by M. D. Cooper
On the far side of the Nietzscheans, the soldiers of Alpha Company surged from behind their cover, launching a counter attack on the enemy, taking advantage of their temporary disarray. After less than a minute in the crossfire, the Nietzscheans broke and ran; the Genevians and the three members of team Hammerfall picking off another dozen as they fled.
Then one of Rika’s drones caught a flash of motion high in the sky and she screamed at Kelly,
CHANGE OF FATE
STELLAR DATE: 12.01.8941 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: Western plains of Naera
REGION: Parson System, Genevian Federation
The nuke detonated directly over Alpha Company, burning the squishies to ash in seconds. Rika crouched behind her cover, praying that Kelly, who was much closer to the explosion, had weathered this second attack.
Seconds ticked by as she waited for team Hammerfall’s combat net to come back to life. When it did, Kelly’s mental voice was a welcome sound.
Rika peered out from behind her cover, once again thanking the strange blue-green granite on Naera for being so damn hard. The Geiger counter on her HUD was spiking, and she knew that if they didn’t wash the radioactive dust off their armor soon, it was going to irradiate their entire bodies.
Down the slope, Kelly was extricating herself from a narrow crevasse, and gave Rika a short wave.
Rika looked past Kelly, down to the narrow end of the valley where Alpha Company had been rushing out after the Nietzscheans. Charred corpses were all that she could see. No one would have survived a blast at that range.
The women quickly swapped their ammunition around, and Silva handed out a pair of parties, just in case things got dicey.
Rika eyed the Nietzschean weapons lying near the corpses of their kills and wished they could grab some. There just wasn’t time to disable the safety locks—and if they didn’t, the weapons could detonate when the women picked them up.
Rika followed, wincing as the support rod in her leg pulled at her shredded flesh and made her gait ungainly. For the first time, she wished that the Genevian military had taken just a bit more of her body. She remembered wondering, after she came out of the assembly facility, why so much of her remained organic. Some models of mechs were little more than brains in jars; nothing more than cheap AI replacements that the government scooped up off the streets.
The answer had come from one of the drill instructors during her all-to-short time in boot. He explained that human twitch reflexes were honed over decades of use. Whole sections of the brain were dedicated to pulling on the right muscles to get the right movement. Replacing knees and elbows to strengthen those joints was relatively simple, but hips were a lot trickier. It was easier to re-enforce the bones and replace the hip socket with a mechanical joint than to take out all the muscles and nerves.
Plus, it was cheaper and faster.
Rika pushed the memories from her mind, pushed everything from her mind, as she followed Silva and Kelly over the hills and valleys. After fifteen minutes of running, which put over twenty kilometers between them and the site of the tacnuke’s explosion—and the remains of Alpha Company—they came down a steep slope into a ravine with a fast-flowing river at its bottom.
Silva called a halt and Rika leaned on a rock, taking the pressure off her right leg.
Rika and Kelly nodded before glancing at one another—something that was pointless with their featureless helmets, but they still seemed to do it anyway. Rika knew what Kelly was thinking. They had five hundred kilometers to cross before they got to the battalion HQ, and Silva hadn’t said whether or not she had managed to raise them on the comms.
It wasn’t a good sign.
Silva placed rubber plugs in the barrels of her weapons before wading the river. The weapons could still dry themselves out and fire when wet, but the women had all picked up the rubber plugs awhile back after they realized—in the middle of a firefight—that it took almost a minute for the weapons to become combat ready after being completely submerged.
Kelly and Rika followed suit, but stayed in the river, while Silva climbed the far shore and the ravine’s steep eastern slope. The pair took a moment to splash water over their helmets and scrub their armor as best they could with moss and brush from the banks. After a minute of cleaning, Rika’s rad-counter began to tone down, and she felt a lot better knowing that her insides wouldn’t liquefy anytime soon.
Her internal bio-systems had already dosed her with a cocktail of chemicals to keep her innards safe, and her nano was scrubbing her blood; but not walking around covered in radioactive dust was still the best way to live a long life.
Once Rika and Kelly satisfied themselves that they were clean, they each pulled a small pouch from their packs. Within each pouch were four bags. Rika and Kelly pushed a button on each bag, which filled with air before their shells solidified. They attached the bags to their arms and legs, and then the bags pumped out all the air, creating near-perfect vacuums. It wasn’t enough to lift their 215kg bodies by any means, but it would allow them to float down the river without dragging on the bottom. The pumps would adjust their buoyancy to ensure they remained below the water’s surface and out of sight
Kelly managed to make a snorting sound over the link.
Rika wondered how Kelly could joke at a time like this. Just over ten minutes ago, they had watched their entire company get killed by a tacnuke. Sure, most of them were assholes—especially Gunny—but some had treated the mechs with respect. There was a particular staff sergeant named Tony who had always been more than cordial to Rika.
Now Tony was a charred husk left on the battlefield.
Kelly had never
made a connection to anyone in the company. She rarely spoke to anyone other than Rika and Silva. It was probably a good thing, since her mouth tended to get her in a lot of trouble when she opened it—metaphorically speaking, of course.
Rika would also miss Lance, the company AI. He wasn’t terribly bright, and probably not actually sentient—though the military claimed all their AI were—but he still treated the mechs with respect. Maybe he was in a similar situation. Rika had a suspicion that most of the AI in the military were not there of their own free will. It made no sense otherwise; why would an AI—a being of pure logic and reason with an eternity ahead of them—join a war?
A splash sounded nearby and Silva’s voice came to them.
Kelly’s voice snapped off, and Rika’s augmented hearing could hear frantic splashes nearby.
Rika appreciated Silva’s sentiment, even though they knew no Niets were within a klick—thanks to the feeds from their few remaining drones. Rika knew those eyes in the sky wouldn’t last much longer; most had burned up when the final tacnuke went off. The five still up there only had another few hours before their batteries would run dry.
Silva must have been on the same train of thought.
Kelly replied.
The team fell silent after that, other than Rika announcing that her drones—except for the one that wouldn’t take a charge—were ready to go. She sent them up into the sky while Silva pulled hers down.
Rika regretted snapping at Kelly, but she didn’t know what to say to smooth things over. She was afraid that Kelly was fuming, ready to lash out the moment Rika tried to talk to her. She went around and around in her mind, preparing defenses should the argument occur; worried that Kelly would hate her now, and that she would lose one of the only two friends she had in the whole damn universe.
A part of her knew it was silly. Kelly would be fine—though she was capable of holding a grudge for a good while.
Eventually, the river came out of the hill country, widened, and slowed. Rika began to doze off as the languid current carried the three submerged women downstream. She knew it would be another hour until they reached the point where they would leave the water’s cover and begin the fifty-kilometer overland trek to the battalion HQ, so she set an alarm to wake her before they arrived.
Rika never fell fully asleep; her combat stims wouldn’t let her. But she managed to drift into a peaceful half-doze, which was rudely interrupted by the alarm in her mind that warned of their approach to Silva’s designated debarkation point.
Silva said with a chuckle.
Rika had to agree. Giving birth to mech babies was a recurring dream she had; one that would have woken her up in a cold sweat, if she could still sweat. At least she could still wake up when she wanted to—most of the time. She had heard that mech-meat, like that poor sap in the K1R, couldn’t even control their own sleep cycles.
The three women of team Hammerfall emerged from the river like a trio of mechanized dryads; water sloughing off them, their matte grey armor gleaming in Parson’s light before their active camo systems kicked in and they shimmered out of view—except for Rika’s thigh, and Kelly’s arm, which she cradled against her body to hide from view as much as possible.
Rika bounded up the low slope at the river’s edge to view the plains beyond. The drones overhead had already given her a picture of what lay before them, but she wanted to see it from her own vantage.
The river at the point of their exit was running almost due east, and they stood on the north shore. Stretching for hundreds of kilometers in every direction was a lush plain covered in tall grass, dotted with copses of trees. The beauty was marred by columns of smoke rising from several locations; one corresponding with where the battalion HQ should be.
They began to move across the prairie, travelling in the open and avoiding the trees, counting on their camo to shield them from prying e
yes. The tall grass rose over two meters in some places, and gave enough cover to hide Rika’s thigh and Kelly’s arm.
Overhead, the drones spotted a Nietzschean patrol to the south, and the women moved north to give it a wide berth. Other than that one sighting, it was as though Naera was devoid of all human life. Rika began to imagine that maybe it was. Maybe both the Nietzscheans and Genevians had left, and they could finally relax.
She allowed herself to indulge in this fantasy for several minutes. Until it was interrupted by a brilliant flash of light on the southern horizon, and the sight of a mushroom cloud rising into the afternoon sky.
Ahead, Kelly turned her head and Rika imagined that the other woman was smiling.
Kelly’s mental tone was sincere, and Rika wished she could hug her. A strong need to have some, just a tiny bit, of human contact crashed into her like a towering wave.
Fuck it, she thought, picking up her pace to catch with Kelly. She reached out and touched her teammate on the right shoulder; a gentle stroke, barely perceptible through the layers of armor they wore, but contact.
Kelly shifted as they walked, moving closer to her, and Rika wrapped her arm around Kelly, her mechanical hand resting on the other woman’s shoulder. Rika was glad to just feel close to another human—even if it wasn’t her real hand that was making contact.