by Jay Korza
The warrior who was on the firing line next to Fang spoke up first. “My personal shield will be fully charged up in less than five minutes. Give me four grenades and strap some explosives to me. I can make it to their center before my shield goes down and then set off the explosives. It will take a lot of them out and cause a bit of mayhem.”
Surgeon looked at their newest soldier and realized that his suggestion just removed any lingering doubt Surgeon had about his allegiance to the Coalition, or at least to the soldiers he fought alongside of. This was the warrior who had left the dogfight against Daria’s team when they stole the ancient warrior ship from the dig site at the abandoned base almost two years ago.
The warrior had said that there was something wrong with him, that he hadn’t been grown correctly, and that defect gave him the ability to think outside of his genetic programming. He wanted to be a part of the Coalition and what it stood for. So they let him. At this point, they didn’t have much to lose. Surgeon didn’t think there was anything wrong with Baldylocks, the warrior was an evolutionary improvement for his species.
“Thanks for the suggestion, Baldylocks, but I’m not throwing away a soldier to buy us only a few minutes. Anyone else?” Surgeon turned to look at his other flank of soldiers.
The warrior looked at Fang. “Humans.”
“Tell me about it.” Fang snarled. “I’d send you out there. Sounds like a good plan to me.”
“Right?!” The warrior fired a few more rounds. “And I thought my new name was ‘Cueball’? What does Baldylocks mean?”
Seth came up beside the warrior. “I’ll explain that one later. For now, give me your shield. You gave me an idea.”
“What have you got for us, Seth?” Surgeon watched his protégé hurriedly working on his idea.
“We’re going to put the shield on our combat mule and load its payload wagon with explosives.” Seth moved fast on his idea, and got the pieces in place. “We run the shielded mule past their front lines, drop the wagon, send the mule on a wide return course, and blow the explosives.”
Joker helped Seth with his plan as soon as he saw what was being done. “Sounds good to me. The mule can run faster than any of us can, so he’ll get more use out of the shield than we would anyway. And, maybe he’ll be able to get far enough away that the explosion doesn’t rip his mechanical hide to hell. If he gets away, we’ll still have the shield and mule as assets.”
“Good plan. Let me know when you’re ready to send it. We might be able to plow the path for the mule so it will take less shield damage.” Surgeon grabbed his own rifle and got into a firing position.
The mule was released and sent downrange, much to the surprise of the enemy. It took at least thirty meters before the shielded robot took any fire at all. The mule ran through the front line, and took out one of the alien enemy along the way. Fifteen meters in, the mule dropped its payload wagon and arced away from the explosives. Once Seth thought the mule was at a good enough distance, he detonated the charges.
“Nice!” Reaper hollered.
“Captain.” Surgeon opened his commlink again. “We just bought you a little more time, but don’t take it for granted.”
“We just got through the door!” Emily’s excitement could be heard even through the muting effects of the commlink. “We’re making entry now. If it’s safe, we can fall back to the chamber interior and close the door. There’s no way they’re getting through it.”
“Copy that. We’re ready to fall back. Sooner rather than later would be nice.” Surgeon added to himself, They can’t get through it unless they have the key. They did build it, after all.
The mule returned a few minutes later and Seth retrieved the shield from it and gave it back to the warrior. “Here you go, Cueball. Thanks for the loan.”
“I really don’t care what you pink hairless monkeys call me, but pick one name and stick with it.” The warrior fired a few more rounds from his plasma rifle, indicating he was done with the verbal exchange.
“Apes, Baldylocks. We’re pink apes, not monkeys. Totally different species.” Surgeon hadn’t heard back from Emily yet but he wasn’t going to wait any longer. “All right, everyone, we’re falling back to the chamber. Get your asses moving, regardless if it’s primate or genetically engineered.”
The fireteam performed a textbook peel-off into the tunnel system behind them. With his shield back in place and mostly charged, Baldylocks was the last man through the entrance, taking rounds that harmlessly deflected off his shield as he moved backwards. Once they reached the chamber’s entrance, Seth announced over the team push that friendlies were coming in.
Once inside, they were greeted by Jeeves. “Hello, sirs. I was left here to close the door after your arrival. You seem to be missing three men. Shall I wait for them or will they not be joining us?”
Surgeon would never get used to losing men, and the relief he felt from not losing more during any given mission always made him feel worse. “Close it. They aren’t coming.”
“Yes, sir.” Jeeves turned to carry out his orders when he paused. “And sir, if later we could discuss the tactical use of the combat mule to deliver an explosive payload…”
“No, we can’t, Jeeves. And now’s not the time to discuss AGAIN how you are different from the automatons we use in the field. I wouldn’t send you out there like that, you should know that by now.” Surgeon was almost at his limit with the robot. He would need to see whether Bloom could correct some of the “issues” Surgeon had noticed lately.
Outside, they could hear enemy gunfire hitting the chamber door. The aliens were trying to shoot the door open. Based on the experimenting Emily’s team had done over the past several hours, Surgeon knew that even the advanced enemy weapons wouldn’t make a dent in the door.
“Now what?” Joker looked around the small room they now safely occupied.
“We go find the rest of our team and see if this chamber was worth it. That is, if Surgeon doesn’t mind me taking over my team again.”
Surgeon put his hands in the air. “Hey, you were out there messing around doing God knows what. Someone had to take over.”
Secretly, Surgeon had liked being in charge of the team again, even if it was only for a few moments. Seth didn’t mind letting go of the reigns, when he saw his friend’s eyes light up a bit as he took charge of the team, Seth let Mike have a few more minutes of nostalgia before taking over again.
“Messing around? I was setting satchel charges on their AA battery. Forgive me for wanting air support,” Seth joked back. “And by the way, as much as I hate being called ‘Father,’ I would hate it even more if we went back to my old call sign of ‘Cadet.’”
“It made you run faster, didn’t it?” Surgeon said as he took point.
The chamber went three stories down before opening up to a much larger cave system. The natural formations had been smoothed out and shaped into useful designs, making the lab look as though it had been purposely grown from the rock. There was plenty of man-made, or Cherta-made, equipment mixed in, but it was the most beautiful lab anyone had ever seen.
Seth found Emily near one of the work stations. “What do you need from us?”
Emily forced herself to look away from the data that scrolled across the screen. “Defensive perimeter. We haven’t even begun to see where these hallways go. I’m sure there isn’t another way in to this chamber but we should make sure. I need my science team with me and anyone you can spare from security detail.”
“You got it.”
Seth sent out two squads to map out the rest of the complex. Nitaha was wound up from all of the fighting; he sent her squad on the detail so she could calm down on the walk. She had done well since the drop. There were several moments that were almost too much for Seth to handle, but she made it through each of them. He was worried her luck wouldn’t hold out for much longer.
Several hours later, they had the interior complex mapped and secure. It wasn’t a large complex. There were
two floors below the main lab that were meant to house fifty or so scientists while they researched whatever they were researching.
The Cherta had been here within the last few days, but left after they got whatever they came for. They left their ground forces and some flying assets, probably to deal with the Seventh Fleet, who couldn’t mask their approach to the system.
The shooting outside had died down to barely a trickle over the last half hour.
“Why don’t they just come in here?” Joker asked no one in particular.
“Obviously they don’t have the access codes to get in,” Surgeon replied.
“Right. But why not? If the Cherta wanted this place defended, why wouldn’t they give their soldiers the access needed to protect it? That doesn’t make sense at all.”
“How did you guys get in here anyway?” Davies asked Bloom.
“Jeeves did it. He detected a wireless receiver on the inside of the chamber. He threw every single access code at it that he had stolen from our Cherta ship. A few times he got the cybernetic equivalent of feeling a tumbler drop in a lock when you are trying to pick it. He mixed the codes up enough and added in some ancient stuff we found during our travels, and voilà. Open sesame.”
Seth came around to the conversation. “Those soldiers out there aren’t Cherta-proper. I know we fall back on calling everything we encounter ‘Cherta,’ because it’s their empire. But those soldiers are a different race. Maybe they’re conscripted or something similar. The Cherta keep telling us that everyone is in their empire voluntarily and treated as equals, but maybe that isn’t true. Maybe they don’t trust these soldiers with the codes to get in here.”
“Maybe. But it just seems too easy. Too easy for us to get in here. Too easy to keep them out. Too easy to get into their systems.” Joker talked more to himself than anyone else, trying to figure something out that niggled at the back of his brain.
“Too easy?” Seth almost spat. “Tell that to Boddie and Jenson.”
“I’m sorry, sir. I didn’t mean it like that. More of a big picture sort of way.”
“I know. I didn’t mean to snap at you. We all need some rest. In fact, Surgeon, put together a rest schedule. I want people sleeping down in the scientists’ quarters. We have been fighting for days straight and it seems as though we are locked in a secure bunker. Let’s take advantage of it.”
“Yes, sir.” Surgeon pointed to the six nearest operators. “Three hours—go.”
Three days later, there wasn’t a single sound coming from outside the vault’s door. The interior of the vault blocked all communication with the Seventh Fleet. The team could only hope their people were doing well and there would be a ride waiting for them when they finally found what they were after. They didn’t dare risk opening the vault’s door, not knowing if they could close it again or what might be waiting for them on the other side.
It took over a day, but the entire team finally got rotated through the original rest periods. Now everyone had to rest thirty minutes for every two and a half hours of research they performed and at least six hours of continuous sleep at some point in any twenty-four-hour cycle. That, along with at least a one-hour workout per day, would keep the team from becoming exhausted and overlooking something important in the Cherta databases.
No security detail was needed, so everyone was on research duty. Bloom and Jeeves had wired up a few security cameras to watch the vault door. If it opened or movement was detected in the antechamber, an alert would be sent to every team member’s visor. They were three floors down, so they would have plenty of time to mount a defense before any would-be invaders reached the laboratory.
An immense amount of data was saved in the system, so much so that it overwhelmed even Jeeves’ ability to sift through it effectively. All of the operators who didn’t have a scientific research background, which was most of them, would tag information they thought might be useful. Then, Emily’s scientific team would go through the tags and determine if it was useful. They found a lot of good information, stuff they would definitely bring back to the Coalition, but nothing so far that would help them with the war.
Stroth wasn’t a scientist, but he did have a strong engineering background so he sifted through data better than most of the operators. He stood up, dropped his datapad on a counter and then walked in circles and stretched.
He knew he was close to coming up with a better search algorithm, but he couldn’t bring the full concept to his conscious mind. He could feel it, wriggling around somewhere in his neurons, jumping from one electrical connection to the next but never joining with the other connections to make an actual thought.
He wished he had another Detrill with him who could help probe his memories and jar the thought to the forefront of his mind. Instead, he started the meditation exercises he, and other Detrills, used before joining memories with each other. In these exercises, if he were the one sharing a memory, he would find that memory in his thoughts and seclude it from all others. He would then move the memory through his synapsis to his nervous system and allow it to leave his body through his fingertips.
The Detrill had done extensive research on their ability to pass memories to each other, and truth be told, even they didn’t know exactly how it worked. They did know that they weren’t actually passing the memory through their nervous system, but that visualization was how it had been taught for millennia. They found that the sender could perform the task more easily and thoroughly if they visualized a physical representation of the memory leaving their brain and entering into someone else’s.
Stroth sifted through his own mind, trying to find the thought that caused the itch he couldn’t scratch. And then he found it, hovering above a memory of a star map. He immediately recognized the system in the star map: it was his home world. But it wasn’t the specific map that was important—it was the idea it represented that was significant.
“Jeeves!” Stroth opened his eyes. “I need your help.”
“Of course, Lieutenant. How may I be of assistance?” Jeeves rolled over to the Detrill.
Even Stroth had to admit that the English butler persona of the robot was charming.
“The president said the Nortes attacked Coalition forces on the border of Sector 692. Do you have star charts of that sector and the adjoining ones?”
“Of course I do, sir. I have every star chart available to the Coalition and its non-aligned but friendly governments.”
“Good. Using the information from the admiral’s briefing, plot the most likely course for the Nortes ships as they exited Sector 692.”
“Done.”
“Now, take that course and compare the star charts for that course with all of the star charts that are in this laboratory’s database. If you find a match…”
“Match found.”
“Okay, that was fast.” Stroth was surprised.
“The moment you asked about the probable course for the Nortes military, I concluded what your end-goal was going to be and worked on the search process. I must admit, I am very impressed with your logic and correlation skills while simultaneously jealous that I had not thought of that solution much sooner.”
“Don’t be too hard on yourself. You were probably connecting thousands of data points simultaneously. You can’t think of everything.”
“Two million, four hundred, thirty-two thousand, nine hundred, twenty-four data points, to be precise.”
“Like I said, you were doing a lot of work all at one time. Anyway… What information came up that correlates to those star charts?”
“I have found multiple data entries that we will need to be read through. Though I would suggest that we start with the journal entries from the Nortes operative we have come to know as Hugesh. She was in this laboratory; in fact, she died here.”
“Good work. Get all of those files ready for download to our datapads. I’ll get Captain Riley over here. Let’s see what happened to our Nortes friend Hugesh…”
Chapter 1
8
Hugesh had found the moon without much difficulty. She didn’t have the exact coordinates from the data she found, but by overlaying several star charts together, she was able to find the one system they all had in common. From there, it was a slow process of checking each celestial body in the system until she found the correct one.
She had been doing this type of research for a while now and had worked out an efficient search pattern. The first few systems she searched over a year ago had taken the longest. She initially gave each planet and their moons a confidence rating and then searched them from most likely to least likely. This created a lot of unnecessary flight time, dodging around, back and forth through the solar system. Eventually she realized the best way was to just hit them in the order they were in once she reached the system. Closest to farthest.
As she approached the fourth moon of the eighth planet in the system, she started to get a good feeling from it. The initial readings were habitable for the Cherta and there were early indications of unnatural structures on the surface; nature didn’t create ninety-degree angles. Once she reached orbit, she knew someone had once lived on the surface; she just had to determine who.
The atmosphere was unusually thick and caused a bit of havoc for her ship during the descent. If she hadn’t been so busy trying not to burn up on entry, she might have noticed the brief flicker on her sensors that indicated the possibility of another ship entering the system. As it was, the stealth craft was only visible to sensors when it entered back into real space, and her one chance to see it had been missed.
Hugesh spent the next few weeks searching the surface of the moon for the ruins that would be important to her. She had five remote drones that helped her in the search, but it was still slow going.