Authors: Evan Currie
The construction was clearly monolithic, something Earth hadn’t seen in close to four thousand years, possibly more. Even the instrumentation was built into stone carved clear out of the plateau the colony had been built on, possibly the very reason they chose to land right on top of the colony instead of the reasons the colonists had chosen the place.
Luckily for her the place was sparsely staffed, as best she could tell, mostly empty space greeted her as she blasted her way through the facility. She shuddered to think why they needed all this room with as few people as she could determine they seemed to have, but for the moment she was wrecking her merry way through the whole place and having a lot of fun in the process.
Anything she spotted that looked important got a small slab of Q-Tex and a micro-detonator slapped on it, the quantum explosive would ensure that whatever it was on would be a lot less interesting after she left.
She had just planted her eighth charge when a high pitched whine almost vibrated the teeth out of her jaw, setting Sorilla so badly on edge that the experienced Special Forces operator almost put rounds through everything in sight just in hopes of killing whatever it was that was making the sound. It reached crescendo after just a few seconds, then abruptly died in such a way that she found herself looking around and wondering if it had really happened after all.
It was several seconds after that when Sorilla felt a distance rumble run through the floor, and her on board computer instantly put a flag on the feeling that matched it to a nuclear strike that she got really interested in the source of the high pitched whine.
Proc,
She subvocalized,
Isolated and locate source of highlighted sound.
The computer worked feverishly for a few moments before sending back a negative result, bringing a growl to her throat. Sorilla knew that she needed,
needed
, to locate the source of that whine. It practically had to be connected to the enemy super weapon, the Gravity Valve, if it wasn’t the valve itself.
She put her boot through another closed door, shattering the stone construction with a blow that would have killed a man in armor, and moved through with her rifle leading the way. She was halfway through the door when another sound caught her attention and she paused for a brief instant.
The sound was both unfamiliar yet unmistakable, Sorilla recognized it at once despite never having heard it before.
An alarm had been sounded.
Either they’d finally found the bodies she’d been leaving behind, or something else bad was happening to the aliens. It didn’t matter which, she supposed. Sorilla set her jaw and moved on, rifle to her shoulder as she did.
Somewhere in this place was the only thing that kept Hayden under the control of the bastards, she had to find it.
Find it and blow it all the way back to whatever space blasted star they came from.
*****
The aliens, drones, whatever the hell they were, were reliable if nothing else. Jerry’s gaze darkened as he watched the Golems and Goblins work their way toward where the Hayden militia lay in wait.
He could literally set his watch by the bastards, they were so regular in their actions. The Sarge said they had to be drones of some kind, and Jerry knew from the ones that they’d blown to pieces that there weren’t any soft squishy parts hidden inside them so she was probably right. That made it all the worse, though, knowing that he and his had been chased out of their homes and into the jungles… left to starve or be eaten by some local beasty too stupid to know that humans weren’t digestible. All that, and they were denied even the chance to get real payback.
All they could do was break the aliens’ toys.
They’d done that so much that Jerry hadn’t even needed to send the signal when the Golems finally lumbered into the kill zone, following after the nimbler Goblins. The echoing boom of sonic booms announced the presence of the Pathfinders as they opened fire from their positions at near point blank range.
Striking so hard and fast that the last of the enemy fell before the sound of the supersonic rounds reached them, the militia appeared from the jungle like wraiths and spent a scant few seconds ensuring that they’d eliminated their target according to plan before ghosting away once again.
Jerry himself paused, the last man visible on the killing field they’d created. He shook his head tiredly and tossed a bundle into the center of the field before vanishing into the underbrush himself.
As Sorilla had discovered, the enemy’s ability to backtrack the location of shooters had inherent limitations. Predictable ones that they could use against the invaders, much as they’d been forced to use any advantage they’d been able to glean.
In this case it was the fact that the MilSpec weapons were simply harder to triangulate. Not impossible, they’d learned that the hard way, but harder. The depleted uranium rounds were hard hitting but, more importantly, fast moving.
Really fast.
The rounds were hypersonic capable, which meant that even whatever system the aliens were using could only identify the source of the shot from some pretty long ranges. As close as they’d gotten against this group of aliens, there was next to no chance of them being able to even recognize they were there, let alone have time to triangulate their positions.
It would have been a moot point, of course, had any of the Goblins had a chance to see them. They’d have simply called in a strike on top of their own position and been done with it, which was why Jerry and his group offered no quarter in the ambush. They had yet to see one of the invaders appear to give a damn about anything other than the job they were doing, and that kind of bull headedness was lethally dangerous.
No surprise there, Jerry supposed, not if they really were drones or something. Why would a robot care if it were destroyed, after all?
The opinion among the academics back at camp was split on that subject. The pieces they’d brought back made it damn clear that whatever these things were, they weren’t life as any human knew it. They weren’t even life as any alien world known to Earth knew it. Every world they’d found to date with life was, in many ways, a mirror Earth.
Sometimes it was a funhouse mirror, to be sure, but a mirror nonetheless.
Convergence theory had predicted it at the turn of the twenty first century, but the proof came when they discovered life on world after world and found that it really wasn’t
that
different from home.
Carbon based life, following the same rules in largely the same environments inevitably turned out largely the same creations. Oh sometimes the wolves had six legs instead of four, or the ostriches had beaks and muscles that could cut through a recon rover, but over six billion years Earth had tried out, if not all permutations then all the
good
and effective ones.
The only times explorers had found really weird life was on truly strange worlds. Places with environments totally bizarre to Earth produced equally bizarre creatures, but even then they’d found nothing remotely like these Goblins and Golems.
He supposed that was probably a fair bit of what was behind the Sarge’s belief that they were drones.
Jerry didn’t argue with her, but he was one of the few that didn’t it seemed sometimes.
Examining the remains of the Goblins and Golems under intense magnification showed some really incredible nanoscale musculature and circulatory systems, nervous systems at least as complex as humans had, and other decidedly biological looking systems.
It didn’t rule them out as drones, Jerry knew, but the debate was there.
He didn’t really give a damn, however. They died, or broke, just fine when he and his group engaged them and since the attack on the colony that was enough for him. When the war was over, one way or another, whoever was left standing could worry about who or what had actually fought the war.
With that thought in mind Jerry pulled a remote from his pocket and triggered the high powered signal jammer he’d left back at the ambush site.
He barely flinched when the nuclear flash lit the jungles around him, and actually smiled as he kept walking through the group of people who’d thrown themselves to the ground in shock.
Sarge was right, predictable bastards. That’s going to cost you even more than it already has.
*****
Rolling echoes in the distance told Samuel that the attacks had begun, he could feel shivers running down his spine at the thought of the nuclear fire burning around his home.
“Bad days, old man.” Silver said from beside him.
Sam shot the other man a glare, “You’ve got three decades on me if you’ve got a day.”
“Only as old as you feel, Sammy,” Silver grinned at him unrepentantly, “And you look like you feel god damned well ancient.”
Sam sighed, shaking his head. He wished he could argue, but honestly he felt like he’d aged decades in the past months.
They’d arrived at the secondary colony site mere minutes ahead of the first rolling thunder of nuclear fire in the distance, unable to take even the barest of time to worry about what was happening in their absence. They’d started to tear into the old site, a place that had been reclaimed by Hayden in the decades since landing.
It was new jungle, though, not so hard to cut through. They located the old survey points quickly enough and set to peeling back the jungle as best they could. The work moved on through the night, against the backdrop of a dark Hayden night punctuated only by the rumblings of the jungle beasts and the rolling thunder of the distant battle.
“Sam! Silver!”
The call from ahead brought the two to attention from the brush they were pulling aside, and they left it where it fell as they turned to see one of the children from Silver’s camp running in their direction.
“What is it, Josh?” Silver asked, clapping the dirt from his hands.
“You need to see this.”
Silver and Sam exchanged glances, but nodded and gestured the boy ahead of them. He ran on while they walked, albeit quickly, after him. When they arrived to where a group of people were standing around, Sam frowned.
“We don’t have time enough as it stands, and you’re all just standing here?”
“Sam, look at this.” Tara told him softly.
He stepped through the crowd and blinked as the light fell on a section of cleared jungle, “What in the name…”
He trailed off as realization struck him, and again shared a loaded glance with Silver.
“Well I’ll be…” Silver muttered.
“I didn’t know they built another tether anchor point.”
“Nor I,” Silver admitted with a shrug, “That would have been the advance team’s doing.”
“Why would they put it down? A backup?” Sam asked, confused.
“Hardly. The only reason would be if this were the primary site, but something changed their minds.”
Sam walked around the immense bonded crete block, eyeing it carefully. “There’s no mention of that in the histories, I’m sure of it.”
Silver shrugged, “No talk of it on the ship either.”
“What would change their minds then?”
“Soil tests may have been misleading, could be something wrong in the geology I suppose.” Silver shrugged, “maybe the tests came back on our site and showed it better than they expected. Lots of reasons, Sam.”
“Can we use this?”
Silver snorted, “Not without a tether, and I don’t have thirty thousand kilometers of carbon nano ribbon back at my camp, do you?”
Sam grimaced, realizing the absurdity of the suggestion, and sighed. “You’re right of course. I had a flash of insane hope for a moment.”
Silver shrugged, “It’s here. We can test it and see if it’s properly anchored, if so then it does provide an alternate point to tether the counterweight. The real problem isn’t getting the tether, though, Sam, it’s defending it if we do.”
Silver had a point, Sam knew. The tether was incredibly valuable, but its nature made it a terrifyingly easy target, as they’d all learned on the long night of wraiths and spirits.
“Back to work!” Silver stepped up, waving people away. “Nothing to be done with this just now. Maybe we can use it later, but for now we have a job to do.”
The group broke up, leaving Sam staring at the anchor point in thought before he too turned back to the task at hand.
*****
Her armor chimed, warning Sorilla of another instance of the high pitched whine. She’d set her systems to edit it out, but to also automatically track and triangulate its source compared to the earlier sounding.
The second rumble of nuclear fire had quickly been followed by a third, but it wasn’t until the fourth that she got a heading with any reasonable confidence. The fact that there had been four uses of the Valve told her that Jerry and his pathfinders were pushing the enemy hard on the outside, harder than they’d been pushed to date.
Getting a bearing on the location of the sound was the good news, the bad was that she didn’t have a map of the damned place and there were walls of solid stone between her and it. The worse news, well that was coming through the next set of doors already.
She hit the ground as a particle blast cut the air over her head, vaporizing a chunk out of the far wall the size of her armored head.
What had begun with a practically vacant base had become a nearly literal beehive in short order after the alarm sounded, with more and more of the larger, furred aliens pouring through every damned door she approached. Their weapons were impressive, at least at close range, the power of their beams fluorescing the air they passed through.
Like something out of a damned movie,
She thought, rolling clear of another beam as she brought her rifle to bear.
It barked in her hand, the power set to maximum so that the supersonic crack of the rounds were still echoing off the walls as the two charging aliens went down with holes blown through them.
Security guards. Not even soldiers,
She thought grimly as she got back to her feet.
Their tactics were too crude to be divined by a soldier’s hand, but their organization was obviously too disciplined to be anything resembling a rough militia. She stepped over the bodies on her way through the door, looking for a way down to the next level where her armor indicated the source of the sound was located.