Nina watched the line of four-legged walker robots scuttle into position behind a worn-down hill. The same hill that had periodically hosted squadrons of such machines for weeks now. The hill was the ideal location to launch missiles against a nearby structure, which Nina also kept an idle eye upon. What purpose the grand metallic structure had once served was anybody's guess, every bit as much as it was anybody's guess how many thousands of years ago it had served that purpose. The last of the robots reached its destination, slowly settling into place, and there was a moment of silence.
Nina took a bite of her protein bar and started to count. The last few dozen times it had taken them twenty five seconds to come up with a firing solution. The bar tasted like dirt, more like dirt than it was supposed to. She scowled in annoyance and stuffed it back into one of the little compartments in her rover and clicked her tongue to activate voice commands.
"Call Nugan," She commanded.
"Nina I'm busy you-" a crackly, impatient voice came through the rover's speakers after a very brief delay.
"Oi! Nugan you shifty little shrew, you told me the protein combiner was fixed!" she shouted over his whiny voice.
"I did! ...I mean, it is. Fixed it last night." Nugan answered with only the barest hint of conviction.
"Lies."
"No, I-"
"Lies!!"
The line went dead as Nugan cut the connection. Nina clicked her tongue to reactivate voice commands again but before she could call Nugan back to yell at him some more, a flurry of motion from the foot of the hill caught her attention. Two dozen missiles streaked away from the hunched squadron of robots, arcing through the air and flying straight into a hail of fire from the fortress' anti-missile defenses.
"Playback recording in forty five minutes," she muttered at the rover's computer. It beeped at her in response, prompting her to record her message. "Make sure 'rina knows Nugan is useless." The computer beeped again, acknowledging that her request would be followed.
The remnants of the precursor's society, the machines that were currently killing each other, were typically divided into four factions. Before they had reawakened and resumed their war where they had presumably left off, Earth Coalition had their own names for them, based upon some kind of structural analysis of where their strongholds were located along the gateway network. ExSol society just called them based by what their logos looked like, Talon, Cat, River, and Eye.
Talon was the dominant faction on the planet, and it was Talon's fortress currently under siege by River's missile launchers.
Several missiles detonated against the walls and outer periphery of the fortress, filling the air with roaring percussion even from all the way over where Nina was. A hangar on the ground floor of the fortress opened, and about thirty intercept craft poured out, racing towards the robots attacking their base of operations. The vehicles, designated 'Locusts,' were basically just cannons mounted to crummy anti-grav engines that suspended them a few feet off the ground. They zipped along the ground, taking a roundabout route that passed very near Nina's own rover. The sound of their engines roared to a crescendo as they passed not much more than ten meters away. She knew their scanners detected her, and that Talon would be aware of her presence, in much the same way that that the fortress was aware of the strange tree-like flora that grew all around it. Which was to say, it couldn't care less so long as she didn't get in their way.
The squadron of thirty Locusts descended upon the group of walkers just as they fired a second barrage of missiles at the fortress. The unwieldy walker robots tried to turn around to face their attackers, bringing the small autocannons mounted into their egg-shaped torsos to bear against their agile attackers. As had been the case for months, they were easy prey. The Locusts nimbly avoided the walker robots' awkward attempts to bring their guns to bear, while their plasma casters tore superheated holes in them in turn.
In a matter of minutes, the twelve artillery walkers were all either disabled or totally scrapped, and the remains of the fortress' interception force started to peel away and return back to their hangar. Nina's hands went to her rover's controls, and she started the vehicle up, heading towards the remains of the artillery walkers. The fortress would dispatch a team to start scavenging the remains of the walker robots, as would the factory that sent them. There would be about a twenty minute window before they both arrived and clashed once again, and Nina had every intention of making the utmost use of that time.
Her rover tore up the sand and dirt as it brought her to the site of the battle. Nina's practiced driving brought her around a pair of scrapped walker robots. A melted hole in the side of one had detonated the artillery piece's ordnance and the resulting blast had triggered a chain reaction that had taken down the one next to it. The resulting mess was two utterly useless unsalvageable hunks of molten metal that she had no interest it, and so she went in deeper to the site of the battle looking for something better.
She spotted a walker robot with its two front legs melted off, and a small but well-placed hole burned right through the control module far off to her left. She immediately swerved her rover around and drove towards it like a madwoman, spinning her wheels at the last minute to do a 180 degree spin. The rover squealed and protested and the centrifugal force made her stomach lurch but she cued the breaks and came to a stop with her cargo bed facing the downed machine. Nina grabbed her plasma cutter and welding mask off of the passenger seat of the rover and hopped out onto the scorched dirt below. Her heavy boots cruched against some partially glassed sand and she only took a brief moment to maintain her footing before jogging over to the fallen robot to inspect it.
There were several armor plates that had come loose but were mostly intact that she could probably pry free and use just for the titanium, steel and carbon that would be contained within, but those materials weren't especially difficult to find, and certainly weren't worth Nina risking her life for. Insead she spotted a missile rack mounted upon the robot's back, the firing port jammed half open by a fragment of metal from some other machine. The fuel inside those missiles, that's what she was after, and the explosive payloads weren't useless either. Nina cracked her knuckles and started to climb, finding hand and footholds in the robot's shredded armor and strange, alien joints. She ascended the fallen robot and got up onto its sloped back. She moved in a crouch, keeping her center of gravity low on the angled, unsteady terrain as she approached the jammed missile port. Her plasma cutter came out, her welding mask went down, and she started quickly shearing off small bits of metal and machinery away from the edge of the missile rack to get it all the way open. She worked quickly but carefully, not interested in hitting the warhead of the missiles directly with the small stream of magnetically bottled plasma and accidentally detonating them.
The port came open, and then a few small cuts later, she sheared the entire missile rack free of its port. She grunted and started to remove some of the missiles, they were relatively small projectiles, maybe a meter and a half long, slender and not too heavy. She carefully grabbed three at a time and went down to her rover, piling them into the back until she had all twelve of them. As she strapped them tightly into the cargo bed of her rover, she heard the grinding sound of treads ripping up the coarse earth. She looked over her shoulder and saw a small convoy of five reclamation machines getting closer, coming to start salvaging the raw materials from this skirmish on a scale that she herself couldn't ever manage.
"Bereaver's tits," Nina cursed to herself and vaulted back into her rover, tossing her cutting equipment back into its proper location on her passenger seat and starting the engine. Tires screeched and crunched as the vehicle lurched into motion. She drove at a ninety degree angle away from where the other convoy of salvage machines would be approaching from. She drove up a hill, her vehicle groaning in protest as it struggled against both gravity and how hard Nina was trying to push it. As she crested the rise, she allowed herself one single glance over her shoulder to see if part of the convoy had broken off to pursue her.
