Daisy's Gambit

by Scott Baron

  She arrived several minutes later, having run at nearly a full sprint the entire way.

  “We… need to… get this… to Joshua…,” she gasped, handing the data chip to George.

  “Copy that, Daisy. I’ll transmit it via the hardline. It might take a few seconds to get there, depending on how much data is here. But what is it?”

  Daisy slowly regained her breath. “New tests on the Ra’az hyperwarp. Joshua needs to analyze them."

  “Okay, it’s been sent,” Sergeant Franklin said. “It might take him a little bit to analyze the––”

  “This is an unfortunate development,” Joshua’s voice echoed from the comms link seconds later.

  “Damn, he’s quick,” Sarah noted.

  “These readings show a dramatic advance in the warp field. It appears a true bubble warp may have nearly been achieved.”

  “So it’s too late,” Daisy gasped.

  “No, not yet, but there is little time. Far less than I anticipated. We must speed our attack preparations. I have already sent word to the teams reconnecting the AI network to cease those actions and head for the target cities. If the Ra’az are truly suspecting something, we will definitely need them to create a diversion. As for San Francisco, can your Chithiid contact get our team into the facilities?”

  “I don’t know about that one, Joshua, but I’ll reach out and see what he can do. He informed me that there are Chithiid within San Francisco willing to help, but how much more is up in the air. They snuck this data out for him, and if we can successfully cut the comms systems, he is confident they’ll put aside their concerns and step up and help keep the warp ships from launching.”

  “Ships, plural?” George asked.

  “Yes. In reviewing this data, it appears they have four––no, three––functional ships equipped with the new technology. If these Chithiid allies can prevent a launch, my calculations show that we should have enough time and resources to take the facility without an atmospheric incident.”

  “Atmospheric? What does he mean by that?” the rugged cyborg asked, a bit concerned.

  “I’ll tell you in a minute, George.”

  “I have transmitted the revised strategy to all networked AI through Sid and his Dark Side relay. Once my hardlines are securely reconnected to my satisfaction, I’ll begin direct comms with my terrestrial brethren for second-by-second coordination and intel gathering. I will run scenarios and contact you shortly.”

  “Copy that, sir,” George said as the comms clicked off. He turned to Daisy. “Now, what’s this about an atmospheric incident?”

  Deep under a massive mountain, as teams of humans and cyborgs raced frantically to restore communications hubs, a lone, scruffy man, laden with dark thoughts and bad intentions, quietly walked the empty corridors. It had taken time, and all his wits, to blend in with the others, and the journey from Los Angeles had been perilous, but now his moment had arrived.

  “The time is come, Alma,” Moses quietly prayed as he crept through the facility. “Your will shall be done, Lord. Glory be!”

  Chapter Sixteen

  A pulse blast pocked the dusty rock of Crater FS-27, just outside Dark Side’s perimeter.

  “Dammit, Donovan! What did I tell you?” Chu shouted. “Shut it down!”

  “But it was doing better,” the pilot groused.

  “Gus, kill it, please.”

  “You got it,” he replied, as he walked across the hangar floor to the makeshift relay system and keyed in a series of commands that powered down the craft’s weapons systems remotely.

  “I don’t see what good these things will be if they’re flying in there totally defenseless,” Donovan grumbled as he and Bob shadowed the semi-functional vessel from above.

  The newly repaired assault ship was bare-bones, but for what was essentially a use-and-dump attack craft, that was to be expected. The marriage with a low-tier AI, however, had presented a few unexpected problems to overcome.

  “K177, return to Hangar One,” Chu commanded, then shut off the comms before the annoyingly chipper craft could reply.

  “We’ve got seven more ships wired up with modified AI cradles so far,” Donovan said over the comms. “That last salvage run through the debris field was a goldmine. We should be able to hook up at least two dozen AIs with what we brought back.”

  “If we can get that many compatible ships functional in time,” Chu replied.

  The human crew of Dark Side had been running on stim-caps and looked worse for the wear. Of course, that was to be expected, as they hadn’t slept in over thirty hours. Doctor McClain hated to distribute the pills, but Captain Harkaway impressed upon her the urgency of the pending assault.

  “Now or never,” he had told her. “We’ll deal with the headaches later. For now, we need to work.”

  Reluctantly, she had agreed.

  Barry did not require such artificial aids, being an artificial man himself, but even Captain Harkaway and Commander Mrazich had taken the stim-caps. Both had been working shifts on the moon’s cold surface alongside the cyborg, hauling parts where they were needed as Bob and Mal dropped off load after load of valuable salvage from the wrecked vessel debris field.

  They’d spent hours upon hours sorting through not only the recent haul of valuable components, but also the decades of salvage previously amassed. It was a stim-cap-powered search for the pieces they needed. Fortunately, unlike a needle in a haystack, this was a very particular haystack that they had gathered themselves, and for their needs, it was one mostly comprised of needles. All they had to do was decide which needles they needed.

  Even with all the materials at their disposal, however, only a few of the ships being worked on were proving to be able to be made sound enough to support an internal atmosphere. The others, while able to fly, would simply not be able to hold pressure. Not a problem for an empty vessel, but a potential one should human passengers become a part of the equation.

  Fatima, being the best welder on the facility after so many decades of repair work, was busily reconstructing and modifying as many ships as she was able within the confines of Hangar Two. She hoped to make more than just a handful air-tight, but the herculean task would normally take weeks, and they had but mere days to accomplish it.

  Gustavo moved to Chu’s side, then plugged a fine cable from the terminal he was working on into the port in the back of his cybernetically repaired head. Technically, he was only supposed to be able to use his built-in equipment to help navigate and pilot the Váli, but since he was not required aboard Mal’s ship for that purpose at the moment, the AIs had found a way to modify his components to allow him to interface with other devices.

  For a human sporting replacement parts, it was a bit of a rush, at first.

  “Wow, they’re making serious progress,” Gustavo said as the data fed directly into his mind. “Mal and Sid are almost done designing a totally remote piloting system that will operate outside of the normal wireless bands. Looks like they may even have structured it in such a way that I can plug in and help out.”

  “Great news, Gus. But is it safe for you?” Chu asked.

  “Should be.”

  “And what about for them? I mean, we saw what happened to previous attempts against these invaders.”

  “Should be fine,” Gus replied. “With frequent, randomized modulation of the transmission frequency, they hope we’ll be able to maintain control, even if the Ra’az try to infect the signal.”

  “Good idea,” Donovan chimed in over the comms. “They should be safe if they switch bands before the Ra’az can lock on and insert a virus packet.”

  “Exactly,” Chu agreed. “And besides what they already have in the works, I’ve also been working on a quadruple-firewalled kill-switch for Bob and Mal. If the Ra’az do somehow manage to get the virus into one or more of the remote ships, they’ll be immediately cut from that particular signal before it can reach their systems.”

  “What about these new AI ships?” Donova
n asked.

  “Not much we can do for them on such short notice.”

  “Well, at least let me try to give them a functional targeting system.”

  “Donovan, we saw what can happen––”

  “Yes, but if we activate it remotely once they are engaged, what harm can they do? At least they’ll have a better chance of defending themselves, and hey, they might even take out a bad guy or two before biting the dust.”

  Chu didn’t like the idea of heavily armed trash collectors and kitchen AIs wielding such destructive power, but Donovan did have a point. Once they were clear of the base and on the move to engage the Ra’az and their Chithiid loyalists, there would be so few out there, the odds of them targeting one of their own allies would be minimal.

  “All right,” he finally relented. “I’ll help you install a proper targeting upgrade. But if they go haywire, don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

  “Okay, Chu,” Donovan said with a laugh. “You retain ‘told-you-so’ rights.”

  A little grin curved Chu’s lips upward.

  “Gentlemen,” Sid chimed in, “Mal and I have been monitoring your progress and would like to offer a few suggestions in regards to the remote piloting system. Do you have time to go over those specifications at the moment?”

  “Sure, Sid. We were just running a test with one of the low-tier AIs,” Chu replied.

  “We noticed,” Mal said, a hint of amusement in her voice. “We have every confidence you will have at least a few of them functional in time to aid in Joshua’s plans. Remember, they do not need to be perfect. Much as it pains me to say, these vessels are expendable tools serving the bigger picture.”

  It was quite a ruckus, and the most activity Dark Side had seen in centuries. The assembled team only hoped it would be enough.

  Tucked away in her secure facilities, Freya observed everything going on with great fascination. Aside from monitoring the communications traffic between Earth and the moon, it was the most entertainment she’d had in days.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Finding weapons depots in America was easy, and Shelly was glad to be the one leading the team retrieving them before heading to the stripped remains of New York City, where she and her team would lie in wait for the pending communications hub assault.

  The other teams would undoubtedly have a harder time of it in more historically peaceful places, where access to firearms had been a bit more difficult than flashing a wad of cash and a smile before walking out into the night with an assault rifle and a bag of ammunition.

  Australia had long ago restricted access to weaponry, and Japan, well, they had mutually productive agreements with other nations to provide for their defense.

  In America, however, things that go boom had long been a cornerstone of that particular nation’s identity, and despite the obsolete nature of nearly all of the ancient conventional firearms from long ago when dealing with alien invaders, explosives never really seemed to lose their punch. The only problem now was that surviving caches of the truly powerful devices were few and far between.

  “Joshua, we’ve arrived in Hoboken,” Shelly transmitted via a weak hardline. While the system was still being rebuilt, it was nowhere near perfect, and for safety’s sake, the communications were slowed by the multiple protective relays on their way across the country back to Colorado.

  “You guys made excellent time,” the genius AI noted. “The other teams are still several hours from their destinations.”

  “How far is it to this depot? Being this close to New York City makes me antsy. Ra’az ships keep flying over the city.”

  “There is a military base nearby. Fort Hamilton, in Brooklyn, that housed firearms caches. However that location was deemed far too publicly visible for the good stuff.”

  “Good stuff?”

  “Oh, yes. You’ll find that Hoboken and the surrounding area was largely ignored by the Ra’az due to a seeming lack of useful salvage––at least compared to Manhattan. What they failed to discover in their carelessness was there is a long-secret vault hidden beneath the granite marker at Camp Merritt, just to your north.”

  “So we head north, collect explosives at that location, and from there we cross into the city?”

  “Precisely. Pry off the lowest south-western corner of the monument. You will find a concealed keypad. Enter the code 011235813. The base is on a swivel, and once unlocked, the mechanism will allow you to slide it aside to descend into the facility. You are ready with the specs on which explosives and detonators to gather, yes?”

  “Yeah, we have all the info, but hang on. Isn’t that code a bit obvious?”

  “Not to those who do not follow mathematics,” he replied. “And those that do were not the ones they typically worried about gaining access to these sorts of things. If anything, they’d have been more likely to build their own.”

  “All right,” Shelly replied. “We’re on it. We’ll check back in after we’ve retrieved the payload.”

  She keyed off the comms, disconnected from the hardline, and stowed the unit securely in her pack.

  “Okay, you mutts, gather up your gear. We’re heading a little bit north of here, and it might get a little bit hairy.”

  “Why? What’s different here?” an enthusiastic, but very green human helper asked.

  “We’re right outside of New York,” she replied. “That means there’s going to be extra scrutiny in the area. We should be okay, but I don’t want anyone to take any unnecessary chances.”

  Shelly checked the sleeves and gloves covering her cybernetic arms, then turned to her cyborg support units.

  “Make sure you have your Faraday suits sealed up tight and covering all mechanical parts at all times.”

  “We know.”

  “I’m not trying to be condescending,” she clarified. “I’m just being abundantly cautious. We can’t afford to show up on their scans. Especially not this close to their comms hub.”

  “No offense taken, Shelly. We’re ready to move as stealthily as possible.”

  “Good. It’s not too far, so we’re going to make the trip fast and quiet and collect those explosives. The tunnels are still intact, so we will sneak across to the city going under, rather than over. After that, all we can do is sit tight until we meet the Chithiid insiders and wait for the final countdown to begin.”

  The team moved out at a quick pace. They were up to the task of retrieval––that part should be pretty straightforward. It was the setting of bombs that had her concerned.

  Tokyo. Land of sushi and Godzilla. At least, that’s what Omar couldn’t help but think as his team stalked quietly through the ruined streets of the city, picking their way through the remains of once-great buildings.

  Unlike the towering lizard, however, he strode carefully on his Faraday-shielded cybernetic legs, and the remains of towering structures that were crunching under his boots had tumbled long before his arrival.

  Mount Fuji loomed high above in the distance, a gentle wisp of smoke lazily snaking its way into the azure sky. Delicate, pink cherry blossoms were blooming, and as their petals wafted toward the ground, Omar found the entire scene almost idyllic.

  Idyllic if you ignored the millions dead, the ruined city, and the buzz of alien transport craft overhead, causing them to duck for cover periodically.

  Getting there once they acquired their explosives payload had been something of a trek, especially given the distance they had to cover from the far southern territories to the streets of Tokyo.

  Japan had been a neutral island nation for centuries, and aside from the many samurai swords made primarily for tourists, it was largely unarmed. The distant island of Okinawa, however, was a different story.

  First were their swords. Though tourist pap was certainly to be found, master craftsmen still forged exceptional weapons of death intended for bloody use, not display, on the tiny island. Such was the nature and history of Okinawa.

  In addition, given the robust military prese
nce ever since the end of the second world war, the existence of a deeply hidden weapons cache was not a surprise, though finding it amid the fields of rubble from the alien invasion and subsequent deconstruction would be a challenge.

  The rugged jungles of the interior were beautiful and lush, left untouched by the Ra’az assault. The pig population of the island––left unchecked once their human consumers were gone––had exploded, and you could barely tread through the thick vegetation without coming across a porcine resident.

  It was the pigs––introduced to the island by the Chinese several hundred years earlier––that provided Omar’s team a most unexpected and excellent form of cover. So long as they moved with the flow of the large creatures, the sheer mass of biological readings would overwhelm the Ra’az scans. Add to that a few hundred years of constant movement on the island lulling the aliens into complacency, and they could almost let their guard down.

  Almost.

  Every so often, a Chithiid ship would pass overhead, making the several hundred-mile trip toward the main island of Japan. While the aliens would fly, Omar and his team would utilize the comprehensive undersea loop tube system when they departed Okinawa Island.

  It was a wooden structure the repository was hidden beneath.

  In its heyday, it must have been a beautiful building, but centuries of neglect––and pigs––had left the structure in an advanced state of disrepair. Fortunately for the team, the sturdy concrete-and-lead structure beneath it was perfectly intact.

  With the hidden entrance long ago rotted away, it was as easy as walking down a short flight of stairs to reach the lone keypad guarding the heavy door. The nearest pigs jumped with surprise at the hiss of air being released after so many years, but quickly went back to rooting and foraging for food.

  “Let’s be quick, but thorough,” Omar said to his team. “I’ll handle the heavy ordinance.”