Earthfall

by Joshua Guess

  There was a reasonable dollop of self-serving in that decision, too. Not that I blamed Vera or Rinna or anyone on Earth for that; they had every right to look out for themselves first. By acknowledging Kitur’s authority over me rather than just roping me in and sending me out against the Gaethe, they were hoping for some goodwill.

  “I can give you a short overview, Governor Kitur,” Rinna said. “We’re going to lose the signal in a few minutes, but we can wait here and reconnect when the platform comes back around. We want to get as much from this, er, first contact as possible.”

  “I’m listening, Captain,” Kitur said.

  “We’re going to attack the warseeds,” Rinna said. “The Gaethe dropped fifty of them during the invasion. The cities, their manufacturing capabilities, everything that powers their civilization here is dependent on them.”

  Kitur grunted. “You’re organizing a worldwide assault?”

  “Yes and no,” Rinna hedged. “It’s vital the Gaethe think we’re attacking all the warseeds equally. And for what it’s worth, we’re hoping to do a lot of damage to as many as we can. Our actual goal is the first one they brought to the surface, the one in what used to be Jacksonville. Every production facility attached to every warseed on the planet requires three forms of exotic matter to function, and every atom of that matter is produced at the Jacksonville location.”

  “Why just there?” I asked. “Why not have a distributed infrastructure?”

  “Because the processes required to make artificial exotic matter are dangerous and energy intensive,” Governor Kitur said. “We keep our own manufacturing plants on isolated asteroids.”

  “She’s right,” Rinna said. “The power requirements don’t make it feasible to create the stuff in more than a few locations. The economy of scale involved makes it much smarter to create everything they need in one spot and ship it around as needed. It’s also a matter of risk management. The processes involved create a minimum volume of exotic matter. There’s no way to make less of it. And if containment failed during creation, the energy release would severely damage everything within a few hundred miles.”

  “Wow,” I said. “No wonder they only built one of them.”

  Rinna nodded. “Yeah. They don’t see it as a weak spot, though, for a couple reasons. The first is that they have no idea we know. The second is obvious; the thing is on the wrong side of two hundred miles of automated and manned defenses, surrounded by millions of Gaethe, and built with the same material they use for their ships and buildings, which is so durable we’d need nuclear weapons to crack it.”

  “Your solution to that is Mister Cori?” Kitur asked.

  I snorted. “Try not to hide your disbelief too much, Governor.”

  “It’s not your ability I doubt,” Kitur replied, “but the sanity of anyone who would send you into that mess. I don’t see how it can be done.”

  Rinna had slowly become more serious as the conversation went on. I could see the strain in her face, the barely-checked urge to shout struggling to escape. “Ma’am, we wouldn’t be asking this if we didn’t have a reasonable expectation of success. This is something we’ve been planning for years. We have solid information to work with, including interior schematics. We’ll be using so much Sand that you’ll be able to see it from your satellite. We’re going to hit the Gaethe with everything we have to force them to evacuate this planet once the their resources are taken away. Mars has the level of technology we need to give us an edge right now, rather than waiting for us to replicate it inside a person.”

  Which all three of us knew would take years. The technical aspects of designing more machines like Jax was clearly in the wheelhouse of the people who had created the Sand, but a functional AI neural interface was more than just the parts. I’d heard horror stories about the early attempts to install a machine directly into adult brains. The tamest of them ended in catatonia. The worst in mass murder. It was a tricky, delicate process that could and did go terribly wrong.

  “Let me consult with the leadership council,” Kitur said. “I’m convinced, but I want other perspectives. If you can wait, I’ll be in touch in about an hour.”

  “Ma’am, if you’re not going to be on when the next connection window is open, could you maybe let Jordan use it? Or if not him, at least someone from home? I’d rather not miss out on any chance to share information.” I crossed my fingers. Literally crossed them. I’d take any luck I could get, real or imagined.

  “Of course,” Kitur said. “We’ll be in touch.” The connection went to standby.

  Rinna turned to me. “What do you think?”

  I raised my eyebrows. “I think it’s a stupidly risky plan, especially given how vague it is. But I’m still ready to do it.”

  She grinned and punched me in the arm. “Glad to hear it, but that’s not what I meant.”

  “I know,” I said. “If I know Kitur at all, she’s not getting alternate points of view. She’s going to bash those poor bastards over the head with the logic of why she’s right until they agree with her. I wouldn’t be surprised if she comes back on with a bunch of specifics on just how we can more efficiently fuck the Gaethe’s day up. My people have been dreaming up ways to do that for a long time.”

  Rinna nodded appreciatively. “It’s a good fit, then, because mine have been doing the practical part for a few decades.”

  I was excited to see what we would accomplish together.

  Seventeen

  Two days later I went on my first mission as part of Rinna’s fire team. Not the mission. Come on, are you serious? I’d done well in training with Sand and Jax helped make me a decent fighter thanks to his control of my brain, but I was still inexperienced. Unblooded. The thought of going into the hellish maelstrom looming in our near future without some practical experience made my brain want to crawl out of my head and hide in a hole.

  Had anyone suggested such a course of action out loud, I would have probably refused to participate until someone pulled rank on the idiot in question and thrown him out on his ass.

  None of which had come to pass, thankfully. There were always jobs in need of doing, and I ask you: what job wasn’t made better by having half a dozen giant robots going it?

  Midwifery, sure. You probably don’t want fifteen feet of metal handling that. Pretty much any small, delicate job was out.

  But there were damn few of those on Earth anymore. There was no shortage of transports and towns in need of defense just in case the bad guys decided to make an example of some helpless schmuck. Today’s mission, however, was a little special. Different than the usual fare, according to Rinna’s briefing.

  Owing to the fact that not every soldier in the EDF—Earth Defense Forces, and yes, I was beginning to think of the organization as the larger institution it was—was suited for training as a member of the armored corps, assignments couldn’t be handed out solely based on unit structure. Rinna held the highest proficiency ratings of any armored pilot on the east coast, which made her an invaluable field asset despite the administrative obligations she held at home in Bravo 2.

  When an assignment came in requiring a heavy presence of armored pilots, they were pulled from whoever was available with the skills to fit the mission profile. A normal fire team of armored pilots maxed out at four.

  Counting me, there were seven of us.

  “It’s too goddamn hot,” Williams said from his position in the tree next to me. “If the courier doesn’t show up soon I’m gonna sweat myself to death.” The big man didn’t look very uncomfortable to me. Even with his size, the guy had the lazy grace of a jungle cat, right up to perching on a branch in the afternoon sun.

  “Quit your bitching,” said Donovan, who was one of four new pilots introduced to me for this mission.

  Williams snorted. “You just wait till I stroke out from dehydration and you have to carry my ass home. Then you’ll wish you’d listened.”

  Rinna, who crouched in the tree closest to the clearing, raised
a closed fist. The rest of us tensed instantly and fell silent.

  The transport appeared at the far side of the clearing. It moved in eerie silence, the electric motors inaudible at any distance. The dry grass might have crunched and hissed beneath the wheels, but from sixty meters away they might as well have been whispers.

  Rinna’s crouch deepened, the only hint at what was about to happen. When she sprung up and forward, smooth and lithe as any gymnast, I reacted without thinking. I flung a hand out as if to catch her, and Jax correctly interpreted the action.

  Sand rose up from the ground to coalesce into a roughly hand-shaped blob. Rinna landed in its palm, her weight and momentum conspiring to drive the cushion back toward the ground in response. I heard Williams and a couple of the other pilots curse in low voices as Rinna stepped forward upon reaching the ground.

  “You sure you don’t want us down there with you?” I sub-vocalized, Jax relaying the words to Rinna’s comm.

  She shook her head, barely visible from my vantage. “No. I want you guys ready to rain hell down on this place if the courier has been compromised.”

  The transport slowed to a halt a few paces in front of Rinna, the huge, bullet-shaped vehicle unnervingly crisp in its movements. The thing looked like it could shrug off a nuclear attack. If the driver wasn’t the guy we were expecting, a light tap on the acceleration would be all the effort he needed to kill Rinna.

  Fortunately everything seemed fine. The transport’s door opened and the driver got out. Rinna, bless her, left the comm line open, and fed the conversation back to the rest of us.

  “Where’s your team?” asked the driver, scanning the area for us.

  “Watching for trouble,” Rinna replied, her right hand hovering casually near her sidearm. “Were there any problems? You look nervous.”

  “Nothing on my end,” the driver said. “Heard some chatter about increased Gaethe patrols, though. Let’s not hang around, eh?”

  Rinna signaled the rest of us to move in, and we did. I heard the scrape of Sand all around me as the other members of the team formed suits around themselves before dropping through the branches. I copied Rinna, if with much less flair. I stepped into open air and let Jax handle the details.

  Which almost broke my idiot neck; most of the nearby Sand had been sucked up by the rest of the fire team. Jax sent a red warning flash across my vision as thin streamers of black dust solidified into narrow ropes to lower me to the ground with the gentleness of a tossed bag of potatoes.

  Around me, five huge machine-wrapped men shook their metal heads at my stumble. As first impressions went, it wasn’t stellar.

  I drew up a modest amount of Sand, fashioning a much smaller suit of armor around myself. It lacked the mass of even the smallest of the standard templates, but it was far more solid. Jax had been experimenting with ways to create maximum protection, and had settled on having me essentially wear two armored suits. This, the inner, was more dense and could deflect and absorb significant damage.

  I’d make the larger one if the situation required.

  We made our way to the transport. Rinna had opened the side cargo door and was leaning into the dark space, talking animatedly with the passenger who was now in our care.

  “I don’t understand why we couldn’t have used the tubes for this,” I mused aloud. “Isn’t being above ground just going to draw attention?”

  Reid, one of the other pilots, sighed. The sound was magnified by his suit, which was just fucking weird. “There aren’t any tubes within fifty miles of the settlement the asset lives in. Limiting contact is the best way to keep him safe.”

  The courier moved to the back of the transport and removed a thin frame from a rack. With a snap of his wrists, the jumble of metal clicked into a new configuration. It was cycle of some kind, narrow metal wheels expanding and locking into shape. Rinna waved him on, and the courier swung a leg over the seat and leaned forward as the wheels bit into the road and fairly launched him back the way he had come.

  “I want one of those,” I said.

  Williams stared hard at the retreating form of the courier. “Where’s he going? Can’t be far on that thing.”

  “We’re only a few miles from the refuge he came from with the asset,” Rinna said. “My guess is he has another transport there. He’ll take it.”

  I frowned. “Who the hell are we guarding that’s so damn important?”

  “Not now,” she said. “Like I said in the briefing, our passenger is a high priority target for the Gaethe. If they figure out we have him, things will get interesting. Now, let’s get moving.”

  She directed an older soldier named Jones to drive the transport. The rest of the group paced the vehicle as it moved, one on each side, one front, and one back, with Rinna and I on the roof. I signaled the local Sand to join us, creating a thick carpet of the stuff atop the transport. It obliged by shifting around using a combination of strong magnetic fields and good, old-fashioned mechanical force, creating a deliberately rough surface to give our feet traction.

  A deeply unsettling thought roiled in the back of my head as we moved forward. Rinna told us the passenger inside the rolling mountain beneath our feet was a high-priority target for the Gaethe. That sentence set off the early warning bells of my Something Is Fucked Up radar, but I hadn’t seen any of the others react so I’d pushed the mild sense of alarm into the background.

  I was the new kid, after all. A few weeks of intense education and meetings didn’t make up for a lifetime of ingrained experience and knowledge. There had to be a huge volume of contextual information I wasn’t aware of.

  But the annoying sense of concern wouldn’t go away. It tickled, then scratched at the inside of my skull until I took it out and played with it.

  Everything I knew about the Gaethe, both my education back home and my briefings now, told me their society was rigidly caste-based. Not the way human beings did it historically; the Gaethe system wasn’t based on financial status—they had none—or racial division. The race had a genome more complex and reliant on epigenetics than anything on Earth, which meant two people from the same racial group in Gaethe culture could have wildly different expressions of genes.

  Long story short, the Gaethe separated their castes based on genetic ability. Unlike human beings, their complicated genetics had definitive, testable traits for superior physical and mental abilities.

  I’d read hundreds of pages of text about Gaethe culture, physiology, evolution, technology, you name it. At that moment nothing in all of that data stood out to me more than the caste system. Within Gaethe society, they didn’t let the castes mingle. You might be a member of one the many races and have a one in a thousand trait that put you in a caste almost empty of your race, meaning you would never see your family again.

  The why of it was fascinating, having to do with the hardwired imperative in the Gaethe to move on and spread out to new locales. At that moment the why wasn’t nearly as important as the ultimate result: the Gaethe didn’t let their own people mingle when it came to caste.

  There was no fucking way they’d let a human being mingle, no matter who or what they were.

  It led me to the only hypothesis I could come to with the information at hand. The person inside the transport was either some incredible example of human intellect so rare as to break all societal taboos the Gaethe held to, or was itself a member of that species. Balance of probability told me the latter was far more likely.

  “Oh, fuck me,” I said out loud.

  Rinna smiled a grim, beautiful smile. “Figured it out, did you?”

  “Why not just tell me?”

  Rinna hesitated. “I wanted to. Fought for it, actually, but the higher ups weren’t sure how you’d react to knowing we were working with some of them. Vera leans toward caution, and Paulson suspected there might be some severe conditioning to make you aggressive toward the Gaethe. Maybe even something programmed into Jax to make you attack on sight.”

  I gaped at her
. “That’s insane.”

  “I know,” Rinna said with a nod. “But it wasn’t just those two. There are a lot of people up the chain from me. I explained what happened the night you crashed, but this isn’t a small thing we’re doing. The asset is our source for everything we—”

  The ground a hundred meters in front of the transport erupted in a fountain of molten dirt and stone, a shock wave blasting outward in an expanding ring. Sand leaped around my body in thickening layers and Jax raised a barrier of the stuff for good measure. The last thing I saw before the wall of black caught the rain of debris was a low-flying Gaethe troop ship vomiting soldiers from the sky.

  Eighteen

  What passed through my head was a series of thoughts as the neurons linked to different concepts and ideas flashed and linked to each other, touching on everything from my fight-or-flight response to the complexities of tactical engagement.

  What came out of my mouth was, “Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck!”

  Rinna reacted so fast it was nearly time travel. Sand snapped into shape around her fast enough that I knew it had done using magnetic rather than mechanical force. It would drain the capacitors in the Sand, but we were in a wireless power zone. Free juice was being radiated onto us.

  Her suit resolved into a variant of the Dancer template, the Blade Dancer, and blurred away at top speed. The spiny protuberances jutting from knees, elbows, and knuckles gleamed darkly as she sprinted and whirled between Gaethe energy blasts.

  “Go nuts,” Rinna said over the comm. I expected her to be winded, but of course she was currently an immobile body wrapped in metal. Her voice was almost Zen in its calm.

  The Gaethe soldiers landed with deceptively light thumps—their effective weight reduced by their armor, which contained miniature gravity manipulators. The armor itself was dark gray but somehow seemed to shine anyway.