First Contact

Chapter 124: (Telkan)

The thinking array was nearly three quarters of a mile in area, with over two hundred lobes, responsible for coordinating everything from spore blooms to biocreation to strategy for eliminating the failed life forms. It had massive plate-like cooling fins, elaborate slurry cooling piping, and a dozen ways to flush excess heat.

None of it was helping.

The surrounding terrain for nearly a mile around it was either one fire, churning up beneath the hammer of bunker buster rounds hitting bedrock, or part of the lakes that were involved in a self-sustaining reaction that even burned sand, mud, rock, and the air itself.

Dropping the psychic shield was impossible, even if it wasn't for the artillery shells that kept slamming down. The fire from the lakes was advancing out of the water, down the thick arterial pipes, as the nutrient solution burned.

Another set of missiles detonated over the lakes, over the psychic thinking array, scouring the area with white phosphorus, thermite, magnesium. Then Azidoazide Azide / chlorine trifluoride / FOOF warheads into what was left of the lakes. Sand turned to glass which then burned with a white hot fire, raising the temperature to the point bedrock began to crack.

For the thinking array, things got worse. It sat upon a thick mat of vegetation holding nutrient fluid and cooling slurry, which was now mixed with reddish orange fire suppresant powder, which bonded to plants to prevent heat from harming it by creating a thermal insulation layer.

Normally used to keep fires from damaging wooden structures, the heat not only couldn't get in...

...it couldn't get out.

The fire retardant foam landed and started to carmelize quickly, turning into thick goo that adhered to the powder and then sealed it beneath an oxygen barrier layer of plasticized fire retardant.

The psychic shield could feel the heat around it as the five lakes boiled away, the steam turning into fuel to make the reaction even more violent, as hydrochloric acid spewed everywhere only to burn. Temperatures hotter than the sun started even the atmosphere burning.

The thinking array had to put more power into the shield, which heated it up. But there was no where for the heat to go. It was hotter outside and the heat was starting to bleed through the psychic shielding. The pipes were cut, the bedrock beneath the thinking array was starting to soften and melt from the hellish inferno. The slurry had boiled away, turning to steam, increasing the temperature inside the psychic shielding.

One second the array was trying to determine a way to minimize the heat the next second it quivered like jello and just melted.

The inferno swept over it, completely destroying it, the heat turning it to ash and the hellfire of chemicals burning even the ash.

Most of the Terrans breathed a sigh of relief knowing it was gone.

Smokey-No launched psychic sensitive torpedoes to sweep the planet. The ash, spores, and pollen in the atmosphere would cut across that bandwidth. Tic-Tak had estimated that if there was a 'brain coral' in the region, when it went down any nearby brain coral would have to increase power to control the remaining insects, that the big ones were too big to let run uncontrolled.

A creature that size would prefer to find food and settle down to slowly chew it up and use as little resources as possible, not charge across the terrain at over a mile a minute chasing tanks.

Two, three, six different points lit up and Smokey-No used his cigarette to jab the icons to transmit the data back down to the planet's surface.

General Tic-Tak looked up from his monitor, waving over a Major.

"Compute those psychic distancing radii, I want estimated ranges, power levels, and signal dropoffs immediately," Tic-Tak told the Major. The Major nodded, getting to work. He motioned at Colonel Fife. "I want 15th Ordnance to pump out more Devil's Spit rounds, get on it."

Colonel Fife winced slightly, but started giving the orders.

"Make sure those incoming scout tanks are decon'd, replace all organic superlubricants with synthetics, and reload the Scout Tanks with fracking drill charges," Tik-Tac said, rubbing his forearms together in a motion more familiar to Treana'ad than humans. "I want those drones up, use warsteel and chlorine trifluoride for the turbines, that'll stop the pollen and spores from clogging the mini-turbines."

Tik-Tac turned to another aide. "I want all that data forwarded to 108th MI and all other MI units. Run computer modelling for any kind of chitin or growth they may try to use to stop Hellburn missiles."

The aide nodded, moving over to another station and opening channels.

"Get 422 Field Artillery Division to spread seismic sensors all over the continent, tell 378 Field Artillery to do the same. I want to know when the Bugs start moving, the Bolo's and Trucker have almost eliminated all the first wave, they'll send another," Tik-Tac said. "Get Hawk Hill on the line, I want sat-scan up now that we've found the SHF band they can't or won't block. Tell them to rig for low and mid orbit satellites."

He turned and looked at the map of the planet again.

"Tell 19th Missile Command to start Operation Aerial. I want to give Nodra'ak and everyone else to get an idea of what's under that water before the plants come up with something we can't counter. Let's nip them in the bud, literally," General Tik-Tac said. "Tell genetic warfare to screen 1st Telkan, 315th Infantry, and 1st Scout Cav before they get decon'd."

He turned away, nervously rubbing his forearms together, a habit he'd developed in early childhood as an orphan.

Again, deep inside, he was thankful he wasn't a combat commander. He couldn't imagine trying to make decisions when other beings were actively out to harm you.

It was hard enough hiding inside the most fortified part of a command center in the most protected part of a logistics base.

Around him his staff, all chosen for skill and ingenuity, kept working.

Trucker yanked around the gun, taking the spray of razor sharp seeds across the back shield before the seed pod hit the battle-screen and managed to liberate its cargo inside the tank's shielding. The quad-barrel spat magnetically accelerated shards of metal into a lifted section of armored caterpillar a hundred feet tall, ripping the top twenty-five feet off the two hundred foot length.

"Get Iron Maiden closer to Pretty Pearl, Pearl's APERS strips are reloading," Trucker snapped a second before Pretty Peal fired off all it's port side APERS to shred apart a hive of boring wasps that flew up in a cloud when the tank was right on top of the nest. "Bolo Cameroon, go to rapid fire into that river, I want the bed cracked, there's something nasty gonna pop on your third shot. Bolo JAWS you fire at six degrees port after Cameroon's fourth shot."

The huge eel, lightning beginning to crackle around its toothy maw, reared up out of the river, only to catch a Hellbore round into the open mouth that had been fired a split second before it had cleared the water and raised up to direct energy at Bolo CMR that would have been enough to overload its battle-screens.

"All units, stagger fire, deslush and cool off. Pop thermal cores," Trucker ordered. "All Bolo units, fire psychic disrupter charges according to filed fireplan. All unit engineers, prioritize HEAP and cannister flechette rounds for main guns, fire retardant foam and thermite napalm for mortar tubes."

Trucker gave a big grin and spit tobacco juice off the side of the tank.

"Jimmy-boy, drop our psychic stealth on the outside the tank," he said. He used his implant to disable his helmet's stealth shielding.

He'd long ago been tested, repeatedly, for psychic ability.

He didn't have any. Not a drop according to every test even the Mantids could devise.

But he knew that they could sense him.

If you're going to have a trap, you gotta bait it, Trucker thought to himself.

The green engineers didn't bother to flash icons. They'd felt Trucker give the order almost ten seconds before. They could feel him guiding their actions. Not the suppression of thought like memories of the Queens, but like he was watching them work and pointing things out and giving them orders.

Engineer 991, chief maintenance mantid of the tank Betty Boop pulled out a fried logic circuit only a second after it had overloaded, slapping in the new one he'd pulled from the nano-forge only two minutes before, and slapped the stud, bringing back the predictive targeting system after less than two seconds of it being offline. The CRC checked out and he skittered through the engineering space on the 400 ton medium tank, heading for the battle-screen projector wavelength resonator. There was a bank of micro-capacitors that were going to fail in thirteen seconds unless he sprayed them down with coolant and fixed the rupture.

He hummed as he moved and worked, singing the pop hit 'Six SUDS in a bottle' as he worked. He felt the bright burning fire of General Trucker appear in his senses and hummed in pleasure.

In the jungle the other thinking arrays felt their brethren suddenly vanish from their shared mind. One second it was reporting minor explosive impacts on it shielding, the next it broadcast massive heat alarms and then was just gone.

That left a massive section of the continent uncovered, which would effect the reclamation of biological resources. The feral failed life on the planet was proving extremely resilient to the point they were able to stop even the destroyers that could normally crush entire cities beneath their bulks.

They all collaborated, considered, and decided.

They pushed more power into their psychic web, growing more relays and broadcasters, pushing into the dead zone, forcing the jungle to create new psychic relays.

That's when they saw it.

A bright burning spark that growled and snarled, bit and chewed, covered in spikes and thorns, that threatened and promised violence.

The thinking arrays all considered and agreed.

That was what was the problem. Some kind of thinking array, some kind of strange and alien presence that they could feel but not understand.

It had to be eliminated. As long as it existed the feral life on the planet would resist, require more resources to subdue and destroy.

As one they increased the power to their psychic array, spread their influence over the dead zone, and ordered their forces to all converge on the bright snarling burning spark they could sense.

Trucker could feel the jungle snarl at him, feel its hate, and he relished it. Every drop of its anger, rage, hatred, and frustration made him smile wider. He knew it was all aimed at him personally, which made him smile wider.

Should worry more about Cry Little Sister than the man commanding it, he thought to himself. You're falling for the same damn trick the Mantids did over and over.

General Nodra'ak watched as psychic signal after psychic signal increased in power to the point that the signal burned through the pollen and spores. Those brain coral used psychic grav-lensing to keep him from hitting them from the orbitals, but he didn't need to hit them when he had ground forces that could hit from the side. He looked over the status readouts and noted that Tik-Tac had ensured that every unit was loaded and ready to go.

Seismic sensors were reporting large objects weighing in the kilotons all heading for Trucker for nearly a thousand miles in every direction. The oceanic sensors were reporting massive water displacement moving from beyond the continental shelf toward the coast.

Third Armor Division and General Trucker, destroying enemies through the application of superior firepower, Nodra'ak thought to himself, rubbing his vestigial wings together as he slowly got out another cigarette. He tapped it thoughtfully against one blade-arm as he looked at the sensor returns coming in from the oceans.

There were structures under the water. Vast tubes and pipes and growths. The seawater was warmer around the vast growths. More than a few things were leaving those structures and heading for the continental shelf.

Strange growths were around the sub-oceanic fault lines.

The initial sensor returns were too hazy, too indistinct, for Nodra'ak to have any initial proof, but looking at them he felt a pall of dread cover him.

Those were bad. He didn't need a creche-teacher to point that out to him.

We've been assuming you can only strip-mine a planet once, been wondering how another race to serve the Lanaktallans could arise with the easily mined metals already mined out. What if... he thought for a long moment.

He suddenly whirled around. "Get me General Vost and his theoretical genetics unit. Right now!" he snapped, flicking his unlit cigarette into the nearest waste dispenser.

Trucker cut loose with the quad-barrel, hosing a flying creature out of the sky. He had felt the slight pressure on his temples that all humans got when a psychic was trying to touch on them. Trucker knew enough time had gone by and brought up his helmets suppression then the tank's shielding, knowing that he had just vanished from any psychic sight.

It was a tradeoff. Humans were massively resistant, if not outright hostile, to psychic attacks and intrusion, but at the same time they were easy to spot by psychics.

Trucker had heard it explained as humans were shards of glittering broken glass in the soft sand of the rest of the world. Interesting to look at from a distance but if you got too close it would jump up and cut the shit out of you.

Which made it an easily repeatable variable.

Which meant it could be weaponized.

"Get ready, men. We're about to have lots of friends," Trucker said, pulling the dip out of his lower lips and slinging it off to the side. It caught a bug in midair and sent it tumbling. He reached into his pocket and pulled out his can, shaking it, packing it, thumping on the side of the plas can with two fingers.

Status reports were flowing in. Nothing more than minor damage, most of it just from moving at high speeds across rough terrain. Captain Jack had busted out three of his front teeth on his coax when Button Up Becky had hit a buried Precursor wreck, but that was the worst of it.

Plus, Jack had just put his teeth in his pocket. Med-tech could fix up his smile later.

Heat was nominal, magazines reloaded, slush was down.

He had enemies coming in from all sides.

Good. That meant they couldn't get away.

"Load HEAP, boys. We're about to have visitors," Trucker said, putting in a new dip. He adjusted his chin strap and patted the grips of the quad-barrel.

"It'd be rude to not have party favors," Trucker grinned.

Missiles were fired from the fire bases, arcing high up as their solid rocket fuel boosters carried them on ballistic arcs designed so that all of the payloads arrived at a widely spread distance all at the same time. Some used areobrakes, others didn't bother.

The warheads had been designed by General Tik-Tac's engineers, repurposed templates normally used for resource extraction.

At the designated point the missiles broke up into their sub-components. Drills, expanding crash protection foam, and Hellburn warheads. The drills hit first, burrowing into the ground, chewing down to and into the bedrock nearly a hundred feet within five seconds, then curving and heading toward the target at over a hundred feet a second. The Hellburn warheads deployed hard-light chutes and landed, popping the aerodynamic shields and vanishing into the drilled hole. The foam warheads landed next on hard-light chutes, quickly vanishing into the drilled open holes.

Within five minutes the drill reached its desination, reconfigured, and waited. The Hellburn warheads stopped next to the drills and waited.

The foam got the signal and blew. The tunnels filled with foam that expanded as it hardened. Designed to protect flesh and blood from high-G impacts, the foam was normally kept at a near liquid state in power armors and the like, kinetic force making it more thick. The bedrock groaned under the pressure, shuddered, and cracked.

The drill warhead exploded, further cracking the bedrock.

The Hellburn charge went off. The foam immediately began to burn at temperatures normally found on the surface of a star, the bedrock superheated and began to burn.

Thermal expansion caused a hundred feet of rock to flex, groan, crackle, and explode in the only direction it could go.

Up.

Exposing the burning Hellburn to air. Not that it needed it, the hellish chemical brew could burn anything it touched even in vacuum, but adding oxygen, hydrogen, and other fuels to the fire just made it burn hotter and higher.

Screaming pillars of flame that tore holes in the cloud cover, that literally reached out to the atmosphere to touch space itself, roared out of the craters across the planet. In some places enough was left of the Hellburn fuel to light the clouds themselves on fire for miles, even burning ash from the fires.

The fire only lasted a few minutes before burning itself.

When it was over, there were two mile craters of liquid rock where each thinking array had been.

"General's compliments to General Tik-Tac's engineers," Smokey-No said, turning from the viewscreen.

Hellfracking had been invented pre-diasporia as part of 21st Century MAD.

And it still chilled General Nodra'ak to see.

I would have done less damage with a C+ Cannon.

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