by C H Gideon
The missile looped back and survived the laser fire from the Finjou fighters that remained airborne.
The P-96-Z reached the target zone 120 meters above the field as the tide of Finjou powersuits’ reached knife-range with Jenkins’ mech. The missile exploded, propagating its magnetic pulse through the thin atmosphere with a deafening crack that briefly caused Warcrafter’s sensors to white out before restoring with a near-instantaneous system reset.
And when they did, Jenkins’ theory was confirmed.
“Droids!” He grimaced as the powersuits froze in near-perfect unison directly beneath the missile’s blast point. “They’re unmanned,” he called over the P2P, laying into the attack droids as they collectively resumed their charge with uncanny unity. Clover’s artillery roared, cratering the ground but doing little to slow the killing machines as they poured into the heart of the battalion.
Jenkins had seen enough. The Finjou were fighting them with unmanned vehicles, which was smart, but which also had its share of drawbacks—one of which he intended to exploit.
“Polarize the dorsal armor, Kim,” Jenkins ordered as his coil guns carved into the oncoming enemy line. For every droid he put down, three more surged past it. The enemy had bracketed him, and if his latest idea didn’t pay off, then his remaining lifespan would be measured in seconds rather than minutes. “Let’s give ‘em a good jolt.”
“Charging the secondary power grid,” Kim acknowledged as the first Finjou droids jumped onto Warcrafter’s back. “Ready when you are, Colonel.”
“Wait…wait…” Jenkins intoned until twenty-six droids were on his hull. “Pop it!” Jenkins commanded, and an ear-splitting crack issued from Warcrafter’s port flank. The secondary power grid’s main relay had just been sacrificed to knock the Finjou droids off the hull, which was a perfectly acceptable trade-off in Jenkins’ opinion.
All twenty-six droids on Warcrafter’s back crumpled like puppets whose strings had been cut. Together, they fell lifelessly to the ground as Jenkins swept his coil guns across the rest of the surrounding horde. While he fired on the enemy, driving them back as the machine equivalent of doubt entered their minds, he broadcast details how to employ the countermeasure to the rest of Clover Battalion. Even in the few seconds it took him to do so, he saw four more of the Razorback Mk 2-Vs’ die under swarms of the enemy droids.
Then a nearby Razorback blew its secondary grid, knocking a dozen synthetic warriors from its hull and soon thereafter devastating them with coil gun fire. A third mech followed, then a fourth and a fifth too close together to know which went first. Across the remaining fifteen mechs of Clover Battalion, droids were rendered inert by electrical overloads that arced across the Terran hulls. Once on the ground, the droids were shot or trampled by the remaining Razorbacks.
“Inbound bogeys,” Kim called, snapping Jenkins’ focus back to the sky as he saw a fresh wing of thirty-two Finjou aircraft streaking toward Clover’s position.
“Railguns up; new targets,” he commanded, assigning each of the remaining fifteen Clover mechs a bogey. Unfortunately, two of the fifteen mechs had lost their railguns during the close combat with the droids. “Prep anti-missile rockets,” he continued grimly, knowing that Xi’s countercharging mechs were still too far to effectively engage the enemy gunships. “Engage at ninety percent solutions and hold interceptor rockets until targets are in the red zone.”
The inbound aircraft swooped in like reapers sent by Death, their guns ominously silent. He had seen the tactical nuke strike near Elvira’s position before Warcrafter had touched down, and he knew there was absolutely no way Clover Battalion could scrub as many missiles from the sky as Dragon Brigade had managed.
If the Finjou wanted to scratch Clover with nukes, that was precisely what was going to happen.
Jenkins’ board lit up with enemy missile icons just as his targeting computer plotted a better than ninety percent solution on his target. The enemy had adapted after the previous engagement, hastening their missile launch window to maximize the number of launches. It was the smart play.
His railgun spewed hypervelocity tungsten, stabbing into an enemy aircraft and putting it into a brief, downward corkscrew. For a moment it looked as though the damaged gunship would pull out of the dive, but that moment came and went four seconds before the aircraft splashed down in a cloud of rust-red dust.
As Clover’s railguns tore nine more enemy aircraft from the sky, a fan-shaped spread of 256 enemy missiles surged toward the Terran formation like a rocket-powered executioner’s axe. Even ignoring the likelihood of tactical nukes being among the inbound warheads, there was enough inbound firepower in that flight of ordnance that nothing larger than a human torso would be left of Clover Battalion if the swarm reached its targets.
Xi’s charging mechs unleashed just over two hundred anti-missile rockets from forty kilometers to the east; those rockets could potentially intercept the Finjou platforms in time to make a difference. But the simple truth of the matter was that Clover was about to get hit hard.
But before that seemingly inevitable blow landed, the Bahamut Zero joined the fray.
The northern edge of Jenkins’ tactical plotter erupted as the Zero launched the most impressive one-vehicle attack Jenkins had ever seen—ninety-six SRMs, twenty-four MRMs, and sixteen LRMs were on intercept courses with the enemy ordnance. The Zero’s sixteen railguns skewered the fan-shaped flight of missiles from its northern flank, tearing twenty-two down. Xi’s people to the east lent their own railguns to the effort, erasing another nine missiles from the sky with direct weapons fire.
The Bahamut Zero’s MRMs veered in pursuit of the breaking Finjou aircraft wing, while the SRMs sped off to intercept the ordnance headed Clover’s way. Meanwhile, the Zero’s LRMs climbed to an identical plane as that occupied by the majority of the Finjou missiles, and one by one, those sixteen Terran LRMs winked off the board as brilliant flashes enveloped their positions.
It all happened too fast to process consciously, but even in the heat of the moment, Jenkins realized that General Akinouye had unleashed sixteen Blue Boys. They weren’t potent enough to reliably eliminate a Viper-class aerospace fighter, but they were more than capable of disrupting any known missile system up to a capital-grade torpedo.
Thankfully for Clover Battalion, there were no torpedoes in the enemy missile flight.
A hundred Finjou missiles were vaporized mid-flight by the Blue Boys, and the three-pronged wave of Terran anti-missile rockets slammed into the remaining missiles of the enemy barrage before they descended on the mechs of Clover Battalion.
The sky was filled with ear-splitting reports as rockets struck missiles mid-flight. Razorback coil guns swept across the sky, weaving back and forth like festival searchlights. Tens of thousands of anti-personnel rounds were sent up in a desperate attempt to intercept whatever managed to pierce the makeshift missile shield, and those coil guns even managed to intercept at least four Finjou missiles.
But in spite of the impressive display of counterfire, the missile shield was not quite perfect.
Five missiles slipped through, annihilating three of Clover’s mechs and badly damaging a fourth. Warcrafter was spared the enemy’s wrath, and thankfully not a single tactical nuke pierced the improvised missile shield. Jenkins’ HUD was filled with damage reports and status updates as Clover Battalion, down to just a single company of battle-ready mechs after the furious exchange, mopped up the rest of the enemy droids and assumed a classic tortoiseshell formation.
“Railguns up,” Jenkins commanded, assigning fleeing aircraft as targets as they bolted off at top speed.
As Clover waited for their railgun capacitors to charge, the Bahamut Zero’s MRMs bore steadily down on their fast-fleeing aircraft. The Finjou fighters broke left and right, up and down, rolled, and even flipped to fire lasers at the pursuing fighter-killers. The last-ditch laser fire sniped a half-dozen MRMs from the sky, but the majority of the remaining MRMs struck their targets, obliteratin
g fifteen enemy fighters outright.
Jenkins quickly revised his railgun packages and gave the order, “Engage targets.”
The ten remaining railguns of Clover Battalion lanced out, stabbing across the sky in pursuit of the disbanded enemy fighter craft. Of the eight targets engaged by Clover’s railguns, six were smoked, but two survived long enough to escape what was likely the last exchange of this particular engagement.
Jenkins’ hands trembled with the familiar thrill of battle, and even the mech’s chemical support systems could not prevent the inevitable post-fight letdown. His entire body seemed to deflate, and his razor-sharp battle senses dulled to something considerably less intense. His tactical plotter showed General Akinouye’s mega-mech had reversed course and was now headed back toward the dig site to the east. The general could read the lay of the land better than anyone planet-side: he knew Jenkins and Xi would have no trouble rolling up the enemy forces to the south, which made the Zero’s top priority preparing for the inevitable assault from the forces previously arrayed to the north and east.
“Clover Battalion,” Jenkins called over the battalion-wide, “execute search-and-rescue operations for our wounded, then form up on Warcrafter. Dragon Brigade will want us ready to charge ASAP.”
A chorus of acknowledgments was Clover’s collective reply, and thankfully it seemed as though at least fifteen of the ruined mechs’ crewmen had survived the harrowing ordeal.
The battle had been much fiercer than he’d expected it to be. But in spite of Clover’s catastrophic losses, Captain Xi’s well-designed and flawlessly-executed pincer counterattack had broken the enemy’s back and swept up fully half of the Finjou forces deployed on the Brick.
Dragon Brigade had lost just six mechs, while Jenkins had lost precisely half of his original twenty-four. Eighteen mechs had fallen in exchange for well over a hundred Finjou vehicles and aircraft, including what were probably thousands of attack droids, which would have been more than capable of eviscerating the Metal Legion had they gotten into spitting distance of Xi’s people. And the ratios became even more impressive when one considered they were achieved despite the Legion taking strategic weapons fire multiple times without authoring any in reply.
All told, the exchange was nothing short of historic, and a hell of a way for the fast-rising Xi Bao to put her mark on the Terran Armed Forces history books. It was the kind of achievement that defined entire careers, and promotions generally accompanied such efforts. Jenkins even suspected that certain elements of the improvised battleplan would be taught in military academies for decades to come.
If they managed to get off the Brick, that was. Judging by the Finjou conduct thus far, Jenkins suspected the enemy had another fearsome assault planned for sooner rather than later.
18
The Prize
Motorcycle headlights shone into the seemingly endless darkness ahead of the six-man team. They rode their vehicles at near-top speed down the artificial, alien passage, grim determination on five of the six faces. Podsy wore a smile, happy to be doing something that didn’t penalize him for having bulky mechanical legs.
The original steeply-inclined tunnel bored out by the drill had precisely intersected an empty cavern, from which a single tunnel stretched to the north. That tunnel, through which Podsy and the team had ridden for over an hour, was triangular rather than circular like the laser tunnel. It was three meters on a side, with the peak directly overhead while the flat surface provided ideal terrain for the Terran motorcycles.
The laser tunnel had been blisteringly hot, with temperatures exceeding three hundred degrees Celsius, but this passage was so cold that patches were faintly lined in frozen carbon dioxide hidden beneath a thin film of dust.
The team had stopped only twice, once in the cavern and another time after twenty minutes or so when Styles had taken some measurements of the tunnel. Other than those two breaks, the team had proceeded in near-total silence.
The monotony of the ride was extreme since the featureless walls of the corridor sped by too fast for the human eye to process at speeds which were often well in excess of a hundred kilometers per hour. Podsy enjoyed the experience; he had never before been required to focus so hard while riding a bike down the road, and this particular trip was testing his abilities.
Then, an hour and twenty minutes into the ride, the lead bike slowed, causing the rest of the vehicles to stand on their brakes. Podsy’s helmet was equipped with a visor that supplied him with a tactical HUD, and that HUD showed a door at what appeared to be the end of the tunnel.
The entourage slowed to a crawl, finally stopping before a triangular door made of a strange material. The quad of troopers dismounted, readying their rifles as Styles produced a scanner and used it to examine the door. Podsy followed Styles, and the two studied the portal in mutual wonderment at what the scanner revealed.
“It’s like the Jemmin ceramics,” Podsy mused, glancing over Styles’ shoulder as the technician conducted the survey.
“It is Jemmin,” Styles confirmed reverently, gesturing at lines of angular script scrawled into borders of the stone doorway and embossed on the ceramic door. “These are obviously a variant of Jemmin glyphs, some of which are stylistically distinct but still translatable by the computer. But the system doesn’t recognize some of them. They share commonalities with the characters in the databanks, but they’re not perfect matches for anything.”
“How old is it?” Podsy asked.
“Tough to say,” Styles mused. “Carbon dating puts it at…at least ten thousand Earth years, and maybe close to double that.”
“Ten thousand years?” Podsy repeated skeptically, eyeing the pristine portal in a new light. “Humanity was just scrawling its first written language then.”
Styles smirked. “Well, thankfully, none of these characters have anything in common with the earliest human writings.”
“What?” Podsy asked in confusion.
Styles turned to him and gestured for Podsy to switch to a secure line. Podsy did so, and Styles explained, “I’m authorized to brief you on some of this, but not all of it, so try to keep the questions to a minimum. Ok?”
“Ok…” Podsy said warily.
Styles took a deep, slow breath. “Humanity was technologically uplifted by the Jemmin. Not ten thousand years ago.” He gestured to the door as Podsy’s eyes bulged at what he was hearing. “At least, not as far as we can tell, but sometime before the mid-twenty-first century, they started manipulating us. I know it’s a shock, Lieutenant, but we humans didn’t achieve FTL flight on our own.”
Podsy cocked his head dubiously while waiting for a punchline that never came. “Is this some kind of joke?” he eventually asked.
“No joke, LT.” Styles shook his head grimly, and his solemn tone was more than convincing. “Back on Shiva’s Wrath, we weren’t there just to secure mines and minerals. Our primary objective was to secretly meet a non-League species called the Zeen. They provided us with circumstantial evidence that indicates that the Jemmin uplifted humanity through a series of carefully-calibrated injections of technology into human civilization. That evidence was corroborated by a Vorr delegate during a secret meeting with Colonel Jenkins.”
“Wait, back up,” Podsy said steadily, his mind reeling from the implications of Styles’ words. “The colonel met with the Vorr? Why?”
“That’s as much as I’m authorized to say at this point, Lieutenant,” Styles said firmly before pointing at the door. “What we’ve been told is that there’s evidence behind this door which will irrefutably corroborate what the Vorr and the Zeen told us: that the Jemmin uplifted humanity, and rather quickly inducted it into the Illumination League.”
“Not all of humanity,” Podsy mused, his mind slowly beginning to wrap around what Styles was telling him.
“No, not all,” Styles agreed. “We don’t know why the Vorr went out of their way to tell us about this place, or why they told us about the Jemmin in the first place. All
we know is that humanity isn’t the first species the Jemmin have done this to…and not every species backstopped by the Jemmin is still around to tell about it.”
That sent an unexpected shiver down Podsy’s spine. He stood there for a long moment, during which one of the troopers tapped Styles on the shoulder. Styles switched the private channel with Podsy offline to talk to the trooper, and after a brief conversation, he turned back to face the still-reeling lieutenant. “I know it’s a lot to take in, Lieutenant,” Styles said sympathetically. “But before we try to open this door, I need you to know what we’re here to do. I have no idea what we’ll find on the other side, but the Vorr gave Colonel Jenkins a passkey, which I’ll use to open this door as soon as you’re ready.”
It was a lot to take in, but Podsy thought he understood well enough. He nodded encouragingly. “Pop the hatch, Chief.”
Styles returned the nod before producing a data slate equipped with a modified transceiver. He tapped in a series of commands, and when he hit the transmit command, the door before them flashed with a pale-blue light.
That light flickered across its triangular surface before consolidating and intensifying at the Jemmin writing embossed on the door. The pale light deepened until it was a rich royal blue, at which point the door parted along previously invisible seams and withdrew into the stone doorframe.
The chamber beyond was unlike anything Podsy had expected. No dusty artifacts littered a stone floor, and no disheveled corpses lay strewn about like in the holovids. Instead, a pristine low-ceilinged chamber designed for figures no taller than two meters was revealed. The room was square, ten meters on a side, with a gentle ramp that led down from the doorway at which he and Styles stood to the edge of the claustrophobic room.
The wall panels were bright silver, the ceiling azure blue, and the floor a deep brown. All surfaces were made of a similar ceramic material to that of the door. As Styles and Podsy moved into the room, two of their escort troopers went forward with them.