by G. D. Stark
I felt my left arm piston like a machine as the mini-grenades were fired out of the forearm launcher, and the Axiosi fire stopped abruptly just before there were six sizable explosions barely 30 meters in front of us. Zee had gotten ahead of me, so I kicked in the servos and we covered the remaining distance in about 15 seconds. We were almost to the low, rocky rise behind which the Axiosi were positioned when one of them popped up and fired his laser right at Zee, hitting him in the arm. That was his last act, as I leaped forward and drove my armored fist right through his helmeted skull, popping the steel and bone as if it were a balloon.
Zee cursed angrily and leaped over the barrier, and kicked the only remaining survivor about ten meters backward into a rock. There was a loud crack and the guy slumped to the ground, though I didn’t know if he was dead or just unconscious. I looked around. Between the grenades and our plasma cannons, the unarmored enemy platoon had been either blown to bits, incinerated, or in some cases, a little of both.
“You all right?”
Zee nodded. “Shorted out my arm for a second there, but it’s back online now. How are Ward and Jonesy holding up?”
We looked back. Judging by the amount of plasma being hurled back and forth from their position, it appeared they were doing all right.
“We need to move on those guys to our right,” I observed.
“Sure,” Zelag agreed. “But we just used up all our grenades, so what are you thinking?”
Just as I was about to reply, a massive sweep of purple energy flew over our heads and struck the enemy position we were considering. The fire being directed at Ward and Jonesey came to an abrupt halt. The ground shook as massive footsteps approached and a massive robotic wrecking ball laid down concentrated whoopass on the enemy.
“Need a little help, Warpuppies?” came the voice of the red-and-brown knight over my com.
“Much obliged,” I told him without a shred of sarcasm. The enemy fire dropped off us and concentrated on the knight, not that it did them any good. The knight towered above the battlefield like a statue erected to the god of war, and was joined by his friend in green and silver. The two of them blasted away at the last enemy position, before rushing forward and chasing them out from their cover. I’ll admit it, I laughed when I saw the silver-and-green knight step on a brave, but doomed soldier who stood his ground and blasted desperately upward at the mighty mechawarrior.
“Go on home, outworlder,” the knight told me. “This is our sandbox. We do not need you to help us play in it.”
I didn’t think we had done so badly for ourselves, but I could see his point.
“All right,” I said to my team. “We’ve got a man down and the knights seem to be taking care of themselves. Let’s meet up with Squid.”
“I think we should-” Ward said, then stopped. “Wait—what?” The silver-and-green knight had suddenly stopped moving about eighty meters to our left. I watched as he fell to the ground and was swarmed by a squad of the enemy, blasting into the chinks of his armor. The massive warrior didn’t even raise an arm to stop them—and then I watched as a man stood on top of his chest and pushed something into where his helmet met his neck. “Holy hell,” Ward said, as the men jumped away from the knight. Seconds later, there was the CRACK of an explosion and the knight’s head was blown apart from his body, rolling a good ten meters before coming to a halt. I looked around for the knight in red and brown and saw him to our right, running towards his fallen fellow.
“Enemy mercs have to be around here somewhere. That knight just froze up without warning!” I said. “Ward, we gotta nail them. Set your rifle for max EMP, no plasma, tight focus. Sit tight, Jonesy. Zee, you stay with him. We don’t want to fry your arm again.”
I switched my rifle from plasma to EMP assist and we sprinted after the surviving knight. His sword was blazing bright and he was blasting away at the enemy as they retreated from the giant metal corpse of his fellow. It looked like he was going to rout them easily, until an enemy soldier appeared out of nowhere and shot him with one of those weird rifles we’d seen on the black box footage.
“There’s the bastard!” I yelled, and we opened fire on the unsuspecting mercenary. The combination of the twin EMP pulses dropped him to the ground, smoking. But it was already too late! The knight staggered, took one unsteady step, then fell flat on his face.
“We have to cover him,” I shouted. “Switch back to plasma.” We took cover behind the huge body of the fallen knight. “Yo, Sir Flat-On-His-Face,” I said over the knight’s channel. “You alive in there?”
“Yes, Thomas,” came the reply. “But my systems appear to be entirely nonfunctional.”
“We nailed the guy that hit you,” I said. A bolt of plasma zipped over my head. “We’re covering you. Can’t you move at all?”
“No. Nothing is responding,” the knight replied, his voice now crackling with static. “And there is a pain in my head.”
“You’re losing your coms too,” I said, firing a shot that took down a charging Axiosi. “How do we get you out of there?” There was no reply except for a hiss of static like waves rolling up on a beach.
“Falkland,” Jock said over the com. “I’m seeing a fallen knight here. Is that near your position?”
“What color?” I said.
“Orange and black.”
“No, that’s not him!” I replied, opening up on two more Axiosi and sending them scurrying back into the brush. “Look for Ward and I camped out behind the fallen body of a knight in red and brown. And blast the everliving shit out of the enemy with your EMP on max or else whatever knights are remaining won’t be standing long. Knight over here just got his head blown clean off. Looks like the Unity are embedded with the regulars. They look like everyone else, but they seem to be keeping themselves cloaked until they have a shot.”
“Roger,” Jock said. “We’re all moving in your direction. Just sit tight.”
My leg started to throb and I dialed in an analgesic to take the edge off. It felt like the pain was inside the muscle now. I looked for a target, then realized the firing around us was dying down. I looked back towards Sfodrian-controlled territory and saw a group of militia moving forward with three Wardogs in their midst. “Well, Fox,” came Squid’s voice over the com. “You boys decided to bag yourselves a knight, eh?”
“You could say that,” I said, then pointed towards the rock where Zelag and Jones were positioned. “Other half of my team is over there. Jones is down with a concussion.”
“Looks like you took a hit yourself,” Squid said, coming forward and noticing my leg.
“Nothing but a heat burn,” I said. “Let’s see if anyone knows how to extricate this knight out of his can, then get out of here.”
I started to turn, then almost slapped myself in the face. “Wait a minute,” I said to Squid. “There’s something else we need to do first. Ward—come on—we’ve got to find that merc we knocked down.”
After a few minutes of searching, we found the Unity guy sprawling limply on the ground. We found him laying on his side in the bushes. He looked pretty wrecked. I waved my hand in front of his visor but he didn’t respond, so I decided to unlatch his helmet.
“Wait, don’t touch him!” Ward warned me. “I’ve heard these guys can hack you ten ways from Sunday. He gets inside your suit AI and next thing you know your emergency bandage foam is getting poured down your throat or something.”
“We hit him with enough electromagnetism to burn out a power station,” I reminded him. “I’m gonna risk it.” I reached down and fumbled with the guy’s helmet and took it off.
Beneath the helmet, the guy’s face was masked by some sort of a black shroud. I carefully pulled it off, revealing one of the ugliest faces I’ve ever seen in my life. The guy’s head was half silvery metal and black plastic, and both his eyes looked like silvery laboratory gemstones, backlit and multi-faceted. I looked a little closer and saw tiny fibrous wires connecting man and machine, as well as clusters of subde
rmal chips that raised small bumps on his slug-white skin, as if he’d developed a strangely geometric case of the hives.
“Damn,” Ward said. “That guy ain’t right.”
Suddenly, the man took a hissing intake of breath. “Identify yourselves,” he said.
“All those facets and you can’t see us?” Ward replied.
“Our optical functionality is compromised,” he said weakly.
“That may be,” I said. “You’re going to tell us why you’re here, machine-head.”
“We will tell you nothing,” he said, raising a hand dismissively.
“We need some answers,” Ward said. “You’re coming with us.”
“We will tell you nothing!”
The man took a convulsive breath, then lay perfectly still.
“I think he’s dead,” I said, after watching him for a moment.
“The EMP probably cooked his circuits,” Ward said.
“At least we can haul in his corpse and take him apart,” I muttered, replacing the guy’s facial shroud and helmet, then hoisting him over my shoulder. I saw the militia was already extricating the surviving knight from his war chassis. “Let’s get out of here.”
Chapter 9
“Their attacks just aren’t making sense,” I said, looking over a map Ward had projected on the wall in the mess room. “They’re taking territory in pieces here and there, then hitting a little factory or something, killing a few guys, then moving back out. I’m not seeing any sort of coherent offensive.”
I’d successfully pawned off my officer screening assignment to Squid, since Captain Yost agreed it was more important for us to figure out exactly what the Axiosi and their cyborg buddies were up to. After several days of research and analysis with little to show for it, I’d gathered some of the guys together to have a few drinks and throw a few ideas around.
I pointed at a large fuel refinery. “They could have hit that, but they went around and blew up a small college instead. Over here,” I said, pointing at a section of green, “there’s a huge buried cable line that provides a lot of power to the capital, coming from the geothermal station up north. They marched over it, bypassing the transformer station here, then trashed a manufacturer of foil display screen tech.”
“Those are used for mobile surveillance centers,” Ward said. “Isn’t that what we used when we tracked that butterfly priest that Vero blasted to death?”
“Not quite the same thing. Those you can crinkle up and then un-crinkle and stick to a wall. These are made to be permanent fixtures. It’s the kind of overlay that goes inside a windscreen display. A laminate layer with embedded image projection.”
“So it’s just a commercial outfit?” Jones asked.
“Yeah,” I replied. “They supply a lot of civilian automobile and hovercraft, some space transports. Minor military contracts for the tech, but something like 95 percent consumer sales, when I looked up the numbers.”
“Not worth hitting compared to a refinery,” Ward said, finishing a swig of beer and popping another top. Pitt had commandeered a few dozen twelve-packs from somewhere and quietly installed them in the motel’s commercial fridge, much to the chagrin of the staff. “They could have hit that cable, too.”
“Right. And if you look here,” I zoomed in and pointed to a red X on top of a cluster of buildings, “you’ll see a zero-friction bearing company was nailed. It’s not even a manufacturer, just an importer of parts manufactured in the Kantillon asteroid belt. They’re used in cranes and other industrial high-stress joints. Another hit was here,” I pointed to another red X. “A superconductor facility. They also bombed a little government archive up here,” I said, pointing to yet another strike. “They’re not even holding the territory. They come in, hit the target, then retreat to a fortified position.”
“What the hell,” Jones said. “It’s almost like they’re just nailing things at random.” He’d rejoined us after a local doc put him in the de-concusser or whatever that big tube thing is where they work on your head. He didn’t seem to make any less sense than usual, as far as I could tell.
“Maybe they’re just trying to lure the knights into ambushes,” Edgerton said.
“At first, maybe, but obviously it hasn’t been working since we figured out how they were taking them down and talked some sense into them.”
“Maybe they’re targeting the knights in some other way,” Ward said. “It has to be about the knights somehow.”
“What, the knights like to take continuing education courses at night and do construction on the weekend?” Jones said. He sounded skeptical, and not without reason.
“Damned if I know,” Ward said. “But I’ll bet there’s a link between these hits and the knights. They’re Sfodria’s main defense. The militia is worse than useless, and if I were gonna knock this place down, I’d take out the 500 knights. Once they’re out of the picture, they can roll up the militia, no problem.”
“Of course!” I said as the pieces snapped together in my head. “I saw all the random crap getting hit, then looked up the numbers on these places and saw they were civilian. But that’s just the report to the public, right? All the tech on the knight’s suits is classified. They’re cutting edge.”
“Maybe they use those crane bearings in their joints,” Zelag said.
“Right, and maybe foil display in their helmets,” Ward added. “Superconductors for computational power, who knows.”
“What about the archive and the college?”
“Babbage has an idea on those,” Edgerton said. “The former contained a massive amount of encrypted archives. Some of those might have been important to the design of the knights’ robotic battlesuits.”
“And the college?” I asked, grabbing my first beer of the evening and popping the top.
“They had a robotics lab. Best in the nation,” Edgerton said.
“Maybe there were researchers there that worked on the suits,” Jones said. “Or a secret lab or something.”
“Now we’re getting somewhere,” I said, then pointed at another red X. “But what about the dog park up here?”
“What?” came multiple voices.
“Never mind. Just screwing with you.”
I stayed up past midnight looking for possible connections between the knights and the strange pattern of destruction laid out on the map. The problem was that if you look hard enough, you can find false patterns almost anywhere. Hell, if they actually had bombed a dog park, I could have theorized it was because the maid of a top armor specialist walked his prize poodle there and the loss of the dog would demoralize the guy and hurt the war effort. But I wanted to focus on credible connections that would help me understand and anticipate the enemy actions, and since the mech development was completely classified, I had to guess as best as I could and rule out big stretches. I managed to link about three-quarters of the pattern to something that could be reasonably related to suit development, research or supply for the knights.
I decided to take what I’d pieced together to the Lord General. He would know more about the manufacturing infrastructure, so I could let him run with it. He was arrogant, but he wasn’t stupid, and now that he understood his knights were being targeted on the field, there was a good chance that he’d buy the Axiosi were striking at them in more surreptitious ways.
I listed the attacks with their locations, summarized my conclusions, and put a data chip together. Then I sent a message to Captain Yost asking for another audience with the Lord General.
The next day Yost and I stood in the chamber of audience again across from the Lord General. This time, only a pair of knights were present, neither of whom I recognized. Neither of them was my red-and-brown battle buddy.
“You have something useful for us?” the Lord General asked as soon as we entered, not bothering with any introductions.
“I hope so, Lord General,” I replied, then held up my data chip. “Do you have a projector?”
He snapped his fingers and a
young man in a white robe entered from a previously hidden door and took the chip from me, handing me a small remote in return. A couple of moments later, a projection of my report appeared in the center of the room.
“As you can see,” I pointed at the projection, “there is what appears to be a strategic purpose behind the enemy attacks.”
“Our analysis indicates that it is random,” the Lord General said. “It’s little more than raiding meant to demoralize the populace. The Axiosi have always tried to stir up the commoners, to no avail.”
I turned to the two knights.“Noble sirs, have the members of your knightly order had any difficulties obtaining anything you need for your armor recently?”
“That is classified information,” the Lord General objected.
I was surprised when one of the knights waved his hand dismissively at the general. “Never mind that, Landros. This is the hireling who stood over Sir Enright when he was disabled on the field. He knows we are not invulnerable.”
Interesting. It seemed the aristocratic order was a little more egalitarian than one would have thought.
“There have been multiple issues with the supply chain, though nothing beyond minor annoyances yet yet. My own mecha is currently suffering from an issue in the wiring harness, but it remains fully operational. The shipment of parts we’d ordered from Rhysalan was shelled inside the hangar. None of this information must leave this chamber. If any of the commoners knew we had a hint of vulnerability in any sense, it would lead to panic.”
“I’m sure,” I agreed. Or rebellion, which is what I suspected the Axiosi intended. “What I have concluded in looking at the pattern of attacks is that what at first appears random is actually a slowly closing net tightening around you and your noble order. Bit by bit, step by step, they are knocking out your structural supports. There have even been some murders of men I concluded are your engineers.”