by C H Gideon
Her eyes went wide when she realized what was inbound.
“Bahamut Zero…” she whispered, feeling goosebumps rise all across her body.
Tearing through the atmosphere of Shiva’s Wrath, flanked by ten decelerating aerospace fighters, was the most terrifying vehicle ever deployed by the Terran Armor Corps. Angry orange flames poured off its hull as Bahamut Zero plunged through the worldlet’s frigid atmosphere.
The massive vehicle was so large it would have taken a specially-designed drop-can twelve times the size of the one that Elvira rode down. Deploying such an enormous can would have required a special launch tube to be installed on the Dietrich Bonhoeffer, so Bahamut Zero was specifically designed as one of the few active-duty Armor Corps vehicles that did not require such a system to safely make planetfall.
Designed as a would-be revolutionary armor platform, Bahamut Zero was a prototype that had eventually been abandoned due to the outrageously high costs of deploying it. Featuring both track-based locomotive systems as well as an eight-legged hybrid walker-roller system similar to Roy, the vehicle cut the distinctive image of a multi-legged beast conjured from the darkest nightmares humanity could endure.
The aerospace fighters broke their diamond formation as Bahamut Zero reached the forty-thousand-foot mark. Two of the fighters broke for the deck, diving like pelicans while two more pairs swept left and right.
Elvira’s sensors lit up with Jemmin missile blooms just eighteen kilometers from her current position. Using her newly-installed SRMs, she locked onto the Jemmin weapons and engaged with anti-missile rockets. Her rockets tore upward, but the Jemmin missiles were moving nearly as fast as her anti-missile rockets.
“Dammit,” she grunted, loading extended-range HE shells into her fifteens and targeting her guns on the missiles’ point-of-origin. “ER-HEs up! On the way!”
Elvira’s guns cleared with a deafening roar, sending the twin extended-range shells toward the enemy position. She didn’t expect to hit the target directly, so she had spread her strike-points far enough that she might hit the stealthy vehicle with enough shrapnel to outline its position.
The shells whistled through the air, taking a ponderous arc before striking exactly where she had aimed them. She felt a thrill course through her as a glimmer of sensor contact flickered into position at the furthest edge of the HE shells’ blast zone.
Before she could even think to coordinate with the incoming fighters, a pair of railgun bolts skewered the Jemmin vehicle. Its power core containment failed, and the vehicle exploded in a brilliant dome of light that left nothing but a steaming crater of ice.
Bahamut Zero hurtled toward the ground, passing the fifteen-thousand-foot mark where its braking thrusters engaged. Giant wings unfurled along its sides, and a maneuvering tail unfolded at the vehicle’s rear as the mighty war machine took control over its descent to the surface of Shiva’s Wrath.
Xi watched with unvarnished awe, giggling with excitement as Bahamut Zero’s deployment chassis came down to seven hundred meters, stabilized its speed for two seconds, and dropped the peerless vehicle. The unburdened deployment frame pulled up, its condor-like wings sweeping back as rocket engines engaged and drove the now-hollow aerospacecraft up toward the heavens from which it had come.
A combination of parachutes and braking thrusters delivered Bahamut Zero safely to the icy surface, where it landed with an authoritative crack less than a kilometer from Elvira’s present position.
The battlefield behemoth immediately began to tear across the open ice-field, accelerating to a speed fully twice Elvira’s maximum in just six seconds. As it reached peak speed, Xi saw an inbound P2P connection request appear on her HUD.
She accepted the request and fought to steady her voice amid the excitement of the moment. “Elvira here, over.”
“This is Bahamut Zero with a message for all Armor Corps units on Shiva’s Wrath,” came the unmistakable, commanding voice of General Akinouye. “Havoc is on deck and operational.”
Seeing Bahamut Zero arrive at the battalion’s new HQ was nothing short of breathtaking, even for Lee Jenkins. Displacing nearly five hundred tons, it bristled with more weaponry than a full company of mechs and had enough armor to stave off at least as many enemy platforms while it eliminated them with murderous precision.
Sixteen railguns in quad-mounts, four LRM launchers with four tubes apiece, four MRM launchers with six tubes apiece, twelve SRM launchers with eight tubes apiece, twenty-two coilguns scattered across its hull, and four plasma cannons of the same design as Cave Troll’s comprised the arsenal of the Armor Corps’ pride and joy.
Fielding Bahamut Zero was normally impractical due to the extensive costs associated with deploying and retrieving it. It took two heavy lifters, working in tandem, to pick the thing off a standard-gravity world and return it to the Dietrich Bonhoeffer. In fact, it had been sixteen years since Bahamut Zero last moved under its own power.
And that had been for a Founding Day parade.
All of which meant that, as shows of support went, the general had just given the most meaningful one that Colonel Jenkins could have hoped for. Akinouye’s message upon arrival was never once uttered, yet nonetheless remained loud and clear to every Terran on Shiva’s Wrath:
We’re staying until the job’s done.
Bahamut Zero rolled to a stop fifty meters from Roy’s position. In deference to the general’s arrival, Jenkins had removed Roy from the central point of the HQ and ceded that territory to his superior officer as both protocol and professional courtesy demanded.
Unexpectedly, Bahamut Zero failed to assume the central position, opting instead for one even more removed than that which Roy occupied.
Elvira, following close behind Bahamut Zero, assumed her assigned slot in the parking lot just as Bahamut Zero’s main boarding ramp lowered and a company of Black Berets disembarked. Black Berets were the special guard units of the Terran Armor Corps, and against the icy white backdrop of Shiva’s Wrath, their all-black uniforms seemed somehow more intimidating than usual.
And as far as Lee Jenkins was concerned, that was saying quite a lot.
He made his way toward the Black Berets’ formation with Styles at his side. They came to a stop just outside the quickly-assembled honor guard and waited at attention for the go-ahead signal.
One of the Black Berets made no show of discretion as he ran a scanner over Jenkins and Styles from a safe distance, while his fellows steadily trained their weapons on the duo.
“Clean!” declared the scanner-wielder.
“Good,” General Akinouye’s voice boomed from the massive vehicle’s speakers.
“Permission to come aboard, General?” Jenkins asked, as protocol dictated.
“Permission granted,” Akinouye acknowledged.
They moved up the steep ramp and came to the mech’s interior, where a young officer silently greeted them and gestured to the rear of the vehicle. Jenkins and Styles silently followed, turning a dozen times along the cramped passageway before arriving at an open door.
Beyond the door was a conference table that looked like something from a trillionaire’s boardroom, and at the head of that table sat General Akinouye.
“Come in, Colonel,” the longest-tenured member of the Terran Joint Chiefs gestured to a pair of unoccupied seats adjacent to his own. “Let’s hear this theory of yours.”
12
Asymmetry
“I never thought I’d see the Zero make planetfall,” whistled Lieutenant Ford as the newly-formed six-mech patrol, led by Captain Xi, drew nearer to its teardrop-shaped route’s apex. “It must have been something seeing her come down with your own eyes, Captain.”
“I’m not going to lie, Forktail,” she said, “I think I got wetter than you did, which I’m sure is a surprise to us both.”
“Ha-ha,” Ford deadpanned.
“Good work on the target reveal, Cap,” came the newly-assigned Jock riding Cave Troll, a 2nd Lieutenant named Yuan. “You
painted that Specter like Bob Ross conjuring a cloud.”
“Like Havoc even needed the help,” Ford chuckled. “The Zero’s so heavily-armored, I doubt six of those Jemmin bottle-rockets would have scratched the paint.”
“Confidence to the point of cockiness is one thing, Forktail,” Xi chided, “but there’s nothing smart about getting hit in a fight, no matter how tough you are.”
“Yeah, yeah.” Ford sighed. “You’re right as usual, Captain. But in the three days since the Zero arrived, the Jemmin haven’t done so much as pop a recon drone above the deck. And with Bahamut Zero enhancing the missile shield back at HQ, we’ve been able to boost these patrols to six mechs apiece. I doubt anyone comes messing with us now. They’re probably hunkered down in their hidey-holes, waiting for a cloaked ship or something to come pick them up.”
“A worthy enemy strikes when you least expect it,” Xi replied irritably.
“Elvira’s right,” agreed the Jock riding Widowmaker, the hundred-ton spider-shaped mech. “Forgetting Bahamut Zero, this patrol is the heaviest unit in the battalion, and we’re near max-distance from HQ. If the Jemmin attack, it will be when we’re stretched as thin as possible, which will be in the next ten minutes.”
“Agreed,” White Zombie confirmed. “Eclipse, are you reading anything out there?”
“Not yet,” Eclipse replied tersely, “but I’d have better luck if y’all weren’t nonstop jabbering in my ear.”
“Copy that, Eclipse,” Xi said. “Pipe down and keep your eyes peeled.”
Two minutes later, Eclipse declared, “Contact bearing zero-seven-niner, range: eight kilometers.”
A swarm of missiles bloomed from the indicated target point just as Xi put Elvira’s sensors on the area. Sure enough, a Jemmin Specter and at least three other, smaller vehicles appeared on the screen. About half of the Jemmin missiles were headed Xi’s way, with the other half headed to HQ.
“Railguns, target inbound missiles and fire,” Xi barked as she zeroed in on the enemy missiles with Elvira’s rockets. Of the thirty-nine missiles sent up by the Jemmin at that location, three were instantly scraped off the board by railguns while rockets downed another four. That left twelve missiles inbound on her patrol’s location, and six of those weapons found their targets.
Elvira’s rear-left leg was blown completely off by a direct hit that made her mech lurch so badly, Xi bit her tongue. With blood briefly spewing out of her mouth, she snarled and re-positioned her Scorpion-class mech to compensate for the lost leg.
Cave Troll was struck by a pair of missiles, with one impact blowing its left plasma cannon completely off and the other tearing a hole in its left flank. Fortunately, the thickly-built mech maintained its footing and sent a burst of SRMs at the enemy in reply.
The exact center of Forktail’s long chassis was struck by a missile, which by all rights should have destroyed the mid-sized vehicle outright. But the design of Forktail’s spinal armor was such that it distributed much of the explosion’s energy to the side and away from the central section, so instead of being killed outright, the nimble mech merely lost its front-left leg and was rendered all but immobile.
“Eclipse, send a flare-burst to that position,” she commanded, deciding to test a theory her company had come up with in the last few days.
“Flares on the way,” Eclipse acknowledged, and a quartet of specially-modified anti-missile rockets sped off on a low trajectory toward the Jemmin location.
“Artillery solution plotted,” Xi declared after taking precious seconds to confirm her onboard computer’s firing solution. “Transmitting now. Fire! Fire! Fire!”
Elvira and Widowmaker, sporting a pair of fifteen-kilo guns apiece, sent HE shells downrange using Xi’s hand-calculated solution. The shells burst in a near-perfect diamond pattern, showering the area with shrapnel and exposing two Jemmin vehicles. Unfortunately, neither was the heavy Specter.
“APs up,” she declared, zeroing in on the now-visible targets. “On the way!”
She cleared her guns a quarter-second before Widowmaker, and both targets were destroyed in radiant displays that briefly illuminated the other two Jemmin vehicles. But just as quickly as they appeared, the enemy craft faded off-screen and out of view.
Eclipse’s flare rockets, moving low and slow by design, reached the target and exploded directly over the briefly-illuminated vehicles’ location shortly after the Jemmin disappeared. The entire area was showered in superheated metal fragments, which scattered like Founding Day fireworks over the town square. An oblong dome of ice was covered by the flare residue, and sure enough, Eclipse’s theory proved out as both Jemmin vehicles were revealed by the relatively crude devices.
“Good shot, Eclipse!” Xi congratulated as she loaded a pair of HE shells into her fifteens.
Elvira bucked as her guns cleared, sending explosive shells to the slow-moving Specter’s location. Widowmaker’s guns cleared beside her just as the Specter flew apart in an eminently satisfying shower of glowing ceramic shards. The smaller vehicle was also scrubbed before it could repair its camouflage systems, and for a moment, Xi thought they had wiped out every enemy in the area.
Then the railguns struck from above.
Widowmaker, the only vehicle in the patrol larger than Elvira, was struck by four precisely-aimed tungsten bolts, which skewered it center-mass. One of those slivers of hyper-velocity tungsten pierced Widowmaker’s power core, which exploded with a force equivalent to three kilotons. The heaviest vehicle in the patrol had been destroyed before its crew even realized they’d been hit.
Only Forktail was close enough to be struck by destructive shrapnel from Widowmaker’s death throes, but its low profile kept it from anything but fist-sized shards of the dead mech’s hull.
“Target lock,” Eclipse declared, and Xi saw a fire solution appear on her HUD.
“Firing,” she snarled in rage at having her patrol so badly hit by the enemy, with one mech destroyed outright. SRMs leapt out of their tubes with murderous intent, and the quartet of offending Jemmin aircraft were destroyed before they could evade the fast-moving missiles.
“All bogeys down, Captain,” reported Eclipse. “Scanning local area.”
“This is Forktail,” Lieutenant Ford said anxiously. “Our fusion reactor containment is critical. Shutting it down and requesting pickup.”
“Moving to your position, Forktail,” Xi said urgently as she turned her mech and used its remaining five legs to walk as fast as possible to Ford’s mech. As she did so, she checked on HQ’s status and saw that they were still taking fire from enemy positions on the far side of the ice-field. Her weaponry would barely let her engage at those ranges against relatively stationary targets, so there was little point in worrying about lending fire support from here.
It looked like Bahamut Zero was making its presence known to both friend and foe alike. Icon after icon of enemy positions winked out while the platform delivered devastation to the Jemmin attackers.
But before she could pore over the combat logs, her board erupted in another burst of signals.
“Contacts,” she instinctively called out as six distinct signatures erupted from the ice-field around her battered patrol. Where a few minutes earlier she’d had six mechs, now she was down to four, and just two of those were undamaged.
But instead of Jemmin signatures, it was bug vehicles crawling up from their ice tunnels.
“Cave Troll.” She smirked while pivoting Elvira to face the nearest insect vehicle. “Clear one of those.”
“With pleasure,” Cave Troll acknowledged, and soon the ice beneath Elvira began to vibrate. Cave Troll’s ultra-powerful, limited-range plasma cannon belched a gout of blue-white fire that annihilated the bug. But unlike previous kills from the dual cannons, this single shot left behind enough wreckage to positively identify what it had been.
White Zombie squared off on two of the insect-like vehicles. The metal plates over that humanoid mech’s shoulder sections folded back to r
eveal a variety of SRM and MRM launchers, which fired four SRMs and two MRMs on each of the bugs. Xi approved of the enthusiasm, though the MRMs were probably a bit more than she would have touched off given the choice.
The left bug was hit by one MRM and two SRMs, which sent it skittering across the smooth ice-field. It came to a stop nearly eighty meters from its previous position. It reoriented itself head-on to White Zombie, and its “mouth” began to glow as its fellows’ had done prior to firing plasma streams.
The right bug was missed by both MRMs, but the SRMs struck and blew the thing apart in a shower of gooey, metallic chitin. It was the first time Terran missiles had killed one of the things outright, and Xi felt no small measure of satisfaction watching the thing die.
But as she squared off against another bug, she noticed something curious: two of the six bugs were hanging back, relatively motionless, while the other two survivors pressed the attack with their plasma cannons.
“What are you waiting for?” she sneered, loading HE shells and locking onto the bug that White Zombie had sent skittering across the field. Raising Elvira’s stern to get a close-quarters firing angle, Xi’s dual-fifteens thundered and delivered their shells into the already-wounded thing a quarter-second after it sent a stream of plasma at White Zombie.
The artillery shredded the bug’s armor, with thirty-centimeter wide gaps appearing across its surface, and Eclipse added to the weight of fire with its twin chain guns. Two hundred rounds per second poured into the unprotected holes in its armor, and Cave Troll soon added its own coilguns to the mix and poured thousands of rounds into the thing before it shuddered, fell over, and died.
The two bugs that had been hanging back scurried down their holes, disappearing before Xi could react to their flight. “Dammit,” she growled, but even as she spoke, the last remaining bug squared off against her.
Again, there was something about its posture which gave her pause, and she suddenly suspected the thing was trying to communicate something with its posture.