Chapter 358: 358
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"Find the goddamn frequency shift they're using," Staff Sergeant Stafford yelled out over the com-link to his greenies. "They keep getting a split second through our screens!"
The nearby heavy mining robots were taking cover behind the mechanical corpses of their previous brethren and firing their heavy mining laser at the tanks of Thunderpunch. Every full second or two worth the firepower managed to get a split second of the laser through the screens as the heavy duty lasers, used to mine rock deep in the crust, flickered through hundreds or thousands of wavelengths a second.
A laser ripped into the side of 4-3, Staffod's tank, scarring the warsteel but not penetrating. The ablative battlesteel in that section had already been torn away by the massive heat transfer of the laser weapon.
Stafford replied with a half second burst from the quad-barrel, the heavy mass reactive armor defeating discarding sabot antimatter core rounds, just listed as API in the upper right of his vision, ripped huge divots in the cover the handful of mechs were using. One mech cartwheeled away, its upper torso shucked out like an oyster and the metal burning from the reaction to the antimatter.
--working-- 582 answered. --shifting algorithm complex multiphasic atomic decay randomization core seed hash--
"Do your best," Stafford answered, pulling the gun around and raking a handful of mechs that had broken cover and were rushing toward the next cover. The actinic white flash of the rounds hitting blew off chunks of armor, reducing two to scrap and collapsed in a heap.
Five made it to cover.
The four green mantids inside the maintenance spaces of the tank clustered around the battlescreen projection system, trying to determine how the Precursor mining machines were managing to get through the frequency of the battlescreen. It had to be tuned to allow visible light and some EM emissions on order to let the tank 'see' and communicate, but the lasers were all amplified, nearly coherent light that should have been drained away or blocked by the battlescreen.
Yet every time a hundredth of a second kept getting through out of every second, which meant gigawatts of power getting through to the tank's armor. Additionally, roughly 16.5254% of the strikes that got through were on the correct frequency to affect the molecularly bonded battlesteel ablative armor. Huge chunks were being blown off by the energy transfer, or deeply slagged, in many cases all the way down to the warsteel hull.
884 was running communication to the other greenie tech teams in other tanks, trying to figure out what was going wrong. In Colonel Dremsal's tank one greenie, 439, was coordinating with Corps Support Command trying to get the issue handled.
If the vulnerability exploit spread to other Precursor vehicles, there could be trouble.
Colonel Dremsal was inside the tank, running his commander's gun through the automated system, the side of his helmet blistered and cracked from a brush by the expanding thermal bloom of one of the mining beams.
"13th Evac, how much longer?" he asked over the commo, focusing his fire on a pair of mining machines moving forward on treads, using the massive laser enhanced drillbit to cover the smaller machines moving with it. The shells from the TC's gun blew large chunks away from the drillbit, which kept rotating up more spiral teeth to take their place.
"How the fuck are mining machines giving us this much trouble?" his driver, SGT Esten asked, holding onto the control bars for his own external gun.
"Because if we fire the main gun the backwash will kill those people," PFC Zuckermann said, his hands holding onto the 'oh-shit bar' above his head instead of holding onto his gunnery station. He had his external gun on automatic, providing point defense.
"Loading the last up. Dropship Glorious Fat Duck is going to go to warmech mode as soon as we crossload the last patient. Her starboard anti-grav is out, so she'll be walking with a limp," Old Iron Feathers answered, not breaking stride from where he was carrying a Lanaktallan filly with a broken leg into the dropship. He'd already injected painkillers, antibiotics, and sprayed a quickset cast on the leg after applying coagulant. The filly was laying her head on Iron Feather's shoulder, sleepily blinking her two side-eyes.
"Let me know when you've got them buttoned up. I need my main guns back," Dremsal said.
"Soon as we lift off, you're clear," Iron Feathers said, handing the filly off and turning to move back out of the dropship. "Our armor can handle backwash."
Dremsal went to answer when his helmet switched channels on a priority.
"Dremsal, you still alive?" Trucker's voice was tight, nearly blotted out by the roar of the main guns.
"Hanging tight, sir," Dremsal said.
"You've got support coming, but that's beside the point," Trucker said. "As soon as the dropships button up, I want you to scatter and scatter hard, get at least a half mile between you and that shelter," Trucker snapped. "You've got crazy seismic all over the place, I'm surprised you can't feel them."
The hull rang and Dremsal shook his head.
"Just hang on," Trucker yelled. "The Great Herd's charging to the rescue. Go to local control, I'm wiping the fireplan in exactly one hundred fifty seconds from now. Make sure you update me via datalink when you can."
"Roger that, sir," Dremsal said. The seconds counting down was moving ooooh so slow.
"Black Betty, blow your track-five before it tears apart your running gear!" Trucker yelled right before the datalink dropped. "Psycho-Ex, drop back, I can see you spilling slush from..."
Dremsal checked the 360 view again. They were still crossloading patients from the smoking dropship.
He wondered where the Great Herd was at as more vehicles pushed their way through their shattered brethren and advanced on the static tank line.
A'armo'o grabbed the round being handed to him and passed it down, breathing heavily. His arms hurt and his waist ached, but they didn't have much time to reload the ammo hopper in his tank. His communications technician passed up a plasma round and A'armo'o handed it to the Terran, who turned and handed it to another one so it could be tossed in 'the grinder' to be reclaimed.
There were four Terrans standing on the back deck of his tank, passing rounds, one on top of the cupola. There were Telkan powered armor troops being handed rounds so they could catch up to the vehicles and hand the round onto the back deck.
Reloading under movement was something so outside the scope of A'armo'o's experience part of him giddily wondered if he'd been killed and didn't know it. It was unsafe, wasteful, and clumsy.
But the time they'd spent traveling was being put to use.
He could see four of the big Terran power armor troops holding onto the side of one of his tanks while the mechanics pulled the entire hoverfan fan drive motor out, dropping it on the ground for someone else to toss into the grinder. Five tanks had been repaired in less than six minutes using such methods.
The smooth, practiced, almost blase way the Terrans did the refit and reloading on the move should have frightened A'armo'o. He knew he should be alarmed, should be scared.
But all he cared about was getting as much done as possible as he passed down another round, which felt cold even through his body armor's gauntlets.
"How long to the river?" he asked his driver.
"Three minutes!" the driver yelled back, grinding the wreckage of a burnt out groundcar under the fans of the tank.
A'armo'o passed it on to the Leiutenant Colonel in charge of the Combat Sustainment Battalion that was working to bring his unit up to the best fighting shape they could.
"SIX MORE ROUNDS!" Captain Starpunt, the Commander of 144th Ordnance, yelled out over the channel, hustling forward with another tank round. The round she was carrying was hydrogen slush.
SFC Casey ran by, carrying two six-pack pods of 155mm mortar rounds, one in each hand, his power assist loading frame hissing as he ran. Captain Starpunt felt the urge to trip the big one-eyed man, who was acting like it nothing more than a spring day.
Vuxten heard the call that only six more rounds would be put out by the nanoforges and nodded to nobody in particular, panting inside his armor. The tank rounds were massive, forged out with handles on the sides, and he could only carry one at a time due to the sheer bulkiness of the munitions. He reached the back of a tank and passed it up to the human on the back, who passed it to next human, who passed it to the one on the cupola. The one on the cupola sprayed something on the handles and knocked them off before handing the round to the Lanaktallan half out of the tank.
The human on the back handed the plasma round to Vuxten. Vuxten turned around and ran back to meet someone carrying another round forward and someone waiting for the plasma round to run it to the reclaimer.
He was covered in sweat like he'd been in combat for the last ten minutes instead of just running fast enough to keep up with the tanks.
While ferrying heavy duty main gun rounds back and forth.
"Is that not dangerous?" Ga'alawpi'in asked, pointing at the icons that showed the Telkan Marines and the troops of 15th Sustainment flowing back and forth between the self-propelled heavy nanoforges and the tanks of the Great Herd.
No'Drak nodded, tapping the cigarette against his bladearm. "It is."
"Why do you permit it, then?" Ga'alawpi'in asked. "Does it not risk troops that may be required for upcoming combat?"
General No'Drak noticed that the Lanaktallan's tone had changed over the last ten minutes and he turned slightly to look at the Great Herd officer.
"Two men have been injured, one badly enough he'll need medivac'd out, but in the last ten minutes they've reloaded nearly half the munitions in two hundred tanks," No'Drak said. "If they stopped, it would have only taken three to four minutes, but that would mean that the tanks of the Great Herd would have been unmoving for that time, and that's movement they'd never get back."
"And who's to say the injured soldier wouldn't have been injured without the operation?" General Pulgrak asked. "His knee servo blew out and his leg folded the wrong way, shattering his knee and breaking the end of his humerus. It could have blown while he was walking to the chow hall."
Ga'alawpi'in nodded slowly. "While many feel the Great Herd cares not for casualties, and indeed, many commanders do not, I have learned in Great Grand Most High A'armo'o's shadow that each lost soldier causes a loss of combat effectiveness that far outstrips a single being's efforts."
No'Drak nodded. "Notice that the injured soldier transferred to sitting on the self-propelled nanoforge to run operations there and maintain the system, freeing up an ambulatory soldier to do the lifting and carrying."
Ga'alawpi'in nodded, turning his attention back to the data. He pointed at the large fuzzed area. "I dislike that we have no data for this area."
No'Drak nodded. "Once the Telkan Marines cross the river, they plan on sending a Scout Company to check that."
Ge'ermo'o pointed at the datastreams. "Trucker's datastream just jumped to nearly triple the bandwidth. More analysts are logging on."
"Something's happening," No'Drak said softly, putting the cigarette between his mandibles. He could smell his own stress pheromones. "What do you see that I don't, Trucker?" he asked, staring at the icon for HHC 1-1 3AD, which was amber and flashing to denote "I am engaged in active combat".
Trucker grunted as he was slammed against the edge of his hatch, his body armor taking the blow. The tank slid a meter to the side, the battlescreen indented almost to the hull of the tank, shooting sparks. The battlescreen projectors howled and something gave a loud metallic KRING! sound.
But the screen held.
Trucker shook his head and looked to the starboard. A Precursor vehicle was ripping up huge sections of the debris from a fallen skyraker, sucking it into the main part of the vehicle, and launching it from what had been the rear section.
It had been a chunk of hyperalloy slightly larger than his tank that had hit his shields.
Several tank main gun shots hit the massive vehicle, bubbles of white streaked with red erupting for a split second before smoke and debris exploded from the impacts. Craters several meters deep glowed red for a second then cooled.
"KILL THAT GODDAMN THING!" Trucker yelled out as his own tank fired on a Precursor vehicle nearly five times the size of the tank, with spinning grinding blades that were tearing up the plascrete road, sucking in shattered houses and vehicles, and spewing the debris out the back. The shot hit the spinning blades, three of them shattering.
The vehicle just rotated up replacements and kept advancing.
"Precursor combat vehicles we can destroy like a tornado into a matchstick house, but these damn things," Trucker snarled, raking a line of deep mining bots, shattering the first rank. Two kept struggling forward, deploying tracks from underneath them and grinding across the rubble.
Trucker closed his eyes for a second, feeling it around him, checking his implant at the same time.
It was going to be tight, but A'armo'o would make it just in time.
Just not to the fight he thought he was going to fight.
A'armo'o stomped the pedal and the command seat lowered, the hatch closing above him. The Terran on the cupola jumped down to the back deck, crouching down next to the Telkan Marines. A'armo'o saw Most High Gu'hunshawt's tank bobble when Sergeant Casey jumped onto the tank, grabbing onto it with one claw, the massive loading frame the Terran was wearing hissing and venting steam.
Ahead of him the river moved sluggishly, discolored with factory runoff from breached storage tanks, debris and corpses floating in the water. In places the water burned, the flames swept downriver.
His tank started warning of dangerous chemical vapor levels a hundred meters from the banks.
"Button up," A'armo'o said over the hybrid command channel his communications tech had put together that let him talk to the leaders of the Terran forces as well as his own Most Highs. Icons flashed for the various units.
They went green as they hit the river.
The fans howled as the tanks bobbled, but the plenum chambers kept up the pressure and the tanks rushed across the river, spraying around them the hellish chemical brew that had been clean blue water a week before. One tank skidded sideways, started to tilt, but the driver got it under control.
There was the tangled wreckage of factories on the other side of the river, twisted hyperalloys, ruptured tanks, partially collapsed buildings, destroyed vehicles. A ship was half sunk into the river and tilted at an angle, the keel sunk to the bedrock in the riverbed.
The tanks of the Great Herd swept around them, slamming into the wreckage, letting their battlescreens slam aside the debris as they streamed through the destroyed industrial section.
The lead tanks, all loaded with the new munitions, led by A'armo'o, cleared the industrial section.
A'armo'o could see the sides of the massive mining machines, the sides open to disgorge more attendant vehicles that had been built in their internal manufacturing spaces.
"OPEN FIRE!" A'armo'o yelled.
"SHOT READY!" his gunner yelled.
"SHOT OUT!" A'armo'o bellowed.
And stomped the fire petal.
Colonel Dremsal saw his IFF update, saw the icons of the Great Herd tanks appear, streaming out of the wreckage of the industrial section by the river, and gave a smile that was more teeth and snarl than anything normally recognizable as a smile.
It got even more toothier when Old Iron Feathers's voice came across the comlink.
"Buttoned up! Catching air!" the SAR officer said.
Dremsal could see the dropships clawing for the sky, the one left behind bending in the middle, the forward section seperating into seperate pieces. The IFF changed from CSFNV Glorious Fat Duck to Warrant Officer Glorious Fat Duck with the icon for heavy warmech.
"GUNS FREE!" Dremsal yelled over the Brigade channel.
The massive main guns of the heavy main battle tanks roared and the Precursor machines found their assault shattered as the guns that had been silent for nearly twenty minutes opened up again. No fancy munitions, nothing mass-reactive or clever tricks.
Straight density collapsed discarding sabot war shot.
Precursor mining machines that took even a glancing shot shattered, armor and mechanical pieces flying through the air. More than a few of the APDSFSDC rounds punched straight through the first one they hit to continue wreaking havoc.
One round blew through three Precursor machines, hit a chunk of battlesteel, and started tumbling.
It slammed into a heavy ore processor sideways, still moving at appreciable speeds, and caved in the entire side, the opposite hull exploding away from the transfer of kinetic force.
The machines in the back were turning, trying to face the oncoming Great Herd tanks, which were breaking into two prongs, sweeping toward Dremsal and the beleagured 3rd Brigade, 14th Regiment's tanks with one, the other trying to get behind the massive machines.
That's right, turn you bastards, show me your sides, Dremsal snarled. He kept an eye on the bar in the upper right of his vision that was slowly climbing toward a line. The bar was the elevation and distance of the dropships, the line was minimum safe distance for him to go guns free on the heavier munitions.
He frowned when he saw that the Great Herd units were hitting spaced shots, not going rapid fire. The rounds weren't apparently doing anything but leaving what looked like ice on the sides of the vehicles. He brought up the magnification and squinted at it.
It looked like someone had peppered the massive machine with snowballs.
"Target the Great Herd impact points!" he said over the comlink.
His own gunner adjusted his aiming point and fired.
The round, just a pointed bar of density collapsed tungsten steel with narrow fins, hit the armor that reacted to heat and pressure by tightening the molecular bonds. The armor that had been hit by nitrogen or hydrogen or helium, depending on which tank had fired.
The armor exploded off the vehicle and the heavy rod got through the armor, into the interior spaces.
The armor on the other side was tough enough that the heavy rod couldn't escape.
It did what fragments of metal had always done when they got inside an armored vehicle.
It bounced, shredding everything in its path.
The deep crawlers shuddered as more and more rounds hit the frozen spots, their nearly impenetrable armor brittle and frozen, the rounds penetrating inside and bouncing around.
"THUNDERPUNCH! SCATTER TO THE EAST!" Trucker suddenly yelled out over the command link.
SGT Eston didn't wait for confirmation, just engaged the tracks so the big tank rotated in place, shooting forward as soon as he was clear of the tank front and back. The rest of the Brigade followed suit, their battlescreens cycling up and going to independent algorithms.
A'armo'o watched the Terran tanks suddenly break rank on their siege wall and race toward the enemy machines, quickly forming into a serrated battle line.
The ground behind them suddenly bulged, the ground cracking as a massive section of the buried makeshift shelter was suddenly thrust upward.
A'armo'o could feel the ground shaking almost two miles away.
The ground suddenly pulled back in, a hole getting larger and larger. Dust and dirt plumed up from the hole as the vibration increased.
Vuxten stared, crouched down behind the cupola of the tank, down on one knee, as something massive clawed its way out of the hole.
What came out first, Vuxten at first thought it was the edge of a massive circular saw blade.
Then he realized that the 'teeth' were earth scooping buckets bigger than the tank he was riding on as the blade kept rising and rising. Four more 'blades' broke free, throwing rock and debris into the air as the massive 'wheels' spun.
Out of the hole came a monstrous mining machine. Three hundred meters tall, a kilometer long, two hundred meters wide, on over two dozen massive treads. It was at an angle for a moment, dirt sliding into the hole underneath it. Vuxten saw what looked like a small robot or something caught in the massive gears of the wheels. Sparks shot out and it was sucked into the gears.
It tilted, and slammed into the ground, the earth shocks making the tank Vuxten was on shudder. The displaced air swept over him, carrying debris.
Heavy battlescreens flickered to life and the machine gave a roar.
"KILL THAT FUCKING THING!" A'armo'o bellowed out over the command channel.
Please report us if you find any errors so we can fix it asap!
"Find the goddamn frequency shift they're using," Staff Sergeant Stafford yelled out over the com-link to his greenies. "They keep getting a split second through our screens!"
The nearby heavy mining robots were taking cover behind the mechanical corpses of their previous brethren and firing their heavy mining laser at the tanks of Thunderpunch. Every full second or two worth the firepower managed to get a split second of the laser through the screens as the heavy duty lasers, used to mine rock deep in the crust, flickered through hundreds or thousands of wavelengths a second.
A laser ripped into the side of 4-3, Staffod's tank, scarring the warsteel but not penetrating. The ablative battlesteel in that section had already been torn away by the massive heat transfer of the laser weapon.
Stafford replied with a half second burst from the quad-barrel, the heavy mass reactive armor defeating discarding sabot antimatter core rounds, just listed as API in the upper right of his vision, ripped huge divots in the cover the handful of mechs were using. One mech cartwheeled away, its upper torso shucked out like an oyster and the metal burning from the reaction to the antimatter.
--working-- 582 answered. --shifting algorithm complex multiphasic atomic decay randomization core seed hash--
"Do your best," Stafford answered, pulling the gun around and raking a handful of mechs that had broken cover and were rushing toward the next cover. The actinic white flash of the rounds hitting blew off chunks of armor, reducing two to scrap and collapsed in a heap.
Five made it to cover.
The four green mantids inside the maintenance spaces of the tank clustered around the battlescreen projection system, trying to determine how the Precursor mining machines were managing to get through the frequency of the battlescreen. It had to be tuned to allow visible light and some EM emissions on order to let the tank 'see' and communicate, but the lasers were all amplified, nearly coherent light that should have been drained away or blocked by the battlescreen.
Yet every time a hundredth of a second kept getting through out of every second, which meant gigawatts of power getting through to the tank's armor. Additionally, roughly 16.5254% of the strikes that got through were on the correct frequency to affect the molecularly bonded battlesteel ablative armor. Huge chunks were being blown off by the energy transfer, or deeply slagged, in many cases all the way down to the warsteel hull.
884 was running communication to the other greenie tech teams in other tanks, trying to figure out what was going wrong. In Colonel Dremsal's tank one greenie, 439, was coordinating with Corps Support Command trying to get the issue handled.
If the vulnerability exploit spread to other Precursor vehicles, there could be trouble.
Colonel Dremsal was inside the tank, running his commander's gun through the automated system, the side of his helmet blistered and cracked from a brush by the expanding thermal bloom of one of the mining beams.
"13th Evac, how much longer?" he asked over the commo, focusing his fire on a pair of mining machines moving forward on treads, using the massive laser enhanced drillbit to cover the smaller machines moving with it. The shells from the TC's gun blew large chunks away from the drillbit, which kept rotating up more spiral teeth to take their place.
"How the fuck are mining machines giving us this much trouble?" his driver, SGT Esten asked, holding onto the control bars for his own external gun.
"Because if we fire the main gun the backwash will kill those people," PFC Zuckermann said, his hands holding onto the 'oh-shit bar' above his head instead of holding onto his gunnery station. He had his external gun on automatic, providing point defense.
"Loading the last up. Dropship Glorious Fat Duck is going to go to warmech mode as soon as we crossload the last patient. Her starboard anti-grav is out, so she'll be walking with a limp," Old Iron Feathers answered, not breaking stride from where he was carrying a Lanaktallan filly with a broken leg into the dropship. He'd already injected painkillers, antibiotics, and sprayed a quickset cast on the leg after applying coagulant. The filly was laying her head on Iron Feather's shoulder, sleepily blinking her two side-eyes.
"Let me know when you've got them buttoned up. I need my main guns back," Dremsal said.
"Soon as we lift off, you're clear," Iron Feathers said, handing the filly off and turning to move back out of the dropship. "Our armor can handle backwash."
Dremsal went to answer when his helmet switched channels on a priority.
"Dremsal, you still alive?" Trucker's voice was tight, nearly blotted out by the roar of the main guns.
"Hanging tight, sir," Dremsal said.
"You've got support coming, but that's beside the point," Trucker said. "As soon as the dropships button up, I want you to scatter and scatter hard, get at least a half mile between you and that shelter," Trucker snapped. "You've got crazy seismic all over the place, I'm surprised you can't feel them."
The hull rang and Dremsal shook his head.
"Just hang on," Trucker yelled. "The Great Herd's charging to the rescue. Go to local control, I'm wiping the fireplan in exactly one hundred fifty seconds from now. Make sure you update me via datalink when you can."
"Roger that, sir," Dremsal said. The seconds counting down was moving ooooh so slow.
"Black Betty, blow your track-five before it tears apart your running gear!" Trucker yelled right before the datalink dropped. "Psycho-Ex, drop back, I can see you spilling slush from..."
Dremsal checked the 360 view again. They were still crossloading patients from the smoking dropship.
He wondered where the Great Herd was at as more vehicles pushed their way through their shattered brethren and advanced on the static tank line.
A'armo'o grabbed the round being handed to him and passed it down, breathing heavily. His arms hurt and his waist ached, but they didn't have much time to reload the ammo hopper in his tank. His communications technician passed up a plasma round and A'armo'o handed it to the Terran, who turned and handed it to another one so it could be tossed in 'the grinder' to be reclaimed.
There were four Terrans standing on the back deck of his tank, passing rounds, one on top of the cupola. There were Telkan powered armor troops being handed rounds so they could catch up to the vehicles and hand the round onto the back deck.
Reloading under movement was something so outside the scope of A'armo'o's experience part of him giddily wondered if he'd been killed and didn't know it. It was unsafe, wasteful, and clumsy.
But the time they'd spent traveling was being put to use.
He could see four of the big Terran power armor troops holding onto the side of one of his tanks while the mechanics pulled the entire hoverfan fan drive motor out, dropping it on the ground for someone else to toss into the grinder. Five tanks had been repaired in less than six minutes using such methods.
The smooth, practiced, almost blase way the Terrans did the refit and reloading on the move should have frightened A'armo'o. He knew he should be alarmed, should be scared.
But all he cared about was getting as much done as possible as he passed down another round, which felt cold even through his body armor's gauntlets.
"How long to the river?" he asked his driver.
"Three minutes!" the driver yelled back, grinding the wreckage of a burnt out groundcar under the fans of the tank.
A'armo'o passed it on to the Leiutenant Colonel in charge of the Combat Sustainment Battalion that was working to bring his unit up to the best fighting shape they could.
"SIX MORE ROUNDS!" Captain Starpunt, the Commander of 144th Ordnance, yelled out over the channel, hustling forward with another tank round. The round she was carrying was hydrogen slush.
SFC Casey ran by, carrying two six-pack pods of 155mm mortar rounds, one in each hand, his power assist loading frame hissing as he ran. Captain Starpunt felt the urge to trip the big one-eyed man, who was acting like it nothing more than a spring day.
Vuxten heard the call that only six more rounds would be put out by the nanoforges and nodded to nobody in particular, panting inside his armor. The tank rounds were massive, forged out with handles on the sides, and he could only carry one at a time due to the sheer bulkiness of the munitions. He reached the back of a tank and passed it up to the human on the back, who passed it to next human, who passed it to the one on the cupola. The one on the cupola sprayed something on the handles and knocked them off before handing the round to the Lanaktallan half out of the tank.
The human on the back handed the plasma round to Vuxten. Vuxten turned around and ran back to meet someone carrying another round forward and someone waiting for the plasma round to run it to the reclaimer.
He was covered in sweat like he'd been in combat for the last ten minutes instead of just running fast enough to keep up with the tanks.
While ferrying heavy duty main gun rounds back and forth.
"Is that not dangerous?" Ga'alawpi'in asked, pointing at the icons that showed the Telkan Marines and the troops of 15th Sustainment flowing back and forth between the self-propelled heavy nanoforges and the tanks of the Great Herd.
No'Drak nodded, tapping the cigarette against his bladearm. "It is."
"Why do you permit it, then?" Ga'alawpi'in asked. "Does it not risk troops that may be required for upcoming combat?"
General No'Drak noticed that the Lanaktallan's tone had changed over the last ten minutes and he turned slightly to look at the Great Herd officer.
"Two men have been injured, one badly enough he'll need medivac'd out, but in the last ten minutes they've reloaded nearly half the munitions in two hundred tanks," No'Drak said. "If they stopped, it would have only taken three to four minutes, but that would mean that the tanks of the Great Herd would have been unmoving for that time, and that's movement they'd never get back."
"And who's to say the injured soldier wouldn't have been injured without the operation?" General Pulgrak asked. "His knee servo blew out and his leg folded the wrong way, shattering his knee and breaking the end of his humerus. It could have blown while he was walking to the chow hall."
Ga'alawpi'in nodded slowly. "While many feel the Great Herd cares not for casualties, and indeed, many commanders do not, I have learned in Great Grand Most High A'armo'o's shadow that each lost soldier causes a loss of combat effectiveness that far outstrips a single being's efforts."
No'Drak nodded. "Notice that the injured soldier transferred to sitting on the self-propelled nanoforge to run operations there and maintain the system, freeing up an ambulatory soldier to do the lifting and carrying."
Ga'alawpi'in nodded, turning his attention back to the data. He pointed at the large fuzzed area. "I dislike that we have no data for this area."
No'Drak nodded. "Once the Telkan Marines cross the river, they plan on sending a Scout Company to check that."
Ge'ermo'o pointed at the datastreams. "Trucker's datastream just jumped to nearly triple the bandwidth. More analysts are logging on."
"Something's happening," No'Drak said softly, putting the cigarette between his mandibles. He could smell his own stress pheromones. "What do you see that I don't, Trucker?" he asked, staring at the icon for HHC 1-1 3AD, which was amber and flashing to denote "I am engaged in active combat".
Trucker grunted as he was slammed against the edge of his hatch, his body armor taking the blow. The tank slid a meter to the side, the battlescreen indented almost to the hull of the tank, shooting sparks. The battlescreen projectors howled and something gave a loud metallic KRING! sound.
But the screen held.
Trucker shook his head and looked to the starboard. A Precursor vehicle was ripping up huge sections of the debris from a fallen skyraker, sucking it into the main part of the vehicle, and launching it from what had been the rear section.
It had been a chunk of hyperalloy slightly larger than his tank that had hit his shields.
Several tank main gun shots hit the massive vehicle, bubbles of white streaked with red erupting for a split second before smoke and debris exploded from the impacts. Craters several meters deep glowed red for a second then cooled.
"KILL THAT GODDAMN THING!" Trucker yelled out as his own tank fired on a Precursor vehicle nearly five times the size of the tank, with spinning grinding blades that were tearing up the plascrete road, sucking in shattered houses and vehicles, and spewing the debris out the back. The shot hit the spinning blades, three of them shattering.
The vehicle just rotated up replacements and kept advancing.
"Precursor combat vehicles we can destroy like a tornado into a matchstick house, but these damn things," Trucker snarled, raking a line of deep mining bots, shattering the first rank. Two kept struggling forward, deploying tracks from underneath them and grinding across the rubble.
Trucker closed his eyes for a second, feeling it around him, checking his implant at the same time.
It was going to be tight, but A'armo'o would make it just in time.
Just not to the fight he thought he was going to fight.
A'armo'o stomped the pedal and the command seat lowered, the hatch closing above him. The Terran on the cupola jumped down to the back deck, crouching down next to the Telkan Marines. A'armo'o saw Most High Gu'hunshawt's tank bobble when Sergeant Casey jumped onto the tank, grabbing onto it with one claw, the massive loading frame the Terran was wearing hissing and venting steam.
Ahead of him the river moved sluggishly, discolored with factory runoff from breached storage tanks, debris and corpses floating in the water. In places the water burned, the flames swept downriver.
His tank started warning of dangerous chemical vapor levels a hundred meters from the banks.
"Button up," A'armo'o said over the hybrid command channel his communications tech had put together that let him talk to the leaders of the Terran forces as well as his own Most Highs. Icons flashed for the various units.
They went green as they hit the river.
The fans howled as the tanks bobbled, but the plenum chambers kept up the pressure and the tanks rushed across the river, spraying around them the hellish chemical brew that had been clean blue water a week before. One tank skidded sideways, started to tilt, but the driver got it under control.
There was the tangled wreckage of factories on the other side of the river, twisted hyperalloys, ruptured tanks, partially collapsed buildings, destroyed vehicles. A ship was half sunk into the river and tilted at an angle, the keel sunk to the bedrock in the riverbed.
The tanks of the Great Herd swept around them, slamming into the wreckage, letting their battlescreens slam aside the debris as they streamed through the destroyed industrial section.
The lead tanks, all loaded with the new munitions, led by A'armo'o, cleared the industrial section.
A'armo'o could see the sides of the massive mining machines, the sides open to disgorge more attendant vehicles that had been built in their internal manufacturing spaces.
"OPEN FIRE!" A'armo'o yelled.
"SHOT READY!" his gunner yelled.
"SHOT OUT!" A'armo'o bellowed.
And stomped the fire petal.
Colonel Dremsal saw his IFF update, saw the icons of the Great Herd tanks appear, streaming out of the wreckage of the industrial section by the river, and gave a smile that was more teeth and snarl than anything normally recognizable as a smile.
It got even more toothier when Old Iron Feathers's voice came across the comlink.
"Buttoned up! Catching air!" the SAR officer said.
Dremsal could see the dropships clawing for the sky, the one left behind bending in the middle, the forward section seperating into seperate pieces. The IFF changed from CSFNV Glorious Fat Duck to Warrant Officer Glorious Fat Duck with the icon for heavy warmech.
"GUNS FREE!" Dremsal yelled over the Brigade channel.
The massive main guns of the heavy main battle tanks roared and the Precursor machines found their assault shattered as the guns that had been silent for nearly twenty minutes opened up again. No fancy munitions, nothing mass-reactive or clever tricks.
Straight density collapsed discarding sabot war shot.
Precursor mining machines that took even a glancing shot shattered, armor and mechanical pieces flying through the air. More than a few of the APDSFSDC rounds punched straight through the first one they hit to continue wreaking havoc.
One round blew through three Precursor machines, hit a chunk of battlesteel, and started tumbling.
It slammed into a heavy ore processor sideways, still moving at appreciable speeds, and caved in the entire side, the opposite hull exploding away from the transfer of kinetic force.
The machines in the back were turning, trying to face the oncoming Great Herd tanks, which were breaking into two prongs, sweeping toward Dremsal and the beleagured 3rd Brigade, 14th Regiment's tanks with one, the other trying to get behind the massive machines.
That's right, turn you bastards, show me your sides, Dremsal snarled. He kept an eye on the bar in the upper right of his vision that was slowly climbing toward a line. The bar was the elevation and distance of the dropships, the line was minimum safe distance for him to go guns free on the heavier munitions.
He frowned when he saw that the Great Herd units were hitting spaced shots, not going rapid fire. The rounds weren't apparently doing anything but leaving what looked like ice on the sides of the vehicles. He brought up the magnification and squinted at it.
It looked like someone had peppered the massive machine with snowballs.
"Target the Great Herd impact points!" he said over the comlink.
His own gunner adjusted his aiming point and fired.
The round, just a pointed bar of density collapsed tungsten steel with narrow fins, hit the armor that reacted to heat and pressure by tightening the molecular bonds. The armor that had been hit by nitrogen or hydrogen or helium, depending on which tank had fired.
The armor exploded off the vehicle and the heavy rod got through the armor, into the interior spaces.
The armor on the other side was tough enough that the heavy rod couldn't escape.
It did what fragments of metal had always done when they got inside an armored vehicle.
It bounced, shredding everything in its path.
The deep crawlers shuddered as more and more rounds hit the frozen spots, their nearly impenetrable armor brittle and frozen, the rounds penetrating inside and bouncing around.
"THUNDERPUNCH! SCATTER TO THE EAST!" Trucker suddenly yelled out over the command link.
SGT Eston didn't wait for confirmation, just engaged the tracks so the big tank rotated in place, shooting forward as soon as he was clear of the tank front and back. The rest of the Brigade followed suit, their battlescreens cycling up and going to independent algorithms.
A'armo'o watched the Terran tanks suddenly break rank on their siege wall and race toward the enemy machines, quickly forming into a serrated battle line.
The ground behind them suddenly bulged, the ground cracking as a massive section of the buried makeshift shelter was suddenly thrust upward.
A'armo'o could feel the ground shaking almost two miles away.
The ground suddenly pulled back in, a hole getting larger and larger. Dust and dirt plumed up from the hole as the vibration increased.
Vuxten stared, crouched down behind the cupola of the tank, down on one knee, as something massive clawed its way out of the hole.
What came out first, Vuxten at first thought it was the edge of a massive circular saw blade.
Then he realized that the 'teeth' were earth scooping buckets bigger than the tank he was riding on as the blade kept rising and rising. Four more 'blades' broke free, throwing rock and debris into the air as the massive 'wheels' spun.
Out of the hole came a monstrous mining machine. Three hundred meters tall, a kilometer long, two hundred meters wide, on over two dozen massive treads. It was at an angle for a moment, dirt sliding into the hole underneath it. Vuxten saw what looked like a small robot or something caught in the massive gears of the wheels. Sparks shot out and it was sucked into the gears.
It tilted, and slammed into the ground, the earth shocks making the tank Vuxten was on shudder. The displaced air swept over him, carrying debris.
Heavy battlescreens flickered to life and the machine gave a roar.
"KILL THAT FUCKING THING!" A'armo'o bellowed out over the command channel.
"Find the goddamn frequency shift they're using," Staff Sergeant Stafford yelled out over the com-link to his greenies. "They keep getting a split second through our screens!"The nearby heavy mining robots were taking cover behind the mechanical corpses of their previous brethren and firing their heavy mining laser at the tanks of Thunderpunch. Every full second or two worth the firepower managed to get a split second of the laser through the screens as the heavy duty lasers, used to mine rock deep in the crust, flickered through hundreds or thousands of wavelengths a second.A laser ripped into the side of 4-3, Staffod's tank, scarring the warsteel but not penetrating. The ablative battlesteel in that section had already been torn away by the massive heat transfer of the laser weapon.Stafford replied with a half second burst from the quad-barrel, the heavy mass reactive armor defeating discarding sabot antimatter core rounds, just listed as API in the upper right of his vision, ripped huge divots in the cover the handful of mechs were using. One mech cartwheeled away, its upper torso shucked out like an oyster and the metal burning from the reaction to the antimatter.--working-- 582 answered. --shifting algorithm complex multiphasic atomic decay randomization core seed hash--"Do your best," Stafford answered, pulling the gun around and raking a handful of mechs that had broken cover and were rushing toward the next cover. The actinic white flash of the rounds hitting blew off chunks of armor, reducing two to scrap and collapsed in a heap.Five made it to cover.The four green mantids inside the maintenance spaces of the tank clustered around the battlescreen projection system, trying to determine how the Precursor mining machines were managing to get through the frequency of the battlescreen. It had to be tuned to allow visible light and some EM emissions on order to let the tank 'see' and communicate, but the lasers were all amplified, nearly coherent light that should have been drained away or blocked by the battlescreen.Yet every time a hundredth of a second kept getting through out of every second, which meant gigawatts of power getting through to the tank's armor. Additionally, roughly 16.5254% of the strikes that got through were on the correct frequency to affect the molecularly bonded battlesteel ablative armor. Huge chunks were being blown off by the energy transfer, or deeply slagged, in many cases all the way down to the warsteel hull.884 was running communication to the other greenie tech teams in other tanks, trying to figure out what was going wrong. In Colonel Dremsal's tank one greenie, 439, was coordinating with Corps Support Command trying to get the issue handled.If the vulnerability exploit spread to other Precursor vehicles, there could be trouble.Colonel Dremsal was inside the tank, running his commander's gun through the automated system, the side of his helmet blistered and cracked from a brush by the expanding thermal bloom of one of the mining beams."13th Evac, how much longer?" he asked over the commo, focusing his fire on a pair of mining machines moving forward on treads, using the massive laser enhanced drillbit to cover the smaller machines moving with it. The shells from the TC's gun blew large chunks away from the drillbit, which kept rotating up more spiral teeth to take their place."How the fuck are mining machines giving us this much trouble?" his driver, SGT Esten asked, holding onto the control bars for his own external gun."Because if we fire the main gun the backwash will kill those people," PFC Zuckermann said, his hands holding onto the 'oh-shit bar' above his head instead of holding onto his gunnery station. He had his external gun on automatic, providing point defense."Loading the last up. Dropship Glorious Fat Duck is going to go to warmech mode as soon as we crossload the last patient. Her starboard anti-grav is out, so she'll be walking with a limp," Old Iron Feathers answered, not breaking stride from where he was carrying a Lanaktallan filly with a broken leg into the dropship. He'd already injected painkillers, antibiotics, and sprayed a quickset cast on the leg after applying coagulant. The filly was laying her head on Iron Feather's shoulder, sleepily blinking her two side-eyes."Let me know when you've got them buttoned up. I need my main guns back," Dremsal said."Soon as we lift off, you're clear," Iron Feathers said, handing the filly off and turning to move back out of the dropship. "Our armor can handle backwash."Dremsal went to answer when his helmet switched channels on a priority."Dremsal, you still alive?" Trucker's voice was tight, nearly blotted out by the roar of the main guns."Hanging tight, sir," Dremsal said."You've got support coming, but that's beside the point," Trucker said. "As soon as the dropships button up, I want you to scatter and scatter hard, get at least a half mile between you and that shelter," Trucker snapped. "You've got crazy seismic all over the place, I'm surprised you can't feel them."The hull rang and Dremsal shook his head."Just hang on," Trucker yelled. "The Great Herd's charging to the rescue. Go to local control, I'm wiping the fireplan in exactly one hundred fifty seconds from now. Make sure you update me via datalink when you can.""Roger that, sir," Dremsal said. The seconds counting down was moving ooooh so slow."Black Betty, blow your track-five before it tears apart your running gear!" Trucker yelled right before the datalink dropped. "Psycho-Ex, drop back, I can see you spilling slush from..."Dremsal checked the 360 view again. They were still crossloading patients from the smoking dropship.He wondered where the Great Herd was at as more vehicles pushed their way through their shattered brethren and advanced on the static tank line.A'armo'o grabbed the round being handed to him and passed it down, breathing heavily. His arms hurt and his waist ached, but they didn't have much time to reload the ammo hopper in his tank. His communications technician passed up a plasma round and A'armo'o handed it to the Terran, who turned and handed it to another one so it could be tossed in 'the grinder' to be reclaimed.There were four Terrans standing on the back deck of his tank, passing rounds, one on top of the cupola. There were Telkan powered armor troops being handed rounds so they could catch up to the vehicles and hand the round onto the back deck.Reloading under movement was something so outside the scope of A'armo'o's experience part of him giddily wondered if he'd been killed and didn't know it. It was unsafe, wasteful, and clumsy.But the time they'd spent traveling was being put to use.He could see four of the big Terran power armor troops holding onto the side of one of his tanks while the mechanics pulled the entire hoverfan fan drive motor out, dropping it on the ground for someone else to toss into the grinder. Five tanks had been repaired in less than six minutes using such methods.The smooth, practiced, almost blase way the Terrans did the refit and reloading on the move should have frightened A'armo'o. He knew he should be alarmed, should be scared.But all he cared about was getting as much done as possible as he passed down another round, which felt cold even through his body armor's gauntlets."How long to the river?" he asked his driver."Three minutes!" the driver yelled back, grinding the wreckage of a burnt out groundcar under the fans of the tank.A'armo'o passed it on to the Leiutenant Colonel in charge of the Combat Sustainment Battalion that was working to bring his unit up to the best fighting shape they could."SIX MORE ROUNDS!" Captain Starpunt, the Commander of 144th Ordnance, yelled out over the channel, hustling forward with another tank round. The round she was carrying was hydrogen slush.SFC Casey ran by, carrying two six-pack pods of 155mm mortar rounds, one in each hand, his power assist loading frame hissing as he ran. Captain Starpunt felt the urge to trip the big one-eyed man, who was acting like it nothing more than a spring day.Vuxten heard the call that only six more rounds would be put out by the nanoforges and nodded to nobody in particular, panting inside his armor. The tank rounds were massive, forged out with handles on the sides, and he could only carry one at a time due to the sheer bulkiness of the munitions. He reached the back of a tank and passed it up to the human on the back, who passed it to next human, who passed it to the one on the cupola. The one on the cupola sprayed something on the handles and knocked them off before handing the round to the Lanaktallan half out of the tank.The human on the back handed the plasma round to Vuxten. Vuxten turned around and ran back to meet someone carrying another round forward and someone waiting for the plasma round to run it to the reclaimer.He was covered in sweat like he'd been in combat for the last ten minutes instead of just running fast enough to keep up with the tanks.While ferrying heavy duty main gun rounds back and forth."Is that not dangerous?" Ga'alawpi'in asked, pointing at the icons that showed the Telkan Marines and the troops of 15th Sustainment flowing back and forth between the self-propelled heavy nanoforges and the tanks of the Great Herd.No'Drak nodded, tapping the cigarette against his bladearm. "It is.""Why do you permit it, then?" Ga'alawpi'in asked. "Does it not risk troops that may be required for upcoming combat?"General No'Drak noticed that the Lanaktallan's tone had changed over the last ten minutes and he turned slightly to look at the Great Herd officer."Two men have been injured, one badly enough he'll need medivac'd out, but in the last ten minutes they've reloaded nearly half the munitions in two hundred tanks," No'Drak said. "If they stopped, it would have only taken three to four minutes, but that would mean that the tanks of the Great Herd would have been unmoving for that time, and that's movement they'd never get back.""And who's to say the injured soldier wouldn't have been injured without the operation?" General Pulgrak asked. "His knee servo blew out and his leg folded the wrong way, shattering his knee and breaking the end of his humerus. It could have blown while he was walking to the chow hall."Ga'alawpi'in nodded slowly. "While many feel the Great Herd cares not for casualties, and indeed, many commanders do not, I have learned in Great Grand Most High A'armo'o's shadow that each lost soldier causes a loss of combat effectiveness that far outstrips a single being's efforts."No'Drak nodded. "Notice that the injured soldier transferred to sitting on the self-propelled nanoforge to run operations there and maintain the system, freeing up an ambulatory soldier to do the lifting and carrying."Ga'alawpi'in nodded, turning his attention back to the data. He pointed at the large fuzzed area. "I dislike that we have no data for this area."No'Drak nodded. "Once the Telkan Marines cross the river, they plan on sending a Scout Company to check that."Ge'ermo'o pointed at the datastreams. "Trucker's datastream just jumped to nearly triple the bandwidth. More analysts are logging on.""Something's happening," No'Drak said softly, putting the cigarette between his mandibles. He could smell his own stress pheromones. "What do you see that I don't, Trucker?" he asked, staring at the icon for HHC 1-1 3AD, which was amber and flashing to denote "I am engaged in active combat".Trucker grunted as he was slammed against the edge of his hatch, his body armor taking the blow. The tank slid a meter to the side, the battlescreen indented almost to the hull of the tank, shooting sparks. The battlescreen projectors howled and something gave a loud metallic KRING! sound.But the screen held.Trucker shook his head and looked to the starboard. A Precursor vehicle was ripping up huge sections of the debris from a fallen skyraker, sucking it into the main part of the vehicle, and launching it from what had been the rear section.It had been a chunk of hyperalloy slightly larger than his tank that had hit his shields.Several tank main gun shots hit the massive vehicle, bubbles of white streaked with red erupting for a split second before smoke and debris exploded from the impacts. Craters several meters deep glowed red for a second then cooled."KILL THAT GODDAMN THING!" Trucker yelled out as his own tank fired on a Precursor vehicle nearly five times the size of the tank, with spinning grinding blades that were tearing up the plascrete road, sucking in shattered houses and vehicles, and spewing the debris out the back. The shot hit the spinning blades, three of them shattering.The vehicle just rotated up replacements and kept advancing."Precursor combat vehicles we can destroy like a tornado into a matchstick house, but these damn things," Trucker snarled, raking a line of deep mining bots, shattering the first rank. Two kept struggling forward, deploying tracks from underneath them and grinding across the rubble.Trucker closed his eyes for a second, feeling it around him, checking his implant at the same time.It was going to be tight, but A'armo'o would make it just in time.Just not to the fight he thought he was going to fight.A'armo'o stomped the pedal and the command seat lowered, the hatch closing above him. The Terran on the cupola jumped down to the back deck, crouching down next to the Telkan Marines. A'armo'o saw Most High Gu'hunshawt's tank bobble when Sergeant Casey jumped onto the tank, grabbing onto it with one claw, the massive loading frame the Terran was wearing hissing and venting steam.Ahead of him the river moved sluggishly, discolored with factory runoff from breached storage tanks, debris and corpses floating in the water. In places the water burned, the flames swept downriver.His tank started warning of dangerous chemical vapor levels a hundred meters from the banks."Button up," A'armo'o said over the hybrid command channel his communications tech had put together that let him talk to the leaders of the Terran forces as well as his own Most Highs. Icons flashed for the various units.They went green as they hit the river.The fans howled as the tanks bobbled, but the plenum chambers kept up the pressure and the tanks rushed across the river, spraying around them the hellish chemical brew that had been clean blue water a week before. One tank skidded sideways, started to tilt, but the driver got it under control.There was the tangled wreckage of factories on the other side of the river, twisted hyperalloys, ruptured tanks, partially collapsed buildings, destroyed vehicles. A ship was half sunk into the river and tilted at an angle, the keel sunk to the bedrock in the riverbed.The tanks of the Great Herd swept around them, slamming into the wreckage, letting their battlescreens slam aside the debris as they streamed through the destroyed industrial section.The lead tanks, all loaded with the new munitions, led by A'armo'o, cleared the industrial section.A'armo'o could see the sides of the massive mining machines, the sides open to disgorge more attendant vehicles that had been built in their internal manufacturing spaces."OPEN FIRE!" A'armo'o yelled."SHOT READY!" his gunner yelled."SHOT OUT!" A'armo'o bellowed.And stomped the fire petal.Colonel Dremsal saw his IFF update, saw the icons of the Great Herd tanks appear, streaming out of the wreckage of the industrial section by the river, and gave a smile that was more teeth and snarl than anything normally recognizable as a smile.It got even more toothier when Old Iron Feathers's voice came across the comlink."Buttoned up! Catching air!" the SAR officer said.Dremsal could see the dropships clawing for the sky, the one left behind bending in the middle, the forward section seperating into seperate pieces. The IFF changed from CSFNV Glorious Fat Duck to Warrant Officer Glorious Fat Duck with the icon for heavy warmech."GUNS FREE!" Dremsal yelled over the Brigade channel.The massive main guns of the heavy main battle tanks roared and the Precursor machines found their assault shattered as the guns that had been silent for nearly twenty minutes opened up again. No fancy munitions, nothing mass-reactive or clever tricks.Straight density collapsed discarding sabot war shot.Precursor mining machines that took even a glancing shot shattered, armor and mechanical pieces flying through the air. More than a few of the APDSFSDC rounds punched straight through the first one they hit to continue wreaking havoc.One round blew through three Precursor machines, hit a chunk of battlesteel, and started tumbling.It slammed into a heavy ore processor sideways, still moving at appreciable speeds, and caved in the entire side, the opposite hull exploding away from the transfer of kinetic force.The machines in the back were turning, trying to face the oncoming Great Herd tanks, which were breaking into two prongs, sweeping toward Dremsal and the beleagured 3rd Brigade, 14th Regiment's tanks with one, the other trying to get behind the massive machines.That's right, turn you bastards, show me your sides, Dremsal snarled. He kept an eye on the bar in the upper right of his vision that was slowly climbing toward a line. The bar was the elevation and distance of the dropships, the line was minimum safe distance for him to go guns free on the heavier munitions.He frowned when he saw that the Great Herd units were hitting spaced shots, not going rapid fire. The rounds weren't apparently doing anything but leaving what looked like ice on the sides of the vehicles. He brought up the magnification and squinted at it.It looked like someone had peppered the massive machine with snowballs."Target the Great Herd impact points!" he said over the comlink.His own gunner adjusted his aiming point and fired.The round, just a pointed bar of density collapsed tungsten steel with narrow fins, hit the armor that reacted to heat and pressure by tightening the molecular bonds. The armor that had been hit by nitrogen or hydrogen or helium, depending on which tank had fired.The armor exploded off the vehicle and the heavy rod got through the armor, into the interior spaces.The armor on the other side was tough enough that the heavy rod couldn't escape.It did what fragments of metal had always done when they got inside an armored vehicle.It bounced, shredding everything in its path.The deep crawlers shuddered as more and more rounds hit the frozen spots, their nearly impenetrable armor brittle and frozen, the rounds penetrating inside and bouncing around."THUNDERPUNCH! SCATTER TO THE EAST!" Trucker suddenly yelled out over the command link.SGT Eston didn't wait for confirmation, just engaged the tracks so the big tank rotated in place, shooting forward as soon as he was clear of the tank front and back. The rest of the Brigade followed suit, their battlescreens cycling up and going to independent algorithms.A'armo'o watched the Terran tanks suddenly break rank on their siege wall and race toward the enemy machines, quickly forming into a serrated battle line.The ground behind them suddenly bulged, the ground cracking as a massive section of the buried makeshift shelter was suddenly thrust upward.A'armo'o could feel the ground shaking almost two miles away.The ground suddenly pulled back in, a hole getting larger and larger. Dust and dirt plumed up from the hole as the vibration increased.Vuxten stared, crouched down behind the cupola of the tank, down on one knee, as something massive clawed its way out of the hole.What came out first, Vuxten at first thought it was the edge of a massive circular saw blade.Then he realized that the 'teeth' were earth scooping buckets bigger than the tank he was riding on as the blade kept rising and rising. Four more 'blades' broke free, throwing rock and debris into the air as the massive 'wheels' spun.Out of the hole came a monstrous mining machine. Three hundred meters tall, a kilometer long, two hundred meters wide, on over two dozen massive treads. It was at an angle for a moment, dirt sliding into the hole underneath it. Vuxten saw what looked like a small robot or something caught in the massive gears of the wheels. Sparks shot out and it was sucked into the gears.It tilted, and slammed into the ground, the earth shocks making the tank Vuxten was on shudder. The displaced air swept over him, carrying debris.Heavy battlescreens flickered to life and the machine gave a roar."KILL THAT FUCKING THING!" A'armo'o bellowed out over the command channel.
