Dead Mech Walking: a mech LitRPG novel (Armored Souls Book 1)

by Xavier P. Hunter

  “Okie dokie, lads and lady,” Grant spoke over the radio. “The reward for the mission bonus is 12,000 credits apiece. The base has some defenses of its own, so our best bet is to let the base hold out while we secure the drop ship. If we kill the last invader, the drop ship will flee.”

  Reggie keyed the radio. “Think maybe I should have spent my level-up points before we shipped out?”

  “You were the one who wanted to treat it like life or death,” Grant replied. “If we didn’t get to this mission first, some other platoon would have taken it.”

  “‘Dump it all in Piloting’ wasn’t advice,” Iris cut in. “You just wanted him to hurry up.”

  “I’ll help you after, if you want,” Kim replied. He was introduced to Reggie just as the platoon loaded into the drop ship, along with Barclay. Kim sounded like the level-headed one in the bunch.

  Reggie’s new scanner picked up juggernauts approaching from the west. “Incoming. Relaying positions.”

  “King, take up a position on that north ridge and light up targets for us,” Grant ordered.

  “Roger that,” Reggie replied. “Heading for hex Juliet one-one-one.”

  Throwing Daisy into gear, Reggie plotted a course and looped around to take the high ground. With any luck, he’d be able to get cover from direct fire by having the ridge to work with.

  “Barclay, you’re with me,” Grant ordered. “We’re taking the ravine that runs from about T109 to V80 and use the cover to flank around and go for the drop ship without them spotting us. Kim, Larson, fall back and slow the enemy approach to the outpost.”

  Reggie clenched his jaw but kept his mouth shut. There was so much about this game he didn’t know yet, but that sounded like an idiotic plan. From the mission objectives, they knew they were outnumbered 8 to 5. Even without knowing the composition of the enemy assault force, Grant had already committed to splitting his firepower. Specker had already demonstrated on the last mission just how powerful focused fire could be. Hadn’t Grant been there?

  The map marked the locations of the friendly forces as they spread out. Grant in his Jackal led the way down the ravine with Barclay’s Badger following close behind. Iris and Kim took their matching pair of Chi-Ri missile juggernauts and retreated to the shadow of the outpost plateau.

  Watching over the ridgeline, Reggie spotted the first of their enemies. Seconds later, he had the whole invading force lit up. They were traveling in a tight cluster, either out of bravado or because they knew they were out of range of the outpost’s artillery. He calibrated his computer to calculate from Larson’s position. Range to target was 3500m.

  “Hold position, Grant,” Reggie radioed. “Relaying enemy locations. If you come out of that ravine now, they’ll spot you immediately.”

  “Got it,” Grant radioed back. “Barclay, fall in behind me and wait for the all-clear.”

  “Aye, aye, sir,” Barclay said with misplaced military polish.

  The enemy contingent was an even mix of Wyverns and Rhinos, four of each. Just slugging it out head to head, the Wyverns looked like a match for the Cold Brotherhood. But Reggie stared at the readout. The Rhinos’ armor weighed more than Daisy. They were packing Mass Drivers that, just judging by the stats, looked like they could blast the torso out of Daisy, leaving nothing but a pile of limbs to clatter to the rock.

  “You getting the target data?” Reggie asked.

  “Yup,” Grant replied. “Gonna be one hell of a fight once we get that drop ship.”

  “We need to fall back to the outpost,” Reggie insisted. “There’s no way to take those on in the open field.”

  “Unless your sensors are bleeped up, those guys are coming into range of our Chi-Ri’s LRM-2s,” Grant shot back. “We’ll have 200m before they can even start returning fire.”

  Reggie fumed silently. There was so much in this game he had to learn. Everything Grant explained sounded right the way he put it, but something in Reggie’s gut told him this was a blunder.

  Firing on targets that couldn’t fire back was a time-honored military tradition. It dated back to the days when Ug and his cavemen friends started throwing spears at woolly mammoths from atop cliffs. The principle was the basis for building castles, longbows, and eventually artillery and ballistic missiles.

  But the rest of the plan was shit. Little as Reggie knew about this game, just looking at a confused mess of stats and unfamiliar wireframes, it was plain to see that those enemy juggernauts weren’t getting dropped in a 200m window before they got in range to engage in return fire.

  “Roger that,” Reggie replied stiffly. Grant might spend his days balancing tires and patching flats, but for now, he was the commanding officer. Reggie had voiced his objection, and the C.O. had made the call. Disobeying orders would just make the situation worse.

  A good platoon could make a bad plan work, but a disjointed platoon couldn’t force any plan to work.

  The rangefinder ticked down.

  3000m…

  2800m…

  2400m…

  Grant must have been counting down as well. “Larson, Kim, open fire!”

  Iris came over the radio. “But that’s not optimal range!”

  “Didn’t you hear me? You have 200m before they can return fire. Dump all those LRMs and get moving.”

  Reggie clenched his fists and kept his hands clear of the steering controls. This was the mistake his gut was warning him about. Firing from max range would give the targets warning of incoming fire, reduce the missiles’ accuracy, and waste ammo.

  Smoke trails whizzed by overhead, tracing lines in the sky toward the approaching juggernaut force. Tracer fire lit the twilight sky as the Wyverns attempted to shoot down the missiles with their Miniguns.

  The wireframes of the Wyverns flashed. The targeting system registered armor damage in the yellow. Reggie cursed. Even with his upgraded sensor package, he couldn’t see the hit points of the enemies’ armor. But he could see yellow wire areas and wide swaths of the blue, undamaged wire frame style.

  “Targets accelerating,” Reggie announced. “The Wyverns are breaking escort formation and pulling away from the Rhinos. Kim, Larson, fall back! Make for the plateau.”

  “Disregard that,” Grant cut in, his voice taking on a phony aura of authority over the radio. It sounded like someone doing a Jack Nicholson impression from A Few Good Men. “You will follow the plan. Keep firing until the enemy stops to engage. Then kite the Wyverns around the outpost using a zigzag evasive pattern.”

  More missiles flew outbound. The Wyverns took a pounding. One of the wire frames turned red in the armor on its left leg. That wasn’t going to be enough.

  “Fall back!” Reggie shouted as the range indicator counted down until the air filled with return fire.

  “Hold position,” Grant ordered. “One more salvo.”

  As Reggie’s attention focused on the Wyverns, something troubling occurred to him: he was closer than the two Chi-Ris.

  The Wyverns stopped short and swiveled their torsos in his direction, but Reggie was already on the move.

  Daisy was in full reverse. Reggie backed down from the ridge, watching the skies. Flipping from DF Ballistic Cannon-150 to Minigun, he brought his crosshairs up in time for the first of the incoming missiles to show up.

  20mm cartridges rained down around him as the Minigun spat continuous fire into the skies above. He fought with the controls to maneuver backward and still train his targeting reticule on the missiles as best he could.

  One missile caught a bullet and exploded midair. The rest got through.

  Daisy shook with two impacts, and Reggie thought he could make out the sound of a third that impacted nearby. It was hard to tell since all the sounds mushed together in quick succession.

  Console lights went out. What little remained blinked urgent red. A klaxon blared a general alert.

  “Warning. Main power unavailable. Warning. Main power unavailable.”

  Reggie searched for a switch to shut o
ff the Captain Obvious of computerized voices. He came up dry.

  Information panels that had shown maps, engine status, ammo count, and a dozen other useful tidbits now only displayed countdown timers until repairs could bring them back online.

  [Secondary Objective Complete: Capture Enemy Drop Ship]

  “What the BLEEP?” Reggie shouted in vain. With no radios, there was no one to hear him. That bastard Grant had ignored the overwhelming force marching down their throats and snuck off to sabotage the enemy force’s escape. At the rate things were going, though, that enemy force would be taking their drop ship home.

  Radio was the first system to come back online.

  “—you hear me? King, come in?” It was Grant.

  “King here,” Reggie reported. “Most of my systems are down. Nothing structural, though. I think I’ll be back in this fight in about 45 seconds.”

  It seemed ludicrous that a repair could be completed in seconds rather than hours, especially without a repair bay or team of mechanics. Reggie was willing to stretch his disbelief on this one since this futuristic society didn’t know jack about gunnery weaponry or fire control, they must have invested their research in something cool and high tech.

  “Me and Barclay are on our way,” Grant reported. “Keep out of range until we get there.”

  Easy for them to say. They were sneaking up from behind.

  Reggie’s data relay came online just then, and he could see the disposition of forces on both sides. It wasn’t a pretty picture.

  In the strictest sense, the Cold Brotherhood had the assault force caught in a loose pincer maneuver. They had the invaders trapped in much the way that a high school chess team could theoretically split up and surround the varsity football squad.

  The countdown to Daisy’s engines coming online seemed interminable as Reggie kept a watch on the platoon’s wire frames.

  Kim was the first to go down.

  While he and Iris had heavily damaged one of the Wyverns in return, the hostile force had concentrated fire as well and had more missile launchers among them. Reggie could barely keep track as Kim’s Chi-Ri went from pristine blue to black. There were flashes of yellow and red in the interim, but they were blink-and-you-missed-it brief.

  “We’ll separate and outmaneuver the Rhinos,” Grant said. “You three take out those Wyverns. Draw them into range of the outpost’s defenses.”

  What planet was this guy from? “We’ve already lost Kim,” Reggie reported. “And I still don’t have main power back online.”

  “Jesus, King,” Grant snapped. “Maybe you shouldn’t have gotten yourself shot. What kind of scout are you?”

  In his cockpit, Reggie fumed. This was his second mission, not counting the no-lose-mode tutorial. He didn’t know any of the weapons in this game well enough to have max and optimal ranges memorized. He didn’t have any warning of a target lock from enemy missiles. He was totally unprepared for this role.

  On this one point, at least, Grant was right. Reggie was a rookie—a noob, in local lingo.

  But fuck Grant if everything else going wrong wasn’t his fault.

  “Reggie, when you get up and running, try to hamstring that damaged Wyvern,” Iris radioed. “I’ll lead the pack south. It should fall behind the rest.”

  A flash of red on the console caught Reggie’s eye. Barclay’s Badger just lost a leg in a single shot. He and Grant had engaged the Rhinos.

  “Roger that,” Reggie replied to Iris, ignoring for a moment the doomed 2 on 4 going on back in the direction of the enemy drop ship.

  The DF Ballistic Cannon-150 was back online. He just needed engines. The countdown was almost finished.

  5 seconds…

  4…

  3…

  2…

  1…

  Cockpit lighting returned to normal as the reactor powered up. The engines rumbled. Reggie took the control sticks and swung Daisy around to give chase.

  The juggernaut limped as it ran. He hadn’t known this giant metal version of Daisy for long, but between the performance indicator reading 80 percent and the noticeable lack of giddyup, he wasn’t gaining as fast as he would have liked.

  Daisy topped out at 68kph. That was still faster than the Wyverns could manage, and the damaged one that lagged the rest was only traveling 32kph.

  “No. No! NO!” Grant shouted over the radio.

  On the status console, Grant’s Jackal went almost completely red. One of those Mass Drivers must have put a shot that pierced his juggernaut from shoulder to hip. A second later, his whole juggernaut went black.

  Barclay’s disappeared soon after.

  “Just you and me,” Reggie radioed Iris. “As senior officer, that puts you in—”

  “Like bleep it does,” Iris shouted back. “You’re a real bleeping soldier outside. Find a way to win this. Take command.”

  Reggie’s breath came ragged. Command. Win.

  He shook his head. “Give ‘em what you got. Don’t go down easy. I… uh, don’t imagine these guys accept surrender or take prisoners.”

  “No low-level missions like this. Maybe if we had something custom scripted or fleshed-out NPCs against us. These are just monsters for game purposes. Kill or be killed.”

  Reggie took a steady breath. “Well… nice knowing ya.”

  “See you on the other side, more like,” Iris shot back.

  Reggie had the Wyvern dead to rights. It couldn’t get away, and half its systems were less than 3 points of damage from destruction. Even a near miss might disable it completely.

  Taking a second to let the targeting reticule settle into a comfortable 78 percent hit chance, Reggie aimed center-of-mass and fired.

  The Wyvern took the shot right in the torso. It toppled mid-stride with one arm coming apart from the rest of the juggernaut.

  Another of the Wyverns had stopped and circled back.

  If Reggie smoked—in game or otherwise—now would have been the time to light one last cigarette, because he was a goner.

  As a volley of missiles converged on his location, Reggie fought to keep his eyes open to the end. Whether he blinked at the last second or not, the game went black.

  ∞

  Reggie awoke to the stinging odor of rubbing alcohol and a view of a digital clock mounted into the ceiling.

  2:59:55

  It counted down steadily as he watched.

  “Warrior King,” a perky female voice cooed. “You’re awake. Don’t worry. We’ll have you fixed up in no time.”

  The voice belonged to someone he presumed to be a nurse. She wore a black House Virgil uniform practically painted onto her figure, but on the collar, there were red plus signs inscribed within a white circle—the medical emblem that transcended nations and game worlds.

  Reggie tried to assure her that he felt fine, but in trying to first convince himself of that fact, he realized he couldn’t feel anything at all. Looking down, he was covered in a shimmering blue force field from the shoulders down. As he watched, armatures equipped with needles, scalpels, and a few instruments he couldn’t identify all plunged in and out of the force field with robotic efficiency.

  “What are these bleeping things doing to me?” Reggie demanded.

  The nurse patted him on the cheek. Her hand was warm, but her eyes were lifeless. She had to be an NPC. That dulled the guilt he felt glancing down the front of her uniform.

  “You were badly wounded. You’re being repaired. House Virgil has the latest technology in clone transplantation and bio-implants. You won’t notice the difference. If you prefer, you may log out during reconstruction. The timer will continue whether you are in game or not.”

  “What’s my other option?” Reggie asked. “You got a TV or anything in here?”

  “I’m afraid not, Warrior King.” The AI nurse gave a plastic smile. “However, if you require companionship, I can remain with you during your treatment.”

  Reggie rolled his eyes. There were probably high school kids playing this
game that ran into combat blind just to end up with a pretty computerized nurse fawning over them.

  “Nah, just tell me how to access the level-up options, and I’ll spend the time figuring how to spend two Pilot Points and a perk.”

  The nurse’s smile fell into an affected pout. “Warrior King, you lost all your XP since last level. No one levels up in the hospital.”

  Reggie’s mouth felt dry. It had to be his imagination. The game couldn’t produce a physiological reaction like that, could it?

  “But I had a level saved up. I was level 2 except for allocating my points.”

  The nurse patted him on the cheek. “Warrior King, I recommend logging out. Fresh air is healthy, and long periods of inactivity are contraindicated by the International Electronic Gaming Consortium Medical Advisory Board.”

  Reggie gritted his teeth. “I’ll stay. Thanks.”

  “Very well, Warrior King. I’ll check in on you periodically. Just remember that your account has ‘additional services’ enabled.” The AI nurse flashed a quick smile and departed. He hadn’t even noticed the high heels until they clacked on the floor down the hallway.

  The door slid shut.

  2:58:32

  It was going to be a long wait.

  ∞

  Reggie felt better back on his feet. Just as the AI nurse had promised, he felt good as new.

  The House Virgo command ship was a maze, but it was a well-documented maze. Information panels were cleverly melded into the glossy surfaces of every wall of the ship. Once Reggie knew to look for them, the panels were easy to spot and blinked to life at a touch.

  FIND LARSON

  The command didn’t do anything.

  FIND BAR

  Reggie was shown a circuitous path through the ship’s corridors, but as he followed the directions, panels lit to keep him on the path. From the corner of his eye, he watched passersby to see if any of them showed signs that they could see the panels glowing or if that was just for Reggie’s benefit.

  The rec room bar wasn’t as crowded as last time he’d been there, but there were still plenty of pilots to make it look lived in. The lower population also made the argument at a corner table impossible to miss.