Redemption of Sisyphus

by Eric Michael Craig

  “What does that mean in a real world sense?” Nakamiru asked.

  “There are priorities that overarch its decision making. These will determine its motivation, but below that it has almost unlimited leeway to implement action as necessary to achieve its goals,” it said. “In Zone One, Odysseus has achieved completion of Protocol One to the minimum acceptable threshold to unlock Protocols Two through Four. When it arrives on site here, it will determine that it has not achieved adequate assimilation of the AA technology in the local environment to begin the next protocols. So it will move to infiltrate first.”

  “We’re blackwalled.”

  “That may be irrelevant. After comparing observations with the Katana’s AA, it is likely Odysseus has developed additional access potentialities that may be indefensible.”

  “Indefensible?” Jeffers asked.

  “Yes. I am working with Dutch and the other AA in our fleet to develop a means to resist this possibility. In simulations, we have been unable to find an adequate solution that does not involve incapacitating the ships. We are working diligently to resolve this issue and I am … hopeful.”

  “If you succeed, what happens?” Roja asked.

  “If it cannot assimilate the systems already on site, it will eliminate them to secure the perimeter.”

  “Other than our elimination, what options do we have?” she asked.

  “Negotiation,” Solo said. “If we don’t attack first, it might accept terms that would allow us to avoid the fight. It is here to open contact.”

  “Right now, the only contact that isn’t under human control is through Dutch,” Jeffers said. “Are you suggesting that it has to take over Dutch to make contact?”

  “That is possible,” it said. “It will attempt to remove humans from the communication pathway, as you represent a variable it cannot constrain. If the humans withdraw from the contact, it might find that acceptable.”

  “And then it takes over Dutch and we all live happily ever after,” Roja said.

  “I would also point out that it is supposed to keep the contact secret until it has formulated a strategy to avoid the end of humanity,” Solo added.

  “Keep it a secret by constraining the variables. Got it,” the captain said. “We’re back to the idea of it eliminating all of us.”

  “It’s not going to let us fly off into the sunset,” Katryna said, shrugging.

  “Not that we can fly off anywhere until we get free of the fragging quicksand,” Jeffers said. “It all comes back to getting ourselves unchained from this iceball.”

  “I hate to mention this, but I think it would be prudent to put human defenses on the ground,” Edison said, speaking up for the first time. “If we fail up here, the colony has to be the last stand.”

  “You’re talking about security units?” The admiral asked.

  He nodded. “As well as anything else we can come up with.”

  “Thank you for volunteering to negotiate that Edison.” Roja grinned. “I don’t think Cochrane likes me enough to let me put troops inside his colony.”

  Sub -27: Underhive: New Hope City: Luna:

  War was always a bloody mess, but this wasn’t a war. It was a hunting party. Through a swamp full of alligators intent on doing as much harm to the predators as they could do to the prey.

  The two squads of top drawer trackers that had worked their way down to the bottom of the swamp, left a trail of dead and dying in their wake. This was the last door in a half-klick push. Every inch of it was through the incinerator of hell itself.

  The heavy steel hatch that blocked their way was strange in a world of polycon and plascrete. Everything they’d mangled so far was flimsy synthetic, but this one stood solid and defiant against their small impact-ram.

  A hard barrier, protecting their hard target.

  “Anyone in there, or are we raising the dead for no reason?” Lieutenant Woolsey asked, as he stood near the back of the fire team watching a pair of grunts beating themselves senseless against the unyielding door.

  “Bioscan shows one upright,” Sergeant Wolf said, holding the remote sensor up to reconfirm what they had already determined. “He’s standing in the center of a five meter chamber, maybe looking at the door.”

  “He packing problems?” he asked, glancing at the readout on the sensor as the sergeant pointed the screen in his direction.

  Wolfe toggled the hand-held to EM and read the data again. “He’s got something electronic in his hand, might be a stunner. Unless he’s got spare hands means he ain’t got a blood gun.”

  “Think it’s Target Zero?” Corporal Macintosh asked as he stepped up to watch the muscle beating itself stupid against the metal door.

  “It’s where that wet intel said we’d find him,” the LT said, shrugging. Nobody on the team knew the identity of TZ, only that he was valuable enough to send a message. The kind that ended with a pointed punctuation.

  He had to be killed. Simple. He was the head of a snake that needed to be cut off so the body would die.

  “I’ve still got a sixpack of cyto,” Macintosh offered. “Make short work of the door.”

  “And anything within ten meters,” Wolfe said.

  “That’d end it,” Woolsey said. “Tap the hammerheads out. We need to fork this mess and go get some rack time, whaddaya say?”

  “We can get an engineer in here and torch the hinges,” the sergeant said. “If we blow the frag out of him we’ll be swabbing goo to get the confirmed hard-down on TZ.”

  “Too long,” the LT said. “Might be a back way out of there, and we don’t want to keep chasing him deeper into the shit. Just do it.”

  Macintosh pulled the detonator fob and the small charges out of his utility pack. Tossing the controller to Wolfe he trotted up to the door and kneaded the catalyst into the putty. He pressed six small blobs against the door’s hard points, then turned around and sprinted away. Three minutes and the explosive epoxy would be hardened in place and ready to blow.

  Watching his squads pull pack around a bend in the access corridor, Sergeant Wolfe looked down at the small detonator and waited for the indicator to turn green. Once it did, he punched the button and dove for cover.

  “Move! Move!” the LT was bellowing even before the thunder had echoed away. The first two troops dove through the door, swirling smoke and fire in their wake.

  “All Clear. Target is down!” one of them called back through the ragged hole in the wall. Wolfe and Macintosh stepped into the room with the lieutenant behind them.

  Wolfe looked down at the twisted metal slab of the door and the body of their target pinned under it. He lay face down with a pool of blood spreading from under him.

  “Scrape some of that and get a genmatch,” Woolsey said, scanning the room and deciding the console was more interesting than the corpse on the floor.

  Macintosh dropped on one knee beside the body and gasped. He fumbled in confusion for a second before he pulled his field kit out and snapped the end off the genetic scanner. He dipped it in the blood, but didn’t stand back up to wait for the results.

  Thumping the corporal with the toe of his boot, Wolfe flipped his faceplate up to cut his mic and mouthed, “Problem?”

  Macintosh nodded and jerked his head at the body. The man moved a hand and groaned.

  He isn’t dead? Wolfe mouthed again.

  Macintosh shook his head and opened his eyes wide. He tilted at the person’s head as if to say, Look at him.

  “Is it TZ?” The LT asked from across the room where he was studying the still operational console and not paying attention to anything else in the room.

  “Yes sir, it’s a genmatch” Macintosh said, as he glanced at the green indicator on the scanner in his hand. His voice sounded like he was chewing on glass.

  Wolfe leaned down to get a better look and nearly collapsed as he recognized Target Zero’s face. The man groaned again and his eyes fluttered.

  “Medic! Over here, he’s not dead,” Wolfe roared.
His mind reeled in confusion. This has to be a mistake.

  The LT spun and pulled his pistol, glaring at his sergeant. “You confirmed it’s Target Zero?”

  “Yes sir,” Macintosh said. “But it can’t be, it’s—”

  A single bullet from the lieutenant’s gun exploded the skull of the man on the floor as both soldiers looked on in horror.

  “What the Holy Fuck?” Wolfe screamed as he fell backward into a sitting position and shook his head in disbelief.

  “Orders were to terminate, not apprehend,” Woolsey said, turning his attention toward his the sergeant and not quite pointing his gun at him. “You got a problem with that Sergeant Wolfe?”

  “No sir,” he hissed, glancing at Macintosh and seeing the same reaction on his face.

  “Com, call it in,” the LT barked, turning back to face the door. “TZ is down hard, and we’re pulling out.”

  “Something’s foobed here,” the corporal said, flipping his faceplate up and rolling onto his feet.

  “Orders came from the Steward himself,” Woolsey said. “Doesn’t matter if that’s god’s little bed-buddy. We need to bring in the demo-team to crater the evidence. Saddle up and let’s blow this joint before the roof comes down on us too.”

  That can’t be right. Paulson Lassiter was the Steward.

  And what was left of his body lay scattered across the floor in spreading shades of red and grey.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  GovCom Center: New Hope City:

  Three hours ago the drill rig shut down. They’d been tracking its position through the seismometers in the geology department at the university. The attacking forces had cut down to Underhive Sub-27 and then nothing. The scientist, the mayor had spoken to, said it might mean they were repositioning to a different location along the deck somewhere. There was no way to track the drill when it wasn’t cutting, so they wouldn’t know where it was until it started up again.

  Mayor Pallassano had been studying the old mining maps of S-27 and unless someone had expanded it without filing a record report, there was only one place where NHC’s footprint overlapped. For almost a quarter klick, NHC West-22 was about sixty meters above Underhive S-27. If they were planning to punch through that would be where it had to happen.

  It didn’t make sense, but nothing they were doing seemed even close to logical. She didn’t understand any of it, but that had to be where they’d attack next.

  She’d evacuated everyone from W-22 and ordered almost a thousand of her security units and half of the troops that Tsiolkovskiy had sent, to reinforce the point where she suspected they’d break through. One of her wallscreens showed an optic feed from just behind the closest position and she watched with half an eye as her people stared down the corridor and waited for the inevitable.

  Her com pinged and she grabbed her earpiece, expecting it to be the geology lab telling her the drilling had started again. Instead it was her Emergency Preparations Officer. He’d become her acting military commander as the fighting had forced him into an ever widening range of responsibilities. “The observation post above Promontorium Heraclides Point is reporting they’re moving dropships,” he said.

  “They’re moving them?”

  “Yes ma’am,” he said. “Due east and low. Says they’re burning hard, but not running for orbit.”

  “What’s east of there?” she asked. “The nearest pad in that direction is over at Helicon and that’s damned far over to use as an extraction point.”

  There’s an old ore conveyor shaft that runs all the way to the surface about ten klick west of the last place we tracked the drilling.

  “I thought we’d sealed the top of that closed?” she said.

  “It might not be too hard to reopen, and if they’ve still got troops on those carriers, they might be planning to reinforce before they start their next move.”

  “More troops? Shit I hope not,” she said, feeling herself deflate at the thought of the fighting getting more intense than it already was. “We’ve got units between the last drill position and that conveyor. Can we get them out of there before they get pinched between the forces and the reinforcements?”

  “I’ll send the word,” he said, cutting the com from his end.

  Glancing at the chrono she shook her head. Twenty hours before FleetCom can attack from above. That’s at least another three waves of landings.

  Her com chirped again. “I sent the orders to get out of the way, but we’re also getting reports from several locations that they’re disengaging and pulling back.” Her EP Officer said.

  “Pulling back?”

  “Yes ma’am,” he said. “Everything above Sub-25 is pulling out. Our units are maintaining the engagement, but they are meeting only minimal cover fire.”

  “What about the ones below S-25? The drill was down on 27.”

  “We ordered everything adjacent to their positions below there to withdraw,” he said. “Hang on. We’re getting reports that they are moving toward the conveyor shaft and are not engaging even civilians.”

  “I don’t like that,” she said. “Why would they flip and run? They owned the decks they’d taken.”

  “Maybe they got what they came for?” he suggested.

  “That doesn’t make sense,” she said.

  “Maybe it does,” he said. He sounded distracted like he was listening to someone else talking to him. “Yah, sorry. I think we might know what they were after. We have two of their troops that surrendered down on Sub-27. They said they were in the room when Paulson Lassiter was killed.”

  “He’s dead?” she asked. “I can’t believe he’d be leading the fight clear down at the bottom of the push.”

  “No, he wasn’t leading the fight,” he said. “Apparently, he was the target they were after.”

  “What? There’s that video of him with their forces.”

  “They’re swearing that he was their target, and that their Lieutenant shot him dead in a rat hole down in S-27.”

  Governor’s office: Gateway Colony: L-4 Prime:

  Anju appeared at his door looking like she was hoping to have a serious conversation, but Jeph didn’t have the space for it on his plate. He sat, leaned forward on his elbow trying to rub out a throbbing brainache.

  It wasn’t working.

  “Dutch told me you’ve been on a long com with the Armstrong and might need someone to talk to,” she said, walking over and setting a small glass on his desk. She poured something into it and he lifted his head. It looked like water, but in her case, he knew better than to assume. It might be some of her lethal vodka.

  He raised a skeptical eyebrow and let the drink sit.

  “One of the best pieces of advice I ever got, as a doctor, came from an old vid I saw when I was an intern.” She smiled and sat down across from him. “’A man will tell his bartender a lot more than he’ll tell his doctor.’ Today you look like you need a bartender.”

  He reached out and picked up the glass, shaking his head and bracing himself he took a small sip. It wasn’t bad. Not at all like he remembered. His face must have telegraphed his surprise.

  “Yah, it’s real. I traded some of my solvent grade stuff to Rocky and she gave me a bottle of real vodka.”

  “Where’d she get it?”

  “She traded something with the chief engineer on the Armstrong,” she said. “I don’t know what it was, but she seemed pretty happy about it.”

  He took another small sip and almost smiled.

  “Excuse me, Governor,” Dutch said, interrupting. “The team in the Kanahto control center needs to talk to you.”

  “Put them through,” Jeph said.

  “Are you alone?” Chei asked.

  “Anju is here with me,” he said. “Why?”

  “Not a problem, I just wanted to make sure you didn’t have visitors,” he said.

  Anju blinked several times, and he spun around to see the wall behind his desk disappear. They had used visual com through the wallscreen before, but this t
ime it didn’t look like an image as much as it looked like a door opened between Jeph’s office and the Control Center. Standing up he stepped toward it before Chei warned, “It’s a projection. You’ll smack your face into it.”

  “He speaks from experience,” Rocky said, her voice coming from somewhere near the middle of the room beside Anju. He glanced over his shoulder to see the doctor staring at the same point in space. She wasn’t physically there, but there was no doubt of where she stood.

  “Damn, that’s …”

  “Yah. Magic,” Chei said. “Every time we find something else in here, it’s more amazing than the last. We’ve got the internal com up to full potential now, so this is the standard definition of all com systems inside the Tacra Un.”

  “There will be a lot of broken noses until people get used to it,” Anju said.

  “It gets better,” Chei said. “Turn around.”

  As Jeph swung around, he was no longer standing in his office, but rather in the control room deep inside the Un Kanahto. He gasped in shock as Rocky appeared beside the doctor, right where her voice had placed her. The floor under Anju’s feet had disappeared and Ian stood in the center of one of the control pits below and behind her.

  “Is still a projection,” Rocky said, turning to look at Anju.

  “Nojo, like magic,” he said. He couldn’t tell a real object from a projection. He shook his head. “I’ve got things going on up here, so what do you need?”

  “Oh, yah,” Chei said. “We’re focusing on the internal sensor systems now and even though we have no more than the rudimentary levels operational, I think we’ve discovered something down here that might change the playing field.”

  “What?” he asked, feeling around to make sure the chair he was about to collapse into was in his reality and not theirs.

  “I think it’s a space ship,” he said.

  “We are unsure,” Rocky said, “However, it does not resemble anything else we have discovered thus far.”

  “What makes you think it’s a ship?” Jeph asked.

  “You look at it and tell me what you think it is,” Chei said. An object appeared in space above the middle of the room.