Base Metal (The Sword Book 2)

by J. M. Kaukola

  "Jamming, sir. We blackout the internals."

  "They'll recognize that as a signal to attack. Sakharov was in special forces before he went dark. He'll know what's happening."

  "Knockout gas. We can synthesize it in the air system with the right virus."

  "Paris, 2513." Halstead replied. "Internal Security Agency RAST teams and gendarmerie attempted to free hostages from a hotel by flooding it with an asphyxiant 'knockout' gas. The dosage was too hard to control, hostages went into shock, and hundreds died. Worse, the terrorists, many of whom were in a heightened state of arousal, were able to withstand the effects long enough to inflict additional casualties and still mount a limited resistance."

  "Drones, then." Firenze proposed. "We gas the sections without civilians, seal the ship, and then send in remote control combat drones to clear out the rest."

  "You're jamming them, remember?" Halstead pointed out. "Even if you aren't, they'll jam you the moment they realize you've sent in RCVs." The colonel motioned to the yellowed window, to the rusted machines beyond, and said, "It's a harsh world out there, Mister Firenze. There are many tools at our disposal, but they are just tools. Nothing substitutes for a good man close at hand. That's what we do. That's why we exist. So long as there's some knucklehead out there who thinks that shooting, stabbing, or bombing is the best way to make a point, you'll need people like us to go dig them out. Those types don't stop when you ask nicely."

  Firenze nodded along. The colonel had a point. Decisions had to be made locally, to prevent jamming or hijacking, but that didn't mean it had to be people. He raised his final argument, "What about AI drones, sir. They can't be jammed. They're stronger, more resilient, more accurate than even your team. And they don't feel fear."

  Halstead's cold eyes narrowed, but his words were measured, "That would seem reasonable, wouldn't it? They're efficient, loyal, effective. Better still, no one loses a child, spouse, or parent when a killbot gets blown to pieces." The colonel reached down, fiddled with one of his binders. His mustache twitched again. "There's just one problem. If you want to deploy killbots, you've got to keep an army of them."

  "We don't?" Firenze asked.

  "Damn right, we don't!" Halstead replied. "And don't think they haven't tried, but good officers shut them down every time."

  "Why? Too expensive? Bodies are cheaper?" Firenze couldn't keep the bitterness out of his voice.

  "Because they're too cheap!" Halstead snapped. He took a breath, smoothed his whiskers with one hand, and then said, "I'm sorry. I didn't mean to bark at you, but you brushed against a mindset I particularly despise." He drew another breath, then asked, "Do you follow the news, Grant?"

  "Sometimes?" Firenze replied.

  "Few do. Most just watch the highlights, the social channels, the gossip and drama. It's astroturfed, almost all of it." Halstead sighed. "Did you know that the Authority has been embroiled in police actions against Path elements for five years? Did you know that this war has cost over nineteen hundred lives?"

  "No!" Firenze protested. "Is that classified? I know some people who'd be pissed-"

  "It's not classified. I wouldn't tell you if it was, but it doesn't need to be. It's on the bottom of the feed every week."

  "Why don't they protest?" Firenze demanded. He'd seen the storms brew around Article Two and Monterrey. Suze and Kendrix had filled street corners and augsim-commons with agitprop, but he'd never heard about this silent war. Why wouldn't they drag this front and center?

  Halstead answered, "They don't notice because it's not our lives being lost. Most have been snuffed from the Path ranks, exterminated by aerial drones and vicious little computer worms that crash cars into walls. Right now, there are automated hunter-killers out there, choosing life or death for someone who never sees the judge. He's an enemy of the state for sure, but right now, he's a father, sitting down for dinner, and thousands of feet above, there's a little computer brain, calculating whether it should dedicate fourteen kilograms of high explosive to terminate his life. He'll never know. He'll reach for the potatoes, and then boom, gone, along with his family. Some bureaucrat in the Capital will chalk up a statistic, and a logistics officer will divert an extra missile to a stockpile near an airstrip. The news will report, 'drone strike in somewhere you've never heard of eliminates Path radical you never knew'. And no one will care. They've got sports, gossip, and scandal to worry about. Those drive far more views on the feed.

  "Sending in soldiers is hard. It's painful. It brings protests and soul searching, rallies and demonstrations. The Senate will convene and convulse, and the media will pounce. It becomes a three-ring circus, it's embarrassing, and, sometimes, it stops us from doing our jobs. But it also keeps the State honest. If you send in the army, you're sending in someone's son or daughter, someone's lover, someone's caretaker. You send over people, and suddenly, you've got yourself a crisis. Citizens start asking, 'Is it worth it? What are we here for?' Drones don't beg those questions, they're cheap and easy. War should never be either of those things. That's we don't build an army of drones: so that we're not tempted to fight battles of convenience."

  Firenze didn't have an answer. Of all the counters he'd imagined, that had not been one of them. He spoke to fill the silent office, "Sir, no offense, but you sound like Suze."

  "Who's that?"

  "Friend of mine. She's real big on Article Two. Real big on getting out of the war business."

  "Smart girl." Halstead replied. "It's a terrible job."

  "Then why do you do it?"

  Halstead's thin smile returned. He said, "Because I'm skilled at it, and it needs done."

  "Sergeant Clausen told me that."

  "Good man." Halstead replied. "Mister Firenze, I think you'll find there are some inherent and irresolvable contradictions that make up the human condition. The best hunters love the wild. The best statesmen are wary of power. If we left war to those who craved it, we'd leave this world a ruin."

  The colonel fixed him with a stare, one without compromise or waver. He said, "We go to that airship with the army we have and free those people. We do this, make this sacrifice, so that those counting on us get to live long enough to see Article Two. We do it in this way so that what happened to you doesn't become the norm. We hold ourselves to a standard and demand that others rise. We go in there, and we do this right, because we're ASOC, and that's who we are."

  For just a moment, Firenze almost believed him.

  Fire in the Sky II

  Another explosion rocked the control room.

  Glass shattered. Metal shrieked. A jackhammer blow slammed against Firenze's chest and ripped the air from his throat like barbed wire.

  He huddled against the ruins of a console as the debris rained around him, his assist box clutched to his chest like a totem. He choked on acrid smoke and begged the universe to make it stop.

  Training hadn't prepared him for this. Nothing could have. Every breath was paramount, every second pendulous, every action compelled by a primordial drive to survive just one moment longer. His goggles fogged, a mix of sweat and dust that turned his HUD to digital noise. Gunfire ripped the air, hot and howling. With every burst, he pressed against the solid steel of his cover.

  Light punched through a freestanding terminal, two meters to his left. Life and death hung on chance, just like the colonel had warned.

  Firenze raised his hand, glass speared through his blood-soaked gloves, and he watched the warm streams flow over his wrist. He couldn't feel it, even when he pulled the shards free. At least the auto-injectors were working.

  The dead lay piled in the hallway, blood pooling amid the carnage. The corpse-pile jerked to a machinegun beat, bits ripped free with each staccato kiss. Firenze closed his eyes and wished away the world.

  Hill's voice broke through his stupor, screaming, "Move! Princess! They're flanking!"

  Firenze opened his eyes.

  The gray-clad soldier crouched beside him, ankle-deep in shattered glass and burnt
plastic. He stared at Firenze from beneath a battered helmet and demanded, "You with us?!"

  Firenze nodded.

  "Fuckin A." Hill clapped Firenze on the shoulder, then hoisted up his machinegun. He torqued the gun's cam lever and commanded, "There's a door, ten meters back! Move when I shoot, got it?!"

  "Stick and move." Firenze whispered.

  "Damn skippy." Hill answered. He swung the gun over the top of the terminal and pulled the trigger.

  The machinegun roared, boiling dust spewing from the vents. Hill propped the weapon against the console and aimed through his eyepiece, walking fire over targets only he could see. After the second burst, he rose and pulled the gun into his shoulder. The volleys tightened, and he gave Firenze a kick.

  Firenze ran.

  Ten meters was an impossible distance. The doorframe pulled away with every step, every scream, and the roar of Hill's machinegun faded behind. Time slowed until every moment hung like a slide-show.

  Firenze broke through the doorway at a stagger-sprint.

  Gloved hands yanked him into cover. Kawalski screamed, "Down, Princess!" Gunfire rang. Firenze pulled his arms over his ears and tried to wall out the blasts.

  Kawalski was screaming, her rifle jumping against her shoulder. Caustic, burning dust rained down upon him.

  Hill crashed through the door and flung himself to the opposite wall. His face was caked in soot and streams of dried blood. He thumbed towards the room he'd fled and yelled, "Three of them!"

  Firenze felt Kawalski grab his shoulder. He looked up, and she ordered, "Stay." She flashed a barrage of sign-language commands, and Hill swung his machinegun through the gap to let rip a long burst. Kawalski followed with a grenade.

  Smoke vomited through the door, thick and flooded with razor debris.

  Goggles up and rifles blazing, the team pushed past Firenze's corner, charging two-by-two into the haze. Gunfire cracked. For the third time today, Delta Four stormed the control room.

  Firenze peered around the corner after them, one eye and a hair-strand past the jam. The server room was a hellscape of strewn cables, spark-showers, and mangled bodies, pierced by the slow-motion belch of rifle-fire. The first time they'd taken this room, it had been sterile. Everything had gone according to plan, even smoother than the drills. They should have smelled the trap.

  It all went wrong when Captain Wilson seized the processing center. The moment Firenze saw that strand harvester parasited onto the Dirac cycler, he'd known everything was fucked. Berenson had been right. That meant that the operation's fundamental assumptions were wrong - this wasn't about hostages. Firenze had done research work. He'd spent enough time in the sciences for an essential truth to be ground into his bones: wrong assumptions made worse results.

  Maybe the others knew that, too, but it was hard to tell through the stern faces and terse orders. The captain had ordered an advance to scout the cycler chamber. He'd directed Firenze into the net. There wasn't time to step back, analyze, and retry. They were all 'in the moment', and they were on a timer.

  That's when everything had gone to hell.

  Every network failed at once, TACNET blanked, and the radio fell to screeching chaos. The local node fell offline, and nothing reported past one gateway. Firenze had tried to reboot the host, regain access to ship systems, but the enemy assault hit within seconds, and he'd been dragged from his hardlink.

  Stuck in the hallway, Firenze pried open his box and checked his signal. One green line hung over a haze of amber jamming. He'd restored local net, run tightbeam-to-tightbeam, but that mesh required him to physically verify every device. It meant Kawalski's shooters had data, but every other team was blind.

  He needed to get to a server. At this wattage, the barrage jamming reduced wireless to rubbish, friend and foe alike. It was lunacy. Perimeter had blinded everyone and chosen to fight in the dark. If he was going to restore anything, he'd need to coopt the hardwired systems of the Plymouth herself. That meant physical access. He needed back into that room.

  He took another peek around the corner, but Kawalski emerged from the smoke like an angry phantom. The rubber sole of her boot slapped against his ceramic carapace, and he tumbled back into safety. She snapped, "Stay down! We need you alive!"

  He protested, "I need to get on the terminal! Two rows up! If I get there, I can link everyone-" he tried to point around the corner, but gunfire clattered. He jerked back, clutched his fingers, and counted. All five were still intact.

  "It's too hot!" She snarled, then shoved a subgun against his chest. On reflex, he caught it. She said, "You've got three mags, don't get stupid."

  He argued, "I need to-"

  "You need to stay alive! If anyone but us comes through this door?" she nodded towards the gun. "Do your best." Then she was gone, vanished back into the chaos.

  He pressed against the wall, wedged his shoulders between the steel folds of the bulkhead. Beyond the threshold, he could hear the screams and the ear-splitting thumps of gunfire. His hand began to sting as painkillers faded. Tears stained his face and poisoned his tongue.

  He had to do something. He had to help.

  He rubbed his sleeve over his goggles, over his eyes, tried to clear his vision. He tried to focus on the once-white walls. There, just above his alcove, he spotted a smudge, a scar of soot, carved between two panels. He concentrated on it, make the edges define.

  Something was wrong with that char-mark. It came from beneath the panel, not atop it. Firenze blinked, cleared his sight, and made sure he saw true.

  This made no sense. Why would there be burning inside the panel?

  Firenze rose, drew his multitool, and let the subgun slide to his feet. He jammed his knife into the burnt hatch, pried it open, and revealed the damage. Smoke billowed out, the stench of melted plastic and hot wire overwhelming. He ducked from the shower of embers and tried to make sense of what he saw.

  The data conduit was gone, severed clean by a scorched ring-charge. Firenze glanced down the hall, spotted four more char-marks in the distance, smoke leaking from sterile white panels. Perimeter hadn't just jammed the wireless, they'd reduced the network to confetti. This ship was a flying brick, dumb and blind.

  A voice rose in the back of his head, reminded him of his training. Donegan had called this scenario 'segmentation'.

  They'd covered what to do if the enemy scorched-earth the network. TACNET would default to local. Tightbeam could pierce the jamming. If he could reach the other nodes, he could tie the teams back together.

  He closed his eyes, tried to focus, to drown out the pounding of the guns. There was an academic problem here, one he could solve if he could just clear his head.

  He needed to bypass the jammer, but how? In his darkened mental cocoon, far from the stink of gel propellant and the clap of gunfire, he ran through his list of 'known facts'. Jamming had rules and limitations. No transmitter could lock down all frequencies, at full power, over unlimited distance. He hadn't seen any massive radio antennae, nor was he cooking alive from multi-megawatt broadcasts. That implied the enemy was using distributed small-scale transmitters to cover a large area. He could work with that.

  TACNET was built to defeat enemy interference by sliding around the radio band. With small, distributed jammers, the enemy had to run sensors to detect transmissions and base-blast the offenders. There were two ways to run that - a processing hub in every corridor or a sensor net with central command. The latter was cheaper to install, easier to maintain, and a hell of a lot more likely. It was also something he could target, provided he could get access to the controller.

  Firenze was pulled from his thoughts by the whistle-chime of the ship's automated paging system. As the tone faded, and the gunfire returned, he found himself once more mired in the horrid corridor, all the worse from his momentary escape.

  From the speakers, a female voice intoned, "Attention, all passengers. Please remain calm. There is an incident in progress, but airship personnel are responding. Please rema
in calm and in your quarters. We will resolve this inconvenience shortly. Thank you."

  He stared up at the pearl-white speaker, thoughts tumbling through his mind. The enemy had left the emergency broadcast online. Those would run on dumb wires - audio-only, low-bandwidth, and separate from any core systems. It wasn't much, but it was something. That system would be connected to a central dispatch. His mind whirled, and a half-plan began to form.

  He pulled his computer open once more, called up schematics of the airship's networks. Wireframes stacked on wireframes as waterfalls of blue and silver cascaded across the screen. What did the PA touch? What systems might still be connected? Could the address network get him close enough to hit the jammers?

  He found his jackpot on the ops deck - the emergency dispatch hub tied into the ship's sensors to pass automated messages. That system connected to navigation. What were the odds they'd severed that? He bit his lip and tried not to consider the darkest options.

  A gloved hand grabbed his shoulder and ripped him from his reverie.

  Hill stared down at him through dust-caked goggles, his helmet chipped and dinged, his machinegun suspended from its sling, barrel orange-hot and smoking. The soldier tilted his head towards the open door and said, "We're clear, Princess. Think you can jack in?"

  Firenze scrambled to his feet and nearly tripped on the subgun. He staggered through the debris, past the crouched and ready soldiers, towards the nearest intact terminal.

  Firenze raced towards it, hands in pockets as he fished for cable. He caromed from the wall, crashed against the console, not bothering to slow as he fed the wire loop from his pouch. He bit into a cleansing pack, tore the seal with his canines, and ripped out the soaked wadding, ignoring the soap-and-alcohol burn that filled his mouth. Packet-in-teeth, he peeled up the synthflesh on his arm and wiped away the dried blood and dirt.