Rika Mechanized Read online

  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.

  The three scout mechs saluted; the other two with their right hands, and Rika with her left.

  Myers cocked his head, and she knew that if he weren’t wearing a helmet, he would have spat. Maybe even on her.

  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.

  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.

  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.

  Silva replied.

  Private Kelly added the team’s motto to the conversation.

  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?

  Kelly asked.

  Corporal Silva replied, and Rika could see her shake the faceless orb that was her helmeted head.

  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.

  Kelly said as they neared the top of the ridge.

  Rika replied with a mental snort.

  Kelly laughed in response.

  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.

  Silva chuckled in their minds.

  Rika said and attempted to shift the conversation.

  Kelly said.

  Silva said, her voice dropping.

  Kelly insisted. 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.

  Rika asked her teammates.

  Kelly replied.

  Silva said with a laugh.

  Kelly’s voice was sullen.

  Silva apologized.

  Kelly said after a pause.

 

  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.

  Rika finally said, desperate to think of something happy.

  Silva said in her best mental approximation of Gunnery Sergeant Myer’s voice.

  Kelly said wistfully.

  Rika exclaimed.

  Silva said morosely.

  Rika said.

  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.

 

  Rika nodded. She reached up to knock her fist against her head.

  Silva whispered.

  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.

 

  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.

  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.

  Rika estimated.

  Silva agreed.

  Kelly muttered.

  Rika asked.

  Silva replied.

  Kelly chuckled.

 

  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.