Mech 2

by Isaac Hooke

  Rade and the men exited their mechs inside the assigned hangar bay. Rade removed his jumpsuit assemblies, and changed into a T-Shirt and cargo pants. Donning his forest digital navy cap, he made his way to the lieutenant commander’s office.

  Scotts was pacing when Rade arrived. The lieutenant commander gestured toward the chair across from his desk. “Have a seat, Chief.”

  Rade sat down. He was expecting Scotts to announce Alpha’s redeployment to another city, where the platoon would help defend against the Sino-Korean invaders. Though such an announcement ordinarily wouldn’t have required an in-person office visit.

  Maybe the LC was going to reveal Rade’s elevation to master chief? Rade hoped not, because that would mean he was no longer in direct command of the team.

  Scotts sat down across from him. He sighed, and crossed his arms. “I’ve just learned you had an elicit relationship with an AI. Specifically, fraternizing with the AI of a Brigand war machine.”

  Rade stared at Scotts open-mouthed. For a moment there, he’d actually thought he was going to be promoted.

  How could I be so… daft.

  He wondered which of his team members had ratted him out. And then he suddenly knew. It had to be Praxter.

  “I didn’t have a relationship with my mech,” Rade said.

  “I pulled the access keys to your Implant,” Scotts said. “And reviewed your logs. I’d call nearly sleeping with your mech fraternization.”

  “Except I didn’t sleep with her,” Rade said. “Nearly sleeping with is not the same as sleeping with.”

  “No, I suppose not,” Scotts said. “As far as I can tell, she wanted to sleep with you, but you turned her down. You shouldn’t have encouraged her to bring things that far. I could forgive that. But what I can’t forgive is the obvious fact that her AI core was defective, which enabled this relationship in the first place. You didn’t report this defect to a technician for repair, as you should have. You couldn’t be sure that her emotional subroutines were the only systems affected. That was a very dangerous thing you did, by operating that mech. You could have put your platoon at risk. You definitely put yourself at risk.”

  Rade didn’t know what to say. He merely gazed at Scotts, waiting for the punishment he knew that was coming.

  “On your feet,” Scotts barked.

  Rade jumped to his feet and locked at the position of attention.

  The LC stared at him, drawing the moment out.

  “Right Face,” Scotts growled.

  Rade turned so that the chair was no longer behind him.

  “Drop,” Scotts continued. “Give me two hundred.”

  Rade dropped to the floor and began pumping out push-ups.

  “I thought long and hard about what I wanted to do after I found out what you did,” Scotts said as he walked around the desk and knelt next to Rade’s head. “I considered a letter of reprimand, but I decided you’re too good of a chief to end your career for this. You’re loved by the men. You made a mistake. I’m willing to forgo it this time around. But be warned, I’ll be keeping an eye on you Mr. Galaal, and if you make another mistake, you can consider that letter of reprimand already written. If ever you discover a defect in a mech, Centurion, or other AI under your command again, you will report it either to me or the platoon tech immediately. Is that clear?”

  “Sir, yes Sir!” Rade wheezed as he pumped himself up and down.

  “Good,” Scotts said. “Now finish your pushups and get the hell out of my office.”

  The next hundred pushups seemed the most difficult, not because Rade was tiring—which he was—but because he could feel the lieutenant commander’s withering gaze boring into his back the whole time. He kept expecting Scotts to kick him in the ribs, or sit on his back or something, but he reminded himself that he wasn’t in training anymore, and Scotts was his LC, not his instructor. This wasn’t Trial Week. Still, the expectation was there.

  Rade was slowing down with every pushup, and the last thirty came with serious effort.

  Getting out of shape.

  Well, that wasn’t entirely true, considering he had fought all day and night with barely any respite. He wasn’t out of shape, just weary to the bone.

  Finally, Rade finished his two hundredth pushup, and then stood on shaky feet. It seemed odd to him that his feet should be so wobbly when his arms had done all the work.

  Rade turned to go.

  “Oh,” Scotts said. “And this isn’t a reward, or even a punishment, but the Brass wants to fly Alpha to Sino Korea tomorrow. We’ve got a little retaliatory operation planned. Have the platoon gather on the airstrip at oh five hundred, prepped for flight. I’ll brief you in the air.”

  The first thing Rade did when he reached the mess hall after his little humiliation session with Scotts was to find Praxter.

  “With me,” he told the Artificial, and took him aside.

  “What I told you about Taya was in the utmost confidence,” Rade continued. “You betrayed me. That’s totally unacceptable. You’re a disgusting, sorry excuse for a MOTH.”

  Praxter seemed confused. “I don’t understand. Betrayed you?”

  “You told Scotts what we talked about after the briefing,” Rade said. “It was enough to make him pull the access keys for my Implant. I’d call that a betrayal.”

  “But I didn’t say a word,” Praxter protested.

  Rade narrowed his eyes. “If not you, then who?” He glanced at the table where Alpha Platoon sat; most of them had their heads down, passed out from sheer exhaustion while eating dinner. Or maybe because of it. Well, Rade wanted to get some sleep himself.

  He gazed from face to face, trying to puzzle out who’d told on him. But then he suddenly knew. “The base AI.”

  He glanced upward, toward the tiny holes of the closest speaker embedded in the ceiling, and the camera concealed within the black dome beside it.

  Praxter nodded. “It’s likely the base AI overhead our conversation, yes.”

  Rade shook his head, wondering how he could have been so careless. But he already knew. He had been distracted by the coming battle, and the role his team would play. Praxter’s offhand words about Taya had caught him off guard, and he had answered without thinking. If he had been paying more attention, he would have grabbed a pair of aReal goggles and activated the noise canceller component. Not that there had been any such aReals nearby at the time.

  He also hadn’t thought to disable recording in his Implant itself, which had allowed Scotts to find the incriminating evidence. He should have disabled logging before making his move with Taya. He supposed he hadn’t done so because at the time a part of him wanted to get caught—he had felt he was doing something wrong, which was why he had backed out at the last moment, after all.

  Rade sighed. “I bet you’re happy with yourself,” he told the ceiling.

  The base AI didn’t answer.

  “Well, see that the platoon members make their way to their on-base berths,” Rade told Praxter. “We have a flight to catch early tomorrow, and I suspect this is the only chance we’ll have to get a full night’s sleep for a while.”

  11

  Rade sat in the cabin of the transport carrier. He could see the clouds if he looked through the window behind him, and underneath them, the blue ocean awaiting far below.

  Beside him sat the other members of the platoon. Their seats formed a long line next to the fuselage of the aircraft, and faced inward, toward the offline Jupiter mechs that were lined up in pairs to form a neat row.

  Scotts was seated on the far right, but he was using the augmented reality capabilities of the platoon’s Implants to make it seem as if he stood directly in front of each team member and personally addressed them.

  “We’ve been using the prisoner Tan Xin Zao as a mole,” Scotts said. “Shortly after arriving in New Coronado, we shipped him off to Los Angeles, and allowed him to escape with a complete array of monitoring devices secretly installed in his head. He led us to another high val
ue target, Admiral Zhihao Jin, cousin of Defense Secretary Shi Jin, who reports directly to the Paramount Leader. The brave MOTHs of Team Six captured the admiral during the invasion.”

  Scotts clasped his hands together and rested them on his belly. “Interrogations of the admiral have proved fruitful. The admiral has confirmed what Tan Xin Zao told us about Cynthia Abraham: she has indeed been harbored by the Sino Koreans for the past two years. He also gave us her whereabouts.”

  “So, our mission is to recover her,” Bomb said.

  “Partially correct,” the lieutenant commander told him. “You see, the admiral also confirmed that Cynthia indeed had spores from the alien entity known as the Anarchist with her. She has planted these spores in a cave system underneath a mountain, one hundred klicks to the west of Beijing. She resides within those caves, personally overseeing the alien being that flourishes under the auspices of the Sino Koreans.”

  Kicker shook his head. “She’s given birth to a new Anarchist.”

  “I always knew we couldn’t trust that broad,” Bender mentally transmitted over the Implant platoon channel, excluding the lieutenant commander. “Her titties are too small.”

  “What does her breast size have to do with anything?” Pyro asked.

  “You can never trust a broad with small titties,” Bender said. “They never feel good enough for their man, and always believe that he’s secretly cheating on her with girls with bigger cups. So of course, since they think their man is cheating, they go ahead and cheat on him, even though nine times out of ten he’s been faithful!”

  “Except if that man is you,” Manic commented.

  Bender smiled, baring that golden grille he called teeth. “I never claimed to be a saint.”

  Apparently realizing that the team was communicating behind his back, Scotts cleared his throat. Heads snapped forward. Bender had this deer-in-the-headlights look like he was afraid the lieutenant commander had somehow been listening in.

  Rade half expected Scotts to chew him out, but instead the lieutenant commander merely continued: “We’ve secured blueprints of this cave system, thanks to the admiral. The tunnels are well defended, with turrets guarding every approach to the mountain. The main entrance is fortified with a blast shield in addition to armored units. Past the blast shield, in the lobby beyond and throughout the cave, there are hundreds of more turrets, along with numerous mechs and other combat robots. Altogether, these defenses make a direct entrance to the cave extremely difficult.

  “However, a small, elite team, taking a less direct approach, has a far greater chance of success. The Brass has gotten the approval of the president to send in just such a team: you. You’re going to land in the jungle to the north of the mountain and make your way to the shoulder. Bravo platoon, in another troop carrier ahead of us, will deploy moments before you arrive, and they’ll act as a diversion, drawing the fire of the closest turrets, along with any nearby SK defenders.”

  The cave system’s blueprints overlaid Rade’s vision. The mountain that contained it appeared as a dim silhouette around the winding tunnels. Scotts rotated those blueprints and the containing mountain until Rade was looking at the northern side, where jungle represented by green foliage covered the land. That jungle had been cleared away all along the length of the mountain’s shoulder, separating the jungle eaves by five hundred meters from the sheer rock before it.

  A blue dotted line emerged from the foliage and passed over the exposed portion of the shoulder, ending upon the rock face. Behind it, the cave system tunneled by, passing close to the surface but not breaching it.

  “You’ll rush the mountain when Bravo attacks,” Scotts continued. “When you reach the breach point, you’ll drill inside. You have ten meters of rock to drill through, which is why you’ll be bringing a portable laser drill.”

  The lieutenant commander beckoned toward the cylindrical device that resided on the far end of the cabin, in front of the mechs. It was about the same height as a Jupiter, though about three times as long. It had treads underneath, which made it mobile. The front portion consisted of a series of lasers on a circular frame that would be rotated at a speed of several thousand RPMs during operation.

  “The goal is to penetrate before you’re noticed,” Scotts said. “We’ve plastered the surface of the drill with the same visual blending and thermal masking technology your mechs use, but since our scientists haven’t been able to reverse engineer the LIDAR blurring tech we’ve captured, there’s a good chance you’ll be spotted. Defend the drill, and the warhead you’ll be carrying, and enter when you’ve breached the inner tunnel. You’ll carry the warhead here.” A waypoint appeared near the center of the cave system. “Where we believe the alien being and its supporting plants reside. Confirm the entity is present, and take it out by conventional means if you’re able. Either way, you’ll still place the bomb… we want to wipe out every last trace of the creature and its support plants. Deploy the defense turrets around the bomb, set the timer, and then get the hell out. Any questions?”

  “So, this warhead, I’m assuming it’s a high-grade nuke, yes?” Snakeoil asked.

  “That is correct,” the lieutenant commander told him.

  “Which means everything in the immediate vicinity will be incinerated…” Snakeoil continued.

  “Also correct,” Scotts agreed.

  “So, is there any reason why we have to place the bomb directly on the alien site?” Snakeoil asked. “Or can we backtrack once we’ve confirmed the presence of the entity, and place the bomb in a less conspicuous part of the cave? Or better yet, send scouts ahead to confirm the alien resides in the expected area, while we stay behind to protect the warhead.”

  “You’ll have a full platoon of HS3s with you, so scouting won’t be a problem,” Scotts said. “I’ll leave the final placement of the bomb to your chief’s discretion. You all have access to the weapon’s complete stats, from the blast yield to the incineration radius. That said, it’s preferable if you can get close enough to the alien to take it out via conventional means, so you can confirm the kill. But even if you’re successful, as I mentioned, you still need to plant the nuke: we don’t want to take the chance that any of those so-called ‘spores’ will remain behind, ready to grow another alien.”

  “How do we know Cynthia Abraham hasn’t planted spores under different mountains already?” Rade asked.

  “We don’t,” Scotts replied. “But if she has, that’s outside your mission scope in any case.”

  Lui was rubbing his chin. “I hate to be one to question the decisions of the Brass, but why didn’t we just go with subs for the deployment, like we did on our last mission? It sounds like we’re going to be doing a flyover across much of China to reach the target. Seems to me there’s a far lower chance of discovery if we came in from underneath the ocean and made our way overland.”

  “The Sino Koreans have placed their coastal regions on high alert after our last stunt,” Scotts said. “So there’s no guarantee a submersible insertion would be any easier. It would also be much longer… we have to travel too far inland for such an insertion to be practical. We’re flying aboard a craft equipped with the latest stealth technology, capable of punching through most Sino Korean detection mechanisms, including satellite. We’ve snagged approval from Russia to cross their air space, and we’ll be coming in from the north, above the contested Mongolia region, where the Sino Koreans have less detectors.”

  “Ah, Mongolia, an old friend,” Tahoe said. “I have so many good memories of sniping insurgents there.”

  That was where Rade and Tahoe had their first deployment. Good times.

  “We’ll fly over Mongolia to the border,” the Lieutenant Commander continued. “But even though there are less land-based detectors along the Sino-Korean side of that border, there are still enough to discern us, despite our stealth features. Fortunately, our flyover will coincide with a crippling cyberattack to the region’s grid. We’re going to knock out power to most of northe
rn China, for at least a minute, until their systems reboot into safe mode. That will keep them occupied while we activate the Trojan already installed in their detector systems, which will remain operational during the reboot, running on emergency power. By the time they realize what we’ve done, our squadron will already be through.”

  “Squadron?” Tahoe said. “I thought only Bravo platoon was with us?”

  “No, there are other support craft with us, albeit spread out,” Scotts said. “Others will be arriving later, like the bombers. In any case, once we’re past the border, we’re scot-free. Our stealth features will evade the remaining detectors. We’ll keep low once we’re through, staying as close as feasible to the surface. We’ve plotted a course that will take us through the most rural regions along the way, far from military bases, using the dips in the land to our advantage. We’ll land in the jungle five klicks to the north of the base, and proceed the rest of the way on foot.”

  That seemed to appease Lui’s worries, because he had no further comments to make.

  Rade was somewhat appeased too, but there was something bothering him…

  “Once we enter the cave, it’s not going to be all that easy to get out again,” Rade said. “What’s the extract strategy?”

  “Once you’re inside, Bravo will retreat to the entrance of the tunnel you’ve drilled,” Scotts said. “We’ll be sending in two more mech platoons thereafter to help defend the entrance, along with a spate of combat robots. We’re also going to have bombers pounding the shoulders of the mountain on either side, so any reinforcements that the Sino Koreans send will take a beating.”

  “I wonder how many of the bombers will be shot down…” Bender said.

  “They’ll be flying fairly high,” Scotts said.

  Bender shrugged. “Heavy lasers can easily reach them. Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad the Sino Koreans will have something else to shoot at, other than us.”

  “Once you emerge, you’ll head directly into the jungle, along with the other platoons,” the lieutenant commander continued. “There, you’ll be picked up by troop shuttles, which will land in designated clearings.”