Space Knights- Last on the Line

by Emerson Fortier

  The field was mayhem. Everything was black, the very earth was fused into glass which crackled beneath the automata’s whiplike limbs. Hounds were generally designed as universal soldiers, mostly optimized for frontline duties, with at least two arms of their hydralike heads designed with internal field manipulators for disabling shields, two more were dedicated to short range kinetic weapons, but the one that Charles found himself observing through was specialized as an artillery model. Two plasma cannons positioned along the “spine’ of its central muscle band and an extended magazine optimized it for finding openings in the enemy’s shields. In simulation the model had proved invaluable in combat, which was why every Hound carried at least two limbs specialized for long range support duties, but only a few carried these unique specialization for dedicated long range support.

  The hound maneuvered across the black and broken terrain picking out targets Charles could barely see through its multifaceted vision blister, dark blurs highlighted by red displays which the hound spat its plasma encased rounds towards like huge globular tracers that turned to clouds of glowing superheated gas around their impact spots.

  Hounds continued to fall from the sky like a rain of hard stones. Their limbs configured themselves like stubby wings as they fell. They were incapable of banking, but the configuration did allow them plummet into a precise landing point without crashing into one another. . As soon as they’d landed the hounds set up a loose cordon around their landing sight, shock troops ranging to the front where they flailed away at the enemy with whips of glowing zero point blades supported by shock troops in support mode, long tentacle arms extended fan like while rail guns at their tips spat black spots at shields being hammered by the bigger artillery hounds beginning to join the battle from the rear. Something hit the hound’s shield and Charles view cut out as the shield closed up and sealed itself against even radio transmission. He switched to another hound, firing in roughly the same direction along the battle line, and continued to study the fight the knot in his stomach forgotten.

  Marain hounds were not like most automata. Where automated manufactories usually connected their automata to a managing AI that dictated the movements of each individual unit in the factory, hounds were individual entities, each with a managing AI all their own, disconnected from any active management program, cut off by the necessity of having their forcefields calibrated to exclude the passage of most radio waves and electronic warfare signals. Before deployment, an AI in the dominions would download the battle plans into the hounds and then unleash them onto the field. The design was annoying but necessary. It meant they had less command of fight once it started, but were less vulnerable to their own machines turning against them or freezing up at conflicting orders delivered via radio wave. What communication there was was all one sided. Hounds fed their sensor data into a battle network that allowed Charles and other corporate personnel to assess combat effectiveness and make changes in strategy programming for other hounds as they deployed. Another side effect the communication cut off was the constant shift of Charles’, view of the battle from one hound to another as the hounds maneuvered, shields snapping on when the Kamele artillery returned fire on their position or they caught collateral fire from the battle raging at the edge of their cordon.

  “Incredible that they could even survive the Cherub bombardment.” Charles said as he watched one of the hounds blown apart by a Kamele machine he couldn’t see. Walls of red plasma appeared as the Kamele artillery swept the hounds’ center with fire. “Has the AI gotten a grasp of their tactical pattern yet?” He asked.

  “Not yet.” Falkye replied. “It’s to be expected. The Cherub’s will have thrown off whatever they’d prepared. We’ll see what they’re up to soon enough.” There was a lot of information they had to gain in this first engagement. Apart from any psychological victory they might win against the surviving captains and commanders of the invader’s fleet, they would also get a glimpse of the inner workings of the Kamele military machine, giving them the opportunity to augment their automated reserves to achieve better efficiency on the field in future engagements.

  Charles shifted around between hounds, trying to get a better glimpse of the enemy’s automata. Amidst the flashing lights and fast activity of the battlefield he had trouble getting a clear picture, but what he did see of the enemy’s machines was intriguingly different from their own.He wondered what the Kamele commander was seeing, and what he would make of their own machines. “What do you think of their automata?” He said out loud.

  Falkye, when Charles looked, was busy managing the swirling clouds of Seraphim and dominions still holding position over top of the Kamele landing zone, just beneath the invader’s swarm which was making its way back up to the mothership.Charles looked back at the images he’d been able to gather of the enemy. Simple, so far as he could see. They had none of the hydra like necks of their own, and they were shorter, much shorter, and very very deadly. He could make out the flash of a zero point blade every now and again, the shimmer of singularity shields like their own, and the flash of guns.

  “What’s that?” Falkye asked after a moment.

  “Their automata are strangely designed.” Charles said.

  “Hold on.” Falkye said to him. “Tell him.” He said to the room.” The graphic of Charles view changed as the dominions hovering over the field zipped back towards the bunkers in the mighty river’s Eastern Range. A flurry of replacements jetting out to bombard the drop site with more hounds.

  “It would appear that our enemy has brought human troops to the field.” A serene voice said.

  “What?” Charles thought he must have heard wrong. “But that’s…” Ludicrous, he wanted to say. He felt his lips peel back in a slow grin as the knot in his stomach grew turbulent at the possibility of good news. “Then they’re screwed.” He said and started to laugh.Humans were frail, high maintenance, and most importantly, impossible for the Kamele to replace. “We’ll be done with them in less than a week.”

  The thought of the thousands that must have been on board the four ships they’d already destroyed sobered him very suddenly. They hadn’t just been destroying the Kamele battle capacity when they blew up those ships, they were killing humans, possibly thousands of them. It seemed inhuman, the way they’d been wiped out without a chance, and these poor saps getting pounded by cherubs. Whoever heard of using humans for shock troops? This wasn’t the homeworld where you could drop the hundred and first into an occupied country and get away with it. He wondered how many had died in the Cherub strikes. Those missiles were capable of a multiple megaton level of power. The thought of them dying almost made Charles angry. Who would send humans to die like this, on a world they’d never seen?

  “Should we spare them?” Charles asked. It didn’t seem right to kill men who had no idea what they were getting into.

  The bell like voice chimed again. “It would appear that their combat efficiency is several magnitudes higher than our own.” It said.

  “Higher efficiency.” Charles didn’t like the way that sounded. It sounded too much like “extreme superiority”.

  “Michael.” Falkye said to the AI. “Reprogram the Hounds. If they’re using humans we need to fight on human terms.I want you try and break up whatever communications or organization they have. Isolated groups won’t be able to fight back as effectively. We should be able to destroy their morale.”

  “I will reprogram the hounds going into deployment. Isolate and destroy.”

  “I’m rerouting some Seraphim for ground support duties.”

  Charles looked at the vast cloud of machines on retreat back up into the sky as the harrying Seraphim turned back to circle the crater. Charles assumed the enemy icons were machines. They couldn’t put people in every role could they, there were hundreds, thousands in that swarm of vehicles. Were there people in every one? They would have to reconsider their estimates of force, hell they would have to reconsider everything if the Kamele had made humans th
e core of their military strength.

  Around the crater the Seraphim dive bombed every spot the enemy icons began to congregate, a barrage that began with streams of coherent plasma or Lasers, and ended with devastating cannonades of rail gun fire. The bombardment drew new lines of craters across the blackened pampas but did little to reduce the number of invaders. More Dominions sprayed hounds into the battlefield. New drop zones formed, new lines of battle as the old ones disintegrated or took on new shapes. Even as they did the Kamele fighters returned from their escort duty, and several dominions exploded as kinetic weapons punched through their unshielded fuselages to spray their guts across the pampas. Speed was the only way to rule the sky and as Seraphim turned from their ground support duties they disappeared, replaced by a streak of light that flew up to engage the similarly invisible kamele craft, turning the air to a nest of glowing lines as they battled.

  “We’re not going to own the air for much longer.” Falkye growled to himself.

  Charles pushed back into the view being transmitted from the ground. Plasma flashed between battle lines, tentacles writhed as they strafed kinetics across shimmering shield barriers. Amongst the unviewable shock troops lightning lashed from the hound’s whips and the enemy’s shield, their own shield’s flashed a response to the enemy’s return blows, but Charles still could not see the enemy troops. They couldn’t be humans. Surely no one could function in that kind of carnage and chaos.

  It was clear that the battle was going badly now. Marain’s defenders stood in the remains of disabled hounds, reinforcements had to wade through the broken bodies, and somewhere in the battlefield enemy artillery made a coughing noise as it fired. Shells arched over the heads of the shock troops to splash amongst the long range support automata, shimmering as they touched shields that sealed up to keep the plasma out. Shields along the front line began to fail even as the specialized hounds responded by pouring purple white fire back towards the source of the offending onslaught.

  Charles view switched to an automata who’s rearward limbs had been turned to slag by a plasma hit. Without its shields, the automata was doomed. It couldn’t move, and it couldn’t defend itself. It did the only thing it could do, firing its twin plasma turrets in a continuous barrage that looked almost like a solid beam as it targeted the shock troops making their slow advance against the thinning line of hounds.

  Shields collapsed under the hound’s barrage of fire, bodies blackened and Charles got his first clear glimpse of the enemy as one of them was frozen in place by a plasma bolt to the chest. The figure was humanoid, melted to grey ash and blackened scorch marks from the plasma, but cemented in place by the melted ground while the presumably human occupant smoked through holes in his armor. Something in the way it was hit made the helmet of the invader appear to be caught screaming as it died. A kinetic round rammed through the hound and Charles’ view of the nauseating corpse was cut off as he was shunted into a new point of view further back from the line.

  The corpse. Undoubtedly a corpse.

  “How many are we going to lose?” Charles asked.

  “All of them.” Falkye replied.

  Charles was silent. The news came too soon after watching the enemy die screaming in a ball of fire. It all made Charles feel sick. And after his assurances that morning. “Use everything we’ve got.” He told Falkye. “Get them off the planet.” They would all have to die, every one of these misguided invaders.

  A laser beam shot down from space and speared one of the dominions on a flight path towards the battlefield. A shield would have protected the craft, but a shield also meant a serious speed barrier. A slow aircraft was easy to hit, and once hit, knocked out of the sky, making shielded airborne units useless except as mobile bunkers. The Dominion blew apart. A second one blew apart a moment later and then all the craft were doing evasive maneuvers, spitting chaff and performing loops at mach seven that left Charles dizzy where he tried to track them. A few more went down but more often, the lasers only turned empty sections of the pampas to brief sheets of flame.

  “Not gonna happen.” Falkye said. “I wondered how long they would hold that trick back.”

  “What do you mean?” Charles felt the knot in his stomach tightening. More lasers shot down through the atmosphere, a few chasing after aircraft that looped and spun away while the beam chased them, a trail of blackened grass scrawling the aircraft’s flight pattern after it until it blew apart. One beam shot down to form a solid pillar of light between space and a circle of Hounds holding out on the ground. “We haven’t even used a percentage of our force yet.”

  “And we can’t.” Falkye said. “Not under that air cover.”

  On the edge of the laser one of the Hounds shot a brief snippet of footage as it fired a barrage of kinetic rounds over another Hounds shoulder before that hound blew apart in a flash of light. Charles froze the image on his own lenses.

  “This was all a test.” Falkye said. “A demonstration of both our technological capabilities. They wanted information, just as much as we did. It was a contest, little more, A contest they’ve won for now.”

  Charles magnified the image of the dying Hound until he could see the figure behind the spectral flash of light.

  “We bought ourselves some time here, time I used to seed the Pampas between them and the eastern mountains with enough hounds to be a problem if they want to maneuver. If we’re lucky, and they move slowly, we’ll be able to contain them on the grass.”

  The man in Charles’ lenses, if it was a man, was heavily armored, like something out of a fairytale, a knight in solid steel. He held a sword in both hands as he cleaved through the automata, the hounds’ dissipating shield still caving in around the blade while lightning spiderwebbed across the man’s forcefield. The world around them both danced with the warp of their forcefields and lines of weapon fire. A ragged gash in the front of the Kamele soldier’s shield showed where the shield had molded itself to allow his sword to pass through and a blurred line of kinetic rounds traced a line back to a turret that squatted on the man’s shoulder like some incredibly violent pet, complete with angry glaring eyes painted above the barrel. The helmet had been sculpted in the same way to show a snarling human face. Somehow, the artificial face made it even harder to believe that underneath the armor there was a person laying waste to Charles’ machines.

  On the overhead tactical display three Cherubs detonated in the middle of the battlefield.

  “Well that’s it.” Falkye said.

  “What?”

  “They can’t stop Cherubs.” Falkye said. “That’s a relief at least.”

  Charles looked at the smoking crater and watched the wiggling black dots reassemble in front of the drop capsules. “It can’t be over.” They were still there. Still on the planet’s surface. Something bit into his fist and Charles looked down to find his fingernails digging into his palm. He breathed and flexed his wrist. Closed his eyes for a moment and focused on letting the anger drain away. When he opened his eyes he was calm, and the battle was, as his brother said, all but over.

  “They cannot be allowed to leave that drop site.” Charles said. The thought of an invading army charging across the planet towards them was like a nightmare. They had millions of hounds ready for deployment before the battle began. Even if they couldn’t use the air, the hounds could reach the pampas in, he didn’t know, maybe a day on “foot”. Millions. Humans couldn’t kill millions could they?

  “Pampas is defended.” Falkye said. “They aren’t shooting anywhere beyond the battlefield.I’ve deployed three hundred thousand hounds between them and the mountains.If they want to go anywhere they’ll have to fight for every step.”

  Charles nodded. Would three hundred thousand be enough? He had no way of knowing. He turned his back abruptly on the whole scene. This was his brother’s domain. “I’ll be outside when you’re done here.” He told Falkye. “Secure the battlefield and we’ll debrief. Find me.”

  Falkye nodded and Charles s
tepped out of the darkened room. Five paces away was a window looking out over the slope of the western mountain range that bordered the mighty river. He stopped at it and this time did look out, not to admire the view of the city and the two mile wide river at the bottom of the valley, but to look up at the sky his fists crossed behind his back as he chewed on what he’d seen.

  Defeat. Not defeat in space this time, but a defeat on the ground. The very place he’d been assured, that he had assured the dynasties, they would not lose. The spot he’d claimed the war would be won, and it wasn’t just a defeat. When he asked, Michael provided Charles with a breakdown of the estimated kill to death ratio for the Hounds. The numbers were staggering. He was amazed they’d killed any of the enemy, and most of the kills they’d achieved had been made when they shot drop capsules out of the air. Suddenly, having a million hounds didn’t make him feel all that safe. They would be a delaying action at best, if he was any judge. Falkye would most likely confirm that belief. Hounds could only slow a battle down. Not win it against a human force.

  There would be repercussions, a loss of confidence among the dynasties, at the very least, but where and how, he couldn’t be sure. There were assets he would have to deploy, allies and old friends he would have to call on, and a war suddenly going in very much the wrong direction to address.

  At every turn Charles had to reign in the anger that wanted to get out of his guts and infect his thoughts. This moment was inevitable, he supposed. At most, they might have built an additional two, maybe three evangelist class spacecraft, but not more, and those numbers still would not have been sufficient to keep the Kamele off of the planet. The landing was inevitable, this moment was inevitable. The past would have been little different had they known.He’d hoped they’d been prepared, but they hadn’t. They would have to adapt.

  “How did this happen?” He asked Falkye when his brother emerged a few hours later. Charles hadn’t moved in that time, and he could feel his shoulders stiffening where he’d held his wrists behind him too long.