Renegades (Expeditionary Force Book 7)
Page 27
Smythe resumed manual control of his suit, rolling to the right to get clear of the overhang and sprung to his feet, the suit automatically reducing power to avoid him jumping too high in the low gravity. He was up and sprinting for the target before Katie pushed herself to her feet but she put on a burst of speed and was at his side in four long strides.
Katie swung her rifle up, having preselected the rocket launcher and set a pair of rockets to wide-dispersal explosive mode. The skin of the base buildings above ground were not armored, as the designers had placed all the truly vital and vulnerable items below ground and behind thick composite armor. She did not have to be particularly accurate with her aim, the rifle had been fed the designated secondary target before she left the crawler, a light squeeze of one finger on her left hand authorized the weapons. In quick succession, one then another rocket were spat out of the tube, propelled first by comparatively gentle electromagnets then by the solid rocket motors kicking in. The first rocket delayed its ignition to wait for the second unit to catch up so they could maximize their firepower. Despite there being less than forty meters to the target, the rockets were moving side by side at over two thousand kilometers per hour when they got within three meters of the wildly-colored alien structure. The warheads detonated with the force directed forward in two overlapping cone shapes, shredding an oval tear in the outer wall. Air and debris rushed out, moisture in the air simultaneously boiling and freezing as it was exposed to hard vacuum. Katie’s suit sensors saw right through the clouds of dust and frozen vapor, providing her a clear synthetic image as she instinctively blinked when debris thrown at her by the backblast pinged off her suit. Hugging the rifle to her chest, she increased her stride length then pushed off with one leg to leap upward five meters, going in through the hole made by the rockets she fired. As she landed, trusting her suit to make her boots grip the damaged surface of what used to be an interior floor, she felt a thump beside her, knowing that was Smythe following right on her heels.
She did not bother announcing ‘Clear’ as the area was very much not clear of enemy activity. Two Bosphuraq lay dead or dying, their bloody unprotected bodies shattered by the explosions and decompression. Neither of the two enemy were wearing any type of environment suit, instead being clothed in coverall that were shades of muted pastels rather than the garish colors of the structure. With her rifle switched back to explosive-tipped rounds and another rocket ready for fragmentation mode, she ran forward, relying on the enhanced vision provided by suit sensors. There was an explosion ahead to her right, her trigger finger took up slack as she judged in a flash whether to shoot. The hallway ahead was already damaged, and they could not risk hitting the data port where Skippy needed to be plugged in or the mission would fail completely. Another shower of sparks showed Katie the explosion had been a power circuit shorting out, not hostile activity directed at her and her finger relaxed ever so slightly.
Their impromptu sprint across the last stretch of open ground had brought them in through the secondary objective, farther from the vital data port and a part of Katie’s mind wondered if Smythe had erred in running rather than continuing to crawl. That the sprint had covered ground rapidly was not in question, Katie’s concern was that running along the blast-damaged hallway was so frustratingly slow, she might have been able to run just as fast without the assistance of powered armor. Her unassisted speed in the powered armor was impressive for a human, but it was too slow for a desperate operation against a technologically superior species like the Bophuraq. The hallway was littered with debris cluttering the floor and hanging down from the ceiling, impeding her progress. Her unenhanced human eyes and slow organic brain could not cope quickly enough with the data projected on the inside of her helmet faceplate, and her reflexes were too slow. Katie had been an athlete since she was a little girl playing soccer and hockey, and prided herself on peak fitness, now she swallowed her pride for the good of the mission. “Suit, Sprint Mode to objective,” she gasped, “engage.”
The rocket fired by Lauren Poole found some sort of target when it flew down the holes knocked into the walls by enemy fire, she knew that from the backblast of fire and warhead shrapnel. If she had time, she could have replayed data from the last microseconds of the rocket’s life to see what it had seen and what it had hit. Unfortunately, the rocket’s impact was decidedly on the bad side of the good news/bad news equation. The rocket had hurt the enemy, it had also alerted the enemy that at least one of the invaders was still alive and combat effective and that prompted an immediate response. Fire from some type of kinetic weapon began tearing the wall apart, ripping holes that stitched a line back toward Poole’s position. In response, she leapt upward to cling to the ceiling upside down with the gecko-grip palms of her gloves and the knee pads. Sensing what she wanted to do even if the suit computer was questioning her sanity, it gripped and released as she scrambled along the ceiling past where the enemy fire was pouring in. She dropped down at the intersection of the hallway to take advantage of the thin concealment there. While the suit’s stabilizers helped keep her from fatally tumbling into the intersection, she was nearly bowled over by her own combot as it raced past her. The machine had freed itself from the wall it had become partly embedded in and, removed from the restrictions of direct command by a human, was racing to engage the enemy threat in its fully autonomous ‘suicide mode’.
A coldly analytical part of Lauren Poole’s mind flashed a thought that she was about to see which type of robotic weapon was superior, in the fight between a Bosphuraq killbot against her Thuranin combot.
The Bosphuraq battlefield robots were set up as self-directed robotic war machines called ‘killbots’, which made their own decisions based on minimal or no direction from their organic masters. The Thuranin had experienced too many incidents over many years, where the Maxolhx or Rindhalu had hacked into robotic weapons and turned them against their owners, so the Thuranin did not trust their robotic killing machines to operate independently. The Thuranin controlled their combots via cybernetic implants, because the organic parts of Thuranin brains could not be hacked, although even the genetically-boosted responses of a Thuranin brain were slow compared to purely artificial minds.
When the Merry Band of Pirates took over the Flying Dutchman, they at first controlled their stolen combots using the crude method of hand gestures communicated through and interpreted by Skippy. Later, the beer can had wiped the original programming completely and installed his own sophisticated code that allowed the deadly machines to be partly guided by slow-reacting humans, or to be directed toward targets and operate largely on their own. The combot brought along by Poole’s team had been given authority to do whatever it needed to stop oncoming enemy killbots, because she knew no human could keep up with a machine-to-machine fight.
Her snap judgment to engage the combot’s suicide mode was the right call, a fact confirmed when the combot blew past her, a metallic tentacle clipping her left elbow and spinning her away. Just as the machine cleared the corner of the hallway, it encountered a larger, heavier enemy killbot and the two machines poured fire at each other, then they were so close their energy shields crackled and flickered off. The opponents collided violently, rounds alternating in armor-piercing and explosive-tipped modes tearing holes in each other. The moonbase killbot’s main autogun was hit and jammed just as a round from the Pirates’ combot exploded inside the barrel of the enemy’s main weapon, blowing a chunk out of the Bosphuraq device and knocking Poole back off her feet.
With their autoguns disabled or missing and being too close to employ rockets or grenade launchers, and with both machines having decided firing masers would be much too slow to cause enough damage during their remaining very short lifespans, the brains of the dueling robots ran through billions of calculations to determine the best course of action. Deep inside well-armored casings, each machine had a sophisticated computer brain, and their processors sent signals coursing through quantum gates at the speed of light. T
he Bosphuraq machine had the crucial advantage of knowing it had a companion right behind while the invading machine was apparently alone, so the defending killbot needed only to delay the invader. In less than a nanosecond, the lead killbot decided to grapple the invader in a move that meant certain death for itself and certain victory for its masters. The grappling arms deployed-
If the Pirates’ combot had used its original totally amateurish, crappy and, oh there are no words to describe how bad the original Thuranin programming was, that combot would have been pinned to the other machine and effectively out of the fight. Instead, because the Pirates’ combot had been programmed by Skippy the Magnificent, and because the beer can in his groovy mancave aboard the starship was watching and able to provide instant analysis through the microwormhole connection, that combot reached its own decision long before the enemy machine ground its way through quantum gateways. In an inventive move worthy of Joe Bishop-style monkey-brain thinking, the combot tilted upward and deployed a harpoon that was designed for use to anchor it in place. The harpoon was used in a way its designers never intended and in a way that was quite effective, for the harpoon’s sharp blade, only three molecules thick at the cutting surfaces, sliced into the enemy machine’s armor casing, shattering the tough composite material and cracking the killbot’s main processor.
Now was a good time for a maser, the combot realized, a creepy tentacle snapping around in front of the temporarily spasming enemy and pouring high-energy photons into the casing, frying the hostile killbot’s computer core until it was not hostile at all, being a melted slag of rare minerals and exotic particles. With the enemy immobile and knowing that happy situation would last only until backup processors took over, the combot retracted the harpoon’s barbs and withdrew the projectile, picking up the enemy machine. That the Bosphuraq killbot was made of tough stuff became evident as it began to struggle, weakly at first then with more authority. The combot took only half a second to pick up and heave the partly-disabled killbot, feeling the machine shudder at it was struck from behind by weapons fire from its companion. Without emotion, the failed killbot had instructed its companion to fire through it if possible, anything to get to the invader. Friendly fire struck it repeatedly, breaking parts off and making the combot’s grip precarious. When the stricken machine was flung through the air, it calculated that its best chance to help before dying was to overload its powercells, an event more deadly to the damaged invader than to its still-shielded companion.
No matter how much smarter and faster-thinking the combot was, it could not escape being surprised by the sudden build-up of power inside the enemy’s powercells even as it tossed the half-dead machine through the air. Nor could it escape the shockwave that threw it backwards despite its attempt to re-use the harpoon for its intended purpose of anchoring it to the floor. The force of the explosion deflected the harpoon in flight, bending its course downward and to the side so it glanced off the floor and stuck into the wall. The wall being made of comparatively flimsy material, the harpoon instantly tore loose though its barbs were out at full extent, the recoil making it fly back at strike its owner. The combot was not without resources, for even as it was struck by heavy weapons fire that tore into its vital areas and it began to lose power, it ripple-fired its own weapons, launching everything it had for it knew that was its only possibility of staying in the fight. Both invader and defender were knocked about violently, the combot being thrown back into the wall it had only seconds ago extracted itself from, the second killbot staggering backward and its energy shield generators overheating and failing in a rapid cascade from absorbing kinetic rounds at point-blank range.
There was a microsecond when the opponents took time to lick their wounds, meaning their central processors switched to backup circuits and rerouted power connections away from depleted and failing powercells. Sensors reset, temporarily blinded by the furious energies flaring in what was left of the hallways. The lone remaining defender jumped forward, having observed that its brain must be slower than the invader, and calculating it needed to close the distance quickly to get a kill shot while it sensors came back online with agonizing slowness. Guessing where the invader must be, it swung its main autocannon around and-
Was struck from the left by two rockets followed by a hail of rounds from what had to be two infantry rifles, then another pair of rockets and another.
The defender had a judgment call to make; which was the bigger threat? It was programmed to consider only the threat to its masters, to the base it was programmed to protect and not to itself. Two enemy soldiers with infantry weapons were certainly less dangerous than what the defender recognized as a Thuranin combot, particularly as- What the hell? The killbot was astonished when its analysis confirmed the infantry rifles being used against it were effective but relatively crude Kristang weapons?! Why were Kristang attacking a Bosphuraq facility- No, scratch that. The real question was how any group of Kristang had the guts to take on a mission against a secure Bosphuraq-
The defender could wonder later about why a mixture of Thuranin and Kristang weapons were being used by the invaders, if there was a later. From the impacts it was sustaining on its armored forward surfaces, it knew the invader combot had reset its sensors more quickly and was targeting the defender’s known vulnerable areas. While its own sensors were still lollygagging on the couch wearing fuzzy slippers and munching on a whole box of sweets instead of rebooting and doing something useful, the defender did not need sensors to determine the invading combot’s location, it only needed to fire back in the direction the maser beams were coming from. So, it did that, launching rockets followed closely by everything else it had; masers, particle beams and autogun.
Poole was firing from the prone position where she had been thrown when the first enemy killbot exploded itself. Her own suit was experiencing problems with sensor inputs, there were a few tiny punctures through the tough armor and several of the power-assist motors were offline. While the two killing machines fought each other, it was best for soft and vulnerable humans to stay out of the way, and enough ordnance was ricocheting around to make it dangerous for her and Roark to be close to the battle area. They remained observers only for the three seconds it took for the enemy killbot to come into view, then Poole hit it with rockets and emptied her magazine at the frightening thing, seeing rockets and rounds from Roark also striking the deadly machine.
With her rockets expended and her magazine empty, she rolled to one side to reach back for a fresh magazine, her smart rifle automatically ejecting the spent magazine to go clattering across the floor. “I’m out!” She shouted to warn Roark, and from the fact that soldier was also not firing, she knew he was also in the act of inserting a fresh magazine. Their own combot was dead, Lauren knew that from the glaring red icon on her faceplate and from seeing the valiant machine slumped on the floor, torn in half, unmoving except for when it jerked from being struck by enemy fire.
The dead combot stopped moving entirely when the enemy killbot, itself gravely wounded and lying on its side with its legs blown off, decided the invader machine was no longer a threat and turned its attention to the pair of Kristang armored suits. Lauren’s gloved fingers found the magazine cartridge and a fully-loaded magazine ejected itself into her hand, her arm swinging around as the killbot’s smoking autogun swung toward her and her vision lit up with the blue glow of a Bosphuraq targeting laser and she knew she and Roark were dead-
Katie saw the data port first, her being half a stride in front of Smythe as planned because he was carrying the all-important microwormhole. They each carried the specially-made jack that needed to be plugged into the data port so Skippy could insert his presence into the alien computer remotely through the microwormhole connection. The jack would not be necessary if Skippy himself had come along on the mission, but no one wanted to risk the beer can going with the ground team, and he could perform almost his full range of awesomeness through the microwormhole in Smythe’s backpack.
“Huh? What? Oh, sorry, I got bored while nothing much was happening, so I am working on a devilishly difficult New York Times crossword puzzle from 1914. Man, the cultural references from that long ago are tough to understand. Hey, maybe you can help. What is a seven-letter word for-”
“Do your bloody job!” Smythe roared in outrage.
“Ok, Ok, Jeez Louise you monkeys are impatient, I’ll do it. Um, remind me, what exactly am I supposed to do here?”
The blue targeting laser was still lighting up her faceplate as Lauren slammed a fresh magazine into her rifle and felt the slight jolt as the weapon automatically chambered a round and released the safety. Kristang weapons, especially those reprogrammed by Skippy, were smart and hers knew she was in combat so she did not need to waste time on useless motions. The rifle had been on its side, the muzzle pointed away from the enemy killbot so she could access the magazine opening. As her rifle swung in agonizingly slow motion toward the target, she saw the machine had rolled farther toward her so its damaged autogun could get line of sight to its first target: her. As her finger took up slack on the trigger, the autogun jerked and she instinctively flinched to prepare for violent death.