Violent Wonder Read online

  King had “Popped the door.”

  POP stood for Precise Orbital Penetration, an acronym that sounded vaguely sexual to Raquel, but then again, it almost was in a sense. Attached to the Leopold’s underside were two sealed hatches that, when opened, launched one drop capsule each. It could either be triggered from the control seat inside of the ship or remotely by laser-designation from the ground. However the method, the POP had been designed by the PUC to drop soldiers behind enemy lines once there were already boots on the ground. Sure, they could be fired without any enemy troops out in the field, but it was observed that mission success rate increased ten-fold when the POP was used for flanking maneuvers.

  The reason for this high success rate was that the power of the launched pod breaking atmosphere acted almost like an artillery shell when it hit, and could successfully break almost any line, so long as it wasn’t underground. With the Precise Orbital Penetration, almost anywhere could become a flank, all you had to do was paint the target.

  All this had been explained to Raquel one day by Nadia, one of the two actual trained soldiers on the Leopold. Technically speaking, she wasn’t a soldier but what the PUC called a Surgical Equalizing Unit. The men and women who functioned as Surgical Equalizing Units weren’t actually given the status of personhood at all. Grown in a lab from salvaged bio-organic material, SEUs were considered state property and used for state business such as crossing off names on a list of individuals who had either chosen to rebel against the PUC, or even some who accidentally transgressed the PUC’s fragile economic system.

  Most people that Raquel knew deemed the term SEU “dehumanizing” and preferred the term “Marauder” which, in Raquel’s opinion, seemed to imbue the soldiers with some sort of mythic superhuman status, which almost felt worse at times. That being said, the strength and capabilities of the Marauders were almost beyond comprehension. Their strength, speed, and agility outmatched a normal person's to the degree that the word “superhuman” wasn’t all that far from the truth.

  It was what the majority of them did with these abilities that made them terrifying, however.

  Nadia and Kit, the other Marauder on board the Leopold, had defected one day—a story that Kit would occasionally tell over a campfire on a lonely world or across the table bolted down in the ship’s rec-room in the pre-dawn hours before a job when everyone was too psyched up to sleep. Raquel often thought to herself about the amount of courage that single act must have taken and how the two Marauders’ experience was so similar to hers, yet so different in every way that mattered.

  Before the dust had even settled, energy bolts began flying around the cloud of dust that had engulfed the warehouse. Raquel wasn’t exactly free from her attacker’s grip, but a rock from the impact of the launch-pods must have hit the bot in the head because it was spinning around, the arm with which it held her twitching and spasming, the other spinning like a helicopter blade in slow motion. Barely able to look back, she observed that there was indeed a big flap of lab-grown tissue hanging off the side of the synth’s head and Raquel gave a brief thanks that whatever had hit it hadn’t gone a foot down and six inches to the left and hit her instead.

  Taking the opportunity, she reached down for the Slugger she had holstered at her hip, drew it, stuck it in the synth’s face and pulled the trigger. She didn’t hear the sound so much as felt it punch through her body. The big pistol boomed in her hand and the mechanical arm around her went limp as the bot’s head exploded in a jet of clear circulatory fluid.

  By the time she had shaken the thing off and turned to look at the others, the other synth had already been cut to pieces by neural rifle fire and Kit was striding over to bandage Ritz’s leg and help him off of the floor.

  “No problem, guys. I got this,” Raquel said, her throat wheezing from where it had nearly been crushed.

  “You looked like you were handling it,” Nadia said. She stood imposing about twenty feet away, rifle cradled in her arms. The armor that she and Kit wore was made out of a sleek titanium alloy that covered every inch of their bodies except the cold, opaque faceplate on their heads and the shock-absorbing mesh-fiber at their joints. The fiber actually covered them completely beneath the armor and helped with some with the impact from the drop-pod, which itself was able to absorb energy through its energy-conducting bottom and disperse it through vents in the side, which the pod’s doors were hooked up to. With the massive amount of impact the pods endured and the uncertain terrain they were often dropped into, any sort of swinging or sliding door could get bent or jam too easily, so better to just blow the whole thing.

  The pods were a one-time use thing, which made them pretty damn expensive, but it had been worth it for this trip. If not because the POP had saved everyone’s lives, then because of the importance of the mission. If they could pull this off successfully, they might not have to deal with the PUC ever again.

  “We’ve got more incoming,” King said, looking at his wrist pad in one hand and patting dust off of himself with the other. Raquel had temporarily forgotten about him once the pods had hit, but she was glad he was okay. “They’re coming from the south, so we better start digging through that rubble and get to where we need to go.”

  “How many?” Kit asked. He had the captain leaning against his right soldier while he hefted his rifle in the other hand.

  “Uhhhh,” King said, looking down at the pad. “Fifteen, it looks like.”

  “That’ll be all of them then,” Nadia said. “Except for the ones they probably have on alert in the control center. But those will stay with the personnel inside, so we shouldn’t have to worry about them. I say we take these guys. Fifteen isn’t too many.”

  “Fifteen isn’t too many when it’s just us and we have time to hunt and pick them off,” Kit said. “With the rest of the crew here though, the situation becomes more complicated. Plus, they’ll be launching reinforcements and I want to get to the gate before we have ten military corvettes to deal with.”

  “You’re no fun,” she replied, stalking over to the collapsed door as she secured her rifle to the magnetic clamp on her back. She began grabbing huge chunks of concrete and rebar and tossing them away.

  The Arc Suits that the SEUs wore were powered by a small Tesla Arc implanted near the middle of the spine. Wiring into the very nervous, circulatory, and muscular systems of the suit’s user; the implementation of the arc had originally been as the last line of defense for the massive amount of kinetic energy that had to be absorbed when the launch pod hit. The pods were great at diverting the impact, but soldiers had still been falling out of them with shattered bones and pulverized internals, so the PUC had to come up with a solution that affected the very anatomy of their soldiers. The extreme strength and agility were nothing more than a welcome side-effect.

  “They’re coming,” King said, growing antsy. He strode quickly over to the giant piece of collapsed concrete that Kit and Ritz were standing behind. Beyond them was the door Nadia was trying to dig her way to.

  Raquel holstered her sidearm and reached down to fish her sub-machine gun out from under a fallen piece of polymer board that had broken off from the ceiling overhead. She ejected the mag, slammed a new one home, and checked the chamber. Before pulling the bolt on the side, she blew into the empty chamber and down the barrel, just in case any dust or dirt had gotten in. The last thing she needed was a gun exploding in her face.

  Miraculously, the door at the south-side of the hangar had remained intact while the walls around it had crumbled. Still, as Raquel made it to cover with the others, a big boom came from the opposite side of the big room as the Combat Synths blew the remaining door off of its hinges rather than walk around.

  Synthetics were always doing strange things like that. The AI that ran them was reasonably complicated—not as much as a ship’s AI, but enough to get the job done—but occasionally it would still get hung up on something like access ways or other protocols it was designed to follow. So rather than come
in at all sides, a tactical command setting that would have had to be input from the security room, all fifteen of the bots piled through the single-panel door.

  “Someone’s asleep at the wheel,” King laughed as Kit and Raquel opened up on them from behind the slab of concrete with their neural rifles.

  Unfortunately, one of the synths had a portable energy shield: a compact square of blue light that emanated from a mount on its wrist. After stepping through the doorway, the bot’s shield flared to life and it remained stationary, blocking the door while the others spilled through behind it and spread out to find cover of their own. The shield was able to deflect fire for a limited duration, but by the time it finally crackled out beneath the barrage of ballistic and energy fire—the bot blown apart behind it—the doorway it had been guarding was empty. They had all gotten inside.

  “How’s that door coming, Nadia?” King yelled. He had drawn his pistol, a large five-shot revolver, and was now looking around warily for targets.

  “Almost there,” she said. “Be ready.”

  Just then, streams of energy came from four different positions while some of the other bots began to move up.

  “Oh fuck,” King muttered, a spray of energy bolts blasting away the tip of concrete by his head. He quickly reached around pulled something out of the side compartment on his pack and began to fiddle with it.

  “Get ready for the flank,” Kit said, turning left. Raquel and Kit had ducked back down as soon as the return fire started.

  Raquel turned to her right where Nadia was digging and raised her gun to the spot just behind her where the first of the bots would likely emerge. She stood with her back to Kit, Ritz and King at her feet. While Ritz still looked conscious and had drawn his own sidearm, he was dreadfully pale and likely wouldn’t be able to hit anything.

  “Done!” Nadia yelled, casting away a final piece of concrete and kicking a medium-sized hole through the remaining structure.

  Before anyone could move though, the attack came from the left and right.

  The wall exploded behind Nadia and before the synth was even through; she had spun, drawn her rifle, and fired a clean hole through the thing’s head. It fell jerking to the ground.

  The other bot came from above, which was something Kit hadn’t been expecting. The heavy synth had climbed up the concrete slab they had been using for cover and then dropped down right in between Raquel and Kit, Ritz just barely lunging out of the way in time.

  Kit spun with his elbow, but the bot caught him in its massive, mechanical hand. Staggering, Raquel lifted her weapon, but as she did, two more bots came from behind her. And another in front of Kit.

  The soldiers in the Arc Suits were something to watch.

  Nadia tried to draw a bead one of the synths with her rifle but it was grabbed by the barrel and pushed back down by one of the bots while the other raised its own gun to her face. Ducking and letting go of the gun, a blade of plasma erupted from her left-hand gauntlet and skewered the bot’s neck, cutting its power supply cord. She then drew her sidearm and blew out both of the other bot’s knees and it collapsed to the ground, still holding her rifle.

  The way it was holding it put the barrel at chest-level now and all she had to do was reach over to the handle and pull the trigger. The burst tore the bot’s chest to shreds in a torrent of fluid and shredded metal.

  On the other side of the fight, Kit had planted a backward kick into one of the bot’s faces, which wasn’t enough to disable it but was enough to phase it for one precious second. In that time, he reached around to his back with his free arm—the other still pinned in the grip of one of his attackers—and freed his Tesla Saber.

  The Tesla Saber was one of the few things that King and Byzzie had cooperated enough on to build together. When activated, the handle created a limited three-foot electronic field that could contain a current of pure energy generated by the Tesla Arc.

  Kit ignited the blade, spun out of the bot’s grip, and in a single sweep, two mechanical heads fell to the ground.

  The two soldiers had moved so fast that no one else in their party had even gotten a shot off. King, still manipulating some device in his hand, hadn’t even tried.

  “Glad to see you were concerned,” Raquel said wryly, observing the ship’s mechanic.

  “I wasn’t,” he said simply. “I’ve seen these two work enough to know what they can and can’t handle.” And with a final twist of the device, he stood up, reached over, and pulled Ritz to his feet.

  The five of them all quickly filtered through the hole, even as more energy bolts buzzed over them and banged off of their armor. Once they were all through, Raquel turned to empty her weapon back through the hole and as she did, King twisted a knob on his mysterious device and then tossed it back the way they had come.

  “Might want to take cover,” he said.

  Twenty seconds later, the tunnel entrance exploded behind them in a shower of rock and debris.

  2

  Escape

  “You better hope there’s another way out of here,” Raquel said as they made their way down the tunnel. The air was still thick with concrete dust.

  “There are two ways out, actually. Depending on how adventurous you all are.” King said,

  “I’m not crawling through any septic tunnels,” she replied. “That’s where I draw the line.”

  “We’re here,” Kit cut in as they arrived at a thick bolted door. The sign over the top said, “Storage” and had a little lightning symbol on each side which indicated it had a closed-circuit energy current beneath it, which meant that whatever was inside couldn’t be contained by a normal concrete room.

  The plasma blade erupted at Nadia’s wrist and she began cutting through the door.

  “How long do you think it’ll take before they have a response team on the ground,” Raquel asked no one in particular as she watched the thick steel melt and bubble away.

  “We’ve only been in for about fifteen minutes,” Ritz said, King nodding along, “Five of which they know about. I’d say we have another five before there are fifty more pairs of boots on the ground.”

  “Let’s hope we’re not here when that happens,” Raquel replied.

  “If everything works out, we shouldn’t be.” The captain adjusted his stance. He had to lean against the wall so he didn’t crumple to the floor.

  “Done.” The plasma blade phased out and Nadia pushed the make-shift door to the ground; it hit with a giant thud.

  The five of them ducked into the storage room. When they were inside, they looked around, taking it all in.

  Rows of buzzing Tesla Arcs in their square containment boxes lined one wall while tall columns of oval housing units lined the other. The entire room hummed with energy and light, the very ground beneath them seemed to vibrate. What drew all of their attention though was the item in the center of the room—the item they had come for.

  The Light Core sat hovering above two dual-prong forks inside of a six-by-six inch cube, similar to the cubes that Kit and Nadia’s Tesla Arcs were housed in. The cube itself was held in a long one-by-three-foot clear cylinder made from diamond-reinforced glass.

  “I’m not carrying that,” Ritz said.

  “Yeah, you can count me out too,” Raquel said. “Looks like that thing would microwave me like a burrito.”

  “It should be safe inside of the housing,” King said. “And it should be even safer inside of the safety shield. You could technically hold the housing unit, actually. You just wouldn’t want to do it for very long. Think really, really bad sunburn. And probably cancer.”

  “What if the containment unit let go?” Ritz said.

  King raised an eyebrow. “If the containment unit let go, you would be vaporized. There would just be a flash about a mile-wide and everything inside of it would just be gone. Oh, and if you looked at it from a mile away, your eyes would melt out of your head.”

  Nadia set her rifle down. “So, what you’re saying is,” she reached up
to unhook the large, black power cord connected to the cylinder, “that I should be careful with it.” And with that, she hefted the device off of the stand and locked it onto the mag-clamps on her back. She reached down and picked her rifle back up. “Just tell the bad guys not to shoot me.”

  “Yeah, I’ll send them an email.” King replied. “On that note: we should get moving. We’ve only got a few minutes before we’re neck-deep in walking toaster-ovens.”

  Suddenly, the ground shuddered beneath them.

  “What was that?” Raquel asked, her concern reflected on the others’ faces.

  “That sounded like it came from the east,” Ritz said. “Which means that they probably just blew up the transport ship.”

  Raquel felt the color drain from her face. “What? Why would they do that?” The transport ship had factored pretty heavily into the escape plan.

  “Probably because they don’t want us to leave,” the captain said casually and with just a hint of disdain. He seemed exhausted, which meant his tolerance for Raquel’s questions was at an all-time low.

  “That is an expensive piece of hardware,” Raquel replied. “I can’t believe they’d just blow it up like that.”

  “Normally, they wouldn’t. If our plan had gone accordingly, we’d probably have been able to take it out of here, even if we had tripped an alarm. Unfortunately,” he cast a glance at King, “we’ve been pretty goddam loud since we’ve arrived. I bet the amount of damage we’ve caused has already doubled the amount of that ship, plus the cost of that thing.” He pointed at the Light Core on Nadia’s back. “A simple transport ship is small potatoes comparatively.”

  “What about the Leopold? Can’t we radio in for a pick-up? It might be risky if they catch a glimpse of it and shoot out some “wanted” posters, but it beats dying.”

  “Nah, they’ve been jamming ever since we dropped the pods,” King cut in. “They’re not going to be risking any more of that shit.”