309 Far Future, Ch. 19 – Punishment is Administered (1/2)
He was going to say something, remembered the room above, and shut up.
”When she gets close, we're going to blow the explosives on her until she's dead. I'll count down the kill numbers, if you can voc-code set three, set two, and Eight through One, and Fourteen, I'd be obliged.”
Bee-beep, beep beep. ”Done,” the quietly impressed demo guy said.
I put Chalice on his launcher, tightened my grip. ”Say when.”
His shiny black helmet nodded slightly. ”Go.”
The first Nimbus flashed up, covered his gun as the barrels began to spin and spit six-inch burning rockets into the distance.
I wasn't worried about him hitting. The third rocket going out had a crackling charge of psychic energy attached, I snapped a new Nimbus into place, discharged it and the Corona, and the second one Flared out.
Explosive rounds danced over the bulging abdomen of the massive Great Empress Shadow Spideroid, sending her turning around and moving in shock at the sudden surges of psychic light punching through the gloam here. The ones flaring with psychic banefire and golden Coronas going off were especially noticeable amid the standard red-yellow eruptions.
First, readied standard action. Second, move action. Third, swift action. Fourth, free action. Fifth, from Grim.
Gkk. I had a nosebleed for a second, and psychic lights were going off inside my eyeballs. That was a lot of Corona and Nimbus to be Flaring out onto a weapon. But I retrieved Chalice as the Juris trooper held down his trigger, drew Paten as I spun around his back to his other side, giving him a full field of fire. Lightning crackled from my hand, fed into the fully recharged power cell on Paten, and I busied myself spraying 1/20th of a second hard light pulses across the uncounted thousands of spideroids between us and her.
She shrieked as armor-penetrating rounds blew against the massive phrenic reinforcement that gave her such size and strength. I could see she was leaking from several holes, and the shooter was keeping a good lock on her as she scuttled and was suddenly out of sight over the lip of the walkway down there.
Being an opportunist, and probably not having the opportunity to waste tens of thousands of credits worth of ammo like this very often, he expertly played his shots into the hordes of spiders coming my way, walking them between the big ones in explosive fashion and really chewing up the black mass of the scuttling horde. The gloam lit up with flying spider bits, fire, and shrapnel.
”She's coming! Run!”
He swung up his launcher as I spoke, took two great bounding steps, and I simply told the Disk to rise straight up in the air and get him out of danger.
A wall of black bodies was blowing apart in front of me as pulsed HHL burned into them, and banefire did its thing messily. They weren't making it to me, but more were just crawling madly over the bodies of their dead to reach me. Chalice ignited in a length of golden force, clearly visible in their gloam, and giving them something to be even more focused on and madder about.
With a shriek that rattled the very walls and would have knocked an unshielded human out cold, the Empress, dripping a lot of dark, vaporous stuff from her side, heaved over the side of the plascrete lip not forty feet away, the claw-points on her legs crunching down into it right through the bodies of some of her descendants, surged forwards-
”Set Three!”
The explosives on the ground five meters outside the entry went off in fireballs as I stepped to the side, and bits and pieces of burning spideroid blew past me and off the wall behind me, rising right up towards the roof as the trio enveloped the Great Empress.
Massive legs thrust in past where I'd been standing a heartbeat later as Great Gramma surged in-
”Set two!”
The sets aiming down at the entrance and on the wall behind the door went off as I backtracked, and shredding flechette rounds with concussion chasers hammered into her.
Still didn't kill her, although she had stuff sticking out of her all over now, looked kinda bristly. Those nine eyes of hers fixed on me as I kicked back and up, catching up to the Juris who hadn't reached the top yet, and was probably starting to panic as he looked down at the spider filling the whole heavy lift shaft below us.
Her rather ragged front legs flailed out, punched into durasteel, and she moved up and forwards after us, while behind her, her army of children swarmed through every opening after her.
”Nine! Eight! Seven! Sixfivefour! Three! Two!” I heaved the Juris up out of the shaft above me as the fireballs blew up and past me with superheated air, and concussions deafened everything while Great Gramma had a bad day, and her kids went tumbling in pyroclastic joy.
A leg drove past me, the Disk and gyro-guy were sent flying as it thrust through the opening and dragged her bulk up-
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Well, I wasn't going out that way.
I dove down, kicking off two kiddies riding her back, going right over her many-eyed head as I did, and as I put Paten in my teeth, I drew out Explosive Fourteen and jammed it into the gaping cut Chalice was opening up through her carapace into her abdomen. I kept falling down, getting her bulk between me and ”One!”