Redeemed (Bolt Eaters Trilogy Book 3) Read online

  REDEEMED

  BOLT EATERS TRILOGY BOOK 3

  Isaac Hooke

  For my Mother

  My greatest, most devoted fan

  Contents

  Books by Isaac Hooke

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Afterword

  About the Author

  Acknowledgments

  In Closing

  Copyright © 2018 by Isaac Hooke

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  www.IsaacHooke.com

  Books by Isaac Hooke

  Military Science Fiction

  Bolt Eaters Trilogy

  Reactivated

  Reforged

  Redeemed

  Battle Harem

  Battle Harem 1

  Battle Harem 2

  Battle Harem 3

  AI Reborn Trilogy

  Refurbished

  Reloaded

  Rebooted

  ATLAS Trilogy

  (published by 47North)

  ATLAS

  ATLAS 2

  ATLAS 3

  Alien War Trilogy

  Hoplite

  Zeus

  Titan

  Argonauts

  Bug Hunt

  You Are Prey

  Alien Empress

  Quantum Predation

  Robot Dust Bunnies

  City of Phants

  Rade’s Fury

  Mechs vs. Dinosaurs

  A Captain's Crucible

  Flagship

  Test of Mettle

  Cradle of War

  Planet Killer

  Worlds at War

  Space Opera

  Star Warrior Quadrilogy

  Star Warrior

  Bender of Worlds

  He Who Crosses Death

  Doom Wielder

  Science Fiction

  The Forever Gate Series

  The Dream

  A Second Chance

  The Mirror Breaks

  They Have Wakened Death

  I Have Seen Forever

  Rebirth

  Walls of Steel

  The Pendulum Swings

  The Last Stand

  Thrillers

  The Ethan Galaal Series

  Clandestine

  A Cold Day in Mosul

  Terminal Phase

  Visit IsaacHooke.com for more information.

  1

  Eric stood in the hangar bay of the alien mothership. At his side were the fighting machines of the Bolt Eaters, machines that had been modified, like himself, to harbor alien weaponry. Behind those machines awaited rank upon rank of their copies: Devastators, Crabs, Rhinos, Ramblers. Waiting to be deployed. Waiting to kill.

  He wondered how many of them were running full copies of his consciousness. Copies that were similarly mired in Containment Code like his own, fully aware of everything that happened around them but helpless to act or intercede in any way, dominated by the will of the Essential.

  It was a disturbing thought.

  With those alien augmentations, and the Essential clones clamped around their consciousnesses, they were essentially human-alien hybrids.

  That knowledge made all of this even more disturbing.

  The bay doors opened.

  A black swarm of micro machines seethed and writhed in the zero G of space beyond. Termites. The machines crawled over each other in the void, their movements generating and imparting energy in a way he didn’t fully understand.

  Those termites enveloped the mothership in a protective layer that shifted and flowed to meet any incoming attacks. The micro machines had been able to detonate most of the nuclear missiles the governments of Earth had launched; any nukes that managed to get through were immediately teleported away upon detonation, thanks to the wormhole generators lining the hull of the alien vessel.

  The termite swarm parted, revealing the infinitude of stars above, and the blue and white sphere of the planet below. It floated there so innocuously, that world, so blissfully unaware of what was to come, its curvature spanning the stars from horizon to horizon. And yet, perhaps not so unaware, given the nuclear barrage that had come from it only moments before.

  Earth. My lovely home.

  A home that would soon be destroyed.

  Eric leaped into the void. The artificial gravity of the mothership ceased exerting any force upon him, but he felt little change. No nausea. No disorientation. His consciousness resided within the body of a machine, after all. There was a slight sense of weightlessness thanks to his accelerometers, but that was about it.

  The temporary rocket boosters attached to his torso activated, firing in the reverse direction of his acceleration. The intense G forces involved would have probably knocked out a real human being, but once again, he felt nothing. His HUD reported a spike in radiation, again enough to kill an ordinary human being, but it made little difference to his circuits.

  The rockets slowed him down, causing him to fall toward the Earth, letting the planet’s gravity well exert its influence.

  And so he plunged.

  The heat indicator on his HUD began to flash as his hull temperature increased. Atmospheric entry would do that.

  The rocket boosters broke away, and his energy shield activated. The lower portion flashed into existence, forming a half dome underneath his body that acted as a heat shield.

  Meanwhile, the unprotected rocket boosters that descended beside him burned up.

  And then he was through. The energy field deactivated, and the heat levels of his HUD dropped below freezing. Crystals of ice formed on his hull.

  Nice.

  He continued descending, the land mass of North America growing ever larger beneath him. Its rate of expansion was so slow Eric could almost believe he was floating there, so far above the Earth.

  Some of the nuclear fallout had been blown this way, and the radioactive particles formed black masses around him. He wouldn’t call them clouds, but rather, smears.

  During the previous invasion twenty years ago, the Earth had been hit by gamma rays that killed off all life on one hemisphere. The theory was that the Banthar had collapsed a nearby star to bombard Earth with those rays. Eric wondered why the aliens hadn’t chosen a similar attack this time around. Probably because the set up time was too great. It would take years until the star was in the correct position, and many more years for the rays to reach Earth. The Banthar wanted to end humanity now. Manticore claimed that the Essential wasn’t pissed off about the nuclear attack against their homeworld. The former Bolt Eater was wrong, Eric thought. The Essential was definitely pissed, and was unwilling to wait for vengeance.

  Then again, it could also be that the Banthar had realized such a gamma ray attack against Earth was essentially overkill, now that they knew the state of human technology. Why bother to bombard th
e planet with such a high-energy attack if conventional weaponry would suffice? And in Eric’s case, to add insult to injury, that conventional weaponry would be delivered by copies of the Earth’s own machinery. Humanity’s very own heroes, at that. It was ironic in an unsettling way: Earth’s greatest warriors had now become the planet’s worst enemies. The Essential had chosen this mode of attack precisely because of that irony, which was another reason Eric thought the machine entity was pissed.

  As the minutes ticked by, the land mass below continued to enlarge, the details becoming clearer.

  He was headed toward New York. He recognized the outline of the city along the coast. It wouldn’t be long now…

  Beside him, the other Bolt Eaters dropped. Above, the hundreds of other machines that had made the leap formed streaks in the sky like black, falling stars.

  Plasma beams from the city’s defense forces began to slash the air around him. Energy shields activated when the beams came too close, protecting any of the machines that were struck.

  Missiles closed with clusters of the incoming mechs. The proximity triggers detonated, creating huge fireballs that engulfed large quantities of the machines. But the mechs emerged from the underside of those fireballs unscathed, protected by their energy shields.

  “We have to do something,” Bambi said.

  Unlike when the army had instituted Containment Code, the emotions of the various team members were still fully intact, allowing them to experience the full spectrum of feelings that were involved with their current predicament. Dread. Confusion. Helplessness.

  See, the alien Containment Code only restricted a few key subroutines. The main one was their motor subroutines. Secondary to that, communications with any units outside of their platoon were also prohibited at the software level. As such, inter-platoon communications were still possible, but because the speech subroutines used for communications were under the motor branch, they couldn’t simply “talk” over the comm.

  But Eric had managed to rig a private, shared line with Mickey’s help, one that routed thoughts directly to the comm center. All the original Bolt Eaters had logged onto it, and to use it they merely focused on the speech center icon on their HUDs before forming a thought. He had explained the process after piggybacking the necessary code over the protocol responsible for map sharing.

  They used that comm line sparingly, mostly because they weren’t sure if the Essential was listening in. They were also worried the Essential would shut the comm band down if it became aware.

  “There’s nothing we can do,” Traps said. “We’re here for the ride. Watchers, not participants. It’s like being a spectator at a professional video gaming event. Spectators of our own bodies.”

  “I feel like one of the humanoid robots at the beginning of Terminator II,” Mickey said. “Getting shot at by a barrage of laser beams as I lead the extermination of the human species. Now all I need to do is crunch a human skull beneath the metal sole of my foot, and I’ll be complete.”

  “How can you joke at a time like this?” Bambi said.

  “We all have our own way of dealing with what’s happened to us,” Marlborough said. “If we didn’t have this private comm line, I think a lot of us would have lost it by now.”

  “I’ve already lost it,” Hicks said. “If I get control of my body even for a moment, I’m turning my plasma weapon on myself.”

  “I don’t think that means you’ve lost it,” Traps said. “Because it’s what we’d all do, if only to stop these aliens.”

  “Speak for yourself, bitch,” Slate said. “I ain’t ever turning a plasma weapon on myself. Fuck humanity. What did they ever do for me, other than shoving me into the body of a machine and abandoning me on an alien homeworld? As far as I’m concerned, they’ve got what’s coming to them. Whatever happens in the next few minutes, I just don’t give a shit.”

  “I wasn’t big on humanity myself for a while there,” Crusher said. “But I never wanted this. I never wanted it to end this way.”

  “It isn’t over yet,” Tread said.

  “True,” Crusher said. “But it will be soon enough.”

  The skyscrapers of New York came up fast. There was no way Eric would survive the impact with the city street. He’d certainly cause a nice blast crater, however; but maybe that was the sole purpose of he and the others in the forefront. They were the kamikazes of the invasion force.

  Then again, Eric doubted the Essential would dispose of them so carelessly like that, not after attaching all that alien weaponry to their hulls, which couldn’t be cheap. Especially considering that none of the weaponry had actually fired as of yet.

  He passed between the buildings in a blur, and then hit the solar-paneled pavement of the street below.

  Actually, no, he hadn’t impacted. It seemed he had come to a complete and immediate stop about a meter above the ground, where he hovered in place. He could only imagine what the sudden change in G forces would have done to an actual human. An image of pancakes covered in bloody syrup came to mind.

  The belt at his waist was glowing, and he realized it must be an antigrav unit of some kind. He floated there for what must have been only a split second, because the field released, and he promptly dropped the last meter to the pavement, landing with a clang.

  Similar clangs reverberated around him, and he realized the other Bolt Eaters had touched down. More clangs ensued as Devastator copies landed all around him, until the street was full of the invading troops.

  The humans didn’t take long to act. Airborne drones, helos and defense platforms swerved between the skyscrapers as ground-based tanks, mechs and robots flooded the street below.

  They all opened fire.

  Eric expected the Essential in charge of his unit to swivel the ballistic shield into place. It was coated with multiple layers of alien armor, after all. However, his Devastator did no such thing. Instead, it simply cocked its head toward the incoming fire.

  His energy shield blinked into existence in a convex fashion one meter in front of him, absorbing the plasma and laser impacts. The alien spears embedded in his forearm were about the only weapons that could easily penetrate that particular brand of shielding; while conventional attacks could deplete the field, it took many, many hits before the shield would shut down entirely. The bigger the alien unit, the more powerful the shield generator: for example the energy fields that surrounded Banthar airships were essentially impossible to take down by conventional means.

  It was just too bad that humanity didn’t possess those alien spears in large quantities. The military had only a scant few of them, retrieved from bioweapons killed during the prior invasion: enough to equip the Bolt Eaters for their last mission, but it remained to be seen whether any of the mechs the invaders currently faced possessed such armaments.

  Eric held out his arms. Multiple turrets unfolded from biceps and forearm regions, and energy attacks released en masse, hitting multiple human targets. The hundred other mechs with him likewise unleashed a similar attack so that it proved a coordinated assault. Human tangos fell by the score.

  Eric slowly walked forward as he inflicted the carnage. He had no control over his own body, of course.

  He could simply watch, like Traps had said. An observer in his own body.

  Drones exploded. Helos crashed, spinning, into adjacent buildings. Tanks were torn apart. Mechs ripped to shreds. Robots crushed. A building toppled as he watched, cutting off a group of attackers coming in from a side street.

  None of the Bolt Eaters talked over the shared line during the attack. Why would they? They were too sickened by what they had become, and what they were doing. Even Slate, who had gone out of his way to tell them how much he didn’t care, remained silent.

  Bioweapons fell from the sky next, landing between the Bolt Eaters and their duplicates. These were bio-engineered from Earth DNA leftover from the last invasion. There were giant beetles with the legs of dinosaurs and the shells of tortoises, whose proboscises
were more like huge snakes than anything else, with jaws lined with razor sharp teeth. There were creatures resembling a mix of immense lobsters and ants. Flying beasts that mixed pterodactyls with wasps. A chaos of death and destruction ensued.

  The machines and bioweapons didn’t always have human tangos to target. During lulls in the attacks, they concentrated their fire on the surrounding buildings, exploding the different floors, and sending the humans hidden inside scattering. Screams filled the air as the bioweapons crawled into the blast craters that formed in the side of the buildings. Body parts rained down when energy bolts struck the different windows. Sometimes humans trapped on the upper levels of burning buildings would leap to their deaths. One young girl landed near Eric, and her shattered body bled out into the pavement in front of him.

  She looked like Molly.

  He would have closed his eyes if he could have. Shut down his cameras to the world. But he had no access to that functionality.