Chapter 385

"So the kid, right, he starts the second grade. Now, his dad and mom are still worried he's going to slack off on his grades like he slacked off all summer on his chores, so his dad promises him anything he wants if he gets straight A's," Casey said, looking down one of the barrels of his partially disassembled minigun.

Vuxten and the others nodded, Vuxten glancing at Addox to see if the scout drones had returned. When Addox shook his head head Vuxten knew they were still out.

"So the kid, right, he really busts his ass. Buckles down doing homework, extra credit, all of it, right? So he gets straight A's and his dad's all: son, you can have whatever you want. A trip to Zaginaw Beach, a tour of Titan, even a trip to Mouse Planet," Casey said. He locked the barrel back in place and begun unscrewing the next one from the housing.

"The kid looks at his dad and goes: Father, I just want a single pink golf ball," Casey said. He lifted the barrel up and looked down the inside. "The father is all "A single pink golf ball? I offer you anything your heart desires, my son. Surely you want more, despite being only a second grader. Surely there is something in this grand universe that you wish." The son replies, just a pink golf ball father."

Casey tilted the barrel, checking for gouges in the barrel's rifling.

"The father thinks to himself: well, bright children are often strange, and buys a single pink golf ball. When he presents it to his son the kid runs off with it, and the father doesn't see it again," Casey said. He suddenly looked up. "Drones coming back. Get ready."

Vuxten nodded. There was always a chance that Precursor machines could follow the drones back.

The drones settled in their cradles on Sergeant Addox's shoulders and Vuxten knew the Terran sergeant would have his armor systems and his greenie compile the data into a usable form.

"Hey, Sergeant Casey, can I ask a question?" one of the Telkan with third squad asked.

"Go ahead, kid," Casey said.

"Aren't you worried about the fact you're just in a loading frame? Why not fab up power armor?" the Telkan asked.

Casey stared for a moment, then shook his head. "I don't do power armor any more. Back a couple centuries ago I was part of Ninth Armored Guard, an Old Blood unit, a historical Vodkatrog armor division," Casey said. Before the Telkan could speak he held up his hand. "I was a damn good power armor troop. Powered Orbital Drop Assault."

"That's a fast life expectancy for someone without SUDS. Ninth Guard is one of the Old Blood units that expect you to die during assaults, you don't get dropped to a non-Blood unit for dying," Glory said from where she was sitting on a pile of uncrushed ore. "How in the burning chrome Hell did you get out of that alive?"

"I was better than the enemy. Too good," Casey locked the barrel in on the minigun and looked back up. "I suffered a bad case of Operator Identification Syndrome. Part of me still yearns for it."

"Oh, I'm sorry," Glory said softly, turning slightly and looking away as if the big combat mech was embarrassed.

"I wasn't patterned on your big dropship ass," Casey laughed.

Glory laughed and it felt like something that Vuxten didn't understand had been cleared from the room.

Vuxten could feel some sort of weird longing from the big Terran.

"Patterned? What's that?" Wextuk asked.

"It's when you develop an emotional attachment to the VI or eVI assist systems in your power armor, robot combat power armor, tank, whatever," he said. "It's pretty rough and if you get a bad enough case you end up needing hospitalization and therapy."

"How did you get it?" Wextuk asked. Vuxten thought about telling the Telkan Private Second Class to shut up, but figured that they might as well talk about something while the maps were being compiled.

"I was a power armor jock. Good one. Deep insertion, heavy assault, had an 80mm railgun on my right shoulder that could hit orbital targets. Rapid fire rapid reload missile rack, point defense, battlescreen systems, the whole nine yards. Toughest suit ever produced by the Confederacy or anyone else in the Universe," Casey said.

"The NovaStar-VII," Glory guessed. "You were a NovaStar pilot. By the Digital Omnimessiah, I thought all of you were dead."

"What happened?" Wextuk asked.

"One drop went bad, hell, the whole war went bad, and I spent literally two years in my armor. Never getting out of it," Casey said. "Once I was able to get out of it, I spent five years where the only time I got out of my armor was to do field repairs on it or to briefly talk to survivors I'd rounded up."

"You can stay in armor that long?" Wextuk asked.

"Yes," Casey said. He reached forward and tapped Wextuk's armored chest. "Your armor is designed for you to live in, without removing it, for up to five years."

Wextuk shivered.

"It's not advised," Glory said softly.

Casey reached down and wrapped his hand around the firing grip for his minigun and Vuxten saw the weapon's smartwire go live.

"When did the drop go bad?" Addox asked, not looking up. Vuxten knew he was going over the maps and the data.

"I barely got to the ground," Casey said softly. "It was a horror show aboard the CSFNV Sulaco less than an hour after we docked with Thule Station. One minute everything was green, the next I was fighting for my life. I was actually in the shower when it all went sideways."

Vuxten noticed everyone glanced at each other as small arcs of purple electricity wound around the barrels of Casey's minigun.

"I barely made it to Jemila and get her wrapped around me before almost everyone was dead," Casey said. "Had to fight my way to the drop pods and launch it manually. For almost two years Jemila was my only company aside from terrified civilians and the enemy. I couldn't leave her embrace, couldn't take the chance. After a while, I didn't feel safe unless I was in her embrace, unless I could hear her voice and feel her touch me, feel myself become one with her."

"Chromium Saint Peter," Glory swore softly.

He suddenly looked up and gave a sudden grin that made Vuxten wonder just exactly how many teeth humans had in their mouths.

"After that, I went Administrative for about ten years, then Maintenance for about twenty years, then went into Ordnance before rotating to an Old Blood unit," his grin seemed to get more friendly and the electrical arcs vanished. "And that, boys and girls, is how Uncle Casey ended up in Ordnance."

"Map's done," Addox said, looking up. "My little brother's about to have a fit."

"It's Mantid make, Precursor Omniqueen era," Casey guessed.

"Yup," Addox said. He shook his head. "It's really obvious once you hit the maintenance spaces."

"I assume it gets worse?" Vuxten said. "Live Mantids?"

Addox shook his head. "No. Pressure suits, hazardous environment suits, greenie toolkits, the whole nine yards. Looks like one of the larger ones, the ruling caste, is supposed to be overseeing this thing but from the scan data it looks like it was retrofitted for full automation. Got the old style horseshoe command center with the upraised central pit in the middle."

"Got us a route?" Vuxten asked.

"Several. Easy to forget how big the ruling caste was," Addox pointed at Casey. "Bigger than him in his loading frame."

"Can you get us a route that won't have us fighting everything between here and there?" Vuxten asked.

Addox nodded. "Yeah. Not for Glory, though. She's gonna have to stay here," he said.

"Great, finally get a date and you all ditch me," Glory laughed. "It's because my butt's big, isn't it?"

"You know it," Addox said.

"I don't like leaving her behind. We should pull her braincase and take her with us," Casey suddenly said, turning from where he was staring at the dead conveyor belts.

"No, I'm good, Casey," Glory said.

Vuxten heard his armor chirp as Glory opened a private channel to Casey, his officer hardware alerting him to the communication's existence but not the contents.

"I'll come back for you if I have to," Casey said.

"I know you will," Glory said.

"Got the route," Addox said. He looked at Vuxten. "Give the order, sir."

Vuxten stood up. "All right, move out by squads. Let's see what this thing's brain looks like."

The blue line appeared on his visor, showing the way.

"Let's get going," Vuxten said.

He led his men into the dark maintenance spaces of the beast.

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General No'Drak looked over the data and Ge'ermo'o watched, slowly being able to make more and more sense of the Confederate labels.

"Can you get a deep level scan of where the three mountain ranges join?" No'Drak asked, puffing on a cigarette.

The pink canine-human-feline chimera shook her head. "Too many atomic explosions to get a good ELF reading or seismic reading. Unless you want to have the Dinochrome Brigade and Third Armor to stop firing and give us a few hours to do deep level crust geo-mapping."

No'Drak clacked his mandibles in irritation.

"So we have no idea what that machine, who has managed to reach speeds of nearly a hundred miles an hour under the ground, is heading toward?" he asked.

"I'm afraid not, sir," the Military Intelligence Analyst said. "I can give you a WAG if you wish?"

WAG? Ge'ermo'o wondered. He checked his implant and nodded. Wild Ass Guess.

"By all means, Sergeant, wag your tail," No'Drak said, putting out his cigarette and pulling the pack out in the same motion.

"Refit base. Probably extensive. Continental plate drift on this planet is slow but steady, which means we're looking at a machine that has probably been largely asleep for millions of years," she said. "Combine it with the fact that the Precursor mining machines all have armor that grows stronger when exposed to heat and pressure and we're looking at deep mining machines. Probably transition zone between the mantles capable so it can access the really exotic materials."

"This planet produce any exotics?" No'Drak asked.

She checked her display and shook her head. "Our dataslicers have cut through the Lanaktallan records. They've only been here thirty thousand years, but before that the native species had to deal with a lack of fissile material and rare metals like lithium and neodymium."

"That machine and any companions might be why," No'Drak mused. "Mining it down in the transition layer before it can be brought up closer to the surface of the crust through geological means."

The Terran chimera nodded. "That's what my Section Leader believes."

"Which means, there might be a bunch of..."

"STATUS CHANGE!" someone called out.

Ge'ermo'o watched as No'Drak spun in place, looking at the tank.

"Third Armor's Third Brigade, Fourteenth Regiment just issued authorization for Mjölnir rounds!" someone called out.

"Time for Trucker to authorize release?" No'Drak asked.

The slim male human with bright pink hair and black warsteel cybereyes checked his console. "Sixty-two seconds, his combat gestalt usage jumped to eighty-three percent of combat bandwidth during that time, up twenty-three percent from current theater combat bandwidth usage."

No'Drak nodded. "Allow it. Patch us in via satellite."

Ge'ermo'o looked up the Mjölnir phrase on his datalink and all six of his eyes opened up wide.

"You are authorizing such rounds?" he asked No'Drak. "I do not seek to interfere but..."

No'Drak nodded. "They're about to engage a Precursor machine the size of a city that's using its onboard manufacturing capabilities to pump out thousands of combat machines as we speak. The longer it has to dig in and acquire resources the more difficult it will be to stop it."

General No'Drak turned and looked at the holotank as the massive machine was shown from orbit. It was surrounded by dust and smoke, its crash having shattered a fifth of the megalopilis it had landed on. Huge cracks, hundreds of meters wide, could be seen in its hull, and craters that were measured in the kilometers glowed sullenly with molten metal from where Space Force had engaged the massive Precursor ship and caused it to crash land instead of continue its orbital bombardment.

"That thing can win the war all by itself," he said.

"STATUS CHANGE!" the shout came again.

Ge'ermo'o felt himself tense.

"3-14 is firing," the same person called out.

Ge'ermo'o felt his tendrils curl protectively under his jowls, felt his crests inflate protectively.

The Precursor's battlescreens were thick, thick enough to resist nCv shots. Thick enough to tear apart the tiny tanks that had just emerged from the flaming hell of a burning chemical refinery.

The whole holotank went white.

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01001111 01010111 00100000 01001101 01011001 00100000 01000010 01000001 01001100 01001100 01010011 activated the additional battlescreen projectors, feeling the electronic equivelent of anxiety as the power level dropped. It was running on backup reactors, its primary reactors dead and in the damaged sections that were little more than wreckage.

The feral lemurs and their damnable kinetic rounds that bypassed the initial battlescreens had hammered it until it had almost begun to break up. Till parts of its superstructure had begun to break up. It had been forced to dive for the planet, narrowly avoiding the massive tanks the size of a Precursor ancillary vehicle, and had slammed belly down into the city.

It was the first time it had ever been in a gravity well and despite the fact the OEM coding had protocols for it, 01001111 01010111 00100000 01001101 01011001 00100000 01000010 01000001 01001100 01001100 01010011 did not enjoy the experience.

The tanks, small pathetic things of strange matter elemental alloy armor wrapped around a massive cannon, with their own battlescreens nearly as powerful as 01001111 01010111 00100000 01001101 01011001 00100000 01000010 01000001 01001100 01001100 01010011's own screens, all leveled their barrels.

The Precursor could detect the rapidly shifting complex battlecode between the tanks, linking them together and linking the tanks to a larger network, but it had learned that to expose itself to the feral's battlecode meant exposing itself to madness as feral attack VI's would swarm it.

The Precursor tensed. It didn't know how it knew, but it knew, that the ferals were about to fire at it.

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The main guns all fired, seconds apart, in one rippling long wave. The Lanaktallan tanks fired first, their shots hitting the battlescreen in rapid succession, all within a single second.

The rounds, fabbed up and assembled by 15th Combat Sustainment, V Corps, III COSCOM, went off as designed.

An atomic detonation to drive a warsteel explosively forged penetrator into the battlescreen.

01001111 01010111 00100000 01001101 01011001 00100000 01000010 01000001 01001100 01001100 01010011 watched the power suddenly drain past its ability to manage, watched the battlescreen projectors overheat and fail in one cataclysmic failure as they tried to resist not only over a hundred 125kt directed atomic explosions, but the warsteel penetrator slightly ahead of the shockwave.

The Precursor's battlescreens failed, nearly 15% of A'armo'os shots streaking forward to hit the forward prow of the Precursor. Those drove craters five hundred meters deep into its armor, blowing out armor in a hundred meter radius as the EFP's did their work.

Before 01001111 01010111 00100000 01001101 01011001 00100000 01000010 01000001 01001100 01001100 01010011 could adapt, could manage the brutal hits it was taking across its prow, which was already damaged from the crash...

...the real rounds streaked over the prow, sailing across the hull.

For an instant 01001111 01010111 00100000 01001101 01011001 00100000 01000010 01000001 01001100 01001100 01010011 thought the rounds had missed. Some of them fired a full two seconds behind the leads.

The rounds were spaced precisely, the math triple and quadruple checked by the green mantid engineers in addition to the fire control computers.

01001111 01010111 00100000 01001101 01011001 00100000 01000010 01000001 01001100 01001100 01010011 had enough time to detect that the shells contained components usually found in crude omnidirectional nuclear weapons. It computed that, based on weight and the standard 0.004 kt/kg explosive weight ratio where all species that developed superluminal flight gave up atomic and nuclear weapons, it could survive even the massive amount of explosions it would suffer. The fact they were omnidirectional meant that the majority of the explosive force would be wasted even if the rounds performed an airburst to hammer compressed atmospheric gasses against the Precursor's hull.

The ghosts of billions of Mantids, uncounted Mar-gite, and races gone from the universes all howled with laughter.

Ge'ermo'o could have even told it that what it was about to receive, it would not be grateful for.

The shells, each weighing 'only' two-hundred and some change kilograms, oriented point down, the warbois shrieked with glee, and then detonated the round.

Those races, who had met the humans toe to toe, or even Ge'ermo'o, could have told 01001111 01010111 00100000 01001101 01011001 00100000 01000010 01000001 01001100 01001100 01010011 that ascribing the achievements of other races to the maddened lemurs of TerraSol was a mistake.

The rounds were directed enough, were too powerful, to be counted under atomic protocols by the Confederate military, which had an upper limit of 2.25 megatons for directed atomic weapons.

The Confederacy counted them these rounds as 'nuclear'.

The backblast appeared, from orbit, like a blast sustained over a full second that came out to just over 50 megatons.

But that was the blast that drove the hammer home, like explosives used to drive a drill into the granite of a quarry.

Those 50 megaton blasts drove the real payload into the Precursor's body like nails of hellfire from a nailgun. The nails five hundred meter wide tubes of ravening energy that were the equivalent of 250kt blasts. The tubes ripped past the armor, the energy release of the 'backblast' and the 'tube' lasting for nearly a full second.

Each 'payload' detonated deep inside the Precursor. Mathematically precision to place each 'payload' within the edge of the adjacent payloads in order to compress the in between matter to the point that even the dullest elements would undergo fusion.

Even battlesteel.

Each of the payloads detonated, the Tsar warheads, with a net explosive weight to system weight ratio that would make any race who had not witnessed it stare in disbelief.

One hundred and thirty megatons detonating in an enclosed area.

The still 'ongoing' blast tube driven by the 'backblast' prevented the blast inside the Precursor from exiting through the channel ripped through the armor by the 'nail'. Instead, as explosions followed the path of least resistance, it was squeezed and pushed into the body of the Precursor.

From orbit, through the few sats still in operation, the entire top of the Precursor vanished in bright white light.

01001111 01010111 00100000 01001101 01011001 00100000 01000010 01000001 01001100 01001100 01010011felt nothing as its surface armor exploded outward and boiling matter ripped apart by the most basic of universal reactions consumed everything inside the armor.

The ground rippled like water for nearly two hundred miles.

The detonation was strong enough that it bounced off the molten core of the planet and caused an echo earthquake a third of the planet's circumference away.

Where the Precursor had been battlesteel burned.

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"Tango down."