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?”

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.

She looked up and nodded before tucking the phone away in a belt pocket. “It is. My dad… kind of insisted that I learn how to use one.”

Weird, but whatever. Rich people would want rich people toys, I supposed. They’d gone out of fashion some thirty years ago, but I supposed that fashion stalled a lot for the upper crust. “Alright. Gomorrah said there was trouble, so we’re going to go find it and blow it up, wanna come?”

“Uh, sure,” Knight said. She stood up, and then followed as I made my way out.

It was kind of strange to step out past the walls. The space within was all city. Sure, it was some shithole little city, barely worthy of the name and it probably didn’t even have a seven-figure population, but it was still urban. The space right outside the walls very much wasn’t. It was open, cleared fields for about half a kilometre, then scraggly woodlands that no one seemed to care about clearing.

The tanks of the Twenty-Second were spread out across the space, each one with a dozen metres between it and its neighbour. There were two companies of heavy armour in that battalion, that was twenty-eight tanks in all, plus the same number again of lighter armour. That made for a pretty long line of heavily armoured fuck off.

Any aliens coming in from the north were going to be running into a rude surprise. And that wasn’t including all of the infantry sitting around, or the APCs and lighter transports that still had guns strapped on because fuck it, why not?

All that to say that I was feeling pretty confident when I walked up to the middle of highway 117 where someone had set up a massive unfolding pavilion tent. I supposed that the mobile bases were still at the other end of the city right now, so we’d have to handle things without that convenience.