by R. M. Meluch
Farragut shook his head. He left Hamster in charge of the deck. He dropped into a seat at one of the day crew’s stations. Told Hamster, “Not sleeping.”
Hamster made a head motion in the direction of the now quiet maintenance hangar. “Sounded like fun over there.”
“I think they had a good time,” said Farragut, unusually subdued. He fell silent.
I killed Augustus.
Not sure he believed it. Seemed a fact. He knew by now never to trust the report of a death unless you actually see the body. This one felt real.
He asked Hamster, “Did we get any readings on the Striker during the time we had it?” Hamster checked the records log. “Yes, we did. Looking for something specific?”
“Any life signs?”
“None. When we got hold of it, the Striker was colder than the grave.” She looked at Farragut. “We knew that.”
“We did,” he said. “ ‘We’re just having a hard time believing it.” He had outdrawn a patterner.
That should never ever have happened.
A patterner’s brain was augmented to allow it to interface with a data bank and analyze the whole of its contents. The patterner was designed to use the human brain’s natural inclination to detect patterns and to order data on a level that machines could not do. Human insight was necessary to conceive of the need or to realize the impact of a data set before a machine intelligence could recognize it.
If, while pursuing an inquiry, the human mind encounters an unexpected pattern the human suspects could be critically important, the human mind—some of them—will chase that pattern. A program will carry out its task, then stop. A machine, when asked a question, answers with the facts within its programmed parameters. A human, asked a question, can sense something odd in the apparent responsive facts—something relevant but not conceived of when the question was first asked—and the human will look for more facts.
Telling a machine to look for “something that could be critically important” was just not specific enough criteria for a machine mind to retrieve all relevant data and then order it. Machines overlooked targets of opportunity. Because a programmer had to consciously see the opportunity and program for it before the machine could know opportunity when opportunity presented.
When creating the patterner mind—in a case of scope creep run utterly amok—the engineers gave patterners enhanced physical strength as well and then tailored a spaceborne weapon around them—the Striker.
Augustus had always rejected the term cyborg. He did not fit the definition. He was not a human being enabled to survive an extraterrestrial environment by means of artificial implants.
Augustus’ alterations did not enable him to survive. They gave him a very, very short life span.
But Augustus should have killed Romulus before he died. He should not have come up from the planet while Romulus still lived.
Farragut was missing something here. Had to be.
The pattern was all wrong.
23
THE AIR PRESSURE WAS higher, but after your first nose blow you didn’t even notice that it was any different from Earth pressure. The alien plants didn’t seem to smell much. Darb said that probably meant the native proteins had a different orientation, whatever that meant. Everything felt a little heavy here, including Kerry Blue’s own feet. The sun was too white.
Alpha Team got the go-ahead to proceed to their first target. “Rome don’t even know we’re here,” said Ranza, packing her gear onto her Silver Horse. “Move it out.”
There had not been enemy troops on Palatine since the war of independence one hundred and fifty years ago. All wars since then had been fought on colonial worlds or in space over stations, convoys, and outposts, never the home worlds.
Still Rome had not let down its guard. The target of the day was nearly impregnable. Alpha Team had been inserted on the planet surface to hit a manufacturing facility.
The site had not been vulnerable from the air. It was contained in a double energy barrier that excluded everything except slow-moving objects at certain points at ground level.
Inside the energy barriers were the compound’s solid polymer walls.
The factory made res chambers—one of three such manufacturing facilities on Palatine.
Security sensors on the rooftop watched for any unauthorized approach. Defensive weapons lay dormant in underground pits.
So far the place was matching up to the information Recon had given the Marines. The little spy bots had done their duty.
“Gotta love roaches.”
“Darb?” said Kerry Blue. “You don’t never want to say that around me.” The facility was also protected by its isolation. It was set in a prairie, convenient to nothing.
The team put on shaggy, tawny yellow camouflage gear and approached to the perimeter of the facility’s surveillance area. They joined in with a vast shambling herd of tawny yellow herbivores that were grazing on the high tawny yellow grasses. The Marines moved in at a grazing gait among the three-toed yaks. The shaggy hooded cloaks disguised their own human shapes. Recon had advised them that detection of a human shape or human motion would trigger the installation’s auto-defenses.
Closer to the facility the approach was blocked by a wide barrier of imported tanglethorn, planted round the factory like a corn maze—without any pathways. It was a solid barricade of vicious vegetation. Rip you to ribbons sure as razor wire. Unless you had a cool torch on hand.
Someone had not been thinking when he put up this barrier instead of razor wire. The tanglethorn grew tall and dense enough to obscure the Marines from the roof monitors’ view when they got close enough. And the stuff was easy to tunnel through. The cool torch broke down the woven thorny stems into component molecules that then formed a soft layer of litter at the Marines’ feet as they hollowed out a man-sized tunnel through the tanglethorn.The operation left enough of the tightly woven branches intact overhead as a ceiling to shield their work.
“Nice of the lupes to plant this shit,” Cain whispered. Recon hadn’t mentioned any Roman listening devices. The hiss of their cold torch hadn’t attracted any gunfire. They easily reached the factory’s outer wall.
Perhaps razor wire would have announced too loudly that there was something of critical importance inside the lonely building.
The installation was self-contained. Power generators and water synthesizers were all inside. The air in there did not need to be pleasant because there were no human workers. But the equipment did need cooling.
There were no dedicated air vents. Air came in with the raw materials deliveries that came in via deep underground tunnels. Sneaking in with a delivery had not been a viable option. Entries were heavily monitored and measured. Even the air intake was metered.
Exits less so.
The Romans could have closed in the waste water system too, but a decision had been made somewhere along the line to draw the line somewhere. There was a point where an excess of caution was truly excessive, not cost effective, and just served pork to some contractor.
The place was protected by spatial barriers, energy barriers, physical barriers, continuous monitoring, and exact measurement of all deliveries. That ought to be enough.
The Marines found the pipe where Recon said it would be. A large pipe that carried out industrial water, heat, and liquefied manufacturing waste. One-way valves kept the water from back flushing, and stopped the odd water rat from swimming up the pipe and getting itself dead in the filtration system.
Dak Shepard widened a pressure relief hole in the top of the pipe with an awl.
Alpha Team had come armed with robotic eels the boffins had ginned up in between games of Moebius chess on Merrimack. The eels were thin as minnows. While the rest of the team was already in retreat, Cain Salvador, the fastest runner of the Alphas, fed the eels into the pipe. Had to feed them in one at a time so no sensor could detect a potential clog.
The eels raced up current, as programmed, negotiating the valves and
turns, seeking air, but programmed to avoid their point of launch. You didn’t want one of those coming back at you. The eels were programmed to jump out of the water at their first chance.
And to detonate when dry again.
At the last eel drop, the rest of the Alphas were already at the tunnel entrance in the shadow of the tanglethorn, picking up their tawny yellow hoods where they left them, and waiting for Cain to come charging out of the tunnel like a cannon shot.
Don’t really care if the roof surveillance picks you up at this point. The installation and its monitors were not long for this world. By the time it identifies you as intruders and warns you to stop your approach, you’re already pelting a retreat through the yellow grass. Or mounting a yak if you can catch one. Or getting your mates almost trampled by stampeding yaks, thank you for that, Cain Salvador.
Meet up at pre-set coordinates. Cain the last to arrive, because there’s no steering a yak.
Summon your Silver Horses outside the area of the factory’s vigilance. Beyond the surveillance equipment’s programmed scope of interest, you just don’t exist. And off you go, close to the ground on your Silver Horse, listening for the kaboom.
Silver Horses left no tracks, except for a faint heat trail that was quickly carried away and dispersed in the prevailing winds.
The initial space battle had taken out any satellite that could have picked up a visual image of the fleeing Alphas on their ground skimming horses.
Somewhere along the way Twitch Fuentes steered around and pointed. “Mira!”
All the Alphas turned to look. Saw it before they heard it. The pillar of fire, straight up, sky high, blue and orange with transparent swirls of superheated air curling off of it.
“Wooly Bully!” said Dak.
“Ausgesichnett!”
Kerry Blue leaned forward around Cole Darby seated in front of her on the Silver Horse. “You German, Darb?”
“No, I just like the sound of the word.”
The factory going up in flames was one of just three factories on Palatine which produced Roman res chambers. Romans were as big on redundance as the Americans were. Which meant Teams Baker and Charlie were doing the same thing to the backup plant and the backup’s backup half a world away.
Any new res chambers would need to come in from the planet Thaleia—but only if the Thaleian ships could get past the U.S. Fleet lying in wait outside the solar system.
The Silver Horses drew a snaking path cross-country, avoiding all cities and settlements. They crossed a narrow sea in darkness under a chill rainfall.
Got themselves to the designated hideout area for a short rest. A place with tawny yellow grass where they could sleep under their shaggy cloaks. It was not raining here.
Woke before dawn for the next raid. “Would be a hell of a lot easier if we could just displace,” said Carly, a little saddle sore. Wiry Carly Delgado didn’t have much upholstery on her butt.
Seemed like the whole planet was under displacement jammers. All the ships in space were. No one wanted to be on the receiving end of a displaced bomb.
Dak checked his landing disk and displacement collar for correspondence. “Hey! I got a green light!”
“Dak, you boon!” Kerry cried, scared for his life. “They changed the color codes!”
For the siege of Palatine, all U.S. displacement equipment had been coded in reverse of international standard. Red was green and green was red. Green was not a good thing to see on U.S. displacement equipment down here. Green meant stop. Wrong. No go.
“Oh,” said Dak, disappointed. “Yeah. It just looked so friendly. It’s green.”
“Think of green gobs of goo gushing from your gut,” Darb suggested. “Okay. Yeah. That works,” said Dak. “I think I got it straight now.”
“All yous!” Ranza commanded. “Forget about displacing! There ain’t gonna be no shooting up a flare to get displaced out of here, ‘kay? Ground don’t get more hostile than this, ‘kay? You step in sushi, there ain’t gonna be no dust off. There ain’t no cavalry. It’s just us. Got that?”
“Why’d they give us these?” Kerry Blue flipped the displacement collar hanging off her Silver Horse.
“Shit if I know,” said Ranza.
“So why aren’t the Roman jammers on our target list?” Darb asked.
“That’s a lot of targets, Darb. Jammers are everywhere. Saddle up, boys and girls. And just so yous all know, the lupes got a real good idea we’re here now.”
The Alphas’ next target was Palatine’s data relay station.
The Romans had sensors orbiting all their colonial worlds throughout their vast Empire and around any other world they could manage to deploy a spy satellite. The sensors picked up enormous amounts of various kinds of data. Information from the sensors came in to Palatine via resonance.
There was no stopping a res pulse without knowing the exact harmonic. If you knew the harmonic, you could white out the pulse with its complement harmonic. But State harmonics were closely guarded secrets, and there was no taking a guess. Harmonics were infinite.
There were hundreds—thousands—countless—satellite eyes sending data to Palatine on unknown harmonics. The Americans could not punch out all those eyes, and could not stop the satellites from transmitting their data.
But the Marines could take out Palatine’s receiver station.
The eyes would still be staring but the optic tracts would be gone. All that information from all those distant eyeballs would not arrive at Palatine.
No doubt another relay station elsewhere (redundance being good and all) was receiving the data, but it wasn’t getting to this planet now.
Speeding away from their victory on Silver Horses, the Alphas were jubilant. Kerry Blue shared a horse with Cole Darby. Cole Darby felt her behind him. Kerry Blue’s hands resting on his hips. Maddening.
A man makes a big score, he wants to celebrate with a lady. But Darb knew who Kerry Blue belonged to. Pretty damn obvious. Some of the guys back on Mack, confused by the sudden drought, had gone to the MO to ask if Kerry Blue were not dying of some strange space ailment. Darb knew better than to try to celebrate with Kerry Blue.
Ranza Espinoza was female. Sort of. Ranza was off-limits because of her rank, and that was a good thing, because Ranza scared him.
Carly was kind of pretty in a lean hard kind of way. But she and Twitch were real close friends. Twitch was shorter than Darb, but wider and brawny. Twitch didn’t say nothing, but you didn’t want to be on wrong side of that hombre.
That left Darb dating Hot Trixi Allnight in the dream boxes on Merrimack. Trixi wasn’t real but she was better than a real shiv between the ribs.
Trixi wasn’t here now. Still Darb could ride the high of their demolition, feel the wind in his face, Kerry Blue back there laughing. Cain sideswiped them. Kerry Blue licked her middle finger and waggled it over at Cain.
Darb wanted to be Cain when he grew up. Except that Cain was younger than Darb. Cain was one of the top picks in anybody’s choose up game. Korean / Hispanic / white / black / yellow / brown mutt. Hell, there was probably some Cherokee in there too. Cain didn’t have much of anything in the way of body hair and he shaved off what was on his head. If Darb did that he was pretty sure he would look like a penis.
Kerry Blue’s laughing voice. “Darb, what are you doing!”
“Singing! Can’t you tell?”
Kerry Blue’s giggle. “No.”
Felt/heard the jarring bang underneath them. Kerry Blue’s grunt. Cold spot on his back where she had just been. Him sailing through the air without his Silver Horse. Hit the ground hard. Heard a snap. No pain. Real bad sign.
Heard words he only understood because he was wearing a language module: “Don’t move.”
24
THE PROVINCE AROUND THE ROMAN capital city maintained a facade of normality. By A now Caesar was aware there were enemy vermin on the planet, but refused to acknowledge they were of any consequence. As for the power, water, and communicatio
ns problems elsewhere, well, some inconveniences were to be expected.
He also knew that U.S. ships were somewhere outside the star system turning merchant vessels away from Palatine. He would just see how long the League of Earth Nations tolerated that. If the Americans could use the LEN as a lever, so could he.
There had been a few minor surprises, but Caesar Romulus knew he was winning this war. Today the Magister of Imperial Intelligence, in person, carried the head of Augustus to Caesar. It was not actually the head. That would be too grisly. Too psychotic. Rome was a modern civilization.
What Munda brought to Caesar was Augustus’ black box—the data bank that had been implanted inside the patterner’s head—on a covered silver platter.
The Magister of Imperial Intelligence was tall, severe, his face thin and hard like something carved in stone with razor blades. Munda had no ability to smile, not even an evil smile. His sense of drama was limited. He did not carry the silver platter over his head, balanced on one palm, or even have a servant do it for him.
Munda brought the platter to the palace in the company of three of his curiosi, agents of the secret police. They were admitted to a reception hall.
No holoimages shrouded this room. No illusions. No lightning strikes, of which Romulus was notoriously fond. Munda did not like holos around him when he was not the one controlling them.
This room was only what it appeared to be. The walls enclosed a wide and tall space in the palace annex, with tall Ionic columns, beautiful frescoes of gardens and villas and aqueducts, olive trees and grape vines. Sedate paintings, all of them. The frisky frescoes were in the bathhouse. The floor of mosaic tile featured animal portraits within geometric borders. Overhead soared a coffered, painted and gilt ceiling. Clerestories let in the daylight.
Caesar did not make the magister wait long, did not take the throne when he entered. Munda appreciated Romulus not playing intimidation games with his own Intelligence agentes.