Mech

  MECH

  Isaac Hooke

  Copyright © 2019 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

  For my dad, my best fan

  Give 'er hell

  Contents

  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

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Mech

  About the Author

  Acknowledgments

  In Closing

  1

  Rade watched the forward operating base explode.

  “Mechs, forward!” he ordered.

  He raced his Brigand mech through the streets of the colony, toward the site of the explosion. The roads around him were littered with the tentacled corpses of the Draactal, along with the wreckages of the armored units that had come to defend against them.

  He glanced at his overhead map and confirmed that the other members of his platoon followed in formation behind him. The colony’s buildings bordered the roadway, their exteriors somewhat yellowed from exposure to the alien atmosphere after the protective dome was breached.

  “TJ, status on the HS3s!” Rade said.

  “They’re gone!” TJ said. His face appeared in the lower right of Rade’s HUD as he spoke. It was an avatar, a three-dimensional computer representation of his features, not his true face, which would have been enclosed by the helmet of his jumpsuit at the moment.

  “What do you mean, gone?” Rade said. The autonomous scouts the team had deployed wouldn’t just up and vanish…

  “I lost contact with them after the explosion,” TJ said.

  “With all of them?” Rade pressed.

  “Yes,” TJ said.

  “What about air support?” Rade glanced skyward, toward where the Raptors had been circling. All three unmanned aerial vehicles were descending rapidly, leaving a trail of smoke behind them. They were on course to hit the ground well outside the colony.

  “Out of the game, too,” TJ said.

  The ground shook as another detonation rocked the base ahead, and an orange fireball overtopped the buildings. Rade and the others continued forward in their mechs, moving all the faster. When they finally arrived, there wasn’t much left of the base. The containerized housing units were smashed and upturned, as were the 3D printed hangars and other outbuildings. The surrounding wall and its razor wire had been penetrated in several places, the laser turrets on the defense platforms crushed and toppled. Draactal flitted across the ruins, their alien forms looking like a cross between horses and spiders, with the four-legged bodies of the former and the mandibled heads of the latter, and several tentacles protruding from their flanks. Their four legs were segmented, outward bending things, whose sharp, flat tips resembled ax heads that could either be padded upon, or stabbed into the ground, depending upon the angle.

  On the far side of the base, in the streets beyond, a sheer wall of Draactal raced toward the former site. They filled every available space between the buildings, covering the horizon from north to south in a layer of wriggling blackness; their hoots and howls filled the alien atmosphere.

  “Well, I can see why we lost contact with all our HS3s now…” Bender said.

  “Retreat!” Rade shouted. “We return to the launch site!”

  He turned his Brigand around and raced through the streets. The other mechs with him followed suit.

  The skin of his mech kept changing hue, trying to adapt to his alternating surroundings to blend in, but it would be useless against the Draactal, who could see on the infrared band.

  Sure enough, some of the Draactals in the forward operating base had spotted them—a few of the aliens followed, mirroring the course of his team on the adjacent rooftops.

  “Bender, eliminate those a-holes,” Rade said.

  “With utmost pleasure, Chief,” the platoon’s lead drone operator said.

  The missile launchers on the shoulders of the Brigand mech closest to Rade swiveled to the left and right as it ran; serpent missiles erupted from those arrays and ate into the Draactals. The explosions tore them apart, sending fragments of alien body parts raining down.

  “LC, the forward operating base has been destroyed,” Rade sent over the comm as he retreated.

  No answer.

  He glanced at his HUD. He still had a connection to the makeshift MilNet the military had activated upon arrival.

  “Snakeoil,” Rade said. “Are you able to raise the LC?”

  “Just lost the uplink,” the communications officer replied.

  “I’m showing a green,” Rade said. But as he spoke, the connection on his HUD turned red. “Scratch that.”

  “Uh, look up,” Fret said. He was the secondary comm officer.

  Rade glanced upward. In the sky, starburst debris patterns expanded outward, reminding him of fireworks.

  “That can’t be good,” Tahoe said. He was Rade’s LPO—leading petty officer.

  Some of that debris entered the atmosphere, and the smoke formed by reentry created big clouds behind the different pieces. Sonic booms rent the air in accompaniment, causing damaged pieces of glass to fall away from the bio dome that enveloped the city. Glass fragments landed on the streets in front of the mechs.

  The ground began to shake.

  “Got a Teether!” Bomb said.

  “Keep going,” Rade said. “Don’t stop!” He spoke to his internal AI next. “Taya, let’s reroute all the power you can spare to the leg servos!”

  “You got it,” Taya replied, a little too sweetly.

  On his HUD, the speed indicator increased a couple of extra kilometers per hour.

  The street continued to tremble around them; at the same time, the ground cracked in a circle beneath him and the others, but their mechs reached the edge and leaped past a few moments before the sinkhole formed.

  In his rearview camera feed, he saw the ground collapse, and the former road vanished into the large gaping maw that resided inside the sinkhole. That maw, and the alien body it belonged to, didn’t otherwise emerge from the hole.

  Rade and the other Brigands continued weaving between the buildings until they reached the edge of the geodesic dome. The base was composed of a five-meter-tall wall that formed a ring around the entire colony; they fired their jumpjets and landed on the metal top section, then dashed through the areas in the triangular frames where the glass of the geodesic dome had shattered.

  Rade reached the edge and leaped down, landing on the barren rocky wasteland beyond. He and the others continued forward, proceeding across the terrain. It rose and fell in several places, and Rade led his platoon into a longish defile to provide cover on the way to their destination.

  According to the overhead map, the launch site was only two klicks ahead. That was where all the booster rockets were wai
ting to take them into orbit. They were spread across a region two square kilometers in area.

  “Wait!” Lui said. The avatar of the Asian American appeared in the lower right of Rade’s HUD. “Why are we heading to the launch site? We just watched all the ships in orbit be destroyed.”

  “We don’t know that was all of them,” Tahoe argued. The Navajo’s avatar replaced Lui’s. “There could be other ships waiting to receive us. Hell, the debris we saw might not even belong to us. Could be the enemy.”

  Rade reached the edge of the defile and called a halt. He peered over the brim, activated maximum zoom, and focused on the launch site.

  The booster rockets were gone. He swiveled his cameras across the different locations, as marked on his overhead map, but in their places lay only depressions in the ground.

  “Looks like Teethers got there first,” Rade said.

  Though the surface was rocky, there was a relatively soft layer of earth and alluvium just below that allowed the Teethers to maneuver with ease.

  “So, what do we do now?” Manic asked over the comm. His avatar had a port wine stain just above the eye, vaguely reminiscent of a moth. “Those boosters were our only way back into orbit.”

  “Like Lui said,” TJ replied, replacing Manic’s image on Rade’s HUD. “Maybe returning into orbit isn’t the best idea anyway at this point.” That Roman nose bespoke of TJ’s Italian heritage, while the Atlas moth inked over his throat hinted at his profession.

  “How the hell did these aliens do this?” Bender said. He sounded just as confused as Rade felt. The black man’s avatar had gold chains hanging from his neck, with teeth covered in gold caps, big hoops hanging from each ear, piercings in both eyebrows, and a labret studding his lower lip. He wouldn’t be wearing any of that now, of course, but it was his typical wear during off mission times. “I thought they were supposed to be barely out of the stone ages… a Tech Class I race. No Tech Class I race is going to be destroying starships, let alone tracking down our booster rockets.”

  “Apparently they have some allies we didn’t know about,” Rade replied.

  “Could it be a competing faction from Earth?” Skullcracker asked. “The SKs or Russians maybe?” His avatar had a realistic skull tattooed over his face.

  “I don’t know,” Rade said. He glanced at his overhead map. “We still have the shuttle site to check.”

  “Probably gone, considering we lost the uplink…” Lui said.

  “We still have to check,” Rade said.

  “Maybe we’ll run into one of the other five platoons along the way,” Fret suggested. The secondary comm officer’s avatar had a skinny build, matching his real-life body. Tall and lanky, he was the complete opposite of Snakeoil, who was short and extremely muscular; of course, one’s build didn’t really matter, not when you piloted a mech. Hell, even jumpsuits were equalizers, allowing men and women of all ages and heights to participate in wars their physical attributes would have otherwise disqualified them from fighting centuries ago.

  “It’s certainly possible,” Rade agreed. Staying in the cover the defile provided, he glanced back the way they had come and confirmed that no Draactal were swarming out of the city to pursue them. Then he clambered out of the trench and led the others toward the shuttle site.

  His team had been sent down to search for the initial platoons, whose members had stopped responding the day before. The HS3 drones dispatched to explore the site had reported the forward operating base as empty, along with the rest of the city. Rade and his platoon had been in the process of confirming that assessment when the shit hit the fan.

  They were used to fighting Draactal by now. The aliens had been infesting human colonies in this region of space for the past few months, and Rade and the others were part of the cleanup crew. What no one had been able to explain was how the Draactal were actually traveling to the planets in question, considering their low Tech Class.

  The shuttle had landed a few klicks outside Newridium Colony along with the mechs, and there it had remained, its comm node providing an uplink to the vessels in orbit.

  They arrived in a short while, but just like the booster rocket site, all that remained of the area was a sinkhole.

  “Since when are Teethers able to track comm nodes?” Lui asked.

  “Since they learned to hunt booster rockets, and destroy starships,” Fret commented. “We’re screwed. We’re going to die here.”

  “No one’s going to die,” Rade said. “We have enough oxygen to last three days. We just need to keep moving, and not give the Teethers a chance to track us.”

  “How do you know that movement doesn’t attract them?” Tahoe said. “Maybe they can detect the vibrations.”

  “Well, sitting still certainly didn’t help the shuttle, or the booster rockets!” Bender said.

  “I’d rather keep moving than sit still,” Lui said.

  “Me too,” Bomb said. The avatar of the second black man in the platoon was completely free of jewelry. However, his head was shaved on either side to form a slight mohawk.

  “All right, good,” Rade said. “But this isn’t a democracy. We continue away from the city. To that rise.” He indicated what looked like the beginnings of a mountain range in the distance.

  He spread the platoon into a long, zig-zagging line, separated into two squadrons. The second followed the first by about a hundred meters, in order to provide overwatch.

  Rade kept an eye on his different cameras but the rocky landscape remained clear out there.

  “Tepin’s going to be pissed if we don’t get back in time,” Tahoe said over a private line. “She’s been planning the wedding for months now.”

  “Not your fault,” Rade said. “The situation spiraled out of control.”

  “I would have quit, you know,” Tahoe said softly. “If I knew something like this was going to happen. It was supposed to be a routine mission. It was—”

  “And it still is a routine mission, as far as I’m concerned,” Rade said. “We’ll be done here by dinner.” But even he didn’t believe that.

  “I’ve missed so many things because of my choice to become a MOTH,” Tahoe said. “All I wanted was a better life for my family. For myself. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve come to terms with that choice I made all those years ago, I just hoped that by now I’d stop missing out on things.” His video image was displayed in the lower right of Rade’s HUD, so Rade was able to watch as Tahoe shook his head. “I’m going to lose out on my daughter’s wedding, of all things. Sometimes I wonder, haven’t I given enough of myself to the Teams?”

  “Cyclone,” Rade said, using his friend’s callsign. “Tahoe. You’ll make it to the wedding. I swear I’ll do everything in my power to see that you do.”

  Tahoe didn’t answer for a long moment. Then: “Thank you. That means a lot to me, hearing it from you.”

  “Good,” Rade said.

  “Sometimes it pays to be friends with the chief of your platoon, huh?” Tahoe pressed.

  “Sure does,” Rade agreed. “You didn’t really mean that, about quitting though, did you?”

  “No,” Tahoe admitted. “I’ve been saying I’m going to quit for years. Never do. For some reason, I can’t bring myself to. I keep thinking about that flint stone back on the grinder in training. Three taps of the mallet, and we could leave whenever we wanted. I didn’t quit then. I’m not going to quit now. If I really wanted to quit, that was when I should have done it. Now, I’ve got nothing else. This is my job. The pay is crap. The hours are crap. But the people, well, that’s why I stay. I can’t abandon my brothers. Besides, the moment I decide to pack it in, I just know you’re going to get some critical mission.”

  “Fear of missing out,” Rade said.

  “Something like that,” Tahoe agreed. “Though more like, fear of not being there at your side when you need me most.” He paused. “You think the newbies can take the stress of all this? They’ve been pretty quiet; in case you haven’t noticed.”

>   “Oh, I noticed,” Rade said.

  Praxter, Rex, Kicker, and Pyro were the newest members of the team; the first two had signed on only a few weeks ago and were fresh from MOTH training school. Praxter was an Artificial, and Rex a full human. Bender and TJ had taken care of the hazing, which hadn’t been pretty from what Rade had heard. This despite that he’d told them to go easy on the pair. Kicker, meanwhile, had transferred in from another MOTH Team, while Pyro had come directly from Bravo platoon in the same Team, so neither had experienced the hazing, but that didn’t mean they had it any easier when it came to earning the respect of the rest of the team.

  “They’ll manage,” Rade said. “I refuse to believe that the MOTHs are graduating substandard trainees.”

  “Ah, you’re right,” Tahoe said. “They went through Trial Week, and all the other joys of MOTH training.” He paused, and then said: “What about Shaw?”

  “What about her?” Rade asked.

  “You’ll miss your scheduled call,” Tahoe replied.

  Rade shrugged inside his mech. “We’re just friends, anyway.”

  “She’ll still worry,” Tahoe said.

  Rade marched in silence for several long moments. “I used to think I’d get with her one day. But now, I don’t see it ever happening. Our careers keep us apart.”

  “Then quit,” Tahoe said. “Make it work.”

  “It’s not worth it to me,” Rade said. “Give up this life? I don’t think so. Besides, even if I wanted to quit, I could never abandon the team. Imagining my brothers marching into battle without me? It’s unthinkable.”