by Brian Smith
“Friend of yours, I take it?”
“And then some. Watch your ass outside the domes down there,” she added. “Most of those synths will be armed, and I doubt they’re looking to surrender like our meek, weepy kitten in the pen.”
“I’ll be careful,” Harper promised.
Aberdeen Astronautics Security Annex
Nuevo Rio | North Spaceport Complex
Amazonis Mensa Region, Mars
As Hutton had predicted, Harper found it ridiculously uneventful to board the maglev and ride it down to Nuevo Rio. Once he arrived, he found the habitat in a state of quiet disorder. Several Omnisynths had been pinpointed and destroyed, and the human element of the MIM were dealing with the implications of that. Whatever they believed regarding the cause of Martian independence, it was clear to everyone that at the very least they had been duped—once they learned how to spot synths, they discovered to their horror that most of their leadership were Omnisynths.
MIM revolutionaries who weren’t native to Nuevo Rio had largely returned to their home settlements, while those who were native were trying to patch things up with their neighbors. In more than one instance, sporadic violence had resulted. Nobody really seemed to be in charge, but there was an air of quiet anticipation as citizens generally maintained order among themselves and waited for legal authority to be restored.
Harper made his way down to the south-garage airlocks; nobody was bothering to guard or actively monitor them anymore, at least as far as he could tell. He saw several combat drones both in the city dome and in the garage, but they had been deactivated and depowered. A couple of them had been sabotaged so that they would never function again.
He sealed himself up in his exosuit; ran the EVA checklist as a matter of habit, to ensure that he hadn’t missed any vital steps; and then ’locked out. He wasn’t the only one outside, not by any stretch. There were dozens of suited figures spread out over the northern spaceport complex, some in small groups.
By using the dual-mode filter, Harper was able to determine that all of them were Omnisynths. Even in exosuits, their bodies still put out an aura visible with the firmware upgrade. He didn’t stay in the open; he quickly made his way over to the old Aberdeen Security Annex, which had been abandoned almost since the first day of the war. If one walked around to the south side of the building, it was still possible to see the discoloration from the repair made after the building was damaged. Other than that, the place was abandoned, dark, and otherwise intact.
Harper let himself inside the depressurized building and brought one of the LENR cold-fusion units to life, providing himself with ready electrical power. He didn’t turn on any lights or the heaters, nor did he pressurize the building. He wanted only enough power to activate the outside optical imagers, which he did.
Harper networked the imagers’ feed back to his snoopers and then settled in to watch what was happening outside. Humans were obviously steering clear of the gathering; anyone motivated to destroy more Omnisynths apparently didn’t want to take on a group this large and well armed—and the Omnisynths were definitely well armed. He maintained his stakeout for several hours, watching as more synths straggled in. His best count, based on the field of vision available to him, was that close to two hundred of them were out there on the north-spaceport tarmac, just waiting. His breath caught in his throat when what they were waiting for finally arrived.
It was a torchship, or at least it had been, once. The gargantuan vessel appeared out of the northwest, flying low over the Martian regolith with no visible thrusters, torch, or use of the aerodynamic principles that were so hard to exploit in the tremendously thin Martian atmosphere. To Harper’s eyes the ship moved as if by magic.
While he wasn’t an astronautical engineer himself, Harper had worked for a company that specialized in building torchships, and he’d heard enough conversations between Bill Campbell and Dmitri Federov to understand what he was seeing here: some form of inertialess or gravity drive. To his knowledge, no ship that size had ever been designed to operate in a terrestrial environment that had an atmosphere—just getting such a ship down out of orbit should have been impossible. Yet here one was.
It wasn’t until the ship was settling into a ground-level hover over most of the north tarmac that Harper realized he recognized it—it was Dejah Thoris.
He saw that the ship had been heavily modified. For one thing, her mass tanks and torch bell had been removed. In their place, another engineering module had been added to her original one, except the second one expanded out somewhat, giving her stern an angular increase in width. Two exhaust ports for additional reactors glowed at her stern with blue-white light, but these weren’t for propulsion—merely for outflow of a slight plasma exhaust produced by her reactors.
Harper let the imagers run, capturing as much as he could as the waiting Omnisynths surged forward, swarming to the open cargo locks and vanishing into the vessel. When the last one was aboard, the airlocks cycled closed and the old Deety levitated as if by magic, straight up to an altitude of several hundred meters, before tilting bow-up and gracefully accelerating away, rapidly dwindling to a pinpoint in the pink Martian sky.
July 25, 2094 (Terran Calendar)
Armstrong Station, Lunar L1 Point
Cheryl Ayers was conferenced in virtual with her boss and their army equivalents as they watched the imagery captured by CFSN naval units over Mars. A radically altered torchship, Dejah Thoris herself, if Colin Harper’s report was to be believed, rose out of the atmosphere on her Federov drive and rapidly accelerated away on a safe vector before she could be engaged. Once she reached full acceleration, she pulled away from Mars so fast that to the naked eye it looked as if she had simply vanished.
By all accounts, the Deety had taken more than five hundred Omnisynths with her—all those that had successfully made their way to four staging points on the surface where the altered ship had stopped and made pickups. The few Omnisynths remaining on Mars had either been destroyed or were still trying to evade their human hunters.
“Did you receive the data from the last few Q-gel pings?” one of the army representatives asked.
Ayers had the data displayed in another open window in virtual, along with the analysis returned to her by LT Ashburn after she’d sent it to him to recompute as keplers. Ashburn was the best man she knew when it came to astrodynamics, and he’d worked it out faster than anyone else could have.
“Affirm. According to the analysis, Dejah Thoris accelerated to a top speed of 0.31 c before we lost her—faster than anything we currently have, by the way. She was on a trajectory taking her below the ecliptic plane, headed out of the solar system in the exact direction of Sirius. At that speed it will take her more than a quarter century to get there, if that’s truly where she’s headed.”
“Does she have that kind of range?” the army rep wanted to know.
Ayers shrugged. “There’s no way to know, only to guess. An engineering analysis is going to be done based on the imagery, but most of what’s inside that ship will be pure conjecture. We’re figuring a dual-reactor configuration at least, maybe even three full-size reactors. She doesn’t need mass tanks with the gravity drive, and in a ship that size you could store hundreds of years’ worth of laser-fusion fuel pellets. The Omnisynths don’t need food, water, or air, and they don’t age. Assuming they can’t be bored to death and the ship holds up, there’s no real reason they couldn’t make it.”
“Why choose Sirius as a destination?”
“I can’t answer that one. To my knowledge there’s nothing in that system that interests us more than what you’ll find anywhere else, which makes us less inclined to follow them. What I don’t understand is how we lost track of them. You’ve tried pinging them again?”
“Affirmative. The process still works fine locally. We still see the cores and the few Omnisynths that are running around Terra, Mars, and the outer system. The hundreds aboard Dejah Thoris we don’t see anymore—we’re n
ot sure why. Either they’ve found a way to defeat the process or maybe the ship itself was somehow critically damaged or destroyed.”
“That’s wishful thinking, general,” the director said archly. “We can never assume that. We won’t know unless we actually find her someday.”
“Sounds like a Navy problem to me. So what about it? Do you think we’ve seen the last of them?”
“I hope so, but we probably can’t count on it,” the admiral replied, sounding tired and annoyed. “It would’ve been so much better if we’d just caught them all and wiped them out, here and now. They almost kicked our asses this time, when we had the lion’s share of advantages. What’s going to happen a couple hundred years from now, when we don’t?”
“We’re going to need to plan for that contingency, admiral,” Ayers warned. “Theoretically speaking, it’s a big universe out there and resources are near-infinite. That said, there’s obviously no love lost, here. If the Omnisynths are alive, self-aware, and conscious, they may hold a grudge.”
“Well, existential threats are good for military budgets, and we have a fleet to rebuild—there’s the silver lining on that cloud. Write it all up and submit it for a CNO-and-NSC review, Cheryl. Good work.”
“Aye, aye, sir.”
Chapter 24
September 2094 (Terran Calendar)
USS Wasp
En Route to Armstrong Station
The survivors of VMF-51, VMF-52, and VMM-164 had taken over a good portion of the “Three-Wire”, the officer’s lounge and the equivalent of the old Dog House aboard Ranger. The loss of their maintenance crews and support staff had pared the group’s entire roster down to a dozen Moray pilots, along with a half dozen dropship pilots and fewer than a dozen enlisted dropship aircrew. Special dispensation was obtained for the latter to attend this little soiree in what was traditionally officers’ country; again, such allowances were far more common in the post-2047 military than in prior eras.
After over a month on Titan waiting for relief, the group was finally on its way home. A.J. McClain had spent a good portion of that month composing letters to the families of his fallen Marines, a task that left him grim, soul-weary, and somewhat temperamental for quite a while. A memorial service for Ranger’s losses had been conducted by the Wasp’s chaplain shortly after they came aboard, and there would probably be another service for the Marines on Terra after they returned, at one of the East Coast Marine Corps bases or perhaps in the Washington, D.C., area.
With their arrival on Wasp and under a hard-burn down-well for home, the mood had lightened considerably. MAJ Khatri was the acting group commander; the usually hard, taciturn major had called them together in the Three-Wire to let them decompress, burn off some steam, and enjoy some well-earned libations. He also used it as an opportunity to deal with some administrative matters and give them the official word concerning the group’s future disposition. The surviving Marines also used the occasion to hold a kangaroo court, during which members of the various squadrons stood before a panel of their peers and told highly exaggerated stories about the exploits of their friends and colleagues, laced with humor and made as sordid as possible.
A.J. McClain used the court’s proceedings to handle the matter of “egregiously loose comm discipline” on the part of one 2LT Tyson “T-Rex” Recinto. He brought an audio recording of T-Rex’s shrill battle cry, which he played over and over and over to the court, while T-Rex blushed purple and everyone else howled with laughter. In the end, the sentence of the court was a permanent change of call sign. Henceforth, the offender would be known as Squeal; it brought the house down.
For the numerous combat missions his crews had flown during the campaign, MAJ Khatri handed out Air Medals, a few Purple Hearts, and several letters of commendation. He quietly informed McClain that the latter had been put in for his second Distinguished Flying Cross: this one for his near-suicidal run at the enemy’s fixed particle-beam defenses over Calypso. Khatri couldn’t award that one until it was approved, however, so the ceremony would happen later, in a more formal setting.
Unfortunately, the war had seriously decimated the U.S. Navy and the Marine Corps. Close to fifty percent of the navy’s fleet had been lost fighting an enemy that had almost no standing force of its own. The Marine Corps suffered an even higher percentage of total loss—close to sixty-five percent—when factoring in the ill-fated Operation Ares.
The pundits at home were saying that, in addition to the massive damage and loss of life sustained by the West Coast of the U.S., America’s interplanetary superpower status was at an end and that the twenty-second century was going to be known as the Chinese Century. As an avid student of history, McClain grinned over that one: the pundits had said the same thing about the twenty-first century, too. He personally felt that the twenty-second century would, rather, be a unifying one for mankind in the aftermath of the First Interplanetary War and the radical technological windfalls it had produced. Time would tell, he supposed.
Regardless, the MAG was the recipient of some good fortune: it was not going to be disestablished despite the near-total casualties, especially not with its storied war record. While most of the personnel would be reassigned as instructors for a time while the Corps worked at replenishing its depleted human resources, the group itself and its subordinate units would survive and gradually be brought back to full strength—fantastic news as far they were concerned, and the main cause for their celebration in the Three-Wire.
Skate Hess joined McClain at the bar, where the latter was liberally pouring cheap blended scotch into an empty glass. She held her own out wordlessly, and her squadron commander charged it to the brim. “Cheers,” McClain said simply, raising his glass.
Hess clinked hers against his, and they both took a deep swallow of whiskey as they watched Squeal Recinto attempt a drunken “carrier landing” on one of the room’s long, beer-lubricated tables. Squeal overshot the roped-up towel two of his friends were stringing out as the arresting wire and tumbled off the far end of the table. He landed on the deck in a heap, to a cacophony of hoots and hollers.
“Stupid nugget,” Hess grinned, shaking her head slightly.
“No, he’s not,” McClain corrected her quietly. “Everyone you see in this room, Skate—they’re the survivors. The new Old Breed. In five years almost the entire Corps is going to be wet behind the ears—a bunch of moto boots straight off the island, and these guys and gals you see here are going to be the old dogs who’ve been in the shit. It’s going to be a whole new generation of people and technology both. Helluva job we’ve got in the years ahead, molding it all back into fighting trim.”
She looked at him appraisingly. “You gonna ride it out, skipper? How much time do you have in right now?”
“Just went over eleven this month,” he added. “That includes my first four years enlisted, of course. I’m a lifer, Skate. I thought you got that about me. What about you?”
“I don’t know,” she sighed. “I’ll stay at least for a bit. Like you said, there’s a lot of work to do, and I want to see what they come up with to replace the old Moray eel. After that, though, . . . we’ll see. Part of me is still amazed I survived the past year. I have a hard time seeing where I’ll be ten years from now. Not you, I suppose. You bleed Marine Corps green.”
McClain nodded, taking another belt of scotch. “Damn straight. I know exactly where I’ll be, Skate: right here, waiting for the next one.”
Saipan, Northern Mariana Islands
Terra
Mike Ashburn stood on the dock facing south, shielding his eyes even with tinted snoopers on as he heard the low crack of a sonic boom. A glint of sunlight off metal caught his gaze as the latest standard container came off the Guam Orbital Catapult and arced skyward at high velocity, headed for an orbital rendezvous with a cargo catcher—a technological marvel in its time. He casually wondered how long it would be until the electromagnetic catapult was turned into a museum attraction or something similar. Once Federo
v drives were being massed produced for commercial use, the catapults on Guam and in other places would be obsolete. Antigravity technology had finally arrived, trumping what had always been mankind’s biggest impediment when it came to space ventures: Terra’s own gravity well.
Ashburn turned his gaze back to the northwest, upping the magnification in his snoopers to maximum. It wasn’t long before he caught sight of the Airfish ground-effect vehicle, half boat and half hovercraft, skimming over the Pacific wave tops at supersonic speed. The craft grew rapidly in his field of vision, forcing him to reduce magnification several times, until it was back in a normal field of view. Its design was like that of many spaceplanes (including the old Banth One), in that the lifting body of the Airfish morphed as it passed through varying speed regimes. It gradually “folded” its wings back like an insect as it went subsonic and settled onto the surface of the water, taxiing near-silently to the pier. The Airfish was an expensive luxury vehicle, akin to the corporate jet aircraft of yesteryear—this model was ideal for island hopping, even from mainland Japan.
Ashburn’s grin got wider when he saw Kusaka Shiguro emerge from the interior of the Airfish once it was secured to the pier. Kusaka offered a hand to assist his companion: a pretty Japanese girl wearing a bright yellow bikini, a wide-brimmed hat, and fashionable designer snoopers. Kusaka was dressed casually also, wearing cargo shorts, a T-shirt, and sandals. As a native Marsman he’d spent enough time on Terra in the past nine months for the oddity of blue skies and oceans to have worn off, but his eyes remained sensitive to bright sunlight; he continued to wear dark-tinted snoopers whenever he was outdoors, even when engaged in his newest hobby, swimming.
Ashburn wore less than the other two: just swim trunks, flip-flops, and snoopers. His slightly darker skin tone had tanned to a deep brown over the past ten days, and his sandy-colored hair seemed even lighter now, bleached slightly from a combination of sun, seawater, and chlorinated resort pools.
