Mech

by Isaac Hooke

  The artillery drove up the ramp formed by the bodies of the Draactals they had downed, and onto the thick ring that formed the base of the geodesic dome. They plowed through the fragments of glass that still hung from the triangular frames of the dome and plunged down the three meters to the streets below before continuing forward.

  Other troops began to follow behind them. Centurions. Mechs. Equestrian tanks. All AI driven.

  The Draactals were interspersed among their ranks, and their claws raked though the hull of the United Systems units. At least two or three aliens dropped every second as the defenders continued to open fire. Weapons were obviously overheated among some of the troops, particularly the mechs, who bashed aliens with arms and ballistic shields.

  As the retreating army drove deeper into the city, they began to clamber up the low to mid-sized buildings in order to shoot down at the Draactals from higher ground. Their intent was also to draw the aliens away from the skyscrapers at the center of the city, where the colonists resided.

  The last of the retreating defenders passed into the city, and now only Draactals flooded inside behind them. Nemesis spheres also began to break through the glass of the geodesic dome higher up, and they raced toward where the defenders were assuming positions on the rooftops. The enemy walker units also broke through large sections of the dome, ripping away the glass and the triangular sections that held them. They fired their energy cannons into the fleeing United Systems defenders.

  Two equestrian tanks swiveled their turrets back and released several rapid-fire plasma shots, targeting the cannons of one of those walkers. They got in solid blows, eliminating those cannons. But above them, two Nemesis spheres swooped downward to intercept them.

  Rade took control of his cobra, and targeted one sphere. He fired, bringing it down, and it crashed into the street below. He targeted the next one, but it swooped behind a building. He was too late: the Equestrians were smoldering ruins below.

  “You think this is real?” Fret said. “Or an illusion?”

  “That’s the problem when you’ve had aliens mindfucking you,” Pyro said. “You don’t know what’s real, and what’s not.”

  “Oh, this is real,” Rade said. “As real as it gets.”

  “What if Praxter turns on us?” Fret said. “Or our mechs do?”

  “Then you have my permission to destroy me,” Praxter said.

  “We don’t need your permission, bro!” Bender said. “I’m gonna destroy your ass when I please!”

  “Well, that didn’t take long…” Manic said. “Bender, dude, you’ve reverted to your old, AI mistreating self. You forgot already how easily a Praxter model downed you in the gym?”

  “That’s only because I wasn’t ready,” Bender said. “If I knew that sly Artificial was going to sucker punch me, I would’ve walloped the fool.”

  “Of course,” Manic said.

  The more mobile troops that had repositioned to the different rooftops were now pinned by the Draactals, with Equestrians and armored artillery units trapped at the bases of the buildings, overwhelmed by the aliens.

  Meanwhile, the medium-range attacks of Rade and the others began to draw the attention of the Nemesis spheres, and the walkers.

  A group of twenty spheres approached, and the local cloud of HS3s swerved away to intercept them, no doubt dispatched by Screwdriver.

  The walkers turned away from the buildings where the bigger army had deployed, and instead aimed large, flat panels that protruded from either flank toward the top portion of the skyscrapers where Rade and the others poked above the rest of the skyline.

  “Reposition!” Screwdriver said. “Those flat panels? They fire gamma rays!”

  “Where do we reposition to?” Scotts asked.

  “Lower!” Screwdriver said. “Scale the walls!”

  Rade retracted his ballistic shield, swung over the edge of the building and dropped. He fired his jumpjets to slow his descent, and prepared to latch onto the metal of the skyscraper’s blast shield beside him. The other mechs from all platoons were doing the same around him. The smaller Centurions remained in place on the rooftop to stand guard, since they wouldn’t be harmed by the gamma rays.

  “Taya, calculate the vulnerability region!” Rade said. “And overlay it!”

  Because there were so many other, shorter skyscrapers between the walkers and their targets, only the top portions of the prism-shaped buildings where Rade and the others resided were currently exposed to the enemy. Taya ran the necessary calculation, and highlighted in red the exposed regions of each building, which ended several floors down.

  Rade shared it with his platoon mates. “Drop below the red line!”

  He passed below the red region, and dropped another two floors for good measure before increasing his thrust and then ramming his arms into the metal surface. He carved a short runnel in the exterior as he came to a halt. Beside him, the other members of the different platoons on this building had similarly latched on, scattered in random positions below the red line. The upper edges of the three nearby skyscrapers were similarly populated.

  “I’m detecting minor gamma ray scatter above us,” Taya said. “The radiation is well within safety levels.”

  “Thanks for the update,” he told her.

  “I feel like I’m King Kong or something,” Pyro quipped.

  “You okay back there, LC?” Rade asked.

  “Not really,” Scotts replied. “What I really need is a mech.”

  “We can swap positions if you like?” Rade offered.

  “That’s a negative,” Scotts said. “You’re a better mech pilot then I am. I don’t suppose I can borrow one of the laser rifles in your storage compartment?”

  Rade did a double check on his inventory. He was expecting to find the storage compartment empty, but was pleasantly surprised to discover it contained a pair of rifles, along with some grenades.

  “All yours,” Rade said, opening the compartment in the lower leg of his mech. “Don’t look down.”

  “Too late.” The lieutenant commander swung from the passenger seat and climbed the rungs on the side of the mech. Scotts seemed completely comfortable, despite the dizzying heights: the parked vehicles on the street below looked like ants from here. “But heights don’t phase me. I’ve probably gone on more helo jumps than you boys.”

  “Probably,” Rade said. “Though we’ve got you beat when it comes to space jumps.”

  “That, I don’t doubt.” Scotts grabbed the rifle and a pair of grenades, shoving the latter into his harness. Then he scooted back up into place.

  Rade shut the storage compartment door. “Don’t forget to strap yourself in,” he told the lieutenant commander. “If I have to move in a hurry, you could very easily be tossed from the seat if you’re not secured.”

  “I’ve gone through MOTH training,” Scotts said, sounding a little insulted. “Besides, I’m wearing a jetpack to boot.”

  Rade was about to tell Scotts that was no reason not to secure himself, but then the “strap secure” indicator highlighted on Rade’s HUD. Good.

  He aimed his cobra at the street with his free arm, switched to the viewpoint of his scope, and ran the crosshairs across the asphalt below. As usual, he kept the main camera feed from his head displayed in the lower left of his vision, normal zoom, for situational awareness purposes. His overhead map remained active in his upper right.

  “Hey, do we have to worry about that red line descending?” Rex said. “The gamma ray exposure area? Because as the walkers approach, won’t more of the building come into view?”

  “It’s the opposite,” Praxter said. “As the walker gets closer, the building in front is going to seem to become taller, occluding more of the target skyscraper. If anything, the red line will get higher.”

  “Yeah, it’s called perspective, dude,” Bender said.

  “That doesn’t mean the walkers can’t easily turn down other intersections to get a better shot,” Lui said.

  �
�Keep an eye out for them,” Rade agreed.

  As he scanned the street, he spotted Draactals crossing into one of the farther intersections below. More and more appeared.

  “The swarm has arrived,” Lui said. “I’ve got Draactals three blocks to the southwest.”

  “I see them,” Rade said. “Fire at will.”

  When Draactals began to fall, some of the others became emboldened, and they howled, darting forward and breaking away to form an advance party. They frothed at the mouth, their mandibles clicking wildly with battle lust. If these aliens had been human, they would have been Benders, Rade thought.

  The Equestrian tanks lining the base of the buildings fired shells and plasma bursts into the incoming aliens, dropping more of them.

  On the overhead map, the HS3s began to wink out as they were struck down by the energy weapons fired by the incoming Nemesis spheres.

  “Got two spheres in view!” Bomb reported.

  Rade switched to his main camera feed and looked up. Several more spheres rounded the adjacent buildings, and hovered into sight.

  “Take them down!” Rade swiveled his zodiac into place as he swung his arm toward the closest spheres, and he fired his electrolaser. The lightning bolts thundered from his weapon, and struck the target, arcing to the three adjacent spheres. All four alien craft dropped to the street below, crushing one of the Draactals that was part of the advance party.

  More spheres swung past the nearby prism-shaped skyscrapers, pursued by HS3s. They zig-zagged wildly in an attempt to dodge the lasers of the smaller HS3s. The latter units were themselves zig-zagging, because more spheres in turn pursued them, firing off random bursts of energy.

  “They’re copying our tactics,” Manic muttered.

  “We taught them everything they know,” Scotts agreed. He was leaning past the edge of the passenger seat, aiming down the scope of the laser rifle he’d borrowed. He was still strapped in, according to the passenger seat feedback sensors.

  Rade switched to his cobra and attempted to track those zig-zagging spheres. He fired rapidly, and kept missing. One of the spheres seemed to tilt toward him. Not wanting to risk an impact, Rade let go of the wall, and dropped.

  On cue, the Nemesis sphere released a burst of energy, and it smashed into the building where Rade had been hanging only a moment before. The energy bolt carved a spherical bite out of the blast shield and underlying metal-concrete, but otherwise didn’t penetrate into the interior of the building, as far as Rade could tell.

  His zodiac recharged and he swiveled it back into place as he latched onto the wall with his free arm—he’d only dropped ten meters. He tracked the zig-zagging sphere for a moment, guessed its next position, and then squeezed the trigger. The lightning bolt roared free, striking the sphere, and arcing to the two nearby, taking all three down.

  “Good shot,” Taya said.

  “Got lucky,” Rade said.

  Other nearby Brigands and Titans launched lightning bolts, but most of their shots missed. However, the spheres moved in somewhat predictable directions to dodge the lightning bolts, allowing the predictive algorithms of the HS3s, and the AI-manned Hoplites and Titans, to strike the remainder with their cobras. The Nemesis spheres following the HS3s dropped, and the surviving units swerved their aim downward to target the Draactals that were reaching the buildings below.

  Rade also rotated his aim toward the street far below, and zoomed in so that the heights didn’t appear too dizzying. The lead aliens had overwhelmed the Equestrians. The ax-like feet of the aliens hacked into their exteriors, and soon tore through the armor and into the power cells and AI cores, terminating them.

  Meanwhile other aliens raced past and slammed their feet axes into and out of the exteriors of the blast shields, and repeated the motion to slowly scale the buildings. They were targeting only those skyscrapers that contained colonists inside, Rade noted. Was that because of the presence of the mechs?

  “Should we move to another building and try to draw them away?” Rade asked over the shared comm.

  “No,” Screwdriver returned. “They know the colonists are here. In all their previous penetration attacks, they’ve concentrated their fire on these four buildings. You can’t tell because of repairs, but the blast shields have suffered a lot of punishment over the past few days.”

  “So, attacks like this are common?” Snakeoil asked.

  “Attacks, but not like this,” Screwdriver said. “Not with this intensity. This is the first time the United Systems army has been completely routed. The entire Nemesis army is penetrating the geodesic dome. Just look, they’re not stopping. An endless swarm of Draactals and other units pouring through the breaches, with more created every second. This is our last stand, I’m afraid.”

  “I might not have a chance to say this later,” Fret announced. “So, I’m going to tell you now. I just wanted to say, it was an honor serving with you all.”

  “Of all the days to crash a starship…” Bomb complained.

  “I’d rather be here then tucked away safely aboard a starship!” Bender said joyfully. “Even if it meant I was doomed.”

  “We’re not doomed yet.” Rade opened fire, targeting Draactals in the head. Each hit from a laser dropped the alien in question, and they sometimes brought down two or three more aliens as they struck those climbing below them. The Draactals had apparently done this sort of rush before, however, because they were spread out in a random pattern along the building exteriors, preventing too many of them from being knocked from the wall by falling comrades. The lower aliens also crouched, digging in if they had time, to avoid being struck.

  For every Draactal Rade and the others eliminated, five more latched onto the prism-like skyscrapers that housed the colonists. He kept an eye on his cobra temperature indicator, and realized the weapon was going to overheat if he kept this up.

  He switched to the zodiac as often as he was able, and fired the cobra in short, well-spaced bursts, trying to keep the weapon within the functional temperature range.

  The HS3s joined in, firing their own cobras at the Draactals, adding their weapons to the mix.

  But more and more Draactals continued to crawl onto the building. As his weapon finally redlined, Rade began to feel that yes, they were indeed doomed.

  26

  Rade waited for his cobra to cool down. Meanwhile, he rotated the zodiac into place, and fired the electrolaser every thirty seconds instead. It was always satisfying to see the lightning bolt arc between Draactals, and take down two or three at the same time, and sometimes others underneath as the stricken aliens fell.

  “Is it just me, or do they seem bigger than any Draactals we’ve faced before?” Rex asked.

  “They’re bigger,” Kicker confirmed.

  “LC, are we going to get some help from the United Systems in orbit?” Rade asked.

  “The captain tells me the Nemesis fleet is making a concerted effort to drive the ships from orbit,” Scotts said. “They won’t be able to offer any support for quite a while.”

  “Figures,” Tahoe said.

  When the Draactals got closer, Rade switched hands, holding onto the building’s blast shield with his right arm so that he could utilize the holler in his left. Then he fired the sonic weapon, sweeping its funnel-like waves across the enemy below. The other nearby Brigands also used their hollers to launch debilitating sound attacks, causing the aliens to plunge from the wall in clumps.

  “It’s like knocking bees from a hive with spurts of smoke!” Kicker said. “You guys ever seen that?”

  No one answered.

  While the holler recharged, Rade switched to his incendiary launcher and fired off streams of jellied gasoline. Draactals lit up below, and they screamed in pain, releasing the building exterior in droves.

  “Cyclone, Hackles, I want rings of flame around all four skyscrapers,” Rade sent. “A few levels below our positions. The Draactals are going to have to crawl through hell if they want to reach us.”


  “On it,” Tahoe said.

  The LPO gave out firing solutions; Rade accepted his, and a region became marked on the blast shield below. He fired his incendiary along the surface, allowing the jellied gasoline to take. It burned, creating a wall of flame. His other companions similarly launched their incendiaries, all across this skyscraper, and the other three they clung from, so that the requested rings of flame appeared around all four buildings, a few floors below the position of the mechs.

  The other mechs under Hackles and Screwdriver released flames as well—those with incendiary capabilities, anyway—and thickened the ring of fire.

  The flames slowed the Draactal onslaught. Rade’s cobra cooled enough to fire again, so he retracted the incendiaries and switched arms once more, swiveling the laser into place.

  “Got walkers!” Snakeoil announced. “Incoming, from the southwest!”

  Rade glanced at his map, and saw the three larger red dots that had appeared in the southwest. From his current position, they would be in view of his mech. He swung his head that way, and spotted the three walkers immediately.

  The big robots were directing the flat panels on their flanks toward the upper sections of the buildings, where the mechs clung.

  Rade couldn’t really give the order to drop yet again… they’d fall through the flames, and into the onslaught of incoming Draactals. No, there was only really one option.

  “Everyone, move to the far side of the building!” Rade ordered.

  He hauled himself past the corner of the building, and released a powerful spurt from his jumpjets so that he was moving horizontally next to the skyscraper. Keeping an eye on his jumpjet fuel, he released a downward spurt as well, to keep his height level.

  “Will we be safe on the far side, though?” Fret asked.

  “Moving to the far side will dip us slightly beneath their angle of attack,” Praxter replied. “Thanks to the increase in distance. Even if we stay at the same height. We’ll be spared the brunt of the gamma rays.”