Déjà Doomed

by Edward M. Lerner

  The commander’s lips moved—silently. Metal walls blocked radio with the base. The wall of rubble behind the commander blocked radio with the ship, and its intact (but by now, surely buried) umbilical relay. Until M’lok made her way inside, Watcher was deaf and mute.

  If she could get inside.

  There! Via an improvised relay through a succession of mobile units, Watcher saw the commander crawl through the twisted wreckage of the rear airlock, its hatches mangled and sprung open. (Over the same makeshift connection, Watcher saw the reactor was also smashed—a catastrophe for another time.)

  The commander’s helmet peeked inside the base ….

  * * *

  As soon as I can stand, I slap emergency patches over both arms and legs. Between near-fatal grabs by the enemy machine chasing me, and snagging myself on the sharp and twisted metal frame of the ruined airlock, the limbs of my pressure suit are rife with holes. I almost lose consciousness before pressure begins to rise. I need a fresh oxygen tank now.

  Only I do not get the chance.

  A telescoping arm lunges out of the half-flattened airlock, the pliers-like gripper snapping open and closed, groping for a handhold. In its blind flailing, the gripper glances off, then clutches, a twisted mass of thick wires on a power-distribution frame. All that broken and tattered insulation? That should have sufficed to fry the machine, but the reactor is dead, an utter wreck beneath masses of fallen stone. Instead of short-circuiting, the mobile unit uses its grasp to drag itself into the reactor room after me.

  One of our mobile units peeks into the room. Instantly, I have a line-of-sight optical connection, along a chain of similar units, all the way to Watcher. And it also has a link to me, because it transmits, “Run!”

  Instead, I pull a sturdy length of twisted metal from the wreckage of the reactor room. Gripping that club with both hands, I swing with all my might against the side of the robot’s turret. The club bounces off. As shock and pain shoot up my arms, I retreat.

  The alien machine rolls after me, grinding concrete and reactor shards beneath its tracks. I stagger toward the other end of the base. Silent rumbling, felt through the soles of my boots, suggests that yet more roof has given way behind me. But, a glance over my shoulder confirms, not soon enough to rid me of my obstinate pursuer.

  “The others?” I ask Watcher.

  “None of my sensors have sight of them.” It adds (in apology? As encouragement?), “But so few of my sensors still function.”

  “Have any of them been inside since the Fergash appeared? Had any contact with you?”

  “No.”

  I reach the main hall by the front airlock. Cabinets and shelves have been overturned, their contents spilled across the floor. Everything is mixed in with, if not crushed by, chunks and slabs of rock and concrete. As I dig for fresh magazines for my handgun, my peripheral vision detects motion. The Fergash mobile unit, relentless, its loose track soundlessly slapping the floor, has again caught up to me.

  “Commander,” Watcher shouts. “Into the control room. Now!”

  As I withdraw, our mobile units swarm. They climb or leap onto the enemy unit, only to be thrown off by the larger entity’s spinning turret and flailing arms. They scamper away as it tries to run them down, then scramble right back onto it. One crippled limb? That is nothing. Or two. Even trailing three broken limbs, our units hobble back into the fray.

  This is primitive combat: trial by metal claw and armored tread. For our part, there had been no reason to arm the mobile units. For theirs, the Fergash did not trust their artificial minds with advanced weapons.

  And so, our units scratch and pull until the enemy’s access panel springs open. Two units plunge arms inside the turret, setting off a coruscating fountain of sparks. All three shudder to a stop.

  My chest heaving, I take the opportunity amid momentary calm to replace my all but empty oxygen tank with a full one.

  I disbelieve any enemy machine other than this one escaped the cave-ins. But what if I am mistaken? I review and refine Watcher’s directions to our mobile units on dealing with inanimate intruders.

  Can I turn our mobile units against the Fergash themselves? I am briefly stymied. Obedient, privacy-observing, maintenance devices—never combatants—by design they have only low-resolution optical sensors. It will not do for them to attack Divornians by mistake. I settle upon describing several distinctive characteristics of our vacuum suits, and authorize our robots to swarm anyone outside the base in different gear. For any enemy discovered in isolation, they are to disable radios first, hopefully to maintain an element of surprise. Then, or immediately with any enemies found in groups, they will tear at extremities. As I have so recently been reminded, patches refuse to stay sealed where a pressure suit is most often flexed.

  At last I find ammunition clips. They had spilled from their cabinet and then been bounced far down a side corridor. With all that ammunition and also our one spare handgun, I—and half of our robots—crowd into our lone remaining airlock to go to the aid of my friends.

  * * *

  As the outer hatch begins to open, my mobile units stream before me into the lava tube. Rock chips fly as the enemy fires upon them. These Fergash, too, are poor shots. My swarm, scurrying, disappears around the bend.

  Before leaving the airlock, I activate the tunnel lights at full spectrum and brightness. Any Fergash intruders will have entered the darkened lava tube using their night-vision visors. However temporarily they might now be blinded, it will be to my advantage. In any event, I need light and so do my mobile units. While they are in the tunnel—and once the battle spilled out onto the surface, for as long as they have an opportunity to retreat into it—they will continue to recharge. In the present dark and cold of the airless night, their batteries cannot last long.

  Netted into sensors that survived the shuttle crash, I see enemy soldiers recoil, and then flee, from my mobile-unit swarm. Only then, warily, do I round the curve. And there on the tunnel floor, immobile, unmistakable in his green pressure suit, lies B’mosh. Telltales on his suit wrist leave no doubt: he has left us.

  “Goodbye old friend,” I murmur, fearing to find L’toth and D’var, also dead, farther up the tunnel. But I come upon neither friend nor enemy as I continue toward the surface. I step past an inert enemy machine with a broken tread—

  And its arms reach out, slashing at my ankles. I leap past, leave it behind; with that broken tread it can only go in tight circles. I have more urgent threats.

  I reach the mouth of the lava tube without further challenge. In the distance, by tapping into another remote sensor, I see Fergash and several of their mobile units skirmishing with a much diminished group of my own. The ground between us is littered with disabled or destroyed machines—of both kinds. But of L’toth and D’var, there is no sign. The regolith all around is too churned to disclose distinct boot prints.

  For now, I seem to be unobserved. (By eyes and cameras on the ground, that is. As for any eyes in the sky, in surveillance satellites, I can do nothing about them.) By a circuitous route, I make my way to the rally point. No one waits for me there.

  Hurrying toward the backup rally point, I come upon an unfamiliar chain of small craters. Splotches and streaks surround them, fresh regolith undarkened by harsh ultraviolet light. Turning on my headlamps at a low setting, peering over the rim into the largest hole, I see—

  Vacuum-desiccated body chunks. Only by the distinctive red tatters of pressure suit can I know this is … was D’var. Almost I vomit into my helmet.

  With grim resolve, I recover my friend’s handgun and ammunition. Nearby I encounter the burst remains of her oxygen tank and three launch tubes, all twisted beyond use. The warhead of one missile looks salvageable. I remove that explosive payload and stow it away.

  Continuing around the crater, looking for anything else useful, I see … drag marks? No, ruts and glo
ve prints deep into the regolith. It can only be L’toth!

  The trail leads me to him, flat upon his back at the secondary rally point. Blood spatter and overlapping patches cover half his abdomen. Here, too, suit telltales deny me all hope.

  Again, there are no words.

  The agony in which he must have dragged himself here is unimaginable, and yet, in death, his face is somehow serene. I leave him undisturbed. The familiar massive rock slabs, in counterpoise above him, shall be his eternal monument.

  I crawl to a nearby crater, stopping just below the edge. Warily, I peer over the top. With my visor at maximum magnification, the terrain is strewn with stationary devices. (Disabled? Without power until the sun rises? It hardly matters.) From the vicinity of the remaining shuttle, more Fergash are scurrying to the fray.

  The battle will not last much longer. When it does end, the Fergash will make another attempt to enter our base. To seek any clues as to the presence of my beloved home world.

  Not if I can help it.

  * * *

  The Fergash, the mobile units, and finally M’lok had disappeared. Now and again, from some of Watcher’s few intact and communicating sensors, it glimpsed battle, or at least motion in the distance. Mostly, in an information void, it extrapolated uselessly about what had happened, or at that instant was occurring, or might yet take place. And pondered the imminent moment when the first enemy warrior penetrated into the base and it would, as the commander had ordered, lobotomize itself.

  Once more, M’lok came into view of an optical sensor. As best Watcher could infer, the commander was headed away from the battle. To the more distant entrance into the lava tube? But roof collapse, surely, had trapped her ship, had rendered the base inaccessible from that side.

  What was the commander thinking, as she gazed down into the ravine? Watcher could only know what she saw: the telescope array, in large measure still intact; the shattered antenna with which it had monitored Fergash communications. M’lok herself maintained radio silence.

  Whatever M’lok observed below, her posture firmed in decision. She strode farther from the base, over a low ridge, out of Watcher’s sight.

  * * *

  That was the last time Watcher saw the commander. And with that realization, and the certainty of M’lok Din’s imminent death, long-repressed memories surfaced.

  In anguish, Watcher continued to watch ….

  Chapter 41

  From behind a boulder, I count and recount the troops by the remaining Fergash shuttle. Seven. By Fergash doctrine, the basic military unit is a squad of seven. Whether from fear or training, I would have preferred to surveil longer; either way, my declining supply of oxygen renders caution more dangerous than action.

  I study the terrain. Internalize their patrol patterns. Disable temperature control, preferring to roast for awhile inside my well-insulated suit rather than reveal myself to Fergash night-vision apparatuses. And then, in the utter nighttime dark, I skulk from crater to boulder to ridge. Eight-square bounding paces from the enemy’s shuttle. Half that. Half that again ….

  To my left, an intense flash! It is the salvaged warhead, triggered by the battery I short-circuited and left behind to overheat.

  A patrolling sentry freezes, turns its hideous face toward the flash. I shoot. Spurting blood, it crumples. Another dies in silence before a third notices the muzzle flash of my handgun. I shoot it, too—but not before it has opened its ugly snout.

  Only boldness can save me.

  As I leap forward, a weapon gripped in each hand, another sentry turns and the final three emerge from behind the parked shuttle. I shoot. They shoot. I hit one. They keep missing. And I understand.

  B’mosh built our weapons and calibrated the gun sights here. They built and calibrated theirs on the much more massive planet. Inevitably, in this lesser gravity, they overshoot.

  I give them no time to reason it out. Two more Fergash go down, and then I am inside the shuttle’s airlock. I shoot the last sentry as the outer hatch cycles closed. When the inner hatch begins to open, I see that this shuttle is, as it had appeared from outside, just as I had hoped. And just like the stuff of my nightmares.

  On the bridge, I encounter a single, cowering Fergash. The pilot?

  “Do not shoot,” it begs in its grating language. “I am unarmed.” Its voice is faint, pathetic through my helmet.

  I put a bullet in its head, then kick the still-quivering body to the floor. Straddling the pilot’s bench, I launch the shuttle.

  There are none left to protect. Only three to avenge ….

  * * *

  Watcher’s people had vanished. The last of the mobile units gone to the surface with the commander had also fallen silent. Two clusters of the enemy, victorious, converged on the remaining lava-tube entrance.

  Watcher prepared itself for the coming memory erasure. It might outlive the procedure—the Fergash willing—but it would no longer be … itself.

  And then the final enemy shuttle rose over the eastern horizon. Tearing toward the base. Hugging the ground. Spewing missiles. Strafing.

  Fergash scattered—or tried to. The shuttle circled the enemy, herded them together, picked them off methodically. Twice, a Fergash stood its ground—and neither one’s launcher fired! (Missiles too smart to fire upon their own ships? So Watcher surmised.) As enemy survivors scuttled to take shelter inside the lava tube, the shuttle headed them off. They scattered again.

  One by one, hovering over them, the shuttle roasted Fergash in the white-hot fusion exhaust of landing thrusters.

  And then, in a Divornian format, the shuttle began to transmit.

  “This is the end,” the commander declared. Somehow, she still lived!

  An enormous lifestream update began. Or, rather, several large updates. Because so much was happening, or from the extended periods of radio silence, or both, there were frequent gaps in the download due to buffer overflows in her implant.

  With the final surface target eliminated, the shuttle looped and rolled, streaking away as rapidly as it had arrived.

  “It is inconceivable that I will return,” M’lok continued. “But I will take more Fergash with me. I found this shuttle fully fueled. Their mother ship must be nearby.”

  Nearby, Watcher mused. How? Had the mother ship been orbiting this world, by now it must one or more times have come into view.

  But its Ship aspect understood. True, the great mass of the nearby planet denied synchronous orbits to its natural satellite—but there were exceptions. In five places the gravitational pull of planet and moon, and the orbital motion of a third body, could balance. A ship loitering in any of the five spots expended little or no fuel. One such parking spot was behind this moon, along the line that joined the centers of both worlds. And the commander was racing for the remote side of this moon.

  “Now the duty passes to you,” M’lok said. “You were made for this. To do—”

  At the worst possible moment, static erupted. But while the commander’s words were lost, the emotional overtones poured through. Rage. Grim determination. And overpowering, all but masking, the rest: resignation to her certain death.

  “Do what?” Watcher pleaded. “I must do what?”

  “Marshall your … units and other resources. Rebuild … needs rebuilding. And then … what I … not.”

  Rebuild? That seemed impossible! Its reserve power would soon run out. Even availing themselves of periodic sunlight, Watcher’s mobile units had neither the intelligence nor the dexterity to reconstruct the fusion reactor.

  And if Watcher somehow accomplished the impossible? Once more it implored, “To do what, Commander?”

  But before any answer came, the shuttle had disappeared beyond the horizon. Carrying the commander to her doom ….

  * * *

  On the surface, nothing stirred. On radio, not a whisper could be heard
. Within the much-damaged underground base, Watcher’s remaining mobile units were quiescent, conserving what little charge remained to their batteries. Hoarding its own dwindling power reserves, Watcher … watched. And worried. And waited. Until—

  The Fergash mother ship soared over the horizon. To dispatch more troops, surely, and so to occupy the base. Thereby obliging Watcher, per the commander’s orders, to expunge its memories. And thereby ensuring—whatever M’lok Din had intended by her last words—the mission’s utter and irreversible failure.

  Only those were not the commander’s last words! From the mother ship, in Divornian format, came: “They did not expect armed visitors. I suppose they rationalized as battle damage the approaching shuttle’s radio silence.” (Faintly, beneath the clipped explanation, Watcher heard intermittent booming. Fergash breaking into wherever aboard the mother ship M’lok Din now made her last stand?) And, triumphantly, “Those were fatal lapses—”

  There was the momentary hint of an explosion before the transmission ceased.

  And then, rather than descend, rather than disgorge smaller craft to land fresh troops, the enormous mother ship … accelerated. And accelerated. And accelerated. Through its telescope array, Watcher tracked the mother ship as it dwindled to a brilliant dot of actinic fusion flame.

  And until the nearby planet swam into the telescope’s view ….

  * * *

  One moment, the plunging spark is centered over an unfamiliar island, in the too narrow Atlantic Ocean of an era long past. A moment later, the spot flares brighter still, as the ship, its main drive still ablaze, plunges into the atmosphere. And the moment after that—

  Madness.

  The impact liquefies rock, melts a glowing hole sixty miles across, punches through Earth’s crust. Rock and magma erupt to beyond Mount Everest heights before splashing down. A shock wave taller still—the very air rendered visible by all the pulverized rock it carries—races outward in every direction. Ocean pours inward, replacing flash-vaporized water; that torrent, too, repeatedly, vanishes into an expanding column of steam. Farther from ground zero, where water remains liquid, a towering tsunami takes shape and sweeps outward.