by Isaac Hooke
The gusting wind ebbed and flowed over the next few hours on the march. At first Rade had been afraid of alerting the enemy to their presence, so he had instructed Fret not to send out automated pings over the enhanced comm node the communicator carried in his mech. But as the hours dragged on, and it became obvious that nothing was out there, Rade had Fret set the comm node to dispatch pings at one minute intervals. It was a potential risk, but worth it if they could contact another drop party.
At the six hour mark, the winds became particularly bad, reducing the speed of the party to a little over three kilometers an hour in the deep snow. Visibility was nil on the visual band, and ranged between ten and fifteen meters on the thermal band. Rade had dialed down his external microphone volume to zero long before then: there was nothing to hear out there but the incessant roar of the gale-force wind.
“Can’t believe this,” Fret said. “These big, bad mechs, brought to their knees by a little snow and wind!”
“Believe it,” Tahoe said. “If there’s one thing these mech aren’t, it’s aerodynamic. We’d need a rocket engine constantly firing behind us if we wanted to make any good headway in this.”
“But when you drive a wheeled vehicle up a hill against the wind, you hardly notice, except that maybe you’re pressing a little harder on the gas pedal,” Grappler argued.
“Take that wheeled vehicle and turn it into a four-tonne truck, and add some snow and ice to that hill, and let me know how well it does,” Tahoe said.
“Put chains on the wheels,” Grappler said.
“Still going to slow it down,” Tahoe said.
“Personally, I think we’re doing just fine,” Manic said. “Three kilometers an hour is great headway.”
“Like hell it is,” Bender said. “I can walk faster than that. Shit, I can do seven or eight kilometers an hour on the treadmill, at incline.”
“I doubt it,” Manic said. “After half an hour walking that fast, you’re going to have sore calves for the rest of the day. Not to mention blisters.”
“Speak for yourself, bitch,” Bender said. “Some of us are more physically fit than you. And they’re called running shoes, bro. You might want to try them. They work wonders against blisters.”
“Don’t discount the effects of height,” Grappler said. “You put me on a treadmill, anything over five kilometers an hour is a struggle for my short legs.”
“That’s why you love your strength-enhanced jumpsuit so much,” Keelhaul said. “The great equalizer.”
“Love my mech more,” Grappler said.
“Bender, you say you can walk faster than three kilometers an hour on a treadmill?” Tahoe said. “In case you haven’t noticed, there’s no treadmill out here. I invite you to step out of your mech and show us what you can do. I’d like to see how far you make it in your jumpsuit out there. I really would.”
“Ha, no thanks,” Bender said. “If I had some hovershoes, or even old school snowshoes, I might take you up on your offer. Otherwise, trying to trudge through drifts higher than I am tall isn’t my thing.”
“You’d probably only sink up to your waist,” Lui said. “Then again, the jumpsuits do add a fair bit of weight.”
“No thanks,” Bender insisted.
“Then like Manic said, we’re making good progress,” Tahoe told him.
“Is anyone else getting tired?” Fret said.
“Put your mech on autopilot, fool,” Bender said.
Rade had done so a while ago, because when piloting it himself, the inner actuators of the cockpit mimicked the external drag of the snow on the mech, translating it to his body so that it felt like he was wading through the drifts directly.
“It is on autopilot,” Fret said. “It’s just the monotony of everything. The endless white. The constant vigilance. It’s draining.”
“I’m authorizing you all to take a half hour nap,” Rade said. “While your mechs continue on autopilot. I’ll take the watch.”
Technically, it wasn’t necessary to have someone remain on watch, since the AIs of each mech would be fully alert. But it was protocol for one human pilot to stay awake in such a scenario.
“You’re our LPO, you need the rest,” Tahoe said. “Go ahead and rack out. I’ll take the watch.”
“Fine,” Rade said.
He set a timer and then closed his eyes. He was out promptly.
four
Rade awoke to the strident tone of an alarm. Blinking rapidly, for a moment he didn’t know where he was. He was expecting to be greeted by the dark gray bulkheads and steel decks of a shipboard berthing area, not the harsh reds and blacks of thermal vision.
Then he remembered he was aboard a mech, stranded on a partially-nuked alien homeworld. Heart pounding loudly in his ears, he switched to the visual band. The bright white of the snowy plains filled his vision.
“Sit-rep,” Rade said urgently over the comm.
“Nothing to report,” Tahoe said. He sounded bored. “Other than the wind has died down.”
Rade realized the alarm he had heard was the timer reaching zero. He had slept for the designated half hour. With a sigh he took several deep breaths, allowing his heart rate to calm.
He glanced at the overhead map overlaid upon the formless terrain. The eight mechs were still marching in single file. The vitals of the occupants were all green.
“Everyone awake?” Rade said.
A chorus of ayes and yeahs reached his ears as the platoon members reported in. The only one who didn’t answer was Fret.
“Fret?”
“Yeah.” He sounded groggy. “I’m here.”
Like Tahoe had said, the wind had abated greatly in the intervening half hour, so that visibility had improved to five hundred meters. The mechs had been able to resume their ten kilometer per hour pace. Still plodding, perhaps, but it was better than three kph.
“Fret, anything on the comms yet?” Rade said.
“Nada.”
“All right, well, go ahead and have your half-hour nap, Tahoe,” Rade said.
Roughly an hour later, Manic broke the silence.
“Gotta love nuclear winter,” Manic said. “We really wrecked this planet. Not that there was much to wreck in the first place, I suppose.”
“You got that right,” Tahoe said. “The planet was already cold to start with.”
“Sure,” Manic said. “But now it’s colder. Like I said, the wonders of nukes.”
“I hear the Sino-Koreans are working on something that will eliminate nukes forever,” Keelhaul said.
“What are you talking about?” Lui said. “Nothing will eliminate nukes from the fleet’s arsenal.”
“Oh yeah?” Keelhaul said. “Well the SKs got something better than nukes up their sleeve. Get this: a geronium bomb.”
“A geronium bomb...” Lui said dubiously.
“Yup. Read about it on Smiki’s Leaks.”
“That site is bullshit,” Bender said.
“Not all of it,” Keelhaul said. “They exposed the Venusgate scandal, remember.”
“I can only imagine the yield you’d get from a geronium explosion,” Tahoe said. “Makes me shudder.”
“Oh I know,” Keelhaul said. “But get this, according to the blueprints leaked to the site, the SKs aren’t planning just any old geronium bomb here. It’s a multi-warhead, multi-phase weapon designed to rip the crust right off a planet.”
“Rip off the crust?” Grappler said. “I doubt it.”
“No, it’s very possible. See, the Delivery Vehicles separate in high orbit, and spread out above the surface so that their impacts are equidistant. They vary the number of DVs based on the planet size. Anyway, once a given DV is in position, it doesn’t wait for the others, it begins its journey to the surface right away—less chance of getting shot down by planetary defenses. Upon impact, a drill unit containing the main warhead is deployed, sort of like a digger nuke. It burrows deep into the crust, and once the calculated depth is attained, it halts, waiting for the
other units.
“When all the devices are in place, a code is transmitted from warhead to warhead, planet-wide. A five second countdown begins, adjusted of course to account for the separation between the warheads and the time it took for the code to arrive. When the timer reaches zero, the embedded bombs all activate at the same time. The result is a massive cascading explosion that tears the crust right off the surface. Planet killers. Can you imagine? If the UC had something like that, we wouldn’t even be here. Hell, ground-based combat troops might not even exist at all.”
“I can see a flaw in that design already,” Tahoe said. “If you can take down even one delivery vehicle, I bet the cascade explosion would be ruined. You’ll get some fairly bad earthquakes, but not much else.”
“No, you’re wrong,” Keelhaul said. “You haven’t seen the schematics of these things. The warheads that make it through to the detonation phase will still interact enough to partially tear away the crust. And that right there will kill a planet. The disruptions to the magnetosphere, atmosphere, oceans, the endless earthquakes... you’ve ruined that world, I guarantee you.”
“Well then shoot down the main deployment device before it separates,” Tahoe said.
“Maybe. Assuming you can bypass the stealth and obfuscation measures. Like a typical ICBM, there are multiple decoys deployed with every device. And the delivery vehicles themselves have their own layers of decoys and subterfuges. I think you know how hard it is to shoot down an evasively moving target at those speeds; good luck hitting the right one with all those decoys.”
“Well, if those blueprints are true,” Tahoe said. “I’m sure the UC is working on a defensive grid of some kind to protect against such an attack. Probably expensive as hell, so they’ll only use it for Earth.”
“Sure, but as I said, a weapon like that mostly eliminates the need for ground troops.”
“You’ll always need combat troops,” Bender said. “No one would ever use a weapon like that. The only reason for it to exist is as a deterrent.”
“Not so sure about that,” Fret said. “If we had a weapon like that, you can bet your sister’s pussy we would have used it here. At least I hope we would have.”
“What?” Bender said. “Don’t be bringing my sister’s pussy into the conversation.”
“Maybe your sister wants me to bring her pussy into the conversation.”
Rade cancelled his autopilot. He might need to intervene, soon.
“If you don’t shut it,” Bender said. “I’m going to eject from my mech and you can tell me to my face how much my sister wants her pussy in the conversation. And it’s not going to end well for you.”
“Better stay in your mech if you do that,” Fret said. “Because I’m not leaving mine.” He was quiet a moment. “I licked your sister’s pussy.”
Bender spun his mech and leaped toward Fret.
Rade was ready. He intercepted and deployed his shield, using it to shove Bender backward. “That’s enough you two. Back in line, Bender. Fret, quit provoking him.”
“Sorry boss,” Fret said. “Sorry Bender. I was being an idiot.”
Bender growled over the comm, but returned to his position in line. The march resumed.
“I’d hope we wouldn’t ever find ourselves in a political environment that would even consider the use of such a thing as a planet killer,” Lui mused. “Not that what we’ve done here is any better, but at least we’ve left the planet relatively intact.”
“Look around,” Grappler said. “Does this look intact to you? It’ll be hundred, maybe thousands of years before the planet recovers. Did you know that in addition to the radiation, we ripped a hole as big as a continent in their ozone layer equivalent?”
“Terraforming can help,” Tahoe said.
“But that’s my point,” Lui said. “At least the planet will recover. You rip the crust off a planet, it will never recover. The planet is killed, as you say.”
“Well, never fear,” Keelhaul said. “These planet-killers are decades away. We’ll probably never see them during our tenure on the Teams. Well, excluding the lifers among you—if you survive that long, that is.”
“Then why bring them up?” Fret said.
“I don’t know,” Keelhaul said. “Better than talking about Bender’s sister and her pussy all day, isn’t it?”
“Hey!” Bender said.
Shortly thereafter the party came upon a series of circular, snow-covered humps protruding from the drifts.
Manic, currently on point, diverted to explore one of them.
“Careful...” Rade said.
Manic swiveled the electrolaser into his right hand and the cobra his left. When he neared the hump, he wiped the snow from the top with the stock of his cobra. He continued digging away in that manner, and shortly folded the weapons away to use his hands.
“What do you have, Manic?” Rade said. He switched to Manic’s point of view and watched as he uncovered a large brown object.
“I think it’s a bioengineered creature,” Manic said. “I got a fur-covered flank so far.”
He slowly dug up the collapsed, frozen mass. Rade recognized four thick limbs protruding from an elephantine torso, as well as a large head. It looked, for all intents and purposes, like a Woolly Mammoth. He pulled up the encyclopedia entry for the extinct mammal on his Implant. This creature had the same sloping back, small ears, and shaggy coat of the extinct beast, though in place of the trunk were two reddish tentacles. It had no tusks, either, but a maw with two large, downward curving canines. Meaning they were carnivores, rather than herbivores like the extinct animals.
“Fret, Grappler, uncover those two,” Rade pointed out two more humps near them.
In moments Fret and Grappler had unveiled two more creatures of the same species.
Fret scanned one of them. “Far as I can tell, their blood is basically antifreeze.”
“But at some point didn’t someone theorize that these bioengineered creatures were cold-blooded?” Grappler said.
“Apparently these ones aren’t,” Fret said.
“So why did they die?” Rade asked.
“Well, they were obviously engineered for a cold environment,” Fret said. “But I’m guessing, not this extreme. The temperature has dropped on average by ten degrees planet-wide since we unleashed the nukes. In some places, like where we are, the drop is closer to forty degrees. They couldn’t adapt. I’m sure the radiation didn’t help matters, either. See this one? Its coat has fallen out in clumps. And look at these marks on the bare skin. Radiation burns.”
“Wouldn’t they have to be directly exposed to the nuclear detonation to get burned like that?” Grappler said.
“They’d be incinerated if that happened,” Manic said.
“No, I mean at a distance, obviously.”
“Maybe they were, but then ran away and ended up here,” Keelhaul said.
“Localized beta burns, people,” Lui said. “It happens when fallout lands on you.”
Rade nodded slowly.
“I’m starting to wonder if maybe all life on the planet has been exterminated after all,” Tahoe said.
“If that’s true, then there’s absolutely no point for us to be here, none at all,” Bender said. “We were sent to kill the survivors. Can’t do that if there’s nothing to kill.”
“Then who shot us down?” Fret said.
“Has to be an automated defense system of some kind,” Tahoe said. “Think about it. If everyone on Earth was wiped out tomorrow, our defenses and their AIs would still be operational. They would live on.”
“That’s exactly what I’m afraid of,” Rade said.
“You’re thinking of all those robots the enemy liked to tote about with them?” Bender said.
“That’s exactly what I’m thinking.”
“Guess we still have some exterminating to do after all,” Bender said. “Killing of robos is still killing.”
“It certainly is,” Rade said. “Though it’s not goi
ng to be easy, considering that those robos will be shooting back. I’d almost prefer the bioengineered swarms.”
The march continued uneventfully for the next several hours. They survived on the meal replacements in their jumpsuits and the recycled water.
It took twelve long hours in total to reach the calculated drop point. He authorized two separate half-hour naps during the march. When they finally arrived at the target site, there was nothing there but endless white drifts.
The snowstorm had completely subsided at that point, though the sky was still overcast of course. Visibility had increased to a crisp four kilometers. On his camera, Rade zoomed in and out, searching his surroundings.
There were no depressions or protrusions in the snow; no bombers jetting past overhead; no signs of any sort of staging area
“All right,” Rade said. “We got a twenty kilometer square area to explore. We’re going to split into groups of two and begin a grid search.” He created four two-person teams and then assigned the routes. “Make liberal use of your zoom lenses while you’re out there, people.”
They spent the next six hours combing the site, to no avail.
When they mustered at the center of the grid after the sixth hour, Fret said: “Maybe no one else survived the drop.” He sounded weary, unsurprisingly. They were all exhausted.
“The more palatable answer,” Bender said. “Is that the boss’ AI is full of shit.”
“What do you have to say for yourself, Jerry?” Rade said. “Because I refuse to believe we’re the only survivors of the invasion.”
“My apologies,” the AI replied over the main comm for the benefit of everybody. “The margin of error in my calculations may been slightly greater than I believed.”
“Slightly greater, my ass,” Bender said. “More like a lot greater.”
“So what now, boss?” Grappler asked Rade.
