by J. N. Chaney
“What happened?”
“It didn’t blow, that’s what happened.”
“No reaction?”
“None. Download this and see for yourself.”
He handed Tomiko the Gnat.
“Play the feed,” he told his AI as Tomiko jacked the Gnat in.
Immediately, Rev was the drone. Without a screen, the feed was being fed directly into his occipital lobe. He was flying through the laurel, the Centaur looming ahead, most of it hidden by the downed tree. Reaching the creek bed, he flew up, his “sight” laser-focused on the Centaur.
It was immediately evident from this vantage that the riever had been hard-used. It was half-sunk into the creek bed, mud and dirt shoved aside, evidence of a crash landing. The far side looked like it had been clawed by a giant bear, the armor whole but gouged and warped. A two or three-centimeter crack ran from somewhere under where the Centaur was buried and up to the base of the pedestal. The entire chassis was out of kilter, and at least one of the legs on this side had been torn off.
As he flew around it, he spotted another section where the armor had been dented in, the outer surface broken open. He couldn’t see anything inside the hole. Maybe his AI could play with that later to try and discern something.
And then he was back above it. Three shots, three flashes as the dart heads exploded. As expected, the little darts had no effect, but he was still surprised that the Centaur didn’t move.
“You don’t have any readings that might mean that thing is operational?”
“Then why didn’t it self-destruct?”
Did it just sound embarrassed?
Rev shook the thought off. He was still riding high on adrenaline.
“It’s fucked up, for sure. But not that bad. But if it’s dead, why didn’t it blow?” Tomiko asked.
“I just asked my AI that. Doesn’t know.”
“Neither does Pikachu. So, now what?”
“I set the Gnat for broadcast.”
“Well, I guess this will be out of our hands soon enough. How long, you think?”
“I set it for Priority Five.”
“Priority fucking Five? Why the hell . . . oh, you wanted some time to figure it out.”
And then he realized she was right. He had wanted time. If this was in fact a dead Centaur, and if it didn’t blow, well, that was earth-shattering, something that the Union would want to control, and over on their right flank somewhere were Ting-a-ling and the other Frisians. Lots more were back at the complex.
They’d been righteous comrades-in-arms, shedding blood with the Marines, but they were still Frisians. They were not children of Perseus.
“So, with Priority Five, you think we’ve got five hours? Ten?”
“Depends, I guess,” Rev said. “Who knows when they’ll get eyes on it. It sure as hell won’t take long once it crosses some sailor’s station.”
“We’ve got to go find the lieutenant and let him get it up the chain of command.”
“Roger that. Both of us or just one?”
“One. You. But first, I want to check it out in person, not through a Gnat,” Rev said.
“We know what it is. It’s a damn tin-ass.”
“Yeah, but I want to see, you know, so you can give the lieutenant a better idea of what we have.”
“Bullshit. You just want to see it before the freaking OD comes to whisk it away.”
Which was true. At the moment, there were only two humans in the galaxy who knew about the Centaur. Soon enough, everything would be out of his hands.
“It’s OK, Rev. I want to see it, too.”
He knew he should send her on her way. Even at Priority Five, the word would get out, so their time was limited. But she was his battle buddy, a real one, not an AI, and that meant something.
“Let’s go.”
The two hopped out of the creek bed and pushed their way forward until they were standing by the shattered tree, looking at the Centaur. It looked smaller, somehow, and not just because it was a riever, unlike the paladin Rev had dropped. It looked broken, almost sad.
Its bulk had acted as a dam, and the slight trickle had backed up to a sizable little puddle before the flow found a way around it.
“It looks like it crash-landed from flight-mode,” Tomiko said, waving a hand at the broken trees.
“So, it should have been spotted. Someone should have known there was something in the area.”
“It could have been cloaked, or maybe the word is still messed up and we just haven’t heard about it yet. I don’t know,” Tomiko said.
“Doesn’t matter, I guess. It’s here now.”
They slowly circled the Centaur, stepping over shattered branches, their nerves on edge. But the riever was motionless. More than that, it felt dead, if that was possible.
The gash in the chassis was a magnet, and they stopped at it to touch the edge of the broken armor. It was almost silky, which surprised Rev, the tactile equivalent of a matte to glossy book cover.
A smell seemed to be coming out of the opening. Not quite rot, but something that made Rev recoil just a bit.
“Can you see anything?” Tomiko asked, leaning over the hole.
It was pitch black after the first fifteen centimeters, as if it was sucking all the light. Rev started to pull his flash before he remembered it had been fried along with their other gear. But that wasn’t the only option.
He pulled a chem light out of his ankle pocket, the same basic piece of gear used by soldiers for a couple thousand years. He held it up to Tomiko, who smiled and nodded. If he dropped it in there, it was going to be obvious what they’d done, and the OD and military brass might have their asses.
Screw them.
He snapped the chem light and dropped it into the hole. They both leaned over to watch it bounce a few times, reach the bottom, and—
Both of them jerked back in shock and fell off the Centaur, into the water.
“Did you fucking see that?” Tomiko shouted. “It’s a—”
“I know what it is!”
“Should we look again?”
Rev pulled out his MF-30 handgun, clutched it so tight that his fingers were turning white, and climbed back on the Centaur, Tomiko by his side. Together, they edged over the gash until they could see into the Centaur.
Or the Centaur mech, as it were.
The chem light was lying in the lap—maybe—of a small, wizened . . . thing. It didn’t look human, exactly, but there were some basic similarities. It was small, maybe a meter in length, although Rev couldn’t see the legs, if it had them. It had two bony arms, fragile-looking, that bifurcated at the ends into three, weird brushes, for lack of a better term, each with what had to be its version of fingers. One of the triple hands was around what would be the throat on a human. The head looked more like that of a weird fish. If there were eyes on the thing, Rev couldn’t see them.
What grabbed his attention were three, widely-spaced gashes, each one gaped open. All Rev could think of was of a drowning human gasping for air.
And then there was that smell. If anything, that was proof enough to him that the thing was dead and not just asleep.
“It looks . . . sickly,” Tomiko said in awe. “Do you think it’s infected or something?”
The commonly held belief was that if the Centaurs were subject to viruses or bacteria, they would be those or the equivalents from their DNA evolution, not Earth’s. But that was just a theory. The thing in there was not human by a long shot, but it was eerily similar. Maybe it was sick, and now he and Tomiko were infected.
Or maybe it was that parallel evolution they were briefed on back at boot camp. They breathed oxygen, after all, just like humans did.
“I don’t know. Give me back my Gnat.”
/> She handed it back, her attention still on the Centaur. Rev jacked it in.
“Have it go into the hole and record that thing.”
“Priority Five.”
They stood there, mesmerized by the creature while his Gnat recorded it for posterity.
Finally, Rev said, “You’d better go. We need to turn this thing over.”
Tomiko looked down at it for a long moment, then, with a sigh, stepped back.
“I think it looks sick. Maybe that’s why it didn’t blow,” she said, hopping off the Centaur.
“Wait a minute,” Rev said, stopping her.
He gave his AI another set of instructions that were loaded into the Gnat.
“Come here,” he told Tomiko, standing in front of the Centaur.
“You’d better erase that,” she said, standing beside him.
“Done and done. As soon as I download it. Now smile.”
Lance Corporals Reverent Pelletier and Tomiko Reiser then took humanity’s first selfie with a Centaur.
39
Three hours later, Rev, Tomiko, and the lieutenant stood off to the side as a team of hazmat-clad sailors maneuvered the Centaur into the waiting shuttle. Two-and-a-half hours of that time had been in waiting for the team to make it to the scene. In the last thirty minutes, in a display of professional efficiency, a team of Seabees had cleared a landing zone, allowing the shuttle and more sailors, supervised by another hazmat-clad figure without rank insignia, to land. The Seabees spread out in a security perimeter, with more toward the west, where the Frisians were still patrolling.
The command had told the lieutenant to limit the number of Marines at the site, so it was only the three of them there when the Seabees dropped in. A lieutenant ordered them to step out of the way, but other than that, they were ignored, even after the shuttle arrived.
And that kind of pissed Rev off. They were the ones who had found the Centaur, after all.
After a perfunctory inspection, the Centaur had been foamed, then wrapped. If Rev didn’t know that it was a Centaur, he would never guess what was inside the package. Now, with a mobile lift-crane, they were edging it into the shuttle.
“Who’s the boss, do you think?” Rev asked. “The OD?”
“Safe bet,” Lieutenant Omestori said.
With an OD in charge, that was a pretty good indication that the military was going to be shouldered aside. Internecine politics would make sure of that. But for now, the OD needed the Navy to get the Centaur to wherever it had to be.
“I still can’t believe this,” the lieutenant said. “A damned riever. First, you bag a paladin, and now you capture a riever.”
“Didn’t capture anything, sir. It was dead when we got here.”
“Yeah, but it was you. I’m going to call you the Centaur Whisperer. You too, Reiser,” he hastily added.
“Both of you, you’re going to get noticed. You got screwed last time, Pelletier, but this is even bigger, and I’m going to make sure you get something.”
Rev didn’t say anything. Like the lieutenant said, he’d been burned once before, and given the secrecy in what was transpiring, he thought that this might get buried.
At a minimum.
It wasn’t that he didn’t trust the government, but there were always rumors that the OD sometimes acted on their own, and shutting off the potential for leaks—for the good of the Union, of course—wasn’t beyond the realms of imagination.
“Kinda sucks for the Frisians,” Tomiko said. “I mean, they’ve been good shits, bleeding alongside us, and now we’re cutting them off.”
“Don’t even think about that,” the lieutenant said. “You did good, Pelletier, putting the report on a delay. If the brass wants to share that with our allies, that’s up to them, not us.”
The Centaur edged up the ramp, the mobile crane contracting to fit through the hatch. With all that foam and wrapping, the riever was twice the size it had been. But it fit easily enough and disappeared into the cargo hold.
“Well, I guess that’s that. I’m going to need you two to make a report on everything that happened,” the lieutenant told them.
Only it wasn’t over. The OD agent finally deigned to notice them and came striding over.
“Which one of you was first at the scene,” he asked, his voice crisp, words clipped.
“I was . . . uh, sir.”
Rev wasn’t sure how to address the man, but using sir was usually a safe choice.
The man brought out a recorder and said, “I’m going to have to download your feed.”
Supposedly, the government’s access was limited, but he wasn’t sure he could trust that. Now, he regretted taking the selfie. What if they found out about that? Was his ass going to be in a sling?
The download was quick, and the agent took a quick look at the readout. “It shows me that you deployed a Gnat?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Give it to me.”
At least his AI had confirmed that the selfie had been erased. He handed it over.
Next was Tomiko. She wasn’t asked to give up her Gnat.
“Alright, now that we’ve got that done, I need the three of you to board.”
“Why?” the lieutenant asked, his face twisted in concern. “I’ve got my company here.”
“Someone will take over, but you three need to come with me for a full debrief.”
“Can’t you just do it here?” the lieutenant asked.
“I won’t be doing any debrief, so, no. That will be done elsewhere.”
“But—”
“You have to board now, Lieutenant.”
The OD agent’s tone brooked no argument, and with a melodramatic sigh, the lieutenant pulled out his Gnat.
“What are you doing?” the agent asked, putting his hand over the little drone.
“We still don’t have comms, and I need to let my command know we’ll be leaving with you.”
Rev glanced at Tomiko, who grimaced. In their excitement they had forgotten that the Gnats could be used as messengers instead of having Tomiko run to track down the lieutenant.
“That’s a negative, Lieutenant,” the agent said, hand out for the Gnat. “We’ll inform your command.”
The lieutenant wanted to argue, Rev could see. He didn’t want to be separated from his Marines. But what choice did he have?
“What about the rest of the team?”
“They will be rounded up and segregated from the rest. We’ll take care of that.”
The lieutenant shook his head, but he knew this was too big for him. He started toward the shuttle. Rev and Tomiko followed.
“At least no more useless patrols,” Tomiko whispered to Rev.
“This one wasn’t so useless.”
Tomiko stopped, then broke out laughing. “Guess you’re right at that.”
The three stepped into the shuttle. Once inside, the Centaur wasn’t taking up that much room. It was being secured to hooks in the deck, but sailors were already taking seats along the bulkhead. The agent pointed to webseats up near the bow, and the three Marines sat down.
The Seabees started filing in, and the agent said, “Just relax. We’ve got a long way to go.”
“What’s going to happen, sir?” Tomiko asked.
“Debriefs, a lot of them,” the agent said with a laugh. “So, gird your loins for that. Your battle buddies will be removed too, so that will take some of the load off.”
“You’re taking Pikachu?” Tomiko said, her voice high in alarm.
“If that’s your battle buddy, then yes. But it will be returned. Don’t worry.”
“They’re taking you?”
Rev leaned back in his seat as the ramp pulled in and the hatch started to close. He wasn’t bonded to his AI like Tomiko was, but he suddenly wasn’t sure he wanted it to be taken from him.
But something told him that he wasn’t going to
have much say in the matter.
40
“Raise you twenty,” Lyra said, an evil look in her eyes.
Rev counted his tiles. He didn’t know if the sailor was bluffing or not. The woman was generally considered bat-shit crazy by everyone else, which made her hard to read. But twenty was just too risky. He was sitting on a ramp-the-hard-way, which was a decent set, but not an unassailable one.
“Fold,” he said with regret. He tapped his bank, sending this previous wager to her. “And with that, I’m out.”
“Big bad Marine, getting schooled by little ol’ me.”
Having folded, he lost his seat and gave it up to Ramonde. He could get back in the queue, but he’d lost enough over the last week. Time to give it a rest.
“You’re really making the Corps look bad,” Tomiko said as he took a seat beside her.
“Not that you or any of the others were going to help.”
“We’re not stupid,” she said, lifting up a Dewey in emphasis.
“Don’t know how you drink that shit,” Rev said.
In all truth he kind of liked the yellow drink, but he needed to vent. He was more bored than anything else. Two months was too long to be sitting on their asses, even if their accommodations were pretty high-end for Marines and sailors. They had private rooms, good chow, and plenty of entertainment options.
“The lieutenant hear when we’re getting out of here?” he asked Tomiko.
“Which one?”
“Our lieutenant.”
“Then, no.”
“Well, then Lieutenant Sampson,” he said, naming the Seabee OIC.
“No, not him either.”
“Geeze, Miko, then why’d you ask me which lieutenant?”
“’Cause I like to fuck with you. You know that.”
Which was true. Even if the two had a closer bond than ever. Most of the guests were Navy: Seabees and the cargo handlers who’d loaded the Centaur. They turned out to be pretty good people, and Rev liked them, but sometimes there was a disconnect. The lieutenant, Nix, and Hussein were the only other Marines with them, and that was better. But no one had gone through the same two-week interrogation as had the two of them. Officially, it was a debrief, but it sure didn’t feel like it. And the two of them were the only ones who’d had their AIs removed.
