trigger. Another gunshot joined those echoing across the camp – and then, a moment afterwards, distance made from her weapon at the speed of shot, a miniature comet lit and streaked down, glowing orange-red even in the light of the sun. It landed on target in a puff of dust and tiny, round specks heated and cooled to glass, three paces ahead of a suddenly scrambling dismounted gunman.

Callie shifted her position; zoomed; zoomed out. “South-West, fleeing into a shelter seven metres East from the main crossroads. BANG; another trail of fire. Shifted her position. Zoomed; zoomed out. “North, injured, crawling along the perimeter fence. BANG. Shifted her position. Zoomed… Zoomed out. “Centre, group of three, moving to reinforce technical. Suppressing.” A burst of three rounds, slamming into the ground inches ahead of them. She blinked the sweat out of her eyes.

The mighty A-rank Arms Master, cowering above the field…

This is where I’m most useful, forcing chaos into coordination.

…and where I won’t get anyone hurt.

Noble Arms: The ASEAN War - Thread Three, the Darkest Hour

News travelled fast, these days. If a gunshot could be heard around the world in the late 1700s, word of one could certainly travel a few kilometres in a matter of seconds now.

Particularly if that gunshot was in the vicinity of the Crown Prince of Japan in a foreign nation.

In her ear, Mikey heard a murmur.

“Friendly incoming – no blue-on-blue.”

And then a void the colour of the sky opened just behind her and a woman in fatigues fell through it into a crouch behind the lip of the roof, blonde ponytail whipping behind her and long rifle, with antique spyglass mounted, clutched in her hands. “Specialist,” Callie intoned with a nod as the portal closed behind her. Then she turned to the battlefield, focus in her darting eyes.

She let go of the rifle with one hand, placing it down with practised speed – and the other hand still on the spyglass. The now free hand she raised, as if to cast a spell, and then began sweeping individual fingers back and forth as if she actually were.

The motorcycles bisected. There was no other word for it – no great bangs, little fire, only great chunks of metal and rubber that split away from the vehicles as if sundered by swords of impossible sharpness, sending clouds of dust spewing forth and flinging screaming riders from their vehicles at terrible speeds. To a watchful eye, their guns, too, came apart, scattering harmlessly across the ground.

Within about three seconds, none in sight were left intact.

Callie let out a heaving breath, then turned back to Mikey. “Any orders in effect? If we need evac –” she added, she threw a gaze behind her, whence she came.

@ctrlsaltdel

Noble Arms: The ASEAN War - Thread Three, the Darkest Hour

Callie had seen a lot in the hours before her return to Task Force Obsidian in Phnom Penh. Heard a lot. Faced down a lot.

She’d always trusted her gut, especially when it came to Charter – well, she had since she first summoned Charter, anyway. She’d had to rely on it a lot as she portalled across the city. And relying on it quite so much seemed to have… Enhanced something of it.

And so, when Callie suddenly became viscerally aware that she, and she alone, was about to be splashed with a liquid that she would very much prefer not to be splashed with, she did not question it. Instead, she suppressed her urge to stiffen or to make any movements out of the ordinary at all. And then waited.

Waited.

Before pushing back and out of her chair, leaping up and falling into a ready stance just soon enough to avoid…

The still-fizzing pop that Nil had just thrown onto her food.

Callie sagged. “God, Nil, please don’t scare a girl like that. I’m tired as is.” She plastered the half-smile onto her face again, then reached over to ruffle her hair. “Old gang’s all here, though. That’s nice. You getting on okay?”

@Chiro @Gerlando

Noble Arms: The ASEAN War - Thread Three, the Darkest Hour

Henri

La Trinidad de Manila Academy

Henri was mostly focused on eating, though occasionally he looked around him. It was then that another fellow appeared at the table. A soldier himself.

"You and me both, pal." Henri replied and shook Oskar's hand,"I'm not much of a conversationalist myself, either. Henri, Henri Janssens."

While they were both military men, this didn't feel like the time of going for ranks. Besides, Arms-Masters here were relatively casual outside of battle.

"So, what do you think of the Philippines?" Henri asked, hoping to ease the mood. "Personally, the sights are beautiful, but this heat really gets to me."

@Chiro

“It’s the humidity.” A figure in army fatigues practically fell into the seat beside Oskar, pallid face and messy blonde hair quickly following and a bowl of arroz caldo thunking onto the table in front of her. “Wish I’d spent more time in the South-East as a kid, I’d have been used to it already, but as is… Didn’t take too long to acclimatise.”

She spared a glance towards Henri, wan smile crossing her face below her half-lidded eyes. “Not going by rank, then, Sergeant? And give the guy a break, he’s barely arrived.” She plunged her spoon into the dish, then turned towards the newcomer, extending a hand to shake. “Caroline, Lidmann, but please just call me ‘Callie’. ‘Caroline’’s what the brass and my mum should call me, and, ideally, not another soul.”

“Speaking of…” Callie lifted the spoon, now heaped with rice broth and chicken, and pointed it at Henri vaguely accusatorially before withdrawing it to beside her mouth. “We’ve barely talked since Lingayen. What brings a Belgian with a Greek NA from an EU spec ops unit to the other side of the world?” she asked – followed by practically inhaling the mouthful and shivering with pleasure, then going for another. “Mmmph… God, that’s good. Anyway – spill.”