Boots down a military sc.., p.1
Boots Down: A Military Science Fiction Adventure (Tall Boys Book 1), page 1
Copyright © 2024 by Scott Moon
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READING ORDER
TALL BOYS
Every galactic empire has a star system where peace won’t stick. These wartorn, dystopian nightmares produce unlikely heroes. Some of them drive mechs. Some get friendly with artificial intelligence, aliens, and the thrill of putting everything on the line for friends and allies.
Mechanized Combat Rigs have another name: Tall Boys.
The men and women who operate them don’t know how to quit.
Salvager (A Tall Boys Novella)
Boots Down (Tall Boys, Book 1)
Crossing Power (Tall Boys, Book 2)
Short Time (Tall Boys, Book 3)
BOOK DESCRIPTION
Hard choices, easy life. Yeah, right.
When a platoon of mechanized combat rigs learns their sergeant’s brother is MIA, they go into a city wracked with centuries of war to find him.
By the end of the fight, they will learn of a massive government coverup by the highest officers in the expeditionary fleet, an alien invasion, new portal technology, and an AI uprising that may or may not be benevolent.
All they must do to put things right is save humanity.
BOOTS DOWN
TALL BOYS
BOOK 1
SCOTT MOON
CONTENTS
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
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What’s next?
Characters
Military Units
Factions
Language
Miscellaneous
Places
Ships
Technology
Weapons, Armor, Equipment, & Other Gear:
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About the Author
Also by Scott Moon
CHAPTER 1
“Stay back, Jam,” she said.
My life was about to get complicated.
Sergeant Amy Stomper of the Capian First Expeditionary Fleet, or C-FEF, faced the mouth of an urban canyon. Not much glass was left in the windows of the skyscrapers. There was a twinkle here and there, like a miracle on the fiftieth floor of this building or that. Sunlight sparkled on the highest points of Yorp, a city that had hosted thousands of battles and would never be the same.
Stomper’s mechanized combat rig was parked twenty meters behind her. That was where I stood to watch the best boss I’d ever worked for brood on how far we wanted to take this. A fool could see she was wrestling with a decision. I told myself she knew what she was doing and that I was following her orders.
But I wasn’t. Not really. She’d directed me to stay behind her rig, maintain cover, and not get my stupid face shot because it provoked snipers. My reputation was sticky with consequences for actions that could never be undone. Our enemies didn’t like me.
The thought made me smile—that and the pleasant aroma of the cigar I wasn’t supposed to be savoring.
I leaned against her six-ton war machine, nursed the chopped down stogie, and felt better. Diligently marching toward cancer and bad breath were things I did well. And piss people off. My talents definitely trended in that direction.
Sergeant Amy Stomper was right about my propensity to draw fire. The way I saw it, that was all the more reason for me to be me. Drawing fire—that was a big part of my job.
There was no way in hell I would expose her, or anyone in Titanium Platoon IV, to the wrath of long-range cowards. Reckless indifference to living or dying had gotten me this far. When there were marksmen out there who could take down your friends from fifteen hundred meters, it was only right to smoke and joke and draw them into the open.
So many rooftops. Even more glassless windows. Construction cranes. The occasional dirigible. The rifle ghosts could lose themselves in the void for all I cared.
My boss, stoic and professional, as talented as she was loyal, was out in the open, feeling the air on her face, well ahead of the last point of cover, staring into the maze as though her intense concentration could see all the way through the city to find her brother.
“This is a no-smoking zone,” her mechanized combat rig, Wolf, spoke firmly, just loud enough for me to hear through my tinnitus.
“Zip it, you AI bucket of bolts.” Elijah might have scolded me, but he wasn’t here. Elijah Adler never would be, so my chance of being a better human was pretty much finished. He’d kept the entire platoon righteous before we really learned to fear snipers. My old friend had maintained a quiet kindness toward AIs. I’d given him so much grief about that. None of the jokes seemed as funny now.
Damn it, Elijah.
“Verbal abuse of C-FEF personnel and their tools is also prohibited.”
“You are a tool.” I heaved myself off Stomper’s MCR and stood straight—not to hide, but to show a little professionalism while the sergeant did her thing. Since I was well known for going the extra mile, I hung my hand down near my leg when not puffing. You’re welcome, universe.
Laughing at myself was important. Somehow, it felt like a way to honor those who had gone before me. Overthinking the idea never led anywhere good, so I didn’t indulge much. “Feeling good, looking good, ready to kick ass.” I laughed as the words came out.
“You are a juvenile in a man’s body.” Wolf wasn’t done with me. “I have made a note in your robust performance file. Consider this a warning before I issue another warning.”
“Give my operator a break, Wolf,” Benji, the artificial intelligence that helped run my rig, said.
“You are as undisciplined as he is. Your programming should serve you—and him—better,” Wolf said. “But have it your way.”
Stomper looked back, held my gaze, then stared into the forward sensors of her MCR AI, Wolf 1, or just Wolf, we called it because the old unit logos had never been removed. The rigs didn’t have a chain of command like we did. Wolf couldn’t tell Benji what to do. At first, they hadn’t been allowed to talk in a manner we could witness, but Stomper removed that restriction.
Most of the platoon liked the change, or had come to grips with the AI personalities and their emphasis on following rules.
I shut up and smoked in peace without the constant, lighthearted harassment of her rig’s AI.
How did she do that, silence it with a look?
Ten meters behind me, the rest of the platoon’s battered machines, including mine, were parked in a diamond shape facing outward per regulations. Their pilots sipped coffee and stretched their backs behind energy screens linking tons of metal.
There were four mechanized combat rig operators in C-FEF Titanium Platoon IV, plus the sergeant. We spent more time than the average rig crews outside of our tall boys because she’d taught us to operate our MCRs remotely, which meant removing most of the AI limitations. Command hated the practice because it was against regulations and was illegal according to the provisions of most treaties. No one wanted self-aware war machines wandering around guns-a-blazing.
Like that had ever happened.
Stomper did what she wanted in the field. Her bosses liked results and censured her in private, sometimes in her file, but only as a written reprimand to cover their asses—never a court-martial. We liked Stomper because she didn’t do stupid shit that got people killed.
Still, taking off, or even altering, the AI governors on MCRs was a big no-no. Much of their computing power was used for the obvious stuff: target acquisition and confirmation, heat management, and communications relays—things that aided in our operating far from support. These were the tools that allowed us to consistently kick the living daylights out of Republic of Vaux VI (ROV6) and United People of Vaux (UPV) forces.
The most autonomous function our rigs were authorized to perform was to return to base with unconscious or dead operators, but that was all. Had there been a few creative soldiers who sent the machines home with other types of loads—critical information or supplies the base needed or children in want of rescue—while the operators fought on the ground in light body armor and
Sure. I knew for a fact that three kids, ages four, six, and nine, could be sent to safety if the operator was willing to face certain death outside of his machine and a court-martial if he survived.
Another story.
Not worth telling.
Definitely not the reason I was here today.
I’d developed a persistent habit of helping salvagers and other locals out of tough spots. They were civilians, after all, and who else were we here for? Something told me I better not involve them in our current misadventure.
As the most senior member of Titanium Platoon IV, I had status. Not even Sergeant Stomper had been in the unit as long as me. Once, for half a tour, I’d done her job. The rank hadn’t stuck, of course, because I had a mouth that wouldn’t quit and a soft spot for kids and puppies and whatever.
This one time, I’d been smoking a rare Guran 50 we’d found boxed up in the middle of a collapsed building and drinking a can of beer when a colonel assaulted me with rules and outrage. I’d handed him one of the thick, perfectly rolled cigars and a brew. His tirade sputtered into a weak ultimatum as he stared at sin incarnate.
Cans were super unique on Vaux VI as well. I’d managed to cool it until beads of water condensed on the aluminum surface. We weren’t all barbarians down here on the planet, no matter what the fleet officers thought.
Lighting his Guran had been a tense moment, but it shut him up. The results were mixed. He left me alone for the rest of the day, but C-FEF investigators seized all of my contraband the next morning.
They’d also assigned Stomper to get us under control. I could have told them all they had to do was bring Elijah back from the dead and get Raquel released from the asylum. That would make the universe right again. I’d be good.
The cigar tasted like hell now, so I let the ember smolder with my thoughts of long ago and far away. I shouldn’t have been surprised. UPV tobacco was substandard, and that was being generous. This thing was barely worth putting in my pocket humidor.
Stomper and the rest of T4 were my people now. I would die before letting them down. That promise was money in the bank.
“Stop looking back at the platoon. They’re fine,” Stomper said via helmet mic. The woman had a great voice and the perfect tone of a leader who was in charge, not an asshole, and confident of her decision to search for Titanium I. Long before her promotion and noncommissioned officer training, I’d known she would be a leader. She had the bearing of a confident NCO and the loyalty of a platoon mate.
Was it a slight conflict of interest that her brother, Corporal Andrew Stomper, had been running T1 when it went MIA?
None of us gave a box of greasy ball bearings. At least, that’s what we told each other when fist-bumping and slamming the last of our coffee before climbing into battered MCRs over the last three days. There was something reassuring about the compact nuclear power plants coming alive and a range of weapons coming online. Even better was the camaraderie of fellow lost souls ready to march through hell on a dare—or a suicide mission to rescue friends. They were basically the same thing on Vaux VI.
“How do you know I was looking back?”
“Because you’re a huge pain in my ass with too much time dirt-side, and your loyalties are in the right place. I need you to take a look at this—without your MCR filters.”
A week ago, I would have chuckled and complied. Now, after three days of searching a contested zone without orders, I just complied. “On my way, Mon Capitaine.”
Stomper had this thing about seeing the terrain with her own eyes. She wasn’t wrong, though there was no way I’d admit naked vision was more satisfying than the technologically enhanced way we lived most of our lives. We could absorb the view with perfect clarity, plus magnification and other enhanced optics from inside our bipedal war machines. We could drop all the grid lines and enhancements and set the range to zero magnification. That would make the camera view functionally identical to what natural eyeballs could do. But mysticism came with seeing things raw, and killers like me needed a touch of it to remain relatively sane.
Too few people from the Capian Alliance of Terran Systems had toured the blasted-apart cities and scorched fields of the planets we seized from the Guran Federation fifty years ago. Five decades was a long time to kick their asses. Mostly, that was what we did. Once in a while, they turned the tables on us. At present they were barely on the sensor boards. Control of Vaux VI was the goal, for the C-FEF and two local factions that had gone astray and forgotten who won the planet from the GF in the first place.
The breeze on my face and the smell of war infiltrating my nostrils changed me as I sauntered forward, carefully putting out the shitty cigar as I went. Stowing the stumpy thing in my body armor was a comfortable habit.
“What don’t you see?” Stomper asked.
“Incoming fire. People. Anything of value.” The buildings lacked power or walls without gaping holes. Rubble had spilled into the streets wherever structures came down. Technically, we’d been in Yorp for a while and only just reached the inner ring where the average building stood twenty stories and sometimes dominated an entire city block. There had been rules about setting aside land for parks and other green spaces when the place was founded, and those efforts could be seen here and there.
Most of the city was on gently rolling hills, but there was a sector of the metropolis known as the heights. On three sides, it was accessible by climbing boulevards and narrower but still functional streets that passed through gaps in the walls so thick they barely seemed to be what they were. To the west of the city were farms that had been reclaimed by wilderness. East was the bay and the ocean beyond it.
“Everyone is hiding,” Stomper agreed as she marched crisply back to her mech with me in tow. “The smoke we saw on the way in is dissipating, but the fact of its existence means we’re only a little late to the grand event.”
“Chen, Malik, Sheila,” I barked into my comms.
All three of them tossed their coffee and climbed into their MCRs. Corporals Chen Lin, Malik Carter, and Sheila Davis were the best crew I’d worked with since Elijah, Raquel, Stomper, and me had caroused our way to legendary status.
Power cores whined as each rig dropped their linked standby shields. Weapons came online. I didn’t see the icons popping up in my unit’s HUD because I hadn’t mounted.
Every operator was a corporal or higher. The table of organization and equipment stated each mechanized combat rig platoon should have a lieutenant as the commanding officer, and that the rest of the unit should be corporal or above, with a preference for sergeants of broad experience and exceptional performance reviews.
That was from about three wars ago.
Corporals got things done. So did sergeants. Officers were fragile on the ground for some reason and just couldn’t stay alive. Or that was how it seemed.
“We will search and clear when feasible, but I want to get to Bridge 49 before nightfall,” Stomper said. “Intel is that the radio and laser comm towers there are operational.”
“You’re going to report in?” I asked.
She climbed into her rig and closed it.
I turned as Benji was just coming to a stop with the chest hatch open.
I crawled inside. “Thanks.”
My MCR had been the second in the platoon to have the AI restrictions scrubbed. That had been well before a UPV marksman ended Elijah as he was closing his rig’s hatch. Benji hadn’t spoken much since that day. We’d scuttled Elijah’s mech and hurried to catch up with the rest of the column. The United People of Vaux couldn’t be allowed to get their hands on our mechs.
Tough day, and the first of many.
Sometimes I wondered if Stomper pulled us from our machines so often to desensitize us. We’d been in companies where no one was allowed into the open air. That felt comforting for the first few hours. A week inside sealed cockpits had exposed disadvantages to most of us sane people.
I freaking loved my MCR. The protection, the mobility, the firepower—it was all good on the ground. But Stomper knew what we needed, and sometimes that was to face our fears.
Mechanized combat rigs weren’t silent, but they didn’t sound like a tank or airship either. Inside, they were as comfortable as the operator could make them. I turned on some music, keeping the volume down.
