Chapter Forty-Six – Ground Penetrating Radar Shell

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Chapter Forty-Six – Ground Penetrating Radar Shell

“There are plenty of historical ‘facts’ that have long since been disproven and are still bandied about. Things like Marie Antoinette saying ‘Let them eat cake.’ Or the first Samurai instantly knowing what and how their abilities functioned!”

–A Treaties on Incorrectness, 2054

***

I didn’t like charging into the Antithesis when they knew I was coming. I supposed that made me some flavour of coward.

Licking my lips, I glanced over the group, then nodded. The smart thing to do was to leverage our ranged advantage. “Myalis, do I have anything like a… like a shell that will let me scan the space ahead?”

I can make something like that, certainly.

“Okay, cool. I just want a good lay of the land, you know? Then we’ll bomb the shit out of it, then come over and clear out the leftovers, make sure to salt the earth and all that.”

Gomorrah and I–and a few others too–had done something similar to a hive next to a lake back when we were working on the Big Gun project. It had worked out well enough at the time, so I didn’t see any harm in doing the same thing again.

There are three standard HE rounds loaded into your gun now. A 155mm sensor round will cost 35 points.

“Okay, cool,” I said. How many points am I even sitting at, right now?”

Point Total: 17,450

I blinked. Holy shit, that was… actually, no, I supposed it made sense. I’d killed at least a hundred aliens so far, right? Plus a few of those were big fuckers. I’d started off the day with something like nine thousand points, so I hadn’t even doubled my point total.

It did look like I was going to end the day with enough in the bank for another mech, though. That was neat!

I had never been big into collecting knick-knacks like some people, but the idea of having a big collection of giant cat mecha was extremely appealing to me. I could park them in my garage and show off my obscene wealth. Or just have a mech for every occasion. Like… some girls collected purses, others had shoes, and I’d have several multi-ton quadrupedal war machines.

I glanced at the targetting computer, then spun the barrel of the MEOW’s main gun around. I would have shot so that the current HE round landed somewhere near our destination, but that would just alert them even more.

The Antithesis, in my limited experience, had a pretty good means of communicating with… itself. But it wasn’t a hive mind, they didn’t share thoughts or anything, and even if they could communicate fairly well with each other, somehow, it wasn’t as fast or reliable as something like radio.

So, a shot landing right next to them would wake them right up, and I didn’t need them on full alert. No more than they already were, in any case.

Aiming up and out into the distance, I tried to target the main body of the force pushing towards the wall. It might land a bit short, but that was fine. If I happened to hit anything then it would cut back on some of the lost points for the shells.

A few shots later and Myalis loaded in the sensor shell and I was spinning the main gun back around to aim ahead. “Loaded?” I asked.

It is. Aim a little higher than you’d expect.

“Got it,” I muttered before pulling the trigger. There was the usual soft bit of recoil, made a little worse by the fact that the mech was walking. Then I started to squint as the mech’s feed was filled with information. I had to tap into it with my augs, and that wasn’t very pleasant for a moment, at least until I minimized it all and discarded the information that wouldn’t help anything.

What I did get, in the end, was a highly-detailed scan of the area up ahead. Every metre was swept over multiple times by the spinning shell which created a sort of cone-shaped footprint, then an… inverse cone as it came back down and eventually crashed into the ground way off in the distance.

The spacing was good enough to have the majority of the water-side hive in the centre, which was what I wanted. It was a snap-shot, but it did give me an idea of what we were dealing with. Better yet, the scan had some amount of ground-penetrating bullshit going on, so after a few seconds of processing, I had an image that was three dimensional and which helpfully outlined all of the aliens in the area in deep red and the Antithesis hivestuff in a dark orange.

I hummed, then flicked on the strike group’s comms. “Okay, Hammer, coming in with a scan here,” I said. “I’m looking at… a whole fuckton of enemies around the site we’re heading for. I’m talking at least a hundred bodies in all. Not little Model Ones either. Maybe another hundred underground around the site, and a third hundred or so scattered around. I’d say… fifty percent Models three to six, the rest is a mix of bigger problems.”

“Sounds tough, ma’am,” Hatner said. “We can take them?”

“Probably. But that’s a lot. If they line up single-file it’ll be easy, but they don’t do easy. We’ll get swarmed.”

“Is there a plan, then?” Hatner asked. “We’ll follow you into the thick of it.”

“Appreciated,” I said. “And yeah. I’m going to detonate a few bigger shells over the top of it all. How easy would it be for you to replace the… what’s the biggest gun size you have?”

“Both C3 Rattlesnakes have 75mm guns, ma’am. The rest is all machine-gun calibres.”

Right, the strike group didn’t have much heavier stuff. It made sense. There weren’t that many Antithesis that wouldn’t go down to enough rifle fire, so why waste space loading on a big gun with expensive ammo when you could tack on three smaller rifles for half the price. It probably made logistics easier too.

“What’s the range on those 75mm guns?” I asked.

“On a clear day, while stationary? Ten kilometres. Accuracy isn’t great at that range however. Normal max range while moving and expecting any sort of accuracy is about five klicks.”

We were well within that range. “Okay. Slow down up ahead. I’m giving you two some ammo with a bit more kick to it. I’m going to unload some heavier ground-pen shots into the hive while you lay into it with some air-burst. We’ll wait about… two kilometres out? More or less? Then gun down anything that comes at us. After that, we move in and mop up. How’s that sound?”

“Sounds like a good way to spend the afternoon, ma’am,” Hatner replied.

I just liked the plan because most of it kept us away from the hungry-hungry aliens.

We came up to a nice wider part of the road, around a bend that was a bit raised from the river and which afforded up a decent amount of cover since the trees hadn’t been clean-cut here. Probably a nice spot for a picnic.

“Alright, Myalis, air-burst 75mm for our friends. Can we manage that?”

Of course.

“And… Something that’ll go boom underground. I don’t know if we’ll be able to completely destroy the hive, but blowing it up a few times should slow it down and kill whatever’s growing around it.”

The process for reloading the MEOW was easy. Myalis shoved a few shell directly into the mech’s internal magazine. They cost a whopping 20 points each. I figured that was alright. Even a near-miss would probably either earn that back, or cause enough damage to the hive that the expenditure was worth it.

Plus, I wasn’t the sort to pinch points for everything they were worth in the first place.

The ammo for the Rattlesnakes was a bit more of a pain in the ass. Mylis summoned two crates next to the MEOW’s feet. They were, of course, hot pink and covered in rainbow cats that made the troopers that ran over to carry them pause.

It was mostly the fact that we had people out of vehicles that bothered me, but the soldiers didn’t seem to mind so much. They ran over, then started stowing the new shells away with admirable efficiency.

Probably for the best, since this wasn’t the kind of place I’d want to be standing around in.

“Everything ready?” I asked.

“Yes ma’am,” Hatner replied. “We might need a few shots to walk the shells in. Gunners report that the feel like they weight the same amount as our standard AP, but the propellant might be different.”

“You’ll have plenty of time for that,” I replied. “I’ll let you take the first shots. On your mark.”

“Yes ma’am!”

The two tanks elevated their guns, then without much ado, both of them fired within a split second of each other.

I squinted at the monitor that was zoomed way in onto the distant hive and grinned as both shots exploded above, peppering the entire area with shrapnel. Then the MEOW’s 155mm gun joined in the chorus.

Time to give them a nice wake up.

***

Two new fics! First is a fanfic with SCS, the other’s entirely original! If you like SCS or Save, or just… cute girl comedy, then you’ll like ! And if you like Cinnamon Bun or Fluff, then you’ll love !

What happens when a hyper-advanced Protectorate AI crashes into a Rogue Trader vessel and starts handing out Vanguard powers to the survivors?

For a happy-go-lucky AdMech tech-priestess whose only friends are her servitors, a chaotic Sister Novitiate who translates holy battle hymns into nightcore, and a grim, tactical junior medicae trying to keep them all alive, the universe just got a whole lot weirder. Stranded in a galaxy that knows only war, this mismatched trio has to navigate terrifying alien threats, warp corruption, and bureaucratic zealotry, all while trying to spend their points wisely.

Sometimes, to survive the grim darkness, you have to bite the stars.

 

Read Bite the Stars if you like:

Numbers go up
Big battles
Toasters
Lots of the author nerding out about niche 40K lore
The Adeptus Mechanicus
The Sisters of Battle
Cute girls doing horrific things

https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/178793/carrot-and-stick

Silas Switchbranch, wizard of the secretive Ordo Venator, is a man whose lack of luck is only equal to his ambitions. He will become a wizard-knight one day… if he can survive that long. That means taking risks, and picking up jobs that no one else wants.

Including one job, in a small podunk city in upstate New York where his investigation immediately goes sour and has him running wand-first into an abnormal number of daemons… and also a strange redheaded girl who can fling magic around like nobody’s business and who thinks she’s a magical girl from something she calls ‘anime.’ 

Stuck, with no one to rely on but the far too excitable and imaginative Carrot Cuddleworth, Silas has to figure out the mystery at the centre of what might well be a terrible conspiracy while keeping his sanity in check and his newfound ally alive.

 

Read Carrot and Stick if you like:

The Dresden Files
Bleach
Silly girls with too much power
The magic of friendship
Petty crime