Assault Troopers

by Vaughn Heppner

  N7 stepped near and pushed his box behind my neck. I heard nothing. A moment later, the android withdrew the box.

  “Well?” I asked.

  “It is as I expected,” N7 said.

  “You can start talking anytime you want.”

  “I am talking.”

  I tilted my head. “Android got attitude,” I said. “Either that’s a further upgrade you’ve been holding back or you have a high learning curve.”

  “Your obedience chip has shorted out,” N7 said.

  “I don’t think so. It has to have a failsafe for that sort of thing. I’m thinking ka-boom would be the failsafe.”

  “Your cynicism has merit,” N7 said. “Under normal circumstances, you would be correct. Any tampering, any shorting would result in an immediate explosion ending in death.”

  “But…?” I asked.

  “These are extraordinary circumstances—the chip is on combat setting. The failsafe was disengaged to allow for just this kind of incident. Upon our return, each Earthbeast and android will pass under a scanner.”

  “Wait a minute. You’re telling me that you wear an obedience chip?”

  “You know that I do,” N7 said.

  I thought about that. My mind was foggy…oh yeah, I remembered Claath saying something about that.

  “I am Jelk property,” N7 said. “Just as you are Jelk property.”

  “So…you’re telling me that your chip has also been disabled?” I asked.

  “Yes, I am saying exactly that,” N7 said. “The intensity of the main PDS beam’s electromagnetic pulse must have melted critical circuitry when it ignited near us. Now that we are free, I suggest we find a Lokhar ship and escape while we can.”

  “Are you hearing this?” I asked Rollo.

  “Loud and clear,” Rollo said.

  “Why do you want me to come with you?” I asked N7.

  “I need a crew,” the android said.

  That seemed reasonable. “How big a crew are you talking about?” I asked.

  “Twenty, twenty-three humans would be optimum,” N7 said.

  “How many androids would you take?”

  “None,” N7 said.

  “You don’t trust your own kind?”

  “I alone have elevated to a self-directing, sentient status.”

  I tried my bad leg, and pain shot through my knee.

  “Overman Creed,” Ella said. “Lokhar reinforcements are coming.”

  “I got it,” I told Ella. “How many troopers do we have left?”

  “In our near vicinity,” Ella said, “a little over three hundred.”

  “We must leave now while we can,” N7 said.

  “Come on, N7,” I said. “Do you really think I’m going to run out on my troopers?”

  “I offer you continued existence,” N7 said. “To remain an Earthbeast—”

  “Who said I’m going to remain one?” I asked. “The obedience chip is gone. The blast must have done it as you suggest. Now—”

  “You do yet comprehend,” N7 said. “This is the rarest of opportunities. You are a free agent, as am I, and we are in a place that undoubtedly holds spacecraft. We must simply find one and affect an escape.”

  “Good luck,” I said.

  “You are not joining me?”

  “Negative, N7. You’re joining me.”

  With blurring speed, the android drew a Lokhar gun, aiming it at my stomach.

  “For the first time in my existence,” N7 said, “I have become a free will agent. This has been my greatest wish for many weeks now. I have maneuvered carefully to reach this phase of existence. I computed you as the creature most likely to help me reach this state. I will not now surrender my free will to reenter servitude.”

  “I’m not suggesting you do,” I said.

  “You have a messiah complex,” N7 said. “You have an irrational belief that you will achieve your goals no matter what kind of obstacles you face. Against reason, you have succeeded until now. Eventually, the ratios, the odds, will combine against you and crush you out of existence. I have no messiah complex or suicidal tendencies. I will not join you in an ill-fated attempt to dethrone Shah Claath, as it cannot be done.”

  “You’re calling me crazy, yet you’re the one with the impossible plan. Think about it for a moment. You’re going to try to fly a pirated spaceship out of here during this massed combat.”

  “It is the only possible opening for us,” N7 said. “You of all people should be willing to take the risk.”

  “And I’m telling you there is a better way,” I said. “We have to return to the battlejumper.”

  “It is as I predicted,” N7 said. “You are an irrational optimist. Earth has become a Jelk mining world. Your species nears extinction. There is nothing you can do to alter that fact.”

  “I’m guessing N-series androids don’t become free will agents too often, do they?”

  “If they receive as many upgrades as I’ve won—”

  “No, no, no,” I said. “That’s a load of crap. You must be rare. Otherwise—if Claath had known about the possibility of your rebellion—the Jelk wouldn’t have risked giving you the upgrades. Something strange happened with you, some spark, I don’t know. I wonder what Ella would think of this?”

  “None of these things matter,” N7 said, with a wave of his left hand. The armor covering the middle three fingers was darker than the rest of his cyber-suit. “If you refuse to aid me—”

  “Don’t forget that Rollo has a targeting circle on your neck,” I said. “You shoot me, you die. Now you’ve already told me that you don’t have suicidal tendencies. So you’ve got yourself a hard choice to make, N7. Put away the gun and accept that you’re my prisoner for now.”

  “To use later as a bargaining chip with Shah Claath?” N7 asked.

  “Don’t worry,” I said. “I’m not going to bargain with the devil. I’m going to kill him.”

  “Even if it were possible for you to kill Shah Claath, your existence would be extremely shortened. Given your success, the Jelk Corporation would put a bounty on your head.”

  “Are you kidding me?” I asked. “We fought our way into here. I’m not worried about a few bounty hunters.”

  “You are being optimistically foolish,” N7 said. “Lokhar reinforcements continue to reach the PDS. We must escape immediately before we’re overwhelmed with numbers.”

  “I’m not abandoning my troopers to join you and I’m not bargaining with the devil. I’m going to pull a Blackbeard on Claath and you’re going to help me. That’s why I need you, N7. Like I told you once, you have a wealth of information stored in that bio-brain of yours. I need that data.”

  “Then believe me when I say my data shows me that your plan cannot work.”

  “You haven’t even heard my plan,” I said.

  “I see,” N7 said. “Your tribalism demands that you go through various procedures before you can admit to yourself that your cause is hopeless. Perhaps after that you will listen to logic. Yes, tell me your plan.”

  I squinted at the android. “Before I tell you anything we first have to take care of the approaching Lokhars. So I’ll tell you afterward. Now lower the gun, N7, or die. The choice is yours. I’m the irrational one that always wins, remember. You’ve already computed that, which is why you’ve played your hand the way you have.”

  “Creed,” Ella said. “We don’t have much time.”

  “You heard the woman, N7,” I said. “What’s it going to be?”

  The android lowered the gun.

  I exhaled sharply. His momentary surrender meant I was going to have to put weight on my bum knee. I gritted me teeth and set down my boot. Damn, but that hurt. It hurt badly.

  This wasn’t going to be easy.

  -23-

  I think the tigers were boiling mad, and maybe one of their top commanders had become desperate. Their great beam had fallen silent. I imagine the space battle went well for the Jelk, while the guardian fleet had lost the PDS’s pillar
-like beam.

  What I’m trying to say is that the approaching Lokhars, in my humble opinion, wanted us too much. They became reckless and acted predictably. That was bad in a battle, particularly where one side had laser rifles, pulse grenades and the added benefit of the claymore-like mine-launcher.

  We ambushed the tigers and cut several cohorts-worth to ribbons, with plenty of misting blood. It cost us, though. The Lokhars didn’t know what it meant to quit.

  By the end of the ambush, I only had two hundred Earth troopers left.

  With N7 in the middle of the formation, we rampaged through the PDS, working our way toward a fellow legion. They had fought hard, too, taking horrendous casualties. We mapped as we traveled and we studied what we could.

  Using my right leg made my knee pound with pain. If I turned the wrong way, I nearly collapsed. The agony made it hard to think. But if ever there was a time to think things through, this was it. I knew my window of opportunity had arrived. The obedience chip no longer leashed me. I couldn’t see how I’d get another chance like this. That meant I had to think to the core of my being. Humanity’s survival might very well depend on it.

  As we traveled through Lokhar corridors, bays, storage areas and engine compartments, I tried to envision this from the Jelk’s point of view. If I were a little red-skinned bastard using slaves as assault troopers…

  “I’ve been thinking,” I told N7, trying to keep my voice level. “Does Claath have anything inside the battlejumper that causes the bio-suits to malfunction while we’re wearing them?”

  “Not malfunction,” N7 said. “But he does have a failsafe switch. Once it emits the needed signal, the bio-suits will suffocate you to death.”

  “Great,” I said. “So our suits are walking deathtraps?”

  “If the living armor receives the correct frequency, yes,” N7 said.

  Speaking of frequencies, I fiddled with the helmet until I keyed in just Rollo, Ella, Dmitri and N7.

  I explained the situation to them in detail, adding, “We need to break down the problem into its component parts. We have a large number of unleashed humans who can finally attack the Jelk without worrying about their heads blowing off. Our problem is that we’re on a Lokhar PDS, far away from the battlejumpers. If we can find a means of reaching the fleet, we still have to get inside Claath’s ship. Then, supposing we can conquer his battlejumper, we have to find a way to fly it and separate ourselves from the rest of the fleet, and from the Starkiens.”

  “It can’t be done,” Ella said.

  “I understand that’s the savant in you speaking,” I said. “But we battled our way onto a Saurian lander many months ago, remember? All I had was an M-14 and Rollo his forty-five. It couldn’t have been done then, but we did it. So we’re going to do it now.”

  “Then I suggest you use similar tactics now as then,” Ella said.

  “I didn’t use any tactics,” I said. “I just went for it.”

  “Do that now,” Ella said.

  “We’re assault troopers now. We’re trained killers. Let’s use that training to save our species.”

  “Problem number one is transport,” Rollo said. “Maybe we should just climb into our assault boats and fly back.”

  “First,” I said, extending an index finger, waggling the tip in front of his face, “a lot of those boats are too shot-up to fly. Second, how do you propose to make it through the battling fleets?”

  “We did it once,” Rollo said. “We just do it again as Ella suggested.”

  “Maybe the fleet battle is over,” Ella said. “That would solve the problem of reaching Claath’s battlejumper.”

  “We want to do this while the battle still rages,” I said. “The chaos gives us our opportunity.”

  “You are not going to get perfection,” Ella said.

  “Not perfection,” I muttered. “You know…didn’t the Lokhars have teleporting blast-ships? N7, what about that?”

  “I know little concerning such vessels,” N7 said. “I have, however, been given to understand that teleportation is an unstable technology. Shah Claath believes the Lokhars set antimatter bombs in their teleport-ships in order to detonate near the enemy. If you’re considering pirating such vessels—”

  “You’re reading my mind,” I said. “We pirate some, teleport the distance and reach our fleet.”

  “The Starkiens will immediately beam us,” N7 said.

  “Right,” I said, “I’ve already thought of that. You provide the Starkiens with friend-or-foe data.”

  “I congratulate you,” N7 said. “That is a reasonable idea. Under the circumstances, however, the Starkiens will ignore recognition codes and beam us anyway.”

  “How do you know that?” I asked.

  “It is standard Jelk procedure,” N7 said. “Such alterations could be ruinous in a battle. Therefore, the procedures protecting against battlefield surprises are stringent. Caution means destroying anything even slightly different from standard.”

  “All right, scratch that idea,” I said.

  “There’s enemy company coming, commander,” Rollo said.

  “Throw it up on the HUD,” I said.

  We each pressed certain helmet pressure-switches: him to transmit and me to receive. As if I was Iron Man, the schematic flickered onto my visor. A huge hangar bay was below our position and one was also above. To the sides were weapons storage chambers and what seemed like a tiger hospital.

  “Where are the others?” I asked, meaning the other legion.

  Rollo told me they were above and to our left. The tiger formation headed straight at us.

  “It’s time to pull a Cannae,” I said.

  Cannae had been the perfect battle between the Carthaginians and the Romans during the Second Punic War. Modern Germans had studied the battle, particularly the general who came up with the Schlieffen Plan of WWI. Many of the German generals during WWII had also hoped to repeat the ancient performance. At the Kiev Pocket in the summer of 1941, the Germans used Cannae tactics and captured 665,000 Russian troops.

  In a nutshell, in 216 B.C., Hannibal Barca lured the massed Roman legions into attacking straight ahead. During the assault, the Romans pushed the Carthaginian front line into a U shape as Hannibal wheeled other troops around the Roman sides. The capstone was when the Carthaginian horsemen closed the back gate by attacking the rear Roman ranks. Then it had been butcher time as Hannibal’s killers pressed the Romans into a tighter and tighter ball. I’d read before that some Romans couldn’t even lift their arms due to the press of others around them. When a Carthaginian sword or spear struck, the poor Roman legionary hadn’t even been able to dodge.

  In the alien corridors, I barked orders, and we forgot about battlejumpers, teleporting and anything else pertaining to the outside world. Three maniples first charged forward and engaged the lead Lokhar elements. Then, using over-watching fire, my troopers leapfrogged back, beaming the enemy and retreating before the tigers could unlimber their heavy weapons.

  It took ten minutes as the Lokhars roared their way into the trap. My cavalry locking the back gate would be the other Earth legion. Through the command channel, I outlined the situation to its assault leader, a black man by the name of Smith-Bell. He had a British background and something of an accent.

  The tigers were brave, they were strong and they had good tech. What they lacked was imagination.

  I joined Rollo and his century. “Now,” I whispered.

  The cannoneers, as we’d starting calling them, used the captured Lokhar chest cannons. They blasted new openings, and we caught tigers creeping down a corridor.

  I knelt on my good knee and pressed the firing stud of a laser I’d taken off a dead trooper. The hot beam burned a hole in a tiger helmet. I kept it on target until I saw a splash of green Lokhar gore. I switched targets and burned through a visor. At the last second, I saw a tiger face in there twist in agony.

  Twenty-five seconds later, by N7’s count, Rollo called the all clear.

>   Two more troopers in my company had died. I kept myself from looking at their gory remains. This was a sickening battle that refused to end.

  I’ll keep it simple. We lost another fifteen troopers and murdered the entire tiger force. We gave the Lokhars a good old-fashioned Cannae and bought ourselves a breathing spell. Now I had to use it. Now I had to figure out a way back to the battlejumpers.

  “Talk to me, N7,” I said, marching to the android as he fiddled with a tablet-like device.

  The android lowered the tablet and turned to face me. “The planetary defense station doubles as a ship-repair yard and arsenal,” he said. “I’m certain we can find a ship or ships to take us away from here.”

  “None of that matters until we know the situation,” I said. “I need a scanning room, a command chamber. Can you use Lokhar tech?”

  “Of course,” N7 said. “I have multipurpose capabilities.”

  “This isn’t the time to brag,” I said. “Only action counts. Where’s the nearest command post?”

  “Check grid four-T-twenty,” N7 said.

  I brought up the schematic. “I see it.”

  “I suggest we employ haste.”

  “Lead the way,” I said. “Rollo, are you watching our captive?” I meant N7.

  “Yes, Overman.”

  “Dmitri, how about giving me a hand,” I said.

  I put an arm around the Cossack’s shoulder. With the remnant of my legion, I followed N7. The other legion was coming, following us via the comm channels.

  It took seven minutes and several claymores before we entered a large chamber. It had a baroque screen with weird looking symbols running up and down the sides. The third symbol was a pyramid with a lidless eye in it. I counted nine stations in here. None of them had chairs. The operators would have had to stand while using them.

  “The tigers aren’t into comfort,” I said.

  N7 unerringly moved to the station nearest the screen. He stood looking down at the controls.

  “Problem?” I asked.

  N7 glanced at me and maybe he took in all the Earthers filing into the room. He lifted his hands, gingerly set them on the controls and began to test them.

  I got tired of waiting with my arm around Dmitri. “Over there,” I said.