Peter Clines - Ex-Heroes

“Arrogant cocksucker, then? You can say it, I won’t tell.” I smirked. “I think all of you need to keep in mind that suit can flip a Humvee with one hand.”

“For real?” I nodded. “It threw a three-ton test weight fifty-five meters in one of the early trials, and we’ve made improvements since then.”

“Shit,” he grinned. “That’s bitchin’.”

“Yeah. Also, never say Danny.”

“No?”

“No. It’s always Danielle. Or Dr. Morris.”

“Danielle?” He struggled with it for a few seconds and then his eyes went wide. “Oh, shit. Sorry, ma’am. Dr. Morris. All of us just heard the name on the radio and—”

“Staff sergeant, sir!?” The airman was snapping his fingers again. Wallen gave me a quick glance and swayed across the deck. They talked for a moment and his shoulders sagged. He gave a sharp nod to the Marines as he made his way back to me. They weren’t buying it either. “What’s going on?”

“Van Nuys has been compromised. One of their fences fell fifteen minutes ago. We’re landing in a hot zone.”

“Can’t we go back to Burbank?” He shook his head and leaned closer. “Burbank’s gone.

Completely overrun. Right now our best bet is to land at Van Nuys and come out fighting.”

“Aren’t there other airports in Long Beach and San Diego?”

“Way too far out of the way.”

“Where’s my team? Are they meeting us there?” He looked me in the eyes. “Your team landed at Burbank forty-five minutes ago.”

“They—”

“We don’t know anything for sure. The tower there’s gone silent. But we have to assume they’re gone.”

“So we’re fighting?” He nodded and set his jaw. “Don’t worry, ma’am. We’re Marines.”

“I’m not worried.” I undid the buckles on my flight harness and stood up. “Let’s get the crates open.” Wallen blinked. “What?”

“We’re going to fight,” I said. “That’s what I’m here to do. I’ll need ten men for some heavy lifting.” He looked at the crates and back at me. His military brain was jamming up in an unexpected, non-combat situation. I’d seen it happen before. I shrugged out of my flak jacket, swayed over to the cases, and yanked on the first ratchet strap. “With my four-person team it takes me ninety minutes to put the suit on. Give me enough men, staff sergeant, especially if they’ve got some basic electronics knowledge, and we can cut that in half. You can circle the airport once and I’ll be ready.” I thumbed the combination locks, released the clasps, and opened the first crate. It was the helmet. The head. Cerberus glared out of the case at me with wide eyes and a fierce mouth. It was what Wallen needed to see. “Little,” he snapped, “Netzley, Carter, Berk. You and six other volunteers get over here and help the lady get ready to kick some ass.” Then he reached past me and pried open the second ratchet. I tried not to think too much about stripping in front of them, but to their credit only two of the male Marines and one woman stared as I dropped my clothes and pulled on the skintight undersuit. Cerberus doesn’t have a spare millimeter for excess clothing. From an ideal, technical point of view, I should be naked, but there are limits to what I’ll do, even during the apocalypse. Just over forty minutes later Wallen connected the last USB cables while Carter and Netzley held the battlesuit’s head over mine. He met my eyes. “Is that everything?” I nodded. “Good work, staff sergeant.”

“Just show me it was worth it.” He nodded to the two Marines and the helmet dropped down over me. I was plunged into claustrophobic darkness and the tight space of the dead suit pressed in. I had twenty-three seconds while they locked the bolts and the mainframe booted. Not all my work was stolen. I’d come up with the two elements that had been hindering everyone else. First was a reactive sensor system with no delay. Most exoskeletons were clumsy because every one of the wearer’s movements had to be fed back to the mainframe, which then made calculations and fed instructions back out to the individual joints and limbs. The whole process could take as much as half a second when someone was making complex movements like, say, walking, and half-seconds start to pile up faster than you’d think they could. It slowed reaction time and forced people to move and act differently wearing the suits, against their reflexes. In all fairness, this idea was somewhat borrowed as well, but I don’t think I’m going to get sued by a brontosaurus. My grad school roommate was a budding paleontologist who once mentioned the bigger dinosaurs had what amounted to a backup brain, a large nerve cluster that served no purpose but to keep their legs coordinated while impulses traveled up and down their spine. I stole the idea and created the idea of subprocessors built into every joint. Piezoelectric sensors fed to the minicomputers, which would relay back to the main processor while triggering the servos. Cut the reaction time to less than one-sixtieth of a second. The power source was original. I’d love to say it’s something amazing that would’ve changed the world and been installed everywhere, but it isn’t. It’s kind of exoskeleton specific. In very, very simple terms, it uses the negative movements of the suit to recharge in the same way hybrid cars use retrograde braking to recharge their batteries. Not a great analogy, but the best I can do that doesn’t take six pages. And it means a forty-minute battery array can last over two hours of full use on one charge. Those two courses in anatomy and biometrics actually paid off in the long run. The battlesuit’s mainframe hummed to life and the darkness vanished. Staff sergeant Jeff Wallen appeared in front of me with his men behind him. Power ran through my limbs and one hundred-thirty-seven tingling sensors lit up across my body. Targeting matrixes. Power levels.

Ammo counters. Integrity seals. I was strong again. The Marines looked even younger and smaller as I gazed down at them. The tallest was three feet beneath me. “How long until we land?”

“Six minutes,” said Wallen. “We’re on final approach. Are you as badass as you look in that thing?” My grim smile was wasted on them. “So much more than you can guess. Ready, staff sergeant?”

“Born ready, ma’am.”

“Not, ma’am,” I said, and my voice growled over the speakers. “From here on in, it’s just Cerberus.” He nodded and gave an evil grin. “Let’s look alive, Marines,”

he bellowed. “We’re on the ground and fighting in five.” They leaped away and hid their nervousness with hollers and ammo checks. The Hercules shook as the landing gear hit the tarmac. Inertia yanked us all in two or three directions. The suit’s gyroscopic systems kicked in, made me a statue. I took a deep breath and rolled my shoulders. Cerberus did the same on a much larger scale and half a dozen armor plates shifted across the suit’s back and shoulders. The ramp dropped with a whine of motors and a hiss of pistons. It wasn’t halfway down before we could see the dead things staggering across the runway toward our plane. I raised my arm and three hundred-ninety-five-thousand dollars worth of targeting software kicked in.

Crosshairs blossomed in my sight, ballistic information scrolled by in my peripheral vision, and the cannons thundered. Four exes exploded into dark

puddles before the ramp hit the tarmac. By technical definition, the Browning M2 was a massive, one hundred-forty-pound semi-automatic rifle, but it was hard to think of it as anything except a cannon. Normally they were mounted on Humvees, helicopters, or aircraft carriers. The Cerberus suit had one of them mounted on each arm, their barrels reaching a good foot past its three-fingered fists.