After Clan War XV, life began to get back to normal. There were a few exceptions, we were having problems with our Gigus; something was spooking them when we got close to the gates. Something in the gates was having an effect with Forerunner technologies. We were getting intermittent communications issues with Yomi Reef, but the alert that came out from the trade guilds was offering a level 9 Gold Contract, and while the Defenders of Bunny were newly rated in that division, we had won only Bronze. That left the communications issues on Bifrost.
Last time we jumped to Bifrost it was the run that took us to the Rim, to Nastrond. That was where we met the Wild Hunt, that was where Walker found us. Doomed or damned, Walker and his Hunt rode the mirror side of the gate, dimensions below and beyond what our science knew, a door the Forerunners opened for reasons unknown, and mankind opened in our eternal ignorance. Walker, in his sapphire blue Holmes, and his one burning eye, riding with a hunt of howling ash grey Red Ants, ever dying, ever rising to fight again. The Wild Hunt. It was a children’s story here in the core, but out on the Rim they spoke of it in whispers, and never when sober.
The Bifrost gate alarms were flashing when we went through. There was howling filling the comm circuits, and weird energies were scrambling our sensors. Skadi came on the comm with a tight beam signal.
“Yo, boss, you need to look at the data on encrypt 9. Look at the gate signatures. This is a mirror side activation. There is more, there have been several passages. This is like last time with…..you know… him.”
I powered up my weapons, but switched all targeting to passive. If this was Walker, we knew the rules. No one who fires on the hunt lives, they are either prey for the hunt, or will rise again to join it. Walker did not miss, any who targeted him died. If you outrun the hunt, you lived. If you fought, you died. Those were the rules. The Hunt was something older than man, older than the gates, something the gates let out, or made necessary.
“Black Company hold in place. In load new Rules of Engagement. ROE Protocol Hunt 1. Any blue Holmes or grey Red Ants you will NOT fire. If you take fire, disengage. Do not fire at all. If I initiate the Successor Protocol, that means you WILL leave me here, you WILL return to base at all speed and pass command to Charles. There will be no follow-up mission. What happens here is sealed Defenders of Bunny Eyes Only. No one needs to know about this, I wish we didn’t know about this. “
There was a wave of swearing, acknowledgement, and a lot of tight beam encrypted chatter. I didn’t pry. This was serious fracking stuff. We tightened our formations, and you could tell by the way the weapon ports kept popping open and torso’s kept swiveling at every trace of motion that everyone was on edge.
The chatter was getting heavier, we were seeing flashes of energy and seeing the occasional wild missile and ricocheting gauss slug from the next valley. Whatever was fighting, there were a lot of them, and their reactor signals were so far off the charts that the distortion was making it impossible to plot. Whatever the Hunt was fighting, was giving as good as it got.
I crested the rim, and saw a nightmare. A wave of ash grey Red Ants was fighting an endless tide of mecha. Some bore marks of Evil Santa, some the spikes of the Gorax, some the signs of Drakes Clone Army. There was something wrong with the way they moved, the grey Red Ants were fast and smooth , like a pack of well trained hounds, but the other mechs moved, oddly.
My cockpit lit up, but there was no warning of target lock on. I turned my head and looked down the crackling blue bore of an early prototype of the Galaxy Eye. A dozen times larger than the model we knew, it was more of a spear of power than a human weapon. There was only one that I knew, only Walker.
“Send them away, they are yet needed among the living. Only you are called. Only you need answer”
His voice was as I remembered; hard as iron, cold as the space between the gates. My blood ran cold, and I hit my radio.
“Succession Protocol activated. Fall back to base. Interdict all traffic from this gate. I will broadcast as long as I can on our secure frequencies. Move it people! The Clan needs you alive.” I shut off the radio, they were arguing, and it wasn’t helping.
Walker reached pointed to a mecha waiting at his side, with the cockpit open. An ash grey Red Ant. Well, since usually I saw them tear one of these from the corpse of mech and pilot they killed, I took the option without hesitation. I hit the cockpit and climbed down out of my Dreadnought, and into the ash grey Red Ant.
I strapped myself in and merged with the MIU, and nearly wet myself.
“Oh holy Odin” I whispered, the mecha was my own Suicide King. My Red Ant that sat in the training hall of the Defenders of Bunny Clan hold. This was a different mecha, strange energies coursed through it, strange weapons whispered to me, and opened their potentials to my use, but the consciousness that merged with mine was my own Suicide King, and he/I joined with a hungry snarl.
With a gesture Walker directed me into the battle, and the fury in my head drove me on with a howl. The rage was ice cold, and invigorating. My thoughts were clear, my motions light and smooth, my weapons reached out with a cold radiance, sharing the properties of both laser and ice. Where they touched, the mecha grew grey like ash.
The weapons that struck back were common, nothing special, but the motions of the mecha themselves were jerky, as if half remembering old skills, or one pushed past the red line from long in battle. The mecha themselves were…..odd, and familiar.
Like common designs they were, but oddly altered. Stronger, many times stronger in some cases, taking damage that would have killed a dozen of their breed, but striking no greater than normal. Unlike other foes I had seen the hunt face, they did not rise again as huntsmen. I rocked under the power of paired Ferrite Storm from a misshapen Smilodon my Red Ants taking a hit twice as strong as would kill the living Suicide King, the ghost mecha of the Hunt were the dream that mortal mecha approached but didn’t achieve. I lanced out with my ghostly spear, and the blue-white beam cored through the join between turret and chassis, igniting the stored ammunition in a critical kill that broke the back of the mecha, opening the cockpit like a flower in the resulting explosion.
Forgetting I was not in my own Suicide King, I ran an image recognition request through the MIU because something about this kill bothered me, something, familiar. Cursing myself for forgetting, I dodged a Megazome’s clumsy Focused Icer and almost missed the chime of my data request returning a positive result (granted, the data banks that held the information were sixteen gates and one hundred thirty light years away, but that didn’t seem to stop Suicide King who didn’t notice he was a ghost of his living self).
“Feeder of Ravens!” I swore by the god of the battle slain, because that was the answer. I did know this mecha, I had killed this mecha. Not just one like this mecha, I mean I had killed this mecha and freed the damned cyborg clone that Drake had grafted into it in an abomination he called “Cost cutting towards the end of a production run” and I called reason to Smurf him with a Square Flame.
I needed to confirm this with my own eyes, I turned on my heel and caught the clumsy Megazome that lashed it pathetic Panther Wheels in the mud I ignored the odd beam weapons the Red Ant was covered with and chose the bulky cannon device in the main arm. Charging slow, like a Wrecker Shot with a bad capacitor, I junked the Red Ant back onto the shot covered ground as the Megazome spun on its axis and over corrected to miss on the other side with a hot wash of plasma. My clunky weapon finally discharged, its energy budget so large my screens greyed out, and I spun half around with recoil as the cannon launched a baby meteor to splatter the armored bug. While I was probably not coming back alive, part of me wondered if I could steal the specs of that weapon, because it would go great on my Dreadnought.
Free of enemies for a moment, I knelt down and upped the magnification on my screen. “Hell take you, it’s the Robbins Clone!” It was her. Stephanie Robbins was a Clansmwoman of mine, and her sometimes boyfriend Drake Novum had cloned her in whole, and sadly, in part a dozen times. This particular clone I had killed in the days before the Faction War. This was not a new clone, the flesh was liquefying now that it was exposed to the air, but this flesh had been dead for months.
I realized what this was. Oh gods.
Snarling in my rage, I shouldered my way to the front of the Red Ants, no longer caring if I lived or died. Not here, not now. While Walker and the Wild Hunt raised the spirits of the dead to war again, what we were facing was worse. On the ridge above a strange mecha looked over at Walker, its hulking shape rotting and foul, a mixture of flesh and technology unfamiliar to me, but clearly the end product of the same diseased Forerunner science that transformed the living Gigus mecha into the Skraig and other monstrous tech enhanced forms of living mecha/constructs.
Lost in my fury, I felt Walker whispering the truth, as if only in my deepest rage I could understand.
“In the end it was not enough to create living mecha to war for them. Mecha cannot fight without a linked organic mind, but the Forerunners would not lower themselves to fight their wars. They bound the dead to their machines, harvesting them like crops. Raising and enslaving the dead, but without direction they were little better than the unlinked Gigus. They sought something to bind them, some consciousness from the mirror side whose energies could bind the deathless flesh and lifeless niodes to a single will. They found it.”
“Brought into this world and bound in ceremetal and caged in niode driven AI more sophisticated than ever your race has known, they thought it slave, and used it to control their armies. It was not slave, but sleeping, and its dreams were their greatest wars. But it began to wake. They tried to destroy it, but it dreamed in dozens of hulls, each command node of their empire had one, and each faction that sought to betray the other held others still in secret. They grew fearful of what they had made and destroyed them all, but even those who feared it most, coveted the power that its waking promise.”
The answer came to me, and shocked me from my rage. I stood still, and paid the price, as my mecha rocked under the power of an Ursa Strike, and fell broken to the ground.
“Yomi Reefs, the call for a Clan Raid. They called for a Gold level raid because they awakened something, they awakened this!”
Two ash grey Red Ants dragged my shattered but healing mecha back towards my Dreadnought. Walker’s laughter, like a raven’s caw, broke over the comm..
“Gold they called, and Silver too. They will call Bronze before you return. This will take all the best of the Clans to contain. Do not let it wake. Put it back in its grave before it calls all the dead back to it. The dead that dwell beyond, the hunt will contain. The dead the can be reached in the earth, you must stop. Succeed, and my Hunt will wait for you, fail, and all your Clans will be my hounds, as the dead do battle with the deathless on worlds now empty of life”
Shaking I climbed back into the cockpit, and marched my Dreadnought to the Bifrost Gate. I hate that fracking gate. I hate the rim. I really wish I remembered to grab the specs on that ugly great cannon though (hey, end of the world or not, a sweet gun is a sweet gun!). Work to be done
As I passed through the gate, my sensors screamed lock as Skadi locked her Jottun’s Focused Icer on me, and I could feel the sweep of Hammer’s Dreadnought range finders. I opened a wide feed, visual audio, and bio-sensors to they could read me, and make sure I was still…..well, you know, alive and piloting.
“New orders, Warning order for all Defenders of Bunny. 72hr full combat load out. Assemble and deploy via Yomi Reef Gate to support ongoing operations by Gold and Silver Clans already deployed. Rules of Engagement: Total War, variant 3 (Biohazard).”
Hammer was first to react, killing his active feed and pivoting his Dreadnought to follow mine as I pushed hard through the gate, and up to a run.
“How the Hel did you get the word about the Bronze Raid being authorized? We only got the word now, and we interdicted all communications through the gate, per your orders!”
I pushed the throttle on my Dreadnought to a thundering run, and watched the Black Company shake into a loose formation in my wake.
“This time we got orders direct from the source. We get this one right people. We put this thing back in the ground, before some chuckle head decides it’s useful. Burn the wreckage when you’re done. These things get a proper burial this time.”
Submitted by John T Mainer #28840
