*****
The shuttle braved the heavy winds, the cadets inside the vehicle clamoring joyfully whenever a more powerful gust came close to toppling it over. The road that linked their base to the MEWAC Suit Installations was embedded six meters below its surroundings, but the frequent curves sabotaged the measure meant to avoid crosswinds, creating powerful eddies which occasionally challenged the driver. As Toni and his mates cheered in favor of the wind, others shouted words of encouragement to the uneasy driver, his knuckles bone-white as they gripped the steering wheel.
The MEWAC Suit Installations loomed into full view, but Baylen was still forced to point it out to the platoon once he’d managed to shut them up. The structure they approached looked like nothing more than a particularly steep hill.
The elevation peaked sixty meters above the surrounding forest floor but Baylen explained that that was merely for show; observed from within the duralumin bracing-reinforced eggshell that enclosed them, the Stables rose no higher than thirty meters. The bracing structure’s exterior was comprised of faux rocky outcroppings and grassy extensions, and there were even a few small trees growing intermittently upon it. It was only when clued in to the deception that one noticed the illusion wasn’t quite perfect. The trees were stunted in comparison to those that surrounded the Stables, and the artificial cave entrance at its base was a little too regular to ever be confused with a real one.
Their transport entered the cave at a slow crawl, having only moments before been stopped at a checkpoint by a complement of RRU personnel. Toni had never seen commandos in the flesh before. They all wore soot-black uniforms, smart red caps and cold, cold, sleepy eyes. A residue of wind, still strong and chilly, had buffeted their heavy cloaks.
They had appeared wholly unimpressed by the collection of cheerful cadets.
As soon as the transport came rolling to a stop, Baylen began to bark orders. Forming the platoon into a double-column beside the shuttle, the corporal marched them through the overhang and into the cave, and then along the wide tunnel that stretched out beyond it. The tunnel soon opened out into a colossal cavern supported by a vast tangle of girders and struts, from where spotlights shone upon the main entryway to a monolithic wooden building.
Toni stood awestruck before what he suddenly knew to be the oldest surviving construction on Capicua. He had seen images of the facade in his History classes; the Adamastor’s crew had had no choice except to over-engineer their first structures on account of the Greats Winds. The History book, however, had not deigned to inform its readers about the building’s present purpose.
Baylen set off and they entered the Warehouse District’s former administrative building with a silence usually reserved for a house of worship. The building’s exterior wall was so thick that crossing the doorway’s threshold gave the impression of entering another tunnel, one barely wide enough for two men to pass through without their shoulders brushing. Everything appeared to be made of redwood and, despite the countless deep scratches that marred all surfaces, shone as if the wood had been polished.
Toni was surprised to find a large number of personnel at work inside. Moving quietly along the principal corridor, the cadets craned their necks to their sides, peering into office after office packed with soldiers and civilians. The impression Toni was left with as they exited the building through the other side was that there were still places in the CDF where people worked for a living.
They finally came face-to-face with the stables themselves, over which the colossal canopy arched and extended out towards the cavern’s opposite side. Each almost as massive as the building they had just left behind, the six stables had inward-facing entrances, three to each side, and an extensive concrete avenue ran along between them. Above the avenue he spotted a sturdy overhead rail system suspended from flanking steel columns. From the main line a secondary branched away towards each stable, effectively interconnecting them.
“You can close your mouths now, Sergeant-cadets,” Baylen drawled. “Now that you all see what you’ve gotten yourselves into, let’s make our way to Stable Three.”
They set off once again. As the group neared the buildings the corporal began to explain the setup.
“Stables One and Two to your left and right, respectively, house the two ASC platoons, one for each. Stable Three houses the Training Suits and is allocated to the SIC only in practice, since formally it’s under the ASC as the Operational Training Section. Stable Four houses the simulators and is an extension of the OTS I just referred to. Stables Five and Six house the Repair and Maintenance Section, also under the ASC.”
They passed the first two stables, observing with apprehension as a very solid-looking piece of hardware sailed over their heads and in through the entrance to Stable One. Beyond it, both walls were almost entirely covered in dense scaffolding, with intermittent gaps about four meters wide and twelve high along their lengths.
The titans lodged within were almost entirely obscured by their service gantries. He managed only to glimpse an enormous rotary-rifle resting on a forklift and surrounded by technicians before the stable’s exterior wall blocked them from view.
The platoon approached Stable Three and crossed the entrance’s threshold at a brisk pace. As with the previous compartment, it possessed a scaffolding structure along its side walls, beginning about a third of the way down and stretching out towards the opposite end about a hundred meters off. The space between the entrance and the scaffold appeared to be a sort of mustering ground for armored Suits, and the concrete floor was painted with faded squares to indicate each unit’s position in formation. The intervals in the scaffolding structure appeared to be smaller and a few technicians in blue overalls loitered where the first of them could be found. The cadets’ footsteps echoed in the great room as they closed the distance towards them.
“Heiya, guys. I’m looking for Ruka, she around?”
“Stall Three, Corp,” the most senior of them replied as Baylen’s hand was briefly shaken by the huddle.
“Yeah, sarge is checking the unit’s access-points,” another volunteered.
As Baylen was about to thank the civilians, an approaching figure motivated them to stand stiffly at attention. Baylen himself stiffened and fired off the smartest salute Toni had ever seen him give. The passing master-sergeant ignored the civilians and reserved only a slight nod for Baylen before he forged a path through the group. The sergeant wore no head-covering and his shaven skull was pock-marked with old scars and burn-marks. His pitted face held a tight but emotionless expression, and the last thing Toni noticed as the sergeant passed within arm’s-length was the Hitlerian moustache that decorated his upper lip, its whiskers abundantly streaked with grey.
The master-sergeant left the stable and the aura of menace left with him, and it was only as Toni observed the diminishing figure that he noticed how short the man was. He would never have realized that from the way he carried himself.
“Master-sergeant Devonport ...” the corporal explained as if the name alone explained everything, and then they set off once more. As the group passed by what Toni understood to be Stall One, he noticed the titans in the opposite stalls and realized that they were smaller than the Hammerhead.
In their present configuration, however, the Mocas looked far more menacing.
The training Suits’ proportions were much more similar to the humans who piloted them, their helms too, than the operational units. But more importantly, the Suits were almost entirely stripped of armor, exposing their glistening pneumatic air muscles to the world. The muscles gave the Suits the volume and appearance of a bodybuilder on a zero-fat diet, which, combined with the occasional jagged protrusions that jutted out from their mostly-hidden endoskeletons, made for a very intimidating sight indeed. Each titan stood a marble statue within its stall, partially obscured by its service gantry, standing watch as the cadets neared one of their brethren. Toni felt someone elbow him. Ray’s eyes were wild with barely contained excitement a
nd he was pointing to his forearm where, to Toni’s lack of surprise, goose-bumps had erupted.
He was unsurprised because his hairs were standing on end too.
“Afternoon, Sergeant. How are you today?” Toni heard Baylen ask. He turned, curious as to what had motivated the corporal to use his seductive voice.
Sergeant Ruka stood high upon the gantry, clad in a red overall that couldn’t quite hide her abundant curves. She wore her black cap with an upward tilt, the expressive eyes beneath it gazing down as she assessed the group. She put on a smile and answered back at him.
“Why, very well, Corporal. And how is Ms. Reeves doing?”
Baylen chuckled.
“She’s very well too, Sarge. I got fourteen cadets down here in desperate need of your wisdom. Can you take the time?”
The sergeant pursed her lips.
“I was under the impression there were sixteen of them ...”
“Recruit Debusey took the Walk over a month ago with some psych problems. Recruit Marcus walked last week due to another unpleasant matter. Seems he was caught smuggling forty kilo-mass of preserved meat from the canteen. Captain didn’t like that too much.”
“Well, the boy sure liked his bacon. All right then, just give me a mike.”
Ruka disappeared through the gantry’s access point and they heard the rattle of feet against metal before she ducked out of a low doorway at the scaffold’s base.
“All right, form them up,” Ruka said.
“Form up!” Baylen bellowed.
Within a few brief seconds, all cadets were standing smartly at attention in a formation three lines deep. As their new instructor appraised the cadets, Toni found himself doing some appraising of his own. It would be the first time he was instructed by a woman, and the idea was somehow leaving him uneasy.
She was older than she looked from afar, and fine lines creased the pale skin around her mouth, eyes and brow. Her hair was not dyed and numerous long grey strands streaked down amidst the thick ginger locks; she had tied those locks into an untidy ponytail with what he suspected was copper wire. But all that did not detract from the fact that a handsome woman stood before them. Toni then saw Baylen observing him with a knowing smile on his lips. Hastily he turned his eyes front.
Clearly unmindful of the scrutiny she had just been subjected to, the sergeant began to speak.
“I am Second-sergeant Ruka Bellamy and I work in the ASC’s Repair and Maintenance Section. I am responsible for prepping the Moca Suits for excursions and inspecting them on their return for any damage. Today I will give you a chance to get up close and personal with a real Suit, but first I’m laying a few simple rules down on the table: keep together at all times, don’t touch anything without permission, don’t interrupt me, and if you have a question, wait till I allow you to ask it. Understood?”
As soon as she was satisfied that all had understood the rules, Baylen dismissed the formation and the cadets were soon huddling beside Unit Three’s right footpad.
“I’d like you all to take a good look around. This is Stall Three and it exists to help the maintenance personnel gain access to the hardware. From these platforms we can detect fractures in some components of the endoskeleton, repair or replace ruptured PAMs situated above waist-line height, maintain the PPU, just about anything that doesn’t require removal of the unit from its stall.
“But sometimes it’s just not possible to do this. If you look above your heads, you’ll see that the Automated Transport Bus, or ATB, which can make its way here from Stables Five and Six via the railing system, is able to access each stall in this stable. In fact, it can access any unit in any stable when needed, remove whichever Suit it’s ordered to remove and convey it to Stable Five, where we have more specialized apparatus to deal with the problem at hand. With that equipment, we can strip a Suit down to its modules in less than half an hour.
“That’s one of the more interesting facts about the Moca Suit; it’s highly modular in nature. There are six hundred and thirty nine skeletal muscles in the human body, but only eight different types of PAMs are needed to reproduce with a Suit almost every movement a human being can perform. These PAM’s are distinguishable by their lengths, widths and compliancy rating. For example, the lowest compliancy rating PAMs can be found in the lower appendages,” she patted the titan’s massive calf muscle beside her for effect, “while the highest compliancy PAMs can be found in the upper body and appendages. There are two reasons for this: the air muscles with highest compliancy have the thinnest walls, and so one saves weight where it counts the most, up above. And this way the Suit’s muscular structure mimics its human counterpart and gives its hydraulic interface a much easier time feeding the impulses back and forth. This takes us to the HINT itself. Follow me.”
She set off towards the scaffold’s stairway at a brisk pace and the cadets scrambled to catch up to her. After climbing three flights of stairs, she exited onto the platform that allowed access to the Suit’s thorax. Before the cadets had managed to set their feet on the structure, Ruka shooed them back and slid an extension plate forwards along the flooring, gaining access to its right breast. She paused for a moment as the cadets crowded onto the cramped gantry, her hand resting lightly on the glistening muscles that covered the breastplate like pythons. Toni and Ray traded mischievous grins with one another before Balyen’s stare cowed them into submission.
“Take a good look at Unit Three’s right pectoral muscle. It’s comprised of fourteen A3-type PAMs. Anyone care to tell me why it’s so important to have fourteen air muscles instead of just one?”
“Because a direct hit would only damage a few of them, leaving the machine still operable,” Hirum volunteered.
“That is correct, though calling the Moca Suit a machine is a little like calling your mother an incubator. It is either Suit or Unit, I’ll accept nothing else. Understood? Each of the fourteen PAMs connects to a detachable interior half-breastplate. That breastplate is detachable for a reason. Watch closely ...”
Ruka pointed to the wide metal ridge that separated the half-breastplates. She then traced her hand up over it before coming to a stop above a small orifice where a human collarbone would normally be. Taking out a large metal turnkey, she inserted it into the orifice and twisted it counter-clockwise. Nothing happened.
“Oh, for fuck’s sake!” Ruka cursed, and she began to slam her knee against the PAMs. On her fourth attempt, the right breastplate suddenly moved, opening out like a clam-shell to the whine of hydraulics to expose its dark interior.
“Hatch is a bit twitchy. And the lighting’s out,” she explained before quickly producing a penlight and illuminating the interior.
There was something medieval about the contraption suspended in there, humanoid in form but crawling with countless color-coded wires that hugged the structure tightly. Its head was missing. A heavy-looking helmet hovered before the hydraulic interface, hanging loosely from the compartment’s ceiling from thick spiraling cables. The interface itself stood suspended by a thick robotic arm fixed to the ceiling, giving the impression that the HINT had been impaled upon a gigantic articulated meat-hook. The compartment’s walls crawled with more wiring, some of it feeding into the hydraulic system that apparently moved the Suit’s breastplates. The sight of it all made Toni feel a sudden urge to strap himself in, to enter the techno-womb and become a titan himself.
Others did not seem to share his enthusiasm.
“Horrible! It has barely more space than a coffin. And what’s with all the wires?” He heard Sueli say, her pretty nose crinkled as she stared with horrified fascination. The sergeant’s answering smile was not entirely genuine.
“There are two types of wiring in the interior. The red-black wiring is electrical and feeds to the HINT, hatch mechanism and HUD Helmet. The Blue-yellow type is actually hydraulic tubing, which again feeds to the HINT and hatch mechanism. The Moca doesn’t have as much interior space as our more recent model, nor is its cavity as tidy as theirs.
But don’t forget that it was a pioneer model, and so this probably couldn’t be helped. On the up side, the Moca weighs less than four tons fully loaded compared to the Hammerheads’ eight and has almost twice the autonomy and less than half the fuel consumption. Respect the Moca, or I’ll lose respect for you.
“On the down side, there is a flaw inherent to the cavity’s reduced volume. Some heavy impacts against the Suit, like when it takes a fall, will result in the driver making physical contact with the cavity walls. Due to this we’ve been outfitting the cavities with protective padding, which we expect will protect the tubing and wiring against damage from the HINT, as well as to provide some protection for the driver himself. In any case, a Moca driver may, with some impacts at least, feel two collisions for every one that actually happens. This is what we call double-slamming –”
Sergeant Ruka’s explanation was interrupted by a blaring alarm. The grating sound filled the cavernous compartment, causing echoes to rebound from the opposite side and add to the cacophony. Only then did Toni notice that loudspeakers had been fixed to the ceiling above every second stall. There was one just above his head, which probably explained why his ears were beginning to hurt.
Ruka’s face began to pale. Pulling Baylen by the collar until his ear was beside her mouth, the sergeant shouted urgently into it. Toni was unable to make out what she was saying, but he didn’t really need to; by her gestures alone, she was ordering him to get the cadets out of there in a hurry. The corporal quickly obliged.
“SINGLE COLUMN!” Baylen bellowed as he displayed an index finger above his head and, without waiting for anyone to react, the corporal began to descend the scaffold stairway at a run. Toni was among the first to follow his instructor. As Baylen left the stairs for the stable’s ground floor, someone collided violently against him and both fell, setting off a traffic jam among the platoon-members still within the scaffolding structure. Toni fell over the struggling pair and rolled over the floor instinctively as he was ejected from the doorway. Toni saw several blue-clad civilians running towards the other stalls, surprise and puzzlement stamped on their faces. Turning around, he found that the man who had caused the collision was one of the technicians. The civilian was splayed out on the floor, held in a headlock by a very livid corporal.
Descent into Mayhem (Capicua Chronicles Book 1) Page 15