by C H Gideon
There was a brief delay, followed by a chorus of, “Copy that, Lieutenant.”
“This is insubordination, Xi,” Ford finally managed to transmit over Xi’s subtle attempts to prevent communication with the hysterical officer. “You’ll be court-martialed for this!”
“Let’s get our people out of that hole before we start with administrative procedures, En-swine,” Xi retorted. “Now shut your suck and fall in behind as we breach this fall.”
“You’ve got a lot to learn, little girl,” Ford growled as he guided his mech through the entry to the cavern.
“I’d gladly take a lesson once we see daylight. Now keep this channel clear,” she said easily, and she could hear a short chorus of snickers over the open channel from the other mechs’ crews.
They’d seen what happened to those who tussled with her, but Ford was just stupid enough that he might actually take her up on it.
“Until then,” she continued blithely, “I think it’s best if you reported to your superior, after you’ve located him, of course.”
Silence was her only reply as the three humanoid mechs moved forward to excavate the passage. In less than ten minutes, they had cleared enough rubble to permit most of the column to pass into the cavern beyond. The smaller mechs went through while the three humanoid units continued excavating the boulders, but Devil Crab’s girth meant she would be the last vehicle capable of passing through the portal.
Thick, black smoke clung to the tunnel’s roof as it billowed steadily up Bravo Tunnel en route to the surface.
“Glad to see you could join us, Lieutenant Xi,” Commander Jenkins said over the battalion channel.
“Sorry we weren’t in there sooner, sir,” she said as a sudden wave of nausea swept over her. “What are your orders?”
“We’re gathering a few of the more intact rock-biter corpses for study,” he replied, “along with some of their railgun tech components. Your danger-close pulse missile strike topside is the only reason we’re still alive down here.”
Her brow scrunched up in confusion, “I don’t understand, sir.”
“The battalion will be briefed after we get back to HQ,” he assured her, “but for now, we need to clear the rest of this rubble and get out of this hole. There are a whole lot more of these sandy bastards down here than we thought. We have to fall back, regroup, and await the main body of Fleet Ground.”
Her lips twisted sourly. “I thought we were the cavalry, sir.”
“One step at a time, Lieutenant,” Jenkins chuckled. “As far as first deployments go, this one was more successful than anyone outside this hole gave us credit for. It’s time to head for the barn and relay what we’ve learned to Fleet.”
“You’re the commander, sir,” she said with as much deference as she could force into her voice. She hated waiting for help from others, even when that help happened to be delivered by the most devastating armed forces branch in the Terran Republic.
“Stand by to assist recovering whatever salvage we can drag out of here,” Jenkins commanded. “We roll in fifteen, well before the rock-biters have a chance to regroup.”
“Copy that,” Xi acknowledged, but less than two minutes later, that plan was out the window.
The rock-biters had returned.
6
Elvira Reborn
“I’ve got over a thousand inbound rock-biters on the screen, Commander,” Styles reported.
“You’re using their comm-linkage to locate them?” Jenkins asked.
“Yes, sir,” Styles acknowledged. “I can’t listen in on the chatter yet, but I can identify individual infantry from HWPs. They’ll breach the perimeter in forty seconds.”
Jenkins switched his mic to the battalion-wide channel, “Devil Crab, Flaming Rose, and Babycake will advance with Roy at flank speed...” He paused, silently cursing himself for using fleet terminology instead of land. “We take the center while all units not assigned to salvage are to assume guandao formation along the eastern edge of the cavern, ordered by the numbers.”
The acknowledgments came as the battalion sprang into action. The majority of the enemy was approaching from the south, which meant he might be able to keep them from entering the cavern. And even if the Arh’Kel breached, sustained fire from the fresher 1st Company mechs would provide ample cover for the rest of the battered battalion to withdraw.
No sooner had the four heaviest mechs reached the cavern’s center than the first Arh’Kel soldiers emerged from the southern tunnels.
And when they did, they were pissed.
“RPGs inbound!” Styles called out before Roy’s armor was struck by a barrage of grenades.
“Kill-box that tunnel,” Jenkins commanded the fourteen mechs ready to engage the enemy. “Fire, fire, fire!”
Arranged like the eponymous guandao halberd, the four heavy mechs near the cavern’s center sent artillery and rockets toward the southern tunnel’s mouth. The ‘shaft’ of the formation was comprised of the ten lighter mechs, each of which lent whatever long-range fire support they could while spraying anti-personnel rounds into the emerging Arh’Kel. Accuracy at the median range of just over a kilometer left much to be desired, but the volume of fire was nothing short of terrifying.
Thousands of rounds per second slammed into the cavern’s south wall during the fierce barrage, while only dozens struck enemy targets. Tracer rounds, sent from some of the older track-style mechs, lit up the cavern as the deafening roar of machine guns rattled dust loose from the cavern’s ceiling.
And the Arh’Kel kept coming.
Devil Crab sent a pair of AP shells into the middle southern tunnel, scrubbing a railgun platform before it could fire a single shot. Flaming Rose added a pair of HE rockets to the onslaught, killing fifty Arh’Kel and partially collapsing one of the smaller tunnels. Hundreds of Arh’Kel died in the first seconds of the engagement, their corpses barely distinguishable from the granite debris which fell over them.
And still, the rock-biters kept coming.
Babycake spat a rocket-assisted explosive round into the main southern tunnel and received railgun fire in reply. Jenkins felt his breath catch at the initial damage reports: Babycake’s drive system had been compromised and its main gun was offline. Fire raged inside the mech’s cabin, and Jenkins felt himself silently willing Babycake’s crew to abandon the mech and save themselves.
But, like the horde of oncoming rock-biters, his people stood tall and mercilessly returned fire. A pair of rockets tore loose from their mounts on Babycake’s undercarriage, with one taking the offending HWP off the board and the other causing a partial collapse of the cavern’s southern edge.
A collapse which soon began to spread throughout the cavern, dropping jagged boulders from the ceiling, some of which were larger than Roy.
The humanoid mech, Creeper’s Daughter, which stood nine-point-five meters tall, was crushed by one of the larger boulders. Skewering its main compartment from above, Creeper’s Daughter was nearly bifurcated by the falling wedge-shaped slab of rock.
Blue Lotus, a five-legged Crab-class artillery mech, lost two legs when a trio of boulders struck it from above. Amazingly, the mech somehow managed to use its remaining three legs to maintain an upright posture and keep anti-personnel fire pouring into the southern tunnels. But without all five of its legs, its artillery was no longer functional.
The primitive side of Jenkins’ brain told him to cease heavy weapons fire to prevent similar cave-ins. Friendly fire had just killed two of his crew aboard Creeper’s Daughter and cost him one mech and badly damaged a second.
But Jenkins’ higher brain told him that if those Arh’Kel made it into the cavern, with less than a kilometer separating their tunnels and his people, no one in the battalion would survive.
So he did the exact opposite of ordering his people to cease fire.
“All units, fire HE rockets,” he commanded, sensing hesitation among his crews. “Pour it on. Remember New Melbourne!”
At invo
king the site of the worst massacre in the conflict’s history, one which saw three million people slaughtered in under six hours when the Arh’Kel attacked New Australia’s most populous settlement, Jenkins saw his people renew their efforts.
A wave of HE rockets tore from their tubes, obliterating most of the Arh’Kel’s ranks before they could emerge from the tunnels. Machine gun barrels glowed bright orange from sustained fire, and the few Arh’Kel who survived the kill-zone were quickly cut down by precise fire delivered by the FGF Pounders.
And still the Arh’Kel continued their charge.
A wave of HE rockets finally collapsed the largest of the southern tunnels, breaking loose another deadly shower of boulders from the cavern’s ceiling. The quadrupedal Priscilla was struck by a six-ton boulder falling from fifty meters above. Priscilla crumpled and quickly exploded with a roar as its liquid fuel supply was ignited by her overheated machine gun barrels.
It was clear that something would need to change, fast, or Jenkins’ fire was going to cause a massive cave-in. There were at least four more railgun platforms en route from the southern tunnels, and if they decided to collapse Bravo Tunnel instead of attacking his mechs directly, the entire column would be trapped and at the enemy’s mercy. But he couldn’t stand his ground and pour fire into the rock-biters at this rate for more than another thirty seconds before many of his mechs’ ammo was exhausted.
Something had to give, and Lee Jenkins grudgingly accepted that it would have to be his battle line.
Just as he was about to give an order for his people to begin retreating through Bravo Tunnel, he noticed that one of his mechs had already broken formation.
And when he saw whose mech it was, he was filled with a warring mixture of respect and outrage for that particular Jock having taken the initiative.
She aimed to provide them cover while the rest of the battalion retreated, which was exactly what Jenkins ordered them to do.
“All units, retreat through Bravo Tunnel,” he barked as Roy’s tactical display showed they had already dropped over a thousand Arh’Kel while at least that many continued shuffling through the southern tunnels and into the cavern. “Retreat,” he reiterated through gritted teeth, even as the units closest to Bravo Tunnel had already begun to do so. “I say again: retreat.”
“This is stupid, Bao.” Podsy grimaced as he fought to balance Devil Crab’s increasingly fragile motive systems. “If the enemy doesn’t kill us, Commander Jenkins will.”
“Quit bitching and load some HE rounds,” Bao snapped. Despite his irritation, Podsy was in awe of Bao’s ability to manually drive a Scorpion-class mech at top-rated speed, a hundred kilometers per hour, across the cavern floor. “I’m taking us into the heart of these ugly bastards, and we’ll only get one good shot to close that tunnel before we’re swarmed.”
Podsy couldn’t argue with the tactical merits of her decision. Devil Crab was the second-fastest heavy mech in the battalion, behind the assault mech Roy, which meant that only Bao and Jenkins were able to contemplate an attack like the one she and Podsednik were executing.
The left fifteen’s loading system jammed, causing Podsy to scramble as he ran a re-cycle but found that there was some sort of mechanical failure in the breach-closing mechanism. The shell was in the pipe, but firing it without the breach locked would be suicidal for Devil Crab’s crew.
Devil Crab stomped toward the wave of rock-biters, which turned as one to intercept her instead of pursuing the smartly-fleeing battalion at her back. Her machine guns roared, rapidly depleting their ammo stores as she tore into the advancing Arh’Kel.
Podsy worked frantically to close the left gun’s breach, trying every trick in the book as he fought desperately to locate the true source of the problem. It looked like the mechanism’s hydraulics were properly functioning, and the sensors throughout the system checked out, but the damned thing still wouldn’t load!
Gripping the heaviest thing he could find, an angled spanner weighing five kilos, he unstrapped from his chair and made his way to the left gun’s control module. It was old school, comprised of a rat’s nest of interconnected electrical switches housed in a half-meter-square junction box, and Podsy threw the cover back to quickly inspect the elements within. There didn’t look to be any obstructions or burn marks, but a thorough inspection would take at least twenty minutes—time they obviously did not have.
So he employed the oldest trick in any grease-monkey’s book: percussion therapy.
Gripping the spanner in both hands, Podsy gently tapped the side of the control box while keeping an eye on the breach.
Nothing happened.
He tapped it again, this time hard enough to dent the control box’s housing.
Again, nothing.
“You ugly bangle snatch,” he growled, striking the box once more from the other side.
Still nothing.
“Smug bitch,” he barked, striking the housing from above with the spanner. This time, he was legitimately concerned he might have broken something with his love-taps.
Nothing.
“I’m gonna shove my fist so far up your...” he yelled, kicking the lower part of the box with his steel-toed boot.
The breach closed with an audible clank, and the electrical switches inside the battered box clicked open and closed in rapid succession as the system finally recycled back to zero.
“Careful, Podsy,” Bao quipped. “Talk like that better be backed up. You don’t want to juice a girl up with dirty talk and then leave her hangin’.”
“Fucking bullshit,” Podsy growled, causing Bao to laugh as he resumed his seat. “HE up,” he finally acknowledged as Devil Crab waded into the thick of the enemy horde.
“Almost there,” Bao called out as small arms fire plinked into Devil Crab’s armor with steadily increasing frequency. “I’ve got a warning light on Three and Four legs,” she said tightly just as Podsednik noticed them on his own panel.
Three was about to overheat its main joint after a catastrophic lubrication system failure. There was nothing he could do about that now. But Four looked to be suffering from some sort of power failure, which probably meant a stuck valve in the main hydraulic system.
There was nothing he could do about either until they came to a complete stop for at least three seconds, so he shut down the sensors feeding both alarms and said, “Fixed ‘em.”
“You’re a terrible liar, Podsy,” Bao laughed, her infectious, and some might say suicidal, energy filling Devil Crab’s every nook and cranny just before the mech was rocked by an inbound strike.
“Railgun impact,” Podsy called out as system reports flooded his screens. One of their machine guns was offline and Leg One had lost its lubrication feeds, but other than that no serious system damage had occurred. “Minor damage,” he called out.
“Kill it,” Bao ordered.
“On the way,” Podsy acknowledged, sending the HE round loaded into their left gun down-range at the offending HWP. Predictably, the enemy platform exploded on impact, with shrapnel knocking fifteen nearby rock-biters to the rocky floor.
Podsy felt like crossing his fingers as he initiated a reload cycle of the left gun, and he was pleasantly surprised when the cycle completed without delay.
“HE up,” he reported as another railgun impact struck their forward hull, snapping Podsy’s head from left to right so violently he felt something give in his neck. Ignoring the pain, he focused on the screens as more serious damage reports came in through Devil Crab’s automated sensors.
“Kill it,” Bao urged, and this time, Podsy fired the right main.
The fifteen-kilo thundered, sending its ordnance into the railgun platform and scrubbing it from the board.
But now it was the right gun’s turn to fail during the reload cycle.
“We collapse the tunnel in five seconds,” Bao called out, though Podsy knew that to successfully blow the tunnel, or even to have a realistic chance to do so, they would need both guns to fire at le
ast twice.
Arh’Kel infantry continued swarming toward Devil Crab, with the mech’s machine guns flashing overheating alarms while ammo stores fell to dangerously low levels. They were less than five hundred meters from the target tunnel, which meant they could shoot more-or-less straight down its throat and hit the bend a hundred and fifty meters from the cavern.
“Five,” she declared while Podsy worked to reinitialize the right gun’s reload mechanism.
“Four.”
He completed a quick diagnostic of the system, finding the problem to be with the same hydraulic feed that had been acting up on the drive assembly.
“Three.”
Podsy barely managed to shunt enough pressure from the left gun’s hydraulic feeders over to the right gun without compromising the system.
“Two.”
The reload cycle initiated, with the spent casing ejecting and a fresh one moving up into the breach.
“One.”
The breach snapped shut with a clang, and the gun’s sensors showed green across the board.
“Fire!”
Podsy gave the tunnel both barrels. Devil’s Crab bounced from the recoil.
The muffled explosions down the tunnel were far from climactic, but he saw that he had scrubbed at least one railgun platform while damaging the tunnel itself.
The guns’ loading mechanisms cycled in three seconds, during which time two of Devil Crab’s three remaining machine guns shut down due to critical overheating. They were nearly out of ammo anyway, but their sudden silence left open lines of attack, lines which the Arh’Kel flooded into with murderous ferocity.
Rock-biter infantry slammed into the hull, carving deep gouges into Devil Crab’s armor with their plasma torch sidearms. In the three seconds it took for the mech’s fifteen-kilo guns to reload, twenty rock-biters began slicing into every sensitive point on the mech’s hull.
“Fire!” Bao commanded, her voice filled with every bit as much desperation as Podsy felt.
