by Isaac Hooke
Beside him, Bender took Juggernaut, and Shaw took Nemesis.
When Rade entered the cockpit, the hatch sealed, surrounding him in darkness. The internal actuators activated, wrapping him in a metal cocoon and hoisting him into the center of the cockpit. The video feed from the external camera filled his vision, and when he lifted his arm, the actuator translated the action to the Hoplite, which mirrored his movement.
“Welcome aboard, Rade,” Electron said. “It’s good to work with you once again.”
“Thanks, El,” Rade said. “It’s good to be working with you, too. Run a systems diagnostic and display the prelaunch checklist.”
The diagnostic returned one hundred percent, and the checkmarks beside each item in the prelaunch list indicated that the mech was ready to drop.
“Perfect,” Rade told the local AI. “If you don’t mind, I’d like to confirm a couple of those items for myself.”
“Of course,” Electron said. “You’re the boss.”
Rade lifted his left leg, then his right, walking in place. There wasn’t much else he could do in the tight confines with those other mechs packed in beside him.
“Still worried about actuator sensitivity?” Electron asked.
“You caught me,” Rade said.
“It should be within expected operational parameters,” Electron replied.
Rade tried a few more tentative stomps with each foot.
“Seems fine,” Rade agreed.
When Tahoe had retrieved the unit after the last mission, the left leg had proved far more sensitive than the right. Tahoe had to take hobbling steps inside the cockpit just to walk normally. After returning to the ship, a Centurion running a tech program had looked at all the mechs, making fixes as necessary. The repair charts showed that everything was in working order, and the test drives had gone well. Still, Rade always liked to double-check.
Judging from the similar, tentative movements of the mechs around him, he wasn’t the only one. His team members were smart people.
He examined the stats on the cobra weapon systems, one per arm. The lasers were fully operational. The grenade launchers underneath each laser were loaded with frags, flashbangs, electromagnetics, and smokes. He confirmed that the Trench Coat anti-missile countermeasures were fully stocked. He extended and retracted the anti-laser ballistic shield in his left arm.
When he was satisfied, Rade said: “Everyone ready?”
He was answered by a chorus of ayes.
three
Rade gave the order to drop. The hangar bays opened and the Hoplites stepped out one by one.
There was no atmosphere on the planet, so the team hadn’t packed the aeroshell heat shields.
Below, the surface was a dark mass. The light from the suns didn’t penetrate to this side. But because of the local-beam LIDAR his mech emitted, he was able to discern an outline of the distant topography, which overlaid his vision.
As he neared the surface, Rade fired the aerospike thrusters in his feet. He didn’t bother to deploy the air brakes of course, which would be useless without an atmosphere.
He landed on a flat plain of methane and nitrogen snow between two towering penitentes, whose outlines were visible only because of the LIDAR. The black blobs composing the blade-like spires blotted out the stars to the north and south.
The other five mechs landed nearby, their positions showing up on the overhead map. Three kilometers to the east the six booster rockets had landed; those would be used to launch the mechs into orbit.
The Dragonfly containing the robots, HS3 scouts, and the rest of the crew landed two kilometers to the west.
“Headlamps, on,” Rade said. “Rendezvous with me, Argonauts.”
There was no point leaving the headlamps turned off. If any enemy units were tracking the party out there, the mechs would be readily visible, thanks to the thermal radiation the battle suits readily emitted in the void: these particular Hoplite models didn’t employ thermal-smearing camouflage, which would have helped offset the heat signatures.
Bright lights appeared in the darkness as the Hoplites and ground troops activated their headlamps. The shuttle proved brightest of all, with the red and green lights on each of its four wings.
Rade turned on his own headlamp and swung the illumination in a full circle; it felt like he stood atop a lighthouse in a frozen sea. The white snow surrounded him on all sides; small particles floated in the cone of light, oddly reminding him of dust.
“Looks a bit dreary, doesn’t it?” Rade said.
“It does, boss,” Electron replied.
“We’ve been in worse,” Tahoe said.
“But not by much,” Rade told his friend.
“It does rank near the bottom of the drear scale,” Tahoe said.
“El, what are those particles I’m seeing floating in the light beams? Is that dust of some kind?”
“Those are particles of snow thrown up by your original impact that haven’t settled yet,” Electron replied. “There is less gravity on this planet. Particulates can take quite some time to descend.”
“And I suspect this particular mix of methane and nitrogen behaves differently than the snow we’re used to,” Tahoe said.
Rade waited for the rest of the team to gather. The Hoplites arrived first, followed by the rifle-toting ground troops and combat robots. Of them, only Surus carried the specially-designed electrolaser that would allow her to stun their prey. Said electrolaser looked indistinguishable from an ordinary rifle, and was equipped with sound dampening tech specifically developed by Surus to reduce the sonic profile the weapon produced to a muted crackling.
“Harlequin, load up in Bender’s passenger seat. Surus, you’re with Shaw. Fret, take TJ’s seat. Manic, with me. Units A and B, load up with TJ and Lui respectively. Other units, remain on foot. C and D, continue to port the Phant trap.”
Rade knelt so that Manic could more easily load into the passenger seat, located in the upper back region above the jumpjets of Rade’s Hoplite; once Manic had strapped in, Rade stood the Hoplite to full height. When the other ex-MOTHs, Artificials and combat robots had boarded the passenger seats of their designated mechs, Rade spoke again.
“I’m highlighting the cave entrance on the overhead map as Waypoint One,” Rade said.
A flashing green dot appeared on the map two kilometers away to the west, at the base of a rather large penitente.
“Bender, I want the HS3 scouts on point fifty meters ahead,” Rade said. “The rest of you, traveling overwatch.”
Tahoe arranged the two fire teams, and the first three mechs proceeded forward in a zigzag formation, followed by the next three thirty meters behind.
The gravity was about one twelfth that of Earth, and the heavy mechs easily advanced along the surface, taking long, bounding steps. They left deep footprints in the methane and nitrogen snow. The two Centurions porting the glass container, or “Phant trap” as everyone called it, kept up, though they had to bound at twice the speed to compensate for their far shorter legs.
The airborne HS3s arrived at the cave opening in about twenty minutes.
The three Hoplites of the lead fire team reached them shortly thereafter.
Rade called a halt to his fire team, and Shaw and Manic assumed defensive positions in the snow beside him. The porters took cover behind them.
Rade switched to the POV of one of the HS3s. Its headlight illuminated a cave entrance that was easily tall enough to fit a Hoplite, and wide enough to fit two Hoplites abreast at the same time. The tunnel inside was circular, the walls smooth, as if carved by a giant drill or laser of some kind. Definitely not natural.
“Okay, send in the HS3s,” Rade said.
The three HS3 scouts swerved inside. The cave retained its same dimensions as the drones advanced.
According to Surus, it was very difficult for a Phant to assume control of aerial drones like HS3s because of their flying nature. The aliens had to touch the AI cores, usually seeping in from the gr
ound into the feet assemblies and making their way up to the torso to where the core resided. For a robot that didn’t touch the ground, like an HS3, a Phant essentially had to drip down from the ceiling onto the passing device, which was a difficult action to time. So Rade wasn’t overly worried about the Phant possessing any of the HS3s.
The signal began to distort and pixelate.
“The interference is fairly bad in there,” Bender said. “We might have to send in some of the Centurions to boost the range.”
“Units A and B,” Rade said. “Get down from the passenger seats and enter that cave. Spread out as necessary to boost the signal.”
On the overhead map, he watched the two robots join the three HS3s. The units halted in turn as the need to place repeaters arose, until only a lone HS3 was continuing on point. So far, the cave hadn’t yet branched in any direction, and it continued in a straight line that trended ever downward.
Finally Bender said: “That’s as far as it can go before losing signal. What do you want to do?”
Rade considered sending the HS3 forward to scout on its own, with instructions to return if it spotted any signs of Phant activity, but thought it best to simply stay within signal range.
“TJ, Lui, Bender, go inside and string out,” Rade said. “Act as repeaters. Boost the range. Everyone else, assume a defensive position at the cave entrance.”
Rade and the other members of fire team two bounded toward the entrance as TJ, Lui and Bender took their mechs inside. Once there, Rade assumed a defensive stance at the opening, keeping his cobra pointed toward the ice plain behind him, while Shaw did the same. Tahoe meanwhile aimed his cobra into the tunnel. The jumpsuited individuals in the passenger seats followed the aim of their respective rides. Rade kept his video feed from the scout on point active, though he had reduced it to a quarter of his vision and repositioned it in the upper right of his HUD.
“Surus, do you sense our prey?” Rade said.
“No,” Surus said. “If the Phant was here, it’s long gone.”
The robot line moved forward when TJ, Lui and Bender arrived. Bender was the first to halt, allowing Lui and TJ to continue forward. Before those two mechs had to separate to further boost the signal, the lead HS3 arrived at a chamber.
Rade watched from the scout’s POV as the tunnel gave way to a small, circular ovoid carved into the ice. The chamber was empty, save for a wide disk situated in the middle of the floor. The metal surface was engraved with Fibonacci spirals.
“I was afraid of this,” Surus said, obviously viewing the same feed.
“What is it?” Rade asked. Though he had a very good idea already. That disk looked similar to something he had seen once before, a long time ago.
“An Acceptor,” Surus said. “The teleportation device used by Phants.”
“How do these work again?” Lui said. “They’re restricted to teleportation to the same system right?”
“No,” Surus said. “The range is galaxy-wide. The technology is similar in concept to the Gate and Slipstream pairs you humans use to transport between systems, except that Acceptors form micro-Slipstreams in realtime between the source and destination disks.”
“How did it get here?” Fret said.
“Our prey placed it here, of course,” Surus said.
“Why here?” Rade said. “Why would the Phant wait all this time to deploy it?”
“The physics of the involved micro-Slipstreams are very specific,” Surus said. “And follow narrow rules. A big one: when drawing a straight line on the galactic map from the source system to the destination system, there can be no black holes within a radius of two thousand lightyears of the target system. If the target system happened to be on the far side of the galaxy, directly opposite human space, it could be occluded by the massive black hole at the center of our galaxy. By coming to this border system, our prey was able to circumvent that black hole, and find a clear path from here to the destination system.”
“Can you tell us where it leads?” Rade asked.
“Not with any certainty, no,” Surus said. “My best guess: a world destroyed by the Phants.”
“What about one of the motherships?” Tahoe said.
“It’s not possible,” Surus said. “The Phant would not know the link codes to any other motherships. While the hives trust one another to some extent, their trust does not extend that far. It would be far too easy for one hive to invade another, otherwise. And since the mothership our prey came from was destroyed, I conclude that the destination cannot be a vessel.”
“So a conquered world...” Rade said.
“Yes,” Surus continued. “The Phant would know the codes to target Acceptors placed on the worlds its hive had conquered in the past.”
“What exactly could we expect on a conquered world?” Lui said. “A bunch of Phants?”
“Very likely it will be completely devoid of Phant life,” Surus said. “I would expect some remnants of the local population, however. Traditionally, before the Phants destroy a world, they usually spare a small portion of the indigenous inhabitants, usually around one percent, to be used as breeding matter for future geronium production on the destroyed world, for entertainment, or to supplement the ranks of those who fight for and defend the hive. But once the Phants move on, that world is typically forgotten. Individual Phants may occasionally teleport back to check on the local population, but there is no real need.”
“So when our prey reaches this destroyed world,” Lui said. “Any Acceptors he finds won’t lead to other motherships?”
“That’s correct,” Surus said. “Each hive is given control over one conquered world. If our prey does find an Acceptor, it will only point to another destroyed world.”
“So why don’t we just destroy the Acceptor on this side, and trap the Phant on the other side?”
“Normally I would agree,” Surus said. “In fact, while helping the Sino-Koreans trap the surviving Phants from Tau Ceti, I encountered many Acceptors, and destroyed them. However, my fear is that I didn’t get them all. Our prey may have leaped to the conquered world to retrieve some artifact, with no intention of ever returning to this Acceptor, but to another in Tau Ceti that I missed. Using the same target Acceptor waiting on the other side of this one.”
“Why go through all that trouble?” Rade said. “Why not use the Tau Ceti Acceptor to travel to the conquered world and retrieve the artifact directly?”
“I don’t know,” Surus said. “It could be that my hunter killer units forced the Phant to flee before then. Either way, I won’t take the chance. We must travel through, capture, and interrogate our prey to discover the truth. Then we will return, and destroy this Acceptor. Let us enter, so I may determine whether the link remains intact. Because if not, this entire discussion is moot.”
Rade instructed two robots to remain behind to protect the cave entrance.
“You’ll stay here for the duration of the mission,” Rade told the Centurions. “Protect this tunnel until we return. I want you to rig charges near the opening, and collapse the tunnel if you’re attacked with overwhelming force. It’ll take us some time to dig out when we return, but it’s better than finding ourselves trapped on the opposite side of the galaxy without an Acceptor to return to at all.”
“If you do use charges, make sure that they are restricted to the opening,” Surus told the robot. “If debris of any kind falls onto the Acceptor, it will be blocked, and we cannot use it to return.”
“Understood,” Unit F said.
The group proceeded into the tunnel.
The mechs and combat robots gathered near the opening to the ovoid chamber, standing in single file to allow Shaw’s Hoplite, and her passenger Surus, to walk past and proceed inside.
Shaw halted Nemesis next to the disk. It was big enough for only a single Hoplite to stand on.
“The link is intact,” Surus announced a moment later. “Come inside one at a time and step onto the teleporter. I will activate it by modul
ating the micro-Slipstream. I must go last, of course, since none of you have the ability to operate the device.”
“Maybe you should go first,” Rade said. “And come back once you confirm it’s safe on the other side.”
“All right,” Surus said. “Shaw, if you don’t mind?”
For a moment Rade was about to tell Shaw to stop in her tracks; he had actually intended that Surus dismount and go alone. But he clamped his mouth shut. Shaw would never let him live it down if he stopped her now in front of all his men. He saw the wisdom in providing a Hoplite as escort, of course, but he just wished it didn’t have to be Shaw’s Hoplite.
Shaw seemed to sense his concern, because she moved the mech quickly, as if worried Rade would change his mind. In a moment she was on the disk.
Rade raised his hand then, indeed having had a change of heart and wanting to transfer Surus to another Hoplite, but then Nemesis vanished.
Rade stared at the empty disk. Long moments passed. He shifted from foot to foot, willing her to return.
Ten seconds passed.
Twenty.
Nothing appeared on the disk. Rade stared at it nervously.
What the hell is taking so long?
Thirty seconds.
Forty.
“Where the hell is she?” Fret said. Even the others were getting worried.
Fifty seconds.
Sixty.
“This isn’t good,” Bender said.
“Damn it,” Rade said. He flexed his fingers into a fist, but somehow resisted the urge to punch the ice wall beside him.
Another tense minute passed, and finally Nemesis reappeared. Surus was strapped into the passenger seat, and the status indicator showed that Shaw was in the cockpit. Her vitals were completely green, and the mech appeared unharmed.
“You were supposed to come straight back,” Rade said.
“We decided to clear the area while we were there,” Shaw said.
Rade growled softly to himself.
Shaw walked Nemesis off the Acceptor.
“So is our prey there, or not?” Rade asked.
“I believe so,” Surus said. “Shaw and I emerged from a cave mouth near the top of a mountain and observed a vast plain before us. I detected a very faint Phant presence on the far side of that plain.”
