Absolution

by Peter Smith

  Sean looked at the imagery displayed before him, he knew that the round could destroy the target, but once they fired it, they would be very popular and quick, “Seems to be a high risk op pops.”

  “Those tanks are pressing our boys onto their heels son, someone has to slow down the advance so we can perform an orderly withdrawal back to Berlin. Best way to pull that off is to remove that local commander from the picture.”

  “What’s our exfiltration plan?”

  There was a pause and Sean filled the silence, “Dad?”

  His father sighed, “Look Sean, it’s a high risk mission, but someone has to do it and it stands a much better chance of success with two of us. There are too many units between here and our front line for a team to successfully reach that CnC vehicle, at least not without a bunch of them not making it back home.”

  “Still not hearing an Exfil plan Dad” Sean said, both trying to get information and reassure his father of his commitment.

  “Just want to make sure you want to be doing this, you’ve got Alex to think of now.”

  He broke protocol and looked over his shoulder, staring at a marginally pixilated patch of air where he thought his father’s face plate was, “Don’t you think you should have asked that before we jumped out of the perfectly good plane?” His head tilting upward for a second, indicating the sky above them.

  His dad laughed, “Good point.”

  “Besides someone has to keep you from breaking a hip old man, so I’m not going anywhere.” Sean said, slipping back into proper protocol and monitoring their surroundings.

  “Thanks boy. Lets get a move on.”

  The suits did their job extremely well. Sean and his father slipped between Russian alliance patrols on numerous occasions, easily evading their detection systems. They were able to stay in contact with one another using low-powered burst transmissions.

  So long as they were with in a dozen yards of one another, their HUDs allowed them to keep track of each other as they moved through the German forest. The system would shut off the data pulses when ever it detected enemy units in the vicinity, it was unlikely that their enemy would pick up the signals but it was better to be safe than sorry when you were amid thousands of hostile soldiers.

  They could communicate with one another, albeit somewhat delayed, using those same positional data bursts. Their questions being placed into the buffer and shared every few seconds as the suits briefly communicated with one another to share location data. Not that he or his father said much, but it allowed their suits to network and share sensor data.

  Their quarry was near, at least that’s what the high altitude reconnaissance drone orbiting above the theater of war was telling them. His father was still tied into the QEC and pulling down updated intelligence from the command network. His power reserves were likely suffering because of using the system so frequently, but as long as they made it back to friendly territory in a few days, it shouldn’t matter.

  If they were still out here for that long, odds were Maria would have raised the entire German countryside looking for them. So they would either have to be dead or soon would be once she got her hands on them and vented her disappointment.

  His father’s fist went into the air and they both dropped to a knee. Sean’s audio sensors detected the racket of diesel motors in the distance. His visor magnified a squadron of Russian tanks pushing through the east German forest.

  He smirked at the idea of Russian armor yet again pushing through Germany. He had read once that history doesn’t repeat itself, but it certainly rhymed. Well, it was spitting verses hard right now.

  The tanks bulldozed smaller plants and trees in their path, the crack of tree trunks reverberating through the night. Dismounted infantry followed along with the armored units, providing protection from Marine raiding teams that might have been behind enemy lines and looking for targets of opportunity. His smirk grew into a full-blown grin. If only they knew how right they were to be concerned.

  His HUD identified several designs of tanks within the formation and for a second he wondered if a few of them hadn’t been used the first time the Russian’s had invaded Germany. The tank he was focusing on now was called a T-62 and explained why Sean was hearing diesel engines.

  Sean narrowed his eyes. Trotsky had access to the vast arsenal of stored tanks that the former Russian military had created. Among them had to be a sizeable amount of more modern armor, likely more than enough to field a sufficient invasion force. Was he sending these modified relics into the front so he could keep the modern vehicles in reserve?

  The tank squadron passed, taking their infantry support with them. He and his father continued toward their objective.

  As they walked, he couldn’t help thinking about what he had observed and it didn’t sit well with him as they neared the target. Trotsky would take a page from the Soviet Union’s war fighting strategy. Wear down their more advanced and better trained enemy with waves of expendable units and then, when the Marines and their allies were exhausted and spread thin, Trotsky would throw his moderately well equipped units against them. Which normally wouldn’t be a problem for the Marines to handle, but if those legacy tanks could sufficiently deplete them, it might lead to them being overwhelmed.

  A simple text message appeared in his vision, “Keep your head in the game, you're losing pace.”

  He nodded his head, knowing that his father couldn’t see it but doing so instinctually. Dad was right, he had fallen behind their usual spacing. He quickened his pace and brought the gap down to an acceptable size.

  His audio detection system alerted him to the distant conversations of the sentries positioned on guard duty for the command-and-control vehicle. He couldn’t see them on the surveillance drone’s observational data, which meant that they were undercover and shielded from thermal detection. Thankfully, they were breaking protocol by speaking when they didn’t need to. They must have assumed that any threat was too far away to be a danger to them. That mistake had just cost them their lives, and they didn’t even know it yet.

  The wire frame representation that was his father dropped to a knee before him. Sean closed the distance, knowing that doing so would endanger them both in the event a powerful enough enemy weapon was used on them. But there was greater risk in sending out a large data burst to communicate with his father so close to the Russian Spire sentries. They’d likely be paying close attention to their EM detection equipment, even though they weren’t that focused on operational security.

  Sean placed his hand on his father’s shoulder, sending a much more secure signal through his gloved hand and into his father’s armor. He spoke when his HUD showed a connection, “Did you pick up the chatterbox?”

  “Yup, there position and another twenty-three meters south of them, one of them has been sneezing a lot.”

  “Do we have enough time to scout around and figure out if there’s a patrol moving between the posts?”

  “Nope, but you can bet there is.”

  Shit, Sean thought to himself, “So what’s the plan?”

  “What do you think we should do?”

  “What?” Sean asked, suddenly thrown into confusion by the unexpected nature of the question, his father was the one who was always in command and decided for the operation.

  “It’s about time you started getting ready for officer training so why don’t you make the action plan.”

  Sean was grateful that his father couldn’t see his expression because he was certain that it would have earned him a smack to the back of the head, but they didn’t have time to waste going back and forth. He called up his tactical map from the orbiting surveillance drone.

  “Set our AI to monitor their radio traffic, wait until after they check in, we slip in and silently neutralize the guards inside the OP directly ahead of us. It’s got a direct line of sight on the command vehicle. We set up the rail gun, take out their CnC and then set it to auto fire. That’ll protect our asses as we exfil back to t
he lake and use to the waterways to throw them off our scent.”

  “Good plan, but scrap waiting for them to check in.”

  Sean thought about it for a second, “Because if there is a patrol we can’t be sure that they won’t be in the area when we take the OP.”

  “Exactly, they might hear or stumble on us in mid-set up of the Rail Gun.”

  “It’s when we’ll be most vulnerable and even if the guards miss check in, the rest won’t have time to react before we can take out the target.” Sean murmured.

  His father nodded and then with his hand motioned forward, “Lead the way.”

  Sean walked several dozen yards closer to the enemy guard post, carefully choosing where to put his feet as he did. While he might be invisible to visual observations, infrared and ground monitoring radar, he could still produce noise and give his position away. The last thing he wanted was to be like the Russian who was engaged in conversation and revealed their location. He used the toes of his booted feet to probe at the ground before he put his full weight into each step, searching for a solid footing that wouldn’t squelch or snap under his feet.

  It was agonizingly slow, but with every meter, the conversation of the enemy soldiers became clearer and after not long he could see directly into their OP using his magnified vision. There was IR refracting netting hanging over their location, that was blocking their orbiting drone from detecting their heat signatures. It shouldn’t have protected their electronic emissions from detection, but Sean suspected that if they performed a thorough enough search they’d find miles and miles of data cabling hidden beneath the ground cover of the forest.

  He sent one last text message to his father, confirming that he was about to make his approach and sending a timer synch, then he deactivated the positioning signal. His father’s positioning icon within his HUD map vanished from where it was on the opposite approach to their target. While he could not see his father on the display anymore, he knew he was making his way to the northern side of the target. Sean would approach from the south.

  The timer in the corner of his vision was rapidly dwindling to zero. When it arrived there, they were supposed to both be in position. Sean placed his rifle onto the magnetic mount on his back. He then methodically lowered himself to his hands, decreasing his visible surface area. While it was dark and their suits were excellent at what they did.

  If the guards at the OP were observant enough, or aided with the proper AI detection system, they might make out the occasional pixilation of the air in front of them. Going low decreased the amount of exposed armor, and therefore the likelihood of being detected. The only significant downside was that it screwed with his lower back and made his thigh and arm muscles burn.

  He slipped closer, meter by meter, until he could easily see into the hole that had been hastily dug for the two-man observation team. Sweat soaked the band that rested against his brow and not for the first time he thanked the designers of the helmet for their forethought. His arms shook as he neared the two men.

  One of them kept his eyes forward, constantly sweeping the darkened forest. The other was speaking at what would have been a normal tone, but Sean suspected was likely an attempt on the man’s part to be quiet. His hands moved up and down in an animated fashion and then cupped the air as his hips thrust back and forth. Sean didn’t need to use his RAI’s built in translator to know what the man was saying.

  Sean reached the edge of the pit, a portion of the tarp stretching over his upper body. To the east and down the grade of this hill he could just make out with his enhanced night vision the large rectangular shape of the command vehicle. He turned his attention back to their immediate targets. His right hand lifted from the ground, gripping the hilt of the combat blade that was sheathed over his left forearm.

  The timer reached zero. The more professional of the two men lit up in red as his father reactivated the data pulses. Sean lit up the talker. The professional looked down at a tablet that was laying in front of him, resting on the rim of the pit, a warning indicator lighting up it’s surface. His hand was nearly to it when his head jerked backward, an invisible palm covering his mouth and muffling his cry of surprise. A knife was inserted between his ribs and into his heart.

  The talker was scrambling for his rifle, which was propped against the side of the pit when Sean slid down into the depression and followed almost the same series of movements his father had. In less than three seconds, both guards had suffered catastrophic damage to their vascular systems.

  Both he and his father left their hands on the men’s mouths until the sensors in their gloves showed that there were no longer any vital signs for either man. Every second that ticked by, watching the life leave the eyes of the man who just a few moments earlier had been happily explaining his sexual exploits, was unnerving. Not just because of the possibility of discovery, but also at how he had to face this choice to end a life. This wasn’t the same as shooting someone from a great distance. He could see this man’s fear and then regret as he approached death.

  Sean removed his hand once his RAI informed him that brain activity had stopped. He wasted no time and grabbed the mounting hardware for the rail gun from his father’s back and laid it on the ground. The professional was taking longer to succumb to his wounds than his friend was. Sean shifted his victim as far against the wall of the hole as possible. His virtual vision showed him the space each one of the stabilizing legs would need to properly deploy and there was just barely enough room.

  He pulled the cylinder upright, placing it directly in the center of the hole. His father’s wireframe image shifted in the pit and grabbed the weapon off his back and activated it. Sean signaled the mount to deploy and three stabilizer legs separated from the main body, falling to the ground with a vibration that ran through his booted feet.

  The RAI of the mount used sensors in each of the stabilizer legs to get an estimate of how hard the ground was and less than a second later, the ground jumped, throwing both men upwards by a little less than a centimeter. Loose soil on the rim of the pit fell in. If the Russians didn’t know they were there before, their sensors had to have detected the seismic anomaly, they’d be on the lookout. Not that they had enough time to prevent what was about to happen anyway,

  His father placed the launcher on the mount. Sean removed the hand-sized magazine from his thigh and inserted it into the unit. His father sent the engagement signal and the barrel of the device swung toward the distant command unit.

  A confirmation button appeared in his field of view, “Do the honors” His father said.

  Sean pushed the button.

  Sean had never been kicked by a horse, but he assumed that this is what it would have felt like. If that horse had landed both feet against his chest, and if the horse was a steroid addict. He staggered backward, losing his footing for a moment. He turned his head, noting that his father was still upright, his foot spacing wider apart. He was certain he would hear about this the next time they had a free moment. There would likely be no end to the gentle mockery his father would bring against him for the next several weeks, if not months.

  A second later an explosion lit up the distance as the rail gun round tore through the command vehicle, from front to back, only stopping after it had embedded itself dozens of meters into the ground. His father’s hand shot out to him and Sean took it, getting hauled up right.

  “Time to run.”

  Flares lit up the night sky, turning the entire region into a shadowy wonderland. Sean set the gun to automatic and activated it’s self destruct routine. A thermite charge within the mounting hardware would turn the entire assembly into an amorphous mass of metal and plastics once the magazine was depleted or enemy soldiers were near to seizing it, whichever came first.

  They scrambled out of the pit, Sean sparing a glance to the rear and catching sight of the glowing trail of vaporized metal from the dart that the weapon had launched. It served as a tracer line all the way back to their position, co
nnecting them to the attack. It wasn’t intentional, just a consequence of physics. The dart was moving so fast that its outer layer vaporized because of friction with the air.

  He knew that this location would be overrun in minutes. He focused forward and tried to catch up with his father galloping through the German woods, using the enhanced agility and speed of his combat armor to it’s fullest advantage. Both had their rifles removed from their backs and at the ready, though they’d only use them if enemy forces engaged them directly.

  For now they were using their speed and stealth to its utmost advantage and were hightailing it from the region. A clap of thunder sounded from behind them, then another and another. The rail gun was engaging targets as rapidly as it’s capacitors could fill and then discharge their stored energy.

  Then the surrounding forest erupted into fire. A tree, likely decades old, exploded in a shower of flame and wooden shrapnel less than twenty meters away. The upper half fell to the ground, crushing smaller plants, its branches snapping as loud as small arms fire.

  His HUD displayed warnings of impacts against the armored surface of his suit, but he ignored them and kept running. His father was doing the same, his wireframe leaping over fallen trees and through low-lying bushes. It had taken them nearly an hour to stealthily clear this same distance earlier, now they were almost to the lake they had inserted into in a manner of minutes. An explosion to the side of his father threw the man fifteen, flinging him as if he were nothing more than a toy.

  Sean slide next to his father’s still form. Smoke curled off the surface of his armor in wisps. Sean’s heart was hammering in his chest as he slapped his hand against the armor over his father’s chest. His RAI synched with his father’s and he activated the health monitor and he let out a breath that he hadn’t realized that he had been holding.