// Orientation_Handbook_Final_FINAL_V2(1).txt

Author: Lucas Stonewood, Logistics Wing

Author's Note: If you're wondering why a dropship pilot wrote the orientation handbook instead of one of the officers, you'll have to ask my brother Dan. Apparently I “communicate well with new recruits.” Personally, I think he just didn't want to write it himself.

EDITOR'S NOTE: He's right. Good luck, Luke. Just remove or accept my fixes before release. -D.S.

Welcome to SPEAR.

Congratulations are in order, I suppose.

Whether you found us through [REMOVED], were recommended by another member, or woke up in one of our infirmaries with a fresh scar at the back of your neck [We don't do that, joke isn't funny] is none of my business. 

One way or another, you've ended up with us, and if you're been granted access this file in particular, it means you'll be climbing into a mech sooner rather than later. 

That makes you my problem.

My name is Lucas Stonewood. I fly one of SPEAR's combat dropships. Officially, my job is logistics—moving equipment, transporting pilots, and making sure people end up where they're supposed to be. Unofficially, I spend most of my time rescuing those same pilots after they've ignored perfectly sensible advice and gotten themselves in trouble. 

If a mission goes well, you'll barely remember my name. If it goes badly, we're going to get VERY well acquainted.

This handbook isn't meant to turn you into a veteran overnight. It won't teach you how to outshoot an Axion pilot or survive your first encounter with a fully-armed Hyperion. Those lessons have a habit of teaching themselves. What it will do is explain who we are, why the Iron War is still being fought, and why you've just joined the only organization on Earth that's trying to end it instead of profit from it.

Read the whole thing before your first deployment. It'll answer most of the questions you would otherwise have asked me.

The rest you'll learn the hard way. [Decent opening, Luke.]

So Who Exactly Are We?

You'll hear a lot of dramatic descriptions over the coming weeks. Terrorists. Freedom fighters. Modern crusaders. Insurgents. Depending on who's writing the news that day, we're apparently all of those things at once. The truth is much less glamorous. SPEAR exists because somebody has to make this [expletive removed] war unprofitable.

Every major corporation left standing after the Age of Steel Skies has found a way to benefit from the endless conflict that is the Iron War. 

Axion Industries sells security by creating insecurity. Savant Systems sees every new battlefield as a chance for a live fire test. Satori Enterprises quietly supplies enough antirad and Red-i-Med to keep the entire war running. Saint Corp... does whatever it is that Saint Corp does. Nobody involved actually wants civilization to collapse—the [expletive removed]s in charge simply have very little incentive to let the fighting end.

That's where we come in.

You'll probably notice something strange over the next few days: nobody here looks like they belong to the same organization. One mechanic spent twenty years at Savant Systems. The surgeon who gave you your new IRON implant used to work for Satori Enterprises in the heart of Neo Tokyo. Our head cook was apparently a hired assassin before they decided making food was a less stressful profession. I've honestly never confirmed whether that's true.  

Point is, SPEAR isn't an army in the traditional sense. We don't recruit from one country, one ideology, or one corporation. We recruit people who looked at the state of the world and decided somebody had to do something about it.

That means you'll meet people from places you've only ever read about. Russians and Chinese working alongside Americans and Canadians. Former Axion engineers arguing about reactor maintenance with ex-Savant officers. Mechanics who spent decades building the very machines we're now trying to destroy. People of every race, gender identity, orientation, affiliation and creed, united against the f[please keep foul language to a minimum] 1% of society who have decided we're all worth nothing.

If that sounds dysfunctional...

...it absolutely is.

A Very Brief History Lesson.

Yes, this part matters. No, you can't skip it.

The Past, As We Know It

The world we know today was built on the biggest mistake in human history. [Overdramatic, but accurate.]

On August 15th, 2130, the American Artificial Superintelligence known as ATLAS incorrectly identified the beginning of a nuclear attack. The government, corrupt and paranoid from decades of imminent threats and cold war, blindly trusted ATLAS' conclusion, and within fifteen hours civilization had largely destroyed itself. Cities vanished, governments collapsed, and much of humanity's digital knowledge disappeared beneath electromagnetic pulses and nuclear fire.

The decade that followed became known as the Age of Steel Skies. Ash darkened the atmosphere, agriculture failed across much of the planet, and the survivors were forced to rebuild with whatever remained. The first mechanized hardsuits weren't weapons, but were industrial machines built for couriers, used to transport lifesaving supplies through irradiated cities, reconnect isolated communities, and keep people alive when conventional infrastructure no longer existed.

Then recovery became business.

The ultra-wealthy that survived the war in their bunkers possessed factories, engineers, and supply chains when governments had little left to offer. They stepped into the power vacuum, rebuilt entire regions, and gradually replaced elected authority with corporate administration. By the time humanity began recovering in earnest, the companies that had saved civilization had quietly become the ones running it. Their petty squabbles for more resources, land, or power now form the conflict we call the Iron War. Bastards. [I'll leave this one in as a treat.]

The mechs you're about to pilot are descendants of the first courier hardsuits, warped from symbols of reunion into weapons of war.

With our help, maybe someday they can be simple tools again.

SPEAR and The Firmament

By now you've probably figured out that SPEAR isn't exactly operating out of a rented warehouse.

This place is called the Firmament, and if you're standing inside it while reading this, congratulations—you've already seen more of our headquarters than any corporation ever will.

Officially, it doesn't exist. The Firmament was constructed as the classified launch gantry for the Aurora Space Terminal, back when humanity still thought our future was in the stars. After the bombs dropped and the Aurora went dark, the tower was rendered inert by the EMPs. After that, most survivors were too busy trying to survive the cold to remember there was a kilometre-tall steel tower anchored to the floor of the Atlantic.

Turns out, abandoned megastructures make surprisingly good secret bases. The entire structure is wrapped in layers of retro-reflective camouflage that scatter radar and bend incoming light. Don't ask me how it works, that's Dan's department. [No it isn't??? Do you even know what I do here??] Inside is another story altogether.

The Firmament is a vertical city built around a central reactor shaft. Hangars occupy the lower levels, workshops, and fabrication bays fill the middle, while barracks, medical facilities, hydroponics, and a command centre spiral upward around an open atrium that stretches almost the entire height of the structure. At the very top, a reinforced glass dome lets daylight filter all the way to the central mezzanine several hundred metres below. You'd almost forget you're living inside an oversized steel chimney.

Almost.

SPEAR itself is a lot younger than the tower we call home.

The organization was founded in 2159 by Canadian Prime Minister John Lambert after years of watching the world's shattered governments become increasingly dependent on the corporations they were supposed to regulate. Rather than accept another decade of proxy wars and shareholder politics, Lambert quietly began funding an independent militia dedicated to making the Iron War too expensive to continue.

The problem was, that money wasn't exactly approved through the proper channels. When the payments were eventually discovered, Lambert hid their destination and took the fall, allowing himself to be impeached for embezzlement. Officially, he'd been stealing from the Canadian government. After that, we were on our own.

General Marissa Mallet—if you've been here more than five minutes you've probably heard that name already—took over day-to-day command, and my brother, Dan, defected from Axion Industries and somehow convinced me it was a good idea to join him. Against all probability, he was right. [Thank you.]

The Firmament, and by extension SPEAR, has survived because almost nobody can find us. Let's keep it that way.

The World Outside Your Hangar

It's worth knowing who you're dealing with before someone starts shooting at you.

Axion Industries is the biggest name you'll encounter. They effectively are the United States now, or at least what's left of it. The American Corporate Zone is their home, but throughout the Iron War they've annexed territory here in Canada, as well as Europe and Eurasia. Make no mistake, though, Axion isn't trying to win one war; it's trying to create a world where every future conflict depends on equipment only they can manufacture.

Savant Systems occupies much of Eastern Europe and western Russia, and if Axion values quantity, Savant values quality. Their machines are durable, meticulously designed, and usually much harder to kill than they have any right to be. We try to “liberate” as many Savant mechs as we can for our own use.

Satori Enterprises is subtle—most people barely think about them until they realize the antirad drip keeping them alive carries a Satori logo. While everyone raced to build mechs, Satori quietly cornered the pharmaceutical market, manufacturing out of Japan and the South Pacific theatre. It's difficult to invade the company manufacturing the medicine your soldiers need every week. Don't be fooled, though—they have mechs, and know how to use 'em.

Saint Corp is harder to explain because they rarely fight directly. They're bankers, investors, insurers, and traders living it up in some fancy city out near the Mediterranean. Somehow they always seem to know where the war is heading before everyone else does. I've stopped trying to understand their business model. If they have mechs of their own, I've never seen one.

There are countless other factions and minor corps vying for power as well—Sedna Heavy Industries in Canada, the United Korean Republic, whatever that Australian infrastructure company is called [it's Meridian Public Works, do some research, man] but ultimately these four are the most likely to be your enemies. Learn them well.

What They Didn't Teach You in Basic

By the time you're reading this, you've already sat through Daniel's lectures on the Interneural Response Optimization Network. You've also probably spent an afternoon in the simulator walking into walls while your cerebellum tried to figure out why your legs suddenly weighed several tons.

I'm not going to explain how the IRON chip works. Dan already did that, and I guarantee he enjoyed every minute of it. [True.] What I am going to explain is what happens when everything goes wrong. 

Every combat mech is really three machines pretending to be one: the chassis, the command capsule, and you. The IRON chip convinces your brain to stop treating those as separate things. After enough practice, the mech stops feeling like something you're controlling and starts feeling like your own body. It's remarkably convincing, right up until someone blows one of your legs off. That's the part the simulator can't replicate.

When a mech suffers catastrophic damage, the command capsule automatically ejects. Your capsule will rocket into the air, and my dropship's guidance systems will help me catch you out of the sky, ready to return to the fight in a fresh mech. 

In practice, things are rarely that tidy.

The IRON chip includes a series of electrical failsafes designed to protect your brain when that interneural link is suddenly severed. Most of the time, those safeguards deliberately burn the chip out before the feedback reaches your implant and fries your nervous system. Losing an IRON chip is expensive, but it's considerably cheaper than replacing you. When those safeguards don't work properly, people stop being pilots. I've seen survivors who couldn't stand upright without vomiting. Others forgot how to walk for weeks because their brains still believed they were three storeys tall. A few never climbed into another cockpit again, because their nervous systems simply couldn't take another neural link.

So when your squad leader tells you to eject, you eject. Don't stay behind trying to save a mech. SPEAR is our people; without you, we'd have nothing to fight for. [Well put, Luke. You were the right choice for this.]

One Last Thing

If you've actually read this far instead of skipping to the end, congratulations. You're already ahead of about half the mech pilots I've flown. By now you know who we are, why this war is still being fought, where you'll be living, and why we crammed expensive electronics into the back of your neck. That's about all a handbook can teach you. Everything else happens once the hangar doors open. 

Your first deployment isn't going to feel heroic. It's going to feel loud, confusing, and terrifying. You'll convince yourself everyone else knows exactly what they're doing, while you're somehow the only pilot who slipped through recruitment by mistake. Here's a secret: every single veteran in this tower once felt exactly the same way. They're just better at pretending otherwise.

You're going to make mistakes. You'll overshoot landings. You'll miss shots. You'll radio the wrong frequency. At some point you'll almost certainly manage to cause excessive property damage. When that happens, somebody will laugh.

It'll probably be me.

Then we'll pull you out, patch up whatever broke, and get you back on your feet. That's how this place works. Nobody expects perfection. We expect you to learn, fight smart, and more importantly, we expect you to make it back home when the mission is complete.

One day you'll look around the hangar and realize you're no longer the newest face in the room. Someone else will be standing where you are now. When that happens, do them a favour: Answer their questions. Share your mistakes. Show them the shortcuts you wish somebody had shown you. 

The corporations win by manufacturing machines. We survive by conserving what makes us human.

Axion measures success in quarterly profits. Savant measures it in engineering breakthroughs. Every corporation has a different metric for victory. SPEAR only has one: how many people came home. If we can keep bringing our pilots back alive while making this war too expensive for everyone else to continue, then eventually somebody, somewhere, is going to decide the fighting simply isn't worth it anymore. 

Maybe that's optimistic. Maybe it's naïve.

Personally, I don't care. It's the closest thing this world has to a plan. So welcome to SPEAR. You're one of us now, whether you've realized it or not.

~L.S.