First Contact

Chapter 783: The Inheritor's War

Were not going to just shoot the sons-of-bitches, were going to rip out their living Goddamned guts and use them to grease the treads of our tanks. - Saint Patton, Second Terran Global Conflict, Pre-Diaspora.

"If you aren't willing to do what you ask of your men, do not be surprised when they are reluctant to follow your orders." Colonel GraAlnt, Felzten Nebula Conflict, 4529 PG.

"There are no predictive analysis chains that will enable you to predict the actions of the Terran Descent Human because the Terran Descent Human has no idea what he is about to do." - War Commander Hezreklary, Ninth Quasar War, 2285 PG

"The Confederacy has vast libraries of doctrine, theory, history, and lessons learned. The majority of troops couldn't find the databases if you threatened to withhold the coingirls and joyboys from them." - General Ekret, First Armored Recon (Speed Metal), The Big C3, 8547 PG

The Ancient and Old Ones watching the phasic construct of the system and planet watched as the 'failsafe plans' went into effect, replacing destroying fighting positions and gating in the strongest slavespawn they had. Tens of thousands of reinforcements from eight servitor species rushed through the space-time bridges, already armed and armored, equipped fully.

Artillery and missile units picked back up their rate of fire as the nearly depleted stocks were replaced with full ammunition lockers. Air superiority craft and creatures swarmed into the air to pit themselves against the Confederate air support units. MANPADS and SAMs were fired by troops on both sides and the atmosphere became a nightmare of aerospace fighters, strikers, Dwellerspawn, missiles, and kinetic weaponry.

The servitors' fire picked back up as ammunition and casualties were replaced.

In over three dozen spots the Inheritors' advance was stopped or reversed. Units were cut off, forced to retreat, or surrounded.

The Young Ones felt the flush of victory and ensured that everyone knew that their plan to push the Inheritors past their limitations had come to fruition.

The Young Ones could taste that the Inheritors were on the edge of defeat. They could see the various units of the Inheritors, see that they were cut off, surrounded, or being forced to retreat in many areas on the planet.

The Ancient Ones conferred and conceded that it appeared that the Inheritors were on the edge of defeat. Their forces were in disarray, many units were surrounded, fresh troops had been gated and t-shifted in to push the Inheritors off the planet.

While the fight for orbit and possession of the system was still in doubt, the Inheritors still holding open the range far enough that the Atrekna vessels could not engage but the Inheritors' weapons could still strike, the Ancient Ones knew that the it was only a matter of time before geometry would force the Inheritor ships into close action.

Each unit was targeted, from planetside to orbit to the outer system.

The Ancient Ones and the Young Ones would continue to work the strategy to defeat them all in detail.

The Old Ones scoffed and turned back to the phasic representation of the planet and the system.

They wanted to be looking at the ebb and flow of battle when, inevitably, the Inheritors found an advantage or one of the Atrekna leadership caste made a critical mistake.

They knew they'd only have minutes, an hour at the most, to react of the battle for the system would be lost.

Concentration on the individual units would reap great dividends, the Atrekna were sure of it.

-----

Three Star General of the Iron Twargark, Commander XXXIV Corps of stared at the holotank.

The Atrekna t-shifts obviously, in hindsight, were able to operate despite the temporal denial munitions being expended. How, the General wasn't sure. That was a job for MilInt to figure out.

Her job was to figure out how to keep it from turning to disaster.

The entire thing felt piecemeal to General Jung.Wark. It had all been deployed within roughly the same timespan, only a bare twenty minutes between shifting in the bunker systems and reinforcements to shifting in the Kaiju Class Dwellerspawn. It looked like a coherent whole, but it still felt piecemeal to the General.

She adjusted his view, pulling back, and ran a quick time-lapse of the last thirty minutes of fighting.

There was heavy chronotron and exotic particle release detected toward the three mountain ranges that snaked across the huge protocontinent that coincided with additional Atrekna units being deployed out of those areas and into the battle. There was a massive chronotron burst, enough to 'flatten' the timestream, just like the Confederacy had used to keep the Atrekna from performing temporal replication, followed by the arrival of reinforcements, repaired and replaced emplacements, and the arrival of the Kaiju Class Dwellerspawn.

The General frowned, shaking her head and rubbing her forearms in a nervous habit.

Units were flashing across the entire system to denote "I AM ENGAGING THE ENEMY", even ones that were pulling back to a better defensive position.

She looked at the plans and actions of her Division and Regimental Commanders, not bothering to approve them. The battlefield was too fluid, active combat was underway in too many areas, for the commanders to have to wait for her signature to authorize them to do anything.

The ability of the commanders to make their own decisions without some General or full cluster Colonel hundreds of miles away interrupting the process had won and lost wars. Won, more than lost, in the General's opinion.

At least Major Vuxten isn't jumping everywhere, she thought to herself as she watched another unit cut off and surrounded suddenly shifted to advancing straight into the enemy. As she watched they broke through the Atrekna lines, linking up with an artillery brigade, then signaling that they were digging in hard.

She had faith in her commanders, had faith in their skill and training, and faith in their confidence in their subordinates.

She pulled her attention away from examining individual units and looked back at the battlefield, replaying the entire thing again.

there

She saw it.

When a Treana'ad Horde detachment, in tandem with the Warsteel Herd, broke through the lines of what was proving to be an incredibly tough objective, the Telkan and Hesstlan troops, backed by Tukna'rn and Hamaroosa ground forces, slammed as deep as they could, heading for the mountains.

Right after the Treana'ad and the Lanaktallan troops moved to assault an artillery division of the Atrekna, and there was a gap between the advance and the followup, that's when the entire planetary situation changed.

General Twargark smiled.

The Atrekna may not have realized it, but they had shown their weakness, what they needed to protect so much as to throw the entire planetary theater into disarray.

She turned to her adjutant.

"Signal all units in this sector," she ordered, tapping where the Confederate forces had managed to push deep into the enemy lines, forcing a breach that the Atrekna had just slammed the door on behind the troops. "Advance into enemy strength at discretion."

Her aide nodded.

"Alert these units to get ready, they'll be doing Air Assault insertions to take advantage of any damage to the Atrekna defenses," she said. She tapped the globe in the holotank. "The Atrekna think of ground battles and air battles as separate things. They are still stuck back in Ninth Generation Warfare."

She turned and rotated the holotank image.

"Get the warplans interlocked," she ordered. She tapped an odd spot in the mountains, where they was a large 'dent' in the mountain range. "Start lobbing tactical atomics at that spot. Let's see how badly they want to defend it."

Her adjutant nodded.

Three Star General of the Iron Twargark, Commander XXXIV Corps, hummed to herself as she bounced up and down on the balls of her feet.

Time to see what shook loose.

-----

Heat alarms were wailing and the cockpit suddenly grew hotter as the massive 90 ton warmek tried to dump heat and found nowhere for it to go. Ret.lek was panting as he blocked a pair of short range missiles with his forearm, the EFP's cratering the already battered armor. He swung the girder with one hand, the other one held back, waiting for the heat to drop far enough it was safe to use the 2 Pack SRM or the autocannon, using to grab at the Dwellerspawn.

The girder smashed aside a pair of Dwellerspawn, knocking them away from the melee.

Ret.lek had dozens of smaller Dwellerspawn crawling all over him. For every one he grabbed, squished, and threw away, another half dozen crawled up his legs.

He was cut off, at least two miles from any help, and his stealth mission had gone Tango Uniform on him when he'd stumbled across a major hatching pit. The bodies of a half dozen Ohm Class Dwellerspawn were slowly deflating as the water and ichor poured from the savage wounds driven through their armor. Dozens more of the smaller ones were scattered around. The skyrakers on either side of him were stripped of their outer facades and most of the interiors of the first ten floors were empty, leaving nothing behind but skeletal structure.

The spawning pool was still on fire, the FOOF devouring it mercilessly.

Ret.lek refused to give up. It didn't matter that he was outnumbered. It didn't matter that his mech was overheating to the point that the ichor steamed and bubbled where it landed on his torso armor, that the Dwellerspawn that tried to crawl on his torso burned when they came into contact with the pitted, cracked, and damaged warsteel. It didn't matter that his creation engine was overheated and slushed out, that the nanoforges were all offline. It didn't matter that his ammunition bays were all empty and the energy weapon mounts had overheated so badly the focusing arrays were worthless. It didn't matter that he had multiple coolant leaks and several armor breaches.

All that mattered is that he was all by himself but he wasn't alone.

FIFTEEN MEN ON A LAST RIDE roared out of the speakers, the Mantid engineer crew blaring music to at least offset the screeching of the Dwellerspawn.

NOTHING MORE THAN SKIN, STEEL, AND PRIDE thundered out.

Ret.lek grabbed a flying Dwellerspawn just behind the heat and cracked it like a whip, armor and body parts shooting off of the back end as the whiplash worked against the body. He flipped the carcass over his back, reaching back and grabbing it with the other hand, letting go of the girder.

Dancing to the side to avoid acid sprays he pulled the carcass tight against his back and pulled it back and forth as he moved it up and down, then dropped it, reaching out and grabbing another girder from the bent and ruined superstructure of the nearest skyraker.

The spawning pool rippled, suddenly refilled with fluid and creatures, as some asshole Atrekna t-shifted it.

The FOOF roared up with white and blue flames as it jumped from where it had been burning the air to an all new refreshed fuel source.

An Ohm Class, easily three times his size, heaved itself out of the pool, the FOOF catching the creature's armor on fire even as it burned away the fluid on the surface of the armor. It oriented as Ret.lek backed up, knowing even as he backpedaled that he couldn't move back too far due to the fact that a collapsed skyraker blocked his way.

VALKYRIE VALKYRIE CAN YOU SEE ME?

Ret.lek grabbed the beam with both hands, pulled it back over his head, and flung it at the Ohm Class.

ANCESTORS ANCESTORS CAN YOU HEAR ME?

The girder fluttered through the air, hit the Dwellerspawn, and bounced off, a split second contact enough for the FOOF to jump to the girder and start devouring it to.

The Dwellerspawn moved forward slowly, lifting its head up to stare into the eyes of Ret.lek's 90 ton warmek.

BLADE AND SPEAR THE BATTLES NOT WON

Ret.lek took two steps forward and swung his fist from down near his knee, jumping up into the air.

DON'T COUNT ME OUT TILL I'M DEAD AND DONE

His fist impacted the bottom of the point of the Dwellerspawn's jaw, the graviton spike driving deep into the spawn's chin, shattering bone and teeth as the head snapped back.

VALKYRIE VALKYRIE ARE THOSE YOUR ARMS I FEEL

Ret.lek backed up as the head slowly came down, his promixity alarms going off as he backed up against the shattered skyraker.

"VALKYRIE DON'T COLLECT ME WITHOUT MY STEEL!" Thundered from above.

Ret.lek looked up just in time to see a battered and worn 100 ton Giest warmek drop from where it had stepped off the hundredth floor of the skyraker, plummeting through the air.

The impact of the 100 ton warmek hitting the Dwellerspawn's spine sounded like the continental plate had snapped. Viscera and ichor spewed up in a fountain as the entire mid-section of the Ohm Class Dwellerspawn exploded into rags of flesh.

The shockwave knocked Ret.lek onto his butt, the back of his mech hitting the rubble.

The warmek ripped out of the corpse with two movements, stepping in front of Ret.lek long enough to hose him off with plasma enhanced thermite-napalm, then turning and hammering the spawning pool with a six-pack of rockets.

"Take five, son," Ret.lek heard over the channel. "Dump heat."

The iron-gray haired icon of the XO appeared in his vision.

Ret.lek found himself nodding silently, his mouth open in shock as he watched the XO go to work.

He'd heard about the Mad Lemurs of Terra in a fight, but had never seen them.

The stories had, if anything, understated it.

In less time than it took Ret.lek's mech to drop from OVERLOAD to yellow heat, the spawning pool and everything around it had been reduced to rubble and molten rock and metal.

The XO turned around, the battered warmek holding out a hand.

Ret.lek took it, letting the bigger warmek pull him to his feet.

"Cool down, we'll link up with the rest of the company. Scout missions are off, squidbillies are making a push across the entire sector," the XO said. The warmek turned back and forth at the waist, the XO's head moving left and right.

"Good job, son," the XO said. "Held them long enough for me to get here, that's what counts."

Ret.lek just nodded.

His heat dropped into dull yellow.

"Let's go," the XO said.

The two Davion class heavy warmeks moved between two shattered skyrakers, slowly climbing the hill of debris.

Above them missiles and rockets dueled with counter-battery fire in the cloudy sky.

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