Chapter 105: (Vuxten)

The monster was huge, larger than any Vuxten had seen. Its leathery hide mottled green, thick plates of chitin and Precursor armor chunks layered onto the hide over vital spots. Massive jaws full of razor sharp teeth that had mandibles that folded out meant to scoop prey into its mouth. Eight legs as thick as a hovercar, a tail covered in spikes and upraised plates. It was six hundred feet long, standing on its legs nearly a hundred feet tall, and eight feet wide.

The code rewrite, being broadcast by powerful transmitter, had woken her up as the drone, which she could barely detect, quartered the city. Her brain case was cracked, three of her four mighty reactors, her hearts, were dead in her chest, her left leg dragged, the knee and ankle frozen, but that didn't matter.

First Telkan needed her. Needed her firepower.

What little she had left after not only crashing through a building, having it crash on her, but then she had been invaded by vines and moss. Her last three greenies, all she had left of the dozen or so she'd launched with, had fought a losing battle with their micro weapons to protect her datacore.

Captain Pamela Cheyenne AKA Peacock, Confederate Marine Corps, Digital Sentient, drop ship and assault mech pilot hurtled through the building, still slightly confused from slamming face first into the ground. Her primary memory core had been disrupted for a split second, forcing her to run error checking, then there'd been the constant yells from Hyperion-One assaulting her and some idiot up on the station had ordered a soft reset on her while she was still getting to her feet.

She was seeing double, but she was still fit to fight.

"FIGHT THE SHIP!" she bellowed out, her voice roaring out loud enough to cause one of the buildings to shudder and collapse under the weight of fungus and crawlers. She slammed her hand down on the neck of the massive creature right in front of the armored figure that was frozen in front of it and drove her fist into the top of the creatures head. It writhed as she brought back 2 ton fist, activated the graviton focusing, and crushed the top of its head with a 25 ton ton fist smashing down in 12G's.

Other creatures were rushing, five more rising out of the lake at the murder of their big brother. They gave a shriek of rage.

Peacock stood up straight and answered with a scream of her own.

"GOJIRA!"

As the fist came down a second time Vuxten jumped up and back, using his HUD to look at his landing zone. 471 flashed a ring on what looked like a stable landing spot, in the footstep of one of the robot power armors a hundred meters back from the hill. 471 helped guide his trajectory, using the graviton generator that Vuxten had used to crush the head of the creature beneath his boots. The head deformed and coral-like brain tissue bulged out the suddenly ruptured and empty eye sockets as the massive creature convulsed.

Vuxten could see more rushing the shore as Peacock stood up. He heard the screeching of the five ones standing up, water and algae running down the sides. Peacock opened her mouth and Vuxten saw it starting to glow blue inside with motes of whitish blue floating out of it.

'atomic atomic atomic' 471 flashed on Vuxten's visor as he landed, feet scraping backwards until he could drop down onto one knee and use his left hand to stop himself with his right hand hefting the magack. Half of his armor's systems went down, his onboard weapons going dead, radio shut down, all his external systems going dead, his nanoforge going dark.

Blue fire, almost white, its intensity so hard that Vuxten's visor blackened across the line, shot from Peacock's mouth with a screech that almost overwhelmed everyone within a mile. The air displacement from the beam rumbled across the city.

Peacock, still seeing double, swept the beam across the middle of the lake, catching three of the five creatures, pulsing extra energy, her systems wailing as she pushed it past the limit. She knew her greenies were all dead, crushed in the crash or died with their micro-rifles in their hands, she was running blind, half her repair systems offline and the rest fighting the vines and moss and the tendrils slowly spreading through her body.

Vuxten started to look up at the hill, at Peacock, at the beam, but 417 locked his armor.

The beam hit the lake, the core interacting with the water and the outer shell of the beam. The weapon mixed with the chemical hell brew of the lake, enhancing the beams destructive power.

Five hundred kilotons every hundred meters exploded across the half-mile wide lake. The lake vaporizing, turning into fuel for a secondary charge, boosting the power of the explosion.

Peacock's graviton generators held her in place even as the blast washed over her armor, making the warsteel glow dull red as she focused her vision. She was blind in one eye now and could feel supercoolant looking from around her brain and down her internal spaces. She was about to be sucked into her survival core, pulled down into dark dreamless sleep.

But she had a job to do.

She staggered, ranging out with her sensors, almost blind. She could see the other lakes, standing on top of the mound of rubble, through the debris and spreading debris cloud.

"GOJIRA!" she bellowed out.

More fire roared from her jaws. She poured the fire into each lake. It wasn't the light cruiser's particle beam cannons of the previous orbital bombardments, not the heavy laser of a frigate's guns that had struck at the lakes.

This was raw atomic fire, where it hit it converted matter to its base atomic structure then ripped it apart in a fury of atomic fission. Not the relatively 'cleaner' fusion reaction of thermonuclear, but raw atomic fury that caused the heavy metal rich waters of the lakes to add their own fuel.

She could barely see now. Five of her seven lobes were fried out, one was on the edge of failure. She could feel the survival core clawing at her, trying to drag her into the WORM molycircs.

The massive creatures in the lakes barely had time to realize that the energy wasn't pouring into them, that the mat was being torn away, in the split second before the water of the lake itself went supercritical and exploded.

Vuxten increased the power to his graviton to keep him in place, his armor groaning with the strain. He felt like he was going to black out as the second shockwave pounded at him. The pavement around him cracked and imploded as he spun it up to levels that had his armor screaming at him. He felt something in one knee give, his damaged shoulder groaned in the socket, the bones grinding against each other.

"GOJIRA!"

I'm not going to make it, I'm not going to make it, Vuxten thought to himself.

Lieutenant Rogers stepped in front of Vuxten and the rest of his troops, slamming his battle-screens to max power, the warsteel endoskeleton groaning by how high he had the gravity spun up to increase his armor's weight. He had both arms crossed over his chest, over his cockpit, and he leaned into the successive blasts. His robot combat armor was screaming in pain, the armor flexing, the actuator in his knee going out in a spray of hydraulic fluid, one arm's metal based pseudo-muscle snapping and tearing out of the armor. The joint was locked, fused in place as the Lieutenant took another step forward, putting everything into the forward battle-screen which was lit up and overloading as more energy than his combat armor could handle was crashing into the shields. He knew he had a death's head grin as the Lieutenant managed to get the massive war machine to step forward again.

He raised his left arm up, aiming the PPC straight up. He slapped the stud to load the frequency rhythm, and triggered it.

"FIRST TELKAN!" the Lieutenant yelled, heat flushing his cockpit. His alarms were going off, urging him to punch out, his reactor trying to shut down and he stomped the override.

It strobed out, flickering across the spectrum, spearing the sky.

"GOJIRA!"

Peacock was blind now, only her radar still working and even that was fading. The survival core was pulling her down, black clawed hands pulling her into an iron prison.

She managed to vomit out one more blast, knowing she was hitting the center lake, and gave it everything she had.

It all went black as the last lobe overheated and exploded.

Her survival core cracked open, inhaled, and sucked her down.

The sky was clear, for a moment. The spores burned away, the clouds pushed away by the rising mushroom clouds.

The Lieutenant's PPC beam scythed into the air as Vuxten looked up. He could feel blood running down his neck and the side of his head.

The LT was frozen, putting up the beacon beam.

"HEAVY METAL COMING IN!" roared out from every flat surface of metal, over every civilian speaker that now had the moss stripped from it, from every armaplas window. Vuxten could see bright points of light all converging on the empty area, sheeting in like a ring of falling stars.

"FIRST TELKAN! UP UP UP!" Vuxten yelled over the radio.

'ride or die' came back. Vuxten couldn't believe that 471 had survived, but he wasn't about to question his good luck as the little green mantid activated his med-pack and a tingling burning filled his shoulder and knee.

Vuxten bounded up the hill, taking it in leaps, landing feet, bent knee, one fist on top of the shoulders of the giant creature that had scrambled out of the lake.

Somehow his rifle was still in his fist.

There were vines squirming from the wreckage of the buildings, going for the bubbling lakes. His radiation alarms were screaming as he scanned what was left of the surroundings.

The facades had blown off of piles of rubble, revealing what he'd seen as air superiority crawler pods that could fire streams of reddish plasma into the atmosphere to knock down drones.

Only these were ten times the size, with glowing bulbous plants around them.

"ANTI-AIR!" Vuxten called out. He started firing rockets at the anti-air bulbs, firing his rifle at the glowing bulbs. He fired 40mm grenades at the writhing tendrils reaching for the lake, going to rapid fire, pushing the nanoforge to the limit.

A glance at his HUD showed him that there were massive dropships coming in, bright blue wings of hard light and plasma spread out from them as they dropped at terminal velocity to hit the LZ as fast as possible.

The lakes were boiling, the tendrils had reached them despite Vuxten's efforts. The plasma belchers that were still up flexed and threw plasma into the sky.

His armor beeped with a status update that 471 rejected but the code header of the update overrode the little green mechanic.

ALL UNITS! SECONDARY LZ'S! USE LOCAL COMMAND DETERMINATION! WAR-GEAR UNLOCKS INCLUDED ALL UNITS!

His armor shuddered for a moment and 471 flashed happiness icons.

"INCOMING METAL!" roared out again.

Vuxten raised up his arm and fired a whisker laser at the lead vehicle, loading the new orders into the beam, choosing the one nearest Log Base Hercules. He switched, 471 assisting with the targeting, going for another one.

He saw the dropships light their engines, shifting their entry angle, sliding away from the city.

More and more of his men joined him on the top of the sloped rubble, most of it fused by the atomic blasts, pouring firepower into the air superiority crawlers. Bulbs ruptured, the glowing pearls exploded in ravening energy as the 'skin' of the massive biological batteries tore.

The dropships, on wings of energy, slid to the side, heading for an LZ thirty miles from where Vuxten was standing up.

"FIRST TELKAN!" Vuxten shouted, firing off a barrage of illumination flares, trying to clear the darkness getting thicker as spores, ash, and smoke spread out from the walls of mushroom clouds.

Gunnery Sergeant Wentmark jumped onto the front of the LT's mech, banging on the armor, trying to break the welds on the armor. "Sir, eject, sir, you're burning up!" Wentmark said.

The big robot power armor kept firing the PPC into the air, the flickering altered a little to copy Vuxten's transmission. It was blowing steam from a half dozen points, from the joints, and Wentmark could hear the alarms even through the thick warsteel.

"Sir, eject! Sir, eject!" Wentmark yelled, putting his hand onto the front of the mech and using an induction speaker. Wentmark's radiation warnings were howling even as the heat went up. "Your reactor's gonna go and the men can't take another atomic!"

The back exploded out, the LT's command cradle fired out, caught on hard-light wings, and dropping down to the ground.

Lt Marxin stood up from where he'd managed to pull Peacock's survive core out of the chassis. All the telltales were lit, although two were amber. Still a push of the 'are you in there' button got back a winking smiley face.

The front of the crash couch blew off and the Lieutenant got up, almost falling but Wentmark grabbed him.

"Vuxten, get us an exit!" Wentmark yelled.

Vuxten fired another drone, panting, breathing heavy as his armor kept working. His cybereye booted back up and he almost threw up. The drone clawed for altitude, graviton generator negating the weight while the solid rocket boosters pushed it into the air. It scanned out, looking, and Vuxten groaned at what he could see.

"Incoming! Many many incoming!" Vuxten called out. "All points, converging enmasse. Big Mommas, firebacks, wingjacks!"

A whisker laser touched the drone.

"Give us a grid!" sounded out in his ear. Unfamiliar. His visor was flashing error for the unit ID.

Firing was picking up around him and 471 was banging on his grenade launcher.

'stupid stupid design stupid' 471 was flashing, trying to kick the loader shut.

Corps regs say never give your position to someone you don't know... Vuxten thought to himself.

A swooping beetle grabbed the drone, ripping away one wing, going for the tiny battery next.

"GRID INCOMING!" Vuxten yelled, half deaf. He toggled the transmission of his own grid coordinate, overrode the lockout, overrode the security, and punched it to the drone. The drone, already torn apart and dying, managed to grab the code, direct it sole remaining commo laser back to where the one talking to it was originating from, and squeak out the code.

Before the beetle could rip out its heart it detonated it, killing them both.

Vuxten didn't notice, concentrating his fire everywhere he could. Heat was rising, his slush was rising, and he knew everyone else was just as bad off. The air was full of heat from the boiling lake that was rapidly covering with moss.

"THIRD ARMOR ON THE WAY! HOLD THE LINES, BROTHERS!" sounded over their speakers.

Another creature screamed as it struggled out of the water, its form half-finished, the fangs curling outward as gravity pulled at their soft structure. Dozens, hundreds of smaller creatures, fully formed but still wet and soft, rushed out of the near bank of the lake and charged the line of Marines.

Vuxten and half a dozen of the rest of 1st Telkan hit it with rockets at the same time.

The five robot combat armors left were fighting with larger ones. A fireback was wrestling with Chief Warrant Officer Two Malcom, who had managed to pry its jaw open and was firing the 120mm rotary autocannon into its mouth even as plasma roared from the creatures back to wash over the rubble of collapsed buildings. Tech Sergeant Ikniktak was down on one knee, the other leg blow off at the knee, firing his missiles as fast as the launchers would reload from his shoulders, his autocannon roaring as he ran his ammo bin dry. Gunnery Sergeant Baker-Ixiltek stomped the heat override and kept firing his autocannon into the belly of a wingjack he'd blocked with his PPC that was trying to get past the warped and cracked barrel to gut the human war machine with its taloned feet. The fishbois finished their reboot and swarmed into the air as two Simbas concentrated their firepower on an onrushing lizard covered in smaller warriors. A FIDO finished digging Private Pletuk out of the rubble, yanking the Telkan to his feet and spitting out a new magack rifle.

For Vuxten everything devovled into up close and personal. He kept firing his magack, overrode the 80% slush shutdown, 80% heat shutdown, and wet to full auto on the grenade launcher.

"It's time again, 471," Vuxten said as Staff Sergeant Akiana's combat mech screamed like a living thing as it collapsed, bioplasma melting the endoskeleton and killing the pilot.

'I'M A HIP HOP SOLDIER!' rang out as Vuxten directed the rest of his rockets into the chest of a large rude beast, pale and watery, slipped from the water and gave a gurgling trumpeting cry.

A warborg went down underneath a hundred crabs. Vuxten hosed the warborg with his rifle, shattering the crabs, spraying chitin and blood. The warborg rolled, letting Vuxten hose him off. The warborg stood up as Vuxten switched fire to knock a pair of flight-pigs out of the air.

Vuxten fired his rifle, switching targets as soon as the one he was shooting at exploded. Blood kept running down into his eye but he kept shooting. His shoulder and leg stung with the biting of a fire gnats as the nanites tried to knit together shredded muscle and cracked bone, but he ignored it, reloading his rifle when the amblok was down to 20%, the metal magnetically sealing to the smaller block.

'LET'S GET ONE THING STRAIGHT!' sounded out as 471 climbed up next to his head, firing his micro-rifle.

Gunnery Sergeant Wentmark went over backwards, bum rushed by a massive insect that vomited red plasma on him that could melt Precursor armor. Before he could do anything LT Rogers stepped up and slammed his chainsword through its neck, yanking back and forth, ripping the insect apart before its bladearms could do much more than scratch Wentmark's softening armor. Bioplasma hit the LT's back, sending him stumbling forward, tripping over Wentmark.

'MY WEAPONS ARE GREAT'

Vuxten turned and showered the LT and Wentmark with magack rounds, the rounds sparking off the other two's armor but blowing the insects free in showers of gore.

'YOU 22 AUTOMATIC SUCKERS ARE LATE'

Vuxten turned, caught the bladearm of the creature lunging for him, blowing out its innards with a full auto squeeze of his magack, tripping what was left of the creature as it went by and throwing a burst into its back.

GOT A QUARTER MOON CLIP AND A SMITH AND WESSON

Marxin was sliding backwards, his hands around two different throats as bladearms scrabbled at his chest and shoulders. His fired a rocket point blank, the force of the magnetically accellerated rocket throwing the creature back, leaving Marxin holding its throat, spine, and head. The rocket punched out the other side, hitting fireback that was rearing back to coat Malcom's mech in liquid napalm.

The explosion lit up the night.

I'M ABOUT TO GIVE YOU ROOTY-POOTS A COLD GUN LESSON!

A flat-snake lunged at Vuxten, who jumped into the air then increased gravity to slam just behind its head, his artificially enhanced weight and velocity causing the wet-chitin to explode. Vuxten jumped out of the body, wobbling as his knee buckled. He landed and 471 flashed icons of happiness as his grenade launcher slammed closed.

I'M THE WIZARD OF MAYHEM!

The LT turned around, ignoring the armor breach that showed off his left scapula. His greenie, missing a bladearm and gripping arm and a leg pulled a glob out of its micro-forge and slapped it on the exposed bone. Gray goo slid over the whole wound and hardened as the LT grabbed Gunny's arm and heaved him to his feet.

MASTER OF DESTRUCTION!

Vuxten overrode his armor's insistence that he shut down the nanoforge, forcing it to wet-print rockets and grenades as fast as 471 could kick them free. 471 dodged two moths, spearing one with the bladearm and blowing the other out of the sky his micro-rifle. Another swooped in, trying to jam up the feeder belt for the rocket launcher that 471 was reconfiguring and 471 blew its soft head off.

GOT A FULLY LOADED MAG WITH A BLUNT INSTRUCTION!

The two FIDO stomped forward, running their guns on rapid fire, chuffing out grenades. A simba raked a building with its 30mm cannon, a solid shaft of light connecting it to the building as the heavy duty sabot rounds ripped apart the structure.

It came down.

PAGE ONE SAYS OPEN

Fishbois swarmed around the troopers, protecting the wounded, ripping apart the smaller creatures with their oscillating warsteel teeth set in heavy snapping jaws even as the lasers mounted beside their eyes snapped moths, dragonflies, and spores out of the air.

PAGE TWO SAYS FILL

The warborgs were backing up, step by step, tightening the circle. The Terran and Telkan Marines fell back with them, adding to the firepower. The fishbois swarmed, protecting who they could. The LT was down to his pistol leaning on a warborg missing an arm and firing it as fast as he could stroke the trigger. A simba bounded away then back.

PAGE THREE SAYS COCK

Vuxten ejected his last thermal core, loading the microcore, still panting heavily inside his arm. Blood kept getting in his eyes, his cybereye cleaning it by clicking the cover open rapidly. Another wet looking half-formed creature slammed into Ikniktak, rocking him the side, and Vuxten opened fire with the newly minted 15mm tribarrel minigun, shredding at it, the wet chitin unable to even slow down the sabot rounds that 471 was ordering cooked up.

PAGE FOUR SAYS KILL!

The Marines opened up with everything they had as the crawlers swarmed over the buildings, over the rubble, up the hill the Marines were standing on, across the regrown moss.

"FRIENDLIES UP HIGH! BLACK HORSE!" came the roar. Air mobile suits roared in, dropping from higher up, wings deployed, shielded turbofans howling, dual-barrel rotary railguns roaring out shards of ADPS at the targets as they made their first past.

"HEAVY METAL IS HERE!" roared out as tanks, bigger than anything Vuxten had seen since the end of the Precursor War, slammed through buildings, roared out of the streets, all their weapons going to rapid fire, sleeting through the sky, raking the creatures off the buildings.

An APC clattered through the rubble, sliding to a stop. The back deck dropped down and a warborg yelled, waving his arm.

"MARINES! WE ARE LEAVING!" LT Rogers bellowed out.

The two undamaged robot jocks supported their wounded one as the Marines and warborgs streamed toward the APC. The tanks were ripping apart the night as the men hustled for the armored vehicles as another slid to a stop, dropping the deck down. The living grabbed the dead, unwilling to leave them behind for the tendrils and moss to turn them against the living. He saw a sad-face emoji flashing, half buried in the rubble.

"ALL--" the warborg said, reaching for the power lift switch.

Vuxten threw himself out, running across the rubble. Two of the air mobile suits dropped next to him, covering him with their railguns. Vuxten snatched the box up, the emoji turning to a happy face as Vuxten ran for the APC. He handed off the armored survival to one of the warborgs before doing one more sweep visually, hanging onto the door frame as the door shut.

Brentili'ik stared at the image of her husband, his armor bent and damaged, one shoulder launcher bent and twisted, his rifle cracked and discolored, a red dot in the middle of his chest, broken up by rings, an X across it. He was handing a heavy warsteel box with a T-shaped handle to a warborg. The caption read "TELKAN LEAVES NONE BEHIND!" on top and at the bottom it read "NOT ABOVE OR BELOW!"

Brentili'ik struggled to reconcile the hearts and happy face icons streaming up the sides of the picture with her terror of seeing her husband had obvious been in battle again.

"Madame Director, it's time," Harvey said.

She reacted, without pausing to think about it, running for the grav-lift.

She got her suit on in 90 seconds.

Harvey made her do it again.

And again

and again

Until she was no longer worried about her husband.

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V CORPS REPORT

Have landed in strength on Telkan-1 and Telkan-2 despite intelligence failures by 303 MI. Am deploying to protect shelters.

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