“But you can only do that as a Marine in the Mechanized Infantry Division,” she continued. “The virus moving through your body is attacking your nerve-endings, giving you pain, eventual complete paralysis, organ failure, and death. My drug blocks that from happening, but you will still be infected by this virus, do you understand?”
Dane gave a slight nod.
“The civilian medical establishment does not have any effective antigens or vaccines for this virus. They can offer you symptomatic relief, but you will spend the rest of your life in this bed. Do you understand, Mr. Williams?” Heathcote carried on.
Again, Dane gave a nod. He was already thinking that he knew what the better option might be. One that allowed him to walk again.
“About a week ago, at approximately sixteen twenty hours, our planet was attacked by an alien force, Mr. Williams,” Heathcote intoned. Her words were so surprising that Dane almost forgot his pain for a moment.
“The Martian and Europa colonies, as well as the North Atlantic seaboard, were all bombarded by coordinated and synchronized attacks from aliens as-yet-unidentified. A new, intelligent species, Mr. Williams. And one that apparently means to destroy us,” Heathcote said.
“The attack was sudden, and the aliens—whom we have named the Exin—disappeared just as soon as we retaliated. We believe that this was a first strike operation to test our defenses.”
Dane nodded that he understood, although his heart was in his mouth. Aliens!? Was he really hearing this right now?
“The city of New Sanctuary, where you were recovered, was one of the targets hit most directly. Tens of thousands died, Mr. Williams,” Heathcote said.
Tens of thousands… Dane thought about his neighbor, old Mrs. Karine who lived in the apartment opposite him with her three cats. He thought of Abi, the newsstand guy who printed out the day’s papers on-demand from his small kiosk. Dane’s thoughts flashed through the many and myriad faces of people that he knew or encountered in his daily life. Did any of them survive?
“We have named this new threat to our future the Exin. After they left our space, and over the initial twenty-four hours, people started getting sick everywhere they had attacked.” Heathcote’s voice was steady, but Dane saw her eyes waver slightly at the heavy oceans of emotion that she hid behind them.
“Prior to the attack, I had been studying a virus of unknown origin that had been sporadically infecting for the last few years,” she said.
“We now know the origin as the people who got sick had this same germ secreting something I had named Exinase. We now believe this to be a bio-weapon created by the Exin and released en masse at the same time they attacked.” Heathcote’s voice started to tremble slightly with anger.
“Exinase cripples humans, Mr. Williams. And then kills them. But if you agree to our bargain, I will ensure that you get my latest inhibitors and will indeed walk again!” Heathcote stared down at Dane. “I have chosen you in particular, Mr. Williams, because it came to my attention that you are a professional Mech-Brawler. Is that correct?”
Professional is a bit of a loose term, Dane might have argued, but he nodded. He was.
“The unit that I am working with is the Mechanized Infantry Division. Mech-Soldiers, you might call them. The M.I.D. have been given point on developing a first-response defense to the Exin threat, as, presumably, those inside mechanized suits will be impervious to the Exinase virus. Having someone already infected in the unit could be an interesting experiment as well.” Heathcote explained.
“The M.I.D. will be able to go into ruined cities and colonies such as your New Sanctuary, or Mars, or New York, and conduct rescue and defense operations. The M.I.D. may also prove to be the best front-line defense we have, should this conflict become land-based. And a man with your skills should already be well-suited to Mech-Fighting.”
“Do you understand what I am offering you, Mr. Williams?” Heathcote’s blue eyes pierced him once again. In her hands was a tablet computer with a Federal Defense Initiative contract, just awaiting his signature.
Dane understood very well what Sylvia was offering. He was already nodding as best as he was able.
She was offering him the chance at revenge.
3
Buddies
Dane’s life became a whirlwind of activity, and unfortunately, most of it involved pain.
The next two weeks at the Sacramento Teaching Hospital were consumed by tests and procedures designed to prepare Dane for his new life. His hospital meals stopped being awful and instead became a whole lot bigger and filled with things like actual vegetables.
He was given a pull-up bar and dumbbell set and expected to work out four times a day. He started feeling his upper body strength return, albeit slowly.
He was fitted for Federal Marine Corps khaki fatigues.
When he was allowed access to the wall-screen and bothered to check his citizen’s bank account, he saw that instead of the weeks of no tournament money he was expecting, he had started getting a stipend pay as a “BASIC RECRUIT.” It wasn’t a lot, but it was regular—and it was happening even as he was spending half a day lying down.
Some of the changes, however, weren’t so great. One afternoon someone came and removed what he thought of as his rather rakish and daring looking mohawk haircut, and instead left him with a regulation buzzcut. Dane thought that he looked like a shaved cat, but kept the opinion to himself.
“You’ll be on Vito-neura for the rest of your life, Mr. Williams,” Heathcote explained, as she handed over a small, sleek black medical box with two metal pincers at one end, making it look like some strange beetle. The box was strapped to his thigh. Almost immediately, Dane felt a pinch as the first dose was delivered to his embattled neurons.
“Vito-neura is the virus-blocker I have been working on,” Heathcote explained. It was midmorning in the hospital, and the sky outside Dane’s window looked sunny and blue, but scarred with the constant flights of drones and military jets.
She looks proud, Dane thought as Heathcote checked his heart, blood-pressure, and neurological activity on the handheld scanner. It was the first glimmer of emotion that he had seen from the blonde woman.
And then Dane experienced why Heathcote was so pleased with her efforts.
He could move his legs. There was still a deep bone ache in his muscles that he remembered from his days training as a Mech-Brawler, but his muscles had been underused for weeks and were hungry for training.
“Stand,” Heathcote said, and, amazingly, Dane Williams found that he could do so. Without pain.
I don’t believe it, Dane thought, taking first one step, and then another, and then—
“Ahhh!” Dane gasped as needles of electric pain surged up his legs and lower back, and he stumbled forward. He had to clasp onto the small steel table in time to avoid splitting his head open.
“The pain hasn’t gone away!” he growled, panting gasps of angry air.
“No, Mr. Williams, it won’t,” she explained. “You see, the Exin virus is still in your system. It never left and might not ever leave your nervous system. But the antigen will keep it at bay…” He watched as she adjusted the dose remotely, and this time Dane didn’t feel the needles of pain against his thighs—but did feel the wash of cooling that ran through his body.
Once again, he found that he could walk, his limbs feeling a little more supple.
“Hmm. Better than I had expected!” Heathcote raised one carefully-poised eyebrow. “It must be your previous conditioning.”
“What do you mean?” Dane asked as he took a few experimental turns around the hospital room, and even a few leg kicks and raises.
“Your body seems to like the punishment, Mr. Williams,” Heathcote explained.
Which seemed, to the doctor at least, like the perfect excuse to give him a whole lot more…
“At-ten-hut, Private!” shouted a voice from Dane’s doorway.
“Huh?” Dane blinked, turning around from where he had bee
n standing and working the punching bag that had been brought in to add to his routine. He was dressed in exercise wear, with a grey Federal Marines sweatshirt already ringed with sweat. He threw what he thought of as a textbook salute.
“Terrible,” the man snapped at him, and then, “Copy me.” He pulled his heels into line, his back ramrod-straight, and threw the perfect, arm-vibrating-with-tight-passion salute.
The man was a little smaller than Dane but broader. He had a slightly graying moustache and the sort of squarish, rangy, and toughened features that Dane was starting to think of as a “Marine-face.”
The stripe and pip on his shoulder marked him as someone important, as well, Dane saw. He did his best to copy the man.
“Hmph,” the man in tan-and-green fatigues pulled a face. “Awful. But I’m feeling generous,” he said with an air of restraint.
“My name is Sergeant Lashmeier, and you, my boy, are Private-nothing Williams. Say ‘Sir yes sir!’”
“Sir yes sir!” Dane did his best.
“What the hell was that, Private?” Lashmeier’s face was as implacable as death itself.
“SIR YES SIR!” Dane tried again, this time summoning as much passion as he could shout and earning a grunt of despair from the sergeant.
“Okay, I see what we have here…” Lashmeier growled. “You’re a dead man walking, Private Williams. You barely know your head from your ass. You used to be physically fit, and you coasted on your youth and a bit of luck until the crawdads got you.”
The sergeant rolled his eyes at Dane’s confused look. “The Exin, Private. We gave them a little nickname.”
“You were likely going to get a reasonably good career, find yourself a nice partner, settle down in some swank New Sanctuary apartment, raise a few screaming brats, and die of a heart attack before you ever got a chance to see my age,” Lashmeier predicted with so much absolute, concrete certainty that Dane found himself believing it, too.
But then Lashmeier suddenly stepped forward, making Dane startle. The older Marine sergeant’s cold gray eyes pierced into him as he hissed in a low voice, like the whisper of steel.
“But lucky for you, Private, I have come to save you from that. Lucky for you, Private Williams, that you have been given the opportunity to join the goddam best examples of humanity that have ever walked this fine earth—do you understand me, Marine?”
“Sir yes sir!” Dane shouted.
“You have been born again, Private Williams. By the grace of the Federal Marine Corps, you have been brought into the light. You will walk again. I don’t want to hear you whining about your legs. Or your pain. Or the chances you might have had, or how hard you think this is—because you have been selected for the best damn thing to ever happen to someone. Do you understand me, Marine?”
Dane felt something stir in the back of his throat. A knot of emotion when he thought about his back and his legs, and everything that he’d had. How the doctors and consultants had looked at him hesitantly when they came to inspect him, like he was an injured bird and worthy of their pity.
And these Marines don’t care about my disability, he thought. It was an oddly encouraging thought.
“SIR YES SIR!” Dane shouted.
“Good man.” There was a ghost of a smile at the corner of the sergeant’s mouth. “You’re starting to get it, Private,” he grunted, before abruptly stepping back and looking around Dane’s room.
“Get your crap together, Private Williams. You’re shipping out to Fort Mayweather within the hour,” the sergeant said, before throwing another salute. Dane did his best to copy the salute before Lashmeier turned on a dime and paced out of the room as quickly as he had arrived.
Things happen fast in the Federal Marines, Dane thought as he left.
Private-nothing Williams found himself on the tarmac outside the large transport bay behind Sacramento Teaching Hospital. He waited alongside a whole host of support staff. Dane could see the same pale and washed-out looks on some of his fellows, indicating that they, too, were recovering from the Exin virus. He wondered what stories each of them had that ensured that they were given the same opportunity that he had…
But Dane’s wonder for his fellow man was short-lived as it was given over to the large shapes on the Sacramento tarmac.
One was a large Marine Transporter—a four-winged craft with two great rotor wheels inside each wing at the corners of a stubby, distended belly. Into it moved a constant flow of smaller drone carts with crates and plastic boxes of equipment.
But Dane’s sight was drawn most of all to the largest contraption there: a giant metal humanoid figure painted a matte military gray. The thing stood easily fifty feet tall and looked as though it was about to lurch to life and clamber onto the roof of the Teaching Hospital at any moment.
“That’s a Titan!” Dane breathed. He’d never thought he’d see one in real life, as up until now, they had only ever been theorized and portrayed visually online. At least that’s what he’d been told.
“Yup,” said a voice behind him. Dane swung around to see a man about his height in cream-and-tan Marine fatigues, with a ready grin and slightly-scruffier-than-regulation black hair.
“Sure is. Biggest of the mechanized infantry class. Looks like the engineers finally got their funding!” said the man, throwing a hand for Dane to shake.
“Joey Corsoni, sapper with the M.I.D.,” he explained, although Dane didn’t understand what “sapper” meant.
“I used to be with the U.S. Corps of Engineers, but we got reassigned,” he said with a shrug, looking past Dane at the Titan.
“You, uh…” It was hard for Dane to take his eyes off of the largest Mech he’d ever seen. “You got the virus, too?” he asked.
“Ha! Thank God, no.” Joey burst into a scandalized laugh. “You’re Private Williams, right?” Joey asked, earning a nod.
“Right. I’m your sapper-support. Every AMP-wearer gets a one-man support engineer, which is gonna be me, to make sure the suit works.”
“AMP?” Dane’s eyes swiveled back to the giant Titan. “Am I going to walk that?” His voice was full of excitement, as he was already wondering how close it was to his old Intrepid suit. No, it must have much better servos and load-carrying capacity. Imagine the speeds that thing can shift!
“You crazy!?” Corsoni burst out laughing. “No, those are the AMPs,” he said, pointing to one of the fast-moving drone trolleys. A stand carrying much, much smaller versions of the Titan was being loaded into the transporter. Each suit looked barely bigger than a human, perhaps adding only a foot or so in height, and reminded Dane of one of the smallest training suits he had started out in as a Brawler, more than a decade ago.
“AMP, or Assisted Mechanized Plate,” Corsoni said. “That’s what you start off in if you complete basic training. And if you do well in training, then do well in the field, they’ll upgrade you to a War Walker class suit, and then maybe—just maybe and God forbid we ever have to actually use them— the Titans will be used for direct land confrontation with the enemy.”
“Land confrontation,” Dane repeated the words. Corsoni meant facing the Exin in battle.
“Sorry to disappoint you, Private.” Corsoni clapped Dane on the shoulder. “But I saw you fight a few times,” he surprised Dane by saying. He waved to one of the loaders. “It’ll be an honor serving alongside ya,” he said with a grin, before the loader was beckoning them, and Corsoni was turning to shout to all of the recruits.
“Right! Our turn next! Everyone line up and move quickly after that fella in the yellow. Get yourself a seat, get strapped in, and get ready for one hell of a ride!” he shouted, before throwing a thumbs up at Dane and breaking into a run.
Dane felt a little bewildered, but joined in with the haphazard line and was soon jogging up the ramp and onto the transport. He strapped himself into the X-harness of webbing that pulled down over every one of the truly uncomfortable hangar-bay seats. The rotors started to spin far above him.
A
nd just like that, Dane started his new life.
4
Focus on Your Goals
Why didn’t you leave me under the New Sanctuary Dome! Private-nothing Dane Williams could have cried out in pain, exhaustion, and frustration as he tried to keep it together.
Private-nothing was alongside a whole heap of other private-nothings attached to the wall of a thirty-foot cliff somewhere in backwoods Virginia, with the harsh sun beating down on his neck and back as he struggled to hold on to the rope.
This was the third time he had been up the rope (and down, and up again) this morning. Now his vest and fatigues were drenched in sweat, he stank, and his muscles were quivering.
“Gah!” He hissed, as his hands started to slip inside his gloves on the rope.
Dane was the last one on the ropes. Even now, as he looked upward, he could see the wobbling legs of his fellow boot-campers disappearing over the top surface of the edge.
It’s not fair! He gritted his teeth. I only got my legs back a month ago! How could anyone be insane enough to expect me to do this! He was starting to pant with the exertion. He could feel the electric tingles running along the soles of his feet that indicated that he might be due for another attack of the virus.
Which could kill me! he thought, biting down on his pain as the Sergeant bawled at them, and reaching one shaking hand up to clamp on the rope above. With a grunt, he shuffled himself up the rope another few inches.
“Move your ass, Williams!” It was Lashmeier, calling down from the top ledge of the cliff, similarly dressed in sweats and fatigues. He apparently did not care at all about the heatwave they were expected to labor under.
Easy for you to say, you sadist! Williams thought, feeling his shoulders shake and now the trickles of pain lace up his thighs, too.
Dane could still feel the box of the Vito-neura medicine strapped to the meat of his thigh—but it wouldn’t be delivering another dose until this evening unless he could get his hand to the orange emergency-release button. He could hit that and self-inject up to three times a day, but it would mean that he would need to order a refill much earlier than usual.
Mech Warrior: Born of Steel (Mechanized Infantry Division Book 1) Page 2
