February 17, 2060
The Reaper War
A hundred and fifty transit platforms thundered down through the storm clouds in the atmosphere. In the heart of Terra Hovos' capital city of Elesium, the rough impact, -inertial dampening and all- flattened a particularly unlucky market place. And a violent wave of air blew out form the pod as the top disappeared in blue teleporter haze.
Dark shadows crouched in alcoves and behind overturned objects and walls. Spines and pincers, twitching eagerly in the gloom.
Then violent craks like gunfire split the air as a hundred tiny objects began teleporting in, their appearance displacing the air and causing the gunshot like cracks.
Aerial view
A dark mass popped into existence inside the market and spread exponentially, it exploded outward, a shockwave of air rushed in front of the racing tentacles of darkness. Inside the dark cloud, weapons went off and culling beams poked though briefly before they were silenced. And the bodies of Reaper soldiers and heavy armor could be seem briefly as they were lifted up by the cloud before they fell back down- dismembered.
Above the monsoon season clouds covering Elysium, tiny stars flashed into existence and diapered as the CSN battle group vaporized whatever orbital debris before it de orbited and fell back down to the planet below.
Interceptors raced in, and more swarmed upwards out of underground hangars. The cloud of Razg hunter killer drones hadn't thinned as it raced outward, but now several kilometers in diameter, focused completely on it's task of sanitizing the ground as it's edge flared with futile weapons fire. The Reaper fighter raced in, arming their fusion charges, safe from orbital retaliation while their cousins continued to pour out of their underground bunkers.
Suddenly they break hard earthward, their instruments screaming lock on warnings.
Because the Razg had had several days' notice, and a variety of captured Interceptors, the units deployed on Terra Havos were optimizing towards the higher wavelength (optical, infrared, UV) detection packages, depriving the Reaper fighters of their stealth capabilities. Which in the day and age of sensor invisibility almost guaranteed destruction.
Above the initial landing site, several more teleporter platforms had been established, and now a flight of Razg Unnamed Aerial Superiority Vehicles thundered heavenward.
Dark blades painted in aerial camouflage. Completely unmarked save for the serial numbers, with a perfectly smooth, radar and sensor scattering surface, sliced the air as they sped to higher altitude.
Over the silent dockyards of the city, the Reaper fighters scattered as white hot tracer artillery thundered down, guided shells adjusting their trajectories to overlap the Interceptors' ones. Great fountains of concrete and steel sprayed upwards as rogue shells missed their targets and blasted into civilian infrastructure, and the fireballs that once were Reaper superiority fighters crashed down, starting fires amongst the warehouses.
At the drop site, the hunter killer masses had reached critical mass, now completely obscuring the city's downtown from aerial observation. AWACS had been assigned and ASVs kept pouring through, ready to provide overwhelming firepower, and the rushing wave began spinning like a sea born maelstrom- a cyclone of death.
The tornado expanded, five million drones, each the size of a human forearm, with edges sharpened to a molecule in thickness, shot outwards in a completely unexpected charge becoming a spinning ring of destruction, throwing whatever organized resistance the Reapers had on the continent out the window as every officer sought to brace for the incoming wave. It was blitzkrieg- lighting war.
They slammed into Reaper outposts, torn apart by dispersion fields, then flowed around them, covering them in a mass of sonic knives, skewering anything that came out, never stopping. Reserves were teleported in, they spread out and hunted down the stray Reaper that had survived the initial onslaught, ASVs fired on known Reaper installation, first regular rounds, then enhanced k-naq shells that flattened blocks around their point of impact. As DFs flickered out, hunter killers rushed down the tunnels, culling beams snatched away the leading units, but the main body slammed into the walls of the tunnel, cutting through organic circuitry and disabling local defenses.
Bursting into their underground hives, a scout fed clear footage of the cavernous structure, humidity levels off the charts, a heavy mist permeated by a sickly yellow glow, lacking any sort of walls or ceiling or floors or walkways, Reapers and their biological vehicles clung and clambered over walls, in turn covered in backlit exowoumb pods, each showing the outlines of various monstrosities in various stages of development; before a energy blast slagged it's housing.
The Reapers concentrated all their fire on the one entrance the enemy was pouring out from, hunter-killers were hit with energy blasts, melted before they could even enter the cavern, reapers covered every part of the space, from the floor, to the walls to the ceiling of the cave, and hunter-killers careered –broken- out of the tunnel, slicing apart accelerated growth pods and exowoumbs and Reaper nutrient stations before detonating in a last act of defiance.
Only the emotionless, calculating minds of machines- or the darkest and most wicked of living creatures were capable of such violence, and that day they dueled to the death to prove their respective supremacy.
A stream of hunter-killers broke through and carved arks in the Reaper counteroffensive, those not killed by the wildly maneuvering drones were killed as their mates tried to weed out the alien infestation moving recklessly though their lines.
Finally an ASV shell thundered into the bunker, shattering the opposite wall, and the distraction was all the hunter-killers needed, swarming in even larger numbers they pushed through into the facility.
An invisible hammer split their solid column apart, like a supercavitating bullet in water, the telekinetic fury of a chaos gun turning them into airborne wreckage before the surviving drones swarmed him and tore him apart.
A ball of superheated gas rose above the Razg harbor city; then exploded outwards and the camera had one last look at the tortured city, with towers bedding backwards in the wind, striped of their coverings, before a hunter killer spinning wildly in the storm obliterated it….