by S. Walker
"Drones, he says." Harland looked quietly amused. "I think we both know that's some quality bullshit, Prickles. We both been in enough engagements to know that autonomous combat crap doesn't work. Hell if Corporate could replace us with machines they'd 'ave done it by now!" He slicked a thick head of black hair backwards with both hands, then ran fingers through an absurdly luxurious beard. "Don't fuckin' miss it for a second. Grooming standards? Ugh."
"Hale." Oscar tapped the map and looked up at the taller man, grey eyes intense. "The homesteads?"
"Oh, it's 'Hale' now, is it? You must be feeling the old days. Or maybe our boxtop prophet over there got you spun up a bit. And before you blow your top, Prickles, that's a hard negative. Homesteads not reporting in, even before we lost satellites." The humor drained out of him by degrees, taking a little humanity with it. He crossed both arms over a barrel like chest, rolled sleeves pulling up to display tattoos on both biceps. "What are you thinking?"
"Not sure." While Harland reveled in the loss of grooming standards, Oscar still kept his shaved to regulation Navy standard. Force of habit, mostly-- he couldn't imagine doing otherwise. But it left him without anything to do with his hands while thinking through a problem. He jammed both into the stained overall pockets. "Still got your Ricochet?"
"Those are illegal for Colonists to own."
"So that's a yes?"
"It's a maybe, dammit. Look, hey: I've seen you like this before and yeah, there's shit going down." He motioned towards the setting sun and the black scar of smoke trailing the skyhook's uncontrolled re-entry. "But that don't mean we have to get involved. Dead stars and supernovas, we bought out our contracts! We don't owe Corporate startups a damn thing any more. Can't we just... settle? Come on."
For a brief second Oscar genuinely considered it. Just let it go, work the herds, spend evenings in the town's small community hall buying drinks for women with an ear for off-world stories. They'd been doing well for the last three years at being civilians. But responsibility wasn't something he could really put a leash on. It was what made Oscar a good Acquisitions team leader, let him climb the Corporate ladder one engagement at a time, taking Harland with him the whole way. Responsibility and preparedness saved lives... but they were also habits: Once you picked them up it took more imagination than Oscar had to just throw them away again.
Harland read him like a book. "Oh fuck me with a stun stick."
"It's just a quick check." He threw both arms up in a 'what can you do?' expression.
"For drones. Autonomous, combat equipped drones without any sort of human assistance." Harland kicked the edge of the roof in frustration, knocking more mud off his boots and drawing a few surprised looks from the crowd. He waved them off with a big smile, then lowered his tone to a hiss. "You know that's bullshit! Nothing operates by itself for very long. It just... quits. Or runs into a color it can't process and hard locks. Or starts shooting at moving bushes until the power runs out."
"I know, I get it." Oscar looked up. "But still. The hell is going on? Stations getting overrun? Warships -- multiple warships!-- in prolonged battles for weeks? Weeks?" He snorted in disbelief. "You've seen what those things can do. We've been aboard when just one of those behemoths sterilized a whole startup system. Tell me two of them fighting anything for weeks makes any kind of sense."
There was a long pause, filled only with a steady rumble of distant sonic booms and the closer mumble of low speed propaganda.
"Fine! Fuck, you got me!" Harland looked annoyed enough to chew nails. "I can't think of anything a warship wouldn't atomize in an hour or less. But you're not going to convince me we're fighting dumb-as-rocks drones, especially not some sort of crash-landed... I dunno, robot recon force bullshit."
"Robot recon force?" Oscar looked faintly impressed. "Where did you get that?"
"Some of us watch entertainment feeds once in a while, Prickles." He levelled a stubby finger at Oscar's amused smile. "I'll get my Ricochet, give me an hour to dig it up and get ready. You're driving. I'm going to be drinking. But listen to me real good," he glared, beard and stylized hair in full, glorious display. "It ain't any kind of fucking drone."
∆∆∆
"I cannot believe it's fucking drones."
Oscar shifted slightly, trying to find a more comfortable spot on bare rock. They were both currently belly-down across a shale escarpment, overlooking an extensive crash site below. Less than a mile away the wrecked remains of a transport thrust a burned metallic fuselage into the night sky like a raised middle finger, torn and curled metal flayed upwards at every angle. An impact crater a quarter mile south and a long slide mark full of debris showed how it ended up in that position. The crash itself must have been pretty spectacular: Bio-wheat fields were burned back a half mile along the entire length.
But what really had their attention were the drones.
"No, seriously. There has to be a human controller in there somewhere. Guiding those things, tasking goals, getting them directed." Harland looked pissed off on a professional level. "They never work on their own."
"Anything organic that went down on that freighter either got smashed into paste or incinerated." Oscar turned slightly, panning the scope of his Ricochet along the crash site below. "What the hell are they doing?"
Below them a churning mass of drones crawled on and around the ship remains like horrific spiders. Each machine was roughly triangular in shape with blunt, rounded corners and beveled long edges. The casing looked about three to four inches thick, made of some kind of mottled metallic looking composite that flashed a rainbow of oily colors when the light hit it just right. There didn't seem to be a defined front or a back to the things: They moved in any direction by flipping themselves completely over or skittering along their edges, pulled or flung by a series of cables that snapped out of each corner. Every now and then a group of them would suddenly snap together, cables pulling and compressing the triangular casings into complex open-sided hexagons.
That last behavior gave Oscar goosebumps. He spent several minutes zoomed in on one of the hexagons, ignoring Harland's complaints in favor of focusing on the small movements within. "Factories."
"-absolutely stupid, how could anyone even trust a machine to wait, what?" He cut off mid-rant. "Say again?"
"I think those are factories. The hexagon things they combine into. See how some of them bring pieces of the ship inside the shapes, then a little later another drone will drop out? They're making more of themselves somehow, inside there."
Harland got low, then snuggled into his Ricochet scope. Five feet of magnetic railgun whined as it cycled up, powering the sight and preparing a tungsten slug for deployment. Breath held, the bearded ex-trooper carefully scanned the activity below with both eyes wide open. "Alright, I see it." He exhaled slowly, controlled. "I don't believe it, but yeah-- that's what it looks like. Well... shit."
Oscar nodded in agreement, then elbow-walked backwards away from the edge to avoid skylining himself. He wasn't sure the drones used optics but old habits died hard. Clear of the edge he sat up, clicking the safety on and setting the railgun within easy reach just in case. He got out the satellite maps and laid them on the rock, tapping the red X marks over the farming homesteads. "So, they're hostile for sure. Everything between the crash sites was razed in a straight line. But are they targeting the farming homesteads, or are they just going from crash to crash for the resources?"
"Does it make a difference? That's a couple dozen people dead already." Harland patted his rifle. "I'm of a mind to spend a couple hours making incendiary loads, then sit back a couple miles and blow large, flaming holes in everything."
"That's definitely a plan." Oscar didn't look up from the map, eyes thoughtfully tracing out elevation markings.
"How come when you say it like that all I hear is 'what a horribly bad plan'?"
"I didn't say that."
"Maybe I should put large, flaming holes through you."
"I might have been t
hinking it." The taller man snorted in disbelief. Oscar relented, gracing his partner with an apologetic grin. "There are some... holes in that plan, though."
Harland's eyes came down to half mast. He let the pun die in the stale air, then continued to wait until the desiccated remains blew away. "I'm going to let that slide just once, Prickles. But why are large, fiery explosions not going to work?"
"Couple of reasons. First, they rode down on a broken transport and survived re-entry. That's, what? Over three thousand degrees? If we had military-grade thermal rounds or white phosphorus loads we could beat that, but otherwise I don't think it'll be good enough. Then there's the other problem."
Harland scratched his beard, then started patting his pockets. "I'm going to need another drink for this shit."
"It's quantity, since you're not interested in asking. There's too many of them, all over the place." Oscar frowned, using one fingertip to backtrace their route from town. Their path dipped and angled in places around rolling hills, but mostly ended up in a straight line from the crash site directly into Seraherd. "You're a hell of a shot, Hale-"
"Damn straight."
"-but even if you hit every single time we'd need over five thousand railgun casings. I doubt you have even a hundred, even if you managed to smuggle them out in every single piece of clothing you had when we left headquarters."
He raised one short finger in protest, then put it down again. "Okay. Good point. So I'll take the first hundred, then you can shoot the next four thousand or so."
"I have no ammunition at all, actually."
Harland recoiled with something like actual disgust. "You went full civilian? Prickles, I am... whoo. I don't even know what to say. This might be the closest I'll ever come to disowning you." Then he looked down at their rifles, side by side like two lethal birds on sleek tripods. "Wait, why the hell did you keep your Ricochet without any freaking ammunition for it?"
Memories rushed up, breaking a hard seal somewhere deep in Oscar's heart. They stormed through his mind, grabbed his hindbrain and took every emotion for a vicious joy ride through the years. Dozens of engagements. Hundreds of buddies, casualties, friends made and lost in the face of Corporate greed and hostile takeovers. Screams, explosions, triumphant yells and the cold vacuum of soundless conflicts.
He opened his mouth to explain it all, then realized he was eye to eye with Harland's sympathetic expression. "Memories."
They both looked away. Harland cleared his throat, turned and spat somewhere far out into the grass. "Yeah. Memories. Fuck 'em."
Oscar deliberately changed the subject, breaking hard away from an unspoken minefield. "Anyways, I think we have a way to take care of them all of once."
"I'm listening."
"We'll need the mining explosives from the dig site up north-- do you have any left over?" He knew the taller man was a pack rat when it came to explosives. Odds were good a couple of the small charges somehow ended up 'misplaced' into a personal backpack.
"Yup, got ten of 'em. But ten small packages isn't going to do much for that swarm down there. And I don't mind telling you I sure as shit am not volunteering to run my ass straight into them chucking bombs everywhere."
"You won't have to. In fact we might not even see them at all. Here's what we're going to do..."
∆∆∆
Early morning in Seraherd was a quiet affair, if one ignored the constant susurrus of several thousand farm animals calling wake-up sounds to each other. Residents typically didn't get out of their premade habitations until the crack of six, when daylight was just starting to crest the horizon enough to walk around unassisted. It was better that way: The town was an agro startup, not a city, so things like streetlights and always-burning exterior LEDs were a luxury most people skipped out on. Which meant trips outside in the dark required a flashlight, a keen eye and a set of footwear you didn't mind getting a permanent slurry of animal shit stuck on.
Not to mention the town layout. Specifically the eastern side of town where the large meat processing facility was, right next to the enormous stockyards of docile protein still on the hoof. It was a fact that life on Palos-1 involved a certain knowledge of prevailing winds, most notably that night time gusts tended to travel west while daytime currents drifted eastward. Accordingly absolutely everyone lived west of the plant and fields, choosing to take the biological smells in the dead of night while they were asleep rather than suffer through sunlight-scorched biohazard breezes during the day. It made for a fragrant morning, but usually paid off later.
This was not a typical morning.
Shortly before dawn the far edge of the processing facility erupted in a cacophony of explosions, a ripping tear of five blasts in a timed series ten seconds long. It was so loud residents nearly a mile away bolted upwards in bed, hands out and clawing for light toggles as they yelled in surprise. Men hollered, women screamed and children burst into tears, sure that some kind of calamity was falling out of the sky to destroy everything. If that seemed like an oddly specific fear then, well-- it was on a lot of people's minds recently.
But the blasts had a similar (and more powerful) effect on Seraherd's primary purpose as a settlement: Their entire herd of bioengineered beef startled as one, then tore straight through the retaining wall of the paddock in a straight line away from the facility.
Oscar watched through his scope as several thousand animals stampeded shoulder to shoulder directly east in a wave nearly a mile long. It looked like a black-and-tan tide of death sweeping the grasslands, leaving nothing but pounded dirt and shattered fencing material behind. A small harvester just behind the barrier never had a chance, going over in a flash of metal as a ton of machinery got rolled, then smashed to pieces and crushed under ten thousand stomping pistons.
He panned the Ricochet upwards, tracking the stampede progress. "Harland, you copy?"
"Copy." He was only about a mile out, sitting on a hillside near where the herd would have to make a decision to cut north or stay east. "Now?"
"Give it about ten seconds." Oscar timed it, eyes intent. The lead animals reached the edge of the hills, hesitating as two directions suddenly opened up for easy access. "Go."
Somewhere out on the hillside Harland squeezed a detonator, triggering another timed series of blasts across the north hills. Instantly the lead herd animals turned away, heads down and legs pumping eastward. "That got it. They'll be on the crash site in about a minute."
With a small smile, Oscar sat up and started disassembling his weapon. "Alright, pack it up. Let's put everything away and report in for work. Don't want to scare anyone, and I have a feeling we're going to be catching stragglers off that herd for at least a week. Better get started early."
"Yes, mom." Harland sounded smug. "Hey, Prickles?"
"Yeah?"
"Ever imagine you'd be using cows as a carpet bomb?"
He laughed once, sharp and pleased. "Never. I'm not that creative."
"You don't say."
Chapter 27
Executive Mergers
Lieutenant Reals ran into a surprising amount of difficulty when it came to murdering Executive Targer.
"Okay, I'm hearing you all." She looked around Kipper's small docking area, one hand anchored to keep both boots on the deck. Zero-G was a problem like that. "But I really cannot emphasize enough that we're taking aboard a human time bomb."
Paul kept himself rooted to the opposite wall by looping his Medical bag around a portable cargo lift. She'd been surprised to learn he had a specialty-made corpsman uniform, dark Corporate Navy blue with a long red slash-and-cross denoting medical status. It must have cost him quite a bit to come by-- he was over seven feet tall and built like someone looked at a stick figure and thought it seemed too skinny. Regulation sizes did not cover that, although he managed to look surprisingly good in a recovery harness festooned with diagnostic devices.
He wasn't, however, happy. "As much as I dislike Management in general, both in specific and as a whole... I
do not think I could stand by while we deliberately purge an airlock on someone."