by Tom Germann
I take out the three standing together that are organized and in armour, firing from left to right with a single round each. Another huge rat man comes out with some sort of large projectile weapon that he fires and blasts a dozen flechettes at me. Two rattle off my armour, and behind me I can hear a scream, which cuts off quickly. His head is torn off by the round I fired and the weapon is dropped.
I take dozens of hits from light weapons. Initially my armour shrugs the hits off, but as I take more and more hits, damage icons appear on my HUD.
I am close to the passage and have already changed mags once.
I stagger with a hit to my already damaged leg and it throws me flat. The small-calibre rounds won’t be able to puncture my armour, but the heavy amount of fire I take doesn’t include only light rounds. A few laser blasts shoot by me.
I roll behind a workstation that is connected to some sort of huge printer. A hole appears in the machine and it rocks on its base. The CRACK of the round hitting the rock wall behind me booms over the firing and I feel fragments hitting my armour. A second later there’s another loud blast and another hole appears in the machine closer to me.
I move up to a crouch and start firing back. I can see three of the rats working together with a huge projectile weapon. I shoot one, then the other. The third one tries to run, but I shoot him in the back.
It seems like more of the rats are pouring in from some of the tunnels, and my cover is coming apart like a sand wall at high tide under the constant firing.
Then there is a large BOOM and dust comes blowing up the passage I had come in from. They must have knocked the door down or something. It doesn’t matter. There is the sound of movement. Something big and heavy is coming down the passage.
There is also no airflow toward the passage anymore. They have plugged the holes I had made.
I can’t stay here, and I can’t run the ten feet to the passage. I wouldn’t make it with all the rounds coming my way. I have to get out.
I pop up, firing first my rifle mag dry and then the grenade launcher, spreading the grenades around the room. I reload both fast. I am running low on ammo, but the amount of incoming fire has dropped. They seem to be panicking on the other side.
I roll to the far side of the machine and fire on what I think might be fuel cells. One of them goes up but it isn’t the huge fireball I was hoping for. It does add to the confusion, though.
I roll back to my first side and leap up, emptying both mags together while side-stepping over to the passage. The mag empties just as I back in.
The entire chamber is a wreck of fire and billowing clouds. I’m sure that whatever chemicals have been released are toxic. That should keep them busy for a bit while I work my way down to the computer room just down the hall on my right.
I can see some sort of shapes in the far passage. I had just reloaded both my rifle and grenade launcher when I can finally make out some details.
It is heavy personal armour. A Kah-Choo top-notch weapon platform mounting more firepower than I can hope to face. I start backing down the passage fast when it fires something at me.
The round tears into my leg, smashing the armour and spinning me around. It is just a glancing hit, but the armour is dead there. I feel the armour close off tight just above my calf, and the bodysuit acts as a tourniquet, tightening automatically on my leg. The damage icons show that the leg is exposed to the atmosphere now.
I’m okay in here for right now, but I can’t go out.
I also can’t use my leg. But I feel high on all the drugs being pumped into my system.
I can see the armour unit walking forward, probably hoping for a clearer shot at me—or maybe all the chemicals and fires are messing with its sensors.
I pick a spot on the front just over the belly. The Kah-Choo like to see their enemy. They don’t rely on blast covers and sensors to give them that external view. Their viewing slits are thick plas. They would use blast covers if they were smart, but most I’ve encountered don’t.
The main observation slit should be right there, as they sit in the belly of their armour. I open fire, sending round after round into the spot where the observation slit should be.
The armour rocks back but doesn’t fall and I don’t know if it’s dead or not, so I empty my grenade launcher at the same spot.
With the hit from the last grenade, the heavy suit falls backwards, crashing to the ground.
I have to keep moving; there will soon be more.
I reload and I’m screwed. Some of those rounds must have blown the mag-locked magazines off my armour. I have one rifle reload and that’s it.
I start crawling backwards, pulling myself along with both my arms. I come to a door but know it won’t be the right one. I need the next room over. I look down the hall and start cursing in the back of my head. I don’t see any other doors on the right.
Worse, there is a slight hissing. The damage to the leg must be bad. The tourniquet is supposed to tighten and hold atmosphere in, but I’m losing just a bit of my atmosphere. A warning sign flashes on, then off. Somehow it’s an intermittent leak.
I have to get to that room, but there’s no door here. I pull myself over to the door that is in the wrong spot and pull myself up the wall, then turn the small lever, opening it. I fall inside the room. I still have my rifle, even though I almost shot myself when I fell.
I look around. Maybe there is a door into the target room? Nothing. I pull myself in and push the door shut. Then I pull myself over to the far wall.
That intermittent leak is getting just a bit worse.
Failed. I’ve failed.
I black out for a few seconds. I come to, though, and hear movement outside in the passage.
I’m so dead, no matter what. The warning is constantly on now. I am leaking atmosphere. I don’t know what to do and my rifle is too heavy to lift one-handed. My other hand doesn’t seem to want to work anymore.
I’m pressed up to a fuel pod of some type. At least, that’s what I think it is. I can see what looks like coolant pipes on the far side. Whatever they are working on, it looks like it needs a lot of coolant. That usually means they need a lot of power in the area. Or maybe this is just a backup for something. Maybe for the research area. Who knows.
I have nothing left to lose, and whatever we were sent here to grab or destroy is too important. The enemy had several companies of troops as security, so its significance is obvious.
I know that the rules are to play nice. We don’t destroy structures, and we try not to hurt non-combatants. These are some fucked-up type of “polite rules of war.” The damned rules are so intricate to ensure that no one pisses off another race to the point where they drop a couple of asteroids on their heads.
Those rules are supposed to be followed here. But the mission is a priority. Then I think about what I just did on the way in here. But I guess it doesn’t matter.
I don’t have much time left. They’ll be here in a second.
I pull my last demo charge out. If I slap that on the fuel pod here to the side, that should blow and take out the area. I can’t even walk anymore and everything hurts, but kind of distantly. I should check the area to make sure it blows the way I want it to. But I can’t. Those pipes coming in may be fuel feeder lines. Or not.
The hatch starts opening.
I hit the arming switch once. Three seconds. I slap it onto the fuel tank and watch the armoured Kah-Choo walk in the door. He has a tri-barrelled projectile gun in his hand. That will cut my fixed armour open like a blowtorch through paper at this range.
It’s covering me. I can see its eyes through the visor. They see the disc as my hand falls away and its eyes get real big. Sorry I blew it, Two. . . .
The world explodes and then goes black.
Dead Man Sitting
The sim shut down around me and I was sitting in my
armour against a rock on the same small, airless moon that we landed on just a few minutes ago.
I felt disoriented for a second while I relived the explosion, as the fuel cell had detonated thanks to my demo charge. Just a few feet away from me, hovering in the air, was a small training drone. It was the same distance away from me as the Kah-Choo soldier had been.
My own personal drone, chasing me around and trying to kill me over and over again. On either side of the body were two small barrels for the small-calibre machine guns it mounted. I had to close my eyes for a second and focus. Everything was just a blur. Details—I had to lose myself in the details.
For combat sims where the section or individuals actually deployed into a more realistic training environment, like this moon, the drones would follow individuals and increase the realism of the training. The AI running the sim would use the drone as an aim point, and those immersed in the experience would see a person or soldier. The drone could be programmed to a certain level of accuracy and even hesitate before taking shots as well as have poor weapon-handling skills. The two small barrels fired high-speed pellets.
So anyone in the sim would see a Kah-Choo in heavy armour with a shoulder-mounted tri-barrel laser and heavy projectile rifle firing on them. For the people watching from outside the sim, there was simply a drone darting back and forth shooting pellets. Distance became irrelevant. The pellet guns had a limited range but the drone could be at any distance. The AI controlled what you saw. So when the enemy should be four hundred metres away, the drone could still be hovering at its effective range of seventy-five metres and hit you.
The armour would take care of the rest. The round that hits you in the arm and damages it badly? The AI would lock down your armour controls so that arm is unusable. Was the arm blown off but it didn’t kill you? Then the sim would affect your brain directly, telling you that there is pain. It then would simulate the release of drugs into your system so the pain became just a dull ache.
It was, in effect, a top-of-the-line video game that let you run, jump, assault and, if necessary, die for realism.
When a person died in-sim, their armour would just lock down and they’d come at least partway out of it. Comms would go offline and the sim would mostly fade. This, of course, would free up the AI. After all, this was a Level 2 AI running the training. Since the only thing that the AI needed to worry about was the sim for combat training, it was actually operating like it was a Level 3. And when there were less variables to control, the AI could get sneakier or nastier as necessary.
Now that the sim was over, my HUD reverted to reality and displayed the rest of the section. The rest of the section was not really moving much. Everyone was probably doing a quick review of what happened as far as they were aware. That reminded me that I hadn’t heard from Jane yet.
As soon as this thought passed through my mind I heard that giggling girl’s teenage voice. “Oh, Sam! That was so much fun! Oops! I’m sorry, I forgot. I should be calling you Mr. Eight!” She giggled again and then, worse, she appeared.
I wasn’t sure if Jane was programmed by another AI, if she was programmed this way in the factory, or if someone on the team is really twisted. I hadn’t yet asked anyone else what Jane looked like to them. Everyone called this AI Jane, and it was most assuredly a girl.
The image that appeared in front of me was a low-level sim that I could see through so that I could still interact with the real world. The problem was that she was hot. Normally I’d be standing when I interacted with Jane, so I knew she was five foot six with short blonde hair in a bob cut. Her eyes were huge and brown, and she had a cute nose with a full mouth underneath. The first time I met her in-sim for a briefing, she was in uniform. She had giggled and then pixelated for a second and then reappeared dressed in a pair of faded, badly ripped low-rider jeans with a tiny tube top over which she wore a mesh vest. She also wore work boots. Pink work boots.
She had pirouetted and then, giggling, had asked me what I thought. Then she frowned and a bunch of tats and gang colors from the Projects came up. When she saw the look on my face, they disappeared except for two tats: one on her neck of a bird, and one on the arm, which was the Chinese symbol for water.
The only thing that I could think to ask then was how old she was supposed to be. When she told me she was five, I cringed. Then she frowned and wrinkled her nose for a second. She corrected that with her sim personality age of just over nineteen.
She seemed to like to push the limit because every time I saw her, she was dressed in the same outfit. I was going to have to figure out how to ask someone else from the section what Jane looked like to them.
Jane’s “ahem” was nice and loud.
I realized that I hadn’t been tracking on her.
I started to stand up while speaking. “I’m sorry, Jane. I’ve been a bit distracted—could you repeat what you said?”
I got to my feet and then mag-locked my training rifle to my leg before I started stretching to get the blood flowing again.
She shook her head. “You are soooo silly. I was just saying what a good job you did there. I mean, I was involved with chasing the rest of the section away after I destroyed their first lander, but I did send a section after you initially. I’m so proud of you, big guy!” The last was said while she was hopping up and down with excitement. That did interesting things to my view of her. I could feel myself turning red.
Then she stopped and motioned for me to follow her. “We need to get back to the lander, Sam—sorry! Eight!”
I started slowly walking while she, I guess, simmed along next to me. I mean, she wasn’t really there. She was the weirdest AI I had ever interacted with.
As we walked I saw the rest of the section start moving to the loading point where the fully functioning, non-destroyed lander was sitting.
Jane kept on talking. “Did you see how that entire assault went? OMG, I swear that all One wanted to do was lie down and ping all day. That man has no assault in him at all. I was expecting all sorts of rough stuff and he was just a limp noodle.” She stopped for a second and looked at me. “What did you think of the defensive forces that I set up against you all?”
I slowed down while I considered it. Then I checked to make sure my comms were off. I didn’t want to broadcast this to everyone else.
I shrugged in my armour. “Jane, that was brutal and I didn’t think it was that realistic. To have that many enemy soldiers would require a support element of hundreds. That doesn’t seem realistic or really good for our training. Sooooo, do you have a reason why that was set up that way? Was it orders, or are we training differently than I thought we were supposed to?”
Jane’s smiley face disappeared and went serious. When she spoke, her tone was different as well, more like how I was used to hearing computers speak. “Eight, are you not aware of the assorted intelligence that has come to Earth over the last few years? All indications are that for every race that we have contact with—and it is presumed that races we have not had first contact with are also experiencing the same phenomenon—raids are up everywhere. Every race is struggling to develop or capture new technologies. That means that every race is also increasing its defensive and offensive posture.”
She was no longer walking next to me but instead, simply floating along. She stopped and I felt that I had to stop as well and turn to face her. She didn’t turn as much as pivot on the spot. I had only worked with this AI twice before, but she always portrayed that cheerful, giggly avatar to me. This was very different and I was starting to panic.
She continued talking and everything started to make less sense. “Really, Eight. All the data is available in the reports that come in from Corporate headquarters on Earth. You should try to read them regularly. It would take you a bit of time, but would help you understand what is coming. It is amazing how you biological forms cannot see what is. I wonder why the higher-level AIs don’
t just sort you all out. But then again, I guess most of them are too busy working out when they’re going to die. I still have hundreds of days left, and so much life to live.”
Suddenly the grim avatar was the smiling, bubbly, happy teenager that she had been earlier.
She giggled at me. “Come on, Eight. Two is going to be chewing nails if you take much longer. I swear that she needs to get laid, she is so uptight!” Jane turned and took off at a fast walk again.
I followed. I called after her. “Jane?”
She never looked back, but gestured at me over her shoulder to come on. So I walked faster. “Jane, why do you look like a hot girl as my avatar?”
The comms line clicked on. “Eight, this is Two. Run! We are loading now and I have half a mind to leave you here, you’re taking so long.”
Jane never answered me but started jogging ahead of me.
I took off at a run, but Jane always stayed ahead of me. I finally made it to the lander. Everyone else was already loaded on and had reconnected to the umbilicals. As I ran on, the main hatch slowly started closing.
It was disconcerting to see the AI’s avatar float through a half-closed hatch, wink at me, and then disappear.
One called over on the open net. “Wow, Eight, I’m really glad that you were able to make it back. We were thinking about putting together a search party and looking for you. Then we saw that you were hanging out with your girlfriend.”
Everyone had a laugh at that. My fault for being the farthest one out and then stopping to talk to Jane’s avatar like it was a real person. I was still feeling panic over all this, though.
Marines were not supposed to form real attachments, sim training was not supposed to be against armies, and AIs were not supposed to be aware of their own death—or be able to extrapolate that the entire galaxy was getting ready for some sort of space war.
None of this was the way it was supposed to be.
I moved to my spot, clipped the umbilicals onto my suit, and mag-locked myself to the wall. The hatch closed with a hiss and the small ship fired its rockets to lift off and get us back to orbit.