Metal Swarm - Kevin J. Anderson [135]
The expanded sensor suite showed a thriving Klikiss subhive, exactly as Sirix had expected. Freshly built mounds and spires rose ten storeys tall. Workers and equipment bustled around the old ruins. A newly erected transportal stood out in the open near a walled-in village of human colonists. All the vegetation around the infestation had been razed, and Sirix inferred that the breedex was about to fission. Other subhives around the Spiral Arm would be doing the same, preparing to fight each other. Sirix would stop them wherever he could. « 'Their defences are significant,' PD said.
And their numbers as well,' QT added.
'We will be ready for them.' Sirix convinced himself he was right. In previous attacks, he had preferred to operate from a safe distance, deploying the battle group's large-scale explosives, ship-to-ship jazer banks, guided bombs, and atomic warheads. This would be a ground assault, and the EDF armouries were still full of jazer rifles, pulse blasters, high-power stunners, and shoulder-mounted projectile launchers.
Sirix assigned small arms to all Soldier compies and black robots. Together, he had nearly a thousand robots remaining, and twice that many Soldier compies. The swift dropships had been stripped of safety interlocks so the robots could descend at projectile velocity, smash onto the strip-harvested ground outside the Klikiss city, and rush outward in a berserker charge. The subhive could not withstand that.
Sirix rode down in the rattling, roaring dropship beside PD and QT. Though he knew they could be competent fighters, he was bringing the two compies along primarily to show them the awful nature of the Klikiss race. And so that the violent battle they witnessed would inform them of the scope of the ancient wars between the black robots and their creators. The two captive compies were very receptive to learning new things.
Like a rain of meteors, the robot fighters slammed into the landscape outside the walled-in human settlement. Despite the rough landing, Sirix regained his footing immediately, opened the hatch, and emerged with the two compies beside him. Black robots and Soldier compies spilled out from all the dropships, heavily armed with EDF weapons.
Marching forward, they began to open fire on any Klikiss target. Scouts, harvesters, and engineers died by the hundreds. The Klikiss squealed and whistled, while the robots and compies were ominously silent, moving forward metre by metre, faster than the hive mind could react.
Ahead, the tall new transportal stood in front of the Klikiss city, and Sirix postulated that the breedex might already have sent many of its warriors to other planets to establish additional subhives or to wipe out rival breedexes. Prominent among the newly built Klikiss structures, he discerned the squat structure where the hive mind dwelled. That was his primary target.
He noted without surprise that the barricade surrounding the human settlement was obviously Klikiss-made. Terrified-looking people had scrambled up makeshift ladders to stand atop the thick wall and stare at the forward push of the black robots. The breedex had trapped these colonists inside a well-defined boundary. Sirix could not fathom the reason. Was it just to keep the humans out of the way, or did the Klikiss have some other purpose? How could humans possibly be useful?
Scrambling to put together a defence, hundreds of spiny warriors scuttled forward, some of them flying. With no regard for their own protection, the Klikiss warriors threw themselves upon the front ranks of Soldier compies, and they fell in great numbers to the barrage of high-powered jazers and rocket-launched projectiles.
But the insect creatures advanced so swiftly that many of them were still alive to close with the Soldier compies. The Klikiss dismantled the compies and crashed into the black robots, ripping them apart. Sirix fought with