by Michael Todd
She Is His Witness
Birth Of Heavy Metal™ Book 2
Michael Todd
Michael Anderle
She Is His Witness (this book) is a work of fiction.
All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Sometimes both.
Copyright © 2018 Michael Todd, and Michael Anderle
Cover by Ryn Katryn Digital Art
Cover copyright © LMBPN Publishing
A Michael Anderle Production
LMBPN Publishing supports the right to free expression and the value of copyright. The purpose of copyright is to encourage writers and artists to produce the creative works that enrich our culture.
The distribution of this book without permission is a theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like permission to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), please contact [email protected]. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.
LMBPN Publishing
PMB 196, 2540 South Maryland Pkwy
Las Vegas, NV 89109
First US edition, January 2019
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Epilogue
Author Notes - Michael Anderle
Connect with Michael Todd
Other Zoo Books
Books written as Michael Anderle
The She Is His Witness Team
JIT Readers
Nicole Emens
John Ashmore
Jeff Eaton
Crystal Wren
Peter Manis
James Caplan
Paul Westman
Kelly O’Donnell
Kelly Ethan
Joshua Ahles
Editor
Skyhunter Editing Team
Dedication
To Family, Friends and
Those Who Love
to Read.
May We All Enjoy Grace
to Live the Life We Are
Called.
Chapter One
The ground shook and the air reverberated with the enraged sounds of hostile creatures and gunfire. The odd shout here and there from the humans punctuated the cacophony. Sal gripped his weapon tighter. He raised his free hand to wipe sweat from his face and blinked when his hand tapped against his facemask.
Funny how you forgot basic shit in the middle of a firefight.
“Jacobs, if you can spare the time?” Kennedy shouted from the ground below him. “I know getting your head stuck in your ass is a full-time job, but if you could unstick it, I’d really appreciate the help down here.”
Right. He nodded and maintained his higher vantage point for a few seconds longer. While he’d determined the lay of the land, Kennedy had dropped down the smaller cliff to hopefully thin the ranks of the animals which massed relentlessly below. Her plan had been to try to keep a path clear in the event that he saw a way out of the massive bowl that they’d found themselves in, but so far, she’d only managed to ensure that the beasts didn’t scale the cliff to where he was.
Which was a good thing, since he couldn’t see jack shit through the thick tree cover, much less an escape route.
Okay, he was done having his head up his ass.
Sal glanced at the scene below and narrowed his eyes. Kennedy dealt with the locusts for the most part, but more than a few of the panthers and a fair number of other reptiles that he’d never seen before circled like they used the locusts as meat shields.
That was the thing about the Zoo, he thought with a smile. There would always be something out there to surprise you. He took a few steps to the right, and his armor seemed to move before he even formed the thought. Without hesitation, he jumped, cleared the cliff face with room to spare, and dropped the fifteen or so meters down to where Kennedy fought. As he executed a perfect three-point landing a few paces to the right of her, his armored fist struck one of the circling panthers.
“Superhero landing,” he said with a grin and raised his gun in the other hand to shoot at a couple of the locusts that had started to flank her. “Hell yeah.”
Sal didn’t have to see her to know that she had rolled her eyes. He’d come to terms with the fact that she either didn’t get his pop culture references or simply didn’t care enough about them to comment while they were in the middle of a firefight. That was okay. Nobody was perfect.
“Did you find us a way out of here?” she asked over the comms.
“Nope.” He kept his voice even. “The whole place is an overgrown jungle, so I honestly wouldn’t have been able to see anything anyway.”
“Is that what all these trees are?” Kennedy growled, her sarcastic side momentarily revealed as she dropped her empty magazine and let the mechanism slip another into her assault rifle. “Hot damn, I knew we should have come with something that can see through the fucking trees.”
Sal gritted his teeth to hold back his instinctive retort. Sure, a satellite feed would have been fantastic but was sadly out of their reach. She was merely annoyed that he had done better than she had, and he didn’t need to say anything to make it worse.
“Hypocrite,” he said and covered with a fake sneeze.
“What was that?” she asked and raised an eyebrow.
“Nothing,” he replied innocently and ran a quick check of his equipment before he moved forward again. “Just…allergies. From all the pollen. We are surrounded by a menagerie of alien plants, you know.”
“Right, and I’m sure you forgot to add a filter to your new state of the art suit of heavy armor,” Kennedy retorted and moved in behind him. As they inched forward, the animals seemed to back away. They probably merely regrouped for another attack since they didn’t seem the types to give up on fresh meat made crunchy by new suits of armor.
“Come on, don’t be jealous that I got the newer, shinier, and better suit of armor, Kennedy,” Sal said with a teasing grin and turned to face her.
“The fact that it’s bullshit that a specialist geek like you gets to try out the new gunner combat armor is irrelevant,” Kennedy returned with a growl.
“Hey, you made a good run for the test, but you failed,” Sal said and turned away once more. “No harm, no foul. You’ll do better once they restructure the Interface to the average gunner’s stats.”
“The test was bullshit,” she grumbled under her breath.
Sal heard it and gasped. “You take that back. Don’t blame the tests.”
“You designed the test for people like you to be the only ones who can pass,” she said belligerently as they continued their slow progress through the jungle.
“Well, since I was the one who designed it, of course it leans toward my style of operating,” he said defensively. “Your style is a lot more reliant on reflex and reaction and less on control. Power armor requires far more control. Of course, they take these tests to the lab and adapt the suit with some sort of movement AI and then it doesn’t matter.” Sal paused to push a series of vines aside to allow Kennedy to pass. She did but flipped him the armored middle finger of her suit as she pushed through.
“I need to be able to react quickly,” she growled. “Control won’t help me when something jumps at me and I only have a blink of an eye to aim and shoot it. You’re saying that years of training and experience are a bad thing here.”
Sal shook his head. “I’m not. I’m saying that when using power armor, if you move too quickly or you force the armor to move faster than your body is able to, you’ll break bones and tear muscles until you adjust to it. Control is necessary. At least until they push the AI that would prevent that from happening past the development stage.”
Again, he didn’t need to see her to know that she rolled her eyes. She knew he was right. That was the reason why he’d been called in to help with the general development. It wasn’t because they didn’t want gunners to use these armor UIs, but rather because they needed a benchmark to work from. As long as they paid his hourly rate, he was more than happy to oblige.
Kennedy knew that, and he knew she understood. Despite her blustery exterior, she was smarter than most of the gunners brought to the Zoo, and honestly, a much better fighter than most of them. The fact that all that came with attitude and sass to spare made it the deal of the century, even though he had still barely begun the learning curve on how to handle it. The more he got to know her, the more he discovered vast pools of sass waiting to be discovered along with…other things.
Sal was suddenly very happy that she couldn’t read his thoughts through the comm system. Not that mind reading AIs would ever be a thing.
Hopefully.
He came to a halt when she stopped abruptly and raised her hand with her fist closed. His body tensed instinctively as he glanced around and his armor reacted instantaneously. He’d added a design that enabled it to use the sensors to detect if the user was in danger of attack or prepared for combat. A few of the combat programs started up and with the armor bunched, although it made for less efficient movement, it protected the vital areas far better.
They’d probably scrap it in the end product, but it had been a good idea anyway.
“What?” Sal asked when he saw nothing to suggest a problem. The entire Zoo had gone suspiciously quiet, but other than that, there didn’t seem to be any obvious imminent danger for them to deal with.
“Motion sensors,” Kennedy said tersely.
He nudged the relevant button with his chin and switched his HUD’s view to motion sensor. Carefully, he scanned their surroundings. Immediately beyond the view of the naked eye, he saw the jungle awash with movement from the animals all around them. He turned around slowly and made sure to keep his gun raised and ready.
Yup, they were completely surrounded.
“I’ve started to feel really iffy about our decision to abandon the cliff face as a defensible position,” Kennedy said, and all the sarcasm and amusement had dropped from her voice. She was all business now. Sal had seen her slip from casual to combat in seconds, and it never failed to send a tingle up his spine. He’d never been sure if it was a good or a bad feeling, but it was incredibly real, there was no denying that.
“You have any more of those…smoke grenades?” He asked, his voice edged with a steely note. They were in some serious shit. He’d been in enough engagements like this to know that. It was chilling how easily these different species managed to work together and how they used reciprocal tactics despite not being even remotely similar in type. The goop in their bodies seemed to resonate and rise above the basic animal instincts to create a shared purpose and unity.
Sometimes, anyway. He’d also watched them hunt each other down, as you’d expect from a thriving ecosystem. Carnivorous predators always hunted omnivorous or herbivorous prey, even when it came to alien animals.
“I have the one that you gave me,” Kennedy confirmed in response and retrieved the grenade from her suit. He’d given it to her when they’d split up the first time and hadn’t even noticed that she’d used one while he was on the top of the cliff. That annoyed him more than anything she could have said. He held himself to higher standards than anybody else could these days. Gone was the slacker doctoral candidate who had faced the prospect of running into the Zoo for the first time with shaking knees.
The animals reacted like they’d waited for a snap of the fingers from some controlling force, and when that invisible command came, they obeyed with a hungry need. They attacked in a single wave without any reliance on tactics like the last battle. Then, they had used the locusts as shields while the stronger, deadlier animals waited on the fringes for the opportunity to go for the jugular.
Not this time. They rushed forward like a solid wall and closed in from all sides, unified ranks of all kinds of creatures that rushed to overwhelm the two invaders.
Their strategy would work. That much was obvious mere seconds into the attack. Sal found weak spots as he and Kennedy stood back to back and fought the animals off after she dropped the smoke grenade. Despite the smoke cover, they would still be able to locate them.
He maintained his fire with his assault rifle as he drew the sidearm from his hip with his free hand. Driven by pure instinct, he used the smaller weapon to push individual beasts back as they tried to force their way in closer.
“Fuck!” Kennedy shouted, and Sal saw in a rear camera that one of the panthers had laid hold of her rifle arm as another gripped the other hand which held a knife. One of the reptiles lunged at her face and spat a foul-smelling acid that instantly ate into her facemask. A scream echoed through their comms as she dropped to the ground.
“Madie!” Sal called. He spun and shot the reptile three times with his sidearm as his rifle sprayed lead into the rest in an effort to drive them clear of her body. It worked for a moment until his guns clicked empty.
He made a mental note to add a quicker reload mechanism to the guns as the creatures’ deadly claws raked his back. The armor withstood the assault for longer than Kennedy’s did, but it wasn’t long before he was crushed face down and the armor was torn off.
“Fuck.”
Chapter Two
“Fuck,” Sal said again and watched the simulation fade around him. The pain in these sims had never been that convincing, but he assumed that was by design. This wasn’t a medical sim, after all. It was meant simply to test the combat software and armor designs in a safe environment, and they couldn’t really do that if testers knew they would be traumatized. Aside from the fact that they’d be unlikely to find volunteers, there were likely moral reasons and also some very real legal reasons that kept the odd psychopath in charge from releasing their inner Hannibal Lecter.
Hopefully.
He felt the disconnect from his suit. It opened enough for him to pull himself free on his own, but Kennedy already stood over him and helped him up.
“I still think your whole testing thing is bullshit, by the way,” she snarked as he stretched. As real as the simulation felt, once you got out of it, you still felt as if you had been lying down for however long it was that the sim ran. A good stretch was definitely required.
“You only say that because you didn’t pass,” Sal replied with a grin but held a hand up to stop her reply. “We can do this all day. We’ve done this all day. It’s obvious we won’t reach a consensus.”
Kennedy shrugged. “Yep, you’re pretty damn right on that.”
He nodded. “Well, I’ll try to be more inclusive of gunners next time I’m asked to help with armor software development in the testing stage.”
“Appreciated,” she said with a grin as they prepared to move ou
tside. As far as testing facilities went, this was relatively a bare-bones facility considering that millions of dollars went into the suits they currently trialed in the Zoo. It was a good place to test them so that they could be mass-produced and sold in other fighting fronts. As with any animal carcasses in the wild, vultures surrounded the Zoo and found dozens of especially creative ways to turn a profit from the disaster that the place had become.
Does that make me one of those vultures? Sal wondered as he studied the EKG results from their time in the sim. His were fairly standard. It wasn’t particularly important for the test apart from the fact that it enabled the control units to monitor the stability of the subjects, but he liked reports on his mental acuity while in a combat situation. There would obviously always be a small part of his mind that told him he wasn’t really in combat and it was all a simulation. The monkey brain in him would inevitably keep him from going full fight or flight, but this was as close as he would ever get to being able to evaluate himself in a stressful environment, and he simply couldn’t pass up the opportunity.
He forwarded the results to his work email for a more in-depth study when he arrived home and turned to join Kennedy as she made her way out of the tent where they ran the sim. Again, the bare bones operation prevailed with only a tent erected as a barrier to keep the test subjects isolated from the other people in the building. The conditions weren’t as sterile as he liked his testing facilities to be, but he’d already raised the situation a couple of times with those in control and each time, they told him they were working on improvements. He’d now simply stopped talking about it.