CHAPTER 4

2207

Four Days After the First Wave

Knox, Atheux Fortuna Earth

Knox was the capital city of Atheux Fortuna. What was once a crowded hub of activity was now as silent as a grave. Some buildings had collapsed but most remained standing, like tombstones in an abandoned cemetery. The sky was streaked with thick black smoke. It was impossible to believe it had only been four days since the first vilis attack on the world’s cities. At the heart of the dead city, a spark of vivid blue light appeared in the air, seven feet above the ground. Seconds later, the spark became a dancing streak, then grew into a tear in the fabric of space-time. The tear exploded and sent a wave of bright blue energy in every direction. A few seconds later, it faded, leaving the Vindex in Machina armor in its place. Vindex knelt on the ground, surrounded by bolts of electricity. The hull was glowing with the heat of the energy that brought it to its new location.

Inside the cockpit was Riley. He was younger, without a scar on his face. He struggled for breath, hands clutching his head, gritting his teeth as his veins bulged. He winced from the agony coursing through his body and bloody tears streamed from his eyes and down his face. It felt like an eternity before he could open his eyes. When he finally opened them, all he could see was red. He feared he had been blinded. Riley rubbed the eyes and his vision slowly cleared, followed by his hearing. The excruciating headache gradually faded too and he released it.

Riley unfastened his seatbelt and climbed out of the seat. He fell to his knees and pulled a med-box down from the wall. There were four syringes inside, each containing a different color fluid. Riley tried to read the label but his vision was still blurred. He sighed. One after another, he shook the syringes and injected his thigh, through his gear. With each injection, his symptoms faded. By the time he used the final syringe, his vision had improved, his headache was gone, and he was no longer nauseous. He still felt weak but he was slowly regaining his strength. Riley held onto the seat for support as he stood up. He struggled to regain his balance and hunched over, holding his stomach. He fell back to his knees and vomited, struggling to regain his composure.

There was a beeping inside the mech, one that Riley couldn’t recognize. In preparation for the time jump, he had memorized every sound and light pattern. His head was a mess and he struggled to think. A message appeared on the display and he tried to read it, using the seat to pull himself up again. He squinted but still couldn’t make out the words. There were men outside, standing in front of the mech. They didn’t look military, but each man was aiming a shotgun at Vindex. Riley was sure the suit had already scanned the men and performed a threat assessment, but he couldn’t see it. He returned to his seat, placed his hands and feet into the control modules. None of the modules responded. He rubbed his eyes, hoping to clean them so he could see, but it didn’t work. He looked up to the ceiling. A red light was blinking, synchronized to the beeping sound.

“Shit!”

The warning light could only mean one thing: backup power was running low. It suddenly made sense. The backup power wasn’t sufficient to supply all of the mech’s systems, including its control modules. If the mech was using its backup power cell, the quantum drive must have shut down. The Vindex in Machina armor was usually powered by a small quantum reactor, unlike its predecessors, which were supplied by nuclear fusion drives. The third generation mechs were new in Riley’s time and Vindex was the first one deployed in the field, the only one.

Riley shook his head and was able to move some blood away from his irises. He looked at the display, with some of his vision restored. He had to act quickly and get Vindex out of sight as soon as possible. He was already botching the mission. His first objective on arrival was to get the mech out of sight before it was discovered. As of 2207, nobody other than high-level officials of Titan Corporation even knew the mechs existed. The initial models entered production a few months after the arrival of the first wave.

Given the reactor they had selected, there was no way for Riley to reach to a secure location without being seen. He would have to deal with the police aiming their guns at him.

Riley activated the external speakers. “It’s just a vehicle. I’m coming out now. I’m unarmed.” His heart was pounding. He had been a soldier for less than a year, and only unusual circumstance had led to him wearing the Vindex mech and jumping through time. When Patricia Evans, his dying friend, told him of time travel, he laughed. It sounded like one last joke. Then they told him he was the one selected to travel to the past. He still wasn’t sure why. He had very little experience. He almost died a hundred times between the first wave and the others that followed. There were candidates far better suited than him. Nobody gave him a convincing answer, so he concluded that he was a guinea pig for the time drive. It was better to send an expendable rookie to die than an elite soldier. He was shocked that he was still alive and had seemingly traveled back in time successfully. In his time, cops no longer existed. Civilization had crumbled, and survival was all that mattered. The only people holding guns and fighting back were Titan Marine Corps, thousands of mechanized armored soldiers, deployed around the globe to battle the vilis on the ground. The Air Raiders Corps continued the fight in the air.

The cops continued aiming their guns at Vindex. Riley looked at them and grunted. He wondered what they imagined their guns could do to his colossal mech. Riley knew the answer, nothing, but he wasn’t about to tell them that. At this time, there was still the law to obey, and he had no other choice but to comply. Riley opened the hatch and the cops aimed their guns at the opening. Riley reached his hands out to prove he was unarmed. He slowly climbed out of the hatch. His hands were shaking, so he clenched his fists. Riley wasn’t afraid of what the cops might do to him; even without Vindex, he would wipe the floor with them. That was what worried him.

“Don’t shoot,” he requested, before stepping from the top of the mech into a twenty-foot drop. His landing dented the ground beneath his feet. The cops stepped back, startled.

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“Who the hell are you?” one of the cops asked.

“Riley Karlsson, Private First Class, Titan Corps.”

The cops exchanged glances. “What the hell is that thing?”

“Mechanized battle armor, still in the testing phase. Look, we’re all fighting the same battle, you don’t need to point those at me,” Riley said, calmly. “If we’re going to beat those monsters, we need to match them in size, and strength. Right?”

The captain lowered his gun, followed by the others. “Sounds good to me. How many of these things are there?”

“Just one, for now. Once testing is complete, they’ll be everywhere.”

The captain nodded. “How did you do that?”

“Do what?”

“You appeared out of nowhere. How do you do that?”

Riley smirked. “I’m just a pilot. I leave that stuff to the scientists.”

“Right,” he nodded. “You give ‘em hell out there, Private Karlsson.”

The cop called his men away, each of them acknowledging Riley with a nod as they passed him. He did the same for them. The cops climbed into a truck and drove away. Riley looked at his surroundings for the first time; they were familiar. He was unsure whether or not he had truly time-traveled but now he was sure. In his time, no buildings still stood in this place, no road, only wasteland. It had been devastated by a nuke during the second wave. Riley climbed into the mech and shut the hatch. He needed to get the armor out of the open before he attracted any more unwanted attention. He went behind the pilot’s seat and opened a small hatch on the floor labeled ‘backup cell’. He pulled out a backup power cell the size of a briefcase and flipped it over. There was a small terminal on its side. He touched the screen and checked the battery’s status. It had a full charge. On the battery compartment floor, there was a small tool similar to a crowbar. He took it, then turned to the opposite wall. Riley ripped open a rectangular cover on the wall, revealing an opening with a ladder down into the engine chamber. He crawled in, then descended the ladder. He ended up in a small room, about half the size of the cockpit. On the left wall of the room, there were two small windows. Riley looked through the first window at the reactor chamber; the reactor had gone dead. He would need to fix that. First, he needed to power up the mech and move it to an abandoned Titan warehouse about forty kilometers from his current location. The warehouse was ideal for hiding a time-traveling mech. Riley opened the backup power cell housing and tugged out the battery. It had turned green, indicating it was dead. In the absence of battery power, emergency systems such as internal lights were automatically connected to the Vindex armor’s solar power supply. Riley dropped the dead battery and replaced it with the new one he carried down the latter, then closed the housing. There was a screen terminal next to the cover. He activated it, then cut off the power supply to all secondary functions, leaving only the visor and limbs able to draw power from the battery. He picked up the dead battery and returned to the cockpit. Riley shoved the dead battery into the floor compartment and closed it. He got in his chair, powered up the mech, then placed his hands and feet into the control modules. This time, the modules responded, wrapping around his hands and legs. He opened the map on the display and plotted the quickest, safest route to the warehouse. Riley moved his limbs and the mech started moving.

Before long, he arrived at the abandoned warehouse. The building was over thirty feet tall and could house a hundred Vindex mechs. Riley parked the mech in a corner of the warehouse. There was barely any power left in the battery by the time he powered down the mech and its systems. Riley had no idea if he could get the reactor up and running again. He had never handled a reactor before and lacked a real understanding of how it worked. He only knew the basics he read in the manual written for him. He had asked what he could do in the event of a reactor failure. One of the engineers told him not to worry about the reactor. “It can never fail,” he remembered hearing.

Riley opened another compartment on the wall, containing a neatly folded plastic suit. He took the gray suit with him and climbed out of the mech. When he touched the ground, he stripped off his tactical pilot uniform until he was in his underwear. Riley looked up and let out a long sigh. He hated wearing the pilot suit. He ran a hand over his hairy chest and looked down at his body, making sure he was still in one piece. Riley had almost forgotten how slim he was, thanks to the multiple-layer padding on the skin-tight suit. He put on the loose plastic suit. After checking that the suit’s joints were sealed, he climbed to the round hatch on the back of Vindex. Riley pulled the handle and twisted it. The hatch opened to reveal a biometric scanner. The device scanned his eyes, then buzzed with a red light. Riley tried again. This time, it buzzed green and the hatch popped open. Riley opened it all the way to reveal the reactor chamber. He climbed inside, took one look at the reactor core, and shook his head. He had no idea how he would ever fix it if anything ever went wrong. He continued past the engine to a terminal at the end of the room. He activated it and searched for the data log entry for the time jump. He wirelessly connected his pilot gear systems to the terminal and downloaded the log. Once the download was completed, Riley pushed the terminal back into the wall. He walked to the reactor core, held out his hand, and cautiously reached toward it. As he moved closer, the plastic suit vibrated, reacting to exposure to high levels of gamma particles. Riley inspected the engine, checked its coupling, and examined the huge, twisted conduits connected to both sides of the core. As far as he could tell, nothing was displaced. The plastic suit, which was once loose, was quickly tightening around Riley’s body. It was a warning to get out of the chamber as quickly as possible. Riley quickly did so and shut the hatch behind him. He walked toward the exit of the warehouse and held out his hands. The suit stopped shrinking and expanded around him until, suddenly, it turned to dust and blew away. Riley returned to the mech. He put his pilot pants back on. He sat down and took out a seven-inch tablet from his suit. Riley opened the log he downloaded and looked through it line by line.

It was more than an hour before Riley figured out what had gone wrong. He dropped the tablet and pumped his fist. He took a brown notebook out of a pouch on his belt. It was empty, with a pen clipped onto it. Riley took the pen and recorded the events that led to his arrival, and what he believed had happened to the reactor. The sensors in the reactor chamber recorded an unfamiliar energy buildup in the reactor chamber during the time jump. That energy then overloaded the core, and the mech’s drive had to shut down to prevent an explosion.

Riley figured all he had to do was jump-start the reactor with enough energy to get it back up and running. The easiest way would be to pull electricity from the power grid but that wasn’t an option. He eventually concluded that the only way to collect the necessary amount of energy was to harvest electricity from lightning. Unfortunately, he had no idea how to do that. He would have to learn.

He placed everything into the mech, locked it, then covered it with a large tarp he found in the warehouse. He went deeper into the warehouse and found a locker, containing various items of clothing. Riley smiled, found something that fitted him, and put it on. He took his tablet and notebook and left the warehouse. It was already midnight. He searched for a Wi-Fi signal but couldn’t find one. The first attack had destroyed most of the network masts in the city. After searching for hours without success, Riley determined that the only other place he could find information was a library. He walked to the town library. The door was unlocked, but the building appeared empty. Riley walked in. The lights were flickering. He looked at the dozens of rows of bookshelves, with nobody to guide him to find what he was looking for.

He sighed and began his search.