Chapter 104: (Vuxten)

General Imak "Tic-Tak" Takilikakik put his hands on his hips, turning off his favorite wallpaper, and stared at the tall skinny General on his screen. General Altair glared back, surrounded by the command room of the orbital station the General ruled with an iron fist.

"Who gave you authorization to override my command, General?" Tic-Tak asked, knowing that he had no change of getting that most excellent dominating growl that the Marines who had seen action were able to project into their voice, so just sticking with his normal speaking voice. "I'm in charge of ground operations on Telkan-1 and Telkan-2."

"As the ranking military intelligence officer I have the power to assign missions without the oversight of ground officers," Altair snarled back. He buffed his East Point Officer's School ring on his dress tunic and examined it, obviously intending on reminding Tic-Tak who had been to officer's school at a prestigious university and who had attended it at a lowly out colony training camp. "The deployment of military forces from exo-atmospheric to planetary landing is, by regulations, under the authority of orbital command."

"You are not orbital command, you are a joint services military intelligence hub. You overstepped your authority! You sent my men into a death trap, you pumped up popinjay!" Tic-Tak snarled. He didn't notice how many of his own troops turned around to look at him. "I don't give a fart in an empty narcobrew bottle about your sphere of authority, General, ground-side is like nothing I've ever seen before..."

"Oh, with your extensive combat experience?" Altair sneered, shifting slightly to highlight his combat action badge.

"No, over two centuries of putting shit back together after you line slime broke everything in sight, over two centuries of keeping you mouth breathing gun bunnies fed, watered, and bunked down in something more than a water filled ditch! Sixty planets and I've never seen anything like this, even after the Elven Queen Martek went mad!" Tic-Tak yelled back. "You sent a company of my best people, led by a Lieutenant who arrived with Tanluan Neural Worms and was down for the first two months he was here, into a city bombed out by atomics, overgrown by the biological warfare symbiotes, with a lockout only you can lift? You sent my men TO THEIR GODDAMN DEATHS!"

"Calm yourself, General. V Corps landings will provide the necessary firepower to ensure that your men are just fine," Altair scoffed. "No need to get hysterical just because someone has to pull a few triggers. I understand you can't really comprehend what it actually means to be a Marine, having never fired your weapon, so you probably don't understand that casualties are to be expected for a major operation against enemy forces such as this."

Tic-Tak stared at the other man in horror. He knew that Marines, even Civilians, could get killed during military operations but he had always tried to ensure that not a single life was ever wasted, that casualties were always kept to a minimum while achieving as many objectives as possible.

But General Altair was acting as if his men were nothing more than game pieces to be disposed of as needed, like tokens to play a game for a high score.

"Yes, General, hmph, Tic-Tak, Marines die during combat, not that I'd expect you to understand that," General Altair sneered.

Major General Takilikakik (Two Stars) had always avoided real confrontation, ever since he was a small fat child on an outer rim colony. There were always ways around a fight, a way to avoid it, but this time, this time there was something different.

"The amount of men that V Corps will be landing would far exceed any possible casualties that might be inflicted on your men by a factor of five, that's without taking into account their firepower and leadership," Lieutenant General (Three Stars) Altair stated with a shrug. "The craters are obvious landing areas. Even if your troops can't lay down beacons, they'll still be able to land on geographic points. Besides, we'll be doing orbital strikes on the craters to clear the area anyway."

Besides, we don't even need you... went through Takilikakik's mind.

"Then why did you send my men into those death zones?" Tic-Tak asked. His body had gone cold, an almost painful prickling up and down his spine. He tapped a message to his XO. "Why did you lock out their weapons?"

"The Marine Corps always covers all possibilities," General Altair answered. During his explanation the holotank became filled with static, getting thicker and thicker. "You know as well as I do, by regulation, they don't need to use their weapons until they become engaged in combat. There's no reason to have them wandering about with hot weapons."

"General, sir, spore level is rising, we're losing atmospheric communications," Tic-Tak's XO, Brigadier General (1-Star) Cormand called out after double-checking the message from General Takilikakik.

"General, I'm losing you," Tic-Tak lied, watching the screen dissolve into static.

Well, there goes my career, Tic-Tak thought to himself. It was nice while it lasted. Maybe I can get a job with Confederate Colony Administration? He turned to his XO.

"Cormand, I want you to pack solid fuel rocket boosted graviton levitation drones with recode orders for all LZ scouts. Limited VI's, we're going to lose those drones. Max-speed max-bandwidth, cook them out of the nearest creation engines to the units. Get them in there. Get those units out of the cities, away from those craters, and have them put up alternate LZ's."

"General Altair won't like that," the XO warned.

"What that empty headed buffoon does and does not like is not my concern. My concern, my only concern was allowing the troops in my area of operations to flourish just as well as the civilians with what little logistics I possess, and throwing their lives away for something that had no realistic reason beyond self-gratification goes directly counter to everything I believe," Tic-Tak said, putting his hands behind his back and staring at the representation of the Telkan-1 and Telkan-2. "He sent the men, my men, into certain death because he is too stupid and pig-headed to believe our reports and he wanted his name on the V Corps relief deployment that will occur, thanks to his LZ sites, under fire, enabling him to gather up more blood stained gongs and ribbons."

He turned away from the holotank. "If he spent less time wondering how to get his next medal and more time doing his job, our people wouldn't be fighting for their lives."

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

The plants, deflated, under a thin layer of moss, suddenly burst up as liquid nutrients flooded their systems. All around the Marines plants erupted from the green carpet, petals and leaves unfurling, catalysts building steam pressure from water. A Precursor wreck erupted in a swarm of insects the size of a basketball, that homed in on the big robot combat armors, shrieking as they bored in, got close enough for their antenna to sense the electrical currents, and exploded. The ring of biological explosive around their anus went off, the chitin at the rear of their abdomens held long enough for the explosive force to be directed through the their abdomen and thorax, hitting and inverted cones made up of thin layers of Precursor armor, and blew out their faces.

The last thing to go through the bees primitive brains were their assholes.

Individually the little copper EFP's weren't that dangerous.

But thousands of bees exploded around each mech, each bee throwing out a dozen streams of liquefied Precursor armor.

Vuxten put a 40mm HEDP (High Explosive Dual Purpose) grenade into a wasp next before the horror-creatures could swarm out of it. Another one into a bulb on the side of a Precursor wreck that would have vomited out Precursor superdense battery core acids. Another one into a bumblebee next that would have had drifting winged 'bumble bees' that would explode in a plasma burst powerful enough to knock down a warborg. A fourth into a nest of crabs, chitin and gore fountaining up. The fifth into a vein-bolt arc that was heading for an armored limo covered in moss, disrupting it. His last grenade he fired at his feet, blowing the moss and ferrocrete at his feet away, leaving him standing in a four inch deep crater ten feet wide. He put a rocket into the limo, seeing the whole thing lift up in agony as the caterpillar that had half-absorbed the limo, the armor plating its bulging flesh. Flesh and blood gouted out the far side. Another rocket into a harmless looking lump that stood up with a roar of agony as the rocket had blown half of its head away. The third into a hold in the building across from the CorpSec building that Vuxten remembered as being a diner where he'd sometimes eaten lunch. The last he turned and managed to get locked onto a twelve winged flatworm diving on his men. His magack stuttered, his smartlink running overtime. He could hear 417 firing his micro-rifle and knew that little greenie was keeping moths and butterflies off of him.

"GET SOME! GET SOME!" one of the warborgs was bellowing, opening up with twin 20mm autocannons. All around the parking lot fire was erupting, beating back the crawly swarm. Two warborgs staggered as steam-driven spikes hammered into them at MACH-4, the layered cellulose striking sparks from the warsteel even as it left gouges. Another went down on knee, its weapons locked out, shielding its head as a giant insect heaved itself out of the moss and began smashing at the warbord with those huge limbs designed so the muscles pulled the limbs with such speed that the tips were moving supersonic.

The night filled with the howl of Terran weaponry and the crack of crawler attacks.

"VUXTEN! GET US A PATH!" Gunnery Sergeant Wentmark yelled out over the comlink. His systems were still dead, he was using his 'powered vegetation cutting bar - one each' in one fist, swinging it to clear apart the darting insects around him.

"In or out?" Vuxten called back. "Tickle incoming, Gunny!" he leveled his magack at his NCO, dropped the accel down to minimum, overrode the safety, and fired around the NCO, bouncing the the metallic darts shaved off the solid block of metal in the magazine well off the other Marine's armor and firing around him, dissolving the cloud of insects.

"Point Alpha, carry on with the mission. V Corps going to land in a world of hurt if we don't take the pressure off," Gunny snapped. "Thanks for the shower."

"First Telkan, on me! Scout Formation Echo!" Vuxten called out. That put him up front, the two squads spread out in two 'bulged' outward lines, the Fidos at the compass points, a simba up with him, and the two other simbas in the middle with the fishbois for support.

Vuxten took off running, shouldering a crawler twice his own size out of the way and gutting it with a burst from his magack.

"All elements, follow the scouts! Break out! Break out! Break out!" Gunnery Sergeant Wentmark yelled, taking his own advice and hustling after Vuxten's men. "Go to cutting bars until the lockout is overridden."

"On the gunny!" Shayshes called out.

The robot combat armors were still on their feet, their battle-screens overloaded, armor covered with tiny divots. One had armored greenies working on the shoulder joint, which was spurting hydraulic fluid from a handful of bees had found a tiny gap in the armor.

"Vuxten, Vuxten, answer me, dammit," Lieutenant Rogers snapped.

"Reconfigure for incendiary, APERS, and HEDP," Vuxten said to the Gunnery Sergeant.

"The man's working, sir. Try to get ahold of command and get our lockout stripped," Wentmark said, his voice pitched to be soothing. "Trust our Telkan scouts, they've been out here since it all started."

"I can't believe it's only been eight days," Lieutenant Rogers said. "It looks like it's been growing for years."

"Yes, sir," the Gunny said carefully.

"Give the Scouts a hundred meters," Wentmark snapped. "Don't crowd them." The NCO knew it wasn't necessary for the majority of the troops, they'd do it out of habit formed over their careers, but sometimes it made the troops feel like everything was running normally if the NCO was giving out standard orders.

Vuxten got his men out in front, following what they knew would be the path of least resistance. A vein bolt sucked all the nutrients from around it as well as pushed the pulse of nutrients from the souce, which meant that the plants around the vein bolt would be dormant, slow to react.

"Mark 'em and pass 'em," Vuxten ordered. His men signaled assent. "Get a move on, we have two klicks to go and less than fifteen minutes to get there. Pick 'em up and put 'em down."

He looked at his HUD twice in the next three blocks, noticing that the veining of the moss on the buildings was glowing by the time the heavy combat robots passed the area, that more and more glowing motes were filling the air. At the next block he stopped, checking both ways at the intersection.

"Right," Vuxten guessed, turning and moving down the street.

"Why are we diverting?" LT Rogers asked.

"Those sphincters you see in the moss on that street?" LT Marxin answered.

"Yeah, so?" LT Rogers asked.

"The veins on the ground will transmit vibrations, causing those sphincters to rumble. The Telkans call them war-drums," Marxin said. "We go down that street it'll call some real big and real nasty ones out to play."

"Why wasn't any of this included in the briefing? They said it was moss and light spore activity," LT Rogers swore. "There was enough crawler anti-air to knock down Peacock near one of the outer craters, much less that massive one in the middle."

"I don't know, sir," Shayshes said. "Maybe MILINT doesn't agree with our assessment of the ground conditions."

Vuxten took a left, heading back toward the craters. He was thinking fast as he could without pulling his attention too far from what he could see. He'd ordered 417 to let him see on light amplification on low. Too many times the computer error-checking missed a section of moss or plant life, too many times the filters covered the wrong thing.

Those craters were huge, a half-mile wide, full of irradiated water, and he'd seen active bioluminescent arteries leading either into or out of circular lakes, one big mat surrounded by three or four smaller ones, and the entire surface of the water covered in algae with mushrooms sprouting on it.

They were a death trap, Vuxten just knew it.

Vuxten was glad he'd removed the filters when he barely spotted the water in the next intersection. It was the crossing of a main boulevard, big enough to fit eight lanes of travel. The surface was trembling from the pounding of the war-mech's giant feet displacing their 500 tons of metal.

"Stop," Vuxten said over the comlink, holding up his clenched fist and went down on one knee. Half of his men went to active camouflage, blending into the moss and their emissions vanishing.

Something big was moving down the boulevard, coming from out of the city. As Vuxten watched it cleared the buildings and he saw the massive insect, like an armored pillbug, with grinding jaws on the underside, massive forward maw surrounded by tentacles, and spikes across the back. A dangerous one that required anti-tank weaponry to stop.

The creature was... bulging. Groaning as it moved.

As Vuxten watched it crawled into the water.

Which started to hiss and bubble. As Vuxten watched the 'water' dissolved the massive insect in seconds, leaving nothing behind as the algae covered back up the water once the bubbling and roiling of the liquid calmed down.

"Back. There's an alley, we'll cut down it," Vuxten said. All the icons on his HUD flashed in agreement. "If it melted that thing that fast I don't want to think what it'll do to our armor."

The alley was close, claustrophic, and Vuxten didn't say anything about his men using their graviton assist to jump up the walls, leaping from point to point, doing their best to avoid the moss and fungus.

One of the big robots brushed a fire scaffolding with a shoulder and the whole thing screamed and collapsed into the alley.

Everyone froze.

"Why don't you just blow trumpets and fire off flares?" One of the warborgs snarled.

"Sorry," the pilot answered.

"How's that override coming, sir?" LT Marxin asked.

"I'm locked out of half of my command deck," LT Rogers cursed. "Hyperion-One keeps requesting updates. My queue is full of them but I can't answer, the cloud cover is too thick and every time I try to answer I get another ten sitrep requests which is bogging up my system because they've all got 'immediate answer required' on them."

Vuxten popped a magnetic distortian bulb with a fist as he went by.

"Sir, I've got an idea," LT Shayshes said.

The flower Vuxten got near swelled at the base, the tip pulling back and Vuxten knew it was going to try to barf something gross and corrosive on him. He slit the bottom with his cutting bar and the acid poured out on the moss, browning it and leaving it smoking.

"Go ahead," LT Roger said.

The goodboi had switched to subsonic rounds for one of his secondary magacks and raked the barnacles off the sides of the mouth of the alley, shattering the chitin shells and spraying the street with chunks of tissue.

"All of higher ranking than Vuxten drop out of the BATTACNET, purge our mission encryption and data. Vuxten reruns the encryption, then we join back up, hook into him, and our own BATTACNET should synch with his. He's scouts, which means that our suits will take our field update packs from him unless we have command packets," Shayshes said.

Vuxten led two men out into the street, waving three more to get up high on the walls of the buildings, one to each side of the alley, one across the street.

"That works?" The LT asked. "That doesn't seem right."

"I've had to use it before," Shayshes admitted. "Bad drop through a particle sleet storm in the exosphere scrambled everyone's datafiles. Half of us had OEM QC files loaded."

The LT was silent for a moment. "Do it."

"Vuxten, you copy all that?" Westmark asked.

"Roger," Vuxten flashed back, not wanting to speak.

One by one everyone but the Telkan scouts dropped out of the Battle Tactical Network. A few minutes passed and Vuxten tabbed up a piece of gum to chew. His systems tossed up a picture of Navy Captain in a lounge chair, being fanned by ratings, drinking a fruit drink through a straw and reading a magazine marked "Theater Updates 3 or 60" with warborgs fighting giant insects around him. The caption read "LOCAL OFFICER TAKES OVER NEW COMMAND" was at the bottom. It was a dumb one but still made him snort as he chewed on the gum. He checked his stats. Everything optimal. His nanoforge was back down to 5% heat and no slush.

One by one they all came back online and "UPDATING RELIEF FORCES" came across his visor.

"ONLINE!" Marxin called out.

The gestalt tossed up an image of Vuxten fighting with a couple dozen crabwalkers with the caption "LOCAL MAN RELIEVED TO FIND OUT EVERYTHING IS STILL ALL FUCKED UP". Another dumb one, which told Vuxten that there was a lot of high stress going on and the gestalts were working hard. Usually they took more time to craft morale and mental health memes, these felt like the pixels hadn't even dried.

"Ugh," Trooper Estex grunted.

"What?" Vuxten asked.

"It threw up three old memes in row," Estex complained. "Bad ones, not even one of the good ones."

"That's... odd..." Vuxten said.

LT Rogers finally came up and Vuxten's armor transferred command to the LT Rogers's big heavy warmech.

"OK, now what?" someone asked. His armor was still updating so it wasn't showing icons yet.

"Continue on mission," LT Rogers said. "I've still got beacon files, so we should be good there."

"Except the beacon was on Peacock," someone else said.

"I can use my port PPC as a signal beacon if I need to," LT Rogers said. "I had 767 recalibrate it while we've been moving."

"We need to move. We're attracting attention. You big boys are too warm to stay hidden from crawlies for long," Vuxten said.

"You heard the man, let's go. Give the scouts a 100 meters, I want a skirmish line after that," LT Rogers said.

They had to double-back twice, but they still got to the piles of rubble that had been buildings with five minutes to spare. They started up the two hundred foot tall piles of rubble, the Scouts flitting from cover to cover, the warborgs spreading out and moving in quick bursts, and the giant warmechs slowly crawling up the hills that had once been home to thousands of beings.

Five minutes to spare would have been fine.

Except for high in the sky, in the lower orbitals, Admiral Howell's ships shifted, communicated with one another, and activated the fireplan laid in and approved by General Altair.

Vuxten was down on one knee what 417 squealed out a warning, flashing the icon to 'assume blast position' even as his warning jumped to his fellow green mantids, all of whom flashed the icon to their own pilots.

The clouds brightened, thickened, swirled as lightning began to arc away from the brighter area. The cloud was suddenly pierced by bright blue light with a white core that stabbed down into the lakes of each of the atomic craters across the entire planet.

For Vuxten and his men, that meant six spots, all in front of them.

All beams touched down, bent slightly by magnetic warping, to hit the giant mats of fibrous material square. Even as the thunderclap of displaced air rolled over the crouching warmechs and prone warborgs and Marines, the mat drank up the energy, lighting beginning to arc over the surface of the radioactive lakes. The energy released mixed with the crazed radiation as the lake heated up enough for steam to come off of it and it began to roil and simmer.

The beams stabbed down, according to General Altair's plan, four more times, five for each crater, then the sky went dark and the clouds rushed back in as cool air collapsed the near-vacuum and the superheated air.

Fog began to spread from the lakes.

"Well, that was useful," LT Marxin said.

"Wish we had atomics," Vuxten said softly. "I'd feel better stirring that soup up with about 250 kilotons."

417 flashed agreement.

"Move up, slowly," LT Rogers ordered.

"I don't like this, Corporal," Private Hukey said softly.

"Reconfigure rockets for HEAP," Vuxten ordered, referring to High Explosive Armor Piercing, moving slowly toward to of the collapsed skyrakers, toward the lake where fog rolled off the heated water.

Above them General Altair stared at his screens. The clouds had immediately rolled back to cover the planet before the energy pulses's distortion could clear enough to get a sitrep from the units that were supposed to be putting up beacons. To top it off, it had looked, for a moment, like nothing had even happened to the lakes even though he'd computed that the orbital fire had provided 10% more energy than should have been needed to evaporate all the water from the craters.

This was General Takilikakik's fault, he knew it. Somehow 'Tic-Tak' had sabotaged his deployment plan.

He was tempted to call off the elements of V Corps making for the planet, but was afraid of looking bad in front of General Nodra'ak.

On the planet Vuxten had just reached the top of the hill when a creature burst from under the water. It was hundreds of feet long, over a hundred feet tall, covered in spines, thick leathery hide and chitin, with massive jaws that it opened up and let loose with an unearthly screech.

The ear-rending noise was the signal for dozens, hundred of creatures to erupt from the shorelines, all grown to rapid maturity by the energy transfer. Blisters erupted, filling the air with spores that jammed everything, even lasers.

"FIRST TELKAN! ROCKETS ON BIG MOMMA, GRENADES ON THE REST! STEADY WITHDRAWL!" Vuxten yelled, his brain processing it automatically. He let loose the rockets, the grenades chuffing out, even as he back up.

The ground shook under his feet as he backed up.

For its size, it moved fast. Vuxten was less than a quarter of the way down the hill when it rushed to the top of the hill, threw back its head, and roared. It lowered its head, spotted the retreating Marines, and lunged forward, its jaws open.

The ground shook beneath Vuxten's feet like an earthquake.

Vuxten stared right at it, 417 climbing on his shoulder and shooting his microrifle, the rocket launcher firing off 40mm rockets that hit with a loud crack but did little more than pinpricks to the giant monster.

The ground was rumbling like he was in the way of a freight train as he fired his magack rifle.

I'll be damned if I look away.

The skyraker behind and to the left of Vuxten shattered as a massive bipedal figure, 75 meters high, crashed through the moss rotted ceramacrete, one fist drawn back, the other hand reaching forward.

Less than twenty feet from Vuxten the giant figure grabbed the behemoth by the neck and smashed its fist down, impacting the skull of the giant creature, crushing it between a thick warsteel plated fist and the rubble.

Vuxten saw it painted on the massive warbot's arm, the white stenciled paint scuffed and scraped.

CMC PEACOCK