Though Magnolia didn’t see it in detail, the tail end vehicle—it was pure happenstance that he was named “Charlie”—went up in an even more extravagant cloud of debris moments after the death of the point Ratha. A third antimatter mine failed to destroy the Ratha nearest it, which was also in the center position, but did manage to force it over a granite outcropping that ruined its antigravity on one side, leaving it spinning in place in a circle while its turret swiveled in the contrary direction, valiantly trying to keep its sector covered.
It was then that dozens of plasma cannon opened up from the right flank, from positions apparently carved out of the rock sometime in the past. Their KE projectiles bounced off, or were deflected from, Magnolia and the fourth vehicle in the formation. The middle vehicle, however, deprived of the protection of the redirected gravitational force on one side, took a series of hits, at least one of which managed to punch through to reach its spherical brain. With its crystalline mind badly damaged, the Ratha began to spin even more wildly, and its own ion cannon began spraying the floor and walls of the valley at random, sending airborne great blasts of dirt and rock. Its crippled brain began transmitting bits and pieces of classical music in no discernable pattern, except to the extent that the beat and the blasting cannon seemed to be in sync.
Here a doctrinal problem interposed itself. Magnolia was caught in the kill zone of what was, in Ratha terms, a near ambush. She automatically charged forward, firing with everything she had, blasting the previously hidden plasma cannon into so much plasma themselves, before running into the wall she could neither surmount nor, as a practical matter, blast her way through. She turned around, presenting her strongest defense to the enemy, knowing she was trapped at bay.
The last remaining vehicle, however, named THN but, because of certain peculiarities in its crystalline brain, (to wit, being unable to decide whether it was male or female, hence never given a nickname, and never fully integrated into the unit), was not in the kill zone. Ratha doctrine called for it to extricate itself from the ambush. This it proceeded to do, diverting its propulsion to return from whence it had come, firing like a maniac to its front, and incidentally, leaving Magnolia quite alone, with her back literally to the wall.
It was then that the Slugs’ own combat vehicles and infantry began pouring from their carefully concealed hides outside the valley from what had been the Ratha formation’s left flank, through the cuts in the granite walls.
Excursus
From:
Imperial Suns: The March of Mankind Through the Orion Arm
, copyright © CE 2936, Thaddeus Nnaji-Olokomo, University of Wooloomooloo Press, Digger City, Wolloomooloo, al-Raqis.
We should not, however, blame the state of Man’s government, military, or social structure for all of its military failures; the problem was more difficult than it might seem to us today. Against this new class of enemies, it was not possible to simply take the armour designs of the Twentieth and Twenty-first centuries and replicate them. Nor would it have been wise, even had it been possible.
In the first place, the Nighean Ruadh were technologically ahead of us, and not to some minor degree. Man was outclassed in every way. A cursory look into the capabilities of their Gauss Muskets, for example, would show them capable of chewing their way through any amount or quality of armour carried by any tank then known to Man. The amount of armor required simply dwarfed any previous requirement. And these were common weapons, carried by almost all of their numerous infantry, the exceptions being even better armed. Only strengths of armour well in excess of anything ever fielded by Man previously could hope to resist the alien fire long enough to allow return fire.
In short, in the absence of comparable technology, Man had little choice but to employ greater mass and greater raw power, just to give him a chance.
Once it was determined how much armour was needed—and it was staggering in terms of the quantity, the quality, and the expense implied—the next question concerned the power plant. And resolution of that question foundered for years on the impossibility of providing sufficient fossil fuels to Man’s prospective armoured legions in alien-held space. We didn’t have the space-transport tonnage to keep these theoretical forces supplied. We didn’t have a sufficient fuel infrastructure on most of the planets we held, and none at all on the enemy-held planets. It may be hard to imagine now, but back in the day, nuclear power actually had a bad reputation that was not entirely undeserved.
Yet nuclear it had to be. Antimatter was simply too dangerous inside a combat vehicle. It drove up the internal cube, expanded the size of the envelope that had to be armoured, and increased the weight, which, until a point of equilibrium was reached, likewise drove up the power requirements.
Then there was the question of tracked versus the recently developed antigravity technology, itself an offshoot of the development of artificial gravity needed to preserve Man's health aboard spacefaring craft. The five options were: tracked, anti-gravity, both but with emphasis on tracked and an anti-gravity assist to reduce ground pressure, both but with an emphasis on anti-gravity and tracks for steering, and a balanced approach incorporating both.
Different models and prototypes were built incorporating every version of those but for the last, before settling on an antigravity-based propulsion and suspension system. The reason for that choice was fourfold. First, the force of gravity repelled could be twisted and turned into a much more intense—albeit not black hole levels of intense—band of hyper-gravity all about the vehicle, which added substantially to its defence, by turning or dispersing incoming threats. Second, it was, in effect, free motive power once one had paid the energy cost of redirecting the force of gravity. Third was the ease of maintenance; anti-gravity was much easier to keep going in an undeveloped planetary theater. Fourth, it was a splendid way, once some kinks had been worked out, of dealing with recoil, for those Rathas that used kinetic energy for their main armament projectiles in the case of the early versions, or the particle beams and ion cannons used by current models.
Fratricide was not an overriding concern to the Slugs. It mattered not to them if their enemy’s screens directed their beams of charged particles up or to the sides to gouge great spewing geysers of granite from the rock face. It didn’t matter, either, when the rock was mixed in with chunks of plasma cannon, or bits and pieces of recently deceased Slugs. The superheated spouts of fractured, molten rock poured down onto the ground, and on to the Ratha hovering a few feet above it, without doing much harm to either.
Even so, the Ratha’s gravity-fed screens could only handle so much…
Magnolia
I am safe enough from the plasma cannon behind me; they cannot depress enough to fire at my less well-armored top deck, while my rearward anti-personnel/anti-flyer turrets are sufficient to keep any infantry which may be with them off me. I wish I could have the same confidence in my ability to handle the scores of Slug armored vehicles, and hundreds, possibly thousands, of infantry units pouring into the valley to my front.
I call them “infantry,” but in fact they move on anti-gravity sleds rather than legs. This is presumably a consequence of the fact that they don’t actually have legs, hence their name. Still, they are armored about as well as my long-lost footmen, and they carry weapons of similar power. They are slightly faster than human infantry but they are not as maneuverable and they present bigger targets. I will make them pay for those weaknesses.
The Ratha’s turret swiveled imperceptibly, keeping her ion cannon focused on the spot where the Slug turret met the top deck. The Slug kept on coming until the shimmering distortion that marked its anti-grav-fed shield flashed and died. Its prow, no longer supported by the ion-fried anti-gravity generators, plowed into the dirt below. This not only slowed the enemy vehicle, it exposed its thinly armored top deck, since the rear anti-grav kept the stern elevated. Magnolia’s cannon punched through the lighter armor as if it weren’t even there, vaporized the brain below it and—possibly, spectral analysis suggested but couldn’t prove—the bodies of one or more Slugs which may have been inside. The resultant flash of metal and plastic—and maybe flesh—turned to gas and plasma that demolished the power station and drove the turret up out of the hull. Even if it was a less spectacular death than Leo's, the Slug Xiphos died all the same.
Meanwhile, the Ratha’s secondary armament, a 75mm KE cannon, electrically driven and coaxially mounted, plus two similarly mounted 15mm Gauss Guns, the twin gatlings in the bow, the three on the cupolae atop her turret, and the top deck-mounted AP/AF guns, kept busy, whirring out a nearly continuous stream of smaller, hypersonic projectiles, eviscerating Slugs and blasting their sleds into wicked, black clouds of fragmented metal.
Gradually, an almost perfect semi-circle of destruction built up around the Ratha, to a distance of several kilometers. Its imperfections were due to folds and depressions in the ground, as well as some of the dead space created by the granite tors rising above the plain.
Not that there weren’t plenty of dead Slugs in that dead space; the Ratha had a twin battery of 300mm mortars, mounted behind the main turret and rising in a broad, flat turret of their own, as well as two arrays dedicated to vertically launched missiles. The problem was that unlike her ion cannon, both mortars and missiles were limited, and her stock would eventually run out unless replenished. So, she had to limit her use of them to the most critically dangerous concentrations of known Slug infantry….
I can't find them! I can’t always see the Slugs! How do they defeat my sensors? Even visual is sometimes unreliable. There was heat shimmer across the valley already, of course; but all this destruction has made it worse. I can hardly pick out one thing from other, not from all the glowing spots and wrecks.
In an effort at improving her position, expending power that she had in abundance to conserve ammunition she did not, the Ratha began targeting the granite tors, hitting them with enough energy to shatter them, thereby spreading showers of razor sharp granite shards out in a fan behind them.
The problem was that the Slugs’ infantry and heavy combat vehicles were essentially immune to the shards and they had taken cover in the low ground.
This is preposterous! There’s no benefit to the Slugs in destroying me that’s remotely commensurate with the price they’ve already paid, let alone what they’re going to have to pay! No wonder we haven’t talked; we don’t share even rudimentary mathematics!
A score of wrecked Xiphos-class vehicles smoked across the landscape. A few of the larger and more powerful Phasganons were littered among them. There were others out there that the Ratha could sense, but rarely well enough for good targeting. Only when they showed themselves did she have a shot worth expending the energy on, and the havoc she’d already wreaked upon them seemed to have finally dissuaded them from launching another direct assault. She sat there for the time being, immobile, scanning… scanning… scanning….
Suddenly, from all around that perimeter of well-marked death, surged the Slugs in their hundreds and thousands. Incoming fire poured down upon her like a hailstorm from Hell, but for the nonce, the Ratha’s screens held. Even so, she had to divert more power to them than she liked. And then….
6f68686868736869747069737363756e746675636b636f636b7375636b65726d6f746865726675636b6572616e6474697473! I want my boys back! They never should have taken them from me!
From around the Ratha, on both flanks and even a couple in the space behind, where her close-defense weapons could not train, began to rise some twenty-seven pairs of Slugs. They’d slithered across the open space, unarmored, flattened to nearly nothing and so nearly transparent as to be invisible. Apparently, they’d also dragged their weapons behind them. They aimed these from extended pseudopods and fired at the underside of the Ratha, at her close-defense turrets and even at her side armor. Pain exploded across Magnolia’s mind, as well as fury at being so easily deceived. Her screens flickered and went out. An ion bolt from a Slug Xiphos struck near her gun mantlet, shearing off a piece of her main armament. Soon her armor began to boil off in silvery clouds of superheated metal steam.
There were four Slug Phasganon, eleven Xiphoi, and many, many infantry on sleds, that managed to get close enough to matter. The Ratha couldn’t tell, not after losing so many sensors to the blasts, how many infantry were attacking. Only her analysis of the amount of communications traffic enabled her to determine even a rough estimate of the numbers of her enemies. Then, too, the agony of losing so many sensors and appendages made it very difficult to use what little information she could glean.
Two heavies exposed themselves to draw her fire. She fired the damaged ion cannon but missed both.
A third crept to within six hundred meters of her and fired into her side. She shuddered with the agony, her light under-armor being no match for its main armament at that range.
The light ablative plates burned away first, exposing pain receptors. These too died, yet such was her design that behind these were other receptors, and behind those still others. Each layered set felt what the exterior set would have felt had it not been destroyed… in addition to its own. The Ratha screamed, silently.
After burning through the lightly armored lower exterior, the bolt struck the inner belt of her core envelope’s armor. Here it fragmented, two beams burning through to her control center, her brain, while a half-dozen more were scattered around her inner compartments. New pain sensors flared. Her brain was damaged badly, in two distinct places. Interior gears melted.