Our first Category 4s.
A zone-wide alert was our alarm clock that morning. We figured the Tsi-Hu decided to test our perimeters and were throwing a few more of their Cat-3s at us, backed by battalions of those shifters to see where we may be the weakest. Would have been pretty standard for any army that didn't mind herding their soldiers into slaughter, just to test the other side. They have the numbers on theirs, anyway. Needless to say, nobody woke up that day thinking they'd have go up against titans, right out of books on mythology they bored most kids in school with.
These walking towers came out of the ocean, on 3, 4, 5 or 6 legs. I don't know why a lot of us thought the higher the category the less variety there might be. And they only had a single thing in common. Most things, flesh or machine or anything in between, are usually the most vulnerable when they're on the attack. Not these things. Every damn one of them had their own little nasty surprise in store that killed the first few who thought they had an opening. The fallen gave us our first real survival lesson. If it hadn't been them, it would have been us.
Sometimes, I'm really glad I prefer to stay at a distance. But, then, someone else has to chance biting the dust, just to give you your moment of glory, so you could live to tell the tale. Sure, very few of us are out here to be heroes or even for the greater good. For most of us it's a chase for adrenalin that either ends up keeping us fed or it buries us without so much as a gravestone. But, still...moments like that is when everyone realizes roles have to be forfeit and everyone has to take that chance and give the others their moment, so all, or...at least, most of us might live. There's nothing revelatory in that. And yet...even in our line of work many don't care to soak up such survival wisdom until it's too late. Moral of the story, go in completely alone and you die alone.
Anyway...
The main weapon of these colossi varies between how many legs they have. The fewer they got the less assuming their armaments. I repeat, the less assuming. None of them are any weaker than the others, though. As far as we could tell the difference is in the area they can damage and not how much of it they can deal. Their accuracy seems to be consistent, all across. The tripods can split an apple in half on someone's head, along with their heads. The beam they fire can carve a defense tower into fine pieces, if they're not dealt with fast enough. The "Siege Hexas", as many from R&D and the archives have started calling the six-legged ones, after some polling, these spiders could probably crawl up a wall, if there was one high enough, but as it is, they can slowly step right over ours, with the speed of a slightly less lively sloth, mind you. And their array of guided, yes, 'guided' mortars can rain down exactly where they want and not a foot off their intended mark. We didn't think they'd care much for some friendly-fire between themselves and we sure lost our excitement when a volley of these partly organic and evidently somewhat intelligent drones just parted over a tripod we managed to accidentally kite under them. Instead of taking care of it for us, they impacted all around it in a neat circle, altering their trajectory in mid-fall to consciously avoid hitting one of their own.
Of course, that little display got our xenobiologists excited. For one, it was finally an actual field of study now and not just an occupation you only read about in fiction. They were crawling all over the husks, before the dust even settled. Turns out all the Cat-4s have entire hives of these drones in them, regeneratig when they 'reload' and they're either used for defense or offense, with varying capabilities. We suspected as much and our fallen were the first to confirm it, when they charged in. Even the tripods they thought defenseless released a swarm of these things, every one of them primed for detonation either on contact or just near their target, so a 'near miss' was not a miss, anymore. And 'close shaves' barely left any of the survivors with enough humor - or enough of a working jaw - to call them as such. And they were the lucky ones. Those who weren't, the drones 'chewed' through their cockpit's shielding, whether they were regular or hard-rider, before going for the kill. All of them moved as one, their little hive minds making them move like they were one being and yet only one or two destroyed themselves to finish off whoever they could, while the rest returned. Back into the body.
As for their mortar attacks, no one really took the 'opportunity' to get between them and their target to see if they'd also snake around a sudden obstacle that wasn't initially there. We can only assume their drones wouldn't be impartial to hitting such a willing target. So our comrades with bigger frames and force-absorption shields could actually shine, next time. Even those single-use dome projectors were enough to spare us from, at least, one attack. After that, we had to make sure it was their last.
The only way we could clear the drones - and I'm saying it's how 'we' did it, might not be the only way - was to forcibly detonate them with kinetic blasts. Grenade launchers, rockets, even repulsive wave emitters could scramble their senses and if just a few explode, they can take the others with them and leave enough of an opening to close in, inside their dampening fields. Oh, did I forgot to mention those? Cat-4s also generate a constant field of energy around them that renders our jump-jets inoperable and it also disables any other type of rockets, so they fall out of the air, before they can reach them. Rockets can still be remotely detonated if one has the mods for it, of course. Might shake up the drones or they can even fall on top of the walker if the salvo is released from above. But, anyone who wants to get close will have to grapple, until the field is taken down. Don't ask, yet, how their mortar-drones work inside the field. Has to be some immunity to their own tech, or a different method of propulsion. What do I know. Hopefully R&D can reverse-engineer some of it. There is a silver-lining, here. A connection between the drones and the field. The faster we could clear them, the longer it seemed to take for the field to recharge, after we drained it with projectile and energy weapons. So it's susceptible to anything other than rocket-propelled ammunition. It does have some serious reserves, though. And it's only a guess, at this point, that it draws power for its field from the same source it uses to regenerate its drones. After taking a lot of punisment, it only has enough to prioritize one over the other. R&D is still pouring over the ins and outs. It's only been a couple of hours since the attack.
All that said, I only dealt with the three and six-legged ones, myself. I saw the quadrupedals, on a different part of the beach, leap around to change positions and spray the area with an electrified fog that seemed to jam the comms and targeting systems of some of our comrades. Their feed cut out, temporarily. And one of the five-legged ones could stand on a single leg and turn itself into a spinning-top to defend itself. Watched through someone else's feed a few of the guys trying to grapple it, hang on for a few round trips, then, get tossed, like one of those old circus-rides from the archived records gone wrong. I'm sure the others took a few notes, as well. Might be worth a bed-time reading. But, here is something that isn't particularly conducive to a good sleep.
The attack was impressively well coordinated. Definitely nothing that we've ever seen from any human troops, present or in the records. Their movements, course-changes, response-times, both on the level of a single drone, a foot-soldier, a shape-shifted beast and as groups, were far too fluid for them to have been directed by different officers, all the way down through a branching chain of command, like the one we're familiar with. We're still not sure if they even have ranks as such. Something like that would just slow them down, if anything. They showed us images of "server rooms" from the old world, as an analog for a big brain. Told us that, in theory, the only way to possibly coordinate an army like this, is to have massive processing power. The server rooms of old were essentially combined machine brains, capable of processing on a far larger scale than its individual parts. Here, the guys talking to us turned a little pale and said that since these Tsi-Hu are both tech and flesh, it's anyone's guess if the mind behind them is organic, machine or both. It took us a few seconds for it to sink in. Some of us turned the same color as them. Whatever was controlling the Tsi-Hu has to be way bigger than anything we've seen so far.
Night night.
