Chapter Five - 105mm Armour-Piercing Fin-Stabilised Discarding Sabots For Fun and Profit


    Chapter Five - 105mm Armour-Piercing Fin-Stabilised Discarding Sabots For Fun and Profit


    "The Trees are coming! Oh god, the trees are coming!"


    --Overheard from a Soldier of the 45th Heavy Battalion, 2048


    ***


    Things were going fine, and it was making me nervous as fuck.


    The wall was properly defended now, there were tanks sitting on the outer side blowing up anything that showed up, we had mortars being installed and pre-fabs coming in from behind. I even checked the reports to see if there was something going wrong somewhere.


    The worst I found was one report about a common side arm having ammo that wouldn''t work half the time, and a second report about a logistics train being ambushed in the city. But it was defended, so the ambusher was mowed down in short order. More teams were being sent back to comb through every building to look for stray aliens to shoot.


    I almost jumped when Gomorrah called me. "We have a problem," she said.


    "Oh, thank fuck."


    "Pardon?" she asked. "Are you... happy that we have a problem?"Fo?ll0w current novE?ls on n/o/(v)/3l/b((in).(co/m)


    I nodded, even if she couldn''t see me. "You wouldn''t believe how happy I am. I was getting real worried there. What''s the problem, and is it the sort that can be blown up?"


    "... Yes Cat, it''s the kind of problem that you can blow up. Can you meet me at the front? There''s a FOB over by the edge of highway 117. Princess and Hedgehog are here as well as Tankette."


    "Alright, I''m on my way. See you in five," I said.


    "See you in ten," she agreed before cutting the line.


    I rolled my eyes. Just because I''ve been consistently late in the past didn''t mean that I was going to be late again today. I found Crackshot chatting it up with a few soldier types while wiping a cloth over the barrel of his gun. A tap on his shoulder and a point out ahead was enough to get him to follow. Knight was hanging out by the edge of the wall, her back pressed up against one of its pillars and the visor of her helmet raised so that she could stare at... a physical phone.


    "Is that a smartphone?" I asked as I got closer.


    "I''m... sorry, but what are those, exactly?" Knight asked. She had moved around the room to be next to Princess. They were both looking at the same video on a tablet held between them. What was with all the handheld shit today?


    "Model twenty-twos are also known as mobile hives," Gomorrah said. "They''re one of the larger models in the twenty-range of antithesis. They''re six-legged, big, and pretty tough. They''re also not an offensive model."


    "They do shit out offensive models," I said.


    "I... wouldn''t use that term, but it''s not entirely inaccurate," Gomorrah said with a nod. "Model twenty-twos can produce smaller models. Anything in the lower ranges that''s smaller than a midsize car. They can produce something like ten model threes an hour, or between two and four model fives in that same timespan. They often produce mixed models."


    "How many of them are there?" I asked. I scrolled back in the video, then counted the line. "I see seven?"


    "We know of nine," Gomorrah said. "But for all their size, they''re relatively hard to spot."


    "They''re heading this way," Princess said. Then her face lit up in a massive grin. "They''re heading this way! We''re going to get to see you at work, Miss Cat!"


    "Uh... uh-huh," I said. That girl still creeped me out something fierce. "We''re going to have to roll out the welcome wagon for them, that''s for sure. If they are heading this way, will the Twenty-Second be enough to take them down?" That last part was directed to the two Lieutenant Colonels.


    Britannica sniffed. "I''d like to see them stand up to a salvo of 105mm armour-piercing fin-stabilised discarding sabots to the face!"


    "Myalis, I''m going to assume that that would work?"


    Yes. That would certainly be sufficient to take out a model twenty-two.


    I nodded. "Cool. So we either sit back and wait for them to get into range, in which case we blow them the fuck up, or we rush out there and mess them up ourselves."


    "I think the problem isn''t so much the model twenty-twos as it is the number of them, and their origin. There''s a hive to the north capable of producing a large number of these. That''s a concern," Gomorrah said. "And just because they''re coming this way, doesn''t mean that they won''t stop out of weapon''s range and just sit there producing more and more aliens to send our way."


    "They have a lot of biomass available to them," Hedgehog said. We all turned his way. "I''ve seen this kind of thing before. They''ll sit way back and start pumping out weaker models by the dozen, then by the hundred, then in massive swarms. We''re going to run out of bullets before they run out of trees and dirt to eat."


    Well, that was a bit of a problem.


    ***