First Contact

Lieutenant General Malcolm would never tell anyone but General Takilikakik frightened him in ways that he had never been frightened before. Malcolm had fought on over a hundred worlds, have faced down strange creatures from beyond space and time, and had been scraped up with a putty knife more than once. He had served in the infantry and the artillery, had charged enemy lines and held the line against a charge.

But he had never served beneath someone like General Takilikakik.

Many combat officers that General Malcolm had met held the portly General in slight contempt. A Terran Marine without a Combat Action Badge, who had apparently never been in combat at all, anywhere, in over a century of service.

But any combat officer who had relied on General Takilikakik during a combat operation would shut any being's mouth who denigrated "Tik-Tac", usually with a fist, a bottle, or a nearby chair.

Now General Malcolm knew why.

The last week should have been a disaster. The creation engines and nano-forges should have been dead, overheated and scorched out. The mechanics should have been so exhausted they were making little mistakes. Morale should have been staggering as the line troops started to clash with the logistics troops.

Instead, the log bases and forward operations bases were humming along almost as if it was peacetime. The stocks were all at 80% and every unit had been able to rotate through at least twelve hours of downtime. The guns were reloaded, the walls repaired, and the vehicles were all almost ready to roll back out. The jungle had been pushed back, by fire and flame, from every base to over a mile outside. Spirits were high and Malcolm had actually heard the lower enlisted cracking jokes with one another in the mess hall.

As if less than four days ago there had not been a brutal fight to the death outside ever logbase and FOB in the system as the jungle had made a push to take out the Terran bases.

The Elven Queens were only hours from being deployed. The High Queen and her High Court were already on the Telkan moon, she was already moving from dreaming to wakefulness. The Royal Courts were landed already, nanite breeders were deployed across the world, and even the sea elves had been deployed.

In hours they'd be woken to full awareness. Not Born Whole, which would have been optimal, but Young Queens.

Malcolm was very aware that things could still go wrong and he just had this nagging feeling that kept whispering in the back of his mind to wake up General Takilikakik despite the fact the General had only been asleep for six hours.

"Sir," one of the intelligence analysts said, coming forward.

"Yes," Malcolm checked the patches on the analysts uniform. "Captain Drader?"

"Imperium units are moving out. They took a member of First Telkan with them," the female officer said. She shifted the view of the holotank to show dropships moving out across the continent.

"Any idea why?" Malcolm asked.

The Captain consulted her datalink then shook her head. "Apparently they claim that their oracles determined that there will be attacks across multiple shelters and that shelter 371A4 will suffer a malfunction and surface."

"When did they inform you of this?" Malcolm asked.

"A half hour ago. We're still trying to determine what they mean by seers and oracles," the Captain said.

Malcolm brought up what he could on Imperium oracles and seers but there wasn't any data on the subject beyond some rather lurid, gory, graphic, and sexualized drawings by artists from around the time of the fall of the Imperium of Rage.

"What's the status of Shelter 371A4?" Malcolm asked.

Captain Drader checked her implant. "It's green across the board. The aVI reports there's some seismic, but that's consistent with the entire planet right now. I had the aVI run diagnostics but there's nothing wrong."

"No reason for the Imperium troops to mobilize?" Malcom asked.

Again, Captain Drader shook her head. "No reason, but they're hard to understand. The language has drifted quite a bit and their dialect's a little difficult to understand."

Malcolm thought for a long moment and tapped his datalink, bringing up the General's Aide.

"Wake General Takilikakik. Something's happening. The Imperium troops are on the move," Malcolm said. He stared at the holotank, watching the icons for the Imperium dropships moving quickly.

"Imperium officers, I think they're officers, these old battle-codes are hard to decipher, are requesting artillery and air support to augment their own units," the Captain said.

General Malcolm nodded. "Authorize it."

"There's no basis for what they're asking for. They're asking for heavy artillery and heavy close air support on areas they haven't even reached yet," the Captain protested.

General Malcolm felt it, right then. That shivering, frozen, crystalline instant. He'd never felt it outside of combat before.

He looked over the status of all the units he had authority and oversight over.

He looked at the Imperium forces.

"Wake the General. Shift all zones up one threat level. Bring all units to active rapid ready," he said, speaking slowly and carefully.

Something passed behind Captain Drader's eyes.

"You're right. It's too quiet," the female Captain answered. "The Imperium troops have been around since the Combine, any of them with poor instincts would be dead a long time ago."

She turned away from the General, making a tossing motion with one hand. "Go back over all the data from the last eight days, focus around the shelters, this time don't remove the geological seismic data. Get everyone on it."

She paused a second.

"Wake up 108th MI."

She glanced at the icon for the lead dropship, wondering what was going on.

The flight was a short one, landing only a few miles from where the shelter that Vuxten's wife had been in was located. The ship hovered off the ground, scorching the plant life away with the thrusters until nothing but ash and dirt remained. There was a tone, a steady beeping that was growing faster. A red light started blinking as the vegetation burned away. It turned yellow and flashed faster as the thrusters started burning into the ground. It went fast enough to go solid right before the beeping went to a steady tone.

Vuxten and the largest one stepped out at the same time.

Standard landing pose: knee into the dirt, fist into the dirt to flare off the kinetic energy, give the battlecomp a second as you come up, deploying the shoulder weapons, 471 linked in deploying his own weaponry. Step forward, straighten up, deploy the rifle (or the heavy autocannon he was now carrying), check your HUD.

The lessons had been ground into Vuxten till they were were just as natural as breathing.

The others thudded the ground, most of them just landing solid and walking forward, steady almost mechanical steps. Vuxten realized the on he had ridden on wasn't the only dropship as more and more of the heavily armored humans slammed to the ground.

A geological tremor shivered the clearing.

--unlocked-- 471 told him.

"They will arise here, Brother Vuxten, my seers and oracles have foreseen it," the largest figure said.

"Does command know?" Vuxten asked, unsure of what to call the figure. All of the big humans only read as "ERROR" on his datalink but he'd gotten used to that over the last two weeks.

"I informed them that I required your presence," the large figure said. "They acquiesced to my demand."

"What do I call you?" Vuxten asked.

"He is Daxin the Unfeeling, Osiris of the Black Warsteel Flame, The Undying One, the Last of the Immortals," the woman said, the torches over each shoulder bursting into flame. Black sooty smoke oozed from the barrel of her plasma ejector gun.

"Brother will do," Daxin rumbled. "You have faced the Dwellerspawn since they arrived. Driving them back with fire and steel. I know not why the half-dead oracles and the riven souled seers saw you here, standing with us as a brother, but here you shall be just as they forsaw your flight from the citadel walls during our arrival."

"My broodcarriers and podlings are here. I will be nowhere else, brother," Vuxten said. The formal, rigid method of speaking was catching and he didn't even realize he was doing it.

The big one just nodded, staring at the jungle around where the dropships had burned away the vegetation.

Another grinding sound that shook the ground, causing dust to raise up from the thruster-scorched ground.

--skyeye gap 2 min last 41 min-- 471 warned Vuxten.

"We've got a gap in the satellite coverage coming up," Vuxten said. "Two minutes from now, it'll last for 41 minutes."

"GET READY, BROTHERS!" the large one roared out. The massive four legged black warsteel cyborg deployed guns from the back. Vuxten checked his 20mm magac cannon, making sure the ammunition hopper's creation engine was warming up.

Warbois moved into position in between others as the armored Terrans checked their weapons and got ready. To Vuxten it felt almost as if the jungle was waiting, as if it was gathering itself, clenching like a fist.

"You feel it, don't you, brother?" the female Terran with the slit throat burbled, turning to look at Vuxten.

"Yes, sister," Vuxten said.

--sixty seconds-- 471 warned.

"Sixty seconds, brothers," Vuxten called out.

"Incoming artillery in ninety seconds," One of the heavy armored humans called out.

"Close air support on station," another roared. There was a faint tremor again.

One of the huge robotic looking ones raised its arms to the sky and screamed in rage.

--thirty seconds--

"Thirty seconds!" Vuxten warned.

"Sixty seconds till artillery impace," another called out.

Vuxten's armor notified him of incoming artillery, high parabolic arcs fired by 223 Field Artillery Regiment. Fuel air explosives coming in aimed around the grouped up troops.

"FIFTEEN SECONDS!" Vuxten yelled. Another mild quake shuddered across the clearing.

The large robotic looking ones readied their weapons.

Vuxten could feel the hatred of the jungle, feel it tensing and getting ready. It was almost pounding at him, waves of hatred that were getting stronger and stronger. Not like the dismissive empty disdain of the Overseers, not like the negligent anger of the Precursor machines, unlike the clean burning wrath and hate of the Imperium troops. The hatred he could feel from the jungle was greasy, cloying, almost gleeful in its hatred of him. Like it wanted to not only kill him but completely obliterate him.

That feeling was one of the reasons he hated the jungle and its creatures.

The countdown ended and a hush fell over the large clearing, even the hissing of the armor and power chassis becoming muted, the idling chainswords seeming to recede, the burning hiss of the flamers quieting.

Vuxten knew it was about to burst from the foliage and he brought around the heavy autocannon and squeezed the trigger. The autocannon jittered and roared in his hands, the solid shaft of light as the 1 tracer for every three rounds lit up the twilight.

The creature that had been moving forward was covered in moss, grass, and small shrubs. It looked like it was partially made of dirt, rock, and chunks of Precursor machine parts and armor. It reared up from where it had been traveling through the ground, revealing the trench it had been digging, full of creatures with trees, grass, and moss growing out of their backs.

Vuxtens shells, warsteel coated antimatter mass reactive 20mm shells, hit the massive creature and blew apart chunks of rock as it roared.

"CONTACT! ENEMY CONTACT!" Vuxten yelled out without thinking about it.

The entire jungle seemed to come alive. Vuxten could ID only about a third of the creatures and even those were covered in moss and rock and grasses. The vegetation on the back of a fireback burst into flame as the creature's plates and fins raised up off its back and began to heat up to white hot. The flatjack scurrying toward the lines on its hundreds of feet no longer showed its segmented hide but instead was covered in broken rocks, grass, and moss. Hundreds of dragonflies and moths took to the air, thousands of wasps and hornets swirled up from the back of the creatures that carried their nests.

"471, snap those and send the to command! That's how they're moving around!" Vuxten yelled out, knowing that his little green mantid engineer could hear him perfectly well but unable to stop himself from yelling.

--roger roger-- 471 one said, taking images of the creatures as fast as it could at the same time as it popped a drone to get communications back online. 471 made sure to get pictures of the trenches that were revealed.

Vuxten felt the buffeting of the rage and hatred from the Terran troops around him as he stepped forward slowly, firing the autocannon in short, sharp bursts.

The artillery rounds started coming in, the protective casings blowing free so the munitions could puff out rings of fuel until they were just above the jungle canopy and detonated. The staged fuel rings went off, not only tearing into the jungle, but the fuel staging pulling the fire and debris upwards.

Immediately afterwards the heavy aerospace fighter-bombers came in fast, dropping from the cloud cover in a steep dive that they pulled up short and dropped canisters of enhanced napalm and thermobaric munitions.

The entire jungle roared in agony as flame scoured it to the bedrock and more, the bedrock itself cracking deeply.

But for every insect wiped away a thousand more scrambled over the charred corpses to take its place.

One of the massive pillbugs burst from beneath the ground, roaring as it surfaced, moving forward on thousands of insect legs, its eyes bright red as it began to pick up speed. Its back was covered in foliage, bees and dragonflies poured from the nests on its back, and it headed straight for the clearing.

Vuxten locked the target and fired the missile launcher dry in a quick chugging burst. The missiles went hypersonic fifty meters out and cracked across the distance to slam into the pillbug's eye one right after another driving deeper and deeper, the third through sixth blowing scraps of flesh and gore out of the crater.

One of the bigger robotic looking Imperium troops cut loose with its rocket launcher and double-barreled autocannons, but it did nothing but hammer divots into the thick armor plates of the giant pillbug that it ignored as it bulled forward, throwing smaller ones out of the way as it charged.

More and more of them lifted up out of the ground, shedding dirt and jungle vegetation like a whale breaching the surface of an algae covered sea.

The drone 471 had kicked into the air managed to link via microwaves to the nearest repeater. The repeater struggled through the moss and pollen that had covered it, orienting, and finding a brother only a few kilometers away. It fed power into its systems even as the fungus and spores fought to get through the battelsteel casing and streamed the message to its brother. Link after link was formed, some of the links dying but struggling on regardless.

The data reached Log Base Echo, transmitted to the Military Intelligence units and beyond.

General Takilikakik saw the data stream in and stared at it for a long moment. He squinted, frowning, examining how they had approached, using the seismic disruptions as cover as they had dug through the stone and earth. They were closing in on the exit point for Shelter 371A4.

He could feel it.

"We missed on," General Takilikakik snapped, turning to the MI liaison.

"Sir?" Captain Drader asked.

"We missed a brain. A big one," General Takilikakik said. He rubbed his hands and forearms together, frowning at the holodisplay of the globe. "I was all seismic focuses..." the hummed for a moment. "That occured beneath any mountain with heavy glacier cover. The brain would have used it for cooling."

He turned and looked at another representation of the globe. "Move out all units to all shelter exit areas! They've figured out how to force the shelters to surface!"

"Are you sure, sir? There's no way they could have been able to figure that out in such a short amount of time," Captain Drader said.

General Takilikakik shook his head. "You are assuming that this enemy is only as old as we know them, only have imprinted records since they made landing here. That is a faulty assumption based off of myopic data."

He pointed at the holodisplay of Telkin 1 and Telkin 2 as well as the moons. "They've done this multiple times, completely eliminating the life on these planets. We should have assumed, from the beginning that they would have the data of those events, somehow, perhaps through genetic imprinting like the Elven Queens use."

Captain Drader frowned but knew better than to argue with a General.

"It took them time to adapt, days and weeks, but they have so far been able to adapt rapidly, in some cases showing adaptations that would only be available from previous campaigns, such as that acid that can slag warsteel, something there is no record of ever occurring," General Takilikakik said slowly, still rubbing his hands and forearms together in an odd gesture. "Are you familiar with seismic mapping?"

Captain Drader nodded.

"They have undoubtedly been using it to map where the shelters are. Combine that with how fiercely we defend those areas, it's been a high priority, and they become obvious targets," General Takilikakik said, his tone still low and slow. "Get the defending units up, tell the commanders to run that plans as if we were surfacing them for launch right now."

Brigadier General Craftmen frowned. "Are you sure, sir?"

"It's the only reason to deploy that much material. They're making a move on the shelters," General Takilikakik said. "Tell them to fire it up."

"No fire, I got no fire," Sergeant Amity said, swearing. He kicked the bottom of the console and hit the power stud again. "Dammit! The whole damn thing went offline as soon as I tried to start Little Sister."

The tank shuddered for a moment then a whine cycled down.

"Dammit!" Amity said, banging on the console. "854, what's going on? They just replaced the damn reactor!"

--no reactor fire reactor dead working working-- 854 reported.

"Go to the secondary," Trucker snapped.

--roger roger-- 548 answered.

The lights flickered twice then the whole tank started to vibrate. The whole tank came to life, although warnings regarding the battle-screens, max speed, and creation engine rates were flashing on Trucker's boards.

"The gun's auto-loader is still down. 994 and 175 are working on it, it looks like the whole wiring harness is shot," Trucker's gunner said.

"Then we'll wet-print the ronds and hand load them if we have to. Tik-tak says those shelters are about to fail and be forced to surface. If we aren't there to protect them the civilians are going to get slaughtered," Trucker snapped. He opened up his comlink. "Roll out, Piledrivers! All Commanders, follow your emergency shelter surface warplans. We've got weapons free but remember once those shelters surface they're only rated for 3.5 megatons."

One by one the Regimental Commanders signaled acknowledgement.

"Configure the main gun for hand-loads, we'll be at our deployment point soon. Little brothers, you've got less than an hour to get the autoloader working," Trucker said. "We'll make it work."

Trucker made sure his men could see him, half out of the commander's hatch, one arm resting on the quad-barrel, his helmet buckled on, spitting over the side of his tank.

They didn't need to know he was rolling in a busted tank.

"BUST 'EM!" Ekret roared out.

"SHOT OUT!" Cheapshot yelled.

The 125kt shell hit the side of the giant pillbug, the penetrator charge driving through the meters thick shell segment, the atomic round going off inside the body. It streamed steam and boiling blood, but kept moving forward, hundreds of bees and wasps pouring from the boils on the armor.

The backblast rocked Ekret's tank, driving his lower ribs into the hatch, but he ignored it, keeping his thumbs down on the tribarrel's butterfly trigger to rake the larger insects even as the point defense went to solid looking strobing rapid fire to try to clear the bees and wasps.

"HIT! STILL UP!" Cheapshot called out.

More shots hit the huge pillbug. One of the segments peeled away from the whitish cottony looking muscle beneath it as the atomic round found the anchor ligaments and tendons for the massive armor section.

Three rounds hit it, including one from Cheapshot, before the pillbug could clench and relax to cover the gap with another piece of segmented armor.

It blew in half, the biomatter fed atomic cloud reaching up to the sky like an angry fist, the fire green and yellow.

"THIRTY TWO KAY TO DEPLOYMENT POINT!" Sneaker called out. "IMPERIUM FORCES ON SITE AND FACING HEAVY ATTACK!"

"FOR THE IMPERIUM!" one of the armored warriors roared, driving its chainsword into the braincase of one of the insects, the burning warsteel chain churning up flesh and ichor, spraying the burning fluid across the clearing.

"BROTHERS, ADVANCE!" called out and Vuxten began to step forward, still firing. The massive corpse of the first pillbug still crackled and burned, the entire shell split down the center lengthwise across the top, a massive crater halfway down the top still steaming as the flesh and ichor boiled.

471 was standing on Vuxten's shoulder, firing his micro-rifle at any insects that got too close. His tiny creation engine on his abdominal armor was creating rockets as fast as possible. It was taking everything he could bring to bear to keep some of the 'bees' off of his power armor brother.

Another massive pillbug started to lift from the dirt and almost a dozen laser designators tapped it at once. The close air support dropped in low, firing off rockets as fast as possible before banking out of the way and pulling up as they kicked in their afterburners.

The Sisters of Wrath were burning away the jungle in their advance with their flamers. Several of them used lighting directed from their armored fists or their roaring chainswords to tear at the insects. One of the robed figures lifted his staff and called lighting from the cloudy sky down onto the insects.

One of the giant pillbugs was raked by lighting that reached down from the sky with clawed fingers to rip at the armor, collapsing the biological battle-screen, tearing deeper and deeper into the armor until the lightning's talons found flesh.

Bright purple light shown through the cracks in the insect's armor for a moment before it exploded, detonating, destroying the vegetation and insects around it for almost a quarter mile.

Vuxten noted that the robed figure had steam and mist coming off of him as he staggered away, leaning heavily on the ornate warsteel staff but then his attention was taken by a kaiju rearing up. He fired the heavy autocannon into its belly, the heavy rounds barely starting to drop when they hit the massive creature's belly. Vuxten dialed up his gravity anchor as he kept firing, slashing up and down the kaiju's lightly armored belly, the mass reactive anti-matter shells blowing massive holes in the creature's flesh.

The kaiju screamed, clawing at the air.

More missiles lanced out, going hypersonic, using kinetic energy to slam deeper in before exploding to drive the EFP's further into the massive body.

"FOR LOST TERRA AND SCARRED TELKAN!" one of the giant war machines roared, opening up with twin autocannons, the massive 60mm rounds hammering into the battle-screens of another kaiju that had erupted from the ground. The screens went down with an eye watering purple flashed and the heavy APDSAM rounds penetrated deeply before exploding.

The ground started to shake, almost unnoticed by those fighting on the surface.

Brentili'ik turned at the shouting.

Shelter 371A4 had detected that the seismic activity had gone beyond alarming and into dangerous. The shaking was overcoming the shock absorbers that the massive shelter used to mitigate the vibration of the drilling. It was putting the tens of thousands refugees in danger. The shelter had determined that it had no choice if it was going to protect the inhabitants.

It had engaged its massive drills.

And was heading for the surface.

Brentili'ik's blood ran cold as she realized which shelter it was.

The same one her broodcarriers and podlings were sheltering in.