I knew, of course, that the San'Shyuum would wear full-body power armor, but I wasn't sure about the aesthetic details. I really liked the idea of a San'Shyuum version of Atlas; armor that would give the impression of a muscular, athletic build, but the details would be soft and indistinct. Maybe the art style I'm thinking of is Art Deco. I dunno.

The idea I went with was that the face would actually be patterned off of a mask. Mostly because I suck at drawing mouths. Really, truly, hopelessly suck at drawing mouths.

Anyway, the San'Shyuum above is Vauskadyamoroai Aleahonnestuera Eyh Heilt Heliathesta(For brevity's sake, we'll call her by her public name, Aleahonne). She is a young infantrywoman in a Pioneer battalion circa 110,000 BCE. Military service is in vogue this decade, and San'Shyuum youth are joining up in droves. Most are thrillseekers hoping to travel the galaxy, tame unexplored systems, and revel in conquest on the battlefield and in the barracks. The professional military wavers between humoring them and deploying them as a layer of ablative meat around heavy shock troops, but mostly just lumps them into battalions with fanciful names like "Pioneer" or "Pathfinder" and finds work for them to do.

Like many of her compatriots, Aleahonne is only lightly augmented via the cybernetic implants that form the interface with her armor and weapon. Her reflexes, durability, and cognitive breadth* are at baseline levels, which means that she qualifies as light infantry no matter how heavy her weapons and armor are.

Of course, that doesn't mean that she's carrying around heavy weaponry either. As a grunt with no specialty, she's issued the assault rifle of the era, a Variable Projector in the seven megawatt range**. True to its name, the Variable Projector can attenuate its output. Milliseconds-long bursts of exotic matter can be alternated on the fly with armor-destroying beams and sprays of hard radiation. Power is drawn directly from the user's suit. This simplifies logistics and frees the user from the tyranny of ammunition management. As a bonus, when troops are deployed against technologically inferior races, the savages can't pull weapons off dead troops and use them.

Modern militaries make heavy use of drones, and Pioneers are no exception. A trooper like Aleahonne would be assigned drones with heavy weaponry (~80 megawatt range) that also project energy shields and conduct electronic warfare. A criticism of San'Shyuum light infantry battalions is that the drones babysit the troopers instead of being directed by the troopers, which proved to be a fatal weakness in the last few wars the San'Shyuum fought. It was simply a matter of relative capability: without augmentations that could improve their reflexes and multitasking, the troopers were slower, weaker, and stupider than their drones.

And that's all I have time to type up tonight. More tomorrow morning. Maybe even a sketch of a San'Shyuum drone.

*Cognitive breadth is the ability to focus on multiple tasks. One of the great Forerunner Warrior-Servants once said that a soldier should be able to plan an invasion, paint a light sculpture, infiltrate a secure ancilla network, study the latest manuscripts on Slipspace engineering, and make love to a spouse. All at the same time. Paying full attention to each task.

By contrast, baseline Humans can barely drive a car and talk on the phone.

**Note: Six megajoules is the amount of chemical energy in a standard barrel of oil, or about the energy required to cremate a Human body. A San'Shyuum Variable Projector can, under ideal conditions, vaporize a Human in less than a second.