Struggle for a Small Blue Planet

by Warwick Gibson

  "It's now the middle of February," continued the message, "so a coordinated attack is either a month away, or six months away. In March Cambodia will still be in its dry season, and Peru will be just entering a wet season. An incursion into Peru can expect occasional heavy showers, but tracks will be passable. August would also be a good time at both sites.

  "We will leave those two deployment times with you, and the President would now like to add a few words."

  There was a momentary pause.

  "Ideas of statehood have been a blessing, and a curse, since the development of the modern nation," came the distinctive voice of Garret Marshall.

  "Yet today, in light of the appearance of the citadels, we are more aware of our common humanity than ever before. People of all backgrounds have been willing to give everything they have toward repulsing the invaders.

  "Several well-resourced groups in Brazil have signalled a willingness to help us attack the Peruvian citadel, and US teams are currently trying to contact what is left of the Mexican military.

  "Set your date, gentlemen, and we will do our best to honour our end of the bargain. We wish you the best in your own endeavours, and may God, in whatever form you praise the Almighty, guide our hands."

  The message ended.

  "Flowery speaker, aint he?" said Bull, who thought politics was at best a necessary evil. Don smiled at the comment, and looked around the room. There was much nodding of heads and quiet side comments. It seemed nearly everyone in the room preferred the earlier time, and Don found himself agreeing with them. There had been too much waiting.

  The problem, mused Don, was that the attack force wasn't anywhere near ready. He took a deep breath. Well, they needed to be. The remaining few weeks would have to be enough.

  Perhaps it was for the best, he thought. He didn't want military discipline for this op, he wanted people who were part of a team and could think on their feet. There was a huge difference in those two things, and over-training was not going to be their friend.

  "Training doubles up, from today," he said, as the background murmuring subsided, "and we leave in two weeks. We'll have our route and transport sorted by then. We want to be on the ground, in the attack zone, within four weeks.

  "Let's make it happen people!"

  Don wondered idly how Cal was going to extract and deliver the Dayak tribesmen with only weeks to go, but he needn't have bothered. A fishing trawler that was out of place on the Kapuas river was already tying up at Sanggau, 200 km upriver in west Kalimantan.

  There had been no way of contacting Dick Chambers, Don's long-standing forester friend in Pontianak, in advance. When enquiries at Pontianak had revealed he was upriver at the moment, the trawler had made its way to Sanggau. This time the captain's inquiries had been more fruitful.

  "You want what?" said Dick incredulously. The trawler captain repeated his request, and stressed it was Ljudevit Maric who was making it, since that was the name Dick knew.

  "Roads are out," said Dick, "and anyway, petrol's impossible to get."

  The earthquakes had caused a lot of casualties, but after that life had continued much as usual for the slash-and-burn subsistence lifestyle of the Dayak people.

  The trawler captain explained how he could help, and the next morning the trawler unloaded Dick's old jeep, with a full tank of gas and a reserve container, at Sintang, in the heart of Dayak country.

  Two days later Dick was back at the trawler.

  "This is Menanggung, mostly called Menan, and this is Pejuang," he said, introducing a Dayak chieftain and his right-hand man to the captain. "The others are the best of his hunters that were in camp."

  The captain nodded. He had been expecting a group, and there were quarters ready for them below decks. Though like the crew they might prefer to sleep on deck most nights.

  The captain noticed differences to the river people lower down the Kapuas. Though a head shorter than he was, these men had a stillness about them, and moved with a quiet grace. They were superbly at home with the all-purpose machetes, and the bags they carried contained sections that fitted together to make blowguns.

  They were more heavily muscled than the people of the lower river as well. Calf muscles and biceps stood out in sharp contrast to the rest of their lean bodies. By the time the trawler dropped Dick and his jeep off at Sanggau, the captain had a deeper appreciation of what made these men special.

  "These guys are from the last of the semi-nomadic tribes,” explained Dick. “They work their way north in the dry season, into the last stretches of untouched forest. Then they migrate south to more open country for the wet season. They make huts then, but the huts are transitory, nothing like the longhouses you see nearer the coast.

  "They've worked with Maric before."

  The captain hesitated, and Dick could see he thought this unlikely.

  "Stopping diamond smuggling in south Kalimantan," said Dick quietly. "Little operation on the hush-hush. The Dayaks came in very handy."

  The captain bowed his head briefly to acknowledge Dick's personal understanding of the affair.

  Don would have been pleased that the plan to secure the Dayaks had gone so smoothly, but he had his own problems getting the strike force ready for Cambodia. Even so, two weeks after the accelerated training began, camel trains began to line up outside the Imazighen village. Preparations were almost complete for the first phase of the long journey to their destination.

  The camel trains would travel independently of each other, to avoid attracting the attention of the citadels. They would be aiming for a point on the Suez canal some distance past the devastation that used to be Cairo.

  The bridges across the Nile had been the city's undoing, especially along the narrows at Gezira island. Debris from fallen skyscrapers, and flotsam washed down the Nile after the 'quakes, had blocked the river at the bridges. Most of Cairo was now a lake, slowly reverting to marshlands.

  Dhows would come in from the Red Sea to the collection point on the Suez, in a seemingly random fashion, for the troops and supplies. The dhows would spread out again for the voyage across the Indian sea, and through the Malaysian bottleneck.

  The strike force would disembark on the Cambodian coast some ten days after they left the Suez canal, at the Phnum Sankoh wildlife sanctuary.

  The huge, mountainous region was where they would find the command citadel they were looking for. If all had gone well, a Gurkha base camp would be waiting for them.

  59

  Cambodian citadel

  Phnum Sankoh wildlife sanctuary, Cambodia

  Don lifted his hand in front of him before dropping his fingers, and Mosha and Bull slid onto their stomachs at the same time he did. The three of them inched forward across the top of the ridge, until they were looking down on the alien citadel. It was huge. An area the size of a sports ground had punched its way fifty metres out of a wetland in the jungle.

  The wetland was a basin in the middle of the Phnum Sankoh sanctuary. The rugged terrain was also the headquarters of the Pursat river. The river headed away from the coast until it emptied into the vast, seasonal, Tonle Sap. Two kilometres behind Don and his team was base camp.

  Colonel Thapa managed the Gurkha teams and ran the camp, working closely with Cal's quartermaster, Jimmy Rumbal. A lot of the food they needed came in from coastal villages, and that was a two-day trip, carefully hidden from aerial observation by the citadel.

  The camp was a masterpiece of camouflage. Thapa's men had constructed more than a kilometre of invisible passageways, spreading the camp over a large area and hiding its activities. The camp headquarters, and the food storage area, were in a cave system they had found. One of the many passageways of the camp connected to a cave entrance.

  The three men on the ridge now had high-res army noculars in play, watching the activity below. A causeway crossed the wetlands from the foot of the slope to a number of bays in the side of the citadel. Machines about the size of a small bulldozer were working on the causew
ay.

  Don was the first to finish his sweep of the citadel, and turn his attention to the grey line, less than a metre wide, that crossed the slope below them. It looked like the ground was moving, but he knew the tiny machines that made up the grey line were too small to be seen by the naked eye.

  On Don's side of that line was jungle, fairly open jungle since it was near the top of the ridge. On the other side of that line was freshly sieved and sorted earth and clay, with scattered stones that disturbed the appearance of a freshly ploughed field. The grey line was nanobot activity.

  He looked at Mosha on his left, and smiled. It was good to be out in the field again, doing what the SAS did best – gathering intel and staying alive.

  Cal had put a Raven drone over the citadel at the machine's maximum height, 4500m. The drone hadn't been shot down, but the Aeskri must have known it was there. Cal hadn't tried to overfly the citadel again. He hoped the Aeskri had no idea what the drone was, or it's information gathering capabilities – but the footage had been very valuable.

  Don and his team would observe the site for the next four hours, and then report back. As far as Don was concerned, they could cover a lot of ground in that time.

  "What say we drop down the ridge to our right, and get a closer look at that causeway?" said Mosha, and Don nodded.

  The area to their right was intriguing. The nanobots seemed to be leaving the river valley which emptied the wetlands untouched, possibly so their activities wouldn't affect the water. It could mean the citadel had an intake lower down. Whatever the reason, that area was the closest observation point to the citadel Don and his team were going to find.

  "Seen anything that could be an Aeskri?" murmured Don, half an hour later, after the team had eased into its new hiding place. The others shook their heads

  The alien creatures would be larger than a water buffalo, but smaller than an elephant, according to files in the buried space craft back in Morocco.

  There was no Earth creature they were directly comparable to, but they did have to breathe. Since their atmosphere was different to Earth's, they would need special equipment if they left the citadel's living quarters.

  "The machines are firming up the causeway," said Mosha. Don turned his nocular onto one of them. The wheels were spheres, multidirectional, and then he saw what Mosha meant. A solid plate dropped from underneath the machine, compacting an area two metres square with a solid thud. It left an impression about ten centimetres deep, and then retracted for the next drop.

  There appeared to be no linkage between the machine and the solid plate. It was puzzling, something to do with magnetic fields perhaps. A moment later the half dozen machines working on the causeway wheeled themselves toward one of the bays. The massive door of the bay slid up, and the machines disappeared into the citadel. The door stayed open, and Mosha looked at Don.

  It was a tough call. The chance of losing lives, against the chance of losing lives in the conflicts to come if they didn't have useful intel.

  Don sighed. The guys in the field always lost that little balancing act. If the citadel had external cameras, or something else that might detect them, they would be in serious trouble.

  He hoped one of the Aeskri had been up all night with stomach trouble, and was dozing in front of the camera screens. He was being fanciful, and he knew it, but the thought of entering the alien facility made him edgy.

  Bull did something with a meter that Jo's team had provided, and nodded. "No nanobot activity here," he said.

  The grey line they had noticed at the top of the ridge was absent. It seemed the citadel had finished with the land at the start of the valley that emptied the wetlands.

  Don decided the excursion was a go. Bull stayed behind, to give covering fire if they had to exfil fast, while Don and Mosha covered the distance to the bay door in record time.

  On the other side of the industrial-sized door was a huge space. Some of the machines waiting around the walls were several stories tall, and Don guessed this was a holding bay for machinery. A moment later spider repairmen ran across the wall to his left, but he ignored them. Cal's report from Lake Adelaide had talked about those.

  The light inside the citadel was almost too bright, but Don wasn't going to wear sunglasses. He wanted nothing between his senses and his surroundings. Helmet cams were recording everything for analysis later.

  The main thing now was to avoid bringing attention to themselves. The automated security guards would be the first to appear if they were spotted, and then possibly the Aeskri.

  "Take the opportunity?' said Mosha, as they moved out of the holding bay and into a tall corridor. They were passing a section of wall covered in shifting light patterns. A line of controls down one side confirmed it was a central point for the citadel's electronics.

  Don nodded, and regretted his decision the instant Mosha's demolition charge attached itself to the wall. The lights in the wall changed to a bright yellow, and the floor thrummed noisily under their feet.

  "Fuck it!" said Mosha, "something must have sensed the magnetic field in the clamps!"

  Both men headed back toward the holding bay, travelling fast. Don saw the door of the bay beckoning, and he saw movement on the other side of the bay at the same time.

  The Aeskri lifted its massive arms off the floor and came to an upright position. It was at least three metres tall. Don noted how comfortable it looked standing, almost humanoid, and then it fell forward into a murderous charge.

  Don had time to notice the smallest things. The Rohif-manufactured rifle spitting a stream of empty cases to one side, and splashes of blue flickering across the chest of the Aeskri as the lead impacted. Mosha's rifle muzzle spitting flashes of fire in almost perfect unison. He noticed the way the attacking creature didn't slow at all.

  As he pushed the ejector slide forward to engage the second magazine, he noticed the Aeskri, like I Wadu, wasn't wearing clothing. It had neither hair nor scales, but every joint projected a bony spike of some sort. It resembled an oversize gorilla coming at them on all fours, though it was much wider through the body. He noticed the bands around each arm, there to hold various devices.

  There was one second's worth of fire from the second magazine, a total of twenty alloy bullets. Don opened fire but didn't empty the magazine. The bullets hurt the Aeskri, and slowed it, but they didn't stop it.

  The shield about its body, whatever was producing the flashes of blue, was absorbing the impact. As Mosha emptied his second magazine, Don was already running for the corridor they had just left. He shouted 'incoming' as he ran, and Mosha dropped to the floor, the standard response.

  Seeing a quarry about to escape, like a dog unable to overcome its instincts, the Aeskri picked up speed and changed direction. It closed quickly on Don.

  Then the beast was upon him, and Don positioned himself for the last moments of an age-old enactment of predator and prey.

  His timing was perfect. He turned at the entrance to the corridor and braced the rifle against the wall. Unable to stop its momentum, the Aeskri threw out an arm to trap Don against the wall. The rifle pushed into its chest, bucking and twisting in Don's hands as he tried desperately to hold it steady.

  At the point of maximum pressure, when, he grimly hoped, the end of the rifle barrel had made it through the shield, he fired the last three alloy bullets.

  He felt the massive body shudder with each one, and exulted. Man, with his inventive mind, had taken down an animal many, many times his own size. The blood roared in his ears as he was crushed against the wall, and then the Aeskri collapsed, dragging him down. Mosha came hurrying over.

  "Almighty Christ, mate," he said. "Are you still alive?"

  Don nodded weakly. He was shaking, whether from adrenaline, or something broken, he couldn't tell.

  "We've got to move!" said Mosha, hauling him to his feet and heading for the bay door.

  60

  Strike force base

  Phnum Sankoh wildlife sanctuary, C
ambodia

  "None of us heard Mosha's demolition charge go off," said Don, "so the spiders must have got to it. I don't think we can count on explosives being effective, no matter how carefully we place them."

  The citadel repair machines were already known as 'the spiders' by the strike force. Everyone had the benefit of Cal's body of information about the citadels by now.

  Don's team was debriefing in Cal's office, which at the Gurkha camp was in the cave system. It was a rocky alcove to one side, not far from the entrance, sectioned off with cloth.

  "You killed an Aeskri," said Cal noncommittally, looking at Don.

  "It was an accident," said Don flatly. Hero worship did not go down well with the tall man. Team players kept people alive, acting out follow-the-leader fantasies got people killed.

  Mosha snorted, and changed it into clearing his throat.

  "What happens on patrol, stays on patrol," said Cal, looking meaningfully at Mosha and Bull. They looked at each other as if they couldn't believe Cal would keep such good news quiet, but they nodded.

  Don stepped in, and asked why his way was the best way. He wanted a number of teams, with a number of different approaches, struggling to make their own kills. Mosha thought about it for a moment, and grunted his agreement.

  "Delta team trialled Jo's nanobot defences on the other side of the citadel from you," said Cal. "They got down the slope and through the wetlands unharmed, so the neutralising devices seem to work.

  "I'll need Don in an hour for a strategy meeting, and you two have important things to do I'm sure."

  Mosha and Bull knew when they'd been dismissed. They left smartly. Don rose to his feet.

  "I'm looking forward to that meeting," he said. "I think I might have a few ideas to put forward."

  "I'm counting on it," said Cal.

  Don paused at the split in the cloth that served as a door. "What's the roll call now," he said quietly.