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The original was posted on /r/hfy by /u/Spooker0 on 2025-06-25 14:04:46+00:00.
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099 Low Ground II
4 years after the Armistice
Fwup-fwup-fwup-fwup.
The thin blades of the Yakama helicopter drone buzzed rhythmically over her head, but they were barely a distraction for Bertel. After all, she’d been living in one attack chopper after another since she was hatched. And in a less… physical sense now than during her service in the Dominion, but it was all-so-familiar. She could fall asleep in this loud cockpit.
She closed her eyes for a brief moment and let the feeling of power wash over her as the interface booted up.
Her radio buzzed in her headset. “Spotter drone ready. Launch in ten… nine… eight…”
With the deft click of a claw, Bertel linked the target drone to her data-link sensors. Her Yakama helodrone couldn’t see it yet, but it knew what was coming too. The predators who’d taught her to use it, they had… inhibitions.
They believed it was important to separate the machine from the operator. That there was something unnatural, something uncomfortable about that link. It wasn’t so much a direct neural connection (those existed as well, mostly in experimental or specialized applications) as it was the machine simply watching her, learning from her patterns and behaviors. It understood intent, and in battle, a machine that could understand — truly understand — what its operator wanted was worth its weight in Republic credits.
The predators taught her tricks, taught her to use that connection, to truly utilize its frightening effectiveness sparingly in combat. They taught her the hardware, what each button and functionality on the multi-million credit Raytech-designed helodrone did. They taught her how to maintain it, to keep it combat effective even when out of logistics reach. They taught her their fears, their ever-present paranoia of losing control to the machines.
Bertel had none of those fears. She’d dropped those the moment she joined them on Grantor. She didn’t care who was in control here; she wasn’t bred to.
Fwup-fwup-fwup-fwup.
Her sensor suite beeped in the background to inform her of what the circular dome on top of her rotors could see. Most of it was civilian radio devices in the city, their emissions clear enough for her machine to categorize and discard. A few friendly radios showed up as well, as their sensor networks merged with hers after only being the briefest authorization.
“Three… two… one… launch!” the traffic control team reported to her via the hardline.
The Yakama drone opened its eyes.
Boop. Boop. Boop. Boop.
In Dominion aviation, that sounded dangerously close to a warning that she was being radar-locked. But Bertel knew that was not the case. It couldn’t be. Her helodrone was dark black, its skin meshed with a layer of soft radar-absorbing material and paint that made her appear as no larger than a bug from the front.
No. That was not a warning. That was the sound of the dinner bell for her Yakama drone. As she raised its collective to rise above the ten-story city building she’d been perched behind, nearly three dozen red boxes popped into her interface.
Boop. Boop. Boop.
More targets arrived. And then, the expected happened.
Brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrt.
One of the enemy Light Longclaws evidently detected the spotter drone, its autocannon raking the skies with tracers. After only a second of continuous fire, the link for the spotter drone blinked out from her feed.
Their locations now revealed, two of the enemy vehicles began pounding the traffic control tower with their cannons, glass and concrete flying off it as they peeled away at its thin walls.
But the Yakama got what it needed, and so did she.
Bertel let the computer select the targets, watching the boxes tick up, then she squeezed the trigger. The machine knew she was going to do it, and she couldn’t tell if it acted before or after she gave the signal. It didn’t matter.
Thud. Thud. Thud. Thud. Thud. Thud. Thud. Thud. Thud. Thud. Thud. Thud.
A dozen Made in Ceres Hornet-80 guided rockets flew off her rack almost simultaneously. Ever since missiles were invented by humans, turning on their seekers so they could begin tracking their targets was a process their pilots called “uncaging”. Here, it was almost literal. The intelligence chips in her Hornet-80s had been on standby, dreaming about this moment since they were produced. Uncaged, they sought their targets.
They each independently noted the moderately heavy electronic warfare signals in their airspace. Four years ago, Znosian electronic warfare was barely distinguishable from slightly more powerful civilian toys. Now, after four years of continuous war, after all the advances imported into the battlefield by the grand predator coalition egging the participants on, it was enough to make the intelligence chips at least sit up and crack their knuckles.
The Hornet-80s coordinated targeting and produced matching countermeasures as they went hypersonic. The targets were only a short distance away from the Yakama drone that kept feeding them its sensor data, but it wasn’t like Republic taxpayers were getting a refund for the fuel they didn’t use up here. Their sophisticated variable-thrust engines burnt brightly as they sped towards their targets.
They deployed a series of penetration aids, confusing the enemy approach detection radars. A few automated guns tried to track them. These were significantly more advanced than the primitive computers that the Dominion fielded at the start of this war, but the research and development divisions at Raytech had not been slacking off during the Znosian schism either.
After all, there were six hundred planets at war. Continuous interstellar war. These were the greatest four years in history, ever, to be a weapons maker. Republic defense companies saw their quarterly revenues take off like the turret ring of a Znosian tank when hit by plasma fire. And some of that money even went towards making better weapons.
In any case, this was their job.
The Longclaws on the ground had been designed for a variety of tasks: transport, fire support, suppression, drone detection, and a few of them were even meant for air defense.
But everything at Bertel’s claws was designed to turn those metal boxes she saw in her white-hot thermal imagery into burning heaps of scrap. Her agility. Her sensors. Her electronic warfare module. Her avionics. Her weapons. Everything.
The Hornet-80s honed in on their targets like their namesake.
Boooooooooooooooom.
For the untrained biological eye, it would appear as if all dozen enemy vehicles exploded simultaneously. For the machine, if there was any gap between the explosions, it readily acknowledged its imperfection that it didn’t have the sensors advanced enough to see them.
Bertel watched them explode, but she didn’t celebrate. Her job was not over.
Thud. Thud. Thud. Thud. Thud. Thud. Thud. Thud. Thud. Thud. Thud. Thud.
Another dozen enemy vehicles disappeared in fiery explosions. The last few Loyalists began reacting. Their turrets moved, their track pivoted them in her direction…
Her third volley finished off the rest of the enemy vehicles.
“Enemy armor neutralized,” Bertel reported dispassionately as she began cataloguing the smaller targets through her sensor pod. Unfortunately for the enemy infantry remaining, the spaceport was very much a flat, open area. Which was favorable condition for the operation of their armored vehicles… about five seconds ago when they still had those.
Snick.
With barely a sound, a hatch in the Yakama’s belly opened to expose its 20mm autocannon. “Working on the hoppers now,” Bertel continued calmly.
That was slang she picked up back on Grantor.
That was where she started, flying for her unit of rogues and volunteers in Grantor Intelligence. But that part of the war had been over pretty quickly. Without support, the Loyalist and State Security units on Grantor had been wiped out in droves, even before the Dominion’s armistice timer with the predator coalition officially ran out. She spent a couple months re-living her earlier experience in the Grantor occupation, a bird of prey raining fire at specks of heat from a kilometer above the battlefield, except this time the holdouts and insurgents were Znosian and not stubborn Granti. Those guys didn’t last very long either; the Granti cleared them out from their home planet with enthusiasm you just couldn’t breed.
After that stint, she was loaned out to one Free Znosian unit after another that needed a pilot who knew how to work predator equipment or with their tactics. It was a surprisingly in-demand position. After all, the predators weren’t supposed to be actively fighting this war on the ground. Deploying them — even the volunteers — to frontline planets was a politically sensitive subject for decision makers back in the predator civilizations. But Bertel had fluffy ears and long whiskers like the rest of them. Take off her Granti Intelligence unit patch, put on a Free Znosian Marine uniform, and no one asked any extra questions.
Far more difficult to smuggle down to Britvik-3 than Bertel herself was, of course, the helodrone. But it was a planet of…
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