The Styx Strikers

by Thor Zollinger

  “Here comes another Hellspawn… no, that’s a Hellhound and he’s using his PPC’s like an expert. Both pilots are mostly trading defensive shots. You can never tell when a situation like this is going to break. When they do, there will be a lot of action on the kill board. He’s a much better shot than our rookie in the Battlemaster. Oh! Would you look at that, the Battlemaster has lost an arm to the PPC’s! The smaller Hellhound is out maneuvering the heavier mech with superior speed and agility. It’s anyone’s guess how this matchup will end.”

  “They’re playing cat and mouse around the barriers, but who’s the cat and who’s the mouse? It looks to me like the Hellhound is the cat this time around. He’s getting shot after devastating shot on the Battlemaster every time he pops out from behind the barriers.”

  “The stream of shells from that rotary autocannon are really taking a toll, I think I spoke too soon. The Hellhound is really taking a beating… And there goes the pilot, ejecting out of his damaged mech like a missile out of an inferno! I don’t know how he’s doing it, but that rookie pilot in the Battlemaster is really doing well, that’s three kills on the board for him tonight. That Specter is one heck of a Solaris pilot.”

  “Matches like these team melees are set up using overall tonnage. Each team can field a specific amount of tonnage, but no more. That’s how the Saber Cats can pit an assault mech against these smaller machines in a fair fight, it’s the team weight that matters. Their other mechs on his team are light weights, giving them space on the roster for one nasty assault mech like this one.”

  “Braaaaaaap!”

  “And that’s the match. The other Saber Cats lost one of their own, but have downed the fourth Diamond Shark on the other side of the arena. It’s a good start for the Saber Cats tonight, but now there is blood on the field. Things should really heat up now. With four more matches to go, this is still anybody’s ballgame. The score is four to one, in favor of the Saber Cats.”

  After the final match was over the three guys left the great room and headed downstairs to run a few matches of their own on the simulator. Sven told Jake about all he’d accomplished the last few weeks programming the simulator while they were going down the stairs. “I’ve got the tunnel system and the Spire Sinkhole all imported into the sim and I can turn the texturing on and off. I textured the walls using the video off the drone’s camera. The geode cavern looks really cool, but the lighting is a bit rough in that part. We need to take the video in that part over again with better lights so I can get the colors to match up better.”

  “Nice. How does the water look?” Jake asked as he rounded the landing halfway down the stairs to the basement rec room.

  “It’s set up in the sim, you just tell it what the water level is at different points down the river bed and the rendering engine fills it in. The lasers on the drone detected the riverbed, not the water level. I used the video to match the water levels up to the real levels in the caves. Oh, and I finished importing the farm mechs and got the guns articulated in the sim so you can aim and shoot ‘em now.”

  “That’s rad! We need to set up some missions where the pirate mechs attack the ranch so we can figure out how to kill ‘em.”

  “Already done, Bjorn set two up last night. We’ve got one where they attack through the front gate, and another where they come in from the outside the rock barrier on the far west side of the fields. On the news they said the last raid the pirates just walked right in the open front gate.”

  “Yah, we need to figure out how to kill those bastards once and for all.” Jakes mood was subdued for a minute as he thought about what had happened to Hai’s uncle. Determination kicked in and he got a steely eyed look on his face. He was going to kill those thugs if it was the last thing he ever did, he just had to figure out how.

  “Ok, who’s in the hot seat first? Sven, you or Jake jump in there, I’ll man the computer controls and feed you some pirates to chew on.” Sometimes Bjorn preferred to torture the other guys and watch them squirm as he fed in and controlled the enemy mechs.

  “I’ll go.” Jake stated as he pulled on the control jacket, gloves, and a sensor headband. He clambered in through the back opening into the fiberboard mockup and into the seat. He plugged the chord from the jacket into the jack on the right side switch panel and settled in. Bjorn powered up the computer and the three view screen monitors came to life, they had a front view, and two side views for peripheral vision, and a control touch pad in the middle. It could display the mission map, sensor screens, mech health parameters, and other types of data screens. The cockpit also had sets of button pads mounted in both arm rests and above the forward view screen which could be programmed to display different control symbols on each button, and map the button to different functions depending upon which machine they wanted to duplicate. The guys were pretty proud of their simulator, it had taken them months to put it all together and program the first time.

  “Ok, lets see you do a little target practice first.” Bjorn commented as his stylus danced all over the on-screen controls of the separate control computer. He was sitting at a console on the opposite side of the room. Jake’s cockpit switched to the layout of the construction mech, but it had an added feature, a targeting reticule on the front screen that followed his head movements. “The number of rounds in your magazines are displayed on the lower right corner of your forward view screen.”

  “Roger. Got it, fifty rounds in each magazine.” Jake took a minute playing with the targeting sensor, placing the cross hairs on different items around the farm in the view screens.

  “Well, shoot somethin’ already!” Sven was getting anxious to see how much damage the new guns would do. “I can see the Loki mech out in the middle of the fields out past the orchards.”

  “Roger. Commencing attack run.” Jake pressed the accelerator pedal and his mech began a slow turn and jogged out from the central driveway area past the machine hanger and out into the fields. He stopped just past the orchard trees and took aim at the Loki and fired once…

  Boom! He hit the Loki right in the center of the torso. It twisted backwards some due to the impact, but one shell didn’t do much damage. Jake let it rip and fired a stream of slugs at the target mech. It fired on auto if he held the trigger in. He expended about half the slugs from the right gun into the right side of the torso, damaging it critically.

  “You do know you’ve got two of those guns, right?” Sven added sarcastically, leaning over the back of the chair into the cockpit.

  “What? Oh yah. Group fire selected.”

  Two streams of slugs erupted from his guns this time, tearing into the left side and arm of the target Loki. The right gun ran out of ammo just as Jake blew the arm of the mech clean off. The left torso was now damaged into the yellow.

  “Hmmmm. That took almost all of my ammo and it only cut him down to about half strength.”

  “He wasn’t mov’n either. If he was maneuvering you’d miss a lot of those shots.”

  “He wasn’t shooting back at Jake either.” Bjorn added as he walked over to look into the cockpit. “Those dual AC-10’s would blow Jake in half before he got very far. At ten slugs per gun per shot, he has us outgunned ten to one. That doesn’t even count the four medium lasers in the torso.”

  “He’s also armored and we’re not.” Jake mentioned, pointing at the armor status screen for the construction mech. “Our armor is paper thin compared to his. We won’t last ten minutes in that meat grinder.”

  “Head shot. It’s the only way. Try that Jake.” Sven suggested shrugging his shoulders.

  Jake pinned the target reticle on the cockpit of the Loki and fired a stream of slugs. After ten shots, the mech’s knees finally buckled and the machine collapsed to the ground in a loud crash. “That’s a pretty small target… how’re we going to pull that off?” Jake grimaced, he didn’t think he could hit it ten times in a row, not if the mech was moving.

  “How about explosive rounds? I
think I saw a schematic for them in the database.” Bjorn was racking his brain trying to remember where he saw it.

  “Armor piercing rounds would be better.” Sven had seen an ad for armor piercing bullets for the rifles a few days before on the hunting show he had watched for hunting Grizz. “They were solid steel, just like the ones we cast, but they have a Teflon coating. What if we add a slick plastic coating to the outside of the mech rounds? Would that work?”

  “Maybe, let me see if I can pull up an armor piercing round in the sim.” Bjorn trotted back over to the control computer and did a bit of digging in the database. “Here they are, I’ll load ‘em up and we can see what the difference is. OK, Jake. You’re all set. Let’r rip.”

  Jake sighted in on the dead Loki on the ground. “Uhmmm, He’s dead Jim, you can stop shooting now…” quoting from a movie they had watched the other night.

  “Oh, sorry. Try it now.” The target mech stood up and all the damage vanished as Bjorn reset it for another test run.

  “That’s better. Here goes…” Jake pulled the trigger and shot the cockpit of the Loki. This time it dropped dead after about five rounds. “Not bad. It’s still a pretty hard shot to pull off four or five times in a row, especially if he’s moving.”

  Sven was looking pensive, holding his chin he said, “The other option is to shoot him in the back. The back armor plating is thicker than the cockpit, but not by much. Jake, run around the other side and shoot it in the back.”

  “No, hold on. Stay put, Jake. I can turn the Loki around faster from the computer over here.” Bjorn clicked a few times with the stylus and had the target mech take a few small steps and rotate around so it’s back was facing Jake. “OK, try it now.”

  Jake put a stream of slugs into the back of the target mech. The autocannons ripped through the armor and did some major internal damage after about fifteen rounds. “Hey, that’s not so bad! I can hit that without any trouble.” Jake put another twenty rounds into the back and the mech dropped like a rock. “That’s the key, we have to get behind ‘em and take ‘em out that way.”

  “Maybe we can distract ‘em long enough with the missile battery to get behind ‘em.”

  “Sounds like a plan to me. Hey, I’ve had enough of this standing around, lets play Solaris-7 in the Spire Sinkhole now.” Sven was getting anxious. After an afternoon watching the matches on the broadcast, he wanted to get into a cockpit.

  Sven went into the bedroom and pulled out his computer tablet and joystick and Bjorn pulled out his control console so all three guys could run around in the simulation at the same time. Cooperative play was a lot more fun than death match mode. Death matches always ended up with the best player dominating everyone else, meaning Bjorn since he was the most experienced player. The guys decided to wear the colors of the Jade Falcons. Not exactly a Solaris-7 team, but the guys liked the Clan logo.

  Picture Pack: Bjorn’s Game Controller, Jade Falcons

  “We’ll start at the north end of the tunnels near the new entrance we found, the Pirate mechs will start at the other end.”

  “Three of us against four of them?” Jake queried.

  “Yah, we’ll just match their tonnage with fewer mechs. That means we each get bigger ones. OK?”

  “Righteo, old bean. Let’s see, 25 + 35 +60 +65 = 185. 185 divided by 3 = 62 tonnes each. We’ll round that up to 65 tonnes each.” Bjorn set up the parameters in the sim so each of them could choose a mech and set up their weaponry.

  Jake selected a Tenchi mech with the standard load-out of dual RAC-2 rotary autocannons and four medium lasers, very similar to the Battlemaster he had seen the rookie mech pilot use earlier in the day on the Solaris-7 broadcast. He finished his selection first and launched into the sim into the tunnels. His mech was standing just inside the entryway where the stream came in the side tunnel. The other guys were still configuring their mechs in the mech lab so Jake decided he’d go exploring down the tunnels and headed off south down the river bed. Bjorn hadn’t turned on the texturing, he’d forgotten that setting, so all the walls were shades of gray which made it easier to see the shape of the tunnels and big rocks. Jake knew Bjorn’d figure that out in a minute when he launched into the sim.

  Heading south Jake made his way around a few large boulders. “Boy, this sure is easy goin’.” Jake came to a stop as he rounded the next corner… “Whoa, this is weird. Sven, did you forget to load a section of the tunnel? The wall is all flat in this section on one side of the tunnel.”

  “What? No way, I loaded all of it in. It scanned, I checked it all after I put the texturing in. Hang on, let me see.” Sven came trotting down the tunnel in a Loki mech and stopped next to Jake. “Well I’ll be, that section is flat.” Taking a few steps closer in his mech, “No, it’s not flat. It’s just mostly flat. Take a closer look, there is an arch to the flat section at the top and a lip in the floor right at the bottom, and the wall is bumpy.”

  “Looks kinda like a big door to me” Jake commented, taking a step closer to get a better look at it. He tried the optical zoom, but it zoomed in too close to be useful.

  Just them Bjorn realized he hadn’t textured the model and turned it back on in the sim controls. ‘Snap.’ All the lighting changed and the flat spot disappeared.

  Sven sat back in his chair, then leaned in to get a closer look at the monitor. “Whoa, check it out. The wall is painted so it looks like the rock walls. There are very faint lines across the flat section about every meter as you go up. Hey, there’s a stairway or ramp or somethin’ off to the north side that goes up above the big door. This is weird.”

  “Sven, what is this? Is this part of the laser scan or is this a 3D model of a building you added in just for fun?” Jake scratched the head of his mech and turned to look directly at Sven’s Loki.

  “I didn’t do it. It’s gotta be part of the laser scan.”

  “I’m getting out” Jake stated flatly, and pressed the key to eject his character out of the mech. The hatch popped open and he watched as the sim animated his guy climbing down the ladder rungs down the side of his mech and down to the ground. Jake took over moving his character and walked his man over to the surface of the large flat wall to get a closer look.

  Sven was right behind him. He ejected too, but he headed north to check out the ramp he’d found. “Hey look at this, it’s just the right width for my guy to walk up.” Sven reached the top of the doorway and looked around. His man was standing on a level landing just above the top center of the doorway. He waved down to Jake, “Planetfaller, this is Moonwalker-1, you’d better get up here. I’ve found something really interesting…”

  “Roger Moonwalker-1, on my way up.”

  Bjorn had walked his mech into the same part of the tunnel the other guys were investigating and turned off the texturing. ‘Snap.’ Everything went flat grays again.

  “Hey, what did you do that for?” Sven said a bit miffed. “Turn it back on, I need the wall detailing back on. And while you’re at it, turn the lighting way up would yah?”

  “I just wanted to see the flat doorway. I’ll turn it back on in a minute.”

  A minute later, ‘Snap’, the texturing came back on and the dim tunnel was lit like noonday. “That’s better. Hey Bjorn, eject out of your mech and get your butt up here. There’s a small man-sized doorway up at the top of the arch. We can just barely see the outline in the wall texture off the video. It’s rounded, like the hatch on a ship, with a vertical pull bar. I can’t see any obvious door handle or anything, though.”

  “Wait, look Sven, on the right side of the door. It looks like a keycard reader, just like the ones at Hai’s mine.”

  “Wow, it sure does. This is so rad! What’d yah think is behind the door?”

  “How should I know? You’re in the way, can you read anything off the card reader? Are there any words you can make out? A manufacturer or model name or somethin’?”

  “Uhmmmm. Not really, the video resolution
is too low. Let me take a snapshot of it and maybe we can match the shape up to something in the database for the fabricators. If we can figure out the manufacturer Hai might be able to figure out how to bypass it.”

  “So, you think it’s real? Wow this is so rad! We SO need to go on another Safari!”

  Just then, Jake’s mech warning system chimed in, “Enemy Detected. Enemy Detected. There are three incoming contacts on radar. Warning. Four incoming mechs detected. Recommend re-entering your mech.” The voice was female, which was Jake’s preference.

  “Oh, shoot. We forgot all about the Pirates. Back to your mechs, men! We’ll come back and investigate the door later!”

  “Charge!!” The three guys ran back down to their mechs, re-entered the cockpits and joined the fray, guns blazing. It was a fun afternoon, and now they had a mystery to solve as well.

  Chapter 11 “Safari #2” –––––––––––––––––––

  Tarra called Ariel on her zipPhone, she was up in her favorite treetop on her perch watching the sunset. “Hey girl, did you hear what the boys found in the north cave?”

  “No. Tell me, tell me.”

  “They found a secret door! A huge one, over ten meters tall and as wide as a two lane road!”

  “No! You’re kidding me… Is that what the big Safari is all about? Wow, that is so cool. Bjorn didn’t say anything about that, just that we were going in the new creek entrance they found last time.”

  “Yah, well Sven spilled it before Bjorn yelled at him. They don’t want any of our parents to find out. They want to explore the caves first, before any of our parents tell us we can’t.”

  “That’s a good point. My Mom would freak out if she found out. She doesn’t know we’ve been in the caves at all, she thinks we’re going to the lake fishing or something. She’s afraid of the caves for some reason, something about the dark and big imaginary beasties she doesn’t want to meet.”