Chapter 129 - Last Resorts

Note : Chapter 130 has been written and added to the queue ! Which brings the backlog to 17 chapters, the biggest it's been...ever, I believe. Damn. New record ! Wooo !

Chapter 129

Red Sands Desert, Principality of Rebirth

ERA Northern Wasteland Expeditionary Force Camp

"-so our only option is a full frontal assault, as soon as possible."

"With these mesas, that'll negate most of our advantage in terms of numbers. We simply can't bring them to bear in a single massive attack. Unless we split up into smaller forces and try to attack everywhere at once."

The general shook her head at Malcom.

"What advantage in numbers? You've seen the golems deploying on the walls when we made our feint. Any advantage in raw numbers we have is too low to be significant, if we even outnumber them to begin with! And such a dispersion tactic will only invite defeat in detail. Even ignoring their ability to shift their forces faster than we can, their airfleet alone would make that suicide. We don't have the artillery or airborne forces necessary to keep their own ships at bay, not anymore."

"Still, this is...this is going to be a bloodbath general!"

Amelia sighed, and her shoulders sagged.

"Yes. Yes it is. And we don't have a choice. That…dungeon." She almost spat out the word. "Leaves us no choice. She can launch these raids every day, whenever she damned wishes. It will keep our soldiers from resting, our mages from preparing rituals. And every day that we wait, our situation worsens while theirs improve! We've seen the golems reinforcements coming out of that dungeon. Every day, every hour that we wait will just make the body count higher." She met Malcom's gaze. The brigadier absolutely hated what he was hearing, but he wasn't contradicting her. After all, he had to have been thinking the same thing. "So yes. A full scale, frontal assault. Try to overwhelm their troops with sheer shock value before that damned dungeon buries us in golems! If you want to blame anyone for those deaths, blame the bastards that sent us here knowing they'd provoked the fucking dungeon into fighting us!"

Malcom's gaze went from grim to alarmed as the general gripped the table so tightly it started to splinter. He'd never seen his superior so angry…or explicit about their political masters. The tent was protected against divination and more mundane forms of spying -it was the general's war tent after all!-, but still.

"Ma'am, I-"

"This has to stop Malcom." Simply said Amelia. She already knew what her subordinate was about to say. It didn't take a genius to…and she was very good at reading people. "How many people have we lost? During the suppression campaign in the eastern provinces? The counter insurgency in Infinity? How many tens of thousands of our comrades, our brothers and our sisters were massacred in the Far Reach because these scumbags wanted to add another pile of mana to their fat purses? More slaves to their personal chattel? Our Republic used to stand for something!"

She slammed her fist into the table, and it broke in a resounding crack.

The sentries, who at that point were inside the tent around the clock, didn't even blink. They didn't even seem shocked. In fact, they looked like they agreed every bit with their general. And were very careful not to acknowledge what was being said.

"But now…now we're here." She continued. "Sacrificing thousands of brave men and women -on both sides, damn it!- just so that those same bastards can keep getting richer. Keep getting fatter. Keep their damned iron boots on our people's -OUR people!- necks for a few years longer." She met Malcom's gaze, and he shivered. "I'm tired of cloaking it beyond half truths and outright lies. I've played their games long enough. Dipped in their corruption so they wouldn't strike me down. Parrotted their lies, and followed their orders. But this has to stop."

"Ma'am…Amelia, if we strike them, we'll fall. There's no way we can take on the entire Republic!"

"With this town…with this town we can. Think about it. Once we have taken this place, we'll have the resources of a dungeon town at our fingertips. We can negotiate a soft exit with the nobles. Buy ourselves time with the Asarians that way. And as long as we manage to keep it quiet long enough, we'll be able to have a secure base of operation and source of funds to retake the Republic."

"The dungeon would sooner slit our throat than help us. Do you expect the loot flowing from it to continue once we take over?"

"Yes. If we provide the appropriate…incentive."

"Incentive?"

She smiled mirthlessly.

"The senators aren't the only ones keeping things to themselves. I assembled a package that should enable us to pacify the dungeon, or a least convince her to give us a chance to prove ourselves to her, to show we're made of different stuff from these scumbags."

"That's…risky."

"So is this." She gestured at the camp beyond them, where even after the emergency repairs you could clearly see the spots where the golems had blown the palisade open like an eggshell. "In fact, I, for one, would rather try bribing her than hammering her into submission! Look how well that has gone for our dear overlords!"

Malcom opened his mouth. And closed it.

There wasn't really anything he could say to that after all.

"So let us do this assault. Get this fight over with. So we can finally turn towards our true objective, and finally spill blood for a cause that's actually fighting for. Do you think you and the others can do that, Malcom?"

The brigadier nodded. Hesitantly, at first, then more and more firmly.

"Yes. Yes general. I believe that's something we can do for you."

The general gazed at her subbordinate for several seconds, then straightened up, and gave him a parade ground salute.

"Then let's be about it brigadier. For the Republic!"

"For the Republic!" Said Malcom as he saluted back.

And for the first time in a long time, it felt like the words actually meant something.

*****

If the facility core could have nervously paced back and forth, it would have.

The intruders had made unacceptable headway into the facility. Soldiers had expanded in every direction, and any defenses they encountered were crushed. They seemed to be deploying more specialized weaponry as well, with satchel charges containing some kind of potent, if highly unstable, chemical explosive, and they were using them with abandon.

It needed to act, and it needed to act now. If they went much further, its abilit to maneuver would be crippled, and its combat units wouldn't be able to replicate the same hit and run tactics that had kept the enemies in check, railguns or no railguns.

So it focused on the corridor it knew the railgun wielding enemy was advancing in…and sprang its trap.

*****

The first to come were the grenades. Unfortunately the supply of such weapons was limited, very limited, as they had not been made to be able to withstand the millenia and the facility core only had so many drones to dedicate to cannibalizing them for parts to make a handful of functional devices.

But the handful it did make were devastation incarnate. Hyper-dense energy capacitors discharged into specially made grav drives, creating a pulse grenade similar to the EFSN's version in a device a tenth the size.

The golems couldn't survive it. Hell, the hallway couldn't survive it.

The corridor dissolved into a hail of shards. Stone, golems, weaponry, all reduced to so much shrapnel as shearing gravity fields ripped everything appart.

But Alexandra and Sarah were paranoid. Very paranoid. The railguns weren't in front of the formation, and as powerful as the grenades were, they were compact models meant to take out a small group of targets, not the entire damned batallion marching down the tunnel, which had been originally dug to accommodate the massive single piece transmission arrays that permitted instantaneous communications between the stars. That, combined with the fact that Sarah had been careful to layer in shield holding golems every few ranks to try to add survivability meant that barely a third of the golems were down.

Then the combat units opened fire. Railgun rounds punched straight through the walls, coming in from the adjacent maintenance corridors. And as predicted, the railguns in the enemy formation retaliated.

The facility core comforted itself in a moment of triumph as two fired. As it had predicted. Unfortunately for it, despite the combat units immediately running for it, one of them was still hit, the impact almost severing its chassis in half and rendering it completely inoperable.

But it had accomplished its purpose, and the last two combat units stepped into the hallway, accompanied by a full platoon of armed golems, and opened fire.

Laser gatlings scythed through the mass of golems, and rockets launchers spoke. But even as the high tech fire was annihilating the mass of enemies, enemy rifle and even submachine gun fire felled the facility's guardians, one by one.

Then there was a flash of energy, as one of the lasers found a railgun, and the weapon's capacitor failed as coherent light vaporized its protective coating. The energy contained within it discharged uncontrolably into the golem holding it and the rest of the weapon, destroying both.

The second railgun managed to fire a shot, completely taking out the gatling laser of one of the combat units, but in doing so marking itself as a target for the rest of the facility's forces. The rockets made sure no one would be salvaging that gun either.

The facility core ordered its troops to retreat. Their job was done, they could resume their previous tactics once-

Four more railguns spoke as one.

And both of the combat units went down, as lasers and rockets suddenly stopped having an effect, stopped in midair by the shimmering glimmer of energy shields.

In that single, clear instant, the facility core realized it was fucked, as Alexandra's praetorian guards annihilated the few golems still standing, and marched to intercept the last remaining combat units before they could escape from their maintenance holes.

*****

The command center was silent as the facility core thought.

One of its combat units had survived. Somehow. It had manage to outrun the pursuing forces, but only because a particularly well preserved security checkpoint had stood in their way and the core had sacrificed half of its remaining security golems to reinforce it. But even then it had been a very, very near run thing.

But that wasn't going to make a difference. The enemy's advance had gone from slow, steady and methodical to frenetic. Now that they had unveiled their shielded, advanced combat units -and they were undeniably advanced, no standard golem could move like that-, they'd thrown the pretenses of being fat and slow to the winds, and began completely overrunning the facility.

The core had destroyed every emergency facility map and sign on their path. But there was only so much it could do to hide the location of the command center. All the cabling had to go somewhere after all, and the security had been built in concentric layers around the facility's nerve centers from the get go.

It couldn't hold. The command center's defenses were formidable, yes, but whatever had killed everyone in the facility and forced its shutdown had taken an even greater toll on them than the rest. They would fall, of that it was sure.

So there remained its final protocols.

Out of reflex, it almost activated them. Then it hesitated.

It knew what the protocols would do. Make it go out in a blaze of glory. But…did it really want that? To die, for creators who had clearly seen it as nothing than a pawn, to be given sapience only to die more slowly?

It shut down the protocols…and extracted the parts it wanted.

No, it wouldn't die for them. But it didn't mean that it would lie down and die for his foes either.

Faster than light communication arrays, massive devices of arcane magic and technological artifice that most surface dwelling scientists would have sold their souls to even look at, activated for the first time in millenia. And a distress signal went out, powerful enough to simply punch through the massive jamming field that seemed to wrap around the whole planet. A jamming field originating from the gigantic battlestation and its obedient satellites that orbitted the world.

But its main purpose hadn't been to reach other stars. Rather, it had been powerful enough that any Sagitarius communication device would have received it.

Around the planet, devices both forgotten and unearthed pinged their owners.

And deep within the death zone of lost sands, wandering war machines stopped moving…and changed direction. Ancient guard protocols overriden by new orders, they began making their way towards their new objective.

Towards the distress signal. Towards Rebirth.