Human Claws

"The Nyx Breaker has begun kiting maneuvers as ordered, sirs." The sitting officer twisted around in his chair and pushed up his cap. For the first time, it struck the Prime Beacon exactly how young the man before him was. He couldn't be a day past thirty, and yet here he was, coordinating a massive defensive force's movements and actions with a machine's precision.

His thoughts trailed back to Pa-5 before they disappeared under a ruthless foot by a mind brooking no distractions. Here they all were. He glanced at Four and Two in his periphery. Though the headmen had much greater age extremes among their ranks, the council of nine half-governing the First possessed a greater variety.

The oldest among them was One, who would soon be well into two decades of his time as an Ancient. Their youngest was only a decade younger than himself. War was a ponderous thing, he decided, seeing the variance in the age of the servicemen around him for the first time.

It cared naught if one was young or old, firm in body or crippled or frail. It only cared how close one was; should they be close enough for the maw to capture them, it would. No exceptions, no ifs or buts about it. He supposed war's nature as an uncaring, unfeeling thing was kinder this way.

"We'll leave the acting sitesman to her duties then." Beside him, Two stroked his chin, a poor attempt to hide his eagerness at seeing Aud casualties plastered across his features. "Get us another report for how the dome is faring."

By now, the volume of Aud falling through the ash-cloud layer was beginning to increase to the point where, if the crew of the Nyx Breaker had the time or sensor arrays to spare to direct their attention upward, they would've become beset with the worst kind of deja vu: one that terrified.

A curtain of thousands of multicolored dots had begun its descent, the earliest among them slamming into the dome. It flashed and lit up in a couple, then a few, then dozens, and finally, hundreds of different locations across its great body.

The space above the city bathed in more yellow than its inhabitants had ever seen prior. A great light show occurred, and if not for knowing what caused it, the humans inside the Last Light might've found such spectacle festive.

"Are you sure firing a salvo or two through the dome isn't viable?" Two asked, the tension in his tone biting.

Another headman or his younger self might've taken offense, but the Prime Beacon had outgrown the chains of pride that weighed down his ancestors. For the most part. "You've read the same specification files as I. The dome is tangible and non-permeable from both sides."

"Fortunate then that we did not let it come down all the way," Four joked by Two's other shoulder, "else we suffer a premature demise through asphyxiation instead of an Aud embrace. Though I do confess, I'm not comfortable with that many tossing about above our heads. Will the shielding generator array have enough in it to last for days?"

By the end of his question, he'd turned back to the sitting officer, now as expectant of the incoming report as Two.

"A moment, sirs." The officer blinked, stiffened, then grimaced.

"While there have been no instances of premature component deterioration, excess heat generation, unaccounted-for energy drain, or the like that would be typical causes for concern, that doesn't mean much in the eyes of those watching over the array. Understandably, they're on edge. This is the first time all the shielding generators activated in tandem and combined their efforts to create a singular, massive construct. Those compiling the report have mentioned that the Sixth Headman himself had to step in during R&D, and most don't know what role he performed in the technology's comprehensive upgrade."

That was a good thing. While the fact that the Sixth Headman's involvement in the R&D process was out in the open, no one knew that the effort to revamp shielding technology to make supersizing the output an option was at first another of the joint secret projects. Aside from the two of them, that was. And the Prime Beacon wasn't clinging to secrecy out of habit now that the main threat was knocking at humanity's gates.

Those Aud first to strike the dome were the first to slide down its great body and fall. Once the number of falling Aud surpassed a dozen--the amount of time for that not even four seconds--a change took place on the top of the walls.

All personnel among the defensive forces had avoided stepping onto the large, circular hatches that took most of the surface area. This made their movements cramped and the initial formations of WAVS lining the outer edge awkward, but it didn't persist.

Red lights dotted along the circumference of every one of these hatches began to flit on and off, painting their surroundings a pale scarlet every other second.

The hatch doors rumbled, before beginning the hard task of dragging themselves aside. They cleared the way to the chambers hidden within the bowels of the walls; straight-down vertical shafts clothed in darkness.

From that darkness rose mounts thick in the base, and on top of them all were four kinds of weapons systems, each emplacement far beyond the size of their Titan-grade counterparts.

Not all would come into their roles immediately; now, two took precedence. The sonics possessed barrels longer than multiple WAVs stacked head to heels, and thicker to boot.

The belts ready to feed them their munitions were so long that even rising dozens of meters into the air to grant the emplacements optimal firing angles hadn't revealed where the belts ended; they snaked off the sides of the mounts and remained in part inside the vertical shafts.

Directed by a combined effort of the techs and their autonomous intelligences, all emplacements ready to unleash sonic munitions did so. With the wealth of data collection and trajectory interpretation resources available to Directory Control's targeting crews, not a single round of the first salvo missed. Even if their targets were further kilometers away, most would still land true.