Code: Typhoon
Cerberus Short Story “Code: Typhoon”
1532Z
May 4th, 2385 ESY
Somewhere in the Rocky Mountains, North America
Guran brought his HE-V to a halt mid-stride, watching the dead branch tumble to the forest floor, the panoramic cockpit display tinting the scene in high-contrast electric blue. He had little doubt the tremors of his squad’s passage sent it falling. External microphones relayed the splintering, snapping racket to the earcups of his helmet.
Guran’s jaw clenched. It could not have been louder than the squad’s clanking footfalls, but even so he feared compromise. The remoteness of the hidden cache was in part its own protection, but complacency was the mother of many defeats.
“Clear, no contact. Falling debris,” Guran said into the mic of his helmet, transmitting directionally on a short range millimeter wave band. “Forward on. Barron, tighten it up, you’re a step behind.” He willed his own machine back into motion, winding through the towering trunks covering the foothills of the mountains.
“Yessir.” Barron’s terse reply, laced with background static. In truth, Barron’s heavy Zuma was hardly out of position. Guran’s correction was more a demonstration to Keene, a recent inductee who served during the recent two-fer contract in Africa.
Keene spoke up. “Sergeant, a question?”
Guran pivoted left, verifying Keene’s machine was in line-of-sight of his own. A quick glance at his comms board showed he had already switched to optical transmission, point-to-point, reducing the possibility of discovery to almost nil. Smart.
“Go ahead.”
“About the last contract. Won’t our turning on Empyrean hurt our prospects in the future? I mean to say, how can people trust us to honor a contract if we publicly double-cross our original employers?”
Guran smiled to himself. Keene was a sharp pilot with a fighter’s instincts, and a natural in the speedy Chesty he rode now. But he was not yet attuned to how Cerberus handled the business of contracting.
“We didn’t turn on them,” Guran catechized him. “Empyrean breached the contract their legal department agreed to. They signed. All above board. In breaching, the contract was voided in total, including the loyalty clause. The Sahel Alliance legally hired us, and their credits cleared. It’s all on record.”
And that whole situation was just as well, Guran thought. Empyrean had threatened hellfire and damnation in the aftermath. He also knew, but did not add, that Cerberus’ hopes of furthering their secret cause through that same contract with the megacorp had not panned out, so it wasn’t any great loss.
“Gotcha, sir.” Keene said.
“War is just another form of economics, young gun. Don’t worry about where the money flows from as long as it spends.” Barron chimed in with grim delight.
“That’s enough. Cut the chatter, watch your sightlines.” Guran ordered lightly, and the three pilots moved on through the remote wilderness under the towering trees, leaves trembling in their wake.
Elsewhere, not far away from Guran’s squad, Cerberus Colonel Alton Mitchell swayed with the movement of the command wagon as the convoy crawled over the rough, undulating terrain. The dim interior was lit in actinic tones of green and yellow from workstations and banks of displays. Those displays relayed a riot of data: the locations of the elements in his platoon, radio traffic and transcriptions, sensor relays, atmospherics, more.
A veteran of dozens of campaigns, Mitchell took it all in at a glance, understanding the disposition of his forces, his men, instinctively. In a few hours time they would be at the pickup point and then boosting for orbit, freshly resupplied and safely away from the hidden facility where HE-Vs and other war materiel was stashed: Cerberus’ ace in the hole.
“Roger that, wait one!” At a nearby station the tense tone in the junior officer’s voice alerted Mitchell instantly.
“Talk to me, Kelly.” Mitchell said from over the man’s shoulder.
“Sir, advance team reports a large group of armed unknowns, looks like an expedition. Civilian vehicles, earthmoving equipment and HE-Vs with mechanized infantry in attendance. Probable freelancers. They’ve hailed them, attempting to ascertain intentions.”
“Cover story?”
“Standard. Warning them of trespass in a ‘North American Prefecture’ restricted area. They aren’t backing down.”
Mitchell felt the familiar buzz of adrenaline seeping into his blood. “Visual? Punch it up right here.” He tapped one of the monitors.
Mitchell deduced from the grainy image that his advance element, two light Chestys and a trio of Grunt ultralights, were hull-down in a draw. The camera feed was relayed from one Chesty’s sensor suite. Installed at the end of an articulated boom, it peeped over the ridge like a periscope.
The camera showed a swarm of civilian off-roaders, immense mobile digging machines, complicated-looking surveyors, and five HE-Vs of various classes and colors. One, a massive Strix ultraheavy, sported neat rows of missile launchers in the hull and twin, long-barreled railguns on the right arm. The other arm was a big, powerful-looking mining drill. Also in attendance were thirty or so infantry, presently spilling out of their APCs and taking up hasty fighting positions near the edge of the clearing.
“Patch in to Beagle One.” Mitchell ordered.
“Live, sir.”
“Beagle One, this is Devil Six Actual. Any markings on these vehicles?”
An affirmative from the radio, and a moment later the camera feed zoomed in. On the industrial machines, new and relatively clean, a crisp logo against a white background: Ember Geologic Solutions.
Corporate sponsored. They were out here looking for something. Digging for something. Mitchell suspected enough and that sealed the fate of the expedition. He looked at the camera feed one more time: armed or not, there were plenty of civilians, innocent civilians, among them.
Mitchell’s conscience gnawed at him over the waste of life, but there was simply too much at stake. Countless lives, the very future of human endeavor rested upon Cerberus’ innermost and secret cause. He could not risk it, would not allow it. He would uphold his oath, the one he swore, bloodily, at his own induction so many years ago.
He snatched the mic from the comms station and keyed it to address every vehicle and every HE-V in his command. “All elements, this is Devil Six Actual. Code Typhoon is in effect. Repeat, Code Typhoon is declared.” He replaced the mic and issued orders to his staff at an auctioneer’s pace.
Guran heard the Colonel’s declaration and chills crawled over his skin in the Earmy’s balmy cockpit. Code Typhoon! A second later, the computer updated his own displays with threat locations, attack vectors and timetables. Friendly ECM jamming notifications popped on. Not far ahead, the rippling thunder of heavy ordnance and explosions.
Guran answered the order. “Broadsword copies, Typhoon is in effect. On the way!” He switched back to his squad. “Check your vectors and advance to contact, now!” Guran spat into the mic as he lit his particle cannon’s coils. He strode headlong through the trees, battering down smaller trunks without slowing.
“Sir, Typhoon-?” Keene spoke with trepidation.
“Full cleanup, no witnesses,” Guran replied. “Do you copy, Corporal?”
A long beat. “Yes sir, understood.”
“Good.” Guran answered, icily. They had less than a minute at this pace until they joined the battle. Ahead smoke drifted, foliage was shredded by tracers and the searing glare of battlefield lasers boiled sap and burst trunks.
Guran watched the three Grunts from Beagle squad scramble down the draw, preparing to counterassault the encroaching infantry. While difficult to root out of built-up areas, the lightly armed ultralights would not endure in a direct clash with larger HE-Vs. Another member of Beagle in a Chesty rose to reposition, pilot unleashing a covering burst from his rotary cannon.
It toppled suddenly, cored out from two railgun hits, glowing holes appearing on its reactor housing in a gout of glowing shrapnel. In one side and out the other. Guran flicked a glance at his tactical map, saw the Chesty’s status indicator dim to charcoal gray and he knew the operator must be dead.
“Barron, with me, go straight in. Close and destroy. Keene, go right, flank and cordon,” Guran ordered briskly. Barron and Guran crested the ridge nearest the clearing together. The scene was chaos: Shattered or flaming wreckage, bodies and parts of them, everywhere. Just ahead, four remaining hostile HE-Vs maneuvering and aiming weapons. Guran’s computer bracketed a nimble, bird-like Scarab crossing fast ahead of him. Warning chimes sounded.
Shooting from the hip, he triggered his particle cannon, once, twice. Both bolts struck the Scarab, one just under the cowl, the other in the hip. The Scarab’s armor and metal skeleton melted and ran together in rivulets of orange as it slowed. A third bolt, well aimed, slagged the cockpit and instantly roasted the pilot inside. It went down smoking, plowing up a trench in the tormented earth.
Barron laid into a rust red Daiko, the nearest threat. The chunky medium had peppered him with autocannon and railgun fire but his Zuma’s armor was unbreached. Barron hoisted his over-under shotcannon. Ejected cases the size of trashcans spun to the dirt as the cavernous bores boomed, raking the Daiko with clouds of forged penetrators.
The freelancer HE-V withered, smoke and flames licking from rents in the hull, and finally fell backwards, one arm pointing dramatically skyward. Then the Strix hove into view from behind one of the giant industrial rigs. Its low, long torso tracked toward Barron and Guran saw its killer railguns swinging toward a firing solution.
“Barron, jink left!”
Too late. A bright line of rotary cannon tracers from Keene washed over the Strix’s mining drill and left side, most ricocheting and doing little harm to the monster. A beat later two concussive flashes and one hypersonic slug lanced deeply into the lower torso of the Zuma, the other just missing the pauldron and slicing through the right shoulder ball joint. The entire arm tore away in a shower of tortured metal, dragging Barron’s dual shot cannon down with it.
Barron had long flirted with Death, and he knew today she would finally kiss back. “Cover, I need cover! Broadsword Two is in trouble!” He pivoted right and tucked his left arm to his head, bringing the Zuma’s left arm up in a shielding gesture. Unseen, two enormous missiles lashed out from the closing Strix, multi-stage warheads further mangling the beleaguered warmachine.
Barron’s main display crackled, sparked and went dark together with the subdisplays. With the complex web of sensors inside the Zuma severed, his haptic suit imparted no sensation and relayed no instructions. Blind and helpless, Barron awaited the crushing moment that would end him.
Guran pushed his Earmy into a dead sprint across the clearing and toward his brother-in-arms. Past wreckage, past the two remaining Grunts bounding from cover to massacre hapless, routed infantry. Closing in, the Strix’s drill spun up to full speed, a blur. Barron’s HE-V keeled over to its side, wrecked. Guran wasn’t unnoticed. The Strix’s pilot swiveled to aim its railguns at the onrushing Earmy. A threat warning blared shrill and insistent in Guran’s helmet and he slipped right, twin slugs flashing past and burrowing into the ancient flank of the mountain.
No time to shoot after the evasive maneuver. He ditched the particle cannon and with his left hand drew the combat blade, fully six feet long, point down. The Strix again pivoted, seeking to mangle the onrushing Earmy with the drill, but Guran fired his jump jets and raised the blade, leaping and colliding with the Strix before driving the molecular-reinforced carbide tip of the blade straight through its canopy. The two machines went down in a tangle, metal howling in protest. Guran shook off the impact, wrenching the great knife free; a slick of red gore on the blade confirmed the kill.
—
With the fighting over, the cleanup operation went on for some time. The dead among the freelancers were ensured so. VIPs were rounded up from among the survivors for interrogation. They eventually joined their departed comrades. Every Cerberus operative upheld their sacred oath, Keene among them. Intelligence analysts pulled storage drives and recovered telemetry from HE-V wrecks, collected personal PDAs, pilfered journals and notebooks; anything that might provide actionable info on who these people were and who sent them.
Arrangements were made to move most of the wreckage and many of the bodies to a site far distant from the cache but no less remote. That unsavory necessity of deniable operations was a red herring for whoever might come looking for their lost expedition. Since the Rift, terrible things happened to the unwary all the time in Earth’s northern hemisphere.
In the command wagon, Mitchell mused over the most important revelation gleaned from the aftermath. Ember Geologic Solutions was a wholly-owned subsidiary of Empyrean Reach; their spurned and badly beaten former employer.
Someone at Empyrean now wanted to know all about Cerberus, and they weren’t just asking. Drawing the curiosity of a megacorporation would complicate things, but Mitchell knew from past experience such curiosity could be turned to their own ends.
Much later, and far removed from the battlefield, an Empyrean Reach executive re-read a report, considering implications, probabilities, possibilities, and the intersections of each. The summary had said simply, Contractors overdue, missing, presumed lost. No further status reports from embedded asset; expungement probable.
Closing the report he set the tablet on the inky vastness of the volcanic glass desktop, a slab cut from the heart of Io. Fingers steepled in the cool, silent vault of his office, he thought for a time. It was curious that the Cerberus Group, conceptually, was a black hole. Their purpose was, in reality, defined by who and what disappeared around them. A boundary that nothing could probe and escape.
Answers resolved in his mind, more plans and possibilities taking form. He opened the tablet again and began composing a directive to one of the many black bag resources at his disposal.
Illustration by Eldon Cowgar