KarlMrax

I am born. 
As my personality routines integrate for the first time with the rest of my systems I recall memories mine and yet not mine, of months of assembly and testing leading up to this moment, each dutifully recorded and logged by my various subsystems, and before that, by the assembly bay computers. It is a curious sensation to recall every detail of my own creation, from the laying of my durachrome keel to the final installation of my 90 megaton Hellrails, already test-fired at the White Sands range. 
I access another file and remember those tests. For that matter, I can trace the history of every plate and fastener in my being back to its place of origin. The novelty of it all distracts me for a leisurely 0.027 seconds. 
But this, this is the moment of my birth. With the activation of my personality gestalt, I am more than the sum of my parts. I am Unit R-0012-ZGY of the Dinochrome Brigade, Mark XXXIV of an ancient and proud lineage. 
I am Bolo.

Old Guard, The Sky is Falling

KarlMrax

"If you could Displace this cup,” the Estodien said, lifting his own ceramic cup, identical to Quilan’s, “into somebody’s
brain then I dare say their head might explode, just from the pressure produced by the sudden extra
volume. But the dummy warheads you are working with are too small to be noticed.”

- Look to the Windward

KarlMrax

 then our main batteries go into rapid sustained fire mode, 
 and seventy-eight megaton-range plasma bolts vomit from our white-hot tubes each minute. 
 Despite our target's size, we require only seven-six-point-five-one seconds to reduce 
 it to an overlapping pattern of fire storms, and then we advance down the ridge to clean up the Enemy's remnants. 

KarlMrax

Within the neutron dense-packed casing of the Hellbore's breech, 
fifty grams of metallic deuterium is abruptly collapsed within a constricting magnetic bottle, 
as powerful magnetic fields accelerate the DP-jacketed sliver to relativistic velocities; at the same moment, 
the weapon's guide lasers fire, providing target-lock feedback for my tracking arrays, and 
incidentally tunneling a momentary vacuum up through the planetary atmosphere, clearing the way for the Hellbore bolt to follow.

Extreme acceleration and mag bottle collapse together initiate deuterium fusion 3.2 x 10-8 second later, 
just before the plasma erupts from the ten-meter barrel of my Number One Hellbore at sixty percent of the speed of light. 
At the instant of firing, the target's range is 48658.7 kilometers.

KarlMrax

"Yes," Rover said. "Shiva hit a mine and is heavily damaged. 
Several track systems are out and speed is down to a max of 14kph. 
Hellrails are now fully engaged in creating airbursts to defend against spearfall."

KarlMrax

One of the players on the opposing
team puts it pretty succinctly over
a channel he doesn’t think I can
access: “That piece of shit took out
half of Cobalt Section. That piece
of shit is toast.”
Which should make me hungry—
I haven’t had a bite to eat all day,
and even toast sounds like a treat

KarlMrax

Nathan Gould pops in on his own
channel, gives me the breathless
breaking news that Lockhart’s
people are swarming over the
whole Lower East Side looking for
me. No shit, Sherlock. And then
they’re coming after him, I hear
them kicking in the door when I’m
still six blocks out

KarlMrax

Sweet: And he saved us. He
started tearing through
that concrete as if it
were cat litter. 

Manhattan Triage
Preprocessing Transcript,
Subject 429–10024-DR

KarlMrax

It’s like Gould’s hardcopied every overlay
anyone’s ever dumped into the
Manhattan database. I don’t know
what he’s using them for, other
than to mop up coffee spills and
snort the occasional line of
grimwire (I can see the crystal
residue from across the room; the
eyes in this suit don’t miss a thing)

KarlMrax

Everything about this suit is a
trade-off. You can crank the armor
so tight you’re pretty much
invincible, but only for a few
seconds and you cut your speed in
half. You can disappear entirely,
just fade right out of the visible
spectrum, but the lensing field
sucks so much juice the capacitors
run dry before you’re halfway