"Maybe one day we'll meet again in less dangerous times." László paused at the door. "Thank-you, Commander."
Isco turned back to the window, didn't move until he'd witnessed the last of the Broken exodus.
THE HUNTER BY TOMAS L. MARTIN
A notable conflict in recent memory was the battle for the planet of Zycanthus in the Thusia system. Once an important hub in the Kellos trading route running from the Capital Worlds out to the rim of the galaxy, Zycanthus became the centre of a complicated power struggle. As one of the last remaining cybel gates away from the Edge, many ships relied on the system as a staging post to escape the Maelstrom, or to take advantage of the opportunities the worlds on the Edge provided. Its orbital cybel energy refineries provided fuel for ships headed in either direction.
Zycanthus, as the only habitable world in the system, had been terraformed for centuries by the Forthrast Syndicate, an Epirian Foundation franchise. With the Maelstrom only decades away, the Foundation scrambled to extract as many resources as possible from the system, building evacuation ships to allow the world’s citizens to escape before the destruction hit. Even as they did so, more stellargees from closer to the Edge arrived, landing their battered and depleted ships, and setting up refugee camps around the hulks of their vessels, many of which would never take off again. Their arrival strained the resources of the Foundation to the brink. The fractious relationship between the Foundation’s security forces and the masses left many to turn to revolution and protest under the loose banner of the Broken.
Amidst all of this, the Karist Enclave determined that Zycanthus was a key world for conversion to their cause. The presence of so many desperate poor and the fragile nature of the peace was ideal for the Karist missionaries to form prayer groups in secret, spreading the message that the Maelstrom’s arrival heralded a new era for mankind, not the end of everything. The Enclave’s following grew in secret, and many members of the military and priesthood castes were smuggled onto the world to build on this foothold.
When the Epirian security learned of these mysterious prayer meetings and clandestine memberships, they assumed the worst. Already paranoid from their clashes with Broken warbands, the Chief Enforcer in the capital of Pike’s Basin gave the order to clamp down on the Karist’s meetings, fearing that the revolution was beginning.
The attacks on the Enclave’s prayer groups decimated the ranks of the Karist priesthood on Zycanthus, and, as on worlds before, showed the Enclave that they could not deliver their message peacefully. The hardliner military leaders had been waiting for such an opportunity, and harnessed the outrage of the remaining Karists to launch an all-out assault on the Epirian Foundation’s main spaceport. Their aim was to destroy the system’s orbital cybel energy refineries, detonating them in a backdraft of destructive energy that would bring the Maelstrom’s embrace closer to Zycanthus.
This next story, ‘The Hunter’, written by Tomas L. Martin, is set during the Battle for Zycanthus, alongside the events told in the Maelstrom’s Edge novels Faith and Sacrifice. As the Karist attack on Zycanthus intensifies, a lone Epirian Bot Handler must get back to the robots under his charge, or risk losing everything.
When the first rumble came Kayo ignored it, shifting his position in the bed to hug Jena more closely. When the room shook a second, then a third time, he groaned, and his eyes scraped reluctantly open.
The fourth blast shattered the polarised windows, filling his brain with bright light. The apartment building moved beneath them, throwing them off the bed, pictures and lamps crashing on top of them.
Kayo disentangled himself from the mess and got up gingerly, stepping carefully over the broken glass to peer out of the window. Zycanthus wasn’t a particularly geoactive planet, despite the changes the Epirian Foundation’s terraforming had made, and earthquakes were incredibly rare. This had to be something else, something closer.
“Kayo... What’s going on?” Jena’s muffled voice came from beneath bedclothes on the floor. Kayo hadn’t known her long. This was the first time he’d spent the night at her place, across town from his tiny pad near the train depot. Technically he should have been back there now, in case anything happened, but he’d never needed to in the past, so he’d left his bots on automatic patrol. He leaned his head forward through the empty window frame, a little bit of bravado in him wanting to impress her, but also checking he didn’t need to get back to his post.
Kayo wasn’t prepared for what he saw. The city was aflame, with a sky crisscrossed with smoke trails and dark, fast moving shapes – he spotted Firefly drones, larger Epirian gunships and strange, bat-winged creatures. As he watched, a swarm of dark shapes surrounded one of the gunships, tearing at its engine cowlings until it heaved over and tumbled towards the ground.
The explosion of the gunship’s crash was not the only blast, even in those few seconds. Down on the street he could hear the staccato of maglock rifle fire mixed in with an unfamiliar soft whine. The air was acrid with smoke. He leaned further out to see a group of Epirian security contractors huddled behind the smoking wreck of a speeder. In front of them a group of soldiers, covered in snow-white armour plate advanced, spraying arcing balls of purple fire from their strange weapons.
“Storms,” Kayo swore. “Jena, Pike’s Basin is under attack!”
Fire leapt from the windows of a building across the street, sending shrapnel whistling in his direction. Pure instinct made him duck away from the heat of the blast, as the wall of the apartment reverberated with the impact. Jena screamed and burrowed deeper into her fortress of blankets. Kayo puzzled over the white armour of the soldiers he’d seen. Initially he thought this might have been the Broken rebels, who had been brewing revolution for months in the desert, but this size of organised assault was in a totally different league.
Kayo reached for his pistol and neural interface. He’d been a bot handler for three years. During his time at the Foundation academy he’d done a little security work, but most of his job at the train depot involved keeping the freight cars and luggage bots organised. The fear of combat sneaked around his nervous system, making his stomach contract. Then he realised how much trouble he’d be in if his superiors realised he’d been sleeping – in someone else’s bed – at the time of the attack, when he was supposed to be keeping watch. Fuelled by that transgression, he tugged his jacket over his shoulders and strapped his Dominator pistol to his thigh.
Jena’s head poked out from under the bedclothes. Her face was white with panic. “Where are you going?”
“I have to get back to the depot.”
“Now?”
“I’m supposed to be the Bot Handler on call.” The pang of guilt at sneaking off with Jena the previous night burned in his gut. “If I don’t get back to my post soon, the Foundation will have my head.”
“I thought you said you set a patrol so no one would notice?”
Kayo looked incredulously at her. “I set enough bots patrolling to deal with vagrants and petty thieves, not a full scale attack! If they catch me off-base at a time like this…”
He pulled the neural interface onto his skull and began the loading sequence. He sent a ping to the bots he’d left on patrol. Instead of the status update he was supposed to receive from each of them, there was no response. The last updates from the six patrol bots had been over half an hour earlier, and then each had cut out.
“Shit,” he said. “My patrol is down. Jena, I gotta go.”
“But what about me?”
He gave her a quick kiss. “Get down to the basement. The comet shelters are strong enough to keep you safe.”
“Kayo!” Jena’s voice came out at a much higher pitch. “Don’t leave me here!”
He leaned down and looked her in the eye. “We’re under attack, Jena. Do you understand? There’s fires all over the city. If I don’t get back to my post, they’ll destroy everything.”
“You can’t save the city, Kayo.”
“No.” Kayo sending a burst of
compressed code across the city to activate the rest of the bots under his command. “But I can protect what’s my responsibility.”
*
+++ID: F4H7JJ091. ARMASYS CORPORATION HUNTER-CLASS WARMECH, CALLIOPE PATTERN. SYSTEMS LOADING…+++
Hunter class attack bot F4H7JJ091 came online when it received the wake-up command from Handler Kayo Asikawa. Its processing routines began their warm-up procedure, checking the status of each servo in its limbs, and spinning through the ammunition belt for its Maglock Chaingun, ensuring there was no potential for weapon jams.
+++WEAPONS SYSTEMS FULLY OPERATIONAL. ENERGY RESERVES AT FULL CAPACITY.+++
Pre-startup checks completed, F4H7JJ091 released its docking clamps and charge cable and stepped forward out of its cradle into the robotics bay. Either side of it other Epirian robots were similarly awakening from their dormant state – lanky Scarecrow patrol bots and squat Spider drones plodded their way towards the bay doors, whilst aerial Firefly drones rose on their rotors with a whine and shot through the open skylight above.
+++ NETWORK SYSTEMS ONLINE. DOWNLOADING TACTICAL INTERFACE.+++
F4H7JJ091 and its partner Hunter, the long-range G9H3RR020 with Suppressor machine guns mounted on either arm, were not usually called for during routine security of the Pike’s Basin rail hub. It took them a while to download updated maps of the area and tactical overlays, and process the incoming information from the city’s defence network. After a few moments mechanical thought, both hulking robots decided on a course of action and began striding towards the outside world, weapons primed for combat.
*
Kayo sprinted through the city, darting down the roads furthest from the fighting, dodging between traffic jams and navigating streams of panicked pedestrians. He was at least five miles from the train depot. Usually he would get one of the monorail lines that crisscrossed Pike’s Basin, but one glance at the monorail cars stuck between stations, the faces of desperate early-morning commuters inside pressed against the glass, convinced him that was a bad idea.
Who was attacking? The net was full of confused messages and broken reports, with no one really able to say what was happening to Pike’s Basin. The fighting was still far from the streets that Kayo was navigating, but the sound of gunfire and the smell of burning told him that it wasn’t far away. He thought about calling in backup, but the thought of being caught away from the depot at such an important moment still made him hesitate. Besides, from the sound of it, most of the Epirian securcons were busy elsewhere.
Every now and then, he’d try and dip his mind into the bots at the train depot, but the lag of communication between the satellite relays meant he could do little other than watch their feeds, tens of seconds behind. There was no sign of attack on any of the drone cameras, but every time he flicked his neural interface over to check, the smoke from the city was getting closer.
By now, the streets had begun to empty. Lines of abandoned vehicles clogged the roadways. In their hurry, some drivers landed their speeders haphazardly between other cars, across the sidewalk and even wrapped around signposts. Some tried to boost the antigrav of their speeders to get above the gridlock, but many of them smouldered, shot down by the unknown assailants of their capital city.
A warning flashed up on the holo display in his helmet, tactical information floating in the air in front of him. One of the squadrons of Firefly drones at the trainyard had spotted intruders, and the lead drone was querying for instructions. Kayo stopped and pressed against the wall as he activated the neural link to the drone. Kayo’s body flushed as the implants in his brain injected a flood of chemicals and the connections in his helmet connected with his synapses.
The rush of projection was an unpleasant sensation. His skin prickled as the interface dampened his nerves, and his eyes swam, as his view of the gridlocked vehicles was replaced with the cold feed from the Firefly’s cameras. Kayo shrugged off the physical sensations and threw his attention into the drone’s sensor.
The drone’s flight was one of two squadrons of Fireflies orbiting the transit hub, and its position high in the air gave it the best view of the vast yards of bullet trains sitting dormant. The high speed line that bisected the planet of Zycanthus was hugely important to connecting the big cities of Pike’s Basin in the north and First Landing in the south. Without it, the Epirian Foundation’s ability to transport people, resources and robots across the planet would be decimated.
Kayo cycled through the feeds from the Fireflies, searching for signs of intruders. He could see the smoke rising from the city, and the sky was filled with unfamiliar shapes in the distance. But of the enemy on the ground, he could see little. Then he saw flashes of white, moving through the factories to the north of the trainyard. His fingers twitched as he manipulated the drone, sending it swooping towards the movement. The drone’s threat recognition marked out around twenty targets, armoured figures taking cover between the stacks of containers.
He zoomed in the camera, studying these unfamiliar attackers. Clad in overlapping white armour plate and their faces masked, they moved with the grace and purpose of trained soldiers. This was no fragmented Broken rebellion. This was an army, and it was focused on knocking out the most important parts of Epirian infrastructure.
The Firefly’s diagnostics flashed red. The soldiers had spotted the drones, and the sky lit up with a hail of purple projectiles, some kind of energy arcing up towards the Epirian bot. Kayo tried to push the drone into evasive action, but there were tens of seconds of lag to his instructions, and the Firefly shook with the impact of the energy pulses, tearing itself apart. Kayo slapped off his neural link, cutting the connection before the Firefly’s destruction could feed back into his head.
His consciousness flooded back into his body, his muscles numb and tingly. The streams of data running through his head ceased and he retched, adrenaline coursing through him from the Firefly’s last moments.
“This is hopeless,” he muttered. He had to get closer, where he could connect directly to each bot. He started walking again, aiming in the general direction of the depot. He replaced his neural link and rather than trying to control the drones directly with such a big lag, resorted to more rudimentary ways of organising his little army. Whilst he walked, he laid the positions of the drones out in a hologram in front of him, where he could survey the battlefield and give each defending robot instructions, albeit with a minute or so delay. Already some of the holo icons representing the Epirian bots were winking out as the attackers flanked their cover.
Kayo had trained as a Bot Handler at the Epirian Foundation academy on Flaxos, tens of light years rimward. Years of instruction and practice had honed his mind in the art of neural interfacing, projecting his consciousness into a bot’s processing core for just long enough to influence its decisions. It was a gruelling, debilitating practice, and even when he had no distractions, Kayo struggled to keep all the information in his head. Managing it whilst leaping across vacated speeders and dodging panicked civilians made it that bit harder.
He tried to move all of the surviving drones into better defensive positions, sending the Fireflies on quick strafing runs making them difficult to hit, and letting the Spiders dig their low profile into the piles of spent rails at the edge of the trainyard. The two Hunter warmechs were by far the most powerful of his charges, and he let them stride ahead of the smaller bots. With his input guiding their targeting choices, the Hunters could advance more quickly, laying down a barrage of shots, keeping the attackers huddled behind cover. Despite the delay in communication, the little tweaks that Kayo was giving to the bots were having an influence on the skirmish.
Just at the point where he felt like he had the enemy soldiers pinned back, and was preparing a counter assault with his remaining Fireflies, his feed cut out, and the glowing map of the train depot in front of his eyes disappeared. He smacked his controller, trying to fix the connection, but it was no good. Every network was down, from the city’s social webs to the
dedicated Epirian satellites.
The skies above him echoed with a thundercrack, and he blinked back into the real world. A nova of fire burned a new star, and streaks of burning debris rained down towards the city. His eye was drawn to the cable of the space elevator. The familiar dark line shooting straight into orbit twisted and tangled, falling free to the ground below.
Kayo stared up at the catastrophe in the sky, and at the blinking light where his holo display should have been. This kind of attack was unprecedented. If these soldiers were willing to destroy the space elevator, they wouldn’t stop there. He couldn’t let them take the train depot, but now he had no way to control the drones. The remaining robots at the train depot were on their own.
*
Hunter F4H7JJ091 stood in the square in front of the trainyard, assessing the situation. The loss of network had shut down many of the data sources it used to track enemy movement, weather conditions and communication. It could also no longer reach its controller. The warmech’s digital brain had only limited capacity for independent thought, but it had enough to work its way through the options.
+++EXPLOSIVE IMPACTS SUSTAINED TO LEFT SHOULDER. ONE DEGREE LOSS OF FREEDOM IN LEFT ARM. MAGLOCK CHAINGUN AT 53% AMMUNITION. TWO CLUSTER MISSILES REMAINING. POWER RESERVES AT 41%. BEGINNING POWER EFFICIENCY SUBROUTINE.+++
It took six seconds after the loss of network for the Hunter to complete its system diagnostics. Next it considered tactical parameters. Whilst it rebuilt the map of the combat zone from its last downloaded satellite images, the Hunter pinged short ranged bursts of radar, infrared and comms in all directions, using friend/foe analysis of the resulting images and encrypted responses to identify the locations of both fellow Epirian drones and enemy combatants.
Tales From The Edge: Emergence Page 13