Descent into Mayhem (Capicua Chronicles Book 1) (36 page)

As the silence stretched out Toni began to wonder whether he was supposed to be the first to sound off. A crackling voice corrected him of the thought.

“Here Digger Two, romeo conditions fine.” Park’s calm voice hailed over the comm.

“Here Digger Three, conditions fine.” Toni answered cautiously.

“Here Digger Four, comm fine.” Jonah reported.

“Here Digger Five, romeo comms fine.” Hannah reported enthusiastically.

Toni smiled and peered to his left, where Hannah’s Digger Five was on its pads and eagerly flexing its upper appendages. He prayed her armor would hold, but as he did so an image of Sueli hugging her severed leg momentarily flashed before his eyes, earning him a warning from his OS as it registered the brief palpitation of his heartbeat.

“Form a single column behind my unit’s position.” Digger Prime ordered, and a Hammerhead that strode south-easterly on the dirt road lifted its massive gauntlet skywards, its index digit protruding.

All units walked and took up positions on the leading Digger’s rearguard, and Toni marveled at the fresh fluidity of his movements. Had he not strapped himself in only moments before, he mightn’t have believed that he was currently encased in a HINT. He had barely taken up position behind Digger Two when they were off at marching speed.

One and a half kilometers further on, after having passed by the deposit and then a Command Bunker surrounded by decoys, wiring and camouflage nets, the column finally arrived at the point where the path and frontline intersected. To their left was an improvised staging area where armored Suits loitered among several flatbed trucks, and where pack charges had been laid out on the ground as if in formation, eight columns of twelve or thirteen devices each. Digger Prime then had the entire section huddle and instructed them on the nature and function of their new weapons, before giving them the opportunity to do practice throws with duffel bags packed with the appropriate weight in rocks.

And so, after fifteen minutes’ worth of practice, where the Suits settled into opposite sides of the clearing to launch their improvised practice grenades at one other, all Diggers were finally permitted to snap on lower-torso webbing and attach their charges securely to it. Toni’s allotted grenades consisted of twelve of the rigged travel packs, six of them redcords.

“You know, I think I just got my own travel pack handed back to me ...” Toni heard Park mutter over their private comm channel.

“Don’t despair, Two, if you leave it for last you might not need to toss it.” He shot back, and was rewarded with a chuckle and accusations of being an optimist.

Shortly after, Toni’s OS privileged him with an up-to-date virtual map of the surrounding area, and all titans momentarily stopped whatever they were doing as their drivers studied the chart, taking special note of the minefield’s location and of their designated starting points.

“FORTSEC, take your positions.” Digger Prime finally ordered.

Encumbered with the four charges that Toni hadn’t managed to strap on to his webbing, Digger Three strode towards his designated spot, situated only a few dozen meters north of the path and behind a bump in the terrain. The remaining Hammerheads also dispersed to their locations, some raising their closed gauntlets in salutation to each another, all appearing pregnant due to their protruding payloads. Studying the map once more, Toni realized that Diggers Two, Three, Seven and Eight bracketed the path where it became MEWAC’s axis of retreat, the remaining Suits having been dispersed along the front in much lower density.

His hair crawled as he suddenly realized what that meant. Some brain in the bunker had probably realized that the Unmil would appear while following that axis, and had decided to place his most senior or combat-experienced assets at its flanks. Which put Toni smack in the expected center of action yet again. The coward in him sighed tremulously and, getting down on a kneepad, he compulsively surveyed his unstrapped weapons.

Having decided to favor mobility, Toni had clipped the six lighter reds and two blues onto his lower torso, which left him with four DIME charges for the initial ambush, after which he would have to make do with whatever he could easily carry in hand and webbing. And he knew the enemy Suit would probably not remain still long enough for all four devices to be thrown. He also disliked the charges’ lightness of weight, finding himself disappointed that the travel packs hadn’t more space for explosives.

The thought gave him an idea.

He clipped the packs two-to-two and, unpocketing one of the oversized rolls of duct tape the engineers appeared to carry on their Suits at all times, he reinforced the union and then overlapped the blue armbands’ extremities from opposite ends, bonding them together.

As he proudly surveyed the product of his labor, his private comm. panel blinked on once more.

“Whatcha doin’ there, pilgrim?”

Park apparently had a thing for the legendary American west.

“There probably won’t be time to lob all our excess charges, so I’m preparing double-whammies.”

“Of course you realize you haven’t drilled to throw anything that heavy ...”

Toni shook his head, the act emulated by his Suit’s hammerhead as the OS processed the data from his helmet’s gyroscope.

“From what I noticed in our session, those duffel grenades weighed in between a redcord and a bluecord, and varied a lot between them. Added to that, I couldn’t even throw with full force, every time I did that the duffels would hit the trees on the other side. So I’d say I haven’t been drilled in throwing any real grenades anyway, so I don’t care. All I know is that I don’t like leaving grenades behind, and this way the first detonations will be felt.”

He was met by silence, although twenty meters away and behind a dense growth of trees, he heard the sound of duct tape being deployed. Smiling to himself, Toni decided to also pair up the charges he had strapped on, the task taking him the best part of ten minutes before all was finally done and returned to place. He then gripped a pair of bluecord packs in his considerable gauntlet and began to burn the time until contact.

His position had been wisely chosen, not only because the curvature of the terrain favored concealment, but also because the tall trees that grew there offered shade to the entire area, diminishing several detection factors simultaneously. All that was left was for him to minimize the remaining and most important detection factor of all. Movement.

Statically he awaited the Unmil’s arrival, scanning the treetops to the south-east for any movements not windborne as his active mind, starved of the nootropics it had become accustomed to, tried not to wander. Trying also to gain some situational awareness, Toni studied the map and attempted to correspond what he saw there to the landmarks surrounding him. His eyes soon fell on the minefield, which began a hundred and fifty meters further on and was a good hundred deep. What he saw there made him groan.

One couldn’t reasonably have expected the engineers to emplace two hundred and forty one tons of explosives, in over a hundred different locations and within the course of a few hours, and have simultaneously expected them to camouflage them effectively. The ground was smooth and appeared untrodden, for sure, but it hadn’t been covered with vegetation, and the sappers’ solution had apparently been to spread the excess dirt over the entire area. It was an understandable thing to do, since that way the precise location of each mine was a mystery, but if his enemy possessed any similarity to Kaiser at all he would certainly find an alternative path around.

A sudden loud snap in the distance caught his attention and his body tensed brusquely in its interface, causing his Suit to shudder slightly. Sorely tempted to break the radio silence that had been ordered almost an hour ago, he decided instead to lower his profile and sharpen his eyes.

“You see something?” Park suddenly asked from his position on loudspeaker, “Can’t see shit with these trees in my face.”

Taking a moment to first moderate his loudspeaker’s volume, Toni answered him in a low voice.

“Nothing. But something might have fallen from the sky. I’m seeing a streak of smoke up there. Pretty far away, though.”

“Ahuh. I see it. Can’t be it, too fresh.”

“Maybe – I have visual on contact directly ahead!” Toni breathed, his heart skipping a beat.

Three hundred meters beyond his position, near the maximum probable range of a grenade throw, stood the enemy Suit, proud and tall and drenched in blood. Hanging from its gorget like an oversized neck-tie, was a bloodied and mangled corpse clad in ROWAC’s pixilated cammo fatigues.

The corpse swayed ever so slightly in the strong wind and Toni watched, horrified, and tried to understand the psyche of the pilot who had hung it there. The attempt failed. Kaiser he could understand, but not this.

This is something else, someone else entirely
, he suddenly realized, and a cold fear gripped him as the monster silently surveyed the terrain before it.

This isn’t gonna work!
His mind screamed as he began to careen towards panic. Once he arrived there, however, the dark stranger inside opened an eyelid and bid everything turn to ice. The storm in his mind suddenly abated, and he found himself gripping the double-pack charge almost to the point of tearing its tough fabric. Relaxing his grip, he peered out towards his enemy and willed his fear to die away, until all that remained was the grim realization that he was laying his eyes on the bringer of his death. He decided to accept that truth, knowing that he wouldn’t be able to move a muscle otherwise, remembering that he hated cowards more than he would hate to die.

With a luminous flash three sudden plumes of soil sprouted into the sky, uniting at the speed of sound into a wall of earth and blocking the enemy Suit entirely from his sight. The following moment the concussive shockwaves reached him and, despite his semi-prone position behind the shelter, his Hammerhead was almost lifted into the air. The noise to his right made it plain that Park’s unit, more exposed as it was to the elements, had impacted violently against the ground.

He began to count the seconds through clenched teeth, each signifying in his mind an opportunity to attack not taken advantage of. When he reached five he snapped, pulled the pair of blue cords from the device in his hand, and lobbed it out towards the rising dust cloud. The throw was better than he had expected it to be, but no sooner had it reached the cloud than, still high above the ground and quickly descending, it detonated spectacularly.

“What?” Toni had time to say, before an arriving Park explained his error for him.

“Three to four seconds, get it? That’s the delay time of the hand-grenades we’re using to initiate these charges. Just ‘cause you can throw that far doesn’t mean it’ll get there.” His Suit was still covered in soil from his fall, but his voice remained calm nevertheless.

“But if our expected range is two hundred meters, then we were too far back to begin with ...” he realized, but his conclusion was cut short by a streaking missile that punched through the dust cloud and roared over their heads.

A moment later a painfully intense flash of light filled his field of vision, and the remainder of the minefield detonated simultaneously, lifting an entire wall of earth into the sky and then towards them. Toni barely had time to throw his weight into the ground, and then the collection of shockwaves reached them with the power of a small nuclear weapon. His unit was abruptly launched backwards, uprooted trees crashing around his rolling frame as he lost notion of his horizon. He came to a sudden stop at the roots of a particularly sturdy pine tree, which nevertheless balanced back and forth like a metronome in slow motion. Then another shockwave, one with less weight behind it but far more snap, collided against his reclined form and the trees that surrounded him, and the majority of the old pine’s branches came crashing violently to the ground.

All the forest’s leaves fell like confetti and Toni felt somehow he had had that vision before, a lifetime ago when two thermonuclear weapons had changed his life.

You’re dead
, the stranger in his mind gleefully informed him,
it doesn’t matter if you die, ‘cause you’re already dead
.

He knew what the voice was implying. It was time to find the monster and kill it. And after that was over and done with he would go find Ian and kill him too. The thought brought a cruel smirk to his lips, and he stood once more, noticing that his second bluecord charge was nowhere to be seen.

Nor was Park, for that matter.

Pulling a redcord double-whammy from his webbing, he gripped it firmly and lowered his center-of-mass, and then he set off back to his initial position to reestablish visual with the bakemono.

As he laid his eyes once more on the remains of the minefield, he found a wall of dust about one kilometer across rising high into the sky, where the savage winds were proceeding to demolish it. Without a second thought he stepped into it, his visibility suddenly diminishing to no more than a few meters. Forwards he marched, heedless of the risk and eager to meet the alien who was tearing his world apart.

Because whatever its form, he absolutely refused to consider it human. And that made it all so much easier, for once something was no longer human there was no need to speak of honor or fair treatment. He understood what Ray had done for the first time, and knew also what logic had made his friend kill the dark-man in the first place. If only he had done the same to Kaiser, his mate might still be alive for two Earthlings dead. There was a lesson hidden in there somewhere; no good deed goes unpunished, no need to be the good guy, not authorized to be a hero, no –