Merkiaari Wars: 01 - Hard Duty

by Mark E. Cooper

  It was done.

  Eric let himself fall to land in the street. He reloaded his rifle and noted its power was low. He swapped cells taking a pair off the charred bandolier across his chest, and shoved grenades into the launcher he had taped under his rifle. He wished he had a properly integrated weapons system, but the new rifles were still in development. The standard Alliance rifle and launcher couldn’t accept targeting data from a Viper, and output was lower, but even so he would have like to have one. His temporary lash up worked, but that was all that it had going for it.

  “Burgton to all units,” the cold, deadly voice of the General was clear on Eric’s comm, and every Viper within Eric’s range paused to listen. “Operation Clean House complete. Proceed with Operation Annihilate. Burgton clear.”

  Eric turned as did every surviving Viper, and pushed himself to a ground consuming lope, heading south. Behind him, the artillery paused for a moment, and then it thundered again at a new target. South. Operation Annihilate was the codename for the endgame of this entire campaign. Burgton wanted to teach the Merki a lesson they would never forget. As he had said in the meeting where it was conceived, they would turn San Luis into the Merkiaari’s vision of hell... it was already Eric’s.

  Eric left the city and reached the rally point. The Wolfcub class landers were coming in hot; scores of them howling down upon Eric and his comrades as if stooping upon prey. One after another they came in, ramps already down and ready to accept the Vipers. Landing struts slammed down, and the Vipers raced up the ramps even as the dampers were recoiling. Moments later the landers went to max thrust and threw themselves skyward so hard that G-stress greyed even a Viper’s vision. Eric groaned as the seat edge cut into his thighs.

  Behind them, navy shuttles crewed by Viper medics and navy corpsmen flew over the burning city on SAR (Search and Rescue) missions to retrieve the fallen. Eric watched a real time view by satellite as they homed on the beacons indicating downed Vipers awaiting pickup. He hoped most would be carried into orbit and back to the ship for repairs, but he knew many would go into cryogenic storage when they arrived to await their final journey back to base and a last appointment with the regiment’s archive.

  He broke his link to the satellite and closed his eyes, trying not to see the faces of the fallen, but Vipers never forgot anything. Nothing at all.

  Computer: combat mode.

  The world sped back up as he dropped back to his default condition. Alerts began appearing upon his display, some flashing for his attention. Priorities. His processor wanted instructions. Did he want to enter maintenance mode? Hell no! He would be fighting again soon. He would rely upon combat mode for now. True, it would take longer to repair his damage that way, but it would be repaired and still let him fight. His decision caused a cascade of new data to be displayed. A shortlist of needed repairs and the wireframe graphic to go with it as if he didn’t already know where it hurt. The worst damage was to his left shoulder, but it wasn’t serious. The rest were burns and some loss of lung capacity. Damn smoke. All was repairable without need for outside intervention.

  >_ Diagnostics: 87% combat capable

  >_ IMS: Repairs in progress.

  Eric glanced at the others, but none acknowledged him. They were all busy with internal business, same as he had just been. He was glad to see Ken Stone had made it, and Dick Hames. Both were good friends, and had been enhanced with him in the same group. Enhanced together, trained together, and often fought beside one another. Dick’s armour was heavily pitted and scarred from enemy fire, but he seemed essentially intact. He could see other faces he knew, all looked weary, and all were ready to fight again. He pretended not to notice the missing faces, preferring to imagine them safe and aboard the other landers.

  “What happened to your hair, bro?” Stone said raising his voice over the noise of the engines.

  Hair? Eric reached up and realised he was burned bald on his right side. His helmet hadn’t protected him from it, probably made it worse. It had been damned hot in that building.

  “You like it?” Eric said. “New style I call Merki Barbeque.”

  Stone grinned and some of the others laughed. “Hell of a thing. You think we get to go home after this one?”

  Eric shrugged. “No clue.” The Alliance was still on the back foot and barely holding on. He doubted they would go home, but even if they did, it would be a short respite. “Don’t worry about it. You’ll get to increase your score—”

  “Incoming Merki Interceptors! Brace for high speed manoeuvres!” the pilot shouted over the comm.

  Eric tugged on his harness straps hard to tighten them. He hugged his rifle to his chest, clamping it there with folded arms as the Wolfcub lurched going to max thrust. It spun upside down, veered left and suddenly a gaping hole appeared in the floor between Eric’s feet. He looked through the hole, pursed his lips in thought, and turned to toward Ken who looked a bit sick. Well, it had been very close

  “I don’t think we—” Eric began as the lander was hit again and fell out of the sky, already disintegrating.”

  The pilot screamed, “Brace, brace, bra—”

  >_ 0559:59 close archive file #0000063577982-3996-SL

  >_ 0600:01 Deactivate maintenance mode... Done.

  Diagnostics: Unit fit for duty

  Activate combat mode... Done

  TRS... Done

  Sensors... Done

  Targeting... Done

  Communications... Done

  Infonet... Done

  TacNet... Done... Scanning... No units/stations found

  >_ 0600:05 Reactivation complete

  Eric’s eyes snapped open, and the dream faded away back to storage. He was in his rack aboard the tramp freighter, instantly alert as always. His programming wouldn’t allow anything else of course. His 0600 wakeup call was better than gospel as far as his processor was concerned. Not that it knew or cared. It was just following its programming. Some days, more and more as the decades rolled by, he thought he was just doing the same.

  “All behaviour is programming one way or the other. Mine is just more so,” he murmured frowning at the thought.

  He was a Viper. A cyborg soldier designed to kill Merkiaari in milliseconds, and he performed that task extremely well. They all did of course, the Vipers, the one hundred units that were all that remained of the once powerful SAG. The Special Assault Group had been created to augment the 501st Infantry Regiment’s offensive capability during the Merki War; it’s mission back then to seek and destroy the alien invaders wherever they were found. Eric and his comrades had done so with extreme prejudice, and their reward?

  Continued existence.

  Eric sneered at the familiar hurt. Existence. They were lucky the Alliance hadn’t decided to deactivate them all. They were feared and respected still, but mostly feared. No one was comfortable in a room with something that could kill three metre tall alien monsters in the blink of an eye. None would seek them out to get to know them, not knowing what they thought they knew of the cyborgs who won the war for them. That war was long over, or in hiatus if you believed General Burgton’s predictions. Unfortunately, Eric and the others did believe him; it wouldn’t be long before the Alliance needed them all again.

  Eric swung his legs out of his rack and went through his routine.

  At precisely 0620 he was groomed, dressed, and ready to debark the ship. His duffel was ready to go; he had packed it last night. There was nothing in it he really needed, but as a prop it added to his cover story. He wasn’t Eric Penleigh right now. He was Eric Martell, ex-merc looking for a cause. The clothes he wore and the kit in his duffel all helped with his image. He had aged his brown uniform coverall well, and it had no insignia—he had unpicked them all himself exposing the darker cloth beneath. It was actually a civ design, but it was the right type and no one could tell now that the insignia had been that of a cleaning company. It made him look like what he was pretending to be. A dishonourably discharged merc.

 
; The ship began its final approach to station. Nothing to do but wait until docked. He sat on his rack and waited staring at the bulkhead in silence. How many times had he been on missions like this now, on missions that could have been identical except for location?

  Working...

  Eric sighed and ignored the list of codenames as it scrolled by on his display. He didn’t want an answer to his question. He knew the answer was in the hundreds. It had been rhetorical, but his processor didn’t care and continued its task of filling his vision with holographic data. It wasn’t really holographic of course. It only seemed to hover before his eyes like a holotank display. No one but he could see it and not even he cared to read it. His internal damn computer was too literal, and Vipers could not forget anything.

  Anything at all.

  He was programmed with perfect recall; the idea had been to make them all better killers by making target acquisition at a glance instant and perfect. The routines in his programming were complicated and numerous. Together they were called Snapshot, and there was no way to turn it off. Not even his death would shut it down, well, not immediately anyway. He had seen comrades take careful aim and one final shot after they were already dead just to take their killers with them. It was freaky as hell, and scary. That would be him one day.

  >_ 563

  Eric sighed when the total blinked on and off. He erased the list with a coded thought and his vision cleared. Five hundred and sixty three missions the same as this one, or close enough for his damned literalist processor to count them. That probably meant a similar amount just outside its acceptable parameters. Its true/false subroutines were distressingly precise and were something every Viper had to take into account when asking for data. The days of real A.I computer architecture were centuries in the past, Douglas Walden and his hacker rebellion had seen to that.

  Over five hundred missions like this one, and hundreds different enough to be excluded from the list, and they all meant nothing. The days when his battles did mean something ended with the Merki War. He spent his time now killing other Humans, not murderously vicious aliens bent on genocide. It was enough to make a statue weep.

  How far they had fallen.

  The Alliance and the regiment was all he had. All any Viper had really. They were his two reasons to exist. The General ordered and he obeyed. The General said the coups and mini wars had to be managed. So they were managed... by Vipers behind the scenes when that was possible, and when not possible the General had the President’s ear. Orders came down, and off they went to war once more... or battle at least. They had to keep the peace when it could be kept, and divert or bring the wars to a swift conclusion when it could not. The Alliance must remain strong when the next Merkiaari incursion occurred. And it would occur soon. Five years the General estimated. Just five more years and his existence would have meaning again.

  >_ 0700:23 Docking commencing.

  The sound of grapples and maintenance lines connecting were clearly audible. He could have used his sensors to detect people on the ship and station but there was no need. He could have slipped into the security net on the station and accessed a live feed of the ship’s final approach. He used to do that, he remembered. Long ago that was. He did not think on it too hard now; if he did, his processor would resurrect one or more memories and replay them. The damn thing was programmed that way.

  He checked the synthskin glove on his right hand, but as before it was intact and hiding his weapon’s data bus. The data bus was the only obvious external difference between his enhanced body and a standard Human. The other one, his primary node was at the base of his spine and hidden by his clothes. As long as the glove remained undamaged, no one would know what he was.

  >_0710:12

  He watched the seconds tick by. The time on his display was set to Thurston local, as were the ship’s chronometers. That was standard for all ships when jumping in system. Made things easier to manage—traffic patterns and the like. Ships received the correct time and other information like trade prices and news bulletins from the beacons.

  The sounds died away and Eric stood. He threw his duffel up onto his shoulder and left his cabin to join the few other passengers debarking here. None of them spoke. All of them were civilians of one kind or another. No tourists here, but then the Betty wasn’t a cruise ship. It was a freighter and only took a few passengers aboard to supplement meagre profits way out here in the Border Zone. Eric supposed these people were down on their luck spacers, they had the look. They would most likely be seeking a ship docked at station to take them on as crew, or to take them to another port where they could try again.

  Eric followed the ramp out of the ship and stepped dockside. Multiple alerts competed for his cybernetically enhanced cerebrum’s attention, but he ignored most of them. As always, his sensors and programming leaned toward tiresome completeness. What did he care that leaving the ship had exposed him to an atmospheric pressure drop of a few hectopascals? Did he give a fuck that the station’s atmosphere was nitrogen rich and its temperature a few degrees low? No, but did his processor care, did it ever take instruction from him to suppress pointless alerts when there was no risk of harm to him? Of course not.

  Nothing to do but keep on keeping on as they say.

  “They are full of shit,” he growled. He shifted his duffle on his shoulder, took a deep breath, and folded himself away letting his cover personae take over his features. “Just another day on the job,” he whispered, the weariness in his voice not registering in his own ears after all these centuries.

  Eric marched across the dock toward arrivals and departures board. He stopped, looking blankly at the departures section and was bumped from behind. He pasted on an annoyed expression and turned to see who had walked into him, already lowering his duffel to the floor.

  “Oh excuse me, so sorry,” the stocky black man said. “Wasn’t paying attention there. Worried about my flight... can’t find it on the boards.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” Eric growled turning to look up at the departures again.

  “No really, you must forgive me. You will won’t you, and shake on it?”

  Eric gritted his teeth noticing the grins from those close enough to hear. He rolled his eyes at them and mouthed the word silently, “Bethanites!”

  The onlookers grinned wider, nodding in sympathy.

  Eric put on a smile and tuned toward the man again. “From Bethany’s World I assume?”

  “Why yes! How did you know?”

  This time the laughter was loud enough for the tourist—he must surely be one as he was dressed in flamboyant colours and ridiculous looking printed patterns—to notice. He looked around uncertainly, his smile slipping and Eric was suddenly tired of the pretence.

  He held out his hand for a shake. “I’m Eric, honoured to meet you. I recognise your scrupulous manner as being from Bethany. I visited there once.”

  “Ah, you are too kind, Eric. My name is Kenneth Hartley-Browne. Glad to make your acquaintance.”

  Eric clasped Ken’s hand.

  >_ Connection request. Accept [Y]es/[N]o?

  >_ Y

  >_ Connection Achieved... Stone, Kenneth. Master Sergeant 501st Infantry Regiment, serial number DGN-896-410-339.

  >_ Incoming data packet... downloading.

  >_ Download complete.

  Eric shook Ken’s hand and palmed the key card he held. “Sorry to leave in such haste, but my shuttle departs soon.”

  Ken smiled. “Quite all right. I must away to find my own transportation. Good bye to you.”

  “Good bye,” Eric said and watched one of his oldest friends walk away.

  Suddenly he couldn’t leave it like that. What if this was his last op? No one stayed lucky forever. Stone was already out of sight but that was no problem. He could have hacked into station comms easily enough, or used his built in comm. No one would have been the wiser. They didn’t know to monitor Viper freqs, and if they had they would have received encrypted bursts
of data that to them would have amounted to garbage or background noise. TacNet (Tactical Network) was a quicker built in system dedicated to Viper systems alone. Totally secure. He quickly accessed it and contacted the only other Viper in the entire Thurston system.

  “Ken... just wanted to say thanks. For everything,” he said silently, his words encoded by his processor and sent on their way.

  “No big, just another recon op.”

  Stone’s voice came to him as if his friend were standing a few feet away. He thought he was worried about the op, easy enough mistake he supposed. “It’s not that, Ken. It’s...” he couldn’t voice it. “It’s just...”

  “Are you okay, brother?” Stone said, sounding concerned now.

  Brother, yes, Stone was his brother in every way that mattered. His family—his birth family—were long dead and their descendants didn’t know him, but he still had brothers and sisters in the regiment. Everyone wearing the snakehead patch was family. He felt better remembering that; he wasn’t alone.

  “I’m coming back there,” Stone said.

  Eric cursed himself. He had taken too long to answer. Stone’s blue icon, clearly visible on his sensors among so many green ones denoting the civs on the station, reversed course.

  “No, Ken. You have somewhere to be, yes?”

  “Tigris, but it can wait. You need me now.”

  “I’m okay, feeling my age I guess. I just didn’t want to let you go without saying it’s been an honour serving with you... in case, you know?”

  “Bro... I feel the same. Nothing is gonna happen to you; not now, not ten years from now. Besides, the General says we have an appointment in five to kick alien butt. You wouldn’t want to miss that, right?”

  “Wouldn’t miss it for anything,” Eric said grimly. He couldn’t kill enough Merkiaari in a thousand lifetimes to make up for what he and the rest of the Human race had lost. “Go, I’ll be fine. That’s an order if you need one.”

  “Nah. I knew you were fine. Stone out.”