by Joshua Guess
Sand erupted in small puffs as the soldiers came to ground, their energy weapons lancing out from the tops of their armored hands. Integrated weapons. Smart. Eliminated the chance the soldier could be disarmed.
Of course, I had my own opinions on what weapons not in your possession could do. Jax caught the direction of my thoughts before I could more than halfway form them, and he ran with it. Bless him.
What happened next was subtle enough that even I almost missed it, and I was watching from my place atop the transport. Between one footfall and the next, every enemy soldier on the ground suddenly encountered some unseen obstacle. A portion of Sand here was suddenly rigid and sticking up just far enough to trip over, while a section there had become slippery as ice.
Basically forty bad guys stumbled all at once. If I could have pantsed them, I would have.
In a fight, even a fraction of a second of hesitation could be an enormous advantage, and it was one Rinna capitalized on without mercy. Her spiked and bladed armor sprinted to the nearest soldier, one arm sweeping in to cut even as she jumped in a graceful, twisting arc over the enemy.
Sparks flew as the magnetically-hardened blade met dense armor, pieces of black edge falling to the ground along with the poor bastard’s arm from the elbow down. Different in evolutionary background and primal imperatives humans and Gaethe might be, but cut off our arms and we have the same reaction.
We bleed. We scream. We clutch at the wound in disbelieving horror.
Rinna’s leap brought her to another enemy, who caught the left side of her armor with a point-blank blast from his wrist gun. I saw superheated pieces of her suit glow red and crumble as the Sand there was fused to slag, but it barely slowed Rinna down. She tumbled to the ground in a controlled dive and shed the damaged portion, slashed at the leg of her attacker, and rolled. Streams of new Sand filled in the jagged edges, and it was only by its slowing that I realized how fast my heart had been beating.
“A little help, please!”
The voice rang out from my right, and I cursed under my breath. I’d been so focused on Rinna that I hadn’t paid attention to the rest of the fight. I signaled Jax to fully integrate with all the Sand in a hundred meter radius and threw myself into the fray.
The sensory data flooding into my brain as I sailed through the air would have been overwhelming had I gotten it unfiltered. We discovered that the hard way; everything about using Jax to integrate with the Sand was new and untested. It meant a lot of trial and error. Every grain, regardless of its purpose, was loaded with some kind of sensor. It’s what allowed me to ‘see’ through the wall I had created in that first public test back at Bravo 2.
Taking on an entire field of the stuff was a different ball of wax altogether. Rather than port hundreds of billions of tiny feeds from microscopic sensor arrays, Jax managed it all himself and gave me a tactical representation. Enemies were highlighted in a neon yellow, with a 360 degree compass view in the bottom corner of my vision. There was also a curved line at the bottom center, which showed abbreviated information about what was behind me.
Basically my heads up display turned the real world into a video game, which was fine by me. I’ve played most of the greats. It wasn’t a hard adjustment to make.
Sand caught me a meter above the ground and enclosed me in my own suit of armor. I didn’t slow down or change my movements at all, instead trusting Jax to manage the process.
My HUD showed the soldier in distress—the tag floating over his head read GREER—a dozen meters away. He was surrounded by six Gaethe and unable to get off a shot from the guns held in his armored hands. It was all Greer could to survive as his titanic form did a mad ballet to avoid the worst of the energy blasts.
I twitched a hand. In neurological terms, a body movement paired with a thought creates a much stronger signal for Jax than a thought alone. My upraised hand, doing what I liked to think of as the villain grasp, made it look like I was about to plunge my hand into something to grab an item with the tips of my fingers.
A small forest of spikes grew rapidly from the ground, shooting upward and seeking the delicate spots that were also a shared feature of Gaethe and humanity. Theirs was a little higher and a shade more forward than ours, but that made it a bit easier to hit.
I head Greer fight back a dry heave as he saw his attackers get impaled through their genitals.
Then things got unpleasant.
***
The fight wasn’t as one-sided as you might imagine. Before discovering the full abilities the Sand had to offer, I would have called the Gaethe force overwhelming, and rightly so. After all, huge suits of armor were meant to give humans equal footing against their enemies at the least, an advantage in ideal circumstances.
Not an overwhelming advantage, however. It was a delicate line to walk, but the key to the entire strategy behind the ultimate purpose of the Sand was to make sure it didn’t look like a big enough threat to warrant a scorched-earth campaign.
Until I came along that wasn’t much of a problem. The computer technology needed to truly make the stuff a weapon of terrifying scope simply didn’t exist. Jax was orders of magnitude beyond current Earth tech, and while the home team could certainly effect larger-scale uses of the Sand, the time to do so was not yet ripe.
Which was why I held back. I could have ordered Jax to crush every Gaethe soldier in fists of Sand in less time than it took to say the words out loud. That sort of thing would be obvious to the support craft humming above us. Even my trick with Greer’s attackers had been pushing the limit.
Deciding on a more subtle approach, I had Jax infest the powered armor worn by the enemies with black grains. Even when the pieces of Sand were ground to dust by the powerful joint motors, the stuff remained a gritty mess perfect for fouling up the whole system. It wouldn’t break anything unless I got lucky, but it would reduce the armor’s efficiency and slow down reaction time.
I clothed myself in the Spider armor template, which featured a less purely human design in favor of more mobile joints located closer to center mass and longer limbs all capable of grasping. The standard version still only had four limbs, but with Jax able to overcome my sad human limitations, my version had a total of eight. It seemed thematically appropriate.
My spindly appendages bent around me, four of them launching me into the air with surgical precision. I streaked through the air, a black comet, and reached out in eight directions as I contacted the enemy. All my weight, somewhere near a short ton, gave me a lot of leverage. The eight Gaethe clustered together in a neat pair of rows stopped firing on my friends when I slammed into them.
Two of them died straightaway. I felt the circular joints melding helmets and chest pieces fail under the stress, their heads jerked around violently, neck bones giving up the ghost.
What had been an efficient nest of shooters laying down an impressive barrage of blistering heat morphed into a chaotic mess of musical alien curses and frenzied attempts to regain balance. I gave the survivors as little time to acclimate as possible, lashing out with several limbs while skittering with others.
Had there been trees close enough to matter, I would have used them. The Spider armor was intended for use in obstructed areas where being able to climb and move from structure to structure was critical. My variation took advantage of the form combined with Jax’s ability to multitask. For example, I was able to snatch the legs out from under two Gaethe while simultaneously shattering the focusing lens on the weapon of another just as his weapon began to glow.
Damaged, something inside the energy weapon malfunctioned badly. What should have been a visible beam of coherent power instead materialized as a crackling orange bloom of lightning. It would have been blinding seen with my own eyes, but the sensors provided by my suit weren’t at all fussed. The explosion of energy connected with a nearby Gaethe soldier, frying him inside his armor. It also blew the arm off the poor fucker whose weapon I’d cracked.
While it was unnerving to ope
rate one set of limbs while Jax managed the other, the experience wasn’t totally outside my wheelhouse. I tried to think of it in terms of flying a ship, where I handled certain duties as Jax did the rest. It wasn’t an even division of labor; Jax had the heavier burden since he was also helping me fight. My skills without him were nowhere near par, not yet.
Sensors registered a thermal bloom propagating through the air near my back in plenty of time for Jax to log the information but, thanks to the limitations of my body and the motive power of the suit, far too late for any meaningful action. Whatever technology powered the Gaethe weapons didn’t fire at light speed, but at knife-fight range even a plain old bullet would have been faster than I could respond to.
The wave of energy melted into my armor, ablating swaths of Sand dangerously close to my actual body. I jerked away, instinctively leaping from the danger only to land on two fried limbs, which had been halfway fused into cracked slag. They shattered beneath me, forcing me to fall on my face since my other limbs didn’t catch up to what was happening in time.
Embarrassing as it was, that fall probably saved my life. The bottom half of a much larger blast passed two feet over my head—a shot from one of the support vehicles. The near miss flipped a switch in my head, pushing me from a reasoned hesitance to use more of Jax’s capabilities to an absolute certainty that it would be necessary for my survival.
I shed the damaged portions of my armor and drew in more Sand. A lot more, enough to form three sets of Titan armor. Rather than rise up fifty feet tall, I used the extra mass as both shield and weapon. My armor thickened and changed shape, forgoing the loose honeycomb structure that kept it light and easy on power in favor of slabs of heat-resistant plate.
The ground writhed beneath me as prehensile cables of Sand formed beneath the mantle of the stuff covering the world. Warnings populated my visual feed from all quarters as enemies aimed at me, redoubling as they began to fire. My armor held as I slowly plodded toward another fight, and the makeshift tentacles beneath the surface began to do their work.
One of those warnings was a notification that three of the support ships buzzing near the troop transport were preparing for a strafing run. In a handful of seconds the entire clearing would be bathed in fire.
Nineteen
The advantages in having a computer integrated with your brain can’t be overstated. Jax utilized quantum architecture, which gave him the complexity and capability to become a true artificial intelligence. Being in my head, his priorities and mine overlapped almost completely, which is why he sent out a message over the comm a nanosecond after realizing what was about to happen.
I saw confirmation signals from everyone in the fire team as they got the message. I waded into a cluster of Gaethe trying to break into the halted transport. For all the fire and fury they poured on the side access door, they hadn’t made much progress. Just as one of them raised a hand to fire his weapon at the door once more, one of my tendrils of Sand rose up from the ground and snatched his wrist. The timing was of course machine-perfect, and the blast meant to weaken the armor instead found the legs of another Gaethe.
“I’ve got the fliers,” Rinna said over the comm. “Mars, stay at the transport. The rest of you know your jobs.”
I didn’t have time to think about how she would prevent three ships from boiling us into a stew of chemicals, but then she was the professional soldier and I was the new guy. My job was to take orders and focus on the task at hand, which meant keeping our asset safely tucked away inside this oversize truck.
My armor grew warm around me as I fought hand to hand with the enemy. Not from their weapons—we were fighting too close to safely let them shoot—but due to the density of the Sand packed around me. The honeycomb layers Jax had eschewed in favor of the heavier solid construction weren’t just in the design specs to make the armor lighter, they also created void spaces where heat from the billions of tiny machines could be easily vented. Basic thermodynamics urged me to end this fight quickly.
My fist latched onto the neck of one Gaethe, the fingers of that hand going fluid and wrapping around his neck before solidifying once more. The makeshift noose drew as tight as it could as fast as possible, the enemy soldier stiffening in alarm as the neck seal cracked. Once the process began it carried the inevitable weight of an avalanche, beheading the soldier before he could finish comprehending what was happening to him.
I dropped the body and lashed out at another soldier with a kick, the force of my incredible weight taking him off his feet and almost breaking him half before slamming him into the side of the transport. I heard a wailing klaxon from inside his helmet. My sensors spiked at the same time, showing a large surge of waste heat, ambient static charge, and a Christmas tree’s worth of colorful warnings that something very energetic and very bad was going on inside that damaged suit.
Run.
Jax filled the entirety of my visual field with the word, and I didn’t second guess him. I ran.
My suit’s long legs got me about ten meters away when the power system failed completely. The result wasn’t an explosion, really, unless you can call a cascading ball of orange lightning and plasma an explosion. A ring of superheated air did a good impression of a blast wave, however, knocking me off my armored feet.
The sensor feed told me the transport had only suffered minor damage, but I couldn’t check the instinct to turn and look just to make sure.
What I saw made me forget about the transport, the mission, and what planet I was even on.
Rinna stood a few meters to the rear left of the transport, utterly still. Her armor was slowly recovering from a staggering amount of damage, glowing red pockmarks shedding from its surface. I didn’t recognize the template she was using, and there was no information about it flowing to me from Jax. It was huge at twenty feet tall, with four extra thick arms sprouting from its stocky trunk. Each of those arms had the tip of a familiar weapon jutting out from beneath a covering of Sand.
Rinna’s armor had four rail guns integrated into its limbs.
A deafening electric whine tore across the clearing as three of them fired in unison. The concentrated magnetic fields played merry hell with Rinna’s armor, causing the Sand caked around the guns themselves to crack and fail. The stuff began to fall away before its programming reasserted itself.
Alert sirens began to wail from overhead. I looked to the sky to find the troop ship pulling away, a deep crack in its white hide spanning almost a quarter of its length. One of the support ships was falling from the sky, dead, while another limped upward in what my pilot’s eye could see was a panicked bid to escape. The last support ship was retreating as well, though it was unharmed.
The remaining troops on the ground gave up the fight immediately, disengaging as one. None of my people argued about it.
I had no illusions about the fight being over. For one, the Gaethe were running in the direction we needed to go. Beyond that, I didn’t think the enemy would let some dead troops and damaged ships stop them from reacquiring the guy we were sent to escort. The more likely scenario was simple enough to figure out.
Rather than waste lives when their people were clearly outgunned, they would retreat and wait to be joined by another patrol. Maybe several. The Gaethe, having found us, would surely have sent out a request for support immediately after spotting the transport. With their level of technology it seemed unlikely they couldn’t have an overwhelming number of soldiers here in a handful of minutes.
I wasn’t looking forward to it.
A few Gaethe let off parting shots as they retreated toward the wooded area ahead of our position. I stood transfixed as startled animal life gave them a wide berth. A few squirrels darted across the black ground, brushing the blades of grass jutting from the Sand. A small flock of birds took to the sky, the first I had ever seen in real life. My fingers twitched inside the protection of my armor, a sudden and deep yearning feel the controls beneath them as a world dropped away from me.
“Did you just quote Star Wars at us?” I asked.
“Uh…yeah? I guess? It wasn’t intentional.” She sounded a little embarrassed. “We weren’t going to use any of the local maglev entrances so we could keep them secret, but we might not have a choice.”
There was cross talk all over the comm at that; no one wanted to risk having the maglev tunnel network compromised. The whole reason they were doing this above ground and using the transport was to make it look like there was no other way.
“I know, I know,” Rinna said over the chorus of dissent. “But this guy is vital. We absolutely cannot fail to get him home safely.”
An idea popped into my head fully formed, and I mentally consulted Jax. A few seconds later I interrupted the back and forth on the comms.
“There’s a third option,” I said.
By now the suited forms of the fire team had gathered nearby, all of us clustered close to the transport. I saw the skeptical body language writ large on the armored forms of my teammates.
Except Rinna. “Go ahead,” she said.
“We can’t go where we were planning to go, and it’s dangerous as hell for us to access the tunnels,” I said. “We don’t have to do either. Jax can help us hide. All we have to do is pull our guy out of the transport and use the Sand to hide all of us. We wait until the Gaethe give up the search, then use the maglev to get home.”
“Not bad,” said Reid. “Though it presents the same problems as just taking the tunnels in the first place. If we disappear, they’re going to get mighty suspicious.”
“Aren’t they already?” I asked. “Don’t you think the Gaethe wonder where you people go when you’re done fighting them?”
“Not usually,” Reid said. “We try not to leave anyone behind to ask that question.”
