She looked over to the far corner of her makeshift office to where Renck sat on an empty, upended munitions case. “And this is what caused our little problem?”
Renck nodded. “The charge blew out fragments of the rock in a fairly wide spread. It’s surprising Scale wasn’t more crippled than he was. Superficially the site now just looks like a mass compactor went at it, but there’s been no digging works in that area for years.” His eyes locked on to hers. “Someone did this to us.”
Kaanen threw a bunch of the site’s access logs onto the desk. “And we’ve got a fairly good idea who.”
Madroth scanned the list of names for a moment. “Hmph. Get everyone weaponed up, we have to move on this now. But do it quietly.”
“We’re lacking in heavy armaments, Guildess. To go up against them now, like this…”
Madroth snapped the palm of her hand up, instantly silencing Kaanen’s concerns, and turned to Renck. “That’s not entirely true though, is it, Keeper?”
* * * *
Rovan was bored; he had spent all afternoon organizing the berth preparations and goods loading for Clan Ret’s departure, and the hours of mundane drudgery and drone programming had left him tired and frustrated. His patience was tested even before he saw the approaching party of Jent clan members, and their arrival was the last thing he needed right now.
“What do you think you’re doing here? Ret doesn’t make a habit of dealing with the likes of Jent, even if you actually possessed anything we wanted.” He made no effort to hide the scorn and derision in his voice, hefting the weighty plasma carbine he held in his hands for added effect.
The Jent party scanned the docks around them, as if waiting for something. Nearby Ret gang members, starting to sense the uneasiness of proceedings, frostily shouldered their weapons and approached the new arrivals, their faces hardening at the outsiders’ continued lack of response.
A severe looking woman stepped to the front of the group, addressing Rovan in wry amusement. “Did you think we wouldn’t find out?”
Rovan laughed. “I haven’t a clue what you are talking about. But whatever you think you know, let me give you some advice. Turn around and walk away. And do it now, before I get tired of your audacity and presumption, and decide to punish these,” his hand waved dismissively at the Boromites surrounding the guildess, “children that you brought with you, for stepping into Clan Ret business.”
And with that, before there was even time for the smug expression to drop from his face, the shooting started.
* * * *
Flechette mag rounds tore great chunks from the thick rock wall behind which Kaanen and his team were hunkered down. Separated from Madroth and her contingent, they were left isolated and cut off, though as far as he could tell her situation looked little better. He estimated that within another five minutes at most, their protection would be reduced to little more than a pile of rubble under this kind of fusillade. After the guns had started firing, Clan Ret fighters had appeared out from below the lower docking platforms like lavan hatchlings fleeing a volcanic eruption, easily outnumbering their force by a factor of two to one and, with their entrenched positions, their adversaries could outmaneuver his group given a little time. It did little to help matters that numerous combat drones had already begun adding their firepower to the crescendo, and he had heard at least two heavy weapons platforms out of sight being unloaded from shipping containers, their grav arrays firing up at that very moment.
If something did not change, and soon, Jent’s long term prospects would become the least of his problems.
* * * *
“Where is Renck? He should have been here already!” Madroth was losing patience. When they had discovered who was behind the sabotage, she knew they had little time to act before the perpetrators would be gone and off the planetoid for good. It would take far too long to track them down afterward, and she had little desire to rip off another syndicate and plunge Jent into another clan war that they had little real chance of winning. So, with the scant time that was left for planning, she had been forced to improvise and make do with the resources at her disposal. And here they were, out-manned and out-gunned, and in all likelihood about to die if Renck did not get off his backside and move it. Still, she had always hated that typical Ret arrogance, and as she leaned out of their makeshift cover it felt incredibly satisfying to unload one mag round after another into their lines.
Before her lay a large, cavernous expanse. At the far end, rows of piled shipping containers were stacked in ramshackle arrangements next to the cliff-like shaft that led down and off, toward the asteroid’s surface. These narrow, vertical runs were scattered all around the station, allowing smaller support craft to ferry supplies and goods to the mainline ships which were arrayed in orbit. She watched as one of the last remaining orbital transports that was still on-point veered heavily to port, the sudden shock of its thrusters skewing the heavily laden vehicle dangerously close to the rough hewn wall. Moments later, the crumpled, bent remains of a large shipping crate, sent flying by a stray mass compactor discharge, smashed against the rocks, barely missing the flyer’s main body. Within a matter of seconds, the pilot managed to right the craft and then it dropped below the horizon, the engines kicking out huge flares of shimmering exhaust as the transport plunged away from the combat zone.
The Jent strike force had begun the confrontation with the element of surprise, the burning wrecks of several weaponized support and loader vehicles a testament to the speed and ferocity with which they had launched the assault. But in spite of the forceful shock of their initial deployment, the Ret contingent still had numbers on their side, and its members were wasting little time in mobilizing their response. Madroth could already see jury rigged hard-points being set up among the mass of containers, with groups of gang members dashing between the crates; their bulky, encrusted hides laboring under the weight of x-launchers and frag borer components.
Small flashes of mag fire and even a few isolated plasma bursts erupted from the enemy’s lines in detached, isolated clumps, but the guildess could see the patterns forming. Interlocking lanes of fire were starting to show themselves as more and more Ret fighters were deployed to provide additional overlapping angles, the crossfire creating ever wider kill zones across the expansive cavern floor. Her forces, meanwhile, were limited to hunkering down behind a few collapsed rock structures and what supporting pillars still remained. The denser material provided better protection than what they were facing, but the sheer dearth of it was seriously hindering the lines of fire they could draw - a fact apparently not lost on Rovan and his cronies. She needed to engineer a breakthrough before their adversary had time to turn their den of ad hoc structures into a rat’s nest of gunnery positions and ambush points.
Madroth called across the no-man’s land to one of her squad commanders, whose force was entrenched behind the shattered boulders and debris of a fallen ceiling support. His outline shimmered as his reflex shield shrugged off a ricochet impact, the weakened velocity of the round easily consumed by the repeaters bolted onto his hard, gnarled body. The guildess, looking back toward the shipping terminal, pinpointed where she suspected a significant number of the enemy’s weapons teams were mustering.
Gesturing in the direction of one of the leftmost groups of containers, she bellowed at the squad leader. “Focus your fire behind that section.” Her voice barely carried the relatively short distance, as incoming shots sizzled and slammed into the rocky floor between them. “We're going to make a heavy push soon.”
With her commander’s x-launchers now pivoting in place to provide a concerted artillery barrage on the enemy, she turned back to the men around her and slapped her palm hard against the shoulder of one of the grizzled veterans. Letting off one last burst of mag fire, he dropped down into cover and looked at her, his face calm, awaiting further instruction.
“We can’t wait for Renck’s support any longer, we need to move now,” her rough hand gestured at
the weapons crates behind her. “I need you to get as many of those drones operational in the next couple of minutes as you can, we’re going to need them when we break into the open. Get on it!”
Shifting her view back to the war zone before her, Madroth could see the wreckage and debris being thrown up by the coordinated impacts of the artillery pieces. Without a wider dispersal, the Jent forces were taking a far greater density of incoming fire than they could put out in response. Running her eyes across her handful of bedded-in positions, she could see at least a dozen fallen gang members. It took a lot to truly incapacitate a child of Borom, but when that critical point was reached, the damage to the body tended to be extensive and all too often fatal. If she had more of her clan's assets in play, perhaps they could have afforded to take a more cautious approach to the situation; but as things stood, her options were severely limited, and if they failed to take the field here, Jent’s losses would be far greater in the long run. She hoped the Matriarch would at least recognize that fact, because there was no way to win this fight that Madroth could see that did not include a severe toll in manpower on their side.
The guildess’s ears prickled as she picked up the rapidly oscillating thrum of a supercharged atmospheric disturbance, and then almost immediately her world exploded violently; colors bled into one another as a vast concussive force knocked her to the ground. Madroth’s head was filled with the reverberating echoes of a shrill, keening cry, as if the very world around her was being torn asunder and had begun screaming out in pain. Slowly she became aware that she was lying on her front, having trapped both her arms beneath her body as she fell. The limbs felt numb, like something alien that had been grafted onto her torso, still attached but lacking any sensory connectivity. With great effort, she managed to work some blood flow back into her mauled hands, fingers twitching as the nerve endings came alive and flooded her brain with pain impulses. Slowly she started pushing out with what strength her body could muster, until eventually flopping onto her back haphazardly. Gazing up at the ceiling above her, the constant, screeching noise seemed to deepen in tone and then gradually started to fade away again.
Vast waves of superheated air washed over her frame, even penetrating the armored hide, resonating down into the flesh and bone deep beneath. Despite her hardened physiology, Madroth still hacked and spluttered as her lungs tried to process the burning, oxygen-depleted gases that she was inhaling. Gradually, she pulled herself up onto all fours and slowly managed a ponderous crawl back into the safety of cover. With her back pressed firmly up against one of the large boulders, the guildess surveyed the catastrophic destruction before her.
The Jent artillery pieces were simply gone, completely and utterly erased from existence. No evidence of the teams or the support struts that they had been sheltering behind remained. In their place was nothing more than a huge, sinking depression of molten slag. Toxic fumes from the burning rock material rose up into the air in sickly colored clouds of green and yellow, obscuring the cavern beyond as the dense gases billowed out from the huge rent in the cavern’s structure. In spite of the scorching, ionized atmosphere that surrounded her, the guildess felt consumed by a cold emptiness rising from her gut. A full quarter of her force had just been annihilated in an instant. Not just her people, but also near enough her entire complement of heavy armaments all gone, wiped out.
With one hand clutching the edge of the rock that she was sheltered behind, Madroth pulled herself upright and found the source of the devastation. On the other side of the cave complex, Ret gang members scurried around the distinctive silhouette of a heavy frag borer. Suddenly the huge machine listed to one side, crashing down into the decking as its suspensor pads cut out one by one. In their haste, the enemy had activated the weaponized mining tool before its fractal core had fully spun itself up, leaving the platform in a highly volatile state. Through the rippling haze she could see huge sparks and electrical discharges lighting up the area as the overloaded safety protocols cut in, dampening the dangerously overstretched power nucleus.
Directing her attention back to the dazed men around her, Madroth locked eyes with each of them. “We’re running out of options here. Get yourselves loaded and make sure everyone is ready - we’re going over on my mark!” Raising her arm, and pointing at the Boromite who was still hurriedly configuring and patching in their drone units, the guildess raised her voice. “You! We’re going with whatever we have, finish the last drone and run the operations protocols through my comms line. Clear?”
The Jent ganger nodded in acknowledgment, his eyes never wavering from the control unit strapped to his wrist, his fingers rapidly tapping through the final sequence of configuration protocols. Within moments, a half dozen of the small devices kicked into life, rising up into the air as their tiny turbos fired and steadied their ascent. The drones immediately flitted over to their assigned positions, their compact engines emitting a distinctive hum, oscillating through the frequency range, while their sensors flicked and scanned for nearby threats.
Checking to make sure that the reflector shield designated models were covering their forward arcs, Madroth leaned into her communicator. “We go now! Everyone, move yourselves.”
* * * *
Kaanen fired round after round into the cargo containers ahead of him, spacing each shot in an attempt to keep as many heads down as possible. Several of his team joined him in putting mag rounds down field, whilst the rest moved ahead, running at an oblique angle as they tried to cut across the worst of the enemy fire. He could feel the heat and static radiating off his weapon’s receiver, electrifying against his skin as the sound and smell of high impact detonations against the rock around him flooded his system with adrenaline. A strange mixture of exhilaration and trepidation suppressed any feelings of fear he may have had facing such odds, and the Boromite unleashed another volley, the projectiles raking a Ret guilder across the chest and throwing him back behind the boxes he had been using as cover. Before the man had even hit the ground, Kaanen was up and running with the rest of his squad.
As he sprinted across the rubble-strewn ground, an explosion to his side sent dozens of small metal fragments flying through the air, signaling the destruction of the last of their protective barrier drones. In that moment, the volume of fire his force started taking increased several times over. Mag fire struck the ground all around the Jent team, shots fizzled past heads, leaving large burns wherever they passed too close. To Kaanen’s ears it seemed like he’d surfaced from under a pool of water, the noises that had seemed somewhat distant and muffled before, now painfully pin sharp and deafening.
All of a sudden the world seemed to jump and spin, and the next thing the Boromite knew, he was lying face down in the dirt. Within seconds he felt a hot, searing pain rising up from his right leg. Twisting to see the damage, all he could make out where the crushed and pulverized remains of bone protruding out from his shattered calf. Groaning in agony and frustration, he struggled to raise his head, and what Kaanen saw sent shudders of dread through his body. As he watched, he saw his friends and guild brothers falling one after another. Some remained firing, but others lay terrifyingly silent, and in that moment Kaanen knew he was done. Whatever happened now was out of his control, and from what he was watching, it seemed only a matter of time before Jent's push would completely falter and fail.
Another vast shock wave caused the nearby cavern wall to explode in a vast cloud of dust. Burying his head under his arms to protect against the falling rubble, Kaanen was not sure if he wanted to know what new weapon Ret had now mobilized against them. Slowly, he lifted his head up to see what had caused the massive impact. For once his natural pessimism left him ill-prepared for the glorious scene that filled his sight and, hearing the rallying cries of the men around him, he reached out for his mag rifle, propping it up with his forearm. As the titanic shadow passed overhead, tracking in the direction of their enemy, he reset the weapon's optics and started panning his view across the foe's position,
finger held tentatively against the trigger.
* * * *
Madroth’s group had made it to the outer ring of Ret’s defenses when the detonation slammed her against one of the metal containers with such force she slumped to her knees, her weapon clattering to the ground nearby.
The nearest Boromite stared at the expanding cloud of debris in abject horror. “What... what is it now...?”
She looked at the dismayed faces around her, and despite her best efforts, the normally stern guildess could not help but burst into a cruel, cawing laugh, before reaching for her gun and turning her attention back toward the rest of the Ret compound, renewed determination running through her veins.
* * * *
In order to see through the choking dust field, Renck engaged the compound thermal optics built into his headgear. The vast lavan matronite he now commanded had taken longer than expected to rouse from its naturally sedative state. But once goaded and enraged, its vast, fiery maw had taken little time to tunnel through the walls surrounding Ret's cavern complex. Rows of huge, worn teeth had stubbornly cracked and ground out the rocky substrata, funneling the hard, craggy fragments down into its molten digestive system, while Renck remained safely ensconced in the beast's command cupola, bolted down into its impregnable hide.
Having broken through into the expansive cave, Renck could see how dire the situation truly was. The Jent forces were in disarray, the separate groups isolated and uncoordinated. Support weaponry was non-existent and it appeared that only a handful of his compatriots had made it across the barren expanse into the Ret camp itself. As difficult as accurately directing a beast of the brood mother's size through rock of this density could be, he had managed to emerge more or less where he had intended to be. He was now positioned close enough to the enemy’s strong-points that the weapons systems under his command could unleash a shocking fusillade of mag rounds on their locations.
Beyond Antares Dimensional Gates Page 5