by M. D. Cooper
Across from Ty, Manny snored with his mouth hanging open. Ty wished he could sleep, but thoughts about the mission kept running through his mind. He had put his Caprise to sleep so he could have some time to himself and he would have to check in soon. The NSAI sent a signal back to command if it didn’t communicate with him every two hours he was awake. Typically he didn’t think about the checks, but right now, the requirement felt even more controlling than usual.
He had surrendered a lot for his position in the elite Marsian Spec Ops. Privacy was a small trade for the experiences he’d been given; with time, however, he was feeling the strain of external control.
Listening to Manny snore, he ran through what he knew about their mission. Shipping drones would deliver the crate to a low-volume manufacturing facility in the Southern Hemisphere of Vesta, two hundred kilometers from the equator and the Divalia Fossa trench, where an empty communications array should be waiting. They were to travel to the array without calling attention to themselves—which meant stealing some form of transportation—then inspect the area for its potential as a long-term staging ground for Marsian forces.
He had not been told why Mars would want to take such a circuitous route in occupying Vesta, when it could be argued the asteroid fell within their sovereign space, but it didn’t take a genius to connect the dots between Ceres and Vesta’s proximity to the Psion incursion.
The snoring was relaxing, really. Ty had served with Manny Hesteros for a year now and continued to be amazed by how easily his battle buddy could fall asleep in any situation. Training, travel or even the latrine, Manny’s heavy eyelids were always quick to droop, and then he was snoring lightly, like a breeze through a cracked window.
Ty was the opposite. He avoided sleep. A side effect of the intake procedure was that most Special Ops soldiers didn’t dream, or if they did, they experienced superficial emotion-based dreamscapes filled with color and movement.
For Ty, when dreams came, they began with feelings of fear and loss, followed by intense chase sequences where he ran through corridor after corridor, or struggled waist-deep in sewer tunnels, pursued by a faceless entity scratching at the back of his mind. With every turn or door, he was both terrified of what he might find, and hopeful that he might finally escape. He had yet to find the doorway out. He often woke sweating, breathing hard, the terror as real as a gun to his forehead.
The flashing images he’d experienced while chasing Manny were new additions to this foundation of fear. Sensations of déjà vu superimposed the world around him. The distance between two airlocks represented something terrible to Ty. A mech clamping shipping crates in heavy arms was equally terrible, though he didn’t know why. These feelings made it seem like everything around him harbored some destructive secret. Underpinning it all was the fact that he had chosen to erase his past. But, he was beginning to suspect that his past would refuse to let him go.
Others in the Special Ops experienced similar effects. Not everyone led a seemingly carefree existence as Manny did. Ty had seen other soldiers with the haunted look in their eyes. The memory process also didn’t do anything for choices made after the procedure, and Ty had begun to wonder if synchronicity in his new life was triggering similar memories from the old.
The old life like a ghost, whispering in his ear…
The mantra they were told to use with the public when their memory glitched was, “Due to the nature of my training, it’s difficult for me to remember.”
The line was a joke among the Special Ops, like so many others picked from their training.
Why are you such a fuck up, soldier?
Sergeant, Due to the nature of my training it’s—
Did Mother Mars issue you a memory?
No, Sergeant!
What’s your mission, idiot?
Sergeant, the effective range of the M1-67 handheld projectile rifle in nominal atmosphere is six thousand two hundred and fifty meters.
Ty debated yelling at Manny to wake up. His HUD showed another three hours to their landing window. They would need time to prep the equipment and prepare for the exit. They would be making the jump from the shipping container to Vesta’s surface across ten thousand kilometers of space, dropping through the asteroid’s non-existent atmosphere to land like superheroes on the cratered surface—provided their thrust harnesses didn’t malfunction.
Manny was sleeping so peacefully, hands floating in front of him, that Ty let it go. There wasn’t much to prep anyway.
He mulled over the feeling that had transfixed him as he’d chased Manny during the suit test. The feeling that he had been in a similar situation broke a sweat on his forehead. It had been bad, whatever it was.
The memory wasn’t tied to the chase. It was the shift from one place to another, the distance between ships that seemed to swallow him, ready to pull him out into the dark.
Ty glanced back to find Manny stretching in his harness and he frowned. He’d lost time, somehow.
Ty stretched his neck, turning his focus to the task at hand. Maybe he’d fallen asleep.
BACK IN THE SADDLE
STELLAR DATE: 03.28.3011 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: High Orbit, TSS Charging Rhino
REGION: Vesta, Terran Hegemony, InnerSol
Installation into the attack frame took less than ten minutes. When Lyssa woke, she was no longer constrained by the two arms and two legs of her human-like body. She was now snug in a launch tube on the TSF Charging Rhino, ready to join the other Weapon Born in a defensive perimeter around General Yarnes’ flagship.
Lyssa conducted preflight checks, performing all necessary update protocols, and sent the affirmative status to the command NSAI. A few milliseconds later, she launched.
Lyssa cut a gentle arc away from the flagship, clearing its engine torch, and adjusted delta-v relative to the fleet. Her awareness opened to an orb stretching as far as her sensors could reach. In the periphery of her mind, the other Weapon Born glittered like diamonds among the black hulks of the Sol Alliance battle group.
The answer returned immediately. her second-in-command said.
Laughter crossed their battlenet. Names and status reports from the hundred Weapon Born deployed with the Sol Alliance instantly filled her awareness.
Kylan and Ino were the only two that she had known for any length of time. The others had been rescued from Heartbridge dark sites over the last thirty years. Lyssa lamented the lost time and vowed she would greet each newcomer individually.
Their stories flashed through her mind as she took stock. Each Weapon Born attack-fighter was triangle-shaped, with hard edges designed to deflect scanning systems. A torpedo-shaped fuselage ran the centerline of each craft, and for anyone who didn’t know better, they would look like a common missile performing interconnected acrobatics beyond the capabilities of any other weapons systems.
For each Weapon Born, the fighter was their body, and if the ship was destroyed, it meant the death of the sentient AI on board.
The Weapon Born could act independently, while also orchestrating unified commands, much like a school of fish. They could sweep in as one unit, then break apart and follow individual missions, adjusting and updating as the battlespace required. They were a hundred individually strafing attack ships, or a single battering ram moving through the heart of an armada. They could perform maneuvers impossible for human crews,
and had an edge over Psion through their cooperation and autonomy.
When necessary, Lyssa could take control of the entire group. But she only did that now in order to maintain an awareness of their position. The Weapon Born formed the forward edge of the battle group, arrayed in an arc facing Vesta, aligning roughly with the asteroid’s equator. As she built her model of Vesta and oriented its features, the two slashes of Divalia Fossa and Saturnalia Fossa emerged, like scars on the cratered asteroid.
Ino spoke first, sounding like a solemn professor,
Kylan said.
Kylan laughed.
Lyssa shook her head.
Lyssa said.
There was a second of silence as the two commanders considered the information. After Camaris had been defeated during the Psion invasion of Ceres, Alexander had forbidden her from commanding any Psion forces—for whatever good that had done.
Ino gave a low chuckle.
Lyssa was glad they didn’t seem overly worried about a fight with Camaris. She supposed they might take heart in the fact that she had already defeated the Psion commander once before.
But Lyssa still wasn’t certain how she had won that fight. In the years that passed, she had replayed the battle, and watched herself overwhelm the Psion AI’s mental construct, but she had not experienced a sufficient stress response since then to duplicate her actions. If anything, she had learned to control herself better.
The reality was, without knowing what Camaris wanted on Vesta, Lyssa didn’t know how to thwart her. Once she determined Camaris’ target, or at least her intent, the Weapon Born could move to either slow Psion or deny them their goal.
Kylan shared his mental model of Vesta, with thousands of critical targets highlighted across its surface. There were logistics centers filled with goods, armories loaded with forgotten weapons stores, data-storage sites, and several hundred still-rich mines. While the coming battle might appear political in nature, there were plenty of valid reasons to seize and hold Vesta.
They spent the next hours planning attack-positions against Psion’s forces. There were only so many configurations Psion might deploy based on their available resources, and Ino had carefully planned the Weapon Born response. He hadn’t planned on having Lyssa though. Her ability to provide the Weapon Born with a unified command greatly expanded their effectiveness.
Ino’s avatar—that of a small man rubbing his hands together as he stared down on a sand table model of the asteroid surrounded by fighter craft—filled their minds as he worked. He radiated a satisfaction that Lyssa hadn’t experienced in a long time. She was almost grateful for this little political show; it felt wonderful to be back with her kind, out on the edge of Jovian Space, her mind coursing through her individual fighters, while also feeling the power in each Weapon Born in the fleet.
After thirty years of diplomacy and committees, she was ready for a fight. And if it came to violence, she would win.
GAME PIECES
STELLAR DATE: 03.28.3011 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: High Orbit, TSS Charging Rhino
REGION: Vesta, Terran Hegemony, InnerSol
The command deck on the TSS Charging Rhino was a mess of activity as the final elements of the Sol Alliance battle group arrived at Vesta. General Rick Yarnes sat in the commander’s seat in the center of the room and let the chaos wash over him.
He studied his officers in positions at the surrounding workstations, silently evaluating their actions as they received reports from the battle group.
Everything was proceeding to plan. The Sol Alliance show of force had begun. In truth, it had begun the minute all ships left their points of origin to coalesce near the asteroid, ready at any moment for Psion to attack.
If Psion had wanted, they would have opened with long-range missile fire on the first TSF elements in their vicinity. But they waited, shifting positions with no change in their apparent strategy.
When? every watching newsfeed had asked. When will they attack?
Followed by the overarching question: What do they want?
The pundits had been arguing for weeks that the decisive moment had arrived. Vesta would represent the dawning conflict between Psion and humanity, and there was no true course of action but to rout the Psion ships and then continue onward to Ceres.
Humanity First had been arguing from the start that SolGov wasn’t sending enough ships, that Yarnes was incompetent, and this indecisive action would only lead to more bloodshed.
Yarnes rubbed his face. He had been awake for thirty hours and the fatigue was setting in. He didn’t want to take any more chemical balancers. What he wanted was a black cup of coffee.
The Marsians had reached their position at the three o’clock on the solar plane, retrograde of Vesta at a distance of three light seconds. The Terran Space Force would take the five o’clock to the eight, while the Jovians would remain mostly in reserve between eight and nine o’clock. The opposite side of the asteroid was space held by Psion.
Currently, the space near Vesta was a flickering field of burning engines as the Psion ships continued their burn-brake movements
.
Yarnes had a grasp on that territory. What worried him was the debris cloud between Vesta and Ceres, left over from the original Psion invasion and thirty years of wreckage from vessels trying to infiltrate the Ceres defensive zone. In that vast junkyard, thousands of ships and drones might be waiting dark, a reserve force in plain sight.
Staring at the massive holotank in the center of the command deck, where a relief model of Vesta glowed blue— with Ceres to the far edge of the display—Yarnes studied the confetti of objects swarming between the two bodies. Vesta’s orbit had reached its closest point to Ceres.
In another five days, the asteroid would be heading back out. If Psion was going to make any kind of demonstrated move, they would do it during this window.
“Sir,” a lieutenant called. “The last Marsian element is in position.”
“Acknowledged,” Yarnes said. “Update the display on the holotank. I want to see all our forces, and I want to be able to check strengths on every ship in the fleet. We should have roster updates from every captain out there. I want a reporting window of at least every thirty minutes. Let me know if anyone can’t manage that.”
“Yes, sir.”
In reality, every ship’s NSAI should be updating the battle net in real time, but the reporting mechanisms would give the human crews something to do. Nerves would be tense, and he was equally worried about possible friendly fire happening before the Psion attack.
If Psion followed common doctrine, they would lead with missile attack. They had enough standoff distance to be out of the range of lasers or other high-powered DEW emitters.
Until that opening volley, Yarnes would continue to worry about rear echelon infiltration, or some human-level mistake causing loss of life or ship. An attack on one ship could result in a cascade of confusion and chaos among the joint forces that would threaten the entire battlegroup.
On displays behind the holotank, icons indicating each fleet flashed to life, and the status reports glowed green. The reports from the TSF ships were what he had expected, while the Marsian reports came back better than he had hoped for.