by Mark Wandrey
It was missing one of its eight wings, and the armor around it looked like melted chocolate. Minu took out her tablet and held it out to the robot. With her thumb, she pressed the communication tab. “Report,” she ordered. The bot’s dimly glowing green eyes flashed twice, and her tablet beeped to let her know it was receiving data.
Minu heard a sound and turned toward the doorway. Luke and Gregg had joined William, and the three were watching her. Like William, they seemed unwilling to enter, as if what was going on was somehow private. The tablet beeped when the file transfer completed. Minu took a small equipment hard case from her pack and opened it. She put the instrument it contained back into her pack and held the hard case out to the bot. “Stand down,” she ordered. Its eyes flashed in understanding, and its wings buzzed. Despite the damage, it flew smoothly to the case and landed delicately inside, folding itself to conform to the container, and powered down. Minu closed the lid and put it in her pack. Logistics would be glad to have the expensive piece of hardware back in their arsenal.
She turned and walked out into the brutal sunlight, shielding the tablet with a hand so she could see the file open. Aaron joined the others. They waited patiently while she read and gave them the highlights.
“This bot was deployed with a frontier scout unit,” she read. The file was a log from the robot’s memory, which began recording upon activation just over sixteen standard months ago. “The bot participated in two small missions on previously explored worlds,” she noted, skipping forward, looking for anything interesting. She thought it unlikely she’d find anything useful. The robot’s memory was etched on permanent computer crystals, which were like regular computer chips except they couldn’t be erased. The bot recorded everything it saw until the memory was full, or someone replaced it with a new array. “Fourteen months ago, it went on a mission in the frontier to scout for salvage.” She paused to click the icon for the search file uploaded to the robot. The file revealed a piece of equipment she’d never seen, so she continued, reminding herself to ask Pip about it.
“It flew several guard missions for camps and one skirmish operation as a diversion.” Sure enough, the damage occurred during that mission. She clicked on the damage log and watched a miniaturized, bot’s eye view as it darted in and out of a wrecked town that looked like the one they were in. A small display showed complicated sensor data, as the robot landed and waited. Then it showed several lifeforms crossing its path. With blinding speed, the bot darted from cover and let fly a flurry of hypersonic projectiles, before spinning away. An energy beam hit it, sending it crashing through a window into a pile of debris. Per its programming, it evaluated the damage and pretended to be dead. The damage didn’t disable it, so it didn’t self-destruct. It waited until the lifeforms were out of sensor range, then circled back to its masters.
“Who was it fighting?” Gregg asked.
“Let me look,” she said. The images were very high definition, even on the small computer screen. She enlarged them and used a finger to control the image position, then scrubbed the video to rewind it. Energy beams flew backward as the view swooped in reverse over the targets. “There,” she said and carefully advanced the image. The enemy was only visible for a couple of frames, due to the bot’s flying speed. She backed it up again, froze the frame, and punched it up to maximum enhancement.
A streak of brilliant flashes lit up the target. They all recognized the effects of a hypersonic round hitting a personal shield. They could discern no real details about the target, but its serpentine outline, slit eyes, and bared fangs were unmistakable. “T’Chillen,” Minu gasped.
“Without a doubt,” Aaron agreed.
“Who the hell was fighting T’Chillen?” William gawked. “Who would be that stupid? I mean, wouldn’t we have heard? ROE say we run any time we encounter a higher-order species, and the snakes are as high as they come.”
Minu knew that. Every Chosen knew the species on the red list, and a hundred fifty more, either because they were friendly or, more often, hostile. Encounters with any of these species often resulted in dead Chosen. Regardless of the situation, they were under orders to retreat. The T’Chillen were mortal enemies of the Tog and, by association, of the humans. Minu slid her finger along the playback bar until it was almost at the end, then let it play forward.
The bot took a circuitous route back to its masters, minimizing the chance of anyone following it. Finally, it flew through a narrow window opening and hovered. Minu saw several Chosen stand as it entered, and she strained to identify them. Then she heard the “stand down” order. The robot turned and flew into a hand. The last frame froze, and she saw her father looking at her from the screen. “Dad,” she mouthed, almost dropping the tablet.
“Isn’t that the First?” asked William.
“You think?” Gregg snapped. Minu wasn’t listening; she was staring at the image in shock. Her father, missing for over a year and soon to be presumed dead, was in a message from beyond the grave. Or was he?
“What’s the big deal?” William persisted. “Haven’t you seen the First before?”
“Search the building,” she said in a hushed voice, “every square inch. Move the rubble piles. Leave no stone unturned.” Gregg and Aaron nodded and began searching. Luke looked confused but complied. Only William remained obstinate.
“I don’t understand what the big deal is. The First has been missing forever. No one knows why they haven’t picked a new one. He’s got to be long d—” He was cut short as Aaron reached back with his well-muscled arm and jerked William into the ruins by his collar.
Minu took a few steps and leaned against a mostly-intact wall. She began going through the robot’s logs in greater detail, looking for any sign of her missing father. He could still be alive, she told herself. At least he was alive when he sent the little scout robot on its harassment mission some fourteen months ago. That meant he’d been in the field for a couple of months already. If he could make it two months, he could make it till now. Maybe he was trapped or cornered? Maybe he was hurt and waiting for rescue? The bot could be an attempt to call for help. Her father knew that, sooner or later, a Chosen team would come looking for this cache. Somehow, her father had fought with the deadly snakes, and this must have been the only way he could get a message out. What had he been up to? What kind of mission would bring him up against the T’Chillen? She meant to find out.
* * *
Minu put the tablet down and stood up to stretch. Night had fallen over the city’s ruins, the light of the tiny, tidally-locked moon casting long shadows. She glanced at the chronometer on her wrist and realized she’d been working with the file for almost eight hours. Next to her were two empty ration packs and a fresh canteen. Her friends had cared for her needs without interrupting her. Minu knew Pip probably could have done the computer search twice as fast, but this was personal.
“So, what did you find?” asked a feminine voice. She turned and saw Cherise standing a few meters away. Between her dark skin and the black jumpsuit, she was nearly invisible in the night, but Minu could still make out the concern on her face.
“Not a lot,” Minu admitted and gestured to the computer. “He only shows up in three images, always handling the bot.”
“SOP,” Cherise said, and Minu nodded. According to standard operating procedure, the commander always handled the expensive scout bots. “When was the newest recording?”
“Just over a year ago.”
“Then he was alive after he was reported missing.” Minu nodded. “Did he include a file with his location?”
“No, that’s the frustrating part. They programmed the robot to come here and settle on the cache, then wait for a Chosen to find it.” She tapped her portal control rod. “In sentry mode, it’s almost impossible to detect, and it had enough power to stay on standby for years. Why send it here and not include a file or message for whoever found it?”
“Maybe they were in too much of a hurry?”
“Then t
hey wasted their time. The portal was already open when they launched the robot. I didn’t even get a look at the terrain. Earlier images looked a lot like the world we’re on now, but with sparse green plant life. It could be any of a thousand worlds.”
“We need to report this to Jacob.”
“Once the mission is complete.”
“Minu…”
“Don’t you start, too,” she growled at her friend.
Cherise didn’t back down. “They’ll understand. He’s First Among the Chosen, and your father.”
“I’m a commander now, and this is our mission. My father would understand that.”
“Even for a simple retrieval mission?”
“He thought this cache was important enough to hide; that makes it worth it.”
Cherise watched her for a moment, her expression indecipherable in the dark. Eventually, she nodded and turned away. Minu watched her disappear into the ruins. The sounds of shifting rubble and grunts of exertion drifted through the doorway.
Minu picked up the tablet and turned to head back to camp, then realized there was no need. A short distance away, Pip sat next to a small, improvised table working on a pair of computers and tending to a simmering pot of reconstituted rations. A trio of low radiance lights provided foot-level illumination around the camp. The lights would be all but impossible to see from more than a dozen meters away.
“When did you move camp?” she asked Pip as she entered the circle of light.
“A few hours ago, when you showed no signs of emerging from your self-induced coma.”
“Ah, I see.” Minu glanced at the computer data he was reviewing and shook her head. Not only was much of it meaningless to her, she couldn’t understand how he could follow it at the blurring speed at which the computer displayed it. “How do you do that?”
“What, this? I don’t read it all. It’s more like scan reading. I pick up the important stuff and shift it around as needed.”
“Is that all for the map problem?”
“No, this is a computer interface project I’ve been working on in my spare time. I’ve been creating micro-programs to better allow our computers to talk to Concordian computers.”
“That sounds interesting,” she lied. “What about our current mission?”
“My Mark One computer can handle that.” She looked for another computer but didn’t see one. Once Pip decided he’d confused her enough, he tapped his forehead with a finger. “The old Mark One computer, complete with factory standard processor.”
“You’re a freak, you know that?”
“That’s what my father always said.”
“What did he do for a living?”
“Butcher.”
“Huh, and your mother?”
“She made kids and cooked meat, most of the time.”
“So where did the brains come from?”
“I have absolutely no idea,” he admitted. “I went over our genealogy once but didn’t have much luck. Guess I’m just a wild card.”
“Well, I’m glad fate cut you into my deck,” she said. She could no longer resist the aroma of food. She grabbed her mess kit and served herself a steaming bowl of mystery meat stew. It wasn’t terribly savory, and the meat was a bigger mystery than usual. At least it was hot and filling. She quickly finished two bowls.
Minu cleaned her implements with a tiny spot of water and some sand before returning them to her pack and finding a place to sit. She took out her tablet and started going over the logs from the dragonfly-bot again. Before she got very far, she drifted off to sleep
* * *
Someone shook her gently, and Minu woke quickly. She’d slumped over in the chill night, and someone had slipped a bed roll under her head and a blanket over her body. Even though she was sore from sleeping on the ground, she felt surprisingly refreshed. The sun was just rising, and her team was standing nearby. Except for Pip, they all looked filthy and tired.
“I’m sorry,” she apologized, “I guess I passed out.” None of them seemed to care, except William, who looked at her resentfully.
“Don’t worry about it,” Aaron said, and he cast a warning look at William, who uncharacteristically kept his mouth shut. “We finished searching the building where you found the robot.”
“You find anything?”
“Not a thing. It’s almost as if the robot picked nowhere on purpose.”
“That isn’t entirely true,” Pip chimed in. “I finished my analysis of the map. I believe someone deliberately altered it.”
“There’s a big surprise,” William snorted, finding someone he could get way with giving a hard time to.
“It was a ‘big surprise.’ It isn’t easy messing with these maps. They’re tiny self-verifying encrypted data packets. It takes quite a bit of computer power to falsify one.”
“Just another test?” Minu wondered.
“I don’t think so. If you use our map and go to where the cache is supposed to be, guess what you find?”
“Nothing,” Luke said. “We were there days ago.”
“Yes, and you guys spent last night there, too.” They looked confused. “Some scouts you guys are!”
“Right!” Minu exclaimed. “There was a reason I headed over here, this is where the cache was supposed to be. The damned little robot was there all along, right under our noses, and we never noticed.”
Gregg slapped himself in the forehead with the heel of his hand. “Of course, we were so busy ‘looking’ for a short-range radio marker, we never really looked around much. I was probably a few inches from it and never even saw the little thing.”
“Who gives a shit?” William yelled. “We just wasted a whole day digging through this miserable rock pile, and it is the last place the cache might be.”
“Not wasted,” Cherise pointed out. “We needed to search to be sure.” William snorted and shook his head.
“So, the robot thought this was the right place, too?” Minu asked Pip, who smiled and gave a thumbs up. “We’re screwed.”
“Far from it. Getting confirmation allowed me to make a few assumptions.” He handed her a tablet displaying the map of the city. “The first assumption is, the map was tampered with logically, and not just scrambled. The robot navigates around known structures and uses existing cover. If the city map was randomly altered, the bot would never have ended up here.”
“Why?” Minu asked.
“If it found too many discrepancies between the actual city and the map, it would assume the data was corrupt or incorrect and return to the portal to await further orders. You can send these bots on missions without detailed maps; they’re intelligent enough, but this one had maps. The operator knew where he wanted it to go and how to get it there. It’s a safety measure, so the bot can’t be used against the team deploying it. If you mess with the data…”
“The map is no longer accurate,” Cherise finished. Pip gave another thumbs up.
“Okay then,” Minu said, “go on.”
“So, with that question answered, I tried to figure out how they stashed the loot. Either it was completely random, which seems very unlikely, or there was logic involved. There were so many possibilities, I spent several hours trying to write a program that would take them all into account. Kind of overthought it, I guess.”
“No, really?” Gregg laughed. Most of the others chuckled, as well.
Pip grumbled, then continued. “Anyway, I realized that whoever screwed up the map still wanted us to find the cache.”
“How do you know that?”
“The only part of the map messed with was three building locations. We know that from your recon. Data strings within the map hold any information added after the map’s creation. So, I tried adjusting those locations, using numbers that made sense.”
“You gonna take us to the end of this?” Minu asked, exasperated. Pip enjoyed demonstrating his intelligence.
“Sure. They used a string of numbers equal to the ID on the robot you found to alter
the coded location for this building.” The other scouts nodded. “But why go to all that effort to confuse the map user?”
Minu knew. “My dad wasn’t sure humans from Bellatrix would have the map. But if humans did have the map, the robot, and could read the robot’s ID number…”
“And that number is in human, English numbers,” Pip pointed out, shaking his head. “Your father is one smart cookie.”
“I don’t get it,” William complained.
Pip glared at him, so Minu explained. “The robot’s ID is in English; there are no other species in the galaxy that can read it. Maybe a few Tog or Beezers could, but they’d never be digging through a backwater world like this. Since snakes were pursuing his team, he didn’t want to take any chances they’d find this cache.”
“He did such a good job, he’s lucky someone found it,” Aaron noted.
That’s my father, Minu said to herself. She turned to Pip. “So, fix it.”
“Already done,” he said smugly and sent the revised map to their tablets.
Pip stayed at the camp while the others raced through the ruins. With the corrected map data, the cache showed up clearly in a building on the far side of the town square. They hadn’t searched that section yet, and the race through the rubble took several minutes. Minu nearly collided with several fallen walls, and her body was on autopilot as her mind spun. They might find a clue to her father’s whereabouts. There had to at least be a clue! The bot had sustained damage, then was dispatched after Chriso’s team got into trouble
“Flanking formation,” she hissed as they closed in, “weapons out!” She couldn’t completely discount the possibility of snakes being nearby, even after spending several days in the town. If there were, a headlong flight for the portal would be their only option. The team was woefully under-armed for any kind of real conflict, even if it hadn’t been against the ROE.
The young Chosen fanned out as trained, surrounding the building in moments. Minu confirmed they were all in position then raced for the door. There was no discussion about the leader hanging back; that wasn’t the Chosen way. She snatched the short-barreled pistol from its holster as she closed in on one of the remarkably intact doorways. She’d chosen the pistol for its superior maneuverability in close quarters. Besides, if there were T’Chillen warriors in the building, her rifle would be no more effective than the pistol.