by B. V. Larson
Thinking hard for a second, I thought of a new angle. Kivi had never been as good at hacking as Natasha was. Nowhere near. Hacking her way up to Gold Deck—that was new ground for her.
But then again… Kivi and Natasha were in the same unit together—my unit.
“So,” I said as I rubbed soap into an armpit. “When did you start hacking Natasha’s computer? Does she even know?”
Kivi dropped her soap. It just plain up and sprang out of her hands. She bent over to pick it up, and I got quite a view. Still, I refused to be distracted.
“Come on,” I said. “Talk to me, or I’ll tell her. She’ll shut you out hard. You know she can.”
She glared at me suddenly. “Damn it, McGill, don’t say a word to her.”
“All right then—talk.”
She heaved a sigh. “It was just natural curiosity. Natasha is always doing things that are… let’s call them special missions. For you, and for others. I was curious, and I didn’t want to work as hard as she does…”
“I see. I get it. You hacked Natasha so you could get into all her business on the cheap. That’s clever. What did you learn?”
“All sorts of things. About you being on the Sea Empress before it blew up, for instance. And about how you screwed Raash and gave him those blue scales he hates.”
“Yeah, he does hate that,” I admitted.
“Did you know that he’s aboard ship?”
I snapped up my head. “He is?”
“Yes. Floramel brought him. They came in with the last wave, but you were too busy chasing Jenny Mills around to notice.”
“Huh… I guess they figure he might be a source of intel on the enemy.”
“I doubt it. That lizard was nuts before, and now he’s completely insane.”
“Kinda, yeah. What else can you tell me?”
“Why should I tell you anything?”
“Because you’ve been hacking and stealing Natasha’s data stream, and I’m going to tell her if you don’t give it all up.”
She shrugged. “Okay, okay. There isn’t much else to tell. I caught a recording of today’s fiasco up on Gold Deck with Armel and Winslade. That’s when I became worried.”
“Why?”
“Because James, there’s no way we’re getting out of this province alive. Once we start bombing planets, every Skay and saurian for lightyears will come running. That’s what Carlos asked about, isn’t it?”
“Yes. But it’s not preordained, girl. Stop worrying so much. We’ll get in, perform a surgical strike, and flash out of here again.”
“Dominus is fast, but they’ll be behind us—between us and Earth.”
“So what? Maybe we’ll run the other way.”
Her eyes widened improbably large, and she turned off the water. Her skin was nice and shiny when it was dripping wet. “Am I hearing this right? Are we planning to rush blindly into some other province? Into territory completely uncharted?”
I threw my hands wide. “Someone has charted it. Have a little faith, girl. Those pricks back on Earth might not give two shits about Legion Varus, but they don’t want to lose this nice, shiny ship, now do they?”
“Huh…” she said, toweling off. “I hope you’re right, James. I really do.”
She left, and we parted ways. I fell onto my bunk a few minutes later, but it took almost a half-hour to fall asleep. I kept thinking about what Armel had said—and what Carlos and Kivi had figured out.
What were we going to do after the strike was over and the smoke had cleared?
-32-
Klaxons went off all over the ship early the next morning. My men were shoved out of their bunks again. We scrambled into our kits and stumbled into the passages.
Red arrows directed us downward. We followed, trotting and stopping only to grab some basic weapons at the armory. I tried every ten steps to contact Graves, but he wasn’t answering.
“Is someone hitting us?” Carlos demanded. “Are they interrupting our warp bubble? We’re all going to fry when the radiation hits if they don’t shut that down right.”
Carlos spoke from experience. I’d once watched him die in the warp bubble on the outer hull of a battlecruiser. It hadn’t looked like a good way to go out.
“We don’t know anything, Carlos. Shut up, and stick to your ranks. Barton, move your lights ahead of my heavies. Harris, hold the center with me and your boys in the fat-suits. Leeson, you’re bringing up the rear with the auxiliaries.”
“Always a pleasure to be last in a head-long rush, sir,” Leeson said happily.
“You’re a frigging plucked chicken, Leeson,” Harris told him, but Leeson just laughed.
We went down a ramp, then two more. Other units were doing the same thing. They were units from our own cohort.
That’s about when I realized our final destination was Green Deck.
“Aw, come on!” Leeson complained from the back. “This is unscheduled bullshit.”
“It’s always bullshit,” Harris said. “Scheduled or not.” Harris turned a suspicious eye in my direction. “What are we walking into, sir? As our centurion, you’ve got to know.”
I shook my head. “Not this time.”
A big closed set of blast-doors with the number three painted on them brought us to a halt. The light above it was red—no entry allowed.
We tried the doors anyway, of course. They were sealed tight.
Sargon came up to me and slapped my helmet. He gestured with his belcher. “You want I should cut a hole in that door, sir? Three tight beams, all converging—it will cut right through.”
I considered it for a second. I honestly did. “Nah.” Then I turned to the unit at large. “All right, troops. After that filling breakfast, and all those warm-up exercises, we’re primed and ready for a drill here on Green Deck. I’ve heard there will be cold beers at the bottom of the lagoon if we get there first.”
Barton looked at me in confusion. “Sir? No one’s been fed or has exercised or—oh. I get it. You made a funny.”
Barton came from Victrix, and she was still our resident straight-man at heart. There was no joke so obvious she couldn’t miss it at first.
“Yes, it was a joke, Adjunct. Thanks for squatting on it.”
The unit laughed half-heartedly, and some of them began to stretch. The smartest ones broke out rations and water they’d stashed in their kits for just such a moment.
Harris came to hover around me again. He seemed agitated.
“What is it, Adjunct? Do you need to pee?”
“Sir, can you find out what’s up? Maybe with some help?” He nodded his head toward our techs, Kivi and Natasha.
They weren’t usually in a good mood, and today was no exception. Still, the idea had merit. I walked over and started a hacking spree. We soon got was a glimpse of the security cams from the inside of Green Deck.
At first, it looked like an angelic scene. There were trees, fake sunshine, a few fake birds and a lot of bushes. In the center of the place, the lagoon sparkled like the clearest water Earth never had.
“What’s that?” Harris demanded, pointing at my tapper.
“What?”
“Pan it, pan it back!”
I frowned at him. “Don’t get too scared. There’s probably someone in there setting up an ambush of some kind.”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah… but that wasn’t a human. It was too… skinny.”
I frowned, spinning back the footage about thirty seconds. Nothing moved for the first ten, then…
“What the hell…?”
“You see? You saw it, didn’t you? A pile of sticks or wires or something. It was walking like a man.”
I had seen something. I didn’t know what it was, but I hadn’t liked it, and there was no way it was a human. It moved with bipedal motion, kind of like a human—but it was too thin and too quick to be a man.
“I don’t know. Maybe it’s a glitch or something.”
“No! It’s some kind of escaped freak. That’s why we’r
e down here without orders, just standing guard. Something is loose inside there.”
We both looked at big door number three. It showed no hint of what was hiding behind it.
“Unit, prepare for a fight,” I told the group. “Expect to walk in hot.”
That got them to change gears. People were walking around, slumping against the walls, chatting and generally goofing off. That was the Legion Varus way, after all. You took your breaks whenever you could get away with it.
But a warning from the CO was something serious. They lifted up their weapons and checked their gear. They made sure every indicator was green, and if it wasn’t, they banged on it until it was.
Finally, the big light over the door switched to green. The doors opened, and we aimed a hundred guns into the interior.
“Advance by squads, maintain overwatch. Move inside fifty meters, take cover, and be ready for anything.”
They did as I ordered with precision. No one was bullshitting anymore. That was all over with. This was go-time, and we didn’t know what we were walking into, but it had to be something.
A Legion Varus man soon develops a powerful sense of paranoia. It comes early in a man’s career, and it never leaves him. As far as I was concerned, that was a good thing.
When the lights were all inside, crouching behind every leaf, fake log and puff-crete rock in sight, I ordered Harris to advance with his heavies.
He did so with his gun to his cheek. You would have thought he was walking into a tunnel full of Vulbites rather than the pleasure center of our own transport ship.
But I didn’t fault him. He’d been the first man to notice something was wrong. That kind of paranoid instinct was worth encouraging in a junior officer.
“Centurion,” Barton called to me over command chat. “I’ve got eyes on… something.”
“What is it?”
“I don’t know, sir—I’ll pass the feed.”
She did so, and I saw nothing at first. The point of view was from Barton’s helmet. I had to zoom in and pan a little over her rifle sights.
Then, I saw it. Something tall, slim, shiny. It was either wearing metal armor, or it was metal.
All of a sudden, I felt a chill run through me. I recognized this thing. It was a practice drone. A robot, like the ones I’d seen back at the Mustering Hall. Usually, they were used for sparring practice, or as shooting targets.
But this one… it was much more intelligent in its movements. It acted like a soldier, a thinking human. It crouched, carried a rifle, and swiveled its head constantly, looking for targets.
Then it spotted us, and it pointed our way with a long metal arm. It was spooky just watching the thing.
A moment later, however, things went from freaky to terrifying. A dozen more robots came out from the trees. Had they been hiding behind every trunk? It was my impression that they had.
“Open fire!” I shouted, marking the enemy robots with my HUD. As a commander, I could put red triangles on certain targets, making sure our fire was concentrated and effective. I didn’t know how hard these robots were to kill, so I did a little over-kill. Each squad got only a single target to shoot at.
And shoot we did. The air ripped with snap-rifle fire. The leaves on the trees jumped. The rocks sparked and popped white dust in the air.
A few of the robots were knocked flat. They danced and sparked more than the fake rocks did.
“Whoa! Whoa!” A big voice boomed. It was Graves, and he didn’t sound happy—but then, he never did. “Who’s firing without orders? Is that…? Yes, Unit 3. McGill, ceasefire.”
Reluctantly, I ordered my troops to stop tearing up the landscape. I didn’t stop deploying them, however. The heavies marched inside the doors, and behind them Leeson’s gang of chicken-littles brought up the rear.
“Everyone is to hold your fire. Didn’t you notice the robots weren’t fighting back?”
“Who cares?” Harris muttered beside me.
I nodded in agreement. When it came to these “exercises” I took a dim view of rules drawn up in secret.
“As every officer should know by now, these war games never begin outside Green Deck itself. No one is to fire until they’re inside these walls, and the games have officially been announced.”
I opened my helmet, spat a big one, then settled behind my rock again. I rested my morph-rifle on top of it, and used the projected 4X reticle to examine the enemy. They were moving just like us, all on their bellies—if they’d had bellies, I mean. A few of them seemed damaged, they were moving slowly, with limbs tangled up.
“We can hurt them at least,” I told Harris.
He grinned back.
The floating reticle on my morph rifle was new. It didn’t use an optical sighting system with glass and such-like. Instead, it warped a region of air above the sights, which formed a lens of compressed air—I didn’t really understand it, to be honest. When the nerds started talking about applied field theory and all, my brain was late for the door.
But I couldn’t argue with the results. It was useful to have what amounted to a virtual scope on your weapon. All you had to do was click a selector to shift the magnification power, and you were in business.
Graves was still talking, of course, but I was barely listening. I figured all these robots crawling around with snap-rifles weren’t escaped sex-dolls. They were killers, that much was obvious.
My mind churned while Graves droned on about the rules of engagement. Mostly, I was trying to figure out how to cheat these metal bastards.
“…not all our units have taken the field yet, so in about five minutes we’re going to start the live-fire part of the exercise. When you…”
“Five minutes?” Harris complained, flipping open his visor and shaking sweat out onto the ground. He always sweated a lot when the guns came out unexpectedly. “It’s got to be frigging Manfred. He’s always slow off the mark. He—”
“Shut up,” I said. He gave me an evil frown, but he did stop talking. “I think… yeah, I’ve got an idea.”
“What? Oh no…”
I stood up. Quickly, I gestured to all the other commanders.
“We’re moving out,” I said. “Everyone, up and out. Move to the center lagoon, right now, on the double!”
Without explaining anything else—because there wasn’t time—I raced toward the line of robots. They perked up, but they didn’t shoot me down. If there was one thing robots were good at, it was following orders.
“McGill!” Barton called out. She was sprinting up next to me. “Where the hell are we going? We’re running right through them, sir!”
“That’s exactly right. If they don’t get out of the way, try to stomp on some of their wires if you can when you run them over.”
My pack was a little slow to get up and chase after me, but they did it. Not every unit full of soldiers would have done something so crazy. I was proud of my troops. They’d follow me into the jaws of Hell if I went first, and I loved them for it.
Puffing to keep up, my ragged line of troops raced through the brush, sometimes kicking robots and stumbling over fallen trees. I picked up a trooper now and then, set them on their feet, and kept running.
“If you don’t keep up, you’re toast!” I shouted.
That got them lifting their feet a little higher. Ahead, I saw the beach. It was less than a hundred meters off, and I dared to let my heart soar. “We’re gonna make it!” I called out.
But then, like the voice of doom that it was, Graves spoke again. His words were fateful.
“Ah, there we go. Manfred’s Unit Seven is finally in position. You can open fire in three… two…”
“Everyone, hit the deck!” I roared. Soldiers pitched themselves on their bellies all around me. A second later, the air itself seemed to light up. A half-dozen troops who hadn’t thrown themselves down fast enough were instantly hit in the ass and knocked sprawling.
Say what you would about these robots—they could shoot straight.
/> -33-
“Crawl! Crawl! Head for the water!”
It was chaos. I’d never performed a beach invasion before, at least not on a large scale. The hellish blaze of rounds going over my head gave me respect for that experience.
We were pretty far from the robots, as we’d run right through and past them. They were now at a higher elevation, and the land dipped at the beach, making it harder for them to hit us as long as we stayed low. They couldn’t get a bead on us when we crawled on our bellies.
Not everyone had gotten the message in time, however. A few dared to run in a crouch. They were shot down instantly.
Most of my troops were confused and breathing hard, but they were listening to me, following orders. Those who’d listened moved like snakes on the run. We wormed our way as fast as we could toward the water.
Only one man stood tall and got away with it. He came to stand over me and walked at my side. I wouldn’t have noticed if I hadn’t seen his footprints in the wet sand.
“This is pretty insane, Centurion, even for you,” he said. It was my chief ghost, Specialist Cooper. He was a mean little guy with a smart mouth on him. “Why are we squirming our way into the water like a herd of turtles?”
“On your belly, Cooper. There’s lots of metal flying.” Reaching out to my right, I grabbed one of his ankles and yanked. He went down onto his face with a whoop.
“They can’t even see me, sir.”
“Nope. But they’re hosing down the beach, and I gave an order.”
Grumbling, he wormed along next to me. Soon, we reached the lapping water. Farther out ahead of us, rounds were hitting and causing a lot of little splashes.
“Looks like the Satilla River back home—when the fish are biting hard.”
“Remind me to avoid your slice of Georgia, sir. Can you at least tell me why we’re doing this? The robots will just come after us and shoot us in the ass.”
“Visors down, everyone! Seal up your suits and swim for the bottom!” After shouting out these orders, I turned to Cooper. He was a weird outline, an emptiness made visible by the water. He looked like a man-shaped bubble.