The ground was a relatively smooth face of rock and they took the long trudge over the bulbous rise and into the rightwise gap between the squat caldera-like Stin and its kin beside; above their heads a jungle of sedimentary vines laced from cliff-face to cliff-face, as if by the elapse of untold eons the Stin had been pushed up into its fellow mountain and pulled away, and then pushed and pulled away again, so that evidence of their dalliances still hung writ in stone.
The Jegorich First Brigade trekked the craggy undulating pass for an indeterminate amount of time, until at length Betelgeuse, panting laboriously and positioned with his section near the front of the contingent, finally exited that claustrophobic corridor; and he saw in the distant gloom and within the chrome walls of Liberation's Reach an immense inferno rising toward a blood-red moon and the butte of flame so solid it seemed geomorphological. The firestorm was a blinding kaleidoscope of colors, with bright yellows and washed out purples, and ghostly like the borealis of Earth.
Fires on Desert do not burn like fires on Earth.
Under the cover of night they went, and the Chimerae's inferno burned and plumes of smog tainted brown to black fresheted over the dark horizon. They forded viscous streams of octane flowing tar-like into distant abysses and descended steep slopes and tumbled over knee-high protuberances and wound round pits ringed by spikes of pyrite shimmering gold under their dimmed headlamps. Someone from the Second Company of the Second Battalion pierced his suit whilst falling into a colorless boiling spring of hydrogen cyanide, and though he was quickly pulled up the unfortunate quickly coated the inside of his visor with vomit and then died. They left the body where it lay, recording the AOP* grid coordinates for pickup by the resup* & casevac* crew.
The hours saw the moon Larua reach its zenith, lobe-shaped and hanging high and full over the incoordinate wastes, revealing a plain of crimson crags warped and twisted into odd shapes. The contingent inched across that harsh topography, their shadows mingling with reefs of phantom shapes and making of that marriage a myriad blasted things dreamt up by poorly calibrated artificial intelligence.
By the end of the night's traversal the Jegorich First Brigade took up a position mere kilometers away from a still-burning Liberation's Reach, sheltering behind two successive natural rock-wall formations.
The front wall was a vertical parapet of rock no taller than an average Desertian man and sporting a kerf at its lower-third. Together with the First and Second Companies of the Second Battalion, the Third Company (which included Subaltern Cacliocos' First Platoon) took up a position behind this wall, with Cacliocos' platoon and the Thete's section taking up at the leftmost vantage of the entire Battalion.
The back wall was a cliff of vertical rock approximately half-a-meter thick and about the height of two Desertian men. This wall of rock was slitted with apertures just wide enough for the troops to pass through single-file. The rest of the Brigade, comprising the First, Third and Fourth Battalions together with the other auxiliary PLPs, took up behind this wall.
They arrived in a thunder of breaths and tersely barked commands. It took Betelgeuse several moments to realize this was the set-up point—their last rest point before engaging the enemy at Liberation's Reach—him being so beside himself with fatigue.
Before he managed to catch his breath Cacliocos' platoon was already a hive of activity, skittering like ants across the jagged ground and slapping together the disparate blacksteel components they had so painstakingly hauled across the Desert landscape. In moments a Ninsei-manufactured EM-HR-HKET* Railgun (or Schwerer Gun for the less acronym-minded) was assembled, its lengthy helix barrel lying flat on the ground and blushing dully under the moonlight. Some distance away lay a crate of compact treaded wheels, to be affixed to the Schwerer's frame shortly before engagement.
"B.T., there, that landform is the Morconis Inselberg, at a westerly four-six-nine-zero mils.* It suggests we are in-position hard south between three-one-five-zero and three-two-five-zero mils of the Target," Thete reported, scanning the frontage with her bino then passing it over to Betelgeuse, who had dragged himself up left of her.
Betelgeuse, still panting, brought the bino up to his visor while Douglas to his left started glibly soliciting for "more commentary".
"Agree?" Thete asked, turning to Betelgeuse so that her rounded face and gently curving chin were perceptible to him. Her snub-nose twitched and he wondered if the slight wince which flashed across her face had been occasioned by her ongoing problem with her prosthetic orb.
"Agreed, Sergeant Jutson," Betelgeuse replied, finally getting his breath under control. He scanned over Liberation's Reach with the bino and then returned the device to Thete, seeing as he did so Voke and Frederica crouched to Thete's right, their bodies half-turned so that their callsigns COKE and DYKE respectively could be observed emblazoned across their torsos. They had just returned from assisting Cacliocos' platoon with the Schwerer Gun's assembly.
"It's Thete, B.T. Shorter designations facilitate more efficient communication."
"Thete," he corrected himself. "I'm assuming each platoon has a turreted railgun?"
"No, only one platoon per company carries it. The First Brigade comprises four Battalions, making ten combat Companies at three Companies per Battalion minus two support Companies. So, ten railguns total," Thete explained. "I'll link-up with Subaltern Cacliocos shortly to go over the map and check on command line's progress with the Power Magnifiers, and confirm if there are any further plan modifications; but the current orders has our engagement starting approximately twenty-nine hours from now with a bombardment by the Schwerers."
"The Target's walls—they aren't like Saltilla's at all," Betelgeuse remarked, thinking aloud. "It's just a steel siding rigged with ladders. Do we know the thickness?"
"Thicker than a meter. It'll take a couple blasts to get through it, at this distance," Thete said.
"I should've asked earlier, but why do they need Power Magnifiers?" Voke interpolated.
Frederica was the one who replied: "It was in the briefing you and D.B.—sorry, B.T.—missed; Goldies and Silvers need the Power Magnifiers so that they can project their abilities over the AOP."*
"Well, that and they have their own Green Book SOPs.* I'm not privy to the details, but generally the Golds use it to deal with long-distance artillery and the Silvers use it for greater visibility over the battlefield," Thete added. "Okay, that counts as our set-up review. You guys prepare the shell scrapes and get some rest first. Do up a night-watch detail and let me know my timing. I'm going to find Cacliocos."
Then she sped past the resting Schwerer and disappeared into the turmoil of shifting soldiers, leaving her section to their devices.
'Hrnh. Hollow, probably,' Betelgeuse thought.
----------------------------------------
1632h
That would be 0432h in sidereal time.
He looked at his wrist-transceiver for the tenth time, then let his arm fall back down beside him to raise a cloud of dust. The sides of the shell scrape came up barely three-quarters the thickness of his supine form so that his body did not lie beneath the level of the surrounding ground, in breach of the dimensional requirements for a defensive shell scrape pursuant to SOP. He couldn't be bothered—the ground was too damn hard.
In any case the terrain's rocky formations provided adequate cover from the front. To Betelgeuse' mind the shell scrape would only really be useful if the Chimerae flanked them.
He turned his head, seeing Frederica to his right, her exosuit's torso rising and falling to sleep's rhythmic beat. Most of her body lay on level ground, her entrenching tool having snapped on the tenth or twelfth hit amidst a shower of sparks. For her, the shell scrape was a nonstarter. Beyond her form loomed a massy shelf of rock that was the first line of defense relied upon by Second Battalion.
He stared up into the nocturnal gloom, wondering if he would be blessed with any more rest. He had taken the second night-watch shift and found it impossible to return to sleep thereafter.
Above him Larua had nearly completed its traversal across the surface of that dark and fathomless ocean, and the constellations were now almost invisible. In maybe two or three hours Corydon would once again reveal itself.
Sighing deeply, Betelgeuse regained his feet and saw at the night-watch position Thete flush against the rock wall, her railgun held at the ready. The inside gouge of the rock wall's kerf spanned from her midriff to her feet.
Thete's shift was the second-to-last. Ten or twenty meters away to her right crouched another shadowy and indistinct form—one of the Jegorich platoon's night-watch detail.
Sensing movement, Thete turned to see Betelgeuse retrieve his railgun and make his way around the silently sleeping forms, then stared at him mutely as he plopped down into a half-crouch beside her. She was short enough that even in that position he kept the same height as her.
They remained like that for some minutes, neither of them saying anything. Then a dull beep sounded through his comms, indicating that a private channel had been established.
"... Can't sleep?" she asked.
"Yes. You can go back to rest if you need to," Betelgeuse offered. "I'll take over night-watch and handover to Voke."
"Hrnh. Believe you me once you do a couple of these you'll start to treasure every bit of rest you can get. I've slept more than soundly in some wretched places."
"Izzat so? How many of these have you 'done'?" Betelgeuse raised his eyebrow.
A bout of silence interspersed.
"... Three."
"And already section leader. A function of our survivability rate, then," Betelgeuse said, his voice low. "Doesn't bode well."
"Shuddup. Don't fucking jinx it."
"I'm not really bothered. It is what it is, yeah, and we still got those Schwerers."
"… Hey Betelgeuse…" Thete began, her voice tentative, "is it really your first time?"
Betelgeuse shot Thete a quizzical look: "You got our dossier right?"
"That's not what I'm talking about. It's very normal to feel anxious or scared before a battle, I think most people experience that. Most people I've fought beside, anyway. Sometimes it's important to be truthful about it, to express it so all those feelings don't stay suppressed and super-pressurized, if only to prevent the anxieties from bubbling up when you can least afford to deal with them."
"… That's good to know. But sometimes the effect of the Incunabulum manifests in unique and unexpected ways."
Thete shifted closer even though there was no need to do so, in the process dragging her suit across the scratchy surface of the rock wall. Their voices were already being piped straight into each other's suits. "You're saying that this is the Incunabulum talking. I've seen your Manifold record; I might not read Common very well, but it's hard to believe a single-word Increment like that could change your personality so drastically. I've known Ash grades who barely changed after the Analysis."
"There's an Earthen-Sinic saying that goes: 海纳百川，有容乃大. The oceans can accommodate a hundred rivers, it says, and we ought to match its breadth in regarding or tolerating differences across people or happenings. It bears an ancient wisdom," Betelgeuse said.
He raised his head, staring straight into the inky blackness of space. There really were no clouds up there. He found in those depths the knowledge of loneliness, and he thought to himself, 'what did it really matter?'
"… I know well enough how much variety the Incunabula admit of," Thete returned. "And I couldn't help but notice you didn't awaken any Etching, is that right? That only leaves the Increment."
"… Yes." Betelgeuse looked her straight in her biological eye.
"I confess myself to have been quite the close observer of Incunabula, especially when I was a student; and to my mind it's inaccurate to say these things change us, you know? They are a manifestation of us, one way or another. They are instruments of our cathexes," Thete remarked.
"That's assuming there was ever any 'us' to begin with. It's a big assumption," Betelgeuse was still looking up into space and now he couldn't keep himself from chuckling softly.
"What?" Thete looked at him incredulously. "What do you mean? We're us."
"I mean, where is 'us'? The 'us' that does, the 'us' that is active and that lives, not the 'us' that is acted upon. These days I can't seem to find that active 'us' anymore, the active 'I'—"
"Betelgeuse, what the hell are you talking about?"
"—we hardly make the Incunabulum. They're foisted upon us by the Analysis, and then we make do. We shit out an Etching or two. You might as well tell me we're nothing but instruments of our Incunabulum's cathexes. You can tell me all about 'us' but then I'd point to the Incunabulum, I'd point to the mind, the personality, the body—and in the end nothing really has an 'us' capable of doing anything… you know what it's really like, it's like we're the canvas upon which some cruel god is painting its surrealist art."
'And they can compel us—control us in ways I never thought possible,' Betelgeuse thought, but he left that part out.
There were lights blinking in the sky, lights that might've been stars or artificial satellites. Already to the east a hazy lucence was stealing over the peaks of the Amate, turning the horizon just the lightest shade pink.
"Look, that's just a tad bit too philosophical for what we're facing," Betelgeuse heard Thete say, but by then he had already become absorbed in inspecting something that caught his eye.
It was small, but he could see directly above him a peculiar speck flare with eerie brightness, then blossom into a multi-pointed star, then adumbrate an unnatural shape that gradually faded away from vision.
"What is that?" Betelgeuse whispered.
"Betelgeuse, I don't think I experience the same—"
"No. Look there," he pointed upward.
"It's—hold on, Cacliocos is calling…"
As Thete shifted channels, Betelgeuse continued to inspect the strange phenomenon in the sky. The blossom had gone, taking with it the speck of light. Something began to well up within him, a strange and superstitious feeling which manifested as a sort of vertigo.
"WAKE UP! WAKE UP!" Thete's voice suddenly exploded through the section comms-link.
"Huh, what?" Douglas slurred sleepily.
"Chimerae!" Voke roared, and Betelgeuse could see him leap upward from his shell scrape like a corpse suddenly risen from the dead. A meter down, Frederica was flailing around soundlessly at her spot.
"Command line instruction: Ready for engagement! Quickly, get over here and cover the frontage," Thete instructed. "Enfilade fire once you have sight!"
Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.
Betelgeuse unslung his railgun and set it flat atop the rock wall, his every sense sharpened to hypervigilance. To his right and behind him the entire Brigade had been roused to fitful movement, and they shouted and hollered and came sprinting to the front wall. He could hear his heart pound in his ears and his blood pump like cresting waves breaking upon a promontory. Before him stretched for four or five kilometers a land of indistinct shapes enshrouded in a thousand confusions, and beyond that loomed the charred steel walls of Liberation's Reach, incessantly refulgent.
"Cacliocos is telling me… he's… uh… hold on, sir, slow down, I can't catch what you're saying… he's telling me the automated triangulation for the Schwerers are down. The satellite's destroyed," Thete transmitted, her voice tremulous.
So that's what it was.
"Eyes peeled. Support companies to manually calibrate the Schwerers. Be ready for attacks," Thete added tersely.
Then everything was silent except for the low whine of acceleration-supporting-solenoids initiating and the rumble and clatter of uncooperative Schwerers being jacked upward somewhere.
Seconds turned to minutes, and Betelgeuse squinted into the darkness. Somebody was breathing hard into the comms, and he wondered if it were Douglas.
"Shut off your comms, Doug," Thete instructed.
Douglas did so without replying.
There might be something moving there… yes, something's definitely moving.
"Unidentified, five hundred!"* Betelgeuse yelled.
"Fire!" Thete ordered, after a moment's hesitation.
He gunned his trigger, ejecting molten arcs into the darkness. In the distance an armature-round smashed into something, causing an explosion that blossomed orange-yellow.
The entire line lit up and he could see the frontage streak with stripes of bright yellow. Shots came hard and fast, engulfing Betelgeuse in a soundscape filled with the relentless hum and twang of small-arms railgun fire. The shadowy figures closed in, and in death they exploded and gave off thick plumes of orange-underbellied smog.
"Attention First Platoon plus Section Five," Betelgeuse' comms crackled to life, "S.A. Cacliocos speaking. Enemy drones carrying payload of hypergolic explosives. Prevent from reaching Schwerers."
"Fire at will!" Thete yelled.
Betelgeuse jammed the trigger repeatedly, and his weapon jumped incessantly against the torso of his exosuit. He could feel his railgun's grip heat up even through the padded gloves of his exosuit.
One of the strange bulbous creatures detonated violently not twenty meters away from him. Warning bells sounded within his head, as he realized that the enemy was far closer than he imagined.
A whirring, compact thing suddenly appeared from out of the thick billows of smoke, shooting through the air toward Betelgeuse with preternatural speed; in that instant he barely registered it as a piece of lopsided metal gum centered by a glowing, baleful eye.
His senses screamed at him to dodge and he flung himself sidewise, bouncing off Douglas into the side of the rock wall and inadvertently losing his balance. His railgun clattered into the inside of the rock wall's kerf as he struggled to regain his balance.
The drone shot past him and impacted the cliff behind, detonating into a brilliant sparkle of flame which melted through a portion of the wall and caused it to judder and fall away and then crash with a mighty cacophony into the ground and break up into rubble.
Betelgeuse scrambled into the cramped kerf to retrieve his railgun; looking up and the through the space between Thete's legs, he saw the Schwerer close by erupt with its floundering crew into fire, the whole mass crumpling into molten slag.
"We need to fall back to the back line," Betelgeuse said, squeezing himself out beside Thete.
"Our orders are to protect—"
"Better vantage. These other three in front are gone. We secure that defilade and protect the remaining six guns with more firepower," he explained, interrupting Thete.
Thete turned to him and hesitated a moment, then nodded.
"... Cacliocos, suggest fallback to backline…" Thete transmitted, not bothering to shut off the section comms-link.
"Okay, go!" She said after a moment's silence, and they dashed madly across the jagged ground. Betelgeuse glanced down his flank and saw the rest of Cacliocos' platoon doing the same. Further down, the rest of the Brigade appeared not to have gotten the memo. They remained at their positions firing haphazardly, heroically holding the line against the mass of explosive drones surging forward relentlessly.
Thete's section shortly reached the rock-wall behind and clambered over the rubble-strewn ground where a portion of the wall had collapsed. Then they traced a path sideways toward an aperture further down the line.
"Doug, Voke, face opposite. Any mozzies come over the rubble, they're yours. B.T., Freddy, we concentrate fire through here," Thete instructed, strafing across the narrow aperture then pointing her barrel through.
'Lungs acting up again,' Betelgeuse thought, wheezing, his grip tightening on his railgun as he fought to keep flush with the covering wall. He could feel someone who was either Voke or Frederica jostling against him from behind.
A harsh crackle issued from his comms: "S.A. Cacliocos speaking to Brigade! Covering fire! Battalion Commander has given the order to fall back!"
Betelgeuse inched forward and peeked around the slit and saw the front line of men trapped in a moil of confusion. Rounds were being fired in all directions, risking fratricide. Several drone explosions claimed the lives of writhing bodies screaming soundlessly into the void.
That's the issue with these fucking things. Chain of command's liable to confuse and kill you if you're not careful.
"Battalion Commander? What the hell's the Brigade Commander doing?" Voke exclaimed.
Ignoring Voke, Betelgeuse aimed his barrel down the aperture and took a chunk out of a swerving drone, causing it to careen into the ground and erupt into a magnificent blaze.
"What the hell's happening, who's our Battalion Commander?" Douglas exasperated.
"The First Battalion Commander dumba—" Frederica began.
"Quiet! We're under Second Battalion Commander Lieutenant-Colonel Brexar and Third Company Commander Major Storr. But we take orders from our direct superior, First Platoon Commander Subaltern Cacliocos. Clear enough?" Thete cut through the chatter, punctuating her words with a barrage of shots.
"Sorry," Frederica mumbled.
"Keep your head in the game and keep shooting!" Thete yelled, letting loose another volley of armature-rounds through the natural embrasure. Betelgeuse followed suit, and watched with some satisfaction the resulting explosions which issued from the ruined carcasses of the enemy.
A flash of pain. An unidentified thing hurtled through the gap, clipping Betelgeuse' upper arm and tearing a gash through his exosuit. He grunted and flipped backward into cover, looking down to see blood weltering through the hole. Shrapnel.
Before Betelgeuse could yell out that he was hit, Frederica, who had been next to him, squeezed close and started foaming her coagulator over his wound, then proceeded to seal up the breach in his exosuit with a cartridge of expanding plastic sprayfoam. Then she tapped him tightly on his shoulder and he was back to shooting.
"S.A. Caclioco—Initial—nd fire—werers!" came the comms' static spew.
By now the rest of the Brigade appeared to have successfully pulled back to the back line, abandoning the front row of Schwerers. The swarm of buzzing drones was starting to thin, as concentrated volleys of small-arms railgun fire lanced out from the gaps in the sheer cliff wall and destroyed large swathes of the enemy. A multitude of drones were ramming straight into the rock cover and cratering the ground between the first and second walls, causing the earth to tremble and thunder under their relentless barrage.
The environment had become suffused in a thick smog which drastically reduced the range of visibility.
Within the smog a dark patch appeared and broadened and then molted its smokeskin as it rushed out at them; Betelgeuse barely had time to swing his railgun around when the figure came close enough that a nearby explosion illuminated its features through its visor.
"Reyes?" Betelgeuse managed, recognising the 'X' branded across a thin forehead slick with sweat. The callsign 'CANK' was printed across his torso.
The figure tripped and tumbled forward into the ground. Muffled cries issued from the prone figure, and it took Betelgeuse a moment to realize they didn't have direct comms.
"Double-damn, it's Caleb Reyes! Got tired of Alisha?" Douglas babbled, putting down a drone which had strafed past the rubble and whipping around as he rifled through his magazine pouch to face a Caleb trying to regain his feet .
"What unit you with, Cank!" Voke transmitted.
"He can't hear us. Thete, can you establish comms?" Betelgeuse inquired, spotting a drone which had skirted the wall overhead and sending a trail of orange-yellow straight through its leering red eye.
"I don't have authorization! Get him into cover!" Thete managed, sending off her own well-placed shots through the aperture and toward a bevy of drones. Betelgeuse followed suit but his shots fell wide.
"Roger, roger!" Frederica returned, dashing out from beside Betelgeuse to grab Caleb's upper arm and then drag him toward the wall.
"It's me!" came Caleb's muffled voice. Betelgeuse barely caught what he said through the exosuit and the raucous din.
"Unit!" he screamed, hoping Caleb would be able to hear.
"Third Company, Fourth plat—"
"Battalion!" Betelgeuse roared. A drone spiraled uncontrollably over the wall abovehead and traced a steep trajectory into a protrusion of rock opposite, consuming a portion of it in a superheated conflagration.
"Fourth Battalion!" Caleb returned, digging into his grenade pouches. He had lost his railgun somewhere in the confusion.
"Fourth Battalion, Third Company, Fourth Platoon," Betelgeuse transmitted.
"They have a Schwerer. Ask him how far!" Thete returned.
Betelgeuse leaned close to Caleb and saw eyebrows matted with moisture arching steeply above large and soulful eyes.
"Distance!"
"One-fifty!"
"One hundred fifty meters," Betelgeuse transmitted.
"Okay, on my mark," Thete said, pointing into the roiling smog. Then, she pointed straight down and made a fist with her thumb pointed sideways and then canted it upward. The hand-signal for grenade.
"Ready!"
The section wrangled their grenades from their pouches.
"Pins out! Go, go!" Thete barked, yanking the safety-pin from her grenade while maintaining pressure on the safety lever. She lunged with exceptional grace into the smog. Caleb, watching her, followed her lead.
Hearing Thete's command the others ripped the pins from their grenades and sprinted over the rough gravel after Thete.
"Ah shit my lever's up!" Douglas transmitted frantically.
"Holy fuck–"
"Nades out!" Thete stormed, interrupting Frederica and flinging her own grenade in the direction from which they had come. Her section did likewise, to a thundering chorus of explosions. Seconds later, an immense crash resounded behind them.
They burst out from the haze approximately twenty meters from a chaotic scene. A clump of soldiers were shooting up into the air, trying desperately to protect a Schwerer from the stream of drones making it over the wall. The wall itself was a curtain of smoking and melted-through perforations, and it didn't seem to Betelgeuse like it would hold up to the assault much longer.
The barrel of the Schwerer was half-raised and made an acute angle with the ground. A trio was straining against its weight, attempting without success to drag its wheel-less frame across the gravel and toward a nearby aperture.
So much for the wheels.
"Cover that gun!" Betelgeuse snapped, dropping to one knee and snapping off several shots from a high kneeling position. Thete and the rest did likewise, proning or crouching and concentrating fire on the deadly, expanding cloud of drones above the Schwerer.
Someone came up behind Betelgeuse and tapped his shoulder. He turned to see Caleb, and observed that he was still holding onto his grenade, the safety level still depressed.
Voke, seeing the same, ripped the device from Caleb's hand and threw it backward through the smog, then resumed firing his weapon.
When Betelgeuse refocused his attention on the Schwerer, he saw that the trio had halted their non-progress and were focused on thinning out the drones abovehead.
At that instant a drone came plummeting from nowhere and threatened to catch the three exposed; but one of them—moving far faster than humanly possible—whipped around in a blur of motion and struck the machine, causing it to careen straight into a wall where it exploded in a brilliant cascade of light.
The section continued pouring rounds into the enemy, steadily reducing their numbers.
A colossal brute of a man came sprinting down from the opposite side of the Schwerer, the man so disproportionately formed that Betelgeuse found it difficult to believe he was not some exotic animal. He was unnaturally tall and stood on two massive stumps for legs; and yet his arms were girthier and longer still—thick, cylindrical appendages that dragged upon the ground like some half-sapient silverback.
"What is that?" Frederica exclaimed, looking wide-eyed at the giant. No one could answer her.
The giant grasped the side-rail of the Schwerer with massive palms, and, straining mightily, singlehandedly began to pull the multi-ton thing sidewise toward one of the apertures. Another drone which had skirted over the top of the wall to hover above the giant received one missed shot from Betelgeuse and one well-aimed shot from Frederica.
It spiraled away into the ground, erupting on impact.
Betelgeuse pressed his trigger again but nothing happened. He felt the hum of his railgun weaken.
'I'm out,' he thought, slinging his weapon over his shoulder. Ahead of him, the base of the Schwerer seemed to have caught on a gnarled protrusion, and the giant began to drag it, painfully, in a different direction.
"Cover me. I gotta help him," Betelgeuse transmitted.
"Covering," returned Thete.
He charged across that blasted terrain and came to the front side of the Schwerer, pushing with his entire body against the siderail in an attempt to maneuver it around the protrusion. The giant glanced at him then redoubled his efforts, and slowly but surely the Schwerer began to turn. Once the protrusion had been skirted, Betelgeuse took up at the adjacent side, pushing at the flank of the massive gun.
He felt the movement accelerate. Turning his head, he saw Caleb straining at the butt of the Schwerer. He nodded to himself.
The seconds dragged on. The persistent rumble of dying drones synchronized with his heartbeat.
Betelgeuse hyperventilated. Every muscle in his body screamed, as the build-up of lactic acid reached new and critical levels. Someone was shouting something through the comms, and he couldn't make out what it was. He continued pushing, feeling himself become faint. He wondered if Thete and the others would not run out of ammunition soon and leave him to die in fire.
There, just a bit more.
With a titanic effort the helix barrel of the Schwerer Gun was shifted around and finally made to aim through the aperture. The giant lobbed a grenade forward, taking down a section of the front wall to clear the frontage and ensure an unbroken line of sight to the walls of Liberation's Reach.
Betelgeuse could see the flames rising in the distance. It was now much dimmed, and above it the sky had started to take on the pinkish hue of the Desertian dawn.
The onslaught of drones had thinned to a trickle, and a handful of remaining soldiers consolidated around the Schwerer, firing at the flying enemy. A bolt clipped one of the drones, sending it screaming downward and over the Schwerer, barely missing the barrel. Betelgeuse ducked as a massive gout of flame flashed violently and momentarily consumed his vision. A wave of heat so intense he could feel it through his exosuit passed over him.
He regained his bearing to see, at the butt of the Schwerer, the charred and flaming remains of Caleb Reyes, the twig-like limbs of the body tracing a slow movement through the air as if it were engaged in yogic exercise. Caleb's melted jaw was gaping and attempting to close out of reflex, and his eyeballs appeared to have melted and dribbled out of his empty sockets.
More comms chatter he couldn't discern through the confusion. Rushing forward, Betelgeuse kicked the corpse away and checked the bearing of the Schwerer.
Too low.
He bent to his left to see the giant brandishing his railgun, and made a series of hand motions as if he were spreading the limbs of a compass tool.
The giant saw this and understood. He crouched down and worked at the jack, and the barrel slowly canted upward.
'That's enough height,' Betelgeuse thought, putting his hand up to indicate that the giant should halt, then waving his arm to indicate 'stand clear'.
"—fire it, B.T.—" crackled the comms. The soldiers around him scattered.
Moving back to the butt of the Schwerer, Betelgeuse verified through the periscope-sight that the Target was sighted and the barrel properly aligned. He inspected the firing panel, but found that the plastic buttons had all melted into messy bits of pudding. Luckily, the button-designations stenciled into the metal had kept their integrity.
Initialize solenoid.
A low whine climbed in pitch, crescendoing to a deafening screech, then receded into the background. An immense current flowed through the acceleration-supporting coils of the Schwerer Gun, creating electromagnets so powerful they caused an intense wave of dizziness and vertigo to sweep over Betelgeuse, threatening him with spontaneous emesis. He fought to keep his balance as his vest and railgun suddenly pulled away from him toward the Schwerer.
Magnetic shielding's gone all wonk. At least the circuitry and battery are still working.
Another drone zipped overhead and strayed too close to the Schwerer's potent magnetic fields. It sketched a downward trajectory and collided with the ground, lapsing in a bright fulmination.
Current, check.
Armature-round, check.
The red dawn had broken, and the helix barrel protruding like some rigid elephantine phallus caught the first shine and shone murkily through the drizzle of dust.
Fire.
With a monstrous resonance the barrel hummed, then erupted in a strident, brassy blare. The shockwave enveloped Betelgeuse in sound and the earth seemed to pulse and a mist of gravel hung suspended about him.
The projectile tore through the air with a supersonic shriek and traced staccato bursts into the distance.