by Geoff Brown
One of Carnigore’s saving graces, as he was just learning, was that it had much nimbler hands than your typical exomech. It was relatively easy to pick up a canister, eject an empty one, and reload the canister directly into the waiting drum feeder. ‘Relatively’ still meant that it took him minutes however, and he was out of battle during a time when mere seconds were critical.
Graves was very aware of his rapidly diminishing ammunition supply, and was firing controlled burst of 2-3 rounds each. It was never going to make a dint in the oncoming horde, but killing those in the lead would buy them some time… no idea what for, but maybe the Singh’s would get there in time to rescue the wives and children locked into the Bunker.
Crazy Bill was firing constantly, preferring his own heavy cannon over his lighter autocannon. The high explosive rounds tore clumps out of the enemy and caused some confusion, which helped slow them down a little. Not enough, but everything helped.
“Hank,” he said over the firing, “something just occurred to me.”
“What’s that Bill?” Graves replied, simultaneously firing a burst from his over-sized shotgun into a clump that was just begging to have a spray of tungsten sent its way. “You leave the gas on?”
“No,” Crazy Bill said, chuckling loudly. “That wife of yours, she never gave us the bad news.”
“You’re right,” Graves said. “Beth, honey? You got something else for us?”
“The bad news? You want it now?”
“Sure! What could possibly make anything worse?”
There was a pause, and Graves could hear his wife’s sharp intake of breath.
“It’s the giant gate on the ridgeline… it’s still open.”
The three men in the exomechs paused a moment as that sunk in. Gates always closed after they’d dropped off their load of deebees. Always.
“Well, shit!” Wright said, trying to push the last of his reload canisters into place.
“And then some,” Crazy Bill added.
* * *
Singh Farmstead, Tau Ceti IV
The three exomechs stood open, family members working quickly to repair and reload them as best as they could, while the three pilots stood around the tactical display in the farmhouse’s security room. The picture looked grim, and they doubted that Graves and the others would last much longer.
“If we move quickly,” Agun said, “Hawk and Eagle might get there in time to be of some help.”
Jaswant shook his head. “You’d need Crescent Moon to support you, you don’t have the firepower to make much of a difference.”
“We could give them close defence like we do for you, keep the deebees clear while they clean them out.”
“Good idea, brother,” Kubai said, “but that would leave Crescent Moon without support.”
“Someone needs to stay here and guard the families.”
That brought a frown from Jaswant, one that silenced his son. “If Graves and the others fall, there’s no point guarding anything else.” He pointed to the satellite images of deebees pouring towards the distant farmstead. “The colony lives or dies at the Graves farmstead.”
“What do we do, father?” Agun asked.
“The best we can my son, the best we can.”
* * *
Graves Farmstead, Tau Ceti IV
Brutiful’s autocannon whirred and clicked as they finally ran out of ammunition. He was down to his last three shotgun rounds and then he’d be useless until the deebees got into close range, and by then it would be all over.
“Hank!” Wright’s voice cut over the radio. “I’m reloaded, you’re up!”
Carnigore stepped beside him, its clown-face a garish red grin as it opened fire on the aliens. Wright had no concerns at all about ammunition now and was firing it as fast as he could – there were certainly plenty of targets for everything he had to throw at them.
Graves stepped back out of the line and moved quickly to the clump of ammunition canisters the drones had dropped off for him. Brutiful was a large exomech, with lots of ammunition storage and he knew it was going to take him a while to get completely reloaded.
“Crap,” Crazy Bill cut in, “I’m out too, nothing but close-in guns and my fists!”
“I can hold them,” Wright replied, “But you’ll need to be quick!”
“Bill, grab your canisters, make for the next hill,” Graves said. “We’ll cover you, you reload up there and cover us as we move back.”
“Roger that!” Crazy Bill picked up his ammunition drums and ran for the next hilltop as fast as Grampage’s servo-motors would go.
Graves could hear the sounds of firing behind him as he reloaded.
“Hank!” Wright yelled over the radio, “I need you real bad!”
Graves picked up the remaining canisters on Brutiful’s lower arms and turned back to the line, his heavy shoulder-weapons coming back down, as reloaded as they were going to be.
The swarm was only a few hundred yards away now, and the exomech sensors still showed thousands of creatures out there. True, they could see the swarm was smaller than it was before, but they both knew it wasn’t going to be enough.
Graves started firing, autocannon on maximum rate, shotgun blasting out a spread of tungsten as soon it chambered another round. Beside him, Carnigore matched him round for round, and the slaughter amongst the deebees was incredible.
But not enough.
“Hank,” Wright’s voice came through on a private direct channel. “I don’t think we’re going to make it.”
Graves knew he wasn’t wrong, but really didn’t want to admit it.
“I know,” he said softly, “but we’ll go down swinging, give the Singhs and the others as best chance we can.”
“I guess we will,” Wright said, triggering another burst. “I just hope it counts for something.”
The two men were silent for a long time, firing rapidly and switching fire to deal with the targets that presented the greatest threat.
“Hank, honey!” Beth’s voice cut through urgently, “I need you to both get off the hill, and now!”
“What?”
“Don’t argue, just get the hell off there!”
Graves shrugged and powered Brutiful off the hill as fast as he could, and a moment later he saw Carnigore do the same, with the front ranks of deebees only a dozen or so metres behind and closing.
His suit sensors pinged as they picked up a flight of something coming in fast and low, and he instinctively ducked as something flew overhead. He’d barely made it half-way down the slope when there was an explosion on the other side of the hill, powerful enough to knock both Carnigore and Brutiful off their feet and send them tumbling down the hill.
* * *
Southern Ridgeline/Jenkins Farmstead, Tau Ceti IV
Jenkins day just wasn’t getting any better. Jessie was sending him the video and satellite feeds and he knew the colony was well and truly screwed over. There was a small chance Graves and the others could hold the deebees back, and he wanted to still be alive when the battle was over, but sitting back and watching wasn’t going to help anybody, including him.
“Keith, I’m picking up movement on the ridgeline,” Jessie said. “Big biomass, headed towards Graves’ place.”
“Well, that’s them screwed then,” he replied. “Might be best if you start packing some things Jessie and we take our chances in the wild until the next ship arrives.”
“Might not be so bad, Keith… that big swarm of deebees isn’t showing up on the satellite at all!”
“What now? That son of a bitch Graves took out an entire swarm by himself?”
“No idea,” Jessie replied. “Might be worthwhile getting over there though, just in case.”
“Good idea, Jessie,” Jenkins said. “There should be plenty to claim from the colony account after this.”
Turning Shepherd southward, he started mentally calculating the claims he was going to be putting in for his defence of the colony… and very, very inflat
ed claims they would be.
* * *
Graves Farmstead, Tau Ceti IV
Shaken, Graves struggled to get his exomech back on its feet, but whatever had knocked him down must have had enough force to throw Brutiful’s gyros out of alignment.
He noticed the ringing in his ears only when he started to get his hearing back, and only when that died down did he hear Beth calling out for him over the radio.
“Hank! Hank! Do you read me?” Her voice was frantic, and Graves had no idea how long he’d been out.
“I’m here, honey,” he replied. “Quit yelling and tell me what the hell just happened.”
“Oh, Hank, honey!” she said, the relief evident in her voice. “I thought I’d lost you!”
“Nope, still here… what did I miss?”
“You missed a lot! The Singhs came through, the smaller gates are all closed and the two Singh boys are on their way over, should be at the bunker within twenty.”
“Just the boys?” Graves asked. “Jaswant didn’t make it?”
“Jaswant’s fine!” Beth replied. “They stripped the fusion cell out of Crescent Moon and sent it in on a drone, rigged to detonate on command.”
Graves paused as that sank in… fusion cells were expensive and temperamental , and it would have been fast and risky work to take one out of an exomech and rig it to a crop-dusting drone.
No wonder Beth had wanted him off that hill in a hurry!
“Wait… the Singh’s just nuked my back yard?”
“Honey!”
“We’ll talk about it later, Beth,” he said. “Right now, I need an update on everything else.”
“I can’t give it to you, honey,” Beth replied. “The blast’s EMP took out our sensors and all the drones, and our satellite link is going to be down until you get back and fix it.”
“Okay… I’ll look around here and let you know what’s going on.”
“Roger that… I’ll get this place sorted out and see to the families I have here.”
He had to shut down and then reboot the gyros before he could stand up, and then he turned and went back to the top of the hill. The place was a mess.
On the fields below, the deebee swarm was now ash, turned to scorched dust by the force and heat of a fusion explosion. It would take him years to deal with the radiation, and he might have to move to maintain enough land to make a viable homestead, but he was glad to be alive.
He was saddened, however, at the sight of Carnigore, lying shattered and twisted at the base of the hill. The blast must have picked the exomech up and hurled it down the slope, and looking at the torn armour the following wave of radiation must have cooked Wright inside his suit.
Hopefully, he’d have been unconscious when the wave hit and he’d died quickly.
There was movement behind him, and he turned to see Grampage moving towards him. The exomech waved at him, then the right arm carefully tapped the suit’s head, indicating radio failure. Grampage would have been well protected from the explosion, but high up on the next hill it would have been quite vulnerable to the EMP.
Crazy Bill came closer, and Graves could see through the armoured glass canopy that he was waving a hand-held radio at him. The hand-helds were standard equipment for all colonists, and it took Graves only a moment to unclip his.
“You okay old-timer?” he asked, smiling to take the sting out of his words.
“Never been better,” Crazy Bill replied. “You got a lot of dead deebees on your land, Hank, going to be good fertiliser come next summer.”
“Summer in about 300 years you mean,” Graves said, “after the radiation dies down.”
He could see Crazy Bill laughing at him.
“Don’t be foolish, Hank, the deebees will absorb that radiation as they break down.”
“Really?”
Crazy Bill was nodding now.
Suddenly, there was an almighty roar, loud enough to shake them both through their armoured exomechs. Looking around, Graves saw a creature that even his worst nightmares wouldn’t have thrown at him.
It was a deebee, but like nothing of them had ever seen before. His visual sensors were out, but it towered over the trees it was brushing easily aside, and must have stood at least 30 metres tall at the shoulder. Graves counted six clawed legs, could see from the sheen that it was chitin armoured, and the snout was fanged like a hungry cat.
“What… on… earth… is … that?” was all he could mutter.
“That,” Crazy Bill replied, “is as good a reason as you’ll ever need to run the hell back to your bunker.”
Nodding, Graves turned his exomech and moved as fast as he could back to his farmstead.
* * *
Graves Farmstead, the Bunker, Tau Ceti IV
By the time Graves and Crazy Bill got back to the Bunker, the two light Singh exomechs had arrived, and Beth and Helen were out chatting to the two men. Beth waved happily when Graves arrived, but stopped waving when she saw the state of Brutiful and the urgency on her husband’s face.
“Hank, honey, what is it?”
“Deebee coming, get back in the Bunker!”
“How many?” Agun asked, strapping himself back into his harness.
“Just one, son,” Crazy Bill replied, “just one.”
Agun and Kubai frowned as they sealed their exomechs and powered up their sensors – they’d known when the fusion cell was due to detonate and had shut down their systems to avoid the worst of the EMP – but they weren’t making much sense of the readings.
“My sensors must be fried,” Kubai said.
“Mine too,” Agun added. “I’m picking up one signature, of enormous mass.”
“There’s nothing wrong with your sensors,” Graves said. “Just the one, and it’s the size of a deep-space shuttle.”
The creature appeared at that moment, towering over the trees, and Beth and Helen both ran for the safety of the Bunker. Moving at great speed, the deebee headed towards them and Graves barely had enough time to reload the last of his ammunition canisters before the thing broke through the electric fence surrounding the farmstead. Built to keep out cattle, it barely registered on the behemoth above them.
The Bunker was equipped with a pair of 200mm cannon, capable of firing both high-explosive and anti-armour rounds. The ammunition hoppers were always filled with high-explosive, and Beth was firing them at the rapid rate, hoping to bring the creature down under a hail of fire. Against the thick chitin armour, however, the rounds did nothing.
Brutiful’s autocannon had much the same effect, bouncing harmlessly off or exploding on impact without troubling the creature at all. He didn’t even bother firing the shotgun, knowing the lower-velocity rounds would do nothing.
The Singhs charged in, Hawk and Eagle moving swiftly around the creature, firing their machine guns hoping to find a weak spot. The creature didn’t appear to have any, and the rounds did little more than distract it.
Kubai’s flamethrowers did little better, managing to infuriate it, and the creature reared up on its four hind legs and brought its fore-paws crashing down…
Both of the lighter exomechs managed to dodge, though only just.
The Bunker’s twin cannon were still firing, and still having no effect at all.
“Beth,” Graves said as he moved Brutiful around to the giant deebee’s right side, “quit wasting the hi-ex. I need you to unload as fast as you can and reload with the anti-armour rounds.”
“Hank, honey,” Beth replied, “what do you think I‘m doing?”
Graves conceded that she had a point… unloading manually would have taken much longer than just firing it all off.
“Okay,” he said. “Let me know when you’ve got a few anti-armour rounds loaded, we’ll try to keep the thing off the bunker until you do.”
“Roger that!”
Eagle and Hawk were running between the creature’s legs now, still firing, and it didn’t seem to like it much. It reared up again, this time on its rearmost pair o
f legs, and brought its whole body down.
This time Eagle wasn’t so lucky, and a descending claw caught it and pressed it to the ground. The giant head came around, jaws open, and then the creature’s teeth crushed and tore into the exomech and the pilot within. Graves winced as he heard Agun’s screams, and then there was silence.
“Brother!” Kubai yelled, and darted forward to avenge his fallen kinsman. The creature was grinding the suit between its teeth, shredding the armour and Agun’s remains. Ignoring his other weapons, Kubai slammed Hawk directly into the deebee’s head, using the suit’s armoured shoulders as a battering ram.
The impact was incredible, and Graves saw teeth fly out of the mouth as the creature sagged for a moment, and Kubai took the opportunity to slam Hawk’s fists into the creature’s head, massive roundhouse blows with power and weight behind them that only an exomech could generate.
The creature’s exoskeletal armour began to break apart, and Kubai dug his suit’s hands deep into a crack and heaved… Armour pulled away, revealing bright pink and yellow flesh beneath. He shoved his right arm into the hole and fired a burst from his twin machine guns, digging deep as the rounds finally punched into something vital.
The creature roared in agony and lifted its body, dragging Hawk with it. Kubai used his left arm to hang on and continued firing as the creature shook his head frantically in an effort to dislodge him.
“Hank, honey!” Beth cut in. “I have six anti-armour rounds loaded, ready to fire!”
“Roger that,” Graves replied. “Kubai, drop clear!”
“Negative, Henry Graves,” Kubai said. “You know the saying about riding the tiger.”
Graves did indeed – there was no getting off once you started.
“Beth, Kubai can’t get clear… I’ll try to turn it so you can get a clean shot.”
“Negative again,” Kubai said. “Beth Graves, take your shot now, while I have it distracted.”
“Hank, honey?”
“He’s right, Beth, take the shot. Try to aim low, and be sure not to miss.”
Graves watched as the twin cannon slewed around and then dropped, aiming right for the creature’s chest, and fired three rounds from each barrel. At that range, they couldn’t miss.
