Returning To Duty

The officer at her side had a contrasting face with her own. Her time in command while running an isolated Titan with no teaching aid or guidance, along with the knowledge she was carrying first one, then later two critically injured VIPs, had turned the responsibilities of leadership into a tainted thing for her. But she expected he hadn't yet experienced those realities as an officer, because he still held onto that gentle, deep smile. 

"Electric lines, anti-grav generators, emplacement mounts and hatches, melee outfittings, sonar mapping, drilling array, and general sensor arrays are ready to operate at full efficiency. We're as prepared as we'll ever be, sir."

"I could think of a few more things we could have," she began, then reserved her energies, "but that's a moot point, I suppose."

The Nyx Breaker crawled forward, clearing the courtyard adjoining the mechatronics complex, then the underpass beneath the maintenance gate. The massive doors were still parting, though each second resulted in them moving a couple meters, so the Titan could follow behind them at a steady pace until it reached its desired fifty meters.

At thirty-five meters, its speed increased, forcing it forward and almost colliding with the backside of the doors. At the last moment, the head curled downward and dragged along the ground for another meter, kicking up stone shards and fine dust and grinding down the larger rocks in its path.

If any of the crew had been outside of the Titan, they would've lost all hearing in seconds from the tumultuous shattering. This persisted, and then the ground gave way and allowed the Titan to pass into it.

With the echo-room providing direction, and the surveillance feeds and fur scanners from the walls providing targets, the Nyx Breaker swam through the underground at a depth of forty meters, well below the required depth to avoid triggering any laid-out mines through physical contact or detected motion.

Re-5 ran some calculations, aided by her cybernetic augmentations. Beside her, her officer tilted his head, and his smile lost some of the minutiae of its luster. "We are to begin kiting maneuvers at your leisure."

"Not until we're behind the main body of the assembled Aud." Emerging while amid the amassed Aud army was nothing short of functional suicide. "While we're in transit, ensure all emplacements are ready to fire upon command."

He drummed three fingers on the edge of her console with blatant idleness while looking away and muttering orders in a whispery tone she couldn't overhear even while straining. So she didn't attempt to, busying herself with monitoring the state of the Nyx Breaker's crew.

She had to replace a few techs and engineers with competencies in specific fields of science with fresher, yet unfamiliar new servicemen, while the originals received reassignment to the walls or Ardiseg Hall.

She wished she could keep every last one of Ze-4's original crew since they were all familiar with each other and worked like a well-oiled machine. Not to say that the replacements failed to fit into the gaps left behind by their predecessors, but there were performance gaps she could glean if she looked hard enough.

It might've been more prudent to focus on her worries with the Aud. "What can Directory Control say with confidence of the army's behavior?"

"The Aud ground forces have split into three rings. The furthest away were only detected because of their movements before positioning and the city's recently refitted GPR arrays. They've stopped multiple kilometers outside the range of the longest-reaching recorders. Considering this ring can connect while maintaining a greater body-to-body crowd density than one despite its diameter, it has the most Aud. The second and third rings are still separating. The forming middle ring is far enough that it is beyond the range of every weapon system aside from the wall-grade electrics." He reserved some seconds to collect his thoughts. "And we've reached the front ranks of the final ring now. They're the only ones continuing onward."

"When Directory Control performed its fur scans, did they capture all three rings?"

"No, only the first two. The final one is so far away that the specific signatures denoting a color become mixed in and indecipherable from one another." He shrugged. "Or so I've heard."

Re-5 looked at a diagram displaying the field of battle. A large, green dot represented the Last Light, while a small, yellow arrow not even a hundredth of its size moved away. The three rings were available to study on a zoomed-out version to the left.

"Have us change our bearing west. If we surface between the two closest rings to strike at the stragglers in the attacking ring, will there be enough time for us to escape again?"

"At the current distance of empty space between the two, no. But by the time we reach that position, I'll take a risk and answer yes, sir."

"Then we will maintain our course."

Though they only had direct surveillance footage from a high angle thanks to the recording equipment at the top of the walls, Re-5 could imagine without strain the thousands of galloping fiends passing above them.

Even encased within a Titan and separated from the first wave of Aud by a forty-meter layer of pockmarked rock, she lacked a distinct sense of safety, not even a modicum of it. Her officer walked to the edge of the sitesman's platform, kneeled to retrieve a screen offered by someone from below, and returned.

"Anything new?"

"No, sir, this is a report on the state of the emplacements. Sonics, electrics, and cylinders are all ready for extension from hatches and immediate firing as you asked."

She nodded with pleasantness to that. She remembered what happened last time, how the Nyx Breaker had struggled to maintain a continued staggered firing pattern due to how much of its munitions the Titan had spent in previous skirmishes. "I take it we're ready to surface?"

He glanced up at the overhead diagram and sent a message to one of the techs a couple levels down. "Yes, sir."

She leaned down to speak into the microphone extending from the console. "Prepare for surfacing. We will emerge, move south while maintaining fire from sonics and electrics for ten seconds, then resume tunneling. Familiarize yourselves with this routine."

The Nyx Breaker ejected from the ground, its bulk shooting off for a second before coming down and slamming a strong impact. Those piloting the Titan had another second to orient themselves, then directed the machine of war south as ordered.

The hatches on the left edge of the back retracted their coverings, and mounts raised their sonic and electric emplacements into the subterranean air. The sonics fired the initial salvo, and the electrics followed behind after a delay so the difference in munitions velocity would receive addressal and both would hit in a combined volley.

Further back, as more and more of the Nyx Breaker pulled free from its discarded underground passage, each compartment's left half of the backside contributed its emplacements to the salvos, growing larger with every added hatch revealed.

Once ten seconds had passed, and enough Aud had turned around to charge at the distant Titan that harassed, wounded, or in the case of one unfortunate white-fur, succeeded in killing them, its head dug down and the rest of the body disappeared into the subterranean earth like before. Re-5 checked the shape of the frontmost ring, then pointed. "We'll move to that part ninety meters down and repeat."