Chapter 984: The Shadows of Twilight

Chapter 984: The Shadows of Twilight

He was an absolute pain in my ass. Drunkenness, whore mongering, disrespectful. One of the worst garrison soldiers I had ever commanded. If he wasn't passed out on the floor of his room, he was usually in the drunk tank at the MP station or in the motorpool or the morgue working on a vehicle or armor with an open bottle of alcohol in his hand. He was the kind of soldier that no commander wished to command in peacetime.

It was an honor and a privilege to pin his awards for valor in the face of the enemy upon his chest. - General of the Warsteel Tut'el, Telkan Marine Corps (ret)

Bit.nek tightened his grip he had around one of the grips at the rear of the M318, twisting his grip slightly.

He felt his smartlink go live.

The weapon was in good shape. Just jammed. It was loaded with ball rounds and was set for two thousand rounds a second. The nanoforge was at 4% slush and 2.5% heat and cooling rapidly. Barrel was in nearly pristine condition. He tried to change the ammo and found he was locked out.

"299," he said softly.

--yes--

"Jack into the armor, then trigger a diagnostic on my smartlink. Use my smartlink to see if you can override the settings on the Madame Three-Eighteen I'm holding," he said.

--uh can do that-- 299 asked.

"Yeah. It'll just be a little painful when you exceed the max bandwidth on my smartlink," Bit.nek said. "My arm will go numb, so you need to be quick."

--we going to die-- 299 asked.

"Eventually, but not right now," Bit.nek said. He felt the muscle move around him, felt the massive windpipe flex and heard a roar faintly. "We're stuck in the neck muscle, between the windpipe and the external armored scales."

--scared-- 299 said.

Bit.nek felt his smartlink go dead and a curious numbess at the corner of his eye, into his brain, then down his neck, into his chest, through his shoulder, and down the length of his arm. His hands and fingers tightened, cramped, and went numb.T/his chapter is updated by nov(ê(l)biin.co/m

"Either we'll do this or we won't," Bit.nek said.

--maintenance codes accepted what need-- the mantid asked.

"Fab it up for APDS, chromium endosteel penetrator with an explosive bursting charge. Set the charge for when the round stops," Bit.nek said.

--okily dokily--

"After that, we're going to need HEDP 40mm grenades, armor defeating. Change the rockets to anti-tank with an osmium EFP," Bit.nek said. "When we come out, we're going to be fighting for our lives straight out of the gate."

He could see the beacons for over thirty sets of armor approaching.

"Once you're done, I want you to see if you get ahold of any still living green mantids in those armors over the engineer channel," Bit.nek said. He closed his eyes as pain radiated from the artificial nerve fiber in his arm. "They need to shut down the beacons and disengage the quantum communication molycircs. Tell them to go to analog."

--ok-- 299 answered. --sorry almost done--

"It's OK," Bit.nek said. He just pushed the pain away, ignoring it.

The beacons were getting closer, over half of them pulsing severe injuries.

He was surprised that out of the thirty odd beacons, only six of them were broadcasting termination of life signs for the operator.

The pain went away with a twinge like someone stabbing needles down his arm, then the warm honey feeling of the smartlink going live again returned.

--done-- 299 said. --rockets and grenades next--

"Hurry," Bit.nek said. He could feel the monster curve and twist.

--done-- 299 said. --engineering channel open working--

"Get ready," Bit.nek said. He pushed his arm through the resistant tissue, grabbing the M318 by the body, shifting his grip on the handle. He'd have to run the gun holding one handle and the body, which would be clumsy to say the least, but he didn't have a choice.

With a thudding crash the beast slammed down. He heard more roaring, felt the neck around him extend out and contract, as well as wave around.

He pushed the barrel hard, the layer of skin underneath the neck scales resisting.

"Disengage the safety interlocks, give me full suit control," Bit.nek said.

--uh ok-- 299 said. --other engineers worried--

"Tell them to follow your orders," Bit.nek said. His HUD suddenly warned him that strength and reflex interlocks were disengaged. He felt the tingling burn around the control jack plugged into his brain stem and grinned inside his helmet.

He pushed the end of the barrel harder and it suddenly ripped through, knocking two scales away by the root. He struggled forward in the tissue till he could see out, knowing he was causing a bulge on the side of the creatures long thick neck.

Outside the gap was a large open area, strewn with twisted metals, power armor jammed into metal wreckage, and high walls made of metallic debris arranged in a bowl around the rooftop. There were cars, buses, even a couple of those crab tanks (torn into pieces) scattered around as well as shoved into the walls.

He could see three other creatures. Massive, two with bat-like wings, the other a long snake-like body and a fearsome looking feline head. They had thick legs with long claws, the snakelike one with over a dozen legs on each side of the body. Some had ribs exposed, some had holes in their bodies exposing rotting meat.

Another creature slammed down, its head reduced to almost a bare skull, massive holes in its chest that leaked black fluid.

--oh boy--

The 20mm cannon roared, its firing rate sitting at 450 rounds a minute. The tracers flashed as the rounds slammed into the face of the massive dragon. Scales shattered and blew away, muscle exploded outward from hydrostatic shock, and the bone was exposed in less than two seconds, huge divots blown in the brownish bone.

Bit.nek's eyebrows raised. He'd used that ammo to rip into Dwellerspawn before.

The dragon looked up and around and Bit.nek walked his fire down its neck. The other dragons were just starting to look around as the rounds exploded inside the dragon's neck, hitting the treetrunk sized spinal column.

One of the serpent ones roared and lunged forward, moving smoothly, eerily like liquid, heading straight for him.

Bit.nek yanked the M318 around and leveled fire into the creature's face. The HE component blew away flesh and scales and filth encrusted hair around the lion face, the WP thread burned white.

The thing kept coming.

Bit.nek put a missile into its face.

The skull held, visible through a gaping hole in the flesh almost three feet wide on a face as wide as a two-laned highway.

"SHIT SHIT SHIT!" Bit.nek yelled, spinning in place and sprinting down the corridor.

The lion faced creature plunged after him as he ran down the tunnel. He took a left, then a right.

"FAB ME UP 20mm APDSFSAM, 5mm sabot, .5 antimatter core!" Bit.nek yelled.

299 checked the system.

--no template-- he said.

"Check my datalink! Look for Happy Happy Joy Joy files!" he yelled, grabbing a corner and sliding around it.

299 checked the datalink, startled to find that Bit.nek had easily fifty times the storage as any other one he'd seen. The mantid engineer could tell it was a black market addon.

It was full of templates.

He grabbed the one labeled Happy Happy Joy Joy in the "Dancing with Madame" file, scanning them quick.

The green mantid couldn't believe all the ammo types. Stuff he'd never even heard of in armor engineer school. He found dozens of them and had to whip up a quick search string.

He found the APDSFSAM under "toucha toucha touch me" and started threading it through the decompressor.

Bit.nek ran up another tunnel, then slid down another one, taking corners as fast as he could.

The lion head roared behind him, the tongue flickering out only a few meters, the end tattered and flapping around.

299 ran the error checker and threaded the template through the compiler, then slammed it through the linkages and into the primary nanoforge's memory. The nanoforge checked the template and rejected it.

--not working-- 299 said.

"Jailbreak it!" Bit.nek yelled. He went to go right, saw that the body of a different lion faced one was going by an intersection only fifty feet away, blocking that tunnel, and took off running.

The tunnels were resin on top of twisted metal. If it wasn't for the 'sticky feet' setting of his grav-boots, he'd be slipping and sliding. Even so, the resin resisted being pulled up and sticking to his feet as he turned another corner.

The M318 beeped and the nanoforge started hissing.

Bit.nek crossed another intersection, spotted a THIRD scale pattern, and slowed. He aimed and squeezing the firing grip, running through the whole twenty rounds in just two seconds.

The white snap of antimatter blew away scraps scale and rags of flesh.

Still sprinting, he went down, made a right, then up, then stopped when he saw another scale pattern.

He leveled the M318 and gripped the firing lever, ramping the fire rate up to 1500 a minute. A solid bar connected the end of the 20mm cannon barrel and the scaled wall of flesh. Bright flashes lit up the corridor and he ripped through part of the body, going for the upper section. For a second he saw the spine.

The damaged part kept sliding away and he moved the barrel up and down.

The body stopped moving and he took off down another passage, running full bore.

299 was busy going through all the templates in Bit.nek's datalink, downloading them, decrypting, decompressing, and recompiling them. He was keeping an eye on a dozen systems, using his telemechanics sense to keep an eye on the armor as Bit.nek ran pell-mell through the labyrinth. The mapping was still mostly based on acoustical echoes, but 299 was working as fast as he could to keep the map updated.

Bit.nek saw the first one's scale pattern, fired two missiles down that passage, and ran down a third.

He barely stopped, grabbing onto the edge, and almost flew out.

He was 80 feet above the base of the nest. Two dragons were gnawing on vehicles, including the one with the blown out throat. Two others stopped butting their heads together and turned to slowly stare at him with cataract covered eyes.

Weirdly, three of the huge reptiles had breasts. One of the three had six of them and two sets of male genitalia.

A roar of one of the lion faced ones from behind him let him know his options were limited.

"299..." he said.

--yeah--

"Get ready..."