WMH-4 Octoscorp

The Emperor’s Sword: Heavy Infantry

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“Heavies! What is your profession?”

“Bein’ the chewy meat center in a vanadium-plated god of war, SIR!!”

– apocryphal

Making up three of every sixteen legions (i.e., one for every three light infantry legions) – again, not counting the various specialized legions built off a heavy infantry platform – are the heavy infantry legions. They’re the tip of the spear, the claw on the paw, the hard-strikin’ leading edge of the attack – if the light infantry are the backbone of the Imperial Legions, one might say that the heavy infantry is the bloody great horn on the end that the animal’s charge rams into its enemy with great force and vigor. But the important thing to understand about the heavy legionaries is the nature of their combat environment, and how it makes them infantry – at least partially – by courtesy alone. They’re not just big, tough legionaries in armor; the light infantry have that covered.

So let’s talk about the M70 Havoc combat exoskeleton, the current standard wear of the Heavy Legions. (Which is a combat exoskeleton because it’s descended from a long line of ancestors including, up front, civilian models used for construction, rescue, and so forth. It’s also fully-sealed powered armor, but then, so’s the N45 Garrex.)

Well, it’s big. It looks like a giant, stocky, barrel-bodied, dome-headed, no-necked humanoid with a back-sized hump, with weapons to match strapped to it. (And sort of as if it might overbalance backwards; it won’t, the gearing is much better than that and the armor is heavier in front to counterbalance, but the size of the powerplant and the auxiliary systems it’s carrying back there do create that impression, somewhat.) What it is, is basically a walking tank with interchangeable modular heavy-weapon packs that let it blast away on the battlefield, punch out small buildings, throw respectably-sized vehicles, dance a merry jig amid venting plasma, and toss around nuclear grenades at close range.

Size

If you take your nominal average wearer as being, oh, 7′ x 2′ x 1′, then while light infantry armor makes ’em bigger, it doesn’t make ’em so much bigger that they can no longer fit through doors, and so forth. The Havoc, contrariwise, makes its wearer more like 12′ x 4′ x 4′, and weighing something close to, maybe even on the far side of, a ton. There’s a reason military bases aren’t built to normal scale, and indeed, why you usually use the light infantry if you need to do the kind of building-clearing where it’s important that you’re left with an intact building afterward. Chap in a Havoc runs into your average suburban house hereabouts, he comes out the other side without noticing much of a stop, and it basically implodes. So it goes.

Operator

The wearer/operator goes in the front. The whole body opens up at the front, hydraulically, forward and up; the legionary climbs in backwards, then sticks his head up into the helmet and arms into the sleeves; then it closes again. The sleeves are internal to the body, not inside the arms of the suit; you can’t wear a suit that much bigger than you without risking tearing your arms off with every maneuver. Technically, when you’re fighting in a Havoc, you’re doing so with your arms at your sides, slightly bent, resting on the emergency hand controllers and keypads.

Those are only for emergency backup control, though. For primary control – if you’re wearing the suit right, the command torc built into the base of the helmet is resting right up against the back of your neck and the virtuality laser-port they installed in there, if you didn’t have one already, about halfway through basic, and has already established a high-bandwidth data connection with your brain. The moment you go active, you’re no longer wearing the suit and moving it about like a marionette; you are the suit, and moving it like your own body.

(Given its radically different capabilities, of course, this can be tricky to learn. That’s why they spend months teaching you Piston-Driven Fist Style martial arts, designed for these things, before letting you get anywhere near a combat exoskeleton for real; it’s also why an active-service heavy legionary is easy to spot on the street, because his gait will always be that little bit off.)

What they’re wearing in there is a very similar silk organza-type body glove to the one worn under regular combat armor; and exactly like its counterpart, it’s woven through with internal networking and environmental control and medical systems, capable of self-sealing, closing wounds, dispensing emergency pharmaceuticals, and covering everything in NBCN decontamination foam if penetrations are detected. The main difference here is that it can get hot in there; the Havoc bodysuit includes sweat-removal facilities (which filter water removed for the drinking reservoir) and Peltier cooling, run off the main power systems. This, and the legionary wearing it, fit tightly into the suit’s internal gel-filled padded sleeve that cushions them against acceleration and shock.

Power

Naturally, all of this uses a lot of power. A lot of power. This is buffered through distributed superconducting-loop accumulators throughout the exoskeleton, but while they do provide enough power to let you keep moving for a while if you lose the main power plant, they aren’t really enough to actually fight it. For that, you need something that can generate the necessary power.

Ordinarily, they might solve that problem with an antimatter (except that’s not good stuff to keep around where people might be shooting at it) or fusion reactor (except they involve lots of auxiliary machinery to keep the reaction sustained, which also makes it stop working fairly readily when people shoot at it). To bypass those problems, they reached back a little in history, and what’s under the small of this suit’s back is a good old-fashioned micro-fission reactor, of the thorium molten-salt design (which is to say, tasty “hot soup”). This is much more resilient under fire – although if someone does manage to penetrate the armor and crack the flask, it does have the minor disadvantage of spraying highly radioactive heavy-metal fluoride vapor over the landscape. But you can’t have everything.

Sensors and Communications

Core sensors and communications are essentially identical to light-legionary combat armor; radio and whisker laser communications, access to the OTP-encrypted military mesh, threat identification systems, teamware and C3I systems integration, thermal imaging, remote sensor access, 360 degree sensing, etc., etc. It also incorporates the sound transmission and imaging systems, which are even more important in the case of the Havoc, since its “helmet” is a sealed armor-dome with no direct vision possible; all internal displays are produced by the battle computer. The internal computer is rather more powerful than that included in, say, the N45 Garrex, both to run the more complicated systems and to act as a more major node in the battle ‘mesh.

On top of this, the Havoc adds pulsed-usage radar and lidar systems, plus integral T-ray high-frequency snoopers, powered by its greater reactor capacity, and a full ECM suite.

Structure, Strength and Armor

In construction terms, outside the padded sleeve is the diamondoid-composite skeleton of the suit, a honeycomb-patterned framework to provide the basic structural strength of the armor. This includes the attachment points and channels for the “muscles” – pseudo-organic structures capable of changing length on electrical signal – which power the suit. (In conjunction, yes, with the stabilization gyros.) They’re calibrated for high strength, speed, and flexibility; a Havoc is designed to let its wearer run at 54 mph and lift over a ton within safe tolerances – while still being able to dance a jig and pick up an egg without breaking it.

This skeleton is environmentally sealed and environment-controlled, for NBCN protection and exotic atmosphere/vacuum use, able to withstand and operate within several hundred atmospheres of pressure and extreme temperatures. Also at this level, all the working portions of suit equipment (computers, sensors, life support, medical support, power distribution, etc.) are located and secured in place. All of these systems are spread out throughout the skeleton, constructed from highly redundant circuitry with automatic re-routing, so that even with heavy damage, it can still function. It also includes mounting voids for heavier subsystems, such as the power reactor, external hives, and modular weapons pack.

The armor on top of this is qualitatively similar to light infantry armor – a sandwich of interlinked, highly corrosion-resistant and refractory cerametal composite armor plates around electrical and thermal superconductor meshes, with an outer anti-energetic ablative layer sprayed atop it. There’s just a lot more of it, quantitatively speaking, in thick, overlapping slabs. Likewise, the Havoc comes with rather more kinetic barrier emitters than light legionary armor, and thanks to its thorium reactor, has a lot more power available to back them up with. Finally, some portions of the armor include reactive sections, capable of exploding outward to neutralize force from external explosions or impacting projectiles (or, occasionally, long drops), in deference to the fact that large anti-materiel weapons are fired at heavy legionaries with depressing regularity.

There are, generally, no chameleonic or “stealth” features included – and the heavy legionary exoskeleton does not come in any “scout” variants – since the thermal – heat has to be radiated! –  et. al., signature produced by the reactor and other exoskeletal systems are more than enough to vitiate attempts at stealth. On the other hand, it is equipped with the abovementioned ECM and signature-scrambling systems to confuse incoming guided missiles out of perfect target locks.

Flight

The Havoc can also fly, at up to several hundred mph depending on local conditions, using a combination of the same vector-control trickery used in standard combat armor, and of using its power reactor to provide the working heat to nuclear-thermal thrusters. (This is normally only an option in atmosphere, which functions as the supply of working fluid; in vacuum, it requires carting a big clip-on tank of remass around with you, which is less than convenient most of the time.) As in the former case, using this for extended flight is discouraged since it makes you an easy kill for air vehicles; on the other hand, it’s great for attaining position, making short skips, and so forth, not to mention extended low ground-skims. Attempting combat parkour with it is possible, but do bear in mind the strength of whatever it is you plan to bounce off of in the process; smashing right through it is often tactically awkward in combat situations.

Integral Weapons & Point Defense

In addition to weapons supplied by the modular pack, the Havoc possesses four integral weapons systems. Two of these are inbuilt to the arms of the suit: on the right, a heavy carbine equivalent to a tribarrel version of the IL-15i Battlesystem‘s carbine section, for routine anti-personnel and light anti-materiel use, and on the left, the KF-15 Dragonspume anti-nanitic/area-denial flamer, serving essentially the same purposes as they do for the light legionary only more so. The EI-12d Valkyrie target designator is built into the helmet section of the Havoc, for use in designating targets for the tactical net and ortillery, etc.

The fourth is a collection of defensive weaponry: each shoulder bears a point-defense pack, consisting of a pair of short-range lasers (designed to cause spontaneous explosion or vaporization-induced deflection) and a pair of short-range autocannon, independently and automatically targeting incoming fire for destruction.

The Havoc also carries an exoskeleton combat knife, which resembles a large hanrian – too heavy for unaugmented sophonts to use – scaled to the exoskeleton, which can be picked up and wielded by its manipulators for use primarily as a utility blade, although melee combat usage isn’t entirely unknown.

Swarms and their Hives

The Havoc also comes with swarm hives, both internal and external, housing microbot/nanobot swarms. The internal hive(s) are integrated into the structural honeycomb, housing repair and medical ‘bots whose purpose is to crawl around the interior of the suit ensuring that it self-repairs, and even more importantly, it keeps its operator in good repair.

The external hives, on the other hand, are a reflection of the Legions’ belief in really close air support. The exact mix can be varied by pre-mission module swap-outs, but a typical default mix for the external hives (the M-823 Horde) is a roughly equal mix of eyeballs, shrikes, gremlins, and balefire – which is to say, of expendable recon assets, counter-swarm swarms, anti-machinery swarms, and anti-personnel/area-denial carbon-devourer swarms.

Modular Weapons Pack

The primary weapons of the heavy legionary, however, are those supplied by the modular weapons pack: again, selected according to mission. The modular weapons pack fits onto the upper rear of the exoskeleton, beneath the armor and behind the helmet, with hardened lines running to extended firing packages which clamp onto the suit’s arms. A typical “mixed-mission” modular weapons pack would be the BP-400 Conflagration, which adds to the integrated loadout the following:

  • An arm-mounted heavy tribarrel sluggun, a larger-bore version of that included in the IL-15i Battlesystem, capable of firing larger (1.5″) versions of all its different ammo types: anti-materiel spikes, flechette canister shot, bore-compatible grenades, or gyroc micromissiles, the latter of which can include as their payload exploding shells, incendiaries and napalm, cryoburn shells, nanoweapons (if someone’s set up a microwave power system for them), chemical/gas dispensers, cyberswarm dispensers, network node – or spy dust – dispensers, injector needles (at low power), restraint nanoglop, electroshock “stunner” shells, acid globs, anti-electronic fiberdust, mollynet, antimatter nuke-in-a-bullets, etc., etc. Naturally, the weapons pack can store plentiful supplies of multiple types, and switch between them on the fly. (One that they’re particularly fond of is the infamous “backscratcher”, which travels a short distance and then blasts flechettes back down at the firer, rattling harmlessly off the heavy armor but making a real mess out of any lighter infantry trying to attack it close up.)
  • A chemical/nanoweapons dispensing system, with storage tanks for same.
  • A backpack vertical-launch system for a half-dozen minimissiles, usually supplied with 0.1 kt microfusion warheads.

Drones

Like the light legionary, the heavy legionary is accompanied by and acting as the command nexus for a half-dozen AI combat drones, in this case usually mixed from the WMH-4 Octoscorp, the WMH-7 Grizzly, and the WMH-12 Skyorca, depending on mission parameters, each heavily armed in its own right. When not commanded otherwise, these too default to acting as defense platforms – but the best defense is a good offense, right?

Transportation?

Like the light infantry, the heavy infantry is usually delivered to the field by the G5-TT Corvee tactical transport, fulfilling its multipurpose role. The module used for heavy legionary transport, however, is somewhat different – it’s an open frame, and the legionaries ride on the outside, held in by suit-controlled magnetic clamps, the Havoc already being heavily armored enough. The weight savings permit systems to let them refuel and rearm in flight to be added instead of all that wasteful hull.

They don’t generally use IFVs/APCs to get around on the battlefield. A platform like this doesn’t need ’em.

“I’M THE JUGGERNAUT!!!”

– rookie heavy-legionary

“Heh. Heheheheh. Here’s a taltis, kid…”

– commander of Basher-class heavy armored vehicle

The Emperors’ Sword: Light Infantry

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Making up nine of every sixteen legions – even when we don’t count the various specialized legions which are mostly built off a light infantry platform – the light infantry are the backbone of the Imperial Legions. Which, in another sense, means they get all the dirty jobs that no-one more specialized is specially equipped for. This is by no means to underrate them; the Legions have long been a service that concentrates on quality over quantity, and your basic light infantry legionary is a highly trained professional equipped and competent to fight in a multitude of different operations – from basic raiding and ground-taking on up – in a bewildering array of different environments.

It’s also from the light infantry that most of the espatiers, or “ship’s troops” – those legionaries posted to provide muscle aboard the starships of the Imperial Navy permanently, as opposed to those who are just transported on troop transports to somewhere where fighting is needed – are drawn, although larger ships will also carry some heavy legionaries for stiffening.

Actually, for all you Mass Effect fans out there, it probably looks something like this...

Actually, for all you Mass Effect fans out there, it probably does look something like this…

So just what is the fashionable light legionary wearing these days?

In the Empire, although similar suits are in fairly common use by other advanced militaries and mercenary units, the answer is the N45 Garrex field combat armor. In some cases, it may instead mean one of its more specialized variants, of which the most common are the N45e Réyneri scout armor (originally built for the Imperial Exploratory Service rather than the legions, it includes extra long-term survival gear and stealth/infiltration capabilities, commonly used in covert ops), the N45a Qasel sea combat armor (includes kinetic barriers optimized for underwater use, specialized sensors like sonar, and the ability to replenish internal environmental supplies from compatible liquid media), the N45r Callérás high-rad field combat armor (includes a lot more radiation protection), and the N45s Merra microgravity combat armor (includes extended environmental supplies, a microgravity maneuvering unit, and magnetic grips – this is what’s issued to espatiers), but these are all variants on the same basic theme.

This armor is a multilayer protection system. Down right at the bottom next to the skin, there’s a silk organza-type body-glove. This is woven through with internal networking and tens of thousands of nodes for the environmental control and medical systems; these nodes and nodules are capable of sealing holes, stopping bleeding, closing wounds, dispensing emergency pharmaceuticals, and covering everything in decontamination foam if penetrations are detected in the presence of NBCN weapons.

On top of that, comes the armor-plating itself; a sandwich of interlinked, highly corrosion-resistant and refractory cerametal composite armor plates around electrical and thermal superconductor meshes, affixed on top of a flexible core suit of non-porous arachnoweave ballistic fabric. An outer ablative layer is sprayed atop the plating, which boils away to protect the wearer from directed energy weapons. (This is, of course, rather heavy – while not power-enhanced, like the M70 Havoc combat exoskeleton, the N45 Garrex is power-assisted, rendering it feather-light in normal use so that it doesn’t impair the legionary’s movements or cause fatigue.)

The outermost layer of protection consists of kinetic barriers generated by the suit’s hardware – essentially, a much smaller version of the same hardware used to protect starships – to “slap aside” incoming projectiles – at least so long as suit power holds out.

The whole suit is fully sealed, with internal climate control and self-contained air reprocessing, such that the Legions can fight anywhere from the chill of outer system moons to inner-system hothouses, come rain, shine, hostile atmospheres, high pressure, vacuum, being underwater, chemical, biological, and nanotechnological weapons, and/or radioactive fallout. For that purpose, the characteristic “teardrop” helmet of the IMS joins seamlessly to the suit body. An electronic sound transmission system allows the wearer to hear and speak, while filtering out sound-based attacks or sounds capable of causing sensory stun; likewise, the integrated imaging system in the helmet filters out basilisk attacks and similarly stunning visual stimuli.

Standard optronic equipment for the N45 Garrex includes an onboard microframe computer to run the suit’s management software and act as a hub for a personal-area dataweave “battle weave”, and a full communications, navigation, and sensor suite. The communications suite includes simple radio and whisker laser communicators, as well as access to the one-time pad encrypted military communications mesh. The sensor suite provides a full head-up display of sensor data incoming from a variety of sources, including teamware, tactical and strategic C3I systems, threat identification systems, weapon status data including “gun’s-eye view” projections, and other such information.

And finally, it has a very limited thruster/vector-control based flight capability. Doctrine strongly discourages using this for extended periods of actual flight, since a flying target is an easy kill; it is, however, useful for attaining a superior position, clearing obstacles, making quick “skips” between cover, running on walls, changing orientation and vector in mid-leap, and generally hurling oneself about the place like a god of parkour wherever no-one expects you to be right now.

And what’s she carrying?

Something like this:

  • The IL-15i Battlesystem battle carbine. This is the light legionary’s primary weapon – combining in a single unit a standard carbine and an underslung sluggun. The former does the main job of propelling tiny flechettes downrange at mind-croggling speeds, which do appropriately gory damage by sheer kinetic energy to whatever they hit. The latter, well, can fire any number of things depending on the mission – anti-materiel spikes, flechette canister shot, bore-compatible grenades, or gyroc micromissiles, the latter of which can include as their payload exploding shells, incendiaries and napalm, cryoburn shells, nanoweapons (if someone’s set up a microwave power system for them), chemical/gas dispensers, cyberswarm dispensers, network node – or spy dust – dispensers, injector needles (at low power), restraint nanoglop, electroshock “stunner” shells, acid globs, anti-electronic fiberdust, mollynet, antimatter nuke-in-a-bullets, and on and on and on. Some of these loads are, obviously, more commonly issued and used than others.
  • The KF-5 Wyvernspit anti-nanitic/area-denial flamer – basically, a weaponized plasma torch (to avoid the need to cart around huge quantities of fuel) capable of creating intense heat at point-blank range. Used for anti-nanoswarm defense, area denial, threatening people, and incidental arson.
  • The EI-12d Valkyrie target designator. Tied into the tactical net, this permits the legionary to call down ortillery strikes and missiles from UAVs to deal with bigger targets than she has time to deal with personally.
  • The IS-5 Stinger pistol, a sidearm used for close up personal defense.
  • A military-grade nanolathe, to permit them to perform field repairs and to manufacture any other small items of equipment they might need on the fly, using recipes stored in the suit computers and/or downloaded ad-hoc off the military mesh.
  • A hanrian, which is to say the second of the Two Swords (1). In its modern military recension, it resembles a cross between a Roman gladius and the USMC combat knife, and serves both as a melee weapon and a general-purpose tool. It’s not a mollyblade or any such fancy device, inasmuch as it’s expected to be used much more often as a utility knife than in combat, but it is made of much better metals for purpose than just about any sword of history. Damn things never get blunt.
  • A bandolier containing replacement powercells, replacement heat sinks, replacement sluggun magazines, nanobricks, and pouches for any other miscellaneous supplies she feels might be particularly useful today. (Grenades come in the sluggun magazines; if you need fixed explosives, you can pull one out and program it manually.)
  • Possibly some components of/ammunition for a heavy fireteam support weapon – missile launcher, heavy semi-portable, etc., although such are usually transported by the IFV and/or robot logistics drones.
  • An emergency survival kit. In the interests of maximizing mobility – especially since high-speed maneuver is such a large part of their doctrine – and combat effectiveness, Legionary doctrine prefers not to burden troops with all the rations and resupply and such they might need; again that’s what the IFV and robot logistics drones are for. But just in case the shit hits the fan, they do get one of these.

She’s also accompanied by, and acting as the command nexus for, half a dozen AI combat drones, usually a mixed set of the WML-12 Warhound (“wolves”), WML-14 Slitherslay (“serpents”), WMH-4 Octoscorp (“spiders”), and the WML-17 Skycat (“raptors”), depending on mission parameters – each of which is quite capably and similarly armed in its own right. When not specifically commanded otherwise, these default to acting as automated return fire platforms, tracking incoming fire and returning it automatically.

Note: these, however, are the officially issued general purpose weapons. On the one hand, the Legions have access to a wide variety of specialized weapons which they’ll hand out as required (if your mission spec calls for house-clearing on a world inhabited by tough guys with natural armor, for example, it’s time to break out the S-11i Mamabear heavy slugguns all around; for riot control, break out the algetic whips, that sort of thing); on the other hand, individually qualified specialists also get the weapons appropriate to their specialty – sniper rifles, etc., say; and on the gripping hand, they also encourage and even subsidize legionaries carrying any personal auxiliary weapons they fancy, know how to use, and which are compatible, on the grounds that it (a) adds flexibility in a pinch, and (b) confuses the enemy’s attempts to figure out what their capabilities actually are, and more confusion to the enemy is always a good thing.

Transportation?

The light infantry is usually delivered to the field, and between fields, by the G5-TT Corvee tactical transport, of which more has been said earlier.

On the field, however, the light legions are usually transported around the battlefield by the V40 Ralihú, an armored personnel carrier/infantry fighting vehicle with full environmental support and sealing, all-directions all terrain-drive, brief hop-jump capability, and a modular swap-out enhancement system with modules permitting it to perform in the roles of IFV, squad transport, ambulance, etc., with equal facility. It also comes equipped, in all its modular roles, with a turreted heavy mass driver and coaxial quadbarrel mass-driver machine-gun.

(Yes, even the medical ones. While the Empire will ostentatiously disable them when fighting people who do abide by the Ley Accords, they spend enough time fighting people who don’t think that the rules of civilized warfare apply to them that they didn’t feel that spending money and logistic capacity on an unarmed military ambulance was a good idea.)

Footnotes:

1. The first-sword, the teirian, is not carried by most units outside dress uniform and is rarely used on the modern battlefield by even those who do carry it, it being mostly a matter of tradition and intimidation for them. A modern teirian is a damnably effective sword under many circumstances, mind you, but not effective enough against equally modern combat armor unless you spend ridiculous amounts of money on it – and, of course, requires closing to within reach.