by M. D. Cooper
If anyone was watching.
Ty dropped the rifle and slung it over his shoulder.
As if on cue, Ty got a ping from Caprise. He silenced the alert; she wouldn’t be of any use to him right now but tell him what a good job he was doing.
They resumed the slow, bouncing walk along the perimeter of the crater, staying below the road.
Ty was teasing him. None of them remembered anything before their first day in Special Operations School. It was a joke that signaling SOS would solve all your problems by simply taking them away. “Who was willing to do that?” people often asked him.
Why had he been willing to pay the price of entry?
I don’t remember, he always said, grinning.
That was another joke among the Special Ops. The truth was Special Operations had no shortage of volunteers.
They crossed the remaining distance to the trench and the fence above it. Up close, Ty spotted the sensor nodes sitting on top of the fence posts, but the expected scan never came. With small bursts of thrust from their armor, the low gravity made it easy to clear the fence.
Displacing a small cloud of dust as he came down, Ty found himself taking a second glance at the fence.
Closer in, the compound reminded Ty of a prison with a giant communications dish on its roof. The low buildings suggested most of the facility was underground. Maybe they’d used an off-the-shelf design.
Ty’s HUD highlighted the nearest door, which looked like an access point to environmental controls on the roof. He sent the location to Manny and they automatically spread out to approach from opposite sides of the yard. The ground was crisscrossed by the tracks of what were probably maintenance drones. He found a few bootprints, but it was useless to try and determine how fresh they might be.
While Vesta had seen centuries of human and drone activity, it was still a static world. Any description in the dusty surface could have happened at any time since humans first arrived. The layers of unchanging history might have intrigued someone who had more time to think about it; for Ty, he needed to get across the open space between the fence and the building in as few leaps as possible, then secure their position and test the door. He focused on the task in front of him.
Ty shrugged.
Ty turned his back to the wall and raised his rifle to scan the area around them as Manny pulled a tool the size of a chocolate square from a cargo pocket. He tapped the top of the grey square and measured the distance from the door’s locking mechanism, then moved the square toward the wall until it was pulled from his fingertips and attached itself to the wall.
In Ty’s HUD, a new status monitor came to life, showing the auto-hack’s status as it probed the locking mechanism.
There was no electrical activity in the wall at all. They were going to have to cut their way in, which was usually a pain in the ass, especially if the inside airlock wasn’t pressurized.
Ty switched to his spectrum scanner and frowned at the response. The door mechanism was still cold; the activity was above them.
He looked toward the roof in time to see a dome rotating above them, opening in two halves to reveal a Gatling-style cannon.
Ty’s HUD highlighted the cannon as a red icon, displaying its field of fire in an orange wedge opening out into the sky. Ty was still firmly in the hot zone.
She purred, a sound that sent meridian response tingles down the back of his neck, as they were designed to do. One of the NSAI’s functions was to limit his focus-lock during stress response. Ty found the sensation irritating and didn’t like that he was starting to associate a pleasurable feeling with disgust.
Without warning, a weight hit the right side of Ty’s body as he was thrown left, away from the tracking cannon. He spun, doing his best to keep sight of the grey-black horizon.
Manny counted down from five, then said,
A three-round burst of projectile fire penetrated the turret’s control center. Manny sent the clear signal and Ty curved back around. He landed next to the door, where a green light was blinking on the auto-hack’s face.
Manny landed beside him and plucked the auto-hack off the wall. He tucked the tool back in its cargo pocket, and turned the door’s locking arm. A puff of atmosphere blew past them as he pulled the door open. A dark airlock tube waited on the other side.
Caprise said, sounding near tears.
Ty caught his retort.
Manny gave him in exaggerated smile, raising his thick eyebrows.
Manny’s laughter followed him as he turned to get a look at the inside airlock, which was also as dead as the outside lock system. The turret must have been on a different grid.
Ty groaned. They were going to have to cut after all.
RUSH
STELLAR DATE: 03.28.3011 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: High Orbit, TSS Furious Leap
REGION: Vesta, Terran Hegemony, InnerSol
Crash gripped a service handle on the bulkhead as the shuttle rolled and jumped. In the holodisplay between the two pilots’ seats, blue Vesta was surrounded by swarms of angry fireflies. Between the fireflies, points jerked and lines flared and disappea
red as various weapons systems registered then exploded.
Crash knew from observing the same information over his Link that they were much closer to the battle than the display made it seem. In ten minutes, they would enter the active combat zone.
In the captain’s seat at the front of the shuttle, Ngoba laughed and cursed as Kirre tried to argue for a different course than what they had decided back in the Furious Leap.
Just as they had expected, the flight of combat aircraft from the Jovian Combine were engaged on the outer edges of the main battlefront. Psion drones darted and swarmed, and the JC commander couldn’t seem to decide if they wanted to commit fully to fight.
Grichs had hacked the Sol Forces battle net—something Crash assumed Psion was probably also monitoring—and had been listening to the Marsian commander screaming at the Jovian for the last fifteen minutes.
“If you’re not going to help me, get the fuck out of my battlespace!” was the last thing the Marsian woman had said.
Ngoba, in a philosophical mood, said he understood the Jovian commander’s dilemma. They didn’t want to commit themselves fully to a fight they had no control over. But if he had been the Marsian commander, he would’ve told the Jovians to pound sand. They could always maintain the rear reserve to be called in if necessary.
The whole situation, including the bickering on the battlenet, demonstrated how ill-prepared the humans had been for Psion to actually attack. Sol Forces were scattered and struggling to maintain even a unified command with common communications. In thirty years of supposedly training together, the basics collapsed when it had counted.
Crash bobbed his head and flared his wings, readjusting his internal balance with each shift in the microgravity. Riding in the shuttle was fun, so long as the humans remained strapped in and remembered to stow their equipment properly. He couldn’t keep an eye on flying debris inside the shuttle as easily as the humans could. He certainly couldn’t weather a wrench to his body.
“There’s a hole!” Ngoba shouted. “Take it. Execute flight maneuver.”
Kirre moved with cool detachment, despite Ngoba’s excitement, and activated the flight computer. The NSAI responded in a neutral tone—“Execute, command”—and lit the shuttle’s main torch.
Crash tightened his grip on the handle and hunkered down. His body was abruptly four times heavier under the g-forces.
He understood there wasn’t much they could do while the shuttle carried out its preprogrammed course. The NSAIs would track the changing locations of the combatants around them and make adjustments as necessary.
Any human pilot couldn’t respond fast enough, especially where the Psion drones were concerned. The battle was too close for normal doctrine. Ngoba had noted several times it was suicide for anyone to fight this close in space.
“Space is big, damn it,” he’d said. “There’s no reason for it unless you’re putting on a show for the newsfeeds.”
Each military force should have maintained a standoff distance, lobbing missiles and tagging one another with beams.
This close in, every move was potential imminent death. There was no tolerance for mistakes and no room to escape fast-moving missiles, lasers, or hard radiation.
For Psion, the advantage was in their drone ships. While humans had drones, they still maintained their dreadnoughts and cruisers packed with soft, squishy bodies. All Psion had to do was destroy a predominance of the human ships before victory was just a cascading math problem.
Psion’s resources, however, appeared split between the space battle and the surface. Their medium-sized vessels were conducting a thorough carpet bombing from close range, which Ngoba said re-affirmed they were looking for something they couldn’t find with long-range scanners.
Something they wanted humanity to know they were going to find.
Otherwise, why make such a big show of all this?
Crash hoped that whatever Psion was looking for was not the Hesperia Nevada.
While Shara hadn’t spoken to him since he returned to Cruithne, he felt certain she would know where the lab ship had ended up.
It was entirely plausible, that a shard of her mind was still stored on the ship, or in the section of its onboard database. If the Hesperia Nevada was Psion’s prize, Shara’s presence would explain their willingness to fight.
While a copy of Shara wasn’t of much value to them, he supposed, it would be of great value to humans looking for an advantage against the Psion AIs.
As far as he knew, Lyssa and Fugia Wong were the only people with access to Psion’s complete history, including several notable backups that had been copied into their main database. Lyssa had no reason to tell the world about her advantage over Psion, especially since humans didn’t trust her anyway, and Fugia would never give up that she held such information. Now that she was leader of the Data Hoarders, it might be assumed that she had access to such knowledge, but Crash didn’t believe she had even shared the Psion database with the Hoarder’s Mesh. It was too valuable.
“Hold on,” Kirre said. “Deployment is changing out there. Executing evasive maneuvers. It’s going to get rocky.” Her knuckles were white from gripping the controls too hard.
Across from Crash, Parva glared straight ahead as Grichs checked his seat harness a second time.
The shuttle jumped and braked in a series of offensive thrust maneuvers that reminded Crash of a human abusing a cocktail shaker.
Kirre shot forward, matching profiles with surrounding ships before cutting the shuttle’s torch altogether. Velocity carried them toward Vesta.
The shuttle’s weak scanning capability still picked up a massive electromagnetic spectrum. Ngoba chuckled with satisfaction as they were swallowed by the white noise of the battlefield.
“Shit,” Kirre said. “We’ve got two missiles locked.”
“What’s that?” Ngoba asked. “From who?”
“Looks like both Psion and the Jovian’s fired on us. Which means they don’t know who we are either.”
Ngoba raised an eyebrow and looked at Kirre. “You got this?”
“I love you, boss, but why do you ask stupid questions?”
Kirre dropped into a wild series of maneuvers that Crash had never seen any pilot perform before. She shifted between manual control and the NSAI, creating what ultimately became the most erratic flight path Crash ever experienced. Not that he’d experienced that many flight paths in his life, but he could search the standard database as well as anyone. Combat maneuvers were well-understood, as well as the boundaries of human safety during such operations. Crash felt like his claws were going to be torn from his body. Still, he held on. The humans clenched their teeth as they endured Kirre’s wild counter-measures.
The asteroid swelled in the holodisplay. In a final hard burn, the shuttle flipped ninety degrees and shot in the opposite direction from where they had been headed.
The missiles—being short range, but also capable of moving at ninety degrees in relation to their velocity—continued to arc toward them. As the proximity alerts screamed in their ears, forcing Crash to huddle down in his wings, the Jovian missile locked on the Psion missile and accelerated to a collision.
Kirre released a slow whistle of relief.
Ngoba slapped her on the shoulder. “Good work. I’ll give you an extra quarter for that.”
“You mean quarter of the haul?” she asked, looking incredulous.
“Hey,” Parva said. “She’s just doing her damn job.”
“No,” Ngoba said, waving at Parva and Grichs. “A quarter credit. It was good work but, like Parva says, I expect good work from you. You deserve a tip though.”
Kirre shook her head, keeping her gaze fixed on the controls.
It was a lame joke, but it had helped break some of the tension in the tight space. Crash sensed the other crewmembers relax.
“What’s it say about me to work for a fool like you?” Kirre asked.
“It’s probably the excellent fringe benefits,
” Ngoba said.
Kirre stabbed the console and the NSAI resume control of the flight plan. The shuttle accelerated again, taking them closer to Vesta, then moving into an orbital path that would make a gradual descent in an attempt to conceal their actual target.
Crash stretched out his neck and clacked his beak. He liked the feeling that they might succeed.
This close to the surface, he kept himself from accessing any of the local networks. He could piggyback on the shuttle’s array and potentially Link to the Hesperia Nevada.
The steps appeared in his mind with bright clarity.
But he didn’t let himself do it. Any Link query or external communications on his part would alert Psion of the shuttle’s destination. While such a search might be something he could hide from humans, he didn’t see Psion missing such a randomly specific communications request.
To occupy his thoughts, Crash preened his chest feathers, and stretched his wings one at a time, enjoying the ruffle of microgravity on his pin feathers.
Ten minutes later, Kirre executed a braking burn and came down over the middle of a scrapyard that covered a hundred-kilometer radius, filling an entire crater.
“Land here and walk to hide our target, or go directly there?” Kirre asked.
“Go there,” Ngoba said. “I want to spend as little time exposed on the surface as possible. Depending on the condition of our lab ship, we’ll connect directly to its cargo hold.”
Crash approved. Once connected, he could perform a local network check without broadcasting a signal. If the ship’s status came back clear, they would be able to enter immediately.
Success all depended on the cover provided by the battle overhead.
Marsians and Jovians continued to shout across their battle net. The Psion ships were apparently splitting into smaller craft, forcing the humans to rethink their entire battle plan.
As the shuttle landed, the view in the holodisplay shifted to show sky directly above, which was still a writhing mass of fighters.
Ngoba stood from his seat, his magboots clicking on the deck, and patted down his form-fitting EV suit. He held out a hand for Crash to hop on, then carefully placed him on his shoulder. Seating his helmet and locking it in place, Ngoba rested his hands on his pistols, looking pleased with himself.