Suddenly, a warning light flickered on. He barely had time to recognise it — something had carved deep into his right arm, striking the laser housing and shorting the small fusion pile — when a spark ignited the flamer fuel pooling around the prone exomech. The explosion was small, but that detonated the unspent high explosive rounds still in his ammunition drums, and that in turn breached the fusion containment cell.
The resulting explosion killed hundreds of deebees, scattering them around the farmstead in shattered chunks. But in a swarm of thousands, it mattered very little indeed.
Graves stood on a low, wide hill, and looked around.
Brutiful was in the centre of a line of exomechs, with Carnigore on his right and Grampage on his left. It wasn’t much against a horde of killer aliens, but it was the best they could do.
“Hank, honey?” Beth said over the combined command net.
“Here, Beth.”
“The Singhs are on their way in, but they’ll be a while, and Jenkins is reporting suit damage, not sure when or even if he can get here.”
“Suit damage my arse,” Crazy Bill said. “He’s either chicken-shit lazy or chicken-shit scared.”
“Either way, we can’t rely on him, so it’s just the three of us for now,” Graves said. “If we can hold out until the Singhs get here, we might have a chance.”
“We could always hole up in your bunker,” Wright said. “Plenty of room down there for everyone.”
“We’d have to come out eventually,” Crazy Bill replied. “Our best chance for the colony is for the exomechs to deal with them now, while we’ve got them in a bunch.”
“I agree,” Graves said. “We kill what we can here then fight as we fall back to the Bunker. That should slow them down a little at least.”
“The command and control suite has some suggestions for fall-back routes, honey,” Beth said. “I’m sending data now for your autopilots.”
Brutiful beeped as the data came in, and Graves quickly looked over it before setting it up as his autopilot program.
“Got it, Beth, thanks,” he said, as both Wright and Crazy Bill acknowledged receipt of their information packets.
“I have all our drones fitted with cameras now, and Helen Wright has sent hers in as well,” Beth continued. “We should have plenty of real-time video coming in, and I’ll punch it through as you need it.”
“What’s the satellite showing?” Wright asked.
“Nothing good,” Beth replied. “There’s a wall of deebees coming your way, should be in sight in a few minutes, and there are some gates still yet to open.”
“Any sight of Peters or Donaldson?” Graves asked. There was a long pause before Beth replied.
“Nothing on the sensors, nothing on satellite, and I can’t raise anyone on the radio.”
“That’s not good.”
“No it’s not,” Beth continued. “And that swarm headed your way would have swept right over their farmsteads.”
There was silence as the three men made last minute preparations for the onslaught to come.
Jaswant Singh stood atop a steep cliff, his Crescent Moon raining death into the valley below him. His exomech’s main armaments were a pair of long-range 3” cannon on the right arm and a heavy rocket launcher on the left. The cannons each spat out high-explosive shells every six seconds, giving him one round every three, and amidst the swarm of deebees headed his way the bursting charges and their tungsten shrapnel were leaving great gaps in the alien ranks.
The rocket launcher was a box-shaped, 6-tube weapon, capable of firing single rockets or volleys of six. It wasn’t as accurate as the cannon, but didn’t need to be — a volley of six rockets had enough scatter and burst to fill quite a large area with shrapnel, and close enough was good enough when it came to big explosions.
Its only problem was that it was slow to reload, and he was getting a volley away every five minutes.
Below him, midway up the hill, Eagle and Hawk waited, both pilots nervous as they watched the swarm approach. Their weapons lacked the long range of Crescent Moon, but were lethal at close range… how lethal, and how quickly they could kill swarming deebees in these numbers, was about to be tested.
The aliens were now 50 metres from the base of the hill, and Crescent Moon had time for one last volley of rockets before the creatures were too close for Jaswant to use his heavy weapons. All he could do now was pick off the creatures following behind, and hope the other exomechs could handle the rest.
As the deebees closed, Hawk and Eagle opened fire. Both arms mounted a pair of linked 15mm machines guns, capable of firing over 800 rounds per minute each and loaded with a mix of solid tungsten slugs and hollowpoint rounds. Each arm could fire independently, and the wall of tungsten that they spread before them stopped the first ranks of the swarm dead in their tracks.
The next waves met the same fate, but as each creature fell it created a small wall for the ones behind. Both exomechs walked slowly backwards up the hill as the wall grew, hoping to maintain some elevation so they could shoot at the creatures massing behind it.
From around both edges of the wall, however, more creatures swarmed, and Eagle and Hawk turned to face the new threat.
Hawk’s heavy weapon was a pair of semi-automatic mortars that fired over the exomech’s shoulder. They only had a range of 50 metres, but were able to empty their 5-round clips in a matter of seconds, generating enough firepower to devastate a large target almost instantly.
Agun Singh stomped the foot pedal for his mortars, emptying the clip at the approaching swarm. The mortars were set to target 40 metres away initially, then increase a few metres for each successive shot… the first three rounds from each mortar, all high-explosive, flattened the incoming wave, while the fourth rounds airburst and scattered shards of white phosphorous around.
The creatures beneath the white-hot halo burned as the hot phosphorous dug into the skin. Some collapsed instantly, the shards deep enough to cook them from the inside, but the rest kept coming, despite their horrible wounds.
The fifth rounds were napalm, splashing across the side of the hill and covering anything it touched with intense flame. Very few creatures made it through, and Agun dispatched those that did with tightly controlled burst from Eagle’s twin machine guns.
Behind him, Kubai deployed Eagle’s own heavy weapons, a pair of flamethrowers, one over each shoulder. Unlike the smaller flamethrowers on other exomechs, these were military grade, emitting white-hot jets of plasma that incinerated anything they touched. His approach was to let the creatures approach to within 20 metres and then spray them all with gouts of plasma.
They died by the dozens, the dead providing no cover at all as they turned to ash under the incredible heat. Eagle’s canopy darkened to protect him from the intense glare, which made Kubai blind to what was happening in front of him.
He toggled the camera feed, tapping into Crescent Moon’s video to get a third-party view of the battle, and adjusted his flame jets to deal with a group that were trying to flank him. They never made it, though the last of them was a charred corpse only a metre or so away.
Jaswant had reloaded his rocket pack now and looked for a target worth expending the high-explosive six-pack on…there was nothing as yet, so he used his time to fire cannon shells into small groups of deebees that were trying to push their way through or over the wall of corpses Hawk and Eagle had made with their machine guns.