Into the Black: Odyssey One (35 page)

“A… are you sure you should be doing that?”

Corporal Deacon glanced back at the police woman, he’d handed his weapon off too, exchanged a brief glance with Mackay, then shrugged in the armor, one of the grossly exaggerated motions that armored troops got used to using, “Just having a look.”

Beside him, Sergeant Steward knelt down and reached down to run his finger through the creature’s ‘blood’. He almost instantly yanked his hand back with a curse and drove his hand into a pile of rubble to scrape the liquid off.

“Mother fuck!” The Sergeant cursed.

“What is it, Sarge??” Deacon jerked around, weapon coming up.

“Fucking shit started eating away at my suit!” Steward growled, checking his finger. “Fuck!”

Deacon’s rifle dropped, “No shit?”

“No shit.”

“Whoa…,” the younger man said, voice filled with a kind of awe. “These things actually got acid for blood? Cool.”

“Shut up,” Steward growled, using a tone that made Deacon take a step back.

“It’s not acid,” Erin muttered, checking the basic analysis, his HUD was putting up for him. “It’s some kind of super-heated compound. It just ate off some of the ablative material that survived your jump, Sarge.”

“Oh,” Deacon sighed, sounding disappointed.

“Deacon, you need to get your candy ass out of the TV room once and a while and quit watching that sci-fi shit,” Steward told him in no uncertain terms. “That stuff will rot your brain, what’s left of it.”

Deacon didn’t have an audible reply, so Mackay just rolled his eyes as he spoke up. “These things have molten rock or something for BLOOD. Would you two mind saving the mutual bitch session for when we’re back on the Odyssey??”

“Molten rock…,” Deacon sounded interested again, and he stepped up and dropped down, checking out the corpse of the drone, flicking slowly through a series of computer enhanced images on his armor HUD. “No way…”

Steward and Mackay waited patiently for him to explain what the hell he was talking about, but all the soldier did was let out a long low whistle and repeat himself.

“No fuckin’ way…”

“Deac!” Steward finally snapped.

“Huh?” Deacon jerked around, “Yeah Sarge?”

“What the fuck are you jabbering about?”

“Wha… Oh, sorry, Sarge,” the soldier flicked his fingers a couple times and sent a download over to the other two’s suit HUD’s. “I think they’ve got silicon based chemistry… But whatever it is, it’s got a real high tolerance to heat…”

He glanced back at the cooling body for a moment, then back at the other two. “Nasty little things for sure, but it might be good news for us.”

“How?” Steward asked in clipped tone.

“Well, that thing there,” he gestured to the dead drone, “has a current body temp that’s over one eighty… I’m guessing that the living ones are hotter…”

“So we can use the IR sensors in our suits to spot them easier… all right…” Steward nodded. “All right, now THAT is what I like to hear, kid.”

“More than that,” Mackay added, thinking furiously. “Our bullets can track heat. If these things are that much hotter than humans, we can activate the thermal guidance chips without worrying about hitting locals.”

“Bingo, El Tee,” Deacon grinned under his darkened face shield.

*****

“I hear you,” Major Brinks said as he mulled over the information. “Hold back on the IR until I get back to you.”

“Confirmed,” Mackay replied.

Brinks frowned as he pondered the thought, while quickly browsing the suit network until he found the person he was looking for, “Lieutenant.”

“Sir?” Savoy’s response was instantaneous, the whining crack of gunfire in the background.

“Got a problem for you.”

“That’s what we Tech Geeks like to hear, Major,” Savoy smirked. “What’s up?”

“These things are running a body temp over one eighty,” Brinks started to explain, “The thought that Corporal Deacon had was…”

“Crank up the sensitivity in the rifles,” Savoy interrupted, grimacing. “Shit.”

“What?”

“Nothing Sir,” Savoy shook his head, jostling the image slightly. “I just should have thought of it first. Give me two minutes.”

Brinks nodded the signed off, leaving Savoy on the other side to mutter a mild curse for having missed something so obvious. He frowned locating the team with the closet Drasin drones.

“Bermont, I need you to do something for me, before you move out,” he said a moment later.

*****

Sean Bermont paused in his handling of the ‘chute’, cocking his head briefly as Savoy told him what he needed.

“Gotcha, Sav,” he said after a moment, then switched his tactical frequency to the squad level. “Russell, we need an IR scan of one of those things, while they’re still kicking!”

A few meters away, Corporal Russell was kneeling on the roof of the apparent access building that adorned the top of the massive sky scraper. “No problem. We’ve got three of the bastard’s jogging over here, right now.”

“Great,” Bermont muttered, yanking one of the guy wires from the ‘chute’ and pulling one of the locals to his feet. “This isn’t going to tickle.”

While the man looked at him oddly Bermont looped the wire under his arms and around his torso. He clipped it to a loop built into the wire for just that purpose. Bermont then grabbed the second man, and repeated the process.

“Two to evac,” he signalled, then turned to see the next chute swoop in.

The two men had a chance to look confused and scared out of their minds, as the line was suddenly drawn taught and they were pulled off their feet, while the wire loop suddenly bit into their chests and under arms. They yelped in pain, but the remote-controlled ‘chute’, didn’t really care one way or another, as it hung low, then dropped over the edge of the skyscraper, using the immense building itself as cover, as Savoy guided the two to safer ground.

“Wait here,” Bermont told the third, the woman who had appeared to be in charge, “I’ll be right back.”

Then he reached up and grabbed a handgrip on the bottom of the ‘chute’ and kicked off the ground, skimming the rooftop over to where Curtis was still unconscious.

*****

“Beautiful,” Savoy whispered as the suits tactical network grabbed the information that Russell was picking up for him, just over a kilometer from where he currently stood. He tossed the numbers over to a module he had developed for on the fly programming.

From there it was just an electronic hop, skip, and jump to recoding the computer buried deep in the carbon fibre chassis of his rifle.

Just after the turn of the twenty-first century, it had become obvious to all, but the most conservative of military men, that while the aging 5.56NATO round, and its bigger brother the 7.62NATO caliber, had served their countries with distinction, it was time to develop a new caliber for military actions.

The old style rifle rounds were still enjoying nearly a hundred percent infiltration in militaries around the world, but the development of armors that could stop even high powered rifle rounds, while remaining man portable was spelling the end for the, then venerable, M16 and ever popular AK47 weapons.

Several competing designs emerged by 2015, all vying to replace the stopgap designs that had been implemented in various, occasionally successful, attempts to extend the life of the widely used munitions.

The European Union, along with its then Allies, in the slowly forming Eastern Block, had begun developing new munitions that could perforate Class X hard shell body armor from distances of up to a hundred meters. Their designs followed a new trend in military munitions, started two decades earlier by many of the leading companies in the field.

They focused on smaller, high velocity rounds, designed to perforate armor while still dumping nearly all of their remaining energies into the target.

Many of these designs became the weapon of choice in the Terror Wars, which preceded the last World Conflagration. The FN P90 and The Heckler and Koch MP7, to name two, became early favorites for the new military standard, the Elite Anti-Terrorist Tactical Units.

However, in the United States especially, dissatisfaction quickly arose in the upper echelon of the military ranks. A dissatisfaction that stemmed from the fact that many of those men had cut their teeth in the last REAL warzones of the twentieth century, and they didn’t believe that the small munitions, no matter how well designed, were going to cut it on a real battlefield.

And thus was born the MX-112 Infantry Assault Rifle.

When it was first introduced, the accolades were unimpressive.

The rifle was big, it was clunky, and it weighed as much as three or even four of the smaller weapons preferred for the standard mission specs of the era. It only carried 75-90% of the bullets one of its smaller brethren could manage, and it had a nasty habit of over-penetrating lightly armored targets and potentially killing anything that was hiding behind them.

For the new standard of the day, it was an obsolete behemoth that no SWAT or EATT-U team would even consider using.

The United States Marine Corps, however, didn’t much care about any of that.

The MX-112 was big, nasty, and it put equally big and nasty holes into whatever it was fired at. It didn’t jam, it fired underwater if someone was stupid enough to try it and if the barrel was clogged with sand, the first bullet simply cleared it and greased the way for the rest.

Put simply, the Marines of the day were in love from grunts to Officers and beyond.

The rest of the world, however, wasn’t.

So, aside from that one branch of the United States military, the basic design wallowed in near obscurity for almost a decade.

Then the Asian Block bombed Tokyo, in retaliation for Japan’s refusal to abandon its economic partners and side with the Block in the political power struggles that had developed over three decades of the War on Terror.

Thus, was born the Third World War.

During some of the earliest land battles, the Block soldiers were understandably perturbed to find that their opponents on the beaches were carrying rifles that were able to perforate light to medium armored Vehicles and still retain enough energy to kill the soldiers inside.

And in that heated forge, a new military legend was born.

A legend that had continued to grow over the decades that passed, as the rifle underwent revisions and evolutionary changes, until the latest product found its way into the hands of one Lt Savoy, NAC Odyssey, on an alien world over a hundred light years from where the rifle was born.

Savoy flipped open a programming window in his HUD, keeping one eye on his threat indicator while calling up the onboard computer built into the rifle. The electronics were entirely optional on the weapon, but when they were in use they offered several degrees of sophistication over any mere convention weapon.

One of those degrees was what concerned Savoy, at this moment in time. He tapped into the software that controlled the rudimentary seeker systems on the heavy caliber bullets, and tapped a single digit into them.

In about thirty-three seconds of programming, most of that time used just to find the appropriate line of code in the first place, he had altered the thermo-sensor’s sensitivity from 96 degrees Celsius to a toasty ,196 degrees. Then he smiled and squirted the program change to every man in his unit.

“Savoy to all teams. Apply incoming program change, and switch weapons to thermal-guidance.”

*****

Milla Chans, Ithan of the Colonial Fleet, found she was forced to pry open the lift doors within the immense construction’s transport tubes. The maglev tubes were necessary to provide for the transport needs of the pyramid’s inhabitants.

Milla knew from personal experience that a great many people within the immense habitats never left them, and never wanted to. Each one was a city in its own right, and they were merely grouped this close together because of convenience.

She made her way through the tube, still moving a little awkwardly in the armor she had been given, looking out for a debarkation point.

She knew that at this level in the pyramid, the local population would be sparse, in spite of the marginally less room available at the apex of the huge tubular design. Those that lived in the apex habitat that was suspended directly below the point of the pyramid would be among the most influential families, and thus able to secure the entire habitat for themselves.

She wasn’t looking forward to bursting in on them, in the slightest.

The debarkation point was fairly easy to locate, and she found herself wishing she’d been carrying one of the standard issue lasers, she normally had. The weapon they had provided her, grudgingly though it may have been, was almost certainly not suited to opening doors.

Milla sighed and looked over the debarkation doors in annoyance.

Finally she reached forward and began to go to work prying them apart.

*****

Lieutenant Mackay sent the coded pulse to his rifle computer, then flipped the weapon over to burst mode, as he glanced around at his squad mates.

“Come on. We’d better move out,” he glanced along the long street that led toward the three towering pyramids that appeared to float eerily over the placid waters, supported by massive struts sunk into the ground below.

“’Fraid that might not be a great idea, Sir.”

“What’s up?” He asked, turning back.

“Roving recon shows another squad of those suckers coming this way, Lieutenant,” Sargent Steward told him, pointing off to one side. “Not sure what the hell is going on with them, but the ‘chutes’ are having trouble locking them down…”

“Hey, no sweat,” Deacon grinned under his helmet. “We took these bozos easy. We’ve got the guns, and we got the mobility…”

A screeching hissing sound jerked all their heads almost straight up, just in time to see three of the Drasin drones clear one of the smaller buildings, the one that was only thirty stories tall, with a bound and come crashing down to street level.

“You were saying, Corporal!” Sargent Steward growled as the three of them scattered, grabbing the local cop as they ran, just ahead of the sizzling blast from the enemy weapons.