The Cadet (LitRPG. Squadcom-13. Book:1)

by D. Rus

  We had come up with a way to get around that; our girls held weapon props constructed of mud, wire, pipes, metal, and a few live batteries. The Crab wouldn’t fall for anything more primitive.

  Our plan was very rational; our weakest would play false targets, giving our strongest a chance to run up to the monster and beat it with sticks, and our fastest and nimblest – a chance to plant the adhesive explosives on the Crab's armored body.

  As the leader of an authoritarian society, I took upon myself the most important and dangerous mission – firing the only weapon.

  Crack! After enduring several thousand blows, the heavy gate in the bulkhead wall finally cracked. The Crab hadn’t just randomly pounded on the gate, but had calculated its every strike to wear down the composite.

  “To battle!” a psychologist-engineered glyph appeared on the public channel, instantly activating our bodies’ stress modes.

  The Crab sent the deformed hatch flying. It clanged across the hall like the lid of a giant cauldron, knocking down a few unlucky fellows and crushing one soldier lying in ambush. The first markers went out on my commander interface.

  I lay, holding my breath and keeping my head down, my body slowly cooking in the nearly boiling water covering the hall floor. I watched the situation through the privates’ implants.

  The Crab made a swift and majestic entrance. It scanned the area, freezing for a second as if flaunting its perfect combat design. Why are things made to kill always beautiful? The knives, swords, burnished steel barrels, sublime armor, and the deceptive frailty of space fighters. Why?

  The Crab looked damaged, which made sense. To take on an intact droid, we would have needed a fully equipped infantry section. Equipped not with some ancient junk, but standard military CASs or something analogous that was at most two generations older.

  Smashed, burned, partially melted, and studded with holes, the Crab horrified us, literally. The Crab had preserved its infrasound generators, but not its upper hemisphere sensors.

  Due to that, the tub of slimy mud that crashed down on the monster took it completely by surprise. However, the Crab was very quick to react. Tucking up its front arms, it raced forward, scraping the deck with its belly, its sensors cleaving the water.

  The Crab ignored the net; it only took its pseudo-intelligence a few milliseconds to solve a few simple equations and establish that the material strength of the obstacle wasn’t enough to restrain its arms and hinder its mobility.

  The girder affixed to the ceiling broke off the locking device and flew at the Crab. With a flick of one of its chelae, the Crab batted the girder away, upsetting yet another one of our plans.

  “Charge!” appeared a stylized tsunami glyph, and the soldiers rushed into battle.

  The fun began.

  The Crab’s reaction rate was phenomenal. It didn’t lag at all, its movements a perfect pattern. It fired its left flank turret sparingly, activating its localizer laser which I hadn’t noticed.

  The heavy bot shot forward, clearing a path for itself, easily outrunning the slow humans and reconfiguring the battle positions to its own advantage.

  The crowd boldly pressed on, attacking the Crab's most intact side which it had intentionally turned toward them. They drew the bot’s fire, surveillance devices, and processor capacity.

  For an instant, one of the Crab’s titanium paws was a few feet away from a camouflaged soldier with an explosive device. The boy was full of initiative and beat the public tactical interface’s recommendation by jumping into action.

  Lunging forward, he slapped the crumpled homemade cone right on the bot’s armored joint. Smeared with a sticky substance, the mine firmly attached to the surface. Thanks to our alchemist experimenters, the glue created by boiling down the slugs had turned out wonderfully.

  The Crab twitched and knocked the brave fellow’s head off with its other paw. But it had no time to retract its limb, having put all of its multi-toned weight on it.

  Kaboom! Came the suppressed explosion. A bright flash followed, and a jet of molten copper burned a hole in the Crab’s arm.

  The bot quickly put down its other arm, compensating the loss of its limb and engaging an alternative motion driver. The Crab lost in speed, but gained in rage.

  Feeling threatened, the heavy bot no longer tried to save its limited resources. It activated its frontal shield. Its pulse gun turret increased its firing rate until the blinding flashes of laser blended into one deadly beam. The Crab was prepared to let the barrel melt, using up its precious cooling agent and quickly draining its batteries.

  We were eight seconds into the battle. Less than half of us were still standing. The Crab’s combat efficiency had decreased by four percent, mostly because of fire unit loss, power circuit load, and barrels overheating.

  My implant scrupulously counted the megawatts of energy spent, monitored the Crab’s temperature to the hundredth decimal place, and outlined the damaged armor areas on the 3D diagram of the Crab.

  Another soldier rose from underneath the mud with an adhesive mine. His head was bleeding; it looked like he had gotten hit with a metal object by one of us.

  The Crab reacted instantly. The cone-shaped mines had already been entered into its primary target register. The heavy bot turned around clumsily, hiding behind its frontal shield and slicing the air with its laser.

  The soldier was protected by the force field of his emergency spacesuit. This lengthened his life by several seconds and served as a serious distraction for the Crab. The young man raced forward, pushing out of the way his burning comrades set on fire by the wide-beam laser.

  The bot wasn’t used to giving up the initiative to its enemy. Its high-performance AI enabled it to play its own game, to pursue a preemptive tactic and to react more quickly to changes in the situation.

  The Crab dealt a blow with its front arm faster than the eye could see. The soldier’s force field gave in and went out. The steel arm impaled him. It was a phantasmagoric sight, a bug sticking an entomologist on a pin.

  The soldier’s partner rushed to pick up the mine that had fallen into the water. He didn’t stand a chance, but I was practically indifferent; I was too focused on carrying out my own mission, letting my Alpha-prime manage the battle.

  I jumped to my feet. Dirty, bloody water streamed down my body. The moss strip draped from my shoulders like a cape. I had tunnel vision like an attacking predator. I didn’t need a 280-degree field of vision because there was no one to fear around me; I needed only to clearly see my target.

  The aiming grid conveniently appeared before my eyes. The Crab’s most damaged flank was facing me. There were hardly any survivors in my area, and the bot had marked it as a “provisional home front.”

  The implant highlighted the most vulnerable points where the factory armor was damaged. My primary target – a crumbled armor composite plate covered with tiny cracks – flared brightly before my eyes. This spot must have taken a “froster” beam, followed by a kinetic blow from the pulse gun that fired that beam. It could’ve also been a bullet rotor.

  I was safe as a plant in a hothouse while firing the first three shots. The plasma steadily cleaved and melted the defective plate. Feeling the new threat, the bot started turning in my direction, hiding its vulnerable flank and trying to get me in its sights.

  I moved with the bot, but in the reverse direction and in a spiral, keeping the damaged flank in view. My implant tried to prolong my life by as many seconds as it could. Its top priority orders cascaded over my interface.

  I saw Ilya dangle from the Crab’s arm, delaying the bot by a heartbeat. Lina shot forward like a young she-wolf pouncing on her prey. She jumped and jammed her body between the barrels of the dual pulse guns. The turret's servo drives whirred violently, but couldn’t move carrying an extra 100 pounds. The Crab abandoned its primary trajectory again in order to brush off the bodies with its arms.

  My heart missed a beat. I heard the sound of mournful bells. No one knew of this, but I
received personal notifications regarding Lina’s every condition, including death.

  Vroom-vroom-vroom! My TT worked like clockwork. Twice per second it turned its reaction mass into white-hot plasma and fired it wherever I pointed the barrel.

  The beams dove into the Crab’s glowing, crimson interior, drawing geysers of smoke and steam, making molten metal shoot out, and mutilating the bot’s delicate electronic innards.

  My implant checked the shots against its diagram of the Crab and attempted to create a current damage model. The reserve power circuit, the left flank fire unit box, and the munitions supply system had almost certainly failed. Most likely, the technical tunnels, the self-repair servers, the defense and active camouflage blocks, the middle connection system, and the waste fuel containers were also damaged. If the fuel containers weren’t empty, then it would soon get extremely hot in our little “haven.” I mean meat-melting-off-the-bones hot. Death by radiation damage is not a pretty one.

  Vroom-vroom-vroom! My implant marked the plasma paths. They slowly went from yellow to dark red. The darker they got, the less shots the TT had left. With some practice, I would be able to determine the exact number of firing units left just by these colors, and even the type of ammo that needed replacement.

  The Crab was clearly struggling. It moved jerkily, its body quivered, and it emitted pungent smoke. I saw a life support system alert through the pile of combat log messages; the local habitability index had fallen below the critical 15 points.

  Nevertheless, the Crab was still fast. It finally moved its most heavily damaged flank out of my firing range, and I opened fire on the next marker. Five shots went to waste; the bot covered the gap in its armor with its upper arm which was designed for close combat and other humanoid actions.

  I shot the vulnerable joints lacking force field cover. My last few shots hit a mash of boiling metal and ceramics.

  My TT-plasma vibrated, indicating that it needed recharging. I hurriedly began the two-second procedure; gripped the handle, making the empty energy cell pop out. I slipped in the new cell, the last one.

  Meanwhile, the Crab surprised me with its maneuver. Unable to handle the close quarter fire, it took a risk; tucked up its left paws and rolled over, moving its mutilated side out of line of fire. Or so I thought.

  Aiming at the rolling bot in perplexity, I didn’t immediately realize what was happening. However, the joyous cries of the survivors helped me understand that this tricky breakdancing wasn’t an evasion move, but ordinary agony. The Crab was dying. The plasma inside it had reached the system units and did its dirty work.

  Slowly lowering the gun, I looked around. Only four survivors stood amidst the chaos and the piles of dead bodies. Five, including me. Five out of seventy. We had barely made it…

  Chapter Eleven

  Alarmed voices and beeping came from the area where we had hidden our personal capsules – the perished were respawning. Not everyone came back within a minute, however. Some would have to spend five, ten, or even twenty minutes in the virtual purgatory. That would hurt… a lot. They taught us to protect our lives in the toughest yet most rational manner.

  Macarius was the first to run out into the main hall. He looked at me with admiration. Clearly, he hadn’t doubted for a second that I would beat the Crab with one hand tied behind my back.

  Macarius rushed over to the vanquished bot. Ignoring the fact that the Crab was still clawing the floor, he jumped on the bot’s back and started dexterously opening all sorts of operational hatches and cracking boxes containing mounted equipment and SPTA sets. He kept looking around thievishly as he swiftly hid various gear in his stretchy pockets.

  Smiling, I nodded encouragingly. Mac would neither take too much nor trade anything for vodka. If he withheld anything, it was for a good purpose.

  A thin electronic surveillance probe emerged from around a corner. The quarantine bot who had been hiding in our depot decided to assess the battlefield for itself. It didn’t trust the victorious cries on the public channels.

  After a few seconds of observing, the droid gave an alarmed squeak, then turned on its blinker and raced toward us. It stopped next to a badly beaten soldier who was critically wounded and already written off by the tactical calculator as “reversibly incapacitated.” We didn’t have the resources to provide him medical care.

  But the medbot believed otherwise. It changed its frontal shield configuration, turning it into tender force field hands. Lifting the wheezing man off the ground, careful not to brush against his chest which had gotten pressed into his spine, the droid lay him on the unfolded cloth that was our surgical site. Tucking up its running gear, the bot let its belly sink into the shallow water, then transformed into an immobile device.

  “A company-level PSH,” whispered our male nurse enthusiastically. God knows how he had survived the global massacre.

  “A portable surgical hospital?” I clarified, quickly uploading the performance characteristics of RE’s auxiliary detachments to my RAM.

  “Exactly. All of the Russian Empire technology of certain classes is dual-purpose. In times of a big war, each unit was subject to draft for reinforcement of irregular troops. Therefore, a peacetime quarantine bot is fully capable of providing medical support to at least one company of citizen soldiers during mobilization. When conflicts aren’t so intense, it can serve a whole battalion. You just have to change its supply cartridges and the fuel elements in its reactor block.”

  As if confirming his words, an entire wreath of info glyphs lit up above the PSH’s glassy tent: Surgery in progress. Warning. Noncombatants. Energy deficit. Missing warehouse connection link.

  A tiny nursebot came out through the force field. The medbot had kept it safely concealed within its belly all this time. The nursebot was like a steel spider with a blinking red-green medical service beacon. It scanned the space around it with its sensors.

  Lifting up its limbs, it scurried from body to body, diagnosing each as either dead or in critical condition and ranking them in order from least to most heavily injured.

  Twice came the hiss of its pneumo-needle injector – the nursebot euthanized the hopelessly wounded.

  Such humaneness made me wince. I quickly shifted my gaze to my internal interface. The system message icon blinked, begging me to open the mailbox and delight in the rewards.

  Swiping my eyes over the message pictogram, I strained my brain just a bit, generating a mental command: Open. The interface was intuitive. Most functions could be carried out by simply wishing: delete, copy, view, or listen. Entertain me also worked. The implant knew its bearer well and would offer the most relevant forms of entertainment: online chess, call girls, legal nonsense, or a ticket to a new production of the naked theater.

  I couldn’t help but smile; the system had marked our battle a dark red, signifying the difficulty level “nightmare,” and multiplied our reward points by a bonus coefficient.

  Status and message windows swiftly obscured my view. Going by memory, I felt for a lump of moss that had been prepared for drying and sat down. Working with the interface was best done while lying or sitting, otherwise I could fall down at some point; my brain lost the coordinates of the space around me. Either my implant hadn’t gotten fully integrated yet, or this was a side effect of being in outer space with Marat's artificial gravity. Or maybe it was just a matter of time and practice.

  I skimmed the system logs: “Commander’s burden: you’ve pulled your division into a hopeless battle. Chances of winning - 1:12. If you lose, you will receive demerit points calculated by the simplified lowest-ranking space staff formula: 10% of the group's aggregate sanctions (114 points will be taken off your RC if the entire division is killed).

  My heart missed a beat. My health monitor squeaked in alarm, highlighting the rising blood adrenaline level.

  I wouldn’t be wearing corporal stripes anymore if we had lost. I would’ve become the lowest-ranking group member, the assistant janitor.

  The Am
azonians sure had a rough way of weaning us from thoughtless frontal attacks. Those of us who were no good at quick, tactical thinking would never see an officer’s comet on their chevrons. Those without strategic planning skills would never become part of the senior space staff.

  As my implant kindly explained, eight out of ten missions had to be successful in order to stay above zero. Otherwise, you would go down in rank due to “being inadequate at your current post.” Naturally, the main military AI took into account more than just victories and all-on-one attacks.

  The brave soldiers who had covered the main unit as it retreated received mission credit despite their KIA (killed in action) status and the seemingly crazy one-to-a-hundred ratio. The goal was to help the common cause.

  I shook my head. I was lucky this time, but had to be more careful in the future. I went back to flipping the virtual pages.

  “Credit received for secondary subject: ‘basic skill in handling hand-held plasma weapons.” Qualities entered into RC. Standard points for secondary basic level subject: +60.”

  “Credit received for primary subject of alternative development track: ‘Commanding interservice team in real combat conditions.’ Qualities entered into RC. Standard points for primary basic level subject: +120.”

  “Status alert! Enough points gained for promotion: Master Corporal. Connecting to low-order stream of the AI Hannibal. Confirmation received, new rank approved.”

  “Congratulations on your new patch! Many annulets to you, Master Corporal!”

  “Single-stage personnel losses have exceeded 25% - it is recommended to withdraw from battle to restore the group’s morale and strength.”

  “Single-stage personnel losses have exceeded 50% - group rated unfit for action! Mandatory order: ‘Withdraw unit from battle. Permitted further losses – up to 10% of remaining personnel.’”