Mark “Coop” Cooper

Location: North American Eastern Seaboard, Earth, United Commonwealth of Colonies

The simulation ended with a sputter of graphic imagery. So far, it had been their best simulation yet. Coop had destroyed nearly sixty percent of the incoming ships in his AO with practiced combinations of his missiles and magnetic accelerator cannon. When the ships got closer, he was even able to leverage his graviton cannon and swatter to smash in the ships’ hulls, or pepper them in the hopes of hitting something vital, or at least killing some people inside.

Once the ships made it past him, and got on the ground to unload their troops and create a beachhead, Coop was ordered to attack and thin their ranks. He’d been forced to run nearly fifty kilometers in the MOUNT, something he’d had little practice with, and engage the enemy alone. The programmer behind this simulation was into some stuff Coop just didn’t understand. The consensus seemed to be they were facing aliens, so the troops he encountered weren’t human, in fact, they weren’t even close.

Coop didn’t know who a guy named Lovecraft was, but apparently the creatures that came at him were based off his creation. The things were in battle armor at least as good as an HI LACS, but they had claws they liked to use when they got up close and personal, and their head looked like it had a lot in common with an octopus. If he got face-to-face with them, tentacles would latch onto him and some stinger looking contraption would repeatedly smash into his shield. The only way to dislodge them was to kill it.

During the melee, which wasn’t an enjoyable experience, he learned the mag-accelerator was more of a hinderance and needed to be stowed and locked away to fight efficiently. The graviton cannon was a life saver, and could blast back the enemy to gain a moment to breathe or set up attacks. Most of all, he got in a lot of practice with the sword-shield combo. He’d made some notes of how to reconfigure the shield when he dropped out of VR and into reality again. Unfortunately, he’d been dropped out without completing his virtual mission, which was never a good sign.

“Incoming fragmentation order,” his Battle AI chimed in as his surrounding solidified back into an area he was very familiar with. Only this time there was a buzz of activity. The soldiers that were usually sitting around on their asses playing hurry up and wait were on the move.

“Squadron check in,” came LT Hillview’s voice over the coms.

“This is Coop, I’m all green, ready to kill some ETs,” he sent back as he double checked the cable attached to his armor. He’d avoided tripping over it in subsequent VR settings.

“Say again?” the LT replied.

“Coop is good to go,” Coop sent back.

“I don’t know a Coop,” the LT’s grin was audible.

Coop gave a sigh and would have pinched his nose in frustration if he wasn’t currently curled in a ball within his MOUNT. “Ballboy is all green and good to go,” he used his callsign.

“Roger that, Ballboy, I read you five by five. SITREPs every ten minutes unless engaged. Hammer out.”

Coop had no idea how the LT got the callsign Hammer, but it was probably had something to do with getting her bronze star. Not everyone got their callsign right away in HI. Sometimes they got it after going through some shit. On the other hand, Camilla’s made a lot of sense. “Bos is all green,” she chimed in.

When Coop first heard it, he thought it was Boss with two S’s, but that was wrong. It was B-O-S, which was actually an acronym for buns of steel. Logically, Coop’s first question was who had fucked her up the ass during HI training, but that only got him a slap in the face. He was still convinced someone had done something to the loud-mouth woman’s ass to get her that callsign, but he hadn’t gotten the full story. Lastly, Mac’s callsign was Ninja.

Coop guessed. That was Third Squadron of the First Battalion, First ACR: Hammer, Ballboy, Bos, and Ninja reporting for duty.

With the check in complete, data started to scroll across his vision. It was a standard five paragraph operations order for the defense of Earth. They’d gone through this multiple times, so Coop filtered for new information. That condensed the pages of texts to the need-to-know bits. He skimmed those quickly to get an update on the situation and any changes to his mission.

he scoffed when he read that the combined human fleet protecting the planet had been outmaneuvered and was in the process of getting pounded into scrap metal. On the bright side, it appeared the fleet of refugees fleeing the planet seemed to be in the clear. A Gold Technologies carrier group was now listed under friendly forces, and were holding the back door open for everyone to escape through.

It didn’t matter to Coop. He was stuck on this ball of mud tens of billions called home. His mission remained unchanged. Defend his area of responsibility from enemy incursion, interdict the establishment of a beachhead, blah . . . blah . . . blah. Coop would know in the first few minutes if he was able to accomplish anything, or if this turned into a fighting retreat. The original OPORDR had fallback positions detailed about a hundred kilometers farther inland, and a final defensive line at the PDC bases along the Appalachian Mountains.

Coop pushed those defeatist thoughts aside and focused on the next few minutes. Enemy capitol ships were operating unhindered they were either going to open fire or star landing troop. The history of humanity would remember the next few minutes.

Coop doubted they’d target his little slice of real estate for the initial bombardment. He was on the coast, in the middle of nowhere, with nothing remotely strategic for kilometers. He was the only special asset in the area, and with TACCOM and STRATNET still offline, the communications node behind him was more than useless.

Suddenly, the sky lit up as the show began. “We’ve got high-energy particle beams discharging from orbit,” Coop relayed to the squad of grunts around him; like they couldn’t see the bright flashes of light with their own two eyes.

“Nothing near us,” the SSG squad leader replied. “Must be targeting the PDCs.”

The PDCs at the final defensive line were concealed by the mountains, but the ones in the cities were pretty obvious. Coop just hoped their shielding held up. The systems were old, and he doubted they undergone regular maintenance. Especially the ones in the PHAs.

The minutes passed as light continued to flash across the horizon. One flash even came close enough the Coop’s position to pucker his asshole, but it wasn’t aimed at him, just the closest metropolis. A chime in his ear signaled that ten minutes had passed since speaking with the LT.

“Hammer, this is Ballboy, all clear here. We’ve got energy discharges flying across the sky but nothing targeting us. Green on all ammo, equipment, and zero casualties, over,” he sent.

No reply.

he waited a few minutes before resending the same message.

Still nothing.

“Staff sergeant, check the comms relay. I’m not getting anything from higher.” He rotated to face the detachment leader.

The NCO was way ahead of him. Apparently, the silence on the channel was concerning to him as well. A few more minutes of silence and Coop was starting to feel an uncomfortable itch between his shoulder blades. It was a psychosomatic itch, he knew that form experience, just like the hallow feeling in his stomach. His intuition was screaming at him that something was wrong.

“Sir, they took out a relay somewhere to the north,” the SSG finally replied. “Not sure if it was deliberate or an accident, but we’re only got contact with units within a hundred and twenty five klicks of here.”

That was a stone’s throw on this battlefield, which only ratcheted up his paranoia that they were going to get hit, and soon. “Bos, you there?” he sent to the nearest MOUNT. Camilla was located south of him at about a hundred fifty clicks. Things would be so much better if he could talk to at least one member of his squadron.

“You . . . com . . .n . . . broke . . . boy,” her garbled response came back. “En . . come . . ta . . . teen . . . sec . . .”

“What the fuck?” Coop growled as he tried to clean up the message.

“I am only fifty-seven percent confident in my translation of the broken message, Warrant Officer Cooper,” the Battle AI replied when Coop got fed up and just asked for its best guess. “The message translated, based on previous interactions and syntax analysis of Warrant Officer Wheeler, as ‘You’re coming broken pretty boy. Enemy is coming. Fifteen seconds.’”

Coop didn’t know about the first half, but the second seemed like reliable information. “We’ve got incoming,” he yelled to the grunts, as his MOUNTs sensors scanned the sky. “Fuck it,” he kicked the cable connecting himself to the comms relay. “If anything comes in yell it to me,” he shook out his big metal legs like a runner preparing for a race.

Fifteen seconds turned into roughly thirty before he spotted anything. It came through the clouds in the distance as nothing more than a spec. He focused his optics in on the object and it solidified like it was right in front of him.

It was clearly an escort formation. A giant cone was at the center. His Battle AI identified it was about twenty-five meters long and half that as thick. The energy output the object was putting off was enormous, so whatever it was, Coop was sure it wasn’t good. It made for an inviting first target. The problem was the craft surrounding it.

There were in four in total. The craft to the rear had to be some sort of troop transport. It was fat compared to the other sleeker craft. He pegged them as fighters. They looked deadly, with visible armaments, or at least he thought the stubby extensions were cannons.

Coop weighed his options as the craft moved across the sky. Fortunately, they were moving slowly. Whatever the big cone was, it had a low acceleration, but he still had to make a quick decision. He needed to lock onto the object with his sensors, which would alert the craft to the threat and his location.

he started pumping himself up.

“Get to cover!” he yelled to the grunts as he braced himself and toggled to the cannon.

He’d only get one shot at the big cone. He was sure of that, and then all hell was going to rain down on him.

nerves flared in his gut and he pushed them down. This was the first time he was actually going to shoot at something in anger with his MOUNT. Everything so far had been simulations.

He next-gen magnetic accelerator rotated toward where he was going to take the shot. He didn’t activate the targeting program until the last second.

“Brace recommended,” the Battle AI chimed, and Coop automatically dismissed. He’d gotten that message every time before he fired the accelerator, so it meant nothing.

He took a few deep breaths and tried to loosen up. Coop chided himself. Before accessing the targeting program.

Range, altitude, temperature, barometric pressure, humidity, light, and the curvature of the earth were all taken into consideration in milliseconds. Time to target was identified and the cannon auto-adjusted before asking for final confirmation from him.

He instantly hit the fire command and was nearly jerked off his feet by the recoil of the rifle. “What the fuck!” he yelled as he spun around and cartwheeled his arms to retain his balance. His servos whined as they tried to help, and he thankfully caught himself before he ate it.

“Brace was recommended,” the AI replied calmly.

“What was that? Why didn’t we have that in the simulations?”

“Recoil was limited to thirty percent for practical purposes,” he was starting to get annoyed at how matter-of-fact the AI was being.

“I think I need to know how this fucking suit shoots. That’s practical!” he leveraged himself back to his feet and dismissed the AI with a mental wave of his hand.

he brushed the dirt off his metal hands and got his head back in the game. He hadn’t seen the impact because he was too busy trying to stay on his feet, so when he got the enemy craft back in his sights, he was happy to see the cone tipping precipitously to the side with flames shooting out of it and debris raining down. The troop transport was trying to get under it and prop it up. The shield around the craft was sparking with the effort. Two of the fighters were putting themselves between the cone and Coop, while the third angled toward him and accelerated.

“Incoming,” he yelled to the grunts as he fired off three micromissiles at the incoming craft.

The kilometers between them were ticking down as the missiles shot toward his target when abruptly MALCON WARNING flashed across his vision.

“Hostile software is attempting to corrupt my programming,” the AI squawked in the first display of emotion Coop had heard.

“Shut down all external sensors and data links!” Coop ordered. If his MOUNT ended up like TACCOM and STRATNET, he was as good as dead.

“Executing. Establishing additional firewalls and launching counterattack.”

Coop let the AI fight the digital battle as he focused on the physical one. With his external sensors offline, he lost his datalink to the missiles. They continued toward their predetermined target, but without the link for him to help guide them, the enemy EW easily defeated them…and then some.

“Fuck, they’re coming around,” he cursed as he maneuvered himself between the new threat and the grunts taking cover near the bunker.

The swatter swung into position, but didn’t track the incoming missiles like it should. Coop was forced to take manual control of the missile-defense gun. He fired a seamless stream of rounds to create a wall of steel between him and the missiles. Thankfully, all three were hit and exploded hundreds of meters out. Unfortunately, he probably used five times the ammunition the AI would have with the external sensors intact.

he pushed the issue aside and scanned for the enemy fighter.

He caught it high in the sky and a few kilometers out. It was clearly waiting to see if his own missiles did the job for it. Now that it saw they’d failed, it banked to reengage.

“MALCON intrusion prevented,” the AI declared with obvious relief. “The following systems are offline,” a mercifully short lift of icons scrolled down, but the real kick in the balls was that all the micromissile’s software was slagged. More than that, if he messed with them, their new program was to detonate. They were only good as old-fashioned paperweights now; very expensive, exploding paperweights.

“Ok,” Coop had to think fast. “What is the minimum range the swatters needed to take out incoming munitions.”

“Against current levels of Commonwealth missiles technology, a minimum engagement range of one hundred meters is recommended,” the AI promptly answered.

“If we turned the external sensors back on, but limited them to passive scanning in a hundred-meter bubble, would the enemy be able to launch another cyber-attack?” that was the million-dollar question.

“The enemy would need to get its cyber warfare-capable units within one hundred meters to effect an attack. So far, my scan of our infected software indicates that the fighters launched the previous attack, and were able to infiltrate the MOUNT through our missile’s datalinks. As long as the fighter remained out of range, we should be able to maintain a small bubble of sensors coverage.”

“Do it.” Coop watched as systems started to come back online with much less data, but no MALCON warnings.

he thanked every deity he could think of, and kept his eyes on the fighter, which took that moment to launch a missile at him.

No alerts screamed at him as the missile rocketed toward him. However, thanks to his visual confirmation, the AI was able to get the swatter in the right location before the missiles reached his engagement envelope. When it hit the hundred-meter bubble, his MOUNT shrieked alarms at him and the swatter opened fire.

The only problem was that a blue field flared up around the missiles when the swatter rounds hit it.

Coop had time to think.

Thankfully, training kicked it as well. He pulled the shield from where it was strapped to the MOUNT, activated it, and maneuvered it into the missile’s path just before he was engulfed by a living inferno.