Existential Threat: Chapter 21 Part 2 of 2 (Patreon)

Nuclear penetrator markers falling on those they couldn’t hit.

“Keep it up,” Kirmani cut off the channel.

“Rolling arty in three minutes, we’ll follow up behind it, dress our lines and dig our asses in,” Luke said to his squad. “Command says that we’re engaged with the actual Adraxi force now.”

“Yay, and here I was thinking we could hop and skip into their rear,” Fin said.

Luke pressed a smile, reading how tired Fin was from his words.

“Ammo?” Jynx asked.

“Good call,” Luke flipped to the engineer channel. “Two minutes till arty drop, be ready to move up and reload everyone, don’t know what we’re going to be in when it all dies down. Build up defensive positions once we stop.”

“Copy,” The engineer commander said.

General markers for the advance, others for the FOBs were added to the map, older markers cleared away or updated.

The sky seemed to inhale several times.

“Incoming,” Luke’s word was covered by the sharp impacts of the artillery rounds. They went of across the frontage of the push, advancing.

Luke got up, the wind battering at his bot as he blinked the move marker, the others getting up and moving with him, tanks, bots, heavies, people got on the move, cutting down the Adraxi that survived.

The near autonomous creatures were dazed and confused as the bots drove through them.

Luke stumbled as the impacts grew in volume. They’re cranking up the payload as they move away.

Seeing it in a simulation, or in the distance was very different from being just a few hundred meters from the impacts. Mushroom clouds rose up, not ahead, not on an angle, but it seemed they were straight up, pillars reaching up to space.

Luke jumped over a crater, jogging, moving with the exaggerated steps of the heavy bot, he came to a stop, firing at Adraxi shooting at his people. Pushing the Adraxi into cover long enough for the squad to orientate on the fire and push the position, hucking grenades.

Still in the yellow on ammo.

The rain tamped the dust from the artillery down, the landscape alien to all but those that had walked through a battlefield before.

He stayed away from the edges of craters, lest he fall in, stepping on fallen trees and stone where he could to stay out of the tar-like mud.

Groups slowed moving markers as they grouped into new cover. The sine clenching gut tightening impacts crunching out in the distance.

I’m glad I’m not under that.

“Alright lets get setup,” Luke checked the ground.

“What if we use the craters, get the engineers to connect them, dump the waste in the bottom?” Shiro asked.

“Good call, lets get in them.”

Luke stepped on the edge, letting it crumble, sliding down the side of the ten meter wide crater, wading through the water gathering in the bottom to the other side, tamping down the other side of the crater with his feet to create steps, resting his machine gun on the side of the crater.

Over the course of minutes, hundreds of thousands of bots and thousands of tanks disappeared into the forest’s dirt.

Engineers ran from position to position, the only sign the land was populated. Weapons fire ripped out in bursts and spurts.

“Go fifty percent, build up your positions,” Kirmani said on the company general chat.

“Moose, Jynx start creating a path to the other craters.” Luke saw a channel blinking at him. “One sec private chat.”

“Boss?” Luke asked.

“You okay to switch off with me, I’m looped in now.”

“Sure thing commander, I added in an artillery hotkey that will take markers made in the last five seconds and turn them into arty requests.”

“Good call, you did good Luke.”

“Thanks boss, but you’re welcome to have it back, lemme know if you need fire support.”

“Will do,” Kirmani chuckled, closing the chat.

Nothing moved but the bots just fifty meters ahead of his crater. Heads moving here and there, dirty being thrown out.

Alright, keep moving else you stop.

With a grunt he secured his rifle and stepped down into water-mud slurry at the bottom of his crater.

“Alright I’m off command now, I’m working on my crater.”

“Anyone got a bucket?” Moose asked.

“Nope, but if we could shoot just one round through the dirt we could clear a path between craters,” Fin said.

“And blow our asses to atoms,” Jynx said.

Luke stepped up the side of the crater, checking where Moose’s crater was, carving two lines into the wall of the crater with his hand before he started to scoop through the mud, tossing it into the crater between his legs.

“What’s happening with the Orkaran?” Jynx asked.

“The civvies and the injured were sent to the freighters which took them to the Sphere World, there’s about two billion of them life, taking some time to lift them all. A chunk of them stayed on planet, getting armored up, building their own redneck movers and joining in the fight like Ken and his band of misfit first Orkarans,” Fin said.

Luke glanced to where Orkarans in their suits were hauling logs to their movers to create platforms that wouldn’t trap the heavy vehicles in the mud.

“Command doesn’t think that there are many left in the remaining cities, spore spread is so heavy,” Luke gritted his teeth, clawing at the mud viciously.

Interceptors hissed out, striking something else in the distance. A wing of hellcats cut across the sky in the direction the interceptors went.

“Keep your heads on a swivel,” Luke said.

“We’re off our log off time by three hours,” Shiro said.

“They’ll probably start trading companies off, most will come once they got the firebases up.” Luke flicked the map up, advancing through the mud, now caked to his hands and front.

“Yeah dropships are inbound, bet they got all the gear they need, two minutes out.”

They sunk back into silence and their own thoughts.

“Well this is glamorous,” Moose said.

Luke looked down at his mud covered bot, scraped and dented from the fighting, he snorted which gave way to a chuckle and a laugh, spreading to the others as they toiled under thunder clouds, cracking with the fury of war, black rain filling their craters.

***

Containers had been outfitted with net-suits along one side, several were running, walking and carrying on in -mid-air, their arms moving to mimic the world they were connected to.

Ken followed the engineering bot, checking something in mid-air as they wandered past them.

“Here we are,” the bot, pressed a button on one of the armored shells, it broke open, revealing ports and lights.

They moved to the second.

“Put your feet in first, then shrug your arms in, you’ll feel finger balls, press all of them and the suit will close around you.” They opened the second suit.

“Once you’re on the net you’ll go through a tutorial on using the net-suit. Been a while since I’ve seen one of those,” They chuckled to themselves. “Follow it and you’ll be up and running in no time.”

“How do we get out?” Per asked.

“Pull up your menu and you’ll have a logout button. Otherwise you can hit the finger-balls three times and the suit will open for you.”

Ken stepped into the suit, putting in his arms twice before finding the right way to do it without it feeling like he was trying to put his shoulders out of their socket.

“Thank you,” Ken said.

“No worries, remember, three presses and you’re out, someone will be here if you need them. Otherwise say override, logout and that’ll pop you out too.”

Ken nodded and pressed the balls at the end of his fingers.

The suit closed around him, pads inflated against his sleeve and then relaxed as his helmet dropped into place.

He rose up on a pad into a roughly hewn room.

“Welcome to your net-suit tutorial, we will go through the basics you need to know to get the most out of your suit!”