Chapter 164: Classic Astartes Tactics: Boarding Action.
The battlefield was burning.
The Chitauri army pouring through the wormhole was beginning, for the first time, to show signs of being pushed back under the Astartes' assault.
Between two buildings, a Leviathan was tearing through the city block. The mass of it was enough that anything it grazed simply came apart. Buildings that had taken years to construct came down in sections, shedding glass and structural steel like debris from a demolition.
People standing in the street watching their apartments disassemble themselves felt the loss with a specific kind of grief that only applies to things you spent the last of your money to own.
"Motherfucker! That's my house! Stop! Stop it!"
"Go to hell, you alien bastards!!"
"Come on, Astartes! Get them! Kill them!"
The prayers of newly-mortgaged homeowners mixed into the noise of the city.
At the same moment. Several rooftops along the same street.
Heavy footsteps. A bloodstained figure moved to the edge of the roof and looked down at the Leviathan below.
From inside the helmet, a voice came out flat and without feeling.
"Target is approaching."
"Unit Two, Unit Three. Confirm positions."
Two responses came back over the internal channel.
On two other rooftops farther down the street, two more figures came to the edges.
"Unit Two at designated position. Awaiting instruction."
"Unit Three at designated position. Awaiting instruction."
"Confirmed. Move."
Three shapes left the rooftops simultaneously.
The air displacement preceded them.
They hit the Leviathan's back like three dropped weights.
The sound of three powered suits of armor connecting with the Leviathan's spine at speed produced a sound that carried for several blocks.
The combined mass of the armor, accelerated by the thruster units, drove a dent into the Leviathan's armored spine. The alloy casing that had been designed to withstand orbital entry bent inward, edges curling and tearing, the entire spinal section pressed into a concave shape that it had not been designed to form.
The Leviathan made a sound that was less a roar and more a structural failure noise.
"Tear it open."
No emotion in the order. None.
The bolt gun and the chainsword started at the same instant.
One Astartes on one knee at the deepest point of the depression, bolt gun pressed directly into the gap in the armor plating, firing as fast as the weapon cycled. Each bolt found the interior and detonated in the Leviathan's internal structures. Metal fragments from the inside of the Leviathan and sparks from whatever hydraulic system was in there covered him completely.
The other two were more direct.
The chainswords went into the Leviathan's side. Fire from the contact point. The teeth of the saws catching on the metal and tearing through it.
There was no technique to what they were doing.
Or rather: the technique was maximum violence in the most direct direction.
First stroke didn't go all the way through? Then keep going. Use the force to open the wound by hand if necessary.
The Leviathan screamed again, something mechanical and massive and increasingly desperate.
It understood its body was coming apart.
It started with shaking, the enormous mechanical body trying to throw them off.
When that didn't work, it changed direction suddenly and drove its own back into the glass curtain wall of the nearest building.
The impact turned ten thousand panes of tempered glass into a storm of downward-moving fragments that kept coming for several seconds.
The body of the Leviathan scraped against the building's structural frame, tearing sparks and concrete off both surfaces.
The objective: crush the three things on its back between its own body and the building.
The three Astartes held on to the armor plating, fingers finding purchase in the gaps, and kept working. The sound of powered armor against concrete and steel beams was the sound of metal under pressure it wasn't designed for. The people inside the building made different sounds.
The attacks from their hands did not stop.
Then, from behind, without warning:
Energy beams from nine Chitauri skimmers that had converged on their position.
The fire caught the powered armor on the backs of all three of them, burning lines into the outer plates where the metal had begun to overheat.
The Astartes being hit turned their heads.
Nine craft moving in from both sides of the street.
Chitauri infantry on the platforms made sounds at them.
The energy fire coming from the craft couldn't penetrate the armor, but the volume and pressure of it was enough to break up the work and give the Leviathan a window to recover.
No words. No hand signals. No channel needed.
The three sets of eyes met through the visors for a fraction of a second and arrived at the same decision.
The rearmost Astartes spun.
One knee down, bolt gun up, two craft already in the targeting system.
Two shots.
Both craft became fire before they could move.
The burning wreckage and the blackened remains of Chitauri soldiers scattered down across the rooftops of parked vehicles below.
Through the smoke, more craft were coming.
He checked the bolt count. Not enough for all of them.
He slung the bolt gun without hesitation.
He bent forward, ten fingers finding the edge of the large section of Leviathan armor plate that the previous work had already loosened.
He pulled.
The sound of metal separating from electrical connections it had been attached to for a long time.
A piece of armor the size of a security door came free.
He looked at the approaching craft. His arms came up.
A discus throw. Standard form.
The armor section went sideways through the air, spinning fast, edges sharp from the tearing, moving into the Chitauri craft formation behind them.
It went through several of them. The craft that it reached first came apart. The Chitauri soldiers on those craft did not have enough time to separate into pieces before the pieces were already separated.
On the other side of the Leviathan, the other two had worked the hull open far enough to see the internal structure.
They looked at each other, each pulled a shaped charge from their belt, and drove both charges into the gap as far as their arms would reach.
Then punched the charges in further with their fists, making sure neither one was going anywhere.
When the indicator lights on both charges started blinking, they understood the close work was done.
"Clear."
The word on the channel.
All three bent at the knee simultaneously.
The powered armor unloaded everything it had into the jump.
Airborne, the leading Astartes saw a Chitauri skimmer coming straight at them, pulled the combat knife from the back of the belt, and threw it.
The knife went through the craft's pilot before the craft could adjust.
As the pilot died and the craft lost direction, the leading Astartes used the thruster to reach it, redirected the craft, and caught the others as they crested the jump arc.
They left on a dead man's vehicle.
Behind them, the Leviathan had worked out what was embedded in its core. The sound it made was the loudest it had been capable of making.
Its tail swept an entire block's worth of streetlights and vehicles off the road.
Too late.
White light forced through every crack in its hull simultaneously. The force inside it exceeded what the structure could contain.
Then:
The explosion arrived before the sound of it did.
The Leviathan broke at the midsection. The forward section continued on momentum, went through a building, and stopped. The rear section became fire and debris distributed across the entire street.
This was happening across the city.
The Chitauri's terrifying war machines, in combined operation against a coordinated Astartes group, were lasting less than thirty seconds.
Once the Astartes identified a Leviathan, it burned from the inside out.
On Stark Tower, Loki's fist had closed.
He did not understand where these things had come from.
He did not understand why each of them individually was this capable.
They had come from a weak human world. That was simply a fact.
He looked up through the wormhole. Still more Chitauri on the other side. Ten thousand of them at rough count, still coming.
The number calmed him.
"Good. There are far more of them than these things."
"They're individually strong, but weight of numbers will grind them down. It always does."
"Let's see how long you last."
The smile came back. The concern left.
If the battle had gone the way Loki was calculating, the numbers might eventually have done it.
But Matthew had known from the beginning that the Chitauri operated as an interconnected system dependent on the command ship. He was not going to leave the command ship on the other side of the wormhole unaddressed.
On a private property outside New York.
A spacecraft was sitting in the open ground.
It had started its life as a Life Foundation cargo ship, purchased at a significant premium. Tony had modified it into a military configuration. Six heavy railguns on the primary weapons systems. Twelve secondary guns. Enough to punch through the outer hull of any ship the Chitauri were operating.
Heavy footsteps from the tree line.
A twelve-person Astartes unit came out of the trees.
Each pair was carrying a black cryogenic transport box the size of a large wardrobe.
Behind them, a team of biohazard-suited technicians followed, moving the cryogenically stored Lickers, Hunters, and Aliens one by one into the ship.
About fifteen minutes later, the cargo doors closed.
The drives fired.
The ship went up fast and turned toward the wormhole above the city.
Their objective was straightforward.
Boarding action.
The classic Astartes doctrine: breach enemy hull, fight inside the enemy ship.
The ship was quick.
Even so, moving directly toward the command ship was something the Chitauri noticed.
They came for it in formation, trying to bring it down before it could close the distance.
The ship answered with its main guns. Fire across the approach corridor, continuous.
"Evading incoming."
"Evasion failed. Right engine has sustained critical damage."
"122 kilometers to target. Estimated arrival in ten seconds."
The countdown continued in the cabin.
The twelve Astartes sat facing each other. The emergency red lighting above them had been on since they lifted. It made them look like they were already in the battle.
Around them: impact sounds from the hull, system warnings, the noise of a ship in the process of being destroyed.
None of them moved.
"..."
"Target reached. Pod One and Pod Two separating from main hull."
"Initiating micro-deceleration sequence."
"Micro-deceleration failure. Filling pod interior with buffer gel. Crew: brace for hard contact."
The ship broke apart.
Two reinforced metal capsules, each carrying six Astartes and a cryogenic transport box, rode the wreckage into the Chitauri command ship's hull at near-full velocity.
They went in like shells fired from the outside.
The impact brought Chitauri soldiers from throughout the ship.
They surrounded the capsules and waited. An unknown object that had just driven itself into their hull at that speed might be a weapon. They didn't fire.
That gave the Astartes their opening.
A sound from inside the capsules. Electrical. Building.
The Chitauri soldiers looked at each other.
A forty-centimeter beam of blue-white light tore through the capsule wall, through the corridor, through the Chitauri soldiers on the other side of it in a straight line.
The energy intensity was such that the blood of the soldiers it passed through had vaporized before it had time to spill.
The light ended.
Twelve Astartes walked out.
In their hands: railguns. The portable variant, modified and developed by Tony Stark. Less output than the full installation, but carriable. Technically. One point two meters long, seventy kilograms, usable only by enhanced soldiers, with no improvement to the charge cycle time. Deployed to a small number of Astartes specifically for this operation.
After emerging from the capsules, the twelve did not immediately advance.
Instead, they took several dozen vials of blue compound from the cryogenic boxes and fed the contents into the ship's waste conduits and internal circulation systems.
Once that was done, they moved deeper into the ship.
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