The Golden Horde (The Revelations Cycle Book 4) Read online

  He separated an end of the line and handed it to VVR. “When I tell you, boost away from us,” Walker said. VVR tied a knot in the end to keep it from sliding and grabbed on with both hands. Walker tied the other end to his left gauntlet.

  “Disconnect VVR,” Walker transmitted. A check of the monitor—shit; they were out of time. “Boost!” he ordered. “Boost now!”

  VVR hit his jumpjets and rocketed away from the group. Walker had timed it a little wrong; VVR hit the end of the line and rebounded back toward the group. Before he could travel far, though, they reached the ship, and VVR went past on one side while the rest of the group missed on the other.

  The bigger group had more momentum, though, and the line went taut and began pulling VVR across the skin of the ship. Backward and upside down, he scrambled for a handhold, anything to break his fall along the hull. He finally hit an antenna, and even though it pulled out of his grasp, he was able to get his boots in front of him. He activated the magnetic locks, and the suit slammed to a stop, wrenching both his knees.

  As their travel ceased, Walker took a breath he hadn’t realized he’d been holding. The group rebounded toward the ship, and he pulled himself up the line the rest of the way so the other suits could get locked to the ship.

  As the troopers readied their weapons, the ship disappeared, and the lights came on; the simulation ended.

  “What the hell?” Walker asked, the adrenaline in his body screaming for an outlet. “I was all set to kick some robot ass.” He tried to control his breathing, but didn’t disconnect the simulator leads. He wanted back into the sim to finish them off. Motion to the side caught his eye; VVR and Loftis were at the stations to his right. He looked left and found Private Allen. “When did you guys get here?”

  “We got a call when you decided to do the Advanced Squad Leader qual,” Allen said. “We happened to be the closest off-duty folks.”

  “We like to do the Advanced qual with real people,” Mun said from behind the control console. “It’s more of an authentic leadership simulation that way. Also, it has to be monitored by one of the senior staff, so I got called back.”

  “Well, it’s authentic aside from the crying part,” Allen added. “I don’t break down in combat; I was just acting there.”

  “So why did we stop?” Walker asked. “We finally made it to the enemy ship.”

  “Well, see, that’s the problem,” Mun replied. “No one’s ever made it to the enemy ship. In fact, I think it’s only the second time—”

  “Third,” the console operator interrupted.

  “—third time anyone’s even tried to fly the dropships out of the ship, and the other two times they crashed.”

  “So?” Walker asked.

  “So, the enemy ship isn’t programmed into the simulation,” the console operator replied. “There aren’t any forces there to defend it.” He sighed. “You won.”

  CASPer Training Building, Golden Horde HQ, Uzbekistan, Earth

  Mun established an aetherlink to Sansar. “Hey, boss, I’m down at the simulator building, and I’m happy to tell you I think the new squad leader is going to do just fine.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah,” Mun said. “He just beat ‘Defense of Pegasus.’”

  “He beat it? You can’t beat it.”

  “Well, he did. By the way, did you know he could fly a dropship?”

  “No, I didn’t. That’s not in his records.”

  “It should be; he can. He was rusty at the start but pulled it off.”

  “Interesting…” Sansar replied. “Run him on ‘Black Death.’”

  “He’s already been here a long time,” Mun noted. “He’s already completed the Basic, Intermediate, and now the Advanced Squad Leader quals today. He may not have a lot left.”

  “That’s fine. I’m curious to see what he’ll do with it.”

  CASPer Training Building, Golden Horde HQ, Uzbekistan, Earth

  “Well, that’s something we haven’t seen before,” Mun said.

  “What do you mean?” Walker asked, finally starting to unclip the leads from his body.

  “The scenario was designed to be a no-win situation so we could evaluate how new squad leaders handle stress in the face of extreme adversity.”

  No wonder the tech had looked so excited, Walker thought—he wasn’t supposed to win.

  “Most people just hunker down and try to kill as many robots as they can,” Mun continued. She turned to the tech. “Who’s got the current record?”

  “Sergeant Morgan,” the tech replied. He looked at a slate on the console. “He destroyed almost 3,000 of the robots before he ran out of ammo, explosives, and booby traps. 2,967 to be exact.”

  “Some people try manning up the dropships or the APCs, but the program generates 1.5 robots for every one killed, so eventually you’re overwhelmed. Other people have also tried hiding out to re-engage later, but there are thermal sensors in the robots; eventually, they will find you…or they blow up the ship, and you lose. We’ve even had a couple people surrender to the robots, despite the psych tests everyone has to take prior to being hired.”

  “Really?” Walker asked. “They surrendered? What happened to them?”

  “Their contracts were terminated.”

  Walker nodded. He would have done the same thing. He noticed Mun was looking at him, her lips pursed, and eyes narrowed. “What?” he asked. “What did I do?”

  “You’re the first person to ever beat ‘Pegasus,’” Mun replied. “You have a different way of approaching a problem and creative problem solving. The colonel and I are curious what you’d do with ‘Black Death.’”

  “He asked about it when he came in,” the tech interjected.

  Mun nodded. “I think we should give him a shot at it.”

  “You mean tomorrow, right, First Sergeant?” the tech asked looking at his watch again. “We’re already running over….”

  “It’s the end of the day, so no one is up after him,” Mun said. “You would like to stay and see how he does, wouldn’t you?”

  Although Mun phrased it as a question, Walker knew it wasn’t. He was going to get ‘Black Death’ whether he wanted it or not. After the last sim, he was pretty beat now that the adrenaline rush was gone, but it was more mental than physical. Even though it had seemed like he was in the suit, he really hadn’t been.

  “Apparently, I wouldn’t miss it for the world…” the tech muttered.

  “That’s the spirit!” Mun exclaimed. “Load it up.”

  “Do I get any sort of mission brief for this one?” Walker asked.

  “Yeah,” the tech replied. “The Tortantulas have just landed 10 miles from here. The mission’s simple—all you have to do is hold them off while the civilians flee.”

  “How many CASPers do I have?”

  “You have a whole battalion,” Mun said. “All you have to do is follow orders and protect your zone.”

  “Seems easy enough,” Walker said with a shrug. “We’ve got plenty of suits; it shouldn’t be a problem. How many spiders are we talking about?”

  “How many?” the tech asked while he continued pressing buttons. “Lots.” He pressed a final button. “Here you go.”

  The light flashed and Walker was on a small hill. He gave his surroundings a passing glance; it was dark on the horizon and looked like a storm was brewing. His eyes scanned his loadout—there were more weapons attached to his suit than he had ever seen mounted before. A laser was fully charged and ready to go on his left arm, a medium MAC waited on the right, and he had a pod of rockets on both shoulders! Not only that, but he had an entire belt-full of K-bombs. His mobility would be greatly reduced, but he was death personified. What mission could possibly require so much ordnance?

  Walker’s squad anchored the right side of a line of CASPers that extended across a river valley between two cliffs. Two companies—an entire battalion—of troops waited, all of them as heavily armed as he was. The vista looked like Earth, or a very E
arth-like planet…did someone forget to tell him World War III had started?

  Movement caught his eye as the cloud on the horizon shifted. All of his troopers seemed ready for whatever it was they were waiting for; no one said a word over the comms system, and their systems were all in the green. With nothing else to do to take his mind off waiting, he zoomed in on the cloud to pass the time.

  It wasn’t a cloud; it was a solid mass of Tortantulas.

  The tech had been wrong. “Lots” of Tortantulas was an understatement. There were more Tortantulas than he had seen in his whole life as a mercenary. The mass of spiders ran from cliff to cliff, with barely any space between individual entities. The depth of the formation was truly horrifying; the lines of aliens numbered in the tens—no, the hundreds—extending as far as he could see. In a flash, he understood the reason for the weapons he carried…and he knew instinctively they wouldn’t be enough.

  The only thing they could do to survive this massacre waiting to happen was to run. Right. Now. His stomach dropped as the mass moved forward as a coherent group. The Tortantulas never did that. Oh fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck! He was going to die. He consoled himself with the fact it was a sim, and he wouldn’t really die, but this was well and truly going to truly suck.

  Aside from the training aspects of getting to fire off an inordinate amount of ordnance, he didn’t understand the value of the scenario.

  Maybe it was an exercise to see if he knew when to say, “Enough.” If so, he would have fled from a smaller force than the tidal wave of spiders sweeping in toward his position. A lot smaller.

  “Hey, First Sergeant,” he called. “Walker here. This may be obvious, but you do see how many spiders are advancing on us, right? I…um…can’t be sure, but I don’t think we have enough ammo to stop them.”

  “No, we don’t,” Mun replied. “We don’t have to stop them, though; we just need to slow them down so the civilians behind us can escape.”

  Walker widened his viewer to 360 degrees. Sure enough, there were civilians emerging from a tunnel behind him who were running toward some shuttles waiting a half mile away. Walker noticed the First Sergeant hadn’t said what the plan was for after the civvies escaped, but he figured his death would figure prominently in it, along with the deaths of the rest of the battalion.

  Yours is not to reason why, he told himself as he flipped off the safeties on his weapons…

  …Two minutes later, he was dead, along with everyone else in the battalion. Two troopers next to each other had been killed, and before the ones on either side could close the gap, a group of Tortantulas had skittered through and galloped off toward the shuttles. Some of the troops had tried to go after them, the line had disintegrated, and the civilians and troopers had all perished.

  The lights came back on. “Well, that sucked,” Walker noted.

  Mun nodded. “The colonel wants us to be able to win this scenario, but so far we haven’t even been able to come close. In one of the live action events, we were able to get one shuttle load of civilians off the planet, but that’s the best we’ve done.”

  “Live action?”

  “Yes, just like we can transmit directly to your brain here in the simulator, the suits can be made to function as a live-action simulator. Even though the simulator is good, it doesn’t perfectly match being in the suit…the visceral feel of a MAC firing, the smell of a rocket barrage going downrange, or even just getting the feel of your jumpjets firing. We’ve run this scenario in a valley not far from here six or seven times. No one has done any better in the simulator, and that’s been run a whole lot more.”

  “But there are more variables here,” Walker said. “As good a simulation as it is, the computer can’t replicate what people think and always know how they’re going to react.”

  “No, it can’t,” Mun replied, “but it’s pretty close to authentic battlefield conditions.”

  “So, why do we need to be able to beat this scenario?”

  “I don’t know,” Mun said. “All I know is it’s important.”

  “Well, I’ll give it some thought then,” Walker said. “Maybe I can come up with something.”

  * * * * *

  Chapter 9

  20 Miles East of Tashkent, Uzbekistan, Earth

  Private Mark DeWayne nudged the snake’s body with the toe of his boot. It didn’t move. “I hate this part,” he muttered. He stepped on the creature’s head, grabbed it by the tail with a gloved hand, and pulled. The body split open, revealing the wires and circuits of a robotic device, not the organs of an actual snake. “Hey, Sergeant, I’ve got another one!” he called to his fire team leader.

  Sergeant Mark Morgan trotted over, and DeWayne held up the “snake” so the sergeant could see the wires hanging from it. “Yeah, no doubt about that one. I think that’s the third one this week, too.” He shook his head. “This shit’s not funny anymore.” He nodded in the direction they’d been heading, parallel to the camp’s fence line. “All right, move out.”

  Computer Operations, Golden Horde HQ, Uzbekistan, Earth

  “This is the third robotic snake we’ve found this week,” Major Good said. “We’ve also found a couple of birds and a rat.”

  “All of them in the EMP field?” Sansar Enkh asked.

  “Yes ma’am,” the intel officer replied. “The birds are new. It looks like they’ve figured out we have some sort of field that’s killing their toys, and they’re trying to fly up over it.”

  “Could they do it?”

  “Yes, ma’am, they could. The field dissipates pretty quickly.”

  “So what you’re telling me is that any bird inside the camp could be a spy.”

  “Yes, ma’am, that’s exactly what I’m telling you.”

  “So where are they coming from?”

  The intel officer shrugged. “I don’t know,” he replied.

  Sansar knew from past association he didn’t like to make guesses that weren’t based on fact. She waited, raising an eyebrow. “How about a guess?”

  “I suspect they’re coming from the starport,” he said finally. “We caught this one on camera right before it got zapped, and we’re estimating it was moving between one and two miles an hour. If it came directly from the starport, it would have taken anywhere between two and four days to get here.”

  “Do we know who’s been in the starport for the last week?”

  “We do.” Good sent out a mental call, and a woman halfway down the closest row got up and joined them, holding a slate.

  “Good afternoon, ma’am,” the soldier said. “I’m Sergeant Medvedev, and I’m on the port operations desk. Over the last five days, there have been five off-world ships at Tashkent Starport plus one Human ship. Three of them, a Zuul destroyer, a Talgud merchant ship, and the Human ship, have since departed. The three remaining are a Zuparti trader, a Cochkala trader, and a Veetanho destroyer.”

  “Do we know anything about any of the off-world ships?” Sansar asked.

  The sergeant scrolled down her slate. “The Zuul ship was here for someone onboard to look at cruiser designs. Their government is interested in having one built for them.”

  “Do you believe that?” Sansar asked.

  Both Major Good and Sergeant Medvedev shook their heads. “We think they were spying, but don’t know who they were spying on. They flew their launches the whole time they were here, but none of them flew over our base. Mostly, they were used to fly people to the United States and back.”

  “Why were they here then?” Sansar asked.

  “They said our starport was cheaper.”

  “Is it?”

  “Yes, ma’am, it is,” the sergeant replied.

  “Okay, so maybe they were spying, but probably not on us.”

  “That’s our assessment,” Major Good replied.

  “Okay, next.”

  “Next is the Talgud merchant, which fit the merchant profile. It offloaded goods as fast it could, took on goods, and left.”

  “Proba
bly not them.”

  “Probably not,” Good agreed.

  “The three that are left,” the sergeant said, looking down at her slate, “are a Zuparti merchant ship, a Cochkala trade ship, and a Veetanho destroyer.”

  “I’m familiar with the Zuparti,” Sansar said. “They look like big weasels. They’re paranoid traders who are always worried someone’s trying to steal their stuff. They hire lots of mercs, including us several times.”

  “That’s them, ma’am,” Medvedev said. “While it’s possible, we don’t believe it’s them.”

  “Which leaves the Cochkala and the Veetanho.”

  “Yes, ma’am.” Medvedev looked at the slate. “The Cochkala ship is a merchant, and they have done some trading here on Earth; however, they’ve been here 10 days already, and haven’t declared their intentions to leave yet.”

  “That’s a long time for a merchant ship to be sitting somewhere not generating income,” Sansar noted.

  “It is,” the sergeant agreed. “Not only that, we know for sure a Cochkala was behind the market manipulations that almost ruined Asbaran Solutions, although we don’t know who it was working for.”

  “What ever happened to the Cochkala?”

  “It looks like they turned him, somehow,” Good replied. “We can’t prove it, but we know they captured him, and after that they became very adept in the stock market. Whenever they bet big, it usually pans out for them. I passed this on to Finance, and I know they’ve made several very profitable deals since then by betting big when Asbaran made a move.”

  “Excellent.” Sansar said. “Well done. Do you think this ship is connected to that? That they’re here to take him out?”

  “We don’t know,” Major Good replied. “We know they’re here for more than trading, but it’s impossible to tell whether that’s espionage on us or for some other reason. We need to break their codes, but still haven’t.”