by C H Gideon
The trip to the collapsed cavern was faster than Xi expected. As soon as the Vultures touched down, she was extricated from the thin metal pod by one of the Wrenches assigned to Lieutenant Billy ‘Big’ Koch’s retrieval-and-repair team. Koch was the head of the unit’s battlefield repair crew, and normally traveled alongside Jenkins’ Roy with the battalion’s two recovery-and-repair mechs: Kochtopussy and Murphy’s Ointment.
The naming conventions in Jenkins’ battalion were reflective of the unit’s colorful personalities and generally rebellious natures. Three in four of Jenkins’ people, Xi and Podsy included, had been recruited directly out of prisons. The rest were castoffs and washouts from various military branches. As people like Captain Murdoch incessantly reminded them, ‘the cream of the crop, you were not.’ It was in no small part due to Murdoch’s snide attitude that the various crews had named their mechs so colorfully, in open defiance of conformity.
In keeping with that non-conformist tradition, Xi had named Elvira after a striking personality she had encountered while perusing a collection of ancient video files. As a teen, Xi had seen the Elvira character as strong, intelligent, and feisty, but above all, she was unafraid to act like a woman when it suited her. That character had been something of a guide-post during Xi’s formative years, as she had grown up in one of the most creatively-oppressive regimes in the Terran Republic.
Xi was taller than most women, not lean and not heavy. Growing up, she had often gotten into fights with young men and, much to their chagrin, won her fair share of those engagements by being better-prepared and trained in hand-to-hand combat. She’d left too many broken noses, and hearts, in her wake during her teens, and looking out into the collapsed cavern littered with broken rock-biter corpses and equipment, she felt grim satisfaction at seeing yet another job well done.
Then her gaze fell on Elvira and she winced despite herself. The mech lay in a crumpled heap, her central chassis resting lifelessly near the pile of rubble Xi had narrowly skated down during the cave-in. Two of her legs were completely destroyed, her hull was riddled with head-sized pock-marks made by small arms fire and plasma cutters, and her fifteen-kilo gun looked to have been torn off its mount sometime after she lost consciousness.
In her current shape, it was hard to see the old Scorpion-class mech ever fighting again. But in that moment, Xi was glad to have chosen Elvira over the generally-superior Babycake back when she had won top honors among the Jocks in their training camp. Babycake was the sweeter ride, no question, but Elvira had a major advantage which was now about to come into play: she was the exact same model as Devil Crab.
Koch’s people had somehow brought Devil Crab down the scrabble onto the cavern floor, where his people worked frantically to bring her online. Devil Crab was missing a primary control module, having come from a civvy-owned military museum on Mars, but Elvira’s systems were completely interchangeable with Devil Crab’s. Even the neural linkage system, if it could be salvaged post-EMP, could be transplanted from one to the other.
But that transplant process would take days of work by a full-time crew, so for now, Xi was going to pilot her backup mech manually.
From the corner of her eye, Xi noticed Lieutenant Koch overseeing work on Devil Crab’s flank-mounted machine guns. “How long until she’s ready?” Xi asked, tearing her gaze away from Elvira to focus on her new ride.
“Motive systems are online, and she’s fully-fueled,” Koch replied without looking her way. “Machine guns are armed and ready to sight in. All we’re missing now is to load her heavy weapons and...”
“Seismic alert!” called out one of the infantrymen standing guard at the upper edge of the depression.
“Confirmed,” a second trooper shouted from a position on the other side of the depression. “We’ve got inbound!”
Xi shared a brief look with Podsy, and his expression confirmed he was as ready as she was. “Looks like it’s time to sight in those guns, Lieutenant Koch,” she said as she rushed toward Devil Crab. Alarms went off along the perimeter. The sixty-four infantrymen assigned to the R&R mechs were locked and loaded and hunkered down. Incoming heavies didn’t bode well for humans in the open.
“Button her up!” Koch barked, prompting his people to close the machine gun mounts while Xi and Podsy made their way into Devil Crab’s cabin. “Get the Puss up on that ridge!” he snapped just as Podsy yanked the hatch shut.
Xi strapped into the pilot’s seat while Podsy ran the minimal series of diagnostics on the power system. While keeping his attention on the streaming information, he asked, “Are you sure you’re good to go all-manual?”
“Just get the weapons online, Podsy.” She smirked as Devil Crab’s power core audibly thrummed to life. She lifted the central ‘carapace’ of the mech off the cavern floor and using the admittedly complicated manual interface, she slowly walked the Scorpion-class mech up the scrabble. “Let me worry about the sticks.”
As they crested the edge of the depression, Xi noted six separate nests the infantrymen had established. With combined RPGs, mortars, machine guns, and even two flame-throwers set up behind rubble barricades, they were ready to receive the enemy. All they lacked was heavy artillery, which Devil Crab unfortunately also lacked.
A flicker of movement half a click off preceded an upward burst of rock, showering like a fountain as rock-biters streamed out of the newly-made hole. Dozens appeared in the first seconds, and the horde soon became hundreds.
Then the first of the enemy vehicles appeared, bearing the signature railguns that the Arh’Kel deployed on this volcanic world.
“Where are our Vultures?” she demanded, unable to get anything out of the comm system when she tried to feed a tactical update to her display.
“Reloading at Battalion HQ,” Podsy replied after a moment’s hesitation. “I’ve got a link established with my personal unit, but it can’t directly relay tactical feeds to Devil Crab.”
“Verbal updates it is,” Xi acknowledged as she crouched and pivoted Devil Crab so her right flank machine guns were on-target. “We need those Vultures’ Hellraisers right about now,” she muttered.
“They’re saying they got Generally’s fifteen-kilo guns working,” Podsy said, jerking with surprise. “They’re asking for target coordinates,” he said, even as she threw the relevant data to his screen.
“Relaying…” he replied, and a few seconds later said, “Receipt confirmed. They’re sending a ranging shell to get the magnetics aligned.”
“Of course they are.” Xi smirked as a total of three railgun mounts emerged from the enemy hole in the glass-field.
“Vultures inbound. ETA fifteen seconds,” Podsy reported.
“All right,” Xi grunted as she armed her right flank machine guns, “let’s put these stoners on their heels.”
Her twin machine guns blazed, spitting twenty rounds apiece which raked the ground midway between Devil Crab and the enemy line. Biting her tongue in annoyance, Xi ceased fire and adjusted her targeting algorithm. Adjustments made, she fired another short burst, which slightly overshot the enemy position.
“Third time’s a charm,” she muttered, unleashing another short burst that partially hit the enemy line. A handful of rock-biters fell while some of her rounds went high and others went low. Frankly, she was amazed she could land more than ten percent of her rounds at this range and without proper alignment of her weapons’ rotary barrels.
“Hellraisers away. Time-to-impact is three seconds,” Podsy reported as the rock-biters began cartwheeling toward them far faster than seemed possible given the physics involved.
Those three seconds seemed like an eternity, during which time it was all Xi could do to refrain from unleashing her guns on the approaching horde.
But when the Hellraisers finally struck, it was well worth the wait.
Streaking in at a low angle, the missiles landed with near-perfect unison and the field erupted into a raging orange wave consuming the rock-biter position. A nearly two-hund
red-meter-long fireball rose to the sky, dragging columns of black smoke up with them. Visualizing through the smoke-field was impossible, but Xi knew that any humans caught in that blast would have been instantly killed. Hellraisers were old-school incendiaries with limited value against armored targets, but seeing the enemy position consumed by the inferno would bolster the surviving ground pounders’ morale. Or give them something else to bitch about.
Then the rock-biters emerged from the cloud, cartwheeling at full-speed like nothing had happened.
“Damn,” she grunted before unleashing her right flank machine guns on the approaching Arh’Kel troops. Her flanking infantrymen did likewise, firing well-aimed rounds at a rapid rate and adding mortars to the machine gun fire.
A dozen Arh’Kel fell in the first seconds of fire. A handful fell to mortar impacts, the explosions blowing them apart, limb from rocky limb. Devil Crab’s machine guns were the most effective weapons, sawing down dozens of cartwheeling rock-biters as they emerged from the smoke.
The infantrymen got their licks in too, grimly holding the line.
Spraying controlled bursts, the unarmored human warriors sent round after round down-range. Even at three hundred meters, more hit their targets than missed. With practiced poise and fearless focus, the men and women of the Terran Fleet Ground Forces executed according to their training. Aim and fire. Aim and fire. Reload. Hold the line. Fire and fire again.
And the rock-biters kept coming.
Hundreds of the silica-based, six-limbed creatures rolled limb-over-limb at an average speed of nearly eighty kilometers per hour. The nearest of them were only two hundred and fifty meters away when a telltale whistling sound filled the air above.
Inbound ordnance.
“Incoming!” someone shouted, loud enough to echo from the chamber walls.
A violent explosion shattered the ground about two hundred meters from the smoke-covered Arh’Kel formation. A geyser of glossy black rock and dust erupted, but not even the debris reached the rock-biters as they drove steadily toward Devil Crab and her flanking FGF troopers.
Xi forwarded her console’s telemetry on the range-finding round’s strike point, and Podsy soon acknowledged, “Got it. Forwarding now.”
The rock-biters broke the two-hundred-meter mark, tearing forward with a single-minded purpose toward Devil Crab’s position.
Kochtopussy and Murphy’s Ointment, silent until that moment, opened fire with four machine guns identical to Devil Crab’s. Their accuracy left plenty to be desired, showing less at two hundred meters than Devil Crab had shown at three hundred. But the added weight of fire began to take its toll, cutting down entire lines of Arh’Kel infantry. But they kept coming, a fearless tidal wave of alien soldiers.
The FGF troops fired with increasing intensity with every meter the enemy covered. By the time the rock-biters crossed the hundred-meter mark, the Pounders’ weapons were sending ammo down-range as fast as their feeders could load it.
Then the Arh’Kel railguns made their presence known.
Kochtopussy was struck by a pair of hypervelocity projectiles, sheering off one of the grappling arms it used to load and secure damaged vehicles. Murphy’s Ointment took a direct hit to one of its tracks, blowing it completely off in a shower of molten metal. One of those fragments careened into an FGF nest, killing its occupants and cooking off the mortar rounds they had been steadily feeding into the enemy line.
The nest nearest that one was shaken, with two Pounders leaping over their makeshift barricade to avoid a similar fate. After a few seconds, its remaining occupants resumed pouring fire into the advancing enemy, and the briefly-scattered soldiers returned to their posts.
“Where the fuck is my artillery?!” Xi screamed, and not two seconds later, in the form of a distinctive whistle, she got her answer.
Like a thunderbolt hurled by the hand of God himself, a fifteen-kilo range-assisted HE round fell upon the rushing enemy horde. Twenty Arh’Kel died instantly, and dozens more were thrown bodily backward by the shockwave and debris.
But the rest rolled on.
“Transmit the railgun coordinates relative to that impact point,” Xi barked, ceasing fire while she forwarded the info to Podsy. She wasn’t positive about the locations she had keyed in, but they were close, and right now that was the best they could hope for. Time was critical. If wasted, they’d die again, within spitting distance of where they’d died before.
Xi screamed her war cry in fury and frustration. Today was not a good day to die.
Again.
“On it,” Podsy acknowledged as Xi pivoted Devil Crab to present her left bank’s fully-loaded guns. Once oriented, she unleashed them and sent hundreds of rounds into the rock-biter formation before the second artillery strike landed.
Another plume of rocky debris shot skyward, this one from the railguns’ target coordinates within the slowly-dispersing smoke cloud. She hooted victoriously when her instruments positively confirmed that one of the three enemy railguns had been neutralized.
Its fellows soon made their displeasure known.
Devil Crab was rocked by a pair of direct railgun strikes to her left flank’s armor. One of her machine guns was scrubbed completely, and warning klaxons went off within the cabin.
Pivoting the mech yet again, Xi snarled in frustration before letting loose with her right-side weapons. The closest enemy were now thirty meters from the line, and as they crossed that threshold, they were greeted by a wave of Pounders’ RPGs. Of the ten grenades sent, only one missed its target. The rock-biters swayed under the fusillade.
The rock-biter wave had been thinned significantly, to be sure. No more than thirty of the leading edge had survived the charge, less than ten percent of the number that started the race to meet the humans.
But those thirty soon proved their mettle against the FGF.
Firing their bizarre slug-throwers after reaching point-blank range, the Arh’Kel warriors sent single shots into their targeted nests. Each round delivered more kinetic energy than even Devil Crab’s machine guns. The incendiaries took their toll and this time, the infantry suffered mightily.
Each FGF nest erupted with white-hot clouds of phosphorous. Dozens of those brave Pounders died in the first wave as the mechs’ machine guns fought back against an enemy that had gotten too close. No matter the amount of fire, there would be no respite for the Pounders. Every man and woman was in a fight for their lives.
Some of the rock-biters pulled a bizarre braking maneuver, planting four of their limbs against the ground while flattening their bodies. Precisely two Arh’Kel did this before reaching each of the nests’ rubble ramparts erected by the FGF, and when the skidding rock-biters collided with the rubble walls, they blew through them like freight trains through sand berms.
Chunks of stone weighing hundreds of pounds were flung into the air when the rock-biters slammed into the barricades. Smaller bits of rubble became deadly projectiles, some of which claimed the lives of Pounders hunkered down near Elvira’s wreckage fifty meters away.
Another artillery strike, courtesy of Generally’s crew, blew apart a second railgun mount. Xi was surprised at their accuracy but was too focused on the fight at hand to spare it much thought. She cut down two rock-biters with her lone left-side machine gun as they cartwheeled past the FGF nests. Unlike their skidding fellows, who had apparently been tasked with breaking the FGF line, these rock-biters seemed determined to breach the depression.
The Ointment and Kochtopussy put down several of the would-be intruders as they dashed past the line. Two of those silica-based soldiers exploded far more violently than should have been possible, even with lucky hits to their sidearm mags. Little was known about the Arh’Kel, but suicide attacks had not once been mentioned in the pre-op intelligence briefs.
Despite the mechs’ best efforts, a handful of Arh’Kel infantry slipped through the line and began tumbling down the depression’s slope, where they were greeted by the gentle sigh of Pounder RPG
s. Despite taking a heavy toll on the FGF troops top-side, not a single rock-biter survived from that first wave, though parts of six rock-biter corpses did come to tumbling stops mere meters from the FGF’s final stand at Elvira’s wreck.
Another artillery strike landed near the last remaining Arh’Kel railgun. Returning her focus to the remnants of the approaching horde, Xi was bitterly disappointed to find that the latest strike had missed the mark by at least thirty meters.
“Nobody’s perfect,” she grunted, deciding it was time to push the offensive as she drove Devil Crab out from the line toward the approaching enemy, “especially not me.”
Crab-walking side-on to the enemy in order to keep her two nearly-depleted machine guns on target, Xi quickly counted no more than fifty rock-biters remaining from the original several hundred. But instead of retreating, as any sane unit would have done in their circumstance, the remaining Arh’Kel continued cartwheeling toward the line. Their impressive, and patently suicidal, determination was met with a steady diet of depleted uranium slugs. Slowly but surely, the horde of enemy soldiers was cut down with none reaching the shattered remnants of the FGF line.
Devil Crab lurched violently to the left from another railgun strike, whiplashing Xi badly enough to make her temporarily black out. As her senses quickly returned, she became aware of another artillery strike on the Arh’Kel railgun’s position. The mushroom cloud and debris cleared, showing that the final railgun had been silenced forever.
Xi shook her head vigorously on instinct, causing a wave of nausea which overcame her and emptied the meager contents of her stomach onto her lap. As she regained control of herself, she was glad to find Podsy had not leapt to her aid and was instead working to put out several fires along their badly-damaged left flank.
