by J. F. Holmes
Along with everything else we learned after the fact, our neurologists and DARPA learned a ton from the augmented animals the aliens had pressed into service. That’s how we learned to tap directly into the brain’s input/output and how to synthesize a peripheral nervous system. Yes, it’s all alien tech. No, it doesn’t bother—bother—bother me in the slightest. (Grin)
Don’t get me wrong, there was some amazing research being done by scientists all over North America before those cities lifted out of whatever hole they’d hidden in. Mind-controlled bionic limbs were starting to become a thing. But if those limbs had been cars, they’d have been Studebakers; the tiger and those wolves were Ferraris. The alien-cyborg-conversion process replaced everything but the brain and spinal cord, and converted the rest to digital impulses.
The brains they left more or less intact. I say more or less, because in simplest “C-A-T-spells-cat” terms, the implants grafted into the animals’ brains very directly manipulated both the pleasure and pain centers of the brain, rewarding aggression and violence, and inflicting horrific pain if the animal shied away from a fight. That explained the many, many missing persons files, the uptick in animal attacks, and why exotic pets were disappearing from the Middle East.
They were recruiting.
April 1, 2023
There was a bright electric blue glow coming from beyond the shattered obsidian hexagons, and we investigated before moving on. There was no way to know how many of the city structures contained the tanks we found, but the answer seemed to be ‘plenty’. Inside the… building, structure, obsidian nightmare, whatever you want to call it, were banks of soft-blue-glowing tanks. If you’re a Star Wars geek, think Bacta Tank, and you’ll be sorta close. Instead of healing Luke Skywalker’s half-frozen butt, they were… converting animals into the kind of cyborg beasts we’d just fought.
A number of them were empty, solution filling ¾ of the tank, but in others, more wolves, sedated it looked like, floated upright. Hoses and conduits disappeared into flesh, limbs partially converted from Mother Nature’s meat to harsh alien alloys. There was a distinct line where the biological gave way to synthetic, and each line was demarked by a strange, semi-liquid mercury-looking fluid that shone brightly in the blue light. It didn’t make sense to me at the time; it was just one more mind-bending horror to deal with.
“Blow the tanks?” Tailor asked. The wolves really had her bothered. At the time, I didn’t know she’d been attacked by coyotes as a child—it had never come up—but looking back, I can see her anxiety clear as day. I’ll say this for her, she didn’t take counsel of her fears and finished the mission, despite everything.
“If we stop to blow every set of tanks we come across, we’ll be out of demo in an hour,” I replied. “All problems can be solved with the proper application of enough force; let’s just get to the center of this fucking thing and get it done in one.”
“I’m in pretty poor shape here, Ash,” Jack reported, his post-battle diagnostic complete. “That tiger thing did a number on my arms, and the wolves worked my legs over. My cockpit is intact, but I’m at about half strength and sixty percent mobility. It’d be a couple hours to patch and replace lines before I can repressurize.”
“We have to keep moving,” I said. “So long as you can keep up and hit a target, you’re doing alright. I’ll take point from here on out.”
I was pretty sure we weren’t actually back where we’d entered—this wasn’t some geometry-bending Cthuluscape—so I elected to press on. We stepped out of the conversion structure with the tanks, and my radio crackled.
“Ash, th- -- Chuck, come in, over,” blared through the static.
“Chuck, go for Ash, over,” I answered and gestured for Tailor, our comms expert, to try to gain some height and clean up the signal.
“Was that y-- --king that -- -- heard gunfire, over,”
“That’s us, you’re broken and distorted,” I replied. If we had voice comms, we could probably send data. “Standby for data dump.” I set up a burst transmission on my end to dump all the automap data we’d gathered, and when Tailor sent me the notice she was ready, I pinged our location out. Thirty seconds passed as she adjusted settings and did what she could to minimize the distortion.
“Ash, update received,” he replied, much more clearly this time. “I’m completely pinned down here. You’re not going to believe this, but they’ve got cyborg gorillas or something, and they’re too close for me to engage with my cannon. They can’t get to me, but I can’t get out, either.”
I checked his location, and we doubled back. Judging by his map, he’d busted into the city’s edge only two hundred meters from the turret we’d torn apart, but he’d gone left where we’d gone right.
“On our way.”
Our progress was slowed by Jack’s damaged limbs, which was a known vulnerability with pretty much any mecha. Chuck had said he was safe-ish though, so he’d just have to be patient. We passed more obsidian structures with gleaming blue light, and I shivered. Rounding a bend, I could see a troop of enormous, enraged, augmented gorillas nearly two hundred meters away, bashing and smashing at another structure. They’d cover that gap in a hurry, so we stopped in place and I zoomed way in with my optic.
By linking facial recognition software with our targeting system, we were able to tag each gorilla’s head and queue up multiple shots from our ion blasters. There’d been zero time to do so in the dogfight; each target has to be manually identified, confirmed, prioritized, and the commands for the attack readied. But for a deliberate attack where we had time and distance, we could set our systems on automatic and let them do the opening salvo. Kate, Jack, and I synced our systems, and I again used VoxAttack to command all three suits to open fire.
Bolts of energy stitched the passageway in formation like tracer fire. The augmented gorillas were angrily milling around, so some of the shots missed, but two of the hulking monsters went down under the first fusillade of aimed headshots. We stood our ground and poured fire into them as they rushed us. That drew them off of Chuck’s position, and he was able to step out into the passage and hit them from behind with his plasma cannon. The destruction those things cause has to be seen to be believed, and the cluster of ogre-sized cyborgs dropped, cooked and blown apart by the plasma impact.
“Man, it’s good to see you,” Chuck sent over his Cerberus’ radio.
“Back at’cha,” I replied. “Status?”
“Green,” Chuck replied, and made his way down to meet us. Tailor and I advanced down the passageway, with Jack covering our six, to link up with him. We’d just passed the smouldering remains that littered the deck when Chuck shouted, “DOWN!” and we dove aside. The aforementioned destructiveness of his plasma cannon was immediately an issue, and Chuck had to hold his fire, else he’d kill all of us. I rolled my Cerberus to its knees and found the threat.
One last cyborg simian had leapt off a structure above us and knocked Jack’s damaged suit to the ground. It was smashing and tearing at the suit, and even as my blaster blew bits of armor plating off, it wrenched off one of the suit’s arms and flung it at me. I swatted at it, but the arm still weighed a hundred kilos or more, and it rocked me onto my heels. I watched in horror as the augmented ape pried the front plate off the robot and punched down inside with awful finality. A tiny corner of my brain noted Jack’s vitals readout went red. Tailor was still blasting away, and one of her shots found its mark. The bolt drilled a hole through the ape’s armored head, killing it dead, but too late.
We gathered around Jack’s mangled robot for a moment. There was a mission to continue, and my mind raced. We hadn’t yet crossed half the distance to the center, and we didn’t have comms with any of the other teams. Echoes bounced around through the obsidian cityscape, so we knew there was fighting going on, but trying to locate it was next to impossible. We’d just have close on the center of the floating city and find each other as it happened.
We salvaged satchel charges from their st
orage bins, and I passed Jack’s blaster to Chuck. “Can you pair this to your systems?” I asked. For it to function with the advanced targeting software, it would need to talk to his onboard systems. Fortunately, pairing the gun was almost as easy as pairing a cell phone with wireless headphones, and Chuck had the gun ready in a minute.
“Move out.”
March, 2035
The work being done in those tanks proved to be foundational to our understanding and advancing our technological know-how in so many fields, it’s hard to know where to start. Take nanites, for example. I now know that the mercurial fluid I saw separating the organic from the synthetic parts of those animals is actually millions upon millions of nanites, slowly, steadily stripping away the fur, dermis, muscle, bone, nerves, organs, and bowels at near-molecular level, and replacing them with the synthetic versions of the same. Brains are too fluid, too complex even for that kind of tech; until the very end of the 20th century, most of our ham-fisted brain experiments amounted to little more than “what happens if we poke it here?” We’d made progress since the turn of the millennium, but reverse-engineering the alien techniques were, to put mildly, a Big Deal.
The cyborg conversion tanks themselves took up much of the space in the obsidian city. It was stark and bare, and shockingly utilitarian. So far as we know, the aliens had very little culture or entertainment, or much else. I seem to recall someone telling me the city grew in a weird fractal pattern, like a Lichtenberg figure radiating from the center in 3D. Doesn’t matter. What I remember is trusting my tracking software and plugging on ahead, getting hit repeatedly by wolves, cats, and gorillas, until we heard an actual firefight erupt only a few hundred meters away.
April 1, 2023
The gunfire perked us right up and got us moving with a sense of urgency again, which was to the good. It also caught the attention of more cyberwolves, which was to the bad. We were being overtaken by another pack of the little monsters, but this time we had time, distance, and Chuck’s plasma cannon. They were still more than a hundred meters away when he opened fire. My screens polarized against the glare, and as it darkened again, I searched for targets—and found none. The single blast had wiped out the whole pack. The cannons were destructive as hell, but “danger close” was within twenty meters, and “suicide” was within ten.
“Where were you an hour ago?” I joked, and Chuck’s voice was strained.
“Was it only an hour ago?” he asked. “Seems like it’s been ages.”
Time did seem to distort the longer we were in the city. Though my watch suggested the sun had been up for at least thirty minutes, there was no way to tell inside.
We reached a point where we were pretty close to the gunfire, which had only intensified, and found no way through a wall that was too tall to climb. We’d established that the obsidian columns could be destroyed with a sufficient explosive charge, so Chuck put on his combat engineer beret and blasted a path to our allies, whoever they were. He strung three charges against a likely chunk of wall as Tailor began frequency hopping, searching for whoever was nearby.
“Clear the blast area,” Chuck ordered, and I ducked into a side alley. The detonation was muted by my Cerberus somewhat, but I still felt the concussion in my bones. I stepped out and swept our way through the now gaping hole in the wall to find four more Cerberus bots to my left, exchanging blaster fire with…cyborg humans?
I watched for barely a moment as the cyborgs, taking cover behind a low wall of hexagonal floor projections, turned to face me and my team me. They were barely twenty-five meters ahead, and with my appearance, more of the hexagons lifted free of the floor to cover the cyborgs’ flank against us. I ducked back around the corner as a fusillade of blaster fire similar to that of my own weapon tore through the hole Chuck had blasted. I leaned out and returned fire myself, and heard my radio crackle.
“Unknown callsign that just blew a gawddamn wall down, this is Marine Force One, over!” I heard a deep southern accent bark.
“Marine Force One, Canuck Two, keep them pinned and we can assault from here, over!” I relayed.
“Roger that, Canuck Two.” And the rain of incoming blaster fire increased another notch. Leaning out, it appeared the traitors, cyborgs, humans, whatever you wanted to call them, had ducked behind their cover-on-demand, and weren’t popping up for fear of getting whacked. I prepped one of my last remaining satchel charges and set it for a five second timer. I lofted it through the air, over the obsidian hexagonal wall that had risen out of the floor, and burst through the wall the moment the charge blew.
I needn’t have rushed. The concussive force of the detonating satchel charge had jellied the brains of the cyborgs, and they lay unmoving, their constituent parts scattered all over the bunker they’d taken cover in. The torn and mangled torsos leaked a silvery-gray ooze, which I presumed was synthetic blood, but they were all immobile and non-responsive. I wasn’t going to take chances, so my team and I put blaster bolts into craniums until they leaked.
“Clear,” I broadcast, and the remnants of the American team of Marines joined us.
“Glad you happened along,” the squad leader said. “Gunnery Sergeant Rick Castle.”
“That’s a very Marine sorta name,” I replied with a hint of amusement, and translated Marinespeak into Canuck. “Warrant Officer Ash Wulfe. Pleased to meet’cha.”
“Warrant?” Castle asked.
“About like you, but Canadian. Senior NCO for a platoon.”
“Alright then,” he said, not quite sure what to think. Warrants in the US forces are a strange, mysterious bunch who aren’t quite commissioned officers, but are apart from the standard NCO cadre, too. A WO in the CF, on the other hand, is a sergeant who’s been promoted.
We cross-loaded our maps again as he brought me up to date. I could see where they’d entered the city and follow their progress through the rat maze. I could see the points where they’d come under attack, and the points, plural, where his Marines had been killed in action, and I came to a realization: we’d had it easy. We’d been left to square off with the dregs, whatever random cyborg animals could be goaded into attacking us, because the abducted cyborgs with heavy weaponry had been fighting back against the American forces, hard. I was a little insulted.
I noticed a spot where Gunny Castle had marked four of the suits down as KIA, and asked him about it.
“We got rushed by some kind of critter, looked like a cat. Hard to tell when they don’t have stripes or spots. It leapt onto Sergeant Allan’s suit and exploded.” He sounded pained. “They were bunched up; it was like arty into a foxhole. You had any critters blow up on you?”
“There was one,” I agreed, “I thought we hit the power source with blaster fire. This one self-destructed?”
“Yep, it was moving too fast, and then it was among them, and it was too late to open up.”
That was a sobering thought. Could any of these augmented critters be autonomous IEDs?
March, 2035
Yes, yes they could be. The alien tech used microfusion cells the size of magnum liquor bottles (about 50 oz. to you Yanks) to provide ample fuel to run the musculature and weapons. The wolves ran off one. The tiger and the silverbacks took three. We used them to run the ion blasters, because alien tech. They provided a steady stream of power, and could be reused once drained, but not in the field, limiting their viability as a front-line fuel source.
They could also be induced to go critical, detonating with the same power as a 120mm mortar shell, and in a confined space, it will ruin your day. Or, in the case of Marine Force Three, a whole team’s.
It’s amazing, if you think about it, how efficient our biological systems are compared to the synthetic equivalent. Microfusion cells fueled the musculature on cyborg humans, where the biological equivalent could run for hours on a hamburger and fries. It was easier to make a synthetic stronger, or swap out parts, and they were harder to kill, but there were limits to the capabilities of both. Looking back, the ideal
way to deal with a cyborg was to take out their legs first, then shoot them in the head from up close.
Easier said than done.
April 1, 2023
On one hand, the United States Marines are hardcore, insane, bunker-charging motherfuckers. On the other hand, we couldn’t afford to soak up more casualties. Castle and I negotiated for a bit, but he agreed to let us take point, “to conserve resources for the final push.” We were all on the same team, after all, but I think he was a bit worried some frozen hoser from up north was going to steal his glory. I wasn’t in this for glory; I was in this because I wanted some payback for the now-smoldering crater that had been Toronto. Americans had burned down Fort York in 1813, and we’d burned down most of Washington in response. This was rather more serious than that.
“Warrant, I’ve got a new signal coming in; I think it’s the Brits,” Tailor advised. “It’s still broken and distorted, but we’re pretty close.
“Drop a navpin and move,” I ordered. “We need to consolidate before we hit the hub.”
We pushed closer and closer to the central hub of the floating city. The support silos were getting denser, and we encountered more turrets, which spat ion tracers whenever we exposed ourselves. This region looked older, too, which supported our theory that the city had been grown using the soil and rock beneath Tunguska, from the center out. The city-ships that had lifted elsewhere on the planet were correspondingly larger or smaller, depending on the date of the strike. Tunguska was the biggest by far.
The density of interior defenses was thickening too, and we had to back off several times as we moved around, over, or through structures to hit the turrets from the exposed flank, crashed through an ambush, or were divided by fog of war and then reconsolidated again. We had to reroute completely twice when we found we couldn’t flank the turrets, because they’d set sufficiently tight interlocking arcs of fire that we just couldn’t break through. The energy shields actually soaked up plasma fire outright, supercharging them, which was both an interesting data point and a pain in the ass.