by CH Gideon
“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 thousand…”
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 plasma 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.
The missile looped back and survived the laser fire from the Finjou fighters that remained airborne.
The P-96-Z reached the target zone 120 meters above the field as the tide of Finjou powersuits’ reached knife-range with Jenkins’ mech. The missile exploded, propagating its magnetic pulse through the thin atmosphere with a deafening crack that briefly caused Warcrafter’s sensors to white out before restoring with a near-instantaneous system reset.
And when they did, Jenkins’ theory was confirmed.
“Droids!” He grimaced as the powersuits froze in near-perfect unison directly beneath the missile’s blast point. “They’re unmanned,” he called over the P2P, laying into the attack droids as they collectively resumed their charge with uncanny unity. Clover’s artillery roared, cratering the ground but doing little to slow the killing machines as they poured into the heart of the battalion.
Jenkins had seen enough. The Finjou were fighting them with unmanned vehicles, which was smart, but which also had its share of drawbacks—one of which he intended to exploit.
“Polarize the dorsal armor, Kim,” Jenkins ordered as his coil guns carved into the oncoming enemy line. For every droid he put down, three more surged past it. The enemy had bracketed him, and if his latest idea didn’t pay off, then his remaining lifespan would be measured in seconds rather than minutes. “Let’s give ‘em a good jolt.”
“Charging the secondary power grid,” Kim acknowledged as the first Finjou droids jumped onto Warcrafter’s back. “Ready when you are, Colonel.”
“Wait…wait…” Jenkins intoned until twenty-six droids were on his hull. “Pop it!” Jenkins commanded, and an ear-splitting crack issued from Warcrafter’s port flank. The secondary power grid’s main relay had just been sacrificed to knock the Finjou droids off the hull, which was a perfectly acceptable trade-off in Jenkins’ opinion.
All twenty-six droids on Warcrafter’s back crumpled like puppets whose strings had been cut. Together, they fell lifelessly to the ground as Jenkins swept his coil guns across the rest of the surrounding horde. While he fired on the enemy, driving them back as the machine equivalent of doubt entered their minds, he broadcast details how to employ the countermeasure to the rest of Clover Battalion. Even in the few seconds it took him to do so, he saw four more of the Razorback Mk 2-Vs’ die under swarms of the enemy droids.
Then a nearby Razorback blew its secondary grid, knocking a dozen synthetic warriors from its hull and soon thereafter devastating them with coil gun fire. A third mech followed, then a fourth and a fifth too close together to know which went first. Across the remaining fifteen mechs of Clover Battalion, droids were rendered
inert by electrical overloads that arced across the Terran hulls. Once on the ground, the droids were shot or trampled by the remaining Razorbacks.
“Inbound bogeys,” Kim called, snapping Jenkins’ focus back to the sky as he saw a fresh wing of thirty-two Finjou aircraft streaking toward Clover’s position.
“Railguns up; new targets,” he commanded, assigning each of the remaining fifteen Clover mechs a bogey. Unfortunately, two of the fifteen mechs had lost their railguns during the close combat with the droids. “Prep anti-missile rockets,” he continued grimly, knowing that Xi’s countercharging mechs were still too far to effectively engage the enemy gunships. “Engage at ninety percent solutions and hold interceptor rockets until targets are in the red zone.”
The inbound aircraft swooped in like reapers sent by Death, their guns ominously silent. He had seen the tactical nuke strike near Elvira’s position before Warcrafter had touched down, and he knew there was absolutely no way Clover Battalion could scrub as many missiles from the sky as Dragon Brigade had managed.
If the Finjou wanted to scratch Clover with nukes, that was precisely what was going to happen.
Jenkins’ board lit up with enemy missile icons just as his targeting computer plotted a better than ninety percent solution on his target. The enemy had adapted after the previous engagement, hastening their missile launch window to maximize the number of launches. It was the smart play.
His railgun spewed hypervelocity tungsten, stabbing into an enemy aircraft and putting it into a brief, downward corkscrew. For a moment it looked as though the damaged gunship would pull out of the dive, but that moment came and went four seconds before the aircraft splashed down in a cloud of rust-red dust.
As Clover’s railguns tore nine more enemy aircraft from the sky, a fan-shaped spread of 256 enemy missiles surged toward the Terran formation like a rocket-powered executioner’s axe. Even ignoring the likelihood of tactical nukes being among the inbound warheads, there was enough inbound firepower in that flight of ordnance that nothing larger than a human torso would be left of Clover Battalion if the swarm reached its targets.
