by C H Gideon
When the first nuke erupted overhead, the world around Xi’s neural-linked senses exploded into absolute chaos. After a brief moment of overwhelming feedback, Elvira’s neural link cut out, leaving Xi disoriented and gasping for air for reasons not immediately apparent to her.
Then she realized what had happened; one of the enemy’s tactical nukes had touched off on the patch of the southern slope where Elvira was stationed. Her mech’s systems resumed their previous input feeds, and Xi was relieved to see that no permanent damage had been inflicted on the venerable mech.
White Wizard and Leatherhead, however, had been totally annihilated by the blast, which left nothing but a shrapnel-strewn crater to mark their passing.
A frantic check of the converted drop-cans that housed the rebel colonists filled Xi with relief when she saw that while they had been on the edge of the blast zone, the cans had suffered no serious damage from the strike.
Xi saw that another pair of nukes had gone off a few hundred meters above the surface, and the EMPs they had generated had knocked several of the lower-technology mechs’ main systems offline. Her attention immediately snapped to the airborne Finjou craft, which seemed to have decided that taking their chances with the Bonhoeffer was their best bet. Xi had received damage reports from the assault carrier, and it seemed their weaponry had been all but knocked offline. They were having difficulty maintaining station due to engine troubles. She couldn’t count on them to engage the fleeing fighters and, worse yet, it was possible those fighters still packed enough firepower to do serious damage to the already battered warship.
Then, just as she had hoped, the enemy fighters broke formation and peeled back like the skin of a banana. Their new course brought them toward the Brick’s surface again, where they would attempt to evade the inbound interceptors head-on instead of testing the Metal Legion’s flagship.
Before the Finjou had the chance to accelerate out of their turns, the Legion’s ground-based railguns fired in unison, tearing three of the six remaining fighters from the sky and leaving the other three in a panicked flight for their lives.
Which was precisely what Captain Chow and his wingman ended after acquiring target lock with their railguns.
Four railgun bolts sliced through the three remaining Finjou fighters, wiping the sky clean of the enemy aircraft.
“Dragon Actual, this is Wasp One,” Captain Chow’s voice came over the line as two of his fighter craft returned to the floor of the Gash. “We have established air supremacy. Wasp One and Wasp Six are bingo fuel. We’re putting down twenty-two klicks south of your position. We have six hours of life support.”
“Roger, Wasp One,” Xi acknowledged as the pair of aerospace fighters made emergency landings. “I’ve got a vehicle in your region, but we’ll need to cut a path for him first.”
“Take your time, Elvira,” Captain Chow replied.
Xi switched to the battalion-wide. “All crews, this is the captain.” She felt a thrill of anticipation as she saw that the encroaching Finjou vehicles had broken and were withdrawing at best speed, so it was with unmasked relish that she gave the next order. “Acknowledge readiness for Heaven Denies formation.”
Acknowledgments flickered across her HUD, showing that only three of the twenty-eight vehicles assigned to countercharge Heaven Denies were down-checked.
Twenty-five is more than enough, she thought fiercely as she queued up Demons & Wizards’ track of the same name as the counterattack.
“Execute Heaven Denies countercharge on my order,” she declared as the shredding metal track filled Elvira’s cabin. “Charge!”
Mechs of the Metal Legion leaped out of their foxholes, easily clearing the ridges behind which they had taken cover from the enemy’s direct-fire weapons.
Elvira was not the fastest mech on the field and the Finjou vehicles were capable of out-pacing her, but her position gave her the unique ability to address both the southern and western approaches. Both of which were rich with fleeing Finjou vehicles, only one of which Xi intended to fire on.
The Legion had a surprise in store for the Finjou on the western front.
The guns of Dragon Brigade thundered toward the south, dropping shell after shell in the midst of the fleeing Finjou. A handful of direct hits preceded a wave of near-misses, some of which saw Finjou track-based vehicles crash into fresh craters with devastating effect.
Xi sent HE shells downrange to the south while leading her mechs to the west at top speed. Near-misses were all she could manage as the enemy vehicles began evasive maneuvers, zig-zagging erratically to avoid the indirect fire of the Terran artillery.
“Blink Dog,” she raised the Recon mech as her fellow Terrans delivered vengeance to the fleeing enemy, “rendezvous with Vipers One and Six and return them to the airfield at the bottom of the Gash. I’ll clear a path for you.”
“Acknowledged, Captain,” Blinky replied, and the quadrupedal Recon mech sprang into action, galloping across the open field toward the downed pilots.
“Nuke me, will you?” Xi sneered while loading eight SRMs into Elvira’s launchers. She bracketed the Finjou vehicles nearest the downed pilots and loosed her vengeance upon the enemy. Her missiles split the sky above the fleet-footed Blink Dog, cratering three of the five Finjou targets and causing the others to drastically alter course away from the stranded pilots of Viper Squadron.
Metal Legion artillery thundered, Terran missiles burned, and human-built railguns lanced into the enemy vehicles’ sterns across the entire southern front. Of the original sixty-one Finjou vehicles which had come from that direction, only twenty-two managed to survive the Terran counter-charge long enough to reach a relatively safe distance. Had Xi and her people wanted, they could have easily slaughtered every last one of the southern vehicles.
But that was not her objective, because at that moment, high above the Legion’s mechs, a mysterious Terran-built warship was about to deploy reinforcements far to the west.
Which meant that if she and her people did their jobs, Xi Bao had just set up what might prove to be the most intense pincer attack in the Metal Legion’s history.
On the northern face of the Gash, the Bahamut Zero sprinted westward, its formidable arsenal largely silent as Xi’s people herded the enemy along the southern slope toward their inevitable doom at the western end of the Gash. The Metal Legion had weathered the initial storm, minimized what could have been devastating losses, and turned the tide on their would-be killers. The Legion’s expert deployment of its resources had thwarted the enemy’s aerial attack, leaving the Finjou ground forces in total disarray.
It was time to tear their throats out.
17
Cry Havoc
Riding the aptly-named Razorback Mk. 2-V mech Warcrafter, Colonel Lee Jenkins conducted his first-ever drop behind enemy lines in a live-fire zone.
His first-ever drop without the aid of a drop-can, for that matter.
With its legs folded precisely beneath it, the Warcrafter fell to the Brick behind an ablative conical heat shield which was secured by the mech’s four legs. Can-less drop systems had been experimented with and even used a century or so earlier, but ultimately, they had been deemed too risky. One in a hundred mechs failed to survive a can-less drop, despite Armor Corps’ best precautions.
But the Red Hare had no other combat-deployment system available to it. It was simply too small a warship to carry drop-cans and the gear necessary to deploy and retrieve them.
So with the mech vibrating all around him and external temperatures rising well past anything Jenkins had previously experienced during a drop, it was no small test of his nerve to ride the dangerous system to the ground.
Fortunately, the Warcrafter’s assigned Wrench was familiar with the protocols and expertly guided the vehicle toward the drop-zone.
“Six thousand meters,” Second Lieutenant Kim declared. He was the Warcrafter’s former Jock and temporary Wrench, at least until Jenkins could get back to the Roy. “Four tho
usand…”
Air-burst shells suddenly began exploding all around them, one striking so close it knocked the mech off-axis and snapped Jenkins’ ear into the pilot chair’s headrest.
“Three thousand,” Kim called as another air-burst shell exploded so close below them that it tore meter-long gashes in the heat shield. “Detaching shield.”
The conical shield flew apart in four equal parts as Kim unfolded the mech’s legs in preparation for landing. Jenkins knew he would need to wait until they touched down before completing the neural link. Otherwise, he risked a feedback loop arising between the mech’s stabilizer systems and his own disorientation from the jarring impact of touchdown.
“Two thousand,” Kim intoned. “Deploying chutes.”
The chutes popped out of their canisters precisely at the five-hundred-meter mark, but these were not fabric parachutes.
Attached to the mech via a precisely-engineered band of carbon nanotube lines, a quartet of braking thrusters shot skyward. The Warcrafter lurched violently beneath Jenkins’ reclined pilot’s chair, and the gee forces intensified with each passing second as the high-powered rocket motors slowed the vehicle’s descent.
The band of carbon nanotube lines disintegrated one strand at a time in perfect synchronicity with each other, exactly as they were designed to. The band prevented the mech’s crew from experiencing greater than thirty gees of deceleration during drop, since that was the precise amount of force the wound fibers could withstand under their individual loads.
Jenkins predictably blacked out, but his pilot’s chair was quick to automatically administer the necessary stimulants to snap him awake less than two seconds after the mech touched down on the Brick.
Warcrafter was already at a sprint when Jenkins completed the neural linkage, and assuming direct control was considerably less jarring than he had expected. The mech felt smooth and tight around him, flooding his senses with a finely-calibrated wave of stimuli that let him process his surroundings much more quickly than any other mech he had piloted.
“Clover Battalion,” Jenkins called, “sound off.” Three seconds later, all twenty-three of the other mechs signaled that they were battle-ready.
Which was good, because eighty-four enemy vehicles were six kilometers to the east and sprinting toward Clover’s position.
At the Finjou’s back were Xi and her counter-charging mechs. Her charge had begun with twenty-five mechs, but she had lost one along the way.
Precisely the same number as those with Jenkins.
“Symmetrical.” Jenkins smirked, recalling the Zeen’s bizarre preoccupation with the geometric concept.
“Colonel?” Kim asked with a hint of concern.
“Nothing, Lieutenant,” he replied, refocusing on the enemy and sending out fire orders to the rest of the former Colonial Guard mechs. “Clover Battalion, you have your targets.” He allowed himself a moment to savor the experience of directly firing his own guns again as he commanded, “Light ‘em up.”
Jenkins launched a full spread of sixteen SRMs at eight distinct targets, followed by a volley of artillery strikes aimed to herd the onrushing Finjou vehicles by cratering the ground before them. The rest of Clover followed suit, sending a combined 384 SRMs and forty-eight artillery shells downrange in a perfectly-coordinated assault which, if uncontested, would destroy every single Finjou vehicle on the western front thrice over.
Predictably, the Finjou intervened on their own behalf.
“Inbound bogeys,” Jenkins called, reflexively slipping back into the role of company commander and issuing counter-fire orders. “Thirty-two airborne hostiles on intercept course.”
As he spoke, the Finjou aircraft lashed out with sustained-fire lasers, sweeping across the missile-filled sky and scrubbing multiple Terran warheads per beam. Sustained-fire laser technology of such potency was beyond Terran ability to reproduce at all, let alone in a unit compact enough to be placed in an aircraft, and the Finjou exploited this particular technological advantage to great effect as they tore eighty-percent of Clover’s missiles down.
Of the remaining Terran SRMs, half were intercepted by ground vehicle-based counterfire, but Jenkins’ people still managed to scratch twenty-two of the onrushing Finjou vehicles with the volley. All told, it was a fine opening salvo.
But Jenkins wasn’t done yet.
“Railguns hot,” he commanded, calling the Mark 2-Vs’ most significant offensive upgrade into action as he forwarded fire packages to the Jocks of Clover Battalion.
The previously-concealed frail-looking railguns popped up from beneath folded armor plates situated along each of the Razorback Mark 2-Vs’ spines. These railguns were every bit as potent as those in Dragon Brigade, but they had been stripped down to the bare minimum to make them fit inside the chassis. That left them without armor or impact-compensation systems while deployed, so a direct hit would take them out of the fight. As far as surprises went, though, they were a Grade-A doozy in Jenkins’ book.
“Take ‘em on my mark… Mark!” he barked, sending a tungsten bolt through the thin atmosphere toward his assigned Finjou aircraft.
With impressive coordination, Clover’s twenty-four railguns spat tungsten slivers skyward, shredding seventeen of the thirty-two Finjou aircraft mid-flight before they had a chance to react. The rest of the aircraft, presently thirty-two kilometers from Clover, scattered in a series of increasingly anxious evasive maneuvers.
Then Jenkins’ attention was drawn back to the charging Finjou vehicles, which unexpectedly multiplied at a distressing rate.
Forty-nine vehicles became 206, which became 359, which in turn became 494! Warcrafter’s auto-targeting system snapped a series of images and began extrapolating from the available data as Jenkins processed the new information.
And what he saw was very much to his dislike. He expected the new bogeys to be electronic creations, and he was pissed that they weren’t.
“Enemy powersuits!” he snarled as the vicious powersuited things loped across the battlefield, driving straight for the heart of Clover formation in a picture-perfect lance formation. “Weapons free. Fire! Fire! Fire!”
The tip of the enemy spear slammed into the leading mech of Clover Battalion, where twenty of the draconic-looking powersuits leaped atop the mech Rising Teardrop. The Teardrop’s coil guns spewed righteous fury at the passing tide of powersuited Finjou, tearing a dozen of them down in two seconds of devastating fire.
But even as the Rising Teardrop carved through the enemy line, the suited Finjou atop the Razorback Mk 2-V aimed their weapons down into the Teardrop’s upper armor and unleashed a concerted barrage of plasma fire into its most vulnerable point: the railgun shell.
The Teardrop buckled from an internal explosion, and sixteen of the powersuited Finjou warriors managed to leap free before the Razorback exploded when its ordnance cooked off and ruptured the mech’s main capacitor.
The Teardrop shuddered in a series of increasingly violent death throes, ending with its reactor overloading and scattering the battlewagon’s empty bones across the field. As the mighty mech died, Finjou powersuits leaped onto another three Razorbacks of Clover Battalion with cold, calculating precision.
Jenkins aimed Warcrafter’s coil guns at one such mech, Pitiless Yangtze, and tore into the enemy suits as they struggled to gain purchase on the Razorback’s spine.
Somewhat surprisingly, the coil gun impacts were strong enough to knock a few of the suits off the Razorback’s roof. The Yangtze’s Jock bucked his mech violently, pitching a handful of the powersuited Finjou to the ground and narrowing the number of targets for Jenkins to engage. Warcrafter’s targeting system was a full generation newer than the systems aboard Roy, and they made sniping the power-suited Finjou child’s play even at his current range of a kilometer.
But knocking the suits off the mech’s back was only a temporary remedy since nearly every power-suited warrior soon regained its feet and lunged back toward the beleaguered Yangtze. Oversized plasm
a rifles spat blue-white bolts of fire from above and from the ground on all sides, enveloping the Yangtze in an inferno as Finjou weapons scored deep rents in the mech’s armor.
Jenkins knew the Yangtze had only a few moments to live at this pace, so he loaded a pair of HE shells in his fifteen-kilo guns and raised it on the P2P. “Friendly fire incoming!”
Warcrafter’s guns roared, sending the explosive shells into the ground five meters from the Pitiless Yangtze’s flank. The dual explosions knocked all but one of the powersuited Finjou from the mech, and once its attackers were grounded, the Yangtze turned its coil guns on them with savage ferocity.
Sweeping left and right, juking and spinning to keep the surrounding enemies off balance, the Pitiless Yangtze cleared its immediate area of hostiles, leaving a disc of glistening debris where the powersuited Finjou had been mere seconds earlier. Capping off the affair, Jenkins sniped the last Finjou from the Yangtze’s hull with his coil guns before turning to address the line of murderous powersuits descending on the Warcrafter.
“Thank you, Colonel,” said the Yangtze’s Jock before turning its artillery on the rushing tide of enemy soldiers.
Missiles tore loose of their mounts and struck the dispersing line of Finjou powersuits, gouging deep scars in the Brick’s barren surface. But the powersuited warriors were quick. Too quick, in Jenkins’ estimation.
“EMP inbound,” Jenkins declared, deciding to test his theory. For a variety of reasons, it was the opinion of Terran intel that Finjou tech would be more susceptible to specifically-attenuated EMPs than most other species’ systems. Loading a single P-96-Z pulse missile into Warcrafter’s tube. Three times as powerful as the P-92-Z Elvira had deployed back on Durgan’s Folly, Jenkins shot it in a looping arc to drop it directly over the battlefield.
It was an expensive test, and a dangerous one considering the Razorback Mk 2-Vs’ impressively hardened control systems, but Jenkins needed to answer an important question.
