There was something wrong about this place, that much Ilshar agreed with as he dropped off the unztadlige's back onto the clearing's blasted ground. The increasing distance they had gained from the sounds of battle below had not been unwelcome, but there was always such a thing as too quiet a moment, especially this close to an enemy's positions. He found himself doubting whether the steadily creeping fog that had welcomed them among the trees was itself some trick of the cannon's defenders, an artificial vapour released to obfuscate the approach to the mountaintop. Excessive as that might have seemed in a heavily wooded area like this, it might not have been without its advantages. Right now, much to his irritation, it was interfering with his own detection attempts. The organs of taste and smell opening and breathing about his skin were quickly flooded with its bland humidity, leaving these senses useless. All he was going to perceive without seeing it were qillatu discharges through his more exotic implanted receptors, and even than might have been too little, too late.
And then there were those bodies.
Ilshar trudged up to the grotesque heap of mangled carcasses and crouched beside them. He had seen similar-looking things before. Not quite identical, but then they tended to be as augmented as any military type in the Expanse, if not more. The memories he had of them were not good.
"Hope these aren't what I think," he grunted aloud as he dug about the mass of splintered carapace and insectile viscera, now and then extruding a long, wormlike tongue to try a piece to the taste. If the League had brought vrexul, they valued this planet much more than anyone had imagined, and his squad's job had gotten that much harder and more dangerous. But even if these were vrexul - he was still not fully sure - had they actually been with the League? If their shells had borne any signs of their allegiance, most of it was now too battered to tell. As he rolled over a dismembered body with no small effort in search of identifying marks, Ilshar spotted an intact smaller plate on its underside. The material looked solid. Too heavy for a whole suit, certainly, but this much was just about the right amount to patch up a vital spot on his own piecemeal armour.
He had just finished painstakingly tearing the segment of slick bio-metal from its host when he heard Rasch's warning. Rotting Abyss, let it not be vrexul. He hunkered as best he could behind the heaped bodies, reaching for his gun and casting out his ethereal senses. If the Nexus was propitious, this cover, however improvised, would be enough.
The ground beneath was dry and crusted with a mixture of what was definitely blood but other fluids had intermingled, turning into a layer of scraping, staining crust like a mixture of scabs and solidified pus. The shotgun was no different other than the crusty, grainy pieces of meat encrusted with exoskeletal growths, the weapon's targeter lights blinking as if awakened by Salvator's hands. The weapon was heavy, even for an experienced and augmented soldier, yet its weight was unusual; it shifted and shuddered as if reluctant to face whatever hellish force had scourged the life from its prior owner.
As if out of some primal fear, the weapon itself reached out.
Salvator would detect it on his HUD; notifications of attempted communications channels opening and preview messages in an almost hieroglyphic language. As if someone had ground up a collection of insects and arranged them into stark geometric characters. It was a vrexul language specifically, one of many and rendered in some sort of cold character of weapon permisison and targeting system calibration.
This meant a number of things:
1) This shotgun was likely from a gun-platform type biomechanical drone; something it was common to see deployed as a part of vrexul infnatry squads. Yet if it was a size and shape that a voidhanger could use it, it was likely manufactured with the intent of giving it to local rebels.
2) Its lethality was considerably higher than a conventional shotgun. Unlikely to the same degree as one properly scaled for its creators but the tips of the slugs almost stared at Salvator. The bandolier of rounds had a threatening weightiness to themselves; perhaps one could simply beat someone to death with it like a flail. This thing could probably punch through a fully power armored UCL trooper with a direct hit or two to the chestplate.
3) The ability to do so had not stopped what were at least four vrexul soldiers (plus an indeterminate amount of biomechanical drones) from being slaughtered into festering slag. Given by the scourged rocks and the chunks of rubble surrounding them, they had put out quite a bit of retaliatory fire.
4) Apparently it was also sending a transmission to the communicator panel, silencing the beeping if only to replace it with a reverberant, crackling drone.
5) In short, the weapon like many vrexul technologies primarily associated with the Intransigence, it was essentially "alive" and if it did not shut up, there is no telling who might hear them.
The rock slab that Kleo had stuffed herself behind was somewhat misleading. It had looked like a single large jutting rock formation but the actual "rock" part of it was maybe less than half of its actual bulk. There was solid natural formation there but a huge part of it was shorn off; the whole upper part of it looked as if someone had hacksawed it away with the uneven and even near-toothed, raw way it had been forcibly removed.
And by the grooves that were cut into it, it had been with a solid round weapon of some sort. A smell of slightly stingy, metallic odour wafted from behind her cover and if her eyes followed it, she would see the circular back-end of some sort of shell embedded in the ground. A circular back-end larger than what one might even load into a vrexul autocannon.
Like the one that lay cracked and bent, nudging up against her knee like some dying animal begging for release or relief. The weapon itself was a broad, semi-rectacugular prism shape simple in structure yet lavished with shifting carapace and slithering bioelectronics, bent at an awkward as if it had been forced into a 45-degree v-shape. Its barrel was torn off with serrated wounding patterns and the creatures that lived inside to maintain it could be seen in the little gaps within its battere shape, life leaving them as it did the weapon.
It belonged to the other part of the "rock" she had been hiding against; the slouching cadaver of an enormous vrexul. Undergrowth camo-pattern body, covered in a layer of dust likely from the rock it had unsuccessfully used to shield itself from its foe, half of its skull torn open, leaving her with the empty pupil-less ocular dome stare of its one remaining primary "eye" and the imperceptible emotion of its incompete mandibular array; perhaps horror, perhaps hatred, perhaps some sort of empty machine-apathy many were stereotyped as possessing.
She could see shapes moving within the various other holes in its body; glistening in the thin rays of light that peaked through the flog and the flares of light from the distant-yet-ever-present battle. Shapes not of native scavengers but living things carrying out whatever tasks they could to maintain a long since deceased form, perhaps in denial or they simply were not biologically programmed for anything else.
Ilshar's guerilla career informed him of some of the patterns and marking not on the front of the various shorn-off vrexul armor chunks but their underside. Patterns inscribed almost as if they were runes seemed to speak to the distant memory of far more violent years; symbols that seemed to gnash at the mind with scything mouthparts laden with teeth, eyes that stared not at but through the psyche in pseudo-geometric patterns on shield-shaped faces. At once militant in severity yet occult in the specifics of construction; hardline militant groups no doubt possessing a similar hatred as the ZRF for its foreign oppressor.
The piece of carapace he held was inert yet he could feel something within; maybe some sort of wiring and electronics preparing to link up to a full-spectrum combat suit, or something that squirmed and crept in its little dark realm of bioengineered robotics-intertwined complexity. He was not merely picking up supplies for repair but something that almost felt like the living, hateful will of another hardened insurgent.
There was something... odd about the body however if he looked closer. Parts of it were shattered and a gruesome labyrinth of annihilated anatomy, yet there were certain components that were missing. The tarrhaidim had no doubt seen the bodies of vrexul before (perhaps he had been responsible for a number of them), and it was rather telling certain components had been removed. Not just organs but something else. What exactly was difficult to discern yet there were parts of its lumbering corpse where connector veins, internal limbs, and claspers were rather delicately pulled away or excised, laying on the viscera-strewn grass or sliding around in its shell.
There was something off about some of the organs that weren't removed however, as if they were bereft of the hellish trauma visible and tangible on the others.
Almost as if they had been planted in the corpse after the fact. Like clusters of fleshy grapes, worm-like veins laced through them, and very slightly growing and tensing as they they traced like trails through their bulbous mass. It was biotech, perhaps not vrexul, but it looked like it had been implanted in the body after it had been averted from living unto death. What was its purpose exactly though?
As the microforms traveled across this landscape, the severity of the scene grew clearer. Some of the shell casings here were almost as large as the little drones themselves and these were not Veiled War era suprlus ones. They were at least from three to five years ago; a few could be seen embedded in a particularly large 12 foot long vrexul slumped face down in the dirt; exit wounds on its back as massive as the dinner plate sized ones they saw punched through the trees earlier. At least nine of said wounds on its body; likely some on the shattered sideways-earwig shaped autocannons that were attached to the underside of its arms but those had been cracked in multiple spots and-
Signal interference, connection fizzling, warning signs; Echo's on board systems were detecting some sort of signal passing through the area. No, it wasn't passing but bouncing about, multiple points of contact - including the corpse that Ilshar had procured an armor shard from. The digital feed faltered yet control of the drones wasn't being affected. It wasn't jamming but some sort of ambient static in the air, the drones unintentionall picking up some of it.
Investigating further, it was connected to the vrexul bodies. Not the corpses in and of themselves; multiple HUD-markers indicated it was something inside of them that was generating the signals.
One drone, the one furthest from the others however, was picking up a sort of light invisible on the physical spectrum. A laser of some sort; stopping right on its body.
Something was targeting the drone but it wasn't firing.
Void damn it. He should have known better than to assume the poor dead vrexul idiot would have had the good sense to keep the shotgun on what was functionally a silent mode. He'd handled biomechanical smart weaponry years ago, though, and knew how to shut the damn thing up. Salvator hurriedly tapped away on the AR display his helmet generated in his HUD, trying to see if he still had it saved...yep. Silent mode signal for biomechanical guns.
"Unbelievable." The voidhanger murmured derisively under his breath as the signal took and the shotgun stopped transmitting to the communicator panel. His sympathy for the dead soldier he'd taken the gun off of decreased by the moment. What idiot didn't put their smartgun on silent during guerilla ops in enemy territory? "Smart" features were for frontline infantry or garrison grunts, not rebels constantly in hostile territory. At least it seemed to be a quality firearm. Heavier than he'd like, but in a straight fight, the sheer force of these slugs would be very welcome. With the shotgun shut up for now, Salvator quickly wrapped its accompanying bandolier of slugs across his chest and got back to the task at hand.
Salvator cautiously peered out from behind cover, never more than a half second at a time. No sense in leaving himself exposed for anyone on overwatch. Visuals were poor from his position, but judging by the ammo count in his scavenged gun and the rubble around them?
"Squad, Rasch." He activated his comms, his helmet muting anything he said in his immediate vicinity. "Whatever took these four out, they gave a good amount of firepower in return. Be prepared for heavy fighting if we're made." With that said, Salvator checked the ammo left in the tube and quickly set about reloading. Fortunately, the dead man he'd taken this off of at least managed to set the bandolier up correctly, allowing Salvator to grab four shells off it at once and quad load, two shells slammed into the port with each motion. Back online, Salvator raised the shotgun and peered out from behind cover, starting to provide overwatch in case anyone had the bright idea to move up.
The tension in the air did not dissipate, but neither did the treeline erupt in fire and shrapnel, and thus after a few slowly creeping moments Ilshar felt safe enough to turn his attention away from the looming uncertainty and back to the plate still held in his hand. The intensity of the sensations he could feel seeping from it was unsettling even to an ether-touched mind, perhaps moreso due to how familiar they were as opposed to the slippery and nebulous emanations of the Chasm. Unfamiliar as he was with vrexul spirituality, he wondered just how much of the fallen insurgent lived on in this fragment. How fitting, he thought, as he slotted the plate into a loose gap on his back, to be properly integrated where his suit was lacking once conditions were more favourable. The fungus thrived on the dead and almost-dead. Such was the way of the Nexus.
"These ones were on our side. What got them is after us," he replied over the comms. On their side as far as Zanovia went, at least. Who, if anyone, the vrexul had truly followed remained a mystery, though Ilshar was ready to wager that they had been breakaways from the war. A venomous resentment much like the one he felt now had suffused those he had seen turn away from the battlefields and disappear into the void. What was less familiar, however...
"And they've been tampered with." It did not look like simple looting, certainly not his own crude groping and severing. Even if the CivSec and their allies had decided to harvest the vrexul's organs for some reason, it seemed much too clean for the hasty field job it ought to have been. Perhaps their main goal had been to make space for these implants, but this only raised even more ominous questions. The fact that the pulsating tangle did not look like an obvious booby trap, be that a bomb or an infection vector, did little to set him at ease. "I'd stay clear of them."
With crouching, wary steps, Ilshar began to make good on his own warning, keeping close to the ground as he edged away from the bodies and towards the surer protection of the rocks. The unpleasant suspicion lingered that he might already have been too late to avoid the bio-construct's effects, but for the moment it was drowned out by the awareness that he was an exposed target. He kept his gun trained on the edge of the clearing, noticing with some relief that the voidhanger looked ready to provide cover. Even if he did make it, however, he knew the safety would be temporary. There were too many unclear things in this place for it to be secure - and the cannon still waited ahead.
Echo came to a halt as the squad took what cover was available. The Warform continued to hunker in place, as the Endoform too hunkered nearby the rest of the squad. The interference it was noticing was messing with its effective 'vision', but the link between the myriad forms remained steady. Its scanners regarded the mangled vrexul corpses before them. In some ways, the Vrexul and Unztadtlige had a sort of unspoken rivalry about them, filling many of the same roles only differing in biological versus mechanical. But, even if such a rivalry existed, these specific vrexul were allies, and whatever had taken them out, were capable of posing a threat to even Echo's durable armor.
As one of the Microforms felt the infrared lasers mark its position, it continued to maintain its course, as to not alert whoever was targeting it. If Echo showed them that it knew it was being targeted, that might set the trap off then and there. So long as Echo maintained the equivalence of being unaware, the unknowns might wait a moment longer before engaging. The other drone began to slowly return to the piles of rubble, searching for cover while maintaining the appearance of scouting.
The next step was to use the angle of the laser painting Echo's microform to trace it back to potential target locations, the main platform quickly running calculations as the marked drone continued to play dumb. The Endoform hunched down, switching to vocal communications to avoid interception, though keeping the voice low enough to prevent prying ears.
Once Echo had managed to trace back the laser to its possible origin, the platform would attempt to extrapolate other possible angles of attack and relay all of that information into the squad net, marking the locations on the HUDs of its team.
The communicator panel Salvator had on hand began to bleep and blink as its small glassy screen flashed alive. IMMINENT MESSAGE: TRANSMITTING IN 10... 9...
The team in the valley had been attempting to make contact for a while now but they had been intermittent with the beeps. This was sudden and unaffected by radio static; the signal was strong, too strong, pulsating in a way that coincided with the hollow droning that emerged from the same carcass he had looted the shotgun from. It was a resonant, sonorous tone even as if intoned out from within a massive hallway yet emerging chant-like and deep. The carcass shifted, its armor plates creaking as the dying things that cowered within shuddered and twisted within, a half-torn head swiveling his way as connector joints and torn biomass tore itself to fac ehim.
And it was not the only cadaver that did not rest. The drone that Salvator heard was joined by a bassy thud, easy to mistake for solid impact on the soil itself but synthesized from sources not entirely digital. The very augmentations implanted in Ilshar's body picked up an influx of signals washing over them; a wave of biolectrical readings, the sort that were associated with targeting, radar, and mass-detection type systems. He'd made his way over to the cover but not enough that his enhanced body did not feel itself tingle and quiver, as if the many things hidden within now realized they were in the sights of an unseen threat.
The broken corpse scavenged by Kleo produced some sort of spherical objects tennis ball sized in shape and overlaid with a series of ridged rims, partially squeezable in her palms but with a satisfying weight behind them. They were some kind of tossable device, but it was difficult to tell if they were actually explosives of some sort. Some sort of priming system was around its top like a grenade but not a pin; a hole of some sort, easily wide enough for her finger to go in. It smelled of wet soil and leaves.
Maybe that was from the spindly and glistening appendages now beginning to emerge from the cadaver; auxiliary limbs alive and well unlike their now deceased owner. Simple at first until the multi-jointed and angular protrusions began to split at their tips, revealing a mess of smaller manipulator-arms, sensor-antennae, and cutting implements. One of these limbs was larger than the others, easily bigger than any human arm as it jerked and twitched. The creature itself appeared to have had four limbs, this one appearing to have been hastily reattached into whatever part of its body it was torn from, yet the double-barreled underslung wrist-claw gun, while not aiming steadily, still pointed Kleo's way.
8... 7... 6...
As the drone traveled, Echo would be able to notice the targeting beam move off of the drone and travel towards the rest of the team, before it abruptly flipped off. Yet it had been active long enough they would be able to trace it back, far back, past the large stones and through the fog to elevated, bushy ground at the outskirts of the area; near a series of heavy bushes and rubble piles.
If whomever was targeting them was smart, they would be focused on Echo. That coincideded with a hailing request over their coms; the source was vrexul, the IFF codes marking them as deceased, and signal tracing lead their multi-bodied sight to barely even a corpse. A scattered selection of armor chunks and limbs surrounding a crater, its severed insectoid head blinking with LED's as it attempted to communicate.
So, rather than directly hailing them, their unknown watcher was doing so through the corpses. The pulse earlier had been some sort of radar scan.
"Odd way for Zanos to be headed, platform." The voice was garbled intentionally, yet it did not sound vrexul. Whatever was contacting Echo was speaking through the corpse but it was both firm and rigid. "And so well dressed for the occasion. Is that human of yours your guide? She's very well dressed; that supplier just happens to deal in recent League antiques, don't they?"
It was a closed channel yet it might be possible for the rest of the party to listen in or for it to be broadcasted. But at the same time...
3... 1... 1...
The communicator panel's screen went black but the lights indicating a message was receiving came through.
Or it would of anyways, if one of the withered trees still standing suddenly jerked. Burnt bark and wood chips burst out of a small human finger-sized exit wound in its back, a bullet cleanly passing through and whizzing past Kleo's side and smacking into the dirt.
Standard rifle cartridge, armor piercing, still smoking - enough to be a threat to medium to light augmented armor but Kleo was the only one whose armor probably would face any major issue from.
The thing is, whoever had fired hadn't realized that that Echo's drones would be able to trace it... back to the rubble pile from earlier.
Not long after, the communicator panel spoke.
"It is not often I grant leniency to swine, especially those bearing such familiar kit. My squadmate is eager for action after what happened here hours earlier. Perhaps you should help me with that. Suspicious lack of markers on you... just new here, let's hope no?"
This was an alien voice, charismatic yet almost hissed not with vitriol but from the mere nature of the voice. An accent that fit the English language yet slightly bent and strained its various syllables. Almost sounding Irish yet the words slurred together slightly with a sonorous tone. Likely gealtirocht, especially from the cocksure swagger it possessed.
The thing is, this one couldn't be so easily traced and somehow, it knew there was a communicator panel here. How exactly it had gotten into the system was anyone's guess. It appeared that for all the informant's talk of the communicator panel's "[e]ncrypted secure coms", it had been bypassed in a matter of minutes.
Void damned insurgent fighters. At least whoever was contacting them wasn't shooting yet. Small mercies. Of course, their contact's promise of secure comms wasn't worth shit now. This was just shaping up to be one of those days.
He'd be more pissed about the human girl causing problems again if it truly was her fault this time. Of course, Salvator couldn't exactly blame the voice on the channel. In an insurgent shitfest like this, with factions sending deniable black ops every which way, of course the fog of war was muddied enough that no one could trust one another. Of course, that didn't stop this situation from being supremely annoying.
"We're not League-affiliated." Salvator keyed his comms, scowling beneath his faceplate as he tried to trace back the warning shot and get a bead on whoever fired it. "Don't know where our squadmate got the kit, first job together. But you're not going to believe us on just that." He said flatly, his newfound shotgun leveled in the direction of the woods.
"Let's make this quick, we're on a timetable. Squad's on assignment to help the locals. If you don't have a problem with that, what do we have to do or say for everyone involved to stand down so we can move on our objective?" With that said, Rasch stopped transmitting on comms for the moment, speaking out loud so that most of the squad in his vicinity could hear him.
"Would rather get out of this without wasting ammo if we can. Stay in cover, let's try not to shoot first if we can help it." If anyone had a problem with him giving orders at this point, well, that was their problem for not displaying enough initiative to do so already.
The unpleasant wave of sensation hit Ilshar an instant earlier than the putrid nerve-clusters in his body could interpret it, drowning him in a surge of vague but stifling unease that would have made someone less hardened freeze up on the spot. As it was, his body was already halfway behind a rock, a proper lithoid one, before he recognised the sense of vulnerability for what it was. Open. Defenseless. A clear target. Augmented senses screamed danger at him, and the message they sent was every bit as clear as the whizzing bullet and the peremptory words that followed it. The feeling did not fully subside even when the rock was safely interposed between most of his body and the now even more sinister treeline, and every inch of himself he left exposed to keep watch over the woods made him keenly aware of itself.
He was about to growl something in response to Rasch, when the staccato of a new series of shots interrupted the gurgle in his amorphous throat and left his shard-toothed maw hanging open in bemusement. The pure human - Kleo, was it - seemed determined to antagonise every force on this worm-forsaken world, to the point Ilshar was beginning to doubt if she was some sort of double agent embedded in their ranks to sabotage them. Most humans were Leaguers, after all, weren't they...
"Kadharra! Hold still!" he cursed, churning as loud as his voice would carry. Perhaps the force in the trees would hear that and take it as a sign of goodwill on his part, but to pray for such a fate would have been hubris at this point. Regardless, he had to make some attempt to defuse the situation, and the only vocal channel was with Rasch. The tarrhaidim let go of his gun and raised both empty hands, splayed wide oped, over the rim of his covering rock. The gesture was universal enough; it remained to be seen if the hidden guerrillas would trust it for what it was.
Regardless of what anyone was saying or doing, as soon as Echo had probable locations on any of their unknown gusts, their locations were immediately pushed to the HUDs of everyone in the squad. Still playing dumb, Echo kept its microforms inconspicuously and surreptitiously moving towards cover as they continued 'scouting'. Its weapons weren't pointed in the right direction, still idly scanning as though they hadn't detected any of their targets just yet- moving at the speed of thought, it wouldn't be difficult for Echo to reorient its weapons in the right direction should fighting break out.
Still, Rasch and Ilshar seemed to be moving in the direction of de-escalation. De-escalation was notably not a skill in Echo's wheelhouse. Unztadlige were not beings of meant to defuse conflict, they were meant to end conflict- violently at that. Still, what time it spent in the ranks of the Intranszjednota had taught the platform that sometimes not shooting everything was sometimes the quickest way to end conflict. A strange paradox for sure, but for now Echo would follow Rasch's lead. Along with Ilshar, the two humanoids seemed to have a more firm grasp on the intricacies of covert operations than it did.
At the sound of Kleo's voice, the Endoform turned its optical sensor towards the object that the human held out to it. Object unknown. Object appears to be grenade. Use case most likely similar. The robotic voice replied a bit unhelpfully. Even Echo- a purpose built warmachine knew that tossing a grenade in the middle of a tense standoff might just be the thing that took it over the red line. Doubtful still that a human arm could toss it far enough to be effective given the approximate location of the unknowns.
This platform is League-unaffiliated. Request: State affiliations and intentions. The large Unztadlige broadcasted over its external speakers, its weapons lowering to the equivalent of a 'ready' stance, but not powering down. Not that the Unztadlige was capable of powering down its weapons anyway- the weapons were as much the Unztadlige as its coral core. Anyone that knew anything of Unztadlige knew that the concept of lying was foreign to most- if not all of them. On the rare occasions that they did speak, they spoke simply and truthfully. Clarification: This unit is not dressed.
"Starting to think your friend spraying like severed neck might be a liability. Maybe we should take them off of you."
A sound like a mag snapping into place played over the communicator-panel with a long but ultimately empty pause. No crack of the rifle nor spray of blood. Just the echo of submachinegun fire and cold tension, fading into the backdrop of distant battle with its volcanic roars of artillery. The desecrated and re-tooled cadavers rattled dry and crunchy; the thump of the heavy cannon the squad was sent to wipe out shook the entire area, silencing the last of the residual weapon report.
"Your tarrhaidim associate had the right idea. The unztadlige's cannons as well. All teams, stand down."
The surrounding wilderness remained quiet but the microforms had managed to pick up the traces of the sniper's fire - a pile of rubble covered by greenish-grey camo netting, one that stretched its fabric and shifted its colours ever so slightly to the various shifts in lighting throughout the smoky day. Far, far away from the area they had walked through, enought hat without patience and a sharp eye (plus visual manigifying capabiity) it would have remained a well-kept secret.
"You mentioned an objective. I presume it is large, stationary, and causing problems for us down in the valley." The voice continued as the sound of rumbling anti-gravitational engines neared. The thick silhouettes of some sort of aircraft could be seen among the clouds, gliding overhead the way the Envenomed squad had been heading.
"You may have an unztadtlige but they have something worse. You have seen the results; even a main battle tank would have trouble with this many vrexul. Yet you do have an unztadtlige-"
The communicator panel flashed red, green, then blue. The insurgent's voice fanished as its screen lit-up and the static vanished. Video-uplinks connected to the Envenomed squad's individual HUD's or equivalents as a flash of light lit-up the screen, revealing a scene of carnage and confusion.
Scores of infantry, clad in armor far heavier than the insurgents they had fought alongside, surging forth amidst a creeping wall of fiery blossoms from scores of missiles and pulse-beam blasts raining from above. Heavyset automata, not military in origin but their civilian construction origins obscured behind reinforced armor and integrated heavy weaponry, stormed forth with blazes of rotary-cannon fire and shrieking trails of missiles before staggering or storming through scoring blasts of magnetically accelerated rounds and near-miss missile blasts.
The same squad they had seen in the foxhole viciously advanced, unfazed by the onslaught as augmented bodies snapped their weapons to distant targets shrouded in the haze of carnage and fire. Distant blasts where their rounds connected signaled their precision accuracy, flashes of shadowed bodies distorting and dismembering in the blaze speaking for their efficiency.
It was not long before they crashed behind the hole-gouged carcass of one of the walkers before one of them swung the camera to face themself.
"When this mission finishes pray that I do not take up your lack of disicpline with your handler!" They called out, crunching forth as their cover rattled, spraying bits of metal fragments that caused the camera to blur momentarily. "But you've finally picked up. Just in time, we're a little over halfway to our targets but resistance is stiffening. Are you anywhere near the artillery platform?"
"The hell are you doing?! Cease fire!" Salvator barked at Kleo as she started spraying suppressive fire. "We're trying to get out of this without a firefight, damn it!"
Fortunately, it seemed that whoever contacted them was at least convinced enough to back down first. Still, the kid was rapidly becoming a liability. If they made it out of this in one piece, someone was going to have to talk to whoever was in charge of this cell about personnel assignments. At this rate, it'd probably end up being him.
"There, they're backing down. Now you do the void-damned same before you start a fight we didn't need to take." Rasch hissed. He was set to respond back to the mystery voice before the transmission was cut all of a sudden. No, hijacked again. He winced as he saw the heavy assault team progress, whoever was handling the camera berating them all. Fuck. One thing after another today, wasn't it. The last thing they needed was this team pissed off at them.
"Take up our handler's crap choice of equipment first. Someone else broke into this line, probably why it's taken this long for you to reach us." He responded smoothly, briefly checking his HUD's map to see how far they were. Huh. After all this, the squad was about halfway there themselves. Convenient.
"We're matching your pace. Halfway to the artillery platform. Void willing, we'll both be hitting our targets at about the same time. Cutting the line, we're about to go radio silent." That said, Salvator did exactly as he said he would and ended the call, trying to connect back to the locals. Once he did, he quickly started speaking again.
"Sorry, had to take that. Anyways, you're not wrong. We're going for the artillery platform. At this point, seems we've got mutual interests. Care to work together on this one? Better odds the more firepower we have."
Nexus be praised, everything had worked out after all, at least for now. There was no telling if these new presences would remain even as friendly as that, but having fewer guns pointed at him right not was something Ilshar could appreciate. At the very least, these people knew what exactly they were going up against on the way to the cannon, and namely what had slaughtered these vrexul in the clearing. What was "worse than an unztadlige". Ilshar could think of a few things, but none that would not have been visible from this distance already. If they could get some intelligence, and better yet some fire support-
Of course, the channel was cut just then.
Grumbling, Ilshar hauled himself to his feet and shuffled over to where Rasch was holding the transmitter, hands no longer up but weapon safely dangling away beyond threatening reach. Through his many sight-organs, he kept moving with ease while looking at the brief transmission that circulated the squad's displays. Good thing he was not there, he thought. Unnerving as the still unknown defenses they were facing might have been, he would much rather go up against them than jump into the sort of furnace the rebellion had stirred up. Still, that did not mean they could get careless now.
"Ask them what exactly we're up against here, I'm tired of this unknown," he gurgled, leaning in as the voidhanger tried to restore contact with the other party, "And if they've got something that can help kill it."
"You have the living tank. We do not. This makes you the perfect battering ram."
From beneath piles of rubble and blast-scourged earth, movement broke the sterility of the ruined battlefield. The area where one of Echo's drones had traced the targeting laser to came alive; light-refracting camo netting was tossed aside and moss-shrouded barrels revealed themselves, wielded by bipedal figures in fluctuating fatigues. Their very criss-crossing colour patterns shimmered from the appearance of mottled dirt and rubbled they were previously laying to into a mixture of murky smoke-grey and black-brown-grown mimicking the surrounding treelines and its many gaps.
There were at least 12 of them, rising to hunched posture. From beneath the shimmering camo-cloaks, a fabric-like armor almost like kevlar stretched against their torsos laced with dulled semi-metallic carapace plating. Above which six-spot eyed HUD-visors swept over the ruined area with a far, far wider field of view than a conventional human's sight.
There was no doubt about it that Intransigence funding and support was far more extensive in the region than even UCL news reports were aware of.
"CivSec defences grow heavier from this point onwards. We were under orders to guard the area, but this is too vital an opportunity to pass up on, now that we have proper firepower."
There were more however, hidden in the treeline; not rifles in their hands but miniaturized rail-cannons, slender and sleek but shoulder mounted. The shaped and edgeless metal of their bodies was contrasted by symbols of eel-like, serpentine creatures marked and imprinted across the length of these deadly weapons, wielded by armored fingers of long digitigrade legs cocked like predators ready to pounce. The slightly elongated heads covered in masks of shaped, cranially fitting composite metals, sleek and lined with one-sided transparent-alloy slits seemed to gaze at all yet also sharply in front of them. Each held their shoulder mounted-cannons with one long, multi-joined arm with six long, armored fingers, their free arms motioning to the notably shorter humanoid and tarrhaidim troopers to begin advancing.
"It had a heftier weapon we did. We arrived just in time to find nothing remained. We set-up a kill-zone with bio-sensors in the corpses, but it seems it's not returning. What this squad was doing, we know not. Autocannon-rounds. Maybe another vrexul squad. Maybe a walker. Gunship, even. With your unztadtlige ally however, its fangs will be blunted."
No doubt those four were the squad leaders and given how substantially more heavily armed and armored they were, this still known threat was a major priority.
"We will be concealed in the foliage; a direct confrontation is not our specialty. Once you punch into their lines and confusion is sown, our wrath will be known."
A sound like a muffled saw aggressively ripping up soggy meat emanated over the coms as the heavily armored aliens raised their arms and swung down, half crouching as they stomped in a circular formation; some tribal war-dance punctuated by the sound of predatory teeth clattering and muffled, chanted words spoken.
Its energy bled through the coms, any semblance of their rigid militancy vanishing yet reappearing as quickly as it had been discarded. Like fish who had felt the water's surface disrupted, they shot off soon into the surrounding trees, silhouettes stalking along the treeline as they advanced towards the artillery platform.
==========
The path had grown steeper but the presence of the artillery platform was ever-threatening. The trees had shuddered once, the ground quivering and buildings trembling. Now the foliage around them shook and thrashed as if by a sudden gust of gale force winds, the crumbling ground rocking itself, stone and loose debris tumbling about, and a wave of skin-tingling, uneasy power washed over them with every no longer distant report of its mighty blasts that nearly muffled anything they attempted to say to one another.
Much of the path the Envenomed squad had traveled on had vanished into the jungle again but that wasn't necessary. HUD systems, bioethereal sensory apparatuses, in-built scanners, even their own supernaturally attuned sensory capabilities - everyone knew it was close. Each time the weapons report made the world tremble, the plume of energy-discharge that burst above the treeline flashed warningly but with enough clarity now they were this much closer, there was no more room to really hide.
They were in deep jungle now yet it was hard not to feel exposed, not just from the bright glare of the energy-cannon's blasts but how busy the air itself felt. Voices could be heard, shouting commands indistinctly as a hum of pulsing, intonating density distorted and obfuscated anything discernible.
If they could hear that through the thunderous wrath of the artillery platform, it meant that they were close to both the target and its crew.
Another sound soon could be discerned. Gears whirring, uniform stomps, and the sound of dirt and rubble - it seemed perhaps there was a pathway again or some sort of road up ahead. Through the gaps in the foliage roughly 150 or so feet ahead, armored figures could be seen hurriedly moving through an area of cleared foliage. Some of them were definitely automata; rigid and tall, standing like statuesque products on display at some arms dealer expo before snapping their heads to wherever the hand of a blue-visored, heavily armored trooper pointed.
The former were familiar; they had seen a few of them back in the abandoned settlement, having run down from the hillside to assist but having been deactivated before they could have amounted to much. Yet this time, there were far more of them, at least six in total. The same LMG in their hands but this time it was yet unknown if they were controlled by a particular user or if they had some sort of autonomous capability.
They were dwarfed a few inches by a power-armored soldier.
No doubt about it, that was not the sort of armor a lesser post-Reckoning power would have access to. Too domineering in size, the brand new servos on its limbs almost profanely out of place in the jungle, and the modularity of its plating far too current generation compared to the heavily retrofitted armor of the CivSec infantry they had gunned down earlier. Its carbine looked almost too small in its arms but as a few of those very humans walked by, gesturing and pointing off down the clearing they stood in, it was clear just what they were up against.
The standard CivSec troopers were a general height of maybe 5''9 to 6''2 but this figure was at least 7''2, their armor a mottled darkened blue, splotced with green camo-patterns. Their carbine dwarfed their rifles, large and thick enough it looked as if hollowed out their rifles could be fitted inside of it diagonally. To say nothing of the barrel-drummed weapon magnetically locked to his back, even longer and larger if difficult to get a read on. The robots themselves were between the CivSec and likely League trooper in size, bringing the group to around 10.
There was a truck most of them were gathered around but past it they could see tripods with what looked almost like triangular communication-dishes made of diagonally pointed parallel rods, camo-meshed tents, and what looked almost like somewhat shrunken down but still enormous shipping crates covered in foliage and bramble.
The Envenomed team had not been spotted but it was outnumbered. While their previous foes had been trained by the League, the likely heavily augmented human while but a single soldier was nothing to be taken lightly. There was a reason they were a superpower; in terms of raw power and durability, augmented League troopers were said to be the most powerful of all the four hegemons.
Based on their body language, this one was not slacking and its high alert state was replicated increasingly in those under its command. They were expecting something and were getting prepared for a potential fight.
Direct confrontation wasn't their new friends' specialty. Right. Cute. In insurgent talk, that translated to "we'd rather risk your lives than our own on the frontal assault". Objectively speaking, it wasn't an unfair statement, considering they were the ones with the walking tank. But that was cold comfort when they were the ones about to face the void-damned power armor. Good thing he'd fought them before on several occasions. They were tough, but not invincible. Sending just one was a cocky move.
Salvator stayed crouched in the foliage, raising a hand to wave the remainder of the Envenomed squad over to him. Once they were gathered close enough, he started speaking through the squad comms.
"Right, this'll be a bit of a problem." He grunted, starting to ping each contact on his display and relay it to the squad's HUDs. "Bad news is that having both the automata and the bastard in the power armor makes this annoying. Good news is that we have the jump on them. I'm going to give us all a cloaking field. It'll keep you in stealth for at least your opening shot, so make use of the advantage and set up a kill box. It's not going to muffle your sound, though, so stay quiet." The veteran trooper slung his newly-acquired shotgun over his back and pulled his carbine out once more, reaching into his armor for a fresh magazine and swapping his current one out.
"EMP rounds if you've got them, they'll screw with the power armor trooper's systems as much as the automata's. Armor-piercing if you don't. Kleo," Salvator reached for a few of the grenades on his belt and handed them over to the aforementioned. "You've been bitching for a grenade this whole op. Hope your throwing arm's good. The one with the blue casing's the only EMP grenade I brought, try and tag as many of the automata as you can. As for the both of you," He tilted his head towards Echo and Ilshar. "Focus fire on the power armor with me, then try to take out the automata as best as possible once he's down. All of you use your own discretion on firepower past the opening salvo. I'm hoping our new friends pick their balls up and open fire once the power armor's taken out at least, but I'm not holding my breath." His briefing done, Rasch channeled the void through himself and swept his hand out, enveloping the entire Envenomed squad in a void cloak.
"Cloak's up. Spread out and set up. Open fire on my mark." Once everyone was in position, Salvator nodded to himself before raising his carbine, drawing a bead on the power armored soldier. "Fire!" He pulled the trigger, sending a burst of EMP rounds straight for the soldier's helmet.
Being deployed to... complicated situations like the one they were in wasn't anything new since Alice joined the Intransigence, but it was the first time she was deployed with such haste. There was little to no time for her to get to familiarize herself with her new team, know what they were capable of, their specialties and prepare herself so she could better support them. Due to that, Alice chose to stay closer to the group than the usual position she took, supporting them from further back. Although not exactly ideal, due to how long and cumbersome her rifle was, it would still be better to be closer from the main group, at least until she was comfortable enough with how well she was able to adapt to their tactics and the teamwork. Especially regarding the Unztadtligeβ, Echo, as it was her first time even seeing one from up close, let alone working together with one. The fact that the leader of the squad was a Voidhanger like her made Alice feel a bit less nervous though.
Like usual, she was wearing the adapted version of the scout armor that was provided to her by the Intransigence. It was thanks to it that she was able to hide and camouflage herself almost perfectly despite the color of her skin, as long as she remained immobile, that is. It was also thanks to that very characteristic that Alice wasn't focused on the earlier skirmish, despite being caught by surprise and off position.
If the chaotic, almost war-like situation they were deployed to wasn't enough, the locals seemed to be quite on edge and with little to no patience to any mistakes caused by lack of experience, as it became evident with the hostility shown by one of the tarrhaidim after one of the grunts that they could have interrogated was killed by the human instead. Unfortunately, that soon proved to not be the only near miss their group would have with locals, when a misunderstanding due Echo's presence almost caused another battle to start against neutral forces. Luckily enough, both sides seemed to be willing to negotiate and as soon as a common objective was identified between both forces, the destruction of the artillery platform that had been punching holes into the battlefield for quite some time.
While having more allies was always good, the new group they negotiated with seemed to be quite intent on using the Envenomed team as a battering ram only so they could strike by surprise, without having to risk themselves. Still, some help was better than no help and after that small briefing, they started making their way through the thick jungle towards their target. Every few seconds, the roar of the artillery platform firing could be heard, getting louder and louder as they approached, until it seemed almost as if they could feel the impact wave after every shot.
Strangely enough, even though it was almost drowned by the artillery fire, the group was able to hear another sound in the background, steadily approaching them. The vaguely familiar sound of gears and strangely uniform steps almost immediately told Alice that they were about to encounter more of the same CivSec forces that had attacked them earlier.
"We must be getting close. There are much more of them..." Alice said with a concerned tone, particularly looking towards the soldier in the power-armor.
Alice merely nodded as she heard Salvator's orders as he put up a cloaking field as they prepared the ambush, extending her own ether signature to a wide area, to try and conceal her position in case there was any other enemy etherealist nearby. Following Salvator's explanation, Alice quickly detached from the main group, using the trees and the cloaking field put by Salvator to reposition herself. Moving as silently as she could, Alice maintained her distance from the main CivSec forces, circling them until she had a good view of the Power-Armor soldier. His armor would be probably very hard to punch through, but thanks to her rifle, if she aimed for a weak spot, such as the sides of the power-armor's joints, she was certain she would be able to pierce it. While not lethal, it would hopefully be enough to immobilize the soldier so the rest of the team would be able to focus their fire on him.
"I think I have a clear shot from here. I am not sure if my rifle can pierce the power-armor in one go, but I think I can pierce if I aim for it's joints. Should be enough to hopefully immobilize it." Alice said as she took cover behind a tree, crouching down and using her ether to activate her armor's camouflage.
"I'm ready. If any of you manage to make a hole in it's armor, exposing the soldier inside just a bit, I can try to fire some tranquilizers to make him unconscious... Interrogating him might give us some intel, given how well equipped that particular soldier is." Alice said, holding her breath and steadying her aim as much as she could as she waited for Salvator's order to fire.
The very second she heard Salvator's order, Alice pulled the trigger two times in rapid succession.
Almost at the same time Salvator's EMP rounds were fired at the power-armor soldier's helmet, Alice's fired, aiming at the weak spot on the side of both it's knees. The tungsten needles her precision rifle fired, while having a very low impact and not causing that much damage, had an incredible penetration capacity. With luck, they would hit the soldier's legs and do just enough damage to make him unable to move... or at least unable to run.
By then, Ilshar could not find it in him to be glad at how this new standoff was defused. Yes, they had gotten out of it without a bullet fired or embedded in their hides, blessed be the Nexus, but the fact that a misunderstanding had wasted this much time irritated him. Worse still if these guerrillas had a direct link to his employers, as their equipment suggested, in which case the whole scene could have been averted with a bit of coordination, something that had been in precious short supply in this operation so far. Downsides of working at the scale that the Intranszjednota did, he supposed, and with forces as haphazardly mixed at this. His first off-planet missions before the war had been clean jobs in comparison.
βIf youβre hanging back, keep an eye open for whatever did this. Would hate if it was patrolling and caught us in the attack,β he rumbled into the transmitter before shambling ahead. Specialty or not, the group in the woods looked more than heavily armed enough to provide decent support in a direct assault; more likely than not they simply saw Echo as an excuse not to put themselves at risk. Arguing the point would be worse than pointless, but they had been preparing to face whatever had taken out those vrexul, so at least they could put those railguns to use.
Whatever dregs the universe gave, he would scrounge them. That was how one survived.
A further stretch of tense woodland march later, Ilsharβs vision organs leered at the first line of defenses before the squadβs ultimate target. The armoured hulk that directed the automated soldiers brought back unpleasant memories of just what being outgunned by League heavies meant. These cybernetic shells were an unpleasant way of overcompensating for other bipedsβ lack of tarrhaidim-kindβs rotborn blessings. They did have their own poisons, but EMP rounds were so damned expensive.
βKillbox, good idea,β he nodded to Rasch as he chambered the precious lightning-marked ammunition and pointed onward to the left with a momentarily free hand, βIβll cut off from over there, keep the pressure from the front.β
Ilshar was about to disappear under the double veil of overgrowth and aetheric cloaking when the other voidhangerβs voice almost made him start. With how quiet their kind was, he tended to forget she was there.
βThe higher-ups would like it if we take him alive,β the tarrhaidim grunted noncommittally, βBut I wouldnβt risk it. Nexus knows heβll have some failsafe implant, I donβt think whoever sent him wants to leave loose ends if things go bad for their side.β
With those words, he shuffled quietly forward, taking an advanced and slightly lateral position away from the main group. His Ulvath had neither the voidhangersβ precision nor Echoβs indiscriminate potency, so to make the most of it in a surprise attack he had to make the most of firing angles. From where he crouched, he had the widest view of the armoured soldier and the lineup of automata, and the advantage was more than an observational one. As the rest of the Envonomed opened up on the target, Ilshar fired off a quick burst at the power armourβs conspicuous center of mass, then smoothly trailed off into a cone that swept over the enemiesβ profile. The most damage with the fewest wasted rounds, a prize that would be worth his riskier station.
Very few would note 'stealth' as one of Echo's strong suits, but throughout this deployment it had been surprisingly apt at just that. Perhaps both the cloaking technology and leadership of Rasch provided assistance in that, but nonetheless, Echo's warform, along with the rest of the team had managed to get the drop on a group of targets. While the others moved in to form a killbox, Echo more or less stayed stationary, hanging back to preparing a base of fire while also negating it's biggest weakness to stealth- it's size and noise it would make if it moved.
With their first strike prepared, Echo's weapons began to power up. Unfortunately, no amount of cloaking would mask the telltale whine of an Unztadlig's beam cannon, but luckily for them all, they did not delay in ambushing their targets. Salvatore and Alice's weapons struck first, followed by the tarrhaidim. A moment later the whine grew to a crescendo and a lance of energy surged towards the power armored trooper, the fresh smell of burnt ozone lingering in the air. A split second later, two streams of tracers swept across the automata positions as Echo charged forward on antigrav boosted legs. With luck, the enemy squad would believe the fire was coming from the Unztadlige platform alone, drawing any return fire towards it's thicker armor, while the rest of the squad maneuvered to collapse on the remaining targets.
Where stealth was not in Echo's toolset, attacking over open ground was. Maneuvering with it's heaviest sections of armor facing forward while autocannons and beam cannons turned the mechanical centaur into a veritable porcupine of weapons fire. For good measure, a second blast from it's main cannon struck where the power armor trooper was positioned.
Alert. Platform is now attempting to draw fire. Advise. Avoid entering projected movement path. Elaboration. Platform mass likely to cause extreme physical trauma in event of collision.
