Cloneborne 076 – Field Trip Report (Patreon)

It took three days for the intelligence analysts to submit a report on the visit to the ‘College of Flames’ to Trout beyond an initial timeline of events. The latter had already been concerning reading, given that it started by confirming that the Kaedekin possessed their own form of FTL technology, one that hadn’t set off the quantum thermograph on the ship when it had been activated. Which meant they had no way of knowing when it was used…

When the report itself arrived, it was another monster of a thing, and glancing at the table of contents, Trout could see why.

‘Confirmation of Kaedekin FTL Technology’‘Kaedekin Transport Craft: XKSC-01 (Temporary Designation)’‘Kaedekin Re-Entry Heat Mitigation Technology: Freeze Rays’‘Surcease Native Megafauna (“Kaiju”) Operational Doctrine and Equipment.’‘Kaedekin Tank: XKM-01 (Temporary Designation)’‘Kaedekin Power Armor Type: XKLHPA-01 (Temporary Designation)’‘Kaedekin Armored Ground Transport: XKM-02 (Temporary Designation)’‘Kaedekin Research and Training Facility: College of Flames’‘Kaedekin Physical Enhancement Research’‘Kaedekin Manufacturing Processes: Transparent Steel’‘Kaedekin Small Unit Doctrine and Tactics‘‘Kaedekin Plasma Manipulation Technology: Flame (Tentative Identification)’‘Kaedekin Crime Rates’‘Kaedekin High-Energy Robotics’‘Kaedekin Superstitions Regarding Vampires’

Trout had started with reading the section on Kaedekin crime rates, and had immediately messaged Bronze to make sure there was not, in fact, a typo on the report and a whole bunch of zeroes hadn’t been misplaced somewhere.

The reply he got back was: “Personally checked suit recording. The number is accurate. More information needed from the Kaedekin themselves to explain it, but it is accurate as per the recording.”

Trout had to sit down for a moment, trying to imagine a planet that considered having twelve crimes that year to be a culturally embarrassing historical high. On the one hand, the kind of civilization that would be embarrassed by the number of crimes that have occurred might be the kind to report it inaccurately. On the other hand, why report such an unrealistically low number as twelve?

…

Well, not his problem, that was a matter for… whoever actually needs to know and deal with the Kaedekin criminal justice system.

He wasn’t sure how to feel about the fact the Kaedekin didn’t consider punching someone else in the face to be a crime. On the one hand, he could think of several people over the years he felt deserving of a punch to the face. On the other hand… well, if someone punched him in the face, he’d want them to prosecuted to the full extent of the law…

Except the Kaedekin didn’t have laws so…

Not his problem!

Dutifully, he read through the report. Finding out what a ‘kaiju’ was supposed to refer to was… well, fantastical and hard to believe, but since that seemed to be a running theme with the Kaedekin, and they actually did have video of it, so he left the matter alone. Could it have been faked? Of course. Could it easily be confirmed or debunked later when they were more free to move around the planet? Also yes, so that was someone else’s problem in the future. Trout found himself nodding at reading that the Kaedekin would insist on non-lethal control methods for deal with ship-sized landbound megafauna, then nodding more thoughtfully at their stated reasoning.

The report on Kaedekin tanks and power armor was more professionally interesting. The tanks were interesting for the fact that they apparently had plasma cannons as standard equipment, but the power armor… Well, they invited a degree of disbelief, because they were several meters tall and moved as lightly as ballerinas despite that. However, it was a muted disbelief, because it was already clear that the Kaedekin’s artificial gravity technology was far more advanced than what the Confederacy had, though perhaps not as advanced as what the pajhadin had kept for themselves. With such control over gravity, the difficulties of building a robot at that scale could be largely mitigated.

And at this point, Trout was willing to just roll with it. Sure, the Kaedekin had building-sized robots more nimble than person-sized power armor, why not? They’d probably let the Venture’s officers see one up close if asked nicely. And that thought wasn’t even sarcastic.

The variety of weapons the power armor were armed with had also been of interest. Trout would have looked in askance at the fact that building-sized robots were wielding oversized archaic weapons, but given the context that they were intended to be used for non-lethal animal control, it almost made sense. Which made some of the weapon choices for the giant robots even more inexplicable. Why would there be giant, robot-scale rifles—and they seemed to be plasma rifles at that—where there were clearly modular mounted weaponry? For that matter, why give such robots hands and arms at all, rather than just having weapon hardpoints at their shoulder? At that scale, there was no good reason to give a robot arms, never mind hands, and as for legs… well, an argument could be made that legs allowed them to possess a smaller area footprint than the Kaedekin tanks, but that was it.

He pointedly didn’t listen to Cadet Trout deep inside his soul, who was giggling at the fact that actual giant robots existed in the observable galaxy. That wasn’t the point!

…

Oh God, that was probably why the Kaedekin had built them, hadn’t they?

Trout continued through the report. If the Kaedekin were trying to intimidate them, they were doing a decent job of it. The stated degree of physical enhancement achieved by the ‘Pseudo-Vampire Research’ was decently intimidating, especially since they actually performed a demonstration, which also revealed that there was already a degree of standard physical enhancement on their ‘Rangers’. As usual, their language was obtuse and coded, talking about ‘Flame’, which was the catch-all term for both their plasma-projection and manipulation technology and the other quantum technologies they were developing at the College. The preliminary analysis was unsure whether the physical enhancement they were developing was based on cybernetics, some kind of gene therapy, or some sort of performance enhancing drug. The only thing that the analysts had managed to rule out were muscle-building steroids, as the Kaedekin who had demonstrated the fruits of their research was noted to have a build insufficient to justify such a treatment.

The overview for how the Kaedekin made transparent steel was fiscally horrifying to read about, but it did prove that it wasn’t just some kind of aluminum oxide. It was a lot of scrypt in QEC to spend on a window, but given how much QEC was apparently on this planet, the Kaedekin obviously weren’t aware of how rare and valuable the substance was. To them, it wasn’t rare at all. However, the process clearly wasn’t just throwing QEC into molten metal. Trout remembered similar experiments had been done in the past, but that had resulted in metal alloys that consistently had increased elasticity, not transparency. The Kaedekin had mentioned ‘using the QEC for anchoring an effect’, but they hadn’t expounded on what that meant, and inquiries towards the ship’s quantum engineers about what it could mean had been replied to with an officially-phrased ‘we have no idea and not enough information to speculate’.

The section on extremely expensive metallurgy was followed by a report on Kaedekin small unit tactics, which immediately filled Trout with mixed feelings. The Kaedekin’s Rangers didn’t seem to have any sort of standardized sidearm, but the analysts had noted a mix of ballistic weaponry, plasma weapons, some kind of ranged electric weapon, and some kind of focused sound weapon. The fact that they consistently missed at the person they were aiming at… well, if they were his people, Trout would have sent them to their officers to be verbally abused until they could actually shoot worth a damn. However, the collective camera data from all the witnesses as well as the sharper cameras on the powered armors all agreed that the Kaedekin were all actually very precise in their shooting, it was just that their target was somehow able to combine evasion and an inefficiently designed forcefield to protect herself. Given that the weapons were all apparently set for nonlethal, resulting in lower muzzle velocities, the assessment was that the Kaedekin would be very effective should they be wielding conventional weapons with correspondingly higher velocities.

They had acted like a well-oiled machine with only a few orders, and the demonstration of the battlefield utility of their forcefields had resulted in writing that was almost visibly trying to not use the phrase ‘change warfare forever’, because no one wants to be the one to commit those words to an official report. And while the Kaedekin received some criticism for being too passive, the report had agreed that given the frankly outrageous numbers disparity at the time and the Kaedekin’s stated priority of protecting the excursion party, the orders had made sense at the time.

It had also not gone unnoticed that whatever plasma-manipulation equipment the majority of the College of Flames apparently had readily available was apparently very vulnerable to getting wet, which seemed less than ideal when the emitters seemed to be positioned right over the skin. No one had gotten a good look at exactly what was being used to project the plasma effects of the ‘Flame’, although Bronze had admitted that had mostly been on his orders when the Kaedekin had started taking their clothes off due to either a desire to avoid being injured due to equipment failure or their collective hydrophobia…

Trout had immediately gone to ask for a more detailed report of what exactly had happened, if only to avoid a headache at trying to imagine it all, only to find that a timeline of the incident was the next thing in his mailbox. He flagged that one, hoping this part would make more sense when he understood the timeline of events better, then skipped ahead to the next section of the report.

…

No, no, that part made no sense either. No one was quite sure if they were being shown actual robotics, some esoteric robotics based on some currently unknown quantum technology, or if this was some kind of magic show that had been meant to entertain them. The things had acted and moved like robots, but when inspected both before and after they’d been made to move, there was nothing under the metaphorical sleeves. The quantum thermograph on the powered armors had been of little help. While the sensor had read all of the ‘golems’ as positive for quantum phenomenon, it was a known bug that it tended to read certain heat sources as positive, such as open flames or stars. No amount of refinement of the device has yet managed to correct for this, but since it could still identify quantum phenomena on the other side of open flames or in front of stars, it was treated as something an experienced operator could account for.

The analyst spent several dozen words speculating on whether the Kaedekin were aware of this particular quirk of the QTG and had deliberately used it to hide what was actually going on, or if they’d just gotten lucky. However, the consensus was that if this was some kind of esoteric robotics technology, it was one that was still in development, as nothing they’d been shown couldn’t be done more efficiently with mechatronic robots, save for the ‘golem’ robot that was indistinguishable from a porcelain sculpture in its inactive state.

The last part of the report had clearly been added for completions sake, and had Trout found himself vaguely amused to read that the Kaedekin apparently considered vampires to be serious business. So serious they had included several satirical books in their gift bags, purporting to be scholarly works about vampires, most of which were devoted to identifying and killing them. Personally, it sounded like a joke that had gone too far, although given their planet never saw any sunlight, it seemed exactly the kind of thing they’d turn into a cultural joke.

Shaking his head, Trout moved on to the next file, the timeline of the excursion party’s encounter with—

He sighed.

—two of only thirteen criminals on the planet.

…

Perhaps he’d ask if he could retire here. Once he knew if they were massively under-reporting their crime rate, of course.

Everyone in the dark room was holding one of the Kaedekin’s pink books, even the ones who hadn’t gone. They had all been reading them intently when Loren had entered, each taking notes on a separate notebook or tablet. Even Phingrui was reading one, written in the pajhadin script and seemingly carved as shallow grooves on the thick paper of the book.

To a wizard, they all looked up when Loren entered the room.

“Ash,” Falling Stillness said. She sounded cheerful and fake at the same time, which had to be a deliberate choice. “Just the human we wanted to see. Come in, sit down. We’ve been reading these books the kaykay gave us, and it’s been absolutely fascinating. We have so many questions.”

For a moment, Loren considered turning around and walking away. She unconsciously stepped back—

The world blurred, and she found herself standing in the middle of the dark room, surrounded on all sides by very intent alien wizards as the back of her knee bumped into a chair that hadn’t been there a moment before.

“Please, sit,” Phingrui said, smiling and showing all his teeth. His shark-like, pointy teeth that he definitely knew unnerved humans who saw them. “This is just a friendly chat. You may, of course, leave if you wish… but we would like to ask you not to.”

“No offense, but it doesn’t seem friendly,” Loren said. Still, she sat, because if you were going to set yourself on fire, it was best to not make it easy to knock you down. “Is this about vampires?”

“Yes,” Drasner said. “While the Kaedekin’s books have made for very interesting reading… we would like a second opinion. And you’re the only one we can approach who probably won’t tell us to go on the ship’s network and watch old horror movies.”

“And old romance movies,” Falling Stillness said. “To quote your civilization: what the fuck, humans?”

Loren sighed. “I’d like to preface this by saying I probably know more incorrect movie stuff than actual, factual stuff,” she said. “Vampires weren’t really something we’re taught as something we hear about in passing until we actually ask someone, and they tell us they’re extinct.”

“They are?” one of the tiwada said hopefully. Loren wasn’t sure which one.

She hesitated. “I don’t actually know,” she admitted. “But I’ve never heard of one, and you’d think it would make the news that there’s some kind of blood-drinking serial killer going around, right?”

“With the average level of crime on a human-controlled planet?” Falling Stillness said pointedly.

Loren considered that, and one hand subconsciously reached for her neck. “Fuck,” she said.

The following discussion was not good for Loren’s peace of mind.