by Isaac Hooke
BOOKS BY ISAAC HOOKE
Military Science Fiction
Alien War Trilogy
Hoplite
Zeus
Titan
ATLAS Trilogy (published by 47North)
ATLAS
ATLAS 2
ATLAS 3
A Captain's Crucible Series
Flagship
Test of Mettle
Cradle of War
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.
TITAN
ALIEN WAR TRILOGY
BOOK THREE
Isaac Hooke
This is a work of fiction. All characters, names, organizations, places, events and incidents are the product of the author's imagination or used fictitiously.
Text copyright © Isaac Hooke 2016
All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be copied, reproduced in any format, by any means, electronic or otherwise, without prior consent from the copyright owner and publisher of this book.
www.IsaacHooke.com
Cover design by Isaac Hooke
Cover image by Shookooboo
table of contents
one
two
three
four
five
six
seven
eight
nine
ten
eleven
twelve
thirteen
fourteen
fifteen
sixteen
seventeen
eighteen
nineteen
twenty
twenty-one
twenty-two
twenty-three
twenty-four
twenty-five
twenty-six
twenty-seven
twenty-eight
twenty-nine
thirty
thirty-one
thirty-two
thirty-three
thirty-four
thirty-five
epilogue
postscript
about the author
acknowledgments
one
Rade stared at the bright veil of white in front of him. Walls of snow violently gusted inside the torn cabin, only to be swept right out again by the careening of the deck. An alarm sounded incessantly inside his jumpsuit.
The bulkhead had been ripped clean away by the ground-based attack, along with the entire starboard half of the drop ship and those members of the platoon who had been secured there. The remaining section containing Rade was spiraling out of control toward the surface. He could feel the horizontal and vertical G forces vying for domination over his body and threatening to knock him unconscious. It felt like someone had strapped him to the bottom of a spinning top.
He attempted to speak. The muscles of his face refused to respond, his lips locked in a rictus. The Gs were too powerful. He tried to turn his head to survey the remaining compartment, but couldn’t. He saw only the blizzard raging outside and the gray-black deck just underneath him. There was supposed to be some blue in that deck, a part of his mind told him, but everything had gone black and white. Loss of color vision was a sure sign of imminent unconsciousness. The alarm in his helmet grew distant.
Unsurprisingly, he blacked out.
Or at least, he thought he did. Because when he opened his eyes a moment later, he was still strapped into the damaged drop ship. Gs continued to assail his body, but the forces seemed gentler, somehow. With effort, he could finally pivot his head, and he glanced at the mechs clamped into the alcoves on either side of him.
The alarm sounded persistently in his helmet. On the HUD, a flashing message accompanied it.
AI pilot disconnected. AI pilot disconnected.
That referred to the drop ship pilot, no doubt.
“Jerry, turn off that goddamn alarm,” Rade said with difficulty, the muscles of his face struggling against the Gs.
The Titan’s AI didn’t respond.
“Jerrycan, I said turn off the alarm,” he repeated.
“Affirmative, LPO.”
The AI of his Titan had been named Jerrycan, no doubt by some wise-ass technician. Rade hadn’t had time to change it. He doubted he was going to bother, especially since it responded to J or Jerry. Usually. Besides, the name was somewhat suiting.
He glanced at his overhead map, which showed the outline of what remained of the drop ship, along with the blue dots indicating those platoon members still clamped to it. Bender, Grappler, Manic, Lui, Tahoe, Fret, and Keelhaul were with him, in Titans.
The rest of the team—those members who had resided in the lost starboard portion of the craft—didn’t show up on the map. Nor did any of the other drop craft.
“Chief, do you read?” He tried. “Facehopper?”
Nothing.
“J, I assume you’ve stabilized the drop ship?” Rade asked.
“As much as possible,” Jerry returned.
“How much control do you have?”
“I have full control,” the AI responded. “But unfortunately, the remaining main engine is not responding. Some of the dorsal, ventral, and port thrusters remain active, but I can’t land with those. The craft will hit fairly hard, I’m afraid. There is an eighty percent chance the Titans will be lost with the drop craft upon impact. I recommend evac ASAP.”
Sleet swept inside, riddling the hull of his Titan. The vibrations transmitted to his helmet sounded like hail.
“How much time do we have?”
“Uncertain,” Jerry said. “Telemetry data unavailable.”
Rade attempted to curl his biceps and the Titan mimicked his motion. However the clamps securing him to the alcove where he was stowed prevented him from lifting his forearms beyond a few millimeters. His legs were similarly locked down.
“Open up the clamps,” Rade said.
“The clamps are not responding,” Jerry replied.
“Can anyone else get free?” Rade said over the comm.
None of the platoon members answered him. He glanced at their status indicators, as arrayed on the lefthand side of his HUD. Their vitals were all green. Were the comms down?
He repeatedly flexed his arms and legs, trying to break through the clamps. He boosted the strength on his exoskeleton to the max, hoping that the pressure against the cockpit inner actuators would be translated to the Titan’s arms and legs.
A new warning appeared on his HUD, courtesy of his local jumpsuit.
Exoskeleton servomotors experiencing extreme stress.
That message only appeared when the jumpsuit servomotors were about to burn out.
He backed off immediately.
“Bender,” he said over the comm. “My clamps aren’t responding. Can you open them up?”
No response.
“Bender. Anyone?”
While their vitals might be green, he realized that no one else was actually conscious.
Didn’t think the Gs were that bad.
“Why hasn’t anyone else awakened?” Rade said. A blast of snow momentarily swept across the deck, and the craft rolled sideways before stabilizing.
“The G forces are causing repeated black outs,” J
erry replied.
“I seem unaffected...”
“I injected a counteracting agent into your system.”
“What about the other Titans?” Rade said. “Why haven’t their AIs done the same?”
“You are LPO. It is my job to ensure you remain active at all times. Only you can authorize a similar injection for the others.”
“Damn it,” Rade said. “Who programmed you? New standing order, make the injection of counteracting agents automatic going forward.”
“As you wish,” Jerry responded.
A moment later Lui’s voice came over the comm: “What the shit...?”
“We’re going down,” Rade said. “We have to get out of here. Is anyone able to open their clamps?”
Titans flexed their arms and legs against the restraining devices down the line. He saw the telltale glow of jumpjet activation as some of the mechs added thrust to the attempt. But for all that, no one was able to break free.
“Who’s the genius who decided to build these clamps without a viable method of manually breaking them open?” Tahoe said.
“The Navy always builds in redundancies,” Bender said. “Unfortunately, those redundancies don’t seem to be working today.”
“That happens when your craft is torn in half,” Lui said.
“What is it with us and getting ripped in half?” Fret said. “Are we cursed or something? First the Intrepid, and now this.”
“The Intrepid was a starship,” Manic said. “Filled with evac stations. This is kind of worse, I think. It’s too bad none of us can lift our arms. We’d make short work of these clamps with our lasers.”
The drop ship rolled to starboard suddenly and Rade was jerked hard along with it. The craft didn’t re-stabilize.
“Craft propellant has been exhausted,” Jerry said. “I’ve done all I can. We’re on our own now.”
“Bender,” Rade said. “Are you sure you can’t override these clamps somehow?”
“If they’ve lost power,” Manic said. “They can’t be overridden.”
“The power to the clamps should have rerouted to the backup battery,” Tahoe said.
“Oh they rerouted to the backups all right,” Bender said. “But they still ain’t working. I’ll try to issue a manual reboot.”
“I’m surprised the AIs didn’t do that already,” Grappler said.
“I have in fact rebooted the system twice,” Jerry said locally.
“My AI says it tried to reboot twice already,” Rade repeated over the main comm.
“We’ll I’m going to try again,” Bender said.
The craft rolled once more, careening to port. Rade felt the Gs increase.
Abruptly his clamps opened up. He was still glued to the alcove however, due to the centrifugal force.
“Wooyah, I got the magic touch,” Bender said.
“Evac people,” Rade said. “We could impact any second.”
He activated his jumpjets and shoved off from the alcove. The drop ship slid away, and he canceled all thrust. The sensation of weightlessness took hold as he entered free fall. Surrounded by that blizzard, it felt like he floated in a formless, white void, his previous existence abandoned for some other dimension.
The only thing anchoring him to reality was the overhead map, which showed the platoon members in relation to himself. That, and the occasional thrumming of snow pellets rippling into his hull.
He switched to the thermal and infrared bands. He still saw nothing.
“Jerry, ground location?” he asked the AI. For a moment he worried he might be falling into a gas giant, or something similar.
Without warning the surface appeared through the whiteout of the storm.
Before Rade could give the order, Jerry engaged the air brakes and fired the aerospike thrusters in the feet.
He still hit hard. His legs caved so that his knees rammed into his chest area, and he felt his lower back tweak. The snow directly underneath cratered, producing a half sphere three meters in diameter around him; a similar dome formed in the blowing snow above because of the shockwave produced by his impact, but it was quickly swallowed by the blizzard.
He stood up. His lower back throbbed for a few moments, but the pain quickly subsided. According to his vitals, he hadn’t suffered any lasting harm. He checked the Titan’s diagnostics. The mech seemed undamaged as well.
Rade took a few tentative steps beyond the white crater formed by his impact, and the deep snow swallowed his mech to the knees, leaving footprints as deep as a man was tall behind him.
He glanced at his map. The seven others had landed nearby within a radius of one kilometer. The signals from some of the more distant Titans winked in and out. Interference from the blizzard? Or something else?
“Muster with me, people,” Rade sent.
“Say again?” Bender replied. He was one of the more distant.
“I said, muster with me.”
As the mechs grew near, he watched them slowly appear around him on the thermal band. The blowing snow was so thick that even visibility on that spectrum was reduced to about fifty meters. It was better than nothing at all, he supposed, as was the case with the visual band. The local-beam LIDAR was useless under those conditions as well.
“I thought this snow was supposed to be methane?” Grappler said. “According to the preliminary planetary scans.”
“It is methane,” Lui responded.
“Then why is it white?”
“Dunno,” Lui said. “Could have something to do with the way the radiation clouds scatter the light. Or the nature of the system’s sun. Or the molecules bound with the Methane to form the snow.”
“The question really is, how much of this is snow, and how much of it is fallout?” Tahoe said.
“Speaking of fallout, how are we doing on the radiation levels, Jerry?” Rade asked his AI.
“I’m detecting external readings of 0.5 mSv per minute,” Jerry returned.
For comparison, on a typical starship shielded from the gamma rays of deep space, the exposure levels were 0.5 mSv per week.
“How’s the rad shielding holding up?”
“Well,” Jerry said. “Only 0.05 mSv per minute are penetrating. Well within the tolerance levels of the subdermal anti-rads you all harbor.”
“Any sign of the HS3s that were supposed to deploy with our platoon?” Rade said.
“Negative,” the AI replied. “The HS3s were stored in the aft compartment of the drop ship. As you know, that section was ripped away when we lost the starboard side.”
“Too bad,” Rade said. “Scouts would’ve been nice right about now.” Though admittedly even HS3s would have been relatively useless under the current conditions.
A platoon of Centurions had also been pegged to accompany them, but the combat robots had come down in a troop carrier. If the Centurions survived, they would be waiting at the staging area of the original drop point.
“Fret,” Rade sent over the main comm. “Are you able to reach any of the ships in orbit? Or anyone else nearby?”
“That’s a Negative with a capital N,” Fret said. “I don’t know if it’s this blizzard, or some form of jamming, but I’m not getting squat on the comm node.”
“Gotta be some other interference,” Tahoe said. “Remember, this enemy has intimate knowledge of our technology. If anyone could set up a planet-wide jamming system, it’s them. The radiation levels aren’t helping either.”
“I’m inclined to agree with you,” Rade said. “The air support squads that dropped with us had several repeater drones with them, not to mention comm nodes. They have to be up there somewhere, even though we can’t see them.”
“Uh,” Lui said. “Unless they were shot down, like us.”
“How the hell did the enemy see well enough to shoot us down in this shitstorm anyway?” Fret said. “When we can barely discern a thing on the thermal band?”
“Maybe it was a lucky shot,” Grappler said.
“A drop ship has a
slightly bigger profile than a mech, bro,” Lui said. “And there are other means of targeting than infrared, you know. Just because our mechs don’t use gamma rays to acquire targets doesn’t mean our enemy does not.”
“There’s a reason we don’t use gamma rays...” Bender said. “Because they pass right through the goddamn targets!”
“Not all of them,” Lui said.
“You’d need a damn sensitive instrument to track the reflections,” Bender said.
“No you wouldn’t,” Lui said.
“Maybe they use gravity waves,” Manic chimed in.
“Then you’d need an even more sensitive instrument,” Bender said.
“Hey, these are aliens, remember,” Lui said.
“Aliens with a predilection for using human tech,” Manic reminded him.
“I’d guess they have other tech in reserve, my friend,” Lui said. “Just because we haven’t seen it, doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.”
A sobering thought.
He hoped Lui was wrong. Because if the enemy could track them in white-out conditions like this, they were all very likely doomed.
two
Trudging through the deep snow, the nearer Titans began to arrive at Rade’s position. Because these mechs had been retrofitted with the thermal smearing feature of the Zeus models, they looked like big blobs on the infrared band, only slightly warmer than the surroundings. All weaponry and other identifying markers were completely masked. As for the visual band, even without the current white-out conditions, Rade doubted he would have spotted them. The camouflage capability of the hull skins would have activated upon touch down: all-white mechs were insanely difficult to spot after a fresh snowfall.
Of course, even though he couldn’t see them, he knew precisely what the Titans looked like, and the armaments they possessed. And this wasn’t just a passing familiarity gleaned from a glance-over in the hangar bay. No, he was well-acquainted with the Titan IV-B class of mech, mostly thanks to the long hours spent in the simulator during the journey to the planet. Not a day went by where he and the others hadn’t piloted the mechs in their war games for at least an hour. They would split into competing teams of Titans and vie against one another.
