Mark “Coop” Cooper

Location: New Lancashire, United Commonwealth of Colonies

Landing Pad One was naturally on the opposite side of the spaceport. It wasn’t a big spaceport, only a kilometer from end to end, but that was a long way to run when mechs were hunting down the remains of the soldiers stationed there and killing or capturing them. The dust helped a bit to hide them from simple optics once they’d moved far enough away from the main gate, but it was a double-edged sword. They had trouble seeing the enemy too.

The thump-thump-thump of the final Spyder’s 35mm shells covering its retreat faded away as it gained altitude, and left Coop feeling exposed and alone. LT Wentworth was running right beside him, but no offense to the officer, if they got into it with a mech, she’d be about as useful as a banana peel. Coop could only hope the mech slipped on her corpse and went down.

The LT was wearing standard Dragonscale armor. For weapons she had her M3 and sidearm. Both fired rounds that wouldn’t penetrate Coop’s armor much less a mechs. Despite that, the LT led the way to the first piece of cover they could find.

Next to each landing pad were warehouses for the shipping companies to store their goods in. There the goods would wait for pickup or undergo more customs inspections if they were imported foodstuffs or animals. Proper quarantine to ensure nothing hostile was administered into a new environment like New Lancashire’s was extremely important. Luckily, the Commonwealth had a ton of practice on building a planetary ecosystem, but it kind of went to shit when the LT kicked open the polyplast door and rushed inside.

The polyplast of the whole building was an opaque tan. You couldn’t quite see through it, but you could see general dark shapes of what was happening immediately outside. This warehouse was only a quarter-full of sealed crates. They had the Gold Technologies symbol on them along with a description and identifying code for what was inside. Coop remembered this shipment of food from Harvest, and the disgruntled pilot who he had to deal with. Now, Coop wondered if the guy was still alive.

“We need to keep moving,” the LT urged when Coop stopped to look at the boxes. She was already moving across the warehouse to a door on the opposite side. “We’ve got less than ten minutes to get there.”

“What’s in ten minutes?” Coop picked up his pace.

They were halfway across the warehouse when a slight darkening of the space clued Coop in to what was about to happen. “Look out!” He yelled and tackled the LT from behind.

They hit the ground just in time to avoid the shrapnel of the exploding warehouse wall and the resulting destruction of the crates created by a mech’s big entrance. It wasn’t just any mech.

It was the same mech Coop had repeatedly shot in the face.

The mech’s big-ass sword wasn’t out, but he was advancing on Coop like he wanted to strangle him, or pull him apart with his bare hands. Neither worked out well for Coop.

“Run!” They both jumped to their feet and sprinted toward the exit while Coop’s railgun rotated and fired on the mech.

He went for the blinding shot again, but the mech was waiting for it. A big armored hand went up to cover the face. The shield still sparked a few centimeters from the giant gauntlet, but the vision wasn’t as greatly affected, so the mech just kept on trucking. At six meters the big fucker could move.

Coop didn’t make it through the door. The mech closed in and made a wide swipe with its free hand. It caught Coop in the shoulder and sent him flying. Red warning lights blinked as his LACS registered the damage. Coop’s own body registered his shoulder coming out of its socket, and the follow-on pain of him smashing into and through the warehouse’s polyplast skin. He nearly lost consciousness as pain surged through him, but he managed to activate his armor’s ES function. Red warning lights still blinked back at him. The hit from the mech, which had used the shield surrounding its hand like a battering ram, had damaged the integrity of the armor. The ES activated across eighty percent of his body, but the section around his damaged arm wouldn’t respond.

Only instinct saved Coop a very uncomfortable landing. He twisted in the air to keep his bad side away from the ground before he plowed into it. His helmet cut off the loud shrieking sound of metal grating against tarmac at over fifty kilometers an hour. Eventually it faded, and Coop raised his head to see he’d been smacked clear to the next landing pad.

“Fuck me,” Coop growled as he struggled to his feet. His helmet’s mic seemed damaged, because TACCOM was coming through choppy, but he got the gist. The LT was running for her life.

Since only she knew what was going to be at Landing Pad One in five minutes, Coop hauled ass toward her STRATNET beacon. Like any small creature throughout history, the LT was trying to put stuff between her and the big predator. She’d burst from the first warehouse while the mech was swatting Coop aside, and sprinted straight to the next one. She’d shot the door to shreds with her M3, so she burst right in without having to slow down. She then dropped a grenade or three into something highly flammable, because she burst out the opposite side of the warehouse just as it went up in flames. Coop hoped the mech was inside. He doubted it would roast the pilot alive, but it might slow him down a bit.

Coop was running parallel to the LT now, and she angled her run to break out from between the warehouses and hangars and out onto the open tarmac. It was a risky maneuver. They didn’t have any cover except the swirling dust storm, but burning down warehouses around the invulnerable mechs wasn’t a sustainable strategy.

“You good, Cooper?” The LT huffed as they sprinted across open space toward the far landing pad.

Coop hadn’t noticed his medical status had gone yellow thanks to the painkillers his LACS had pumped into his bloodstream. “I’m good.” He felt an uncomfortable pulling sensation with every stride he took, but it didn’t hurt. He knew it would in the morning.

He could have made it to the landing pad faster, but he wasn’t going to leave the LT in the dust. For all he knew, whatever was waiting for them required some officer code.

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A loud ripping sound echoed behind them before Coop’s vision went black. He came to a few seconds later on his ass about fifty meters from where he’d been. A deep groove had been carved in the hardened tarmac by the same weapon the mechs had used to butcher the Guards and civilians. Whatever it was, Coop wished he had one, but it looked like his luck had run out.

He wanted to mute the alarm bells ringing in his LACS because there were so many of them. He struggled to get to his feet, but the LACS was sluggish to respond. The railgun had been dented on impact and was unresponsive. His buss was lying twenty-five meters away, and he’d never to get to it in time. He still had a few missiles, which had survived two falls, but they hadn’t been effective the last time he used them. His 125mm cannon was still operational, but he doubted anything short of his antimatter round would do anything to help.

Coop was getting a bit loopy as his damaged LACS pumped more painkillers into his body. He didn’t know if the dispenser was broken, or if the system deemed he needed to be fully doped up to survive the next five minutes. Either way, he was still cognizant enough to toggle to his weapons menu and order the neural net to load the antimatter shell. It was the first time he’d ever done it except in training.

“Command authorization required. Please enter authorization code.” A wobbly, automated voice asked.

The system barred him from going any farther without a code.

He stabbed the commands into the system. “Command authorization required. Please enter authorization code.”

“Fuck you!” Coop yelled back at his LACS. “Command is dead! I’m trying to go down in a blaze of glory while taking all the bad guys with me. Don’t fuck me over now!” He screamed and bashed his head repeatedly against the sides of his helmet…like it was going to change anything.

“Cooper.” The LT’s voice was pinched.

Coop looked over and saw her trying to get to her feet and failing. They’d only taken a glancing blow from the weapon, but it had been enough to toss her like a rag doll and break a leg. Despite all of that, she was still crawling slowly in the direction of Landing Pad One.

“Cooper,” she repeated. “Keep moving.”

After a second Coop abandoned his suicide-by-antimatter holocaust and rushed over to grab the LT. He slung her over his bad shoulder, since his good shoulder held his remaining missiles, and rushed toward the landing pad.

The fact that he was still alive meant the mech way toying with them. He could have ended them with another shot of his gun, but Coop still felt the slight vibration in the ground from the mech’s advancing steps. Half of Coop’s rear sensors were down, but he still saw the big mech drawing his even bigger sword.

He tripped on a bit of debris and nearly dropped the LT.

He heard her scream of pain through her helmet, but told her to suck it up and kept moving forward. They were within twenty five meters of Landing Pad One when the dust cleared enough for Coop to see…nothing. Landing Pad One was just as bare and empty as the rest of the destroyed spaceport.

“Lieutenant, there’s nothing here…Lieutenant!” Coop jostled her and got only a low moan in response.

The mech had his sword out and dragging it across the tarmac. Only a few sparks shot up into the air as the nano-blade sliced a clean path through the ground. The mech advanced leisurely. He’d taken everything Coop could dish out without scratching his armor. The Roman numeral V still stood cleanly stenciled on his chest. Coop imagined whoever was piloting the thing was laughing at them.

That just pissed Coop off.

“Lieutenant, what is the command override code…Lieutenant!” Coop unslung her, grabbed her by the shoulders and shook her repeatedly. “Give me the code!”

He thought, but despite his shaking, the LT was pretty doped up now.

“Up there,” she responded.

“Up There?” Coop tried the code, got a big error message, and a second message that said he only had two more attempts until the system shut him out. “Lieutenant, get your head out of your well-shaped ass and give me the code.” The mech was still advancing, and still supremely secure in its supremacy.

“Behind you,” the LT said.

Coop tried that and got another error. He shook the LT forcefully. “You’re going to let these fuckers get away with killing all our people, without us even denting their armor, unless you give me the FUCKING CODE!” Spittle flew as Coop yelled the last words and dripped down his helmet’s HUD.

Something about his tone, or his choice of language, snapped the LT out of her morphine-laced fugue. “Look up there and behind you, Cooper, you fucking moron!” Despite the hard words they were laced with joy.

By now the mech was only ten meters away. He raised his sword high above his head and was prepared to cleave Coop and the LT in two. He started the downward swing and was hit square in the chest by heat and kinetic energy. Now it was the mech’s turn to fly backward as its shield flared dangerously bright. Next came the rapid thump-thump-thump of duro-steel rounds and the cracking of them impacting the mech’s shield and the ground around it. These weren’t the puny rounds Coop had stocked in his LACS, these were warship-grade ammo, which could only mean…

Dust parted like the Red Sea as one-hundred-and-twenty-five meters of gunboat descended to the ground. Its one-meter-thick armor shone defiantly in the face of the retreating mech, while its fifty terawatt starboard laser mount continued to target and harass the mech. A six-meter mech might be able to chew up HI troopers and eat them for dinner, but a gunboat was a whole different story. The mech quickly fell back and vanished from sight, but Coop imagined the pilot shaking his fist and vowing revenge on those who escaped his grasp.

he chastised himself.

He repositioned the LT back on his shoulder and lumbered toward the gunboat as it settled on Landing Pad One. The moment the ship touched down a hatch opened and ten marines poured out to form a perimeter.

“Cooper,” SGT O’Neil’s voice came over TACCOM with a health bit of static. “What’s the situation?”

“We already evacuated everyone we could, Sergeant.” Coop didn’t stop to talk. He kept walking toward the hatch. “Anyone still on this planet has been captured or killed by the enemy. We need to get the fuck off this hunk of rock and make the Alcubierre Launcher before the enemy fleet cuts us off from that too.”

“That’s not your decision to make, Corporal. I…” The SGT’s transmission cut out for a few seconds as something came in on another channel “Everyone, load back up!” His tone was urgent, and he didn’t have to tell Coop twice.

Coop heaved himself through the hatch and into Grunt country. His plan was to get out of his armor, take a crap-ton of drugs, and pass out until they hit Earth or wherever the hell they were retreating to. He didn’t make it more than a few steps before the SGT ordered him and the LT to medical. They were both pretty banged up, so it was the right move, but medical would regulate his dosage, and all he wanted to do now was pass the fuck out for the next month.

He was only halfway to the small medical bay when the ship shuddered. They were moving and moving fast by the slight inclination and pull his inner ear was feeling.

The ship’s medics helped him out of his armor and onto a bed. It was the first look Coop had of the V2 LACS since this whole thing started, and he was surprised he wasn’t in worse shape. A few spots looked like the scales had been welded together like play doh, and then a two year old went to town on it.

The leg was totally off and had been stabbing into him with every step. He looked down and saw a very big bruise covered the majority of his quad.

That was his last coherent thought before the medics jammed an injector into his arm and sent him to a sleepy, happy place. If he died he wouldn’t even know it until he woke up in the burning fires of Hell with some she-demon trying to cut off his dick.

Right now, his survival was in the hands of LCDR Gold and the crew of CWS Argo.