Renegade (21 page)

She jetted at hard thrust toward that dark, bullet-pitted hole, and not one of her squad hesitated to follow. “Nine point nine!” Corporal Rael yelled on the way in.

“Nine point nine!” the others replied. Ten billion souls in Sol System when the krim hit Earth. Nine point nine billion dead. It had been humanity’s battle cry for the past thousand years, and the hacksaws weren’t the only ones who talked in numbers.

“
A
ll hands
,” Erik told the ship, “be aware, emergency undock could occur at any time. I repeat, emergency undock could occur at any time.” He flipped to marine channel. “Lieutenant Crozier?”

“
Copy LC,”
came the Delta Platoon commander. She was the other senior marine still aboard besides Lieutenant Zhi of Echo Platoon, and next in the dock to leave or defend.

“Lieutenant I may have to break dock at any moment, prepare your troops.”

“
Copy LC.
”

“We’re not going to get clear?” Geish asked in astonishment.

“Not yet,” Erik said grimly, staring at the screens, ears straining to gain any sense of the chaos unfolding in the rock.

“Sir, I’m with Second Lieutenant Geish on this one,” said Shahaim. “Those hacksaws can operate in vacuum just fine. They’re sure to have other exits around the rock, and if they can get out, they can latch to our hull and cut straight through…”

“Second Lieutenant Karle,” said Erik. “Do you have Armscomp dialled to near-defence?”

“Yes Captain. I mean yes LC.” Very tense, with fingers and thumbs hovering over multiple handgrip buttons. Between him at Arms One, and Harris at Arms Two, they could handle near and far range threats simultaneously.

“Sir,” Shahaim tried again, “they’re so small and fast that at this range, and with the rock for cover, we’re going to have blind spots and a few of them will get through…”

“We’ve got marines getting hurt in there,” Erik said firmly. “They’ll need medical attention immediately, if we have to evac them via the shuttles it’ll take time, and the shuttles will be a lot more vulnerable to hacksaws than
Phoenix
is.”

“Sir,” Geish said angrily, “if any of those things get aboard…!”

“The Major has it under control,” Erik shut him down.

“Sir this is a
hacksaw
nest! She could be dead!”

“The Major has it under control,” Erik repeated coolly. And gave Geish a glare. “That will be all, Second Lieutenant.”

“Aye sir.” Geish looked grim.

“And watch those damn scans, hacksaws aren’t the only thing we’re worried about.”

T
race put
her Heavies on point and told them not to let the drones shoot first. They responded by blowing everything to hell on the way in and alternating the lead to let the others change mags and cool barrels. Corners that would otherwise be cleared with a visual inspection were instead air-burst grenaded, and several ambushing drones were blasted, or tried to attack once they realised their ‘ambush’ was blown and got shredded by chainguns instead.

The corridor wound through hard rock and confined engineering levels, a blur of steel gantries and support structures for systems Trace didn’t recognise. But the hacksaws didn’t appear to want them booby trapped, and there were a lot of electrical and other piping that Trace guessed were sensitive to high explosive.

The corridor ended with a hatch that Trace commanded blown, which the Heavies did with gusto. Trace threw a handball through the wreckage and saw… she wasn’t sure what, a mass of systems that looked like nothing human-made. But there were no obvious threats, and tacnet was getting better at identifying hacksaws off handball sensors, so they burst through and took position…

And found themselves amidst a spidery tangle of steel beams, gantries, cables and pipes, all reworked and welded like some grotesquely beautiful piece of art. Or the inside of an insect’s nest, on a thousand times the scale. Passages twisted away in all directions, never a straight line. In amongst it all were machines and machinery — zero-G formers, refiners, 3-D printers, all alive and blinking. Trace’s HUD told her the air here was plus-31C — warm but not humid. This was where the heat was coming from, and the AIs must indeed have flushed the outer corridors to vacuum when they saw
Phoenix
coming, then let the life support air reflush to get such an abandoned, freezing look.

“Hold,” Trace told her remaining unit, as they drifted to cover positions with effortless coordination. These had once been inner crew quarters and systems around the central reactor, she thought… but under however many centuries of hacksaw occupation, those old walls and divisions had been erased, and replaced with this. A colonised system, for the utility of the colonisers, who did not need gravity, or walls and doors. Air, they’d evidently kept, for the excellent insulator and heat-retainer it was.

A check of tacnet showed her no further fighting. She couldn’t see everything, the feed remained as snowy as ever… but several other units she could see now advancing toward the core as she had, along similar routes. There should have been desperate resistance, now that she’d penetrated the inner sanctum, but there wasn’t.

“Okay,” she said carefully. “There’s a chance that might be it. There might not have been that many of them, and maybe we’ve killed them all.”

“
Or maybe they just don’t want to shoot up their pretty nest now we’re in it,
” Corporal Riskin countered between hard breaths.

“
Or they’re waiting until we’re deep inside then we get it from all sides,
” Terez added.

“That’s possible too,” Trace agreed. “The reactor should be up ahead. Probably they’ve rerouted the bridge controls to here as well. Let’s progress slowly. You see anything moving that’s not human, shoot it. Don’t relax now, we’re nearly there.”

“
Oh no chance of that,
” murmured Van, staring wide-eyed at the nest. Every human instinct told a sane person to go the other way. But marines and sanity did not always agree.

They moved in slowly, weaving on jet bursts between the spidery mechanisms. They did not shoot to clear corners here — a lot of this environment looked as though it could do anything if damaged, including explode, catch fire or electrocute everyone within fifty meters. Machinery running lights cast ghostly shadows through the web of steel and cables, and drifting steam swirled in zero-G eddies.

“
I got big power readings,”
said Riskin. “
Heading 290.”

Trace gave a thrust that way, rifle searching the shadows. Her hands wanted to shake, but knew better. On the climb, the shaking ones fell. It felt strange not to have Sergeant Willis here beside her, but she couldn’t think about that now. Preferably not ever. Sometimes she wished she could just crawl into a cave, and meditate, and never come out. So many connections to the world made so many conduits for pain, like raw nerves to her soul. If she could remove them all, she would.

Ahead, her audio fed her the deep, pulsing throb of an alien mega-core. Ten-thousand-year-old-plus engineering, purring away to make power for these new guests. She could see it now, the great toroidal arc of some older fusion design, surrounded by a thick mass of rubberised electrical work, like a writhing nest of eels that fed around these spidery strands.

Here before the reactor, a cluster of control plates and a lot of relatively exposed wiring. Within the control plates, something unlike anything Trace had ever seen before. Unlike anything most humans had ever seen before. Its body was snakelike, articulated, effortlessly adrift in zero-G. It had various protruding arms, thin and articulated like a slender spider. Its head was circular, numerous sensors encircling a single, giant red eye. And its body, silver in the dim systems light, was rippling, like wind across a field of wheat.

“
Major?”
It was the LC’s voice, faint and crackling. “
Major, where are you? I’m getting reports that the fighting has stopped, can you confirm?”

“LC,” Trace murmured, and transmitted visual feed. “Take a look at this.” And to her marines, “Don’t shoot. Yet.”

She jetted past the last obstructions, and halted. The thing slowly writhed and turned within its control panels. The red eye lifted, as though to peer at them. Another ripple fled down its body, then back up just as fast. The effect was caused by thousands of tiny metal plates, Trace realised. Protruding from that long body like scales, and rippling in coordination to make this extraordinary effect. She’d never imagined AI might communicate like this. Creepy as hell, and chilling at this range… but oddly, mesmerisingly beautiful.

“
Hu-mans,”
it said. Or she thought it said. The voice modulators were odd, multi-toned and well-synthesised copies of human speech… and yet, somehow not. It was hard to pinpoint exactly where the sound was coming from. “
Hu-mans. Why did you kill the children?”

Trace drew a deep breath. And heard, through the static, the LC swear in disbelief. “So. You speak English.”

“
Why?”
Plaintively, almost aggressively. Ripples zoomed up and down, in great agitation.

“Your children were trying to kill us,” Trace replied. “We are soldiers. UF Marines. Trying to kill us is a very bad idea.”

“
Humans always aggressive,”
it said. The voice was changing even now, deeper, more melodious. As though perhaps this was its first encounter with humans, and it was learning from her speech what sounded right. “
Humans always kill the children. We must defend ourselves.
”

Trace gestured around. “Do you control all of this? Are you plugged into the entire asteroid system?”

“
We always control. The children would not have hurt you. You should have gone.”

“We’re hiding,” Trace explained. “We needed this rock. Can you be unplugged?”

“
Why?”
Again plaintively. “
You have already killed the children. What more?”

“We need this rock,” Trace repeated. “Can you be unplugged?”

It writhed, back and forth within its panels. “
Major,”
came Erik’s voice through the static. “
There were a number of sides in the AI wars. They split at least six ways. The truly hostile ones were nothing like this. We might be able to talk to it.
”

Trace switched channels briefly. “LC, that reactor can go critical if the controller wants it. We’ll have time to get clear, but we’ll lose the rock and draw every eye in the system onto our position.” Back to external. “Can you be unplugged? We will not harm you if you unplug. Give the systems to us. We will be gone in time, and you can rebuild your children in peace.” It was a lie. Hacksaw nests were always exterminated to the last circuit.

“
Children cannot be rebuilt,”
it said sadly. Yes, sadly. It certainly sounded sad. Trace refused to believe it. “
We have not the resources. The humans always kill the children. They will lie to the children too, to get them to unplug. The children do not want to die, we have still so much to do!”

“
Major,”
Erik tried again. “
This isn’t a warrior queen! It’s something else… talk to it, you might get something!”

“This rock is no use to us without control,” Trace told the queen. “You must give us control, or you will die.”

“
There is no purpose without the children,”
said the queen. The red eye glowed at her, unblinking and wise. For a moment, the ripples were still. “
The humans always kill the children. I am ready.”

Trace shot it through the eye.

E
rik did not want
to go down to Assembly to greet the marines back aboard. The Captain had done so frequently, but it could be intense down there after casualties had been taken. There would be a lot of corpsmen treating wounded, a lot of life-and-death activity, and he did not want to be in the way. And he was not entirely sure that the marines would want him there anyway.

He had plenty to keep him occupied on the bridge, and went to Medbay when the chaos had settled down a bit. Medbay One was mostly full, fifteen out of twenty beds occupied. Medbay Two was also full — of bodies. A corpsman told him that the count was fourteen, but they weren’t sure they’d recovered everyone yet. There were marines in there, some in tears, but keeping clear of corpsmen doing organ recovery — no one begrudged them that, even with the latest bio-synth aboard, sometimes the only thing that saved a wounded marine was one of his dead buddy’s organs.

Erik returned to Medbay One and talked to a few of the less seriously wounded. One was Private Rolonde, one of the Major’s Command Squad, her leg on ice, white-faced and stunned. It wasn’t the leg that did it — First Sergeant Willis was dead, the guy who lead Command Squad and watched the Major’s back while she was commanding the entire formation. Willis had been thought as indestructible as the Major. His marines couldn’t believe he was gone, and Erik worried at the effect of this loss so soon on top of losing the Captain.

Trace arrived in the sweaty undershirt and light pants that marines wore under armour, and proceeded to talk to her people. Her touch was effortless as she clasped their hands, and spoke with quiet affection. She kissed several, put her hand in their hair, nothing like the cold-steel machine she was in combat. He could see how they looked at her, the relief at seeing her safe and here with them. The sense that despite everything, things would somehow work out, so long as the Major was here. Erik did not envy Trace her profession nor her lifestyle, but he envied the hell out of this. While he valued his many good friends on
Phoenix
, he doubted any loved him as much as this, nor needed his input as Trace’s people needed her. And he was scared, to think of what would happen to them all if they lost her too.

She came to him before finishing her rounds, knowing that debrief came first. “What’s the damage?” he asked her quietly as they stood by a wall as out of the way as they could get.

“Fifteen confirmed,” said Trace. “One there wasn’t enough left to bring back. Likely seventeen, there’s two missing and not much hope. Twenty wounded.” She indicated the adjoining emergency ward, where the most serious were in surgery or intensive care. “Five serious.”