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Bonus content! Trying out a few other perspectives.
Interlude: Meanwhile, the watchers above
General Murphy was not having a good day.
He stood on the other side of the tactical board from Doctor Anokhin, staring at the blinking dots on the table. It showed the terrain layout of the area, the various positions of the units in the simulation, and with a tap could bring up their sensor data and the viewpoints of his forces on his own tablet.
He couldn’t affect any of it, as one of the observers. Contact beyond briefing was prohibited.
The gently glowing blue dot to the east represented his latest vexation, and the green dots of the Strider walkers marching away from its location.
There was no comm-chatter of ‘Target spotted’, no weapons firing, or even movement from the blue dot.
He brought up his tablet, to look at Strider-1’s feed from the last couple of seconds. He then rewound it, looked at the sensor feeds from the probe attached, and placed the tablet back on the table.
Murphy stabbed the blue dot viciously.
“There is no possible way that your stealth system is properly represented in the simulation. A machine that large? Should NOT be able to gods-damned hide beneath the Trapdoor system. I can pull up the test readings right here that show how it doesn’t scale up for anything larger than a Predator. And even then, the mark 1 eyeball should be able to see clean through it.”
His opposite took a moment to tap at his own tablet before responding.
“I can assure you that every effort was made to accurately replicate weapons, hardware, and armor from specifications given to us by the various Projects in the simulator. It wouldn’t be helpful to condition the Cores and pilots to better than actual performance.”
“You mean to tell me, that my man there,” Murphy gestured to Strider-1, “Didn’t look out the window and see the Frame twice his size crouched next to him?”
Doctor Anokhin shrugged.
“Human error is often the downfall of many well-planned operations.”
Murphy knew when he was being peddled horseshit, but he couldn’t call it directly.
Instead he settled with glaring holes into the infuriating blue dot on the interface, and hoped to hell that Captain Blake could still turn his walker around and not continue to blindly walk into a trap.
Well, he thought, at least I’m not the only one fuming today. He could hear the First Royals getting out of the sim-pods through the door, and someone was yelling very loudly. It wasn’t a cheerful sound.
A/N
Some stuff happening in the observation rooms. Some people are happy, some aren’t
Also, all three cores are getting tested today
[spoilers]Delta's already done
