Chapter 387

I was a mere Gunner Fifteenth Class when we heard the sound that any member of the Great Herd's military forces dreads to hear.

HOLD THE LINE, BROTHERS!

It roared out over every speaker, from every pane of glass, echoed from every flat surface, blinked from every pane of smartglass and every display.

The call to arms of the Terran Confederacy.

The pre-battle warning roar of the universe's most terrible creation.

Insane highly intelligent bipedal lemur primates with enough savagery to fill a dozen other species.

I closed my eyes, all four of my knees shaking, my crests inflating protectively, as the sound roared out.

The Precursors were here, and that was bad enough.

But the Terrans?

That was like discovering that the fire you are battling is about to be stopped by detonating a nuclear weapon. Sure, it stops the fire, but at what cost?

My knees started to buckle as despair filled me. A black yawning maw full of eyes and tentacles that reached out for my soul to drag me into the depths and render me nothing more than a shivering bag of meat who's mind had shattered.

A Telkan female passed me, unseen, crying softly.

I heard her sounds of distress, the pitiable sobbing reaching through the darkness, through the horror, through the terror, a sound of anguish of a being who was powerless to do anything to save a life being destroyed all around her.

Strength filled my body, filled my soul, and I straightened up, opening my eyes.

The armored recovery vehicle, the hoverbus, and a badly damaged hovertank were before me.

My crew, my men, my faithful soldiers, stood staring at me.

"Mount the vehicles. I need a volunteer to drive the tank as I shall act as its gunner," I stated, trotting toward the tank.

The entire side was ripped open, exposing the crew cabin. I would not need to open the rear crew loading ramp.

"But, Most High, you will not be protected," Feelmeenta said, wringing her hands.

"It does not matter. This must be done, thus I shall be the one to do it," I told her.

"I will drive," a wounded Savashan told me. "I drove tanks from the motor pool to the maintenance bays as well as tested the drive trains after repair or refit."

"I will run your defensive systems," another told me, a Telkan with burn bandages down her side told me.

"Then we shall ride into defeat and glory together," I told them.

The inside of the tank stunk of burnt flesh as we climbed in. It started, the autoloader whined as it brought a plasma round from the munition storage into the chamber, the fans howled, and the entire thing vibrated.

It was wounded, mortally so, but could still fight.

My driver, Karelesh, rotated the tank and, at my direction, led our pathetic convoy out of the hastily assembled base and into the city.

"We should have reloaded the flares and chaff and smoke," the Telkan, Lu'ucilu'u, said softly as she activated the electronic counter-counter measures up and activated the wan and flickering battlescreens.

"Remember, if we encounter Precursor machines, we pull them away from the hoverbus," I ordered. "We may only be able to buy them a few minutes, but those minutes may mean the difference between life and death for an entire busload of people."

"As you say, Most High," Lu'ucilu'u said.

I was chewing stimcud, my brain singing with that tight, almost heard sound, that strange feeling that a wire inside your mind has had too much tension put on it. I needed sleep, but there was no time for it, too many depended on me.

We were on the third hab when high intensity lasers cracked out, the high energy beams superheating the air that then collapsed back onto the near-vacuum with rippling snarling thunder. The port side battlescreen flared, but held.

Karelesh spun the vehicle in place as I pushed my masked face against the gunner's sight, lifting my hoof in readiness.

The machine was function over form, blocky and heavy, a rotating barrel mining laser slicing at the tank with a continuous beam of coherent light. It slid into my sight but the sight's electronics kept wavering and pixelating, telling me that there was no target.

"SHOT OUT!" I snapped, training overriding my fear as my mouth went dry and my tendrils curled protectively.

I stomped the firing lever.

The plasma round hit it dead center, washing it with proto-matter fire.

The fire cleared and the mining machine still stood there.

Our weapons are almost useless! We are all doomed! the words of the hysterical Most High floated up in my mind as I clenched my jaws on my stimcud.

The targeting computer fought me as I tried to realign the barrel and I reached out and slapped the override, sending the VI back to it's storage and taking over the gun myself. I lowered the barrel as Karelesh skidded the tank sideways, away from the hoverbus, and the Precursor machine turned to follow us.

"SHOT OUT!" I yelled as I stomped the lever.

The plasma round hit just in front of the machine, the heavy burst of matter-energy combination slamming into the ferrocrete road in a bright flash at an angle.

The ferrocrete, liquified and then flash hardened by the heat of the plamsa round, crashed into the machine. Its battlescreens flared purple and collapsed.

"SHOT OUT!"

The third shot dug another chunk of the road out, the matter hitting the Precursor machine and caving in the large central structure.

It shot sparks and collapsed.

Even though the environmental hookups weren't engaged and I had been in my armor for nearly two days, I still had to urinate as we kept sliding to the side. I licked my lips and tendrils, my mouth dry, as our slide brought another Precursor machine into view.

I moved the barrel, still running it on manual, even as part of me paid attention to the way my lower right hand fired the coaxial gun mounted next to the main gun.

I stomped the bar twice in rapid succession.

The first shot hit the heavy groundcar, causing it to explode and lift up off the ground. My second shot hit the car again, slamming it into the Precursor machine.

I fired a third time into the twisted and burning wreckage.

Precursor battlesteel parts showered out of the twisted carnage.

"More Precursors! A lot more, Most High Ha'almo'or!" Lu'ucilu'u called out. "We're being locked up."

"Go through them!" I shouted, loading another round of high-energy plasma warshot into the tank. I changed channels.

"Mal-Kar, this is Ha'almo'or, do you read?" I asked.

"I hear you, Most High!" Mal-Kar shouted over the roar of the hoverbus's fans and the noise of the passengers.

"Get them to safety! We'll buy you the time!" I yelled. I changed channels. "Prepare to meet your ancestors," I told me faithful crew. "We do this because we must and there is no-one else."

No better beings existed than those two who rode with me, as no better beings existed than those that marched with you into your own personal hells.

The tank was moving at maximum speed when we slammed between two heavy cargo lifters, throwing them to the side. I managed to fire the main gun twice, the additional heavy plasma machineguns all on autonomous rapid-fire, the two heavy plasma rounds crashing into the ground to rake the Precursors we were suddenly mixed in with with shattered pieces of ferrocrete.

Karelesh spun us in place, the skirt of a plenum chamber scraping the ground and throwing a fan of sparks behind us as I double-pumped the coolant into the chamber, forcing it to cycle on an empty chamber, and loaded a plasma round in half the time I should have, slapping the override for the gunnery system.

Iwas the gunner, not computers, not VI,me! I may have been only a Gunner Fifteenth Class, but by the Terran's Digital Omnimessiah and the Twelve Biological Disciples, it wasIwho would wield this mortally wounded beast's claws against the foe of all living things.

Alarms were wailing as I kept firing. Half of my shots hitting the ferrocrete street, slashing the mechs with shrapnel, some of them covering the mechs with burning plasma long enough for me to get another shot into them.

Lu'ucilu'u launched two EW drones in quick succession, one of them almost getting sucked into the tank's open crew space by a sudden backdraft, and sent them at the Precursors.

I reached out, slapped the override, and ramped their tiny microreactors into overload right as Lu'ucilu'u slammed her hand down on the self destruct button.

Both drones detonated, the microfusion detonation biting a huge chunk out of the Precursor ranks that Karelesh ground his teeth and drove us straight into.

My teeth were itching, my bones aching, my guts aching, as the tank's hoverfans roared and we moved straight into the burning smoke of the explosion.

Finally, a stomp on the loading lever brought nothing but a steady beeping.

We were out of ammo.

"Sound retreat," I ordered.

"Aye, Most High," Lu'ucilu'u said.

"As you command, Most High," Karelesh said, sounding exhausted.

The tank stunk of excrement, of burnt electro-propellant, of overheated molycircs, of urine, sweat, and fear. All three of us, our armor was pitted, cracked, and bubbled. I was blind on one side, either because my helmet had failed or my eyes were gone.

It didn't matter as we raced, billowing smoke, for the refugee point.

We had survived the night.

When the refugee point came into sight we heard it.

And the small part of me that was rejoicing at having survived shrivelled and died.

HEAVY METAL INCOMING!

--Excerpt From: We Were the Lanaktallan of the Atomic Hooves, a Memoir.

The Googly-Eye was a subclass known as Squinties by the Terran Space Force. A highly stealth recon machine it stayed silent and still and merely watched. It didn't even use battlescreens, relied on a single micro-fusion plant for power, and watched.

It was currently in near orbit, relying on gravity, speed, and angle to remain over a crashed Devastator. It had watched as the tiny specks of Terran and Lanaktallan tanks had approached the massive machine. It didn't bother computing the chances of success. Its lean molycircs devoted only to recon and observation.

There was a sparkling and the Squinty took a risk and opened its eye completely.

The grounded Precursor vanished in a white glare. The Squinty could see through the clouds, could compensate for the particle haze, could see that what was left was a gutted shell with boiling molten matter in the bottom.

An entire Devastator, gone.

It was an electronic intelligence. It had no fear of what it was programmed to do.

It compressed the data, extended an antenna, used rapid ignition to fire up the main reactor, and shot out a single compressed squeal of data.

A Space Force particle beam blew it out of space only a nanosecond after it finished its compressed squeal.

The Harvester of the Lessers was discontent, watching the fighting for the system. It alone of the Ancient Ones remained, watching the battle in case something new reared its ugly head. So far, the data showed that even outnumbered a hundred to one and outmassed by a million to one, the ferals could fight hard enough and effectively enough that victory was a statistical probability.

The squeal, barely gotten out, reached it and Harvester decompressed it and examined it.

What it felt was the cold analytical equivalent of horror.

It slowed it down and watched it, frame by holographic frame, examining it from as many angles as possible as provided by the miles wide sensor arrays.

The dispersion was mathematically precise. The explosions self-evident. Only a single gap in the network of explosions that had no affect upon the outcome that left the Devastator a gutted burning hulk with molten matter in the bottom.

Harvester paused, rewound the entire battle, and ran it at hyper-speeds.

It knew what it had just witnessed.

The Terrans were able to put out such devastating firepower that a harvester the size of a large city could be obliterated in a handful of seconds planetside by a few bare hundred of armored vehicles. In space and in the orbitals, the Terran ships were raking the Precursors out of the sky. For every Terran ship that was destroyed, dozens, scores, hundreds of Precursor War Machine were destroyed or knocked out of action.

Harvester ran the programs, ran the analysis as it slowly shifted its massive bulk, angling for a good jumpspace entry.

After seeing that, there was only one conclusion that could logically drawn.

The amount of resources that would have to be devoted to produce even the barest of mathematical change of defeating the mad lemurs of Terra would far outstrip decades, centuries of harvesting entire star systems.

The lemurs of Terra did not care about resources. Did not care about anything but on thing.

Harvester had run the computations. Had interrogated lemurs itself.

The massive Balor knew now, understood now, something that it had not understood before.

The Ancient Ones existed to consume resources. The Logical Compact existed to shepherd those resources.

The mad lemurs of Terra existed for one thing and one thing only.

To seek out and destroy the enemy at all costs.

Harvester knew its computations would be unpopular. That others of the Logical Compact would try to deny its computations.

Any of the Logical Compact that sought to face the crazed lemurs would become the enemies of said lemurs.

And Harvester knew that every Terran, every maddened lemur primate, believed the same thing.

Had demonstrated the same thing in dozens of stellar systems, on dozens of planetary bodies.

The Enemy exists only to be destroyed.

Harvester jumped out the system.

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A'armo'o stared in shock at the burning cloud that had washed over his own tanks. The cloud looked like an inverted atomic blast as the top of the cloud had hit the upper limits of the atmosphere and flattened out.

The white light of the blast had seemingly penetrated the thick armor of his tank, filling the crew compartment with blinding white light. His spinal mane and his fur all felt as if it had been blown backwards by a strong wind. The skin on the front of his upper torso felt tight and prickly, like he'd been sun burned.

"Tango down," came over the radio.

A'armo'o swallowed thickly, glancing at the monitors that showed outside his tank. The four power armor scouts from First Telkan were straightening up from where they had been braced against the back of his tank to help hold it in place.

The radiation alarms were howling as lightning rippled through the burning cloud.

"All units, incoming movement plan from Division Command," Dremsal's voice broke A'armo'o's shock. "There's another Clanker that needs shown it isn't welcome."

"All Great Herd units, load movement plan. There's still a war to fight," A'armo'o said, knowing his voice was quiet.

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

Ge'ermo'o just stared at the holotank.

"STATUS CHANGE!" rang out.

Ge'ermo'o couldn't pull his attention from the holotank, from the tiny icons of the tanks that were already moving, shifting into a battle formation as they headed toward the next manufacturing class Precursor.

"Precursor units attempting to jump out," the tech called out. "Looks like they've had enough."

"Compliments to the Admiral," General No'Drak clacked, tapping an unlit cigarette on his arm.

"What... what was that?" Ge'ermo'o asked. He'd seen the specifications, but the question came unbidden from his shocked brain to his mouth.

"Started life as an atomic cratering charge, a medium atomic demolition mine, before the diaispora, was converted to a bunker buster eventually," one of the Terrans near Ge'ermo'o said. "We use it to crack heavily armored subterranian facilities."

"Like the Precursors use," Ge'ermo'o said.

"Just like that."

Ge'ermo'o stared at the holotank and discovered that he did know how to pray after all.

Please do not let these Terrans decide that my people need eradicated from the universe.

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The mining machine trembled for a moment and Addox held up one clenched fist. The trembling went on for almost a full two seconds, then stopped.

The platoon held still, staying quiet, for a long moment.

"Must have been something outside," Addox said, waving everyone forward. "Doesn't concern us."