Lost Ship: A Military Sci-Fi Series (Exodus Earth Book 2) by Andrew Beery

Author:Andrew Beery [Beery, Andrew]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Aethon Books
Published: 2021-08-30T16:00:00+00:00

Normally, a four-kilometer run through thick brush would have taken a bit out of the fittest of soldiers. As it was, thanks to my armor I was able to carry both Teddy Cochran and Janice and then essentially just sit back and enjoy the air-conditioned ride. My armor did all the work. The others rode with Matt, and we made excellent time… covering the four klicks in under eight minutes despite the underbrush. Of course, it helped that modern battle armor had dedicated latch points for transporting personnel in BDUs—what the Marines liked to call “squishy body armor.”

The rise itself was not what we had been expecting. We ended up at the base of a small cliff heading straight up for about ten meters. Again, our armor proved invaluable. Ten meters, even carrying two people in light armor, was an easy jump when you have a fusion powerpack strapped to your back.

That didn’t keep my passengers from complaining about the ride sharing service I was providing. Seems things were a bit too bumpy and I shouldn’t expect a tip. To be fair, most of the complaints came from Chief Cochran. I shrugged it off. He was ninety-three years old. You had to make allowances for grumpy nonagenarians.

As soon as we were settled behind some rocks and brush, Matt launched a flight of cloaked drones. He instructed their AIs to surround the opposing force and provide us with a bird’s eye view of the goings on.

“Arty, what can you tell us about these mechs?” I asked over my comms. Arty had stayed with the forward Marines.

Proving yet again he could be in two places at once, a holographic representation of the Jabesh AI materialized next to me in a low crouch that mimicked my own.

“They are not Ancestor technology. In point of fact, they are roughly equivalent if not slightly inferior to your own systems. They do, however appear to be quite old. I estimate somewhere on the order of ten to fifteen thousand years.”

I shook my head in disappointment. I had been hoping for clues as to why I had been infected with a mutagenic virus. This wasn’t a near-tech problem developed by some race at a similar stage of technological advancement… even if it was thousands of years old. Even given the virus might well have been created and deployed by a future version of Arty… it was hard to believe these mechs or their creators were going to have the answers I was after. Ergo my disappointment.

I shook my head again, gentler this time. “So, we’re not looking at a cache of Jabesh artifacts here.”

“Certainly not the mechs,” Arty agreed. “The central building, however, is of completely different construction, orders of magnitude older and, Admiral, it is actively shielded. That fact alone suggests Ancestor-level technology. It is possible the race that deployed the mechs are guarding access to it.”

I zoomed my HUD’s display. The advancing mechs began firing on Chad’s position. The Marines returned fire. Whatever the bad guys were using, it seemed to only be effective at chewing up the ground.

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