Sons of the Gods

by James Von Ohlen

  As he scrambled to his new position, one of his men, an operator with over fifty years of service in the civil war, a warrior among warriors who had personally sent hundreds of traitors to rot in hell, fell to his knees and shuddered as though having a seizure. A moment later the man’s upper body was gone in a spray of mangled bionics and shattered armor.

  It seemed that some supernatural artists had drawn an outline of the cybernetic warrior that rapidly expanded. The new volume being filled with air and vital fluids until it completely lost its shape in a cloud of broken machine and shredded man. Turned to shrapnel that spun in a lethal arc, seemingly in slow motion as his superhuman senses took in the scene. Any unarmored man standing near the dead warrior would have been shredded as well.

  As fast as the shattered armor was moving, he could still see it. But he could never see the rounds that caused that damage. That same armor could take multiple hits from just about any man portable weapon used by either the UN or the Coalition without the operator inside being wounded. His own armor had stopped incoming hostile fire on countless occasions. It had undoubtedly saved his life over and over.

  A split second later he heard the report. It was unmistakable. Thunder shitting thunder. The fabric of the universe ripping. A handheld automatic railgun.

  UN forces had experimented with such weapons. They were common enough in static defenses but not in the hands of infantry. They could cause massive damage, but were too unreliable. Too bulky. He had been told that they had not been fielded in any significant numbers due to material issues. The rails that carried the projectiles were simply too fragile. There had been similar issues with coil variants of the weapons as well.

  Somehow, some hick on this backwater had figured it out. Sorted through the issues, and made a real weapon out of it. And that wasn’t the only threat they faced. Their weapons were good. Far too good for his liking. Too many of his men had fallen. Hard rounds, physical projectiles that relied on the force of impact to cause damage, as well as beam weapons that fired various forms of energy, killed UN soldiers and Coalition troopers equally dead and without remorse.

  He had lost men in combat before. That was inevitable. Once his unit had been ambushed while conducting sabotage and assassination operations on a Coalition held planet. Key seditionists had been terminated before they could manage to spread their lies any further.

  There had been no incidents while their small stealth carrier had ferried the squad of ten men from orbit to the planet’s surface. There had been no problems as they murdered everyone on their list of targets.

  When it came time to leave though, the Coalition had been waiting for him and his men. Militia at best, as far as their armaments were concerned, but so numerous that his men hadn’t stood a chance. They were pinned down until heavy armor units had arrived to deal with them. He had been the only survivor. Even then, he’d had to escape from a prison and steal a shuttle before he could return to his posting.

  But here, here it was different. His men had the numerical advantage. At least they had when the operation began. Now their numbers were roughly even with that of the enemy, but they were quickly being ground down.

  He leapt a pile of rubble as hard rounds shattered everything behind him and beams turned their targets white hot. He rolled to his feet and came up firing. Three more hits on three more targets and no effect. His rifle was virtually useless.

  Another of his men went down to his right. At least what was left of the man and his characteristic black armor. And that wasn’t much. He moved to a better firing position, relaying his orders to the men immediately under his command as he ran. The fibers of synthetic muscle in his armor and his legs gave him strength far beyond that of normal men, carrying him quickly.

  That was one of the reasons he had elected to join the UN Spec Ops units. He had been so badly wounded in combat that he would have to spend years in rehab to regrow and repair the damage done to his body. Far easier to go full conversion and have a mechanical body with incredible abilities, while his new body grew in a vat back in UN controlled territory. In meantime he would use the opportunity to live out his childhood fantasy of being an invincible warrior.

  Or so he had thought.

  The reality of it all had been far different. He had never gotten used to the way normal people looked at him. Like he was some kind of monster. As if he wasn’t out there fighting the Coalition at every turn for their sake. They saw him as an abomination. Saw all of the Specs Ops men, all having undergone the same full-conversion as himself, as monsters. Cold, inhuman machines. They could only inspire fear and distrust when they were seen.

  The end result was that they stayed together, avoiding contact with normal people whenever possible. “Squishies”, they’d started to call them. Their isolation strengthened the bonds of their brotherhood, making them a more effective unit.

  That was probably why the UN had picked that design, he guessed. To scare the Coalition troops they would be facing, and to keep them together.

  Once, he’d been eligible for discharge. He’d jumped at the chance. If there was anything he missed, it was getting black out drunk and fucking. Back in civilization with a new body, though, he could never quite fit in. His distrust of squishies had stuck with him, costing him friendships and jobs. And no matter how hard he pushed his flesh and blood form, it was never as strong, never as fast, never as smart as his mechanical body had been.

  A year of deep depression and a failed suicide attempt later and he re-enlisted on the condition that he could return to the Black Corp, the Spec Ops units he had served in before. The UN defense forces were more than happy to have him back. The civil war had started to show all the signs of being no easy fight and they needed all the men they could muster. Regardless of potential mental problems.

  Upon his return to action, in his new mechanical body, an upgraded version of the old one complete with a metallic skull face that could be swapped out for a more human looking visage when not in battle, he felt whole again.

  His strength was even greater than before and he enjoyed using it. Literally twisting the heads off of captives had become a joke among the machine men in his unit. He was quite good at it. With the bodies of the men being uniform, their strength roughly equal, it came down to differences in how they could control them. He had been the envy of the others with how quickly he could decapitate a hostage with his bare hands.

  War crimes. In the past they would have been looked down upon at best and punished outright at worst. Often with execution. But as the war dragged on and on, more and more people stopped caring. They did what they wanted to whom they wanted. And they enjoyed it.

  His unit was no stranger to war crimes on this backwater either. Or as they called it ‘goodcleanfun’, all one word. They had descended on a column of unarmed families fleeing the destruction of their city by the fleets above in orbit. He was sure it was a Coalition bombardment that had crushed their town, but he wasn’t going to look a gift horse in the mouth.

  As he and his unit had beaten and ridiculed whoever struck their fancy, someone had produced a heat lance. Hidden somehow from their scanners. A nasty surprise. Before they realized what was happening, two men had been reduced to slag, their brains destroyed. Real death. Not this inconvenient body death, remedied by being placed in a new body, but the permanent version.

  In retaliation the rest of his unit had killed everyone there at his command. Mostly women and children. They were weak. They deserved to die, he thought.

  The men shooting at him as he scrambled through the rubble deserved to die as well. They might not have been weak, but if he ever got his hands on them… A hard round slammed into the plate of armor that covered his upper back, sending him sprawling. Alarms screamed across his mind carrying reports that the integrity of the armor plate covering his back had been compromised and that he had suffered mechanical damage. Despite having been slowed by the shot, he recovered quickly, finding himself in an undignified position fro
m which to conduct warfare.

  He fired three quick shots at one target, sensors confirming a split second later that he had indeed finally killed one of them. He played the input back in his mind at hundreds of times the original speed and saw the laser beam punch through a lens covering the eye opening on his opponent’s armor and a puff of pink mist emerge as it vaporized the contents of the man’s skull.

  Well and good, but he wished he had a heat lance of his own to turn on his enemies. It took quite a bit to disable and destroy the armor these hicks had come up with, but they melted just the same under the assault of that weapon. If they’d been cheaper to produce, there might be more of them in the hands of UN soldiers.

  Aircraft screamed overhead, firing indiscriminately into the two warring factions battling amidst the ruins. He couldn’t tell if they were UN or Coalition. They had been moving too fast and their respective ground attack aircraft looked very similar. It was obviously one of those two though. The defenders of this planet would never have tried such a thing. They seemed overly concerned with friendly fire.

  If an allied unit had fired upon his and inflicted casualties, they would pay in blood. But if it happened at his command, then it was just a part of war that had to be factored in to battle plans. So be it.

  Another aircraft passed by low, delivering a steady stream of hard rounds into the momentary lines of the battle. A UN Spec Ops soldier went down along with two of the defenders. The armor of the two dead men shook oddly for a moment and looked to be changing form back and forth between a liquid and a solid.

  Whatever this technology was, it would be better off in UN hands. Deployed against Coalition forces where it could do some good. Instead these backwoods hillbillies were running around with it. If they could only see how much better it would be for everyone if they joined the UN without a fight…

  But they weren’t joining. They were trying their hardest to be a serious threat. A threat that could not be ignored. If they didn’t submit, then they would all have to die. It was as simple as that.

  So be it. While he continued firing at any target that presented itself, he radioed his command to the police units that had accompanied his. While he held the enemy at bay, the police units would set up a dispersal system. There a custom-tailored airborne virus would be released. It would have no effect on UN soldiers. It would kill just about everyone else it came into contact with.

  They brought this on themselves, he thought as he rose from his cover to fire another round at a visible target, finger already squeezing the trigger. Something slammed into his side, hammering its way up his body and into the side of his head, shattering his armor and steel flesh as it went.

  The end of the data plug was annotated to show that the memories had been retrieved from the corpse of a Spec Ops unit commander. Name withheld as classified data. The data plug he carried had been the only piece of equipment to survive his death.

  He always smiled grimly at that one. Classified. He far outranked the dead man whose memories he watched as if they were his own. There were few things so classified that he was not privy to them.

  He rose from the chair once more and placed the data plug back with the collection. That was enough for now. The ritual he took part in every day he remained outside of the stasis chambers was complete. The ritual that helped renew his sense of purpose. Of duty. As long as he had the mission, his mission, all was not lost.

  “Good morning General Kasabian.” A flowing female voice intoned, gently filling the room with her words. He moved like lightning, movement blurring to mortal eyes as shutters opened, allowing sunlight into his chambers. He crouched for a moment in a fighting stance, reaching for a weapon that wasn’t there.

  As he looked out of the windows he relaxed. As long as he had been here, he would never get used to the sudden voice and movement. It was meant as an alarm. To keep him on a standard sleeping and waking schedule. Good for the brain and such. The only reason it still continued after all of these years… all of these centuries… was that he kept forgetting to turn it off.

  Alarm or not, it was unnecessary as of late. He had emerged from a stasis chamber recently, having been there for several decades at least. He wasn’t sure exactly how long, but he was beginning to be able to tell how much time had passed by how he felt when he emerged. A few years passing while he slept and he felt as though he had just woken from a nap. A little groggy. Longer, and he felt better.

  This time he’d been in long enough that he hadn’t felt the need to sleep since he emerged again. To him that suggested fifty or so years. A long time to leave the upkeep of his battle station and his mission in the hands of machines and machines that used to be men, but necessary to preserving his own life and his own sanity.

  He took a deep breath of the stale, cold air in the room and walked towards the windows, hands clasped behind his back as though deep in thought. His teeth ground and the muscles in his jaw flexed as he slowly approached.

  There it was, just like always. The planet he had come here to subjugate or destroy. Far below his view point in his orbiting battle station. His command center and home for these past centuries. Still hidden in the ring of debris from the final battles between the UN and the Coalition in this godforsaken backwater of the universe. Filling his vision from edge to edge.

  He looked to the ring of debris that had formed around the planet. How many dead ships and satellites were out there, he wondered. How many dead men, entombed permanently in their spacesuits floated along still waiting for rescue that would never come? Too many to count. Perhaps a tragedy in some minds, but in no small measure it was his salvation.

  And which chunk of dead battleship or slagged cruiser hid the orbiting home of his last remaining rival? Locked in their game of cat and mouse since the crippled remains of both fleets had fired their last salvos at one another and the pathetic remains of the planet below. In better times it would have been a simple matter to find the location of Mordechai’s battle station and destroy it, or to simply knock every last piece of debris from the skies.

  Now, though, such was beyond his ability. He had ammunition in abundance, more weaponry than he could use, even Spec Ops soldiers still obeying his orders. But there was little in the way of power. The solar power systems kept his computers running and kept him alive. That and the advanced medical bays at his disposal. If he waited long enough his systems could store enough power to fire one of the main weapons. A beam or mass driver. Perhaps even a guided missile. They could complete a scan of the debris field and find any activity out there.

  But that would have been a waste of time and energy both. Such an act would give away his position, opening him to retaliation. If Mordechai was indeed still out there.

  What a stupid fucking name, he thought. Mordechai. It must be a codename of some kind, though UN intelligence had never been able to identify the man who bore it. Aside from the point though, he thought. Both battle stations could move. Of that, he was certain. What was to say that the commander of the traitor armies here hadn’t fled for his life after their last engagement?

  Alas, such was probably beyond the traitor’s intelligence.

  Just recently the two had jockeyed for position above a spot on the planet’s surface. Striving to get the best vantage point without being spotted by the other and battling through each other’s jamming and interference efforts when their servants on the world below had clashed. Mordechai had momentarily won the electronic battle in orbit, but his men had lost the battle on the ground.

  This latest batch of puppets showed promise. The last time his energy reserves had been high enough, he had brought them here to fix them and arm them before sending them on his errands below. He had found them with a routine planetside scan that had surprised him with its results.

  They were outnumbered and on the verge of being killed. But they had been fighting Mordechai’s men and his biometric scanning had showed that their brain activities and nervous system structures were compat
ible with a vast array of implants at his disposal. It had cost him much to bring them here. To heal them, upgrade them, arm them, and send them back.

  He had been left vulnerable for a short window and it would have been disastrous if his old enemy had found him and attacked. But it was beginning to look like a wise investment as the men had slaughtered Mordechai’s soldiers below and set back his enemy’s cause. And if they happened to find what he had sent them after?

  A decryption Nexus. Such a trifling thing in days long ago. Commonly available through any armory and even in civilian computational fields. Now, it was the rarest thing in his corner of the universe. Without it, his battle station would continue to drift along, only able to function at a tiny fraction of its intended power. Locked out of control of his own assets by something as mundane as a computer virus. The decryption Nexus would go a long way towards defeating that.

  Such a rare thing. But his puppets were drawing close to one. And they had found other objects of use as well. And they would return them to him.

  Then, he smiled to himself, then, this battle station would be revived. Brought back to full functionality. Then he would repair his decaying body, and decaying mind some tiny voice said in his thoughts, equip himself with his best weapons and armor and personally board Mordechai’s vessel so that he might take the man’s life with his own hands. Tear the whole fucking thing apart on his own.

  But then, what if he couldn’t? He could obliterate the entire debris field. Either way the thorn in his side would be removed. Then his mission would be all but completed.

  Easier said than done, his jaw clenched as he thought.

  Much damage had been done to his fleet and his own ship in the final days of the larger battle here. The computers that remained online were severely crippled. Incapable of much else than the basic tasks required to keep him alive. The last gift of some military hacker from the planetary defense forces below. He hoped that one had died from the effects of one of the weaponized viruses released planetside. A quick death from the thousands of neutron bombs unleashed by the UN and Coalition would have been too good for that one.