by M. D. Cooper
Again, she tried to determine the ulterior motive. There was too much EM scatter now to determine if Psion was scanning a specific section of the asteroid. The ground attack forces on the Sol side had spread out in an erratic formation where some had been delayed as others pushed forward. The mechs still ate everything in their path, demonstrating no plan beyond complete destruction.
For a few seconds, Lyssa connected to distant observation-points to get an outside view of Vesta, attempting to determine if the enemy might be writing something on the surface. It was a dumb idea, but she wanted to rule it out.
No pattern emerged.
Then she was surprised by a communication request from a source she didn’t recognize at first. The origin point appeared to be somewhere in the TSF fleet. When she checked the token, it came up anonymous. She knew it could only be one person.
Lyssa paused. A cold sensation swept through her mind.
Fugia said.
SWARM
STELLAR DATE: 03.28.3011 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: High Orbit, TSS Furious Leap
REGION: Vesta, Terran Hegemony, InnerSol
“The problem,” Kirre said, “is that Vesta is at its closest point to Ceres. If the TSF was anticipating any sort of attack, they had to have known it would happen now.”
“You’re thinking about the military perspective,” Ngoba said. “Me, I want to know how a politician would look at it.”
The small crew—Ngoba, Kirre, and two mercenaries named Dan Grichs and Caitlin Parva—were gathered around the holotank, staring at the rotating lump that was Vesta. Parva was an explosives expert and Grichs claimed he could split a mech in two with his bare hands. He looked the part, stretching his EV suit to splitting.
“That EM spectrum is a mess,” Kirre said. “That’s good, and bad. We can hide when we go in, but we’ll be mostly blind. Maybe you could ask your parrot friend to hack one of the military scanning nets, but we’d run the risk of exposure.”
“The parrot cracks comms nets?” Parva asked, giving Crash a skeptical look.
“We don’t talk about what our friend Crash can do,” Ngoba said.
Crash thought he was making a joke but Ngoba’s tone of voice made the other humans stop talking.
Parva continued staring at Crash and he bobbed his head, not liking how anxious her scrutiny made him feel. Grichs elbowed her in the ribs and she finally looked away.
Perched on the back of Kirre’s seat, Crash had a good view of the display. At the model’s resolution, large collections of human settlements were barely visible, and Crash tilted his head, blinking as he studied the image, wondering who lived on the asteroid. He also had a good view of the thousands of Psion and human ships encircling Vesta, blocking the Furious Leap from its goal of reaching the Hesperia Nevada.
He had replicated the model in his mind so he could zoom in and out and get a better look at the various places the humans discussed. According to Kirre, they were still at a safe standoff distance from Vesta and the battle fleets. Traffic moving toward the battle had ignored them so far. Currently, the surface of the massive asteroid was under assault in what Ngoba called ‘preparatory bombing.’
Kirre shook her head. “I don’t understand why the AI forces are staying on the surface. They’re getting slaughtered.”
“Looks like they’re doing their work,” Ngoba said. “They’re all drones. Psion doesn’t care if they get blown up or not.”
“Well, even drones cost money,” Kirre said. “What a waste. What’s strange is that it looks like the Sol Alliance sent in recon teams.”
She replayed a portion of the earlier scan, which showed several small forces dropping to the surface not long before the actual fighting began.
Kirre pointed at different locations on the globe. “Honestly, it makes me wonder if the Sol Alliance Forces are even talking to each other. Why send in recon units when they’re just going to carpet-bomb the place?”
Ngoba rubbed his chin. “You do that if you have specific high-value targets you would like to exploit during the attack,” he said. “It’s happened often enough during battles. How do you think most human art gets redistributed? Also, they might not have planned on Psion even moving to the ground.”
“Psion isn’t doing anything that makes sense,” Grichs said.
“Well,” Kirre said, “I got the data on the locations. We can look up what they are. It really doesn’t have anything to do with our target, but it does make me wish we’d arrived three weeks ago. There could be a lot of forgotten loot down there.”
Ngoba laughed. “Everything is easier when it was easier. We’re here now. We’re all smart people and there’s a war going on, so it’s our task to figure out how to get the contents of the Hesperia Nevada off the surface. Considering your locations, Kirre, there may still be some opportunity for profit while we’re helping our friend Crash. What’s on Vesta that we can get our hands on during this attack?”
For the next thirty minutes, they pored through the available databases on Vesta. They debated whether they should steal heavy metals, equipment, or information that might be sitting in forgotten company databases.
In the end, they returned to Kirre’s list of locations where the Sol Alliance had sent teams, and then studied areas as far from those points as possible. This brought up a list of large manufacturing sites, which Ngoba vetoed.
“Here,” he said. “Show me the list of Heartbridge locations again.”
Grichs snapped his fingers. “No, there’s an Enfield Scientific site on the list. It’s not far from these locations.”
He expanded the map and brought up history and schematics on a small compound with only one surface-side building. The site had been built in early 2800.
Ngoba grinned. “That’s it,” he said. “We’ll hit the Enfield depository. “It has the added benefit of only being a few hundred kilometers from our Hesperia Nevada.”
The human faces around the holodisplay all turned to look at him, showing several frowns.
“Oh shit, that could be why they’re on the surface at all,” Kirre said.
“Entirely feasible,” Ngoba said. “But not too likely, or they would already be there. Howe
ver, the fact that they haven’t grabbed it, means they probably don’t know about it. I would wager that as soon as we approach, someone’s going to figure it out. In a desert like Vesta, it’s pretty difficult to hide your movements.
“What if we made ourselves look like a missile barrage?” Kirre asked.
Ngoba gave a quizzical frown. “That collection of words doesn’t make any sense to me.”
“We fire on a location not far from our target. Send in a barrage that gets noted but fits the profile of all the other crap going on in the area.”
“We’d need to edit our registry to something Terran,” Grichs said.
“Probably better to use something from the JC,” Ngoba said. “We know they’re not coordinating well. It’s entirely likely the small showing from the JC would push forward some ineffective attack just to say they had something to do with the assault.”
“Details!” Kirre said. “Let me finish. We send a shuttle simultaneously. It means hard gs on the shuttle, but we use the EM noise to our advantage. We can’t hide the mass profile, but we could disguise the shuttle as a drone of some kind. It’s the flight profile that matters. We go in fast and as soon as we’re below the rim of a crater, we brake and move out.”
“So we’re still betting on the fact that no one’s paying attention,” Ngoba said. “We might as well save the missiles and just take the shuttle in. We’re still operating on the hope that no one follows us. That way we’ve got weaponry for the escape—which could get ugly. I like the idea of editing the registry to say that we’re JC. That might confuse the TSF and Marsians long enough to slip in and out.”
Crash checked the two locations on his mental model. Between the Enfield site and the Hesperia Nevada was three hundred kilometers of cratered surface, as well as the Divalia Fossa trough. The yard where the Hesperia Nevada was parked sat in the bottom of a wide crater with walls ten kilometers high, its floor covered in scrapped ships.
On a private channel, Ngoba said quickly,
Ngoba spread his hands in an appeasing gesture.
He shifted the holodisplay and increased resolution on the scrap yard where the ship sat in dry dock. “Here’s out lovely Hesperia Nevada, lab ship hidden as a standard light freighter. As we can see, it’s already a little odd that she’s resting on a support frame that keeps her mid-section elevated. We’ll need to stay frosty in the event someone’s been using the lab section as an illicit drug factory, or something similar.”
Crash clacked his beak and ruffled his feathers. He hadn’t thought of that possibility, then realized Ngoba was performing for the crew.
How hard it had to be to never trust anyone…. Crash studied the back of Ngoba’s head as he talked, eventually getting a laugh from his crew.
Crash read a mixture of greed and anticipation on the faces watching their captain. This wasn’t like a math problem, where even variables made sense. Here the variables shifted in the moment, and for the first time since deciding to leave Cruithne, he doubted he would reach the ship.
Ngoba clapped his hands together with relish. “Now, let’s figure out the rest of this problem called the Hesperia Nevada, or as I like to call it, our friendly neighborhood Parrot Genius Factory.”
WHISPERS
STELLAR DATE: 03.28.3011 (Adjusted Years)
LOCATION: Divalia Fossa
REGION: Vesta, Terran Hegemony, InnerSol
The dead communications center sat silent and dark in the shadowed side of a crater roughly twenty kilometers from Vesta’s equator. Overhead, the engine plumes from braking ships engines covered space in white streaks. Smaller arcs drew the paths of missiles across the black, moving to ships Ty couldn’t see.
His breathing heavy in his helmet, Ty moved among the cracks along the crater’s dark upper edge, below a roadway that curved from the surface down to the collection of buildings making up the communications center.
‘Boss’ was a joke, as Manny Hesteros outranked him by a week. They had gone through Basic together on the slopes of Olympus Mons, served their first two years as EV ring-pounders providing outer surface security on the Mars 1 Ring, and been accepted into the Marsian Special Forces on the same set of orders.
Ty dropped to a knee and raised his rifle to use its scope to scan the terrain below. Nothing had changed since they made the surface on Vesta and humped the fifty kilometers from the drop site to this ancient relay station. They had passed abandoned storage yards, manufacturing sites and fields filled with silent drones in dress-right-dress formation, waiting for another company to buy them at salvage prices—as they had been waiting for probably a hundred years at least.
Vesta was a junkyard. Sitting between Mars and Ceres, with an orbit that took the asteroid closer to either body depending on its position, Vesta had served humanity’s space-faring history as a last stop before the long hall into Jovian space—a refueling point and communications relay. As technology improved, the asteroid had remained under the influence separatist groups, with Mars loosely claiming sovereignty.
All that changed when the Psion AIs invaded Ceres, smashed its Insi Ring, and established their homeland within firing range of all major human population centers…and had then gone silent.
The silence tactic might have infuriated politicians, but Ty understood it well enough. Waiting for an opponent to show their hand was classic Sun Tzu. While Ty specialized in infiltrating enemy territory and securing, isolating or neutralizing enemy targets, i.e. blowing them up, he fully understood the value in hanging back so an impatient enemy could be the first to show their ass. He would always follow orders, but he had no doubt his current mission was part of an ongoing game of “You show me yours and I’ll show you mine.”
In this situation, showing you mine meant demonstrating a willingness to go to war.
But Mars hadn’t reached that point yet, as far as Ty could figure, and his current mission seemed one of many designed to probe the enemy’s tolerance for incursion, while gaining a potentially valuable asset. Every meter they covered on Vesta updated ancient maps, validated civilian-owned territory, including a few powerful corporations—like Heartbridge that seemed to have forgotten about their various holdings—and basically made the battlefield a much more complicated place.
Still, here they were, with a mission to accomplish. Despite Ty’s attempts to understand the big picture, he was still a sergeant in the Special Forces, and he understood the problem in front of him. He was a trigger-puller, plain and simple, and if he failed in his mission, he was failing probably a thousand Marsians who had dedicated themselves to providing for his success.
Ty groaned.
Ty nodded absently.
Manny snorted.
Ty laughed. Still looking through the scope, he transferred the updated layout to his HUD. The facility had been built with ground security in mind, which was interesting. A trench and fence system ran its perimeter, with a sensor system that looked consistent with what was available during the station’s lifetime. If the system was alive, they could expect passive scanning—until the local NSAIs recognized them and followed with an active sweep. Since they were well within range of passive scan, and Ty hadn’t seen anything on the EM spectrum, he figured all signs pointed toward the station being empty.
Beyond the fence, a series of low buildings surrounded the antennae array in the center, its face open to the black sky like an inverted mushroom.
Manny had argued for taking the road down. Why waste time with all this over-ground movement when anyone in the station would see them approach from klicks away?
Ty had pointed out that the road was visible from Earth, and especially Ceres, which was their real concern.
