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Grant wasn’t one of those captains who believed in making others do the work as a point of pride. Forcing authority had its uses and in the right circumstances could be the best or only choice. But too many of his own commanding officers tried to swing their weight at him for no other reason than their ability to do so for him to care much for the concept. Which was why he let the experts work and only stepped into the process when he saw something one of them may not have considered.
By the end of the night, two things became clear. The first was that his teams worked out two solid parts of a plan, with Blue and his avatar ship ready to help. It wasn’t the sort of precise surgical strike he would have preferred—or that the majority of his crew would have liked as well—but from what they knew of the Children and how the local mind running the Vault operated, it should do the job. The only task left was to do one final update before they all probably died in the attempt.
Which led to the other thing Grant knew: his people needed sleep. Rather than jump in on almost no rest, he ordered them to take twelve hours. He himself felt fine; the crew was not shy about making their feelings known when it came to keeping himself rested.
Blue, of course, needed no sleep. Grant asked the avatar to watch over the others while he climbed into his survival suit and slowly worked his way out of the building. The glacial pace had more to do with his excess caution than any real danger; the local mind seemed to have recalled all the drone slaves to the core of the building just as Spencer had theorized. It either knew or strongly suspected Grant’s people were inside, but instead of allocating assets to do searches or stand sentry, the mind protected its core systems and the Vault’s precious technology resources like a human body drawing blood to the torso to keep the heart and brain warm.
Grant made his slow way out of the Vault, shambling through empty halls between him and the planet outside. An earlier version of him, one raised on a planet with a regular day-night cycle, might have had broken expectations that the surface remained as dim and shaded as it was the last time he walked across its gritty soil. The massive orbital stations providing artificial sunlight didn’t cover this part of the world; their light was diffuse and weak.
It didn’t take long to move a few kilometers away and send the burst transmission to Seraphim. Crash and Iona were supposed to have been back in range a few hours earlier, though he had a hunch they probably gave up their search well before the communication deadline he’d given them. They, but especially Crash, would be bored up there and worried incessantly about the crew below.
Grant crouched in a shallow gully and sent his transmission. The burst contained a long text version of the situation on the ground and a request for Iona to relay the information back to Sharp. Not for approval or orders, but so the Commander knew the situation. If this was the day the crew finally ended their streak of good luck, he wanted as much information sent on as possible. Grant had no loyalty left for the service on a personal level, but he respected Sharp and the work the NIA did.
He waited a few minutes for replies, all of which had to be funneled through Iona. Sharp had little to add, only wishing the team good luck. Iona and Crash gave him a brief overview of what they’d seen in their scattered run of orbits around the planet.
Grant acknowledged the message and signed off. Crash and Iona’s report was troubling, and both made sure to analyze the threat the hardware on this planet represented as best they could with limited information. To be sure, Grant didn’t like the idea of planetary-assault level numbers of ships just laying around for whoever wanted to take them, but as he trudged back to the Vault, it wasn’t the most concerning implication.
What happened if the technology itself was something that could be reverse-engineered by human beings? The Children managed at least some of it, and there were a lot more people in the universe. Humans could crack the technology here through the sheer brute force approach numbers gave them. If this place was suddenly open for business, the Navy wouldn’t be able to fend off the ungodly swarm of opportunists that would descend on it to snap up even the smallest piece of advanced alien tech. This far from...well, anything, everyone from pirate bands to mega corporations would risk a fight with the navy to get a piece of the pie. Why not? The right tech could alter the shape of human civilization forever.
After all, the Alliance itself was forged by the first colonial governments to have reliable Cascade technology, and it had so far endured for three centuries. All it took was one shift in the balance of power to alter the course of the future in ways no one could predict.
Well, not perfectly. Grant was enough a student of history to know which way the wind would blow. The allied colonies used Cascade technology to—mostly—peacefully take over an enormous chunk of human space. It was as close to bloodless as conquest went, in large part because the Alliance wanted each colony to govern itself and the larger framework to exist only as a protective force against larger threats.
Even so, there were those who fought against the tide. The colonies hadn’t waged war, instead offering Cascade technology as the carrot. Join and the stars were open to you and your people. You got protection. Even in a few places where the majorities voted to become part of the Alliance, others in the minority railed against it and fought.
Where the fighting happened, the Alliance was as merciless as any military force had ever been. Using their ability to pop into virtually any system unannounced, they annihilated entire fleets attempting to ‘take back’ their newly allied home colonies.
Grant was fairly sure the least of the tech on this planet was an order of magnitude beyond Cascade travel in sheer power. It almost didn’t matter who got their hands on it. The consequences would be the same. Chaos. Death. War on a galactic scale as the people holding that power in their hands did what all human beings throughout history did with it:
They’d use it.
––––––––
Grant managed to get in a few hours of rest himself before the final preparations began. This involved final checks and preparations for their survival suits first and foremost. Blue networked with their systems to make sure everything would work as planned.
There was one last review of what they were to do, each team discussing timelines with the other, and then they were off.
Grant went with Spencer’s group, but as support. If their information was correct, the mind would have the hallways clear to draw them in. Unless it changed tactics, in which case they were probably all going to die horribly. Not that he said as much out loud. That would be poor leadership.
Spencer led the group, with Dex and Hayes on either side of her. Grant covered the rear, and was the most heavily armed among them. The lack of a survival suit made his skin itch. He had to remind himself over and over again that the armor wouldn’t do much against heavy weaponry or any of the horrors the mind could throw at them.
Just outside one of the main corridors leading to the enormous block where the slave population was raised and altered as they grew, Spencer halted and raised a fist. Grant instinctively dropped back and to the side, resting on one knee as he brought his weapon to bear.
Spencer stood for a few seconds, peering down the turn toward the incubation section—that was what Blue called it. The idea made Grant want to murder the Originators all over again. People were not farm animals to be grown at need.
Spencer made the sign for ‘enemy ahead’ and motioned for the rest of the team to wait. The crash course in hand signals was less a fresh lesson than an hour of breaking the rust off academy training he’d never needed to use, but he followed along well enough. Spencer would move down the hallway and either kill the sentry or find some way to draw it off. The schematics were clear: this area was the only place their plan had a chance of working.
It was always unnerving to be the guy waiting while Spencer did her job. While her talents rested firmly in information gathering, she had demonstrated time and again how skilled at killing she was. Seeing her slim figure shimmer and nearly vanish as her suit adapted to the space around her and knowing he could do nothing to help warred against the logical understanding that she laughably outstripped him in combat.
She returned without a sound less than five minutes later and crouched in the middle of the group. When she spoke, it was in a low voice that couldn’t have carried more than a few feet past their small circle. “We’re good to go. The sentry is chasing after a drone right now. He didn’t see it, but it’s making just enough noise to be suspicious. We’ve got maybe ten minutes to get this done. Grant, you’re going with Hayes. She can kill quietly if it comes to that, but remember that any dead drones will automatically be noticed by the mind. They’ll tell it exactly where we are.”
“Hope the distraction works,” Dex muttered.
Hayes grinned. “Hard to imagine it not getting the job done.”
Spencer nodded. “We need to be in place when it happens. Let’s move.”
Grant and Hayes followed Spencer and Dex through the hallway into the incubation section and split off from them almost at once. Hayes seemed to nearly dance as she moved, all subtle grace and muscles like spring steel. Grant plodded by comparison, but did it quietly. His boots were swathed with fabric on the soles to cut down noise.
The entire plan couldn’t be accomplished in ten minutes, of course. That was just the time they needed to get in place. Once that happened, they could wait for the distraction. It should give them all the time they needed to work.
Hayes led them to a section of wall that looked to Grant like any other, though he knew it wasn’t. The hallway was built in segments. Theirs was segment thirty-four, with a hidden access panel allowing entry into part of the defense system covering this block. He glanced around nervously as Hayes followed the instructions Blue gave her for accessing the small space.
“Got it,” she whispered as the panel finally popped free. “Captains first.”
With a sour expression just for her, he crouched and moved into the tube. It was barely more than a meter on a side and ended in a right angle turn only a few meters in, but they fit. Grant waited as Hayes pulled the panel back into place. Technically they could move and begin working at any time, but Spencer was adamant they wait. The risk of being overheard if they made even the slightest bit of noise as a sentry moved past the crawl space was not worth getting the job done faster. Especially because being caught would almost certainly mean failure.
Instead they hunkered down and waited. The quiet between Grant and Hayes might have been heavy were they closer, but he hadn’t spent the months training becoming friends with the new crewmen. Not because they were part of the assault team and thus far more likely to die in the line of duty—which Fen had initially assumed to be the case—but simply because they weren’t part of the family to him yet. Fen was with them on Proxima and through the hell that came after. Grant felt a kinship with the reptilian alien in a way he had yet to experience with Hayes and the others. She had been there for much of it, if somewhat removed.
He figured if they made it out of this alive, a drink and a night spent bonding without living under the threat of death would be just the thing.
The distraction came fifteen minutes after the pair of them got in position. It arrived in the form of a large piece of metal dropped from orbit and aimed specifically at a spot just to the west of the Vault. Far enough it wouldn’t accidentally wipe the place out, but close enough to do damage. The kinetic strike equaled a small nuclear weapon, but that only got the mind’s attention. What kept it was the shuttle that followed, heavily armed and staffed with a pair of avatars. Grant knew all this from their plans, just as he knew three armored figures would run to meet it.
Hayes nodded at him, and they moved around the corner and toward the small cluster of instruments nestled within the nerve center of the local defenses. Now they had plenty of time to get the job done.