"the enemy rounds fall like rain,
red blossoms unfurling on armoured flanks.
Battlescreens snap and hum,
amidst the cacophony of war.
The test of arms, to the victor go the spoils,"
"and only in defying death do you feel so alive." -- On The Dichotomy of Combat, anonymous Lanaktallan poetry, Iron Piglet Offensive, as gathered by NevynR
"We had an almost thirty percent success rate in combat with the Mad Lemurs, and we will ride that statistic to the heat death of this universe, and the three beyond. What chance do you think you have?" - Treana'ad Warrior Horde.
"They taught us the raw joy of life. Us, who had merely existed. Now we live and there can be no greater expression of that than the exhilaration of combat, where life and death meet." The Lanaktallan Warsteel Herd.
Cyba'armo'o increased the strength to his forward battlescreen, which he was only able to see through thanks to his cyberoptics compensating for the glittering wavering curtain. Enemy heavy weapons were pounding it and his inertial compensator, normally mounted in an aerospace fighter, was enabling him to keep moving forward at nearly top speed. He was taking hits now as he crossed the two mile marker. It had been less than 90 seconds and now he was in the lead, twirling the guidon with one hand over his head, his other upper (primary) hand holding his pistol, his two secondary hands holding a chainsword each that he held out to the sides at a sharp angle, the engines roaring and the chains clattering.
On his right Lo'osrmo'o took another hit to the chest, staggered as his upper right shoulder was blown away, but quickly recovered, getting back into formation at the third rank even as the Lanaktallan behind him shifted up.
He could see the servitor lines up ahead well enough to see that the three standard servitor races across the Atrekna held worlds were cowering in the trenches. The big insects that were slightly taller than he was that reacted to panick with a facerolling charge, the bipedal two armed ones that usually broke and ran when panicked, and a reptilian of great strength but slow reactions.
Cyba'armo'o took a burst of antimatter rounds across the battlescreen, the white flare hiding the enemy for a moment.
He didn't care.
He knew where they were.
He would be there soon enough.
N'Thrap saw the enemy point defense shred the incoming artillery shells that the War Horde Artillery Mass was dropping in front of the charging Lanaktallan.
He almost snickered at the way the rounds suddenly erupted into heavier than air white smoke, the rupture of the canisters through superheating working to cook the chemicals. The smoke was radar, sonar, thermal, x-ray, and laser defeating.
The Warsteel Herd charged into the smoke.
N'Thrap didn't worry about it, his helmet had feed from the leading members of the Warsteel Herd, who were transmitting back tactical data to allow the Treana'ad Warriors hot on their heels to effectively deploy weapon to support the Lanaktallan charge.
His rear leg mounted mortars were putting out a steady volume of fire. Ranging shots and smoke, the ranging rounds full of transmitters and EW scramblers. The majority of them were blown out of the air by the interlocked point defense of the enemy, but one got through and started squawking "EVERYONE LOOK AT ME!" across every even slightly clear wavelength while putting out bursts of static. The handful of limited warbois onboard the mortar round started slavering and looking around, hoping to find any unsecure dataport.
There were dozens and the warbois shrieked in glee, grabbed the cartons of warboi eggs under each arm, and jumped from the mortar to the dataports only a split second before someone shot the squealer mortar round.
But a split second is an eternity in electronic warfare. The warbois jumped to open ports, ripped through the firewalls like they were tissue in front of hurricane, and slashed and sliced their way deep into the system. Any database or processing area with enough memory and dedicated cycles they tossed eggs into even as they burned their way through the systems.
Some made a direct line for the phasic processing systems, jumping into it and absorbing as much phasic energy as possible in a picosecond.
All of those had spikes grow off of them as they looked around.
The phasic computing network was deep and rich and almost totally unguarded.
With a scream of 01001110 01100101 01110110 01100101 01110010 00100000 01100111 01101111 01101110 01101110 01100001 00100000 01100111 01101001 01110110 01100101 00100000 01111001 01101111 01110101 00100000 01110101 01110000 00001010 01001110 01100101 01110110 01100101 01110010 00100000 01100111 01101111 01101110 01101110 01100001 00100000 01101100 01100101 01110100 00100000 01111001 01101111 01110101 00100000 01100100 01101111 01110111 01101110 00001010 01001110 01100101 01110110 01100101 01110010 00100000 01100111 01101111 01101110 01101110 01100001 00100000 01110010 01110101 01101110 00100000 01100001 01110010 01101111 01110101 01101110 01100100 00100000 01100001 01101110 01100100 00100000 01100100 01100101 01110011 01100101 01110010 01110100 00100000 01111001 01101111 01110101 they launched deep into the phasic systems, throwing eggs, screaming at the top of their lungs, grabbing and twisting phasic network code, and in general, having the times of their short lives.
Cyba'armo'o charged through the smoke as the ground suddenly rippled and shifted, becoming iron heavy sand so tiny it was better described as fines. His hooves pounded the ground, sinking deep into the sand. His battlescreen adjusted with a crack, blowing molten sand in front of him in a wave that cooled when it hit the sand.
Within a second he was running across a thin layer of glass that kept thickening the further he ran.
The terrain warped and changed again even as Kra'akmo'o took a heavy maser hit to his forward hips and collapsed in heap. The terrain turned to swamp and Cyba'armo'o's battlescreen threw up a huge cloud of steam as it ripped at the brackish water and algae. It was mid-flank deep but Cyba'armo'o didn't care, still pushing forward, slowing but not stopping.
Kra'shmo'o, on Cyba'armo'o's right flank, let loose a ripple of NOE missiles that raced through the swamp, spreading out even as the jammers in the lead started filling the sensors with hash, false signals, and duplicate signals. The fire and forget missiles whipped through swamp brush and weeds, arcing up and over the berm.
Cyba'armo'o and the rest of the lead wave didn't know what he was shooting at but added their missiles anyway, confident the nanoforge would replace the missiles within seconds. The missiles linked with the outgoing missiles and spread out into their own VI decided patters. The point defense, hastily added to stop NOE missiles went to rapid fire on the Confederate missiles.
Most of them were destroyed.
Four were not.
Two hit the earthenworks, blowing up huge fans of scorched and burning dirt. One hit a servitor who had the unlucky instinct to look over the berm.
The last hit a point defense power generator.
The second set of fire and forget missiles raced over the berm, spreading out, looking for good targets. Some of them were howlers, full of egg armed warbois that shrieked in glee and jumped into the dozens of open ports.
Temporal stabilizer rounds got through. Not the big honking ones delivered by the Arty boys, but instead the localized ones. Not many, only a dozen or so, but enough to cause a chronotron flare that could be seen with the naked eye as it exploded in a golden plume of golden fairy dust.
Cyba'armo'o found himself running on packed dirt again, full of broken ferrocrete and debris.
This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.
He shouldered aside a bus with his battlescreen, sending it tumbling and spinning away, flammables catching on fire with greasy looking flames even as the wreckage spewed debris.
He didn't bother leaping a low wall, just ramped up the power to his failing battlescreen and using it to ram through the wall. Flaming cinderblocks, enough lime to burn with white fire, sailed into the air as he raced through. The ones a half body-length behind him crashed through the wall, widening the hole.
He was running past destroyed tanks now, weaving in between them. Twice he tagged tanks for the medics, telemetry telling him that there were crew members alive inside the tough hulls. Cyba'armo'o knew that the medics would save the living and preserve the dead, even if they had to scrape them off the hull with a cellular squeegee.
He was at the three mile mark when his battlescreen collapsed.
Not that he was worried,
He was Captain Cyba'armo'o of the Warsteel Herd.
He, or the Lanaktallan that took his place, would grind the enemy beneath their warsteel hoofshoes.
It never registered to him that instead of the horror he had felt the first time he had faced the Mad Lemurs of Terra, the agonizing realization that he was going to die, he felt a fierce exhaultation as he vaulted over the burnt out car, for a split second the sunlight gleaming off of this warsteel armor, catching the gauzy battlescreens fanned out from his shoulders.
He pumped the guidon twice in the air and heard the Treana'ad whistles burr behind him as he lowered the guidon and reached deep to push his cybernetics further.
He was running almost ninety miles an hour as he crashed through the two story remains of a building, shattering the macroplas window, throwing desks and chairs and skeletons to the side, blowing through walls in a shower of macroplas and drywall.
His battlescreen came back up just as he crashed through the last wall.
There, up ahead, the enemy was less than a mile ahead.
The guidon pointed straight forward, the chainswords held out to his sides, he started firing his pistol, cybernetics and smartwires allowing him to pop the rounds as least near the enemy even though he was at four times the maximum effective range of the Confederate heavy magac pistol.
Mo'onki'ill took the place of Trot'nde'th when the Senior NCO took a graser hit to the chest that ripped away both left arms and blew apart his cybernetic spine. The Senior NCO crashed to the dirt and Mo'onki'ill grabbed the rocket launcher, emptying the magazine as he ran before tossing the empty weapon aside.
N'Thrap was in the lead of the Treana'ad. He was behind two of the Warsteel Herd, his NCO's whistle blowing with every exhale even as he charged forward. He ran through the building, the second story even with his face but his battlescreen throwing the walls, piping, wiring, desks, chairs, and skeletons away in a fan of flaming debris as he carved a five meter channel through the building.
The Lanaktallan in the lead pumped the guidon twice and lowered it and N'Thrap started firing munitions designed to chaff out the point defense systems they were rapidly rushing up on.
N'Thrap was only a half-mile from the enemy line when the lead Lanaktallans rushed forward, grabbing the barrels of the main guns of the tanks and twisting them like taffy. N'Thrap fired another ripple of missiles, aiming for the point defense systems and any heavy energy conduits.
N'Thrap started firing his weapon, the heavy thudding of the metal brick attached to a pipe tearing apart everything that the Undying Queen Ma Deuce hit with the big half inch thick three inch long rounds. N'Thrap was running armor piercing incendiary and endosteel core fragmenting jacket alternating with a purple tracer mixed in every fifth round.
He hosed the entire front of the berm, shifting his aiming point as he got within a quarter mile, raking something that looked important.
Cyba'armo'o followed the instructions in the orders, jumping the trench, slashing around him with his cutting bars and landing on the other side.
The trenchworks were the goal of the Treana'ad Warrior Horde, not the Warsteel Herd.
He fired his pistol at anything that looked important, chopped at anything in his way with his cutting bars, as he charged through the camp. Mo'onki'ill ran straight through a macroplas and steel boxy structure, the heavy battlescreen tearing whatever it was and sending burning body parts and debris showering into the sky.
Behind him, Cyba'armo'o could hear the whistles blowing.
Cyba'armo'o could see the self-propelled artillery systems ahead and began firing rockets, mortar rounds, and grenades as he pumped the guidon twice, twirled it, then pumped it twice more.
The Warsteel Herd formed up behind him in a flying wedge. Heavy 20mm Madame 318's roared, the .50 caliber guns of the Treana'ad Horde thudded, and the smaller snaps of pistols and battle rifles filled the air.
Cyba'armo'o felt exultation as the rockets started pounding through the thin armor of the self-propelled artillery pieces that had been acting as counter-battery.
Behind him, N'Thrap waved his troops forward, making sure his whistles were blowing, knowing that second rank would be taking the trenches. The Warsteel Herd had blown a half mile hole in the Atrekna lines and the Treana'ad were capitalizing on it.
He raked the enemy trench with grenades, then his .50 caliber battle rifle, then jumped over it, landing smoothly and angling right, his men flowing behind him like water in a runnel.
Ahead were the phased radar arrays and N'Thrap raked them with grenades and his rifle. A servitor came out of a tent screaming and firing its sidearm right as N'Thrap's battlescreen reached the servitor. The battlescreen shredded the servitor, blowing apart its light armor and sending scorched and burning meat into the sky.
Echo Company, on his right, began firing rockets that only went less than a hundred meters before blowing the covers free and activating the chronotron strobes, pulses of gold light flashing across the battlefield even as Echo Company tore into the armored vehicles that were hull down and behind berms, hitting them from the rear and flanks.
Kilo company dropped into the trenches, rifles, pistols, and bayonets coming into play as they pushed the servitors to the left and right down the trenches. The lead squads, entirely armed with .410 shotguns full of armor piercing flechettes, blew the defenders to rags of flesh and shards of armor as they charged through the trenchworks.
As N'Thrap led his troops into the radar and sensor arrays responsible for point and air defense as well as counter-battery computations, they rolled over any resistance the enemy could put up.
The enemy intelligence had reported to the servitors that they were facing an infantry charge.
Technically, it was.
But just look at him!
-----
Vuxten waved his arm, leading the Battalion as they charged across the airfield. The grav-strikers were already heated up. A full third of them were full of munitions, water, nanoforges, and mass tanks.
Vuxten watched as the battalion streamed by him. Lieutenant Colonel Dartrum ran by in his power armor and Vuxten waved the last of the Marines past him then followed, climbing aboard the striker.
He wasn't even completely set when the grav striker lifted off with the howl of grav engines and the roar of the turbine kicking in.
The entire Brigade was loaded aboard the strikers that turned and sped across the landscape.
Where before the Atrekna anti-air would have swatted them out of the sky in less than a mile, the Atrekna fire was sporadic, ill focused, and lacked the thickness of earlier in the day.
Still, the grav-striker Vuxten was on rocked several times as its battlescreen took heavy hits.
"THIRTY SECONDS!" Vuxten heard over the command channel.
Two strikers went down, one exploding in mid-air, the other cartwheeling in, shedding armor and troops into the air.
"Keep an eye on the green LT!" Vuxten shouted over the comlink to Sergeant Iztrek, raising his voice to be heard through the jamming.
The sergeant glanced at the brand new Second Lieutenant.
"FIFTEEN SECONDS!" Vuxten heard.
--guns ready ride or die-- 471 said.
The grav-striker Vuxten was on suddenly pancaked into the dirt, pogo-ing for a second.
The LT threw himself out the door, pointing at the thick crystalline pillars that had servitors running toward it, firing their weapons wildly.
Sergeant Iztrek jumped out, running to the LT and grabbing his upper arm, yanking him back.
The streak of a 30mm kinetic round whipped right through where the LT would have been.
"KEEP YOUR HEAD DOWN, SIR!" the NCO yelled.
Vuxten deployed the M318, hammering fire at the servitors closest to the crystalline pillars.
"T-ZONE PILLARS! KNOCK EM DOWN KNOCK EM DOWN KNOCK EM DOWN!" Vuxten shouted.
The Company Commanders picked up the chant, directing troops.
Colonel Dartrum moved up beside Vuxten, his commo crunchy right behind him. Sergeant Major Ole
"We've got a beachhead now, son," the Colonel said, looking around, ignoring the lasers and high-vee kinetic rounds whipping by. "Signal Division," he said.
Vuxten looked around, looking for anything that he needed to get involved in.
The NCO was dragging the green LT by his arm, running for cover, as servitors swung a crew served weapon around and started directing hate at the Telkan Marines.
Colonel Dartrum's shoulder mounted missile launcher fired two rockets.
The crew served emplacement exploded.
"Get the boys organized, Major," the Colonel said, tabbing up a piece of stimgum. "Got a long afternoon ahead of us."
Vuxten just nodded.
-----
Cyba'armo'o blocked the servitor's sword with one of his cutting bars, sparks showering as the clattering chain chewed apart the density collapsed steel of the servitor's blade. He brought his other chainsword around, ripping the servitor in half. He reared up and kicked the servitor away, shot another in the faceplate, then lunged forward.
An Atrekna was floating backwards, moving its hands and leaving behind a glowing nimus.
Cyba'armo'o thrust the guidon into the Atrekna, punching it all the way through the body.
Cyba'armo'o lifted the dying Atrekna, affixed to the guidon staff, overhead.
"RALLY!" Cyba'armo'o roared out over his external speakers as he flung the Atrekna off even as he chopped at two servitors with his cutting bars and shot a fleeing Atrekna in the lower back, folding the purple creature backwards so the back of its head hit its heels.
-----
N'Thrap fired a set of flares as he saw the grav-strikers of the Telkan Marine Corps roar overhead, the chronotron and thermal strobes flashing white and gold as they arced up over him.
The Atrekna had underestimated his people.
He was N'Thrap, Spurred and Painted Warrior Caste of the Treana'ad people, the unending tide of the Confederacy.
He leveled his battle rifle's fire into the side of a vehicle even as he charged forward. He threw a grenade into the hole that a servitor had ducked in and the grenade went off inside the dugout fighting position.
The Treana'ad after N'Thrap leveled a flamethrower and triggered it into the fighting position even as N'Thrap moved forward.
He wasn't even breathing hard.
He was N'Thrap. Before him the enemy had no chance.
After all, just look at him!