Chapter 447 (2/2)

”What's out there?” he asked.

ATOMIC streamed up his visor again, followed by rapid flashes and detonations in the 50 to 150 kiloton range, as if a 90mm hellbore had gone to rapid fire and strafed an enemy advance.

--not know-- 471 said. --must be casey--

Up in orbit Captain Vantree stared at his displays. He couldn't see into the debris cloud from where SFC Casey and HHC Platoon HHC First Telkan had landed, but the bright actinic flashes and radiation spikes pointed at someone using atomic weapons inside the landing zone.

”Who's doing that?” Colonel Brathmurt asked, his eyes wide.

”It must be Casey somehow,” Vantree said, staring at his monitor. Another series of flashes, nearly twenty, in a tight grouping.

”Get that psychopath on the line, I want to know who authorized him to go atomic,” Brathmurt snarled.

Vantree checked his commo. He had one line to Casey, the icon blinking, but it was to the suit's VI. He triggered an ordnance report.

Brathmurt had just turned back to the holotank when he saw it.

The holotank fuzzed, flickered, and a woman seemed to rise up out of it. Brathmurt knew enough about humans to know the woman's features, while lovely, were contorted with fury. She was clad all in armor, with a wreath of flowers and leaves around her brow. She held a burning sword in one hand, her other hand held what looked like a long canister. Brathmurt noticed, insanely, that her pointed fingernails were painted neon pink. She snarled, revealing sharp serrated teeth, and dissolved into pixels, leaving behind the canister.

The canister suddenly went to wire-frame, then came apart in an exploded view, showing the parts and statistics.

No nomenclature, no designation number, just labeled ”SUTR” with the components. Brathmurt frowned as he looked at it. Warsteel casing, 'inverted' strange matter tritium, phasic charged strange matter conversion U238, and 'deadened' antimatter-2. The round was 66mm wide, 205mm long, had folded 'wings' that deployed when fired, and two strips of 'spooky particle' iron on the sides for magnetic acceleration.

Brathmurt turned and looked at his intelligence section. ”What the hell does this thing do?”

Two green mantids started flashing icons at each other, their computer displays streaming code and equations. Before Brathmurt could say anything it suddenly stopped.

The holotank blinked and a window opened up.

ESTIMATED EFFECT appeared above the window.

An atomic detonation went off in the window, with a weird purple pulse in a thin band that outraced the white light spectrum blastwave.

0.5kt -14.5Mt Range appeared at the bottom.

It rotated and showed the round going off, directing a phasic pulse in an inverted cone that had actual kinetic shock value, followed by a directed atomic detonation pulse.

BANNED - FIFTH ORION COMPACT 7925 PG

That made Brathmurt blink. He turned back to Vantree. ”Tell him to stop using that ammunition!” he called out.

I am not getting convicted of war crimes just because of some psycho... he started thinking.

He remembered the meeting with Admiral Shtuklar where Casey had been brought up.

The man's a psycho, he remembered.

He just stared at the holotank, watching the cloud of debris spread out as each atomic detonation pushed outward.

”INCOMING IFF FROM CASEY!” someone called out.

On the surface Vuxten struggled to his feet, his graviton boots howling, his battlescreen sparking and crackling, visible to the naked eye.

In the upper right of his vision Casey's icon blinked. Vuxten was surprised to even see that he could talk to the Senior NCO of First Telkan. He blinked twice at the icon even as he leaned into another set of hammerblow.

Casey appeared in the small box, his face covered in sweat, his expression serious.

A warsteel jacketed datacable plugged into his empty eye socket.

”Sir, am engaging the enemy who are in overwhelming strength,” Casey snapped. ”IFF file ready for dissemination.”

'You're hammering us to pieces, Sergeant,” Vuxten said, putting a forearm up as another stream of ATOMIC went by.

”Switching to non-atomic munitions, sir,” Casey replied.

”I do not recommend that at this time, Casey,” a woman's voice said. A Terran female appeared in another little window. She had wings of burning warsteel, was in warsteel armor, and wore a garland of leaves and flowers on her brow. Her skin was the color of hammered copper, her eyes were burning chrome and her hair flowing oynx. Beneath the box it said ”LOZEN”

”You heard the orders,” Casey said. ”Fab and load Gridharvolur rounds,” he seemed to look at Vuxten. ”Going to 30mm. Antimatter warning,” he said. The fierce looking woman vanished.

IFF LOADED Vuxten saw on his visor as the two small windows vanished.

”What is a Gridharvolur round, 471?” Vuxten asked, opening the IFF file.

--no clue-- 471 answered. --think maybe something terrible--

Vuxten stared as the enemy profiles streamed by. Multiple angles, anatomy popouts, wireframe, multi-color. They were all Dwellerspawn, but weird ones. Vuxten knew Dwellerspawn when he saw them, the rough unfinished, wrong look to them.

Ones with eight or six legs, a multiple segmented bulbous body, with an upper thorax like a mantid or Lanaktallan, with two or four arms, a head that looked like a cross between a catfish and spider or a canine and a serrated scaled lizard. They were all in purplish black armor, which was listed as ”TYPE-TWO WARSTEEL”.

But it was the header on each of them that caught his attention.

They were all named. From the ”Spidercow” to ”Dappnu”, they each had names.

It was more than that. It was what was next to the names.

NIVEN RING 18F or O'NEILL TUBE 04D or NIVEN RING 09R on them.

--doubleplus ungood-- 471 said. --ring locusts--

Vuxten felt his mouth go dry.

”CONTACT! ENEMY CONTACT!” sounded out from Corporal Jirvet, 2nd squad.

Before Vuxten could shout out an order he saw it coming out of the dust. It was at least nine feet high, its head looking like someone shoved three lizard heads together, tentacles coming out of its mouth. It had eight spider legs, thick and multi-jointed, coming from an abdomen that was the size of a small car. The chain guns on either side roared for a second then jammed up as Vuxten saw the iron particles in the debris sudden adhere to the magnetic acceleration system on the chainguns. The creature roared, rushing Vuxten.

Vuxten leveled the stubber and pulled the trigger. The heavy rounds exploded across the creature, collapsing the biologically produced battlescreen, shattering the warsteel plating it was clad in, and blowing apart the upper torso in white flashes that sprayed greenish yellow ichor through the dust.

Four more rushed, and Vuxten ripple fired his rocket pack, the missiles detonating on the battlescreens but the EFP pounding through the screen to hit the creature's armor plating, blowing holes clear through their bodies as big as a dinner plate.

GRAV SHOCK GRAV SHOCK GRAV SHOCK appeared on his visor.

--shit shit shit-- 471 sent. He shot the warning to all the others and took manual control of the graviton systems in the armor at the same time as the cosine and sine-wave profiles. He slammed it into the graviton, checking the rest of the platoon.

Lance Corporal Nestup got it loaded a bare .1 second before it happened.

To Vuxten it felt like the outside world not only turned upside down, but like everything was falling, raising, falling to the side, while everything tilted in every direction at once as reality turned upside down. For a second it felt like he had fluttering butterflies in his guts.

He almost puked.

--now know what gridharvolur is-- 471 sent. --graviton shockwave weapon--

”A grav shockwave weapon?” Admiral Shtuklar said, staring at the screen. He'd been pulled away from watching the entire deployment to watching what looked like a big dirt cloud that the north side kept flashing. ”What kind of psycho uses a fucking graviton shockwave weapon planetside?”

Commodore Sinclair, a Saurian Compact Kobold looked up. ”Oh, it's better.”

Admiral Shtuklar felt sick as he asked the obvious question. ”Define 'better', Guns.”

”It's got a phasic and temporal shake and bake shockwave,” the Kobold said.

”Who authorized First Telkan to use shit like that?” The Admiral yelled.

A Saurian Compact Centemarian turned and stared at the Admiral almost insolently. ”You did, sir.”

Shtuklar frowned. ”When?”

”Sir, I warned you that Casey was a goddamn psycho and you not only deployed him to the surface with an RoE that reads not 'save the civilians', not 'do as little damage to infrastructre as possible' but rather 'kill the enemy with extreme prejudice'. As if that wasn't bad enough, you put him in Novastar VII armor!” The Commodore snapped.

”I beg your pardon?” the Admiral blinked.

”You sent them with a too broad RoE, your briefing went as far as casualties, locations, and an order to kill the enemy, and then you put a man I, personally, warned you was a psychopath, in armor that's almost considered a war crime to even manufacture,” the Commodore said. He stared. ”I had my doubts, but I kept them to myself, thinking you'd overseen enough planetary assaults and worked with the Army and Marine groundside forces to realize you have to have a detailed objective list, assault plan, warplan, and rules of engagement.”

He shook his head. ”I was wrong.”

The Admiral turned back to look at the screen. Graviton warnings kept popping up, expanding rings of red that grew into existence and faded.

”How was I supposed to know he'd do this?” the Admiral asked.

-------------

On the ground, for one person, everything was clear, crisp, clean.

Things made sense again.

There was no worries about training up lower ranking troops. No briefings. No detailed plans.

Just kill the enemy with extreme prejudice.

As it should be.

”Do you love me?” Casey asked.

”Forever and ever,” Lozen answered.