by Ian Douglas
“Where the hell are we going, Gunny?” Lewis asked.
“That way,” Hancock replied, pointing. “To the left, down that rill and in among those buildings. That damaged pyramid there is our way in.”
“And how do we know that?” Gregory asked.
“We bugged one of the natives,” Baumgartner said. His use of the word “we” was a little self-important, since he hadn’t even arrived yet when Matthew and his people had left our camp. “Now shut up, all of you. Necessary comm only.”
That made sense. It would have been easy enough to tag one or several of our guests with gnatbots or other microscopic hitchhikers, and track their movements back into the city. Such devices would not have been able to maintain radio or laser contact with our base, of course, but Hancock likely had dispatched a robot relay to follow them. We had several such devices in our arsenal, including the spider-legged RV-90, which is a nanoflage-black sphere about the size of my fist, striding along on slender legs that hold it perhaps thirty centimeters off the ground. The spider would have followed the short-range pulses from the gnatbots, recorded the path by which our guests had entered their city, then skittered back to base, where the entire path could be downloaded and analyzed by our command team.
Of course, no one had bothered to tell the rest of us what we were doing. No matter. We were here now, and it looked like we had a means of getting into the city . . . if we could slip past those patrolling Qesh.
Five of us would make the descent—Hancock, Hutchison, Leighton, and Gregory, with me along as tech support. The rest would stay with our wounded and equipment at the top of a barren ridge overlooking the spaceport.
Using an eroded gully for cover, we edged our way down the hill and into the wreckage bordering the port field, achingly aware of the disk-shape with the bite taken out of it hovering 100 meters overhead. We moved slowly, to avoid tripping any motion sensors they might have up there, focused on the ground below. We knew the Salvationists had made the same trip, however, and they didn’t have nanoflage to cover their movements. Either the Qesh weren’t keeping an especially close lookout for trespassers, or the Salvationists had figured out just how slowly to move to avoid being picked up by their automated scanners.
Possibly, the Qesh simply didn’t care. The Roc might be parked up there simply to intimidate the local population, or to declare their spaceport off-limits. The port didn’t have much in the way of space-capable assets; I could see the wreckage of two orbital craft, possibly there to service the communications satellites that would be vital for a terrain-divided colony like Bloodworld, but nothing larger, and certainly nothing interstellar, of course. Ships capable of star travel are big—bigger than that whole starport—and usually weren’t designed to set down on planetary surfaces. Besides, the Salvationists appeared to be an insular, isolationist bunch, utterly disinterested in contact with anyone else. I wondered what could drive a community to embrace that level of isolation, on a world of storms, temperature extremes, and rumbling volcanoes.
Once among the buildings, we froze in place, as three Qesh walked past, fifty meters away. They were carrying what were obviously weapons. Again, though, their search didn’t appear to be terribly focused or intense. I was becoming more and more concerned about what we’d seen so far—an apparent collaboration between the Qesh invaders and the ruling faction of the human colonists.
The fact that the humans were divided into factions at all was also worrying. Until we knew more about the local politics, we would have to proceed very carefully indeed.
The pyramid-shaped building, a squat, truncated structure about ten meters high, rose from the debris and rubble a few meters ahead, its upper surface blackened by a Qesh energy bolt.
We were halfway to the door when it irised open directly in front of us, and leather-clad humans began filing out. The one in the lead spotted us almost at once.
“Halt!” he called, his old-fashioned laser rifle snapping up to cover us. “Fallen ones! Drop your weapons!”
For a horrible moment, the five of us stood facing ten of them, our weapons trained on one another. Hancock took the initiative.
“Hold your fire, Marines,” he said over our private laser-net channel. “Put your weapons on the ground . . . slowly. Then raise your hands.”
“Hancock!” Baumgartner snapped at us from his vantage point on the ridge behind us. “What the hell are you doing?”
“Getting into the city,” Hancock replied. “Trust me, sir. . . .”
Chapter Seventeen
As we laid our weapons down, the Salvationist soldiers crowded around us, poking at us with the muzzles of their rifles. I actually doubt that those obsolete lasers could have burned through our Mk. 10 combat armor—not unless they were able to hold a steady beam on one spot for several seconds. I glanced up at the Roc overhead, but they didn’t seem to be taking notice of us.
Or had they seen us in our approach down the gully, and dispatched a Salvationist patrol to pick us up?
Too many unknowns. We would have to play this one damned carefully.
“Inside,” the presumed leader of the native patrol barked, gesturing sharply. All of them were thickly swaddled in the local equivalent of environmental gear—breather masks, heavy goggles, and brown and gray leather outerwear and boots. I wondered if the leather was synthetic—did their dislike for industrial chemistry extend to clothing? And if it was real, what kinds of animals did they have, to provide the hides? There might be native animals capable of providing skins that could be tanned by traditional techniques, but more likely they’d brought the fertilized ova of various species from Earth. Somewhere beneath that mountain there must be grazing areas large enough to accommodate herds of gene-tailored neocattle or measts.
One of them nudged Hancock along with the butt of his rifle.
“Easy there, fella,” Hancock said over his external speaker. “We’re not your enemies.”
“You are Fallens,” the leader said, using the word like a name. “We’re willing to suffer hell for you, but we will not listen to your lies! Drop your pistols as well!”
“We’re not Fallens,” I said. “We’re Angels of the Rapture!”
“That remains to be seen. You will be judged by the Council of Elders. They will determine your relevance to sacred scripture!”
Once we were disarmed, they herded us into a fairly large airlock, and I watched one of them operate a control that shut the outer door. I could hear pumps operating somewhere overhead, replacing the outside air, laden with sulfur dioxide and sulfuric acid, with Earth-normal air.
“Heads up,” Hancock said over the laser channel. “After they open the inner door for us . . .”
The inner door began to dilate open.
“Now!”
Five of us, against ten of them. What happened next took almost no time at all.
They outnumbered us, yes, but four of us were Marines extensively trained in hand-to-hand combat. In the centuries since the U.S. Marine Corps has become the principle space-capable combat infantry force for the Commonwealth, Marines have honed their close-quarters combat techniques to an amazing degree—necessary, if they are to conduct VBSS operations—visit, board, search, and seizure—against potentially hostile ships. In the close confines of spacecraft or orbital stations, you often don’t have enough room to employ ranged weapons like lasers, and certainly not high-energy weapons like plasma guns. Close quarters combat generally comes down to hand-to-hand, employing heavily modified jujitsu and tae kwon do to pin and disable opponents, even in zero-G.
FMF Corpsmen learn some of the basic stuff, though we’re not the masters that the Marines are. I brought my elbow up and into the throat of the Salvationist directly behind me, and snatched his rifle as I shoved him into a second man nearby. Fortunately, we weren’t in zero-G; fighting hand-to-hand is real tricky in an environment where every punch, every movement
has an opposite-but-equal reaction that can send you tumbling backward, out of control. My zero-G training had been pretty much limited to just learning how to maneuver through the dark and tangled interior of a disabled ship without becoming hopelessly disoriented, leaving the actual grappling and fighting to the Marines.
And this, of course, was anything but zero-G. At 1.85 Gs, we were reliant on our exoskeletons to keep us moving without falling and breaking something. Our opponents didn’t have that advantage. All of them had been born and raised in this environment, however, and as a result they were heavily muscled.
But they were slow, their movements honed by lifetimes of moving carefully and with deliberation in high gravity, even when their reflexes were quickened by the fact that things fell almost twice as quickly here as on Earth.
With the two Salvationists behind me dancing with each other, I took the laser rifle I’d wrested away from one and slammed the other in the face with the butt, shattering his goggles. The rifle was connected by a flexible metal cable to a backpack worn by the first man; I looped this around his throat and yanked him off his feet. He pounded at me with leather-gloved fists, but I couldn’t even feel the blows through my armor. By the time he hit the deck, hard, perhaps three seconds after Gunny Hancock had given us the word, the fight was over. The deck was covered by writhing, groaning Salvationists. It took another ten seconds for us to cut their lasers from their backpacks, rendering them useless, and making sure they weren’t carrying any other hardware.
“Tie ’em up,” Gunny said. He found a small surveillance camera mounted above the inner lock door up near the overhead, and disabled it with his knife. “Use the cables. We don’t want to be interrupted.”
Several of the bad guys were in bad shape after being manhandled by the Marines. I slapped nanopatches on the worst of them—giving them doses of generic nananodynes that would kill the pain and send them into a twilight happyland for twelve hours or so. They protested, of course, loud and angrily, and I threatened to zap all of them if they didn’t sit still and keep quiet; I could not understand their issues with medical nano.
We took their breath masks so they couldn’t warn anyone else, and left them tied hand and foot inside the airlock. Beyond the inner hatch, a hallway slanted down into darkness; evidently, this outbuilding wasn’t much used and the passageway was not lit. However, bundles of piping along the overhead showed the path of some major electrical connections. Following these down the corridor led us within a few tens of meters to a junction box—and the telltale jacks for a computer connection. They weren’t the same size as the ones we use, but they showed us we were in the right spot.
“Major bingo,” Leighton said.
“Yeah?” Hutchison shot back. “Who’s he?”
“Okay, Doc,” Hancock said. “It’s all yours.”
“Right.” I stepped up to the input jacks, found a panel release, and opened it. Inside were circuit panels and cables . . . and a configuration totally unlike what we used on Earth.
“Non-standard config,” I said. “Jesus, it looks like they’ve been patching it with spit and duct tape.”
“Let me see, Doc,” Leighton said. She was a whiz with all things electrical, one reason she’d been volunteered for this mission. She pulled a multitool from a pouch and probed at the wiring for a moment before pulling a red and a blue free. “These two,” she said. “I think they feed into a fiber-optic data cable through that converter.”
“Let’s see if you’re right.” I’d opened up a panel on the left forearm of my armor and pulled a pair of wires free. This was definitely the old-tech way of handling things, but sometimes old tech is simple tech, and less prone to failure than the shiny and the new.
I hardwired the connection, then opened the link for the AI mod.
I’d downloaded it from the platoon AI back at the OP—a stripped-down version made by copying the original and trimming off all of the unneeded extras—like code for keeping track of supplies and logistics, or personnel health records, or tactical decision making. What was left was a low-functioning AI with some newly written code piggybacked into the body, code designed to enter a strange computer network, explore it, and find certain very specific data files.
Since the beginning of the information age, we’ve had software constructs like this. They’ve been called agents, netbots, or simply computer viruses, and over the centuries they’ve become extremely sophisticated—as good as Marines at infiltrating hostile and well-defended places.
Words appeared on my in-head: INITIATING PROGRAM. MAPPING O/S.
Seconds passed. The Marines spread out around me, kneeling on the deck, watching both directions for the approach of hostiles. “Hurry it the fuck up, e-Car!”
“The agent is inside, Gunny. I can’t do anything to hurry it.”
O/S IDENTIFIED. INCORPORATING O/S SHELL.
“Okay, I said. “It’s figured out the colony’s operating system. It looks like a variant of Core 1230.”
“Shit, that’s ancient. Will it support the AI?”
MAPPING TARGET SYSTEM.
“It ought to. We had AIs running on computer nets long before the Neoessies packed up and moved out here.”
SEARCHING TARGET SYSTEM.
More seconds passed, seconds dragging into minutes. What was happening inside the Salvationist network was very much like a virus scan on a non-AI system. As it identified each file, it explored it, looking for certain key strings of characters. Information about Earth and the location of Sol might be encrypted, but more likely it was resident within the computer’s memory banks in the same format and with the same identifiers as when the Neoessies arrived on Bloodworld sixty-four years ago.
Of course, it was unlikely that the agent would find something with a nice, neat name like “Navigation data: Sol.” It would keep poking around, though, looking for any of a number of possible matches. Whatever was stored in there might be something as simple as a string of coordinates. Such a string wouldn’t do the Qesh a bit of good, however—not without some sort of nav table or algorithm that would relate our standard coordinate system, with Sol at 0, 0, 0. Bloodworld’s coordinates on our computers, for instance, were RA 15h 19m 26s; Dec -07º 43’ 20”; D = 20.3 ly, which identified a precise spot in Earth’s night sky, plus the distance of just over twenty light years. The coordinates would be meaningless to the Qesh, unless they could convert it to whatever system of celestial navigation they used.
NAVIGATIONAL FILES IDENTIFIED.
SEARCHING NAVIGATIONAL FILES.
HISTORICAL FILES IDENTIFIED.
SEARCHING HISTORICAL FILES.
The process actually was proceeding fairly quickly, faster than I’d expected. On Earth and the other worlds of the Commonwealth, nearly all computers—some hundreds of thousands to millions of them—are linked together by system nets, with thousands of local systems overlapping and interconnected to create what amounts to an electronic nervous system for an entire world. This means the network is everywhere, and that every citizen can be connected to the local net through the hardware grown inside his own brain, with in-head CDF displays and internal-voice links with anyone else on the web with whom he wishes to converse.
On Bloodworld, they seemed to have pursued a different way of doing things. So far as my agent had been able to determine, there was only one computer in Salvation, with connections to a number of dumb terminals. One big computer, then, rather than millions of separate ones tied in together.
TARGET STRNGS FOUND IN SALVATION LOCAL NETWORK:
NAVSTELLEXE9386
NAVSTELRECORD284279.
NAVSTELRECORD284534.
NO FURTHER LOCAL SYSTEM ENTRIES FOUND.
Like the lady said, Major bingo!
I pulled up an abstract of the file listings. The first was the algorithm for creating a representation of three-dimensional space, listing all of t
he stars visited by humans when they colonized Bloodworld sixty-four years ago. The next gave the position of Sol in Bloodworld’s night sky, using Bloodstar as the central coordinate, 0, 0, 0. The third was the position of Earth on an absolute map, showing all of local interstellar space out to about fifty light years from Sol. Using those three together would make it easy for the Qesh to find Humankind’s homeworld.
“Hurry it up, Doc!” Hancock said. “Someone’s coming!”
“We’re nearly there. . . .”
I sent another search command through, looking for the last time those files had been called up, or the program executed. I was enormously relieved when I saw the answer come up: 1217:10, 15 November, 2181. That appeared to be the date when Salvation’s computer went on-line, and they hadn’t bothered with the information since.
It made sense. The Salvatonists weren’t interested in staying in touch with Earth, or even finding it again. Mostly what it meant, though, was that the Qesh hadn’t found it . . . yet.
“Got it,” I told the others. “Permission to delete.”
“Do it,” Hancock told me.
I sent the command to delete all three files.
“Hostiles!” Leighton called.
“Engage at will!” Hancock replied.
I heard the shriek and crack of Leighton’s M4-A2 firing in the close confines of the passageway. Hancock was beside her, firing his laser.
As the system did so, my agent was identifying portals and connections to other computer systems.
CONNECTION GATE IDENTIFIED: MARTYRDOM.
CONNECTION GATE IDENTIFIED: WIDE THE GATE.
CONNECTION GATE IDENTIFIED: RESURRECTION.
CONNECTION GATE IDENTIFIED: SCRIPTURE’S TRUTH.
Other cities on Bloodworld. On Earth, computers were tied together through orbital relays up at Geosynch. Here, they seemed to be tied together by landlines—probably fiber-optical cables. Odd. I would have thought that satellite relays would be less prone to disruption by, for instance, massive seismic quakes or lava flows or tidal waves, all of which this crazy planet had in abundance. As I thought about it further, though, I realized that satellites might not be that secure either, not with periodic gales of charged particles blasting in from that too-close red dwarf sun.
