With a whine, the drone’s own powersource came to max power, and Trace stepped back as her visor darkened, saving her eyes from the brilliant light. Golden sparks fountained, and bits of ceramic debris spattered the walls and ceiling, setting the insulation canvas to fire. The kid levered himself around in a circle, up and around the obstructing door, and in several seconds the two ends of his line met. He pushed, and the circle crashed inward — in about ten percent the time that human technology would have taken, Trace reckoned, having lasers nothing like as powerful and efficient.
“After me,” she told the drone, and pushed ahead, stepping carefully over the breach, her Koshaim levelled. Immediately ahead, she could hear the concussive impacts of heavy weapons hitting the far side of steel armour.
“Major!” came Aristan’s translated voice in her ear, as her coms finally made contact. “They are assaulting the inner doors, move fast!”
Trace ran, ducking under a half-closed airlock door and into the vault’s entry chamber. Past the disabled inner-airlock, the main airlock doors were on the right — big, four-meter-tall things that could admit the few working ground vehicles able to tolerate the atmosphere for a period. Before the doors sat one such vehicle, with massive, ceramic-steel tires larger than the rest of it, and a pressurised ceramic tube for a body in the middle. The entire chamber was flashing with warning lights, and a siren blared above the thud of explosions.
The left wall of the chamber was occupied by an enclosed, pressurised control room, and through the distorting lens of heavy-duty glass, Trace could see Aristan, manning the post. The empty canister sat beside a roller-trolley, overturned and empty. Alongside it were two sard bodies, one still feebly kicking, amidst a lot of blood. Further along, a secure container with special seals and electronic locks, and a third sard.
“Chenkov, control room!” she ordered, running to duck between the big vehicle’s wheels, and under its belly to a fire position at the far, rear wheel. “First Section, cover the door! Kid, stay in the rear and take cover!”
She clumped to the wheel and put her back launcher to the rim, rifle levelled past the tire as Kale clattered to the wheel’s other side, Kono and Terez at the other wheel. The armoured door bulged visibly from another far-side explosion.
“Major!” came Chenkov on coms. “I’ve got partial control in here, this room’s segregated from the rest of the vault systems, just as the intel said! I can’t do much from here, we have to get further in!”
“Awful lot of sard on the far side of those doors!” Kono remarked. “Sounds like they’re fully armoured.”
“Let’s hope not all of them are,” said Trace, calculating furiously. She hadn’t been exactly fast getting in here, and sard armour wasn’t as technically complex as human Fleet standard, and so was faster to get running. On the other hand, there was no record of the vault being successfully assaulted ever, and even sard were bound to get complacent. “Chenkov, report!”
“I nearly got it Major!” came the tech’s anxious reply. “I just gotta disable the emergency decompression routines!”
Trace just hoped he could close the damn doors again, or they were all going to fry. “Corporal Rael,” she called. “Status?”
“We’re nearly there Major!” Rael panted, as his Second Squad came running down the access tube. “Don’t wait for us, we’re a few seconds out!”
“Got it!” Chenkov called.
“Good, now do it!” Trace commanded. “Everybody brace!”
A new siren alarm wailed over the top of the first, as the big ceramic door behind the vehicle slowly rumbled open. Then, well further up the tunnel of hot rock, the second door did the same.
“Opening inner door now!” Chenkov advised, and the door separating them from sard fire ground open several meters, then stuck as the damaged surface refused to retract further. Heavy fire tore through the gap, hitting ceramic-plated walls and sending fragments spinning. Trace’s team returned fire, her suit’s powered arms absorbing the massive recoil with in-built ease. “That’s as far as it’ll go!”
“It’s enough!” Trace yelled above the noise, near-deafening even within her insulated helmet, and ceased fire long enough to grab the big wheel for support.
She couldn’t hear the third major airlock door begin to move, far up the entry tunnel, but she heard the rush of hot air as it came, hissing like death itself. And then it hit them, a blasting wall of air, and everything went sideways with a force like a hurricane, and the chamber shimmered like the inside of an oven. Her suit’s sensors shrieked and flashed in panic, environmentals warning of a catastrophic environment, surging pressure and temperatures, and the heat build upon her face through the more vulnerable faceplate, with a radiating burn as though she were standing too close to a roaring fire.
Twenty seconds, they’d calculated, from the layout tavalai Fleet had provided them. So huge was the pressure differential between inside and out that the air would rush in at high speed, and tear through the entire vault. Any sard not yet in their suits would die, and reduce the odds considerably. Then, if Chenkov could get control of the interior system of secure pressure doors, as he and Styx claimed he could, then Command Squad could move through the facility, cutting off different sections and isolating them at will, with their defenders. But if the doors stayed open too long, the heat and pressure would defeat even the vault’s enormous emergency air regulators, and the high-pressure pumping fans would fail and melt. And then they’d all be dead, slowly and painfully, as faceplate visors cracked and failed first. Phoenix techs had insisted it would be at least three minutes before that began to happen. Trace thought that if the doors could not be closed again, there were faster ways to end things than waiting for her face to melt.
“Twenty seconds!” shouted Chenkov, who was no doubt staring at the armoured windows in the control room, and thinking that his own, much less well-armoured suit and visor would fail very quickly in that atmosphere. “Doors closing!”
Slowly the furnace wind began to ease, then stopped completely. Trace’s readout told her the external temperature was now three hundred and ninety degrees celsius, hot enough to incinerate food rather than cook it. She could feel the heat now all over, despite her suit blasting pressurised, cold air in an attempt to keep her alive.
“Vault life support is maxed out!” Chenkov advised. “It should be down to a hundred degrees in twenty minutes!”
“Corporal Rael?” Trace asked.
“We’re all here!” Rael replied.
“We are advancing!” Trace told Command Squad. “Calm and slow, watch your spacing, watch your corners, keep it simple! Too fast and your suit will melt, let’s go!”
She removed a handball from her webbing and tossed it through the half-open blast door ahead, hopeful that all the tests they’d run on marine equipment, to see what would and wouldn’t melt, would hold true in the field. The ball gave her a brief scan of the room and hallways beyond, before a blast of fire destroyed it, but her tacnet was propagating now, and fixed the locations of observable sard into that tactical map, including the source of that latest fire.
“Full volley!” Trace commanded, and several marines stepped clear of cover to turn sideways and align backrack launchers. The missiles were loaded with extra-powerful warheads for this mission, all fragmentation for maximum effective radius. “Fire!”
The superhot air filled with streaking mini-missiles, which turned corners as they shot through the gap in the blast door, followed by a huge series of explosions. Kono simply ran, hurdled the lower-door through the gap, heading for where tacnet showed cover on the right, Terez, Zale and Trace close behind. A new wave of heat flooded her suit from that movement, as power systems devoted to life-support suddenly switched to heat-producing motion, and then she was hurdling the door and crashing hard to a right-side wall as the others laid down fire ahead.
The room was a wide chamber with double-height ceilings and multiple approach corridors, the walls filled with partiti
oned equipment lockers below walkways overhead, all flashing and glaring with warning lights in the heat-haze. Kono and Terez moved ahead on the right, mowing down sard armour damaged from missile strikes and disoriented from atmosphere breaches. Trace moved left with Zale, past locker partitions already drooping in the heat, as Zale shot a sard through one partition, detonating an oxygen tank amidst wall-stacked equipment that blew with a flash and rocketed to the ceiling.
In pairs formation Trace had the left flank, but refrained momentarily from shooting one confused sard stumbling within her arc, in armour but without a weapon as he fumbled among safety equipment and gave no thought to defence. Under extreme stress, isolated sard became confused and unreliable, and only reacquired strategic utility as they rejoined larger formations. She had no idea what this one was looking for, and leaving him standing at her back was impossible, so she put an armour piercing round through his spine and moved on.
“Next hall on the left quarter,” she advised Kono in the lead, keeping her pace steady, rifle panning for survivors. There were some unoccupied armour suits amidst the wilting locker partitions, and more dead sard, unarmored and roasted in seconds, chitinous arms wrapped over their faces in a vain effort to protect sensitive, multiple eyes. “Chenkov, get these other doors closed, we’re going left.”
“I got it Major.” One of the side doors came down. “The others aren’t moving, I think the electrics might be cooked.”
Tacnet showed Trace the rest of Command Squad coming through the doors with the kid, whom Styx had also cleared for several minutes’ operation in this heat. Then half of the chamber’s emergency lights stopped flashing, as two bulbs imploded simultaneously, then a third. Then a regular light vanished, and a wall panel exploded in flames, followed by an entire section of locker-wall abruptly caving in on itself, crumpled by an invisible hand.
“That’s the fucking pressure,” Kono observed. “I’m reading nearly thirty atmospheres, feels like walking in soup.”
Trace realised he was right — she’d thought it was just the suit responding poorly to the temperature, but the air was now so thick that moving through it was creating resistance, like trying to walk underwater.
“The fans are designed to clear a full breach,” Trace reminded them. “We have to make progress before we lose the advantage, sard will get their confidence back when they get their numbers up.”
She reached the left side of the passage she intended to take, and spared a glance back as Zale peered in, seeing the rest of her squad in cover behind. The kid prodded at a dead, unarmored sard, as though wondering what was wrong with it. Then gave Trace a look that she thought faintly accusing, as though only now realising what this mission entailed. ‘Sorry kid’, she thought. ‘But this is what you’re built for, and that’s not my fault.’
“It’s clear Major,” said Zale, and Trace waved him in, then followed.
27
Sometime after local midday, the Tsubarata medical bay holding the Phoenix humans came under attack from unknown assailants. Tavalai security assigned to guard the humans rushed to forward-deploy up the corridor, answering to desperate Togiri cries for assistance on their coms, and the sound of gunfire, and were abruptly cut off from the medbay by descending security doors. In the midst of running aliens and a lot of yelling, Erik led Lieutenant Alomaim, Sergeant Brice and Private Cruze from the unguarded medbay, leaving the fuming Private Ito in his bunk.
“How the hell is that even possible?” Brice muttered beneath her breath as they followed Styx’s directions down an adjoining corridor.
“Turn left on the stairs,” Styx advised, and Erik did so, and into a service stairwell — narrow, full of echoes and not intended for regular access.
“How does she simulate an attack on coms so all the guards believe it?” Brice continued. “I mean, they’ve all got some kind of tacnet, don’t they? How does she just fool them all?”
“Gunnery Sergeant,” said Styx. “You would not understand if I explained it to you.”
“I think she just called you stupid, Sarge,” said Cruze as they rattled down the stairs.
“Not stupid,” said Styx. “Just under-equipped.”
“Stupid,” Cruze repeated.
“Styx,” said Erik. “How many interventions like that until tavalai start to realise there’s no organic technology in the galaxy that can do what you’re doing?”
“Curious,” said Styx with what might have been amusement, had she been capable of such. “Second Lieutenant Tif asked me something similar.”
Erik frowned, rounding stairwell switchbacks fast. “When?”
“Quite recently.”
“You’ve been in contact with Tif recently?” Erik’s heart nearly skipped a beat. That wasn’t supposed to happen. “Why, what happened to Tif?”
“This is a distraction,” said Styx. “Second Lieutenant Tif is well, and her mission is progressing. It has been my observation that humans are easily distracted. You should focus on completing your personal mission first.”
“It’s been my observation,” Alomaim said grimly, “that some very intelligent individuals start to think they’re in charge just because they’re smart. Such individuals shouldn’t overestimate their own indispensability.”
A month ago, Erik was sure that Styx would have conceded the point. “At this moment, Lieutenant Alomaim,” she replied calmly, “you’ll find that my indispensability is absolute. Another three levels down, Captain.”
Styx’s route led them to a service crawlway that had been inaccessible from the Human Quarter, and should have been heavily guarded by Tsubarata’s network security. But as the humans stooped and crouched their way beneath the low overhead tangles of pipes and wires, the periodic doors opened without requiring a passcard, and the many cameras and motion sensors registered nothing.
“I have almost no access within the Krim Quarter itself,” Styx admitted. “I can get you inside, nothing more. Those network systems have not been operational in many centuries.”
“Can regular drones manipulate network systems as well as you do?” Erik found the time to ask. It seemed suddenly relevant, given how the Spiral was confronting the prospect of many more hacksaws running loose than anyone had thought possible.
“Only when acting as a conduit for my own direct uplinks,” said Styx. “A queen will need to be within effective transmission range, and drones can serve as relays.”
“But they’re not smart enough to do what you’re doing on their own?”
“Intelligence is not at issue. They simply lack the capability.”
“Could they acquire the capability? You’re saying they’re smart enough to do it?”
“The spread of non-preliminary capabilities among my people was partly responsible for our factional conflicts and wars. Effective AI civilisation requires the compartmentalisation of capabilities, least roles undergo an unintended expansion across the centuries. You might call it ‘mission creep’.”
Erik paused against a new security door, and wiped his brow of the sweat that gathered in the crawlway’s less-regulated heat, emanating off all the pipes and electrics. He accidentally bumped his partly-swollen eye with his hand, thankfully not so bad that he couldn’t see out of it. “You mean that drones’ capabilities began to evolve across the centuries? And this led to them… what, getting too big for their boots?”
The security door’s access light blinked green, and it opened. “Simplistically put, but adequate,” Styx conceded as Erik led them through. “AI civilisation has long struggled to balance the strengths of individuals against the strengths of the disciplined group. Some factions attempted to slow this evolutionary creep by reducing the intelligence of their drones, but this led to ineffective drones. Drysines have generally attempted the opposite.”
“You mean your drones are smarter than average?”
“Considerably.”
“And the drone you assigned to Major Thakur’s squad could eventually become very intelligent?
”
“All drysine drones are very intelligent. And yes, Major Thakur’s drone could likely have carried out many of the network security functions that Spacer Chenkov was assigned to do.”
“That might have been a more efficient way to do it,” said Erik, ducking under another set of pipes. “Why didn’t you give him those capabilities?”
“The same reason AI civilisations have always withheld inappropriate capabilities from lower functionaries. I didn’t want him getting any ideas.”
Erik glanced behind at Lieutenant Alomaim. “He can get ‘ideas’ now?” Alomaim murmured. “Great.”
The crawlway emerged into another deserted stairwell, and Styx directed them down another two levels to a door. The door required a high security engineering clearance, which meant it took Styx a millisecond longer to access than usual, and came open at Erik’s touch when she insisted the coast was clear. Another ten meters down the corridor was a door quite similar to the large, hall-blocking steel slab that Tsubarata engineering had opened for the first time in a millennia upon Phoenix’s arrival. This one had been closed for about seven hundred years, but as Erik ran he saw it was already open enough at the bottom for him to drop and roll under.
He waited on the far side for Alomaim, Brice and Cruze to follow, Brice wincing and feeling her ribs as she came up — a medic had given her a painkiller for the next few hours at least, and had told her to lie down and not disturb the fracture. There’d been no chance of that, though. As soon as they were all in, the door descended once more, and they all pulled small flashlights from various pockets — standard kit for spaceship crew who never knew what disaster could leave them all drifting in the dark.
Kantovan Vault (The Spiral Wars Book 3) Page 41