First was a reactive sensor system with no delay. Most exoskeletons were clumsy because every one of the wearer’s movements had to be fed back to the mainframe, which then made calculations and fed instructions back out to the individual joints and limbs. The whole process could take as much as half a second when someone was making complex movements like, say, walking, and half-seconds start to pile up faster than you’d think they could. It slowed reaction time and forced people to move and act differently wearing the suits, against their reflexes.
In all fairness, this idea was somewhat borrowed as well, but I don’t think I’m going to get sued by a brontosaurus. My grad school roommate was a budding paleontologist who once mentioned the bigger dinosaurs had what amounted to a back-up brain, a large nerve cluster that served no purpose but to keep their legs coordinated while impulses traveled up and down their spine. I stole the idea and created the idea of sub-processors built into every joint. Piezoelectric sensors fed to the mini-computers, which would relay back to the main processor while triggering the servos. Cut the reaction time to less than one-sixtieth of a second.
The power source was original. I’d love to say it’s something amazing that would’ve changed the world and been installed everywhere, but it isn’t. It’s kind of exoskeleton specific. In very, very simple terms, it uses the negative movements of the suit to recharge in the same way hybrid cars use retrograde braking to recharge their batteries. Not a great analogy, but the best I can do that doesn’t take six pages. And it means a forty-minute battery array can last over two hours of full use on one charge. Those two courses in anatomy and biometrics actually paid off in the long run.
The battlesuit’s mainframe hummed to life and the darkness vanished. Staff sergeant Jeff Wallen appeared in front of me with his men behind him. Power ran through my limbs and one hundred-thirty-seven tingling sensors lit up across my body. Targeting matrixes. Power levels. Ammo counters. Integrity seals.
I was strong again.
The Marines looked even younger and smaller as I gazed down at them. The tallest was three feet beneath me. “How long until we land?”
“Six minutes,” said Wallen. “We’re on final approach. Are you as badass as you look in that thing?”
My grim smile was wasted on them. “So much more than you can guess. Ready, staff sergeant?”
“Born ready, ma’am.”
“Not, ma’am,” I said, and my voice growled over the speakers. “From here on in, it’s just Cerberus.”
He nodded and gave an evil grin. “Let’s look alive, Marines,” he bellowed. “We’re on the ground and fighting in five.” They leaped away and hid their nervousness with hollers and ammo checks.
The Hercules shook as the landing gear hit the tarmac. Inertia yanked us all in two or three directions. The suit’s gyroscopic systems kicked in, made me a statue. I took a deep breath and rolled my shoulders. Cerberus did the same on a much larger scale and half a dozen armor plates shifted across the suit’s back and shoulders.
The ramp dropped with a whine of motors and a hiss of pistons. It wasn’t halfway down before we could see the dead things staggering across the runway toward our plane. I raised my arm and three-hundred-ninety-five-thousand dollars worth of targeting software kicked in. Cross-hairs blossomed in my sight, ballistic information scrolled by in my peripheral vision, and the cannons thundered. Four exes exploded into dark puddles before the ramp hit the tarmac.
By technical definition, the Browning M2 was a massive, one-hundred-forty-pound semi-automatic rifle, but it was hard to think of it as anything except a cannon. Normally they were mounted on Humvees, helicopters, or aircraft carriers. The Cerberus suit had one of them mounted on each arm, their barrels reaching a good foot past its three-fingered fists. Twin ammo belts swung back to the file cabinet-sized hopper mounted on the armor’s back. They could fire non-stop for three and a half minutes, with an effective range just shy of two miles.
I stomped down to solid ground flanked on either side by half a dozen Marines. Gunfire echoed across the landing strip and another ten exes fell. They were young and nervous, but they knew how to kill. I heard two screams as the dead fell on them. Having a three-hundred ton aircraft hit the ground a few feet away hadn’t stunned any of them. They were right on top of us.
I moved out from under the plane’s tail. The suit identified dozens of targets. The cannons roared again and another handful of exes vanished in dark red clouds.
Another scream came from behind us and I switched views inside the helmet. There were two or three exes crawling on the ground. The engines drowned out their chattering teeth. Their legs and spines had been crushed when the Hercules rolled over them during its landing, but that didn’t stop exes. One of them had Tran by the leg, gnawing through his camos and drawing blood. He beat its head in with his rifle stock and then fell over, clutching his calf and screaming. Netzley and Sibal stalked the other crawlers, and their skulls shattered with loud, harsh claps of gunfire.