Ex-Heroes, Peter Clines [reading like a writer txt] 📗

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 and 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 and 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. Twin ammo belts swung back to the file cabinet–sized hopper mounted on the armor’s back. They could fire nonstop for three and a half minutes, with an effective range just shy of two miles.

I stomped down to solid ground flanked on either side by half a dozen Marines. Gunfire echoed across the landing strip and another ten exes fell. They were young and nervous, but they knew how to kill. I heard two screams as the dead fell on them. Having a three-hundred-ton aircraft hit the ground a few feet away hadn’t stunned any of them. They were right on top of us.

I moved out from under