Recruit by Jonathan Brazee (best historical fiction books of all time .txt) 📖

that Ryck’s PICS couldn’t handle, but the servos still whined a bit with each step over the rough ground as they worked to keep Ryck upright and oriented to the enemy.

Ryck didn’t need the speakers to hear the blast just 30 meters to his right.  The sound waves easily penetrated his PICS as Greg Hohn was lifted into the air.  Ryck watched as the big PICS flew up 10 or 12 meters, then crashed back down.  He hesitated a moment, then took a step to check on Greg.

“Back in position, Ryck,” King Tong’s voice came over the direct circuit. 

The squad leader was right.  Greg’s fate was already determined, and he would be fine or not, but Ryck could not leave the assault.  The force had to be focused.  He did glance up at Greg’s icon.  It was still blue, but a light blue instead of the normal dark blue.  He was alive and not in immediate danger, but his PICS was damaged.  His weapons pack was operational, so he could still provide supporting fire if he could not advance.

The PICS were supposed to be able to locate mines, which had to be what hit Greg.  Ryck wondered what happened, then started looking more closely at the ground in front of him. 

They were less than 300 meters from the outer perimeter when all hell broke loose.  There were at least four BAAAs facing them.  They had not been sucked in to confront the frontal assault, which would have been too easy for the Marines.  Going against four BAAAs with thirteen PICS should be a reasonable mission.  That was, of course, unless the rebels threw something else into the mix.

The PICS could cover the 200 meters over broken terrain in about 20 seconds, and the immediate action for this would be a full charge.  He started to lurch into a run as his target comp zeroed in on one of the BAAAs.  He lifted the HGL and put three rounds downrange.  All three hit the gun.  There wasn’t a catastrophic kill, but the gun went silent.

One problem with the combat visors was that there could be info overload.  There were traces of incoming and outgoing fire, there were orders being given.  To Ryck, though, unless he personally received a direct order to do something different, his war narrowed down to who and what was directly in front of him.  Nothing else mattered, and frankly, that was about all he could take in.  He had to trust his fellow Marines to take care of business on either side of him.

He fired at another position, a light automatic weapon of some sort, but nothing that could affect a PICS.  And then he was inside the outer perimeter.  He was within the camp.  To his left was the BAAA he’d taken out, a light plume of smoke rising from it.  There was an arm visible, but most of the gunner’s body was hidden from sight.  His original course of action was to breach the perimeter, then force his way deeper, past the outer belt of defenses.  However, with Greg out, then the 60 meters or so to his right had not been cleared.  Marines were not automatons.  They were trained to think.  Ryck knew he had to clear the area and not leave a potential pocket of the rebels there.  He veered to the right and followed the defensive line until his movement sphere intersected with that of Corporal Nimoto, who’d had the same idea with Greg’s sector uncovered and had been moving to his left.  As each Marine moved, the AI’s determined a “cleared” area and pushed that up to the lieutenant so that he would know what areas had been cleared and what areas still had potential bad guys in them.

Corporal Nimoto pointed a big PICS arm back toward the inner defenses.  Ryck didn’t acknowledge, but his turning and moving out was enough.  Fast dissemination of information was the key to the modern battlefield, so it was ironic that the Marines relied heavily on old fashioned-hand and arm signals.  But with crowded nets and anti-comms being employed against them, the less being passed via electrons the better.

Ryck shifted back to his left to where he could cover better both his original sector as well as Greg’s.  He was a little behind the other Marines, so he hurried to catch up.

The turtle hatch opening up just 20 meters to his front right took him by surprise.  His PICS never picked it up until it opened.  The big BAAA deployed within a second as Ryck tried to bring his HGL to bear.  Before he could fire, flames flew from the barrel and something big slammed into Ryck’s side overpowering the PICS’ servos and sending it crashing to the ground.

Ryck was stunned, certain he was in it deep.  He tried to stand up, but his PICS complained as his visor started flashing different series of numbers before going dark.  He tried to turn his head, and to his surprise, the PICS grudgingly complied.  His comms seemed to be gone, but he could see out the visor.  The BAAA was right in his sight.  It was a type he’d not been briefed on before.  It was obviously slaved, either controlled by an AI or by an operator off-site.  It moved quickly from target to target, firing away.  “Target” seemed impersonal to Ryck.  Those “targets” were his fellow Marines.

An explosion rocked the base of the BAAA.  That had to be the Davis, getting into the fight.  The BAAA immediately spun around and let out a string of fire, faster than Ryck had thought possible.  There was no return fire from the Davis.

Ryck took stock of his situation.  Despite being initially stunned, he didn’t seem hurt.  His PICS, though, was at 10% at best.  His visor occasionally flickered on, but for the most part, he was cut off from the rest of the platoon. 

The BAAA in front of him was close, only 20 meters away, and it was actively engaging the platoon, but Ryck didn’t know what he could do about it.  Robot gun or not, he knew a string of his 20 mike-mike grenades would do it some serious hurt. 

Ryck tried to force his HGL arm forward.  It edged forward before stopping, still a good 40 degrees from being on target.  If his weapon wouldn’t move, he wondered if his body could.  He tried to edge back, hoping to drag his HGL into position.  That didn’t seem to be happening—all he seemed to do was to roll over on his belly.

Stuck there on his side, he was safe for the moment, but his platoon was still in the shit. He was trying to figure out his next course of action when something seemed to burn his ass.  At first, he thought his PICS was on fire, but he couldn’t smell anything.  The pain started getting intense, and it was spreading down his leg. 

Then it hit him.  His coldpack had somehow ruptured! 

He immediately hit the emergency eject for the pack, which had its own self-contained power source.  The PICS made an odd sound of grinding, but nothing happened.  The coldpack was still there, spreading down his leg.  Already, the right cheek of his ass was numb, probably frozen solid.

He tried the eject again.  The same grinding noise sounded, followed by a pop, then silence. 

Ryck knew he had to get away from the coldpack.  It could literally suck the heat right out of him.  If the eject wasn’t working, then there was only one choice.  He had to molt.

A combat molt was a last-ditch action, used when a suit had to be abandoned.  He pulled back his left hand and arm from the PICS sleeve and wormed down his side.  He resisted trying to feel around to his ass and grabbed the molt release instead.  Once outside, he’d have no protection, but it was better than freezing to death.  He gave it a hard pull.  At first, he thought it had failed as well, but the molt was not instantaneous.  A PICS was a pretty impressive machine that was designed to take a beating, so there were a number of steps to disconnect and break the integrity of it to get out.  It normally took about a minute to go through the steps to get out of a suit, but an emergency molt was much, much quicker.  It really only took about five seconds, but to Ryck, it seemed like an eternity. The suit split up the back, and Ryck scrambled out.

Once out, he flopped in back of his suit, expecting to feel rebel rounds hitting him.  To his surprise, he seemed to be being ignored.  Twenty meters from him, the unmanned B-Triple-A kept aiming at targets and firing.  The way the gun seemed to pick targets, spinning from one to the other back and forth rather than from one, then to another close by, would indicate that the guns were being controlled by an AI, or at least a program that prioritized targets.  When humans selected targets, they tended to go from one then to another that was close by the first target.  Humans targeted in patterns while AIs ignored patterns based on location.

Ryck glanced in back of him.  The Davis was some 400 meters back, a column of black smoke rising from it.  He could see other PICS moving back and forth, taking cover when and where they could.  The plan to bull-rush the perimeter was already by the wayside.

Ryck took stock of what he had.  That wasn’t much.  In his longjohns, he had no protection from even thorny bushes, much less weapons.  He had his small Ruger 2mm strapped to his thigh, but that was only good against unarmored personnel.  His rocket launcher and HCL looked intact, but they were on the weapons pack and so, useless.

Or were they?

Ryck started thinking of the hours he’d spent in the battalion armory.  Each weapons pack was powered by the PICS.  However, there was a small battery in the pack that kept the electronics alive and functioning while the pack was not attached to a suit.  For energy weapons, that little battery wouldn’t do much.  But Ryck’s weapons pack was Number 2, and the pack only used power for the electronics, which included the trigger for both the rockets as well as the grenades.  Both weapons were self-powered in flight to the target.

Could he jury-rig the pack to fire?

Ryck scootched forward, his ass and thigh numb, and looked over the pack’s connections.  It should be easy to release the