Horseplay

by Cam Daly

  Keryapt suddenly understood. Shadow was more afraid than angry. “Look, these things happen. We all make decisions that seem right to us at the moment. Then we live with the consequences.”

  “What about your decisions with Connor? What happens when he happens to mention to the wrong someone that the Dogpatch blast would have taken fifty micrograms of AM? Then his friends or parents mysteriously disappear. What then?”

  “I don’t think-“

  “No! You don’t think! You just do! That’s always been your specialty. Doing whatever seems right to you, without considering how it affects other people. You’ll never change.” She withdrew from the Stage.

  The Active sighed heavily. There was so much the younger woman didn’t know. She gave Shadow a few seconds to get herself composed then continued talking in the Planning Stage. “Okay. I need Dove’s sensors to scout for me, but will task Hawk with watching over Connor. If anything happens to him then I will intercede. And, you’re right that we need more long range remotes. I'll go build some while your team works the analysis. Let me know as soon as you have anything, and we can discuss my next move.”

  Keryapt waited for another long moment for a reply, but none came. At least she had a plan for the moment.

  INTERLUDE

  Jason DeVries was pacing rapidly, clearly agitated by recent events. “I had really hoped that the photographer would be able to tell us something more.”

  Senator Ormlan didn’t seem surprised by the outburst or the lack of information from Connor. “It was a long shot at best. I think he was telling the truth that he wasn’t involved in the theft of the disabled Knight. That’s something.”

  “I’ll take your word on that. I’m not good at reading faces, human or otherwise.”

  “He didn’t seem happy to relive that night’s experience. There was more collateral damage than expected.”

  DeVries stoped pacing and looked at the seated Senator. “There is sometimes a price to be paid for progress.”

  The two were alone in one of the gleaming underground labs of the ESWAT base on Alcatraz. Neither one paid attention to the array of computer hardware, or the racks of clothing and weapons. There was enough ordnance in the room to equip a small army.

  Ormlan rose and pulled off his suit coat. “Let’s forget about that for a moment. Where do we stand on the remaining mechs?”

  “We lost all the Knights at Dogpatch, as well as two of the heavy units. The others were damaged by the Fleet missile strike and antimatter blast, but we have enough spare parts to get them functional again.”

  Vest and shirt followed the coat. The Senator hung them neatly with other clothes on the rack. “Excellent. It should be at least another week before Fleet Four can get another Active here, but we know the Vreen have at least one ship nearby. We should assume they have someone here.”

  DeVries paid no mind as the older man continued to strip. “The research team is almost ready for planetary scale deployment. If the Vreen or whoever doesn’t act now, they won’t be able to stop us.”

  “True. Once Phase 2 begins-“

  The private elevator door at one end of the lab hissed open. The younger man inside bore a strong resemblance to Senator Ormlan, although he was wearing a lot more clothing.

  “Dad! Good to see you again.” He strode forward, meeting the Senator in a hug.

  “You don’t have to do that on my account.” DeVries studied the two for a moment. “And I think you’re doing it wrong.”

  The younger man stepped back, looked at his father’s lack of clothing and grinned impishly. “I think he’s right, dad. Good to see you again, Jason. You’re as humorous as ever.”

  The VSE executive tried on a smile but it didn’t seem to fit. “What brings Special Agent Ormlan back to San Francisco?”

  The Senator was naked now. He walked over to a water tank next to DeVries and started pulling on a swimmer’s cap. “I asked him to come back from DC. There are some places he can go that you or I can’t. Not without arousing suspicion.”

  The old man laid down in the coffin-like tank. DeVries studied the instruments on the lid as it closed, sealing the Senator in.

  “We certainly wouldn’t want to have anyone suspect something unusual was going on.”

  CHAPTER 4

  The pair of ships arriving in the Sol system didn’t seem to care who noticed them. They didn’t reduce power to their gravitic gradient drives until well inside Plutonian orbit, only then slowing to less than light speed. It took a full hour for them to quiet the telltale distortions of the interstellar drives and switch over to antimatter thrusters.

  The hundreds of observational satellites deployed by Fleet Four in the asteroid belt lost track of them at that point. Gradient drives could be triangulated in almost real time, depending on the power being exerted to generate gravitational distortions. The only way to spot a directed AM thruster was by infrared radiation, and it traveled at the speed of light.

  The new arrivals would be decelerating heavily, but by aiming the needle-tight exhaust from their thrusters away from the plane of the system they could hide their heat signatures indefinitely. The two hour delay from Neptunian orbit to the belt complicated matters as well.

  Keryapt watched the simulation for another few seconds, seeing but not paying attention as the modeled ships retracted their gravity-altering engine pods back into their hulls. The simulation was based on the data from the observational satellites gravitic sensors, not actual visible light images. It would be hours before that arrived.

  “Where are we on identification?”

  Shadow threw a handful of models on the Planning Stage main screen, all of which roughly matched the newcomers’ ships. “From direction and drive characteristics, they would most likely be Molu, Tetatotetot, Craven or Vreen. Yes, multiple ships traveling together is an unusual event for a low significance Labworld like Earth. If they are headed for the planet itself, it will be days until they are there. We’ll keep an eye out for them.”

  “More than one ship but fewer than a fleet makes me think the answer is ‘Craven’.”

  “I said that as well, but Analysis & Observation tells me that’s statistically incorrect. Three or more would increase the likelihood of that but two could just be a coincidence.”

  “Hmm.” Keryapt didn’t agree with that logic. She very much wanted to know who she was up against.

  “Also, there was a suspicious deorbit event that terminated over the state of Texas, near the city of Dallas. 50-50 that the object’s speed was artificially controlled. It could have been in the low multi-ton range.” Shadow sounded as if she were reading a weather report.

  “Only 50% certainty? We didn’t see the landing?”

  “The Observatory and related orbital hardware spot at least a couple dozen atmospheric entry events each day. If someone deorbits a package without high relative velocity or a gravitic drive then we don’t have enough warning to pay much attention to it. We get more data from human observers and warning systems than our own in some cases.”

  Keryapt’s face soured. “Can we improve that?”

  “Not quickly. We’ve added more microsats here but the humans created so much orbital shrapnel during their satellite conflict last summer that we can barely keep track of it all. Of course we could cannibalize your cranial pod delivery ship to make more microsats, but we should save those resources for emergencies.”

  “Or for my departure.”

  “Whichever comes first.”

  Keryapt didn’t have a reply to that. Shadow took that as a sign to continue with the mission planning which Keryapt had interrupted. “There won’t be any workers at the site today since it’s a Sunday. Sunrise is at 6:54 am, but it will take hours before the fog clears. Analysis & Observation has added a couple more locations to scan before anyone else shows up in the area.”

  “Roger that. Was A&O up all night?”

  “Yes. Connor’s spectral rig detected incredibly high levels of iridium and
other exotic materials in a few locations. Much more than could be explained by the destruction of Mezerello’s Intruder.”

  Keryapt herself was now inside the officially marked perimeter of the blasted Dogpatch area, walking through the dense fog as quietly as she could on the field of dirt and rubble. A ghostly model of the pre-blast neighborhood was overlaid on her visual field, and she could see that Mezerello’s original target building was at the center of the locations to search.

  “I had a weird dream last night, that everyone there quit and I had to be your Shadow. But I didn’t know how to do anything.”

  “I’m sure you wouldn’t. Did you sleep accelerated or normal?”

  “I went to bed at local midnight then slept at 2x, which usually doesn’t affect me. Anything above four or so and I would go psychotic.”

  Shadow snorted a laugh. “I thought you already were psychotic.”

  “Nope. Just advantageously unpredictable. Although…”

  “Although..what?”

  Keryapt was silent for a moment as her body continued quietly crunching across the loose ground. “If I did sleep enough while accelerated, then I could be a…psycho-Active!”

  “Holy- was that a joke? A joke using translated local linguistics? How long have you been working on that?”

  “You could at least chuckle or something. Since last night. I’ve got more.”

  “Please spare me, and focus on the mission. Stay off active sensors.”

  A radar scan or lidar beam would give away her location, but as a result Keryapt couldn’t see more than twenty or so meters in any direction and it seemed to take forever to cross the open space.

  Outside the fenced-in perimeter of the blast site, the city still slept quietly. Shadow had a handful of camera remotes monitoring the few vehicles that moved nearby. If it weren’t for the constant and inescapable background electromagnetic radiation the humans used for all communication, Kery could be sneaking across a patch of gray and brown pulverized debris on any world in the galaxy. There were a lot of formerly inhabited planets that weren’t much more than that.

  Finally, the fog-shrouded shapes of construction equipment loomed ahead. The area of almost fifteen square blocks and the waterfront pier area were off limits to would-be spectators or meteorite fragment hunters. Gates on the west side of the fence, opposite the old pier and gantry that had partially survived the blast, allowed access to the security and construction trailer offices. There were a variety of excavators, bulldozers and dump trucks around the site but their work was almost complete. The majority of the rubble and debris left by the blast had been cleared out, leaving a pronounced depression almost a full block in diameter.

  “Time to go to work, Kery. First target area ahead.”

  “Right. Let’s take a look.”

  Connor’s video had revealed a few locations where enemy hardware had ended up after the blast. It had almost certainly been recovered but the team wanted to check for remnants.

  This particular spot had been where a chunk landed of what might have been a leg from one of the six legged enemies. Shadow’s team had designated them as Dragons, in keeping with the Knight nomenclature. Keryapt bent down and waved her hands above the loose rock, scanning and gathering samples for her onboard mass spectrometer.

  The magnetic sensors in her hands detected no trace within the top meter or two of the surface. She peered around for a moment then retracted the sleeve of her grey shapecloth running suit and removed the Gunsleeve from her right forearm. The matte black combat suit underneath it was tougher than her skin so she left it in place.

  After a final glance, she punched her right arm into the ground up to her shoulder. She ran a stronger scan.

  “Nothing here.”

  “Next site, five meters ahead.”

  Keryapt pulled her arm free, slid the weapon back into place and started forward. The slight downward slope indicated she was entering the shallow blast crater itself.

  “By the way, we do have one interesting result from yesterday's close range scan of Connor.” Shadow’s team had anonymously employed a human physician to review the data. Humans knew a lot more about interpreting medical data than Fleet did. “He looks like he’s in good shape but actually suffers from a mild heart murmur. It shouldn’t affect his lifespan. Of course that won’t matter if you get him killed.”

  “Unfortunately for him, I needed Dove here. So we won’t even know if he is attacked until it's too late.”

  “Enough. This next site showed possible indications that the ground collapsed to a lower level. There were a variety of different industries here over the course of the last century and we want to check for tunnels or basements that aren’t mapped. You might have to be a little more noisy.”

  “Understood.” Keryapt removed her right Gunsleeve again. She punched her right hand down into the compacted rubble and dirt then raised her left arm.

  She brought her left hand down to the ground at full speed, palm open, generating a shock wave that would reflect off any irregular underground structures. Humans used this type of seismic imaging when searching for minerals and petroleum but this was a much more simple implementation. The resulting shockwave would take a few seconds to analyze and she might to have try from a few different points to build a map of what was underneath. She pulled her arm free and began wiping it clear of dust and debris.

  A combat alarm sounded and she looked in the indicated direction. Her combat subsystem was superimposing battlefield data over her vision and she could see the outlines and position markers for the various Fleet remotes in the area. One of the camera remotes above the fog layer had changed from a simple white outline to a red-outlined collection of falling parts. She hastily reattached her right Gunsleeve and stepped up her processing rate to match Shadow’s.

  “Contacts?”

  “Nothing. Could have been a mechanical failure - those things are mostly plastic.” She didn’t sound convinced. “The humans have a saying that once is an accident, twice is coincidence and three times is enemy action.”

  Another of the higher altitude camera remotes changed to red. “I think twice is enough.” She felt very exposed in the open plain of rubble. She ordered the pigeon-shaped Dove remote to fly from its perch on top of one of the excavators and get altitude. She stalked as quietly as possible back towards the southern edge of the devastated waterfront area.

  “Agreed. I think - hold up! An ESWAT Knight insertion vehicle just powered up on Alcatraz. It could be in firing range in 90 seconds. Recommend southern departure along exit route two.” Shadow set the remaining remotes on evasive patterns. It would make their cameras much less useful. “Bringing in S-4 with package. Fifteen seconds out.”

  The “package” was a standard issue Fleet autocannon, like the one that Mezerello had carried. The recently assembled Striker 4 remote had been lurking farther south in the fog in case trouble arose.

  “Both of the destroyed remotes had been using active sensors in the past minute. I’m going to have camera 17 go active to draw fire in five seconds.”

  Keryapt didn’t object. Camera 17 was under the fog in the opposite direction from where she was headed.

  She was out of the crater and moving between a pair of bulldozers when she heard a scrape of metal on stone. The fog made sound travel strangely and she couldn’t tell exactly where it came from.

  “Something else is here near me. Preparing for combat.” Passing for human was no longer a priority. She slowly reached back through a narrow slit in the combat suit, withdrew her mask and put it on. It was a black vestige of a face with silver-gray whorls and lines where its various sensor panels protruded. A human would have thought she was dressed for a masquerade.

  Two hundred meters behind her, camera 17 started making a great deal of electromagnetic noise to distract opponents.

  In front of her, a female voice spoke out loud. “Shadow! Is this another one of yours?”

  Keryapt’s combat system pinpointed the
source. Fifty meters away a human-sized silhouette was just barely visible through the fog as it rose to a standing position. The outline was indistinct but there seemed to be a more angled object starting from the figure’s right hand.

  It took the Interloper a twentieth of a second to process the audio and add identity information to the yellow outline around the figure in Keryapt’s augmented vision.

  Mezerello.

  “Shadow, I have a system error of some sort. Are you seeing this target designation?”

  “I’m…yes, I see it. I heard her. It. Hold on…” The targeted figure had spoken at normal human speed, not accelerated like the two Fleet women. Keryapt gave Shadow a few subjective seconds while she replayed the audio. The word had definitely been “Shadow,” which no one on Earth should know about.

  “How did I miss that on the way in? And what’s she talking about?” Keryapt was still mostly behind a bulldozer and didn’t believe she would be a clear target.

  “I don’t know. We can’t tell what she - it - is carrying. This has to be a trap of some sort, but I want to find out more.”

  “I concur.” Keryapt switched to external audio. “Mezerello? Is that you?”

  She fully activated her Gunsleeves as she spoke. Barrels extended from above each wrist and the multilayer armor within them began to spin up to full speed. The right arm’s barrel was slightly longer and wider than the three barrels on the left.

  The mysterious figure took a step forward in response. Its exact shape was still unclear, hidden by a loose garment of some kind. The object in its right hand was still held down along its side and its barrel or base seemed to be touching the ground. A sound which could have been a single short laugh or grunt came as it took another noisy step in Keryapt’s direction. She was sure that the figure hadn’t moved in the slightest before now.