Riding the Red Horse

by Christopher Nuttall

  The Marines looked at each other, confused.

  “Does he think we're surrendering to him?” Baudet asked on the team channel. “Maybe he's got a bug in his programming.”

  “Shut up,” Sarge barked.

  “Thank you for the offer, but we will respectfully decline.” Lieutenant Bosson placed his hands on his armored hips. “All right. Who are you, why do you claim to possess such an authorization, and how many more Unity soldiers are there on the planet and in Pandoria? You may address me as 'Lieutenant'.”

  The posthuman responded with a stream of unintelligible high-pitched electronic gibberish.

  “How about you try that again, in a language we understand. You should be aware that if you will not divulge your name, rank, and identification, I have the right under the Treaty of Alzakhar to have you shot as a spy, your various accoutrements notwithstanding.”

  One of the men accompanying the lieutenant, Sergeant Daniels, Tower thought, pressed his fist to the back of the prisoner's skull. There was an audible click as projectile rifle in his right forearm auto-loaded.

  “His what?”

  “All the machine whatnot.”

  “Oh, right.”

  “Will you two shut it?”

  “Sorry Sarge.”

  “Our apologies, Lieutenant. Our name is Anzine Y849-34H2-2B77-848K. Our rank is the equivalent of a captain in the Rhysalani Armed Forces. Our identification is identical to our name; we do not differentiate between name and identity as you do.”

  “Of course you don't. How many are there in your cadre operation?”

  “We are not required to tell you that, Lieutenant.”

  “That's true, you're not. But this is one of your comm centers, and I expect there is a good bit of information on those machines I'm informed you've got in the basement. So, we're going to get the information anyhow, and if you simply tell me how many of you there are and where you are located, you'll save me the trouble of killing large quantities of Pandorians hunting them down.”

  “We are afraid we do not share your concern for your fellow semi-evolved, Lieutenant.”

  The lieutenant stared silently at the posthuman for a long moment. It seemed as if a full kilosec passed before he spoke again, although it wasn't nearly that long by Tower's running mission clock. “I've ordered an orbital strike on one of our tertiary targets. It is going to kill a large quantity of Pandorians, many of them non-combatants, as well as however many of your kind are present in that location. It will take place in thirty seconds. And after it takes place, I will issue a no-quarter order for all non-Pandorian military personnel, yourself excluded, as you have already been taken prisoner. Unless you start talking now.”

  Metal eyes met mirrored shield. Neither blinked. There were perhaps ten seconds remaining when the prisoner nodded and lifted his bound hands behind his back.

  “You win, lieutenant. Call off the orbital strike. Free our hands and we will give you the information you seek concerning the current locations and status of all Unity personnel on the planet.”

  The lieutenant nodded at the sergeant, who slashed through the plasmetal zips with a laserblade. The cyborg held out one finger, and peeled both glove and pseudoflesh back to reveal what looked like a standard XSB interface. He held it up and waggled it, daringly.

  “Where would you like us to insert it, Lieutenant?”

  Tower couldn't help it. He laughed. The lieutenant did not.

  “What about the viral codes?” Fire asked on the team channel.

  “He'll scan it first, officers have AIs equipped to handle that sort of stuff,” Sarge answered. And indeed, the lieutenant produced a device that was unattached to his suit, inserted the prisoner's finger-interface into it, then examined the readout. He nodded, satisfied, then extruded an interface cord from the device that he plugged into his own suit.

  Fire looked at Tower, and they both shook their heads in unison. Maybe their AIs were smart enough to quarantine any electronic attacks, but what if they weren't? On the other hand, if the information was good, it would help them get the mission done faster, and at less risk. Tower shrugged. Either way, it wasn't his call. And it seemed as if the lieutenant had made the right one, because in a matter of seconds, Tower saw his mission parameters updated as the strat-AIs in the orbital op center reassessed the situation and revised their objectives.

  Certainly the lieutenant seemed pleased.

  “Sidran, Marshall, escort the prisoners to the designated area, then rejoin your team here. Howe, Carpenter, while they're doing that, I want every piece of information on those machines in the comm center uploaded to orbit for analysis. Quarantine it. Everyone else, you know what to do. Let's move out!”

  Tower followed Sarge and Ready out the gaping hole that had once been a door. He glanced back at the Unity officer, and saw the cyborg was coolly staring at them, its secret thoughts safely ensconced behind inhuman metal eyes.

  The Pandorians fell back before their advance, but the Marines met stiffer resistance as they approached the spaceport that was their new objective. The Pandorians had brought up their mobile artillery and were augmenting it with a pair of low-flying armored hovercraft. Tower wasted two of his remaining eleven missiles trying to bring them down before he realized they were being protected from laser-lock by some sort of sophisticated jamming equipment. Unity, no doubt. They were just a minor annoyance, however, as their armor was too light to permit them to come within range of the twin flechette cannons of Fire and the other gunners. The real problem was the mobile artillery, which were Cobras armed with large-bore fusion cannons. Between their agility and their firepower, they were able to keep the Marines pinned down and unable to advance towards the complex in which the Unity had set up its command center.

  “Hit the dirt and shade your screens,” Sarge warned as two bright blue explosions detonated two hundred meters to their left. “The lieutenant is calling in the orbital. And turn off your sonics!”

  They hastened to obey. An orbital bombardment was the closest thing to an Act of God that Interstellar Man had produced since the sunbuster turned out to be nothing more than a ruse. A full FFE by an assault cruiser made being caught outside with a savage thunderstorm directly overhead seem like an afternoon at the beach by comparison.

  When it hit, the ground underneath them didn't so much shake as recoil. The noise wasn't something that Tower heard, it was something he felt resonating violently through him to his very core. It was as if a giant hammer of the gods was being driven deep into the crust of the planet again, and again, and again. And when it ended, Tower felt as if he'd been beaten, literally and physically beaten, and was left with a strange sense of his perceptions being permanently altered.

  Sarge rose to his knees, and then swore.

  “What's the matter, Sarge?”

  “Damned artillery is still there. So where did it land?”

  Tower undimmed his screen and cautiously looked over the ridge. Sarge was right. The three port-o-cannons that had been in view before were still there.

  “Oh, dammit, that can't be right!”

  “What can't be right?”

  But before Ready answered, Tower realized what he was about to say. Calling up the platoon summary showed an entire squad had gone dark. Offline, which under the circumstances almost surely meant KIA.

  “Shit!” It was bad, Tower realized. Sarge never swore on the platoon channel, he usually reserved his more colorful language for the team net. “Lieutenant, we've got a Code Blue. Repeat, Code Blue, dammit!”

  Tower could hear the other men swearing. Somehow, someone had screwed up along the way. Badly screwed up. The orbital strike for which the Lieutenant called had gone awry and taken out twelve Marines. Not even battle armor could withstand the fearsome main guns of a star cruiser. They would have been smashed like bugs beneath a hard-soled boot.

  “The coordinates were correct! I checked them twice, sergeant!” The lieutenant sounded uncharacteristically rattled. “I'm
checking them again…look, they were right!”

  “It's not your fault, sir.” Sarge was quick to reassure him. “Someone up there is probably getting an Alpha Charlie about now. Damn squids!”

  “Dammit, what do I do? We can't move in until we clear out those fusion cannons!”

  “Call it in again, sir. Navy can hardly kill them twice.”

  There was a moment of comm silence, broken only by the strange zap-barking of the fusion cannon and the subsequent detonations.

  “All right, men. Incoming in twenty.”

  Again, they hit the deck. Again, the wrath of a thousand angry gods smote the earth in a hellish series of gargantuan detonations that left Tower feeling detached, almost dreamy, as if he was having an out-of-body experience. But no sooner had the orbital barrage ended than the Pandorians began firing again.

  “The hell?” Sarge swore. Tower looked over the ridge and was appalled to see scores of Pandorians pouring out of the spaceport buildings, counterattacking under the suppressing fire of the mobile artillery. “Lieutenant? Billy? Daniels? Dammit, where are you all at?”

  They were dead, Tower realized. About four hundred meters off to their left was a smaller hill overlooking the spaceport. Lieutenant Bosson, the platoon HQ, and Alpha Squad had taken up positions on the slope, behind the crest. Now the hill simply wasn't there anymore; great gouts of glowing, overheated smoke were rising from where it had been. He called up the platoon summary. Thirteen more Marines were now offline.

  Tower was bewildered. He knew blue-on-blue events could happen, but how had the lieutenant somehow managed to call for the orbital right on top of his own head? Lieutenant Bosson was right sharp, even the buck sergeants respected him.

  “The bastards knew!” Ready exclaimed, even as he crawled over the crest and commenced firing. One Pandorian dropped, then a second, followed by a third. At this range, he was one shot, one kill-lethal. “Sarge, they had to know!”

  “Who knew, the Pandorians? How could they know the bloody Navy bolos would drop their loads on us?”

  “They must have compromised our comm links somehow!”

  “That's impossible!”

  But Tower had the terrible feeling he might have an idea about how they might have done it.

  “Fall back, Charlie!” Tower recognized the voice of the company CO ordering the other squad to retreat. A new objective flashed in green some 10 kilometers behind. “Sergeant Nichols, sitrep! Can you hold long enough to permit an extraction?”

  “Negative, Captain! We got a major clusterfugazi developing here. Code Blue! They're counterattacking, they've got eight, no, nine Cobras, my effectives count is well over 100 and climbing, and I've got fuck-all to stop them! Arrow, bogey at three-thirty!”

  Tower stopped firing his plasma and looked up to see a hovercraft swooping down in their direction, lasers blazing. He still couldn't achieve a proper lock, so he lined up the crosshairs manually and dumb-fired four missiles in quick succession, figuring there was no point in saving them for when he was dead. Three of them missed, but one struck home, and the hovercraft suddenly spun into a twisting dive as it ceased to defy gravity. A second hovercraft he hadn't seen abruptly pulled up and turned away before he could even take aim at it. Score one for the old school, he thought to himself.

  Even so, the situation was still desperate.

  “We've lost contact with Lieutenant Bosson. Do you know where he is, Sergeant?”

  “He's dead, sir! I told you, we just had two bloody Code Blues!”

  “Do you want to try another orbital?”

  “Negative, Captain! Hell, no! I think they're inside our system and screwing with the artillery coordinates somehow. Lieutenant Bosson called the last one right onto his own HQ!”

  “Inside our system? That's not possible, sergeant. Why do you think that?”

  “Sir, all I know is they were counterattacking before we even got our heads out of the dirt! They knew it was going to hit us and not them!”

  “After the last FFE?”

  “Yes! Sir.”

  Tower grimaced as he swept his plasma at a pair of Pandorians and saw them take cover before it struck. They were the only infantry targets now in sight, as the enemy had apparently abandoned the frontal assault and were now moving to flank their position. It was only a matter of time, and not very much of it, before he and the rest of the team would be overrun.

  For lack of a better target, he aimed his purple crosshair at one of the Cobras and discovered it would lock. Apparently the Unity hadn't thought about ground-to-ground missiles. For good reason, he discovered, as the assault gun's anti-missile cannons shredded the Hellraiser's little warhead before it got within 100 meters of the vehicle. Then a thought struck him.

  “Hey, Captain, this is Tower. Can you patch me through to the squids' big boys? I got an idea!”

  “What's the idea, Private?”

  “I can lock on their mobile guns with the X42. If the squids can get a read from that, I can maintain lock and sort of paint the target for them. I don't know what that Unity snake is doing to our systems, but I doubt it can interfere with a direct homing.”

  “Hold that lock and don't go anywhere, Tower.” There was silence for a moment. “Good idea, son. They read your lock and we're going to try it. Just one shot for starters.”

  “Incoming,” an unfamiliar voice said. Tower presumed it was the squid.

  “Get down, y'all,” Sarge barked. “Except you, Tower.”

  That reminded Tower to dim his screen. He did so just in time, because the Cobra he was targeting evaporated in a brilliant blue-green flash. The noise was loud, but the ground didn't shake more than momentarily and this time, he wasn't disoriented.

  “Strike one Cobra,” he informed the Captain with satisfaction.

  “Bravo Zulu, Tower. Find us another one.”

  Another devastating bolt caused a vehicle to vanish. Then a third. The Pandorians quickly abandoned their flanking attempt and scurried back to the spaceport as orbital artillery took out three more Cobras in rapid succession. The surviving mobile artillery pulled back too, safely out of Tower's line-of-sight, before he could target them.

  “They're falling back to the buildings,” Sarge reported.

  “Can you give us a lock there, Tower?”

  “No problem, sir.” He targeted the building into which the most troops seemed to be retreating. The crosshairs changed color and the familiar tone sounded. “We got lock. Bring the noise, Captain.”

  “Firing for effect,” the squid said. “Incoming.”

  “I reckon we can hold now, Captain,” Sarge said a few hectos later. Most of the spaceport's buildings were burning rubble, with huge gouts of flame shooting thirty meters into the air.

  “Bravo Zulu, gentlemen. Fall back to Xray, Sergeant Nichols. The transport will be there to extract you in twenty.”

  “Roger that, Captain.”

  The retrieval transport, which was considerably squatter and better armored than its insertion counterpart, was already on the ground by the time they arrived at the extraction point. It was better armed as well; its high-intensity laser cannons drove off a pair of unarmed drones that had been following the Marines' retreat. In the interests of not leaving any men behind, Sarge had taken the time to examine the ground where the platoon HQ had been. But, as Tower suspected, the orbital bombardment had left no sign of human remains other than a few scraps of twisted metal that still glowed with heat, and quite possibly a little radiation to boot.

  “What are we going to do with the prisoners?” Tower asked, looking at the collection of thirty or more bound men. And at the one creature that was not a man.

  “Captain says to leave them,” the lieutenant overseeing the extraction said. “Pandorians don't mean jack and that cyberfreak will be more trouble than he's worth. The Duke doesn't want a diplomatic incident with the Unity.”

  Tower walked up to the cyborg, which was watching the proceedings with a supercilious smile on its thi
n lips. “It was you, wasn't it.”

  It said nothing.

  “Look, you know our techs are going to figure out what you did sooner or later. I know you did it. I just want to know how.”

  The posthuman shrugged. “You are correct. War is nothing but heightened selection pressure. By the time a counter is devised by your technicians, we will have ten new variants with which to take your unenhanced minds by surprise.”

  “So tell me. How come the lieutenant's box-scrubber didn't work?”

  “Let us explain it in terms even your selection-limited brain might be able to understand. Blue does not mean go. Yellow does not mean go. But put them both together, and, well, we expect even a fleshmind assembled through haphazard processes is capable of working out the rest.”

  Tower nodded. “Yeah, I figured it was something like that.” He raised his right hand and blew off the posthuman's head with his laser. The nearby Pandorians cried out as they were splattered with blood, brains, and bits of bone and metal.

  “Stand down, Private!” Sergeant Nichols screamed at him. “What are you doing, Tower? You can't kill prisoners of war!”

  “He wasn't no prisoner, he was a damn Trojan Horse. Besides, we don't have no prisoners, right? We let them go.”

  The sergeant shook his head. “I was going to put you in for a medal, kid. Now you'll be lucky if you don't get cashiered!”

  “Tell it to the lieutenant, Sarge,” Tower said. And he walked up the ramp of the transport without looking back.

  Editor's Introduction to:

  THE LIMITS OF INTELLIGENCE: WHY IT’S NOWHERE NEAR AS IMPORTANT AS THE SPOOKS WOULD HAVE YOU THINK

  by Harry Kitchener

  “Harry Kitchener” is a nom de spook for an intelligence operative who served for longer than he cares to recall in what he insists was a relatively comfortable role in a specialized arm of the British state apparatus. It is not entirely clear how he is defining “comfortable” in this case, since it is known that for substantial portions of it “comfortable” consisted of being slightly less cold, wet, hungry, and tired than a few minutes prior. During a career which he insists was almost entirely undistinguished, despite it not having been entirely without incident, he often found himself serving far from home and largely amongst foreigners. He wonders now, sometimes aloud, about his suspicion that someone was trying to tell him something. As it turns out, they were.