AMP The Core (22 page)

I spoke. "What was that? You gave me a shot in the face?"

The officer chuckled. "Sorry, Sir. We need clean skin, and I am not familiar with the suit you have on. You face was available, so I took the shot. Blood flow is good there; you should be feeling the effects shortly."

I blinked my eyes and rocked backwards as the meds kicked in full. "Whoa. That was, like, almost instantaneous. And... I can’t feel my chest at all anymore. Thanks, Doc!"

Six stretchers soon appeared. I and the wounded were gently lifted onto them just before I passed out. When I awoke, a full day had passed. The Colonel was standing behind a glass wall with a grin on his face.

I groggily spoke. "What are you grinning for, Colonel?"

The Colonel shook his head. "Docs say you should be dead, Grange. Those wounded Marines you brought back died within an hour. The Durians must have just infected them. Anyway, the docs say you have a bug that is about as nasty as any they have ever seen. They are baffled by how your blood is fighting it off. You have something different going on that is holding back that virus from completely kicking your ass. My guess is that DNA shot you took back on Molov. Docs think you have some sort of super-DNA in you now."

I looked down at my burned but rapidly healing chest. "Well, at least the burns don’t look so bad."

The Colonel laughed. "The docs had you all zipped up in a BGS suit all night. They just pulled you out about a half hour ago. It seems that suit accelerates the healing process as well as feeding and medicating you. They are swapping out the gel and the filter pack to see if that will speed things up."

I looked up at the Colonel. "So, how did our operation go yesterday?"

The Colonel replied, "It went very well is how it went. We have four Colossun mega-transports parked just outside our walls with half a million androids trapped in their containers."

I attempted to sit up as much as I could. "Are we going to blow the ships or what?"

The Colonel grinned. "We isolated their comms so they can’t get orders, and I have a couple techs that were working with Dr. Touchstone who are in the process of reprogramming them. Then we plan on sending them back with a single android piloting each ship."

I asked, "And this reprogramming—I suppose it is going to do something for us?"

The Colonel again grinned. "Yes it is. About fifteen minutes after they are activated, they are going to turn on their makers. I am expecting a battlefield full of nothing but chaos. It might even delay their use of any androids until they figure out what we did."

I nodded in approval. "Sounds like you are going to exploit this fully, Colonel. Has anyone said how long I will be in here?"

The Colonel’s grin turned to a serious expression. "You have a battle ahead of you, Grange. Docs won’t be releasing you until you are dead or they are sure that virus has been eradicated. We won’t know either of those things until they have happened. Just sit back and heal up, Grange. We can put up a decent fight for a while without you."

I gave the Colonel a half wave as I flopped back onto my pillow. I was exhausted.

The next two days were spent in the infirmary. The Durians had stopped their assaults to assess the security around their landing port at Nevil. Several attempts were made to retake the captured mega-transports that sat just outside our walls, each without success.

At the end of the second day, I woke when a medical tech opened the sealed door and entered my room. "Mr. Grange, looks like you beat this thing. The doctors are still scratching their heads over how you are even alive. And those burns on your chest, those should have taken a month or two to heal, but you will be back to 100 percent in about a week. The docs think it’s that BGS suit. I’ve been studying that thing, and I have to say I think what has happened here is beyond what that suit will do."

I replied, "So, what’s next?"

The tech looked at me. "What’s next is you are free to go. They want to see you in a week to check on those burns, but as of right now, you can go back to the fight if you want. Your blood work shows absolutely no sign of that virus. And the docs took a couple pints of your blood to work with on creating a vaccine for the rest of us."

As I began to get up, I noticed the two new legs that were attached to my lower torso. "What am I supposed to do with these? I don’t have time to train them."

The tech laughed. "Doc George came by with those while you were out. He said they have a 60 percent usage algorithm built into them, so you are not starting from scratch. He says in two days of normal use, you should be at 90 percent."

I tried to stand on the legs and found them to be wobbly, but usable. "Thanks for the help, Corporal. Do I have a helmet around here? And where did I get this full suit?"

The corporal replied, "In the locker over there in the corner. The suit we had to take back from another Marine. He wasn’t happy, but he didn’t complain much either."

I retrieved the helmet and made my way to the Colonel’s office. "Colonel, what do we have on the books for today?"

The Colonel looked up and replied, "I have a team loading our program onto those androids out there. As a kicker, we added some code that we took from the Duke. It’s a long shot, but with a little luck we can spread our worm through parts of their network."

I gestured towards the Colonel’s console. "What city is next up on the defense block?"

The Colonel brought up a map. "Parliot is the next logical target. They have their force in position. We aren’t sure why they haven’t attacked. The Durians are not ones for indecision."

I spoke as I looked over the map. "Any word from outside? From Frig or Ashley?"

The Colonel shook his head. "Not a peep. The only external comm we have had has been the Duke trying to pester everyone for information on you. As far as he knows, that Durian virus took you out."

I replied, "Yeah, he has a way to track every one of us. For some reason, he seems to have lost that ability with me."

The Colonel leaned back in his chair. "Maybe it’s that DNA update you had. The doctors are still baffled that you are alive. Every lab sample they had of blood from anyone else saw that virus spread quickly. They even tried it on samples from the Milgari, Dakar, and Prassi, and even a Bulgar sample we had. That virus blossomed in every one. Your blood fights back and actually does what you would hope it would do by isolating cells that are infected, and then eradicating them."

I crossed my arms in thought. "Hmm. I hadn’t really considered the DNA aspect as what might have knocked the Duke off my trail. Since the lab already has blood samples from me, have them look for anything that would somehow allow us to be tracked that doesn’t show in my blood. I’m guessing it might be a big help to our cause if the Duke no longer knows where each of us is."

The Colonel again shook his head. "That sounds like a stretch to me, Grange. How could anyone possibly track every Human being? That would be six hundred million objects at once."

I nodded. "Improbable, yes; impossible, no. Remember, we now believe the Duke transported nearly four billion of us from one galaxy to another. It’s hard to imagine the assets he would have to have at his disposal for doing such a task, but it was done."

The Colonel sighed. "You know, it seems that not a day goes by that we don’t learn something new, something we would have thought not possible. War used to be easy, Grange. Two sides came together and fought. You hoped you had the manpower to have the edge on the day it happened. Now, it seems there are too many other factors involved, and they are constantly changing. We have done well to be where we are. A big part of that is from your contributions."

I held up my hand. "Whoa, Colonel. I have just been bouncing along through this whole thing. You give me too much credit for just being there. Your leadership has had more to do with our ability to survive than my poking my nose into everyone’s business."

The Colonel shook his head. "You know, I have only come across a handful of people that have had an impact like you have on those around them. One of those people had the same last name as you. Your father would have been proud of you, Grange. Heck, I know I’m proud to just have known you!"

I rolled my eyes. "OK, Colonel. I can see it’s time for me to go. Otherwise my head is going to start swelling from all the cheese you are pumping into my ears."

The Colonel reached out his big left arm and slapped me on the back as I began to stand. "Glad to see you got your legs back, Grange. I’ll let you know when we need your services again."

As I walked out of the Colonel’s office, I ran into George in the hall. "Hey, Doc!"

George replied, "I see you are already walking."

I nodded. "You did good with these new legs, Doc. Last time it took me a week to get to this point."

George stepped back and looked over my new legs. "Walk down the hall and back for me."

After walking a few steps, I turned back. "I feel like I’m putting on a fashion show or something."

When I returned, George had his right hand propped up under his chin. "Hmm. Looks like you are favoring the left leg. I’ll have to make a slight adjustment to the balancing algorithm."

I replied, "Well, just keep doing whatever it is you’ve been doing, because they feel great already. I might still be a little unstable with certain moves, but overall, with a little effort, I can do anything I need to do."

Word then came over the comm. The Durians had resumed their attacks. Parliot was now under siege.

I walked back into the Colonel’s office. "Where do you want me, Colonel!"

The Colonel had two staffers standing beside him. "Grange, it looks like they are preparing to open another front. We are watching a massive buildup near East Fallia. If they punch through there, then West Fallia is next. The significance is that would place them on the outskirts of this city. They have too large a force for us to keep them out of here. We need for them to stick to the attrition plan if we are going to have a defense near-equal to their attacking force."

I replied, "So, how do we get them back on track at Parliot?"

The Colonel swiped several screens and sent a staffer away with several numbers. "I am sending orders to abandon Parliot and to then weaken our force at Gamella. That might draw them back into the pattern we have been pursuing. What I think this shows, however, is that the Durians may be onto our strategy now. The Fallias are nicely defended; if we are lucky, each will last for a day."

The BGS Marines were ordered to East Fallia in anticipation of the coming assault. The Colonel’s techs had fully uploaded the worm virus onto the Colossun androids that we held captive. In a final raid by the Durians, we allowed the mega-transports to be recaptured and taken away.

As I landed in the fields in front of East Fallia, York landed beside me. "Glad to see you back out here, Mr. Grange. Looks like your luck is still holding!"

I replied, "I sometimes wonder which side of that equation the real luck is on, York. I’ll keep fighting so long as I have breath in me, but I am so ready for all this fighting to be over."

York looked out in the direction the assault would be coming from. "I think you might have your answer one way or the other in the next week, Sir. If we make it that long, I think the tide of this war might have turned."

I looked at York. "Why would you say that? The other side has been constantly reinforcing, while we have a fixed defense."

York sighed. "I’m not supposed to mention it, Sir, but we have a new weapon that might be ready in as little as ten days. It’s a fission bomb, Sir. Dirty and nasty for us all, but we can take out every ship on that landing pad along with all the troops positioned there. That would make one serious dent in their assault capabilities. Typically nukes aren’t even a consideration because of a difficult delivery and a nasty cleanup afterward. With a Wren, we can put one right where we want it."

I laughed. "So, a fission weapon is going to be our salvation. Hmm."

York replied, "As I said, Sir, we never had a good delivery system before. Nukes are easy to detect, and with conventional delivery such as shooting them at something or dropping them, they can be easily destroyed by ion defenses. I suspect the Durians changed their strategy based on detecting our creation of the fissionable materials the bomb requires. Unless we can hold them off from reaching our core cities now, it won’t really matter."

I looked up as the first of the attackers at East Fallia began to top a hill that was eight hundred meters away. "Well, I guess we find out now. Knock ’em dead over there, York!"

The invaders were soon upon us, and the massive amounts of killing began. I squeezed the triggers on my weapons as rapidly as they were again ready to fire. I could hardly feel the burn wounds on my chest, as the BGS suit kept a set amount of pain medication pumping through the bio-gel. I glanced down as I sent the destruction out with each finger squeeze. I was happy to once again be standing as I fought.

The battle for East Fallia lasted all of sixteen hours before the walls were overrun and the remaining troops evacuated. Our BGS Marines cleared a swath through the attacking troops, creating a pathway for retreat to West Fallia. As the Colonel had predicted, nearly 40 percent of the 350,000 troops who had manned the walls of East Fallia made it out by the end. Those Marines would live to fight again, when their kill ratios would be much higher.

As we prepared to defend West Fallia, a comm came in from the Colonel. "Grange, it looks like our androids have been activated. Their landing port appears to be in complete chaos. I have a Wren circling over it right now, reporting back. I’m patching through a video feed."

On the video, thousands of Colossun androids were in a fierce fight with a company of Durian Helgrons and three brigades of Dakar regulars. From what I could see, our newly programmed androids were pushing the others back. I then took note of a Dakar frigate that came down just above Nevil and began to fire upon its own ships. Our worm virus was spreading!

As I watched with the corners of my lips turned up, the Colonel again came over the comm. "Grange! Prep your BGS people for an assault on East Fallia. We are going to see if we can push them back."

As I looked back towards West Fallia, I could see hundreds if not thousands of Marines dropping over the high walls onto the farmlands below. Within ten minutes, forty thousand Marines were standing in the field behind me. York waved her arm in the air, and the assault force began to move forward.

As the single Wren circled around Nevil, the remaining seven began to perform strafing runs on the troops that reinforced East Fallia. Within seconds of York’s wave, the entire force was sprinting towards the just-fallen city.

My BGS suit again worked to restrain the adrenaline that was coursing through my veins as we charged ahead. As I fired off the first few rounds from my weapons, I found myself yelling at the top of my lungs. With my helmet secure, there would be no one to hear my battle cry but me.

As I reached the outer wall, I used my BHD glove to power up and over the top. When I landed on the other side, I began to blast away at the Durians and Dakar who were busy trying to mount a defense against an assault they were not prepared for.

Five Durians lined the top of a near wall. I powered up to their position and blinked in and out as I ran through their position. A tungsten round then took out the three Dakar just beyond.

As we pushed the enemy back around the walls of East Fallia, the Durians switched tactics. Thirteen Colossun cruisers dropped from the sky and began to pound the ground around the city. We had no defense against the heavy ion cannons, as the ion inhibitors for East Fallia had already been destroyed. Our guns at West Fallia fired repeatedly at the destroyers, doing damage with every hit. But the Durians had accomplished what they had intended. Our push forward had been halted, and our casualty count was rising rapidly.

The Colonel came over the comm. "Grange! Get your people out of there! We’ve lost two BGS units, and a third is badly injured. Your suits won’t shield you from those big cannons!"

I spoke. "Colonel, eight of those cruisers are lifting off due to the fire West Fallia is laying on them!"

The Colonel replied, "And five new cruisers are on their way. It’s time to cut our losses and run, Grange. Pull back to West Fallia until we can figure this out."

I spread the word as I powered up and over the outer wall. As I reached halfway across the fields between the cities, a heavy ion bolt struck the ground beside where I flew. My active skin shot up to 86 percent shielding capacity. The single cruiser continued its random fire as I fled.

Just before reaching the safe area around West Fallia, I turned my head back and looked up for the new cruisers. As I zoomed in with the optics on my HUD, I was stunned to see one of the new cruisers firing upon the others. Our worm virus had disrupted their counteroffensive!

I raised the Colonel on the comm. "Colonel, are you seeing that battle raging between those cruisers? Is it worth us taking another shot at East Fallia?"

The Colonel replied, "We are watching that unfold, Grange. Two Durian ships are now on their way down. Sit tight and wait for things to settle. We can’t risk losing BGS Marines to that heavy fire. You guys are good for 25 percent of our kills. You are too valuable."