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| ===The boobytrap===
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| Boone snaps out of his reverie as the whizzkid excitedly tells him there is a scramble briefing. Babarazza slapped his hands and rubbed them together with glee, his eyes fiercely aglow. “This is it, Boone! This is it! I’m ''finally'' going to see action!”
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| The air crackled as Eagle Squad filed into the briefing room. The banter-pulse was flat.
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| In a CDO warehouse on the edge of town there is a booby-trapped FWMD. Boone goes out on his motorcycle but finds his weapons hamstrung by new protocols. Stamps on the cross accelerator.
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| Throws a netting field around it and it implodes
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| Spvs are r&A a wasting commodity and are infrequently being grandfathered because there are no new ones to be found. The grandfather's are are weak and do not yield as much. There is talk of a new supply of spvs flooding in from a black market somewhere. Segue to hunting session.
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| History lesson at at crustards about the first men. Algy and George roleplay reg margin and Oleg paripassu
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| —
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| ---
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| Boone motioned his unit forward. They fanned left and right. They deployed the four-hand room clearing technique.
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| Georgie barked, “clear”.
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| Algy barked, “clear”.
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| Baxter-Morley barked, “clear”.
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| “All right, kid, in you go. Let’s throw a redline around the immediate area.”
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| E.J.P. followed up with a static-mount differentiation sensor. He rookie unclipped the stabilisers and set the unit on the floor. He punched in the coordinates and it emitted a sheet of red light.
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| Okay, everyone hold still now.
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| The diff-sensor swept the semantic content of the room. Babarazza watched the display. The hourglass flipped. It flipped again. After a few moments it rendered: zeroes across the board.
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| “We’re clean, sir. No material alterations. The text-field is Delta-1 as we left it.”
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| Boone looked concerned. “Odd. To what significance?”
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| “To one decimal place, Commander.”
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| “Okay. Run it to three, soldier.”
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| The kid re-ran the analytics. The diff binoc whistled and beeped. Babarazza shrugged. “Point nine-nine-seven. As good as clean, sir. You could eat your dinner off that.”
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| ''As good as'' clean, but ''not'' clean. ''Interesting''. “Recalibrate it, lad. Let’s go find those missing diffs.”
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| “Whatever you say, sir.” Babarazza twiddled dials and hit ''RENDER''. “Okay, team: Stand by. All material deltas should now show up.”
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| The redline swept a red sheet over the text-field. It burped a negative.
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| “Nothing, Commander.”
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| “What are your settings, Soldier?”
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| “Text deltas down to individual ascii level, sir. Can’t get more granular than that.
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| “Moves?”
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| “Marked green. Formatting off. Punctuation off.”
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| Boone shot the rookie a quizzical look. “Why so?”
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| Babarazza smiled. “This way I pick up all syntactically relevant amendments while filtering out the noise. I’m sure we would have caught anything that made a difference. Sir. The text-field is clean.”
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| “Run it again, Soldier, but this time include the noise. Let’s have a gander at that formatting and punctuation delta.”
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| “But —”
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| Boone shot him a stern look.
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| The rookie blanched. “Okay, sir. On the double sir. Okay folks; hold still again.”
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| The unit snapped back to attention.
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| This time ''two'' curtain beams shot out of the DV generator: one red and one green.
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| They swept back and forth. The sensor chirped. The lights doused.
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| “Ok, lads, at ease.” The men chilled.
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| The DV re-rendered on the HUD.
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| This time some changes showed up: some straight-to-curly action on the quote-marks round a definition. ''Something — or someone — had tampered with the docscene''.
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| “That explains the point oh-three deviation, I guess, Commander.” The kid holstered his DV unit and moved forward.
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| “Stop right there, lad.” Boone’s voice was urgent.
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| Babarazza froze. “What is it?”
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| Boone intoned in a halting whisper. “It looks like — it looks like we have a Biggs hoson.”
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| Eagle-Squad Corporal J-P Babarazza looked at his commander with wondrous eyes. “Seriously? A Biggs hoson! I don’t bel —”
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| SHHHHHHH! silent running soldier!
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| Babarazza clammed pronto.
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| I don’t think it ''is'' a Biggs hoson, Barbarazza. It just looks like one. Hosons are not stable. A hoson would have degraded into entropic tedium by now. This has a much longer half-life.
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