SWNOVELS Fractured Earth: Chapter 29
With a whir and a crunch, the fifteen-foot-tall robot plowed forward through the drab scrub next to the highway. They only had about ten of the mechs retrofitted to run on mana, and at William’s suggestion, they weren’t running them on the roads. According to William, they were too heavy for the blacktop. Given the way they tore up the bland California countryside, Dan suspected that the interstate wouldn’t be able to hold up to their heavy footfalls.
Behind them, a handful of infantry fighting vehicles led a column of semis and city buses through the bleak landscape. They didn’t have enough suits of powered armor to equip everyone, but a couple hundred sets of armor working in support of the tanks and Bradleys would go a long way toward evening the odds.
“Tatiana,” Dan asked, furrowing his brows. “Is central California supposed to be this grey and flat? Honestly, if I didn’t know any better, I’d think I’m back on Twilight right now.”
“This is just Bakersfield,” she chirped back helpfully. “Everything is just vaguely arid and miserable. I think that’s how it’s supposed to be.”
“Why the hell do people live here, then?” Dan glanced out the window of his car as he drove at about fifty miles per hour, pacing the rest of the convoy. Maybe his speed was hiding some of the barren landscape’s natural beauty, but he doubted it. “This state is full of gorgeous landscapes, and this is absolutely miserable.”
“I think it’s the oil,” Tatiana replied cheerfully. “You may have noticed the rigs dotting the beautiful landscape, but Bakersfield is known as a major petroleum and agricultural hub. It doesn’t make for a pretty landscape, but given the depths that society is falling to, securing gasoline and food seem like pretty good ideas to me.”
“Is that why Best and Drummond were fighting over it?” Dan turned his attention back to the road. The last thing he needed was to die in a stupid car accident while leading his triumphant army to consolidate the West Coast.
“More or less,” the AI replied, her voice vaguely indifferent. “Bakersfield is nearly halfway between San Francisco and San Diego, give or take a couple hundred miles. If you’re traveling down Interstate 5, you’ll run into it eventually. Best has been pushing Drummond back for months, but Drummond has refused to cede Bakersfield. His troops and their dogbot swarms are embedded all over the city and regularly patrol the oil rigs in the nearby countryside. Best’s only options are to bomb Bakersfield flat or go door-to-door, rooting them out. So far, they’re making pushes into the outskirts but they’ve been meeting stiff resistance. That’s why most of the powered armor reserves were shipped down here.”
“What are we running into anyway?” Dan asked, squinting his eyes at the city sprouting out of the scrub on the horizon. “I know you and William suggested that we strike right away, but we don’t even know what happened to Peter Best. He just disappeared while we raided San Francisco. For all we know, he’s just waiting for most of our forces to leave so he can sneak back in.”
“Don’t worry about it too much.” Dan frowned at Tatiana’s voice over the steady boom of guns coming from Bakersfield. Already, he could see the occasional flash of light as something high caliber was fired into the city. “I can’t be sure, but I think he fled to his army. They’ve been acting differently lately. More active and aggressive than their usual behavior. It’s entirely speculation, but I think Peter Best is there and trying to bring the battle to a close so he can retake San Francisco.”
“Does he know we’re coming?” Dan asked, turning the car off into a truck stop to park it. Behind him, the semis and buses pulled into the rest stop one-by-one. He removed the key from the car’s ignition and stood up, stretching the kinks out of his back.
“Probably,” Tatiana admitted. “I’ve been doing my best to prevent people from mentioning you on social media, but it’s fairly hard to hide twenty semis and a hundred buses. Someone will have seen you and likely reported it. Of course, even if Best hasn’t directly seen your forces coming, he knows you’re gunning for him. He isn’t a dumb man; the chances of him being on alert are incredibly high.”
“So, he has an entire army, and he knows we’re coming.” Dan stepped away from the car and observed the mechs slowing to a halt as the various vehicles began to park. “Can you explain why we’re transporting our infantry in buses down a public highway, rather than using the literal spaceship to tear apart his camp from above?”
“Because,” the AI answered, ignoring his slightly surly tone. “William, Abe, and I all agreed that we were beginning to get predictable. The Viceroy’s Pride is a useful tool, but its spellshields can’t stop more than a couple missiles. The element of surprise will generally keep us from flying into the teeth of a fully equipped anti-aircraft element, but Best and Drummond have been fighting each other with small air forces. The after-action reports I’ve been able to scrape from public servers make it sound like there are at least a couple surface-to-air missile launchers, as well as a decent number of old-fashioned flak cannons.”
Dan remained silent, listening to the rumble of gunfire and taking in the flashes of light from Bakersfield. It wasn’t the worst plan he’d heard of. Even if Best’s forces outnumbered Dan’s, they were currently locked in combat with Drummond. Between the advantages provided by the mechs, his forces’ ability to use magic, and surprise, they had a good chance.
Unfortunately, avoiding this battle wasn’t a real decision. The population and industrial base they’d seized from Best was too valuable to surrender without a fight. Even soldiers able to use mana didn’t fare terribly well against the Orakh unless, like him, they’d had time to perfect their skills and gain mana. The average person’s best bet was to use their meager mana to fuel the runes in powered armor or a mech, and that meant holding onto the production facility.
Mentally, he made a note to send an expeditionary force to Brazil, once he wasn’t stumbling from one disaster to another. By now, the entire Amazon was infested with monsters, making it almost as useful of a spot to collect mana as another established world like Twilight. If humanity was going to survive in a dangerous galaxy, he would need more allies capable of casting spells.
As for Best? Even though they already had control of the production facilities, the oligarch wasn’t the type to turn the other cheek. If he was left alive, he was sure to have some hidden reserves that he’d try to use for a resurgence.
The plan was to settle matters on the West Coast before preparing to kick the Orakh out of New York. Given the distressing stories of exponential growth in the Orakh Horde coming out of New York City, it looked like Dan would need the entirety of his army to beat them back. Both Merella and Peter Best represented knives in the dark that Dan would prefer not to leave bared and unchecked while he fought for the future of his country.
“You ready to rock and roll, Thrush?” Dan glanced up as Abe approached him from one of the nearby buses. “I gotta say, I’m pretty excited to take the new toys for a spin.”
Abe jerked his head toward the row of mechs parked nearby. Each one was disgorging two exhausted-looking soldiers, almost all of their mana drained from the trip to San Francisco, despite frequent stops to swap the mech pilots out once their mana ran dry.
Dan frowned slightly. “You do realize that you’re going to have to be careful with those things. Even with two high-mana-level soldiers per mech, their operational time still isn’t amazing. If you start taking fire, it’ll activate their automatic spellshields, and they’ll ring you out like sponges in no time flat. It’s better than nothing, but people aren’t meant to power spellshields that can take anti-tank fire.”
“Well,” Dan chuckled slightly, “at least until they’re arch-maguses. Things start to get fairly unhinged from reality at that point.”
“I’m more excited for the prospect of piloting a fifteen-foot tall, twenty-foot long tank,” Abe grinned. “When you let Sam tinker with those things, she really managed to slap enough bells and whistles on them to make me want to kiss her. Anyone who can polish up a hundred and twenty-ton death machine until the ride is that smooth deserves something. Maybe a gift basket.”
“I’d have thought you would have preferred to stay in your powered armor?” Dan asked, quirking an eyebrow. “In fact, I seem to distinctly recall you complaining constantly for almost a week when I told you that we’d need you in a mech due to your higher mana level.”
“That was before you let me take Michelle for a spin on the practice range,” Abe replied, walking over toward his mech. “Even if I only get to steer the thing and fire the main cannon, it’s still an absolute blast. I get why you have a gunner for the shoulder cannons and anti-personnel weapons, but I’d love an opportunity to fire those off as well. I bet I could absolutely swiss cheese an armored personnel carrier with this thing in under fifteen seconds.”
“Michelle?” Dan asked, only to be cut off by Tatiana.
“Both of you know I could easily take over enough of the mech’s subsystems that the pilot could control all of the guns,” she interjected cheerily. “I just want to reiterate that only having human crews on all of the war machines you’ve been building and salvaging just seems inefficient.”
“We’ve been over this, Tatiana,” Dan answered, trying to keep the exasperation from his voice. “Most of us would just feel more comfortable if you didn’t have direct access and control to metal behemoths covered in cannons and machine guns. A lot of people are still fairly unnerved at what you can do with their email and social media.”
Dan turned his ire back to Abe as the man began slipping out of his travel clothes and into the skintight leotard worn by the mech pilots. “First of all, you could easily go inside the shelter to change. There are literally hundreds of people watching you right now. Second, you still haven’t told me why you’ve named your mech Michelle. I’m not just letting something like that slip.”
Dan smiled, steepling his fingers as he made eye contact with the half-naked man, partially to make him uncomfortable, but also to avoid glancing at his state of undress.
“Uh,” Abe’s eyes darted back and forth as Dan’s gaze trapped him. “She’s an ex-girlfriend. Get a drink in her, and she’d snap at you like a diamondback. I figure she’s a threatening enough namesake for a giant battle robot.”
“Fair enough,” Dan shrugged, “but why are you stripping down out in the open?”
“Plenty of cute girls on the bus.” Abe grinned at him. “I wanted to make sure they got a good view of what I have to offer.”
“Do you mean the female soldiers?” Dan spoke slowly, disbelief coloring his voice. “The ones that you train and supervise?”
“Yup,” Abe answered, flashing teeth at him cheerfully.
“I think I’m going to have to ask you to report to yourself,” Dan shook his head while rolling his eyes. “This seems like a matter for Human Resources, if we’ve ever had one.”