by C H Gideon
The final Solarian missile destroyed Cleaver’s capacitors. They were mostly depleted following the plasma bolt, but the energy release was still potent enough to break Cleaver’s fusion core containment, and the mech exploded so violently that four nearby buildings collapsed around it.
Wolverine’s armor protected it from the worst of Cleaver’s death, but status alarms flared on her HUD, signaling that it had suffered serious internal damage. Xi knew that the Tactical-grade mech would need time to address its wounds before it would be able to return to even limited combat effectiveness.
The last Solarian Marine had somehow evaded all of the Terran SRMs and disappeared down the street in the transceiver’s direction.
“Takeover complete, Captain,” Eclipse’s Jock reported with relief as a new screen popped up on Xi’s HUD. “The array’s self-destruct systems were three seconds from activation when the program overrode them.”
“We’ve got to neutralize that Marine,” Xi growled. “He could spike the array and scrap the entire op. Preacher, TG Cid,” she barked, “throw up a roadblock. Now!”
“Copy that,” came the simultaneous acknowledgments before forty missiles flew out from those two mechs’ launchers. Most were SRMs, complemented by four Devastator MRMs and two Scythe-class LRMs.
As the missiles streaked above the empty streets, Elvira’s fifteen-kilo guns thundered, and they were joined by Roy’s from the other side of the city. All ordnance was aimed at a three-block-wide patch of ground between the Marine’s last known position and the transceiver array.
If the Marine crossed that line, he would have clear line-of-sight on the array and could end Operation Antivenom with a few well-placed railgun shots. The Solarians had already deduced the Legion’s objective, and according to Sargon, they were perfectly happy to deny the Terrans the possibility of success by destroying the all-important transceiver.
Artillery shells fell to the ground and missiles slammed home, collapsing buildings left and right while cratering the pristine, empty streets of the abandoned Lunar city. Xi had the sudden chilling thought that she and her people were opening fire on a human city in hopes of killing a Marine before he could achieve his eminently noble objective.
Are we the bad guys here? she wondered, and the deafening silence between her ears was even more ominous than the question. No, she replied. We know more than he does. We know why. He does not.
The MRMs collapsed two of the larger buildings, causing them to fall across the street and obstruct any potential traffic with a three-meter-tall pile of loose rubble.
But it was the Scythe-class LRMs that proved the most terrible weapons of the fearsome barrage.
Each Scythe carried forty smaller warheads that burst from the Scythe’s chassis like a plague of locusts to descend on the streets below. Scythes had originally been designed to clear minefields or other lightly-fortified positions from a safe range, and the combined eighty microwarheads annihilated anything lighter than a Tactical-grade mech wherever they fell.
Marines, even the Solar variants, were afforded significant protection with their state-of-the-art reactive armor systems. Small arms fire splashed off them like raindrops, and even anti-material weaponry could not penetrate an armored Marine’s protective casement.
But robust as it was, a Marine’s power-suit was not the equal of a mech when it came to soaking up violent energy.
A hostile icon flickered briefly into being before it once again disappeared in the middle of the Scythe’s field of devastation. “Give me eyes on the approach, Eclipse,” Xi commanded, and another short-lived drone took to the sky above the Lunar city.
The drone soon locked onto the last known position of the icon, where the remains of a Solar Marine’s power-armored body lay amid the rubble. Xi could not help but wince at the sight. If someone had accused her of shedding a tear in the ensuing seconds, she would have punched them in the throat…but she wouldn’t have denied that it was true.
But the fight wasn’t over yet.
A pair of railgun bolts stabbed out so fast that Xi was temporarily confused by their purposes. But when she finally processed the situation, she saw one of the railgun bolts had struck the humanoid Indestructible-Mega-Titan Thunder-God Cid. Like a puppet whose strings had been cut, the mighty mech collapsed to the Lunar surface, where it lay motionless. The mech seemed intact, aside from some fresh damage to its left leg from the fall, but it didn’t take a genius to deduce that its Jock had been killed by sniper fire.
What had confused Xi had been the second railgun strike, which she now realized had come from Roy less than a quarter second after the Solarian railgun sliver had pierced TG Cid’s cockpit. Roy’s precise, ultra-fast counterfire had sanctioned the Solar Marine who had killed TG Cid’s Jock. Fortunately, TG Cid’s Wrench survived, but it would be impossible to field the mech, considering the damage it had sustained during the fall.
Xi shivered in awe of her CO’s quick reflexes. She doubted she could have reacted as quickly, even with the aid of a Razorback’s high-end neural interface. But above all, she gritted her teeth in anger at having lost yet another Metalhead to this bloody operation.
“2nd Company,” she called in a voice she fought to keep steady and professional, “secure the objective. On the double.”
“3rd Company, form up on me,” Lieutenant Colonel Jenkins said as Elvira, Cave Troll and Wolverine moved to take up defensive positions around the array. “We’ll cover the facility’s southern ridge while 2nd takes the north.”
“Captain, Wolverine here,” Nakamura reported grimly. “We lost too much coolant, ma’am. If we don’t shut the reactor down now, this rig’s done for.”
Xi cursed irritably off-mic before replying, “Shut it down, Wolverine. I hope for your sake that your envirosuits are in better shape than they were on Durgan’s Folly.”
“Copy that, Elvira,” Nakamura acknowledged. “Shutting it down. I’m sorry, Captain.”
“Shove ‘sorry’ where you keep your pet octopus off-hours, Wolverine,” Xi quipped. “Grab an anti-material rifle and as much ordnance as you can carry to a nest up in the array’s command tower. Hook up with Adams, Cid’s Wrench, and hoof it to your new home. I’ll be timing you.”
“Already on it, ma’am,” he replied as Wolverine’s reactor went off-line.
As the Terran mechs converged on the transceiver array, Xi was impressed by both the facility’s simplicity and the sheer scope of it.
Built just behind the north-south equatorial band that separated Luna’s near- and far-sides relative to Earth, this particular transceiver had once been considered key to the Chinese plans to maintain information superiority over all of Earth.
Without a direct line of sight to Earth, it was uniquely positioned to exclusively access high-orbit information satellites that would relay its transmissions across the entire swarm of near-Earth orbital platforms.
During the so-called Information Wars of the early twenty-first century, armies of Western and Eastern virtual technicians waged incessant battles for control over Earth’s myriad data networks. The “internet,” which was an incredibly low-tech and disjointed version of a type-one civilization’s mass communication network, was absolute chaos in those early days.
Anyone with a shot of code to squirt into that system could do so at their leisure, resulting in backdoors and Trojan horses of nearly limitless variation being disseminated and used for an equally large number of purposes. As a result, it became necessary to control input and output at key points in the earliest iterations of the information superhighway. The Chinese partly accomplished this goal of information security with a series of stealthy satellites placed in high orbit where they could interface with many of the lower-orbiting platforms using backdoors of both physical and virtual design.
And this Lunar transceiver, being a hundred percent inaccessible by Earthbound transmitters, had proven crucial to achieving and maintaining information dominance during Earth’s Final War. Thousands
of Chinese technicians had worked tirelessly from Luna One, using transceivers like this one, to bring Earth’s information network into compliance while their enemies could do nothing but look on helplessly from the surface.
Shaped like any other parabolic dish, each of this transceiver array’s three dishes measured sixty meters across and was propped up by massive superstructures of steel and concrete. With an angle almost perfectly parallel to the Moon’s surface, the array’s transmissions could only be picked up and relayed by a handful of high-orbit satellites.
But all the Metal Legion needed was one of those satellites to accept Jem’s signal.
“Contact,” Eclipse called as the Legion’s mechs finally assumed a defensive position surrounding the bowl-shaped depression of the transceiver array. A fresh icon appeared on the tactical HUD, and unlike every other contact they had encountered thus far, this one was not vehicle-scale. It was capital-scale.
As the early sensor returns streamed in, the approaching ship was revealed to be nearly as large as the Dietrich Bonhoeffer.
“That’s a Unity-class battle carrier inbound, Metalheads,” Jenkins declared over the battalion-wide. “Standard complement of two hundred Solar Marines deployed by four Mongol-class dropships and thirty void fighters, with enough capital-grade weaponry onboard the Unity carrier to give a Behemoth-class warship like the Bonhoeffer a run for its money. We are now officially outmanned and outgunned, people, and in twenty-eight minutes that carrier will reach the high ground of low orbit, where we’ll be at their mercy.”
The transceiver’s auto-defenses, which featured a robust collection of railguns and orbit-capable missile launchers, spun up and turned toward the approaching battle carrier. Jem’s takeover had seized total control of the system’s local assets, once again proving just how effective (and dangerous) the relic of the Jem’un civilization could be.
“The Metal Legion doesn’t ask for mercy,” Jenkins said with rousing conviction, sending a thrill through Xi’s body as the heavily-fortified array’s weaponry began to guzzle enormous amounts of energy from subterranean reactors. “And today, we can’t afford to offer it.”
The railguns went hot, stabbing hyper-velocity tungsten bolts into the approaching battle carrier. Missiles flew from the array’s launchers, sending a storm of over one hundred LRMs up to greet the Solarian warship. Each of those missiles was armed with a nuclear warhead with delivered power ranging from two to ten kilotons. It was easily ten times as much ordnance as was required to destroy the battle carrier, but Xi’s breath caught in her chest as the Unity-class warship’s counterfire destroyed fully half of those missiles before they reached the midpoint of their flights.
Railgun bolts hammered into the Solarian warship, with some puncturing clean through the heavily-armored carrier’s hull and erupting out the far side. Explosions rippled across the mighty vessel as bolt after bolt thundered into the warship’s bow and ventral sections.
A storm of fifty counter-missiles erupted from the battle carrier, each targeting a launch platform on the array or, in a handful of instances, the array itself. Elvira’s SRMs loosed interceptor rockets which rose beside Cave Troll and Eclipse’s anti-missile fire to meet the enemy ordnance. Roy and 3rd Company likewise added to the interceptor wave, and only eight Solar missiles pierced the shield to strike their targets.
Meanwhile, twenty of Jenkins’ tactical nukes buried themselves in the battle carrier’s thick hide, causing catastrophic damage to the fearsome engine of war.
One of the transceiver dishes was struck directly, cleaving the parabola in half as the twin pieces of nearly-symmetrical wreckage crashed silently to the Lunar surface. Six railgun mounts were destroyed by Solar fire, leaving just two of the facility’s capital-grade railguns under Terran control. Another missile near-missed a second array dish, but the impact was close enough that Xi suspected it might have been rendered inert for Antivenom’s purposes.
That left one dish unmolested, but the devastation wrought by Jenkins’ attack on the Solar battle carrier was such that it would no longer factor in this phase of the engagement.
Three fusion cores were ejected in rapid succession from the battle carrier’s hull, two of which exploded at a safe distance while the third failed close enough to the scrambling dropships and void fighters that a handful of Solar craft were destroyed by the reactor’s death.
The Unity-class warship was battered unrecognizable by the Terran barrage and slowly tumbled stern-over-bow. Mid-way through its first rotation, like a green twig snapping between a child’s fingers, the fearsome vessel’s hull split in two. The bow and stern sections slowly separated, and internal explosions sent shower after shower of metallic debris streaming from what had previously been interior compartments.
Xi wanted to cry. She wanted to scream. A thousand different impulses flew through her consciousness, each trying to tear her focus from the task at hand.
But the most powerful impulse among them was the will to win; to survive, and most importantly, to accomplish the mission. Xi Bao was both proud and ashamed by the realization that she was now every bit as hardened and heartless as she had thought her superiors to be just a few short months earlier.
As the enemy carrier fell dark and silent, escape pods flew clear of the dying warship’s broken bones. But in spite of the devastation Colonel Jenkins’ surprise attack had caused to the warship and its accompanying vessels, five distinct icons appeared on the battalion’s linked sensor grid.
Four were void interceptors, whose trajectories hugged the Lunar surface so tightly that they would not be in line-of-sight until they were less than ten kilometers from the array.
The fifth was a Mongol-class dropship, potentially loaded with as many as forty Solar Marines.
In spite of the utter devastation they had just wrought on the Solar warship and its deployable assets, even forty power-armored Marines were more than a match for the beleaguered remnants of the Terran forces on Luna One. Although they would arrive later than they would have done via the battle carrier, the Solarians would come to grips with the Terrans no later than one hour from now.
Xi knew that one way or another, Operation Antivenom was about to come to an end.
She just hoped Podsy and Trapper had reached the uplink on-schedule.
14
The Uplink Underground
Blink Dog’s chain guns whirred, sending eighty-five rounds per second down-range into the hardened turrets, the final obstacle between the Nutcrackers and their objective: a direct uplink node.
Sergeant Major Trapper, obeying what seemed like a genetic predisposition, stood tall in the midst of the firestorm and sniped round after round at the turrets. Four of the armored coil guns had greeted them twenty seconds earlier, but only two remained after Blinky had expertly neutralized one with chain gun fire.
The second had been scrubbed by Trapper’s heavy weapons teams, one of which fell to counterfire before they could send another grenade into the third turret.
Snarling like a savage war god, Trapper dropped his rifle and stooped to collect the loaded tube from his fallen comrade’s lifeless grip. Kneeling and shouldering the weapon in one fluid motion, he fired an RPG into the concrete bunker that protected the coil gun that had killed his people.
The grenade struck just below the narrow portal, blowing a thirty-centimeter-wide chunk of concrete loose and exposing the coil gun.
That increased exposure proved vital as Blink Dog’s chain guns dug into the coil gun’s bunker with a half-second burst of fire that filled the fortified compartment with sparks and molten metal fragments.
Another of Trapper’s RPG teams launched a grenade into the fourth bunker, destroying the weapon within and causing a quad of infantry to sprint forward (as well as one could sprint in such low gravity) with frag grenades in hand.
Just before they tossed their grenades into the silent bunker, its embedded coil gun cut down one of the Pounders with a devastating center-mass burst. As the so
ldier was thrown back, she somehow tossed the grenade clear of her fellows before all four grenades went off in rapid succession.
Three of the frag grenades secured the enemy gun nest, while the fourth sent a shower of shrapnel into the lightly-armored troopers who had sprinted toward the turret’s placement.
“Medic!” Trapper barked as he collected his rifle and moved to assist one of the three soldiers who had fallen with shrapnel embedded in his hip. The other two of the team were already busily assisting their wounded squadmate while Blink Dog crawled through the fortified entryway to the information hub.
“We must initiate a hard link with the system,” Jem urged. “My previous override of the central processors in this facility will not obfuscate our presence indefinitely. If we do not establish a physical uplink to the system prior to our discovery, the system might be hardened against our attempts.”
Podsy and Styles had already checked each other’s envirosuits and were ready to disembark the mech’s pressurized cabin. Corporal Staubach brought Blink Dog to the door situated between two of the dead coil gun nests, and as he did so, Trapper’s people lined the tunnel they had just come through with high-explosives.
“I wrecked the outer airlock laying her down,” Blinky explained as he donned his pressurized helmet, which Styles had checked and found green. The mech’s Jock continued, “We have to use the explosive bolts to pop it loose.”
“Do it,” Podsy urged, gripping Jem’s satchel tightly in his hands while Styles and Staubach checked their sidearms.
“Blowing the hatch,” Blinky declared, priming the manually-operated explosives with a few cranks of the detonator handle. “All clear!”