Chapter 542: 4th & 10 (2/2)
One second the dozen Atrekna were stabilizing the temporal field to finalize bringing in the massive slavespawn.
The next they were nothing but liquefied flesh splashing out across the air.
The Treana'ad gave a whoop of victory and fired another missile, letting it drift around the edge of the western cliff, requesting a heavy gunner to hit the cliff face.
Precursors had bad pattern recognition and the gunner figured he could go to the well a couple more times on the trick.
Undrat was hammering at the big autonomous war machine, which had turned its attention from Delta Company to Undrat. The rockets had hit and blown massive craters into the armor, the EFP driving deep enough to find critical machinery. Smoke was boiling out of it, its portside tracks were inoperative, and the point defense was down.
He was drawing more and more fire as he let half his weapons run off of Lamark's suggestions. 538 was still blasting music even as he ran Little Sister, slamming 7.62mm hate into anything that looked remotely vulnerable.
Undrat fired a brace of illumination shells, lighting up the battlefield with harsh white light.
”DRIVING 'ROUND THE MOUNTAINSIDE!” his speakers roared.
Nuk could see that the giant insects went from nearly solid, their eyes glowing red, their forward mouth-feet flexing and stomping with agitation, to wavery like a badly tuned holotank. He clicked his clicker, sending the message.
More Atrekna left the fortress to assist in bringing back the giant insects, this time surrounded by a phasic protective field.
Nuk kept watch. The battlescreen was starting to thin, starting to waver, and Nuk knew that sooner or later the fortress would have to deploy heat sinks of otherwise cool the massive crystalline arrays that produced the psionic force field.
”WELL HIT UP ALL THE BARS!”
Undrat's nanoforges were whistling like teakettles as they gulped down the contents of the mass tanks like a booze hound hitting a vodka bottle in the bathroom at Thanksgiving dinner. The heat shround of Madame Three-Eighteen was starting to heat up, the words of the Digital Omnimessiah starting to glow with a red light before the rest of the shroud.
Undrat knew it had to do with how the etchings made the warsteel thinner and other quirks of thermodynamics, but it still gave him a thrill to see Enraged Phillips statement of ”To preserve life by taking it is the universe laughing at us.”
Madame Three-Eighteen chuckled to herself as she rotated out her thermal sinks, rotating up ones that had had time to cool off.
She never stopped singing.
”DRINK TILL WE COME OUT THE OTHER SIDE!” his speakers blared out.
Undrat knew he had a lot of fire coming his way, he could tell by the way that his battlescreens were so thick he could barely see around him and had to rely on his drones, the sensor systems of the rest of the battalion, and the dim shadows moving on the other side.
He released the grav-spike and took ten steps forward, bringing him nearly fifty feet from the front of the line.
He had all the attention.
The rest of Alpha Company was playing air defense for him, targeting the vehicles that targeted Undrat, and concentrating on the massive insects that swarmed forward.
The whole time Undrat's speakers roared out the classical parody hit.
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Nuk blinked twice as he saw it. Six massive pillars were rising up from the top of the base, out of the granite bedrock the base was built into. They were hot enough that his sensitive vision could barely see them over the thermal bloom.
He clicked the clicker rapidly.
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The massive fortress covered nearly a mile, embedded into the granite bones of the planet. Vast amounts of crystal had been drawn into its making. It was a mile from the river that divided the two mile wide valley in half. There was roughly two miles to the north and south of the fortress, to the mouths of the valley.
It was heavily shielded, heavily armored, and in a perfect temporal nexus point that converged with the planetary magnetic lines.
The fortress was exactly the type that proven to be unassailable by the Hive Lords and the Great Herd.
The Atrekna knew that nothing the ferals in general, and those screaming primate in particular, could do about it if the might of the Hive Lords, the Great Herd, or even rogue Atrekna could not even mar the surface of the fortress.
True, the fighting to the North and South was fierce. Far more than the primates had engaged in in the last few years, but so far the shielding had held with a few minor inconveinces.
The ferals had not been able to bring in any armor up the treacherous mountain slopes, so the Atrekna had no fear that the ferals could breach the phasic shielding. While the battlescreen was heating up, and the heat dissipation pillars had to be deployed, it was still within tolerances.
The Atrekna smugly turned away from worrying about heat, concentrating on bringing through another wave. There was some kind of heavy static coming from the Prime System, but the Atrekna chalked it up to the heavy presence of lemur military forces.
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Nuk noticed that one of the giant pillbugs suddenly lurched to the side, flesh and biological battlesteel gouting from a sudden wound that had greasy fire reaching for the sky where the majority of the pillbug was. Blue, white, and purple lightning raked the side of the pillbug, tearing a gaping slash in the side of the
The Atrekna in the air physically recoiled and Nuk saw them sever the connection as two more gaping wounds were suddenly torn in the side of the pillbug when an enraged bellow sounded out.
”RIP AND TEAR!” thundered out across the battlefield.
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General P'Kank leaned forward, looking at the feed from the Leebaw amphibious commandos. He heard the bellowed roar of a Terran literally too angry to die.
He turned to his aides, raising his antenna slightly.
”There is now no reason to doubt that the Atrekna on this planet are directly receiving reinforcements from the secondary target system,” the Treana'ad said.
He reached out and pressed a commo button. The sweating face of the commanding officer of 1st Cavalry Division appeared. Faintly P'Kank could hear a song playing loud enough that the CO of 1st Cav was accidentally relaying it.
in a big pink car we'll drive, roaming round the mountainsides
”Yes, sir?” the Rigellian female asked.
”We have confirmation,” P'Kank stated. ”Your orders have changed.”
The Rigellian female smiled.
”Destroy the enemy,” P'Kank ordered.
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Nuk saw it float up on his retinal link and quickly ducked under the water, swimming for the underwater shelter.
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Undrat saw it at the same time the LT ordered him to take a knee.
The Division CO ordered everyone in the red and amber threat zone to go hull down or take a knee.
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ATOMIC ATOMIC ATOMIC
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IN A BIG PINK CAR WE'LL DRIVE