Mecha

by J. F. Holmes

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah, and I knew…There was no, no help from you…” The mech landed firmly in the middle of the terrified and fleeing enemy soldiers. Stepping forward and bringing a massive foot down hard on a crawling figure, Andrew spun around, firing in a circle, never firing at a group of enemies more than once.

  “The beating in my heart…the thunder of guns…” The sounds of the guitar, the drums, and the lascannon fire seemed to meld into a perfect melody. Stopping the big machine and crouching for a split second, he fired off every high-explosive rocket he had left, set to launch in a circular pattern around him. The orange flashing of the detonations and the pinging of shrapnel off of the armor on his mech told him his rockets were shredding the area around him.

  “Tore me apart….” Something hit the left side of his mech, rocking him in his seat. Whirling the machine, he poured fire into the Elai soldier who was kneeling with an expended rocket tube, the searing hot bolts tearing the enemy into several large pieces that crumpled into a heap.

  “Hey, it’s all right…” Another impact on the rear of the mech rocked him again. With a muttered curse, he spun and triggered the big plasma cannon, vaporizing another rocket crew. There were bright flashes as the rocket crew’s spare rocket rounds detonated, tossing bodies into the air like broken toys as it exploded.

  “We’re doing fine…” Triggering the remaining anti-personnel bomblets in the grenade dispenser, the rippling crackle of the bomblets was deafening, even inside the armored cockpit. The temperature gauge was screaming at him, but Andrew didn’t care. He wasn’t cold anymore, he had good music, and he was actually having fun.

  “Beating in my heart…” The mech took a blast to the knee, dropping it hard, before struggling up. The Mark 30s were chiming that they were out of ammunition. The plasma cannon fired once more and fell silent. The cockpit was so smoky now that he couldn’t see, so he kicked open the door and saw the slick black armor of enemy infantry trying to close in on his position while his mech was down. Pulling his M45 carbine out with his right hand, he pointed it out the left pilot’s door at the oncoming Elai soldiers and squeezed the trigger, emptying the magazine in a long burst. With a grin, Andrew watched two of them crumple to the ground and several others dive for cover. He dropped the empty rifle, letting it fall into the cockpit at his feet.

  Commanding the mech back to its feet, he looked out the open door and saw the hilltop was empty, and there was no more fire coming down from the trapped unit. Catching a glimpse of several more black-suited figures darting underneath him, he jerked the controls, moving the mech so the figures couldn’t get to the legs, when the master alarm began to chime urgently, and the mech slowed. Flicking his eyes down to the instruments, he saw that the core temp was now at 3500 degrees, and the batteries were at 1%. As he watched, the 1% vanished, replaced with a double dashed line, and then all his control panels went dark. The music hit the crescendo, and Andrew leaned forward and saw three more figures closing to his left, more to the front of him, and almost certainly more behind him.

  Andrew grinned, feeling his dry lips cracking as he did so. He looked at the enemy soldier closest to him, now almost at his door, and reached over and flipped the last manual safety off on the core. Immediately a low vibration and an almost inaudible hum started that grew rapidly louder, mounting to a violent shaking and ear-splitting, bone-marrow-quivering, low-frequency hum.

  Andrew looked into the shiny black faceplate of the Elai soldier as it started to climb up the wrecked mech to the cockpit and said with a smile, “You’ve been…Thunderstruck.” Snapping his hands to the ejection seat handle between his legs, he slammed his head back and yanked on the yellow and black handle and yelled into his radio, “RENEGADE THREE ZERO, PUNCHING OUT! GARRYOWEN!!!”

  The rocket motors ignited, and the explosive bolts keeping the cockpit on the mech’s body blew, throwing the Elai soldier off as Andrew’s ejection pod rocketed skyward. Two seconds after the rocket motors fired, Andrew was screaming for the sky. He fought to stay conscious as the tremendous acceleration caused him to see spots, when suddenly the battered cockpit around him lit up a brilliant, chalky white, spinning the pod out of control. Andrew’s head cracked into the side of the cockpit, and everything went black.

  ***

  “Colonel Terrell, you’re going to want to see this.” The young officer had just entered the spaceborne field operations center and was out of breath.

  The spaceborne commander looked up from the clipboard someone was showing him and responded, “What do you have, Captain?”

  “Well, sir. It’s…hard to explain. It’s probably easier just to show you. We have a lifter outside. It’ll take ten minutes, and it’s important.” The stocky commander nodded and turned to a tall, flinty-eyed woman at a console next to him. “Major, call if anything comes up.” The woman nodded without speaking. Colonel Terrell picked up his helmet and, locking it onto his armor, followed the young captain to the waiting lifter outside.

  As they moved over the barren terrain, the junior officer started to explain, “So, I was tasked by Division to try to identify and locate any missing UEA units in our area of operations. There were a lot of them. The 7th Cav got hammered pretty hard, and so did a bunch of support elements. We recovered what was left of an MP unit out here that had gotten cut off and shot up, and was about to be overrun, when a fast attack mech they said had markings from the First of the Seventh hit the Elai assault in the rear. Gave the MPs time to unass the AO, and most of them made it back to the lines.”

  Colonel Terrell nodded, and asked, “So, where’s the pilot? Where’s his lance?”

  “That’s the thing, sir. His lance was wiped out. We found them. It looks like he was knocked out of the fight, then came back and tried to link up with his men, but found them all dead. He covered their bodies, and then made for Forward Operating Base Humpback.”

  Nodding, Terrell stared out the window of the lifter, seeing burned-out human and Elai tanks and military vehicles scattered across the landscape. After a few seconds he spoke, “So he ran into the Elai as they were about to hit the MPs.”

  “Yes, sir. He did a number on them, too. Our casualty collection teams estimate that he probably killed a hundred of them outright, and vaporized dozens more when the core of his mech blew.”

  “So what are we coming out here to look at?” The lifter settled and came down on a flat patch of grey rock. Nearby stood five soldiers in power armor, standing guard over what looked like a heavily-damaged ejected mech cockpit. Colonel Terrell’s jaw set. He looked at the young captain, then stepped out of the flitter and moved over to the men standing around the chunk of metal. Stepping closer for a clearer view, Colonel Terrell examined the scene carefully, his hands on his hips.

  There was the still form of a human soldier lying on top of the broken cockpit, carefully wrapped in an unfamiliar camouflage print blanket, with his arms folded on top of it. His eyes were bandaged with a blue cloth that wrapped around his head, covering his eyes, and his face was clean. In one hand he had two pictures, facing out. A young woman and a child smiled out from a field of brilliant green grass. The other was a scene of golden plains with words written on it. In the other hand, he clutched a strange knife, its blade a deep, shimmery black, with an oddly curved hilt. Tucked carefully next to his body was an M45 rifle with several empty magazines carefully lined up next to it. On his waist was a piece of metal, apparently slashed with a cutting laser from the armor of the ruined cockpit. Burned into it was a string of symbols Terrell had never seen before.

  After a moment of looking at the scene, Terrell turned to the captain and asked, “Who is he?”

  The captain replied, “Staff Sergeant Andrew Zeligman. He was the detachment sergeant for 2nd Lance, 1st Battalion, 7th Armored Cav.”

  Turning back to the carefully arranged body, the colonel stared at the plate. “What’s that?”

  “Near as we can make out, sir, that’s Elai writing.”

  In a ton
e of strained patience, Terrell responded, “I can see that, Captain. What does it say?”

  Flushing, the captain replied, “Yes, sir. Sorry. We sent it up to Division, and they kicked it to Naval Intelligence. Best we can tell so far is, it’s just four words. ‘Sing’, ‘home’, ‘star’, and a word that’s either ‘fighter’ or ‘warrior’.”

  Terrell looked down and closed his eyes. He was silent for a long moment, then he raised his head with a strange look on his face. He looked past the body to the far-off hills, where he could see the flashing of artillery and hear the distant rumble of explosions from the ferocious combat still raging.

  He nodded, then with a sad smile, turned and said, “Get him packed up to go home, Captain.” The young officer nodded silently. The colonel added, “One thing. All that stuff goes with him.”

  “But, sir...Division intelligence said...” the captain protested.

  The spaceborne commander turned and, with a hard look, stared into the captain’s eyes and said, “He goes home with it. I’m not asking, Captain.” He turned back to the still form and, laying an armored hand on the blanket, looked toward the hills where the fighting still raged and murmured, “Thanks, guys. Someday we’ll return the favor.”

  Epilogue

  The Battle of Desolation was the first major ground action of the Human-Elai war. The UEA invasion, codenamed ‘Operation Urgent Dawn’, was intended to rapidly seize the planet and drive the supposedly technologically-inferior Elai ground forces off of the surface. The skill, adaptability, and tenacity of the Elai defenders shocked the UEA forces, and the five-week battle that resulted was some of the fiercest and bloodiest fighting of the entire war.

  After the heavy losses incurred in the battle, the strategic value of the system came into question, with it being too far away from Elai space to use as a starship base, and too poor in natural resources to utilize as a support installation. A small garrison remained for some time after the planet was secured, but eventually the planet was abandoned. The lessons learned from the Battle of Desolation would have a lasting impact throughout the UEA. First and foremost among these lessons was the fact that the Elai, while outmatched technologically, could and would fight ferociously, and the war was likely to continue for years to come.

  END

  Lucas Marcum is a Neurological Critical Care Nurse Practitioner in a busy Pennsylvania trauma center and an officer in the US Army Reserve. When he's not working, or performing his reserve duties, he can be found hiking, reading, attempting to perfect his soft pretzel recipe and spending time with his family. His is the author of the critically acclaimed Valkyrie series. His work can be found on Amazon.

  Little Gray Man

  Jamie Ibson

  March, 2035

  Do you remember Facebook? Google?

  How about Twitter?

  I do. Not that I ever used Twitter, but still.

  They were the facilitators of the great social revolution that quietly began, somehow without anyone noticing, in the late “aughts”, and became engines of great social change, driving the Arab Spring, capturing every major news story, covering every major disaster that followed.

  Well, every one but the last. No, that’s not quite true. Online communities had started to put it together, just before everything went to hell.

  April 1, 2023

  “We just lost Royal Three and Canuck One,” the pilot announced, calmly relaying the destruction of four billion dollars’ worth of B-2 Spirits, six highly-trained American crewmembers, and the dozen armored SF assault technicians in the bombers’ bellies. That left us with eight fully American crews still in the air, and two each Canadian, Brit, and Australian teams. Bygones being bygones, we were the only ones the Yankees trusted aboard their precious stealth craft. The Euros didn’t even have heavy bombers—before the aliens went overt, their “bombers” had been attack jets with cruise missiles stuck under each wing. The EU forces had wound up tasked with ground security, while the rest of us Anglos went for the decapitation strike, since they lacked the necessary hardware.

  “Fuck, man, that doesn’t leave many,” Buerk complained over his communicator. He wasn’t wrong—the entire Blackjack contingent, three dozen Tu-160s carrying eighty Russian and/or Chinese technicians, had all gone down in flames. (That’s what happens when one panics, rather than sticking to the plan, idiots.) Rather than arriving over the objective like a Time On Target salvo, the former-and-current commies lost exactly one Blackjack and punched their afterburners, hoping speed would defeat the anti-air fire. It didn’t, which we already knew, (see the wiki entry on “Combat aircraft losses of 2022” for the entire list) but the pilots panicked, and they died.

  “Thirty seconds,” Chief Hopkins shouted, though I was plugged into the Spirit’s navigation readout and keeping track as well. Each B-2 requires a pilot/co-pilot pair up front, due to the long duration of their flights. Since the plan was to drop people and not bombs, they’d added a jumpmaster to keep us all in line. We crossed an invisible line in the sky, and the aircraft bucked and yawed. My inner ear got very confused, and I felt very ill, very quickly. The AA plasma fire was slow (compared to say, lasers), which meant we’d programmed our final assault path to avoid cruising in one predictable direction longer than a couple seconds. The dead troopers in Royal Three and my teammates in Canuck One had just been unlucky, was all—the AA systems had guessed right, and that was that.

  “Ten se-” Hopkins warned, and WHAM, I could see sky and the world was upside down. Everything was on fire, my suit was on fire, and I was falling out of control. The flaming jet fuel, wreckage, and wing/fuselage cast ghastly silhouettes against the pre-dawn sky. A detached part of my brain noted that, even missing a third of its belly and an entire wing, I was falling faster than the Spirit because it had an enormous surface area, while I had all the aerodynamic profile of an eighteen-foot-tall rock.

  Oh yeah. Wings.

  I mashed a control, and my ‘bot’s wings lashed out, and my glide-by-wire systems engaged. It had seemed mad at the time, but the enormous ‘wingsuit’ caught the air and gave us some slight control surface. Single-use kerosene jets inspired by that madman in Dubai ignited, my tumble became a swoop, and I banked to align myself with the target. Good news, the fire blew out, and my systems hadn’t suffered any damage. Bad news, I saw Buerk spiraling away below me, one wing extended, the other wrecked and useless.

  Gory, gory what a helluva way to die…

  I glanced up, and the AR rings on my HUD told me I had the altitude and glide path to make it to the target—the monstrous, 10km-wide alien city floating eleven klicks above Russia. It was too massive to conceive of, an enormous floating chunk of dirt, and rock, and who knew what else. Satellite imagery showed the roof was an incongruous, frosty-green, since it hadn’t shed the soil, trees, and foliage from beneath Tunguska.

  March, 2035

  You remember Tunguska, right?

  You don’t.

  Tunguska was a colossal goddamn explosion that occurred over the…middle-ish of Russia in June 1908. Keep in mind, Russia is pretty fucking enormous to begin with. Like, eleven-time-zones-wide enormous. From the tip of the Bering Strait to Crimea is more than 7500 klicks as the crow flies, and most of that is barely-colonized forest. So yeah, despite it being the largest “meteorite” impact ever to have happened in human history up to that point, it went relatively unnoticed, because virtually nobody lived in the middle of Russia at the time. It blew down a couple thousand square klicks worth of trees, and may have, MAY have, killed two people.

  World War One came and went before they even bothered to explore the area. Belief at the time was that it was a massive space rock (somewhere between half and two football fields in diameter) that exploded in mid-air, detonating with the power of 1000 Hiroshima nukes.

  Like I said, colossal goddamn explosion.

  Now, Lake Cheko was a nearby lake the science community had an on-again-off-again love affair with.

  First they thoug
ht, “Hey, this is near the epicenter, maybe this lake was formed by that colossal goddamn explosion!” and then some Soviet said, “Naw, couldn’t be, the silt layers are meters and meters thick, this lake’s been here for like, 5000 years.”

  Then in 2007, Western scientists took soil samples, disproving the five millennia theory.

  Then, in 2017, just before everything went to hell, a new batch of Soviets-I-Mean-Russians took samples from a different part of the lake, claiming the gang a decade earlier was wrong, too. I kinda suspect all these core samples were what provoked the attack—we were getting too close.

  And hell, it’s not like we didn’t have even more warning:

  Lake Michigan, November 26th, 1919.

  Rio Curuçá, Brazil, August 13th, 1930.

  Seville, Spain, February 18th, 1934.

  Chelyabinsk, Russia, April 9th, 1941, and then the mountains near Vladivostok, February 12th, 1947.

  Indian Ocean, off the coast of South Africa, August 3rd, 1963.

  Finally, to kick everything off, Chelyabinsk again in 2013.

  April 1, 2023

  “Canuck Three, Canuck Two, our ride’s blown, but we can still make the ORV. All callsigns, Canuck Two, check in, over,” I barked into the comm. They’d shot us down, so stealth was blown, and we were free to use our radios again. I just hoped the encryption held. I could tell from my system readout we’d lost Buerk and Stuart, but a check-in was familiar and would get our four remaining heads back in the game. We’d trained for this, but that didn’t mean it was easy; it just lessened the likelihood of utterly catastrophic failure.