Ellie accessed her neural implant and pulled up the standard available information. They’d been on the planet a total of twenty hours. Night was coming, and it would be twelve hours long.
She found Cain and stood next to him as he watched Brutus devour the rabbit.
“Jolly, what kind of light can we expect tonight?’ Ellie asked over the general comm channel.
“There are seven moons, but they will cast little light. I can equate it to what you would see on Cygnus VII under a crescent moon,” he replied.
“It’ll be dark,” Cain clarified.
“It’ll be dark,” Ellie repeated. “I’m so sorry, Cain.”
He’d asked for her help and she let him down. He faced her. “Dig into the guts of that bot and figure out what makes it tick. If we can’t blow them up or electrocute them, then maybe there’s something in there that we can use.”
She brightened and leaned up to kiss him on the cheek. She jogged off, in the shuffling gait the humans had adopted in the heavy gravity.
She asked for Bull’s help to move the destroyed bots to the ground near the shuttle. The big Wolfoid appeared and together, they added the newly sparked bots to the one they’d brought in the cart. Ellie lined them up, looking at the least damaged ones first, then used the blaster sparingly to cut into the front panel.
***
Rand, Starsgard, and Briz stood together on the weapons deck, the small room that the corporal called home. Briz had shut down communications with Jolly and linked directly to the base computer systems, bypassing the AI.
They didn’t need Jolly to shut the ship down as he had already done once. They didn’t need him to come unhinged as Holly had.
That bothered Briz more than he let on. Holly and Jolly were sentient, but had their shortcomings. The AI’s inability to reconcile themselves with moral issues was the biggest one. The ship’s crew had readily reached the conclusion that the bots were hostile. The Olive Branch wouldn’t survive long enough to talk with the bots and that was why Rand and Starsgard wanted to fire the first shot.
To Jolly, the mechanical intelligence of the bots was neither good nor bad, it simply was. If he wanted the chance to talk with the bot ship, Briz wanted him to have it.
“Is this the right course of action?” Briz asked, his vocalization device reflecting his dismay. He shuffled his big Rabbit feet while fiddling with controls on the screen. “I mean, is there any chance that we could win a fight against a ship like that? There are too many unknowns, and I don’t buy Jolly’s ninety-seven percent estimate. That concerns me the most. If we go down this path, we guarantee that we will create an enemy who is far superior, in space anyway. We can’t adopt a proactive attack course of action no matter what.”
The captain shifted uncomfortably, sighed, and picked something innocuous to look at. Starsgard was an academic who had been turned into a man of action. He preferred the cerebral approach and was leaning toward Briz’s recommendation, which was to let Jolly talk with the suspected AI that would be running a bot ship.
“Our people on the ground are having good luck with massed fire from the lightning staffs. But can we generate enough electricity for something a thousand times their size?” Briz prodded, already knowing the answer.
The captain knew that Briz knew.
“Exactly. Conventional explosives, of which we couldn’t make very much, would probably not even scratch the paint. We can’t generate a lightning bolt of the necessary strength. I’m afraid we only have one viable course of action to give us the best chance of surviving an attack by a bot army. Our AI talks to their AI and convinces them that we aren’t a threat,” Briz explained.
“I have to agree,” the captain admitted, nodding slowly. “Jolly worked wonders with Concordia’s AI. If that ship comes back, Jolly is our only real chance. Bring him back into the conversation, please, Briz.”
Briz’s pink nose twitched as it usually did when he was happy. The captain couldn’t look at him without seeing the scars on his body. The Rabbit had had some challenging times, but he’d always pulled through. The captain trusted Briz’s intuition when it came to the security of the ship.
The fact that the Rabbit’s big ears, head, and back were fluorescent pink only detracted slightly. Briz didn’t even think about the coloring, but the captain couldn’t look at him without seeing it.
“Jolly! We need you to talk with the bot ship, should it return. We are not going to fire anything at it or drop explosives in space. We have no idea what kind of time you’ll get, but we expect it won’t be long. It could only be nanoseconds before they are ready to fire. We trust you to make the most of that time,” Briz said aloud for the others’ sake. He was linked directly to Jolly and could have had that conversation at the speed of the thought.
“I am so happy to hear that, my friends!” Jolly erupted joyously. The humans didn’t understand how much their demanding emotional choices drained the AI. He would partition more and more computing power to the dilemmas, but that never brought him closer to a resolution. It only sent him into a self-defeating spiral.
“That’s that then,” the captain replied. “What do you need from us to help you extend your communications range or the bandwidth or even the volume, so we sound taller than we are.”
Rand smiled at his own joke.
“I don’t think there’s anything I need, Captain. We have the broadcast power and bandwidth for burst communication,” Jolly answered, sobering after his previous exuberance.
“We leave the ship in your capable hands, Jolly. With that settled, let us pray to high heaven that the bot ship does not make a return visit. We have people on the surface of this monster, and the question is, how can we help them?”
“We can’t,” Starsgard said ominously.
***
It had been hours since the previous attack. The group’s energy was waning--heads drooped and eyes sagged. Spence’s squad was still sleeping.
Cain wanted to wake them up while it was still twilight so they could settle in to ambush positions along the road, well before the bots made it to the clearing wherein the shuttle stood.
The major crouched and jogged to the OP where he found Flash standing up, leaning against a tree, and sound asleep. Cain vigorously shook the Wolfoid awake, but he wasn’t angry.
“That’s a new one, Flash. I didn’t know Wolfoids could sleep standing up. Are you tired?” he asked rhetorically.
“Just a lot,” Flash replied, mumbling, the vocalization device capturing it perfectly.
“Relief is coming soon. Maybe fifteen or twenty minutes. Hang tough until then. You’ll bed down right here, but at least you won’t have to sleep standing up. That was impressive, Flash.” Cain slapped the Wolfoid on his hairy shoulder, before leaning into the roadway, making sure nothing was coming, and jogging to the other side.
Bull waited there. He was gnawing on something. When Cain arrived, he took it out of his mouth and stood.
“Is that a rabbit bone?” Cain wondered.
“Thor wasn’t going to eat it,” the Wolfoid replied defensively.
“It’s okay, anything to help you stay frosty, Corporal. Your people will be relieved by Spence and his squad in about fifteen,” the major stated, making eye contact to ensure the message was received, then walking away, leaving Bull to his rabbit bone. The major strolled down the middle of the road, having given up on his attempt at tactical movement and stealth. He was too tired.
He wanted a stand up fight now, not later, but he knew that wasn’t going to happen. The bots weren’t going to come one at a time. They were going to come in a group and they were coming at night.
Cain needed to rest, but there wasn’t time.
He continued forward to survey where he wanted second squad to set up the ambush. The top of a small building. Tall trees. A ditch devoid of water. The beautiful world of Heimdall shimmered out of focus. He turned about, trying to understand why.
He heard the call come in over his co
mm device. He thought it might have been Bull. “The major’s down.” He wondered what the Wolfoid meant by that.
They’re Coming
Bull had the major under the man’s arms while Flash had his legs. The two Wolfoids carried Cain to an anxious group near the shuttle.
Ellie hovered, waiting impatiently for them to arrive. They deposited him next to one of the landing struts. Ellie was there in an instant, guiding him to the ground. He was breathing slowly, regularly. Brutus strolled up seemingly without a care in the world. Ellie huffed at the scruffy orange beast.
Daksha was awake and floating. The contraption that he’d been carrying on his shell was on the ground with the injured Hawkoid inside. BJ was in there, too, staying with Ascenti at the commander’s request.
“Well?” Ellie asked, glaring at the ‘cat.
‘Well what, human?’ Brutus answered gruffly. She continued scowling at him, but being a ‘cat, he was unimpressed.
‘Carnesto,’ she started, ‘please beat the snot out of the orange cretin.’
‘Oooh. No can do,’ Carnesto answered. He’d battled Brutus once before as the males positioned themselves for Mixial’s affections. Brutus was a mean and vicious fighter, whereas Carnesto considered himself to be a lover. He was a good hunter, but had no intention of tangling with the smaller Brutus anytime soon.
After seeing how Mixi was as a mate, Carnesto was happy that Brutus had won the fight. He had no intention of sharing that with Ellie, however, because she and Mixial’s human were friends. He’d seen how poorly Cain fared when on the wrong end of that tag team’s ire.
Ellie angrily waved them both away.
‘He’s fine. Exhausted, that’s all,’ Brutus told her while turning and deliberately putting his ‘cat butt close to her face. She took a clumsy swing at him, but he danced out of the way. ‘And you wonder why I didn’t want to talk with you.’
Ellie cradled Cain’s head in her lap and rocked. She’d slept twice while Cain had been awake the whole time. He had asked her for help and she was no closer to finding a solution. The technology within the bots was well beyond her. She had no idea where to start.
She couldn’t find a power source. Ellie had decided to look at the weapons and find a way to turn them against the bots, but she’d been two whole minutes into that when Cain went down. She knew that she had to get back to studying the systems, but she wanted to spend time with Cain first, caress his head and his close-cropped hair.
Whisper how much she loved him and missed him.
She was cried out. The trial of Heimdall proved to her that Cain had been right, that he’d been driving his people hard to get them ready. He had done what he needed to, but she hadn’t, besides playing his heart strings and getting her way. She apologized one last time, then gently put his head in the grass.
Ellie had to find a way to help Cain, to help the Marines.
She clicked on the flashlight that she’d found inside the shuttle, so she could see better to study the bots’ laser weapons.
***
Spence roused his people with kicks and growls. “Time to carry your own weight, ladies!” he called in a low voice. Tracker and Shady rolled to their stomachs and stood up on all fours. Zisk could barely stand.
Stalker and Leaper jumped to all fours and without waiting, ran to the shuttle. “Cain’s down? How?” Stalker demanded, angry that no one had awakened her, even though it had only been ten minutes since the Wolfoids had carried the major in.
“Exhaustion,” Ellie said without looking up from her ad hoc work bench. “The last thing he talked about was setting up an ambush far forward of where the bots had been hit before. That’s all I know. Talk to Bull, he was with him out there,” she told the two Wolfoids, waving her arm dismissively as she remained embroiled in her study of the strange bots.
Bathed in the final twilight, Stalker and Leaper nodded their thanks and ran on all fours, lightning spears slapping the ground as they went.
Bull was waiting for his relief, keeping his eyes focused down the road. Wolfoids could see better in the dark than humans, but the night was falling, and it was shaping up to be too dark for even their enhanced vision.
“He was down there, looking at the building and the trees,” Bull said in the Wolfoid language, pointing with his spear.
“The fire from above was effective. The surprise fire was effective. He wanted to combine both,” Stinky said as he thought out loud. “Stalker, take Shady and Spence to the building. Find your way to the roof. We’ll be opposite you. Establish the kill zone past us in this direction, so we shoot any bots from above and behind. If a bot comes through, we’ll kill it and move closer to the city. Then we’ll retrograde back to these positions. At some point in time, the bots are going to learn not to approach. Then we’ll have the time that we need for the shuttles to refill their tanks, and we can leave.”
“I don’t know about you, but that little nap was refreshing,” Night Stalker suggested, pulling her lips backward in a smile.
Bull was stone-faced.
“Get some sleep,” Stalker told him. She activated her comm system. “Corporal Spence, bring your people forward. We need to set up a surprise for our uninvited guests.”
***
“I see something heading into the system at extreme speed,” Starsgard reported to the bridge, alarming everyone who heard.
“Jolly, bring it up on the main screen,” Rand ordered, leaning forward. Lieutenant Pace and Ensign Kalinda joined him in focusing on the screen. Lieutenant Peekaless looked up from his systems briefly, but returned to his own consoles before anything appeared up front.
A dot, a speck of light, moved at the edge of darkness. The only reason they saw it was because Jolly drew a circle around it.
“Trajectory?” Rand asked.
“Calculating now,” Jolly replied and shared his formulas on the screen. They flashed and then the final number appeared. “It appears to be traveling at a twenty degree angle to our position at a speed of two hundred, fifty-two thousand kilometers per hour. The bot ship had been traveling roughly one hundred, forty times as fast as this object. We’ll watch it, but I suspect it is only a comet.”
Rand leaned back and exhaled long and slowly.
“Concur. I believe the object is a comet. False alarm. Sorry, Captain,” Starsgard apologized.
“Nothing to be sorry for, Starsgard. This whole thing has us on edge, but keep in mind, people, this is why we signed up. Nothing like a little bit of adventure to brighten your day!” Rand’s voice sounded upbeat with the relief of the false alarm. He tapped his artificial fingers on the arm of his chair. “Thanks you two for keeping watch. We need as much lead time as we can get. With that in mind, is there anything we can do for our people on the planet?”
“Nothing,” Jolly replied mirthlessly.
***
Spence had propped his handlight in a bush, turned it on, and aimed it across the road. Without it, he knew they would not be able to see anything pass by.
They worked their way through the building, past a pile of bodies, and up an access ladder to the roof. Spence had to help the Wolfoids up the ladder, but once on the roof, they had an unimpeded view of the road and the trees beyond. Spence stayed in the middle with a Wolfoid at each corner. They hunched down behind the wall and peeked over the top.
Stalker, Tracker, and Zisk were across the road. Zisk helped Tracker into the tree, but neither of them climbed very far. The Lizard Man didn’t take off his skin suit in order to blend with the tree. There wasn’t enough humidity for him to survive without the suit.
And they had no idea how long they would be there.
The darkness settled and it was as bad as they thought. The moons were barely lit in the night sky, unable to share their limited brightness. No shadows were cast. Nothing made a sound.
A flash of light. An image of horror frozen in that instant.
A laser sliced through the darkness and destroyed the flashlight. The view of a s
treet filled with bots was seared onto the backs of their eyeballs.
“FIRE!” Black Leaper yelled. Lightning arced from his spear into the middle of a bot army.
Lightning flashed from the rooftop and tight beams crisscrossed from both sides of the road as Zisk and Spence fired their blasters wildly into the mass of targets.
The return fire from the bots lit the sky like a supernova.
On one side of the road, the beams lashed haphazardly into the trees. The branches exploded as the water within superheated. The bots fired again and again, wave after wave of intense laser beams carved a wide swath through the treeline. A Wolfoid screamed as the trees toppled.
Night Stalker heard it but had been thrown backward by the first blasts into the wall they were hiding behind. The front of the building started to cave in. Spence, Stalker, and Shady scrambled for the ladder, making it to the second floor as the front of the building crashed into the overgrown street. The Wolfoids ran while Spence limped for the back door.
***
Black Leaper winced as the fire licked past the tree’s trunk, touching the scar that stood out on the Wolfoid’s side. Stinky had nowhere to go. The Wolfoid closed his eyes and clenched his jaw as he prepared to die. Something from below grabbed him and pulled him off his branch. He screamed as he felt himself falling. He continued downward and hit the ground, but gently.
Cygnus Arrives: Humanity Returns Home (Cygnus Space Opera Book 3) Page 14