Hostile Genus: An Epic Military Sci-Fi Series (Invasive Species Book 2) Ben Stevens (best contemporary novels txt) 📖

Ugly or not, Jon surmised that the wall did its job well enough, keeping unwanted people and things out. The sheer height and thickness alone convinced him that anything short of a Mech would have an impossible time breaching it.

Unlike the wall, the rest of the city’s construction was new. It was as if the builders had swept up the old city to build the wall and started fresh. The architecture was unlike anything Jon had seen before; the strong majority of the buildings constructed from some red ocher-stained earthen brick, with flat roofs and square windows and doors. Some were one story tall, with others towering several stories. Ratt had told him that it was called adobe and had suggested, based on its presence as well as the climate and vegetation—what little of it there was—that they had come out of the Drop either slightly west, in flying ship relative terms, or south of where they had crossed over the Southern Sea.

Shortly after the run-in with the savages, they’d watched the sun rise and set and cross-referenced its motions with the pillar of gold light. They had concluded that Xibalba must be southeast of their current location, and Ratt had ventured to guess that there would be no sea standing between them, assuming the shapes of the continents hadn’t changed too much from the Storm. He had studied pre-Storm maps of Earth-That-Was, and based on their original course as well as the physical appearance of the child Wyntr, had expected their destination to be either in Central or South America, but he also knew that during the Storm, the seas had raged like never before, altering the coastlines forever. Stories abounded in the days of his parents that had told of entire cities like Houston-That-Was being swallowed by the drink. A place once called Panama, might be an issue, if Xibalba were that far south.

For two days and nights, they had followed the direction of the pillar into the rising hills, every step haunted by the worry that they would encounter more of the savages. However, on the morn of the third day, unmolested, they had crested the summit of a small mountain and discovered the city below.

From their vantage point, high up in the hills that embraced and sheltered the valley and city below, Jon, Lucy, and Carbine studied the city. They had diligently performed their duty in shifts, day and night, for the last three days. After trekking through the desert, they welcomed the respite, having picked out a good location with plenty of rocky cover and a few paddle cacti, and set up their stakeout. But now their supplies were running low. Food and water were in short supply. Jon, of course, offered to refrain from eating anything again, but Maya insisted that he keep his body strong, despite his lack of hunger, if only to ward off the growing fire of death that was burning in his blood.

They were running out of time, but all were in agreement that they needed to ascertain the disposition of the city before simply strolling up to its gates. The first night, Carbine had seen what he swore was a glint of glowing red eyes on the face of one of the sentries that patrolled the flat, wide walkways atop the wall. To confirm his suspicions, he’d called Lucy over and asked her to use her robotic eyes to zoom in and switch to thermal vision. Ratt had educated them all as to the ins and outs of the undead during their journey, which was otherwise uneventful. Lucy had confirmed that the sentry was ambient temperature, just like the savages.

The walking dead.

And yet, most of the city was not. An easy nine out of ten of the city’s occupants gave off heat signatures, just like normal walking, talking, living humans. Nor did the sentries behave anything like the animalistic savages they had met earlier. It was a puzzler, and it was the source of their prolonged caution.

Over the last two and a half days, they’d watched and studied, and prepared. Carbine assisted Lucy with a deeper analysis by using optics mounted to his railgun. Using these, he was able to see through solid walls and control how “deep” he went by turning a dial on the side of the makeshift scope.

When they weren’t using the railgun’s scope to make observations, Ratt insisted that he be allowed to modify the weapon so that Carbine might still be able to use it.

“You aren’t going to break it, are you?” Carbine asked, offering the weapon to the whiz-kid, but unable to let go of it, prompting a sort of tug-of-war. “I love this pea-shooter.”

“Don’t be silly. But if I don’t change it a bit, it’ll rip you in two. You aren’t in the Mini-Mech anymore.”

Carbine frowned at that thought. In his final battle with Colonel Taylor, the Mechanized Infantry Sniper Suit, or MISS, had been shredded by Taylor’s Heavy Mech’s guns. Carbine himself had suffered damages from that exchange, damage from which he had nearly bled out, ultimately resulting in his having to receive a prosthetic leg, much like Sgt. Miller’s. Ratt had managed to rebuild the power armor once, but the efforts had proven to be in vain, for the sum of his hard work was now a scattered smear of metal on the desert plain, three days’ march behind them.

“I’m thinking that if I add a spike here,” Ratt gestured to the rifle’s underside, “you can drive the gun into the ground, which will not only serve as a uni-pod, but will also absorb some of the recoil.”

“Please don’t call it a gun…” Carbine muttered, more to himself than to Ratt.

“Then, I will add a hydro-pneumatic recuperator, like Artillery uses. It will further reduce the recoil.”

“A what?” Carbine asked.

“If all else fails, I can machine bore a second barrel in the rear and put a