For Captain Rick Knight, USMC, the universe was noise. For three days, the constant thunder of booming naval rifles had kept him company like the chimes of some very destructive cuckoo clock. Now the thunder of five roaring gas turbines shoved past the meager attempts of his CVC to block it out and rattled him to his very bones.
His tank, an M1A2 Abrams by the name of Baneblade, vibrated with caged energy atop the pounding deck of a sprinting LCAC. Knight knew the tiny rock his men were assaulting had been thoroughly worked over by four battleships, one of which had anger issues that'd make the hulk seem timid and one who'd repeatedly grumbled that she was bored out of her fucking mind. But he also knew his Abrams was, by world-war two standards, a medium tank.
He didn't know how the leveling effect would work on tanks, nobody did except maybe the Chinese, and they were all dead by now. But a tiny voice in the back of his head kept whispering "you're in a medium." He didn't want to risk it, Baneblade was getting hull down the instant that ramp dropped.
"HEY!" Knight yelled over the roar of the LCAC's turbines and propellers, waving frantically for one of the navy crewmen. He wasn't sure if his voice even made it past his tank's skirts, but his wild gestures seemed to get the point across. "GET MY TANK FREE!"
The sailors were quick to release the tie-downs holding Baneblade on the landing craft's deck. Knight supposed they weren't any more interested in hanging around a possibly-contested beach than he was. Probably less so, at least he had armor, even if its effectiveness remained an open question.
"Driver ready!" Knight hunkered down in his open hatch, using his crossed arms as a wall to hide his face behind. He couldn't bring himself to trust his optics, not after the unending series of disasters the navy had with their radars. He was going to fight this battle old-school, from the open hatch of his tank.
"Mmm." His driver was a quiet fellow, but he could make a seventy-ton main battle tank dance like it was a little Italian sports car. Hell, give him a big enough tarmac on a wet day, and he'd drift the damn thing. Although, of course, Knight would plead the fifth if asked how he knew.
"Load Sabot!"
"Sabot up." His loader was a good ol' boy from Iowa, so big and fat he barely fit into the Abrams' turret. But the man could toss one-twenty-millimeter rounds around like they were made out of Styrofoam.
Knight hissed a breath through his teeth, and put three gloved fingers to the picture of his family taped inside the hatch rim. There was a time when he'd scoff at superstitions like that. That was before he was fighting literal Nazis from hell alongside warships incarnated into pretty girls. For a moment, he felt an almost zen-like calm come over him. A sense of purpose so pure it made everything else fade into the distance.
Then the LCAC's ramp dropped, and it was time for war.
"ALL TANKS!" Knight thundered over the net. "PANZER VOR!" He claimed it was from Achtung Panzer, but his gunner knew the real origin of that line.
Baneblade's turbine roared as seventy tons of American Iron hurled itself off the landing craft's deck and landed with a crash on the soft sand. The tank lurched as its tracks scrambled for grip, only to finally catch and send it roaring forwards over the dunes.
His driver was already angling for a berm a few hundred feet ahead, and Knight allowed himself a moment to check on his other tanks. But when he glanced at War Pig off his right flank, he swore time froze.
He could actually follow the shell's progress as it slammed into the Abrams' turret cheek and muscled aside the steel and composite like it was made of tissue paper. The gun buckled as one of its trunions crumpled, and a moment later the turret bustle erupted with gouts of fire as the stored ammunition exploded.
"Fuck!" Knight cursed. "Driver, fucking MOVE!"
Baneblade roared and clawed for one of the heavy concrete pillboxes the Chinese had set up. Knight crouched low in his hatch and scanned the blasted forest and burnt-out buildings, trying to find the— there.
Konigstigers.
Knight grabbed the commander's override and slewed the turret roughly on target. "Engage Sabot!"
His gunner fined-tuned the aim, somehow managing to dial in a perfect bead as the tank lurched over the dunes in a frantic attempt to get into cover.
BOOM! "On the way!"
Knight watched the depleted-uranium shell cover the distance in an instant and smash into the King Tiger's front slope. And then he watched it harmlessly ricochet away like a crumpled lawn dart.
He cursed under his breath. His tank was under cover—barely. But the Marines behind him were packed depressingly tightly on to the open beach. If the Nazis weren't mounting a counter attack at this instant, they'd do it soon. Artillery was already falling on the beach. There wasn't time for the Harriers and Cobras to do their job. It was down to him and his tank.
"Driver, advance!" Knight scowled as his tank lurched over the berm and crashed down behind a shattered structure that'd once been a SAM bunker. If he could get around them…
"There, road direct front." It was just high enough to hide hull-down behind. If he remembered his map right, he could run along then hook back through the bombed-out jungle to get in flanking position. "Follow it east."
The tank lurched, its turret slewing around to aim over the engine deck. The Tigers were already starting to push out from their fortified position, while quad-barreled flakpanzers alternated between swatting away bothersome CAS birds and pouring suppressing fire into the Marines.
Baneblade smacked one of the SPAAGs with a HEAT round before the big Abrams roared into the forest. Knight didn't know how fast it was going, and to be honest, he didn't want to. Gravel sprayed behind him as the tracks scrambled for grip, and his driver couldn't be bothered to slow down as the tank hurled itself into turns so violent the rear kicked out like a street drifter.
It'd taken barely more than a few panicked heartbeats, but Baneblade was now thoroughly in the enemy rear. A platoon of panzergrenadiers spotted him, and a few raised their panzerfausts in defiance. Knight grabbed the fifty-caliber, but his driver found some extra reserve of speed and plowed the Abrams squarely into the infantry formation.
Bone cracked under the tracks, and the torso of a soldier torn in half at the waist crashed against the turret roof. It was a soldier, but not a man. The… thing's eyes glowed with burning red, its face the mauled skull of a corpse left to rot in the ocean depths. It shrieked, fumbling with fingers closer to clawed talons than human hands for a stick grenade in its belt.
Knight drew his sidearm and emptied the magazine into its skull in what felt like one single motion. He shoved the corpse off his tank and let it crash to the bombed-out ground. He'd deal with that bit of mental trauma later, right now there were big cats to kill.
"Gunner, Fi—"
BOOM "On the way!" A sabot round screamed from the Abrams' barrel and punched clean through the rear slope of a Kingtiger. Knight had barely even registered the metal sickly black explosion hurling spinning metal shrapnel into the sky when his loader offered a calm. "Sabot up!"
"Fire at will!" Knight barked. "Driver, Move!" The cats were stunned, but some were already bringing their guns around to point at him, and Knight did not want to personally experience the fury of a long-eight-eight. Baneblade got off another shot—this time into the turret flank of a Tiger—as it bolted for cover behind a warehouse.
The sky roared with jet engines and streaming rocket fire as Harriers, Cobras, and even Shidens tore into the Nazi column from above. Knight was under no illusion that he'd somehow saved the day. He'd just stalled and confused the enemy advance long enough for the Marines to regroup and air cover to do its thing. But he'd killed his share of demon nazis from hell, which was nice.
—|—|—
By midnight, the island was tenuously in American hands. There were still a few pockets of abyssal infantry, but the enemy had bet everything it had on its first counter-attack. When the Marines broke through, they took all of the enemy armor and most of the enemy infantry with them.
But while the fight had been short, it was equally fierce. Bonnie Dick's magazines had been exhausted by constant CAS runs, and according to reports, poor Shinano kept clutching at her belly whenever she thought nobody was looking. But brutal or not, the battle had buoyed spirits throughout the fleet. For almost two years, this war had been a series of desperate retreats, of last-stands and defiant battles to hold the line. Now, for the first time since that fateful day the armies of man were advancing. Territory that once belong to the Abyss was back under American control.
Spirits on the island were high, but they dimmed the closer Colonel Wallace got to the vast bunker that served as the Enemy's headquarters. His Marines had run up the stars and stripes, but the stain of the bloody swastika had not been washed away. The bunker oozed malevoulence, and the Colonel felt air turn to ash in his mouth as he got ever closer.
"S-sir. " Gunnery Sergeant Callaghan was a rock of a Marine, but his weatherbeaten features wore the horrified fear of a PFC in his first firefight.
"Gunny," Wallace scowled. He didn't know what he was going to see. None of his Marines could describe what was in that bunker in any depth beyond "You have to look at this."
"Brace yourself, sir." Callaghan lead Wallace through the bunker's yawning gate and into a cavern of concrete and iron. Grimy spotlights hung from the girders above, and chains hung silent from gantry cranes. A pool, step-sided and lit from below with oily green light, stood in the center of the room like a miniature graving dock or a giant's bathtub. Smaller pools flanked it, each with its own gantry crane and suite of welding torches and cutting tools.
The colonel grimaced as his boots squelched on the floor. Every surface was covered with blood-soaked oil. Even thicker trails streaked from the foot of the larger pool to the smaller ones, like someone had dragged a body away. In one corner, a deep bit was full of cast-off metal scraps that twisted and bent like chopped-up limbs.
"The fuck," Wallace growled in an attempt to hide his horror. He didn't know why, but something about this place felt eerily familiar. Like a half-forgotten memory reflected in a grimy mirror. It wasn't until he'd almost reached the door that he realized it.
He was walking through a maternity ward.
But before that thought could haunt him any further, Callaghan lead in deeper into the compound. Into what was unmistakably a throne room.
The corpse of a woman easily a dozen feet tall slouched on a throne of twisted metal and shattered concrete. Where her hands should be were vast gauntlets of black, wrought metal with talons as big as a man's arm. A crown of iron burst tore through her skull, covering where her eyes would be with burnt metal and a bleeding gash that was the only touch of color to her otherwise bone-white face. Blood as black as coal dripped from the corner of her mouth.
Her greatcoat strained over the vast size of her swollen bosom, and the fabric spread over a belly thick with post-partum distention. Whatever she was… she was a mother.
"Get," Wallace coughed to cover a painful crack in his voice. "Get every thermite grenade we have. Every phosphorus round the destroyers can spare."
"Sir."
"I want her ashes burned."
