Sixteen

 

A new set of hardware, a new AI core, and a mission information module that had been designated “Meridian” stepped through the breach first. Lieutenant Hoffman handled the latest Meridian. They’d almost changed the name as well, giving it one of the new names set aside for the latest replacements, but Hoffman had complained: the machine hadn’t fallen in battle, and so it was still Meridian. Only the name remained of the original ASSAIL that had gone in first at Thermopylae.

Bren had seen to that. He’d feared some kind of AI Easter egg hidden somewhere, in a hardware buffer or a file or … anything. Anything to explain why Meridian had been so much stronger and faster than the others were, or how it had survived all the missions where the others had failed.

The horrible part was Bren knew they might need the original Meridian more than ever. But he had no choice. He had to take precautions to make sure he didn’t unleash a rogue AI that could mean the extinction of humanity.

The rest of the Synchronicity ASSAIL team strode into the station: Oblivion, Pandora, Panzer, Patton, Plato, and Pythagoras. Bren could see the inside of a repair hangar through the cameras. The Vigilant lay attached directly below where it had sat for the twenty minutes it took to drill a hole into the station.

The cores were fairly mature again. They’d come straight at Synchronicity without any attempt at hiding the UNSF fleet. There wasn’t time with a Chinese task force headed their way under heavy acceleration. In fact, the approach was so direct that Synchronicity might have mistaken the fleet for decoy signals.

The machines fanned out into a semicircle scanning for Reds. Their intelligence on Synchronicity indicated they faced not one, but two Reds, and this time the station would see them coming. What would the two aliens come up with to stop them? Or had they fled into their ship and gone back to … wherever they came from?

The heavy ASSAIL units strode farther from the breach point taking up positions in the hangar. Bren took a deep breath and resigned himself to the familiar agony of waiting and watching. Smaller robots and a handful of marine scouts entered the station searching for danger.

“The hangar is ours. No sign of resistance. Marines, prepare to enter the breach,” came Henley’s orders.

“Armed humans are approaching,” said the synthetic voice of Meridian. Bren noted it had been transmitted across the marine’s channel as well as the ASSAIL team’s channel.

“Get in there!” Henley ordered. “Get in there behind those machines!”

Bren couldn’t see the marines coming in from Meridian’s camera. His view was focused on an airlock next to a metal walkway on the level above. The portal opened.

Boom. Brrrooom.

Bren heard the ASSAIL guns start to fire. A form in black gear staggered through the opening and then fell flat. Blood splattered at the far wall. After a couple of seconds, the reports of small arms fire started up.

“Fractures in Pythagoras,” Bren heard in the Guts.

No one else spoke up.

“Pythagoras is being hit from two angles,” said the handler. “Both of the Reds must be in there somewhere!”

Bren tensed and waited. There was nothing he could do to help. He watched Meridian swing its head about rapidly, firing at targets that Bren couldn’t catch in the view. He couldn’t make out any Reds, either.

Bren heard an explosion and then smoke and debris filled the view. Then there was another explosion. He nervously watched the ASSAIL data. None of the machines went down. Bren realized he had stopped breathing, so he drew in a deep breath.

The shooting continued for long seconds while smoke billowed by the camera. It looked as though Meridian moved rapidly. Bren confirmed the movement through the tactical pane of his PV. Navigating through the smoke was easy for the AI core.

“Pythagoras is down,” someone announced aloud in the Guts.

The smoke had cleared a little. Bren saw a walkway littered with the bulky prone forms of the attackers. Meridian arrived at the airlock Bren had seen earlier and looked through it.

More dead bodies. Or dying ones, at least. The corridor was blackened. Bren caught sight of a silvery bug rolling on the floor. A grenade. The grenade rolled away ahead of Meridian, so Bren decided it must belong to the marines.

“We were lucky. The locals weren’t firing their weapons very well,” Henley noted. “But we ate two fragmentation grenades. We have men down.”

Fragmentation grenades, Bren echoed in his mind. The UNSF seldom used weapons like that. Even the marines’ rifles could accommodate a wide range of non-lethal rounds. He’d feared such tactics. The spinners had little interest in limiting themselves to humane weapons.

“The operative crippled some of their firearms,” Meridian transmitted.

“Niachi? Really?” Bren found himself saying. “Is she nearby?”

“Her current whereabouts are unknown.”

Bren took stock of their losses. Pythagoras sat still at the edge of the hangar. The machine had crumpled forward onto its folded front legs. Smoke and sparks flickered out from three small holes in its chest. Six marines shared its fate, bleeding out on the hangar floor. Bren forced himself to look at the mess of blood that illustrated the vulnerability of human bodies. Medics were working on clearing away the first group of dead and wounded.

Bren checked the mission chronometer in his tactical pane. They’d been in Synchronicity for less than an hour.

“How did the Reds get in there? I didn’t see one come in,” Bren said. He began searching through the visual feeds of other machines trying to spot one.

“There are holes in the hangar that weren’t there when we first got in,” Henley said. “I think they may have used the molecule cutters to create murder holes in the walls.”

Bren hadn’t heard of a murder hole before, but the name spoke for itself. The Reds must have cut openings in the metal wall so they could attack from cover.

Bren watched a fresh team of engineers open a simple plastic crate on the bloodied deck. It held dozens of round metal spheres. More grenades, Bren thought. They dumped the weapons onto the floor. Bren guessed there were a hundred or more of the devices.

“This is a surprise some of our guys whipped up since we’re low on mines,” Henley said. “We’ve targeted these grenades for a spinner. All we have to do is give the order and those things will roll out looking for a spinner to glue down. We have five incendiary grenades, as well.”

“Why didn’t we do that when we arrived?” Bren asked.

“Those things can’t go far, and we didn’t know if the Reds would be waiting. They’re mostly payload, without much battery power. I think they could travel maybe three or four hundred meters to a target. We’ll use them to secure the bridgehead.”

“Unless they get hacked by a Red and reprogrammed,” Bren said.

“All our weapons are hackable, but it would be hard. They each have their own set of one-use codes.”

“I hope so. These creatures are advanced. We have to store and deploy those codes without tampering.”

Bren browsed through data in his PV for fifteen minutes while the marines tried to clean up the bay and secure it. He thought the job could easily take half an hour, but no one wanted to wait around and give the enemy any longer to figure out how to counter the UNSF incursion.

He found a camera feed from a small reconnaissance robot that Henley sent out toward the main concourse. The concourse served as a transportation artery that ran the circumference of Synchronicity. The tracked vehicle stood lower than an average human, with several visual sensors and a pair of thin graspers that each had four fingers and a thumb. Bren was struck by how humanlike the movements of its hands were as it manually actuated a door handle. The robot pushed the door open and went inside.

The camera view peeked around a corner. Bren got the feeling that the robot could look around corners without moving its body into the open. It crept through an empty machine shop and a locker room before coming to an exit out onto the main station concourse. Bren hadn’t seen any people or machines. He hoped all the people had gone to hide in their quarters as the UNSF broadcast order had instructed, but he doubted they all had, since they seemed controlled by the Reds.

Bren watched as the scout rolled out onto an open walkway in front of a Pho restaurant. All the food must be takeout under the new station rules, he thought. The machine panned its camera to peer inside, but no one was visible through the front windows.

The scout rounded the edge of the store entrance and looked farther down the concourse. Bren spotted a round robot with two short arms bearing weapons. Bren recognized it as a Circle Four. The security machine rolled closer on wide treads, traveling straight down the main walkway. He didn’t have a good enough view to tell exactly how it was armed.

The feed went dead. Apparently, the Circle Four didn’t take kindly to visitors.

“Stop! We’re not ready to move on!” Henley transmitted. Bren shifted his attention back to the ASSAILs. He saw from a tactical viewpane in his PV that the assault machines headed toward the concourse.

“We should engage now before the enemy reaches full concentration on the concourse,” Meridian said. Bren didn’t object. It made sense that the Reds had organized a response using the concourse, since it was the quickest way around the circumference of the station.

“If you have information about the enemy disposition, then why haven’t you shared it with us?” Henley demanded.

“The situation is fluid and complex,” Meridian said on the marine and ASSAIL channels. The machines were still moving as it talked. “We have data that would appear fragmented and unrelated under a shallow analysis, but we can act with some degree of confidence. I suggest you remain here and prepare your defenses in case we have to fall back.”

Bren sighed. The ASSAILs were less than a minute from the concourse.

“I guess we’ve lost control of them,” Henley said to Bren on a private channel.

“Probably not. At least not yet. But I didn’t bother trying to stop them because if I did, it would cost us … I think it would solidify an impression of human weakness to the AI cores. Let’s let them do their job. We may yet be able to issue a couple of orders if it becomes critical.”

“Have you ever thought about it the other way? If we keep them on a tight leash, they may think we know better. Now I complained to them, they explained themselves, and we accepted it. Showing them that we aren’t on top of what’s going on.”

“I think the tight leash would work for a short time,” Bren said. “But then it could get worse fast when we forced them into a snafu. Then they’d see how bad we are at warfare without them.”

Bren watched Meridian approach the concourse entrance. A couple of humans in gear sniped at the machines from the opening. They scrambled when a glue grenade shot out past them onto the rubberized roadway beyond.

Bren lost sight of the people. The ASSAILs charged out into the concourse and immediately started to fire.

Boom. Boom. Boom.

Bren couldn’t see the targets from the camera feed. A tactical view of the machines indicated that three machines were facing in each direction and firing.

“Circle Fours coming in from both sides,” Bren noted.

Boom. Boom.

Meridian fired and dodged behind a support column. A person in gear darted out from the other side of the column and shot Meridian with a projectile rifle then rolled back behind the cover. Meridian responded by launching another glue grenade, banking it off the wall so it went hurtling around the column.

“Plato is heating up,” said its handler. “Some of its optics went out.”

Bren accessed the base schematics looking for the nearest laser emplacement. Sure enough, there was a security hardpoint sixty meters down the concourse equipped with a heavy laser.

The tactical showed Plato had retreated into a travel store to remove itself from the line of fire. Bren assumed that one of the ASSAILs would knock out the laser any moment with their 12mm cannons.

“Fractures,” two handlers said in unison.

“Patton,” one continued.

“Pandora,” said the other.

Bren heard the kah-wump of glue grenades going off. Glue tendrils whipped past the view on Meridian, but he couldn’t tell who tried to glue whom.

Boom. Boom.

Bren sighed and watched the tactical. He’d lost track of the sniper that had engaged Meridian, but he assumed the person wasn’t a major threat to the ASSAILs.

Nothing I can do but watch, he told himself again.

“Pandora’s down,” a handler said. “I’m putting in for a transfer.”

Bren wasn’t too concerned. The handlers could screw up and cause trouble for a mission, but trouble in a mission didn’t mean they had screwed up. Still, the handlers were serious about their jobs and often took it personally when their machine was killed. Much as Hoffman exhibited the opposite reaction—pride—when Meridian survived time and again.

Boom.

The firing slowed. The tactical display updated to show more dead security machines out on the concourse. Bren swept the view around in the virtual pane trying to find a symbol indicating a Red kill. There was none.

“That was close. I think we could have easily lost more machines there,” Bren said aloud.

“Lucky Meridian,” Hoffman said, smiling.

Bren smiled. Hoffman must be very unpopular among the handlers.

“Well, I hope he makes it again,” Bren said. “You know a lot of people wanted us to keep Meridian down. I had a hard time explaining he’s the same as the others except for the name and handler.”

But as Bren spoke the words, he wondered whether Meridian was the same now. Why did he still have the doubt?

Marines hustled out onto the concourse, sticking to the storefronts and hauling away the glue-covered figures in gear. One or two more shots rang out as they discovered another sniper hiding in a service corridor that joined the concourse from the other side. Bren saw their skinsuits lighten to blend in with the pale walls and bright concourse lights.

Bren watched the camera view move back and forth across the concourse as marines set up their positions. A team of engineers began widening the pathway from the hangar to the concourse, creating an access road from the Vigilant to the main concourse. Bren monitored the radio traffic on the marine channel as they set up a laser-armed hardpoint in the hangar to guard the umbilical entrance.

“Time to play leapfrog again,” Henley announced a half hour after the firefight on the concourse.

The ASSAIL machines took his cue and strode away.

They have no trouble discerning Henley’s meaning. Of course, they wouldn’t. These things are ten times smarter than a security drone. They’re smarter than I am.

“The incursion plan calls for spinward progress toward the spaceport,” Henley said.

Bren wondered why Henley had stated that, then realized that the ASSAIL machines were headed in the opposite direction.

“We have an opportunity nearby,” Meridian said. “A massive lab is situated less than half a kilometer from here. I believe Slicer may be there, and I have reason to believe that it wants to protect something there.”

Henley didn’t answer, but Bren could imagine what was going through his mind. The marine commander was probably on the verge of deciding that he’d rather not have the ASSAIL units on his side at all. A space force commander could not rely on them and could not order them around for fear of demonstrating his own inferiority to them. Bren felt certain that younger AI cores would obey direct commands, but each time a human told one to do something suboptimal, it would learn more about the limitations of its creators. He wasn’t sure what Meridian would do anymore.

The machines split into two groups. Bren scouted ahead in his PV, checking out their intelligence on the terrain before them. There was indeed supposed to be a major lab facility nearby. It looked like the machines had split up to cover two main entrances. There were additional security hardpoints in the area, but they had already destroyed the only laser emplacement out on the concourse.

An urgent voice called out on the marines’ channel.

“The grenades are moving out! No one’s given them the go-ahead!”

“We need them,” transmitted Meridian. “Slicer is in the lab. There are unstable compounds in there that could be used to our advantage.”

“Are you sure they can make it that far?” Bren asked.

“I’ve provided an efficient route that takes advantage of the terrain. The devices will make it.”

Bren knew better than to contradict the core. If it said the grenades would make it then he didn’t doubt it.

“Damn! Those things are moving! They’re ricocheting off this corner!” exclaimed a marine commander in the station.

“It’s like a train of grenades coming down the ramp!” someone else said.

“Stay out of their goddamn way,” Henley said.

Bren watched in fascination as a line of grenades hurtled past Meridian’s front camera view into the lab. Bren wondered which five were the incendiary grenades. The last grenade rolled by in a perfect pattern, following the exact course of its predecessors.

A second later, the lab exploded. The Guts shook. Pieces of loose equipment fell onto the rubberized deck. Bren hoped the breach umbilical held fast to the station.

Hoffman and a couple of the other handlers cursed and gripped their niches. Bren couldn’t blame them. If the station broke apart, the Vigilant would be in for a rough ride.

“Any sign of the Red?” Bren asked.

“I dunno. Is the whole station going to explode?” Henley snarled on the private channel.

“I doubt it,” was all Bren could say.

“We’re not going in there until the smoke clears. That explosion was hot, though. The Red had to be damaged, at least.”

Henley spoke to the space force marines. “Use your vac masks, if the chemicals from the lab explosion don’t get you, then the fire control measures will.”

Bren saw gray smoke and white mist curling out of the lab. He imagined one or the other was a fire control spray that had been deployed after the explosion. How did the ASSAILs know this wasn’t the Red’s plan? It could be a chemical or biological attack.

How much have the Reds learned about human biology? It’s gotta be a lot more than we know about theirs.

The white mist began to thicken and spread. Bren assumed it was fire control spray.

“Visibility is dropping here,” someone said.

“Pull the scouts back to the concourse entrance,” Henley said. “This should clear up, if the goddamn station doesn’t rip itself apart first.”

Bren refocused on his tactical. The ASSAILs moved back to the concourse entrance, then on toward the spaceport as originally planned.

Henley surprised Bren by sending several squads of marines straight after the ASSAILs toward the spaceport.

“We’ve done some reconnaissance of the spaceport while your friends were blowing up the station,” Henley transmitted to Bren. “It looks clear, so I’m going to go ahead and get some men to secure that objective.”

“Surely the ASSAILs are aware of your recon,” Bren said. “So, why are they still headed there?”

Henley grunted but didn’t answer. Bren concluded he was probably satisfied that at least the ASSAILs were back on the incursion plan.

Meridian’s camera showed a wide branch of the concourse splitting off, offering entrance to the spaceport. The view showed a couple of marines hunkered down by some support columns near the entrance. As the camera jogged with the ASSAIL’s steps, Bren recalled the quiet footsteps from the last mission. He magnified the audio for a few seconds to check it out.

Meridian’s footsteps were clearly much quieter than the ASSAILs usually sounded. Bren cursed. Whatever had happened to Meridian before was happening again.

The war machines tromped into the spaceport terminal. Along the right side of the camera feed, Bren saw a long line of tall, wide windows offering a view out onto the inner face of Synchronicity, where the spaceplanes landed to match the spin of the station. It was a strange union of a simple Earth airfield with the exotic view of a space ring. Bren didn’t often see it since the Vigilant wasn’t an atmospheric craft, and was one of the few specialized craft that could land on the outside of a space station, a tricky prospect given the spin of the space habitats.

The inside of the terminal appeared uninhabited. Rows of chairs were interspersed with luggage carriers and support columns. A set of conveyor belts and rows of manicured airscrub brush dominated the center of the room.

“There it is! I see the fucking Red!” shot the voice of a marine across the channel.

“We have the Red, it’s out on the runway,” someone confirmed. “Damn! It’s fast. It slipped around that passenger shuttle.”

Meridian’s camera swept back toward the waiting area by the windows. Bren caught sight of the Red dot at last, out on the runway in the vacuum of space.

Captain looked to be about three hundred meters away, maybe farther. The alien stopped and sat motionless out on the runway for a moment, as if to taunt the ASSAILs. Then a wavering distortion of the light made Bren blink. It looked as if the spinner stood on a hot desert highway with the heat shimmer engulfing it.

A hundred meters of the giant plate windows in the waiting area cracked from left to right in about a second. Bren imagined what must have happened: hundreds or even thousands of invisible cutter molecules sprayed out to fracture the glass.

“Masks! Masks!” yelled Henley.

Bren felt it wasn’t necessary. It was clear to everyone in that waiting area what was about to happen. He saw a marine dive for a stairwell out of the corner of Meridian’s camera view. The windows exploded outward onto the inner surface of the station. Bren saw debris flying. The air must have left the atrium in a few seconds. The tactical view showed doors closing throughout the area to contain the atmosphere in the station.

Boom. Boom. Boom.

The ASSAIL units pursued Captain out onto the runway, shooting as they went. The alien spun away, almost too fast to spot. The creature seemed to move even faster in an airless environment. But there wasn’t much cover out on the inside face of the station. Only three spaceplanes and a few maintenance vehicles lay between the observation windows and the spinner.

“If they’re headed out there, then they’re going it alone,” Henley said. “My men are pulling back to a pressurized zone.”

That didn’t surprise Bren. The vac masks the marines had would save their lives when an area became depressurized, but the men wouldn’t last long in such a cold, dangerous environment. They had to retreat.

Boom. Brrrooom.

Captain evaded the fire. Craters started to pock the runway as the 12mm rounds dug into it. Bren could imagine what Henley would be saying. He hoped the structure of Synchronicity was so massive that it could absorb a great deal of such punishment without flying apart.

“Oblivion is dead,” a handler said. “I don’t know how.”

Bren checked Oblivion’s last status. The machine had fractures.

Could have been Captain or a lucky shot by someone else. Or a cutter molecule may have hit its core in the right place to knock it out.

Bren heard Henley cursing on the marine channel. The safety measures on the local airlock doors weren’t working. Apparently, Captain had disabled them. Some marines were out in the vacuum and couldn’t get back in.

“Fractures on Plato,” a handler said.

“Fractures on Meridian,” Hoffman said. Bren detected strain in Hoffman’s voice.

Boom. Boom.

The 12mm sounded different now between Meridian and the other machines. The lack of atmosphere blocked out the audio sensor’s pickup, but the cannons still caused vibrations that were loud in Meridian’s chassis.

“Plato’s lost the left magazine,” a handler said. “But I think it may have clipped Captain. It put a hole through—”

Bren kept watching Meridian’s feed. It moved rapidly up behind Plato. The ASSAIL in view jerked and then sprawled onto the runway.

“Plato’s out. Plato’s out,” someone announced. “Shit. It put some holes through the spaceplane the spinner was hiding behind.”

“Sonofabitch,” Henley said. Bren didn’t know why Henley cursed. Bren saw Patton and Panzer walking side by side to the left of Meridian on the tactical display. Bren couldn’t keep track of everything. Captain was somewhere out there flitting around the planes. Or what was left of the planes. Some of them had been reduced to debris littering the inner surface of the station.

Boom. Boom.

Meridian’s view faltered. Escaping gas and debris obscured the camera view. Bren watched the gray runway surface grow closer to the camera.

“More fractures … no!” Hoffman said.

“Is he …?”

“He’s fallen to the ground,” Hoffman said.

Maybe the leg was hit? Bren thought aloud.

The camera angle changed again, but Bren still saw only the runway surface as if the camera looked sharply down. He checked Meridian’s diagnostics in his PV. Everything appeared normal.

“He’s faking it!” Bren said.

“That’s it. He’s faking it,” agreed Hoffman urgently.

Brrrooom. Brrrooom.

Bren heard more salvoes from either Patton or Panzer. Bren felt the Guts shudder slightly.

“We’re freezing out here!” someone said on the marine channel.

Several others echoed the same urgent announcement. The marine’s equipment wasn’t enough to protect them for long.

Meridian’s view righted itself. Bren saw Plato’s chassis sitting on the runway. The spinner whirled out from behind it for a split second, its spherical shape imprinted on his mind in an instant.

Brrrooom.

The orb exploded. Plato’s torso hurtled into view then smashed into the forward camera bubble. Bren’s view became marred by white streaks of stress damage in the plastic lens shield, but the camera feed was intact.

Bren felt another tremor.

Please hold together awhile longer.

“Captain’s dead!” Hoffman exclaimed. “Meridian is invincible!”

Bren smiled, but said, “So he is. Should I be happy or worried?”