~We all here? Elfrida was in charge of the platoon.
Distracted responses trickled in.
Each phavatar had a steel carapace that came up behind its head like a hood, and wrapped around, enclosing its skull—processors, memory crystals, other vital stuff—in a mesh Faraday cage. Their skinny, pathetically naked legs stuck out, much abraded and scorched on the backs by the exhaust from the mobility jets under their carapaces. Their arms were flechette cannons with grippers hanging off the bottoms of their barrels. Grenades and spare clips wreathed their torsos. Faces that still could pass for human stared out blankly through their mesh masks.
They were crawling along a trench on the surface of Stickney.
It heartened Elfrida to see it was not the same trench they’d been in when she logged out yesterday.
She could tell by the walls. The regolith bore no signs of superheating—no glassy patches, or shattered regions where pockets of gas had blown out. No one had fought over this trench yet. So how did we get here? She hastily scanned the action summary left for her by the last agent to operate Sandhya 4863CCP. At the same time, she was reviewing the phavatar’s telemetry, reading status reports from the rest of her platoon, figuring out exactly where they were, and updating her phavatar’s .config file.
Every operator developed a repertoire of SUIT COMMANDS he or she found to be effective. They squirted them in at the beginning of each shift, so that the phavatars could implement them in real time. This made them legally and morally responsible for whatever the phavatars did.
Energy pulses zinged around the elbow of the trench, chewing holes in the regolith ahead of Sandhya 4863CCP.
“Incoming!” shouted Delitsky, one of Elfrida’s lieutenants, a 20-year-old Space Corps agent from Kiev. The whole platoon’s stress indicators spiked, a row of red flames on Elfrida’s master display. This had all happened 194 million kilometers away, ten minutes ago. It was stressful all the same.
Sandhya 4863CCP retracted her head under her carapace, and Elfrida’s vision went black. She pulled herself forward with her grippers. Scuttling around the elbow of the trench at cockroach speed, she fired both flechette cannons blindly.
Elfrida had worked hard on that sequence, literally crawling around in the gym with a blanket over her head to see how it would go.
The phavatars could do this kind of thing by themselves, supposedly. But in reality, it had been ninety years since the last ground war on Earth. No one alive had first-hand knowledge of small unit tactics. Worse yet, lots of potential reference data from the 21st and 22nd centuries had been lost because it was stored on digital media that degraded or got deleted. The Star Force programmers had had to go back to the First World War, at the beginning of the twentieth century, to learn about trench warfare.
A bullet slammed into Sandhya 4863CCP’s carapace, tossing her back into the wall of the trench. Gravity on Stickney was next to nil. You could float away like that. Maybe that was why the previous occupants of this rock had dug trenches.
Elfrida’s back throbbed as if she’d been hit by a bullet herself. Sympathetic debilitation was the phenomenon whereby telepresence operators felt their phavatars’ pain. These bots didn’t emit stingy pain signals like most phavatars, so Elfrida had only sensed a light tap on the back. But her brain was still trying to convince her it hurt.
Two more phavatars scrambled over Sandhya 4863CCP. They charged up the trench, firing bursts of flechettes. Scrawny dark figures bounded away. One of them paused to whirl a sling around its head. A primitive combustion grenade hurtled at the two phavatars and exploded between them.
Faraday cages did not keep out chemical flames. “Fuuuuck!” screamed Delitsky. “I’m out!”
Sandhya 4863CCP reached into her chest webbing, where her breasts had once been. She took out one of her own grenades and threw it with the accuracy of a champion softball pitcher. A bright white flash engulfed the hostile who’d taken Delitsky out.
The platoon surged forward into a gently expanding cloud of ash.
A half-dozen hostiles cowered behind the next bend. Elfrida’s grenade had incinerated the lot of them.
Their charred bodies floated up when the phavatars kicked them.
Twisted into unnatural poses, their limbs outflung, or burned to stumps, each one was the size of an Earth-born child.
Half a dozen Little Sisters.
Half a thousand? Half a million? God knows how many there were on Stickney alone.
They just kept coming, and dying.
They wore no spacesuits. They had no respirators. No protection from the vacuum, or from the blizzard of radiation that howled around Stickney. Burnt scraps of cloth flaked from their bodies. Their weapons were slagged; wouldn’t have been worth taking, anyway. Just laser pistols so big and clumsy the operators called them blasters, like something out of an old movie. And slings. And lengths of pipe.
The phavatars scuffled through the corpses like armored giants. The operators made crude comments about burning the bacon.
Elfrida noticed that one operator wasn’t joining in the banter. Gilchrist? Holy crap, it was Sophie Gilchrist, her and Colden’s classmate from way back when. She must’ve got rotated into Elfrida’s platoon today. I’ll have to talk to her, Elfrida thought.
But Sandhya 4863CCP had other things in mind. She went back to see to Delitsky’s phavatar.
Having lost contact with Eureka Station, Jeff 8299AX was now operating autonomously. It brushed past Elfrida and knelt among the charred bodies. “I can see you’ve suffered a severe trauma,” it said gruffly. It held up body parts, matched their ragged ends together, and shook its head. “This is really beyond the scope of my expertise. But I’ll see what I can do.”
The operators murmured curses. When a phavatar lost contact with its operator, it reverted to its original personality. This was by design. Phavatars could not be permitted to operate lethal weaponry without a human in control. There was nothing less lethal than a therapist or a nanny, so the programmers had left those algorithms as-is to serve as defaults. However, it was pretty awful to watch.
“Jeff 8299AX,” Sandhya 4863CCP said on the comms link, “you are confused. It looks to me as if your antenna array may be fixable. We will take you back to base for repairs. In the meantime, stop that. These are Martians. They are dead. What is more, they were not human to begin with.”
“Yes, they were!” exclaimed Sophie Gilchrist. “They were. Look at them!”
Elfrida closed her teeth on the four-letter words trying to escape. If that wasn’t just great for morale.
“Guys,” she said to the other operators, “it looks like I’m going to take Jeff 8299AX back to base. While I’m gone, secure this trench. Try to use kinetics if you meet any more hostiles.”
“If,” they echoed, and laughed hollowly.
“OK, when. Crispy-crittering them is a waste. Yeah, I know I did it, but do as I say, not as I do.”
With Jeff 8299AX trudging behind her, Sandhya 4863CCP started back the way they’d come. They stayed in the trenches, where these ran in the right direction. Otherwise, they dragged themselves across the surface. The Martians had built the trenches. They did not run in convenient straight lines, but formed groups of curves and fishhooks. The phavatars had been fighting over this ground for the last three months.
Occasionally a shell burst nearby, hooking over the horizon from the Castle, their ultimate objective. The Castle was the location of Stickney’s railgun.
Elfrida figured Sandhya 4863CCP could handle this. She took off her headset, mask, and gloves. A blue sky dotted with clouds came into focus. For an instant she thought she was back on Earth, and then she remembered the smartpaper on the ceiling of the telepresence center.
It was a big no-no to exit immersion without going through the log-out protocols. The disorientation could be a killer. But Elfrida had gotten good at sucking it up. She felt almost human again by the time she reached Sophie Gilchrist’s couch.
She tapped Gi
lchrist’s shoulder. Gilchrist twitched. Elfrida got impatient and pulled Gilchrist’s headset off, pulling some strands of blonde hair with it.
“I’m taking rounds!” Gilchrist yelped.
“Shit, did you run into trouble after I left?”
“There are hundreds of them! They’re all over us!”
Elfrida hoped Gilchrist was exaggerating. “I need to talk to you for a minute.”
“I can’t … oh, it’s you.” Gilchrist swung her legs off her couch. She removed her gloves, so she wouldn’t accidentally make her phavatar hit a friend, and rubbed her hands over her knees. “Long time no see. I couldn’t believe it was you on the roster. I don’t think I’ve seen you since—Ganymede?”
“I know. Time flies, right?”
“They remind me of the POCKs,” Gilchrist said. “Remember? The giant mutant hamsters, that weren’t.”
“Yeah.” Elfrida remembered that, and she also remembered how she and Colden used to tease Gilchrist for being pretty and soft-hearted. She felt ashamed of that now.
“The POCKS had human DNA,” Gilchrist recalled. “Some sick freak had gengineered them.” She stared at Elfrida with haunted eyes. “This is the POCK hunt all over again, on an interplanetary scale. The Martians are gengineered humans. I’m sorry, but it’s as obvious as the nose on—on their faces. They’re weird, but they’re human. I know I shouldn’t have blurted it out. It was just getting to me, the way the kids were kicking them around.”
Elfrida had come over here to tear a strip off of Gilchrist for endangering morale. Gilchrist’s apology took the wind out of her sails. She sat back on her heels. “But where do you draw the line?”
“What do you think they are? You must have some ideas, opinions.”
Elfrida did. Her opinion was that the Martians were demonically possessed. She’d seen it on 4 Vesta and she was seeing it again now. Meat puppets, Cydney Blaisze had called the individuals who fell victim to the Heidegger program. Jun Yonezawa had called it demonic possession. Maybe they were both right. The technological and the supernatural met at their extremes. Either way, she recognized the Martians’ weird smiles, their insect-like speed, and their sheer zest for carnage. They, or the power that manipulated them, thought this war was fun. In that respect they weren’t human at all.
But she couldn’t say that to Gilchrist. She thought for a moment and then said, “Our pilots have ceramic bones and plastic hearts. I’ve met cyborgs that are basically just robots with human brains. The Martians seem to be one hundred percent organic. On the other hand, they self-euthanize if you look at them the wrong way, they work for a ruthless artifical super-intelligence, and their art sucks. So I think it’s a wash. They’re not post-human, if post-human is supposed to be something good.”
Gilchrist raised her eyebrows.
“Geneva has decided they’re human, anyway.” Elfrida shrugged. “If they hadn’t, we wouldn’t be here.”
“That’s what gets me. Machines can’t be allowed to kill humans. So you ship in a few hundred kids to kill them instead? And then encourage those kids to dehumanize them, so they can crispy-critter them without having nightmares?”
Elfrida felt irritated. Gilchrist wanted everything to be perfect. There was no such thing as perfect. But there was such a thing as sticking to your principles, and she admired the UN for lashing itself to the mast of its most fundamental principle: Machines shall not kill humans. Humans must do it themselves, if it has to be done.
“The Martians have brains full of PLAN neuroware, and not much else, as far as anyone knows,” she said. “So I, personally, am quite happy to stomp them like cockroaches. See what I did there?”
Gilchrist looked at her in disappointment. “I heard you got religion,” she said.
“Doesn’t stop me from doing my job.” Elfrida stood up. “And I hope your feelings won’t stop you from doing yours.”
Gilchrist lay back on her couch. “I’ll just have to deal, won’t I? I’d better not go on the trauma list … seeing as we’re fresh out of therapists.”
Elfrida sprinted back to her couch. When she got her headset on, she saw that Gilchrist had not been exaggerating. The platoon was buried in Martians. The little bastards had ambushed them in the curving end of the trench. The phavatars had run out of flechettes and grenades. They were now fighting with their backup weapons, technically termed ‘edged truncheons’—a.k.a. swords. Thermal blankets wrapped around their free arms, swirling like cloaks, shielded them from energy pulses. It was a scene straight out of the Middle Ages, on a moonlet orbiting Mars.
One on one, the phavatars’ superior speed and strength always prevailed, but now they were badly outnumbered. The trench was too narrow for them to cover each other’s flanks, forcing each one to fight essentially alone. And Martians were still flooding across the surface from the next trench system, in the teeth of the allied artillery.
Elfrida saw all this in a few seconds of dipping into her platoon’s data feeds.
But the real emergency was technical. The phavatars were running out of juice. No wireless charging on Stickney, natch.
Elfrida put in a request for backup, and learned that another platoon was already on its way. Then, because she could do no more, she returned to where she should be: clambering down a tunnel in Sandhya 4863CCP’s ungainly body.
This tunnel started outside the rim of the Big Bowl, and went all the way down to the bowels of the fragged laser assembly. The Fraggers had widened it for the phavatars. In some places the tunnel had already collapsed, probably owing to old fractures caused by the PLAN machinery that chewed Phobos apart. You could see just how easily this whole rock would come apart with just the right application of pressure.
Sandhya 4863CCP towed Jeff 8299AX around a rockfall and came face to face with a Fragger sentry. Her headlamp picked out the nametag on his filthy EVA suit. “Colonel Miller,” she said. “Here is Jeff 8299AX. He needs fixing.” She switched from her phavatar’s voice into Elfrida’s. “Hey, Bob! It’s your favorite whale-watcher, Elfrida.”
She had a preloaded greeting for Bob Miller. She was always happy to see him. Technically, he’d deserted when he crash-landed his Fragger on Stickney, but she couldn’t find it in her heart to disapprove. This was what he really needed—to be back with his men.
“Elfrida! You’re looking charming today. Is that Martian blood on your shins, or are you just happy to see me?” Miller chuckled. “I can see this guy needs some TLC. I’ll take him down to Maintenance.”
“I’ll go with you,” Elfrida said. She had pre-programmed Sandhya 4863CCP to say this, regardless of who she met. Why was Miller on sentry duty, anyway? He was a colonel. “I’m in a hurry. I need to pick up power packs and ammo for my platoon.”
To her astonishment, Miller barred her way. “I’ll have them sent out to you.”
“Get out of my way,” said Sandhya 4863CCP. “I need to carry out my orders.”
Miller levelled his shotgun at her. “Elfrida, not today! We’re expecting a supply drop. I’ll tell you when it’s OK to come down. For now, just wait here. Oh, right: SUIT COMMAND. Wait here.”
Programmed to obey anyone with officer permissions, Sandhya 4863CCP froze. Elfrida seethed with curiosity. Why didn’t Miller want her to go downstairs? The phavatars often helped with supply drops. It wasn’t as if the Gravesfighter pilots didn’t know they were here. They’d delivered them to Stickney themselves.
It took twenty minutes for the power packs and ammo to be brought up. Long enough for Elfrida’s reaction to reach Stickney. “You’re up to something, Bob,” she said severely. “You can’t fool me. You’re planning to go over the top, and you know I wouldn’t approve. Well, no I don’t, because it’s not safe for you out there! The radiation would kill you, if a troll didn’t swing by and nuke you first. Please leave it to us. We’re doing our best, we really are. ”
The Fragger who’d brought her supplies said, “Er, I’m not Bob. I’m Ahmad.”
“Oh. Sorry.”
“But I’ll definitely, um, tell him how you feel.”
“He already knows how I feel,” Elfrida said, aware that this wouldn’t reach Stickney for another twenty minutes.
Sandhya 4863CCP took the supplies and flew back up the tunnel.
Back to her platoon.
The battle was over when she got there. Her platoon’s phavatars sagged against the walls of the trenches, out of juice. Martian corpses drifted around them. The backup platoon was pawing through the bodies, picking out those with intact heads. When the Martians self-euthanized, their heads exploded. When they were grenaded, they just burned up. Hence Elfrida’s emphasis on using kinetics. Intact Martian brains could be analyzed, possibly yielding up the secrets of their hardware-free comms technology. Needless to say, there was no neuroscience lab on Stickney. But the heads could be frozen and stored, hopefully to be returned to Earth for analysis in the future.
Right now, no one and nothing could leave Stickney. Not even radio signals. Only the quantum-encrypted UHF telepresence frequency defied jamming by the PLAN. If the Fraggers wanted to call home, they had to send messages via the phavatars, which suited the UN very well.
Elfrida stood on one of the phavatars that had run out of charge and poked her head up. The horizon loomed just a few meters away. Stickney was so small that the horizon was always close.
Looking up into the blackness of space, she saw a flash that must be one of the other two fortresses in this orbital plane, Limtoc and Reldresal. The PLAN had rearranged them to cover the gap in its defenses. Now, Limtoc and Reldresal paced Stickney in its orbit, dipping below it and rising above it at intervals. When they came closest, they sometimes fired their laser cannons at the Big Bowl. Never their railguns—that would risk shattering Stickney, precisely the outcome the PLAN must dread, if it dreaded anything at all
She didn’t see any Star Force ships. But then again, she wouldn’t. When they made supply drops, they flashed past at thousands of kilometers per second.
The Phobos Maneuver: A Space Opera Thriller (Sol System Renegades Book 5) Page 17