"So, Senator, let me get this straight: You authorized specific changes to the cybernetic linkages of the program volunteers on your own authority?"
"That is correct."
"Despite scientists and psychologists warning you against this? Specialists and experts you then had removed from the program and replaced with your own selected people?"
"I felt, at that time, that their advice was misinformed and did not understand the project."
"Senator, were you authorized to make changes to the stated program goals, as set down by the Department of Defense?"
"After consulting with my attorney, we determined I did have that authority."
"And what was the result of your change?"
"An increase in willingness to kill."
"That seems quite disingenuous, Senator. In reality, and this is according to nearly thirty unbiased experts, that what your change did was stimulate the pleasure center every time a kill was made."
"That's not exactly..."
"Did they or did they not receive direct electrical stimulation to their pleasure center when the subject killed another human being or simulacrum of a human being?"
"There is a specific difference in..."
"Yes or no, Senator. May I remind you, you are under oath and a truth beam."
"Yes."
"Did the program instill limits as to what exactly constituted a 'target elimination induced pleasure reward' in the subjectcs?"
"Well, you have to understand..."
"Yes or no?"
"No. That proved impossible with current technology."
"So the subject did not need to differentiate between enemies, friendlies, or civilians to receive the stimulation reward?"
"No."
--Soldier Amplification Project Congressional Inquiry, Pre-Diasporia, Hamburger Kingdom
The Sectiods screeched and tried to adjust to the carnage in their ranks. Almost without exception they fired where the Terrans had been, not where they were or where they would be. For the first five seconds of the fight the majority of them were firing at empty air above the building while Roca and the five infantry following her were already in their ranks fighting at close range.
The Atrekna were taken aback by the sheer fury of the Terran's assault. The tactics were unlike anything they had seen before. They engaged at close range with kinetic assaults with fists, at medium and long range with a heavy kinetic weapon buried in their forearm, at close and medium range with sonic attacks or by clapping their hands together so the shockwave knocked down the Atrekna troops. They even stomped on the ground to throw the Sectiods to the ground.
The heavily armored Sectiods were destroyed by a swung fist that the cannon in the forearm fired point blank into the damaged armor.
The Terrans were roaring and yelling out battlecries, liquid Substance-W streaming from their jaws. Their black armor was some kind of Substance-W alloy that the Atrekna found resisted phasic energy at a higher level than Substance-W normally possessed.
Roca smashed aside four of the big bipedal bugs with one backhand, grabbed the crew served weapon that they were trying to bring into play, spun, and began slamming it against the armored insects while she laughed. A rocket hit her in the cheek and she turned, saw the launcher was being reloaded, and threw the crew served plasma machinegun overhand.
The launcher shattered, the same with the crew.
"Up high! Ground pound!" she called out loud. "Mbutu, you got any squids?" she asked over t-link.
"Chronotrons all over, Sergeant," Mbutu t-linked back. "Keep thinning them out."
As one the six Heavy Assault Infantry launched themselves into the air as Mbutu scanned the crowd from the sidelines. The Atrekna immediately tried to figure out vectors, to see if the Terrans were fleeing.
Instead the Terrans somersaulted and came back down, slamming into the ground as their onboard grav systems cranked the gravity around them to 10G's, cutting out right as they hit the ground. Feet first, then the one knee at the same time as the fist to bleed off all the kinetic and gravitic energy in one explosive ring.
Half of the remaining Sectiods exploded from the shockwave.
"Got six signals!" Mbutu t-linked.
"Kill any group of three or more, track one runner," Roca ordered.
The Atrekna were furiously trying to bring up another wave, trying to get the chronotrons to stabilize, but the six Terrans on the ground were disrupting it all. Waves of temporal 'static' as well as time turning into nearly a solid plate around the Terrans were preventing the Atrekna from using their powers to bring through reinforcements.
The Terrans slammed into the ground and the shockwave was more than gravitons and kinetic energy. Chronotrons exploded from their feet, shattering protections, destroying the temporal construct. The phasic 'snap' at the beginning and end of the eruption shattered carefully built psychic constructs.
One small trio of the Quorum were still linked together when the rocket hit their flickering psychic shielding. FOOF enhanced warsteel kicker napalm coated their psychic shielding, eagerly gobbling up the oxygen as even the atmosphere began to burn.
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The Atrekna had a split second to feel confident that their psychic shielding would hold, after all, it wasn't like psychic constructs could...
The FOOF and high-tech napalm interacted with the rage infused warsteel, which was vapor form.
The phasic construct erupted into flame.
THAT'S NOT HOW IT WORKS! one managed to think.
Right before all three Atrekna discovered that they too could burn.
Humans had learned something before they had even left the caves.
Many creatures could remain calm and in fighting mode when stabbed by knives, hit by rocks, punctured by spears, and later: when shot, under artillery, hit by shrapnel.
But nobody, NOBODY, remained calm and collected when they burst into flame.
Even a pack will seriously reconsider things when members of the pack catch on fire.
The Atrekna that burst into flame made of the rest of the Atrekna recoil.
The only one that nodded to itself and remained calm was the single devotee to the Cult of the Defiled One, who felt almost smug at the fact he had known the Terrans would light someone on fire.
The other two's psychic stealth flickered. One broke and ran, gliding away as fast as possible.
"Got a runner, Sergeant," Mbutu t-linked.
"Highlight him for me," Roca said. She'd changed direction when she'd seen three Sectiods, larger and more heavily armored than the others, striding forward clacking large claws. Her punch ripped through their chests like they were made of fog, the first one literally exploding as hydrostatic shock blew through the ichor filled chest. The second went down in a heap, thrown nearly fifty feet, crushing and mangling Sectiods it hit. The third was realizing it needed to get its arms up in a protective posture instead of the instinctive attack mode when Roca's fist shattered its thorax into fragments of chitin and gobbets of gore.
Roca looked up, saw the rapidly moving Atrekna, and pointed her fist at it. The 20mm cannon thudded, a round every .75 seconds, the rounds hitting on target from the first one.
The shields went down and the Atrekna was reduced to an airborne grease smudge that rained down.
"Other one is still holding, looks like panic," Mbutu said, highlighting it. "Don't see any others."
"There's always a sneaky one," Roca reminded him.
Sergeant Ishiro clapped his hands together right in front of four of the larger ones. The concussive force exploded the first two, reducing them to mist that was carried on the concussive force cone, which shattered the other two and destroyed the Sectiods around them.
In orbit the satellites evaluated the nearest TLZ's, consulted with the Steamboat Willy's tactical and strategic sections, and highlighted one.
Roca felt the data load into her tactical systems, blinked twice, and nodded slightly even as she grabbed one of the larger ones and beat on the smaller ones with it even as it flew into pieces.
"Highlight the other," Roca ordered. "Ishiro, take it out. Mbutu, watch for the sneak."
"Roger" both replied.
As soon as the hidden Atrekna was highlighted, Sergeant Ishiro launched himself into the air, one arm out to the side. The Atrekna had just enough time to realize the Terran was coming at it before the outstretched arm hit it in the waist, ripping clean through the body.
The two body halves hit a moment after Ishiro landed.
The Sections were all dead or dying, the entire area scattered with shattered equipment and carapaces.
The hidden Atrekna pulled in all its phasic power, using just enough to bend light around itself and keep itself hovering in place.
Mbutu scanned carefully, looking for any phasic signatures or temporal ripples or chronotron bursts.
"Looks like there isn't a sneak this time, Sergeant," Mbutu t-linked back.
"Hold position, we're moving to Point Bravo," Roca said, turning and pointing. Her right forearm was steaming as the sweat evaporated off of her black armor.
"Roger," Mbutu t-linked.
Roca threw herself forward, running hard. The next TLZ was nearly sixty miles out and she knew the squad would need to push it.
She allowed herself a big smile as her steps turned to long jumps which turned to leaps and bounds.
Kalki's clanging nuts, I love this job.
----------
Space twisted and shuddered with the firepower tearing through the system. Steamboat Willy's guns thundered, ripping and warping spacetime with enough fury that 'droplets' of dark matter showered into existence along the path of the guns. Heavy warshot dropped from Deadspace as more of a collapsing waveform function than actual mass, hovering right on the edge of massless waveform and 1C moving particles, causing huge explosions deep in the hulls of the autonomous war machines.
Nearly a third of the autonomous war machines were firing on the others, as well as the living ships of the Atrekna, screaming out their new warcry.
THERE IS ONLY ENOUGH FOR ME!
and
IT ALL BELONGS TO ME!
Admiral Thennis kept up the pressure, keeping the Atrekna focused on her as the timer in the upper right of her vision ran down. She knew that on the ground Monster Class Infantry had awoken from a coma as well as hundreds of standard Confederate Army troops, nearly an entire Divisions worth.
According to her files there was an entire Army on the planet, but after the Great Die-Off, Thennis was satisfied with any number of troops above zero.
A set of twenty nautilus shelled ships, each of them kilometers wide and twenty kilometers high, nearly sixty kilometers long, suddenly extended and began to open up wide 'wings' of membranes supported by heavy organic battlesteel structures.
Thennis stared at them, pointed her crop at them, set her feet, and gave the order by voice as she stood on the deck of the Steamboat Willy in full vacuum.
"FIRE FOR EFFECT! CRACKER AND CHEESE!" she screamed.
The deckhands loaded the shells by hand, the lash from the Ordnance Oh-No-Noko striking at their bare sweaty backs. The gun breaches slammed closed and the girls cheered even as they rushed to the munitions forge to throw tied together stocking under the next shell and muscle it toward the guns as the Ordnance Oh-No-Noko cracked her whip. One either side of her Ordriko's spun and danced, the ribbons in their hands fluttering and streaming orders to the gun commanders further down the gunnery hull.
The massive guns fired in sequence. 1-3-5-2-4, in literal miles of batteries. Space seemed to ripple as flame gouted from the end of the massive barrels.
The Atrekna were no longer startled and outraged, they just pushed away their irritation as the commanders of the vast nautilus ships ordered their ships to slide to one side or the other as well as speed up or slow down slightly in hopes of throwing off Thennis's targeting.
The Atrekna were within a light minute. Still outside the range of their weapons, but close enough to launch ancillary craft in hopes that one might score a mortal wound on the massive black ship.
Massive explosions of purple light and Hellspace energy bloomed around the nautilus ships. Three of them took direct hits, past their battlescreens and on the neutronium hulls themselves. Wide cracks appeared on the shells as the first salvo of the barrage hit. Then the same cracks were hit again. Five other ships too hits across the lightly armored 'foot' of the snail-like design, armor shattering and pinwheeling away from the vessels. The next salvos kept pounding on armor, exploded in space from near hits, or obliterated ancillary vessels unluckily enough to be in the path of Mark Nyah 72 Caliber Cannon's massive shells.
Then the last part of the salvo arrived, the shells detonating against the flickering and failing battlescreens.
The phasic flash of warsteel loaded by enraged hands. The thundering detonation of Deadspace interacting with realspace. The roar of Hellspace suddenly being exposed to compressed dark matter in the vacuum of realspace.
The entire front of the six unlucky vessels to be hit was coated in dark matter reduced to Hellspace fueld plasma, a liquid coating that burned hotter than any sun as the Hellspace hatefully tore at what was left of the Deadspace matter, the dark matter, and the enraged warsteel.
The six ships started burning, the cracked shells ejecting steam and boiling fluids.
The time in Thennis's vision hit zero.
The munitions, launched hours ago and carefully moved into position under heavy stealth, went off.
The system almost turned inside out as the sun went from a baleful reddish-orange to bright yellow.
And the Steamboat Willy fired its massive guns again.