New World Disorder
George S Mahaffey Jr.
Contents
New World Disorder
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
AUTHOR NOTES
Other Books By George
About George
World Of Hurt
BOOK 2 SAMPLE CHAPTER
What Next?
New World Disorder
Mech Command – Book 1
By George S. Mahaffey Jr.
To all of the amazing fans who made the Syndicate Wars books a success, and to all the new ones who are ready to sign up for a tour of duty with the Mech Command. Thanks also to Justin Sloan and Kyle Noe, my co-creators on the Syndicate Wars books, and everyone at the 20Booksto50K FB group (you know who you are), who’ve shown what can be accomplished in the world of indie publishing. Also, many thanks to H.G. Wells, Robert Heinlein, and Go Nagai (among many others, including all the wonderful indie mech and space marine authors like Isaac Hooke, M.R. Forbes, Scott Bartlett, M.D. Cooper, etc.), who helped pioneer the idea of mechanical fighting machines and battle suits and other cool sci-fi stuff. Without those authors, there probably wouldn’t be any mech books at all.
Editor
The great team at Veritas E&P.
Engineering Guru & Expert On All Things Mech
Weez Stevenson.
Mech Command Team/Beta Readers/Editors
Kelly O’Donnell
Leo Roars
Tom Ogden
Edward Rosenfeld
Copyright 2018 by George S. Mahaffey Jr., & High Concept Books
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Cover art by: Shookooboo
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This is a work of fiction (like you didn’t know that) and all rights are reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the copyright owner.
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Several mechs were harmed during the writing of this book …
Prologue
You always remember the first time you die.
I remember it well because I was knee deep in aliens, ambushed by a whole army of them out in the middle of the desert. Of course, it didn’t start out that way. I was strapped inside my mech (a fifteen-foot tall mechanized fighting machine for those that don’t know) when I hit the sand with my comrades and scanned the machine’s matrix array-imaging radar. We’d been told to hope for the best and expect the worst, but there was nothing, not a single creepy crawly or anything else in sight. Just lots of … sand.
I powered my machine into a loping run, following the other mechs as we churned across the barren landscape. We’d arrived just before dawn and were waiting for the bad guys to show.
Just as we thundered over a series of dunes, it dawned on me. Why the hell does everyone always look up and then side to side? Why doesn’t anybody ever look down? Yeah, I know, looking down’s probably the first thing you would’ve done, but as you’ll come to find, I’m not the sharpest tool in the shed.
Anyway, I looked down at the sand and spotted a glint of metal and that’s when I saw the faces of the monsters who were hiding underfoot, just waiting for the right time to strike.
“AMBUSH” I heard someone shriek over the internal communications link.
The sand suddenly exploded, and I watched in horror as dozens of the monstrous things pulled themselves up out of the little hiding places they’d burrowed in the ground. There was this strange little moment where I traded looks with the alien closest to me, a big bruiser with knobby bones protruding from its skull that looked like a crown, and then all of the mechs let loose with everything they had. We’re talking multi-barreled cannons, rocket-launchers, harsh language, you name it.
I juiced the engines on my battle machine and plowed into the extraterrestrial demons, cannons on both of the mech’s arms spinning so quickly they began to glow orange.
The aliens, a motley group of eight to ten-foot tall biomechanical praying mantis lookalikes from outer space, were cut down in rows, but here’s the thing. Where ten of the mothers dropped to the ground, ten more took their places.
“WE’VE GOT PPE’s,” someone shouted, referencing the purple people eaters some of us had encountered in the past.
Sure enough, a colossal extraterrestrial warrior with purplish skin, a mouth the size of a manhole cover in the middle of its stomach, and five, whip-like arms, shot up out of the sand.
The beast landed and pointed at me, and I fired a rocket that curled into the thing’s maw and blew it apart. As you might expect, this did not go down well with the other aliens who regrouped and charged. I continued to fire into the approaching horde but was barely able to make a dent. Too many targets, not enough rockets.
The aliens whipped out their own weapons and fired energized rounds while flinging explosives that carved divots in the ground and sent geysers of sand and dirt up into the air.
Spinning, I saw an alien grenade hit the ground and vanish in a fireball. The resulting blast lifted me off my metal feet, tossing my mech sideways.
I slammed into the sand and carved a twelve-foot long trench before grinding to a stop. When I turned over and looked up, one of the aliens had mounted me.
The bug’s jaws unhinged and snapped at the air.
My mech’s arm blocked and punched the thing away. Then I levered my machine up and gutshot the alien, turning its torso into pulp before another alien threw itself at me with a full-body heave.
“You need any help, Deus?!” one of the other mech operators shouted through the commlink.
“I’m good!” I replied. “Got ‘em right where I want ‘em!”
“Yeah!” the other operator said with a laugh. “Surrounded from the inside out!”
I fired a rocket that bisected the alien attacker and then I was on the move again, steamrolling through the aliens. I don’t want to ruin the story for you, but eventually I found myself trapped inside a massive alien outpost with my comrades and had to fight my way out. After shooting down a number of the enemy, I hurdled a high wall and dropped down the other side only to come face to face with an alien sniper who was clutching a black rifle the size of a jousting lance. Before I could react, the sniper BOOM! fired the rifle.
WHACK!
The round from gun struck my mech’s cockpit glass.
And kept on going.
Stabbing right through the canopy into my exosuit.
Yep, that’s right.
The round slammed into my chest and exited somewhere around the small of my back.
I was so shocked; I swear I didn’t even feel the pain … for the first three seconds.
And then my adrenaline ebbed, and I was in agony, wallop
ed like a shotgun blast to the face. Every neuron in my body screamed at once. A bitter, metallic taste filled my mouth, and my breath came in gut-wrenching, stabbing gasps. My life seeped away with each spurt of red that splashed the dashboard, and my vision sputtered in discontinuous flutters and flashes. I knew my body. I knew I was dying, a goner for sure.
I knew there was only one thing left to do.
I reached back and grabbed a syringe loaded with a mysterious amber liquid that everyone called “Lazarus.” I popped the cap on the syringe and angled it around. Then I brought the needle down toward my neck in one swift and sudden move when—
Stop!
Wait.
Hold up.
I imagine at this point you’ve probably got some questions. Maybe a lot of questions. Who the hell am I? How did I get to pilot a mech out on the desert? Why am I doing battle with aliens? And perhaps most importantly, did I just almost die and get resurrected? Seriously? Inquiring minds want to know, right?
Well, in order to provide the answers to these and other equally fascinating questions, I’m going to have to take a step back and talk a little, and you’re going to (hopefully) listen to a little background on how it all began. About how everything that matters started after the first alien invasion ended, and how the galaxy’s greatest fighting force was assembled as a result of a single text message from the world’s most infamous billionaire.
Yeah, I know that’s a mouthful, but stick with me, it’s worth it…
1
Everyone with a pulse and a functioning personal electronic device remembers the day they heard about the Icarus Project. It was six months or so after the end of the alien occupation, what most folks called “VS Day” (victory over the aliens, the “Syndicate”) when a text was received from a number associated with the infamous Jonas Vidmark.
It was initially assumed that the text was a scam or a joke. I mean, cell reception had just been restored, and the first text was from a billionaire playboy? What are the odds? I wasn’t a tech guru by any measure, but I knew who Vidmark was. He was the dude who made his bones inventing Scienta, the online social media, and networking service that snuffed out Facebook, Instagram, and all the other wannabes in the late-2040s. You probably remember him from his many online posts, the ones set on yachts and air cruisers, with a bearded, well-muscled Vidmark flashing ivory-white teeth to a posse of impossibly beautiful people. Yep, that’s the guy. Doctor Jonas Xavier Vidmark. The bad boy of Silicon Valley. Steve Jobs with a friggin’ eight-pack. I couldn’t stand the douchebag either.
Still, there was a time you couldn’t escape his toothy mug: looking down from holographic ads on Pennsylvania Avenue and Times Square, singing along from the stage on Dave Grohl’s ninety-fourth birthday, celebrating Benjamin Brady’s fifth Superbowl win, hosting the Oscars! The guy was literally everywhere and then, at the height of his fame, when no more praise or shade could be thrown his way, he just up and vanished.
Some said he’d had a nervous breakdown, while others claimed he’d experienced a kind of religious awakening. I always figured he just got bored. I mean, how many times can you bang the same chicks and swill the same booze without thinking, been there, and literally, done that? He reappeared eighteen months later, claiming to have received a vision that he was destined to save the world. He was going green big time, investing heavily in solar, then wind, and finally a new kind of modular thorium reactor that would revolutionize the way everyone used energy. The buzz started to build, and Vidmark soaked it all in, claiming he was preparing to ascend to the top of the mountain figuratively. Unfortunately, that’s when the mountain struck back.
Vidmark, you see, had taken to rock climbing during his eighteen months in the wilderness, and was trudging up a peak somewhere in the Canadian Rockies in the dead of winter when an avalanche struck. Trapped in blizzard conditions, he miraculously found a way to descend the mountain and then forged through miles of hip-deep snow in fifty-mile an hour wind. Ultimately, he came upon a frozen lake whose ice was not so frozen. He fell through and was trapped under the surface for ten minutes, eventually able to claw his way out. By the time a couple snowshoeing in the backcountry found him several days later, the frostbite had done the good doctor all kinds of wrong. His legs had gone bad, and the hospital in Alberta was forced to amputate three inches below each knee.
Legend has it that Vidmark, still loopy after taking the pain train to fentanyl-ville, asked his doctors how long it would be until he could once again scale some rock. Never was the answer and Vidmark, if you believe the stories, snickered and said he’d be climbing within a hundred and eighty days of his operation. He was wrong of course. The bastard did it in a hundred and twenty. A hundred and twenty goddamn days and Vidmark was better and faster than ever before. He’d rebuilt himself, reconfiguring his prosthetic limbs to allow for extreme and unusual locomotion, his catchphrase becoming, “I’m not handicapped, the technology is.”
Soon he was besting non-para athletes in everything from climbing to biking while landing on the covers of outdoor magazines and the few national newspapers that still existed. He claimed he’d found his new calling, determined to give people their legs back. Plunging into it with his usual gusto, Vidmark went back to school and obtained advanced degrees in engineering and robotics, becoming a world-renowned biophysicist in a remarkably short period of time. Next came the patents, hundreds of them for unique exosuits, and bionic limbs, and various things that helped with nerve regeneration and amputation and even Parkinson’s disease.
With the backing of investors and his own immense wealth, he became a disrupter in the field of biomechanics, funding controversial teams of biomechatronics researchers at the world’s greatest universities who worked day and night, eventually discovering a way to effectively end disability. That’s right; he’s the guy who found a way to reverse paralysis, to return disabled people to the vertical world via a synthetic spinal cord seeded with stem-cells and whatnot that he called the “Bionic Ladder.”
The ladder was unveiled on a webcast seen by hundreds of millions of people. It featured a quadriplegic actor named Terry Hughes rising and walking at Vidmark’s command for the first time since he’d been injured in a nasty polo accident nine years earlier. I was watching and initially thought it was bullshit, the result of crappy lighting or kickass special effects, but there Hughes was, strutting across the dais, busting a few moves, Vidmark standing in the background on his titanium legs, smiling hugely. A thought sprang to mind, something from a book I’d been forced to read in high school English class, a quote by a famous author who said there aren’t any second acts in life. Whoever wrote that never met Jonas Vidmark.
Satisfied that the webcast was legit, my contempt for Vidmark turned to admiration. After all, he’d been to the top of the heap and fallen off, and found a way to climb back up. What’s more American than that? He had everything for the taking once again and then, less than a week later, it all came crashing down. That was the day we all remember as “5/15,” May the 15th, the day the Syndicate, the aliens we called “scuds,” came calling.
I won’t go into the gory details of those first horrible weeks after the invasion. If you’re alive, if you’re part of the “Forty Percenters,” the forty percent of the population that survived, you remember how it was. You remember the heat from the fire bombings and the sound, like a million trumpets being blown inside a metal box, that the alien ships made as they carved across our skies.
You remember the desperation and the dying and the occupation that nearly wrecked the world. But then something happened, and you’ll likely remember where you were when you heard that a small team of Marines and resistance fighters had found a way onto the main Syndicate fortress, a floating city in the sky, and forced the surrender of the Potentate, the head of the alien empire. That was the beginning of the end, because once the head was chopped off, the Syndicate body began to rot, and within a few weeks, the occupation was officially over, nearly seven ye
ars to the day after it began.
And my boy Vidmark? What about him? Well, since the internet was largely still down, we’d only heard second-hand stories about what he’d been up to during the occupation. Some said he’d been busy building weapons for the resistance, while others claimed he’d been kidnapped by the scuds, sucked up with most of the other able-bodied men and women into spaceships, where he became a scab, a collaborator, helping the aliens perfect the drones that they used to lay waste to the planet. Whatever the truth was, after the occupation ended, the first real sign that Vidmark was alive was his cryptic text, the one that linked to a .gov website, the first new operational site since the fighting was over.
It was also the landing page for the Icarus Project.
When you clicked on the link, you were met with the words “NEVER AGAIN” in bold and all caps. Beneath this was an interactive map and an immense set of numbers that were constantly repopulating and updating, what I reckoned had to be a list of the global dead and dying. The numbers continued to roll as patriotic music swelled and then came images from several famous battles, including the Solstice Offensive, an ill-fated attempt by the resistance to overthrow the aliens which had been ruthlessly put down two winters before—
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