by Mel Keegan
The plascrete came up as fast as he had expected, but the hardsuit absorbed most of the shock of impact. He set his mass back down to forty kilos before he had even straightened from the landing, and was shoulder to shoulder with Marin as they covered the distance to the massdriver in three long strides. The closest of the automata were beyond, with three hapless drones taking random shots at them.
In the helmet displays, the access way to the generator bunker showed as a semi-opaque overlay with a range of seventy meters south, beyond the blockhouses and the black and yellow spire of the very crane gantry that had installed the Prometheus machine. In Travers’s ears now was a whisper of comm traffic, and he listened with as much attention as he could spare as he and Marin crouched in the cover of the massdriver’s great steel and plascrete footing.
The human crew on Fridjof Central was on full alert, not yet panicking, but bellowing for help on every frequency. They might have hoped for an answer from the Marak defense forces, but it came from the Mercury. Travers recognized the voice of one of the more senior officers, a long-time trustee of Shapiro’s, with a lifetime of service and experience in Fleet ships. Margot Fedayev’s voice was deep, resonant, with the accent of uptown Elstrom City. In terse words, she counseled getting the general population of the installation into the nuke bunkers, and everyone into armor who could be armored. Fridjof’s civilian management was delighted to comply.
“There they are. I have line of sight,” Marin said softly. “Three o’clock, right behind the fuel boom.”
“Now you see them, now you don’t … and they’re way out of pulse range,” Travers warned. “Two of the buggers, like … like the Kulich brothers in flat black skinsuits.”
But those suits would be a feather-light armor of the Zunshu alloy, enough to give the oddly-proportioned automata an edge against normal gunfire, even though they had no need of life support.
“See if the drones can take one,” Marin suggested. “We’ll pick off whatever gets through.” He checked the charge on the rifle before he shouldered it and marked his target.
As he spoke, a drone erupted in a cascade of magnesium sparklets and a small storm of steel confetti. Bits scythed toward Travers, and he rode them on the left shoulder of the armor. His display lit up with hazmat and temperature warnings, but he ignored them. The suit could be stripped to the bare kevlex, but it would remain sound.
“One drone down, two to go,” Marin murmured. “They’re falling back … if they fall back far enough, we’ll get a clear shot at the automata while they’re busy with the drones. Damn, I wish we had a way to task the Murchison units, use them as bait.”
“Keep it in mind,” Travers said with grim determination. “This kind of fight could be happening every day if … and here we go.”
The black, barrel-shaped Murchison security drones scudded on powerful Arago fields, bristling with gunbarrels and the spines of scores of sensors. They were surprisingly intelligent, smart enough to play a good game of chess. They knew about evasion, decoy, diversion, ambush, and multiple player strategy. One was leading the automata, showing itself, bobbing up and out into plain sight and then spinning and twisting around the bursts of incoming rounds, while the other surviving drone hugged the plascrete and snuck into a crevice in the girder and conduit around the massdriver. From such a position it might get a clear shot at the oncoming insurgents which should follow the unit that was playing tag with them.
“They’re good,” Marin observed.
“State of the art.” Travers checked his weapon and pulled it back to his shoulder. “Harlequin, where’s the Mercury, damnit? They should be here!”
The voice answering belonged to Fedayev. “We are here, Travers. We’re a few K’s over your skyline, wrangling your data. I just popped up a dozen drones for vid and sensor coverage … you’ll have a squad of four Bravo units groundside in armor, in one minute.”
“Give me a comm feed.” Travers’s finger hovered on the trigger, waiting, waiting, while the oncoming machines played tag. The Zunshu automata were getting close now – quite close enough for him to see the grain in the flat black suits sheathing the oddly-proportioned bodies. Their helmets were faceless; the forearms and shoulders carried more than twenty tiny protrusions which spat high-velocity, dart-sized rounds with enough knock-down potential to destroy the best security drones Murchison knew how to manufacture.
The comm feed patched through as he watched, and he heard a voice he recognized. “It’s Fargo, boss,” she said glibly, “and the boys thought they’d come along for the exercise. Inosanto, Kravitz, Choi. Codename is Groundhound.”
Again. It was all so familiar, time seemed to dissolve away. “Mark your targets,” Travers told them. “Remember Kjorin. We learned how on Kjorin. It’ll work the same way here.”
Sure enough, as he spoke, Marin stroked the trigger of the AR-19. The weapon lay like a lover in his arms, and Travers held his breath as a single massive pulse of electricity punched the black-clad figure of the Zunshu machine onto its back. It went down like a doll and stayed down.
Without even taking a breath, Travers switched to the grenade launcher mounted on his right forearm and put three rounds into it, tightly targeted on the belly. The core processor was there. Taking off the automaton’s head would only slow it down until it routed navigation and sensory feeds through alternative sources.
This machine went up in a blue-white hail of shrapnel and sparks, bright enough to make the helmet visors dim and leave Travers’s eyes filled with corneal after-images.
“One Zunshu down,” Marin was saying. “Mercury, do you get any energy readings off it?”
“Nada,” Fedayev said crisply. “We’re looking at visuals from popup drones fifty meters right over your head … you blew it in two, there’s not enough left for it to reboot.”
“That’s how we do it,” Travers breathed. “Bravo, listen up. Switch to pulse, I repeat pulse, on the AR-19. One shot, dead-center in the chest, right where the heart would be if they were human. The pulse will knock the machine offline, give you a few seconds to put two or three grenades right into the belly. That’s the belly, not the head, you hear me? The core processor is in the belly.”
“Got it, boss,” Fargo responded.
And Fedayev: “All Bravo units are away.”
“I’m not a freakin’ unit,” Fargo said loudly. “I walked the hell away from Fleet because I was sick and tired of being a unit.”
“Have it your way, Judith,” Fedayev said blithely. “Neil, be aware, Judith, Tim, Reuben and Paul are groundside, one hundred meters southwest of your position, tracking four Zunshu machines. Fridjof’s security drones have taken two more. Nine, total, are viable, and you have one twenty meters dead ahead of your position, behind the massdriver. You want me to flush it toward you?”
Travers chuckled, and it was a sound of genuine humor. “Why don’t you do that, Margot?”
The Mercury was maneuvering even then, never quite rising above the jungle of pylon, girder and silos, but the glare of floodlights and sterntubes lit up the clouds of dust which hung in the airless sky of Ulrand Prime, drifting down under a gravity load just a little less than a third of Earth’s normal.
The ship was coming around, circling behind the Zunshu machine – and it knew. Travers had taken a breath to bark a warning when it burst out of cover, both arms up, more than a dozen tiny barrels leveled both on the drones and on Travers and Marin.
They fired together, two service rifles and two combat shotguns, two high-voltage energy pulses and a blizzard of explosive pellets, which knocked the machine offline and in the same instant took its head off at mid-chest. To be sure, Marin switched to grenades and eviscerated the carcass.
“Mercury, you read any signature off it?” Travers prompted.
“Nothing,” Fedayev’s assured him. “And Bravo has gone hunting. They’re after three, headed west of your position.”
She had barely finished speaking when Tim Inosanto whooped o
ver the comm and Fargo said, “Hey boss, you’re right. The pulse makes the buggers go dark … but man, are these mothers mean. I’m sending Choi back up to the Mercury. He’s busted up.”
“How bad?” Travers had risen to his feet and was panning the suit’s scanners to and fro, looking for the next nearest target. He had it a moment later – a single figure skulking among the high-pressure, high-temperature pipes.
“The armor’s fritzed,” Tim Inosanto told him. “He was hit before we made it down. The legs are compromised, but he says he’s okay, just bruised, a few gashes. Doc Drury has the OR cranked up to receive incoming. He’ll be good.”
“You watch yourselves,” Travers told them. “Judith, can you get backup?”
“Not with four of us tied down, bodyguarding for Shapiro.” She stopped there, and he heard the heavy breathing of considerable physical effort.
Groundhound was working hard. They knew what they were doing, and they were the only human squad who had gained any experience in the field against Zunshu automata and lived to tell about it. These scenes would have been fought out scores of times on the worlds where the Resalq dared to stop long enough to gather food, mine fuel, but Travers was very much aware, the Resalq had come late, and reluctantly, to the arts of war. The Zunshu won many victories before the Resalq warrior caste was born, and at last the Zunshu began to lose.
The automata were tough, smart, and virtually impervious to normal rounds. Their weakness was discovered at the cost of many lives. “We can take them,” Travers said softly as he and Marin moved off toward their own target.
“But they’re at their most dangerous when they figure out they’re losing the fight,” Marin warned. “Remember? The moment they believe they can’t get to the colony generators, they’ll self-destruct, and there won’t be two molecules left sticking together in the crater.”
“Damn,” Travers rasped.
Over the comm, Hubler’s voice was a bass growl. “I’m hearing most of this, Travers. Classified shit?”
“It used to be,” Travers said ruefully. “You’re getting the crash course, Roark. Any time you want to join the party, feel free.”
“You hit the buggers with a few million volts, and then you tear out the guts, to get the core processor?”
“You got it,” Marin told him. “But the more we knock down, the bigger the mess we’re digging ourselves into. When they get down to a handful of viable units, and when they figure they can’t get the whole colony, they’ll cut their losses and blow away what they can.”
For a long moment Hubler was silent. Then he called, “Mercury Ops, How many you tracking, still viable?”
“Seven,” Fedayev informed him.
“Gimme the data,” Hubler invited. “You know what I’m thinking, Travers?”
“You’re thinking, you can target a bunch of them together, from altitude,” Travers guessed.
“Not seven. I can get four, with six megavolts apiece, in discrete pulses,” Hubler mused. “We don’t want to zap the whole zone with EMP. Christ, we’d knock the whole lot of you dark, you’d lie there and suffocate! But I can get the last four, all at one time. If you think four is safe, before they do the self-destruct number.”
“Curtis?” Travers prompted. “You’ve seen those old training vids.”
The question was delicate, and Marin chewed on it for a while. “It should be safe,” he decided at last, “because of the conditions. Industrial field, low gravity, vacuum. I’d have to guess they perceive themselves as having the advantage over living creatures. They could be right. I don’t know if you’ve looked at the ranging data lately, but all seven of the buggers are well inside of sixty meters of the access elevators to the generator bunkers!”
“I’ve seen it,” Travers said bleakly. “So we can take them down to four?”
“If this were the chaos of a city, where they were cut off from each other and human soldiers – or Resalq! – could be anywhere by the thousand, they might call game over at six.” Marin spoke slowly, deliberately. “But once or twice, they pushed further. Once, they didn’t call game over till they were down to two. And then five thousand Resalq perished in one event.”
“Christ almighty,” Asako Rodman’s voice whispered. “That’s some hellish history. You saw this on CityNet?”
“Not quite,” Marin admitted. “It’s more stuff that would have been classified an hour ago. You want in, Asako?”
She did not hesitate. “I do. I’m taking the Harlequin up to fifteen hundred meters.”
“And I’m going to lock targets on the four closest to the access elevators,” Hubler added. “You listening to this, Groundhound? I can put ’em down, but I don’t have the ordnance to be dead sure of taking ’em all right out – not from the altitude we need to hit all four at once with a high-voltage kick in the head.”
Fedayev was back at once. “We got it covered, Harlequin. Feed us your data. I’ve been piping this comm to General Shapiro, and we have clearance to bring the Mercury closer. We won’t get a clear enough shot to put them down with discrete EM pulses, but we can target the hotspots you’re about to create. If the Harlequin can knock ’em dark for a few seconds, I’ve got gunners here guaranteeing you mangled wreckage where the automata used to be. Good enough?”
“Curtis?” Travers asked deliberately. “You’re the specialist.”
“God help me,” Marin breathed. “Mark your targets, Roark, but do not fire on them until they’re the last four viable, understand? They’re a lot smarter than drones, and if they figure out what we’re doing –”
“Got it,” Hubler assured him. “Mercury, move your fat ass – you’re too close. Your engine wake is scrambling my instruments! I can’t get a target lock when you’re frying every sensor I’ve got!”
While they spoke, Travers and Marin had been making their way around the mass driver and around the long, rectangular blockhouse beyond it. Six security drones were also converging on the area, bright blips in the helmet displays. As the Murchison drones appeared in Travers’s line of sight they began to sneak, holding to the harsh shadows cast by spotlights mounted high on the gantries overhead.
Stealth was worth the effort. The sheer tonnage of machinery, the background noise from the Prometheus generator buried in the rock beneath them, the fallout from big ships’ engines, was scrambling everyone’s sensor feed. Travers, Marin and Bravo were getting direct data from the popup drones, but the Zunshu units were on their own.
The Zunshu comm was so much white noise, an annoying, insectoidal crackle and hiss of data, defying human machinery. They were using a frequency so high, human equipment could barely register it at all, but Travers could hear the breakup in their signals.
The datastream on which they depended for networked performance was dropping out under the load of interference. Marin was hearing the same thing, and his voice was sharp with disquiet. “Neil, are you listening to their comm?” he asked softly. “This could get ugly. Groundhound, Harlequin, we don’t have a lot of time. Zunshu comm is starting to break up. If they get cut off from each other, any single, isolated unit can make a unilateral decision, and it’s over for all of us.”
“Shit,” Rodman muttered, “shitshitshit. Okay, Curtis, you seem to be the specialist. Which way do you want us to jump?”
“It’s the Mercury,” Travers said. “Fedayev, you’re putting out too much wake noise as you come up over our skyline. You gotta get her back out of the way.”
“If we drop over your horizon,” Fedayev’s warned, “we can’t guarantee the accuracy you need … I’m assuming the Zunshu drones will boot themselves right back up, come back online, if they’re given half a chance. How long, Marin? This ship’s not some little bucket like the Mako. She doesn’t pick up and move on a dime.”
The question was critical. “As little as twelve seconds,” Marin said carefully. “Reports have varied from place to place. This has been done before, and people got out alive to tell the story, but it’s seconds.
I wouldn’t want to push it to twenty seconds. Ten would be safer, and I’d like eight a whole lot better. Can do, Mercury?”
“Negative,” Fedayev told him. “I’ve got pilot and weapons officers shaking their heads at me. No guarantees.”
Travers’s mind was racing. “Can you deploy gundrones?”
“Not four,” Fedayev said tersely “We’re a cruiser, half-staffed and not geared up for a full-on battle. Nobody expected to be fighting today –
weapons officer reports two gundrones on standby. And before you ask, my specialists have looked into using viddrones to remote-guide rounds fired from the cannons aboard the Mercury. The zone’s too sizzling hot to guarantee four clean kills on the first volley, and eight seconds isn’t enough to take a second crack at them with any safety factor.”
If this were a battlefield Travers would have accepted the odds, but the lives of two thousand civilian workers were riding on this action. He swore softly.” Curtis, you want to call it?”
“Dendra Shemiji always took them one on one,” Marin said quietly. “Gundrones, Bravo, you and me. We have the numbers.”
“Mercury Operations, launch the gundrones,” Travers said without hesitation. “Groundhound, you getting all this?”
Fargo was there at once. “Every lousy syllable. We lost about twenty more security drones out this way, but they took one more Zunshu machine with them – just blind luck. You guys are tracking one, which leaves one more in play before we do this thing … and I know what you’re going to ask. One on one, right?”
“Two gundrones,” Travers told her, “best we can do. Can you guys cover the last two Zunshu units?”
“We can,” she barked.
“Can you do it fast enough?” Marin pressed. “We’re history, all of us, if you miss your shot.”
“We can,” Fargo said loudly. “Me and Roo, we’ll nail one apiece, and we’re getting targeting data right from the Harlequin.”
“Kravitz?” Travers said softly into the comm. “You good to do this?”