by J. F. Holmes
“Canuck Three, Roger, over,” the last Canadian team confirmed. “Good hunting, Ash.”
“Canuck Two One, on your six, high,” Kate Tailor sent. That was good. She was our comms expert and would coordinate with any suits that survived the assault.
“Two Three, at your two o’clock,” Jack Peters checked in. I glanced over and barely saw the silhouette of his armored ‘bot, black against the dark blue of pre-dawn sky.
“Two Four, below Two-Three,” Chuck Sandhu said. He was our heavy—well, heaviest—weapons guy.
“Two Six copies all. Increase spacing, minimum a hundred meters, and stay on profile.”
“I, uh, AR projections show me falling short,” Sandhu relayed. “I’m gonna miss the roof and hit the rim.”
Shit. We still had twenty seconds or so of glide time.
“Highlight your best guess impact point. Everyone else, fire on his mark.”
The moment Chuck lit a target point, our blasters locked into place and everyone lit up the area, perforating the sidewall of the floating city just ten meters below the edge. Chuck carried our sole plasma cannon, and he managed to fire it off-hand while flying headfirst at the wall. Hopefully, that would be enough.
“Going in,” Chuck said tightly. “See you in Valhalla.”
And with that, he jettisoned his wings, rolled, and collided feet-first with the outer rim we’d shot up. The good news was, he smashed through the wall. The bad news was, we immediately lost contact with him, and his suit no longer broadcast its status to my rig. Buerk’s readout finally went from yellow to red at nearly the same time. It was a long way to fall—I hoped he’d at least been unconscious.
A few seconds later, Peters, Tailor, and I touched down on the loam, grass and fallen trees riding piggyback on the alien monstrosity. I popped off my wings, shouldered my blaster, and took my bearings. Satellite imagery had identified what we thought was an access point closer to the center. The center, however, was nearly five kilometers away. Other teams began lighting up on my HUD as they touched down. Seven of the eight American teams made it down, but I think we lost a B1 full of Force Recon Marines. The Aussies made it down intact, as did Royal One and Canuck Three. Twelve full teams of six, plus my lame-duck team, meant seventy-some suits, out of the two hundred we started with.
March, 2035
Even worse than the sudden, terrifying, “what is this, an Avengers movie?” reactions to the eight flying city-ships, it turned out we’d had years of notice. But the authorities weren’t saying, or they hadn’t put it together, or investigators had marked the file ‘unsolved’ and moved on to the next matter. People had been disappearing. Animals were disappearing. People were dying and the killings written off as wildlife.
We should be so lucky.
Having spoken to a few people in the know, what I understand now is that there were a whole bunch of alphabet agencies all over the globe that were seeing snippets of the big picture, but didn’t share. The Anglo intel community wouldn’t talk to Ze Rooshians. China talked to the Norks and occasionally Ze Rooshians but didn’t trust Westerners worth a damn. Nobody talked to India or Brazil, which, to be honest, we should have. Hell, a whole village in central Russia just up and disappeared, and ze Rooshians, in typical fine form, didn’t tell anyone. Ironically, it was some very wealthy, very influential Saudis making a stink over a bunch of disappeared exotic pets that caused a few informed codeword-cleared TS crypto-geeks go, “Hmm, that’s odd.” And as we know, some of the greatest changes come when a very select few say exactly that.
We’d developed the suits after the first city-ship lifted out of Lake Michigan. Not too many people realize that lake is nearly a thousand feet deep at some points. But holy god did it send a panic across the globe when Milwaukee, Chicago, and the rest of the lakefront got clobbered with a tsunami. The Great Lakes don’t get tsunamis, they’re just lakes. Well, they did.
Once the shock wore off—which, under President Norman, was three hours—they hammered the city-ship with everything in the US armory. The damn blue shields repulsed explosives, conventional weaponry, air-to-air missiles, 105mm fire from AC-130s, plural… With enough firepower hitting it from enough directions for a long enough time, they started to inflict a tiny bit of damage. So they exploited the damage and sent in an assault force.
Everyone died.
Total party kill in minutes, if not seconds. It gutted SOCOM’s primary operator teams, because what we hadn’t known then, what we’d learned at terrible expense, was that the aliens thrived in a toxic atmosphere that was utterly poisonous to humans, the primary gas being carbon monoxide, additional gasses tending toward caustic. Thus our suits, in addition to being armored against enemy fire and equipped with blasters developed from same, were also life-support systems designed to keep us alive long enough to reach the core of the ship and blow it.
On Sept 11th, 2001, the Air National Guard pilots assigned to intercept United 93 had orders to take the airliner down before it got to Washington DC. They didn’t have time to arm their jets with weapons—and they agreed to ram their F-16s into the captured 757 if that was what it took. Those on board were able to wrest control from the bad guys, and the pilots’ plan proved unnecessary. This time, the USAF pilots stepped up and did what they had todo—the city-ship in North America finally went down in New Mexico, after Major McHale smashed the central core with her F-22 and destroyed the artificial gravity system.
New Mexico quite literally became an overnight alien research facility. The irony was not lost on us.
April 1, 2023
As expected, our respite on the surreal roof of the city was short-lived. A thin sheen of ice crystals brought on by altitude blanketed everything, reflecting starlight here and there. Peters took point, and we hadn’t gone more than fifty meters before a turret popped out of the frozen grass ahead of us and opened fire. The suits’ alien armor was somewhat proof against the turret’s blaster fire (it’s a shame we couldn’t build strategic bombers out of the stuff) so the first few bolts impacted on Peters’ armor, sending spalling flying and leaving small glowing impact craters on the alloy. Some kind of projected energy shield glowed blue against the pre-dawn sky, which highlighted it well, but also shrugged off much of our firepower. Tailor dove prone and let loose with her own blaster, while I ran wide to get around the shield. It rotated to track me, so I kept running, vaulting over fallen trees and dodging around debris. Peters and Tailor hammered the shield projector until it failed, sparked, smoked, and quit spitting bolts of energy.
“We need to get inside,” I said. “We see even two turrets like that at the same time, we’re going down. Ideas?”
“Maybe,” Jack replied and leopard-crawled over the brittle foliage to the wreckage of the turret. He took hold of an exposed metallic plate on the side of the boxy thing and got his suits’ feet under him. “Help me with this.”
I understood, and Tailor and I each took an edge. The turret machinery occupied a space nearly ten feet by ten feet. Jack wanted to see what was underneath, so we grabbed hold and asserted ourselves. Our turkey-sized fists grabbed hold and heaved, tearing the entire mechanism free, exposing the void beneath.
“Demo it first,” I ordered, and Peters daintily plucked a satchel charge from a bin on his hip and prepped it. There wasn’t much on this floating airbase/city thing we didn’t want destroyed, so he primed the charge and dunked it down the shaft.
Five seconds later, an earth-shattering kaboom shook the dirt beneath our suits, and greasy purple and gray smoke billowed out of the shaft. Peters took a quick glance, and leapt. A moment later, he sent word:
“Clear!”
March, 2035
For a year, the ships cruised all over the world, seemingly invulnerable, raining down plasma fire and humanoid robot alien things from above. Then they’d disappear. What were they doing? We didn’t know, didn’t understand. There was no pattern. The Americans tried two Tomahawk cruise missiles in Tennessee, got nothing. Lobbed MOA
Bs in Montana. Cooked them with plasma fire well before impact.
Nuked them over Nebraska. That seemed to annoy them, especially since they’d lobbed twelve, and one got through the defenses. Standoff drones watched from miles distant through high-powered optics. The damage was repaired in a few days.
The big brains kicked off the fastest, loosest military procurement in modern history, fabricating suits with physics-bending materials seized from the enemy, arming our suits with cyclic ion blasters seized from the enemy, running off mad-science power sources seized from the enemy. We didn’t have time to fuck around with procurement, and the US President, Jim Norman, knew that. He’d hand-picked three dozen of our brightest, most visionary science fiction authors, video game designers, code monkeys, and app designers, then partnered them with top-tier engineers, and gave them more-or-less unlimited funding, access to every bit of scrap we fought and bled and died and killed for, and told them, “You have twelve months. No fucking around.”
His callsign in the USMC was Havoc Actual, and he knew not to let perfect be the enemy of the good. Pragmatism kicked the shit out of cronyism; I honestly believe, if we’d had just about any other guy running the US, we’d have lost. “Will it work?” took front seat ahead of “How expensive is this?” and “Can we tweak it a little better?” and they saved the troubleshooting for the very end. In a lot of cases, they just isolated systems from each other so software programming didn’t bug out.
Fifty-one weeks later, the Cerberus robotic suit stood up as our combat walker for fighting the alien cyborgs. They stood eighteen feet, six inches tall, which was a requirement to fit everything in, the most important of which was a life-support system. The atmosphere on the cities was toxic to humans, which was to be expected, I suppose, when dealing with space aliens who hadn’t evolved on Earth. Maybe someday in the future they’ll have human-sized power armor like they have in so much science fiction, but those suits were the best we could bodge together in twelve months, and in the twelve years since, it ain’t happened yet. At the time, each suit had a disposable glider wing harness, a Frankensteinian mishmash of cell phone apps, haptic inputs, and captured alien tech. Optics could see in IR, UV, low light, no light, and added cutting-edge augmented-reality overlays for our monitors. We had alien blaster rifles, alien blaster machine guns, and cataclysmic alien plasma cannon.
It was the Hailest Mary Pass of Hail Mary Passes. You couldn’t have gotten me to admit it at the time, but twelve years later, I’m still amazed any of it worked.
April 1, 2023
Inside, the Tunguska flying city felt a lot like a city, except, you know, it had a roof. The hole we’d ripped came down inside a large silo that had apparently housed several cog/teeth tracks that elevated and lowered the turret. Peters’ satchel charge had blown out one wall of the column completely, so when he landed, he swatted aside some debris, and stepped out into a thoroughfare with a thirty-foot ceiling, more than enough for our ‘mere’ eighteen-foot mecha to walk though.
As far as the eye could see, hexagonal obsidian columns, warm with an inner glow, rose from the floor. Some kind of fog or mist wisped between columns and silos. Some columns reached the ceiling—and if they were all turret silos, we’d been wise to get indoors. Some formed walls for structures at different heights. Conduits snaked across the floor, some emitting a toxic-looking green, sickly purple, or electric-blue glow. The thoroughfare we’d entered only carried on ten or fifteen meters before disappearing around a bend, and with everything looking so similar and having zero landmarks, navigation was going to be a stone bitch.
“Activate automapping,” I ordered, then repeated the command after activating my VoxAttack mic.
Lasers and HD cell phone-style cameras began measuring everything I saw though my suit’s “head”, and interpreted the results, turning my environment into a 3D line map of the immediate area. The tablet/map readout to my left came alive with details, and filled in even more as Tailor and Peters got their systems functioning as well. All three suits fed each other information in real-time.
“Team ready?” I asked, and both suits turned to me with their deaths’ heads grinning, and each gave me a thumbs-up. The heads were stylized like a Coalition Enforcer bot, so help me. The engineer geek who got all the tech to fit into the beach-ball-sized “head” also happened to love him some Rifts role-playing. Compromises were made.
We hefted our blasters and moved, one corner at a time, one building at a time, toward what we thought ought to be the center of this insane flying city.
We’d advanced maybe fifty meters, three turns, before the baying of wolves drew us up short.
“Are you fucking kidding me right now?” Tailor asked, tense.
“Kate, you’re in a twenty-foot mecha that can punt a wolf like a Chihuahua. Steady up,” I said, and her suit, mimicking her actions inside, straightened up a bit and took a more aggressive stance.
We resumed our advance through the obsidian city, and the howls echoed through the air around us. Tailor kept pausing whenever she picked up a blip of motion on her tracker. In the far distance we heard blaster fire, but the city echoed like crazy, and it was impossible to direction-find. We rounded several more corners and went in what seemed like the right direction, per our automap software, until I rounded another bend and saw the shattered remains of a turret silo that looked suspiciously like the point where we’d entered. How we’d gotten turned around didn’t make sense—true, everything looked the same wherever we went, but our mapping software claimed we’d moved almost a kilometer inward.
Peters, on point, drew up short, and comically, he hadn’t disconnected his arms from their sensor web, meaning his bot mimicked him inside the cockpit when he scratched his head. That one action likely saved him, because that was when the fucking tiger attacked.
I didn’t recognize the blur of blued steel and chrome at first. It leapt on him from above us, off the roof of one of the obsidian structures. Burnished talons of some gleaming alloy clawed deep gouges out of the robot’s arm, and the cyborg beast clamped its jaws on the bot’s hand and wouldn’t let go, raking with its rear claws as well.
A normal Siberian tiger can mass more than 300 kilos. Replace his organic structures with alien alloys, and it can weigh half that again or more. The impact of more than a thousand pounds of augmented tiger overbalanced Peters’ Cerberus, which tumbled to the deck below our feet.
That’s when the wolves charged.
Neither Tailor nor I had a shot at the tiger without hitting Peters, but we did at the pack of cyborg wolves rushing us from the roadway. I snapped up my blaster and started shooting. Headshots on wolves mid-sprint are hard, and the blasters didn’t deal the kind of damage Chuck’s plasma cannon would have. To kill a cyborg—we now know—you generally need one of two things: Option A, sufficient concussive impact to inflict a fatal TBI; or B, a headshot that penetrates the armor protecting the brain. Anything else merely slowed it down or pissed it off.
Of the dozen-ish wolves rushing us, three were down and out before we were in hand-to-hand. Five went straight for Peters, and their talons and teeth rended his Cerberus’ systems and pried armor plating free. I caught one wolf by the throat and threw it as hard as I could. It cartwheeled through the air twice before it slammed headfirst into an obsidian wall and slid down in a chromium heap. I’d file that one under “Option A”.
While one snapped at my robotic legs, I grabbed at another, and it latched onto my left hand with its teeth. That was sorta what I’d been going for anyway, so I swung it like a golf club, knocking the one on my leg free, and gave it a kick while running to relieve Jack. I might have overstated things on the ‘punting Chihuahuas’ front. I swung the cyberwolf again and again, knocking a couple more off. The damage wasn’t nearly enough to kill them, but it bought him the time he needed to regain his knees, and his fists punched down like pistons, smashing the tiger’s head to oozing circuitry and gray matter.
Tailor was much more graceful t
han Peters or me, and she’d sidestep a charging cyberwolf and put a blaster round into the back of its head as it charged past. She’d taken out three that way already, which left five. Three Cerberuses versus five augmented wolves and no tigers seemed a lot more reasonable than a baker’s dozen of the bastards, and we stitched them with concentrated blaster fire even as a couple tried to flank us again.
One wolf charged, and we concentrated fire on it. Its primary power pack exploded in front of our eyes, taking three more wolves with it. At least, that’s what I thought at the time, and that in turn shattered the obsidian wall behind it. Tailor put down the last one, and we paused to examine the carnage.
“Was that as insane for you as it seemed for me?” Peters asked. “Where the fuck did they get Terminator dogs from?”
March, 2035
If only we’d known then what we know now.
Yes, everything we fought on that city had been born and raised on Earth, with one exception. Our alien enemy had captured all manner of critters from all over the globe, and forcibly converted them into something more tractable, something more dangerous. Stronger musculature and ultra-tough alloyed bones. Artificial blood and artificial lungs that could survive in a frigid, oxygen-starved environment at jet-flight altitudes.
That was what we’d missed when the Saudis had complained all their leopards and cheetahs and tigers were going missing. They blamed everyone from Activists to Zookeepers, but aliens weren’t on the suspect list.