[TnL] Chapter 166 – Whistling Death

AN: Got a neat little update! The Tinea T-Shirt is now available in black!

Chapter 166 – Whistling Death

Written are Earth's most profound lessons in blood,
Carried to wise students on voiceless echoes by dead.

– It is bitter irony, that even our most conscientious still learn mostly from suffering and pain.

⁂

Thirty minutes of slowly dispersing storm later, and I finally had a proper look at our newest battlefield from two hundred meters up in the air, sailing along on wings of fabric. I wasn't straying far from Leah, if only to make sure the hidden buggers didn't force us to go loud too early. We wanted to kick things off on our terms, and Leah's army of scavenging robots was not quite finished picking apart the corpse of the Sapper to craft more of themselves.

The much-lightened rain pattered peacefully against my canopy, thick enough only to obscure vision some three-thousand meters out. There weren't even any model Ones around, all broken and washed away by the sudden monsoon, or burned by my earlier skyfires. Or maybe they were just waiting for the last of the weather to die down?

I couldn't quite see as far as Baie-Comeau, much less beyond and to the river, but our immediate terrain was finally revealed: 

The heavy floods had torn the topsoil from half the hill and turned its bottom into a muddy mire. Furrows still ran with water, trees lay in felled fields, and generally, Dervish's little paradise was ruined. I supposed she figured that was going to happen anyway, what with the waves of Antithesis we'd had coming.

Those had been disrupted, split into huge amounts of smaller groups nosing around wherever they'd washed up or dug free from. There were pods of them still swimming in the myriad little flows born from the floods. A buttload of model Eight digging worms out and about, fleeing from the subterranean flooding like earthworms.

All threatening new nests.

Even so, Dervish's storm had been a victory. It had shocked them out of whatever cohesion had kept them traveling for days, which meant we would have an easier time culling them and making sure their buried bodies didn't grow fresh hives. 

Dervish herself would soon range far to take out the older nests still feeding the collapsed incursion with thousands of fresh models every hour. At least those weren't joining a coordinated attack. They just ran smack-bang into the confusion and found disparate, aimlessly milling masses.

We, on the other hand, had a ready setup of two main battle tanks, a half-strength squad of Hatchets with good versatility and good self-sufficiency, three hundred crawling-and-brawling ant-robot scavengers the size of any model Three—but approximately twenty times as tough, if I knew my fiber composites—and, of course, myself on overwatch, ready to toss bombs.

Even as those ants carried the last pieces of dead mech to Leah's mobile foundry for recycling, I comm'd Leah.

"Okay. Our attitude's looking lovely. Our enemy is disorganized, their strongest models have no backup, and we know that they don't know what we know. What actions does your Sim Cell suggest?"

The strategic nerve-center automatically spat out a fast selection of missions:

• Counter Ambush [Kill; Deception, Triggered by Action; Target: Kill Squad, Combination Melee Specialist/Control Specialist/Sabotage Specialist/Infiltration Specialist]

  • Kill: 3 targets, models Thirty-Three. Variant!

  • Deception, Triggered by Action: pretend separation, initiate aerial bombing of nearby low tier Antithesis. Respond to triggered ambush with ranged rocketry.

  • Target: combined specialities per target. Standard capabilities extended: additional subcutaneous armoring, grappling and garotting via electrified wire; extreme voltages observed. Engagement ranges: short. No ballistic weaponry observed. Threat ratings: Extreme in melee range. Extreme from ambush. Extreme against soft targets.

  • Priority/Immediacy: High/Immediate

• Eradication [Kill; Campaign; Target: massed Antithesis]

  • Kill: clusters to swarms, models One through Twenty-Eight. Variants!

  • Campaign: multi-pronged extermination. Development of routine expected, remote-controlled execution expected. Generate intangible resource: Vanguard Points.

  • Target: greater incursion, varied models, varied variants. Bunker busters detected! Model Fifteen Artillery detected! Stealthed pack hunters detected! Specialist models detected! Subterraneous Resource Gathering Specialists detected! Massively increased threat of local nest formation! Reduced air presence.

  • Priority/Immediacy: High/Mediate 1

• Establish Networked Warforge Fabrication Center [Logistics; Campaign; Partial Autonomy; Scavenging]

  • Logistics: provide materials, provide construction equipment, provide materiel transport.

  • Campaign: establish and hold secured area. Develop material flow. Develop victory condition guarantees: mass supply of ordnance, Hatchets.

  • Partial Autonomy: strategic delegation, CPU backups, demand-guided network.

  • Scavenging: availability of unused refined resources: none. Offset via limited scavenging of allied infrastructure: permissions? Set guidelines?

  • Priority/Immediacy: Middling/Mediate 2

• Flesh Out Forces [Optional; Expediency; Independency; Variable Outlay; Quick Reaction Force]

  • Optional: not required to generate victory conditions.

  • Expediency: no material resources required, no time-to-completion.

  • Independency: no fabrication center required, no logistics required

  • Variable Outlay: purchases scale to requirements. Cost: Vanguard Points.

  • Quick Reaction Force: eases securing of sovereign area, eases guarding of sovereign area.

  • Priority/Immediacy: None/Variable

I was impressed. The machine had given us a rather concise list, considering the challenges we faced. Easily summarized with the tag system. It even recognized our immediate intentions based on our preparations over the last thirty minutes: kill the most dangerous threat by turning their own ambush on them.

And the following items made sense, too; generate enough points to set up an automated system that could fight our war for us, and if necessary, enhance combat effectiveness along the way by buying additional walkers with points.

Even resource collection was an issue recognized by the Sim Cell's strategic calculators. Sifting through the ground for minerals wasn't an option—too little, too late. But perhaps we could use parts from the flooded village, or better yet, convince Dervish to chip in? She had just yoinked a million points from the sky, nevermind whatever she did to the river-aliens.

"Nice," I commented.

"Hella nice," Leah agreed, satisfaction coloring her tone and making me smile. "These kinda campaigns are the lowest domain of the Warforge catalog. Been waiting long enough to get here."

"Well. Ready to go?"

"Go."

My parachute all but sucked itself back into its pack, and I fell from the sky with the terrible death-whistle of the German Sturzkampfbomber so familiar from World War II clips.

Dumbfire rockets rolled onto the fringes of my Chrysaora's veils and lit off, adding more Notice me, Senpai! to the cacophony. They raced ahead, towards the closest group of model Threes, which barely had time to look up, register my approach, and die in balls of fire.

Whatever it took to be utterly unignorable to everything inside a few hundred meters. Whatever made it look like I was preoccupied with fighting my own targets.

More alien heads lifted and saw me. More things for me to bomb.

Two minutes later, I finally crossed the magic boundary and the Thirty-Threes attacked.

Their hidden shapes suddenly jumped forwards, busting through trees and across rocky outcrops, racing for the Sim Cell. 

Daddy-Long-Legs just so happened to stand between them, loaded with an avalanche of stealthed anti-tank mines with proximity sensors attached magnetically to his undersides—coincidentally placed there by myself earlier, when I'd been busy servicing the Hatchets—which just so happened to be designed specifically to delimb a certain type of alien monstrosity.

There were enough for twice as many of them. Just in case.

The trio of Hatchets immediately made for the safety of the Implacables, seeding hidden mines along the way. I released a set of Long Hand Carrier missiles overtuned for speed, and loaded with more of Leah's stinky soup. They arrived between blinks, spinning wildly to tornado the offending aliens' path of retreat with a truly toxic repellant, until they had nowhere to go but above the mines.

We wanted them good and locked in for what came next.

As soon as all three Thirty-Threes had placed their spidery limbs in reach of the mines, barbed steel-wire lassos shot out and slung themselves around exposed leg joints and reeled in teethed trapjaws of metal that dug into octopus-patterned skin and held tight.

Even around the joints themselves, the aliens' armor was too tough for half-assed penetration. It was only when the leg was fully extended that a worthwhile gap exposed itself.

When the first Thirty-Three bent its long neck around and stretched a leg to sling its own steel-melting wire around the mines' ropes, it found itself jerking in pain instead as the mine implanted a rod through the extended joint's gap and unleashed spring-loaded spindles of monofilament wire to destroy the tissue inside. Even when the monster tried to slag the whole thing with retaliatory voltage, the rod only conducted the current and electrocuted even more of its insides.

It took another three destroyed legs for the aliens to wise up and realize that, as long as they didn't move them too much, the traps wouldn't engage their mechanisms and they didn't have to risk removing them. It left them hobbled, barely able to maneuver. Yet the untriggered rods inflicted no injuries, and therefore presented no cause for retreat. After all, even a single Thirty-Three had been enough to force one of the Hatchets to sacrifice itself. Three were a very serious threat.

A checkmate I'd carefully customized to catch out their assassin psychologies.

The Daddy-Long-Legs, the Sim Cell, and the Dakka all ducked so suddenly that their abdomens slammed into the ground, and twin clouds of flechettes blasted past just above. Ballistic razors defoliated a path through the forest that connected the muzzles of the Implacables' 203 mm cannons with the bodies of the Thirty-Threes.

Two-and-a-half seconds later, the flechettes were followed by a pair of high-explosive squash head shells, set to spiral by a number of fins. Like shaped charges, they spread themselves on impact across the aliens' skin, deformed into a pillow of explosive, and attempted to blast a layer of shards off the subcutaneous armor.

The two beasts staggered from the force of the blast, but showed no sign of deeper-than-superficial damage.

Leah loaded the next double set of experimental probes.

Tungsten rod penetrators, fired sequentially at one alien's chest, where the plating would be least angled. One ricocheted, leaving little more than a bleeding gash in the thick skin. The second shattered, but the Sim Cell's ultrasharp cameras caught the splintering reflection of a hairline crack.

I smiled at the beatific grin on Leah's avatar as she designated the same spot for another go…which, somehow, only mildly worsened the damage.

The fuckers were insanely tough. Truly, superlative tiers of toughness. But that was why we'd chosen this method of slowly wearing down the deadliest aliens we'd faced thus far—Tynea, in another show of her newly adopted wholesomeness, had warned us that Class II ammunition wouldn't make a quick work of Antithesis in the Thirties.

⁂

My warstriding girlfriend had eventually settled on a series of three shells to kill anything as armored as the Thirty-Threes had been: A subsonic round that dispensed an insanely strong base across a ten centimeter radius to destroy whatever binding agents gave the armor its immense energy-deflection/absorption metrics, A squash head round to hit the brittled plate like a hammer, and finally, an armor-piercing shell with a grenade's worth of flesh-melting nanites inside.

One of the last two Threes had pissed right off after that combat injection of fleshmelters, and we'd found its body dried out and curled up like a dead spider just fifteen minutes later, slowly soaking up the everlessening rain. It had still gone up like kindling when we wanted to make sure it wasn't coming back somehow.

Now that we knew that, and how, Leah could murder such enemies even with mere Class II ammunition, we wanted to see how the Sim Cell did with autonomous strategy. To that end, Leah had given it full control over the horde of three hundred Res Mechanica Repentis ant robots, and I would accompany them from above to see if they'd need any help. Leah herself didn't need me on overwatch fulltime, not from inside her Implacable, and not with her squad of Hatchets riding patrol in circles around her. I could return quickly enough if a greater threat showed itself again.

On the way out, I passed by the shallow wound the first of my two Sol rounds had left in the ground. It was a miniature crater, especially compared to my very first Sol round. There was little soil left, and so the heat and radiation had eaten into exposed rock instead. It was discolored blackish grey, and even from dozens of meters up, it looked like it would crack beneath the weight of my feet.

A far cry from the glassed bowl from when I'd killed the Twenty-Two, but I suppose that wasn't surprising, considering that we'd shaped the bottle differently, this time. Little energy had gone wasted, and so, little had had an impact on the world. There hadn't even been any of the fallout that had required the cold void last time, because the entirety of the attack had gone into the thing's armor.

The shell that had detonated inside the Thirty-Three had been similarly contained, though readings showed that the alien had suffered the voiding. The radiation left behind would have been poisonous in the extreme. But even the absolute cold hadn't been enough to stop the thing, just put it on a timer.

Ypsi figured that was why it hadn't retreated—too hurt to heal, ravaged from the inside, dying quickly from the blast of radiation. Maybe even missing too much biomass to bother retreating. It had attempted to set up its packmates instead, which Leah had stopped cold with her sacrifice of the Sapper.

All in all, this disquietingly easy part of the battle had come to an early end. There was much I wanted to consider—such as; if a pair of Class II Vanguard were powerful enough to finish off model Thirties with such aplomb, how come so few of us survived past Class II?

And if our sensors were good enough to catch these assholes…how come nobody hadn't ever stopped my father? Surely his strategies to hide himself and his clan weren't that effective? 

I…might have to go back there and take another look.

Breathing deeply, I decided to leave that can of worms unopened for the moment. It could wait until we were done with the Global Incursion. Yeah.

Once we were certain that the Sim Cell was indeed capable of waging a war on its own, we'd travel the few kilometers back towards the village and see if we could get close enough to Dervish to get a connection. Maybe bounce the radio off the water to get across, if we had to.

Another helpful suggestion from Tynea.

Maybe I could come to forgive her, after all.

⁂