I steal a peek over the lip of my rudy trench, inhaling boiling air from my suit’s rebreather. Tasting metal. Of course those last shots hit my air supply too. My Heads-Up-Display (HUD) stutters, glitching as it recalibrates, numbers spinning wildly as it adjusts the amount of life support remaining. A mild distraction as four autocannons pivot towards my groin.
“Got a leak here, lettin’ out emergency air—better grab a top-up, mate, quick as ya can!” Says the suit in its off-kilter Australian accent.
Fan-fucking-tastic.
Of course the Artificial-Intelligence (AI) made the announcer an aussie. Just what I needed today.
*click click click* echoes through the trench as firing pins slam against empty chambers. Long since dry of bullets.
“Can it you stupid bot. Can’t you tell the pilot’s already dead?” I snap, planting a power-armor-boosted kick straight into its twisted chassis.
Steel snaps under my boot, hydraulic fluid spraying across the groin and stomach of my armor, as if the dead pilot’s soul lingers, wishing to mock his murderer. I glance down my nose at the cyborg wanting to kill him again. Expression tightening. Was the pilot even male? Impossible to guess after the -surgical butchery- they’d undergone to become one of these superheavy tanks, a Juggernaut. Bile claws up my gullet at the thought of having myself cut apart and fused into the battle mech. Absolutely disgusting-
-and a blackened mirror to my own transformation. Yet I experience no discomfort, for I chose this path.
My helmet chirps at me, automatically opening the channel to my ‘squadmate’.
“Phfina? Awre you awight?” Asks a lisping voice too young to be on the battlefield.
Especially this battlefield.
“I’m fine,” I grimace, gritting the pain beneath my armor. “Suit’s buggered. Ah, can you check that bunker for a spare?” I manage, forcing my voice to remain level through sheer willpower.
Tremors rumble across the battlefield, distant. Still I duck beneath the edge and face my only remaining friend. Who's picking her way through the archaic trench -so similar to the muck of World War One- heading towards a battered durasteel arch, gaping wide like the jaws of Cerberus.
Each breath pours molten glass into my lung, a cruel reminder that overconfidence always demands its pound of flesh.
The girl’s suit is identical to mine, eight feet tall, a brutal exoskeleton of layered of composite armor, designed to shrug off multiple hits from any angle and powered by twin fusion reactors, a form of technology I’m still struggling to understand despite it thrumming within my chest, fully encapsulating the soft human heart.
Except for the child pilot, entirely organic in nature and giving her an unfortunate handicap of being three point five feet tall. I’m impressed she can move at all in that thing, albeit with a stiff legged waddle. We really should have used something other than artillery shells as stilts, they’re too rigid. Seems like they’re tripping the suit’s crush limiters. All the pesky little bits of software that keep the powered armor from actuating its limbs beyond what is humanly possible; and bending us backwards.
Things I wouldn’t have to worry about in her place…
She shouldn’t be here.
Logic slithers into my thoughts, whispering cold solutions to my problems. I’m the one fighting, it’s only right for me to take the working armor. A child wouldn’t survive the switchover, not before radiation or my busted suit cooked her alive. The idea tightens around me, a parasite feeding off the cracks in my resolve.
Disgust hits harder than the bullet in my lung, revulsion hotter than the nuclear sun.
“Otay Phfina.” Is Kerrigan’s response, oblivious to my vile machinations.
Nausea hits me harder than bullets. A one-two combo with her innocence that hammers my ribs. She trusts me completely, she would not hesitate to swap suits. Might even ask if the air was supposed to burn as she handed me the only good rebreather.
A tear rolls down my cheek.
No, this is my battlefield, I won’t lose myself. We will live or die together, as best friends should. Our fates intertwined on the back of these newfound abilities. Presents of the device Jim gave me. The solarium reactor with my chest. Heart of flesh or heart of iron,
I
am
human
A blind scanner ping ripples through the trench, bouncing off our armors before I can duck or hide, mapping our positions. In pico-seconds -faster than thought- our positions will be entered into ballistic computers, targeting two exposed power armors for direct artillery interdiction. Or another kill team.
“Run!” I scream, checking the rounds in my flechette pistol.
But I already know the answer. The pistol’s electronic readout displays 0/100.
"Shit." I hiss, tapping into my solarium reactor, at least that is fully charged.
I hammer the only button available to me, the generically cryptic 'Empower'. Nestled within the armor--within me- a caged sun spins to life. Fusion collations ripple through my center, bending reality to my energy. Bones creak, pain lancing up and down my spine as a human body endures forces it was not evolved to experience. Vision sharpening, detecting every pixel of my HUD then plunging between them to see forward, not just in space, but into meaning. Sparks pump through my arteries, heat flaring like ten pounds of caffeine shooting right past the jitters and into a state of stimulated humming. The moment before a duel begins.
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A feeling that sticks to my entire body, like gelatinized anxiety. Waiting for the moment I can release it. I exhale long and slow, still perched atop the Juggernaut, shielding Kerrigan with my body once again. A few more bullet holes in my armor won't matter.
Kerrigan’s shuffle becomes a frantic straight-legged waddle, limbs slurping in and out of puddles as the suit compensates for a kid pilot. I don’t want her last memory to be a scream. So I activate the com once more.
“Thanks Kerrigan. Be quick now.” I gasp, smothering the agony in my voice. No reason to make a child half my age worry about my bullet wounds. Besides, I already rubbed some hydraulic oil into them, best we can do since the dirt is radioactive.
Howling echoes through the trench, hunting dogs summoned by the ping or the mad leftovers of a slain army.
Time to go.
My boots -slick with hydraulic fluid- slips off a Juggernaut’s track, the metal tangle clawing out from the depths of muddy hell to snag my ankle sending me cartwheeling over fragmented autocannons and empty missile racks. Their dead scanners chasing me into the mud twenty feet below. Suit dampeners cushion the blow, sending fire through the bullet holes in my side and shoulder.
I need to get into the bunker before artillery or some curious little killbot shows up. The battlefield above enters a lull, holding it's breath before a furious lunge.
I think.
God, I really hope so.
Howls snap off, to the echo of particle rifle. Mass produced and mil-spec weapons that my army will never stoop to using. Yet quite fatal. Flashing lights warn of my left reactor overheating, going super critical. Normally I could shunt spare coolant from the opposite reactor to even out the load, but it’s nonfunctional from the five autocannon bullets inside it. Minutes of air left, enemies incoming, and busted armor.
Suit power begins to fail, adding hundreds of pounds as I struggle to stand, rising to one knee before joints cease to bend.
Sorry Kerrigan, this is as far as I go. Or it would be if not for 'Empower'. Solarium energy, tawny and chrome rushes from my skin into the power armor filling it with juice.
My hud blinks red. 5:00 until power failure. Enough time. I stand, coughing blood into my fishbowl helmet, running with all my might towards Kerrigan and the bunker's protection.
A new warning appears.
“Oi, big one’s on the way—grab your dingo an’ kiss that bitch goodbye!” Says the suit.
“Of every accent in the universe, why did it have to be Australian!”
The sounds of screaming hound-lings and laser fire die off in an instant, smothered beneath the weight of a single, shared realization. The few survivors of this pocket war registering the same grim warning. Except the Tulvarians who continue their war-hooting. For spacefaring iguanas I would have expected more intelligence from them, or at least vocalizations that are distinguishable from a dozen bovines in heat.
A thin line of black knifes through the atmosphere, an ominous herald. No reading on the HUD means the missile is out of scanner range, yet visible. An infantryman’s way of saying InterContinental Ballistic Missile (ICBM). I swallow, trying to work spit back into my mouth. The missile plummeting on an angle of attack that is close to ninety degrees, indicating an orbital launch. Probably one of the warships who are here on ‘observational’ duties.
“Please don’t be a Technomancy nuke.” I whisper.
I value my own hide quite highly—it’s the best one. Yes, that’s not saying a whole lot considering I’ve possessed a grand total of three bodies, but still! Nuclear annihilation is low on my list of preferred deaths.
Energy batteries whine, thrumming to life for several horrible seconds. Each instant bringing the missile deeper into our atmosphere. A dozen alien fortresses fire, beams of hope lancing into the heavens. Nine go wide, vanishing into the abyss of space at .9C. Effectively the speed of light. Three beams score direct hits, one on the nose and two center mass. A blue sphere glows softly, little more than the blink of death.
The missile, dropped from orbit, is shielded.
No one puts shielding on an average missile. It can only be one thing. Someone broke the rules and decided to flip the table. To win the war by erasing everyone, including themselves. Galactic sanctions would be imposed, a small comfort to my soon-to-be vaporized body.
Damn, three lives and I couldn’t get married in a single one. Sometimes the universe is a cruel bitch.
A nuclear flash illuminates my world. Colored electric green by the instant sun over me, tattling on the treaty breaker. Why would the Technomancy drop a nuke on little ole me?
I laugh. The answer is obvious, sitting within my chest. A weapon so mighty it caused half of the galaxy's humans to give up. At least, it's that potent when combined with the squads standing in the nearby bunker.
Between the childish bioweapon and myself there are four power armor wearing, plasma wielding silhouettes that guard my nanofactory. A sort of universal assembling and production facility that can turn those four power armored prototypical mutants into an endless army. In a month there would have been hundreds of them, and thousands of the quadruped shadows lurking just behind them. A legion of mutant marines to compliment an endless horde of spinolings. A threat so great that the Novan AI would lose, so they’d broken the only rule -no radiation, no nukes- during this battle royale. To take me out. Kill me here and now before my influence could spread off world.
A logical course of action.
If not for the solarium mines.
Artificial Intelligences of every stripe require solarium reactors and its unique form of energy. Able to power anything, from armor, to my embedded reactor, to my cells, and even to the rare protochronian devices of the -nameless-. All races require solarium, but to the Novan Technomancy of Steel it is more than energy as enriched solarium is the very essence of their AI technologies; so fundamental to their kernels. More baffling still, they relied upon the solarium mines of Syrak-9 as their primary source. A nuke here poisons their own well!
Now the nuclear radiation would scatter across the atmosphere, irradiating anything that attempted to harvest solarium for the next millennia, if not two. Worse, irradiated solarium operates at one tenth efficiency until the radioactive isotopes worked themselves out of the crystalline lattice, a galaxy spanning death knell.
My faceplate glass polarizes to a hard mirror finish, deflecting nuclear light for all its worth. I’m too close. Soon the shockwave will hit. Motors whine, slamming the opaque “Hazardous Environmental Litigating Protections” over my faceplate. The HELP system designed to ricochet bullets and horny exes alike, like a steel shutter slamming shut to provide the highest level of protection possible for an armored trooper.
I sigh, annoyed that the armor doesn’t know when shut up.
“NUCLEAR DETONATION DETECTED!”
“FIND COVER!”
“Yeah yeah, thanks a lot. Never would have seen that without you.” I say, chinning the faceplate to silence the alarm.
All goes white.
It even pairs well with cheese. If you're a lunatic.
