by G. D. Stark
“Got something,” Ward said, interrupting my thoughts. “Looks like a small patrol, five klicks to the west. They were holed up under the trees, got some anti-scanner tech—still surprised we hadn’t seen them yet. Still blurry as hell on the camera.” He fished out the drone controls and took back manual control.
“Can the platterpussy see them?” I asked.
“I’ve switched it on but we’re not close enough for the new scanner.”
“Maybe take it low, then fly over their position so they don’t have time to shoot it down?”
“Yep,” Ward said, watching the data and visuals on his tablet. “You guys can watch the scan while I’m flying her if you want to link the second tablet in the sack.”
Jones pulled it out and took the electronic scanner feed. We saw a bunch of rippling gray and then a lighter patch started to resolve in one corner.
“Coming in,” Ward said. The image zoomed, and the lighter patch turned into glowing blobs. “We’ll just gather data on this sweep, so you might not see much live. The tablet can tighten up what we’re seeing after we pull her back.” The glowing images moved across the screen, then were gone.
“All right,” Ward said, “I’m sending her back up out of range. They definitely saw her and I don’t want to risk losing her.”
“Well,” Jones said. “Those blobs look like cyborgs to you?”
“Nope,” I said.
“Just wait,” Ward said, setting down the drone controls and picking up his tablet. “Okay, we got an image. We just need to enhance it. Okay, there, have a look at that.”
Now we saw the shapes of three guys. Their armor was dark but their bodies glowed a pale gray around it against the darker background of the ground. All three of them had bright halos around their heads.
“What’s up with the glowing heads?” Jones asked.
“Helmets,” Ward said. “It’s probably the active electronic in their heads-up displays.”
“I see some glowing lines here and there on their bodies, too,” Zelag said.
“Probably suit sensors,” Ward said. “I’ll see if we can look through the armor better.”
He made some adjustments and the armor mostly faded away, leaving just the shape of men, though still with halos. The bright lines showed up brighter and the rifle batteries were glowing now.
“I don’t see anything here that can’t be explained by normal suits and weapons,” Ward said.
“So they’re just regular humans?” Zelag asked.
“Yeah, I’d say so,” Ward said.
“Good, we got ourselves a baseline,” I said. “Later, we can refine the parameters for the AI to ignore. Send that drone higher and we’ll circle around these guys. Let’s keep hunting.”
A couple hours later as we baked in the midday heat, which was moderated but not completely eliminated by our battlesuits, Jock called in and told me they’d come across a patrol too but hadn’t see anything that looked like Unity mercs. They sent the images to Ward and he concurred.
The rest of the day we sat in the shade and let Platterpussy free to wander the sky. The sun went below the horizon and we set up camp. Around midnight local time I drifted off to an uncomfortable sleep as Zelag watched the monitor for signs of wandering enemy. We weren’t game for trying to scan their fortified positions but we figured at some point they’d be sending out some guys or bringing in a load of supplies or something where we might catch a glimpse of an isolated group with at least one Unity guy in it. I was having a fitful dream about electric worms eating into my brain when something shaking my shoulder woke me. I grabbed the arm, and realized from its complete lack of give that it belonged to Zelag.
“What’s up, Zee?”
“We’ve got movement again,” he said. Ward was already up and looking at the monitor.
“Bang,” he shouted with satisfaction.
“Do we have one?”
“We have one,” he confirmed. “Or else that truck is carrying a pair of nuclear reactors.”
He pointed to the screen. Even unresolved, there was one white-hot glow in the cab and a second one toward the rear of the transport that was impossible to miss. Zooming in on the latter, we could see that it belonged to one of eight human figures in the back of the truck, but whereas the other seven resembled the standard profile we’d identified as an Axiosi regular, the eighth one looked like a being of pure light.
“I guess they come in pairs.” The decision was an easy one. “Let’s go get them.”
We tore down the hillside at our suits’ top speed, aiming to lay an ambush about a klick before the vehicle’s current location. It was going to be close, since the drone image showed us they’d picked up speed.
“Get ahead of them,” I yelled, as I ran like a madman, shooting a burst of stim into my system to knock back the burning of my limbs. You can run like the wind in a suit but it hurts when you do it for too long. The truck was nearing the ambush spot—and then they sped up even faster.
“They’ve seen us,” Jones said, his breath coming in gasps over the com. “They must have sensors.”
“We’re just inside Feemper range,” Zelag said. “Just a little farther.”
We hauled it but the truck was starting to pull ahead now—we weren’t going to make the cutoff point.
“Ward!” I yelled. “Crash the drone into the vehicle!”
“What about the sensor?”
“Just do it!”
Ward crouched down and pulled out his remote and we sped past him towards the truck. I could see it on my scanners and the glowing dot of the vehicle was still pulling away. They passed our intended ambush point and I heard Jones curse.
Then there was an explosion and the truck veered sideways and slowed.
“I think I winged them,” Ward said on the com.
“Blast them!” I yelled. “Whoever gets closest first, open up.”
Jones was ahead of me by about 50 meters with Zelag about 20 behind him. I saw the truck start to move back towards its previous track but my leg just wasn’t getting me there fast enough.
“Must not have hit them hard enough,” Jones shouted.
“First time… I crashed… one on purpose,” Ward retorted. I could see his dot on my tactical display coming up from behind.
“I can get a shot if I get up this ridge,” Zelag said. I saw him moving off to one side.
“I’m heading straight,” Jones said.
Meanwhile, the truck came to a stop, then moved forward a little, then back, then forward.
“Holy Possenti,” Zelag said. “I think they’re stuck!”
“Firing!” Zelag yelled, lighting up the truck. Jones joined in from another angle and I kept running to get close enough for a narrow-array pulse. On my tactical display I saw a cluster of enemy signatures and a now-still truck. One of the signatures was still but the others were scattering.
“I’m gonna bet we nailed the Unity guy,” I said. “Plasma on the rest!”
An explosion of lights lit up the night as I finally reached a good firing point and raised my own Feemper to my shoulder. I looked through the scope and saw multiple guys down, but nothing of the still-moving dots on my tactical display. They’d made it behind the rocks beyond the broken road and were still running.
“Alright,” I said. “Move in slowly. Kill anything that moves, just try not to toast our cyborg on the ground.”
We got to the truck and found the front grille smashed away on one side and the front tire torn to shreds. It was jammed up in the gravel left by some long-ago rockslide. In the back was a downed man, and another was in the cab.
“Keep your eyes open in case we have any cloaked enemy here,” I said. “Ward, check out the guy in the back. I’ll take the cab.” I opened the driver’s side door of the truck and realized the dead man was slumped in the passenger seat against the door. I lit the light on my helmet and looked at him. He was in black armor like the rest of the Axiosi. No sign of damage. The guy hadn’t been killed
by plasma. I went around to his side of the vehicle and popped the door. He fell onto the ground like a sack of wheat.
“Whoa,” Ward said from the back of the transport. “We got ourselves one creepy-looking bastard here.”
“There in a minute,” I said as I unstrapped the helmet of the man on the ground. I pulled it off and saw a Unity merc staring back at me. A jolt of adrenaline jumped through me and I dropped his head, thinking he was still alive. Then I realized he had no eyelids—just two silvery spheres in a face marred by plastic and ports. There was no movement. Still, I wasn’t going to get any closer for now. Maybe they could infect a guy with nanotech even after they were dead. I wasn’t going to take that risk. I probably shouldn’t have even touched him, I thought. Maybe even now there were nanites burrowing into my suit.
“Yeah, this guy is definitely not human,” Ward said. “But he’s dead, as far as I can tell.”
“Leave him there. We’ll let them get bagged and pulled out,” I said. “Jones, Zelag—don’t go too far. I don’t think the enemy is coming back yet.” The dots of the Axiosi were already over a klick away and still moving towards the nearest base. “Though they may bring a truck and come back for these guys if we stick around too long,” I said, then dialed in to base. “Squid, Blue Team is ready for exfil. Mission accomplished.”
After receiving acknowledgement from Squid, I called in to the other team and let them know the hunt was over. They sounded pissed they’d come up empty, but I’m pretty sure none of them wanted to spend another day in the heat.
“What a corrupt image of the gods,” Lord General Landros said as he stood looking down at the naked bodies of the two cyborgs we’d taken from the truck. “Their very existence is blasphemy.”
The skin on the corpses was pale and mottled with subcutaneous electronics and strange, bulging nodules. The skin you could see, anyways. Entire sections of their bodies were constructed out of composite material and silvery alloy and rubbery plastic.
“They believe they are gods,” Captain Yost said dismissively. “The next stage in human evolution.”
“Then it is time to make the environment more hostile for them here on Pyrrha,” the Lord General declared. He stalked angrily from the room, slamming the door shut behind him.
Chapter 11
“You smashed my drone?” Edgerton said, looking pained.
“Had to be done,” Ward said. “I’m afraid the sensor got smashed too.”
Edgerton sighed and shook his head.
“Hey, it worked!” Pitt said, punching the sergeant on the shoulder. “We need twelve more, as soon as you can put them together. We’ve already allotted the budget. Ward, Falkland, you guys come up with any tweaks you want him to make?”
“Yeah,” Ward said. “We need these scanners to work from farther away. It’s one thing to buzz patrols, but sending them low over enemy encampments will just get us dead drones. No way they don’t have some anti-drone laser batteries linked to an AI out there.”
“Tricky,” Edgerton said. “It’s a close-up sort of a sniffer, you know?”
“You can’t figure out a way to direct it closer?” I said. “Zoom in, somehow?”
Edgerton hummed tunelessly to himself for a few moments, looking up towards the roof of the hangar workshop. “Well,” he said. “I might be able to tighten up the field. Direct it, maybe. Would have to be pretty tight to be out of range though.”
“Okay,” Pitt said. “Good man. Tighten it up, then.”
“It will take a lot more search time on a tight beam, though,” Edgerton said. “No—wait. I could just set it up to search with regular thermals, then scan the identified points. Yes, yes. Let the base AI sort and flash, kind of, just hitting the points with the sharknose once they’re already seen.”
“Good work, good work,” Pitt said. “Hey, you want a job working for my tech team?”
“Depends on the range privileges,” Edgerton grinned. “And I doubt you get the fun guns lurking around the edges of civilization.”
We hashed out a plan to spot the rest of the Unity mercs by sending up our drones over the front lines of the Axiosi invasion. If we could figure out where the cyborgs were, then we could hit them however we could. We had no idea how many of them there were, but judging by the multiple times the knights fought the Axiosi without getting taken down with a nanite rifle, we figured they might be spread a bit thin. The first thing was to get the drones in the air and figure out what we were dealing with.
For two days we trained with the Sfodrian militia. Much to Yost’s satisfaction, the commoners were learning tactics and starting to get some cohesion. Knowing they were now Sfodria’s main line of defense instead of the long-venerated knights seemed to put some spine in them. Despite their lousy training, they were dedicated. For years they’d been little more than cannon fodder to slow enemy attacks until their big brothers showed up in massive and borderline-indestructible battlesuits. Now was their turn in the spotlight and they were determined not to blow it.
On the night of the second day, the drones took flight towards the enemy position. I watched them take off, almost silent as they floated like spirits up into the dark sky. It was late and I’d spent most of the day teaching a company of militia various formations so I hit the sack, figuring the night’s work was in the hands of the drones and their masters on the ground.
I woke up early the next morning, eager to see what had happened. Ward was still asleep and the weird purple dawn was just breaking between the window slats.
I caught Edgerton in the cafeteria, looking beat. “What’s up, Edgerton?” I asked.
He blinked and looked blearily over at me. “Stayed up with the drones last night, watching the info come in.”
“All night?” I asked.
“Yes, just couldn’t stop watching. We found some.”
“Unity?” I asked. “How many?”
“Morning, Falkland,” Pitt said, walking into the room with a carafe. Suddenly I smelled something good.
“Coffee again. Good man.”
“Some for you too, Edgerton?” Pitt asked, pushing a mug over to me.
“No thanks,” Edgerton said, shaking his head.
“Captain told me I should quit,” I said to Pitt.
Pitt laughed. “Brass is brass. They don’t appreciate the finer things. So, Edgerton tell you about last night?”
“Right,” Edgerton said with a yawn. “They look incredible on the scanners. All glittery. We found thirteen total, and we scanned all over the place.”
“That’s it?” I said. “Just thirteen?”
“Yep,” he said, yawning again. “That was all. Pitt can fill you in on the rest. I’m going to sleep until someone makes me wake up.”
“Rest in peace,” I said as he walked out. “So, Pitt—13?”
“Right,” Pitt said. “And they swept again and again. We got thermals inside of buildings, then the platterpussy nailed them down. The pinpoint worked like a charm, though it did take a few passes on some. Six of the bastards are in just one building we’ve ID’d as a company HQ. Seven others are scattered here and there.”
“They spot the drones?” I asked.
“Oh sure,” Pitt said. “But they’ve seen the drones before. None of ’em knew these were any different. They shot one down but we got the rest back.”
“Hope they didn’t recover it and see our new scanner.”
“Nope,” Pitt said. “We blew it up ourselves.”
“You can blow them up?” I said. “We could have used that feature the other day.”
“That one you couldn’t blow up,” Pitt said. “Edgerton packed the new ones with an explosive device, just in case. They get hit or go down, they blow up. Better not to give the bad guys any idea of our capabilities, right?”
“Right,” I said, finishing my coffee. “Speaking of that, where’s the captain this morning?”
“He’s meeting with the Lord General. Should be back in a few.”
�
�Hey,” Jones said, walking in and pouring himself some coffee without asking. “What’s up with the drone scans, Tommy?”
“Edgerton says thirteen Unity mercs identified. Six are in one spot, the rest are spread out.”
“I feel a special mission coming on,” Jones said.
“Yeah, most like. When the captain gets back, we’ll see.”
Jones was right. It was a very special mission. Now we were concealed on a ridge, without our battlesuits as three of the giant knight-mechs launched an assault on an enemy position. We’d been given armor, but it was nothing like our servo-assisted suits with their AI-assisted tactical systems.
“I’ll bet these cyborg bastards are licking their plastic lips at taking out three knights,” Jock said from my right.
Park was watching the entry to the enemy base through the scope of his L-24 while Edgerton was glued to the readout on a sophisticated jamming field generator. The thing weighed about 20 kilos and had a self-contained AI that automatically wave-cancelled incoming scans. Edgerton was grumbling to himself as he worked its touchscreen. Before we’d left, he’d had his augment firewalled somewhere inside his brain. His brainjack had been removed, just like the rest of ours. We were even using ancient headset coms. We’d been stripped of everything the techs thought the Unity might be liable to hack and now we were going in to take them on their own turf.
For all their size and power, the knights were just the bait.
I watched the surrounding of the compound as the knights rolled into position, then unwound and took standing attack positions in front of the gate. They launched blasts of plasma that splattered off the shield protecting the multiple quonset huts inside, prompting the enemy inside to deploy and starting firing back at them. The knights’ cloaking had permitted them to approach to within 100 meters before they opened fire, so to the Axiosi it must have looked like they appeared from nowhere. I watched through my scope as the shield broke down and allowed blasts of fire from the lead knight through and into the side of one of the huts, tearing through its walls and igniting the metal in a burst of radiating heat.