Earthfall
Page 16
The trick was staying alive.
***
“This thing is more dangerous than you can imagine,” Paulson said, then handed the thing to me.
“Aww,” I said, taking the small sphere. “I didn’t get you anything.”
Paulson rolled his eyes. “Seriously, Mars, be fucking careful with that. The housing is q-carbon based, but it’s not indestructible. A sustained shot from one of those Gaethe particle beams could crack it.”
The sphere was basically a bomb, but containing Kyotogen instead of something less apocalyptic. I wasn’t fully up to speed on the physics of it, but Paulson assured me that the same principle which allowed exotic matter to create more of itself also worked in reverse. Setting off the bomb within a certain radius of the supply within the warseed would annihilate all of it.
“I’m planning to keep it right next to me inside my suit,” I assured him. “If something breaks the bomb, it’s because I’m dead.”
Paulson’s eyes lit up. “That reminds me, I have a surprise for you!”
“You mean other than the doomsday device? Because honestly, that’s plenty.”
He was already moving, waving for me to follow. We moved through the main lab and some narrow hallways, ending up in a room that looked like what machine shops wanted to be when they grew up.
“Over here is where we disassembled your rail gun and tweaked it a bit,” Paulson said, waving a hand at one corner of the giant shop. “When we scanned it into the system and shared the schematics, I had messages from everyone with a fabrication setup asking where the hell we got this tech from. It blew their minds.”
“I’ll be sure to pass that on if I ever get home,” I said bemusedly.
Paulson went right on as if I hadn’t spoken. “This is what I wanted to show you, though. Took a team of five three weeks to fix it, another ten days to add the upgrades. It’s ready to go, though.”
I followed his gaze and broke into a grin. “My survival suit! You fixed it? Really? I thought that thing was recycled.”
“No, though the damage was severe.” Paulson scratched his chin. “It’s strange how far ahead your folks are in some areas, but way behind us in others. We’re integrating system wide battery upgrades based on the technology you brought with you, and people everywhere are fabbing portable rail guns. That’s just the tip of the iceberg, of course.” He reached out and rapped his knuckles on the arm of the survival suit. It didn’t ring the way the composite should have. “But we’re way ahead of you when it comes to materials science. This thing is much more durable now. Once you get inside, it will automatically link with Jax and feed you information about the upgrades.”
I had to admit, the suit gave me a lot of comfort. Having a hard armor shell inside a larger Sand construct meant more concrete protection. “Too bad everyone doesn’t have one of these,” I said.
“You wound me, Mars,” Paulson said. “Did you think we’d use the tech in your gun and not in your armor? The composites are nothing we haven’t come up with, but the power systems, motion control, pretty much everything else, it’s all new ground. I’ve distributed the specs just like the rail gun. Takes longer to fabricate, but I made sure we had suits made up for your team.”
“How the hell did you manage it so fast?” I asked.
Paulson pointed to my head. “Jax. He’s fully integrated into our network and his processing capacity is incredible. He has specs for all your gear, your ship, even the technology you have back home.” He looked at me curiously. “I mean, he basically walked us through it. Our fabrication units did all the hard work.”
I gaped at him stupidly. At least, I’m assuming I looked stupid, because I definitely felt that way. “Why would Jax have all that stuff stored? Isn’t it risky as hell? It’s dangerous to let every weak point in UEE technology float around like that.”
Paulson scratched his stubble. “I thought you knew. Ah, no, it’s not dangerous. I don’t think anyone could take information from Jax unless he let them. I assumed, once I saw the files, that he was a sort of seed. A repository of data meant to be a starting point to rebuild. The functions you use him for like flying and using the Sand, that stuff is honestly barely scratching the surface of what he can do. Give him one of your fabricators, which are well ahead of ours here, and with enough time he could build a warship. A planetary base. Hell, there’s even guides for all the biological stuff. It’s enough to create a whole new society.”
Or change an existing one. The possibility appeared in my head fully formed, and I kicked myself for not considering it before. The only thing keeping me from being certain I’d been dropped here on purpose were the circumstances of my arrival. No one could have planned for the scout ship.
I shook my head. The last thing I needed before starting in on this insane plan was another distraction. Instead of voicing my concerns and talking myself into a headache, I put a hand out to Paulson.
“Thank you,” I said, and meant it. “Not just for getting my suit back into shape, but for the team. You’ve made our chances a little better.”
Paulson shook, grinning. “If you really want to thank me, find me an addiction specialist. I’ve been drinking so much coffee over the last few weeks that I’m starting to hear colors.”
“How about we just get the job done and call it even?” I asked, smiling.
Paulson shrugged. “Eh. Saving the world. Can’t be that hard, can it?”
“Nah, with you making our gear, we couldn’t lose if we wanted to.” I meant it as a joke, but only halfway. Though the people of Earth didn’t have the advanced energy weapons the Gaethe could utilize, they weren’t slouches when it came to destruction. Paulson, however, only grew more animated.
“Oh, this is nothing,” he said. “Let me show you a few of the armaments I’m sending with you. Then I’ll show you specs for the stuff we’ll be using to give you ranged support.”
I let him show me. I expected to nod in the right places and make quiet sounds of agreement. I did not expect to be impressed.
What Paulson showed me blew my fucking mind.
Twenty-Five
In the UEE, missions of any type are given an alphanumeric designation based on a planned hierarchy. The Home Run that brought me to Earth, for example, was labeled Sol-IR28B. The system abbreviation at the beginning, in this case the Solar system, followed by mission parameters—Information Retrieval—and ending with the pilot or commanding officer’s designation number. I’m 28B, so named because I was the twenty-eighth engineered pilot to come out of the program, the result of the beta group of embryos.
It’s a long but logical means of giving a name to what is a simple flight, but because everyone knows the system it’s really easy for anyone looking at a status board or information request to know what they’re seeing.
The mission to destroy the exotic matter reserves at the Jacksonville warseed was given the name Rockbreaker. This name worked in a functionally identical manner to the conventions I was used to, even if I thought it sounded dumb.
There were two major tasks to accomplish before we could reach the warseed proper and begin the actual mission. The first was the wide mobilization of the Sand, which was easy. Send a command, let it propagate through the stuff, and wait for it to move. I saw the simulations based on the movement data, and the bit about being able to see it from orbit was spot-on. The Sand stretched across a thousand miles of land gathered slowly but surely to pile up in huge drifts at the base of the draas wall of the Gaethe mega-city.
The second hurdle was getting the Sand and us across a few hundred miles of the city so we could attack the warseed directly. Several facts made this much more difficult than it sounds.
The fact that the wall of the city facing the interior of the continent stood a hundred feet tall was one. Then add the defenses, ranging from automated turrets to thousands of gunships and tens of thousands of soldiers stationed around and on top of the city, and you begin to see the scope of the problem.
Shuul was the key. His insights into Gaethe engineering made it obvious why something as relatively weak as my portable rail gun could put holes through ships. The draas was crystalline, engineered to absorb the worst sort of punishment the energy weapons fielded by the other advanced species out there could dish out. It was incredibly tough stuff, but its structure could be compromised by a powerful kinetic strike.
Of course, the wall was magnitudes stronger than the hull of a ship. It would require something a bit more…extreme.
“Are you sure we’re far enough away?” Durham asked, his voice somewhat muted by the suit he wore.
“We’re fine,” Rinna assured him. “Thirty seconds.”
Our face plates darkened to protect us from the flash. We stood on a hill two miles from the wall, and even knowing the calculations had been checked dozens of times, I was still scared. Jax almost hummed in my brain in counterpoint to my nervous tension. I was ready to raise up a barrier of Sand as big as I could make, if it came to that.
“Incoming!” Rinna shouted over the com.
A streak of light fell from the sky, a pure white flare moving so fast it appeared as a solid bar. The light hit the city wall in less time than it took to blink, unleashing a maelstrom of light and sound. Thunder clapped, hard and sharp, and my face plate went nearly black to protect my eyes from the light of the impact.
“Holy shit!” Williams said in unison with Reid.
“Perfect hit,” Rinna reported over the channel.
“Do these suits protect us from the radiation?” Durham asked with the fearful curiosity of a child. Everyone looked away from the terrible spectacle to stare at him.
Rinna put up a hand to stop Williams from the response his body language screamed was about to come. “First of all, these are designed to work in space. So yes, we would be safe from radiation. Second? That bar of tungsten only hit with the force of a small nuclear bomb. It isn’t radioactive.”
I tuned out the speech Rinna gave the others about teamwork and not giving each other a bunch of crap at this point in the mission. Truth was, Durham wasn’t dumb. He was ignorant about some things, which isn’t anything to be ashamed of. I was right there with him; despite devouring thousands of movies and books, Earth was alien to me in a lot of ways. I couldn’t fault the guy for being someone who thought in straight lines.
Instead of listening, I watched. The debris and dust blew away from the wall, and under the magnification from my helmet I could see the breach. Jax took measurements using the known height of the wall, and I whistled low inside my helmet. The impact of the orbital strike had done more damage than expected, leaving a section nearly a hundred meters wide nothing more than a pile of rubble. Cracks radiated in every direction, starting a meter wide and narrowing down until they were too fine to see from so far away.
A tone sounded across the com, Jax telling us it was time to move out.
Rinna cut her admonishing speech short and took point. “Okay, guys. Here we go. Stay close and keep a steady pace. We don’t want to get there before Jax is ready for us.”
We set out in single file. I rarely looked away from the slowly growing wall in front of us, the destruction becoming more obvious, more real, with every step. I tried to imagine the same thing repeated twenty-nine times over around the world and came up short. The weapons satellites we used to drop the tungsten rods were a century and a half old and those thirty shots were all the human race had left. If we wanted to drop more of them, we’d have to launch new satellites, and that was functionally impossible.
The shots were spread across the world. It was the only way to start the war while making this look like the broad assault we wanted the Gaethe to respond to. Even the shot we were approaching wasn’t close to our eventual goal; we were north of Florida by a significant distance.
In a corner of my HUD, Jax fed me a stream of updates about what was happening at the wall, and less frequently, how the global assault was unfolding.
The Sand undulated around us as we moved, creating solid surfaces for us to walk on while ferrying our supplies with us underneath. This was a peripheral thought, merely a fact I filed away. It was, like most things in everyday life, unimportant as long as it was working properly. Normally I might have spared some anxiety over the fact that each step was steadied by a complex array of machines bound together by questionable physics and managed by a precocious AI, but all my attention was on the hole in the wall.
I could see inside it once we got closer, and I was reminded of a run I made to an ice moon. It was a small UEE splinter colony, one of the places we had put down just enough roots to net actual vegetables and meats. Back when the place had first been settled, one of the drone supply ships had malfunctioned badly. The crater where the colony was to eventually be housed had a rough circle chewed out of it by the explosion of plasma from the crashing drone.
This looked like that; a terrible wound as deep as it was wide. In the sun light streaming through the gaps I could see blackened carbon smears. Were those the remains of the hundreds or thousands of Gaethe we had just vaporized? If so, they were only an appetizer for what was about to happen. I shuddered.
My HUD blinked at me with several notifications at once, Jax letting me know he cut off my mic and my feed for the team channel, but was listening to it for me.
“Mars?” Jax asked in my ear piece. “Are you all right?”
I pursed my lips. “You’re literally in my head, Jax. You know the answer.”
Jax hesitated. It was only a fraction of a second, but for him it was an eternity. That’s only a little hyperbolic since his operations per second put every historical supercomputer on Earth to shame. “Once I alerted you about the combat protocols, they became optional. I have full discretion for their use. If you would prefer, I can dampen this reaction. Allow you to focus on the task at hand.”
I shook my head. “No. Feeling shitty about it won’t stop me from getting the job done. Leave my brain chemistry alone. And turn the mic back on. I need to be able to hear the team.”
“Of course,” Jax intoned, and reverted everything back to normal.
I felt like an idiot for resenting him, but I had begun to feel mostly like a host body for something infinitely more valuable than me. I knew it was stupid, of course, because Jax couldn’t exist without me. Didn’t mean I felt great about having been kept in the dark for my entire life. Call me childish if you want, I don’t care. But it does make you a meany-head, and you smell like farts.
“Set a marker for a hundred yards,” Rinna said. Jax obediently threw up a range overlay, marking out the distance from the wall. We stopped at three hundred feet and watched. This would be the last bit of pure observation for us. The rest would be increasingly hands-on.
Shapes rose from the Sand as if from a perfect liquid. No streams of material cascaded off; the stuff behaved as ordered so not a particle or grain stuck anywhere. The first thing to appear was a cylinder about three times my height and as thick as my waist, slightly flared at the tail end. Metal guides extended from it equilaterally, springy but strong. They would act as a crude guidance mechanism.
“Execute when ready,” Rinna said to Jax.
Tendrils of Sand spiraled out and up, moving the rocket into place at the mouth of the breach. Sand wrapped around stray pieces of draas debris, flinging them away. I saw ports on the sides of the weapon iris open, ready to spew tiny pellets on its journey down the wide and tall corridor Shuul assured us bisected the entire wall.
Fire whooshed to life and sent the thing into the darkness. From the simulations we watched, I knew it would take only a quarter hour to cover the distance, shedding enough neurotoxin to kill any Ga
ethe within a kilometer, depending on how many ventilation systems were active. The poison was harmless to human beings, but no one on the team wanted to risk it. As soon as the rocket came to life, our filtration systems went from minimal action to a setting that would make clinical paranoids whistle in appreciation.
Sand flowed through after it, moving much faster in the enclosed space than it ever could on open ground. The reason was as simple as volume; with so much of the stuff concentrated in one place, we could afford to be inefficient. By the time we reached the coast, a quarter of it would be drained of energy. We’d brought along a few useful items to help, but even with a smallish fusion reactor, magnetically propelling gigatons of particulate through two hundred miles of tunnel tall and wide enough to serve as main street for a race of giants was going to cost staggering amounts of energy.
Jax kicked up the rest of our goods in the form of a transport for the team to ride in, two more for our weapons, a fourth that would trail behind us a by a few kilometers because it was packed with what Mark Watney would call some serious death, and a fifth containing the stripped-down fusion reactor, currently radiating ten megawatts of energy in the form of high-frequency microwaves.
The team piled into the transport, each of us gathering a thin armor of Sand over our survival suits. Jax floated firearms to us, traditional guns using caseless ammunition. They didn’t have the power of a rail gun shot, but against stragglers it wasn’t likely we’d need that much overkill. Not yet, at any rate. Superior rate of fire and ease of use was far more important.
“Well, it was nice knowing all of you,” Reid intoned happily over the channel.
“Speak for yourself,” Williams replied. “Though I admit, it’s probably pretty great to know me.”
“Damn right,” Durham said. “You’re perfect to hide behind. Gotta love big soldiers.”
I expected Rinna to give them grief over the morose exchange, but she laughed. “You dumb motherfuckers think I’m gonna let you all die just so you get called heroes? Screw that noise. I’m planning on getting all the glory—and having my drinks bought for me for life—by getting you home in one piece. Should be a challenge.”