––––––––
The captain watched the view screen, fascinated, as a cliff face split in two. It was a live feed being sent up from the surface of Jade Stone.
"Where is this happening," she asked Skydancer.
"Northern hemisphere," the spaceship's AI replied, "roughly seventy miles from Exploration Base North."
"That can't be a coincidence," the captain said, "It's right next to them, on a planetary scale. Could this be some kind of natural plate tectonics?"
"I'm no expert," the ship's computer said, " But we haven't seen anything similar before on the planet, and if it is plate tectonics, it's very localized in nature."
The image on the screen then started to break up. First it pixelated, then started dropping entire frames.
"Problem?" the captain asked.
"Yes," Skydancer answered simply, "Some kind of very localized atmospheric interference. But again, I hesitate to call it natural. It seems too coincidental, too targeted for that."
"Agreed," the captain said.
She called Masskin and Keen. Two holograms soon joined her on the bridge.
"We are monitoring the situation from orbit," the captain said, "and it seems there's something to report."
Skydancer replayed some edited highlights of the cliff splitting in two and of the interference knocking out their satellite surveillance.
"Masskin," the captain said, "Your base is closest. Get a couple of scramjets up in the air, and let us know what they see as soon as possible."
"Immediately"
Masskin could be seen turning away, but what she was looking at wasn't caught in the hologram. She could be seen barking orders, but they weren't captured either.
"Keen," the captain said.
"Yes?"
"I think the likelihood of your base experiencing a similar nearby seismic event is quite high."
"Yes captain?"
"So I want you to increase your frequency of scramjet patrols, but restrict their operations to a hundred mile radius. We may not be able to warn you next time and, whatever is going on, I want you to have as much warning as possible. Get me as much information as you can and get it to me as quickly as you can."
"Yes captain," Keen said.
The captain killed the connection. Her people had a lot to do and they didn't need the distraction of their captain breathing over their shoulders.
"What is this wild goose chase we've been sent on?" the captain asked.
"Obviously," Skydancer said, "Fleet Command have blundered onto some kind of beehive and they need some idiots to poke it."
"So," the captain growled, "Do we pull out the ground crews, reinforce them now with more slugs, or wait and see what happens?"
"There is too little information yet," Skydancer said, "We don't even know if the seismic event and loss of satellite surveillance mean that there has been an escalation in the danger present in theater. Therefore, unfortunately I can not advise you whether it would be better, strategically, to reinforce the positions on the surface, or whether to pull the units out."
"And yet," the captain said, "I feel things just got a whole lot more dangerous."
***
Down on the surface, Keen was at the landing pad watching the last scramjet gently moving upward on secondary gravitic thrusters, and the main engines were already ticking over, ready to accelerate it to many times the speed of sound. It was so fast it could arc into the upper atmosphere and be on the other side of the planet in an hour or two. It looked like a hunting avian, but a hunting avian with thick wings, laden with ordnance.
She had fully half of her drones out on patrol as well, the last of them going through the main gate right then. A pair of her Whipbacks. The Whipback was a versatile drone with good armor, she assured herself, and good intelligence for a machine that wasn't AI. It looked a little like a fish mounted on a pair of medium-duty legs, and that's how most people referred to it, the fish. It was an old and dependable design that had been in service with Tarazet forces for decades. The legs provided a good firing platform, ate up almost any type of terrain thrown at them and weren’t so heavy that the beast would sink into the surrounding terrain and have to be pulled out. The fish had two robust wings, each with two blasters, making four blasters in all. That would be formidable enough even without the mass driver built into the nose. It was a very robust model of mass driver, ideal for dealing with the dirt and stress of jungle use, and it was installed so that it could dump its waste heat into the fish's heat vane, mounted down its back. Keen noticed that Punter had wandered up, come to watch the last drones go out as well.
"Go get 'em little fishies," Punter said.
He was at the gate supervising engineering drones as they added mass to the fence. It was an old trick Keen had told him about. Nothing beats adding more mass. If she had to choose between building an earthen rampart and putting in a fancy energy fence, she'd build the dirt wall every time. She'd seen an energy fence just flicker out one time, closely followed by a bloodbath. She never did find out why it had happened, damn thing was probably just doing a software update.
"Go get who?" Keen suddenly asked, "One seismic event and some satellite glitching doesn't mean there are necessarily any hostiles.
"Except we know there are."
"Yeah there probably are," she conceded, "And I think it's pretty obvious by now that Skydancer has no idea what the hell we're dealing with here, probably some kind of alien."
"Could be anything then," Punter said.
"Yeah, from a stone-age frog creature with a club all the way up to a being made out of pure energy that can melt your ass with a thought," Keen nodded.
"My ass is already pretty cooked in this damn armor, it wouldn't take much to set it to melting," Punter smiled.
Keen left him to his work and returned to base control, a very grand title for the most hardened of their temporary structures. Keen had left instructions with the engineering drones to add mass here too, and she was pleased with the progress they were making, building up earth in angled ramps around the walls and hardening it with metal plates and whole trees.
"Good work," she murmured as she entered the structure. Now the question came of whether she should remove her armor. And as there had been no contact with hostiles, and control operations were a hell of a lot easier outside the unwieldy metal jumpsuit, she decided to remove it.
She deftly toggled the little clasps at neck and wrists and started the process. The gloves and helmet came off and the armor opened down the front in one long slit that turned into two slits down the legs, Keen slid out of the cushioning embrace and dropped to the floor, easily more than a meter shorter now that she was unarmored.
She was left in what was called the inner skin, a kind of uniform modified to have fewer zips and studs that would start to dig into the flesh after a while in the armor. All the fastenings were Velcro and there were no pockets. She reached back into the armor, and found the little compartment where her belongings were stowed. She pulled out some light shoes, there was no space for heavy boots, a pouch with key cards and the like. And a sidearm with a holster, both strung together on an elastic belt. She put the belt on and settled her sidearm and pouch of belongings comfortably. There was a mirror in the armor storage area so she stopped to see how her uniform and hair were sitting. You never knew when you would be required for holographic communication and it didn't do to look unkempt or less than perfectly groomed, not if the captain called. She saw a woman looking back who was what would be called veteran, no longer a new recruit. Her uniform jacket was short sleeved and showed her iron butterfly tattoo on the light brown skin of her right forearm. Her black hair was cropped short and there was no obvious defect with her kit.
"That will do," she said to the woman in the mirror.
Then she went through the few short corridors to the main chamber of control. She selected the most central of the chairs and glanced at the information on nearby screens, power usage, fence integrity, drone positions, feeds from the patrolling scramjets, all normal.
There was no base AI, but a pretty good base computer was doing its best to keep the most relevant information nearby, where she could access it easily. Keen nodded appreciatively. She opened a line to Punter, and saw his hologram appear in the room in front of her desk, just a portion with the upper body of his armor and his helmet, the area of his face round his eyes visible through the slit.
"How's it going with the fence?" she asked.
"It'll all be done before nightfall," his hologram said, its eyes darting about, attentively watching the drones, "We'll have three times as much mass in that fence. Not even fifty of the lashfaces could push it over."
"Great," she said, "Everything is normal here, so take your time, do a good job."
"Wilco," Punter said and Keen killed the connection.
Then she called up Masskin, but the hologram was degraded, concentrating information at the face to reduce the data required, detailing the base commander's full lips and epicanthic folds, but just sketching in the rest of the body.
"Hello," Keen said.
"Hello," Masskin replied, "The connection's getting worse I see. Soon we'll be relying on line of sight communications, lasers and radio and other primitive stuff."
"There is no line of sight between the north and south hemispheres, or between surface and orbit."
"No," Masskin agreed, "And it's a huge problem. Just to talk to my scramjets, ten miles away, I need a chain of drones on hilltops relaying laser messages. Radio comes and goes, but I can't rely on it. Only line of sight is dependable..."
The hologram froze, gradually pixelating, then came back.
"See what I mean," Masskin said, the definition in her hologram fading again, "We are going to be cut off from the outside world before nightfall at this rate."
"I agree. Communications are our primary problem," Keen said, "We need a solution. I need to know what's happening up at Base North and so does Skydancer."
Masskin nodded.
"I propose using my scramjets as relays."
"What do you mean?" Masskin asked.
Keen paused. Not sure herself what she meant. The problem had crept up on them fast and she hadn’t had time to think the details through, but as she watched the hologram deteriorate she knew she had to make some kind of communications solution work.
"I propose rendezvousing one of your scramjets with mine. I'll pull up a map."
"Okay," Masskin said, her nodding hologram head causing pixelation and disruption.
Keen took her time calling up the map, giving her some space to think through her spur of the moment plan. She had the feeling it just might work.
"Here she said," painting the map coordinates for a position just north of the equator, "We'll rendezvous two scramjets here. Load one of your scramjets with data and transmit it to my scramjet. It'll bring the data home to me and I'll send a scramjet into upper orbit to transmit the data up to Skydancer via a satellite or a shuttle."
"Okay, It'll have to be a snapshot every hour, but I'll only need to dedicate a single scramjet to it."
"Actually, I'll send you one of mine," Keen offered, "There's nothing going on here yet, and I'll still have a couple left over for patrolling. Let me take care of the entire communications chain. You just make sure that your base computer knows to transmit my drone some useful information."
"My base computer is good. That won't be a problem."
"Great. How long do you think you'll need my drone station keeping above your base for you to send up the information packet?"
"How much information will you need?"
"It's not just that. I want to keep drone exposure to the environment in north hemisphere to a minimum. I'd like to set a maximum loiter time."
"We can set a maximum of five minutes and still send you a good selection of collected video and readings."
"Five minutes it is. I'll start setting up the drone relay communications chain immediately. The first drone should be over your base to collect the first information packet within the hour, coming back around again every hour after."
"Great, we'll have some information to squirt to it by then."
Keen wasn't sure if Masskin had cut the connection or if the system had run out of satellites to bounce information off, but her counterpart at Base North was suddenly gone. Keen called Punter.
"You're going to see circling drones on the hour Punter," she told him.
As she was explaining the drone data relay, she saw his hologram start to degrade. The interference was spreading to the southern hemisphere, or a new center of interference was starting up centered on Base South. Whichever way, it was a worrying development. The conversation with Punter took a while because of the radio problems, but he soon got the idea, and she was able to devote herself to the problem of actually setting up the communication relay with Base North.
It took Keen more time than she expected to get all the moving parts of the scramjet relay arranged, and she ended up needing three of the machines flying in three giant ovals to reach Base North, each delicately synchronized, and another to make the long climb up into orbit and back, to pass information to Skydancer.
Once the system was set up, she could forget it, because the scramjets had a virtually inexhaustible power source, at least on a tactical scale. They would be quite happy to keep relaying information till the end of the world, or until their power ran out, decades hence. One difficult part was to set up the protocols to allow the drones to swiftly handshake and then fly alongside each other for a few minutes at the end of each loop, swapping information, but she kept working till she got it. In the end, it was five hours later before the first information arrived with her. It was also swiftly relayed to the orbital scramjet which started its climb, meaning that Skydancer wouldn’t see it for another half an hour or so.
Keen opened the data package and was rewarded with a heading written in large letters across the top of her screen - Data Scrape Jade Stone - Base North - Folder 0001 – and below that was a file tree. It was extremely short, with just three subheadings. The first was, Video with 9,865 files, the next was Instrument Readings with 7,890 files, and the last was Summaries with just one file.
Keen clicked the summaries folder and opened the single file it contained. A hologram appeared before her, but she recognized instantly that it wasn't a recorded image and it certainly wasn't being transmitted live. Instead, it was a simple avatar, a simplified, smoother version of the speaker with just enough features to be recognizable, generated on the fly. It was Masskin.
“This video,” Masskin's avatar said, “Is our first sighting of the threat we know is coming.”
Then the avatar was replaced by a video. The point of view of the video was through the cameras on the nose of a drone, the view showed a wider field of view than a human eye was capable of, as images from the drone's various eyes were combined into one image.
The drone was walking slowly through primeval forest, there were no other drones in the field of view. The drone was out of contact with Base North and on full autonomous operation. In the bottom of the video, a title appeared - First Contact. The drone stopped and scanned the forest around it. Keen hadn't seen enough of the video to know if this was part of its normal patrol procedure, or if it signified that the drone had heard or seen something unusual. The door behind her opened and Punter came in.
"Is that it?" he said, "Did you start watching the data without me?”
“Yes, this is it. You haven't missed anything,” she said, distractedly.
Something in the video had caught her eye, something among the foliage.
The video froze, and a subtitle appeared - Frame Showing Greatest Extent of Creature. But the greatest extent didn't show much. It was a chitinous, insectile face, or part of a face, the details indistinct among the alien foliage of the forest. But she could see that the mouth was half open.
"Creature?" Punter said, "Why does the base computer care about some creature? What threat can it pose to drone armor, how many hits from a mass driver can it survive, or even a blaster for that matter? What is this?"
"I don't know," Keen said, "I'll play the rest."
The paused symbol disappeared from the player and the video file continued. The quality of the file immediately degraded. The creature emerged from the foliage, but was pixelated and the color balance was so far off that all that was left was a silhouette.
"Looks humanoid," Punter said, "Why isn't that stupid drone shooting at it."
Keen thought it hadn't yet recognized the creature as a threat, and was about to say so but she didn't get time. There were readouts down the side of the screen showing the drone's status. All the readouts that mattered suddenly jerked into the red. The drone had finally decided to engage the alien creature as the most likely source of the distortion and damage to its systems. Unfortunately, its sensors were very badly impacted across a huge range. It was getting mostly shadows and gibberish from its video, magnetic, infrared, ultraviolet, motion, audio and olfactory sensors. It was going blind.
A simplified 3D representation of the world, a model based on most recent reliable sensor readings, was suddenly overlaid over the shadows provided by the drone's eyes, and the drone started shooting. It was shooting at a shadow, overlaid with a vaguely humanoid 3D shape. The position where the drone thought the creature was. It's gun temperature readings jumped and capacitor levels started falling as its energy charge was turned into destructive force and projected at the enemy.
Keen saw Punter's trigger finger tighten in sympathy with what he was seeing on screen. Then the video feed went to three seconds of static and died. Replaced with a new title - Recovery of Video File from Drone Carcass.
"Carcass," Punter said, his trigger finger relaxing, "I don't like the sound of that."
"Me neither," Keen said.
Again they were watching through the nose sensors of a drone as it strode through the woods in full autonomous operation mode. It pushed through thick patches of the spiraled, thorny and convoluted branches with its nose. When patches were too thick, it ripped at them with its utility arms, extending from hatches below the fish-like body for the purpose. It ripped at a bunch of thick branches and broke through to an open space beyond. The trees in the clearing, four or five of them, were denuded of branches and all leaning in one direction, towards what was left of a drone. It was standing at the back of the clearing and its fish shape was still recognizable, but it was horribly damaged.
Their drone, the one whose eyes they were watching through, hesitated at the edge of the clearing, scanning the space and as far into the trees as its sensors would go. It then, as if summoning its courage, stepped into the blasted space. It went straight over to the remains of its fellow drone, but, as it passed one of the trees, a picture in picture zoomed in on the damage done to the trunk. The wood looked churned up. A weird mixture of melted and mixed. The damage was strange, like heat damage, but worse and without any scorching.
"Have you ever seen anything like that?" Keen asked Punter.
"No boss," he said, "But that's weapon damage for sure. Look, it's directional and it intensifies round our busted up drone."
The damaged drone was now looming in the view as their host drone neared it. At such close range the damage was frightening. The thick armor had split in several places and bulged outwards, the drone's insides spilling out, twisted deformed and melted. Where the armor hadn't split, where it had maintained its integrity, it was twisted and distorted like the fabric of the tree that they had seen a moment earlier. The two main legs were untouched, strangely, and the drone looked like a twisted mess installed on two mechanical reverse jointed legs. The host drone tried to initiate a handshake to swap data via a laser connection, but the damaged drone was completely inert and unresponsive.
The host drone opened a hatch in its belly and extended a utility arm. The hand on the end folded back to reveal a data jack. The host drone knocked some of the twisted armor aside to find a place to insert the jack. It found a socket, plugged in and the damaged drone's file system appeared in a window. It was a mess, just as twisted as the physical body.
"Data damage too," Keen murmured as they watched.
The host drone downloaded what it could then headed off through the trees.
The video then cut to another caption - The Recovery Drone Finds High Ground and Passes Data to a Scramjet.
The view was now from a circling scramjet. It was centered on a drone on an exposed rocky outcrop. There was a high-speed red flickering as lasers mounted around the drone's eyes beamed up the information retrieved from the blasted drone carcass and its own experiences too.
As the scramjet circled, it noticed movement in the forest around the drone. It beamed down a warning, but the computer operating the drone on the exposed hilltop decided to keep transmitting. It could use its wing blasters and keep its nose trained on the scramjet to ensure the data connection. It couldn't use its main mass driver though because this was nose mounted. The scramjet also started loosing off missiles into the forest at targets, based on observed movement of the canopy, as the drone on the hilltop was firing into the woods with its blasters as best it could.
Trees were torn apart, dirt, rock and foliage was thrown into the air. The view on the ground became chaos, and still the drone kept broadcasting, sending up its precious cargo of data. The drone was then buffeted by impacts, its armor sloughing off and its internal structure rupturing to the surface. The data stream from the ground broke off and the scramjet immediately banked away and the video stopped. It was replaced by another caption across the screen - Base Commander’s Personal Log
This was an audio file only, but Keen could well imagine the concerned look on the base commander's face. She was much closer to whatever this threat was, and it was pretty obvious she wouldn't be getting any reinforcements or evacuation until Skydancer had more information about what they were dealing with. She'd been hung out to dry, thrown down on the surface of the planet as bait, just like Keen, but there wasn't a hint of resentment in her voice, Keen had to give her that.
"The lack of communications is the worst thing," came the base commander's voice from the audio file, "I don't know I've even lost a unit till it fails to come back from patrol. It is just a fluke that I have any idea what I'm dealing with, just a couple of degraded video files of movement in the trees.”
She paused, collecting her thoughts.
“There are a few things I can already say however. One thing is that these creatures are not human and I'm sure we're dealing with multiple hostiles. They appear to be using some kind of organic armor. They are bipedal, judging by the first contact alien, and they have potent weaponry. I'm confused about why they didn't engage the scramjet. I would love to know if that is related to some kind of range limitation of their weaponry. I guess we'll just have to wait for them to show up at the base."
The audio stopped and a caption appeared on the screen - End of Summary.
Keen turned to Punter, her face grim. He met her gaze, his expression hard to read, waiting for her to speak.
"Did that look to you like a fair fight between the drones and the hostiles?" Keen asked.
"No it most certainly did not, boss," he replied, his voice vehement, "They took the first drone by surprise. How was it supposed to know this was a hostile and not some dumb forest creature? And the second one was surrounded, outnumbered."
"We both saw the state of the first drone, the busted up armor. How long did it last before it lost functionality under the hostile's fire?"
"Not long," Punter admitted, "But long enough to return fire. It got off a few good rounds with the big gun, with a pretty good chance of having hit it. It's a pity it was taken out before it could confirm the kill."
"I didn't see any dead aliens strewn about that clearing," Keen said, pensively.
"No," Punter nodded, "but maybe, with its alien physique, it can have its ass shot off and still mange to crawl away somewhere to die."
Keen started laughing, and Punter smiled.
"Okay, Punter," she said, "Go talk to the drones. I don't want them wandering round on their own any more. I want them patrolling in groups of..."
She paused, half thinking, half inviting suggestions. Punter's guess was as good as hers right now about how many drones should be in each group in order to survive contact with the hostiles.
"Five?" Punter suggested.
"Five it is," Keen said, "And we'll have our next installment from Base North in about an hour. Off you go."
Punter went to organizing the defense of the base. He sent scramjets flying low over the forest, out looking for any sign of the hostiles, out to twenty or thirty miles away. He soon had all the drones out on permanent patrol as well. They patrolled in groups of five around a rigidly predetermined circuit. Some groups starting and stopping, some patrolling continuously, some clockwise, some anticlockwise.
The circuit was one mile out and it took the drones an hour to go round one time. The drones were stamping through this terrain with such regularity that it was turning into a wide muddy track, almost completely denuded of vegetation. Punter also had the engineering drones clear a line of sight track out to the patrol circuit, with drones spread along it as a relay, so he could be alerted by laser communications the moment anything happened.