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United States from attack by armed enemies. They were aliens, of course, but
that just made it better. He was a reader of science fiction and aliens were a
nice, morally clean enemy. You couldn't get worked up over mounds of alien
carcasses. The only post traumatic stress syndrome that was going to come from
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fighting the Titcher was related to possibly losing.
At the moment, however, the enemy seemed to be unavailable.
There had been reports that a team had entered the Eustis gate and that
something had happened there. At the same time radiation counters in the units
that had been fighting in Staunton had gone wild. The aliens, who had been
pouring through in an apparently unstoppable tide, had suddenly stopped coming
through the gate. The remnant, mostly dog-demons and thorn-throwers with a few
rhinoceros tanks, had been mopped up by the survivors of the first National
Guard company to be thrown in and locals who, like those in Florida, had
turned out with everything from hunting rifles to one squad in an old M-113
Armored
Personnel Carrier complete with M-2 .50 caliber machine gun.
None of them had gotten close to the gate, however, because the ground was
still reading very hot. There had been no explosion, just a sudden jump in the
radiation count. And now the gate was acting . . .
odd. Instead of a flat mirror it was rippling, reflecting the light in a
pattern of every color of the rainbow.
That, however, was not Major Slade's concern. He was tasked with designing the
defenses to be emplaced to cover the gate. There were tanks and fighting
vehicles dug in on the hill but the division commander wanted a complete and
thorough prepared defense with
interlocking fire, bunkers, communications trenches and all the rest.
So Major Slade sat down on the front glacis of the engineering vehicle, laid
his map across his lap and pulled out a camouflage colored portfolio,
unzipping it and opening it to reveal the 8½x11 lined pad therein. Then he
pulled a Cross pen out of his left chest pocket and began to sketch,
occasionally picking up the binoculars or referring to the map on his lap.
It was while he was examining dead-zones around the gate, spots where direct
fire could not be placed on the enemy, that the mecha-suit appeared. It seemed
to hang in air, almost insubstantial for a moment but that might have been an
optical illusion, then dropped to the ground.
It was human shaped, about four meters tall, or would be if it were standing
up. He looked at it again and made a moue of uncertainty. He had three
children, all boys, and they were great players of computer games when they
weren't watching Japanese anime. Major Slade, for that matter, had spent a
couple of years religiously reading the
Battletech series until it turned to utter dreck. And he damned well knew
mecha when he saw it. And as far as he knew, the United States
Army did not have any mecha units. If they did he'd turn in his commission and
reenlist as a private if that was what it took to join.
The mecha rolled over on its side and seemed to be looking towards the town;
there was a small rectangle of what looked like glass on the chest of the
suit. Then it lay back down on its back, as if exhausted.
Major Slade pounded on the driver's hatch with the handle of his locking blade
knife until the vehicle commander, wearing a gas mask, popped out of the
hatch.
"We need to go down and pick up that soldier," Major Slade said.
"What the fuck is that?" the vehicle commander, a sergeant, asked in surprise.
It was clear that none of the crew had been watching the gate which, given
that the Titcher might appear at any moment was just criminally stupid. What
they'd probably been doing was sitting as high up as they could, fearfully
watching the radiation detectors.
"It's a mecha-suit," the major replied, picking up his materials and
climbing up the armored engineering vehicle. "One of ours."
The major was not aware that the Army had mecha, but that did not mean that he
thought the suit was alien. Oh, he could get his head around some race, as yet
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uncontacted, having mecha. There were numerous arguments against mecha as a
combat system. Joints were much more prone to mechanical breakdown than the
simple track and drive wheel system of an armored fighting vehicle. They also
had a higher profile than tanks and more surface area to hit. But the major
had known that the Army was eventually going to go to something like mecha for
infantry. The weight that infantry soldiers were expected to carry was growing
every day as more and more "vital" systems were discovered. Properly designed
mecha would simply amplify the abilities of the infantry.
Thus another race could be using them for combat, say against the
Titcher; one such might have been "sucked in" by whatever destabilized that
gate. And he could allow the logic of them being humanoid;
covergent evolution and all that. He could even allow the logic of them being
vaguely human facially; he had seen the mask sculpted on the
"face" of the suit. Although that was pushing the bonds of credulity.
But lying on the ground next to the suit was what appeared to be a cut-down
25mm Bushmaster from a Bradley Fighting Vehicle. He couldn't imagine precise
covergent evolution of the Bushmaster. Among other things, it had some real
design drawbacks.
Ergo, it had to be a human. Furthermore, it had to be a human from a time
sometime near the present. It was probably from the present.
And it was right in the middle of one of the hottest patches of radiation in
the world.
The vehicle lurched into motion and he, carefully, climbed up onto the turret
and held onto the commander's machine-gun mount as it slowly negotiated the
rubble on the hillside.
The mecha had gotten to its feet and was now lurching in the general direction
of town. It didn't walk very well; every step seemed to be dragged out of some
recesses of energy. And the steps were not graceful at all, foot by foot
lurches, arms held at the sides. It had left the
Bushmaster on the ground and now plodded its weary way up the hill, one slow
step at a time.
It didn't seem to notice the engineering vehicle until they were about fifty
meters away. Then it stopped and raised its right arm, waving it back and
forth slowly, very much like the droid in Star Wars but slower and with much
less enthusiasm. But Slade waved back and motioned for the mecha to stay where
it was.
When the engineering vehicle stopped it was within a meter of the mecha. Slade
called for a Geiger counter and went forward, waving the wand over the suit.
Sure enough, it was hot enough to fry eggs.
"Stay in that," he yelled. He could see a human face peering at him through
the armored glass.
He climbed back up onto the turret and ordered them to pick the mecha up with
the manipulator arm.
The manipulator arm was a relatively recent addition to the engineering
vehicle. It was designed to pick up mines and "Improvised
Explosive Devices." It should, however, be able to lift the mecha. If it was
even working; the arm was complicated and broke down on a regular basis.
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