The Nyx Breaker tunneled not like a simple drill, but like it was born for the task. The head rammed against the ground, and in no time at all the drills spun. The top layers barring its way were there one second and ripped through the next. It pressed deeper inside, pulling one segment with it at a time.
Half of the head vanished. Then the parting layers swallowed the first neck segments. And once that went, the rest were quick to follow. Even prioritizing speed, they needed to stall long enough to allow the turrets time to retreat inside their hatches.
With each segment gone, another fifty turrets vanished from the skirmish. The pressure on the horde lessened, and their approach sped up, becoming inevitable. Forced to bear a burden too large for the reduced number, the rear turrets looked close to melting from all the waste heat.
As the tail compartment disappeared into the ground, it suffered a gash in the plating. No breach, but there was nothing important back there and no one still stationed so far in the rear. It wouldn't be an immediate disaster if an Aud got in a second time–but a disaster was still a disaster! She was confident they could kill an orange Aud or lower with their internal defenses. Or a yellow if they were lucky. They hadn't activated them with the blue Aud because nothing would have made a difference.
The tunnel they left behind again flooded with Aud, but that was only while they curved down. Once they leveled out and curved back up, their speed outperformed even the most feverish of their pursuers. The Titan contracted and pulled itself along like a snake, mechanisms smooth and movements fluid. It passed through each layer like breaking water, oblivious that what it did wasn't how the world worked.
After the calibrations and endless precision scans, the echo-room located a source of movement too large to be one of the local wildlife, but too small to be an Aud. They navigated a path toward it.
The Greater Western Tunnel Systems twisted and turned on itself like how veins and arteries would twist and curve away from a heart. Their growth was irregular and inconsiderate of industrial standards, making normal navigation hard. But they weren't constrained by these mundane concerns. The Nyx Breaker could make its own paths, and they needed one that traveled up. So they went that way.
They arced around the circumference of the tunnel, sure to stay dozens of meters apart from the walls between them and open space. Their progress wasn't quiet; although they weren't followed further in the tunnel, a great scramble occurred outside.
The echo-room recorded a collective horde climbing the walls, digging and biting with disregard for safety. The Titan increased the buffer distance, but continued to climb in the walls. The higher they went, less Aud could muscle past their weaker kin and fight gravity with as much might as before. The thousands fell away to hundreds, and the hundreds dwindled until all large sources of movement ceased. The scan crew were positive individual high-tier Aud could continue climbing to the roof, but even they got outpaced.
There existed quiet celebration in the command compartment. Some exchanged handshakes or quick hugs, but that received culling fast.
Her officer doled out warnings. They just escaped the most recent round of their gauntlet, but there would be more to come, more they would have to blitz past if they hoped to return.
The pilots kept the course steady, driving them up the walls. At their slowest, they would reach the joining layers between the arched walls and the cavern ceiling in ten minutes. They would not waste the break in action.
"I want all pilots reporting to the garage. Engineer crews, prepare every WAV to sortie. Prioritize fittings with sonic and cylinder modules." The lesser electrics WAVs wielded lacked the appropriate kick to be worth installing into the shoulder mounts. Sonics and cylinders, even if downsized, were still kinetic and combustive weaponry that specialized in knocking around Aud.
While her orders sparked movement up and down the Titan, she relayed one more. "Return modus operandi to green, but we will raise to blue upon contact. I want variant protocols: all crew report back to their compartments."
They needed their supply lines up and running again. The recent skirmish depleted the on-hand stores of munitions, focusing agents, and cylinders. To remedy this, all servicemen returned to their respective compartments, and normal activities resumed. The reports came in at a lightning-fast pace, but between the two of them, Re-5 and her officer could sort through them without falling too far behind.
Controlled pandemonium caught the garage in its throes. The cavernous space within the Titan's jaws structured itself like an escalator rotating on an axis, with lines of polished, shiny WAVs locked into harnesses. Catwalks on both sides held activity.
In the front, groups of engineers lugged large carts of replacement modules and munitions behind them. Both their tools and the anti-grav fields supporting the carts, which would weigh too many kilograms to lift on their own, expedited the process. Like ants, they clustered around, ripped off the default modules, and reset the sparking sockets. While autonomous intelligences partnering with HUDs ran preset background checks, the engineers locked new sonic and cylinder emplacements into the shoulder and forearm mounts. Finished with their task, the engineers would toss the discarded modules into a separate cart managed by a different crew, and continue down the line.
From behind, techs and assistive staff helped pilots change into proper garb. Tougher, and yet more comfortable than the norm, the custom skinsuits were better at dispersing shocks and impacts across a wider surface area; they could also tighten and condense around points of single contact, better preserving a pilot's life in the event of a suit breach.
They mounted gurneys next, strapped in, and lifted over open WAVs. The techs only needed seconds to prepare the perfect angle, and as soon as the clamps released, the gurney and pilot slotted into place within the torso. After a quick check on the pilot, they sealed the suits.
First, the internal layers meshed together, molding around the back and neck of the pilot to leave no openings to exploit. The techs averted their eyes as they reinstalled the shield cores. Distortion fields wrapped around the suits of scutumsteel, flickering in and out of view like someone flipped a switch on a whim. The final touch came as scutumsteel plating. Clamps applied each piece, starting from the back of the helmet and working their way down, smothering with reflective armor.
Rotating up and down and back along the walls of the Nyx Breaker's jaws, every lane filled vacant WAVs. The harnesses released, and pilots began receiving instructions from their HUDs. Formation changes were in order. All the lanes organized themselves by the weight class of WAVs. This made things awkward for the line of light WAVs closest to the opening ramp, waiting for the call to sortie.
Despite the common logic of letting the largest slabs of scutumsteel tank the opening seconds of their upcoming contact, heavy WAVs were too slow. They were better armored and better armed, but they weren't setting up a defense. Well, they were, but it wasn't meant to be a lasting one. In, and out.
That explained why the default WAVs took the position of the vanguard. The Aud above wouldn't immediately shred them, but they could run faster than the next weight class up.
The Titan lurched as the last of the light WAVs retreated behind the fresh lines. Although the Nyx Breaker's anti-grav generators were as powerful as they could get, something of its size couldn't halt without conforming somewhat to physics. And if it did stop, their sortie was only seconds away.
Re-5 did not disappoint. As the garage ramp uncurled and folded outward, her voice rang throughout the head of the Titan. "Pilots, begin contact with coil protocol."