She suddenly looked troubled. Staring at the ground for a moment longer, she wrung her hands in frustration and sniffed back tears before continuing. Then she raised her head and looked me squarely in the eye.
“Can you forgive me? You now know more than I ever intended you should. You were intended to remain ignorant of everything non-essential to our mission, so as not to be burdened by painful internal conflicts. We knew you would fall in love with me, or at least be strongly lustful. That was unavoidable; lust is my stock in trade. I was not however supposed to reciprocate, to fall in love with you. That was unplanned, perhaps unfortunate. It may have cost us the mission. It may have cost us our very lives.
“My weakness has placed a burden on you that you should not have carried. Can you now shoulder this awful burden and carry on? Can you complete the mission without letting this burden kill us all?”
I answered by taking her into my arms and kissing her. Petch turned away apparently in disgust. She returned my kiss, then almost in tears, I pushed her away.
Steeling myself, I stood and faced her squarely. I said, “I think I know what you mean. I cannot afford to think of you as a lover, a bedmate or even a woman. I must harden my heart, no matter how strong the need, like an addict going cold turkey, the slightest break in my resolve would result in complete relapse. So you are my fellow warrior and nothing more.”
I put my hands on her shoulders. I went on, “For the duration of this mission, we are brothers at arms, but that alone. I need to be able to steel myself so that if need be, I can muster the strength to cut into your flesh with a knife to retrieve the data capsule within. If you fall in battle, I need to be able to do whatever is necessary to carry on, without hesitation, without recriminations.”
I kissed her again, “I must put my heart on hold. Until after the mission. I will not make you any promises for then, and I ask none of you. After the mission, if we both live, we start anew.”
She pulled me to her, gave me one last passionate kiss, then drew back. “After the mission!”
I heard Petchy whisper softly to himself, “Oh Brother!”
Looking Glass
I sat in stunned silence after that. I no longer wanted to know more about the mission. I needed time to think, to process, and to digest all I had learned. I needed to screw my head on straight to be able to face what was on the other side of the portal. I needed time, but I had almost none. Our date with the machines of Planet K could not be postponed.
I began to understand why Petchy had been so upset. If she is almost supernaturally able to manipulate males using her looks and her pheromones, then any thought I had about her was suspect. Any feeling I had was given to me from outside. I had been shamelessly manipulated from the moment I first met her. Since that day in the Plaza, really. Had any thought since that moment been my own?
I saw why Petch had called her an old hag. He was not just talking about her age, which I realized I STILL didn't know! He also meant her almost supernatural, witch-like power to manipulate. Could a man around her ever be his own man? Could a mortal man under her influence ever make any decision on his own and honestly trust he was free of manipulation?
I recognized that this was not so strange. The game of sexual roulette demands a suspension of logic and reason when passion reigns. Nature has always provided women with a touch of power over men, even without her unnatural enhancements. But Oh! Those enhancements. I burned for her still, even in my growing anger! One smile from her and I would forgive everything.
She was, to put it colloquially, a witch. A cast-iron, cold-blooded triple-plated witch. A scheming bitch of a witch, willing to do anything, stoop to any level, use her supernatural powers without any limit to attain her goals. That her goals included saving all of humanity changed not a thing. Ends never justify means, we are told, right?
I think I understand Petch's original colorfully descriptive rant now.
Despite my anger, despite feeling betrayed, manipulated and sucker-punched, I still felt the passion she incited. A part of me would forgive anything, accept any abuse just to have her smile at me. That magical, arousing smile. What man would not do anything for her? Her pheromone enhanced smile alone could move mountains. Could any drug be more addicting? Could any narcotic warp a man's judgment more?
Could I handle it if she fell in battle? Could I lock away my emotions and soldier on, no matter what? I resolved I would. I must. I must harden my heart and forget that we had made love. We are brothers at arms, and nothing more. So it must be. But how?
I was still ruminating on the subject, in a way working up to a solid hate for my newly unveiled great-grandmother when the portal opened!
Teena touched my arm and pointed. Startled, I jumped, returning from the deep recesses of my psyche to the harsh world before me with a start. Collecting myself, I looked where she pointed. I saw nothing. She pointed again, and then I realized what I was looking at. On the stone side of the marker, the quartz stone that had been pointed out to me had gotten darker. I looked critically at the portal itself and realized there was a faint shimmer in the air, like heat rising off of a sun-drenched highway.
I examined it minutely. I angled my head back and forth as if trying to find the optimal angle to view a screen. There, at just the perfect spot I could see through the haze, and mirage-like, see something dark, with flashes of light behind it. At the ideal location and angle, I could see through to another world. The slightest shift and it was gone!
I asked, “How long will it stay open?” Teena responded, “This opening lasts for just under twenty minutes.”
“Should we go right away, or wait a few minutes, that vigilance on the other side might relax. If the other side knew it would open, perhaps they would give it the most scrutiny immediately, then less if nothing comes through right away.”
Teena and Petch looked at one another. Petch said “These are machines, they don't get tired or complacent. I don't think it would matter.”
Teena shook her head. “What you say is true enough, but Fitz has a point. All computers, no matter how powerful, have finite resources. Knowing the portal will appear would focus attention there. But like any process in any computer, if a process is idle for a while and especially if there are other demands on the system – and we sincerely hope our brothers are placing other demands on the system – idle processes get swapped out of memory. That's the principle behind virtual memory, where unused memory is moved to storage and lowered in priority in the run queue. Fitz is right, waiting a little while might work in our favor. But only a tiny amount. Once it sees us, it can elevate the run queue and swap back into memory very quickly. The advantage will be milliseconds at best and will depend on precisely how busy the system is. But milliseconds count!”
That made sense to my systems engineering mindset. I had at times in my career spent hours optimizing systems for precisely those reasons, hoping to shave a few milliseconds off of the response time for some critical process. I said, “Then we wait. But for how long?”
We debated it a while. I realized Teena knew quite a lot about computers, memory allocation stacks, run queues and such. She had evidently worked as a systems engineer. In the end, we settled on about five minutes as our best guess of the optimal wait time.
In truth, we had too little data about what was happening in the system to make any intelligent judgment, for that matter we had no way to know when five minutes had passed anyway. Perhaps we could count our heartbeats.
We had divested ourselves of all our supplies, our travel packs, and our weaponry. I looked longingly at my exquisitely crafted bow, The Lady Seven, and her equally exquisite ammunition. Too bad I could not take them with me as I suspected we could seriously use them on the other side. I should have left her in the care of our support team, asked them to send her back to Stapleya. I had become so used to running with a weapon at the ready that to do otherwise those last 15 or so miles had not even crossed my mind. I packed her carefully and stored
her beneath some rocks, promising her that I would do all within my power to return and claim her again soon.
As we were pausing, I suddenly noticed Teena had forgotten her hair restraint. She had been forced to restrain her long crimson mop for our runs, and I assume she had become so used to it that she had forgotten. I quickly motioned to her to remove it. She was surprised and hastily yanked it away. Disaster narrowly averted at the last instant.
Perhaps the minor mass of the bit of string and leather would have passed the portal, but maybe not. She had said this particular portal was more finicky than most. Quite likely, had she tried to enter the wormhole with that in her hair, the Portal would have popped and disappeared, committing her, and anyone with her to a sumptuous feast, as the main course! Petch and I both checked ourselves for any other forgotten objects. Whew!
Very shortly, Petch called 'TIME.' We chug-a-lugged the last of our water as there wouldn’t be any on Planet ‘K.’ Then, taking a deep breath, we jumped for the portal. Perhaps our strategy worked, at least we were not shot down instantly as we popped out into the hostile land.
I burst through the portal and hit the ground in a roll. I leaped to my feet and began running. Much too late I realized I had not asked what direction I was supposed to run, so I just ran straight away from the portal.
Petch and Teena hit the ground milliseconds behind me and launched themselves in a different direction, yelling 'This way!' I executed a hard 90-degree turn and headed in their direction just as an explosion erupted right where I would have been had I not turned. We later decided that by coming thru first and inadvertently charging directly toward the citadel I had drawn the machine's attention and fire, allowing Teena and Petch to come through unscathed. Their yell and my sudden, unplanned course correction had saved my very life. My unintended 'wrong-way Corrigan' and sudden course correction might well have saved us all.
Several more explosions ranged around us, making my ears ring, and bullets stitched the soil around us, but after a spot of adrenalin augmented calisthenics we dove over a small outcropping and hugged the ground, off the radar and out of the line of sight of the enemy. We hoped.
We heard weapons fire in the distance, but the worst noise near us died away when we jumped over the outcropping.
Ignoring the minor injuries, and doing my best to ignore the heat and control my breathing, we lay in the dirt for a few moments waiting to see if the enemy would let us go, or continue to attack us. Scant moments later I heard a mechanical whirring and scanned the sky above us for the source. At first, I saw nothing, but then against the heavy overcast I saw movement, and my ears tracked the sounds to the object I saw.
A small drone was circling our position at a low altitude. It appeared too small to carry a weapon but certainly had a camera. No doubt we were under surveillance by an eye in the sky. I judged its position and range, deciding to have a try at it. Scooping up the nearest fist-sized rock from the coarse terrain, I suddenly stood up and hurled the missile at the flying camera with all my strength.
Missed! Dodging slightly in response to my effort, it signaled it indeed was under intelligent real-time control. Our every action was being watched and evaluated for threat-level. We could not move until this was taken care of, lest the enemy predict our next moves. We believed the enemy did not know about the small cave and wanted to keep it that way.
I heaved another missile at it, and again it dodged precisely the same. With sudden inspiration, I handed Petchy a rock and instructed him to take his best shot, and grabbed another of my own. Watching him wind up, timing my drawdown to release scant milliseconds after his, I targeted the space just below the drone. Since it could evaluate our trajectory and dodge, hitting it with a single missile was improbable. It was quick enough to move out of the way of anything we could hurl. I was hoping that it would dodge Petchy's effort in the same manner and direction it had my two previous shots.
The strategy worked! The crafty machine indeed ducked under Petch's hard-thrown projectile just as I had expected. It, however, had not recognized my own incoming bolt and dipped right into my path. The drone rewarded our efforts with a most satisfying crunch as the machine fell to the ground mere feet from our position. I smashed it again with another rock to ensure it was well and truly dead.
Petch turned to look at me with a look of incredulity on his face as he divined what had just happened. His awe only lasted an instant, but I felt satisfaction, having not only defeated an enemy agent but also attained a new level of respect from my former mentor. I began to believe I was earning my leadership position on our team.
Flying spy-camera defeated, Teena pushed some debris away and revealed a small cave in the side of the hill. We crawled inside before the A.I. could send another drone. The next one might be armed with more than a camera!
Now that I was not running and fighting for my life, I was suddenly overwhelmed by the heat. Teena had promised it would be hot here. Like a blast furnace. Like the engine room of a steam-powered freighter in the tropics. The hottest day on 'Planet Oz' was a balmy spring morning compared to this.
It was clear that the heat would rapidly kill us due to dehydration if nothing else. The sweat was pouring off my body, and I was having trouble breathing. We were scraped and bruised from our dive into the dirt. Walking barefoot to the chin on the exquisitely groomed forest trails maintained by the fur-people was one thing, diving unprotected into the harsh rocky soil of this rough terrain was quite another! Bare skin has no place on this battlefield!
Cursing the improbable and circuitous logic that had brought us to this battleground naked and vulnerable, I turned my attention to the promised weapons cache, hoping that we would find weapons and supplies that would better prepare us for the fight ahead.
I'm not sure what I expected. I mean, in all the Sci-Fi action movies, when the hero needs to weaponize, there is a huge closet with a formidable display of weaponry neatly racked, ready for use. Sliding racks and racks of everything from knives, to full-automatics, all carefully displayed.
Weapons cache my clavicle! We had a hole in the ground and a pair of canvas bags, wrapped in a tarp. In the dirt!
Citadel
Grabbing the tarp, I unwrapped it and took inventory. Short inventory. This weapons cache yielded meager pickings. Haven't these folks seen any action movies? Guess not. Well, here we are, and this is what we have to work with; Not much!
We had a huge tarp, much larger than what was required to wrap a pair of canvas bags. We had some rope tying them together, and the two small canvas bags.
Firearms? No AK-47, no grenade launchers for us. We got two revolvers, six shots each, and no additional ammunition. That doesn't seem like much to storm a citadel. There was also a military grade multi-tool with pliers and knife blades, some string, tape and two vests with pockets.
The smaller bag contained the most promising, most weapon-like items. Two more-or-less textbook WWI hand-grenades and a small block of what appeared to be modeling clay. Not being an expert in explosives, I was puzzled at first. I turned it over, looked carefully at it, smelled it. Realization dawned, this was the promised high explosive. Or so I hoped. It must be!
I stared at it for a moment, wondering what I would use it for. I am not an expert, but I was pretty sure that C4 would not explode without a severe concussion, typically delivered via a blasting cap. Which we didn't have. I searched the bags and the pockets of the vests. Nada.
I dug into the ground searching for more materials. I quizzed my companions, got nothing but a shrug.
It is what it is. I shrugged back!
I thought about how to storm the citadel with our meager resources. It seemed impossible. We were several hundred feet from the nearest point of access, a drain covered by a fully automatic weapon aimed by a computer that would be unrelenting and merciless. Any approach to that drain would draw weapons fire, certain death. It seemed as if our world-saving, as well as we ourselves, was to die right here in this hole.
Petch responded, “What are you getting at?” I answered, “I mean does it simply fire at anything that moves, or does it seek only humans or human artifacts, and only fire on things it considers a threat?”
Teena interjected, “Do you think you can simply raise your hands and say 'Don't Shoot' and it won't consider you a threat?”
Petch shook his head as he responded, “It is an AI, and knows humans and many types of equipment that humans use. It won't waste ammunition on things that aren't threats. You cannot exhaust its ammunition by making it shoot at meaningless targets. It's too smart for that.”
“That's not exactly my plan. My idea was more along the lines of disguising myself so the machine would not recognize me, and then just walking right up to it and poking its eyes out.”
Teena squinted at me like a mother of a child who has just said something extraordinarily stupid. “How do you propose to do that?”
I elaborated, “I was thinking I could take the tarp, and get under it, and crawl along the ground slowly, slowly, as if the wind were merely blowing the tarp along. Once I was inside the range of fire, I would then stand up and simply throw rocks at it, breaking the camera so it can't see, or even knocking the gun mount askew.”
I was about to bet my very life and the success of the mission on a harebrained scheme. I insisted we needed to test the idea before trying it for real. We experimented using the rope and various sticks and branches to push and drag the tarp around within sight of the camera watching the area. We could see the gun swivel and track the tarp, but it did not open fire. After several minutes of taunting the machine, we concluded it would not fire on us. This part of my harebrained scheme might actually work.
Teena looked pensive as she thought about the idea. Petch raised an objection. “Those are armored. Do you think you can throw a rock hard enough to inflict serious damage?”
Chromosome Quest Page 20