by Mark Wandrey
Well, that was fun, he thought, and opened his hand. Some kind of cable had become wrapped around his whole lower left arm. Using the technique he’d learned from Murdock, he sat up and rolled onto his feet. Speaking of Murdock...
“Cavalier Actual. Anyone out there?” No response. He repeated his call and got nothing again. He started to get worried, then realized the radio status indicator was red. The suit was chiming a trio of master alarms. He went down the list quickly. None of them put the suit out of commission, so he dismissed them for now. A clanking from the tank reminded him he was still in a combat zone. He turned to see a Zuul climbing out of a hatch, a toolkit in hand.
The alien walked calmly toward the back of the tank, looking left and right down at his feet, examining the tank, unconcerned with what was around him. He’s out to repair, Jim realized as the alien knelt on the rear deck next to one of the vents he’d vandalized and started unlocking it. Jim checked his options, found an operational weapons system, and raised his right arm. The Zuul finished fixing the vent, nodded in satisfaction, and reached for his toolkit.
Joshpa growled and mumbled as he unjammed the vent. It was difficult because the super-hot exhaust had made it too hot to touch, forcing him to use heavy gloves. The damned enemy merc had done a hell of a job on the vent, but he finally managed to pop it open. It wouldn’t close again without a lot of maintenance, but it was open, and that was better than closed. He stood and grabbed the toolkit, and there was the enemy merc, just a few feet behind the tank.
Joshpa hadn’t known it was that big. It had to be one of those human suits he’d heard about. Entropy, they were huge! And it was pointing an arm at him. He moved his head a fraction, looking back at the hatch he’d come up from. It was six feet away. Too cursed far by a long shot. The suited merc took a step toward him. Joshpa sighed and raised his hands to surrender. He never felt the explosion.
Jim held his arm on target, fingers ready on the triggers. The alien stood and saw him, freezing instantly. It was obviously surprised to see Jim standing there pointing a weapon at him and didn’t know what to do. Jim was waiting and weighing his options when the Zuul suddenly moved. The alien never finished the gesture because Jim triggered the railgun.
The gun cracked once, firing a hypersonic round that hit the Zuul center of mass and blew him apart. By the time he realized he’d shot the alien, all that was left was flying arms and legs.
“Damn,” he said. It almost looked like the mechanic was trying to surrender. “Oops.”
“What now?” Jakutah demanded after the thump above them. “Joshpa, report? Joshpa? Someone tell me what is happening.”
“The engineer is dead!” one of his surviving crew barked. “The armored trooper is back, and it killed Joshpa!”
“Button up!” the commander ordered, and the hatches automatically slammed shut. A moment later the hull resounded with a bang as the enemy trooper once again landed on the tank’s deck. “I have had enough of this!” he roared in frustration at continually being thwarted by this mecha-monstrosity. “Driver, move! You shook it off once before; do it again – permanently!”
“Understood,” Juslogo said and threw the tank into gear, this time pushing the throttle all the way forward.
“Fire anything you have up there to get him off!” the commander ordered. Weapons popped out and spun, firing in random directions as the tank careened madly through the frozen landscape, jumping over hillocks, tracks throwing rooster tails of dirt and snow behind as it lurched forward. With the engineer, Joshpa, splattered all over the top of the tank, no one was manning his station. Thus no one took notice of the rapidly climbing temperature reading from the fusion reactor.
On top, Jim had a secure handhold on the tank’s main gun, the reinforced barrel of a particle-accelerator cannon, and he held on for all he was worth as the tank’s driver went absolutely apeshit. Several more lasers popped out and started randomly firing, none coming anywhere close to hitting him. A good part of Jim was thrilled that he was causing so much alarm. Another part of him figured that, sooner or later, they were going to succeed in scoring a good hit.
“Might as well see how much I can screw this thing up in the meantime,” he said. The barrel of the particle cannon looked expensive. It was too big for him to bend, even using the enhanced strength provided by his suit. As luck would have it, he didn’t have to bend it. The focusing channel was crystalline, running down the center of the barrel and protected by a spun steel shroud with gaps for cooling. He made a knife edge of his right hand and pushed it through the gap.
“Alarm from the main gun!” Jinpaka barked and swiveled the turret without waiting for orders. “The cursed trooper is trying to take out the main gun!” He swung the gun back and forth as fast he could, but the alarm continued to sound. Worse, the beam-focusing crystal was sending an alarm, too. Any more flexing and...
“Not my gun,” Jinpaka moaned and swung the turret around as hard and fast as he could. It spun a full 360, the tip of the barrel probably going 120 mph. It was tracking slower than spec; something had to be pulling against it. He added up and down motion to the barrel. With a resounding crash, the turret stopped spinning and its motors exploded.
Jim pushed as hard as he could. The hand of the suit was a good eighteen inches from his actual fingertips which were roughly around the suit elbows. The sound of tortured metal on metal was relayed up the suit’s arm as his suit hand screeched its way into the armored barrel shroud until he just scraped the crystal core. Just a little...bit...further...in...FUCK!
The barrel and turret swung right toward him, slamming him in the suit’s midriff and bending him over like he’d been hit in the gut by a telephone pole. Worse, it swung him right out over the side of the tank and stopped, almost flipping him off completely. Jim grabbed the barrel with his left hand and then wrapped that arm completely around it. Overriding the maximum strength control, he hung on for dear life as the turret swung back and forth with increasing desperation, all the while Jim digging his hand in deeper. If he could just take out the particle cannon, the tank’s effectiveness would be considerably reduced. If he could just reach a mechanical finger around the focusing crystal...
The turret suddenly reversed rotation, hard. In an instant, he was flipped end over end, still holding on to the barrel, and slammed against the tank’s chassis. It felt like he’d just been smashed in the back with a sledgehammer.
“Ouch,” he said, feeling the suit’s back articulations bend in ways they weren’t meant to bend. More red status lights on his board. When the barrel crushed him into the chassis, Jim finally felt the crunch of the weapon’s crystal. “Well, there’s that!” he said as he pushed back and slowly got the turret to rotate enough to get free. The tank continued to drive crazily, but was now on a relatively flat section of ground. He was intensely aware they should arrive at the point where Second Squad was deployed at any time. Even with the particle cannon disabled, the tank was still dangerous. He needed to take it out of commission completely.
The remaining crew in the turret cried out in alarm as the main drive motors overloaded and exploded. At the same time, the gunner growled in consternation as the status alarm on the cannon went off. The trooper had destroyed the main gun!
“Entropy!” Jinpaka growled. “Main gun is out!”
“Gunner, get your assistant out there and shoot that robotic dung off the tank!”
“But we are driving!” Jinpaka complained.
“I will shoot you myself if you do not! We have a mission to complete – or die trying.” Jinpaka looked at his assistant, both staring wide-eyed in fear. They were tankers, not troopers, and that powered armor was virtually unstoppable, its operator skilled beyond reason. Look at what it had done all by itself – and there were many more of them out there. The logical thing to do was flee. On the other paw, he knew with certainty that if they disobeyed, Jakutah would, indeed, kill them. It was the way of a pack leader among their people. They agreed without sp
eaking and both reached for weapons. Jinpaka stopped in mid-reach for a gun when the hull rang from an explosion. Everyone looked around in surprise as another one made the chassis ring like a bell.
“The trooper is using grenades!” another crew member said. The assistant gunner, who was already armed, leaned over his controls and cursed.
“The left missile launcher has been damaged.”
“Get up there while we still have a tank,” the commander spat.
His suit was not in good shape. The right hand wouldn’t properly grasp anymore after he’d used it to tear apart the tank’s main gun barrel and break the focusing crystal. Being flung around by that hand also damaged the shoulder and elbow. The back articulations were bent, and a number of the sensors were either destroyed or clogged with dirt and snow. The crashing around and being dragged had also knocked out several weapons. As he climbed back up and managed to grab on with the mostly wrecked right hand, he realized he still had a number of grenades at his disposal.
“Better than nothing,” he said and snatched one of them from the belt holder. It armed immediately, and he stuffed it into an important-looking hatch. He crawled quickly away, and the grenade exploded, tearing apart the target. “Well, that worked,” he said as he snatched another grenade and stuffed it into a piece of machinery. Boom! He gave a little laugh and armed a third grenade just as something hit him in the back of his suit.
Jim turned to see a pair of Zuul halfway out of the turret hatch. One had a huge laser rifle which he’d just used to shoot Jim in the back; the other had some kind of rocket launcher he was aiming.
“Damn it,” Jim cursed and snapped his left arm up, moving the grenade to his right hand. The Zuul with the laser was trying to load another chemical charge, while the other was struggling with the rocket launcher. Jim tried to get the right hand of his suit to cooperate. He finally got it to grasp the grenade and quickly brought the left up and triggered the magnetic accelerator. The suit sensors weren’t working worth a damn, so he aimed based on where the rounds threw sparks off the tank turret as they gouged the metal. The Zuul ducked as the rounds flew past them.
Jim turned back around. He was near the front of the tank now, and he thought he spotted what looked like an opening – an important one. He moved as quickly as he could to stuff the grenade into it.
Jinpaka almost soiled himself as the suited trooper unleashed a deadly hail of fire at him. He and the assistant yipped in panic and dove out of the way as the human’s rounds ricocheted off the turret and hatch. His assistant was shaking so hard he couldn’t reload his laser rifle. Jinpaka had to stop the trooper himself!
It took a phenomenal effort of will to push himself back out of the hatch. The rocket launcher was so big he had to lift it out first. The trooper had his back turned and was moving toward the driver’s compartment, another of those grenades in one hand.
“You have done enough damage to my tank!” Jinpaka yelled and leveled the rocket launcher. Not remembering or caring about the firing guidelines, he triggered the weapon just as his assistant, who’d finally reloaded his weapon, popped up right behind him. The back blast of the rocket firing nearly decapitated the hapless assistant.
The rocket lanced out and hit the trooper square in the back. The suit jerked and both arms shot up as if it were surrendering. Fire flared and exploded from the back of the suit, even though the rocket hadn’t detonated. Jinpaka had forgotten the rocket needed at least fifty feet to arm and the armored trooper was only ten feet away. Just as well, as the rocket explosion would have killed Jinpaka too.
The trooper staggered, obviously badly damaged. Jinpaka was trying to remember where the spare rockets were stowed when the suited trooper did a half pirouette and plummeted off the front of the tank, which bumped upwards as it ran over him.
“Yes! I did it!” Jinpaka cheered, turning to share the moment with his assistant. He was too stunned at the sight of the burned corpse of his former assistant to see the grenade, released from Jim’s damaged hand when he fell, as it rolled past Jinpaka and fell into the tank’s interior. The grenade rattled around for a second, lodged next to the extra missiles which Jinpaka had just been wondering about, and exploded.
* * * * *
Chapter 18
Jim wondered why he’d set the alarm so damned early. He felt like he’d only just gone to sleep, and it was beeping, beeping, beeping, and beeping. He shook his head in annoyance and instantly regretted it. It did, however, drive home the realization that he was not, in fact, at home in his comfortable bed. He was inside a CASPer, lying on his face on an alien planet, and he hurt. Everywhere.
“Oh...shit,” he moaned and opened his eyes. The projection system that showed an exterior display on the inside of his cockpit was no longer functioning. The feeds into his pinplants had become disconnected. The status board to his right, where Dash used to hang, had broken free from the strut it had been welded to and was no longer working. The parts that were still powered and at least partly functional showed red on their status indicators. The air was still moving inside his suit, so at least there was that. It was quite possible to suffocate inside a CASPer, even on a world with breathable air, if its life-support system failed. He’d learned that in his brief training session. He decided to take stock of his situation by reconstructing, in his mind, the last few moments of the fight.
Jim remembered firing at the two Zuul in the turret, then turning to use his grenade. Then something stabbed him in the back. He spun and fell off the tank. I fell, he thought, some more of the cobwebs clearing. Oh, right, I fell in front. And then the tank ran me over. Yeah, that had hurt. As the tread hit his leg, effectively dragging him under, he’d been slapped to the ground and had smashed his head against the cockpit side. He glanced at the controls that had broken free. Right. So that’s how that happened.
He wanted to feel his head and back, but his large arms were wedged so tightly inside the suit there was simply no way he could pull them out by himself. Since he was lying on his face, he also knew there wasn’t much chance he was getting out the normal way either. Boy, Adayn was going to be pissed at him, and that was too bad. That girl was cute!
“You’ve got bigger worries than a pretty gal who doesn’t even know you’re alive,” he berated himself. “Let’s see if this thing still works at all.” Jim tried moving his arms and found to his amazement they worked. Then his legs. Nothing. “Well, not walking out of here.” The standard radio had been out since the beginning of his little tussle with the tank. He’d resisted using the emergency beacon, for obvious reasons. However, under the current circumstances – specifically that he was lying in the dirt in a mostly dead CASPer – it seemed like a good time to call for help. Using a specific combination of finger presses in his gloves he activated the flashing blue strobe of his emergency radio beacon. It occurred to him that, if he made it back alive, the engineers who designed that feature deserved a nice bonus.
An alarm started warbling. Jim looked around for it. Fixed to the left side of the cockpit, opposite the redundant controls, were a number of instruments. Atmosphere, temperature, pressure, and radiation. The radiation alarm was screaming. A neutron source nearby was emitting dangerous levels, and it was rising.
“That’s not good,” Jim said. “That’s really not good.”
He considered crawling, but with zero outside visibility he was just as liable to crawl toward the dangerous source of rads as he was to climb away from it. No, he needed to get out of this thing and away from here.
“Eject, eject, eject,” he said. Nothing. He hadn’t expected the voice system to work, but it was worth a try. He gave the sequence of finger pushes designed to initiate an ejection, basically counting to ten with all his fingers, then again in reverse order. Nothing again. “So not good.” It was an incredibly fool proof system, so the damage was either severe, or some safety was keeping it from functioning because if it did work, he would be in worse shape than where he was. The radiation alarm tone
grew steadily louder. “I’m not going to lie here and die,” he decided.
Since crawling away wasn’t an option, and the ejection system through the back was also out, that left the main cockpit exit, but lying on his belly, or basically the cockpit, kind of made that a no-go as well. Then he remembered his arms still worked! Jim tried pushing with his right arm. The motors whined a little and he heard a popping sound quickly followed by ozone wafting down the arm opening.
“Okay, that didn’t work.” Of course, he knew the right arm was already pretty screwed from his tank-turret whirligig routine. So that meant the left one. He pushed, and the suit shifted, maybe a couple of inches. “Come on,” he grunted and pushed harder. It felt like the feedback was set at about half of maximum, and that was a problem. Lying on his stomach he was basically trying to do a one-handed pushup. “Damn it,” he cursed, “damn, damn, damn!”
Still, it should be possible, he thought, and pulled in on the arm as hard as he could. It moved about a third of the way to a pushup position. Not nearly enough to get the leverage he needed, especially at half power. The slowly growing tone of the radiation alarm was a ceaseless and increasing threat. As he’d flexed his back, he could feel wetness spreading. He wasn’t hot, so it couldn’t meant sweat, and that meant blood. For the first time, he realized his right hand was feeling cold.
The only other way to override the strength enhancement was by removing the haptic uniform. Inside that uniform was the feedback system which made operating the suit possible. But to remove it, he had to get his right arm out. He’d seen thinner troopers do it, so he knew it was possible. He started twisting and pulling.
