by SD Tanner
The voice took on an irritated tone. “The discipline of this chickenshit outfit is going to hell.”
Sounding as smooth as she looked, his Captain replied. “You just proved your own point.”
Once a person transformed into a Bombardier they lost their human name, becoming known only by a number. It was fitting inasmuch as they also lost their family and home planet, forever forced to live in space. There was considerable argument amongst them whether they should also lose their original numbers. With no record of the Bombardiers living on Tracha at least their assigned numbers were unique. He’d stuck with his number, as if that somehow gave him a link to his previous life. It had been eighty years since he was transformed. Unable to go home, his parents and sister were living on in his mind, but he knew they were already long dead.
Continuing to tap his fingers on the arm of the chair, he used his other hand to flick through the screens he could see on his visor. Bombardiers didn’t need much sleep, so the sleeping quarters filled with bunk beds were mostly for the Navigators and Trachans. They all shared the lounges, gyms and games rooms located at the center of the ship. Even while on bridge duty, he was in the middle of a game of Dead Man, hunting for critters in a simulated space war. He wasn’t supposed to be playing games while he was on the Bridge, but no one bothered stopping him. After centuries in space, left alone to fend for themselves, they were not functioning like an army.
Accessing the cameras in the engineering room, he noticed it was empty, only it wasn’t. Flicking through the spectrums, he finally identified what was smeared across a workbench. The telltale red swipe of color contained fragments of what looked like brain matter.
Standing as he spoke, he wasn’t the only one who’d just accessed the engineering room cameras. “What the hell happened down there?”
The Captain was ahead of him and alarms began ringing across every room on the ship. “Battle conditions! Ship is under attack. All pilots to Scorpions. Launch and defend. Support crew arm up and search the ship. We’ve been boarded.”
“How’s that even possible?”
His question was a redundant one. Still scanning through the onboard cameras, he finally found what he was looking for. Bombardiers stood up to seven feet tall, but what he was looking at was at least a foot taller. It might have been humanoid in shape, but that was where the similarity ended. At least four feet wide, its shoulders were squared and angular. Large multi-barrel weapons were built into each arm. Its tiny, flat-topped head was nestled between heavy-set shoulders. Wrapped around its hips and designed to auto feed the weapons, were wide belts of ammunition. It didn’t walk like a human, Navigator or Bombardier. Instead, each foot was planting one in front of the other with a mechanical gait. When it turned into the next corridor, it sharply twisted its upper body so that the rest of it spun to catch up.
A Bombardier was running along the corridor and the robot opened fire, forcing him to stagger backwards. They were mostly made of a hardened exoskeleton, so the man should have survived, but the gunfire cut him apart. Wearing only a one-piece suit, small chunks of his exoskeleton were flying into the surrounding walls. As the Bombardier jolted backwards, losing his footing, the robot marched closer firing rounds at his head. When blood leaked from the deep holes in his skull, he knew the man was dead.
Scorpions were departing from the bottom of the ship, but the Visibility Specialist had already launched pods, scanning the space around them. “There’s nothing out there. I don’t know where that guy has come from.”
“It doesn’t matter where he came from. He’s tearing up the ship.”
The Captain hadn’t underplayed what the robot was doing. Firing at anything it could, massive holes were appearing in the walls and Bombardiers were falling under its fire. Being almost indestructible, they never bothered to arm themselves onboard, relying mostly on the weapons carried by the Scorpion. This was probably the first time one of their ships had ever been boarded by an enemy and he didn’t know what to do. He was in charge of weapons, but there was nothing to shoot at outside of the ship.
“This damage is beyond the nanobytes. We need to abandon ship.”
Tracha’s technology was based on the tiny robots inside of everything they built. Nanobytes were intelligent mechanical cells able to think for themselves. Whenever something was damaged, the nanobytes would rebuild themselves, replicating and repairing whatever was broken. It meant their ships were largely self-maintaining, but there was a limit to what the nanobytes could do. If the ship was too badly damaged then they couldn’t replicate enough nanobytes to recreate the broken parts.
Flicking through the screens on her visor, the Captain replied, “Not yet. Let’s try taking it down first. Scorpions. Return to ship. Support crew. Get into four squads. We’ll track the enemy movement from the Bridge. Let’s bring this sucker down.”
“I don’t think it’s alive, C.”
The extended vision every Bombardier had was useless inside of the Trachan ships. The nanobytes were giving off their own peculiar signal, interfering with his ability to scan the enemy robot. Relying on the cameras inside of the corridors, he tracked it walking along one. It fired at anything that was moving, but didn’t seem to know where it was headed. Right now, it was tramping along a corridor that led into the docking bay where the Scorpions were queuing to land. Using the railguns or particle beams on the Scorpions to destroy the robot would cause too much damage inside of the bay.
“Ship Command to Scorpion Seven-Two. Enemy is heading into the docking bay. Do not fire. Use handguns only. Take that robot down.”
“It’s a robot?”
The pilots were in full armor and visors and he began flicking through their screens, looking for anyone who could give him an eye level view of their enemy. Eventually he found a pilot standing behind one of the Scorpions, peering at the robot that was no more than fifty yards ahead of her. Closer to the target, he got a better view of its weapons. The guns were plasma mini-guns and the shoulders looked as if they were packed with something other than spare ammunition.
“C, how many Scorpions are back on board?”
“All of them. Why?”
“They need to leave now!”
“All Scorpions. Emergency evac.”
Even as she issued the order, it was already too late. The owner of the camera he was using to view the robot had already spun around, clambering into the nearest Scorpion. As she boarded the ship through a hatch at the bottom, the robot was firing from its shoulder packs. These weren’t just bullets. They were bombs. Each Scorpion was loaded with highly explosive missiles and a drive powered by a small nuclear generator. They were packed so tightly in the bay that each Scorpion would set off the next creating a massive explosion.
“Abandon ship!”
The Captain’s order was too late. The docking bay disappeared in a bright white light, rocking the huge ship. Flicking through his screens, he located one from a pod launched by the Visibility Specialist. From outside of the ship, he watched as the bay beneath them exploded in an endless series of sharp lights. The base of their ship was gone. Unable to repair the damage, the nanobytes would try to seal the breach. Another pod was launching from a side tail on their ship, zipping underneath it. Fifty or more Bombardiers in full armor and helmets were floating away from the main ship. Pieces of Scorpions were drifting past with Bombardiers clinging to them. Dressed in full battle armor, all he could see of their faces was the wide and dark strip covering their eyes.
The Captain opened a ship wide channel. “Docking bay is gone. Comms. Send out a distress signal. All remaining Bombardiers, gear for combat and retreat to the living quarters.”
“Where’s the robot?”
Desperately flicking through the screens, he hunted for their enemy. The corridor leading to the docking bay was empty as was the next corridor. Perhaps the robot had been blown into space, but he didn’t think so.
“Viz, look for that robot in space.”
“
I am.”
Every corridor was empty until he reached what they nicknamed the hotel area on the ship. There he saw fifty Bombardiers, all pulling on their gear. Most were only armed with sidearms called Needles, which were their equivalent of a handgun.
Muttering to himself, he continued frantically flicking through the screens. “Where are you?”
The attack was too clever for the robot to have committed mechanical suicide, so couldn’t believe it was gone. It had boarded the ship without being seen, killed everything in its way until it found the docking bay, where it had destroyed an entire fleet with just a few bombs. It was then that he saw something small running along the corridor. So fast that he almost missed it, it was the size of a small dog. Galloping along on more than four legs, it was heading towards the living quarters.
“Enemy target approaching quarters. Stand ready!”
Almost as a single mind, fifty Bombardiers turned in unison looking at the door to their quarters. With rows of beds on either side, the little robot dog was about to die under a hail of gunfire, only it didn’t. Instead, before it entered the room, it reconfigured itself into a missile. The legs disappeared, straightening themselves into the body. The head that had resembled the snout of a dog was now clearly the nose of a rocket. A fiery propulsion burst from its rear as it slammed through the door exploding on entry. The cameras he’d been using were lost to him and he looked across at the Captain.
“Oh, shit, where’s the rest of it?”
“What do you mean?”
Finally cluing into what was happening, the robot wasn’t a single enemy. It was many weapons in the one body. The little robot dog had been part of the main body, which meant the rest of it was still around. Not wasting time explaining, he began flicking through the screens, only now many of the cameras were damaged. Rising from his chair, he was already in armor and helmet, all he needed was a weapon. He never made it to the guns hanging on the racks against the back wall. The door to the Bridge exploded inward.
Spinning on his heel, he expected the robot to walk through the door. It did, but not before it fired a grenade directly at the screens in front of the room. Thrown backwards, he crashed into the wall, falling behind one of the command consoles. A massive hole had appeared in front of the row of consoles and the room was decompressing. Everything that wasn’t bolted down flew past him. The Captain was lost, spinning through the open hole and into space. The Visibility and Communications Specialists followed her. Wedged behind the console, he drew his knees to his chest, hoping the robot wouldn’t see him. His gear was torn, but if he was lucky, he could still crawl back to the main body of the ship.
With its feet wedged against the door, holding itself steady against the decompression, the robot appeared to scan the room. Seeming satisfied, it simply winked out of existence as if it had never been there.
His screens were damaged. Using the edge of the console, he pulled himself from the floor. Somewhere on the table was a large button. Clinging to the top, his legs still wedged so he wasn’t sucked into space, he slammed his hand against the emergency beacon. As he dropped back onto the floor, it began to pulse with a repeating message.
“Mayday. Mayday. Mayday.”
CHAPTER TWO:
Enemies and Allies
(Ark Three)
“They were all navs before they were Boms, so why are they so…undisciplined?”
Tank gave a deep sigh. “If you don’t like it then change it.”
That was easy for Tank to say, but not so simple to do. Tracha was an incredibly advanced planet. Covered in what looked like a silver sheath, it was really an intelligent metal skin. Nanobytes were smart. Once they were coded and given orders, the little cells would create and maintain whatever was asked of them. Endlessly resourceful and always eager to work, the nanobytes followed their orders, protecting the planet from outside forces. By using the planet as their raw material, they’d created the protective shell covering it.
Based on the footage he’d been shown, Tracha had once looked much like Earth with a humanoid population to match. As an aggressive species, each had formed their own cities, arguing with one another over who was the biggest badass. Eventually one of them had taken their brawling a step too far, unleashing a flesh eating virus at one of their enemies. One thing had led to another and the missiles had flown, leaving the surface of the planet uninhabitable. Most of the Trachans had died in the conflict, leaving only a few thousand survivors. To combat the flesh-eating virus, they’d infected themselves with a form of nanobyte virus. Now these viral nanobytes perpetually replaced their damaged organs and limbs, extending their lives by hundreds of years.
Having almost wiped out their own planet, adding more people to their dwindling population was their only chance of survival. When his grandfather, Ark, had arrived with the first of the Bombardiers, they’d welcomed them. The other lasting legacy of the conflict was their refusal to fight. Whatever aggression had led them to self-destruct was gone, leaving only peace in its place. The Trachans believed they’d been stupid and now they valued intellect above all else.
Two miles under the skin covering the planet was an underground city. This warren of streets and buildings was home to the Trachans and Bombardiers. He was standing next to the fake river flowing in front of a line of buildings making up the heart of the city. On both sides of the waterway was a belt of green mimicking grass. Mechanical duck-like birds waddled at the edge of the nanobyte water. Perfect trees offered shade from the three suns that were really lights in the roof of the chamber. In front of the engineered park were seven white buildings. Other than the one in the center, all were utilitarian. The ornately carved middle building represented what little government Tracha had. Other buildings housed the Trachan engineers who designed and built the nanobytes. Behind the seven buildings were thousands of small dwellings built into a gentle slope. Close to the surface and under the silver skin were several satellite cities where the nanobytes built their weapons and ships.
Looking along the street that was now his home, his Bombardiers and Navigators ambled along as if there was no place they needed to be. “If we’re going to win against Dunk then they need to function like an army.”
Sighing again, Tank’s heavy brow furrowed in irritation. “They’ve been assigned ranks, allocated to crews and squads, plus we have seven battalions of twenty BattleRigs. What’s your problem?”
“They’re not…focused.”
“Give it a rest, Ark. You’ve only been here six months.” Slapping his shoulder hard, he gave him a worried look. “You’re too hard on yourself. What’s the rush? It’s taken us two hundred years to get this far and Dunk isn’t going anywhere.”
Reaching one of the technical design buildings, the door silently slid open as they walked through it. Tracha didn’t have much by way of security, which was another thing that was bothering him. Before the war that nearly annihilated them, they’d made differences of very little. Deciding this was the core of their problem, they’d taken down the borders, meaning all Trachans were equal. It was well and good to be altruistic, but it meant they had no security, allowing anyone to go anywhere.
Inside of the building was an open area bathed in a soft blue light. It was supposed to relax him, but instead his agitation went up by several levels. He felt sure the Trachan attitude was infecting his army, leaving them calmer than they should be.
Walking through the next set of doors, it opened to a lounge. Anka was the lead designer for Tracha, and seeing them, he waved a warm welcome. Every Trachan was different. Depending upon the damage the biological virus had done to their bodies, some had mechanical limbs and others had faces that were half machine. All of them had mechanical parts on the inside, relying on the nanobytes to maintain the organs keeping them alive. Their ability to procreate was limited to less than twenty Trachans, so their young were highly valued. The Dunks were masters when it came to genetic engineering. If only he could borrow Dunk Three for a day, he co
uld teach the Trachans how to artificially inseminate and grow their young outside of the womb.
Sitting on a deep sofa in front of the lead designer, his hefty weight flattened the soft cushioning. “Anka,” he said with a curt nod.
“Not happy today?”
Anka’s voice sounded robotic, meaning he’d lost his vocal cords to the virus. His face reflected the damage, so that one half was a sheath of dark metal with a robotic eye. He was more than three hundred years old and the flesh left on his face was drooping and wrinkled. Bald with mechanical hips and legs, very little of Anka was still biological, which was how he’d lived for so long. He was one of the lucky few who had a daughter before the war. She’d grown into a tall, lanky woman with dark hair and a sharply featured face. Sitting next to her father, she smiled at him warmly.
“What is it Ark? What is upsetting you?” Leaning across the divide, she touched his hand. “Let me help.”
Tiana had taken a shine to him. When he’d arrived, she’d immediately claimed him as her own, guiding him through his induction. Despite the virus ravaging her internal organs, much of her external body was still biological. He’d often joked that with him being mostly exoskeleton, and her internal organs being mechanical, that they were the exact opposite of one another. Between them, they could make up a single biological person.
Her warm and genuine concern broke through his irritation. “I’m worried about the fleet.”
Anka frowned, immediately concerned. “But we have enough ships. We coded the nanobytes for the new weapons.”
It was true the Trachans had given him everything he’d asked for. Although they weren’t willing to fight, they had no issue with the Bombardiers and Navigators going to war with Earth. Tiana told him it was an issue of philosophy. Had the Trachans accepted one another from the start then they wouldn’t have gone to war. With their own history, they agreed Dunk’s decision to alienate people based on their DNA was wrong, happily loaning him their energy and resources. Privately, Tiana had confessed they also wanted Earth’s technology. Where Tracha specialized in tiny robotics, Dunk’s engineers knew how to transform living cells. If the Trachans were to have a future then they needed what Dunk’s engineers could do.
