Metal Monsters

by G. D. Stark

  The Parker slowed behind a rolling ridge of cacti and gorse, not even kicking up dust as it rolled smoothly to a halt. The men jumped to the ground and the Parker returned to base.

  “Other side of the ridge, down towards the lake,” Orion said, checking his recon tablet. “Looks like we can cut around down the edge of the ridge and follow it closer towards them. There’s also a wash cutting through the ridge a bit over a click from here. Team Alpha will cut over on the wash, Beta will continue on to the ridge. Get eyes on them and then we can call in a strike. Watch your optics for scouts.”

  Grit crunched beneath Laedon’s boots as they moved forward. The cover was thin, the plants twisted by lack of rainfall and the burning sun above. Toward the back the woods were thicker, but here there was nowhere to hide. They hit the wash and split with Alpha, moving on towards the ridge. Addams took point, with Laedon, Rollo and Orion behind.

  The trees started to thicken as they neared the river and lost a little altitude. Scattered wildflowers started to appear, like blue and yellow eyes watching them pass. Everything was silent except the crunching of their boots and the high buzz of desert cicadas.

  “All clear,” Addams reported.

  “Confirmed, no targets,” Orion said.

  We’ll see them if they’re in shooting range, Laedon told himself. We’ve got the satellites.

  He zoomed out on his visor and saw the location of the ship—but there was no troop activity around it. Just the ship. It was as if they were waiting for something. They were only two clicks away on the other side of the ridge.

  “We’ll be dropping shells on their heads before they manage to get their doors open,” Rollo said.

  “Almost for certain,” Laedon replied, hoping that was the case.

  CRACK! A tree exploded behind Rollo—and the man fell to the ground, open-mouthed, a hole burned through his chest.

  “DOWN!” Orion yelled.

  “I don’t see them!” Addams said. “I don’t see anything, Sarge!”

  “Up there!” Laedon yelled, pointing towards the woods. An armored figure was advancing towards them quickly, rifle in hand. His armor was like nothing Laedon had ever seen. It almost… rippled as he walked, like it was reflecting energy.

  “Take him out!” Orion hissed and they opened up, spraying depleted uranium slugs at the enemy. The stranger moved for cover but was knocked to the ground by more than one slug before reaching safety.

  “Nailed him,” Addams said.

  “How did he get so close without our optics letting us know?” Orion said, standing and leaning over Rollo’s fallen form. “Dammit,” he said, closing their squadmate’s open eyes. “All right, let’s move in on this guy but don’t count on your optics. Trust your eyes. They must be jamming us. For all we know there could be thirty hostiles waiting for us on the other side of the ridge.”

  The three remaining members of Fire Team Beta moved cautiously towards the man on the ground. As they got closer, Laedon watched the trees for other figures but saw nothing.

  “Down and dead as a doornail,” Addams reported as they approached the fallen enemy. “We can radio this sucker in.”

  They looked at the prone figure. His strange armor was pierced in multiple locations. Addams knocked his knuckles on the man’s helmet. “Tough stuff,” he said. “Not tough enough, though. I wonder where the devil he’s from?” he said, turning back to Laedon and Orion with a shrug.

  Then the dead man sat up.

  “Addams!” Orion yelled—too late!

  The invader was up off the ground and firing his rifle in an inhumanly fast flash, spitting accurate blasts of plasma so rapidly that the men couldn’t even move their rifles before they were mortally wounded and falling to the ground. Laedon was hit in the side of the neck and the chest. He felt his lungs bubbling and the strangely heady sensation of blood leaving his body.

  As he lay bleeding out into the hot sand, the shadow of the enemy stretched over him as the armored invader surveyed his work.

  “This is Unternos S696-43V2-4D75-232E. Initial contact,” Laedon heard him say in a strangely cold voice. “Four units neutralized. Transmitting location.”

  Chapter 1

  I saw Gunner Naaman Crowe smile as he pulled a slate-blue rifle from a padded case. Our platoon had been called to the range for some special training—and as soon as I saw that smile I knew it was going to be a lot more entertaining than normal. We met in the air-conditioned room inside the big hanger WDI set up as the small arms range. Outside was a serious rifle range with stationary and moving targets, drones and even holographic enemy simulations, but this was more comfortable for talking. And quieter. Even in here, the popping of gunfire outside was loud.

  “This, my friends, is Sphinx’s latest excursion into the exciting world of long guns,” Gunner said, holding up the rifle. “Until last week, it was a classified project. Meet the Sphinx L-24 Fusion-Enhanced Electro-Magnetic Pulse Rifle.”

  “Also known as the Feemper!” Jones, sitting next to me, announced.

  “It’s a little too fancy for my taste,” Squid muttered from my other side. “New don’t mean it’s good.”

  I shot a Sphinx CPB-18 a couple of times on the range. It was a versatile hand-held particle gun, but I never knew Sphinx made rifles.

  “You may have heard about this project,” Gunner continued. “It’s not available in the broader market yet but some of the boys upstairs love us and love their guns, as God intended—so Wardogs is going to be field-testing some of these babies, and although I have no idea who obviously screwed this up, you’re the boys who get first crack at it.” He paused for a moment. “Try not to break them, if you can manage that.”

  “Why do we need a fusion-enhanced EMP rifle, I hear some of you thinking,” Gunner said. “Are we going to be facing sentient dishwashing machines? Perhaps bust up a tripjacking convention by frying a billion neurons for the price of one? Don’t ask me, I’m just your friendly CWO. My job is to introduce you to this lovely lady—where you take her for a date is in the hands of the brass.” He stroked the rifle lovingly, then turned to Edgerton who was standing behind him. “Edgerton—you wanna break down the vitals on our new girl, here?”

  Edgerton is a thin, balding guy. He’s one of those smart nerdlings who will happily run his mouth for hours on anything from antigrav engines to the making of synthetic fabric if you give him half a chance. But his favorite topic is guns, and the smile on his face when Gunner put him front and center told us we were in for an enthusiastic show-and-tell session. At least this one promised to be halfway-interesting.

  “Thanks, Gnat,” Edgerton said, taking the rifle. “First of all, using this baby on a dishwasher would be a waste.”

  “How’s it work on a fridge?” Jones said.

  “Drop the appliances, okay?” Edgerton said, adjusting his glasses. “That would be like using a bulldozer to squash a puppy. So, if I can get back to this bad boy, let me just say the EMP power is similar to a concentrated nuclear blast, capable of overwhelming even the heaviest shielding and toasting electronics like putting a marshmallow into a blast furnace. It’s dual-purpose, so if you use the plasma just like your standard issue PN-60s, you can take down anyone wearing armor rated up to 26 KFs. I’ll run you through through the wiring specs and the fusion assist—it’s really amazing. They fixed the heat issue with a sink that draws it out—I’ve got the whole thing on my tablet. Actually, yeah, we can jack that into the projector and I’ll let you see how they got around the containment issues on the old models. Let me just-”

  “That’ll do, Edgerton,” Gunner broke in. “To summarize, the Sphinx L-24 rips through man and machine alike. And you guys are going to try it out in the field after getting qualified on the range here. Come on up and grab your guns. I’ll get the guys cleared out so we have the place to ourselves.”

  When I picked up my L-24 I noticed it was heavier than my normal PN-60. That wouldn’t matter much in armor. You feel these things without the
exo assist, but still—it was nothing like the heavy, ancient slug throwers we carried on the ill-fated Ulixis mission. The blue color was a little flashy for my taste but it wasn’t in show-off territory. I wondered if there was any potential for radiation exposure if it was blown up in action but I knew better than to ask Edgerton about it. I wanted to shoot it, not sit through an hour-long lecture on the science of nuclear containment in man-portable devices.

  The settings were straightforward enough and Gunner talked us through them with little fuss. On a full-power burst you got 24 shots, then popped in a new charge. Without the full EMP assist, you’d get almost two hundred plasma bolts on a charge. When a charge was used up, an indicator on the bottom flipped red so you didn’t pick up a dead one and reload with it. Fresh charges had a green indicator. You get down to a quarter charge and it went yellow. Simple enough. The charges could be reloaded on a proprietary box that plugged into a variety of power outlets, including a solar-powered box with enough efficiency that it could drip-charge under a street light if need be. The charges weren’t all that heavy, so you could carry quite a few into combat. Things probably weighed about the same as a golf ball and were about the size of two dominos stuck together. I had to admit, for new tech, it actually appeared to be designed to be battle-friendly.

  “We’ll start with stationary targets,” Gunner said, lining up our platoon in the low tech part of the range where a row of armored plates sat in front of a bank of earth. “Set to plasma just to get the feel. We’ll go up to full power later.”

  I squeezed off a few blasts and get a good grouping. The trigger was a little tighter than I liked but I’d get Park to tweak it for me once I was issued one for keeps. I looked down the row and watched him as he nailed round after round into the dead center of his target. That guy could probably hit flies with rubber bands at fifty feet. Beyond him, Squid was systematically popping off rounds and holding his own. Despite his initial reticence, he looked like he’d been born with an L-24 in his hands.

  Next to me, Zelag squeezed off a few rounds, then popped out his charge and looked over the controls on the L-24. He shook his head.

  “What is it?” I asked. “You don’t like your Feemper?”

  “No,” he said. “It’s what it implies about the mission that worries me.”

  “How so?” I asked.

  “Dude,” he said. “This isn’t just a new toy for Gunner and Edgerton. They’re qualifying us on these rifles for a reason.”

  “Maybe they’re phasing out the PN-60?”

  “The PN-60 shoots a lot more rounds than these at full power,” he said. “And how many times have you ever needed an EMP assist?”

  “I dunno,” I said. “A few. I usually just use a pulse grenade, though.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “Usually. Unless the enemy isn’t human.”

  “Rogue appliances?” I joked, then had a thought. “Wait a minute, you think we’re going against…”

  “The Unity,” he said.

  “Naw,” I said. “Not us. The TA always deals with them.”

  “Do they always?” he asked, popping the charge back into his L-24. “I wonder.”

  “Well, if we end up fighting the Unity, maybe they’ll see your metal arm and adopt you.”

  “Screw that,” he said, taking a bead on his target. “I’d rather go back to the cannibal zombie death station for dinner than let those freaks mess with my head.”

  After we got used to firing plasma, Gunner set up Park and released a target drone over the range. Normally, their armor repelled plasma and they’d release a burst of light to let you know when you scored a hit. But when this one flew into range Park nailed the bug-like AI drone with an EMP-assisted blast and that sucker fell from the air like a rock.

  I heard Ace whistle. “Nice!” I was glad the lieutenant was in on this training. He was a good pilot but not much of a shot.

  “As you can see,” Edgerton said, “despite the armor of the target drone, a hit with the EMP assist took it down hard. And it won’t fly again, either. It’s dead as a doornail. Corporal Park, if you would kindly broaden the EMP range, let’s see if we can take out an entire flight at once. Now, we’re not going to blow a lot of money here by releasing dozens of drones, but Gunner and I do want you to see the capability this rifle has against AI-driven weaponry. We’ll spread them out to simulate a whole swarm coming in.”

  Edgerton released three drones and they fanned out over the field at about 300 meters range.

  “Aim for the center of the swarm and fire when they’re within 200,” Edgerton instructed. Park adjusted his rifle, aimed, then pulled the trigger. Though the plasma burst hit the center drone, the other two dropped as well—even the one that was more than 50 meters from the one he hit.

  “And that’s all she wrote!” Zelag said enthusiastically.

  “I want to take one of these to a carnival,” Jones said. “All those rides, people riding around, then bam! Everything stops!”

  “I’d say that was sociopathic, but we’ve already blown up a science lab and a whorehouse,” I told him. “A carnival would kind of complete the set.”

  “A school would be better,” Jones mused.

  “See, now that’s sociopathic, Tommy,” Zelag said, shaking his head.

  Gunner and Edgerton set up some terrain drills with drones and we crouched in trenches and took potshots on narrow beam, trying our luck at hitting the rapidly dodging AI drones. “It’s important to keep the beam narrow in a combat situation,” Gunner explained before we started. “The EMP doesn’t care if you hit a robot or your own radio operator—broad spectrum is only useful when you have a clear spot to let loose. It’s almost a 180-targeting range, and remember, you can’t see it when you fire. Learn to keep them tight, and for Possenti’s sake, don’t go wrecking your own tech! Tight beam is way more powerful as well, so if the shielding is heavy, keep it tight.”

  The drones were equipped with heat lasers that stung like the dickens if they managed to nail you—and with their AI targeting and our lack of armor, that happened pretty often. I managed to take one down, so I was pretty proud of myself, but as the last pair of them came in on a run, someone fired, they both dropped, and at the same time, a gagging scream came from somewhere to my right. I heard a shout of “Medic! Medic!” but I couldn’t see what happened.

  The all-clear sounded and I jumped up from my trench to see what was going on. In the next trench I saw Private Whitter convulsing on the ground. Jock was already there, holding his head and trying to clear his tongue. “He’s having a seizure!” he yelled. Another Wardog checked his pulse as Gunner radioed for help. We’re all screened for epilepsy, so how was this guy having a seizure?

  I watched as they started to give him CPR, pumping his chest and blowing into his mouth. Moments later, a medic arrived from the office and they got Whitter loaded into a biostretcher.

  “What happened?” Gunner demanded. “Who hit him?”

  “Hit him?” I said. “I don’t think anyone shot him.”

  “Maybe implants?” Edgerton said. “An EMP charge could have screwed up some of his medical implants.”

  “I think it was my fault, Gunny,” Cole said, stepping forward and showing Gunner the settings on his rifle. “I messed up my dispersion. I wasn’t anywhere near him, though.”

  “What part of ‘180 degrees’ did you not understand, Cole?” Gunner snapped, taking the rifle from the man. “Medical implants are computers,” he said, addressing all of us. “If you have so much as a bionic appendix, these weapons will mess you up good! We’re done with practice for today, but I’m going to expect all of you to put in extra hours on this before I’ll qualify you. Especially you, Cole,” he said, addressing our hapless squadmate. “So do it, unless you want to end up pushing papers in Corporate while your platoon is out collecting combat bonuses.”

  Suddenly, those clunky old rifles were looking pretty good by comparison.

  Chapter 2

  “You suck at d
arts,” Park said, as he sunk his third shot within an inch of the center of the board, completely destroying me for the third game in a row.

  “It’s never been a priority,” I said. “If you weren’t a wuss you’d play Zelag instead of me.”

  “Unfair,” Park said, retrieving his darts.

  “Yeah, right,” I said. “Like you being a sniper ain’t.”

  Park nodded to me. “It is good that you show respect to your betters.”

  I considered throwing my bottle of Newt at the back of his pointy little head but I restrained myself.

  “Yo,” Jock said, showing up with a dumbbell in each arm, pumping as he walked.

  Kantillon HQ had excellent gym facilities, right next door to the game room.

  “What’s up?” I asked. “You working off a church social?”

  “Nailed it,” Jock said. “You get the message?”

  “Unplugged,” I said, tapping the side of my head. “I was tired of getting pinged every time HR changed their laundry policy.” We didn’t have to stay jacked on base, so I was inside regs.

  “Don’t disconnect completely—you’ll get left out,” Jock chided. “Didn’t you tell him, Park?” Park shrugged and Jock shook his head. “You’re a real team player, Psycho. Anyhow, no problem Tommy. We’ve got a briefing in an hour. Looks like the Bastards are back in play.”

  I found myself thinking back to what Zelag had said when we were on the range. It was looking like we’d find out soon if he was right about the Unity.

  Marks was expertly shaved and poster-perfect as always, jaw sharp and eyes cold as he surveyed us. “Well, men. We’ve got a little counter-mercenary work for you.”

  Interesting, I thought. I wondered which outfit we’d be going up against. Didn’t matter, though. We could take anyone in our field. Everyone knows Wardogs has the best and biggest guns for hire.

  Marks pulled up a holographic map on the wall of the briefing room, showing a brownish world circled by three moons. He pointed to the planet. “This is Pyrrha. It’s a Tech 13 world, so not terribly backwards, but it’s nothing to write home about. The larger of the two continents on the surface is dominated by two rival polities, the Demos of Axios and the Sfodrian Stratocracy. They are rivals going back almost to the time of the planet’s original colonization, when the first governorship collapsed in a tedious philosophical debate over equality, representation, and the usual academic nonsense. For thousands of years, the two factions drifted apart and went their own ways, neither ever becoming entirely dominant, eventually bringing us to the present. The Axiosi are more liberal in dress and culture, have lots of art and music festivals, engage in a fair amount of manufacturing and interplanetary trade, and are constantly absorbed with all the protests and political parties and orgies and nonsense you’d expect in a democracy. The Sfodrians are more traditionally minded and pride themselves on duty and honor, putting great stock in their history, genealogy, and political unity. They’re also one-third the population of Axios, and they’re basically an oligarchy ruled by 500 knights, all of whom are extremely accomplished warriors. It’s actually one of the craziest military setups you’re likely to see.”