Chapter Fifteen - Mech Makes Might

Chapter Fifteen - Mech Makes Might

Chapter Fifteen - Mech Makes Might

"The issues with mechanised walkers, as in, bipedal mechs, is... everything. There is no advantage to any of this. On paper, every aspect of this design is a disaster waiting to happen!"

--Ignored Noeing Engineer Memo, 2048

***

If I wasn't used to dealing with whining children then I might have been a little overwhelmed at the level of brattiness I had to deal with when I returned.

"It's not working," Princess said.

"Well, we haven't exactly tried everything, now have we?" Crackshot shot back.

"This isn't according to protocol. Not that any of you have the faintest clue what that even means," Hedgehog grumped... okay, so it wasn't grumpy, but rather the mature adult man's version of grumpy, which was the same but with a deeper voice.

I blinked at the lot of them, then slowly looked over to where Knight was standing next to Tankette's tank. Neither of them seemed willing to join in on the incessant whining, which was actually kind of nice.

"Alright, fuckwits," I snapped. That calmed them all down, though I think it might have pissed off a couple. "Someone needs to tell me what's going on."

They, of course, all started talking at the same time.

I sighed. "No, no, shut up. Hedgehog, you go first. Gimme a report as if I'm... I dunno, some out of town shareholder."

Hedgehog stood taller at that.

When I'd come over, I'd discovered the newbie squad spread out across a couple of acres. They were bitching over the comms and very clearly not working out what to do next. Princess and Knight were stabbing at the ground on one end, Tankette was parked at the back doing nothing. Crackshot was planting explosives into the ground with a sort of post-digger, and Hedgehog was patrolling the outside area while complaining the hardest.

Nothing practical seemed to be getting done, and it kind of annoyed me. So I had them all gather up in the shadow of that hill we'd fought from earlier, then I got out of my mech so that they could read from my body language. I wanted it to be clear that I wasn't impressed.

"Once you left with Gomorrah, we continued to fight the antithesis until the area was cleared of living examples," Hedgehog began.

"Alright," I said. So far so good.

"Then we couldn't decide on how to get rid of the hive. I suspect we all started to take care of things in our own way," Hedgehog said.

"We were just gonna cut up all of the roots," Princess said.

"And I was planting bombs all over. They're sucky vacuum bombs, they'll rip the area up without tossing too much dust into the air," Crackshot said.

I scanned the area at a glance. Lots of broken trees and burnt grass and whipped up dirt. "Might be a while before this area's safe. I bet there's a few model threes under all that dirt just playing dead or something."

"Very possible. The army will have to look into it," Gomorrah said. "Our job is to kill the hive. Making sure it stays dead either happens as a consequence of how hard we kill it, or it becomes someone's full-time job, at least for a while."

Made sense to me. We'd probably left a few husks of hives behind us already that needed to be scoured. Someone probably earned a nice hourly income making sure that every last root was burnt to a crisp.

Gomorrah and I made it to the top of the hill where Crackshot was buying up some crates of ammo. "My AI got a grid laid out for us to follow," he said before sending a file out. "Just got to line things up and then we can pull the trigger."

"Oh, can I do it?" Princess asked.

"Yeah, sure thing, kiddo," Crackshot said.

With the mortars loaded up, they started to fire out bombs that rose up, then thumped into the soggy ground. It was nice to see the pattern forming, bombs every two metres or so in a sort of circular spiral pattern.

I sat back and waited while they loaded and fired in sequence. At the same time, I checked the news. There were some hints that the whole Phobos thing was being leaked. Politicians were seen panicking about things, and there were lots of celeb-news channels that were saying that fan-favourites were looking into bunkers all of a sudden.

Some were saying that it was just an after-effect of the whole global incursion, but it felt like more, especially knowing the full story.

Poor fucks thought that bunkers would save them.

"Alrighty! We're done!" Princess said. She raised both hands as if she were the conductor of an orchestra, then paused. "All clear?... Yeah? In that case... ka-boom!"

There was, in fact, a rather nice ka-boom some split second later. The explosions started in the centre of the spiral, then continued outwards. They were rather strange, loud pops that had the air in the area visibly sucking inwards even as dirt was kicked up on the edge. With each subsequent explosion the circle grew and the spiral of missing dirt continued to grow.

Then all was done, there were a few last explosions in some nooks and corners, and a row of them along the shoreline that had the lake's water churning, then it was over.

A few spots revealed some ancient roots from the old trees in the area, liberated at last, and a few spots looked like the sort of roots I'd expect from a hive.

"Nice work," I said. "Now... Gomorrah, what's the next step?"

Gomorrah, who'd relocated to sitting on the hood of the Fury. Looked my way. I could imagine her blinking languidly at my attempt to fling responsibility her way. "The next step is returning to Saint-Jrome. The city will survive without us for a few hours, but it'll be better if we're there."

"Good point," I said. "Back to the city, folks!" I said.

Time to go back and see if the army had managed not to set themselves on fire while we were gone for... what, four hours?

Even odds, I figured.

***