"He didn't." He-6's assistant wavered between searing, white-hot fury and a visceral concern that left her stomach hollow. "Please tell me he didn't just do that."
Her HUD responded automatically. It opened a separate section on the display and replayed the event there in perfect fidelity. Watching it again only deepened her jawline tension.
Then the klaxons triggered. Pulsating growls reverberated across the command compartment. She terminated the feed, pulse spiking, suppressing the urge to discharge frustration at her subordinates. 'What now?'
Aa-7 advanced, his hands moving in rapid succession through layered displays only he could perceive. His handheld screen pulsed, data converging into compressed caches. He forwarded it directly to her HUD, and she reviewed it with a stripped-down, triage-style method: non-essential data discarded, potential clarifiers ignored, speed favored over context. Trade-offs.
The overhead screens updated, fed directly from the Jackal's recording equipment. Multiple perspectives stitched the same event together: the Aud river bifurcating, the flow splitting as though encountering a solid obstruction in its path.
He-6 himself was absent from view, subsumed beneath the torrent. The implication was disturbing. The sitesman's physical scale was immense; for it to be hidden required something larger—or at minimum, more numerous—than anything they could fathom. But speculation was nonproductive.
The Aud no longer ascended directly toward the Jackal. Their split redirected the majority against wall-grade emplacements along either side beneath the Jackal's position to the west and east. There was no need to transmit a warning. The multipurpose sensor arrays installed along the walls' outer face had already noticed and calculated the course change, flagging walltop threat acquisition and targeting programs. Several wall-grade emplacements along the edges reoriented and resumed fire, the rhythm interruption already erased by mechanical efficiency.
She transmitted orders. The Jackal's piloting crews readied their steed for high-intensity maneuvering. Reloading mechanisms accelerated into double-cycle performance. Waste heat surged, redlines encroaching. It was acceptable. The AWS discharges bought critical seconds.
The NDS's operators escalated their preparations in parallel. Resource consumption spiked unsustainably as dozens more salvos were mixed and matched through carefully monitored processes before being spit out and sealed into canisters, munition casings, or gas stores; that was no longer a concern. Short-term efficacy outweighed long-term depletion. The attrition rate against the Aud intelligence would increase in their favor. Still, not all had abandoned the prior climbing vector.
Twelve signatures on the fur scanners—green-furs—punched through the smoke, projectile haze, and detritus, ascending toward the Titan's position.
Her body reacted before she thought. Her heart rate spiked. Instinctual tension. Then military training interceded, constraining automatic panic into controlled breath cycles. She smiled despite tremors at her mouth's edges. Her strained cheek muscles diverted attention, working as a benefit. At least a fraction of the Aud were redirected from He-6. But the relief was thin, unreliable. The Aud intellect had pre-calculated for this change of pace.
Her initial impulse was to horizontally reposition the Jackal, shifting toward the wall-grade emplacements and defensive crews under duress. But a preliminary analysis invalidated it immediately. There could only be two outcomes, and both guaranteed failure.
One: with its back exposed, the Jackal would be overtaken by the greens. Two: the Aud intellect could redirect its "units", bringing the greens back against He-6, creating a coordinated decapitation strike. She couldn't do that to him.
There was a secondary constraint, too. The Jackal's mass and volume and quadrupedic stance risked compromising the structures of walkways, wall-grade emplacements, and supply depots. There was no need to consider the servicemen operating around everything. Structural compromise was unacceptable, not to mention unhelpful. That meant they were stuck on this limited stretch, spacious as it was.
She decided against firing on the two streams; the Jackal had its own problems to address now. The gunnery crews were re-tasked with renewing target saturation. The sonics were given priority. She instructed the piloting crews to adjust the mechatronic systems for high stress.
The salvos converged on twelve points, explosions raising dense clouds that saturated the visual feeds. Positional tracking defaulted to fur scanners, the only reliable diagnostic.
The Aud intelligence gave up on directing their evasion patterns. They initiated straight-line acceleration. Their choice supported what He-6's aide thought: they would dismantle the Jackal or die while trying. Damage accumulated—external burns and bruising, signs of internal trauma—but all twelve maintained their advance. They reached the walltop walkways intact even through the effects of the NDS.
Of course they did. Was the fact she was growing accustomed to their odds a positive development?
The Jackal repositioned to the walltop's midsection, where its spatial allowance was plentiful. The surface would be vast enough to grid multiple Jackals within, with a maneuver margin preserved for full, unrestrained articulation.
The greens formed a line, then spread in a prong-shaped pattern, converging around the Titan as the centerpiece. She allowed half-encirclement before her crew implemented their countermeasure.
The Jackal's hind legs contracted. The stored kinetic force released when the actuators engaged, then detonated outward. Explosive articulation launched the Titan over one flank of the formation. The emplacements retracted preemptively into their hatches, preserving clearance for mobility. They reengaged upon touching down. The leap marked the closest thing to a formal transition into close-range combat they would get.
She thought back on her training. Being selected as He-6's aide when hundreds of others were vying for the role had required a comprehensive revamp of her existing education: psychology, administration, military training, Titan systems, crew culture. One element had been drilled into her until it became a reflexive thought: the most critical assignment on the Jackal was not logistics, nor administration, nor deployment of the auxiliary WAV pilots. It was the piloting crews.
Now she saw why.
All piloting crews were modified beyond a human baseline. Cybernetic augmentations dominated. Those without them compensated—relevant Vigors for the carriers of the Old Man's Blessing, surgical optimization down to genetics for the unlucky majority. The Seventh's personnel installed and monitored the enhancements. Baseline physiology could not withstand the demands.
The Jackal contorted in ways no other Titan chassis could replicate. It twisted, dodged, baited—forcing errors into the greens' attack patterns. They escaped each charge or other attempt to rend the scutumsteel plating, their survival guaranteed only by the grace of the piloting crews' precision.
For the first time, she let a dull hope grow. The Aud intelligence, despite its aggregate scale, displayed limitations in micro-level control of individual units. That was exploitable.
But the odds remained unrepentently unforgiving in negative bias. Sustained high-intensity operation inevitably induced stress failures, though the engineering crews hadn't expected it so soon.
The right foreleg collapsed during the sprint initiation cycle. Controlled forward motion aborted, but the inertia remained. The Titan's mass ground into the walltop, frictional sparks cascading as it was carried forward.
The Aud exploited the weakness like they'd been waiting for it. Two breached a significant distance in a single leap. Their baseline physical capabilities at that fur tier would make any carrier of the Blessing green with envy. They landed along the spinal plating, tearing through scutumsteel, stripping layers, shredding wall-grade emplacements in seconds.
Their aim was clear: burrowing deep enough to cause irreparable damage to the internals. Which meant breaching the internal compartments and going on a rampage. The unsure smile was back.