“My data indicates that you have four Uhu reconnaissance aerospace craft?”
“Yeah on roster, but one is down for maintenance, and another was damaged in a training accident last week.”
“Unfortunate, send the available aircraft to the coordinates I have sent in this communication. I realize the area is immense, but the Uhus have good sensors.”
“Affirmative, we’ll signal if we learn of anything.”
Another transmission impinges on me, I turn to the television. On the screen is an image of the burned out Leyland AFV being loaded on a recovery vehicle. The site of the battle has evidently been discovered by local media.
“Wrik,” Delt calls from downstairs. “You’d better get down here.”
His tone tells me there is trouble, and I race down the stairs to find him and Maauro looking at a holographic newsfeed on the wall. A grim-faced newscaster is staring out at the audience.
“Confederate authorities have confirmed the breaking news of an aborted attack two weeks ago by a group of Retiefan rebels. Unlike in prior such matters, no group has claimed responsibility, but members of many of the most vocal opposition groups seem to have been involved.
“The terrorists planned an attack with armored vehicles in considerable strength on the capitol’s infrastructure, when it was countered by Confederate Special Forces. Multiple fatalities are reported and additional arrests are likely, though curiously no live prisoners were taken.
“Outraged planetary officials are demanding explanations and planning hearings over the excessive use of force. The list of known dead—”
Delt switched it off.
“This must be what Rena was afraid that Grieg is involved with.” Maauro said.
“So there was no car wreck,” I said.
“No. Confed did an excellent job of keeping this quiet, but now that it is out I am intercepting traffic about the matter. The fact that Confed authorities have not arrested, or even questioned Grieg Nazir, is being used by some to point fingers of collaboration at him.”
“What?” Delt said.
“The suspicion is that he is too close to Confed. He’s a moderate as such things go locally and is married to Wrik’s sister.”
“Is he in danger?” I asked.
“It might be as well if I returned to the area around Rena’s house,” Maauro responded. “Since I need neither food, nor lodgings, I can guard the area of the house unseen.”
“I’ll pack.”
She shook her head. “No, I will call Dusko and the flitter which is far faster than the Magister.
“Why by yourself?”
Delt answered. “Wrik, you’re too well known and too tied up with Confed. If you head for Rena’s house it will just confirm the suspicions of the people that are most dangerous to Grieg’s family. It may well be that by not bringing him in, Confed is hanging him out for target practice, hoping his own side will turn on him.”
Maauro nodded. “Excellent logic.”
“I don’t like it,” I grated.
“Can you fault the intelligence?” Maauro asked patiently.
“No, of course not. Which you knew before you asked me.”
“I do think much faster than you.”
“Which I can see is going to have relationship downsides,” I replied.
Maauro smiled. “Only when you disagree with me.”
Delt slapped me on the back. “You’re flamed, flyboy. Eject before the ground comes up and smacks ya. I’ll be out in the hanger.”
“In truth,” Maauro added, after Delt left, “I don’t wish to be apart either, but your mother did advise me not to be clingy. This may be good practice.”
“Oh, don’t listen to such nonsense.”
“I think your mother has good, practical sense.” Maauro walked up and stood on tiptoes to kiss me.
“OK, I still don’t like it, but call Dusko.”
“Already done. I will leave within two hours.”
I put my arms around her. “Being apart will be strange now.”
“Yes,” she whispers. “I always fear partings, short or long.”
“When Dusko comes,” I said, prompted by some vague foreboding, “whatever else is going on, we always stop. Whenever we part, I always want the last words we say to each other to be, “I love you.”
She nodded. “That shall be our practice from now on. So that one day, if for either of us the separation becomes permanent, we will have that.”
I swallowed a rising sense of dread.
Chapter 26
Wrik and I part exactly as we planned after Dusko lands the flitter. The Dua-denlenn doesn’t come out, he and Wrik merely exchanging waves through the canopy. I get a hug and a worried look from Delt.
As we lift off, I join Dusko on the flight deck of the cargo flitter. “You should have come out to say hello.”
He gives an evil grin. “Would either of you have noticed? As usual, you seem to be off in that little fold of space where only the two of you exist.”
I give him a glare which seems to affect him not at all.
“Or it could be worse,” he adds. “Trigardt might actually hug me, then I would probably retch all over the place.”
I sigh and settle into the seat. “It is so comforting to know that some things do not change.”
“Where to?”
“Head for Grieg Nazir’s house until we are out of the flight control for Delt’s airport. I told Wrik I was going to watch his house.”
“Call that an airport?” he snorts. “Anyway that will take only five minutes.”
“I will have a course for you shortly. I must check in with Colonel Kurocal meanwhile,” I punch in the coordinates I have sent the Uhus to. “Here is our present course.”
He grunts. “Well here we go, loaded for Okaran as usual.”
As the flitter clear a range of mountains, a signal reaches me, and I flick on my internal monitor to see Colonel Kurocal.
“Maauro,” she calls, her voice is urgent.
“Here.”
“Both of the Uhu’s are down.”
“What has transpired?”
“Don’t know. They went out of contact at the same instant five minutes ago.”
“A cybernetic attack on the aircraft systems then,” I say. “Clearly, one of them was close to detecting her and, as she had to strike, she struck both. Send me their last known coordinates.”
“Sending. Listen there were crews on those aircraft. They may still be alive.”
“A cyber attack would have hacked all the Uhu systems including the automatic escape. If they could reach the emergency backups—”
“I want to send in my SAR teams.”
I consider. The Search and Rescue Teams will be vulnerable to any form of attack, either physical or cyber in their slower, vulnerable VTOLs. Still, there is no reason for Lilith to expose or waste assets to strike at paramedics. Such action would make her even more vulnerable to an attack by me.
“I cannot guarantee it, but I doubt the teams will be attacked. Have the pilots turn off as many automatic systems as they can and use manual piloting.”
Kurocal nods, leans backward and raps out orders about the SAR teams to her subordinates. Then she turns a grim aspect back to me. “She knows you’re coming.”
“Yes, but not exactly when or how. She is trying to limit my support from you. Lilith has made at least one intruder unit. I suspect she has made more. Alert your forces covering my priority targets at once. She may try spoiling attacks to pin your troops down.
“Take Eldra Trigardt into protective custody, tell her it is in regard to a terrorist threat, but give no details. Close up security on the Nazir and Van Zyle residences. Nazir will cooperate if need be.
“Wrik is with Delt at his facility, move your protective forces in as c
lose as you can without revealing them.”
“Keeping Trigardt out of the loop is getting very difficult even in with the fiction of armored exercises,” Kurocal says
“Yet it must remain so”
“That is on you.”
“It is.” I respond, but not without misgiving. “Remember, if I have not checked in within twenty-four hours from now, assume I am lost and govern yourself accordingly.”
“Affirmative, good luck.”
As I am giving her orders I am also calculating a location based on the lasts uploads from the Uhus and any other data I can scavenge. Unfortunately, one Uhu went down over an island, and the other over a peninsula of the main continent, jutting out into the sea. Once down, it will be time consuming for me to move from one location to the other. Either I must leave Dusko orbiting, with the attendant danger to him and the flitter, or I must swim, expending considerable energy I may need for the battle ahead.
Lilith is dangerous but inexperienced. She will likely see an island as a defensible location instead of the tactical trap that it is. An experienced campaigner would choose the peninsula. Indeed, they should reject both for a featureless open area where they would not be pinned against the sea. I must risk choosing the island. I order to Dusko to make a low pass at sea-top level and head for the beach near where the Uhu went down.
“You’re the boss,” he says, but his lips are tight and thin.
I use the time. I am busy in the multiverse checking my defenses. Her attack on the Uhus should have opened her up to a lethal counter-strike by my subprograms. Yet, this did not occur. How has she avoided my strike? I check my attack barrier. It has been fired. And then I find my answer. Lilith has sacrificed an HCR. She used one of them as a relay and launched her attack, sacrificing it to take out the Uhus. The attack barrier contacted and blasted the HCR’s cyberbrain, frying it.
I am surprised. Lilith has been cautious of her HCR bodies, not as if she was fond of the machines, but the same way Wrik is careful of his body parts. This is like gnawing a leg off to escape a trap, and it is surprising she would burn a fifth of her force for such a small advantage. Her fear of me must be causing her to become unhinged.
We are closing on the island. It is a large one, over 50 kilometers in depth and 45 in length, craggy and mountainous. There are too many places one could easily hide the sort of ship Lilith stole, a VTOL model for unimproved fields, landing horizontally, as opposed to Stardust, which is an older design. If we pop up enough for me to use my onboard sensors, an HCR or a missile could target us. No, better to attack at ground level.
Dusko brings the ship down so low that the pressure of our passage rips spray off the wave tips of the wine-dark sea below us. I almost order him higher, then we are over the reef and the calmer shallows of the lagoon. A beach appears, lit by the moonlight of two of Retief’s moons, and he goes into hover, kicking up sand. The door slides back and night beckons beyond it.
“Orbit out while you have fuel. Be alert for my signal,” I order.
He nods. I leap through the door, armspac in hand and other weapons webbed to my back. I sink into the sand and train my armspac on the treeline as the flitter’s engine’s roar, and it again heads out to sea. Then I am racing for the treeline, every sensor operating at full capacity. I am moving too fast to use my spybees. Trees splinter and foliage shreds as I plunge into the forest. But nothing strikes me in direct, or indirect fire. If Lilith is here, she has either not detected my arrival, or is biding her time.
I slow to normal speed and begin to search the island. I can only hope that I have guessed correctly.
In many ways, I am returning to my origin as a fighting machine. My chassis is now flat-black. It feels both weirdly familiar and comforting. I was made for this. I must put aside the gentle Maauro and again become the M-7.
It frightens me a little how easily I do so. How seductive it is to return to my old role and put aside the doubts, the confusions, the new-found hopes and dreams. Destroy or be destroyed. There is no ambiguity here. The superior fighting machine will triumph. I am outnumbered, but I am the best ever made. Were it merely a question of me verses the five HCRs, I would be confident of victory, but Lilith remains the X-factor. What sort of force-multiplier will she be? Will she tip the balance?
I have not allowed myself to envision failure. In consequence, I have not left anything for Wrik should I fail, explaining what happened, only a short message supporting the ruse that I am protecting his family from terrorists. But just now I am too much M-7 to do so. The feelings that surround us have receded. I can only be reunited with my love on the other side of this night’s work, when I will again be Maauro and place my warrior-self back under lock and key.
Now that I have slowed, I release some spybees. These are leaner, faster models designed to spend their power in one night. I send them to explore alternate vectors as I advance inland.
I detect the smell of burnt metal and polymers and alter my course. The forest canopy above me is torn, and I find the shattered remains of the Uhu among savaged trees. I make a circuit of the machine, hunting for an ambush. Nothing threatens, and I risk a recovery attempt on the crew. There are no survivors, the crew’s bodies are in the main wreckage. Three men and one woman must now be added to Lilith’s account. I leave the bodies undisturbed. Either SAR or Graves Registration will attend to them, and I must press forward on my own mission.
I move on, searching with my passive sensors to avoid giving away my position. Twenty-three minutes and seventeen seconds further into the search, I am beginning to fear that I have chosen badly. Perhaps Lilith is on the peninsula—
The tree next to me explodes. I roll into a ball and spin for twenty meters. I detect one HCR on a ridge about a kilometer distant, but it is not the one pumping out the HE rounds blasting the trees around me. The others must be on the ridge’s reverse slope, firing up munitions for this one to guide. The spotter on the ridge is using a combination of a laser and some form of ground radar to track me. This analysis takes me .07834 seconds but most of a full second elapses before I roll out flat behind a rise of dirt and rock, my armspac stretched ahead of me.
Lilith’s troops have opened fire at long range, with weapons better suited to destroying biologicals, though, if one of the plunging shells lands on me I will not be dancing with Wrik again. Score one for Lilith for getting in the first shot, but it would have been better for her had she waited until I was closer and tried for me with direct-fire and penetrating munitions. Still, one HE shell goes off close enough to cause my sensors to derezz. I cannot tolerate the exposure to these mortars any longer.
The searching laser is more accurate then the ground radar, but its beam perfectly targets the firer. My weapon spits out fifty, HVAP flechettes in a concentrated burst, most strike, removing the head of the HCR. The machine struggles to right itself; its brain is not in the head, and there are auxiliary sensors in the chest.
I have counted on this, as it rears up to bring its secondary sensors into play, my second burst of HVAP rounds tears though the armored torso, .75 seconds before a small HEAT missile finishes the job, blasting melted metal through the HCR’s core brain. The machine falls, and I immediately change position. The HCR’s on the reverse slope can’t update their targeting now. They blast my last location, and then walk fire around assuming I am charging up the ridge.
I have no indirect fire weapons, and consider for .00988 seconds whether I should toss some grenades over the ridge. They will do nothing to the HCRs but the base of my enemy’s pyramid is a human mind, which works only so fast and is easily distractible. The grenades arc will reveal my location so I head to the right for 100 meters; throw three grenades in a tenth of a second, then double back to the left, to go around the ridge at a lower level. The mortars fall silent for 1.890 seconds in which I cover 287 meters of uneven ground.
I detect and jam the passive sensors they ha
ve planted on this killing ground, leaving only the area near the valley entrance clear. But I fire spoof signals into the sensor network. If I am lucky, it will make them believe I went the other way. Some of the signals must have penetrated the passive sensor’s network, as the mortar fire walks to the far side
Kurocal’s interior channel with me engages. “Maauro!”
“I am busy, Colonel.”
“This is urgent.”
“Report.”
“There’s an insystem freighter in orbit, the Arc in Ciel. We’ve lost contact with it. Its orbit is degrading, and it’s on course to crash into the capitol.”
“Can you send up a boarding party to intercept it?” I ask, as I slow down and move with greater care. The mortars have stopped. They do not know where I am. Too much sound could give me away.
“No. There’s nothing in the port that can be readied quick enough. I have aerospace interceptors, but all they can do is shoot it down. There are one hundred miners and their families on that craft!”
“They are almost certainly dead. Lilith probably decompressed the ship to prevent their interference. I would have.”
“What!”
“Colonel, the math of this is simple. Destroy a mine ship full of corpses, or suffer an impact equivalent to 1.732 kilotons on the capitol and spaceport.”
“God damn it, they may be alive. I’m not going to order the death of a hundred civilians.”
“Then you invite the death of thousands more.”
The fury in her slips away. “Can’t you do anything?” she says. “For God’s sake, it’s murder either way.” Her face shows the misery of a trapped animal.
Empathy returns to me and suddenly I am afraid. Have I lost Maauro in my return to M-7? Would she not have felt pity, or horror, at the thought of a shipful of helpless families plunging into a city, or dying in each other’s arms the ship’s air bled off? Could she not feel the anguish of a commander, who must order their deaths, or risk the deaths of thousands she has sworn to protect with her life?
“I am sorry,” I whisper in my shame. In truth, I feel it and am thankful to feel it. “I do not know what I can do, but I will try. But I can lift one burden from you, if nothing more can be done. I order you to destroy the Arc in Ciel before it strikes the city. The responsibility for their deaths, if they still live, is mine alone.”
All the Difference Page 24