Exodus Earth: The Complete Series, page 37
“Roger that, sir.”
* * *
Normally, a four-kilometer run through thick brush would have taken a bit out of the fittest of soldiers. As it was, thanks to my armor I was able to carry both Teddy Cochran and Janice and then essentially just sit back and enjoy the air-conditioned ride. My armor did all the work. The others rode with Matt, and we made excellent time… covering the four klicks in under eight minutes despite the underbrush. Of course, it helped that modern battle armor had dedicated latch points for transporting personnel in BDUs—what the Marines liked to call “squishy body armor.”
The rise itself was not what we had been expecting. We ended up at the base of a small cliff heading straight up for about ten meters. Again, our armor proved invaluable. Ten meters, even carrying two people in light armor, was an easy jump when you have a fusion powerpack strapped to your back.
That didn’t keep my passengers from complaining about the ride sharing service I was providing. Seems things were a bit too bumpy and I shouldn’t expect a tip. To be fair, most of the complaints came from Chief Cochran. I shrugged it off. He was ninety-three years old. You had to make allowances for grumpy nonagenarians.
As soon as we were settled behind some rocks and brush, Matt launched a flight of cloaked drones. He instructed their AIs to surround the opposing force and provide us with a bird’s eye view of the goings on.
“Arty, what can you tell us about these mechs?” I asked over my comms. Arty had stayed with the forward Marines.
Proving yet again he could be in two places at once, a holographic representation of the Jabesh AI materialized next to me in a low crouch that mimicked my own.
“They are not Ancestor technology. In point of fact, they are roughly equivalent if not slightly inferior to your own systems. They do, however appear to be quite old. I estimate somewhere on the order of ten to fifteen thousand years.”
I shook my head in disappointment. I had been hoping for clues as to why I had been infected with a mutagenic virus. This wasn’t a near-tech problem developed by some race at a similar stage of technological advancement… even if it was thousands of years old. Even given the virus might well have been created and deployed by a future version of Arty… it was hard to believe these mechs or their creators were going to have the answers I was after. Ergo my disappointment.
I shook my head again, gentler this time. “So, we’re not looking at a cache of Jabesh artifacts here.”
“Certainly not the mechs,” Arty agreed. “The central building, however, is of completely different construction, orders of magnitude older and, Admiral, it is actively shielded. That fact alone suggests Ancestor-level technology. It is possible the race that deployed the mechs are guarding access to it.”
I zoomed my HUD’s display. The advancing mechs began firing on Chad’s position. The Marines returned fire. Whatever the bad guys were using, it seemed to only be effective at chewing up the ground. They either were terrible aims, or they had a different plan of attack. As it was, it seemed all they were doing was firing into the ground a few meters in front of our troops. It threw a lot of dirt into the air but that was about it.
I was beginning to think dirt in the air was the whole point—creating a smokescreen of sorts—when a new thought suddenly occurred to me. It must have occurred to Matt at the same time, because we both yelled at the same time.
“FALL BACK! FALL BACK NOW!”
15
COLD FURY
There are times I hate being right. The enemy wasn’t missing. They were firing rounds designed to bore under our troop’s position. Once they were in position, the enemy sent some unseen signal and all hell broke loose. Chad’s entire line of Marines was enveloped in an earth-shattering explosion. I saw battle armor flying in every direction.
Modern battle armor can take a lot of abuse, but there are limits. My HUD provided a constant feed on the location and health status of the entire landing party, including Chad’s Marines. There was a lot of red and only a handful of yellow indicators. Chad’s suit was one of the yellows. He was injured but alive. I brought a detailed view of his armor’s condition up on a holographic display. His fusion powerpack was toast. He was running on battery backups alone. That would normally buy him five minutes at most.
His hip servos were frozen, and his right leg was a mangled mess. He wasn’t walking out of this one. A quick check of the others and I realized Chad was in better shape than most of the survivors. How the hell had things gone south so quickly?
My instinct was to rush back down there. Matt must have sensed it, because he clamped an armored hand on my shoulder.
“There are too many of them, Captain.”
He was right. There had to be thirty or more of the alien mechs crawling all over the scene of carnage they had created.
I watched helplessly as the vaguely humanoid mechs grabbed the arms, legs, and sometimes heads of our people and dragged them into two piles. The living and the dead. The fact that they were bothering to sort the Marines filled me with some hope. They weren’t just killing the survivors outright. It turned out that hope was premature.
With seeming complete disregard for the horror of what they were doing, the mechs approached each of the survivors and using massive, clawed tools, snipped off various appendages. One time it might be two legs. Another time an arm and a leg. In the case of Chad and one other, it was their heads followed by an arm.
In most cases the battle armor sealed the amputations and administered emergency sedatives, but the screams over the comms were deafening. Of course, I didn’t hear any of them. My eyes were fixated on the flashing red status light that had been Chad Boseman. He was gone. Lost to a senseless death. Our long, intimate conversation the other night would be our last. There would be no more of his deep voiced laugher. No more twinkle in his eye. No more handheld walks through the gardens. He was gone. Well and truly gone. He was… gone.
I felt a bitter cold fill my soul. I’ve seen plenty of death. I’ve sent more men and women to their deaths then I’d care to admit. This, however, was something different. This was evil. This was… I don’t have the words to adequately describe what this was. I knew at that moment that these mechs and the creatures driving them would die by my hand. Of that I had no doubt.
As I watched, the survivors were dragged by their remaining limbs towards some unknown fate through the now thoroughly trampled brush. Their destination seemed to be the structures from which the alien mechs had emerged.
I wanted with all my heart and soul to go after them. Janice and even Teddy begged the colonel and me to do something. Instead, we stood frozen and stone silent. It was Lieutenant Gillespie who finally signaled our companions to stop. The agonizingly painful reality was we could do nothing but survive in the present in the hopes we could do something in the future.
“Orders, Captain?”
I turned my head to face my first officer. Although his armored visor was closed, my suit’s AI superimposed a holographic version of his face on top of it. I imagined my expression reflected the same fury.
“We live. We watch. We plan. We kill every last one of them,” I said in a calm and quite voice that scared even me.
* * *
The alien mechs spent the better part of an hour going through our crashed shuttle. They carried several items away including the shuttle’s computer core, as well as what looked to be the entire emergency ration supply. I wasn’t sure how I felt about the last. While it was a relief that the mech aliens intended to feed their prisoners, it also meant our people would be subjected to their depravations that much longer.
When they were done, they used something akin to thermite to melt the entire ship into a molten pool of slag.
It was that cooling mass of metal we were now approaching. The sun had set and rose again while we waited to approach the shuttle. We simply couldn’t take the risk that the mech aliens were monitoring the crash site for more survivors. While we waited, we were in constant communication with Survey One.
Lieutenant Commander Aikawa had offered to send a second shuttle. I nixed the idea. There was too great a chance that shuttle would be shot down too. In addition, Matt and I were of the opinion that we were never going to win a direct assault on the enemy position.
If we were only talking the thirty or so mechs we had seen, we might have been able to do something… especially given that Bernice had programmed the fabricators to start producing our own mechs and additional battle armor. The problem was, we had every reason to suspect that each of the alien structures had a similar number of opponents. In other words, we weren’t facing thirty enemies, but several hundred.
There were a number of additional problems with a frontal approach. It would take time to produce the additional mechs. They were far more complex than battle armor. Second, we only had a handful of warm bodies rated as mech pilots. Third, any attempt to land additional forces would erase the element of surprise we currently enjoyed. Matt and I agreed that a covert approach was the way to go.
Teddy knelt near the molten mass. “Whatever they used, it was certainly effective. I don’t think reclamation nanites could have done as effective a job.”
“Do you have anything useful to add to the conversation, engineer?” I quipped. “In case you’ve forgotten, we’re here looking for food, weapons, and clues. Have you found any of those?”
Matt stopped what he was doing and sent me a flash text message on my HUD.
You ok? We’re all on the same side here.
I sighed. He was right, and chewing the chief’s head off was not helpful.
While I read Matt’s message, Teddy stood up and turn away from me stiffly. I could tell by his body language that he was hurt.
“Chief?”
“Captain?” I noticed he did not turn around but continued walking the parameter of the downed and now thoroughly destroyed shuttle.
“I’m sorry. You didn’t deserve that, and I was wrong to say it. Please accept my apology.”
I saw that he paused for a moment before answering.
“No apology needed, Captain,” he said in a fatherly tone. “You’re tired, recovering from a serious illness, hurt, frustrated, and angry. It’s a wonder you haven’t bitten more heads off.”
“CAPTAIN! I think I have something!”
All eyes turned towards Lieutenant Gillespie. Catherine was bending over something in the grass.
“It looks like oil of some type.”
“Confirmed,” Teddy announced after scanning the greenish-yellow substance. “It’s a synthetic graphite emulsion in a viscous polymer base. There do not appear to be any nanite structures present.”
“In other words, without the nanites working to repair the polymer bonds, this stuff will eventually wear out,” I said. “Think, people. How do we use this?”
Arty watched the engineer finish scanning the substance before turning to face the rest of us.
“I think it’s reasonable to assume the utilization of nanotechnology is somewhat limited. Had nanites been generally employed, in addition to functioning as a preservation additive to their lubricant, they would also be utilized to maintain lubricant seals. The fact that we have found evidence of a leak would seem that nanites are not in widespread use.”
I nodded. I had already reached the same conclusion.
“Question. What impact would the lack of the ‘wide-spread’ as Arty puts it… utilization of nanites have on their technology? What aspects of that can we use against them?”
We bandied the question back and forth for a few minutes without arriving at a definitive answer. The bottom line was nanites were a means of solving technological challenges. But at the end of the day, they were but one such means… most challenges have multiple potential solutions.
We decided to attempt to approach the central Jabesh dome-like structure. We were operating on the assumption that the mech aliens had built their pillboxes to prevent someone from approaching the Jabesh dome. This was subtly different from defending the dome.
Initially, we had attempted to approach the dome by flying in and landing the shuttle. None of our scans had given us any indication that there were warm bodies on the planet’s surface intent on preventing that from happening. We had operated on the assumption that the planet was deserted. There’s an old saying about what happens when you assume. Turns out that saying is correct.
Our hope was that a covert ground infiltration might succeed where an overt air approach had failed. Both our battle armor and our BDUs had limited cloaking capabilities. We were going to attempt to use this capability to walk past the pillboxes and right up to the Jabesh dome.
Let me be clear about this. We had no clue what we were going to find once we got to the dome. Our hope was we would find something we could leverage to get our wounded people back. What that something was… was up in the air at the moment.
We used Arty as our forward scout. The reason for this was simple. If Arty didn’t want you to know he was there, you didn’t know he was there. His cloaking tech was second to none. In addition, he had access to a personal forcefield that offered him significant protection should things go south for the winter. In short, he was the perfect scout to test the enemy’s defenses.
My only problem with Arty was I still wasn’t sure he could be trusted. Don’t get me wrong. He was my friend. I wanted to trust him. I just wasn’t sure that I did. Whatever the reason behind my infection, it had ultimately led to the death of Chad and the horrific maiming of soldiers under his command. I was having a problem getting past that. As I said, I wanted to trust the Jabesh AI, but that trust was going to have to be re-earned. For the moment I was going to apply the ancient adage—trust but verify.
The Jabesh AI sent a video feed to our HUDs. He moved in sync to the gentle breeze that was blowing. That in and of itself was an amazing trick. Even cloaked, a soldier’s movements could be tracked by watching for the movement of tall grasses. I knew where to look, and I still couldn’t see my “friend.”
“I’m not detecting any activity on sensors. I’m going to plant the probe and move on to the primary objective,” Arty reported a moment later.
The probe in question was a small packet of recon nanites that would attempt to penetrate the outer shell of the pillbox where our men had been taken.
Ten minutes later the probe had been planted and Arty had sprinted the three quarters of a kilometer between the pillbox and the side of the Jabesh dome. The mech aliens were either unaware of his presence or chose not to react.
His video feed showed a clean white surface. Up close it seemed to have that same slight white sheen or glow that had been a hallmark of Midway station. A quick inspection of the surface showed the slightest of circular indentations.
“It’s a teleport pad,” Arty explained. “I think it would be best if I avoided activating it until after you join me. I suspect our belligerent friends will notice the electro-magnetic energy spike such pads generate.”
I had Janice and Catherine strapped to my armor’s mount points. They each rode on my back on opposite sides of my fusion power pack. They faced outward, theoretically so they could use their weapons to defend my flank… at least that’s what the designers of these suits claimed. The reality was I suspected it had more to do with reducing the sphincter factor for my passengers. When you were being chased and your role in the chase was that of squishy body armor, you tended to get nervous.
Matt carried the chief and the few supplies we had managed to salvage from the downed shuttle. What had remained unsaid was the reality that our backs were up against the wall. The planets on this world were not toxic, but neither were they nutritious. We would be forced to attempt a shuttle landing in less than a week if we couldn’t secure a food source of some type.
Our cloaks were not as effective as Arty’s, and we lacked the finesse to follow the wind as he had done. Still, the mech aliens seemed oblivious to our presence. We had started to see images from inside the pillbox thanks to the nanite package Arty had dropped off on the way in. Strangely, we saw plenty of mech armor attached to recharging ports, but we had yet to see a sample of the soft and gooey insides that typically piloted said mechs. I desperately wanted to see the beings whose very existence I had sworn to erase with extreme prejudice. Sadly, I would have to wait.
16
MARK IN THE MORNING
I felt the indentation with my fingers. One of the nice things about modern battle armor was the fidelity of the haptic feedback built into the external pressure sensors. Even with my augments, it would have been difficult to feel the seam. The feedback provided by my battle armor had no trouble detecting it.
“So how do we get in?” Lieutenant Gillespie asked.
I had been wondering the same thing. We had been hovering around this section of the Jabesh dome for the better part of ten minutes. Now I realize ten minutes isn’t all that long, but when you’re standing fully exposed with enemies on several sides and an impenetrable wall on the other, impatience is a natural response.
“I’m baffled as to why I am not able to initiate a teleport sequence. These are teleport pads. I would have expected they would have responded to my command to detach and configure themselves for use. I’m embarrassed to admit they are ignoring me. I keep getting an error message. It is frustrating.”
I worked hard to suppress a smile. I could count on the tip of one finger the number of times I had seen Arty flustered.
“Just as a matter of curiosity, what would be the error message you’re getting?” Teddy asked.
If it were possible for a Jabesh AI to look even more embarrassed than he had been previously, it was what we were seeing now.
“I would prefer not to say.”
I looked up from the surface I was examining.
