Chapter 541: 4th & 10 (2/2)
Undrat heard the flares and chaff deploy, felt the renewed zing of blueberries across his back teeth, as the grav-striker engaged its defenses. He felt the odd vibration of something coming loose from the grav-striker and knew it had released the Warbound it was carrying on the undercarriage.
**YEEEEEE HAW** 583 flashed an emoji of a smiley face with a moomoo tender hat and a cigar.
”Indeed,” Undrat answered.
538 had gotten use to the Tukna'rn habit of terseness.
The grav-striker's engines howled as it suddenly came to near stop, everyone inside the striker suffering a 5G shock that their armor easily compensated for.
”DISMOUNT!” LT Ontruk yelled as the light went red and he hurled himself from the grav-striker.
538 unlocked all the safeties, feeling the thrill of going into combat riding a Tukna'rn into glory.
Undrat stepped out of the grav-striker in a practiced movement, his knees flexing to take the shock of dropping nearly three meters. Madame Three-Eighteen dropped into deployment configuration in mid-air, locking into place as he hit the ground. Undrat knew that any fouling of the mechanism or slight gear jamming would be overcome by the shock of hitting the ground.
Alpha Company was already engaged, on the north flank, laying down suppressive fire at the shimmering curtian of phasic energy that the Atrekna used as battlescreens and defensive shielding. Explosions were already blossoming across the curtain, already impacting the mechanical and biological war machines thundering through the curtain to defend the crystalline fortress beyond.
Undrat took two extra steps, coming up next to the LT. He reached out, putting his heavily armored gauntlet on LT Ontruk's head and putting pressure, forcing the LT to duck.
”Keep your head down, sir,” Undrat said over his loudspeaker and the Section channel, taking another step to interpose himself between the enemy and the LT. 538 activated the battlescreen, Lamark paying more attention to the phasic and electronic warfare and counter-warfare systems that were already lit up as the invisible battlefield gained ferocity.
The high-vee round hit Undrat in the chest with a flash, spinning away with a whistling shriek into the darkness.
The 30mm round would have hit the LT straight in the faceplate and blown his head clean off.
It did not even mar the heavy warsteel plating of Undrat's chest.
Undrat saw one of the massive biological weapons charge through the rippling curtain, a huge creature like a Terran pillbug, with dozens of eyes and hundreds of legs at the front. He marked it for Third Squad even as he shifted his body slightly.
The two 'letterbox' shoulder launchers chuffed and missiles streaked away from him. The other members of Third Squad followed his example, and nearly a score of missiles slammed into the face of the massive creature, the purplish-white actinic flare of the explosion blotting away the face.
”I CAN HEAR THE SINGING OF THE BROOD MOTHERS!” roared over the battlefield as the massive Warbound, Sigma, stomped forward, firing missiles from larger versions of the ones on Undrat's shoulders.
Undrat began moving forward, advancing into the Atrekna fire. Explosions the size of his fist, the larger ones the size of a melon, rippled across his battlescreen, but he paid them no mind. Madame Three-Eighteen added her own voice to the roar of combat as he leveled his firepower at one of the large tracked machines.
Two other lines of tracers joined him and the armor was stripped away, the heavy 20mm rounds seeking out and finding vulnerable machinery.
The AWM exploded, the fusion reactor letting go in a plume of white light that washed the advancing ranks of Confed troops with radiation that they paid no mind to.
Undrat fired another quartet of missiles, two from each letterbox launcher, the hypersonic smart missiles streaking forward to smash into the burning face of the big insect, which was slowing, but had not stopped. Vaporized tissue flew outward in white flash and one of the massive armored bands on its flank popped loose of the muscle, the white fibrous tissue holding on in long strings as a slurry of ravaged meat erupted from the wound.
Fifteen seconds.
More grav-strikers were landing, troops bailing off of them. Undrat saw the ID of a medic run up and tuck herself behind Sergeant R'Nert, ducking slightly to use the big insectoid NCO as cover.
Undrat was pleased to see that First Section's medic was still alive.
Sixth Squad was still striding forward, their weapons still in mobile configuration, the big 155mm snub-nosed artillery pieces firing low-vee rounds at a high parabolic arc, forcing the Atrekna to maintain the upper parts of their phasic battlescreen.
Undrat was pleased to see that all of Third Platoon was now deployed and advancing on the enemy.
The enemy had gotten over their initial shock at the sudden insertion. More and more firepower was being directed at the troops of Ninth Battalion, but Undrat knew that any round that was allowed to pass through the phasic battlescreen would provide Lamark and his fellow eVI's that much more data on the phasic frequencies needed to bypass the battlescreen, or allow them to compute the 'flutter' algorithm that allowed the firepower to pass through.
Unlike Confed battlescreens, a phasic battlescreen blocked fire from both sides.
A priority fire request appeared in Undrat's HUD and he took care of it himself, not interrupting the other heavy weapons elements of Third Squad.
There was a hole, no more than a meter wide, in the phasic battlescreen, allowing a heavy 66mm gun to rain fire down on Bravo Company, which was also heavily engaged with Atrekna AWM's. It was nearly a thousand meters away.
The Atrekna weaponry was inaccurate at anything over a hundred meters.
Undrat was not so hindered.
The armor wheezed slightly as Undrat twisted slightly at the waist, bringing the weapon smoothly into position.
He squeezed off a quick burst once, twice, three times.
The first burst of M782A4E2 (self-correcting guided armor piercing discarding sabot fin stabilized warsteel jacketed density enhanced shell - mass reactive antimatter core with phasic enhancement with tracer) destroyed the battlescreen the barrel of the Atrekna fixed position weapon poked through. The second burst destroyed the heavy crystalline armor of the fixed position.
The third burst of 15 rounds destroyed the weapon, the two Atrekna gunners, and blew fifteen huge holes in the crystalline wall behind them, showering shards of crystal into the chamber beyond.
Undrat turned his attention back to the advance, swivelling at the waist to face forward again.
He continued his advance.
Undrat checked his HUD. The LT was still alive. His statistical chances of survival would rise every minute he survived until it would reach 80%, where it would stay.
”Keep your head down, sir,” Undrat reminded the LT over the com-band.
Thirty seconds.
The war plan had not yet jelled beyond ”Advance into the enemy” but that was fine with Undrat.
---------
Nuk watched as the biologicals and the mechanical war machines suddenly came to life. Half streamed to the east, half the west, as the battlescreens on either side of the valley flared to more intense colors. The Atrekna outside fled for the fortress.
Nuk blinked slowly, holding place with slow kicks of his webbed feet.
The fortress came alive. Battlescreen projectors were extruded from the crystalline structure, vast towers of carved crystal lit up, and the fortress's defenses went to full power.
Nuk watched it all, transmitting the data down the fiberoptic cable attached just over his tailbone, the cable, disguised as a weed, shielded from any leakage.
Down below him the other members of the Alpha Group fed in templates to the heavily shielded creation engines. The creation engines snarled to full awareness, lightning crackling across them.
Each of the creation engines had been in the presence of an Enraged Terran and carried echoes of that being's wrath.
The Leebaw aquatic commandos passed the missiles silently to one another, moving into the water to swim up to one of the scouts and pass it silently to them before returning to gather more.
Soon, the Leebaw would teach one of the most important lessons of the Prophet Jawnconnor to the Atrekna.
You are never as safe as you think you are.
------------
P'Kank watched the holotank as his forces went from retreating in front of massive waves of Atrekna war machines to attacking full on. He could see that the forces tasked with taking out the fortresses were engaged.
All of the III Corps was hard at work. From the lowliest file clerk, who was dutifully filing battlefield reports, to the most high ranking tank commander, to P'Kank himself.
The Treana'ad officer gave his species equivalent of a smile as he lit a cigarette, accidentally bumping one of his pockets so that the extra googly eyes clicked, making him smile wider.
The Atrekna thought they had seen all that the Confederacy could bring to bear.
You're wrong, P'Kank thought.