Chapter 166 – Whistling Death
Written are Earth's most profound lessons in blood,Carried to wise students on voiceless echoes by dead.
– It is bitter irony, that even our most conscientious still learn mostly from suffering and pain.
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It took thirty minutes of slowly dispersing storm before I finally had a proper look at our newest battlefield, sailing along on wings of fabric two hundred meters up.
I wasn't straying far from Leah, if only to make sure the hidden buggers didn't force us to go loud too early—we needed to know whether we'd be dealing with more Antithesis ambushes while fighting the big, stealthy ones. Further, Leah's army of scavenging robots wasn't quite finished picking apart the corpse of the Sapper to craft more of themselves.
The much-lightened rain pattered peacefully against my canopy, thick enough only to obscure vision some three thousand meters out. No model Ones were in sight, presumably all of them broken by the sudden monsoon or burned by my skyfires before the storm. But they were the Antithesis' cheapest and most mass-produced unit—they'd be back soon enough.
I couldn't see as far as Baie-Comeau, much less all the way to the river, but our immediate terrain was finally revealed:
The heavy floods had torn the topsoil from half the hill and turned its bottom into a muddy mire. Furrows ran with water, even the healthy trees lay felled, and generally, Dervish's little paradise was ruined. I supposed the Class III samurai had figured that was going to happen anyway, what with the huge wave of Antithesis we'd had coming.
The Incursion itself had been thoroughly disrupted, its Antithesis split into myriad smaller groups nosing around wherever they'd washed up. There were pods of them still swimming in the flows. A buttload of model Eights had dug themselves out, fleeing from the subterranean flooding like earthworms.
So many aliens, and each single one of those units threatened a new nest now that they'd lost the cohesion of the Incursion.
Even so, Dervish's storm had been a victory. It had shocked them out of the coordination that had kept them traveling, which meant we would have an easier time culling them and their new nests. Dervish herself would soon range out to destroy the older nests still feeding the collapsed Incursion with thousands of fresh models every hour—at least those weren't joining a coordinated attack on us. They just ran smack-bang into the confusion of aimlessly milling masses.
We, on the other hand, had a setup of two main battle tanks, a half-strength squad of versatile Hatchets, three hundred crawling-and-brawling mechanized scavengers the size of a model Three—but approximately twenty times as tough, if I knew my fiber composites—and, of course, myself on overwatch, ready to toss bombs.
As those robot ants carried the last pieces of dead Sapper to Leah's mobile foundry for recycling, I commed Leah.
"Okay. Things are looking lovely. They're all disorganized, the Three Assholes have no backup, and we know that they don't know what we know. What does your Sim Cell say?"
The strategic nerve-center automatically spat out a fast selection of missions before Leah could even answer:
I was impressed. The machine had given us a rather concise list, considering the challenges we faced. Easily summarized with a tag system, too. It even recognized our immediate intentions based on our preparations over the last thirty minutes: kill the most dangerous threat by turning their own ambush on them.
And the following items made sense, too; generate enough points to set up an automated system that could fight our war for us, and if necessary, enhance combat effectiveness along the way by buying additional walkers.
Even resource collection was an issue recognized by the Sim Cell's strategic calculators. Sifting through the ground for minerals wasn't an option—too little, too late. But perhaps we could use parts from the flooded village, or better yet, convince Dervish to chip in? She had just yoinked my million points from the sky, nevermind whatever she did to the river-aliens.
"Nice," I commented.
"Hella nice," Leah agreed, satisfaction coloring her tone and making me smile. "These kinda campaigns are the lowest domain of the Warforge catalog. Been waiting long enough to get here."
"Well. Ready to go?"
"Go."
My parachute all but sucked itself back into its packs while specially crafted whistles rolled along the veils of my Chrysaora Plenum. Then I fell from the sky with the terrible death-scream of the German Sturzkampfbomber so familiar from those antique World War II clips.
Dumbfire rockets joined my whistling cylinders and lit off, adding more Notice me, Senpai! to the cacophony. They raced ahead, towards the closest group of model Threes, which barely had time to look up, register my approach, and die in balls of fire.
Whatever it took to be utterly unignorable to everything inside a few hundred meters. Whatever made it look like I was preoccupied with fighting my own targets.
More alien heads lifted and saw me. More things for me to bomb.
Two minutes later, I finally crossed some magic boundary and the Thirty-Threes attacked Leah.
Their hidden shapes jumped forwards, busting through trees and across rocky outcrops, racing for the Sim Cell.
Daddy-Long-Legs just so happened to stand between them, loaded with an avalanche of stealthed anti-tank mines with proximity sensors attached magnetically to his undersides—covertly placed there by myself earlier, when I'd been busy servicing the Hatchets.
The mines had been designed specifically to delimb a certain type of alien monstrosity.
There were enough for twice as many Assholes. Just in case.
The trio of Hatchets immediately made for the safety of the Implacables, seeding hidden mines along the way. I released a set of Long Hand Carrier missiles overtuned for blinding speed, and loaded with more of Leah's stinky mist. They arrived in moments, spinning wildly to tornado the aliens' surroundings with that truly toxic repellant, until they had nowhere to go but specifically where we wanted them: into the mines.
As soon as all three Thirty-Threes had placed their spidery limbs in reach, barbed steel-wire lassos shot out and slung themselves around exposed leg joints and reeled in teethed trapjaws of metal that dug into octopus-patterned skin and held tight.
Even around the joints themselves, the Assholes' armor was too tough for half-assed penetration. We needed their legs fully extended to expose a leathery gap.
When the first Thirty-Three bent its long neck around and stretched a trapped leg to sling its own wire around the mines' steel lasso to try and melt it, it suddenly jerked in pain instead as our mine explosively implanted a rod through the gap. The rod unleashed spring-loaded spindles of monofilament razors to mulch the flesh inside, and kept going even as the monster slagged the mine on the outside with lightning voltages—only for the rod to conduct the current and electrocute its tissues from the inside, too.
It took another three destroyed legs for the aliens to wise up and realize that, as long as they kept their legs curled up, the traps couldn't engage their mechanisms. It left them hobbled, barely able to maneuver.
Yet the untriggered rods inflicted no injuries, and therefore presented no cause for retreat. After all, even a single Thirty-Three had been enough to force one of the Hatchets to sacrifice itself, hadn't it. Three were a very serious threat, so they had every reason to press on. A checkmate we'd carefully customized to catch out their assassin psychologies.
The Daddy-Long-Legs, the Sim Cell, and the Dakka all ducked so suddenly that their abdomens slammed into the ground, and twin clouds of flechettes blasted past just above. Ballistic razors defoliated a tunnel through the remaining forest that connected the muzzles of the two Implacables' 203 mm cannons with the bodies of the Thirty-Threes.
Two-and-a-half seconds later, the flechettes were followed by a pair of high-explosive squash head shells, set to spiral by a number of fins. Like shaped charges, they spread themselves on impact across the aliens' skin, deformed into a pillow of explosive, and attempted to blast a layer of shards off the subcutaneous armor.
The two beasts staggered from the force of the blast, but showed no sign of more than superficial damage.
Leah loaded a set of experimental probes.
Tungsten rod penetrators, fired sequentially at one alien's chest, where the plating would be least angled. One ricocheted, leaving little more than a bleeding gash in the thick skin. The second shattered, but the Sim Cell's ultrasharp cameras caught the splintering reflection of a hairline crack in the Asshole's armor.
I smiled at the beatific grin on Leah's avatar as she designated the same spot for another go…which, somehow, only mildly worsened the damage.
The fuckers were insanely tough. Truly, superlative tiers of toughness. But that was why we'd chosen this method of only hobbling the deadliest aliens we'd faced thus far—Tynea, in another show of her newly adopted wholesomeness, had warned us that Class II ammunition wouldn't make a quick work of Antithesis in the Thirties.
We'd needed a chance to experiment.
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My warstriding girlfriend had eventually settled on a series of three shells to kill anything as armored as the Three Assholes had been: A subsonic round that dispensed an insanely strong chemical base across a ten centimeter radius to destroy whatever binding agents gave the organo-alloy armor its immense energy-deflection/absorption metrics, A squash head round to hit the brittled plate like a hammer, and finally, an armor-piercing shell with a grenade's worth of flesh-melting nanites inside.
One of the last two Threes had pissed right off after a combat injection of fleshmelters, even suffering the destruction of most of its legs' muscles in the process, and we'd found its body dried out and curled up like a dead spider just minutes later, slowly soaking up the everlessening rain. Even wet, it had gone up like kindling when we made sure it wasn't coming back somehow.
Now that we knew that Leah could murder such units with mere Class II ammunition, we wanted to see how the Sim Cell did with autonomous strategy.
To that end, Leah had given it full control over the horde of three hundred Res Mechanica Repentis ant robots. I would accompany them from above to see if they'd need any help. Leah herself didn't need me on overwatch fulltime, not from inside her Implacable, and not with her squad of Hatchets riding patrol in circles around her. I could return quickly enough if a greater threat showed itself again.
On the way out, I passed by the shallow wound the first of my two Sol rounds had left in the ground. It was a miniature crater, especially compared to my very first Sol round. There was little soil left, and so the heat and radiation had eaten into exposed rock instead. It was discolored blackish gray, and even from dozens of meters up, it looked like it would crack beneath the weight of my feet.
A far cry from the glassed bowl from when I'd killed the Twenty-Two, but I suppose that wasn't surprising, considering that we'd shaped the bottle differently, this time. Little energy had gone anywhere but into the armor of that Thirty-Three, and so, little energy had had an impact on the world. There hadn't even been any of the fallout that had required the cold void last time, because the thing's armor had so thoroughly soaked it up.
The shell that had detonated inside the Thirty-Three had been even more contained, though readings showed that the alien had suffered the voiding, both to remove the irradiated biomass and to inflict more thermal stress. But even the absolute cold hadn't been enough to stop the thing, just put it on a timer.
Ypsi figured that was why it hadn't retreated—too hurt to heal, ravaged from the inside, its cells already dying quickly from the damage to their genes. Maybe even missing too much biomass to bother retreating. It had attempted to set up its packmates instead, which Leah had stopped cold with her sacrifice of the Sapper.
All in all, this unexpectedly easy part of the battle had come to an early end. Our counter-ambush had worked with zero complications. Really, the implications were kind of disquieting; if a pair of Class II Vanguard were powerful enough to finish off model Thirties with such aplomb, how come there were so few Class IIIs?
And if our sensors were good enough to catch these assholes…how come nobody hadn't ever stopped my father? Surely his strategies to hide himself and his clan weren't that effective?
I…might have to go back there and take another look.
Breathing deeply, I decided to leave that can of worms unopened for the moment. It could wait until the Global Incursion was done with. Yeah.
Once we'd have determined whether the Sim Cell was indeed capable of waging a war on its own, we'd travel the few kilometers back towards Baie-Comeau and see if we could get a connection to Dervish. Maybe bounce the radio off the water to get across, if we had to.
Another helpful suggestion from Tynea.
Maybe I could come to forgive her, after all.
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