Authors: Evan Currie
“I see,” he sighed, “When are we going?”
“Now,” She replied, pulling a section from the vest front of her armored suit, tucking it into a pouch on her vest.
*****
For Sorilla the next three hours of hiking out and away from the camp, heading toward her ‘landing’ site, was pure agony. She had, again, left her armor and it’s environmental control systems behind while it trickle charged on its organic solar collectors, and was sweating bullets as she and the others marched through the jungle heat.
The people Jerry had gathered for the task seemed to be better off, though few of them were in a state of physical fitness that compared to Aida’s own. This was their world, however, and they were acclimated to it. The slight difference in oxygen levels, combined with the heat, and her injuries, were making every step a torturous ordeal for the woman, for the human, in her. The Operator she’d trained all her life to be, however, refused to let that slow her down.
When they stopped, more than fifty klicks from the camp, she pulsed the radio identification frequency (RIF), its range setting kept to a mere hundred kilometer range. According to her maps, and the locals input, there was nothing but jungle in that entire range, so it was the best she could do to minimize the danger of being detected.
Only one hit came back off the signal, and it was quite a distance off. Sorilla sighed, then looked off in the appropriate direction and nodded. “That way.”
Several hours of march later they stepped into a clearing that had a huge hole in the canopy and a matching supply container sitting lop sided against a boulder.
“It looks intact,” Sorilla said, relieved. She’d been worried, actually, though the containers were among the most solid items in the fleet. They broke cover, approaching the large container slowly as Sorilla looked for damage.
Just as she reached it a local avian screeched, her HUD flashing to life with a red warning blinking into on her right eye. Sorilla spun, dropping into a crouch even as a sound of wood splintering erupted into the field.
“Incoming!,” She screamed, throwing herself to one side as a pattern of splinters erupted out in her general direction, and a tree began to topple.
One of the men yelled in shock and horror as a lumbering form suddenly rushed out of the jungle foliage, its massive size dwarfing him as it loped in on all fours. It reached out with a forelimb before he could move, plucking him up like a toy, and threw the man across the path of the others as Sorilla hit the ground, shoulder first.
She rolled, swinging her rifle up as she came to a stop in a crouch near a thick tree, her eyes focusing in the thing for the first time even as her processor finished pattern matching it against local predators.
Warning! No Matches Found!
She noted the red flash as her rifle buttstock pressed tight to her shoulder, the beast dropping into her sights as she squeezed off her first shot. The round hissed through the air, almost silent as the magnetic propulsion sent it on its way, and slammed into the target with an eruption of black smoke as it exploded on contact.
The creature roared, but didn’t go down as it backhanded another of the local men hard enough to send him sprawling through the brush, well out of sight. Rifle fire erupted around her then, as she squeezed off the next round, and Sorilla could see the heavy hunting rounds sparking off the thing without affecting it in the slightest.
She flipped the lever that converted her battle rifle to full auto mode, locking the creature into her targeting HUD, and squeezed the trigger down. Twenty rounds erupted from the weapon in under a second, erupting into a cacophony of explosive percussion as each of them tore into the thing without mercy.
It paused in mid motion, and then fell over without moving again.
Slowly the members of the group appeared from the brush as Sorilla moved toward the thing, her weapon trained constantly on it. Behind her, Jerry was calling out orders to the others, his voice urgent.
“Ben, check on Mike! Sam, you go see if Trent is ok! Keep your eyes open everyone!”
In the back of her mind, Sorilla approved of the orders, but her attention was focused on the thing that had attacked them. She moved closer, pausing just out of reach as Jerry came up behind her.
“Christ... is that thing...”
“Rock. It’s made out of rock...” Sorilla said in disbelief.
“There’s nothing on this world like that,” Jerry replied with an uncertain sounding voice, “Nothing around here anyway.”
“There’s nothing anywhere like that,” she responded, handing off her rifle to him. “Hold this. Keep it pointed at that thing.”
“What? Hey, wait a second.” his voice slightly panicked.
“There’s no safety. If it moves, just hold the trigger down,” She told him, drawing her knife from the sheath that crossed the small of her back along her belt. “I want a chunk of this thing to take home.”
He covered the beast as she carved into the stone with the molecular edge of her blade, eyes flickering to the jungle constantly. She got her chunk of stone, a sizeable hunk taken from its forelimb, and retrieved her rifle as two of Jerry’s people appeared.
“Mike? Trent?” He asked.
They shook their heads, causing Jerry to grimace, “Damn.”
Sorilla sympathized with him, she knew what he was feeling, but at that moment her mind was too caught up with the new information to focus entirely on him. The enemy had something new, something she could not fathom, and that was not acceptable. How could a rock move, let alone fight?
Jerry came up beside her as she was thinking, laying a hand on her shoulder, “We’ll start unloading...”
She nodded, “I’ll keep watch.”
Jerry stared for a moment, then nodded. “Alright.”
“From now on, no unnecessary talking,” She told him, “I’m on point when we leave, watch me for signals... Someone’s out here hunting us.”
*****
Nothing else accosted them on the return trip and they arrived back in the camp about halfway through the night, the binary moons high in the sky over top of them, the reflected light of the lunar twins visible occasionally through the jungle canopy as they walked.
Aida and the rest tiredly dropped their burdens into the main shelter and collapsed in exhaustion for the night. It was midday the next day before anyone saw the soldier appear in the camp, she simply appeared outside Samuel’s hut just after the midday lunch break, a tight tan tank top and matching pants her chosen covering. She carried a big pistol on her hip, a five cylinder revolver that made most of the automatics available to the colonists look like children’s toys by size alone.
Samuel nodded to her, once his heart had slowed to a normal beat, “Good day, Sergeant.”
“G’day, sir,” she replied, nodding to the papers he was looking at. “Better today?”
“Yes, thank you.” He nodded, “The rations will keep us in food for another month. Did you retrieve what you needed?”
She nodded, “Yeah. Now I just need to figure out what to say.”
“I’m not sure I can help there,” Samuel smiled, his eyes holding a tinge of sadness.
“That just makes us even, sir,” she sighed, pulling up a rough bench cut from the local wood and sitting down, “Nothing makes sense..”
“In what way?” Samuel asked curiously, pushing his papers away as he crossed his arms on the rough table.
“The invaders... enemy... whatever they are,” Aida responded, shaking her head. “They’re not right.”
“I could have told you that,” Samuel replied, eyebrow raised.
“Not that... I mean...” Sorilla shook her head, pausing often as she tried to find the right words to describe what she’d seen. “The weapons they use... all wrong. I’ve never seen anything that does what they do... And these stone... things.”
Samuel nodded, “Is that so strange, though? New technology comes around quite often.”
“New, yeah... but usually even new technology is just... faster, stronger... but basically the same.” Sorilla said, wrapping her hands around something in midair. “Bullets make holes, lasers burn holes... missiles blow shit up...”
She paused, shaking her head, “I don’t know what I’m trying to say, sir. I’m just, I’ve never seen a weapon that mangles what it hits, folding it in on itself, compressing it, it’s like some giant hand just reached out and crushed my people... and your colony.”
She stopped again, taking a breath before continuing. “And then there’s this...”
She tossed the chunk of tether to the table, where it actually glided for a moment before touching the wood of the desk. Samuel frowned, looking at it, then looked up, “Is this...?”
“From the colony’s Orbital Tether, yes sir.”
He looked at the cut end, then at the end that had been snapped, and his eyes widened, “This is impossible.”
She nodded, “I know. Any force that could have snapped a tether like that should have pulled the counterweight right out of orbit first. It’s still there though, I checked.”
“My God,” Samuel replied, frowning at the piece of carbon laying in front of him. “The force... it’s almost incalculable...”
“Almost?” Sorilla asked, the corner of her mouth turning up.
Samuel looked up at her, a hint of amusement in his expression as well. “Well, Sergeant... we are largely a colony of researchers here. I’m sure I can find someone to tell you exactly what level of force this would have taken.”
“Do that,” Sorilla said seriously, “And anyone else who might have an idea too. I was sent in for intel, and I’ve got some of that... but I’ll be damned if I can figure out what it means.”
“Perhaps we can help then,” Samuel nodded to himself, “I’ll begin speaking with some of our more... academic minded members of society. They’ve been in need of something useful to do for quite some time anyway.”
“Thank you, while you’re at it let your geeks loose on this too,” She said, dropping the sawed off chunk of the strange thing that had attacked them onto the makeshift desk as well. “I’m going to prepare my report to the Fleet. I’ll be able to transmit it tonight as the moons pass over. I’d appreciate it if you could get any first hand reports of what happened when the colony was attacked for me. I’ll provide recording equipment, if you need it.”
“No, that won’t be necessary,” He said, shaking his head. “We have such equipment aplenty.”
She nodded, she hadn’t really expected much different. Everyone, especially scientists of any type, carried portable computers, even if only for day scheduling and holding contact addresses.
“I’ll have those for you by nightfall,” Samuel promised, “and whatever we can figure out on this too.”
Sorrilla nodded, “Thanks.”
*****
As he’d promised, Samuel delivered the force calculations within a couple hours, but it was what he had to say about the chunk of rock she’d cut off the Golem thing that piqued her curiosity.
First, it wasn’t rock. It was silicate based, to be sure, but it had no more in common with rock than a human being had in common with diamond. The entire chunk of material was criss-crossed with nanometer sized pathways that resembled nothing more than neural superhighways. It had a far more fluidic structure than anything any of them had ever seen, with enough completely alien structures to have the local egg heads yanking their hair out and wishing for the labs on the Counterweight.
Despite all that, by nightfall she had her report filled out, as much as possible at any rate. She then added all the colonists’ impressions, as well as the theories Samuel’s academics came up with to the report and keyed in the coordinates on the laser transmitter. It hummed happily in her ear, letting her know that it was working, and she settled back to wait. The distance to the moon was far enough that her stomach clenched while waiting for the return signal bounce to confirm a lock.
She let out a relieved sigh when the system responded with the comforting chirp directly fed into her inner ear through her implant interface. The military station keeping relay was still in place, and she was linked in. She checked the time on her HUD reflexively, noting that she had another half hour before the orbit would bring the satellite out of range.
She only needed a few seconds.
She uploaded her report in a pulse, then waited for the confirmation to report that it had been received. When that came back, there was an info-dump along with it. Sorilla signed off the satellite and quietly packed the system away as her processor checked the dump and confirmed that she had all the decryption sequences required to access it.
Days on Hayden’s World, a dozen lost lives, and it all came down to less than one minute to send back her report.
No, she shook her head. Not that easy. Her report was only the first stage, there was a lot more work to do. She checked the chrono again, and did some mental calculations. Fleet would have her report in about fourteen hours, if they were still holding station at their scheduled location. After that, well it would depend what they made of the situation on planet.
For her, the job was just starting no matter what else was now set in motion.
She closed up the kit, hefting the transceiver in her left hand as she headed back to her shelter. There she put the electronics away, and lay back on her cot, eyes glowing green as she stared at the ceiling without seeing and read the Fleet info-dump.
FLTCOM FLASH TRFFC
TO :
All Operators, Operation Jungle Savior
FRM :
FLTCOMSOL
SUBJECT :
Intel Update
MAIN BODY FOLLOWS :
Long Range Scouts have detected ship movements in range of Hayden’s World. Unknown ship configuration, unknown propulsion system. Operation Jungle Savior is suspended, all Operators are to shift to stance beta and commence Operation Jungle Wind. Secondary objectives green lighted, new intel attached
.
SIGNED :
Jorgen Sweet, VICE ADM, Commanding USV Task Force 2
Sorilla sighed, closing her eyes as she continued to read the attached files. Jungle Savior had been a straightforward operation, basically a short term mission assignment with the goal of preparing for a fleet landing on Hayden’s World. Jungle Wind was... something else.