Hey guys, I'm back.

You have like a hundred thousand credits you stupid fuck. Why in the shit do you care about a hundred? [/quote]

Aw c'mmawwwn, shift manager, you should know dis by now - it ain't 'bout da cash, it's da principle. You make a bet wit' some frog legs, an' shit comes yer way, 'specially on Iceball Central, you expect ter get paid 'cause daaaamn bitch you got made. But noooooooo, pussy li'l toad says da crawlers on dat snowball ain't rachni, dey're a fungus wit leeeegs.

An' I say shit ter dat, dem shits was rachni what got loose. But frungy ain't payin, so I gotta tell Steve I'm takin' a leave'a absence offa dat snowball ter collect, 'cause you know dat once you've seen dem spiders it ain't gon' be long 'till you see 'em again.

AN' DEN DEM REAPERS ATTACKED AN' ALLA SUDDEN EVER'BUDDY'S SCREAMIN' BOUT SPIDERS LAUNCHIN' NUKES AN' SHIT

AN HE STILL SAYS DEY AIN'T RACHNI, DEY'S JUST SOME TARANTULAS WIT' CANNONS ON DERE BACKS SO DEY DON'T COUNT

NEVER MIND DA FACT WHAT DEM REAPERS LOOK LIKE GIANT BUGS IN DA FIRS' PLACE

SO NOW WE GOT FUCKIN' SPIDERS GOIN "HI FUCKERS WE GON' ROOM UP WIT' DA BUCKETBOT BRIGADE AN' I'M MADDER'N HELL

'CAUSE I AM RIGHT

I AM RIGHT
I AM RIGHT AGAIN






an' i aim ter fuckin' collect






also vents sez i used up my ladeez budget fer da next year
an' dis dwick's dwick got needs, y'know

...buildin' shit

for, uh

a show







called shitshow


eh

arms grow back

Man, I know there is the fucking principle of a bet. But asshole, you are supposed to be one of the wealthiest fuckers on this site. I mean, you're fucking fat as hell how the fuck can you not be fucking rich?


Why the fuck do you even have that fat little asshole around? You're bigger than he is you dumb fucker. Just punt his gargantuan ass out a window

fuck, man

You can even record that shit make an entire special out of it called

Fucker Volus Gets Booted Out my Window


Fucking liar

'CAUSE I FUCKIN' COLLECT ON MY DEBTS, BITCH


Uh, duh. It ain't no meteor hammer wit'out da counterweight.


I AIN'T NEVER LIED IN MY NINE HUNNERD AN' FITTY SOME'IN YEARS OF MY LIFE YOU TOOTHLESS SOFT-CRESTED EXCUSE FER A WHELP

Man, you don't even know. Turned out that they didn't have to even remove the arm; it wasn't damaged badly enough to warrant getting rid of it according to Polcus' medical readouts from the field. They just had to set it properly, pump me full of medigel, make sure that the treatments took, and then get me back in the fight. But no, the regulars arranged for me to get my arm cut off, jammed a cybernetic in there, and woke me up after the process was done. I spent the next week trying to adjust to the implant before going back into combat. So it probably took longer for me to get back on the field than it would have if they'd just given me the damn medigel and some bed-rest.

The worst part? The loyalists charged me for the implant and surgery, and then added a surcharge on top of that. Took the value of the implant and the procedure, plus the surcharge, out of my paycheck at the end of the campaign.

Fuckin' assholes.



No they don't you fat fuck.

But my new arm actually isn't complete shit, so it's OK. The implant's actually decent - military-grade.

(Y'know, aside from the fact that it was fucking expensive.)

Anyways, after losing the arm and waking up in the field hospital, I spent about a week getting used to the implant before going back into the field. The battalion got reassigned to patrol duty and supply raids away from the front lines during the rest of the fighting in the capital. Mostly low-risk stuff while the regulars took up the slack of fighting the insurrectionists head-on. The auxiliaries secured a beachhead to bring them in (even though I missed that part on account of being incapacitated and then adjusting to my new arm). So we spent about four weeks running supply raids on the insurrectionists' flanks and doing some patrol duty on the front to keep things in order when the loyalists' regulars managed to kick the insurrection out of a district of the city. I've got a ton of shots from that period of time in the capital.



This shot is of a piece of the capital where some of the bloodiest fighting went down between the loyalists and the insurrection. The street's completely abandoned. Felt like I was standing in a graveyard when my squad went on patrol through the area. We didn't run into any resistance that night, and there was no contact reported by any other patrols going through for several days after the district was taken from the insurrection. Couple of my squadmates swore they saw something creeping through the rubble, but I didn't catch a glimpse of anything moving. Fucking eerie.



Another shot of the capital. This one's a still from some combat footage in the financial district, during a final sweep of the area after we took it from the mutineers. Those aircraft are loyalist gunships, and that guy up ahead of me in the frame is my squad's point-man. Turns out any leftover rebels had already taken off, but we swept the area and secured it after dealing with a metric shit-ton of IEDs that they'd left behind to give us a bit of a black eye after losing the district to the loyalists.

Guess who got to fucking deal with the remote-detonator triggers. Go 'head. Guess. Ten minutes of that shit wasn't fun.



One of those old-school water-based warships in the city's waterfront district, shortly after the loyalists' regulars drove the rebels out. This was taken...maybe six weeks into the campaign, on another patrol. I'd picked up some comm-traffic coming from the ship, told my squad leader, and he decided we should go to check it out. (This was Lieutenant Shithead's replacement after the Mech Incident on Day 1. Decent guy, but kind of a hard-ass.) It turned out some insurrectionists went into hiding inside that boat, so we decided to go flush 'em out (and I wasn't put on point, which was fucking awesome). We swept the ship, killed five or six rebels, and found a shitload of encrypted comm equipment they were using to direct commando teams behind our lines.

So, of course I hacked that shit, the Lieutenant passed it onto the loyalist command staff, and my squad promptly got extra rations and a cushy rearline security detail for the next two weeks as a kind of reward.

No, they didn't fucking refund me for the implant, which was bullshit.

Mekan, at this rate you are going to be more MACHINE than batarian MAN.

And that is FASCINATING. I wish that you would damage your body more so that I can see how many implants your body can handle.

Odd to hear that they charged you for the arm, considering they didn't need to amputate. Do you know where they got the part from, or who made it? It's good that you were able to get used to it, and aren't rejecting it or anything. Did they patch the new arm directly into the nerves or install a nerve port so you could upgrade or reinstall new parts later?

I've heard horror stories of mercs getting 'leashed' by their employers after buying them replacement limbs. Threats of activating a killswitch in their implants if they leave, shutting the nerve receptors off at the first signs of rebellion, etcetera.

Considering this is Terminus we're talking about, I wouldn't be surprised if a few of those accounts hold some grain of truth to them. Doubly alarming considering they made you pay for an operation that wasn't even necessary. I'd be worried if I were you.

It's easier to control the supply of anti-rejection drugs, I think. I wouldn't be surprised if that is standard procedure by these uh... more ruthless armies (government and otherwise) in the terminus.
We had that chap over at the birningham resistance cell that had a cybernetic arm because the insurance company were all cheapskates who didn't want to pay for a cloned replacement. When what was left of us Fools arrived there he was alright, but when we left a week later he was screaming bloody murder from his bed. Don't know if he made it.

Oh, and to our four-eyed fellow, nice picture of that mech. Looks to be much larger than one of our Goliath seige-mechs. Or maybe that's the angle. They always look larger from below. Doesn't seem to have large guns to go with the size though, maybe a utility model that got retrofit by this insurgency. Or maybe I am just way off on this one.

BUT NOT THAT ONE

LOL!


don't call me a whelp you fucker

you lying fucker

you lying bitch fuck that can't even get one-hundred credits from a dead fucking frog

liar

Well, at this rate, I won’t doubt it’ll happen eventually. But, I’ll deal with that when I come to it.


Well, the manufacturer's apparently Gornag Industrial. I looked 'em up - standard mil-spec implants, nothing fancy, apparently robust enough for the Ashki Colonial Protectorate military to make them their preferred supplier. That said, they included a nerve port, which is apparently standard for the Gornag line, so I can swap it out easy later. Could be worse.


That’s the thing - they wouldn’t bother with that. There’s no real practical reason for that, as far as that goes. Why go to all the effort of wiring up one specific freelancer auxiliary with some kind of cybernetic kill-switch? What I can say is that I’m not the only one who got implants, but some of the other mercs who got them were in bad shape when they underwent the procedures, and they were all charged as well.

I think it was one of two things: An honest medical fuckup, or some attempt at making back some of the money they spent on getting the mercs in here. Patch us up, charge us for the courtesy, and then suddenly they’re not spending quite so much on paying the auxiliaries what they’re owed. In their position, it’s what I would do, and I checked with the agency - that’s the official line, and it’s not uncommon, at least with these freelancer-battalion postings.

And if they do this to all of the mercs who get shot up to a certain point, then suddenly they’re making back a little more than they anticipated without any kind of long-term legal problems with the agency, because they can conveniently write it all off as an honest mistake, the mercs remain effective in a fight, and they technically end up making a net profit for their time while out on deployment anyways, so the auxiliaries aren’t inclined to complain too much. Some arguably come out of the implantation procedures for the better. It’s not some grand moneymaking scheme, but it cuts expenses more than you might think. Mil-spec cybernetics aren’t cheap, and the Protectorate had a boatload in stock.


shut up whelp, I’m talking

Anyways, here’s the last few holos in my little war journal.



Here's a snapshot of a couple of the other merc auxiliaries in my battalion suiting up for a patrol, about Week 9 into our contract. If you're noticing that these guys all wear the same armor (rare in a unit composed entirely of freelancers), then it's not a coincidence. These guys are all survivors from some PMC that got smashed elsewhere in the Terminus in some other brushfire conflict around the time the Shrike Abyssal opened up. Apparently, the agency is willing to lump people who've worked together in the past into the same squad in these auxiliary battalions. It's their attempt at trying to get some kind of cohesion out of their units before shipping them off to the employer.

In other words, if you've got a track record of working well with certain people and those people are also with the agency, there's a good bet you're going to deploy together. This is always handy to keep in mind if you sign up with one. Find a buddy or two, guys you've worked with before, and get them to sign up with you if they're looking for a job. Usually works out well, by all accounts. Keep that in mind.



Week 10, we were pushing the rebels out of the region near the capital entirely. This was taken near the city's edge; you'll notice that this guy's probably sizing me up. He had a tactical cloak, and got the drop on me. This snapshot is from right before he rushed me.

Arguably the closest to death I've come in the last few years. We fought in CQC, and eventually he managed to...well...beat the crap out of me, knocked me on my ass. My squadmates managed to gun him down before he finished me.

I've been looking into better CQC training ever since.

Not my finest moment.


A snapshot from my last fight with the rebels. This is at the outer edge of the city. They were making one final push to try and regain some ground in the capital, and they threw everything at us. The loyalists were committing everything to the effort to repel the insurrection; this mech here in the shot was apparently piloted by an ace. I managed to drop that guy with the rifle on the right with an Incineration tech-attack after jamming his gun with a Sabotage function.

The mech got popped by a lucky shot from our heavy weapons expert. Right to the cockpit. That sent the guy on the left retreating, and we got him in the back as he made a run for it. That was our last shootout with the rebels. The loyalists took up the pursuit, and they eventually drove them out of the city. The next week was the end of our contract, and we ended up departing on a bit of a sour note. We all got paid, but apparently lost about 37% of the battalion. That wasn't fun news.

Is that 37% dead or just casualties?

37% of the company dead, by the looks of it.

37% dead. Looking at that kind of bodycount on a contract that was supposed to be (relatively, for a raging warzone) brief, low-risk and largely consisted of rear-line patrols, flanking maneuvers and the occasional bout of guard duty? With a non-fatal casualty percentage that was something in the range of 70% (70% of everyone who survived the contract)?

Not exactly a great 'final score' for a three-month long deployment.

But, I kind of saw that coming, and planned accordingly. The three weeks in transit to Ashki were well-spent on a crash-course on How To Not Die, courtesy of some of the more seasoned mercs I was traveling with who weren't complete assholes. Most of them made it through the deployment with only a few injuries/new cybernetics.

Anyways, overall, my time on Ashki was a trip I don't feel too bad for taking.

7/10, would deploy again.