Space Knights- Last on the Line

by Emerson Fortier

  “That went about as smooth as it might have.” Bairn said. When it was just Charles and the execs.

  “I agree with Bairn.” One of them said. He was the Planetary Security Officer, or PSO, another old man deaf enough he had to yell in order to hear his own voice. “We should have postponed this meeting until the damn Kamele landed.” Charles looked to Bairn who shook his head. The PSO, Ferin Goor, liked to hear his own opinions in other people's’ words when he wasn’t paying enough attention to actually listen to them, an effort that usually caused him to scowl as he watched their lips moving.

  “You know why we did it.” Charles replied while Goor watched his lips and knit his eyebrows together. The knot that had loosened itself during the distracting back and forth of the meeting was tying itself back into a bitter ball at the base of Charles stomach. A green pain liquor couldn’t touch that made him impatient to get out of the room.

  “Yes. You don’t want these yokels thinkin they’ve got an opportunity to start something they shouldn’t.” Goor shouted. “Be damned if they’re happy though. A lot of things could go wrong. Might encourage em.”

  The Quinn Corporation was officially the Lord and Sovereign of all Marain, but laws that held true over the common folk, grew strange around the dynasty heads. They all had personal industrial bases. To build and maintain the Knopf dynasty’s ships, to serve the Avakoff bank, and a dozen other pocket industries, not to mention the dynastic estates. A few of the families refused to hire human servants, seeing automata as a statement of prestige and power, which it was in its way.

  All of these presented opportunities to circumvent the Quinn corporate monopoly on the planets’ industries. Distractions like an invasion were usually treated like opportunities by the dynasties. Opportunities he’d seen exploited before. House servitors reprogrammed for self replication and repair, ship maintenance constructs repurposed for building docks and quays, all without corporate approval. During his father’s lifetime the Mikaeus dynasty had tried to set up a secret factory in the Berg mountain range near the center of the continent for churning out a breed of automata of their own design, a design which managed to resist the automata his father had sent to wipe them out. The Mikaeus dynasty had all earned themselves a one way trip to the black coast for that, the planet’s penal colony along the Sunset river delta to the north east. He didn’t expect they were doing well there.

  “It won’t.” Charles said.

  “We should be prepared.” Ryker said in a voice undoubtedly to soft for Goor to hear. “In case it does.”

  Charles scowled and thought about remonstrating the SEO for the break in executive cohesion during the meeting, but decided against it. The battle on the display was progressing and his stomach was making his eye twitch. He wanted to get down to Falkye to watch the invasion in person.

  “If it does go badly it will be for reasons we can’t expect. We’ll have to make new arrangements if that’s that case. Nothing we can prepare for until then.” Charles held up a hand as other execs down the table opened their mouths to speak. “Keep to the schedule we put together for the invasion. If anything changes we’ve got a meeting tomorrow to review it. Make your own notes in that time.” They agreed, and then he was free. Free to make his way out of the office while the wait staff, human machinery in his father’s eyes, moved into the room to clean up what was left of the luncheon while he took the elevator down to the command room. An old media room his brother Falkye had converted for the war.

  Chapter 3: Charles // General Falkye

  General, Falkye, Charles had to remember his rank. Charles still found it amusing to think of his little brother as a general. For all his thirty some odd years, Falkye still found the thought of combat intoxicating, the way they had as boys, imagining themselves the knights of the round table or the hundred and first airborne, or any of the other heroic soldiers to fight in ancient wars and adventures of the homeworld’s history. At four years Charles’ junior the man might have qualified to take on the CEO role Charles had inherited when his father stepped down, if Charles hadn’t been a little older and Falkye still a little addicted to the sort of games Charles had abandoned when his father started teaching him how to run the corporation. “Learn this game.” Their father had told them “and those simulations will seem boring by comparison.” Falkye never had. There was a part of him, Charles was sure, that revelled in this all too real war. A place to try out everything he’d learned fighting the simulated foes of the digital multiverse while Charles learned to fight the battles that kept their corporation afloat.

  There had been a time when brothers had been close friends, a time when they were almost inseparable, before the knot in Charles stomach tightened at the sight of him and made him want to vomit blood. They were still friends, but no longer as they had been in their youth. He was too much the reminder for Charles of things lost, things that could no longer be. “The face that killed hope.” Charles thought every time he saw him.

  “Expect they’ll try a landing soon.” Falkye told him as soon as Charles stepped into the command room. His brother was a thin man, like Charles, but always casually dressed. He was the only one of the siblings to have their grandmother’s ginger hair and he wore it in an absurd bowl cut that he said was more convenient to care for while he lavished attention on the thick red-brown beard he let grow to his chest. Marriage had changed little in his appearance even after two years, though he did get his hair cut more frequently now.

  “If you say so.” Charles said. He set his implant to manual mode and took hold of the link icon for Falkye’s view. The room was transformed around him into a composite three dimensional view of the battle moving in from orbit stitched together from the data feeds of stealthed observations drones and emplaced radio, radar, and visual telescopes around the continent. At the center of the room the data was neatly tabulated into a digital holograph made up of icons and data symbols like the one he’d displayed for the dynasty leaders during the meeting.

  “Did any of the Cherubs make it?” Charles asked.

  “To the flagship? No. Then again, I didn’t think they would. More a show of force really. Make it expensive for them to start, more expensive for them to stay. I Let them know how much the next hundred years will cost.”

  “Yes.” Charles watched the cloud of debris from the cherub’s brief skirmish with the invader’s drones turn into a shower of sparks as they fell into the atmosphere. He and his brother had discussed this opening strategy. They’d intentionally set a thin picket around the planet in order to draw the enemy in where the cherubs would be at their greatest potential. The smart missiles were cheaper than the archangel class automata used in orbit, and importantly had far greater versatility. Right now they were smashing aircraft on descent from the enemy fleet. Should Kamele attempt a landing, they would be used in support of the Quinn’s ground assault automata where an archangel would have been useless miles beyond the atmosphere.

  Charles had preferred trying to hit the more expensive starships, but his brother pointed out that the fighting craft were actually more valuable in the long run. A starship couldn’t land on the planet’s surface, nor could it fight effectively once it had been emptied of its automata. If they could hit it, well and good, if not, it was just one more piece of space junk the invaders held in the sky. Space junk with lasers, no doubt, but incapable of actually finishing the war, a limitation the smaller craft may not share with them.

  “Did you tell them the outline?” Falkye asked.

  “You mean the blockade?”

  “Yes.”

  “Yes I told them.”

  “How did they take it?”

  “With as much bellyaching as one could expect. Three years of reduced production shares haven’t meant much real sacrifice from the older dynasties yet, and the new ones don’t have a choice except to knuckle under. I think they’re waiting for the fall out. See which way the wind turns.They like the projection for share growth of course. If we win.Thi
ngs will depend on the next few months.”

  “Looks like we’ll see our first landing in a moment.” Falkye told him.

  That made Charles pulse quicken. An actual landing hadn’t been what he expected this early in the campaign. Predictive models had given odds that the enemy would wait to consolidate their position in orbit, laser or bomb every exposed facility and installation from beyond the air, then attempt to sneak their landing in under the Quinn’s “crippled” surveillance. A landing this early would mean denying the dynastic heads the time they’d need to invest in the data Charles had provided. They, undoubtedly, had their own data, but he’d hoped to align their plans and projections with the corporate ones before the enemy landed.

  Charles turned his attention to the small swarm building around the invader’s ship. “What makes you say that?” He asked.

  “Visible craft just increased by twenty percent.” Falkye replied “and that’s them moving towards the surface.”

  Even as he watched, the cloud of smaller ships coalesced and dove towards the surface of the continent. A new wave of Cherub’s poured from underground bunkers and arched up to meet them in the upper stratosphere. There they unleashed madness as they burst amongst the descending ships. Hidden swarms of corporate Seraphim followed close behind to harass the column headed for the ground even as more craft emerged from the parked starships to begin their descent.

  “This is a much larger group than I expected.” Falkye said.

  Charles nodded. “What was the projection?”

  “Michael projected any assault on the surface this early would be little more than a cover for a flight of crash factories over the rest of the continent. This is much bigger than necessary for that sort of thing.”

  Michael was the “war games AI”, resurrected from the data warehouse most of the relics from the Kidawa conflict had been stored. “A problem?” Charles asked.

  “No problem. Just unusual. Presents an awesome target for the cherub’s though. Never a better chance to smash what military power they came in with.”

  “What about the crash factories?”

  “I’m marking where they land. Mostly on the opposite side of the continent. Cherub’s will take care of them later, and I can send some hounds to make sure the sites are clear.”

  At the heart of the swarm of automata dropping from the starship was a loose column of far bulkier craft that Charles assumed had to be ground assault carriers. He zoomed in to get a better look and watched one of the smaller fighting craft suicide in order to stop a Cherub from getting in range of the dropship. “They’re protecting whatever’s in those dropships.” Charles said.

  “I’ve got the Automata targeting them.” Falkye said. “Seventy percent confirmed that they’re headed for a landing sight East of the Mighty River. Somewhere in the pampas if I had to guess. Open ground. They must want to test what we have for defenders.”

  “They know it’s where the fight will be won.” Charles said.

  “Or lost.” Falkye added.

  The first drop ships came within a mile of the ground and curved upwards abruptly. The cargo sections of their fuselage uncoupled to plummet, bomb like. Small wings deployed as they reached the ground and they pulled a hard turn to skim above the ground, setting down to plow long furrows through the grassy plants which covered that that part of the Marain’s single enormous continent, a huge treeless pampas all the way across the continental plateau east of the Mighty River’s gorge.

  The drop location bothered Charles. He’d expected fighting on the ground, but he’d expected it to focus around crash factories or major industrial centers on marain. Places where the enemy would be at a disadvantage to the the corporations overwhelming industrial capacity. He expected them to build a beach head, not drop on the empty pampas. There was nothing there. Nothing they would have seen from space anyways. A few trace mineral deposits in the foothills was the only resource he could think of. “What are they after?” He mused aloud.

  “They’ve landed maybe a hundred miles from the agricultural settlements.” Falkye said. “Might be hoping to use them as captives. Nullify any serious response.”

  That would put the settlement prospectors into an uproar. As if they weren’t enough of a nuisance. The Kamele would be disappointed if they tried a hostage situation though. Charles never understood why his great great grandfather had splurged on colony settlers. The investment was one that had its benefits. A higher standard of living for the dynasties, a wider breeding pool, men and women to employ in the process of technological development and engineering innovation, and a stock of souls to elevate new execs and sub dynasties out of. It had produced the Knopfs and persaga tea if nothing else, but it brought with it all the nuisances of civil government to add to his corporate responsibilities. Law enforcement, disease control, a whole branch of engineering and manufacturing to supply the settlement prospectors with the goods they required to keep their settlements viable. “You can think of them as free range automata.” His father had told him on more than one occasion. “They’re less efficient, and more troublesome than automata might be, but they are self maintaining after a fashion, they keep the sub dynasties occupied, and they can occasionally turn a profit for the corporation.” They would lose little if the colonists were lost. Still, if they’re power over the land was to be demonstrated, it would be important that the Quinn Corporation didn’t suffer any irreplaceable losses in the first incursion. Colonists were more like trees than automata to Charles mind, they took an incredibly long time to grow, people were sentimental about them, and they showed their scars for centuries if you let vermin gnaw on them.

  “Can we defend them?” Charles asked.

  “Undoubtedly.” Falkye said. “Automata are already on their way.”

  Stubby aircraft, called “dominions” in Falkye’s mythological system of nomenclature for Marain’s military machine, shot over the Eastern mountain range towards the invader’s dropped cargo capsules like flights of shooting stars. Wingless, they skated through the atmosphere on a stream of ionized gas ejected from the nose and pressurized between the ships magnetic engine and the Marain’s own magnetosphere, reaching several times the speed of sound without ever meeting the resistance fo the surrounding atmosphere through the shell of glowing gas.

  One of the Seraphim managed to shoot past the drop ships defenders and cut one of the invader’s carrier ships in half with a laser. Friction blew the ship apart as it dropped but Charles could see some of the shrapnel wriggling as it fell. Infantry automata, Charles thought, and wondered how far they could fall and still remain functional. Still, more capsules plowed into the pampas as the dominions closed in and troop machinery poured from them looking from a distance for all the world like a swarm of eater beetles fleeing the corpse of a fish washed up along the river, to congregate on the grass in front of their landing sight.

  A cherub landed in the black swarm of infantry automata and blew the formation apart. The explosion was huge. As the dust settle it was followed by a second, and then a third. Each landed with a frightening level of force. Drop capsules already in the grass were shredded by the blast before a fourth Cherub landed with a “BOOM”.

  “A bit excessive don’t you think?” Charles asked as the dust settled.

  Falkye’s eyes glowed. “If we’re truly about to be blockaded for a century we might as well let them know how little it costs us to hit them this hard from the start. Our automata will be there in a moment to clean up. Right now we’re sending a message.” Falkye said. “Plus its fun.”

  Like the Kamele drop ships, the Marain Dominions didn’t bother touching down to unload their payloads. They shot over the smoking crater at mach three and deployed their payloads like bullets from an automatic rifle. Charles knew what sort of Automata were being deployed, he’d been instrumental in their design, and had insisted on naming them Hounds, rather than Falkye’s suggested “Crusaders”. The mechanoids looked more like animals than men.

&nbs
p; A long band of pitch black synthetic muscle and steel formed the core of the machine. Four bands of the same material gave it whip like legs that could propel it at speeds of several hundred miles an hour, while dozens of other “tentacles” of the muscle sprouted from the front in. Each of them terminated in a sensor or weapons blister with a diversity of functions. In reality, the looked more like black hydras than hounds, but Falkye insisted it was bad luck to name them after monsters and Charles didn’t care to argue, so long as they worked.

  Two shield generators were hidden in what passed for each machine’s internal organs which allowed them to land at several times the speed of sound and survive. Dominions flocked over the crater sight as more and more hounds were deployed into the charred circle of the Cherub’s blast radius while more Kamele landing capsules plowed to a stop yards from the edge of the crater.

  “Can we get a visual on the ground?” Charles asked. The sense of excitement he felt at watching the automata land felt like being a child again, watching the story of the hundred and first airborne for the first time. He’d imagined landing in enemy territory and fighting through to some objective. No one was going to be landing with the hounds, but the hounds were at least partially his design. It was something like watching his own children jumping into their first test. An experience both exciting and harrowing. If they turned out less effective here than they had against the Kidawas in their previous iterations it might mean disaster.

  “You can latch into one of the hounds.” Falkye said. He tapped an icon near his command chair and tumbled it through the air towards Charles. Charles caught the digital wraith and found himself looking through the eyes of one of the hounds, a point of view several feet above his usual perspective, and with a significantly wider field of view, but jarringly real.