The floor shook again.
This time the glass in the windows of the suite shook with it, and that bothered Loth a bit.
It felt like artillery crossing the land, falling slowly to bracket its target. And for some reason he felt that cold ice-water thrill up his spine. The kind you feel when you suspect you might just be that target.
Another thunder strike. Coming quicker now.
Loth stumbled toward the window just as the new Soshie head-chopper was shown in. He ignored her. His eyes searched the streets. He knew what he was looking for even before he found it.
But already over the comm he was getting traffic from his LP-Ops in the streets telling him what the situation was. That what he was seeing wasn’t a figment of his imagination.
The marines were sending in an HK-PP.
And it looked to be headed straight for the tower.
47
Normally the bot assigned to operations control of the mighty assault and infantry support vehicle designated Hunter-Killer Planet-Pounder, or HK-PP, did little beyond run power plant management, handle automated damage control, and make sure a number of smaller systems were interfacing to assist during the ground assault phase of operations. But in this instance, Rechs had made sure the little Nubarian bot had been outfitted with enough utility command override programs to take full control of everything, including the main mounted turrets along the back of the mech and the devastating mauler blaster system atop used for the destruction of heavy fortifications.
The Nubarian felt it had ended runtime and gone to the fabled eternal factory floor. It squealed with electronic delight as it ordered power to all weapons systems. It had already crushed three combat sleds and a small prefab tower the marines had evacuated upon seeing which direction the HK-PP was traveling.
Now they were engaging with ground fire from their assault blasters. But the heavy armor on the mech laughed at this. And so did the bot as it fired both forward turrets at an unoccupied dropship pad and blew it to shreds.
The Nubarian bot had orders not to hurt civilians or military. And it would, grudgingly, follow those orders. But other than that… it had been instructed to cause as much chaos and damage as possible along the way to the target.
A glorious mission indeed.
The bot whirled scanners around to make sure the main battle tanks weren’t online and moving to engage, because those would be a problem. But they were still offline. The bot sent a complement of missiles rocketing toward the undefended MBTs, sending them up in blossoming towers of flame.
If it all weren’t so exhilarating, the bot might have felt sorrow for destroying those three beautiful machines. But it needed to be done.
A moment later the massive HK-PP crossed through the wire, trampling the flimsy defenses, and entered the streets of the city. Civilians dressed in their red-and-black costumes, which the Nubarian bot thought were pretty, fled from the mech’s presence with panicked abandon.
This was what it was like to be a conqueror, the bot calculated. It saw itself as one N0MAAD6, the legendary scout recon bot that had singlehandedly defeated a Savage battalion on Dataan in the long ago. The secret hero of every bot that ever trundled the warships of the galaxy. Or slogged alongside the marines and even the Legion in some war or another.
When you’ve been designed for massive destruction, war is the fulfillment of your grand purpose.
Initially, as calculated, the Nubarian bot would have the advantage. And it spent much of this advantage firing into unoccupied buildings, devastating multiple floors with each hit. He could get off one shot every minute from the mauler; it took that long for the cannon to power up again from the onboard reactor.
A marine SLIC came in, and the door gunner opened up on the walker’s pilot cupola. The little Nubarian bot paid little attention to this and instead swiveled both forward turrets at the hovering aircraft. Slowly, so they’d get the point. The pilot wisely broke off the attack and dove away down a canyon of towers to break target lock.
More SLICs were coming in to make passes on the mech’s armor. If they were more advanced ships, like assault shuttles or buzz ships, the bot would be in trouble. But the marines sent to handle Detron were doing it with left-over equipment from Psydon. Which was something hullbusters took pride in: having the worst gear and still getting the job done.
The bot was busy angling the dorsal deflector to keep these attacks off its back when the mech reached the main avenue it needed to take. It chirped in a businesslike fashion and busied itself with its new heading as damage alerts came in from the articulating legs.
A marine anti-armor team using combat sleds had followed up the street despite the Soshie mob and fired off three missiles at the walking behemoth. The HK-PP’s innate ECM generators handled two of the attacks, but the third missile had rocketed into one of the legs and done substantial damage.
Smoke and bells erupted across the command cupola as the bot ordered damage-control fire extinguishers activated.
“Master Rechs indicates that you should hurry along to your destination and quit fooling around with destroying everything, you little maniac.”
It was G232.
The bot ordered the head of the walker to come about and look rearward, presenting the forward turrets with some field of the rear firing arc. It wasn’t everything, but it was enough. The bot laid down a blistering barrage of fire from both turrets, ordering the blasters into extreme high-cycle suppressive.
Bright blue fire spat out from the walker and tore up the street the sleds were speeding down. They cut hard and braked to avoid being enveloped in the barrage of incoming fire as a fourth missile snaked off into the late-afternoon smoke, untargeted.
The bot told G232 to mind its own business.
“I am doing just that,” lectured the admin bot. “Captain Rechs has tasked me with
