Chapter Eighty-Six - Xenocide Act VII; Thoom

"You know, a lot of the cheaper stuff in Class I you can buy on the market with real-world money, right? It's expensive, but companies have figured out how to manufacture some of it. The Foxteeth for example," Road Rash said, lifting his sidearm, "would cost you one or two hundred thousand credits. That's a ridiculous price—but it's technically not really Class I tech anymore. Earthside corpos are manufacturing them now, and I think the AIs will reclassify them as Class 0 soon…

"Hmm. I suspect these'll get cheaper soon."

– Road Rash, during a Just Talking stream 2057

 

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Leah left the handling of the purchases to Ypsi and focused her attention back on the mob as another clunk and a full feeling somewhere under her belly informed her that the cannon had finished reloading.

A quick glance confirmed the canister shot, and then she twisted her rear around until she was scuttling sideways like a crab, not slowing in the slightest.

She carefully studied the enemy clump and widened her circle slightly even as she kept weaving through the trees a few dozen meters from the edge of the little clearing the Twenty-Two had created when it dug itself in.

The Antithesis followed suit, and the clump elongated slightly.

Leah smiled. Perfect.

She crossed into the line of felled trees that was either storm damage, or probably gave away where the Twenty-Two must have come from, and froze, legs spread and braced past the muddy top-soil, spearing several centimeters into the rock below through a combination of the pod's dense weight, hydraulic injectors and flash-freezers at the leg tips to widen cracks, and good old mechanic leverage.

And there she was again, calm and relaxed, sinking into that zen, waiting for the thing.

The units closest to her responded first, reorienting back towards her. The entire line of aliens wavered slightly as they adjusted to her sudden immobility, and straightened out from the gentle spiraling curve that had been chasing her circling.

There. All lined up.

She twitched a muscle she didn't have, and the cannon underneath her belly roared. Lead balls and flechettes of hardened steel ripped through the line in front of her, completely annihilating this batch of at least fifty Antithesis, and her point counter jumped back up into the two thousands.

With the satisfaction of a good shot, Leah tore her legs from the ground and set off to circle again, as she felt water and dirt kicked up by the gunfire blast pearl down her hydrophobic chassis.

A heavy object matching the size of the entire pod, minus the legs, popped into existence just behind her, and bobbed half a meter up and down as its maneuvering rocket motors engaged with powerful jets of blue flame that torched the ground beneath it and steamed the watery mud.

It stabilized momentarily, and the high-impulse thrusters cut out to let the drone drift along on its turbine hover-engines.

It clearly wasn't Warforge Technologies tech. Ypsi had given it the rough aesthetics, but more as a nod to Leah's ownership, rather than as an attempt at copying the look.

With a quick flick of its rear maneuvering thrusters, the drone nearly jumped to above Leah's pod, where it counterbalanced with weaker hot-gas hydrogen reaction-control-system thrusters.

Huh, Leah thought, studying the mix of energetic maneuvering motors and RCS thrusters. That thing is space-worthy, isn't it? The hover engines would let it conserve fuel in-atmosphere, and with the thrusters it could maneuver while servicing a gunship in space.

She watched as multiple centimeter-thick panels of armor extended themselves away from the drone's body to expose a gap through which two one-meter-long bays within its side could be accessed.

Oh! The new cannons!

Hydraulic props extended the first cannon from inside its bay, and more arms appeared from a hatch in the drone's belly to accept the weapon. 

It was about ninety centimeters long, the barrel clearly visible along most of its body. The breech was a box at the rear and Leah could see some sort of complicated-looking mechanism attached to it.

That's the quasi-recoilless part! It'll configure itself to the ammunition you load and manages the recoil. With the current rounds, um, they have a charge to help them launch. So it'll stay closed like a normal chamber first and then reverse the flow of the explosive gasses! So, um, they come out the back like from a rocket, so that it's more like a recoilless rifle once the round has left the barrel!

Um, did I explain that properly?

"Yup, got it Ypsi." Leah giggled.

Neat! I'm helpful!

"Good job."

Yet another set of arms clamped onto the right turret's gun, and Leah disconnected the electronics and disengaged the mount's mechanical fasteners, even as she kept running and weaving between the trees and continued to use the left turret to cut down any of the quick-moving Threes drawing close.

The drone constantly fired its jets to keep its position above her turrets, and a hose extended to suck the spent brass from the basket, while another grabber removed the magazines she hadn't used yet.

It then placed the weapon itself onto the mount with quick and sure movements, and Leah immediately attached the gun and connected to it.

The new cannon greeted Leah through her 'Polylaterality' prosthetics control implant, and she instinctively got a sense of how much damage it could do with the belted high-explosive fragmentation shells already being loaded from the boxy eighty-round magazine that had latched itself into the basket after being put there by the drone.

While the drone busied itself replacing the second gun, Leah began experimenting with the new cannon. 

It was a little larger than the previous smoothbores, but only slightly heavier and much better balanced. As a result, it was quite agile on the turret and she had little trouble snapping it at any number of targets.

The cannon signaled readiness, and with anticipation pumping breath into her lungs, Leah fired her first cartridge at the shoulder plate of a Three in the middle of the nearest cluster.

A big thoom rattled the trees around her, and even the pod shook slightly from the blast, putting a grin on Leah's face. The fuze found enough resistance to arm and the entire group of Threes got torn to pieces by the shrapnel.

Leah looked behind her and saw the rifle's back blast had created two small vortexes. They sucked up a muddy spray and coated both the drone and the pod with dirt, before they were destabilized by the interference of the drone's jets.

"Whoo! Well, those are certainly something!"

Leah replayed the firing in slow motion, half an eye on her path so she wouldn’t crash into any trees. The retort of the cannon was a strange mix of a whoosh and a bang, one that perfectly represented its dual nature as a weapon with both the contained detonation of a gunpowder charge igniting within the breech, and the hissing of the projectile's integrated rocket motor. There was a second, prolonged hiss as the breach flipped around faster than even the digital recording could track and expelled a great gout of heated gasses through a constricted opening in the chamber to counteract the recoil.

"Yeah, these are hella awesome. But what a strange way to handle kick back. Ypsilon, wouldn't it have been easier to just leave the back of the breech open? You know, like in normal recoilless rifles?"

Easier, yes, came Ypsilon's mature voice, but this cannon can better adapt to varying shells and charges. Recoilless rifles need precisely controlled ammunition. Both the shell or kinetic projectile must always be of precisely the correct weight, and the gunpowder must be equally precisely coordinated to fit with the rifle's design. This technology permits a great deal of variance without sacrificing any dampening of recoil or any additional stressing of the turret mount.

"Hmm, I see. Well, I'll probably make use of that soon enough…", said Leah, looking towards the middle of the clearing, where the Twenty-Two had likely gone underground.

The drone had meanwhile finished replacing the second smoothbore, and proceeded to equip them itself. It placed one upside down within a small gimbal at the top, and the other in another at the bottom, before manually slotting in the half-used magazines.

Almost immediately Leah had to command it to stop, when it started shooting random aliens everywhere.

"Uh, Ypsi, could you make sure it only mops up after my cannon shots? Tell it to take out any isolated survivors, instead of wasting ammunition like that."

Okay!

"Thank you."

Eighty rounds, huh? I could go through those in, what, a little less than fifty seconds of continuous fire?

Why the hell not. Leah glanced at the drone. Won't really need the Fives for aerial pest control either.

"Actually, task the pod to kill all the Ones, please? Can I reload it from here?"

Yup! Um, it'll have to be nearby, though! It'll be cheapest to just drop the magazines into the baskets and have it grab them from there. But, uh, if you want me to, I can directly teleport the magazines into the drone, but that'll cost extra!

"Do the basket, that sounds fine to me."

Okie!

Leah saw the drone move its belly gun to the front, and watched it open fire on the Ones circling above, who reacted violently to the new attacker. They scattered and dive bombed it in concentrated groups, but the drone often swerved sideways, leaving a few of the fake pigeons to get cooked in the exhaust plumes of its maneuvering jets, flung away to break against the tree trunks.

That side of things being taken care of, Leah returned her attention to the ground-bound aliens.

Let's see. I've got a hundred and sixty twenty mil frag shells. And two more seventy-five mil canister shot.

There's… probably three hundred Threes left, along with a few Fours, Fives, and a single Six. The four Eights. The drone's tearing through the Ones.

"Yeah. Let's see what these babies can do," Leah said as she twitched the cannons to either end of the Antithesis mob, and let them both rip as she slowly walked them inwards, one shot at a time.

There wasn't a lot of recoil, but the slow rate of fire of one round every two-third seconds or so created a rhythm to the turbulence around the pod that caused it to seesaw back and forth. Leah barely even noticed, considering the utter butchery in front of her.

The HE fragmentation shells were mean. They didn't just explode what they hit, they positively blended everything around the target too, despite being merely twenty millimeter caliber grenades.

She actually had to hurry up the guns' traversal around the edges, because the masses were too thin there. It wasn't until she started hitting the dense group that had formed at the center as a result of her steady circling, that she really got to see the effectiveness of the sort-of-rapid-firing cannons.

It didn't matter where she hit a unit, it was gone anyhow. Even if sometimes the shell over-penetrated, it would still arm against the next beast and explode there.

"This is mad," said Leah in quiet awe. "What a fucking mess."

She still had about ten seconds of continuous fire left by the time no Antithesis were so much as twitching anymore, aside from the massive Eights, which just had huge bleeding divots and holes in them, but otherwise still functioned.

"Holy crap…"

Having hit the limits of her ability to express the degree of bullshit in front of her, Leah just pointed her cannons at the Eight furthest away, held the virtual triggers and jacked the cycling all the way up, and watched as it got obliterated explosion by explosion at a rate of three per second.

She then marked two of the remaining Eights for the 150mm cannon, and moved to kill the last with her own 75mm.

"Ypsi, can you have the one hundred and fifty mil aim at their undersides? I'll figure that'll kill them, while also creating a few craters through which we might dig into the nest."

I can do that, Leah!

 

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