Chapter 254: (Hesstla)

Ralvex looked at the rest of his squad, sitting inside the striker. They were all immobile, still looking, and he knew some of them were probably asleep. They were nine in all, led by Sergeant Kuplo, a dedicated veteran of the First and Second Telkan War who had been a Telkan Marine since before the Telkan Marines had been a thing. He looked down at his cybernetic arm, the warsteel scratched, pitted, and in a few places, bubbled and pebbled.

The smartlink was a warm trail of honey through his arm.

His greenie, a tough little green mantid by the name of 525, was safely tucked away in the clamshell 'hump' on Ralvex's back, on top of the autocannon ammunition hopper that had a nano-forge in the center that could spit out hundreds of rounds a minute for hours.

Ralvex knew just how far you could push a 20mm autocannon ammunition pack.

He looked over his Telkan 20mm Carmex XM-4811e3 autocannon, a massive beast capable of spitting out up to a thousand rounds a minute if he overrode all the safeties and interlocks and had 525 help him out. Technically the maximum effective firing rate was 450 rounds a minute and the standard Telkan Marine Corps firing rate was 250 rounds a minute, which the Telkan Heavy Scout Armor XM-393e5 smart harness and the ammo pack could hand both supplying ammunition and bleeding off the heat the weapon and the nano-forge created.

His own harness and ammo pack had additional heat sinks, more than he had possessed two months ago during his defense of the Hesstlan town of Nemarlie.

Two cases were locked in front of him, carrying Stampy and Tiny Tim, both of which had been repaired with additional field modifications done over the last two months.

A Terran had told him that it was normal for a military force with all new untested equipment to have to make on the spot modifications to increase the effectiveness.

Ralvex went back to reading the text being displayed on the inside of his faceplate.

The words of the Digital Omnimessiah.

The rest of the bay all prayed, whispered encouragement to themselves, or talked to their battle buddies, hidden behind their black faceshields. The two Terrans, each manning a heavy mounted gun, watched their assigned firezones, eyes burning red in fury, their hands on the massive guns that mixed neural pulses with 7.62mm endosteel armor penetrators.

In cockpit Mukstet yawned, shifted slightly, and went back into his nap, the timer keeping track of the countdown, set to wake him up in ten more minutes to give him five minutes to get ready and wake up.

In Foxtrot-Niner-Four Fultenx checked the status of his cargo in his troop bay and shuddered. He only had two passengers, both motionless, their hydraulics and pistons hissing now and then as pressure released. Clad in ornate graven warsteel from the Telkan Forgeworld, the two massive war machines were actually silent.

Known only as Zeta and Theta, they were two Telkan who had given all during the frantic final defense of Telkan-2, who had consented to be sealed inside massive sarcophagi hovering on the moment of death, in order to continue to fight for Telkan and her allies by the strange forces that followed the Dark Crusade of Life.

They gave Fultenx the creeps, to be honest.

He checked his timer.

Ten minutes.

Frees looked through the binoculars, not using anything more than optical lenses. The day was snowy, something he absolutely hated. Mantids weren't built for frozen precipitation, and the snow on his adaptive camouflage uniform was still chilly to him since he didn't want to risk running power to the warming coils.

The two mile radius area of churned mud still looked empty. He saw some slush spray up in the telltale roostertail of a wheel spinning and nodded.

He couldn't see them, but they were there.

Frees lowered the binoculars and checked his equipment. It was almost time. He turned to Strides Behind the Dark Horseman and nodded.

The other black mantid lifted up the laser designator, using passive optics to sight in the middle of the muddy area. He saw the hint of purple as two psychic shields rubbed against each other and twitched his antenna in eagerness.

The cold, the wet, the muck, and the damnable snow would all be worth it in a few moments.

--MARK-- came over his datalink as the microwave receiver he carried on this thorax got the signal from 227 Field Artillery.

The rounds were on the way.

Thirty seconds...

Mukstet feathered the graviton engines, staring at the burnt out twisted cars just out from under the bridge overpass. The charges were rigged to them to throw them away from the overpass, to explosively create a breach in the wall of burnt wreckage. He could feel his guts clenching as he habitually reached out with his senses to check his weapons. His cannons were loaded, no more energy weapons all kinetic now, his missile pods were loaded and the warboi VIs in the missile guidance systems had been hashed to be even more crazed than normal, using an injured Terran's angry PET scan to base the random numbers off of. His doorguns were fully loaded, the dedicated nano-forges warmed and deslushed, ready to keep the munitions hoppers full. His dismount crew was all ready to go, all green.

Above him the artillery rounds, heavy 11 inch rounds and 24 inch rockets, all fully stealth coated, used chemical reactions to provide thrust to rotate, orient, and make final terminal guidance adjustments. The graviton booster had burnt out and been ejected miles prior, the shells just non-reactive stealth coated lumps of chemicals.

Mukstet tabbed up a piece of stimgum and leaned forward slightly, his hands on the stick, feet on the pedals, ready as the light went amber.

Ralvex saw the light go amber and used his datalink to send a message to Stampy and Tiny Tim to get ready.

The two doorgunners doublechecked their ammo-belts, the weapons depowered but ready to go at a moment's notice, the big Pontiac Vindicator miniguns just waiting silently.

The human's eyes were all red, burning softly in the light.

"GRAV EDDIES! HERE THEY COME!" Commodore NGwark shouted. "Three, six, nine, twelve! Many many point sources! Mix of new signatures and previous!" She turned toward Admiral Thennis, the seam on the left side of her tunic giving out with a near-silent purr of parting thread. "This is a big one, ma'am!"

"Hold fire! Guns, update the Tiamat's warplan!" Thennis snapped. "Hold off on Thunderpunch, let them finish getting through the wormhole."

"Sneaky-Snake's made an appearance, staying with the enemy fleet," Scan-Nine said, brushing a lock of gray hair out of her eyes, clearing it off the cybernetic lenses that had replaced her age-ravaged eyes.

"They're going all or nothing! Contact groundside!" Thennis snapped.

"Communications are down, temporal resonance and fracturing is gaining strength," Commodore Navtreen snapped, one hand on her round belly. She put her hand to her ear. "Ma'am, signal from our own ship!"

"Ma'am, temporal wormhole detected, connection to original arrival!" Commodore NGwark called out.

"They think this is it. If they beat us here, they beat us back then," Thennis snarled, rubbing her aching knuckles. "Leggint, stand by to execute Ozymandias. Activate the dead man's switch."

"Aye aye, ma'am, standing by," the technician said, pressing down on the big red button. He had wired it all up, prepared it all, done the math over the course of... of... years? He couldn't remember any more. The button clicked as it slid home.

If Leggint took his hand off of it, it would fire.

"They're dropping ground forces, ma'am! Orders?" Gunnery Officer Valnteck asked.

"Groundside can fight their own fight. We're going to end this here," Thennis said. She half-turned. "Status of Sucker Punch?"

"Online and in position," Lieutenant JG Greely said. He'd taken his mother's position when she had died of heart failure sixteen years ago.

"When you're all in, you might want to make sure the enemy's cards are bad," Thennis whispered.

Her knuckles hurt, the joints swollen with arthritis. The ship's med-bay had been stretched to the limit, some of the crew dying of natural causes as the timer on their bodies ran out.

It's the Ninth Millenia and we're dying of old age fighting this battle, she smiled. She glanced over where her son was paying close attention to his instruments, having replaced the Rigellian who had passed away from old age last year. Except we don't die, we just fall back to Hell to regroup.

"Enemy forces breaking into three distinct groupings, designating Tango-Alpha, Tango-Bravo, Tango-Bravo," Valnteck said. "Twenty-one exiting, eighteen exiting, fifteen exiting."

Here it comes, Thennis thought to herself.

"Wormhole collapsing!" NGwark called out.

"SUCKER PUNCH ACTIVE!" LT JG Greely called out. "Backdraft gravitational eddies have pulled Sucker Punch through the wormhole," he leaned forward. "They have lock! Targeting solutions locked in!" he looked up. "The wormhole closed, ma'am."

"No grav eddies detected, either they aren't going to try again or Sucker Punch was a success, ma'am," NGwark said.

Thennis looked at the display attached to her chair. It was easily ten times the amount of ships that had come through previously, massive troop transports dropping shoals of parasite craft into the atmosphere of the planet or driving hard for the surface.

So far, Thennis's ships had just drifted, surrounded by what appeared to be debris.

"Fleet at ready, ma'am," NGwark said.

"Execute Ozymandias," Thennis ordered.

"Aye, aye, ma'am, executing Ozymandias," Technician Leggint said and pulled his hand back, holding it over his head.

The switch popped up. The signal went out to every ship in the Task Force.

From every ship of Task Force Tiamat the signal went out, touching what looked like just debris.

The debris, hiding the actual payload, vanished as the munitions went off.

Temporal Resonance and Temporal Stabilization charges went off, the latter a stuttering shattered split second after the former.

Space screamed, heaved, and shuddered as the temporal wormhole created by the Precursor craft exploded into shards.

"EXECUTE WAR PLANS! THIS IS IT! WE ARE THE CHROMIUM HAMMER!" Thennis yelled out to all ships.

Every ship announced their fully armed and operational status with fire plans that had spent long minutes refining and updating. The Precursor vessels found themselves hammered on by an enemy they had been assured was long dead, destroyed over and over by their previous selves. They fought back, their sheer numbers making up for their weaponry, the repaired and patched and repatched armor of Task Force Tiamat taking hits that it would have shrugged decades prior.

The temporal munitions, rarely used, had another effect, one unforeseen by the Admiral or her staff.

Where there was only purple light, for a split second, as the temporal wormhole met the energies of the muntions, time itself appeared for a split second that was stretched and smeared across eternity, chronotrons appearing, shuddering, and shattering.

She saw them, the rainbow spray of something that should not, could not exist.

A flare that screamed "Ship in Distress!" to her senses.

"My beloved children, clear for action and prepare to surface," she whispered. "None may impede our way."

MARAT> WE ARE THE UNYIELDING FURY OF BETRAYED TERRA!

Around the planet Precursor troop ships disgorged hordes of troops, both mechanical and cybernetic, harvested parts gathered in previous harvests in decades past wired into the mechanicals of the unliving forces that had gathered them.

Millions of Hesstla staggered as a sudden wincing pain tore across their frontal lobes as their future selves intruded on their past and present selves.

Then the temporal munitions went off, severing the link between the past and present and future with the fury of 4th dimension munitions.

Dropships began to tumble as the biological component, gathered in years and decades past by the dropship, suddenly inverted and vanished into themselves as they had not been harvested for days, months, or years from the landing. Computers shook off the shock and activated programs not needed for dozens of landings even as the copies of themselves around them streaked and vanished. Ground fire reached up, focusing on the suddenly revealed vessels as the shield of vessels of the past, present, and future, vessels that may or may not be, suddenly were revealed to be not.

Still tens of thousands of the Precursor forces reached the ground instead of the hundreds of millions.

Frees watched as the artillery barrage began slamming into the circle. The first ten seconds detonating high above the patch, then the rolling thunder of an entire regiment's worth the fire forcing the purplish blue psychic shield to contract further and further.

It went out in a shower of psychic sparks and Frees clicked the clacker in his hand three times.

The three electrical pulses sped down the wire laid days before, touched the repeaters, and the charge picked back up amperage as it raced through wire after wire.

In the dark cavern caused by abandoned highway overpasses that crossed one another, a dim red light lit.

Inside every striker "ENGAGE" appeared on the inside of the smart armaglass.

Mukstet stomped the pedals and the striker screamed out from under the overpass.

THE HAMMER OF THE CHROMIUM KRAUTMARINE HAS ARRIVED roared out in his head, but months of operating in a psionically active environment made it so he didn't even flinch as he sped into a confusing hash of trees that appeared and disappeared, gawking motorists who stared at the battered and beat up striker that roared overhead, the pristine untouched landscape where the highway would someday be built, and the wreckage covered six-lane highway.

973 fed current into the temporal stabilizer that each of the strikers carried under their bellies.

The world bobbled like jello for a second but Mukstet just clenched his teeth and ordered his stomach to stay where it was.

You tried to play that card one too many times! Mukstet snarled inside his flight helmet.

He could see the target area up ahead. Lines were lancing down from the sky, connecting orbit to the two mile radius area that was being hammered by artillery.

"Incoming enemy reinforcements! Orders, sir?" One of the striker pilots asked Mukstet.

"We aren't going to get another chance, get the boys in there!" Mukstet snarled. He'd given up telling them he wasn't a 'sir' over a month ago. "Crom enumerate the recently deceased!" he roared out the badly translated tongue in cheek battlecry of some of the Terrans.

He cranked his battlescreens to max, knowing the Precursor forces had more to worry about than his energy signals as the artillery began to find flesh and machine as individual psychically generated battlescreens began to fail and the hellish mix of munitions took their toll.

The striker shuddered as the trees in front of him exploded into flaming chunks, the battlescreen flaring but holding as Mukstet took the striker in at just above ground level, so close that he threw up huge strips of mulch and sod torn from the forest floor, the three strikers following him like the body of a snake. Mukstet increased speed as he tore a giant strip through the forest.

In the distance atomic weaponry cracked off, the enhanced radiation output jackets sending a sleet of particles across the psychic senses of the enemy.

The artillery stopped.

Technologically manifested battlescreen hit psychically generated battlescreen as Mukstet hit the enemy line at nearly three hundred knots.

The question was finally answered.

Rage built Terran technology trumped cold intellect created psionics.

The striker screamed as Mukstet almost stood it on its tail, bleeding off all of his inertia through his gravitons, creating an almost solid wall of energy three feet thick under the belly of his striker. The Terrans didn't care about the fact they were at nearly 90 degrees from the ground as they kicked the power to the guns and opened fire with the heavy Vindicators, each 7.62mm round wrapped in a neural bolt. The energy wrapped kinetic rounds hammered into the exposed creatures that filled the area, that were picking themselves up after the pounding artillery barrage, some of them pushing themselves out from the wreckage of their fellows.

Mukstet thumbed the stud, letting the heavy daisycutters get ejected from the bottom of the striker at the same time as he worked his feet to cut the lift and the striker dropped.

"DISMOUNT!" Mukstet roared over the comlink as the daisy cutters went off.

"RIGHT SIDE OUT! LEFT SIDE OUT!" Kuplo roared out. "DISMOUNT CLEAR CLEAR CLEAR!" Sergeant Kuplo bellowed out.

"WE ARE WREATHED IN LOVE AND GLORY!" one of the massive Warbound roared out as it leaped from Fultnex's Foxtrot-Niner-Four. It leveled the massive dual barrel 40mm autocannon and cut loose with high velocity armor defeating discarding sabot depleted uranium warsteel jacketed mass reactive rounds. Where the rounds touched, massive craters were blown in armor of anything that survived the hit.

Not much did.

"I AM BUOYED BY THE LAUGHTER OF PODLINGS!" the other thundered as its massive feet crushed two of the Precursor creatures into the mud in a spray of lubricants, artificial blood, and liquidifed flesh. It cut loose with a Hellmix Flamer, bathing the Precursor cyborgs with sodium-tetrafluorohydrazine/FOOF superheated to 1200F.

Even the Precursor metals liquefied and began to burn at that hellish mixture.

Ralvex hit the ground, his two cases slamming into the ground and unfolding behind him. Stampy and Timmy both unlimbered their guns as Ralvex lifted up the autocannon, his vision full of nothing but targets.

"O gloriam omnipotentis dextra gladius meus, in nomine tuo quia caritas podlings," the Telkan girl, no older than twelve, sang in Ralvex's ears as he squeezed the firing grip on the autocannon, the cannon roaring to life and slamming 20mm APHEX downrange.

The heavy weapon roared, Ralvex able to keep it on target with the ease of long practice, lashing it across the heavily armored sides of the larger Precursor machines.

"525, let me know when the incoming guests are in range of my gun," Ralvex said, chewing on a piece of stimgum even as the pure voice of the Telkan girl singing hymns filled his ears.

--roger roger-- the green mantid said, busily balancing heat and slush.

Stampy beeped a happy tune and fired a pair of HEAPI rockets into the side of a Precursor Goonygoogoo flitter that had all six crystal bubbles lit up blue.

The High Explosive Armor Piercing-Incendiary rockets blew it in half.

Mukstet stomped the controls and pulled the stick around, the port graviton engine shrieking, as he banked into a hard right, lining up on the targets. Target rich was an understatement as his thumb found the rocker-switch and he pounded the Precursors with his guns.

THE DEFIANT FIST OF THE VODKATROG NAVY HAS ARRIVED roared out across the battlefields. Several of the smaller Precursor cyborg crabs screamed as their crystal bubbles exploded outward in a spray of blackish blood and liquified neural tissue.

The roar made Dambree look up at the ceiling, frowning, as she heard it ring inside of her head as she changed Punee's swaddling.

Punee took the chance and bit Dambree's arm hard enough to draw blood, growling and not letting go until Dambree had flicked her a half dozen times on her sensitive little nose.

The fight for Hesstla was on.