Beta Testers

by Joseph R. Lallo

  “The way you say it, it almost sounds like we’re not attempting to take out a whole paramilitary organization by ourselves.”

  “I find a bit of unreasonable simplification helps set the mind on the right path.”

  “Uh-huh. I’d tell you where it seems like you’ve got your mind set, but I’m a lady, and a lady doesn’t talk like that.”

  “Ooh. Saucier and saucier. If I’d seen this side of you on our earlier outings, I might have sought you out ages ago.”

  #

  They brought the ship down on a relatively flat section of mountain a bit more than seven kilometers away and began to equip themselves for infiltration. One of the key devices Garotte had made a point to secure, and one that accounted for a shamefully large percentage of the debt they had to work off via their testing, was a full set of color-adaptive over-gear. It allowed them to, with some initial manual setup, alter the color of their outer armor into a pattern and color that would blend with their specific surroundings. Most of the rest of his equipment was devoted to cracking security, leaving room only for two small pistols. The first was ballistic, the second energy-based.

  “That’s all you’re bringing?” Silo said.

  “Ideally I won’t need to fire a shot.”

  “Since when does anything go ideally?” She slung her grenade launcher across her back and strapped two more bags into place. “Two full grenade clips, one high explosive, one concussive. Two spare clips, one ocular/respiratory irritant, one experimental. A full-auto shotgun, fully loaded with standard shot, one spare clip of slugs, one of experimental rounds. Plus a few of the more interesting doodads that maniac sent with us. That is how you prepare for the unexpected, honey.”

  “A fine complement to my own tactics, though I don’t envy you for having to lug all of that around. Fortunate that I had room to pack the skimmer.”

  He pulled a small case from the packed cargo compartment and opened it. A network of thin pipes and chunky modules unfolded and clicked into place, forming what was without a doubt the least confidence-inspiring vehicle Silo had ever seen. Four repulsor modules, the pieces of technology that had replaced wheels once cars slipped the bonds of gravity, held a long, narrow platform aloft. The platform was little more than a series of metallic planks, and a fifteen-centimeter-high railing served more as cargo tie-downs than a safety railing. A set of handlebars with very simple controls jutted up from the front of the craft, and two more bars jutted up from the back.

  “My gosh I thought they junked all of these…” Silo said. “I’d hoped they had.”

  “Oh, come now,” Garotte said. “Lightweight, capable of carrying a combined six hundred kilograms of personnel and cargo, and capable of truly unpleasant speeds, all in a form factor smaller than a decent suitcase. What’s not to like?”

  “How about the fact that the only times I’ve ever seen this thing used were as automated litters, and they had about a fifty-fifty chance of dumping the wounded on the ground at some point along the way.”

  “A fine reason to use it for lightweight transportation instead.” He stepped onto the platform and took the controls.

  “And why exactly are you the one driving?”

  “I could offer quite a few reasons, but I suspect the two most compelling reasons are as follows. I was the one who brought the skimmer, and you, as the most heavily armed among us, would be better equipped to quite literally ride shotgun.”

  “… Fine. But I drive on the way back.”

  “What possible reason could you have for that?”

  “I’ve never driven one of these, and if we’re going to be relying on it for infiltration and exfiltration, then I want to have some time behind the wheel.”

  “That is all well and good, but if we are going to be exfiltrating, wouldn’t you prefer the more experienced pilot at the controls?”

  “And what if you don’t make it? You’re packing two peashooters, in a firefight you’re not exactly equipped to get the job done. This is just bad planning. I told you we should have gotten two of those tri-bikes. I’ve got sixty hours of operation on those, and they’re twice as fast.”

  “And triple the size. You would have had to leave behind your rocket launcher and its ammunition.”

  Silo heaved an additional bag of supplies onto the platform behind him, then straddled it and steadied herself against the rear struts. “Let’s get going.”

  He glanced back at her and took note of her rather rigid grip. “If you are nervous you might fall, I invite you to wrap your arms around me.”

  “Keep dreaming, hon. Now get moving before I change my mind.”

  #

  The pair set down a few hundred meters from where the prior scan indicated the main entrance would be. It was well hidden, not through any complex technological method, but by matching the color of the cargo doors to the surrounding landscape and setting them well back into what was either a natural alcove or something skillfully dug to resemble one.

  The doors were massive, large enough to allow Garotte’s whole ship to slip through. They also appeared to be the only entrance or exit.

  “Pretty clever, if you ask me, making the cargo doors the only doors. Makes it pretty tricky for someone to sneak in or out,” Silo said.

  “It also highlights the value of being an evil syndicate. No need to observe basic fire codes,” Garotte said.

  “What do you say we smoke them out?” Silo said. “Where’s the nearest vent?”

  Garotte pulled out his datapad and scrolled through the schematic Dr. Dee’s device extrapolated.

  “If the analysis is to be believed, it should be right,” he put a digital monocular to his eye and swept across the mountain, “there. I see a port, about two meters in diameter. One of six. No telling if it is an intake or an exhaust.”

  “We’ll find out in a minute,” she said, taking the monocular. “What do you say… 125 meters?”

  “There’s a range-finder button on the side there.”

  “Ah… Ha! One hundred twenty-seven. Not too bad for eyeballing it.”

  She handed back the monocle and stood, keeping as best she could behind the outcrop that had hidden them so far. Her experience, if it was not already obvious, became apparent as she deftly popped one of the clips from the grenade launcher and pulled the round from the chamber. It looked to be done entirely through muscle memory, as she didn’t take her eyes from the distant target once while doing so. She hefted the round and tossed it in the air a few times.

  “Feels like about zero point eight Earth gravity,” she mused.

  A few more deft movements delivered one of her “irritant” grenades into the chamber. She took aim through the built-in viewer, and her thumb eased a dial on the side of the weapon beside the trigger, carefully decreasing the launcher’s power.

  “Doesn’t that thing do autoranging?” Garotte asked.

  “It does…” she said distantly, too deep in concentration to spare much brain power for conversation. “But not for blind targets…”

  “What blind target? I can plainly see the vent shaft.”

  “I’m not aiming for the top of the vent shaft.” She tilted the weapon almost vertically. “I’m aiming for the bottom of the vent shaft.”

  A squeeze of the trigger sent the grenade in a high, arcing trajectory.

  “Forgive my ignorance,” Garotte said, “but why precisely do you feel the need to aim for the bottom?”

  The grenade was just reaching the peak of its arc and beginning to drop down.

  “There’s probably a grating somewhere along the shaft. I can’t see it, but for all I know it’s a few centimeters below the lip. If I glance off that on a horizontal trajectory, this thing could end up bouncing a half-kilometer off target. Plus, vertical trajectory gets me a bigger cross-section to aim for.”

  The grenade came down and disappeared into the vent opening. A burst of hazy orange gas wafted up, then swiftly sucked back down as the vent drew it in.

  “B
ull’s-eye. That’s the first in-mission shot I’ve taken in too long and I nailed it, first try,” she said proudly.

  “Was there ever any doubt?”

  “It’s bad luck to assume.”

  “Nonsense. All my best achievements have been based on assumptions.”

  He pulled a pair of goggles and a respirator from his equipment. Silo did the same, and once both were equipped, they stowed the nonessential equipment with the skimmer and set off toward the main door.

  It wasn’t entirely clear from their high-tech schematic capture, but if there was any wisdom at all put into the design of this base, there would be cameras and motion sensors around the entrance, so the instant they emerged from cover and started approaching they would have set off alarms. Both Silo and Garotte had been exposed to the current evolution of tear gas during training, and thus they knew all too well that after a single whiff of the stuff, the poor unfortunates inside the base would be running for fresh air regardless of what sort of alerts were blaring.

  Sure enough, just as the soldiers pressed their backs against a curve in the mountainside beside the door’s alcove, the massive loading door shuddered to motion, rolling upward like an overgrown garage door. As soon as there was room to do so, two jumpsuit-clad workers slid from within and took long, grateful breaths of the clean air. Tears streamed down their faces, along with less pleasant fluids from their noses and mouths.

  Before either of them could restore enough functionality to their brains to process the attack, Silo and Garotte descended upon them, hauling them back from the doorway and wrestling them to the ground. The heavy gunner pulled plastic cable-cuffs from a pouch at her belt and bound both hands and feet of each worker while Garotte gagged them. Once they were secured, Silo turned her attention to the door and made ready to subdue any newcomers.

  “Gentlemen!” Garotte said brightly, as though he’d merely bumped into them at the water cooler. “I do apologize for the interruption to your routine. We hope to make it a brief one.”

  He pulled badges and secure radios from each of the men and set about transferring codes from them to his own device. One of the men growled something into his gag.

  “Yes, yes. I’m sure I’ll never get away with this and I surely don’t know who I’m dealing with. One moment please.” He raised his voice. “Stand by for communications test, Silo. I’ll be overlaying their com chatter in receive only.”

  “Roger that,” Silo called back.

  He activated the codes. The sounds of chaos erupted into his earpiece as workers, who were until this point little more than babysitters for industrial robots, suddenly found themselves the targets of an attack.

  “… Can’t breathe! What’s going on! Is this chemical weapons? Are these things chemical weapons? Are we going to die? … Shut up, idiot, it’s vent six. Shut off vent six! … What are these alarms? Oh God! Oh God there’s people out there with guns.”

  “Fantastic. We’re dealing with civilians,” Silo muttered.

  “That should make for a simplified mission.”

  “Even so, it’s hard to feel good about a military campaign when you’re fighting civilians.”

  “If it helps, perhaps you could imagine they are simply inept soldiers.”

  “Activate defense protocols!” cried a voice on the communications.

  Klaxons blared and flashing red light filled the doorway. Beneath the tumult, the ominous whine of midsized thrusters formed a chorus.

  “Cover! We’ve got drones,” Silo announced, falling back.

  Garotte grabbed both bound men and dragged them farther from the doorway. “It’s time to see just how stingy your superiors were with their targeting systems,” he said.

  Clipping one of the stolen ID tags back on to a worker and taking care to place it on the wrong worker, he then retreated farther. Silo glanced at the workers briefly as she rushed past, then joined Garotte.

  “You’re not going to just leave them there.”

  “They have generously volunteered to help me identify the targeting method of the drones. I’m sure they would appreciate it if you were ready to destroy whatever comes our way, pending the results of this experiment.”

  Silo grumbled, slinging the grenade launcher behind her and swapping in the clip of slugs for her shotgun. “What I’d prefer is if you’d stick to proper military terminology during a mission.”

  “Where’s the fun in that? I pride myself on my banter.”

  Any further conversation was cut short by the arrival of the first defense drones. They were the same civil-style drones featured heavily in the propaganda videos, little more than a bulb of sensors, some light-duty repulsors, and a big fat gun drifting around on something the size of a kitchen appliance. Four of them strafed into view and entered a rigid formation, angling to face the two bound men as the first identified potential targets. After a few indicator sounds, the four drones emitted the same preprogrammed warning in sloppy harmony.

  “Attention, unknown interloper. You are trespassing on Broadline Syndicate property. You will submit to custody or be destroyed.”

  Notably, all weapons and warnings were directed at the worker who was lacking his ID badge.

  Garotte clucked his tongue. “Are you really relying upon ID badges for ally identification?” he said. “Without so much as facial matching? For shame, boys. For shame.”

  The drones turned to target Garotte and Silo. The spy clicked the remaining ID into place on Silo’s chest. All attention turned to him.

  “Attention, unknown interloper. You are—”

  Silo spared all involved the repetition of the warning by pumping a slug into each drone with four well-aimed shots. The first three struck the drones squarely on the sensor node, blinding them. The fourth damaged the feed mechanism to the drone’s weapon. The impaired robots drifted about, comically bashing into each other for a few moments before Silo delivered additional shots to put them out of their misery.

  “When this started I wasn’t so sure it would be achievable with a force of two,” Silo said. “I may have been mistaken.”

  “It would appear a focus on the bottom line means that corporations are even more interested in finding the lowest bidder than governments,” Garotte said.

  He stooped to fetch the second ID and clipped it to his chest.

  “Oh God, they blew up the robots. What do we do?” yelped one of the voices on the radio.

  “Send more robots, stupid!” commanded the other.

  Six more drones charged out of the doors, scanned Garotte and Silo, then entered a search pattern until they found the bound workers and began reading them a warning.

  “As nice as it is to not have to worry about the drones personally, we really ought to figure a way to deactivate them globally, hon. Blowing them up to spare these workers is going to put a serious dent in my ammunition,” Silo said, cocking her shotgun and lining up a shot.

  With the rear of the drones turned to her, a lightly armored exhaust port presented a lovely little one-hit-kill for her to exploit.

  “Technically we aren’t a sanctioned military body and thus are not bound by the minimum civilian casualty requirement,” Garotte said as he slipped inside and scoped out the entryway.

  “I’m going to pretend I didn’t hear that,” Silo rumbled.

  “It was a joke, I assure you,” Garotte said.

  With the latest round of robots put down, Silo joined Garotte inside the loading/unloading bay formerly hidden behind the doors. It was a massive room, twice as long as it was wide and home to large overhead cranes running along gantries, assorted load-lifting robots, two dozen more defense drones in various stages of booting up, and an enormous freight elevator on an angled track. The platform of the elevator took up fully half of the floor space.

  “We need to make sure there aren’t any civilians around before we start using our heavier weapons.”

  “Simple enough,” Garotte said. He tapped his communicator. “Hello, ladies and gentlemen.
We were about to start blowing up parts of your base and we wonder if you wouldn’t mind letting us know where you are, such that we can take measures to avoid blowing up that bit.”

  He focused on the screen of his communicator and brought up the schematic.

  “We’re all going to die! They’re terrorists!” cried one voice.

  “Calm down, there are protocols! Someone get the emergency protocol document up,” instructed another.

  “I still can’t see. What the hell is coming out of the ventilation system,” said a third.

  “Has anyone seen Wally and Ben!? Are they okay?”

  “Responses came from sublevels 7 through 10,” Garotte said. “This level is clear.”

  “Good. Explosives hot. I’ll take care of these drones,” Silo said, trying to hide her delight at having an opportunity to load her grenade launcher with explosive rounds. “You might want to activate your hearing protection.”

  “Way ahead of you,” Garotte said.

  He took a quick internal survey and found the standing workstations that the two unfortunate workers outside had likely been using when the sabotaged vent first made it intolerable. As Silo’s grenade launcher made its distinctive pneumatic burps and sent rounds into position to detonate drones by the half-dozen, Garotte hurried to the nearest workstation.

  “Oh, Wally, Wally, Wally,” he said, shaking his head. “You didn’t log out before stepping away from the station. If people keep making that mistake, I’m going to have a terrible time feeling any sense of accomplishment in my network penetration tasks. Such lax data security procedures in the face of a simple airborne irritant. Your boss will be so disappointed.”

  The system, though entirely accessible, wasn’t one he was intimately familiar with. It took him a few seconds to figure out the OS and file structures. Once he worked out the key points, his fingers danced across the screen, copying data to his slidepad and linking it to his ship wirelessly, pulling down shipping manifests, access codes, security measures, and a dozen other high-sensitivity bits of data. He spent as little time as possible identifying or reading the stolen data. That could be done when there wasn’t quite so much debris flying through the air. The key points he made certain to sift to the top of the pile, as they would be immediately valuable, were the crew manifest for the facility and the official schematic.