Thus it was that the commanding general of the 82nd Airborne Division, who was finishing up paperwork for the week and looking forward to a cold martini and maybe a smile from his wife, suddenly found his back covered with glass as a resounding explosion occurred somewhere on the ranges.
Lieutenant Slade was required to reply by endorsement as to his reasoning that led to the commanding general’s window being broken. Furthermore, the incident was reflected in his next officer’s evaluation. Officers’ evaluations are carefully considered reports that bring the term “hyperbole” to a new level. Lieutenants that managed to avoid pissing in potted palms or screwing the commanding general’s underage daughter still had phrases in their reports that indicated that they were the next Napoleon, but with higher moral standards. Anything other than such phrases led to officers that were so described being promoted ahead of those who were not. It was assumed that if you were not the next Napoleon, you simply were not Army material.
Lieutenant Slade’s next efficiency report had the phrase “sometimes given to acts of less than calculated logic.” In a civilian environment that might have been overlooked. But even for a second lieutenant, this was the kiss of death to an army career.
Thus “Bomber” Slade, after an otherwise exemplary career, chose to hang up the uniform, go back to his hometown of Fredericksburg, VA, and go to work building apartments and retaining walls in suburban developments.
However, he did not leave the Army entirely. He joined the Virginia National Guard which had its engineer battalion headquarters located in Fredericksburg (one of the reasons he had joined the Army in the first place) and after another company command and staff time was eventually promoted (despite the efficiency report and probably with a helping hand from the West Point Protective Association) to major. He acted for a while as the assistant division engineer then became the S-3 (Operations) officer of the battalion. Life, really, wasn’t all that bad. He would have preferred, of course, to have deployed with The Division (former members of the 82nd always refer to it as The Division as if there were only one) to Iraq. But life goes on. And he’d built quite a few nice retaining walls instead.
Then came the gates.
Now he was, unquestionably, doing the work that he had looked forward to all his adult, and much of his preadult, life: defending the United States from attack by armed enemies. They were aliens, of course, but that just made it better. He was a reader of science fiction and aliens were a nice, morally clean enemy. You couldn’t get worked up over mounds of alien carcasses. The only post traumatic stress syndrome that was going to come from fighting the Titcher was related to possibly losing.
At the moment, however, the enemy seemed to be unavailable.
There had been reports that a team had entered the Eustis gate and that something had happened there. At the same time radiation counters in the units that had been fighting in Staunton had gone wild. The aliens, who had been pouring through in an apparently unstoppable tide, had suddenly stopped coming through the gate. The remnant, mostly dog-demons and thorn-throwers with a few rhinoceros tanks, had been mopped up by the survivors of the first National Guard company to be thrown in and locals who, like those in Florida, had turned out with everything from hunting rifles to one squad in an old M-113 Armored Personnel Carrier complete with M-2 .50 caliber machine gun.
None of them had gotten close to the gate, however, because the ground was still reading very hot. There had been no explosion, just a sudden jump in the radiation count. And now the gate was acting… odd. Instead of a flat mirror it was rippling, reflecting the light in a pattern of every color of the rainbow.
That, however, was not Major Slade’s concern. He was tasked with designing the defenses to be emplaced to cover the gate. There were tanks and fighting vehicles dug in on the hill but the division commander wanted a complete and thorough prepared defense with interlocking fire, bunkers, communications trenches and all the rest.
So Major Slade sat down on the front glacis of the engineering vehicle, laid his map across his lap and pulled out a camouflage colored portfolio, unzipping it and opening it to reveal the 8½x11 lined pad therein. Then he pulled a Cross pen out of his left chest pocket and began to sketch, occasionally picking up the binoculars or referring to the map on his lap.
It was while he was examining dead-zones around the gate, spots where direct fire could not be placed on the enemy, that the mecha-suit appeared. It seemed to hang in air, almost insubstantial for a moment but that might have been an optical illusion, then dropped to the ground. It was human shaped, about four meters tall, or would be if it were standing up. He looked at it again and made a moue of uncertainty. He had three children, all boys, and they were great players of computer games when they weren’t watching Japanese anime. Major Slade, for that matter, had spent a couple of years religiously reading the Battletech series until it turned to utter dreck. And he damned well knew mecha when he saw it. And as far as he knew, the United States Army did not have any mecha units. If they did he’d turn in his commission and reenlist as a private if that was what it took to join.
The mecha rolled over on its side and seemed to be looking towards the town; there was a small rectangle of what looked like glass on the chest of the suit. Then it lay back down on its back, as if exhausted.
Major Slade pounded on the driver’s hatch with the handle of his locking blade knife until the vehicle commander, wearing a gas mask, popped out of the hatch.
“We need to go down and pick up that soldier,” Major Slade said.
“What the fuck is that?” the vehicle commander, a sergeant, asked in surprise. It was clear that none of the crew had been watching the gate which, given that the Titcher might appear at any moment was just criminally stupid. What they’d probably been doing was sitting as high up as they could, fearfully watching the radiation detectors.
“It’s a mecha-suit,” the major replied, picking up his materials and climbing up the armored engineering vehicle. “One of ours.”
The major was not aware that the Army had mecha, but that did not mean that he thought the suit was alien. Oh, he could get his head around some race, as yet uncontacted, having mecha. There were numerous arguments against mecha as a combat system. Joints were much more prone to mechanical breakdown than the simple track and drive wheel system of an armored fighting vehicle. They also had a higher profile than tanks and more surface area to hit. But the major had known that the Army was eventually going to go to something like mecha for infantry. The weight that infantry soldiers were expected to carry was growing every day as more and more “vital” systems were discovered. Properly designed mecha would simply amplify the abilities of the infantry.
Thus another race could be using them for combat, say against the Titcher; one such might have been “sucked in” by whatever destabilized that gate. And he could allow the logic of them being humanoid; covergent evolution and all that. He could even allow the logic of them being vaguely human facially; he had seen the mask sculpted on the “face” of the suit. Although that was pushing the bonds of credulity.