He had to shut down and then reboot the gyros before he could stand up, and then he turned and went back to the top of the hill. The place was a mess.
On the fields below, the deebee swarm was now ash, turned to scorched dust by the force and heat of a fusion explosion. It would take him years to deal with the radiation, and he might have to move to maintain enough land to make a viable homestead, but he was glad to be alive.
He was saddened, however, at the sight of Carnigore, lying shattered and twisted at the base of the hill. The blast must have picked the exomech up and hurled it down the slope, and looking at the torn armour the following wave of radiation must have cooked Wright inside his suit.
Hopefully, he’d have been unconscious when the wave hit and he’d died quickly.
There was movement behind him, and he turned to see Grampage moving towards him. The exomech waved at him, then the right arm carefully tapped the suit’s head, indicating radio failure. Grampage would have been well protected from the explosion, but high up on the next hill it would have been quite vulnerable to the EMP.
Crazy Bill came closer, and Graves could see through the armoured glass canopy that he was waving a hand-held radio at him. The hand-helds were standard equipment for all colonists, and it took Graves only a moment to unclip his.
“You okay old-timer?” he asked, smiling to take the sting out of his words.
“Never been better,” Crazy Bill replied. “You got a lot of dead deebees on your land, Hank, going to be good fertiliser come next summer.”
“Summer in about 300 years you mean,” Graves said, “after the radiation dies down.”
He could see Crazy Bill laughing at him.
“Don’t be foolish, Hank, the deebees will absorb that radiation as they break down.”
“Really?”
Crazy Bill was nodding now.
Suddenly, there was an almighty roar, loud enough to shake them both through their armoured exomechs. Looking around, Graves saw a creature that even his worst nightmares wouldn’t have thrown at him.
It was a deebee, but like nothing of them had ever seen before. His visual sensors were out, but it towered over the trees it was brushing easily aside, and must have stood at least 30 metres tall at the shoulder. Graves counted six clawed legs, could see from the sheen that it was chitin armoured, and the snout was fanged like a hungry cat.
“What… on… earth… is … that?” was all he could mutter.
“That,” Crazy Bill replied, “is as good a reason as you’ll ever need to run the hell back to your bunker.”
Nodding, Graves turned his exomech and moved as fast as he could back to his farmstead.
By the time Graves and Crazy Bill got back to the Bunker, the two light Singh exomechs had arrived, and Beth and Helen were out chatting to the two men. Beth waved happily when Graves arrived, but stopped waving when she saw the state of Brutiful and the urgency on her husband’s face.
“Hank, honey, what is it?”
“Deebee coming, get back in the Bunker!”
“How many?” Agun asked, strapping himself back into his harness.
“Just one, son,” Crazy Bill replied, “just one.”
Agun and Kubai frowned as they sealed their exomechs and powered up their sensors — they’d known when the fusion cell was due to detonate and had shut down their systems to avoid the worst of the EMP — but they weren’t making much sense of the readings.
“My sensors must be fried,” Kubai said.
“Mine too,” Agun added. “I’m picking up one signature, of enormous mass.”
“There’s nothing wrong with your sensors,” Graves said. “Just the one, and it’s the size of a deep-space shuttle.”
The creature appeared at that moment, towering over the trees, and Beth and Helen both ran for the safety of the Bunker. Moving at great speed, the deebee headed towards them and Graves barely had enough time to reload the last of his ammunition canisters before the thing broke through the electric fence surrounding the farmstead. Built to keep out cattle, it barely registered on the behemoth above them.
The Bunker was equipped with a pair of 200mm cannon, capable of firing both high-explosive and anti-armour rounds. The ammunition hoppers were always filled with high-explosive, and Beth was firing them at the rapid rate, hoping to bring the creature down under a hail of fire. Against the thick chitin armour, however, the rounds did nothing.
Brutiful’s autocannon had much the same effect, bouncing harmlessly off or exploding on impact without troubling the creature at all. He didn’t even bother firing the shotgun, knowing the lower-velocity rounds would do nothing.
The Singhs charged in, Hawk and Eagle moving swiftly around the creature, firing their machine guns hoping to find a weak spot. The creature didn’t appear to have any, and the rounds did little more than distract it.
Kubai’s flamethrowers did little better, managing to infuriate it, and the creature reared up on its four hind legs and brought its fore-paws crashing down…
Both of the lighter exomechs managed to dodge, though only just.
The Bunker’s twin cannon were still firing, and still having no effect at all.
“Beth,” Graves said as he moved Brutiful around to the giant deebee’s right side, “quit wasting the hi-ex. I need you to unload as fast as you can and reload with the anti-armour rounds.”
“Hank, honey,” Beth replied, “what do you think I‘m doing?”
Graves conceded that she had a point… unloading manually would have taken much longer than just firing it all off.
“Okay,” he said. “Let me know when you’ve got a few anti-armour rounds loaded, we’ll try to keep the thing off the bunker until you do.”
“Roger that!”
Eagle and Hawk were running between the creature’s legs now, still firing, and it didn’t seem to like it much. It reared up again, this time on its rearmost pair of legs, and brought its whole body down.
This time Eagle wasn’t so lucky, and a descending claw caught it and pressed it to the ground. The giant head came around, jaws open, and then the creature’s teeth crushed and tore into the exomech and the pilot within. Graves winced as he heard Agun’s screams, and then there was silence.
“Brother!” Kubai yelled, and darted forward to avenge his fallen kinsman. The creature was grinding the suit between its teeth, shredding the armour and Agun’s remains. Ignoring his other weapons, Kubai slammed Hawk directly into the deebee’s head, using the suit’s armoured shoulders as a battering ram.
The impact was incredible, and Graves saw teeth fly out of the mouth as the creature sagged for a moment, and Kubai took the opportunity to slam Hawk’s fists into the creature’s head, massive roundhouse blows with power and weight behind them that only an exomech could generate.
The creature’s exoskeletal armour began to break apart, and Kubai dug his suit’s hands deep into a crack and heaved… Armour pulled away, revealing bright pink and yellow flesh beneath. He shoved his right arm into the hole and fired a burst from his twin machine guns, digging deep as the rounds finally punched into something vital.
The creature roared in agony and lifted its body, dragging Hawk with it. Kubai used his left arm to hang on and continued firing as the creature shook his head frantically in an effort to dislodge him.
“Hank, honey!” Beth cut in. “I have six anti-armour rounds loaded, ready to fire!”