Iron Dragoons (Terran Armor Corps Book 1)

by Richard Fox

  Roland struggled against the smothering grip of the pod, his body in full-scale panic as his lungs lost their air to the crush and the liquid flooded his chest, which felt like it was burning, suffocating him until…nothing.

  The pod pressed against his abdomen, regulating the rhythm of his diaphragm as fluid moved into and out of his body.

  “Candidate Shaw,” Gideon said through the earpiece, “can you hear me?”

  “Yes, sir.” Roland froze, unsure how he’d managed the word without moving air across his voice box.

  “The modulator’s working well. Good. How do you feel? Answer quickly and honestly.”

  “I…have to pee.” Roland noted that he sounded an awful lot like Aignar as he spoke.

  “Normal reaction to equilibrium. It will pass. Why are you here?”

  Roland’s brow furrowed in confusion. This was a level of interest the cadre had never shown before.

  “Sorry, sir. Are you…are you talking to me?”

  “Yes, candidate, I am.”

  “Just an odd time to make conversation…sir. I’m an orphan. Lost my parents to the Xaros. This is how I want to honor them.” He pushed a foot against the end of the pod and felt water swirl up his leg.

  “I don’t believe you,” Gideon said. Roland opened his eyes in shock, though he saw the same inky darkness as when they were shut.

  “Your parents were both in the navy,” Gideon said. “Armor is far from that. We do not speak of our deeds outside the Corps. Only in death is your name made known beyond the Corps. I’ve never met a parent that wanted their child to have a shorter life span. Your reason doesn’t pass muster. Tell me the truth.”

  “I…” Roland squirmed against the pod, which felt tighter since Gideon had spoken to him. “Do you know what it’s like growing up in an orphanage? No one cares. The people that ran my place were not a mother or father to me. I was a just another thing to be managed. Sent to school, monitored. I didn’t matter. To anyone.

  “Then I’m walking home one night and this strange woman pops out of nowhere when I’m at the Armor Square and tells me a story about all the armor that died that day. People don’t just volunteer to die beside one another unless there’s a damn good reason. Unless they care about each other. Unless they have something worth fighting for. The Templars, the Iron Hearts and the Hussars, they all found something. I’m not going to quit until I do too.”

  “Who told you this story?” Gideon asked.

  “Some old lady with enough influence to get through the perimeter security. Said her name was Sophia.”

  “You met the Minder of the Crucible. Impressive.”

  “What who of the what, sir?” Roland waited a moment, then repeated the question. Gideon didn’t answer.

  Roland turned his focus to the warmth and closeness of the pod walls.

  I wonder if this is what it’s like being a mummy, he thought. So warm and cramped…maybe this is what the womb—Mom’s womb—was like. Sure wasn’t breathing air in there. Just add a heartbeat and this might be just like it.

  What would she think of this? Did Gideon call me on my answer because he can see God-knows-what through the nubs, or was it just that weak?

  The question stayed with him as the long dark continued.

  “Shaw.” Gideon snapped the candidate out of his wandering state. “The exercise is over. We’re taking you out of equilibrium.”

  Lights filled the pod, wavering through the amniosis. The liquid drained quickly, but air didn’t return to his lungs.

  The pod opened and Tongea pulled out Roland’s mouthpiece. The cadre flipped the candidate on his side and amniosis came rushing out of his nose and mouth in waves onto the floor.

  “That was horrible.” Roland stayed on his side and wiped a trembling hand across his mouth. “I see why they didn’t mention this part back in Phoenix.”

  The other pods were open; most held recovering candidates. Two were empty.

  Roland struggled to sit up, his muscles trembling and his ears ringing.

  “The first time is the worst.” Tongea shined a penlight into Roland’s eyes. “Your body will adapt after more sessions. You won’t need the mouthpiece or forced evacuation after a few months.”

  Roland blew air out of his mouth, trying to rid himself of the taste. He looked around the room, wondering who he might have to fight in the next few minutes.

  “Sir, where’s Burke?”

  “That candidate voluntarily dropped from selection four hours ago,” Gideon said. “You and the other basics are due for a drill instructor–led road march in twenty-seven minutes. I suggest you shower and change into your kit.” He pointed back to the locker room.

  “Burke…quit?”

  Tongea nodded and looked back to the locker room door.

  Roland swung his feet onto the floor and took a few unsure steps on half-numb legs. If Burke, who’d never struggled with anything since he entered selection with Roland, couldn’t make it, Roland wasn’t sure how much longer he’d last.

  ****

  When Roland finally got into one of the large warehouses he’d seen when he first arrived at Fort Knox, he expected to find the buildings brimming with advanced equipment to train him into an armor soldier. But when he and the rest of his class entered one of the buildings, he found it rather underwhelming.

  The warehouse was nearly empty. The floor was raised a few feet off the ground, and he marched up a short flight of stairs with the rest of his class and stopped in front of Gideon. The walls and deck were gently lit holo panels, and the uniform glow played with Roland’s sense of distance.

  Gideon paced back and forth along the line as he spoke. “Candidates, today you will receive your rigs. They are a step down from full armor, but the tactics and techniques you learn in the rigs are the same as what you’ll use in armor.”

  Double doors on the opposite side of the warehouse opened, and Tongea strode in, clad in an exoskeleton that left much of his body exposed. The rig moved like simple cargo robots Roland had seen around spaceports and construction sites—graceless and slow. Empty rigs followed Tongea, each with a mock-up rotary cannon on the right shoulder, forearm-mounted gauss weapon, and electromagnetic rail vanes on their backs.

  A smile crept across Roland’s face. Finally.

  “Mount up,” Gideon said.

  Roland ran to an empty rig and looked it over. The footrests and straps were easy enough to grasp, but there were no control sticks or keypads anywhere. A brass plate against the back of the rig at neck level glinted in the light, and Roland’s excitement waned.

  “What’re you waiting for?” Masako asked as she climbed into the rig next to his. “We’re finally in the crawl phase of crawl-walk-run.”

  “Haven’t had my brain waves turned into motion before.” He put a foot onto a stirrup and stepped up into the rig. Straps came out of the rig and went over his thighs, chest and shoulders, pulling him taut against thinly padded backing.

  After spending so much time in the equilibrium pods, being sewn into the rig didn’t feel that awkward.

  “Press your nubs against the receiver plate,” Gideon said. “This will feel a little odd.”

  Roland leaned his head back to the padded headrest. He felt a tremor go down his neck, then there was a whirr of servos. A visor snapped over his face and pressed against his forehead. Everything went dark for a moment, then a screen came to life, showing him the same view he’d had before. He reached up to adjust the fit…and the rig’s mechanical hand came into view.

  Roland stretched his arm forward, and the rig mimed the gesture. He looked down…and found his arm was still at his side.

  “What the hell?” He looked over at Masako, and the rig swung a foot forward to face her rig.

  “The rigs are responding to the commands your brain sends to your body,” Gideon said. The cadre looked at his forearm screen, then to Masako, and frowned. “The neural bridge isn’t as efficient as the plugs and”—there was a crash of metal as a
candidate and rig fell to the ground—“there will be an adjustment period.”

  “Roland,” Masako said as Gideon and Tongea went over to their felled classmate, “you getting a weird taste in your mouth?”

  “No…but my feet are tingling a little bit.”

  “Candidates…” Gideon touched his forearm screen and several floor panels sank down and moved beneath the rest of the floor. A lift holding dented and splintered wooden blocks rose up.

  “Time to build a house,” Gideon said.

  ****

  The M-99 gauss cannon was a weapon exclusive to armor, who carried the double-barreled weapon system mounted to their right forearms. Roland looked at the one on the workbench in front of him, armored access panels raised up to expose the inner workings, and put his hands on his hips.

  “They’ve got to be messing with us,” he said. A group of candidates were behind him, examining schematics on an oversized tablet. Several teams worked on different cannons throughout the maintenance bay. “Why do we need to know how to fix this thing? Don’t we have maintenance bots? Service crews? Do the cadre spend a lot of time elbow-deep in…grunt work?”

  “Think trouble-shooting is beneath you?” Aignar asked. The veteran snapped his cybernetic fingers around a wrench and brought it over to the weapon.

  “Hardly, I just don’t know when we—the armor—would ever do such a thing.”

  Aignar leaned his head into the weapon, which was almost the size of a small refrigerator, and tapped the wrench against a component.

  “What will you do when your ship full of maintainers and robots gets blown out of the sky?” Aignar asked. “And then your ammo feeder breaks. What’ll you do? Shrug your shoulders and tell the enemy that we can’t play war until everything’s in working order?”

  “Guess I didn’t think of that.” Roland felt his cheeks flush in embarrassment. “Was the fighting that bad on Cygnus? Everything I saw on the net said it was a ‘low-intensity’ conflict.”

  Aignar lifted up one of his cybernetic hands and let it fall heavily onto the top of the cannon with a ring of metal on metal.

  “No such thing as ‘low intensity’ when you’re getting shot at,” Aignar said. “A battalion gets chewed up by Vish over the course of a month or in a day, doesn’t make the casualties any less dead.”

  “I think the problem’s in the mag coils,” Masako said. She carried the tablet with her and held it between Roland and the weapon. The screen projected a wire diagram of the weapon’s interior, the innermost working flashing orange. She held the screen up for a moment, then her hands began to tremble.

  “You OK?” Roland took the tablet before she could drop it.

  “Feels like pins and needles.” She winced and squeezed her hands shut.

  “Should we tell the cadre?” Roland asked quietly. “Get you to sick call?”

  “Why? So they can find some excuse to drop me? No. The feeling comes and goes,” she said.

  Aignar tapped his wrench against the cannon’s inches-thick metal case.

  “Might be the mag coils,” Roland said, swiping across the screen, “which means we need to open access panel D9…then remove coupling H22-b…wasn’t the original design of the M-99 Swedish? Didn’t they use to make furniture so simple to put together the instructions didn’t have words? Now we’ve got this thing and…wait.”

  Masako reached into a panel and flipped a switch. The back of the casing fell open, and the metal swung against the hinges and smacked against the table. She grabbed the pair of handles and pulled the inner workings out on a set of rails built into the bottom of the case.

  “Didn’t you do the reading last night?” she asked Roland.

  “Someone was up until ‘Taps’ putting his side of the room back together again after the DIs found his closet unsecured,” Aignar said.

  “I swear they give us thirty hours of work for a twenty-four-hour day,” Roland said.

  “Aignar, did the higher-ups even tell you why you were fighting on Cygnus?” Masako asked.

  “Something about the Crucible network. I was more focused on my little piece of the orbital assault than the reasoning.” Aignar reached for the magnetic coils and his hand smacked against the housing. Stuck. He tried to pull it back, but it wouldn’t budge.

  “Well…shit,” he said.

  Roland and Masako traded worried looks.

  “The coils will hold a charge even after being powered off,” Tongea said as he came over, Cha’ril a step behind him.

  “Sir, should we get another unit with reverse polarity to…” Masako swiped the tablet and trailed off into a murmur.

  Tongea took the wrench from Aignar’s hand and hit it against the coil housing. Aignar’s hand popped away.

  “Guess that part wasn’t in the reading,” Roland said. Masako took a deep breath through her nose, her face trembling with anger.

  “Candidate Shaw, why were Terran forces fighting on Cygnus?” the cadre asked.

  “Sir…it was something to do with the Crucible network, right?”

  “Are you asking me or telling me?”

  Roland opened his mouth to answer, then stopped, unsure what kind of logical conundrum he’d stumbled into.

  “Cygnus’ Crucible gate fell within Earth’s sphere of influence,” Cha’ril said. “The jump gate could open a wormhole within a light-year of Earth, depending on gravity tides, but that gave the Terran Union a priority claim on the world by the Hale Treaty.”

  “Did you all understand that answer?” Tongea asked. The three human candidates shook their heads.

  “Any Crucible gate can access any other gate the Xaros built across the galaxy,” Cha’ril said. “The gates can also open a wormhole within a certain range, depending on the amount of energy stored in the gates and quantum gravity fluctuations in the target—Roland, your eyes are glazing over. Any gate can provide one-way travel from it to a limited area.”

  “Any gate that can open a portal to within a light-year of Earth is a danger to us,” Tongea said. “Why, Candidate Yanagi?”

  “A hostile species could send an invasion fleet through,” she said. “Might take them a while to get to Earth, but they could still make it. Or they could send a mass driver through at high velocity. The math is complex, but doable. If a rock the size of a battleship moving at a significant percentage of the speed of light hits a habitable world…the effect would be disastrous.”

  “Is this why the colonial administration was so hell-bent on settling worlds after the Ember War?” Roland asked.

  “Quite right, candidate,” Tongea said. “The first phase of settlement went to gate systems that could launch an indirect assault on Earth. The second phase will secure the stars around those worlds.”

  “Then why wasn’t Cygnus settled immediately?” Aignar asked. “It wasn’t exactly a top-tier world before the Vish tried to poison it, but the place didn’t need much in the way of terraforming.”

  “The stars are ever moving,” Cha’ril said. “A small black hole a couple of light years away ingested a brown dwarf, sending a graviton wave that—Roland, your eyes again…do you need medical attention?”

  “No!” Roland’s face perked up. “Just fine.”

  “The disturbance changed the range on Cygnus’ Crucible. The Vishrakath could have used the gate to launch an attack on Earth. They are well-known for their use of asteroids as ships and as weapons,” the Dotari said.

  “It was ours by the Hale Treaty,” Masako said. “Why didn’t they just leave?”

  “The Vishrakath demanded time to recover the resources used to establish their colony before they left,” Tongea said. “Phoenix agreed, and the aliens used the time to poison the well, as it was. While there are billions of stars in the galaxy, the percentage of stars with habitable worlds is almost insignificant. A planet that doesn’t require terraforming is a jewel beyond price for humanity—and our allies. That we abandoned colonies on three worlds per the Hale Treaty without razing them, and the Vishraka
th did not return the favor, put us in conflict.”

  “Why didn’t we just declare war on all the Vish?” Aignar asked. “The Xaros hit them hard toward the end of the war. We could have ended them quickly.”

  “The Vishrakath were very influential on Bastion before it was destroyed,” Cha’ril said. “They maintained a network of alliances. A vast network.”

  “We fought on Cygnus as the situation there was something of a gray area in the Hale Treaty,” Tongea said. “Attacking the Vishrakath directly would lead to a much wider war. One we might not win.”

  “What’s to stop them from using one of their allies to hurt us again?” Roland asked. “The Ruhaald are at least cordial with us now. We haven’t heard from the Naroosha and the Toth since the last time they attacked us. Whatever happened to them?”

  “The Naroosha refuse to have any diplomatic contact with us,” Tongea said.

  “And the Toth? I’ve heard rumors some of them survived the attack on Earth and live in the unsettled territories,” Masako said.

  “I cannot speak of them.” Tongea touched the timer on his forearm screen and walked off.

  Aignar rapped a knuckle against the coil housing.

  “There’s still a pull,” he said. “One of you open this up.”

  “Anyone else find it odd that Tongea doesn’t want to talk about the Toth?” Roland picked up a motorized screwdriver and went to work on the housing.

  “Never had a threat briefing about them in training,” Aignar said, shrugging.

  “They were not present at Bastion when the technology to create Crucible gates was shared,” Cha’ril said. “They may be confined to their own world.”

  “Then why doesn’t Tongea just say that about the Toth?” Roland plucked a screw off the end of his tool. “What’s the big secret?”

  “You want the Toth to show up and fix this cannon for you?” Aignar asked. “Stop goldbricking and let’s finish this job.”