Chapter 543: 4th & 10 (2/2)
She put her scalpel back, fingers moving automatically as she looked up at the aid station. It was still intact, still pulsing a medical beacon.
She got to one knee, grabbed the patient, slung him over one shoulder, her frame whining, and struggled to her feet. She lurched and staggered forward, one foot after another.
Three times she felt heavy impacts against her battlescreen, sending her stumbling forward, but she managed to get around the large boulder.
There was a half dozen russet mantids, a gold mantid, and nearly a dozen medics, all working on patients. She put the patient down on the stretcher as two others ran up.
”Ballistic trauma severed left arm, spore poisoning,” Melinvae said, even though her eVI transmitted it to the two litter bearers who ran up. ”I got the spore out.”
The two litter bearers nodded, lifting up the stretcher.
An urgent icon pinged to life on her HUD and she heard the audible warning.
”MEDIC!” sounded out in her ear.
She turned, looking at the battlefield. Her brain automatically ran through her route even as she threw herself forward, the frame hissing and whining, her feet thudding into the dirt and mud.
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ATOMIC ATOMIC ATOMIC popped up in Undrat's vision.
538 cranked up the gravity spike even as Lamark locked down the EM systems.
Undrat kept up the firepower at the Dwellerspawn heavy assault biological unit. Madame Three-Eighteen was singing loud, the engravings burning a bright yellow, a gold color, as Undrat directed fire across the upper row of eyes of the massive pillbug-esque creature. The eyes exploded as bright whitish blue actinic flashes marked the antimatter mass-reactive cores going off.
The massive creature screamed as Undrat pulled his fire down and raked the second set of eyes.
A meme popped up. A three panel vertical meme. The top panel read ”Congratulations on your new child, Animeland” with the banner of the Hamburger Kingdom painted on a little white ball. The middle panel was a ball with the banner of Animeland on it saying ”What new child?” The last was an atomic explosion with the Hamburger Kingdom colors painted ball saying ”The Little Boy.”
Undrat didn't understand it, but it still got a chuckle. A very sensible chuckle for a very sensible meme.
There was a white flash from the sky and Undrat's armor automatically let him know that it was an airburst at 1500 meters above the valley in the 450 kiloton range.
He automatically lifted off the trigger.
The overpressure wave hit like a hammer. 20 psi of overpressure, enough to destroy reinforced ferrocrete buildings, slammed into his shields. His grav-spike roared like a beast in pain, he could see his zero-point reactors go to peak load, but he paid it no mind.
He was Tukna'rn.
He was a Terran Confederacy of Aligned Systems Armed Services Heavy Weapons Operator.
He was First Cavalry Division.
538 and Lamark furiously worked, keeping the systems running. Lamark felt the impact, not as an overpressure, but as a fist of EMP slamming into him, only shunted away by the new systems. Radiation alarms screamed, but even the direct exposure didn't penetrate the radiation shielding.
The fireball expanded for just a smidge over three seconds, reaching out nearly four hundred meters from the explosion point. The superheated air drove a wall of compressed atmosphere in front of it, the thermal pulse outracing the shockwave.
In the four seconds it took for the blast wave to collapse back in on itself as the superheated air cooled and contracted, Undrat saw his heat and slush drop. The slush was faster, until the 'wind' changed direction. Despite the fact the air was hot, the fins were even hotter and the air being pulled over them helped with the heat dissapation.
538 reset the sensors and Undrat saw his vision clear.
The battlescreen was down. There were huge crystalline pillars atop the fortress fractured and splintered, throwing huge arcs of lightning into the top of the fortress, into the granite surrounding them. Any dirt or flora that had been on top of the fortress was gone, the blast scouring the earth down to the bedrock and flinging it out as well as pulling it up into the air.
”ALL UNITS! ADVANCE!” Undrat heard the order.
Undrat nodded. The back of the enemies defenses was broken.
It was time to crush the skull.
All according to doctrine.
Undrat's armor hummed as he slowly, purposefully began striding forward, out of the crater his grav-anchor had forged into the ground. His massive boots crunched against the shattered bedrock, his guns already searching for any surviving enemy.
Medic requests were popping up, but Undrat knew those were the job of the medics.
He was to ensure the enemy had better things to do than concentrate on the medics.
A giant centipede was shrieking, rearing up from where half its body had been crushed, lashing at itself and the creatures around it.
Undrat raked it with Madame Three-Eighteen as he stomped foward toward the enemy base.
Behind him the rest of Third Platoon stood up from where they were kneeling and began moving forward.
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Nuk was inside the little shelter when the blast went off. The water felt like it clanged to Nuk's senses as the thermal pulse hit the water, raising its temperature, then the shockwave hit it like a hammer.
The shelter groaned. One of the struts snapped and a small split appeared but one of the Leebaw commandos slapped a patch on it before it could do much more than spray everyone. The nanoforges all snarled and sparked.
Nuk could feel it was more in anger than the radiation really effecting them.
The viewscreen went green as they reset and degaussed. When the reset the showed the valley was completely swept clean. The external point defense emplacements had broken away, crashed to the ground and shattered. The spawning field was empty.
Nuk's Alpha Team Leader looked at the screens and clicked happily. He held up the clacker, a simple little box with a lever on the side, and clicked it three times. The amber light flashed three times, and three pulses of electricity, generated by the lever action, raced down the wire.
At the bottom of the river, where Team Two of the Alpha Team had set it up, the Temporal Stabilization Unit got the signal. The little spark closed the circuit, the zero point reactors fired up, the computer systems went live, and activated the primary temporal core.
It roared to life, the cold water keeping the heat down as it revved up to max power.
The entire valley seemed to thrum, to become more real than real, as the temporal instabilities created by the Atrekna were wiped away and the timelines slammed together, collapsing, crushing Atrekna working on making the timeline where they emerged victorious and spreading them out as ultra-minute sub-particles spreading through the dimensional foam.
Nuk's Team Leader gave a grin and clicked with satisfaction.
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”Do we need to get into the basement?” Elu asked.
Dambree held her arm straight out, her thumb extended up, and put it between her eye and the burning red mushroom cloud rising up in the mountains off in the distance.
Her thumb completely covered it.
”No, we should be good,” Dambree said. ”Let's go inside.”
”I hate black rain,” Elu grumped, reaching out and taking his sister's large hand.
”I know,” Dambree said.
Together they walked back to the cabin.