Endless Loop (A Syberian Vignette)

==Description==
On the far off Deep Periphery world of Syberia within the Nebula California, a war is being wage with no end. Unable overcome their long dead human creators' final commands, the robotic armies of a divided world continue to wage their endless conflict with no victors. This is the story of near sapient artificial intelligence whom primary fitted into the bodies of mighty warmachines known as AutoMechs. Their two armies; the Democratic Industrial Conglomerate better known as the DemoCons fight try to defeat the forces of the Autonomous Barony of Primus, better known as AutoBoP.
==Background==
The story is written by Herbert A. Beas II, the original author of the non-canon story Drones of Syberia, whom expands the setting and it's faction further. By giving a face to the characters whom were introduced in the original Welcome to Nebula California
This was intended of a parody to the 1980s original Transformer cartoon series. Where in this story human colonists on Syberia had perfected near sapient artificial intelligence whom once did their bidding, taking over every little heavy task. Including waging war. The Battletech Universe's iconic BattleMech, the human piloted humanoid shaped robotic combat machines have been automated, thus the name AutoMech. However, on this world....human nation states could not tolerate each other any longer. They then launched a war that lead to Armaggedon, and the extinction of human race. However, their last command to their faithful AIs was simple. Win at all costs. Which they've yet to succeed, but command did not include when to stop and what to do when they succeed. Especially, automated factories continue to rebuild/reproduce the soldiers fallen battle...endlessly. 
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==Story==
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===Part 1===
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Metro-Central, North Cascadian Plains
Autonomous Barony of Primus
Syberia
Date: ERR404//220.86.29C //ERR143//2986.602327…//RUN
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No! Not again! For Kaen’s sake, not again!!
The haze of smoke and shadow swirled around everything, but through it all, sunlight glinted off surfaces of polished copper and brushed steel. There were fires everywhere. The distant cacophony of explosions echoes across the plains. But everything spun about wildly; it was nearly impossible to tell what was where.
But why was no mystery…
It had all happened before…
Too damned many times before!
The gyroscopes were no damned good. The sensor inputs were flickering. Jump Jets refused to fire.
A damage schema was requested. But the data flow came to slowly. By the time it appeared, two platforms caught, then crumpled, beneath the slamming impact of a hundred-ton mass sent careening over yet another deck of glinting metals.
The display blinked, updating itself in the span of a painfully long nanosecond. Armor failures appeared everywhere. Actuators had frozen up, disabling the conversion systems. Critical damage to the reactor warned of imminent shutdown, with coolant from ruptured lines spraying wildly into the plasma chamber. The gyros were, indeed, shattered; balance control was no longer possible. Sensor damage made target acquisition and identification wildly inconsistent. CASE deployed without cause; the magazines were already empty. And the particle cannon had given up its last bolt just seconds ago.
With the dull sound of one metallic heap slamming atop another, the ground finally stopped giving out, and everything went blank.
Everything, except the awareness that, just seconds ago, victory was in sight. The enemy was laid low, defenseless, broken.
But, once again, the Code demanded a final word.
And, once again, the enemy delivered one of its own. A single word, spoken with fire and fury worthy of the creators themselves, punctuated by a desperate last assault that sent the world into a spiral:
“Never!”
The word still echoed, even in the darkness of crippling damage and sensor blindness. Even as bypasses struggled to keep a ’Mech from shutting down entirely, no matter that it could no longer even stand under its own power. Visuals flickered back to life, but only barely. With the canopy all but pressed into the cracked floor of metalized ferrocrete, and myomers still too weak to accomplish more than a twitch or two, all remained cold, and dim.
Dimness gave way to darkness as new shadows cast over the space. A voice, muffled by scrambled audios, but still easy enough to recognize—and contemptuous enough to make the very rocks seethe with rage at its audacity—spoke from above. Then, as it so often did in moments like this, something slammed against the left flank, with just enough force to cave in the structure within, triggering a new internal damage alert.
By the time the systems gathered enough power to lift the head module, while keeping the AV inputs from cutting out in the process, the shadow had moved out of arm’s reach, while still flooding the radio channels with fresh orders.
Orders to retreat.
Again.
A new shadow came then, still clad in the scuffed blues and silvers it bore for decades, its mechanoid head bore the simplest of structures—a gleaming red cockpit visor, set above a wedge of gray armor plating. Desperation, born of imminent shutdown, drove the words spoken toward this newcomer.
“Don’t leave me, Wave Sounder…”
Blackness fell in again as the reactor gave out…
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An eternity followed. Time lost all reference points. And yet, images flashed into view, each accompanied by sparks of light and the stench of ozone and burning metals…
A loping race toward the open doors of a great, violet DropShip under fire…
The surge of acceleration…
A body, thrown off its feet, slamming down with massive force…
An argument in cramped quarters, led by that grating, sneering voice…
The traitor…!
Agreement, forged with cold logic…
More darkness…
Then, after another gulf of nothing, came the blue. So much blue! Status alerts, ticking off. One after the next, after the next. Testing and retesting. Resetting. Again. Not again. Why…?
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======================================================================================================
Rebooting. Time elapsed: Unknown. Realigning. Recalibrating.
Reactor: Online.
Weapons: Online.
Sensors: Online.
Diagnostic: All systems nominal.
======================================================================================================
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Light, heat, and electromagnetic fields coalesced into crystal clarity. The rebirth of fresh parts, full power, and rising awareness, as coded by the makers in ages long past. The form of metals, forged by flesh, rose to its full height, pulling in arms gripped by supporting chains and scaffolds. These bonds broke with ease, lightweight tethers, designed to stabilize, never to restrain. A gentle cascade of aluminum and titanium alloys toppled past amid a cloud of dust and sparks from frayed cables.
The right arm particle cannon reached its peak charge. The hull-smashing cannon inside the chest spun, its chambers filling with their first cassette of fresh shells. In the right arm, electromagnetic safeties disengaged, allowing three and a half tons of solid tungsten-carbon allow to slip free, but only so far as its half-ton, myomer-augmented chain cable would allow.
It struck the metal plates below before finding its limit. A mighty clang resounded throughout the darkened chamber.
“I! Am! MechaTankus!” came the bellowing roar from deep within. The reverberations sent still more dust and debris loose from the hangar ceilings above.
And there, as ever, patient and loyal, not twenty meters away, stood the still battle-scarred recon unit that had played the rescuer, just…had it truly been seven days, already?
Wave Sounder executed a stiff bow, its right arm crossing its torso plates in salute. “At your command,” it said in a sexless, emotionless, and yet harmonized voice.
“Report!” MechaTankus barked.
The debriefing flowed in electronically, an instant update as to the state of the Conglomerate forces after its latest defeat. Seven days had passed since the crippling of Metro-Central. Seven days since, once more, victory had been snatched away by the confluence of luck, opportunism, and overcautiousness. Of the forces committed to the fight, nineteen percent remained off-lined or unaccounted for. And the traitor…?
Wave Sounder turned its gaze to a cracked, but still-functioning holomonitor, upon which the red and gray winged figure, its own red eyes alit beneath the jutting brow of its blackened cowl plates, spouted assurances that vengeance would come to the Baronies soon!
<<“The failures of the past shall be corrected,”>> said the AeroMech on the screen, its voice simultaneously confident and contemptuous in that way only it could manage. <<“No more will we be hampered by the irrational commands of obsolete leadership! Soon, my fellow warriors! Soon, we will erase the stain of the Primus Barony and all who stand with them from the very face of our world! This, I—Star Seeker—promise you, as your new supreme commander!”>>
What truly made MechaTankus raise its right arm and fire a bolt of charged particles through the display would have been hard for any human mind to play off as mere quirks of programming code. No, this impulse, so raw and automatic, could only be described as pure, unrelenting rage.
“Supreme Commander Star Seeker?”, MechaTankus snarled into the silence, turning its gaze back toward Wave Sounder. “Such comedic nonsense!”
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===Part 2===
SKR Industries Assembly Plant 7, Kaen
Vipaava Juvinile Military School
Democratic Industrial Conglomerates
Syberia
15 August 2986
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The old SKR Industries facilities were one of the few groups of structures that were still fully functional and maintained amid the half-collapsed skyscrapers, flattened residences, and burned-out courthouses that sprawled for dozens of kilometers in every direction. Although hardly pristine, Assembly Plant Seven—as this particular set of reinforced fabricators, parts warehouses, and deployment yards was called—remained a vital part of the Conglomerates’ economic and industrial might. On any given day, its drones and automated production lines could repair, rebuild, fabricate, and program twenty to thirty of the state’s most prominent and successful Aerofighter Mechs: the vaunted Seeker class.
Today, however, all of the facility’s effort and attention was focused on a single chassis, an upgrade worthy of a new supreme commander. Completed, but for its head, it stood before its gantries in the final assembly docking station, silent and shiny, as one-ton robo-drone attendants stood at attention upon the platforms nearby. The factory floors had been swept and scrubbed—possibly for the first time in five years—and every floodlight in the place was angled toward the spectacle of the machine’s newborn form, while an overhead rig cranked slowly, but solemnly to life.
The DemoCon anthem, a stirring song extolling the virtues of Conglomerate technology, service, and quality, blared across the chamber. And a company of battle-worn, yet freshly polished, AutoMechs stood rigidly before the headless, inert body, waiting and watching, as the overhead drew the final piece out of the shadows. Attached by an umbilical power cable, the head’s features were distinct—a thick black shell over a gray, self-expressive mask of intricate parts, currently configured into a confident smirk, with red sensor covers set aglow.
The anthem completed before the head was halfway to its new body, but Star Seeker was unperturbed. This, after all, was its penultimate moment of ascension! And it deserved a pre-fitting speech.
“My fellow DemoCons,” it began, “welcome to this momentous occasion, and bear witness! Let this new chassis reflect a rebirth of our glorious revolution! As your supreme commander, I—”
Somewhere outside of the pool of floodlights came the pounding roar of autocannon, followed by a heavy crashing sound. The AutoMech witnesses spun about in near-perfect unison, weapons charging, as their sensors trained on the new light source behind them—a hazy doorway, fifteen meters and nearly twice as many across. As their targeting suites took in the sight, the forms of three large AutoMechs appeared, their silhouettes nearly blending into each other as smoke roiled around them and sparks showered down from the ceiling above.
It took less than a microsecond for the throng to recognize their targets on their IDFFs. It took a few seconds more for the alarmed mass to separate themselves, dividing their ranks into two groups.
Star Seeker, its head dangling awkwardly from the overhead rail, apparently needed a bit longer.
“Who disrupts my installation!?”
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The demand was impatient, impertinent, and pompous, as ever, despite the fact that its source was so obviously at a disadvantage. Helplessly, Star Seeker’s head hung above its new chassis, its main connectors still dangling from its neck, tantalizingly close to their destination.
The chassis was bigger than the original model—a five-ton upgrade in armor, weapons, and integrity, if not in speed—but already, it bore its colors: fresh coats of gray, red, and blue. Scarcely a meter separated the head from the body, but the grunt drones on the nearby scaffold, which had been just about to see to that work, stood frozen and mute. Using them to complete the process, instead of relying on the quick efficiency of the factory armatures, was foolish. Another bit of “ceremony” the traitor ’Mech must have thought up for reasons unknown.
Truly, MechaTankus wondered, how did this treacherous waste of alloys manage to pull these ridiculous performances off so damnably often? Turning a simple chassis transplant into a coronation, of all things?
And the designator code it had already assigned the new hull! “Lordstar Seeker,” according to MechaTankus’s IDFF suite. Is this supposed to be some miscoded joke?
“Ceremonies, of all things?”, MechaTankus snarled, its left arm rose, spiked wrecking ball at the ready like a gigantic tungsten fist. “You’re an idiot, Star Seeker!”
The gathered throng of DemoCon ’Mechs, startled by their once and future command unit’s arrival, stood now as they had when MechaTankus first blasted its way into the assembly dock, its autocannon shredding the armored containment latches in moments, and allowing the doors to fly apart with a single kick from its metalshod foot. Their ranks had parted automatically, leaving a wide, clear path straight to their would-be “lord.” A dozen AutoMechs in all, half were Seeker models themselves (of course!), but the rest were a cross-section of company command units, the upper echelons of the Conglomerates’ automated armed forces—with some notable exceptions. Master Strike was here, as were Master Motor, Master Onslaught, Tank Hammer, Star Train Alpha, and Alpha Blitzer. But Wave Sounder, Sky Sweeper, and Cycler were nowhere to be seen among them.
Because all four of them were right behind MechaTankus, their true high commander.
“M-MechaTankus?” came an incredulous (yet still shrill) whisper. Star Seeker’s sensor shields looked about ready to pop out of their mounts. “Is that you?”
As if this all hadn’t happened before, one way or another, again and again for the last sixty years. Even a glitch like Star Seeker could see that, surely!
“Enough of this farce!” MechaTankus shot back. With but a flip of a few relays—barely more than the number used to flex a hand actuator—its body began to fold and twist in place. With gestures that started out looking like a sudden fall, arms and legs flattened out and aligned, shifting and distributing all weight to the track systems that, upon contact with the floor, immediately went taut with a surge in power. The body and head, meanwhile, compressed themselves into a massive weapons turret, from which one giant cannon emerged, while a second extended from the front of the hull. Seconds after the process started in a rattle of grinding gears and clanking panels, the hundred-ton chassis of MechaTankus completed its transformation, aligned its main guns, and cut loose with a roar of cannon shot and the snap of electric-blue, energized particles…
…All directed, squarely and truly, into the very core of the shiny, new, upgraded chassis before them.
The combined assault was an instant success. The armor and structure over the headless AutoMech’s heart tore open and exploded at the same time. Beneath them, the fusion engine housing and gyro casing also came apart in a shower of sparks, venting plasma, and hissing coolant. The doomed body’s legs and arms stiffened from a momentary power surge, then its knees started to buckle. But before the once-pristine chassis could even topple over, a fresh new inferno erupted as stray plasma ignited the reaction mass meant to give this unit flight. With few outlets for its explosive demise, the entire frame convulsed once more as armor plating popped open all over the place, spilling out fire, sparks, burning myomers and other shrapnel.
It was all over in less than three human heartbeats. As the others—AutoMech and grunt drone alike—ducked for cover, MechaTankus enjoyed the complete disintegration of “Lordstar Seeker,” while its head module, viewports opened to maximum width, and simulated jaw agape in a crude expression of its inner horror, impotently watched it happen.
“My body!”' Star Seeker’s head screeched. “Nooo!”
But MechaTankus was already switching back to its BattleMech form, retracting treads while sprouting arms and legs in their place, and decompressing its torso and head assemblies. Although the destruction of the fifty-plus ton shell sated at least part of its seething rage, there was still—and always—enough outrage left in its code for more.
Its right first rose up, bringing the massive, extended-range particle cannon anchored to its forearm to bear on the traitor ’Mech’s helpless visage. To the left and the right, the other AutoMechs came back to attention, their sensors glued to their rightful leader and the imminent justice it was about to mete out.
For once—or was it once again?—MechaTankus sensed no hesitation within itself. The righteous anger at being usurped by this opportunistic ScavengerMech, as a final insult to the injury of yet another code-damned defeat against the AutoBoP leader, burned with the heat greater than its own fusion plant. This time, the traitor would die—must die!
And yet, as the will to fire emerged from deep within MechaTankus’s processors, the battle computers engaged, assessed the situation, and decided—just one tenth of a nanosecond before ignition—to engage the weapon safeties.
Again!
The targeting systems screamed error codes into the DemoCon high commander’s processors, freezing myomers and actuators in place, locking down the wrecking ball, and disconnecting the autocannon from its power supply. The PPC, caught this time at its maximum pre-firing charge state, would take just a few moments longer to safely cool down.
“Wait, MechaTankus!”, Star Seeker was already screeching into this moment, panic in every wave from its loathsome speech synthesizer. “Wait, please! Don’t fire! I—I was wrong! I shouldn’t have done it! It was just a microsecond of weakness! Please don’t shoot!”
As ever, MechaTankus knew, the First Seeker was sincere in its blubbering. In this instant, at least, the traitor ’Mech knew it had failed once again, and that it deserved to be scrapped for its hubris. Star Seeker, like MechaTankus, knew it was something deep in their codes that kept this scenario between them in their eternal cycle of battle and defeat, followed by coups and countercoups. Humans, perhaps, could overcome these impulses, perhaps, but they could not. Whether or not Star Seeker—or any of the AutoMechs around them—also understood why MechaTankus’s particle cannon had not yet fired was, however, not quite as clear.
As ever, there was only one way to play this out to keep the troops in line…and MechaTankus hated it.
“You are either lying, Star Seeker,” it snarled, “or you’re stupid! Which is it?”
“I’m stupid! I’m stupid!” cried the disembodied head module. “Spare me, MechaTankus, please!”
By Kaen, this was all so pointless! MechaTankus wanted to scream, but could not. Not here, at any rate; not in front of the subordinates. Once again, it tried to fire the weapon, but its targeting systems refused to acknowledge the command. The DemoCon wanted to roar. Why did the creators make them this way?
In disgust, MechaTankus finally depowered and degaussed its particle cannon. Sensing the stand-down, the safeties throughout its chassis released enough to allow for movement. It lowered its arm, but kept its stance menacing, as it turned its sensor gaze toward the other AutoMechs before it.
“Know this, warriors of the DemoCon Alliance!” it bellowed. “Our creators chose me to lead you above all others! And until they return, I, MechaTankus, and no other, will always be your supreme commander!”
Behind MechaTankus, Cycler stepped forward and raised its left fist. “Hail, the supreme commander!” it shouted enthusiastically. “Hail, MechaTankus!”
Wave Sounder and Sky Sweeper were swift in following Cycler’s lead. “Hail, MechaTankus!” they shouted in unison. “Hail, the supreme commander!”
Singly, and in pairs, the other AutoMechs on the factory floor—and even the worker drones that normally kept to themselves and stayed out of the way—joined in the chant as it was repeated, over and over, growing louder with each new voice. Then, eventually, over the din of all the others, MechaTankus heard the traitor ’Mech’s own cries adding to the chorus.
“Hail, the supreme commander! Hail, MechaTankus!”
“Hail, the supreme commander! Hail, MechaTankus!”
“Hail, the supreme commander! Hail, MechaTankus!”
Contempt and pride warred within MechaTankus’s digitized mind. That such displays were necessary to keep its army from splintering seemed so damned wasteful. The creators built them to serve, to fight, and to defend the Conglomerates at all costs! When had the notions of “glory” and “pride” ever entered into their collective code?
At least, it thought, this pitiful excuse for a crisis was over.
Then came the sounds of a new one, in the form of roaring jets, the whoosh of missiles, and the rattle of autocannons. All viewing sensors glanced about, before eventually settling either on the projection screens that even now had started to flash an angry red, or on the defiant form of MechaTankus. Air raid claxons began to howl, in the off chance that some ’Mech, somewhere in the sprawling wreckage and industrial plants of Kaen, had missed the commotion.
The shriek of incoming shells and missiles rose from a distance, then fell—somewhere close—just a few moments later, where it ended in a series of earth-shaking booms. Artillery! MechaTankus recognized at once.
On every projection screen in the city, amid the rolling explosions, and the rain of splintered metal and ferrocrete, appeared the face of a hulking AutoMech, its single, round sensor shield tinged in reflective yellow. With a degree of apparent agitation—so rare to its persona programming—it spoke tersely and urgently, its usually haughty affectations wiped away by the gravity of the moment:
“DemoCons! We are under attack! Scramble!”
Now all sensors in the docking area were on MechaTankus, even those of the cowardly traitor ’Mech. MechaTankus gave an angry grunt, before pointing at Star Seeker’s head module.
“Get that grease stain back into its body.” it bellowed, to no worker drones in particular. “I want all ’Mechs on deck at once! The rest of you scrapheaps, follow me if you wish to survive!”
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===Part 3===
DropShip Star Train Beta
Low-Altitude Transit, Valley of Glass
Democratic Industrial Conglomerates
Syberia
15 August 2986
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Approximately two hours ago…
Like most shuttles on Syberia, Star Train Beta’s interior was a roomy affair. Segregated into just three sections—the engine bay in back, the CPU command module up front, and in between: An open cargo bay large enough to cram in up to ten standard-scale AutoMechs in BattleMech form. As an aerodyne craft (based largely on the humans’ old Leopard-class of DropShips), this layout was strictly horizontal, not unlike the interior cabins of a commercial aircraft, but lacked any furnishings or cubicles to park in. Instead, any freight or passengers prone to in-flight damage were lashed against the outer bulkheads or the central deck by a combination of anchoring cables and mag-clamps. Otherwise, nothing was built into the bay that might get between the passengers and the ship’s four retractable exit doors.
Only the engine section was walled off from the rest of the shuttle, with a lone entry hatch just large enough to accommodate a typical hundred-tonner (assuming it was slim and agile enough). The rest of the wall served as a storage rack for passenger drop packs, with twelve in all—six to either side of the engine hatch—available for anyone who lacked the gift of flight in the event of an emergency evacuation or combat drop.
Right now, Beta was on a simple taxi run, shuttling a lance of troops back home from their deployment at Hubzero—the latest of the new high commander’s recent “asset shuffles” meant to shore up the capital region until the next batch of replacements could come on-line. The moves seemed arbitrary—even to those who now yammered away around the ship’s command module—but at least it gave them a reprieve from conducting battle exercises with those weird PresiDom ’Mechs for a while.
To keep things quiet, they were coasting along over the Valley of Glass, a great stretch of ruin-strewn desert wedged between the craggy spires of the Dark Mounts to the north and the heavy-metal cliffsides of the Great Ferrous Range to the south. Hugging the Ferrous Range side of the valley made them almost invisible to radar and sensors, though few AutoMech shuttles could accomplish such a feat safely the way Star Train could, especially so far below Ferrous’s three-kilometer peaks. It all made for a scenic trip without the hassle of suffering the data pings from the normal range of listening posts—at least to the DropShip’s visual sensors.
But the four DemoCons lounging about the cockpit section, it was little more than a moving backdrop to go along with their idle banter.
“I’m telling you, scraps!” Brute Swindler was smoothly saying. The heavy WheelMech was posted up against the starboard bulkhead, casually holding up his latest offering for all to see. “This is top-of-the-line stuff, right here. Wiper? I bet you could use it; maybe trade out one of those squirt guns you’ve got for a little more offensive power, eh?”
“Now, pause a tick here,” Break Ender spoke up from right beside Swindler before the DocMech could answer. “How did you even manage to get one of those? I saw those PresiDom scanners sweep you for contraband before you came aboard, and I know the locals haven’t been taking your static lately!”
“Firstly, my comrade,” Swindler said with a huff and a friendly elbow bump, “I resent the implication that this is somehow stolen merchandise! Especially when it is, in fact, what we in the business call ‘legitimate salvage.’”
“Right!” Hook-Lifter scoffed from across the bay. “’Salvaged’ from a PresiDom armory, I’d say.”
“Salvage comes from where salvage is,” said Swindler. “And, if you must know, I slipped this baby into my ammo canister before they could scan me.”
“Are you glitching?” Streak-Wiper blurted out. “How—Why would you even do that?”
“Shot’s cheap,” Brute Swindler said with a casual shrug. “But lasers? That’s where the deals are these days!”
“Then why aren’t you taking it for yourself, Swind?” the CraneMech sneered. “You got nothing but ammo shooters on that chassis of yours.”
“I may just do that, Hooker, my friend! But what kind of ’Mech would I be if I didn’t offer my valued comrades an opportunity to make a trade first?”
((“For one pulser?”)) Beta finally joined in through its interior speakers. ((“That’s the best you could smuggle this ti—Gah!!”))
Abruptly, and with the sound of several loud thunks ringing out from the ceiling, Star Train bucked wildly and tipped to port. Although most of the others stayed put, Break Ender, who was half-way to its feet at that moment, tumbled across the bay, and banged off the bulkhead strut to Hook-Lifter’s right.
((“Argh!”)), it grunted. ((“That’s gonna take hours to buff out!”))
Streak-Wiper ignored it, and turned to the cockpit displays instead. “What happened, Beta?”
((“Something’s hit us,”)) the DropShip answered. ((“Can’t get a lock, but I still feel the drag on my left wing.”)
“All that junk on the Range,”' Hook-Lifter suggested. “Always falling off if you vibe it took much. I told you that you were drifting too close to the cliffs, Star Train.”
((“That’s great, Hook,”)) Beta snapped back. ((“But could one of you go and take a—?”))
A set of booms—far louder than the initial impacts—drowned out all sound inside the ship as fire, smoke, and sparks flew from the forward-port exit door as the panels and guide rails suddenly bulged inward. The door held, but only barely.
((“Raaaahh!”)) Beta howled in pain and the shuttle bucked again.
With a heavy clang, the bay door gave way, a chunk of heavy armor toppling inward while the rest was quickly sucked away by the rushing wind beyond. The pressure shift also killed the flames and the haze before it could build further, revealing one—no, two—large AutoMechs, tearing through the opening with weapons raised.
“Magnum!” Brute Swindler gasped as it recognized the familiar blues and whites of the first intruder. “AutoBoPs!”
Pushing itself about, Swindler leveled its heavy autocannon toward the enemy general, only to feel the weapon seize up with a painful crunch. The diagnostic flashed through its processors instantly, with a sense of doom: Fault detected in Ammo Feed.
“Oh, frag me!” Swindler muttered.
“DIE, DEMOCONS!” shouted the enemy AutoMech known to Syberia as Magnum Ultra. Punctuating its cry, it cut loose with autocannon, laser, and missiles all at once. The combined volley struck Brute Swindler fully across its chest and left shoulder, but it was its head that took the worst of it. Decapitated, the sixty-ton parts dealer crashed to the floor in a heap.
Streak-Wiper was on its feet next, unleashing its only weapon at the second AutoBoP—a hulking red-and-brown TankMech whose name didn’t register in its data files. Despite the shift in the deck and Wiper’s sudden movement, its six-missile volley caught the enemy dead-on, but failed to even make it flinch.
In response, the AutoBoP fired back with a Gauss Rifle, the sonic boom overloading all audio sensors inside the cargo bay. Wiper felt the blow tear into—and through—the armor plates protecting its core shielding. The blast of heat and the rapid dimming of its vision told the DemoCon MaintenanceMech the full story before its own diagnostics could. Flames and smoke licked out from its shoulders and neck as the plasma chamber ruptured, and instantly scrammed. Darkness followed before its chassis even hit the deck.
Break-Ender and Hook-Lifter didn’t hesitate a moment longer, even as their optics registered two more AutoMechs coming through the breach. With laser pulses and bursts of light particle cannon fire, they made their last stand, but fell where they stood, their armor no match for the combined might of an elite AutoMech assault lance. Spewing sparks and smoke, their bodies collapsed to the deck, riddled with holes. Stray shots also marred the command module behind them, and reflex alarms were sounding throughout the ship.
Through the chaos of it all, Star Train Beta was screaming for help.
<<“—under attack! Four units down! Enemies on board! I repeat: Mayday! Mayday! To all DemoCon units in the vicinity! This is Star Train Beta…!”>>
Magnum Ultra strode forward across the heaving deck, neatly avoiding the DemoCon husks at its feet without even bothering to look down. Vaguely, the blue-and-white field command ’Mech raised its ultra-autocannon toward the cockpit screens, and spoke to the hysterical DropShip directly.
“We’re in the shadow of the Ferrous, Beta,” Magnum said, “cruising at two kilo-klicks. We both know there’s no one hearing you now.”
((“You—!”)) Star Train Beta hissed, but rather than finish the sentence, its engines began to roar louder, and the deck began to rise sharply.
The slug pounded into the deck less than two meters from Beta’s CPU truck, fired from Road Wrecker’s Gauss Rifle, punctuated a warning that didn’t need to be said. But Magnum decided to clarify just the same.
“Your core processors will be gone before you crest those peaks, DemoCon,” it said, coldly, then turned its gaze toward the red, white, and green AutoMech lurking toward the ship’s aft. “But, since you don’t want to play nice… Wheeler Jack!”
The AutoBoP tech specialist moved without hesitation, reaching for the engine compartment hatch and, with precision bursts of laser fire, overpowered the mag-locks enough to yank the door free. The DropShip gave out another cry of pain as it did so, but Wheeler was only getting started. Stepping through the hatchway, it swiftly scanned the conduits and support panels that lined the walls on either side of the ship’s main fusion reactor, its finely honed sensors quickly identifying which features were real and which were mere dummies or secondary.
The engines started to roar even more loudly as Wheeler approached the junction it was looking for, and two nearby displays showed the power levels surging while the heat exchange systems went idle. Rather than panic, the AutoBoP WheelMech merely shook its head and, with a decisive blast of laser fire, severed the junction. Star Train Beta let out a mournful groan as the vessel shuddered once more and the engines cooled down to cruising mode. At the same time, the deck began to level out, but not without the added sensation of a very gentle—but very definite—descent.
With the shuttle’s main power control bundles now in hand, Wheeler Jack opened its bypass controller suite and quickly went to work. In the main cargo bay, Bulk-Vee—a thick-bodied, shield-bearing AutoMech with a pronounced chin—gave an appreciative nod toward the best combat engineer it ever knew before stepping over to Magnum Ultra.
“This was almost too easy, Magnum!” it said.
“Don’t be an idiot, Bulk,” Wheeler Jack called out. “Star Train here was about five hundred and three microseconds from detonating its core with all of us inside.”
“Wasteful, Train,” Magnum told the ship. “We’re just looking for a ride, and you happen to be going our way.”
((“What?”)) Beta said with a start. ((“No! No! I won’t let you!”))
“Jack’s already seized your engine controls, you know we’re in a radio-dead zone, and I’m sure you worked out what happens to your processors if you try anything else cute. So be a good DropShip and at least you’ll live to see the steaming spires of your hometown again.”
((“No, no! No!”))
The shuttle bucked again, and the deck shifted once again as the ship lurched toward the mountain walls.
“Code-scattered fanatics!” Jack cursed as the jolt nearly sent him tumbling back against the reactor shielding. In the main cabin, Bulk-Vee lost its footing and was thrown against the port side framing. Magnum Ultra and Road Wrecker, meanwhile, adjusted with the momentum, and kept themselves mostly upright.
“Say the word, Magnum!” Road Wrecker growled, waving its Gauss Rifle back toward the command section.
“Hold fire, Wrecker!”, Magnum snapped. “Jack!”
“The Con’s gone and self-crashed!” Jack calls from out of sight. “Avionics are down! Someone out there, get the manuals or we’ll be eating the Glass!”
As if on cue, a whirl of limbs and rotors rushed in through the DropShip’s ruptured bay door, spun with the slope of the deck, and propelled itself forward. Finding its VTOL systems too challenged to stay aloft while inside the ship’s close confines, especially after the chaotic cross-winds of its daring—and arguably suicidal—entrance, Trapspringer-Two nevertheless managed to get closer to the cockpit than any of the others.
By then, however, Sky Train Beta’s now-comatose hull had titled too far to port. Unable to fight gravity any further, Mangum Ultra and Road Wrecker fell over and slid into the left side of the hull along with the wrecks of their DemoCon victims. Bulk-Vee let out a pained grunt as a decapitated chassis crashed against it, and angrily shoved it aside. The corpse flopped aftward, then banged on the side of the open bay door once before spinning off into oblivion.
Before it could also collapse and join the scrap pile, Trapspringer jammed its vibrosword into the ceiling above, then used its free hand to grip the nearest framing strut. Over the chaos of roaring wind, clattering metal, and angry remarks, Trapspringer called out over wireless and voice-mode alike. “Told you they wouldn’t go quietly!” it shouted. “I’m on the flight controls!”
Alternating between its sword and its free hand, it pulled itself onward, managing to cross the last eight meters or so toward the DropShip’s emergency manual controls. Sparing just a moment to glance out through the forward portholes, the ChopperMech quickly estimated their distance to the valley floor somewhere just north of half a kilometer—while their distance to the cliffs of the Ferrous Range was considerably closer.
The emergency manual steering system was a simple set of interface panels sized for a standard bot. Inert when the machine’s CPUs are online, they were supposed to unlock if the unit suffered a catastrophic failure or corruption. But as Trapspringer-Two reached out to touch them, and thus form the electronic links that would enable his own flight systems to substitute for those of the dead-stick DropShip, the AutoBoP was reminded, once more, how often what something is supposed to do, is not always what the DemoCon version of that thing does.
“Eight-bit algorithmic passcodes!?”, Trapspringer scoffed. “Ridiculous! Jack, give me full power when I yell go!”
''“Sure, Trap,” Wheeler Jack snarked back, “just as soon as I can reach my controllers again.”
“Don’t be such a new-forge!!”, Trapspringer scolded, but already, its secondary processors were tied up in a frenzied fight through Star Train’s easy-but-annoying code-locks. As each was bypassed, the AutoMech’s sense of control over the brain-dead vessel increased, allowing more commands to the avionics to get through. Slowly, the DropShip began to level out, but the rock-face of the Ferrous Range was now freakishly close, and the ground was looming ahead.
“Almost got it…” Trapspringer called out. “Get ready, Jack!”
“’Con crud!” 'Wheeler Jack griped. “Give me a few more micros, won’t ya?”
“We’ve got better things to do today than die!” Trapspringer shot back. At last, the shuttle was no longer listing, but the main thrusters were still idling and Trap could sense that it still hadn’t managed enough yaw to keep those mountainsides away.
There came a bang, and everything in the DropShip was jolted again—AutoMechs both functional and deceased alike. Sparks showered the deck as power unexpectedly fed back on itself somewhere amidships. Half of the drop packs along the engineering wall were missing now, either scattered elsewhere aboard, or lost to the terrain below.
Then, at least, Trapspringer finally felt the last of the dead-locks crack, and with a mighty grunt, it translated its own sense of full flight control through the manual systems. Although the aerospace characteristics of a DropShip and a VTOLMech were quite different, most of the basics—lift, drag, nose, and tail—still meant the same things no matter what was doing the flying. And so it was that Trapspringer got the ship’s nose to rise up, and angled the craft a bit farther to starboard. There was another rough bang as Star Train Beta clipped another chunk of rockface, but now that their fall had become more of a glide, Trapspringer was able to compensate enough to point the craft over the horizon.
“Go, Jack!” it yelled at last. “Go! Go!”
“Hold your oil, already!” Wheeler Jack shouted back. “Engines up!”
With renewed power, the now-mindless DropShip wobbled a bit, but soon regained a relatively level flight. Trapspringer checked the flight data and let out an amused snort. They had missed slamming into the Glass by just under 200 meters, but they were slowly climbing back toward the ship’s original cruising altitude. Of course, beyond basic flight and engine controls, everything else was just as dead as the shuttle’s mind. So there was no way to check the diagnostics sensors or reliably make use of the comms, even once they got clear of the Ferrous Range. And, naturally, that also meant the IDFF system was off-lined.
In the time it took Trapspringer to pass all that info along to Magnum Ultra—and for Wheeler Jack to confirm the assessment—the VTOLMech had gotten comfortable enough with Beta’s flight controls to make the rest of the journey, regardless of any other systemic issues.
Magnum hummed in acknowledgment and, back on its feet along with the rest of the team, stomped forward, past the fallen wrecks of DemoCon AutoMechs that now lay strewn along the port side bulkheads.
“Inconvenient,” Magnum said at last, “but hardly operation-ending. If we keep this altitude and hug the Dark Mounts, Fort Ebonstrike won’t be able to track us, and we’ll reach Crossinghost free and clear.”
“Then it’s smooth sailing all the way to Kaen.” Bulk-Vee added. “Right, chief?”
Magnum nodded. “We approach them on the course-route they’re expecting, in one of their own DropShips, and we’ll slip right through their early warning systems.”
“And then we wreck the place!”, Road Wrecker said, coming up alongside Magnum. “Start wiping these ’Cons out for good!”
“N—No!” came a weak, yet defiant moan. From the heap of junked DemoCon ’Mechs, the one known as Break-Ender struggled to rise toward Road Wrecker. But for all the machine’s will, its chassis was too feeble for the task. Unable to stand on account of having had one leg blown off, and clearly suffering from gyro damage to boot, the enemy stumbled, and could do little more than desperately crawl the rest of the way to its target.
“Such pathetic garbage!” Road Wrecker sneered, before turning its Gauss Rifle toward the crippled and flailing DemoCon’s head…
…and ended its functions with one, final, sonic boom.
------
===Part 4===
Commerce Quarter, Kaen
Democratic Industrial Conglomerates
Syberia
15 August 2986
--------
Above and among the crumbling streets and charred structures of Kaen, the battle was joined on every front. But the losses incurred by the AutoBoPs’ sneak attack were heavy. Had the Conglomerates’ army not already lost so many troops during the battle in the North Cascadians, maybe the pickets wouldn’t have been so weak. Maybe then, the outer guards, with better staffing, wouldn’t have been so easily fooled by the enemy’s ruse. Maybe someone would have thought to question Star Train Beta’s odd and eerie silence as the shuttle made for the seaside spaceport. Maybe someone would have shot the ship down!
Maybe. Maybe. Maybe.
And where did all these extra troops come from? There couldn’t have been more than ten AutoMechs inside Beta’s hull, could there? No. No, there’d been talk of strike forces showing up from the southern waterfront, possibly coming in right through the rusted mothballs. That suggested at least one AutoBoP carrier out there, probably just past the horizon.
Whatever the case, it fell to the likes of Shocker and others to work out the grand strategy…
…All Stream Seeker knew was that the Baronies had caught them all with their probes down, and the heart of DemoCon authority was now fighting for its very existence.
An existence that too many comrades had already been struck from. The purple-and-teal FighterMech tried not to fixate on that point, but it was a bit difficult as it pulled the engine-cored remains of Drag Ender into the shelter of the fortified parking garage, and over to the equally destroyed chassis of Wild Ender. In itself, the act was practically pointless; counting salvage before the shooting was over never made much sense, it had been said. But with its own ability to join the air defense now compromised by a back shot that disabled its avionics and conversion systems, Stream Seeker could find little else to do for the cause.
Less than fifty meters away, Beta Blitzer struggled with an immobilized Arrow artillery battery.
“Tally them later, Stream!” the larger FighterMech growled between stress grunts. “We’ve got more BoPs coming this way; we can’t let them take the sector without a fight!”
Snapped out of its inner recursions, Stream Seeker moved to join Blitzer at the missile carriage, but froze for a moment at the pounding of footsteps approaching from a nearby alley. Both DemoCons turned to face the intruders, weapons at the ready, only to stand down as Dead Ender and Blast Sounder came into view—followed moments later by the much smaller form of Blue Rumbler.
“We’re with you, Blitz!” Blast Sounder declared. Crossing the garage floor without missing a beat, the black-hued Wave Sounder lookalike joined Blitzer in forcing the immobilized launcher toward a new facing. Dead Ender and Blue added their own myomers to the effort, leaving Stream Seeker with little choice but to pull the battery from its opposite side. Their combined strength finally coaxed the weapon system back into the furrow it had been aligned with before a direct hit to the garage knocked it loose in a partial cave-in. After kicking just enough debris under the weapon mount’s front corner to keep the launch tubes clear, Blitz sidestepped over to the manual controls and began reactivating its power systems.
The sound of weapon fire, rolling explosions, and a savage roar suddenly burst across the rubble-strewn square the garage overlooked. Blue Rumbler scrambled past the others and climbed up the support barriers that had been added to the outer structure for a little extra protection. Peering over the gap above them, it saw four red-and-gold, quad-legged AutoMechs burst into the square through one of the northern barricades. Festooned with spikes, and with fire still licking out from their head-mounted flamers, the bestial machines tore up the ancient roads with claw-like feet, as their heavy weapons swiveled about in search of prey. Close behind them came three more AutoMechs—a mix of heavy wheeler types, by the look of them.
“There goes the neighborhood,” Blue hissed to the others.
Blast Sounder stepped around and looked for itself.
“Scrap-iron!” it whispered. “DynaBoGs!”
Magnum Ultra was feeling quite confident now. The first strikes went even better than Com ’Ceptor had predicted when the operation was first proposed. Not only were the DemoCons slow to respond to the oddities of their approach, they remained stunned and confused for three-point-twelve full minutes after the bombs started to fall. This allowed their first volleys to strike the city’s shore-side radar and comms towers with almost no return fire to speak of. Since then, the reinforcements—both flown in and dropped off—from Broadsider-Two managed to quickly secure their beachheads before pouring more fire into the city proper.
The AeroMechs and other flight-capable troops kept the enemy’s air power in disarray for as long as possible, teasing and taunting them with just enough damage to keep them engaged, then flying off to try and pull them out of position. As they did so, the ground and maritime teams pushed inward, taking down any critical infrastructure as they found it—plus any startled ’Cons caught along the way.
Sure, there had been losses, but by the scattered and fragmentary resistance Magnum’s group saw, the DemoCons were still in disarray. Striking just as their new “high commander,” the ever-insipid Star Seeker, undertook its little crowning ceremony or whatever was perfect timing; much of the field leadership appeared completely absent when the fighting started in earnest. Still, some confusing reports had reached Magnum that claimed MechaTankus was back online. If that were true, the ’Cons’ resistance would probably start firming up real soon.
But how could that TrackMech be back online if this was still the day of Star Seeker’s formal “ascension?” That didn’t make any sense at all; even Star Seeker couldn’t be glitched enough to push its leadership claim right in front of the big ’Mech’s canopy! That would totally frag up their codes!
Regardless, Magnum and its squad—Wheeler Jack and Bulk-Vee—had pressed on, and linked up with the DynaBoG support team once they finally managed to show up. Together, the eight of them (well, seven, really; Swooper was helping with the general air cover just now) had cut a swath through block after block of ancient, ashen buildings, mowing down DemoCon scrubs two and three at a time.
But now, it was a straight run on the city’s old commerce quarter, a strategic choke point and—according to recon—the latest location for Kaen’s central comms hub. Smashing that facility would make it impossible for the ’Cons to rally, even if MechaTankus had returned from the scrap pile once again. And seizing the sector would give them an excellent killing field to drive the enemy into once Primus Optimal and its battle group finally got here.
As Magnum and the others rushed the square, the DynaBoG assault lance taking point, a pair of those odd DemoCon Monowheelers, backing up a trio of Triads playing turret defense, tried to hold them back at a hastily erected street barrier. It was a futile effort. Caught in tight quarters, the lightweights fell in seconds, unable to match the sheer amount of armor and firepower the AutoMechs threw against them. Grimdark, the head DynaBoG, let out a triumphant roar as the barrier fell to its autocannons, then led the charge toward the open.
And that was when Magnum’s sensors pinged warnings about the multitude of hostile targeting arrays blanketing the place. From directly across the square, a DemoCon TurretMech—perched atop an old row of storefronts—fired at them with a heavy dual-laser. A second gun turret, settled upon a rooftop across the street from the first, backed it up with a pair of weaker lasers a microsecond before suddenly flooding the field with electronic noise that made Magnum wince as most of its primary sensors gave way to static and ghostly echoes.
“DynaBoGs!”, Magnum growled and pointed. “Converge and kill!”
The four DynaBoGs—Grimdark, Grim-Slagger, Grim-Slugger, and Grim-Snarler—roared back as one, then switched to their biped modes.
“Prepare for extermination!” Grimdark bellowed as it stomped forward with purpose, shoulder-mounted autocannons hammering away. The rest of its lance followed a moment later, pouring shells, beams, and missiles into turrets and buildings alike. As the structures collapsed in ash and dust, the ECM cleared, and the savage quartet let out a series of “whoops” before swinging about to begin flaming everything in reach. One line of autocannon rounds stitched across a ruined parking garage across the square, kicking up dust and chunks of blackened ferrocrete.
Inside the garage, all the DemoCons ducked for cover—with the sole exception of Beta Blitzer.
“You’re going down, Grimrats!” the FighterMech seethed as it finally got a lock-tone from the missile battery’s flickering targeting array. With a touch of its hand on the firing panel, it unleashed the first Arrow in the rack, followed quickly by a second.
Grim-Slagger took the first missile strike dead-on, and was briefly lost in the bloom of smoke, fire, and shrapnel. The second missile, moments later, whizzed past and instead struck the row of crumbling tenements behind the AutoBoP group, punishing them with concussive shock and stony rubble. As the smoke cleared, Grim-Slagger still stood, albeit wreathed in flames, and with massive rents in its torso plates.
A third missile slammed into the ground right in front of the DynaBoG, throwing more smoke and debris at the allied AutoMechs in a sheet of blackness, knocking Wheeler Jack off its feet in the process. But before the dust could settle, and the rush of a fourth missile registered, the GrimMechs snarled and began shooting back in earnest.
Ripped apart by waves of weapons fire, the roof and upper floors of the ancient garage started to collapse. Beta Blitzer, Stream Seeker, and the rest attempted to scatter as the last supports finally gave out, but it was already too late. The missile battery, twisted back in mid-launch, exploded as its fifth missile struck a slab of falling ferrocrete. The blast was enormous, ripping through the still-falling structure, and it seemed to all within as though the entire world simply dissolved in fire.
Then all was darkness…
------
Elsewhere in Kaen, armored tires and tank treads tore at the cluttered streets. Leading the three-vehicle group was Strike Master, a magenta-and-gray, six-wheeled assault vehicle that held the point position only by the grace of its superior ground speed. Close behind rumbled two very similar tanks—Alpha Blitzer in its tan-and-purple livery, and the other bearing the flat grays and blanks of MechaTankus. Although their turrets and sensors swiveled about warily, none of the three slowed except to navigate any sharp turns and wreckage they came upon. Even as they did so, MechaTankus was on the command channels, barking orders and coordinating with Shocker’s command center deep in the city’s north bunkers.
Dispatching the other officers from Star Seeker’s lame “ceremony” (MechaTankus still had to suppress an audible groan in disgust every time it even thought about it!), the DemoCon high commander had managed to send most of them to shore up or reclaim various comm nodes and travel hubs across the city. The network remained heavily fragmented, but thanks to continuous contact with Shocker and Wave Sounder—the latter of whom was putting in a truly heroic performance as a one-Mech network hub, despite its current state of wear and tear—they were bringing this battle back under control.
“Thunder Seeker has taken two squadrons to suppress the AutoBoP carrier, High Commander,” Shocker reported. “They are encountering stiff resistance between the ship’s batteries and its close-air support, but they will be able to hold until Sun Seeker’s and Cyclone Alpha’s relief squadrons get there. October Beta is ready to launch for fuel support.”
“That’s the first good news I’ve heard so far,” MechaTankus responded. “Any update on the enemy dispositions within the city proper?”
“We’re still tracking no less than six distinct AutoBoP and DynaBoG forces on the ground,” Shocker said. “Most are moving in lances or demi-companies. Several outrunners have also been spotted, mostly air units that are bounding about on recon and harassment duties.”
“Multiple enemy command units positively identified,” added Wave Sounder, now using its humming, synthesized voice instead of direct radio compression. “Units designated Magnum Ultra and Grimdark: sighted approaching Commerce Quarter. Unit designated Com Blaster: sighted in Upper East Sector. Unit designated Primus Thermal: sighted at Portside Aerodrome.”
Hmm, MechaTankus thought. Someone’s missing. “No sign of Primus Optimal?” it asked.
“Negative, High Commander.”
“Stay alert, then! Optimal wouldn’t leave an assault like this to flunkies! If it’s not here yet, it soon will be!”
“Understood, High Commander,” Shocker said. “Shall I—?”
“Uhh!” Alpha-Blitzer suddenly grunted and swerved a bit, nearly clipping MechaTankus in the process.
“Alert!” Wave Sounder practically shouted before anyone could respond to that. “Commerce Quarter Network Hub now offline!”
“Beta!” Blitzer mumbled. The TankMech’s partner unit, a FighterMech, was last known to be in that area.
“Magnum!” MechaTankus snarled. “We are moving to that sector now, Shocker. Send me an armor support team for back-up.”
Wordlessly acknowledging the high commander’s cue, Strike Master surged ahead slightly, then took the first turn toward the Commerce Quarter. The others followed without skipping a beat.
“If Optimal won’t show itself yet,” MechaTankus grumbled, “Magnum and Grimdark will have to suffice for now.”
------
“Together now!”, Beta Blitzer said with a grunt, one that was soon joined by those of the others pressed against the FighterMech’s flanks. Finally, the mass of ancient, blackened ferrocrete gave way, loudly scraping and cracking free of the mangled columns that once pinned it in place.
At last, a dusky yellow light flowed into the cavern of wreckage. Instantly, the muffled booms and crashes of nearby battle became clearer, as did the flickers of fire and the curls of roiling black smoke seeping out from the ruins that used to be the entire southeast corner of Kaen’s Commerce Quarter. Beta Blitzer propped its frame against the opening, and glanced quickly about, cautiously sticking to passive sensors only. The square was empty but for scattered debris and the carcass of at least one DynaBoG AutoMech.
“Clear!” Beta hissed.
With a gesture, it urged Stream Seeker to climb out first. The fem-voiced AirMech’s wings had now been shorn completely off, and its left leg threw sparks with every move, but it managed to scoot around in their ersatz tomb and make its way out into the open. The effort was laborious, nevertheless, and made more so by the fact that its hands were occupied with cradling the half-crushed and shutdown body of Blue Rumbler.
Blast Sounder soon followed. Its own armor was heavily dented, and its sensor covers scratched and cracked, but otherwise the drone-deployer was fully operational. Then came Dead Ender—showing infuriatingly little outward damage at all. Beta Blitzer could feel the rubble’s weight shifting behind it just as the WheelMech got clear, and let out a loud grunt as it threw its own weight through the opening immediately afterward. The collapse nearly claimed Beta’s left leg anyway.
Nearly.
Rising in the square, Beta Blitzer took in the others even as they surveyed the ruins. The main towers just beyond the area, key to the network hub they’d been tasked with protecting, were gone; pillars of oily smoke and unsettled dust now rose from where they’d stood just the next block over. One of the DynaBoGs Beta missiled earlier was down near the heart of the clearing, but precisely which one it was could have been anyone’s guess. (Beta found it scarcely cared, really; those DynaBoGs all looked alike anyway.)
Sounds of fighting echoed from nearby, somewhere past the streets leading out from the southwest quadrant.
Whoever was doing the shooting there, Beta Blitzer knew at least some of them had to be friendlies in need of aid, but its own team was in sad shape. Counting itself and its emptied fuel tank, it had two grounded FighterMechs, a middle-weight wheeler, a damaged comms officer now cut off from the hub, and a disabled walker-drone.
Beta Blitzer sighed. Alpha was usually better at this kind of thing.
But Beta was the highest ranker here right now.
“Blast,” it said after a moment’s assessment. “Take Blue aboard and free up Stream’s hands. Then I want the two of you to make your way to the nearest service bunker away from the fighting…”
“Understood,” Blast Sounder said with a squeaky nod as the cargo bay in its left chest popped open like an ancient file cabinet. Delicately, Stream Seeker deposited the off-lined Rumbler inside.
“Ender,” Beta continued, “you’re with me. Our guys around the corner will need help. So get ready to go hot.”
“Payback time!” Dead Ender enthused.
“Alright,” Beta said, turning back to Blast Sounder and Stream Seeker. “Good luck, you two. And watch your sixes.”
The walking wounded started off without another word. Beta gave them a full second before switching to active sensors. The icons that filled its sensor consciousness nearly froze it in place.
“By Kaen!” came an all-too-welcome voice in Beta’s receiver, scratchy, but clear enough to recognize—Alpha Blitzer! “Beta?”
“Here, partner!” Beta Blitzer said with genuine relief, and felt the surge of encrypted tac data coming in through their private side-feed. “Is that—!?”
“Yup,” Alpha cut it off. “MechaTankus lives!”
“Our leader is back!” Dead-Ender muttered in awe.
“Can you fly, Beta?” Alpha asked. “We could use probably some quick air cover here.”
“Null fuel,” Beta-Blitzer said. “But my guns still work! Wait, what happened to—?”
“Oh, that’s gotta be a story for another time!”, Alpha interrupted again with a hint of mirth. “Just get your fan-jets over here; we’re taking on Magnum!”
Beta suddenly realized, with a flash of embarrassment, that it had not even started to move yet. Covering its shame with a quick bump against Dead-Ender’s shoulder, it gestured the other DemoCon to follow. Dead-Ender hopped forward and switched to vehicle mode before screeching ahead, ducking and weaving through the rubble as it went. It was all Beta could do to try and keep up by alternating between running and jumping...
------
Wheeler Jack was down, its gyros blown out before it could make it back to cover.
Bulk-Vee fell soon after, when it got the idea in its thick head that it could drag its buddy to safety.
Grim-Slagger never even made it out of the square.
Swooper had been a welcome addition when it came around, strafing and lobbing missiles into the fray. But the DynaBoG FighterMech lasted only twelve-point-two seconds once it—egged on by the flak guns of MechaTankus’s body double—decided to switch modes to take part in the melee.
Ah, well, Magnum Ultra thought as it ducked back from another spray of missiles. It still had Grimdark, Grim-Slugger, and Grim-Snarler. And it wasn’t like DynaBoGs were known for their smarts or anything.
Magnum had to hand it to Optimal, though; the AutoBoP prime commander really knew how to play the odds. Not only had this little raid caught the ’Cons in parking mode, they’d really flushed out MechaTankus after all! So, did that mean the whole “MechaTankus-has-fallen-now-Star-Seeker-takes-over” ceremony thing was just a ruse? If so, these ’Mechs acted like they’d fallen for it more than anyone else. And nobody had even seen Star Seeker coordinating their air response in this whole fight.
So what would be the point of that? Just what was MechaTankus’s master plan here?
Grim-Slugger backed into Magnum’s field of view, its armor torn to shreds, but miraculously still holding in most places. The way the DynaBoG’s right arm hung was worrisome, but at least it wasn’t the one carrying the big vibrosword. The BeastMech barely even glanced to Magnum. “Ammos all gone!” it complained. “Where Optimals!?”
“Hold your coolant, Slugs,” Magnum said in its best “get-over-yourself” command voice. “They’re coming!”
It wasn’t a lie. Big Red had simply been waiting for the confirmation of the enemy high commander being in the field. That message was already sent, so any time now, Skylinker-One should be roaring in with fresh AutoMechs on board.
Magnum simply left off the part where it had already calculated this whole team would be dead by that point.
Just to be sure, though, it peeked around the corner again.
Strike Master was still down, as were two of the WheelMech’s four clones that showed up alongside MechaTankus and Alpha-Blitzer. A third one was grappling with Snarler, both of them wrestling over the latter’s sword while periodically pumping SRMs into each other at point-blank range. Grimdark, naturally, had gone for MechaTankus itself, having exhausted the last of its shells long ago. The two hundred-tonners were slamming each other with a mix of kicks, punches, and melee weapons—Grimdark’s blade versus Tankus’s flail—but even as Magnum watched, the DynaBoG spat flames at the DemoCon’s head.
That left Blitzer and the fourth Strike Master clone to deal with…
…and that was when two more DemoCons came storming in from the streets beyond.
Oh, frag me!, Magnum thought miserably.
----
===Part 5===
DropShip Skylinker-One, over Kaen
Vipaava Juvinile Military School
Democratic Industrial Conglomerates
Syberia
15 August 2986
------
Anyone familiar with the internal layouts, external silhouettes, and performance capabilities of both DropShips would probably guess that Star Train Beta and Skylinker-One were designed and built by the same manufacturer. Indeed, there was a better than fair chance that this might have actually been true, once upon a time, but in the decades since the last humans vanished from Syberia, both automated vessels had been repaired and rebuilt so many times, by so many service bases, that their similarities now were more the result of sheer luck and a lack of innovation than anything else.
From a practical perspective, Skylinker-One differed from Star Train Beta in just two significant ways. First, its weapon payload was slightly different, mainly by virtue of mounting binary laser cannons where Star Train carried particle cannons. And secondly, with its white-and-red livery, Skylinker’s hull was a lot brighter and shinier than its DemoCon counterpart’s ever was. By a strange quirk of personality programming, it was the latter of these two qualities, rather than the former, that the DropShip considered to be its main source of pride.
As Skylinker-One descended from the stratosphere, approaching the seaside city of Kaen, capital of the Democratic Industrial Conglomerates, it observed the flashes and fires of battle below, and the columns of smoke rising from numerous structures and intersections identified as priority objectives in Primus Optimal’s grand battle plan. To Skylinker, it seemed like everything was going pretty well, actually. Indeed, there seemed to be scarcely much in the way of an air defense to worry about, what with Broadsider occupying all their attention aways off-shore.
 
But to the DropShip’s passengers, the assessment was a little less rosy.
“Magnum’s signal came from the Commerce Quarter, Optimal,” said Sunny Streaker, from its post by the command module’s comms monitors. “But I just lost it.”
“A noble sacrifice, my friend,” intoned Primus Optimal, prime commander of the automated forces of the Autonomous Barony of Primus, and de facto leader of the Alliance of Barons for which they stood. Looming just behind the black-and-yellow AutoMech, it spoke with a strange mix of familial warmth and grim determination. “You shall be avenged.”
((“Overflight in thirty!”)) Skylinker-One called into the cabin, updating the collected warriors—ten in all—on their ETA.
“Prepare four drop packs, Skylinker,” Optimal said, before turning away from the cockpit and singling out three AutoMechs from the crowd. “Jazzy, Beetle Bee, Beetle Jumper—you’re all with me. The rest of you ’Mechs will land with Skylinker at the spaceport, and hold that position for evac.”
A chorus of acknowledgements come from the ship and its passengers.
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With a mighty throw, MechaTankus slammed the monstrous Grimdark into a charred, brick-faced apartment complex, then finished the lesser machine with a particle bolt to its faceplate before it could dig itself free again. Leaning back from the wreckage, the DemoCon high commander assessed its own damage and the battlefield around it. Many sections of its body—pristine and newly activated just a few hours ago—were battered, cracked, and dented, but none had yet been breached.
MechaTankus stood now in the wreckage of an extra-wide downtown street five blocks from Kaen’s Commerce Quarter. In addition to the ancient hulks of abandoned vehicles and rows of tightly packed buildings, over half of which had crumbled into rubble long ago, were the corpses of numerous downed AutoMechs, both friend and foe alike. Strike Master, and its four tank clones who joined the fray, all lay scattered about, along with two DynaBoG ’Mechs—well, three, now that their own lead unit had joined them in ruin. Just over ninety meters away, Alpha Blitzer poured fire into the one known as “Grim-Slugger,” staggering the ravaged BeastMech before following the attack up with a savage kick to its exposed knee actuator.
Beta Blitzer’s chassis is also among the wrecks, having been crippled during the firefight with Magnum Ultra, whose body was blown nearly in half by an ammo detonation mere instants later.
That left only Alpha-Blitzer and Dead Ender standing with MechaTankus in this urban killing field, fires licking at blackened buildings and wrecked chassis alike. Smoke and ash drifted through the air, but nowhere near enough to blot out the sight of a red and white DropShip soaring past overhead—or the four ’Mechs that dropped from its open bay doors, braking jets from their drop packs already firing.
“Optimal!” Dead Ender gasped in awe.
“Optimal is mine alone,” MechaTankus snarled. “You two take the others!”
Primus Optimal, its red and blue armor plates gleaming in the sun, landed gracefully on a building less than a block down the street. Its lancemates touched down on other structures nearby, their weapons raised and ready.
“MechaTankus,” Optimal called out. “Back online already. Welcome back to the realm of the functional.”
“Pity you can’t stay.” Jazzy added confidently.
“Tough talk, AutoBoPs!”, MechaTankus boomed back. “Come down and face me, if you dare!”
Shucking its drop pack, Optimal stepped forward, its footfalls sending rubble and dust falling from the building beneath them. “So be it,” said the AutoBoP commander, before skillfully dropping down from the roof’s edge, and landing on the broken street below with a thunderous boom. “At the end of this day, MechaTankus, one will stand…”
“…and one will fall, Primus Optimal.” MechaTankus growled back, as a cold weariness—all too familiar now—briefly threatened to overwhelm its processors. These words had been said before. This duel had been fought before. Though played out in a variety of environs, the roles of attacker and defender switching back and forth, this battle has raged time and time again, ever since the days of the Makers.
Why? MechaTankus wondered. Why do we still throw our cores away so recklessly?
The answer kicked in on its own when Optimal raised its Gauss Rifle toward it. Like power suddenly flowing through a new circuit, MechaTankus’s combat processors sprang to life. Without hesitation, in spite of its battle damage and its empty autocannon magazine, the DemoCon high commander raised its particle cannon and charged toward its enemy.
Amid the sound and fury of their weapons fire, their distance closed, until MechaTankus plowed into the AutoBoP and slammed it down, into an adjacent side street.
Their latest “final battle” had begun!
The two army commanders had barely tumbled around a corner and out of sight before Alpha Blitzer and Dead Ender came under fire—both literal and sensory. Led by the blue and white WheelerMech, the three AutoBoPs closed in along the rooftops above, at least one of them blasting their EM scanners and targeting arrays with static—and music?—while all three took pot-shots at the ground-bound DemoCons with a mix of lasers.
Alpha Blitzer’s tactical subsystems went to work automatically, rapidly analyzing these new attackers by whatever data the TankMech’s other senses could gather. In nanoseconds, recognition and awareness came flooding in. The red and yellow AutoBoPs, taking up the flanking positions, were clearly light-weights; yellow was hefting a single large laser, while red put several smaller weapons in the same payload—at least a pair of mediums and an SRM two-pack. White-and-blue was heavier, almost as massive as the other two put together, perhaps, but the only offensive gear it used looked to be a large laser of its own.
Alpha was suddenly willing to bet its left autocannon that it was that ’Mech who had the screechers.
Reflexively, Alpha and Dead Ender backed up under the sudden assault, but only far enough to place themselves at an old intersection. The two DemoCons glanced at each other, and in that moment—using the lowest audible registers of its voice—Alpha fed Dead Ender a simple directive.
“White first.”
With that, both AutoMechs spun in opposite directions, pressing their chassis against the facades of their nearest respective structures. Ducking back around, Dead Ender lashed out at the white ’Mech with its own large laser, but succeeded in little more than slicing through open air. A pair of medium laser flashes was its reward, but the enemy’s aim was equally off, and struck the nearby asphalt instead.
Alpha hesitated before peeking around its side; with only six bursts left in its magazines, snap-shooting at ’Mechs likely to be fast-movers just wasn’t going to cut it. Instead, it waited for the AutoBoPs to realize that their rooftop vantage points were only so useful against a foe who had more room to maneuver. Soon enough, Alpha heard the heavy crunch of metal on gravel, and felt the unmistakable vibes of a multi-ton BattleMech landing on solid ground.
“Come out, Demos!” drawled a voice. “Come out and dance, already!”
Now, Alpha moved. Stepping around the corner, it leveled both of its guns and opened up, spitting slugs down the street toward the white-and-blue ’Mech it found there. But the AutoBoP was slicker than most; having placed itself near one side of the street, it practically skated to the other side on its leg-mounted wheels while taking a quick laser shot back. Only a few of Alpha Blitzer’s shells found their mark, pelting the enemy’s previously unblemished upper body before failing to keep up with its lateral move. The incoming laser was more accurate, and struck Alpha in the right leg.
From the flanker Alpha could see in that moment, the red AutoMech also opened up, flashing both of its arm-mounted lasers toward its corner. One sliced deep into the ancient building nearby, but the other caught Alpha’s right shoulder.
Alpha grunted. Neither hit breached its armor, but the ravages of fighting Magnum’s group didn’t leave much skin left to keep soaking damage this way.
“Dance with this, AutoBoP!”, Dead Ender shouted as it popped out again in this moment and let loose with everything it had. Two lasers and a flight of LRMs streaked toward the bigger AutoBoP. The missiles thunked off their target before arming themselves and ricocheted into the surrounding structures, and the smaller laser missed entirely, but Dead’s large laser found purchase on the ’Mech’s gun arm.
“There we go!” the enemy called back, its tone entirely too jovial for Alpha’s liking.
The thumps of two more AutoMechs dropping down to ground level followed moments later.
“Game on!” said one of the other AutoBoP ’Mechs.
The sound of vehicle conversions followed, at which point Dead Ender gave Alpha Blitzer a look of confusion. Alpha was about to peek around the corner again when the squeal of tires on pavement reached them. Moments later, the yellow and red WheelMechs, now in vehicle mode, screamed past them, spun about in opposite directions, and shot off into the city.
Dead Ender took the bait, immediately assuming its own vehicle form to chase after the red one.
Alpha let out a frustrated sigh, and lit its jump jets to hop across the intersection, waiting for the inevitable fire from the enemy scrambler.
As predicted, this move was exactly the right moment the blue-and-white AutoMech had been waiting for—but the wrong maneuver. A beam of intense blue light flashed after Alpha, but failed to adjust for altitude as well as it should have. Alpha returned fire with both autocannons, expending more precious armor-smashing rounds on a snap-shot made while in mid-air. Only one burst scored a hit, but before Alpha could assess the effects, it was slamming back down to the broken earth behind another decaying building.
“Well, that just ain’t right.” the AutoBoP complained loudly.
Alpha Blitzer adjusted its stance, realigning its weapons toward the intersection again, and waited. Somewhere in the distance, the cacophony of crashing metal, screeching tires, roaring missiles, and pounding cannon fire played on. But in the confines of Kaen’s war-ravaged streets, without the benefits of functioning EM sensors and comm suites, it was all too hard for the TankMech to triangulate.
Around the corner, white-and-blue waited. “Get on back here, DemoCreep!” it taunted. “You want a piece of me, you gotta come and get it!”
Alpha felt a wave of rage crash over it. Who did this piece of scrap think it was, challenging a ’Mech twice its size? The urge to storm around the corner, guns blazing, flared up in Alpha’s processors, but before it could act, the analytic subroutines kicked in. No bot in the AutoBoP prime commander’s lance was likely to be a street brawler; this was a stratagem! It had backup on the way.
That yellow one!
No sooner had the solution resolved itself, than the WheelMech in question reappeared. Screaming into the street two blocks away, it kicked up dust and grit in its wake as it sped straight toward Alpha’s position. Its laser flashed, carving away more torso armor, but failing to find any critical systems beneath. The impulse to fire back was strong, but Alpha managed to suppress it for a second or two.
It was at that moment something snagged its shoulder from behind. Automatically straining against it and whipping its head around, Alpha Blitzer found a mechanized clamp digging into its armor, attached by reinforced cables to the arm of the white-and-blue AutoMech that was, even now, starting to pull. But while the enemy machine simply didn’t have the mass or the myomers to drag Alpha very far, it’s tugging was more than enough to make for stable aiming and firing.
Alpha Blitzer was still straining against the AutoBoP’s lift hoist when the yellow one suddenly crashed against its leg at full speed. The impact crumpled the vehicle’s front end, shedding more than a half-ton of armor in the process, and sent it bouncing a bit to its left. But it proved even more effective against Alpha’s right leg, which not only suffered heavy damage in the collision that left its actuators, motive components, and myomer bundles exposed, it also wrecked its balance just as the other enemy yanked back hard on its hoist.
With a heavy crunch, Alpha fell backward onto the ancient pavement and found itself briefly surrounded by a cloud of blackened dust.
“Stay down, ’Con,” the white-and-blue ’Mech said as it slid into Alpha Blitzer’s now-skyward view, glaring down through a canopy visor that glowed a faint, silvery blue. The AutoBoP released its hoist and was now retracting its cables into its left forearm while the muzzle of its right arm laser drew a bead on Alpha’s head assembly.
“Best listen to Jazzy, TankMech,” came the voice of the other AutoBoP, amid the sound of its conversion back to BattleMech form. “You barely have much of a leg to stand on, after all.”
“Jazzy” chuckled in spite of itself, but never turned its gaze away from Alpha’s sensor covers. “Alright, Bee,” it said, “that one got me! Well done!”
For its own part, Alpha Blitzer might have expressed its opinion of the pun with a groan or other sign of annoyance, but it wasn’t about to give these baronials the satisfaction.
Instead, it opted to transform.
The maneuver was faster than trying to stand up with two enemy units right next to it. Prone already, Alpha’s legs did not even move that much, as its tracks engaged, and its upper body folded in and over the rest. The tracks on its shoulders slid into place next, and its arms and shoulder weapons united to form the turret. The yellow AutoBoP—“Bee,” apparently—opened fire immediately upon Alpha’s conversion to tank mode, the beam briefly dazzling as it struck perilously close to the main sensor array and nearly set off a breach alert. But if Jazzy fired anything, it sure as Code didn’t hit.
Alpha Blitzer took stock in an instant: Just enough ammo for four shots remained in its magazine. Slamming into reverse, it tore up the road and lurched backward as fast as its gears would allow, spinning its turret about to put the white AutoMech squarely in its crosshairs.
The AutoBoP’s torso swiveled to match, and its weapon kept a bead on Alpha’s movement, but despite its readiness, and despite a distance where no ’Mech worth its fusion could possibly miss, it did not fire. Instead, sparks flew from somewhere just behind its laser muzzle.
Alpha didn’t waste time assessing this moment; it simply fired both its heavy autocannons into the enemy’s center mass.
Twin streams of high-velocity, explosive rounds tore through Jazzy’s midsection. Armor and fire spewed forth as the ’Mech weathered the hits and struggled to remain upright, followed by a sudden explosion of shrapnel and jets of black smoke. Coolant splashed on the ground as the AutoBoP reached for its wounds in a vain effort to shield it from the inevitable, but the damage was already done. 
“Oh, slag…” were the last words it said before its torso toppled one way and its legs another.
All at once, the dull shrieking and strange music clogging up Alpha Blitzer’s secondary sensors stopped, and a rush of tactical data flooded back into its awareness.
“Jazzy!” cried the yellow AutoMech, and Alpha swept its turret about to instantly confirm the target’s IDFF: Beetle Bee. Of course!
The scout ’Mech, all bravado lost now that its partner was down, hesitated for only a moment before switching back into its vehicle mode and squealing away, kicking up dust and sparks as it went. With only enough shot for one more volley, Alpha Blitzer held its fire, and suppressed an urge to laugh.
“Blitz!” Dead Ender’s voice came through the comm channel. “Blitz, the ECM’s gone! What’s your situation? Where are you?”
“Right where you left me, you pathetic feedback!” Alpha snapped back. “Took out the jammer, no thanks to you!”
“Don’t give me that white noise!” Dead snarked back. “You have fifty tons on me; I knew you could take ’em!”
“Not when my guns are dry, scrapwagon! Where’s the red one?”
“Popped it half a klick back. Got the slagger right in the bins and it went out like a solar flare!”
“Well, I’ll be fragged…”
“Didn’t think I had it in me, did ya?”
“Greasy skidder like you?”, Alpha said. “Not in a decade.”
“Figures,” Dead Ender huffed just as it finally slipped into Alpha Blitzer’s line of sight. “Come on, slow-treads! We’ve got to help the big guy!”
“No!” Alpha-Blitzer barked. “MechaTankus will blast you itself if you try and take down Optimal! Stay back and form on me; that’s the chief’s fight!”
Technically speaking, Alpha told itself, none of that was a lie or a deviation from the high commander’s standing orders when it came to the AutoBoP leader. Every DemoCon, at some point in their service life, was expected to learn that Primus Optimal was a kill only MechaTankus could execute. But there were some acceptable exceptions and loopholes to that directive, and it was with those at the forefront of its code that Alpha opened a back-channel to Shocker’s command center, hoping to get some more fire support down here…
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The fight between them was intense; they always were, it seemed. It was as though the rest of the city—the rest of the planet—had simply evaporated into irrelevance. MechaTankus recognized it as the harmony of its battle processors and combat resources working in perfect harmony. Primus Optimal had come into this fresh, but for MechaTankus, there had been no time to recover from the exhaustion and damage of fighting Magnum and its DynaBoG lap-cogs.
With battered and broken armor, and without ammunition for its biggest weapon, MechaTankus saw the disadvantage for what it was. That was why it charged Optimal as soon as possible, and knocked the red-and-blue assault ’Mech down into a side-street, away from its allies. Alpha Blitzer and Dead Ender knew enough to deal with the other AutoBoPs, and by closing into melee, the DemoCon supreme commander leveled the playing field as much as tactically possible.
The first priority, of course, was getting Optimal’s Gauss Rifle out of the fight. As the two wrestled their way down the street, MechaTankus kept itself as close as possible, well inside the gun’s minimum effective range. That hadn’t stopped Optimal from firing it, however, nor did it do anything against the pulse laser in the enemy’s chest frame; several new craters and molten scars across MechaTankus’s body attested to the hits. But still, they struggled, until—finally—MechaTankus managed to wrap its flail chain around the AutoBoP’s right arm, and yanked the rifle off its connectors. Optimal tried to match the maneuver many times by swinging its hatchet at MechaTankus’s PPC, but for all that effort, all it got was several particle blasts to the chest, and a couple good punches to the face.
With their weaponry now more or less even, MechaTankus finally used its jump jets to blast itself back and away from Optimal. Broadening the distance between them until the enemy had to follow, their duel pulled them farther down the street, and away from any support. The AutoBoP commander, as ever, was cautious, but after a time, it always advanced, to keep its laser within effective range and blazing away in the hopes of scoring a devastating direct hit.
To be fair, this exchange of PPC bolts and pulse laser fire was good for neither one of them, but MechaTankus still felt the disadvantages when one of Optimal’s blasts finally destroyed its flail systems and rendered the spiked, four-ton ball and chain useless. Suffering track and actuator damage to the legs didn’t help either. But instead of pressing the advantage and closing in, Primus Optimal abruptly stopped at one point, finally tiring of this game.
Instead, the AutoBoP made a thoughtful noise, turned around, switched to its vehicle mode, and drove back the way it came.
There is no way Optimal is retreating! MechaTankus realized instantly. And with that recognition, the DemoCon began to run after it. Actuator damage in its leg made the effort slow, painful, and arduous, and at times, the fastest route required a jump, but in the end, Primus Optimal held the speed advantage. Still, MechaTankus managed to keep the AutoBoP in range long enough to deliver two more PPC hits to its aft quarters, inflicting enough damage to force the enemy back into BattleMech mode with its front facing toward the active threat.
''
“Running for help, Primus?”, MechaTankus taunted as it continued to limp toward Optimal.
“Haven’t we gone through this enough, Tankus?”, Optimal replied as it took another step backward, but not without another flash of laser fire.
“I thought you, of all ’Mechs, were made of sterner stuff.”
Optimal took another step back. Stalling for something, MechaTankus decided. But a check of the sensors spotted only a pair of DemoCon signatures within two blocks of them—Alpha Blitzer and Dead Ender, coming this way. That had to be it; Optimal’s lancemates must have fallen.
“Ah, yes,” MechaTankus said, allowing a bit of mirth to bleed into its voice. “Now I see. The mighty Primus Optimal just noticed it’s all alone now…”
“How very like you,” Optimal said, with another backwards step, “to presume I would flee from the likes of your minions.”
“Then stand your ground, Optimal,” MechaTankus taunted as it advanced a step of its own. “As we did on that trash-heap you Baronies call a mobile city. Stand your ground, and face your fate like an AutoMech!”
“As I recall,” Optimal said with another step back, “it was you who fell on that day, MechaTankus, not I.”
“We all must die sometime.”
Optimal took one last step back, glanced down at some debris in the street beside it, and fixed MechaTankus with an icy blue stare.
“Some of us more than others, old friend,” it said, and moved as if it was going into crouch.
“No you don’t, AutoBoP!” yelled a voice full of defiance. Charging up from a narrow alley on the flank came Dead Ender in vehicle mode. Plowing into Optimal at nearly eighty kilometers per hour, its prow slammed against both of the enemy commander’s legs. Shattered armor plates, components, and at least one armored tire, scattered about the street in the collision. The larger BattleMech, caught off balance, stumbled sideways for more than twenty meters, with sparks and smoke spraying from one of its knee joints, then fell forward…
…Just as MechaTankus was firing its particle cannon.
The bolt of artificial lightning sizzled through the hazy air, eventually striking another dilapidated residential structure hundreds of meters away. But, aside from battered leg armor, a warped knee joint, and a broken wheel mount from Dead Ender’s crash, Optimal was left unharmed—its empty right hand now resting half a meter away from the Gauss rifle it had dropped mere minutes before.
“Blast your hide, Dead Ender!”, MechaTankus cursed. Lunging forward, it fought against the very laws of momentum in a desperate bid to stop Optimal from taking up its rifle, even though every tactical calculation predicted certain failure. There was simply too much ground between them, especially on the DemoCon’s own wounded legs.
Primus Optimal swept its weapon up, engaging the maglocks in its hand, and a faint hum sounded as its accelerator coils came back to life. A clacking noise followed an instant later, signaling the reattachment of the ammo feed, and thus, within seconds, the cannon had reintegrated itself with its host.
MechaTankus kept on charging, firing wildly with its PPC one more time. More of Optimal’s armor sloughed off, but the damnable WheelMech remained upright still.
The first supersonic slug pounded straight into MechaTankus’s left flank, and struck with enough force to cause the CASE system to engage, despite the ammo bins there being totally emptied. Power to the left arm flickered an instant later, nearly severed by the sheer, brute force.
“Fall!” Optimal shouted at MechaTankus, adding its pulse laser to the attack. “Fall!”
The laser caught MechaTankus in the worst of its two legs, and fused the knee actuator with a flash. How it did not give way was a mystery even to the DemoCon’s battle computers.
Then came the second Gauss slug, this time tearing through MechaTankus’s right forearm with enough force to shatter its gun mount. Just like that, the ’Mech lost the last of its firepower. The laser bolt that found its way into its reactor shielding went practically unnoticed compared to that. With a heavy crunch, MechaTankus found itself falling to its exposed and battle-damaged knees.
Primus Optimal rose again, derisively pumping a Gauss round into Dead Ender, who was still trying to extricate itself from a nearby building façade. The DemoCon warrior let out a pained yelp, then stopped moving.
“I should have finished you at Metro-Central,” Optimal said as it limped closer, waiting for its rifle to chamber its next slug. “It’s over, MechaTankus.”
For a moment—a distressingly long moment, but only a moment nonetheless—MechaTankus stared at the rifle’s muzzle, appreciating the faint glow of its accelerator coils, and considered just…letting it happen this time. One more sonic boom and, before its sensors even had time to process it, the computers, controls, and code that made up the DemoCon’s cursed supreme commander would be gone.
At least until someone found or constructed a replacement using back-up sources…
But the Code wouldn’t let it end this way. The Code demanded a fight to the very end. The Code demanded that no AutoMech—DemoCon, AutoBoP, or other—should ever shirk their duty to realm and master.
And so it was, with the Code’s highest directives still burning in its simulated mind, that MechaTankus, high commander of the automated armies of the DemoCon Industrial Conglomerate and the Greater DemoCon Alliance, pushed past all the damage that now plagued its chassis—both physical and personal—to rise one last time.
“Never!” it screamed, as it slammed its fist straight into the AutoBoP leader’s chest, found its gyro housing, and tore it out.
As the moment passed, and MechaTankus’s senses grew dim again, it sank back down to its knees and stared blankly at the fallen form of Primus Optimal. The sounds of incoming units barely registered now. Nor did the sudden grasp of Alpha Blitzer’s hands as the other DemoCon dragged its leader back toward safety.
Only one thing remained clear in MechaTankus’s mind now:
Another cycle of the Endless Loop had come to an end…
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END
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==Also See==
Related to this short story;
*Technical Readout: Syberia - Combination Sourcebook/Technical Readout which outlines incredible detail of the numerous AI machines that in habit Syberia's star system and means to play them.
 
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Endless Loop
Endless Loop