Taking up more of the limited and low-ceilinged space are two additional H-A suits, holding their ICWs at rest. The tenser-feeling of the two has Specialist chevrons and a nameplate that reads “Scheffe, J.” The other one I recognize through her faceplate before I read the name: It’s Corso. I can feel Lyra take a sharp breath in when she sees her.
“Glad to see they cleared you for duty, Major,” I offer less-than-convincingly. “Though we missed you in Iso.”
Corso’s eyes are ice cold. Something’s got her angry nearly beyond reason, more than my presence alone would.
There’s movement above us, and another suit climbs partway down from an upper hatch that probably gives access to the main turret. The nameplate reads “SIMMONS, FDR” and the armor bears Technical Sergeant insignia.
“Welcome aboard the Long Range Recon Vehicle Warhorse One,” Corso growls at me, then unceremoniously tosses me a flash pad.
General Richards’ face appears on the screen, looking dour.
“Major Corso, please use your software to confirm this image has not been falsified.”
The screen freezes. She tears off one of her heavy gloves, reaches out and presses her thumb to the device like this entire situation is offensive to her. The video message continues, but she makes a point of not looking at the pad screen.
“This information is authorized for the ears of your crew,” Richards continues heavily. The time index tells me this is all pre-recorded, so I’m guessing Corso’s viewed it already; its content probably explains her self-righteous indignation. (Of course, everything on this planet seems to garner the same general reaction from her. Or maybe her face is just stuck that way.) But the rest of the crew gather intently, close enough to see without getting too close to the scary monster holding the pad.
“When Colonel Burns attempted to upload his official report on the North Blade Incident, the uplink was hacked again, we assume by the hostile entity known as Asmodeus. This time, he broadcast the files recovered from the research vessel Circe. The details of the illegal experimentation ordered by UNCORT officials, as well as UNCORT’s foreknowledge of the existence of survivors on this planet, are now public knowledge. The files also contained information that incriminated specific members of the Committee as well as the Security Council, including Dr. Chandry. Arrest warrants are being issued. You can imagine the scandal this has caused back home. But the damage doesn’t end there.
“Also broadcast was the bombing of the City of Industry authorized by Colonel Burns without my knowledge, including casualty estimates. I have been forced to relieve Colonel Burns pending a cross-planet court martial.” He doesn’t sound at all unhappy about that last piece of news. I try not to smirk too sadistically. But then he hardens again. “I am taking direct command of all planetary operations as of zero-nine-thirty-five this morning.”
I feel the others shuffle behind me. For a few, the new-drops, I figure this is all very upsetting. But I feel a flash of silent satisfaction from Horst, Jenovec and Lyra.
“None of that alters the essence of your orders,” Richards tries to be reassuring, considering what those orders are. “You are still to attempt to locate the entity Asmodeus or his on-planet assets and target them for us, or destroy them yourselves. You are still authorized to deploy the nuclear warheads in your charge to accomplish this if the situation is dire and no other options are available. You are still to maintain strict communication silence, which is why these orders were hand-delivered to you before you rolled out. However, one significant change has been made since your original mission briefing:
“You will meet and take aboard Colonel Ram and his companion Specialist Jameson. Major Corso, you remain in command of this mission, but Ram will act as your advisor in the field, while Specialist Jameson’s knowledge of biological nanotechnology is unmatched on-planet. Know that the restructured Security Council is under global public pressure to resolve the Asmodeus threat, and they have chosen to give Colonel Ram their limited trust on a probationary basis. Personally, I trust his intentions, and more so, I value his skill sets. I expect you all will treat him with due respect.
“Good luck and God Speed.”
Dee.
I’ve seen this before. This is how Dee goes to war.
If it had been Asmodeus, he would have made a show out of it. I get the impression this was clean, direct, and devastating, crafted for maximum political damage. Dee has brought down governments with a few select gigs of incriminating files, released publically. True infowar.
And here I am smirking again, like I did this myself.
But I wonder if this means Dee has “found himself” in the process, located his core entity still lurking in Earth’s networks, or whatever his core entity has evolved into in all these decades. And then I feel foolish at how automatically I buy into the bullshit:
The original Dee did evolve. Into Yod. The Dee that’s here isn’t really a remote CALO sent to help me. Yod planted him here on Mars, programmed to believe he is what he “thinks” he is and why he thinks is. Just like all the rest of us.
Right now, I don’t really care. I’m happy to take the help, especially if the Earthside idiots are getting hit hard in the process.
I hand the pad back to Corso. Her eyes narrow at me, seething.
“Carry on, Major,” I try giving a little. “You’re in command.”
She turns her back on me without a word and goes forward, almost banging her head on the hatchway into the next section.
The vehicle gets rolling again, and the small crew gets back to station. After a few minutes, they start stripping out of their H-A shells and stowing them in standing racks at the fore and aft of the bay (making it look like there are extra armored troopers standing in here with us like guards).
Horst and then Jenovec unseal first, expressing their greater faith in me. Of the crew I’ve met, they’re the only Sleeper Vets unlucky enough to get assigned to this likely-suicide mission. But Earthside must have been desperate to send them out on such a critical op, realizing they needed a few guns in this lumbering can with actual battle experience.
Of course now, every time I look at either of them now, or any of the others I knew before the Apocalypse, I know they used to be Modded immortals like me. Either that, or Yod manufactured them to fill in gaps in his “reset”, recreating those who had died in the interim because they’d rejected Modding or didn’t live long enough to get it. Like Matthew. And Rick. And Tru. And Doc Ryder. (And it sours my mood again, thinking that Yod has surrounded me with so many convincing copies of dear friends, as if he’s intentionally reminding me what I’ve lost to immortality, and what he can give me back on a whim.)
If Horst and Jenovec were among the Modded, I wonder what they were like. It certainly isn’t true that people never change, but certain strong character traits—good or bad—may persist. Horst is strong, loyal, honorable; quietly professional yet human. A good man and a good soldier. He reminds me of Azazel, though certainly nowhere near as shaggy. Jenovec… He’s young. He does his job, but much of the time he barely seems invested as far as I can tell. Giving him Mods probably made his worst traits worse. He’s not stupid, but I don’t get the sense that he really values anything, maybe not even his own future, so he never seems totally present in the now.
Simmons and Scheffe, like Corso, are new-drop. I expect the balance of cherry-to-vet is less based on talent and more based on making sure they keep anyone with potentially questionable loyalties (and morality) outnumbered.
Corso is all bureaucrat. An almost comical martinet, sent—as far as I can tell—by UNCORT to keep Richards in line. (I’m pretty sure Burns “volunteered” for the same reason.) I wonder how much she’s panicking now, knowing that her benefactors back home may all be imprisoned or worse. (Do they still have the death penalty in their theo-fascist utopia?) She’s probably been sweating, worrying about where exactly she stands since she viewed Richards’ update. I’d wonder if there was anything to incriminate he
r in what Dee dumped Upworld, but she’s too young, maybe thirty-five, to have been involved in the worst of it. UNCORT’s atrocities against the people of this planet are more than twenty years old. But she could still be caught in whatever backlash is coming. And I don’t feel bad for her at all.
FDR Simmons: I get the impression he runs this land-boat, the way he scurries intensely to check and adjust the primitive systems. That highlights the most striking thing about this vehicle: All the cables, running everywhere, obviously tacked down after-build. I hear no wireless signals—everything is running on hard linkages and hard wires so it can’t be remotely hacked. But that buys us some serious vulnerabilities.
“How do you run fire control?” I ask him as he seals up the small access hatch to the main turret.
He hesitates for a moment like he’s not sure he should be speaking to me at all, wipes sweat and grease off of his high forehead. He’s tanned and weathered like old leather and frosted gray. Even his eyes look antique.
“Everything’s manual, sir. You can run the guns from the cockpit or crawl up inside—there are crew chairs wedged in tight.”
“How are you going to manage the accuracy to hit a Harvester module just right?” I point behind my own ear.
“Twenty millimeter explosive rounds will do the trick. Anything center of mass, and it’s bits and juice. Same for the seven-six-two chain guns: gazpacho. It burns shells, but that’s why we packed a triple load of ammo for everything. We know we’ll be doing some missing.”
“The big turret guns were never made to track a small moving target, Sergeant,” I warn him. “They’re not fast. You may be doing a lot more missing that hitting.”
“I heard they did fine against Discs in the day,” he defends, but I feel him doubt what he’s been assured of.
“Not so much. And they only did what they did because we timed the shells to airburst. They didn’t have to hit a Disc dead-on, they just had to blow close enough for frag to chew on them. The Discs were built for speed and maneuverability. They weren’t armored. But that took our base AI running the math during the fight.”
“That’s Scheffe’s thing, Colonel,” he tries to assure, almost defensively, gesturing at the slim, almost frail young woman I didn’t see under the heavy armor suit. She glances at me and gives me a nervous smile before she busies herself securing supplies. “She’s fast with the numbers. Has a real feel for it.”
So there is some actual talent on this rolling coffin.
“And Jenovec and I are here to do the shooting when the big gun can’t get the job done,” Horst tells me aside, only half-joking, confirming that he understands their reason for being here.
As we roll on, I soon notice one of the drawbacks to traveling on primitive tech: There are no screens back here in the main bay, and since there are also no viewports, I have no idea where we are or where we’re going. I can feel the vehicle’s suspension get rocked by whatever it’s rolling over, sometimes quite sharply (which is even more unsettling since I can’t see it coming). And the deck shifts with acceleration and deceleration. The whole effect is nausea-inducing—thankfully I can no longer physically vomit. But I can see it turn Lyra paler than usual, though I know she spent weeks riding the Leviathan Three. (Maybe that much larger vehicle was also more stable?) Even the assigned crew look like they aren’t used to it yet, so I guess they haven’t been aboard very long. Hopefully they stocked lots of anti-emetics along with all the ammo.
Corso sits one section forward, trying to hold down her own breakfast and pretend that she’s not. She’s left the heavy hatch between the pressurized sections secured open, possible just for the sense of “fresh air”. Through the hatchway, I can see a small chamber that looks like it’s designed to be a combination of comm room, officer’s quarters and mess. It’s got maybe only four square meters of floor space, barely big enough to wedge four people into at a time with the fold-down table in place. I’m more and more reminded of submarines I’ve been on, and not the bigger nuclear boats—the cramped old diesel cans, where every cubic meter of space was used to its maximum potential.
We thump over another big something, and I hit my head on a roof support. Lyra shoots me a pained grin in sympathy as she holds on to one of the numerous handrails.
I find myself a place to sit on one of the narrow benches on the port side. Lyra sits across from me, still careful to keep her distance even in these tight spaces.
Probably spurred by wanting someone to blame for the non-existent lump on my head, I start to wonder who’s actually driving this thing. Looking past Corso, who’s brooding over laminated hardcopy maps, I see another heavy hatch, this one only two-thirds high, as if it opens into a lower section, possibly a cockpit. (Probably a cockpit, as this beast doesn’t have that much more length.) I ask Horst who our pilot is, as it certainly can’t be AI. He answers me with a grim look.
I get up, stagger forward like a sailor on the rolling and jerking deck, and interrupt Corso’s sulk.
“Who’s in there?” I gesture at the hatch.
Corso also doesn’t give me a direct answer, but reaches over like I’ve annoyed her for no good reason and raps a coded knock out on the hatch, before pushing a primitive intercom button.
“Corso to Oldboy. Secure. You have a visitor.”
I feel the vehicle slow and stop under my feet. Then hear some scraping and bumping from whatever space is forward of the hatch, and then it groans as it unlocks. Like the other hatches, it’s heavily reinforced and heavily locked, as if they built the vehicle expecting it might be taken section by section (something we experienced with both the Shinkyo and the Zodanga, back before we contacted Earth). It takes some effort to push it open, and Corso has to get out of the way in the tight space. But then I see a familiar face poke through, looking up at me at an incline as if he was sitting in a century-and-a-half-old space capsule. The cockpit is only big enough for a pilot’s couch.
“It’s good to see you again, Colonel. Welcome aboard.”
It’s Wilson Smith. He was our best combat pilot, and I monopolized him as my personal pilot, before Earthside came and started flushing my people out of their assignments, replacing them with their own loyalists.
“What the hell are you doing here, Captain?” I just blurt out. “This is a tank.”
“Only way they’d let me back in the suck, sir.” He glances at Corso to catch her squirming at his “uncivilized” language. “Got tired of riding transports. They won’t let me touch one of their new fighters, not even the refurbished museum pieces, even though they know I can fly them a hundred times better than any of their cherries can. Probably afraid I’d turn and frag.” He glances at Corso again, this time looking for sign of validation. She keeps herself nose-down into her maps, pretending to ignore us.
“This is a rolling target, you know that,” I chastise him, aggravated that another one of my friends has been levered into danger. “A big, slow one.”
“Everything on this planet is a target, sir,” he downplays. “At least this one is resistant to squad-level arms. And you can’t shoot it down.” And he’s been shot down before, twice just that I know of.
I look past him into his tight working space. He can “see” what’s around us through a mix of simple hardwired screens and shielded periscopes. There are similar but less complete eyes in the comm section. I imagine there are screens and/or scopes in the gun turrets as well. Only the troop bay is blind.
But all of the ship is deaf except for one very basic radio in the comm section, wired to nothing but its own antenna. The intercoms are hardwired and dedicated.
“It’s quite the antique, Captain.”
“So are we, Colonel,” he jokes. “But this makes me feel like I’m in an old World War Two VR.”
“I’m getting that myself,” I tell him.
“We need to keep the pace, Captain,” Corso prods him. “We can’t lose our window.”
I see a flash of doubt and frustration in Smith’s eyes,
as if he wants to say “What target? What window?” But he holds his tongue, gives her a curt “Yes, Major,” and slides back into his couch behind his mechanical controls. Corso closes and relocks the hatch like she’s locking him away out of my reach.
I go back and sit down across from Lyra. She sees the simmering perturbation in my eyes, but doesn’t ask. We just hang on to the benches and ride the bucking lumbering can.
Chapter 2: Plague of Hornets
From the memory files of Lisa Ava, 4 June 2118:
With all the chaotic drama caused by Asmodeus’ infowar tactics, Burns and Jackson haven’t been able to properly address whatever part they’re sure I’ve had in Michael and Specialist Jameson’s unauthorized exit. I fully expected they’d put the ridiculous bomb collar back on me, and/or find me an even-less-hospitable hole to wile my helplessly unproductive time away in. But by the time anyone remembers I’m still being good and sitting all by myself in Iso, things have gone bent.
“Burns has been relieved,” Ryder whispers too softly for the sentry systems to hear when she comes for her routine rounds. “Confined to quarters pending court martial. Jackson is livid. The General is taking a shuttle down to Melas Two to take over command of planetary ops in person.”
I make myself not smile at the news, since Earthside Command is already sure that Asmodeus and I are somehow in this together. And I see that I’m being watched by more than just the cameras: In addition to the two H-A troopers they’ve stationed in the gallery since they discovered Michael and his new “companion” gone, one of the new techs keeps looking at me through the transparency like I’m some kind of curiosity. When I lock his pale blue eyes, he forces a brief awkward smile and looks back down at his screens.
I realize I haven’t seen him on duty before. He may be some new specialist sent in to discreetly crack how we managed the vanishing act despite all the steps they took. But he doesn’t look like he’s looking to fix anything or find anything, just keeping watch on the feeds like every other shift before him. In fact, he doesn’t look like much at all: Maybe late twenties, pale blonde skinny kid. Boyishly pretty, if I was into that sort of thing. He reminds me of an old catalogue model, all perfect bland and fake smiles.
The God Mars Book Six: Valhalla I Am Coming Page 22
