5.8

Across the continent of Belius, and far in orbit on top of that, the PCA began to move.

Everybody noticed it. Such a wide scale of activity was impossible to conceal; the sheer amount of material that started shifting, the total mass of the forces that the PCA had available to them, the marshalling of such force, was more akin the overt action of a lovecraftian deity than the real truth. That a single entity made a single decision and mountains of metal bent to follow its will spoke of the true size of the tyrant that held its boot to Rubicon's neck.

Within twenty minutes, the skies around Grid 339 were littered with trailing lines of fire. AH12s, flanked by scores of drones, came down from above, escorting hordes of transports that ferried a truly absurd number of warmachines to their chosen destinations.

And those destinations were everywhere.

They landed on each and every single bridge that connected to the Grid. They landed on top of the Outer Shell, where I had no defenses waiting because anything that was exposed would be obliterated by orbital laser blasts. They landed on the ground surrounding the Grid, forming a circular perimeter tens of kilometers in diameter.

They dropped an endless army of drones, Auxilia swarming into formation by the thousands, aerial Watchers numbering thousands more. They dropped LCs and Sentries by the hundreds; a significant proportion of their piloted forces.

But that wasn't all.

No, the PCA had pulled out the final beatsticks on top of that.

AS07 Heavy Warships.

Ten of the fucking things. All of them had also been carrying full complements of machines, automated and piloted both.

That was a lot more firepower on top of everything else. Those drones had quite a bit of range on them, and their Generators could be supplemented by energy beamed from their parent warships, which made them an endless source of long-range, high-power laser blasts, fully capable of handling the duty of protecting their Warships, and that wasn't mentioning the full squads of LCs the Warships had also ferried down.

Despite all this, it was not everything the PCA could possibly bring to bear. They had a lot more Warships hanging around up there in orbit, and they could strip quite a bit more from the other facilities on Belius before they started running low on LCs and MTs.

But it wasn't likely that anything would bring out more than this. If something required more than this, then the Enforcement System would cut its losses.

However, it was enough.

I had succeeded in my original purpose of being bait, after all.

"Dolmayan." I spoke. "That's the best we're going to get. Everything else is up to you."

"My thanks." Dolmayan spoke.

"We've got this, mother!" Seria agreed.

"Good luck." I wished them well, before turning my attention back to the Grid.

My only purpose now was to bleed the PCA as much as I could.

I wasn't likely to achieve too much, here. That was a lot of firepower they had brought to bear, after all.

Still, I had my advantages. The vast majority of the Heavy Warships' firepower came from the lasers on the front. Ten emitters, connected directly to the reactor, each with their own dedicated capacitor and supplies of coolant, plus independent targeting systems yet synchronised targeting systems. Potent things, those lasers, more than capable of sweeping a few kilometers of ground and wiping out anything that was in the path.

The problem with them, however, was simple. The vast majority of the Heavy Warship's firepower was intended for bombardment, and the Warship was designed with that thought in mind. The laser emitters were pointed down, not forwards.

They could aim only a few degrees above the Warship itself, and in an environment like the Grid?

Yeah... A Warship could fit underneath the Grid canopy, but the amount of guns it had that faced upwards? A lot lower than you'd expect. There was enough there to fend of attacks from most things you'd actually expect at that altitude, but it wouldn't handle larger machines, and with the bridge also exposed since it had been expected to be the safest space on account of the rest of hull blocking the angles for expected attacks which could be an actual threat, it was actually quite a risk to fly under the Grid.

The bridge would be target practice.

I knew that, they knew that, and if the PCA was even half as intelligent as I knew they were, they weren't going to risk it.

In turn that meant that a lot of their Warships' power couldn't actually be brought to bear- the angles just didn't agree. Anything on the underside of the plates was effectively safe from the Warships.

That still left about two thirds of my guns exposed, though, and with the scores of AH12s also present, the undersides weren't actually safe. They were just going to take a bit longer to destroy than the rest of the facility.

The PCA began the attack the moment their forces were in place. As I expected it was the hordes of automatons that went first, obviously inherently more expendable. The attack came from everywhere, simultaneously. Every bridge, every access point, from the top of the Outer Shell to the very base of the Grid itself.

Above, on the Outer Shell, Auxilia made for elevators, for passages, for the gaps in the megastructure that they could pass through. They quickly found resistance once they were outside of the watchful sight of the PCA Satellites, where I could have defences and not have them get blown out of existence by angry lasers.

In the 'middle', on the bridges and tramways, the Auxilia swarmed, a wall of machines thick enough to block the view of whatever was behind them. Supporting them; the Heavy Warships, who had begun bombardment mere moments after the Auxilia started to move.

As spread out around the Grid as they were, a mere ten Warships weren't going to get the job done quickly, but they could certainly start sweeping things up and leave the approaching forces significantly safer than they would have otherwise been.

The blue beams of the Heavy Warships' laser cannons lanced out, crossing tens of kilometers in an instant. Each beam individually found their own targets, emplacements and defences melting in moments. The moment they had confirmed kills, the emitters would shift just slightly, and then the beam would carve a glowing path across the exterior of the Grid to its next target, lingering on that one for just long enough to destroy it before moving onwards. It took about ten seconds before the emitters turned off and the Warships started cycling coolant for the next round.

My response was to unleash everything I had in storage. No holding back here, it was time to bring out all the fun stuff, because it was now use it or lose it. I was surrounded on all sides. This was excellent, because now I couldn't possibly miss.

The Grid just about groaned as I started rerouting energy. The entire place opened up, doors and panels shifting wide, the trams rolling out of their stations, cranes and lifts activating and starting to shift cargo and materials. This was the first clue that the PCA had that I had no intention of making this easy for them.

The first things that I rolled out on the trams were my own artillery weapons. A bunch of Big Fucking Guns, of various different types, all with sufficient firepower that they would eventually be able to take down a Warship if they survived long enough.

I knew full well that they would not survive long enough, however, so I left their targets to be the much smaller and much more easily destroyed AH12s.

The only things I didn't throw at the AH12s were missiles, because they would accomplish exactly nothing at this distance. Everything else? Fair game, because everything else was still very effective. More than a few AH12s were simply knocked right out the sky, laser beams wider than an AC coring them, hypersonic railgun darts puncturing straight through them, pulse energy shots frying the entire frame with heat and electricity... And more.

The missiles I used weren't the small things equipped by ACs and MTs. No; these were much bigger; thirty meter armoured monsters equipped with fusion charges. They would never hit an AH12 to begin with, but a Heavy Warship wasn't nearly so agile.

I launched thirty of the things simultaneously, splitting them between each and every Warship.

Most of them were able to handle that just fine, between the drone compliments and their own point defense weapons. Having launched the missiles from so close, they didn't have the chance to build up enough speed that would let them get past the point defence more reliably.

I say 'most', because despite having everything possible in their favour, one of them still somehow managed to drop the ball enough that a missile was able to get through.

It struck the side of the Heavy Warship, and the resulting flash of light and plasma turned the early morning into midday.

I had legitimately not expected any of the missiles to work. The fact that one of them did, however, was going to reflect very poorly in the PCA's post-mission analysis and debriefing.

That giant monument to tyranny fell to the ground in two large pieces and uncountable smaller ones, and it was already a better result than I could have ever hoped for. The PCA losing one of their vaunted Warships in an enforcement mission? Oh boy...

...

You know, I could make this worse for them.

It'd be a real dick move...

"How are you doing over there, Seria?"

"We're almost done! We're extracting now."

"Most excellent. I'll start the finale over here, then."

I had done quite a bit of damage to this army over the course of this battle. Frankly, achieving a kill on a Heavy Warship alone made all of this worth it, but I'd taken out a lot of AH12s, and more Watchers and Auxilia than I cared to count. Pilot casualties for mechs were a bit on the low side, but crews for Heavy Warships didn't exactly grow on trees, so that was almost worse.

I had done enough material damage.

Now it was time to finish up on the PR damage.

I rerouted power again, let it trickle into the internal supercapacitors of the Grid. A few minutes passed, and my guns died one after the other, more and more machines starting to close in. Total exterior domination was in sight for the PCA, though it would require a bit more pushing to get it all.

But then the supercapacitors reached the charge level I was waiting for, and I threw open a new connection. The supercapacitors immediately flipped, dumping the entire charge.

There was an electric hum throughout the Grid, audible even to normal, unaugmented Humans.

And then, there was a deafening clunk as, for the first time in about thirty years, the Grid's main fusion reactor came to life.

Energy flooded the system, and I started activating anything and everything I could. Long dormant material processing units came to life, groaning as they were woken from their sleep. Transit units came out of stasis, every single light turning on and brightening to a warm glow, environmental systems spinning up and sending out clouds of dust, dirt, and sand that had slowly accumulated over the decades...

The Grid roused, grumbling like the ancient, disrepaired edifice of industry that it was, yet steadily reanimating and crawling its way back to true life.

And yet?

I had just signed the Grid's Death Warrant.