Crisis

by David Drake

  Sometimes you get lucky. The dropmaster slid bonelessly over the deck. English, tethering him to the webbing, said, “Everybody go! Guiness, drop ‘em when ready.”

  No way they were leaving three of their guys on the skin of an enemy spacecraft.

  Sawyer cut in to English’s com: “Flight deck secure, slaved to your C&C circuit, sir.”

  Whatever Sawyer and Trask had done with, or to, the pilots, it didn’t sound like they’d be flying anything, anywhere, anytime soon. The priorities of Marines in a naval fleet just weren’t the same as your mission support’s priorities.

  As far as the Marines of the 92nd–the Fleet’s badass electro-research specialists–were concerned, every Fleet machine and man were merely logistical support to their mission–whatever mission they were performing.

  When English jumped down onto that enemy hull, he saw what the trouble was before his computer-assisted magnetic boots made hull contact: lots of Syndicate robots on the skin, defending their ship against the NOCM. They behaved like telerobots. But they couldn’t be, because when you opened up the ships hauling them, there weren’t any humans or life-support to suggest that humans had ever been inside.

  Sawyer thought the Syndicate might be using some kind of A-Potential communicators, because A-Potential weapons ran on zero-delay, zero-point energy right out of Dirac’s energy sea. But then, Sawyer was some kind of frigging rocket scientist ever since he’d begun hanging out with Manning, the Haig’s Intel officer.

  English didn’t care if the robots were teleprompted by saints in East Jesus. He just wanted to blind their optical oscillators with ten to the tenth power neutrons per centimeter and about six million electron volts, the way his SERPA equipment was meant to do. That way, the eerie-looking metal men couldn’t see him to shoot at him.

  When he’d done that, starting with a flash to scramble the robots’ incoming signals, he could use Transient Radiation Effects (TREs): any Syndicate robotic sensor or antenna was a pathway he could use to bombard a robotic combatant with TREs–as long as he could see it.

  All this x-class SERPA antirobot gear depended on line of sight. You had to go one-on-one with the damned robots, to get them in your sights out in the open. Syndicate robots like these were shielded enough to be resistant to ionizing radiation up to one hundred rads, so the power you were pushing out was in the gigawatt range and highly lethal to humans.

  Which meant you really had to be careful about not shooting your own people with any of this gear while aiming invisible beams at a robot. Line of sight gave you huge fratricide problems, not just for Fleet communications gear, but for Marines.

  The robots didn’t care if they killed each other, as long as they killed Marines. So you went down real careful, and you shot real early. And you kept shooting, even if you couldn’t see anything outside your black-polarized helmet.

  Trask called these free-firing drops mad minutes. You shot all you could before you had Marines spread out along the hull among the enemy robots.

  Once the 92nd was on the hull, your helmets ported in real-time field-of-fire grids. ...

  You played everything as close to the chest as you could, screaming and yelling yourself hoarse when the hull opened up by itself and more of the infernal things came climbing out to try overwhelming your fifty guys with sheer expendability.

  English couldn’t remember how many robots he’d personally shot. Or how many Al directives to move here or there or hit the deck or run like hell he’d obeyed. English’s Delta Associate AI was better at commanding this mission than he was. And they both knew it–if his Delta Associate knew anything at all.

  But it was English who had to talk to Trask, when Trask’s plot point orders brought him to direct intercept with five telerobots trying to make off with Guiness’s corpse in full x-class armor.

  The ported real-time view burst onto both of their visors at once and English was shaking with suppressed combat reactions: he wanted to shoot, but it was too dangerous; go over there himself and help Trask.

  But two of his three-teams were closer, and all he could do was call them down.

  No overhead fire from the NOCM was going to help them, because anything that would take out these robots would take out Redhorse’s coms, life-support, weapons–and English’s Marines. Line of sight. All the enemy fiber optics terminated in electronic hardware. To take out enemy hardware, you risked taking out your own: fratricide.

  Coms were dicey, by now. Hand signals and simulated returns were replacing real-time field-of-fire grids on English’s screen because his AI had made some fucking command decision. English had an override switch. He could pull his Delta Associate’s plugs and call his own plays without technoassist. But he was afraid to: his Delta Associate knew this enemy better than he did.

  He couldn’t hear anything but his own breathing, so he realized how ragged it was.

  English pulled up a physio scan and blinked at what he saw: his pulse rate was 140, his chemistries looked like they belonged to a rapist on the rampage, and he’d lost three liters of water from his body mass. All in fourteen and one-half meters of combat. His oxygen-consumption rate was high, too, but that was a blessing: otherwise, as spiked as he was, he might wonder if he were still alive.

  But looking around him he saw wonder of wonders; that the skin of the Syndicate vessel was free of moving enemy robots. One point for Redhorse.

  He tried an all-com on a backup system and got a weak response from Sawyer: “Headcount, Sawyer?”

  “Captain ... I make it one dead, two wounded but moving, and three down inside already.”

  “Let’s finish it.” He wanted to go down into that hive full of hostile robotics about as much as he’d want to sleep in a Weasels’ den. Less, maybe. At least the Weasels hurt when they died.

  He hated this fucking AI war. English had wanted to fight–and kill–Weasels, once; furry, vicious enemies with atrocious natures and a taste for human anatomy. He’d never wanted to fight electro-intelligences. Or humans.

  Now the powers that were had decreed that the Fleet and its Marines fight side by side with Weasels against the Weasels’ former oppressors. English didn’t get it: humans should be siding with humans the way he saw it.

  Sometimes he wished he would find some guy from the Syndicate inside one of these space cans his ER company opened up for SERPA and OPSCOM and ISA and all the other acronymous spookish organizations, so he could ask a Syndicate human what the hell went wrong and why they were fighting each other.

  But then at other times English remembered who and what he was: a Marine Reaction captain whose company was shoehorned into a Fleet destroyer.

  Marine or no, Toby English had never wanted to kill people. He still didn’t think it was any part of his job. The occasional personal enemy, such as a certain spook named Grant, maybe–but not humans in general. Killing men you didn’t know and had no personal reason to kill was murder. Grant and his buddies from Eight Ball Command had made murderers out of English’s 92nd, and then turned them into a special techno-commando outfit, and English couldn’t do anything about that.

  But if Toby ever got some Syndicate enemy in his sights, and the guy really was a human being, he was going to ask the megabuck question: How come we aren’t negotiating some kind of settlement?

  He couldn’t figure why not, and nobody on his own side would tell him. If the Syndicate was a human society, you could trade with it. If you could trade with it, you didn’t need to fight wars of extermination over turf and assets and raw materials.

  It just didn’t figure.

  But this wasn’t the day English was going to get an answer to his question. Once they’d cut through the Faraday-cage shielding, there was nothing inside the huge hull of the Syndicate vessel but more robots, in a dark, airless space that only infrared would illuminate well enough to suit English.

  No people in here. Not a single Syndicate human. Just robots. Robots of every kind and some of no kind he’d ever seen, working in conf
igurations he didn’t understand.

  But his AI did. Once they’d shot whatever attacked them, English’s Associate directed what was left of the 92nd to take out particular stations and boxes and melt huge ropes of cabling as thick as a man, made up of a billion strands of hair.

  During the search and destroy, English had to watch his C&C grid, trying to ensure that none of his guys disabled each other, shooting line-of-sight beams. And the whole while, somebody was humming in the emergency com, and somebody else was breathing too deeply, and coughing, a burbling cough full of far-too-much liquid.

  During the entire sortie inside the Syndicate vessel, English couldn’t raise a soul from the Haig or the NOCM that his AI insisted was still waiting above.

  When they’d gutted the ship and English’s Delta Associate had what it wanted, the AI in his helmet said, ”Resume Command, Delta Two.”

  He hated his Associate every now and again. He’d programmed his not to talk to him except when absolutely necessary. Its voice added insult to injury.

  And injuries they had. Not just fried equipment. Guys microwaved, irradiated, half-cooked–burned so badly through their suits that they sobbed or groaned when they moved. And two down from massive equipment failure.

  But once you were out of the hull and under the stars, you could try telling yourselves it was worth it: the NOCM was going to be able to slave the Syndicate vessel and bring her in for study.

  That was the mission these days: acquire each other’s equipment, study enemy technology, try to reverse-engineer countermeasures–no matter how much hardware got fried or how many men lost their lives. ...

  English had to deal with Guiness’s corpse. At least, now that the 92nd was in the personnel carrier, accelerating toward the Haig, they had gravity. Guiness’s body wasn’t floating around loose on its tether, nudging English’s wounded and making them moan. He hadn’t had first Sergeant Guiness under his command long enough to know, without pulling the dead guy’s file, whether the poor bastard had a family for English to write some awkward letter to tonight.

  He knelt down over the body when they’d gotten it back aboard the NOCM and manually retracted the helmet visor.

  The face in there, staring at him, had exploded eyes. Somehow, once Guiness’s suit failed, a laser beam had hit him. In the human eye, a laser weapon’s beam is magnified ten thousand times by the time it hits the retina.

  English closed his own eyes. The mess was enough to make you want to retch.

  He slammed Guiness’s faceplate back down and stood up. The body was no longer somebody they’d lost in combat. Now it was a clear and present danger. “Listen up,” he said, and he knew they could hear how harsh his voice was on all-com. “Fratricide problems are getting out of hand with this equipment. Guiness’s countermeasures were fried and useless before he died. Or he wouldn’t have died. So we killed him, girls. One of us. Some of us. Nobody in particular. No need for an investigation. Just keep in mind where your butts are, or we’re going to lose more of us to our own weapons than to these fucking robots.”

  He went forward, taking off his helmet rebelliously. It was half-fucked, anyway. Ducking onto the flight deck, he saw Sawyer standing guard over the two angry, but now free to fly, Fleet pilots.

  “Hi, fellas,” English said as both heads turned his way. “You got something to say to me?” English still wore his kinetic kill pistol–always did. And as much as he hated killing humans, right now the two pilots who’d decided that saving their own asses was worth aborting English’s mission with three of his men on an enemy hull in space weren’t, to his mind, humans.

  They were some lower form of life.

  Something must have showed in his eyes. Both pilots turned around stiffly, without a word of complaint.

  Sawyer said, “Hey, sir, you, might want to get your messages.”

  “Just fucking tell me, okay, Sawyer? Whatever it is, it can’t be so bad I need to hear it through this fritzy gear–it’ll take me too long to find somethin’ in this helmet that works the way it should.”

  “Yes, sir.” Crisp. Taut. Cold as the space envelope around them.

  As he really looked at Sawyer for the first time in hours, English caught a glimpse out the viewport of the planet called Khalia below. Who’d have thought they’d be fighting to protect an alien stronghold? Nothing about this war made sense. ...

  “Sir–Toby, the Haig wants to know if we’ll stop by the One-Twenty-First’s ground coordinates on our way.”

  “Ain’t on our way. Your gear must be in better shape than mine. Or do we not have wounded back there? I could have sworn–”

  “Sir, Manning and TA went out there, to see what they could do for the One-Twenty-First. There was a big bang and now we’ve got a no-contact throughout a ten-klick area.”

  English leaned back against the wall. “Let’s get there, Sawyer. You can brief me on the way.”

  He was filled with a weariness that was like something he’d felt before, only he’d never felt anything like this before. His gear was so heavy he had to put a hand on one of the pilot’s couches.

  And his heart felt it didn’t want to beat. No contact throughout a ten-klick area.

  Well, why the hell not? It was Saturday, wasn’t it? English always hated to do dual missions on the weekend. He tried to remember what was the last thing he’d said to Cleary, and then gave up. He’d given her permission to do any damned thing she wanted.

  With his blessing. He just hadn’t figured she’d want to go try getting killed.

  “How about casualty signs–sensoring readouts?” he managed to croak.

  “Nothing. Some kind of backspill from the lobes of the non-nuclear EMP and TRE they were using. ... The reflectivity of some source was enough to knock out everything in line of sight up to low orbit. We lost the overhead sensors in that area as well. We’re lucky we didn’t lose a manned spacecraft.”

  “Lucky,” English murmured. That was nice to hear. It didn’t matter how good you were, these days, if you weren’t lucky.

  * * *

  When English’s crippled outfit got to the coordinates of the 121st’s distress signal and Manning and Cleary’s subsequent rescue mission, English couldn’t see any signs of life at first.

  He kept coaxing his Delta Associate into some kind of delicate linkage with the Haig overhead, but they’d lost all the piggyback relays when they lost the geostationary comsat, and his Delta was full-up with mission data, still trying to self-repair all the damage its circuits had taken in the Syndicate engagement.

  But the NOCM was plenty capable, yet. She was SERPA-spec, and when Sawyer booted the navy copilot out of his way and sat at the weapons officer’s station, English realized how much his ER Commandos had learned since they’d gone back to school.

  And, English knew from the way his own body felt, you couldn’t expect the results from an unconcerned navy pilot that you could from a Marine with a mission.

  Sawyer and Manning had been an item since prehistory–way back when Sawyer was a sergeant and Toby was a lieutenant and they were collecting Weasel tails for their coup-coats.

  “You go on aft, too,” English told the navy pilot, who was glad enough to leave, since he was probably still expecting a 10mm slug in the back of the neck for trying to bug out while English had three men on that spaceborne LZ.

  English had half a mind to do that still, the way he was feeling. Just because the pilots weren‘t complaining yet didn’t mean they wouldn’t later. But the mission was so successful, in Fleet terms, maybe you could let it go on faith. The Syndicate captive was parked at the Haig by now.

  English had personally turned the Syndicate ship’s control over to Jay’s Operations Control as soon as Sawyer had briefed them. He’d had to do that before he could get an update on the 121st’s situation.

  Since he’d gotten it, everything that was happening to him was about a hundred kilometers away and badly attenuated. He knew Sawyer was in that same state, one you achieved only i
n certain kinds of combat–when you were so overloaded that you either functioned at twice normal efficiency or half.

  They were lucky, he and Sawyer, that they had some goddamn thing to do that seemed like it was going to help.

  But since what they were doing was basically electro-reconnaissance and damage control, it only took the part of your brain that got used to interfacing intimately with special electronics.

  English could feel his suit recalibrating itself to steal capability from the NOCM’s undamaged circuitry, as if his Delta Al was telling him what it was doing.

  As they swept down over the fire zone at last, electro-optics on full magnification and taking visual scans, English wasn’t the least worried about getting shot at by whatever had blown this place to hell. There was enough residual damage that they had a good picture of what had happened.

  It just wasn’t a very survivable picture, if what they were guessing had been the case.

  “Sawyer,” he said softly, “all that rock and dirt and such might be our best hope.”

  Sawyer, his helmet on, visor up, trailing a lead into the console, turned his head. “You think they could have survived the planet-wrecker going off, huh?” Hopeful. A kid looked at him out of Sawyer’s sick eyes.

  “We got another, what, three klicks to overfly. The One-Twenty-First would have been in bunkers. When Manning and Cleary overflew low with a gigawatt of non-nuclear EMP beam and TRE management, my guess is they took out the threat that had the One-Twenty-First yelling for help.

  ”Yeah, and if the beam was on switchable, it went right down that straight-arrow excavation and tripped the interrupt circuit on the planet-wrecker. One booby trap, one hell of a subterranean explosion.” Sawyer’s blue jaw was bristling with hairs and shiny with sweat. It was so quiet on the flight deck that English could hear the sand papery sound as Sawyer rubbed his callused palm over his chin to mask whatever expression he couldn’t control.

  They were a sorry pair, up here looking for their women and their friends and half hoping they weren’t going to find their worst-case assessment.