I was born, possibly shocking enough, in the Appreciation of Generosity Habitation Complex on Hrrudra'antii-521, now named Shalluki System, on the 54th Level. I was my parent's fourth child, which meant their license and mandatory pairing was over. I was moved, by the time I was a year old, to the creche down on 64th Level. I was a mediocre student at best, with abysmal mathematics scores. I was uninterested in history, such as it was, but was able to focus on tasks well enough to slowly but surely ascend through the Unified School System. Upon my graduation, I took the tests, like any good Lanaktallan, and had a short list of less than twenty employment offers.

Being young, a merely 22, I had grown up seeing the Unity videos on the Tri-Vee. Visions of Lanaktallan all gazing upward at a future that was guarded by the Unified Military Forces. Handsome stallions in their sashes, vests, and flank coverings marching in unison down the street with their rifles. Armor covered soldiers guarding space ports and colonies.

Of course, the young me had no idea that those videos had been recorded tens of thousands of years ago. That the ideals I bought so whole-heartedly into were set down hundreds of thousands of years ago.

I signed up on the Level Five recruitment office. I was excited at the vast, dizzying array of jobs I was being offered by the Unified Military Recruitment System.

I can still remember trotting out of the Recruitment Center, a new sash proclaiming to everyone that I was a now a recruit, awaiting the next shuttle. I remember standing in the elevator, feeling proud of myself.

I would be a tank gunner. My reflexes, my eyesight acuity, my focus and concentrating offering me a job that had a wonderful signing bonus. Why, I even had a waiver for cost of training, lodging, food, and the pay of my trainers.

Two days before I was to board the vessel, a colt from Level 84 put an illegal needle pistol to the back of my head and had me transfer the balance of my account to his. Afterwards, he took my sash.

Still, two days later I found myself on a three month voyage to where I would receive my basic military training. I was broke, but wiser. My sash would not protect me, being part of the Unified Military Forces impressed nobody.

Little did I know, when I stepped onto the tarmac at the end of the flight, that I was on a collision course that would, less than three years later, have me shoulder to shoulder with enraged lemurs.

Eventually, beyond all reasonable predictions, I would find myself, wrapped in Terran warsteel and driven by Terran designed hover systems, wielding an atomic sledgehammer, in a place where even Death had died.

--Excerpt From: We Were the Lanaktallan of the Atomic Hooves, a Memoir.

Vuxten watched as the battlescreen passed overhead. It was meters thick, ripping apart the vehicles, exploding traffic guides, shredding plasteel street guardrails. His whole mouth went tingly, sparks danced on his armor, and 471 flashed three unhappy faces in a row.

Then it was clear.

PFC Shutruk started to move forward but Second Lieutenant Plunex grabbed his arm, stopping him.

The second battlescreen moved by, making the air wavy and distorted, colors appearing in streaks from the meters thick protective field.

"You'd be dead, dumbass," Plunex said.

Vuxten watched as Casey edged up, keeping about two meters back from the opening. He shaded his eye again and looked.

"It's big. Twenty meter high tracks, roadwheels and running gear are covered by armor. No platforms, I can see three access points for additional robotic ancillary mechanisms, one's open and dropping what looks like quadruped miner robots. They're only the size of a small groundcar," the Terran said.

Only, Vuxten thought to himself, grinning inside his helmet. Back before First and Second Telkan, something that size would have terrified him.

Now he was holding an Imperium of Wrath stubber formerly wielded by a Persian Immortal, whatever that was, of the Martial Order of Xerxes. He had faced far far worse than a mining robot the size of a groundcar with less in his hands.

"Six access points up top," the Terran said. He looked further up. "Those cables are thick, but under a lot of tension, I can see stretching in some points. The pulleys look like battlesteel, and I can see some warping and wobbling. The axles are at least five meters thick, probably hardened battlesteel."

"You know a lot," Lieutenant Plunex said softly.

"You pick up a lot after a few years," Casey said. He reached back and pulled the six barrel minigun around and started punching in codes into the small holokeyboard that popped up.

Vuxten managed not to snort.

"Plan, sir?" Plunex asked Vuxten, deferring to the only Telkan born First Lieutenant in the Telkan Marines so far.

"Not sure. Let Sergeant Casey and Sergeant Addox make an appraisal," Vuxten said. He leaned over and put his helmet against the other Lieutenant's. "These two NCO's have, together, over a thousand years of military experience. We have the time, we listen to them."

"Oh," Plunex answered. He noticed that Sergeant Casey had a nanoforge welded to the back of the minigun's frame and it was starting to steam.

"The Telkan Marine power armor can jump high enough to reach the top of that section there with a running start," Addox said.

Vuxten saw that Addox was streaming video to him and opened it.

The vehicle was a monster. Multiple platforms, articulated at several points in the middle section, the multiple wheels with scoops big enough to snatch up a tank, the street, and a couple tons of dirt, the thick cables and girders.

Addox highlighted the top of the lowest section, which looked like a massive baseplate.

Vuxten tagged five locations for landing points and his armor's computer automatically showed him where everyone would need to jump and at what angle.

"We'll attract attention as soon as we break from this pipe," Plunex said.

"We'll use masking smoke," Addox said.

Casey gave a hmm. "Three two mix. Masking smoke and prism chaff. That should do it."

Addox nodded and Vuxten paid attention.

"Battlescreen cleaned the parking lot at least," Addox added.

"There's gotta be debris clearing systems," Casey said. He did a slow look. "Man, this thing is freaking slow. The tanks can outrun them, but then it'll just home in on another underground shelter and rip everyone out of it."

"Do you think that's what it was doing?" Plunex asked.

"Without a doubt," Casey said quietly. "That thing would do some damage even to a warsteel shelter. Physics is on its side."

"We need to decide quick, he's halfway across," Addox said. He turned to Vuxten. "Sir?"

"We'll toss masking agents, move to the jump points, reach that first level, jump for this point on the second level, then we'll figure out what to do," Vuxten said.

"Remember, it's not a vehicle, it's a semi-intelligent autonomous mining machine," Casey said. He had let the minigun pull back around to his back.

"Are you sure you should come along? You're only wearing a loading frame," Plunex said.

"Sir, I'll be all right. If I'm wrong, I'll be dead, and you can tell me 'I told you so' as Graves Registration scrapes up my shadow with a spoon," Casey answered, grinning. He started pulling grenades from a canister rack on the side of his Pontiac and tossing them out.

Vuxten noted that his eyes were glowing amber, not by much, but still amber.

"Get ready," Vuxten said, using his armor's systems to mark where everyone would stand, what path they would take, where they would jump, and where they would land.

Addox threw a couple of grenades out, the canisters hissing as they deployed prism laden mist.

Everyone shifted inside the pipe.

"Get steady," Plunex said.

"GO! GO! GO!" Addox yelled, bursting out of the culvert at a run.

A'armo'o saw, through the distortion of the thick battlescreens little black figures running across the gap between the inside of the battlescreen and the hull of the massive vehicle. So far all the robots were shooting their mining lasers at the Great Herd tanks, to no effect.

He knew if they saw the little invaders, they'd swarm them.

"ALL TANKS! GO TO RAPID FIRE! POUND THE SHIELDS!" he ordered, yelling over the communications link.

He held down the trigger on the plasma gun, thankful a Telkan had jumped up on the back deck of his tank with a cannister of ammo only a few moments prior.

The plasma, bright orange, shrieked through the air, the quad-barrel's thick munitions detonating with a greasy yellowish-green snap.

Tank guns started roared, pounding the battlescreen to no avail.

"Sir, enemy vehicle has increased the power to the rear quadrants of the shield," A'armo'o's electronic warfare officer relayed from the scanning tech.

"Look for any weakening areas," A'armo'o ordered, swinging his weapon through a long arc that got enough space that the rapid fire shots had a foot or two space between them. "How are the Terrans doing?"

Dremsal snarled, stomping the firing lever for the main gun. His gunner was wiping blood out of his eyes from where his face had slammed against the sight and cut his forehead by ramming the edge of his helmet just above his eyebrows.

The heavy round hit the Precursor vehicle, another mining vehicle, and detonated with a whitish blue flash, the antimatter armor defeater going off. The density collapsed tungsten steel rod hit a split second after, when half of the energy release had died down to light, x-rays, and electromagnetic hash.

Contrary to popular belief, anti-matter energy release was not 1-1 even if you mated anti-hydrogen to hydrogen.

But enough energy released to blow a massive hole in armor that was supposed to be impenetrable when heat and pressure was applied.

The tungsten-steel rod was only two inches think, only three feet long, with narrow long fins on four sides, and a blunt point for the forward quarter. Normally, it would weigh only seventy-five pounds. It had been 'squeezed' by graviton fields, collapsing more matter into a smaller space.

It was a quarter-ton of tungsten steel.

The rod, white hot from passing through the still ravening anti-matter/matter recombination fog, slammed deep into the armor. The inner lining turned white and bulged for a second before exploding into the internal spaces, which were used for cooling and ore movement.

The vehicle was lobotomized, still driving forward on powered tracks, but the burrowing lasers going dead and the drill bit slowing down.

B-3-9 hit it from the side, killing the massive engines.

Dremsal was fighting his way into the mass of vehicles streaming from the wounded Jotun class Precursor, leading his Brigade straight into hell. They were flanking and spearheading for nearly a hundred Great Herd tanks that had gotten mixed into their lines, but the Most High of the 423rd Armor Battalion had started accepting Dremsal's orders as soon as they were shouted.

The Great Herd tanks had their external weapon systems on automatic, thickening the heavy Terran main battle tank's point defense. Blowing missiles out of the air with plasma shots. Their main guns boomed to slam heavy plasma rounds into air mobile units, gutting them and sending them tumbling to the ground to explode amidst their land-locked brethren.

Sto'odfa'azt had his hands wrapped around the gun controls, his face pressed against the holographic assisted gunnery sight, seeing where the barrel was pointed. His datalink was useless, too much electronic warfare turning the entire area into nothing but screaming chaos.

Twice he'd felt the weird tingle of a Terran attack program jump to his datalink, hold still for a second, then jump again.

Not one of the big self-aware ones, more like small ones that rabidly looked for open dataports to jump to and just blare false signals.

Gunnery Assistant Fifteenth Class Sto'odfa'azt felt all four of his stomach's clench as he got a clean shot on what looked like a flying flatworm, the entire bottom covered with glowing, spark shedding Precursor graviton engines.

"TARGET!" he yelled.

"SHOT!" his tank commander yelled back.

Sto'odfa'azt stomped the pedal. "SHOT OUT!"

The round hit the metal flatworm, easily two hundred feet long, dead center, where a cluster of grav-pods were showering sparks.

"HIT!" Sto'odfa'azt yelled as the tank lurched over debris that had been a metro-bench.

The flatworm exploded in mid-air, raining down on the top-side battlescreens of the tanks in a shower of sparks.

"TARGET DOWN!" Sto'odfa'azt yelled, watching through the scope as the Tank Most High swung the cupola around toward another target.

"TARGET!"

Dremsal just nodded, grinding his teeth, raking the upper stories of a building. He'd seen shadows on the inside of the macroplast windows and knew what that meant. The windows exploded inward and flames burst out, carrying shattered Precursor armor. Pieces of robots, identifiable as combat or near-combat models, showered from the sky, exploding on the battlescreens of the tanks.

Sto'odfa'azt put a round into the building, overriding the tank's computer attempting to keep him from firing into a civilian building.

The roof of the building exploded outward as the plasma cannon liberated its energy.

The carat flashed yellow.

Vuxten felt his knee ache as he shoved off, kicking a graviton boost, trusting 471 to keep him level as he sailed through the air.

Vuxten's gut clenched, shattered shards of old terrible memories teasing the edges of his consciousness from other times he'd flown through the air.

None of them good.

He landed on target, just like his onboards had promised.

Lieutenant Plunex and both of the Terran Senior NCO's landed around him.

Vuxten kept count of all of the Telkan that made it. The squad leaders, Terran NCO's, sticking with their squads, which had made it to their appointed jump points.

All of them.

He breathed a sigh of relief that the training and experience were paying off.

Casey was looking up. "Next floor," he said. He jumped up, grabbing protrusions with his loading frame's hands and pulling himself up to the next part.

The Telkan Marines just used their graviton systems to climb the thick pebbled battlesteel.

Twice more they moved up, until they were near the 'top' of the massive machine.

Six hundred meters up.

Vuxten shook his head, looking around. He didn't see any hatches, no way to get inside. There were what looked like tracks sunk into the battlesteel armor, slowly rotating.

--topside tracks-- 471 prompted before Vuxten could even ask.

"What's the plan now?" Addox asked.

"Me? I thought you had one," Plunex said.

Vuxten chuckled. "We get inside, we find this thing's brain or heart, and we kill it," he said. He looked forward, where he could see the Precursor vehicles trying to slow the Terran tanks or force them back into the clattering maw of the giant mining machine.

"So how do we get in?" Plunex asked.

Casey held up on hand, making a fist pumping motion, and a whitish flame appeared around the loading frame's fist.

"Fusion torch," Addox said as Casey knelt down and began to work.

"Well, this promises to be fun," Vuxten said.

The battlescreens around him flared at the Great Herd kept hammering at them.