Bull began barking orders through his suitcomm, consolidating his men and weapons, converging them midway between where he estimated the AI vault to be and its nearest reactor, even as he led his heavy weapons section there at a shuffling trot. Down metalsnake corridors, steely gray with age and use, Marines tramped on converging courses.
He watched as Corporal Bannon cleared corners, releasing tiny gnat drones from a slot on his back-rack. Special suits and training made Recon Marines the best at what they did, and he wondered what possessed him to have tried walking point himself. Probably stupid enthusiasm after nothing but training for the last three years, he thought. Well those autoguns almost got me, and the aliens’ maser weapons gave me some nasty burns. Maybe Jehovah is trying to tell me to quit sticking my dick out quite so far.
Splitting his attention between the here and now and the virtual HUD overlay, he watched carefully as his section approached the rear of the twoscore Marines of First Platoon, Alpha Company. “Captain Bryson,” he called to the company commander on the top channel, “keep a good three-sixty lookout, three dimensions. The enemy’s resistance has been scattered, but the Ryss aliens say the Desolator AI is crazy. We don’t know what it will do.”
Bull switched his net one level down in order to include the understrength battalion’s senior NCOs. “Coming up behind, Swede,” he called, watching as Bannon sent a drone around another corner. “You should see my point man’s gnat momentarily.”
“Got it, sir,” Master Sergeant Lars “Swede” Gunderson replied. “Come on in. First Platoon will keep you snug and safe as a baby in his mother’s arms.”
“Bad metaphor, Swede, since all the mothers are back on Afrana, but I appreciate the sentiment.” Bull waved his men forward rather than switch channels again, though the gunner in charge of the semi-portable should have heard the exchange anyway.
A moment later they jogged by First Platoon’s outer troops and into the large intersection that was their meeting place.
From the portside corridor, another Recon Marine showed himself, and then led others forward. Third platoon, Bull saw on his HUD. Fourth was off to the starboard side and Heavy Weapon Section Two moved up behind them. He now had most of Alpha Company here, minus only Second Platoon spread out guarding the sleds, almost half his command.
Sergeant Major Charlie McCoy waved a greeting as he joined Bull from Fourth.
“General channel, all hands. First, Alpha Company,” he said. “Objective One is this fusion reactor,” throwing it up on their HUDs. “It’s forward of us and on the port side. My intent is to move forward cautiously and in force to Objective One and use the semis to disable it. My goal is to deny power to the enemy. The enemy is an AI the aliens call Desolator, and the machines it controls. All of those are fair game.
“The aliens are big catlike people,” he went on, “and they don’t have sealed armor the way we do, but their weapons are high-tech and effective. Do not engage them unless you absolutely must. They are supposed to be passing the word over their comms to avoid engaging us too, but you never know.
“All right, Third Platoon you are on the port side flank up these parallel corridors, with your limit the usable edge of the ship. Fourth here to starboard, with your limit the central corridor. First platoon, right up the middle toward the reactor, with semis One and Two in trail. Third and Fourth, detail one squad each to cover my ass, and remember everyone, they could come from the levels above or below. Any questions?”
None came, so Bull ordered, “Alpha, move out. Break break, Bravo Company this is Objective Two here,” HUD-marking a fusion reactor on the starboard side of the ship. “Captain Curtin, take that objective with all deliberate speed, keeping the rules of engagement in mind. The aliens are our allies, but new and twitchy ones from what I have seen. When you disable that generator, move on to the next one forward. Ben Tauros out.”
Curtin was a good man; Bull knew he’d get the job done.
Walking forward, he kept watching the HUD for any sign of resistance, but it didn’t come right away. Instead a sudden heavy feeling staggered him, and he saw the section carrying the semi-portable abruptly and clumsily set it down. “Gravity is increasing,” an unknown voice reported, then the whole company was shoved to the deck as the Gs went up to at least five. Bull crawled forward, his implanted cybernetics powering his limbs, but the sixty kilos of armor, suit and weapons that normally seemed so light now weighed at least three hundred.
“Alpha Company, is anyone experiencing less than five Gs?” The pull was not dangerous in itself, but they had lost all mobility and some of their combat capability too.
“I am, sir, about two,” Corporal Bannon called. The other two platoon Recon Marines on point reported the same.
“Gravplates take a lot of power, people, and that’s one thing this ship is short of – that’s why it pirated our fuel and why it’s only now putting these reactors on line. It’s also why we need to take them down. I’m guessing it has sensors and is gravving as many of us as it can, but it can’t do all of us, so everyone start crawling outward from the center of the company. See if you can find zones of less gravity, but be careful about standing up.”
Acknowledgements filled the suitcomm and Bull saw the company slowly spreading out. He noticed Bannon and a few other Recons moving fast enough to be on their feet, then the icons suddenly reversed course and blinked with the shorthand for enemy contact.
“Bannon here; war drones coming.” A shaky video feed from a gnat flashed briefly on the company’s HUDs, showing a jumble of nightmare machinery with far too many arms and legs for comfort before whiting out. “They got the gnat, though it took a few shots. First it tried some kind of EM weapon, maybe a maser, then it fired that blue plasma discharge.”
“The aliens had masers too. I think both sides are armed with weapons optimized against Meme,” Bull quickly called over the general net. “If they hit you they will cause burns. Seal up all faceplates and go to instruments only or you may lose your eyes. Use the new anti-armor rockets and Hippo plasma rifles and fall back toward the semis if that doesn’t stop them. Fire from doorways and crawl back into rooms if you have to. You know the drill.” He hoped they did: they may have trained too much against anti-Meme scenarios. He’d have to correct that later.
Bull watched the icons representing the enemy advance up the three corridors against Alpha Company, wondering if the AI would really be this unsubtle. Perhaps it was used to fighting nonsentient Meme boarders who used no technique, just brute force and numbers.
“Set up ambushes at the intersections, then fall back: delaying tactics,” he ordered. “Recon elements, get me some more video. I want to see what we’re up against.”
Bursts of static came though his suitcomm, quickly suppressed by the software. Microwaves were, after all, a kind of EM radio wave, and apparently were causing interference with the Marines’ ultra-wideband system.
Seems all right so far, Bull thought. We can handle five Gs if we have to, from on the deck, but retreating will be a hell of a thing. “Sections, get those semis set up to cover these corridors.” The teams grunted and dragged the heavy machines inch by inch into positions where they could fire down two of the most likely avenues, and the operators crawled up wearily to sit in the gunners seats.
Looks like maybe we waited too long to attack these reactors. Now we’re stuck like bugs in glue. We can fight, but we can’t move. We might all die in place here. Have to change the game. Already he heard terse orders and cursing as his lead elements ambushed the advancing war drones.
Dialing up the senior Flight Warrant on the assault sled channel, Bull said, “Sled command, this is Bull. Butler, we’re pinned down by heavy gravplates and being attacked. Is there any way you can take the sleds outside the hull and come back in through a damaged area, give us some fire support?” The idea was crazy, but then again, so were flyboys.
“Negative, sir...there’s no outside to go to. I can’t even describe what I’m seeing, but we are not traveling normally through space. Everything to the front and rear just turned black. There’s a white-and-rainbow vertical band precisely perpendicular to our axis of travel, and the radiation meters in the outermost sleds has gone off the charts. We had to move them inward to get behind more shielding. Whatever is out there...we can’t survive in it.”
Bull swallowed a few choice epithets. “All right, can you fly the sleds through the main corridors? It looks like most of them run five meters square.”
“Five by five? We’ll barely scrape through. Do a lot of damage to the sleds and corridors both, and everything will get torn up by fusion drive and thrusters. Sleds might not be flyable after all that.” Flight Warrant Butler sounded very doubtful.
“I don’t care. We’ve already lost enough men that we can spare some sleds, and we can always pack more in them, and we need fire support, now.” Watching the icons, he saw a dozen of his men already showed as dead, and two dozen more wounded as enemy warbots drove his Marines back toward his laser cannon.
Bull went on, “Get volunteers and send sleds up these four corridors on this center level. Look at your HUD feed; the whole situation is there. Use the breaching weapons to blast your way through along our flanks, engage any war drones you see, and if you can, put a couple of missiles into the Objective One reactor. That may get rid of the heavy gravity, and then you can come around behind the enemy and take them in the rear.”
“If I wanted to do that I’d have joined the Navy instead of Aerospace,” Butler quipped. “Aye aye, sir; we’ll get the job done.”
***
Trissk and Rick jogged side by side, the other Ryss leading and the Marines in staggered trail.
The Human had put his helmet back on but opened his faceplate, and this seemed to help the warriors to ignore the strangeness of his ape-like visage. Trissk thought, perhaps if they don’t have to look at Rick’s bizarrely shaped head, they can imagine he’s just a Ryss of another clan, in armor.
“We go to the Armory. The weapons there are supposed to be only issued in case of Meme boarding, but we decided to break the regulations this once.” Trissk smiled at the Human, then realized that the creature probably had no idea how to interpret such facial expressions.
Rick seemed to understand the irony, though, and replied, “Our people have a saying: rules are made to be broken. You just have to know when.”
“That seems like a good saying for times like these.”
“So what will we do at the Armory that has not already been done?”
Trissk flicked his ears and glanced at the funny-smelling being. “I was hoping you could tell me. We are called warriors but we are neither trained soldiers nor ship crew. Perhaps with your, ah, advantages,” he went on, tapping his own head, “you might be able to do things we cannot. You are intelligent, it is clear, and you may smell with a fresh nose.”
“Frankly I can’t smell anything but metal and Ryss right now,” Rick said quietly, and Trissk found himself surprised yet again. Of course, we would smell different to them as well. I have much to learn about treating with aliens.
“Perhaps we should just see past the smells, then. I hope our vision is similar.”
“I’ll leave that to the biologists. I’m just a communications officer, though a damned good one if I do say so myself.”
“Then,” Trissk replied, slowing his pace, “perhaps you can communicate with some of these.” Rounding a corner, they followed the Ryss into the Armory they had so recently looted of small arms. Then, he had been frightened, but now, with these armored aliens, he found himself clearheaded and fearless.
With a sweeping gesture he indicated a line of bizarre wheeled vehicles parked neatly on one side of the huge room. Their strangeness came from the abnormal arrangement of wheels – twenty of them, all angled so that their treads rolled perpendicular to the center. If a car was an elongated cube, the wheels would be mounted on the eight corners and in the middle of every one of twelve edges, turned in twenty different directions in gimbals, so that they could lose several and still move.
Rick could see the advantage of it right away. No matter what, enough wheels would be in contact with a wall or floor. It could tip over and still roll. Gravity could shift, or even reverse, and after some bumping and bruising, it should just keep going.
Walking toward the machines, he could see movable, gimbaled cages for each driver inside with simple-looking manual controls. Armored in front and rear, but open on the sides, stubby cannon poked from the nose of each: some kind of conventional gun from the look of it. Rick reached out to touch the weapon, turning to look at Trissk inquisitively.
“It is a compressed-gas gun, throwing low-velocity exploding charges designed to do maximum damage –”
“– to Meme, right?” Rick interrupted. “I’m starting to think we’re all getting too specialized. We Humans fought against Purelings not Meme with our war machines to conquer this star system, and our weapons could have been more effective.”
Trissk replied, “We never expected to fight Desolator or its war drones. After all, we made them – or we made the machines to make them. These weapons are designed to minimize damage to ship structures. At least they are optimized for movement within the ship, to fit through all the corridors and up and down the main ramps.”
“I understand your excuse,” Rick said, “but we humans should have planned better.”
Trissk twitched his ears, then looked into the cramped cockpit of the weird corridor-car. “I have no idea how to use one of these, nor whether they have power. I am a self-taught technologist, though, so I should be able to figure it out, given time.”
“Let’s work together, then. You have tools?”
Trissk tapped the small-item pouch he always carried on his hip. “Some. I will ask that more be brought.”
Detaching his back-rack, Rick opened the largest utility bin on it and started pulling out those implements he carried. It would take some jerry-rigging, he was sure, but if they could get power to these combat cars, they would have something to add to their mobility and their firepower – and that of the Ryss.
***
The three humans crawled up out of the warm water onto the rocky shore, into the muggy night. As the environment was comfortable for Hippos, it was hot and barely tolerable for unadapted humans. Their skinsuits helped, the smart fabric wicking water and sweat to evaporate at a controlled rate, providing some cooling.
“Wait one,” Ezekiel said, and unclipped what looked like a gourd from his belt. “Pull down your face shields and hoods, and close your eyes. I’m going to cover you with a masking signature so the Sekoi won’t smell you.” A moment later, the strange living spray bottle discharged a mist onto all three from head to toe. They took a moment for it to dry from their masks.
“One more thing.” Ezekiel handed them what looked like rubber shoes. “Slip these on. As soon as you put pressure on them, they will flatten out to create a track that looks like a Hippo child, rather than a human.”
“Why didn’t you make some inflatable Hippo suits while you were at it?” Jill grumbled, putting the things on her feet.
Ezekiel chuckled, while Spooky ignored her and said, “All right. Internal chronometer set to zero on my mark: three, two, one, mark. GPS has acquired. IR glow stick is on.” He bent the plastic tube to mix its binary contents, creating an infrared glow invisible to normal Hippo or human eyesight – but not to the cybernetic optics of the two commandos.
Jill did not know whether Ezekiel could see IR wavelengths, but trusted Spooky to have thought of such elementary issues. Perhaps the small backpack he carried had goggles.
“All right, let’s go.” Spooky moved off slowly, picking his way up the rocky beach toward the island’s center.
Jill did the same, diverging slightly off to the right. Once she got above the tide line, she slipped into the scrubby forest and tuned her optics to maximum sensitivity. This allowed her to keep her distance from the fishing shacks and small freeholds that dotted the island. The Hippos kept large rat-like animals, called noiks, as humans kept dogs, and now and again she heard them call to each other with coughing squeals. Fortunately they relied more on noses than ears.
Because silence and stealth were her goals, she moved without haste, but still arrived at her target with plenty of time to spare. A long low building, it had no fence or wall. Being an island, Jill suspected there were few threats to the seafood harvest – at most, something that filled the niche of a fox or small cat. Afranan seabirds similar to gulls lined the edge of the roof, though, and she suspected the building was tightly sealed against their depredations.
She took out the two inflammatory bio-bombs Steadfast Roger had made for her. Like all Meme ships, he was a factory of nearly infinite flexibility when guided by a greater intelligence. Ezekiel had explained to her that he built the devices in the virtual reality, then simply downloaded their specifications to the ship and instructed him to gestate them.
With five minutes to her detonation mark, she glided forward out of the trees and up to the nearest door, at the back corner. Hippo-sized, of course, it loomed over her, and looked thick. Taking a ferrocrystal crowbar off her belt, she was about to pry open the door, but then stopped, remembering her training. Always try the handle; you may get lucky, Spooky’s voice from long ago echoed in her head.
It opened. Apparently there was no need to secure the building. Who steals fish except animals?
Inside, a wall of stink hit her. She breathed through her mouth to cut down on the rotting smell, then looked around. Instead of the bins or refrigerators she expected, she saw a row of what appeared to be ceramic vats. They glowed in her IR vision, and she put a palm against one: hot, perhaps sixty degrees Celsius.
A sudden hissing sound startled her, and she looked up to see gas venting from a valve near the top of one of the vats. This increased the smell even further, if that were possible.
Fermentation vats. Some kind of fish sauce or paste. I sincerely hope it isn’t flammable.
Looking around, she located a wall of neatly stacked wooden bins, perhaps what the fresh-caught fish came in before being processed. She marked them as the perfect thing to catch fire, perhaps without too much damage to the rest of the facility.
Jill walked quickly down the row toward the front of the building where she presumed some kind of office or control center would be. Form apparently followed function, as she found a place that qualified, with oversized tables, desks, computers, and telephones. A smaller room in the back seemed to be a private office with more ornate furnishings.
Setting the bio-bombs down and reattaching her crowbar to her belt, she took out the cloth bag and dumped the obols quietly out on the floor, and then returned the bag to her utility pouch. Catching movement out of the corner of her eye, she turned just in time for a pair of squealing noiks to sink their teeth into her calves.
Pain shot through her, quickly damped by her cybernetic systems. In one fast motion she extended her claws, squatted, and drove her stiffened hands into the creatures’ bodies like blades. Two more quick chops and she’d severed their spines at the neck.
Cursing, she looked at the pools of blood on the floor, some of it undoubtedly hers. Evidence, she thought. I was stupid not to check for noiks, or even a night watchman. Overconfidence kills. Bloody hell.
There was only one thing for it. Much as she regretted ruining the plant administration, she had to burn it.
First, she checked her wounds, making sure her nanites and Eden Plague had healed and sealed them, at least on the surface, before she moved from her place. She did not want a trail of human blood leading away from the scene of the crime.
Carefully she picked the two inflammable devices up. Then, closing the door to the smaller office, she dragged a wooden desk and several chairs over to make a pile surrounding the animal bodies, and then set the first bio-bomb on it. Squeezing it hard, she activated its one-minute timer, and then ran, leaving the door open, the better to oxygenate the flames.
Jill sprinted through the stink down the row of vats to the back corner near her entry point. Squeezing her second incendiary, she rolled it into a wooden bin and then exited the building.
Gulls fluttered above her head at the sudden movement, then settled back down. Jill slipped across the sandy ground into the low trees, retracing her steps toward the extraction point.
Behind her the gulls abruptly took off together, flocking and wheeling around, then spreading out in all directions. Glancing back, she could see flames showing through the tight ventilation mesh high on the wall near the front corner. The office must already be blazing.
Mechanical whooping sounded nearby in the village, and Jill cursed Hippo efficiency. The fire alarm sound would wake everyone up, turning her stealthy return route into an obstacle course. She crouched and scuttled from tree to tree, bush to bush, more concerned now about being silhouetted and remembered, an alien thing in the midst of the natives.
More squealing came from up ahead and lights began to flare in the shacks and cottages. “Spooky,” she subvocalized over her implanted comm, “my extraction may get messy. Suggest you expedite your end.”
“Understood,” came his answer. “You will reach there first. Board Roger and get immediately into the VR coffin. As soon as you are inside, maneuver the ship farther down the coast one kilometer and we will meet you there.”
“Wilco.” Jill threw herself flat beneath some bushes to avoid being seen as three Hippos pounded heavily past. Behind them a noik followed, then paused, sniffing the air with its rat-like nose. The rearmost native turned to call to the animal, and it followed reluctantly, glancing behind. She waited until they got out of sight before moving, scrambling low and avoiding the light as best she could.
Almost to the last cottage, a pack of squealing noiks suddenly rounded a shack and charged toward her position.
Fight or flight? The two Hippos that followed distantly decided for her. She turned and ran, bent over in hopes that the natives would not see, or mistake her for some other animal, or perhaps a child.
The pack turned to follow her and the Hippos followed the pack through the humid night. Once she reached the darkness well past any artificial light, she stood up and sprinted at seventy kilometers an hour with her full cybernetic capacity, leaving the noiks behind. She only slowed when she saw the IR glow stick on the sand. Scooping it up, she waded into the sea and submerged as soon as she could, swimming straight out under water. Her internal oxygen reserve would hold for ten minutes.
A hundred meters later, she saw Steadfast Roger’s IR lights and she hurried toward him. Running her hands along his top surface, she found a hole opening beneath her and slipped inside. The water-filled chamber lit around her, a bluish otherworldly glow that allowed her to see the iris above closing. A moment later, the water drained out with a sucking sound, to be replaced by air.
Jill breathed deep, then hurried to the cocoon chamber, stripping off her skinsuit and accoutrements as she walked, leaving a trail of articles in her wake. Slipping naked into her sarcophagus, she closed her eyes and tried not to flinch as the fleshy walls sucked themselves close to her skin. Induction fields reached for her brainwaves and she took deep breaths, relaxing, not fighting the transition to VR space.
As soon as she found herself within the virtual cockpit, Jill placed her hands on the half-wheel and gingerly turned it, pushing the throttle gently forward. Ezekiel had showed her the basics of the setup, but she was acutely aware of how much could go wrong. She desperately hoped that Roger could interpret her intent as well as her specific inputs, and save her from any serious mistake.
Scant minutes later, she arrived at what she believed the correct position should be. Absent a GPS fix, she had just estimated, using visual cues and staying in sight of the ocean’s edge. Now she wished she knew how to tell the ship to put up a periscope.
A screen blinked and came on obligingly, showing a dim view just above the waves. He understood me! she exulted, and for the first time felt what it must be like to have this amazing animal, this biological machine, under her command. I wonder what else he will understand, or how complex my commands can be?
Fiddling with the control under the screen, she got it turned toward the shoreline, sweeping it left and right to look for the other two. “Roger,” she said aloud, “can you put a dim infrared glow on top of the periscope, please?”
The screen blinked twice, then steadied, and a red lamp next to it came on steady. “Hope that means yes,” she mumbled, and the screen blinked twice again. “Wow, you understand spoken language?”
Two more flashes.
“Can you talk back? In English?”
Of course, Jill Repeth, came a ghostly reply.
“Oh. My. Lord.”
No, it is I, Steadfast Roger.
Jill took another look at the periscope screen, now selfishly hoping her comrades took their time rejoining the ship. Somehow she suspected she was not supposed to find out how bright Roger really was. What had she heard Ezekiel say? As smart as a dog? He’d misled her. She wondered why.
She also wondered if Spooky knew.
This suddenly drove home to her how much she did not know. Had she been wasting the last three years, staying out of the game? She refused to believe that: bearing two children was important, and so were her regular duties as a Marine. Still, a niggling voice whispered somewhere deep inside her. It sounded like Spooky’s, reminding her how much she had missed – about their adopted world, their allies, and all the complexity she had tried to keep at bay.
“Roger, will you do me a favor?”
I will.
“Please do not tell Ezekiel that I know how smart you are.”
That is impossible. As soon as we link, he and I share all knowledge. Besides, that would be dishonest.
Jill chewed her lower lip, thinking. “How about this, then: don’t tell Spooky, and ask Ezekiel not to tell him. I’ll keep his secret.”
I will be happy to pass on your message.
“Thank you.”
They come.
Jill looked at the periscope screen, seeing two figures against the shoreline as they plunged into the surf. She fidgeted, looking around with the periscope, as they entered the ship and, presumably, got into their cocoons. After what seemed an inordinately long time, they popped into VR existence.
“How did it go?” Jill and Spooky said simultaneously. “You first,” she continued as she stood up to make room for Ezekiel to take over the pilot’s seat. He gave her a speculative look as he slipped in front of her.
“Perfectly. We got in, downloaded their entire database, and got out without a hitch.”
“I got...” Jill looked down at her calves, thinking the wounds would not show in VR. Surprisingly, though, they did, and she felt the dull pain. “I got bit by some watch-noiks I was too stupid to notice. Almost bollixed up the whole thing. Sorry, you were right. I am out of practice. Thanks for taking me on this mission, Spooky.”
“Oh, you’re welcome, Jill.”
“Do you ever get tired of being smugly superior?”
“Never,” he responded with a wink, and she sighed in disgust. Spooky lit up a cigar. “Well done, everyone. Now let’s head for home.”