by Brian Smith
Everyone nodded or voiced an affirmation.
“Next. We’re currently not able to contact anyone in management. Flores, you and Wolfe are a team now. Head for the residential areas and call on them personally—determine their status and inform them what’s happened and that the Security Annex is where they should report. Be careful on the streets inside the dome. This is TOA territory, but don’t take anything for granted. Reports of fighting nearby at the south spaceport complex are coming in. That’s probably a bunch of Marsmen revolutionaries going at it against the TOA outfit there. That’s another thing—some of you are native-born Marsmen and some are Earthworms like me. Most of you hold Terran citizenships no matter where you’re from, but a few of you don’t. Hear me clear as a fucking bell, people: I don’t care. Right this minute, I don’t give fuck-all about politics or who is going to govern this dust ball next month. Right now your tribe is Aberdeen Astronautics, its employees, and their families. Anyone disagrees with that, they can shuck their gear and piss off. Any one of you have a problem with that?” Harper added, looking particularly fierce behind his eyepatch.
Nobody moved a muscle.
“If you stand there now and screw us over later, I’ll bloody well hunt you down and skin you alive, and you can take that to the bank. Are you all sure?”
Again nobody made a move to leave.
“Any questions?”
“Sir, we can’t just leave them all in there . . . like that.”
“We won’t,” Harper replied, softening his tone a bit. “We need to let a forensic team have a go first, and then we’ll see to the dead. It may be the only way we find out who was responsible for this. Once we know the who, we’ll probably know the why, and then we’ll be able to respond properly, going forward. I have questions like the lot of you, but we can’t stop to look for the answers just yet—we aren’t necessarily out of the woods here, and some of our people may still be in danger. Any more questions?”
There were none.
“Righto. Flores, Wolfe, off you go. Everyone else, follow me. We’re headed back to the Security Annex.
Nuevo Rio Spaceport, TOA (South) Complex
Amazonis Mensa Region, Mars
Diane Hutton and Cheryl Ayers could see the telltale flashes of light and distant explosions coming from the south side of the spaceport after their rolligon swung west around the crater rim that formed the foundation of the Nuevo Rio dome.
Hutton instinctively took control of the vehicle back from the AI autopilot, slowing them as they cautiously approached the spaceport complex. It was pitch dark outside right now; the only way they could see anything—other than the explosions and flashes of small-arms and particle-beam fire—was by using low-light overlays in their snoopers and oculars.
“What the hell is going on?” Ayers breathed, hardly believing what she was seeing.
“I think we’re driving into the middle of someone’s war,” Hutton offered. “What’s that?” she added a moment later, slamming on the brakes. They were approaching the field boundary, where something large and mechanical had appeared out of the darkness. It was just off the paved road on the east side, right between them and the spaceport landing field. It was the size of a small rover, with the general appearance of a giant metallic insect. There was a central body with four springy mechanical struts that arched out to all-terrain treads. The central portion appeared to bristle with sensors—and weapons.
“Combat drone,” Ayers replied tensely. “I’m switching off our transponders,” she added, already accessing those functions remotely. “Get your helmet on and seal up, on the double!” she added, reaching for her own.
***
The semiautonomous AI constituting the brain of the combat drone fired a string of small guided-rocket munitions at some unseen target to the east before it noticed the rolligon. The machine’s upper dome pivoted around, taking the vehicle under intense electronic and visual scrutiny. The rolligon appeared nonthreatening, with no active sensors or external weapons mounts detected. The drone’s electronic query came back with a null reply; there was no transponder signal to aid in identifying the rolligon as friend or foe. The AI of the unmanned weapon was ethically unsure how to respond, so it sent a query to the human operator sitting in a command unit a few kilometers away.
The MIM soldier commanding this platoon of drones examined the visual feed, seeing only a lone vehicle stopped on the road. It didn’t appear to be armed, and it was outside the designated zone for hostile action. However, it had been heading for the main gate of the TOA complex and it wasn’t one of theirs. . . .
***
“What should I do?” Hutton asked tensely.
“Back us off—very slowly, into a three-point turn, then slowly back the way we came, toward the dome. Your exosuit all sealed up? Good. Depressurize us down to ambient outside pressure and be ready to haul ass if I yell for it.”
“Depressurize us?” Hutton asked.
“Standard navy doctrine in case they start shooting—it works wonders. Do it.”
“Well, yes, ma’am! Here goes nothing,” Hutton breathed. She shifted into reverse and began backing them down the road.
Beside her, Ayers brought up a virtual keyboard and looked at the frequency on which the drone had sent its IFF query. Was there anything there she could work with? There was! She mentally cracked her knuckles and began working an on-the-fly hack of its network. If she could obtain control of the drone, even temporarily, maybe she could exploit it for information or even turn it against its team. An old campaigner when it came to GQ drills, she barely noticed the slight expansion of her suit as the internal pressure inside the rover dropped until it was equalized with the near-nothing ambient pressure outside. It got cold, too, but the Peltier plates in her exosuit compensated for that.
***
If the drone’s overseer hadn’t been monitoring it directly at that moment, Ayers’s hack would have succeeded. However, the soldier commanding the drone spotted the intrusion and sent an overriding signal instructing the drone to cut its network and go autonomous for one minute, before returning to network control. That was the manufacturer’s recommended response against a combat cyberhack for this hardware model, a temporary denetworking that would make the attacker give up and move on to the next target, followed by immediate renetworking and reengagement. In the meantime, the drone would autonomously attack any target without friendly IFF within its proscribed self-defense range. Unfortunately, the rolligon was still inside it.
***
“Haul ass!” Ayers cried.
She mashed back into her seat as Hutton gunned the rolligon, instinctively taking them off road to the west and driving past a large boulder. The twin particle beams that hit the back hatch of the rolligon and almost immediately began burning through were temporarily foiled when the vehicle passed behind the rock shield, which superheated and fractured violently even before the drone ceased fire. The thunderous crack of the rock was dimly audible even inside the rolligon, but neither woman noticed it.
The rolligon picked up speed, and now that it was offroad it was kicking up an impressive rooster tail of Martian dust behind it, forcing the drone to work that much harder to reacquire and fire. Particle beams lashed out again, scything through the dust and illuminating the dust cloud like red-orange fire as they found the vehicle again and tracked down the right side, from about midcabin to the aft portion of the vehicle.
Hutton slewed it back to the right and blew over the road again, this time plowing across the north spaceport-complex boundary and onto the field itself, setting off a dozen alarms throughout the complex.
The drone wasn’t as fast as the rolligon, but it wasn’t giving up, either. It followed behind them at top speed on its treads, deftly avoiding obstacles and cleverly using the paved roadway for as long as it could before leaving it on the east side, pursuing the rolligon across the north complex toward the crater wall that obscured the Nuevo Rio Habitat dome.
Up t
o the north, Hutton could see the lights of the nearest tunnel leading underground—into the north spaceport garage complex. She seriously doubted the drone would be allowed to chase them that far, so if they could make it there without being sliced, diced, or exploded, they might just make it all the way.
“This thing doesn’t have any weapons on it, does it?” Cheryl finally thought to ask.
“Sorry, it’s just a transport,” Hutton replied through gritted teeth.
Hutton drove as evasively as she dared at this speed, but the particle beams kept hitting the rover and punching holes in it. At that point it was really nothing more than sheer luck that spared her and Ayers from being hit. Hutton spotted a sizable cross-shaped building toward the northern end of the north complex and made a beeline for it. A small surface hopper sat parked on a remote tarmac nearby; Hutton jinked the rolligon over and put the hopper between themselves and the drone. The hopper blew up spectacularly a moment later when the drone’s twin particle beams ignited the its methane fuel tanks, but the fire was short lived in the subfreezing super-thin air of the Martian night. The drone drove itself in a tight arc around the smoldering wreckage and drew a fresh bead on the rolligon, firing again. This time the beams sliced into the rover’s right-side axles, slicing off both right-rear wheels.
“Crap,” Hutton announced.
“Keep going. I’m going to try something,” Ayers replied.
She was trying to remotely access the drone again, using every tool in her cyber-warfare toolkit. As a quarter-century veteran with Level-Five credentials in her chosen field, she had invented some of those tools herself. This time she didn’t try to exploit the drone or take direct control of it. Instead she spoofed it with a little misdirection. She managed to convince it that the big building ahead of them was the target, rather than the rolligon itself.
She was just executing the command when the final shot the drone took at them severed the last two wheels on their right side. The AI had gone for the disabling shot in the end; once the rolligon was stopped, the drone could close the gap and finish the job with ruthless machine precision.
Succumbing to the hack, the drone shifted its attention to the hapless building at the same time Hutton lost control of the rolligon. The vehicle flipped end for end, coming down hard on its roof and then tumbling across the spaceport tarmac in a violent sideways roll. When it came to a stop upside down, the two women inside were stunned and shaken but still breathing.
“Help!” Hutton cried faintly through her suit radio. She sounded winded and faint.
Ayers diagnosed the problem immediately. She scrambled to unstrap herself, reaching down and catching herself with Terran strength as she fell out of her inverted seat, then twisted upright. Amazingly, the rolligon’s emergency battery packs were still functioning, and there was internal light to see by. She winced when she saw the piece of composite stanchion impaling Hutton’s left hip. It wasn’t just a serious wound, but a suit breach as well—Ayers could see the stream of air hissing out around it.
“Don’t move, honey,” Ayers called. “Sit tight for a moment—I’ve got ya!”
She groped around frantically until she found one of the advanced particle-beam weapons they’d taken off MIM insurgents that night—or was it a lifetime ago now? She hefted the weapon and triggered it, using the powerful particle beam to cut away the stanchion from the vehicle’s sidewall. Hutton was flailing now, twitching, as she grew increasingly hypoxic and lost consciousness.
Slow is smooth, smooth is fast. Steady now, Ayers told herself firmly. She’d drilled this scenario countless times—this time it was for real. She snatched a suit patch off her belt and took a deep breath as she grabbed the stanchion protruding from Hutton’s thigh and jerked it free. There was a danger in doing so: if the splinter had pierced a major blood vessel, Hutton would bleed out in short order. However, in any sort of vacuum environment, the priority was clear: a breached suit had to be patched and repressurized or it wouldn’t make any difference. Vacuum killed quickly and dying from a pulmonary embolism due to a rapid decompression was another danger as well.
Ayers got the patch on quickly and then cracked Hutton’s air bottle wide open, letting it empty into her suit. She jabbed the marshal with an emergency respirocyte injection and followed up by replacing her depleted air bottle with a fresh one. After that, she accessed Hutton’s vitals and checked them. Hutton was relatively stable, for now: her suit pressure was back up and holding, and her blood pressure was low but not dangerously so. Ayers added another shot of respirocytes for good measure—keeping the body oxygenated was one of the best things she could do for Hutton right now.
Ayers slumped down with an exhausted sigh, peering out the viewport to see what the drone was doing. Obviously, her last-minute hack had worked or they wouldn’t be here at all. It was when she looked outside and saw a string of figures out there near the “target” building, on foot, that she realized how monumentally she might have just screwed somebody else.
***
“Harper! Two o’clock!” Rico Takeshi called.
Colin Harper looked just in time to see a rolligon of some kind heading pell-mell in their general direction across the north-complex tarmac. He dialed in some magnification and saw a commercially produced combat drone maneuver around the wreckage of the hopper it had just flamed, still obviously intent on hitting the rolligon.
There wasn’t much cover out here on the tarmac; flat ground was preferred for spaceport landing fields, after all. “Spread out and get prone,” Harper ordered. “Don’t bunch up. Everyone hold your fire—this isn’t our fight.”
He took a knee, watching as his team spread out and assumed what was a seriously weak and exposed defensive position. Fortunately, they weren’t the ones under attack. Once he was satisfied that a single explosive charge wouldn’t get more than one of his team, Harper flattened out as well, swinging around his heavy particle-beam rifle and switching it on. He knew the cyclotron pack on his back would give off a telltale energy signal, but a drone that big wasn’t going to miss any of them on its sensors if it looked this way.
The real question was, whose drone was it? He remembered that two of his team members were carrying heavy weapons: Westinghouse 300s. These were essentially human-portable artillery pieces that fired large depleted-uranium rounds. They were powerful enough that a couple of shots in in the same spot could punch through a habitat dome constructed from some of the strongest composite ceramics mankind knew how to make. He figured that a single round from a Westinghouse 300 would have just about vaporized an Omnisynth, if push came to shove. He ordered those carrying the 300s to lock and load and stand by.
The team watched the rest of the chase play out. Some muffled exclamations were shared over their common frequency when they saw the rolligon flip and roll—that should have been the end of it, right there. Then, much to their chagrin, they watched as the distant drone seemed to focus in on their Security Annex building and suddenly head their way.
“Uh, what’s it doing?” Takeshi called. “Colonel Harper?”
“Hold fire,” Harper reiterated.
The drone drove steadily toward them and then suddenly opened fire with twin particle beams when it was about half a kilometer away. The twin beams hit the outer structure of the building and began to burn through immediately, producing an explosive decompression that shredded the wall even further. Fortunately, nobody was currently inside—they were all out here.
“Bloody hell!” Harper cursed. “Light it up!” It was a short battle. Ayers’s hack made the drone think that the building was the only threat, and the drone totally ignored the dozen men lying in the open, pointing weapons at it. Two DU rounds from the Westinghouse 300s hit the drone almost simultaneously, turning it into a heap of barely smoking scrap.
When it was over, the team climbed back to their feet, unsure whether to feel elated about all of this or not. Harper took one look at his would-be command post and cursed a blue streak. Takeshi wa
lked up and put a hand on his exosuit-clad shoulder.
“Tough day, eh, jefe?”
“That’s just bloody bonzer!” Harper cursed, shaking his head.
“Hey, bossman, not to worry,” Rico told him. “This company builds torchships—once we get hold of some of the workers, I’ll turn a crew and a couple bots loose on this and it’ll be better than new by close of business tomorrow. In the meantime, maybe we can use a couple of our rovers as temporary shelters and get anyone nonessential back into the city?”
“Okay, sounds good,” Harper replied, grateful for Takeshi’s stepping up. “Can you deal with the complex administrator as well?” he added with a trace of sarcasm. “He’s sure to have questions about the rolligon and the combat drone turning his tarmac into a gigantic FOD hazard.”
“Might not be our problem. Look,” Rico told him.
Harper turned back to the overturned rolligon, cursing his lack of depth perception and the nonutility that snoopers afforded those with monocular sight. He magnified and light-enhanced his blurry vision until he could make out a misshapen figure ambling slowly toward them. After a moment he realized it was someone in an exosuit bringing someone else in a classic fireman’s carry.
