[X] Let Reizay hack the Command Centre and set an ambush for whoever's coming but try to talk to them first
"Alright Reizay, do your thing. We'll keep you safe." Luyu gives Reizay a thumbs up then turns to the rest of you. "Alright. I think I'm the the most experienced here, any objections?"
"No." Mirareki says. Aletta shakes her head. You shrug. You feel like you're experienced but you don't remember any of it.
"Alright." Luyu pulls up a map of the bridge in AR and begins to sketch out a plan. "The bug came from that direction, so we can assume that's their primary axis. Working around the bridge would take a lot of extra time. Mirareki, you cover the other air gate into the bridge garden. Rig it with proximity grenades inside then weld the inner door. You've got the tools for that right?"
"Yeah."
"Once it's rigged, cover it, and make sure you keep your screen well out to stop them coming through the vents. That's how they did those poor bitches in the corridor. I'll let you pick your position. There's plenty of good spots in that fucked up garden."
Mirareki nods and sets off. "Priestess, stay here with the girl and make sure nothing gets in through any of the vents. You're our last line of defence."
Aletta nods. It looks like she's settled on being the one out for this event.
"Blank, you're with me." Both of Luyu heft her guns and head out of the door. "Leave the air gate to me. Find a position that lets you cover the vents. I'm going to start putting out a drone screen."
The Luyu with the carbine unslings her backpack and plugs it into one of the garden's nanofountains. You recognize the pack as it unfolds: an anti-tank drone hive. Luyu delivers a smug smirk as it begins to deploy, first a screen of scouts then larger machines with stronger vectored screens and high-energy cores. The drone gun moves up with them, then sets itself and pulls up soil in front of it into a berm, spraying it down with a glistening, vaguely disgusting polymer. Two of the anti-tank drones move forward, heading for the vents, and two of their siblings nose off into the closing airlock. A Luyu sees you watching and gives a thumbs upt. "No reason to start at the actual start line, is there?"
The two Luyus bound apart, one behind one of the black stone shrines, the other in the cover of a tree. They lie prone and set up a crossfire on the door. You find your own position near another of the shrines, pause a moment, then make a vague praying motion and light a candle. No point tempting fate. Though given it marks your position, you task one of Luyu's drones to light the rest of the candles while you think about fall back positions and routes and spread out your funnels. Each covering a vent, each able to target the airlock if needed. Your signature reduction cuts in and you watch your own hand fade to translucency.
"You've done this before." Luyu hasn't moved from her overwatch since she lay prone, but she doesn't need to to see what you've done.
"Pretty sure I have. I just wish I remembered it." You open the bipod on your suppression weapon and aim at the airlock, range it and load it and the vents into the sights. The whole garden is less than a hundred metres. If it does come to a direct fire engagement in here it's going to be a catastrophe. Probably more of a catastrophe for the people trying to bust in through an airlock though.
But that's not where the battlefield is yet. The maze inside the walls unfolds in your AR and soon populates with inferred shadows, drawing closer. The enemy is at hand. Sound and scanner signals shift in the fog until at last one comes into solid view. A blocky, spidery thing, in unadorned gunmetal. You hold for a moment to see what it will do, and your drone dies.
"They don't seem to think we're friendly," Luyu says.
A claustrophobic war develops in the vents and component spaces. You aren't surprised to find youself an expert. The play of micros in the vents. The game of obfuscation of capacities, of hunting and killing, of allowing the enemy forward into traps. The enemy you're playing it against is good though. Really good. Your drones are better, faster, sharper, but you find yourself pulling back centimetre by centimetre, barely holding your own against the enemy's perfect game.
An armoured something steps around the corner ahead of the airlock. It's blank, dark and square, moving on all four tracked legs like an antiquel. "Doesn't look human." Luyu says. "Let's try Rivertongue." You hear the click as she accesses an expendable drone's audio. "Yo buddy. Who are you?"
The creature snaps up an arm and fires. The camera feed cuts out in a flash of laser light..
"Doesn't look like they want to talk, but let's give them a moment to process what we said."
Mirareki cuts in, urgent. "Shoot now. I know what those things are."
"Oh yeah?" Luyu asks. You manoeuvre in new drones.
"People call them the Quiet because they don't ever talk. They either ignore you, or they're hostile. Please. I know what I'm talking about."
"I never thought you didn't." Luyu says. New drones are in position. "Last chance, buddy."
The Quiet, if that's what it is, shoots again. Luyu remotely cracks open the air gate's outer hatch and fires a single anti-tank at it. A flash whites out the corridor.
More are coming. These ones have flesh. Ropy white bags of muscle and tendon stretched in a procrustean frame that scuttles spiderlike on its four legs along the walls. A centipede of armour suggests a spine, a mass of lenses and barrels suggests a head. More launchers are mounted lower down the body. More follow it. Luyu fires the second anti-tank drone in the airlock, and one of the ones in the ducts. There's a twin explosion, but the enemy seem heedless of loss. Another large one lumbers in the background of the pressing swarm of flesh and metal, clamps limbs into floor and launches a heavy projectile at the gate.
"Bra-"
The wall detonates. You see an instant of light bursting through before your visor cuts it out. Your suit locks rigid and even through its shields the shock of air makes something more than noise in your ears. Your senses race to recover; you hear Reizay screaming, the crack and crumble of falling structure and breaking trees. Beside your vision your systems race to analyse the radiation profile, matching against a dozen possibilities to find one ancient bane.
"Nuke's already huh? Just a small one. A baby." Luyu's voice is breaking, laughing high on adrenaline. Her body and drones move with precision, her speech disconnected from the surreal calm of her movements.
The enemy haven't waited. The breaching force are scrambling through the gap with the shock-broken remains of their comrades held aloft as cover. Luyu shoots with her spider drone and punches hyperkinetic holes through the horde, but more follow.. There's no sign of another warhead, hopefully they don't want to risk the command centre, but they've neutralised the problem of the air gate very effectively. Laser and ballistic projectiles rip down the corridor, chipping the stone and polymer laced earth where Luyu and her drone hide. Both begin to fire smart grenades back, then Luyu braces her plasma gun and fires an alpha burst down the corridor. The fire slackens off for a moment, then returns as a fresh wave of attackers move in, ignoring the heat to use the burning wreckage for cover.
"There's no end of them." Luyu sounds exasperated.
You get an alert from your funnels and trigger to fire. Other, smaller attackers are pulling themselves through the vents. More humanoid, but bent all wrong, limbs flexing and reversing in a crude and nauseating dance. The smell of dust and fire mixes with a disgusting stench, a medicinal and metallic. They have no voices and make no appeals or demands, but the silence of their name is drowned beneath the scream of servos and the endless thud of weapons fire.
A funnel carves through one of the attackers, burning through armour and popping cysts of ballistic gel. You roll to one side and begin to fire on the vent, aiming to suppress, trying to keep half your mind still on the interplay of drones, to pinpoint where the next wave of enemies will come. The Quiet push forward, covering with the bodies of their fallen, or wreckage, or the bodies of people carted in and blessedly marked by your overlays as dead. Each dash carries them closer. Luyu curses and rolls to one side as fire rips across the shrine above her, miraculously missing the statue but chipping the altar in a spray of basalt.
<<Any sign of them on your side?>> Luyu asks Mirareki.
<<They're moving around to try to get me into position but I'm not seeing a push. They could nuke my airgate and come through any time though.>>
Luyu fires a pattern of anti-tank drones. They clear the corridor mouth only briefly. <<We don't have this.>> she says, conversationally. <<Any ideas?>>
[ ] Detonate the anti-tank drone still in the ducts at maximum yield to clear out the enemy insect drones inside, hoping to gain information superiority and allow you to manoeuvre your remaining heavy drones through the vents and into their flanks.
[ ] The enemy is pushing forward, but they're strung out in the corridor and have taken major casualties. A sudden counter attack now with you moving up to fight from the air gate might break their formation and force them to fall back.
[ ] As above, but bringing Mirareki around to your side to add her firepower before launching the attack.
[ ] It's gruelling, but they're feeding themselves into a well-prepared killzone. Continue to fight from your defensible positions and make the superior exchange rate tell.
[ ]
EXEC.TERMINATE
