Rise of the Liberators (Terrafide Book 1) Page 5

  “That’s better…I guess,” Ray said.

  Ray was able to move with the full range of motion promised in class, except the actual feeling of operating a Liberator differed slightly from the theoretical one. Moving Mama’s Boy One was a little what Ray imagined it might have been like trying to perform a trapeze act. Although Ray’s movements were supposed to manipulate the machine, in some ways it seemed Ray’s movements were being manipulated. Perhaps this strange sense of motion had to do with the altered communication settings between Ray and his partner, which severed their psychic connection and might have prevented Ray from ‘feeling’ what Liberator did.

  Regardless, when Ray moved his legs forward in a walking motion, Liberator’s seemed to respond likewise. However, the connection between man and machine was not so complete that Ray felt Liberator’s feet touch the ground as they both walked. Instead, locomotion was an act of faith, and confirmation that Ray and his giant robot partner were moving in tandem came not from Ray’s own sense of touch as his feet pressed back and forth against cockpit floor, but from Ray’s sense of sight as the steel beams of the hangar passed over the cockpit shield.

  Indeed, for better or worse, and to the best of the knowledge of each, man and machine lurched forward in symbiotic synchronicity. A throng of engineers scrambled out of the way as Mama’s Boy One stumbled forth, slowly and awkwardly, as it emerged from the hangar into sunlight.

  The Liberator and its pilot stood momentarily to survey the scene and bask in the glory of the day’s desert glow. They faced east toward an ecological wasteland dotted with cactus and shrubs. As the aperture of Ray’s pupils narrowed from the influx of light, so Liberator’s sensors adjusted to augment his field of vision. The cockpit shield dimmed Ray’s view of the sun above and turned the purplish mountains along the horizon to subtler shades of gray. The cactus and shrubs in the foreground became more accentuated, details Ray couldn’t believe the longer he stared, superimposed with color-coded lines and numbers. It was like seeing with superhuman eyes, Ray thought, and his were already the best his species offered. Any object singled out from the milieu of desert foliage jumped forward, as if leaping closer toward his face, becoming more distinct and focused. Ray noticed a saguaro standing tall and proud one hundred yards beyond the grounds. After gazing at it for a split second, it amplified within the cockpit, practically poking Ray’s nose. Alongside appeared the letter and number sequence “OP-1,” designation for his first observed possible target, the technical language of ACE. Due to his note-taking, Ray was familiar with the symbols and terminology.

  The code flashed red, indicating the saguaro was a threat.

  “OP-1 clear,” Ray said, because he knew that a cactus, even if it did resemble a pitchfork that belonged to the Devil, was still not a viable target, and he felt a little apprehensive that his advanced automated copilot didn’t seem to differentiate such subtle nuances.

  “Don’t leave me hanging out to dry with shitty advice,” Ray said, and he tried to sound playful, with a country drawl.

  “I won’t, partner,” ACE said.

  “You misidentified your first target,” Ray said soberly. “OP-1 is a common cactus, not our common enemy.”

  “Just checking your judgment, that’s all.”

  “Well, how about that?” Ray said, and he felt a mixture of anxiety and relief. “I thought I was judge around here.”

  There was a pause. Ray heard static from the training command center, a video-conferencing room supposedly located at the old Indigenous plant. For all Ray knew, however, his remarks were overheard by the Pentagon or an alien ship in outer space. At the moment, it all seemed the same to him.

  Weird.

  “Affirmative, Mama’s Boy One,” said a human voice not having to pretend it belonged to a redneck. “This is your father talking, you hear? Your adrenaline levels are making Daddy’s Girl trigger happy. Stay close to the playground, and keep it safe for now. Repeat, this is not a live exercise. Your mission is to identify the bad kids out there in need of a good whooping. Do you understand, Mama’s Boy One?”

  “Roger,” Ray said, and OP-1, the saguaro cactus, flashed from red to green.

  Ray took a deep breath and a better look at the training area, a scene that reminded him of a Western movie set. Several streets spanning a few square miles were filled with prop people and building fronts. There was a market, hotel, bank, café, and hookah bar. The female mannequins scattered about wore burkas, and the fake business establishments had signs posted in Arabic and Persian, clues to Ray’s eventual combat destination, he thought. He and his squad were probably headed to the Middle East, maybe to re-stabilize Iraq.

  “Let the games begin,” Ray said.

  Mama’s Boy One began scanning a crowd of dummy civilians gathered at a nearby bazaar and assessing them for explosives.

  CHAPTER 6

  Ray stepped out of the front door of his home the following morning on his way to work when he noticed his wife’s hatchback had been broken into the night before. Those responsible for the burglary smashed the vehicle’s three back windows. For their troubles, Ray guessed the thieves gained a car seat and stroller worth approximately one hundred dollars in resalable merchandise. On the other hand, the cost to Ray’s family was more – hundreds of dollars in frustration, repairs and replacements.

  Had the incident occurred two months prior, it would have been the kind of setback that went ignored, because Ray wouldn’t have been able to afford to deal with it. Sara wouldn’t have been able to ride in the car or her stroller, and the busted windows would have been tarped and taped, another eyesore on the road and mark of a civilization in decay.

  Fortunately for Ray, he was in better circumstances than he was two months prior, and the incident posed no logistical difficulty or humiliation for him and his family, only an inconvenience. Times had changed, and the burglary now was an expense Ray could manage. But Ray was still upset, not just because his family, the victim, had to pay for the crime, but because he was sensitive to even the slightest injustice done to him or those he loved.

  Ray gazed at the glass sprinkled along his driveway as if it were magic fairy dust, and he thought, what kind of creep would steal a toddler’s car seat and stroller? A voice inside his head responded, the kind of creep who deserves to get his ass kicked.

  Unfortunately for Ray, retribution was unlikely. He could probably file a police report, but he knew he wouldn’t be able to get an officer to come out to the scene, take fingerprints and investigate the wrongdoing. In a society spiraling further out of control every day, the police had more pressing problems demanding attention.

  Ray was likely to never know who the assailants were. He called Dee from his truck as he drove to work to tell her what happened. He assumed a drug addict out to make a quick buck was responsible for the crime, as there were many derelicts lurking around Phoenix who fit the profile. However, as Ray drove past numerous houses and their for-sale signs, he started to wonder if the culprits weren’t parents. After all, wasn’t Ray’s family facing desperate circumstances, before Ray was hired? If it hadn’t been for Ray obtaining his new job with the military, his family would have been on the road to homelessness, like so many other households in the neighborhood. If the burglars were parents, Ray wondered if he still would feel anger toward them, or sympathy. An idea occurred to him how he might discover the identity of the perpetrators and the motive behind their odd, distasteful crime against a kid and her providers.

  “Do me a favor, babe, while you’re browsing for car seats and strollers online: let me know if you come across anyone who seems like they might be trying to sell our stolen items,” Ray said to his wife.

  “I’d rather not,” Dee said. “Last thing I want is you acting like some vigilante and getting in trouble over this. You might be demoted, or dismissed.”

  “First you don’t want me to reenlist, now you hope I don’t get discharged,” Ray said with a laugh. “Make up your mind already. Which w
ay is it?”

  “Whichever way keeps you and us safe.”

  “Very well,” Ray said. “But tell me this: in the years you’ve known me, have I ever lost a fight?”

  “No, Ray, that’s why I’m worried. Your time is overdue.”

  “Maybe, but it won’t be over this.”

  “Fine,” Dee said. “See it your way, as usual, and as usual, I’ll be the one who has to clean up the mess.”

  She hung up.

  Ray conducted his Liberator simulation exercises at the Generic Motors proving grounds in the mornings, broke for an hour lunch in the afternoon, and then he returned to the Indigenous plant for a training debriefing and physical conditioning for the remainder of the work day. If it wasn’t for Ray being in such good shape, his peers might have assumed he spent the majority of his life sitting around, eating potato chips and getting fat playing video games, so well did he adapt to the Liberator’s virtual environment.

  Within minutes of his first training exercise, Ray used his wits and a Liberator field search program to single out five armed insurgents out of one thousand prop civilians who were scattered around the proving grounds. He practiced transforming the Liberator into its flying and driving modes and was quickly promoted to participate in live-fire drills. Working closely with Daddy’s Girl, Ray maneuvered Mama’s Boy One around makeshift buildings, destroying wave after wave of bogus enemy soldiers, cannons, tanks and planes, obsolete and retired models of Indigenous-made military hardware.

  Such destructive feats provided Ray a source of little pride, however, since overall they required minimal human skill. A Liberator pilot merely needed to point or say a magic word, and presto, any target on his shield was obliterated, thanks to the automated tracking and attack system. More challenging and perhaps telling of Ray’s potential on the battlefield was what he accomplished during manual exercises. These were necessary to prepare for the rare situations in which ACE for some reason might be disrupted or disabled as Liberator engaged the enemy.

  In one common drill, called a sweep, a pilot ran his Liberator alongside the frontline of an incoming enemy force and from this position switched to a hovering flight mode, which provided an aerial view of the enemy front. The pilot then aimed, fired and destroyed as many grounded targets as possible and then landed in a sprint to avoid retaliatory fire. Ray’s stats for these kinds of maneuvers were exceptional. During a standard one-mile/one-minute sweep, he destroyed on average twenty targets with ninety-five percent accuracy, as close to perfection as any human conducting similar exercises ever achieved. It was because of his keen marksmanship that his squad, which joined him a week later, nicknamed their captain Ray Gun.

  Ray greeted his crew as they arrived at the proving grounds the Monday following his own arrival. The Colonel’s rushed timetable explained the shorter instructional period they received within the classroom, not that they would have been able to follow Liberator’s advanced math and physics anyway, Ray realized, since most of them only had a high school education, and it was something Ray himself struggled to comprehend, or even believe. The bulk of his squad’s education was best obtained in the field, and they learned quickly, so that soon Ray had only a few lingering doubts about the reliability of his men in regards to the upcoming struggle.

  At home at night while his daughter Sara slept and Dee surfed the Telenet, Ray sat on the living room couch and reviewed his crew’s personnel files. Eight were soldiers trained not as pilots, but as commandos. This fact seemed to be an odd coincidence at first, but on second thought Ray realized it made sense. For these men, Liberator would serve as a dramatic extension of their current hand-to-hand combat abilities. These hardened young vets included Joaquin Alvarez and Chip Cardoza from New Mexico; Sam Hagel and Alonso Wheaton from Arizona; and Bernard Maximo, Louis Ramirez, Alex Rodriguez and Jerry Terry from California. There were no women in Ray’s unit, and Ray felt it was probably for the best. Fewer distractions.

  However, the three remaining members of Ray’s unit had some to proving to do before Ray trusted them.

  One of them was Sergeant John Huxley, who on paper seemed too reckless for his own good. Huxley graduated from Palm Springs High School in 2015 and worked for his father’s air-conditioning business before it went bankrupt; such a luxury had no place in the modern failed economy, even in a sweltering desert, where unemployment tended to be higher than other parts of the nation and money for discretionary spending continued to be an issue. Huxley joined the Marines in 2020 after the federal government slowly began to recover from China’s ‘T-Party’ and the financial sabotage of the American military budget. He saw heavy combat in Afghanistan where he drove a Humvee and led armed incursions into disputed territory with the Taliban. That put Huxley’s total combat experience at little over two years, which Ray thought made him still a little too green to be in his seasoned squad of war vets. As if to prove this concern, Ray found reference in Huxley’s file to ‘unverified’ accusations that the sergeant hastily ordered a drone attack over a civilian community in order to eradicate an advancing enemy during a recent battle. Determinations from subsequent investigations proved to be ‘inconclusive,’ but the incident was all of the evidence Ray needed to question why such a loose cannon had been selected to fight alongside his elite unit.

  As if to further affirm Ray’s suspicions about Huxley, he noticed the Greatest Depression seemed to have missed the sergeant altogether, as apparent by his pattern of conspicuous consumption. Examining Huxley’s credit report, Ray found that one of the youngest men in his unit was also overextended with personal loans and credit cards, and not out of necessity, either, but as a lifestyle.

  Huxley arrived at the proving grounds in a fully-loaded, forest-green lifted pickup truck with huge wheels and shiny accessories. The monthly payment and insurance for such a vehicle probably cost Huxley as much as some people’s home mortgages, and he also was likely decades away from paying it off, nor was it even for his home, the price tag for which was even worse. Such poor financial habits, along with the accompanying monetary pressures to fulfill them, made Huxley a bribe risk. He was also at risk for involving himself in other foolish or accidental forms of treachery, Ray knew, but luckily such concerns were quickly assuaged.

  After a few practice runs together in their Liberators, Ray’s gut convinced him the young sergeant was more patriot than opportunist. He doubted the down-home, gung-ho big spender would sell out his country’s military secrets to help pay off a loan or profit through some other lucrative transaction, but dealing with people who lived beyond their means – these days, especially – one could never be too careful, because in such dire times, such people clearly were not careful enough. Ray would have to keep an eye on him.

  On a positive note, Huxley’s zealousness was unlike anything Ray ever witnessed, even in a Marine. The sergeant treated the proving grounds like some fabulous shooting gallery made for his personal amusement. He was fond of carefree rampages in his Liberator in which the sheer quantity of firepower expended made up in damage to the enemy for his relatively weak aim. Huxley might serve as an excellent warrior charging the enemy in an open field, for example, but he was not the person Ray wanted guarding an embassy, because in his eagerness, Ray realized he might accidentally blow it away. Due to his excessive ways, Huxley’s nickname became H-Bomb.

  Specialist David Kim was the only man with a mustache in Ray’s unit, although at age twenty, one might argue he was hardly a man at all. A 2020 graduate from Marshall High School in Los Angeles, Kim tried to appear as confident as Huxley, with one big difference. Kim knew better. His parents, scientists, were killed at a convention during the 2020 New York bio-terrorism attack. Instead of following in their footsteps, Kim enlisted in the Marines, a show of solidarity for his country and also his brother and sister, who were too young to support themselves when their parents passed.

  Kim was trained at Camp Pendleton in San Diego and worked as an intern in the Department of Defense’s weapon
development section before being transferred to his current and first combat assignment. His unusually high test scores pegged him early for unique career opportunities and advancement within the military. In exchange for using his superior intelligence and technical abilities in the service of Ray’s unit, Kim was to be granted a scholarship to attain as high of an education as he wished upon completing his tour of duty, so long as he promised to continue working for the Marines.

  The downside to Kim’s smarts was that he had never seen a day of combat. As clever as he was, until he had been tried under duress, there was no telling how well or how poorly he would fare in his military career. Men from the unit nicknamed Kim Wonder Kid, partly because they wondered how Kim mastered Liberator maneuvers so easily, and partly because they wondered if he were still a virgin. Kim, amused by the double meaning of his nickname, refused to discuss his secrets.

  One final standout whom Ray had reservations about was Lieutenant Omar Mustafa, a twenty-two-year-old academy graduate and Muslim from Oakland, California. Mustafa’s father was an insurance executive, his mother an attorney. Both were prominent members of the Muslim American community. Humble, pious and sincere, Ray had much respect for Mustafa as a person, but knowing their combat destination was likely the Middle East, Ray was concerned that having to target followers of his own religion might create a cruel and unnecessary conflict of interest for the young man.

  Huxley nicknamed Mustafa Camel Jockey, and while Huxley was first to admit the name was hardly original, he insisted it fit.

  “That’s ridiculous,” Mustafa said one afternoon as they geared up in the locker room. “I’m not even from the Middle East.”

  “See what I mean,” Huxley said. “Only a Camel Jockey would get so worked up over nothing.”

  For some reason, that settled it.

  Seeing his men in good spirits, Ray decided to address the collective weaknesses of his unit by singling out those individuals who needed his attention most. He requested that his ex-commandos proceed with their briefings and workouts at the Indigenous plant after lunch. As for Huxley, Kim and Mustafa, he asked them to remain in their suits for one more drill before their dismissal.