Two Worlds – Chapter 165

Eve Berg

Location: Launcher A, Yangon System, Eastern Block

“Only three?” Eve filtered out the gunfire and cries of the injured as she surveyed her requested equipment.

“We work with what we’ve got.” GYSGT Cunningham stood off to the side of the three little robots, and she was pissed.

It had nothing to do with their resupply or Eve’s handling of the operation. Her anger was directed inward. She believed she’d failed. It took nearly twenty minutes to get the Crawlers to the front lines, and in that time the soldiers of Alpha and Bravo Company 2511^th Infantry Battalion had dug in. Since they couldn’t literally dig into the duro-steel surroundings, they’d gathered material, constructed improvised barriers, and kept an eye on the enemy. The Battalion Commander had even authorized a small number of 250mm shells to be allotted to the Rangers about to storm the enemy position. That was how important taking engineering was to the brass.

Normally, the prep and extra firepower would be good enough, but whoever was in command on the other end wasn’t stupid. He saw the Commonwealth troops digging in and he wasn’t going to wait around.

The counterattack hit Alpha Company first. They’d stepped up so Bravo could take a step back and get some breathing room after their failed assault. Bravo’s LT, the GYSGT, and Eve were all off in another corridor going over the Crawler’s route to the objective when the attack hit. Two shoulder-mounted launchers preceded a rush of two dozen Blockies. Alpha returned fire, but fire from the 90mms forced them to keep their heads down. When the enemy got close enough they threw grenades into the Commonwealth lines. Those exploded right before Eve and the GYSGT joined the action.

They lobbed a couple precious shells toward the enemy to stop the advance. A few went down, most skidded to a stop and fell back to get under the safety umbrella of the swatters, but a few pushed forward. Eve took two more down with a Buss before those adventurous few wised up and fell back.

The assault didn’t last more than a few minutes, but when the dust cleared Alpha and Bravo each had a few KIAs and twice as many WIAs. There were at least a dozen Blockie bodies blocking the corridor, which was going to make the eventual assault that much more difficult.

The one bright side of the whole incident was Higher sending down Echo Company. The fresh company had encountered minimal resistance capturing their assigned section of the Launcher, so the extra bodies were welcome. Even better, the LT was a really gung-ho chick who was ready to kick ass and take names. Bravo’s LT offered her to lead the eventual charge and she took it without hesitation.

The GYSGT looked at the new LT like she’d bitten into a sour lemon, but some of that was her kicking herself. Now that the action was over and she had some time to evaluate what had happened, she was disappointed in her own lack of vigilance.

“Stupid. I shouldn’t have expected them to sit on their asses and wait for us to come to them.” Eve overheard her while she was programming the Crawlers.

<She’ll be fine. She’s a grown ass woman.> Eve reminded herself and focused on her task.

Three Crawlers was a lot less than she was hoping for. Her original plan called for twice that – three for each wall next to the heavy weapons. The goal was to take them out. With Echo Company in the fight, all they needed to do was cripple the 90mms. Hopefully they could get the swatters too, but she wasn’t going to get ahead of herself.

The Crawlers were fairly easy to program, and she really only needed to work on one. She entered a mirror program onto the other two. Their sensors would evaluate what the Crawler Eve was controlling was doing and mirror that behavior. It was the easiest way to get all three into position at once, and as the counterattack had showed, time was of the essence. The enemy could still blow the whole Launcher if they wanted.

“Just about good to go here.” She let the commanders and GYSGT know it was go time.

“Lieutenant, we’re starting to get some particle spikes from down the corridor.”

GYSGT Cunningham had put a buddy team with sensors in an OP as far out as she dared. The original team had been killed in the counterattack, and a new team was voluntold to assume that position. It was a good thing too. A spike in the type of particles those instruments measured could only mean one thing.

“Wrap it up, Berg. You’re on in two, and we’re assaulting that position in ten or less. Anything more than that and we’re totally fucked.”

Eve didn’t bother to complain about the time constraint or potentially throwing a Company of soldiers into the meat grinder as cannon fodder. She knew what they were facing, and if they didn’t take the objective everyone was going to die. It was a numbers game pure and simple. Having to choose between a hundred and fifty guys or a few thousand was a no brainer.

<We’ll be the sacrifice if we need to be.> Eve thought it, and then pushed it to the back of her mind. Negative thinking wasn’t going to help. She was going to get those Crawlers where they needed to go, she was going to cripple those heavy weapons, and then they were going to kill the enemy and live happily ever after.

“Ready.” She scooped up the Crawlers and hauled ass to the section of wall they’d dismantled. Behind it was a second wall of machinery, but it had an entry point big enough to get the Crawlers through one at a time.

She ran a final systems check, just to make sure she could remote detonate the small, powerful packs of explosive each Crawler was carrying. Everything came back green, so she switched functions on her HUD. The Launcher’s stark aesthetics disappeared and she was in the darkness of the machinery. She switched on the night vision, readied her hands for the subtle fingertip manipulations that would drive the Crawlers, and went to work.

The interior of the walls between the Commonwealth and Blockie positions was a labyrinth of hodgepodge systems. The Crawler’s sensor identified everything from a water main to conduits that supplied power to the quantum entanglement communications equipment. She deftly maneuvered around all of it, and the machines twisted and contorted like acrobats. That was their true genius. They weren’t something stiff and rigid to move stuff from Point A to Point B. These were for delicate work, or in this case, delicate killing.

<These could totally be murder bots.> She thought as her Crawler bent into a right angle and slimmed down its mass to its minimal threshold, and transferred it to its length, so it could fit between a pair of pipes. She used the sensors to check behind her to make sure the other Crawlers made it. They did. <So far so good.>

A timer ticked down in the corner of her vision. She was already five minutes into the ten minute time hack, but things were moving smoothly. Three minute later she was coming up on the end of the trip and everything looked good…until her HUD squawked a warning, highlighted an item in red, and automatically froze the Crawlers.

“Shit,” Eve cursed.

“What is it, Berg?” The GYSGT had been supervising the troops getting ready to attack. She assigned herself to be the assault force’s mobile swatter. Her hulking armor would be a big bullseye for the 90mms if Eve couldn’t take them out.

“I’ve got nanites,” she whispered.

It seemed whoever designed this defensive gem of a Launcher had thought of everything. They knew that getting down the corridor to engineering was going to be a pain in the ass, and people were going to think of going through the walls. They likely didn’t know about the Crawlers, since it wasn’t on the nanite box’s programmed list of things to automatically attack, but if she went much farther it was going to become clear that they were a threat.

The Crawlers were designed to fight off miniscule intruders, and had a small batch of their own defensive nanites, but against a box that size, with all the Blockies nanites being directed at them, the Crawlers would quickly be overwhelmed.

“Make a call, Berg. Shit or get off the pot. We’re going in ninety seconds.”

<Shit…shit…shit…> Eve scanned the area.

The box was attached to some type of coolant device that flowed into the QE communications circuits. She briefly considered rupturing the line, but there was no telling what was actually in the coolant device. It might jack up her Crawlers too. A quick search of anything to divert the attention of the nanites came up with a big fat nothing.

That really left her with only one choice.

She programmed the next instructions and relayed the info to the GYSGT. Originally, she was supposed to position the two other Crawlers on this wall and work her remote controlled Crawler to a better position to hit the second set of swatter and 90mms. The charges on the Crawlers were shape charges, so they would funnel all of their destructive potential at a target. That clearly wouldn’t work now. She just hoped the new plan would.

The GO signal for the attack would be the Crawlers detonating. That was hard to miss, but first, Eve had to get them to actually detonate. With the program set she hit the EXECUTE button, and the tiny robots scurried into action.

Two went for the preprogrammed positions on the wall. One was a good spot to hit one of the 90mms. The second had the highest probability of at least inflicting minor damage on the second one. It all depended on who and what was between the wall and that second weapons system. The third Crawler was her sacrificial play. That Crawler charged the nanite box and broadcasted all kinds of Commonwealth crap. The box reacted immediately, and did exactly what machines of limited programming were supposed to do. They swarmed the one Crawler.

Eve pushed her Crawler and the one remaining one as fast as she could, but she still had five meters of obstacles to overcome. They crossed the distance as fast as they could, but it wasn’t fast enough. The defensive nanites literally ate the decoy Crawler alive. The little guy was set to self-destruct once the other two got into position, but it never got that far, and now that the nanites had tasted Commonwealth tech they were hungry for more. The two remaining Crawlers were just getting into position when a wave of nanite smashed into them. Their own defensive nanites went to work defending them, and because the enemy nanites were split in half, they lasted longer. Longer only meant a few seconds, but sometimes that was all it took if luck was on your side.

Today, luck kind of was.

Eve lost the visual feed as nanites attacked her Crawler, but it had gotten into position and locked itself to the wall with the shaped charge pointing at the right angle. Eve hit the button to detonate over and over again…nothing happened.

<Shit!>  She continued smashing the button, and finally the floor rumbled as a big BOOM ripped through the Blockie position…but it was only one boom, and Eve didn’t have time to figure out which. Echo Company was already charging.

The distraction of a wall exploding in the middle of your position allowed Echo to advance a lot farther than Bravo ever got before taking fire. Of course, the return fire was a lance of energy that lopped off the lead soldiers arm at the shoulder, and bisected the man next to him.

Eve heard the rapid fire of the GYSGT’s railgun as she charged forward and took down any other incoming ordinance.

“Corporal, where are you going?!” Bravo’s LT called as Eve leapt over one of their improvised barriers.

“Up there.” Eve pointed forward with her Buss without turning back.

The battle was in full swing now. Lances of light blared out every few seconds, but it was only one judging by the recycle time on the weapon. It looked like the Crawlers had worked. At least one of the big guns was down.

“Gunney, let’s hit them with anti-personnel, scatter shot.” Eve suggested, already rotating one of her few remaining rounds into her 250mm cannon.

The GYSGT didn’t even respond. A timer just appeared on Eve’s HUD with an arrow pointing to the right. Eve split her screen to fly the round in herself, and fire when the countdown hit zero. If one of the swatters was down, two incoming rounds coming in at different directions from different places might confuse it enough to get through.

The rapid fire of the swatter was audible over the softer 1mm M3s, and an explosion up ahead told Eve that the Gunney’s round had been intercepted. For the second time in as many minutes, Eve ordered her munition to detonate. STRATNET showed her it was a little premature, but it still did the trick. It detonated right over the front of the enemy lines. Over a dozen Blockie infantry were pelted with ceramic shrapnel. At such a close range their armor was ineffective and all of them went down, which provided a tactical opportunity.

“Advance right!” The GYSGT beat Eve too it, but Eve pushed forward with a mass of soldiers.

She fired off three-round bursts with her Buss to keep the enemy from reoccupying the position. Her LACS sensors were the only warning she had to throw herself to the ground. A 90mm lance passed right over her head, and only missed her by millimeters.  Four of Echo Company’s soldiers took a hit, and only one’s armor held. The other three went down with amputated limbs and the smell of cauterized flesh.

Lying prone on her belly, in the open, and vulnerable, Eve did the only thing she could think of. She fired off another 250mm shell at the enemy.

The GYSGT must have used the 90mm’s distraction to advance on the left, because no swatter tried to save the Blockies. Eve’s round streaked into the middle of the Blockie position and exploded with maximum effectiveness. Everyone within five meters was dead. Half within ten meters met the same fate while all the others were injured. The casualty rate for people within twenty meters was twenty percent – none killed – but every injured Blockie was one less shooting at Eve and her people.

STRANET repopulated as quick as the dust settled, and any idiot with a modicum of tactical knowledge could see that the artillery strike had been a decisive blow. Sometimes in battle, it only took one hit to turn the tides.

Echo Company surged forward across the length of the corridor. Eve high-crawled forward and rolled away when the 90mm tried to retarget her. She got her calf a bit scorched as she rolled, but her armor held against the brief burst of energy. Due to the weapon’s placement, she was soon out of the line of fire. The GYSGT pushed forward on the left by lobbing more artillery shells into their midst. After giving up on targeting Eve, the 90mm gunner tried to use the high powered laser as a swatter. With such a tightly dialed aperture it didn’t work well, but one or two Commonwealth soldiers who didn’t have the situational awareness to duck lost their heads.

It was only a matter of time until the Commonwealth overran the position, but Eve had to admire the Blockies’ courage. Even cut down to size by the artillery strikes they still fought back viciously. The GYSGT was the first to bound over the Blockie barriers built in to the Launcher, but Eve wasn’t far behind. Her Buss roared as she cut down Blockie after Blockie. 1mm rounds pinged off her armor, but didn’t penetrate. When she got close enough, blades came out of her forearms and started cutting down the defenders. The 90mm was silent now. The GYSGT had shot the gunner through the helmet, and a Commonwealth grunt was rotating it toward the enemy.

The Blockies finally broke when their own weapon was used against them. A few escaped through a few doors into individual engineering chambers, but the position Eve had just overrun was the final fallback position for the defense of the area.

Eve removed her blade from a Blockie soldier’s chest as the 90mm started to light up the bottleneck at those doors. She quickly filtered out the screams of the dying as the powerful energy lance cut through person after person. She trained her Buss on the enemy and started taking headshots. A sudden fade to black was better than the agony of getting sliced in two and taking a minute to die.

The Blockies never surrendered. They fought to the last man. The GYSGT had to send out teams into the individual engineering chambers to root out the few who’d escaped the slaughterhouse. Even those lone Blockies took down some Commonwealth soldiers.

Eve led one three-man team on a search. A Blockie popped out of nowhere and threw a grenade. Eve activated her ES and plowed right through the explosion. She was thankful it wasn’t a grav grenade or she would have been fucked. She parted through the fire like some demon, and had to raise her blade to deflect a blow from the Blockie’s sword.

<A fucking sword!> She was almost as surprised to see the Blockie wielding the ancient weapon as she was to see it bite into her blade a bit.

<Nano-blade.> It was a threat to her armor, but the Blockie was clearly just trying to buy time. He only had one sword, she had two.

The guy was an officer judging by his armor, and a ballsy one. His hand went to his belt to grab another grenade as Eve rammed her second blade through his chest. He still managed to hit the button on the grenade. She could tell he’d expired because he’d gone limp, but he was stuck on the end of her blade, so she did the only thing she could think of. She activated her ES armor again, and slammed the corpse down on top of the grenade. It was the best she could do to protect her team.

The body bucked from the blast, but it was just another frag grenade. None of her team was hurt, and the officer’s now-shredded body made it easy for her to get her blade out of him.

<Good try, Lieutenant Wong.> She read the name plate on the officer’s armor and gave the dead man a respectful nod before grabbing his blade. <To the victor go the spoils.>

That was true. Launcher A had fallen to the Commonwealth, along with the other two. Third Fleet had secured the most likely avenue of approach for an enemy counterattack, and increased the arrival time of that counterattack by days, maybe even weeks.

Yangon system was now at the Fleet’s mercy, so with this mission complete everyone turned their eyes on the real goals: the planets.

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