All the modus operandi the servicemen crewing the Nyx Breaker had conformed to had come from the TRS--the Titan Readiness System. From white to purple, it provided a complete list of procedures to follow and the general alertness the servicemen should carry themselves with during missions.
They had started the Nyx Breaker's trial run with modus operandi brown. While they weren't operating in the presence of another Titan, they didn't encounter any Aud until the fallen Fort Io. Once they had entered the tunnels and skirmished with a horde of Aud, they had almost jumped to the opposite end in severity.
When modus operandi blue was in effect, the Titan was in an active combat zone with a heavy presence of Aud, and all military personnel--even reserves, were to report for duty. Non-essential activities were to cease, and cargo would be buckled down with anti-grav fields.
So what did modus operandi purple mean?
Like purple Aud themselves, purple in the TRS was as dire as conditions would get. Titans were embroiled in an active combat zone with expectations of facing a horde or a purple Aud was discovered in its vicinity. Both were worst-case scenarios that sitesmen had to strive to avoid no matter the circumstances.
In that sense, she was already a terrible replacement for Ze-4, wasn't she?
She imagined the controlled panic running through the servicemen. Even without notice, pilots would be running to the WAV garage as fast as their legs would go to suit up. Techs were transferring data and status updates with increased frequency, one screen or another firing off once per second.
In the stores, inventory management would have returned long enough to strap everything down. Both the innards and externals of the Titan were subjected to the contradictory forces of natural gravity and the anti-grav generators; the latter continued to win, but Re-5 noted the structural integrity of the Titan would soon suffer for it. She barked out a few compensating orders to bring them back into equilibrium.
The Nyx Breaker continued on its path, the course corrections carried out by the pilots meticulously. They were embroiled in darkness and stone, smashing through pocket after pocket for one second. The next, they broke through one last barrier and entered another vast, open space.
"Bring our luminosity to its maximum. I want the echo-room to perform a quick survey of our tunnel, then they can do what they need to do." The noise of a Titan-sized construct burrowing through a rock wall of the greater tunnels wasn't insignificant. Because of this, she felt no qualms about further broadcasting their location. They needed every advantage they could get, and locating targets as soon as possible was one of them.
"The echo-room is on it. Should we post WAVs outside?"
"No. We'll condemn our pilots to death if they forgo the Nyx Breaker's protection." It would be a risk, sure, but it could pay off. By spreading out additional targets, it would take oncoming Aud more time to reach the asset that mattered most. It was hardly anything outrageous or scandalous according to the directives of the First Ray.
Many, many times, servicemen had been abandoned, used as bait, and sacrificed for "the greater good". The war stretched back three centuries, after all. Titans were even used as disposable assets, once. Pilots especially understood their place in combat. They were the most likely to engage Aud up close and had the highest casualty counts for it.
But even if Re-5 was willing to send out a couple of squads of pilots, she only had so many WAVs to spare. Engineers and techs received sparse training to replace pilots in an emergency, but once the WAVs stepped out of the garage, they wouldn't be returned. She would need them later when--not if--it came time to extract any survivors.
As planned, the Nyx Breaker curled its long body over itself continuously. Over and over, the massive segments clanked across others, and soon, a spiraling, undulating mass replaced the Titan. It slowly crept across the greater tunnel, aiming for its center. Above the undulating mass, the head of the Nyx Breaker flashed its eyes into the dark like a watchtower, turning back and forth.
The legs re-emerged from the belly of the Titan, joining the segments clanking off each other. The knees flexed, drawing out the sonic protrusions. The thousands of melee emplacements bristled, already trembling to contain the copious amounts of energy pumped into them. The sonic and electric turrets on the roof received the same treatment.
In that short period, the command compartment received the preliminary scans from the echo-room. Re-5 winced as she studied the diagram. Their tunnel was positioned with one end coiling for kilometers to the north, while the other went even longer to the south. Both ends had sharp twists and turns that misaligned them at plenty of points, but their tunnel segment was level ground. That meant they would have an uninterrupted line of sight in both directions; she should've been ecstatic.
Instead, she was apprehensive at best. Connected to the southern segment below them on the diagram, there was a vertical shaft. Rarely did the greater tunnels become fully vertical, but they managed to stumble upon one such abnormality all the same. The unpleasantness of this discovery was only magnified when the diagram was updated with the positions of nearby hordes.
The north had a horde coming their way. The south had smaller movement clusters so that direction shouldn't have been too stressful to lock down. It would've been the case, if not for the vertical tunnel. The diagram updated the positions every few seconds, but in between, all those in the command center could see a massive overload of movement rushing down the shaft, like a flood. It was big enough to be a larger horde than normal, maybe even two that had merged.
The vertical tunnel connected with the ceiling of their tunnel was far closer than she liked. Once the Aud began falling, they would be nearly on top of them, separated only by a handful of kilometers. That was nothing.
"Can we move north to give ourselves distance?"
The officer had moved up to her platform, so she could feel her stomach drop as he looked her in the eyes. "The echo-room has already started the intensive scanning. If we change locations even by a dozen meters, they'll be reset."
She grunted, turning to the command console and studying the diagram. "Tell them they better work fast, or I'm tossing them out to the Aud. They're here."
The ghost of a pale smile graced the officer's lips.