MECH

by Tim Marquitz

  It was cursed.

  For centuries before the invasion, the island had been home to devastating tropical storms, destruction from tsunamis, human wars, earthquakes from the clash of two subduction zones straddling either side of the mountains like sardines in a pressure tin, and the biggest volcanic eruptions of the twentieth, twenty-first, and twenty-second centuries.

  The island was the homeland of apocalyptic destruction.

  “Mr. Pekkarin, status please,” Macumber called, stepping back from the viewing port and returning to his command chair at the side of the room. Pekkarin did not glance in his direction—no one on the bridge did. They all wore helmets that completely covered their heads, and the visors on the front faceplates were all digitally darkened on the exterior. On the insides, they would be viewing multiple data images, mimicking curved television screens of the twenty-first century, showing all the views outside the craft far better than the natural viewport Macumber had just used. But the captain liked to use his own eyes sometimes instead of relying solely on technology.

  Despite his head being obscured from view in his helmet, Pekkarin had clearly heard his captain, and the young man replied through the inner-ear auditory system, making it sound to Macumber as if the ensign’s response was just a thought in his own head.

  “No movement yet, sir.”

  The captain clambered into his gel chair, allowing the seat to envelop him, as the others in the room—six of them—were all cocooned in their own chairs, reclined as if sleeping in beds. Robotic arms gently lowered Macumber’s own helmet onto his head, snugging the locking mechanism in place. Neo-metal shells closed over his limbs like several tiny coffins. They hissed and filled with astro-gel that would absorb all impacts to the bridge or to his body. The seat reclined, and he felt the sway as his body moved backward. Once his seat was fully activated, the zero-G compensators would keep him effectively weightless in his gel container and, even if the ship were to roll repeatedly, he would feel as if his body remained level.

  Unless one of the squids bashed the ship hard enough to breach it.

  He’d seen that kind of mess before, and the results were not pretty. But now wasn’t the time to mentally revisit the horrors of the war, and he chided himself with a gentle shake of his head for allowing his thoughts to drift. The chair moved with his body, the gel sluicing around him to accommodate his new position.

  The view before his eyes remained dark. The digital and optical systems would remain dormant until he told them to activate, with a verbal command. That was how he liked it. The calm before the storm. He would stay still in his gel swaddle, his head shrouded in darkness, waiting for Pekkarin to inform him of First Movement. It wasn’t quite meditation for Macumber, just a chance to rest his eyes.

  “Here we go,” Pekkarin said though his earpiece.

  “Activate,” Macumber mumbled into his helmet.

  His retinas stung briefly from the instant brightness of the screens leaping to life all around his eyes. He blinked twice, and his vision resolved.

  Several screens appeared before his eyes. Views in all directions around the craft. In the upper right of his periphery, he could see a zoomed view of the distant acid clouds. He turned his eyes toward that screen, and its view expanded and intensified, filling his field of vision. The screens all tracked eye movement and would anticipate what a viewer wanted to see more of, moving that image to center and enhancing it. The training for the program had been intense, but Macumber was now so used to the transition that his mind no longer even registered the change. Thought and action were one. If anything, he found the eye strain on changing depth-of-field to his unaided eyes was more of a challenge these days.

  Waving strands of spaghetti-like purple tentacles descended from the clouds in the sky, the creature levitating by means human scientists had yet to ascertain. As Macumber watched, the beast dropped from the boiling cumulus clouds, its upper body descending after the army of waving tentacles and covered in armor like a brick-red balloon wrapped in angular overlapping blood vessels. The creature was clearly some kind of octopus or squid-like thing, but the Verengeretti were two-hundred feet tall, and instead of eight limbs, they had hundreds. In the last two years, after the humans had finally started to fight back with brains instead of only brawn, the Verengeretti had upped their game, covering the upper bodies of their invader scouts with the thick, ropey armor that covered most of their bulbous head-bodies, with the exceptions of the base under the tentacles and a single, sinister, angled eye slit on the front. The overall appearance always somehow reminded Macumber of a Japanese samurai helmet’s faceplate. And the armor made the bastards that much harder to kill.

  “Fight,” Macumber ordered, and Pekkarin sent the craft into action.

  2

  Rockets engaged, launching the S.S. Nagai, a Polonium-class mechanized battle chassis, into the sky, leaving the gray, neo-metal and asphalt launch pad behind. Officially a World Security Force battleship, the three-hundred-foot-long vehicle was known to its crew by an alternate moniker: King Raidizer.

  The massive flying ship resembled the metal naval vessels of the twentieth century. At least it did until it reached its destination, when thrusters lifted it vertical, revealing that the top surface of the craft, which was bristling with gun emplacements and other armaments, was in fact the front of a huge, humanoid robot. Its feet were known as the bow, and the head, where the bridge was located, was technically the stern of the vessel. To keep things simple in battle, those terms were still used when the craft was in its vertical orientation as well.

  Constructed entirely of modern materials, the outer shell looked like it was shiny, old-world metal, but parts of the structure were astro-gel or a viscous liquid that excelled at redistributing vibrations from impacts. Other parts of the hull were high tech arsenals of nanobots that could repair damage to the ship in mid flight—or in its robot form, in mid-battle.

  Designed to be manned by a crew of six hundred human sailors and officers, but officially rated for duty with a skeleton crew of just two hundred, Raidizer actually ran with a crew of just 107 people dispersed through the craft’s body. Trained humans were hard to come by in a war that had lasted far too long.

  As Macumber watched the armored squid descend below the clouds, Raidizer rocketed toward the creature at a speed close to two hundred miles an hour, flying feet first. Impact would occur in seconds.

  “Commencing SK attack,” Pekkarin announced.

  The attack was formally known as a ‘forward thrust plantar action,’ but like with most things in the WSF, the ensigns renamed it something simple they could pronounce under the stress of combat. In this case, the shitkicker attack was comprised of hydraulic pistons re-angling Raidizer’s feet from their normal, pointed-toe position in flight to a non-aerodynamic, flat-footed orientation, and the stern thrusters were then engaged at the last second, smashing the soles of the huge robot’s flat feet into the opponent in a rocket-assisted stomp.

  A second after Pekkarin made the announcement, Macumber felt a vibration gently rock his body in the impact fluid of his command chair, and he knew they had delivered a wallop to the creature. He watched on a viewscreen as the hungry squid, its front armor buckled inward slightly from the collision, flew backward and away from Raidizer.

  Macumber wouldn’t let it get far, though.

  “Pivot and prepare rockets ones and two,” he said.

  “Aye, Sir,” Ensign Callabera announced. She was one of two women on the bridge. Callabera was the chief weapons expert on deck. He heard her quickly mutter to her weapons crews in the robot’s left forearm. They controlled the hand and all its munitions, and they would form the hand into a fist while preparing to launch the missiles mounted in each of Raidizer’s knuckles.

  Pekkarin followed Macumber’s first direction and brought the craft from its battleship mode into the vertical robot orientation. Rockets on all sides of the lower legs and its back kept Raidizer in a hover, several hundred feet of
f the ground. From outside, the move looked both fluid and threatening, but Macumber knew the Verengeretti were not moved by swagger.

  “Fire one and two,” he ordered.

  Twin trails of smoke spiraled away from Raidizer’s extended fist as the projectiles—one-hundred-pound air-to-surface Devastation-class missiles with rotary-drilling nanobot warheads capable of puncturing any known Earth substance—launched and streaked across the sky, darting and re-angling left and right, past the Verengeretti’s horde of defensive tendrils. The missiles erupted against the armored surface of the creature’s head. They hit close to the top of its helmet, and as Macumber watched, the destructive cloud of nanobots swarmed over the huge alien’s protection as smoke from the explosion that had deployed them temporarily obscured his view.

  Then, as Macumber and the others watched, and before he could order a second strike, the squid’s tentacles pulled in toward the swarm of black mechanized insects covering its body.

  What is it doing now?

  Macumber’s job as the captain of the vessel was never as simple as just presenting the crew with orders. He had to out-think the alien Verengeretti, and it was made further challenging by the fact that the creatures never fought the same way twice—they adapted. Or evolved. No one was sure. The Verengeretti had been breaching the fabric of space-time from their dimension for years. Always one at a time, but always fighting differently. The fissure would seal as soon as one came through. All attempts to breach the fissure in reverse, with all manner of probes and weaponry, had ended in complete failure.

  All studies of the invaders’ strange biology were thwarted by their tendency to melt into a watery sludge upon death. Shortly thereafter, their liquid remains would evaporate into the atmosphere, leaving only known gasses and something acidic like hydrogen sulfide, but which wasn’t. Science had failed at finding the chink in the armor of the alien menace, so the surviving militaries of the planet had formed the World Security Force, and ordered a new tack. If they couldn’t figure out how to stop the incursions from happening, they could at least create weapons with enough variety and brawn to brutalize each tentacled intruder as it breached the world.

  Macumber watched the last tentacle retreat into the nanobot swarm. All he could see now was a dark cloud of the miniature robots. But as the last tentacle slipped inside the swarm, he saw the black cloud of penetrating robots ripple, like a wake left in water after the movement of a large mammal or fish beneath it.

  But the ripple moved horizontally, across what would be the squid’s bulk.

  “Defensive measures!” he shouted, despite the lack of any need to. He could speak in a soft whisper and the audio compensators would enhance his voice for the crew. Luckily it worked in reverse as well, and his shouted command would convey all the urgency of the message without the volume.

  A grim smile crept over his face. The crew was so well trained that even before he had finished the second syllable of the order, Pekkarin dropped Raidizer from the sky to the glinting, glass-coated foothills below them while Callabera ordered her rocket crews to reload.

  Lieutenant Rutledge, the ship’s defensive armaments officer, ordered the radiation and proton shields up over the craft. “Shields. Launch chaff.”

  Macumber blinked, and his viewscreen retreated to the upper right corner of his vision. He glanced left to a view just ahead of Raidizer’s broad, armament-covered chest, and he watched as two, three-foot-long, metal rods were forcibly ejected like spinning torpedoes, flinging away from the robot in both directions like flipping drum-major batons.

  Macumber switched cameras again with a blink, and he saw what he’d expected.

  The Verengeretti had begun to spin at incomprehensible speeds inside the nanobot cloud, its tentacles pulling in to whip horizontally around its core. Suddenly the spin ejected the drilling micro-robots away like the metal fragments in a grenade. The bot-swarm shot away from the creature in all directions, much of it heading for Raidizer. Then the Verengeretti charged toward its attacker, following close on the heels of the spray of drilling insects, the squid’s tentacles still whirling and ready to deliver a spinning battering of their own.

  This is going to be close, Macumber thought. Way too close.

  3

  Raidizer hit the ground, the soles of its forty-foot-long feet mashing through the glazed glass and sand surface of the ground, driving deeply into the soil under the battle-scarred façade.

  “Arms up,” Macumber ordered, and Rutledge repeated the command to the defense teams throughout the chassis.

  The defense teams knew their jobs. Raidizer bent at the knees, dropping one knee to the fractured ground, crossing the robot’s forearms over its head to withstand the oncoming collision. Nanobots embedded in Raidizer’s matte, gray and white exterior scrambled to critical areas, both to dull the impact and to repair any damage sustained.

  The repelled devastation bots approached first. While most of the nanobots followed the chaff to either side, a good third of the swarm hit in a series of ballistic pings. Most followed their programming and ricocheted away from their mother ship. Some, damaged by contact with the enemy, or perhaps somehow overwritten by the Verengeretti, attacked Raidizer’s hull with the same vigor they had just used on the squid. They would be neutralized soon enough, though, by the defensive bots roaming the ship’s hull. The rotating ball of fury with the multitudes of electrically stinging tentacles barreling toward the ship was the true threat.

  “Wait for it,” Macumber said softly.

  On the viewscreen, the spinning squid shifted to a forty-five-degree angle, its tentacles ceasing their whirl and leading the attack. The creature’s sharp beak under the legs, at its bottom, snapped in anticipation of a tasty snack. Over the exterior audio systems, Macumber could hear the rhythmic clacking. Without the computer’s dampening, each mandibular strike would sound like a peal of thunder.

  “And…now. Axes deploy.”

  Macumber’s command was repeated, and he felt the gentle sway in his chair. Raidizer dove in a somersault, the robot’s hands reaching over its shoulders to the handles of two crossed axes mounted on its back—the lower hull when the vessel was in flight as a battleship. The handles were half the length of the ship, and the ends held massive, double-sided, curving blades, which were engineered from the same material as the drill bits in the nanobot swarm.

  As the Verengeretti’s fusillade of wavering purple appendages scattered at the sudden movement of Raidizer below them, the robot rolled and swung upward, slicing two deep gouges in the creature’s underside. The blades bit deep on either side of the squid’s snapping beak, spraying acidic blood and sending a caul-like membrane to splatter on the cracked, blackened ground.

  Raidizer completed its roll crouched on its feet, then sprang up into the air, spinning as it did so, until the superstructure chest faced the back of the still-moving invader.

  “Fire main guns.”

  Unlike earlier versions of the battle-chassis, Raidizer was designed first and foremost as a battleship, to be used in its horizontal configuration. The entire top-side of the vessel was covered in sixteen-inch guns on swiveling turrets. Instead of the fifty-caliber ammunition of old, the cannon fired plasma pulses that could core through mountains. Unfortunately, Macumber knew they couldn’t penetrate the ropey Verengeretti armor. But enough sustained blasts could weaken the alien protection so that the axes could bite through. Or he could just keep out-maneuvering the beast so Raidizer could keep swiping at the creature’s unprotected underside.

  The blitzkrieg assault of the plasma blasts peppered the rear of the beast’s armored head-covering, pocking the cabled surface, but as Macumber had guessed, not penetrating it. The Verengeretti quickly recovered from the feigned vulnerability of the robot, and twirled hard, several of its purple appendages lashing out and seizing around Raidizer’s upper left leg. Instantly, a burst of electricity blasted out of the creature and sizzled through the proton shields, throwing off sparks in all directi
ons.

  “Sweep and launch chest measures,” Macumber said, not perturbed by the invader’s tentacles having grabbed a hold of his ship.

  Raidizer’s arms swung inward, bringing the axes in a low downward sweep, neatly slicing through the attached tentacles and three others that were in the process of reaching for the leg. Their armor was strong, but the Verengeretti’s uncovered flesh was no match for the axes. As soon as the sweep completed, and before the creature could recoil in pain, huge missiles embedded in Raidizer’s chest-plate launched at point-blank range. The ten-ton tritonal warheads produced a pressure wave that rocked Raidizer back and down onto its feet while the squid—unprepared for the blast—was hurled away to careen into the side of a low mountain. A plume of dust erupted into the air, even as the noise from the blast—muted to acceptable levels in the crewmembers’ helmets—was replaced by the keening, chittering wail of the creature.

  “We’ve hurt it,” Callabera reported.

  A younger, less experienced captain would have pressed the attack, rushing in to fire more rockets and swing Raidizer’s axes like a madman, but Macumber knew the fight was far from over. Now wasn’t the time to press on, it was the time to assess damage and prepare for the next round.

  “Status, Mr. Rutledge.”

  “The shields held up pretty well, Sir. Just a twenty percent dip from that blast. We’ll have them back up soon.” Rutledge sounded confident, and Macumber was glad for it. The Lieutenant was new aboard the ship, but very efficient. Still, it wasn’t the ship’s defensive measures Macumber was concerned about. It always came down to ordinance. If they ran out, it would be practically impossible to take the creature down with Raidizer’s physical strikes. While the robot could land a hell of a punch, Macumber would need to call in the next battle chassis—the S. S. Yardley—if he ran out of missiles.