by Ivan Kal
A few moments later, an explosion rocked the turret and sent it into the air in a cloud of red. She was about to turn and target the next one when something entered the courtyard from the other side. It was a vehicle of some kind, with turrets mounted on it. It fired as it moved, its energy beams bathing Mira’s mech and dissipating as they were met with its shimmering field. Mira turned her right arm and fired with her 30mm rotary cannon, and watched as the bullets shredded its armor. A few moments later, it stopped dead, its weapons no longer firing.
Mira looked around and saw fire and destruction; dead Sowir tool-soldiers lay down on the ground in hordes. The remaining anti-orbital cannons were crumbling under the combined fire of her mechs and tanks. Seeing the last one fall, Mira opened a channel to the base.
“The anti-orbital weapons are down. Requesting immediate reinforcements,” Mira said.
“The reinforcements are on their way, ETA twenty-four minutes,” Force Commander Mao said over the comm.
Mira glanced at her battle map, seeing the numbers her people were relaying back at her. The Sowir were pushing hard, and there had been reports of them taking to field and controlling their tool-soldiers directly. And her troops were taking casualties, even though they were now defending.
Mira started giving orders for her force to reinforce their defensive positions inside the courtyard as they waited for the reinforcements.
There were a lot more Sowir tool-soldiers than they had anticipated, certainly more than what had been in the troop ships. Either they had a lot more troops available to them than the Empire had previously believed, or they had pulled some of their underground troops to the surface. But ultimately, their numbers would mean nothing belowground in the tunnels of Guxaxac, where most of the fighting would take place. The Empire’s superior technology would prevail, as now the Sowir didn’t have near unlimited troops to draw on. The rest of their Dominion would be far too busy to send reinforcements.
Chapter Ten
Gaxasas city – 17 hours later
Sahib shot a Sowir in the head. As it dropped, he could feel a fog lift of his mind and he could see the tool-soldiers around them freeze and get mauled down by the bullets, plasma, and energy weapons. He moved quickly, exiting from building he was in and jumping on the Guxcacul walker-transport, grabbing hold of the railings not designed for human hands. Immediately behind him followed his six squadmates and Riss. He held firm as it started walking up the pillar to the next level of the city that the Sowir now used as their base.
He had stopped counting how many Sowir and their tool-soldiers he had killed after the first hour of combat. It seemed as if there was no end to them. He and his squad had been a part of the Guxcacul offensive. Every able Guxcacul soldier was a part of it, thousands of soldiers attacking the Sowir bases from beneath, just as the Empire pushed from above.
The walker reached the next level, and some of the Guxcacul soldiers started moving from the back of the transport to the buildings. Sahib, the rest of his squad, and Riss waited for the Guxcacul troops to disembark, as they would be of limited use fighting in the strangely built Guxcacul buildings—at least, the humans would. Then, after they were alone on the walker, it started moving further up the pillar to a carved-out platform. He and his squad disembarked there, and two more walkers arrived soon after from the other pillars or bridges that connected the various parts of the city.
Sahib, Riss, and his squad followed the Sowir troops into the main city building, and what the Sowir now used as the base headquarters. Upon entering, the Guxcacul soldiers opened fire with energy weapons similar to those of the Sowir mounted on their middle arm set, while they used their top scorpion claw-like arms to batter away any Sowir that tried to get into melee range. The Sowir wore full body armor suits, similar to the Empire’s battle suits. Riss wore his Warpath battle gear, which allowed him better movement, as it covered only his critical areas.
The energy beams from the Sowir slowed and then stopped as the Guxcacul cleared the entrance. Sahib and his people followed deeper inside the building. They took the twisting bridge-like staircases that led to the top level, where they encountered another enemy force. Sahib raised his NP-04 plasma rifle and fired at the tool-soldiers racing towards him. The bolt went right through the first, and scorched the second enemy. Then another tool jumped out of the small defensive wall, this one dressed in a heavier armor. Sahib fired at it, but its armor soaked up the hits, although Sahib could see damage. As it almost reached Sahib, Bella stepped in front of him carrying a shield, one that had been designed to fight against the tool-soldier in melee combat.
She used the full strength of her powered suit to bat the attacker to the wall. Then she stabbed at him with her monomolecular blade. The mono-blade pushed through and impaled the creature, but it wasn’t enough to outright kill it. So Sahib approached and fired three more shots point blank and killed it. As more of the enemy troops left the wall, Riss moved in front and let loose with his own, more powerful plasma rifles, mowing them down.
The Guxcacul soldiers charged the wall, crossing over and killing the defending enemy. Sahib and his squad followed, but as they entered deeper into the building, they were forced to split. Sahib, his squad, and Riss took one of the side tunnels, while the other Guxcacul soldiers took the other four.
Riss led the way with Sahib and his team following. Sahib noticed his sensors ping on movement ahead, and he and his people spread out in the cramped passage. The enemy came at them from around the bend, firing their energy weapons from their backs. But his force quickly cut them down.
They continued moving forward, clearing rooms and nearing the most probable location for the Sowir control room. All tunnels eventually led to that central room, but when Sahib and his people arrived, none of the other had reached it yet. Instead, they were met with another fifty tool-soldiers and five Sowir. Immediately after noticing them, the Sowir directed their tools to attack.
Loca stepped forward and pointed her heavy weapon, the CFG-02. The centrifugal-based weapon fired and sent thousands of bullets into the room, smashing computer screens and furniture and ripping through the enemy. The Sowir hid behind their tools, but even with that, two of them fell to the onslaught.
Behind Loca, Riss charged inside, firing his plasma rifles and smashing into the group of the enemy tool-soldiers. The arthropod grabbed them with his upper claws and then fired his plasma rifles point blank. His movements were quick, precise, and deadly, and Sahib was reminded that Riss was a Sentinel from Clan Warpath, and that even though he had a completely different body shape, he had trained with Adrian, who’d helped him develop fighting styles.
Riss was unstoppable as he used his greater mass to pin and kill the enemy, whether by his claws, stabbing through them with his feet, or by liquefying their insides with his plasma rifles. Sahib provided help and covering fire from the entrance of the room, just as his squadmates moved inside and started clearing the remainder of the enemy. The three Sowir survivors, seeing that they would lose, decided to charge Riss in a futile attack. They were armed with energy weapons similar to what they had given their tools, but it didn’t matter. Upon seeing them, Riss turned and blew one apart with his plasma rifle. The second he hit with his clawed hand and sent flying into the wall on the other side of the room, while he grabbed the third one and squeezed with his other claw, slowly decapitating him.
Sahib motioned for his squad to sweep the room, and then opened a channel to the Guxcacul forces, telling them that they had secured the control room.
***
Squad Leader Zhu “Pyro” Zhang Wei ducked behind a rock as the Sowir threw something at him. He heard it impact the wall not far from him, and then he was shaken by a small explosion. He peeked out of his cover and fired his CF-13 light assault rifle, sending centrifugally propelled bullets right into the Sowir, puncturing him with dozens of holes.
“Take care, they have some kind of grenades. Less powerful than ours, though,” Zhu warned over the
comms.
“It won’t help them much,” Anton said over their squad comms.
“You should really work on that arrogance of yours,” Dson chimed in. “If they bring to bear enough troops, there won’t be anything that we can do. They will overwhelm us.”
“I doubt that they will be able to d that. We are hitting them all across the planet; if they pull forces from one side to help another, we get through,” Toferami added.
“Let’s focus on taking this base, then we can weigh in on the probable Sowir decisions,” Zhu said. Then he proceeded to move to the next rock in the vast tunnel leading downwards towards a former Guxcacul city, which was now a Sowir base.
There were many different types of tunnels, from small tunnels barely large enough for a human to move through them, to vast tunnels large enough for several tanks moving beside one another to pass. Zhu glanced backwards and saw exactly that, four tanks moving towards the massive gate below that led into the city proper. They knew that those tanks would be of limited use inside the city, as they weren’t really built anything like human or Nel cities. But the Sowir had the gate closed, and they would need the firepower to open it.
Zhu raised his rifle again and killed the remaining enemies in the vicinity of the gate. He then stepped back and let the tanks park themselves across from it, preparing to fire.
Zhu watched as they started bombarding the gate, blowing away chunks of it with each hit. The Guxcacul gates were tough, and the Sowir had repaired and improved them a bit after they’d taken the city. But in the end, they wouldn’t hold against the tanks’ assault.
As the tunnel walls shook, Zhu glanced at the ceiling, and yet again admired the ingenuity and skill of the Guxcacul engineers. The tunnel might have looked rough, but it was anything but. It was reinforced from all sides, so that even the detonations of Empire’s tanks against the gate didn’t compromise its integrity.
Then he felt the ground shake as the gate blew inward and dropped on the floor of the city. Tanks moved inside and immediately came under fire from Sowir turrets placed on the city’s dome ceiling. The tanks shrugged off the attacks and returned fire, blowing the turrets and the buildings on the dome ceiling apart, raining dust and rocks down on the rest of the city.
Then they moved along the entrance platform and took positions near the bridges leading to buildings suspended in the middle of the air. Then the Empire’s walkers entered, built based on Guxcacul specifications, exactly for easier movement around their cities. Zhu and his squad got onto one and held on tight as it started walking on one of the city’s pillar bridges, on its way to the next level.
***
Field Commander Dayo Okoro looked at the holo in his battle center, following the many battles around the planet. He was getting real-time updates from every battle via FTL comms. His forces had been pushing the Sowir on all fronts, just as the Guxcacal pushed from below. The Sowir had been unprepared to fight on many fronts at the same time, and were losing ground because of it. Already the kill count for his forces had reached 5 digits, and soon would pass into six. Although the confirmed kill count for the true Sowir was lower than what he’d expected, only around four hundred. But even with their success, there were areas where they were having difficulties.
The Sowir just had too many of their tool-soldiers available to throw at his forces, slowing down their advance and giving the Sowir a chance to set up traps. And those traps and ambushes were where most of his casualties came from. The Sowir had a very small arsenal, and very few things they possessed could actually harm his people, aside from accumulated fire and their melee weapons.
The problem was—as they had anticipated—numbers. And the Sowir could use their troops as sacrificial pawns in order to get bigger rewards. Dayo knew that this campaign would be a long one. For now, their main focus was in taking out as many Sowir as possible, as that lowered the effectiveness of their troops. If they managed to take them all out, they would have a much easier job later. Their tools couldn’t function for long without guidance, and they would turn feral and start attacking each other and everything around them.
The other problem was the Sowir food supply. According to their intel, Sowir had about three years’ worth of supplies for both themselves and their troops. Which was why Dayo had chosen to focus on attacking as many of their underground bases as possible.
His campaign rested on their ability to lower the effectiveness of the Sowir troops, which meant direct attacks on the Sowir and their supplies. His people had orders to ignore the Sowir attempts to pull them into prolonged fights with hordes of their troops, and instead focus on those troops that were clearly guided by a Sowir. This early in the campaign, killing one Sowir was worth tens of thousands of their troops.
With a flick of his hand, Dayo focused the holo on the deep underground, where the Guxcacul counterattack was taking place. They had taken the last three years while the Empire prepared and told the Guxcacul how to build FTL comms, and had them integrated into the Empire’s systems. So Dayo had real-time updates from their side as well.
The Guxcacul counterattack was very well coordinated, and while their equipment wasn’t as advanced as that of the Empire, they were a match for the Sowir. They were advancing a bit slower than what Dayo would have liked, but they were gaining ground. He saw that they had almost captured one of the Sowir bases deep underground. There was a great amount of risk for them, because they didn’t have anywhere near the number of troops as either the Sowir or the Empire, and they could be overrun far easier if the Sowir decided to amass troops and send a large force against them. But it was neither Dayo’s nor the Empire’s place to tell them that they couldn’t fight for their world.
Dayo would need to make sure to minimized the risk by taking out as many of the Sowir troops as he was able. As he started reading reports from the various fronts, he was interrupted by a comm from the fleet.
“What can I do for you, Fleet Commander?” Dayo asked.
“Our cargo ships have arrived. As soon as they place the defense platforms in orbit, I will take the fleet out of system. If there is anything else that you need, now is the time to ask for it,” Fleet Commander Bethany Jones responded.
“Of course, Fleet Commander. I doubt that we will need anything, but I will check with my people,” Dayo said.
“Very well, Field Commander. You have a couple of hours before we leave,” she said, and then ended the call with a salute.
Dayo signaled to one of his aides and sent him off to the quartermaster building on the other side of the base. With that taken care of, he returned his attention to the holo and the many battles raging across the planet.
Chapter Eleven
January; Year 36 of the Empire; Thanatos – Fleet Headquarters; Nineteen days later
Laura sat in a chair that had become uncomfortable three hours ago and listened to the presentations from the Fleet’s best scientists and engineers. They were presenting her with the new technologies that could be used for their ships in the future, based on the technology they had received from the sphere. There was surprisingly little technology on weapons and military.
As it was told to her, the People hadn’t really had a military, or a need to develop weapons. They were the oldest race in the galaxy, and their technology had been so far ahead of anyone else that any attack against them had been laughable. They had had weapons, but all of those had been energy-based weapons, far ahead of anything that the Empire could even attempt to make. It required resources and elements that they hadn’t even discovered yet. But there were other things, nonmilitary in nature, that Laura and Seo-yun hoped they could adapt and turn into weapons.
She gave out a mental sigh of relief when they reached the last item on the list.
“Energy shields,” said Ritsarni, one of Fleet’s leading scientists, but also one of the youngest.
Laura looked at him without speaking, willing him to continue.
“Ahem, well…we found blueprints for the
energy shield, which we are confident we can adapt for our needs and install onto our ships,” Ritsarni said.
“We already have shimmering field technology,” Laura added tiredly. A lot of the technology they had presented to her today, the fleet already had something similar. But she knew that she shouldn’t have been surprised about that. They couldn’t really make a big jump in technology, even if they had the knowledge, because they lacked the means to build what they found in the sphere. It would take them at least ten years to reach a level where they could start utilizing some of the more advanced technologies from the sphere. At least, advanced compared to the Empire’s technology. What the People had had at the peak of their civilization was so far ahead of them that it might as well have been magic. They had the data, but they lacked knowledge and understanding. But that would come with time.
“Yes. But the shimmering field technology doesn’t really stop the energy weapons, it dissipates them around their impact point, basically robbing the energy beam of its power. A powerful enough weapon would still transfer some of the energy through the field,” Ritsarni said.
“And an energy shield does what, exactly?” Laura asked, and immediately regretted her choice of words as she saw the look on Ritsarni’s face.