Plaguelands (Slayers Book 1)

by Jae Hill

  Rebekah chuckled like she found the whole thing very amusing, but then she became more serious as she realized how real it all was. She was sitting in a place that she could have never imagined, hanging out with robots, talking about the vastness of the universe, while only a few months ago, her views of the world were very different.

  My parents stayed late, until they saw me getting tired and drifting to sleep. They left, and it was hugs for everyone. My dad nudged me and then looked at Rebekah, winking.

  I loved him so much.

  ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

  Marshal Burnham entered my makeshift office where I was staring at my digibook, looking over the latest satellite reconnaissance. The zombies were clustering around the foothills of the eastern slope of the Rocky Mountains, near the ancient city of Colorado Springs.

  “Marshal, I’m glad you’re here,” I said, standing respectfully as he entered.

  “Yes, Commander?” he asked inquisitively.

  My train of thought was interrupted for a moment.

  “Commander?” I asked.

  “Provisional, of course,” he stated. “You’re only given authority over the units and soldiers under your command, but the rank will help you when you need to call in orbital support or get through to my command echelon. Once the conflict is over, you’ll be retired to civilian status.”

  “Thank you,” I said, humbly, even bowing my head a bit.

  “Now why are you glad I’m here?” he asked.

  “I’ve been looking over the satellite imagery and it appears there’s a large cluster of zombies outside of the Colorado Springs ruins. And we’ve been training for a Colorado Springs mission, so obviously that’s where we’re going. Why haven’t we just opened up the MAC guns on them and thinned their numbers.”

  “That’s exactly why I was coming to see you,” he said somberly, closing the door behind him. He took a seat next to my desk as I did the same.

  “We’re limited on how many times we can use the MACs, for starters,” he continued. “They throw so much ejecta and debris into the air that we risk negatively altering the planetary climate if we over use them. Our scientists are already concerned about the nearly dozen impacts since, and including, Omaha. The other concern is where they are right now. Just west of Colorado Springs lies one of the biggest secrets of the Republic. Only a few hundred people even know about it. But given the location of the zombies, the Reverend must as well, and I think we’ve figured out how he knows.”

  I was puzzled by his cryptic statements.

  He looked toward my digibook. “We reviewed your journal from your adventures in the east. You wrote about a blonde robot woman. You never mentioned this during your debriefings—“

  “I didn’t think it was important.”

  “Actually, it was the most important detail you could have remembered,” stated the marshal. “You just didn’t know.”

  He paused—what probably would have been a sigh for an organic human—before beginning again.

  “The blonde robot isn’t an enhanced form. She doesn’t have an organic brain. She is 100 percent a robot, controlled by an artificial intelligence.”

  He paused again, presumably collecting his thoughts.

  “You probably know that we have shipboard AIs to help calculate the trillions of functions necessary to keep a ship oriented in superspace. The AIs are patterned after actual human brains, and mapped using a technique called digital neuropathy. The digital brain operates as an organic brain would, but at quantum speeds—thousands of times faster. We mapped the brains of some of our most brilliant math and physics geniuses, then accelerated them, and inserted them into shipboard computers.”

  I did know that, actually.

  “The problem with AIs”, he continued, “is that they’re modeled after a human brain, but they run out of space to perform calculations and they occasionally lose vital bits of information. After enough time, the likelihood of ‘latency’ issues is so probable that the AIs are removed from the ships. The problem is, though, that they are sentient beings. They’re human, in thought and action. The purest intelligence. It was believed early on that shutting down AIs was cruel and akin to murder. That the beings should be allowed to live out the rest of their ‘natural lives’ in peace after having served the Republic. So a sort of retirement home was created for the retired AIs to dwell. It’s called the Sanctuary. The AIs are still given tasks to perform…they digest the trillions of flops of data coming in from all corners of the universe. Monitoring tachyon-burst transmissions. Still advanced-level functions, but none that would cause the deaths of an entire starship crew if they failed. Moreover, they live inside their own vast computer systems deep inside an old military fortress inside Cheyenne Mountain, outside of Colorado Springs.”

  I thumbed at the stubble on my chin. “So the Reverend wants these AIs for something?”

  “No, I don’t think so,” the marshal replied. “The AIs probably are of no use to him, but Cheyenne Mountain has vital communications links and equipment that could be exploited. The real reason must have to do with….”

  He trailed off, and looked at me, as if he didn’t know how to continue.

  “About four months ago,” he said slowly, “a technician flew to Cheyenne Mountain to check on the equipment. The whole facility, including defenses, is automated and robots keep it clean and tidy…but we send a person every few months to perform a physical check.”

  He withdrew a small digibook from his breast pocket, tapped the screen.

  “This is Valkyrie Penrose,” he said showing me a picture.

  It was the blonde I’d seen stalking the streets of Omaha, and the marshal knew it from the expression on my face. Her hair was down in the picture instead of the ponytail, but it was definitely the same woman.

  “She never returned from the Sanctuary. Her central nervous system was found discarded inside the facility by the cleaning robots approximately four months ago. After she’d been missing for a week, we sent an investigator and a Vanguard team to determine what had happened. There were no initial signs of foul play or intrusion into the facility. The security cameras showed her working among the computer terminals, and then, well... just watch.”

  He tapped the digibook screen a few more times and handed it back to me. The woman could be seen checking instruments, then tapping away on a digibook. She touched one of the large mainframes, glowing blue with energy and lights. She suddenly jerked as if she’d been electrocuted. She thrashed for a minute, not taking her hand away from the mainframe the whole time. She stopped shaking, then reached her free hand up to the back of her head and dug her fingers into the synthetic skin beneath the baseplate of her skull, where the neck meets the head. Her fingers dug and twisted until the plate started to bend upward. She reached in…and pulled her own brain out. She pulled harder and her entire central nervous system slid out of the hole in the back of her head. It flopped to the floor like a wet fish, splattering maintenance fluid on the ground. She reached back up, bent the skull plate back into place, stood motionlessly for a minute, then let go of the mainframe.

  The blonde then tied her hair into a ponytail, covering the mangled back part of her skull, and walked out of view. A few other cameras caught her leaving the deep mountain hall.

  “How is that even possible?” I asked. “She should have died without her brain!”

  Burnham shook his head. “We have been working for months to figure out what happened. The AI who resided in that particular mainframe is missing, something we never thought possible. It somehow figured out a way to overclock the Sanctuary computer, short-circuit the body, take over motor control, and then insert itself into the hard drives and flash storage units located in the body. We can’t figure out how, but then again…we’re not AIs.”

  “So the blonde is why they’re back at Cheyenne Mountain?” I asked.

  “We have to assume so,” the marshal said. “We don’t know why, though. Fortunately, we’ve changed t
he security protocols and they can’t access the base for now. Oh, and her enhanced-form body is locked out of the neural web, which is why they needed your digibook to access the central library for info on the nuclear weapons. So while the ghost of Valkyrie Penrose does not appear to be an immediate threat, we have to be extremely careful. AIs are immeasurably intelligent, and a wildcard in this mess that I don’t think anyone anticipated.”

  “Rampancy,” I said, remembering a word from a stellar navigation course a decade ago.

  In latency, an AI became feeble and unable to complete commands in a timely and accurate fashion. Rampancy was the opposite: when an AI overclocked and went insane. It had happened only once in history before. Some thirty years ago, a shipboard AI had gone insane and intentionally altered course in mid-jump, pulverizing the ship into quantum foam, effectively committing suicide and murdering the crew in the process.

  “We can’t use the MAC gun on the encampments around Cheyenne Mountain. The AIs still inside the mountain, plus the deep-space tachyon emitters and receivers, are all vital and irreparable pieces of our interstellar exploration program. Plus, if there’s a rampant AI in the mix, we need to capture it and study it.”

  Marshal Burnham stood, saluted with his fist to his chest, and opened the door to leave.

  “The Reverend’s forces will probably be there for months, scavenging for supplies, ravaging any settlements nearby, and waiting out the winter. We need to prepare for the Battle of Cheyenne Mountain. It might just be the end to this war.”

  STARSHIPS

  The warrior drones were all folded up in teardrop forms in their launch tubes, ready to be fired from the belly of the Republic warship. I strolled along the aisle of the ship, my spacesuit bouncing along the metal grating in the low gravity environment. I was the first biologic human to set foot aboard a starship in our solar system in nearly a hundred years. The ships simply weren’t equipped with the facilities to handle humans on a regular basis, or on extended voyages, but as the commander of the division of drones in this engagement, it was customary to inspect the troops before their deployment. Given that the cruiser was in low-orbit over the planet, I could spend a few days in an environment suit, being intravenously fed and watered…a catheter removing my bodily wastes.

  The Javelin was one of only a handful of dedicated warships that the Republic owned, all of which were named after ancient weapons. I looked out the porthole and saw the others in close formation: Flamberge, Halberd, Cutlass, Discus, and the command ship, Morningstar. While all the buildings of the Republic were comprised of graceful, sleek lines, these grey behemoths were boxy by comparison. The large armored fronts and sides were smooth and swept along to the rear in a tapering line, but as the plating tapered, it revealed the squared edges of the actual hull of the ship. It looked almost as if a big boxy ship was wearing a smooth helmet.

  It looked, I thought, like a giant warrior robot, halfway unfolded.

  Since the Republic had no enemies with spacefaring capabilities, the assault ships were usually tasked with “milk runs” between large colonies, carrying cargo and supplies. The reason for their existence was one part insurance and one part deterrence: if there were any hostile alien species out there, some sort of defense would be needed, and if any colonies tried to rebel, the government needed a quick way to end the uprisings. Generally, however, the warships and their complements responded only to natural disasters or other calamities. This would be the first time any of them had dropped their forces in anger.

  I went over the numbers in my head again. Each ship could drop 100 warriors in a “volley”, and hold another 100 for a second drop. With six ships, we could drop a total of 1200 warrior drones to the surface, operated via remote link from the Bionics Research Facility. With nearly 400 children at the BRF, which of course they were now calling “the Barf”, each operator would get three lives, in video game-speak. We’d also have limited air support from a squadron of two-dozen “fast-movers,” very small dropships with air-to-ground weapons and extraction ability.

  Finally, a company-sized unit of about 100 Vanguard warrior forms—the last full company of regulars in existence—would drop in from a number of standard cruisers and the GEO station. Each cruiser normally carried six warriors, and tomorrow their complements would be tripled. GEO could fire three dozen at the planet per volley. They would all land in two precise waves to seize and secure the Cheyenne Mountain complex itself, while the drone forces pushed the zombies down the mountain slope, into MAC range—and away from the vital information processing center. The fighting was expected to be more technical in the narrow passages and tunnels, and the Vanguard’s skill was necessary where the children, despite their weeks of intense training, would still not be up to par.

  I watched a test firing of a tube that had been malfunctioning. It was almost like something out of an ancient text by Heinlein, who had first imagined this type of orbital insertion. The teardrop was rotated into the tube. The tube closed. A whirring noise indicated that the magnetic trolley inside the tube was powered up. Then a loud “clunk” and a shudder of the ship as the magnetic tube accelerated its target up to maximum velocity and fired it like a bullet. The MAC guns worked the same way, but had much larger magnets and power needs so that they could pulverize asteroids or blast holes in planets deep enough to access the molten inner cores. Whereas the whole ship had to be aligned to fire the MAC, the drop tubes were independently targeted and could place an entire company of troops within centimeters of their intended targets: an important feat when trying to keep multi-ton hunks of metal from crashing into each other after flying 800 kilometers at 25,000 kilometers per hour.

  I received a communication from Marshal Burnham aboard Morningstar. He would be commanding the shipboard side of the drop while I commanded the ground forces from inside the simulation. The last nine ships, he said, had entered formation with their loads of Vanguard regulars. These cruisers were the typical research and exploration ships of the Republic, each crewed by about twenty enhanced forms and typically used for surveying or exploration, collecting biologic and astrogeologic samples from across the universe. With the exception of Paradise Falls, none of them had ever fired their MAC guns in combat, only for science. mining, or planetary defense from large asteroids; Paradise had been the one to strike Earth at several locations since “the Battle of Omaha,” as it was now being called.

  The marshal’s message also ordered me planetside, to oversee the last of the preparations at the BRF. I was excited that the battle was drawing so near, but sad that I’d have to leave space.

  Heading home wasn’t all bad though: I had an itch behind my knee that I hadn’t been able to scratch through my suit for two days.

  The dropship left the hangar of the Javelin and made a graceful arc toward the planet’s atmosphere, which glowed blue against the darkness of space. The pilots must have forgotten I was biologic, because the G-forces were astounding. The ship didn’t shake or rattle, it was just a constant pressure that grew stronger and stronger. I could hardly breathe. I was pinned to my seat. I felt like hours were going by, like I was going to black out…and then everything became calm as we stabilized in the atmosphere. I couldn’t imagine what that re-entry felt like as a warrior form, if they even felt it at all.

  The ship landed at the facility where two white-clothed technicians came to help me out. I staggered for a moment, but then could walk under my own power. The suit seemed so much heavier than when I’d gone up. They brought a motorized gurney to me, laid me on it, and took me into an examination room where they detached my biomedical monitors, IV access port, catheter, and all the other tubes and wires stuck to me.

  I stood shakily to my feet, and then sat back down in a chair while sipping on a glass of ice water. Two days in space and I’d really missed drinking water. Even though my body didn’t need the water because of the tubes and fluids I was receiving, I still wanted it. I felt thirsty. Parched, despite being carefully and precisely hyd
rated. Maybe that’s like how Semper missed food, even though he knew he didn’t need it?

  After an hour of medical tests confirming that I was, in fact, still alive or something like that, I put on my crisp, deep-blue uniform and headed to the BRF auditorium. The kids—who were now wearing Fleet jumpsuits and being called “cadets” —trickled into the hall, taking seats, getting ready for the last mission-briefing before tomorrow’s big “invasion.” There were laughs and jokes among the cadets. I don’t know if real troops would have been as jovial. For these kids, even though the real-life situation was dire, combat was still just a game.

  I caught a glimpse of Rebekah staring at me from the side doorway. I ran to her, and when we were out of sight, I gave her a long kiss and let my hands wander her body for a minute before I regained my composure. I straightened out my uniform.

  “I love you,” she cooed in my ear.

  “I love you, too,” I whispered, nuzzling against her cheek.

  “It felt like you were gone for ages,” she whined.

  “I know.”

  A loud clanking-thumping sound came from around the corner. Footsteps from something giant and metal. There was silence in the room as the big metal robot walked up to the stage, the floor groaning under its mass. The big screen on the wall glowed behind it, and there was the face of Major Walling.

  “Good morning, cadets,” she said, to a round of applause and cheers. “I’m glad we could meet in person.” Her avatar on the screen smiled.

  From the simulations, all the robots seem like they’re tiny, because they’re the same size as you. In person, they seem so much larger. I hadn’t felt so tiny since that day in Omaha, when the one had picked Rebekah and me up under each arm and carried us to safety.