Drysine Legacy (The Spiral Wars Book 2)

by Joel Shepherd

  Lieutenant Jersey’s voice came in her ears, but past the engine roar and vibration, plus the crackle on the coms, Tif caught perhaps one word in three. Something about entry points and Europa’s location…

  “Ree,” she said impatiently, “nav screen.” Because she and Ensign Lee had a system worked out, where any incoming commands that could be flashed to her screens would happen immediately, and save her the trouble of trying to figure out what was said. Between the words and the visual, she could usually figure it out in just a few seconds more than it would take a human pilot. For anything that required a faster reaction than a few seconds, she was on her own.

  The nav screen flashed, and Tif’s blink transferred it to her visor — a plotted trajectory, with Europa’s position on the far end. In between, Jersey would take them down very low to the Tartarus surface, to avoid exposure to fire. Scan overlaid active data onto that course-plot, as Phoenix compiled as much data as it could gather from the battlespace, then fed it out to its pilots. And what it showed was crazy, drysine drones swarming in the Tartarus, sard warriors fighting back, and in all likelihood deepynine drones gathering forces near the core. Tif found a moment to be thankful Lisbeth wasn’t coming along on this one — the girl had a rough idea what she was doing, and probably some natural talent as well. But this was a place for warriors.

  PH-3 and 4 hit the turnover point, cut deceleration thrust and flipped to face the target. The sheer size of it baffled the senses, a vast horizon of steel-grey beams and girders, creating odd patterns that reminded her for a crazy moment of the baskets her grandmother had once weaved from river reeds. But she had no time to ponder it, locking forward cannon to her visor with thumbs on the triggers. That weapon system she’d gotten good at. The others, she left to Lee in the nose seat.

  Off to one side, a series of rolling fireballs across the steel horizon — Phoenix engaging surface targets in their path. Correction point arrived and she hit thrust as the lines matched, Gs slamming her down and rolling PH-4 about so she could see her course direction through the upper canopy. Then they were matching the Tartarus horizon, the steel whipping past a hundred meters below. Tif nudged them lower, heard Lee warn of debris ahead and gave them a little kick sideways to miss it. There were no big burns and big manoeuvres down this low — like the low altitude flying she’d learned on Choghoth in Lord Kharghesh’s academy, you kept your movements smooth and small, or you made a smoking crater in something hard.

  More fire from Phoenix ahead, paralleling their course ‘above’ relative to Tartarus, and moving to put Tartarus between herself and those picket vessels. Something big blew up with the brightest flash Tif had ever seen, her visor blackening to save her vision. Steady chatter now on her coms — human chatter, far beyond her ability to understand, but she trusted that if she needed to know something, Lee would flash it to her screen or yell it at her in time. The flash died away — probably Phoenix had hit another sard ship. Tif could not help the surge of pride in her heart. Phoenix was a beast, a legend of the human war machine and as powerful as a squadron of ships in the meagre kuhsi fleet. That the scared little poor girl from Heshog should find herself here, a vital part of the Phoenix operation, would make the spirits of ten thousand ancestors rise from their graves to notice.

  Jersey said something else, sounding alarmed, and Tif heard the word ‘escort’. Scan showed small marks approaching, and Lee was not tagging them as hostile, so she held course and swung the tail out for a light burn to keep her course circular, matching Tartarus’s curve as the base lacked the gravity to make a normal orbit. And then the marks on scan arrived, and Tif glanced out the canopy to see hacksaws off her wing, in flexible formation. She’d expected it, but still it was shocking to see them this close. They looked like dark-silver lobsters, bristling with limbs and bulky with modular weapons and thrusters that nearly doubled their size. In gravity they’d be nearly immobile, but out here a drone could act as a very small ship, though without the powersource to thrust for long before running out of fuel. Clearly these were drysine, given no one was dead yet. Their escort.

  Course correction arrived, and Tif swung PH-4 tail-first and kicked the thrust at a full 4-Gs to slow them. It was unnerving, because slowing down would make them an easier target for an enemy shooting at them from the cover of Tartarus… which was where, at slower velocities, an escort would be useful, to spot and kill any threat before it could fire.

  She reached nearly zero-V immediately over the lip of a cavernous shipyard. Within was chaos, several smaller ships ruined and floating free amidst the smashed debris of a recent fight. Tif cut thrust a moment to allow PH-3 to assume the lead — unloaded, PH-4 was a little more mobile, and she’d get ahead of Jersey if she wasn’t careful.

  “Watch your V,” Jersey said tersely as they powered inside, then cut thrust and swung to dodge the best course through the debris. “Could run out of room real fast.”

  Tif matched her lead — no more than two hundred kph in here, little more than a ground car on a big city freeway, but surrounded by things to crash into and with no direct line-of-sight to anything, it felt fast enough. Flying shuttles was nothing like driving cars or flying aeroplanes in atmosphere — those vehicles went where you pointed them. Shuttles in zero-G vacuum went with their momentum, like a puck sliding on ice, and in close proximity a pilot’s illusion of control could disappear real fast. To move she’d have to swing PH-4’s thrusters well out past where she wanted to go, which took at least several seconds’ advance planning. Shuttle pilots in proximity had to think and look well ahead of their immediate surroundings, like a racecar driver already plotting the apex of a corner three turns ahead. Reflexes helped, but if your fast evasion only put you smack on course to an even worse obstacle, reflexes alone could get you killed.

  Tif swung and rolled her way through the moving debris field, giving repeated little kicks of thrust to change course, then a final big one past a large chunk of engine housing, tumbling with explosive scorch marks. Beyond was a much larger ship — a warship, Tif judged, though barely half the size of Phoenix. Hacksaw drones swarmed over it, even now Tif could see them disappearing into small holes torn in the midships hull.

  “Looks like they’re still fighting in there,” Lee observed. “Probably sard warriors still inside.” Only half of the drones appeared to be armed… but inside the close corridors of a ship, unarmed hacksaws could still be deadly.

  “Big target,” Tif complained, thinking of those docked ships she’d seen Phoenix kill so far. “Draw big fire, we go.” Ahead, their thrust-equipped escort dove and skidded through a hexagonal gap and into the gloom beyond. Through the forest of pylons and supports, Tif could see a flashing red storm of tracer fire. She took a deep breath, swung PH-4 sideways, and kicked the thrusters to begin her first turn.

  * * *

  Command Squad shot forward on accumulated V, Trace hitting light thrust to edge closer to a massive support truss for cover, her local formation flexing to pass around it. About them, Charlie Platoon did the same, First Squad ahead, Second and Third on the wings, proceeding with depth and flexibility as they avoided the most deadly open space without losing formation.

  Out to a kilometre ahead the shooting was intense, as armed drysines dodged and ducked through the Tartarus tangle in a silver swarm, coordinating cross-fires and zig-zags with their comrades amidst a rain of incoming and outgoing fire. That fire was going everywhere, already her marines had taken several hits, all thankfully stopped by armour with minimal damage so far. But Styx had been right — operating without cover was something best left to machines that could soak up damage and keep functioning at close to optimal. With limited cover, hacksaw warfare in Tartarus turned into a contest of fire volumes, and with most of the drysines’ immediate enemy being sard, it was a contest the drysines were winning.

  Sard defenders now fell back past a series of dark bands encircling the Tartarus interior. Trace had supposed those bands constituted a manufacturing layer,
but now they seemed more complex — enclosed factory complexes interlocking with the open frameworks that hacksaws seemed to prefer as living space. Tacnet highlighted defensive positions the sard had hastily set up, hundreds of drones feeding data into what was undoubtedly the largest and most stable tacnet setup Trace had ever seen. Her marines put missiles on those locations, primed for airburst, and drones rushed them before sard could recover their aim.

  “Get in and find cover!” Trace commanded, above the background flurry of small chatter, noncoms keeping formations tight, buddies warning of debris or exposure to incoming fire. “I want good forward fire positions, we are the base of fire for the drysines!”

  Her eye flicked to the countdown as she approached — it was T-minus-twenty-six minutes until Makimakala’s arrival. Ahead was a latticework of steel frames, deep and complex like honeycomb with drones scrambling through the gaps. She decelerated hard at fifty meters and followed Kono though an opening.

  The interior was black, alien and harsh… yet strangely beautiful. Central structures were like ornamental stars, with exploding points fanning in all directions, twenty meters wide and spreading like fingers. Even now several drones backed onto those fingers with an almost sensuous wiggle, and made a connection. Power recharge? A hive-mind uplink for hardline data transfer? There were dozens of star-structures in irregular rows amidst the interconnecting hexagons of overlapping spheres, everything both predictable and utterly unpredictable at the same time.

  “Some kind of goddamn living room,” Kono guessed, jetting quickly past the stars to the far side, and cover with a view of the Tartarus interior.

  “Guess they’re not much on scrabble, huh?” said Rael. Drones jetted past, suddenly close-up and scary again, evading humans and each other with grace and pushing off steel structures with nimble limbs. Trace grabbed a star arm to halt her momentum, and paused to study tacnet — always hard with so much going on around her, and particularly so here.

  Drysines were pouring in behind, but in straggling formation. Most of the armouries were nearer the perimeter, closer to where drones would deploy to meet external threats. Arming there, then getting here, took a while, particularly as some of the armouries in other parts of Tartarus were still engulfed in heavy fighting. It looked to Trace as though four armouries had been thoroughly captured, producing these successful thrusts of armed drones toward the central hub. Another three armouries were much less successful, with far heavier sard resistance than they’d seen here, and unarmed drones destroyed in large numbers. If they couldn’t shoot back, even drones were vulnerable.

  “Styx?” she asked. “Our numbers here are good but our positioning is patchy, we’ve got massive gaps on our flanks. We can’t spread out because we lose fire volume intensity, I’d rather they tried to flank us through those gaps and get caught in our crossfire.”

  “Yes,” Styx agreed.

  “Do we have enough? Can you tell what we’re up against?” Random fire snapped off nearby steel, close enough to feel the vibration through her gloved grip on cover.

  “Uncertain as yet. Jamming is strong, and I have no eyes on the hub to inform tacnet further. There should be no advancing beyond this position until our numbers grow.”

  “I copy that.” It gnawed at her, though. She was hardly eager to take her marines across open space into the kind of defences that could be waiting… but somewhere up ahead was a deepynine queen, and quite probably an alo presence of some sort. And that connection, if they could see it, prove it and understand it, could tell them just how much danger the human race was actually in. Without that knowledge, they were blind.

  “Hey buddy, you okay?” That was Terez, talking to a drone of all things. One-and-a-half times his size in the body, far wider across the legs… only several of those legs were missing from gunfire, and it now struggled to remove a dangling remnant with its cutting-tool. A slash and it was gone, and the drone departed.

  “Leo, you fucking nuts?” Rolonde asked Terez.

  “Just making conversation,” said Terez. “Guess they’re not big on conversation.”

  Trace’s feed began fracturing with static, and her suit tactical warned her that local coms traffic had reached such intense volumes that it was interfering with her marines’ communications. “Styx, tell your drones to turn it down a bit, they’re breaking up our coms.”

  “I will tell them Major. They are excited and angry, and unaccustomed to coordinating with humans.”

  Trace found it easier to pretend she hadn’t heard that, rather than trying to process it. Styx was translating into concepts humans might understand, surely, and she couldn’t take it literally. A drone grappled onto the star-arm she was using for cover, and Trace saw the little portal open in the gap between armoured thorax and abdomen, and the arm inserted. Definitely some kind of data-uplink… Rael had made a joke about scrabble, but electronic brains had no need for physical pastimes when they could experience an electronic, VR reality far more intensely than humans. Was this really their communal space, where they came to plug into a larger, singular reality?

  She pushed out from within the star-frame, and was confronted by a drone stopping immediately before her with a burst of white thrust. Dual eyes, one big, one small and off-set within a central mobile head, a big cutting tool held in small arms below, twin rotary cannon on the main abdomen, recently added from the armoury. Amidst added thrusters, half its arms were occupied, while a middle pair gestured at her aggressively.

  “Whoa whoa whoa!” Kono said in alarm, swinging his rifle about to the drone confronting his major.

  “It’s okay Giddy,” she told him. “Just cool it.” Red laser light flashed on her visor from the drone’s carapace… lasercom? Her suit received and decoded it reflexively.

  “This unit is A1,” announced a very synthetic voice in her ear. Definitely a vocal program, something dumb and automatic employed by a machine that was neither, to translate its familiar numerical communications into speech. “A1 has local command. A1 will coordinate with humans.”

  “Yes A1,” Trace replied, with deliberate calm. “How many levels of local command do you have?”

  “Multiple. A1 is sufficient for humans. Integrate tactical analysis, proceed go five nine alpha.” As the vocal processor got carried away, or A1 forgot to limit its instructions to things useful to humans… but suddenly Trace’s tacnet flashed and expanded, as though infused with many multiples of incoming data. Individual markers now glowed blue, marking drone positions beside her marines. Amazingly, those markers were not alone, but were joined by a spaghetti of multi-coloured lines. Binding those drones together in distinct formations, Trace realised. Like squads and sections, though here the numbers were irregular and she’d never make sense of it in this limited time…

  “Thank you A1,” she told the drone. “We will coordinate and kill deepynines.” It seemed safest to repeat that common cause, at this range.

  “Yes,” said A1, and jetted about and away.

  “What the hell was that?” Kono wondered.

  “Damn thing took control of my suit commands by lasercom and fed me some kind of hacksaw tacnet,” Trace told him. That was pretty scary — that they really could just assume control of human tech by remote. Or maybe these drones only knew how because Styx had shown them. “That’s an individual, their regional commander. Called himself A1.”

  “No shit,” muttered Rolonde, unimpressed.

  “They’re individuals?” Arime asked. “Not just numbers?” It was impossible to know, Trace thought. Like it was impossible to know what Styx actually thought of anything, given all of her vocal cues were just simulations that fooled human brains into thinking they’d heard human emotion where none existed. A1 identified himself as an individual because that was what humans understood. What kind of individual consciousness could just be reprogrammed by an enemy queen, and deprived of the free will to resist?

  “Major Thakur this is Phoenix,” came Lieutenant Shilu’s voice. “Pi
cket vessels are returning, most of the firebases appear to have been destroyed. Phoenix has cover on the far side of Tartarus, current trajectories suggest picket vessels are not threatening us but returning to Tartarus.”

  Trace flipped tacnet displays to see Phoenix’s feed — sure enough, multiple warships were racing in on pulse-V, and not spreading wide to open an angle on Phoenix, tucked tight behind Tartarus.

  “They’re going to flank us, probably with sard warriors, they’ll be dropped right in our rear. I’m expecting a major deepynine counterattack any moment, they’ll catch us between them.” Ahead, the shooting had died down considerably. Far off to one side, her apparent ‘right’ on this orientation, some major fireworks were flaring near the Tartarus rim. “The sard are putting most of their fight back into recapturing the warships the drysines took, we’ve only got two fully on our side, another three are heavily contested and I can’t get any reading on the rest… my viewpoint here is a lot more limited than I’d like and I don’t know how much of this tacnet feed is reliable.”

  Her visor countdown showed twenty-three minutes to Makimakala’s arrival. If the tavalai was late, or had somehow decided to screw them over, then there’d be no getting out of this for humans or drysines.

  “Major,” came Erik’s voice, “if you can’t get to the core, withdraw on AT-7.”

  “I’m getting what I came for,” Trace said grimly. Ahead, tacnet erupted with massive movement. “Here we go, counter-attack commencing… Charlie Platoon, full defensive, I want clean kills and watch your ammo.”

  She jetted to where the outer framework gave her cover and a rifle brace, activating the mild forearm magnetism that stopped her from drifting out of cover. The habitation complex, if that was what it was, spread in a wide layer across this part of the inner Tartarus sphere. Ahead of her were more nodules, blocking a clear field of fire but impractical for defence because of their exposure. It hadn’t stopped many of the drysines from occupying them, nor the surrounding superstructure, creating a multi-layered defence. Trace bit back an objection — surely drysines knew better how they’d best defend against a zero-G massed deepynine assault than she did.