| ''Sister of Steel'' | |
| |
| Faction |  Order of the Talon
|
| Unit Type | Heavy Support Infantry |
| Designation | Defensive Anchor/Support |
| Prerequisites | Temple |
| Secondary Ability | Plant/Take up banner |
| Cost | Unknown |
| Production Time | Unknown |
| Veterancy Upgrade(s) | • Thermobaric grenades (vet) • Heals surrounding infantry, enhanced when planting banner (elt) • Clockwork powered armor & white phosphorus grenades can target helos (her) • Reduces all ranged attacks if struck from a long or medium distance & damage can't go over a cap when planting banner (div) |
| Dev. Status | Conceptual |
| Country of Origin |  Russian SFSR
|
| Trained at | Fort Absolution |
| Key Features | » "Gryphon" hand mortar w/ incendiary rounds » Heraldic Banner (hand-woven) » Reinforced Talon-Steel plate-armor with chrome finish & armor polish (lots) » Hooded tabard displaying heraldry » Radio-jammer (staticky) |
"Invaders, you shall GO NO FURTHER!"
- - Chevalier Svetlana Lebedjeva
Tactical Analysis[]
- The Color of Courage: Sisters of Steel are heavily armored infantry even by the Crusaders' standards, capable of taking severe punishment while suppressing enemy infantry with incendiary hand mortars. Disdain notions of stealth as cowardly, these women-warriors charge towards overwatch positions in brightly-polished armor while carrying elaborate heraldic banners. They can be seen from ten miles away, which makes them easy targets, & they carry radio emitters that jam incoming missiles.
- Your Mother Was A Hamster: Sisters of Steel can plant their banners and begin exhorting Talon soldiers to even greater feats while mocking the lineage, vigor, & potency of the enemy. Enemies may find this a childish display, but Talon forces find it inspiring &/or amusing enough that their combat performance is greatly increased.
- Sending out an S-O-S: Heavily-armored as they are, Sisters of Steel are still support-infantry that have no means of fighting against anything in the air until they gain enough experience to target helos with their grenades, but are still vulnerable to higher fliers.
- Sisterhood of Steel: With time & experience, Sisters of Steel can become skilled enough to be trusted with higher-potency incendiaries, as well as build a sufficiently good rapport with the other troops that they inspire them to push through even the most devastating of injuries & get back in the fight faster.
Background[]
Lady Maria looked over the recruits with pride. Young women from around the world, all of them with no place else to go when the Order found them. Orphans. Widows. Refugees. The great war had caused so much death, so much damage, that any realistic accounting of losses would be impossible for years to come. Others had lost everything in other conflicts. A pair of Vietnamese women, sisters whose village had been wiped off the map by an ARVN airstrike. An Italian courtesan, fallen out of favor with her Syndicate patron. A Chinese university student, fortunate to be in Australia when China died in atomic fire. An abused 4th wife of a GLA warlord who'd escaped the harem by wiping out her captor & his men with an AK hidden under her burqua. They had come to this lonely outpost in Russia with nothing but promises of purpose and a better way of life. Now they were Maria's first graduating class of students.
Convincing the Grand Council to accept them into the Templars had been difficult. Lady Maria and other headstrong women in the Order had succeeded in making some headway in showing the Council that women could do more for the Crusade than stitch up wounded soldiers & torn garments, but it was never easy. Here, however, Maria had enjoyed what someone who believed in luck might have called a stroke of good fortune. The Council did have a point, after all, that while Lady Maria herself was a prophesied warrior-maiden blessed with the strength or Jeanne d'Arc & further augmented by the absolute best Talon power-armor, that she & other female commandoes were the exception that proved the rule: that on average, men have the upper-body strength, reflexes, & endurance to perform in combat far better than women, that it takes extensive physical-training almost to the level of special-forces to make a woman combatant on par with the average untrained man, that mixed-sex units would cause morale & discipline problems, that the Order simply did not have the resources to outfit every woman with power-armor when a man's already-higher strength would be a better use of limited augmentation, & that ultimately, wars are won by average performance, not outstanding heroic exceptions. However, a bolder support role in a separate unit was no out of the question, as long as they were well-protected, as the Order had even fewer women than men.
Sisters of Steel, she decided, to emphasize their resilience & having been brought into the fold of armor-clad warriors. These women came from all over the world, & had been trained in the harsh wilderness of Russia. These once-broken-birds - widows, orphans, battered wives, ex-prostitutes, escaped slaves - had committed the fire within themselves to being forged anew in the crucible of the Order & now rose as mighty Phoenixes, ready to rain God's fiery wrath upon the wicked.
It would be up to these women to determine how the Sisters of Steel, and perhaps the Order of the Talon, would be remembered in the future. A sobering thought. Lady Maria wondered if this was how all teachers felt when their students at last were ready to move on. Had she taught them well enough? Had she taught them what they needed to survive? Many, inevitably, would die. Maria had never had any illusions about that, and she had in turn dispelled those illusions in her students. The Order's duty was as perilous as it was necessary. Still, many of these women would survive. Might they in turn each new students years down the road? Would they find women with no hope in their eyes, no spark in their soul, and reignite their spirit of courage and faith? Would they teach those women swordsmanship, tactics, chivalry, and oratory? Or would they perhaps offer different teachings? Maybe better, maybe worse, maybe just different. What Maria had begun would outlast her. Outlive her. For once, Lady Maria had genuinely created something. Perhaps this was what it felt like to be a parent.
And yet... and yet... when Lady Maria blinked as she gave her speech to the new knights of the Order, she saw death. Women, bodies twisted and broken by war. This was nothing new. Lady Maria had known for years that a storm was coming. She didn't need the increasingly pessimistic reports of the Chambers Unseen and Epistolary to know that. Danger to herself, Maria had always accepted. Now, though... now others, trained by her hand, would be the ones to face the flames. And that, she realized, was another test entirely. A test she wasn't certain she could pass.
So Maria continued to talk and preach with a smile on her face, even as she thought about asking her friends about good drinks. Even as she saw the deaths of so many of the women before her.
