When the Repub Navy points aboard, the Illustrious refused to send down a recovery shuttle or fire support, Chhun and his people began a running gun battle from street to street against the planet’s native inhabitants, the dwahsers. Elephant-like bipeds of tremendous size, the dwahsers also had a propensity for siding with the Mid-Core Rebellion against the Republic. Of course, this led to a savage blaster-battle street fight between the Kill Team and the locals, where things were already out of control.
During the fight, we see some amazing tech on the part of the Kill Team, even far above the kit normally fielded in legion units. The first of these is the bubbler.
A portable field generator often carried by dark ops, the bubbler produces an energy field around a desired point. The force bubble is strong enough to withstand damage, as if it were two feet of hardened impervisteel. Simply tap the activator and the bubbler goes into effect. With the incredibly slow cook-off time for Mid-Core grenades, the bubbler came in handy for Chhun’s team on the ground when the dwahsers began lobbing explosives. All Masters had to do was track the grenade to its landing point and deploy a bubbler to capture all that explosive force.
With the shield capable of keeping the leejes safe from dwahser’s lobbed grenades, we see more of their bucket-tech in action. Loaded with complex tracking software, the bucket can map a grenade’s flight path and even detect the time remaining in the fuse before it detonates. As Kill Team Victory noted, the MCR provided explosives had wonky timers, which gave them seconds to trap the weapons. Their buckets easily calculating the drop point enabled Masters to hunt down where the grenades landed to drop a drop shield over it and cover the blast.
For more Kill Team Victory and Masters putting the hurt to the dwahser rebels, check out Sword of the Legion!
Wow. I feel like Tyrus Rechs trying to remember ancient battles thinking about what happened in this book. I guess reading GE is going to be like painting the Golden Gate bridge: Start at one end and paint (read) to the other, and then it'll be time to start from the beginning again.
“Unless our buckets got fried because there’s so much of it, ’Bassa! The next thing you know we’re all going to start mutating. Or possibly dying. But probably mutating. Like… Bear will become an actual bear. So a little less hairy and drooly.” “Bombassa, will you please shoot him?” says Bear. But Masters is on one of his rolls. “We’ll all become hybrids of who we normally are. Like, Exo will have like a… skull face. And Chhun will be even more boring. And Bombassa will grow twice as tall. And… worst of all, I’ll go from being handsome to being radioactive-super-handsome.” “A skull face would be pretty badass,” says Exo. He and I are sharing a crate. It’s nice to have him back on the team. “But Bear is right. Shut up, Masters.” “You know what?” Masters says. “I won’t shut up. Because, quite frankly, the galaxy is not equipped to handle smoking-hot radioactive Masters.”