Two Worlds – Chapter 337

Mark “Coop” Cooper

Location: Alamo, Lone Star System, United Commonwealth of Colonies

“How the fuck did you miss?” Coop wiped his hands across his face to push some of the sand and dirt out of his vision. “Your targeting icon is literally in your brain. All you have to do is point and shoot. Are you trying to get me killed? That has to be it. How else could you suck so much at such a simple task.”

The PFC in the prone firing position on the ground in front of him grumbled defensively as Coop continued to lay into him with increased vigor. It let him blow off some steam that had been building due to his new phase of life.

It had been a year since the clusterfuck that was the Battle of Sol. Even a year later, the numbers kept changing, but the number of dead was concretely in the billions. That was with a B. The ET’s microwave weapons had melted whole metropolises. The PDCs had saved millions, but they weren’t built to hold everyone. Afterall, it was Earth; who would threaten Earth?

The whole human race was learning from their mistakes the hard way. Earth was back down to early twenty-first century levels; barely ten billion. Instead of being the largest population center of the human race, it was now just one of many. The various spacefaring governments were all teary-eyed, made the date of the battle a Commonwealth holiday, and promised to never forget; but people always forget. Coop was positive they were practically giddy on the inside. A large chunk of the welfare Rat population had been sterilized in one fell swoop. The Commonwealth might have lost all the industrial capacity that Sol represented, but it also lost all those extra mouths to feed and bodies to support. The cost benefit was close to even. It was sick and wrong, but true.

The place where the Commonwealth had taken the biggest shot to the nuts was the military. Tens of millions had died between the earthbound forces and the fleets sent to rescue them. It had only been a year, but already tension started to fray. The grand alliance of humanity against the alien menace was yesterday’s news.

The Blockies were balking at continued peace negotiations. The Windsor’s were getting uppity now that they’d recovered from the Commonwealth retaking some worlds, and there was always the ever-looming threat of the ETs. Even worse, because of the tonnage lost at Sol, there were less ships to patrol the commercial space lanes. Piracy was one the rise everywhere, even in the core worlds. But the cherry on top of the cake that was the Commonwealth’s new reality was the Confederation of Corporate Interests. Gold and his flunkies had forced the Commonwealth into negotiations to use their proprietary technologies. The Commonwealth would have just taken them, but Gold had been planning this for a long time. There were self-destructs built into the technologies, and despite the politician’s clamorings to the contrary, Gold built the best stuff.

Even the second-best stuff was built by companies that had defected with Gold. The Commonwealth was forced to rebuild a lot of product lines and supply chains from scratch, but even in trying to do that, they ran into resource problems. The Corpies owned the systems, asteroid belts, rare metal refineries, fabbers, and knowhow to make most of this stuff. With a third of the Commonwealth suddenly unavailable, on top of Sol’s losses, the government was suddenly finding themselves strapped; something the largest polity in human history had never really experienced before. As a result, the tension with the Corpies was building toward a boil, both sides knew it, and it was only a matter of time.

The once mighty Commonwealth was now wounded. They were still the megalodon of the galactic seas, but they were hemorrhaging blood, and that was attracting the other sharks. Bite by bite, they’d take down the greater beast, and it was Coop’s job to make sure he took a chunk out of anyone that tried to snack on them.

That was why he found himself on the hellishly hot, covered in desert, asshole of the universe, planet Alamo. It was named after one of the great last stands in history, but it didn’t give Coop much comfort to know everyone who fought there died.

<That’s a little too ominous for my taste,> he grumbled when he first read up on the history.

Alamo was technically identified as a planet, but it was one of several moons around a very large and resource-rich gas giant. It was on the edge of the mid-worlds and rim, and had previously been pretty unimportant. Now, you’d think it was the second coming of Asgard. Within a year, a fleet shipyard was born around the moon. Cradles capable of handling the production of dozens of battleships at a time sprung up in a spiderweb lattice that you could see from the surface. There were smaller cradles as well, and those were pumping out destroyers and cruisers as fast as humanly possible. Alamo was building their own fleet from the ground up, and they needed infantry to go with that.

As such, a basic training facility was established on the surface. Not in the temperate zone around the equator, where you were lucky if a day passed where you couldn’t cook on egg on the asphalt, but a hundred miles north in a large canyon complex. Building the barracks and training facilities into the rock gave the whole place a bunker-like appearance that was mildly reassuring after Sol nearly got wiped from the universe; but staring at rock and duro-steel for months at a time got old quick.

That was how it worked; one class on and then two weeks off to recover. Each Basic class ran eight weeks, and then the new PVTs moved straight on to their specialty schools. They taught everything from pay clerks to HI on Alamo, but there was one specialty that everyone wanted. An MOS that had been highlighted for its bravery and skill at defeating the giant ETs that burned Earth’s cities. Their exploits were played over and over again in recruiting footage that overloaded the nets as the Commonwealth looked far and wide for recruits. The PM didn’t want to have to initiate a draft, but as economic conditions fell, the military was a solid bet for people out of work and in need of something to believe in.

Names like Valkyrie, Ballboy, BOS, Hammer, Ninja, and the dozen other MOUNTS that had fought with skill and valor in defense of Sol had reached near-legendary status. The few armored cavalry operators who lived went on to do different things; some went on the PR tours, others went back to the front lines to command the next generation of MOUNTS, some went to the specialty school to teach the new pilots, one became a mother, and one more needed an attitude adjustment.

In hindsight, Coop knew he shouldn’t have laid out that Commander, but the jumped-up asshat started spouting shit at the officer’s club; which Coop quickly learned that despite his CW2 rank, was a place he shouldn’t be. The whole incident was a bit of a blur. The officer had said something disreputable about the infantry on the ground during the invasion, and how he could have commanded them to do better.

<Or was it that he wouldn’t have rolled over and died like so many had,> Coop wasn’t sure exactly what the man said. All he remembered was the rage, and then the CMDR was on the floor, his jaw shattered and suffering from a brain bleed that would have killed him had he not gotten to the hospital quickly.

The MPs came and hauled his ass to jail, but that put the Commonwealth in a conundrum. He was a certified, grade A, fucking hero. He had the Cross of Honor to prove it. Eve had one too. Plus, there was another oak leaf cluster on his Purple Heart and citations from everyone from the bunker Commander to the PM herself. On top of that, he was one of the most skilled MOUNT pilots in the entire armed forces. They couldn’t let him go after he nearly killed a mere Commander.

Still, punching out senior officers was frowned upon, so he went for some neural therapy to deal with the mental scars of Sol, and now he was teaching back-to-back MOUNT MOS classes as punishment. MOUNT school was longer than basic for obvious reasons, so it had been months since he’d fucked his fiancé or seen his baby girl.

That’s right . . . fiancé. Coop finally sucked it up and proposed. Him and Eve had seen too much shit to think they didn’t want to be together, and with little Emily in the picture, it seemed right. Of course, they probably weren’t going to actually get married in this century if the Infantry had its way. Eve had been on maternity leave for the last three months, but that was almost up, and then she’d get orders to go do something dangerous. Coop was stuck here for at least another few rotations, and then, god only knew what.

Being heroes had gotten them stationed together, and getting married would keep it that way, but needs of the service would always trump their happiness; and until shit settled down enough for the government to let soldiers go, they were in this for the long haul whether they liked it or not.

Which brought Coop back to his current issue: a PFC that couldn’t shoot despite the fucking dot in his vision showing him exactly where his bullets would go.

“Do it again,” he ordered, and sent the command over his IOR. The range reset and the PFC grabbed a fresh hundred-round magazine to qualify.

Honestly, Coop didn’t know why they bothered. The qualification on the IAR, and its 1mm darts, was pointless. The weapon had become obsolete in the last few years. Graviton cannons, next-gen magnetic accelerators, energy, and plasma tipped projectiles were the future. In Coop’s oh-so humble opinion, anything less than the 3mm plasma-tipped rounds should be scrapped. Why waste resources on something that wasn’t going to kill anything?

<Why send me someone to pilot a multi-million-dollar piece of equipment who can’t shoot for shit?> It was a mystery of the universe that only the personnel officers could bullshit an answer to.

That was something else Coop was getting used to. The MOUNTs he’d fought in on Sol were taken by the R&D folks to study. From what he heard; they didn’t get much out of them. Systems slagged, and hardware became useless when they tried to hack the data core and get Gold’s blueprints, but they had enough to work with to design and implement a program to build their own MOUNTS. The six meter killing machines that Coop had slaughtered BAMFs in were dead and gone. In its place was a four-meter LACS-MOUNT hybrid that bore the MOUNT name in a blasphemous sort of way.

Coop likened it to something he’d been reading about the old World War Two back on Earth. The MOUNT was like the German Tiger tanks; superior in every way. The Commonwealth was taking the same approach as the old USA had with their Sherman tanks. They weren’t as good, but they could make a lot of them.

The new MOUNTS had no stealth mode, which wasn’t too much of a loss in Coop’s opinion, but the polymorphic makeup of the armor’s skin was shit. Where the old MOUNT could really blend into the environment, the new ones were programmable to a solid color that was generally present in the operating environment. On Alamo, that meant the MOUNTs were the color of sand. It worked well in an place with a single color like that, but they weren’t going to be fighting a war in the deserts of Alamo, and Coop knew one of these new kids was going to get overconfident in their ability to blend and get dead for it.

Defensively, the R&D guys had been able to recreate the directional amplifiers for the directional shields. Even a brief time fighting with the old-school bubble shields reminded Coop of why the new tech was better. However, they didn’t quite get it right. The new MOUNTS powerplant wasn’t quite as powerful as what Gold managed, so there was less power overall, and the positioning of the amplifiers left holes in your defense if you knew where to look for them. That meant an after-production configuration change by the armorers at the unit level, and that meant the pilot had to pray his techs got it right. R&D promised they’d fix it on their next model, but each new MOUNT Alamo got was the same old Model 1 (M1) they’d been dealing with for the last six months.

Offensively, instead of the dual, 10mm forearm cannons, the M1 only had a single 6mm forearm cannon on the pilot’s non-dominant arm. The reason for this was; apparently, the small-caliber weapon hadn’t been used much against the ETs. Coop knew that was right, but in a fight against non-aliens, not having a large-capacity, anti-personnel weapon could come back to bite them in the ass. Of course, no one listened to him, or asked for his input in the design.

Thankfully, or the whole MOUNT project would have been a bust in his opinion, the new MOUNT had both a grav-cannon and next-gen accelerator . . . sort of. The grav-cannon was underpowered from what he was used to, and had a longer cycle time; both bad things in combat. The accelerator, instead of being mounted on the shoulder, was mounted along the forearm of the grav-cannon side. The combination made it impossible to use the MOUNT’s dominant hand for any tactile movements, and the shorter railgun feature decreased its power and range. Coop couldn’t reach a starship in orbit, and he might not even hit some hypersonic fighters providing overwatch for the enemy. The accelerator was yet to be proven in battle, which was just great for the first people who had to use it. Standard swatters and mini-missile loadouts completed the offensive capabilities; which, thankfully, were identical to the old MOUNTS. Plus, there was the added protections the fleet was able to come up with so a virus couldn’t knock everyone back into the stone ages.

Cyberwarfare was a thing again, and the MOUNTS were uploaded with the best AIs the Commonwealth was willing to spend money on. Since the infantry bought their shit en-mass from the lowest bidder, they naturally got nothing but the best. All in all, Coop hoped he never had to face a Gold Technologies MOUNT in battle; and he wasn’t even comfortable against a Windsor mech.

<Tough shit,> he knew what his fiancé and commanding officers would say. <Go complete the mission.> Right now, the mission was to get these kids combat ready in only a few months. It didn’t matter that they were only a few years younger than he was. When it came to war, he was an old man at this point.

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