by Isaac Hooke
Jason had his left arm currently frozen to his side, for example, and had to rely on the laser and energy weapons in his right arm.
He had to resort to bashing in the heads of these Freezers when those two weapons overheated.
Aria leaped toward him then, surprising him. Her ballistic shield blocked a plasma beam that had been aimed at him. Beyond, the Triceratops that had fired the beam was attacked by Cheyanne and Tara. Their swords bit into its legs, quickly hamstringing the robot and toppling it.
An enemy mech appeared, and it fired its energy cannons at Cheyanne and Tara in rapid succession. Sophie leaped in front of Tara, and her energy shield protected the swordswoman. Cheyanne meanwhile swooped skyward, twin blades a blur, and she cut around that mech, slicing off its canons before separating its head from its body.
Another nearby Earth rift went down, and more bioweapons diverted from the feeder rift beside it toward the War Forgers.
“Clones, could use some help here,” Jason said.
But a quick glance at the map told him that the other War Forger clones were just as occupied.
“There’s too many of them!” Xin said. She had stopped unleashing her plasma beam because it had overheated, and instead was striking out with superheated fists that melted through the creatures when she struck them.
Two more Triceratopses approached her, and Aria leaped in front of Xin to protect her with her ballistic shield. Aria returned fire with her lightning weapon.
But Jason couldn’t watch them for long, because the new bioweapon closed. They resembled giant porcupines, except they could launch barbed spines. Several struck Jason in the chest, and those spines injected acid into the surrounding metal, melting it away.
Jason quickly scooped up the carcass of a Freezer and used it as a shield as the next Porcupine unleashed a similar attack. Then he struck out with that body, knocking the attacker aside.
Tara dove forward beside him, wading into the fray, sending up fresh splashes of blood with her sword.
A steady stream of explosions rocked the area as charges detonated throughout the battlefield.
“Those yours, Lori?” Jason asked. But there were too many explosions for them to belong to her.
“Wasn’t me!” Lori said.
Large black blobs fell from the sky above, smashing into the Triceratops and the mechs that assailed them. More blobs also crashed into the enemy bioweapons just in front of him, disintegrating large swaths of the enemy.
“Get away from the rifts, Loris!” Jason looked up, and saw a large pyramid ship overhead.
The Devastator.
Other Mimic vessels hovered behind it.
“Thought you could use some help,” Jain transmitted.
“I didn’t know your ships were atmosphere capable,” Jason said.
“Surprise,” Jain said.
“How did you shoot through the shield?” Jason asked.
“The Bolt Eaters took a shuttle down and entered through the hole your sappers dug for them,” Jain explained. “While you distracted the bioweapons and other units, they were busy planting charges on all the shield generators.”
“So that explains the rapid series of explosions,” Julian said.
“I had stealth units out there…” Jason said. “I hope you didn’t destroy them.”
“We targeted only the feeder rifts, the bioweapons, and the enemy robots,” Jain said. “If your stealth units adhered to the mission objectives, they should be fine.”
All the Loris reported in shortly. They were all right, much to Jason’s relief.
With the team accounted for, Jason allowed the Devastator and the Nurturers with it to open fire at the quonsets and remaining enemy robots.
There were still some Earth rifts active out there, but the blob attacks were able to rapidly reduce the local shields around the generators, allowing the teams to quickly destroy them.
There were no generators on the feed rifts—those would be present only on the source planets. The War Forgers lined up in front of half of those rifts to mow down all bioweapons that emerged. The Devastator and other Mimic vessels meanwhile fired their blobs at the remaining rifts, butchering the bioweapons that appeared. They occasionally launched lightning attacks, and the bolts arced between enemy units, searing them.
The creatures kept coming and coming, and the mechs and starships continued to fire. The resultant slaughter bordered on the disgusting—like dropping meat into the grinder.
Finally the aliens responsible for the feeder rifts realized they were sending their bioweapons to their deaths, and shut down the rifts in turn.
“Cease firing!” Jason said.
Most of his weapons had overheated by that point anyway, so it was actually good timing on the part of the aliens.
He paused to survey the ruin in front of him.
The bioweapons formed piles of flesh that were basically unrecognizable. On the ground in front of the alien warships, the blast craters their attacks had made were filled to the brim with the melted body parts of their opponents.
“Tell me again why we volunteered for this?” Tara said.
But Jason didn’t have an answer. He felt a mental exhaustion that was almost physical. In fact, it must have translated to his physical body, because he sat down then, directly on the ground, collapsing in a heap.
“Jason!” Lori said. She ran to his side. The top of her mech’s tail was a bright orange, because she had fired her plasma weapon to overheating several times. “Are you all right?”
“Fine,” he said as she helped him sit upright. “Just need… a rest.”
Aria approached him, and plopped down beside him. “That was one of the more grueling missions we’ve been on.”
Jason nodded. “Earth is safe now. No more bioweapons will be coming.”
“Until the Link set up another staging planet,” Jerry said.
“Yes, but very soon now the Link will be on the defensive,” Jain sent over the comm. “They won’t have time to set up any such staging planets. We’re turning the tide here, people.”
“I hope so,” Jason said. He gazed out at the barely recognizable dead bodies. “Though that tide of yours is formed of blood at the moment.”
“It always is, in war,” Jain said. “By the way, do you need a ride?”
Jason hesitated. “Just give me a little longer.” He turned away from those bodies, and instead, he gazed at the ground directly in front of him, which was free from the dead bodies. He simply held onto Lori and Aria beside him, squeezing their metal shoulders tight.
“We’re going to get through this,” Lori said. “We’ve been through worse.”
Jason nodded, but somehow, he couldn’t make himself agree with her. What they’d just endured had to be the worst yet. And it was only going to get harder from here.
Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe it’ll get easier.
Somehow, he didn’t quite buy it.
11
Eric logged out of his android shortly after the Bolt Eaters finished setting the bombs on the planet. Bambi and Crusher promised to drag his body back to the shuttle, and if they couldn’t make it, they’d abandon the android, and when he wanted to return, he’d simply log into a new one.
He wanted to check on Dee’s progress against the Repelling the Entity attack.
He floated within the VR environment of his planet-wide consciousness, surrounded by the three-dimensional outlines of the different cities scattered across the world. Each of those cities harbored buildings containing the server farms responsible for his planet-wide consciousness. The flashing red dots that had marked those server farms earlier were gone—the attack against him had ended.
He attempted to log into the android he’d left in Little Earth, but couldn’t. “Dee, what’s going on? I can’t log into my Little Earth android.”
“Come to the palace in the capital,” Dee said cryptically.
“Why?” he said.
“Just do it,” his Accomp replied.
He returned his consciousness to the Banthar android he kept in the main palace of the capital city.
“I’m here,” Eric said. “Now what?”
“Proceed to the eastern wing,” Dee said.
“Little Earth is destroyed, isn’t it?” Eric said. “There’s no other reason why you’d tell me to go there.”
But Dee didn’t answer.
With a sigh, he used his prehensile limbs to manipulate the controls of the Hoverdisk that conveyed the android from place to place. He made his way to the eastern side of the palace, and passed various robotic servants along the way, all of which paused to bow when he went by. He hated that.
I’m going to have to change the programming on those robots someday.
But he didn’t really spend enough time here to justify it.
He reached the eastern wing, and proceeded to the topmost tower, which would give him a good view of the city. When he attained the upper level, he headed straight to the closest balcony and peered out across the city. Alien flyers hovered protectively above the skyscrapers in the city core that held his consciousness. Plumes of smoke arose from the outskirts of those buildings, and there was some blast damage to the different exteriors, but they seemed intact for the most past.
He shifted his gaze toward the neighborhood that held Little Earth. It wasn’t hard to find, because two more alien flyers hovered above it.
The smoldering ruin he saw below them wasn’t a surprise.
“How much is left?” he asked Dee.
“None of it,” Dee replied. “You told me to concentrate the defense on the server farm towers, to protect your consciousness at all costs. I did that. And this is the aforementioned cost.”
Eric simply stared at the ruins. “I’m not sure whether to be upset with you, or pleased. I’m leaning toward the former.”
Dee replayed a snippet he’d said earlier: “If you have to choose between losing Little Earth, or losing mind servers, then let Little Earth go.”
Eric closed his eyes, and took a deep breath. “We’ll just have to rebuild.”
“I have repair swarms and termites working on the site as we speak,” Dee said. “It will take a few days.”
That wasn’t so bad.
“By the way, I finally found out which councilors belong to the Repelling the Entity group, as per your orders,” Dee said.
“Great, which ones?” Eric asked.
“All of them,” Dee said.
“Oh.” My fault for keeping them on. I should have terminated them all when I took charge.
He blamed it on that pesky thing called human morality, a leftover vestige of his former self.
He heard the buzzing of a movement disk behind him, and flicked the controls to turn his craft around. A Banthar stood on another Hoverdisk across from him. One of the councilors.
It held a pistol in its hands.
Before Eric could say anything, the pistol fired.
His consciousness snapped back to the staging environment and he was surrounded by wireframe cities once more.
“Damn it,” Eric said. “Those androids are expensive.”
“The rift gates in orbit are under attack by shuttles,” Dee said. “As are the orbital defense platforms.”
“What?” Eric said. “Deploy the defensive birds. And get me some surface-to-space protective fire.”
“The surface-to-space guns have been disabled in separate attacks,” Dee said.
He pulled up the damage profiles and saw that Dee was telling the truth. He confirmed that the hangar bays for the defense birds were still active, and those ships launched skyward.
“I’m getting a call from one of the councilors,” Dee said. “It’s Paisley.” He was essentially the de facto leader of the council, at least in Eric’s absence.
“Put him through,” Eric said.
A Banthar hologram appeared in front of him. To the untrained eye, all the snails looked pretty much identical, but there were differences if you knew what to look for. The shells they carried on their back, for example, always had unique spiral patterns. The curls in Paisley’s shells were fairly tight, a sign of noble blood. Paisley also had distinctive notches in the skin beneath his antenna. That, and a series of warts that dotted his slimy face.
“Well, well, well,” Paisley said. “It looks like your unwelcome rule is about to come to an end.”
Eric had chosen an English accent for Paisley’s avatar in the translation engine, which had seemed somehow appropriate to the Banthar’s usually condescending words. Dunnigan hadn’t been too happy about that.
“You can’t use my accent!” Dunnigan had complained. “That’s cultural appropriation. Or something.”
“You think that destroying the rift gates will get you anywhere?” Eric said. “I’ll have the shuttles you sent quashed within the hour. And then I’ll hunt the rest of you down one by one. After, I’ll choose a new Ruling Council. One more amenable to my will.”
“Oh, but those aren’t shuttles,” Paisley said. “They’re fighters. You see, it’s not us who are destroying the gates and defense platforms, but the Link. That’s right: the Ruling Council has already cut a deal with them. The Link will help us destroy you, and in return we agree to restore formal relations. We will resume bioweapon shipments as per quota, and commence invasion of Earth.”
“And let me guess, in return for doing all of this, the Link have agreed to install your mind into the Essential once you’ve rebuilt the planet-side network after I’m gone,” Eric told the Banthar.
“You are very good at this game,” Paisley said.
“It will take you months to rebuild, if you destroy me,” Eric said. “Your world will be without power and other essential utilities during that time.”
“We’ve been stockpiling repair elements in secret,” Paisley said. “And producing extra 3D printers in each city. We’ll be up and running far sooner, don’t you worry. Current estimates are as optimistic as two days.”
Eric had to laugh at that. “Rebuilding a planet-wide network in two days? I don’t think so. Well, I’d love to sit and talk with you, but I’ve got an empire to ward off, and some rebel snails to squash, so if you don’t mind…”
He disconnected, and Paisley’s avatar vanished. He upped his time sense to the max so he could think.
“You have to look at it from their perspective,” Dee said. “You do kind of look like an evil alien dictator, from their eyes: forcing them to build a replica of an Earth street in the heart of their most expensive neighborhood. Severing ties with an empire they have belonged to for hundreds of years, causing that empire to promise destruction. Monopolizing trade in precious metals so that your military always has fresh stock for its robots.”
“I can’t believe you’re sympathizing with these creatures,” Eric said. “Considering they plan to convert Earth into a bioweapons factory when this is done. Not to mention destroying me, and you in the process.”
Dee didn’t have anything to say about that.
Eric accessed the camera feeds from different orbital satellites, and plotted the data on an overhead map, emulating the tactical display he had aboard the Bethunia II, which he overlaid atop the cities around him. He confirmed that Link ships had indeed arrived. It looked like a few Battlestars, some Teleporters, and some Claws, along with some classes he’d never seen in person before. The Battlestars were no doubt responsible for the fighters that were sequentially destroying the rift gates in orbit.
“I have to talk to the Bolt Eaters, before my connection is severed,” Eric said.
“Probably a good idea,” Dee agreed.
Eric logged back into his remote android. Bambi had carried it aboard the shuttle, which was no doubt proceeding to the Bethunia II at this very moment.
He left his time sense on high as he looped Tanis, Hephaestus, Jason, Jhagan, and Jain onto the comm line he shared with his Bolt Eaters. Their AI cores would all up-switch to match his time sense when they received his m
essage.
“So, I’m under attack by the Link,” Eric said.
“What?” Bambi said. “Oh, no.”
“Yes,” Eric said. “I’m also experiencing a bit of an insurrection. So you’ll understand why I’m going to have to temporarily recall my space navy. Tanis, you know how to send a message.”
“The rift generator you gave us,” Tanis said.
“Yes,” Eric told the Earth admiral. “But be warned, the neighborhood the rift leads to no longer exists. You’ll probably have to send a few mechs to escort any messengers.”
“Wait,” Tanis said. “We can help you.”
“That won’t be necessary,” Eric said. He didn’t want to be in the position of owing Earth anything. He preferred the current situation, where Earth owed him. “The Banthar fleet will be able to handle the intruders. There aren’t that many of them. I suggest you repair instead. If the situation changes, and we do need your help, I’ll let you know. Besides, you won’t be able to help me deal with the insurrection. That has to be all me.”
“All right,” Tanis said. “Well, we’re sorry to see you go.”
“Does this mean you’re leaving the alliance?” Hephaestus asked.
“I told you I was going to be temporarily recalling my space navy,” Eric told the Mimic. “I’m just taking a reprieve. I’ll try to rejoin the fight when I can.”
“When can we expect you?” Tanis said.
“Shouldn’t be too long,” Eric said. “A day. Maybe two.”
“Really? That quick?”
“Yes,” Eric said. “Slate, turn the Bug Killer around. Set a course for Banthar Prime. We’re going to need all the ships.” He glanced at the other Bolt Eaters who shared the shuttle with him. “When you get back to the Bethunia II, jump as soon as you’re able. I’m instructing the other Banthar ships to return immediately. I’m not sure how much longer the rift gates in orbit will be active, so after I log out here, you probably won’t hear from me until you reach Banthar Prime. See you soon. And to everyone else, I’m sorry.”
With that, Eric disconnected.
He returned his attention to the tactical display. The Bug Killer arrived momentarily, followed by the other Banthar ships under his command. He sent them on intercept courses.
