Rogue Stars

by C Gockel et al.

  He used his knife to cut away webbing, and then tied it roughly across his chest like a bandolier. It didn’t seem out of place; there were others already hanging from his armour. Most empty now. He didn’t bother cutting them away.

  Grenades and power cells.

  It meant he didn’t have to stop yet. He gave no other thought to the downed unit behind him. He was in hibernation and that was all that could be said. Nothing but evac would help him now, and that wouldn’t happen until the Merki were cleared out.

  The street ahead was blocked, one of the towers had fallen filling the street with debris. The retreating Merki bunched up and artillery control took full advantage by hammering them in the tight confines of the blocked street. The aliens, starting to panic now, turned to enter a side street. Eric turned aside without a second to consider the danger and ran through flames. The partially collapsed building was fully engulfed; the heat unbearable on exposed skin, but he was a viper and any amount of pain could be endured if it meant he could kill more Merki.

  Damage and warning alerts flashed upon his display as the temperature soared around him. He wanted to hold his breath against the smoke and pollutants in the air as well as the heat that seared his throat and lungs, but he couldn’t. Not and run. His armour smoked in the heat, and he had a moment to worry about the power cells and grenades so recently acquired. What was the flash-over temp of the regiment’s power cells again? He didn’t have the time to check. Nothing to do about it anyway. He smashed through an already burning door, shot away a partition wall that divided offices, and saw windows overlooking a street. He dove toward them as the ceiling gave way above him.

  Other viper units noticed his new direction and followed, but they were fighting their own war and Eric didn’t have any advice they would listen to. It was every unit for himself this late in the battle.

  Eric crashed onto the street gasping and choking on the pollutants released from burning synthetics, but TRS (Target Recognition Software) didn’t care about anything other than its programming. It acquired the Merki without his input and he opened fire on automatic even as he rolled into the road.

  The entire action took milliseconds, and he didn’t intervene. He poured fire into the snarling aliens; other units bursting into the street did the same. The shrieking of dying aliens blotted out the roar of the nearby blazing buildings for an instant. Return fire hammered the street and buildings around him. The Merki troopers were in such a panic, their fire discipline was shot to hell.

  Eric got to his feet, dodged left, right, left and jumped reaching for a handhold on a building ahead. He crashed into the wall, missed his grip, and fell toward the ground far below. He reached for another hold, anything to arrest his fall as the wall rushed by. Failed again, and kicked hard at a ledge as it flashed by him, launching himself away toward the next building over.

  He grunted as he hit the target building awkwardly. Damage alerts flashed, but it was nothing serious. Left shoulder only, but it hurt and made his arm tingle. The arm felt slower of a sudden, but usable. The building had taken damage, the wall blasted to ruins, and he had smashed down on jagged broken plascrete. It was well though. A better firing position and one with better handholds.

  He hung by one hand, kicked and shoved himself up until he could hook an elbow in the nearest cavity blasted into the wall by RPG attack, and rained fire onto the Merkiaari. He emptied his rifle into them and then pumped grenades as fast as he could. Slowly the enemy withered away to nothing.

  Eric snarled as vipers ripped and bludgeoned the bodies in a berserk frenzy, reducing them to bits and red paste. He wanted to join them in that, but he was sane enough to realise he couldn’t kill the Merki any deader than they already were.

  The last few red icons on his sensors winked out one by one. It was done.

  Eric let himself fall to land in the street. He reloaded his rifle and noted its power was low. He swapped cells taking a pair off the charred bandolier across his chest, and shoved grenades into the launcher he had taped under his rifle. He wished he had a properly integrated weapons system, but the new rifles were still in development. The standard Alliance rifle and launcher couldn’t accept targeting data from a viper, and output was lower, but even so he would have like to have one. His temporary lash up worked, but that was all that it had going for it.

  “Burgton to all units,” the cold, deadly voice of the General was clear on Eric’s comm, and every viper within Eric’s range paused to listen. “Operation Clean House complete. Proceed with Operation Annihilate. Burgton clear.”

  Eric turned as did every surviving viper, and pushed himself to a ground-consuming lope, heading south. Behind him, the artillery paused for a moment, and then it thundered again at a new target. South. Operation Annihilate was the codename for the endgame of this entire campaign. Burgton wanted to teach the Merki a lesson they would never forget. As he had said in the meeting where it was conceived, they would turn San Luis into the Merkiaari’s vision of hell... it was already Eric’s.

  Eric left the city and reached the rally point. The Wolfcub class landers were coming in hot; scores of them stooping upon Eric and his comrades as if on prey. One after another they came in, ramps already descending and ready to accept the vipers. Landing struts slammed down, and the vipers raced up the ramps even as the dampers were recoiling. Moments later, the landers went to max thrust and threw themselves skyward so hard that G-stress greyed even a viper’s vision. Eric groaned as the seat edge cut into his thighs.

  Behind them, navy shuttles crewed by viper medics and navy corpsmen flew over the burning city on SAR missions to retrieve the fallen. Eric watched a real time view by satellite as they homed on the beacons indicating downed vipers awaiting pickup. He hoped most would be carried into orbit and back to the ship for repairs, but he knew many would go into cryogenic storage when they arrived to await their final journey back to base and a last appointment with the regiment’s archive.

  He broke his link to the satellite and closed his eyes, trying not to see the faces of the fallen, but vipers never forgot anything. Nothing at all.

  Computer: combat mode.

  The world sped back up as he dropped back to his default condition. Alerts began appearing upon his display, some flashing for his attention. Priorities. His processor wanted instructions. Did he want to enter maintenance mode? Hell no! He would be fighting again soon. He would rely upon combat mode for now. True, it would take longer to repair his damage that way, but it would be repaired and still let him fight.

  His decision caused a cascade of new data to be displayed. A shortlist of needed repairs and the wire-frame graphic to go with it, as if he didn’t already know where it hurt. The worst damage was to his left shoulder, but it wasn’t serious. The rest were burns and some loss of lung capacity. Damn smoke. All was repairable without need for outside intervention.

  >_ Diagnostics: 87% combat capable

  >_ IMS: Repairs in progress.

  Eric glanced at the others, but none acknowledged him. They were all busy with internal business, same as he had just been. He was glad to see Ken Stone had made it, and Dick Hames. Both were good friends, and had been enhanced with him in the same group. Enhanced together, trained together, and often fought beside one another. Dick’s armour was heavily pitted and scarred from enemy fire, but he seemed essentially intact. He could see other faces he knew, all looked weary, and all were ready to fight again. He pretended not to notice the missing faces, preferring to imagine them safe and aboard the other landers.

  “What happened to your hair, bro?” Stone said raising his voice over the noise of the engines.

  Hair? Eric reached up and realised he was burned bald on his right side. His helmet hadn’t protected him from it, probably made it worse. It had been damned hot in that building.

  “You like it?” Eric said. “New style I call Merki Barbecue.”

  Stone grinned and some of the others laughed. “Hell of a thing. You think we get to go hom
e after this one?”

  Eric shrugged. “No clue.” The Alliance was still on the back foot and barely holding on. He doubted they would go home, but even if they did, it would be a short respite. “Don’t worry about it. You’ll get to increase your score—”

  “Incoming Merki Interceptors! Brace for high speed manoeuvres!” the pilot shouted over the comm.

  Eric tugged on his harness straps hard to tighten them. He hugged his rifle to his chest, clamping it there with folded arms as the Wolfcub lurched going to max thrust. It spun upside down, veered left and suddenly a gaping hole appeared in the floor between Eric’s feet. He looked through the hole, pursed his lips in thought, and turned to toward Ken who looked a bit sick. Well, it had been very close

  “I don’t think—” Eric began as the lander was hit again and fell out of the sky, already disintegrating.

  The pilot screamed, “Brace, brace, bra—”

  * * *

  >_ 0559:59 close archive file #0000063577982-3996-SL

  >_ 0600:01 Deactivate maintenance mode... Done.

  Diagnostics: Unit fit for duty

  Activate combat mode... Done

  TRS... Done

  Sensors... Done

  Targeting... Done

  Communications... Done

  Infonet... Done

  TacNet... Done... Scanning... No units/stations found

  >_ 0600:05 Reactivation complete

  Eric’s eyes snapped open, and the dream faded away back to storage. He was in his rack aboard the tramp freighter, instantly alert as always. His programming wouldn’t allow anything else of course. His 0600 wakeup call was better than gospel as far as his processor was concerned. Not that it knew or cared. It was just following its programming. Some days, more and more as the decades rolled by, he thought he was just doing the same.

  “All behaviour is programming one way or the other. Mine is just more so,” he mumbled, and frowned at the thought.

  He was a viper. A cyborg soldier designed to kill Merkiaari in milliseconds, and he performed that task extremely well. They all did of course, the vipers, the one-hundred units that were all that remained of the once powerful SAG. The Special Assault Group had been created to augment the 501st Infantry Regiment’s offensive capability during the Merki War; it’s mission back then to seek and destroy the alien invaders wherever they were found. Eric and his comrades had done so with extreme prejudice, and their reward?

  Continued existence.

  Eric sneered at the familiar hurt. Existence. They were lucky the Alliance hadn’t decided to deactivate them all. They were feared and respected still, but mostly feared. No one was comfortable in a room with something that could kill three-metre-tall alien monsters in the blink of an eye. None would seek them out to get to know them, not knowing what they thought they knew of the cyborgs who won the war for them. That war was long over, or in hiatus if you believed General Burgton’s predictions. Unfortunately, Eric and the others did believe him; it wouldn’t be long before the Alliance needed them all again.

  Eric swung his legs out of his rack and went through his routine.

  At precisely 0620 he was groomed, dressed, and ready to debark the ship. His duffel was ready to go; he had packed it last night. There was nothing in it he really needed, but as a prop it added to his cover story. He wasn’t Eric Penleigh right now. He was Eric Martell, ex-merc looking for a cause. The clothes he wore and the kit in his duffel all helped with his image. He had aged his brown uniform coverall well, and it had no insignia—he had unpicked them all himself exposing the darker cloth beneath. It was actually a civ design, but it was the right type and no one could tell now that the insignia had been that of a cleaning company. It made him look like what he was pretending to be. A dishonourably discharged merc.

  The ship began its final approach to station. Nothing to do but wait until docked. He sat on his rack and waited staring at the bulkhead in silence. How many times had he been on missions like this now, on missions that could have been identical except for location?

  Working...

  Eric sighed and ignored the list of codenames as it scrolled by on his display. He didn’t want an answer to his question. He knew the answer was in the hundreds. It had been rhetorical, but his processor didn’t care and continued its task of filling his vision with holographic data. It wasn’t really holographic of course. It only seemed to hover before his eyes like a holotank display. No one but he could see it and not even he cared to read it. His internal damn computer was too literal, and vipers could not forget anything.

  Anything at all.

  He was programmed with perfect recall; the idea had been to make them all better killers by making target acquisition at a glance instant and perfect. The routines in his programming were complicated and numerous. Together they were called Snapshot, and there was no way to turn it off. Not even his death would shut it down, well, not immediately anyway. He had seen comrades take careful aim and one final shot after they were already dead just to take their killers with them. It was freaky as hell, and scary. That would be him one day.

  >_ 563

  Eric sighed when the total blinked on and off. He erased the list with a coded thought and his vision cleared. Five hundred and sixty-three missions the same as this one, or close enough for his damned literalist processor to count them. That probably meant a similar amount just outside its acceptable parameters. Its true/false subroutines were distressingly precise and were something every viper had to take into account when asking for data. The days of real A.I computer architecture were centuries in the past, Douglas Walden and his hacker rebellion had seen to that.

  Over five hundred missions like this one, and hundreds different enough to be excluded from the list, and they all meant nothing. The days when his battles did mean something ended with the Merki War. He spent his time now killing other Humans, not murderously vicious aliens bent on genocide. It was enough to make a statue weep.

  How far they had fallen.

  The Alliance and the regiment was all he had. All any viper had really. They were his two reasons to exist. The General ordered and he obeyed. The General said the coups and mini wars had to be managed. So they were managed... by vipers behind the scenes when that was possible, and when not possible the General had the President’s ear. Orders came down, and off they went to war once more... or battle at least. They had to keep the peace when it could be kept, and divert or bring the wars to a swift conclusion when it could not. The Alliance must remain strong when the next Merkiaari incursion occurred. And it would occur soon. Five years the General estimated. Just five more years and his existence would have meaning again.

  >_ 0700:23 Docking commencing.

  The sound of grapples and maintenance lines connecting were clearly audible. He could have used his sensors to detect people on the ship and station but there was no need. He could have slipped into the security net on the station and accessed a live feed of the ship’s final approach. He used to do that, he remembered. Long ago that was. He did not think on it too hard now; if he did, his processor would resurrect one or more memories and replay them. The damn thing was programmed that way.

  He checked the synthskin glove on his right hand, but as before it was intact and hiding his weapon’s data bus. The data bus was the only obvious external difference between his enhanced body and a standard Human. The other one, his primary node was at the base of his spine and hidden by his clothes. As long as the glove remained undamaged, no one would know what he was.

  >_0710:12

  He watched the seconds tick by. The time on his display was set to Thurston local, as were the ship’s chronometers. That was standard for all ships when jumping in system. Made things easier to manage—traffic patterns and the like. Ships received the correct time and other information like trade prices and news bulletins from the beacons.

  The sounds died away and Eric stood. He threw his duffel up onto his shoulder and left his cabin to join the few other passenge
rs debarking here. None of them spoke. All of them were civilians of one kind or another. No tourists here, but then the Betty wasn’t a cruise ship. It was a freighter and only took a few passengers aboard to supplement meagre profits way out here in the Border Zone. Eric supposed these people were down on their luck spacers, they had the look. They would most likely be seeking a ship docked at station to take them on as crew, or to take them to another port where they could try again.

  Eric followed the ramp out of the ship and stepped dockside. Multiple alerts competed for his cybernetically enhanced cerebrum’s attention, but he ignored most of them. As always, his sensors and programming leaned toward tiresome completeness. What did he care that leaving the ship had exposed him to an atmospheric pressure drop of a few hectopascals? Did he give a fuck that the station’s atmosphere was nitrogen rich and its temperature a few degrees low? No, but did his processor care, did it ever take instruction from him to suppress pointless alerts when there was no risk of harm to him? Of course not.

  Nothing to do but keep on keeping on as they say.

  “They’re full of shit,” he growled. He shifted his duffel on his shoulder, took a deep breath, and folded himself away letting his cover personae take over his features. “Just another day on the job,” he whispered, the weariness in his voice not registering in his own ears after all these centuries.

  Eric marched across the dock toward arrivals and departures board. He stopped, looking blankly at the departures section and was bumped from behind. He pasted on an annoyed expression and turned to see who had walked into him, already lowering his duffel to the floor.

  “Oh excuse me, so sorry,” the stocky black man said. “Wasn’t paying attention there. Worried about my flight... can’t find it on the boards.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” Eric growled turning to look up at the departures again.

  “No really, you must forgive me. You will won’t you, and shake on it?”