CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Mining quadrant, 08H35, 14th of June, 2771
You’ve been taught how to stand in your Suit, Toni reminded himself as he stared hazily at the treetops above, the sky beyond darkening fast.
Something was wrong with his Suit, although he couldn’t quite figure out what it was. He rolled over his left side and onto a prone position. Pushing himself with difficulty up onto his kneepads, oblivious of the roaring chaos, he finally realized that his right appendage was unable to move. Finally managing to lift himself upright, he peered to the right side of his Suit’s torso.
His appendage, undamaged although it was, appeared as though it had been pulled halfway round to his back, and there appeared to be an object of some kind protruding from his right breastplate, exposing its interior. Slowly he realized that the hatch had popped open, the repeat event currently leaving him able to see almost directly into his chest, where the interface cavity resided. That explained the pungent air that was presently searing Toni’s lungs. He tried to close the hatch with his left gauntlet; as he’d expected, it didn’t budge. Almost as an afterthought, he gazed at his surroundings.
He easily found east due to the wall of flames that was feeding on the plantation, belching coal-black plumes of smoke into the sky as if giving birth to a storm.
Movement to the south suddenly caught his attention. Dunn’s Unit Fifteen was a hundred paces away, motioning frantically to Toni to retreat westward. The two Mocas beside him were scorched but otherwise operational, and they accompanied their sec-leader as he turned west and set off at a run, several damaged Hammerheads quickly overtaking them at a sprint.
The last of the Hammerheads burned fiercely with crimson flames as it bounded along, heedless of the thick smoky trail it left in its wake.
The vision made no sense, and he dully decided that if it didn’t make sense, it didn’t really matter. You are not authorized to be a hero, he reminded himself once more.
The remembered words reminded him of Hirum. Turning north, he searched for his partner’s unit, and found it still gripping what remained of the tree it had been sheltering behind. Toni bounded towards him, and he began to choke on the fumes that were circulating more briskly in his cavity. Dimly he wondered if it was some sort of chemical attack.
Dimly he decided he didn’t care.
Reaching Hirum’s unit, he pressed the PTT on his rifle-grip, trying to hail him over the comm and failing to do so. He checked his communications panel and did not like what he saw; his OS had just completed a self-diagnostic test, having confidently concluded that radio comms were no longer possible due to action of enemy frequency inhibitors. He activated his loudspeaker.
“Hirum,” he bellowed loudly, the smallest hint of feedback in his ears. “Let’s get the hell outta here. Ya hear me?”
The Suit did not budge.
Toni tried to pry Unit Fourteen’s hatch open with his gauntlet, not managing to find any handhold to better apply his strength. My hatch can’t stay shut and his just won’t open, he thought, somehow finding the irony amusing.
Unit Fourteen’s titanium face turned slowly towards him. Its placid expression seemed to fit there, as if hugging trees in a burning forest filled with monsters was the thing to do nowadays, didn’t you know?
“Awake now? Good! Now let go of the fucking tree, mate ...”
Its round oculars stared at him uncomprehendingly. Cursing, Toni grabbed a hold of Unit Fourteen’s torso webbing and gave him a violent yank, shaking himself so badly in the process that he teetered on the verge of unconsciousness. Two more firm pulls and he was finally able to get Hirum moving at the cost of an uprooted tree.
Hirum backtracked placidly under his mate’s towing force, hugging the tree as if it were some hideous teddy bear, clumps of earth still falling from what remained of its roots. Toni suddenly perceived movement from the smoldering forest. Instinct took over and he slipped behind Fourteen’s bulk.
An earsplitting concussion hammered its way through his skull as Unit Fourteen tore apart, sending incandescent metal through Unit Seven’s hatch and against his right arm, encased in its hydraulic interface. Lava-hot spalls punctured through steel and flesh alike, the impacts shaking him as if he were being ravaged by a predator. Screaming, Unit Seven fell hard upon the earth, splintered wood raining down all over as an orange haze cloaked the unknown assailant from his sight.
Jet engines screamed at full throttle beside his ears, and it took a while to realize the sound wasn’t coming from outside his skull. Aside from the sharp headache, Toni felt little pain, although he was beginning to feel a warm wetness beginning to spread over his right arm and groin. Refusing to deactivate oculars, he attempted to access the integrated tourniquet under the HINT’s armpit. It was no use; every time he came close, his gauntlet collided against the open hatch or his spaulder, forcing his real hand to stop short of its objective. Working against time, Toni decided to deactivate his Suit.
The interior of his interface cavity was a mess. Although partially shrouded in a haze, he could still make out a few branches and an armful of leaves, fragments from Unit Fourteen and a lot of draining hydraulic fluid. He followed the fluid to its source, realizing in horror that it was mixed with blood. Desperately he pulled at the tourniquet near his armpit until the tightness satisfied him, his eyes carefully avoiding the wounds. Within fifteen minutes he would need to relieve the pressure. As if to underline the situation’s urgency, Toni felt the ground begin to vibrate. He reactivated Unit Seven and took a quick look around.
No more than twenty meters off, an armored Suit unlike any Toni had ever seen lumbered into view. It was heavier than the Hammerhead beyond a doubt, and its aerodynamic rifle was still smoking from what looked like radiators along its barrel-length. The unit managed to look squat and sleek at the same time. Its narrow skull turned to observe him.
The air around the unidentified Suit suddenly became alive with supersonic fireflies, each accompanied by a sonic boom, several of them impacting the walker’s superstructure in a festival of fireworks. Unaffected by the impacts, the Suit bounded back east with surprising agility and fired off a casual shot with his rifle, the sound it made no louder than a petard. The microsecond flash produced by the weapon elucidated Toni as to its nature.
Toni heard the characteristic chainsaw-like roar of the Hammers’ thirty millimeter cannon a full second after the fireflies’ appearance, putting them three to four hundred meters away. He searched for the enemy Suit, finding to his relief that it was nowhere to be seen. Locating his rifle beside him, Toni sat up to reach for the weapon. Something slid down onto his Suit’s lap with a metallic clang.
He looked at the object for a while. It was torn in two just as its Suit had been, though where the other half was he wasn’t inclined to speculate. Hirum’s corpse was still encased in its interface, hydraulic and electric wires in disarray, only his right arm remaining, his left having found someplace else to rest. His eyes were semi-closed as if about to fall asleep, an illusion not helped much by the fact that most of his cranium was missing. Toni lifted the corpse delicately from his lap and laid it to rest beside Unit Fourteen’s exposed APU, horrified by how light the body felt to him. What remained of its head bobbed sickeningly as he laid it down, giving him a brief peek at where its brain should have been. Unformed thoughts swimming in his mind, Toni picked up his rifle and began to move east.
It didn’t take longer than a minute for Toni to find what he was looking for. Something between eight and a dozen Hammerheads had opted to engage the Suit, and the hilly forest was alive with ricocheting fireflies and earth-shaking concussions. Every few moments a brilliant white flash could be seen from the converging point of the Hammers’ wrath and, some of those times, the flash struck its target, precipitating another eruption of the unnatural red fire. They were moving fast, faster than Toni could keep up with, but every time he slowed down the memory of the lolling empty head returned to him. He pressed onwards, moving across planta
tion land where fires raged and Hammerhead scrap was everywhere to be seen. His APU sputtered into activity, the sound it made somewhat unhealthier than when last he’d heard it. Finally he put a knee to the earth inside a shallow depression and ordered his Suit to shutdown.
Toni lost track of time for a while as his darker half showed up to pay the world a visit. By the time he finally snapped back into consciousness, he found himself sitting on the cavity floor, his right arm disinfected and bandaged, the tourniquet loosened, and smelling like a latrine.
The arm looked ugly in its blood-soaked bandages, and he realized he wouldn’t be able to reinsert it into the interface. Inspecting the device as it floated before him, he began to cut into wires and hoses with his pocketknife, adding even more hydraulic fluid to the mixed puddle of blood and oil on the floor. Before much time had passed and with the assistance of a few conveniently removable pegs, Toni managed to detach the HINT’s right appendage and toss it out the hatch. Renewed sounds of battle became apparent to his recovering ears, and he peered hard at his surroundings through the broken hatch.
The terrain kept its secrets, whatever they were.
He popped three pain-killers at once, hoping they would be enough. Strapping his right arm carefully to his chest, he slipped once more into the HINT, ignoring the scent of his recent urinary contribution to the device. He activated his Suit and tried to spy the source of the sounds. Gradually he became aware of Hammerheads communicating through loudspeakers to the east. Whatever they were saying, they sounded desperate. The sound of several turbines at full throttle became clear and began to intensify.
From the east, Toni finally spotted several Hammerheads sprinting in single file at speeds he had never imagined possible. The larger trees were spared by the group, the smaller ones simply being shouldered aside as they tore desperately towards the west. He counted four Suits, the rearmost lagging behind by a fair margin. It seemed to be that driver who spoke as they passed obliviously by at a hundred paces.
“GOING FOR IT. BEST OF LUCK!”
The Hammerhead released an object from its gauntlet and then put its footpad into the ground in a braking action, the extremity excavating enough earth to impress any dump truck driver. Before coming to a full stop, the Suit snapped about and fired off a short burst with its cannon. Several missiles rocketed from its spaulder-pods while smoke grenades popped off around him, effectively obscuring the titan from view. Then the Suit detonated in crimson flames, the fireball expanding quickly to envelope the surrounding trees. The enemy Suit appeared from the forest unscathed to calmly survey the carnage.
Toni made ready to engage, but the Suit immediately noticed the Moca and turned its rifle to towards him.
A powerful blast suddenly lifted the hostile Suit off its footpads, engulfing the Unmil in a miniature mushroom cloud before gravity pulled it back to earth. It struck the ground on its back, the impact causing the leaf-less trees surrounding it to shake as if they had suddenly come to life. The detonation appeared to have originated from the Hammerhead’s discarded object.
Toni took advantage.
Activating all armament, he opened fire on the Unmil simultaneously with rocket-pods and rifle. The sound of all systems firing at once rang him like a bell, the sight of the impacts against the hostile Suit’s chassis making the agony worthwhile. Quickly he changed clips and prepared to reengage.
A brilliant flash from the Unmil’s upraised rifle coincided with the complete disintegration of Unit Seven’s right appendage. PAMs popped as the Suit rolled to its left, and Toni hastily decided it was time to become scarce.
He rolled out of the depression and began to wind among the trees as fast as his one-armed Suit could carry him, glancing back occasionally to see whether he was being followed. Seeing nothing, he decided not to risk it and took advantage of the long descent to pick up speed. A tree behind him suddenly exploded into splinters, followed by another a moment later. Giving his dancing compass a cursory look, he took a westish course and prepared to go aerobic.
A full minute later, Toni’s APU was running to an ever louder clattering sound and a burning smell began to intrude upon the interface cavity. His dismayed oculars were staring at the open hatch, watching as diffuse smoke billowed from its interior, when a tree close behind suddenly exploded into splinters. The laser beam burned its way through the wood and struck the fugitive unit below its pressure vessel, where its APU was situated. The impact sent Unit Seven rolling down the hill, colliding hard enough against trees to uproot one and spilling four hundred liters of Resinin oil over the landscape. Toni collided twice against the cavity’s interior wall, and he mentally thanked Ruka for the padding she’d thought to fit there. Taking advantage of his momentum, he rolled himself back onto his feet and took off at a sprint, his lungs beginning to burn on par with his legs.
Strangely enough, Toni suddenly found it much easier to run, and before long he accelerated to a pace beyond anything he had thought possible for a Moca. He managed the following hill so fast that only the occasional tree strike was enough to reduce speeds to their original level. Two minutes later he took the moment to read the accumulating warning messages on his display. The information was like a blade through his heart:
» WARNING: APU PURGED
» WARNING: FUEL TANK RUPTURED
» WARNING: ACAT AT 50 PERCENT CAPACITY
Somehow he had managed to lose his APU and empty his biofuel deposit in his rolling descent. And he had five minutes’ worth of locomotion, at best, before he ran out of air entirely. The cause behind his sudden increase in performance was no doubt due to the loss of so much weight.
Running flat out, he made for a forest island and then adjusted his trajectory to home in on the axis of retreat displayed on his map. The islands were much hardier terrain than the plantation land, probably the reason why they had managed to remain forests in the first place, and that suited him fine; with more landscape to hide behind, agility, not peak speed, became the primary factor for survival.
As Unit Seven came out onto an open area on the island’s opposite side, a laser beam struck its titanium skull, disintegrating it and sending his Suit rolling down what remained of the high ground. Entirely blind, Toni fell into a ravine at the end of the decline, landing on his right side to the sound of a loud snap just before his body double-slammed against the cavity’s wall. The OS automatically activated the Crab Eye system, the pair of wing-like accessories with compact oculars at their ends unfolding elegantly from the torso’s summit.
Picking himself up, Toni turned and bounded unsteadily down the ravine with an intense hissing sound coming from below his midsection. Water vapor began to condense around the Suit’s waist area as cool air bled out, both denouncing his presence to any potential pursuant and warning him that its hollow hipbone had probably been damaged.
The ravine was dangerously straight and bare, and he was fortunate in finding a collapsed bank only moments after his fall. He decided to move parallel to the axis of retreat, suspecting that the enemy armored Suit had placed itself between him and his escape route. Once again Toni found it easier to move, and he realized that the pressure build-up in the Suit’s hollow bones and external tank had probably been slowly decreasing the PAMs’ ability to expel air, a problem inadvertently resolved by the sudden pressure loss from the break. He continued onwards desperately, hoping that somehow the Unmil had give up on him.
His hope proved to be optimistic.
As Unit Seven intruded unexpectedly upon the edge of a wide clearing, the Suit’s lower appendages exploded underneath it, the legless torso plowing into the ground with a tremendous crash before it came rolling to a halt. The dying Suit dug its only remaining gauntlet into the ground and rolled away from the clearing. It kept on rolling, the open hatch scooping up so much earth with every turn that the cavity was becoming akin to a concrete mixer, soiling Toni’s injuries in the process. Keeping his mouth closed, holding his breath and then holding it again when his l
oose travel pack smacked against his body, Toni finally came to rest inside a shallow dip in the terrain.
Raw terror, never too far away, made an opportunistic stab for the limelight. For a while Toni was unable to move or even think; his eyes, however, were already occupying themselves with his surroundings.
He lay in a natural bowl three meters deep by about twenty wide, likely the topographical dimple resulting from a cave collapse. The trees surrounding it were widely spaced but very broad. The ground was soft and moist.
Toni’s mind slowly began to function again. He weighed his options carefully; he could stay and fight and die. He could stay and surrender. He could abandon his Suit and try and escape on foot. Option three appeared by far the most attractive of the lot. Suspecting that he wouldn’t have much time to effect an escape, he tried to look around, only to be reminded that he no longer had any head to swivel. A sound at the edge of his hearing then caused him to freeze and listen very carefully.
Picking up nothing but suspecting every sound, he slowly came to terms with the fact that the Unmil Suit was hunting him. An idea of the desperate kind came to him.
He popped off his twenty-four flares all at once, and they shot off banging and hissing every which way. Supporting himself on his remaining arm, he lifted his torso up awkwardly, looking west where it seemed likely that the enemy unit would have placed itself.
Only its movement gave the Suit away. The hostile was less than fifty meters off, quite difficult to see due to the quality of the Moca’s auxiliary oculars. Toni threw himself onto his back with a shudder and then tried to fire over the depression’s lip with his rifle. The first burst hit the ground nearby, the explosive rounds peppering his Suit with tungsten carbide spheres in the process. He fired higher and managed to get a second burst over the lip. Then his only remaining appendage disintegrated all the way up to its elbow and the spinning rifle hammered into the ground nearby.
“Deactivate suit!” Toni roared.
Finding it very hard to extricate himself from the interface with only one functioning arm, he finally shrugged his way out through the exposed right side, pulled the pen-key out from its slot and bolted for the cavity’s access panel. He reached for his sidearm and put it away in a pouch on his vest, shouldering the Lacrau firmly as soon as he’d hooked the strap to a pad eye on his shoulder. Carefully, he approached the hatch and peered outside.
From its full height of ten meters, the enemy armored Suit peered down at him, its chassis showing more damage than he had noticed from a distance. Toni moved out of sight, thinking hard. A sudden impact projected him against the cavity wall and he struck the HINT’s maintenance panel hard with his unprotected head. Blacking out momentarily, he returned to consciousness with what remained of his Suit still rocking from the kick it had just received.
Toni strode beyond fear and into the land of hate.
Finding his helmet beneath a pile of rubble, he strapped it on firmly and kept out of the enemy Suit’s sight, hoping that the driver would somehow be foolish enough to exit his unit. Another violent shudder shook the Moca, and Toni began to feel his gut sinking as the entire chassis was lifted off the ground. He grimly prepared himself for the end of his life.
Instead the entire cavity shook and shuddered and turned, and the accumulated cargo in the interface cavity began to pour out of the hatch. Feeling once again as if he were inside a concrete mixer, Toni held on as best as he could to the wiring surrounding him, finding himself being shaken almost beyond the resilience of his flesh as rock, dirt, vegetation, what remained of his first-aid kit and his travel pack were ejected into the world beyond. After several frustrated shakes that Toni barely managed to resist, the enemy driver disgustedly released the chassis, and the remains of Unit Seven collided hard against the soil. Toni took the impact against his right side and screamed in pain, far beyond caring about his fate anymore.
A pair of intense strobes suddenly filled his field of vision, making him suspect that he was on the verge of passing out. A moment later, Toni felt more than heard a heavy impact that shook the ground beneath the wreck. Silently he waited, trying to grasp what was happening.
An immense shock-wave suddenly struck the area with enough force to lay the chassis out on its side and strip the leaves from their trees, leaving the foliage to fall to the ground like confetti. A second shock-wave then washed over the tormented land, threatening to turn the Moca’s remains over entirely. Enough was enough; a bloody and butchered Toni abandoned his unit for the last time.
He came out into the open with the Lacrau hanging impotently from its strap, a multitude of leaves still falling upon his skewed helmet as he stared agawk at his surroundings. To his south-west and no more than a couple of kilometers from where he stood, two great mushroom clouds rose majestically from the ground, presiding over their immediate territory like twin gods fallen from the skies. Toni could see them clearly because every tree around him was stripped of its foliage, allowing him also to observe vast forest fires from south to south-east. And the goliath that only moments ago had been trying to shake him out of his Suit like a mouse from an empty can of beans was lying motionless on its back, almost perfectly camouflaged by the fallen leaves.
Hugging his middle, Toni plodded miserably towards his badly beaten travel pack, still reeling from the trauma and sick with the thought of returning to an interface cavity any time soon. He reached his pack only to vomit beside it, the effort of the act causing him to black out once more. He slowly regained consciousness to a persistent hammering noise. Suddenly there was another sound, much like something giving way.
“Sheisse!”
Toni turned towards the source of the sound. Unable to move, he watched as a man’s torso protruded from an opening in the flank of the enemy unit’s breastplate. The man was dirty-blonde and rugged in appearance, and clothed in what looked like a black bodysuit. And he was armed with a sleek rifle, which he promptly raised towards the injured driver.
Toni acted due more to a sudden spark of rage than to fear. Gripping the Lacrau with a slap of his hand, he fired a short burst at the driver, striking him several times. The remaining shots veered away as the rifle danced in his hand and the enemy driver disappeared quickly into his unit. The driver began to laugh from inside the colossus, a genuine laugh that seemed alien to the circumstances. The laughter was followed by several words that Toni failed to understand, and then by a hand -grenade that flew out the hatch towards him.
Toni instinctively sheltered behind his travel pack, and the following concussion promptly riddled it with shrapnel. Both soldiers rose from their shelters simultaneously, Lacrau eight-millimeter projectiles crossing paths with sub-caliber two-millimeter flechettes in a hailstorm of gunfire. Toni was struck twice in his vest and once under his right armpit, hardly feeling the impacts as he watched some of his own strike home. A second grenade detonated nearby, how it had arrived there quite beyond Toni’s understanding. His already injured arm took a fragment and a second one thwacked against his helmet. Taking shelter again, Toni began to get the distinct impression he was losing the fight. Further laughter from the enemy driver only served to add weight to the thought.
Desperately he unpocketed a grenade and pulled out the arming pin with the hook on his vest, giving the hatch a split-second glimpse before he lobbed the device. As the grenade left his hand, a moving shadow near the giant’s armpit caught his attention. The shadow catapulted over the unit’s arm, rolled over the depression’s lip and disappeared from sight just as the hatch swallowed the grenade. He bolted after the driver, his mind too numb to think about leaving the depression from a safer side. As he approached the lip, several impacts against his upper vest felled him, the gradient rolling him back until he was beside the Unmil Suit. He barely had time to notice that the hatch had somehow sealed itself when the enemy unit’s torso ruptured with a thunderous thump, much of the overpressure inside being relieved by what looked to be explosion vents between the giant’s neck and
pauldrons.
Rising unsteadily to his feet, Toni released his rifle to hang at his chest, produced a second grenade and pulled its pin. A part of his brain was having a hard time deciding whether it was currently in command of a human body or an armored Suit, but he shoved the thought aside and instead released the safety lever, lobbing the grenade outwards at a high angle. Three seconds later a blast shook the area, followed by the static-like sound of shrapnel impacting wood at ever greater distances.
Throwing himself forward as if breaching an invisible force field, Toni bounded up and over the lip, picking up as much speed as his ailing body would allow. Grunting in pain and effort, he searched for his quarry. A fleeing figure slalomed among the denuded trees.
He set off in pursuit with another grenade firmly held in his hand, his rifle tucked snugly into the crevice between his vest and his badly bleeding arm. He did not need to pursue for long.
A grenade, surreptitiously dropped by the escaping driver, detonated twenty paces ahead of Toni, drumming shrapnel into the trees before and beside him. Not daring to slacken his pace, Toni deviated left to follow a more parallel trajectory. Despite his bleeding wounds, his burning muscles and lungs and the weight of his equipment, he found himself closing the distance quickly. Soon he was thirty paces away and beginning to suspect that the slowdown was deliberate, but then the fugitive collapsed into the ground and lay there motionless, his only sounds a deep, unhealthy wheezing.
Pocketing his grenade, Toni approached carefully, aiming the Lacrau at the back of the soldier’s head.
“Throw the weapon aside! NOW!” he demanded, his suspicion deep despite the soldier’s unhesitating obedience.
“On your back!” he ordered. Very slowly, the enemy driver obliged.
He was older than he looked from a distance, his handsome face finely lined by time. Despite his wheezing, the soldier wore a wide grin on his face, perhaps more akin to a grimace. As Toni stared at his eyes, those intelligent grey eyes, they stared back at him measuringly. The soldier spoke.
“Yes yes, kinder. You are a very persistent boy. You have captured me. Well done! Now you must show me –”
“You killed my friend ...” Toni interrupted.
The man’s grin faded to a forced smile. He insisted.
“That is unfortunate, but this is war –”
Toni fired a burst into his gut, the soldier’s body wiggling spastically as the rounds connected. The object of his rage turned to the side and let off a long, choked groan, his perspiring face flushing red as the he momentarily ceased to breathe.
“On your back!” Toni demanded, kicking the man viciously as soon as it became clear he wasn’t obeying.
Eventually the soldier did obey and lay gingerly on his back, his renewed breathing shallow and difficult. There was no longer a smile on his face. Instead the soldier looked sullen, almost sulky, and he held his hands high beside his head. The bodysuit appeared almost unchanged except for some stretch-marks in the fabric. That fascinated Toni enough for him to consider repeating the act, but the soldier read his thoughts easily.
“Nein, Nein, kinder! The textile is special, see? If you press slowly it bends easily, but the harder you strike it, the harder it gets. That is all, that is all it is –” The soldier began to wheeze again, the act of speaking having apparently exhausted him.
Toni fired another burst into his midsection and then the electrical firing pin arced across empty air. Hastily he reloaded, a task not aided in the least by his onehandedness. He cursed at his own stupidity; if the soldier had not been rolling in the leaves crying, he would have been fighting a two-handed adversary for his life.
He noticed the man watching him from the corner of his eye, tears of pain still coursing from it. There was pain to be seen there but, more importantly, there was a barely-concealed coldness that he hadn’t seen before. For a moment Toni imagined having to imprison someone as smart and cold-blooded as lieutenant Templeton while having use of only one good arm. The thought helped him to make the decision. He pointed his rifle at the soldier’s head, committed to what he needed to do.
The soldier rolled slowly onto his back, the cold expression replaced by a very cautious one. He spoke again.
“I am sorry, kinder. I have been a soldier for too long and sometimes I forget how deeply young fighters feel a loss. I am your prisoner, as certainly as you would have been mine if I had caught you. I would have honored you as a prisoner, and you will honor me as one too, yes?”
Carefully he turned over onto his stomach, placing his hands behind his back, wrists side-by-side. And then he waited quietly.