The Eagle Reborn - Chapter 3 (Rifts RPG - A.R.C.H.I.E. SI)

N.E.M.A. North Star Subterranean Complex

Eagle Peak, Anchorage, Chugach Mountain Range, Alaska

23rd, July, 2103

I groaned in frustration as my robots brought back the last of the goods and materials from the ruins of the city. It had been going well until the non-stop snow turned into a blizzard. I could have worked with light and heavy snow despite it constantly falling night and day, but now it was just too dangerous, even for my robots, to be out there. Zero visibility, and temperatures dropping below minus forty degrees Fahrenheit, and my control range being reduced by 80% as a result of unusual activity from the blue zones, I had no choice but to pull it in and wait it out.

I hadn’t even had the time to lay out any surveillance systems to keep an eye on things despite being bottled up, so anything that happens when I come back out of my bunker will be new to me. Since that’s the situation now, I decided to go forward with digging into the mountain for more resources and hollowing the thing out. I had no illusions that this will be a fast process. This was going to be several years if not a decade or two in the making, but the good thing about being able to manufacture more robots is that the more you have, the faster the process becomes. At least until my supply outstrips my ability to produce.

It also has forced me to look into mining robot designs that had been in my archives, and thankfully I had a few dozen designs either acquired legally, or stolen from, various corporations and nations around the world. The ones I needed at this time were man and truck sized machines, and my factories were already producing these units in the factories that were pre-tooled for this purpose.

The first unit is a man-sized machine that possessed powerful arms and legs, allowing a single one to lift several tons of weight. The ends of its arms possess claws for the purpose of gripping boulders, digging into them through sheer force alone, as well as a powerful mining laser at the center of the hand to burn through said boulders.

The second was basically a bulldozer the size of a small truck with a carrying bed. It came with arms to scoop up rocks and dump them into its truck bed.

Currently, I had produced around seventeen of the first robot, and three of the second since the day started, and by the end of the week I will have a three hundred of the first, and one hundred of the second.

With the mining bots, and combat units assigned to mining, all digging to my specifications, and the combat units currently finishing the maintenance and repair of certain sections that hadn’t been finished just yet, I basically had nothing to do but wait and keep an eye on things.

That’s boring though. So, I guess I’ll…play some video games.

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N.E.M.A. North Star Subterranean Complex

Eagle Peak, Anchorage, Chugach Mountain Range, Alaska

30th, July, 2103

I played all of the games I had. I played them, beat them, and then played completionism so that each was “100%” done. You’d think, hearing that, I had only a few games. Nope. I had thousands of games in case of a world ending disaster so people had entertainment. I even played the VR-MMO games I had on file for this base, and played all of the various paths for each one until I had done everything. I had so many new ideas on what kind of units to make now, as well as new toys in general.

After that I watched all the movies I had on file. There were quite a few I could watch over and over without getting tired of them. Charlie Brown and Snoopy were one such series of works.

One week is what it took. Thousands of games, tens of thousands of movies and cartoons, and I’ve finished them all.

Now I am bored.

I had been about to read all the books I had on file when I decided to check and see what it looked like outside. My sensors, what few I had that could penetrate outside the mountain, said it was still a storm outside. The tremors from the blue zones confirmed this too. However, I hadn’t actually seen what the storm looked like.

So, like the first time I dug myself out, I had a horde of robots blasting plasma beams out the hanger entrance to create a tunnel, until I could see outside. Once done, I sent out a reconnaissance drone again, but this time one of the spider drones since the storm winds would blow the flying version away.

I finally got a look at the outside, and I stared in awe.

Four thousand feet above the mountain peaks, the sky was being torn asunder by rips in space and time, closing as quickly as they were opening, and in some cases dumping things out into the snow.

The first rip in the sky was only open for about fifteen seconds, but it was clearly Tokyo given all the Kanji and various people who were near the tear. Fortunately, no one was pulled through it. The second rip spewed out ash and molten lava onto the ground. No idea where that one was, but I wasn’t in the mood to find out.

The third rip opened to what appeared to be something of an advanced city, and without warning around three dozen muscularly armored beings had been sucked through the tear and sent falling to the ground below. I immediately readied my SAMAS units and rescue vehicles, as the newcomers wouldn’t survive long in this weather, if they survived the fall to begin with.

The fourth tear in the air opened to what appeared to be…some sort of schizo-tech city. A mix of something modern mixed with medieval. Knights walking around with large guns, and alien beings. They barely took notice of the tear and just acted like things were normal. It shifted between that world and another that was ruled over by humanoid soldiers wearing skeletal styled armor. They were pointing at the tear, weapons drawn with cannons and missiles pointing at it, before it shifted back to the first world again.

The fifth tear in the sky was showing three different worlds in rapid succession. Ten seconds, and the tear would shift to a different place. The first of these was…some kind of landfill since all sorts of junk was just randomly falling out of the hole. The second was less a rain of junk and more a rain of fucking DEMONS as various monstrous beings just fell through, or gleefully jumped through the tear. The last shift was a medieval world full of…wolf people. Who stared in shock at the dimensional tear floating amongst them. Mother wolves pulling their cubs away from the portal, while male warriors wearing roman styled armor pointed steel spears towards it.

Then it shifted back to the garbage hole.

The last of the sky tears was just a single world, but it was one in the middle of a battlefield. Although most of the beings I could see through the tear were humanoid, there were actually multiple species involved in the fighting. Orangutang people fighting alongside lizard people, who were in turn fighting frog people. What kind of Silver-Age DC Weirdness is that?!

The fighting near the portal stopped as the they suddenly realized that something was amiss and began to suck them in. Frog people fell through and tumbled in the air, while the Ape people were caught in mid-air by the Lizard people…who could fly for some reason.

Six frogs fell onto the side of mountain opposite of Eagle Peak and tumbled down the steep incline. Twelve lizards floated in the air as they caught and took a hold of the seven ape people who were looking about wide-eyed. Only to suddenly dodge out of the way of a fire beam fired by a flying, red skinned and large horned demon creature. The group scattered, with apes and lizards firing ion and laser weapons at the demon, as well as the half dozen flying monsters that followed the giant demon. Each of the smaller demons broke off to chase after the fliers who dodged while their allies focused on firing at their pursuers.

I looked at the first group that had fallen, and it appeared that none of them had survived the fall, and the demonic creatures looked to be trying to tear open their suits of armor to bodies within. I was surprised when suddenly eight of the fallen alien beings began to move, looking to be in pain.

The eight noticed that their fallen comrades were being torn open by the monsters, and in an instant went from slow and in pain, to fast and decisive. Those who had arms replaced with weapon clusters fired laser pulses that blasted skin open, tearing apart muscle and bone as the monsters screeched in rage and pain. The others had triple barreled rifles that fired laser beams one barrel at a time in rapid succession, that did its share of damage while one large soldier pointed a large, and curved weapon towards a monster that had turned and charged at them. The weapon fired, and a powerful plasma bolt exploded outwards and hit the monster in the face, melting half of its head off.

Eighty “Silver Eagle” SAMAS Power Armor units flew down the launching tunnel and joined the fray, their engines screaming into the air, living up to their name as they picked individual targets, focusing on the demons which had just increased in number as a result of the portal opening to the demon world again. The numbers of monsters were far higher this time as the creatures beyond the portal had realized there was a portal at all, and they fell through like a flood. Hundreds of monsters fell or flew through the air, fighting each other as much as they tried to attack and pursue my units and the newcomers.

Speaking of which, the lizard people realized they were outnumbered and began flying in any direction that took them away from the fight. My units pursued them, but didn’t fire at them despite some of them firing at me. Fortunately, they coalesced into three groups and one individual. I caught the individual lizard female who looked terrified as my machine took her arm, only to then look confused as I dragged her back to one group who had been about to open fire when they noticed the unit carrying their comrade.

They stopped, and glared as the SAMAS stopped before them, and tossed the female towards them. They caught her, looks of confusion rippled in their body language. That, followed by it turning around to fire on a monster that leaped towards them, with two other SAMAS units who joined in, suddenly made this group realize I wasn’t their enemy despite the chaos.

For a moment they stared at me, when I waved at them to follow, and flew towards another group of theirs. The caught on and followed quickly, and in the next few minutes the multiple groups were once again a single group, and realized they had, at the moment, an ally in this new world.

As that had been happening, a few units flew down towards the frogs, and found three of them were alive but were critically injured. They fired at me in panic, and I tried to calm them down, but was quickly besieged by monsters that ran over and jumped the two units. The frogs were quickly killed as my units were torn apart.

Other units had flown over to the eight survivors who had been fighting tooth and nail, laser and plasma, adding their volume of rail gun rounds into the fray. The armored aliens paused as supersonic bolts of superheated metal slammed into the various ground dwelling monsters, tearing meat and bone off in blood covered chunks, before shrugging and adding their own fire back in.

As all this happened, “Bulldog” robot combat units were firing super-heated plasma bolts out of the primary hanger doors to create a path so I could send more units into the fray. Dozens of bolts melting tons of snow into boiling hot water made it a quick bit of work. With the path open, they moved aside as the “Big Dog, Super Mastiff” unit stepped forth and fired six medium ranged missiles with Plasma Warheads. They were expensive to make, but given when I was dealing with…well, when in doubt, kill it with fire.

Missile guidance systems tied to the information network of the SAMAS units gave them near perfect accuracy, and when said missiles were traveling nearly twice the speed of sound, they hit fast and hard. The demons and monsters were caught completely off guard at the sudden assault, completely vaporized unless they were further from the center of the explosions, which just meant they were burned to ash or charred chunks of meat.

The snow was flash boiled into steam, and exploded into a gigantic cloud that blinded and cooked everything caught in it. As if that wasn’t enough, the sudden loud explosion, and shaking caused by said explosion, caused the snow on the mountain sides of the valley to break loose.

The snow began to roll down the mountain, quickly gaining volume and speed as it became an avalanche.

The SAMAS units grabbed the armored aliens, living and dead, plus equipment, despite protests and them fighting back. The rumble, and my pointing up shifted their focus. Seeing the mountain coming down on them changed their minds pretty fast as they leapt onto my units that were trying to carry them away.

The army of demons that had fallen onto the Earth, literally and metaphorically, were buried under kilotons of snow within a few minutes. Only the fliers were spared, and with most of the SAMAS units now focused on them, the monsters were on the run.

I realized that I still had to deal with the hole that dumped these things into my world to begin with. I had to destabilize it while doing damage at the same time, and my first thought was to pull out one of the tactical nuclear missiles I had via conveyer and elevator. With my “unchaining”, I had full authorization on how to protect my charges, which included nuking the whole of south-east Alaska if neccesary.

The ground hanger was tied to the Elevator that went to the vertical hanger, so having a “Condor”, the land version of the Naval VTOL jet fighter “Sea-Hawk”, was an easy affair. It wheeled off the elevator and rolled towards the hanger doors, all the while having target data inputted and authorizations entered. The engines whined loudly as they came to life, and lifted the fighter off the floor. Thrusting forward, the jet flew out into the air, and angled itself towards the portal.

The timer for when the demon portal would open was near, and the SAMAS units, as was the Mastiff, were ready to fire into the portal to create space. The timer reached zero, and the jet fired the missile just as the flood of beasts met a rain of high-speed metal. Destruction of their monsters caused the rest to back off, creating a hole, which the missile flew through. When the timer reached one second before the portal closed, I sent the code to detonate.

I was treated to the sight of a bright flash, and the monsters cringing from the light, before the portal closed, and then shuddered violently before disappearing.

“YES!” I cheered, most of my SAMAS units raising their arms in celebration as my voice filtered through them.

The newcomers looked uncertain as to what just happened, aside from the armored ones who saw the rain of steel and the missile, and the flash, and seemed to have an idea of what just occurred. A few of them roared approvingly along with me even!

Speaking of the newcomers, now that it was done and over with, I began to try and guide them to the portals they belonged to. The one where the armored fellows came from appeared, and more of their forces were on the other side. They appeared to have reinforced it with barricades around the streets of the city it apparently was set in. It was still sucking things in, by my SAMAS units pushed through regardless. One of the fellows I held called out over radio as I approached the portal, and it appears that he might have been a commanding officer of some sort as I wasn’t immediately immolated with laser fire upon entering their world.

I flew and dropped them off at their barricades before flying off, dropping their dead and equipment as well, though I will be honest and say I didn’t give it all back. In the chaos, I kept two of their dead, and their equipment during the rescue. Dishonest? Yes, but hey, alien technology. X-Com did nothing wrong.

Despite their attempts to maybe talk to me, convince my SAMAS units to stay, my units flew through and back to my side before the countdown was done.

The other group of aliens was essentially the same situation, except I gave them covering fire from the Frogs who fired at me through the portal. Whether they will make it or not, I cannot say, but they seemed pretty thankful for my aid despite their short visit.

I felt relief when it was all done, but I kept my SAMAS units out, and released more to clean up whatever monsters remained and keep an eye on the portals until everything was done.

I hoped this weather cleared soon. After this short bit of excitement... I think I might prefer being bored.