The Heart of Matter: Odyssey One (73 page)

Instead, his tri-barrel autogun and laser cannon were mounted on gimbal articulating arms that retracted into the back of the armor. In effect, the weapons stored themselves when the armor-shod fists of the EXO-12 let their handles drop.

That left his hands free to grasp out and climb clear of the debris, Jackson taking a moment while on top to quickly scout the immediate area before contacting his team and Bravo squad.

“Bravo, Gamma, Gamma Actual.”

“We’re online, Actual,” his team answered instantly.

“Bravo Actual, here. Bravo is linked into the network.”

“Confirmed,” Jackson said, checking the nearby icons. “The debris here is not conducive to a clean operation, Bravo. Suggest we fall back and contain the area until we can get some serious demo in here.”

“Negative. They’ve had less than an hour, and they damned near overwhelmed our forces. If we leave them any more time, these bastards will rip the planet out from under our feet.”

Yes, well, there was that. Jackson felt a shiver run down his spine. He’d been briefed on that before he shipped out, but it was a sort of abstract concept unless you were standing on the planet in question.

All right. Fine, so falling back isn’t an option.

“Confirmed. Gamma Team, deploy and support Bravo. Bravo Actual, suggestions?”

“How much are you packing in that Tinkertoy?” Bermont came back quickly.

“More than your squad started with.”

There was a pause over the comm for a moment; then Crowley noticed tags going up on his HUD. Bermont was labeling areas on the fly, so Crowley left him to it while he jumped down from the debris he was on and stomped over to a section he was reading a human heat source from.

The EXO-12 was a combat chassis, but the engineers saw no reason to skimp on raw power in terms of lifting strength. So when he determined that the person was trapped under the debris, Jackson shouldered into the section of building and dug titanium-shod fingers into the section of wall and lifted. It gave slowly at first, then with a smooth acceleration as his hydraulic pumps whirred into action, and a few seconds later, he’d cleared the fallen chunk of wall.

“If you can move, get the hell out of my AO,” he told the person lying under the rubble, hoping the translator got the point across. “You’re in the way.”

It was a man, lying shocked there for a moment before scrambling across the ground away from the EXO-12. Jackson
sighed, rolled his eyes, and grabbed the panicked guy by the leg. This didn’t reduce his panic in the slightest, as he was dragged back to where Jackson lifted him up to look him in the face.

“Wrong direction.” He pointed with his free hand. “That way.”

He let the guy go, and this time, he thankfully scrambled away from the enemy’s positions.

“Gamma Actual, Bravo Actual.”

“Go for Gamma,” Jackson said.

“I think we’ve got a plan.”

“I’m listening.”

A hundred kilometers away, at the first impact site, Savoy looked over the mess they’d made, one eye on the seismo readings as he glanced over to where the battered Navy SEAL was slouched on the ground.

“I think we’ve got the last of them,” he said finally.

“Hoorah,” Wilson muttered, completely unenthused. “I figured that out when they stopped trying to kill us.”

“There were fifteen of the bastards left then, Chief,” Savoy countered, “We nailed them with pocket TBs, remember?”

“That was twenty minutes ago.”

“You have any idea how hard it is to clean up the noise from these seismos when we have heavy fighting going on in the same zip code?” Savoy shrugged. “The major dropped a shit ton of ordnance just a hundred klicks from here. We’re still picking up echoes from some of it.”

“Hoorah.” Wilson pulled himself to his feet and rested the gravity impeller on his shoulder as he turned around. “So, we’re clear?”

“Looks like it. We’ll need to leave the sensors and keep some of the militia boys here to stand watch,” Savoy said, “but this site looks secure.”

“Glad to hear it, Lieutenant.”

Both men started when Colonel Reed’s voice injected itself into the circuit.

“Sir!”

“We’ve got a problem brewing at Bravo squad’s AO,” Reed said, not bothering to acknowledge the startled soldiers. “Leave a trip wire team and haul ass to Bravo’s location.”

“Roger that, sir. Uh…We’re going to need a lift,” Savoy answered.

“Shuttles are all tied up. I’ve wrangled you a seat on a Priminae orbiter.”

“Great,” Savoy replied dryly. “It won’t melt if we hit rain, will it?”

Reed ignored the question and, in fact, simply signed off, leaving Savoy hanging. The lieutenant groaned.

“Man, I really don’t trust those things. Who builds a ship that can melt, anyway?”

“In World War Two, there was a serious plan to build aircraft carriers out of ice,” Master Chief Wilson answered as he got to his feet. “It was only canceled because the war ended. So I suppose the answer to your question is we’re all a little crazy. Probably has to do with the uniform cutting blood off to the head.”

Savoy rolled his eyes.
A Navy master chief with a sense of humor. Great, now I know the world is ending.

Of course, the moment he thought that, Savoy remembered the consequences of leaving even a single one of the Drasin drones intact. A cold shudder passed through his body at the thought, and he firmly pushed that entire line of thinking well away.

Some things just weren’t funny no matter what angle you looked at them from.

Crowley gnashed his teeth as he had to drop his laser cutter, letting the articulated arm pull the weapon back into its slot along the back of his armor, so he could grab a chunk of debris and loft it clear of his road. The hardened construction material flipped end over end through the air and came down on a small grouping of Drasin soldier drones with a crash that shook the ground.

He guided the EXO-12 armor through the gap he’d made, leading with the tri-barrel cannon already spinning up. As the combat network reported, there were a dozen of the dog-sized drones waiting for him—well, they
thought
they were waiting for him.

What they were really waiting for was the hundred-round burst from his tri-barrel. The explosive shells tore them apart, splattering molten silicon across the terrain in the process.

The energy cost these things have to have, just to stay mobile, is insane.

Crowley was something of a thinker, one of the reasons he’d volunteered for the experimental testing of gear like the EXO-12. He loved getting his hands on things no one else had seen before and discovering all the little things that made them special, both for good and for ill. The Drasin cued that
part of his mind every time he saw a new bit of intel on the species.

The molten silicon they used for blood, or what passed for blood, intrigued him to no end. Certainly, the high heat was a boon in many ways to the creatures. It let them be mobile, for one, since silicon was rather solid at temperatures normally encountered on life-bearing worlds.

Well, human life-bearing worlds, at any rate.

No, what made it so damned
weird
in his book was the fact that there were so many other ways they could have gone. Silicon based or not, they could have—no, they
should have
—developed in some saner way. The high heat that the Drasin exhibited simply
had
to be enormously energy intensive. In order to maintain it for any length of time, it was clear that they had to
eat
or somehow take in energy very nearly constantly.

On its own, that wasn’t entirely unheard of, there were many simpler species on Earth that did the same thing. What made it completely bizarre, however, was the fact that these things ate and reproduced on a level that could literally consume
planets
.

And that, right there, was when Crowley’s intelligent, curious, and downright insatiable mind shut down and said it had had enough for the day, come back tomorrow, if you please.

The word
impossible
wasn’t something that he liked to throw around, particularly when it concerned something that clearly
wasn’t
, but the Drasin were so completely impossible that if he’d encountered them in one of the many science fiction novels he loved to read, he would have instantly screamed foul and called the author an idiot.

And yet, here I am
, the man thought wryly as the gentle vibration shook him through the massively insulated system,
proving how very powerful the tri-barrel autocannon really was.

A pair of stray Drasin tried to flank him, but with the compressed imagery in his HUD, he spotted them easily and reached back to pull his laser cannon back into play. The powerful laser mounted on his armor was a smaller, much smaller, version of the
Odyssey
’s primary array. Designed using trillions of nano-scale light-emitting diodes, the cannon emitted just under a gigawatt of narrow frequency energy.

Compared to the multi-terawatt beams tossed around by the Drasin, it wasn’t a lot; however, the other trick it could do made up for it. The beam also acted as part of a targeting and diagnostic system completed by hyperspectral scanners in his armor. They analyzed the composition of the surface being targeted, then adjusted the frequency of the laser to the precise degree that would be most completely absorbed. With near 100 percent efficiency, the beam was lethal beyond its measure as it vaporized almost any material it was aimed at.

So when he swung the laser out and triggered a pulse into the nearest Drasin, the vaporized material expanded into gaseous state so fast that the Drasin was blown back by the jet of exhaust gasses and then exploded into shards. The second followed less than two seconds after the fist.

“Gamma, Bravo, Gamma Actual,” he said calmly as he looked around the killing ground he was centered in. “Sector cleared. Moving on.”

“Roger. We’re reading more activity below the fallen buildings, copy,” Bermont responded, his voice tense.

“Copy that,” he responded, his own tone matching the other lieutenant’s.

As powerful as the EXO-12 was, he couldn’t move that much debris on his own, and there was no way in hell that the
standard power suits could shift even the smaller pieces of the toppled buildings.

They couldn’t do the job with what they had. There was just no way.

He toggled into the command channel, copying Bermont as well. “Sir, we can’t clear this area. We do not have the assets.”

“I concur,” Bermont said. “We need combat engineers, pronto.”

There was a pause while the system compressed the messages, pulsed them out, and then waited for Colonel Brinks to receive the data and respond. In the meantime, both lieutenants went about their duties and continued to attempt the impossible and clear the area.

“Roger that, Gamma, Bravo,” Reed answered a short while later. “Stand by for reinforcement from Savoy’s team.”

“Thank god, how far out are they?” Bermont asked.

The channel was now live, so Reed responded quickly. “One hundred klicks, waiting on a lift from a local bird.”

“ETA?”

“Fifteen minutes.”

Bermont swore, making Crowley cringe. Generally, it was a bad idea to start swearing at a full-bird colonel, even one who’d spent most of his career in the field the way an SF man would have.

“That’s how long it’ll take to shake the nearest bird loose,” Reed said, thankfully ignoring the profanities. “No can do any sooner.”

Bermont sighed audibly. “Roger that, sir. With that kind of time, however, we have an issue. These things make rabbits look like cloistered monks, Colonel. Even minutes count here, trust me. Talk to Savoy, he’s seen the inside of their burrows.”

“Copy that. I can’t change the speed of the universe, boys, but I’ll do what I can. In the meantime, hold the line.”

“Copy that,” Bermont answered dully.

“Copy,” Crowley signed off the command channel, leaving the team leader tac channel open. “You’ve been here before, what do you think?”

“I think we’re going to get overrun,” Bermont answered frankly. “They’ve already got way more drones than I thought possible, and it won’t be getting any better.”