The expansion box set, p.6
The Expansion Box Set, page 6
part #1 of The Expansion Series
Brandt chalked up the score: suit one, her cynicism nil.
“Two miles,” she told her team. “My pace.” She set off, doing the curious run that took them years to get fully acclimatized to.
They bounded along at almost forty-five miles per hour; each long, lateral leap carried them a normal person’s ten paces, as their servo-driven legs applied superhuman-strength to their limbs. The armor wasn’t capable of moving each leg quickly enough to sprint, but the adaptation of movement was an easy pay-off for the ability to move nearly twice as fast as they could without it, and for far longer than they could sustain with their bodies alone.
That said, simply wearing the armor didn’t make them fit and strong; It required the physical ability of the user. The initial movement to start the servos firing their limbs explosively took effort.
The score was soon at two points in favor of the suits, when they had covered the first mile in three laps of their complex over a minute faster than they had set previously. The new armor was lighter and easier to use, even though it didn’t appear to be much smaller than they had been wearing before. The suits moved faster, reacted quicker and most importantly, had kept them cooler.
Brandt called a stop near the entrance to their facility just before the two-mile mark. She stood still, her chest plate rising and falling in response to her deep breathing.
“Battery check,” she said in between breaths.
“Ninety-nine percent,” Bulldog said crisply. “We certainly have come a long way since those first exoskeleton suits in the twenty-first century.”
“Same,” Zero said.
“Still at one hundred,” Phoenix answered as they turned to look at the last member of the team.
“Ninety… eight…” Tower said, more out of breath than the others. Their mirrored visors took in each other’s faces pointlessly as they only saw their reflections, then Brandt raised her left forearm and tapped at the toughened screen built in to it.
The new tech upgrade made her eyes pop as it interacted with her HUD to project the information ahead of her.
“Whoa,” she said. “Guys, check this out.”
They followed her lead, tapping on their forearm interfaces until the air immediately in front of them erupted in light. The interactive menu was displayed ahead of them in a kind of virtual reality interface. To anyone not wearing a suit with this new tech, it would look as though they were all trying to do some kind of bad Tai Chi routine all at different times, or maybe they were trying to shoo away the world’s slowest wasp, but with the visors activated they could see the options laid out for them.
“Try using the blink feature instead of touching it,” Zero said, his own hands now down by his side as he scrolled through the options using his eyes alone.
“Ha!” Bulldog blurted out, giving a snorting bray of a laugh. “Warning: Do not attempt to use this interface when in combat. Failure to pay full attention to your environment could result in serious injury or death. The user assumes full responsibility and risk when using this interface option.”
“The hell are you reading, Bulldog?” Zero asked him, his hands still down by his sides and his head unnaturally still as though he had been hypnotized.
“The instruction manual, obviously,” Bulldog answered. “Seems as though the upgrades are still subject to health and safety regulations.”
“Like those old urban legends about people driving fossil fuel vehicles off cliffs because they were following a nav program?” Phoenix asked.
“Something like that,” Brandt told her, taking back control of the group. “Tower, what are the usual battery depletions for a two-mile run on the old suits?”
“Anything up to sixteen percent, but in all likelihood higher in these temperatures. Anyone else still perfectly cool?”
They all were, which was a major bonus for them and allowed for daytime operations in extreme heat just as much as it allowed them to function in extreme cold. They were moving toward an intuitive and interfaced exoskeleton rather than a conventional suit of body armor. The design was being varied, according to Tower who stayed abreast of all things technical, to allow for more specialized use for EVAs in space and underwater-based operations on Earth. This current incarnation was the standard combat model, and they had to admit it was an unexpected improvement.
“Everyone fully integrated?” Brand asked the team, checking to see if their software had adapted to their individual movement patterns. The team confirmed, and she had reached one hundred percent integration before the end of the short run. “Okay, everyone back inside to the range.”
As they stepped inside the entrance of the facility to ride the elevator down to their subterranean firing range, the comm on Brandt’s forearm chirped and flashed.
She tapped the device, flicking the menu up and trying the blink selection feature to answer the incoming call.
The others watched—their visors had gone back to being transparent—but a privacy feature prevented them from seeing or hearing Brandt’s incoming message.
“Commander, Glo-Con,” the incoming voice from global command network which tasked the CP teams said, “confirm you are on private comm?”
Brandt’s eyes flickered to the padlock icon on the top bar of the comm window.
“Confirmed,” she said aloud, not explaining that the rest of her team could hear her responses. “Send message.”
“CP Lambda One is en-route to your location. You will assume command of both teams and stand by for mission brief. Out.”
Brandt killed the display with a wave of her hand and said nothing.
“Well, Commander?” Bulldog asked politely.
“Yeah, the suspense is killing us, Grip,” Tower added.
“Brush your teeth and get out the good china, kids,” she told them. “We got guests comin’ over.”
7
Sapporo Mountains, Japan
“Try again,” Doctor Hamada said.
His patient flexed the fingers of his hands, still marveling at the sensation he felt in them after so many years of phantom pain from his missing limbs. He shuffled both feet, again trying to get accustomed to the neural feedback of the tiny rise and fall in pressure. He had grown used to the numbness of prosthetic hands and feet.
“Go.”
The subject snatched the gun off his left thigh with his dominant hand and raised it as his right hand cupped the base of the pistol grip to offer better stability. His left index finger squeezed off rounds at a rate not humanly possible for them to be properly aimed, but the subsonic 6mm rounds each found their targets with accuracy that indicated years of training.
He had spent years training, but those years had been interspersed with long periods of recovery and therapy after the latest round of surgeries to further enhance his body and integrate new technology.
At first, when he had been brought around from the yearlong coma he had been kept in, the medical team had treated him very carefully. The only people he spoke to were psychologists with experience in limb loss, sight loss, survivor’s guilt, post-traumatic stress and a whole raft of other issues applicable to him. He was unique. Not unique in that he was the only one to have survived those kinds of injuries and the endless operations to repair and rebuild him, but unique in that he was so focused on recovering and improving himself.
He was driving the project as much as Hamada or any of the bioengineering team were.
Once awake, he had spent the first five months blind, which had been a tactical move on Hamada’s part on advice from the psych experts. If he couldn’t see the damage but was allowed the time to come to terms with their description, then the shock wouldn’t be so severe.
In that time he had been fitted with the melded components that allowed the prosthetics to link to him neurologically, and that took longer than the creation of the bespoke limbs themselves.
He wasn’t Jake Santana any more. He couldn’t be, they told him. He had to make a conscious decision to leave that person, that identity, behind and embrace his new life as a pioneer. He had accepted that, believing it with every fiber left of his body, and that was how he had adapted so easily to every change they made to him.
Jake was dead, and he had adopted the name Specter in his place.
The ocular prosthetics had taken almost a year to become fully effective, and the constant adjustments and rejections had caused migraines so severe that he had to be sedated numerous times for the pain to subside. It had been the neuro-interface implants that had posed the biggest challenges. The new software they had been forced to innovate had quickly been adapted for commercial means and the program sold to the UN for considerable profit.
The UN research and development labs based all over the world were lightyears behind the discoveries and innovations that Hyper was making. In the last five years alone almost all of the new tech employed by the UN and combined territories forces off-world were traceable directly to the private company.
That didn’t mean they got all of their new tech, however.
With the four prosthetic limbs fitted and covered with the rubberized matte-black suit Specter wore, only his eyes gave him away as different. They shone a bright green, like the ancient night vision optics, and when he focused you could see the iris spinning like the zoom lens it was.
When the feed from two binocular ultra-high-definition cameras was successfully routed through his repaired ocular nerves to the microprocessor implanted in his brain and was married up to the speed and dexterity of his new limbs, the end result was what they saw on the training range. That processor, one of five embedded in his repaired and much-improved body, learned and adapted with each movement he made. The scope for his abilities had an upper limit, but they had yet to reach it. They had yet to even come within sight of it.
“Very nice,” Hamada said through a grin, “but the smile is a little crooked, don’t you think?”
He turned back and the faintest of whirring noises sounded as Specter’s eyes zoomed in to take a closer look.
“Hmm,” he said, a slightly metallic synthesized edge to his voice after the fiery explosion had scorched his throat.
He lifted the pistol again toward the target and turned to face Hamada. He smiled as he pulled the trigger twice more, lowering the gun to his left thigh where he released the handle for the weapon to lock magnetically against his suit.
Hamada looked back at the target and laughed out loud. The final two shots, so cockily fired with a no-look approach, had evened up the grin on the smiley face of bullet holes drilled into the featureless face of the target.
“Better?” he asked the doctor.
“Yes,” Hamada laughed. “Anyway, Specter, I want you to meet Mister Volkov. He is the man responsible for the new pistol.”
He looked down at the gun on his thigh then back to the man facing him with the short and neatly groomed beard. The gun’s inventor was younger than expected, so Specter thought he must be either extremely talented or well connected.
He had met a lot of important people in recent years—or at least had been paraded for their interest, amusement or investment—but never anyone from, or at least currently in, government service in any of the four territories.
Specter held out his right hand for Volkov to shake, the lightning-fast speed of his movement catching the man off-guard. He was unaccustomed to being around such a surgically enhanced human being.
“A pleasure to finally make your acquaintance,” Volkov said in a businesslike tone. He produced an older model of gun, UN’s standard issue universal service pistol, and held it in a way that instantly made Specter recognize that he knew how it worked down to the last micron. The way he held it showed he wanted people to know he wasn’t going to fire it. “Now, if I may offer demonstration?”
He turned his head to the side and two assistants scurried over to the destroyed target.
“If I may?” Volkov said, gesturing at the pistol magnetically glued to the thigh of the thick, black suit.
Specter grasped the grip, feeling the weapon come free the moment he held it, and handed it over with the barrel pointing away from them both.
“Thank you. Now observe how there appears to be two magazine wells? One in the grip of the pistol itself and the other here, ahead of the trigger?” Specter had noticed, but he had been told to test fire the weapon and wait for the explanation. “And of course, you are familiar with this?” he asked, offering the USP to him.
Specter took it, and was accosted by the sudden flash of memory with yellow teeth bared in his face as he pulled the trigger over and over with no effect. He brushed the flashback away as quickly as it had come so that nobody noticed his momentary lapse.
“Of course I do,” he said as he smiled. “I could field-strip this in my sleep.”
“I’m sure you could,” Volkov said with a matching smile that seemed anxious. “Now if you would oblige me with three shots into the target once more? Center mass, if you please.”
Specter looked back to see that the assistants had put a mannequin against the firing wall and dressed it in the heavy chest plate of the polymer armor of his previous life. He raised the USP, fighting back the threat of more flashbacks by pulling the trigger, and squeezed off three bullets into the dummy. This time he was sure to group together in a neat triangle instead of putting the second two in the same spot as the first.
“Excellent,” Volkov said as he carefully produced a small device from his pocket, which he clicked into the port under the barrel of the new weapon. “Again, with this one now if you please.”
Specter swapped weapons with him and adjusted his grip to counter the slight weight increase of the gun. He had seen enough weapons demonstrations in his life to know when he had just been handed the magnum. He set his stance wider and gripped the weapon that little bit tighter without crushing the thing in his artificially strong hands. He fired three times adopting the same triangular shot pattern.
No clanging noises came back. No ping and whine of a ricochet filled the air, instead he simply heard a crackle and fizz as the bullets left the gun before the heavy chink-chink-chink of the same small caliber bullets drilling neat holes straight through the armor.
Silence filled the shooting gallery as Specter turned the gun in his hand and inspected it again.
“How?” he asked simply.
“The weapon you are holding is not just an upgraded version of the standard pistol used all over the world but is a totally new design.” Volkov explained. “However, the addition of this part charges the rounds fired with the singularity energy.”
“You managed to create a singularity that small?” Hamada cut in excitedly.
“No, we have harnessed the energy from a singularity to use, or at least someone has,” Volkov answered. “I merely specified what housing I needed it in and they did the rest. My design uses that energy to supercharge the bullets, if you understand?”
They did. Specter turned the small, lightweight and well-balanced gun over and over in his hands marveling at the destructive power contained in something so small.
“What about vehicle and ship armor?” he asked.
In response, Volkov nodded to his assistants again, who shuffled toward the end of the range carrying a large square of polymer alloy blast plating that seemed to be taken from one of the UN reinforced troop transports.
“It is belly plate,” Volkov said with a wry smile, “before you ask.” They both knew the belly was where the armor was thickest. “Group your shots, if you please.”
Specter smiled, raised the gun and drilled a dozen shots into a single spot where the original bullet hole widened with each successive projectile going into the same place. He stopped, lowering the gun and zooming in with his green eyes to see the damage.
“It’s penetrated,” he said, “just not all the way through.”
“With armor this thick there are two ways to approach: more bullets or bigger bullets.”
“What have you got?”
“Both,” Volkov smiled as wolfishly as his name suggested, snapping his fingers for two small crates to be carried forward.
“So what is to stop our own troops being vulnerable to this new technology?” a technician asked after the impressive display had ended. He earned himself an annoyed look from his superiors at addressing their guest directly. That look lingered until Specter agreed that it was a good question.
“Simply that we are the only ones to possess it,” Volkov answered, “and we have another ace up our sleeve, as you say.”
“Which is?”
“Shielding.”
Specter frowned. “But the smallest we’ve been able to create a shield is still big enough to need an entire shuttle to carry it. Most vehicles still rely on heavy plate armor because they can’t be shielded unless by an emitter array. Now you’re going to tell me you’ve cracked that too?”
“Again, not us,” Volkov said, “but another research laboratory. You know how the company likes to keep its assets separated. This is not my gift to give, but I hope you enjoy the new prototypes.”
Volkov and his entourage left, no doubt being flown down to Tokyo to be shown a good time by the corporate fixers whose only job was to keep the talent happy and faithful. Specter stayed on the range level alone for a while, no longer requiring a chaperone everywhere he went, if he didn’t leave the complex. If the new pistol was an angular and sleek thing of beauty, then the sub-machine gun and the battle rifle he had been left with were in a new league entirely.
