The Guardians of Sol (18 page)

Finding myself out of targets, I rushed around the corner. There I found perhaps, judging by their body language, fifty men who were as surprised to see me as I was to see them. I screeched to a halt. They screeched to a halt. We looked at each other. I slammed my hammer into the wall of the building, shattering the mortar. The results were clear, although not even my vision was at that point. I was already switching to thermal imaging, and charging full speed into the middle of the group.

I bowled a few
over, and whipped my hammer around, destroying a couple more armors. Now, I might not always be the brightest person, but even I know that standing in the middle of a bunch of your enemies can be bad for your health. It’s an untenable situation where numbers count more than equipment or training. So I did the first thing that came to mind and jumped, assisted by the thrusters on my backpack. At the point where I would have come back down, I instead grabbed the nearest ledge. Anchoring myself there, I popped off two rounds from the plasma engine cannon. I was fairly sure that the resulting blast decimated most of the milling soldiers.

It was at that point where the wall I was clinging to, incidentally the wall I had weakened by destroying its mortar, gave out. I crashed into the ground with a metal shriek and a thud. I was promptly covered by falling bricks. This prompted a weary sigh from me. I began to get up, when I was hauled to my feet by someone in very familiar armor.

“Some kind of example you’re setting there, Cap. Laying down on the job like that,” Squatter quipped. I’m sure the bugger was grinning stupidly inside his helmet. At least he’d taken care of the rest of those soldiers.

“You’re pushing it,
private
. Come on, let’s head back to the mobile ops station and see what’s what. Maybe pull everyone back together so we’re harder to pick off.”

I would like to say that we got back without incident, but my luck doesn’t extend that far. We were running down a particularly trashed street when Squatter’s feet went out from under him. I promptly followed him, striking sparks off of the pavement. A grenade landed gently between the two of us. It was at that point I think I realized we were in trouble. I did the fastest push up of my life and pushed my thrusters to full burn. Squatter rolled away. Neither action was quite enough.

My body slammed into a wall, the breath rushed out of my lungs. My teammate was somewhere beyond the curtain of smoke rising from the shallow crater where the grenade had gone off. I saw the man responsible for my discomfiture.

His armor was golden. He had an eagle crest on his helmet not unlike mine. He held two long…
objects… that were retracting into gilded swords. At that moment, the sun hit him just right, splaying perfectly off of the curves of his armor; he looked like a mythical hero, damn him. Now if only he weren’t trying to kill me. This Knight of the Table walked gracefully, slowly, coming ever closer. I stood, having regained my breath. He stopped and looked at me. If a posture could have a sound attached to it, then right then that bastard’s would have been an evil laugh.

“Well come on then, you over polished nutcracker! Fight me!” I yelled. I came at him then, my hammer held in both hands.

He moved towards me as well, one of the swords whipping out and around twice. The blade of the thing extended, and scythed through brickwork as a red-hot razor blade through warm butter. A piece of a building fell towards me. I backhanded it with my hammer, reducing it to dust. Simultaneously, I reached out with my left arm and unloaded my last two shots from the cannon there. Uther’s Knight destroyed the projectiles in midair with his whip-sword. I continued my mad rush.

His blade met my hammer… and nothing happened to his sword. He brought his other sword around and I blocked it with my adamantium covered fist. I had a feeling that if the materials making up my armor weren’t of such rare and high quality, there would be little keeping me from being sliced in half. My old armor certainly wouldn’t have stood up to those blades.

I attacked again, and was again rebuffed. He extended one sword into a lance that would have skewered me but I was already spinning away, trying to reach his flank. His sword deflected my blow yet again, and his other sword whipped around and yanked my weapon from my grip. The first sword snaked out, denting a chest plate when I threw myself backwards too slowly.

The knight threw my hammer far beyond the immediate reach of my retrieval system. I jumped to the side to avoid his sneaking blades and let loose with my plasma cannons. He somehow dodged the explosive packets, and his armor absorbed the energy from the smaller darts.

I wanted to cry out in frustration, but stopping to do that would have been the death of me, and there were a few things I most dearly wanted to live for. I dove away from the flitting blades and saw a fallen Spartan shield on the edge of a pile of shattered and mutilated bodies.

A flick of the wrist and the shield flew into my outstretched hand. I moved, and using the shield I turned the knight’s blades aside. Near my wits end, I slammed into him bodily, unsteadying him. I hit him again, and again, the surface of the shield combined with my fury seemed too much for him to avoid. Just when my confidence that I wasn’t going to die was returning, he pulled my feet out from under me again.

Being on my back certainly afforded me a very nice view of my opponent. I took a small amount of joy in seeing the eagle he wore on his crown look more like a retarded pug than any sort of raptor. Fortunately, I had not been completely unprepared for him knocking me down again. I rolled, my borrowed protection deflecting the golden sword instead of it spearing through me. I engaged my thrusters, and this time when we collided, he lost his footing. I landed several feet away, near an unconscious Squatter. Fat lot of help he was. I shifted my shield to my other hand and snagged a now ownerless sword.

A golden streak struck sparks off of me, sliced the sword in two. So much for that idea. I spied another shield not too far away, and as my enemy closed on me, I brought it towards me as fast as I could get my armor to manage. When it got to the point where I would have grabbed it, I jumped out of the way, disengaging the magnetic fields.

The second shield flew straight at the knight, and though he flipped it out of his path with those wicked swords of his, I was right behind it. He hit me before I could hit him. He kicked me, flipped me. The blows came and I lost sense of up and down. He smashed me into a wall, and I sagged down to the ground, disoriented. Weakened. Defeated. I didn’t even have the energy to grab the hammer that was now at my fingertips.

“For one of the Guardian’s vaunted Specials, you are far from impressive. I am going to enjoy killing you more than you will ever know, dead man.” The Knight said to me conversationally.

“Messed up your pretty armor good though,” I wheezed back.

“Armor is easy to repair or replace. Your heart is not. Goodbye. I had hoped you would have been more entertaining.”

I was still too dazed to move much, but it was enough. His sword lanced into my shoulder instead of my heart. It also pinned me to the wall. He let go of his grip on that weapon. Almost casually, he extended his remaining blade into a lance, and used both his hands. Shamefully, instead of looking my death in the eye, I closed my own. That is to say, I blinked, and I missed it.

When my eyes opened again, the knight was spurting blood and various mechanical fluids from a new hole in his neck. He collapsed, revealing my rescuer. The Fallen already had his sword back in its sheathe, looking for all the world like appearing out of nowhere was perfectly normal. Granted, it could very well be. No one knew much about the Fallen.

He walked over and pulled the blade from my shoulder. In his grip, it retracted into a normal sized sword. He discarded it and shoved a biofoam dispenser into my wound. The biofoam acted like a clotting agent, but it also began to take on the characteristics of the tissues around it, speeding healing even more than nanobots or natural processes.

“You must not die just yet, Captain,” he told me with that strange accent. “There is still a great amount of work to do.”

I looked around to see a second Fallen reviving Squatter. I nodded to the man who had saved my life. I grabbed my hammer, and my new shield. After a moment’s consideration, I fastened the knight’s golden swords to my belt. I would have Ruiz or Rachel analyze them later. Maybe they’d even give them back some day. Part of me wondered how much I would hurt myself if they did.

“Alright, let’s rally the troops. We’ve got a long day ahead before all of those lovely reinforcements arrive.”

“This way, my Captain is waiting.” They are men of precious few words, the Fallen.

November 13, 2289. Orbital Debris Field

Four months of hell. Figuratively, not literally, of course. In this era of warfare, it was rare that any war, or conflict, lasted more than a few weeks. So shouldn’t I be happy that I got to fight in an actual war? The last big one was more than forty years ago… Still, I almost feel bad skipping over it. Almost, but not really.

After we broke the sieges in Greece, of which Larissa was just the first, the AEU armies retreated to strongholds in Serbia, and Bulgaria. By the time those of us on foot reached the fortresses, the Guardian fleets had pushed back their AEU counterparts. This might seem a trivial thing, but it is very nice to have air support. Said air support gets even nicer when it bombs the hell out of the people trying to kill you. The bombing of those strongholds made for a nice show. Big explosions, pretty lights, went on for hours. I got a very good recording of it on my armor. It’s all about perspective, right?

Every few weeks, the Sentinel would call some of us Specials back to the Forge to send us on various, well… “special” missions. He wasn’t going to waste us on the front lines anymore than he had to. Not that I complained, this schedule let me grab a few days with Rachel every so often. Strangely enough, the more beat up I became, the more gorgeous she got. It was probably only in my mind, but that never bothered me before. And she didn’t dump my sorry butt, so I guess she didn’t mind either.

The assignments that the Sentinel gave us ranged from assassinations, and materiel escort, to full out assaults on various outposts. Basically anything the Venators couldn’t handle on their own to prep for the main Guardian forces making their way through Europe. The last few assignments led to the capture of Berlin and Paris… taking out their defensive grids before our guys arrived to sweep up, it was rough business with lots of resistance. However, my squad got plenty of practice with our new equipment. No Table Knights got the drop on me again.

All of which brings me to my current predicament, floating in a debris field, in an assault shuttle with a rapidly degrading orbit. Of course, as bad as that sounds, everything was going according to plan. The war is in its ending stages, but in order to actually end it, the High Sentinel said that we needed another viable landing field close to but outside of
Britain. Teamed with the first squad, that was our mission. As much as everyone (myself included) calls them insane, I’ve found that the first squad is actually more peculiar than crazy. They still aren’t people you want to spend much time with though.

Unfortunately, to get to our operational zone, we had to do an orbital drop. Stuffed into a tight, tiny little pod and then shot toward the ground with a fair chance to explode before landing. It’s quick and it’s effective, and it’s enough to give a sane man issues. Not that that kind of thing ever matters to the brass. I’ve never really liked orbital drops, the fact that our pods weren’t the solid shell variety we used in Greece just made things worse. But I’d survive, and no one but Haywire knew me well enough to make fun of me later.

“Drop point reached,” the pilot announced happily. “Releasing pods in ten. Good luck.”

There was a jolt, and then I was spinning slowly in the void. Through the external feed on the pod, I watched the assault shuttle fly away after it popped out the last few guys. Since we didn’t want the AEU to think this was anything but a normal meteor shower, radio silence was in force. Unable to move, enclosed in darkness, I felt increasingly claustrophobic.

“IRIS, load playlist1 and run program. Volume at seventy.” I told my OS, and the soothing instrumentals of music from across the ages soon played through my head.

I don’t usually have too much trouble doing an orbital drop, the massive speeds and propensity towards dying usually gets overlooked when you’re hyped up on adrenaline. It was times like this one that involved a long waiting period before the action that got to me.

We floated another forty minutes before the pods reoriented for proper reentry with the debris. The movement jolted me awake, and before long the whole pod was rattling from turbulence and heat. I switched to a more lively soundtrack, and watched different pieces of debris burning up at different rates, some disappearing fast, and others racing on ahead. After a few seconds, the outermost layer of pod plating boiled off and the next layer ejected soon after which cut my visual feed.

Cheap and disposable, these prototype drop pods were composed of about half-dozen layers of ablative plating that alternatively boiled or popped off to reduce heat and velocity. This system also made the pod itself hard to lock onto with anti-air guns, since all the loose plating created more targets than most targeting computers could compensate for. Theoretically the pods should look like a meteor breaking apart.

Unlike the op in Berlin though, no one was shooting at us (yet) because no one was expecting us. Thank the Light.

The last layer of my pod opened up, jolting me with the deceleration. In free air now, a parachute opened up from an addition on my backpack, slowing me even more. Closer to the ground, a gentle application of thrusters gave me a nice gentle landing. Judging from the dust rising from the other side of a nearby hill, not everyone had had such nice touchdowns.

I jogged over to find one of the First squad laying face down in the mud, his chute still blowing in the wind. I checked his vitals on my HUD, still alive, and still conscious. I honestly had no idea why he wasn’t moving. Once I got him turned over, I saw that his servomotors had locked up in flight. Again, I had no idea how that happened.

It took some effort, but I got his helmet off so that he could breathe while I figured out how to unlock his armor. My mistake, he could breathe just fine in there, and as soon as his face was clear of the helmet, he let me know with a long and rather creative stream of invective. Probably could have embarrassed a sailor. If I had had something besides a gun to shove in his mouth, I would have. Ungrateful bastard.

“I can always come later, if you’d prefer,” I told him. He shut up for the moment, still looked far too angry.

I finally found an access port on his unfamiliar armor and, taking a cord from one of my gauntlets, hooked IRIS into his operating system. That was one of the few problems with customized armor; everything was always in different places. After that, it didn’t take her long to sort out the problem and I barely avoided getting slugged in the side of the head by the angry Fuzzy Bunny.

Don’t ask me about the name, the first squad is the strangest collection of men I’ve ever met. Some of them are crazy enough to have literal targets painted on their backs. They pride themselves on being the first into a scrap and the last ones standing. Good guys to have in front of you in a fight, definitely not at your side, or behind you… or anywhere where you can’t see what they’re doing.

If anyone asked me, and no one did, the fourth and fifth squads were much more suited to this mission. They knew the land and the people, and they didn’t stand out nearly as much as the rainbow headache of the First squad or the golden glory of my Tenth. However, they were busy negotiating with the new independent kingdom of Scandinavia, recently split from the AEU. Hell, the Shadowstealers could have made this op look easy.

“You’re lucky I don’t have time to put you in your place properly,
private
,” I told the big man. “On your feet, we’re heading out. We have to make the rendezvous or we won’t get any of the fun later.”

He just grunted, and followed me as I followed the map marker that IRIS had displayed on my visor. I ran toward it at full speed, jumping over streams and dodging the occasional tree. My surly companion blew past me, his armor letting him hover and move faster than anyone on foot, even if they were in power armor. The first squad’s armor is wider and taller than anyone else’s, their back weapons dropped down for manual use, the hover systems near their shins prevented easy jogging, and their armor was at least twice as thick as anyone else’s. They each had huge heatsabers that could cut through all but the toughest material with ease.

Private Fischer reached the RZ a full ten minutes ahead of me, but then, so did almost everyone else. Captain Joshua nodded to me as I came to a stop in the middle of the huddled group.

“Just in time, Captain. Much longer and we would have gone to the beta RZ without you,” he said cheerfully.

“I would have been here faster, but I had to unlock Fischer’s armor. I thought it would be better to be late than shorthanded.”

“He was telling us. Except you were a villain in his story. Old bastard always likes to exaggerate.”

“Hey!” the private cried indignantly.

“Don’t deny it, Fish, we’ve all known you too long,” Joshua replied. Fischer pouted in an exaggerated manner. I’m not sure I’ll ever get used to the first squad, maybe that’s how they like it.

IRIS chimed a new countdown and marker on my HUD, the beta RZ was at least an hour away. “Time to get moving. Try not to get too far ahead of my boys and me, eh?”

“No Promises, junior.”

*****

The missing squad members, three Fuzzy Bunnies and two Thundermakers, were waiting for us. One of my men, Filch, was sitting apart from the others.

“Sorry we couldn’t meet you at the alpha site, sir. Filch got all of our OS infected with a computer virus. By the time we got it cleaned up it was better to just head here.” Sandsmark explained.

“I guess I forgot to run the filter on that last batch of downloads…” The guilty man explained, shamefaced.

“I thought I told you to stop pirating things last year,” I scolded him.

“You weren’t my captain last year, and you never brought it up with O’Neal. Frankly, I forgot about the whole thing,” He explained. Lovely.

“Well now I am your captain and I’m telling you to stop pirating things. Music, movies, games, books; I don’t care what you pirate, just don’t do it.”

He put on his helmet, but his body language bespoke dejection. Joshua got my attention, gestured to his wrist like he was wearing a watch there. Time to move out.

*****

By the time we made it to the designated campsite, a cave near some ocean cliffs, it was getting dark. Not entirely unexpected, but later than we’d hoped. At least it was dry, out of the way, and large enough for two dozen men in power armor. Our IRA contacts were being uncharacteristically thoughtful. I flagged down John.

“Shot-put, Filch was stupid enough to get on my shitlist. Enjoy first watch.”

My friend swore, and I explained why they got the short stick. I had a feeling Filch wasn’t going to be living up to his name for awhile.

At the far end of the cavern, Joshua was getting helped out of his armor, so I wandered over to him after making sure my boys were on task.

“What now, Joshua?” I really needed to see if that was his first or last name… or only name. “I’m at the limit of my instructions here. I know we’re supposed to blow something up, but what?”

Out of his armor, Joshua was just a well built, but weathered and aging man with blond hair going grey. “There’s a landing field about ten clicks away that’s controlled by the enemy. Our contact is supposed to meet us here in the morning to give us more details about its defenses. Then we take it out and stand by for reinforcements. It shouldn’t take more than day or so.”

One of his guys handed him some field rations, he took a bite and grimaced. “Gods! You’d think after a so many centuries someone would have figured out how to make field rations that were actually palatable. You might as well take a load off, Castle. My boys’ll take second watch.”

Without anything else to say I shrugged, and walked to an unoccupied corner. Now the Bunnies were going to see something to hate my squad for. Helmet off; I quietly said the command phrase, sliding the chest armor open. As opposed to seventh generation (and older) armor, where you sometimes needed a small team of engineers to get your armor on or off, you could pretty much just walk out of our eight generation suits. We were walking around free in a fraction of the time it took the first squad. Hateful glares all around. Good times and all that. As I settled into my sack, I gave Shot-put a wave goodnight. He replied with a rude gesture. It is just nice to be as feared and respected as I am…