"Then get him out and down to Cyber," Kjaskle snapped. "Memo to adjutant: 'Check tech workshop wait times. Report by 1200.' The DOG unit works doesn't it?"
"Ah, yes, sir," Gillies replied unhappily. "But I don't know the command phrases or its capabilities."
"It has an artificial persona, I believe, Sergeant," the CO replied. "Treat it like a real dog. The exercise will be delayed till the DOG unit is ready to deploy. You have fifteen minutes, Sergeant Gillies. Copy to all OC, Bridge, BrigCom. Ex re-start 0335. And we'll change it to a planetary search and destroy. All sub-units deploy to drop stations. Orders Group in ten."
Gillies snapped a salute, ordered the platoon to re-equip for planet action and drop, and watched the Colonel's back as she marched on to the heavy weapons platoon ready room, the adjutant and RSM marching behind, catching a steady stream of orders.
"Treat it like a real dog," he muttered to himself. He'd forgotten the Colonel's last assignment had been in Sol. Staff College on Mars. There were probably hundreds of dogs there. He tongued his impcom. "ComOp. Gillies. Get me BQMS Skuarren. Urgent."
Fortunately, "Sublight" Skuarren was on duty, and so it only took two or three minutes for the ComOp to convince him that he had to talk to Gillies. Sublight, being both a hundred and fifty-year veteran and a quartermaster, considered himself to be a sort of independent prince, and gave rare audiences. He probably should have been retired, but since he'd started his career back when starships were sublight and subject to temporal dilation, no one could figure out how old he actually was. It was also rumored that his retirement payout would be so huge that the Paymaster was hoping he'd die first.
"Gillies? Assault engineers, huh? I was an assault sergeant for a while, son. Back in the First War. Lost a hand when a mini-sun novaed prematurely when we were burning through the Xene flagship off Parast. Then the damned trauma seal malfunctioned and cut off my whole damn arm! Had a prosthetic one for about ten years before I could get a new one grown back. Hell of a thing, that prosthetic . . . what? Terran dogs? Yeah. A what? A collie? Nice dog, may be a bit gentle. Shepherd cross? German shepherd, that'd be. No, nothing to do with bacterial weapons. Germany is a sub-unit of Terra. Of course I know. I used to have a Labrador—that's another variant, son— when we were doing police work on Nightwing. Commands? The usual stuff. Sit, Walk, Find, Retrieve, Stay, Attack, Heel . . . no, it means follow close by your heels. On your boots. The part at the back. You call it what? Where are you from, son? Brink II! Shit, son, I was part of the relief force that recaptured Brink. More commands? Okay, I'll see what I can remember, and zap it down on the dataline. Enjoy your exercise, Sergeant. I hope it's a good dog."
Ten hours later, Sergeant Gillies was pretty sure that even if it was a good dog, he didn't like it. They'd hit the planet at 0400, deploying in squad-sized drop saucers, and the DOG had been out the hatch as soon as it opened, without waiting for a command. It had run backwards and forwards around him as he'd disembarked, and got in the way of the initial scans. Then, when the whole battalion had moved off towards the simulated enemy defense area, the DOG had raced out in front of the lead scouts, confusing them and everybody else. Luckily, Gillies had remembered "heel." and transmitted it at once, but to add insult to injury, the DOG communicated on one of the spare bands that Gillies had assigned as a private channel for him and the three squad leaders. Now, it was interrupted all the time by sharp, strident noises from the DOG. It seemed to make them every time it found something.
To be fair, it found things with considerable efficiency, turning up several booby traps or fixed auto weapons several minutes before Gillie's slipscan teams. But it was only a few minutes, and the Sergeant didn't really think it was worth the aggravation.
The DOG had been useful in the assault too, demoralizing the defenders (from the brigade's HQ company) by digging through a frozen oxygen rampart and then springing out in a heavy weapons emplacement, blue teeth and six sets of claws scoring faceplates and shredding exterior aerials and the like. No one had been hurt by the DOG—which seemed to understand it was an exercise—but it certainly put them off long enough for a squad to gee-vault in and finish them off with low-en simulated plasma dotters.
Now, on the shuttle going back up to Garrison, Gillies noticed that the DOG must have purposefully rolled around on one of the crystalline "plant-mats" that grew on Hogawan VII, because long lines of furry crystals were now growing on its black body, giving it the appearance of long hair. The crystals were harmless, but Gillies eyed it with misgiving. Bald was good enough for Marines, it ought to be good enough for an auxiliary animal. The DOG seemed to notice he was looking, because it put its head back and thrust its tongue out at him, while its tail rotated in eccentric circles. Probably an insult, Gillies thought.
Suddenly, his suit com squawked into life, and his tongue tingled with the sensation of a red alert. The troopers around him in the shuttle's shockwebs suddenly jerked upright, and the DOG sprang to its feet. Gillies felt every inch of his skin suddenly contract, like being dumped in freezing water, as the shuttle energized its protective shield. It was followed a moment later by the controlled but excited voice of the naval duty officer.
"Red! Nilsim! All hands, close up for action."
There was a pause, then Colonel Kjaskle came on the all troops channel.
"Listen up, Marines! An unauthorized craft is approaching the interdicted zone. Fighters are vectoring to intercept. We're going in behind to board. The craft looks like a Xene battle barge, but it's all on its own. This is not a simulation. Nilsim. Company and platoon commanders standby for orders."
The colonel clicked off and Gillies spoke quickly, before she came on the command channel directly.
"Pull safety tags and sim buttons and cross-check with your team."
Seconds later, the colonel spoke to Gillies directly. "Gillies. We've got a ID on the battle barge. A Xene renegade, probably a suicide run for the garrison. It's pointed straight at it on full acceleration, and the navy isn't positive they can totally vaporize it without some debris hitting the garrison and attendant craft. So we've got to clean up—and only your shuttle and 2nd Platoon, A company are close enough for immediate intercept. That's the situation. Orders. Two-A platoon will take the bridge. Your assault engineer platoon will secure the engine room. Scan downloading now. From the schematics, it looks like a standard battle barge, but don't take it for granted, they're running a full screen. Do it by the book, exactly as you've done before. Any questions?"
"No, sir," replied Gillies, as he studied the schematics displayed just in front of his eyes on the upper part of the visor. "We'll cut in the trailing cargo hold and deploy from there."
"Sounds good to me, Sergeant," said the CO. "Take it away."
"Okay, children, listen in!" Gillies said. "We're going in to take the engine room of this battle barge. It looks like a Xene suicide ram, so we've got the important job. But I want it nice and careful, okay? Smazl, your squad will be on scan and support, Wattson, your guys'll do the drill-in and blow. I'll go with Nreda's squad, and we'll do the assault. The schematics look just like the sim we did last month, but don't take it for granted. Okay. The trailing cargo bay is the cut-in, core bulkhead the scan and blow, and then the aft hatch of that corridor behind I'll mini-sun for the assault party. Drop in four thirty-two. Any questions?"
There were no questions. The DOG looked like it would ask questions if it could talk, and Gillies realized he hadn't thought about what it would do. Stay with him, he guessed, if it had an EVA capability.
"Okay. Three minutes. Seal and energize. Weapons—ready! Load and set! Take up boarding positions."
Gillies slapped his own faceplate down and checked the suit tell-tales, before arming his in-built and carried weapons and setting the safety switches. Finally, he stood up, locked his boots into position on the floor and called the bridge, while his eyes ran over the men and women of the platoon, checking the readiness tell-tales which didn't always sync up with his helm
et display. The DOG, he noticed, had automatically assumed the drop position when everyone else did.
"Platoon ready for boarding. Open boarding hatch and standby for drop."
"Confirmed. Okay, you Marines! Boarding hatch opening, standby for gravity alert. Two point five gees matched with the target. Good luck!"
The floor in front of Gillies suddenly slid away, revealing open space. He couldn't see the Xene craft because of the shield interference, but his locator beam was already on it, locking in on his chosen drop point. It flashed a yellow warning in his helmet, and then red, as the ejection field picked up the entire platoon and hurled them into space.
Gravity hit like a sucker punch, more than the 2. 5G the shuttle pilot had indicated, and the heavens wheeled around the faceplate as Gillies spun towards the enemy vessel. The suit's autopilot was firing pulsion units to stop the spin, but Gillies assumed control and merely slowed it, so he could get his bearings. A few seconds later, he felt his skin crawl again, as he passed through the enemy energy field. That made him susceptible to fire, so he upped the acceleration and started jinking, while his suit fired chaff and tiny distorter missiles. Around him, everyone in the platoon was doing the same, as the squads sorted themselves into a rough formation for the landing.
The first squad hit and established a scan perimeter, taking out two enemy autoguns as they did so; Wattson's squad pancaked in and drillers flared white, sparking fountains of light. Gillies kept the other squad matched to the ship's vector, in a rough circle about twenty meters above the hull. Experience had shown that a band about four meters deep existed here, where the enemy's ship-mounted AP weapons couldn't bear. A frageware glitch probably, but one common to this type of vessel. Gillies hoped it was still current.
Down on the hull, Wattson's troops finished drilling and starting placing charges in the boreholes to finish the breach. Wattson came over the com.
"Two minutes, from my mark. Mark!"
The circle on the deck suddenly expanded, as both squads opened up the perimeter to allow room for the blast. The cutting charges were supposed to be uni-directional—inwards—but it never seemed to totally work that way. Gillies, up above, opened up his perimeter too, and as Wattson said "three seconds!" they all flipped to take the flash and blast debris on their back armor.
Wattson's "One" was lost in the com interference from the micronukes, but the flash was clear enough. Gillies counted "one-two," then somersaulted and jetted for what he hoped was a gaping hole through the outer hull into a cargo bay. Out of the corner of his eye, he noticed the DOG was close behind him, its crystalline hair wavering as pulsors from its legs delivered sudden changes of direction.
The breach was there, twenty meters in diameter, with molten metal still bleeding off in all directions, and the Xene's chlorine atmosphere boiling out like green steam.
"Go to wavescan," Gillies instructed the assaulting squad, and his visor suddenly cleared to show a simulated real-time view of what everything looked like without the gases. The hull was cleanly breached, revealing a large, empty cargo hold. The assault squad raced in through the breach, leapfrogging in alternate pairs along the notional floor and walls of the hold. The enemy ship was maintaining an artificial gravity of about 0.2G, but this was wasn't enough for full gravity tactics. Two marines bounced off the walls to the coreward bulkhead, the first running a deepscan across the bulkhead, the second slapping a long ribbon-shaped cutting charge on the point indicated by the scan. The bomber then went left as the scanner went right, and five seconds later there was an explosion and a door-sized hole in the bulkhead. Another marine moved up and flipped flechette grenades through, to cover each end of the corridor on the other side of the bulkhead. Immediately they exploded, two marines dived through, and plasma dotters fired, almost simultaneously with a Xene greyband. There was a muffled exclamation on com.
"One Xene down in the corridor, none in range," said Corporal Nreda. "I've taken a greyband hit on the leg, lost ablat, knee-joint's immobilized."
"Okay," snapped Gillies as he bounded forward. "Stay there and cover the topside approach. I'm coming through. Smazl, stay hullside and secure. Wattson, come through when we're into the engine room."
He dived through the bulkhead hole, and cursed as the DOG dived too, almost colliding with him as he flipped to take the impact on his legs. Nreda was firing again, to the left, and the flare from the stream of microscopic plasma dots was causing part of his faceplate to polarize and the wavescan view was chopping up. The marine to his right indicated the aft hatch, then flew hullwards and sticktered herself against the corridor 'roof,' to get a good firing position when Gillies sunned the door.
The sergeant locked himself feet-first on the 'wall,' at right-angles to the other two marines, and unclipped the black globe of the minisun from his belt. He aimed it at the hatch, thumb securely pressing the safety interlock switch, while his suitcomp downloaded the instructions that would define both the protective field and the arc of destruction. As Gillies raised his thumb, he thought of Sublight's story about losing an arm—but that had been an earlier model. Below him, the DOG unit seemed to see the weapon for the first time, and it pressed itself totally flat on the floor and tucked its head in between its front legs. Then Gillies let the mini-sun go.
It worked perfectly. The globe flew forward, and the instant before it hit the hatch, raised a protective field in a hemisphere behind it, while vaporizing everything in a hemisphere in front of it. The hatch, part of the aft bulkhead and two Xene warriors several meters behind the hatch just disappeared. The half of the globe that had generated the field continued in its trajectory, rebounding from the far bulkhead of the room.
The marine on the roof fired as Gillies went in below her, the DOG at his reboos, or heels as Sublight called them. She missed whatever she was aiming at, and a millisecond later, she was hit by an rocket-propelled greyband capsule, the Xene organic solvent eating into her armor as she frantically activated the shedding process that would slough off her outer ablative layer.
Gillies' comp tracked the launch, and he instinctively fired back with his in-built arm dotter, taking a Xene as it dived to new cover. At that same second, Gillies realized that this room wasn't the engine control room. The schematics were wrong. He anchored himself behind a panel and called his squad leaders.
"Smazl! Get a scan team down here to me! Wattson! Report! Nreda, where's the rest of the fucking squad?"
"We're under fire, boss! Big counter-attack—ambush—they're coming out of the fucking forr'd hold . . . the boat deck . . . they're everywhere!"
Gillies had to check his comp to see who was talking, the voice was almost hysterical, totally unlike Smazl. Before he could answer, Wattson came over the com, speaking fast.
"Smazl just went down, Sarge! His troopies are in hand-to-hand, I'll counter-attack up the hold rim before they're over-run. At least fifty warriors . . ."
"Okay!" Gillies snapped. "Wattson, hold your attack, there's too many of them. Get Smazl's squad to fall back if they can. Nreda, join your squad with Wattson's and establish a defensive position around the hold for a hot insertion by reinforcements. Wattson, you're in command, contact the CO and ask for some goddamn help. I'm going on for the engine room."
Gillies hardly heard the affirmatives of Nreda and Wattson. They knew as well as he did that there might not be any reinforcements if he couldn't stop or at least slow the battle barge long enough for the rest of the battalion to catch up. And in the worst-case scenario, the Navy might have to try and take the barge out even with the marines still fighting on board. Gillies would have to try and find the engine room without a scan team.
Boosting his suit scans to maximum, the sergeant moved his head from side-to-side, hoping that some aberrant energy emission would show up. One did, but visual observation showed it to be the DOG unit. Gillies looked at it, and suddenly wondered if the Pallas R&D people really were as stupid as everyone thought.
"Okay, DOG," he transmitted
to it. "Where's the engine room?"
The DOG's ears pricked up and it moved its head sideways, as if listening, but it didn't do anything.
"DOG-01, locate engine room!" Gillies snapped. Again, the DOG looked like it was intently listening, but it still didn't do anything.
"DOG-01, search for the engine room . . ." Gillies tried, a little half-heartedly. He knew the DOG could locate things—it just needed the right command.
"Sublight!"
Gillies suddenly remembered the old codger was going to download a list of commands on the dataline. Quickly, he accessed his comp. Sure enough, there was a stored low priority send from BQMS Skuarren. He activated it, and Sublight's familiar voice filled his ears.
"I got that full list of commands, son. Would you believe it? That second capsule came to me with a batch of left-handed spinsticks. I've been scrolling it all morning, and those guys on Pallas sure have a sense of humor. Must be some old-timers there like me . . ."
Gillies hit fast-forward, as his helmet tell-tales showed two new casualties among Smazl's squad. Six of Smazl"s ten marines were either dead or their suits were, and there five casualties among the other two squads. He had to find the engine room!
"Okay, Sergeant, the basic command menu follows. There's some real funny stuff, but it sure is a good DOG."
Gillies listened intently to the stream of one-word commands and two- or three-word groups, till he heard the one he wanted. It was incredibly obvious, but he didn't waste time worrying about that.
"DOG . . . FIND . . . ENGINE . . . ROOM."
The pauses were important apparently. Something else Xene mockers couldn't handle properly. They had no sense of rhythm.
The DOG shot up from the deck, its head went down and it rotated through a complex sphere. Apparently finding some scan-trail or trace, it then used its pulsors to head off towards the coreward hatch. Gillies followed along the wall, using his stickters, plasma dotter tracking just above the DOG's head. According to the schematics, this hatch led to a drop shaft to a drive inspection chamber, but the schematics were clearly wrong.
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