Jungle (Colony Book 2), page 88
“The trick,” the old computer programmer continued, “is determining how long that war will buy us.” He looked up at Didem. “Didem—”
“My agents on Earth are now compromised,” she said, shaking her head. “None remain. According to the feeds from the incoming courier, they were forced to use every method at their disposal to achieve our aims, as well as a few mission-critical extras. I believe the exact term used was ‘we burned every bridge that could be burned.’ However …” she said, letting the feeling of pleasure rushing through her mind show on her face. “That does not mean we are out of options. After all, we now have new ones available to us.”
She held up a hand, colored motes of light coming together to form a small, black orb that floated above her hand. “You recall the stealth satellite that I intercepted last week?” Rodriguez and West both nodded.
“Well,” she said, summoning several more images of the tiny satellites and setting them at orbit around her. “With the knowledge and schematics needed to construct FTL drives in our control, nothing is stopping me from building a small, jump-capable ship to dispatch to Sol in order to make our own inquiries of what’s happening at Earth. Via satellite or information brokers.”
“Why wait?” West asked, his voice firm. “Refuel the courier ship the moment you have the FTL schematics and send it back!”
“I would,” Didem said, lifting a clawed finger. “Save that there is one other bit of news I’ve yet to divulge which my agents recovered. However, before I act on it, I need information and opinions from both of you.” Which in turn will tell me more about how much I can trust you, she thought, though it was a tangential connection.
“The first question is how long can we safely delay acquiring intelligence on Earth, along with what sort of turnaround we could expect to face in the event that hostilities cease?”
“That’s … a very hard-to-answer question,” Rodriguez said, glancing at West and then looking back at Didem with concern in his eyes. “What does this have to do with—?”
“My second question,” Didem said, letting herself drift forward slightly toward the pair. “Is how committed you are to recovering the trio?”
“Those three?” Surprise more genuine than any Didem could recall seeing flashed across the admiral’s face. “You know where they are?”
“I do,” Didem said. “And unfortunately, I have reason to believe that they are in grave danger. Eidre never intended to let any of them live. Instead, she—”
Alarms flashed inside her mind as specially-coded observation programs triggered, sending alerts flashing through her systems. Within a second she had checked the data again and again, examined her own systems and receivers for errors, and then checked them once more.
“Di—”
She ignored the beginning of Rodriguez’s question as she went to work, analyzing what had happened, setting aside a subroutine to dispatch a notice to Madero, as well as a second to awaken every single communication and survey device she had currently in-system. Which, unfortunately, did not include the not-yet-functional secondary FTL array she and her team of engineers had been so carefully building for the last few weeks.
“—de—”
She ran the anomaly through an analysis again, checking it for all sorts of hidden encryption checks, devoting the full power of her systems to the task and crunching through multiple quadrillions of possibilities in less time than it took a human to blink. Nothing. It was exactly what it appeared to be. Nothing more, nothing less. Clinical. Textbook.
“—m?”
Thousands of simulations raged, sorting probabilities and chance with brutal efficiency. This was her at her most inorganic, when her mind was at its most alien, and closest to her origins. No emotion, no distractions. Just pure, ruthlessly powerful computing capability.
They had to know. Immediately. Her avatar burst into motion again, the sudden movements startling Rodriguez and bringing and expression of concerned worry to Wests face.
“It’s not attackers,” she said, predicting both their questions before they could speak. By the time she’d reached the end of her sentence, several of her Astraea-class frigates were adjusting to new orbits, though she wasn’t sure what use their weapons would be in the current emergency. They were designed for orbital combat, not bombardment. The Thetis-class corvettes even less-so. Unless I dropped them, she thought. But I have better tools at my disposal for that sort of operation. “It’s the signal. From beneath North Shore. It’s changed. It’s transmitting something else now.”
“What?” West asked, rising as she continued to alert every single defensive item in the system.
“An image,” she said, summoning a copy of the flat, two-dimensional diagram that had been encoded in the message. It appeared in the air, a white surface with black text scrawled across it.
“The encoding was standard to our systems,” she said as the two locked eyes on the picture. “And this image is a single word repeated in over a dozen known languages.” She looked down at West and Rodriguez as their confusion grew.
“That word is ‘hello.’”
PART FOUR
Chapter 26
“I’m going,” Anna said before the shock of Ikeda’s proclamation could finish resonating through the room. She stepped toward the armory racks, her mind already working out what she would need to take. A Rezzer for starters, with plenty of ammunition. A rifle too. One of the throwers. And an emergency kit. There would be plenty of space on the—
“What?”
Anna gave a half-hearted glance over her shoulder as the commander spoke to show she was listening, even as her hands tugged a Rezzer free of its mounting.
“Neres, what are you doing?” Was that shock in the commander’s voice?
“Exactly what I’m supposed to do,” she answered, checking the Rezzer and then setting the boxy shotgun on a nearby counter. Ammo … ammo … Third drawer. The boxes of shells were made of thin, flimsy cardboard, and they flexed as she dropped several of them on the counter. One split, spilling the square shells out onto the tabletop. “You know the law concerning the receipt of an emergency distress beacon signal, commander.”
“I do,” Ikeda said, stepping up alongside Anna as she began loading shells into the Rezzer. “But I’m also well aware that they can be safely ignored if the receiving party is in a dangerous situation itself.”
“Not dangerous enough,” Anna said, the last shell going into the weapon with a faint click beneath her fingers. She checked the safety, then docked the shotgun on her back without cocking it. The spare boxes of shells came apart quickly under her hands, the extra ammunition going into empty pouches on the outside of her armor. Then she paused, her motions slowing, and gave Ikeda a sideways look. The woman’s jaw was set, but her expression was one of concern more than anything else. “Are you going to suggest we ignore their distress call?”
“I … No,” the commander said, shaking her head quickly. “We can’t do that. I know the regulations. But you don’t have to leave now. The batteries on those beacons can last for decades. For all we know, it’s a lifeboat from a smuggler ship that crashed here years ago. The sun is going to set in another two hours, and that weather system is nearly here. We won’t have communication with you. And then there’s the rest of what those drones found—”
“Wait, they found something else?” Jake asked. “What?”
“Yeah,” Johan replied, nodding as he stepped up to the display. “And it’s not good.” The display shifted, expanding in the air as he adjusted the controls so that all of them could see what he was looking at. “We caught it by pure chance, just because of one of the pictures that was fed into the—” He shook his head. “Right, well, I’ll just show you. This,” he said, a picture appearing in the air above the display, “is one of the pictures we fed into the drone’s recognition system. You know, so it would know what was ‘normal’ and what wasn’t.” The image floating above the display was one of the many mushroom trees that existed beneath the canopy, it’s odd, bulbous shape slowly rotating as the picture spun.
“It’s a mushroom tree about two miles east of here,” Johan said. “Pretty standard. Except when the drone passed over it on the way out, it looked like this instead.” He tapped at the display, and the image in the air shifted. For a moment the room was quiet, Johan and the commander giving both of them expectant looks.
Jake was the first to break the silence. “Oh,” he said, his choice of phrase almost underwhelming in the wake of the image in front of them. “That’s … That’s not good.”
“No,” Ikeda said, her voice quiet and grim as she agreed with him. “It’s not.”
The tree had … burst. That was the best word for it. Cracked apart like an overripe melon. About half of it was still standing, but it was merely an empty space, the inside where one would have expected a trunk or spongy heartwood an empty space slick with slime and other fluids. The missing half was lying on the ground nearby, broken into several pieces that already appeared to be decomposing. In fact, Anna realized, the whole of the remains looked like they were decomposing, the bark that she could see sloughing away from the remains of the shell in thick strips while the leaves had curled up and gone almost black.
No, Anna realized as she continued to stare at the remains. Not burst. Hatched. The ground near the fragments of broken-off bark—or was that shell—was clawed, torn up in angry divots, like something had dug into the earth while pulling itself free of its confinement.
“It’s an egg,” she said, her stomach twisting. “It’s a damn egg.”
“Yes,” Ikeda said, her expression hollow. “Or a cocoon of some kind; we can’t really say without a closer look but—”
“How big was it?” Anna asked. “This tree. Before it … hatched.”
“It was one of the smaller ones,” Johan said. “About ten feet tall?”
“Did the drone get a picture of whatever came out of it?”
Johan shook his head. “Not that I’ve seen yet. I’m still going through the footage.”
That’s why the trees were hollow, Anna thought. They weren’t trees. That was space for something to grow. But what?
“A cavity of that size could have held multiple dozens of hoppers,” Ikeda said, turning away from the picture and looking at Anna. “Or less of something even larger and more dangerous.”
“Have you told the rest of the team yet?” Jake asked.
Ikeda shook her head. “Not yet. Johan only found that picture while waiting for me to arrive, and then I alerted you two. They’re still hard at work helping Wells narrow down that XNA or Botha learn more about that hopper.”
“She might have more to examine soon,” Jake said. “But either way, I think they’re going to want to know.”
“They will,” Ikeda said. “I’m going to call a meeting and show them. After we’ve examined the rest of what these drones brought in. And I’d like—” Her eyes turned towards Anna, “—to discuss the feasibility of sending a team out to track down the distress call there.”
Anna shook her head. “No team,” she said, stepping past the commander and heading for another part of the armory. “Just me.”
“Neres—”
“A full team can’t use the skimmer,” she said, running her eyes down one of the weapon racks and picking a short-range, compact high-powered rifle. It wasn’t one she’d used before, but she recognized the branding and the style. A civilian version or UNSEC knock-off of a close-quarters urban weapon. Perfect. “But I can. And of everyone here, I’m the best suited for this kind of excursion.” She lifted one hand and tapped the hardened communications unit on her helmet. “I’ve got better gear, better armor, and I’m augmented.” She loaded the rifle, practiced fingers sliding bullet after bullet into the weapon’s internal magazine. She’d have to track her shots carefully if she didn’t want to run out at an inopportune moment. Provided she had to use the gun in the first place.
“Yes but—”
“I also am a member of the security team,” she said, docking the now-loaded rifle on her back next to the Rezzer. “Which means that I have full authority to supersede your orders under certain conditions.” A clip of extra bullets went into another pouch. She was running out of space, and she still needed to take the thrower. “And one of those conditions is a distress call like this one.”
“I am aware of the contingencies,” Ikeda said, her voice slightly strained. “But if you wait—”
“For what?” Anna asked as she picked up one of the throwers, loading it with the lone yellow tank she’d had the armory put together. “For you to tell the rest of the team? When the result will still be the same? Jake will stay here in case something strange happens. The skimmer has less range when weighed down with two people anyway.” She docked the thrower on her lower thigh. It’d get in the way there, but she could set it on the skimmer instead. Or the rifle. One of the two. “Meanwhile, I’ll go and check out the source of the distress call.”
There was one more thing she needed, and she moved across the armory toward the far wall, Commander Ikeda following her even if she wasn’t speaking, apparently at a loss at the moment. Let’s see, Anna thought as she opened a drawer labeled “EXPLOSIVES.” Three should be good. The fragmentation grenades were similar to what UN Peacekeepers used—small and compact, with a low blast radius, but at the same time still effective under the right conditions. Which for Peacekeepers, usually meant unruly civilian crowds rather than actual opponents. The odds of one of the low-powered explosives penetrating her armor was slim. A hopper, or a horde of them, however …
“I’ll be back in an hour or two,” Anna said, securing the trio of explosives on her armor. “All I’m doing is quick reconnaissance.” She turned and faced the commander head on. “Besides,” she said, looking her right in the eyes. “You’re not going to send anyone other than me anyway. Whether or not we learn anything new in the next twelve hours or longer, I’m still going to be the one you send. With the same gear I’m already grabbing. But for all we know, on the other end of that emergency beacon is another team like ours that we weren’t told about for some reason who ran into the same kind of problem with the local wildlife as we did, only they didn’t have a pair like Jake and me around to make sure all of them survived.”
“I …” Ikeda stood silently for a moment, but then nodded. She clearly didn’t like the logic, but … there wasn’t much that could be said against it, and she knew it. “All right, Neres. It is your call, after all.”
“Damn right it is,” Anna said, tapping her wrist and calling up her suit diagnostic. Plenty of power left—enough for several days if needed—and her air supply was more than capable. Especially if she brought a reserve tank on the skimmer. One more thing to grab, she thought as she closed the display. “Right.” She looked at Jake. “Jake, stay here and keep anyone from going anywhere. If I don’t come back, don’t bother looking for me. If I couldn’t handle it, it’s not something you want to deal with. Keep the team alive and button up for extraction.”
“But—”
“You can come back and look for me after everyone else is safe,” she said, doing a quick final check of her equipment. Everything was where it needed to be. Even her knife, secure in its sheath. “Preferably in a gunship, with a detachment of mercs in tow. You can probably afford some by now.” She saw Ikeda and Johan’s eyebrows go up at her proclamation, but neither of them said anything. “Also, I want you to go over all the footage those drones brought back and learn everything you can. Feed it to the team so they can analyze it. Got it?”
“Got it,” he said, looking right at her visor and giving her a nod. He still looked tired, but his expression was firm all the same. She could count on him.
“Good, because I’m about to change it,” she said, letting her voice grow a little softer, losing some of the hard, commanding edge she’d given. “First I want you to pop a drone and slave it to my suit to take with me. And send me the coordinates where that drone picked up the emergency beacon. Whatever I find, the drone will have better recording equipment than my suit. Then I want you to talk to Kombes and get a quick nap—one hour—before you start sifting through the drone footage. You need it. Are we clear?”
“Yeah.” Jake stepped up to the display, Johan moving out of the way, and called up the drone command interface. “I’ll get the nap.”
“Good.” Anna turned back toward Ikeda, the woman’s dark eyes searching Anna’s visor before settling on staring at roughly where her nose would be. “Commander, while I am taking away your decision on the matter, officially it’s up to you whether to voice approval of my actions.” For a moment the woman looked conflicted, but then she nodded, her lips and jaw set in the same firm line once more.
“Approved,” she said. “Over my objections.”
“Noted,” Anna said, and gave her a curt nod. She could feel a cool chill moving through her, a familiar sensation from before every mission, before every combat drop.
Pre-mission jitters, some called it. Others called it the early rush. Whatever moniker it fell under, she could feel it now, readying her for another operation she might never come back from.
Been a lot of those in the last few months, she thought as she headed for the door to the armory and stepped out, into the rest of the hab. Lankiss was walking down the hall, her eyes fixed on a datapad, and she looked up as Anna approached.
“Is Kaori in the armory?” she asked. Then she frowned, concern in her eyes. She’d seen the weapons adorning Anna’s body.
“She is,” Anna said, not slowing. “Head on in.” Lankiss nodded, but didn’t say anything, her expression growing more suspicious as her pupils darted around Anna’s armored form. Counting the armament.
“What happened?” the woman asked, her tone blunt.
“Ask the commander,” Anna replied as she moved past her. “I have somewhere I need to be.” She moved on without a word, and Lankiss didn’t call after her.
