Chapter Sixty-Two – Getting Out of Hand

Chapter Sixty-Two – Getting Out of Hand

“You can never be too prepared when dealing with an incursion. When on defensive duty, it behooves a commanding officer to spend their entire budget on good equipment. Yes, cutting corners is tempting, but history and statistics have proven that more money is saved by having better equipment than by purchasing and equipping soldiers with poorer equipment.”

–The Awe Strikers, CO manual, Page 257, 2044 edition

***

“This is getting out of hand,” I shouted over the din of constant gunfire.

The debris barrier had served its purpose, it had slowed down the alien swarm for a good long while.

Now, the wall of crumbled cement was riddled with holes as artillery shots from the antithesis exploded against the far side and bigger models rammed their way through the debris. The smaller, more nimble aliens just continued to flow over the wall without much issue.

We were burning them. We were shooting them full of holes. We were even outright melting them with acid and resonators. The occasional bomb set off in their midst was chewing through their numbers too. I was tossing everything over to the wall to slow the tide down.

Blackhole bombs could only take so much before they stopped. Zero-kelvin grenades would slow the advance down, but only in pockets. Garrot grenades were great at mulching the smaller antithesis, but against the more armoured ones they would break apart after a few seconds of sustained use.

Gomorrah’s flames grew hotter as she switched over to a new gun. Soon the PMCs on her side were inching closer to mine, away from the scorching heat. I think Crackshot Cowboy to my right got some sort of infinite-ammo thing for his gun because he was firing a whole lot faster. He’d need to replace the barrel soon, it was glowing orange, and not from any RGB.

“Christ,” Gomorrah said. “This isn’t working. We’re not going to hold them back forever.”

Eventually bigger, stronger models would show up. The barricade we had would fail. Or maybe we’d just run out of bullets. There were vans driving over to the backlines with entire pallets of ammo boxes, but I didn’t think that would be enough, even with teams of volunteers reloading magazines that were being run back and forth.

“Myalis, one of those fire-lasers, please,” I said. She dropped the grenade into my open palm and I flung it forwards with a grunt. It flew a good long ways before bursting and sniping a dozen aliens with fiery beams of reddish light.

That poked a hole in the alien carpet.

The hole was filled a moment later.

“Fuck me,” I swore.

“Yeah, I feel ya,” Jimothy said over our shared comms.

I had points to spare. Thousands of them. What I didn’t have was time. I was really tempted to start chucking nukes or their equivalents onto the aliens, but I had to worry about collateral damage, which meant using more precise weaponry.

“Go wider,” Gomorrah said. “Bigger effects, everyone.”

Bigger effects… I could do that. “Myalis, I need the mother of all acid bombs. I want to carpet the entire area in alien-melting goop.”

That can be arranged. Might I suggest bombs which have highly-pressurized compressed space within them? If filled with sufficiently dangerous chemicals you could quite literally flood a large space with your chemical of choice!

“Sounds perfect,” I said. “And give me something to shoot it with. I don’t want something too dangerous to go off at our feet.”

Understood. Delivering.

“Head’s up!” I shouted aloud. “Switching guns. Keep up the fire!”

The amount of gunfire redoubled for a moment while I ducked back. A pair of boxes appeared next to me. One long and big enough that I could have stuffed Lucy into it, the other the size of a fat briefcase.

I opened the smaller of the two, revealing two big, egg-shaped objects that were very obviously bombs. They had little fins on the back and black-yellow warning stripes around their middle. Each had a cap with a different colour. Green and blue.

The green one should be fired first. It’s an aerosolized acid dispersal bomb. Despite its size, the bomb contains point five tonnes of hyper-compressed gas. The blue bomb contains a connection to what is essentially a massive off-planet vat of liquid acid. It’s technically a sulfuric acid, though the exact chemical makeup is somewhat dissimilar to the frequently-used acid and there are several additives.

“Green first, got it,” I said. I popped open the second box to reveal a long tube with pads for it to hang onto my shoulder and a trigger mechanism at the front. There was a big opening on the side, very conspicuously bomb-shaped. “Alright,” I said. “I think I’ve figured this one out already.”

The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

Very well done. Place the bomb into the slot, business end pointing forwards, then aim and fire. The launch device has no safety, so please be careful.

I picked up the launcher, grabbed the handle, then reached down for the green-topped bomb.

Damn thing was heavier than it looked, by a lot. Still, I managed to load it into its slot. As soon as it was in, the opening closed with a clunk and a few lights on the side of the barrel went green.

I dropped to one knee and aimed down a holographic sight on the side of the barrel. It very conveniently showed me the arc the bomb would take. Tipping the entire thing back, I aimed skywards, then pulled the trigger.