Chapter 385 (2/2)
WAG? Ge'ermo'o wondered. He checked his implant and nodded. Wild Ass Guess.
”By all means, Sergeant, wag your tail,” No'Drak said, putting out his cigarette and pulling the pack out in the same motion.
”Refit base. Probably extensive. Continental plate drift on this planet is slow but steady, which means we're looking at a machine that has probably been largely asleep for millions of years,” she said. ”Combine it with the fact that the Precursor mining machines all have armor that grows stronger when exposed to heat and pressure and we're looking at deep mining machines. Probably transition zone between the mantles capable so it can access the really exotic materials.”
”This planet produce any exotics?” No'Drak asked.
She checked her display and shook her head. ”Our dataslicers have cut through the Lanaktallan records. They've only been here thirty thousand years, but before that the native species had to deal with a lack of fissile material and rare metals like lithium and neodymium.”
”That machine and any companions might be why,” No'Drak mused. ”Mining it down in the transition layer before it can be brought up closer to the surface of the crust through geological means.”
The Terran chimera nodded. ”That's what my Section Leader believes.”
”Which means, there might be a bunch of...”
”STATUS CHANGE!” someone called out.
Ge'ermo'o watched as No'Drak spun in place, looking at the tank.
”Third Armor's Third Brigade, Fourteenth Regiment just issued authorization for Mjölnir rounds!” someone called out.
”Time for Trucker to authorize release?” No'Drak asked.
The slim male human with bright pink hair and black warsteel cybereyes checked his console. ”Sixty-two seconds, his combat gestalt usage jumped to eighty-three percent of combat bandwidth during that time, up twenty-three percent from current theater combat bandwidth usage.”
No'Drak nodded. ”Allow it. Patch us in via satellite.”
Ge'ermo'o looked up the Mjölnir phrase on his datalink and all six of his eyes opened up wide.
”You are authorizing such rounds?” he asked No'Drak. ”I do not seek to interfere but...”
No'Drak nodded. ”They're about to engage a Precursor machine the size of a city that's using its onboard manufacturing capabilities to pump out thousands of combat machines as we speak. The longer it has to dig in and acquire resources the more difficult it will be to stop it.”
General No'Drak turned and looked at the holotank as the massive machine was shown from orbit. It was surrounded by dust and smoke, its crash having shattered a fifth of the megalopilis it had landed on. Huge cracks, hundreds of meters wide, could be seen in its hull, and craters that were measured in the kilometers glowed sullenly with molten metal from where Space Force had engaged the massive Precursor ship and caused it to crash land instead of continue its orbital bombardment.
”That thing can win the war all by itself,” he said.
”STATUS CHANGE!” the shout came again.
Ge'ermo'o felt himself tense.
”3-14 is firing,” the same person called out.
Ge'ermo'o felt his tendrils curl protectively under his jowls, felt his crests inflate protectively.
The Precursor's battlescreens were thick, thick enough to resist nCv shots. Thick enough to tear apart the tiny tanks that had just emerged from the flaming hell of a burning chemical refinery.
The whole holotank went white.
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01001111 01010111 00100000 01001101 01011001 00100000 01000010 01000001 01001100 01001100 01010011 activated the additional battlescreen projectors, feeling the electronic equivelent of anxiety as the power level dropped. It was running on backup reactors, its primary reactors dead and in the damaged sections that were little more than wreckage.
The feral lemurs and their damnable kinetic rounds that bypassed the initial battlescreens had hammered it until it had almost begun to break up. Till parts of its superstructure had begun to break up. It had been forced to dive for the planet, narrowly avoiding the massive tanks the size of a Precursor ancillary vehicle, and had slammed belly down into the city.
It was the first time it had ever been in a gravity well and despite the fact the OEM coding had protocols for it, 01001111 01010111 00100000 01001101 01011001 00100000 01000010 01000001 01001100 01001100 01010011 did not enjoy the experience.
The tanks, small pathetic things of strange matter elemental alloy armor wrapped around a massive cannon, with their own battlescreens nearly as powerful as 01001111 01010111 00100000 01001101 01011001 00100000 01000010 01000001 01001100 01001100 01010011's own screens, all leveled their barrels.
The Precursor could detect the rapidly shifting complex battlecode between the tanks, linking them together and linking the tanks to a larger network, but it had learned that to expose itself to the feral's battlecode meant exposing itself to madness as feral attack VI's would swarm it.
The Precursor tensed. It didn't know how it knew, but it knew, that the ferals were about to fire at it.
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The main guns all fired, seconds apart, in one rippling long wave. The Lanaktallan tanks fired first, their shots hitting the battlescreen in rapid succession, all within a single second.
The rounds, fabbed up and assembled by 15th Combat Sustainment, V Corps, III COSCOM, went off as designed.
An atomic detonation to drive a warsteel explosively forged penetrator into the battlescreen.
01001111 01010111 00100000 01001101 01011001 00100000 01000010 01000001 01001100 01001100 01010011 watched the power suddenly drain past its ability to manage, watched the battlescreen projectors overheat and fail in one cataclysmic failure as they tried to resist not only over a hundred 125kt directed atomic explosions, but the warsteel penetrator slightly ahead of the shockwave.
The Precursor's battlescreens failed, nearly 15% of A'armo'os shots streaking forward to hit the forward prow of the Precursor. Those drove craters five hundred meters deep into its armor, blowing out armor in a hundred meter radius as the EFP's did their work.
Before 01001111 01010111 00100000 01001101 01011001 00100000 01000010 01000001 01001100 01001100 01010011 could adapt, could manage the brutal hits it was taking across its prow, which was already damaged from the crash...
...the real rounds streaked over the prow, sailing across the hull.
For an instant 01001111 01010111 00100000 01001101 01011001 00100000 01000010 01000001 01001100 01001100 01010011 thought the rounds had missed. Some of them fired a full two seconds behind the leads.
The rounds were spaced precisely, the math triple and quadruple checked by the green mantid engineers in addition to the fire control computers.
01001111 01010111 00100000 01001101 01011001 00100000 01000010 01000001 01001100 01001100 01010011 had enough time to detect that the shells contained components usually found in crude omnidirectional nuclear weapons. It computed that, based on weight and the standard 0.004 kt/kg explosive weight ratio where all species that developed superluminal flight gave up atomic and nuclear weapons, it could survive even the massive amount of explosions it would suffer. The fact they were omnidirectional meant that the majority of the explosive force would be wasted even if the rounds performed an airburst to hammer compressed atmospheric gasses against the Precursor's hull.
The ghosts of billions of Mantids, uncounted Mar-gite, and races gone from the universes all howled with laughter.
Ge'ermo'o could have even told it that what it was about to receive, it would not be grateful for.
The shells, each weighing 'only' two-hundred and some change kilograms, oriented point down, the warbois shrieked with glee, and then detonated the round.
Those races, who had met the humans toe to toe, or even Ge'ermo'o, could have told 01001111 01010111 00100000 01001101 01011001 00100000 01000010 01000001 01001100 01001100 01010011 that ascribing the achievements of other races to the maddened lemurs of TerraSol was a mistake.
The rounds were directed enough, were too powerful, to be counted under atomic protocols by the Confederate military, which had an upper limit of 2.25 megatons for directed atomic weapons.
The Confederacy counted them these rounds as 'nuclear'.
The backblast appeared, from orbit, like a blast sustained over a full second that came out to just over 50 megatons.
But that was the blast that drove the hammer home, like explosives used to drive a drill into the granite of a quarry.
Those 50 megaton blasts drove the real payload into the Precursor's body like nails of hellfire from a nailgun. The nails five hundred meter wide tubes of ravening energy that were the equivalent of 250kt blasts. The tubes ripped past the armor, the energy release of the 'backblast' and the 'tube' lasting for nearly a full second.
Each 'payload' detonated deep inside the Precursor. Mathematically precision to place each 'payload' within the edge of the adjacent payloads in order to compress the in between matter to the point that even the dullest elements would undergo fusion.
Even battlesteel.
Each of the payloads detonated, the Tsar warheads, with a net explosive weight to system weight ratio that would make any race who had not witnessed it stare in disbelief.
One hundred and thirty megatons detonating in an enclosed area.
The still 'ongoing' blast tube driven by the 'backblast' prevented the blast inside the Precursor from exiting through the channel ripped through the armor by the 'nail'. Instead, as explosions followed the path of least resistance, it was squeezed and pushed into the body of the Precursor.
From orbit, through the few sats still in operation, the entire top of the Precursor vanished in bright white light.
01001111 01010111 00100000 01001101 01011001 00100000 01000010 01000001 01001100 01001100 01010011felt nothing as its surface armor exploded outward and boiling matter ripped apart by the most basic of universal reactions consumed everything inside the armor.
The ground rippled like water for nearly two hundred miles.
The detonation was strong enough that it bounced off the molten core of the planet and caused an echo earthquake a third of the planet's circumference away.
Where the Precursor had been battlesteel burned.
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”Tango down.”