The Lancer shook his head to clear his nostrils, but it was a futile gesture. He stepped back from the opening and looked down the street where blackened and smoking corpses littered the ground. “Get them loaded up. We’ve got clicks to make across this warzone,” ordered the Triceratops, and he found himself again curious about how many he had killed. Brokehorn recognized the idea as a human one, but engaged it all the same. As he peered around the corner he could hear Anna loading the others into the open-sided, rugged-looking craft from inside the hangar.
More corpses were scattered, smoldering from the energy discharge. Brokehorn realized an entire company of Defenders were dead around him. His chain lightning-fork had hopped from foe to foe to the last soldier, and the results were visible before him. It was a stroke of luck he wasn’t going to question.
He turned back to the humans to find Anna driving the truck into the street. He trotted up to them, the ground rumbling only slightly under his steps as he approached. He was eye-level with the driver’s open-topped compartment, and Anna looked past him to the alien wreckage he left behind before gazing at his weaponry. “That one thing did... that?” she asked.
“It did, but it won’t be able to do so for a while,” Brokehorn admitted. Part of what had piqued his curiosity was that the energy drain on the weapon was much higher than normal. His eyes commanded his HUD to bring up the route the task force was taking – they still had a rough trip ahead of them.
“Listen to me,” the Triceratops told her, raising the screens on his helmet so she could look at his eyes. Humans always liked seeing your eyes, he had realized early on in his career. “If I engage something you need to keep heading west,” he explained. “Eventually you should meet up with friendly lines.”
“And what of you?” Anna asked the Lancer.
“What about me?” he replied.
“Will you be all right?”
Brokehorn snorted. “I will live or die. Nothing less, nothing more.”
The human woman looked at him, and then shook her head. “You are very brave beneath the fatalism,” she told him as she put the vehicle into gear.
Brokehorn didn’t respond, but the comment made him wonder what she meant by ‘brave’. He had explained to Ripper his reasons for fighting, but he had never considered what he did to be of that refined act the humans called courageous. They walked along until the vehicle shifted gear, and Brokehorn began to trot.
It was good that he had built his speed up because the Butcher tank turned smoothly as it came into the center of the road and fired its missiles. Brokehorn was able to leap forward and put his body between the weapons and the vehicle behind him.
His anti-missile systems engaged, defeating the Leitani armaments’ countermeasures. Intense, narrowly-directed lasers danced off his armor and fried the warheads, causing them to explode in mid-flight. That didn’t end his problems though, as two armored figures dismounted from the hull of the hovering, wedge-shaped tank.
“Get down a side street!” Brokehorn roared at Anna, returning fire with his machine guns then firing his hip mortars. Smoke rounds burst in the street in front of him as he took his own advice just in time. Powerful energy beams from the Khajali rai’liths blasted craters in the ground where he had just stood, debris raining everywhere.
Turning in the tight corridor, Brokehorn calmed his breathing and waited until he heard the sound of claws scraping the asphalt in the smoke-filled street in front of him. Then he filled it with fire from his flamethrowers, spewing flaming fuel. Shields were no use against the stuff, as it moved too slow to activate them. One warrior flung its arm about wildly, trying to dislodge the adhesive stuff from his arm. The other bellowed as it sunk to its knees – it had caught both streams full-on and was now a humanoid-shaped flaming totem.
Quickly, the Lancer moved to engage the partially aflame Khajali, machine guns firing at close range. The alien’s shield sprung up in response, but couldn’t stop the Old Blood bearing down on him, his rai’lith only notching Brokehorn’s intact horn before being ripped from the alien’s grasp. Brokehorn activated his flamethrowers again, and turned as the Khajali fell to the ground, the corpse hidden behind the thick flames.
There was no time to watch his handiwork as his shield sprang up. The butcher tank had silently approached him in the melee, and it had been joined by another. At close range, the purple light pulsed underneath the black vehicle, the anti-gravity technology a trademark of the Leitani species. An opaque dome rose from the wedge-shaped base, where twin cannons rode either side of it, with a large anti-aircraft gun riding on the dorsal mount. The guns spun up again, and Brokehorn’s shield’s dropped. Pain lanced into him as shrapnel penetrated the exposed thick scales that protected his sides.
The second tank popped up above its comrade, its missile’s aiming downwards toward him. The Lancer realized he had only one option, counter intuitive as it may have seemed. He charged forward and slid his horn underneath the floating tank in front of him and heaved upwards. The tank’s pilot did not respond fast enough to the sudden strike and was hurled into the air. With a crunch of metal on metal the two tanks collided just as the second butcher fired its missiles.
They had not traveled far enough to arm their fuses, but instead functioned as metal spears. The range was close enough that the two powerful shields interfered with each other, and the missile wasn’t turned. Instead there was a high-pitched whine as the anti-gravity engines failed on the first butcher. This was followed by a low drone as the second tank couldn’t keep them both in the air, and they crashed into the ground.
Brokehorn had the good sense to retreat from the impact zone of the twin tanks in the few seconds of chaos. He had made just enough distance to save his life as the impact activated the fuse on one of the missiles. It exploded in a blossom of green fire. This combustion set off a chain reaction in short order – all the ordnance on the twin tanks exploded. Chunks of metal were hurled down the street, and Brokehorn sought refuge in another side street. All the same, one jagged piece of wreckage lodged itself into his side and he caught himself before he screamed in shock as much as pain. Another piece crashed into his armored side, and he dropped to his knees, trying to catch his breath as he shook his head.
“That last one would have killed me,” he murmured. The thought of his own mortality worried him for a moment, and then he turned it aside. He had a greater responsibility than his own life to worry about, especially after his bold words to Ripper in the Sea Spray.
As if on cue, Ripper’s voice came to life on his radio. “Brokehorn, what is going on over there? We just saw a massive explosion near your last reported position. Are you all right?” asked Ripper, unable to keep the concern out of his tone.
Brokehorn tried to catch his breath, winced, and then spoke in clipped bursts. “Two butcher tanks. Company of Naith Defenders. Three Khajali. All dead. Humans safe,” he said, backing out of the side street. He motioned with his head for the humans to follow in their truck. “This way,” he told them, loping down the road and ignoring the stabbing pain in his side. He did not see the wide-eyed looks the human wore as they passed the charred Khajalian corpses or the flaming wreckage of the butcher tanks.
“You’re injured,” said Ripper.
“I’ll live,” Brokehorn said, mentally chiding himself. Maybe he did whine as much as Ripper claimed.
“There are no assurances on that, but I won’t let it happen because I wasn’t there,” Ripper retorted. “Dhimion, I’m going to assist the Lancer with his escort mission. He’s wounded and needs aid.”