Colonyside

by Michael Mammay

  She sighed. “I’ll try to figure out how to get you all of that.”

  “Just put me on a targeting terminal. I’ll make it happen.”

  She smiled. “Nice try.”

  “I’m not trying anything. You want me to lead this counterattack? Then I need to know. Someone is going to have to synch the assets and get them tasked. At a minimum, I’m going to need to talk to the person doing that and make sure they know their business. This isn’t rookie-level shit.” If she took that as an insult, I could live with that.

  “You will definitely be in the room during execution.”

  Of course I would. They’d want video of that. “I need to be in there for planning before that.”

  “I’ll take it under advisement.”

  “Thank you. And don’t forget my walk.”

  It was the third time I went on a walk, and I got the same two guards—a man and a woman. On about lap fifteen, I decided to engage them.

  “How long you been here?” I asked.

  Neither responded.

  I didn’t change my tone. “Not here, specifically, if you can’t talk about that. How long have you been colonyside?”

  The man glanced at the woman, who shrugged slightly. That’s right. There’s no harm in answering a simple question. “About a year,” he said.

  “Same,” said the woman.

  “Pay good?”

  “Better than the military,” said the woman.

  “Usually is,” I said with a chuckle. “Same kind of duty?”

  “Easier,” said the man. “But they don’t tolerate fuckups as much. They expect us to do our jobs without being told all the time. And there’s no manual for simple stuff, like how to sweep a hangar.”

  I fully laughed this time. “That must be nice. I wonder how much they’d pay a guy like me.”

  “You’re not getting paid?” asked the woman.

  “You did see that they’re keeping me in a cell, right?”

  “Guess I didn’t think about it. Doesn’t seem right, you being a war hero, and all that.”

  I didn’t agree with her assessment of my hero status, but I wasn’t going to disabuse her of the notion when it worked to my advantage. I might have found the break I needed. “They don’t want me leaving, I guess. I’m working on the plan for the attack.”

  “No shit?” said the guy.

  “No shit.” I stopped talking for a lap or two. Cameras monitored us all along the hall, and I didn’t want to look too chummy. The silence worked to my favor, because it made them more curious.

  “Can you tell us what we’re going to be doing?” the woman asked.

  They kept their soldiers in the dark. Not uncommon, but it made troops nervous. I’d use that too, but I couldn’t seem too eager. “I really shouldn’t. If the bosses wanted you to know, I’m sure they’d have briefed you.”

  “What they don’t know won’t hurt them,” suggested the man.

  “Cameras.” I nodded to one as we passed.

  “They don’t have sound,” said the woman. “They’ll see us talking, but they won’t know what we’re saying. If someone asks, we’ll make up some bullshit.”

  I stayed silent for half a lap, pretending to think about it. “They’re expecting something to happen with the hominiverts. The green apes. But you didn’t hear it from me.”

  “Oh, shit,” said the woman.

  “About time,” said the man. “We’ll blow the shit out of ’em.”

  I hadn’t considered sowing discontent until that moment, but when life presents an opportunity, I don’t pass. I tried to come up with the most damaging possible rumor. “If they let you.”

  “What do you mean?” they asked, almost simultaneously.

  “Relax,” I said, indicating a camera. “Hey, what’s down there?” We passed the stairway down.

  “Living space and the mess hall,” said the guy. “Come on. What did you mean, if they let us?”

  I pretended to think about it. “The boss is scared. He’s a civilian, you know?”

  “Fuuuck,” said the woman.

  “You get the pay, but you also get the civilians,” I said. “What can you do?”

  I knew what I’d done. I’d planted a seed that would spread among the soldiers and make them question their leadership. It wasn’t much, but it was the first time in a long time I felt like I’d accomplished something.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  When I got back to my cell, someone had brought in a portable table and chair, along with a tablet. I picked it up and opened the interface. Of course it didn’t have a connection to a network. It did have a series of files, but it looked like someone had dropped them without any sort of a searchable database. Eddleston came in a few minutes later.

  “Seriously?” I said. “Dump files?”

  “You wanted access to our material, but we couldn’t have you on the network. It was a compromise.”

  I shook my head. “Okay. I’ll get to work on this. It won’t be as easy as if I had access to the whole system.”

  She fake-smiled. “We all sacrifice for the cause.”

  That line stayed with me after she left. Did they? What portion of Zentas’s empire was actually in on this? The soldiers I’d walked with hadn’t known. They probably kept it to as small a crew as possible. Even after the fact, they’d want as few witnesses as they could manage. That led me to a darker place. If I could kill Eddleston and Zentas, would that end the plan? Not that I could pull that off. One, maybe. I doubt I’d get the opportunity for both. Eddleston had let her guard down enough to get close to me without an escort, but I doubted her death would stop anything. And Zentas wouldn’t be so lax. On top of that, I didn’t have any weapons, unless I wanted to hit someone with the tablet they gave me.

  I’d call that Plan C.

  Plan A was on a ship on its way out of the system, and Plan B was more pressing. I flipped through the files, concentrating first on the bots. There was a reason that the military rarely used them—they had flaws—and maybe I could exploit that. It was tricky, because I needed two different sets of parameters. I needed a bot that would serve the purpose that Zentas thought I wanted—saving people without collateral damage—which at the same time would also allow me to thwart their plan. I broke the second part into two pieces: First, stop the attack, and second, get them caught. If I could only manage one of those, I’d probably still take it.

  I had to be careful of the biases in my own thinking. From the start, I’d thought about taking out the low-frequency broadcasters, but I had to put that out of my head because it ran the risk of blinding me to better answers. That’s always a tough thing to do. It’s like when someone tells you not to think about bugs in your sleeping bag, but then you can’t help it.

  After an hour I focused in on the Mark XI. It had originally been developed (by one of Zentas’s companies, I learned) to hunt a specific animal on Tau 4, two decades ago. Someone on the design team had thought ahead and allowed variable parameters. We could program it to target a specific species and only that species. It also came with a high-velocity 14-millimeter weapon, which could function as a seriously overpowered hunting rifle. The round would penetrate just about anything, including the wall of a dome, so it presented risks. But it didn’t explode, so that helped.

  The bot itself wasn’t ideal for jungle warfare, with four legs and standing almost three meters high. It looked a little like a giant headless dog, if the dog were made of metal composites and had rifles in its shoulders. I’d have to figure out a way to deliver them right where I needed them to keep them from bogging down in the foliage. We had twenty-two available, which would require at least two aircraft. The small number also probably wouldn’t stop a concentrated wave, but we’d be okay if we kept it to a few hundred ’verts.

  I also found the FL-207. Made by my old friends at Omicron, it was an old-model flying bot that had been used in a jungle environment to target a specific species of flying rodent. The rodent in question emi
tted a sonarlike signal, and the bot used that to home in on them. The same function would allow them to find sonic emitters, which made them perfect for what I wanted. They were small, with a 0.6-meter wingspan, and had limited ammunition, but what they did have was ideal for taking out transmitters. They fired an eleven-millimeter rocket that exploded into a shotgun pattern as it approached the source of the sound. Unfortunately, they were too perfect, so there was no way Zentas would let me have them. And it would tip off my plan if I asked. They had no viable use for the mission—they wouldn’t do anything to a hominivert except piss it off.

  If I could somehow get to the arsenal, though . . .

  I didn’t realize how long I’d been staring at the stuff until dinner arrived. It was Hanson again, the guy from breakfast. “You got promoted to dinner duty?”

  “I was just going off shift and the person who was supposed to do it was busy, so I volunteered.”

  “Thanks for doing that,” I said.

  “It wasn’t much of a sacrifice. Hope you enjoy.”

  I did enjoy it. There was grilled chicken and a salad with a creamy dressing that I couldn’t quite place but had great flavor. I let my mind drift, and for whatever reason, Hanson’s statement stuck in my head. Wasn’t much of a sacrifice. And then I had it. I’d been looking at it all wrong. I was looking for a technological solution when I needed a human one.

  I needed to talk to Zentas.

  I broached the subject of meeting with him the next time I saw Eddleston, but she had no intention of letting me see her boss anymore. She had control of me, and she liked it that way. She probably didn’t want me letting Zentas in on the fact that most of her ideas were in fact mine. I didn’t intend to do that, but I couldn’t come right out and tell her that without revealing what I was actually doing. She stood in front of my cell, hands on both hips, head up, jaw square, like something out of a book on how to take charge of a situation. I couldn’t get over how young she looked. I’d always pictured the face of evil to be older.

  “He’s not available.” She almost sneered as she said it.

  “Ever?” I’d been fine with the situation, but I couldn’t let her dictate everything. I wanted to change how we fought the mission, and only Zentas could do that. I also wanted to ask him a question about something unrelated. It had come to me, the night before, when I couldn’t sleep. Why had he had someone plant the bomb to kill me outside the governor’s? It didn’t matter much now, but once it got in my head, I couldn’t get it out.

  “He’s happy with the current arrangement.” Her attitude was pissing me off.

  I made the decision right there to destroy her.

  “You mean the arrangement where you pass on my ideas, but you don’t tell him where they came from? Is that the arrangement that makes him happy? You know he’s not stupid, right?”

  She didn’t respond, but the power façade cracked for a second and her face reddened. The truth hurts. I’d put voice to what we’d previously left unspoken, and now she couldn’t pretend that I didn’t know. She tried to hide it, but when she spoke, it was with a touch less confidence. “And?”

  And now it was time to make her pay for it. I let her stare me down, and finally broke off the eye contact. I let out a small breath—not quite a sigh, didn’t want to be too melodramatic—and said, “Fine. If I can’t talk to him, you pass on the idea.”

  “What have you got?” She didn’t even sound suspicious. She thought she’d broken me. I almost felt bad for her. Almost.

  “It’s the FL-207s. They fly, so they’re maneuverable through the jungle, and they have a low-yield weapon that won’t cause a lot of collateral damage. We’ve got seventy of them in the inventory. Because they can fly, we can bring them in after the attack starts. I just need Zentas’s engineers to work to modify the targeting system so that they focus specifically on the hominiverts. Maybe a size profile, or something, unless there’s a big enough heat difference between the primates and a human.” I threw that last bit in there to distract her.

  “They’re about a degree below human. I’m not sure if that’s enough for targeting.” She fell for it. As a xenobiologist, she probably had to.

  “I don’t think that will be enough for the bots to differentiate with the jungle clutter. That’s why I need Zentas. I need to know what his engineers can modify within the specs of the bots. There’s nothing in the inventory that serves our purposes as is. We’re going to have to do some work.”

  “I’ll pass it along and see what they can do.”

  I hoped she did.

  Eddleston stared lasers at me when she and Zentas showed up the next morning during my breakfast. Apparently my plan worked. With her boss there, she couldn’t yell at me about it, which made it funnier, and I had to hide a smile behind a bite of eggs.

  “I’m disappointed, Carl. The FL-207? That’s an amateur-level attempt. You want me to give them to you so that you can target them against the low-frequency broadcasts.”

  “Give me some credit. I knew you’d see through it. But Genocide Barbie over there wouldn’t let me talk to you, so I had to do something to get your attention. You’ve probably figured out by now that she doesn’t know what she’s doing and that everything she’s given you over the last few days came from me.”

  If a glare could get even more angry, Eddleston’s did. I smiled openly this time. Screw her.

  “It’s not genocide. They’re not human,” said Zentas, missing the point.

  “That’s your takeaway from this?”

  “You wanted to see me, Carl. What do you want?”

  “I wanted to ask you a question. You wanted me here so you could use me to further your cause . . . so why try to assassinate me outside the governor’s mansion?”

  “That’s why you wanted to see me?”

  “No. But you’re here, and it’s been bothering me. I can’t figure it out.”

  He considered it, probably wondering whether to tell me the truth. I figured he would. It fit his style. “We didn’t try to kill you. You were never in danger from the bomb. You were meant to find it.”

  Interesting. So he’d wanted to use it to scare me . . . or no, not scare me. To get me looking toward EPV and simultaneously keep me from leaving. Like I’d done to him, he’d used my own stubborn nature against me.

  He was good.

  “What about the hominivert attack on my patrol? That seems risky.”

  “A calculated risk. You seem to have an innate ability to survive. And we could have driven off the animals at any time by turning off the broadcasters driving them toward you and turning on the one nearby to push them away.”

  “It was a good move. You really threw me off the trail with that one. I never suspected the setup.” It was true, but it also didn’t hurt to stroke his ego a little.

  “It worked for a while, but ultimately fell short of the goal.”

  “Which was?” I asked.

  “I wanted you to see EPV as the enemy.”

  Of course. If I thought EPV tried to kill me, I’d want to get back at them, which in another timeline could have led me into the arms of Caliber sooner. “I did—for a while, at least. I wonder how things would have worked out if I’d taken that bait fully.”

  “I wonder too. And while I’d love to stand around and chat all day, Carl, I’m a busy man. Can you get to the point?”

  “I’ve got a solution that meets your needs and saves lives.”

  “And why should I trust you?”

  He shouldn’t. But I still had to make my play. “Send me.”

  “Send you where?”

  “To the site where the hominiverts attack. Send me there. You need an optic . . . something that will make the news and bring public opinion to bear. Who would make more news than me on the ground trying to save the day?”

  He thought about it. “Interesting. You’d sacrifice yourself like that?”

  “You’re going to kill me anyway.”

  “Not necessarily.” That he didn
’t straight-up say he wouldn’t made me respect him a little bit. It also meant he was cocky, which I was counting on. “But I’m intrigued. Why would you do it though? Are you trying to change your legacy? ‘Hero dies trying to save lives as marauding animals terrorize human outpost’—something like that?”

  “If I die, nobody else has to,” I said.

  “Perhaps,” he said, but his tone said he didn’t agree.

  “And we don’t need to kill the hominiverts, either. Once they’ve killed me and trashed a dome, you’ve got everything you need.”

  He stayed silent for several seconds. “No, I don’t think that will work. We need their bodies on the scene. We can’t have any doubt about what happened and that the animals were responsible.” I started to protest, but he held up his hand. “But . . . we may be able to do it with significantly fewer animal deaths—not that I care either way in that regard.” He thought about it some more. “If we did it, we could make sure they’ve destroyed a couple uninhabited domes before they got to your location.”

  He was close to saying yes, but I wasn’t ready to quit. “How many fewer casualties?” I didn’t have any leverage with which to negotiate, and we both knew it. Zentas was polite enough not to point it out.

  “We’ll see how it goes.” I took that for agreement. I didn’t blame him for not caving on the casualties. He didn’t have to concede anything, and he didn’t. “Why don’t you start by telling me your plan?”

  “I want the Mark XIs.”

  “Interesting choice. Do they have enough firepower to drive the apes away?”

  “There are twenty-two of them. I guess it depends on how many hominiverts show up.”

  “Thousands. Nonnegotiable.”

  Well then. I was fucked. No way could I win that fight. “Sure. I can do it,” I said. “I’ll need some noisemakers, though. Missiles or bombs. It doesn’t matter which, as long as I can deliver and target them precisely. Give me a helmet with an interface and I’ll put them where I need them.”