"Look, the whole city is totaled, we're running out bullets, and the only place with potential resupply is a likely ambush. The only way to make things right is start making some wrongs. Get busy." Jugen did not pretend to be a tech-head beyond armor maintenance but he hoped that sacrificing an otherwise vital piece of military hardware would give them at least some bigger picture of the situation around them.
As Doug surgically opened the machine, he winced a little at the thought. Maybe they would get a transmission from someone who had broken through whatever jamming had digitally silenced the city, only for them to be answered by the silent ignorance of his squad.
"Ask Doug if you're curious," He spoke to the perimeter watch.
"I didn't go to college for whatever that is. Any signs of movement?"
They were sitting sitting around on a rooftop after having slaughtered droves of insects; insects that had not attacked them for whatever reasons and had vanished as abruptly as they had emerged. Insects that were single minded in a way that appeared far from the tactics employed by those they had encountered earlier. After all, the largest of the aliens had attacked from cover with allies and even retreated when it had taken one burst too many. These things? From what he could tell, they cared not for their own lives but the drone. They were a different appearance and colour scheme but perhaps that was just variety in design sensibilities.
Among the
human bodies scattered were the occasionaly faded white carapace and jutting limbs of arthropod creatures half buried in rubble and if not, riddled with gaping holes and often scattered in pieces. A few damaged IFV's and what appeared to be blown-out tanks sat half embedded in the various buildings, their
weapons twisted and bent with the shattered bodies of the aliens fallen before them in morbid prayer.
He made sure to stay a safe distance from whatever monstrosity of DIY engineering was going on a large part due to the foul smell but soon it was time to see what results their sorcery had produced. Looking over to the now mutilated datapad, he winced a little as a flow of information began to flow from the screen. Immediately, he turned on the recording feature of his HUD.
==========
What they were seeing was surprisingly solid quality with marginal screen tearing and blurs, an aerial view high above the ground but not high enough the figures moving across the city became specks. Human figures to be exact: the drone's camera zoomed in on them - GDW and SSM, one squad moving ahead of the other among the rubble and ruins with weapons sweeping wildly. Another drone, GDW in origin momentarily passed under their sight, a third, fourth, fifth - the camera swung up to follow their flight towards the communications tower before zeroing in back on the streets.
It would pan around to follow teams moving on foot and with light armored vehicle support towards the habitation blocks, the outskirts where the mining facilities were located, the previously sighted tower, and now back to the squads who were moving towards the government building.
Based on the timestamps, this had been roughly three hours ago. These were likely reinforcements then. It was not particularly exciting footage but it did show both teams approaching the government building, looking as ruined as it had when they first descended to the planet. The drone focused ont he enormous holes crushed into its roof and a shorn off elevated tower position; sliced diagonally as if a giant blade had cut through it. He remembered that a GDW team had fast-roped down onto the roof but something was off. The part of the roof they had descended to was gone; collapsed if anything leaving much of the building exposed to the elements even if it was too dark to make out anything through the massive hole beyond rubble and more rubble.
There was the possibility that structural integrity had been weakened during what he presumed was the initial invasion of these alien forces but Jurgen's primary takeaway was that the government structure (that they could vaguely make out in the distance) was a good bet with at least three different squads of allied infantry.
That is when the drone accelerated and the screen blurred until stopping, focusing on a pair of armored personnel carriers accompanied by at least three or so AFV's. Burnt out cars and scattered piles of debris were slammed out of the way as they charged towards the perimeter of the structure - brick walls and cement barriers fared no better if they were in their way as they rapidly advanced over collapsed stairs and what appeared to be makeshift defensive emplacements. Office furniture, metal barriers, and even the carcasses of service-drone
vehicles were clustered together with human bodies visibly scattered among them.
The vehicular convoy however was opening fire. Autocannons, missiles, and heavy machine guns sprayed fire down the same street that Jurgen's squad had been travelling. The drone was flying towards the structure but it's camera swept back to the street, following the trails of smoke and tracers as they slammed into... whatever those things were. They were difficult to make out exactly; smoke and dust from weapons fire and the wreckage surrounding them obscured their forms but they were not human.
Legs of some sort, long and dense but ending in pointed fang like tips dug into the dirt and bumpy purple-white carapace could be glimpsed through the obscuration. Shells and missiles slammed into their bulk, bursts of flame and force momentarily revealing the craggy beetle and louse-like forms nearly as big as the buildings surrounding them. Whole segments of their armored forms shifted, plating moving as if it lived as tubular protrusions, revealed from smoke-dispersing blast-waves, stretched out of hidden port-holes and bump-ridden surfaces flipped open across the abdominal portions.
Smoke shrouded them again as they fired.
Nauseaus beams of pinkish-white light shone out, cutting through the mist as an IFV, accelerating in reverse, dodged a second too late. Like a lashing tongue of fire the beam ripped across its sides, undoing treads as the vehicle spun out of control and careened backwards in a curving path crashing it into a totalled MBT. Infantry poured out, stumbling and dragging their comrades as zig-zagging pod-shaped projectiles dashed through the sky, attracting heavy machine gun and interceptor munition fire, splattering them in spurts of gaseous fog and yellowish smoke.
It was not enough to stop the rain of explosives from landing among the troops, concussive blast force and storms of shrapnel-like spines bisecting men or shredding them into fragments of viscera and shattered metal armor.
The other vehicles began to spread as APC's unloaded infantry, many sliding into cover, shoving corpses out of the way as missile launchers immediately fired non-lock on into the smoke, slamming armor piercing rounds in bursts of light and cones of smoke into the slowly approaching forms. Chunks of armor tore open, twitching biomass revealed spitting out fluids and crawling with mite-like maintenance organisms the size of small dogs. No response from the mandible-ridden mask-faces and stomping biometallic limbs - they advanced spitting beams and biomissiles, missing the armored vehicles by metres, then feet, then scoring more and more hits.
To their credit, the drivers reacted quickly, running over barricades and overturned vehicles as they constantly repositioned to lay down heavy weapons fire but the closer the creature-constructs got, the more accurate their fire became. It was not only the beams; fast blurs of hard projectiles slammed into the front of one IFV, stunning it as its gun swivelled towards the pair of enormous monstrosities. That was all that was needed before a different kind of directed energy weapon fired; a purple raindrop like glob of crackling, luminous energy streaking across the street.
Infantry scattered out of the way as the angry purple-white glob flew. Sparks erupted from metallic wreckage in its mere presence, slamming into the IFV in a massive burst of crackling, spark-spitting violence.
The drone at this point began to experience electronic interference as it screen swarmed with static. A warning sign appeared in the top left corner:
potential risk of target lock on, battery levels nearing 45%, recommend concelament protocol.
As the beleagured human defenders found their armored support diminishing further and further, the drone began pulling away back to the street, rapidly accelerating as another swarm of foul living missiles erupted from the backs of both creatures. The last thing it saw before they slammed into the desperate defence of the government structure was the window frame of the structure they had found it in the shadows that dance outside of it.
===========
"Well, I guess that settles what happened." Jurgen said, looking out towards the same structure that the
humans had been defending.
"If there's any chance of surivivors, they are likely holed out htere."
