"Sir!" His aide pulled him from his musing. "The foremost Aud are within melee range of both of us."
He grunted, trying another kind of attack with his mouth. Gathering a wad of saliva, he swirled it around against one of his cheeks, then spat it down as a glob of liquid.
It collided with a cluster of Aud, coating their fur and weighing them down, while making the exterior face of the walls slippery and harder to cling to. "That means they should also be within range of the NDS. Or some of its capabilities, no?"
"Correct. I was going to have it activated."
"Which one first?"
Her analysis was smooth and swift. "The Aud have packed together, but they are also not advancing on a horizontal plane, which means a simple heavy gas-based measure would waste most of its potential, with less than twenty percent of gas released actually coming into contact with the Aud, and even less being inhaled to the point where their faculties become impaired as severe as intended. We haven't given much consideration to any potential divergences brought on by the greater tunnel gales, such as wind shear, nor for temperature and humidity. So we should stick to solid, heavier measures of deployment for now that we can guide to their target clusters without complication, and with minimal need to delay release to calculate their projectile motion with a margin of error in mind."
"The powders in the contact pads or the capsules?"
"The capsules. Just because it remains difficult for us to deploy gas measures from our current position doesn't mean we cannot detonate smaller payloads by remote. Gas is still an effective measure we shouldn't turn away from using when confronted with such a tightly packed group begging for us to slaughter them."
"Not that you need my approval--" He whistled, pausing to hear the exterior face of the walls crinkle as the air burst flew parallel to it. "But you have it all the same."
"Thank you, sir." She ended the communication, addressing one of the officers below her in the same heartbeat.
"Engage the NDS's third module. We're going to be dropping the capsules, then triggering them to detonate upon a manual switch. Spread the word around to the techs responsible for managing the targeting systems. I want the ones with the fastest reaction speeds, depth perception, and best cooperation between themselves and their HUDs to assume the responsibility of detonating the capsules."
After witnessing first-hand what the communication deadzone had wrought, she couldn't be sure what was and wasn't spared by its effects, which might include the trigger signals autonomous intelligences sent to detonate the capsules once they reached the perfect descent point to reach the maximum possible coverage their payloads could reach.
Or it might not. Either way, she couldn't be irresponsible or callous here. Each capsule represented not only a missed opportunity but also a heavy material cost.
That was true to every aspect of the Neurochemical Disruptor System, which increased the pressure weighing upon He-6's aide's shoulders the moment she, albeit with He-6's blessing, chose to bring it online.
That was why she would place her trust in the most tried and true trigger operators stationed aboard the Jackal that remained uncompromised by the communication deadzone: its servicemen.
The officer was as fast as her. After delivering an impeccable "Yes, sir" laced with equal amounts respect and scrutiny, he turned his back to her, and from what she could determine, opened communications with near a dozen people at once. Talk about multitasking.
She waited until one of the techs scaled the ladder to the sitesman's platform and offered a screen. She scrolled, finding everything her eyes scanned to be satisfactory.
The NDS, despite its heavy material costs, was surprising in the fact that it took what amounted to dregs of energy to power when compared to other Titans' signature systems, such as the Nyx Breaker's echoes and drills, or the Flux Monolith's primary mechanism.
What was it, something like less than a tenth of the Titan's entire electric grid output? She reached that section of the report and nodded to herself, finding her guess validated.
While within, its crew was set alive with a new vigor as they prepared to activate another of humanity's rarely seen weapons of war, the Jackal itself made no actual positioning changes.
It continued to remain still while its emplacements worked their damnedest to whittle down the Aud. At this point, they had crossed two-thirds of their journey, and though there remained a sizable buffer of space between the Titan and its sitesman, and the ravenous maws and mad eyes below, the urgency of their situation was stronger than their confidence in humanity's technological supremacy.
Then again, some argued that the Aud had chosen biotechnology as a route of advancement in contrast to humanity--but she could ponder on stuff like that once the first battle had concluded.
Though no serviceman wanted to speak it aloud or even think it if they could, several facts were pressuring them and beginning to affect their preexisting capabilities, whether they were a part of the defense crews, staffing a Titan, or hidden away in one of the many compartments chewing their way through incoming and outgoing data.
One of them was beginning to resolve itself in a positive manner. Most of the servicemen stationed on either side of the Titan perches were unsure whether the massive constructs could produce superior results than if their space retained the original wall-grade emplacements, like the rest of the walls.
But the casualty reports on the Aud side were fruitful, revealing that all the Titans could at least meet basic expectations, and at least two were exceeding even those projections. But not the Jackal.
The Jackal was hanging on by a thread, and that was only because of its sitesman. The other Titans could all rely on their signature systems in advance, as well as much larger surface areas to hold superior numbers of Titan-grade emplacements.
The Jackal was the slimmest and lightest among its brethren--even the Nyx Breaker was greater in total surface area, though comparing a long, wormy construct to a simple feline wasn't fair in the slightest.
And though questioning the reasoning of their superiors was nothing short of taboo, a combination of frequent stressors and high-intensity warfare was one of history's most effective measures at breaking the discipline of military professionals.
Was the Jackal up to par compared to the other Titans? Why did its sitesman need to support it through direct action when the other Titans had no such shortcoming? Wasn't leaving the Jackal without any significant support an irresponsible decision, especially if there had been no data collection beforehand on the Titan's capabilities in dealing with a massed, horde enemy?
Questions such as those and more were becoming more and more common, though the unease would be short-lived. Both Directory Control and the Jackal's sitesman had predicted such a psychological response in advance.
Retrospect and foresight were two powerful abilities humanity had often neglected to use to its advantage, but not this time. The quiet doubt was about to explode, not unlike the first of the capsules loading into the launcher for the NDS's third module.