Chapter 254: (Hesstla) (2/2)

From every ship of Task Force Tiamat the signal went out, touching what looked like just debris.

The debris, hiding the actual payload, vanished as the munitions went off.

Temporal Resonance and Temporal Stabilization charges went off, the latter a stuttering shattered split second after the former.

Space screamed, heaved, and shuddered as the temporal wormhole created by the Precursor craft exploded into shards.

”EXECUTE WAR PLANS! THIS IS IT! WE ARE THE CHROMIUM HAMMER!” Thennis yelled out to all ships.

Every ship announced their fully armed and operational status with fire plans that had spent long minutes refining and updating. The Precursor vessels found themselves hammered on by an enemy they had been assured was long dead, destroyed over and over by their previous selves. They fought back, their sheer numbers making up for their weaponry, the repaired and patched and repatched armor of Task Force Tiamat taking hits that it would have shrugged decades prior.

The temporal munitions, rarely used, had another effect, one unforeseen by the Admiral or her staff.

Where there was only purple light, for a split second, as the temporal wormhole met the energies of the muntions, time itself appeared for a split second that was stretched and smeared across eternity, chronotrons appearing, shuddering, and shattering.

She saw them, the rainbow spray of something that should not, could not exist.

A flare that screamed ”Ship in Distress!” to her senses.

”My beloved children, clear for action and prepare to surface,” she whispered. ”None may impede our way.”

MARAT> WE ARE THE UNYIELDING FURY OF BETRAYED TERRA!

Around the planet Precursor troop ships disgorged hordes of troops, both mechanical and cybernetic, harvested parts gathered in previous harvests in decades past wired into the mechanicals of the unliving forces that had gathered them.

Millions of Hesstla staggered as a sudden wincing pain tore across their frontal lobes as their future selves intruded on their past and present selves.

Then the temporal munitions went off, severing the link between the past and present and future with the fury of 4th dimension munitions.

Dropships began to tumble as the biological component, gathered in years and decades past by the dropship, suddenly inverted and vanished into themselves as they had not been harvested for days, months, or years from the landing. Computers shook off the shock and activated programs not needed for dozens of landings even as the copies of themselves around them streaked and vanished. Ground fire reached up, focusing on the suddenly revealed vessels as the shield of vessels of the past, present, and future, vessels that may or may not be, suddenly were revealed to be not.

Still tens of thousands of the Precursor forces reached the ground instead of the hundreds of millions.

Frees watched as the artillery barrage began slamming into the circle. The first ten seconds detonating high above the patch, then the rolling thunder of an entire regiment's worth the fire forcing the purplish blue psychic shield to contract further and further.

It went out in a shower of psychic sparks and Frees clicked the clacker in his hand three times.

The three electrical pulses sped down the wire laid days before, touched the repeaters, and the charge picked back up amperage as it raced through wire after wire.

In the dark cavern caused by abandoned highway overpasses that crossed one another, a dim red light lit.

Inside every striker ”ENGAGE” appeared on the inside of the smart armaglass.

Mukstet stomped the pedals and the striker screamed out from under the overpass.

THE HAMMER OF THE CHROMIUM KRAUTMARINE HAS ARRIVED roared out in his head, but months of operating in a psionically active environment made it so he didn't even flinch as he sped into a confusing hash of trees that appeared and disappeared, gawking motorists who stared at the battered and beat up striker that roared overhead, the pristine untouched landscape where the highway would someday be built, and the wreckage covered six-lane highway.

973 fed current into the temporal stabilizer that each of the strikers carried under their bellies.

The world bobbled like jello for a second but Mukstet just clenched his teeth and ordered his stomach to stay where it was.

You tried to play that card one too many times! Mukstet snarled inside his flight helmet.

He could see the target area up ahead. Lines were lancing down from the sky, connecting orbit to the two mile radius area that was being hammered by artillery.

”Incoming enemy reinforcements! Orders, sir?” One of the striker pilots asked Mukstet.

”We aren't going to get another chance, get the boys in there!” Mukstet snarled. He'd given up telling them he wasn't a 'sir' over a month ago. ”Crom enumerate the recently deceased!” he roared out the badly translated tongue in cheek battlecry of some of the Terrans.

He cranked his battlescreens to max, knowing the Precursor forces had more to worry about than his energy signals as the artillery began to find flesh and machine as individual psychically generated battlescreens began to fail and the hellish mix of munitions took their toll.

The striker shuddered as the trees in front of him exploded into flaming chunks, the battlescreen flaring but holding as Mukstet took the striker in at just above ground level, so close that he threw up huge strips of mulch and sod torn from the forest floor, the three strikers following him like the body of a snake. Mukstet increased speed as he tore a giant strip through the forest.

In the distance atomic weaponry cracked off, the enhanced radiation output jackets sending a sleet of particles across the psychic senses of the enemy.

The artillery stopped.

Technologically manifested battlescreen hit psychically generated battlescreen as Mukstet hit the enemy line at nearly three hundred knots.

The question was finally answered.

Rage built Terran technology trumped cold intellect created psionics.

The striker screamed as Mukstet almost stood it on its tail, bleeding off all of his inertia through his gravitons, creating an almost solid wall of energy three feet thick under the belly of his striker. The Terrans didn't care about the fact they were at nearly 90 degrees from the ground as they kicked the power to the guns and opened fire with the heavy Vindicators, each 7.62mm round wrapped in a neural bolt. The energy wrapped kinetic rounds hammered into the exposed creatures that filled the area, that were picking themselves up after the pounding artillery barrage, some of them pushing themselves out from the wreckage of their fellows.

Mukstet thumbed the stud, letting the heavy daisycutters get ejected from the bottom of the striker at the same time as he worked his feet to cut the lift and the striker dropped.

”DISMOUNT!” Mukstet roared over the comlink as the daisy cutters went off.

”RIGHT SIDE OUT! LEFT SIDE OUT!” Kuplo roared out. ”DISMOUNT CLEAR CLEAR CLEAR!” Sergeant Kuplo bellowed out.

”WE ARE WREATHED IN LOVE AND GLORY!” one of the massive Warbound roared out as it leaped from Fultnex's Foxtrot-Niner-Four. It leveled the massive dual barrel 40mm autocannon and cut loose with high velocity armor defeating discarding sabot depleted uranium warsteel jacketed mass reactive rounds. Where the rounds touched, massive craters were blown in armor of anything that survived the hit.

Not much did.

”I AM BUOYED BY THE LAUGHTER OF PODLINGS!” the other thundered as its massive feet crushed two of the Precursor creatures into the mud in a spray of lubricants, artificial blood, and liquidifed flesh. It cut loose with a Hellmix Flamer, bathing the Precursor cyborgs with sodium-tetrafluorohydrazine/FOOF superheated to 1200F.

Even the Precursor metals liquefied and began to burn at that hellish mixture.

Ralvex hit the ground, his two cases slamming into the ground and unfolding behind him. Stampy and Timmy both unlimbered their guns as Ralvex lifted up the autocannon, his vision full of nothing but targets.

”O gloriam omnipotentis dextra gladius meus, in nomine tuo quia caritas podlings,” the Telkan girl, no older than twelve, sang in Ralvex's ears as he squeezed the firing grip on the autocannon, the cannon roaring to life and slamming 20mm APHEX downrange.

The heavy weapon roared, Ralvex able to keep it on target with the ease of long practice, lashing it across the heavily armored sides of the larger Precursor machines.

”525, let me know when the incoming guests are in range of my gun,” Ralvex said, chewing on a piece of stimgum even as the pure voice of the Telkan girl singing hymns filled his ears.

--roger roger-- the green mantid said, busily balancing heat and slush.

Stampy beeped a happy tune and fired a pair of HEAPI rockets into the side of a Precursor Goonygoogoo flitter that had all six crystal bubbles lit up blue.

The High Explosive Armor Piercing-Incendiary rockets blew it in half.

Mukstet stomped the controls and pulled the stick around, the port graviton engine shrieking, as he banked into a hard right, lining up on the targets. Target rich was an understatement as his thumb found the rocker-switch and he pounded the Precursors with his guns.

THE DEFIANT FIST OF THE VODKATROG NAVY HAS ARRIVED roared out across the battlefields. Several of the smaller Precursor cyborg crabs screamed as their crystal bubbles exploded outward in a spray of blackish blood and liquified neural tissue.

The roar made Dambree look up at the ceiling, frowning, as she heard it ring inside of her head as she changed Punee's swaddling.

Punee took the chance and bit Dambree's arm hard enough to draw blood, growling and not letting go until Dambree had flicked her a half dozen times on her sensitive little nose.

The fight for Hesstla was on.