A new display opened up in front of Wasp. This floating square of light was light grey with bright white silhouettes of the entire floor. It was an x-ray scanner ,Wasp realized. And it was for sniping with the railgun. His lips creased into the slightest of smiles. Immediately he began to search for targets of opportunity.

"I can see em all, Dizzy" he pinpointed the bottlenecks that would make for the best killzones. "Im gonna drill these frakkers" he laughed somewhat menacingly. "Whatever man, just make sure none of them get past us", Dizzy replied.

He could see a line of them approaching the locked hatch that separated them from the cargo airlock. They were in a neat row , perfect for a single piercing shot. Now, it was time to choose, head or heart? Wasp would have tossed a coin to figure that out but chose the torso instead, thinking that the mass of blood and guts would be piloting from there.

Three mechs , similar to the ones that were fried by the nuke on the floor below, came rolling fast. He lined up the cannon and waited for the hyper capacitors to fully charge. The liquid cooling pipes were at full pressurization , waiting for the melting heat of the friction between the sabot round and the rails. All of it would be pumped out through a rapid discharge heat exchanger with the propensity to melt itself under normal usage.

His finger slowly pressed down on the trigger before the primary click of the gun activation. Then he slammed the trigger down to fire off the round. A brilliant blue streak exploded out of the gun barrel followed by the jettisoned disposable heat sinks popping out like red hot pop-tarts. The round flew at nearly ten times the speed of sound on Earth's surface, which on Glacius would be enough to reach orbital velocity.

The round neatly pierced through the airlock doorway and travelled down the hallway towards the incredibly slow parasite-mechs. Their response time was too slow to dodge the metal spear that now turned star-blue from the air friction imparting enough energy to turn the micro bomblets inside its core to turn into electromagnetically stabilized plasma spheres.

When the round penetrated the first mech , its shell began to disassemble yet the solid warhead continued on. A few bomblets separate like flower petals and come in contact with the gooey innards of the first mech , igniting its flesh into burning plasma fire.

It leaves the first mech through a clean hole bored through its back and approaches the second machine with only one percent of its momentum discharged thanks to the incredibly thin and fine nose cone of the warhead that diverted all the energy of the impact away from the core. The round drilled through and deposited its plasma eggs into the second mech in haste , leaving it only a fraction of a second after it entered.

The final mech bore the brunt of the remaining energy of the round. The tip now melted away as it made its final borehole as the remaining shell solidified into thin spikes of shrapnel. The remaining plasma spheres exploded inside with the mix of pin size shrapnel , creating a fluid like mix of pure energy and shrapnel shards. To those on the outside , it looked as if the mech had exploded into a shower of small detritus as most of the mech had been vaporized in the primary impact. The shards continued past and eviscerated everything behind the first three mechs. All that was left now was several burning hulks spewing grey and green viscous fluid in an expanding pool of sinew and guts. One of the mechs almost looked as if it was raising its hand for a non-existent friend to help it up before the hydraulics leaked out completely.

The airlock door still stood but with a hole bored through it. "What the frak was that!?" Dizzy yelled at Wasp. "I told you , this thing is a tank" he replied.

Ross saw the blue streak but only realized what it was a moment after the first mech exploded with licks of flames crawling out from under its armor. Its torso was carved open with a gaping hole left behind by the exploding balls of plasma when he figured it was the gun mounted to Dizzy's tank that had done that.

While Dizzy and Wasp alternated between elated and angry , the walls began to bulge. Ross could hear the sound of the steel straining under the pressure of the bugs trying to cut through it. Then the yellow traces began to appear , the mark of plasma cutters.

He prepared himself by taking a charging stance with his shield while he kept his autocarbine at his side. Conservation of ammunition was his only choice since there was no telling how long this fight would go on. He waited, watched and coughed incessantly. The stress of combat combined with the pneumonia welling up in his lungs had sent his body reeling. And then ,as if a reprieve from some valkyrie , the plasma cutters stopped. The skittering feet began to sound farther and farther away.

"They're pulling out" Ross said over the point to point radio comm. He wondered if it was the railgun that scared them off. Wasp watched the x-ray scanner display , noting that they were all heading in the same direction, towards where Ryuki had gone. "Uh, they aren't pulling out , their going straight to the Cap", Wasp exhaled.

Popping sounds from some distance away ricocheted through the hallway and into the airlock. Explosions probably, Ross thought. It had to be him fighting. The ship began to rumble under the feet. It was lifting off.

"Get that door down as fast as you can!" Ross yelled. Knowing the Cap, the explosions were from him barreling through the hallway at full thrust , guns blazing. Or not. When Ross popped the airlock doors open, he could see a cloud of grey smoke filling the gleaming white hallway. Popping out of it was Ryuki , his shield up. Too fast, Ross said to himself. "Slow down!" he yelled over the radio. Ryuki tossed his shield behind him and attached to its underside were a set of primed grenades with flashing red tops. As he rocketed towards the airlock, he turned around and activated the torso mounted retro boosters to keep his momentum going. He aimed his autocannon and fired a round. The impact of the round cooked off the grenades and engulfed the hallway in shrapnel and blue fire.

A burst of air erupted outwards as the sliding door opened, relieving the pressure that had built up while the airlock was closed. The air rushed towards the fires that slurped it up like hungry wolves. In return, they flames grew larger and hotter just as Ryuki's mech broke through the firewall . The outstretched fiery wisps seemed to grasp and lash at Ryuki's thoroughly charred mech , attempting to pull it back into the fight. His boosters ignited for the final charge , throwing his mech into a crash course with the rest of the team.

They squeezed up onto the sides as the flames spread into the airlock. Dizzy launched the rocket grapple anchors up onto the ceiling . The thinktank flipped over so that its wheeled feet touched the walls and the railgun faced down the hallway. Ryuki came crashing a moment late. The fireball he arrived in dissipated once the airlock closed up and negative pressure was applied by the automatic fire suppression system. Barry took the opportunity to kick the ship hatch down to reveal a long suspended gantry that lead to the cargo hold of the docked frigate.

The ship began to rock back and forth and the sound of explosions raced along the hull. No doubt it had began to breach the thick icy mantle . The horde began to regroup and rush the airlock once again. Wasp decided it was now a good time to try the railgun's secondary firing mode , an attack that launches a warhead filled with depleted uranium marbles surrounding a high explosive charge. The combination of the momentum imparted by the gun and the force of the explosion would create a screen of flak that would perforate everything in front of it while simultaneously releasing a pressure wave strong enough to cause the mechanical beasts to essentially vomit out their internal organs.

Dizzy provided fire support as the rest of the team began to stream across the gantry and oblivious to Wasp's plan. When the power cut out from her controls and the lights dimmed she yelled at Wasp, knowing right that instant that he was up to no good.

The ultracapacitors were fully charged , fresh heatsinks slid into place and the molten salt cooling system was near its breaking point. When he fired the single round, arches of electricity jumped out from the rails and burst the exposed capacitors , causing their capacitive fluid to stain the thinktank a dark blood red.

The round left the barrel at 5 kilometer per second, fast enough to reach London from New York in 18 minutes. The body of the round disintegrated a moment later when the explosive detonated , concentrating all its force forward by a shape charged plate that acted like a parabolic dish. The depleted uranium pellets shred through the walls and the mechs alike, disintegrating everything in the hallway into a mist of grey and green. The sound of the pellets impacting the far end of the wall revealed that they had turned to plasma and were now melting out the bridge. The rush of air leaving the hallway proved that the hull had been punctured thoroughly and the bridge probably disintegrated under the force and heat of the impacting plasma balls.

The power returned to her controls at which point she ejected the now useless cannon and closed up the turret section of the thinktank's thorax. "Not bad yeah?" Wasp quipped. "Listen,mate, I am going to give you a beating so powerful that it will be passed down by oral tradition because everyone in your frakkin family is gonna be paraplegic afterwards" she spoke calmly. Wasp made sure not to speak again.

The ships cargo hold was open and revealed a space big enough to fit only three mechs. Dizzy and Wasp abandoned the tank, though Wasp felt a pang of regret leaving it there. The transport ship shook hard , knockin Ryuki off his feet. He glanced down to see that the ground was pulling away. The docking bay was wide open allowing the ship to make a clean getaway. But that also meant that it was open for invasion. They crawled out from the walls and through the bay doors , thousands of angry machines pulsating like a murderous colony of ants.

The airlock was soon overrun but the bugs did not advance further. Instead, they made a path for a platoon of mechs armed with an array of large caliber guns and missiles. Before Ryuki could consider what to do , they opened fire, hitting the frigate's broadside and dorsal section. The armor held out but it would only be a matter of time before it would be penetrated.

Ryuki yelled over the comm ,telling Dizzy to launch. The other mechs had spent all their ammunition and thus making them useless in the fight. They needed to launch now if they were to survive. "Launch ,dammit!" he yelled again. The cargo bay closed up and the docking clamps were blown off. The frigate dropped down before its Alcubierre drives activated and smoothly egressed out of the bay.

Ryuki stood at the platform of the gantry , huddled behind a stack of red and green cargo containers, watching the ship fly away. Once he lost sight of them, he rose up and began to return fire. Plumes of smoke erupted from his mechs torso as he launched unguided rockets and impact grenades at the platoon. A shower of sparks gushed out from one of the mechs as an armor piercing electromagnetic shell electrified its internal components ,burning it from the inside out. A red stained mech from the rear lines rushed up and knocked the still standing dead mech off the gantry and down into the frozen tundra. Each of its arms had a pair of chainguns each being fed from a giant backpack with armored munition belts snaking out like metal tongues.