Iron Dragoons (Terran Armor Corps Book 1)

by Richard Fox

  The suit was pockmarked, lines of welds and repair epoxy marring the armor like old scars. An iron-colored heart was below a stenciled name on the breastplate that read: ELIAS.

  “The Mark III’s and IV’s fought in the Ember War. This is an earlier suit, before the aegis plating was implemented,” Tongea said and turned to face the gaggle of candidates hanging on his every word. “The latest models are on Mars or deployed.”

  A set of double doors behind him opened to an auditorium. He led the candidates inside, where half the seats were already full of new recruits and a smattering of veterans.

  “Take your seats. Fill in from the front.” Tongea stepped aside.

  The wooden stage held three flags: the Terran Union; a stained-glass image of an alien world from orbit set to cloth; and the flag of the Armor Corps. Roland followed Masako down a row, then froze as he did a double-take.

  At the far end of a row, a half-dozen aliens sat next to each other. The upper halves of their blue-gray heads were almost human, but they had blunted beaks for mouths and jaws. Thick black quills ran from their foreheads to the backs of their skulls. They chatted among themselves, quick clicks and muted squawks.

  Burke gave Roland a gentle push.

  “Move it. You act like you’ve never seen a Dotari before,” Burke said.

  Roland shuffled forward and sat next to Masako.

  “On screen, not in person,” Roland said, “and they’re called Dotok.”

  “They changed soon as they got their home world back,” Masako said. “The etymology of ‘Dotok’ in their language means ‘one cut off from home.’ Now they’re ‘of home’ and Dotari.” She shrugged. “We’re the Terran Union now.”

  “How do you know all this?” Roland asked.

  “Military Intelligence was my next choice after medical,” she said. “I studied up just in case things didn’t work out.”

  “Why do we need intelligence on our allies? Never mind. Why are there Dotari here?” Roland leaned over his seat to get a better look at the aliens.

  “You know two of the armor in Memorial Square were Dotari, don’t you?” Masako shook her head at him. “What were you doing in high school?”

  “Not paying enough attention,” Roland said.

  The lights dimmed and brightened several times and conversations died away.

  A soldier walked onto the stage and clicked his heels together.

  “Room! Atten-tion!”

  The veterans snapped to their feet, and the new recruits stood up quickly, but not nearly as fast.

  An army captain came onto the stage, his hands clasped behind his back.

  “Be seated,” he said. “I am Captain Perez, your company commander at Fort Knox. While you are here, you will be evaluated for mental and physical suitability to serve in the Armor Corps. You have all been officially accessed into the Corps on a probationary basis as privates—any rank you held before today is gone. You may choose to drop from training at any time, and I will return you to Phoenix for reassignment without any adverse action on your personnel file. Do not remove your monitors. Do not speak with candidates in other training cycles.”

  When he paced to the other side of the stage, Roland saw that the back of his head was normal. No plugs.

  “All candidates who’ve completed a tour of duty, stand up and exit to the door to my right.” Perez waited as the dozen veterans and all the Dotari left the room.

  “The rest of you will now meet your drill instructors.”

  Doors on the other side of the auditorium opened with the force of a bomb blast. Soldiers in campaign hats swarmed into the room like sharks tearing into a wounded whale, bellowing orders at the top of their lungs.

  One of the drill instructors grabbed Roland by the front of his uniform and hauled him to his feet, commenting on his parentage and lack of motivation and questioning if his IQ was above room temperature.

  ****

  Roland pushed the door to his barracks room open, fell onto his hands and knees, twisted around and shut the door as quickly, and as quietly, as he could, while the shouts from drill instructors echoed up and down the hallway. He slumped to the ground, sweating buckets as his arms quivered with exhaustion.

  “Good times?” Aignar asked from the back of the room.

  Roland’s head shot up and he froze like a deer caught in headlights. The room had two beds along the walls, small closets and desks, and a single sink. Aignar sat behind his desk, wearing a gray issued exercise T-shirt and holding a slate.

  “They’re all so…angry.” Roland went to the sink and drank straight from the faucet. “I never knew there was a correct way to turn left and right, or around, or walk with people who don’t know their left from their right.”

  “Drill and ceremonies…good times.” Aignar set one edge of his slate on the desk, then dropped it as his fingers snapped open.

  “Why was it just us newbies out there getting yelled at?” Roland opened the closet on his side of the room and found uniforms with his name on them hung up, each hanger equally spaced away from the others.

  “Everyone with a complete term has already done basic training. The Air Force weenies had it easy compared to the rest of us—some things never change. You cherries need that same baseline.” He gestured a stiff hand toward a slate on Roland’s desk. “Training schedule is out. Looks like you have an additional hour of training at the beginning and end of every day.”

  The two beds were made, the corners folded into forty-five-degree angles and the sheets pulled so tight that Roland wasn’t sure if he was supposed to sleep under them.

  “Did you…do all this?” Roland looked under his bed at a neat line of unpolished shoes and boots with straps instead of laces.

  “I’m selfish that way,” Aignar said. “If DIs come in here and see you’re a soup sandwich, they’ll crush me too. Now that you’re here, I suggest you get through the assigned reading. I need some rack time.”

  When he stood up and walked around the desk, Roland saw that both his legs from the knee down were bionic. Gears in his metal and composite-plastic feet whirred with each step. Black rings circled his forearms close to the elbows, marking where the prosthetics ended and his flesh began.

  Aignar sat on his bed and looked at Roland. “Just ask.”

  “About…what?” Roland turned his gaze to the floor.

  “I got hit on Cygnus. First week of the campaign, too. Years of training and then a Vishrakath razor-wire grenade brought my Ranger career to a screeching halt. Trauma systems in my armor kept me from bleeding to death. Then I find out I’m something of a medical phenomenon—one of a very small percentage of human beings that can’t take vat-grown organ replacements. Took six transplants to figure that out.” Aignar’s eyes flashed with pain for a moment.

  “They offered me a discharge, full benefits and pension…but I’m not ready to be a cubicle mushroom. Armor will take anyone that can pass the screening, so here I am. I’m not the first broke dick to come through these halls. I won’t be the last.”

  “If I can help you somehow…”

  “They didn’t let me leave the hospital on Maui until I could take care of myself.” Aignar leaned forward and twisted the top of the prosthetic on one leg. His knee came out with a pop, leaving the shin and foot on the ground. He removed his other leg and shifted over on the mattress.

  He pressed one finger to the side of his jaw, and there was an audible pop as Aignar’s mouth snapped open a quarter inch.

  “Now the tricky part.” Aignar grabbed one arm and removed it with a snap. He put it on the desk behind the head of his bed, then looked at his still-attached arm, then to the one on the desk. “You mind?”

  “Yes. I mean no. I mean sure.” Roland stood up and rubbed his palms down his sides. “I need to…”

  Aignar held his hand out to Roland.

  “Just twist it to the left.”

  The faux-skin felt like thin leather as Roland gripped it. He grimaced and turned it slowly.
The prosthetic popped free of the socket and Roland stepped back, holding the arm up to get a closer look.

  The thing came alive and grabbed him by the wrist.

  “Jesus Christ!” Roland tossed his hands up in shock and the prosthetic clattered to the floor as Aignar’s monotone HA HA HA filled the room.

  “Sorry,” Aignar said, one elbow slapping against his side, “the look on your face. I’m sorry.”

  “You want help like this again? Not the way you’re going to get it!” Roland crossed his arms over his chest, more embarrassed than angry.

  “Really, I’m sorry.” Aignar gestured to the arm on the ground with his chin. “Would you put it on the desk?”

  Roland touched the prosthetic, snatched his hand back like it was a live wire and then set it next to the other arm.

  Aignar got under his sheets and rolled over to face the wall.

  “Roland, let me tell you something,” he said as he nuzzled his head against his pillow. “Secret to happiness in the military is getting enough sleep.”

  Roland sat at his desk and looked over the slate. The schedule for the next day began entirely too early with physical training, then there was a long block of empty space until another period of physical training and drill instruction.

  “Why’s there nothing else on here? Shouldn’t there be a plan?” Roland asked.

  “One of two things.” Aignar yawned. “Either the cadre have no idea what they’re doing and they turn candidates into armor by accident, or they want us off balance to get used to working in a chaotic environment. Which do you think it is?”

  “Latter.” Roland went to the next tab and found his assigned reading: History of Armor during the Australian Conflict. “I thought I was done with homework after high school.”

  Aignar snored softly.

  Chapter 7

  Roland sat in a small classroom, his muscles aching from the physical training session with the drill instructors earlier. He thought sitting would help him feel better, but all it did was give his legs the opportunity to cramp up.

  Gideon stood behind a small lectern, a thin metal pointer in one hand. He snapped the tip against a map of Australia covered in red and blue symbols, a snapshot in time from the Australian theater of the war between China and the Atlantic Union in the middle of the twenty-first century.

  Roland rubbed his calf and glanced at the two Dotari a few seats from him. The aliens had been in the classroom when he and a dozen others arrived. Neither had spoken yet.

  “Colonel Carius committed the 4th Regiment to the envelopment effort just north of Brisbane,” Gideon said. “What was the effect on the Chinese 3rd Army…Burke.” He leveled the pointer at the candidate’s chest like he was a fencer about to lunge forward and impale him.

  Burke stood up and scratched at his monitor.

  “The Chinese…got their asses kicked, sir,” Burke said.

  Gideon snapped the pointer to his side. He narrowed his eyes at the candidate.

  “‘Got their asses kicked’ is not how we speak in the Armor Corps. We use military terms and phrases from doctrine whenever and wherever possible. Radioing your commander and telling him there’s a shitpot full of Ruhaald guys with rifles attacking you is not as useful as saying a battalion of dismounted infantry have engaged from the ridgeline to your east. The proper terminology was in your reading from last night. I’ll see that you receive an additional assignment tonight. Sit.”

  “The Chinese advance halted,” Masako said. “The Atlantic Union armor broke through their lines in a double…envelopment. Chinese casualties were high.”

  “And why was Colonel Carius so successful? Analog armor units—crewed tanks with turrets and treads—from the American 1st Cavalry Division had attacked through the same terrain days before with limited success.” Gideon looked over the candidates before tapping his pointer on Roland’s desk.

  “It was the first time armor, our kind of armor, was ever massed on the battlefield,” Roland said, racing to pull up snippets from his fuzzy memory. “Before, they’d been used in four suit units called lances. So many used in one attack was too much for the Chinese to handle.”

  “Decent, but wrong.” Gideon flicked his pointer to the wall behind his lectern, and a holo screen came to life. A highway, the shoulders crammed with civilian cars bulldozed off the road, stretched into the distance. Squat tanks and armored personnel carriers took up the road, spaced a dozen yards apart. The camera, which must have been ten feet off the ground, bounced along with the stomp of metal footfalls on the asphalt.

  An armored fist smashed into the driver’s hatch of the Chinese tank, and the turret swung toward the armor slowly. The armor jammed his belt-fed rifle into the gap between the turret and the hull and fired twice, the back of the tank exploding into flame as the ammunition cooked off. The armor charged through the flames and slammed hands down on the front of a personnel transport. The fingers crumpled the hull, then hefted the vehicle up onto its side. The armor shoved it over with a crunch of breaking antennae and abused metal.

  A door on the overturned carrier popped open and a Chinese soldier scrambled out. He looked up at the armor, dropped his weapon and ran with a frightened yelp. The armor snatched the fleeing soldier by the leg and lifted him into the air.

  “Sha xi ni!” boomed from the armor’s speakers.

  Bullets snapped through the air. The armor turned around and faced three more Chinese that had escaped their stricken APC. The armor raised the terrified soldier in his grip, then swung him like a club into his fellows.

  Roland winced as the video captured the sound of breaking bones.

  One Chinese, his arm badly broken from the impact, cowered against the side of the APC. The armor crushed him with a stomp, then flung the dead soldier in his hand down the highway, the corpse skipping like a stone over a pond until it came to a messy stop against another Chinese tank.

  “Sha xi ni!” The armor charged toward the tank, firing its massive rifle from the hip. More armor suits joined the charge, all broadcasting the same message.

  Gideon froze the replay just as a helicopter came around a hillside and exploded, the victim of massed fire from several armor soldiers.

  “What were they saying?” the cadre asked.

  The candidates shifted in their seats as more than one looked queasy from the brutality they’d just witnessed. Roland glanced at the two Dotari, but if they knew the answer, he couldn’t tell.

  “There are only a handful of native Chinese speakers left on the planet, prisoners of war picked up in the last few hours before the Xaros attack, and none of them are in this room,” Gideon said. “But if you had to guess what was said…Yanagi?”

  Masako tugged at her lip.

  “Well, sir, it’s not ‘surrender.’”

  “Prepare to die,” a Dotari said. Roland assumed the alien was a she, given the mammary glands on her chest and slight stature compared to her broad-shouldered companion. “Or words to that effect. Your prewar languages are difficult for us.”

  “Sha xi ni,” Gideon said as he whacked his pointer against the chair of a candidate dangerously close to nodding off, “roughly translates to ‘I will kill you.’ Did these words make a difference in the battle? Anyone?”

  “It was the fear,” the same Dotari said. “These other humans had never faced armor before. To come beak to beak with something so brutal while confined to those metal boxes, death must have seemed inevitable.”

  “Your name?” Gideon asked.

  “Sub-Lieutenant Cha’ril,” she said.

  “And what gives you this insight, Sub-Lieutenant?”

  “Dotari armor fought at the Battle of Firebase X-Ray, during the brief conflict with the Ruhaald and Naroosha. The Ruhaald, even though they had rudimentary armor of their own, were…intimidated by the Terran and Dotari armor.”

  The cadre touched a screen on the back of his hand and the holo changed to a painting. An armor soldier, an aegis shield mounted to a forearm, faced an
alien tank shaped like a scorpion. Another suit of armor leaped through the air, a lance gripped in both hands angled down at the enemy tank. The artist had added semiopaque feathered hooks to the back of the airborne suit and a ray of sunlight that glittered off the lance.

  “Fear.” Gideon paced back and forth across the classroom. “Violence of action…élan, effective against the Chinese—against enemies that have the biological capacity for an ingrained resistance to death, these are useful tools. Tools you will learn to use. Armor, Terran and Dotari, have many roles to fill on the battlefield. Fire support with our rail cannons. Action in environments too hazardous for normal troops. All of this will be taught to you, but when it comes to instilling fear…you must find that iron within you.”

  “We’re to be terror weapons?” Masako asked. “Did Ibarra have that in mind when he invented the suits?”

  “Ibarra?” Cha’ril asked.

  “Marc Ibarra,” Gideon said, setting his pointer on the lectern, “was an inventor, businessman…and a manipulator. He had advance warning—decades in advance—of the Xaros invasions. Decades he used to engineer a solution to the overwhelming drone armada. A solution that led to the deaths of every man, woman and child in the solar system that wasn’t part of his Saturn Colonization fleet the moment it sidestepped the invasion. That humanity survived, and won the war against the Xaros, is largely thanks to him. The Armor Corps is part of his legacy.”

  Gideon swiped a finger across his forearm screen and an oblong drone with bent spikes protruding from its surface came up on the screen. The drone’s surface swirled with deep-gray fractals. Roland felt ice in his stomach as he looked upon a monster from childhood nightmares.

  “This is a Xaros drone. It did not feel fear, or remorse. It carried out programming to destroy and eradicate any and all intelligent life it encountered, and to build Crucible gates in systems with worlds habitable by the now-dead Xaros Masters. Ibarra knew what they were, their weaknesses. Why did he bother to create armor to fight them?”