Beta Testers

by Joseph R. Lallo

  “That’s two soldiers down, Silo. I’m bruised but functional,” he said.

  “Damn it!” barked the commander.

  The outburst was audible not only through the communication channel but also echoing from a few floors down.

  “I’m going to investigate the final military presence and try not to get shot in the back by a civilian,” he groaned, climbing to his feet. “Just to warn you, thanks to our overachieving benefactor, all interior doors are now open. How are things on the surface?”

  #

  “Just peachy,” she said.

  The remaining ship and the first two backup ships had opened all deployment slats. Dozens of drones poured from each one. Each new cluster jockeyed for position, shifting and nudging the neighboring formations like an extremely orderly flock of birds. The soldiers, still skittish from watching two ships seeming to choose of their own accord to bash into each other, had not returned to the “kill zone” they’d foolishly occupied upon arrival. Now they were scattered about the mountainside, in cover and waiting for whatever would come next.

  “Why don’t I hear any combat!?” demanded the commander.

  “They’re still unloading, sir,” answered a trooper from the outside.

  “Then activate the ones that are out!”

  “We don’t have the personnel to command them in subgroups, so we have to give a blanket command or they’ll—”

  “Don’t give me excuses! There is a female soldier up there in the upper levels, and the longer you wait the better prepared she’ll be.”

  “I’m already pretty well prepared. Just waiting for these dopes to finish showing their cards,” Silo said.

  She was still hidden in the vent opening, watching through the detached targeter of her grenade launcher. Drone combat made up a substantial portion of her training, and though the way they moved and their general design suggested these were far from top of the line, there were still precautions to be taken. The lowest-end automated drone would be able to track the impact point and origin point of a grenade as soon as it was headed in their direction. And once they were fully deployed, they’d start a search pattern that would ferret her out pretty quickly. The next few moves demanded careful planning and the sort of behavior a robot wasn’t programmed to counter. At least, not a consumer model.

  Silo eased herself upward, keeping clear of the line of sight of the nearest soldiers. Plenty of the drones could see her, but until they received orders they may as well have their eyes closed. She turned to the slope that continued upward along the mountainside above the cargo door and scoped out a few relatively flat surfaces.

  “Those’ll do,” she muttered to herself.

  She glanced back over her shoulder and watched as the flow of drones and the jostling of ranks slowed. A quick consultation of the schematics they’d downloaded confirmed where the other ventilation ducts were and where they led. A few more moments and the drones would be ready for their grand “attack everything in that direction” command. The closer she got to the issuing of the command, the more effective this tactic would be.

  The lead trooper’s voice got out half a syllable of the command before Silo acted. She fired off three quick shots. Each in the wrong direction. They struck the flattish faces of the slope and rebounded back with the sort of geometrical perfection that would make a pool shark proud. The arcs carried them into the ranks of arrayed drones, detonating in midair and turning a dozen each into clouds of expensive shrapnel.

  About half of the drones automatically deployed, following the tracked arc to its “origin,” which just happened to be a chunk of mountain well beyond Silo’s hiding place. She swapped to her shotgun and blasted three clusters of drones as they flew over, then switched back and fired a spread of grenades in random arcs before dropping her now unloaded launcher back down the vent and replacing it with the targeted system shocker Dee had demonstrated.

  She sprang from the vent and sprinted across the surface of the mountain as drones targeted and blasted the shaft. A short distance away, she slid into cover, then raised the targeted shocker and pulled the first trigger. Shafts of astonishingly powerful laser light blasted from the front. The drones in use by the Broadline Syndicate weren’t quite as potent as what Dr. Dee used as a demonstration model, because the lasers alone were enough to fry a few of them. She leveled the weapon at the starboard thrusters of one of the three remaining ships and pulled the second trigger. Electricity discharged over the huge distance between them, passed through the thruster housing, and returned to the gun. It wasn’t enough to black out the ship as Silo had hoped, but it did something a good deal more interesting. The thrusters on the starboard side shut down, causing the ship to tip wildly out of control, invert, and bash into the ground.

  By now she’d pushed her luck enough and needed to move again. It was still a fair distance to the next vent, and if she relied upon speed alone to reach it, the drones would catch her. She needed something to distract them. One hand clicked open a pouch to fetch a pair of devices Dr. Dee called Spring Heels. They were supposed to be affixed to boots to enable prodigious leaps. Having seen the overpowered nature of his other devices, Silo suspected putting them to their intended use would shatter her femurs. Instead, she set them to standby and tossed them under a nearby boulder.

  They activated on impact and proved Silo’s precaution to be quite wise indeed. The activating devices dislodged the boulder, launching it in a low arc and suddenly producing a much larger, much more interesting target for the low-intelligence drones to chase down the mountain.

  She slid to the mouth of the next vent and angled the system shocker down into it. A quick blast disabled the fan, and she dropped safely inside.

  “By my estimate, I’ve taken down maybe eighty of these things and another ship, but that’s barely a dent,” Silo said breathlessly once she was out of danger.

  She bounded down to the floor of the loading bay and rushed back to the base of the first vent where her sturdy grenade launcher was waiting for her. With it in hand, she returned to the ship. Weapons of various sorts discharged in near unison above and around her position, the robots finally deciding that “the mountain” was a good enough target to start with. The air filled with a deafening roar of weaponry, combining with the hum of drones into something akin to an angry swarm of bees. The portable shield shimmered and sparked as the robots focused their fire on it, but there was no indication that it would fail anytime soon. The stone and metal of the facility made her much less confident, however. Struts started to creak almost immediately, and gravel started to fall in a steady hailstorm in short order.

  “Things are beginning to sound rather vigorous up there, Silo,” Garotte said.

  “Yes, vigorous,” Silo said, slipping into the ship to top off her ammunition. She took stock of the loading bay, then whipped around as she realized hidden among the sounds of bombardment were the taps of boots. “Not so fast!” she snapped, pivoting and raising her shotgun.

  Three of the nonmilitary personnel skidded to a stop. Their wide eyes and postures of complete surrender suggested they weren’t likely to put up much of a fight.

  “What are they doing? How are we supposed to get out of here!?” cried the first worker to find his voice, a man labeled “Brock” by his ID.

  Silo kept her weapon on them while she tapped her communicator. “We’ve got civilian contractors in here! You think you might want to cool it with the drones until they can evacuate?” she said.

  Three voices replied. While they didn’t agree in their specific responses, they were unified in their vicious, negative tone and filthy vocabulary.

  Silo sighed. “Congratulations. Your compatriots have decided you are officially what we would call ‘acceptable losses.’”

  The response from the workers was, once again, unified in sentiment if not in phrasing, and boiled down roughly to several different flavors of “I don’t want to die!”

  “Now, now, now, quiet down! Unlike t
hese people, whom I’ve officially decided didn’t deserve the consideration I gave them earlier, I’m in the game of minimizing civilian casualties, so unless you give me a reason not to, I’m keeping you alive.”

  “How do we know we can trust you? Aren’t you the people who gassed us?” demanded a worker named Stan, his brain finally getting enough traction to be suspicious.

  “I’ll tell you how you know you can trust me. I’ve got a gun and I’m not shooting at you.” Silo pointed through the force field to the grid of drones peppering it with shots. “They’ve got guns and they are shooting at you. And the only reason you haven’t been killed by them is my force field. I’d say that makes us friends, honey.”

  The bombardment intensified as the troopers outside started to target specific weak points.

  “We’ve got to get down to storage! They won’t attack the weapon storage, right?” suggested a third worker, her name tag reading “Mei.”

  “You want to go hide next to explosives? What sort of an idiot are you?” countered Brock.

  “Okay, okay. Here’s what’s going to happen. Brock, go inside that ship and grab hold of the other end of this power cable here. Don’t yank it, because that’s what’s powering that shield that’s keeping us from getting blown to bits. Mei, go into the third bin from the top and measure out fifteen meters of cable. You can go over a little but don’t go under. Stan, there’s bin of power cable junctions in there, over on the right. Get a splitter.”

  “What’s this all about?” asked Brock.

  “This is all about us taking the ship and retreating farther down so when this roof comes down we’re not under it. But to keep us safe we’re going to need that shield to come along with us, and that’ll be tricky since we don’t have enough cord to get clear of the firing line before the shield loses power.”

  “Why are we going to run your errands? Why don’t you do that stuff?” said Brock.

  “Because right about now you should be trying to get on my good side, since good tactics call you a liability.”

  This proved sufficient logic to get the workers moving. Once the cable was measured out, Silo attached it to the shield generator, then ushered everyone into the ship. Three workers plus herself made for precious little maneuvering room, but the threat of death had a way of motivating people into solving problems such as those.

  Silo plopped down in the pilot’s seat and gazed out the windshield at the onslaught. She glanced at the control panel and did some quick math on the defensive capabilities of the navigational shields.

  “Garotte, your ‘more than adequate’ navigational shields won’t last seven seconds against these attackers,” Silo said.

  “Yes, my dear. This is evidence of one of quite a few shortcomings with this plan,” Garotte replied.

  “We’re not going to get this thing down into the elevator shaft unless they stop shooting. We need a distraction.”

  She ran some possibilities through her head. Supposedly the shield was one-way and she might be able to lay down some cover fire, but lobbing explosives at something that “should” let them pass through was not a recipe for longevity. She dug a controller out of her pocket.

  “Everybody back there, hold tight,” Silo said. “We might be moving in a hurry.”

  She activated the engines and coaxed the ship into the air. With one hand on the ship’s controls, and the other on the remote she’d pulled from her pocket, she scrolled through the menus.

  “Pair 1… repel,” she said. She tapped the command and was rewarded with a terrifying screech of steel and stone that drowned out even the constant attacks.

  The ships she’d drawn together with the monopoles earlier were on the move. Illustrating yet another way the mad doctor’s inventions were profoundly over-designed, the monopoles had survived the impact and were now quite willing to repel one another with the same force they’d attracted one another. The first ship was facing down and thus served as something of a springboard for the second one. With all the unimaginable power Dr. Dee had packed into the devices, the second ship launched into the air, presenting a much more tantalizing target for all the attackers.

  With their attention thus shifted, she guided the ship away from the door and toward the elevator shaft. After only a few meters of motion she reached the end of the power cable, and it was yanked from the shield generator. Shortly after that, the cable connected to the now inactive device dragged it along after the ship.

  They vanished into the elevator shaft and moved five or six floors down before Silo brought them to a halt.

  “One of you reel in that cable, the other one get the power cable ready with that splitter attached,” she said.

  Working as an impromptu team, Silo and the workers were able to position and reactivate the shield generator such that it blocked off the elevator shaft above them. Not a moment too soon, either. The rain of stones flicking against the shield quickly accelerated until daylight joined in, then the attacks of far too many drones.

  “That sounded eventful,” Garotte said over the communicator.

  “I’ve got the ship down into the shaft, but that’s about the last time we’re going to be repositioning it until we can be sure the drones won’t follow. Where are you?”

  “Level 18, which is where I’ve stopped the elevator. I suspect I am on the trail of the commander, as I’m encountering doors that have been manually shut and secured.”

  “I’m coming to you, and I’m bringing friends.” Silo stood, looking to the workers. “Come on. Let’s go. And don’t go starting trouble. My mood’s really going downhill in a hurry.”

  #

  Garotte pumped a few more energy bolts into the hinge of a hefty door, then waited for his pistol to cool down. One of the unfortunate weaknesses of catering one’s equipment to overcoming mechanical and digital locks was that it left one more or less stymied by something as basic as an old-fashioned brace across the opposite side. He’d made little progress by the time Silo and her crew arrived.

  “Ah, lovely. I trust you haven’t had any of those lovely curls of yours singed by the excitement?”

  “Lay off the banter, hon. Time’s a-wasting, and we need to both finish up our mission and get out.”

  “Then I believe the next step would be opening yonder door,” he said.

  “Piece of cake.”

  She pulled what looked oddly like a pack of gum from one of her many pouches and slapped a few strips of gray substance in strategic spots. The group took cover, and Garotte fired a shot to ignite the charges. The strips thumped with what seemed like a woefully inadequate explosion, then the door fell forward.

  The lack of a flurry of shots convinced them to take a peek and find the hallway beyond empty.

  “I’d really rather not spend the next hour playing cat and mouse trying to find this fellow in his own facility,” Garotte said, reaching into his pocket for yet another device and tearing open a control panel. “Now that we are in the high-security section, I suspect tapping into the security subsystem will be a good deal simpler.”

  His gadget churned for a few seconds, then responded.

  “Ah… There. I’ve got video at least,” he said.

  He showed Silo the screen of the device. She nodded and manually readied one of the rounds from her launcher. When both she and Garotte confirmed their gas masks were firmly in place and the workers were herded back to the elevator shaft, she worked her way through a few twists of hallway and banked the round off a wall into a dead end. This brought a few rounds of return fire, then a hiss of gas and some agonized coughing.

  “Full destruction protocol authorized!” he wheezed. “Blast this place to bedrock! Eliminate all civilian observers!”

  Garotte swept in and secured the commander. The enemy soldier had heaped tables and assorted equipment into a fortified position for his last stand, blocking the way to a door behind him.

  “Well,” Garotte said, hoisting the man from the ground. “Frankly that was a bit
of an anticlimax. I’m downright disappointed in you.”

  “If you’re looking for a climax, I figure us getting out of here alive will be a pretty good one, hon,” Silo said.

  Garotte gazed at the door.

  “… You want to see what’s behind that door before we go, don’t you…” Silo muttered.

  “He was going to have a showdown to protect it and authorized a complete facility wipe when he realized it was lost. I think it is fair to say it has piqued my curiosity.”

  Silo shook her head and readied some more demo strips. “We’ve got to talk about your priorities when we’re through here.”

  They blew the door. Garotte kicked it down and stepped through.

  “… Ah… Well, that explains a number of things…”

  Silo stepped in after him and froze. The door led to a catwalk overlooking a massive, fully automated assembly facility. Huge tunnels, cutting marks suggesting they were freshly excavated, opened out in all directions. Row after row of crates were in the process of being packaged. Most were the same high-quality ordnance that was warehoused elsewhere, but more complex and more lethal weapons were present in smaller quantities as well.

  “That would explain the lack of incoming shipments,” Garotte said.

  “And it suggests they had big plans for this planet,” Silo added.

  “Indeed… This may warrant a minor change of plans…”

  #

  Ten very busy minutes later, Silo and Garotte reconvened at the ship, along with the three civilian workers. Quite a bit of work had been achieved in very little time. The most apparent portion being some quite precise demolition work by Silo, which had opened up a portion of the elevator shaft to one of the mining tunnels. Garotte straddled the secured commander.

  “Is it all clear?” he asked.

  “Yep. Ship-sized hole straight to a mined-out shaft that’ll take us a good five kilometers that way. From there, I’m confident a few of these babies will punch a hole to daylight.”

  She patted a half-dozen of the high-powered rockets with launchers, which they had strapped to the hull of the ship.