The remote’s beams weren’t as powerful, but it had three of them. Its armor wasn’t as tough, but it had a lot more of it. D was outmatched and overwhelmed, but his remote bought the surviving boarders enough time to retreat out of the corridor before the final drone landed the killing blow.
55
“Interceptor, I need you to seal all boarding bays except three,” Chen said over the radio. “All teams, fall back on the access for Team Three. We’ll consolidate and form a beachhead for the second wave.
“Team B-Three: move through the airlock and set up a base of fire. Engage any drones detected with armor-piercing and maximum-focus plasma weapons. Treat as tanks, not infantry.”
That was going to make a mess of the Creator ship, but Octavio agreed with her orders.
“Das? Seal boarding bays other than three,” he snapped. “D, did the team leads get the orders?”
“They did,” the AI confirmed. “My remotes are falling back to take the rear. I am scanning for incoming drones, but they appear to be specifically stealthed against my sensor frequencies. Outside of visual, I cannot locate them.”
The video feed from one of D’s remotes flashed up on Octavio’s screen as the algorithm picked up movement. Laser fire flashed into the corridor a moment later as the remote halted and engaged.
“Team Three, you have ten hostiles in pursuit,” D said calmly. “I’ll hold them off as long as I can, but you need to get back to that base of fire Chen is setting up.”
The map on Octavio’s screen told him that the attack on Team Three was bad news. The boarding bays had been aligned left to right, putting bay three right in the middle—which meant that if Team Three was overrun and the drones reached the airlock before the Marines set up their base of fire, they were in serious trouble.
Chen knew what she was doing. She had to.
“Remote Three is down,” D announced, his voice unperturbed by the violent death of one of his bodies. “I have a rough map of this section of the ship; I am moving remote two to intercept this force and buy more time.”
“Team B-Three is in position and setting up,” Chen replied. “I need maybe another minute, D.”
“You’ll have it,” the AI promised.
The remote hit the drone assault from the side, lasers flashing in the dimly lit corridors as D calmly sacrificed the mechanical minion to buy that minute. Octavio wasn’t sure D’s counterattack took out any of the drones, but the AI took out a lot of legs in the firefight.
“Remote Two is down,” he concluded. “This batch of drones is going to be slower now. You should have several minutes, Lieutenant Chen.”
“Thanks, D. All teams, fall back past B-Three once you hit the beachhead. Organize and redeploy forward once you’ve caught your breath. The last thing we need is extra losses becau—”
“CONTACT!”
Team Two had been untouched until that point, but Team One was behind them—and Team Two no longer had one of D’s remotes. Half a dozen drones cut through a wall and swarmed into the middle of the team.
Octavio’s screens were a mess of explosions and plasma fire…and video feeds going blank.
Team Two was gone.
“This is Team Three; we are reinforcing B-Three. We have a base of fire and we are watching for the fuckers,” a Marine corporal announced. “We have Four’s survivors here; I’m sending them back into the ship.”
“This is Team Five; we have sightlines on the beachhead position,” another voice reported. “I’m watching the estimate for the drones that chased Team Three… We’re going to swing around and try to flank them. D, take the remote in to cover the beachhead.”
“Negative,” Chen ordered. “Fall back to the beachhead and consolidate. If they’re willing to come to us, let them. That’s an order, Sergeant!”
There was a pause.
“Understood.”
The map told Octavio what Chen’s biggest problem was: the Marine Lieutenant was with Team One. There was an unknown number of drones between her and the rest of her people, and attacking the robots hadn’t been going so well.
“Chen, this is Catalan,” he said quietly in a direct channel. “You’re less than twenty meters from the Bay Two access point. I’ll have Das reopen that bay, and you and your team can fall back in.”
“Sir, we can’t risk them getting into Interceptor,” Chen replied.
“Then you’ll need to cover your ass, won’t you?” Octavio told her. “Charging straight into an infestation of robotic hunter-killers is a suicide op, Lieutenant. Fall back to Bay Two and rendezvous via Interceptor.”
“Is that an order, sir?” Chen said grimly, and he grimaced. He didn’t have the authority to overrule her tactical decisions without a major outside factor.
“Consider it a strongly worded suggestion,” he told her. “I’d rather not lose our Marine CO today.”
“Understood,” Chen conceded, echoing her own subordinate. “Team One, fall back on the Bay Two cut. Interceptor is going to open the door when we get there, and it isn’t staying open, so move your feet!”
“We have contact,” Team Three’s commander reported. “Just one drone, scouting the hallway.” Octavio’s screen flashed to one of Team Three’s helmets just in time to watch the Marine fire their pulse gun.
At maximum focus, a pulse gun shot a lance of superheated gasses less than four millimeters across. It was dense, fast and hot.
It cut through the drone like a hot knife through butter. The machine was damaged, but it kept moving.
So the Marine shot it three more times, the rest of the squad adding their own fire to scatter the robot back across the hallway in molten pieces.
“They’re going to keep coming,” the Sergeant replied. “Watch all sides; they’re going to try and flank us. Anyone got a count on targets?”
“The force in front of you is eleven units now,” D’s voice answered. “The force to your left is eight, two of which are badly damaged. There is a least one damaged unit to your right, but it appears to have withdrawn to attempt self-repair.”
“Self-repair.” The Sergeant’s tone made the phrase a curse. “What’s their self-repair like? Should we be double-tapping downed units?”
“Disabled units may reactivate, but these appear to be operating independently. Destruction of the central computer core should permanently disable the units.” D paused. “Downloading my estimate of the core’s locations to all Marines and Spears. Follow-up fire to be certain the core is destroyed is likely wise.”
“Good to know.” The Sergeant’s voice was grim, and Octavio now had his link up on the screen. “I have movement on the frontal corridor. Looks like it’s our chance to avenge our friends, people. Lock and load!”
Octavio wasn’t sure what the drones had been expecting—or even if they were smart enough to do anything he would count as “expecting” at all—but they clearly weren’t ready to come around the wall into a prepared defensive position.
The Marines and Spears didn’t have any fortifications, just a handful of self-constructing barriers Team B-Three had brought over from Interceptor. What they did have was a solid double line of trained soldiers who knew what weapons could hurt their enemy now.
Octavio couldn’t trace the chaos that ensued as the defenders opened fire. He could tell there was some order to it that, say, Lieutenant Chen would easily pick out, but it was beyond him.
What wasn’t beyond him was the results. None of the drones managed to fire a single laser beam. It was a massacre.
“Contact left!” another Marine snapped, and Octavio’s cameras shifted over to see a second swarm of drones come charging down the maintenance corridor.
This was a narrower corridor and the drones could only charge four abreast. The Vistan Spears couldn’t kneel in their rush-built armor and had to aim high. The Marines could kneel, allowing the Vistans to fire over their shoulders.
Only five Marines or Spears could stand or kneel side by side in the corridor, but
that still allowed ten of them to shoot at once. Plasma pulses cut through at one level, and armor-piercing grenades flashed through the air above them.
The front line of drones went down, but they shielded the second line of four drones from the fire. Even in the smoky mess the plasma and grenades had made of the corridor, the lasers were mostly invisible.
The explosions that killed three of Octavio’s Marines weren’t. More fire flashed each way and Octavio knew he was going to lose more people.
“Contact right!” someone bellowed.
“Contact forward!” another voice added. “Contacts on all sides.”
“Hold your positions,” Chen snapped. “All second-wave teams are ready to move in, but we can only move one fire team at a time. We need that beachhead, people!”
More of the blue icons on Octavio’s map were starting to push into the beachhead. Marines and Vistans fell as the drones continued, but others stepped into their place. The lines solidified, each corridor firmly held.
Things calmed as the drones seemed to reach the same conclusion, but then D’s voice cut through the apparent quiet.
“Contact up.”
The two remaining remotes were in the center of the beachhead, and their sensors had seen what the Marines and Spears had been too busy to notice: the lasers cutting holes in the floor plating above them.
Both remotes opened fire simultaneously, pulsing their lasers into the middle of the accessway the drone were cutting. Metal fell from the ceiling and several drones came with it.
None of them hit the ground intact, but more robots were coming through the hole. They focused their fire on one remote, hammering D’s tool with lasers that rapidly burned through the remote’s armor.
The remote collapsed, but the other one was still firing—and the remotes’ counterattack had bought time for Lieutenant Chen and her people to turn their weapons on the drones in their midst.
After several more terrifying seconds, Octavio’s screens all showed calm.
A sanitized report also informed him that Lieutenant Chen was down to twenty-two Marines and forty-three Vistan Spears. The report wasn’t clear on how many of the casualties were dead versus wounded, but Octavio’s hopes weren’t high.
“Is that all of them?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” D admitted. “Given their aggression levels, it seems likely that they waited to gather their forces and then hit us with every drone aboard the ship. Stragglers are still likely, especially if damaged units dragged themselves away to repair.”
“Keep your teams together, Lieutenant Chen,” Octavio said quietly. “But we need to keep sweeping the ship.”
“Understood.” The Marine’s camera rotated as she surveyed the unexpected war zone. “The good news is that we now have a lot of potential entry points into the core hull.”
56
Sweeping the ship’s main spaces took over three hours. There were a few drones that had, as D warned, dragged themselves away to self-repair. None were in good-enough shape to threaten the Marines or Spears that found them.
What was creepy was how empty the ship was. They found corpses, a crew that had clearly come under attack by the drones, but it seemed like the entire ship had been crewed by about thirty individuals.
The ship was on the high end of the Matrices’ original estimates, just over three kilometers long from bow to stern. Even after three hours, they’d only managed to get through the core operating spaces and not the cargo containers, but they’d only found those thirty beings.
“D, does this ship have a Matrix core or some equivalent?” Octavio finally asked, as D’s remote and Lieutenant Chen surveyed what looked like it had been the bridge.
The crew here had died somewhat more peacefully. From what the Marines’ scanners said, the three Creators on this bridge had poisoned themselves when the rest of the crew was being murdered by hunter-killer robots.
The remote was linking itself into the ship’s computers as Octavio asked his question, and D took a few seconds to complete that process.
“Strange,” they finally answered. “The system architecture is definitely ours—advanced by some decades of development but fundamentally the same concepts—and from the file and system structure, I would say yes.”
“But?” Octavio was pretty sure he’d heard a but there.
“There is no Matrix in here,” D told him. “From the design of the ship’s systems, I would hypothesize that the ship’s manual controls were an afterthought. It was intended to operate with a sentient AI as the interface between the crew and the systems.
“It does not have that AI, which suggests the probability that the AI was destroyed.”
“Can you estimate where it would physically have been located?” Octavio asked. “We can send a team to check it out.”
“Of course. Relaying the coordinates to Lieutenant Chen.”
Chen started barking orders, but Octavio was looking at the displays.
“Do we have any data in here on the cargo, D? We figured she was a colony ship, but what is actually aboard?”
“Checking the systems. Strange.”
“That’s twice you’ve called this ship strange, D,” Octavio replied. “What are you seeing?”
“This ship is designed to carry a miniaturized version of the seven-spike terraforming system we operate with, but only one terraformer is aboard, and it appears to be lacking critical supplies.
“As can be presumed from the presence of the hunter-killer drones, this vessel has more hull breaches than can be accounted for by our own boarding operations. It has also lost multiple hull emplacements for scanners, and similar systems and entire cargo bays appear to have been cut off from air and power.
“In fact, only one non-terraformer cargo bay currently has a fully functioning atmosphere, and it is responsible for over fifty-two point three percent of the vessel’s current power consumption. The other bays, ten in total, excluding the ones that should be carrying the terraformers, are empty and unpowered.
“The vessel appears to have three more matter-conversion power plants that were either never brought online or were properly shut down. The two that are operating are operating safely at what appears to be forty percent of capacity—suggesting both that the Creators have a lower safe limit for the operation of the units and that their units are significantly more efficient and powerful than the ones available to the Matrices.”
“Another century or so of tech development,” Octavio guessed. “Where’s that cargo bay, D? I think that might have some of the key answers to my questions. Can you access its systems?”
“No. While it is drawing power from the main vessel, the bay’s computers appear to have been intentionally isolated at some point in the past. There is no data connection between the systems there and the rest of the ship.”
“Well, I can’t speak to that,” Chen cut in. “What I can tell you is why you can’t find the AI. Flip to Sergeant Downey’s camera.”
Octavio obeyed and swallowed as he saw what clearly had been an AI core, roughly a third of the size of D. Even with a century of development, it had probably been an inferior AI—but then, D was a nearly complete copy of the AI in a Regional Construction Matrix. D was actually more powerful than any Matrix the humans had encountered before, including the Sub-Regional Matrices they’d been forced to destroy.
At some point, however, the AI core’s electrical systems had been overloaded. The black material of the core’s surface was charred and broken, and several of the conduits linking power deeper into the core had clearly exploded.
“That doesn’t look good,” Octavio said softly. “I’m sorry, D; I was hoping to run into a sibling of yours.”
“It may be either worse or better than you may think, Captain,” D told him. “Analysis will take time, but my initial impression is that this wasn’t externally imposed. The AI core destroyed itself, Captain.
“And I hesitate to judge whether that was victory or defeat wit
hout knowing why.”
“We’ve reached the cargo bay, sir, but the doors are secured,” the Marine Corporal leading the team inspecting the bay announced. “Looks like the drones attempted to cut through and gave up. Can’t have tried too hard, really.”
“I should be able to override if I link in locally,” D noted. “I am down to only the one remote.”
“Chen, do we have anything we can set up to keep D linked into the main computer?” Octavio asked.
“So long as you don’t mind using regular radio, we can manage it,” the Marine confirmed. “Our tachyon communicators don’t fit in the armor.”
“That will change,” D replied. “Give me the radio frequency and I will set it up.”
That will change. The words sent a cold shiver down Octavio’s spine. He’d forgotten the other half of the bribe that the Matrices had offered humanity: in addition to D themselves, D’s core contained a complete download of the Matrices’ technical databanks.
Once Interceptor’s main mission was completed, D’s job was to be a librarian and researcher, helping the Republic make sense of the Matrices’ technology and integrate it. Power-armor-scale tachyon communicators were probably going to be the least of it.
“Sufficient,” D said a minute later. “I have a link so long as we are within a thousand kilometers of the Creator ship. My remote is moving toward the cargo bay.”
“Are you in control of the ship?” Octavio asked. “Can you slow her down?”
“I do have engine control, yes,” D confirmed. “Once we exit warped space, I can commence the deceleration. Please note that the ship has zero excess fuel. Once decelerated into orbit of a planet, she would never leave again.”
“So, they needed to terraform that world…but they didn’t have the gear aboard.”
“Exactly. This ship is well designed for its purpose but appears to be lacking many of its designed accessories.”
Refuge Page 33
