The Guardians of Sol Read online

  Haywire gave me a sad look as I abandoned him to the tender mercies of the Spartans, but there seemed to be a smile as part of it so I assumed the best. I turned away from them and made my way to where the rest of my squad was waiting, triumphant grins on their faces. I do believe that I had just doubled their income for the month. Rachel ran over and threw her arms around me, and then immediately backed away.

  “You stink!” She told me, all concern gone from her voice and manner. “Shower before you pick me up tonight.”

  “What did you expect? I’m covered in blood and sweat, of course I’m going to stink.”

  I leaned down and kissed her cheek. “But I guess I’ll do as you ask. Just this once. Now if you’ll excuse me, beauty, I have to let to the medic check me over before I get cleaned up. I have one or two other things to take care of before dinner too.”

  *****

  Later that day, still smarting from my wounds, I made my way over to one of the engineering blocks. More specifically, I made my way to the bay where all of the technology for the Specials was maintained and developed. I did, of course, hope that this preliminary meeting didn’t take very long. I had that date with Rachel tonight, after all. I turned the corner of the corridor to where the bay was…

  And threw myself back, barely missing impalement on a Ring Jumper’s spiked armor. The man and his team walked past me as if I weren’t even there. Arrogant bastards. In all my time in the Corps, I think I have only met one likeable man from that space-born branch of Castigars. Their armor is hardened to the rigors of space, so it is appropriately bigger than anyone else’s except perhaps the first specials squad’s. It is covered in straight spikes they use to attach themselves to floating rocks, and the forward facing barbs on their gauntlets are attached at the base by a cord, that can rocket away to facilitate their movement through the rings of their Saturn home or a battlefield. The only real problem with the men is that they don’t seem to have a concept of where they fit in the tapestry that is the Guardian Corps. Without that concept they have become arrogant and conceited. Far too firm in the belief that they are better than everyone else; though they see far less combat than the average Vindicator. That is why they tend to be ostracized by the rest of the Corps. I nursed a private theory that they neglected the philosophical courses that are an integral part of the Swordmaster program.

  I brushed myself off, though dust was rare on the Forge, and headed into the engineering bay, growling about the Ring Jumpers. The bay Chief, Ruiz, looked up from what he was doing and acknowledged me with a wave. He said something to the man he was with, who sported the red and brown unit patch of the Blood Wolves, and let an assistant take over calibrating the man’s cybernetic leg. Ruiz came over to me.

  “Finally, someone who shows up on time,” the grizzled engineer growled. I couldn’t tell if he was happy or annoyed by my presence. “Damned Ring Jumpers came in twenty minutes late and still have the nerve to mouth off to the guy certifying their armor. They shouldn't have even been assigned to my bay!” he referenced something on his PDA. “Captain Castle, right? Let’s step into my office so we can discuss the particulars of your squad’s new armor. This way.”

  Ruiz was a middle-aged man, seemingly tired and world-weary, but he was very satisfied with his life. I followed him into a corner room where shelves and even the desk were cluttered with gutted, twisted, and burned out pieces of equipment.

  “Alright, first things first, do you have the things I told you to bring?”

  I rummaged through my pockets for a moment before pulling out several very wrinkled pieces of paper. I smoothed them out as best I could and handed them to him. The older man gave me an incredulous look. There may have been a few specks of blood and coffee on some of the papers as well. I just shrugged and smiled. He sighed and looked through the forms.

  “So your new squad is going to be called the Thundermakers? How did you come up with that?”

  “A few bruises and a couple black eyes,” I said. “My boys and I have an affinity for Norse mythology I guess. Of course, a few wanted something with a different theme, but they were outvoted.”

  Ruiz grumbled. “Well we can work with anything. At least your theme is fairly easy.” Indicating another sheet, he continued. “Now this unit crest, it makes sense given the name you want, but are you sure this is exactly what you want? Once I put everything in the system it’ll be damned hard to change anything.”

  I considered the sketch, it was a simple affair. It was made up of a war hammer; business end down, over a field of lightning. “That’s the basic idea we want. If someone can make it look prettier we certainly won’t argue. What’s next?”

  He shuffled through the sheets mumbling to himself. “Gold/blue color scheme, that’s simple enough, eagle crests on the helmets, doable…” He took a breath and looked me in the eye. “These forms all seem to be in order. Who did these sketches?"

  "Squatter, uh... Kyle Moss," I replied. "He's the best artist in the squad. I probably should have had him fiddle with the crest now that I think about it."

  Ruiz grunted. "Now as for the basic weapons systems, thanks to your stalwart defense, we’ve been able to get the research back up here, and produce upgraded plasma cores. We can fit three of them in the standard-size Castigar armor you want. The new cores should increase power by about five times, and they mostly recharge by drawing on ambient energy. So really, anything you want, we can put in. Even plasma weapons.”

  That last part surprised me a little. “I thought plasma weapons couldn’t be miniaturized enough for armor. What changed?”

  “What? Oh, no no no. It was never a matter of miniaturization, but power. With the new plasma cores coming from manufacturing there’s more than enough power to equip your armor with a plasma equivalent to a chain gun or cannon. Perhaps we could even rig you up with guns depending on how we configure the systems. Like I said, if you want a weapon on this armor, we can fit it in.”

  “That is one of the most wonderful things anyone has ever told me,” I replied to him. For the next half hour we talked about the relative strengths and weaknesses of each type of weapon, as well as the style of combat that my squad hoped to employ. We settled on a solid ammunition machine gun in the left forearm, a plasma cannon over the right shoulder, a plasma Gatling over the left, a short vibroblade in either gauntlet, and a plasma knife housed in the underside of the right forearm.

  “Looks like a solid, balanced weapons system you’ve chosen, Captain. One last concern before I let you go. Are you planning on using swords as your primary close combat weapons? I know that’s a popular option, and we can do a lot with them.

  “That’s the plan,” I replied. “Unless you have any better ideas for me.”

  “I might… come back in a week, and I’ll have a presentation for you. It should truly impress. There are some things I’ve been playing with. A week will give me time to work some of the kinks out. I’ll get all this entered so my crew can start working on it. Get your boys to come on in in a week and a half so we can tune the new armor to each man. We already have your old armor ready to break down in one of the alcoves so I know a few of the suits are going to need a good bit of customization.” Ruiz smiled. “Now I’m sure a young pup like you has better things to do than listen to an old man ramble on about work. Get out of here and try not to do anything too stupid in the meantime, alright?”

  “Yes, sir.” I agreed.

  6

  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.”

  U
pon 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 content
edly 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.”