On Distant Shores (Exiles Triology Book 1) (36 page)

              What Mike, his team, and the security team didn’t know, was that a large group of people were watching the potential engagement down in the play room.  They relocated a large screen TV from the offices on the second floor, hooked up the drone feed, and now they watched the drone and armor feeds.  They could see everything that was transpiring.  Below the screen was information on the AI, and the various systems that kept the mech armor going.  The screen zoomed in as the threats came closer to the friendlies.

              Dr. Randall was in charge of this.  She wanted to ensure that the mech armor was functioning within all of the engineered tolerances.  She and her team would go back later and analyze all of the data to ensure peak performance.  After her visit to the surface, she was more willing to work with the team.  Mike still didn’t trust her, though.  He was waiting for the other shoe to drop.

              The hostile that had been labeled as target one, possible a female dragon, stopped at the edge of the clearing.  She smelled the fragrance of death, of prey animals, and the scent of her old rival.  She knew that her rival was dead due to the miasma of death that lingered from previous carnage.  She looked out on the meadow.  She could see movement inside the cave.  Prey was present, and soon she would eat.  She screamed a hunting call.  The coughing scream silenced everything in the valley.

              Tom was looking at his head’s up display, “Holy hell, did everybody see that?”

              Mike took his eyes off of the edge of the meadow, trying to see what Tom was talking about.  The secondary figures were moving differently now.  They were no longer maintaining a triangle figure based on the female in front of them.  Now they moved forward, one on the left side of the possible female, and the other to the right.

              “Roger Tom, I think they’re putting aside their differences for hunting.”

              Mike could feel his emotions cool, his focus increase.  His body knew it was going into combat, and was preparing for that action.  The rest of the team reacted in pretty much the same way.  This team was special, and the reason was, when the rubber met the road, the team didn’t get hyped up on adrenaline.  Instead, they become cool as ice, focused on the mission in front of them.  Now, with the hostile animals so much closer to the cave mouth, the AI displayed information about the size and approximate weight of the beasts.  Mike took it all in at a glance, but it was causing consternation in the room below.

              “Damn, look at the size of the first one.  It’s about six tons of dragon.”  More of the voices started talking as the other threat information was displayed.  People were amazed at the size of these animals.  In the secondary threats, the possible males, one was eleven tons, and the other was twelve tons, approximately.

              The female felt the presence of the two males.  She had been aware of them the entire time that she was moving across the valley floor.  She was waiting for them to challenge, to kill or maim each other.  Once the battle was over, she would challenge the males, to kill them if they were weak.  She was not the largest female, but she, like the rest of the females in her species, would not suffer an inferior male to impregnate her.

              With the bellow of the hunting call, she was no longer interested in killing them.  Instead, her focus was on the prey in front of her.  She waited as their posture changed from rutting, to hunting.  The males were intrigued by her proposition.  They moved up to smell the death in the meadow.  They smelled prey that was not familiar to them.  This excited them, almost as much as the idea of battle with each other and the mating with the female would have produced.  As the males tasted the flavor of the air on their tongues, their curiosity overcame their other instincts.  As vicious as they were to each other, the prospect of tasting another animal, different than others they tasted before, overcame their previous instincts.  They could challenge each other after the hunt.One male roared his hunting call, then the other did so, both calls echoing through the valley.  This communicated to the female that they were willing to hunt with her.  She added her voice to the cacophony, and then all three moved forward, out of the tree cover, slouching forward into a hunter’s stalk.

              Mike watched all three.  Mike gave another order, “All teams, weapons hot, I say again, weapons are now hot.”

              All weapons systems were ready to fire at that moment.

              “Sniper, are you ready?”

              “Roger, I’m ready.”

              The sniper in question was a civilian.  Joe Oaks was a hunter, and a damn good shot.  He volunteered to work with the security police, or, as he put it, “not sit around on my ass while other people are doing their damned best to protect it.”

              When the team talked to him, they found out that he was the civilian version of Tom, a guy that went hunting as much as he possibly could.  He rattled off ballistic statistics to Tom, then walked him through several different weapons systems.  Tom was impressed, so he put Joe on the .338 Lapua.  They hadn’t had time to get somebody ready on the BMG .50 caliber.  They moved that weapon into the cave tunnel to be used as a last resort in case something tried to slither through.  It would be very hard to miss at the point blank range in the tunnel.

              Plus, there was a lot more .338 ammunition than there was .50 caliber.

              “Okay, Joe, you see the smaller animal in the middle?”

              “Yes, I do.”

              “I want you to shoot it.  Try for the chest or the shoulder, but if you can’t get those, then take a head shot.”

              Joe lined up the shot, and then pulled the trigger.

              Because of her stance, he couldn’t get a good shot at the chest or shoulders, so he aimed for the eye.  She jerked at the last moment, and the shot went above the eye, creasing the top of the head.
              “Roger, shot out.”

              This short sentence was drowned out by the bellow she unleased, rage surging through the monster.  She felt the impact of the bullet and pain seared through her head.  The shot itself was deflected by the thickness of her skull.  Still, the impact ripped skin and cracked bone.    Her hunting companions smelled the blood in the air and felt her rage.  The short stalk was finished. She leaped forward to kill the thing in the cave that hurt her, and the males leaped forward to join her.

              Mike gave the order to the teams, “All mech and sec teams, you’re free to engage.”

              The burr of high speed projectiles announced their launch from the rail guns.  They hit the three animals like a chainsaw.  The tough hide was hard to penetrate.  These animals, even with the advanced capabilities of the mech armor, were difficult to kill.

              Mike called out, “I’m taking the small one in the middle, Mech two and four take the one on the right, Mech three and five take the one on the left.”

              With that statement, his AI painted the smaller dragon as his primary target in red, and the secondary targets in orange.  Reality blurred as Mike slammed into the body of the dragon closing in on his position.  The beast howled as the hard ridge of the cutting fists of the mech armor slammed into her body.  She didn’t understand what was happening, not seeing her enemy before it attacked.  Mike activated his pulse laser, cutting into flesh.  Gore dripped and splattered across the armor.  He could feel small arms fire plinking around his armor as the security team tried to aid him.

              The dragon twisted her body, and Mike felt his armor lifted from the ground, rotating around her body, and then slamming into the ground on his back.  He felt the protective foam collapse and re-inflate as it took the majority of the energy of the impact and dissipated it.  He was underneath the dragon as shehammered him down with her paws and mouth.  He punched from underneath, trying to cause as much damage as possible to what could be a softer underbelly.  His pulse laser cycled as he tried to cut into flesh.

              He felt his world shift again as she laid over to use her back legs to rake his mech armor.  When this didn’t bring the results that she hoped for, she rolled until he was on top, then set her legs against his armor, and kicked him into the air, away from her.  His mech armor slammed against something and then he landed on the ground, the foam cushioning his impact once again.

              He rolled to his feet, whatever he landed against moving away from him.  He found his target circling him, about to launch into him.  Since she was a good hundred feet away from him, he triggered his rail gun and the projectiles cut into her front leg, spoiling the jump.  He was able to side step and punch out with his hands, driving them into her shoulder.  He grabbed a handful of the writhing tentacles and used them to launch onto her back.  As he gained the back of the dragon, he aimed his laser at the base of her neck.  The movement of her body underneath him spoiled his aim, and he only succeeded in cutting off tentacles.

              She rolled again, trying to dislodge him from her back, and she succeeded, though he was able to retain his hold on the tentacles.  Gravity slammed him back up against the damaged leg.  He tore into the leg.  The hide along the leg was ripped and bloodied from the damage he inflicted, so he rammed his arm against the leg, and then shot the elbow of the leg with his rail gun.  The elbow collapsed.  He followed the body of the female to the ground.  He used his grip on her tentacles to position himself so he could pound her face with the gauntlet.  The gauntlet pounded continuously until he felt the orbit of the eye socket collapse.  The dragon screamed in pain, rearing up and shaking her head, tossing him away from her.  His armor sped toward the ground.  He tucked and rolled the armor, his AI helping to move through the maneuver, coming back on his feet as he prepared to hit her again.

              Then he heard the warning, far too late.  The huge paw of one of the heavier males hit him and sent him tumbling across the ground.  As he righted himself, he could see the big male launch on top of him.  The male grabbed the arm of the mech armor and started shaking him like a rag doll.  If he had been in metal armor, this wouldn’t have been possible.  Since the armor he was in was mostly graphene and titanium, it was much lighter.  Still, the armor didn’t crack or crumple.  The engineers had designed well.

              The big beast didn’t realize the mistake it had made.  Mike’s rail gun was inside the large male dragon’s mouth.  He triggered the rail gun.  The side of the dragon’s mouth exploded as the rail gun ripped into it.  Gore dripped from the side of the dragon’s head.  He grabbed a handful of the tentacles and used that leverage to shift his rail gun deeper into the beast’s throat.  As the beast choked on his hand, he triggered the rail gun again.  The projectiles tore through the beast, into the back of the neck, into the chest cavity, causing maximum destruction as they went.

              A torrent of blood dripped, and then gushed out of the mouth of the great beast, and it collapsed.  “Must have cut its spinal column,” Mike thought.  Mike pulled his hand out of the great dragon’s mouth and stood up.  He looked around for his original target and saw it lying, unmoving on the meadow, twitching as it died.

              The final hostile was fatally damaged.  Its spine was broken.  It had been clawed from head to toe by small arms fire, pulse lasers, and rail guns.  There was no give in it, though.  The desire to kill was so deeply rooted, that it tried to pull itself forward to kill.  Mike watched as his team moved forward and, saving ammunition, hacked it apart with pulse lasers.  A finally quiver of the muscle and it went still.

              Mike walked over to the female on the ground.  He noticed the rapid shallow breaths.  He assumed it was in shock. It didn’t seem to be able to move anymore, so he walked around to the eye of the dragon, which was open.  The great beast tracked him with the one good eye.  He saw the hate in its soul.  He triggered his pulse laser, piercing the brain of the beast.  The breathing stopped.

              He stood up, “ACE report. Over.”

              His team reported in, green across the board.

              Then he called Pang, “Lieutenant Pang, ACE report, over.”

              She replied, “Green across the board, they didn’t even come close to us.”  Pang looked at the team.  They were no longer camouflaged.  They looked like the denizens of some demonic charnel house, covered in gore, dripping blood across the grass and sand of the churned up meadow, gods of slaughter and death.

              The valley map expanded across Mike’s vision again, the boarders flashing red.  Another hostile was on the way.

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              Lenny talked to Matki Awrani using the AI software.  He had been working long hours to create a program and AI that would learn Matki Awrani’s language.  Matki Awrani was no fool, and quickly figured out that Lenny was trying to learn his language.  Matki Awrani was taken aback the first time that he heard Lenny say something, and then hear the computer say a phrase in his own language.  As for Lenny, he was delighted to see how the AI was beginning to respond to the new program.  It learned very quickly, and was able to access a lot of the stored internet translation programs to learn how different languages worked and intersected from Earth.  It was able to use these programs to create a new algorithm to understand Matki Awrani’s language, and then translate it into English, and from English back into Matki Awrani’s language.  With this comprehension, Lenny was able to understand one thing about the hostile dragons that just tried to kill everybody.