by C H Gideon
“The facts, yes.” Jenkins nodded. “But we might be chasing a red herring. We don’t know a whole lot about the Jemmin from which to base our guesstimates. I need something more concrete before we take it to the brass. For now, this theory remains between you and me. Understood?”
“Yes, sir,” Styles agreed.
“All right.” Jenkins nodded approvingly. “This could be a case of pattern recognition run amok,” he said pointedly, causing Styles to chuckle.
“I’ve been guilty of that on a few occasions,” the technician agreed.
“But it could also be that you’re onto something here,” Jenkins added heavily. “And if you are, we need to make sure that no one learns about it. If the Jemmin think we’re onto them, they’ll give us both barrels. Which only makes cracking their stealth suites that much more important,” he said pointedly.
“Still no luck on that front, sir,” Styles said sourly. “I’m going over every byte of data from the battalion’s sensor logs, but I still can’t see a way to punch through the fog.”
“Negating their stealth advantage is now your top priority,” Jenkins said severely. “Without the ability to reliably locate and target them, we’re surrendering the initiative to the enemy. We can’t surrender tempo against a technologically superior adversary, Chief.”
“Understood, Colonel,” Styles agreed, standing and offering a salute. “I’ll get back to it.”
“Good work, Chief.” Jenkins nodded approvingly before the technician hurried out, closing the hatch behind him. After he had gone, the lieutenant colonel rubbed his jaw and muttered, “What the hell have you gotten yourself into, Leeroy?”
9
Ambush
Three days after Elvira had undergone decontamination, Xi was once again at the head of a patrol. This time, she led only Cave Troll and Masamune, deciding with Colonel Jenkins’ approval that their combined anti-missile capability was more than enough.
“I can’t believe I just heard you say that,” Masamune’s Jock scoffed.
“Can’t handle the truth, Masamune?” Cave Troll challenged.
“Anyone who argues that the early-twenty-first hip-hop scene was as impactful on human music as the late-twentieth metal peak is braindead,” Masamune rebuked.
“A lot of this argument depends on how you define ‘impact,’” Xi interjected with a smirk.
“Sure,” Masamune agreed, “if by ‘impact’ you mean ‘left a festering sore that took a century to lance and heal over,’ then yeah, it was maybe as impactful as the metal uprising…maybe. It’s like saying Billy Joel was as great a composer as Mozart just because they happened to both play piano. Man, I thought better of you, Cave Troll.” Masamune registered his disappointment with a low and long sigh.
“Whoever said I liked hip-hop?” Cave Troll asked, unable to keep the bemused note from his voice.
“You’ve been arguing for the past twenty minutes for something you don’t actually believe?” Masamune demanded in outrage.
For her part, Xi muted her mic to hide her laughter at seeing Cave Troll’s well-laid trap snap shut on his fellow Jock.
“It was either that,” Cave Troll replied slowly, “or go through Styles’ creepy porn collection…again. Between you, me, and this exceptionally limber-looking Arh’Kel, I had a lot more fun defending the indefensible against you.”
“So, you don’t actually like ear-virus music?” Masamune asked irritably.
“I’m hurt, Masamune. I may be big and stinky,” Cave Troll retorted, “but that doesn’t mean I’m stupid.”
“You’ve got a sick sense of humor, Cave Troll,” Xi quipped approvingly after unmuting her mic. “I knew we brought you along for more than just the BO.”
The patrol resumed in relative quiet for a few minutes before Elvira’s tectonic sensors suddenly began to tickle Xi’s left arm.
“Bugs,” she snapped, pivoting Elvira and zeroing in on the point of the disturbance just as the ice erupted in a geyser of steam. One of the strange, bug-looking things emerged just as Elvira and her flanking mechs opened fired on the new hole in the ground.
The initial fire was focused and intense, combining anti-personnel chain guns and coilguns that tore the icy tunnel’s mouth apart. Chunks of ice flew in all directions, with much of it pulverized or turned to steam by the ferocity of the barrage.
But less than two seconds into the onslaught, Xi got the nagging suspicion that it was a decoy and spun Elvira to her six o’clock just in time to see another bug emerge from the ground three hundred and fifty meters from the first one.
“Multiple contacts,” she barked, unleashing Elvira’s chain guns and locking on with her dual fifteens. She didn’t want to kill these things since they were probably the species they had come to entreat, but they were ambushing her people, and that meant they needed to be treated as hostiles.
Her fifteens thundered simultaneously, lifting Elvira’s front legs fractionally off the ground, stabbing deeper into the ice following the recoil. The bug-looking vehicle was knocked over, but it managed to regain its footing before firing a stream of plasma fire at Masamune. Instantly, a second stream of fire erupted from the opposite side of the humanoid, anti-mech Masamune.
The coordination of those strikes was so precise that they struck Masamune’s left leg from both sides directly above the knee. For a moment Xi thought it would survive.
Then, like a tree felled in the woods, Masamune tilted further and further over its damaged limb. The deadly mech’s Jock did everything he could to keep the vehicle upright and seemed to have halted the ponderous fall before a third plasma jet struck that same leg and blew the damaged joint apart.
The mighty Masamune crashed to the ice, sending a plume of snowy dust up around it. True to form, its pilot fought to train his damaged mech’s guns on the enemy, and even managed to fire his railgun at one of the flankers.
The targeted bug vehicle’s rear, tail-like section was shorn completely off by Masamune’s defiant fury. The loss of a full fifth of its body seemed irrelevant to the creature as it skittered across the ice while its fellows did likewise.
“Crab-cakes inbound,” called out Cave Troll just as Xi noted the stream of meter-wide, crab-like grenade delivery drones that had tried to kill Heavy Metal Jesus during the first engagement.
Following Xi’s pre-mission directives, Cave Troll re-focused his coilguns on the approaching lines of “crab-cakes.” With four coilguns on his squat, roughly-humanoid mech, Cave Troll tore into the crab-cakes and annihilated at least a hundred of them in the first few seconds. Emerging from three separate holes in the ice, the suicide vehicles surged mindlessly forward without attempting to mask their intent.
They meant to destroy the downed Masamune, which was something Xi could not allow.
She unleashed Elvira’s chain guns on the stream of tiny enemies while locking onto the nearest of the larger vehicles with SRMs. She could not simultaneously control four chain guns and the SRM launcher, so she focused her attention on the SRM while letting Elvira’s auto-targeting systems deal with the crab-cakes.
She manually locked a pair of SRMs onto the circling target and growled, “Gotcha, bitch.”
But less than a second before the SRMs left their racks, the other two bug vehicles fired their plasma cannons. Elvira was driven into the ice as a deafening explosion went off just above the mech’s stern.
Xi’s neural link temporarily cut out, and for a precious second-and-a-half, Xi was disoriented and unable to process what had just happened. But when the link’s data-stream resumed, she knew precisely how bad they had been hit.
“Launchers One & Two are gone,” she declared, quickly finding none of her top-side cameras functioning. “Lock off the ammo feeds and clamp down the ordnance,” she snapped with bitter appreciation for her enemy’s efficiency. Refocusing her attention on the battle, she loaded HE shells into her dual fifteens and growled, “HE up. Firing!”
Elvira’s violent reply to having lost he
r SRMs was every bit as devastating as Xi had hoped. The dual high-explosive shells struck the same target she had previously bracketed, tearing two-meter-long gashes in its upper carapace. She focused her left chain guns on the vehicle’s exposed innards, sending nearly two hundred rounds per second into the gory rents in the enemy’s armor.
The unmistakable whine of Cave Troll’s plasma cannons cycling up filled her virtual ears. Capacitors thrummed and the ground beneath Elvira vibrated for a pair of seconds before Cave Troll delivered twin bolts of plasma fire at the last undamaged bug vehicle.
Just as before, nothing but steam and tiny armor fragments survived Cave Troll’s wrath.
But somehow, the encroaching crab-cakes had swarmed dangerously close to the mighty plasma-throwing mech. They had altered their target priority after Cave Troll’s devastating display of firepower, which suggested autonomous decision-making ability.
Xi turned Elvira’s chain guns onto the horde of grenade-carrying critters, but for some reason, her accuracy had fallen off completely. Instead of thoroughly devastating the enemy line as she had previously done, she only managed to pick off half as many per second.
“Preacher,” she raised the HQ-stationed highly-specialized missile mech, “I need a Purgatory on Cave Troll’s position. Now.”
“Purgatory on the way,” Preacher replied two seconds later. “ETA: four seconds.”
Xi continued to sweep her guns up and down the lines of oncoming grenade drones, while Cave Troll did likewise. But it seemed her vehicle was not the only one whose accuracy had nose-dived, and no matter how many rounds they put into the ice, some of the crab-cakes managed to slip through.
A pair of grenades went off on Cave Troll’s articulated feet, doing little damage but heralding worse to come as the crab-cakes clambered up the squat mech’s massive legs. They were looking to damage sensitive points like the knee, but it seemed that Cave Troll’s armor was too tight for them to squeeze through. Dozens had already climbed halfway up its armored bulk, and it would only be a matter of time before they reached the relatively vulnerable cockpit.
Thankfully, before that happened, the Purgatory-class missile arrived.
The air was filled with a fiery roar as the air-burst missile exploded mere meters from the spot where Cave Troll stood. A Purgatory-class missile was a finely-tuned, broad-dispersal incendiary device. If correctly attenuated to the target environment, a Purgatory would instantly clear any unarmored target from a half-kilometer patch of ground, and they had been known to slag small arms and crew-served weapons alike near the blast point. They were unthinkably devastating and horrific but were also perfect for danger-close support of armored units like Xi’s platoon. Only Arh’Kel were heat-resistant to such a degree that they could survive a Purgatory strike relatively unscathed without the benefit of armor, which was why the ordnance had not been used on Durgan’s Folly.
Xi kept firing, half-blindly, in the hope of driving off whatever creatures somehow survived the hellish inferno. The smoke soon cleared, replaced with fast-dispersing steam, and when her visual systems were back online, Xi saw that Cave Troll was on the ground. There was no movement anywhere nearby, which suggested the Purgatory had wiped the critters clean.
But not before they had brought down Cave Troll.
Snarling in frustration, Xi locked onto the badly-damaged bug vehicle she had hit with HE shells. “Come and get me, roaches!” she yelled as she loaded another pair of HE shells into her fifteens and sent them downrange.
One of the HE shells missed high, exploding nearly a kilometer behind the target. But the other struck one of the massive rents caused by its predecessors, and the resulting shower of gore was a thing of beauty as the bug vehicle exploded in all directions.
“One-on-one,” she said triumphantly, turning Elvira toward the last remaining bug vehicle.
The enemy vehicle seemed confused, milling this way and that for a few seconds while Xi loaded fresh ordnance into her fifteens. She ran a quick diagnostic on her errant left gun’s targeting system while staying the right gun for a moment. “Lu,” she called over Elvira’s intercom, “check the gimble and the mount points for the left gun. Blinky, open up the targeting computer and tell me what you see.”
Xi crab-walked Elvira to the right as her crew worked to diagnose the targeting problem. The bug vehicle, somewhat surprisingly, mirrored her movement and the two began to circle for several long, tense seconds while Elvira’s systems diagnosed the problem with the left fifteen. Just a hundred and twenty meters separated the vehicles, and Xi suddenly realized that unlike its previous, side-on posture, the hunch-backed, pillbug-looking vehicle was facing Elvira head-on.
“It’s mirroring my posture…” she muttered in mixed alarm and curiosity. She stopped her right-ward progress, and the bug immediately did likewise. She slowly moved Elvira back five meters and, again, the enemy vehicle uncannily mirrored her movements.
Gritting her teeth, she knew there was something significant to the thing’s maneuver. But what was it? The thing had ambushed them, torn two of her mechs down, and now it wanted to dance?
“Targeting computer looks good, Captain,” Blinky reported.
“The gimbal’s fine, Captain,” Lu added, “but the mounts were tweaked when the SRMs blew. I’m inputting the new position into the computer,” he said as those figures appeared on Xi’s HUD.
“Good work.” She nodded, confirming the HE shells up in her guns were ready to fire. She was less confident than she had been a minute earlier, but she knew that this bug needed to die. Now. “On the way,” she declared, sending another pair of HE shells into the bug vehicle.
Both shells struck the mark, but shockingly, neither seemed to do significant damage. The thing’s carapace was bent and now sported several length-wise cracks, but unlike previous strikes, there were no meter-wide holes in the thing’s armored skin.
But even more surprising was the fact that, instead of returning fire with its plasma cannon, it skittered toward the nearest ice-hole from which one of its companions had emerged at the fight’s outset.
“Oh, no, you don’t.” Xi grimaced, reloading HE shells. “HE up.” She sneered as the thing’s front-half moved into the tunnel. “On the way!”
Her guns thundered, sending their ordnance into the tunnel’s mouth, but from the angle of impact, she doubted she’d hit the thing.
“Dammit!” she screamed in frustration.
And then a meter-wide beam of light stabbed into that tunnel from directly overhead, slicing through the ice-field like a scalpel as the ice boiled straight into steam. The constant laser gouged deeper and deeper into the ice, like a needle pursuing a splinter lodged beneath the skin, and it tore a three-hundred-meter long, fifty-meter-deep chasm in the ice before finally disappearing.
Steam boiled skyward and liquid water fell to the bottom of the chasm, most of which froze before it reached the floor of the icy gash.
The fallen Masamune was dangerously close to the newly-formed ravine and fell several meters down the gentler top-most section of its steep walls before coming to a stop. Cave Troll, on the other hand, had fallen far from the beam’s path and was unaffected by the suddenly-unstable patch of ice surrounding the orbital strike’s impact zone.
“Masamune, Cave Troll, respond,” Xi called out over the P2P, but she knew that neither of the vehicles’ point-to-point comm systems were likely to function after the Purgatory strike.
It would take relatively minor but critical repairs to their lateral P2P transceivers before they functioned properly. Still, the protocol was usually protocol for very good reasons, which meant she needed to try raising them at least three times before dispatching her crews in a search-and-rescue mission.
“Masamune, Cave Troll, respond,” she repeated while walking over to the nearer Cave Troll, but again, she received no reply. “Masamune, Cave Troll, respond,” she called for the third time before switching to Elvira’s intercom. “Lu, Blinky, Samuels: grab your gear an
d head over to Cave Troll in search of survivors. On the double,” she snapped, unlocking Elvira’s hatch and knowing that she was poisoning them all with radioactive dust by doing so, “we’ve got two downed mechs whose crews need our help. Move!”
“Yes, Captain,” came Blinky’s immediate reply, while both Lu and Samuels were much more belated in their acknowledgment of her orders.
“HQ, this is Elvira.” Xi raised the battalion on the priority channel. “I’ve got two downed mechs in need of retrieval. Cave Troll and Masamune crew condition currently unknown. We’re conducting emergency support at this time. Requesting immediate medevac, over.”
“Copy that, Elvira,” Styles acknowledged. “R&R team notified. ETA forty-five minutes.”
“Be advised,” she continued, careful not to make direct reference to the still-unrecognized alien species, “Jemmin warship opened fire on a fleeing vehicle.”
“Repeat your last, Elvira,” Styles said neutrally.
“Jemmin warship opened fire with capital-grade lasers on the last hostile as it fled beneath the ice, and the strike-zone was danger-close to Masamune,” she reiterated, again careful not to refer to the bug vehicle. All official logs would be processed at a later date by Terran Armed Forces oversight agencies, and this mission was supposed to be as secretive as they could manage. “Suggest you notify Colonel Jenkins immediately.”
“Copy that, Elvira,” Styles acknowledged. “I’m sending Second Platoon out to replace 4th Platoon in the patrol. ETA: seventy-one minutes.”
“Roger, Headquarters,” she replied. “Holding position here.”
Twenty minutes later, the final tally was in: all three of Cave Troll’s crew were dead, killed by crab-cakes that had somehow penetrated the cabin before the Purgatory struck. But the mech was largely intact, and with a new crew could probably be put back in service in a day or two.
Masamune’s crew had all survived, but their mech would need more extensive repairs than Cave Troll. Still, given enough time, Lieutenant Koch assured Xi that it would be back on its feet within the week.