Copper Rain

Copper Rain Part 8

Chapter Two

The Past

Our basic training had so far been a blast—cool weaponry to play with, violent, bloody combat scenarios to game out, and the constant threat of being asked to do something badass with tech we'd never even heard of before. But the bottom line was this—we still didn't know what the fuck we were supposed to be doing.

The sergeant had dangled the image of the rejuvenated Earth in front of us, told us the rip gate was busted, and then never mentioned it again. The one trainee who'd been dumb enough to ask about it was told to 'shut the fuck up'—so I had. But that didn't stop us recruits from playing the speculation game. The scuttle we arrived at was as varied as it was unlikely.

Ideas ranged from us being trained to covertly break open the high-tech rip gate and force our way through to the new Earthy goodness. Another one had the HeXtract military dusting off some ancient sleeper rigs and us deep-hibernating all the way back to Old Earth. Then there was the suggestion that we had new alien tech that would allow us to completely circumvent the rip gate technology and beam our newly trained asses straight onto to the pristine surface of the mother rock—not that any alien species had yet been dumb enough to expose themselves to humanity's self-destructive tendencies.

But in reality, we didn't know shit. Throughout history, military organizations had never been the caring and sharing type, and now that the armed forces were hardwired into corporate interests, they became even less so. There was never even a murmur from the up aboves about what we were supposed to be doing—so back to training it was. Well kind of, because someone along the way had decided to chuck a few of us throat deep into an actual mission.

The moon we were now on was big, as far as moons go, but it didn't rate in terms of planet size. Even as weighed down as we were with weaponry and equip, there was still a burly bounce to our step. The moon was currently orbiting close to a jolly green gas giant, which made for some spectacular tectonic activity as the planet's enormous gravity tugged at the rock's surface and lava spurts exploded from the crust. This terrain altering activity was also the reason why our bosses had ordered us here.

One of the mid-tier corporate players in this system had done some covert exploring and found that the interior of this moon was loaded with sexy hard-to-find minerals that constantly bubbled to the surface on the back of all this volcanic action. Said minor corporate House had done some preliminary surveys that supported the viability of a major extract operation. Said corporate House had also been underpaying some of its key execs, so, with the help of a little discrete bribery, this information was leaked to HeXtract, and we were mission go.

So here we were, on our first mission. I shouldered on my batt-pack, made sure the jump gun interface was solid and lurched my ass to vertical. The majority of our training had taken place under g-strains that were beyond even the heavy-load planets we grew up on, and our natural cardio-vascular systems and skeletal structures were uber ripped—but it came at a personnel cost. What had started as a group of twenty had winnowed down to a small core of survivors. So for this particular crew there were four from the original grouping plus an outside prick called Titus. Why the fuck he was part of us was beyond me. He said he wasn't even from Heladon and, worst of all, he knew he was smarter than us—which is why the powers-that-be didn't trust him and put me in charge.

"Let's do this," I told them, orienting my eye to the constantly changing skyline.

I got the usual grumbling from everyone except Titus, who snapped me off a sharp salute completely at odds with my standing as a corporal.

"What's the plan, boss?" he asked.

I dropped my visor and set the combat-skel to scan. The aim of our foray was to take out the competition, secure a beachhead and allow our over-armed, more experienced comrades to come barreling in with the heavy equip to finish the job off. So why didn't the big boys just come in and do the job properly in the first place? Simple. Two words that have been etched into the stone of corporate biz-speak since the dawn of commerce—plausible deniability.

If HeXtract came in hot 'n' hard with all guns blazing and then fucked up, the shareholders would get shitty. But if you sent a crew of wet-behind-the-ears recruits to do the job, and they fucked up it was a training exercise gone wrong and you could hit reset for later. Everyone knew the score, of course they did, but no one wanted this crap stinking up the public realm. Besides, it was a standard system-wide biz practice, and all the Houses did it.

With my scanning complete, the visor overlaid a green path suggesting the best route through the myriad of automatic ambushes and dead ends that were securing the entrance of the compound we needed to breach. The visor also flashed up, for my eyes only, an estimated blood cost for this tiptoe through the booby traps. The software estimated our chances of success were a robust seventy-three percent, but the price was three dead—not tremendous odds for a crew of five. And here I was thinking that they wanted us for some off book covert op at some time in the future.

The penetration package had no doubt been designed by the cocksuckers in the Takeover and Tactics Department, who for the most part were the lesser scions of the upper-level Enshri looking to prove how badass they were. Unfortunately for us, none of these bastards had ever shucked on a hotwired T&T combat-skel, yet alone taken part in a live fire acquisition. So to say the software was fucking useless was to vastly oversell the situation.

"How do the numbers check out?" asked Dali.

"Sixty percent."

"Success?"

"Dead."

"Let me guess." Jumped in Ines. "It's telling us to go in through the front door."

"Fucking T&T strategy BS," complained Titus. "Always with the obvious."

"Suggestions?" I asked.

I may have been in charge, but getting more than one brain in on the decision making was always the smart move.

"Definitely not the fucking front door," someone mumbled over comms.

"No shit," I said and switched over to the wireframe view. The outline contours of the crappy landscape and all the traps and dead ends were now lit up in green lines. I punched the send button, and what I saw in my visor was transmitted to the crew. Now they could all take in our tactical scenario—including the blinking death calculation hanging in the upper right hand corner of the screen.

"Crap," uttered Ines. "Three dead really is acceptable losses for those bastards."

"Believe it," answered Titus. "How the fuck do you think I got here?"

"So . . . ?" started Ines.

"I know you guys hate my guts," said Titus, cutting in. "But this is how my crew got smoked. Not here, but it's the same goddamn scenario."

"Not useful people," I said. "Gimme ideas."

There was silence as the five of us looked for approaches that would cause fewer of us to end up in body bags or dumped into lava pools. And I had to say, I was getting nothing. Then Jael piped up with a possibility.

"Loose the heavy gear, and we can bounce in," she said.

"What does that even mean?" asked Titus.

"We drop the batt-packs, reroute shielding into power and jump the fuck over there."

"Over the defenses?" I check.

"I'm guessing nothing flies low around here with all the lava geysering up," she said. "So weapons will be ground focused."

"She's got a point," added Dali, our pilot. "That's why we had to schlep our butts here all the way from the LZ. It was the closest place we could land something that big without getting cooked."

I pulled back from the wireframe view and pinged a sonic pulse through the substrata. The building's foundations were set on the only solid piece of rock in the whole area. The rest of the stuff was floating on a thin crust over the liquid mantle. And if we got our positioning and timing right, we could maybe leap our way through.

Cool. The plan had merits.

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