The Genetic Imerative

by P. Joseph Cherubino

  "You are in for a treat. Watch what I do and follow me," Nina said as she pumped her legs harder. She pulled away with a burst of speed.

  "Third row from the rear, second column," Nina thought, keeping the channel open to her sergeant and the troop ahead.

  The sergeant was surprised to see a pair of hands pop up exactly where the Captain described. Nina put on another incredible burst of speed aided by a flood of energy through her armor. The gasses parted in roiling, billowing waves around her body as she bored a hole through the caustic atmosphere. Just before reaching the last warrior of the troop, she jumped as hard as she could, hands extended. Her aim was perfect. The upraised hands in the running column stretched back to catch her and clasped Nina's wrists as she flew forward. Then the running soldier whipped her arms forward hard, bending from the waist. Nina spun twice and extended her body arrow-straight as she arced high into the air that now seemed more like water which could not resist the displacement of her energy sheath.

  Nina concentrated harder on that displacement field until the atmosphere broke before her. Tucked inside a sudden vacuum, she accelerated briefly as the closing envelope of atmosphere behind her became stronger than the breaking ahead. A bright smile spread across her face in that brief moment before the reality of the vicious planet's air collapsed around her again with a violent thud. She tumbled to the ground and sprang back to her feet several hundred meters from her patrol.

  "Now you do the same!" Nina said to the sergeant with a tone that sounded like joy. Nina loved this maneuver. It was flight. She learned it from other Rangers while she was still a cadet training on Homesphere. Only the landing was difficult, but for a moment she was free.

  Nina turned around and ran backward a few paces and saw the sergeant sail up and away. Nina slowed down to witness the sergeant pinwheel twice before stabilizing at the top of her arc. She recovered and made a perfect landing. Nina was impressed to see her hit the ground running. One after another, the other troops did the same. Peals of laughter and startled shouts from the uninitiated came across the channel. They regrouped at a run and most wore smiles beneath their breathers.

  "Nice landing, you are a natural!" Nina moved close and hollered into her breather mask. The sergeant could not hide her grin.

  "Let me find more heavy troops," the sergeant thought in reply.

  The two ran close together for another few minutes before reaching the new group. Their lightened hearts sank quickly. They were about a kilometer from the edge of a massive canyon. The leader of this new group transmitted the thought map of her survey of the surrounding area. Nina shared it with the troop. Nina had the same view as the scout during her mission to catalog this spore.

  The infection was immense. It was, at least, three times the size of anything on record. It was a splinter of brilliant white crystalline rock looming at an oblique angle to the broken ground at the base of the canyon. They would have to go down there to fight it if their goal was eradication. They just didn't have the numbers for that, but it appeared that was what this group was prepared to do.

  It slowly dawned on Nina that whoever captured this image of the spore had already been shockingly close. The thought picture came from the canyon floor. Nina guessed that at least half the spore’s mass lay buried beneath the crust, and it still towered more than one hundred meters above ground. It was apparently boring into the surface searching for the minerals and thermal energy that would let its ravenous, mindless cells divide. They encountered no trigger spore along the way, so the main cell was dormant. That gave them more opportunity.

  The same thought echoed across the network. There must be millions of Silicoid cells inside the main body. To say the situation was bad would be understatement bordering on delusion.

  "Sergeant. Exclusive channel to Abal.”

  The response was instant.

  “Message received. We see this,” Abal said. Nina paused for the follow-up. There was none.

  “Captain. What do we do?” Nina asked. Another pause.

  “We fight,” came the flat, bloodless response. “Stand by,” Abal ordered.

  This was the first time Nina had experienced anything resembling panic in her hundreds of engagements. She urged herself to think, to stay calm. She breathed deeply from her oil tanks and studied the faces of her troops. Those faces were mirrors, and she didn't like the reflections.

  “Comm!” Nina thought sharply. “Front and center.”

  The Comm Sergeant appeared promptly.

  “Query all primary nodes. I want reports. Force disposition, Scout status. Anything and everything you can get. Work fast."

  Nina closed her eyes for a moment, and her field of vision filled with an organized list of open signals and channels to the soldiers designated as primary information points. The competence and efficiency of the young sergeant were comforting. Well-organized thoughts streamed through her mind. Nina quickly saw that Abal had deployed several other patrols that scouted the lava dome to a radius of ten kilometers. There was no other sign of spore. The area where they stood now seemed to be the main incursion point. Nina didn’t believe in luck, but this seemed like a case for it.

  “Captain,” came Abal’s voice on a secure thought channel. “I hear you taking reports.”

  “Nothing personal, Captain Abal,” Nina said. There was a long pause.

  “I don't care about that. We need leadership. You are now in command of the front. I am changing scout deployments as we speak”, Abal said. “I have numbers. We have contact with forty-five thousand troops of the hundred-thousand launched. About ten thousand are dispersed in a one-kilometer radius of the dome. The rest are inbound or taking defensive positions. I'm holding about five thousand here at base. We salvaged orbital comm, and we are broadcasting. There is no response."

  Nina let that sink in. There was no answer from Orbital. On the surface, they lost contact with more than half the Warsphere army. In her experience, that situation alone was unprecedented. In more than two hundred years as a warrior, Communication breakdown between Orbital and a ground force simply did not happen. In the worst case scenario, they communicated with atmospheric flares or even gravity-induced seismic waves. There was always a way to communicate.

  “Are you sure they hear you?” Nina asked.

  “No doubt. We burned two power crystals on full gain. They could hear us on Homesphere with that amount of power.”

  A ball of ice formed in Nina's belly spread to her bladder, causing her feet to tingle. She had to voice the unthinkable. It appeared that Abal could not.

  “Were they attacked?” Nina asked. A long pause stretched out to fill up with fear. Nina let it hang there.

  “I just asked my head engineer. They are hard to see with the interference, but they are up there. Intact. No signs of battle. We’d know it. Just silence.”

  “What could be preventing communication?” Nina asked desperately.

  “Choice,” came Abal’s flat response. Nina could not believe it.

  Nina took this all in as she paced around in a small circle. Soldiers ran hard, bursting out of the mist to confront the enemy. Some came alone, others in groups. Abal dispatched some here with orders, but others were fragments following the ever-growing mass of signals at what was now the front line.

  In watching all this chaos, Nina realized Abal was right. Even if the planet itself, or some unknown force on the planet, was interfering with communications, there is no way that Orbital would not be able to detect the attempt. There was no known force in the galaxy capable of attacking the Queen’s fleet without being detected light years in advance. Nina had never seen a case where Orbital would not or could not respond in some way. They were alone.

  In all her years, the thought of dying hadn't bothered Nina much. She dealt with it by enjoying the soldier's life. She took small pleasures when and where she could. Life was lived in the few moments when she found beauty in contact with another species. She took joy in discovering the incredible f
orms of life scattered among the stars. It was life itself that Nina was born to protect and preserve.

  Nina had seen parts of the galaxy few sentient beings could ever hope to imagine. She'd seen entire planets covered with forest and thick with harmonious life. She'd seen planets of water, sand and grass. After a battle, she'd climbed mountains with ape-like humanoids and swam in an ocean accepted by the creatures there as one individual in a hive-mind of millions.

  With her comrades, she was celebrated as a God-like savior on some worlds and met with fear and hostility as a warrior-demons on others. Nina felt she had seen every major expression of DNA the galaxy had to offer. All except this. This situation was certainly not a noble expression of the double helix that granted life.

  In combat, realizations come quickly. Truth comes plainly when the need for survival strips all else away. The truth was stark and plain. Her species had abandoned them. They had abandoned her. No sentient being fully welcomes death, but many do learn to live comfortably with the thought. For the first time in her life, Nina would not accept her fate. It would not be her duty to die like this. Alone. Abandoned. A castaway. Her survival, not the survival of the genome, became her fight.

  Chapter 2: Earth, Maryland, The Interview

  Colonel Rachel Balanik stared at the candidate and drummed the finger pads of her right hand lightly on the folding table. She sat in a ground floor conference room deep inside the rabbit warren that was the "Operations 2b" building, on the grounds of the National Intelligence Agency. It was a cheap injection-molded plastic table common to one of the many warehouse stores found in several of the sprawling exurb pockets surrounding Fort Meade, Maryland. In fact, Rachel was almost sure that a low-level administrative assistant was sent forth to such a place on a significant civilian mission to retrieve this very table on which Rachel tapped out her plodding rhythm of fours. It was likely the same harried assistant who assigned them this room.

  The dreary room smelled of stale coffee and carried the slightly musty undertones of untended leaks that exposed themselves as brown stains on sagging ceiling tiles. Wall paneling from the 1980s did a poor job of simulating wood from laminate patterns and thin, cheap particle board. The dark brown walls consumed more than their fair share of fluorescent light that was available from the buzzing ceiling fixtures. Meeting in this forgotten and neglected space meant that the group was not a high priority, but a logistical annoyance. That suited Rachel well because it meant that not many people were paying attention to them. They were just another group of officers doing routine work in a very busy place.

  Two other officers sat at the table. At Rachel’s left hand was a wire-thin and razor sharp Marine Corps General by the name of Chase Breslin. What Breslin lacked in stature, he made up for with sheer intensity. He was the veteran of three tours in Vietnam and more than a few undocumented conflicts. It seemed to Rachel that the General’s eyes were needles attempting to pin the candidate to the back wall like a rare insect specimen.

  The general stared, barely breathing. He hardly blinked. His spine was ramrod straight. Before the candidate had permission to sit, the General spent several minutes adjusting his office chair to facilitate this posture. The armrests were adjusted precisely so that his elbows applied slight pressure to the beige microfiber upholstery while his hands rested perfectly still, each of his fingers spread out placidly and uncannily equidistant from one another. The candidate could see those hands below the table. Breslin studied the candidate with a mind as sharp as his stare. At seventy-three, the general was well past retirement age. The knowledge he carried made retirement impossible, and would probably keep him in service until he died of old age. He was fine with that. He operated under the belief that he was born for the work he did.

  On Rachel’s right sat a tall, heavyset Air Force Major. Charles Spivey sat with a deceptively casual air. The major’s uniform wasn’t as perfectly arranged as the other two officers. Little things, like his Air Force wings not quite aligned, and tie slightly askew, suggested less care for formality. The Major’s salt-and-pepper hair was cut just within regulation, and compared to the spit and polish of the other two soldiers, he appeared downright disheveled.

  Major Spivey had learned early in his military career that he would have to devote a portion of his genius-level IQ to the banality of grooming. He accepted this and grudgingly made due. As he rose in rank, he delegated as much of that as he could, but there was only so much he could get away with. His aides grudgingly accepted valet duties and the Major had just enough social intelligence to keep resentment at a minimum. Major Spivey himself still resented the regulations, as he would much rather apply all of his time to science and reason as it related to the mission. It was only the work of the Unit that kept him in military service. No other position would allow him access to what he considered the greatest discovery in human history. The candidate guessed incorrectly that his appearance was also calculated. Nothing about these three was as it seemed. In fact, nothing about this long strange interview process added up.

  The officers sat and waited. The candidate had seen this tactic before. He learned the tactic himself in a low-level interrogation class. Uncomfortable silence was a deceptively powerful force. As he sat and waited, he had no doubt this was an interrogation and not an interview. Having established their authority to make him wait, they stared. And they waited. A slight rumble came a fan in some remote part of the building pushed air into the room. The soft white noise of the gently rushing cold air muted the drumming fingers only slightly.

  Half the fluorescent lights in the room were either out or failing, and one of them drew the candidate’s attention. A light tube just above the Marine General had a black spot at one end. It shone through the busy diamond pattern of the diffuser. That tube was much dimmer and glowed with a pale pinkish hue. Damn, the candidate thought. He tried not to focus on it because they wanted him to drift. Once they saw him lose focus they would pounce. And of course, his center of the fixture was the invitation they needed.

  “Lieutenant Triska, why are you here?” Colonel Balanik spoke. Her voice was firm but didn’t quite fill the room.

  “Ma'am?” Arnold replied. It was too quick. Bad move, he thought to himself. Stalling is not good.

  “You’ve come too far to be coy, Triska. Tell me why you are here,” came the response, this time filling the room.

  The folding chair was hard and cold. He was far enough back, around two and a half meters, so he could get a clear picture of all three of them without having to move his eyes much. This was to his advantage, and he wondered if they had allowed this. He stared straight ahead at the Colonel. It was his turn to make them wait; to take some power back.

  Triska took the time to evaluate Colonel Balanik, who was obviously the lead. He guessed she was in her early forties, tall, fit and slender. Her hands were work-strong, and glancing at them told him those hands had seen some manual labor, something a bit more than house chores or gardening. Maybe she grew up on a farm.

  He found her quite attractive and found his eyes flashing down to her chest involuntarily, impulsively trying to glean womanly shape from the crisp, pressed uniform. That was a stress reaction. He caught himself. The impulse would not serve him well here, so he reigned it in. He did notice an unusually high number of service ribbons on her uniform. She’d seen combat. A lot of it. For a moment he thought he recognized a ribbon for service in World War II. Since that was laughably impossible, he guessed that he wasn’t as knowledgeable about service ribbons as he believed. He paused until he detected a change in the Colonel’s drumming fingers, then replied.

  “I’m ready for whatever comes next. I know this group is above top secret. I’ve trained my entire career for an opportunity like this.”

  No change of expression on the faces of his interrogators.

  “What do you think we do here, Lieutenant?” the Colonel shot back immediately.

  “Does it matter?” Triska volleyed back, taking an aggressi
ve stance.

  “That’s what we’re here to find out,” Rachel returned the volley with a casual air.

  The major was next to speak.

  “You enlisted at eighteen, right out of high school. Single, or wed to the career, it seems. It took you six years to get your B.S. in Computer Science while on active duty. Impressive. Mathematics and probability are hobbies of yours I understand. You are highly trained. It seems that you volunteer for every training opportunity that comes your way.”

  The Major made a show of shuffling papers. He could have drawn any one of a thousand facts about the candidate from his nearly photographic memory. Instead, he waved paper with a list.

  “Journalism, jump school—tried to make Ranger, didn’t qualify. They sent you to signals, and then digital countermeasures and now Army intelligence, where you’ve been for the past seven years. You were in the Balkans, and then Afghanistan for two years straight.

  Chasing some strange communication patterns or something like that? Your superiors were intrigued. Some previously unknown cell or group…” the major trailed off for effect.

  “You’ve been in twenty years now,” Spivey continued. “Your path has changed three times. That’s very unusual. Why is that?”

  “Because I apply myself, Major.”

  Major Spivey blinked and remained silent.

  “You apply yourself,” the Colonel repeated, picking up the baton, and letting the mirrored statement hang in the air. Was that a mocking tone?

  “Can you think of another reason you were allowed to change your career three times?” the colonel asked. “I’ve not seen many others do this, and I’ve been in a lot longer than you have.”

  The Major cast sideways eyes at the Colonel. Arnold took note. Which comment caused that glance? It was a break in his persona, almost like a surprise. It was an uncalculated moment.

  Arnold unintentionally shifted in his seat. He wasn’t expecting this line of questioning though he should have. They always come at you from an unexpected angle. He didn’t know where they were going with this. He thought they would want to talk to him about his work in the Balkans or Afghanistan. Arnold’s record of service was the first thing nearly every one of his commanding officers noted first. His sterling record and his performance were the reasons he was here, or so he thought.