FACTORY (CYCLES)
The sand slipped through her hands: tiny smoothed stones and miniscule grains alike falling through the widening gaps between thin fingers. Time slipping away, she remembered thinking even then, a fragment stubbornly lingering from last night’s dream, last night’s memory, brought forth, perhaps, by the sight of the unchanging vast ochre landscape before her. The wind was picking up and across the barren desert, dust was rising in rhythmic waves; drifting eastward against craggy rock, obscuring the horizon and lending a warm, hazy hue to the sky. The few scattered wisps of cloud offered no shade from the unrelenting midday sun. Twice it created a colorful halo across her visor as she gazed out, so Cera thumbed the helmet’s auto tint switch, and continued scanning the skyline: an old habit that she would apparently never break. Evie would let her know of the Carriers’ arrival long before her helmet optics could reveal anything. Maybe they won’t even come today, she thought. It was a notion she amused herself with more frequently of late.
She sat back down on the outcropping, ignoring the tightness in her left thigh. Cera stretched out her legs, then clasped her hands around padded knees. She glanced at the temperature readout on her helmet display and frowned, but fumbled with the clasps. There was a brief whistle of air as the seal was broken. Then she was free of the clunky thing and tossed it aside. Cera blinked a few times, pupils shrinking quickly against the now-unfiltered daylight. She brushed a gloved hand through short auburn hair, rolled her head to stretch the kinks out of her neck.
Abruptly, she stood. She gave only a cursory look towards the battlesuit as she addressed it, “I’m going to take a piss.” Then, with a smirk, added, “Don’t watch me this time.”
Evie gave no reply. While Cera still wasn’t sure whether the AI could understand the joke, it had at least learned to recognize Cera’s quirks, and had thankfully refrained from comment. Evie could no more stop monitoring its pilot than it could sprout antlers.
Cera could have simply used the suit’s filtration system, and she normally did. In combat, there’d be no question. But she liked these occasional opportunities to feel more human, more free, to separate herself from monotonous routine.
When she finished, she returned to Evie and stood studying the battlesuit. Hunkered down in standby position, its armor was all curves: sleek, off-white metal polished to a shine almost resembling plastic, a blown-up child’s toy. Beneath the outer shell, angular grey robotics hummed in stark shadow. The cockpit remained open, its hinged doors spread around the pilot housing like thick glass wings. “We lose any more bots?” Cera asked.
“No, Lieutenant. All one hundred and twenty eight drones are accounted for,” Evie answered, her voice feminine but without emotion.
Cera breathed a sigh of relief at that. “How many went out last night?”
“Forty three individual drones were released for repair and maintenance tasks last cycle.” A short pause then, and Cera had just opened her mouth to speak, when Evie answered her next question. “Mickey was among them and returned intact, Lieutenant. Still functioning. Still red.”
Cera grinned at that. Maybe Evie was learning to make jokes after all. Some days ago, one of the larger retrieval drones had gotten stuck on its way back, carrying a pint of red paint to retouch some detailing on the battlesuit’s right arm. When they found it, Cera had instead painted the drone, dubbing it Mickey. Ever since, she had made sure to ask about him specifically.
She felt beads of sweat dripping down from her hair and wiped the back of her glove across her forehead. The occasional light breeze did nothing to alleviate the scorching heat and humidity. Her suit was air conditioned, but now that her head was exposed for even a few minutes, the heat was searing. She took a deep breath, inhaled the dry desert air one last time, and then scooped up her helmet. The cooled climate calmed her nerves a bit, rushing over her skin even before the latches were secure. She was like this before every battle, her mood alternating between relaxed, whimsical, and antsy apprehension. She fidgeted with the straps on her gloves. If they weren’t tightened properly, her grip on the controls would feel off. She didn’t like any distractions in combat. A split second could bring her down, could end everything. “How long?” she asked Evie.
“My best estimate is three hours, fifteen minutes, Lieutenant. Minimum ETA: one hour, forty five minutes. You should eat something. There’s time.”
Of course, she would receive everything she needed during the off cycle, asleep in the suit. But eating was another habit that let her feel more normal. The manufactured bars had little taste, but she liked the consistency. “Yeah, maybe.” She considered. “In a little while, I don’t want to take my helmet off again. I’m going to stretch first.” Her body ached still. The synths were absorbed into her body through jet dermal patches while she slept. But the chemicals didn’t always react well. The exercise would do her good.
“Classical?” Evie asked.
“Let’s go with something a little more upbeat. Surprise me.” She’d requested a varied selection from the Archive last cycle. One of the retrieval drones would have copied the music for her during its excursion. Maybe Mickey, probably one of the others. “And play the anticipated attack patterns vid again. I have a feeling they’re going to give us a changeup today.”
The Carriers would change something up. They always did. Usually something minor: timing differences, the configuration of their attack waves, a shakeup of maneuver patterns. Occasionally, they’d switch up something more consequential: a new craft design or weapon type. Their tactics were inherently alien, almost robotic in their infinite patience. The logic behind their strategies was not something she’d been able to analyze in any useful way. She extended her arms and legs, ignoring the muscles’ complaints. As long as the Carriers kept coming, Trinity would be there to stand against them.
Two hours later, Evie picked up the first wave crossing the planetary terminator into daylight, angling in directly towards the Factory. Fifteen minutes after that, Cera stepped into the battlesuit cockpit, secured herself into the seat, and began the startup sequence. She’d already primed the engines, tested battery power, and run diagnostics, as she did every morning. The word “Linking” scrolled up on her HUD, and all lines shifted from yellow to green. The projection grid configured automatically, adjusting for the curve of the glass and aligning with her helmet rotation. She flicked a pair of switches on her left to the “up” position, felt the vibration build to a steady rumble, then switched on a series of controls above her head: VDUs, targeting computer, countermeasure systems, internal cockpit lights, defroster, defogger, extinguisher autospray. Status lights blinked on one-by-one.
After that, she pulled the levers to seal the cockpit, and the sections swung in with a low whine and a final click into place. The startup sequence finished on the left display, so she dialed it into nav, and a three dimensional map of the surrounding landscape replaced the text. On the right, she switched to weapons, armed each in sequence, and set up the groupings. She set timings on the countermeasures. And finally configured targeting. “Evie, bring us up,” she said, scaling the nav map out a few degrees.
“Yes, Lieutenant,” Evie answered in her ear. Somehow different, Cera thought. There’s always something different about her voice once we’re sealed in together. All business.
“I want to run weapons tests before we head out.” She thought for a moment. “How long do we have?”
“They’re moving faster than we’ve seen before. Assuming no change from current measurements, time to intercept target grid: fifty five minutes.”
“Right, then we better get moving.” And she pushed the throttles forward.
They came from the northeast. Evie had calculated an intercept point twelve klicks out from the Factory, taking high ground on the south side of a canyon. The river that had carved it had dried up long ago, long before the time of man. Now the sands and rock covered all, and the heavy winds pummeled grains and small pebbles against the suit’s outer armor in waves that left ripple patterns below. Cera studied them for a moment, reminded of something she couldn’t quite bring into focus. Her nerves calmed as the target distance numbers wound down.
And then they were within range and she was one with the suit, with Evie. Two larger ships flew in tandem down the center: flattened capsule shapes each with a ring of iridescent blue boxes around the circumference. Bright silver, just this side of pure white, reflecting in the sunlight. Wings of smaller, more angular craft flew in formation off to either side, like swarms of tiny insects. When she fired, they broke into a symphony of controlled chaos, vectoring out in seemingly random directions, missing each other by mere inches.
The larger Carrier craft wouldn’t go down quickly, but the gauss rifle on her right arm blasted holes in their underside armor. The battlesuit was already lurching to the right. Cera had slammed the controls hard, now rotating the upper torso to unleash a volley of homing projectiles from the shoulder launchers. Evie flashed a warning and she pushed the suit low, sprinted forward, locking onto targets with laser-guided precision. The big ships, cruisers, wouldn’t have time to lock and fire. But Cera noted on radar that they began to turn in opposite directions, slowly circling around instead of continuing on towards the Factory as she had expected. Good, that would give her time. The seeker projectiles began to detonate behind, shredding many of the front wave fighters. The rest coordinated strafing runs, small bolts of plasma melting sand and rock around the suit. Alternately firing from the left and right wing-mounted guns in quick succession, each ship dove in fast, then broke away to circle around in a wide arc. She managed to pick off four while avoiding most of the return fire. The battlesuit took three shots across the back, one through the ankle, but none penetrating the thick outer armor.
A three dimensional model popped up onto her visor, and Cera assessed the damage. Armor intact, but the shots had burned deeper than she remembered from past encounters. “Anything offline?” she asked Evie.
“Negative, Lieutenant. But those bolts did penetrate an average of six millimeters deeper than damage sustained during our last engagement.”
The damage assessment faded to a corner of the hud. Cera targeted one of the cruisers and eased the stick over, set her feet, and braced to fire the long range laser. Two beams of brilliant red lanced out in quick succession, cutting straight through the ship’s hull with small flickers of yellow sparks intermittently lighting the exposed holes. The cruiser pitched forward slightly, but otherwise continued on course. “Scan the armor. Any irregularities?”
“The aft armor is particularly thick on the underside here and here,” Evie replied, two blue crosshairs highlighting the sections.
As Cera retrained her targeting reticle and began to reposition the suit’s feet, a warning alarm started to chime and she felt the machine gun thuds of the countermeasure system ejecting dozens of decoy cartridges into the air. Reflex moved her now. Forward, still locking on to the marked spots on the aft underside of the cruiser, but now moving in (what she hoped were) unpredictable steps. The countermeasures slowed for a second and she fired the laser, hitting the target squarely. This time, the ship lurched to one side in the start of a slow, flat spin, and began to lose altitude. A missile warning blared. She turned just in time to see a smoke trail veer off to the left, but it detonated amongst the countermeasures close enough to tear armor from the suit’s left shoulder and torso. And send her reeling. But the suit’s balancing gyros restored order, setting the legs apart at precise angles to recover from the stumble, freeing Cera to pick out the missile bomber silhouette on her radar display and send a burst of 30mm armor piercing rounds in its direction.
She had to keep moving. Another missile detonated, this one farther away, behind her, but still too close for comfort. She broke into a run, following along the cliff ledge, an eighty meter drop just to her left. She rotated the upper torso again, braced the left arm, and fired another burst from the gatling gun, not bothering to watch whether any impacted. Instead she turned her focus forward, zoomed the cockpit hud window in, saw a thick plume of smoke now obscuring most of the starboard cruiser’s tail section. She targeted the second one just as the first hit a small cliff face, sending a curtain of sand into the sky. Evie stabilized the legs again, against the shockwave, but Cera overrode the movement, already guiding the suit over the cliff, trying to ignore the weightless feeling in the pit of her stomach and the anticipation of hitting the ground below. The legs absorbed the impact, as they were designed to. She immediately repositioned them and fired off another volley of long-range seeker missiles. They flared out wide, arcing lazily through the sky in the general direction of the second cruiser.
Cera set her sights back on the bomber, which had suffered some minor damage, but was now circling away from her to set up for another attack run. The V-shape of its fuselage tilted sharply, the ends of its missile pod wings leaving contrails through the air high above. Too far for guns now. She recalibrated the laser targeter, snapped it in place, and let it auto-acquire the aircraft. As the ship began to come out of its turn, she fired the laser three times in succession, transforming the ship into fragments.
Decoys fired off from their housing on the suit’s back again, this time even before the audible warning sounded. These quickly burst into shards, attempting to scramble Carrier fighter targeting rather than missile guidance. The right VDU flashed to a tracked image of the fighters, coming in low from behind, twin starburst flashes indicating plasma bolt fire. They strafed past her, one at a time, several shots boring into the suit’s armor. She only managed to take down the last, as it swung out to the right, a burst from the autocannon sending it spiraling to earth. She lost track of the other two, refocusing on the remaining cruiser. Cera pushed the stick forward, using the cliff face to her right as cover, closing on the ship ahead. “Evie, what were those targets we hit on that last one?”
“I’m not sure, but based on the effects of damaging one, I’d guess that thicker armor houses something important to the lift or flight systems.”
“Good. Let’s target them again.” Almost immediately, crosshairs appeared on the hud.