Rika Mechanized Read online

  The Niets were fierce warriors on the ground, as well. When it came down to squishie versus squishie, they tended to win. However, now that the Genevians were employing mech-meat, the tables had turned, and the Genevians were seeing more victories than losses, when the fighting happened dirt-side.

  Still, all too often, the ground forces would see their victory rendered meaningless by the fleets falling back and abandoning whatever territory they had secured. Or an orbital strike from the Niets would render the victory moot—like what had happened to Bravo Company.

  Ahead, Rika spotted a series of granite outcroppings, something that could offer real cover if the enemy spotted her and fired back. Who was she kidding? When the enemy spotted her and fired back.

  She lay prone and extended her right arm over the top of a low slab of green granite. She didn’t need her head to be above the rock; she could ‘see’ through the rifle’s optical sights without exposing anything more than the weapon’s barrel.

  Rika took another look at the enemy’s rate of travel, and estimated that they would pass in front of her in five minutes; and then reach Bravo Company’s ambush site two minutes later.

  She signaled her passel of remote drones to deploy around her, directing them a hundred meters up and down the ridge, extra eyes to make sure no one would sneak up on her. They also facilitated lower EM level comms with the rest of Hammerfall. She didn’t need to send a message the half kilometer to Silva—only just as far as the closest drone, relaying comms through short hops using tightbeam signals.

  Over the next minute, as the enemy grew closer, she could make out more of the enemy formation through the cloud of dust they kicked up. Two lumbering figures were visible through the haze, and Rika realized they were mechs—one at the fore, the other at the rear of the column.

  Everything she knew said the Nietzscheans despised mechs; their true warrior code would never allow any of them to submit such an indignity. Perhaps their continual losses on the ground to the Genevian mechs had made them reconsider.

  No…she thought as a gust of wind blew the dust away from the mech at the front of the enemy column. That was no Nietzschean mech; it was Genevian. The enemy, it seemed, had no compunctions about using captured Genevians. Though Rika supposed that it fit with their master-slave morality. If the Genevians were willing to create a slave class, the Nietzscheans would be more than happy to make use of it.

  Rika looked at the mech and compared its buildout to what she knew of other models the Genevian military produced. It most closely resembled a K1R, though there were a few alterations to suit Nietzschean weaponry.

  Rika sent to her team through her relay drones. She included a visual of the mech with her message.

  Silva replied.

  Kelly asked.

  Rika answered.

  Silva commented.

  Kelly asked.

  Rika replied.

 

  Rika said with a sigh.

  Kelly swore.

  Rika chuckled.

 

  Silva sent back.

  Kelly grunted.

  Silva replied.

  Poor bastards, Rika thought with a shake of her head as she watched the K1R mech lumbering at the head of the column. We’re just hardware in this fight. Whoever picks us up off the ground gets to pull our trigger.

  Silva said.

  Rika replied.

  Kelly added.

  None of the women spoke further as the column approached and began to pass below the ridge, just three hundred meters down the slope, and another half-klick out on the plain. Roughly seven hundred meters as the projectile—or beam—flew.

  Rika messaged the corporal as the rear of the column passed her position.

  Silva replied.

  Kelly asked.

  Silva replied.

  Rika sent back.

  None of those weapons would take down a K1R before it knew where you were. Electron beams would be the best, but those drew a straight blue-white bolt of lightning between the weapon and the target—a big arrow telling the enemy where to shoot.

  They also heavily sapped the tiny bottle of antimatter each of the three women carried within their torsos. When that antimatter bottle ran dry, they would be down to superconductor batteries; and those wouldn’t power their armor or weapons for long.

  If the fleet was nearby, they could beam energy down to their mechs, but they all knew that wasn’t going to happen. They’d have to take down the K1R’s the old-fashioned way.

  A swath of enemy drones flew up over the ridge, scanning the area for enemies, and Rika clenched her jaw—or at least the neural feedback from her augmentations told her she was clenching her jaw—praying that her active camouflage would hide her from the prying eyes above.

  The enemy didn’t halt their march, and she knew she was safe for the moment. Down on the plain, the head of the column had almost reached the pass into the hills. Rika forced her breathing to slow as she waited for the opening salvos—which would be the sound of Alpha Company’s SAWs opening up on the K1R in the lead.

  Rika took a moment to wonder, now that they had their own mechs, if the Nietzscheans did have Nutri-Stations. Maybe their paste was better. Though Rika and Silva needled Kelly about it, she was right; half the time they all felt ill after ‘eating’.

  Her momentary distraction ended as the thundering CRACK-CRACK-CRACK of the SAWs echoed through the hills, and Rika wasted no time opening fire on the K1R in the rear with her GNR-41B sniper rifle.

  She used its kinetic projectile firing mode and mentally squeezed the trigger. The weapon launched a quintet of 22cm projectiles that burst from its muzzle with little more than a soft snap. The rounds flew across the thousand meters to her target in three tenths of a second, striking the target with a combined 1.5 billion joules of kinetic energy.

  She had aimed for the joint where the K1R’s right leg attached to its torso, but the shot missed, striking the mech’s ‘thigh’ instead. The beast of a machine barely flinched as the rounds struck it, and it turned toward her just as it was hit by Kelly and Silva’s rounds.

  Kelly’s shots hit the mech in the upper ‘chest’, smashing one of its sensor nodules, while Silva’s traced a line down its torso; one lucky round hitting the K1R’s hip joint, though it did not appear to sustain any noticeable damage.

  The K1R turned and aimed both its weapons at the hillside. It took a moment to triangulate the origin of
the incoming projectiles, before firing three shots from its 50mm canon. Depleted uranium rods burst from sabots and screamed through the dawn air and slammed into the top of the ridge.

  The women of team Hammerfall had not stuck around to see if their cover could withstand those rounds, and were well below the top of the ridgeline, on the move to new positions when they hit.

  Rika released another passel of drones, these ones larger and equipped with lasers. They fired at the enemy surveillance drones, and while she took up a new position; automated aerial combat took place above her.

  She pulled the feed from her first batch of drones, and saw that the enemy column had stopped. The K1R was spraying the hillside with covering fire as Nietzschean troops in fully powered battle armor leapt out of the transports.

  Kelly called over the Link.

  Rika sent affirmation back to her teammate. Soldiers in full armor didn’t need transports. They could run as fast as the trucks could drive—faster if they had jump-jets. One on one, the Nietzscheans still weren’t a match for the SMI-2s of team Hammerfall; but they were still a force to be reckoned with—especially when there were three hundred of them.

  Silva called out.

  Rika announced, and switched her GNR-41B to the electron beam mode, causing the second barrel to rotate into firing position.

  She aligned it with the K1R’s torso, right where two of the armor plates overlapped, hoping to slip the beam in for a kill shot.

  She fired, and for a fraction of a second, a laser lanced between her rifle and the target, superheating the air and opening a path for the electrons; then the beam fired. A blue-white bolt of lightning described a straight line between Rika and the K1R mech. A nimbus haze of Cerenkov radiation glowed around the beam—a result, she was told—of the electrons scattering as they collided with the atoms in the air.

  The K1R was at the edge of the beam’s effective range, but a stream of electrons travelling close to the speed of light still packed a huge punch, even if it spread out over few centimeters before it hit the target.

  Her shot was true, and the beam hit where the armor overlapped in a blinding flash of light, as bolts of lightning arched through the air around the K1R. A second later, Kelly fired her electron beam as well, hitting the same spot on the K1R, and their combined strikes burned a hole through the first layer of ablative plating.

  As an added bonus, the radiation showering off the mech caused the Nietzscheans nearby to back away to a safe distance. They bunched up, and down the ridgeline, Silva fired her own electron beam into their midst, scattering them once more.

  In response to their attack, the K1R fired a single missile from the launcher on its back. It flew high overhead, almost disappearing from view, before it turned and streaked down from the heavens toward the positions Rika and Kelly had vacated after firing their electron beams.

  If the K1R meant to take them out with one missile, it was going to be a big one, and Rika sprinted away at top speed, hoping that Kelly had the sense to do the same. She was half a kilometer from her previous location when a blinding light appeared a dozen meters off the ground.

  She ducked behind a large rock and gripped the ground with the three claws on each of her feet as the nuclear shockwave, and the hot, radioactive wind which followed, washed over her.

  Fuck! Tacnukes! So much for a livable world. The Nietzscheans were pulling out all the stops. She thanked the stars that she was leeward from the wind, and allowed a minute for the stiff breeze to blow away at least some of the fallout before she peered around the rock.

  Rika called out, doubtful that they could pick her up through the irradiated atmosphere. She pinged her drones and only two responded. She directed them toward her teammates’ positions, hoping to pick up a signal as she released her final passel to aid in the search.

  She looked at the rock she had taken cover behind, and took a second to appreciate that nearly half of it had melted away. The ground between her and the ridge was a smoking ruin, shrouded by the mushroom cloud that rose overhead.

  A note on her HUD provided an estimate as to the weapon’s probable yield: 100 kilotons. More than enough to melt through an SMI2’s armor and fry the meat inside.

  came a call from Kelly, relayed through one of Rika’s drones.

 

  Kelly added a string of curses directed at the K1R and his heritage before asking,

  Rika replied as she cast a worried eye toward the ridge. In a minute, the K1R was going to come over the top; she prayed it didn’t have another tacnuke in his back pocket, because that wasn’t the sort of ordinance she wanted to dodge again.

  As if on cue, the mech topped the rise; its four-meter height a dark shadow in the dim morning sun, further obscured by the dust and ash in the air from the nuclear blast.

  Rika swore as the K1R spotted her and unleashed several rounds from its 50mm cannon.

  She dashed up the smoldering valley’s far slope at top speed, aiming to put another rise between her and the enemy.

  Kelly called out.

  Rika responded, referring to the AR97 secondary weapon the SMI-2s carried. It was a standard Genevian multi-purpose weapon, the sort that the heavy weapons squishies might use, but not much more than a spitgun when it came to taking on a K1R at anything other than point-blank range.

  The bark of Kelly’s AR97 confirmed that Rika’s teammate wasn’t going to heed her advice. She decided not to waste Kelly’s bravery, and made the top of the next rise before dashing down the far side then north fifty meters, and back up, where she fired her electron beam at the mech once more.

  Her probes had kept it in sight, and she only needed a second to lock onto the monster and strike it once more at the same place as before.

  The mech took the hit, and, after the shower of sparks and lightning, its left arm began to jerk erratically. Rika gave thanks that no more 50mm rounds would come their way. While her beam rifle recharged, she pulled the AR97 off its latch on her back and fired from the hip with its 15mm rounds. She spent the clip in twenty seconds while the K1R on the far rise fought with its spasming limb.

  Rika was glad to see that Kelly made proper use of the distraction, and raced up the rise, discarding the twisted barrel of her GNR-41B’s sniper rifle in her wake.

  Once her teammate was over the ridge, Rika dashed down the far side of the slope and met up with her.

  she asked, while looking Kelly over.

  Kelly replied while she pulled the rest of the GNR-41B’s assembly off. Once it was clear, Kelly slapped her AR97 into the gun mount, and drew her DR88 handgun free from its thigh-holster.

  Rika asked.

 

 

  Kelly cocked her grey oval head.

  Rika gave a mental snort as Kelly turned and raced a hundred meters to the north before cresting the rise and opening fire with her AR97. Rika didn’t waste any time, moving to the south and lining up to fire as the K1R fired a salvo from its heavy repeater at Kelly.

  Her teammate dodged the first few shots, but then one ricocheted off her arm and spun her around.

  Rika asked as her electron beam lanced out, striki
ng the corresponding location on the other side of the mech’s torso.

  Kelly replied as she ran to a new position.

  Rika called back as she moved into new cover as well.

  Kelly replied with a chuckle.

  Rika watched the K1R through the eyes of her drones as it descended into the valley and began to climb the slope toward Kelly’s position. She braced herself to make another shot, when the enemy mech leapt into the air, powerful chem boosters pushing it up over the rise to land just five meters away from Kelly.

  Kelly screamed as she unloaded her AR97 rifle’s kinetic rounds into the K1R while backpedaling and firing her DR88 handgun at full auto.

  The enemy hunched forward, ignoring the weapons fire, intent on getting its massive hands around the SMI-2 mech in front of it.

  Rika didn’t give a moment’s thought as she rushed toward the K1R, her double-kneed legs pushing her up over a hundred kilometers per hour. When she was twenty meters away, she leapt, barely passing over a stream of projectile fire the enemy casually sprayed in her direction as it grabbed Kelly by her right arm.

  She landed on the K1R, the claws on her feet clamping onto its shoulders. Rika switched modes on her AR97, and fired a stream of rail-accelerated pellets into the joints where the K1R’s arms met its body. Half the pellets ricocheted off—a few striking her own armor—but she kept firing. Four seconds later, the enemy mech’s left arm—the one dangling Kelly’s body in the air—fell limp.

  Kelly crashed to the ground, and the K1R began to flail wildly, attempting to shake Rika free as she continued to fire into its body. She spent a second clip, and then crouched low and leapt straight up, firing her electron beam at point-blank range.

  With few atmospheric nuclei between her weapon and the target, the bolt of electrons tore through the front of the K1R, splitting its torso wide open.