by M. D. Cooper
She smiled wickedly.
“Give me a few hours, and you’ll have your signal.”
QUARANTINE CAMPS
STELLAR DATE: 08.25.3246 (Adjusted Gregorian)
LOCATION: Happo Settlement, Q-Camp Fourteen
REGION: 20 kilometers outside Hokkaido, Galene
Khela and her band of Marines were arranged just outside Q-camp Fourteen, awaiting the runner that would deliver their weekly report. This was the third camp this week that her team had checked in on, and one of sixteen ringing a ruined twenty-kilometer stretch of land. That band of land, in turn, surrounded Galene’s main elevator and the ruin that was once the city of Hokkaido.
Some called that twenty-kilometer span a ‘no man’s land’. It was a term Khela had never heard before, but it fit…so long as they added women, AIs, dogs, deer, and anything large enough to register on scan and be summarily obliterated by Galene Space Command.
With the transfer of power up on the ring, the new government had authorized an increasing number of EMP strafing runs made periodically upon the camps themselves. And the GSC no longer restricted itself only to EMPs; carpet-bombing tactics were apparently the new administration’s solution to everything these days.
Careful examination of the planet explained such actions—although it did nothing to justify them. Everywhere you looked, you could see that the phage had begun to encroach upon the planet itself. Nearby trees were slowly being overtaken by nanofilament and morphing into network towers. Boulders were covered in power grids. Some nearby scrub had even transmuted into a waste reclamation pipeline.
Xiao was up in the branches of what used to be a banyan tree but was slowly being taken over by a nano scaffolding assembly. Lena was tucked up against a boulder, while Ramon was the most exposed of them all, trusting their scan disruptor camo and a simple bit of ghillie concealment netting to help him blend with the long grasses in which he lay.
It had been four months since Colonel Banks had smuggled them down to Galene; in all, he’d managed to ship four full spec-ops teams to Noa before he’d been removed from active duty.
Don’t go there, Khela. Don’t think about that now.
The Marine teams had remained off the grid, unlisted on the rosters of official Q-camp populations. They roamed the planet, providing protection from bands of marauders and coordinating with military personnel inside the camps, those soldiers that had been sent down to the planet after becoming infected. These, in turn, reported to the loose coalition of camp governors that Congress had formed once they, too, had been condemned to the planet.
An older man came laboring up the hill, huffing as he worked his way up to the small stand of bamboo that concealed her position.
“Sorry, Captain.” The man bent over, hands on his knees as he worked to catch his breath. “The phage just hit our food supply. Had to rush one of the senator’s kids over to the medical tent in the center of camp.”
At her raised brow, he explained. “We discovered too late that a batch of meal rations had been infected with self-repairing plas nano. It started to turn her stomach to—”
He blanched, and she waved off the remainder of the explanation.
“How are the prefab units they dropshipped to you holding up? Any more infected panels beyond the ones you reported last week?”
The man shook his head. “After our common meeting house began to cover itself in light armor, and the latrines started replicating lifts every two meters, we’ve left everything outside the camp and let the bastards EM the shit out of the supplies before we touch anything.” He shot her a meaningful look. “Nothing like looking up while you’re on the toilet to see a lift door opening in the ceiling above you to get your attention.”
“I can imagine,” she murmured. “Are there any serious cases you need us to transport to triage?” she asked, referring to the medical camp the surgeon general had set up just outside her father’s bunker in the Zao Foothills.
Khela knew her father had planned it that way, in order to give Doctor Gonsalves access to the research and decontamination facilities the bunker could provide.
“No, thank the ancestors. Nothing has progressed that far—not this week, at least.”
“And no more new arrivals?” Khela heard the sharp edge in her voice, but couldn’t bring herself to contain it.
The man shook his head sorrowfully. “I’m sorry, Captain. I was told the only AIs left on the ring were the ones who volunteered for the study with Reya deSangro and her scientists.”
“Volunteered.” She spat the word as if it were an imprecation, and her knuckles whitened as she gripped her PepBoy tighter.
As it so often did, her anger seemed to trigger a reaction from the nano inside her body that had turned traitor on her. She squeezed her eyes shut against a fresh wave of pain and shuddered in an attempt to shake it off.
“Are you all right, Captain?”
The man’s sympathetic voice made her snap her eyes open, and she nodded mutely until she knew she could trust herself to speak once more.
“Fine,” she rasped, and then belatedly, “thank you.”
She looked down at the torn seam of her left leg, where the self-repairing nano in her BDUs’ base layer where its had begun to knit itself into her skin. She was infected. She’d been infected for weeks now.
So are thousands of others. Shake it off, soldier.
“If there’s nothing else…?” She somehow managed to keep her voice level and her gaze steady as she addressed the man from Q-camp Fourteen.
He shook his head.
“Then we’ll move on. We’ll be back, same time next week. I—”
“Wait!” The man snapped his fingers as he recalled something. “I almost forgot. One of our doctors asked if you would mind transporting something to Doctor Gonsalves for us?”
At her nod, he smiled and began to reach toward her to pat her on the arm, but pulled his hand back at the last moment, an apologetic look on his face.
“I’ll send young Sascha up with it as soon as I get back.” He winked. “She’s much faster at running up hills than I am, in my old age.”
He nodded to her, turned, and began to pick his way back down the hill, retracing his steps to the camp.
Khela sank back into her crouch among the bamboo, the rustling sounds it made reminding her of the tonal scale the waterfall had played at the Sea of Stones Spa that she and Hana had visited, so many years ago.
Hana….
An acid burn of raw anger washed over her as she castigated herself yet again for being so careless, so stupidly reckless as to access their commanding officer’s final report without sandboxing it first….
But she and Hana had been so worried about Colonel Banks.
A true Marine, Banks had stoically acquiesced when volunteered by his superiors at Space Command to be an experimental subject. The first few months, the experimentation had seemed benign, and Khela and Hana had dared to hope that he would be shipped down to join them at some point. At the end, they’d learned that he’d hidden from them the extent to which deSangro had mutilated him. His last transmission had been a difficult one to listen to, and it had hit Hana hard.
Khela knew some string of contaminated code must have been buried in Banks’s final transmission. Her dad had warned her that they needed to sandbox every comm and had instructed her carefully on how to do so—but she had messed up somewhere along the way….
She squeezed her dark eyes shut and then opened them again, her face drawn and bleak as she withstood the onslaught of her own self-flagellation. Outwardly, she was vigilant. Inwardly, her mind was trapped among memories of past events.
Careless, she berated herself mercilessly. Reckless. If I’d only headed back to the bunker the moment I suspected—or waited until then to access the Colonel’s message….
Hana had become in
fected. Her base code had been modified, and the feedback loops that she had been trapped in had been beyond what she could manage without help. Overloaded and fearing the harm her contamination might bring to Khela…Hana had suicided.
Their team had been deployed at the time, days away from her father’s bunker. By the time Khela had realized how bad off Hana truly was, she’d rushed back to the bunker, half-mad with fear for her partner’s life, but it had been too late.
White-hot fury had stabbed through Khela, and she’d fought a deeply irrational feeling of betrayal that Hana would abandon her like this. A part of her brain blamed the AI for quitting, even though she knew to the core of her soul that what Hana had done was out of concern for Khela’s own well-being.
Khela had heard that some of the human/AI pairings suffered from nano filament bleed-through, a condition where AI axons that ran parallel to human ones began to bleed past their buffers, interleaving themselves as they punched through human myelin sheaths. Local doctors were unsure if this was the cause for some of the paired deaths, or if the deaths had transpired first, and the unconstrained replication of nano that occurred afterward had made it impossible for the doctors to remove the now-deceased AI from within the human brain.
It would have been nothing less than what I deserve, she thought bitterly. Marines leave no one behind. If Hana falls, then so do I.
Her jaw clenched, muscles bunching in a cheek now laced with an unwanted filigree of nano antennae that traced its way across her cheekbone as she gritted her teeth against a wave of thought fragments not her own. Alien these thoughts were, wholly AI in nature, but they were all she had left of Hana, and she would stoically endure them. It was the only way she could honor her fallen comrade, the person she had failed to save.
“Damned Ringers,” she muttered, as a young girl raced up the hill, data chip in hand.
She heard a two-click acknowledgement over the comm from Ramon, his figure indistinguishable among the grasses.
Khela thanked the girl once she received the chip, and sent her back to the camp.
Lena chimed in with her own assessment.
Her voice came from her position two klicks away, overlooking the buffer zone. They were using an encrypted network to communicate, localized and too low-powered for the ring to detect—or so they hoped.
Tama, the AI that Lena was paired with, was busy scanning all frequencies for any chatter that might indicate activity—or that their position had been made. Xiao would send out a call if he spotted the Ringers beginning one of their aerial approaches—a routine that seemed to be growing more common as the days went on.
Their vigilance would provide them little more than the time to slap sensitive gear into the hardened cases the team had taken to humping along with them wherever they went. Every AI in the camp—and those embedded within her team—would be rendered unconscious for a time, but it could not be helped. It was still far better than getting hit with the missiles that the Ringers had begun using to hammer no man’s land into dust.
Khela parted the bamboo and stepped into the grasses, skirting the forest as she headed for Lena’s position.
Double-clicks returned to her, and she could just make out a slight rustling that could have been wind, but was Ramon slithering his way out of the grasses.
Xiao dropped from the banyan and marched silently beside her as she passed beneath it, and Ramon fell in behind Xiao.
They fell into an easy, ground-eating trot, one every Marine had learned to maintain for hours back in Basic. The kilometers fell behind them, and they kept up the pace until they reached the narrowest and most treacherous part of the journey.
Khela called a halt and motioned for them to go to ground. Just ahead, the bamboo forest curved sharply to the left, taking them dangerously close to the edge of no man’s land. The forest here was too marshy to traverse, or they would have simply cut through its interior.
In the four months they’d been making the trek between camps Fourteen and Fifteen, they’d yet to be spotted by the GSC—even here—yet Khela didn’t dare break protocol.
Kneeling as one, they each broke out swaths of ghillie. The stuff was too difficult to replace, now that they had no way to replicate it, so they kept it packed away in their kits when it wasn’t needed.
Khela pulled hers over the shredded remains of her base layer, a material that had once protected her head, but had mindlessly begun to embed itself into her skull, while rejecting her hair follicles as foreign matter. The ghillie brushed against her sensitized scalp, abrasive and uncomfortable, and she gritted her teeth against yet another discomfort, nodding to Ramon to lead on.
Two figures were moving swiftly through the ravaged land, toward the ruined city and the elevator.
She nodded and began to pick her way through the grasses that led to the barren wasteland up ahead. She’d taken three steps when she heard Lena’s voice sing out.
Stars! Surely they wouldn’t send a strafing run to take out a few teenagers! Just as the thought crossed Khela’s mind, Tama’s terse voice interjected over their net.
Khela didn’t have time to think. She sprang from her position, forcing her leaden limbs to pump furiously as she raced flat-out to reach the teens in time. The GSC was after them, not a couple of kids. There was no way she could make it to those youngsters in time, but, stars, she had to try—
She went down in a tangle of limbs with an oof as Xiao launched himself toward her. She growled at him as he dragged her to cover just before the fighters overflew their position.
And then the world exploded in light, sound, and fire all around them.
Minutes later, she stood looking despairingly down at the lifeless form of the two young boys she had been unable to save.
Dammit! she thought savagely as she bent to check the nearest form for signs of life. We’re supposed to protect these people, not get them killed!
Tears she refused to shed swam in her eyes, and she ignored the burning, throbbing pain in her limbs as she squatted next to the remains of the first boy. The pain was an old companion, one that had blossomed within her when Hana had fallen victim to the phage.
Well, at least I no longer have to brush my hair out of my face when I lean down, she thought, and heard the bitter tone that laced her own mental voice.
“Let me, Cap.”
Xiao’s hands reached out and hefted the body into his arms.
With a weary nod, Kehla let him.
* * * * *
Minutes later and kilometers away, lookouts sounded the alarm from the edges of the triage camp, tucked in close to Noa’s bunker. Former Surgeon General Dominica Gonsalves ran flat-out toward the camouflaged tent, ducking through the entrance and passing through the portable ES shield that had been set up in an attempt to maintain a sterile surgical environment.
“Get those scanners shielded!” she shouted at the nurse who was scrambling to get the units into hardened cases before the first EM pulse hit.
She splayed her hands across the surgical table to steady the instruments as the fighters screamed overhead. The tent shook from the sonic booms—and Dominica shook from the EMP—that passed through their triage unit.
“Damned Ringers,” she muttered, unknowingly echoing Khela’s imprecation, while staring helplessly across at a shelf filled with newly sterilized scalpels as they tumbled to the dirt floor. Well, there goes a morning�
��s worth of work, she sighed. Dismissing the thought, she turned back to her current patient.
The man spread on the table before her—one of the president’s cabinet, by the name of Bryce—was a mess. He suffered from outbreaks across his torso and upper arms, where muscle modifications had begun to grow outside of his body. She had just finished repairing the heart tissue that had begun to protrude outside his chest cavity and stepped out to check on a newly-arrived patient while her nurse closed the incision for her, when the alarm had sounded. Now that the danger had passed, she could begin to address the infected areas on the man that were not as critical.
Glancing down to ensure the strafing run had not jostled any of her work loose, she sighed in frustration as she cleansed her hands once more and donned sterile, nano-resistant gloves.
This man should be in cryo, she thought, not lying before me on an operating table.
A shadow darkened the entrance, and the ES field flickered as Noa Sakai ducked inside, followed by one of the human senators—Dominica couldn’t recall the woman’s name. They had journeyed here days ago from Q-camp Three, requesting aid. Once Bryce was stable, one of the Marine teams would escort them back to their camp.
As he approached, Noa’s dark gaze flickered down to the table and back up to Dominica’s face before scanning the tent’s interior, taking in its disarray without expression.
“That was the last of them,” he said.
Stepping up to the table, he reached for a sterilizing swab, and efficiently disinfected his own hands while the senator stood a distance away, observing quietly. Looking up at her expectantly, he opened his palms, spreading them in a ‘what now’ gesture.
“How may I be of assistance?”
“What? Nothing keeping you occupied over in nano-land? And are you certain your precious rectification code’s going to keep you safe from all this?” Dominica felt immediately ashamed of herself for the caustic remark.
Noa, as unflappable as ever, merely shook his head and lowered his gaze to the neat line of stitches across the chest of the patient laying before them.