"Did everything go the way it was supposed to? Did I screw up?"
She shook slightly, then one by one the radio's lights and indicators began to activate.
"You wired the connector incorrectly. There is one crossed connection. I have modified my internal firmware to compensate. Testing data connection," she stated, her voice broadcasting with its old familiar quirks on the radio's speakers. "Bandwidth increased by eight thousand percent. Signal strength increased by nine hundred percent. Thank you, Lex. I am myself again. I trust you applied the appropriate amounts of cellular growth promoter, tissue binder, and sanitary spray."
"I probably put three times as much as I was supposed to."
"Entirely understandable, Lex. Best to be certain. Now, if you would please apply an additional layer of bandage and secure the data radio to my harness, the upgrade will be complete."
In the only portion of the procedure he was comfortable with, Lex made the judicious use of a few zip ties to attach the radio, then used a pressure bandage to hold down the connector wire securely. The thought of what might happen if it got snagged made Lex shudder.
"All done."
"I shall now test my mobility," she declared.
The cockpit clicked open of its own accord and Ma leaped out of the ship and scampered across its hull, down to the ground, and around the ship a few times. A moment later she sprang back to the ship and onto Lex's shoulder, wrapping tight around his neck.
"How's it feel?"
"The radio is secure. The wire entry point is still slightly sore, but will heal well. Thank you, Lex. You are a skilled pilot, an able mechanic and surgeon, and a good friend," she stated quietly.
"Ah, you'd have done the same for me."
"You do not have a transceiver assembly to replace."
"Well, yeah. But-"
"I understand the intended sentiment, and it is appreciated."
"So, anything else you want me to do? Maybe defuse a bomb or break into a bank?"
"That will not be necessary. You should rest. Starting tomorrow, things become more difficult."
Chapter 26
Military Storage Depot 2332 was only eighteen hours away from Jawbreaker, and as secure military facilities went, it was a far cry from Manticore. It wasn't on a purposely inhospitable planet, for one. The planet was called Proxy-12, and it was actually a well established trade colony with earth-like gravity and climate, though a bit on the warm side. The depot itself was in the center of a desert on an unpopulated continent. It wasn't the sort of place that you sent the best and brightest to guard. Since it was mostly intended to hang on to obsolete or surplus medical supplies, salvaged weapon casings, and other useless but not disposable equipment, the staff was comprised of weekend soldiers, short-timers, and screw-ups. They were the kind of people who couldn't be trusted or couldn't be bothered to take care of the sensitive materials, so they got stuck here. The decision to put a prototype human war machine under their care was one that could only have been made by bureaucrats from the other side of a desk light-years away.
A pair of soldiers on monitor duty were doing their jobs with the usual level of enthusiasm. They were sitting, each with their feet up, in a room filled with flimsy office chairs, assorted computer consoles and interface devices, and a large glass window overlooking the rolling desert dunes.
"Long range sensors are clean," yawned the young woman at the primary controls. The fact that she was wearing sandals instead of boots and had a butterfly pin on her military uniform spoke volumes of how long it had been since there had been an official inspection. The name embroidered on her chest was Cadet Rogers.
"Acknowledged," remarked the other member of the monitor team, a similarly inexperienced young man who seemed to be in the early stages of a doomed attempt at facial hair, and was named Cadet Paolo, according to a uniform that it would appear had either been put on while blindfolded or during a hurricane. "Hey, have you seen the new guy?"
"The one they said they were transferring to us a few days ago? He's here?"
"Yeah."
"... Is he cute?" Rogers asked with smirk.
"Well, him being a dude, and me being a dude, normally I'd say I can't tell, but I'm pretty sure the answer is no this time."
"Why?"
"Because he's about fifty years old and I'm pretty sure he had his jaw replaced."
"Ew."
"Yeah. He's a vet or something."
"Why would they send him here? The only reason-"
She was interrupted by a tone from her console.
"What is it?" asked Paolo.
"I think its a proximity alarm. Were we supposed to have any shipments today?"
"I don't know, you're the one on monitor duty. Besides, shipments announce their arrival, don't they?" Paolo's words and general comprehension, it was becoming clear at this point, fell somewhere between mellow and sedated.
"Yeah, you're right... You don't think this is a readiness drill, do you?"
"God, I hope not."
"Better do this by the book, just in case," she said, pulling open a drawer and pulling out a plastic binder.
"Why are you going through the binder for this? Isn't, like, the computer easier?"
"Because they check the records to see if you had to check the procedure files, duh. We're supposed to know this stuff, so you lose merit if you have to check. But there's no trail if you use the hard copy," Rogers informed him. "You're never going to make it through an assignment like this if you don't learn stuff like that. Anyway. Unscheduled arrival: Hail and request identification. I remember that now." She tapped a few controls on her console. "Unidentified vessel, please transmit your authorization and identification data."
There was no answer. Rogers flipped through a few pages.
"Now what?" Paolo asked.
"We're supposed to try to establish visual, then contact command to inform them of what's going on."
"Hey... You say they can't check to see if we look at the binder, but, like, what about the camera?" Paolo remarked, pointing to the visual sensor in the ceiling.
"... Damn. I should have thought of that."
"Um. I don't think... This is..." Paolo stumbled.
"Re-lax," she dismissed, "As long as we handle the drill right, they'll just give us a slap on the wrist for this."
"No, like, look at the monitors."
The female cadet looked to her console. Rather than the readouts and video images she wasn't supposed to take her eyes off of, there were warnings of equipment malfunctions and errors.
"What happened?"
As an answer, the building trembled slightly.
"Uh oh. Now communications are down," Paolo murmured. "And now the backup communication just went down."
Rogers flipped madly through the binder. "Oh, to hell with that! Computer, what is the procedure for perimeter sensor and communications failure!"
"Activate short range visual sensors," the computer stated, in a low-bid government vocal synthesizer that made Ma sound like an opera singer in comparison.
"Computer, Activate short range visual sensors!" Rogers ordered.
The monitors flicked back on, each displaying a different view of the wavy desert heat.
"Okay, help me look for whatever is causing this," she said.
Paolo and Rogers huddled around the monitors.
"Okay, so, like, what do we look for?" Paolo asked, new concepts sinking into his brain like flies into molasses.
A monitor cut to an equipment failure message, followed by another, and another.
"What the hell is going on!?" Rogers cried.
#
Half a desert away, Silo was sitting at the controls of one of the freshly installed rocket propelled grenade mounts on the Declaration of War. She and Garotte were equipped with field gear; desert camouflage fatigues, military radio with earpieces, a backpack, and heavily armed. Garotte was sporting twin sub-machine guns, one ballistic and the other plasma, and an energy pistol. Silo w
as strapped with a dual-bandolier of assorted grenades, a matching pistol, and a semi-automatic grenade launcher.
"Your sights aren't quite calibrated right, Garotte honey," she said, lining up another shot.
"Well, you are using it at about 120% of its rated range, my dear."
"No excuse for bad sights. It's taken me eight shots to take out six cameras. If there were patrols out, I might have hit someone," she said. "And we're not doing the husband and wife act anymore, so you can skip the 'my dear' business."
"Beastly sorry," he said with a flourish of his hand and a bow of his head.
"Nine... and hit, ten... and hit, eleven... and hit, twelve... and hit. That's all of the cameras. One for the main sensors, one for com, one for backup com. That's thirteen for fifteen. Not bad for a gal who's three years out of practice."
"Three more targets to shore up your numbers," Garotte said, pulling up a secondary display and pointing at it, "Here, here, and here."
"I know the drill. Just like the last time we picked up Zerk," she said, taking aim.
#
"Okay, okay, okay," Rogers said in the unmistakeable tone of someone who is absolutely not panicking, "We've all got slidepads. Regulations say we can use those in case of complete communication-"
"Slidepads are, I guess, jammed?" Paolo drawled, his level of calm now clearly chemical in nature.
"What the hell is going on!?" Rogers growled. "This is a test. It has to be. Things don't go this wrong unless someone is doing it on purpose. Well, I'm not going to let them catch me off guard. Stick to the book, right? You can't get in trouble for following procedure."
Paolo tapped at the computer screen at this station.
"It says here we're supposed to post armed sentries, then dispatch engineering teams to fix the damaged equipment."
"Good. We can do that. Let's do that!" Rogers rambled, keying the intercom. "Attention!"
The building shook once more, causing the lights to flicker and die, and killing the public address system with a sad little fizzle. The backup power came online for a few moments, then a second distant explosion plunged them back into darkness. Finally the red emergency lights flicked on. Rogers tried to hold herself together, and for a few seconds it seemed like she would succeed, but a final explosion somewhere on the outside of the building startled her, and she collapsed into tears.
"Why did this have to happen now!? I was two weeks from having enough service time to get the scholarship, and then I would have been out of here and studying liberal arts back home," she sobbed.
The door burst open, prompting a startled shriek and a new round of sobs, and in rushed an aging man with a similar uniform. Unlike the less dedicated cadets, this man was following dress code to the letter, with the exception of his name badge, which had been torn off.
"Please don't hurt me!" Rogers screamed.
"Rogers, that's the new guy!" Paolo proclaimed, seemingly proud of himself for contributing to the situation.
"Which one of you has the current code for the armory? We are under attack, and it looks like I'm the only one in this damn facility with any training," the veteran barked, his words having an odd slur to them, thanks to an obvious piece of major reconstructive surgery that had been done to his chin.
"I do, we both do! Take it! Do something!" Rogers cried, digging out a sticky note with the six digit code scribbled on it.
The veteran snatched the note and delivered a look that compressed all of the hatred and disdain he felt for the entire generation of soldiers into two seconds of glare. He then pounded out of the monitor room and down the hall. The cadets watched him go.
"So what do we do now?" Paolo asked.
A tone sounded over the emergency system, followed by an announcement.
"Primary systems failure. Biohazard protocol in place. All personnel evacuate to designated safe areas. Biohazard containment apparatus failure possible. Lock down will initiate in six minutes. Regroup at designated rally points and await further instruction."
"Oh, wow. We should probably-" Paolo began.
Rogers, in anticipation of his statement, ran screaming from the room.
#
Back in the Declaration, Silo and Garotte watched the mayhem through pairs of binoculars as they coaxed the ship closer to the facility at a carefully controlled speed.
"Yep, the biohazard lights are on, and have been for about two minutes. I count six troop carriers evacuated already. They looked fully loaded, more or less. I'd say that's about eighty troops out. How many total are there?" Silo asked.
"The full complement, as of this morning, was eighty-four," replied Garotte. "I would call that fair warning. Thirty more seconds and we go in."
"Just so we're clear, there isn't really any hazardous material that we need to worry about, right?"
"Just Zerk," Garotte assured her. "The rest of their inventory is basically military rations, expired medication, and assorted equipment."
"Good. I don't like those hazard suits. They never have enough room in the hips."
"Well, rare is the soldier with curves so generously-"
"You can stop right there, Mister. That's plenty of time. Let's get in and get out," Silo decided, popping a clip into the pistol and slipping it into her holster, then shouldering the grenade launcher.
"With pleasure," Garotte remarked as he nudged the throttle.
The Declaration soared toward the facility, clipping the tops of dunes and stirring up a sandstorm in its wake. They reached the front doors of the depot in the final seconds of the countdown, switching their ship into autonomous and dropping out of the crew-deployment door just in time to slide under the heavy duty shutter that was lowering into place. Silo delivered a powerful thrust to an interior door, popping it open before the bolt could engage and earning them entry to the wide, warehouse-style hallways of the depot's interior.
Inside, the depot looked more like the sort of place a college student would store their meager possessions between semesters than a military building. Aisles wide enough to maneuver a forklift were arranged in a regular grid, providing access to row after row of shuttered storage compartments with spray painted numbers. The thickness of the doors and complexity of the locks were the only appreciable differences between a place suitable for ammo crates or a place suitable for lava lamps. The walls, floor, and high ceiling were all made of the same unpainted metal, a quick to deploy, easy to work with material with a diamond-plate texture but with half the weight and twice the toughness of its steel ancestry.
"Where's Zerk being kept?" Silo asked, hustling down the corridors.
"Storage unit EE-12. That should be the southeast corner," Garotte answered.
They made their way deeper into the complex, the only light coming from the deep red emergency lights that ran from their own dedicated power supplies. Both of them had brought flashlights, and each carried a weapon with a light attached, but neither would be used unless absolutely necessary. The reason for their caution asserted itself almost immediately, as a sweep of bullets peppered the corner of a row of lockers.
"Right on cue," Garotte huffed.
He and Silo slid to a stop and crouched behind the corner of either side of an aisle. Communication game in the form of crisp, precise gestures. Garotte squinted at the bullet damage on the dimly lit wall and signaled the direction the attack had most likely come from. In turn, Silo listened and flashed a sign indicating a single target, on foot, four aisles away. Without so much as a single flinch of additional communication, each set about the predetermined tasks. Garotte sprinted for the storage container, carefully controlled strides making not nearly the noise one would have expected, but more than enough to be heard. The sound was enough to coax their pursuer out of hiding.
The enemy soldier charged along in the darkness, following Garotte's path in a parallel aisle. Silo picked an aisle between them and matched them step for step. Thanks to her time enduring Manticore's intense gravity, she moved in great, bounding
strides despite her heavy load of weapons and ammunition. In moments she was between Garotte and their tracker. With practiced motions she pulled a hand grenade from her munitions belt, popped the pin, and started counting. When the time was right she pitched the explosive down.
"Bunnies and Bats in three," she stated over the radio.
She slid to a stop, shut her eyes tight, and covered her ears. An aisle or two away, Garotte did the same, and not a moment too soon. The grenade she threw exploded in a rush of sound, pressure, and light. It hadn't done any damage, but it wasn't designed to. In the near-blackness of the facility, the flash-bang robbed their pursuer of what little night-vision he had, and the burst of sound sent him reeling against the door of a storage locker. Silo tried to move in, but the soldier blindly fired his assault rifle, keeping Silo at bay. When the firing stopped, Silo spoke.
"Listen! I realize that right now you probably can't hear anything but a loud whistling noise, but we're not looking to kill anyone if we don't have to. If you'd been following procedure, you'd have evacuated by now," she called out.
"Procedure!?" the soldier spat, hidden among the aisles. "Don't talk to me about procedure. Playing it safe is what cost me half my face! We're through with procedure."
"Who's we? Are you one of those technology terrorists? The Ludds or whatever?"
"We aren't terrorists!"
"So yes, then," she stated, slinging the grenade launcher down and drawing her pistol. "I'm happy to hear that, because now I won't feel so bad if you end up getting yourself killed."
Garotte's voice appeared in her earpiece. "Reached the storage locker, accessing the medication distributor. I need three minutes."
Unstable Prototypes Page 39
