36 – THE TUNNEL GOES "BOOM"
The fusion coils made a tremendous racket as they landed in an explosive hail, blowing huge holes in the ground at their points of impact. The Warthog Nome had placed in front of the tunnel was hit by several of them, and the heat caused its engine and turret ammunition to detonate in a brilliant secondary explosion. Everyone in cover had to duck yet again as pieces of vehicle and coil rained from the sky in a similar fashion to the fusion coils, which were also still coming down in a merciless and destructive torrent. After a few seconds, both types of falling objects thinned and finally stopped.
"Shit! What the hell was that?" Ryan exclaimed, rising cautiously to his knees and quickly scanning the debris around him.
"No idea, but whatever the hell it is, it's not conventional," Clair commented.
"Not conventional?" Skope asked, glancing around his cover. "How can you tell?"
"It was firing fucking fusion coils!" Kenny responded angrily. "I seriously doubt that anything standard would fire them!"
"Then what could, I wonder?" Nome postulated. "Those fusion coils didn't just appear out of thin air. Some kind of mechanism must be launching them at us from inside the base."
"A mortar battery, perhaps?" offered Ryan.
"As good a guess as any, I suppose," said Clair. The rest of the soldiers agreed.
"Hey, guys!" a heliumly high voice shouted from behind the group (specifically Patton, who was furthest back, hiding behind a large rock outcrop).
The group turned to see six Blue soldiers from the reinforcement group standing behind Patton.
"Yeah, what the hell do you guys want?" he asked them, less then patiently.
"We're ready to enter the tunnel. Mind moving?"
Patton shook his head. "No, you're not doing this again. No one is going into that damn tunnel. We're finding another way of entering the base. You guys just sit tight until the killing starts. We need as much cannon fodder as possible, as a distraction."
"Well, if we're not using the Blues to trip the bombs, then what?" Skope asked. "How else can we get inside the base?"
"Hmmmmm," said Nome as he looked around at the bits of fusion coil lying about. He noticed that many of them had somehow managed not to explode upon landing, and that a couple were actually stuck in some of the trees around them. This gave him an idea. He turned to face everyone else. "I believe I have discovered a way to rid ourselves of the landmines in the tunnel. Everyone, gather as many non-exploded fusion coils as you can."
Patton started nodding as he figured out where Nome was going. "Right, we can use fusion coils in place of Blues. It's not quite as hilarious as our previous strategy, but it still has lots of exploding involved, so I'm in."
"And the blast will be one hell of a lot bigger!" Ryan added gleefully. Patton nodded.
Everyone fanned out to find intact fusion coils. It took some time to gather what Nome perceived as "enough," and by the time Nome decided they were done they had amassed a pile almost as high as the tunnel itself.
"So, do we just chuck them in?" Jess asked.
Nome shook his head. "No, we need to set them off all at once. The magnitude of that explosion will force all of the landmines in the tunnel to explode as well." They pushed the pile of fusion coils as far as they could get it without triggering any of the land mines, then stepped back so that they could set it off from a distance, hurrying behind cover. Nome pulled out his pistol and loaded a single round into it. "You may all want to find cover." he said, somewhat unnecessarily, though the comment might have been aimed at the Blues, who were still standing around. "You can expect lots of shrapnel to come in your direction." The Blues did so, and Nome got as far back as he could while still able to aim properly at the pile of fusion coils. He activated his pistol's scope, aimed, and fired.
The explosion was like nothing they had ever heard before. The ground shook as though an earthquake was going on, but then quickly subsided. The blast was strong enough to force Jess from her cover when the rocks she was hiding behind slid loose and fell towards her.
As Ryan poked his head up to examine the damaged, he noticed his ears were ringing. When he tried talking to Clair to see if she could do something about it, he discovered that hers were as well. It turned out that most of the soldiers in the area had temporarily lost their hearing. When everyone peeked out from their cover, they saw that the tunnel had not just been cleared of traps; it had been completely annihilated. For that matter, much of the wall surrounding the tunnel was gone as well. A great gaping hole in the wall now led straight into Red Base.
"That…was…awesome!" Patton shouted, pumping his shotgun in the air.
One of the Blues approached Nome and tried to grab his pistol from him. "I've never seen pistols to that before! Is there some kind of trick to it? I want a turn with that thing!"
Nome pulled the pistol out of the Blue's grasp. "That explosion was not caused entirely by this weapon. It was only the trigger. What would make you think that?" He glanced to his side and noticed that Patton had walked over.
"Hey, how often do you guys get reinforcements?" he asked the Blue.
"We have a teleport-ish system that gets troops to our base in moments," The Blue replied. "Whenever we lose a lot of personnel, which is, like, kind of a lot, soldiers to replace all of them are sent in just the next five minutes. Sometimes, if the battle goes really, really bad, we get double the original number. And since our base is just on the other side of the bridge, we can get here really quickly."
"That sounds quite efficient," Nome commented. Especially for the Blue Army, he thought silently to himself.
The Blue shrugged. "Oh yeah, it takes like no time at all, like five hundred hours. Less, even!"
"Wait, five hundred hours?" Patton gasped. "I thought you just said it took five minutes?"
"Minutes, or hundreds of hours?" Nome asked.
"The shorter one," the Blue responded.
"Oh, that explains it." Patton relaxed. "The Blue misconception of time."
Nome turned to Patton. "Hmmm, if the Blues get constant reinforcements, then we might be able to stage a distraction for this new threat while the rest of us run inside and deal with it. We should probably take this group of Blues with us, and the Blue's reinforcement system will automatically put more Blues out here to trigger and maintain said distraction."
Patton nodded. "Sounds good. With this many Blues around, I doubt that person controlling that mortar will want to fire at anything else. And, as a bonus, if we need back up, we just lure the Red's out here and they get mobbed by a wave of Blues! It's perfect!"
Ryan glanced excitedly at the giant hole in the wall that he had helped to create. "Well, what the hell are you guys waiting for? Let's go already!"
"Right," said Patton fiercely. He pointed the barrel of his shotgun straight at the giant hole. "Charge!"
A giant cannon sat mounted on a tower like turret-sitting in the center of the Red Base front yard, with all four members of Red Team hurriedly preparing it to fire again. After giving a horrified glance at the giant hole in the defensive wall that had appeared just a moment ago with a blast powerful enough to knock Candice straight off the cannon, Edward frantically grabbed a fusion coil from the pile sitting next to him and handed it up to John, who was standing above him, behind the barrels of the cannon. John hastily jammed the glowing box into the back of the barrel nearest him. "We're about ready to fire!" he called down. "Lock the coordinates and let's bring the rain!"
"As if I haven't prepared yet!" Candice shouted up to him from the targeting laptop she was looking at. "I've only had this entire time to do so. Target locked on."
"FIRE!" John shouted.
The cannon launched all of its fusion coils simultaneously with a tremendous roar that made the earth rumble. The entire team watched in wonder as dozens of fusion coils sailed through the air. "Hast thou never seen a more glorious sight than a Coil of Fusion in flight?" Edward asked rhetorically as he tracked the flying objects.
"Did you just rhyme again?" Candice asked Edward in annoyance.
"Yes, I believe I hath," he responded proudly.
"What did the boss say about rhyming?"
"I cannot recall the exact words…"
John happily answered for him: "He said 'If you rhyme again, I'll rip your skull out of your helmet and drink Dr. Pepper out of it.' Ain't that right boss? Boss?"
He looked down at Steve, and noticed that his boss's gaze was focused elsewhere, at the giant hole in the wall. John followed his path of sight and nearly jumped in surprise, which would have ended badly considering he was up on the cannon's loading platform. Greens, Yellows, and no less then forty Blues were storming in through the hole.
Steve was off like a gazelle, running faster than anyone had ever seen him do before. "Retreat!" he shouted. "We can deal with them once we lure them inside the base!"
Candice and John exchanged a glance, and followed, but Edward remained, fraught with indecision over what to do and torn between his pride and his instincts for survival. "Oh, glorious battle! And yet, the enemy outnumbers us so. Suicide or survival? To run like hell or not to run like hell, that is the ultimate-" He stopped as a shotgun came into view, the barrel aimed at his helmet. The weapon was close enough to his eyes that he could easily see that the barrel was blackened from firing. He heard the sound of its owner's finger pulling down on the trigger, and then he knew no more.
"Shakespeare," Patton grumbled as he stood over Edward's body and loaded another set of shells into his shotgun's barrel. "God, I hate Shakespeare!"
"So you have mentioned before." Nome commented, jogging up to join Patton. He came to a stop, but was forced to the side by a sudden crush of Blue's stampeding towards the body. For a moment, both soldier's were confused by their sudden hurry. Then they noticed that most of the Blues were holding small packets of herbal drink. The ones closest to Edward's body started to tapping his armor with the packets, like the body was a cup of hot water.
"Oh damn...they're tea-bagging him!" Patton exclaimed, laughing.
"A most interesting example of it, if I do say myself." Nome replied.
The two soldiers shook their heads, signaled to the Blues, and continued their charge into Red Base.