Iron Dragoons (Terran Armor Corps Book 1)

by Richard Fox

  “Time,” Roland said.

  “Nineteen hours and thirty-seven minutes,” Aignar answered. “Cha’ril’s turn.”

  “You two should be alert and ready for the target, not playing these useless trivia games,” the Dotari said from the other side of the rock.

  “This trial—like all the others—didn’t come with a duration,” Roland said. “We can either discuss something or lie here, under sensor shrouds, and wonder if the Scipio and Gideon forgot where they left us.”

  “That option hadn’t occurred to me, thanks, buddy,” Aignar said.

  “We’re not to break radio silence until the target appears and is destroyed,” Cha’ril said. “We’ve all spent longer periods in the pods—without talking to anyone, I might add. I don’t know why you insist on speaking now. Unless you’re doing it just to annoy me. Is that what this is, Aignar? A long, drawn-out attempt to damage my calm?”

  “Sounds like I win!” Aignar said.

  “Son of a…you cheated,” Roland said.

  “Wait…you two have some sort of wager?” Cha’ril said.

  “Twenty-four hours before you snapped at one of us,” Aignar said. “I had the under; Roland had the over. Guess who’s paying for the first round the next time we find beer?”

  “You are a dickhead.” Cha’ril pronounced the insult with an Australian accent. “And a runt. No, a tunt. You are a tunt.”

  “I think you mean—”

  “Let that one go,” Aignar said.

  A target icon flashed onto Roland’s UI.

  “Got it…reads as a Vishrakath shuttle, heading thirteen mark two-two-nine. Your fire arc, Aignar.”

  “Engaging,” Aignar said.

  Roland pulled the shroud away and rose to his feet, his rail cannon vanes lifting up from his back and tilting over his shoulder. The target continued just above the truncated horizon of the asteroid. Roland waited for Aignar’s rail cannons to fire…and waited.

  “Got a malfunction! Batteries read charged but there’s no polarity down my vanes,” Aignar said.

  The target dipped below the horizon.

  “Cha’ril?” Roland asked.

  “Not in my line of sight,” she said.

  “Balls,” Roland said and raised his anchor from the rock, pushing himself forward with his jet pack. Rounding the asteroid, he reacquired the target and pinged the asteroid’s surface with radar, searching for another anchor point. Only one small patch of dust read as “marginal.”

  “Dropping anchor.” He raised his right boot, and a diamond-tipped spike extended from his heel; he rammed it into the ground as the anchor screwed into the regolith.

  “Are you locked?” Cha’ril asked.

  “Close enough.” His rail cannon vanes hummed with power as he unsnapped a shell the size of his flesh-and-blood forearm off his thigh and pressed it into the weapon’s breach. His armor made minute adjustments to the cannon’s direction, and a tone hummed through his mind.

  The shell shot down the powerful magnetic field between the two vanes and tore off into the void, the recoil traveling down Roland’s armor and into the anchor spike. The asteroid broke, shooting Roland back and tumbling end over end, a jagged boulder fixed to the anchor. Roland’s view alternated between a blur of stars and the passing asteroid as his momentum eclipsed exit velocity in a split second.

  A jolt rattled him within his womb and all he saw were unmoving stars.

  “Got you,” Cha’ril said. She had Roland by the ankle. Her own anchor was half out of the asteroid, her armor stretched open like she was about to do a basketball layup. As she tugged at Roland’s armor, he bounced off a dust patch and bashed the lump of rock off his anchor, then returned the spike to its housing.

  “Did I hit it?” Roland asked.

  “Target destroyed,” Aignar said.

  “You almost went ass over quills into the void,” Cha’ril said. “You’re lucky I anticipated the worst possible outcome and dropped anchor where I could stop you.”

  “Right, thank you. I’m going to stop making bets on pissing you off.”

  “Speaking of taking a piss…” Cha’ril spun around and pointed at Aignar. “Explain.”

  “My rail cannon malfunctioned. The diagnostics—”

  “I disabled his cannon remotely,” Gideon said over the radio. “No fault on his part. You all should have set up secondary and tertiary engagement criteria while you were emplaced. And you should have sunk anchor points to cover multiple fields of fire. That I’m not directing the Scipio to recover a Flying Dutchman before Roland became another bit of space junk is a miracle…well done.”

  “Was that a compliment?” Roland sent to his fellows over an IR beam.

  “Shh, don’t spoil it,” Aignar said.

  “There are three rocket packs six meters behind Roland, inside a locker. Conduct a High Orbit Low Opening assault on the following coordinates. Destroy all hostile targets. You have…ten minutes to complete the task. Time starts now.”

  Roland swept dust off the locker embedded in the asteroid and ripped the top off in his haste.

  “Oops,” he said and tossed rocket packs to Cha’ril and Aignar before slinging the last one over his head and onto the mag locks on his back that set it into the right position. Screws extended from his armor and into the jet pack, locking it tight against him.

  “I have a flight plan,” Aignar said. “Synch with me and launch.”

  Roland crouched slightly and leaped off the asteroid. His jet pack fired and he angled toward Ceres. Red circles rotated within a crater on his HUD. He maneuvered behind and to Aignar’s left, Cha’ril to the right.

  With their jet packs burning at full power, they’d make landfall in six minutes.

  “This’ll be close,” Roland said.

  “No target intel, crater’s a dust bowl.” Aignar adjusted their course to land just outside the crater rim.

  As the acceleration pressed Roland’s true body against his womb, he looked between his lance mates hurtling through the void. Months ago, he was a busboy. Now, he’d just blasted off an asteroid to drop onto Ceres. He hoped someone on the Scipio got a picture of this. His parents would have been impressed.

  “Is all human military training this way?” Cha’ril asked. “Chaos after chaos?”

  “This is what war’s like,” Aignar said. “Nothing ever goes according to plan. And anything that can go wrong, will, and at the worst possible moment. Which I just experienced. Damn that Murphy.”

  “Who?” Cha’ril asked.

  “Ancient human philosopher.”

  “We need an assault plan,” Roland said. Through his optics, the target area was still a barren plain of dust accumulated over the billions of years since Ceres formed into a sphere.

  “Violence of action,” Aignar said. “Movement.”

  Stepped pyramids and blocky buildings rose out of the dust. Threat icons appeared in the crater as weapon emplacements slid out of the emerging structures.

  “Dive, go nap-of-the-earth.” Aignar pitched down and the three made straight toward the moon’s surface. Red energy beams snapped between Roland and Cha’ril just before they pulled up and skimmed the surface by a few yards. Ceres’ horizon kept the weapon emplacements from drawing line of sight to the armor.

  “Trident or a dangle?” Roland asked.

  “Dangle,” Cha’ril said. “Feed data to the other two before we strike.”

  “I’ll take the hit,” Aignar said. “Break on three…two…break!”

  Roland veered to the left as Aignar popped up, his forearm cannons blazing. Images of bullet-scarred stone buildings captured by Aignar fed into Roland’s armor. He marked priority targets with a flick of his eyes, then cut his jet pack.

  “Missiles,” Aignar called out, “got me painted. Pulling back to break line of sight.”

  Roland rode his momentum over the horizon and swung his feet forward, bringing him perpendicular to the surface. He slowed just enough that his feet touched down and he bro
ke into a run as the crater came into view.

  Gatling guns mounted atop the crater rim slewed toward him. Roland blew them apart with quick bursts from his forearm cannons, then vaulted over the crater rim and into a maze of buildings…that were moving. Structures the size of Destrier transports shifted on tracks embedded into the surface.

  Roland used his shoulder cannon to shred a missile-targeting array. He pressed his back to a building spinning in place and took single, well-aimed shots at laser emitters within open panels.

  Suddenly, the space behind him fell open, and Roland dropped to his knees as a massive gauss cannon blasted shells over his head. Roland slid to one side, stood up and slammed a hand onto the cannon. His fingers bent metal and he ripped it off its seat and threw it away. The cannon bounced off a spinning building and skipped down a street.

  A pair of doors taller than him snapped open across the way, revealing a giant creature that looked like a jellyfish made of compacted crystals. Roland held his fire, spinning in place and engaging a suit of armor with floating plates and burning with light as it pointed a hand toward him, the fingers alive with fire.

  Three oblong black metal objects rose out of a stepped pyramid, each the size of his body. Bent metal arms snapped up from their sides and the mock-ups of the now-extinct Xaros drones dove toward him. With a blast from his forearm cannons, he destroyed one, sidestepped a laser beam from another and directly into the path of the third.

  Roland swung a punch that connected with the drone’s forward tip, cracking the shell and leaving an indentation of his fist that extended up to his wrist. Using the remains as a shield against the remaining drone’s lasers, he ducked down as it approached. The blade in his forearm’s housing snapped out. The drone flew right overhead, and he rammed his sword into its belly, ripping it in two as it passed.

  Kicking the drone off his hand, he spied Cha’ril and Aignar fighting back-to-back through the spinning buildings.

  A swarm of missiles erupted from a roof and angled toward the pair.

  “Link rotaries,” Roland said. The three suits connected and their shoulder-mounted Gatling guns opened up with a flurry of bullets that shredded through the missile barrage. Cha’ril took a single hit to her armor’s thigh, but kept firing without missing a beat.

  Roland joined them, and the three wrecked a pack of faux Xaros drones the second they appeared from a false panel within a building. Then the spinning structures slowed…and stopped.

  The armor kept their weapons raised, scanning their sectors as gauss shells cycled into their cannons and empty ammo canisters on their backs ejected, spinning through Ceres’ slight gravity.

  “Exercise complete,” Gideon said. “Return to the Scipio for debriefing.” An icon flashed on Roland’s HUD and he saw that the ship was a few craters over.

  “I haven’t felt this good in a long time,” Aignar said.

  Roland felt adrenaline coursing through his body and unclenched his true hands within the womb.

  White light flashed overhead from the Crucible. Roland zoomed in on a single ship—a destroyer—as it emerged. A gash ran down her flank, trailing atmosphere into the void like blood trailing through water. Scorch marks dotted the hull.

  “We need to get back to the ship,” Roland said. “Now.”

  ****

  Roland moved through the force field separating the Scipio’s pressurized cemetery from the near-vacuum of Ceres’ surface like he was walking through water. The energy wall stripped most of the moon dust from his armor, and sound returned to his sensors once he’d stepped free of the morass.

  Gideon had both hands to a control console on the upper section of the scaffolding, his armor’s chest open and ready to receive him. The other coffins were open, and trios of support technicians were at each, anxious with energy like a pit crew waiting for a race car to pull in.

  The damaged destroyer hung in a screen over Gideon’s head, the face of a woman with a wrinkled face and gray hair on another. A hologram of Commander Tagawa stood next to him, looking at the same screens from her doppelganger position on the ship’s bridge.

  “If there are life signs, why aren’t they answering hails?” Tagawa asked.

  “I sent rescue teams from the Crucible,” the old woman said. “How long until the Scipio can make intercept?”

  “Soon as the anti-gravs warm up. Three minutes to liftoff. Maybe ten to dock with the Ticonderoga,” Tagawa said.

  Roland stepped into his coffin and extended his right arm. A technician brought a mechanical claw up from the lower level and used it to clamp down on the weapon. It came away with a snap. Armor panels on his back opened and battery packs popped free of their housings and were swapped out by the coffin’s auto-loaders.

  “What’s going on?” Roland asked his chief technician, an older man named Henrique.

  “Something in the Ash system,” Henrique said. “Gideon’s got a fire in him. Told us to drop your system limitations to zero. Go for full-combat configuration.”

  “Combat? Henrique…combat against who?”

  A new twin-gauss cannon attached to his forearm, this one boasting the flamethrower attachment. A grenade launcher snapped onto his back. Ammo trackers lit up on his HUD as his techs loaded him down with every round his armor could carry.

  Roland felt his world come into sharp focus. This was not a drill.

  A new holo screen came to life on Gideon’s command console. A sailor in full vac suit, with emergency sealant tape on his shoulder and one half of his helmet, tapped his camera. Behind him, a support beam from the ceiling had crushed the captain’s chair. A flickering force field held back the raw vacuum of a hull breach.

  “Crucible command, this is Commander Fallon of the Ticonderoga. A Vishrakath task force arrived through the Ash gate thirty minutes ago and declared a planetary interdiction. They scrambled everything coming off the surface, but we managed to get a tight beam from Doctor Lowenn on Barada.” Fallon held up a data slate displaying a grainy video of a woman with long hair and thick glasses, tall jungle trees and an azure sky behind her. The video distorted and skipped as she spoke.

  “—repeat we found a gamma-level artifact in the Barada ruins…pathfinder team went missing somewhere in the Shard Jungle…Vish…know, but haven’t reached it yet. We need back up imme—ly!”

  “Vish fired on us as we broke orbit,” Fallon said. “They broke off pursuit once we got close to the gate. They’re holding to the exact letter of the Hale Treaty. Bastards.” A wire diagram of the Ash system came up. Two dozen alien capital ships formed a cordon between the planet Barada and the jump gate.

  “Minder, have any more Vishrakath ships gone through the gate?” Gideon asked.

  “No,” the older woman said as she cocked her head to the side, her eyes unfocused, “they’ve activated a quantum distortion field near the gate. It’s tricky…but I can break the pattern in another few hours to get our alert task force through.”

  “Then the artifact is still on Barada,” Gideon said. “Can you send the Scipio through?”

  “Wait just a second,” Tagawa said. “This ship can do precisely jack and squat against that many Vish ships.”

  “Just the Scipio…I can. It’ll be rough passage and a one-way trip until I break their distortion algorithm,” Minder said. Roland zoomed in on her face; she seemed rather familiar for some reason.

  “This is my ship,” Tagawa said. “What do you think she’s going to accomplish?”

  “Get us close to this Shard Jungle Lowenn mentioned,” Gideon said, “and my lance will drop in and secure the artifact. You rendezvous with the pathfinder ships in orbit and stay out of the way.”

  “This is insane,” Tagawa said.

  “Gamma-level artifacts can change everything, Captain,” Gideon said. “They’re on par with the omnium-reactor technology, the Qa’Resh codex that taught us to build our own Crucible gates. If we let the Vishrakath get it, the balance of power might shift far beyond our ability to adapt. We
must go.”

  “Message from Phoenix command,” Minder said, “they’re—”

  “Ordering the Scipio to the Ash system,” Tagawa waved a hand in the air. “I’ll go on record saying this is a bad idea, so if we all die, know that I’ll spend the entire afterlife saying ‘I told you so.’ Helm, take us out.”

  The deck rumbled as the Scipio lifted away from Ceres.

  ****

  The amniosis engulfing his body felt colder as Roland watched Gideon climb into his armor. The lance leader’s womb shut, and Roland opened an IR channel to Aignar and Cha’ril.

  “Quick, while he’s off-line during hookup, do you two think this is real?” Roland asked. “The cadre have done nothing but screw with us since the very first day.”

  Chat windows with the other faces came up on his HUD.

  “We should behave as if it’s real,” Cha’ril said evenly. “Success and victory are the only acceptable outcomes in any training evolution. Now is not the time to drag our feet.”

  “This is a combat mission,” Aignar said. “We’re led by officers, not actors. There’s an air to all this that I haven’t felt since Cygnus.”

  “We’ve had our suits for a few weeks,” Roland said. “I thought it took years to—”

  “We don’t have years,” Gideon said, popping into the center of Roland’s UI. “We have a critical situation that armor can solve. If we sit around and wait for a committee to come up with a better solution, the artifact will be in Vishrakath hands. This is a time for action.”

  “What’s the plan, sir?” Aignar asked.

  “I’m working on that…none of you have made Low Orbit Low Opening drops yet…or done adverse-conditions training. Damn it.”

  “Sir, how ‘adverse’ are these conditions?” Roland asked.

  Gideon pushed a data file for the Ash system to the others. Roland sifted through survey data and skimmed over conditions on the other two habitable planets, Nicto and Klaatu. Barada was once home to a sentient species that had colonized several nearby star systems using sub-light seed ships. Images of vine-covered stone temples and foliage-choked decaying cityscapes popped up on a map of Barada. From what the initial Pathfinder Corps could piece together, the entire species had died out over the course of a few hundred years. When the Xaros drone armada had come to the dead world, they’d built a Crucible and placed every last trace of the Baradans in stasis fields that held back the inexorable grind of time and the elements.