CMC Power Armor

By the third week, Augustus's class officially began learning how to operate and use CMC-200 Power Armor. To be honest, their first attempt left them deeply disappointed.

The training Power Armor was all old battlefield-retired models. Their surfaces were covered in scratches and shrapnel scars, some sections were severely missing armor plating, and their internal servos and padding were coated in a frost-like layer of soot.

The damage was so common that the rookies could more or less understand why some suits were missing arms or legs.

These battered Power Armor suits were vastly different from the gleaming steel armor on conscription posters, seeming like antiques from centuries ago.

After receiving his Power Armor, Augustus still had to clean the grease and soot from its interior, then use perfume to cover the foot odor and sweat stench left by its previous wearer. If that was not disgusting enough, someone even found hardened vomit and other unidentifiable substances inside his helmet.

Confederate Marine Corps Power Armor was maintained by dedicated armor technicians. Usually, each platoon was assigned one armor technician and two assistants. Main-force units and special tactical squads were equipped with more specialized technicians, but the entire rookie training camp had only one squad of them.

Maintaining armor and weapons was a required course for rookies, even if all they could actually do was polish and oil the armor.

The first thing Augustus learned was that he needed to get along well with the armor technicians in his unit.

On the battlefield, Power Armor was a marine's only guarantee of survival. No one wanted it to malfunction. If his unit had only one technician and they had a grudge against each other, no one would know whether his Power Armor's life-support system might suddenly fail.

Or, more simply, an Electromagnetic Grenade might somehow turn up inside the Power Armor's battery unit.

Compared with the latest CMC-230 Power Armor, the 230F-X series, experimental special-purpose armor like the CMC-250E Power Armor, and the CMC-300 Power Armor that would be widely issued to marines in the future, the CMC-200's cold-fusion filter core, which powered its servo system, had serious stability issues. Its failure rate fluctuated around an astonishing 0.9%.

For some unlucky bastard trapped inside a steel prison on the battlefield after his armor's power system shut down, that failure rate was a nightmare guaranteed to happen.

This Power Armor still retained many flaws from an earlier era. For instance, the joints between its armor plates were a fatal weakness. The seam between the two knee plates lacked sufficient protection, and neither the several-inch-thick cables of the servo system nor the marine's environmental combat suit could withstand bullets accelerated to supersonic speed.

And if the angle was right, shattered shrapnel and bullets deflected by the armor could slip into those seams from above, cutting a marine's leg clean in half.

At the same time, the cooling tower on the back of the CMC-200 still used technology from the middle of the century, making its efficiency far inferior to the latest products from Tarsonis Blueback Military Industries.

Setting aside those flaws, Power Armor was still a revolutionary weapon of war. Its sturdy plating could ignore all light weapon fire; rifles and shotguns of every caliber from Earth's era could leave only scratches on it.

It could also withstand chemical and biological weapons as well as nuclear radiation. People had to deal with these iron cans as they would tanks and heavy Armored Vehicles, using anti-tank guns and heavy weapons to shatter the relatively more vulnerable helmets of marines and blow apart their skulls.

Within the Terran Confederacy's territory, local armed groups in frontier regions often still used hunting weapons passed down from their great-grandfathers. Even their most powerful automatic rifles were incapable of penetrating a marine's armor.

According to local security officers' logs, a single company of Federal Marine Corps troops could often easily crush a massive rebel force in a completely one-sided slaughter.

Marines had become the most common combat force in the Koprulu Sector. Power Armor technology would not fall into the hands of private military groups, mercenaries, and pirates until the next century.

In 2488, this technological barrier was enough for the Terran Confederacy to suppress the Kel-Morian army, which lacked Power Armor, and gain the upper hand in the war.

Before they came into contact with Power Armor, the training camp sergeants handed every rookie a Power Armor training manual. The manual had been compiled by an army general.

At the beginning, the general kindly informed the rookies that operating CMC Power Armor was no more difficult than using their fathers' exoskeleton harvesting robots.

Yet when every rookie first climbed into those metal shells, they seemed to lose the ability to walk as if they had returned to infancy. Beginners with poor coordination could not even crawl across the ground, while even the best rookies could only stagger forward a few steps.

Of course, it would not take long for the rookies to adapt to the change.

CMC Power Armor possessed a complete spine-like internal framework that bore the armor's weight for the marine inside, preventing them from being crushed by its sheer mass. The use of ceramic composite armor made the Power Armor lighter, and even the heaviest full plate armor of Earth's Middle Ages was no heavier than these fusion-powered suits.

The Haptic Feedback System inside the Power Armor ensured that marines could operate it flexibly. It precisely transmitted the marines' movements and other commands throughout the armor through servo systems embedded beneath every plate and connected by cables, preventing bodily displacement or sprains caused by uncoordinated responses between the various parts of the Power Armor and the human body.

Marines had to undergo constant training until the Power Armor truly became a part of their bodies, until armor weighing hundreds of pounds felt as easy and natural as skin.

That was no easy task for Confederate rookies who had only just encountered these new toys. Fortunately, they had a full eight weeks to learn how to operate Power Armor proficiently. According to experience and data, even the dumbest rookie could make the armor part of their body within two weeks.

Both the training manual and the virtual sergeants responsible for rookie training stressed the same point: if you could not make Power Armor your external organ in a short time, your third and fourth pairs of hands and feet, then it would become the grave that buried you.

Augustus had never touched a harvesting robot. His only impression of Terran marine Power Armor in the Koprulu Sector came from Tychus in the cinematic of StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty.

Like every other rookie, Augustus looked like a drunken duck when he first put on Power Armor.

Although Augustus did not believe that veterans had been born knowing how to operate Power Armor, they were still cursed out viciously by the instructors supervising them. "My eighty-year-old grandmother could dance ballet in that thing!"

To the instructors, the rookies' ugly performance was as unbelievable as newborn fish being unable to swim. Faced with their roars, any complaint was treated as a challenge to authority, and the only words the rookies could say were, "Yes, sir. Yes, sir."

If their "Yes, sir" was not loud enough, if their words lacked force and fullness, the instructors immediately questioned whether they had enough spirit. "Why can't I hear you maggots?"

At that point, Augustus and his comrades could only answer in unison again and again: "We love the Marine Corps! There is no greater honor than serving!"

"We are weapons of war! We pray for death! We thirst for war!"

For the next three weeks, the first thing the rookies did each day after waking was quickly straighten up their quarters. Then, carrying personal information cards bearing their identification numbers, they boarded military transport trucks. The trucks took them to the Power Armor assembly platforms in the barracks, where modular-programmed mechanical arms assembled the armor piece by piece.

Training continued for the entire day. Only when the rookies were too exhausted to move, or when Colonel Maibika conducted surprise inspections of their ideological coursework, were they granted brief rests.

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