Right now, He-6's aide and the Prime Beacon shared the same thought: He-6 hadn't needed to deploy himself this early. Granted, acting in a leadership capacity while possessing great personal martial capabilities created a unique series of circumstances where responsibilities were hard to balance, but that was no excuse for He-6 to reveal himself to whatever intelligence guided the actions of the Aud.
He was capable of making those rationalizations himself, seeing as he had achieved the esteemed position of sitesman and outperformed so many of his other peers in fierce competition.
The Prime Beacon grunted. Like the head generals, his HUD was performing calculations at dizzying speeds, and most of them were currently dedicated to a comprehensive analysis of the southern stretch's position. The Jackal was still leaning over the side of the walls, the emplacements embedded into its upper body raining destruction upon the advancing forces.
Servicemen on either side of the barren perch where the Titan resided were busy targeting the rest the Jackal was too busy to focus down, or found themselves occupied by the Aud beneath the wall-grade turrets they were responsible for.
Unable to observe the happenings and shifts on the field of battle, everyone in Directory Control was nervous, well aware that delays in communication could escalate into a breach or some other undesirable outcome that would set back the defending side.
He flagged down a passing serviceman, pushing along a cart with stacked microchips. After issuing orders veiled as requests in polite fashion, he sent her on her way and returned his attention to the large screens. Without the ability to see the growing violence on the walls, Directory Control had to display raw data and graphs that encapsulated the changing circumstances as best as possible.
Two deviated from fretting over the state of the southern stretch when the defenders of the eastern stretch spotted more greens than the First's strategists anticipated would appear. He jammed his hands deeper into the vest pockets while reorganizing the defenses by remote in preparation for the greens' arrival. The stationary defenses wouldn't stop them; they would stall them in the most hopeful outcome, forcing him to activate two carriers of the Old Man's Blessing.
The Prime Beacon didn't waste his time monitoring Two's decisions--his trust in his men was near absolute, hindered from reaching higher only by the knowledge that human error could persist in the least unlikely of places. He initiated a conversation with He-6's aide by proxy. "Why did your sitesman deploy prematurely?"
"He doesn't think the Jackal's emplacements can delay the progress of the Aud on our side as well, or long as an equal number of wall-grade emplacements. I figure his line of thinking goes that we should utilize what makes Titans different from fixed defenses: melee capabilities and the ability to reposition ourselves, as well as our lesser ranged armaments."
"I see. And do you think his deviation has merit? I'm willing to override his authority and raise you to acting sitesman for the remaining duration of this battle."
"I can't say, sir, but we should have enough of a buffer against excessive error that it wouldn't harm us to perform light experimentation in the first major engagement."
"This is hardly a 'light experiment', as you put it. Should you underestimate the effect of prioritizing superior qualitative Titan melee attacks, while impressive as they are, over the superior quantitative ranged armaments, we may lose more servicemen and hardware than we're prepared to stomach for defending the southern stretch. Remember, once the enemy pass you two, they will make us pay in precious blood for every Aud we down inside the walls."
"No, I know it isn't. I apologize, sir, but I figure there is the potential for manageable harm in allowing the Jackal as well as He-6 to try this approach. If it works, the other Titans can mirror our new strategy and save on munitions in the long run. Should we prove to be in error, as I've said, this is the first battle between a human and Aud army."
"Your thinking has merit," he admitted. "But with the Aud, there is no such thing as 'manageable harm', while error buffers are flimsy comforts at best."
"Would you like me to recall He-6 on your orders then, sir?"
He considered it, then tossed a shoulder. "He's already out there. With how close you two are letting the Aud you've claimed responsibility over become, it makes little sense to compromise the Jackal's mobility so your sitesman can return inside the Titan."
More than that, the Prime Beacon would be ready to admit, were he in a private setting, that he endorsed using He-6 as a probe to test the adaptive capabilities of the intelligence guiding the Aud. He frowned.
Though He-6 was one of his supporters in the First's ranks that contributed much to ensuring the militarists could stand their ground against the home interest, he was, at face value, nothing more than a more valuable piece of the puzzle the Prime Beacon moved at his discretion to create outcomes most sides desired.
And he was sometimes forced to split old puzzle pieces in an attempt to make a new shape that fit the latest gap that he needed to address. One of the most pressing gaps in the military's strategy was how little they knew about the new way the Aud were acting. He and everyone else could determine that something external was guiding them.
It wasn't as if they all became smart enough to act close to a human standard when engaged in warfare at the drop of a ball. Sarcasm enriched his mutterings. "And congratulations to us for that."
If the common assumption was that the intellect had been around for a time, then another assumption that came with it was that it had already seen much of what humanity had to offer--barring the surprises even most of the military were unaware of, kept in reserve for bad days.
Military standards, cultural conventions that bled into how humanity fought, military doctrines, the peaks of military, utility, exploration, and sensory technology, and the common stock of humans involved in skirmishes.
It had to know, too, that there were some special humans as well, capable of breaching the fundamental laws of physics or reality due to a mysterious "blessing". Though it might not consider the phenomenon a blessing. Since it wasn't human, it might not know what the concept of a blessing was.
If he analyzed the human-Aud conflict through the lens of information warfare, then humanity wasn't just on the back foot. It was suffering internal hemorrhaging, writhing on the ground while its opponent stood over it, ready to crush its skull in a final act of omnicide.
The Prime Beacon, as well as the top officials in the One-Light Directory, were aware of that. And there was no pretending the issue didn't exist, or that it was manageable, or not as necessary to solve as other problems. The First was a reflection of its current leader, as remained the case for all the rays, and the Prime Beacon was willing to make a potential sacrifice or two to produce a change in the status quo.
He-6, as he was right now, was a magnet for attention. Even something as mundane as his breathing had become a modest weapon, turning into downward gales strong enough to press down Aud beneath him. A few of the weaker oranges and whites couldn't hang on, and the force ripped them free of their climbing holds to fall back into the roiling masses of color below.
The Jackal capitalized on this temporary lapse to become choosier with its targets, slowing down its rate of fire to become more accurate in landing strikes on Aud that were closer to the edge than their brethren. The status quo had become more favorable for the defensive crews for this stretch of the southern side.
And the Prime Beacon was eager to see how the intellect would react. Was it limited to proactive measures beforehand, like the ring formations? Or could it react and change the fortunes of its "soldiers" mid-battle?