by Isaac Hooke
“Speak for yourself, bitch,” Bender said. “There’s always a way. Never met a pair of goggles I couldn’t privilege escalate.”
“Yeah well, tell you what,” TJ said. “How about you surrender, and meanwhile the rest of us will make our way to the shuttles. We’ll leave a Dragonfly behind for you so that when you’re released for good behavior in forty years you can take it into orbit and head home.”
“If they arrest me, I’ll free myself and take a Dragonfly into orbit long before you reach the shuttles,” Bender said. “I guarantee you. I got skills, baby. Skills with a z.”
“Look who wants to go to prison now,” Manic said. “Maybe we should be knocking out your teeth, Bender. Or is that grille removable? I bet it is, you BJ master you.”
“Hey, I just noticed,” Fret said. “TJ rhymes with BJ.”
“What are you trying to say?” TJ said, his voice dangerously soft.
“I do believe the bitch known as Fret wants to give you a BJ,” Bender said. “You know, getting in some practice for the days to come.”
“Guys!” Lui stiffened. “I’m reading increasing toxicity levels. They’re piping gas in here!”
“Faceplates shut, Argonauts!” Rade said.
The glass portions of the helmets closed across the squad. The hostages didn’t have faceplates, and in seconds they collapsed, succumbing to the invisible gas.
“What’s going on!” Batindo said. He had shut his faceplate like the others.
“Figure it out,” Rade said.
Next, from a small vent on the wall, thick white mist began to flood the room.
“I’m getting troop movements in the hallways,” Unit E reported from its position near the blocked entrance.
“Fire at will,” Rade said. “Take down as many of them as you can.”
“Retreat from the windows,” Rade instructed his Argonauts. “Deploy behind the upturned bed frames next to the hostages. Robots, remain in position. Don’t let anything get into the hallway, or the adjacent room.”
As the Argonauts took their places in the center of the room, each of them crouching beside a hostage, Fret said: “We’re using the hostages as human shields?”
“Essentially,” Lui said.
Unit E collapsed at the entrance. A laser bore hole had passed clean through its head.
The white gas continued to pour into the room from the vent, becoming so thick that soon Rade couldn’t discern his own hand in front of him.
Rade tried LIDAR, but the expected three-dimensional wireframe didn’t appear.
“The gas is diffusing the LIDAR,” Lui said.
“The fog is drifting past the breaches,” Unit D said. “Visual and LIDAR-based targeting is useless.”
“Switch to echolocation,” Rade said. He did so, and soft squawking sounds emitted from his helmet. Promptly a white wireframe representation of his surroundings appeared, revealing the area the same way the LIDAR would have. It wasn’t as detailed, though: it was like taking a high polygon computer-generated scene and reducing the polygon count so that the individual features lumped together. The low polygon count made his glove appear like a mitten, for example, in the way that it joined the individual fingers into a solid mass.
The helmets around him emitted similar soft chirps at different frequencies so as not to interfere with one another. Strictly speaking, only one of them needed to activate echolocation, because their Implants allowed them to share the resultant data; but it was always good to have them all operating for redundancy purposes.
“Echolocation won’t work at these breaches,” Unit D said. “Unless you want us to clear the blocking debris?”
“The enemy units know echolocation won’t penetrate the debris,” Lui said. “That’s why they’re flooding the rooms with gas.”
“Centurions, retreat from the breaches,” Rade said. “Join us in the center of the room.”
Rade and the others waited for the attack to come. Several quiet moments passed. He heard the patter of steel feet in the adjacent room. Then a soft thud.
“Prepare for breaching explosion,” Rade said.
It came soon enough. The loud bang momentarily disrupted the echolocation stream, whiting out his view. A moment later the three-dimensional wireframe overlay returned, in time to represent two humanoid intruders making their way into the room at a crouch from the side wall.
“Fire.” Rade aimed his targeting reticle over the center of mass of one of the tangos and squeezed the trigger.
He heard a tumbling sound, like that of a grenade bouncing across the floor over the debris.
“Echobang!” Tahoe shouted.
A loud squawking erupted from just beyond the shield of upturned bed frames, randomly cycling through several frequencies and pitches to play havoc with their echolocation stream.
“Bender, coordinate with the AIs of our jumpsuits!” Rade said. “Set our squawk boxes to cycle through the sound frequencies, and freeze on the clean hits!”
“Roger that!” Bender said.
The chirps from the noise generators rapidly crescendoed around him. Whenever one of them got a hit on a “clean” frequency—one that allowed for proper digital reconstruction—the data would automatically transmit to them all, providing a glimpse of the room before the echobang squawker ruined it once again. By having Bender “freeze” those clean hits, the digital representation of the mist-filled room would seem to update in intervals, redrawing when the next data hit came in.
The enemy would use a similar tactic, though since they were linked to the echobang, their echolocation generators could counter in realtime to provide a constant live representation, giving the tangos a slight advantage.
Rade momentarily received an updated picture of the room. It refreshed in random intervals ranging from five hundred milliseconds to two full seconds thereafter.
The room appeared empty between several updates. He thought he heard a soft chirp intermixed among those of his men—enemy echolocation. The sounds seemed to come from all directions at once.
And then the display updated: two robot shapes appeared, halfway across the room.
Rade and the others fired immediately before the positional data became too outdated.
He heard clangs over the squawking of the echobang; the shapes didn’t move, of course, but in the next update the robots had vanished from view.
Two more tangos down.
“Unit D, see if you can find that echobang!” Rade sent.
Another tango appeared in the next update. Once again Rade and the others fired, eliminating it.
The echobang abruptly ceased chirping.
Rade’s vision once more began to update in realtime; he left the helmet coordination in place, however, should the enemy try that tactic once again.
He scanned the room, waiting for another enemy to step into the fog.
That was when he noticed movement on the floor nearby, about a meter in front of his upturned bed frame. It looked like... a rifle swiveling into position?
“They’re crawling on the floor!” Rade sent.
The low-resolution of the echolocation polygons had allowed the crawling robots to blend-in almost entirely with the floor. Rade and the others directed their rifles downward and fired at will, razing the floor in front of their makeshift bulwark.
The mist began to clear. The receding clang of steel feet in the next room told him the enemy was retreating.
“We’ve staved off another volley,” Lui said. The relief was obvious in his voice.
“You think they’ll give us safe passage to the shuttles now?” Fret asked.
“I doubt it,” Rade said. “They’ll be back again, soon, to try some other underhanded tactic I’m sure. But what they don’t understand is that we’re well acquainted with their methods, since we’ve used them ourselves many times... for every tactic they have, we have a countermeasure.”
The mist had cleared enough by then that Rade could dismiss his echolocation and revert to t
he visual band. He saw that the explosion had cleared one of the wall breaches.
“Centurions,” Rade said. “Secure that opening.”
Rade waited for the robots to move into place.
“It’s clear,” Unit C said.
“All right, Units A and B, stand guard while the rest rebuild that breach,” Rade said. “Unit D, assume a watch position near the entrance. Harlequin, check if Unit E can be salvaged. Argonauts, gather the weapons from the fallen. Lui, Tahoe, resume watch positions by the windows. Shaw, Surus, check on the status of the hostages. See if you can revive them. Maybe with some sort of stimulants the Weavers can provide.”
Some of the Argonauts left their positions behind the bed frames to salvage the rifles from the terminated robots, and slung them over their shoulders.
Shaw and Surus examined the unconscious hostages, who were still breathing, then went to a nearby Weaver they had sheltered behind an upturned closet, and returned with a sonic injector. They moved from hostage to hostage, applying the injector to the arm region, waking them in turn. In moments all of the hostages were awake.
“This is really strange,” Lui said from the position he had taken underneath a debris-covered window. “The police are all retreating. And fast. Like they’re afraid the governor has decided to bomb the hospital or something.”
“Time to get the hell out of here?” Fret said.
“Wait,” Tahoe said. He lingered beneath another window, his rifle wedged in between the mattress and the sill. “I don’t think they’re planning on bombing the building. Something else is happening. Look past the buildings, into the sky beyond the geodesic dome. There’s a strange black cloud.”
Rade switched to the viewpoint of Tahoe’s scope and saw the cloud he was talking about.
“Looks almost like the kind of cloud you’d see forming around a meteor during atmospheric reentry under certain atmospheres,” Lui said. “Or maybe a large vessel.”
“Looks like a hairy muff to me,” Bender said.
The glass tiles composing the geodesic dome began to shake visibly. A clattering sound suffused the inner environment of the colony, seeming to come from every direction at once.
“Sonic booms are assailing the dome from the outside... shaking the glass tiles,” Lui said. “Whatever that object is, it’s big.”
Distant screams were heard in the streets below.
An air raid siren sounded.
“Do you hear that?” Fret said. “That’s the sound of a colony about to fall.”
Sharply defined edges began to take shape near the outskirts of the cloud as the object within decelerated.
“That’s no meteor,” Tahoe said.
eleven
In moments the cloud coverage subsided entirely, revealing an elongated diamond shape. It was colored molten red, perhaps from the heat of reentry. From the bulging portion near the middle, several tines protruded in a ray-like fashion. The clattering of the dome’s glass had ceased, but the air raid siren persisted.
Above the ship, a massive formation of green clouds was forming, with the tips spiraling off into the higher atmosphere.
“Uh, what the hell is going on above the ship?” Tahoe said.
“Looks like a storm,” Fret said.
“That’s no storm,” Lui said. “That’s the planet’s atmosphere. They’re siphoning it away.”
“What?” Tahoe said. “Impossible.”
“Let’s not throw out alarmist theories,” Manic said. “You’ll scare the children.”
As Rade watched, the storm became even larger.
“I’m telling you, they’re sucking away the planet’s atmosphere,” Lui said.
Rade switched back to his own viewpoint.
“Well, at least we know who our Phant was calling with the quantum Slipstreams,” Manic said.
“Just goes to show you,” Bender said. “Phants are so afraid of us, they have to call in their alien buddies. And those aliens in turn are so scared shitless of us, they have to suck the whole planet’s atmosphere away before they feel safe enough to engage!”
“Or maybe they just operate better in the void,” Lui said.
Shaw stepped over the debris to stand beside Rade, then she peered past the mattress that blocked a nearby window.
“Careful,” Rade told her.
“I want to see it with my own eyes,” she said, shoving her rifle past the mattress. “Or my own scope, anyway...” She was quiet a moment. “Incredible. So here we are, present at the forefront of an alien invasion.”
“It’s always been my dream,” Manic said.
“Mine too.” Bender stuffed his rifle into a bore hole on the exterior wall. He’d given up his minigun turret for the smaller weapon—the turret was simply too unwieldy, especially for the close quarters fighting that had followed.
Once he was in place, Bender seemed to address the aliens: “Nice ship you got there, bitches. Now give me some bugs to shoot!”
“We’re all going to die,” Batindo said.
“No,” Bender said. “Just you.”
“Now would be a good time to make our way back to the shuttles,” Lui said.
“What about them?” Tahoe nodded toward the hostages.
“We let them go, obviously,” Manic said.
“You’re free to go,” Rade told the hostages.
The men and women got up.
“Not you,” Rade told the VIP, Ran Kato. “You stay. We need an insurance policy in case Governor Ganye isn’t done with us.”
“Then I stay, too,” one of the women said. She was dressed in a nurse’s scrubs.
“That’s completely fine with me,” Rade said.
The remaining hostages hurried to the most recent breach; the robots had only just finished piling the debris into it, and stepped aside to allow the Kenyans through. The men and women frantically tore down the blocking furniture and in moments they were away.
“Centurions, track them through the cracks in the breaches,” Rade said. “I want to know if anyone is waiting to receive them out there.”
A moment later Unit A said: “There’s no one. The hallway remains clear.”
Rade switched once more to Tahoe’s scope, which Tahoe had kept directed toward the alien vessel. The hull had darkened from red to black, perhaps having cooled after reentry. He saw dark streaks emerge from the tines protruding from the middle of the ship.
“Tahoe, can you track one of those streaks and zoom in?” Rade asked.
“On it,” Tahoe replied. The display shifted to follow one of the streaks, and then the magnification increased: it appeared to be a dark pod of some sort.
“Who wants to bet that those are troop shuttles?” Manic asked.
“Lui, can you compute a trajectory?” Rade asked.
“Already have,” Lui said. “Those things are headed straight for the geodesic domes composing the colony.”
The air raid siren stopped just in time for Rade to hear several loud thudding sounds, joined by the noise of breaking glass. Via Tahoe’s scope, he saw shards raining down from above. Dark pods followed, crashing out of view behind the buildings.
“Tahoe, see if you can get me a bead on one of those pods,” Rade said.
Tahoe swept the streets below. “They all landed past other buildings.”
“All right, then point your scope upward, toward the roof of the geodesic dome,” Rade said.
Tahoe did so. Rade saw several punctures in the glass where the pods had impacted. Too many.
“I’m guessing the dome repair drones aren’t going to be able to fix those in time...” Fret said.
“It’s getting windy out there,” Tahoe said.
Rade could hear the now raging wind, intermixed with screams. The holes in the dome whistled terribly as the air was sucked out.
“Shit!” Rade said. His faceplate was still sealed from the earlier attack, as were the faceplates of the other Argonauts, protecting them from the decompression that was in progress. But it wa
sn’t the Argonauts he was worried about.
He glanced toward Kato and the nurse. “Does this hospital have auto-seal capabilities?” That was a safety feature that activated when a dome was breached to prevent loss of life.
“Not this one, no,” Kato said. “But there is a storage compartment on the floor below where we keep emergency environmental suits.”
He returned his attention to his Argonauts. “We have to get these civilians to those jumpsuits before the oxygen is completely sucked out of the dome. Lui, how long do we have?”
“I’d say about ten minutes, less if more of those pods break through,” Lui said.
“All right, Kato, lead the way,” Rade said.
Kato and the nurse hurried through the breach the previous hostages had cleared, and into the adjacent room. The combat robots followed, with the Argonauts on drag. They kept their weapons at the ready.
The hallways were completely deserted. They passed a few fallen robots that the party had taken down during the siege, but otherwise there was nothing out there. The different hospital rooms had been completely evacuated.
They clambered down the stairs to the second floor and found the storage closet Kato had mentioned. The two Kenyans stripped down and put on the thermal undergarments required by the environmental suits, and with the help of the Argonauts they donned the various assemblies in record time. In moments they were completely suited up, and their helmets sealed.
“Give me access to your vital feeds,” Rade commanded.
The two obeyed, and their green status indicators appeared on his HUD along with those of his fellow Argonauts.
Rade glanced at a doorway adjacent to the closet. It opened up into a room with windows. He motioned the Argonauts to assume a defensive position at the entrance to that room.
When everyone was in place, Rade said: “Units A and B, go to the closest window. Stay low... do what you can to stay out of view from any observers outside.”
The robots obeyed. Rade switched to Unit A’s video feed as it peered out into the street below. The wind seemed to be dying down: tree branches stopped waving, and flags hung limply.