by Isaac Hooke
I looked up. Dust filled the air. It smelled musty.
I shook my head, disoriented.
As my hearing returned, I remembered. The cave. The microexplosives.
“That was a bit nasty,” I said, crawling to my feet.
Bomb smirked. “Just the way I like it, baby.”
We helped Ghost to his feet and then turned around to survey the damage.
Through the clearing dust, I saw that the roof had collapsed, sealing the passage. Whether it would be enough to hold back the nuclear blast wave—or the Phants—was debatable.
“Let’s go, mates!” Facehopper shouted from ahead. “Give it your all!” Likely he shared the same doubts about the seal as me.
I hurried onward, leaving the dust behind. The glimmer grew in front of me until I could clearly make out the twilit sky and a portion of the gas giant that roofed it. I never thought I would be so glad to see those swirling blue and white clouds.
Trace stood outlined beside the opening, waving us forward.
“Come on!” Trace shouted. “It’s clear!”
And then it happened. One moment I was jogging within the darkness of the cave, and the next I emerged into the perpetual twilight of the open air.
I’d made it.
Actually made it.
I stood outside an unremarkable hole, one of many similar pits pocking the resin around me. Caking the bottom half of one of the former buildings of Shangde City, that resin sloped down to the street. The neighboring towers and complexes were similarly encrusted, but the buildings themselves appeared as hollowed-out skeletons of concrete and rebar—a consequence of the nuclear weapons Brass had dropped a week ago. Everything was covered in a thin layer of white ash. Local nuclear fallout.
The air smelled strongly of chlorine and I nearly gagged.
“Go!” Facehopper said.
TJ led the way and I barreled over the ash-covered resin after my brothers, half limping, half sliding down the slope toward the street. We wanted to put as much distance between the gaping holes and ourselves as possible.
We reached the asphalt.
“To the shack!” Facehopper shouted.
Shack? There. Nestled between two buildings, I spotted a small shed we could use for shelter. It was free of the black resin.
Before we reached it, the ground quaked terribly and I almost lost my balance. From the holes in the substance that caked the buildings around us, pressure waves steamed forth like a thousand geysers blowing their tops at the same time. Plumes of black smoke gushed into the air.
One of the geysers tore right through the shed in front of us, ripping it apart.
“Drop!” Facehopper said.
We did. Right into the radioactive ash that sheathed the street.
I broke into a sweat as the air temperature rose dramatically around me, and I ducked my head as more ash rained down.
The eruptions of steam and heat continued from those holes for a full thirty seconds before ceasing as abruptly as they had begun.
When the ground stopped shaking, I hesitantly raised my head. The city looked much the same as it had before, except for the black radioactive cloud that now loomed over everything. The ash in the vicinity of the pits had dispersed.
We had detonated two subterranean nuclear bombs, taking out the Queen and the Observer Mind at the same time. We had succeeded in our mission.
And somehow we had survived.
Thank you, Wind Walkers.
As I lay there, panting, a few cheers went up.
“Brothers to the end!” Ghost said.
I wasn’t sure I was ready to cheer yet: We were all getting a triple-lethal dose of radiation right then. Though I didn’t feel any different yet, I knew invisible, deadly rays assailed my body. I had to wonder if the burning in my throat was from the exertion of the past few moments or the irradiated air.
If we didn’t get treatment within the next forty-eight hours or so, my squad mates and I would begin dying. The sudden radiation spike had almost certainly overwhelmed our existing subdermal anti-rads. We’d need many more such skin patches installed, and likely bone marrow and microvilli transplants. Doctor Banye was going to have a field day with us.
Jabbing the butt of my rifle into the asphalt for leverage, I stood up, feeling a surge of nausea and dizziness. The wave passed, though my head was pounding. The pain from my leg wounds also flared up and it was like I was experiencing the insect bites all over again.
I brushed radioactive ash away from my arms: the exposed skin was red and itchy underneath. Not good.
Trace vomited beside me.
“How’s everyone feeling?” Facehopper said as he stumbled drunkenly to his feet.
“Excellent, sir,” Bomb said. His teeth were covered in blood that oozed from his gums.
“Right.” Facehopper steadied himself. “I’m going to hear the same answer from each and every one of you, no matter how terrible you really feel, aren’t I? Well, bloody good, mates. I expected no less. We’ve survived this long. We’re not about to give up now.”
I heard a sound like hail behind me. I turned.
Glowing droplets rained down onto the remnants of the shed. A blue Phant. The explosion must have blasted it into the atmosphere.
“Uh, guys?” I said.
“I see it.” Facehopper gazed skyward, toward the ominous black cloud that mantled the city. “We need to start moving.”
I wondered how many more Phants were up there, waiting to recondense and rain down on us.
“Bogey 1 . . .” TJ said.
I followed TJ’s gaze. The Skull Ship was no longer attached to the moon; it appeared as a fist-sized object on the horizon, visible just beneath the eaves of the black cloud above.
“Fleet must have caused a helluva distraction in orbit,” Mauler said. He still held the two EM emitters.
“That’s not my point,” TJ said. “Look closely. It’s getting bigger. Coming towards us.”
TJ was right. As I watched, the Skull Ship indeed seemed to enlarge. I thought it was an optical illusion at first, caused by a thermal layer in the atmosphere, so I closed my eyes a few seconds and reopened them.
Bogey 1 had grown visibly, by at least two millimeters on all sides.
“Maybe it’s docking with the moon’s surface again?” Bomb suggested.
Fret clasped his hands together and tapped them against his chin. “No, Bomb. We’ve destroyed its Observer Mind. That means no one’s driving the thing. It’s going to crash into this moon. We’re talking about something worse than an extinction-level event, here. When the Skull Ship and the moon collide, both of them are going to shatter.”
I vomited in my mouth, not entirely from the rad sickness.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Rade
Azen had been right. Piloting one of the golden mechs wasn’t so different from operating an ATLAS 5.
When my assigned unit knelt, I stepped into the cockpit and an inner cocoon deployed around my jumpsuit. I had been a bit doubtful that the alien tech would be able to integrate with our own, but the green Phants had done a fine job of copying our interface protocols. The connection request appeared immediately. I approved it and the unit fed audio and video from the outside world directly into my helmet aReal so that I observed the cavern from the height of the mech. I was a bit worried that some kind of digital virus might come along with the connection but the scanners said the feed was clean. Like Azen said, we had to start trusting them at some point.
The HUD overlaying my vision provided the tactical components I’d come to expect. In a scrollable column on the left, the callsigns of my brothers appeared alongside the names of the Phants assigned to their mechs, with one bar representing the health of the pilot, the other the condition of the mech. For those machines with only Phant operators, the mech hea
lth alone was displayed. On the upper right of the HUD was a map with the positions of all twenty-eight members of the company marked in green. Azen assured us that enemy targets would be indicated in red.
I controlled my mech exactly the same way I would an ATLAS 5—the internal actuators translated the movements of my body into the equivalent external motions on the mech. The only thing missing was the initial feeling of sluggishness, like wading through a swamp, that I ordinarily felt when trying to operate an ATLAS without my Implant for the first few minutes. With this alien technology, it was smooth sailing all the way.
The right arm possessed a single, fixed weapon in the form of a particle cannon; its beam was capable of dissolving matter at a touch. The left arm harbored a device that could generate a hyperdimensional energy shield on demand, providing the only known defense against the particle weapons. Activated by squeezing the fist, the energy shield looked like a translucent, bluish ellipse with white bolts of electricity streaming from a central point. When properly positioned, the tall shield could protect the entire front side of the mech.
The particle weapon fired in half-second bursts, with a minimum of five seconds required to recharge. A status bar at the bottom of the HUD kept the pilot apprised of the weapon’s state. After firing, the bar receded to the far left of the display and became dark red. As the seconds passed and the bar lengthened horizontally, it changed colors from orange, to blue, to yellow, finally becoming green when the weapon was ready to fire. The female AI also issued an audible alert at that point: “Particle weapon fully charged.”
Similarly, the energy shield could be active for only up to three seconds before a mandatory recharge, and it had similar audio and visual cues integrated into the HUD. If the pilot used the shield for the entire three seconds, ten seconds were required to completely replenish its power. Unlike the particle cannon, the shield could be utilized before reaching its fully charged state. If the operator activated it while the status bar was at the halfway mark, for example, the shield would merely last one and a half seconds instead of the full three.
There were two main downsides to the armaments. The shield couldn’t be triggered at the same time as the particle weapon, and if utilized too often, both the shield and the particle weapon could individually overheat, requiring five to ten Stanminutes of downtime depending on the internal and external temperatures.
The particle weapon also had the ability to disintegrate Phants. Azen explained it as “snipping” the alien entities from this universe—the loss of form didn’t kill them, not right away. It was more like permanently chopping off an appendage. The given Phant would lose all contact with this universe and eventually starve to death. Lui remarked that killing Phants this way seemed far more effective than tossing them into gravity wells, and when he asked Azen why particle weapons hadn’t been used to eliminate the greens during the Great Cleanse, Azen explained that the tech had still been in development at the time.
Jumpjet capability was also charge-based, and relied on some obscure principle of gravity to function. The recharge behaved the same as the shield subsystem in that the operator could jump on a partial charge. A full charge allowed for a ten-second jump, a half charge five seconds, and so forth. It took thirty seconds to fully refresh once the charge reached zero.
Azen was deliberately vague when asked about the power source for all of this, saying “micro-Slipstreams.”
“Friggin’ micro-Slipstreams,” Bender had complained. “The alien explanation for everything.”
The twenty-eight members of the company climbed a tunnel toward the surface. Azen had chosen a series of moderately sloped sinkholes that would deposit us in the general vicinity of the ATLAS factory.
Around me, my squad brothers looked like limber knights decked in shining, golden armor. We didn’t have headlamps. The hulls glowed automatically, with an intensity that seemed dependent on the surrounding light levels as the alien mechs in the forefront and rear glowed brighter than those in the middle of the group.
We had taken to calling the mechs ZEUS units because we felt like Olympian gods inside them. The white gold coloration, combined with the glow, only enhanced the sensation. Plus the electrical pattern generated when the shields activated reminded us of lightning bolts, kind of like what Zeus would throw.
A lone mech had remained behind to guard the civilians, Giger and Tung, while two more had gone ahead to scout the target site. The positions of all three continued to update even though they were several klicks away: It was nice to finally have an HUD that worked again, as the alien tech was quite capable of transmitting data through the planetwide interference.
Two of the Phant-operated ZEUS units carried the particle bomb between them. Shaped like a torpedo half the size of the gold mechs, the bomb was apparently extremely heavy.
The universe had a strange sense of humor, because it seemed like our spec-ops squad was always being burdened with one heavy item or another. If it wasn’t a containment cage or a nuclear weapon, it was an alien bomb.
Shaw was here too, of course, and I kept close to her ZEUS. She didn’t share her mech with Azen this time, but rather some other green identified as Halios.
So far the tunnel had proven surprisingly devoid of life—apparently the crabs had burrowed deep to avoid the coronal storm.
“How are you holding up, Surus?” I said.
That was the green I shared my ZEUS unit with. The alien entity had taken control of the AI built into the mech and lurked somewhere unseen beneath my cockpit. I felt a little exposed without the EM emitter in my jumpsuit, knowing that the Phant could drift upward and reduce me to a charred organic mess at any time. But there was nothing I could do about that, not if I wanted to be a part of the mission. Well, other than stay on the Phant’s good side.
“You are aware, I am sure,” Surus said, via the internal speakers, “that I do not experience the same mental strain as a human being, linked as I am to the onboard AI, which has limited emotional capacity. Nor am I ‘holding up’ the physical structure of the mech in any way.”
“Never mind. It’s just an expression. Tell me, what’s the temperature?”
“The air temperature in this tunnel is currently fifty-five degrees Celsius, and rising,” Surus said. “Expected air temperature by the time we attain the surface: one hundred degrees Celsius, or two hundred twelve degrees Fahrenheit.”
“You got to be kidding me.”
“It is entirely within operational parameters.”
“Well sure, but that means we’re stuck inside these mechs.” Which had marvelous thermal regulation by the way—it felt a comfortable twenty degrees Celsius in here.
“Extravehicular activity is not recommended,” Surus agreed.
“Almost as bad as talking to an AI for real,” I grumbled.
“We can have a philosophical discourse if you would prefer,” Surus said.
“That’s all right.”
“But there is ample time for such a discussion,” Surus insisted. “It is not often I have the chance to engage with a species not shackled by the developmental constraints of my race. Human beings are fascinating creatures. Your society is similar to other mature species we have encountered in the past, yet there are glaring differences. Take, for example, the fact that you have achieved spacefaring status, yet still rely upon sexual reproduction. Most other spacefaring races had long since given that up.
“Cloning is a far superior method. It guarantees that the species will not change genetically over time, and it also eliminates the need for redundant medical science. With clones, it is easier to back up and restore one’s consciousness, because the brain structure and neurochemical layout is entirely known and mapped. Other spacefaring races had taken advantage of this fact to essentially live forever, transferring their individual consciousnesses from clone to clone.
“And while on the topic of mind ba
ckups, I should mention that many races out there explored the galaxy by means of conscious machines, similar to the Builder ships you humans use to create Gates in remote star systems. I find it—”
“Surus. Enough.” When you got Surus going, the green could ramble on worse than Manic. I imagined my squad brother was having a field day with the Phant assigned to his own mech.
Twenty minutes later we emerged from the tunnel onto the streets of Hongleong City and were greeted by a truly barren landscape. The glass had melted from the windows of the surrounding buildings, solidifying into icy, uneven shells that oozed onto the bulbous resin engulfing the bottom halves of the structures. It reminded me of solidified glaze dripped onto black donuts. On the street itself were the melted remnants of abandoned vehicles and fallen robots. The asphalt had softened—with each step our ZEUS units sunk slightly, and we left footprints.
I passed what had once been a Centurion. Its body was half melted in a pool of synthetic plastic. The remaining upper torso was covered in rivulets of its own liquefied polycarbonate.
The only untouched mechanical forms belonged to the disabled ATLAS 5s, whose hulls were rated for operation on Mercury—pilotless mode, mind you, as such temperatures would bake any human operators.
“Look at how far away Bogey 2 is,” Bender transmitted.
I glanced at the horizon between the buildings: The Skull Ship had broken away from the surface and moved into a higher orbit. The faint object was about the size of my thumbnail.
“You’re sure the coronal weapon won’t reach us?” Lui sent.
“We are out of range of the coronal weapon,” Azen confirmed. “Even if the ship fired a concentrated burst, it would dissipate long before reaching the surface.”
I spotted another object near Bogey 2, about half its size and even fainter. “Is that your mothership?” I marked it, transmitting the position to Azen.
“It is.” Azen confirmed.
As I watched, Bogey 2 flared, launching its coronal weapon toward the dimmer object.
