“Omelet, it’s Esau.”
“The fucking building is moving!” Gabriel barked into the comms.
“Yeah, that’s what one of the prisoners just told us,” Esau stated. “Operation Mincemeat is what was planned in case they lost Mauser Tower. They’re gonna bring it down on top of everyone.”
“We should have executed more of their senior officers,” Gabriel grumbled. “I can’t get Dry Burn, so I have no idea if they cleared their floors or not.”
“I had him earlier,” Esau replied. “He took the remainder of his squad into an underground bunker beneath the tower to search for survivors. Apparently he and his squad left quite a mess behind on the lower floors. Haven’t heard from him since.”
“Get him out of here,” Gabriel ordered.
“His comms are down, Gabe,” Esau informed him. “There’s no way I can reach him in time. Being underground must be hampering the comms. Stupid. It can reach all the way into orbit, but a few feet below ground? Nope.”
Gabriel brought up the schematics of the tower once more and, sure enough, there was a network of underground tunnels expanding outward from the facility. He zoomed out and realized it overlaid perfectly with Marigold City’s underground transportation system. He mapped it further out and had a terrifying moment of panic.
“Esau, where do all the civilians on Solomon go in the event of an alien attack or something?” Gabriel asked his friend.
“I don’t know,” Esau replied. “Some kind of underground bunker in the cities. Never had to use them, though. Why?”
“Here on Belleza Sutil, we have reinforced basements in our homes that protect us from debris if we get hit,” Gabriel explained. “In the larger cities, they use the underground transportation tunnels. They make excellent bomb shelters, and the civilian populace can easily make it to them in a few short minutes. I noticed we haven’t seen too many civilians around. That tells me they’re in the underground shelters.”
A third explosion rocked the tower, and Gabriel dropped to one knee as the swaying grew worse. He consulted the suit, and it informed him the likelihood of the building toppling was growing with each passing second. That’s not good, he thought as another rumble was detected by the suit. This one was deeper in the building, and while it wasn’t as sharp as the initial explosions, it continued.
“Esau, you see what’s hitting the tower?”
“Roger that, Omelet. They’re hammering the southeast corner of the building with railguns,” the regimental commander responded. “We’re trying to isolate and destroy them now, but the Goliaths are covering each other. I eyeball eight tanks at the moment, and what looks like four company-sized clusters of marines backing them up. You need to get out of that tower right now.”
“They’re about to drop this tower on a million people hiding below,” Gabriel realized in horror. “Esau, we gotta get those civilians out of the subway!”
“How? How do you propose moving a million people in thirty seconds?”
“I don’t know,” Gabriel admitted as he walked to the busted windows. He looked down and saw the cluster of tanks nearby, putting shots into the building. “If we could get in contact with Dry Burn and his squad, perhaps they could move people. Wait…this is pretty high up. Those tanks are putting a lot of pressure on that intersection with their weight… I may have an idea.”
“What’s that?” Esau asked, curious.
“Something utterly stupid,” Gabriel replied as he began to run the sim on his screen. “Try to get people clear of the building. If those tanks bring it down, a lot of innocents are going to die.”
“Gabe, you didn’t tell me what you’re planning,” Esau reminded him.
“I did that for a reason,” Gabriel stated, and without another word, leapt out the window.
Each floor of the beautifully designed Mauser Tower was over three meters high, and with an additional meter between each floor for added noise dampening, it rose majestically above the rest of Marigold City. With the comms signal booster on top, the overall height of the building was well over two hundred meters. It didn’t feature an observation deck, which made it unique—it was the only skyscraper in the entire Dominion that didn’t have one.
All this passed through Gabriel’s head as he began his fall. His suit, despite being heavier than a normal person, wouldn’t have enough time to reach terminal velocity on its own, and falling directly down would eventually cause him to crash into the side of the building. He couldn’t afford the time, so he activated his jump jets and pushed away from the building. Changing his body’s position, he powered up the rockets to full and changed his trajectory.
The human body typically needed about twelve seconds to reach terminal velocity while falling. Gabriel achieved it in two. Unfortunately, he hit the ground at precisely that moment.
The math had been perfect, courtesy of the suit’s Leviathan cortex. Gabriel landed in the midst of the Goliath tanks while moving in excess of ninety kilometers per second. A small part of this was due to his normal freefall weight. Most of it, though, was due to the jump jets on the Darksuit propelling him downward. Instead of slowing his fall, as they were designed to do, they increased it exponentially.
Knowing in advance the fall would more than likely knock him unconscious, Gabriel had tossed all his anti-personnel grenades the moment he’d cleared the window. Forty small white phosphorous “bangers” fell behind him, not nearly fast enough to match his speed. These beautiful black balls of death and doom arced gracefully through the air, their approach catching the marines completely unaware. While the bangers wouldn’t do much to the tanks, the infantrymen guarding them were completely exposed, and an already bad day got decidedly worse.
When Gabriel landed on the concrete, the force of the impact actually lifted the seventy-ton Goliath tank next to him off the ground a few inches. The infantrymen next to the massive tank were knocked over as well. While not nearly as heavy as the average Wraith suit, a Darksuit still weighed enough to cause problems for anything nearby when moving at a high enough velocity. In this case, he left a five-meter-wide crater when he landed.
The Darksuit was in a bind. Every program in the cortex demanded that it slow down before approaching the concrete, yet the human controller inside had overridden normal safety precautions. Instead of fighting the commands, the suit readied the gel to transfer all the impending kinetic energy into something useful. This meant the reactive armor which protected the human inside received a massive boost of energy upon impact. Unfortunately, there was nowhere for all the excess to go, so the suit, out of options, allowed the armor to release all the kinetic energy into the very ground it had just landed upon.
The concrete, already destroyed by the Darksuit’s initial impact, had nothing left to offer. The explosive release of kinetic energy from the impact created a much larger hole in the ground. A large open area, approximately twenty meters below the surface of the road, appeared as the reinforced structure of the street failed catastrophically. The crater widened quickly, and a massive sinkhole formed. All eight of the Goliath tanks suddenly disappeared, swallowed whole, as the sinkhole grew at a terrifying rate. The nearby marines, who believed they’d gotten lucky, in that they’d narrowly avoided the crater, suddenly recognized the bangers that landed in their midst. The white phosphorous grenades exploded, and men screamed as the powdery substance got into their clothing and began to burn them. Those unfortunates who hadn’t been wearing goggles were instantly blinded as particles of the white phosphorous got into their eyes. They all died horribly, and in agony. Those who survived again believed they were lucky. However, they had only a few minutes more before they, too, died in a horrific manner.
Gabriel would have smiled, knowing the carnage he had caused. Unfortunately, he was unconscious and partially buried beneath two of the ruined tanks that had fallen into the massive sinkhole he’d created.
It was at this moment that the building, having suffered irreparable damage from the Go
liath tanks, fell. The support structures in the southeast corner failed completely, and while the design of the Mauser Tower was supposed to prevent this from occurring, there had simply been too much damage. It began slowly—a slight tilt—as the weight shifted to where the missing support beams had kept it level. Once momentum was gained, structural failure was inevitable. The tower tipped, then fell. A nearby building half the height of the Mauser Tower slowed the fall, and quite possibly saved the civilians hiding underground.
Slamming into the main street where fighting was still taking place, it wiped out over four hundred Wraiths, thousands of civilians, and the remaining marines and their tanks. While a staggering death toll, it was far lower than it could have been. Fortune smiled upon the innocents in the underground tunnels that day. Most of those who ran managed to find their way out of the subway tunnels eventually, through various lines that ran to different parts of the city. Others simply walked until they reached the end, complaining the entire time. Though even they were forced to admit it was a far better fate than dying.
The siege of Marigold City had ended; the civil war, however, was only beginning throughout the rest of the Dominion.
* * * * *
Chapter Six
Aurelia
For the first time in a long while, Aurelia was enjoying being a child. The girl might not have looked that young, due to the experimentation she’d gone through while in the womb and later as an infant, but she still retained a lot of the behavior and quirks of one. Which meant playtime, when she could find it, was worth more to her than almost anything else. Now she had the time, as well as potential partners, to play all sorts of games. Her favorite was termed “operational combat maneuvers” by Collyn, though for eons it had gone by something else.
Thanks to Sfyri, the game of hide-and-seek among the female Wraiths tasked with watching Aurelia had gotten much more exciting. The suit, which seemed tailor-made for Aurelia, caused a massive shock to those who had remained behind with her on Solomon. That soon changed to nervousness as the Wraiths realized nobody seemed to know where the suit had come from. The AI inside couldn’t help, since it contained no records of the time before Aurelia had accidently turned it on.
More digging on the ’net had turned up nothing. None of the Wraiths could determine why there was a Wraith suit prototype on their planet, especially given that all suits were constructed on Anvil. A few of the Wraiths, including Collyn, suggested it had been placed down there years before and forgotten as the Third Regiment had been wiped out at Ibliss. However, without proof, they could only imagine why the suit had been left in the abandoned part of the base. Especially since it was in an area that hadn’t been used in over a decade.
There was a second and unforeseen problem they hadn’t anticipated: Aurelia didn’t like to take the suit off. The AI and the little girl had bonded, and while Collyn, as ranking Wraith on the base, could’ve ordered her to exit the suit, nobody knew precisely what would happen if Aurelia grew angry. The legend of the exploding goat was whispered among the Imperfects whenever Aurelia wasn’t around. No one knew if it was true, having heard the story second-hand from Christine before the DIB agent had left the planet.
Nobody was willing to take the risk of finding out if the girl could make goats explode, so Aurelia received permission to keep the suit on as long as she wanted. Which apparently was all the time, as Collyn and the others would come to discover rather quickly. The little girl enjoyed wearing the suit far more than even the most dedicated of Wraiths, and it showed, as the only time she took it off was for bath and bedtime. Even that was oftentimes a small battle, since, like most children, Aurelia didn’t like to interrupt playtime with bath time. Especially since said child looked more like a teenager and was in a technologically advanced suit of armor.
Instead of stopping her or trying to force the girl to do anything that would make her upset, Collyn had simply made the game of hide-and-seek grander by taking them outside to the proving grounds, but with additional rules. The idea of keeping the young girl busy and occupied so she couldn’t get into any further trouble wasn’t a new one. “Keep the child occupied” was one of the hardest chores for parents, going back thousands of years. Collyn, who’d grown up in a Holding Home and didn’t remember her parents, did an admirable job of getting Aurelia to do as she was told. Bribery was expected, and obedience was rewarded with extra time in the suit. Hence, playtime in the Boneyard.
Out on the base’s proving grounds, known locally as the Boneyard, hundreds of obstacles were situated around a fifty-acre area, each serving both as obstacles and potential cover in a fight. The Wraith suits were bulky and slow compared to a Darksuit. The new suit made a Darksuit look clunky in comparison, which gave the Wraiths some serious training as they tried to “find” Aurelia.
The women who’d decided to keep an eye on Aurelia had been dubbed the “Shiva” squad by the remaining Wraiths on base. Instead of being insulted, they took the name and ran with it. Indeed, as the results soon began to show, Shiva squad’s training with Aurelia had given them a much deeper tactical understanding of how to maneuver against a tricky opponent, as well as working together as a unit. Trickery was not a Wraith’s normal forte, and Aurelia, they all would attest in private, was the trickiest girl around.
Aurelia sprinted to one of the smaller bunkers, a concrete hole only two meters high and two wide. It typically offered no chance of concealment for a Wraith, but for Aurelia and her special suit, it was more than enough. She could feel the others around her, corralling her. It was getting tight, as the Wraiths worked together to trap her in a smaller area. However, they didn’t quite have her yet, and she had no plans to let it happen.
Bending her legs, she leaped out from behind the concrete barrier and flipped over the dirt berm. The suit estimated her trajectory, and she tucked her legs. Her feet barely missed the lip of the berm as she flew through the air. The momentum took her into a roll, from which she popped up in a graceful manner. Sfyri helped anticipate the next move, and with the grace of a gymnast, the suit was moving once again. Aurelia sprinted toward one of the areas she’d identified as potentially good cover beforehand. It would be an ideal spot to lose her pursuers once again, since the area opened into six locations that made for amazing hiding places.
Unfortunately, another Wraith had the same idea, and Aurelia was tagged by Collyn. The experienced Wraith had managed to circle around Aurelia somehow and caught her just before she made it to the new zone. As programmed, the suit froze up when pressure was felt, and Aurelia crashed to the ground. She rolled, and Sfyri, realizing Aurelia was “out,” took the fall and turned it into a slide. There was no way for Aurelia to be hurt by the simple fall, but it was a bit jarring, to say the least. Crying out, Aurelia stopped and lay for a moment, upset she’d been caught. Slowly crawling to her feet, she turned to glare at Collyn.
“You cheated!” she accused the young woman in an angry tone. The helmet on Collyn’s head shifted to clear, so Aurelia followed her example and dropped hers completely.
“How did I cheat?” Collyn asked, a small smile on her lips. Aurelia’s arms crossed her chest, and she began to pout.
“I don’t know,” the little girl admitted sullenly. Her lower lip stuck out slightly. “But I know you did!”
“Of course I cheated,” Collyn answered in a calm voice. This shocked Aurelia enough that she was at a loss for words. Collyn continued, “In war, if you play fair, you die. It’s simple. The question you should ask—which I already asked you once, and is your problem to solve for the day—is how did I cheat?”
Aurelia looked at her for a moment, stumped. She really hadn’t thought that far ahead in her line of questioning.
“I know how she cheated,” Sfyri offered. Aurelia thought about letting the AI answer before she decided against it. She recognized the test Collyn had put in front of her.
“No, I need to figure it out for myself,” Aurelia muttered as she tried to remember everythin
g she’d read about the Wraiths during her time in the suit. It came to her in an instant, and a smile formed. “You used a dragonfly!”
“I did.” Collyn nodded, obviously pleased with the little girl. Aurelia smiled and enjoyed the small triumph. “It’s actually been following you around since we began. If you know what the enemy is doing the moment they’re doing it, and you understand their reasoning, you can figure out easily enough what’s going to happen next. You prepare for that, position yourself properly, then strike. They’ll never know what hit them. As you found out.”
“How’d you get so smart?” Aurelia asked as Sfyri located the miniscule reconnaissance drone for her. Sure enough, it hovered in the air less than three feet away. Sfyri sent out a querying ping at the pesky reconnaissance device. Upon being positively identified by the artificial intelligence, the dragonfly returned to Collyn’s suit and settled down in the wrist armor, recharging its batteries and awaiting the next deployment.
“Experience,” Collyn replied as other Wraiths joined them. The women stood silently in a half-circle around Collyn and Aurelia. “I’ve been a Wraith for ten years now. I’ve done hundreds of drops and fought in many skirmishes against the Abassi. My old regimental commander encouraged us to read in our downtime, so I did. I studied all types of warfare and philosophy. Being an Imperfect means society’s given up on us. It doesn’t mean I need to give up on myself, though.”
“Always keep learning.” Aurelia understood that part. It was one thing both her grandparents had told her. If the brain is active and constantly learning, it will never grow old, simply age. She hadn’t fully understood it then, but now it was pretty clear.
“Precisely.” Collyn nodded, a smile on her face. “Always keep learning. The minute your mind stops learning, it withers and begins to die. Life is just new experiences on a daily basis.”
Homeguard Page 10
