Originator (51 page)

“
Copy Snowcat
.”

Pillars of orange fire lit the sky as main engines engaged, and the shuttles accelerated toward escape velocity. For another long, several minutes, there was thunder in the sky. And then, slowly, fading to quiet. A stillness lay across the corporate center of Droze, broken only by rising smoke and crackling flames. Sandy had lived a long time for a GI and had seen a lot of strange things. But she had never experienced any moment in her life quite so surreal as that silence.

Sandy stood by the armoured corpse of a fallen enemy hopper. The armour release wouldn't operate, disabled by the huge magfire hole through the middle, armour melted and blackened into a mass of burnt electrics and blood. But the helmet was off, and within it, head back and mouth open, was a Talee.

A longish face, narrower than humans. Large, wide eyes, now closed. Better peripheral vision, and probably smell, to judge from the prominent nose. Worse hearing, perhaps, with just earholes and little skin flaps. Omnivorous teeth, nothing sharp. A very human-looking tongue. Skin a brown shade under light fuzz . . . but her troops were reporting others had different shades—natural variability or evolved racial difference? A pronounced inverse ridge down the center of the skull, twin brain cases, as all the rumours said. Alien, but not repulsive, not even especially odd-looking, to human eyes. Like just another humanoid species, depicted in one of her kids' animated TV shows. She could imagine such a face smiling, laughing, or frowning, if Talee did any of those things.

And she'd killed him. She did not feel grief—that was reserved for those she loved, person to person. Yet she could rarely recall having felt so sad.

“What the hell were you doing here?” she muttered to the corpse, leaning on her two-meter rifle, still in her suit as they all were.

“Organic,” said Jane, taking a knee alongside to look more closely. The suits made squatting impossible. “Probably augmented, but not a synth. Might explain why they can't fight worth shit.”

“I've got six organics in my unit,” said Lieutenant Rikowski opposite, another GI. “They're all damn good, way better than these guys.” Indicating the Talee. “With augments in suits, the synthetic physical advantage is minimal. These guys didn't lose because they were slow.”

“No,” Sandy agreed. “Their reflexes were fine. They just fought like green rookies. Like they'd never done it before, even in training.”

“Technology dependent,” Rikowski agreed. “Arrogant dicks, never thought we'd figure a way past their net-tech, and never had a plan B in case we did.”

The assault team had five dead, five wounded, all of them in those final, close-range phases when the Talee had finally brought their hoppers into play, then followed it up with airburst AMLORAs to cover their retreat. Sandy had been bracing for thirty percent–plus casualties. Instead, she had one percent.

Talee casualties were forty-six, all of them hopper infantry, and all of them dead. Wounded, in hopper suits, usually only happened from artillery near-misses, and the FSA hadn't been using artillery directly on hoppers. Magfire rarely left survivors, at least not among organics, and the Talee had been in the process of being overrun and overwhelmed, presenting a lot of easy targets. Sandy was nearly relieved she had no prisoners. She didn't want her first face-to-face interaction with an alien race to be her explaining to them why she'd killed all their friends.

“Fuck it,” she muttered, and powered her suit back to full mobility. “Put an auto-sentry on each of them in case the civvies come wandering.” She looked about at the deserted streets, the empty surrounding high-rise, the manicured street verge gardens, littered with the occasional alien corpse or smoking ordnance crater. “Where the hell are all the civvies, anyway?”

She sealed the faceplate once more, jogged to the middle of the road, and jumped. Cut and landed on top of a hundred-meter high-rise, paused to let the combat-strained jets cool and recharge, then jumped again. To her right now was Chancelry main HQ, an all-too-familiar cluster of low-rise compounds, still scarred from year-old damage she'd participated in inflicting. But her troops said it was empty, that all of the action was over in Dhamsel Corporation Headquarters.

That was across the neutral zone, and she cruised that way, across low-rise suburban streets she recalled fighting her way through on Kiet's ill-judged attempt to rescue the other corporations' high-designation GIs from the certain death that awaited them from lethal experiments. The suburbs looked nicer now than she recalled, bloodstained and horrifying as her memories were. Neat rows of tiled rooves amidst many leafy trees and gardens, it could
have been a modest Tanushan neighbourhood. She landed on the rooftop of a ten-storey apartment block, paused again for ten seconds, then jumped again.

In the central zone, she could see where the assault shuttles had landed—on a green belt that half-arced across the northern side, with parks, lakes, and children's playgrounds. The grass was blackened now and imprinted with the marks of huge landing feet. She flew through lingering smoke from smouldering fires and blasted dust, toward Dhamsel compound adjoining.

Dhamsel Headquarters looked much like Chancelry, only undamaged, with shiny glass buildings around common courtyards and paths. She landed in a blast of smoke as tacnet showed her the deployment of soldiers about the compound and a gathering in the main foyer of the central building. She walked that way, past a six-legged AMLORA in the courtyard, immobile once the Talee had abandoned it, like all the other human hardware they'd controlled by remote.

The main foyer doubled as a suit-parking zone, and Sandy shut down her hopper, cracked the forward armour, and climbed out. A soldier directed her to the next floor up, and she unracked her regular rifle from the hopper's back-rack, and walked with Jane to the stairs.

“
We can't find any GIs
,” said Singh as she climbed. “
The GI quarters are empty, so are the cells. No sign of any production facilities either
.” It had never been settled just who was in charge of GI production in Droze, and how it was coordinated. Chancelry Corporation had originated GI technology, had found the initial Talee outposts here on Pantala that led to synthetic replication tech in the first place. But whether Chancelry had
all
of the production facilities, and did all of the medical tests, had never been conclusively proven. Surely not all, because League had required medical testing on a massive scale, given the ticking clock on the neurological disorders the technology was causing in the broader League population. And the other four Droze corporations had all kept sizeable forces of GIs.

“
Check the hospital wards
,” Sandy replied, leaving the stairs and heading down the central hall. “
In Chancelry the top floor were synth-experiments, the bottom floors were organic
.” Chancelry had used their “experiments” as regular security, let them serve to term, then terminated them. Apparently they'd learned a lot. But mostly, they'd learned that the primary generation of neural-synth technology caused flaws when integrated into regular human brains that
could not be easily reversed. It would take new tech. And that had been supplied by Renaldo Takewashi, who was still revered in these corridors . . . or in Chancelry corridors, perhaps. The first person to fully decode what they'd found here.

Private Ricardo was guarding a doorway ahead. Through it, Sandy found Vanessa, also in her light armour, sipping coffee someone had made from a still-functioning coffee machine in an adjoining tea room.

“Like some?” Vanessa asked. Several of her other soldiers were also drinking a cup. “It's actually not bad, for synthetic League swill.”

“Careful now,” said Jane, stretching her stiff neck, “people will think you're talking about me.”

Vanessa raised an eyebrow at Sandy. “Was that a joke?”

“She does that sometimes,” Sandy explained. And regarded the rest of the office. There were beds in here. Some tables, a few TVs, chairs. Sleeping for fifteen, she counted, squeezed in quite tightly. Sitting on the beds or chairs were various men and women, some in business clothes, others in casuals. They looked worn and scruffy, and very tired, sitting head in hands, hair a-mess. Sandy looked at Vanessa questioningly.

“Prisoners here,” Vanessa explained. “Dhamsel Corporation employees. Talee had them VR-locked on and off for weeks, any time they liked. Rounded them up, put them in a central place, didn't let them go home. Interrogated them, we think . . . they're a bit of a mess, not making much sense. At least we can guess from the sleeping arrangements that this whole male-female privacy thing doesn't mean much to Talee.”

“Doesn't mean much to GIs either,” said Sandy. Vanessa shrugged, conceding. “Guess they didn't need much security to keep them here, the VR-Matrix would know exactly what they're doing any given moment, if anyone tried to escape. . . .”

“Bam,” Vanessa agreed. “Straight back under.”

“They've got family outside,” said Jane. “They didn't return, were kept captive here for weeks . . . so where are the families?”

“All looks deserted,” Sandy added. “I think all the civvies here who could probably ran to the other side of the wall. They'll be hiding among the noncorporates. Big fat irony there.” She fixed the man seated nearest Vanessa with a stare. “So . . . kept them here for what?”

“Won't give his name,” said Vanessa, sipping coffee. “Database has been wiped, and he's not on ours.”

“Ours is out of date,” said Sandy, taking a knee opposite the man. He looked a wreck, eyes dark and sleepy, suit and shirt mangled and unwashed. The smell wasn't great either . . . though Sandy guessed the office buildings would be quite good for captivity, because of the toilets, showers, and food supplies. “What did they want with you?” she asked him. No reply. She couldn't tell if he was ignoring her or genuinely out of it. “Where's Patana?”

Patana was the CEO of Dhamsel. He'd been the one who sent the kills-witch signal that killed at least a thousand high-des GIs in the confusion of Kiet's failed jailbreak. “Haven't found him yet,” said Vanessa. “You know he'd actually be quite useful alive?”

“Sure.”

“And he's more likely to help us if he thinks you won't just kill him as soon as he's no further use?”

“I guess.” She wasn't about to say any more on the matter, and Vanessa didn't push it. “Are the other corporations like this?”

Vanessa nodded. “Seem to be. Every database is completely blank, and the research labs in Chancelry have been stripped. No sign of any kids like Kiril. But I mean, if that was all they were after, it wouldn't have taken long. So why were they still here?”

“
Could have done more damage than they did
,” Reichardt was telling her on the big displays in the Dhamsel executive offices. “
Did some crazy short-jump reversal to pick up those shuttles from Droze, then left just as fast. League's arrivals scared them too, but they could have hit a lot more of us than they did, if they'd bothered. I think they just wanted out after you beat the crap out of them down there
.”

Sandy nodded, glancing elsewhere in the office, where a search was underway. Desk drawers and shelves were being cleared, any portable devices scanned or taken back to someone who could. Elsewhere, the occasional safe was being cut open, and the network scoured by the Federation's lately-very-superior hacking tools. Anything for clues, no matter how small.

“
You don't look that happy
,” Reichardt observed on the awkward five-second delay that their distance currently made.

“Well, whatever the Talee were doing here, we haven't found it. If it was
just Chancelry biotech they had that in the first few hours. But they stayed here weeks, nearly a month.”

Again the delay pause. Reichardt was in his captain's chair, studying multiple displays while talking. There was no activity on the bridge behind him, so they were still strapped in on full alert. League Fleet had indeed arrived, a carrier and four cruisers, courtesy of Hafeez and the Federation courier that had dropped him at the nearest known League Fleet base. League's arrival had outflanked and scared off the Talee, but no one knew how long that would last. Now League were inbound, and in typical League style, giving instructions like they owned the place. Which, legally speaking, they did.

“
So what's bugging you?
”

“Talee. I don't take any losses lightly, but getting in here was
easy
. As these things go.” On five-second delay she couldn't pause to see that Reichardt was getting her point. “They fought like they'd never done it before. I don't mean just them, I mean we've got some rookies on this mission too, but they did good because of their training. Humans have generations, centuries, millennia of experience at warfare. Green troops can still perform, because they're trained as their ancestors have learned through hard experience.

“But the Talee down here fought like they've never seen war before. Never heard about war, not from their forebears, not from anyone. They had the basic skills but had no idea how to put it all together, like a chef who chucks everything in a bowl and hopes for the best. No sense of sequential thinking, no strategy.”

“
Well, they were a lot better than that up here
.” A faint frown, thinking on it. “
But, yeah, I know what you mean. Like I said, they could have done better with what they had. We lost
Vigilant,
but it should have been more, given what they can do
.”

“Arron, their hoppers are
our
technology. I don't mean just inspired by, I mean exact copies. Our techs are looking at them, they say aside from the different saddle shape to accommodate Talee bodies, and some crazy advanced bits and pieces, the basic design philosophy is identical. And they say it doesn't make any sense, because if their technology is that much better, they should have been able to change the design philosophy—that's what better technology does, you put a better engine in a car, suddenly you have the same power for less weight, you can change the shape and layout of everything else
accordingly. But Talee haven't done that . . . and these weren't captured suits, they were Talee-made.”