RIKA MECHANIZED
RIKA’S MARAUDERS – PREQUEL
M. D. COOPER
Copyright © 2017 M. D. Cooper
Aeon 14 is Copyright © 2017 M. D. Cooper
All rights reserved.
Cover Art by M. D. Cooper
Editing by Jen McDonnel
TABLE OF CONTENTS
HAMMERFALL
OVERWHELMED
CHANGE OF FATE
EVAC
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
THE AEON 14 UNIVERSE
What if humanity took millennia to discover faster than light (FTL) travel? What if journeys between the stars took decades, or even centuries?
Our spread through the space would be slow, deliberate, it would take thousands of years to explore even one percent of the galaxy. We would make the most of each star system, because a journey to the next would make take a lifetime.
And then… FTL is discovered. Your neighbors who used to be two decades away, can now be on your doorstep in a week.
The FTL wars devastated humanity, sending it into a thousand-year dark age. That time has passed and people have pulled back from the brink. But now a new conflict looms…
RIKA’S STORY & THE ORION WAR
If you’ve read any of the Orion War books, you’ll know that the Intrepid’s arrival in the 90th century has shaken things up. One of those things is the long balance between the Genevian and Nietzschean empires.
Rika is just one woman who has been caught up in the growing conflict that is spreading across the Orion Arm of the galaxy. Things aren’t going to be easy for her, but eventually she’ll have a significant part to play on the larger stage.
HAMMERFALL
STELLAR DATE: 12.01.8941 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: Western plains of Naera
REGION: Parson System, Genevian Federation
“Alright, mech-meat, I want the three of you on that ridge to the south,” Gunnery Sergeant Myers said as he pulled on his helmet. His voice changed from his surly growl to a voice in their minds as his armor closed up around him. <You pick off any stragglers that come off their main column, and let me know if there’s anything bigger than troop transports out there.>
The three scout mechs saluted; the other two with their right hands, and Rika with her left.
Rika wished she could respond, swear at the gunnery sergeant; hell, she’d love to pound him into the dirt, and with the cybernetic limbs the Genevian military had given her, she could do it with ease.
If not for the compliance chip in her head. Even thinking about hitting the sergeant took her perilously close to a treatment of Discipline—excruciating pain that would tear through her body and drop her like a rock.
She glanced down at her right arm, its current configuration the cause of her left-handed salute. Where she once had possessed a flesh and blood limb, there was now just a rifle mount and ammunition feeder. The current weapon locked onto the mount was a twin-mode GNR-41B sniper rifle with a 120cm barrel. Not the ideal thing to attempt a salute with.
Her left arm, though it did not serve as a weapons mount, was also no longer hers, but the property of the Genevian military. Rika harbored no illusions on that front—she was the property of the Genevian military.
By some small miracle, the designers of the SMI-2, Scout-Mechanized Infantry—her model—had given her a real left arm. Not to say that it was a natural arm; her flesh and blood limb ended above the elbow there as well, but at least the cybernetic portion ended in a hand, robotic though it was.
When she first left the assembly plant, Rika had wondered why the military had replaced her left arm—until she felt the kick of an automatic rifle, and understood that the arm she had been born with could not have lifted, let alone fired, such a weapon.
<Let’s move,> Corporal Silva, the fireteam’s leader, ordered.
Rika turned and followed the other two scout mechs in her fireteam as they sprinted out of the camp toward the ridge. They kept their run to a sedate 30km/h so as not to kick up dust in the arid hills and alert the enemy to their movement.
It was a shame, too; the double-kneed legs—reminiscent of a horse’s hindquarters—were able to propel the SMI-2 mechs over 100km/h, and a full-bore run was one of the few true joys Rika had in life anymore. It was the one time she could pretend she was free.
Ahead of her, Corporal Silva and PFC Kelly loped along a dry streambed east of the ridgeline where they would take up position, their lithe bodies wrapped in layers of dusty, matte-grey armor. Only long familiarity with the way they moved allowed Rika to tell the other two women apart. The things they had become were all but indistinguishable from one another; every trace of individuality cut off or covered up.
Some days it took a lot of effort for Rika to think of herself as a woman, not as a machine. The military would be happy if she was subsumed by what they did to her; to become just a cheap brain inside their hardware, little more than a robot. But robots didn’t fight as well as humans—not unless they were powered by AIs, and AIs were expensive and used for much more important tasks. Mech-meat, someone dumb enough to take military service over prison, were cheap.
It was Silva who had saved her, kept her sane. The corporal used to be a waitress—back in ‘the world’, as they called their former lives. She had been taking acting and dance classes at night, trying to make a life for herself. But the war was taking its toll everywhere. Times got tough, and she palmed a few credit chits, only to find herself standing before a judge, facing a prison sentence or military enlistment.
But somehow Silva’s spirit and sense of self were unaffected by what had been done to her—to them. She had forged Rika and Kelly into a team and given them a name: Hammerfall. Now Rika didn’t fight for the Genevian Military. She fought for her teammates, her sisters. She would do anything for them.
<What’s the expected enemy strength?> Rika asked Corporal Silva.
She raised the question on the fireteam’s private combat net, a direct and constantly open connection to Silva and Kelly’s minds—so long as they were in RF range.
<Army Intel thinks there are going to be three hundred Niets out there—at least. Medium armor, light troop transports,> Silva replied. <Nothing we can’t handle if we have to.>
<There ain’t nothing we can’t handle.> Private Kelly added the team’s motto to the conversation.
<Hammerfall will bring the pain.> Rika gave the counter call.
The three women all shared a mental smile as they worked their way through the thick brush to the ridge.
The Genevian military frowned on things like names for mech fireteams—hells, they frowned on their mechanized warriors having, let alone using, names at all. But Gunnery Sergeant Myers had more important things to do than to listen in on the three women talk over the Link—or if he did listen in, he didn’t care that they used their names from back in the world. Or that they had named their fireteam.
Either way, Rika didn’t care. What were they going to do to her team that hadn’t been done already?
<What if we just take them all out?> Kelly asked. <Think Gunny will be pissed?>
<Don’t even think about it,> Corporal Silva replied, and Rika could see her shake the faceless orb that was her helmeted head. <We have to make sure the squishies get their glory.>
<Fucking squishies,> Rika added.
She wondered if the army reviled the full-sized mech warriors like they did the scouts. Most mechs were massive, lumbering things, the shells of humans embedded within them. A full-sized mech could tear a ground vehicle in half with its arms, not t
o mention what one could do with the multiple weapons systems they carried.
The SMI-2 model that Rika and the other two members of team Hammerfall had been turned into was a new experiment by the military. Take smaller humans—namely women—and make a scout mech. A warrior that could carry a significant armament, but operate in environments and terrain that a full-sized mech could not. SMI-2s averaged 2.3 meters in height, and weighed in at no more than 230 kilograms, depending on their loadout. And though more of their human body remained beneath than with a regular mech, their bones and muscles were heavily augmented to give them the strength of a dozen squishies.
<I wonder if they’ll have any supplies? Maybe even Nutri-Stations. I bet their paste tastes better than ours,> Kelly said as they neared the top of the ridge.
Kelly laughed in response. <Last meal I had was a dick I was sucking in an alley on Kidra, before I got picked up in a sting.>
Kelly’s delivery was crass—as always—but the sentiment was one Rika shared. All the mechs she knew had been picked up for petty crimes. Her own had been stealing food; food she never even got a taste of.
<Probably why paste doesn’t sit well with you, Kelly,> Silva chuckled in their minds. <I bet it doesn’t go well with all that spunk you’re still digesting.>
<What a lovely picture,> Rika said and attempted to shift the conversation. <I don’t know about you, but when I get out, I’m going to eat so much pie and ice cream that I’ll get fat as a pig.>
<I want coffee,> Kelly said. <Fuck, do I want coffee. I’m just going to pour it down my throat for days.>
<You’re going to need a face for that again,> Silva said, her voice dropping.
<They’ll give us faces when we get out,> Kelly insisted. <I heard it from one of the lieutenants. They’re going to put us back together again. Make us real women, not…> She left the words hanging. None of them wanted to think too much about what they were.
Rika wasn’t as optimistic. Their forced enlistment term was five years, but she didn’t see a happy ending to the war with the Nietzscheans. It had already been going on for seven years, and her side seemed to be losing ground.
No one spoke of it, but station-by-station, world-by-world, the Niets were pushing them back.
Even if the Genevians did win—in a stalemate, or some miracle victory—they had put too much time and effort into their mechs. They always talked about how the mechs—especially the women in the SMI-2 modules—were just barely adequate, called the humans within ‘mech-meat’; but Rika knew better. She had only been in four combat engagements in her six months of service, but each time, it had been the mechs who had saved the day.
Without their firepower and fortitude, the squishies would be doomed.
<Think the Niets will make us people again if they win?> Rika asked her teammates.
<You know Nietzschean philosophy,> Kelly replied. <They revile our people for compassion, mercy, all that shit. To them, Genevians have a slave morality—imagine what they think of us mechs? To them, we’re the slaves of slaves.>
<For a ten-chit prostitute, you sure know your philosophy,> Silva said with a laugh.
<I wasn’t always…that.> Kelly’s voice was sullen. <I had a life before the war came, you know. No matter what, I’m going to get through this war and see my children again—even if I don’t get my face back.>
<Sorry,> Silva apologized. <That came out a bit harsher than I meant it to.>
<We all have bad days,> Kelly said after a pause. <It’s OK.>
<Thanks.>
The women fell silent for a few minutes as they picked their way along the hillside, just a few meters below the ridge, at the military crest. Rika knew what the women all feared, what made them lash out at times. They worried that the best-case scenario was that after the war, the military would remove their compliance chips and military hardware, but that would be all. They’d face a lifetime of slinging cargo in some shit station, saving credits for repairs, power, and NutriPaste.
<I dream of steak every night,> Rika finally said, desperate to think of something happy. <It’s juicy, red; mmm… I can almost taste it.>
<Mech-meat doesn’t dream!> Silva said in her best mental approximation of Gunnery Sergeant Myer’s voice.
<I dream,> Kelly said wistfully. <I dream that they’ll add some sort of pleasure attachment to while away the hours when we’re on the charging stations.>
<Kelly! Seriously!> Rika exclaimed.
<We probably don’t have enough bits down there anymore for that,> Silva said morosely. <Face it, girls: a good time with a man—or a woman—isn’t in our future anytime soon.>
<Believe it or not, we do still have the parts,> Rika said. <I was awake for most of it; I know what they cut, and what they left. And why. Same reason we still have our breasts. My assembler told me that someone up the chain figured that our protective female instincts would be valuable—though the assembler said it was really just to make sure we didn’t have crazy hormone imbalances that they’d have to constantly drug us for.>
Kelly turned the nearly featureless oval that was her head to look back at Rika—an unnecessary gesture since their mods allowed the women to all see in every direction at once.
<Seriously? You were awake? You never told me that!>
Rika nodded. <Yeah… I guess I haven’t really shared that yet. I wasn’t awake for all of it…but I was for the first part, and then the end. We have more face left than you’d think under these.> She reached up to knock her fist against her head. <They just want us to think we’re nothing more than machines.>
<For the first part…> Silva whispered. <That’s hard-core, Rika…. I had no idea.>
<Not something I really like to talk about,> Rika replied quietly.
The three women fell silent once more, and Rika did her best to push all thoughts of ‘the world’ from her mind.
This was one area where she learned that the military knew what they were talking about. As much as she hated to, when it came to combat, it was best to think of herself as a machine. She was capabilities and tactics. She was cold steel and death. Her right arm was her sword, and her thick armor was her shield. She would complete her objectives and return alive.
They reached a small depression in the ridgeline, a saddle where some small scrubby bushes grew, and Silva held up her right hand in a fist.
<OK, girls, let’s take a peek and see what it looks like out there.>
They had all been through VR sims of the terrain on the other side of the ridge, they knew its features by heart; but one thing the three women had learned from their prior engagements, is that what the VR showed was someone else’s impression of what was important.
Little details always seemed to be off, and those little details made all the difference on the ground.
It could be something as small as a bush, or the degree to which a tree’s limbs bent in a wind. How much dust was on the ground for the enemy to kick up…anything could make the difference between coming back, and being just another rotting corpse on the battlefield.
Silva took a position on the left side of the saddle, Kelly on the right, and Rika crouched low behind a boulder in the middle.
Below them, stretching off into the west, was a broad plain. It was shrouded in early morning shadow; the ridge still obscuring the growing light of Parson, the system’s star, which rose behind them in the east. Wind rushed across the dry plain, creating small dunes and eddies of dry earth as it whipped around stray rock outcroppings and a few stunted trees.
A road—little more than a single lane of packed dirt—twisted its way toward the ridgeline from the west before running alongside it for a few kilometers.
It was a wide-open killbox.
She wondered why the Nietzscheans would travel on the west s
ide of the ridge, and not in the hill country to the east. Military strategy was not something they taught much of during her indoctrination, but Rika supposed that if you were worried about an ambush—and everyone was always worried about ambushes—having just one ridgeline looming over you was better than two.
Even so, two kilometers to the north, the road the enemy was traveling on crossed into the hills, and that was where the bulk of Alpha Company would hit them.
<I see them,> Kelly said, and passed the coordinates over the Link to the other members of team Hammerfall.
Rika cycled her vision to a higher level of magnification and saw a thin cloud of dust rising off the plain.
<Rate of travel, just twenty kph,> Rika estimated. <Slow.>
<Yeah,> Silva agreed. <Passing this on to the gunny. Kelly, you stay here. Rika, I want you to find a good spot a few hundred meters to the south; I’ll take a position to the north. We don’t fire till the company hits them. Then we’ll pick ‘em off from the rear.>
<And save everyone’s asses again,> Kelly muttered.
<Think we’ll get any help from fleet?> Rika asked.
<Doubt it,> Silva replied. <I overheard one of the LT’s talking back at camp. They’re pretty evenly matched up there; neither side is getting close to the planet, other than sneaking ground forced down when they can. What we have down here is all we got.>
<So, just like normal,> Kelly chuckled.
<Yeah. Now get moving, Rika. They’ll be here soon.>
Rika nodded her assent and slipped out of the saddle, back to the eastern side of the ridge.
She was glad the fleets were holding back. Naera was the last terrestrial world that the Genevians held in the Parson System. If they lost it, it was probable that the entire system would fall to the Nietzscheans in a matter of weeks. The Niets won in space more often than not, which meant that if ships showed up to rain starfire, it would probably come down on the Genevians.