Sons of the Gods

by James Von Ohlen

  A large boarding torpedo, disguised to look like a piece of wreckage from a larger ship, had smashed through the viewing windows of the chamber and the front of it was now beginning to open. The armored battering ram of the prow shifting and pushing debris aside. He relayed the images to his crew as he felt the thud and vibration of the automated machinegun on the other end of the chamber begin firing. No sound as there was no air to carry it. Sensors indicated they were not the target.

  Coalition assets boarding the station, it would appear.

  “We’ve got company.” Ragnald’s voice sounded to all before he fired a short burst from his rifle down the stairwell. Sensory input from his suit showed a group of bronze knights being shredded by the rounds erupting from his railgun. Chemical propellant pushed the armor piercing discarding sabots onto the rail, ensuring maximum velocity when they left the weapon’s barrel. Their effect on the armored bronze knights was devastating.

  The robots burst apart in a storm of shattered alloys and plastics. Ceramic composites designed to stop incoming projectiles and to cause beams to burn themselves out on impact cracked and broke into pieces that took flight under the impact. Anyone near them would have to be armored or they would be seriously injured by the makeshift shrapnel.

  The rounds continued through them, punching through several floors of the battle station before coming to a halt. Perhaps it was overkill for the situation they found themselves in, especially if they wished to retain control of the station instead of destroying it. But it was what they had to work with.

  Torsten wouldn’t admit it, but he was jealous of Ragnald now. He’d gotten the first use of their new toys in combat and the first kill with one. Or the first five kills as it were. The man’s shape was highlighted in Torsten’s vision as he leapt back from the middle of the stairwell he had just fired down. A storm of beams shot up from below, slagging the ceiling above him and evaporating the railing he had looked over. Apparently the bronze knights weren’t too concerned with preserving the integrity of their home. If they couldn’t have it, then no one could.

  More coming, Ragnald sent. Torsten sorted through his sensory input seeing a group of ten or so of the bronze knights firing up the stairs as they advanced. He sent his order and Ragnald acknowledged before he tossed a grenade down the stairwell. Each man crouched and covered his head as the small explosive detonated, obliterating the group of bronze knights beneath them.

  Torsten looked back into the chamber they had been about to enter before it had been breached. The armored prow of the boarding ship had opened completely and a score of gray men had emerged. They were immediately fired on by the automated machinegun, but to no effect. Their armor stopped the rounds and they fired back, destroying it utterly. There was a brief moment’s respite before two doors opened along the wall of the chamber facing the empty place that had previously been filled with windows.

  A group of bronze knights emerged from each, firing on the gray men. The gray men scrambled to take up better positions and an intense exchange of fire took place. The gray men seemed to be getting the better of the situation, pushing the bronze knights back.

  Torsten’s crew conferred in their thoughts. Torsten’s view that they should let the two opposing forces weaken one another and then wipe out the victor prevailing without debate. Styg watched and relayed his sensory input to everyone as the gray men slowly pushed the bronze knights out of their path and began moving in the direction of where the bridge was predicted to be.

  As the gray knights cleared the chamber, they advanced. Slowly. Robotically. Just before the last of them left the far end of the chamber, massive blast shutters slammed down in place of the shattered windows. Several of the shutters were blocked in their paths by the body of the boarding vessel. It shook for a second, threatening to come loose. Finally it settled in beneath the pressure and remained still. The shutters ground against it for a second before they began to change shape and flow around it like liquid. Once in place, the shutters sealed the chamber against the void.

  Better late than never, Torsten thought as air jetted into the chamber from portals hidden in the decorative design of the walls, refilling it with a breathable atmosphere. Irrelevant to men wearing armor that could supply its own atmosphere, but a good design element when there might have been unarmored enlisted men present.

  Torsten watched as the last gray man left the chamber. It paused in its stride long enough to raise its weapon and fire a burst of beams through an open doorway. No return fire came and a second later the head of a bronze knight rolled through the door, the stump of its neck glowing red-hot. Machines, he realized as he watched. These gray men were machines.

  Their movements were almost identical to a humans, but the mechanical nature of their gait was unmistakable once he had noticed it. Earlier perusal of Coalition tactics told him that it was unlikely that the machines would all be autonomous. There was likely a control unit nearby, acting as a central relay for the unit of gray men.

  And that central unit would likely be a human or human brain in a mechanical body. He couldn’t help but think of the brain case that had been pulled from the Titan unit. Modi and Vidar had tried to read out the contents of the soldier’s brain during the downtime waiting for the gateway to charge. They had found some useful information, but mostly it had been an unreadable jumble of machine code and fragments of memories smashed together.

  Nightmarish and brutal, she had described it. It could not have been the product of a sane mind at peace. Modi was of the opinion that quickly destroying the brain case would be granting the remains of the soldier within a great mercy. Vidar had disagreed and instead taken the brain case to be vivisected as to better understand the onset of psychoses caused by the organic-machine interface. Whatever happened to the mishmash of human brain and inhuman machine was of no consequence to Torsten, but he couldn’t help but wonder.

  Torsten’s crew filed out of the stairwell, fanning out as they advanced into the chamber. The room had been brightly lit by sunlight and recessed diodes before the impact of the boarding vessel. Now it was washed blood red in the glare of emergency lights. Optical sensors did their trick and the colors returned to normal in the scouts’ view.

  As air returned to the chamber, so did sound. The footsteps of Torsten’s crew echoed ahead of them, shockingly loud. A badly damaged speaker began announcing coded orders in a heavily accented female voice. Torsten didn’t understand what was being said, but his halo unit provided several likely translations. Damage control orders for fire crews and engineers. Containment orders for security teams.

  Torsten head-checked to his left and to his right, seeing the hot-air distorted masses of Pier and Styg outlined and named in light blue. Both trained the heavy heat lances they carried, visible to Torsten only as a six foot long cylindrical distortion of the air, on the open doors of the boarding vessel as he passed. Warnings that he was crossing the scope of a friendly heavy weapon spoke in his thoughts. Something stirred inside as Torsten’s crew paused in front to peer into the interior.

  Weapons came up without thought, tracking the movements. Sensors pierced the darkness inside and outlined the shape of a lone gray man, slowly making its way to the front of the vessel. It carried no weapons and limped heavily on one leg. Torsten looked down to see that it was missing its left foot, apparently lost in the impact of the boarding vessel with Anhur’s battle station.

  Sensors outlined a small puddle in Torsten’s vision and he zoomed in on it. The gray man stumbled into the interior walls, repeatedly walking into the same part over and over before finally losing its balance and falling. Torsten turned on a diode embedded in his suit’s exterior, flooding the interior of the boarding vessel with harsh blue light.

  It was blood.

  The gray man was leaking human blood. Torsten stepped into the interior of the ship scanning for further threats as he did so. He made his way to the fallen gray man and shouldered his rifle as the rest of his crew maintained their
vigilant watch in both directions back in the chamber.

  The gray man had been a human inside a suit of armor, just like the gray men he had fought planetside. This one had been thrown loose of his seating when the boarding vessel had hit the battle station and he had lost a foot in the crash. The flow of blood from the stump of the man’s foot had slowed to a trickle. If he wasn’t already dead, he would be soon. Something about the situation struck Torsten as wrong.

  If the other gray men had been human as well, then why had they moved like machines? If this man was the only human with them acting as the commander, who or what was commanding them now? A troubling thought tingled at the back of his mind and he drew his sword. The magnetic sheath that held the blade in perfect place, preventing the monomolecular edge from cutting through its own scabbard, hissed as he drew the weapon. Just like the steel he’d grown accustomed to over the past decades.

  “Sorry about this, but there’s something I need to check. And since you’re already dead, I don’t think you’re going to mind.” Torsten spoke out loud, his voice sounding hollow and metallic in the interior of the boarding vessel.

  He knelt and very quickly cut the top of the gray man’s head off with a precise cut. Blood flowed and electricity crackled. Inside the dead man’s head where his brain should have been was a jumble of electronic components. Why should that surprise me, he asked himself.

  If they would put a man’s brain in a machine, why wouldn’t they put a machine’s brain in a man? If that was the norm for this boarding party, that would explain their unusual movements. He knew that he shouldn’t care, but he still found himself wondering about the fate of the brains that had been removed. What had been done with them? Where had they come from?

  He examined the gray man for a moment longer before he saw it. A small tattoo running along the dead man’s scalp. There was no mistaking it. The mark of the Stone Crow’s. This man had been a Mountain Man. Mordechai needed soldiers and considering his past, it shouldn’t surprise Torsten that he was taking men from Veldt below and turning them into his slaves. That parasite would have to be dealt with.

  But first things first, Anhur’s time was at hand.

  Torsten rose from his kneeling position and sheathed his sword, relaying his findings to the rest of his crew. Their response was unanimous. A simultaneous “What the fuck?” was relayed back to him from all of them.

  Before he could respond, the world around him exploded. Torsten found himself spinning end over end with damage indicators and warning alarms blaring through his head. He collided with someone in his crew before he came to a hard stop as he slammed into the far wall of the viewing chamber and slumped to the ground.

  The reports of assault carbines filled the air and echoed through the chamber along with the sound of metal tearing. Armor piercing rounds ricocheted off of something and ripped through the interior of the boarding vessel. Something roared, an inhuman monster borne of steel and flesh. Ed’s orders to the scouts passed through Torsten’s mind as he weakly pushed himself to his feet. Covered retreat, concentrate fire here and here. Two by two. Now. Now. NOW. MOVE.

  Torsten made it to his feet and turned back to the boarding vessel as he drew his own rifle. There among the wreckage of the interior stood the armored figure of a child’s nightmares come to life. Some type of Titan unit, but a far more advanced variant of the one they had seen earlier. If the UN could learn from Veldt technology, why not the Coalition?

  It seemed to be both leaner and stronger at the same time. Every inch covered with spikes and bearing four arms instead of the two he had seen earlier. Two of the arms ended in open hands beneath forearm length blades covered with crackling energy. The other two ended in fists that had undoubtedly very recently found the back of Torsten’s head as they tore through a bulkhead within the boarding vessel.

  One of the fists clenched the grip of a huge rifle that was now firing wildly at the shapes of Torsten’s men. Somehow it could see them despite their optical camouflage and stealth capabilities. The arm firing the weapon diminished the violence of its movement and then remained level, tracking targets as the Titan moved forward in the boarding vessel. The other three arms shredded everything around them with savage blows, gripping pieces of wreckage and hurling them at its enemies.

  Hard rounds from the rifle slammed into Eric’s running form and sent him sprawling, warnings about his suit integrity flowing across Torsten’s vision. More rounds found the prone form of the warrior as the warnings in Torsten’s vision became more intense.

  Torsten drew his rifle and began running towards the Titan unit, emptying an entire magazine in the space of a few steps. Hard rounds bounced off of the Titan’s armor in a few places, piercing it in others, but showing no significant damage. The Titan turned its attention towards Torsten and fired a short burst at him. The time dilation effect of the suit’s sensors feeding their data directly into Torsten’s brain allowed him to see the first round leaving the barrel and to change his path just enough for the burst to miss him. Somewhere behind him, he heard the hard rounds tearing into the wall.

  He dropped his own rifle as he took another step and leapt forward. He drew his sword in the air and landed with a downwards blow at the Titan that it blocked with a blow of its own from one of its blades. Power crackled along the length of both blades as man and machine pushed against one another, seeking advantage in a struggle that lasted the blink of an eye.

  Torsten leaned back to avoid a blow from the other blade, aimed at taking his head off. He drew his compact heat lance pistol and fire a single blast into the Titan’s left knee before rolling backwards. Hard rounds tore through the floor in his wake as the enemy machine sought to destroy him.

  The Titan took a single step forward, its knee joint still glowing with heat, and there was a single pop. It limped hard and threatened to fall over before it recovered its balance. All four arms drew in and then threw outwards, shattering the mouth of the boarding vessel as it stepped into the chamber and threatening to send the crippled ship back into the void.

  The blast shutters held the vessel in place as two large weapons sprang from the Titan’s back to both of its shoulders. Now that there was enough room it could deploy its heavy weapons. Twin 30mm cannons began shredding everything in their path as they sought out the scouts. Both guns rapidly converging on Torsten’s position.

  An advanced firing algorithm took over Torsten’s actions, tracking the movement of the 30mm cannons aimed at him. Without thought he reloaded his assault carbine and in a moment that defied his own belief, everything around him came to an absolute crawl as time seemed to stand still. A haze of predicted trajectories and physical data flowed around him as he fired a series of individual shots that intercepted each of the incoming hostile rounds.

  His armor-piercing hard rounds shattered each of the explosives, filling the air between Torsten and the Titan with a blossoming field of fire and shrapnel. Thoughts of disbelief reflected back at him from the men of his crew as they watched him shoot down the incoming rounds.

  Their moment of inaction came to an end as Ed screamed threats of violence against their manhood if they didn’t move their asses and kill that fucking thing. Leading by example he sprinted forward, swinging his hammer into the Titan unit’s chest, rocking it with the force of the blow and sending the last few rounds from its twin cannons into the ceiling.

  Ed swung the hammer around in a wide arc for a follow up attack and found himself lying on the floor after a huge steel fist slammed into his face. The form of a man leapt over him firing into the Titan in the air until a huge fist close around the other man’s head and flung him to the other side of the chamber. Ed rolled to his left, narrowly avoiding the huge foot aiming to stomp down on his chest followed by another clenched fist and two huge blades that stabbed into the floor.

  “Would you fuckers quit jumping into my scope?” Pier’s voice spoke directly to each man. “Unless you want me to ash you as well.” Sensory input of the
man trying to aim his heavy heat lance at the Titan flowed into each man’s mind. Those close to the Titan sprang back, firing as they went. Torsten asked Styg why he wasn’t engaging the Titan with his heat lance, only to be informed that the weapon had been knocked from the scout’s grasp when his commander had been thrown into him.

  The hissing sound that they had all come to know as the Demon’s Breath filled the chamber as the first bolt was fired. The weapon fired a pulse of energy that itself wasn’t hot, but that excited molecular bonds in a way similar to a microwave, but far more intensely. Few materials in the known universe could stand up to the direct assault of such a weapon. The Titan threw itself flat at the last possible moment and the bolt of energy blasted through the shoulder joint of its lower right arm, severing it completely and continuing back into the interior of the boarding vessel.

  The Titan was back on its feet before its severed arm even hit the ground, bringing one of its cannons to bear on Pier. He didn’t think the heavy heat lance could fire fast enough to replicate Torsten’s miracle of shooting down incoming rounds. Even if it could, Pier doubted he could do such a thing. It just seemed so… superhuman.

  A single long burst would have to do. He adjusted the aiming reticle in his visual feed, noting it was still yellow. Yellow indicating the weapon was not ready to fire. The weapon’s refractory period hadn’t passed yet and it was still recharging. Maybe he had enough time to switch back to his rifle, or perhaps his sword. The moment of indecision cost him as he finally rolled to his right. Rounds from the Titan’s cannon ripped the heat lance to pieces and sent Pier flying.

  As the Titan stalked towards Pier, the stream of shells stopped and a whirring sound came from the cannons. They were reloading. A terrible design feature, Torsten thought as he charged the Titan with sword in hand, but one he would be glad to take advantage of.