Giant Robots? Say no more. I’m in. Chapter 11

Giant Robots? Say no more. I’m in. Chapter 11

…

Interlude: The Rising Heiress: Madelynn Harris

…

Operation Descending Star was absolute madness, and a gamble of everything that House Hariss has built.

Our treasury, our war chest to attempt to rise in ranking amongst nobility, was halved the instant the operation began. I bought the other Knights present at the battlefield. The airspace and land of the region cost a staggering amount, despite the presence of the Psionic Tower erected by the Seidans, because any land that they tried to claim is known to be rich in resources. Then, there were the instant purchases made by OS-549, as well as the need to recruit an immense force to guard the retreat and the area.

Decades of careful investment and saving of profits evaporated in seconds.

My lady mother and lord father were calling in minutes, but they were stymied with a simple statement:

If we succeed, we are ascendant.

That was enough to quell their concerns, but soon after another warning came.

A fast-moving transport approaching our lands and heading straight for the facility.

In time with the warning was a call to my personal communicator.

I answered.

“Empress.”

“Report.” There was no guise any longer. No implication. Not a mote of a suggestion. I spoke with the ruler of humanity who was crafting our society into a weapon for her personal use. Of course, she had eyes on our finances and our movements. That was just a matter of fact. “My eyes will be on location within half an hour. It will be too late.”

“A Seidan battlecruiser breached into our dimension to protect their Psionic Tower. It jumped in to guard it, and avoided the smoke and debris of the surrounding shield generator bases.”

I didn’t need to explain any more, or provide the rest of the information.

She knew.

And, she gave a low, chuckling laugh.

“Those arrogant bastards finally made a mistake. Their attempt to secure victory has become their undoing.” Her words sent a chill down my spine. I could hear her smile and vindication. However, more clearly, I heard OS-549’s earlier words. They mirrored each other. In temperament and personality… and most likely in mind. Was that even possible with his genetic limitations? Or, perhaps, the Empress’s genetic improvements merely brought to the forefront human traits that were always a possibility? “You’ll need a secure route back here.”

I swallowed the building tension in my throat.

With a word, the Empress can send the whole fleet to secure it… and House Hariss will receive little t recognition and maybe gain no ownership over the battlecruiser.

No.

The prize for that was immense, but it was not enough.

Not when we could get more.

“House Hariss is ready for this duty. Let us fail, before you intervene, Empress.” I stood my ground and there was a deep silence across the line. Then, a single soft chuckle.

“Go forth, then, Madelynn Hariss. Struggle, suffer, and strive with all the ambition that you have. Risk everything… for everything.”

With those last words stated, the line cut, and I was notified that her ship was landing at my operation center.

I gave her the clearance to enter, and access the dataflows, but focused on my duties.

This is it.

The moment my household has been waiting for.

It came suddenly, violently, and demanded everything that we have, but if we succeeded, then it would be all worth it.

I did not hesitate to start leveraging loans against my family’s assets to acquire more ships and more firepower, while triangulating the fastest route for the battlecruiser to reach us.

Today we take the leap.

Either we fall and perish, or take flight to untouchable heights.

And, everything was reliant upon OS-549.

At that thought, I spared a look at the screen tracking his progress, as the whole command center was dedicated to coordinating the assets he kept calling in.

I snorted at the ludicrous sight.

Millions of credits were being expended. Thousands of munitions were crashing onto the field. Drones of the highest quality were being pulled in. Fortresses were being dropped from orbit. Every orbital asset vaguely close to the site was being requisitioned and repositioned at truly eye-watering cost.

Meanwhile, OS-549 was dragging two poor Ranked Knights upward into glory onto the deck of the ship through a ferocious storm of plasmafire, Seidan fighters, and energy bursts.

Three blue arrows in a sea of red heading for a battlecruiser that utterly dwarfed them in size.

Ludicrous.

Absurd.

Miraculous.

Many struggled to tear their eyes from the screen, to do their duty and not be captivated, and I was the same.

This is what it feels like to witness history.

…

The squids didn’t use software or AI automatic targeting with their weapons.

Some researchers say that they have some sort of code of honor, or at least a custom in their society that stated killing must be done by warriors. Assistance is fine, of course, but there was no lock-on capability involved.

That meant that the underside of the battlecruiser we were facing looked like a mass of bulbous protrusions of varying sizes and shapes, as well as massive turrets. They swiveled quickly, aimed our way, and shot at us.

However, because those turrets were manned/squid-filled that meant we could shoot back.

It meant that climbing up wasn’t impossible.

Our attack warning systems could inform us when an attack that was about to hit was about to come. Additionally, with a few missiles obscuring fields of fire, we could blind sectors of turrets from attacking us with chaff, signal jamming, decoys, and everything else we could throw. Whatever we couldn’t dodge and couldn’t blind, finally, we had to kill before they killed us.

Saturating the side we were ascending at with missile fire and coil guns, as well as setting the deck on fire to keep shields from coming back online helped too. Swathes of the bulbous ball-style turrets were destroyed by missiles, set aflame, or gouged off the hull. With those gone, we just had to deal with the remaining forty-percent of the surface area we were opposing being covered with guns… and flying saucers coming out in force from the deck to try and stop our advance.

The wave of discs armed with plasma casters, though, were interrupted with my next call of support.

Long range, anti-aircraft missiles launched as a swarm collided with the waterfall of interceptors. Their warheads were massive and designed to shoot out fields of shrapnel. Though a swarm of hundreds came out from the battlecruiser to stop us, the tide was mostly stoppered by the long-range anti-fighter missiles streaming in to stop them.

That’s when the orbitals’ contribution came in in the form of sustained shrapnel bursts, designed to shred swarms of lightly-armored vehicles and bugs. Aimed right at the hangars where the discs were streaming out from, the thunderous barrage streaking in smashed apart the fighters, and threatened to close their path.

Between the stream of missiles and the orbital artillery firing away, the fighter swarm was effectively nullified with the few that got through dispatched by us while we dodged and wove through streams of plasma, bursts of bright green wave-force energy, and small-caliber plasma bolts.

There was a problem though.

The wall of shrapnel shredding the enemy fighters before they killed us?

Yeah.

That was also in our way.

Both Red and Blue both started pinging me nonstop about it when they realized what my plan was.

There was a gap, you see, between the barrages of both orbital shrapnel bursts and long-range missile spam. They came from different sources. After getting expended from one source, the next set of missiles and shrapnel burst from orbit needed to come from another arsenal and another suborbital battlestation. With proper timing of requests, and infinite money, you can keep requisitioning assets, staggering them, and make sure that the firepower is constant.

So, I made a window.

A small thirty second window.

A window we needed to fly through, or we get shredded by our own missiles and artillery.

The pinging was getting pretty annoying, so I went ahead and just answered them both.

“Boost in ten seconds. We all see the same thing. The window’s about to open, and when it closes you die.” That’s all I had. I shut off the communications and primed my suit ready for maximum speed. The suit was meant to help me overcome the g-force by externally applying pressure across my body to keep my blood flowing. There’s a lot of mumbo-jumbo and sci-fi around the suit. Artificial muscle fibers, microscopic hydraulics, and even some sort of self-distributing, smart impact gel arranged all over the back of my suit. All that I knew about the suit was that it let me reach 6 forces of gravity without dying… and that’s what I needed. “Over-boosting on my mark… Mark!”

I slammed into my seat, and darkness filled the corners of my vision, until the machines surrounding my body kicked in. Pressure and pain suffused me, and I grunted as the machines started to squeeze me tight and forcibly pump my blood through my body. It was like feeling pressure cuffs at maximum rolling all over me at once, from the tips of my fingers and toes, all the way to my head. My heart ached as it suddenly received unwanted mechanical assistance, and breathing was all but impossible… but I was conscious and not dead even as I felt blood spill out of my nose and my eyes felt like they were about to pop.

All that I needed, really.

Gray Corpse sped up. Despite being thousands of tons, the accelerometer registered my speed at 1 kilometer per second, while dodging enemy anti-air fire. Lances of plasma flew past me, streaks of plasma bursts were everywhere, and the din of lock-ons were constant.

But, up ahead, for a moment the wall of fire and shrapnel stopping the flood of fighters from coming down on us stopped.

We had ten seconds to pass through it, to go past it, turn, and land on the surface of the battlecruiser, before the barrage kept the enemy hangar suppressed.

The math was brutally simple.

If we didn’t get through in those ten seconds, we died, and in those ten seconds fighters were going to confront us while supported by the defenses

10.

Three fighters exit the hangars.

9.

 I take one out with a burst from my primary weapons.

8.

Scarlet takes out another with high-caliber autocannon rounds.

7.

Blue Harbinger misses with its primary, but a missile launch from its back kills it before it could reach us.

6.

We were halfway through the suppression field. The squids notice the gap and unleash more fighters from the hangar gap on the battlecruiser side.

5.

All three of us knew this was going to happen, so we have all our guns pointed at the cratered, burning entrance, while flying straight up.

4.

Well over a dozen enemy fighters are flying out, some realize what is happening and activate weapons, but it’s too late.

3.

We adjust our weapons to a slight downward trajectory. The recoil will push us up, just the slightest bit, and unleash everything.

2.

Three mechs armed to the teeth with heavy ordnance replace the fire power of missile batteries and orbital battle stations for just 1 second. Alarms blare in all our cockpits about oncoming, friendly munitions.

1.

Emergency boosters flare at once for all three of us, as alien fighters explode in the hangars and block the ones behind them, and we crest through the kill zone… just as missiles appear at our feet and massive fragmentation shells streak past us.

0.

We reached the apex of our climb, our bodies twisted before slamming forward as our mechs turned in midair to re-angle our mechs downward instead of up. Like comets, we surged towards the burning, charred deck of the squid battlecruiser.

I was finally able to take a single breath, while my heart thundered in my chest, and my piloting suit relented in its efforts to keep blood flowing through my body.

Tomorrow, I’ll be covered in bruises… but it’s a worthwhile price to pay.

“There it is. The command station.” Scarlet Knight and Blue Harbinger flanked me. A glance at their vitals told me they were in the same state. Hearts running way past a hundred beats a minute, signs of minor injury all over the body, and warnings to provide them with stimulants and pain relievers. I spoke before granting them. “Go with the stims, but the pain relievers can slow you down. I don’t recommend it.”

They didn’t get to reply, as the top deck began to open up.

The surface was burning and cratered. Any external weapon pods were gone. The squids disgorged troops from the underside of their ships, but they also had access ports on the top. In space, the more ways you can get your troops out the better, after all.

Hatches hissed open all over the deck.

Tanks trundled out with weapons at the ready, but with battle damage still on their hulls.

Mechs leapt out of chutes with barely any armor plating on them.

Smaller versions of their fighters, their equivalent to drones, spun out of hatches and swarmed together in the air to head our way. No weapons, just their bodies and shields.

We caught them with their pants down, but they were going to fight anyway.

Then, finally, they unleashed one of their abominations. A floating mass of meat covered in grafted cybernetic parts to keep it alive. A living brain with a singular massive eye, which was protected by large machines shaped like mechs, but were more like pure-white puppets wielding weapons.  However, unlike all other iterations of the squid warbeast, this one didn’t have any armor plating. It only had a shimmering purple shield covering and protecting its squishy body.

They came forth, poorly equipped and without all that they need, because didn’t have a choice.

They were desperate to retain their ship.

I could tell that both my fellow mech pilots realized the same thing, and got ready without a word.

Even after refreshing our munitions before the climb, we were expended.

Armor hits to non-vital areas.

Ammunition expended to put down turrets before they picked us off.

Engines barely cooled down after the stress from the climb.

And, I’d bet their faces were just as bloody and mouths as filled with the taste of hot iron.

But we’re here, we’re alive, and we’re here to win.

Only one real phrase to start off this party.

“Commence mission!”