MERCS: Crimson Worlds Successors (7 page)

Cain walked toward a long wall at the end of the ready room.  There were empty racks stretching for a hundred meters, with one suit remaining in place.  He walked over toward the hulking black armor, sliding his shirt over his head as he did.  “Open,” he said, as he continued to undress.

“Open,” the AI responded as the suit popped like a clamshell.

“Diagnostics?”  Cain pulled the last of his clothes off, stowing them on the small shelf next to the suit.

“All systems confirmed 100% functional, General.”

The AI’s voice was calm, almost human-sounding, but not quite.  He had a passing memory of Hector, his father’s AI.  Hector had accompanied the elder Cain during most of his career.  Darius could remember his father’s stories, liberally laced with complaints about the poor attitude the AI had developed.  It had all been part of a program implemented by the Corps, an elaborate experiment with enhanced personality AIs designed to adapt to their individual officers to lower stress and improve interaction.  Darius didn’t know if it had been a success, but he suspected it had been, at least to a greater extent than his father had ever admitted.  Erik complained about Hector, but he’d also brought the AI with him when he retired, and he spent the next fifteen years sparring with it about one thing or another, as the computer presence went about the mundane tasks of running the Cain household.

“Very well, begin power up sequence.”  Darius’ AI had substantially less personality than Hector.  When he’d had the Mark VIII units put into production, he hadn’t worried about esoteric details like customized AIs.  His suits’ systems served their purposes and did their jobs, without excess banter with their wearers.

Cain backed into the suit, pushing himself upwards and into place.  “Close,” he said, and he prepared himself for the inevitable pain as the suit shut and a series of probes and intravenous connections jabbed into him.  The Mark VIII suits were the ultimate union between man and machine, but the interface that made all that possible was not a gentle one.

“All systems activated.  Neural interface established and functioning.”

No shit, it’s established.
  The neural connection was the worst part of suiting up—a thick probe that drove into the top of the spinal column.  It was something new in the Mark VIII armor, an innovation that no one but the Eagles had, at least to the best of Cain’s knowledge.  It allowed direct communication between the wearer’s thoughts and the artificial intelligence controlling the armor.  It came close to allowing an Eagle trooper to control the mechanicals of his suit the way he moved an arm or a leg—or took a deep breath.  But it hurt like a motherfucker going in.

“Let’s go,” he snapped to the AI.  An instant later he felt the suit moving down the track toward the launch tubes.  Landing was one area where the Mark VIII suits were a step ahead of the Mark VII’s his father and the Marines had worn.  The “eights” as they were called, were capable of individual orbital insertion, while the Mark VII’s had been designed for use with landing craft.

Darius could feel himself moving down the launch prep track.  He knew the procedure so well, he could imagine every step of it as he stood silently inside his suit.  First, the disposable thrust pack would be bolted to one of his armor’s multi-use hardpoints.  Then, the three braking parachute modules would be attached, after which he would be encased in a thin metal launch pod.  The cocoon would then be force-filled with expanding, heat-resistant foam before he was placed in the electro-magnetic launch tube.

A Black Eagle ready for launch was almost like a bullet in a gun, ready to be blasted out of the ship into the upper atmosphere of the target world.  It was a streamlined system, requiring far less tonnage of support materials than the old Gordon and Liggett landers the Marines had used.  It allowed Cain to carry almost twice as many soldiers per ton on his transports, a huge advantage in the leaner times that had come upon mankind.

He felt the pod moving to a horizontal position as it fed into the catapult.  He was not only in the first wave, he was in the initial group of that wave.  He knew his people were going to have a tough fight on their hands on Lysandria.  There was nothing he could do about that.  But he could damned sure be on the front lines with them, and nobody was going to keep him from that.

“
Eagle One
command center, this is General Cain…commence landing operations.”

Chapter 6

“We just got word on the com unit.  The Martians are making another series of aid drops.  We should have ours sometime tomorrow.”  Ellie was walking up the path toward the small shelter she and Axe had shared for 25 years.  She had a big smile on her face.  “That’s really going to help us with our winter stores.”

Axe turned abruptly when he first heard her, and he slipped something behind his back, hiding it before she rounded the corner and looked up at him.  He stifled a cough and gave her his own smile.  “That’s great news.  We can really use it.”  Jericho’s population had been growing steadily over the past few years, and now there were over a thousand men, women, and children crowded within its makeshift walls.  Axe had been determined to turn away the last few bands of refugees, but Ellie had convinced him to take them in.

He understood her sympathy, but he also knew there was a limit to what they could do.  Thirty years after the Final War, Earth was still a ravaged wasteland, its poisoned hills and fields traversed by wandering bands, survivors of the doom that had claimed most of mankind.  Axe knew how tenuous life was for the scattered groups, but he felt his first responsibility was to Jericho’s existing residents, many of whom had been with him for years and who had helped to build the settlement to its current state of relative prosperity.  It was a constant challenge to feed the people they already had.  If it hadn’t been for the Martian drops…

He remembered the early years, right after the war, the nightmare just to survive from day to day.  Axe had been about 40 klicks from the city when the bombs hit.  New York had shrunken considerably since its peak centuries earlier as a massive metropolis, but the Manhattan Protected Zone had still occupied a prominent place on the target lists of the enemy Superpowers.  Half a dozen of the big city-killer warheads had impacted by the time the attacks ceased, leaving nothing whatsoever of the kilometer-tall towers that had reached into the sky.

Axe and his small band of followers had taken refuge deep in the cellar of a long-abandoned factory, hiding from bombs, from radiation—from the nightmare that had descended on the world.  But eventually they ran out of food and water, and they were forced to leave the relative safety of their hiding place in search of sustenance.

They didn’t dare get any closer to the radioactive hell surrounding the city, so they went east, eventually reaching the very end of what had been called Long Island.  Once a densely-populated part of the massive New York metropolis, the island had long been mostly abandoned, a sea of crumbling suburbs where millions had once lived, before the government decided people were easier to control in densely populated cities than they were dispersed over hundreds of small towns.  Now there was little but the remnants of 150 year-old houses and stores, all that still stood to attest that so many had once called the place home.

Axe had realized his small band needed to get off the island to survive.  They’d managed to scavenge what they had needed to survive in the short term, but Axe knew they had to find someplace they could hunt and grow food if they were going to survive in the years to come.  His limited knowledge of geography told him the route back west was out of the question.  There was no way off the island in that direction that didn’t come within the lethal radiation zone around the city.  In the end, they left from the east, building crude rafts and barges to cross the narrow sound to the coast of what had once been Connecticut.  They’d then marched north for weeks, staying away from the deadzones and finally settling in a wooded area right next to a river.

Axe didn’t know what the place had been called, what state or government administrative unit had ruled over it, but none of that mattered anymore.  It was far enough from the devastated and polluted areas closer to the old urban centers, as good a place as any to stop fleeing, and that is what they did, struggling to build their growing community through one challenge after another.  They survived the Great Dark, the two-year long partial nuclear winter that followed the war, and a hundred other calamities after that, but thirty years later they were still there. 

Axe had been a gang leader in the Brooklyn sector of old New York, every bit as ruthless as any of his brethren.  He’d learned to kill at a very young age, and he’d murdered more people than he could remember.  He was ashamed of his youth now, though he realized his experience had helped him lead his band of refugees to this place, and to provide a haven for countless others over the years.  Had he been a normal Cog, he knew he’d have died in Brooklyn when the bombs came.  How many of his thousand would also be dead in that scenario?  There was no way to know, but he suspected the answer was most of them.  He’d often considered the strange way life worked, that his earlier brutality had given him the ability to save so many lives later.

He shook out of his thoughtfulness as he felt Ellie sit down next to him.  “What’s wrong?” she said.  “You look like something’s bothering you.”  She smiled and put her arm around his back.

Ellie was another odd addition to his little band.  He’d found her when he was scavenging the Manhattan Protected Zone just before the final attacks, robbing whatever he could in the wake of the Cog revolts that had swept the city.  She’d been a captive of a member of the elite of the Political Class, and he’d found her locked up, brutalized and left behind to die when the politicians had fled.

She had been skittish and terrified.  For months, he’d worried she might take off and die on her own somewhere, alone.  But she had stayed with him.  It took a long time for her to get past what had happened to her, but she found the strength she needed, and they’d been together ever since.

“Nothing’s wrong.”  He was lying, and he suspected she saw through it.  But she was used to him being overly protective.  He tried to change his tone to something more cheerful, with very limited success.  “You mind tracking down Horace and letting him know about the drop?  Tell him to put a group together to go collect it.”  The Martians had been making humanitarian deliveries for twenty years now, air drops that usually came pretty close to landing at the designated coordinates.  A Martian drop was full of useful items—food, medicine, and tools—and he knew if he didn’t have his people out there and ready to load it up and bring it all back to Jericho, someone else would find it.

“I’ll take care of it.”  Ellie looked at him strangely.  Axe knew she could tell something was wrong.  He never had been able to lie to her.  She leaned in and gave him a kiss on the cheek then she got up and walked down the path toward the center of the village, looking back a couple times as she did.

Axe struggled to hold back the spasm until she vanished from view.  Then he pulled the rag he’d hidden behind his back and coughed hard half a dozen times.  He pulled it from his mouth, looking down at the blood soaked cloth.  He wasn’t sure what it was, but had a pretty good idea.  He’d seen the long term effects of radiation exposure far too many times.  Jericho had buried its share of residents who had died far too young, victims of compromised immune systems and various cancers.  The Final War had been thirty years before, but it was still killing people.

Axe knew he and Ellie hadn’t escaped all of the effects of being too close to New York.  He was fairly certain one of them, at least, was sterile.  They’d tried for years to conceive a child, with no success.  But after decades of constant worry, he’d begun to hope they had been spared anything worse.  Until now.

He coughed again.  More blood, and pain this time too.  Whatever it was, the symptoms were getting worse. 
Cancer, I guess.  Probably in my lungs.
  Before the Final War, cancer was an easily cured disease, usually requiring just a few injections.  It was such a simple treatment, it was even available to the lower classes.  But targeted immunotherapy was part of the knowledge that was lost along with so much else, on Earth, at least, when man had finally tried to destroy himself.

Something else worried him too.  The larger Jericho’s population grew, the harder the settlement was to control.  Axe had come up in the old gangs of New York, and he’d seen firsthand the brutality people could perpetrate on each other.  The pathetic refugees he’d taken in had been enormously grateful, but Axe knew that kind of thing only lasted so long.  Now he heard grumbling, complaints about allowing new people in, anger at his strict rules and heavy security.  The newer arrivals clashed with the old residents, and there was a growing feeling of unrest.

He had maintained control for a long time, doing whatever was necessary, including executing several dozen of his own citizens over the years.  He’d found those instances to be particularly difficult.  After all the destruction, he knew the last thing the survivors needed to do was keep killing each other.  But there was no room in his community for those who preyed on the others, as he had once done, and no resources to waste on keeping prisoners perpetually jailed.  When the necessity arose, Axe himself had performed the executions.  It wasn’t something he felt he could order someone else to do.

Jericho wasn’t a democracy, and he made that completely clear to every refugee he allowed to become part of the community.  He’d seen the world people had created for themselves before, the poor judgment they’d shown, and he didn’t intend to allow that to happen to his small settlement.  But he also knew the dynamics of force and brutality.  If he let his guard down, one day someone would unseat him and take control.  He’d been confident that he could counter any threats, at least while he’d been strong and healthy, but what about when he was gone?  What would happen to his people then?  What would happen to Ellie?

*        *        *        *        *

“Boss, we found a settlement of some kind.  It’s about ten klicks to the east.”  Peter Barkley scrambled down the steep hillside, pushing his way through the heavy brush.  He was clad in dark green fatigues, with heavy combat boots reaching almost to his knees.  He had a martial look of a sort, but it was less like a soldier and more like a…hunter.

Rufus Grax turned and watched his lieutenant barreling down the slope, plunging through the heavy scrub.  He winced as he saw Barkley plow through a particularly dense section of brush.  “Careful, Pete, these bushes are a motherfucker.”

Barkley stumbled to a halt right in front of Grax.  “No shit,” he said, pulling a large branch full of thorns from the side of his neck.  He shook himself and yanked another handful of prickly leaves from his fatigues. 

“Like I said, Boss, a settlement.  A damned big one, built right alongside the river.  The place has walls and everything.”  Barkley was obviously excited.  “There must be close to a thousand people living there.  And they got their shit together, Boss, so they’re probably healthy, well fed.  Good stock, not like that last bunch, half rotten inside.  They’ll fetch a good price.”

Grax stood still, listening to his second-in-command.  He glanced absent-mindedly in the direction Barkley had come from.  He nodded, but his expression was full of doubt.  “Sounds like a good haul, Pete, but I wonder if we can handle that ourselves.  A village that size probably has at least some weapons.  And that’s a lot of people, even if they’ve just got clubs.  It’s gonna be a lot harder to take them than grabbing a dozen scavengers in the woods.”

“There are a lot of them, Boss, that’s true.  But they’re still Earthers…refugees.  They may manage to feed themselves, but any fighting experience they have is just against wanderers.  I doubt they’ve ever faced an organized attack.  We’ll blow a section of the wall out and be in there before they know what hit them.”  Barkley’s voice was arrogant, dismissive.  “They’ll probably give up without a fight.  If not, we’ll take ‘em out with the gas, and by the time they wake up, they’ll be all chained up and halfway to the clearinghouse.”

Grax stared at his second-in-command.  “I just don’t know.  After thirty years, they must have had their share of scrapes.”  He paused.  “I can call it in and get some help.  Central Command can divert a couple more teams here, give us some backup.”  He hesitated, taking another look in the direction of the village.  “Better to be careful than to get in too deep.”  His voice was far from certain.

Barkley frowned.  “Yeah, but then we’re splitting the pot more ways.  And
we
found the place, Boss.”  Barkley glanced back over his shoulder in the general direction of the settlement.  Then he swung back to face Grax.  “They looked like prime candidates.  If we take this down ourselves, we’re looking at one hell of a payday.”

Grax sighed and stood silently for half a minute.  Then he smiled and said, “Ok, Pete.  We could use a good payday like that.  And they’re just Earthers, after all.”  He sighed, a nervous expression on his face.  “But I want this executed perfectly.  No mistakes.”

“No mistakes, Boss.  We can hit them at dawn.”

*        *        *        *        *

Axe sprang out of bed at the sound of the first shot.  Ellie hadn’t heard it, but he woke her up scrambling noisily across the small room, throwing on his clothes.

“What is it, Axe?”  She stared at him with bleary eyes.

“Gunfire.  Sounded like outside the south wa…”