The Gates of Hell

by Chris Kennedy

  * * * * *

  First Steps by Richard Alan Chandler

  Kenneth Branson stood in the hot Texas sun watching the ship descend on the recently rededicated Houston Starport. The Cochkala freighter wasn’t one of the regularly scheduled ones, and Kenneth had lucked out and had been able to grab the new loader—trying to run a forklift in alien freighters was often an invitation to frustration or damage claims. The loader was a bipedal framework of steel bars and hydraulic rams. The new ones used batteries instead of propane engines—the aliens often complained about the smell of the exhaust, although compared to some of the things he’d smelled on those ships, Kenneth didn’t think they had any room for objections.

  The freighter settled down on the landing pad, and the cargo ramp descended. One of the Customs jerks was there to make the captain sign some paperwork, but after a very short conversation, he stalked off. The crew chief waved for the rest of them to get to work.

  Kenneth checked the straps holding his feet in the stirrups, pulled the crash cage down in front of himself, and cycled the joysticks to make sure all the controls were operating—standard procedure. He loved the loaders. Even the other cargo handlers who had more experience had to admit he was a natural with the machine. There was even talk of sending him to compete in the Heavy Equipment Rodeo in Dallas this fall. That would be fun.

  Thoughts of fun were dismissed, though, as a line of ambulances pulled up on the concrete apron, and a stream of men began descending the ramp. Human mercenaries returning from a contract; no wonder the ship wasn’t on the schedule. They looked pretty beaten up. Most of them were bandaged in some way or another. Others helped their buddies hobble down the ramp, while still more were carried to the ambulances on stretchers. There was some incredible medical tech out there in the Galactic Union, but none of it was specifically for Humans yet, and these men paid the price. As Kenneth walked the loader up to the ramp, one of the mercs came up to him full of long-stewing anger and got in his face, poking his arm though the cage and pointing at him. The man shouted, “You baggage monkeys better take good care of my men! You drop one, and so help me, I’ll kill you with my bare hands!”

  Another merc grabbed the first by the shoulder. “Come on, Sarge, leave him alone.”

  “I’m just sayin’…” the sergeant let the threat trail off.

  “I’ll do my best, sir,” Kenneth said to the back of the grumbling mercenary. He knew what he’d find at the top of the ramp—coffins, or body bags. He wasn’t quite prepared for so many of them, though. It was grim work, and by the time they finished filling the fourth baggage train, he realized this company had probably lost three quarters of its complement.

  The crates were easier to load into the trucks, but behind that was a load of loose equipment. A lot of rifles and such just thrown in a pile. That made Kenneth nervous, wondering if any of them were still loaded. The rest of the loading crew seemed to have no trouble just grabbing individual rifles and running them out to the truck, but the heavier stuff they left for him. He carefully clamped the manipulators around a huge pedestal-mounted 20mm Vulcan cannon and turned to walk down the ramp.

  At the bottom of the ramp were two men. He didn’t recognize the man in the suit, but the man in the uniform everybody knew, Colonel James E. Cartwright, commander of Cartwright’s Cavaliers. Whatever they were discussing, though, they were still blocking the ramp.

  “Uh, excuse me…”

  They both looked up the ramp at Kenneth and the loader. The man in the suit immediately stepped out of the way, but Col. Cartwright just looked at him, and then there was a gleam in his eye, and a smile grew on his face. Then he stepped out of the way, but he watched as the loader came down the ramp.

  “Say, son, could you stop there for a moment?”

  “Sure thing, Colonel Cartwright.”

  “How’s that thing work?”

  Kenneth put the loader through the motions, explaining how, when he lifted against the straps of the stirrup, the foot of the machine came up with it, automatically shifting weight to the opposite foot. Then he showed how the manipulators could move around based on how he moved the joysticks and switches on the panel in front of him.

  The colonel turned to the man in the suit. “What do you think, Jerry? What if we got some of these things and armored them up a bit? Then we could bring the big guns to those damned spiders.”

  “I dunno, sir,” said Jerry, “they probably aren’t designed with combat conditions in mind.”

  Cartwright walked around the loader, examining it. “What’s this thing called, son? Who makes it?”

  Kenneth had to look at the panel for the exact model number, since there was such a variety of equipment on site. “It’s a Mitsubishi HF-22A Heavy Frame Loader.” He pointed to the logo on the front, three red diamonds arranged radially to form an equilateral triangle.

  Cartwright continued to circle the machine. “Ripley? That you?”

  Kenneth leaned out through the bars and looked at the side of the cab. Dean Norton had struck again; most of the bright yellow panel had been pinstriped with a black marker, including—in beautifully rendered script—“Ripley,” styled like the name of a fighter pilot. Kenneth didn’t get the joke, but Dean insisted it was hilarious, and kept re-doing it every time the managers forced him to remove his handiwork. A shame, because he was actually quite talented.

  “No, sir, I’m Branson. Kenneth Branson.”

  “Well, thank you, Mister Branson. You’ve given me quite the idea to think about.”

  Kenneth finished loading the truck, and then of course there was an outbound cargo ship to load. 100 tons of frozen strawberries later, he was exhausted, and the loader barely had enough juice left to make it back to the charging station. He really didn’t think much about the encounter after that.

  * * *

  Dr. Paul Mauser, chief of Robotics Engineering at the Mitsubishi Heavy Industries complex just outside of Houston, clicked send on his critique of the company’s internal white paper on asteroid mining. As long as Earth was dependent on chemical rockets or on hiring alien shuttles at incredible expense, the effort was financially impractical. And hiring alien mining companies to do the entire job would basically bleed the planet dry. They were only interested in F11, virtually unknown in the Sol System, which was part of the reason Galactic civilization had passed humanity by for so long. Iron ore and rare earths couldn’t be produced in the quantities required to be profitable.

  No, if Earth was going to exploit her own system, she needed her own ships. But to get the fusion drive technology to do it, she needed credits. And right now, the only real source of credits was the mercenary trade, which converted Human bodies into capital at a ruinous rate. As for how MHI was going to get their hands on those credits, he didn’t have an answer. But at least he could design the robots to do the mining.

  The other answer that eluded him was how to design an automated cargo-handling system that could cope with the seemingly infinite variety of alien ships. Even their common designs had so many variables due to repairs, customization, and the sheer age of some ships. That’s what had made the Heavy Loaders such an instant hit, and why this facility had been built so close to Houston Starport. They could rapidly prototype and adapt the machines as needed. Specialization and customization had become his area of expertise, even as much as he hoped for a more universal solution.

  He pulled up the design files he’d requested on coal loaders. Those earth-moving machines were built so low to the ground the driver sat almost prone. They’d run into one race who—at only a meter tall—didn’t believe in wide-open cargo holds. He was looking for inspiration, but before he could really switch mental gears, an IM appeared on his screen. “Director Yashimoto wants to see you in his office immediately.” He sighed. It was too soon for Yashimoto to have actually read his e-mail, but that wouldn’t stop him from receiving his ire.

  * * *

  “Doctor Mauser. Good! Good! Come in. I was just telling Col
onel Cartwright here about the amazing work you’ve been doing with our Heavy Loader line. He’s very interested in having us do a project for him.” Yashimoto turned to the other man in his office. “Colonel, this is Paul Mauser, the lead engineer in our Research and Development department. If anyone can realize your vision, this is the man.”

  The twin shocks of the effusive praise from Yashimoto and the sheer presence of Cartwright left Paul speechless. Yoshihiro Yashimoto being anything but an ass could easily be attributable to the need to make a good impression, but Cartwright was more than just a folk hero, and the reality more than lived up to the legend.

  Cartwright walked over and shook Paul’s hand. “Nice to meet you.” Then he shoved a slate into his hands and started poking at it. Paul scrambled to keep a grip on the alien computing device worth more than his annual salary as the colonel cycled through a series of pictures of what looked like an HF-22A carrying a very, very big gun.

  * * *

  Jim Cartwright followed the bald and goateed engineer back to his office to discuss specifics. The place was full of odd little robot toys on shelves on the wall. Another shelf was lined with various engineering awards, and prominent in the middle was something that looked like an enormous nut.

  He was pulled back from the cacophony of colored plastic by a question that sounded like English, but didn’t really register.

  “So, basically we’re going more for Starship Troopers than Mobile Suit Gundam…”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Just trying to pin down the overall concept. One would be basically a powered suit of armor; the other encloses the pilot entirely inside the torso of the machine.”

  “Oh, the first one. The other one sounds like it would be big. And big things are easier to hit. You see, the Cavaliers specialize in heavy assault. We move fast, hit hard, and break through defenses. But infantry armor is only effective against small arms. And man-portable weapons are of limited effectiveness against some of the aliens and defenses we’re running up against.”

  “And tanks are out of the question.”

  “Too big, too slow, too vulnerable to terrain.”

  “And crew-served weapons like that one from the pictures you showed me aren’t mobile enough.”

  “We move them up behind our assault line to back up the infantry. Being able to deploy them faster, and to the front line, would make a huge difference.”

  “I can imagine. But the important question is, where are you willing to compromise?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “In engineering, we like to say, ‘You can have it Good, Fast, or Cheap, pick two.’ In terms of Good, I can see the ideal is something that fits like a suit of armor, lets a man run, jump and fly like Superman, and carry a ton of weapons. The technology isn’t even close to that. It would take time and considerable research to get there. I get the feeling you’d like a much more immediate solution. At the fast and cheap end of the line, we could take an HF-22A and weld on a bunch of armor and weapons mounts like something out of the A-Team. It won’t be perfect, but it will get the job done.”

  “Both,” the colonel said firmly, “I need something I can field right away. We’re getting slaughtered out there. Anything we can do to improve things for my men is worth doing. In the long term, yeah, I love what you’re saying, and we can work toward that. But unless something changes, I swear sometimes it looks like the Earth is going to run out of men who can fight.”

  * * *

  The conversation lasted hours, and in the end, Paul had more than enough information about the types of weapons systems the Cavaliers fielded, their tactics, and how the colonel would like to deploy them. Likewise, Paul had given him an understanding of the capabilities and limitations of what was physically possible, and even lent him Jim Smentowski’s seminal work on robotic combat so he would understand the trade-offs between speed, armor, weight, power density, and duration. (“Sounds a lot like that Good, Fast, Cheap thing.”) By the time the colonel left, Paul’s mind was entirely oriented on the problem, and he found himself sketching out a development program late into the night.

  Two days later, four brand-new HF-22A heavy loaders unloaded themselves from a flatbed trailer into the high-bay shop requisitioned for the project. Dr. Mauser addressed the collection of machinists and technicians recruited from the manufacturing line. “Gentlemen, we’ve been commissioned to transform these humble cargo loaders into the most advanced infantry fighting machine in the world. Something long in the annals of science fiction, we’re going to make them real. And in the process, we’re going to put Human mercs on an even footing with the nastiest aliens the universe can throw at us.”

  Fortunately, the loaders were already structurally strong enough to support the proposed weight of the armor. Armor plates of half-inch thick AR500 steel were delivered to the waterjet cutting shop and cut per the 3D model. Welders fashioned the parts into armor segments for each moving part of the loader, bolting them to standoffs welded directly to the loader’s frame. Technicians stripped out the cargo-handling gear from the arms and installed mounts for the guns that arrived on a pallet from the Cavaliers. Mauser and his assistants modified the control systems to actuate the guns and added small LCD screens for remote sight cameras mounted on the guns. It took almost an entire day to recalibrate the balance systems. The first prototype was quick and dirty, but it would work.

  * * *

  Three weeks into the project, Cartwright visited the bay to see how the project was progressing.

  “The biggest problem we’re having is battery life,” Mauser advised him. “Right now, without external power, we’re only getting about 4 hours of average walking life, and simulated combat maneuvering cuts that almost in half. I have some guys working on a modified troop carrier that can keep them topped off until they dismount, and a tow-behind diesel genset they can drop as needed. It’ll have to be modified to automatically change its operation for various atmospheres, but that should be doable.

  “Reloading the guns is another issue. Either they need an infantryman to assist, or the driver needs to pop the canopy to reach the gun.”

  “It needs a bayonet,” said Cartwright.

  Mauser cocked his head. “A bayonet?”

  “It needs to be able to fight when he’s out of ammunition until it can get resupplied.”

  One of the welders stood up a long, wickedly curved chunk of leftover armor steel. “I could whip something up out of this.”

  Cartwright grinned. “How soon before we can conduct some trials?”

  * * *

  Two weeks later at the Cavalier’s training grounds, Prototypes #2 and #3 stepped off the trailer, and the gawking began.

  “It’s huge.”

  “I don’t like it.”

  “It’s fucking awesome, I want one!”

  “Needs a bigger gun, and missiles, and a grenade launcher.”

  “Get a round into one of those view slots, and it’ll bounce around inside until it hits you.”

  Paul Mauser flitted nervously around the machines, checking in with the drivers. “It’s our first live fire exercise. You know how to calibrate the rangefinders, right?”

  “Stop worrying, Doc, we’ve got this.”

  Cartwright led Mauser up to the observation stand, and the demonstration began. First they demonstrated their range of motion, squatting down, standing, pointing the arms in all directions. Then they marched forward to the first firing line. Mauser clenched his fists, but the first salvo was right on target. The truck never had a chance. The machines made a remarkably stable fire platform.

  Next they demonstrated advancing fire, and the cargo-handling legacy of the machines showed as they maintained their aim. The pop-up targets were another story. Getting the guns shifting from target to target had some definite lag. That was an inherent problem with using joysticks to control the arm movement.

  The obstacle section was distinctly unimpressive, until one of the drivers improvised and bull
ed through the obstacles, knocking them over, and popped the blade to smash through a section of fencing. That elicited a cheer from the men observing.

  All Paul could see was a long list of things that needed fixing, so he was totally unprepared when the colonel turned to him and said, “We’ll take 20 to see how they operate, with a tentative contract for the 100 depending on performance.”

  * * *

  Production at the Houston facility was turned over 100% to manufacturing the new “Combat Assault System, Personal, Mk 1,” and even then it was strained to the limit. They’d never built loaders at anything near this rate before. Parts shortages were leaving a lot of units partially completed. Technicians installed systems whenever they could, which sometimes meant they had to be disassembled again when the needed parts finally came in, and this drove up costs. But that didn’t matter; the payment the Cavaliers had agreed to still made this ridiculously profitable for the MHI Cargo Handling Systems division. Yashimoto was positively giddy.

  After the initial demo, Dr. Mauser had addressed a few concerns. The first production units now sported auxiliary hardpoints on the shoulders where additional weapons could be mounted, either a “six pack” of surface-to-air missiles, or a 7.62mm minigun. A spall liner was added to the interior to catch the fragments of shrapnel that flake off at high velocity from the interior of armor plates even when they aren’t penetrated, and bulletproof prismatic periscopes were added to the view slots, much like the commander’s hatch of a tank. Additional changes were made to the control software to make it possible for the machines to actually jump. They couldn’t jump very high, but the fact they could jump at all owed greatly to the code they licensed from Boston Dynamics.