Shifting Dimensions: A Military Science Fiction Anthology

by Justin Sloan

  Even Stringer was there, standing front and center.

  Haskell slowed her mech and just stood in silence for several seconds before her brethren.

  Then a cheer rose up. Faint at first, then more powerful.

  Clenched fists were raised.

  Even Stringer was shouting and signaling to her.

  She’d done it.

  She’d created a new kind of fighting machine to take on the aliens.

  She’d struck the first blow.

  She’d drawn first blood.

  She raised the arms on the mech like a gladiator, knowing that nothing after that day would ever be the same again.

  GEORGE S. MAHAFFEY JR.

  HOW DO you make a good series better? You introduce new stories and toss in lots of crazier, more colorful characters. That’s how Justin essentially pitched us all on the idea of writing an anthology – a way to explore, via a series of time loops, the Seppukarian Universe and all of the interesting people who are trapped when the Syndicate invades. I chose to focus on Haskell, a once promising engineering student who’s sucked back through a time loop at the end of the events in Book 4 to the days when she was a laborer, working for a resistance outpost in Baltimore. But Haskell’s no average, ordinary grunt – oh, no, she’s got big dreams, including creating a weapon from salvaged parts that may help the resistance take the fight to the aliens. We see the battle through her eyes and explore how she takes revenge on the things that have destroyed her life and her planet by developing a mechanized fighting machine, the resistance’s first “mech,” that just might help turn the tide of the war.

  Author Note

  George S. Mahaffey Jr. is a lawyer, screenwriter, and author. His script Heatseekers was bought by Paramount Pictures with Michael Bay producing and Timur Bekmambetov attached to direct. In addition, he's sold or written scripts for Arnold Kopelson, Blumhouse, Benderspink, Mandalay, Sony, director Louis Leterrier and Paul McGuigan, and is the creator of In The Dust, an action-horror graphic novel in the vein of 30 Days of Night to be published by Top Cow with art by Christian Duce. He has also written the following books: Amityville: Origins, Amityville: Revenants, Razorbacks I, Razorbacks II, Razorbacks III, The Pact, The Devil's Ark, Familiars, and the Vertical City zombie series (Books 1-4). In addition, he is the co-creator and co-author of the first four sci-fi books in the Syndicate Wars series (the Seppukarian Universe), along with the post-apocalyptic thriller trilogy, Blood Runners. He lives in the Washington D.C. area with his wife and young son. For more info, see WWW.GEORGEMAHAFFEY.COM. You can also email George at gsm@gdldlaw.com.

  RETINA

  BY GENTRY RACE

  Lost In Space

  Nate Collins's legs felt like canned noodles as he awoke in his mech suit. His tongue was like worn sandpaper. His eyes strained in the blackness behind gun-range amber shades. He tapped the side of his eyewear and waited for an outline of the environment in customary wireframe mesh to appear, but to no avail. Damn specs.

  His face was exposed and his helmet was still neatly folded within the high collar of his nano-mech suit. This encased his body from the neck down and purred quietly with a soft orange light that hued his features from beneath. It comforted him, for the most part, to feel the tepid recycled air venting from the collar despite the strong odor of burnt metal. At least this meant his suit was still had power.

  He raised himself up so that he rested on one elbow and tried to remember what had happened the moment before the instant when he had found himself here. His mind was black as the room. Had the Syndicate manipulated his mental state? His memories? Collins had heard of veterans losing their sense of time in the battlefield, but he could remember only one battle at this point—one embarrassment—his first battle. He adjusted his shades to better cover his eyes—one being distinct in white in color like an odd case of heterochromia.

  The young all American-looking cadet, with windswept hair to match, had spent the past few months on the pencil pushing side of the war, studying astrophysics. It wasn't until word of his sister joining the fight against the Syndicate that he decided to act. So, he willingly traded his pencil for a gun.

  Collins perked up and engaged his mech suit in movement. The gears drove and popped from the pressurized servos that seemed to have settled like a stalled engine that had sat too long. How long had he been here? He raised his broad mechanized arm encased in the suit, and an animated display came alive.

  "Adjusting to new environment…" a mechanized voice hummed from inside his suit.

  "Engage auxiliary lights." Collins ordered.

  His suit fired up two barrel shaped lights off the sides of his shoulders.

  Collins felt the anxiety flood his mind as he searched what looked like an empty storage room and set of stairs ascending to another platform. Where am I? How did I get here? Am I alone? His heart began to race and the fear of being alone might well cripple him if his scan didn't send something back soon. He remembered he had just joined a team and now they were gone.

  "Scan complete. Four entities found," the mechanized voice said.

  Collins climbed the stairs and recognized the suits of his old team and a sense of relief overcame him. One Marine was propped up and moving about. Collins couldn't mistake the pulled back fiery amber ponytail slumped over. It was Commander Sasha Hastings.

  Her commanding strength and courage was only measured to the skill of hiding her crush on him. Ever since she saved him in his first brush with death against the Syndicate, Collins had known she had a thing for him, but she was a tough cookie – always keeping it professional.

  Collins smiled, walking over to Hastings, shining his two bright beams directly on her face. Her freckles were more prominent now, spattered like a brush painting. He grabbed her mech-suited arm and gloated with an ironic expression. "Now, look who's saving who.”

  "Get those damn lights out of my eyes… and it’s whom." Hastings ordered, blotting out the strong light.

  Collins smirked to himself, lowering the lights. "I didn't know you wanted me to set the mood, Hastings."

  Hastings instinctively threw a punch into Collins’s mech-suited stomach, "That’s Commander Hasting to you, bitch."

  Collins jolted back, feeling the force, but pretended not to react to the pain. "Kitty's got claws."

  "Fuck off," Hasting said.

  Hastings fired up her auxiliary lights, arcing two wide beams over the room. Collins watched her as she scanned the space looking over the three other marines laying on the ground, then to railings and windows that made up the large enclosed room.

  "This is a Syndicate ship," Hastings said, walking to the window across the way.

  "Did they put us here? Like some kind of dimensional collapse?" Collins asked.

  "Wake those men, Sergeant,” Hastings ordered, brushing off his question.

  Collins walked toward where the three Marines lay sleeping and the memories began to trickle back to him. He recognized his old comrades Sanchez and Piña They shared similar features and race but Sanchez had curlier hair. Friends from his days of first joining the Resistance, they had been full-fledged fighting Marines for months and were outstanding in the battlefield.

  While Collins took every opportunity to learn all that he could from the group, he was envious of their amicable careers and choices. Promotions and ranks seemed to fall into their laps instead of his. Despite being green, Collins felt entitled to be a higher ranking officer. He could lead this team and he wanted everyone to know it.

  "Sanchez? Piña?" Collins asked, gently shaking them. Piña slowly opened his deep brown eyes.

  "Snipes, get that fucking light out of my face," Piña said, lying still on the ground.

  Collins hated when they called him 'snipes' referring to his first altercation with the Syndicate. He wore an eye patch for months, and the team thought he’d be better suited for a sniper position than an intel op.

  "My head feels like I got fucked two ways from Sunday," Sanchez said, raising h
imself.

  "Why's it so dark in here?" Piña asked.

  To the right of his friends, Collins noticed a similar nano-mech suit he recognized from a different battalion. This battalion came from the Taiwanese region of Asia and were known for their tough antics and hate for the Syndicate. Collins tried to remember how he knew this—the memories were fuzzy.

  He shone the light over onto the yellow armor, tattered with red striations and on the chest name tag that read "Tang.” The man's chiseled brown face was rugged and sun-spotted up to his closed, epicurean folded eyes. His thin, black hair was long and he had a bristly goatee knotted up into strands with twisted blue and yellow rubber bands.

  WHAM!

  A kick to Collins’s stomach sent him barreling back, knocking his glasses off his head and onto the ground. Collins's right iris could be seen more clearly now – white as a ghost and slightly deformed. He tasted the cold ship in his mouth and spat out his bruised ego.

  Edward Tang towered over Collins tying his long, greasy, tendril-like hair back into a bun. His beady sharp eyes bored into Nate as he propped himself up.

  "That's how you got that fucked up eye to begin with. You gotta be ready for anything, One Eye," Tang said with smirk

  Collins looked at Hastings now, shining her burning lights onto the two. He felt her glaring at his pale white eye, still in disappointment. No Marine goes into battle for the first time and gets such a hideous display of embarrassment, but he did, and she remembered. That was definitely the one moment he wished more than anything he could go back and change if he had his time all over again.

  Collins shot to his feet, grabbing Tang by his collar. "I'm gonna kill you, motherfucker."

  "You better make sure I'm dead," Tang said.

  The feuding Marines stopped when Commander Hastings yelled out from across the bleak room, "Marines! Get your shit together and find the power source to turn this ship on. We got only about 2 hours before our suits drain or we become meat popsicles."

  Sanchez helped Piña to his feet and pushed between the irate men, breaking Collins' hold.

  Collins picked up his glasses and adjusted the frames to a comfortable fitting, covering both eyes, his features now similar in color behind the amber frames. He kept a keen eye on the burly Tang, stepping away to cool off.

  Sanchez stepped over to where Hastings stood, now looking out an icy window that framed an endless backdrop of stars. Like tiny diamonds strewn across a black blanket, they shimmered slightly amongst the infinite darkness.

  "Where are we commander?" Sanchez asked.

  "I don't know," she said.

  The Dead Ship

  COMMANDER HASTINGS LED the Marines down the long, dark hallways of the empty ship, with their guns raised and shoulder lights guiding the way. She didn’t care how she got here or why she couldn't remember the events that led up to this moment. She had only one thought at this time—one hope—would this ship have power?

  "Keep an eye out for some kind of breaker switch," Hastings ordered out.

  "What about hostiles?" Collins naïvely asked.

  "What's a matter, Snipes? You afraid of the dark?" Piña asked.

  "I wouldn't worry about shit. I’d blow any fucking Predator away,” Tang said, lifting up a six barrel air-cooled mini-gun slung from his shoulder.

  "That's nothing compared to my electromagnetic stunners. You might run out of ammo," Sanchez said.

  "Shit, the only thing running out is your momma," Tang quipped.

  Hastings cringed hearing the two Marine's try to measure each others’ dicks. The nano-mech suits made a loud clunking against the metal grating catwalk that suspended them over the spaceship's thick hull. If there were any Syndicate on this ship, then they surely already knew the marines were here.

  She glanced back at her misfit team, remembering Sanchez, Tang, and Piña holding their own in a fight, but Snipes—Nate Collins—had a lot to learn. Considering he had only just joined the team, his sense of self-entitlement was overbearing. Just because you pencil pushed at some private academy on a government grant didn't mean you had the respect of a team, or know how to handle a fire fight.

  Hastings shuddered at the thought of Collins's persistent harmless advances. How could someone be so self-centered and arrogant? And, yet, despite the bothersome egotistical buffoonery, Hastings did find it somewhat amusing. He was cute after all, despite that messed up eye. Personality went far in Hastings’s book, a trait Collins would never get past his thick skull.

  "Commander, I think I see a breaker switch on the starboard wall," Sanchez called out.

  The trident shaped switch was connected to a large rectangular extrusion under a section of the ship's breastwork. The metal prongs, heavily rusted and pitted from corrosion, connected to a dirt covered composite dowel shaped handle.

  "Looks a little dirty, Sanchez," Piña said, gesturing with his fore finger above his upper lip.

  The Marines laughed while Sanchez accentuated his Mexican mustache in a prideful manner. Hastings rolled her eyes and pushed past the immature banter Sanchez and Piña liked to play toward each other. She even noticed Tang and Collins getting in on the action. Team camaraderie was fun, but not in a time like this.

  "You're not gonna be laughing if this ship doesn't turn on," Hastings said as she eyed each Marine with serious intent.

  Hastings pulled down the switch and with a loud clunk, the hull seemed to rattle. The marines took guard, raising their weapons and scanning for any movement.

  "The damn things' dead," Tang said.

  "There has to be a core reactor we can turn on," Hastings said.

  Commander Hastings watched the young Collins in her peripheral vision walking off from the group, looking even more distracted than usual. He slowly pulled off his ridiculous eyewear and cocked his head slightly.

  "What is it, Snipes?" Sanchez called out.

  "I think I see something," Collins said, more detached than usual.

  "Good, keep your eye open," Tang joked to crickets.

  Collins walked over to a thin metal pipe that ran the course of the hull upward, and touched it.

  BASH!

  The pipeline exploded in Collins’s face, knocking him down and jetting a powdery mist into the air. Rivets along the spaceship's hull burst from their seal one by one, ricocheting off the catwalk and grazing the group. The Marines hit the ground, ducking any stray bolts that came their way.

  "That's the damn halon fire suppression," Piña yelled out.

  Hastings watched Collins lying on his back, looking upward in terror, pushing himself to the wall, his skin turning the same color as his damaged eye. She recognized his panic – the same look she had seen on the battlefield once before.

  Sheer panic swept over Collins, like a tsunami, when he looked above. Just as in the days of his drug-addled youth he felt like he was having a flashback. However, the disparity in vision was not a figment of his imagination—nor a side effect of drugs—this was real.

  Through one eye he could see wispy human shaped forms floating high above him, phasing in and out of the walls and through the other eye, nothing. Their distortions seemed to fade in and out to Collins and he tried to make out where they began and ended.

  "Look, the fuck, up," Collins cried out.

  "What the hell is that?" Tang said, trying to make out the slight movement in the mist.

  Collins watched Hastings ready her gear, engaging a hand scanner from her suit. Her movements were swift and purposeful as she switched on a sensor of sorts to get a reading, "I'm not getting anything on this."

  "Looks like mist moving," Piña said.

  "Fucking Yao Guai." Tang murmured under his breath.

  "I can't see shit," Sanchez said.

  "I think I see it!" Piña said.

  A barrage of gunfire from Piña, followed by Tang, strobed in a fiery red inferno.

  Collins could see the ghostly forms clearly now and watched the onslaught of bullets pass through them with ease. Colli
ns made out the appearance of one, and couldn't believe what he saw. The familiar-looking face became angry at the assault and pulled itself back, gathering the other energy forms as if to gain momentum.

  "Fuck you!" Piña said, now crouching, his arm shaking like a jack hammer from his gun's assault on the nothingness. Bullets ricocheted throughout the cabin.

  The entities shot off the ceiling and barreled their motion toward Piña, entering into his body.

  Collins watched the forms fumble within his teammate and pull the very essence of life out from him. The flickering gunfire and the ear piercing noise ceased. Piña was gone.

  A Man Down

  Collins's stomach was in his throat and his head felt numb. Never in his life had he seen a ghost-like entity, let alone a man die in a way like that. He looked at his fellow Marines across the landing, tending to Piña's lifeless body. He remembered hearing of the nano-mech suits having a disposing function using acid to rapidly decompose the body. This made him even more sick.

  "What the fuck did you see up there, One Eye? Yao Guai? A phantom?" Tang asked, standing over Collins.

  Collins remained silent. He despised the nicknames, the hazing, and insults he received from the crew, especially the ones that came from Tang. Deep down, Collins had wished that the phantom thing could at least have taken Tang instead.

  "Get the fuck away from me," Collins said.

  Collins could see Hastings watching from afar with her sharp crimson eyebrows raised in disappointment, trying to calculate the situation. Hastings stood up and walked over to stand next to Tang, ignoring the brute scent he seemed to exude from being packed away in a nano-mech suit.

  "What did you see, Collins?" Hastings asked.

  Collins remained silent.

  "He ain't saying shit. He's just a dumb pencil pusher,” Tang said

  Hastings shot a look at Tang. "Officer Tang, help Sanchez with Piña. That's an order."

  As Tang walked off, Hastings knelt down to the level of Collins. Her eyes were now more sympathetic and warm. Collins took a moment to breathe her in when she got close, but that thought was shit now. His friend Piña was gone and what he had witnessed was crazy. Hastings would not believe the insanity he had seen.