Descent into Mayhem (Capicua Chronicles Book 1) (16 page)

He was unsurprised because his hairs were standing on end too.

“Afternoon, Sergeant. How are you today?” Toni heard Baylen ask. He turned, curious as to what had motivated the corporal to use his seductive voice.

Sergeant Ruka stood high upon the gantry, clad in a red overall that couldn’t quite hide her abundant curves. She wore her black cap with an upward tilt, the expressive eyes beneath it gazing down as she assessed the group. She put on a smile and answered back at him.

“Why, very well, Corporal. And how is Ms. Reeves doing?”

Baylen chuckled.

“She’s very well too, Sarge. I got fourteen cadets down here in desperate need of your wisdom. Can you take the time?”

The sergeant pursed her lips.

“I was under the impression there were sixteen of them ...”

“Recruit Debusey took the Walk over a month ago with some psych problems. Recruit Marcus walked last week due to another unpleasant matter. Seems he was caught smuggling forty kilo-mass of preserved meat from the canteen. Captain didn’t like that too much.”

“Well, the boy sure liked his bacon. All right then, just give me a mike.”

Ruka disappeared through the gantry’s access point and they heard the rattle of feet against metal before she ducked out of a low doorway at the scaffold’s base.

“All right, form them up,” Ruka said.

“Form up!” Baylen bellowed.

Within a few brief seconds, all cadets were standing smartly at attention in a formation three lines deep. As their new instructor appraised the cadets, Toni found himself doing some appraising of his own. It would be the first time he was instructed by a woman, and the idea was somehow leaving him uneasy.

She was older than she looked from afar, and fine lines creased the pale skin around her mouth, eyes and brow. Her hair was not dyed and numerous long grey strands streaked down amidst the thick ginger locks; she had tied those locks into an untidy ponytail with what he suspected was copper wire. But all that did not detract from the fact that a handsome woman stood before them. Toni then saw Baylen observing him with a knowing smile on his lips. Hastily he turned his eyes front.

Clearly unmindful of the scrutiny she had just been subjected to, the sergeant began to speak.

“I am Second-sergeant Ruka Bellamy and I work in the ASC’s Repair and Maintenance Section. I am responsible for prepping the Moca Suits for excursions and inspecting them on their return for any damage. Today I will give you a chance to get up close and personal with a real Suit, but first I’m laying a few simple rules down on the table: keep together at all times, don’t touch anything without permission, don’t interrupt me, and if you have a question, wait till I allow you to ask it. Understood?”

As soon as she was satisfied that all had understood the rules, Baylen dismissed the formation
and the cadets were soon huddling beside Unit Three’s right footpad.

“I’d like you all to take a good look around. This is Stall Three and it exists to help the maintenance personnel gain access to the hardware. From these platforms we can detect fractures in some components of the endoskeleton, repair or replace ruptured PAMs situated above waist-line height, maintain the PPU, just about anything that doesn’t require removal of the unit from its stall.

“But sometimes it’s just not possible to do this. If you look above your heads, you’ll see that the Automated Transport Bus, or ATB, which can make its way here from Stables Five and Six via the railing system, is able to access each stall in this stable. In fact, it can access any unit in any stable when needed, remove whichever Suit it’s ordered to remove and convey it to Stable Five, where we have more specialized apparatus to deal with the problem at hand. With that equipment, we can strip a Suit down to its modules in less than half an hour.

“That’s one of the more interesting facts about the Moca Suit; it’s highly modular in nature. There are six hundred and thirty nine skeletal muscles in the human body, but only eight different types of PAMs are needed to reproduce with a Suit almost every movement a human being can perform. These PAM’s are distinguishable by their lengths, widths and compliancy rating. For example, the lowest compliancy rating PAMs can be found in the lower appendages,” she patted the titan’s massive calf muscle beside her for effect, “while the highest compliancy PAMs can be found in the upper body and appendages. There are two reasons for this: the air muscles with highest compliancy have the thinnest walls, and so one saves weight where it counts the most, up above. And this way the Suit’s muscular structure mimics its human counterpart and gives its hydraulic interface a much easier time feeding the impulses back and forth. This takes us to the HINT itself. Follow me.”

She set off towards the scaffold’s stairway at a brisk pace and the cadets scrambled to catch up to her. After climbing three flights of stairs, she exited onto the platform that allowed access to the Suit’s thorax. Before the cadets had managed to set their feet on the structure, Ruka shooed them back and slid an extension plate forwards along the flooring, gaining access to its right breast. She paused for a moment as the cadets crowded onto the cramped gantry, her hand resting lightly on the glistening muscles that covered the breastplate like pythons. Toni and Ray traded mischievous grins with one another before Balyen’s stare cowed them into submission.

“Take a good look at Unit Three’s right pectoral muscle. It’s comprised of fourteen A3-type PAMs. Anyone care to tell me why it’s so important to have fourteen air muscles instead of just one?”

“Because a direct hit would only damage a few of them, leaving the machine still operable,” Hirum volunteered.

“That is correct, though calling the Moca Suit a machine is a little like calling your mother an incubator. It is either Suit or Unit, I’ll accept nothing else. Understood? Each of the fourteen PAMs connects to a detachable interior half-breastplate. That breastplate is detachable for a reason. Watch closely ...”

Ruka pointed to the wide metal ridge that separated the half-breastplates. She then traced her hand up over it before coming to a stop above a small orifice where a human collarbone would normally be. Taking out a large metal turnkey, she inserted it into the orifice and twisted it counter-clockwise. Nothing happened.

“Oh, for fuck’s sake!” Ruka cursed, and she began to slam her knee against the PAMs. On her fourth attempt, the right breastplate suddenly moved, opening out like a clam-shell to the whine of hydraulics to expose its dark interior.

“Hatch is a bit twitchy. And the lighting’s out,” she explained before quickly producing a penlight and illuminating the interior.

There was something medieval about the contraption suspended in there, humanoid in form but crawling with countless color-coded wires that hugged the structure tightly. Its head was missing. A heavy-looking helmet hovered before the hydraulic interface, hanging loosely from the compartment’s ceiling from thick spiraling cables. The interface itself stood suspended by a thick robotic arm fixed to the ceiling, giving the impression that the HINT had been impaled upon a gigantic articulated meat-hook. The compartment’s walls crawled with more wiring, some of it feeding into the hydraulic system that apparently moved the Suit’s breastplates. The sight of it all made Toni feel a sudden urge to strap himself in, to enter the techno-womb and become a titan himself.

Others did not seem to share his enthusiasm.

“Horrible! It has barely more space than a coffin. And what’s with all the wires?” He heard Sueli say, her pretty nose crinkled as she stared with horrified fascination. The sergeant’s answering smile was not entirely genuine.

“There are two types of wiring in the interior. The red-black wiring is electrical and feeds to the HINT, hatch mechanism and HUD Helmet. The Blue-yellow type is actually hydraulic tubing, which again feeds to the HINT and hatch mechanism. The Moca doesn’t have as much interior space as our more recent model, nor is its cavity as tidy as theirs. But don’t forget that it was a pioneer model, and so this probably couldn’t be helped. On the up side, the Moca weighs less than four tons fully loaded compared to the Hammerheads’ eight and has almost twice the autonomy and less than half the fuel consumption. Respect the Moca, or I’ll lose respect for you.

“On the down side, there is a flaw inherent to the cavity’s reduced volume. Some heavy impacts against the Suit, like when it takes a fall, will result in the driver making physical contact with the cavity walls. Due to this we’ve been outfitting the cavities with protective padding, which we expect will protect the tubing and wiring against damage from the HINT, as well as to provide some protection for the driver himself. In any case, a Moca driver may, with some impacts at least, feel two collisions for every one that actually happens. This is what we call double-slamming –”

Sergeant Ruka’s explanation was interrupted by a blaring alarm. The grating sound filled the cavernous compartment, causing echoes to rebound from the opposite side and add to the cacophony. Only then did Toni notice that loudspeakers had been fixed to the ceiling above every second stall. There was one just above his head, which probably explained why his ears were beginning to hurt.

Ruka’s face began to pale. Pulling Baylen by the collar until his ear was beside her mouth, the sergeant shouted urgently into it. Toni was unable to make out what she was saying, but he didn’t really need to; by her gestures alone, she was ordering him to get the cadets out of there in a hurry. The corporal quickly obliged.

“SINGLE COLUMN!” Baylen bellowed as he displayed an index finger above his head and, without waiting for anyone to react, the corporal began to descend the scaffold stairway at a run. Toni was among the first to follow his instructor. As Baylen left the stairs for the stable’s ground floor, someone collided violently against him and both fell, setting off a traffic jam among the platoon-members still within the scaffolding structure.
Toni fell over the struggling pair and rolled over the floor instinctively as he was ejected from the doorway. Toni saw several blue-clad civilians running towards the other stalls, surprise and puzzlement stamped on their faces. Turning around, he found that the man who had caused the collision was one of the technicians. The civilian was splayed out on the floor, held in a headlock by a very livid corporal.

He hurried to intervene.

“Corporal, sir. Baylen, you’re gonna kill him, dammit. He’s a civilian!” Toni shouted as he and others tried unsuccessfully to loosen his superior’s hold on the man. The technician’s face was fast becoming as blue as his uniform.

The corporal suddenly released him and, after shouting a few expletives into the dazed man’s ear, stood and stepped away from the doorway, holding a pair of fingers above his head in a V sign. The platoon poured out of the scaffold and formed a double-column while on the platform above their heads an exasperated Ruka shouted for her assistant. The platoon then set off at a run and quickly exited Stable Three, finding the first two stables in an even greater state of confusion as they passed them by.

“Open columns!” Baylen shouted as they neared the exit.

The platoon hurried to comply. A second group, also formed up in a double column, raced through the doorway at a sprint and passed between them. Toni watched the soldiers as they sped by, mostly men with short haircuts and hard faces, but some women were among them too. One femme was still clothing herself in a driving suit as she ran, her muscular arm straining as she pushed the other through its elastic sleeve.

A few short seconds later they were gone, and Toni only realized that they were the ASC’s sergeants-at-arms once his platoon was already abandoning the warehouse district.

Leiben, 14H49, 21th of April, 2771

It being the twenty first day of the month, many in Leiben were surprised with the cloudless sky upon waking that morning.

Despite first appearances, however, over the course of the day cycle the city was wracked by powerful gusts of wind, the squat, aerodynamic buildings that dominated the capital channeling those gusts into its streets and alleys, effectively turning them into wind-tunnels. By early afternoon, most commuting was being conducted via the metro system and subterranean walkways that interconnected the buildings, and as a result very few citizens were topside when the solar flare alarm began to sound. The few up top who did hear the intermittent blare found it all quite odd, not so much due to such flares being a rare occurrence, but because of the peculiar manner in which it all happened.

There was a sudden, intense flash from the sky above, and all those who happened to be looking up were momentarily blinded, feeling sudden warmth on their faces they hadn’t known over the last few days. Many kept their eyes to the sky a moment longer, finding it strange that the quickly dissipating flash had originated separately from the red sun further south, a few of them wondering whether it was some strange atmospheric phenomenon due to solar wind striking the upper atmosphere.

Even those citizens, however, soon found themselves bounding towards the nearest building or underground access point as the alarm’s urgent blare began to make itself heard. No one wanted to be caught topside once the flare’s full force hit the planet. The alarm had choked momentarily before singing out with all its might, something else those who had heard it before didn’t remember having ever happened. By the end of the first minute after the event’s onset, every window in the city had been shuttered and every citizen evacuated to a safer place, all except for the ATS users.

Almost every transport vehicle of the Automated Transit System inexplicably sputtered to a complete stop, their panicked passengers being forced to use the manual overrides to exit their allotted cars, some even having to shatter the side windows with little glass-breaking hammers. The few hundred ATS commuters scurried towards the nearest refuges, the unforgiving wind buffeting them violently as they hurried along like drunks in a footrace, some glancing to the sky with barely-suppressed panic while others laughed at the unexpected adventure.

By that time, almost every alarm system crammed inside a cramped room within the Anti-Air Threat Artillery Command Center had been muted, their overwhelmed operators struggling to take stock of the situation.

*****

Donovan Gaeta had been an AATACC Second-Lieutenant for more than two years, and the small, comfortable, air-conditioned Detection and Response Room was slowly becoming a second home to him. One year short of the thirty five year promotion barrier, Don had finally been evaluated as officer material, his electronic warfare background having weighed heavily in favor of the decision.

The promotion’s details didn’t matter, however. What mattered to him was the net effect it would have on his life. His current employment was in a home appliance repair shop, and the extra pay from his part-time commitment to the forces, along with his recent promotion, were allowing him to entertain possibilities that only a few years ago he wouldn’t have dreamed possible. Lisa had recently begun to hint that they should once again request endorsement for procreation. It was time for offspring number three, perhaps, she had whispered to him more than once. Don had decided that morning to discuss the possibility with the lieutenant warming the seat beside his.

First-Lieutenant Mara Springer had more than twenty years of service and four childbirths under her considerable belt. She possessed a healthy dose of lucidity, a larger dose of humor, and happened to enjoy dispensing advice when encouraged to do so. After the usual morning formalities, their conversation had focused mainly on the weather and other such futilities, before he had finally broached the subject of family planning. Mara had found interest in the matter, and they had spoken all morning about licenses, parental financing and his wife’s current state of health. By morning’s end, as they enjoyed the best grub an Army with a tight budget could afford, he had quietly decided to become a father once more. Everything of relevance having been said, the afternoon began to drag along more slowly, the operators trading point position with one another so Don could get some drill-time on the principal console.

The AATACC’s DRR was Capicua’s primary instrument for the detection and elimination of air and spaceborne threats against its capital. Mostly that implied the detection and tracking of Apollo-type asteroids or similar bodies by way of the Active Electronically Scanned Array, an old-world Radar system scavenged from the Adamastor, the system being complimented by an ultra high gain antenna array of similar origin for threat pinpointing and ID. The AESA was an old workhorse and had been upgraded several times, but as yet no replacement program had been developed out of the sheer expense such an endeavor would entail. In fact, the only recent addition to the collection of detection instruments was the Plasma InfraRed Emission Detector, a relatively recent investment that, duly coupled with the Disposable Laser Cartridge Artillery System, was expected to intercept any inbound hyper-velocity target over the city’s upper atmosphere.

The PIRED and DLCAS were the brainchildren of those who had been particularly shaken up by the long-past phantom battle, and both systems were currently an integral part of Leiben’s continuing bid to be the sole power on Capicua.

A warning blip suddenly made itself heard, the response room’s mellow lighting correspondingly morphing into red. Surprised at the unexpected exercise, Don sat a little straighter, flicking his eyes towards Mara; she appeared bored and a little irritated by the interruption to her private thoughts.

“Threat identified!” Don said, a little louder than was really necessary. Mara annoyance intensified. She was once again sitting in the primary’s seat and he had just spoken her line.

“Threat identified!” Mara barked, staring at her second with an expectant quirk in her brow. Feeling foolish, Don quickly slid up his display screen and assessed the incoming data.

“Threat inbound from LCO, heading towards the equator at 62 degrees latitudinal inclination. Velocity barely sub-orbital, vertical component almost nil, with an altitude a smidge over one hundred clicks. No threat of impact with Leiben or any other manmade infrastructure.” He summed up.

“Sub-orbital ...” Mara whispered. More loudly, she addressed her second.

“No intervention necessary. Inform the artillery batteries to standby but to not, I repeat, to not fire against threat.”

As Don hurried to comply, Mara took a closer look at her own screen’s display, the only one between them that provided a visual representation of what was taking place; the three-dimensional image before her eyes displayed the curve of a planetary surface and, high up and moving in a lazy arc just north of Leiben’s outskirts, a small yellow blip surrounded by a triangle.

“What’s its cross-section?” She asked.

“It’s tiny. Must be a meteor, probably no more than a few kilos.”

“No meteor would be moving at sub-orbital speeds. This is manmade, Don. We’re looking at a manmade something coming out of orbit. Or maybe this is just an exercise.”

A debate broke out between them as to whether they were at the moment party to a simulation, and indeed Mara was beginning to suspect that that was the case. All orbiting objects more than five centimeters across had already been detected and their orbits characterized. All fifty five of them. And there was no indication that any would be returning to Capicua in the near future. Just as Mara was thinking that, however, the yellow blip vanished.

Several things suddenly happened at once. Every single alarm system inside the room simultaneously elected to bleat, blare, and otherwise buffet the operators with an overwhelming cacophony of sound. In the same moment their display screens caved in, and Mara suddenly found herself staring at a transparent glassy pane and, through it, at myriad flashing lights fixed against the wall, warning her that something was terribly wrong.

“What did we do?” Don asked, holding his hands away from his console as if suspecting he had pressed a wrong button.

“Nothing. Restart your computer.”

Pressing the rapid boot button on the wall, she began to pray as she waited for a response. An impossibly long second later their display screens came to life once more, and Mara’s relief was quickly overruled by fear for what she might find once all systems were running. Working fast, she digited her pass-code when the prompt appeared, barking at her second to hurry and do the same. Before assessing the visrep on her screen, she pressed the Call-to-Quarters alarm button and, quickly pulling the C-to-Q pass-code tag out from the crevice of her substantial bosom, she broke it and read the eight digit alphanumeric code concealed inside. Quickly digiting the code into the appropriate prompt, she entered, and a brand new hooting alarm began to make itself heard somewhere beyond the response room. Hollering at her second to evaluate and deactivate the remaining alarms, she finally opened the visrep on the screen before her.

What she saw there nearly stopped her heart.

Several dozen blips populated the entire lower thermosphere above Leiben, and were belting down fast over the capital of her world.

“We’re under attack.” She stated breathlessly.

“What do you mean, under attack? You just said it was an exercise.” He countered.

Not saying a word, she turned her display screen towards him. The expression on his face made it clear that he was seeing her point. She hurried to make a decision.

“These are way too many targets to leave to human intervention. I’m removing execution authority from the ArtBats and handing it to the MAGE. Do you agree?” She asked, her chest heaving.

“Seventy three – no, seventy five ballistic targets inbound at over five clicks per sec. Yeah, I agree.” He replied, and then they simultaneously did the same thing.

Removing pen-keys from their pockets, they inserted the devices into their respective slots on the consoles before them. All visual displays promptly disappeared, only to be replaced by a series of command options. Working quickly, they progressed through each option. The last one was for Mara alone.

She opted to engage the MAGE.

A corded telephone suddenly chimed beside Mara, startling her. The phone rang once more before the lieutenant managed to unfreeze herself and answer it.

“Say, what the hell is going on over there, people?” An outraged voice shouted from some obscure office in the Strategic Command Center. It was Lieutenant-Colonel Timmons, the center’s most highly decorated asshole.

But Mara couldn’t let him be one today.

“Colonel, sir, we were moments ago tracking a single spaceborne threat as it passed over Leiben. It then detonated and almost knocked out our defensive capability. Since getting our systems back online we’ve been tracking seventy five targets closing in on Leiben at over five clicks per second. I initiated the Call-to-Quarters alarm and passed execution authority to the MAGE –”

“You did WHAT?” Her superior screamed from on other side. She winced at his sudden rage and wondered for the first time whether she had done the right thing. The colonel began to laugh.

“Well then, Lieutenant, we seemed to have jumped the gun a little here. You may not have realized it all cooked up in there, but the solar flare alarm has sounded over the city, compliments of our Flare Early Warning System. What you’re seeing is a clear sign of interference from the higher atmosphere due to unusual solar activity. We are not, nor have we any reason to suspect we are about to be, under attack. Now just relax and keep your hands off the console so I can overrule that decision of yours.”

“NO!” She shouted before she could stop herself.

The complete silence on the line was disheartening.

“Apologies, sir, but that decision can’t be made without authorization of the SCC commander himself,” she reasoned, thinking hard as she mentally reassessed what she had witnessed over the last minute.

“Sweetie, I know you think you’re very smart, but if I inform the Colonel you engaged the MAGE under these circumstances, you will be court-martialed. Am I clear?”

“Yessir, I understand that, but if you’re wrong and I’m right, in a minute or two we’ll all be dead. Please listen, sir. If the signals we’re receiving were radar phantoms, and my second’s telling me we’re up to eighty three now, their trajectories would be erratic. Not ballistic! And certainly not nearly parallel to one another. My conclusion is that this is either an exercise or a legitimate strike. I’ll stake my career on it, sir!”

There was a long pause as her superior pondered on her words.

“Well, sunshine, you’re in luck today, ‘cause I’m not in a mood to stake your career on this notion of yours. I am removing execution authority from MAGE and handing it to the ArtBats. Where it belongs. Have a nice day, dear.” The line went dead, leaving a very distraught Lieutenant to stare at her screen as a cascade of inbounds rained down over her beloved city.

*****

The moment after Lieutenant Mara engaged the MAGE, the Master Gigabit Ethernet system was flooded with several terabytes of data that had accumulated in the response room’s databanks since the first bogey’s appearance. It took all of ten seconds for the silicone-germanium processors to upload and process the information, and to reach a decision. Accessing the General Military Network, it ploughed through all firewalls and hooked itself up to the six Artillery Batteries that belted the capital, as well as to the three primary instruments with which it intended to perceive its foe. Accessing the Active Electronically Scanned Array, Plasma InfraRed Emission Display and High Gain Antenna array directly, it dispensed with the response room’s torrent of data, preferring the much more direct influx those systems could provide. The master system duly noted that the inbound targets did not appear on the scanned array and presumed that it was due to stealth technology on the Threat’s part. In fact, the signals only showed up on the PIRED because their inbound trajectories through the lower thermosphere were leaving an infrared-emitting path in their wakes. The system calculated the probability of interception at the nearest target’s altitude, which at that very moment was just inside the mesosphere. Dissatisfied with the results, it decided to wait, and instead prepared the Disposable Laser Cartridge Artillery System for firing operations.