by Stephen Moss
The strange planes had been mostly dismissed by the locals as yet another example of the potent technology of the world’s superpowers, most notably the resurgent Russian Federation that had so recently subsumed their ex-democratic nation. But to the educated eyes of Nick and Malcolm they had been something far more disturbing.
This was nothing that any armed force they knew of had access to. This was something wholly new. It went some way toward accounting for the speed with which the new People’s Republic had spread its influence over the Stannic world, and to the urgency with which Nick had been ordered to get Malcolm out of the country. Taking liberal notes as the planes passed overhead, Nick had tried to document what he was seeing, and then they had tried to ignore the rising feeling of panic the deadly looking craft instilled in them both.
Now, days later, lying in the hold of a forty-year-old fishing junker with an equally old, nine-horsepower diesel engine, they waited for the ship’s crew to come aboard and take her out to sea. When the crew arrived, Nick and Malcolm would wait until they had steered their ship out onto the Caspian’s vast waters before emerging from their hiding spots.
Hopefully they would be able to overpower the crew and coerce the ship’s skipper to steer a new course for the sea’s far coast. Hopefully, the ever-expanding Russian empire would not have extended its reach to Azerbaijan before they got there. They lay in wait as they heard the telltale thud of a boat pulling alongside and boots clambering expertly aboard with their equipment and supplies, their loud voices brimming with ignorance of the coming confrontation.
- - -
As Nick and Malcolm tried so desperately to escape Russia’s grasp, there were those that were trying to get into it. Hektor Gruler, formerly of the German elite Spezialkrafte, stood in the center of a large, empty hangar, waiting for his team to arrive. They were scheduled to deploy the following morning. He was wearing his battleskin, as he nearly always did these days, getting used to the way it moved, teaching his muscles to accept the battle armor as part of him, becoming one with the abilities it gave him.
He had been working on his balance, fine-tuning his muscle memory to account for his augmented limbs’ vastly increased strength. Bending, he pressed his fists against the floor of the hangar and hoisted his weight onto them, not in a swift movement, but pushing his feet into the air in a smooth extension, as though stretching, focusing on maintaining tight control on his limbs as his weight shifted. Upright, he moved his weight to just his right arm, and extended his left arm out to the side, feeling the massive power of his suited body as he easily absorbed his mass on one balled fist.
“Vie gehen sie, Hektor?” the other German member of their team asked as he approached. Niels was not quite as practiced in the new suits as Hektor, having only joined Ayala’s shock troops after their base of operations had moved to SpacePort One. He was no slouch, no, he was an incredibly skilled martial artist, as they all were, but he was still unlearning long practiced training; reprogramming his reflexive responses to accommodate and complement his battleskin’s capabilities.
Hektor had been one of the first to use the most recent evolution of the suits, including the spinal interfaces being refined by Amadeu’s team that allowed them to control their sensors and onboard weapons systems directly. This left his arms and legs free to maximize the potential of the suit’s potent limbs: carrying heavier weapons and moving faster and with even more agility than before.
Hektor had helped Amadeu and Birgit test these new suits when their teams relocated to SpacePort One for the final stages of the elevator’s construction, making him one of a short list of candidates to lead one of the three Russian infiltration teams being put together.
“Gutt, und sie?” replied Hektor to Niels’s greeting, bending his right arm, and then pushing down into his fist with all of its massive power, punching himself upward and flipping gracefully upright in a smooth backward twisting turn that left him facing his friend a moment later.
Niels smiled, watching the acrobatic maneuver, but then felt his system suddenly get pinged directly by Hektor’s.
As only he could, Hektor had just engaged Training Mode on his team member’s suit, and without warning the team CO swung a low tight blow to Niels’ midriff. The Training Mode restricted impact strength during practice sessions, for as defensive as the suits were, they were primarily built to be offensive machines, and if anything could damage one of the expensive suits, it was another, well-trained user of the deadly armor.
It was a low blow, quite literally, and Niels was caught off guard and flung backward, his systems helping to give realistic weight to Hektor’s punch even though its full power had been automatically withheld. He recovered quickly though, tucking and rolling backward to come to rest on his knees some ten feet away, a scraping line left in the concrete. His arms came up to protect his face as he recovered, his sensors rushing to alert him to his opponent’s movements.
As he rolled backward, his visor also engaged, a three-part mesh of plate panels locking in front of his face and completing one of the only inflexible parts of the suit. The helmet contained controls and interface systems, part of the suit’s sensor suite, and even some weaponry, but mostly it was a thick, shock proof buttress, hard as a diamond on the outside, and soft as gel on the inside, to insulate its wearer’s fragile skull from some measure of the shock that came from full-on contact battle. Vision and hearing were supplied from external sensors directly in the spinal port, and supplemented with radar and external feeds to form a detailed picture of the wearer’s surroundings.
And as the visor closed, another system engaged. A small dose of psychomotor stimulants suddenly glanded into his brain, his onboard AI prompting his adrenal and pituitary glands the moment battle was commenced. Dopamine and adrenalin suddenly flooded his system, bringing his mind and body into vivid focus. It was one of the many tricks Amadeu employed to amp up the Spezialists’ reaction times.
Niels came to his senses after the initial blow and scanned for Hektor. His vision melded as his helmet closed, allowing him to see not only ahead, but to the side and behind him, a sensation he was still getting used to. As a relative novice, he still used the option in his suit where he viewed himself in the third person. Staring down upon himself as though he were a character in a computer game. His suddenly alert mind saw his surroundings from above and behind, giving him some approximation of his full surroundings without straining his ability to process the now panoramic information being supplied to his optic nerves.
It was a good tool for a beginner, but Hektor was more advanced, and he had learned, with long practice, to overcome the sensory overload of multiple views being supplied to his visual cortex at once.
It gave Hektor, and the few others who had mastered this, a fundamental advantage. For while Niels could see far more of his surroundings than the average human, his view was still unidirectional. Hektor, on the other hand, used the pure feed from his systems to see in all directions at once.
And unfortunately for Niels, Hektor knew his blind spot. After knocking Niels over, he had leapt upward, grasping a part of the hangar’s ceiling frame forty feet above them. Hanging here, effectively above Niels’ point of view, he waited a moment, and then engaged his sonic punch, sending a single targeted smack to the back of Niels’ helmet. The hit registered as a resounding thump to the other man’s systems, and he was flung forward again, losing the footing he had regained only a moment ago. But he was not slow. Sensing where Hektor must be lurking he spun as he fell, zeroing his weapons and raising them to the maximum power allowed by the training parameters.
Hektor knew that Niels wouldn’t take long to figure out his ruse, and was already falling toward him. As Niels spun, Hektor fell, right into Niels’ weapons arc. Seeing the coming repost, Hektor flexed in midair, extending his hand downward to grab Niels’ arm just as the other man fired his own pulse. The pulse hit Hektor in midair above Niels, just as he grasped Niels’ flailing left arm, and the two s
uits strained as momentum pushed them both apart even as iron-like muscles held them together.
Across the hangar floor, their four teammates approached, also suited, and saw their CO grappling with their sergeant. They watched as the lieutenant came in from above, saw him react to the coming fire from Sergeant Osten, and then watched as the two black-coated figures swung apart, still attached at the arm, spinning in a vertical arc, like superhuman ballet dancers.
Niels’s teammates figured out quickly what was happening, their own systems also receiving the training signal from Hektor’s master link, and they grinned. Hektor was a master at combat in the suits, he had shamed them all a hundred times during training. Which side they were going to join in the test was clear. As one, they all dropped their equipment and surged forward to come to the defense of their brother Niels.
And none too soon. For Hektor had used his improbable angle of attack to wrench his feet downward, even as Niels twisted in midair, and he had also activated his forearm-mounted laser. Targeting Niels’ weapons arrays, Hektor fired. The laser itself did not actually ignite, they had no desire to start actually destroying systems on each others’ suits, but the systems governing the test environment assessed the accuracy and intended power of the shot, and predicted the damage it would cause.
Niels’ suit told him his sonic punch had just been hit, even as he sent the fire command to his own laser, bringing his arm around to fire at the matte black of his CO’s helmet. But even as the test system logged Niels’ laser firing, Hektor’s feet were coming into play.
The blow was hard. Even with controls on his systems Hektor’s entire weight was behind it, and it would have snapped Niels in two if he were unprotected. But Niels’ black suit tensed under the pressure, the hit conducting instantly across Niels’ body, just as Hektor registered the other four fighters engaging their test systems and entering the fray. His reactions were lightning fast. He knew exactly which side the other four would choose.
They were clearly going to take this opportunity to kick their CO’s ass. Hektor smiled inside his helmet. Well, they were going to try.
Releasing Niels’ arm, he registered the other man being driven into the hangar’s concrete floor, and felt the momentum of his own two-booted kick being transferred back to him, driving him backward and away.
The first sonic punches and laser strikes hit him midair, but he had anticipated the other four men’s angle of attack and twisted his helmet away from them. Their attacks were wasted on the black armor of his suited back as he spun. He had about half a second before they could fire again, and he reacted fast, knowing he only had a moment before they were on him.
Selecting targets and programming them into his attack arc, he swung his arm across them, automatically firing as it went, the training system assessing and assigning likely damage as it went. Hektor thought he should be able to score a few good blows before they were on him and the real fighting began.
But they had specifically practiced attacking a single target en masse, in case, heaven forbid, they ever came up against one of the two surviving enemy Agents. They had even sparred as a team with Quavoce a couple of times. They had been massacred by the Agent with disturbing alacrity, but they had registered steadily higher simulated hits on Quavoce’s own systems as they progressed, and it had been clear that they would be able to make either Pei or Mikhail pay very dearly indeed if they ever met one of them in the field.
Those practice sessions had taught them not to waste their shots, and to use their greater numbers to their full advantage. So Bohdan Lewycka, one of the four men closing on Hektor, had withheld his weapons from the initial attack in case Hektor pulled just the move he had.
As Hektor landed he was instantly accelerating at a tangent to the four men that were spreading out to close in on him. This served to counter the effects of their spreading formation, forcing contact with one or two of them at a time, instead of allowing them to come at him all at once.
For his part, Niels was also recovering from the beating he had received and climbing to his feet again as he reeled from the body blow that had felled him. But he would be precious seconds joining his compadres, seconds that would have seen him dead against an Agent, and Hektor did not factor him into his immediate plans.
Nor did he factor in being hit hard with Bohdan’s delayed laser strike either. The test system assessed the strike a direct hit on his forearm mounted barium laser and disabled it, along with one of the four radar and visual mounts ranged around his helmet. It came at an inopportune moment for Hektor as he was still figuring out what had happened when he came into contact with Tomas Koleshnikov, the most junior of the team.
Tomas was not lacking bravery and he was not reticent as he braced for hand-to-hand combat with the fearsome Hektor. In the quarter second before they collided he kicked his right foot forward with all his might at Hektor’s stomach. But as Tomas committed to the attack, Hektor flexed left, grasping Tomas’s leg as he went by, and throwing all his weight into a wrenching twist away from Tomas. Done at this speed without armor, the move would have shattered every bone in Tomas’s leg and possibly ripped it off completely, but it would also have crushed Hektor’s own rib cage and dislocated one or both of his shoulders in the process.
It did none of those things though. What it did do was refocus Tomas’s entire weight into a screaming arc around Hektor, while leaving the other man facing outward, away from Hektor, and unable to fight back. Cara Weisz, the only female member of the team, saw it just in time. Just before she pounced in to help the hopelessly outmatched Tomas, she saw that Tomas was rapidly turning into a weapon himself. As Hektor wielded the other man like a club toward Cara, she dropped, driving under the arc of Tomas’s black-clad body.
Ayala and Quavoce approached from the side to the sound of thuds and thumps and a mild sense of alarm filled Ayala as she registered the vicious fight going on. She started forward, a shout about to escape her lips, but Quavoce stopped her gently with a hand on her shoulder sensing the training mode of the squad’s systems with his own onboard sensors.
Smiling, he reassured her, “They’re just practicing.”
She looked back at Quavoce, then at the six troopers going at it, and the sheer violence of it began to sink in. Hektor had managed to get at least a glancing blow into Cara with the massive bat that was Tomas’s body, before letting the poor boy go, and sending him flying off into the air toward the three other men as they also closed on Hektor.
Two of them dodged Tomas handily, but Niels deliberately got in the boy’s way to bring Tomas back to ground, and they both were soon heading back into the fight. Meanwhile Cara had managed to connect with Hektor’s legs, not in a powerful blow, but it was enough to bring Hektor down on top of her. Hektor pranced, trying to avoid Cara’s grasp, trying to stay unencumbered, but Cara was good, one of the best after Hektor himself, and she managed to keep Hektor embroiled in a hand-to-hand grapple on the ground as the others got to grips with their CO as well.
Hektor knew he was done for when he did not manage to avoid Cara’s wily grasp. But he was still going to make them work for it, and as they began landing their blows, he punished any foolhardy attack with ferocious counter kicks and punches, laughing giddily as he did so. He saw them in 3-D, from inside and outside instantaneously. He had no point of view. He was looking at them from above and below, from the edge of his boot and the tip of his fist, all at once.
They needed to know that numbers were not enough and that the suits did not make them invulnerable. He taught them that lesson in spades and he sensed their improvement, even over the few short but grueling weeks they’d had to spar together.
As the training system assessed their hits and his systems began shutting down, he kept fighting, wounded but still deadly. Only nineteen seconds had passed from the moment he first struck Niels. In that time, he had landed over fifty blows, each of them powerful enough to kill an unarmored man. That he was losing was moot. He was thrilled by
the mechanical efficiency with which his team was beating him down, and it was from within this maelstrom of his last desperate counterattacks that he sensed the approach of Ayala and Quavoce from across the hangar floor.
“Attention!” he screamed across his link to them. It took them a moment to respond but a second later they had stopped fighting, and were stumbling to untangle themselves and climb to their feet, forming into some semblance of a line. Their movements were somewhat awkward as they waited for Hektor to disengage the training mode from their suits and give them back control over their ‘damaged’ systems.
Releasing the training wheels, he felt his body come back online. Sensor suites came back to 100% like blackened eyes opening once more and he sent the open command to his helmet fascia.
“Lieutenant Gruler,” said Quavoce as they approached, “most impressive. I will be factoring your latest tactics into our next matchup. I may even use some of them myself.”
Hektor was breathing hard as the shielding in front of his face slid smoothly to the side, revealing his sweating, grinning face beneath. Adrenalin pumped in batch lots around his body as the battle high made his dilated pupils seem ready to pop. But he managed a small nod to match his smile at Quavoce’s comment, respect for his tactical superior showing in his face.
“Yes,” said Ayala, still somewhat shell-shocked at the sight of Hektor and his team in action, “very impressive, Lieutenant, but they got you eventually.”
“Yes, ma’am,” said Hektor, “Cara was particularly troublesome, as always.” Ayala beamed at this statement, Cara being a handpicked protégé of her own from the ranks of Shayetet-13, a highly secretive branch of the Israeli Defense Force.