by Stephen Moss
He could see a tributary of a river, flowing briskly to the southwest, toward the city, and onward to the Black Sea, not far over the horizon. Thick, dense foliage lined the valley, filling it and overflowing its sides into valleys beyond, where his team was spread out, vigilant and still. The trees were dark green, almost black in the dawn light, wet with dew and life.
He felt it before he heard it. A ping in his center. Though he had scrolled his faceplate back, his suit’s spinal interface still relayed any data coming to it directly to his visual cortex, to appear across his eyesight, not over his view, but as well as his view. A shimmering text and graphical display he could read in detail without ever losing focus on the very things the text should be obscuring. He was not as comfortable with the sensation as some, but was still better at handling it than most.
The ping was coming from one of his team members. Even as he answered it, his faceplate was already rejoining in front of his face, sealing out the light and brisk air, even as the greater light of his data feed overwhelmed his natural sight.
Stannislav: ‘captain, i have movement coming down highway e50, sir. looks like another armored troop division, and more on its tail.’
Miller: ‘copy that, stannis. team, that is the seventh division since midnight. mik, open a channel to command, i want eyes from above on this. if this isn’t an invasion force then my name is umka.’
Umka was an old soviet era cartoon character, a lost young polar bear looking for his friend. It was a story that pretty much everyone behind the Iron Curtain had loved as a child. As a Lithuanian Jew, Ben had been no exception, and neither had the bulk of his Slavic and Russian born team.
Guttman: ‘opening channel now, my sweet little umka.’
Ben Miller felt the channel open as he suppressed a chuckle, relayed from the short-range subspace tweeter in his suit to the larger, much bulkier one that Mik carried, as team comms specialist.
Captain Miller: ‘mission command, we have more movement, on top of the night’s already significant traffic. patching data packet to you now.’
Mik Guttman was already parceling his teammate Stannislav’s report and image captures and forwarding on, as Ben knew he would be.
The reply was curt at first.
Comms. AI.:
Ayala: ‘ben, looking at the packet now. that is not a small number of troops. ¿were you able to get a bead on those mobile missile launchers that came in at 0530?’
Miller: ‘no more data there, i am afraid. they continued on directly into the main camp at chaltyr. we have altered our viewpoints accordingly, though, if anything like that comes by again, we will be able to get eyes on to it.’
As he spoke with Ayala, he felt Mik reach out to him. He could not speak to two people at once with the fluency that users like Amadeu had managed, but he could come close. With only a brief interlude in his flow of speech to Ayala he listened to Mik’s message.
Guttman: ‘captain, i have an inbound aircraft, matches priority one description, it has come to hover at a mile out from my position.’
Mik, seated over two miles from Ben, was laying prone on a small bank, shrouded by shrubs and the low, heavy foliage of an old oak tree. At Ben’s request, Mik’s view became his own.
The plane, such as it was, was hovering. Its two rear jets were angled toward the ground as a third in its nose created a smaller plume, directed straight down. They could see the leaves of the trees below it rustling violently under the force of its pinpoint thrusters.
Miller: ‘mik, open your view. send it live to command. i want commander zubaideh to see this.’
There was no confirmation from Mik, he just did it. Ayala saw it the next moment. Its thin wings were as wide as the plane was long. Judging by scale it was maybe four meters long, maybe less. A thin, tubular fuselage, with its two main wings matched by smaller ones at a 45 angle at the end of its tail.
Ayala: ‘i see it, gentlemen, i see it. it is not as large as our stratojets, but the propulsion units are undoubtedly the same. as is the armor plating.’
Ben did not know everything about the source of the StratoJets, but he knew enough to know that this technology should not be in the hands of the Russians. He also knew enough to know that the suit that he wore now, the suit he had come to feel so very comfortable in, was from the same source as said StratoJets. Even as he went to comment on this, the scene suddenly changed.
The sonic boom caught them all off guard. It announced the arrival of another of the small jets, inbound at full speed from the north. The boom rippled over each of the team’s positions in quick succession, heard through the ears of the most northerly Spezialist first, then BANG, BANG, BANG, as its arrival thundered across the valley.
Stannislav: ‘i have another bogie, sir, inbound on mik’s position at …’
He paused as his radar told him the speed. Finally he got up the nerve to relay it.
Stannislav: ‘…at mach 4. i repeat, mach 4.’
As the second Russian Ubitsya jet came in, the first started wheeling in midair. It was zeroing in. The hypersonic second jet barely had time to bank as it came down upon them, but it was already braking hard and coming around even as the first jet opened fire.
Mik Guttman did not have time to react. His position was blanketed in a wall of kinetic fury that tore the ground, the tree, the shrubbery, and his body to shreds. His suit attempted to withstand the force, but this was not something that could be absorbed. Imbedded in the nose of the Ubitsya was a quad-barreled flechette cannon not unlike the ones that Ben and two other of his team carried, only twice as large.
At twenty thousand miles an hour, they pulverized Mik Guttman’s world. He barely had time to register that he was under attack before his suit, his weapons, and his body were liquefied.
- - -
Ayala saw the connection go dead with a start. Still watching through Mik’s eyes, she had seen the first Russian jet turn on him as its cousin arrived. She had seen the air around him suddenly erupt as the ground was vaporized, and then whatever had opened fire on him had destroyed the main subspace tweeter he had carried, and that had been that.
She reeled in cyberspace.
Ayala: ‘minnie, get me neal! get me barrett! get me everyone, now!’
- - -
Ben reacted with animal instinct, going to move toward his friend’s position. But the ominous silence coming from his comms specialist, and from the main relay, stopped him.
Miller: ‘team, guttman is hit, assumed dead. go weapons hot. maintain positions and remain vigil. i don’t know how they spotted him, so stay low. let’s not add to our casualties.’
They responded only with pings. Ben was cold, not immune to the loss of his teammate and friend, but aware of the greater mission. When one member of a Recon Team was discovered it was his job to do anything he could to save him, but only if it did not compromise the mission. That was the deal. They all understood it.
Without the main subspace relay, comms were limited to suit-to-suit. Merik was the first to spot the planes again.
Merik: ‘captain, i have visual on bogie 2, coming up from south.’
Stannislav: ‘bogie 1 spotted, sir, also moving north from mik’s position. staying low, and moving slowly.’
Merik: ‘bogie 2 now subsonic, sir, circling stannis’s position at low altitude.’
Ben had an uneasy feeling.
Miller: ‘stannislav, i don’t like this. i want you to find deeper cover. we know that the suits can be spotted via negative space scanning from our days hunting lana. get behind a tree. get covered in mud. whatever you can to …’
Stannis waited a moment too long, watching the first Ubitsya as it came stealthily over a rise. As the second jet came in once more, much slower this time, it was only then that he turned to jump from his perch in a tall willow tree. Both jets came to hover, a quarter mile apart, focused on h
is position.
Silence, for just a moment, as he stepped from the branch. Then, sensing his movement somehow, they both fired.
Just across a small valley, Merik could see the second jet as it started to spit its terrible munition. He saw the tree Stannis had been sitting in, he saw it burst into dust, into smoke, then into vapor. The tree was ripped to atoms by the dual fire from the two Russian fighters. Where the kinetic bullets crossed paths, blue ionic lightning could be seen, static to the point of devastation. Merik’s arm came up, leveling at the second bogie. The rampage stopped, leaving a savage scar across the earth.
Merik froze, his weapons sighted, his systems tracking the second bogie. He was not in deep cover, but the majority of his body was behind a small rock outcropping.
The Ubitsya wheeled on his position, its nose panning back and forth as it hovered on its fusion jets, as if sniffing for him. They stood facing each other. His eyes focused in on the front of the jet. He could see the quad barrel nozzle of its flechette gun. He aimed his own at it.
The second jet was not even in sight as he spoke.
Merik: ‘it can’t see me, but …’
But he had spoken too soon. He saw in the split second that it got a bead on him, he saw as it broke from its slow panning and whirled to directly face him, and they both opened fire in almost the same instant.
The bullets closed at stupendous speed, a wall of copper lancing together to connect in a blink. Where it collided, a thunderclap formed, a shockwave washing outward from the kinetic force. Where it did not connect a hundred supercharged pellets raced in a microsecond at both targets. It was a quickly lost war of attrition, a war in which Merik had less weight, less armor, and less firepower.
His gun arm was protected only because of the kinetic shield it was also unleashing. For a moment, it continued to fire, hanging in midair as his head and torso were wiped away. Then it slowly fell, its bullets wasted, to be erased along with the rest of him.
His hits registered, though, his parting moment engraving a blistering scar across the face of the small, hovering predator, ripping at its systems and sensors.
Ben, moving only slightly to bring his eyes to bear, watched it falter, clearly damaged, but far from destroyed. He had set his sensors to passive, not wanting to give any indication of his position, and was using his eyes to supplement his suddenly limited view.
Realization of how they were hunting his team came to him in a flash. He did not move. Instead, he packaged up a small data pack and prepared it for his team. Then he also set his systems to analyzing the flight patterns of the satellites overhead. It would be a long shot, but he had to let them know. He had to tell command what had happened here.
He braced for what he knew was about to happen when he opened his comms once more, then he initiated the signal that he knew would bring them down upon him.
He was already running when it went out.
- - -
Ayala: ‘it’s happening now, neal, right now. i saw it take out one of their positions, then they went comms dark, which means the relay was probably destroyed as well.’
Neal: ‘¿but how? I can see them spotting them if they were up close, but from a quarter mile out.’
Quavoce: ‘i am not aware of a technology that would allow them to target one of the suits from a distance. unless there was a second …’
Minnie:
Their view swam to a dizzying height, and suddenly they were a hundred miles above the earth, staring down through the morning haze to an undulating sea of green below. The view zoomed violently, splitting as it did so into two quadrants.
They could see the first plane, moving now, hunting, firing as it went. They could not make out its quarry, but only a blur of destruction as it darted this way and that, driving through the hillside and firing a line of destruction ahead of it. Minnie tried to focus ahead of the bullets, to see what it was chasing, but caught only momentary blurs as it danced this way and that. Whoever it was they were heading towards a gully. They would soon be exposed.
The second quadrant showed a very different scene. The second jet was lying in small crater, a plume of smoke coming from its nose as it tried to get airborne again. They could not know it, but it had been hit hard once more after Merik spat his last breath at it. This time in a concerted effort by Ben’s remaining two team members. He had sent them a strategic package, sealed with an order for absolute radio silence, and then set off at a run to lead the two planes away.
As the two predators had begun to track him, the first had followed the path Ben had intended, and his team had been waiting as he had ordered them to be. When they opened fire, one with his flechette gun, the other with the tamer, but still lethal barium laser he carried, they had blown apart its nose cone, ripping into its nose-mounted guns and forward thruster.
Neal: ‘¿what is that? it looks like a stratojet, but much smaller. ¿can we get an estimate on dimensions?’
Minnie began to overlay details, but the attention of the team was already on another set of movement. The view shifted away from the plane to the two men that had ambushed it. Whoever was on the ground there was embroiled in something close to a battle of the titans. It was an epic scene.
Ayala: ‘¿how many …?’
Minnie was already doing the calculation.
Minnie:
As she spoke, the screen was designating the members in the fight. The two 4th generation suits, assumed to be the remnants of Ben’s team, had clearly been set upon by a much larger but technologically inferior platoon of ground troops.
The scene was ultra-violent.
- - -
His arm moved as if possessed, blanketing each target in turn as he allowed his AI to run amuck.
The counter ran down in his mind as he ripped at each target in turn. His opponents’ armor was saving them, but not all of them, he was winging each in turn as his gun blurred across them, a leg removed there, a forearm there. As one was decapitated, his threat counter adjusted, removing the attacker from his list of priorities.
But it was not much of an adjustment. The swarm still came, ever more fierce as he butchered their colleagues. He saw them coming in, he saw the wave washing up to him, their guns blaring into his armor. He felt the arc of security given by his surviving teammate at his back, their respective systems trying to keep up with each others’ rampaging defense of their combined position.
<44 attackers, 43, 42, 41 …>
There were thirty-seven left when the fight got personal.
As his conscious mind lost sway, he became animal. Still firing his weapon even at close range, he now used it as a sword, a saber, to maim and rend his attackers as they came at him. As one landed a tight-fisted blow to his ribs, another fist was coming at his face. He brought the butt off his flechette gun across the armpit of the second attacker, and as his body was hurled away from one opponent, his flechettes were opening up the shoulder of another, pummeling the joint and flesh to liquid.
His arms ripped and pulled. He no longer had footing, he was being assailed from every side, and every limb was a weapon. His boot was embedding itself in the face of one soldier, as his calf connected with the waist of another. He felt the butt of a rifle at his thigh before the actual bullets. He blocked the pain of the shots as they began to penetrate his knee and thigh, relying on the bionic reinforcement of his battleskin to bring his two legs together in a scissor on the attacker, as he simultaneously continued to cut his gun across the groin of another man trying to kick at his neck.
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The scissoring action, with the combined force of both his bolstered leg muscles, clamped on an unfortunate attacker, compressing his hips and abdomen to but a few inches, and the pain was so great it burst a thousand blood vessels across his brain. The man’s continued machine gun-fire went wild now, hitting his colleagues, the ground, and wheeling off into the air to join the expanding debris, bullets, limbs and broken bodies of the Russian troops coming from the epicenter of the gale-force conflict.
As his subconscious wrestled with inhuman speed, slicing, kicking, firing, and killing, a part of him respected the bravery of his assailants. A part of him noted their unrelenting attack in the face of terrible retribution. And a part of him noted, as they finally brought down his friend, that this was a fight he would not win.
He inflicted a terrible toll on them, he pulled them limb from limb, but as their numbers fell, his own systems fell as well. As the munition tube to his flechette gun was ripped free his tactical AI registered the loss as a rapid fall in his options. They had him by two limbs now, his torn left leg and his right arm, and though he still kicked and punched at them, they finally had him pinned. He felt the muzzles of their guns being pressed against his neck as they held him, and he opened his faceplate.
He was done. Faced with his admittance of defeat, they felt some measure of the same respect for him as he did for them. Not pity, and certainly not mercy. But respect. Their friends lay dead and maimed all around. The ground was slick with blood, the air full of screams. They aimed their guns at his face, and he looked at the sky.
- - -
Ayala, Neal, and Quavoce had been joined in cyberspace by Jack, Madeline and John, and they watched as the remaining twenty Russian shock troops executed the last of Ben’s team. They were looking into his eyes as he stared skyward, resigned and exhausted.
