by Richard Fox
Cortaro called out the time and Hale removed his blindfold.
“Not bad, sir,” Cortaro said.
Elias, legs folded into travel mode, let loose a grunt—which Hale knew was high praise. The two Marines wore their combat armor, helmets resting on the waist-high ledge separating them from the VR firing range. A foot beyond the ledge, the ship looked like a purgatorial mass of gray, the default projection before the shooters loaded up firing scenarios from a simple known-distance range on the green fields of Ft. Benning to the orange skies and methane lakes of Titan.
“How much longer are we going to wait for this guy?” Cortaro asked. He sat on the pallet of ammo cases that had been delivered to the Breitenfeld a few hours ago, along with strict instructions not to open the cases until they’d received instruction from a specialist…who was supposed to have joined them fifteen minutes ago.
“This is a waste of time. Does the Ibarra Corp really think we can’t figure out how to use bullets?” Elias added.
“Captain Valdar said hurry up and get down here. We did and now we wait. Some things in the Marine Corps won’t ever change, even after the apocalypse,” Hale said.
The VR room snapped from gray to void black. A tall Nordic man’s projection, wavering around the edges, came into being.
“Ah, Lieutenant Hale. I didn’t think I’d see you again, but this week’s been full of surprises, hasn’t it?” Thorsson said. “Sorry I was late, some training issues on the Tarawa.”
“You’re taking away our training time. What are you going to tell us about bullets beyond ‘put them in the bad guys until they stop moving’?” Cortaro asked.
“Don’t call them bullets. They are works of art. Please, open the case,” Thorsson said. The locks on the cases switched from red to green with a click.
Cortaro opened a case and pulled out a belt of silver-gray bullets, their surfaces riven with fractals.
“You’re holding specially treated quadrium-jacketed tungsten rounds, similar to your normal gauss bolts but these do amazing things when accelerated to high speed,” Thorsson said.
Hale brought the belt to his face for closer inspection; the bullets smelled of ozone and burning hair.
“What’s quadrium?” Hale asked.
“An isotope of hydrogen that is a pain in the ass to manufacture and the most expensive substance in the solar system. Each round costs the Ibarra Corp almost four million dollars. Not that money means anything anymore. Now—the fun part!” Thorsson reached down and picked up a gauss rifle within his VR environment. He turned around and a floating Xaros drone materialized ten meters away from him.
Thorsson fired at the drone and lightning erupted around his target. The lighting arced back against the drone and it fell to the ground, smoking.
“I never get tired of that!” Thorsson said.
“Did you kill it?” Hale asked.
“No, as you see, the drone hasn’t disintegrated. The quadrium disrupts the drones, stuns them. Then….” A mech suit’s arm materialized next to Thorsson, a double-barreled gun mounted on its forearm. Two rounds fired from the gun, each shot so close it almost melded into a single sound.
The drone jerked and cracked open, the pyrite in the shell spilling out. The drone blinked out of existence.
“Where do I get one of those?” Elias asked, pointing to the gun that finished off the drone.
“The schematics are already with your ship’s 3-D printing shop and should be ready soon. The first shot cracks the shell. The second cracks the nut inside. Now, the Q-rounds require a great deal of power to activate. You’ll have to hot shot your gauss rifles,” Thorsson said.
“One shot per battery? Not a lot of room for error,” Hale said.
“You see that case of Q-rounds? That is it, jarhead. We divvied them up across the fleet but there will be no resupply. Don’t miss. I’ll leave a VR simulation of Xaros drones and proxy Q-rounds so you can practice.” Thorsson checked his watch and sighed. “More ships, more Marines.” His projection blinked away.
Cortaro lifted another belt of rounds from a case and twisted them like a wind chime.
Thorsson snapped back into reality.
“Oh, and they’re a little radioactive. Don’t handle them for too long if you have exposed skin or are outside your void suits.” Thorsson vanished again.
Cortaro gently but quickly replaced the belt.
“We’ve got something now,” Elias said.
“Still isn’t much. What will kill these things? The anti-armor grenades can crack them but getting them to connect is iffy. High-velocity gauss rounds will do it but that takes several hits and they move damn fast. The rail guns will do the trick but the rate of fire is too low to take out the small ones…,” Hale said, his mind trying to dissect the tactical problem.
“It takes…two and a half tons of force to crack the shells, maybe a bit less,” Elias said. “Maybe there’s a way to save a few Q-rounds.” Elias raised an arm and the mechanical hand retracted into the forearm. A spike slid out and replaced the hand, nearly the length of Hale’s arm.
“This is for enemy armor.” The spike retracted into the housing, then shot forward like a piston’s cylinder, stopping with a clang that rang Hale’s ears with tinnitus. “If high-powered gauss rounds will crack them, this will do the trick too.”
“You want to stab them to death?” Hale asked. “This is a void fight in the twenty-first century, not the Battle of Agincourt.”
“Albrecht said the drones boarded ships, said he heard them slaughtering the crew. You want to fire those Q-rounds or high-powered gauss shots inside the ship?” Elias said.
Hale crossed his arms and leaned against the VR shelf. He was in charge of shipboard defense now and he felt shame for not seeing this problem before Elias did.
“Sir, why don’t we get our Marines over here? See what we can figure out together,” Cortaro said.
“Right, good idea. Elias, bring up the rest of the armor.”
“They’re already on their way.”
****
Fourteen Marines. Three suits of armor. That was all Hale had left to command. The Marines knelt and stood in groups of four arrayed across the VR shooting range. Franklin fired a single Q-round into the starry void simulation. The range rifle, designed to simulate the recoil, slammed into Franklin’s shoulder like he was firing an elephant gun. Standish and Cortaro put high-powered gauss rounds into the drone crippled by Franklin’s hit and their target disintegrated.
Franklin exchanged his spent rifle for a fully charged weapon with Torni, who swapped out the battery almost as fast as Franklin could engage another target.
Back when warships plied the seas by sail, American Marines would send their best shots into the crow’s nest on top of the masts to pick off enemy officers during close-in fights. How little things have changed, Hale thought.
The second and third group of Marines repeated the firing drill.
“We can kill fifteen drones a minute like this,” Cortaro said.
“Let’s hope the drones are polite enough to come at us a few at a time,” Hale said.
“Sir? I was thinking,” Standish said. He stood up from his firing line and watched as Elias swung his spike into a holographic drone.
“Now we’re in trouble,” Torni said.
“You ever work on a cattle ranch? Because when it was time to slaughter a cow, we had to kill them in a way that was humane and not so messy—stay with me,” he added quickly when he saw Cortaro frown. “We used pneumatic bolts attached to an air tank, called a captive bolt gun. Whack! Right on the cattle’s forehead and they’re out for good,” Standish said.
“Cut to the chase before I think you’re just goldbricking,” Cortaro said.
“We can’t use the armor’s spikes all over the ship. They won’t fit. But we could make a bolt gun like that, small enough to carry but with enough force to get the job done. Stun the drones with the Q-rounds and finish them off with the bolts,” Standish said.<
br />
Hale thought for a moment.
“I hate to say it, but he might have a good idea,” Hale said. “Get a design together in the machine shop and load up the plans to the fleet net. The 3-D printers shouldn’t have a problem replicating whatever you come up with.”
A peal of thunder burst from the trio of suits at the end of the line.
Elias stood at full height, both arms extending into the VR field. His right arm bore the holographic double-barreled gun Thorsson had shown them; his left arm had a miniature version of the rail gun he carried on his back mounted on it, also a hologram.
An ammo canister fed Q-rounds into the rail gun, which sent the Q-rounds sizzling through the air and into drones up to five hundred meters downrange. Elias’ right arm engaged drones bearing down on the firing line.
“Are you dual targeting?” Hale asked.
A drone swept in and vanished into the edge of the VR field.
“Yes,” Elias said, “works best when I’m not distracted.”
Another suit, both arms carrying the double-barreled gauss guns, fired. Each gun fired on separate targets, winnowing the approaching swarm with marked efficiency. The suit’s rate of fire stopped suddenly and the suit stepped back from the line. Its metal hands clamped against its head sensors as if it had a sudden migraine.
“He’s redlined, isn’t he?” Hale demanded. The link between pilot and armor put a tremendous strain on the pilot’s nervous system and there were limits to what the human brain could handle. Hale’s selection training at Ft. Knox had shown more than one vid of armor pilots reduced to vegetables from overloading their nervous systems by pushing their suits beyond the bounds of their design.
“He’ll be fine,” Elias said. “Leave our methods to us. It doesn’t concern you.”
“The hell it doesn’t. I need you all in this fight and you’re no good to anyone if you burn yourself out before the battle even starts,” Hale said.
Elias growled and bent at the waist, lowering his suit’s head level with Hale’s. Hale didn’t flinch as he locked eyes with the suit’s lenses.
“We are armor.” Elias slammed a fist against his chest with the clang of a tolling bell. “We are the Iron Hearts. We are the anvil that will break our foe.”
“And we fight as one,” Hale said, finishing the creed. “I may not have my plugs, Elias, but we will fight as one. Don’t burn yourself out.”
“This is Ragnarok, Hale. Armageddon. We can leave nothing on the table. No sacrifice is too great,” Elias said.
“Only if we lose, and I don’t plan on packing it in just yet. We will need armor after this battle.”
The three suits remained silent but their arms and heads moved and gestured in conversation. Elias brought a fist up parallel to his shoulder; the old hand signal for “stop.”
“We won’t redline in training. No restraint in battle,” Elias said.
Hale, who had enough experience to know when he couldn’t push an argument any further—and that Elias could easily squish his head like a grape—nodded in agreement.
CHAPTER 9
Valdar moved the scope down the Virginia coastline. Past Mobjack Bay where he’d taught his boys to sail. Past the York River and onto the now bare isthmus where Newport News used to be. His mind traced where Interstate 664 had crossed the James River and he zoomed in on the lakeshore where his home should have been.
The house was gone, replaced by scrub forest reclaiming the neighborhood. Another decade of growth and there would be no sign that humanity had ever lived there.
“Sir?” Ericson said. “They’re about to start.”
Valdar sent the scope’s view over the Atlantic and stood up. He straightened his uniform and walked over to the tactical table where Hale, Durand and his senior officers waited for him.
Valdar took his place catty-corner to the end of the table; he wasn’t the focus of this briefing.
The holo display in the center of the table lit up and a mass of light swirled above it, coalescing into Ceres, slowly rotating within its artificial rings. The crown of thorns over its north pole hung motionless.
Admiral Garrett’s hologram appeared at the end of the table.
“All right, let’s get this started,” Garrett said.
The image of Ceres shrank and the fleet’s icons appeared at the far edge of the projection.
“We’re eight hours from the target, the Xaros gate designated Objective Crucible,” Garrett said. “The Xaros have been busy since we broke clear of our moorings. Crucible is better defended now than when we first saw it. See for yourself.”
The holo changed to the Crucible. Four carrier-sized ships, resembling the much bigger brother of the Xaros gun that destroyed the Tucson, surrounded the alien star gate.
“I’ll let our resident expert explain this,” Garrett said. His image switched to Stacey, her face impassive.
“The Xaros drones extracting omnium from within Ceres combined into these defense platforms in the last half hour. Joining is a significant drain on their pyrite cores, so we won’t likely see them morph into something larger or more maneuverable,” Stacey said. Her voice was steady but seemed to originate from somewhere far deep within her.
“Fixed defenses, this fight will be an assault, not a meeting engagement like we’d thought,” Garrett said.
“Why aren’t they coming for us? They know our rail batteries could hit a stationary target from here,” asked the captain of the Falklands, a Sikh man wearing the traditional turban, speaking with a heavy English accent.
“Because of this.” Garrett tapped at his table and a swarm of drones, thousands strong, filled the projection. “This is every single drone from Earth and Luna. Once the last drone caught up with the swarm, it started accelerating. Massing against a foe seems to be their preferred tactic.” The projection shifted; the mass of drones were gaining on the fleet. A convergence point lay ahead of the fleet, well short of Ceres.
The Breitenfeld’s officers traded worried glances. The pursuit swarm looked like more than the fleet could handle.
“We prepared for this,” Stacey said. The asteroid home to Thorsson and his hidden factory popped onto the projection, just ahead of the swarm. “The asteroid is lined with graphene-doped quadrium, which has a number of unique properties your science will appreciate once your knowledge of quantum mechanics advances for another thousand years. Namely, the Xaros sensors can’t penetrate it, which is why they didn’t detect the cache within this asteroid or my—excuse me, the probe’s—little hiding place beneath Euskal Tower.
“When you bombard quadrium with just the right kind of graviton particle, you get an incredibly strong gravity well in a localized space—a localized space that the swarm will completely enter in just a few seconds,” she said.
The plot of the swarm bent toward the asteroid and swirled into it like ships sucked into a whirlpool. Debris spat away from the rock and it vanished from the plot, along with the entire swarm.
“The drones are tough, but even they will be ripped apart by a quantum singularity. A nice trick if I do say so myself,” Stacey said.
“She acting funny to you?” Durand whispered to Hale, who nodded.
“Why didn’t we use that weapon against the Crucible?” Valdar asked Garrett.
“We need the Crucible intact,” Stacey answered. “Once we can use it, we’ll either escape from this solar system or bring in reinforcements to defend it. Even if we win this day, the Xaros have already sent out a speed-of-light distress signal. The nearest Xaros drone is six light years away at Barnard’s star. The drone in that system will replicate and bring another swarm equal to the one that wiped out Earth.”
“Are we going to get any good news today?” Hale asked under his breath.
“The rate of fire from the orbitals is…a challenge,” Garrett said.
A sped-up simulation of the fleet approaching the Crucible ran; the four orbitals destroyed the fleet within a half hour. Variations of the simulation en
ded the same way.
Valdar tugged at his mustache as he watched the fleet’s demise over and over again. His eyes widened with an idea and he co-opted the display to run his own simulation.
“Sir, this is Captain Valdar of the Breitenfeld. I think we’re looking at this problem the wrong way.”
Garrett looked right at Valdar.
“I’m open to suggestions,” the admiral said.
****
Torni shifted her knee against the hull of the civilian luxury liner and locked her knee armor to the metal plating. She pressed the arc welder against the launch rails she and Standish had been working on for the last thirty minutes.
Standish, welding on the opposite side of Torni, glanced up at the dark gray orb of Ceres, so close it was the same size as a penny held at arm’s length. The glint of drop ship engines burning away from the cluster of luxury liners looked like a line of orderly comets.
“I heard some of the civilians were mad, mad, mad about losing their comfy bunks,” Standish said. He brought his forearm up to wipe his brow and pressed it against his helmet uselessly. “Heard the Marines on the Tarawa had to crack a few skulls to get a couple civvies out.”
“Entitled bunch of progs. Figured they’d all want off as soon as they knew what we were going to do with their ships. Good thing there aren’t any courts to issue injunctions,” Torni said in between zaps from her welder.
“Did we bring any lawyers?” Standish asked.
They both paused their work and shrugged in unison.
“Makes you wonder, don’t it?” Standish asked.
“Wonder how you can talk so damn much?”
“No, wonder why Ibarra decided to make us his fleet. Guy had sixty years, right? Sixty years to screw around with politics and economies. He invented the first real graphene battery—made a fortune—and had some super alien computer to help him out. So why didn’t he get the Chinese in on his plan? They were a hell of a lot more organized. Not a lot of dissent in their politics, kind of deal. I swear we couldn’t get five guys and gals on the Breit to agree on pizza toppings.”
