The Rudense was a small ship of a class designed specifically for the Indomitus Crusade. Its Adeptus Astartes complement was set at fifty – not even a full company. But the warriors aboard had an important role, one never seen in the armies of the Space Marines before the Ultima Founding. Slender as a dart, seven hundred metres long and as fast as its shape suggested, the Rudense was heavily armed for its size class, and strengthened to withstand brushes with planetary atmospheres. It was a rapid insertion craft, intended to fight its way through the maelstrom of close-range orbital combat and deliver its payload to the surface directly from the edge of a planet’s atmosphere.
It only had small hangars and no drop pod tubes. The Rudense was something new, and it had taken the enemy by surprise many times.
Explosions burst around the Rudense, and Justinian’s helm lenses darkened against the dazzle. Lasbeams stabbed from the ship’s side out to infinity. The wide rays of defence lasers slammed up from the planet below, but the Rudense was artful at deception, and it was never where the lasers fired.
A massive explosion ahead sent shivers along the ship. The Space Marines swung below their drop arms. Flaming debris span past, wreathed in dying sparks and glittering ices. An escort of interdiction fighters accelerated and fell in alongside the Rudense, weaving through the turmoil and then off ahead, guns blazing. Justinian’s view of the battle was limited by the projecting shields sheltering the Primaris Space Marines from the deadly impacts of micro shrapnel and direct attack. Behind, the ship’s iron immensity blocked off everything. Somewhere beyond that great metal cliff, larger ships would be fighting.
For all the fury of the anti-ship fire streaking up from the surface, beneath Justinian’s feet the world floated peacefully by, its ochre surface hazed by the blue of a thin atmosphere mottled with clouds and their shadows. He had seen many worlds from this vantage point. He had thought he would grow jaded at the sight eventually, but he never had. Every world was different, and when viewed from this height, every world – whether hell or paradise – had been beautiful in its own way.
‘The calm before the storm, brother,’ said Solus, as if reading his thoughts.
‘These places we fight for,’ said Kalael, his armour the green of the Dark Angels. ‘How small they are. We hold that to ourselves as a secret truth. From space, every world is but a fragile glass ornament against the infinite black.’
‘Ten seconds. Nine seconds. Eight seconds...’ The machine counted down.
Justinian kept his eyes on the planet. Flashes of light burst further along its curve, drawing closer as the ship raced towards the battle site. Ground combat from orbit looked deceptively celebratory, a display of multi-hued explosions and storms of light that appeared too artful to be destructive. Shock waves burst clouds apart, and he spied Titans lumbering away from their coffin ships. Beneath the sheath of air, the giant war machines were like aquatic insects that had never learnt how to swim, doomed to laboriously plod along the pond floor.
‘Battleground two hundred and fifty kilometres and closing!’ said Sarkis, his excitement revealing itself as a slight rise in his voice. ‘Prepare for drop! Emperor preserve us in our flight and grant might to our fists!’
‘Four seconds. Mark,’ said the machine voice. ‘Three, two, one. Drop. Unit 10-5011/32A away.’
The drop arm disengaged from Sarkis’ back. The claw that held him dangling over the planet’s sky opened silently. A disposable thruster burned on top of his drop pack, shooting him towards the target zone, and the black-clad son of Ferrus Manus fell away. The booster exhausted its fuel supply quickly and detached. Sarkis fell without a word, plummeting towards the world as surely as a cogitator-guided munition. There was a flaring burst of jets as he corrected his course, and he was gone. Half a second later, the machine intoned Bjarni’s Primaris number. The wolf’s son fell with a whoop, a grey streak, his squad going one, two after him, swift as heartbeats, their impeller jets burning and detaching.
Then it was Justinian’s turn.
‘Unit 13-10889/189E away,’ said the machine, and let him fall.
The claw’s release was gentle as a kiss, the firing of the impeller hard as a punch. It ceased after a
second’s burn. Justinian felt it come away from his jump pack, a bump in his otherwise smooth flight. Justinian plummeted. The long, slender shape of the Rudense vanished overhead, becoming a blade of light in the sky surrounded by the starbursts of orbital combat. The ship drew away, trailing a wake of false lightning through the world’s magnetosphere and chased by the stabbing beams of enemy lances. Enemy fighters sped after it, drawing their own lines in the sky. Naval interceptors approached obliquely.
They made marvellous patterns about the cruiser.
Justinian fixed the sight in his memory, and ordered his armour to capture a series of images at fifty
millisecond intervals. Maybe if he survived this, he would paint the war in space. Justinian liked to paint. The pelorus’ nested reticles shifted slightly, and he looked down. The circles tilted within one another, providing him with a false horizon and a vertical gauge to set his descent by. Cordus and Aldred were bright orange teardrops drifting across the circles, the members of the other squads yellow dots spread
above and below.
A blue line rose up the display towards him. The atmosphere of 108/Beta-Kalapus-9.2 was thin. It
would take him twenty minutes to fall to the ground.
For minutes he fell in silence. The surface was so far away he appeared to be making no progress.
There is no sharp delineation between a world’s air envelope and the void, but instead a region of
increasing attenuation where, atom by atom, air gives way to vacuum. But there does exist a point where the air becomes thick enough to support atmospheric flight – the Kármán line – and there, air becomes thick enough to feel. Justinian hit it with a jolt. Heat followed almost immediately as friction, imperceptible only moments before, quickly built around his armour. A plasma-torch roar filled his ears.
The coming moments were critical. Gaining a good angle of descent at this stage would ensure mission success – a colourless statement that meant only that he would not die before the enemy got a chance to shoot at him.
An alarm sounded in his ear. Cordus’ signifier flashed.
‘Cordus, correct course two points vertical, you are drifting,’ said Justinian.
‘Yes, brother sergeant,’ Cordus responded. His signifier dot and its accompanying rune moved across
Justinian’s display, and the graphic ceased blinking.
The others spread out into a wide dispersion pattern. Three targets awaited the demi-company’s
attention: a series of closely bunched bastions, each one bristling with ordnance.
A bright corona of heat streamed around Justinian, most intense about the reinforced ceramite of his boots. It became uncomfortable, but not dangerous. Provided there was no breach in his Inceptor battleplate, he would be safe.
Soon after, he reached terminal velocity and stopped accelerating. The curve of the world grew quickly, filling his vision with the ground. As the minutes passed, space retreated to the periphery of his vision and vanished. When the last of the black was gone, he finally felt like he was falling. Individual surface features resolved themselves, details popping into sharp definition, though all were flattened by his relative height, so that mountains appeared as painted flourishes upon a round canvas.
Below him, fighting raged upon a plain bordered by a range of hills pierced by a wide valley. Across the valley mouth was a great wall, and a strong fortress not far behind. Two battle lines became visible. Their exchanges of fire were startling weaves of light. A vast phalanx of Astra Militarum tanks, supported by Adeptus Mechanicus cyborg troops and war machines, advanced on the wall from the drop zone.
The wall looked like a ribbon, but in truth it was almost one hundred metres tall, and forty wide. The Titans of the Legio Metalica swelled, their carapace insignia taking on form. They were now the size of men, and the warriors milling about their feet had become the insects. The scene grew before Justinian’s eyes, unfolding like a fractal tapestry.
Aircraft sped below, swift as avians, duelling with draconic daemon engines for control of the sky.
‘Demi-company split,’ ordered Sarkis. ‘Squads to target designated mission objectives in three, two, one. Fire jets. Formation disperse.’
‘Fire jets!’ ordered Justinian. A smaller reticle ignited in the centre of his pelorus and settled over his own squad’s landing zone: the middle tower of the wall. The tallest one.
His jets roared furiously against the drag of the planet. Justinian slowed only a little, but his course altered, and he was sent hurtling laterally towards the tower.
They avoided firing their jets until the last second of a drop. When the Inceptors had first been deployed, the enemy had mistaken their squads for falling debris or stray munitions. In the chaos of battle, they had been paid little attention until it was too late. Lately, the foes of the Imperium had become wise to Inceptor drop tactics. The sky filled with a storm of flak moments after their jets finished burning.
Justinian fell through a wash of fire. Shrapnel pinged off his armour. The thunder of atmosphere lessened. The demi-company’s attack spread widened, the dots that denoted each warrior perfectly positioned in three clusters, one for each defence tower.
The target went from a child’s toy to a towering edifice in a matter of seconds.
‘Fire jets, prolonged burst,’ he ordered. ‘Decelerate to engagement speed. Rouse the spirits of your weapons.’
He hefted his own guns, eager to unleash them upon the enemy. His jets ignited again, and this time they stayed burning. The fuel gauge in his display rapidly fell from full to a third as he braked. He was no longer falling but flying, and that ate up his fuel quickly. In a graceful arc, he and his squad thundered towards the upper battlements of the tower. The bastion was ludicrously embellished with screaming daemonic faces, its crenellations tall and fashioned into unnecessary spikes, but it was well armoured, and four quad flak cannons squatted in heavy turrets at each corner, banging off shots at the attacking Space Marines. Heretic Astartes opened fire as the Inceptors approached, and their fire was more worrisome than the flak cannons. A bolt round spanked off the cowling of Justinian’s left jet nozzle, staggering his flight. More bolts came, then a flurry of them.
Cordus’ ident signifier blinked to red and fell away from Justinian’s display. Justinian risked a glance back. Smoke and explosions hid Cordus’ fate, and he did not see his comrade die.
Another bolt smacked into his breastplate, cracking the outer casing and fracturing the power cabling beneath. Smoke blew from the crack and his jump pack engines coughed. A lurching drop made his stomach flip. Icons blinked, alarms squealed. Justinian prepared to fall to his death while he sought a solution to his power failure. At his urging, the cogitator in his suit rerouted power. The jets roared again, and he surged on with renewed speed. Sealant foam bubbled up to plug the breach in his armour.
The enemy would have to try harder to stop him than that.
Justinian dropped down then burst upward and over the battlements, Aldred beside him. Half a dozen members of the Iron Warriors lined the parapet. Boltguns flashed, revealing horned helms and faceplates cast with daemonic visages. They were terrifying foes, made Adeptus Astartes by the Emperor and granted greater vigour by their Dark Gods. Once, they were the mightiest warriors in the galaxy.
They were the mightiest no longer.
‘Your death has been too long coming!’ Justinian roared, his voxed shout blasting from his helm as he descended on pillars of fiery smoke. ‘Prepare yourselves for the Emperor’s judgement!’
He came down with a bone-jarring thump hard enough to crack the ferrocrete of the tower, guns already blazing fire. Assault bolters were powerful weapons, but if used unwisely they would run through their ammunition stores in seconds. Justinian checked his fury. The resupply pods had yet to land.
Even utilised with care, the assault bolters fired at a terrifying rate. Flames blazed from the weapons’ exhaust slots. Explosions smashed the Iron Warriors from their feet, hurling them backwards with a force that a standard bolter could not hope to emulate.
Bjarni came over the side, howling joyously, his warriors following him. Then came Sergeant Rusticus’ squad, of which Solus was a part. The Primaris Space Marines looked almost as daemonic as their foes, with their varicoloured liveries scorched and smoking from the heat of their descent. Caught between the murderous crossfire of eight Primaris Inceptors, the Iron Warriors were cut to pieces. One of them came at Justinian through the fire storm, a chain axe raised. Justinian leapt back from him with a controlled burst of his jets, retargeting one of his guns on the warrior as he flew. He could not let the enemy get close.
The Inceptor load-out’s only real weakness was a lack of melee weaponry. The guns he held in his gauntlets, however, meant it wasn’t much of a weakness at all.
Justinian’s bolts hit the traitor square in the chest. The Iron Warrior’s antique armour burst apart, spraying his ancient innards in a red slick across the ramparts, and his chain axe fell to the ground. Its teeth bit on the ferrocrete, and it span madly before the motor cut out with a muted growl.
‘For the Emperor! For Guilliman! For mankind!’ Justinian shouted, stamping across the bastion’s roof. He was taller than the Heretic Astartes. Shock-absorbent calipers around the lower part of his legs and feet granted him more height, and he fired over the heads of his enemy as they dropped dead.
The last of the traitors fell. They had not been caught by surprise; they had seen the Inceptors coming. It did not matter. None could stand before the Primaris Space Marines, the new sons of the Emperor.
Sergeant Rusticus’ warriors went to the flak cannons, raised their assault bolters and riddled the firing mechanisms. Bolts exploded inside the guns, setting off their shells. The cannon barrels fell away from popping detonations, clanging from the ornate tower sides and falling down to the wall ramparts far elow. Soon all four cannons were smoking ruins.
‘Primary objective achieved. Anti-air guns are silent,’ voxed Justinian, his feed going to Lieutenant Sarkis and the command cadre of his Primaris Chapter simultaneously. ‘Pursuing secondary objective.’ With Aldred’s garish Imperial Fists yellow at his side, Justinian stormed down the stairs into the lower levels. His guns banged out death to everything he encountered. There were an insignificant number of Traitor Space Marines within. That had been the pattern these last few years. The armies of Chaos were legion and everywhere, but it was arguable that they were losing their best to Guilliman’s relentless crusading. Most of the tower’s defenders were born thralls, or deluded mortals from conquered worlds who had thrown in their lot with evil for the chance at a few more weeks’ life. They came at him in hordes, dirty faces branded and tattooed, twisted into desperate snarls. Justinian cut them down without mercy.
‘Death to the traitor, who in weakness denies the supremacy of the Emperor,’ he said emotionlessly.
$me: "Repeat that? All we got was background noise."The radio crackled back to life, and the quality of it wasn't much better, but at least they were talking in the vicinity of their microphone this time - it was enough for me to hear the location "1-Foxtrot-2301".
$me: "You said 1-Fox-2301?"I stand up and stretch my legs a moment, and $supervisor and I walk out to the machine that bore the location plate reading 1-FF-2301. That one was a game we'd recently converted into a 3-pack of linked games that "shared" a bonus, which linked all 3 upper screens together. Of note is that the "shared bonus" was on a timer as a sort of attract mode, rather than triggered via gameplay - it would appear at certain intervals, and players would have to get a certain combination on the payline to play this bonus mode. After a period of time elapsed in the shared bonus mode, the game would return to normal play, to repeat again a few minutes later.
$radio with excessive background noise: "10-4."
$patron: "See? It didn't show the 'big win' with the little numbers!"The patron nods, and eventually the five or so minutes passes before the shared bonus mode triggers again. A couple of spins into it, the patron gets another trip to the bonus. The bonus plays out, and I see her reach for the spin button.
$me: "It showed, you just skipped it. When you press the spin button, it'll skip the little numbers."
$patron: "But I didn't! It didn't show when the timer hit zero!"
$me: "You weren't in the bonus when the timer hit zero. It tried to play right after you went in the bonus, but you pressed 'spin' and skipped it."
$patron: "Are you sure?"
$me: "Yes, ma'am. We can wait for another bonus and show you, if you want."
**$me: "Ma'am, no, wait. Don't press the button yet."The patron looks at me confused, and I gesture towards the screen, which reads "BIG WIN" with the numbers quickly counting up to a number I'd normally expect to see on my check stub. After a couple of seconds, the patron gives the 'Ohhhhhhh' of Understanding and thanks us.
But everyday life doesn’t always permit a fixed-interval or fixed-ratio reinforcement schedule. Sometimes reinforcers are presented on a variable basis. In the variable-interval schedule of reinforcement: the reinforcer might appear after 2 hours in the first instance, after 1 1⁄2 hours the next time, and after 2 hours and 15 minutes the third time. A person who spends the day fishing For instance, slot machines at casinos operate on partial schedules. They provide money (positive reinforcement) after an unpredictable number of plays (behavior). Hence, slot players are likely to continuously play slots in the hopes that they will gain money the next round (Myers, 2011). Partial reinforcement schedules occur the most frequently in everyday life, and vary according to the The fixed interval schedule yields a scallop-shaped response pattern, reflecting a significant pause after reinforcement (e.g., surgery patient). Connect the Concepts: Gambling and the Brain Skinner (1953) stated, “If the gambling establishment cannot persuade a patron to turn over money with no return, it may achieve the same effect by returning part of the patron’s money on a variable It may involve a fixed or variable interval schedule, where the time that has lapsed determines the amount of reinforcement received. Weekly assessment tests and surprise pop quizzes are good examples of fixed and variable schedules, respectively. The number of responses made can also determine the reinforcement that follows and strengthens them, i.e., the ratio schedule. It can be that A fixed interval schedule delivers a reward when a set amount of time has elapsed. This schedule usually trains subjects, person, animal or organism, to time the interval, slow down the response rate right after a reinforcement and then quickly increase towards the end of the interval. A “scalloping” pattern of break-run behavior is the characteristic of this type of reinforcement schedule Imagine you are playing on something like a slot machine, except that it is guaranteed to pay out approximately (not exactly) every 3 minutes, no matter how many times you pull the handle, with the stipulation that you must pull the handle once after it is “ready,” for it to pay off. This is an interval schedule. (In real life, slot machines are on ratio schedules, that is, their payoffs Learn fixed+interval with free interactive flashcards. Choose from 26 different sets of fixed+interval flashcards on Quizlet. Payoffs from slot machines and other games of chance: Fixed-interval: Behaviour is reinforced for the first response after a specific amount of time has passed. People who earn a monthly salary : Variable-interval: Behaviour is reinforced for the first response after an average, but unpredictable, amount of time has passed. Person who checks email for messages: Partial reinforcement schedules Fixed Interval. Raquel plays the nickel slot machines. She knows that if she plays long enough, she will probably win. She just doesn't know how many nickels it is going to take. Variable ratio. Darby earns $5 every time he stuffs 100 envelopes. fixed ratio. Amelia wants to earn a good grade in her psychology class. However, her professor is going to give four pop quizzes throughout the term Payoffs from slot machines and other games of chance: Fixed-interval: Behaviour is reinforced for the first response after a specific amount of time has passed. People who earn a monthly salary : Variable-interval: Behaviour is reinforced for the first response after an average, but unpredictable, amount of time has passed. Person who checks email for messages: Partial reinforcement schedules
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