The Guardians of Sol (26 page)

January 12, 2290. The Forge.

I was in the engineering bay again (Ruiz had finally given up on trying to get me to stay away when I didn't have actual business since it didn't seem to affect my fiancée’s work) waiting for Rachel to get off for her lunch hour. I think that I may have been annoying her somewhat this morning so I was keeping to myself in my squad’s secluded area. Everyone’s armor was clean, repaired, and utterly customized to each of my soldiers.

Well, almost everyone’s armor. The suits for Hektor and the others were still under reconstruction, missing plates and internal mechanisms. Hektor’s armor still had some styling and weapons reminiscent of his Spartan past. Lieutenant Prestor’s armor was Thundermaker standard, except for a large old style (though technologically updated) rifle that was magnetically attached to one of the hip plates. The most interesting part, I thought happened to be my personal Viking’s customizations which included some sort of tech-enhanced ax, a second plasma exploder cannon in place of the machine gun, and a myriad of hidden explosives and close combat devices.

My own armor showed signs of recent fiddling – likely Rachel’s doing. A long knife handle was coming out of one of the upper chest plates for easy gripping. The tops of the boots by the knees and the elbow bits on the bracers had all been modified so that it looked like something could come out of them. The magnetic retrieval system in the right bracer had been streamlined and miniaturized to make room for what looked like an aperture for plasma discharge. There were quite a few other changes, but I think most of them were too subtle for me to figure out just from appearances.

Rachel came through the blind door and gestured towards the clock on her wrist com.

“Come on, we’re going to miss our transport to the residential block and lose our window for lunch.”

“Alright, I’m on my way. And maybe you can tell me what exactly you’ve been doing to my armor while we’re going,” I jokingly fumed.

We left the armor alcove and had just turned the corner into the main engineering bay when the lights went off. Curses and cries of frustration echoed through the entire bay as engineers lost power to their projects.

“That shouldn’t be possible,” Rachel whispered. “Especially here. We have backups to our backups and not even an EMP or solar flare could knock them all out.”

“I guess this means we’re skipping lunch,” I replied as she carefully moved towards the closest computer terminal.

With a flashlight in her teeth she worked with the wiring around the computer and fitted it with a small power cell that she pulled from one of her pockets. While she was doing that, some of the other engineers were setting up mobile emergency lighting so that they could see well enough to figure out what the hell had just happened. It was probably a safe bet that the other engineering bays across the forge were doing the same thing.

Rachel had the computer up and running, although from what I could see by looking over her shoulder there wasn’t too much data actually available to it. The whole network was down and there was nothing else there for that lone terminal to run diagnostics on. Everyone was working with purpose, but I was at a complete loss as to what I should do. Then the main bay doors slowly squealed open and half dozen small spheres rolled inside.

Instinct took over and I tackled Rachel, placing myself between her and the grenades. We were braced against the blast, but it threw several of the engineers across the room, broken and bleeding. I think I took some shrapnel to my back, but my uniform absorbed most of the energy and kept both me and my love from serious harm.

“The hell is going on?” I yelled over the screams of the wounded, not expecting an answer. Of course, the answer I didn’t want was the one I received when a flurry of bullets poured through the dark opening to the darker hallway.

From the back of the bay Ruiz came out of his personal workshop holding a rather large gun hooked up to a plasma core. “Whoever you are, get the Hell away from my engineering bay!” The man roared as he unleashed a volley of bright bolts into the open doorway. The resulting detonations made the deck plating rattle and half-deafened me. Still, I took advantage of the temporary cessation to pull Rachel back out of the line of fire and towards my armor.

“I’ll be alright, go suit up,” She told me as she pulled away. “I’ve got a project I need to check on.”

“Be safe,” I told her. “I don’t want to have to find another fiancée.”

Before she had even closed the blind door behind her, I pulled the helmet, threw it on my head, and opened up my armor. I got in and it closed around me. The entire process took maybe thirty seconds, but the systems boot up took a little longer. What had Rachel been doing to my stuff?

“Secondary systems initialized. Welcome back, Captain Castle,” A familiar voice greeted me, but it wasn’t the voice of IRIS.

“Rachel?” I inquired.

“I’m sorry for the confusion, sir. Rachel programmed me, but that is not my designation. You may call me Rommy, sir. Primary systems beginning boot.”

“Is that short for something? Give me a quick brief on recent suit modifications until I can move.”

“My designation is short for Andromeda. Rachel thought it would be confusing and self-indulgent if she named me after herself. I shortened my name for your convenience. Do not worry, sir, I still have all of your preferences and tactics as presets.”

“I’m beginning to feel that my fiancée is too good for me,” I muttered, reading over the updated schematics. “And you sound like you’re a smart AI. Where the hell does she get the time to do all of this?”

“I am a very smart AI, sir, although I do not have enough data to answer your question. Primary systems initialized. You now have full armor capability,” Rommy informed me.

“Alright, let’s go save our engineers.”

*****

I was only gone a minute or two and when I returned things seemed to be fairly calm in the main bay with Ruiz occasionally lobbing another volley through the open doorway whenever he saw a little movement. Rachel came up behind me, although I only knew it was her when she contacted me over the comm. It’s a good thing I could expect not to go into combat with her very often because hearing her voice from both the comm and my AI confused me enough that an enemy could have taken advantage of it in other circumstances.

Rachel was unrecognizable because she was wearing an NMS suit a lot like the schematics she had shown me a few weeks ago. Of course, the real thing hugged and accentuated her curves in rather… distracting ways. She was lugging a huge rifle that looked like it might be able to blow up a spaceship.

“Don’t you think that thing is a bit unwieldy for the current circumstances?” I inquired.

“It could punch a hole in your armor…”

“If you could bring it around in time, love. That monstrosity looks like it would only be useful at long range. We’ve gotta be close and quick and brutal here and honestly I don’t want to have to worry about you. Please, stay here, stay safe. You’ve added and tweaked my armor so much that I’ve got tricks I didn’t even know I could have. You don’t need to worry about me, but your NMS system doesn’t give you the same durability as my full armor. Please, stay here where you and Ruiz’s big guns can kill any bad guys stupid enough to poke their heads in.”

“Alright, but if I think you need help I’ll be right there. I’m not going to be one of those women who loses their great love and regrets it the rest of their life.”

“I’m your great love?” I asked, genuinely touched. “So you’re not going to realized just how amazingly out of my league you are and dump me? But that’s the only way you’ll get rid of me, love. Always injured, never dead. That’s my well earned reputation.”

She started to say something, but it was cut off by a tethered spike or harpoon rocketing through the smoke and darkness to spear an unlucky engineer and yank him into it before he even had time to scream. A second later blood and gore sprayed through the entrance onto the deck.

“Stay here!” I reiterated to Rachel. “Rommy! Give me full spectrum visibility and ready all weapon systems! Lethal close combat protocols!”

Suddenly the picture on my HUD brightened and clarified and I could see perfectly through the smoke and darkness to the spiked and hulking forms beyond. I burst through the obstructions right after a volley from Ruiz, and before they could regroup for their next assault. I popped the blades from my knuckle plates and slammed a series of rapid punches into the midsection of the closest Centurion, tearing the man and his armor apart. I spun and slammed an elbow into the next in line and for a split second a plasma blade flickered from the joint to skewer the man’s brain. The sight of the next man pulled me up short before pulling an angry growl from me.

The next man in line was a Ring Jumper. He was standing with the Centurions like they were his brothers. He swung his bloody anchor spiked fist at me; I ducked under the blow and slammed my own fist into his chest, but the blade didn’t quite puncture all the way through the double-hulled armor of the traitor. The bastard slammed me into the wall with his other hand. I strained against the prodigious strength of the Ring Jumper’s armor as he aimed the anchor spike of his other arm at the weak point of my visor. I slashed one of my knuckle blades across the gauntlet holding me still to do little more than cosmetic damage. With my other hand I grabbed the long knife from my chest and used it to deflect the incoming spike enough that it slammed into the wall instead of my face. I tried to slam the knife into the man’s neck but it was deflected by the gorget. Things were not looking very good for me as the traitor pulled his arm back for another strike, and yet another Ring Jumper made his way past to fire into the engineering bay.

Well I certainly wasn’t going to sit there and die while people were attacking my love. Fortunately, Rommy was reminding me of some of my new armaments. A flurry of tiny explosive spikes shot out from beneath my collar armor and stuck to the turncoat’s helmet and neck. True to their description, the spikes exploded, hurling the man back. The Ring Jumper threw me down the hall as he collapsed. I rolled onto my feet and used my new plasma discharger on the second Ring Jumper just as he launched a spike into the bay – likely to spear another poor engineer. But it seems that my blast disrupted his aim, because when the spike automatically reeled in it dragged the headless Jumper into the room.

Distracted, I let a Centurion get too close and he actually hit me with his sword. The tip skidded across my armor until it hit a joint between plates and spun me around. My knife flew from my hand as another of the bastards hit me with an even larger blade. A third Centurion hit me with some sort of energy discharge that dropped me in my tracks. My HUD flickered, vital details disappeared. I couldn’t move.

“Rommy, get me moving again! I’m in a very bad way right now!”

“Systems rebooting,” she replied, suddenly emotionless.

I yelled in frustration, helpless and outwardly silent. My armor would become my tomb. What had they hit me with? If it weren’t for that I could have killed them all, protected Rachel, Ruiz, the others. But I wouldn’t even survive long enough to wreak vengeance on their killers. I cried out again, but only I could hear the pain in my voice. Only I could hear my voice. At least Rachel wouldn’t be able to see me die.

An odd sound attracted my attention, a movement at the corner of my eye. The Centurion standing over me began the thrust that would kill me. Before he could finish it, a massive furred hand reached out from the darkness and slammed the man in to the opposite wall. The rest of the being came into my view, and picked up the enemy’s fallen blade. He slammed the sword into the man’s chest, through the thickest part of the armor, with little apparent effort, and snapped the thing off at the hilt inside the man.

“It would seem that today is not your day to die, Captain,” Vadasz growled at me. “It has been far too long since we’ve spoken. You should remedy that later.”

I could only watch as the Farkas easily took down the remaining Centurions and Ring Jumpers. With his graceful movements, it seemed that his worst danger was scratching his thick hide on their assorted barbs. More often than not, it seemed like the wolfman took the weapons from his opponents’ hands simply so that he could kill them ever so mockingly with their own weapons. Brutal, perhaps cruel, but I suppose that under the circumstances I too would enjoy making the aliens that had enslaved my race look and feel as weak as possible before they died.

“Systems rebooted and initialized. We are again combat ready,” Rommy informed me.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” she replied surprisingly sarcastic. “I was just busy dealing with a directed EMP specifically modulated for Guardian systems as well as the virus that piggybacked on its signal waveform. With a lesser AI you’d still be dead in the water, and a danger to whatever computer system you connected to.”

“Alright, I’m sorry,” I caved in. “Good work, Rommy.”

“Was that so hard? I’m connecting to that terminal Rachel activated. I believe that this new information could help to restore power.”

I grunted my assent for her to continue and stood up. I grabbed my knife as I walked over to Vadasz. “You may not want to stick your head through the doorway for a moment. You might lose it. What are you doing here anyway? I thought you were holed up in your apartment on block one.”

"The High Sentinel sent me to his personal armorer on the deck below to get me properly outfitted for the coming battles. Once the lights went out and I saw the man to safety, I decided to do the same for the engineers here. Is that explanation enough?"