by Mark Wandrey
“I know,” Sato said. “But that’s where we’re going.” The location was etched in his mind like it was laser engraved. A short time later, he was giving directions for Rick to pull off the freeway. A large sign proclaimed, “Caution—You Are Entering A Zero Enforcement Zone—ENTER AT YOUR OWN RISK.”
“I warned you,” Rick said.
“What are you worried about? You’re a fucking tank.”
“Some of these punks have tanks,” Rick muttered.
Sato shook his head and laughed as they passed a former armored car, now a ruined hulk with several large holes in its side. He blinked, his head turning as they passed. Tanks?
Block after block had the look of a once busy and prosperous area of the city. Six lane streets with wide two-way turn lanes. The intersections had once had sweeping metallic lamp posts and signal arms. Most were gone, probably torn down and sold for scrap decades ago. The ones remaining were tagged with graffiti, bent, or even melted from the many fires that had swept through the area. Most intersections now sported 4-way stop signs, though many of those were gone as well.
A few characters wandered the ruined streets, all wearing dark clothes and keeping to the shadows, afraid of the afternoon light. They turned left on Westheimer at his direction, past the shell of a Walgreens burned out years ago. A half a block further on, he said, “Stop there.”
“This?” Rick asked as the SUV came to a stop. His glowing blue eyes moved back and forth across the ruins. “This pile of wreckage?”
“Yes,” Sato said. In his mind the image of the burned-out building was superimposed over a completely intact one. A storefront which was far from pristine, but not burned down, and still with a business sign. “Ship-N-Pac” was printed in colorful letters. He could see the woman behind the counter. “This is the place.”
Rick pulled the SUV up to the curb and parked. He shook his head as he got out. Sato got out and checked the readouts on Dakkar’s support module. The Wrogul was fine, and the module was plugged into the SUV’s optional power input, so as long as the food held out, he’d be fine indefinitely.
“So, what’s the plan?” Rick asked, standing at the edge of the charred wood and melted plastic.
Sato closed the back door of the SUV and joined Rick, his eyes darting over the debris, struggling to impose an echo of what it once was on its current state. A beam here, a remaining piece of the wall there. Then a burned and blackened series of boxes. There it is.
“There’ll be more boxes, like these,” Sato said and pointed. “But bigger and heavier.”
“What do you mean, heavier?”
“Thicker steel.”
“What was this place?”
“A package and shipping service. Well, it was years ago. They did a side business renting mailboxes without asking questions.”
“To criminals?”
“Maybe, but also to people who just didn’t want to be found.”
“Criminals,” Rick persisted.
“Not all who don’t want to be found are criminals. Some have an ex-wife looking for them. Some are paranoid. Lots of reasons.” Rick shrugged. And some are…
Sato moved back, and Rick began overturning burned sections of wall, exposing another section of mailboxes, all light-duty ones like the first he’d spotted. Rick glanced at Sato, who shook his head, so he continued digging.
The armor might not be as powerful as a full-sized CASPer, but it was several times stronger than an unarmored Human. He had to stop a couple times to break sections apart to continue the excavation. After moving several pieces, he stopped and turned toward Sato, then said, “Move along, nothing to see here.”
Sato spun around and gawked. He’d been unaware several big nefarious looking fuckers had rolled up and were ‘casually’ watching Rick’s excavating work.
“Yo, whatcha up to?” one asked.
“Somethin good in there? Lots a people dug in there, ain’t none found nothin,” another guy said.
“You stick around, all you’re going to find is pain,” Rick said. He made his eyes flash brightly, and the punks gawked. “Get! Last chance.” They ran. Rick turned to Sato. “We probably don’t have much time.”
“Let me help,” Sato said and moved toward him.
Rick held up a hand and laughed. “No, you’ll just get in the way. Keep an eye out; that will help.”
“Yeah, sure.” Sato turned around and tried to watch the street, but his heart was racing. Behind him the sounds of breaking glass and crunching wood echoed for long minutes.
“I think this is it,” Rick eventually said.
Sato spun and clambered over the jumbled debris. The pile of boxes was a match. “Yeah, this is it.” He bent over and rubbed at the boxes. Unlike the smaller, lighter versions, these didn’t have little glass windows. Also unlike the others, not all of these were broken open. Clearly someone had looted the place before burning it, but these mailboxes were much beefier than the others.
“The place was torched,” Rick noted. “Anything in there is probably melted or burned.”
Sato ignored him and kept at his search. As Rick had suggested, most of the box numbers were either burnt off or obscured by soot. Most, but not all. Whenever he found a surviving marking, he compared it to his memory. With no match, he moved on.
Rick said something. Sato ignored him and kept looking. Eventually he realized it was getting dark. He fumbled in his pockets for a light. Rick used his arm-mounted laser to produce some diffuse illumination. Sato mumbled his thanks and went back to searching.
Finally, he found a number that matched his memory. Immediately he moved debris to the left to find yet another. The mental images matched. He put his hand on a box. “This is it,” he said.
“How can you be sure?”
“Because I was here. Can you get into it?”
Rick moved up and knelt to examine the box. “Yes, but not here. It’ll take some time. Let’s just take it with us.”
“How do we do that?” Sato asked.
“These boxes are made individually and were fitted into the wall.” The laser-based illumination ceased, and a second later Sato heard four snapping sounds accompanied by a whiff of burning metal. The section of surviving wall that held his box fell away, and Rick straightened. In his arms was the box.
“Well done,” Sato said, and turned toward the street. “Let’s get out of here.”
Powerful, unyielding metal arms grabbed him from behind and spun him around as everything seemed to explode.
* * * * *
Chapter Two
Rick was beginning to dislike following Sato’s crazy urges around the galaxy. He’d never wanted to go to Earth, and here he was. He definitely didn’t want to return to Houston. And yet, here he was. He had a feeling he’d be going more places he didn’t want to go.
Sato guided him as he turned off the freeway and into the ‘you really don’t want to be here’ part of Houston. His suit’s sensors picked up a dozen entities watching them drive down the ruined roadways. Rick watched them in turn, closely.
They turned at Sato’s direction, passing a mostly intact building with a sign. “Genghis Kahn Import/Export.” A solitary man stood by the entrance watching them drive past, his dark skin almost like ebony, and his stark white eyes followed their SUV as it passed.
Sato took no notice and continued to lead them to some destination only he knew. At least, Rick hoped he knew where they were going. His quip about tanks wasn’t offhand. Old Houston was notorious as a war zone. Some of the rougher mercs used it as a free-form training area. Despite the best efforts of local authorities and Earth Republic forces, tons of arms made it out of the startown and into the city proper. Much ended up in the hands of gangs, which resulted in Zero Enforcement Zones, such as the one they were driving through in an expensive SUV.
For whatever reason, the locals remained at bay, and Sato led them to the location he was looking for. Rick figured he’d lost it; the building was a wreck. Instead of leaving
, he started a post-apocalyptic scavenger hunt in the ruins.
Sato knew exactly what he wanted. Of course, in the tumbledown ruins of a business, decades old by the looks of it, finding what he wanted proved difficult. Rick spent hours overturning crumbling walls and uncovering banks of half-melted mailboxes until they found what the scientist was looking for. Amazingly, it appeared intact.
He used his low-powered lasers to slice the box free and hefted it. It only weighed a dozen kilos at most.
“Well done,” Sato said just as Rick’s threat assessment system lit up. “Let’s get out of here.”
Rick dropped the box and spun, engulfing Sato in his arms. He turned again and bent over. A rain of bullets fell on them from the direction of the street. Most missed, though more than a few ricocheted off his back. The bastards had come in slow and quiet, and he’d been too busy with the scavenger hunt. But now he was pissed.
Regardless of how many attackers there were, they’d eventually have to reload. After the first few shots, Rick was certain they didn’t have anything immediately dangerous to him. He waited for empty magazines so he could afford to stop protecting Sato. The scientist wasn’t bulletproof.
“Who’s shooting at us?” Sato yelled over the cacophony of gunfire.
“Everyone, I think,” Rick replied. A moment later, fire slackened off, but it didn’t stop entirely. Great, that meant the punks had some small amount of fire discipline. He decided it was unlikely there would be a better opportunity. “Stay low,” he said, then as gently as possible, lifted Sato up and moved him to the other side of the boxes he’d just cut apart. These were the extra-strong ones and should provide protection. At least for a short time.
Clear of the need to keep his charge alive, Rick was free to respond. While he was shielding Sato with his armored body, the computers in the armor had been analyzing the attack, using infrared and ultraviolet sensors to spot muzzle flashes as well as the heat from bodies. The counter-battery fire process had identified nine aggressors.
If he had to guess, the two punks he’d run off a couple hours ago had brought their whole gang. Good move, tactically, against anyone except an Æsir.
Rick controlled the armor via a sort of pinplant. Based on the design Sato had ‘dreamed up’ and first used on himself, the scientist called it a Mesh. It provided a direct neurolink to the armor, as well as a dozen other features. More of a wide-spread neural web than a specialized pinplant. Humans with pinplants used them to control starships and CASPers. With the Mesh, Rick didn’t control the armor, he was the armor.
The moment he turned around, the incoming fire faltered dramatically.
“Surprise,” Rick said, though he knew none of the attackers could hear him. Because there were so many targets identified, he let his armor do most of the work. Based on the heat signatures, he could tell two were using larger automatic rifles. They were the primary targets. He triggered both arm lasers to maximum.
A 250-kilowatt laser doesn’t sound like much; most alien laser rifles were nearly a megawatt of energy. Except those weapons operated in limited wavelengths and short pulses. The Æsir could put 500-kilowatts on target for minutes at a time, and with a highly refined beam. Both shots were perfectly on target, drilling a five-millimeter round hole through the heavy gunners’ heads. Seven.
The incoming fire resumed, though not nearly as steadily or as disciplined. Rick kept the arm lasers on full power, firing continuous beams. He got two more, but the others had realized they’d kicked over a KzSha nest and stayed under cover. He located one behind the remnants of a crashed flyer, aimed both arms at it, and fired. The beams burned through the fuselage and into the man within a second. This one had time to scream before he died. Four left.
Okay, time to go hunting. Rick spun up the suit’s flight system just as a garbage truck rumbled around the corner. It had a dozen slots cut in the heavy metal sides and multi-barrel weapons sticking out. “Oh, I hate being right,” he said as the chain guns opened up.
Rick snatched up another wall, not as heavy as the one he’d used to protect Sato. His arms whined with the strain as he lifted the one-ton chunk of metal and concrete, then moved sideways.
Bullets tore into his improvised shield, 20mm and .50 caliber according to the counter-battery fire computer. The wall began coming apart in seconds under the fusillade. The first to penetrate bounced harmlessly off one of his shoulder pauldrons, but another scored right in the center of his chest, staggering him and sending a flurry of warning lights flashing through his Mesh.
Rick rolled the dice and fired his jumpjets.
They weren’t like the ones built into CASPers; these were more akin to the high-powered micro electric jet turbines used in drones and some flier cars. They had the advantage of being small enough to fit within the Æsir’s remarkably tiny footprint, utilizing the suit’s massive power cells instead of fuel, and having an incredibly fast response to demands. What they didn’t have was the power and speed of jumpjets.
Rick soared into the sky with a scream of the tiny turbines. There were six engines, one on each limb, and two on his back. The noise from the engines was loud outside. It was deafening inside the helmet. Between the screaming of the exhaust and the motors conducting noise through the metal of the suit, it was an assault on his senses. He instantly wished he’d tried it out beforehand.
The gunners didn’t react quickly. No doubt they weren’t expecting his sudden leap to flight. His armor’s computer tracing of threat fire registered the heavy gunners’ direction of fire lagging a full half-second behind him. More than enough, he thought. Their gunfire even managed to miss Sato’s hiding place by a good margin.
After he’d risen a dozen meters, he angled the suit forward. The combination of engines on the arms and legs afforded him amazing control of his flightpath. It still wasn’t the gutsy acceleration of a CASPer, but the memory of an old movie about a comic book superhero brought a smile to his face. “Yeah, I can fly.”
His feelings of exultation and freedom were his undoing. He hadn’t bothered with detailed scans of the former garbage truck. If he had, he’d have noticed there was a turret on the roof as well as the gun slits on the sides. As he angled his flight forward, the armor’s threat assessment noticed the turret at the same time he spotted it.
It looked like it came off some sort of tank, and was probably alien made. Considering there’d been a good deal of fighting around Houston as well, he shouldn’t have been surprised. A lot of merc-quality hardware was just lying around. Some of it had made its way into gang hands, and onto a garbage truck.
“Oh, fuck,” Rick said and altered his flight path, which didn’t respond as quickly as he thought it would. The armor’s anti-fire control system augmented his inputs, though too late. The alien manufactured high-velocity chain gun opened up with a brrrrrt! sound, tearing through the air and across Rick’s flightpath.
His poorly executed dodge was enough to get out of the path of gunfire from the surprise turret. It also jinked his flightpath into one of the other gunner’s sights. A 20mm round ripped through his right leg just below the knee, severing it.
“Argh!” he yelled as the kinetic force of the impact sent him spinning wildly. He tried to control his flight, unsuccessfully. He slammed into the top of the garbage truck hard enough to crush the turret. “Ouch,” he said, trying to concentrate through the sea of warning lights projected into his brain. I need a way to tone these down.
By the time he’d overridden all the warnings, a hatch had opened in the top of the garbage truck less than a meter away, and some dude was pointing a laser rifle at his head. Rick triggered the arm blade and punched with lightning speed. The man gave a gurgling scream as a quarter of his head fell away in a wash of blood.
Yells sounded from inside the improvised armor. Already missing a leg, Rick wasn’t in the mood to climb inside and sort it out. He reached behind his back and triggered the armor to release one of the six grenades fitted around his waist, progra
mming it for a 5 second detonation at the same time. “Little something for you,” he yelled and dropped it inside the hatch.
He activated the flight controls to make good his escape. Nothing happened.
“Well, that’s inconvenient,” he said as the grenade exploded.
* * *
Sato hunkered behind the heavy wall section Rick had propped up to shield him as heavy rounds tore up the ground all around him. He was on his knees, hands over his head, and someone was screaming. With a roar of electric turbines, Rick jumped away, and the gunfire followed him.
They have a damn tank! he thought. Rick had to be right about that of all things. He peeked around the now partially shattered wall he’d used for cover and saw Rick soar through the air like a superhero. He had a moment to admire how well he flew. The flight system really was quite elegant. For a moment Sato completely forgot he was in a deadly battle—at least until the Æsir was swatted out of the sky by the heavy guns.
Sato watched as one of the Æsir’s legs spiraled away, and Rick crashed into the ‘tank,’ and out of his view. He stayed on his knees, blinking in disbelief.
“Hey, asshole!”
Sato’s head came around. Four men were a few meters away pointing a variety of guns at him. They looked tough and pissed. He slowly raised his hands.
“See, I knew they was after something,” one of them said.
“What we do wid dis one?” another asked.
“Kill ‘em and take that box.”
No. Sato thought, and a veil fell over his vision.
