by Cam Daly
Connor felt his stomach turn. “Down” was changing, and heading towards what had previously been “sideways.” Then suddenly Mason was rushing away from him, falling sideways at an incredible rate through the shattered window. His impact with the far wall was so loud that Connor could hear it over the fire, sprinklers, alarm and other sounds of combat. The strange twisting sensation disappeared with Mason, who was now a very large smear.
A blur of motion above the collider suddenly became a humanoid figure standing in front of him. It was a metallic form, somehow vaguely feminine but lacking detailed features. It was colored the same blue-gray as the sky, which was now visible through the gaping hole where the collider bay doors had been. The head was a flattened tombstone shape which tapered to a sharp tip. There was no face at all. It reached one arm out and he could see that the forearm was wider than the upper arm. A neat row of blue-black circles ran from its wrist to elbow, somehow pulsing in a way which was hard to focus on. Then it spoke.
“This is Horseplay. Where is the cranial pod of Keryapt Zess?” The voice was neutral, without inflection.
Connor tried to turn sideways to bring the backpack to its attention but the gel on his arm made it impossible. “In-“ He coughed. “In there.”
It reached out and stuck fingers like knives through the fabric of the pack, slicing it cleanly open. Pulled out the head inside and studied it briefly. Its singed hair and features made the Horseplay body seem even more inhuman. Connor could see his own reflection in its wide, flat suggestion of a face and he wondered whether Kery’s head would somehow attach to the top.
The answer came a moment later as its fingers either cut through or somehow opened the damaged Interloper head. With superhuman speed yet delicate precision the back of the head and scalp were taken apart, revealing a dull grey lozenge. The cranial pod.
Connor stumbled unexpectedly as a pair of silver-blue chevrons whistled through the air past him and into the room. They took up stations near Sousa and Park. They reminded him of his father’s single-edged razor blades, but bent down the middle into a sort of boomerang shape. As each of them whistled past, “down” lost its bearings for a moment. They somehow warped gravity to fly.
When he looked back a second later, Horseplay’s arms had twisted around and behind its body with the cranial pod and inserted it somewhere. It reached forward, almost casually slicing the gel that attached him to the cannon and door frame. He stumbled a half step back, letting it continue to hold his arm in its cold grip and shave off the last bits.
Then suddenly it changed. What had been a nearly smooth front to its head was now a perfect recreation of Kery’s face. She was smiling at him. The rest of her still looked like it was made of seamless blue glass or metal, but its movements seemed less robotic. More…human.
“Thank you.” Her voice held unexpected tenderness. “The symbol you cut on the bay doors with the plasma gun. That was good. Horseplay saw it. Let’s get you three out of here.”
He didn’t even realize that he had been holding his breath as she changed. He didn’t care what she looked like. He was just relieved that she was back.
#
An instant of uncontrolled light and sound and then she was in control of Horseplay. The change was obvious, even on the Planning Stage. Where the Interloper’s cranial processing had given her crude renderings and sluggish responses, she now had perfect crisp interactions and realistic simulation. And two minutes worth of atmospheric re-entry combat to review when she had a moment, plus a thousand other notices and reminders and messages.
It would have to wait. Her 32 winglets were being engaged by Craven and Molu enemies in and above the complex. A pair of them in this area was mapping the collider itself, figuring out how the decoherence field was generated. And Connor was urgently trying to tell her something. He had started with “Park” but a quick glance showed that the scientist was only superficially injured. She freed Sousa as Connor continued speaking, verifying that the scientist’s vitals were still good. He was the important one.
No drug could affect the crystalline brain of an Active, but the transition from hours of disrupted consciousness to this new state was as close as she would ever come. In a moment of perfect clarity, as all the combat status indicators clamored for her attention, she realized that what she had just gone through was what life was like for non-Actives every hour of every day. Even when she had been trapped without a body, on her final mission as an Active, she had still been able to think clearly. She had forgotten what it was like to be one of them.
Connor was still delivering his message. “Park was-“ Park was what? She found the facial contortions caused by the word ‘was’ especially amusing. This location seemed as safe as any for the humans, so she gave him another few seconds to get his words out.
But she had forgotten what it was to be herself as well. She had changed bodies dozens of times and never let them define who she was, but she had let the expectations of others do exactly that. ‘Keryapt Zess’ was a specific, unchanging thing to them and her attempts to pretend she still was that person had led her to choose exile from her own people. The relief in Conner’s face, his realization that he could stop pretending to be Tumorish, was something she craved. Something she had earned, and would not be denied again. No more pretending. She-
She realized Conner’s next word was “hit.” Park was hit? There was no sign of trauma, her vitals were…too slow for these conditions. The pinprick wounds on her face were not from shrapnel or broken glass, they were conversion needle wounds.
She hoped that Horseplay’s built in biolab had been updated with the data that the Interloper had gathered during Connor’s experience.
Except Horseplay had no biolab. That entire system had been replaced by the Factory’s own tanglecomm modules. Once the decoherence field was removed then she would have direct connections to the Asteroid Belt Factory and…Stopgap. The weapon of last resort. She understood how that communication channel would have been a high priority to the Admiralty, but now she would have preferred the biolab instead. Susan Park had two hours at most before she became Tumorish.
Before that mattered, though, Keryapt needed to get them out of the building. Outside, four of her semi-autonomous winglets were attached to her railgun and firing at the Molu-controlled Dragons. A full flight of sixteen more winglets were engaged in the now three-sided combat with the Craven attack platform and the Dragons, while the last twelve were inside the building.
She ordered eight of those twelve to ignore enemies on foot and each rescue at least one human. She didn’t have time to explain to Connor or Sousa how uncomfortable they were about to be, and their foreknowledge of it wouldn’t affect the outcome of transporting them. She gave the order to the winglets near her to drag them out of the building. She could ask for forgiveness after they were safe.
The remaining winglets were finishing off the last few Tumorish and Knights near the collider itself. If she turned off the collider, her enemies’ tanglecomm systems would all start to function again and they would be able to precisely target her antigravity systems. She needed to eliminate the opposition here first.
#
“Kery, Park was hit by Tumor-aaaaaahhhh…”
Before Connor could finish, things went sideways again. Then quickly got worse. He was falling towards the hole in the collider bay doors that Horseplay had entered through, then was outside and over the wall. Falling faster and faster all the time, always towards the silver-blue chevron that seemed to be his sole companion now. No sign of Kery, Sousa or Park. He gyrated as he “fell,” giving him momentary views in all directions. Fat lines of black haze were traced all over the sky near the complex, merging into a large black dome of cloud. The haze must be coming from the Dragons, briefly visible specks releasing pinpoints of light towards another dark pinpoint higher above the cloud.
The incessant falling made rational thought increasingly impossible - there was just bright sky, and roaring wind, an
d pain. He felt like he was being pulled in half. Whatever part of him was near the chevron was pulled towards it, while the rest of his body seemed to drag behind. He managed to bring his legs up and hold them close to his chest, which helped a bit.
And then just as suddenly as it started, it eased and stopped completely. He was rolling to a gentle stop on a grassy hill. The sun was coming up, there wasn’t a cloud in the sky and the grass under him was still damp from the night dew.
Laying there seemed like a good idea. The winglet floated silently just above him, nose pointed back towards where they had just come from. He noticed that its shape wasn’t completely flat, as there was a sort of flattened teardrop at its center.
He was momentarily confused when the Sneaker phone in his pocket rang. He hadn’t remembered putting it back there.
Somewhere in his flight he had lost the Fleet earpiece, so he pulled the phone out and answered it. Kery spoke urgently. “Connor. Get Park to the hospital. Your mission now is to protect her and Sousa.”
“Park? Where is she?” He struggled to his feet as two more of the silver winglets came racing into view. Each carried one of the scientists. “What hospital?”
His winglet lifted him again, more gently this time. The three of them were carried over the hill, revealing a small town. A four story brick building just ahead had a pair of ambulances parked in front. “Oh. That hospital.”
“Yes. Park has to be put into a medically induced coma as quickly as possible. Tell them she has rabies. They won’t be able to contradict that diagnosis.”
“Can’t you cure her?” He was lowered down right next to one of the ambulances. Voices were audible just past the boxy vehicle but no one was directly in view.
“No. Horseplay doesn’t have a biolab like the Interloper did. Once I’ve secured the collider, we will be able to contact my people and see if they can come up with something.” Sousa was lowered to his feet right next to Connor. Apparently Kery had cut his shirt apart to free him from the gel, leaving him half naked. The third winglet delicately placed Park into Sousa’s arms. Thunder echoed from the west and two of the winglets raced off. The third zipped around behind Connor, reoriented itself into a vertical position and somehow adhered itself to the back of his shirt. “Do whatever it takes to get her treated immediately.”
“What about Sousa? He can just tell us what we need to know. Game over. We win.”
“Ask him.”
Sousa could only hear Connor’s side of the conversation and was staring with increasing hostility. “Rafael-“
“Forget it. I’m not telling you anything until I know she’s okay.”
“What? We just saved your life.”
Sousa hefted Park’s paralyzed body as counterpoint. “You ruined our lives! Until she wakes up and I know she’s okay, I’m not helping you or anyone.”
There was a mad gleam in his eyes that made Connor suddenly nervous. “Kery, did you hear-“
“Yes. I was pretty sure he would say that. The computers here have been remotely erased, so I’m going to have to get the data from the collider itself. First I have to clear out all these mechs. After that I’ll come to you.”
“Can you do it?”
“I’ve got the most advanced aerospace supremacy platform that my civilization has ever allowed into the field. If I somehow lose this battle, you should make sure to find my body. There’s at least a million dollars worth of iridium alone.” She didn’t sound like someone who had just recovered from decapitation.
It seemed unfair, but more time had passed from her perspective than his since she had entered Horseplay. All he wanted to do was crawl into bed for a week.
“Umm. Okay.” Sousa was nudging Connor with Park's leg, pushing him towards the entrance to the hospital. “We gotta go. Good luck. Bye.”
“What did she say? Why isn’t she here?” Sousa was angry.
Connor wasn’t surprised. It was only a few hours since Sousa had learned about the aliens. Connor still sometimes felt anger that the world had changed so much.
“She’s protecting us. You okay carrying Park? Follow my lead.” He moved towards the rear of the ambulance.
Two EMTs there were discussing the light show they had just seen overhead. They looked up and saw Connor with his burned cheek and torn clothing, but then immediately switched their focus to the unconscious woman in Sousa’s arms. They sprang into action.
#
The Interloper had been soft in parts and hard in others, lumpy and comfortable. It belonged in the human world. Horseplay was elemental speed and motion, barely bound in humanoid form. Gravity was its plaything. And now Keryapt was its master.
But the exotic body had come at a steep price. The orbital Factory had exhausted two decades of exotic elements to create Horseplay, then deorbited itself to act as a shield. It stopped all but one of the missiles headed its way, but even a single antimatter-laden weapon was one too many. Horseplay had used the destruction of the Factory to cover the final seconds of its planetfall. Apparently neither the Craven nor Molu forces wanted to let the decoherence field drop, so the VSE Collider complex itself seemed to be off-limits to weaponry of that power.
But the longer she studied the situation from within the complex, the larger the black particle cloud of the Dragons expanded above it. Her winglets carved clear tunnels through it with their gravitic drives, drawing cannon and missile fire with each pass. But they couldn’t penetrate it with their sensors. The clear areas were quickly filled in again and the Dragons were only visible as momentary flashes of dark metal. If they carried more antimatter missiles, they would save them for a larger target. Her.
Or the Craven combat platform. It was around the size of a human train locomotive, with weapons concealed inside armored blisters or mounted on external stalks. Most of its weapons were aimed out or down, not up. Her combat system had already established a colloquial designation: the Louse. It lumbered around a few kilometers above the Dragons, spraying streams of projectiles or beams at her pack of winglets if they ventured too close.
They arced and spun, a chaotic stream of blue-silver unleashing swarms of micromissiles back at their prey. They used their drives in concert, yanking each other out of the path of incoming fire and constantly changing paths and directions. Kery had to force herself to not stare at the beauty of the intricate patterns they made.
Two of them had already been holed but still functioned. She set them to search and rescue of any remaining humans in the area. It was time to add herself to the complex dance going on outside.
She erupted from the collider complex in a cloud of debris dragged along by her gravitic nodes. She flickered her drives off for a moment of free fall and the haze around her fell away, giving her a first direct view of the battle. The Dragon cloud was a jet black cylinder angled up towards the Louse, with missiles barely visible as shining pinpricks racing into and out of it.
She slammed back into motion and zigzagged away and up. A particle beam from the Louse probed where she would have been if she had continued to move in a straight line. Below her, the remaining undamaged winglets from the complex burst out through windows and doors and raced to her.
The other half of the winglet flight was engaged with the Dragons, studying them as much as attacking them. There were two variant models amongst them, neither of which had the head-based cannons. One black and yellow-striped model was probably some sort of construction prototype. The other was bright red with banks of blue lights. For fire fighting or rescue? Her combat system automatically downgraded the threat potential from those two.
The single Craven unit was an exotech construct, faster and more dangerous than the factory-built Dragons. It had to go first.
She had the eight winglets harassing the Louse disengage and sent them spiraling up and away at a thousand meters a second, gaining altitude while evading its attacks. The other eight with her rushed to join them.
As she hoped, the Louse used the decrease in attacks by her
forces to drop lower and engage the Dragons. A detonation here or there made it clear that it was finding them.
The flight of 16 winglets, half of her total complement, was twenty kilometers up now. Ready to start her real attack. There had never been a body like Horseplay before, so some of the battle plans were not field tested. She gave the order and the winglets reversed course, their gravitic drives accelerating each one with a force a hundred times Earth’s gravity as they plunged downwards. A second later, 16 tiny sonic booms combined to give notice that the battle was changing.
The twenty drives embedded in Horseplay, five in each limb, were powerful enough to rip her apart if they were activated at full power and pulled in different directions. Now they worked together to fling her into the blue sky. The combat control system took over the details of her movement and aimed her at a point midway between her winglets and the Louse.
The winglets fell faster and faster, their systems locked to Horseplay’s control and altering their courses precisely as they sliced through the air. Keryapt rushed up to meet them, accelerating as well. They fell into a line as they approached her, mach cones merging and making the passage easier for each subsequent one.
Alone on the Planning Stage, focused on the intricate attack, she spoke to no one. “You thought we were fast before. How about a little gravity slingshot to make things extra tricky?”
Five kilometers up, she met the vanguard of the winglet group. The first one whipped around Keryapt faster than she could see, adding her speed to its own and slicing through the sky towards the Louse. It crossed the twelve kilometer gap in a single second, a dagger flung at the heart of her titanic enemy.
Its wings splintered into dozens of micromissiles which impacted the Louse with near-nuclear force. The core of its body streaked just past the Craven mech, slowing as it went and starting the long loop back to re-engage.
The next winglet followed a fraction of a second later, targeting the next section of the Louse. Each successive slingshot stole more of Kery’s forward momentum, which in turn meant the following winglet was accelerated less and its micromissiles had reduced power when they struck.
