VanMorgan
The Beacon outpost was a Remote Broadcast Station, or “RBS”, setup to provide support for members of Zion while in the Matrix. Each outpost was shielded from electronic detection devices, and had access to the Matrix through a central unmanned station, called “The Hub,” that linked all the outposts. It was physically hard-wire hacked into the Matrix so it couldn’t be traced.. We were like a mini Zion, only much smaller. We were one of the smaller outposts in the region. But, we still had our own fusion generator, recycling systems, food stores, hangar, etc. We usually got a resupply from Zion every couple of weeks, brought out by the Osiris. We had a station compliment of 78 members. Of those 78; 10 were operators, 20 “Matrix” operatives, 15 facility security staff, 7 command staff, 13 facility technicians and Maintenance, and 12 ship engineers. We would have operatives in the Matrix at all times, and at at least 1 operator online. But one day, something was wrong.
I was a Matrix operative, plugged in. I was on the phone w/ my operator, Bell. We were in the middle of a mission brief when she yelled something incoherent, I wasn’t sure what. Then the line went dead. Moments later one of the other operators called me back. He said “You have to get out of the Matrix, NOW!!” I wasn’t sure what was going on, but I wasn’t far from a hardline. I reached it about the same time as four of the other operatives in the Matrix. They had looks of terror on their faces, as I’m sure I did as well. We each took our turns jacking out. I was the last one out.
As I regained myself in the bay, I became aware of a phrenetic sense of panic. There was almost no sense of order in the place. I managed to grab one of the techs, and he told me we had been compromised. I wasn’t sure what that meant, so I headed to the command deck. There, Commander Hook informed me we had incoming, and wanted me to report to the guns.
For months, our techs had been working on a couple new technologies we had gotten from an Exile in the matrix. They were a couple of new weapon types that could be used against the machines. The first was an Electro-Static Discharge gun, or “ESD”. It was similar to the standard “lightning gun” carried on most ships, except instead of a steady stream of energy, it fired in pulses, physically destroying the target. The second was an Electro-Magnetic Discharge gun, or “EMD”. This second type of weapon fired a directed electro-magnetic pulse, disabling any electronic devices within the line of fire. Muzzle shielding provided protection to surrounding electronics, but anything within 1 to 3 meters received temporary “E.M.P.” effects. We hadn’t quite worked out all the bugs yet, so we hadn’t reported the devices to Zion. Most unfortunately for them, I would find out later.
We had several batteries of each type of gun mounted at the 4 access tunnels to the station, and I made my way to one of the ESD batteries at access tunnel 3. It was a smaller tunnel, only about 12 meters across, but we’d had squidies come up that way before. All of a sudden I heard the fizzle and pop of the forward batteries engaging hostiles. God, there must’ve been dozens of ‘em. The guns didn’t stop firing. On my scanner, I could see them. Sentinels, just outside E.M.P. range, but coming in quick. I trained my guns down the tunnel. Just as the scanners had them coming into my line of fire, something exploded behind me, and I was knocked unconscious. I don’t remember anything after that. . . . .
I regained consciousness several hours later. I was in pretty bad shape. Debris from the explosion must have dislocated my shoulder, and I was aware of blood free flowing from the right side of my face and chest. I dressed the wounds as best I could, but I knew I would need medical attention if I hoped to survive. The station was trashed. The squidies had destroyed just about everything. Somehow, the reactor hadn’t gone critical, and the hangar was virtually untouched. As I search for any signs of life, all I kept finding were mangled bodies. The smell of death was overwhelming. Then I heard it. Tap tap tap; tap, tap, tap; tap tap tap. It just kept repeating. Three quick taps, three slow taps, and three more quick taps. Someone was signaling an SOS. I tried to follow the tapping, with it getting louder as I went along. Finally the sound dead ended at a wall, but whoever it was, they were on the other side. I had a mobile ESD gun, and signaled whoever it was to take cover.
A couple shots later, w/ the smell of burnt metal in the air, I stepped through the hole. What I saw on the other side wasn’t very encouraging. Death, everywhere I looked. I was afraid I had killed whoever was in here tapping the SOS But then, I heard her voice. It was small, and timid, like that of a small child. It was Wing, one of our operators. She wasn’t in much better condition than I was. Her head was wrapped in gauze, and her left arm was in a sling. Her clothes tattered, blood virtually covering her entire body. She would go on to tell me the sentinels had broken through the defenses, and stormed the station. She and a few of the other operators had hidden in one of the access shafts, but had been discovered. They stammered out to find sentinels just tearing everyone and everything to pieces. Then there was an explosion. It may have been the same explosion that knocked me out. But afterwards, all she could think to do was take one of the bodies of the others, and hide underneath it hoping she wouldn’t be discovered. Luckily, the explosion had blocked off the room she was in, and apparently the sentinels were satisfied because they didn’t try to get in.
We both stumbled about, carrying each other. We got lucky and found an aid station. After tending to each other wounds, we tried to salvage what we could. Of the five ships in the bay, the Cerberus, a standard Mk. VI hovercraft; the Swift, a modified “01 Versatran” Model III hovercraft; and the Gibraltar, a Mk. VIII Command Cruiser Hovercraft, were in the best condition. The other two, the Albatross and the Fist were damaged beyond repair. We managed to get the sensor array on the Gibraltar online.
We scanned the area, and found remote sentinel activity, but it was several kilometers away and moving farther. But we had another problem. The sentinels had buried us. The station lay under a couple hundred meters of debris. Luckily, with the weapons onboard the Gibraltar, we would be able to get through it with little trouble, but we weren’t sure if that would attract more attention. Luckily the Gibraltar and the Cerberus both still had broadcast capabilities; but only the Cerberus had direct-connect capabilities. We powered up minimum systems on the Cerberus, hoping it would go unnoticed. Wing was still shaky, but we needed to know if there had been any other attacks. Our last sensor readings had the sentinel army heading toward Lighthouse Outpost. As Wing loaded me into our “Secure Outpost Communication Construct”, all I could think was “Please let me warn them in time”. The SOCC was a hard-wired, direct connect network; similar to a LAN; that was also run through The Hub. But I was too late. Their access node was null. There’s always one member from each outpost in the SOCC, but now there was noone. Had we been the last station attacked? Of the 7 stations in our region, were we the only ones left?
As I scanned the room, all I could find was a plain white envelope and single sheet of paper with a hastily written message. The paper had only one sentence on it. It read “They are coming, be on guard.” Had one of the other stations seen the attack coming and try to warn the rest of us? And the envelope contained a letter of apology. All it said was “Please forgive me for what I have done. I had no choice.” Had we been betrayed? Had someone within our own ranks disclosed the locations of the outposts? And what about Zion? If the machines could find us here, it was possible that Zion had been compromised as well. They had to be warned. But how? There was nothing we could do. The debris blocked the ships from broadcasting into the Matrix, and all the other access nodes in the SOCC were dead. As I came out, I told Wing of what I had discovered. She took it rather well. All she said was “By the grace of God we were spared. Now we have to survive, to try to warn Zion.” I didn’t share her religious optimism toward our situation, but I tried to share her resolve to warn the others.
We powered down the Cerberus, and moved into the Gibraltar to begin the task of trying to blast our way out. As we powered up, the sensors picked up the Osiris. She was moving fast, and the sentinel army was on her tail. They must have been making a supply run. All I could do now was ask Wing to pray for them. As she whispered a hushed verse, I powered up the forward ESD guns, and began firing at the main access tunnel, which would be our only hope of getting out.
Rock and steel began melting away in flashes. I couldn’t do too much at one time because our sensor scans told us the tunnels had been weakened in the attack It was a slow and arduous pace, but we finally had opened up the end of the tunnel. There was debris from another ship, but I couldn’t tell which one. Had they tried to warn us? Had they tried to fight with, or defend us? Or had they led the sentinels to us? I would never know. The debris was scattered over to large an area and the damage too extensive to hope for survivors.
Once we were back in the hangar, we tried to think of what to do next. There was no way we could contact Zion to warn them of the sentinel army; The Hub’s Matrix connection had been severed. We didn’t know the condition of the other outposts. We didn’t know if the sentinels were going to come back. After another sensor sweep on the Gibraltar came back with no contacts at all in the area, we decided to head for Lighthouse outpost. We chose to take the Swift. She had virtually no weapons, but was faster than anything else we’d ever encountered from the machines. Also, she could hold a passenger capacity of up to ten people, so any survivors we’d find, we’d be able to bring them back with us. So we loaded up the storage w/ medical supplies, and rations for a short while, and moved out. We took a mobile scanner with us, just to keep an eye out. It only had a range of about a kilometer and a half, but that would be plenty to give us a head start if we had to run.
We got out to Lighthouse Outpost a couple hours later, and actually found survivors; a half dozen techs and an operator. They’d held up in a reactor coolant storage room. The room was empty but shielded, so the sentinels never even knew they were there. The had told us that they had been hit right around the same time we had. They’d seen the sentinel patrol that Wing and I had seen on the sensors, but the squidies hadn’t stopped. So, we helped tend to their wounds, which were surprisingly minor, and searched for salvageable materials. We found quite a bit, more than we could fit in the storage of the Swift. So we decided we’d come back with the Cerberus. It had plenty of room for what was here. Unfortunately their hangar had been virtually destroyed, and none of the ships were salvageable.
And so it went. We’d move out to the other outposts, search for survivors, bandage them if they were wounded, and see what was salvageable. We even found a couple more ships at Hope and Rock outposts. But at Frontier the fusion reactor had been shut down and was totally intact. Several of us found that very suspicious, since that would have left the outpost totally defenseless. But there was no sign that there had even been a conflict. No damage, no bodies, nothing. Two of their five ships were gone, and the three remaining had been disabled. None of the techs could figure out how. Needless to say, there were no survivors found there. But, of the 7 outposts in our region, 5 had survivors, 6 had salvageable materials, and only North Star Outpost had been totally destroyed; the result of what we can only assume as it’s reactor going critical.
The area was saturated with radiation, and there was no trace of the station on our sensor scans. And since the machines hadn’t used radiation based weapons since the “Second Renaissance,” which we can only guess was a hundred years or more ago, a reactor meltdown was the only logical explanation. However, on the outskirts of the blast zone, we found what appeared to be a machine storage facility. It had several dozen old Versetran type scout hovercrafts, and hundreds of sentinels, from squidies to runners. Few of them had any damage if any at all. But none of them had ever even been programmed, let alone activated. This gave some of the techs ideas. So we collected up as many sentinels and about a dozen of the Versetrans, and took them back to Beacon.
We all knew we’d never be safe at Beacon. The area had taken quite a beating, and if we were attacked again, we’d be done for. So we starting thinking about finding a new base of operations. Some of us had thought about Frontier, but something just didn’t feel right about that place. It was too clean. And we couldn’t go back to Zion. None of us felt any great loyalty to them. They’d failed us in our times of need. So, we began scouting out. We’d managed to modify the crafts we’d salvaged from the machine storage for human occupancy, equipped them with medium range scanners, and would go out in two ship teams. These new ships were almost as fast as the Swift, so being caught wasn’t a real concern. Finding a suitable place to relocate to, however, presented a larger challenge.
After the “Lightning Incident” sever years prior, Wing and I, being the sole survivors of Beacon, and both of us having served on the Lightning before it was renamed the Cerberus; we had connections inside Zion. And after the battle that ended the war with the machines, we were able to finally contact Zion. They had sustained heavy losses, but were still in better condition than we were. But with very a little, however vital, assistance from Zion, we were able to locate another RBS that had been excavated in secrecy, but never completed or occupied. It was much larger than any of the other outposts, and considerably farther from Zion as well. But with some alterations to the facility, it suited our needs just fine. The hanger was large enough to accommodate all our ships, plus had room in case we “acquired” a few more. We had facilities and quarters for the entire survivor complement from Beacon plus many more. There were recycling systems, processors, and scrubbers almost comparable to those in Zion. We were, suffice it to say, entirely self sufficient. And we were far enough from Zion to be independent of them, but close enough to lend a hand or receive one in dire circumstances. And we called our new home Phoenix Station, after the creature of legend, able to rise again from the ashes of it’s own destruction. And thus, this story is how the survivors of the outposts of Remote Region IV came to be known simply as “The Others”.
I was a Matrix operative, plugged in. I was on the phone w/ my operator, Bell. We were in the middle of a mission brief when she yelled something incoherent, I wasn’t sure what. Then the line went dead. Moments later one of the other operators called me back. He said “You have to get out of the Matrix, NOW!!” I wasn’t sure what was going on, but I wasn’t far from a hardline. I reached it about the same time as four of the other operatives in the Matrix. They had looks of terror on their faces, as I’m sure I did as well. We each took our turns jacking out. I was the last one out.
As I regained myself in the bay, I became aware of a phrenetic sense of panic. There was almost no sense of order in the place. I managed to grab one of the techs, and he told me we had been compromised. I wasn’t sure what that meant, so I headed to the command deck. There, Commander Hook informed me we had incoming, and wanted me to report to the guns.
For months, our techs had been working on a couple new technologies we had gotten from an Exile in the matrix. They were a couple of new weapon types that could be used against the machines. The first was an Electro-Static Discharge gun, or “ESD”. It was similar to the standard “lightning gun” carried on most ships, except instead of a steady stream of energy, it fired in pulses, physically destroying the target. The second was an Electro-Magnetic Discharge gun, or “EMD”. This second type of weapon fired a directed electro-magnetic pulse, disabling any electronic devices within the line of fire. Muzzle shielding provided protection to surrounding electronics, but anything within 1 to 3 meters received temporary “E.M.P.” effects. We hadn’t quite worked out all the bugs yet, so we hadn’t reported the devices to Zion. Most unfortunately for them, I would find out later.
We had several batteries of each type of gun mounted at the 4 access tunnels to the station, and I made my way to one of the ESD batteries at access tunnel 3. It was a smaller tunnel, only about 12 meters across, but we’d had squidies come up that way before. All of a sudden I heard the fizzle and pop of the forward batteries engaging hostiles. God, there must’ve been dozens of ‘em. The guns didn’t stop firing. On my scanner, I could see them. Sentinels, just outside E.M.P. range, but coming in quick. I trained my guns down the tunnel. Just as the scanners had them coming into my line of fire, something exploded behind me, and I was knocked unconscious. I don’t remember anything after that. . . . .
I regained consciousness several hours later. I was in pretty bad shape. Debris from the explosion must have dislocated my shoulder, and I was aware of blood free flowing from the right side of my face and chest. I dressed the wounds as best I could, but I knew I would need medical attention if I hoped to survive. The station was trashed. The squidies had destroyed just about everything. Somehow, the reactor hadn’t gone critical, and the hangar was virtually untouched. As I search for any signs of life, all I kept finding were mangled bodies. The smell of death was overwhelming. Then I heard it. Tap tap tap; tap, tap, tap; tap tap tap. It just kept repeating. Three quick taps, three slow taps, and three more quick taps. Someone was signaling an SOS. I tried to follow the tapping, with it getting louder as I went along. Finally the sound dead ended at a wall, but whoever it was, they were on the other side. I had a mobile ESD gun, and signaled whoever it was to take cover.
A couple shots later, w/ the smell of burnt metal in the air, I stepped through the hole. What I saw on the other side wasn’t very encouraging. Death, everywhere I looked. I was afraid I had killed whoever was in here tapping the SOS But then, I heard her voice. It was small, and timid, like that of a small child. It was Wing, one of our operators. She wasn’t in much better condition than I was. Her head was wrapped in gauze, and her left arm was in a sling. Her clothes tattered, blood virtually covering her entire body. She would go on to tell me the sentinels had broken through the defenses, and stormed the station. She and a few of the other operators had hidden in one of the access shafts, but had been discovered. They stammered out to find sentinels just tearing everyone and everything to pieces. Then there was an explosion. It may have been the same explosion that knocked me out. But afterwards, all she could think to do was take one of the bodies of the others, and hide underneath it hoping she wouldn’t be discovered. Luckily, the explosion had blocked off the room she was in, and apparently the sentinels were satisfied because they didn’t try to get in.
We both stumbled about, carrying each other. We got lucky and found an aid station. After tending to each other wounds, we tried to salvage what we could. Of the five ships in the bay, the Cerberus, a standard Mk. VI hovercraft; the Swift, a modified “01 Versatran” Model III hovercraft; and the Gibraltar, a Mk. VIII Command Cruiser Hovercraft, were in the best condition. The other two, the Albatross and the Fist were damaged beyond repair. We managed to get the sensor array on the Gibraltar online.
We scanned the area, and found remote sentinel activity, but it was several kilometers away and moving farther. But we had another problem. The sentinels had buried us. The station lay under a couple hundred meters of debris. Luckily, with the weapons onboard the Gibraltar, we would be able to get through it with little trouble, but we weren’t sure if that would attract more attention. Luckily the Gibraltar and the Cerberus both still had broadcast capabilities; but only the Cerberus had direct-connect capabilities. We powered up minimum systems on the Cerberus, hoping it would go unnoticed. Wing was still shaky, but we needed to know if there had been any other attacks. Our last sensor readings had the sentinel army heading toward Lighthouse Outpost. As Wing loaded me into our “Secure Outpost Communication Construct”, all I could think was “Please let me warn them in time”. The SOCC was a hard-wired, direct connect network; similar to a LAN; that was also run through The Hub. But I was too late. Their access node was null. There’s always one member from each outpost in the SOCC, but now there was noone. Had we been the last station attacked? Of the 7 stations in our region, were we the only ones left?
As I scanned the room, all I could find was a plain white envelope and single sheet of paper with a hastily written message. The paper had only one sentence on it. It read “They are coming, be on guard.” Had one of the other stations seen the attack coming and try to warn the rest of us? And the envelope contained a letter of apology. All it said was “Please forgive me for what I have done. I had no choice.” Had we been betrayed? Had someone within our own ranks disclosed the locations of the outposts? And what about Zion? If the machines could find us here, it was possible that Zion had been compromised as well. They had to be warned. But how? There was nothing we could do. The debris blocked the ships from broadcasting into the Matrix, and all the other access nodes in the SOCC were dead. As I came out, I told Wing of what I had discovered. She took it rather well. All she said was “By the grace of God we were spared. Now we have to survive, to try to warn Zion.” I didn’t share her religious optimism toward our situation, but I tried to share her resolve to warn the others.
We powered down the Cerberus, and moved into the Gibraltar to begin the task of trying to blast our way out. As we powered up, the sensors picked up the Osiris. She was moving fast, and the sentinel army was on her tail. They must have been making a supply run. All I could do now was ask Wing to pray for them. As she whispered a hushed verse, I powered up the forward ESD guns, and began firing at the main access tunnel, which would be our only hope of getting out.
Rock and steel began melting away in flashes. I couldn’t do too much at one time because our sensor scans told us the tunnels had been weakened in the attack It was a slow and arduous pace, but we finally had opened up the end of the tunnel. There was debris from another ship, but I couldn’t tell which one. Had they tried to warn us? Had they tried to fight with, or defend us? Or had they led the sentinels to us? I would never know. The debris was scattered over to large an area and the damage too extensive to hope for survivors.
Once we were back in the hangar, we tried to think of what to do next. There was no way we could contact Zion to warn them of the sentinel army; The Hub’s Matrix connection had been severed. We didn’t know the condition of the other outposts. We didn’t know if the sentinels were going to come back. After another sensor sweep on the Gibraltar came back with no contacts at all in the area, we decided to head for Lighthouse outpost. We chose to take the Swift. She had virtually no weapons, but was faster than anything else we’d ever encountered from the machines. Also, she could hold a passenger capacity of up to ten people, so any survivors we’d find, we’d be able to bring them back with us. So we loaded up the storage w/ medical supplies, and rations for a short while, and moved out. We took a mobile scanner with us, just to keep an eye out. It only had a range of about a kilometer and a half, but that would be plenty to give us a head start if we had to run.
We got out to Lighthouse Outpost a couple hours later, and actually found survivors; a half dozen techs and an operator. They’d held up in a reactor coolant storage room. The room was empty but shielded, so the sentinels never even knew they were there. The had told us that they had been hit right around the same time we had. They’d seen the sentinel patrol that Wing and I had seen on the sensors, but the squidies hadn’t stopped. So, we helped tend to their wounds, which were surprisingly minor, and searched for salvageable materials. We found quite a bit, more than we could fit in the storage of the Swift. So we decided we’d come back with the Cerberus. It had plenty of room for what was here. Unfortunately their hangar had been virtually destroyed, and none of the ships were salvageable.
And so it went. We’d move out to the other outposts, search for survivors, bandage them if they were wounded, and see what was salvageable. We even found a couple more ships at Hope and Rock outposts. But at Frontier the fusion reactor had been shut down and was totally intact. Several of us found that very suspicious, since that would have left the outpost totally defenseless. But there was no sign that there had even been a conflict. No damage, no bodies, nothing. Two of their five ships were gone, and the three remaining had been disabled. None of the techs could figure out how. Needless to say, there were no survivors found there. But, of the 7 outposts in our region, 5 had survivors, 6 had salvageable materials, and only North Star Outpost had been totally destroyed; the result of what we can only assume as it’s reactor going critical.
The area was saturated with radiation, and there was no trace of the station on our sensor scans. And since the machines hadn’t used radiation based weapons since the “Second Renaissance,” which we can only guess was a hundred years or more ago, a reactor meltdown was the only logical explanation. However, on the outskirts of the blast zone, we found what appeared to be a machine storage facility. It had several dozen old Versetran type scout hovercrafts, and hundreds of sentinels, from squidies to runners. Few of them had any damage if any at all. But none of them had ever even been programmed, let alone activated. This gave some of the techs ideas. So we collected up as many sentinels and about a dozen of the Versetrans, and took them back to Beacon.
We all knew we’d never be safe at Beacon. The area had taken quite a beating, and if we were attacked again, we’d be done for. So we starting thinking about finding a new base of operations. Some of us had thought about Frontier, but something just didn’t feel right about that place. It was too clean. And we couldn’t go back to Zion. None of us felt any great loyalty to them. They’d failed us in our times of need. So, we began scouting out. We’d managed to modify the crafts we’d salvaged from the machine storage for human occupancy, equipped them with medium range scanners, and would go out in two ship teams. These new ships were almost as fast as the Swift, so being caught wasn’t a real concern. Finding a suitable place to relocate to, however, presented a larger challenge.
After the “Lightning Incident” sever years prior, Wing and I, being the sole survivors of Beacon, and both of us having served on the Lightning before it was renamed the Cerberus; we had connections inside Zion. And after the battle that ended the war with the machines, we were able to finally contact Zion. They had sustained heavy losses, but were still in better condition than we were. But with very a little, however vital, assistance from Zion, we were able to locate another RBS that had been excavated in secrecy, but never completed or occupied. It was much larger than any of the other outposts, and considerably farther from Zion as well. But with some alterations to the facility, it suited our needs just fine. The hanger was large enough to accommodate all our ships, plus had room in case we “acquired” a few more. We had facilities and quarters for the entire survivor complement from Beacon plus many more. There were recycling systems, processors, and scrubbers almost comparable to those in Zion. We were, suffice it to say, entirely self sufficient. And we were far enough from Zion to be independent of them, but close enough to lend a hand or receive one in dire circumstances. And we called our new home Phoenix Station, after the creature of legend, able to rise again from the ashes of it’s own destruction. And thus, this story is how the survivors of the outposts of Remote Region IV came to be known simply as “The Others”.