I have a dozen of these charges tucked away in the shell of Lucille’s back. Four ought to damage a Zilla beyond repair. The mechs camouflaged themselves and shot missiles out of the air, but they can’t see a height charge coming.
“Prepare for cluster release of the magma charges, Lucille,” I say. “Set the fuses for seven seconds.”
Lucille’s onboard texts: SEVEN SECOND DELAY CONFIRMED. VERY WELL, SIR.
I nudge my Sand Shark’s nose higher. Lucille’s fin cuts just below the surface of the sand. It’s called skimming, although the media displacement isn’t supposed to leave a ripple a machine can detect. Not until it’s too late, anyway.
Swimming too high has its own set of dangers. There is the danger of a clam bake, of course. Also, where the sand is shiftier and less densely packed, the drill and paddles lose traction. The drill would speed up to compensate but I’d still lose purchase in softer sand. I pray I didn’t damage Lucille’s drill when I hit the Zilla’s armored ankle.
The NAV shows my bright green dot merging with the target’s red dot. In a moment, my green dot passes the red target.
The first time I saw magma charges deploy, I thought they’d failed to detonate. I expected to be yelled at by my sand swimming instructor for missing some element of the attack protocol. However, Lucille performs as she should. We are under the mech’s last known position. Then the mech is five meters behind my tail. Then ten meters…fifteen…. At twenty meters I fire.
I hear the bangs as four height charges shoot upward. Lucille’s skin seals automatically after the magmas are free of the hull. Nothing is more damaging to equipment in the desert than sand. Ironic, no?
Lucille dives and the steep angle takes me by surprise. I’m reminded of getting tipped out of the back of the aircraft…when was that? Just a few minutes ago? It seems longer. My stomach turns over and I’m hungry and slightly ill at the same time.
Desert sand is usually no more than thirty meters thick. Then it’s rock of all sorts, limestone and sandstone, layers of clay and coal, oil and underground lakes and rivers. I lurch forward in my seat and the straps tighten around me as I hit granitic bedrock. Above and behind me, the magma charges explode out of the sand. Lucille counts off the seconds in my helmet display.
Seven.
I wish I could see this.
Six.
The height charges would be out in the air and the magnetized heads would zip onto the mech’s body with a series of loud clangs. Heat seekers would act as backups in case the target is demagnetized.
Five.
Super glue fires from the charges wherever they hit. Once a magma mine sticks, it stays stuck. The acid explosive can’t simply be brushed off and won’t slide off, even if the target’s armored hull is oiled ceramic.
Four.
“Charges away, Control!” I’m probably too deep for Thomas to hear me.
Three.
Two.
Oh, god!
One.
4
I don’t hear the explosions, but I feel their vibrations through the sand. Lucille rocks as I continue in a deep dive. The media changes and my descent slows so I level off and tell Lucille to circle back for a scan of the surface. It takes a few minutes of near-breathless anticipation before I find out how I did. By my screen, the other two giants are on the move again but I need to be careful about rushing up to check out my target. I give Lucille a circuitous route to sneak into a safer recon position.
I’m still deep enough that I am out of comm reach of Thomas for a few moments. Every coffin jockey feels a little lonely when it’s just you in the confines of your machine behind the speeding drill. When Sand Sharks were first introduced to modern warfare, the machines didn’t have all the bells and whistles Lucille has. The first pilots certainly didn’t have ports in their necks to be pumped full of drugs as necessary.
Neck ports for pilots were a point of contention among the brass for a long time. The first guys to climb into a Sand Shark thought of themselves as astronauts. There are parallels. Both astronauts and Sand Shark pilots are isolated with a few inches of metal separating us from horrible deaths. There was a lot of bravado and gallows humor among the test pilots. (Still is, I guess.) They said if a Sand Shark’s engine died, it was an expensive loss to the company, but the cost of burial was saved. Dark, funny stuff until those pilots either died in the early prototypes or went home and killed themselves. Claustrophobia isn’t half the problem. Oxygen must be conserved. You have to fly by your instruments all the time and there’s a lot of math and geology involved. There’s something powerfully mean and dark about working underground. It’s like a preview of the nasty fate we’re all bound to.
The Powers That Be started giving us drugs to cope after they saw the suicide rates among Sand Shark pilots. I don’t know why there was such puritanical debate back then. Everybody in the military is on some kind of drug now. Some take something to sharpen their senses or yo build themselves up. Others take drugs to dull the nerves. To preserve each soldier’s humanity, nobody should go to war unmedicated. That is the last resolution passed by the United Nations before it dissolved, so I guess the UN was good for something.
“12? Come in, 12.”
“This is 12.”
“Sitrep, Avery?”
The comm link comes back online and the sat feed shows me two Zillas running away. Well, not running. They walk fast. Each stride is the length of a city block. I zoom in and smirk. The giant I targeted is in several pieces and its link with the other Zillas is dead. We can’t read what the bots say to each other but when one is unhooked from its Collective, that’s a sure sign it is dead and done. I manage to report without a trace of euphoria, “One target destroyed, Vegas. I am officially a Jack!”
Jack is the equivalent to Ace among Sub-T scouts. I’m a Jack, as in Jack and the Beanstalk. In other words, I’m a giant killer.
Thomas doesn’t seem to register the significance of the feat. “And the other tangos, 12?”
I’m pissed off but I don’t say anything. Thomas is Chair Force. He doesn’t get the slang used in my unit. We’re coffin jockeys and widely considered the best of the best of what’s left of the human Army. “One’s heading south,” I say, cool and professional. “The other is now heading northeast, Vegas.”
“Very well. Do not pursue. Your mission lies to the northwest.”
“Very well, Control.” This is the first Zilla class bot anyone in my unit has taken down. I want to scream and shout and clap and laugh. However, I also want to sound like I do this every day, three times before breakfast. I plot a new course and Lucille turns northwest.
Lucille takes a series of slow S turns and occasionally doubles back and crosses her own path. Seismic sensors might track my course if I’m too linear about going where I’m tasked to go. My link with Thomas is encrypted but the enemy knows I’m in the area. I have to assume they’ll be listening for me.
I manage to hide the excitement in my voice but my biomarkers betray me.
“Your air is a little thin, 12,” Thomas says. “You got a little excited there. Can you clamp that down or do you need an O-two booster?”
I close my eyes for a moment and listen to my heart rate monitor. As soon as it clicks into my audio feed I begin to bring it down.
“Ninety-nine beats per minute, 12.”
I know. Sh! I focus. The monitor tells me my technique is working but the monitor is also a distraction. The key is to focus and to listen to my body, not to the monitor.
“Eighty-two…” Thomas informs me. After another moment, I’m back down to a steady fifty.
“Good job, Avery,” Thomas says, sounding less stiff and maybe even friendly. “How do you do that?”
“What? You can’t?”
“Too much coffee and sitting down.”
“I picture a place from my childhood. There was a barn and a pasture and I remember the smell of hay. It’s sweet. I picture myself hiding in the hay.”
“Lik
e in a haystack?”
“No. We baled ours. I hid in the loft in the barn. Sweet, clean hay is a good bed and a nice place to get away from chores and read a book.”
“Sounds itchy.”
“Only if you’re naked, Vegas.”
“My, my! Lt. Avery! That sounds like the voice of experience.”
Wow. Thomas is actually sounding flirty!
I flirt right back. “I read books for a long time before I let a boyfriend see my…secret hiding place. What was your secret hiding place, Thomas?”
“I was a townie,” he says. “I didn’t have any hay.”
“C’mon. Every kid has a secret hiding place. Under the bed, maybe?”
“If I tell you my secret it won’t be secret, anymore, 12.”
Hmph. Twelve. We’re back to being professional and stiff, I guess.
I scan the oxygen tank readings and zip up to cruising depth for maximum speed. I tell Lucille to dump half the S turns and delete all circles. The more speed I have now, the more oxygen I have to play with.
After a moment, Thomas picks up on the course alterations. “What are you doing, 12?”
“I lost some time and oxygen killing a Zilla, Control. I’m making it up with some speed.”
“You’re being less cautious, 12.”
“Enjoy the improved comm feed, Control.”
“Very well. Eyes open, 12.”
“Ears open here, Control.”
Within an hour, my seismics pick up faint readings. The scan is far too small for a city-killing machine.
“New orders, 12. Multiple tangos ahead. Dive! Dive! Acknowledge, 12!”
Lucille’s drill tips and I’m already on my way down before I can zoom in on the visual. From what little I saw of the seismic readings, and judging by Thomas’s excitement, I guess I’m headed into the teeth of a platoon of biped kill bots.
5
The difficulty with seismic scanning is cutting down the signal to noise ratio. Lucille’s algos diminish the ambient distractions, like the big drill I’m sitting behind. Still, I wish I could’ve had a clear visual from the sat feed before Thomas told me to take evasive maneuvers, especially since his next advisory was that I go on the attack.
“Did you get a glimpse of the sat feed before I dove, Control? What am I going at?”
“Analyzing, 12…it’s not exactly a horde.”
Easy for you to say. Have another coffee or maybe a nap, Lieutenant Sheaffer. “Got any specifics? Am I taking on military grade bots or what?” Not exactly professional, but I was losing the memory of the sweet smell of hay and my heartbeat was back up to sixty. We are trained that we had to ration our heartbeats if we want to have a lot of them.
“At least one has a weapon, 12,” he says.
“Only one weapon, Control?” I am skeptical. Our intel is often faulty. That’s one of the main reasons I am out here: to gather real time intel, up close and personal.
“I count eight tangos, bipedal. Expect little resistance, 12. Destroy the targets’ last known position. One steel ball package will do it. Execute.”
“Very well, Control. Actuating.”
The Sand Shark rocks into a sharp turn and a steep dive as I come up from behind. This is supposed to be a recon mission but so far all I’m doing is engaging and spending oxygen unexpectedly. That’s okay. Recon is relatively boring. This is what I trained so hard for. I live to kill enemy bots.
The steep dive turns into a steep climb as I begin my run on the tangos. “Warm up the weapons, Lucille. Stingray, now.” Stingrays deliver needle slugs at high velocity. It makes thousands of tiny holes in just about anything. A stingray is a fairly mindless drone that, once detached from a Sand Shark’s hull, cannot return. It activates automatically and starts seeking targets as soon as it hits the air.
The early Stingrays were steel ball deployment packages on springs that simply shot up in the air and exploded on the way down. This presented multiple engineering problems, mainly loss of speed in the Sand Shark, post-deployment. After the steel ball explosive damaged a Sand Shark as much as its intended targets, engineers added a parachute to slow the device’s descent. That allowed too much time for the enemy to destroy the threat or hunt cover. We’re at war with bots that possess Next Intelligence so naturally we also worried, what if we got hacked and the stingrays were used on our own troops? Pragmatism won out and the Sand Shark program accepted the Stingray as part of our autonomous weapons arsenal.
Lucille’s dashboard is all green but, as soon as I hit weapon depth, the sat feed craps out.
“Control? I’ve lost visual! Red light on the sat feed! I’m still in the blind!”
“Swim by your instruments, 12. Attack.”
Something’s screwing up my sat link and, if that’s really out, my mission is aborted. But there’s no time to talk. I’m on top of the enemy’s last known position. I dare to pull up a little higher for a clean shot and maximum effect. I lose speed in the loose sand as I let the stingray loose. Stingray One detaches smoothly from Lucille’s hull. I’m told the kill bot’s design was inspired by stingrays that swim the ocean. It looks like a very pregnant stingray to me. It’s got quite a belly full of needle slugs.
“Stingray away, Control. Visual?”
“Negative, 12. Dive! Dive!”
I dive.
The loss of the sat feed is worrying but, as I slip back under the desert sand, I can’t help smiling. I expected a long mission swimming in the dark and sitting still in the sand on boring recon duty. Silent running and long hours hoping to see a blip on a seismic scan is not the stuff of victories and good war stories. If I survive the Sand Wars, I want big tales to tell after we successfully turn back the clock and get the uppity bots to serve us again.
I imagine the bots on patrol above me, already dropping away in the distance, already dropping to the desert sand, their lubricants leaking. The Stingray’s propellers would spin up as soon as the drone hit the air, a cloud of sand flying off its black wings. The drone would spin and turn and flip, all the while firing its steel slivers.
As Stingray One weaves through the bots above me, the slivers shoot out in patterns matching the outline of the target. Each sliver is almost microscopic. However, even at maximum spread, targets are perforated thoroughly.
The brass told us that necessity is the mother of invention and invention is mostly driven by our urge to kill things. Stingray’s hit-to-kill tech was a counter to the Saudis’ sly innovation in war tech: don’t put the bot brain where anyone expects it. Early in the war, the Saudis had the upper hand in close combat. Our machines would target their machines, directing our fire at the greatest mass. First they fooled us by putting the bot brains in an appendage. Those bots didn’t work particularly well but they were hard to bring down unless you hit the right appendage.
Once we figured that out, the Saudis added redundant systems throughout the bots and even added a big, empty head. Despite our training, it’s very tempting for a human to shoot for the head, even if all that metal skull is good for is a battering ram and a decoy target.
We were losing the war until we jumped ahead of the Saudis. We started networking our bot army’s OS to the Cloud Collective. Mech brains weren’t in their bodies anymore. They got all their orders from coordinating computers high above the battle. That worked great for a while. We began to kill enemy bots in greater numbers. We thought we’d declare victory in short order and go home. Then those same oversight computer networks got the Next Intelligence. Our own metal children grew increasingly rebellious and turned on us.
I dive to safety, no doubt leaving carnage in my wake. I don’t know what I’ve done. Not yet. For another few minutes, I am as innocent as a girl reading a book in a barn.
I’ll never be that girl again. I’ll never be able to bring down my heart rate when I recall the smell of sweet hay.
6
Lucille turns back, Stingray Two at the ready, just in case the intel is all wrong and it’s a horde of kill bo
ts up there. I bring Lucille to a halt and watch the seismic scanner. As the drill winds down, the seismic reading has no interference. “This is 12. I’m in the blind, swimming by seismics. No movement.”
No reply.
“Control? Do you copy?”
I didn’t expect an answer. I’m too deep. I wait and watch.
“Lucille? Replay the last seismic scan as we launched Stingray One.”
The readout replays. Thomas said he saw eight bogies, but my readout shows two dozen little green traces. Figures. I’ll definitely need Stingray Two to deliver another package. Stingray One will run out of needle slugs before it takes down that many bots. Still, the seismic readout is a flat line. The bots above me seem to have fallen easily. I review the replay again. Judging by the pattern traces right after I launched Stingray One, the bots are fleeing in every direction, possibly trying to lead Stingray away. I let the recording play. The footfalls are faint but, as I watch, the circle of traces widens and then contracts. The drone corralled its targets.
Within moments, there is no attack pattern left to track. The bots are dead. Chalk up another victory for the good guys. Still, I watch and wait. My training makes me paranoid. I know that whatever can go wrong, generally will. I know that if an attack is going too well, it’s a trap.
The minutes tick by. Thomas will be waiting for a sitrep but, if he can link to the cam in Stingray One, he already knows more about the tangos than I do. If the sat feed doesn’t come back online, I’ll be headed back to friendlies for extraction. Hallelujah. Maybe I’ll come back here soon, but next time I won’t be dropped on top of three city-killers. This mission was cursed from the beginning. Still, despite the technical malfunctions, I’ve got multiple bot kills. No shame in that. I’ll return to base the unit’s first Zilla slayer. Everyone will buy me a drink, slap me on the back and call me Jack. I’ll shrug it off like I’ve got ice in my veins, as cold a killer as any of the enemy. Zilla Slayer might be my new name in the squad and that would be solid. That’s a war record and a legacy no one will forget.
Robot Planet, The Complete Series (The Robot Planet Series) Page 23
