The Tenth Awakens (Maraukian War Book 1)

by Michael Chatfield

  “Yes, sir.”

  Chapter 10

  Camp Epsilon

  Tricticus, Emarl system

  5/3351

  Mark woke slowly to the laughs of the development team. He looked around sleepily, wiping his face. His nanites took care of any stubble as he picked himself up from the low—too low—pallet.

  “Huh.” He broke out into a grin as he looked at the remnants of his pallet.

  “Whoops. Guess I’ll need a new bed.” He turned to the other excited faces of the development team.

  “Well, let’s hurry the hell up. We have a suit to make, people! Today’s going to be a busy day, people!” Charles said from beside Mark, pushing him along too.

  Mark and Charles walked ahead of the others to the two large covered objects the development team had brought when they’d first arrived. They looked at each other; as if signaled, they threw off the covers to reveal two massive nanite tanks connected by a physical pipe and a data stream.

  Mark exhaled, merging with Sarah with ease but out of practice. He opened his eyes. He felt more alive than he ever had before as he slowly put his hands into the tank. His personal nanites and those from the tank intermingled as he sent his and Sarah’s presence through the tanks, touching every nanite.

  Charles put his hands in the other vat. They’d be making both of them at the same time as they knew that it would be impossible to make a second if they made them one by one in the time they had. The recovery from what they were about to do was going to be long.

  Mark guided Charles to a single task, which he threw himself into. More and more of the development team joined with Mark, breaking down the suits’ components and partitioning off the nanites for each user. As they took up the reins, the nanites swarmed, creating the suit from a molecular level up.

  Mark likened the feeling to being a conductor. He optimized the talents of those around him in perfect synchrony. Each knew their part, how it fit perfectly with the others as they brought their corner of the masterpiece together. The vat became a frenzy. Each of the fourteen minds and NIAIs connected perfectly, working in synchronization, knowing what the other was doing as fast as they themselves knew. They were the components that made up a machine with one focus, one purpose as something grew in the depths of the tanks.

  It was terribly tiring mentally, as people fought against it, holding to their purpose—in the whole—over fatigue. Ava joined, seeing the big picture as Mark spread his efforts over the whole to take the strain away from those who were still quite drained.

  Mark pushed a few from the collective as they reached their fatigue point before they caused harm to themselves; he took over their parts and displaced it to everyone as they fought a mental battle.

  It was harder than anything Mark had ever done physically. Being connected to Sarah brought him clarity and allowed him to take on a larger load, but he monitored everyone’s health while he held the entire thought of the suit. It was as though he were a ball of yarn, having everyone pulling a string from it to distribute it. Time lost its meaning as they wrestled with their minds. More dropped out as Mark fought on. After what felt like eternity, three of them were left as the image Mark had created the other night now lay unseen in the vats.

  “Time for the final touch.” Sarah pulled the coding from their collective memory banks. It was trillions of lines long, more coding than the biggest cruiser and four times longer than the original AI of Roma and with more permutations than Mark was willing to calculate. They’d completed it three days ago, having started with it as Mark came out of the nanite vat.

  It was the soul, the living part of the machine through which a human was able to transform. His hand touched the carbon hendral plating of the armor under the surface of nanites. He opened the processors and memory banks of the suit and with a direct connection, felt the trillions of lines of code flow from him into the suit. It was as if he’d electrocuted it, bringing it from death to life as the image was now an entity. Instantly, the coding transmitted to the second suit as nanites were repurposed; those inside came alive as they were given a final objective.

  Mark and Sarah admired their work through the nanites. They pulled back the development teams, using grav lifts to pull the suits from the silver tanks, which oddly gathered together in groups, slinking down to the tanks. Even the nanites were tired. The suits were running diagnostics; every system was turned on and off, checking for no faults or corruption in the data.

  Everyone on the development team was silent as they looked up at the two suits of armor. The armor was so dark it gave off the telltale purple shimmering that carbon hendral plating had. On its arms, it had a cylinder covering its forearms, with a barrel and trigger assembly folded back against the cylinder. Two dark-gray blocks were attached to the cylinder at right angles from one another. Mono-blade swords seven feet long protruded over the shoulders beside the faceless helmet. The armor from helmet to boot was around nine feet tall. The second was eight and a half.

  Excitement gave them the energy to pick themselves up. They wouldn’t miss this for anything.

  “Well, let’s get the prototype ready for transport. Jess and Gomez, get Mark fitted and run diagnostics.” Charles was all business but no one missed the massive grin plastered on his face. “By the gods, people, I think we’ve got ourselves a Pluto-powered armor suit!”

  Cheers rang out as the development team whooped, high-fived, and hugged one another, their fatigue forgotten. Their eyes went dull as a crate was pulled forward; lines of data cables readied as one suit moved toward it and the other moved to Mark.

  “Open,” Mark said to the suit, which split open to reveal a swirling mass of silver nanites. Mark grinned and caught Ava’s look at both Mark and his suit. He winked as he turned around. His clothes turned into their nanite form as they reached for the suit, which, in turn, reached for him. As he walked backward, the nanite streams intermingled, wrapping around him as he settled inside the armor.

  The nanites covered every inch of his body except for his eyes, nose, mouth, and ears. The armor sealed seamlessly as nanites fused it together on a molecular level in seconds. The anti-matter power supply hummed briefly as Mark looked at the absolute black of the inside of the helmet. Sarah connected to the processing center of the suit, feeding pertinent information to Mark directly through his brain. It took on the appearance of a HUD to Mark, still staring at the inside of the armor, but his brain told him he was seeing through the sensors as if they were his own eyes.

  Sarah tracked his eyes, moving the view to where he wanted to look. He moved as much as the suit would let him—which wasn’t much—yet the way it moved and reacted just felt right.

  “Looks good from here. What’s your diagnostic readout?” Gomez watched Mark as he made notes with his NIAI.

  Mark pushed him the raw data feed as he ran through system checks which the nanites, Sarah, and the suit’s processing center were already running through, unable to find a flaw with the operating system and coding he’d created. So far, he reminded himself as the diagnostic came back, telling him he was operational.

  “All right, try the M20s.” Jess received the same readout from the suit.

  Mark cycled the guns on his forearms. The trigger assembly fit into his fists perfectly as the barrel swung up and locked underneath his forearm. He rotated the barrels, able to completely rotate around his forearm while the trigger assembly stayed in the same position. The two gray blocks were ammunition already loaded into the rifle at ninety degrees so Mark could always reload by slapping his forearms against his sides.

  Inside the barrel, the accelerator rails opened till they were touching the walls of the outer barrel and then closed so there was just a centimeter-wide hole.

  Mark rotated the M20s. The trigger assembly stayed in his hand before it and the barrel pulled back, with Mark grabbing the hilts of his seven-foot-long mono-blades. He changed back to the guns, switching between the blades and M20 a few more times.

&nbs
p; “Is that fast enough for when you’re merged?” Jess said through the net.

  “Yeah. I was making it slower to make sure everything was perfect,” Mark said through his external speakers, demonstrating by making the M20 assemble and disassemble so fast Jess and Gomez swore they couldn’t see it move.

  “Show-off,” Jess growled, a twinkle in her eye as Gomez looked on appreciatively.

  “Jess, I know you’re the one who made them, so I don’t think I’m the one who’s completely showing off—well, maybe a little,” Mark admitted, pinching his fingers close together.

  “All right, you’re cleared to start up power source initiation.”

  Everyone was tense as Mark sent a prompt to Sarah as the anti-matter power source started to release stored energy. Mark felt the power of the suit, a power no one else could understand. He wanted to run, to soar. It was as if he could run through a mountain or jump from space.

  He felt alive, alive in a way he had never felt before. Information was at his fingertips; power surged through his body. He was a force of destruction. It was easy to see how someone could get drunk on merging, on the power that lay within them.

  “Anti-matter was a good idea,” Mark said, barely stopping himself from merging. Just imagining what he’d be able to do filled him with pure, unadulterated and scary excitement.

  If he was going to make a unit of people with the same abilities, he was going to know them better than they knew themselves.

  This power…it could change humanity, and Mark was the gateway.

  Chapter 11

  SLS Shadow

  Tricticus, Emarl system

  5/3351

  “We’ve been cleared for entry. They’re rolling out the Bellona to provide support,” Carla commed Chen, bringing him awake as he found he was already out of his bunk. After a few seconds of walking, he was on the tiny bridge. Carla vacated his seat, changing to her own as he sat down and pulled up the clearance.

  “Thank you, Carla. Taelyon, if you will.”

  “My pleasure, sir.” She turned toward the camp along their flight plan.

  “Weapons?” Chen asked. The ship was so small he didn’t need to use his NIAI to communicate.

  “Online and ready to rock,” Travestki said.

  “Engineering?”

  “All green across the board,” Carla said.

  “That’s what I like to hear.” Chen grinned as the ship started to shake as they entered the atmosphere. Grins spread across the room as the g’s pushed them back in their seats as they spit through the atmosphere, coming out and spinning. Taelyon let out a whoop, which Captain Chen deemed unacceptable for a man of his rank—however much he wished to do it.

  “Targets! Weapon’s firing. Opening missile ports,” Travestki said. The weapons fired on mostly automatic as they passed over the ground at Mach nine. Travestki took over the two heavy turrets on the relative undercarriage of the ship.

  The heavy rail guns could be heard through the ship as they spit their rounds and turned the ground into massive craters and blue gore as they ran down groups of Maraukians with laser-like precision. Missiles slammed into larger groups, creating a blue-white brilliant flash as space-classed weapons removed sand dunes and thousands of Maraukians in an instant.

  The herd commander’s guns were tracking the stealth ship; their sensor suite allowed them to compensate for the ship’s incredible speeds as their grunts fired with them—a ship that was near undetectable unless you could physically see it. Plasma and coilguns fired in return, pitting the stealth ship as Taelyon hurtled them through the air in a stomach-churning display of aerobatics that would’ve ripped a lesser ship in half multiple times. Chen thought the Shadow was going to as well.

  “This is Shadow. Coming in hot and ready. Hope you have the door open.”

  “Ready and waiting, Shadow. Laying down fire.”

  The images Chen had seen from space had seemed a little unreal but now he was awed as Bellona spat out from around the base, joined with an artillery barrage that laid into the Maraukians like a sledgehammer against jelly. The Bellona, every time he saw them, made him re-evaluate ground pounders’ might. Bellona just left Chen in awe as it would wipe out thousands of Maraukians in seconds, shrugging off the Maraukians’ fire and keep going.

  Chen’s stomach was in his throat as he saw the view for a few seconds before Taelyon dropped and made a straight dive for the deck faster than even the Maraukian commanders could track, pulling up and leveling out to a closed hangar door. The door opened as they were a few hundred meters out. Taelyon fired her braking thrusters as the base’s landing AI used gravity compensators to slow the ship rapidly. Chen felt himself nearly black out from the g’s before they hung in mid-air. Taelyon cut power to the engines as the landing AI took over, settling them onto a cradle.

  “Let’s try to not do that again,” Chen said to the green faces of his crew—except for Taelyon, who’d clearly enjoyed the hellish ride. Damn fighter jockey, through and through. He sighed into the quiet room; a weight lifted from his shoulders as they listened to the popping and crackling of the stealth ship’s hull as its heat-dissipating underlay bled heat as fast as it could.

  Their cradle came to rest in a hangar bay with resupply drones already attaching themselves to the hull of the ship and getting to work. Engineers, from the color of their dress, were already studying the ship; repair bots scanned it as they pulled the reports straight from Carla.

  “All right, let’s get some fresh air and a shower.” Approval ran through the ship in grunts and whoops as they shut down their systems, cracked the hatch and wandered toward their assigned rooms. Chen was the last to follow, double-checking the shutdown and talking to the engineers who were already getting to work.

  “Please, for the love of God, sort out that recycler. It’s been broken for a month and a half,” he said as he met the chief engineer on his walk out of the ship.

  “Yes, sir. I can smell it.” The man held his nose, as his men did likewise. One grabbed masks from their supplies; quite a few of them looked an interesting shade of green.

  Chen grinned to himself as he hurried off to a much-needed shower. Maybe three.

  Chen had been woken after a good four hours of sleep, being summoned to the base commander’s office. Dutifully, he’d put on his new uniform—as stores had incinerated his last one with a certain amount of glee—and ran as fast as he could to the legate’s office.

  “Hello, Captain Chen. Well rested and fed, I hope.” Legatus Pullo scanned information flashing across a hologram of the base, wearing full Jupiter armor except for the helmet that was clamped to his arm.

  Chen didn’t miss others’ noses wrinkle. Pullo, whether he noticed it or not, had the courtesy not to bring it up. Still should’ve had the third shower. He mentally kicked himself as he replied to the legate. “Yes, sir.”

  “I doubt that very much,” Pullo said with a knowing tone. “I have talked with Legatus legionis; the information has reached Roma and stirred things up quite a bit. Meaning as soon as I can clear you for flight, you’ll be heading toward Roma. You will also be carrying a group of VIPs and a package.”

  “Yes, sir. When do we leave?”

  “Two days. Get as much rest as possible. I don’t know when you’ll be able to get any more.”

  “Understood.”

  “Good luck, Captain.” Pullo clasped his forearms. “Get home safe.”

  Chapter 12

  Camp Epsilon

  Tricticus, Emarl system

  5/3351

  “I had no idea what a merge was like,” Ava said from beside Mark, leaning against the coffin which held the second suit. It was the first time in the two days since Mark had put on the suit where they’d had time or opportunity to talk. Since then, he’d been doing test after test as the development team gathered as much data as possible.

  Mark looked at her questioningly. “Oh, with the tank. It’s different, I’ll say that. I don’t think you have experienced a
true merge yet, though.”

  “Why not?”

  “Well, what did it feel like to you?”

  “Like I was connected to everyone’s thoughts—that I knew they were doing work as well as I was. It was like I could sense them through everything, working as one to complete our goal.”

  “That is kind of like a merge but not really.” Mark pushed off the vat tank, moving around a medico, and sat against the wall across from Ava.

  “So what is it like?”

  “It’s completely and utterly indescribable.” Mark had to laugh, pausing in thought. “You stop being a person. You become a god. Reactions faster than light. Thoughts as fast, too—fully formed thoughts, with all of the information added in. You know exactly what will happen when you do something. Everything the user thinks, the NIAI supplies instantly—no lag. The NIAI knows—sometimes before the user asks—what they’re going to say. Your body surges with power to do anything. It’s…wonderful.”

  “What do you think it’ll be like interacting with other merged people?”

  “I’ve been thinking about it a lot. I have no idea what it’ll be like. Well, that’s wrong. I have some ideas on what might happen, such as we’ll be communicating on a level faster than you could even think possible. Information flow could be seamless ideas from munifices to centurions, combining into battle plans in seconds. Until there’s two merging capable people, it’s all theoretical, though.” Mark finished with a wave.

  “Wait, why don’t you communicate via the net?”

  “If I was to, then I could possibly blow out your NIAI’s processors. I have a step-down program to make it easier to communicate via the net but haven’t had the time to test it so I’m stuck with my external speakers for now.”

  “Huh. That’s got to suck.”

  “It does. Currently I’m playing a simulation as I’m talking to you. I just run faster, which means waiting is just pure hell.”