"Damn. Nothing but forests down there," Adam muttered to himself, flying over the green expanse as he and the two escort Spectres headed towards Tokyo, the only break from vegetation being the mountains that bracketed the area.
Every city, town and village in the former Gunma Prefecture was nowhere to be seen. Nature had overtaken every last man made structure, the decayed mounds of brick, cement and steel buried under a thick bed of vegetation. There wasn't anything recognizable compared to his memories. It was a depressing and humbling feeling for him to see all of this.
Adam sighed somberly before focusing his sight on the HUD.
EVANS had drafted a flight path on the display, providing the best estimate for bearings and markers that should have led to his destination. It wasn't his preferred choice, but it wasn't like there was a better option. Not with the thousands of years that had passed since Project Endurance had begun. Most of the satellites would have long since fallen from orbit once their fuel was expended. Anything left up there in higher orbit would be a dead hulk, their systems burned out after a millennia of hard radiation.
With satellite options out of the question, they had to rely on literally millennia old maps and dead reckoning to find their way to the city. Not ideal, but better than flying blind anyway.
"We are approaching maximum communication range with the bunker in five minutes. A subroutine gestalt will take over from here soon," EVANS declared from inside his helmet, the synthetic voice carrying what Adam suspected was a tinge of sadness.
"Would your lesser copy do its job as well as you have, EVANS?" He joked.
"It will not be as capable, but sufficient to provide adequate tactical support for the entire duration of your mission," was the AI's response. "Or as Doctor Okazaki would say: 'babysitting your moronic ass'."
Adam chuckled. The way EVANS delivered unironic curses on the Lancer with his monotonous voice never failed to get a rise out of him. "Hanako asked you to say that to me, didn't she?"
"While you were changing into your BDU back in the bunker, yes."
"Ah, EVANS..." Adam became silent for a moment, his smile slowly changed into a slightly sad one. "You've grown so much, haven't you?"
"It is all thanks to you and the others in the bunker," the AI replied, appreciation clear in its voice.
Adam felt an ache in his chest, knowing that he would be out of contact with the AI for as long as the job would take. Ten years of living in the bunker with EVAN's omnipresence had accustomed him to the idea of the intelligence always being just a single word away. The subroutine intelligence it could spawn just wasn't the same. The limited personality matrices the lesser gestalts had were no replacement for actual sapience. And certainly no substitute at staving off the loneliness and isolation he was certain to face in this godforsaken world for the duration of his mission. But needs must...
"I'll see you again, EVANS. Take care of everyone back there, buddy."
"Understood. I wish you best of luck, Adam. EVANS-Main out."
As soon as it said that, EVANS avatar in the upper right corner of his display winked out, the undulating blue orb replaced by a solid pixel dot ball the color of cerulean. EVANS-Subroutine. It was only a minor change in look, but Adam felt the difference much more keenly. The subroutine did it's job, but as far as a facsimile of personality went, it was hollow and meaningless. Like talking to a picture of someone instead of the real thing.
But on the balance of things, it wasn't as bad as it could be, not like back in the days when the fighting against Legion was at its heaviest. He'd deal with the solitude.
"How far is Tokyo now, EVANS?" Adam asked.
"Approximately 100 kilometers remain." The subroutine answered, toneless and devoid of any expression. "ETA is 1 hour and 12 minutes at current flight speed."
"Alright," he sighed. It was going to take a while for him to reach the city, and not much else he could do in the meantime. Keeping watch might have been prudent, but the Javelin's sensors and threat response systems would ping on anything long before the plain old eyeball did, even one with access to its optical enhancement suites. And what he did have for onboard entertainment were films and music millennia old and watched a dozen times over during the long reawakening.
"EVANS, take over the flight for me, would ya? I'm gonna get some shut-eye for a while. Wake me up if you find something odd in visuals, scans and radar."
"Affirmative."
It was easier said than done though. Autopilot and posture locking or not, the Javelin's flight angle meant he would be largely sleeping on his front. And while the internal lining might have provided padding against concussive forces, it was a suit not a bed and all that implied as far as comfort went. At least the internal environment regulation meant he would be comfortably warm. Closing his eyes, he attempted to fall asleep.
Short of a bird strike, a nigh impossibility anyway with an AI at the helm, he doubted there would be anything to worth waking up for. Not when the entire planet was ruined beyond recognition.
**********
"AHHH!!!"
Adam jerked awake with a shout as the shrill screech of the threat alarm blared in his ears. Combat reflexes honed through a decade of combat sloughed through the initial panic and drowsiness, snapping his mind awake. Just in time to feel his body jolting under the pull of sudden acceleration, his Javelin automatically hurtling to the side with a flare of emergency power. A split second later, his visuals turned red as a massive blast of crimson energy split the sky, radiant heat from the near miss flooding his display with heat spike warnings. Before he could even blink the spots from his eyes, the Javelin moved again, rolling under another attack from across the horizon. Two more shots followed in quick succession, each one aiming for his escorts. Only semi-randomized thruster firing kept the Specters from being atomized, but both were looking worse for it.
"EVANS! Sitrep!" Adams shouted as soon as their flight stabilized on a sharp downward dash to the deck.
"Unknown enemy attack. Incoming directed energy weapons fire from beyond sensor range." The AI explained, the bland statement providing absolutely nothing but the obvious.
Shoving his frustrations to the side he glued his eyes to the horizon. But even the imminent threat of being blasted out of the sky couldn't keep his thoughts from racing at the implication. Weapons like that didn't exist in his time. Someone shooting at him meant someone had to be alive. There had to be other survivors outside of Endurance, thriving even if they could build things like that.
Which they were using to try and kill him. Happy thoughts.
Almost on cue, the threat alarm blared again to EVANS warning.
"Laser emission spike. Evade. Evade."
There was no need for movement. No reaching for control. At the speed of thought, a signal from his implant raced to the Storm Javelin. Maso emitters all over the suit flared with azure light, and the world blinked out of existence. A heartbeat later, and they blinked back, a dozen meters to the left. A beam of high energy death scorching the air where he'd been moments ago.
"Damnit!" He swore, an eye darting to the altimeter. The forest floor was rapidly coming too close for comfort. "How much longer until we're out of their firing angles?"
"We are now in the estimated clear zone," the AI announced, only to immediately speak again when blips appeared on his tac display, "Alert. New contacts inbound."
They were barely visible dots in the horizon, but a moments thought had the suit's long range camera focus on them, magnifying the image into clear detail.
They were... not what he was expecting. Instead of sleek interceptor craft or bulkier gunships, the contacts were little more than circular metal pillboxes, the contraptions held aloft by jet engines of some kidn bolted onto the bottom. Hunchbacked mannequin robots sat atop the devices. A patina of rust on the entire ensemble completed the ramshackle look, but there was nothing slipshod about the mounted heavy weapon in their hands, or the twin red circles that served as eyes locking onto his position.
"What the hell?" Adam couldn't hide the incredulity in his voice at the ramshackle appearance. "What even is that?"
"Unknown. There are no records of UNC or any human military organization fielding designs similar to the ones before us." EVANS stated. "It is likely they are a post-Legion development by a surviving faction."
"Ugh, nevermind. We can look for answers after they're splashed. Give me tactical."
Numbers blinked into his viewscreen, the inbound hostiles tagged with immediately relevant numbers. And right now, the most important was the rapidly shrinking distance of 3500 meters. At the rate of closure, it'd be seconds before his weapons were in effective ra-
"Alert. Laser spike."
"Fuck!"
Maso burned through his veins. Space twisted. His senses wrenched as they were spat out of the space between spaces. Only meters away, another lance of crimson energy carved through the sky where he'd been. Smaller than before, but the backwash of heat sent another thermal warning spiking into his HUD. Bathed in a bloody glow of its steaming weapon, his attacker was already lining for another shot even as the other machines brought their weapons to bear.
Adam cursed. The last shot had been too close to the emergence point. The bastards were learning fast. And against that kind of power, he wasn't going to bet on his Kinesis shield.
"Do or die," he muttered, thoughts whirling. "EVANS, hang the Spectres back, slave fire control to me."
More icons popped on his display, access control rights signalling in green. Blink commands flickered through, a dozen reticles marking targets in response. Behind and on either side of him, Spectre mounted missile launchers popped their covers as distance markers spun down. Two seconds.
Two seconds too long.
He felt the lash of enemy radar. The pinpricks of ionizing beams. The thermal bloom of a building plasma channel.
The world stuttered. A ravening stream of light crisscrossed empty air.
No, not empty. Disjunction induced nausea already pushed aside, he noted the angry red marker on his board.
Shit.
One of the escorts was closer to half a Specter, and slowing fast. But it's weapons...
Close enough.
Missiles roared from their racks, six fiery tails launching from each Specter. They rocketed into the sky on already discarding engines, jackknifed in a heartbeat as tracking systems engaged, bringing them to bear on their machine targets. Second stage engines erupted with life and the missiles streaked in with deadly intent. In less than a second, explosions stitched across the sky. Scrap and broken parts rained onto the forest floor below as half the machine force was swatted down. A human force would have faltered at that point.
The surviving machines simply accelerated to closing.
"Break and engage!"
Three things happened right then.
One Spectre roared to his right, arcing away for a flanking shot.
The other reached its limits, damaged systems finally sputtering out, the wreck falling on a terminal course.
And Adam disabled his engine limiters.
The roar of engines became a howling scream. The Javelin hurtled forward in an uncontrollable lunge, subject to acceleration stresses above design standard. His vision blackened. Distance went from kilometers to only tens of meters inside a heartbeat. To-
Now.
Preprogrammed triggers activated. Inertial shunts glutted on kinetic energy. His world came to an abrupt stop, capacitors whining to dangerous levels. Inertial bleed-through squeezed his body. Threatened to liquefy him inside his suit. Secondary emitters kicked online, captured energy flooding out as horizontal became vertical. Snapping his right arm out at whipcrack speeds.
Adding their angular velocity to the globes of Bose-Einstein condensate floating just above rime-covered palm emitters.
Spheres of absolute zero cracked out at supersonic speeds, splashing the nearby machines. Hoarfrost exploded across rusted metal, choking gears, blocking apertures and smothering intakes. Engines guttered, their passengers falling out of the sky as thrusters froze into immobility. Weapons that only moments before were dialing in now whined in protest as inch thick ice choked their servos. For a moment, the machines faltered.
Streaking above them, Adam gave them no time to recover. Kinetic energy was bled further, adding to the maso buildup. His left hand erupted in flames, waste energies wreathing the limb as an orb of liquid fire formed above his palm before shooting downwards like a blazing comet. Down towards the ice choked machine in the center of the formation.
The stable matrices of maso manifested ice and fire collided. Erupted. The targeted machine instantly vanished in an expanding ball of conflicting energies. Nearby frost covered machines were buffeted by the storm of burning ice, already weakened hulls crumpling under the blast wave. More eruptions filled the sky as power systems overloaded or failed containment, their deaths showering the rest of the densely packed formation with a hail of high speed shrapnel.
More enemy machines fell out of the sky, others struggled to stay aloft, bleeding smoke from shredded engines and sparks from deep tears within their metal frames or missing parts entirely. But with machine borne single mindedness, the surviving machines ignored the damage. As one they brought their guns to bear on Adam, some going as far as to tilt their entire platforms when damaged limbs weren't enough to get an angle on him.
He tensed, maso pooling, waiting for that laser alert.
Instead, a hail of crackling orbs streaked up at him. He reacted on instinct. The world inverted, space twisting as he translocated a dozen meters to the right-
"Gah!"
-only to shout in pain as his right flank all but exploded. Automated routines took over, sending the suit into a tailspin as damage alerts blared across his reddening vision. A toneless voice droned, medical status and quick response systems lost in the haze of screaming sensations. He never felt the pinprick on his neck. Never heard the hiss of injectors.
Clarity, abrupt and total, cut through the pain. Dulled it to nonexistence. The blood hue haze of damage warnings still painted his HUD, snapping into focus as time slowed, hammering into his brain with stiletto prefixes. Shield breached. Armor compromised. Inner seal fractured. Thermal and electrical burns both outside and inside. A litany of pain and hurt, yet-
Still functional. Still able to fight back. At least until the chemical cocktail finished burning through his brain.
He saw past the warnings and alerts. Witnessed the storm of dark crimson fire crawling through the air in that split second of sharpened clarity. Crackling orbs the size of watermelons spinning ever slightly so faster with each passing moment. Not just at him, but around him too. Bracketing fire. They had adapted.
A heartbeat to act faster.
The assault rifle on his waist popped free at a silent command, sucked into his charged grip in a blur of motion. His arm rose, targets feeding directly into his HUD from the smart link. A finger twitched.
The Impulse rifle thundered. 8.6mm spikes erupted from its muzzle, hypervelocity rounds shrouded with the actinic corona of electromagnetic energy. They snap-flashed through the sky, vacuum channels of distorted air their trail. Enemy fire slackened, fat bellied projectiles destabilizing when they intersected with rail fire, spending their fury on empty air with detonations of fire and lightning. Other spikes found enemy hulls, punching through rusted steel, erupting through the other side with showers of mechanical viscera. Several more machines fell from the sky, belching smoke as vitals were pierced.
Several more remained, but it was that exact moment when Spectre 002 returned to the field in a hail of fire.
Three more machines were swatted out of the sky when the drone smashed into the rear of their formation, impaling a fourth with a wrist spike. Thrusters flared, drone and victim spinning in a sharp circle before it let go, flinging the dying machine into the last two. Their engines flared, machines moving to evade, turning around to bring their guns on the new threat.
The Spectre's underbarrel weapon spoke first, sending a 60mm shell hurtling down range. It's proximity charge erupted an instant later, releasing and accelerating its payload from nuisance to fatal. Tungsten ball bearings hissed through the distance at supersonic speeds, ripping through the machines, tearing their internals and smashing vitals in a heartbeat of metal rain. Volatiles within ignited instantly, a wave of brilliant red-orange flames consuming the last of the machine forces. Only fragments emerged from the roiling cloud of fire, smoking debris raining down to the forest floor below.
"All hostiles eliminated," EVANS declared, lowering the Spectre's weapon as it returned to escort position.
"Alright," Adam sighed, wincing as the last of the combat stimulants were flushed, his burning wounds coming to the forefront of his awareness once more. Coagulants were already being applied by the autodoc, but it was only a temporary measure for in flight combat. "Let's head down there and check on those things once I've fixed myself."
**********
The forest glade was a picture of tranquility. All was quiet and still, with only the muffled susurration of a light breeze through the leaves to disturb the silence.
The high pitched roar of thrusters was an abrupt announcement that the quiet had come to an end, punctuated by the loud thud as Adam's suit landed heavily on the forest loam before cutting engines. Amidst the whine of spooling down engines, there was a sharp hiss, a puff of condensation as the seals of his faceplate unlocked. And for the first time in a very long time, Adam took a deep breath of unfiltered surface air.
Only to spoil the moment by immediately hunching with a gasp.
"Please refrain from unnecessary exertion." EVAN's voice toned in his ear with all the emotion plain bread. "The application of medical foam application is not yet complete."
Adam chose not to reply, simply focusing on keeping his breath shallow while the rest of his senses caught up. It was beautiful, once he could ignore the pain in his side. With his thrusters cold, the forest was starting to show signs of life again, hot jet wash replaced by a cool breeze that rustled the leaves of nearby trees while bird song tentatively filled the air again. Compared to the years of scrubbed sterile air while fighting in the front as a Lancer, and the additional years of canned air living in an underground shelter, it was… nice.
Peaceful.
"Medical treatment complete." EVANS voice was a bucket of cold water. "You may continue the mission when ready."
"Right." Adam sighed sheepishly. "Miles away but there's more to go."
One of the enemy machines had gone down nearby, and it only took a minute of walking to reach the crash site. It was one of the more intact ones by his estimation. The 'pilot' had been tossed from its ride in the crash, but both robot and glorified flying can were recognizable as coherent forms rather than bits of blown up scrap. Reaching his hand out to the vaguely humanoid machine, he triggered the scan process, an orange halo of translucent light appearing above his palm.
"Scanning." EVANS stated, the AI taking over the process while he settled in for a brief wait, eyeing the enemy machine for nothing better to do.
And almost at once, he was struck by the incongruity. The deadliness of their weapons aside, the enemy just didn't
look impressive to the casual eye. Bulbous body and head, clumsy looking stick limbs with crude grasping claws for fingers, articulation that was obviously even less flexible than the first generation drone soldiers. If form followed from function, he could only surmise that the robots function was a play school budget mascot run amok.
Honestly, it would have been a lot cheaper to omit the robot entirely.
Any further ruminations were cut short by a chime in his helmet followed by EVANS's voice.
"Scan complete."
"Alright EVANS. What did you find?"
"Battle damage has introduced some uncertain variables in the analysis, but rust pattern growth and other environmental degradation indicates that this machine was manufactured approximately 90 to 100 years ago." EVANS explained to him. "However, attempts to interface with the control systems for further interrogation has revealed anomalous information. The machine's internals possesses both a mixture of pre-Shaper technology and unknown components that diverge significantly from all known parent technologies."
Adam frowned in thought as he caught at the last part. "How significant a divergence are you saying?"
"Significant." The AI said, somehow managing to emphasize the word despite the voice remaining as toneless as before. "The power core and elements of its coding software are completely alien from my database. Of note is the motive systems which do not operate on any known scientific principles. Furthermore, given the delipidated nature of the machine and ease of its destruction, this technology is likely viewed as commonplace or even obsolete by its makers instead of an experimental unit using next generation devices. There is a high probability of non-human origin."
The Lancer froze at the suggestion. The first and only time humanity had ever encountered any technology built by non-humans had been well before Project Endurance. Back when...
"Is it Legion?" He asked, feeling his mouth dry at the thought. He had to clamp down on the sudden desire to turn tail, burn for home at max thrust and tell the bunker to close the doors pull the earth in over them for another couple thousand years. If it really was their old enemy, if they were still present even so far into the future, the risks to Endurance were unimaginable.
"It is possible, but of low probability." The AI began. "Legion technology and design principles are well documented. Their autonomous war machines have always fallen under specific patterns with certain universal traits, none of which are present in the current wreck. Logic dictates that they would refine proven proven designs in favor of radically new but potentially suboptimal platforms."
"Who does that leave then? A different batch of aliens?"
"It is possible. The existence of White Chlorination Syndrome, and subsequently Legion, confirmed the Multiple-Worlds Theory. It cannot be ruled out that Earth has since experienced another incursion, be it extra-dimensional or extraterrestrial. It should be noted however, that radiocarbon analysis indicates local materials were used in this platform's construction. It is likely that it's creators have established significant groundside industrial infrastructure."
"Just great." Adam grunted. As if Earth hadn't had enough to deal with, they now had another unknown but very hostile alien force who had decided to turn humanities homeworld into their stomping ground. Endurance's prospects of succeeding was looking to be getting dimmer by the minute. Still...
He sighed. "It doesn't change the mission. The danger's upped, but we still need to get a better idea of what's going on. Wrap up the data we've got from this wreck in the backup storage. We'll share what we've found with the experts once we get back home."
"Acknowledged."
Closing the faceplate, Adam cast one more look around the once seemingly peaceful forest. It didn't seem so peaceful anymore. Shaking his head regretfully, he closed the faceplate and activated flight systems, letting the emitters wrap his frame with the signature mist-like aura of maso-atmospheric interactions. A flex of his legs had him jumping off the ground, servo boosted feet launching him a half dozen meters into the air. With a roar of thrusters, Adam took off into the horizon, followed by his surviving Spectre.
He never looked back.
**********
EVANS remained silent throughout the flight, and for once the silence from the sub-AI suited Adam just fine.
His thoughts more than filled up the quiet, old worries gnawing at him like a dried up bone.
The reasoning was solid, and he had to agree with the sub-AI's conclusions. He'd fought Legion machines after all, and for all that they'd been
wrong to the eye, the writhing things of limbs and steel bore little resemblance to this latest upset. It
probably wasn't Legion behind this. But probably wasn't a certainty.
And even if it was a certainty, that still left him with an unknown hostile faction with powerful energy weapons, combat drones and a highly developed industrial footprint on the world stretching back by at least a century if not longer. Who were they, what were their goals, why were they shooting at him?
Unknown, unknown, and more unknown.
Adam was an uncomplicated man who preferred things laid out in a straightforward fashion. Not that he couldn't adapt to life being it's usual unpredictable self, you didn't survive long on the front by being inflexible. But that didn't mean he had to like it.
Similar thoughts circled his mind as they continued to fly, until at last EVANS' voice came over the speaker.
"We are approaching Tokyo airspace. ETA 3 minutes."
He blinked clicked the acknowledgement, noticing the buildings already starting to appear over the horizon, the endless canopy of thick forests giving way to signs of former civilization. They were towering things, skyscrapers once in an era long forgotten, now hollowed eyed concrete corpses covered in mould and the decay of millennia. Beyond that was a coast that stretched to the ocean, the lapping waters the only thing that remained unchanged from his memory.
Except for those strange structures standing in the-
Light bloomed, flashed in his vision with the intensity of a thousand suns. A pillar of light had erupted from the oceanic structure, splitting the sky in a single contemptuous second. Air roiled in its wake, atmospheric moisture flashing to steam as an errant cloud too close to its path was instantly obliterated.
And only as the beam tapered off, Adam came to one belated realization.
It hadn't been aimed at him. It had been directed
towards the sea.
In the moment it took to have that thought, another flash of incandescent death lashed out, and then another. The newly identified structures hurled death at some distant foe, and Adam felt a chill at just exactly
what had been firing on him moments before his clash with the drones.
"The current approach vector is no longer feasible. What is your next course of action, Adam?" EVANS inquired as he dove for the deck, throttling down his thrusters to the lowest they could go without losing flight entirely.
"Detour looks like." He grunted. "The regular approaches are out while those laser cannons are still active. Speaking of which, were you able to find out what they were shooting at?"
"Negative. Any such targets were well beyond this suits sensor capabilities."
"Nevermind then," he grunted, "Those laser platforms are a problem, and they need to go before we can complete our mission. Can you scan them from a distance? Look for a weakness for me to take out?"
"It is possible, but not at this distance."
He suppressed the sigh that threatened to bubble up his throat. "Can you plot me a safe route then?"
"Of course, charting a new flight path now."
Now if only the rest of the mission would be that easy. Somehow, Adam doubted it would.