Chapter 330 (1/2)

The hvee rounds screamed through the air, the speed creating flashes of light through the air as the air itself fluoresced, ripping into the building. Vuxten released the graviton gennies in his boots and jumped from the eighteenth story of the damaged skyraker. The rest of the squad following him, the lines of hvee rounds just missing the last one. Steel and high tensile macroplas shattered as the entire squad flew through the air, the power armor making it easy to jump the twenty-five meter gap across the street. As they moved their smoke/hash/prism generators went to work, filling the air with high concentrate thermal masking white smoke, tiny mosquito sized robots that put out the EM signature of a suit of power armor, and laser scattering prisms suspended in droplets of water.

The Precursor machines on the ground opened up on the squad, most of their rounds passing through the spoofer images, confused by the EM counter-warfare suites in the suits. A few rounds tagged warsteel armor here and there, bouncing off in a shower of sparks.

Vuxten hit first, glanced up, blinked twice, and jumped again, the macroplas and support beam shattering under the power in his armored legs.

The rest of the squad followed, three of them somersaulting in mid-air to get the best deployment of their masking rounds.

The Precursor machines cut off fire as the last Telkan Marine passed through the middle of the street.

Three time's a pattern, Vuxten though to himself as he hit feet first on the macroplas window of the skyraker. His heavy 40mm grenade launcher and his 66mm rocket launcher were deployed as the graviton boots spun up, anchoring him in place. He put one hand on the building, giving him the three points of stabilization his training had always insisted on.

471 threaded the firing computations, keeping an eye on the heat and the graviton generator in the left boot, since it was kicking a little bit.

Below the squad, that were now up near the sixtieth story, the Precursor machines were pushing down the main avenue, hoping to ambush 3rd Armor's Warsteel Maidens Regiment. Mostly heavy armored vehicles, with minimal air defense systems that were proving largely ineffective against the Telkan's armor.

The entire squad fired their loadouts of 40mm and 66mm before jumping for the next point.

Straight up the side of the skyraker as flickering holograms and em-scatter decoys jumped across.

Highvee rounds shrieked through empty air, hitting the holograms and the em-flux.

The Telkan went straight up twenty stories then kicked off across the street. Below them semi-smart munitions saw the weak points in the Precursor battlesteel armor and came howling in. Explosions started climbing for the sky as the autonomous war machines took heavy fire from the Telkan Marines.

Below them the Precursor machines pushed into the intersection. Above them was just hash, the chaff, microprism, em-gnats, and thermal masking smoke making it nearly impossible for them to see, much less aim with any accuracy.

It grated on the two larger one's electronic nerves that the stubborn feral biologicals could apparently see through their countermeasures while the best of his scanners could see nothing but a solid wall of jangling swirling confusion.

They knew those power armor clad ferals were up there somewhere, but they couldn't target them with area denial munitions without risking bringing the entire skyraker down on the street. While the heavier vehicles would survive, they would be badly damaged and pinned in the wreckage, and the AWM's weren't willing to take the chance that trapping the AWM's under rubble wasn't part of the feral's war plan.

They were tenacious, innovative, but worst of all, their weapons were effective.

Vuxten looked down and saw through the countermeasures that the Precursors had given up firing at the squad he was leading. He looked up and jumped straight up, using the graviton systems in his gloves and boots to hold tight to the wall at the end of each jump.

He and his men were at the one hundred twenty story mark.

Only four hundred and ten stories to go.

The lighter units of the AWM's passed through the intersection, picking up speed now that the ambush by the annoying light power armor units was over.

The two squads of Telkan Heavy Weapons Specialists opened up on the heavy units when they tried to cross across the four lane avenue intersection. Heavy 30mm shells raked out from each of the four drones per side, all firing at an angle so any misses would slam into the bottom of the skyraker rather than hit the troops on the other side.

The two hellbore drones on each side fired armor penetrator 'shells' rather than use the full on atomic blasts inside a city.

Macroplast windows thrummed as they flexed from the explosions. Dirt and dust and weather deposited grime puffed out from the skyrakers as the impacts of the 60mm hellbores slammed into the larger AWM's.

In a split second the entire intersection was a burning hellscape.

The Telkan Marines Heavy Weapons Section didn't let up, they were all kneeling down and firing their shoulder mounted rocket packs, wetprinting reloads, while the heavy gunners were braced behind their battlescreens, the heavy 60mm autocannons roaring as they lashed at the Precursors with high explosive armor defeating anti-matter cored rounds.

Vuxten looked down as he paused at the two hundred story mark.

Third and Fourth Squad had broken the back of the Precursor assault and were now breaking contact, dropping smoke and jammers and quickly exfiltrating along their preplanned routes.

Even if you reach the Warsteel Maidens, you don't have the firepower to do anything but die, he sneered before looking up.

He jumped up again, the squad following him.

Just another day in Paradise, he thought.

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Vuxten hopped off the back of the tank he'd been riding on, his squad following, the massive 1,000 ton behemoth not even noticing the fly-weight of the eight Telkan Marines jumping off. His knee twinged as he stood up and headed toward the power armor section.

He planned on having a talk with the maintenance crews again.

The 40mm grenade launcher kept jamming.

He'd been promised repeatedly that the new design would fix the problem, but it was still there. After the third or fourth 40mm round rapid fired off the shell casing would expand and get stuck in the breach, only ejecting partway, and the carrier section would ride forward, pinching the shell casing between the carrier and the barrel, requiring manual extraction.

Vuxten understood it in the original power armors from the Second Telkan War, but the new suits were supposed to have been designed by Terran Procurement.

He saw a couple of the armor techs staring at him and ignored it.

He'd taken a heavy high-v round straight the chest. He'd been lucky the angle had been bad, the impact hadn't even registered through the kinetic lining, but it had damaged the first couple of layers of the warsteel laminate.

He had a set of concentric rings on his chest.

Again.

The Forward Operations Base was still only half set up. Any armor that needed immediate repair or had not been checked out, the operator had to stand in the frames outside so that the repair technicians could look at it.

He waited in line, chewing his last allotted stimgum for the next two hours, waiting his turn up in the frame.

When his turn came, he put one boot then the other in the foot rests, feeling the sides flip up and hold his foot securely, then stepped in and let the grippers take hold of forearms. From the sides came the sections to hold him still.

”Any injuries your medcomp didn't pick up, sir?” A Terran female asked, sitting next to the frame. She was one of the ones who chose to have her eyes go solid white when she was using VR sight.

”No,” Vuxten said.

”All right. You've got some h-vee hits registered, so we'll go into maintenance position nice and slow. You tell me if there's any pain. I'll also stop if your heartbeat goes too high or too low or any other medical emergency symptoms occur,” she said.

His suit went dark and MAINTENANCE MODE floated up in his vision.

471 was making his report, a full quarter of it devoted to the greenie equivelant of calling the 40mm grenade launcher a complete and total piece of shit that could be replaced by a blind Rigellian duck throwing rocks with its beak.

His arms slowly pulled up and his feet spread out till he was in the X-position. He saw his suit functions flicker by.

”You're favoring your knee, sir,” she said.

”Injured it during First Telkan,” he answered. ”Building fell on me.”

The female technician laughed and after a second an image appeared on Vuxten's screen.

It was an elderly looking Telkan, dressed in a Telkan Marine dress uniform, laying on the floor, with the caption: ”Help, I've fallen, and I can't get up.” The lower half of the picture was a far shot of a collapsed pile of wreckage. ”And there's a building on me.” with ”Worker Vuxten, you have been fined 2 days pay for unauthorized relaxation” at the bottom.

Vuxten laughed at that.

”Damn, your left shoulder mounted indirect fire weapon is jammed. Looks like a known issue. I'll have Third Shop see if they can figure it out, you're the tenth Telkan to come through with a jammed launcher,” she said, her voice filled with annoyance. ”All right, the damage to your outer fragmentation deflection plate is largely cosmetic. Looks like only the first two layers cracked. The fabs are working overtime to keep the Lank tanks running, so it might be a while before we can replace your chest plate.”

”All right,” Vuxten answered, sighing.

”Your right shoulder servo is showing signs of wear, looks like some slippage in your left boot gravity generator, and your out of stimgum,” she said. ”All right, I'm gonna pop your shell. Ready?”

”Ready,” Vuxten said. He felt the weird twinge of the system disconnecting from his nervous system. He panted a few times, getting covered in sweat, when the power shut off to the environmental, then the suit clamshelled opened.

Vuxten stepped down, wincing slightly as his left knee took the weight, and stretched real quick.

”Heh, I forgot you Telkan guys run nude in your armor,” the technician laughed. She pointed at a box. ”Auto-fit jumpsuits are right there.”

Vuxten nodded, panting, feeling sweat slick his fur, as he moved over to the box and grabbed and adaptive camouflage armor-weave jumpsuit and pulled it on. His suit was grabbed by the loading system and whisked off into the FOB's main maintenance building. 471 was sitting on the shoulder, despite the General's mandate against that, waving at everyone and flashing a smiley face with a hat and cigar between his antenna.

He'd just finished sealing the suit, putting his mag-ac pistol in the holster, and heading toward the FOB when a power loader came lurching from between two vehicles.

Vuxten gritted his teeth. After 14 hours on mission, the last thing he needed was some one eyed Terran psychopath wrapped in a robotic exoskeleton to lunge out of the shadows.

”Hey, Lieutenant, there you are,” the Terran said.

”Hello, Sergeant,” Vuxten said, giving the human the side-eye as the Terran walked next to him, the frame whirring, whining, and hissing.

”Trucker, the Lank, and your CO is over by the water purifiers. Your CO wanted me to find you, and Trucker and the Lank want to see me,” he said.