Global Warming Fun 6: Ice Giants Make Manhattan
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CHAPTER 11
Battle for New York City
Two armies of Stone-Coats converged on their destinations in Upper and Midtown Manhattan. They came in various shapes and sizes, but most were in the form of Ice Giants fifty to a hundred feet tall that weighed hundreds of tons. The very Earth shook under their diamond-clawed feet!
As the marching army of stone creatures reached the CCNY campus three dozen modest-sized Ice Giants of only a few tons each emerged from underground bins and joined them. Oddly, each was painted green.
Above the arriving armies at CCNY and the UN, several armed unmanned drones hovered. These were not City NYPD surveillance drones, but Army armored automobile- sized military flying vehicles that carried air-to-ground guns, rockets, and bombs.
Above them a scattering of peregrine falcons flew and communicated what they saw to the jant and Tribe minds that telepathically flew with them. What they saw and heard was sudden chaos and carnage as the Ice Giants suddenly attacked each other!
The fake Ice Giant robots looked, acted, and 'sounded' exactly like real Ice-Giants, except for one thing: to meet their higher energy requirements they were much more radioactive. This had been anticipated by the authentic Ice Giants, many of whom had fashioned Geiger counter-like sensors within themselves that had used to already identify the robots before the fighting even started. Authentic Stone-Coats secretly surrounded the impostors during the march.
The robot attack was so sudden and swift however, that the Stone-Coat plan to immediately contain them failed. The dozens of attacking fake Ice Giants were all small to mid-sized, moved impossibly fast, and struck crippling blows to the legs of their often much larger and slower foes, tackling Ice Giant legs so hard that they were usually broken in two. Once an Ice Giant leg was broken, the Giant was mostly incapacitated, and could only awkwardly crawl about.
Many of the Ice-Giants spat steam-driven icicles at the robots from their mouths with such force that the robots were momentarily stopped, but not damaged. A few such projectiles were diamond-tipped and did do serious damage, but those instances were too few to make much difference.
The military drones dove to attack the robots but were mostly ineffective, as they couldn't readily distinguish friend from foe. Worse, the robots must have broken through the drone cyber security protections, because less than a minute into the battle all the drones suddenly lost power and plunged to the ground where they typically blew up.
Human ground forces were even more impotent. The Army with its heavy weapons hadn't arrived yet, and the lightly armed NYPD and UN security forces could only stand aside and watch as the Stone-Coats appeared to suddenly go mad and attack each other. Which were the 'good guys' and which were the 'bad' was almost impossible for the humans to tell, but decades of experience had shown that even high-powered SWAT team rifles were totally useless against diamond-armored Stone-Coats anyway.
The best that human forces could do was help puny humans flee from areas of battle as the giant stone creatures fought giant robots and collaterally crushed human autos and buildings in their path, sometimes along with humans that cowered within them. Sometimes autos or parts of buildings were used as improvised weapons by the fighters, and knocking part of a building down upon a foe quickly became a tactic favored by both robots and Stone-Coats. Some fires broke out among the wreckage, which didn't seem to much bother the fighters but posed deadly hazards to humans.
There were easily ten genuine Ice Giants for each attacking robot, but the attackers were much stronger and quicker. One Giant after another fell heavily to the ground, crippled and helpless. The noise of herculean blows, cracking stone, and wrenching metal was thunderously loud, and the Earth itself trembled and shook. The smaller Stone-Coats were in even more trouble than great Ice-Giants, as it was easier for them to be severely damaged. Flying Stone-Coat and robot bits were a hazard for fleeing humans. Hundreds of broken Stone-Coats arms, legs, and heads soon lay about, along with helpless Stone-Coat torsos.
The Ice Giants fought back, and sometimes got in damaging blows to their attackers, but most of their ponderous blows missed their intended faster moving targets.
The robots were winning.