by Richard Fox
“Armor drop, prepare to move out once they’re on the ground,” Acera said over the net. The IR net had limited range from person to person, but the IR would rebroadcast received messages, creating a web that could extend for miles.
Two of the drop ships lowered their ramps and tilted nearly parallel to the Earth. Two huge humanoid shapes, their legs tight together and arms crossed over their chests like pharaohs in their crypts, slid from the drop ships.
The mechanized armor suits unlimbered in midair and hit the ground so hard Hale felt tremors. The armor that landed closest to Hale knelt for a moment, then stood to its full ten feet. Pale beige armor plates swirled as the active camouflage adjusted to the terrain.
The M-37 mechanized armor suits were one of the great innovations to come out of the Second Pacific War between the Chinese and America and its allies, where crewed tanks proved too vulnerable to urban terrain and relentless electromagnetic attack. Neither the Chinese nor Atlantic Union belligerents could hack the human nervous system so an engineer at MIT figured out a way to integrate a mechanized suit of armor with a human brain.
The first deployment of a half-dozen mechanized armor at the Battle of Brisbane routed the Chinese invaders and accelerated their development. All six of the original Black Knights died in subsequent battles, their armor recovered and put on permanent display at the armor training center at Fort Knox. Hale remembered running past each suit during pilot selection, the battle damage that felled each suit never repaired, still as raw as the day it died.
The nearest suit took a dark metal Gatling cannon off the mag-lock on its leg and connected a belt of gauss bolts to the cannon’s magazine. Twin spikes of launch rails were visible, sticking up from the suit’s back, as it strode over and bent at the waist to bring the sensor box that made up its head level with Stacey.
“I’m to keep you safe,” came over the IR net, the voice tinny and mechanical. The pilots couldn’t speak while suited up, their entire nervous system given over to controlling the armor. A separate system kept the pilots alive while they were curled up inside the armored wombs within the suits.
Stacey backed away from the suit and bumped into Torni.
“First Lieutenant Elias, at your service,” the suit said and tapped a quick salute against its head.
“Armor, go tracked. Low profile needed,” Acera said over the net.
Elias’ leg panels snapped open, revealing treads. The treads extended with a mechanical whine and the legs hinged at the hips to bring the tracks into contact with the ground.
“Stay behind me, crunchies,” Elias said and rolled to the north.
“I swear those guys give me the creeps,” Standish said.
Hale shared the route to the Euskal Tower with his section and fell into his position as his Marines formed a wedge behind Elias. Hale grabbed a bewildered Stacey by the back of her chest harness and put her two steps behind him.
“Stay with us and keep your head down if things go sideways, OK?” he said.
She nodded.
Hale glanced over his shoulder as the drop ships and their fighter escort broke away and flew south. They’d hole up in a canyon until they were needed for extraction.
As their engines died away, an unnerving silence surrounded the Marines. They marched past a suburb that had been home to tens of thousands of people, but nothing moved around them except for the wind whispering through mesquite trees, doves whinnying through the air, and the flap, flap, flap of a ragged American flag on a pole outside a grade school.
“Oh wow,” Standish said, pointing to a distant mountain range where a mile-long spaceship lay broken against the peaks and valleys. The ship had survived reentry scorched and mostly intact. Sections of the hull had been ripped away, exposing the internal beams and hinting at what remained within.
“It’s the Midway. I can see her hull numbers,” Cortaro said. The Atlantic Union’s flagship was the best assignment for a sailor’s career and every position, from cook to captain, was a hard-won contest. Now it lay in the sun, rotting like a giant animal.
“Focus. Keep moving,” Hale said.
Hale looked into a car parked on the roadside, blanketed in years of blown pollen and dust, a fist-sized hole in the roof and a dusty Ubi on the passenger seat the only clues as to what happened to the driver.
A tumbleweed meandered down the road, thumping lazily along.
Hale tightened his grip on his gauss rifle. Euskal Tower loomed ahead of them, wavering as dust blew through the sky.
A gust of wind sent a line of dirt snaking down the road and a radiation warning icon pinged on his visor.
“Walsh, how bad is it?” Hale asked.
“Trace alpha and beta particles, minimal gamma rays. Nothing to worry about, but definitely more than what’s normally in the atmosphere,” Walsh said. The medic tapped at his forearm computer.
“What caused it?” Hale asked.
“There hasn’t been a nuke power plant for decades, but modeling fits with atmospheric nuclear weapons decades ago,” Walsh said.
“At least there was a fight,” Franklin said, hefting his gauss cannon against his hip. The micro grav emitters around the barrel glowed as they kept the barrel level to the ground.
“Eyes open, mouth shut,” Cortaro said.
The march continued through the empty city. Packs of wild dogs barked and howled in the distance, none daring to come close to the Marines as they passed.
A sign, rattling against its frame, welcomed them to the Ibarra Corporation headquarters. A twenty-foot wall surrounded the enclave and prominent warnings against drone trespassing ran along the wall. Hale’s diagram showed an entrance to the compound, but their map must have been extremely dated.
“Let me get a look,” Standish said. He grabbed a vine attached to the wall and started climbing.
“No, wait!” Stacey called out. Standish froze, his hand almost over the top of the wall. “Grandpa put almost every electronic countermeasure he could invent into that wall. Anything with an electrical impulse goes over it—all hell will break loose. All the entrances will be blocked.”
Standish dropped to the ground and dusted himself off.
“You think it’s still active after all this time?” Hale asked.
“The batteries are supposed to last for fifty years and the top of the walls have ingrained solar panels to keep them running even longer,” she said.
“Then how do we get in?” Cortaro asked.
Stacey looked up and down the wall, then took off her right glove. She pressed her palm against the wall, and a second later a red arrow pointed to the left along with “32m.”
“I put a couple backdoors in the program so I could sneak out as a teenager,” she said.
Thirty-two meters away, Stacey put her hand against the wall again and a section sank into the ground, just enough for an adult to get through on their hands and knees.
On the other side of the wall, Hale saw a wrecked building and lumps of concrete on the ground.
“Something happened over there,” he knelt down to cross through.
“Hale, hold up,” Major Acera said over the IR net. Hale pointed to Standish and then to the entrance.
“Sure, if anyone’s going to get their face eaten by an alien, it should be me,” Standish said as he scurried through the entrance.
Acera jogged up and looked into the hole in the wall.
“Can you make it bigger?” he asked Stacey.
“No, sir, this was all I ever needed to get in and out. Never thought I’d have to bring a walking tank with me,” she said, pointing to Elias.
“I’m not a tank. I am armor,” Elias said, lifting a leg off the ground with flexibility impossible to any human, and got to his feet. The treads returned to the housings in his suit’s calves and thighs. “If you need us, just start shooting,” he said.
Acera touched his forearm computer. “Second platoon, secure this exit and provide security for the mortar tube. First and third
platoons are with me to the objective. Let’s go.”
Marines followed their commander through the tunnel.
“Ibarra never mentioned any of this to you? No ‘aliens are coming—here’s my super-secret plan to save us’?” Hale asked Stacey.
“Never. He was so security conscious about everything, real paranoid. He got hacked in the ’20s and never trusted a networked device again. Weird that the inventor of the modern world was pretty much a Luddite, right?” she said.
Hale looked south where blue-black storm clouds crept through the sky toward them.
“Monsoon season,” she said.
“We’re up,” Hale said as he followed the last Marine through—and found a war zone on the other side. Building walls had crumpled during some long-ago onslaught. Broken windows and lumps of concrete knocked from walls by gauss fire littered the ground. The rear of the wall surrounding the compound had hastily erected firing stoops built against the wall, much of it crumpled to the ground.
“Last stand?” Cortaro asked Hale as their Marines crept into a wrecked building; their training demanded they seek cover whenever possible.
“I hope not,” Hale said.
“Oh no,” Stacey said from behind them. “That’s my house!” She ran past Hale before he could stop her, flitted around the rubble and ran into a once-elegant townhouse, Hale on her heels.
“Stop! Damn you,” Hale reached out, his fingertips scraping against her back.
She pushed past a door swinging on its hinges and came to a sudden stop once she made it down the hallway beyond the door.
Hale brought his gauss rifle to his shoulder and set his weapon to FIRE. He stepped in front of her and saw what brought her to a halt.
Half the house was missing, seemingly erased from existence, the floor tiles, refrigerator and part of a bed, perfectly sliced away. Hanging in the emptiness was a cube, cobalt blue around the edges, the faces faded to the color of a sky filled with gossamer clouds. Golden flakes floated within it.
“What is that?” Stacey asked, her voice filled with awe.
The cube rotated in place, randomly changing directions as if buffeted by a phantom breeze. An ice-blue light flared above them. Hale grabbed Stacey by the waist, swung her back into what remained of her home and snapped his weapon up toward the light.
Another cube, barely the size of baseball, floated toward the larger cube. Its light drew sharp shadows across the floor, mimicking a day’s worth of the sun’s passage in a few seconds. A tight beam of white light connected the two cubes and the smaller cube passed into the larger one, which pulsed and grew several inches bigger.
“It’s beautiful,” she whispered.
“Hale, get back here. We’ve got contact,” Acera said over the IR net.
Hale grabbed Stacey by the carry handle on the back of her harness and gave her a tug as he backed out of the room. She stutter-stepped backwards, her eyes locked on the cube.
Hale found his Marines, with the exception of Sergeant Cortaro, bunched up on the corner of a mostly intact home, where gauss rounds had stitched up the walls and knocked gouts of plaster and concrete away. Vincenti pointed to Hale and then to the door.
“Attach a line to her if she tries to run off again,” Hale said to Torni, finally letting go of Stacey as he stepped into the house.
Cortaro was at the top of a flight of stairs on his hands and knees. Windows ran along the upper hallway above Cortaro’s head. A low buzzing sound pulsed through the house and windows rattled in their frames.
Hale crouched and climbed up the stairs, careful not to flag his location by sticking his rifle barrel into view of whatever was making that noise beyond the windows.
“Sir, this is loco,” Cortaro said. “Come see.”
Cortaro led Hale into an adolescent’s bedroom, dolls and plush toys from girlhood shoved to the fringes of the room in favor of shift-posters of pop stars and a burgeoning collection of clothing.
Another of the perfect holes ran from the wall to the bedframe. Something glinted underneath the bed. Hale pulled an Ubi out from under the bed and saw a light-red dust covered the screen. He handed it to Cortaro.
“They’re built to last. Maybe we can charge it,” Hale said.
“Look through that hole. You’ll see it,” his team sergeant said.
A buzz went through the wall like an electric current as Hale brought his eye to the hole.
“Three stories up, your two o’clock.”
Hale found it hovering midair, a black and gray oblong shape next to the sliced remnants of an air conditioner. It was a little more than a meter long and held its position perfectly, like it was bolted into place. Hale toggled his magnification lenses to zoom in. It looked like a drone, like those sent into Europa’s oceans years ago. Four segmented stalks moved around the air conditioner, red light arcing between the stalk tips and their focus. The air conditioner disintegrated where the red light touched it, small blue motes sublimating from the metal and floating around the drone.
Four different stalks converged into a point behind the drone and blue light identical to the cube he and Stacey had seen emanated from the convergence. The blue motes fell into the convergence like it was a black hole.
Hale magnified further. The drone’s surface was gray and black bands and mottled patterns like Damascus steel wavered across the surface, never still. A stalk moved from the convergence to the air conditioner, sliding effortlessly across the drone’s surface.
The drone lacked any other features. It was just the stalks connected to the ellipsoid body with the swirling patterns.
The buzzing intensified, in time with a pulse of red light from the drone.
“Hale, take your team and the principal to the tower. We’ll keep an eye on that thing. Call out if you see another,” Acera said.
“Roger, moving.”
Hale and Cortaro crept out of the house. The lieutenant pulled his Marines together into a huddle.
“Whatever that thing is, it looks armored. Switch to high-powered shots but make them count. We’re a long way from a resupply,” Hale said.
“Faben—Ibarra, whatever—stay close and stay quiet,” he said to Stacey, who nodded quickly.
“Follow me.” Hale turned and switched his rifle to high power. A warning icon popped on his visor, alerting him to the power drain he placed on the system. The batteries on their gauss rifles would run dry after ten shots. They carried spare batteries, but not enough for a prolonged fight.
A threat icon on his visor’s mini-map, fed to him by the Marines watching the drone, remained steady. They moved another two hundred meters toward the looming tower, and the threat icon faded away.
“We’re out of IR range. Stay sharp,” Cortaro said.
They came up to a wide intersection, the road twisted and broken. Hunks of solar-panel glass that made up the road had melted, like a flash-frozen lava flow.
Walsh used a mirror to look around the corner, then sprinted across the roadway. He was halfway across when he did a double take at something in the debris. He got to the other side and pointed to what he’d seen.
“Sir, there’s an armor suit in the road,” Walsh said over the IR.
“I’ll look it over. Leapfrog me,” Hale said. He sprinted across the road and vaulted over a lump of panel glass into a depression. An armored hand and forearm stuck up from the dirt, bent into a claw. Hale swept dirt away and found the shoulder and unit patch. He recognized the worn insignia instantly, the fleur-de-lis over an eight-pointed shield and the words Toujours Pret—Always Ready. The armor belonged to the 2nd Dragoons, a unit that had served the United States of America and the Atlantic Union for over two centuries.
He ran his hands under the shoulder joint and found a button, right where it should be. A panel popped open on the shoulder, a blank screen underneath it. If the suit had power, the screen would have lit with the pilot’s vital signs. Hale grabbed a wire from his helmet and was about to connect it into the screen’s port when
he told himself, No, this isn’t my mission. There was no way the pilot could still be alive. Even with the coma protocols, the womb could keep the pilot alive for only a few days at best. Hale hoped the pilot died quickly and not screaming inside the suit. A shiver passed through Hale and he crossed the road.
“Anything?” Walsh asked as his hand went to a laser cutter locked to his thigh. The cutter could open the suit’s armor like a tin can if needed, but it would take time.
“No power, not worth the risk to have a loose EM broadcast either,” Hale said.
Standish, the point man, held up a fist and the team froze in place.
“Contact, one drone, two hundred meters,” Standish said.
The drone descended from an upper level of the Euskal Tower, its stalks bent in half and sunk into the body. It floated to a few feet above the road and zipped around the corner, out of sight from the Marines.
“There any other way into that tower?” Hale asked Stacey.
“I’m fresh out of secret passages,” she said.
“It didn’t notice us from this distance. Maybe we can sneak past it,” Cortaro said.
“If not…,” Franklin said, patting his Gustav.
The Marines continued past the remnants of a bank, the vault door perforated with holes. They came to a wide boulevard running past the Euskal Tower, a hundred meters bereft of cover and concealment. The double doors to the tower hung from their hinges.
Hale peeked around the corner, searching for the drone.
A buzz rattled the walls of the bank.
Standish and Franklin jumped away from the building like it was on fire, scanning the sky with their weapons.
“Christ, that’s close,” Standish said.
“Go, now!” Hale said and then tore across the road, dodging stopped cars and leaping over a rail guard. His lungs burned as his sprint brought him to the tower’s entrance. He leaned back and slid into the tower, his Marines right behind him. Torni had thrown Stacey over her shoulder and carried her across the road.
There was no sign of the drone, nothing but labored breathing over the IR.
