by M. D. Cooper
Are they supposed to do that? she wondered. Details of police procedure—when they could fire on suspects and all that—was not something she had ever needed to know in the past.
She stood inside the entrance to the room, waiting for the cop to step through. Five seconds ticked past, then ten, then twenty.
Shit, he must be waiting for backup. Smart man.
A moment later, weapons fire sounded and a barrage of projectiles tore through the wall where she was standing.
I guess they have IR, Rika thought. She considered her options and then did the exact opposite of what the police expected: She broke through the wall and rushed them.
There were two of them, and neither even had time to register surprise before Rika tore the rifle from the first cop’s hands and smashed it into the head of the second—as gently as she could manage.
Then she hit the first cop on the side of the head with the barrel of her GNR and watched him fall.
“Damn squishies,” she muttered, examining their vitals. “You’ll live.”
She returned to the room she had just burst out of, which had an excellent view of the four cruisers parked below—pulled up right in front of the broad stairs leading into the villa. Rika scanned them for occupants. Her luck, such as it was, had held; they were empty.
Rika took aim and fired an electron beam at the first cruiser, blowing a hole through it and shattering its battery. She fired on the second, and was lining up on the third when an all too familiar sound met her ears.
Gatling guns always take an instant to spin up before they fire, and that telltale whine was all it took for Rika to dive out of the window as the room above and behind her was cut to shreds from the high-velocity rounds.
If those dumbasses kill their own people back in the hall, I’ll kill ‘em, Rika thought angrily.
She looked up and saw the air-cav only twenty meters above the cruisers. It had stopped firing, but was repositioning to shoot at her new location.
Rika didn’t give it time to take aim. She ran across the open space in front of the villa’s main doors and leapt off the ruins of one cruiser onto the villa’s wall, her feet grasping a windowsill. She crouched, and a second jump propelled her to the villa’s roof.
The air-cav was turning, and its gatling gun was winding up once more when Rika leapt from the roof, sailed through the air, and landed on the air-cav.
She looked inside and saw that there was indeed a human pilot in the cockpit. Rika leveled her rifle at him and screamed “Land”, loud enough that they probably could have heard her halfway down the valley.
Once they were suitably disabled, she brought the air-cav up over the villa and pushed the manual control stick forward. The air-cav pitched, and Rika jumped out, landing again on the villa’s roof.
The air-cav sped forward and slammed into the escarpment behind the villa before falling to the ground in a twisted heap of metal.
Rika turned and scanned the road, easily spotting the car her team had stolen from Cheri’s garage. She leapt off the villa’s roof and chased after. A few shots came from the villa as Rika disappeared into the night. Most missed, and those that didn’t were unable to penetrate her armor.
She rolled her head back and laughed as she ran down the mountainside, not bothering with following the road. She reviewed her sensory capture of the battle. As far as she could tell, she hadn’t killed any of the police. Maybe she wasn’t just a killer after all.
Rika neared the location where the other car was hidden and scanned the area to make sure it was clear. As she looked up, a flash of light appeared in the skies, and a scan showed that there was another air-cav closing in. IR indicated another human pilot—this time approaching at a much higher altitude.
Rika raced to the road, reaching it just as the air-cav opened fire on Basilisk’s escape vehicle. Her electron beam wouldn’t be effective against the air-cav at its current range, so Rika sped up, racing toward it. Ahead she could see Leslie leaning out of the car, firing on the air-cav. Her shots were hitting the craft, but appeared to make no impact.
Barne swerved the car wildly, avoiding the air-cav’s spray of bullets. It pulled around, coming in for a strafing run behind the car. Rika knew it wouldn’t miss this time, and scanned the trees for a good candidate to climb. They were all young and spindly; then her eyes locked on a thirty-meter pine close by.
Without a moment’s hesitation, Rika leapt into the tree’s branches and clambered up its trunk. When she reached the top, Rika leapt toward the air-cav, closing the distance enough—she hoped—and fired her electron beam.
The straight line of lightning streaked out and hit the air-cav on its left side, taking out one of its a-grav units and sending the craft into a tailspin.
The pilot, either purposefully or by accident, opened up with the gatling gun, and fifty-caliber rounds filled the air in a broad circle around the falling air-cav.
Rika saw that the car with Team Basilisk in it was past the falling air-cav, but she was not. In fact, her trajectory still had her approaching it.
A round struck her thigh, then another hit her in the chest, and two more slammed into her left arm.
Rika hit the ground hard and rolled to her feet, her HUD registering severe damage to her left arm. She looked down and saw that an armor plate had been shattered below her elbow. She tried to flex her fingers, but they didn’t move.
She glanced over the rest of herself and saw that her chest plate had a microfracture; she was otherwise all right. Ahead, the air-cav’s damaged a-grav unit burst into flames, and Rika rushed forward to save the cop inside.
Within, she saw a woman slumped over the controls. Rika reached down to tear off the craft’s canopy, when she remembered that her hand wasn’t working.
Thank the stars for clawed feet, she thought with a smile, and smashed her foot through the canopy’s clear plas, and then pushed the eject button next to the woman’s chair.
An instant later, the chair flew from the downed craft, and deployed a parachute. It settled down to the ground one hundred meters up the road.
“You’ll thank me later,” Rika said, running from the burning air-cav and ducking into the trees a second before it exploded.
Four minutes later she arrived at the cars. Leslie was helping Jerry into the backseat of the vehicle she and Barne had brought. He looked a bit better but was still holding his head with one hand.
Barne had the trunk open and pulled out a small package. “Hopefully we didn’t leave too much DNA in the villa, but we’d best scrub what we can.”
He held up the package and then tossed it into the car they had stolen from Cheri. Small silver filaments spread from the kit, sweeping over every surface in the vehicle in a matter of seconds before retracting into the box.
“Like we were never here,” Barne said with a smile.
He closed the trunk and got in the driver’s seat while Rika collapsed in the passenger’s side.
“You OK?” Leslie asked. “Your arm looks funny.”
“Yeah, mostly,” Rika replied. “Took some shots to my left arm—not the organic part. Not sure how messed up it is yet, but my hand’s offline.”
Barne backed the car out of the copse of trees it was hidden in and gave Rika a smile. “You know, being a mech must not be so bad sometimes. No pain, and you can swap that arm out in minutes.”
Rika closed her eyes and sighed. Maybe it isn’t so bad. Maybe not always, at least.
DELIBERATION
STELLAR DATE: 12.17.8948 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: Enlisted Commissary, MSS Foe Hammer
REGION: Interstellar Space, near the Praesepe Cluster
David sat in the Foe Hammer’s enlisted commissary taking a meal at a table with Aaron and Genevieve, two other specialists who worked in the fleet’s CIC on the ship.
“Something’s not right,” David said, and he reached into his pocket, pulled out a dampener, and set it on the table. It wasn’t uncommon for the CIC teams to discuss their work at lunch, and because it got more work from them at the same pay, their superiors allowed it—so long as they took precautions not to be overheard.
David smiled at Aaron’s pet term for his abilities. Aaron wasn’t a P-Cog. His augmentations had been focused on heavy mathematics for close-quarters fleet engagements; the alterations he had undergone at the hands of the GAF were even more extreme than what the mechs had undergone.
Where David’s alterations had been focused on enhancing the interconnectivity in his brain, Aaron’s had been centered on adding raw computational power. In the war, the official term for people like him was ‘Non-AI Sentient Computer’. Just like the mechs and the others who were heavily modded, the military had both treated and labeled NAISCs as objects.
Unlike with David, they hadn’t bothered with saving any visual aspect of Aaron’s humanity. His head was a half-meter-tall grey ovoid with two bulbous lenses where his eyes should be—though no organic eyes lay beneath. His face was also devoid of nose or mouth; his air coming through two breathing ports on his upper torso, and his food through the NutriPaste socket on the surface of his stomach.
David admitted that ‘torso’ wasn’t quite the right word for Aaron’s body. Because the Genevian Space Force had treated NAISCs like mobile organic AIs, they had removed all of Aaron’s limbs and set what remained of his body inside a hard shell.
Though David had never said it aloud, Aaron looked much like a snowman that just needed the bottom ball.
Luckily for Aaron, the Old Man had taken him in right at the end of the war, and had a mobile stand of sorts constructed for him. It had a cup that his body sat in and six legs—any of which could also double as hands, as needed—stemming from the stand upon which the cup sat.
The level of technology to undo what had been done to Aaron was outside of what the Marauders possessed, and David had been impressed with the level of self-acceptance Aaron managed. David was sure that he’d lose his mind if he were in his friend’s place.
One thing was for certain; it made Aaron one mean Snark player. He could simultaneously play six games against separate opponents, and typically win five out of the six.
Teams on the Foe Hammer continually tried to beat him—many of their players were heavily augmented as well—but the best contenders had still only managed two wins to his four.
David shook his head. “Sorry, not enough coffee today.”
“A P-Cog’s favorite stabilizer,” Genevieve said as she held hers out to David. “Need my packet?”
“No, I’m OK, just had one—it’ll kick in shortly,” David replied.
“Suit yourself,” Genevieve replied.
David nodded his thanks. Genevieve was the most normal-looking of their little group. After the war she was able to access her savings, and she’d had enough money to get her shark fins replaced. She now sported a head covered in thick hairs that served the same purpose as his steel ridges.
Not that anyone would mistake the gleaming, white, one-centimeter-thick strands for real hair, but it certainly beat metal fins.
Genevieve was the backbone of their unit. Nothing fazed her; she never became upset, worried, or even agitated. She was an endless sea of calm. David had relied on her more than once to help him through hard times.
She always held herself perfectly erect, and her high, sloped forehead spoke of an origin in New Sweden—though her family had lived for generations in Genevia, on one of the terraformed planets close to a G-spectrum star.
As a result, Genevieve had naturally dark skin that contrasted with her white ‘hair’, giving her an otherworldly look.
David coughed and tried to get his mind back on track, pushing down the excess stimuli around him to focus on what he had discovered. Patterns, analyzing connections—that’s where he found his peace.
“It’s with Operation Phoenix, of course,” he began. “I’m worried about its effects.”
“You mean the change of hands for the Theban stars?” Genevieve asked.
“That’s one way to put it, but yeah,” David replied. “See, I don’t think that this benefits the Septhians as much as everyone would like to think it does.”
“David does have a point, though,” Genevieve said, interrupting Aaron’s spiel. “By that logic, there should just be one team hitting the president and nothing more—well, maybe her VP, too.”
“OK, I know it’s all just suspicion and conjecture and I can’t go anywhere with that,” David replied. “But it did start me digging. I began to look at all the logs for the Old Man’s talks with his Septhian contacts who arranged Phoenix in the first place.”
“I didn’t look at the messages themselves, just the logs in the comm systems.”
Genevieve frowned. “Marauders, the Old Man especially, talk to Septhians all the time. Septhia is where our main facilities are. How could you pick out the communication with the contact for this operation amidst all the noise?”
“Because it was different,” David said. “It had a unique pattern.”
“It was in the packet segmentation on the comms,” David said. “Septhians don’t use octal code in their comm systems.”
“Yeah, they use that weird-ass base-9 setup. They folded their parity bit right into the data structure. It’s always a pain in the ass to translate.”
David nodded. “Yeah, and you can see the pattern it creates in the headers alone—you don’t even need to look at the message content. But there was a subset of messages where the pattern was different, and they were all communications sent to the Old Man.”
“I thought about that, too,” David said. “But I really wanted to know how to achieve that pattern. I got kinda obsessed with it. I converted messages from a hundred different source systems into base-9, and then back to base-8; everything from raw-binary to SAI analog code systems. A lot were close, real close, and within the margin of error. But there were three that were dead matches.”
“Here goes,” Genevieve said.
“The Tarurae high command’s exalted network, the Trisilieds space force comms, and…the Nietzscheans.”
“I don’t think so,” David said. “See, it wasn’t that the whole message was a red flag—just the parity bits. And not all of them, either—it was a weird pattern that looked almost random. Well, it still does, but I know something’s in there. It’s a pattern I can almost make out, like a detail that, if I just squint at right, I’ll see.”
Aaron said.
David raised his hands and nodded. “Hey, Aaron. I appreciate what the Old Man’s built for us here as much as anyone. But if I have a Nietzschean connection to Phoenix, I have to pursue it. Do you think you could take a look at what I have?”
Aaron didn’t respond for a moment, and then his long head nodded.
David passed his analysis over the Link to his friend.
“Maybe what?” Genevieve asked.
“Simulate it,” David said.
“That’s it, then. There’s a Nietzschean somewhere in the Septhian government!” David exclaimed.
Genevieve sat back and let out a long whistle while Aaron’s ovoid head pivoted.
“I think your findings are sound enough to take it to Commander Siemens,” Genevieve said. “I would, at least. Let her decide if the intel should get pushed up the chain or not.”