Snippet #2816055

Amidst the chaos, Roland took a deep breath. He spoke clearly into the transmitter using a speech-to-text-to-speech conversion dictation device. The resulting voice was clear and monotoned although maintained the volume and emphasis with which he spoke. The signal appeared to originate from the Command Carrier’s transmitter, as well as every spaceport on Sky’s Edge.

“Hello, Admiral. I’m requesting that you cease this clumsy display of power. This is a planet of warlords. Like the land, they’ve grown into hostility long before your lot ever claimed dominion out here. They adapt to survive. So go ahead, burn this world. The people here will continue to rise from the ashes and their children will finally see who they should have been fighting all this time. End of transmission.”

Roland looked at Jack and smiled. The tension was as high as ever, but Roland could not help but feel a little pride in telling an Aschen authority what for. Behind the shallow gloating, he was genuinely unsure what was going to happen. He knew the planet was well armed, it was just up to those factions to set their sights on the common enemy.

~Elsewhere on Sky’s Edge~

In addition to their traditional armaments, the neverending arms race on Sky’s Edge had resulted in the procurement or development of many fascinating tools of destruction.

A large manned turret was embedded in a jungle settlement, with a 20ft lightning rod on top of a large open vacuum tube. A stray fighter was moving out to investigate the approaching Taiyou ships. The woman manning the turret followed it, aware of what it was doing. However this fighter was from an opposing faction.

She turned to her male superior with the telescopic-binoculars. He turned to her and nodded, smiling. Her eyes lit up, and a devilish smirk struck her hardened expression. She pulled a large lever to the left of the turret and a series of lights lit up all along the lightning-rod. In the turret’s line of sight, past the fighter it was aimed at, a series of dark cumulus clouds amassed together. A few moments later-
*CRACKOOM!!!*
A bolt of lightning came from the clouds and hit the fighter, frying its systems and blowing off of a wing sending it veering off course into the jungle canopy. The Cloud Cannon’s pilot cackled, swinging the gun around to the right and keeping its sights on the Taiyou ships as the distant clouds started to re-align themselves.

Her superior used a primitive comms unit to alert four other mortar crews to abandon camp and man their respective Cloud Cannons.


The fighter had emerged from underneath a lake in an underground hangar. Nine more shot out to locate the Cloud Cannon that took out their comrade, uncertain whether the Taiyou ships were worth worrying about. They were understanding, however, of the clouds amassing above them.

Each fighter was armed with what was known as a Colour Bomb, a remotely detonated smoke bomb that spreads an incredibly thick, bright multicolored smoke in a 10 mile radius. The smoke is thick enough to act as paint for anything that comes into contact with it. A technology appropriated from mass exterior painting tech, the Colour Bomb was used to blind spaces in atmosphere or on the ground, as well as paint its moving targets that otherwise would try to camouflage themselves in the jungle.

They were also equipped with simple Light Beams, essentially hyper powerful spotlights that fired a concentrated UV ray. They could burn through flesh, set standard foliage on fire, and a sustained beam could burn through steel. Ordinarily, the power on these would be toned down to act as standard spotlights.

As for their ballistic weapons, average 90mm cannons for tearing shit up.

One Colour Bomb was fired at the origin point of the thunderclouds (possibly in the path of the Taiyou ships), intended to blind the Cloud Cannon’s target whereas another fighter bombed the jungle in a rough estimation of where the pilot thought it was. They were not mathematical geniuses, and the Colour Bomb’s boundary was a couple miles off of the weather-manipulating artillery.


Chaos like this was consistent in most uninhabited spaces across Sky’s Edge. Civilisation and agriculture was frequently abandoned in these rapid skirmishes for land, only to be taken back when the enemy (or a new faction) showed up with armaments designed to counter what had resulted in their defeat. Bladder Mines for orbital bombardment, Weirdness Sludge for bio-confusion, and Evolution Rays to ruin degradable materials in inefficiently designed tech.

It was likely that EVE would know what the militias called their improvised and traded weaponry, and they only cared enough to hide themselves from whom they were fighting. The exact details of their latest tech, however, would have to be learnt through experience.