31. Shells and Batteries

Academy Hill, Vidako

Imperium Stellarum
October 4, 2847

Your loadout is a fire-linked twenty millimeter Broadleaf Arms autocannon mounted on each shoulder, with a pair of Centauran Optics L-27 light lasers just beneath, Iceni explained. Populating battery display and ammo count icons now.

Arc kept the simulated Tyro still while the damage readout—a green wireframe icon of the mech—appeared in the lower left of his vision. The green battery icon, reading 99%, settled just beneath it, and then ‘Autocannon Rounds: 1,200’ under that. After a week of walking and running the mech through every kind of terrain imaginable, from desert cliffs, to marshy bogs, to thick jungle like that just outside the city of San Teodoro, Lieutenant Commander Libby had seen fit to give his cadets the Friday afternoon reward of weapons training.

It brought Arc back to their target practice with the BA-50 rifles during Hard Burn, though in this case no one expected the piloting cadets to understand how to strip, clean, or reload the half-ton, six barrelled, revolving autocannons fixed to the Tyro’s shoulders—nevermind the weapons-grade lenses inside those light lasers. All of that was the job of a tech crew—and, Arc presumed, that meant that in one of the hangar bays at the south end of Academy Hill, Natalie Ramírez and her classmates were elbow-deep in grease, learning how to do just that.

Proceed to the range, Iceni told him, relaying the instructions of the training program. Whoever had created this simulation for the academy had, wisely in Arc’s opinion, kept things simple to begin with. Iceni marked the waypoint for him, and he set out along a low, flat, dry kind of badlands.

Arc could see dry stream beds and the occasional withered tree, deformed and twisted under the cruel heat of a desert sun. There were high cliffs and rocky ridges in the distance, but nothing close enough to cause the mech’s feet any difficulty. The sensors in the Tyro’s head picked up the movement of snakes and small lizards, which scampered off away from the thunderous tread of the great machine. With a thought, Arc was able to zoom in on the fleeing creatures. He imagined that enemy infantry would be detected just as easily.

The waypoint saw Arc perched atop a low rise, with a river curving along one side beneath a great cliff. To either side of the river, vibrant green underbrush stuck out in vivid contrast to the red-brown dust, sand, and packed clay which made up nearly everything else in sight. Arc set his back to the river and the cliff, and the simulation populated his first target: an old, F-1 Myrmidon from the Singularity War, sixty years before. Iceni tagged it, but Arc would have recognized the chassis, anyway: he’d certainly played against enough of them during his war-gaming days, before the academy.

During the Singularity War, the sixty-ton Myrmidons had served roughly the same function that the Imperium’s third generation Janissaries fulfilled now—a close assault mech made to break enemy lines. The shapes were less graceful, more primitive and somewhat boxy, with thick plates of older composite armor, and Arc could see that the mech was not only unarmed, but apparently not even powered or piloted. It simply stood there, dead and still, like some sort of decaying monument to a long ago battle.

Probably good that the first one isn’t moving, Arc admitted.

It isn’t like you’re going to be targeting it with some ancient iron sight, the AI teased him. Hooking you up to the mech’s targeting computer, now.

A red targeting reticule appeared at the very center of Arc’s vision, overlaying his sensor-fed view of the desert and the enemy mech. The Myrmidon stood off-center, so that the reticule didn’t even touch it at first.

Focus on the mech, Iceni told him. Intend to move the targeting reticule onto it.

A flicker of focus, and the reticule moved, settled onto the Myrmidon’s torso, and changed color to green. Just above it, a label appeared in the same color, which read ‘100 meters.’ Couldn’t you do this for me? Arc asked. Just tag targets as we detect them?

I could, Iceni agreed. However, I am not permitted to by Imperial law. An AI cannot make the decision to fire a weapon, or to take a life. There must always be a human in the loop, so to speak. Therefore, you must deliberately choose your targets, and you must give the command to fire. You will find the triggers on the control-sticks in the simulator pod. The left trigger will be your autocannons, and the right your lasers. If necessary, you can also turn off the targeting computer and aim manually using those control sticks, though I wouldn’t recommend it.

It was a bizarre feeling, to focus on the control sticks rather than the hands of the mech itself, but Arc found the triggers and slipped a finger over each. Then, he squeezed the right-hand trigger. Twin pulses of green light stabbed out from his peripheral vision, momentarily linking the shoulders of the Tyro with the chest of the Myrmidon. They were so bright that they left an afterimage of two dark lines across Arc’s vision, along with a cloud of steam billowing up from the Myrmidon’s armor plates, where metal and ceramic had melted away.

That afterimage is psychosomatic, Iceni told him. I’ll see what I can do to scrub it on the next shot, but your brain is convinced that it should be there. Try the autocannons.

“Alright,” Arc muttered to himself. The very experience of using the control sticks and triggers made him more focused on his physical body, as opposed to the rest of the week when he’d fallen almost completely into the simulation. He checked the reticule to make certain it was still green, and then pulled the left-trigger.

This time, the mech jerked at the recoil of the autocannons. A thunderous roar filled Arc’s ears, and he could actually see the tracer rounds streaking through the air to slam into the enemy mech. He leaned forward against the recoil out of instinct, then eased up on the trigger. He wasn’t certain how long he’d been shooting for, but once the barrels stopped rotating, Arc glanced down to see that his ammo display now read only ‘1,129.’ He’d blown through over seventy rounds in a single squeeze of the trigger.

You can set those for burst fire, by the way, Iceni said. It’s recommended to make certain that you don’t waste your ammo, given that otherwise you can empty your entire supply in only six seconds.

“Six seconds?” Arc exclaimed. “That’s absolutely crazy. Yes, set it to a three-round burst from each cannon.” He glanced at the battery readout just above his ammo count, and saw that it now read 97%. I presume that’s the energy drain from firing those lasers? Now that he was no longer so shocked by just how quickly the autocannons ripped through bullets, and the visceral, pounding feel of actually firing them, he focused on thinking at Iceni again, rather than murmuring like a crazy person inside his simulation pod.

Burst fire mode engaged, Iceni confirmed. Would you like to try a few moving targets?

Arc nodded. Let’s give it a shot.

Ahead of him, the Myrmidon suddenly lurched into motion, lumbering sideways in an attempt to circle around to Arc’s lefthand side. The motion took it out of his targeting reticule immediately, and the color changed back from green to red. In response, Arc sent his own mech barrelling forward and to the left, trusting to his own instincts and sense of balance to take him across the rough, dry terrain of the badlands. The lasers, he decided. With the lasers, he wouldn’t have to figure out how to lead the thing’s movement. That particular problem could come later.

This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

His finger tightened on the right trigger, and once again beams of green light stabbed across the space between the two mechs.

𝝮

When the cadets boiled out of the training hall that day, it was with a clear and exuberant excitement. After a week of learning how to walk without falling down, it seemed the experience of actually getting to fire weapons—even simulated ones—was exactly what they all needed. Amidst the crowd, which broke up into knots as they poured out onto the paved paths of the campus, Cassie walked next to him, tablet in hand and unfolded.