Scorpion’s Fury

by C H Gideon

  Elvira’s fifteen belched righteous fury, thundering into the far side of the now-open-air cavern and destroying two more of the fleeing enemy tanks, or whatever these rock-biters called the large, lumbering hunks of mostly iron that served as their heavy unit transports.

  “Good shot, Podsy!” Bao cheered as she pivoted Elvira on her two remaining left legs.

  The front-left leg had been snapped off at the nearest joint, leaving the mech badly-crippled but still able to fire her main guns, for now. Thankfully, the rest of the mech’s limbs were functional; she could still maneuver her big guns into firing arcs that would keep the worst of the enemy off them as long as their supply of close-range rounds held.

  “Side-up against the wall,” Podsy suggested just as she had the inkling to do precisely that. “We can cut our fire to just one flank’s machine guns and maybe stretch the ammo out for another minute, minute and a half.”

  The downside to his suggestion, of course, was that they would be conceding the possibility of escape. Using the wall for cover would make certain this would be a fight to the death, since the enemy would cut them off from the rubble-strewn slope down which they had arrived. But it was an easy call to make. Bao had no illusions about the fact that they weren’t already in a fight to the death, and clearly Podsy felt the same.

  “Good call,” she agreed as she walked Elvira toward the nearest cavern wall while pouring hot rounds point-blank at an enemy that seemed to ooze out of the rubble.

  They were made of the same stuff as the stone that had temporarily buried them.

  Rock-biters. The Arh’Kel.

  Silica-based life forms were nothing new to veterans of the Fleet, but this was Bao’s first combat deployment and her up-close-and-personal look at non-humans. These ones were short, squat, three-legged things with a trio of ‘arms’ that were apparently identical to their ‘legs’ because, in actuality, they were. Without any recognizable head, the creatures’ locomotion consisted of them ‘rolling’ along like a cross between a slinky and a caltrop, with each limb taking a turn as a leg before rotating upright once again and becoming an arm.

  They were big, too, over three meters tall when fully extended. Each of their limbs was half a meter thick, and they moved with greater speed than most creatures of their mass, an average of three-quarter metric ton apiece, seemed physically capable of.

  Still, like anything with a skin, the bastards bled just as freely as humans when Elvira’s machine guns delivered the most intimate of greetings.

  The ammo bars on Bao’s virtual HUD steadily dropped as she lashed out, precisely delivering short bursts into the encroaching hordes. Elvira’s comm antenna had been damaged during the fall, which meant Bao and Podsy were among the unlucky few who, no matter how effectively they fought, would know exactly what the inside of their final resting place looked like.

  A pair of enemy ‘infantry’ came dangerously close to breaking through Elvira’s machine gun arc, but two thousand hours in the targeting simulator paid off as a burst of three rounds struck the rushing enemy twice apiece. Four hits with three shots, at this range, had to be some kind of battalion record.

  Not that anyone would ever learn about it. Even though the mech recorded all data streams for later review, and its data storage systems were hardened against EMP interference, the old-style silica boards in Elvira’s computer systems were like candy to the rock-biters who stripped every last trace of silica from any piece of hardware they’d yet captured.

  She and Podsy were going to die here, surrounded by rock-biters in a six-legged metal casket. She had already made peace with that.

  The only question now was how many of the bastards they took with them.

  Fire spat from Elvira’s right flank, downing over a hundred enemy soldiers before the right side’s ammo broke into the red zone. “Turning,” she barked, knowing that Podsy would need to make the most of his next shot with the fifteen.

  As the Scorpion-class mech pivoted, round after round of enemy fire slammed into her badly-perforated armor. But it was all small arms fire, miniature plasma launchers and coilguns not much different from their human infantry counterparts in terms of destructive force, so the punctures in the mech’s armor were shallow. Elvira would hold together against such weaponry long enough to empty her guns.

  Beyond that…

  As Bao pivoted Elvira clockwise, Podsy sent a soft-loaded fifteen-kilo shell into the far side of the cavern mere seconds before an enemy railgun was brought to bear on them, a railgun she had not been aware of until Podsy had obliterated it.

  “One shot, one kill,” she joked, silently cursing herself for missing the railgun’s presence. She soon completed her turn, and promptly vented her indignation upon the approaching wave of enemy soldiers, tearing them limb from rocky limb as they tumbled toward Elvira’s position.

  “No luck, all skill,” Podsy approvingly finished the much-maligned poem for her. “I’m reading an overload in the number two power coupler,” he reported more seriously just as her neural linkage indicated the same via her HUD. Number Two powered the fifteen’s ammo feed system. Without it functioning, they would be down to Elvira’s missile launcher.

  Firing the soft-loaded fifteen at point-blank range in unstable terrain was risky, to be sure. But firing the ballistic missile launcher closer than a kilometer?

  That was straight-up suicidal for more reasons than Bao could list.

  “Shut it down and reroute through Number One,” she grunted, swaying Elvira aside an eighth of a second before another enemy railgun appeared at a larger tunnel and spat fire at them. The hypervelocity projectiles tore clean through Elvira’s right middle leg, cleaving it roughly in half. Bao felt a surge of feedback akin to pain as the neural interface fed damage reports directly into her brain.

  Spraying Elvira’s machine guns in tightly-grouped bursts, Bao put another fifty of the enemy infantry down while Podsy worked furiously to re-align the mech’s failing power grid. They were at risk of a cascade failure if he couldn’t get it under control, which meant their remaining lifespans likely stood at less than a minute.

  A flicker of movement from a nearby tunnel showed another railgun platform emerging. Followed by another, and another. It was over. They’d fallen into the heart of the enemy and were about to pay the price for nothing short of bad luck.

  “Fire the pulse warhead!” she growled, re-orienting Elvira toward the open ceiling as the enemy railgun set up for a second shot. As last words went, Bao knew those left a lot to be desired, but there was no way she would go down with unspent ammo in the can.

  “Firing,” Podsy acknowledged, his voice filled with resignation as he unleashed the fury of the million man-hours of blood, sweat, and tears which had gone into building the high-precision pulse warhead, a weapon designed to create a powerful EMP capable of knocking just about any electrical system offline, at least temporarily.

  The missile fired off its launcher, propelled by chemically-driven rocket engines. It hurtled up toward the sky, passing from view as Bao turned Elvira’s machine guns toward the horde of rock-biters.

  A time-to-impact countdown appeared on her HUD, signaling they had just six seconds before the pulse warhead completed its turn and went off a few hundred meters above their position.

  Her right machine gun ran dry at the three-seconds-to-go mark, prompting her to stomp Elvira’s front-right leg with such perfect timing that it flattened an inbound soldier breaking through the breach in her defenses. His flanking allies cartwheeled in their odd fashion past his ruin and moved with plasma torches burning, their intentions clear.

  She kept firing the left guns, watching the countdown clock draw steadily nearer to zero. While she did so, the infantry began cutting into Elvira’s armor with their torches. Apparently, they were considered standard sidearms by the rock-biters.

  “Back to the stone age, assholes,” Bao snarled as the clock reached zero, and the soft glow of the enemy railgun preceded what would certainly
be a fatal shot on Elvira’s ruined hull.

  Dying with a pun on her lips was about the last way she had envisioned going out, and as the world exploded with hellish light, all Bao could think about was how much worse those ‘last words’ had been than their predecessors.

  “Detecting a targeted EMP, Commander Jenkins,” Styles reported grimly after his drone’s video feed went dark. “The pulse warhead went off eighty-three meters above the surface.”

  Jenkins released his death-grip on the rail, straightening as he nodded curtly. “Understood. How long until our aerial units arrive?”

  “First unit intercepts in twenty seconds,” Styles replied promptly.

  No one could survive an EMP’s explosive generator at that range, especially not while riding an old rust bucket like a Scorpion. Those things, even in their heyday, had been designed more for show than proper warfare. The human aversion to insects, coupled with the constant need for engineers to constantly reinvent the wheel, and topped off by the bureaucratic insistence on spending government funds on boondoggles, had resulted in the old Scorpion and a handful of similarly bizarre designs being approved and built.

  Thankfully, until now, they had never seen anything approaching real combat. Pulling them out of mothballs had been entirely Jenkins’ plan, and now that plan had cost at least two of his mech crewmen their lives. Given the last few weeks’ results on this dump of a planet, Jenkins was giving serious consideration to leaping off the wagon and finding a deep, dark bottle to crawl inside.

  “Gain altitude and achieve overwatch outside of the biters’ small arms range,” Commander Jenkins ordered. “Our land units will need as much intel on that hole as possible when they arrive. Every byte of data matters here; keep that bird in the air as long as possible.”

  “Moving to overwatch,” Styles acknowledged.

  “Have Monsoon and Babycake formations group at Rendezvous Point Charlie,” Jenkins continued. “We’re scrapping the reinforcement op and adopting a fast-attack posture in the hope we can get there before they collapse all of the tunnels. Establish overlapping fields of fire from the depression’s rim to prevent...”

  “Sir!” Styles interrupted, more than a little uncharacteristically. “You need to see this!”

  Jenkins ground his teeth and glowered in Styles’ direction, “What is it, Mr. Styles?”

  “The hole…it’s clean,” Styles reported eagerly as he threw data streams up on a nearby display for Jenkins to peruse. “No movement, limited EM activity. The thermals clearly show where the rock-biters went down, but...”

  “But they’re not moving,” Jenkins interrupted as he realized what Styles was showing him. The rock-biters were not, in fact, completely motionless, but they were moving sluggishly and without any of the coordination they had displayed in previous engagements. They were either stunned or dying.

  This was the opportunity of a lifetime: the chance to actually breach the enemy’s line before Jenkins’ battalion was battered to a pulp!

  “Rescind my previous orders,” he snapped anxiously, turning to his comm operator. “Monsoon and Babycake are to move with all speed to secure that location. Every second counts!” he barked, and the warrant quickly went to work relaying his orders.

  “Without their infantry,” Styles observed, “they’ll be as exposed as Elvira was, Commander.”

  “The difference here is that Elvira was facing an enemy stronghold at full strength,” Jenkins said, offering a silent prayer of thanks to the fallen crew in the downed Scorpion-class mech, the wreckage of which sat near the edge of the collapsed cavern. “Monsoon and Babycake will be more than capable of securing the area, especially after the hell Elvira gave them. And in eight minutes,” Jenkins added, “Silent Fox and Blue Balls will reinforce their position. Let’s get in there and grab these sandy bastards by the stones!” he exclaimed with relish, and it was obvious from the postures of his command center’s crew that they shared his enthusiasm.

  “Copy that, Commander,” Styles said with an eager nod, and sure enough, the overwatch drone soon spotted the quadrupedal Babycake as it approached the crater, while the bipedal, but six-armed, Monsoon followed some twenty seconds later. “Babycake and Monsoon have started securing the area,” Styles reported unnecessarily as Monsoon began to pour anti-personnel fire into the cavern from the edge, while Babycake slowly wended down the treacherous rubble-strewn slope that Elvira had fallen down earlier.

  The grisly work was done well in advance of the mechs’ attached infantrymen, and soon human soldiers were moving in teams down the rockslide to secure the mouths of each major tunnel leading out of the unthinkably vast transit hub, a hub which stretched a full kilometer from one end to the other at its longest.

  Overwatch was established two minutes later, as another quartet of mechs arrived, but the good news was far from finished, streaming continuously into the command post.

  “Commander,” Styles muttered in an awestruck tone as he looked up wide-eyed, “they survived…”

  “Who, the rock-biters?” Jenkins demanded, the hairs on the back of his neck rising as he wondered how the damned rock-biters could have made it through the hell his people had just poured on them.

  “No… Lieutenant Xi and Chief Warrant Podsednik, sir,” Styles clarified, “Elvira’s crew…they survived!” Jenkins blinked in stunned confusion for a moment before Styles continued, “I’ve got a team of corpsmen reporting Xi is in critical condition. They’re requesting immediate medevac.”

  Surprising no one more than himself, Jenkins pumped his fist victoriously as the command center erupted into a chorus of cheers. “Deploy the medevac, priority one,” he barked, trying to rein in his enthusiasm and retain the dignity of his position. “Yes!” He raised his voice above the hoots and high-fives around the command center as he declared. “It looks like this battalion just produced its first heroes. Keep them alive, Styles. At all costs, keep them alive. They’ve done the battalion’s heavy lifting. Now it’s our turn to carry them.”

  Judging by the mood of his people, he had finally, after six months of working with the dregs and castoffs of every other unit in the armed forces and scraping together every mobile platform which could remotely be considered a combat mech, managed to produce a fighting force worthy of taking the field.

  It was a good feeling, being proud of his people and their accomplishments, and in the grind of the military, good feelings were usually few and far between. He was going to savor it as long as possible.

  But he still had an invasion to spearhead, and he had every intention of achieving his objective before the so-called real soldiers arrived.

  1

  Maximizing Initiative

  “1st Company, throttle up and follow Roy at best possible speed,” Lieutenant Commander Jenkins barked over the local comm, “we’ve got to link up with 2nd Company and move into that hole before the rock-biters close it. Break formation and move out at max-burn.”

  “Orders acknowledged. All units show five-by-five, Commander,” Warrant Styles reported as Roy’s engines ran near the red line, driving the six-man-crew vehicle across the blasted glassy plains.

  Roy was Jenkins’ Mobile Command Center, and the only proper super-heavy vehicle in the battalion. With a quad of individual motive units, each at the end of an extendable limb capable of stretching ten meters out in a ninety-degree range from its joint with the rectangular hull, it was capable of greater speed than any other vehicle under Jenkins’ command.

  Jenkins’ battalion was little more than two full companies of loosely termed ‘combat-ready’ platforms, plus a pair of support mechs used for shuttling damaged gear from the engagement zone for repairs. Those mechs were nearly as fast as Roy and had remained in tight formation with Jenkins’ mech since the battalion’s arrival on this contested world. But as Roy’s engines spun up to maximum output, driving their leg-mounted bearing-style rollers to their rated limits, Jenkins soon left the relatively-fleet-footed recovery vehicles chewing his
exhaust.

  The landscape was dotted with meter-deep craters broad enough to fit whole mechs and crisscrossed with fissures deep enough to spell certain death for any vehicle unfortunate enough to fall down them. Some of those crevices were even large enough to swallow Roy with the wrong misstep.

  But Jenkins’ pilot, Chris ‘Chaps’ Harbaugh, was one of the best.

  Extending and flexing the mech’s front and rear limbs in a perfectly-coordinated display of hard-earned skill, Chaps made traversing ten-meter-wide fissures seem like child’s play, and he did it without ever throttling back.

  As Roy tore across the blasted volcanic glass-field, barely registering the depressions it easily crossed, the vehicle came to a twenty-meter-wide fissure. Rather than slow down and look for a path around the two-click-long ravine, Chaps adjusted the mech’s posture and took it to max accel. Jenkins gripped the nearest rail, noting his crew doing likewise, as Chaps angled Roy’s legs at the last second. The cabin pitched back, then forward, then back again like a galloping horse before the ultra-heavy vehicle launched across the divide with less than a meter to spare.

  Roy landed with a deck-shaking clang, the edge of the ravine crumbling into a slide of rubble that fell away into the chasm while Roy’s momentum carried it forward. With every second precious, Jenkins bit back the rebuke that he wanted to deliver. With 2nd Company already at the rendezvous point, Jenkins needed to get to the breach with his lone assault-grade mech if they were to have any chance of penetrating the tunnels.

  “Mind the paint, Chaps,” Jenkins remarked with forced calm.

  “Sure thing, sir,” Chaps acknowledged tersely. The uncharacteristic dribble of sweat running down his pilot’s temple told Jenkins he should let him focus. Reviewing two thousand hours of Chaps’ training records with this specific mech had taught Jenkins everything he needed to know about performance limits, both the pilot’s and the mech’s.