by Isaac Hooke
“Yes,” Rade agreed. “But not completely. There could still be spores in that cave somewhere. Another team will have to do the mission all over again at some point.”
“The SKs will likely reinforce the cave,” Nicolas said. “And perhaps move the support plants and spores to another tunnel system.”
“Yeah, it’s going to be messy,” Rade said. “Which is why I hate partially completed missions.”
“On the bright side, you have survived,” Nicolas said.
“That’s certainly the bright edge of the sword,” Rade agreed. He could imagine the relief Tahoe and the others would be feeling at the moment. The lack of a nuclear detonation meant a greater chance their chief lived.
The air cracked with a sound twice as loud as thunder, a booming, continual noise that caused his cockpit to vibrate. The forest canopy was thinner here, so when he glanced up, he spotted the source of the noise: a long cloud of smoke arced down from the heavens, similar to the plume produced by a meteorite, or a disabled starship. Several smaller plumes broke away from the main cloud, spreading in every direction.
He spotted a metal object falling through the air nearby. A parachute had deployed above it, but the object still fell at a good clip. He zoomed in, and spotted the familiar, elliptical shape of an escape pod.
He wasn’t sure if it was Sino Korean, or United Systems, but it didn’t matter: it would have a comm node.
He increased his pace, running toward the pod, but it soon dipped below the tree line and he lost sight of it. He continued forward along a path computed by Nicolas. The thundering sound in the background shifted in pitch and dropped in volume; the smoke plume that sourced it had ripped a path directly across the sky overhead. A moment later he heard a crash in the distance, one that caused the ground to reverberate even here. The meteorite—likely a starship—had finally hit the Earth. If anyone was still aboard, they would be dead.
He reached the location where Nicolas estimated the escape pod had crashed. He didn’t see it at first. Above, the branches had been torn away, forming a tunnel of sorts through the canopy. A ripped parachute was snagged on the boughs. He followed that tunnel to the ground with his gaze, where an egg-shaped container, about half the size of his mech, was embedded in the moss.
He hurried to the device. It was United Systems after all, judging from the labels. The remote interface was inactive, so he ripped off the door. Inside, the occupant was dead—the glass composite of the portal behind the passenger had shattered at some point after the pod had launched, exposing the person to deep space, followed by the flames of atmospheric entry. The body was burned so badly he couldn’t even tell what gender it was.
“Nicolas, where would I find the comm node?” Rade asked.
Nicolas highlighted a small panel behind the body.
Rade gently moved the burned mass aside, and then peeled away the panel. He found a small metal box inside, with several small LED indicators on the surface.
“The remote interface appears to be disabled at the moment,” Nicolas said. “You’ll have to manually interface.”
Rade opened up the cockpit hatch, and leaped out of his Jupiter mech. Wearing his jumpsuit, he clambered down the rungs in the leg, and entered the pod.
He opened up a small panel in his wrist assembly, retrieved the male plugs necessary for manual interfacing, and slid them into the female connectors on the comm node.
He smiled. “The comm node is fully operational.”
“The question is, whether the range will be enough…” Nicolas commented.
Thinking to contact the retreating United Systems aircraft, he sent a broadcast on the general United Systems military band, using the common set of encryption keys. “This is Rade Galaal of Alpha Platoon, MOTH Team Seven. I’ve been stranded behind enemy lines. If anyone is out there, please respond.”
No answer.
He repeated the transmission.
This time, it was returned by a voice he thought he’d never hear out here. “Rade, is that you?”
He stared at the comm node in shock. He hardly saw anything for the sudden haze that filled his vision.
“Rade?” came the voice again.
“Shaw?” he answered finally, blinking several times.
“It is you,” she said.
“What the hell you doing out here?” he said.
“The starship I was stationed aboard was just shot down by a member of the Nemesis fleet,” Shaw said. “I rode an escape pod down the roller coaster of fire, and unless I’ve confused my continents entirely, I’ve landed myself squarely in the heart of SK territory.”
Of all the places to land… the universe always did have a way of messing with Rade.
“Which begs the question,” Shaw continued. “What the hell are you doing out here?”
“It’s classified,” Rade said.
“As usual,” Shaw said.
“I’ll tell you when I retrieve you,” Rade said. “Transmit your position.”
“Too late,” Shaw said. “Looks like I have company. And they’re not friendly. I’m going to have to surrender. Bye Rade. Don’t come for me. Complete whatever mission you’re on, and get yourself the hell out of here.”
“That’s a negative,” Rade said. “Transmit your position.”
No answer.
“Damn it, Shaw, transmit!” Rade said.
Still nothing.
He slumped, then punched the panel next to comm node hard enough to dent it. He could’ve punctured his glove, not that it would matter, given the atmosphere was breathable.
A beeping sound came from the comm node.
He glanced at the interface area on his HUD, and saw a notice:
Receiving Data.
Perking up, he transferred that data to his jumpsuit. It was a pair of coordinates.
Heart pounding with both eagerness and fear, he swung back into the cockpit of his Jupiter. The hatch sealed behind him and he resumed control of Nicolas.
“We head for these coordinates,” Rade told the AI, and transmitted the location.
Nicolas set a waypoint on his overhead map, and a red line appeared on the jungle floor in front of him, guiding him toward Shaw’s position. He set out toward it at a sprint.
I’m coming for you, Shaw.
18
Rade hurried forward, moving quickly through the trees. As he closed to within five hundred meters of the coordinates, he slowed, wanting to advance more quietly. He could hear branches cracking up ahead, along with thudding footfalls. Something big was traveling through the jungle ahead. The sound seemed to be decreasing in volume, as if moving away from him.
He picked up his pace slightly, confident that any noises he made would be masked by the passage of whatever was retreating through the jungle ahead.
As he neared the coordinates he slowed down once more and picked his way forward through the trees. He saw the telltale signs of a pod crash: the branches overhead were broken away in tunnel-like fashion all the way to the sky. A torn parachute was caught in the upper boughs.
At the bottom of that tunnel, nestled between the roots of a big tree, rested the egg-shaped pod. The door was ripped off its hinges. Shaw was gone.
From the crushed undergrowth all around her, and the big footprints, he realized she had been retrieved by SK mechs. He couldn’t quite tell how many, but he guessed anywhere from two to six. Their path was obvious through the jungle: they were headed south, back to the mountain. He could still hear the sound of footfalls and breaking boughs in the distance… he was eight klicks from the mountain, according to the map. There was enough time to catch up with them.
At a jog, he followed that trail through the trees, once again relying on the noises of the enemy’s advance to cover his own sounds. A random memory popped into his head of a tiger he had once seen hunting a goat in the mountains of Mongolia. The forward operating base in the area was under attack, and a klaxon sounded at set intervals in the background. Each time the klaxon s
ounded, the slinking tiger would move forward a few paces, and then stop when the noise ceased. In that matter it proceeded to close with the goat, which didn’t notice the tiger until the animal was already pouncing on it.
Rade didn’t have a klaxon, but he would use the careless advance of these mechs against them.
He focused all of his attention on tracking these mechs. As he advanced, he glanced often at his rear-view camera feed, and the left and right sides, sometimes scanning the areas with his cobra scope while letting Nicolas handle the reins, well aware that someone else could be tracking him.
He also used his scope to scan the jungle ahead, and soon caught a glimpse of a mech.
“Slow down,” he told Nicolas, who was yet controlling the mech for him.
He zoomed in further, and panned his scope from left to right. He couldn’t actually see the mechs out there, courtesy of their environment-blending skin and thermal masking, but he could see the breaking branches, and the footprints created by their passage. They used a patrolling separation of about five meters—a little low, but not too bad, he supposed, considering the power of each mech. They were slightly offset from one another as well, traveling in a zig-zag formation. He estimated that there were five in total, given the footprints that appeared in the undergrowth.
On the back of the mech in the middle, he saw a person seemingly floating above the surrounding foliage. Well, half of a person. It was Shaw, dressed in the navy fatigues typically found aboard starships. She looked little different from how he remembered her. There was less baby fat around her features, maybe, but otherwise she was the same beautiful woman he had known, with her tanned skin, blue eyes, and blond hair cropped at the shoulders.
Carbon fiber binds strapped her to the hidden passenger seat of the mech, her lower body concealed by the environment blending hull of the mech. She was gazing into the forest behind her, as if searching for him, her rescuer. The strain was obvious on her face—he thought she was trying to break free of her bonds.
When he saw her there, bound up like that, he was filled with a rage, and it was all he could to do resist firing right then. He knew he had to get closer if he wanted to avoid having the mechs dig in. He needed to take down as many of them as possible in the first few volleys.
“Nicolas, I need you to highlight any known weaknesses on these particular mech models,” Rade said.
“It’s impossible to determine the model type, given the environment blending,” Nicolas said. “But if these are the same Yanjingshe class mechs we encountered before, you can expect them to be fully armored and equipped with ballistic shields. Damaging them with only a cobra will prove difficult. If your stingray was still intact, then that would be different.”
“I was afraid you’d say that,” Rade told the mech AI. That ruled out the direct assault he had been planning. “What about demolition bricks?”
“Such charges will have a good chance of penetrating the armor if placed at the joints,” Nicolas said. “However, the environment blending of the hulls makes precise charge placement difficult. Also, you’d have to place them in areas that would be difficult for the mechs to pull away with their hands, unless you planned to detonate the charges immediately upon impact.”
“All right, open up the hatch,” Rade said.
He came to a halt as the hatch dropped open. He clambered down the rungs of the right leg in his jumpsuit and opened the storage compartment. He grabbed several of the demolition blocks stored inside, and shoved them into the loops in his chest harness.
He sealed the compartment, and relayed his plan to Nicolas.
“An interesting strategy,” Nicolas said. “However, if it fails…”
“It won’t fail,” Rade said.
Nicolas sealed the cockpit, and Rade clambered into the passenger seat. The Jupiter mech proceeded on a diagonal path outward from the retreating targets, and then moved forward, so as to mirror their path, three hundred meters to the left. Nicolas had to maintain a good clip to keep pace with the mechs, and Rade cringed at the sound of every breaking branch. He kept an eye on the distant mechs—zooming in on the area where the boughs ceded before their passage—but so far, they hadn’t noticed that someone was mirroring them.
When Nicolas had pulled well ahead of the enemy, he slowed down to move more quietly through the foliage. Nicolas also moved inward at the same time, on a path that would eventually allow the faster moving enemies to intercept them.
Rade had Nicolas unlock the armor panel that protected the jumpjet feed lines, and then he shut the valve before twisting the line from the fuel tank. The male section fell free after a moment, and fuel spilled onto the ground. Rade redirected the tube so that the fuel dropped onto the foliage beside Nicolas, but the line soon dried up. He opened up the feed valve once more, and drizzled fuel from the tube across the undergrowth as the mech advanced. He tried to target the plants that seemed the driest and most brittle—the one’s that would ignite the best.
The pair continued moving on an intercept course toward the incoming enemy units. Rade called a halt twenty meters from where the mechs would pass by. He had about a minute to move into position before the tangos arrived.
“All right, I’m switching to radio silence,” Rade said. He leaped off the passenger seat, and jetted into the boughs of the closest tree. He crawled higher on the thick branches, placing himself well above Nicolas and the other mechs. Then he hurried forward, leaping between trees, using his jetpack as necessary where the branches were too thin. He kept track of the nearby branches, marking off the areas where the jungle was relatively free of the wooden limbs. He occasionally paused to affix a demolition block to a tree, or sometimes throwing one onto the ground.
He could hear the growing noise of the approaching mechs. They were so close now that he heard not only their heavy footfalls, and the cracking of boughs, but also the whirring of servomotors. To the north, he saw the undergrowth collapsing in their path.
He halted in place on a branch directly above where the zig zag line of mechs would pass. He began removing the demolition blocks from his harness, peeling away the backing, and laying them down on the thick trunk beside him for easy access.
When he had the blocks set up, he kept himself very still. His jumpsuit was equipped with environmental blending skin—even the faceplate of his helmet was equipped with the tech, which was one-way of course so that he could still see through the visor. However, the thermal masking of the suit left something to be desired. Still, he didn’t emit more than an average animal, and given that it was midday, it was doubtful the mechs would pick him up from the background thermals.
The first mech reached him and passed underneath. Rade waited for the second mech to travel by, and when Shaw was underneath him, he raised a hand. Nicolas was watching him from his position out in the forest, and immediately ignited the jumpjet fuel with his cobra. A long line of flame lit up, forming a wall of fire that began twenty meters to the west of the tangos. Nicolas would have repositioned himself to stand behind that wall.
At the same time, the Jupiter activated the makeshift echolocation device, and relayed the data to Rade. Rade’s Implant received it without any acknowledgement—so as to avoid revealing his position—and the mechs became silhouetted on his HUD. They immediately stopped and spun toward the flames.
Nicolas began firing the cobra, causing bore holes to appear in the mechs the AI targeted. Those impacts would allow the SKs to determine the Jupiter’s position, but Nicolas would already be moving to a new location.
The mechs swiveled their weapons toward where they believed the source of the attack resided, and unleashed missiles and plasma cannons.
Rade began throwing the demolition bricks at the different targets below him. He moved quickly, his exoskeleton boosting his speed. Loud thuds echoed from the tangos where the blocks attached. The furthest mechs were twelve meters from him on either side, because of their separation for patrolling, but his strength-enhanced jumpsuit e
asily made up for the distance, while his Implant helped with his aim.
The tangos would have been able to extrapolate his position by sharing where those bricks had attached to their hulls, but Nicolas squawked louder, firing his grappling hook, which latched onto the lead mech.
Rade used the distraction to leap down and cut away Shaw; he slid his hands beneath her shoulders and jetted back up. The mechs spotted him, and swiveled their weapon turrets to attack him; he activated the charges then, while jetting onto the path he had marked on his map while moving into position—a path mostly free of branches. A few clawed at him and Shaw as he jetted through the trees, but for the most part, they traveled unhindered.
Nicolas withdrew the grappling hook and ceased squawking.
“Detecting LIDAR bursts,” Nicholas said. “They’re looking for us.”
Rade paused behind a thick bole, waited a few seconds and continued. Then he paused again behind another trunk.
Those mechs that hadn’t suffered too much damage from the charge detonations were running in the direction he had jetted, which led to the west, where Nicolas had originally fired the cobra to distract them.
Rade had anticipated that, and doubled back around them, following the path he’d marked, continuing to pause to ensure they weren’t pursuing. He enabled his comm node to detonate a few of the demolition blocks he had placed on the trees and ground, further confusing the SKs.
Soon he reached the area where Nicolas himself had doubled-back, and was waiting.
He loaded Shaw into the passenger seat, and clambered back into the main cockpit while she secured herself.
When the hatch closed, Rade took control and turned around, fleeing the scene. He cut through the forest, and turned onto the path the SKs had trampled on their way here.
He detonated the final demolition charges he had placed in the jungle, and then paused for a moment to listen. The pursuers sounded moderately close.
When he continued the retreat, Shaw used her Implant to communicate with him.
“Thank you for saving me,” Shaw said.
