Warsong (Hunter-Killer #2)

Chapter 18 - The Enemy of My Enemy

Ryke couldn't quite believe what he was seeing.

At first it just looked like a shapeless mass of smashed rock and earth, rising like some kind of primeval golem behind Qadira's Hunter-Killer. Then a forest of limbs exploded to the left and right of the central mass, sloughing off the shell of muddy refuse to reveal the creature in its entirety.

Much larger than a Hunter-Killer, the central disc of the thing's body must've been six meters across, slightly ovoid in its shape, but made irregular by lumpy plates of bony armour. Immense, multi-segmented limbs splurged from the flanks of the body, and something that looked like a tail thrashed viciously somewhere in the debris behind it.

The head that jutted from the front of the carapace had a roughly triangular shape, sloping down in the shape of an upturned shovel and ending in a gaping double jaw. It didn't seem to have any eyes, but evidently didn't need them. A forest of teeth clashed angrily, viscous liquid spraying in all directions as it reared up.

His eyes opened wide when he saw the underside of the monster. A secondary maw that must have been more than a meter wide gaped open, almost a perfect, fleshy circle infested with concentric rings of massive teeth. Teeth that looked an awful lot like what they'd pulled out of the Scraegan body not so long ago.

There was no time to think about the implications, however, as it hurled itself forward, straight at Qadira.

The woman showed the lightning reflexes that made her a Hunter-Killer, and they saved her life. She twisted sharply to the side before the rocks and rubble had even settled, turning her mech in the nick of time so that the huge, spherical maw smashed down against the metal of her shoulder shield instead of the vital systems in the Hunter-Killer's back.

The weight of the thing still crushed her to the ground. A scream tore over the comm and Ryke heard the screech of rending metal. The shield would only protect her for a matter of moments. He raced forward, shunting every dumbstruck question to the back of his mind. His cannon snarled, spitting shots at the thing's body, but to his shock the armour-piercing rounds barely dented the thick plates of toughened bone.

That didn't stop him, though. Shards of torn metal whipped from Qadira's mech as the monster bore down, that strange, spherical arrangement of teeth rotating to rip through the plating of her shield. They only had seconds.

Ryke abandoned his cannon, instead launching himself forward, ducking beneath a snap of the monster's head and surging upright again to wedge his mech underneath it. Legs flailed and bashed at the rear armour of his mech, and amber stress warnings blared through his pilot station as he tried to lever the creature up and off of his comrade. His eyes widened in amazement when he saw the numbers the Hunter-Killer's systems were blurting out.

The thing weighed almost forty tons.

A close range blast from Brigg's shoulder cannon was enough to put a dent in the outer carapace, but still the monster tried to bear down on Qadira, its limbs lashing out at the other Hunter-Killers as they tried to approach. A savage whip of its colossal tail smashed into Ricardo's Raptor mech, and the impact hurled the rookie Hunter-Killer backwards with a crash of buckling metal. More amber warning belched across his HUD but Ryke couldn't worry about that now.

"Get under it!" he bellowed. "Avalanche, Mallet, get in here and lift this son of a bitch!"

The two Goliaths thundered forward at his words. Brigg took a crushing blow on his shield from one of the flailing legs but managed to jam his powerful machine into position under its right flank. On the opposite side, Brody took a different approach, ducking down beneath a swinging leg until he was almost on one knee. Then he burst upwards and rammed his unsheathed warblade hard into one of the limb sockets.