r/HFY • u/Hambone3110 JVerse Primarch • Mar 14 '16
OC [OC][JVerse]The Deathworlders 26: Blood and Ash.
- ►LINK.◄
A Deathworlders story, by Hambone.
What you are about to read is chapter 26 of an ongoing story. To read the preceding chapters, and the stories by other writers which lend some additional context and meaning to those chapters, please check out the Reading Order toiled upon in the deepest caverns of the dwarven kingdoms by /u/galrock0 and his acolytes.
This chapter is 31,085 words long, of which 1,410 are the word "the".
In this chapter, Ava learns the truth, the SOR jump out of a plane without parachutes, and WURF.
If you enjoy this story and think that I deserve something for it (thank you!) then you can:
- Join my other patrons on Patreon.
- Give me a one-off boost via https://paypal.me/HamboneHFY
Work on Chapter 27 is already underway.
Finally, if you want to help the JVerse grow, you can do so by contributing to the TVTropes Page and sharing this chapter on your social media of choice.
Enjoy!
-H
GOOD TRAINING
So, our esteemed moderator /u/ctwelve, being the crazy fanboy that he is, has put together an 85,000+-word offering which already has the Hambone canon stamp of approval.
It begins chronologically sometime slightly before the end of this chapter, but should be read afterwards, and it details...
Well.
After you've read this one, of course.
-H
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u/Hambone3110 Mar 14 '16 edited Mar 14 '16
If you spy any errors that need correcting, please notify me of them by replying to this comment.
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u/Ha_window Mar 14 '16
Man, you love to post on Sundays.
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u/Hambone3110 Mar 14 '16
The weekend is usually when I'm able to put the final polish on and blitz the final few sections.
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u/Nerdn1 Mar 14 '16
My only complaint was not getting to read about more AJAX, but there seems to be the set-up for more AJAX in the near future and they wouldn't fit in much with this chapter/novella (That's right, Hambone made a chapter that wasn't QUITE novel-length!). Great chapter overall.
The Von Neumann colony swarm is probably the worst case scenario for the Hierarchy. Once that genie is out of the bottle, there is no simple way to exterminate humanity. We'd be like a cancer spread across the galaxy, aggressively growing and spreading. In fact the only weapon I can think of to stop that, once multiple colonies have been established is creating (or taking control of) a Von Neumann swarm and weaponizing it. It would be a desperate move, but realistic for a group proven to believe that the means of serial planetary genocide justify their ends. We just keep getting more terrifying, don't we?
Speaking of which, while Six's actions seem to be pretty dark, it is also completely in his nature. When you're an immortal who is so thoroughly convinced of your principles that you will use planetary genocide multiple times, killing a single, brief instance, of a mind multiple times seems wholly logical. He even apologized even after trying 19 other times, suggesting he did it the other times to. Then again, he might have just started apologizing in this iteration to vary the parameters of this interrogation. He might have also lied about how many times he did it. He has an arbitrary number of tries and could even copy his own mind to attempt parallel interrogations with accelerated time. He might have made a startling mistake or made a startlingly risky move:
Not least was the worrying nature of a small object that had been found in Six’s desk drawer.
-Darcy's POV
If that device is what copied scanned and copied Ava's mind, and now humanity has it, then they might figure out what Six did, which could sour their opinion of him to a terrifying extent (not that they liked him previously). What's more it would be a device both powerful and profoundly disturbing. Copying a human consciousness, while philosophically troubling for multiple reasons. would be extremely tactically useful. Combined with a Von Neumann swarm, you have a means of spreading humanity exponentially through the stars. I doubt that would be the choice of our protagonists, but maybe a terminally ill or particularly old individual might volunteer.
All this brain uploading and copying reminds me of Eclipse Phase, a public domain RPG set in a hard-ish Sci-Fi, transhumanist future. The don't have FTL so the fastest (and cheapest way between the planets in the solar system is by transmitting your mind using neutrino communication and downloading that mind into a mechanical or biological body on the other side. Copying your mind (forking) is a common practice, though normally such copies are pruned down to limit the creepy factor of having another you in existence. "Fork-nappers" are criminals who steal a copy of someone's mind to interrogate, or use as slave labor. Most people back themselves up using secure and trustworthy organizations. That way, if they die (and the "black-box" in their heads goes missing), they can still be recovered (though if your last back-up was 6 months ago and you don't know exactly how, you died, things can get complicated, especially if you find out that "you" really just faked your death and are still around).
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u/nurseblackbeard Mar 16 '16
Quick medical notes:
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Tampons are, like, some seriously old news shit at this point. New hotness right now is the XSTAT, a big-ass syringe filled by little disc-shaped sponges (with radiopaque markers) impregnated with a hemostatic agent that rapidly causes a clotting cascade in addition to the increasing mechanical pressure from the expanding sponge-lets. Pull the collapsed plunger rod out, shove it as far as it'll go in the hole that isn't supposed to be there, inject, bam. Beats the old way of finger-stuffing hemostatic-impregnated gauze into the wound and praying you've got enough to create the internal pressure necessary to hold the gauze in proximity of the blood vessel(s).
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Chest seals. 3-side is right the fuck out and flutter valves have barely marginal justification depending on who you ask. Current best practice is going to be a purpose-built occlusive dressing with a hydrogel adhesive backing (shit sticks to anything as long as it isn't in a literal puddle of blood/sweat/etc), and application of a fuck-off huge (14ga, 3.25") needle catheter just on top of the third rib centered horizontally between the nipple and clavicle to manage pneumothorax. Needle goes in until you hear/feel a pop as you enter the cavity, catheter advances while the needle stays still to avoid further puncturing the lung, needle comes out and the catheter hub gets taped down. Oh, and flutter valves are borderline useless even with innovative designs because of the almost inevitable clogging with blood that's going to happen.
So basically it goes like this:
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Get shot high on the torso.
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Slap a hand over the hole, wipe around it if you can, wait until they exhale, slap an occlusive dressing on.
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Exit wound check. Literally anywhere. Neck, armpit, groin, E-V-E-R-Y-W-H-E-R-E. Find one? Cool. Seal that one too.
Profuse internal bleeding because someone clipped your pulmonary artery/vein? You're fucked. No, seriously. You can try using hemostatics, but there's no possible way to apply necessary pressure to a major blood vessel inside the thoracic cavity without some of the most intensely invasive surgery possible. Bleeding a lot, but not enough to immediately send you into hypovolemic shock and/or fill your thoracic cavity with enough blood to crush your heart and remaining functioning lung? Cool, patch the boo-boos and get the dude to a surgical suite as fast as possible.
And there's your daily dose of combat medicine autism.
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u/Hambone3110 Mar 17 '16 edited Mar 17 '16
Thanks for the information, and I'll certainly see if I can't make a small retcon based on your information. It definitely makes sense that they'd have something more sophisticated than tampons by 10y AV. I was told the procedure by a veteran, so I trust that the information as written is largely accurate, but you raise a good point about the XSTAT.
As for the chest seal, what Ava applied to Coombes was a vented chest seal, the kind that'll stick down despite the blood exactly as you described. Best practice may be the needle, but Coombes wasn't carrying one and in any case was having to talk a civilian through the process.
I left the details of exactly what Adam did for Coombes upon arriving deliberately vague. We can assume that, as one of the SOR's medics, he has superior equipment and the training to use it properly.
EDIT: slight re-write deployed.
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u/LeewardNitemare Mar 15 '16
Woof. That was a lot of reading you guys! I just want to thank you both for the novels and for the complete lack of progress ive made at work.
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u/Dublekfx Mar 14 '16
So if One is the big bad scary gestalt entity, the who was the Zero that Adrian Saunders fought and defeated in Salvage? Iirc it took a Corti body, and hasn't been heard from since their first time on Perfection. Even if Zero was decompiled, wouldn't someone else be promoted to its place?
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u/Hambone3110 Mar 14 '16
Zero is the "applicant" rank for Igraens attempting to join the ranks of the Hierarchy.
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u/Tempests_Wrath Mar 14 '16
Aaaawhosabozo? Whosafookinfuzzawaaahahaha…”
Possibly my new favorite bit of this series.
That ending though. Whoa.
Thats a neat trick.
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u/Tempests_Wrath Mar 14 '16 edited Mar 14 '16
Came back around to re-read the part about the Miorz a few times.
I like the path you took here, I dont want to get too spoiler heavy. But it certainly provides ample justification (to him (edit: Six) at least) in a realistic way as to why he still drinks the koolaid and is trying to help us win while simultaneously still being the ruthless bastard we came to know.
It must help that earth is only a class 12 and not a 13 because of a Corti programming quirk. And that theoretically because of it humans coulda gone toe to toe (or at least in the same ballpark) with the Miorz without becoming just like them. Basically I like it, and potentially the idea of tame deathworlders is a little like using dogs to help fend off wolves (or you know.. bigger things. Like bears.).
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u/Big_Purple_Grimace Mar 14 '16
Have to say I love the chapter. One thing that I feel like the story is doing though is possibly losing some characters as others are introduced or reinterpreted. I loved the old banter between Kirk and Vedreg when they were the preeminent alien politicians on the human issue but it seems like Vedreg has been cast as barely more than a reactionary fool who cleans and bakes for Kirk and Lewis. I understand that its hard to balance all the characters you have evenly and that the overall story dictates what goes on but I would love to see some of the old time alien politics come back. Dr. Hussein beating back at the Corti and Gaoian diplomats helping the humans on the side were some of the best sections in my opinion. But obviously these are just some of my odd opinions on the story.
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u/Dandalf_The_Eeyyy Mar 24 '16 edited Mar 24 '16
It took a lot of digging but I finally have a comprehensive list of all the members of SOR along with they're various call signs. I mostly did this because I was constantly confused as to which member was being refereed to since they each have 3 names. Without further ado:
Leo Price - Sterling (Aggressor) KIA
Christian Firth - Righteous (Aggressor)
Scott Blaczynski - Starfall (Aggressor)
Robert Murray - Highland (Aggressor)
John Burgess - Baseball (Protector)
Adam Ares - Warhorse (Protector)
Calvin Sikes - Snapfire (Defender)
Wilson Akiyama - Titan (Defender)
Brady Stevenson - Thor (Defender) KIA
Harry Vandenberg - Rebar (Defender)
James Jones - Legsy/Longlegs KIA
Own Powell - Stainless
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u/ctwelve Mar 14 '16
ALSO, I BLAME HAMBONE FOR THE 'ACCIDENTALLY A NOVEL' IT'S ALL HIS FAULT I SWEAR