Cracking the Sky

by Brenda Cooper

  There was no money in letting nature balance itself. Hence the science wars, and this small battle.

  The dead between us and the next hill attested to the seriousness of this small battle. Our own corporations, or at least multis born here, killing us. Assholes. I swore I’d do my best. Both to kill the big scary lab and to stay alive.

  I was gonna miss Mario, even if he was a loudmouthed idiot.

  Simon opened the conversation. “This sucks.”

  “Yep.” And that closed the conversation.

  We sat close to each other, taking comfort in the silence of long friendship. We’d been on three attacks like this before, and come back from all of them. I wasn’t so sure this time, but no soldier says those things to another. Instead, we watched the empty blue sky and baked quietly on the rock, the sun glinting on the great field of ash that surrounded us.

  NorAM interrupted to tell me the others had all died. No one left on the far ridge. I imagined it. One of the dots had been healthy. They’d watched the others die, gotten too close. Prayed to be safe. Maybe they’d even donned their protective suit, the crappy one that came in all our belts. But something too small to see and big enough to kill them had gotten in anyway. It made me feel cold even in the punishing heat.

  The rocks started throwing longer shadows. Simon and I traded with Kris and Scott. I wiped the sweat from my face and felt sure the heat would keep me fitful and maybe even awake.

  A fat warm glob of rain struck me on the cheek and I shook awake, swinging my head like an animal. Wind cooled the air. Dark, roiling cumulonimbus clouds towered overhead, the front edge of them splitting the sky like angry foam, blue, then gray, white above, tinged gold by the setting sun.

  Kris looked down at me. “Almost ready?”

  “Are they?”

  I had given her my comm. She shaded the screen with her hand and said “Forty minutes.”

  I took five minutes to perform routine body maintenance functions, and five more to verify that everyone else did the same. I gathered the humans all into formation, packs at their side and ready, each with a weapon in hand.

  The dog handlers had already chosen John’s dog for the first receptacle in line. I didn’t ask how he’d drawn the risky straw. Just thanked him for being ready.

  At least there was so much wind I didn’t need a posted UAV watcher any more. Anything over about twenty miles an hour tended to slam them off course, into the ground, or both. I was willing to bet the occasional gust was past the twenty mile an hour mark. In fact, there was a serious whine in the part of the wind that passed up above us. Damn NorAM physics jocks.

  John handed me the launcher.

  “Did you name your dog?” I asked.

  He swallowed. “Max, sir. Ma’am.”

  His confusion felt almost touching. John passed Max’s hand controls to me, and me and the metal dog walked away from the group, as far out into the open as we could get. Wind tore at my shirt.

  All the blue had been blown out of the sky.

  Max came to my waist, with four legs that had two joints each, and a hollow tail. His belly was big, and right now all that it held was empty space and some magic built from Tesla’s dreams and our materials. Too classified for me to get the details, and too new to be completely sure it would work.

  Lightning slammed upward from the ridge we had been going to, would go toward again soon. Rain sheeted down, sharpening the smell of the charred soil.

  John and Paulette called out the other dogs, lining them up one after the other, tails in mouths, a long string of conductivity. Hunter was last. John said something to Max, and the big robot tilted its ugly black head back and opened its jaws. Someone had painted sharp teeth like a shark’s onto the dull gripping surfaces.

  John handed me dark goggles. I slid them on, the world almost black, John now a silhouette. He handed me a long slender rod with a firing pin on the outside. The laser gun felt heavier than I remembered, harder to manage. I pointed it up at the roiling clouds, ignoring the rain that nearly blinded me.

  The two trainers raced to the rocks to join Simon and the others.

  I pulled the trigger and nothing happened.

  I checked. The gun worked. The laser beams shot fast as lightning itself into the clouds, but invisible. The clouds had simply ignored my call, my act, the light.

  They had to be ready, to be almost pregnant with charge.

  I giggled, absurdly, soaking wet and wondering if the storm were a lover I’d just tried to drive to premature ejaculation.

  The laser had enough power for three charges. I’d wasted one. I took a deep breath and stared up into the rain and the dark boiling clouds and smelled the damp, charred air.

  Another lightning bolt flashed down near the rocks and thunder made me cringe and cover my head.

  My timing was still off.

  Practice for this had been controlled. The storms had been smaller.

  I closed my eyes, let the water fall on the goggles. Braced. Waited.

  Fired.

  I opened my eyes.

  Thunder smacked again.

  White light surrounded me, the world turned to day in spite of the lenses between my eyes and the bolt. Max stood unmoved but full, and I had the briefest glimpse of the dog with light pouring out of every hole in its body, out through its tail into the other dogs, a line of lightning eaters.

  Then I couldn’t see, and all I felt was a deep thrumming in my body, and a sharp pain behind the eyes. I shook, relieved and scared and pissed off as well, mad at NorAM and GenGreen and the whole difficult, warring world. The thunder kept rolling away from me, hiding any other noises.

  John’s voice, a whoop. “We did it! You did it!”

  Someone took the laser gun from my hands. Simon spoke. “I’m taking off the goggles. Keep your eyes closed.”

  I felt them slide away.

  “Look at me.”

  His face existed. Thank god. I could see, and what I saw was Simon grinning, ear to ear. “Now what, Chief?”

  I swallowed and stood up, my legs shaky, the back of my head still shocky mushy and pain-wracked. Nothing good was easy. Unless we called it again, the lightning would move on. We had what we needed from it, and all that was left was danger. We could wait it out. “Is everyone here?”

  Simon nodded. I verified he was right. They looked shocked and bewildered. Some soldiers. But at least everyone had their packs. “You’re a damn good second,” I whispered to him, and then I stood up and addressed everyone else. “By the time I finish this briefing, the worst of the storm will have moved on, and we’ll go take the lab. We’re going to ride in there.”

  Scott’s eyes widened. “On the dogs?”

  “No. On each other.” Dingbat. But then he was in as much danger as the rest of us. Maybe more for being wet behind the ears. Whatever was in the lab had better be good. “We’re moving light and fast, following the storm, hoping to take them by surprise. We’ll have enough power to get there on the bots. I don’t know if we’ll get back that way or if we’ll walk.” Which meant I didn’t know how much power we’d have on the way back. Once we succeeded—if we succeeded—NorAM wasn’t going to burn more climate credits on getting back the easy way, not unless we had something they wanted fast. That was an idea. I looked back at them. “The extra supplies are still here. We meet back here. Has everyone marked this on their maps?”

  Jillie looked sheepish and fiddled with her wrist unit until she could nod and say, “Yes,” just like everyone else had.

  I tested communications, made sure we could all hear and speak to each other. “Use voice when you can,” I reminded them. “Security.”

  Lightning fell again, far away now, a thin streak that forked in three places and was gone. I waited for the thunder to die down and then I said, “All right. Go.”

  We skirted the dead, going so wide we missed the ravine. Better to add ten minutes than pick up some windblown death. On the smooth ground, the dogs had pretty even gaits, about l
ike a horse walking. Over hills or rocks, they rocked and lurched, irritating my still-sharp head and scraping my inner thighs. There were reasons we don’t usually ride the damned things. Plenty of bots had been designed to carry soldiers, but the pack dogs like these had it as a second priority. Or maybe a third or fourth.

  It hurt.

  I had ridden the dogs in the wild, but Jillie and Scott had only mounted in training exercises. They managed, but only because I paired them each up with a trainer. Behind them, Kris and I rode together. Simon protected Alissa, the pair of them in front of us and off to the side.

  For the first hour, we followed the storm. Dusk yellowed the lagging edge of the clouds, and Alissa pointed out a fresh storm behind us, maybe five miles away. “Backup?” she screamed the question to me over the wind and the rain and the space between us.

  I shrugged. Sometimes weathering made more weather, as if sun or wind or rain called to its own kind. If it was a NorAM storm, they hadn’t told me. But then maybe they wouldn’t. Maybe we’d wake up in the morning to August snow. If we made it to morning.

  As we neared the top of a long, low hill, two huge figures rose up. Bipedal, metal, too thin to be manned. Legs like tree trunks and torsos like limbs, this and wiry and fast. Six arms, or maybe more. They held rocks in each hand.

  I ducked.

  Hunter feinted right under me, then left.

  Rocks landed on either side of us.

  Voices screeched in my ear. Too many to make sense of.

  Alissa gripped her dog’s ears, which held its head down.

  “Let go!” I screamed at her. “Hold its neck. Handholds.”

  Just as she let go, a rock the size of her head pounded into the ground at her dog’s feet and the robot dog rose up on just its hind feet, striking the ground with its tail to help balance. Alissa threw her weight backward instead of forward and landed with a hard thump on her butt, immediately twisting away from the dog.

  A rock fell between the scientist and the robot dog.

  It stepped back, avoiding the rock, programmed to stay with its handler.

  I charged her attacker, drawing two of its rocks toward me. It was agile enough to pick another rock up as it threw two at me. So a brain for each hand? My immediate reaction was to go eye for an eye. Sometimes old-fashioned weapons are just fine, and since I’d never even seen a rumor of a six-armed rock-throwing robot, this couldn’t be far out of beta. By the time I’d pulled the pin, the bot had hit Alissa’s dog in the torso, leaving a dent. It stood over her small form. She lay curled under its broad belly in a fetal position.

  Well, I’d probably have gone fetal, too.

  I threw the grenade and watched it arc up toward the robot. I turned away, hoping Alissa was smart enough to cover her face.

  Hunter shied, if that’s what you call evasive actions in a robotic dog the size of a small horse.

  After the initial explosion, I heard metal screech and turned to look. A leg complete with a long string of cables that must have pulled loose from inside the robot lay behind us, evidence there had been something for Hunter to avoid.

  A rock slammed into us, hitting a glancing blow to my thigh. Hunter took the blow, moving with it, taking three fast steps like those daisy steps from aerobics. I managed to hold on. My thigh hurt like hell. I tested and my leg bent normally if I forced it. No telling if I could put weight on it.

  Wind had blown the wet ash clear enough for me to make out the robot, no longer standing, but with at least two working arms.

  No time to look around and see what else was happening. I raced to Alissa’s side and barked at her, “Stand up!”

  She looked up at me with a face streaked with tears and ash, but she nodded and pushed herself to standing. She reached for the holds to mount.

  “No. Use it as a shield and run.”

  Alissa stood blinking at me with shocky eyes for just a second before she understood what I meant and started heading away from the now-stationary rock-thrower, keeping the robot dog between her and the damaged enemy.

  I looked for the other robot. Simon or Kris had done a better job than I had, and it lay inert.

  I called for everyone to come here, counting as they appeared. John and Jillie, John with one arm hanging and a bruised cheek. Jillie looking like hell but smiling. I hoped it was happiness at being alive and not something more manic.

  Kris and Simon rode in from the left, Simon looking ecstatic. I knew where his happiness came from. He must have been the one to bring the bot down. If this had been the middle ages and the six-armed bot a dragon, Simon is the guy who would have raced toward it on a black charger, whirling his sword above his head. His voice blossomed in my ear. “If that’s all they have, we’re okay.”

  I suspected we wouldn’t be that lucky. “Paulette? Scott?”

  No answer. Everyone else had the discipline to keep silent while I called for them.

  Finally, Scott’s voice. “She’s hurt. My robot died.”

  “Are you okay?” I asked, grateful he didn’t seem as shaken as he had the day before.

  “Yes.”

  “How badly hurt is Paulette?”

  “I think her leg’s broken.”

  Thank god. I’d been afraid of something worse. “Do you remember field medicine?”

  “I think so.”

  “Is Paulette conscious?”

  “Yes.”

  “She can talk you through.”

  He sounded shaky as he said, “Okay.”

  Simon broke in. “Hurry up. There’s another storm coming.”

  I’d almost forgotten that. The sky was darker, but it was also later in the day. The wind came up again, only this time at our backs. The lab was close.

  “Scott,” I said. “Good luck.” And then to the others. “Group around me.”

  I still had no clear idea how six of us were going to get into a secret GenGreen lab. There had to be better defenses than what we’d seen so far. I took time to report in. NorAM was quick to respond. “Keep going. There are reinforcements coming.”

  I glanced up over my shoulder. “Is that our storm?”

  “Get Alissa to the lab.”

  “I’ll do my best.” I closed my communit. Aye, aye, sir. Thanks for doing the impossible so far, and keep on going. Of course, I’d signed up for it. On purpose.

  Lighting split the sky behind us, followed a few seconds later by thunder. Maybe they sent the storm just to drive us. Hopefully Paulette and Scott would be okay. “Let’s go!”

  The dogs had the GPS data, and this close, there wasn’t much routing I had to do. The last bit of the journey was mostly a balancing act trying to stick to Hunter in spite of my head and my thigh. Rain made the broad backs of the dogs slippery as hell.

  Kris did fall off once.

  We got close enough I started watching for the fence.

  NorAM messaged us all to turn around and look the other way. Them talking in our ears was a security risk of the first order and so I turned my head even before telling Hunter to turn. Looking up and down the small line of us left, I was pleased to note everyone had understood the order.

  Light pinned us bright and blind. Then again. Flash. Wind, or maybe the electricity of what must be simultaneous lightning bolts, lifted and twisted the stray hairs around my face. Flash. Thunder boomed, a deep cracking sound as if the sky had been hit with the hammer of the god. More noise poured through right above us, enveloping us, making it impossible to talk.

  We stood, still looking away. I hadn’t known they could do that. We could do that. Another ratchet up in the weather wars.

  It scared me as much as the lab.

  NorAM’s voice again. “The fences are all fried. The building’s main security is probably off, but there may be generator power. Go, now. Copters will be along. Ground troops are arriving now.”

  Another scary thing. “Did you catch the traitor?”

  “Yes.”

  Hopefully there was only one. “Wait for orders,” the N
orAM dispatcher said, enough happiness in her voice that I guessed whatever the lightning and the new troops were supposed to do was getting done.

  I glanced over at Alissa. “Are you okay?”

  “I will be.” She still looked fierce. Like the scientist in a television show I used to love that chased down Japanese whale boats. Something to be said for fierce scientists. Our back was still to the lab and the conflict, and we watched a sliver of black cloudless sky slowly grow as the storm above us blew further east. From time to time we heard thunder in the distance.

  It had stopped raining by the time they called for us. I smiled at the look on some of the NorAM shock troop faces and I brought Alissa Freitag into the compound on top of a wet, banged-up robot that barely resembled a dog. I had no mirror, but I’m sure we looked like wild women, rain and sun and wind and thunder drenched, wild-eyes, and fierce.

  I kind of liked the picture that drew for me.

  Two scientists had come in via the road, and been protected in the back until the lab’s defenses were neutralized. NorAM replacing what we’d lost, and probably unhappy about it. But then they’d wanted us to be entirely stealth. Which is probably why so many died. Making sure of success, I supposed. Not that I got to make high-level battle plans or even hear what data went into them. It felt good to have done my part, and that all of the soldiers who had escaped with me were alive. And I liked seeing Alissa run up to the others and start organizing immediately, no question, as if she were the field commander among the scientists.

  Maybe she was.

  John and Jillie and me attended to the robots and set them charging. After about twenty minutes, a small crew returned with Scott and Paulette. I complimented Scott on a decent job of field-bandaging, and he blushed.