Recruit (21 page)

One problem with the combat visors was that there could be info overload.  There were traces of incoming and outgoing fire, there were orders being given.  To Ryck, though, unless he personally received a direct order to do something different, his war narrowed down to who and what was directly in front of him.  Nothing else mattered, and frankly, that was about all he could take in.  He had to trust his fellow Marines to take care of business on either side of him.

He fired at another position, a light automatic weapon of some sort, but nothing that could affect a PICS.  And then he was inside the outer perimeter.  He was within the camp.  To his left was the BAAA he’d taken out, a light plume of smoke rising from it.  There was an arm visible, but most of the body was hidden from sight.  His original course of action was to breach the perimeter, then force his way deeper, past the outer belt of defenses.  However, with Greg out, then the 60 meters or so to his right had not been cleared.  Marines were not automotrons.  They were trained to think.  Ryck knew he had to clear the area and not leave a potential pocket of the rebels there.  He veered to the right and followed the defensive line until his movement sphere intersected with that of Cpl Nimoto, who’d had the same idea with Greg’s sector uncovered and had been moving to his left.  As each Marine moved, the AI’s determined a “cleared” area and pushed that up to the lieutenant so that he would know what areas had been cleared and what areas still had potential bad guys in them.

Cpl Nimoto pointed a big PICS arm back towards the inner defenses.  Ryck didn’t acknowledge, but his turning and moving out was enough.  Fast dissemination of information was the key to the modern battlefield, so it was ironic that the Marines relied heavily on old fashioned-hand and arm signals. 
But with crowded nets and anti-comms being employed against them, the less being passed via electrons the better.

Rycks shifted back to his left top where he could cover better both his original sector as well as Greg’s. 
He was a little behind the other Marines, so he hurried to catch up.

The turtle hatch opening up just 20 meters to his front right took him by surprise.  His PICS never picked it up until it opened.  The big BAAA deployed within a second as Ryck tried to bring his HCL to bear.  Before he could fire, flames flew from the barrel and
something big slammed into Ryck’s side overpowering the PICS’ servos and sending it crashing to the ground.

Ryck was
stunned, certain he was in it deep.  He tried to stand up, but his PICS complained as his visor started flashing different series of numbers before going dark.  He tried to turn his head, and to his surprise, the PICS grudgingly complied.  His comms seemed to be gone, but he could see out the visor.  The BAAA was right in his sight.  It was a type he’d not been briefed on before.  It was obviously slaved, either controlled by an AI or by an operator off-site.  It moved quickly from target to target, firing away.  “Target” seemed impersonal to Ryck.  Those “targets” were his fellow Marines.

An explosion rocked the base of the BAAA.  That had to be the Davis, getting into the fight.  The BAAA immediately spun around and let out a st
ring of fire, faster than Ryck had thought possible.  There was no return fire from the Davis.

Ryck took stock of his situation.  Despite being initially stunned, he didn’t seem hurt.  His PICS, though, was at 10% at best.  His visor occasionally flickered on, but for the most part, he was cut off from the rest of the platoon. 

The BAAA in front of him was close, only 20 meters away, and it was actively engaging the platoon, but Ryck didn’t know what he could do about it.  Robot gun or not, he knew a string of his 20 mike-mike grenades would do it some serious hurt. 

Ryck tried to forces his HCL arm forward.  It edged forward before stopping, still a good 40 degrees from being on target.  If his weapon wouldn’t move, he wondered if his body could.  He tried to edge back, hoping to drag his HCL into position.  That didn’t seem to be happening—all he seemed to do was to roll over on his belly.

Stuck there on his side, he was safe for the moment, but his platoon was still in the shit. He was trying to figure out his next course of action when something seemed to burn his ass.  At first, he thought his PICS was on fire, but he couldn’t smell anything.  The pain started getting intense, and it was spreading down his leg. 

Then it hit him.  His coldpack had somehow ruptured! 

He immediately hit the emergency eject for the pack, which had its own self-contained power source.  The PICS made an odd sound of grinding, but nothing happened.  The coldpack was still there, spreading down his leg.  Already, the right cheek of his ass was numb, probably frozen solid.

He tried
the eject again.  The same grinding noise sounded, followed by a pop, then silence. 

Ryck knew he had to get away from the coldpack.  It could literally suck the heat right out of him.  If the eject wasn’t working, then there was only one choice.  He had to molt.

A combat molt was a last-ditch action, used when a suit had to be abandoned.  He pulled back his left hand and arm from the PICS sleeve and wormed down his side.  He resisted trying to feel around to his ass and grabbed the molt release instead.  Once outside, he’d have no protection, but it was better than freezing to death.  He gave it a hard pull.  At first, he thought it had failed as well, but the molt was not instantaneous.  A PICS was a pretty impressive machine that was designed to take a beating, so there were a number of steps to disconnect and break the integrity of it to get out.  It normally took about a minute to go through the steps to get out of a suit, but an emergency molt was much, much quicker.  It really only took about five seconds, but to Ryck, it seemed like an eternity. The suit split up the back, and Ryck scrambled out.

Once out, he flopped in back of his suit, expecting to feel rebel rounds hitting him.  To his surprise, he seemed to be being ignored.  Twenty meters from him, the unmanned B-Triple
-A kept aiming at targets and firing.  The way the gun seemed to pick targets, spinning from one to the other back and forth rather than from one, then to another close by, would indicate that the guns were being controlled by an AI, or at least a program that prioritized targets.  When humans selected targets, they tended to go from one then to another that was close by the first target.  Humans targeted in patterns while AIs ignored patterns based on location.

Ryck glanced in back of him.  The Davis was some 400 meters back, a column of black smoke rising from it.  He could see other PICS moving back and forth, taking cover when and where they could.  The plan to bull-rush the perimeter was already by the wayside.

Ryck took stock of what he had.  That wasn’t much.  In his longjohns, he had no protection from even thorny bushes, much less weapons.  He had his small Ruger 2mm strapped to his thigh, but that was only good against unarmored personnel.  His rocket launcher and HCL looked intact, but they were on the weapons pack and so, useless.

Or were they?

Ryck started thinking of the hours he’d spent in the battalion armory.  Each weapons pack was powered by the PICS.  However, there was a small battery in the pack that kept the electronics alive and functioning while the pack was not attacked to a suit.  For energy weapons, that little battery wouldn’t do much.  But Ryck’s weapons pack was Number 2, and the pack only used power for the electronics, which included the trigger for both the rockets as well as the grenades.  Both weapons were self-powered in flight to the target.

Could he jury-rig the pack to fire?

Ryck scootched forward, looking at the pack’s connections.  It should be easy to release the pack.  Throwing the cover lever should do it.  Without even thinking, he crawled up on the back of the PICS and pulled on the lever.  It barely budged.  In the armory, the loader mechanically opened and closed the lever.  Ryck’s muscles did not match that power.  Mindless of the battle raging around him, he stood up on top of his PICS, reached down to grasp the lever, and heaved up with his legs.  Grudgingly, the lever moved—one millimeter, two millimeters, three—before suddenly giving way.  The weapons pack was free.  Ryck had to kick it up and over the PICS helmet before it fell to the dirt.

He scrambled back to it, pushing it over so it “faced” up. 
The battery was just under the left shoulder.  It seemed fine.  Ryck pushed the purple test button, and the test lights lit up the armorer’s panel in the correct sequence and all green.  The weapons pack was undamaged.  Throw in on another PICS, and it would be good to go.  But Ryck didn’t have another PICS. 

The question was how he could get the rockets or grenades to fire.  The targeting system was in the PICS, not the pack, and his PICS
was out of the equation.  The firing signal was also generated from the PICS.  Ryck couldn’t figure out a way to target a weapons pack alone, but he could bypass the firing signal.

He worried out one of his longjohns’ control wires, the interface between his body and the PICS.  For all the high-tech aspects of the longjohns, the controller was essentially a copper wire.  He pulled off the connector, revealing the bright bare metal. 
Taking out his combat knife, he cut the wire in two.  An explosion less than five meters away erupted beside him, showering him with dirt, but he ignored that as he twisted one end of one wire around the HCL firing input positive, and the other around the common ground in the female connector in the pack.  All the prongs were color-coded, and because of his work in the armory , he knew which prong was which

He had to “fool” the pack into thinking a signal was coming from the PICS to fire.  But the only power was from the pack’s own battery.  Taking out his combat knife, he dug through the silicon coating of the battery to reveal the terminals.  He had to be careful.  One
slip, and the battery would short.  He ended up making a small slit on the outside of both terminals.  Stripping two more wires from his longjohns, he slid them into the two slits he’d made, trusting the silicon’s elasticity to keep the ends of the wires in contact.  He took the negative wire and twisted it around the wire that went into the firing input negative.  All he would have to do, he figured, was touch the positive from the battery to the positive of the firing input, and the HTC should launch. 

“Should,” being the operative word.

The power from the battery was not the same as the power from the PICS.  Ryck didn’t know if the small output from the battery would be enough to activate the trigger mechanism.

All of this had taken a surprisingly short amount of time, maybe a minute at most.  Ryck looked up in time to see a PICS off in the distance go down.  One of the BAAAs was down, but there were three still in action.  They were stationary targets, and Ryck didn’t understand why the Marines were having issues with them, or why Marine or Navy Air couldn’t take them out.  He couldn’t affect any of that, though.

Ryck had to get the weapons pack up and aimed somehow.  The logical step would be to wear the pack, just as if it was
on a PICS.  The pack alone, with ammo, weighed in at a good 160 kg.  That was a pretty hefty load, and Ryck wasn’t sure he could manage it.  He turned it around so it was facing down and slid his body in.  His head went through the opening easily.  Too easily.  The pack was designed to sit around the collar and on the shoulders of a PICS.  Ryck’s shoulders were not nearly as wide, and the color ring of the pack came down right on the edge of this shoulders.  There wasn’t much he could do about that, though.

Ryck gathered his feet under him, and tried to stand up.  He actually lifted the pack off the ground before he fell forward, his neck slamming into the hard edge of the pack.  Simply standing up was not going to work.  He had to get his feet under him.
  That was easier said than done.  It took some maneuvering and using his PICS hulk as an anchor, but he finally got it done.  Taking a deep breath, he stood up.

In the gym, he’d squatted more than that before.  But that was
on a pad with the weight being a barbell.  In this case, he was standing in the dirt of Luminosity, a battle was going full tilt around him, his right butt cheek and leg were numb, and the edge of the weapons pack was digging into his shoulders.  With a grunt, he did it, though.  He stood up.

He expected the B-Triple A in front of him to swing in his direction and let loose.  He was surprised, but quite relieved, when it seemed to ignore him.  The AIs or targeting computers evidently were not particularly discerning.

He staggered forward a few steps and stopped.  The pack was digging unmercifully into his shoulders.  The edge of the pack came down within a couple of centimeters from the edge of this shoulder, so a lot of weight was being supported by only a little of Ryck.  And that hurt.

Fifteen meters or 10 meters wouldn’t make much difference, so he stopped his advance.  The bulk of the grenade launcher was in the pack itself, but the muzzle was normally
“worn” on the gauntlet of the PICS.  Ryck didn’t have the PICS there, so he simply jammed his right hand into the dangling muzzle, then strained to lift it up.  A gauntlet was much bigger than a naked hand, so the fit was not right, but at least he could still reach the thumb trigger.  The firing trigger itself was electronic, but the switch to open the circuit was the mechanical trigger.  With his left hand, he would have to reach to the loose wire to bring it to the other one, closing the circuit and (hopefully) firing the launcher.  As he raised the weapon, though, with his right arm aiming and his left trying to reach back under the pack, his shoulders narrowed, and the pack almost slipped off.  He had to tense up his left shoulder, keeping it in place as his fingers quested for the wire.  He should have made them longer.