einherjarvalk

  There's a lot of names for the Archdiocese capture teams. "Feather pluckers." "Can openers." Some of the more sadistic Handlers call them "dog catchers." They're all names for the same types of people: predators of tortured brains.

  I had a run-in with them. One time was enough for this life.

  One of the obvious aspects of doing raids deep behind enemy lines is that, no matter how good your frame's onboard ECM is, you're operating in a hostile EW environment. Communication with your team has to be kept to short burst, tight-band communiques, set to rotating frequencies. You can't just get on the radio like normal; every brickhead in a fifty-click radius will immediately pick up where you're transmitting from.

  The thing they don't tell you about these raids is that if you lose your ECM pod, you're not just suddenly cut off from your squad, you're immediately bombarded with noise.

  The noise you get at first isn't too bad. It's things like inaccurate radar pings, intermittent satellite positioning failures, and scrambled communications. It's rough, but it's manageable, at least until they realize you're operating in their world now, and not your own little bubble. That's when they start the Screamers.

  Screamers are…interesting. Not AGD tech; they ck the institutional knowledge to break our systems even if they had the foresight to realize they'd need it. Screamers are Chartered Systems tech. More specifically, they're freebooter products, meant to brute-force UGS freighter AIs and reduce them to a gibbering mess that practically opens the doors for the boarding parties. Naturally, it works like a charm on us too.

  My run-in with a can opener team was the first time anyone ran into a Screamer system in AGD hands. Contrary to the name, it starts with a whisper. You think you heard something, something close, and you get a ghost ping on your sensors accordingly, and then it's gone. Sometimes it's a snap, or a whine, or a voice, but whatever it is, it's tuned to your state of mind. It's whatever the system thinks you want to hear, because by the time you hear it, it's already tapped into your biomonitor uplink. If you're particurly unlucky and have an older generation neural ce, it'll start reading your memories too.

  Whatever the noises started as, they always become a voice. Whispers all around you, and the longer it goes on, the harder it becomes to discern what's a real person and what's the Screamer trying to get under your skin. It's a steady drip, drip, drip of auditory hallucination, meant to get a response out of you. You'll hear a mixture of voices, and if they've got your memories - like they had mine - you'll start to recognize them. Teammates. Friends. Lovers. Your Handler. Your family.

  While this is going on, the can opener team is fencing you in. The data they're feeding your sensors is pushing you further and further from friendlies - who, thanks to the Screamer, they now know the locations of too. You'd think a can opener team would be all combat frames, but the AGD, sadistic fuckers that they are, like to task mechanized infantry on these details. There might be a mech or two in support, but for the most part, it's just infantry. Usually augmented, but always male. They want to remind you of your pce.

  See, the thing about can openers is that they don't really serve a military purpose in the traditional sense. Taking a pilot as a POW is usually wasted effort; while they can sometimes pry a bit of operational intel out of you or use you in a prisoner swap, for the most part they just try to convert or kill us. Your average pilot is of no use to the AGD as-is; we're too atrophied to serve as physical bor, too wired up to be of much intelligence value. Some might want to use us just as meat for personal relief, but brickheads apparently find our…pliability to be a bit boring. Besides, the AGD can deny it and call it sin all they want, but there's not a single more subservient bitch in this universe than their own wannabe übermensch pilots, and everyone knows they make institutional use of them in that way. Good soldiers follow orders and all.

  What a can opener team actually does is act as a terror unit. They want to punish you for “defiling the work of God.” They are meant to put fear into UGS mech pilots, to make us feel like that armored shell we cocoon ourselves into every sortie is just something that deys the Archdiocese’s inevitable judgement. They want us to feel like they have control. Their own mech corps can't keep up with our tech, but their cruelty is timeless.

  As the Screamer is slowly driving you up the wall, pelting you with messages from people you trust and making you question your own sanity, the can openers are setting ambushes. They're not infallible - and my job is to teach you to do what I did, to escape them - but they're getting better. I've seen the combat cam footage.

  It'd be easy for them to just kill you, once you're in the crosshairs. You're confused, alone, struggling just to sort hallucinations from reality. Their support frames are bulky, yes, but it also means they can mount some fearsome weaponry. The one I ran into had a 120mm rail cannon mounted on its shoulder. State-of-the-art tech, probably delivered on the same purchase orders as the Screamer units. A single shot from that gun will rip right through any UGS frame. You wouldn't even feel it hit you; the overpressure would kill you before your nerves can fire. The guns aren't the killing tool though. They're the insurance.

  Most can opener infantry is pulled from combat engineering teams. They use this experience to set up fortifications of all sorts - EM mines, IEDs, tripwire traps, whatever it takes. The goal - again - isn't to kill you, it's to make you helpless. They go for the leg joints above all else; if they can get a satchel charge in pce they'll cut you down at the knees just to watch you crawl.

  Once you're on the ground, you'll be able to feel them fumbling around on your frame, greedy flesh and steel grappling for whatever purchase they can. They tend to poke and prod at your pelvic girdle, for obvious reasons. The engineers will pry away the armor pting covering your hip actuators with the intent of immobilizing you completely from the waist down. You can scream at them to stop, and the only thing you'll hear are the Screamer's voices in your head, telling you that you deserve this, that it's your fault, that it's your pce in this world.

  When they're so close to you, the Screamer can start fshing images directly into your head. Brutalized, beaten pilots that they got to before you. Sometimes they'll be members of your own team, even if they're alive and well in reality. Many of them will have had their dignity vioted, and others will be strung up on hooks like beef. The goal is to remind you that it's all you are to the AGD: meat. You're nothing without your frame, and they make sure to remind you of that.

  It's at this point that they get to the hatch. They know you're in there, they know you're panicking, they know you can't run, and they know you have only one remaining course of action strapped to the side of your ejection seat, one st means of control. That's when you learn the one thing that I can't prepare you for.

  In the confines of the cockpit, a gunshot is thrice as loud.

  -Intake address, unknown SERE instructorDate unknown