Chapter 505

Undrat held down the trigger of the Madame Three-Eighteen as the grav striker rolled nearly onto one side. He raked it across a flying creature covered with pulsating sacks and thin plates of phasic enhanced chitin, blowing huge divots in it. It shrieked, vomited up acidic blood, curled up, and fell from the sky.

Undrat stood on his tiptoes as he tilted the gun down and raked it again just for good measure, just as doctrine suggested. After all, it might be still combat capable on the ground and if he was going to drop anything on the infantry below it would be polite to ensure that it was either dead or as injured/damaged as possible.

The grav-striker finished its roll after taking a handful of autonomous war machine missiles on the grav-band on the belly. For a moment, when the craft was upside down, Undrat had a sight picture on the attacking PAWM, surrounded by Dwellerspawn.

The Madame Three-Eighteen took her due from the PAWM as Undrat triggered the heavy weapon, smashing HEAT-AM into its face. It exploded in mid-air, showering down, but Undrat was already past, the striker still rolling.

Undrat was dressed in his heavy combat armor, his frame boosted with graviton boots, a graviton spike, an inertial dampener, strength assist, and heavy plating. It meant he had to move with a kind of steady grace, but he had been trained on it and so he was still able to use the armor as he had been trained.

The grav-strikers were making a high speed run between two bands of clouds. The ones below were gray and greasy looking, heavy and almost sulky, the ones above looked light and fluffy, hiding Dwellerspawn which had been driven back by the sheer firepower of the grav-striker force.

For a moment there was no combat, just the roar of the engines, the howling of the graviton engines, and the whistling of the wind. For a moment Undrat spotted a pair of rainbows arcing between the clouds off in the distance.

The moment broke.

The grav-striker suddenly dropped into the lower cloud band, like the engines had been cut, the nose lifting and the tail dropping. An icon in Undrat's vision went from red to amber and he pulled his hands from the trigger, reaching up and grabbing the handle bar above his head.

He could see the rest of the striker lance dropping with him, the world eerily silent, just the whistling of the wind and the white mist from the gray clouds. The battlescreens still snapped and popped at the heavier drops of water, shimmering around the grav-striker.

His armor picked up the sounds of heavy combat below. The distinctive snap-whine of PAWM energy weaponry, the whip-crack of Terran Confederate Army return fire, the weird vomiting sound of Dwellerspawn attacks, and lots and lots of explosions. Some were dull thumps, others sharp cracks, and they all merged together in one sustained static sound.

The altimeter displayed on the upper right of his visor HUD showed they were at twenty-thousand feet and falling fast. When it hit eighteen thousand 'feet' (Who's feet was it? Who's feet had they measured at such a large size, and who were they that they were able to define a unit of measurement just based off of their feet? - Undrat tabbed a quick note to look it up some day) it switched to 6,000 meters, still dropping.

They dropped from the heavy cloud cover at a thousand meters, the grav engines suddenly screaming to life. The shields were cranked up even further and Undrat tasted an odd sweet fruit and felt a tingle across his back molars as his psychic shielding ramped up to 78.2%. The icon went from amber to red and Undrat grabbed the firing handles of Madame Three-Eighteen, putting his thumbs on the 'butterfly trigger' and applying pressure as his smart-link synched up again.

The entire battlefield was nothing but roaring machines, screaming Dwellerspawn, and plumes of dirt and rubble being thrown in the air by artillery. In the middle, below the strikers, was a small firebase, completely surrounded and cut off. Tracers raked out from the dug in positions, mines exploded around the berm as the self-heating minefields took their toll.

Undrat could see six teams working at mortar positions, his armor automatically tagging friendly forces, weapons, and armor. Twenty tanks were positioned behind the berms, four per side, with one at each corner. The massive guns of the 1,000 ton behemoths were blowing huge arcs of the enemy into scrap metal and gobbets of flesh.

More poured into the gap.

Undrat poured in the fire, prioritizing heavy units and any units that took to the air that were not tagged by the fire base's air defense system. Twice the air defense control computers tagged targets for him as the grav strikers broke into four groups, pounding the Dwellerspawn and the PAWM ground combat machines with their heavy guns.

The icons in his HUD flashed and Undrat let off the trigger, reaching down and yanking the heavy pin out of the frame as he grabbed the thick handle on the top of Madame Three-Eighteen. She came loose and in one smooth motion that he had practiced over and over with his fellow Tukna'rn recruits, he fixed her firmly in his smartgun harness. The heavy frame lifted up out of the way as Madame Three-Eighteen synched up with the heavy gun rig, patched into his armor, and flickered a ready icon.

A countdown appeared in his vision and he stepped up slightly, toes at the very edge of the striker's deck plating, one hand reached up to hold onto the bar, the other stabilizing Madame Three-Eighteen. The striker banked and slid, skating through the air, slipping across the battlefield even as it dropped cluster munitions behind it. Undrat saw the top of the rise go by, a low hill blocking view from the firebase to the area beyond.

The hill had huge divots and fan-shaped chunks ripped out of it, exposing bedrock. The loose dirt was all blown off, without a scrap of vegetation to be seen. Stray rounds hit the exposed rock, exploding, driving pockmarks into the hill.

But it was still a half-mile thick and almost two hundred feet high and gave excellent protection to the Dwellerspawn and the PAWM that suddenly came into view.

The striker suddenly dropped. Hard. It fired cluster munitions from the bottom, the bomblets flying free, orienting on thin fins, and the air whistling through the hole in the middle ignited the solid fuel booster.

The entire edge of the Dwellerspawn on the far side of the hill from the firebase suddenly vanished in an explosion of 'folded' inverted white phosphorous strange matter that burned an eye searing and watering black with white edging.

The grav engines cut back in with a scream like a slasher queen being stabbed. The grav band across the bottom reach down and grabbed what was left below. Burning dirt, gobbets of Dwellerspawn flesh and blood, and shrapnel from shattered precursor armor filled the air in a torus around the striker as it suddenly came to a dead halt at fifty meters.

Undrat simply stepped off the edge of the deck, his hands both holding Madame Three-Eighteen safe and sound in his grip as he pulled her up at a forty-five degree angle across his chest, barrel up and left over his left shoulder.

You will respect her and she will keep you alive. Disrespect her and you will die instead of the enemy and that is unacceptable!

Gauzy energy tendrils spread out behind his back, almost like wings, as he plummet through the air for fifty meters, the energy spreading out behind his back a side effect of the inertial dampener and kinetic energy shunts in his armor activating. At five meters to impact the wings flared and he slowed down as if he'd only stepped into the air a meter above.

He slammed into the dirt, his thick legs taking the impact, the armor's grav stabilizers howling, the inertial dampener shrieking as it dumped the excess energy in a bright orange flare around him, leaving him in the middle of a donut of energy.

By the time the energy cleared, Undrat had Madame Three-Eighteen lowered into position and ready. He squeezed the firing grip, panning from the left to the right in a slow steady movement, her heat fins already deployed, the nanoforge already running with deployed heat fins.

On either side of him others dropped from their strikers, dropping straight down, slamming down with a flare of energy.

The Precursor Autonomous War Machines and the Dwellerspawn, which had been concentrating on the firebase, were completely unprepared for Undrat and his fellow Tukna'rn infantrymen laying down heavy firepower straight into their faces. For twenty-nine days they had used this as a staging/spawning area to push against the annoying firebase without opposition.

You will not have thirty, Undrat thought to himself, making on his helmet HUD a spawning pool he could not get a bead on.

The Tukna'rn who had slammed to earth behind him was knelt down. Outriggers extended around him, he had one fist slammed into the dirty with the haze of an engaged graviton spike around the armor gauntlet. The Tukna'rn looked where Undrat had marked, marked it himself, and squeezed the firing grip with his free hand.

The massive 105mm snub barrel rapid fire artillery unit on the Tukna'rn's back configued the munitions, sent the order to the nanoforge, which wet-printed the rounds into the autoloader.

Less then five seconds since Undrat tagged the spawning pool, where huge rude beasts were heaving their half-formed bodies from the thick liquid, the 105 barked three times, the shockwave rippling out as the blast deflector channeled it to either side and behind the gunner. The gunner's inertial dampener howled as it took the heavy recoil.

The gunner looked at a new target, assessed it according to doctrine and the battle roaring around him, and the gun shifted position.

The spawning pool erupted as all three rounds plunged into the thick liquid and detonated. Liquid hate fountained up as the FOOF enhanced WP-thermite plasma napalm gleefully went to work converting everything to carbon ash and then burning the ash for good measure.

Undrat wasn't paying attention. He knew the heavy indirect fire troops would handle their end of the job. He was laying fire into one of the medium-heavy pillbugs, shattering its teeth, its faceplates, ripping out its eyes.

A brace of hypersonic missiles slammed through the sound barrel, got close, kicked in the sprint drives, and fired off the explosive 'kicker' and two foot tungsten steel rods turned to liquid and hit the gouges in the armor. Three of them penetrated deeply, boiling the flesh around them.

The creature roared and another set of rockets hit it, this time from the side, and the armor gave out with a soft thump, innards burning as steam rose in the air.

There was a flickering as time and space tried to fold and twist. The 105 gunners saw it being marked, gave the munitions orders, and their heavy indirect fire weapons roared. The rounds arced up, deployed fins to make final adjustments, and plunged down. The tips slammed deep into the earth and the two foot tall rods quivered for a second.

They all went off with a deep THRUM that sent a wave of sparkling gold and silver energy across the battlefield.

The creatures and mechanical combat troops that had started to phase in didn't even get a chance to scream as the temporal munitions slammed the door in their faces. Those that were partway through exploded into gobs of tissue. Those who made it came under immediate fire as the grav-strikers pulled danger close white knuckle runs, bringing the heavy guns to bear as they streaked across the battlefield at less than twenty-five meters up.

Undrat switched targets as Madame Three-Eighteen sang her aria in the face of a hateful universe.

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There was nothing but smoke and steam as the grav-strikers dropped down.

Undrat stepped forward, grabbing the lift bar, and pulled himself into the grav-striker.

"Cool down, deslush. We've got another target area," the big Treana'ad NCO yelled as he climbed into the striker behind Undrat.

Undrat just nodded and triggered the icon for affirmative.

He checked his heat. It was only at 36.87%. Slush was only at 52.72%. Both were dropping as he watched, the cooling fins on the creation engine and around the barrel no longer glowing red.

The striker tilted slightly, lifting up from where it had been resting on a pad of purplish graviton energy that snarled and snapped against the ground.

Undrat grabbed the stabilization bar above his head with one hand, pulling Madame Three-Eighteen close to his chest, the barrel at a forty-five degree angle, with the other.

As the Terrans say: just another day in paradise, Undrat thought to himself as the grav-striker launched itself into the air with the scream of graviton engines and reactionless drives.

Behind them, the enemy's ability to bring in reinforcements had been shattered.

The six Atrekna watching glided away, following the grav strikers on discs of phasic energy. They were completely silent, wrapped in psychic protections, completely undetectable to technological systems. Their methods were tried and true and had proved to be effective.

Above them, in gliders with no metal parts and only phasic neutral polymers, the six green mantids banked their gliders and rode the air currents after them, tiny helmets converting their complex thoughts to the plain and simple thoughts of dim birds of prey to any who might scan for brain activity while leaving their true intellect hidden. The bioluminscent chemical pinlights on their wings blinked slowly, but still passed on encoded data using an ancient but still usable code.

Written on the side of one of the gliders was the phrase: 'he who adapts eats'.

Above them, silently gliding along, a larger glider contained twelve black mantids, all of them carefully shielded.

Sooner or later, they knew it would be their turn to eat.