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She/they were hurt—badly—but she/they brushed that knowledge aside like the anguish of the pain circuits. She/they charged ahead under emergency military power at her/their maximum sprint speed of a hundred and thirty-five kilometers per hour, despite her/their track damage, and even before she/they topped the ridge, her/their main turret had been laid on the coordinates of the Surtur which signals analysis had identified as the armored battalion's command vehicle.
She/they were hurt—badly—but she/they brushed that knowledge aside like the anguish of the pain circuits. She/they charged ahead under emergency military power at her/their maximum sprint speed of a hundred and thirty-five kilometers per hour, despite her/their track damage, and even before she/they topped the ridge, her/their main turret had been laid on the coordinates of the Surtur which signals analysis had identified as the armored battalion's command vehicle.
*
The Bolo fired.
Na-Lythan's Surtur exploded like a volcano as a 110-centimeter Hellbore punched a 2.75 megaton/second battering ram through it. The Surtur's armor and battle screen might have slowed that focused blast of plasma down, but they never had a prayer of stopping it. It slammed straight through the vehicle's heart, blasting out the far side with sufficient residual energy to blow a twenty-five-meter crater in the cliff beyond.
She/they noted the destruction of the first Enemy heavy, and her/their surviving starboard infinite repeaters locked onto the nearest Fenris, spewing bolts at maximum rate fire. The Fenris' lighter battle screen glared, flickering with white-hot fury as the ion bolts chewed into it. The medium mech threw emergency power to its screens, but even as it sought to bolster them, black patches of local failure began to appear, and she/they held it locked in her/their sights while she/they poured fire into it.
But the Fenris was only a secondary threat, and her/their main turret swivelled, traversing at maximum speed, searching for the second Surtur on her/their port side.
The Surtur fired first.
The forward turret of Major Sa-Thor's heavy belched white fury while the after turret was still training frantically around to bring its weapons to bear.
Ka-Frahkan saw the trio of Hellbores lash out at the Bolo. The Human mech's battle screen was better than anything Ka-Frahkan's units had, but it wasn't enough to absorb those ravening bolts at such a short range. It slowed them—and, he knew, siphoned off much of their power for its own use, although the People's battle screen couldn't do that—but it couldn't stop them. They slammed into the plasma-shedding ceramic appliques on its port side, and one of its infinite repeater turrets exploded as one of the bolts blasted through its frontal armor. Another of Sa-Thor's bolts slammed into the heavy armored plate of its forward starboard track shield, and the Bolo staggered as the plasma punched straight through the shield and sheared away two of its road wheels. The massive track itself shattered, and the Bolo ran forward off of it, its speed dropping as it left the tangled ruin behind like the cast-off skin of some huge serpent. The third and last of Sa-Thor's shots impacted directly on the frontal armor of the massive turret. Antiplasma ceramic shattered, a meter-wide patch of duralloy vaporized, and a glowing crater deep enough to envelop Ka-Frahkan to the waist if he'd stood inside it blasted into the turret armor.
But the armor held. That shot would have destroyed any Surtur ever built, but the Bolo's rapidly traversing turret didn't even slow.
Maneka Trevor's teeth clenched as a fresh lightning bolt of agony ripped through her. She felt the wounds torn into her/their armored body, and her/their entire hull rocked with the massive transfer energy blasting into her/them.
Number Two Secondary turret was destroyed, taking two more of her/their infinite repeaters with it.
She/they were down to only six, and the hit which had destroyed Number Two blasted down the turret's access trunk. A capacitor ring blew, adding its own stored energy to the blast front, and a disrupter shield failed. Side blast damaged the traversing motors for Number Three Secondary—not fatally, but enough to impose serious fire control limitations. The tide of destruction cascaded on inward, but the secondary disrupter shield held, stopping it short of her/their core hull.
She/they staggered again as the outer forward track disintegrated. The drivetrain to the independently powered road wheels exploded as the savage power surge of the hit bled into it, but she/they managed to disengage the transmissions, and at least the bare wheels rotated freely as she/they continued to drive ahead on her/their remaining seven track systems.
The hit on her/their turret was actually the least serious of the three. A Bolo turret face, like the frontal armor of its glacis plates, was almost inconceivably thick and tough. Her/their turret had been designed to survive at least one direct hit from her/their own main battery weapon; the lighter Melconian plasma bolts could tear away the outer layer of antiplasma ceramic and blast deeply into the duralloy beneath, but they could not penetrate without multiple hits in the same spot, and her/their Hellbore fired in the instant the still-traversing turret swept it across the second Surtur.
Major Sa-Thor's vehicle simply vanished as its powerplant lost containment in a stupendous eruption of light and heat. It was as if yet another warhead had detonated in the center of the First Armored's own position. One of the two Fenrises attached to the Surtur was too close. The blast front caught it, stripped away its battle screen, and hurled it bodily sideways. It rolled almost all the way up onto its side before it crashed back down on its tracks again, and even as it came back upright, four of the Bolo's infinite repeaters ripped into its relatively thin side armor. With no battle screen to interdict, they opened the helpless vehicle like a used ration pack, and it exploded bare seconds after its Surtur.
Ka-Frahkan clung to the arms of his command chair, staring into his display as the bellowing Bolo rampaged through the perimeter of his last armored battalion's defensive position. Its starboard secondary weapons had continued to hammer at the closer of Na-Lythan's Fenrises, and Ka-Frahkan bared his fangs in furious grief as that mech, too, blew apart with the fury of a failing powerplant.
The surviving two Fenrises of Na-Lythan's forward fists stood their ground even as the Bolo's forward-mounted mortars hammered their battle screen with hundreds of 30-centimeter rounds. The mortar shells' hypervelocity, self-forging penetrators were individually too light to punch through the screen, but stopping scores of them forced the mechs to divert power from their own offensive weapons, and their crews knew full well that it was no more than a matter of seconds before the infinite repeaters which had already disemboweled two of their battalion mates did the same to them. Yet they held their positions, blasting away at minimum range with their far lighter Hellbores, and lightning flashed and danced across the Bolo's prow. But the Fenrises' weapons had too little penetration. Blinding light erupted in hellish strobes across its battle screen, gyred and danced across its glacis like enraged demons, but they couldn't get through the combination of the Human mech's better screen and far heavier frontal armor. Their own tracks spun, throwing out rooster tails of pulverized soil, as they tried to maneuver around the Bolo's flanks, tried to get at its thi