by Ian Douglas
The images were pretty low-res—grainy—and they were in black-and-white in order to preserve bandwidth, but they were good enough to give us close-ups from a number of viewpoints of the pit and the Jacker machines working on it. Qesh warriors in battle armor and lugging massive personal weapons were everywhere, newly arrived, it appeared, on several Roc assault craft that were now hovering motionless in the sky. There was something else in the sky, too, floating above the Rocs, so much larger than the other fliers that it dwarfed them—a gleaming Daitya weapons platform.
“When did that show up?” Hancock wanted to know. He’d been outside checking on our sentries, but came in when I told him there was something on the monitors he might want to see.
“Just a couple of minutes ago,” I told him. “The bad guys look pretty stirred up.”
“Looks like we managed to kick over the hornet’s nest,” Calli Lewis said.
“Any sign of reprisals?” Hancock wanted to know.
We were all worried about that. After freeing the hostages, it was a fair bet that the Qesh would simply grab some more, maybe a lot more, and promptly start executing them. What was curious was that Matthew and the other Salvationists with him hadn’t seemed that concerned about the possibility.
“No, Gunny.” I told him. “But we did see this.”
I brought up a segment of video recorded about half an hour before. We had thousands of such segments individually beamed back to our OP. Only our AI could monitor all of them and single out the particular ones that might be of interest to us.
This particular sequence had been captured by a microbot stuck to the side of one of the spotlight masts rising near the city wall.
Most microbot surveillance drones, smaller than a speck of dust, drifted on currents of air in the same way that biobots moved through circulatory fluid. We didn’t have a lot of control over them—you can lock them into a local magnetic field and steer them a bit that way, but with the equipment our squad had been able to pack along, we were pretty much limited to what we could pick up by chance.
Worse, microbots were subject to the wind. You can release a cloud of them over an enemy encampment, but if there’s any wind at all, the cloud will be dispersed to hell and gone before you can get much in the way of recon data. And the wind on Bloodworld was fiercely unrelenting, gusting constantly from dayside around to night, except when thermal storms happened to send countercurrents from the wintry night across to the day.
This wasn’t a major limitation for simple surveillance; out of some hundreds of millions of ’bots released into the wind, a few could be expected to hit convenient rocks or other structures, and most were designed with nano-reactive pads that let them adhere to convenient surfaces. With enough samples to draw upon, our AI could usually pick up images of what we were interested in, selecting them from the flood of data coming back from the relay.
“That,” I told Hancock, using the AI program to isolate and zoom in on the interesting part of the picture, “looks like the bad guys’ head honch.”
We were looking down at an oblique angle on a procession of Qesh warriors. Most were encased in heavy armor and carried weapons that looked big enough to take on a Commonwealth Mk. 4 hovertank. Their armor showed scuffs, dents, and dings as though it all had seen long and rough usage.
One of the Qesh below, however, was wearing what could only be called elegant armor. We couldn’t guess at the color in those images, of course, but this one individual’s armor looked like it was richly engraved, with a mirrored polish that gleamed in the glare from the mast-mounted spotlights. If the battle armor of the average Qesh troopers was utilitarian and well-used, this guy’s armor was strictly ceremonial. It looked lightweight, not much heavier than the Qesh’s own exoskeletal plates.
“That Jacker,” I told Hancock, “is either a general or a politician. And maybe both.”
The chasing on the Qesh leader’s armor reminded me of the ornate engraving on some samples of medieval parade armor—the sort worn by kings and dukes and the wealthiest of knights, gear far too precious to be worn into actual battle.
I was particularly interested in the fact that the Qesh seemed to go in for this sort of thing. Marine combat armor shows absolutely no difference between that worn by a general and that worn by a private; emblems of rank, of combat distinction, and of tradition—like the centuries-old eagle-globe-anchor device—are displayed only during full-dress parade. In combat, you don’t want the enemy to be able to pick out your officers for special consideration.
A warrior culture might be expected to have lead-from-the-front officers with highly visible regalia. That sort of thing doesn’t make much sense in modern combat, at least not as humans understand it now, but the Qesh weren’t remotely human, and their society and history might have emphasized a markedly different set of traditions.
This particular Qesh leader was approaching a small structure built into the rock of the city wall, surrounded by a retinue of more conventionally armored soldiers. The structure opened in front of them—it appeared to be a doorway into a large airlock—and the group filed inside.
“Interesting,” Hancock said. “I wonder if they’ll come out again later with a new bunch of hostages?”
“I was thinking, Gunny . . .”
“What?”
“We might be able to use Jackers to get a look at the inside of the city. Maybe we could see what’s going on in there.”
“Hitch a ride, you mean? Instead of gnatbots?”
“Exactly.”
“It’s certainly worth a try,” Hancock told me. “Do it.”
So I did.
We had a supply of gnatbots with us, of course, but they would be all but useless over Bloodworld’s windy surface. To deploy them effectively, we would have to get inside the city ourselves. Until we heard back from Matthew and his people, we were stuck outside.
Gnatbots are, literally, the size of gnats—perhaps a tenth of a millimeter long and just barely visible to the human eye if you’re focused right on them. They dance through the air on tiny wings and can be directed either by a human controller or by a simple on-board program. The police use them a lot for general surveillance on Earth—and especially for security surveillance inside sealed structures on Earth, the moon, and Mars. In the wind-gusted environment of Bloodworld’s twilight zone, though, those wings were next to useless. We needed to find another way of getting camera-carrying ’bots inside the city gates.
What I had in mind was using standard microbots attached to an individual Jacker’s armor, and letting him carry the surveillance drone inside. A gram or so of programmed nano could assemble itself at the scene into a camera and transmitter too small to see without optical magnification.
The problem was finding a way of safely putting the microbots on the armor. We didn’t have any special-grown nanobots like that on hand, and would have to program our own. I plugged my N-org into a console, brought up the programming base chart on-screen, and then asked Kookie to join me.
This would be a job for a Marine sniper.
“You should have bugged that Qesh pilot, e-Car,” Sergeant Leighton told me. “Would’ve been more certain.”
“Not really,” I told her. “Chances are he got shipped back up to orbit as soon as his friends picked him up. No reason to think they would have dragged him inside the city.”
“I guess that’s true.”
I’d actually considered at the time bugging my alien patient, but had decided against it. It might have been useful having a spy-cam on board one of the Qesh capital ships up in orbit, but there were some major disadvantages as well. For one thing, if the Qesh were the suspicious sort, they would assume that one of their troops given medical treatment by the enemy would carry bugging devices of some sort, and so would screen him extra closely. In fact, I fully expected that as soon as they got the Qesh pilot back to one of their m
edical facilities, they would deprogram the nano I’d put into him, and shoot him up with their own, including something to wipe out any enemy alien nano that might still be in his body.
And for another, I’d not had the appropriate base nano on hand. The medical ’bots I carried with me in my M-7 needed substantially different programming than I could normally provide through my N-prog, with most of the code written by an AI. I could have managed something, but it would have taken longer than I’d cared to remain out there in the open, with bad guys closing in.
We were in the OP dome with two viewall displays above us, one showing the view from the microbot glued to the spotlight mast outside the city gate, the other giving us a vid feed from Lance Corporal Ron Kukowicz’s M-440 accelerator rifle.
Kookie had slipped out of the OP encampment and stealthily made his way back to the edge of the forest overlooking the plain beneath the Salvationist city. The camera mounted on his MAR was zoomed in on several Qesh warriors; they appeared to be making their way toward the gate.
“Try for that one,” I said, indicating one of the Qesh warriors in front of the others with a red dot. A crosshair reticle appeared against the Jacker’s side.
“Range one-one-four-five meters,” Kukowicz said over the squad channel. “Wind, variable at two-eight-five degrees, at my back with a slight drift to the right, between thirty and fifty kph, gusts to eighty-five. Selecting for twelve thousand Gs of acceleration.”
I watched the data dropping into a column on the right side of the display. The paintball-bullet could steer itself to a certain extent, but needed input on windspeed, acceleration, and direction.
“You’re cleared for the shot,” Hancock told him.
“Roger. On the way.”
I’d programmed a “paintball,” a term that once referred to a marker used in target practice and a non-lethal combat sport but that now referred to a useful means of inserting nano cameras into hostile territory. The round consisted of a tiny slug of programmed ’bots packed into a steel jacket so that it could be gripped by the magnetic field of a gauss accelerator weapon and launched at extremely high velocity. Boosted at 12,000 gravities down the one-meter-long barrel of Kukowicz’s accelerator weapon, the round would exit with a muzzle velocity of 490 meters per second, giving it a flight time of 2.337 seconds. The projectile was designed to hold an aerodynamic form briefly, and to use lift and steering to actively compensate both for wind and for the better than 43-meter drop between the time it left the muzzle and the instant it struck the target two and a third seconds later in this gravity. Just before impact, it would shed the steel jacket and the round’s inner packing firing it forward, in order to kill its speed an instant before it struck the target, with as small a projectile as possible.
What actually struck home massed less than a gram. The Jacker probably didn’t even feel the impact or, if it did, it would assume that its armor had been hit by a bit of windblown debris. From Kookie’s vantage point back at the edge of the woods, it didn’t look as though the Qesh we’d targeted had noticed anything.
Good.
There was a nervous silence for several seconds, as we waited to acquire the probe’s transmission. A lot could go wrong with a mag-inducted round; a miss was possible despite the high-tech gimmickry, and too hard of an impact could damage the microbots to uselessness.
But within a few seconds, a new image came up on the monitor, transmitted from the newly grown nano camera now riding on the Jacker’s side just above its right middle leg.
“Good picture,” Leighton said.
“And a very nice shot, Kook,” I added. “Bang on.”
“Thanks. RTB.”
Returning to base. “Come on in,” Hancock told him.
I watched the show on the main monitor. After a few flashes and pixilation blizzards, the image from our paintball grew sharp and clear, rocking from side to side with the pace of the Qesh warrior it was riding on. This transmission, unlike the mass generic broadcasts of the gnatbots, was in full color, and included a sound feed as well.
We heard something like rumbling drums—an exchange of speech among several of the Qesh. Ahead, past the armored being’s front shoulder, I could see a white door dilating open, leading into the side of the city cliff.
A number of Qesh filed into the airlock; it was crowded inside, with at least twenty of them packed in flank to flank as the outer door irised shut, the local air pressure bled off to Earth-normal, blower-filters pulled out the last of any toxic gasses, and an inner door opened up.
We’d been wondering if this was a Qesh assault team, moving into the city to seize more hostages or to otherwise punish the locals for the attack of a few hours before.
We were quite unprepared for what we actually saw and heard.
Chapter Sixteen
The Qesh troopers entered a large, well-lit chamber beyond the airlock door, a chamber large enough to have served as a concourse for some thousands of people. I’m not sure what I expected the interior of the city of Salvation to look like. I did know that, whatever the Salvationists might think about nanotechnology in general, the city itself—the buildings and the infrastructure, including air purifiers, life support, power generators, and everything else that went into making a city live—would have been created through applied nanotechnic engineering.
When the Salvation of Man colony had been put down on Bloodstar’s World in 2181, the engineering department of the Commonwealth Colony Ship Outward Venture would have employed large-scale nanotech to tunnel out vast caverns going deep into the rock, and to have used native materials to create the life-support infrastructure, everything from power generators to furnishings in the living quarters. An entire city grown from native rock, using the techniques we’d pioneered back when the summers had stopped coming and the glaciers of the New Ice Age had begun their southward march. The hall we were looking at now had the look of nanarchitecture, with highly polished stone walls and a mirror-bright reflective floor of a deep, lustrous, semitransparent green stone. One far wall was dominated by an immense floor-to-ceiling portrait of a bearded man in black robes, though I couldn’t tell whether it was supposed to be Jesus or some other, more modern, religious leader or guru. Oddly out of place, something like a shallow swimming pool occupied the center of the room.
Waiting for the newly arriving Qesh were a number of other Qesh, including the one we’d seen earlier with the richly engraved ceremonial armor. With them were perhaps a hundred humans, those in the forefront wearing ornate red robes with rich and elegantly detailed silver and gold embroidery. The fanciest robes belonged to a white-bearded man who looked like he was well past two hundred, though again, without anti-aging treatments he might have been only seventy or so.
And that whole thronging crowd appeared to be the best of buddies. The humans, many of them, were sipping from spherical drink containers. The head-honch Jacker held a mug of something steaming with his top arm, and sipped at it from time to time with what might have been a mouth, a puckered, upside-down Y located well down below the upper arm. His helmet was off, his armor open in the front, and he wasn’t armed. Lots of the Qesh behind him had their helmets off as well. It was impossible to read expressions behind those flicking, turreted chameleon eyes, but they didn’t appear to be particularly anxious or on guard.
And neither did the humans.
“What the shit?” Hancock asked. “They’re having a fucking cocktail party in there!”
We heard a drumming sound, as the Qesh carrying our camera-and-microphone combo said something to Head Honch. The richly armored Qesh drummed something back, then turned to the white-bearded human. “My subordinate tells me that my troops have not found the bandits as yet. They will do so, however. Of this I promise you.”
The Jacker’s voice was pitched in a deep and rumbling bass register, but it had a flat affect to it, sounding almost mechanical. He must have been wear
ing some sort of electronic translator.
That was disturbing on several levels. For a Qesh translator to work, they would have to have access to English and, possibly, to other human languages. I strongly doubted that they could come up with the means for a running Qesh-English translation in less than two weeks.
And conquerors rarely troubled to learn the speech of subject peoples. Usually, at least as it had played out countless times on Earth, they made conquered populations learn the masters’ tongue.
What the hell was going on?
“You have my assurance,” the human said, “that the raiders will be rooted out. If they’re in this city, we’ll find them. And when we do, we will hand them over to you.”
“It is important,” the Qesh said, “to present the . . . how do you say . . . the people with an object lesson immediately, to prevent similar banditry in future.”
“Of course, Lord.”
Lord. So this was a conversation between the conqueror and his subject after all.
I made sure everything was being recorded. Several of the Qesh were not wearing armor at all, and this was a good opportunity to glimpse something of their physiology. Their mouths appeared to be slits shaped like an inverted Y located between the uppermost paired legs. More slits—two pairs on either side partially concealed by leathery flaps of carapace—were probably for breathing. I could see them rippling open and shut every few seconds. The rattling and booming speech of the Qesh appeared to be generated by a pair of large tympani on the upper part of the body, and they appeared to add emphasis to their speech both with color changes to the gray, blank area of leathery skin between their four eyes, and by clicking and grinding the tips of their two enormous horn-claws together.
Qesh speech, I decided, must be extraordinarily complex, combining fast-shifting color patterns with the sounds made by two plate-sized drum heads and the screech and clack of rubbing claws. No human could reproduce that blend of voiceless sounds, to say nothing of the colors. Maybe they spoke English with the Salvationists because the humans were simply incapable of reproducing “spoken” Qesh—not without a kettle drum and a few other instruments in an orchestral percussion section.
