Making my ideas work with the points I had required getting somewhat creative. First I bought a Class I Combat Walkers for three hundred points, then I started min-maxing for affordability. Maneuverability? Toss it. Armor? Frontal is good enough. Sensors? They aren’t going to be detecting any Model Twenty-Ones anyway, so forget about them. Air conditioning? Boone is heading into fall anyway; the pilots can deal with it.
Everything I cut reduced the price and increased the number of vehicles I could buy before cutting into the funds I had to save for terraforming equipment. What I had settled on was eight small walkers equipped for killing low-numbered models in droves, which could be spread out over the length of the wall, and four larger ones with massive railguns capable of killing Fourteens in a single shot and, according to Juny, Twenty-Threes if they massed fire.
Alana’s tanks could do the same thing, so why bother with the walkers? Well, Alana’s tanks needed Class I shells, and we were expecting an increase in the number of models needing the attention of our heavy units. The large walkers just needed a ferrous-metal slug. Nothing fancy; the Samurai tech stuff was all in the gun itself. They would also be able to fire more quickly, and since they had legs, they could crouch to take cover behind the walls.
The smaller walkers were modeled after GDI Wolverines, but they diverged quite a bit because of a few tactical considerations. If I’d made them to spec they would have been twice as tall as an infantryman and unable to make much use of cover, so I’d made their legs a heck of a lot stubbier, barely long enough to even walk, so that their tops would only peak above the battlements slightly. The arms were shorter as well, which placed the guns mounted on them closer to the top, peaking out over the walls.
And while the originals had mounted gatling guns, these were equipped with rapid-firing plasma cannons, which would be deadly against single-digit models and chew through even double-digits with concentrated fire. Most important was that they didn’t need ammunition, as they were fed directly by the walker’s power plant. In the end what I had were walking coffins on stubby legs, missing most of their yellow armor and with their guns protruding directly from the shoulders. Frankly, they looked ridiculous.
I’d modeled the big walkers after the GDI Titan, which meant it was tall but somewhat clunky. They looked a lot more impressive than they really were. Almost everything going into them was essentially Class 0 tech, much to Juny’s displeasure, but they had Class I railguns and that’s where most of the cost came from.
The Titans were twenty-five feet tall, just slightly rising above the walls, with digitigrade legs making up half that height. Above the legs was the section all the machinery went into, which looked a bit like one of those cars with a protruding grill or headlights to either side of the engine compartment, and strapped to the right side of it was a railgun nearly as long as the Titan was tall. Finally, on top there was a crew compartment resembling the turret of a tank if it didn’t have a gun, and the whole thing was plated in dull yellow armor.
Since they came up a bit short in height, I’d also bought a few Class 0 shipping containers to stand them on, bringing their guns just above the height of the soldiers manning the walls. They would...well, get the job done. I couldn’t afford engineering marvels right now. All dozen of the walkers were to be piloted by volunteers from wounded mercs and militia who couldn’t walk due to their injuries.
Mind you, I’d offered medical supplies to fix up their legs, but they’d deferred until after the battle, saying I might need the resources. I respected it, but I didn’t agree. Still, I couldn’t force them to let me heal them, so I didn’t argue too much.
“We’re all ready on our end,” Alana’s voice said over the radio. “Are you done on your side?”
“It was kind of a rush job so the pilots can’t do much more than point and shoot, but Juny says they should let us hold out a bit longer. I’ll be up in a moment.” Ending the call, I headed back to the hovercar I’d ridden out to the walls. It was the same one from yesterday, which Juny had apparently extracted before it could be crushed by a falling building. Since the elevator was obviously still out, we rode the hovercar right up to the top floor of the mercenary base, entering the hangar through the shutter the Antithesis destroyed this morning.
When I stepped out, I saw the other two gunships had been transferred to landing pads and crewed. The landing pads themselves had been mostly cleared of Antithesis, though some dried goo remained. Maintenance staff were using forklifts to shove the dead bodies onto the remaining pad that still had a functioning hatch so they could be lifted up to the roof and burned.
The two rapid response teams had done a fairly thorough job making sure everyone was dead while I installed the turret on the roof, so I wasn’t too worried about the possibility of survivors hiding in the pile.
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I met Alana between the two gunships where she was speaking to Lieutenant Alvarez. Their squads weren’t present, so they’d likely moved to their staging points already.
“I’d feel a lot more comfortable with a Samurai holding the line. Are you sure both of you are needed for this?” Alvarez asked as I approached.
“The sonic piles are too big to carry on the gunships. We were able to buy them in advance so that we could split the points, but we have to deploy them on-site,” Alana answered, shaking her head. “You’ve essentially got fifteen mini-Samurai. You’ll do just fine without me.”
“It’s not the same. We can’t buy more gear when we need it. But I’m assuming it would be too slow if only one of you handled the deployments, so I guess we don’t have a choice.” Alvarez sighed, running a hand over his shaved head.
“Unfortunately, you’d be correct. That would double the time we need and the twenty-plus models will be showing up by the time we finished. If we want to finish this before they hatch it’s going to take two,” Alana confirmed grimly.
“I’m not interrupting, am I?” I asked as I reached the pair, stopping a few steps away. Both turned to look at me, shaking their heads.
“You’re just in time, Erica. That bird’s yours,” she said, pointing at the gunship to my left. “Dylta already gave the pilots the coordinates. We’ll just be along for the ride and they’ll get us where we need to go.”
“Not sure I like the idea of sitting there helplessly if we’re attacked in the air,” I said, frowning beneath my helmet.
“Both gunships have Class I rockets onboard that can shoot down any Antithesis air forces we encounter. They’ve been keeping their heads down since you put that turret down on the roof anyway- there’s probably not too many left, and they haven’t had enough time to grow more yet,” Alana replied, adjusting a strap on her armor as she spoke. “You shouldn’t need to land either, just have your AI deploy the sonic piles from the air and move on.”
“Will do. Good luck, I guess,” I said, not sure what else to say. She just nodded and raised a fist, so I bumped it with my own.
“Right back at you. See you on the other side.”
We went our separate ways. I approached the gunship I’d been pointed towards, which already had its engines fired up and on standby. The craft looked a bit like an attack helicopter, but with four VTOL jets instead of rotors. A door in the side led into the crew compartment, which was empty except for the pilots. Seeing no reason to stop, I climbed right in and took a seat.
“Ready when you are, ma’am,” the pilot told me over the radio. He was glancing at me over his shoulder, but the engines were too loud for his voice to be heard without his helmet mic.
“Ready,” I told him, and he turned and flicked something on his dashboard. The shutters above us creaked as they parted, and the landing pad elevator began to rise towards the roof. The door closed as well, blessedly. I’d prefer not to see the ground rushing past below me. “When you reach the first spot, just get me close to the ground, no need to land. I’ll deploy the device from the air.”
“Copy that, wilco.”
A few moments later I felt the gunship lift off the pad, and then I was shoved back into my seat when it shot forward. We were heading east while Alana went west, wrapping around to meet in the south. We’d each be placing sonic piles in pairs at the top and bottom of the mountain slopes, which was important because these weren’t terribly steep. The Appalachians are old mountains, worn down over millennia and forested over. They didn’t really rise that far above the town, so it was important that we made sure the entire mountainside sloughed off, building up momentum and mass as it slid down towards the town.
We had a few things in our favor. The Antithesis had undermined the foundations of a lot of the buildings in the outer city, which meant that they wouldn’t hold up as well against lateral stresses. They’d also, according to Juny’s preliminary ground scans, eaten up a lot of the roots systems that would have otherwise held the mountainsides together. It probably made sense at the time- a stealth hive needed to gather biomass without being noticed, and it could gather roots without even emerging from their burrows.
Which meant the soil on the mountains was being held in place mostly because they weren’t steep enough for gravity to cause a landslide on its own, but if we saturated the soil with water and induced liquefaction, well…it didn’t matter how steep the mountains were, liquid will always flow downhill with the slightest of inclines. And the sonic piles were designed to root themselves in the bedrock below and keep emitting sonic pulses at a frequency humans couldn’t perceive and a decibel level high enough to shake the ground, even while tonnes of dirt and wood rushed past.
The gunship started to slow, and I checked my map to find we were above the first location. Once we were near the ground, amidst a thin cluster of dead trees, the doors opened up and I stood, holding tightly onto a handhold while I looked out.
“So, what do I need to do now?” I asked Juny.
“Deploying the first sonic pile!” she said instead of answering, which was kind of an answer in itself. Below, an egg shaped object popped into existence, three struts holding it up. We were far enough away that I could see a spike below the egg extend downwards, then shoot into the soil.
“Huh, so that’s what it looks like. What about the hydration capsule?”
“Those will be deployed inside the sonic piles we leave at the mountaintops, as the water would not spread far enough if deployed from here!” Juny explained. Obvious now that I thought about it. I sat back down, figuring that was the extent of my involvement. The pile would begin to burrow once it hit bedrock, which conveniently made it hard for the Antithesis to find even if they knew what to look for.
“First one down, let’s head to the second location,” I instructed the pilot.