by Isaac Stone
DINO MECHS
Battle Force Jurassic
By Isaac Stone
With contributions by Timothy Mayer
Copyright 2017 Isaac Stone
EPISODE 1: BATTLE REX
ONE
It all started when I shot the bank guard. The job wasn’t supposed to happen the way it went down. We had a perfect plan to get in there and walk out with money the Swedes laundered, but something went wrong.
I once had a man tell me that no plan survives contact and I believe it after what happened then and much later. No matter how carefully you rehearse everything, no matter how detailed your map, no matter how much time you put into the concept, in the end something will happen you didn’t take into account. This is why I always leave an opening in my strategy. At least I do now.
Philly Bob and myself had it all figured out. The Swedes transferred the money they weren’t supposed to have into a little boutique bank outside Malvern. The place was one of those little mom-and-pop joints, which were popular before the big crunch of the last millennia. Somebody came in and saw the place had plenty of assets. It could be used to put dirty money through a super wash cycle. It would leave the bank by a different company than the one that placed it there. The bank would clean up with processing fees and no one would ever figure it out. Since the cash was real, it wouldn’t leave an electronic fingerprint. So long as they kept it below a certain line, the feds would never figure out what they’d done. When they were done with the operation, the bank could be sold off to a clueless corporation, which would uncover the scam and howl to the moon. By that time, the former bank owners would be on their way to the outer colonies.
It was too perfect.
“You have everything you need?” I asked Bob as we stood outside the bank that day. Bob was the man who figured out what happened on the inside.
Philly Bob used to fix neural interfaces until his own synaptic system became quirky from all the deep diving he did for his clients. Too many implants I guess. He’d taken a small job for this bank and saw what really took place behind the staid storefront they showed to the world. This was when he got in touch with me.
I was in the bar drinking a beer when Bob slid next to me. He was about five-five, had short hair and a tick in his face from all those neural implants. I was my usual brutal self at six-two and cracked my knuckles while I tried to figure out what to do that day.
The last hot job put me away for two years, subjective time. I went into the capsule for two days on the outside, but spent two years in mental-stasis until the court decided what to do about me. At least this time I didn’t have a tracker in my cortex. I still don’t know why they stuck one on me the last time.
“What’s happening, Bob?” I asked the little punk. Bob and I went back a long ways, ever since I saved his ass from that clown gang in his neighborhood. Those guys didn’t fool around, and no the humor of that isn’t lost on me.
“We can make some serious money, Clay,” he told me and ordered a scotch. “Not like that other time, we’re talking big cash.”
I rolled my eyes and took another sip from the beer. The last job with him resulted in the cortex tracker, which I still prayed they would never put back. Bob had some big ideas, just not so good in the execution department.
“Let’s hear it,” I told him.
He told me and, like a fool, I agreed to come along and help him for my fifty percent.
You see, it was supposed to be simple. I would hold the patrons at bay with my grandfather’s old Glock and they would stand there terrified while Philly Bob went into the back and looted the money they weren’t supposed to have. We had a shuttle booked to take us to the nearest Glopkin Jump Point. At the point, we would drop our pod inside and voila, we would come out right over the sunny skies of New Florida in the Cygnus System. Hardly anyone there and we could spend our days drinking mojitos with the small colony of bored humans who lived on the surface. It wasn’t exactly paradise, but it took us away from the hell Earth became years ago.
I walked into the lobby with Bob and pulled the Glock out of my coat. Wasn’t sure if it even worked after all these years, but I was certain these suits watched the same videos we all did and would be terrified of it.
“Everybody freeze!” I yelled. “This is a stick-up. You just shut up and no one gets hurt!” To make my point I waved the Glock around because the guys in the old videos did it that way.
Except this wasn’t an old video. There was a pop and Philly Bob, and his briefcase, fell to the floor with half his head gone. I spun around to the source of the sound and saw a man in a security uniform step out of the back with a railgun.
I aimed the gun at him and it worked. He went down and dropped the railgun. I stood there and tried to decide what I should do. It was a mess, and they don’t usually show that in the old videos.
The only reason I’m still alive to tell this story is that the other security guard wanted his stipend for a live capture.
I heard another pop and the other railgun went off. It was dialed down. I hit the floor this time, but instead of not having a head the guard did me the favor of pulping my left knee.
My second mistake was when I agreed to a cyberjudge. The defender told me it was the quick way to get my trial to court. The backlog was too long for a human trial and the courts came up with an automated procedure. So I agreed to it.
“Thirty years hard labor on the Nexus Colony,” the electronic voice ruled in five seconds. I stood there in disbelief as my defender shrugged.
I screamed for another defender as they hauled me out. Before the guards tossed me back in the cell, I was told it would take too long to appeal, but I could try from Nexus.
The place they sent me to was on the other side of a jump point. I don’t know how many places you can go to from those federal points. They used a different one than the civilian route we planned for the New Florida transfer. Nexus was a primitive place since it wasn’t finished yet. The terraformers planned to get it into shape eventually, but nobody expected that to happen soon.
For the next two years my closest companions were Shovel and Pickaxe, because even though we lived in the bright future of humanity the masters of Nexus believed in real deal hard labor. We can travel through space and there I was digging ditches with a shovel. Prison. Nice.
TWO
I was in the bottom of an active septic pit hammering out rock when the guard called to me from the top. Funny how those bulls never had to come down and inspect the work we did. Do your quota and you got a day off. Don’t do your quota and they’d find a deeper pit for you to dig.
“Claymore,” I heard a voice yell from the top. “Michael Claymore! You’re wanted at the administrative center!”
I yelled back and started the long climb up the stone staircase. It was the only way down to get out from the pit. Elevators would be better, but the government didn’t want to waste money on irredeemables like us.
“Claymore, here,” I told the bull when I got to the top. “What is so important they need me at the admin?” I was the only member of my family that made it to adulthood, so it couldn’t have anything to do with relatives.
“Hell if I know,” she told me. “Now shut it and get moving.” She glanced over at the excrement that covered my work clothes and tried not to look disgusted, “And keep your distance.”
I walked with her back to the administration center. The sky was overcast that day for a change. Although the weather control didn‘t allow it to rain very often, someone decided it was better to keep the sky cloudy most of the time. I guess they thought it would keep us too depressed to contemplate an escape.
The bull dropped me off in a small r
oom and left the door open. Most of the doors were unlocked on Nexus, admin didn’t seem to mind if somebody got shanked, and nobody was escaping this rock anyway.
As I sat at the table and wondered what would come next, I tried to remember how I ended up here. It wasn’t just that the bank job that went bad, it was everything back on Earth. My old neighborhood was a dump and all I dreamed about as a kid was getting out of the place. Mom wasn’t around much and no one ever did tell me who my father was. Not that I cared, most of the other kids didn’t grow up with men around the house either. We all lived in that huge structure outside Philadelphia on the gratis of the state. It was years since anyone made useful things for the economy. It passed us by in laughter. We’d sit around the busted video machines and watch old displays since they no longer made anything we could access on those clunky machines. Someone once told me the neighborhood where I lived was exclusive once upon a time and the building where my unit was situated was, once upon a time, a huge shopping center. But those days were far in the past.
The administrator entered the room and sat down opposite of me. She looked in her forties and had the blue tinged skin of someone who’d undergone hormone regeneration. Hard to tell how old she was given the treatments, could be a hundred and ten for all I knew. I speculated how much of her body was original.
She allowed just enough cleavage to show through her outfit to keep my interest. I hadn’t seen a woman who wasn’t a bull since I left earth. The guards, male and female, were pumped up with hormonal suppressors so even if they did let you have some it, or if you and some friends were able to take it in some dark corner, it would make you nauseated and functionally paralyzed in seconds.
“Ever thought about a career change?” she asked me from her side of the table. “You haven’t done so well with your former one.”
“Then why would you be interested?” I asked her. I wasn’t the type who lived for a suicide charge, and from the emblems pinned to her low cut collar I knew she was penal military.
“That last job you screwed up showed some ingenuity,” she told me. “A gun so old it doesn’t have a registration chip, so no security is going to ping on it, and the thing even fired. We like that kind of crude cunning. You might’ve got out alive if the other guard wasn’t there.”
“Is this an offer?” I asked her.
She smiled. It was.
THREE
One week later, I was on Basic, the domed asteroid they used to train the new recruits. My term of enlistment was for five years. Should I survive, I would be mustered out on some retirement world and given a pension. At which time I could marry and raise a family, if that’s what I wanted. The Solar Force would only pay for two spouses as dependents, but I didn’t think that far ahead. All I wanted to do was survive and get off this wretched place. At least the first part was easy.
At any time I could quit and be returned to serve out my sentence on Nexus. Active duty didn’t count. If I couldn’t hack it in the Force, my sentence would resume from where it was when I left. It was a tough deal, a gamble really, but you try working in a sewer for two years and see how fast you’d sign the bottom line.
They had us up and early every day. Most of the other rookies where men given the same offer as myself, and like me they took it without much of a second thought. The real crazies weren’t made the offer. The last thing any army needed was a lunatic wondering around killing at random when there was an object to be met.
I learned how to use a plasma rifle on the quick. They were calibrated to the target range, so you couldn’t use them against the drill instructor, no matter how much you might desire to do it. We trained for six hours a day on weapons and were sent to the tactical range afterwards.
I did well on tactics. Outrunning and outmaneuvering people was something I’d learned to do as a kid, so it was plus to know I’d be paid for it one day if I made my five years. They would put us into full kit and order the entire squad to get to the top of a ridge. Many times I had wait for the rest of my guys to catch up with me. Maybe digging ditches hadn’t been an entirely wasted activity.
All in all I took to soldiering rather well, surprisingly so considering my personality. Most of the other guys did ok, but it really seemed like they were pushing us through basic training at a desperate pace. Like they were in a rush to get us turned into functional troopers and were willing to cut a few corners to make that happen.
I found out why three weeks into basic.
The Invaders.
The Kaiju Armada.
Hell unleashed from the depths of space.
FOUR
Until recently, just before I went into lockup, no one thought another species of intelligent life existed in the universe. There was some talk of other life forms in capable of self-awareness, but it was just speculation. Plenty of the colony worlds had their own native biology, some of if hostile to humanity, but nothing capable of communication or building tools.
Two years ago a probe out near a distant star system ran into another probe, this one not of human design. Since the time when jump engines were invented, humanity spread ever so quickly out to the stars. It was the losers such as me who were condemned to grow up in the post-posh neighborhoods the rich people left behind. Until the probe encountered one of its own kind, though from an alien world, no one speculated what the first contact might involve.
The humanity found out when our probe was destroyed by the alien one. I was locked up and prisoners are subject to media blackout, which was normal. The rub was that the Solar government kept the fate of the probe secret, and it wasn’t until the invasion had begun that a whistleblower clued the public into the cover up.
The Invaders attacked a frontier colony world and slaughtered the population.
The Invaders brought with them a completely new system of battle, and we just weren’t ready for it.
It was a unique method of fighting, land a horde of massive creatures, monsters really, that were the size of our own prehistoric lizards, and had them destroy everything in sight. These creatures, swiftly dubbed ‘kaiju’ by journalists who had probably watched lots of the old videos I did, came equipped with their own weapon systems, which could shoot a city apart and the people in it. Within six months, three more colony worlds fell and the war was in full progress.
Only a few survivors made it out of the colony worlds and those recalled figures in metal suits that moved with the kaiju. They seemed to be quadrupeds, just like us, but no one ever saw one outside their suits. The Solar Force trained us as best they could in the short time they had, as they were desperate to toss men into battle. The trick was that they weren’t about to send more actual soldiers and equipment into the jaws of the enemy, those boys and girls were withdrawn behind the front line to protect planets that mattered. Nope, they were going to toss us into the meat grinder instead, and there wasn’t time to fine-tune the training methods.
Early on, someone decided to fight fire with fire, or in this case giant monster with giant monster. No one had seen a real dinosaur in millions of years outside some modern evolutionary leftovers, so it was a shock to consider them for combat. The use of animals to argument humans in battle was phased out hundreds of years ago, nobody had ridden a horse into battle in ages. The reports of the kaiju and the terror they created were enough to inspire the government implement a dinosaur regeneration project.
Once the scientific resources of the Solar government were dedicated to the project, the dino mechs were turned out on an assembly line. Regular amphibian DNA was merged with the DNA found in fossils to recreate the terrible reptiles of the past. They were as big as the kaiju, could be armed just as heavily, and most importantly, they could be trained to fight for our side.
FIVE
The truck, which took us out to the dinosaur field, was an older model that still had wheels. While I was in the pit digging, the Invaders had made their mark upon human space. We didn’t get any news on Nexus and it wouldn’t have mattered if we
did. There was no escape from a penal world. I found out my first few weeks on Basic that the Invaders took out the colony worlds. Suddenly I understood why they wanted men like me. Someone was needed for the first wave so the second and third would know what to do. The first wave could be used for calibration.
Therefore, as we were dumped out on the field that day, I found out my mission. It was a shock to learn about it. The Raptor Marines would be my destiny from now on out, and we would serve as infantry support for the dino mechs, as the massive beasts were called.
We were named after the smaller and faster reptiles of the Jurassic age, the idea of armor and infantry being transformed to make a completely new division of the Solar Force. Instead of the heavy tanks and humanoid battle mechs of modern war, we would get to work with dinosaurs.
The giant reptiles were brought to the field in the morning sunlight. Although they had better internal thermal control than you average chameleon, these were still cold-blooded lizards and they needed hot weather to function to the best of their abilities, hence all of the heated armor plating they put on the creatures.
Four handlers directed the massive creatures to the field. They didn’t have to make physical contact with their charges; all that was needed was to guide them via an electric shock collar. The beasts learned what they were supposed to do fast enough, but one slip-up could be fatal. They didn’t bond with their humans the way a mammal might bond. I later found out in the early days of the program, about a year into the invasion, it was almost suicide to volunteer with dinosaurs. An angry Tyrannosaurus was prone to ripping its handler in half. With their massive jaws and huge legs, the dino mechs could outrun any human and turn him into a snack. After the first few deaths, the Force began to use methods of controlling the reptilian giants so that you didn’t have to make physical contact in the training phase.