The Guardians of Sol (5 page)

“Yes, sir.” I agreed.

June 7, 2289. The Forge, Block 2

While waiting for the airlock to finish cycling, I addressed the forty-eight children wearing vacuum proofed armor for the first time. “Cadets. This is real. You are being exposed to hard vacuum as we speak and I do expect all of you to survive. None of you are screaming so I’m going to assume that you managed to put your armor on correctly. You have been divided into red and blue teams. We’re going to play a simple game of capture the flag. At no time are you to EVER deactivate the mag-clamps in your boots.”

Upon that last comment, a half dozen recruits quickly fiddled with their controls to activate the magnetic-clamps in their boots. The signal finally chimed in the helmet of my borrowed instructors’ armor, and the artificial gravity turned off. Several cadets still started to float despite repeated reminders. Their companions dragged them back to the deck so they could turn on the crucial equipment. “File out. Instructors Reid and Harker will show you to your parts of the field and get you formed up. From there it’s up to you. And kids, try not to die. I hate doing the paperwork.”

After a few minutes of setup, the cadets began straining against each other in vacuum, although a few complained of nausea. As soon as our leave was over, the High Sentinel had wasted no time assigning my squad our temporary orders. While our armor was being constructed, we got to babysit trainees at the academy. At least we were teaching combat classes instead of mathematics.

Red and blue paintballs flew back and forth occasionally hitting a cadet but more often just continued into the void. Every so often one of their instructors would fire at trainees who looked a little too reckless. More than a few soon sported bright green splotches on their armor. On adjacent fields, Haywire and Shot-put were leading other classes of cadets in similar exercises.

I was watching it all from a wall that surrounded the playing field with all of its obstacles. In the corner of my HUD I saw a couple enterprising young men start bouncing around without their mag-clamps in an attempt to gain more maneuverability. The only real problem that I had with that was that their version of training armor had no thrusters in the backpack, so once they were off the deck they would have no way to navigate. It seemed like a serious oversight to me. I nailed two of them with enough paintballs and force that they went back to the deck and reactivated the gear in their boots. Unfortunately, I missed the third one and he went careening into empty space.

“I’ve got a kid gone projectile sited!” Spicy called over the com.

“I’ll get him; keep your eyes on the rest of them.” I returned.

I pushed off of the deck and accelerated towards the runaway cadet. For the potentially deadly position he was in, the boy was insanely calm. He kept reporting his position and occasionally a description to his squad mates about their opponents’ movements. I didn’t trust that calm to hold up much longer. Getting closer I applied a quick second burn from my jets to reverse thrust and caught him. Taken by surprise he tried to hit me.

“Stop struggling you idiot! Or do you want to die?”

He stopped moving immediately, his heavy breathing came in clearly over the com. I carefully used my thrusters to stabilize both of us, trying to take into consideration the increased mass. This kind of math never has been my strong suit. I prefer my feet on nice solid ground.

It took a few more minutes, but I finally got the spinning to stop and pointed in the right direction. I boosted us back toward the field and gave him a final shove. Altering my angle, I headed back to my look out.

A stray paintball hit me in the shoulder and sent me just barely off course. I calmly readjusted my angle. Something else hit me. Hard. Everything went black.

*****

Earlier that day, I had gone in for my appointment with Chief Ruiz. Heading back to the engineering bay to see what his surprise weapon was. Approaching the team working on the new armors for my squad, I couldn’t help but notice that the bay was virtually empty aside from the typical engineers. I thought I saw a flash of red hair and a grimy jumpsuit from the corner of my eye, but it was gone when I looked.

“Hey, why’s it so quiet here?” I asked.

“Well, we only have some minor repair work, and your team’s new armor. Besides, tonight that new series from the Corporations is being broadcast. You know how much everyone's been looking forward to that one. After three centuries it’s about time the Avengers got a decent live action show,” replied Bay Chief Ruiz. The wiry man gestured to a particular section, “Come over here, Castle.”

In this part of the bay were the new armors for my team, lined against the walls. Most were still missing plates, and showing the complex circuitry underneath. The helms were styled with eagle wings curving around on the sides. The eagles’ heads were above the brows and it seemed likely that they contained some kind of secondary sensors. The full effect placed stylized Norse decorations on helmets that were slightly more reminiscent of ancient Doric styles. It was beautiful.

“We’ve rebuilt the armor from the bones up using better materials and more up to date tech. Most of the suit customizations are finished, and the color scheme has been applied to all the finished pieces either with durable epoxies or anodizing techniques. Now we just need to have your men come in over the next few days to finish calibrating weapons,” Ruiz eyed Rhys appraisingly. “Some of them have interesting tastes in armaments.”

I grinned. “Well, I’ve always liked to give my men the freedom to express their inner creative violence. You think we call Sergeant Mace “Shot-put” because he competed in his younger days?” Which he did, but that wasn’t the reason for his call sign.

“Hm… Good a reason as any, I suppose. Anyway, I think we have something that should fit your squad’s new moniker quite nicely. Follow me.”

We traversed to yet another area, to the experimental section of the surprisingly large engineering bay. Behind a Blind door, which shielded the rest of the bay from sound, light, and occasionally blasts of radiation; we came to an area with rubble piled in the corners and several stacks of concrete bricks with metal sheets stretched over one side. Strangely there were several sledge hammers leaning on a rack by the doorway.

“Stay here for a second,” Ruiz told me as he went through another doorway to an observation room. “Alright, now, take hold of the sledge with the wood handle, and give that first stack a good whack.”

I did as I was told, hitting the metal plating with all my might. All the blow did was numb my arms for a few moments. I turned to the observation window, and I am sure I looked strange, trying to glare and express my confusion at the same time.

“Don’t worry, that was supposed to happen. You might have chipped or broken some of the concrete but that metal is part of a sample of the Adamantium alloy we put over your armor’s vital areas. No way could you expect to even dent it with that thing. Now, grab one of the ones with metal handles, and hold on for a second.” Ruiz hit a few buttons on his control board, before turning back to me. “Go ahead and hit the stack again; you don’t even have to hit it that hard.”

I shrugged, and slammed the new hammer into the metal plate. The bricks behind it practically exploded, and what was left of the base was instantly turned into dust. The plate still stood tall, quivering slightly. I looked from the hammer to the rubble, and back, amazed. Then I turned to give Ruiz a huge grin. This was the best thing that I had seen since Haywire and Shot-put had used stolen chemicals from the research base to blow up a tree stump during one of our off duty shifts. A thought occurred to me, though.

“This isn’t going to make me go sterile, is it?”

“Always get the smartasses. Non-ionizing radiation is fine and specialized and even if it did cause problems there are treatments for that kind of thing now…” The man grumbled under his breath.

“I heard that,” I told him, but I was mollified.

“Just a moment, Castle,” Ruiz hit a few more keys. “Hit the plate again, if you will.”

With much greater enthusiasm, I hit the nigh indestructible metal. This time, the effect was not as immediate, but the plate let out a long ringing wail that quickly increased in volume. After a few seconds, a crack appeared, and then another, and yet another. Finally the whole plate shattered, more like glass than the most durable substance yet created by man.

My eyes may have gotten rather large from awe and general amazement; I couldn’t even bring myself to utter the few words I was thinking: “I want this.” With a silly grin on my face I just kept looking back and forth from the hammer to Ruiz sitting contentedly in his booth.

Back in Ruiz’s office, he handed me a few data pads. “Just sign those and we can begin fabricating the hammers for your team. It will take us a couple more weeks to build and integrate them into your weapons array so that they can draw power from the reactors like the rest of your armaments, instead of having to use a battery. I would also suggest getting some practice in with some two-handed hammers if you’re sure this is what you want. ”

“Oh, I’m sure. Sounds great, and my team really will need the time to get used to fighting with war hammers,” I remarked, signing my thumb to the appropriate options on the pads.

“Yeah, yeah, just don’t do anything too stupid in the meantime.”

“Good doing business with you, Chief… How’d you guys get your greasy hands on this tech, anyway?”

“We pulled it out of those Republic tanks you broke down by the California research base. One of the other bays reverse engineered and improved on it. They did good enough work that I snagged one of their techs for my team. Frankly, the whole system is inspired. With a little tweaking it could even be used to stabilize an Archimedes drives. If that happens, then the equations would get simpler, and the range should improve. Plus, the number of people lost to accidents from independent jumps would plummet. Unfortunately, we still have no real idea where the initial research and design came from, and there just isn’t any information about people working on this, not even rumors. There are some of people that think that it may have come from the Zulus… but as far as I understand, their technology is still lagging behind the Republics’. They have made some huge strides in the last few years though.”

“So what are you calling this new system?” I asked, very curious now.

“Well, since the obvious effects are obviously rather vicious, and because it uses sonic vibrations combined with various electromagnetic fields that reinforce each other… we’ve taken to calling the technology Destructive Harmonics. At least in the iteration that you’ll be using. We can set up the electromagnetic frequencies to do more than tear things apart, but those are in an even more experimental phase than the DH right now.”

"Odd. But I like it. I'll look forward to breaking things with it."

Ruiz gave me an appraising look again, “I’m sure you will, Captain.”

*****

“Boss, hey boss man, wake up.” Someone slapped me. I groaned incoherently, or so I was later told. They slapped me again. I think this time I swore, and opened my eyes to see a blurry image of Voodoo staring at me with his big creepy witch doctor grin. Voodoo is from the Caribbean, he also happens to be my squad’s medic. His sense of humor scares me sometimes. I waived him off. Looked around.

“Where am I? And why aren’t I sucking vacuum?”

Behind the witch doctor, Spicy and Squatter tried to stifle laughter, and the cadets just looked mortified and uncertain. Voodoo grinned again. “Look down, boss man.” I looked down. My instructor’s armor was crumpled and dented. “Ya drifted right into a shuttle, mon. Don’t know how or why but ya did. Right after ya saved dat kid. Luckily ya don’ got no broken bones, no internal injuries. Ye’ll probably be stiff for day or two while your body and da bots do dere work, but dat’s about it. So you be tellin’ dat girl of yors to take it easy on ya, yah?”

“I only understood something about me not dying and a pie in all of that. I kind of want some pie now.”

“Don’ be messing with yer docta now. Might be he makes a mistake and don’ realize it, mon.”

“That’d be unfortunate. Because then I’d have to assign that poor confused doctor to latrine cleaning duty. Help me out of this thing. Cadets, get out of that armor. Go do twenty laps around the track then shower; we’re done for the day.”

“Might be a
serious
mistake,” he grinned menacingly.

They filed out, a few looking back uncertainly. Spicy and Squatter helped me up while Voodoo cracked the plates and exoskeleton of the armor to get me out. I turned to Spicy.

“Which team won, anyway?”

He gave me an incredulous look. “Does that really matter, Cap?” I just kept staring at him. “Ok fine, Red team snagged the Blues’ flag before we noticed that you got hit.”

“Good, arrange for twelve-hour passes and some supervision for them. I promised the winning team some time away from the Academy and I like keep my promises.”

“You sure do, Cap.” Squatter chipped in. “So don’t forget to give Haywire his twenty credits. Oh don’t look at me like that; I was there when you made the deal with him. You got hurt while we’re on the Forge, he gets the credits.”

I gave him a rude gesture. Voodoo lifted the top off of my armor so I could climb out. “Just for that, you can take this armor down to the shop to get repaired. And after that... see you guys tomorrow. I’ve got plans tonight.”