Armored-ARC

by John Joseph Adams

The D-Z’s valley carved through the mountains to the west and opened out onto a plain overlaid with red haze. The main boiler infestation, a plague of self-replicating machines. A cluster of the simplest and sturdiest of them had likely arrived in a lump of meteor and been bootstrapping themselves ever since. He circled several map-areas at that end of the valley, highlighting them in pale yellow. “Harry, what’s the uncertainty over here?”

  “Sir, from the limited data I can collect with the range-finding lasers, those areas differ from the historical models by just over the margin of error given the current level of interference.”

  “That’s a little strange. The model’s only a month old. You suppose the Panesthians have been doing some remodeling out there, maybe defensive works? It’s right on the edge of the boiler’s zone.”

  Silence.

  “That last bit wasn’t me talking to myself, Harry. It was for you.”

  “Noted. Unknown, sir. I have no information on any Panesthian earth-moving operations of that scale. I have very little data on their construction projects at all, sir.”

  “You can call me Karith if you want, Harry.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Karith chuckled. He zoomed out and slewed the view over past the yellow end of the valley and beyond, into the red zone on the plains where the boilers were building their industrial compounds. “That’s a pretty big infestation for stage seventeen.”

  “Agreed, sir, but it is within parameters. I note the stage fifteen on Brindle Eight, the stage sixteen on—”

  “Right.”

  The boilers were mostly predictable. Stage of development followed stage of development like clockwork. Small simple foragers like four-legged crabs running on springs. Steam powered crawlers and cutters. Hydrocarbon-burning, motor-driven mechanicals bent on mining and refining. All the way up to nuclear spiders, tanks, and aerials. There was always some variation, of course, in response to environmental factors, but the basics stayed the same. His eyes flicked to the grip readouts. They were solid.

  “Hey, Nic.”

  “Wait one.”

  He slammed hard against his restraints again and his stomach floated up into the back of his throat. Moments later, he settled back into the webbing. That would be the second-stage inflation scoops. Outside, hundreds more of the little spheres were lining up to get inflated with superheated air and then roll away on smart velcro into the thick braking ribbons trailing behind Nicolette. The surface of Milacria stopped sliding away to the right and resumed its steady flow beneath them.

  He heard a touch of strain in his own voice when he said, “You feeling this, Nic?”

  “Yeah, I felt that.”

  “No, I mean, I feel like a green kid. Butterflies in the guts and everything.”

  “You do?” Her tone was faintly incredulous, and he could hear laughter behind it.

  “I’m going to regret telling you, aren’t I?”

  “After twelve years in RGK, you’ve got drop jitters? You can’t be serious.”

  “It’s no big deal.”

  “Wait until I tell Jarko. You transfer to advisory to keep yourself safe for your wife and baby, and the first drop where you’re not getting shot at, you get a case of the shakes?” She laughed again. “You want a tranq?”

  “Oh, shut up.”

  Her giggle filled the cabin.

  Karith hissed and then stabbed the button that would connect him with Major Kewlett, the commander of the mech-infantry unit dropping with them.

  “Major, how goes the drop?”

  The major was chewing something. “Fine, fine. Nobody’s let go of their airship yet anyway. What about you? Must be old hat, eh? You on track to meet up with the indig?”

  “Yes indeed, sir.” As a member of the Advisory Corps now it was his job to be the liaison between the Major and the locals.

  “Good to hear. Luck. Out.” The connection clicked off.

  “Sir,” HARRE said, “the Panesthians are trying to raise you on the beacon channel.”

  “Put ’em through, Harry.”

  The soft hiss of a long-range transmission filled the cabin, and a rectangular hole opened in Karith’s HUD. The image solidified and filled with a nightmarish mandibled visage. Karith was struck again by how much Panesthians looked like big cockroaches—big enough to eat your head. Fortunately, there had been a few Panesthians in RGK, and he’d gotten used to them.

  This one hissed and clacked at him, its mouthparts writhing. It took a moment before he was able to parse the heavily accented Spranto. “Greetings, Sir Marvudi. We await your arrival with great awaitingness.” As it talked, there was close movement in the background, other Panesthians crawling back and forth over its back.

  “Thank you. You are?”

  The Panesthian buzzed for a moment. “My apologies, Sir Marvudi. My name is ‘hzzzclackyow.’ The humans at the embassy speak to me as ‘Yow,’ and as a male.” He buzzed again, wingcases opening slightly, disrupting the footing of a passing Panesthian, which slid forward over Yow’s head. Yow used his forelegs, triple claws pinching, to move the other along before crawling closer to the camera lens. “I wish to confirm, Sir Marvudi, that your dropping is indeed on these coordinates?” Yow did something offscreen, and coordinates appeared in Karith’s HUD next to the visual.

  HARRE spoke up, “Confirmed.”

  “Wellness!” Yow replied. “I will come up to meet you in how many minutes…?”

  “Harry?” Karith asked.

  “Approximately twelve minutes, sir.”

  Yow’s antennae waved. “I hurry. Few of my nestmates speak Spranto. Your class awaits on the surface already, Captain. I will join them. Drop with great trepidating!” The image went dark and blinked away.

  Nicolette’s awed voice came over the audio circuit, “Holy shit,” at the same time the alarms started.

  Red warning icons began to populate Karith’s HUD.

  “Incoming, sir,” HARRE said calmly. “Brace for maneuvering.”

  “Damn it!” Nicolette swore. “There wasn’t supposed to be…” She trailed off and Karith’s restraints cinched up tight as they accelerated, swerved, and side-slipped all at once.

  “Outside view, Harry!” Karith shouted. His cockpit blinked away and he was speeding through the middle reaches of Milacria’s atmosphere, high above the mottled green-and-yellow landscape. Something dark flashed past him, its red glowing backtrail leading to a computed point-of-origin deep in the red boiler haze. His computers held the view steady, but his body felt the chaotic maneuvers Nicolette was putting them through.

  They were losing altitude faster than they’d planned. Below, the Panesthian city streaked by. It looked like a pile of dusty intestines. The surreal look of the place held his attention for a moment even as Nicolette tried to make him lose his lunch. The Panesthian burrow-buildings wormed over and around each other in a great heap, spreading out into the surrounding countryside like the roots of a tree, giving way to cultivated land.

  “Holy Moses, Harry, is that correct?” He jabbed a finger at the icon for the MarsFree. It was black.

  “Yes, sir. The MarsFree is no longer in communication. Presumed destroyed.”

  He goggled. “By what?”

  “The first salvo of hyperkinetic rounds was largely ineffective against the mech-infantry drop formation, sir. It was likely not intended for them or us.”

  Black puffs began to blossom in the air near and far, all at about the same altitude. Anti-air, targeting the droptroops.

  “Sir, I recommend a redirect to the company headquarters area—”

  Karith cut him off. “Overlay unit locations and status.” HARRE went silent and complied. Karith clenched his fists. The fear had teeth now. Aborting to a nice, well-defended company headquarters appealed to the monkey part of his brain, but he was supposed to embed with that Panesthian unit. That was the whole point of his being here.

  Behind him, the sky started filling with icons for the infantry unit he was inserting with
, each one a mech shielding its airship from the violence of entry. He and Nic had preceded them out of the ship. Close to a hundred icons filled the sky. Additional icons over the horizon showed HARRE’s best guess at the location of enemy weapon emplacements.

  He glanced back. Well over a third of the infantry icons were already flashing or black. So many casualties. A hypervelocity round could go right through a mech and its airship.

  Explosion after explosion rocked them, black smoke obscuring his view time and again as Nicolette jinked them through the kind of evasive maneuverings that had made her famous in the RGK. The kind of maneuvers that had kept them both alive through a hundred hot drops.

  “Karith,” she said, strained, “you need to make the call right now. I can still get you to that D-Z if you want, but I’m with Harry about redirecting to the company area. I think the embedding gig is out the window.”

  “Sir,” HARRE said, “doctrine clearly indicates that when encountering a superior force, retreat and regroup is the—”

  Karith gritted his teeth. “Can’t do it. Are you seeing this, Nic?”

  “Yeah. Thirty percent casualties. Damn. They shouldn’t have hyperkinetic weapons yet.”

  Karith growled. The boilers didn’t usually develop hyperkinetics until stage thirty, usually a good two years after stage seventeen. It was extremely dangerous to drop this close to a boiler complex at that stage of development, even for RGK troops.

  These infantry were just troops of the line. Most of their missions were holding and clearing actions against early-catch boiler infestations, not assault strikes against advanced strongholds, which was what this was feeling more like every second.

  HARRE’s count of casualty icons ticked up on the overlay to seventy-eight. They were approaching fifty percent casualties, mechs and airships alike, on the entry alone. Adrenaline filled Karith.

  “Sir, I say again, I highly recommend that we redirect to the headquarters D-Z.”

  “Noted. Nicolette, put me in on the original. The Major’s going to need eyes out this way and there might not be anyone else in contact with the local military. Besides, I’ll be damned if I’ll let a little boiler anti-air fire…” he gasped as they swooped into a long curve and his restraints pushed the air out of his lungs. “…scare me off. I bet our D-Z’s under the maximum depression of those railguns anyway.”

  “Damn it, Karith.” He could hear a mixture of exasperation and excited anticipation in her voice. “This is exactly why I love you.”

  “What?”

  She went on. “Can you expose your guns?”

  He checked their airspeed and did so. He and HARRE started intercepting some of the rounds coming their way.

  At fifty feet above the deck Karith cut loose and dropped away from Nicolette’s airship into free fall. As he fell he engaged the feedback mechanisms and the straps tightened up around him.

  Nicolette peeled away and shot to the south, her lift spheres held in a streamlined bullet shape by their smart velcro. Her cockpit and lasers were inside the mass of spheres somewhere. As she rose back into the railgun’s target zone, she took a glancing hit. The spheres rippled, parted to let the missile pass, and then reformed again. A hundred meters beyond her the round exploded. She clawed for height, changing shape for more lift. She shrank smaller until he couldn’t pick her out anymore.

  “Ready for operations, Karith,” she said. Her breathing was tight and fast in his ear.

  “What was that you said to me a little bit ago?”

  With a crash and a spray of dirt, he plowed into the ground at the center of the D-Z, rolling to absorb some of the impact. He stood up and shook himself to free his mech of dirt.

  “Sir,” HARRE said. “I can play back any traffic you may have misse—”

  “Shut up, Harry.”

  Nicolette’s voice was tight, “Nothing. I didn’t say anything.”

  He smiled. “’Cause it sounded like you…”

  “Leave it, dammit.”

  Karith dropped the grin. Her reaction worried him a little. “Right. Nothing. Got it.”

  Two Panesthians scuttled up to him. Hip high to a human and about two meters long, he could have covered either one with his mech’s foot. He tried to imagine what his fifteen foot tall, multi-turreted, thick-bodied, thick-limbed bipedal mech must look like to a rural Panesthian and crouched down. “Yow?”

  “It is I,” the Panesthian on the right replied. “We,” he waved with one foreleg and an antenna at a seething pile of agitated Panesthians on the edge of the D-Z, “are hearing that the boilers are having effective firings on your droptroops.”

  The seething mass of giant insects was the 1st Company of the 3rd Milacrian Armored Battalion. Of course, they didn’t have any armor yet. Karith was there to learn their combat tactics and advise them on how best to augment their abilities with mechs like his own. That would all have to wait now.

  HARRE spoke in Karith’s ear. “Sir, the company restructured its drop points. They are consolidating in the city to the east. I recommend—”

  “Not now, Harry. Yow, we understood that the boilers were at stage seventeen. Railguns are at least stage thirty. Care to explain?”

  Yow squeaked and clicked at his companion, who replied, trilling and buzzing. Yow’s wingcasings raised, and the gauzy wings within fluttered. “Truly, it is the first we have seen of the magrails. We cannot explain.”

  “Well, we’re all stuck into it now. Give me your latest information on boiler disposition and activity.”

  “Of course. Immediately.” Yow spoke to his companion, who used his multi-clawed legs to manipulate something on his underside. Karith saw that he and the other Panesthians all had equipment strapped to their bellies as well as fiery circles emblazoned on their wingcasings.

  “Sir,” HARRE said, “the link has been established and I’m receiving the information. Updating models now.”

  “Good. Put me through to Major Kewlett.”

  The HUD had Major Kewlett on the ground in the city to the east. A moment later his voice grated into Karith’s cockpit.

  “Whattaya got, Marvudi?”

  “Sir, I’ve made linkup with the Panesthian ground forces.”

  Major Kewlett’s gum popped in Karith’s ears. “I’m glad somethin’ went right. They gonna be any use to us? MarsFree is gone, we got twelve hours before the next follow-on ship, and I got close to a hundred of my boys and girls broken already.”

  “I’m not sure yet how useful the locals will be. I’ll have to get back to you on that, sir.”

  “Good copy here.” Snap, chew. “Out.”

  The connection went dead. “Harry, transmit the data from the Panesthians to the general situation model.”

  “Done, sir.”

  Karith turned his attention back to Yow. Before he could speak, another bit of motion caught his eye. He turned. “What the hell is that?” he asked, pointing behind him.

  Yow turned. There was a separate group of adult Panesthians on the other edge of the field, and they numbered almost as many as the soldiers. Half of them had smaller ones swarming on and around them.

  “The families, sir?”

  “Those are your families?”

  “I am unmated, sir. But I believe they are the mates of the soldiers, sir, yes.”

  “Are you hearing this, Nic?” Karith said.

  “Sir,” HARRE said, “the non-combatants should clear the field.”

  Nicolette snorted. “Yeah, what he said. You should feel right at home though, Karith, with little ones to dandle on your knee and all that.”

  “Shut it.”

  She laughed again.

  Karith re-opened Yow’s circuit and poked one finger down at the other Panesthian. “Yow, who is this?”

  “Sir Marvudi, that is the commander of the Company. He is choosing the human name Delbert.”

  Delbert said, “Delbert!” and fluttered his wings.

  “Ah, okay. Yow, tell Delbert that he needs to get the fa
milies under cov—”

  “Sir!” HARRE’s voice was urgent.

  “What!”

  HARRE’s voice was normal again. “Sir, I am detecting a great deal of movement on the far end of this valley.”

  Nicolette whistled. “He’s not kidding. There’s a whole lot of something going on over there.”

  “Show me.”

  HARRE opened another window in Karith’s HUD with an overhead view of the area in question, icons and indicators overlaid. The western end of the valley was alive with red, active machine units sweeping toward their location. They were maybe five miles away.

  “Okay, we’re out of time. Yow, tell Delbert those families need to be evacuated to the city to the east of here. The boilers are coming, and they’re coming now.”

  Yow’s antennae froze and then waved excitedly as he jabbered at Delbert. Delbert turned and buzzed loudly at the soldiers. At his words, the families on the periphery of the drop zone jerked into frenzied activity. They turned as one churning mass and fled, followed by most of the soldiers, disappearing into scattered holes in the ground.

  “Harry, give me a radar shot of the surrounding ground, eh?” Karith formed his mech’s hand into a blade shape and jammed it into the dirt. He was on the western edge of a huge warren complex that seemed to run all the way to the city. He grimaced. “That’s a lot of civilians, Harry.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Nic, I need you to engage the lead boiler units. Slow them down and try to trigger their ‘seek cover’ response.”

  “Roger that, Karith.” In the background he could hear her motive engines kicking in and the mutter of her battle song.

  “Sir,” HARRE said, “she should target the railguns. They are the primary threat and liable to—”

  “I know, Harry. She’ll be fine. We have to get those lead machines stopped first.”

  “Sir Marvudi,” Yow said, “Delbert wishes to know what you would have him do?” Yow and Delbert were still at his feet. In front of them there were perhaps a dozen soldiers left in the short grass. They were in some semblance of a single rank, their shiny brown carapaces like giant wooden toggle buttons on the ground.

  “Get the civilians out of here, Yow. Delbert and the rest of his soldiers should evacuate as many civilians as they can to the city. Get them behind the human defenses.”