The Heart of Matter: Odyssey One (72 page)

▸“SUIT UP, CROWLEY!”

“You got it, Master Chief,” Jackson Crowley replied, ignoring the fact that he was technically the superior officer on board as he started unstrapping from his bolster and grabbing the rails above the armor unit strapped in beside him. “What’s the sitch?”

“Trojan Horse at Bravo’s AO.”

“Oh shit,” Crowley muttered as he swung himself into the armor.

“Oh shit is right, boy!” the master chief called. “We’ve got squad casualties and a whole shitload of enemy combatants mixed in with friendlies on the ground. Medevac drones are being dropped ahead of our insertion, but we’re going to have to get that area pacified, otherwise the shit is going to hit the fan in a big way.”

Crowley pulled the hatch on the armor shut behind him, cutting the master chief off for a moment as the suit booted up. From a cold boot, the armor took seven seconds to bring basic systems online, another ten to warm up all the advanced sensors and other similar gear. By the time his external camera
came online, the master chief had moved on to the other guys in the shuttle.

“Aerial units show two dozen enemy targets and counting,” he was saying. “They’re coming up out of the ground, so we don’t have exact numbers. That means, once we drop, we’ll be in a Trojan Horse ourselves until we can get the wounded and any civilians out of the area. The buildings the impact strike brought down make aerial strikes less than effective, so the enemy has cover from our heavy weapons.”

“What’s the plan, Master Chief?”

“We’ll be carrying the heavy weapons in with us,” the master chief said. “If we get a chance, we’re to access the enemy infrastructure and blow it to hell.”

“Infrastructure?” Crowley blinked. “What infrastructure?”

“The little bastards are like ants, Lieutenant,” the chief said. “They dig tunnels. Find a way in, get some explosives deep enough, and we’ll collapse the whole system on them. They’re tough, but we know that they aren’t impervious to overpressure.”

“Right. Roger that, Chief.” Crowley shunted power to his weapons systems.

“Good! Drop in twenty seconds!”

The droplight turned yellow as the men all got to their feet and prepared for what came next.

BRAVO AO

▸BERMONT GLANCED UP as the shuttle swept in against the blue-green sky. He could see the jump doors opening in its belly from where he was, the drones dropping first. They were a lot like the para-packs used for infiltration jumps, but more so in many ways. They were designed to provide emergency response in a pinch, to pick up wounded, or to supply additional air surveillance as needed. He immediately signaled for a priority medevac and dragged Simon Bell farther up onto the fallen building, above the debris of the battleground, to where the drones could more easily get to them.

“Hold on a little longer, Corporal. We’ve got reinforcements arriving. I’ve called for a medevac.”

“I guess I get out of this mess first, then, huh, Lieutenant?”

“Yup. Check out the nurses for me, will you?” Sean asked with a smile. “I’ll probably wind up in the bed next to yours before this is over.”

“You’re too lucky, Lieutenant.”

“I’m lucky? Didn’t I just have to ask you to check out the nurses for me?” Sean snorted. “I think you and me need to have a little chat about what luck really is.”

The medevac drone dropped into range, and Sean grabbed the hook it lowered. He clamped it onto Bell’s armor and signaled it to lift clear. Bell flashed him a thumbs-up as he was pulled up by the CM-powered drone.

“We’ll do that, Lieutenant,” he said. “Just nail those bastards.”

“Can do, Corporal.”

The drone reversed its thrust and pulled clear of the building, drawing the wounded man along with it. Now that he wasn’t carrying Bell around, he brought his rifle forward again and started looking around for targets.

The shuttle was finished spewing drones, most of them already in low orbital positions over his location, so he didn’t waste any time signing into the battle network they had established. Knowing what they were up against, the techs on the
Odyssey
had spent some time recoding the drones’ software to look for heat sources above human norms. Armor IFF designated the
Odyssey
troops as friendlies in blue on his HUD, near-human normal temperatures were shown in green, and anything hotter than that was designated as hostile red.

A glance at the latest data crawling across his HUD told him that the situation wasn’t getting any better. The computer tally on hostiles had topped to three dozen now and was still climbing as more of the Drasin poured out of their tunnels.

Jesus. How fast do they reproduce, anyway? They make rabbits look like monks.

Bermont snarled as he popped up over his cover and leveled the rifle down at a grouping of red dots his HUD had steered him toward. The Drasin were a little larger than big dogs, which he actually found a lot creepier than the big horse-sized versions they’d fought the last time around.

Spiders shouldn’t be bigger than I can squash with my boot.

He flipped over to full autofire and toggled the smart rounds to thermal tracking, then simply opened fire.

The big battle rifle roared, unloading the entire magazine in just seconds. He didn’t wait for the results, knowing that the Drasin had effective ranged weapons. Once he was back in cover, he simply requested a live feed from the overhead drones to view the results of his handiwork.

The heat sources were still there, but several were a lot fuzzier than before and had stopped moving.
Being spread across the ground will do that to you.

“Bravo Actual, be advised Shuttle Three is dropping reinforcements in five seconds.”

“Roger, Shuttle Three. Bravo squad,” he called his remaining team members, “cavalry inbound. Cover their landing.”

“Huah, Lieutenant!” they called back.

Sean cat-crawled a short distance to where the local militia were huddled and found the coranth in charge. “All right, we’ve got to get this area secure, or things are going to get real ugly for the city. Your boys up to it?”

“We will hold our part, Lieutenant,” the coranth promised as he gripped his weapon, probably too tightly.

“Good. Here comes some help.” Sean nodded upward.

They looked up as the shuttle swept overhead, men pouring from the belly of the bird and dropping to the shattered terrain around them. Just when they thought the last man had dropped, a hulking figure appeared in the hold and threw itself clear.

“What is
that
?”

Sean was glad that his helmet hid his expression as he rolled his eyes. “Combat mech prototype.”

The mech hit the ground with enough force to send tremors to their positions, weapons opening fire as it cleared a 360-degree circle around it.

“It is very well armed.”

“Put a gun on a turd and it would be well armed, too,” Sean muttered.

“What is a turd?” the coranth asked, the translator completely missing the word.

“Never mind. The turd has the area cleared for the moment,” Sean replied, amused with himself. “We’re going to have to do some definitive search and destroy. We can’t let any of those things get loose.”

“You are correct. I will rally my men.”

Bermont nodded and followed, electing to stay close to the militia in his role as liaison. Nothing sucked more than a blue-on-blue incident between fresh allies.

The Drasin were well used to having their own way on the various worlds they visited, though admittedly few of the species would think of things in those terms. It wasn’t that they didn’t incur losses—most of the inhabitants of any world they landed on were understandably perturbed to be hosting what amounted to the
ultimate
invasive species of the universe. Resistance was normal; however, it was generally futile as well.

Being capable of extremely quick reproduction and immune to most forms of natural threat they might encounter, a Drasin force generally accomplished its assigned task and died happily in the process.

This world, however, had already survived one incursion and the mind that guided the alien drones could already detect signs that things were not going well at all.

The local weapons had changed; no longer were they encountering the light energy beams they had been engineered to use as alternate energy sources. Now every opposing unit they faced appeared to use kinetic-strike weapons that were far more difficult to defend against.

The mind was well aware that no world changed so completely in such little time. This could only be caused by an outside force, but the Drasin were already committed, and the remainder of the Drasin forces were too far away to warn.

Its forces would continue until they succeeded, or until mobility functions ended. That was their way.

Lt. Jackson Crowley was grinning with such rigor that had anyone seen the expression on his face, they would almost certainly have recoiled in horror. He circled the powerful mech he was sitting in, weapons extended in opposite directions, while the computer kept a running tally of the kills he’d been racking up.

When the area was clear, he paused for a moment and took stock of the situation, noting that, while he had indeed landed in a relatively clear space as he’d intended when he jumped, he’d managed to get himself blockaded in by the debris scattered all around him.

Well, time to prove this suit’s worth on a real battlefield
, he thought as an eager charge ran through him.

He wasn’t deaf, nor was he immune to the slings and arrows sent his way when his comrades saw the EXO-12 for
the first time. He even understood it, given the relatively poor showing most walking robots had displayed over the last century or so. Even the very best autonomous designs couldn’t hope to navigate a battlefield in anything resembling a reasonable time, and interface solutions that put a human in command were often worse.

That was until the NICS interface had been designed. It took years to make it work for a system as potentially complex as human ranges of motion, but once that had been done, the sheer precision the system allowed for was staggering.

Jackson evaluated the situation briefly, then let go of the weapon control handles. When they designed the EXO-12, there had been two options debated by the designers. The first had been to integrate the weapons into the armor’s arms, but that had been discarded due to a lack of flexibility and mobility caused by the required feeds for ammo, energy, and cooling.