Beware of Light (Dark Stars Book 1)

by Alex Kirko

  “Drummond,” said Nat. “Stop gawking at the barrier. All the roads are protected by them.”

  “Doesn’t make the design any less impressive,” he said.

  Nat said, “The only thing I care about is that the network is damn complex and reliant on quantum computers, so the Council can’t touch the codes and maintenance procedures without breaking it. Stand back.”

  Most mech pilots would reach up with the dominant hand and wiggle fingers when interacting with machines, but Nat simply went still until a portal of brilliant pink appeared in the wall of purple. Prismatic tendrils of light drifted off it and into the rest of the shield, quickly dissolving.

  “How do we get across?” asked Mel.

  Nat said, “We jump.”

  They had to slow down on the other side. Thick knotted trees stood on all sides, covered in sapphire moss and bearing hundreds of pounds of olive green vines, branches creaking with the weight. The air smelled of earth and decomposition, and barely any light reached ground level. The group turned on stealth generators and tried to make as little noise as possible. The forest bed was soft under their feet even if clumps of brown organic mush kept getting stuck to Blake’s boots.

  “I like the top levels of the jungle more,” he said. “I can feel the muck up to my ankles.”

  They had been moving for fifteen minutes when he heard a branch crack. He held up a hand, and everyone stopped.

  “What is it?” Irene looked at the tops of the trees, her head moving like that of an agitated bird.

  “Everything looks normal to me,” said Nat. “Drummond, you see something?”

  He shushed them with a sharp slash of his hand. The short-range intercom their mechs used was almost impossible to detect, but he didn’t want to risk it.

  “Aileen, can you pinpoint the sound?” he asked.

  An overlay appeared over his vision, red lines leading from the microphones on his body and intersecting a hundred feet ahead in a tree. There were other trunks in the way that hid whatever was waiting for them.

  “Nat, did you see any wildlife?” he asked.

  “No, nothing.”

  He shut off his visual receptors and focused on the smell. There it was. The faintest stench of burning meat and fur. He shook his head and turned his sight back on.

  He said, “The Republic burned enough animals alive to scare them into running. And there is at least one mech over there.” He pointed at the clump of trees ahead of them. “This is the kind of place I would pick for an ambush. I thought the Council’s jungle maps were outdated.”

  Nat moved a little closer, and he could hear a gentle whirr as her sensors went into overdrive. “Must be a coincidence,” she said. “These guys don’t know anything about mech stealth if they are that easy to hear. Still, be on your guard: looks like we are dealing with a competent commander. Let’s go around.”

  They gave the trees a wide berth and spread out to mask their radiation signatures. Blake overrode his suit’s limiters, and Aileen all but stopped emitting anything. The energy levels in the heat sinks in his thighs began climbing.

  They avoided another ambush two hundred feet farther and just started to relax when he heard a tree groan right above them.

  “I’m detecting a radio transmission,” said Aileen. “It’s short, and there is no response.”

  “Can you decipher it?”

  “Sure. If I have you to help me, half an hour, and more transmissions to analyze.”

  He motioned for them to flatten themselves against a geronia tree stump twenty feet in diameter. “Incoming,” he said. “Hold still.”

  There was a heavy thump as something landed on the ground, and then its stealth field failed. Cheap, Blake thought.

  The mech was matte white, and it moved in serpentine lunges that reminded Blake of a robot. It dashed toward their group, stopped ten feet away, and swiveled its head, looking for something. It examined the ground, but the jungle floor here was so thick with roots that it bounced back right after they stepped off it. The mech jerked its head to look behind it in what must have been an unpleasant motion for the operator, and then it scurried back up the tree.

  “Slowly,” Blake said. “Gently.”

  Mel giggled on the intercom. “Sorry,” she said.

  Once they were out of earshot, Nat said, “That was too close. They have sentries, and they have a proper communications protocol. The risk of extracting a scientist has gone up.”

  Blake said, “My stealth field is better than standard. As long as they aren’t fat, I should be able to hide one person. A skinny well-proportioned woman would be best.”

  Nat snorted, “Are you sure that’s the reason, Drummond?”

  He laughed. “Or maybe I’m into strapping unconscious women to my mech and sneaking around a forest filled with enemies.”

  The sensors indicated a break in the trees ahead that didn’t match their map, so they crouched and moved even slower. “Wow,” said Blake. “Gallows wasn’t kidding when he said that the Council loves to blast everything they don’t like.”

  The clearing was five hundred feet across, and it wasn’t natural. The ground was uneven, pockmarked with craters and covered in blackened roots, and the smell of burned wood and meat was much stronger here.

  “Is that a Lance VII?” transmitted Ryan. “Didn’t think the bastards had it in them.”

  The artillery beam platform stood at the far end of the clearing. It was a chrome gun thirty feet in length wrapped in superconductor magnets and attached to a twenty-foot-high stack of ammunition that took up another heavy platform.

  “The scary thing about it?” said Blake. “What they have here is enough for five volleys, no more, but each one would be enough to melt a city block.”

  “The gun doesn’t bother me,” said Nat. “They do.” She motioned to the hundreds of white forms sitting on the ground and dashing between temporary structures. “I can detect two more camps with similar signatures half a mile deeper into the jungle. And it’s only mechs, so they can attack during the day. Where did they get this many?”

  “I think I see the science center,” said Blake. He adjusted his sensors. “That light-green building on the right emits four times more energy than all others.”

  Ryan said, “We could cause a distraction while another group grabs the lead egghead—”

  “One suicide mission a month is enough, Ryan,” said Nat. “And Irene will want to go with you—”

  “Of course,” said Irene.

  “—and I am not explaining how I got you killed to your parents. The scientists aren’t even that important. This intel is. We can’t broadcast it from here without giving away our position.” She looked up. “I just wish we had satellite imagery, but it seems that what little remains up there is the only Council piece of equipment we can’t hack.”

  “Not until the bozos let me have a go,” said Mel.

  “We are stalling,” said Nat. “Unless there is some way we can bypass the guards, we are leaving.”

  Blake took a step forward, redirected more resources to processing sensor input and observed the camp for a minute.

  “Anything you want to share with the rest of us, Drummond?” asked Nat.

  “Don’t even think about it,” said Aileen.

  “I could probably get in, grab a scientist, and get out. The mechs move in patterns.”

  Ryan cocked his head to the right. “It’s like a disturbed insect colony out there.”

  Blake waved in dismissal. “At any time, exactly a third of them are sitting on the ground. Two mechs approached the science building after we got here with exactly two minutes between them. The dashing figures? Those are patrol disruptions made to cover deliberate holes in the security network. It’s all too precise to be a coincidence.”

  “How would you do it?” asked Nat.

  Blake took a moment to plan. “The science center is near this edge and not too heavily guarded. The patrols are mainly looping around the command post
and the artillery battery.”

  Mel said, “Blake, there is at least a dozen of them around that center.”

  “I checked out their equipment,” he said. “Their sensors are crap, and my stealth systems aren’t exactly regulations-friendly.”

  Mel giggled. “Irene, tell him.”

  The smaller girl looked at Mel and then at Blake. She hunched her shoulders and seemed to draw in on herself. “They are only rumors.” She paused. “Some think that you are some sort of super-spy of the Republic outfitted with the best technology they have.”

  He said, “That’s stupid. Anyway, I’m more worried about getting the captive out alive. Can’t guarantee it if we have to dodge attacks.”

  “They have brought the science stations here for a reason,” said Nat. “Even if we kill the target, it will still deal a blow to them. Go. We’ll prepare an ambush a hundred feet to the north from here in case you’ll need it.” He started to leave, but she wasn’t finished. “And Drummond? Don’t get yourself killed.”

  He felt a sharp pang in his chest at the words. He had heard them many times from many commanders, but this was the first time a superior worried about him on Terra Nox. Blake nodded.

  He crept ahead. Blake made sure to walk behind shrubs and tall grass, so that depressions his feet left wouldn’t be visible. He found a suitably craggy tree, saw a branch as thick as his mech’s thigh, calculated the exact force needed, and jumped up landing on it without a sound.

  “I have almost forgotten what it’s like,” said Aileen. “Just the two of us on a mission.”

  “I haven’t.”

  The jungle was dark, but near the clearing emerald shadows clashed with golden lights. It took him ten minutes to memorize the guards’ routes. The white mechs followed them exactly without deviating a second or a single step.

  “Something is wrong here,” he said. “The Republic army doesn’t have that kind of discipline.”

  “Nobody has that kind of discipline, Blake,” said Aileen.

  He said, “I’ve seen this pattern before, though. It’s an adapted version of the one we used in ten-man groups.”

  All surveillance relied on a human’s quick eye in the end, and every static defense had holes, but Blake would have rather left all these soldiers sitting with overlapping lines of sight instead of shuffling them to create false openings. After all, an opening was only false when there was no one good enough to exploit it.

  Heatsinks were at sixty percent, so he didn’t have much time. He kept to hard ground giving Aileen an opportunity to analyze the surface and muffle the sound of his steps. His trek toward the science center was the strangest mix of boredom and sheer terror: he could be killed in seconds, but all he did was look for rocks among blackened soil. A group of five white mechs walked past him.

  Aileen said, “Hold on, hacking into their short-range communications—”

  A blinding screech filled his head like ten thousand nails scraping on glass. Blake clapped his hands to his non-existent ears, and the sound cut off. Patches of color blanketed his vision, but he still saw the closest mech turn its head in his direction. It stopped, stared for ten seconds, and then hurried after its comrades. It took Blake a moment to put his finger on what was so unsettling about the movement.

  “It’s the speed,” he said still gripping his head.

  Aileen said, “Oh God, I’m so sorry, Blake. I wasn’t expecting their AIs to be broadcasting across the network.”

  “The speed,” he repeated. “He went from zero to seven miles per hour in a second flat and then ran after his friends without changing the speed.”

  “That would be the optimal way to do it,” said Aileen.

  “Yes. It would also be something a human would never do. Our instincts would tell us to accelerate slowly, then change speed depending on the terrain, and then slow down. Not jump from zero to cruising and then back.”

  With all her processing power Aileen still needed a moment to catch on.

  “No, not even the Republic would do it,” she said. “They aren’t even up against the wall.”

  He said, “We have no choice now. We must get that scientist.”

  The lab was a squat prefabricated cube of grey alloy. The patrols didn’t come near it. He knew there had to be a reason, so he examined the ground and caught the barest glimmer out of the corner of his eye. Blake froze for a second and then put his right foot back where it had been. He bent down to examine sparkles in the air.

  “Blake, I see at least five more,” said Aileen.

  “Damn it. We are lucky it rained yesterday.”

  Millenia had passed since humanity first came up with the idea, but a laser grid was still an effective—if low-tech—security system. With all the moisture in the morning air, beams fractured when they hit microscopic droplets, and this was what created the glitter.

  “Check the system for wireless access,” said Blake.

  “I see a backdoor built-in for maintenance. Whoever set up this camp isn’t big on cybersecurity.”

  “At least something is going our way. Let’s go in and check for more surprises.”

  “Connection established,” said Aileen.

  The world vanished to be replaced by a broken grove of wine-red luminescent trees. Their gnarled branches twisted together into a tangle of thorns, and their roots were covered in bulbous pulsating lesions of encryption blocks. A myriad of pinpricks of light darted along the vegetation, and he couldn’t see deeper than five feet beyond the tree line.

  “A hedge defense,” said Aileen. “A security option for the lazy, but it can still be dangerous. I’ll take the top.”

  Blake could feel her derision for the sloppy defense. He took an imaginary breath. First, he identified the parasite thoughts and emotions. He was afraid of death. Then there was Tara. How long had it been since he trusted someone enough to allow himself to be vulnerable? Doubt over all the choices he had made since waking up lingered over his and Aileen’s world like a miasma of rot. Blake focused. He wasn’t going to die from organ failure, Tara would probably want to kill him soon, and he had chosen right between the Republic and the Federation—this camp was evidence of that. He let it all drift away.

  Two of Aileen’s roots darted across the dark ground between her and the grove and touched the root system of the camp.

  The first firewall made his avatar shiver, but it was so ridden with holes that he barely stopped. The encryption bulbs proved to be more of an obstacle. A thousand algorithms with different keys were shuffling randomly in each one. He thought about joining Aileen in her efforts to break through the canopy, but the thorns above were more dangerous than the roots. They twisted and garbled the signals that passed through them.

  “Well, I was going to find some elegant solution, but this is ridiculous,” he said.

  He saw that this security system relied not on private keys that soldiers carried but on its complexity. The enemy mechs had a map of data pathways, firewalls and scramblers. With it, they could plot a path for their information that would keep their messages safe. He had no doubt that almost all the data flowing across the network was fake so that an attacker wouldn’t discover the weaknesses.

  All he and Aileen needed was to be fast enough to replace data packets and to avoid the paths none of the data travelled.

  He breathed out, and broke through the first encryption node in a second, jumped to the next one, and broke it too. From there the path split ten ways, so Blake intercepted a hundred signals, added a worm to each of them, and distracted the security network with a burst of random static that he sent on another path. This created a millisecond delay as the system verified whether the data had been tampered with, and it was enough for the worm to break the verifier altogether. Until the network rebooted, it would show that everything was fine even if he started streaming terrorists’ manifestos at it.

  He felt a powerful lurch forward.

  Something grabbed at Aileen’s probes and pulled, nearly tearing
apart the delicate program he’d built to piggyback his consciousness on junk data. He panicked for a fraction of a second, and then slammed containment firewalls of his own around whatever was attacking him.

  “Aileen, a little help?”

  “Busy here, Blake.”

  The thing that was tearing at him was a rabid animal with barely any connection to the rest of the system—a purple knot of twitching roots, dripping with thick putrid sap. A couple of those tentacles wrapped around his essence, and they were now hacking him, using the connection to inject probes into his mind, and thrashing around, spreading more slime over his thoughts. Blake’s vision began to dim.

  He reached into the knot, looking for a weakness, but it was all branches covered in spikes and thick bark, and he could feel the roots wrap around him and start dismantling his arsenal of defending programs.

  “No,” said Aileen. “You will not take him, oath-breaker.”

  She blasted it with an impulse that looked like a rainbow compressed into a miniature sun. It exploded and showered the beast with random data, paradoxes, and logic puzzles. The roots twitched once, twice, and then convulsed and batted Blake away.

  “Ignorant idiots. Come on, we don’t have much time,” Aileen said. “I’ve disabled the scanners around the camp. We need to grab a scientist and get the hell out before that thing recovers.”

  He asked, “What was that? It looked like a mech AI, only I could barely sense the pilot’s presence. I think he was in the middle of that knot, but there wasn’t enough space for him to even breathe.”

  She repeated, “No time.”

  Blake nodded. They had control of the camp’s security for the time being, so he disabled the alarms, checked whether his stealth field was still working, walked up to the entrance, and got into the science center.

  The stench was of putrid meat, disinfectant, and acrid rosin. The place was five hundred square feet of the kind of white that only fresh snow and prefabricated buildings have. He was in a decontamination chamber, and glass walls on the other side laid bare the main working area. Blake felt prickly cold wash over him starting at the nape of his neck.