Hardwired Faith (The Exoskeleton Codex Book 1)

by Sean Kennedy

  It is night time.

  How can it be night? It was daylight a second ago...

  Unknown.

  Alien trees with barklike fish scales stretched hundreds of feet into the air, making him so much smaller than he was on the desert plain.

  Jacob stood motionless as the moisture washed him in the jungle’s breath. Droplets clawed away the red dust that still clung to his body, as mud globules fell away leaving long yellow slashes of his paint beneath.

  A wireframe model in his HUD showed a signal modulation in its spectrum analyzer. Something was being broadcast, and from the north, but the Hummingbird’s systems couldn't decipher it.

  “Any call sign, any call sign, this is Hummingbird 8, please respond.” Jacob sent out, but nothing returned.

  A diagnostic report flashed: his back had taken a bad hit, but the armor’s integrity was still intact. Beyond that, there were only scratches from the Legion’s rifle fire, along with the loss of ammo and rockets.

  Sensors read 95 degrees Fahrenheit with 100% humidity, and Jacob looked back to Phobos as the jungle whispered through the night. He took his first steps like a yellow beetle, his domed body reaching just above a low clinging mist.

  Where is the Kaizen outpost? He thought, and the HUD outlined an area a few hundred meters through the foliage, at what should be the edge of the great Mariner Canyon.

  Jacob moved through the jungle towards it. Shrill cries rose and fell just under the moisture’s falling hiss. A chorus of Martian life blended with the sounds of unseen organisms that watched the foreign beetle make its way across the jungle floor.

  He moved slowly, sweeping his legs to clear the vines in his path. Thick leaf litter crushed beneath him as he pressed on through the foliage.

  The Hummingbird had been designed for the harsh forces found on lifeless asteroid mines. His skin could take the strongest acids and most crippling atmospheric pressure any planet could offer, but it became obvious to Jacob that moving through the jungle was not part of the unit’s original design strategy.

  He pushed his way through the brush, slipping between long green blades snaking up towards the light as he approached the canopy’s edge. The tall grass made a cushion of green, taking some of his delta wing weight. He swam through the final emerald strands and emerged on a broken piece of tawny bedrock jutting from a jagged cliff at the edge of the world.

  He stood where the HUD indicated the Kaizen base should be, but there was no trace of it. Calls of life heralded the dawn as a deep purple grew brighter around the dimming stars.The calls of Martian life heralded the dawn as a deep purple grew brighter around the dimming stars. The first sunbeams from the great golden orb on the horizon split the sky and danced through the great valley, creating a shifting cascade of rainbows in the morning mist.

  As alien insects flexed their wings, Jacob felt the sun's warmth on his synthetic skin. In the space of a gasp, the day’s performance began anew. Long serpents with great leathery wings swam just above the canopy, hunting near the valley’s great ocean shore far below.

  Another wireless blast slashed the spectrum as it skipped along the valley walls. The HUD marked its broadcast location beyond the wedged horizon.

  Jacob flexed his wings and twin turbines extended from their shrouds in what remained of the Hummingbird’s armored back. The blades roared as Jacob stretched into a systems check, reaching through synthetic nerves to feel from the edges of his mono-blades to the tips of his muddy clawed feet.

  He took two sprung steps and vaulted over the cliff into the the vastness of the canyon. The turbine fans pushed him away and Jacob gave himself to the rapture of flight.

  Speeding down the canopy slopes towards the distant waters, the cool morning poured through his senses. Jacob skipped along the treetops, chasing the first golden rays of the sun.

  Bright red flashes targeted wary creatures as Jacob flew by. When he saw them, he pushed himself higher above the jungle canopy. There was no sense in terrifying the locals, and no telling what other predators, might have evolved below the emerald waves.

  The Hummingbird leveled its descent as the water’s surface rushed to greet him. The green abyss fell away as Jacob sped from the jungle shore. An oxygen rich atmosphere warmed as winds swept the valley, making rippling waves on the valley’s sea that sparkles in the morning light.

  The wireless transmission came in short bursts over the next hour as Jacob flew over the valley’s ocean. He followed the shoreline as the HUD continued to chase the multi-spectrum broadcast.

  During each transmission, Jacob focused his neural resources to decipher the signal, and each time it came back with nothing. Jacob channeled his frustration into speed, racing towards the immense valley’s broken horizon.

  Atmospheric analysis of the wind detected smoke in the faintest trace parts per million, with just the right chemical signature to give the taint of war. Far ahead, Jacob saw the valley’s great jungle had been clear-cut, slashed away leaving only torn wounds in the red soil, like blood pooling in great stump craters. A battlefield’s tendrils replaced the rich jungle kingdom with vicious and deadly injuries.

  His optics strained, and in the distance the HUD’s red targeting brackets closed in on a great fallen tree, floating far out beyond the water's edge.

  A humongous insectlike beast, with a sickly blue exoskeleton and terrible pinchers, stood revealing itself to the dawn. The HUD measured its bulbous length at six meters, with thick mandibles on its ugly flat head and heavy clawed arms with the dried blood of battle still on them.

  Its body was stark, an alien contrast with the great tree it stood on, and Jacob knew this creature was just as foreign to this world as he was.

  The HUD targeted hundreds more of these beings moving in the burning jungle wreckage, but no two were alike. Some worked with great pinching claws to shear the forest, while other giant transporters formed great trains to carrying the planet's biomass up and over the canyon’s ridge.

  The burst transmission came again, and this time the Hummingbird caught the location, magnifying an area of shoreline in a flashing triangle. The giant alien insects either didn’t notice him or didn’t care as Jacob angled himself towards the transmission source.

  As he scanned the destruction, shapes of ruined structures emerged from the wasteland. Polished stone lay smashed and scattered on the sculpted walkways that weaved through a shattered cyclopean city. Fires still belched smoke into the morning air, as broken spires and the impossible arches of a once great civilization lay in the ravaged landscape of war.

  A great carved jetty, like a fallen obelisk, stretched over a thousand yards into the water as a single piece of stone. Jacob thought it might be some kind of sculpted dock, but he could see no floating vessels, nor any way for them to be tethered.

  He landed on the deep red rock and took in the destroyed Martian city as his turbines retracted into their armored shroud. His optics magnified the shore, and Jacob watched the invading insects pick through the wasted civilization.

  Jacob wondered, and then saw in his HUD, projections of the city before any of this had happened. This had been a civilization of temples, with architecture designed in obvious harmony with the Martian jungle.

  This place was not long destroyed, and the translucent insectoids were busy harvesting, shifting through the rubble to gather every trace of organic life.

  The HUD drew his vision to two great scorpionlike creatures, lifting tons of debris from a collapsed building with their vicious claws. As Jacob watched, a third dragged a body into the morning light. It was human, or at least more humanoid than the semi-clear crustacean that pulled the corpse from the rubble.

  The twelve-foot tall body of a female, her pale olive skin covered in dust, was lifted by her leg and dropped onto a purposely grown transport creature, leaving her arm dangling limp over the edge of its exoskeleton shell. The monstrous carrier turned away and started towards the top of the valley, vanishing amongst other harvesting insects
in the rubble.

  A magnificent culture lay unknown and destroyed as the wind swept the scent of death across the canyon sea. The sight conjured a rage in Jacob, and as it built, he heard the buzz of tiny wings.

  “This is the horror of the Fractal.” Vade Mecum said, hovering beside Jacob.

  “What are you?” Jacob asked, studying Vade against the backdrop of the expanding Martian sea.

  “I am the Vade Mecum, Jacob, but the question is: what are you?”

  Jacob looked back out over the destroyed city and felt despair swelling within his rage.

  “This is over Jacob, it happened in another time,” Vade landed on the end of Jacob’s railgun barrel.

  “You must listen, and you must remember what I say, or the light of humanity will be lost.”

  “What is this?” Jacob asked, shaking his head.

  “Come, let me show you the source of the broadcast,” Vade said and Jacob started his clawed feet clacking against the polished stone.

  “Humanity has inherited the worst of the Martian traits. You feel arrogance and resentment for the past while dreaming of a tomorrow filled with peace and harmony. This conflict was the Martian’s undoing Jacob, and it could be humanity’s as well.”

  “How can believing in peace and harmony be bad?” Jacob asked.

  “It is not a fault to believe in peace, Jacob, but it is a fault to expect others to respect your imaginary values,” Vade said, as Jacob’s clawed feet clacked along the stone.

  “The Fractal are not evil, Jacob, they exist in the natural order to protect our universe. The Martians unknowingly called the Fractal to their civilization by tearing holes in space-time, just as humanity calls to them now."

  “That's what happened to my parents! That's what happened to their ship isn’t it? The Fractal!”

  Vade shook his head. “No Jacob, but it’s true that what you know as jump travel indeed calls the Fractal; space and time do not take kindly to being wounded. The Martians thought there would be no toll to be paid.” Vade ruffled his feathers, “but it is this very cosmic balance that leads humanity to their destiny.”

  A deep blast tore through the morning. The hollow sound reverberated through his being as Jacob watched a black twisting mass rising above the canyon ridgeline, floating upwards into the atmosphere.

  Against the the blue sky, it looked like a distended intestine, writhing and loaded with stolen life as it drifted ever higher. The great bulbous ship faded out of sight as it slipped past the atmosphere and into space, like the surfacing bubbles of the drowned.

  Time leapt forward in motion as the Fractal cruiser vanished. Clouds boiled and the sun sped across the sky. The Fractal’s translucent bodies became a steady blur as track lines formed like parasitic veins, feeding on the Martian world.

  With each streaking pass of the sun, Jacob watched the lush jungle scape be worn away. First the city, then the sides of the jungle valley faded as the Fractal harvested the planet.

  Weeks flew by in seconds as the valley burned away in a flameless fire. The Fractal raided all life, dragging anything organic to their great maggot ships, and their living craft fell away like they were bombing the sky. The passage of time began to slow and the clouds dissolved into a starry night over a now waterless Mariner Valley.

  A sun erupted in the south, and it drew a burning streak across the sky before Jacob felt a planet shaking impact from the fatal blow. The storm sound of a world's atmosphere being ripped away came, as the Fractal’s scorched wasteland became engulfed in a meteoric wall of fire that threatened to burn Phobos from where it watched in the sky.

  “The Martians forgot the lessons of the past, and just as trees without roots fall in heavy weather, so their civilisation was unprepared for the cosmic wind,” Vade said. “Just as the Fractal were themselves unprepared to have the universe reclaim Mars.”

  The wrath of the fallen star came, swallowing the planet, dissolving it into a wave of cosmic fire across the horizon. Jacob turned to face the blastwave, bracing himself against the impact as the wall of racing chaos washed over him.

  Chapter 20

  The wall of fire became a dust storm, tearing at where Jacob stood. The storm played havoc with his sensors. Vade was gone, and Jacob could see only a few yards around him in the swirling ochre. He began to walk forward, following the wind-worn edge of the polished stone jetty.

  Through the grinding hiss, a darkness formed in the storm ahead. As he tread closer, the darkness became a depression, then a jagged crack in the canyon wall where the polished stone surface led into a cavern. The dust clawed in protest as Jacob made his way in for shelter, away from the planetary sandstorm.

  The wind’s grip faded as he pushed over the drifting sand dunes at the mouth of the cave and Jacob saw hewn walls emerge past the shattered rock. He moved deeper, and the Hummingbird’s optics calibrated without the storm’s constant assault, bringing the passage into focus.

  Beyond the sand’s grasp, the ancient walls were shrouded in crystalline dust creating a sparkling sheen. Jacob brushed the wall, and micro-sediment fell away, revealing intricate writing carved deep into the rock.

  Jacob watched thousands of symbols flash in his HUD’s frame as the Hummingbird’s databanks searched for possible matches, but found nothing.

  Over the faint whisper of the storm outside, the flutter of a hummingbird’s wings could be heard as Vade emerged from deeper down the passage darkness, coming to a stalled hover beside him.

  “The Martians were a powerful race, who unlike humanity learned early that other forces sought to control this reality.” Vade’s deep voice echoed in the hall.

  The roar from Vade’s wings grew louder, and the impossible power of his flight scattered the crystalline dust, revealing symbols like circuit calligraphy cut into the stone that reached from the polished floor to an arched ceiling.

  Jacob saw the stone cut symbols begin to vibrate at first, then bend and move like animated figures, sliding over each other in a blur as though the stone wall were a giant media screen.

  “Come, Jacob, you must understand this.” Vade floated deeper into the passage as the ancient glyphs drew themselves into images. Maps of great cities appeared amongst scenes of Martian jungles. Theirs was a culture in planetary harmony as they explored the solar system reaching out beyond the stars.

  “Long before the time of the Fractal, the Martians emerged the dominant sentient race of this system and discovered the ancient outworld race known as the Archons.”

  Images of long cigar shaped ships floated over Martian cities, and small gray bipedal aliens with oversized heads and dark almond eyes met with the much larger humanoid Martians.

  “When the Archons arrived, the Martians were awed by their power,” Vade said, “but before it was too late for their species, the true nature of the Archons became clear.”

  Jacob watched as the dancing images devolved into scenes of Martians being tortured as strange experiments were done on them by the small thin Archons. Jacob saw the horrors of the Archon laboratories, witnessing atrocities play out in Martian carved history.

  “They were afraid...” Vade spoke as images of Martian warships were locked in combat with the long cylinder craft in the vacuum of space.

  “...but they did not give into their fear, and after millennia of battle they respected the Archons enough to master war.”

  Jacob watched giant metal suits, great ranks of Martian armor belch terrible fire as they cut their way into Archonian ships.

  “Power armor,” Jacob whispered.

  “Yes, a recent development for humanity, but you must remember mass killing on this scale was unknown to Martian civilization. Before this war, the Martians only had small conflicts where ego and interests were in struggle. There had never been an existential war for their survival.”

  Images of Martian cities erupting in celebration were superimposed over alien craft fading out of existence. Powerful Martian war machines supervised the alien exit, stan
ding guard like great armored knights as their enemy was driven before them.

  “Eventually their strength prevailed, and the Archons were driven from this reality, but the cost of the Archon War was terrible. The Martians were forced to change themselves into terrible weapons, and weapons can not be kept amongst the peaceful.”

  The images transformed again to show great Martian legions marching into a floating fortress. It was an alien castle, impossibly large and with the same cyclopean design that Jacob had seen in the wasted canyon city.

  “They... imprisoned them?” Jacob asked.

  “You must remember, a prison, like a military, was an unknown concept. Once the effect of total war is felt by any organism, it is forever changed; the violence is in them as long as they live.”

  The carved calligraphy showed the same citadel fortress floating in the vastness of space. An energy field rippled, and the citadel faded from existence.

  “For millennia, the Martians slumbered in the dream of peace, but in time a greater threat found them.”

  “The Fractal.” Jacob followed Vade as he flew deeper into the passage.

  “An enemy with speed beyond the scope of anything they could imagine. An insect race, scavenging the most precious commodity in the universe: life.”

  The cavern passage opened, with dust sparkling on a giant stone dome. A chair sat like a throne in the center of the strange chamber, covered with eons of microcrystal dust.

  Jacob stepped forward, and as he did the impact from his foot started a great blast of wind evaporating the particulates, plunging the chamber back in time.

  “What is this place?” Jacob asked as he felt a dull pain behind his eyes. He wanted more than anything to just close them and be embraced by the darkness.

  “I know you are processing much Jacob, but you must remain.” Vade landed on the throne’s carved backrest.

  “Like Mars, Earth was a lush and beautiful paradise, but the Archons corrupted your world for their purposes.” Vade looked down at the throne, gesturing with his tiny beak. “Please sit Jacob, and I’ll show you.”