Chapter Thirty-Nine - The Difference Between Brave and Stupid |
Chapter Thirty-Nine - The Difference Between Brave and Stupid
"I think one of the biggest issues is that the new browser--other than the usual things, like selling all of your data--just takes too long to load. Come on, it's 2036! I can't have it taking three seconds to open a page just because your bespoke AI is wasting a hundred tokens making sure that it's what I wanted!"
--NetInformer Cumulus Browser review, 2036
***
It took two minutes before the feed from that main sensor drone cut off. I wasn't even sure what did it, because my attention was split on other things. I just know that between one moment and the next, the camera feed I'd been occasionally glancing at went dark.
"Strike team," came an officious voice over the comms. Someone from the army, and probably someone sitting in an office somewhere, or maybe in one of those field bases. "Second wave of scout drones coming in. ETA three minutes until they're over your position. Artillery strike was ordered on your pinged coordinates by Samurai Gomorrah. Confirmation?"
"Give me a second," I said. I looked over the coordinates, checked on the map I had open in the corner of my vision, then nodded. "Yup, that looks right. Green to go on that arty strike."
"Acknowledge strike group. Battery teams confirming... we have confirmation. Shots incoming in t-minus one minute."
"Thanks," I replied. The coordinates were something like fifty metres ahead of where the Model Fifteens had been. If they kept moving at the same plodding pace, that would more or less hit right on top of them. At least, assuming that the artillery team was accurate enough.
"Confirmed."
"Acknowledged."
I nodded through a small litany of acknowledgements, some more enthusiastic than the rest. It was mostly the Wolverine pilots that unnerved me. They were far too excited to drive into an Antithesis horde for people riding what was basically an overpriced ATV with a gun strapped onto the top.
Maybe there was some selection bias at work. The sane people didn't ask to become the kind of person that ended up straddling the pleather ATVs and charging to their early death.
I'd have to pay attention to them, just in case.
Before we set off, I checked the ammo on the MEOW's main gun, made sure it was full-up on 155mm shells. Then I had the gimballed rifles on the mech's flanks eject all of their unspent rounds and ordered a new magazine. Myalis was nice enough to summon the fresh shells and mags into place already, so all I had to do was confirm the receival through the MEOW's software and listen to the satisfying ker-chunk of multiple guns racking a fresh round.
The unused ammo spilled out of the mech, like coins out of a winning slot machine, tumbling into four little piles at my side.
Probably a waste, but I wanted to be full-up, just in case. Reloading mid-fight was stupid if I could avoid it.
"Ready?" I asked.
I got more approvals.
"I'll clear the path. Stay close behind. Focus on near targets first. Rattlesnake one and two, you're in charge of our, uh, main targets. Once we're close to those Model Fifteens, blow them the fuck up."
"Yes ma'am, with pleasure," Sergeant Hatner said.
I nodded, then lowered my hands onto the throttle and pushed it up. There was a whole mechanism to control the legs individually, so I linked in and did just that. It wasn't that much better than the automatic system, but connecting my augs to it gave me a bit more control. I had to put those expensive augs to good use somehow.
The strike group fanned out behind me, and I quickly realized that we were going to have an issue. The Pikes, the two tankettes with us, were too damned slow. While they could drive over just about anything with their tracks, they couldn't keep up.
"Pikes, stay back. Uh, which of our troop transports has one of the squads?"
"Two and three," Hatner said.
"Good. Three, stay with the Pikes."
"Do we deploy?" someone from Pike three asked.
I considered it for a minute. That would mean having normal soldiers out of their nice protective tank, out in the open where any alien could swoop over and eat them. On the other hand, what use were they stuck in a metal box? They kinda signed up for this.
The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.
"Yeah," I said. "Stay close. When we're on our return trip, I want both Pikes and the transport to meet up with us. Try to help clear our flanks."
That was, I figured, about the best I could do. Not that it was the best overall, but... well, it more or less matched some of the scenarios I'd seen in my lessons. Damn, maybe I should have been studying ahead in school huh? At least small-unit tactics. Professor Roger's lessons had covered larger-scale things, kind of like the overall engagement. Smaller movements, of a single strike group heading out to take out an enemy VIP, wasn't covered as much.
Still, I think this was a reasonable move.
I was flinched out of my thinking when the artillery raining down across the battlefield just... cut off entirely.
It was strange, the non-stop booming, the flashes of light and the huge pillars of scattered dirt had become background noise, not having them anymore was a shock.
Not as much of a sock as seeing the ground ahead of us exploding upwards. A shell struck some two hundred metres ahead, then it was only a hundred and fifty or so. We kept moving forwards, and the guns on some of the ATVs opened up.
Behind us, the squad in ATT three came out and formed a line next to their truck. They started shooting our way, taking out anything that wasn't in our direct line of sight while the rest of the strike group right behind me just ripped into anything that came close.
We rode up an embankment and onto the road that the Antithesis had been using.
There were always a lot of complaints about Canadian roads, but those were usually not shelled to hell and back and covered in exploded alien bits.
A few of those aliens were only partially exploded, though. I stomped down on a Model Five, spun the mech's main gun around and blew a bowling-ball sized hole through a Model Six, then let my side guns open up automatically on anything that slipped into their range of fire.
The strike group tightened up behind me, then we started forward again.
The artillery fire was moving ahead, striking the ground further and further out, which was deeply satisfying because we were really starting to put some speed on and I didn't want to have an accidental hit land in my group.
We reached the spot where the Model Fifteens were in under a minute. Most were dead. One wasn't, and it stumbled awkwardly onto four of its remaining legs from within a still-smoking crater made of the side of the road. Had it been blown up and then back down?
The alien fired, and I winced as the strike rammed into one of the ATVs, foot-long spiked ramming into the armour. The pilot screamed, but they were alive.
"Hold here, focus ahead. Medics?"
"We're on it, ma'am!"
Medics and soldiers poured out of the troop transport, got around the ATV, then rushed back, pulling the injured with them. By then the Model Fifteen was pulped and so were any aliens within a few hundred metres down the road.
That wasn't the end of it, though. I could see a surge of them coming, on the road and off.
"Okay, U-turn," I said.
No sticking around, not when it wasn't worth it.
The strike group did as I asked. We abandoned the ATV. It wasn't worth the effort to tow. Though... "Myalis, Can I buy a few mines? I'd like to leave them behind us as we move."
That can be arranged. What sort?
"No need to be fancy," I said. "Proximity, something that goes boom when an alien gets close enough."
I counted the dead aliens. We were up to three hundred kills already, but this was nowhere near the end of this push. This batch of Model Fifteens was out of the fight, though, so I'd call it a mission success.
Now, everything depended on how well things were going with Princess and her sister by the river.
We turned around and left, my MEOW taking up the rear, turret spun around to pick off anything that looked big in the distance.
There was a lot.
I didn't like the number of big shadows I could only barely see through the approaching wall of smoke. The real push was coming. I think what we'd seen so far was more of a test.
I don't know if we passed it or not. Hopefully that made for good propaganda footage too.
We regrouped with the Pikes and the troop transport, then rushed out at best speed, letting the artillery return to its spread out fire.
***