Synchronicity Trilogy Omnibus

by Michael McCloskey

  “Good enough,” the man said. He motioned to his fellows and they picked the desk up, moving it to bar the double doorway leading into the office from the station.

  “I understand there’s a side entrance for staff,” he said. “Willows is on it. He’s got two Circle Fours with him.”

  The leader looked distracted. Xinmei could tell from that and the traffic that he was taking in information on events happening elsewhere.

  “Please move farther back into your quarters, sir,” the security leader said. The other three were finding cover in the office, facing the double doors.

  Alec nodded. He planted his hand in the small of Xinmei’s back and herded her quickly through a side door, into a small hallway.

  The thunderous sound of projectile weapons fire erupted in the office. Alec bolted forward. Xinmei followed.

  They came to a bedroom. It was as large as the office, with a wide, knee-high bed in the center.

  “Willows? Willows, are you there?” came a voice through Xinmei’s ringing ears. The security leader came to the doorway of the bedroom behind them and turned to point his rifle down the corridor.

  The leader fired his weapon again. The sound was deafening. Xinmei squealed and dropped to all fours. Alec dove behind the far side of his bed.

  Then the leader opened his mouth, and blood poured out. He collapsed on the floor. Xinmei couldn’t see any obvious damage to the man or his armored skinsuit.

  The man’s eyes were open, staring blankly. Dead.

  “My god. My god. Someone’s sent assassin robots after me. I’m ill prepared. This may be it,” rambled Alec from behind the bed.

  “What the hell do you want? Who sent you here?” yelled Alec. “We surrender!”

  A robot appeared in the doorway. It was round, over a meter wide, with several arms attached around its vertical perimeter. Some of the arms were bent forward. One arm extended straight below, but Xinmei saw that its pointed end didn’t quite touch the floor.

  Xinmei gasped.

  The sphere whirled toward Alec alarmingly fast. It stopped just short, causing Alec to cower back in fear. Xinmei was afraid too. Her heart pounded away though she barely breathed.

  We seek Alec Vineaux.

  Xinmei’s passive link picked up the message. It wasn’t encrypted, presumably sent for Alec.

  “I’m Alec. What the hell is this? Jackson, where are you?”

  Another of the spherical robots appeared in the bedroom. The second robot towered over Xinmei where she crouched on the floor.

  Jackson is dead. Your underlings tried to stop us. We have defeated them.

  “Oh... my... god,” Alec gasped. “You’ve killed Jackson. How many people have you killed?”

  Only those who resist. This one was your head of security. We are in charge of security now. We are in charge of this place.

  Xinmei swallowed hard.

  I understand you have the concept of rank. This is your underling?

  Xinmei froze. Did it see her link? She shouldn’t be able to hear it.

  “Step over there, please,” Alec told her. Gratefully, she retreated back into the corner.

  “What do you want?” Alec asked.

  We’ll learn about this place. First, you must cover yourselves. Your flesh distresses us to view.

  “Cover ourselves? You mean our faces?”

  Everything must be covered. Your flesh should be covered. Don’t you see it? How vulnerable you are?

  “Well, I... I don’t know if we have coverings for everyone,” Alec said haltingly.

  Then they’ll be manufactured. This place has factories. We’ll specify your coverings. Work must begin immediately.

  Five

  When Feng awoke, he could tell something was wrong. It took him a moment to shake off the grogginess and figure it out: he felt heavy. He checked with the ship’s navigation service and verified it. The Ascending Dragon had departed Grand China station under 1.2 gravities of acceleration.

  His link contained a recorded message from Admiral Huang, broadcast to all the officers of the ship.

  Something suspicious has happened at Pearl River. There was a distress signal, followed by a blackout. Communication has been re-established, but some oddities remain. Although the Ascending Dragon wasn’t planning to leave the vicinity so quickly, the incident has prompted me to deploy you to Pearl River immediately.

  Feng knew that Pearl River was a station much farther from Earth, at an L5 rendezvous point with gas freighters that came in from the outer system while Earth was at a different point in its orbit. That meant he was now moving farther away from Earth than he had ever been. The idea was both exciting and scary. Anything could happen millions of kilometers from Earth, and help could be far off, depending on the movements of other ships in the system.

  Two hours later, the captain called an officers’ meeting. Feng linked in and found himself in the now familiar lecture hall.

  “I’ll only say this one time,” Captain Lin began. “This is not a drill. We’ll select friendly breach points to minimize damage to our station unless there’s a compelling reason to do otherwise. Best case scenario, this is a surprise inspection in force. Worst case, the station has been taken over by our enemies. It’s not unheard of for neutral or Western corporations to raid each other’s stations. That may be what’s happened here. If so, we want to put a stop to it. We’re going in with a full incursion and any resistance will be crushed with lethal force. Your weapons will be live.”

  The captain prompted Wenbo to insert a question.

  “I assume we will have base specs to use for our simulations?”

  Captain Lin nodded. “Yes. But you should be aware that there are sometimes discrepancies between the official specs handed to the government and the actual station. These... inconsistencies increase with the distance from Earth. This isn’t so bad with our companies, but it’s somewhat worse with Western stations, and notoriously bad in the neutral stations. What we have should be ninety-nine percent accurate for Pearl River, although we could see a ten or twenty percent variation in the size of their security forces.”

  “Are we to give special consideration to the civilians?” Zhengqing asked.

  “Only if they’re being used as hostages. If they resist, we will fire on them. As far as bystanders, the station will be ordered to quarters before the incursion. So other than a hostage situation, don’t cripple yourselves to prevent incidental casualties in the inhabitants. If we do face a hostage situation then I’ll assess it and give you more specific orders at that time.”

  Feng couldn’t believe his ears. He half believed that Captain Lin didn’t think there was much chance of anything being wrong, and was taking advantage of a small incident to give his men some experience with a weapons-live incursion. But Feng wasn’t complaining. This was exactly what he joined the space force for. A real military action conducted with robotic weapons in deep space.

  After the meeting, Feng wandered over to the mess hall to pore over the Pearl River specs. The station belonged to a company called QingTie, that made ultra-strong plastics for use in space construction. The station was almost completely automated, with an engineering staff of less than one hundred individuals and a security force of about thirty humans and fifty security robots. At least another hundred robots served for various fabrication and maintenance duties through the station. Unlike the stations that Feng had been on so far, only a small part of the station had simulated gravity, with the majority of the volume of the station at the center, very close to zero-g.

  Feng assimilated this data while taking a meal of steamed vegetables and rice. The Ascending Dragon produced a crop of fresh vegetables to supplement its frozen stores every month. This month it was broccoli. The hydroponics farm was small but fast. It could only produce one type of vegetable crop at a time. Feng hoped that Pearl River could trade them for part of the broccoli stores, since they always ate more of the on-board fresh crop than the stores, and he tired of the l
ack of variety.

  Zhengqing contacted Feng over his link.

  “I’m putting you in charge of forces deployed on Module One,” Zhengqing told him. “Don’t pilot a dog. I want you paying attention to the officers and the big picture, not on the front line sniping at security robots.”

  “Aye, sir,” Feng said.

  “Wenbo has some simulations set up for your objectives, which include the main security station and the reactor bay. Module Two will deploy near the spaceport.”

  Feng was reminded of their failure to seize the spaceport last time. But that was before the battle controller was used on their side, he reminded himself.

  “I’ll check with him later, then,” Feng said. “I’ll familiarize myself further with the station around those areas.”

  “I know you won’t disappoint me,” Zhengqing said and dropped the link connection.

  ***

  Feng and Wenbo worked on testing Feng’s dog configurations on a virtual model of the station. They lounged in an empty cubicle near the officers’ mess, picking at food and monitoring the simulations in their PVs.

  “The simulations are amusing to watch, as well as informative,” Feng said. He adjusted the sleeves of his ship’s uniform. He found the uniforms to be a bit hot for the ship’s default temperature, though they were much more comfortable than the vac suits they sometimes had to wear.

  “I thought so too, before I knew about the battle controller,” Wenbo said. “I spent so much time learning to do these at the academy. But now what good are they really? We test our backup plans. We can’t see what will happen with the battle controller running things.”

  “Why not? Just hook it up to the simulation?” asked Feng.

  “It’s far too dangerous to turn on simply for that,” Wenbo said.

  “Dangerous? To us?”

  “Of course. It’s smarter than we are, remember?”

  “Don’t we control it?”

  “We try. Like a group of monkeys might try to control an astronaut.”

  “It’s that bad?” Feng asked.

  “It’s very dangerous. There’s a whole team dedicated to isolating the battle controller from the rest of the Ascending Dragon, yet giving it control to the robotics we have in the incursion. At all other times it’s turned off.”

  Feng hadn’t realized quite how dangerous the battle controller was.

  “It’s kind of like playing with chemical and nuclear weapons then,” he said. “There are protocols to adhere to, and mistakes are deadly.”

  “Yes. And the controller is too smart to simulate without turning it on, so my simulations are basically useless. I’m a dinosaur!”

  Feng laughed. “These are still useful. They familiarize me with the situation. Besides, if the battle controller is that complicated, then something can go wrong with it. Maybe it’ll turn on us, that team you mention will have to turn it off, and then we’ll be so glad we ran the simulations!”

  Wenbo shrugged. “I can’t hope for such a thing. It would be to our disadvantage. The battle controller is so good.”

  “We could adjust your simulations just a bit, make the dogs more likely to hit, more maneuverable, that sort of thing, to pretend like they’re in the control of a super-computer.”

  “Yes, I’ve done that. But of course it’s the brilliant strategy and coordination of the army as a whole that we’re missing here.”

  Feng nodded.

  “The simulations are still helpful,” Feng repeated. “And besides, we’ve been ordered to conduct them, so let’s get back to work.”

  ***

  Feng watched his dogs enter the station through his PV. Each dog had redundant forward and rear-facing views to offer him, so he was able to get a feel for the breach point. The module had attached to Pearl River at a cargo dock. The dogs entered the station in an empty area perhaps fifty meters across. Once a hundred of them had disembarked, groups of the machines moved to cover each of the three exits.

  “I don’t see any humans here or on our scans of the area beyond. Looks like they obeyed and went to their quarters,” Feng observed. He moved out of the module to set up in the station, though it wasn’t strictly necessary. Feng didn’t like the cramped quarters of the module, and he was curious to see the station.

  Human soldiers were securing the area in the wake of the dogs’ blitz into the station. They hopped oddly in low gravity, jerked to the floor by magnetic boots.

  The station looked older, dirtier, Feng noted. The cargo dock had a wide corridor leading straight into the factory in one direction and a smaller corridor to the security station in the other. The third exit was not particularly interesting to the invaders, since it led around the living quarters ring at one gravity in the direction opposite the security station. The walls were composed of gray and white plates of plastic with supporting structural components of carbon and steel. The area had seen heavy use, Feng thought, examining the grungy floor plates. The ceiling was twice his height.

  “We’re fully deployed,” an officer announced. “No resistance in the debarkment area.”

  “I’m leaving fifty dogs here at the module. Everyone else, move for the security headquarters when you get my signal,” Feng ordered.

  Feng’s second assigned to Module One was an officer named Sheng. Like Wenbo, who Zhengqing kept for himself on Module Two, Sheng was good with the dog configs and simulations. He was tall, like Feng, though somewhat softer-looking with darker skin.

  Feng and Sheng set up in a corner by themselves. They unslung their rifles from their backs, and set them down. A couple of soldiers dropped off some supply boxes to give them a table and some cover. Everyone relied on the dogs to let them know of any approaching danger.

  The typical incursion doctrine used by the Divine Space Force dictated that an invader should select an unexpected location, create a breach and enter the station as quickly as possible. Then the force should prepare for possible counter-attack, in case the defenders decided to reply at the site of the breach. Zhengqing had planned according to this doctrine, and so the dogs were set in the access corridors in all three directions around the breach. Feng wasn’t surprised when the dogs detected the enemy quickly.

  “We have security machines moving in,” Feng noted. “Should be no problem.”

  No sooner had Feng spoken when the attack began. Security robots appeared on a wide front around the breach area.

  Three dogs fell off the active status display. Four. Five. Six. Alerts went out. Feng watched in dismay as entire units went dead in his PV. He noticed that the dogs were firing back in defense, but their positions were static. The army wasn’t moving as a whole to either retreat or counterattack the frontal assault.

  “What’s going on? And why are our dogs just sitting here?”

  Sheng had his eyes closed to concentrate on his PV.

  “The dogs are acting on their default programming,” Sheng said. “We aren’t getting oversight from the battle controller.”

  “The battle controller isn’t working?” Feng asked urgently.

  “They’ve been cut off from the battle controller,” Sheng said. “Something’s jamming us over on this end of the station.”

  “Tell the dogs to get back there,” ordered Zhengqing. “They’ve got a default configuration that will make them useful. We just need to get them into a defensive perimeter until the controller can—”

  Zhengqing’s transmission cut off. There was an upswell of chatter from the soldiers’ channel and the robotic officers’ channel. Feng found the action in his PV. Zhengqing’s position at the other breach had been attacked. Another ten dogs had been lost. The human casualty list also began an upward climb.

  “Captain Zhengqing is dead,” someone reported.

  “What? Can you verify that? Can someone verify that?” asked Sheng.

  “He’s dead,” said Wenbo from the other site. “I don’t know what happened. We’ve been attacked,” he said in a dull voice.

  Zheng
qing is dead. Wenbo’s alive, but he’s in shock, Feng thought. That means I’m in command of the dogs here.

  Feng felt a spike of sadness. The emotion quickly hardened into anger. Feng accessed his old dog configuration tools and used his authority to reset some defaults. He saw that the battle controller was communicating with the dogs at the other module, so he left that side alone and concentrated on his local dogs.

  “We have a huge numerical advantage,” he said. “Time to use it.” Feng put in a directive to counter-attack across all his dogs. Immediately the dog army started to move forward.

  The dogs exchanged fire with the line of security robots. Feng saw that the dogs had already killed a few of the robots, even acting on their purely defensive reactions. Now that more and more dogs poured forward, the line of security robots took heavy fire.

  A minute later, it was clear that the counter-attack had been successful. Dogs moved deeper into the station without resistance. He had only lost about twenty dogs from the module.

  “Wenbo? We’ve had great success with our ‘overwhelm’ counter-attack program. Are you responding with something over there already?”

  “The battle controller is running things over on this side. But we weren’t attacked by any normal security robot,” Wenbo said. “It was something different. Something fast. It came in here and wiped out dozens of dogs, killed several officers and soldiers. It’s gone now. I think.”

  “What? One machine did that?”

  Even as he asked he started accessing information on the Module Two assault.

  “Why can Wenbo hear me but our dogs are out of touch with the controller?” he asked Sheng aloud.

  “The controller channels are being actively blocked. I contacted the EW section on the ship. They said the battle controller is trying to compensate. Someone is fighting it.”

  Feng cursed. “It’s supposed to be an amazing brain, super-intelligent,” he said to himself.

  He saw video of the attack piped in from a surviving dog of the other module. One moment a large atrium was filled with dogs moving by, with Zhengqing and a handful of officers working at the side. The next moment, dogs started dropping. A few fired back, although Feng couldn’t see what they shot at. Then the officers dropped as if they died in an instant. Then more dogs ran in and through the room as if in pursuit.