Chapter 338 (2/2)

”Ah, now I see,” Kulamu'u said. It was obvious once it was pointed out. ”I see none of the Type-I or Type-II hulls out there.”

”There are some, but mostly in ancillary craft,” Admiral Thickett said. ”Notice how sometimes the lesser craft are deployed and they suddenly Helljump out? Those, weirdly enough, are usually Type-II. The Type-I's usually try to arrange themselves in an interlocked formation and get ripped up, with the survivors jumping out.”

Kulamu'u nodded again. ”They are older ones, who still abide by the law of diminishing returns when approaching their war.”

”Sir,” one of the analysts snapped out, her voice demanding attention.

Mana'aktoo turned with the officers. The Rigellian had her hand on her datalink and was staring at the officers. When she was sure she had their attention she nodded. ”The smaller ones are in range of Birthday Cake.”

”Execute,” Admiral Schmidt said, turning back to the holotank. ”You poor sad bastards.”

Mana'aktoo leaned forward slightly, watching with eagerness.

He could see the massive Jotun and Djinn and Devestator class ships were in between the orbital path of the moon and the planet, crossing a dashed crimson line.

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The Djinn didn't have a name, just a number. Manufactured within the last six days, it was replacing the losses of the Harvester following it, intending on establishing orbit and providing orbital support.

The Djinn looked below it. The city was large, nearly twenty miles across. The buildings were all lit, power sources everywhere, with vehicles moving through the streets. The city surrounded by five stadiums, all of them massive structures that shown with power. There were vehicles streaming to and from it and there were unencrypted transmissions from all five stadiums detailing complex sports games played by biologicals.

It aimed for between two of the stadiums and began making landing preparations as it moved toward the planet.

It, and its cohorts, crossed the line that only existed in the tactical holotanks.

Holographic and hard-light systems winked off beneath the attacking AWM's.

Revealing five fully powered up and waiting BOLO Mark XXX Continental Siege Engines that had been running firing solutions for tens of thousands of seconds, the tanks positronic brains fully linked up with the biological minds of their commanders.

Massive Hellbores fired, the nuclear detonation compressed and guided, with a 60mm laser 'tip' to reduce air attenuation, the leading edge of it a tightly packed array of digital code in the pattern of screaming tachyons, a crazed warboi standing on a directed armor piercing nuclear explosion.

200mm Hellbore shots screamed through the sky, hitting the lesser vessels.

There weren't standard tank guns, these were the kind of cannons most races would have mounted on battleships.

The kind of cannons that the Terrans built then wrapped a combat spacecraft hull around and said ”Lo, behold mine assault fighter, for it is a light attack craft!” and the other species went ”Oh, for fuck's sake” when they saw it.

A third of the vessels that were hit had the cataclysmic shot go clear through the superstructure and come out the other side in a massive lance of liberated energy.

Around the BOLO tanks were missile systems that hadn't existed until a Terran sitting in the back of a hovertruck had been driven by so that he could toss a softball sized device into the ground.

They cut loose too. No chemical accelerant, gravity drivers slammed them forward to speeds that created a plasma envelope around the nose of the missile. The surviving and/or mortally injured Precursors expected standard explosive, maybe plasma.

They got directed antimatter.

The missile used a high powered particle beam to tear a deep hole into the hull of the AWM, powerful enough to strike nearly a hundred meters deep. The fusing charge, an implosion charge, ripped a pocket at the end of the particle beam lance's path.

The antimatter warhead went off inside the pocket with a blast measured in the megatons that was compressed for a few moments as the integrity fields and the armor itself held.

Well, moments measured in the micro-seconds.

to quote the ancient Terran saying.

The Djinn and Jotun had expected to be hit by missiles that would slash at their armor, perhaps crater it, if the weapon got through the battlescreen.

The blast went off under the surface of the armor. The armor itself carried the shockwave, the exterior and the interior of the armor both exploding away from the detonation.

The BOLOs had fired twice more in the time it took the missiles to hit.

BOLO Pumpkin and her commander, Major Halfrey, took a shot at the Goliath just to wake it up and remind it that it could be touched by the BOLOs too.

It was a ridiculous shot, a needle prick against the massive bulk of the Goliath.

But the universe was in full 'fuck your couch' mode.

The three 200mm Hellbore shots got through the shields thanks to a laughing warboi that had just slagged an entire thirty mile stretch of battlescreen projectors.

A Jotun had just launched from the bay and the twenty mile thick doors still had three miles left between them.

The high speed manufacturing system was already laying down the hull for another Jotun.

The three shots were staggered. Not by much, a second each, so that it wouldn't warp the hull or tear loose the cupola of the BOLO, but they were still staggered.

The Goliath had devoted the power from the internal integrity fields to the external battlescreen projectors. There was no use in dedicating power and resources to systems that were obviously not needed since there was no chance the Goliath could ever take an internal hull hit.

Except...

...it did.

The first one hit, a 200mm directed thermonuclear blast, directly into the 'floor' of the manufacturing bay. Designed to penetrate warsteel armor, the hyperalloy floor might as well have been tissue paper. The blast drove deep, ripping through internal spaces, before it finally stopped. The next one followed, tearing through the shattered atomic haze that had been mass only a few micro-seconds before, ripping even deeper. It went even deeper into the hull, before the power was depleted.

The last one found something good.

The massive Hellcore.

Like most things that had to do with Hellspace, it didn't like to be touched.

And there was still 35kt of explosive force left.

Touch.

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The Djinn had been lucky. It had veered off fast enough, only taken minor cosmetic damage.

Above it, a hundred and eighty thousand miles, a new sun boiled to life, purple and red, the sky looking angry and bruised as an eye of hellfire opened up, blinked, then closed.

The Djinn slewed down, overshooting the target by nearly a hundred miles, managing to miss the top of a mountain. It hit the water of an ocean, heeled up, and slid into the port of a city, grinding its full body length through buildings until it came to a rest.

It's mind clenched, expecting those massive tanks to unveil themselves.

Instead, the water of the ocean rushed back in, lapping at its dead and damaged engines, before sullenly returning to the bay.

It rotated up extra thinking lobes, building two additional arrays. The Goliath it relied upon for higher analytical processes was now nothing more than boiling and shrieking Hellspace particles.

No matter. The city was still 80% intact. It represented a wealth of resources.

It was time to gather.

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Palgret picked himself up off the floor, spitting blood from a split lip. His faceshield was still up and he could see two layers of dust, one dropping down from the ceiling, one rising from the ferrocrete floor of the parking garage.

He saw the humans getting up, they'd gone prone too when ”IMPACT IMMINENT” had flashed on their visors.

There was a creaking sound, followed by the snarl of a stressed integrity field.

Palgret moved over next to his squad leader, who was next to the Platoon Sergeant, who was looking at the Lieutenant, who was looking at one of the humans.

”What was it?” the Platoon Leader asked.

The Terran wiped his mouth, glanced at his gauntlet to check for blood, then bared his teeth.

”A Djinn. One of the new Mark-II's,” he said.

”It landed near the city? How far away?” the Platoon Leader asked.

The human grinned. ”If by landed, you mean 'surfed in and slid halfway into the city' then you're right,” his voice was full of amusement.

The integrity fields snarled again as the human pointed up.

”He's right on top of us.”

Palgret groaned, getting a look of ire from his squad leader.

This just keeps getting better and better.

DAY ONE