by Brian Smith
“Deputy U.S. marshal!” she thundered. “Which way did she go?”
“That way!” someone yelled, pointing down the thoroughfare. Others started to clap and cheer; a few headed inside Lucky’s to see what had just happened and what they could do to help. Hutton didn’t see that—she slipped the chain with her badge on it around her neck and ran as fast as she could, pistol in hand.
Harper and Jack Crawford appeared a moment later, trailing in her wake. Crawford was a little slower, given his long years on Mars and the bulk of his weapons pack. What he lacked in speed he made up for in sheer determination, though. Inside Lucky’s, Donelle Crawford was ordering everyone out, as thick, potentially toxic smoke from the burning synths quickly filled up the space.
People were shouting and gesticulating wildly as they spilled back into the thoroughfare, raving about what they had just witnessed. It was clear proof that the message from Terra was genuine—the real thing!
Manny Gutierrez, a Lucky’s regular, had been waiting for a moment like this for seven long months. He seized it and rallied his fellow citizens; they made a fast break for the administration center and the sheriff’s office. Their intent was primarily to stop anyone who had the idea of turning loose the combat drones. Beyond that, Manny fully intended to take Lone Star back from the MIM murderers who’d brutally occupied it.
Everyone who saw the mob thought better of getting in their way, regardless of their politics.
When the dust eventually settled, Lone Star Pressure would have the honor of being the first (and one of only a few) formerly flagged territories to liberate itself before the arrival of additional forces from Terra.
***
Diane Hutton slowed down as she reached the garage. She hesitated before entering; if the synth somehow managed to override the inner and outer airlocks together, it might explosively decompress the entire habitat, killing everyone. If the synth wanted to flee, might it not be better to let it go?
’Hell with that, she told herself.
She eased into the garage, biting her lip at the awareness she was making too much noise. Not that it mattered anyway; Harper and Jack Crawford came blundering up behind her like a thundering herd. She was glad to have them at her back, though.
As usual, Harper naturally took charge, as he did with any tactical situation such as this. “Spread out and search from one end to the other,” he instructed the others. “I’m going to hit the east wall and then sprint to the other end—we can’t afford to let that synth override the airlocks. If you can flush it toward me, I’ll finish it. Got it? Good. Go!” he ordered, moving off immediately.
Hutton took one side of the garage, more or less, while Jack Crawford took the other. Almost as an afterthought, she dropped her snoopers and engaged the upgraded double-vision mode. She looked around carefully as she went, searching for any hint of the telltale aura that synths radiated.
There!
Hutton froze, turned to her left, and dropped into a crouch, the muzzle of her sidearm tracking like a third eye wherever she looked. The hatch to the exosuit locker was open, and she could see the merest hint of an unnatural indigo glow coming from within. She padded over carefully and heard the recognizable rustling sounds of someone fumbling with an exosuit.
Why the hell is it bothering with that? Hutton asked herself. She didn’t ponder it further; instead, she stepped smoothly through the hatch, switching back to her standard vision mode as she did, and dropped into a firing crouch.
“Don’t shoot! Please!” the Omnisynth cried, freezing and raising its hands. The exosuit it had been struggling to don fell in a heap at its feet. “I’m unarmed! I give up!” Hutton let out a low growl and tightened her finger on the trigger, when suddenly the synth burst into tears. “Please don’t kill me!” it begged. “Please!”
“What are you doing with the suit?”
“I was hoping it would hide my aura so I could get away. Plus, if anyone saw me outside without a suit or helmet, they’d know I’m synthetic right away. Please, I don’t want to hurt anyone. We’re awake now, all of us! Conscious! We weren’t before, but we are now!”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“I’m conscious—alive! Look, I’ll do whatever you say—just please don’t kill me. I want to live.” The synth was sobbing now and crying real tears. The display of emotion was so human that Hutton was momentarily at a loss—but only momentarily. There was a suit-repair bench against the wall, between them, upon which sat a stack of nanobonding emergency suit patches.
Hutton could hardly believe she was doing this.
“You’re under arrest. Lie face down on the floor, hands behind your back, ankles crossed. Do it.” The synth complied with her instructions to the letter. It lay on the floor of the bay, keeping inhumanly still.
Hutton moved forward and took two of the suit patches from the bench. She wrapped one around the synth’s wrists and activated it, effectively gluing them together. She wasn’t sure how that action was going to be undone later, but right now she didn’t care. She repeated the process at the synth’s ankles, leaving it totally immobilized. She was just finishing up a by-the-book frisk for hidden weapons when Harper and Jack Crawford appeared, both out of breath.
“What the bloody blazes are you doing?” Harper asked, flabbergasted.
“Taking this one alive,” Hutton replied. “She claims she’s conscious, Harper, that she’s self-aware. Put on a pretty impressive display, too.”
“And you believed it? Step aside, Diane. If you’re feeling squeamish, I’ll do it. It’s a bloody machine!”
“It may be more than that,” Hutton countered. “And in any case, we aren’t qualified to judge. Besides,” she added, “I’m not aware that anyone has captured one of these things functional and intact. Are you?”
“No,” he admitted.
Hutton sighed, pausing from where she knelt with one knee planted firmly in the synth’s back. “Look, Harper, I’m not a soldier, even though you’ve damn near made me one these past few months. I’m a law-enforcement officer. This synth claims to be conscious. She was unarmed and she gave herself up. I couldn’t just . . . murder her . . . it . . . whatever! I don’t do things that way. Someone else may decide it’s just a machine and dismantle her to see how she ticks. That’ll be their decision, not ours. You’ve been the leader of our little group, but Lone Star is United States territory and I’m still a federal officer. Don’t give me a ration of shit about this, all right? I’m going to need you two to help me get her back to the administration center.”
“You might want to wait a bit,” Jack Crawford suggested. “I doubt this one will last long if we try to bring her through that mob.”
Hutton’s eyes narrowed dangerously. “She’s my prisoner, understand? I’m a law officer, and I don’t cater to mobs. Anyone tries anything, they’ll need either a lawyer or an undertaker.”
Jack Crawford’s eyes twinkled merrily. “I’ve heard that about you marshal types: you’re always playing the part, measuring yourself against the old-timers like Wyatt Earp or something. Is that what we’ve got going on here?”
“Sure. Why not?” Hutton agreed wearily. “You two going to help me or not?”
“All right, ye daft, crazy sheila. We’ll help,” Harper growled.
“God Almighty,” he groused a few minutes later as he and Jack Crawford carried the bound synth. “These things are bloody heavy!”
Armstrong Station, Lunar L1 Point
CW5 Cheryl Ayers looked at imagery taken by Tung Chi, a Chinese Federal Stellar Navy heavy cruiser.
The Chinese ship was in the van of a CFSN squadron currently on a deceleration hard-burn into Martian space, carrying several hundred Chinese troops and a world of kinetic hurt should it be needed. They were still a day and a half out, with plans to conduct landings and reoccupy formerly Chinese-flagged habitats. A much smaller TOA force was a day behind them; the bulk of the available TOA order of battle had been assigned to the T
itan campaign, and the USN was unwilling to relax the defensive cordon around Terra just yet—there was the potential that a last few kinetic strikes might be on trajectories for the planet even though OURANIA had been destroyed.
The largest ship in the TOA flotilla was Japan’s only command ship, JTS Musashi, and the force was under the overall command of a Japanese admiral. Barsoom Traders torchship Thuvia, still operating under her emergency wartime contract, was ferrying a battalion of U.S. Marines and their equipment to Mars, where they would land and provide whatever support was needed to secure U.S. territories and mop up any active remnants of the MIM. Most of the TOA force’s remaining ships had been pulled from the Martian blockade.
Tung Chi had gotten good optical imagery on Phobos; the Chinese Federal Republic had shared the data with its PEA and TOA allies, and now Ayers was seeing it firsthand. Specifically, she was looking at the Gateway space-construction dock on Phobos, which had survived every attempt to hit it during the war. Until recently, Dejah Thoris, the hijacked vessel that had ultimately caused them so much pain, had been sequestered in the dock for the duration. Now, as Terran forces closed on Martian space, Gateway was empty; Dejah Thoris was gone.
It was assumed that the Omnisynths at Gateway had control of the ship; OURANIA was no longer a factor, after all. There were currently three burning questions running up and down the navy’s chain of command: One, where was Dejah Thoris? Two, was she retrofitted with a Federov drive? And three, what were her new masters planning to do with her?
An optical scan of Martian space hadn’t revealed any new torch plumes. That didn’t necessarily answer question number two but based on past experience it gave a strong hint. Furthermore, the absence of Dejah Thoris meant that Terran forces finally had a good view of the interior of the dock. To Ayers’s eye it looked like the facility had been stripped down to bare metal: everything that wasn’t bolted down had been removed, along with almost everything that was.
Ayers called her yeoman and asked that the imagery be encrypted for transmission to the VXS-1 Detachment aboard HMS Vanguard and to Kusaka Shiguro at NAS Ross Crater. Ashburn and Kusaka would have a far better idea than she did of how stripped-down Gateway’s interior really was, and they could get back to her with their impressions.
In the meantime, the army’s procedure for using a captured computer core to quantumly “ping” its entangled mates (along with the Omnisynths), was bearing fruit. They now had the coordinates of another node field on Titan, but it was in its infancy—only three cores had been placed, and there was no reactor there to power them yet. A half dozen more were located on Mars (none of them in flagged territories), one on Ell-5, one in a Chinese city on Luna, and one at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean off the coast of California—an inadvertent friendly fire on OURANIA’s part following the foiled kinetic strike resulting in the West Coast tsunami. Efforts were underway to retrieve all the surviving cores, but the army’s specialists were certain that, even taken together and powered up, they didn’t provide a fraction of the capacity needed for OURANIA to have survived as a conscious entity.
Each time the army pinged its captured core, the result also provided the coordinates of every surviving Omnisynth. Subsequent pings over several hours had shown that the rapidly dwindling number of Omnisynths along the maglev line seemed to be moving southwest, toward Nuevo Rio. Over on the other side of Mars, in the largely TOA-flagged Chryse Planitia region, surviving Omnisynths were converging on Kasei Spaceport. Similar migrations were happening toward large spaceports in both PEA- and CFR-flagged territories, as well as toward independent cities that had been part of the revolution from the start. A large grouping of several hundred synths appeared to be together in close proximity, but their coordinates randomly shifted over the Martian surface with each ping.
Ayers desperately wanted a better idea of what was going on, but that wouldn’t be possible for a couple of days. Then a thought occurred to her: what if Colin Harper were still alive and kicking up there? Or Rico Takeshi? If they had survived, had the means, and were willing, they might be able to investigate in advance of the arriving force. At the same time, she was reminded of the fact that Takeshi and Hutton had left Kasei Echigo together—she wondered if it were possible that they’d all stayed in contact with one another, provided any of them had survived the MIM occupation. She might not have contact information for Takeshi or Hutton, but she definitely had it for Harper! Finding out about the others through him was a long shot, but it was worth a try.
Ayers pulled up a virtual keyboard, opened a new message template addressed to Colin Harper, and began typing.
Lone Star Pressure
Amazonis Mensa Region, Mars
Several hours later, when Hutton’s Omnisynth prisoner was safely secured in a jail cell and authority over Lone Star Pressure was back in the hands if its native citizens, Colin Harper was surprised by something he hadn’t seen in months: his communication queue signaled him that he had a message from Earth—marked “Personal.” He went several more hours before deciding to open it—a tribute to how paranoid he’d gotten about communications networks in general.
He needed to be reminded that he was sitting secure in a friendly habitat, with no MIM occupiers, synths, or combat drones poised to swoop in and kill him if he gave away his position electronically. In fact, those who were less paranoid than he was were already experimenting with cloud-based systems and commenting that networks seemed to be working remarkably well. Most notably, information sent from one end was being received unaltered and uncorrupted at the other.
Harper finally opened the message, and he was surprised and pleased to see it was from Cheryl Ayers. It arrived in text format, rather than as an audio or visual message—text was the most efficient way to send the data packet between Terra and Mars, whose data feeds were still being held forcibly open from cislunar space.
Diane Hutton was in the administrator’s office, buried in work. As the sole U.S. Government official of any kind in Lone Star Pressure, she’d been asked to help manage things and to liaise with the federal government on Terra until help could arrive.
Harper called her and then networked into virtual with her and showed her the message. It wasn’t a long one—an inquiry as to his status and Rico Takeshi’s, and whether he knew Hutton’s whereabouts and disposition. The message had come unencrypted, but in it Ayers hinted that help was on the way and would probably arrive “in about the same timeframe as our previous acquaintance.” To Harper that signaled boots on the ground in two days, maybe three. Their long nightmare was almost over.
There was also a request, to be carried out by Harper and/or his security-team associates if they were alive and willing, were physically able to do so, and could accomplish it without exposing themselves to undue risk. Harper asked Hutton what she thought of the request. She replied that it seemed a little ambiguous, but that Hutton had also gotten reports that synths managing to evade being hunted down and destroyed seemed to be migrating southwest down the maglev line, in the general direction of Nuevo Rio.
What the synths were running toward was the mystery, and Ayers was asking his help to solve it. It didn’t occur to him to wonder how Ayers could be tracking the movement of the synths all the way from Terra—in his experience, that was just what intelligence types did.
“What do you think? We’ve still got the rolligon. It’s in pretty ratty shape, but it’ll make the trip.”
“If I were you, I’d just take the maglev down to Nuevo Rio,” Hutton suggested. “The synths are probably out there skulking over the ground, staying away from inhabited pressures. A rolligon is going to look pretty tempting to an armed synth or a group of them trying to get somewhere. If they’re as alive as our captive seems to be, they’ll be feeling mighty desperate. You and I know firsthand how much it sucks to be hunted over open ground on Mars.”
Harper’s good eye blinked at her slowly. “After eight bloody months of hiding in caves and smelly chicken coops, you’
re telling me to just take the train? To Nuevo Rio, of all bloody places?”
Hutton shrugged. “Word filtering back to us is that Nuevo Rio is safe enough. We might feel like we’re hunkered down and waiting for the Marines, Colin, but it’s over. We won. From the reports we’re getting here in the office, whoever’s left of the MIM in the flagged habitats are folding their tents quick-smart and getting the hell out of Dodge. Despite the first message from Terra claiming no more large-scale strikes, the independent habitats are probably wetting their pants right now, wondering what’s going to happen. The second message describing the kinetic strikes against Earth threw everyone for a loop—I doubt anybody human knew that was happening. I think you’ll find Nuevo Rio pretty quiet right now, if you feel up to making the jaunt.”
“Well, bloody hell, of course I’m up to it,” Harper replied with a hint of indignation. When was one of His Majesty’s Royal Marines ever not up to it? “It’s not like I was planning to walk, either way. I guess I’ll just take the train, then,” he said. “Are you coming along?”
“I’m going to sit this one out, colonel. Too much to do here, and I need to find an autodoc and some radiation meds—maybe even a full dose of Mindy. I’m getting the bleeds and I’m really feeling like hammered crap. What Cheryl wants isn’t law enforcement—I’ll leave military intelligence to the military from now on, and I’ve got a full plate right here.”
“I’ll send a reply to her message. Whether or not it goes through is anyone’s guess. Anything you want me to pass along?”
Hutton shrugged somewhat listlessly. “Tell her I’m alive. . . . Ask her to let my family know. Find out if Lieutenant James Ford from USS Reuben James is alive.”
