Chương 88: (Rewritten) Ch. 86 – Xenocide Act VII; Thoom

Ch. 86 - Xenocide Act VII; Thoom"Y'know how you can buy the cheapest stuff in Class I on the market with real-world money? It's 'cause the corps figured out how to manufacture it. Say, this Foxteeth here," Road Rash said, lifting his oldest sidearm, "would cost you a hundred thousand credits. Bit ridiculous for a handgun, but whatever. They're making 'em now, does mean it's technically not Class I tech anymore. I imagine the AIs will reclassify them Class 0 any moment now.

And, methinks, " Road Rash continued, waving the piece, "these'll get cheaper soon, both in credits and in points. Corpos ain't gonna be happy about that," he finished with a nasty grin. – Just Talking stream 2057 Leah left the handling of the purchases to Ypsi and focused her attention back on the mob as another clunk and a sensation of fullness in her belly informed her that the cannon had finished reloading. She twisted her rear around until she was scuttling sideways like a crab, not slowing in the slightest.

But, studying the clumping enemies, Leah held her shot and widened her circle to draw them out instead, weaving through the trees a few dozen meters from the edge of the clearing the Twenty-Two had created when it dug itself in. The Antithesis followed suit, and the clump elongated. Leah smiled. Perfect. She crossed into the break of storm-felled trees, and froze. She braced her legs and nailed them past the muddy top-soil, like hydraulic injectors.

Flash-freezers in her toes used the everpresent water to rupture cracks into the rock beneath for her to hold onto, and good old mechanic leverage and weight fixed her in place. And there she was again, calm and relaxed, sinking into that zen, waiting for the thing. The entire line of aliens wavered slightly as they adjusted to her sudden stillness 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. Balls and flechettes of lead and hardened steel ripped through the line in front of her, completely annihilating a good fifty Antithesis, and her point counter jumped back up into the two thousands. Flooded with the satisfaction of a good shot, Leah tore her legs from the ground and set off to circle again, feeling water and dirt, kicked up by the gunfire blast, pearl down her hydrophobic chassis.

A heavy object matching the size of her pod popped into existence to her rear, and bobbed in the air like a buoy as its maneuvering rocket motors engaged. Powerful jets of blue flame torched the ground beneath, steaming mud into dirty, billowing clouds that blinded the Antithesis. Safely occluded in fog, the drone jumped above Leah's pod with a flick of high-impulse maneuvering thrusters, and counterbalanced with weaker hot-gas hydrogen reaction-control-system thrusters. Spaceworthy, thought Leah.

Once stabilized, the thrusters cut out to let the drone drift along on fuel-efficient turbines, and Leah took a good look. 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. Multiple centimeter-thick panels of side armor hissed with hydraulics, and extended to reveal a gap through which two bays could be accessed. Oh! The new cannons!

Robotic beams lifted the first cannon from inside its bay, where more arms appeared from a hatch in the drone's belly to accept the new weapon. It was about ninety centimeters long, and built lightly, with the barrel exposed 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! Ypsi explained. 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! Did you know this text is from a different site? Read the official version to support the creator.

"Good job." Yet another set of arms clamped onto the right turret's old gun, and Leah disconnected the electronics and disengaged the mount's mechanical fasteners, even as she continued to use the left turret to cut down any of the Threes drawing close in the fog. But the cloud of aerosolized water was beginning to settle and thin. Leah got moving again, weaving into the trees.

The drone constantly fired its jets to keep its position above her turrets, and a hose extended to suck the spent brass from the baskets, while another grabber removed the magazines she hadn't used yet. It then placed the new cannon itself onto the mount with quick and sure movements, and Leah immediately connected to it, both mechanically and electronically.

The gun greeted Leah through her Polylaterality prosthetics control implant, and she got an instinctive sense of how much damage it could do with the belted high-explosive fragmentation shells already being loaded from the boxy eighty-round magazine latched into the basket. 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, fully loaded, signaled readiness, and with anticipation pumping 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 projectile's fuze armed, triggered, and the entire group of Threes got torn to pieces by the shrapnel. Behind Leah, the rifle's back blast had created two vortexes. They sucked up a muddy spray and coated both the drone and the pod with dirt, before they destabilized from the drone's jets' interference.

"Whoo! Well, those are certainly something!" Leah replayed the firing in slow motion, only 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, with both the contained conflagration of a gunpowder charge, and the prolonged hiss as the breech snapped around to expel 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?" Easier, yes, came Ypsilon's mature voice, but this cannon can better adapt to variances. Static recoilless rifles need precisely controlled coordination between the projectile's weight, the gunpowder charge, and the rifle's design.

Warforge technology has solved those limitations at the cost of additional complexity, and my manufacturing precision helps us avoid the usual complications.

"I see." said Leah, looking towards the middle of the clearing, where the Twenty-Two had apparently gone underground.

"We'll need that soon enough, it seems, considering I can't use my one-fifty." The drone had meanwhile finished replacing the second smoothbore, and proceeded to equip itself with her old guns. One within a small gimbal at the top, and the other in another at the bottom. Almost immediately, Leah had to command it to stop, as 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. Oh…have it do aerial pest control too, 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's fine." 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 swerved sideways, cooking a few with the exhaust plumes of its maneuvering jets and flinging more into nearby trees.

That side of things being taken care of, Leah returned her attention to the ground-bound aliens, counting herself around three hundred Threes, a few Fours, Fives, and a single Six. She had a hundred and sixty 20mm fragmentation shells, and two rounds of 75mm canister shot. Eighty rounds per recoilless, huh? I could go through those in, what, a little less than fifty seconds of continuous fire?

"Hah. Why the fuck not?" 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 see-saw gently, 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 cannons on full auto. 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," Leah whispered 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 bled from huge divots and holes, but were otherwise just fine.

"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 cannons' cycling all the way up, and watched as it got obliterated explosion by explosion at a rate of three shells per second. She then marked two of the remaining Eights for her artillery hidden on the hill, and moved to kill the last with her own 75mm.

"Ypsi, can you have the big one aim at their undersides? I figure that'll kill them, and we might dig into the nest." I can do that, Leah!