by J. F. Holmes
Finally, we found the Brits, who by some miracle still had a whole team, although everyone had some damage.
“Hullo hullo,” drawled their OIC, a 22nd SAS captain named Palin. “Noice to see somebody else made it.”
Exchanging pleasantries, such as they were, we moved out again, probing thoroughfares and getting rushed by more cyborg critters. By this time, with more than a dozen suits, we were able to throw enough hate downrange they couldn’t get close enough to do the suicide bomber trick. Two Marines developed an overwatch system where they moved rooftop to rooftop, as best they could, watching for ambushes from the silverbacks and cats, and keeping us oriented toward the center of the city, until there were no more rooftops, just the central pillar of the entire floating fortress.
Once we breached the hub, it got very chaotic, very quickly. This part of the city seemed to be made of Technic Lego, with exposed driveshafts, gears, conduits, shifting walls, and shifting floors. Our auto navigation systems began giving us fits as mapping data changed on the fly, like the protective walls that emerged to protect the cyborgs when we flanked them. After our third time doubling back on ourselves to collect troops who’d been cut off and separated by shifting walls, Captain Palin called us all to a halt. His accent gave everyone trouble at first, but understanding seemed to improve the louder he got.
“Roit, this marching up ‘n’ down these fockin ‘allways is focked, troops,” he swore. “’Fore I joined the Regiment, I was a sapper, and we ‘ad a sayin’. The fastest way pahst an obstacle is to blow an ‘ole roit fockin fru it. They don’t pay us to bring the PE back, an’ there’s nuffin worse ‘n ending an ex wif leftovah demo, so quit mincin’ about and fockin get the job done. Plasma gunners to the fore, ‘eavy singers cover our flanks.”
Between Chuck, Lance Corporal Cole, and an SAS trooper named McTavish, we, and I quote, “stopped mincing about and fucking got the job done”. The plasma rounds had a helluva thermal bloom, and it would heat the front of the Cerberus suits tremendously, but with nearly a platoon of suits to backstop them, they could afford to cycle through, one wall at a time, and cool off between breaching blasts. Stuart, who’d been KIA the moment our B-2 was destroyed, had been armed with what Palin had nicknamed a “singer”, Brit slang for heavy machinegun, so we hadn’t had one. But the Marines and the guys from the Regiment did. If our ion blasters were the Cerberus equivalent of battle rifles, the singers were ion miniguns.
Evidently our choice to blast through the walls instead of going around them compelled the enemy to make a final stand, consolidating all their augmented troops in one hard ring around our target. The converted humans, the only forces who’d been armed with ranged weapons, laid ambush after ambush, but they were scattered and lacked strategy. I didn’t understand at the time why that would be—you’d think an alien menace could manage some basic fire & movement, but no.
Singers cut down wolves and great cats as they charged our positions, and the plasma gunners demolished cover where the enemy hid, allowing us vanilla Cerberus troops to take them under aimed fire. The suits ran off those alien powerpacks, which recharged the capacitors, but the thicker the fighting, the more energy we used, and the less we recovered. We breached one more wall, and it opened into the central chamber of the central hub of the central zone of the entire city.
The vaulted ceiling arched away high above us, with a central silo glowing the same blue, purple, and green that had lit the rest of the city. The obsidian silo supports branched out like alien flying buttresses above armored blast shields. The shields couldn’t quite contain an electric blue glow that reminded me of the tanks of fluid with the half-converted wolves inside. Crenellated platforms ringed the center, and cyborg troops began blasting poorly-aimed ion bolts our way, while turrets added to their fire.
I saw one of the 22nd troops’ suits ignite in an incandescent heap of slag when a bolt took out a leg and he fell, exposed, to be hammered by bolts from three directions. McTavish blew a hole in the wall to our flank, leaned out, and fired again. He was pushing out around the circumference of the hub to turn the turret’s flank, like we had on the surface. If we spread out far enough, we could get around the shielding and pour fire into it no matter which way it faced. Chuck caught his intent and pushed sideways as well, blowing holes through the bulkheads in the opposite direction.
Each time, the obsidian walls shattered and leaked glowing neon goop like enormous shattered glowsticks; some blue, some green, some purple. So long as it wasn’t actively killing me or mine, I didn’t care. When we blew the fourth hole into the hub, the turrets and bodyguarding cyborgs couldn’t track or decide which hole to attack. We coordinated between teams, dashing across an opening, drawing the attention of a shooter, and then hammered the enemy from the flank. It was dicey, and another of the Marines went down when he mistimed a dash across the gap, but that bought Captain Palin’s brutes enough time to slag the turret in reprisal.
The weight of our fire had reduced many of the inner features—half walls and turret silos—to hot spalling, dripping metal, and jagged rubble. The outgoing weight of our fire was finally overwhelming the bolts that peppered our four breaches.
“Fockin ‘ammer the bastads!” Palin roared, and he and three of the SAS troops hammered through the breach and dove prone behind a ruined wall. A blaster turret mounted high on the inside of the wall, too high to be seen from our access points, opened fire on their position from above. The four suits scrambled away, realizing they’d exposed themselves, but the turret tracked Palin’s Cerberus, stitching his legs with bolts, damaging a knee and causing him to fall. “Go!” I barked to my own troops, and we rushed our gap, firing upward at the turret. It had locked onto the captain and took off his gun arm at the shoulder. We destroyed that turret too, before it could finish him off, and then took fire ourselves.
There wasn’t much cover inside, and I saw Chuck’s suit fall under a fusillade. Tailor blasted the cyborg that had flanked us, and then another behind. I was firing past both of them in the other direction, and the Marines blew in through the two center gaps we’d created.
An explosion rocked me, and I blacked out.
March, 2035
One of those fucking cyborgs had rushed me and detonated. Ruined My Day.
April 1, 2023
I came to, lying on my side in a world of hurt. My own readout was blinking alternatively between yellow and red, and I tried to stand up.
Tried to.
Failed.
There was a fiery burn in my lower back, and below that, numbness. My legs were ignoring me completely, and I groaned.
“Wulfe, down,” I said, and I used the VoxAttack command to disconnect the feedback from my haptic sleeves. I released the control and pulled my arm in close to my body, illuminated my cockpit fully, and looked down. I was leaking, a lot, and I became aware of the stench of feces mingling with the coppery tang of aerosolized blood. Something, maybe a fragment, had punctured my suit, my back, and my guts. The pain was immense, and the harness rig I wore inside the suit had become a prison. It was intended to cushion me from the impacts of walking, running, jumping, and diving in a suit three times my size, but now I was trapped and couldn’t reach the first aid kit. There’d been a lot of design compromises in these suits, rushed as they had been, and the kit had been jammed in the cockpit wherever it would fit, namely down behind my calves. The assumption had been that no one would have to self-administer, but as they say, assumption is the mother of all fuckups.
I snugged down my SCBA rig and opened the flow of air in case my healthy suit atmo was invisibly being replaced by carbon monoxide. Poisonous air would kill me sooner than paralysis or a ruptured intestine, so I had to play the odds. Chuck was down, too, and my HUD status indicator for him winked from yellow to red as he flatlined. Tailor was still up, though, and I watched as she turned the flank of the last turret, still firing on the Marines, and blew that fucker to tiny constituent parts. The blast rang for a moment in the sud
den stillness, and then Gunny Castle was barking orders.
Of the fifteen suits that had breached the chamber, Castle, Tailor, two Marines, and McTavish were the only ones upright and functional. Palin was wounded but semi-functional; I was completely out of the fight. Tailor came to check on me, and I commed her.
“Continue the mission, Kate,” I groaned. “I think my spine is severed, and I’m gutshot, which is fucking awful and would probably hurt a lot more if I wasn’t paralyzed. If I’m still here after we’ve dealt with the target, do what you must.”
Kate was a great troop; still is, actually. She immediately linked up with Castle and the Marines and helped them rig one last set of breaching charges, on the blast shields in the center of the hub.
March, 2035
What can I say?
At the end of the day, it all came down to one gray-skinned little alien. The city, the ship, it was one xeno.
The explosion over Tunguska was, I think, probably not deliberate. The central hub that Castle and Tailor destroyed that day was likely some kind of…emergency escape pod, and once we had an intact core to compare it to, the wreckage of the other floating cities were built around the same core equipment. Armed with the entirety of its species’ knowledge on Xenopedia, sufficient time and resources, the ability to process raw granite, silica, dirt and metals into useful shit, and no neighbors to speak of, the Little Gray Man from Tunguska bided his time until he thought he could go loud and…I don’t know. Go home?
For fuck’s sake, ET, YOU COULD HAVE JUST ASKED.
Why did he kidnap all those people?
Because he didn’t have troops of his own.
Why did he steal all those dogs and wolves and cats and gorillas?
Because they were all he had to work with.
Why, armed with all this tech and knowhow and equipment, was he such a poor strategist?
My guess, not that anyone cares, is that it had never been an invasion. My guess, not that it’s anything more than a hunch, is that he was just some fucking alien ship crew member who ejected from a spaceship that encountered a disaster. My guess, based on what we know now about our nearby star systems, is that they happened to be in the neighborhood, suffered a catastrophic failure, went into stasis, and slowly drifted into Earth orbit over a hundred-year span.
They had next to no training or imagination when it came to conquering alien planets. Eight city-ships, eight Grays, a billion dead. After downing the New Mexico ship, we’d found some small alien tissue samples when they analyzed the wreckage of the other ships, but it wasn’t enough to know what we were dealing with. There was no strategy in how the cyborgs attacked—they were zapped in their brain centers when they did something he didn’t like, and rewarded with dopamine when they did something good. Given enough time and stimulus, anyone will break and do what they must to avoid that pain, especially when the alternative feels so good. Any time we were able to overwhelm him, it was because we were many, acting on our own initiative, and he was one, and could only react so fast.
So yes, even though I was laying there in my holed Cerberus, numb in a pool of my own blood and shit, it was with a great degree of satisfaction I watched as Kate, Castle, McTavish and the others shattered the blast shields, blew open the nano tank the LGM floated in, cut the cables connecting that big brain of his to the neural web that ran the entire city, and put two in his chest.
April 1, 2023
Everything
Just
Stopped.
A background hum that hadn’t really registered, faded. Its absence spoke volumes.
The good news was, we weren’t falling to our doom, with a solid minute or so of freefall time before the alien tech cratered a massive chunk of Russian countryside (again).
The bad news was, the pain in my gut wasn’t getting any better, and I moaned quietly in the darkness as the survivors started first aid on all of us wounded, necessarily complicated by the hostile alien atmosphere.
The radio blared in the stillness.
“---call sign, this --- Aussie Two, do you read, over?”
Kate’s voice filled the cockpit of my robot as I lay there, bleeding out.
“Aussie Two, this is Canuck Two, Checkmate, I say again, Checkmate, over.”
Mission accomplished. I closed my eyes.
March, 2035
I died twice waiting to extract. Kate wouldn’t leave my side even after the last teams RV’d with us in the hub. We hadn’t exactly expected to survive, if/when we took out the alien. We’d all quietly agreed that when the alien went, odds were the argrav would too, and that would be that. The world would survive. It was a bit of a surprise when we had to put the “extraction” contingency plan into place. There was nothing so fancy as a landing strip on the roof, so getting down was actually a pretty significant problem. C-130s, their crews in pressure gear, climbed high enough to kick out the extraction rigs for the Cerberus-equipped troops, essentially bolt-on glider packs like we’d arrived in. These days, I can pretty much laugh and say, “But it wasn’t my problem.” We wound up in Helsinki.
The tanks that had converted the various animals to cyborgs literally saved my life. The Gray Man’s reliance on Terran animals as his foot soldiers meant the tanks were already calibrated for Terran mammals, and just making sure the nanite soup was properly balanced was fiddly bits. Being a Terran mammal myself, and considering the alternative, I was pretty happy be one of the first human volunteers. This was months and months later, of course, but my spine and legs function again, and I don’t shit into a bag anymore.
Silver linings.
There was more than that, though. The central chamber where we found him was both the nucleus of the city and the pod that had brought him to our planet. It only took our geek squad a year to figure out how to make it go, and less than six months how to make it go faster. For in-system travel, it accelerates at something like fifty gravities. Then it shifts to FTL, where its slowest speed begins at c and jumps exponentially from there. I wasn’t kidding about the Xenopedia; once we figured out how to read Gray, incredible new technologies were at our fingertips.
So here we are. After twelve years of salvage, reverse engineering, experimentation, and outright repurposing, Mankind is taking the next step: leaving Sol and colonizing the stars.
I didn’t get to go on the first mission to explore our interstellar neighbors, or the second, but those missions paid huge dividends, and we won’t be stuck on one little ball of mud any longer. The planetary governments held what was, for lack of a better term, a draft, and I’m going out with the first wave of colonists. The Americans set their sights on a region with a dozen or more viable systems, while the rest of us Anglos are headed in a slightly different direction. Big, big corporations are staking claims on planets and asteroid belts. Almost every nation is madly off in all directions, scanning systems and staking claims. King Harry declared the Windsor system the capital of a new Commonwealth star realm, and shocked, well, everyone when he abdicated the British throne in lieu of it.
I’m sure Queen Eugenie will do fine back here on Earth, but Kate and I will be out there, breaking trail and exploring the madness this galaxy has to offer, in our Mk III Cerberus Hostile Environment mechs.
Best way to see the stars.
*****
Jamie Ibson is Canadian, born and raised in Ontario and now on the left coast. Spent some time in the CF reserves and went on a peacekeeping mission when he finished high school. Now he’s in law enforcement and writes in his spare time. His work can be found on Amazon.
Stack Knight
Thomas A. Mays
Randall accepted the leather purse offered down by the mounted nobleman and suppressed the urge to give the coins inside a shake. That would look unprofessional before Teague’s hired swords, and the young mechamage was nothing if not professional. At least, that was what Randall told himself. The grin he flashed out of pure, avaricious joy might have indicated otherwise, however.
&nbs
p; The nobleman’s perpetual frown revealed nothing of his own views about Randall’s professionalism. Instead, he hurried to finalize the deal. “Mage, you’ll get the other half of the agreed upon payment when the deed is done, and done cleanly. Mess about, and that sum will be docked! Understood?”
Randall nodded enthusiastically. “Yes, Lord Teague! The Company of Sir Potbelly will deliver a victory and relieve your people of this scourge by week’s end—I promise you!”
Lord Teague frowned even deeper, if that was possible. Rather than remark on the likelihood of that timeline, he turned his well-appointed mount and spurred the horse’s flanks. The coal-black steed leapt forward and cantered down the road, while the mage waved amiably. The lord’s grim armsmen also turned from their covering positions surrounding Randall’s small camp and formed a cordon around Teague. The young wizard kept his confident smile and wave going until the lot of them disappeared beyond the nearest crest of the hilly road.
In that time, Old Jeff and Even Older Jenn approached from their respective spots beside the camp’s forge and kitchen to stand beside him. Randall was too taken up with fantastical visions of sweet, sweet solvency to notice the glares they projected at him. Unlike Teague, though, these two were not shy about calling the mage on his overconfidence.
“Are ya tetched in yer head, boy?” Old Jeff asked. “Tha Gilt Valley’s three day’s ride fr’m heah! Ah’ve got at least a week o’ repairs ta get Potbelly ta stand, much less fight! An’ thass assumin’ ah had tha damn materials ta begin with! No way we attack this’n a week!”