Chapter 124: (Telkan) (2/2)

That's when they saw it.

A bright burning spark that growled and snarled, bit and chewed, covered in spikes and thorns, that threatened and promised violence.

The thinking arrays all considered and agreed.

That was what was the problem. Some kind of thinking array, some kind of strange and alien presence that they could feel but not understand.

It had to be eliminated. As long as it existed the feral life on the planet would resist, require more resources to subdue and destroy.

As one they increased the power to their psychic array, spread their influence over the dead zone, and ordered their forces to all converge on the bright snarling burning spark they could sense.

Trucker could feel the jungle snarl at him, feel its hate, and he relished it. Every drop of its anger, rage, hatred, and frustration made him smile wider. He knew it was all aimed at him personally, which made him smile wider.

Should worry more about Cry Little Sister than the man commanding it, he thought to himself. You're falling for the same damn trick the Mantids did over and over.

General Nodra'ak watched as psychic signal after psychic signal increased in power to the point that the signal burned through the pollen and spores. Those brain coral used psychic grav-lensing to keep him from hitting them from the orbitals, but he didn't need to hit them when he had ground forces that could hit from the side. He looked over the status readouts and noted that Tik-Tac had ensured that every unit was loaded and ready to go.

Seismic sensors were reporting large objects weighing in the kilotons all heading for Trucker for nearly a thousand miles in every direction. The oceanic sensors were reporting massive water displacement moving from beyond the continental shelf toward the coast.

Third Armor Division and General Trucker, destroying enemies through the application of superior firepower, Nodra'ak thought to himself, rubbing his vestigial wings together as he slowly got out another cigarette. He tapped it thoughtfully against one blade-arm as he looked at the sensor returns coming in from the oceans.

There were structures under the water. Vast tubes and pipes and growths. The seawater was warmer around the vast growths. More than a few things were leaving those structures and heading for the continental shelf.

Strange growths were around the sub-oceanic fault lines.

The initial sensor returns were too hazy, too indistinct, for Nodra'ak to have any initial proof, but looking at them he felt a pall of dread cover him.

Those were bad. He didn't need a creche-teacher to point that out to him.

We've been assuming you can only strip-mine a planet once, been wondering how another race to serve the Lanaktallans could arise with the easily mined metals already mined out. What if... he thought for a long moment.

He suddenly whirled around. ”Get me General Vost and his theoretical genetics unit. Right now!” he snapped, flicking his unlit cigarette into the nearest waste dispenser.

Trucker cut loose with the quad-barrel, hosing a flying creature out of the sky. He had felt the slight pressure on his temples that all humans got when a psychic was trying to touch on them. Trucker knew enough time had gone by and brought up his helmets suppression then the tank's shielding, knowing that he had just vanished from any psychic sight.

It was a tradeoff. Humans were massively resistant, if not outright hostile, to psychic attacks and intrusion, but at the same time they were easy to spot by psychics.

Trucker had heard it explained as humans were shards of glittering broken glass in the soft sand of the rest of the world. Interesting to look at from a distance but if you got too close it would jump up and cut the shit out of you.

Which made it an easily repeatable variable.

Which meant it could be weaponized.

”Get ready, men. We're about to have lots of friends,” Trucker said, pulling the dip out of his lower lips and slinging it off to the side. It caught a bug in midair and sent it tumbling. He reached into his pocket and pulled out his can, shaking it, packing it, thumping on the side of the plas can with two fingers.

Status reports were flowing in. Nothing more than minor damage, most of it just from moving at high speeds across rough terrain. Captain Jack had busted out three of his front teeth on his coax when Button Up Becky had hit a buried Precursor wreck, but that was the worst of it.

Plus, Jack had just put his teeth in his pocket. Med-tech could fix up his smile later.

Heat was nominal, magazines reloaded, slush was down.

He had enemies coming in from all sides.

Good. That meant they couldn't get away.

”Load HEAP, boys. We're about to have visitors,” Trucker said, putting in a new dip. He adjusted his chin strap and patted the grips of the quad-barrel.

”It'd be rude to not have party favors,” Trucker grinned.

Missiles were fired from the fire bases, arcing high up as their solid rocket fuel boosters carried them on ballistic arcs designed so that all of the payloads arrived at a widely spread distance all at the same time. Some used areobrakes, others didn't bother.

The warheads had been designed by General Tik-Tac's engineers, repurposed templates normally used for resource extraction.

At the designated point the missiles broke up into their sub-components. Drills, expanding crash protection foam, and Hellburn warheads. The drills hit first, burrowing into the ground, chewing down to and into the bedrock nearly a hundred feet within five seconds, then curving and heading toward the target at over a hundred feet a second. The Hellburn warheads deployed hard-light chutes and landed, popping the aerodynamic shields and vanishing into the drilled hole. The foam warheads landed next on hard-light chutes, quickly vanishing into the drilled open holes.

Within five minutes the drill reached its desination, reconfigured, and waited. The Hellburn warheads stopped next to the drills and waited.

The foam got the signal and blew. The tunnels filled with foam that expanded as it hardened. Designed to protect flesh and blood from high-G impacts, the foam was normally kept at a near liquid state in power armors and the like, kinetic force making it more thick. The bedrock groaned under the pressure, shuddered, and cracked.

The drill warhead exploded, further cracking the bedrock.

The Hellburn charge went off. The foam immediately began to burn at temperatures normally found on the surface of a star, the bedrock superheated and began to burn.

Thermal expansion caused a hundred feet of rock to flex, groan, crackle, and explode in the only direction it could go.

Up.

Exposing the burning Hellburn to air. Not that it needed it, the hellish chemical brew could burn anything it touched even in vacuum, but adding oxygen, hydrogen, and other fuels to the fire just made it burn hotter and higher.

Screaming pillars of flame that tore holes in the cloud cover, that literally reached out to the atmosphere to touch space itself, roared out of the craters across the planet. In some places enough was left of the Hellburn fuel to light the clouds themselves on fire for miles, even burning ash from the fires.

The fire only lasted a few minutes before burning itself.

When it was over, there were two mile craters of liquid rock where each thinking array had been.

”General's compliments to General Tik-Tac's engineers,” Smokey-No said, turning from the viewscreen.

Hellfracking had been invented pre-diasporia as part of 21st Century MAD.

And it still chilled General Nodra'ak to see.

I would have done less damage with a C+ Cannon.