Chapter 20: Chapter 20

“Peace through power!”

The warcry of the Nexus rang out through the troopers’ external comms. The mortal army of the Nexus marched out of the Mekhane at a steady pace, firing off volleys from their Tiberium rifles all the while. Precise bursts of glowing crystals shredded the enemy cyborgs and robots. Edward grinned as his shield flared from the incoming fire. Radiation beams, fat laser beams, underpowered plasma bolts, cannon rounds… His shield took the storm of fire with barely a dent to its integrity. In exchange, he tracked his bursts of crystal fire tearing through the heads of three or more enemies each time.

“Keep this pace,” Sarah Lyons ordered through the overriding channel. As reserved as she usually was, even the head of the Nexus’ military marched alongside the troopers, not wanting to miss the opportunity to take to the field like this. “Infantry and cavalry only,” she reminded, “There’s plenty to go around for everyone.”

Assuming the enemy didn’t break, a lot of the veteran troopers thought to themselves. Several bets had already been placed on the enemy’s stalwartness. Edward wasn’t involved in any gambling, but he sincerely hoped that these cog-fuckers would put up a decent fight. At least long enough that he and his friends and comrades would make their presence here worthwhile.

As the Companies formed a perimeter within the ship’s shield bubble, Hornets hover tanks shot out above their heads, twin PPCs spitting incandescent death into Mechanicum vehicles. Each lightning-wreathed bolt disintegrated the footsoldiers of the Sol Martians unlucky enough to be in its way, and punctured the disappointingly weak hulls of the Mechanicum armor before detonating in a lightshow of electricity and volatile plasma.

“How the hell did you miss that?” Mandy taunted from her remote cockpit back in Caladan. 

Other middle and high schoolers occupied the cockpits, exchanging banter or fully focused on their task as they applied what had been drilled into their heads for almost a month now. Thanks to the robust connection offered by the Li String Particle Network, the lucky top scorers from schools all throughout the Nexus got the chance to pilot the Hornets from the safety and comfort of the marine arcology with virtually no loss in performance despite the light years separating pilot from vehicle. 

Not that it stopped some from making up excuses.

“It’s the latency!” Josh cried out in frustration as his eyes were fixed to his screen as he jerked and weaved around larger ordnance raining from the massive Mechanicum walkers in the distance. “The second tank suddenly jumped out of my firing solution!”

Mandy rolled her eyes as she expertly commanded her paired Hornet to cut through four cog- and skull-studded vehicles. “Yeah, yeah, it’s never your skills. Typi- Ahhh FUUUCK!” The young teen rocked back in her cockpit as a glancing blow from some megaweapon clipped her Hornet, knocking shield integrity down to 73% and knocking the tank sideways into the rust-red ground.

“Gee, how the hell did you miss that?” Josh echoed mockingly.

“Ughhh… Shut up.” Mandy growled as she quickly righted her vehicle and zipped out of further incoming fire.

Behind the zipping hover tanks, none of the troopers slowed their advance as massive shadows loomed over them and massive mechanical feet of Mad Cats stomped between their ranks. The agile blunt-nosed walkers focused their attention to the enemy warmachines that matched or greatly exceeded their own size. 

Unlike the Hornets, these war walkers were directly controlled. Cait cackled sadistically as she locked onto a hunched, snarling giant that furiously and futilely emptied its massive gatling cannons at her and her friends. Warhound titans, according to Sev and captured intelligence. “Time to put some doggies down,” the redhead whispered eagerly to herself.

A pull of her trigger sent charged particle bolts breaking through the titan’s supposedly multi-layered shields and blasting into its shoulders. A press of a button on the same joystick unleashed a swarm of missiles from her Mad Cat’s shoulder racks. The cluster of semi-intelligent guided projectiles made a beeline towards the Warhound’s head, detonating one after another in almost the exact location. The massive walker, now missing the front half of its head, tilted over and fell onto the unlucky Mechanicum infantry underneath it.

Other Mad Cat pilots took down ‘Knight’ class walkers with ease, or crippled larger ‘titan’ class walkers within range in the same manner Cait had done. PPCs broke through the semi-metanatural shields of the Mechanicum warmachines, often penetrating into the Knight walkers to core them out. Missile salvos hammered into the fragile cockpits of Warhounds and Reavers within range.

The Mad Cats broke into a run as they left the perimeter of the Nexus infantry, callously squashing cyborgs and kicking over ordnance pieces as they ran down larger prey. Entire Knights lances were left gutted and slagged, joining the often headless wrecks of more than a dozen Warhounds and four Reaver titans. Prisoners were highly optional in this operation, so firing solutions were free to be as lethal as the pilots liked.

As infantry and armor pushed back the cordon around the Mekhane to claim Martian ground for the Nexus, the ship’s dorsal bays opened, sending out aircraft to claim the planet’s airspace. Prism fighters announced themselves by scouring the skies with white lasers and overcharged plasma bolts. The skies of Mars quickly began to darken after their arrival as molten wreckage began trailing smoke as they rained down.

The pilots in their remote cockpits of Caladan’s flight center were glad to have better targets at last, after having defended their rule of the skies of their homeworld against scrapyard fliers or pre-War relics. Flight Major Tatiana Degtyarov grinned as she flew into several enemy fighters, her Prism’s shield and frame easily holding up against multiple head-on collisions.

She mostly stuck to the underslung PPCs when she bothered to actually shoot, preferring their explosive firepower in the close-ranged dogfight. Despite the enemy’s foreign appearance and weapons, she was right in distrusting the durability of their frames. Because of their flimsiness, white lasers were more likely to end up hitting non-aerial targets and accidentally stealing kills from the other elements. 

Such were the incompetent enemies she had to deal with.

And Tatiana did not need any inter-departmental bad blood to fester over such clumsiness. Staring intently at her remote cockpit’s screen, she locked onto a group of aircraft and patiently waited for them to line up before firing. The bolt tore into seven fighters before its energies bled away and only half-melted an eight victim. 

“Eight for one,” she declared proudly.

“Confirming kill,” came a robotic voice within the operation room. “New efficiency record has been set to eight-to-one.”

Tatiana grinned smugly as she heard groans and grumbling rise from the other cockpits around her and in the general comms channel. If she could reach ten for one shot, maybe she could leverage her way into a higher pay increment, or at least a bonus.

*****

The Nexus warmachine pushed the defenders back with ease, murdering themselves a significant amount of dead space beyond the Mekhane’s shield. In contrast, the Mechanicum struggled to provide any significant resistance, and were forced to either withdraw or die. 

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Only the guns of the Ordinatii and larger titans meaningfully slowed the Nexus advance. Many of the largest walking skyscrapers were almost nothing but silhouettes in the horizon, out of reach of most conventional Nexus weapons. Their otherwise devastating fire was rendered impotent by the Mekhane’s shield bubble, but the unprotected land beyond it were left vulnerable to the storm of fire, giving reason for the hover tanks and walkers to bother with evasive maneuvers.

For a moment, it seemed that the battle lines had achieved some form of stability. As lethal as the Nexus forces were, they became corralled around the Mekhane by a constant barrage of plasma and melta macro-cannons, turbo lasers and more of the Mechanicum’s largest, most potent weapons. For a moment, the magi of the Cult Mechanicus revised their estimates ever so slightly upwards from the steep drop suffered during the initial phase of the invasion.

And then the auguries picked up several dense frequencies on several points in no man’s land. The odds of battle saw another massive drop for the Mechanicum as deafening thunderclaps and adamantine-twisting shockwaves erupted from those sites. In their wake, line of sight to the Mekhane was blotted out as the Nexus’ own titans made their Martian debut.

There were twelve of them, each vaguely similar in size and shape to a Mars-Alpha pattern Warlord battle titan. But their carapace and shin armor was sleeker, and the titans’ heads were mounted above the shoulders, instead of set in front of the chest as nearly all Mechanicum titan designs.

Each arm mounted blocky, rectangular barrels. Resting on each shoulder were slightly smaller barrels that were clearly oversized versions of the Nexus’ plasma cannons wielded by their tanks and walkers. Smaller weapon systems could be spied on their torso, swiveling about to track targets. 

Off in the distance, the sonorous war horns of the Omnissiah’s god machines blared in a challenge against these new blasphemers of the machine form. The storm of fire was redirected, but as with the Nexus ship, these towering machines had shields strong enough to diffuse and deflect the city-killing shots.

The Nexus titans shifted to turn their attention to their attackers. Their eye lenses glowed brightly and a rumbling voice shook the very core of those who heard it.

“We are…the Apocalypse.”

The tech-priests etched onto memory banks the sight of the twelve devil machines, lit up by the constant sparking of their shields, raising their cannon-arms towards the titan legions in the distance. The movement was far smoother and far faster than what the Omnissiah’s avatars could manage.

“The end is at hand.”

When they fired, so potent were the actinic energies that most witnesses, even lower ranking magi with sufficiently robust augmentations, had their optics burnt out from staring at the weapons discharge. The shockwave that followed after the simultaneous weapons discharge flung back Skitarii, siege automata and weapon platforms. Several esteemed magi met their untimely demise as they were caught in the hurricane of metal and flesh and were crushed. 

For all the collateral it caused, the damage dealt by the firing of the Nexus titans’ weapons paled in comparison to the results on their intended target.

Those magi sufficiently authorized found themselves dumbstruck with terror as the casualty reports were updated. Two dozen Imperators and Warmongers, each an avatar of the Omnissiah’s wrath, had been suddenly struck off the roster as engine kills. Looking to the horizon, the faithful of the Cult Mechanicus finally tasted true despair as the silhouettes of their god machines sported clean holes where their heads and power cores used to be. More than a score of the greatest manifestations of the Omnissiah were outright slain by a single shot, as if their layers of void shields were curtains of saran-parchment, as if their hulls were made of iron sheets.

The dead super-heavy titans toppled over with a ruinous slowness, trailing thick columns of smoke after them. Around them, their stunned brethren began taking their first steps backwards.

Their hulks barely hit the rust-colored soil when the Nexus titans fired again. 

“Taste your mortality.”

More of the Omnissiah’s holy weapons were felled, and when the invading titans began to move their towering legs, panic finally broke out among the defenders. To anyone with a basic cogitator unit, the calculus of war had clearly fallen steeply in favor of the Nexus. The only thing now giving the Mechanicum a non-zero percent of victory was the inclusion of unfactored, extraneous acts. 

Like the Omnissiah’s personal intervention or a surgical orbital bombardment to cleanse all traces of the invaders.

Skitarii cohorts not fully slaved to their magos' will dropped what weapons they could and ran from the approaching titanic footfalls. Even the most fanatical of the Martian priesthood found themselves stalling as their bellicose programming warred with dampened self-preservation protocols in the face of extinction and futile aggression.

The grand army of the Omnissiah’s faithful, Kelbor-Hal’s great bulwark against the heathens, lost all coherency and routed as the invaders began their advance in earnest. Or, more accurately, they would have routed, if not for the Nexus ship sending out a pulse of exotic electric signals that shut down every machine spirit and turned almost every augmentation into dead weight.

Cybernetic limbs turned limp as the foreign signals burnt out their interfaces. Thousands of Skitarii gave their last gasp as oxygen processors and cardio-regulators stopped. The warforms of the Legio Cybernetica either slumped or fell over as their entire circuitry burned out. What was left of the Mechanicum’s air presence fell from the heavens, often with both augmented pilot and aircraft already dead.

Adepts and magi screamed in agony as their severed cranial processors and cogitation banks rendered the remains of their organic brains an unshackled mess of emotion and primal thoughts. Magi who kept their brains in artificial storage units found themselves trapped in their minds and wholly cut off from the rest of the world. The ensuing sensory deprivation quickly overwhelmed them even as the unregulated chemical mix in their neural tanks slowly played havoc with their brains’ neurotransmitters.

The battlefield became host to swathes of crippled or petrified men and women in red robes amidst burning wrecks and corpses. Those that had the organic throats for it screamed their terror and agony, and the lucky few who were more flesh than metal desperately crawled through the forest of deactivated bodies, dragging their equally dead augmentations along with them.

Off in the distance, deafening explosions marked the ruination of doom of the titan legions as Nexus grav tanks, walkers and titans hunted down the last Martian defenders capable of defending themselves, however futile the attempt might be.

Mars officially admitted its defeat only when a Nexus soldier tore out the head of fabricator-general Kelbor-Hal and connected it to a profane device that gave him the means to communicate the desperate plea for surrender.

7,441.27 seconds after the invaders’ boots sullied holy Mars, all hostilities finally ceased as the Nexus accepted the Mechanicum’s unconditional surrender.

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