by Isaac Hooke
As they advanced, leapfrogging each other across the snowpack streets, the bodies began to thin out once more.
The second fire team was making its way forward when Rade, hidden behind a pile of rubble with the first team on overwatch, spotted movement in a side street between some of the nearby structures.
“Fire team two take cover,” Rade said. “I’ve got movement.”
Rade glanced at the overhead map to confirm that the second fire team had indeed halted and taken shelter, then he zoomed in on the side street where he had spotted the motion. There: more of those humanoid robots with the Sino-Korean faces jogged past in rigid formations. Carrying wicked looking rifles, they were headed in the direction of the crater. He glanced that way and his gaze drifted toward the top of the valley. He could see more motion in the hills there as companies of enemy units fanned out, bioengineered creatures and robots alike.
Perhaps it had been a bad idea to make that general broadcast up there.
Good thing we came to the city from an unexpected direction.
When the nearby robots had jogged past, Rade asked Jerry: “Is it safe to communicate between Titans? Or will we give ourselves away?”
“Local communications over the adhoc network formed between Implants should be fine,” Jerry said. “Due to the limited range. But I recommend against using the more powerful comm nodes in the Titans. With all of these structures in the way, the enemy will have difficulty pinpointing your location even with triangulation sensors, but why risk it?”
“This is a test message,” Rade sent to his brothers via Implant. “Do not reply.” He kept an eye on the retreating patrol through the buildings, but none of the robots faltered or otherwise gave any indication that they had heard the transmission.
Rade glanced at his overhead map. The icons that represented his men returned low ping times, which meant the Implants had been exchanging positional information all that time anyway: if the enemy could listen in to the local band, those robots would have detected them already.
“Looks like we can communicate safely with our Implants,” Rade said. “But avoid the use of comm nodes. Unless you want to bring those patrols down on us.”
“We are here to exterminate them,” Bender said. “In case you forgot.”
“We are,” Rade agreed. “But given the numbers of enemy units I’m seeing up there, it looks like they’re the ones more likely to be doing the exterminating, than us.”
“I don’t know about that,” Bender said. “It looks like the chief handed them their asses on a silver platter back there...”
“Maybe,” Rade said. “But there’s a reason why we haven’t found any other landing parties out here, and that reason is most likely the overwhelming enemy numbers. My priority at the moment is to find the chief.”
“On the plus side, I guess sedating Keelhaul actually worked,” Manic said. “Those nano-machines in his head kept quiet about our positions.”
“I’m starting to think more and more that he only experienced a stress hallucination back there,” Tahoe said. “Triggered by the intensity of that fight.”
“I have to keep him sedated,” Rade said. “You know that, Cyclone. To be on the safe side. Besides, we were in plenty of stressful situations in our last deployment, if you recall, and he never had an hallucination then.”
“I know.”
“It might not have actually been Keelhaul’s fault that the robot attacked us on the plains,” Lui said. “After all, here we have actual structures to hide behind. On those plains we were basically lying out in the open on that outcropping, covered only in snow. I don’t need to tell you how many ways you can detect something hiding under a snowdrift. We’ve talked about this before...”
“Okay that’s enough for the moment,” Rade said. “Let’s have some quiet on the comms, please.”
Rade waited until he was sure the enemy patrol was out of earshot—he added on an extra two minutes to account for the sensitivity of robotic hearing, factoring in that the crunch of the Titan footfalls weren’t all that soft on the snowpack in the first place—and then he and the others advanced, continuing their bounding overwatch formation. Over time, the dead bodies dwindled completely so that soon the streets were empty save for the compressed snow.
In a few blocks, the crystalline structures gave way to squat, closely packed stucco buildings that he hadn’t seen from the vantage point at the valley top. Those buildings had rectangular doors, arched windows, and “mansard” roofs with the four sloping sides preferred by the Sino-Koreans. All of them were damaged in some way, of course; most of the windows were broken, and there were no curtains. Many of the homes were burnt out husks. Bare asphalt painted with dividing lines occasionally peeked out from the windblown drifts next to the snowpack, as did the wreckages of a few rotor crafts. It reminded Rade of a wintry Chinatown neighborhood on Earth. After a bombing.
Perhaps the aliens had designed the place to comfort the newly converted human hosts they had brought to the homeworld. The “human quarter.” Rade wondered how many such neighborhoods had existed in the city before the nukes arrived.
A little oasis of humanity in an alien city.
The buildings didn’t glow like the crystalline structures, so the area was cloaked in shadow. Rade preferred that. He switched to the thermal band as Bender led the way.
Rade’s fire team was on overwatch when Tahoe’s neared the new coordinates. Fret, the point man of Tahoe’s team, halted at the precise spot marked on the map. Fret crouched, scanning the street and the surrounding buildings with his cobra in one hand, and his shield the other, while the remaining Titans of his fire team assumed support positions.
“Nothing here, boss,” Fret said.
Something leaped down in front of Fret, landing with a loud crunch on the snowpack only five meters from his Titan. On the thermal band, it looked like a big, red smear.
Rade glanced at his overhead map. The newcomer was represented by a red dot. Not the friendly blue...
The tango straightened up, standing to its full height; its smudge resolved enough for Rade to catch a glimpse of weapon turrets locked into place upon large robotic hands.
twelve
Rade aimed the targeting reticle of his cobra over the smear’s center of mass. He knew that those providing overwatch with him were doing the same. He kept the video feed from his main camera piped into his other eye to maintain battlefield awareness—he saw Fret bring his shield to bear and crouch behind it. The others in Tahoe’s fire team out there similarly swiveled their bodies toward the tango and shielded themselves.
Rade knew he should have unleashed the cobra already if he wanted to bring down the newcomer, but something didn’t add up.
“Hold your fire!” Rade said. “It would have shot you down already if it meant to attack.”
“I thought it was you.” A barely audible voice floated to Rade from outside. He jacked up his external volume.
“Trace?” Fret said over the comm.
“The one and only,” came the muffled voice.
Rade switched to Fret’s point of view to get a better look at the heat smear.
“Fret, can you get closer?” Rade said.
Fret stood up and cautiously approached. The soldier switched to the visual band; when he was two meters away the exposure compensation converted the dim outline into a recognizable figure in the dim light.
It was another Titan mech.
“Fret, pipe me in to your external speakers,” Rade sent.
“Done,” Fret replied.
“What the hell are you doing, Trace?” Rade said. “We nearly shot you down.”
“I was calling to you,” Trace answered. “Why didn’t you answer me?”
“Fret, did you hear him?” Rade asked.
“No,” Fret said.
“You might have tried the communication band,” Tahoe said. “You have your external speakers set to such a low volume, our footfalls were probably louder. You’re not
showing up as a friendly on the overhead map either by the way...”
“Chief’s orders,” Trace said. “No Implants, or comm nodes. You’re going to have to shut down both before I can take you to him. The external networking portions, anyway.”
“Facehopper isn’t here?” Rade said.
“He’s here, but not at this precise spot,” Trace said. “I’m on lookout.”
“How did you know it was us?” Fret asked.
“I recognized the Alpha Platoon insignias scratched into your chest plates,” Trace said.
“Oh.”
There were no such insignias of course.
“Obviously it was you,” Trace said. “Since no other Titan models were part of the drop team.”
“But how could you see us in this dim light?” Fret said. “When we couldn’t recognize you worth a damn, even after you leaped down?”
“I’ve been overwatching your approach from this rooftop for a long time,” Trace said. “I saw your mechs pass in and out of the shadows from several streets away.”
“Doesn’t bode well for any enemy snipers watching us out here,” Lui said.
“Come on,” Trace said. “I’ll take you to Facehopper. But please, shut off the adhoc networking portions of your Implants. It’s far too easy for the enemy to track us otherwise. All they have to do is close to within fifty meters and then their own Implants handshake with ours and we appear as friendlies on their overhead maps. We tried Snakeoil’s Node-jammer, but all it did was further alert them to our presence. So shut off the Implants in your heads, and disable the comm nodes in your Titans. Please.”
“Do as he says,” Rade sent. “Going forward, we communicate via external speakers only. Low volume. Boost the sensitivity of your external microphones.”
Rade watched as he lost connection to every member of the squad in turn, and when he was the only one left, he too disabled the adhoc networking portion of his Implant, maintaining local connections only so that he could preserve his link to the Titan. Additionally, he disabled the mech’s comm node.
Trace led them along that street, keeping close to the building walls, until he arrived at a larger building in the human quarter. A warehouse of sorts.
Rade scanned the nearby rooftops and spotted what appeared to be the outlines of laser pulse platforms. He wondered what range trigger the automated weapons had been set to. Not too close, or a nearby enemy patrol would be alerted to their presence when the platforms opened fire. And not too far, or an incoming attacker would more readily breach the perimeter. It was a delicate balance; he suspected hidden sentries resided on the rooftops with their hands on the overrides, ready to make a judgement call if an enemy patrol came by.
Inside the warehouse, Rade and his men discovered the remainder of Alpha Platoon, along with several Marine infantry units wielding laser rifles and clad in bulky, radiation armored jumpsuits. The members of Alpha resided on the left side of the warehouse, while the Marines sat in clusters on the right, seated around strange, glowing crystals with pentagonal facets jutting forth from dodecahedral bases; those crystals were the secondary source of illumination in the warehouse, after the headlamps. Marine combat robots stood guard near the walls, carrying heavy assault weapons slung over their shoulders.
The Alpha Platoon members remained inside their mechs, most likely because their jumpsuits didn’t have the same radiation protection as those of the Marines, and they relied upon the Titan armor to protect them.
More laser pulse platforms had been raised along the inner perimeter of the warehouse, in between the combat robots, and the turrets tracked each Titan as it entered. Obviously the platforms had been programmed for visual recognition, because without active Implants or comm nodes the new Titans wouldn’t have otherwise been recognizable as UC.
“Facehopper?” Rade said. Without the adhoc network of his Implant, he couldn’t tell which of the Titans contained the chief.
“I’m here.” A mech lounging in the middle of Alpha raised a hand. “The rest of us are here, too. Mauler, TJ, Bomb, Skullcracker, Snakeoil, and Harlequin. And you already met Trace.”
“Glad to see you all made it,” Rade said.
“Not sure made it is the right word,” Bomb said. “Surviving, seems more suiting.”
“I can’t tell you how much I’ve missed your pretty faces,” Bender said.
“Too bad you can’t see our faces at the moment,” Snakeoil said.
“Probably a good thing,” Bender said, the irony continuing to ooze from his words. “I wouldn’t want to tarnish the memory.”
“We’ve missed your sexy face, too,” TJ said.
“Yeah, Bender is pretty hot,” Manic said. “He’d be popular in prison.”
“Not as popular as your ass,” Bender said. “Literally. By the way, who are the chicks?”
Rade glanced at the Marines. He zoomed in on the helmets and moved his gaze from face to face. He thought at first that Bender was only being sarcastic, but the Marines really were all women.
“You’re looking at a couple of rifle platoons from B Company, 1st Battalion 37th Marines,” TJ said. “The all-women battalion otherwise known as The Storming Amazons. And don’t ever let them hear you call them chicks. Or bitches.”
“Too late, Dirt Astronaut,” one of the women said. “We already heard.”
“That’s Tamara Luxe, by the way,” Mauler said. “Their sergeant.”
“No major with them?” Rade asked.
Luxe shook her head behind her faceplate. “We lost our major at the drop site.”
“What about the Centurions?” Rade said, indicating the combat robots that sat behind the infantry.
“A weapons platoon from the same company,” TJ said.
“No HQ and Service company members?” Rade asked.
Facehopper was the one who answered. “The HQS company was downed at the drop site, too. The enemy captured the comm node.”
Rade studied the Marines for several moments: “How do we know they aren’t infiltration units, like the Marines who turned on us at Radiance?”
“How do we know you aren’t?” Luxe retorted.
“Her Amazons fought beside us at the drop site,” Facehopper said. “If they are infiltration units, they would have had to kill their own kind to gain our trust.” Facehopper paused. “You’re missing a Titan.”
“Grappler didn’t make it.” Rade tilted slightly so that the dead body of his passenger could be seen.
Facehopper remained motionless for several moments, the gaze of his mech fixed on that passenger seat.
“Did we lose anyone else?” the chief finally asked.
“I have Keelhaul sedated,” Rade said. “He was showing signs of alien infection.”
“You have one of them with you?” Luxe said, standing. Other Marines stood up, too. They slid down the laser rifles from their shoulders but kept them pointed at the floor. For the moment.
Facehopper extended a big metal palm toward them. “Relax for a second, Sergeant.” He turned toward Rade. “I thought Keelhaul was cleared for duty?”
“We all thought that.” Rade eyed the Marines uncertainly. “But apparently not. He claims the aliens were trying to communicate with him.”
“We’ve seen evidence they can communicate even when unconscious,” Luxe said.
“Maybe they can, for full hosts,” Rade said. “But he isn’t even a half host. As far as we know.”
“As far as you know...”
“We’ve encountered patrols,” Rade said. “We hid. Our positions weren’t discovered.”
She turned toward Facehopper. “I say we get rid of him.”
“No can do,” Facehopper replied. “Keelhaul stays with us. For as long as he doesn’t put the rest of us in danger, anyway.”
Luxe hesitated. For a moment Rade thought she was going to pull out her platoons and abandon them.
But then she sat back down. The Marines followed her example.
“If they find us,” she
said. “I’m holding you and your men personally responsible.”
“I wouldn’t have it any other way,” the chief said.
Tahoe’s Titan stepped forward. “I have a question: what the hell are those?” The gaze of his mech was directed toward the multifaceted crystals the Marines sat about.
Rade was glad his friend was changing the topic of conversation, as the tension between the two units had been growing palpable.
“We don’t really know,” Facehopper admitted. “TJ thinks they’re data storage devices of some kind. They’re made of the same substance as the crystalline buildings out there.”
“Data storage?” Tahoe said. “As in, alien archives?”
“Something like that,” TJ replied. “I’ve seen patterns in the crystal that remind me of the holographic imprinting techniques used in human storage tech.”
“But never mind that for now,” Facehopper said. “Rage. You said you passed enemy patrols on the way here?”
“We passed one, yes, but they didn’t notice us,” Rade said. “A bunch of them were swarming the top of the valley though, where I made my initial broadcast.”
“You’re talking to the south?”
“I made my broadcast at the overlook to the south, yes,” Rade replied.
“All of your Implants and comm nodes are turned off at the moment, right?” the chief asked.
“That’s correct.”
“But your Implants were still active when you hid from that one patrol?”
“Also correct.”
“How close did they pass?”
“No more than a hundred meters,” Rade told him.
Facehopper swiveled his Titan to regard the other members of Alpha. “Beyond the handshake range.”
“We should be safe,” TJ said.
“All right, mates,” Facehopper said. “It’s high time we left behind this irradiated, alien-infested dump for good. We’ll use the distraction Rage and his men provided to the south to our advantage.”
“I’ll obey, of course, but why not stay?” Fret said. “What’s the difference between hiding here and hiding on the plains?”