For a split second I was certain all five of them were going to crash into one of the blast doors in some sort of kamikaze run. But then I realized that they weren’t going to impact on the doors. They were aiming for a spot several dozen yards away, near the center of the farm—near a cluster of our remaining infantry drones, which were already scattering to get out of their way.
But the squadron slid to an abrupt halt just before impact, then began to hover a few feet above the ground. In the space of a few seconds, the five Glaive Fighters turned and rotated themselves into a star-shaped formation, so that their wingtips barely touched, linking themselves together in a circular chain. Then the curved, blade-like wings of the five Glaive Fighters began to interlock and merge with each other, rapidly combining and then reconfiguring to form a single giant humanoid robot, roughly the same size as one of our own Sentinels—like a makeshift Basilisk.
The giant junkyard golem began to bound across the solitary paved road leading up to the isolated farm house fa?ade, uprooting the line of utility poles adjacent to it, until the power lines snapped across its chest like Godzilla. Tines of electricity briefly erupted across its shambling torso, but that didn’t slow its progress. It kept on coming, as other Glaives began to combine and make landfall behind it.
That was when I stopped feeling cocky, and started feeling afraid—terrified, really. None of the Sobrukai ships had ever exhibited behavior like this in Armada or Terra Firma. This was something new. Nearby squadrons of ATHIDs and Sentinels were already converging on the threat, scrambling to attack this new enemy in their midst.
“You’ve got to be kidding me!” I heard a female voice shout over the open comlink channel. It was Lex. “Since when did these things learn how to form into Voltron?”
She said something else after that, but her voice was drowned out by the chainsaw-like roar of her Sentinel’s Gauss guns as she unloaded both of them at the thing.
Hearing Lex’s voice seemed to remind all of the other drone operators that they had access to a comlink, too, because the public channel was suddenly flooded with overlapping voices. Several of them were ground troops screaming for more air support, as the giant five-Glaive mech thing began to wade through their comparatively Lilliputian ranks, strafing them with plasma bolts from the photon cannons that bristled on each of its armored limbs. Blue flame roared from the thrusters at its feet as it flexed its knees and leapt forward, propelling itself a hundred meters across the burning landscape, toward the base’s massive armored blast doors, which had both warped and buckled free of their frame, creating huge gaps along their edges—several of which looked wide enough to allow the giant alien mech to squeeze through and get inside.
I scanned the wave of ATHIDs and Sentinels storming across the landscape below me. Each operator’s call sign was superimposed over the drone they were controlling on my HUD, but it still took me several seconds to locate Lex. She was power-leaping toward the newly assembled Glaive mechs, but her drone and those around her were fighting through a hail of plasma fire from above as the remaining Glaive squadrons swooped in to lay down cover fire for their comrades on the surface.
I jinked my ship down and to the left, joining a line of Interceptors beginning an attack run on the remaining mass of Glaives. We rocketed straight into their midst, unloading everything we had at them. I nailed at least two enemy fighters myself and saw at least a dozen more get bull’s-eyed by my comrades in the space of as many seconds, but we lost several of our Interceptors during the charge.
Down on the surface, I saw Lex’s Sentinel overtake the lead Glaive mech. The two towering opponents began to grapple with one another at the edge of the widest breach in the blast doors. The Sentinel executed an impressive move, spinning counter-clockwise and bringing up one of its massive arms in a clothesline maneuver that knocked the enemy mech’s leg completely off of its hodgepodge torso. Lex power-jumped her Sentinel clear of it just before two other Sentinels unloaded on the immobilized metal beast. This barrage was joined by hundreds of ATHIDs who began to fire on it, too. Within seconds, the five-Glaive mech exploded, raining wreckage and debris down onto the smoking blast doors, which pinged and clanged as each piece impacted on it.
I swung my interceptor up and around again, intending to make another pass at the remaining Glaives. But then I scanned my HUD and saw that only five Glaive Fighters remained, a small cluster of green triangles on my tactical display moving into some kind of attack formation high above me.