Chapter 151: (Telkan) (2/2)
Vuxten knew it was about to burst from the foliage and he brought around the heavy autocannon and squeezed the trigger. The autocannon jittered and roared in his hands, the solid shaft of light as the 1 tracer for every three rounds lit up the twilight.
The creature that had been moving forward was covered in moss, grass, and small shrubs. It looked like it was partially made of dirt, rock, and chunks of Precursor machine parts and armor. It reared up from where it had been traveling through the ground, revealing the trench it had been digging, full of creatures with trees, grass, and moss growing out of their backs.
Vuxtens shells, warsteel coated antimatter mass reactive 20mm shells, hit the massive creature and blew apart chunks of rock as it roared.
”CONTACT! ENEMY CONTACT!” Vuxten yelled out without thinking about it.
The entire jungle seemed to come alive. Vuxten could ID only about a third of the creatures and even those were covered in moss and rock and grasses. The vegetation on the back of a fireback burst into flame as the creature's plates and fins raised up off its back and began to heat up to white hot. The flatjack scurrying toward the lines on its hundreds of feet no longer showed its segmented hide but instead was covered in broken rocks, grass, and moss. Hundreds of dragonflies and moths took to the air, thousands of wasps and hornets swirled up from the back of the creatures that carried their nests.
”471, snap those and send the to command! That's how they're moving around!” Vuxten yelled out, knowing that his little green mantid engineer could hear him perfectly well but unable to stop himself from yelling.
--roger roger-- 471 one said, taking images of the creatures as fast as it could at the same time as it popped a drone to get communications back online. 471 made sure to get pictures of the trenches that were revealed.
Vuxten felt the buffeting of the rage and hatred from the Terran troops around him as he stepped forward slowly, firing the autocannon in short, sharp bursts.
The artillery rounds started coming in, the protective casings blowing free so the munitions could puff out rings of fuel until they were just above the jungle canopy and detonated. The staged fuel rings went off, not only tearing into the jungle, but the fuel staging pulling the fire and debris upwards.
Immediately afterwards the heavy aerospace fighter-bombers came in fast, dropping from the cloud cover in a steep dive that they pulled up short and dropped canisters of enhanced napalm and thermobaric munitions.
The entire jungle roared in agony as flame scoured it to the bedrock and more, the bedrock itself cracking deeply.
But for every insect wiped away a thousand more scrambled over the charred corpses to take its place.
One of the massive pillbugs burst from beneath the ground, roaring as it surfaced, moving forward on thousands of insect legs, its eyes bright red as it began to pick up speed. Its back was covered in foliage, bees and dragonflies poured from the nests on its back, and it headed straight for the clearing.
Vuxten locked the target and fired the missile launcher dry in a quick chugging burst. The missiles went hypersonic fifty meters out and cracked across the distance to slam into the pillbug's eye one right after another driving deeper and deeper, the third through sixth blowing scraps of flesh and gore out of the crater.
One of the bigger robotic looking Imperium troops cut loose with its rocket launcher and double-barreled autocannons, but it did nothing but hammer divots into the thick armor plates of the giant pillbug that it ignored as it bulled forward, throwing smaller ones out of the way as it charged.
More and more of them lifted up out of the ground, shedding dirt and jungle vegetation like a whale breaching the surface of an algae covered sea.
The drone 471 had kicked into the air managed to link via microwaves to the nearest repeater. The repeater struggled through the moss and pollen that had covered it, orienting, and finding a brother only a few kilometers away. It fed power into its systems even as the fungus and spores fought to get through the battelsteel casing and streamed the message to its brother. Link after link was formed, some of the links dying but struggling on regardless.
The data reached Log Base Echo, transmitted to the Military Intelligence units and beyond.
General Takilikakik saw the data stream in and stared at it for a long moment. He squinted, frowning, examining how they had approached, using the seismic disruptions as cover as they had dug through the stone and earth. They were closing in on the exit point for Shelter 371A4.
He could feel it.
”We missed on,” General Takilikakik snapped, turning to the MI liaison.
”Sir?” Captain Drader asked.
”We missed a brain. A big one,” General Takilikakik said. He rubbed his hands and forearms together, frowning at the holodisplay of the globe. ”I was all seismic focuses...” the hummed for a moment. ”That occured beneath any mountain with heavy glacier cover. The brain would have used it for cooling.”
He turned and looked at another representation of the globe. ”Move out all units to all shelter exit areas! They've figured out how to force the shelters to surface!”
”Are you sure, sir? There's no way they could have been able to figure that out in such a short amount of time,” Captain Drader said.
General Takilikakik shook his head. ”You are assuming that this enemy is only as old as we know them, only have imprinted records since they made landing here. That is a faulty assumption based off of myopic data.”
He pointed at the holodisplay of Telkin 1 and Telkin 2 as well as the moons. ”They've done this multiple times, completely eliminating the life on these planets. We should have assumed, from the beginning that they would have the data of those events, somehow, perhaps through genetic imprinting like the Elven Queens use.”
Captain Drader frowned but knew better than to argue with a General.
”It took them time to adapt, days and weeks, but they have so far been able to adapt rapidly, in some cases showing adaptations that would only be available from previous campaigns, such as that acid that can slag warsteel, something there is no record of ever occurring,” General Takilikakik said slowly, still rubbing his hands and forearms together in an odd gesture. ”Are you familiar with seismic mapping?”
Captain Drader nodded.
”They have undoubtedly been using it to map where the shelters are. Combine that with how fiercely we defend those areas, it's been a high priority, and they become obvious targets,” General Takilikakik said, his tone still low and slow. ”Get the defending units up, tell the commanders to run that plans as if we were surfacing them for launch right now.”
Brigadier General Craftmen frowned. ”Are you sure, sir?”
”It's the only reason to deploy that much material. They're making a move on the shelters,” General Takilikakik said. ”Tell them to fire it up.”
”No fire, I got no fire,” Sergeant Amity said, swearing. He kicked the bottom of the console and hit the power stud again. ”Dammit! The whole damn thing went offline as soon as I tried to start Little Sister.”
The tank shuddered for a moment then a whine cycled down.
”Dammit!” Amity said, banging on the console. ”854, what's going on? They just replaced the damn reactor!”
--no reactor fire reactor dead working working-- 854 reported.
”Go to the secondary,” Trucker snapped.
--roger roger-- 548 answered.
The lights flickered twice then the whole tank started to vibrate. The whole tank came to life, although warnings regarding the battle-screens, max speed, and creation engine rates were flashing on Trucker's boards.
”The gun's auto-loader is still down. 994 and 175 are working on it, it looks like the whole wiring harness is shot,” Trucker's gunner said.
”Then we'll wet-print the ronds and hand load them if we have to. Tik-tak says those shelters are about to fail and be forced to surface. If we aren't there to protect them the civilians are going to get slaughtered,” Trucker snapped. He opened up his comlink. ”Roll out, Piledrivers! All Commanders, follow your emergency shelter surface warplans. We've got weapons free but remember once those shelters surface they're only rated for 3.5 megatons.”
One by one the Regimental Commanders signaled acknowledgement.
”Configure the main gun for hand-loads, we'll be at our deployment point soon. Little brothers, you've got less than an hour to get the autoloader working,” Trucker said. ”We'll make it work.”
Trucker made sure his men could see him, half out of the commander's hatch, one arm resting on the quad-barrel, his helmet buckled on, spitting over the side of his tank.
They didn't need to know he was rolling in a busted tank.
”BUST 'EM!” Ekret roared out.
”SHOT OUT!” Cheapshot yelled.
The 125kt shell hit the side of the giant pillbug, the penetrator charge driving through the meters thick shell segment, the atomic round going off inside the body. It streamed steam and boiling blood, but kept moving forward, hundreds of bees and wasps pouring from the boils on the armor.
The backblast rocked Ekret's tank, driving his lower ribs into the hatch, but he ignored it, keeping his thumbs down on the tribarrel's butterfly trigger to rake the larger insects even as the point defense went to solid looking strobing rapid fire to try to clear the bees and wasps.
”HIT! STILL UP!” Cheapshot called out.
More shots hit the huge pillbug. One of the segments peeled away from the whitish cottony looking muscle beneath it as the atomic round found the anchor ligaments and tendons for the massive armor section.
Three rounds hit it, including one from Cheapshot, before the pillbug could clench and relax to cover the gap with another piece of segmented armor.
It blew in half, the biomatter fed atomic cloud reaching up to the sky like an angry fist, the fire green and yellow.
”THIRTY TWO KAY TO DEPLOYMENT POINT!” Sneaker called out. ”IMPERIUM FORCES ON SITE AND FACING HEAVY ATTACK!”
”FOR THE IMPERIUM!” one of the armored warriors roared, driving its chainsword into the braincase of one of the insects, the burning warsteel chain churning up flesh and ichor, spraying the burning fluid across the clearing.
”BROTHERS, ADVANCE!” called out and Vuxten began to step forward, still firing. The massive corpse of the first pillbug still crackled and burned, the entire shell split down the center lengthwise across the top, a massive crater halfway down the top still steaming as the flesh and ichor boiled.
471 was standing on Vuxten's shoulder, firing his micro-rifle at any insects that got too close. His tiny creation engine on his abdominal armor was creating rockets as fast as possible. It was taking everything he could bring to bear to keep some of the 'bees' off of his power armor brother.
Another massive pillbug started to lift from the dirt and almost a dozen laser designators tapped it at once. The close air support dropped in low, firing off rockets as fast as possible before banking out of the way and pulling up as they kicked in their afterburners.
The Sisters of Wrath were burning away the jungle in their advance with their flamers. Several of them used lighting directed from their armored fists or their roaring chainswords to tear at the insects. One of the robed figures lifted his staff and called lighting from the cloudy sky down onto the insects.
One of the giant pillbugs was raked by lighting that reached down from the sky with clawed fingers to rip at the armor, collapsing the biological battle-screen, tearing deeper and deeper into the armor until the lightning's talons found flesh.
Bright purple light shown through the cracks in the insect's armor for a moment before it exploded, detonating, destroying the vegetation and insects around it for almost a quarter mile.
Vuxten noted that the robed figure had steam and mist coming off of him as he staggered away, leaning heavily on the ornate warsteel staff but then his attention was taken by a kaiju rearing up. He fired the heavy autocannon into its belly, the heavy rounds barely starting to drop when they hit the massive creature's belly. Vuxten dialed up his gravity anchor as he kept firing, slashing up and down the kaiju's lightly armored belly, the mass reactive anti-matter shells blowing massive holes in the creature's flesh.
The kaiju screamed, clawing at the air.
More missiles lanced out, going hypersonic, using kinetic energy to slam deeper in before exploding to drive the EFP's further into the massive body.
”FOR LOST TERRA AND SCARRED TELKAN!” one of the giant war machines roared, opening up with twin autocannons, the massive 60mm rounds hammering into the battle-screens of another kaiju that had erupted from the ground. The screens went down with an eye watering purple flashed and the heavy APDSAM rounds penetrated deeply before exploding.
The ground started to shake, almost unnoticed by those fighting on the surface.
Brentili'ik turned at the shouting.
Shelter 371A4 had detected that the seismic activity had gone beyond alarming and into dangerous. The shaking was overcoming the shock absorbers that the massive shelter used to mitigate the vibration of the drilling. It was putting the tens of thousands refugees in danger. The shelter had determined that it had no choice if it was going to protect the inhabitants.
It had engaged its massive drills.
And was heading for the surface.
Brentili'ik's blood ran cold as she realized which shelter it was.
The same one her broodcarriers and podlings were sheltering in.