Chapter Thirty-Eight - Drone On |
Chapter Thirty-Eight - Drone On
"The drone is to modern warfare today what the artillery piece was to warfare at the start of the 20th century. If you don't adapt to it, it will adapt you into a pile of giblets."
--Translated (MTL) Ukrainian Drone-Op manual, 2029
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The was a hiss before a voice came on over their comms. Since my augs were pretty top-shelf, they labelled the speaker before they had time to say anything. Jaun Hatner, Sergeant First Class, tank commander of one of the C3 Rattlersnakes. "Ma'am, we have firing solutions on the nearest targets. Permission to open fire?"
I reached over and toggled on my own comms. "Granted. I don't know what your ammo stock looks like, but let's not have any left when we get back," I said.
"Yes ma'am!"
The strike force is sharing their data feeds.
"Patch them in, please," I said. I was even being nice and saying 'please.' A moment later, I had a dozen orange pips across my vision, each one above a distant Model Fifteen, with some targeting data next to each, mostly ranges from our current location.
Model Threes were rushing across the space, even if the ground was still smoking and the air wavering with heat. A few of them tumbled and crashed before making it through, but others managed, even if their little alien feet were melted by the end.
The strange thing was seeing Model Tens riding on the backs of the bigger Model Threes, like chimps riding well-trained dogs in a circus.
I supposed that the Antithesis had one goal in mind, and a few hundred loses didn't change that for them.
The hell had cleared up enough room and pushed away some of the smokescreen. It was allowing the Model Fifteens and other bigger aliens to stand out.
The strike force spread out around me, using the top of the hill as a vantage. The bigger tanks started firing almost immediately, then the Pikes joined in a bit later, spraying lines of heavy machinegun fire into the distance to pepper the nearest Model Fifteens full of holes.
"Is that all of them?" I asked.
There were only a dozen Model Fifteens? I felt like there ought to be more. They could fling their equivalent of an artillery shell out every thirty seconds or so. The number of hits on the wall... well, I wasn't good at math, but it was about one a second, do there had to be more of them.
"We have drones incoming," the sergeant said.
I felt my ears perk up as a distant whine, one I'd dismissed with all of the shooting and engine noises around us, grew louder and closer.
Then I followed the view on one of the MEOW's gimbal-mounted gun's cameras as a flight of friendly drones rushed over.
There was a larger drone in the centre of the group, with a footprint bigger than a car. It was trailed by two groups of three smaller drones, with another group of three up and ahead of it.
The big guy had these black, glassy half-domes pressed into its sides. Some sort of scanning thing? Cameras? Probably a bit of both and a few more things. That larger drone isn't armed at all, so I figure it's a recon drone of some sort.
In each team of three, the centre-most drone is equipped with a small gun. The other two are flying light.
The drones connect to the strike group's feed as they approach, and I get to look in on our formation from above. Then the drones continue on past us, making way too much noise as they do so. Still, they're scanning out ahead and soon we'll probably have location markers for the rest of the Model Fifteens we're out here to blow up.
The Antithesis, predictably, reacted. Entire swarms of Model Ones rise up from the ground and take to the air. Then they fly straight for the incoming drones.
It's not long before one of the foremost smaller drones peels off from the rest. In a blink, it goes from flying as fast as a car to zipping out bullet-fast to crash into a flock of Model Ones. The drone detonated in the middle of the ground. It's not a huge explosion, but judging by the number of flying aliens that weren't able to fly anymore, I figured it had to be some sort of fragmentation grenade designed explicitly for taking out Model Ones.
A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.
The comms hissed again and I could make out the rumble that came from the insides of a tank as Sergeant Hatner spoke up. "New targets found, ma'am."
"Got it," I said. "Give me two minutes to look over everything, yeah?"
"Yes ma'am."
I did just that, then found myself frowning. The smokescreen was clearing out even as the drones flew deeper into the territory that the Antithesis were crawling through. There were a dozen more Model Fifteens, some of them were even pretty close, but we hadn't picked them out because of bushes and trees and other aliens in the way. The software on the drones was better at finding them.
My big concern was the group of some thirty Model Fifteens walking out way. The long, almost cricket-like monsters were scuttling along a pitted road maybe two kilometres out. That was a lot of alien firepower. I wasn't sure if they'd be able to punch a hole in the wall, but they'd damage it, and if they got close, they'd definitely be able to fling stuff over the wall.
The issue wasn't so much the thirty Model Fifteens. Sure, that was a lot of firepower, but we could take them.
The issue was the escort.
The drones continued to fly out, a few of them darting out and exploding to clear the way every so often and the gun-toting ones fired at anything that rushed towards the main sensor drone. As it mapped out more of the road, it became clear that this fight wasn't going to end any time soon.
The aliens were using the road, which I guess made sense. The road was filled to the brim. Thousands of smaller models, interspersed with a random mix of bigger aliens, all moving at their own pace with more patience and skill than the average Quebec driver would show.
More concerning than the huge numbers, were the bigger models stuck in with the rest. It looked like every one of those were in the teens, not the twenties range, so shit wasn't fucked that hard yet, but if the hive these were coming from could make those, then it wouldn't be long before we were dealing with Antithesis from the mid-twenties range.
Plus, we already knew that there were some tougher, smarter models out there as well, from weeks ago.
I took control of the MEOW's main gun, made sure that it was loaded with something appropriate (Myalis loaded it with some run of the mill HE shells, so that worked) then fired at one of the furthest targets while I thought.
We could kill those Model Fifteens. Charge in, get close enough, blow them up. Maybe take out any that were further away as well.
If we did that, we'd have to move soon. The little Wolverine ATVs and the three troop transports were shooting into the nearest aliens already. The Antithesis had very obviously noticed us up on our little hill and were coming to take a bite. Most of them were still rushing towards the walls, some even ignoring us outright, but more were starting to form a loose circle and I was sure that we'd get swarmed once they reached critical mass.
The problem was... was the risk worth it?
I'd like the points. But... fuck, we had the location they were in now. While taking them out ourselves would guarantee the kills, I had a couple of dozen soldiers around me right now that might not make it. They were volunteers, but I was still responsible for them.
"Fuck," I muttered before switching comm channels. "Gom! I need some help for a sec. I have a location that needs a quick artillery strike, can we do that?"
Gomorrah didn't mess around. "Possibly. Where? Hedgehog is setting up his own longer-ranging systems as well. Could that help?"
"Yeah, that'd be perfect," I said.
"Good. We need you nearer to the river. Princess asked for reinforcements there."
"Okay... yeah, no, that's perfect," I said. "Get me a shot on the coords I'm sending you. We'll mop up after then head over to the river from here. We might need a resupply, though."
"I'll forward that to the army. You know that I'm not your secretary, right?"
"Yeah, but what else were you doing? Probably just having fun and goofing off."
"I was burning the xeno," Gomorrah said.
"Like I said, probably just having fun and goofing off."
***