32
Rev sat in a windowless van in a remote range in the foothills, a range guarded by heavily armed MPs. Daryll was running a diagnostic check on Pashu.
“Will my blood-alcohol content show up on Daryll’s stuff?”
<I can’t say for sure, but probably not. Besides, you’re only at a 0.001 now.>
“Tell that to my head.”
<I am in your head.>
“Very funny.”
<Really? That was funny?>
“No, Punch, it wasn’t. That was sarcasm.”
<OK, I’ve filed that away for reference.>
“You’re good to go, Rev. Break a leg,” Daryll said, pulling the cable from the jack on Pashu, not the one in his neck.
Rev stood up from the chair. It looked like it had been filched from a dentist’s office, but it was good enough for government work. Daryll had assured him that a better donning system was being developed, but for the moment, it was the chair and hoist crammed in the back of a commercial trailer.
He extended Pashu, twisting it at the shoulder. It moved smoothly, without a hitch. It still amazed him that it reacted to his thought as good, if not better, than his right arm.
“Let’s do it.”
He stepped out the back of the trailer and slipped behind it where Major Jewell, one of Colonel Tolouse’s staff, stood waiting.
She touched her ear and whispered, “He’s ready.”
Not too quiet for Rev not to hear. People seemed to focus on Pashu, forgetting that he’d had quite a few augments done before this project. He had a feeling that might come in handy sometime, so he wasn’t running around reminding them. Already, he knew that the good major was having an affair with a Navy captain. Not that he cared about what two adults did behind closed doors, but maybe some little tidbit would pop up about which he did care.
The major held up her hand against his chest while she listened. “The colonel’s going to speak first, then you’re hot.”
There were some bleachers fifty meters in front of the trailer where the Raider Platoon, Colonel Destafney, Lieutenant General Locklear Begay, the commanding general of the Safe Harbor Marine Force, and Lieutenant General Trejo, the HQ general who’d been monitoring Rev and who’d allowed Rev to come back to Camp Nguyen, were seated. No one else.
Doctor Chakrabarti and her staff were off to the side of the bleachers. The doctor looked like she was alternating between a nervous breakdown and absolute pride.
“General Trejo, General Begay, Colonel Destafney, Marines and sailors of the First Raider Platoon,” Colonel Tolouse said as he walked to stand in front of the bleachers. “While the general officers are aware of why we’re here, it’s time to reveal to Colonel Destafney and the Raider Platoon your next mission. So, without further ado . . .”
The colonel stepped back with a dramatic sweep of his arm to encompass the remote range. Rev started forward, but the major put her hand against his chest again.
Colonel Tolouse stood there for a moment, and Rev heard Jewell say, “I told them to go . . . yes, sir. It’s . . . it’s coming now.”
From the left side of the range, a paladin emerged, and the eyes in the stands craned to take it in. Rev leaned over, trying to see through the stands. He had to admit, the colonel’s team had done a pretty amazing job. The “paladin” looked pretty good—if you ignored the fact that it had wheels instead of articulated legs—far better than the mock-ups used in routine training. The pedestal was deployed, and the beamer searching for a target as it moved across the range, 150 meters out.
The major waited until the paladin was a third of the way across when she removed her hand and said, “Go!”
Rev took a deep breath, then started sprinting forward, praying he wasn’t going to trip and land on his face. He’d only done this three times before and never in front of someone new. He bolted between the doctor and her staff—with her beaming like a proud mother—and the bleachers. A collective gasp rang, then a few shouts, but he tuned everything out. His mission was that hunk of machinery in front of him.
As he passed the colonel, the paladin picked him up, and the pedestal started tracking him. The paladin was programmed to defend itself, and the beamer was active. It might be shooting what amounted to hi-tech paintballs, and Doctor Chakrabarti had convinced the colonel to slow down the paladin by fifteen percent, but this was a real test. Rev had failed the first two times, and the third was essentially a draw.
He was not going to fail this time.
Rev had a grid implanted in his vision, which centered on the pedestal. The grid helped him determine the thing’s aim, and Punch helped monitor it for him.
<Now, left!>
Rev dodged, pushing with his legs to change direction. He had a lot of mass to shift, and his legs screamed as he pushed them to his limit. The paladin fired, but Rev was already out of the cone, and the paintball flew harmlessly by.
Now Rev increased his straight-line speed, not at the paladin, but at an angle to its rear. The pedestal started traversing again, but with Rev’s speed, that allowed him to stay ahead for almost three seconds. Rev could cover a lot of ground in three seconds, and he closed the distance.
Not close enough, though. He was still too far.
<Right!>
He conjured up Coach Kirkpatrick, his secondary school flipball coach, and his flop and roll drills. Rev planted his left leg, flung Pashu across his body, and darted back through the paladin’s line of fire. He went low, rolling once before coming to his feet in one smooth move. Rev wasn’t a fan of the maneuver, but the numbers types assured him that by going low, he was increasing his chances of success by fourteen percent. It hadn’t worked the first time. He’d stumbled getting back to his feet, Pashu’s mass throwing him off balance, and gotten nailed.
This time, by some miracle, he was back on his feet and charging. He hadn’t seen if the paladin fired, but it didn’t matter. He had to get within range.
The paladin started accelerating away. Even at eighty-five percent, the AI had correctly determined that it needed to create distance between them.
Seventy meters. I need fifty!
Rev strained, his mouth open as he gulped air to fuel his muscles. His joints jolted with each step, Pashu ramming down on his shoulder as each foot hit the ground. His harness tightened around his chest as they strained to keep Pashu and him in one piece.
“Let me know when I can fire,” he shouted aloud.
He gained with each stride, but the paladin kept the gains in check as it brought around the pedestal to take Rev out.
<Left.>
Which would bring Rev behind the paladin. But he didn’t argue. He pushed off with his right foot, moving him farther away from the beamer’s aim. And it bought him a few precious seconds.
<Sixty meters.>
The paladin started to turn to protect its rear, which had less armor. Normally, it would have been a good move, but Rev didn’t want the rear. He wasn’t firing a Moray or Yellowjacket. He wanted one of the two heat-exchanger ports, either the one on the starboard side or the one on the port side.
And by turning, the paladin was letting him close the distance.
But turning also brought around the beamer quicker. The grid was still locked on as it kept calculating the point-of-aim. It flashed red, meaning Rev was about to be dead meat. Still, nothing from Punch. He wanted to fire, but he knew he had to trust his battle buddy.
The flashing red went steady, just as Punch said, <Fire.>
Rev was running, jolting his arm. It didn’t matter. He might as well have just thought of firing, it was that easy. Pashu came up and fired, and this wasn’t a training round.
The intertwined strings of energy twisted and sparked as they covered the distance in a pico-second, and the paladin exploded in a fiery ball of flame that shot thirty meters into the air. The concussion wave hit Rev hard, but it was a glorious feeling, a wondrous feeling. Debris rained down in seemingly slow motion . . . until Rev had to dodge to keep from getting hit by two wheels that bounced by.
Brought back to reality, he slowly turned to face the bleachers, where his entire platoon was on their feet, jumping up and down and screaming like fans at a platinum-rock concert.
* * *
“Nice of you to keep me out of the loop,” Tomiko whispered. She’d claimed a spot next to him with Yazzie claiming the other. He was the next bright and shiny thing, and being in their element, they were taking ownership.
Doctor Chakrabarti was debriefing the observers on a portable easel, but from the looks of it, not many of his platoon, at least, were paying much attention. They’d seen Rev run up with a BFG—a Big Fucking Gun—and the paladin go boom. That pretty much explained the situation.
Sure, Colonel Tolouse had rigged the paladin with a little extra explosive for effect, but that didn’t matter. They’d just seen that a Marine Raider could take on, face-to-face, a paladin and defeat it. Maybe it was a TS-40 chassis with a paladin shell on top, maybe it was shooting paintballs, and maybe it was operating at eighty-five percent, but the mere potential . . .
Colonel Destafney was listening intently. Unlike the two generals, this was the first he’d heard about the project, and unlike the platoon, he wasn’t taking a dog-and-pony show at face value.
He interrupted the doctor with, “That’s all well and good to be able to get to fifty meters. With training, I think we could develop the techniques. But tin-asses are remarkably resilient to energy weapons. What makes you think that this braided beam weapon will be any different?”
Colonel Tolouse motioned to the Krueger rep. Krueger was a weapons company, a subsidiary of Sieben.
“I’m Doctor Willinghouse, and I’m the project head for the cannon at Kreuger.”
He must have known the question would pop up, and he was prepared. He downloaded his brief into the easel and turned to the observers.
“The BEC-1 is the first practical application of chaos-physics, as I’m sure you are aware.”
OK, maybe he isn’t as prepared, Rev thought, seeing all the blank faces.
But the rest of his little brief was slick, professional, and best of all, you didn’t need to have five PhDs to understand it. Rev wished he’d seen it before instead of having it explained in terms he didn’t understand. In this case, the animation was really helpful.
If Rev now had it right, Pashu’s beamer didn’t have one projector but rather twenty-one in the nozzle. A random generator created beams of energy at different strengths and different wavelengths, pushing them out through the projectors. Not only were they all different, but they each changed every three microseconds.
As the beams shot forward, they were attracted to each other, creating a “bending” that twisted them around each other, hence the “braiding.” As they braided, they bounced against each other, which sent off tiny tendrils (and created the sparks visible to the naked eye), which further changed the nature of each beam.
With so much going on, it was nigh on impossible—theoretically—for a Centaur to counteract them all. Throw even more power, and they’d created a BFG—Doctor Willinghouse used the Marine term with more than a little glee.
Of course, those little tendrils bled the power of the combined beam and caused beam dispersion, which was the reason the range was so short, especially in any kind of atmosphere. But that limited range was more than compensated by the immense punch.
Again, theoretically.
And that was why all of them had been gathered. It was time to prove the theory.
Colonel Tolouse took the easel again and put up an image of Rev attacking a paladin. Arrayed around him were Marines.
“Hell, you look pretty studly in that,” Tomiko whispered.
“This is what you’re going to be doing. Sergeant Pelletier will be testing the IBHU against a live target. First Raider platoon will be tasked as his security detail to get him to the objective, then get him back.”
“And where will this be taking place. I don’t suppose you’ve got a paladin stashed away somewhere.”
“Maybe the Frisians think we do, but no, unfortunately,” the colonel said, eliciting a nice chuckle from the Marines in the bleachers. “No, we don’t have a pet tin-ass. But we do have a few who are, shall we say, stuck somewhere. We know where they are, and we’ve kept back from them for just such a need.
“But for now, your mission is to put together an op order, then rehearse the living shit out of it.”
There was a low murmur of voices, and Colonel Tolouse waited for it to calm down.
“And you don’t have much time to get this done. You’ll be deploying in six days.”