by Isaac Hooke
Battle Harem
Book Two
Isaac Hooke
Copyright © 2018 by Isaac Hooke
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
www.IsaacHooke.com
Books by Isaac Hooke
Military Science Fiction
Battle Harem
Battle Harem 1
Battle Harem 2
Battle Harem 3
AI Reborn Trilogy
Refurbished
Reloaded
Rebooted
ATLAS Trilogy
(published by 47North)
ATLAS
ATLAS 2
ATLAS 3
Alien War Trilogy
Hoplite
Zeus
Titan
Argonauts
Bug Hunt
You Are Prey
Alien Empress
Quantum Predation
Robot Dust Bunnies
City of Phants
Rade’s Fury
Mechs vs. Dinosaurs
A Captain's Crucible
Flagship
Test of Mettle
Cradle of War
Planet Killer
Worlds at War
Space Opera
Star Warrior Quadrilogy
Star Warrior
Bender of Worlds
He Who Crosses Death
Doom Wielder
Science Fiction
The Forever Gate Series
The Dream
A Second Chance
The Mirror Breaks
They Have Wakened Death
I Have Seen Forever
Rebirth
Walls of Steel
The Pendulum Swings
The Last Stand
Thrillers
The Ethan Galaal Series
Clandestine
A Cold Day in Mosul
Terminal Phase
Visit IsaacHooke.com for more information.
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Afterword
About the Author
Acknowledgments
In Closing
1
Jason stared at the rip in space-time ahead of him. It had been opening for the past ten minutes, and showed no sign of slowing.
“Looks like it’s going to be a big one!” Tara commented. Her avatar appeared in the lower right of his vision, courtesy of his HUD. Her long dark hair was secured into a ponytail today. She’d also smeared Māori war paint over her cheeks: cultural appropriation at its finest. Then again, as a Honolulu native, she was part Polynesian.
Or so she claimed.
“Big is an understatement,” Sophie said. Her avatar narrowed eyes that were painted in kohl to look catlike. “This is the hugest rift we’ve seen so far.”
“Remind me again why we’re out here?” Xin said. She had a slight Japanese accent, which matched the look of her avatar.
“Because this is our wasteland now,” Jason said. “And aliens aren’t welcome in it.”
“It’s time to show them why we call ourselves the War Forgers!” Lori said, the shoulder-length blond hair of her avatar bobbing as she spoke.
Everyone had embraced the “War Forger” moniker shortly after Xin had revealed the original team had been called that before their untimely destruction. Well, everyone except for Tara, who felt it was bad luck to use the name of a fallen unit.
Jason watched as the edges of the rift expanded outward. The fringes were a purplish gray that seemed almost like mist, while the insides appeared more like funhouse mirrors—the kind that pinched your reflection when you looked into them. Except here, instead of pinching one’s reflection, the rift pinched the view of the farmhouses and villages beyond the rift, most of whose buildings had been destroyed in previous battles.
Nearby rifts were easy to detect—before opening they created a characteristic thermal smear that was visible from a kilometer away. Aria had deployed specialized cameras around the War Forger base, as well as along the perimeter of Brussels itself, to detect them.
As far as Jason and the others had been able to determine, the rifts were wormholes to alien staging areas, either aboard a ship or on a planet somewhere. Sometimes the staging area contained an atmosphere that was compatible with Earth’s. Sometimes it did not.
Jason dispatched the team as soon as rift formation was detected, because the bioweapons and machines were at their most vulnerable when they first emerged—only a few units could appear at once. Or at least, that had been the case up until today. However, it looked like the aliens were wising up to Jason’s tactics and now were simply widening their entrance door to compensate.
Similar rifts were probably opening across the continent, but there was nothing the team could do about those. Copies of the rogue AI “Bokerov” would likely be protecting them, in exchange for the promise of technology. Jason had defeated one cell Bokerov had deployed nearby, and it hadn’t been easy: the Russian AI had duplicated his consciousness into huge war machines that had required Jason and the girls to combine to defeat them.
So far, no reinforcements from the surviving governments had come to help the War Forgers against Bokerov and the alien invaders. Or maybe reinforcements had arrived, but in different regions of the continent, or other continents of the uninhabited zone, and Jason and the War Forgers simply didn’t know about them. They had no way to communicate with the civilized world, after all: Bokerov had destroyed all comm satellites in orbit via some sort of advanced cyber attack. The fact that the governments hadn’t launched replacements told Jason that the cyber attack probably had a physical component as well, and he had to wonder if Bokerov had used specially designed androids to infiltrate the launch facilities of the different nations.
The rift continued to widen as Jason watched. He thought of Bruiser, Lackey, Shaggy, and Runt. The Rex Wolves were secure inside the cistern that served as the team’s base, as were Aria’s tanks. This battle was for the mechs of the Mind Refurbs alone. Still, as that rift continued to enlarge, he wondered how long it would be before the team was forced to retreat to the cistern.
“Shit on a pickle of poop!” Lori said. “We’ve never seen anything like this before! Look at how tall it is, too!”
“That’s right, wag your tail,” Sophie said.
Lori was indeed wagging the tail of her Stalker mech, in anticipation of the coming battle.
“Shit on a pickle of poop?” Aria said. Her avatar looked vampirish: pale skin, sapphire eyes, blood-red lips. A hot vampire, at that. He was just waiting for her to add the elongated fangs.
“Yeah!” Lori said. “That’s what I call peanut butter smeared on a pickle. Ever tried that?”
“Can’t say that I have,” Aria said.
“I’ve had peanut butter smears on a pickle before,” Xin said. “But it’s probably not the kind of pickle you’re all thinking of.”
“Ooo!” Lori said. “You�
�re so dirty! I like the way you think!”
“Should we combine?” Tara asked.
“No,” Jason replied. “Not until we know what we’re dealing with.” Combining was best reserved for the bigger foes, due to the reductions in range and duration of the various abilities the different mechs brought to the table. When combined, they made a bigger target as well, which was a bad thing when dealing with alien machines who liked to fire certain weapons that used an enemy’s mass against them, such as miniature black holes, for example.
Aria had used the blades on her tanks to build different berms to deal with the frequent arrivals, which usually happened in the same areas. The team members were crouched behind those berms at this very moment, and held their armaments over the top edges, in what was known as a “hull down” position: only their weapons were exposed, and the rest of the mechs were hidden from view. They’d also rebuilt many of the surrounding outbuildings on the estate to serve as different fallback points, and to provide cover against enemy fire. The buildings and berms in a given area often had to be replaced after each fight.
The purple fringe vanished as the rift set in this universe, as did the pinched inner region, replaced by a ragged tear in reality that led to a different place entirely: a multitude of grayish craft floated against a backdrop of stars and rocks. Those hovering objects filled the skyscape beyond that rift, from the left side to the right side. He counted two hundred and three, total. Yes, that was an exact count: the wonders of a human mind inhabiting an AI core.
Jason felt the gale force winds almost immediately. Staying ducked behind the berm, he slammed his fists into the ground, breaking through the surface to hold himself in place.
“We gots ourselves a sucker!” Tara said.
That meant the environment harboring the coming attackers existed in a vacuum, most likely a moon without an atmosphere, given the stars and rocky surface Jason saw beyond the rift. It also meant the attackers were all machines.
Most of the enemy craft he spotted were about half the size of the mechs the War Forgers piloted, with nothing to really warrant combining. Those craft all possessed the same basic shape: ellipses with small rectangles poking from either flank. The front portions of those rectangles were lined with dark red circles—he’d faced similar vessels in the past, and those circles launched different types of energy, plasma, and laser weapons.
Jason switched to Bullet Time and unleashed a barrage of custom-made Hellhawks from his left-hand rocket launcher—the missiles were provided by Aria’s new “chem lab,” as she liked to call it. He also lined up the laser in his other arm with one of the targets, aiming at the vulnerable point just underneath the bottom of the ellipse, where the power source seemed to be located. He fired.
The craft didn’t go down.
“Damn it,” Jason said, switching to a higher Bullet Time so that everything froze around him. “They’ve adapted. My laser didn’t do shit.”
“Nor mine,” Tara said. “To the sally tunnel?” It wasn’t really a tunnel so much as an aisle formed by the outbuildings and berms of the surrounding estate. It led back to the retention pond that bordered the cistern they called home. That was another reason it was preferable to remain in uncombined form, in case they needed to retreat without exposing themselves.
“Wait,” Jason said. “I want to confirm something. Sync your laser with mine.”
“Done,” Tara said.
Jason saw the green sync light on his HUD and then reduced his time sense slightly so that the battlefield timeline advanced rather than remained frozen, though the pace was still pleasantly slow. He waited for Tara’s muzzle alignment indicator to turn green, and when it did, her laser had lined up with his own. He adjusted his aim slightly to target the previous spot underneath the ellipse, and fired once more. Synched with his weapon, Tara’s laser shot simultaneously and together their invisible beams blackened the small target area on the underside, but it didn’t help: the craft continued its advance.
“Well, I was trying to see if they reinforced the area with extra armor, but it looks like they moved the power source to somewhere else entirely,” Jason said. “Guess we’ll hit it randomly at some point and find out.”
“So, into the sally tunnel?” Sophie said, echoing Tara’s earlier question.
“Not yet,” Jason said. “Hold your fire...”
He swiveled the energy weapon into his right arm. Then he aimed into the incoming craft, which hadn’t yet crossed over from the alien staging area to Earth. The missiles he’d launched at the beginning of the battle swerved slightly, drawn off course by the gale force winds produced by the tear in space-time. Predictively, those missiles still served as a draw for the enemy, and were destroyed in a spectacular display of force: lightning bolts, plasma bolts, and energy bolts launched from the left and right flanks of several alien craft at nearly the same time.
So they hadn’t adapted to everything.
“Hold your fire...” Jason said.
One by one, the craft began passing through the rift and into the barren terrain of the uninhabited zone.
And then, all at once, the rift closed, and the incredible suction ended.
Jason waited as the craft approached. No doubt the alien aircraft were scanning the landscape, waiting for Jason or Tara to fire their lasers again, so they could calculate the source positions, something that apparently wasn’t possible while the aliens were still on their side of the rift.
When they were three hundred meters distant, he judged that the range was about right.
“All right,” Jason said. “Fire at will.” It was time to fight the alien tech with alien tech.
Jason unleashed his energy weapon; it cut through two craft that made the mistake of traveling one after the other.
Aria unleashed her lightning bolt weapon and the bolts arced between four of the enemies, taking them down.
Lori fired the plasma bolt from her tail cannon and terminated another.
Sophie unleashed a swarm of swirling micro machines that cut through three of the ships.
Xin unleashed a beam of superheated plasma from her eyes, rapidly cutting a swath through six of them.
Tara teleported behind the hovering vessels, and swept her sword in a wide arc, cutting down another five.
They’d downed twenty craft in that one volley. But that still left another one hundred and eighty three.
“Now to the sally tunnel!” Jason said.
Before any of the nearby enemy could rotate to engage her, Tara teleported back to the War Forgers and took the lead in the retreat.
Jason crouched into the small aisle between the berms and buildings, and followed Xin, Sophie and Lori. The aliens opened fire, their energy and plasma weapons smashing into the berms.
Aria took up the rear, placing her shield behind her back as the aliens continued to unleash hell—there were points along the sally tunnel where the team would be completely exposed to the enemy, and her special ballistic shield was the only thing that could stand up to those blasts for any period of time.
The War Forgers led them away from the rift location, and toward the planned ambush site. Jason kept an eye on his overhead map, and when the team was in the proper location, he called a halt.
The team members dropped; the red dots that represented the alien units continued to close, updating as per the different cameras and other sensors hidden throughout the area.
“Aria, activate defense platforms,” Jason said.
Fifty defense platforms deployed, rising from hidden trap doors that had opened around them. Those platforms immediately tracked the incoming alien objects, and began unleashing energy bolts. In only a few seconds it was over: all remaining one hundred and eighty three alien craft were reduced to mere wreckages lying on the ground.
Meanwhile, the team had only lost eight of their own defense platforms in the process. A number that would be replenished, and then some, given the latest batch they’d just shot down.
&
nbsp; “Nicely done,” Jason said. “How many energy weapons do you think we captured intact this time?”
“Should be all of them,” Aria said. “At least, those targeted by the defense platforms, considering the mods I made to the tracking: the cannons targeted the main bodies only, as requested, leaving the turrets intact.”
“Again, good job,” Jason said. “Call in the cleanup crew.”
In moments several drones arrived from home base and began picking through the rubble.
“Gotta love it when your enemy keeps inadvertently supplying you with more of his own tech,” Jason commented.
2
Jason sat at the picnic table in his VR, and stared out across the pristine lake. He could see the clouds and mountains reflected on the still surface.
Lori appeared at his side, and immediately wrapped her arm around his hips. Wait, that wasn’t her arm, but her tail. She was dressed in a skintight skiers outfit that accentuated her lovely figure.
“Hey Babe,” Lori said, her blond hair swaying about her face.
“What’s up?” Jason said. Before he could turn his head toward her, she was planting a sloppy kiss on his cheek. He pulled away, and rubbed the skin. “Do you have to make it so wet?”
