Homeworld: A Military Science Fiction Novel (26 page)

Expressions of Gratitude

Privates Ridge and Rain were gathering their gear and preparing to head out when a knock came at the door of the apartment they had been sharing. Being closer, Dinah went to answer. “Whose there?” She called, standing off to the side of the door with her sidearm drawn. Enemies weren’t known to knock but Dinah was a bit jittery and wasn’t taking any chances. “An old friend,” answered a familiar voice.

Dinah swung the door open wide and holstered her weapon as she smiled at Drake. “Drake! Come on in. We were just throwing a, ‘Let’s get the hell out of here party’ and you’re the last guest to arrive,” she said with a smile. Drake stood in the doorway as if unsure of himself but then entered briskly.

“I wanted to come to see how you two were doing before this whole mess gets underway,” he said, standing just a few feet inside the door.

As Dinah closed the door, Abigail gave Drake a long look as she walked over to him and flatly stated, “Cut the crap. None of us has time for it. What did you come here to say?” She asked, genuinely curious, as she offered him a smoke. Drake smiled and said, “If you’re not careful they’ll make a fine NCO out of you yet, Abigail.” He accepted the smoke and lit it.

He stared out the sliding glass door of the apartment that led to a small, metal railed, balcony for a moment, taking several deep drags on the cigarette. Both Dinah and Abigail just stood there and waited for him to say whatever it was that he needed to say.

“Look. I came here to say thank you. I’ve seen a lot of horrible things in this world and done worse, but when you two idiots, fresh out of Initial Training, didn’t make me kill you when we met in that alley, something changed. I’m not sure what it was. Maybe I got a chance to see the people I killed as people again instead of moving targets. Maybe I just couldn’t walk away while Flint and his bastards did what they did anymore. Maybe I was hoping that when you “captured” me I would just be shot on sight, as I just don’t have it in me to go out in suicide. Maybe I was just too tired to keep murdering good people. I’m not saying I’m going to turn into a saint or anything, but at least now because of meeting you two, I’m killing the right people for the right reasons,” Drake said and then turned for the door.

Before he could reach for the handle and escape, Dinah had him wrapped in a huge hug. She planted a kiss on his cheek that was beginning to show signs of a beard, and whispered, “Thank you for saving our lives.” Then she let him go and backed away.

“Move aside, sister. It’s my turn now,” Abigail said as she grabbed Drake by his right arm and spun him around to face her. Then with her left hand, she pulled his head down to her level as she planted a long, passionate, kiss on him before letting the shocked Drake go and walking back to her gear as she resumed packing. As she stowed her gear she said, “Now don’t go getting yourself killed, Drake. I have plans for you after this war is over.” Dinah, almost as shocked as Drake, was the first to smile. Drake muttered, “Yes ma’am,” and walked out of the apartment, slowly closing the door behind him.

Ben’s “Truck”

Colonel Miller of the Earth Republic Infantry stood in shock at the contents of Ben’s oversized “garage”. First off, it was practically a small factory complete with overhead crane, fusion powered blast furnace and smelter, and machine shop. Secondly, there in the middle, pristine as if it had just rolled off the factory floor, was what bore a strong resemblance to an Earth Republic Infantry, Archer class six-wheeled armored fighting vehicle.

The vehicle was three meters wide and as Miller started to walk around the vehicle, he saw that it was about six meters in length, which was slightly wider and longer than standard but that was not the only differences he noticed. The vehicle had been coated in a non-reflective black substance that did not look like paint. As he looked towards the top of the vehicle, he saw that instead of an open air turret there was an armored cupola coated black like the rest of the vehicle bringing the overall height of the vehicle to about four meters. The cupola had a weapons system sticking out that he didn’t recognize but could possibly be some sort of rail gun.

The profile of the vehicle was also modified. Its undercarriage had about a meters worth of clearance, which was almost double of what was standard. In addition, the front end of the vehicle came together in two planes to a point, which from a side view would look like an arrow. The sides and corners of the vehicle were similarly shaped. Miller guessed this was to deflect a projectile’s trajectory, lessening the impact on what looked like the sturdier multilayer ablative armor that was used by ships of the Fleet. The wheels were also of unique design in that they were coated in the same black material and the rims bore the same type of armor as the rest of the vehicle. The visible sidewall of the tires were similarly armored with what looked like five centimeter wide and five centimeter tall “blocks” that were as wide as the tire these were spaced five centimeters apart around the perimeter of the tire.

“You call this a truck?” Miller stammered as he finished circling the vehicle and stood astonished before the smiling Ben.

Ben just smiled and said. “Yep, isn’t she a beauty? I call her the Bowman, as it didn’t seem right calling her an Archer after all the upgrades I made.”

“Upgrades, you mean this used to be an Archer? Where and how did you get it? You didn’t steal it did you?” The colonel asked, his face turning stern as he took a step closer to Ben.

“Now why do you have to insult a man like that? I have never stooped to stealing except under the direst of circumstances. I only started stealing, as you call it, when the Coalition hit planet side. Besides, I prefer the term salvage to stealing and salvaging is what has been keeping this outfit running, I might add.

It also got us the components I needed to refine and remanufacture the cyclonite, trinitrotoluene, dioctyl sebacate, polyisobutylene and polyolefin I needed to make the plastic explosive we’re going to use. Seeing as how we lost our supply of military grade explosives when we left Alpha Base I’ve had all the Explosive Ordnance Disposal technicians we have left, which is five including myself, working all at ludicrously dangerous speeds to resupply a stockpile in case we needed it. I know it may not be top of the line military grade explosives but it will bring the buildings down as sure as water is wet.

Further, this was an Archer. I may have started with that as a base design in mind but I’ve built my baby almost from the ground up. Steal it indeed,” Ben said in a calm and even tone, but he had a hurt expression on his face. Miller raised his hands in apology and took a step back.

Ben walked into his garage as he continued, “For your information, Colonel Miller, I have a few friends who worked down at the factory where these were built. Occasionally, they would manufacture a defective part and rather than throw it in the slag heap to be melted down and processed through the assembly line again, they would send it my way,” Ben said as he walked into the garage and paced around the vehicle carefully wiping off any dust he found with a clean cloth.

“The few pieces I didn’t manufacture myself came from them. I would fix up the part good as new right here in my shop. It took seven years to make the basic components of the vehicle and the rest I just made in my spare time.” Ben patted the side of the vehicle lovingly as he stopped his inspection for offensive dust particles.

The Bowman’s got more and different armor than your Republic issue Archer, but with the modified fusion power supply I installed, she’ll move faster than the Republic issue too,” Ben said pride evident in his voice.

“Now, Ben, I mean no disrespect. You’ve proven yourself a very useful man to have around but where did you get the money for all this on a technician’s pay grade?” Miller asked waving his arms about the garage and pointing towards the large, red brick, colonial style house next to it.

“Well, I like to tinker with things as you might have noticed and I still have several active patents that have set me up pretty well. As you can tell, Sir, I don’t stay in the Infantry for the paycheck. I stay because I think I can do some good,” Ben answered humbly.

Drake, who had just been standing there smiling at the vehicle, pointed at the turret-mounted weapon on top and asked, “Dare I ask what that is mounted in the cupola, Ben?”

Ben looked up at the weapon with a huge smile. “That? Oh just a little something I’ve been tinkering with. To be honest, I’ve never had the opportunity to test her out as I didn’t want to scare the neighbors and make them think we were being invaded by driving my Bowman out to the range but on paper it all checks out. I call it a Fusion Energized Automatic Railgun,” Ben said smiling.

“What are its capabilities on paper?” Drake asked enjoying the tour.

“I’m glad you asked! First off, it fires these little babies,” Ben said, carefully reaching into a large cardboard box on a workbench and pulling out a half centimeter in length but otherwise ordinary looking flechette round. “Not so impressive by itself but the round is made of plastisteel and coated in my own secret blend of heat resistant material. So it should withstand the heat caused by atmospheric friction without any trouble. The weapon fires them at speeds of right around fifty seven thousand kilometers per hour or sixteen kilometers a second which is about forty seven times the speed of sound. Here is the really fun part. It fires them at sixteen thousand rounds per second. So if the armor plating could survive it, we could drive right up and decimate their little army, theoretically, on paper at least.”

Drake let out a low whistle. Miller just stood there calculating numbers for a second and then stared at Ben, his eyes growing wide. “So what you are saying is nothing short of a warship’s ablative shielding that will stop this round and it fires sixteen thousand per second so it would still blow right through the armor plate and the hull and the interior of the ship and out the other side if you could kept your fire concentrated in one area?”

Ben actually blushed and said simply, “Yep, or at least it would if the ship’s magnetic array was turned off. Of course, it hasn’t been tested yet. I have faith in my proprietary heat resistant material blend but until you open her up in actual combat you just don’t know, do you?”

“How much ammunition do you have on board and what’s the loading system?” Drake asked, clearly impressed. However, if it was a one shot wonder it wouldn’t be much use in an extended fight. Not that he was planning on getting in one; it was just always good to plan ahead. “Well, I like to keep about four billion rounds on hand which would give you about an hour worth of firing, which hopefully would get you through any extended field stay. Now the loading system that’s where I had to get really inventive first I had to create a magnetic antechamber that…”

Miller cut the two of them off with a loud whistle. “Gentlemen, please, it’s a really impressive vehicle with an extremely impressive gun now can we get to our objective? We’re about to lose the planet here. By all means, continue the conversation as we go as I too am interested, Ben, because if this works you’ve just reinvented ground warfare, but for now let’s hustle.”

“Fine, you’re right but for your rude interruption I get to man the turret,” Drake said with a grin

Miller muttered something under his breath about a couple of kids in a toy store as he began loading the equipment they would need into Ben’s Bowman.

The Urban Front

It wasn’t long after they had gotten underway that Miller was wishing he was the one riding in the cupola. While Command Sergeant Major O’Farrell was clearly a genius of the highest order, he also liked to talk about his inventions nonstop once you got him going.

It had started out innocently enough. They had been rolling quietly along when Miller had complimented Ben on the miniaturized version of a Virtual Array that served as the Bowman’s windows as it kept the crew better protected by eliminating the need for plastisteel viewports. Then as they had got further down the road, he had complimented him on the smooth ride and speed at which his vehicle could travel. Ben had told him that the Bowman could sense conditions on the road ahead using multiple laser’s that were invisible to the human eye and the automatically adjust the tire pressure and shocks accordingly and by his calculations his “truck” could gain a top speed of one hundred and ninety kilometers but that was a conservative estimate.

Impressed, the colonel had mistakenly gone on to ask Ben how they would avoid enemy detection as they approached their destination. For the next several kilometers, he had been told, in detail, about all manner of Ben’s inventions including the black, invisible to radar, adhesive coating and improvements to the fusion engine that not only increased power output, but also made it impossible for existing technology to detect their fusion signature.

Then he had been told about the armor improvements and how he had started with extremely thin layers of extremely tough, but ablative, plastisteel and sandwiched between those layers were an equally thin layer of something he called second skin but the composition of which he could not disclose as the Republic patent office hadn’t got back to him yet. This “second skin” when exposed to earth’s atmosphere would resolve itself into plastisteel. In his self-conducted live fire tests he had determined that fifty layers was optimal for resisting Coalition tank ammunition loads so he had applied sixty layers to the Bowman just to be sure.

He had also been inspired by the inertial dampening capabilities of the Fleet’s warships so he had designed and built something he hoped would function in a similar manner and was about to tell Miller how it worked, but by this point, Miller was beginning to get overwhelmed with information. He irrationally began to suspect that when he looked at Ben, he was looking at a Gener in some sort of camouflage that disguised him as a human. That was impossible though because he had never met a Gener who talked as much in a year as Ben would talk in a minute if you asked the normally reserved sergeant major about his inventions.

Drake saved his brain from a severe migraine when he called over the Bowman’s com. “How about a weapons test? That exposed rocky outcropping up ahead should provide for a good backdrop.”

Ben had eagerly agreed and pulled the vehicle over to the side of the road and brought it to a stop. They were still about five kilometers away from the outcropping and Drake called over the com, “Why are we stopping here, Ben?”

Miller could see Ben’s large smile as he said, “Remember the second part of the deal about scratching my paint? Unless you want to buy me a new Bowman I think we should stay back here, Mr. Drake.”

“Fair enough if you think this will make that range?” Drake sounded a little skeptical. “Oh and will you stop with all this mister business? It’s just Drake, Ben.”

“Thank you, Drake. My momma always taught me it was best to be nice to a man who could kill you in his sleep and if you’ll forgive my saying, after what I’ve heard about you, well, you just seemed the type that could do a thing like that.” Now it was Miller’s turn to grin as he muttered, “Your mother is a wise woman, Ben.”

Ben grinned over at the colonel and continue, “Now, like I said, it’s all down on paper and if I figured the blast radius right for sedimentary rock this should be just about right distance to keep us from being pelted by debris. Your HUD up there can zoom in and calculate where you should place your shot if you’d like,” Ben said as he adjusted his Virtual Array to get a better few of the cliff face.

Drake spun the Bowman’s never before tested main gun around and aimed it at the base of an exposed cliff face where a large boulder had come to rest. “Just so you know, Drake, the weapon is calibrated to fire in exactly one second bursts so that no unnecessary ammo is used,” Ben called up to him.

“Alright, but say there are multiple targets, will there be any problem if I just depress the firing mechanism repeatedly?”

Drake asked.

“None that I can think of and I tried to anticipate all possible contingencies but you have to understand sometimes reality throws you a curveball,” Ben replied.

“Understood, see that large boulder? That will be my first target,” Drake said

“I hope that boulder has made peace with the creator as well as the cliff face behind it,” Miller heard Ben mutter as he set his V.A. to a wide view.

“Firing,” called Drake as he depressed the firing mechanism. He didn’t see or hear anything but the boulder had ceased to be and the solid rock face behind it had a new roughly hewn five meter deep cave that was twelve meters in circumference.

Drake let out a low whistle. “I’d say it works. What are the chances of getting a hand held version of this, Ben?”

“Well, I don’t think that’d be very practical at this stage of development. As you’d first have to lug around a fusion bottle on your back and then there is the two hundred decibel sounds caused by the flechettes breaking the sound barrier. Then there would be the shock wave from the sonic boom to contend with. So until I get a few more kinks worked out or just lower the capability of it by quite a bit the F.E.A.R. isn’t going to be replacing the P-200 as the standard issue rifle anytime soon.”

“Do you want to try for repeated bursts and see if there is gold in them there hills? I’m all for it but we did just make a very loud noise just then and it might be best to just move on,” Ben warned.

Drake said, “Let’s move out then.” Regret was evident in his voice.

As they moved into the heart of the urban center, which surrounded the spaceport, Ben pointed out to Miller the fusion signatures of the Coalition’s armored forces when they were about five kilometers away.

“As they are not moving to intercept it doesn’t appear that they can detect us, Colonel. How close do you want me to bring her in? The closer I get, the more risk we run of stumbling across some Infantry forces and the Bowman’s only armament, while devastating, makes a heck of a loud noise. While I have faith in my baby, she was not meant to go toe to toe against a small army,” Ben said as his eyes quickly darted about his Virtual Array.

“Thermal Imaging suggests that the most of the infantry forces are maintaining a perimeter of roughly one kilometer out from the main body and there are quite a few snipers set up in the buildings keeping watch to.”

Ben adjusted the array to show a three dimensional schematic of the area based on the plans he had obtained earlier. “If it’s all the same to you, sir, I suggest I park here.” Ben pointed to a three level parking garage.

“That will put you two kilometers from the first building and give you plenty of space to deal with the snipers. If you don’t mind, sir, I’ll wait with the Bowman. I’m no super soldier like you two and it would be a pity if someone came along and stole her and got hold of my proprietary technology,” Ben said with a grin

“Oh, and these may help some.” Ben handed Miller and Drake, who had just climbed out of the cupola, what looked very similar to night vision lenses, a little bulkier than your average pair of sunglasses, but not by much. “Now before you go and tell me that it’s daylight, they’re for thermal imaging and the battery life should give you a good two hours worth of use. They are yours to keep, compliments of O’Farrell Industries,” Ben said as he pulled into the parking garage and spun the vehicle one hundred and eighty degrees, by setting one set of wheels in drive and the other set in reverse, so it was facing the entrance again and turned to look at them both.

“I wish I had another toy or gadget to get you through this, gentlemen, but that’s all I have. Now if you get into trouble, just give a yell over you com and I’ll come running. I won’t even charge you for damages if that happens,” Ben said smiling at Drake.

“You’re a good man, Ben,” Miller said, slapping him on the shoulder as he grabbed his gear and headed for the rear hatch as Ben opened the ramp.

“Thanks for the lift,” Drake said as the ramp doors were closing behind them.

The two men shouldered their backs and faded into the darkness of the parking garage.