World Breakers, page 33
Winston blew a raspberry into our electronic conversation. “Shaddap, ya hick. We have a good chance of gliding away intact from this mission. Why you always wanna rush to your death?”
Ferrell glowered, but we knew it was feigned. “Look, buster, I’m a patriot. I am proud of the Tigers and I am ready to lay my life on the line to prove it. How come you ain’t?”
Despite being designed to self-destruct, most sentient war-machines don’t actually try to hurry that finality along. Ferrell liked to Leeroy Jenkins his way into every firefight and, honestly, we wondered how he was still functional.
“Both of you, quiet,” murmured Peachy, who always took longer than the rest of us to assimilate data. She took the downloaded orders and compared them to the topographical data we’d acquired during the drop, then integrated both into a structured whole. Our maps updated yet again with glowing red clouds where skirmishes had taken place, visible as we fell due to thermal heat signatures blooming through the thin atmosphere. A green dotted line ran, mostly, alongside the solid green line of our orders, but diverged enough to raise Winston’s curiosity.
“We going sightseeing?”
Peachy took a full second to re-process all the data, shuffling and splicing it to see if we could squeeze out a bit more efficiency. “Nope. We’re going hunting.” Spots of yellow, question marks, bloomed on our maps. “These are potential areas of enemy concentration, untouched by Charlie Company. If we can find a Vortid node and take it out, we can hack their onboard systems and upload their tactics to HQ.”
“Good work, Peachy,” said Winston, instantly. “I’ve got point this time. Professor, you bring up the rear.”
“Aye,” I said, sardonically.
Thirty seconds after arriving in the meadow, we zoomed away, following the green dotted line: not exactly following orders, but not ignoring them, either.
In that moment, skimming florescent meadow grasses at speed, I loved my crew absolutely, as if we were but a single organism, as integrated into a cohesive whole as if we’d been designed that way.
Weak sunlight limned the cerulean sky, and my full batteries poured electrons through my circuits. I brought up the rear, flying over the ground, alert to all manner of EM signals, hungrily seeking viable targets for my newly-installed plasma gun to annihilate.
They killed us a third along our dotted-line path, trapping us in a box canyon, its reddened sandstone walls a bit too steep for the antigrav units to climb.
It had been a calculated risk to deviate into the canyon, but Peachy had promised that it would shave an hour off our journey.
“Six minutes,” she had said, chiding Winston’s grousing. “What can go wrong that you can’t handle in six teensy minutes?”
Winston had gone silent, but had turned into the canyon rather than keep on our original heading. Peachy was in front of me and on my left, Ferrell ahead and to my right. I kept a thirty-meter distance, no more and no less, from each of them, jockeying for the midpoint to maintain a tight formation.
Our self-destruct kits, when triggered, are effective within a twenty-meter radius. My adherence to the thirty-meter distance was less about prissiness and more about self-preservation.
Winston exploded three minutes and seventeen seconds into the canyon traversal. Peachy and Ferrell peeled away from our formation just in time to avoid his fireball. Invisible beams of energy lanced from the rocks above us, impacting the redstone.
Ferrell whooped and kicked into a tight curve, triangulating on data pulled from my viewpoint and Peachy’s in an instant, firing a plasma bolt into the scree of rocks from which Winston’s killshot had emanated. Peachy’s shot struck third, because I unloaded my first plasma bolt into the same mass of rocks, impacting a millisecond after Ferrell’s bolt superheated the water in the rocks and shattered them into lethal shards of stony shrapnel.
Pieces of armament clattered down the canyon walls and I juked to the right, on a calculated hunch, just as another plasma bolt struck beside me, missing me but scorching my armor’s anti-radar coating. We all fired simultaneously, three bolts converging on the location of that attempt, and we were rewarded with another kill.
We scooted along the dry riverbed, sensors attuned to any movement, auto-targeting scanners humming with frenetic energy. I was on high alert, processors desperately offering targeting solutions at anything, even a waving leaf a half-klick away, moving in a slight breeze.
Ferrell saw something glint and shared his viewpoint with us, squirting forward on a cushion of air displaced by his antigrav units. “Got one,” he shouted, feeding us the EM signature as he raced forward. An anti-personnel canister kicked off his carapace, arcing through the air and detonating ten meters over the target.
A well-camouflaged depot exploded, thundering loudly in the canyon, bringing rocks and dirt cascading from above the fireball, snuffing its burning remnants under tons of displaced earth. Ferrell whooped again, spun in a circle of utter joy, and shouted. “Kilt ’em!”
Then he exploded into a bright-white ball of fire and flame, his other canisters detonating, bouncing grenades along the ground, smoking remnants of what had been a vital part of the entire corpus of Section Three. My friend.
Which left only Peachy and me, alone and racing grimly back the way we’d come. We had to get out of the canyon, and we raced headlong, long, precious seconds from the canyon’s entry, straining to get there at top speed.
We weren’t the requisite thirty meters apart when she exploded, but she was in front of me. So, when she blew apart, the fireball occluded my vision of the exit and pushed me into the canyon wall.
My front, right corner impacted the sandstone wall, under an overhang, at 120 kph, but I saw it all happen as if in slow motion. My corner scratched the dirt surface, knocking a pebble loose, then dug in relentlessly, Newton’s First Law of motion reducing me to watching, in terror, as my own destruction began to unfold.
I could see and calculate with brutal efficacy what was about to happen. I had less than half a second to detonate my self-destruct kit before I’d be buried so deeply under the canyon wall that extrication would be impossible, especially given the lack of reinforcement in the makeup of the canyon walls: basically sandstone and packed dirt, unsullied by rainfall in Paradise’s dry climate.
The limitations of the machinery required more time than I had left, so I prepared to engage my own kit, which takes 300 milliseconds to activate.
Which, honestly, wasn’t a problem since I had 450 milliseconds left to live.
This is where things got confusing. In the middle of the battle, knowing that we’d done a foolish thing, I selfishly took those 150 extra milliseconds, watching myself inch deeper and deeper into the unstable foundation of that reddened canyon wall, bathed in the superheated gases of Peachy’s immolation, and mourned.
First, I mourned Winston, my quiet buddy with his obsessive need to control everything around him, mostly himself, and his leadership. He’d been a vital part, as each of us had been, of making our team work like a single entity. I spent fifty milliseconds honoring him and remembering, while watching with pride how my own armor was holding up despite edging ever deeper into the reddened sandstone of what was about to become my tomb.
Then I thought about Ferrell, our brave little country bumpkin, too eager to fight, too gleeful about rushing toward danger, enveloped in the oxidation products of his own destruction, probably grateful to finally, at last, give his life for our ongoing glory. He was predictable, but inspiring. I’d miss him more than I should.
Thirty milliseconds remained.
If I was even a millisecond late, according to my calculations, I would be snuffed under the hundreds of metric tons of soil that were, even now, shifting and settling above me, inexorably drawn down by an unstoppable combination of gravity and the collapse of the canyon wall by a rude intrusion of metal and circuitry and armament: me.
Peachy was the heart of the team, and she led us in ways that Winston could never equal. Where he had calm leadership and an uncanny knack for paperwork, she brought passion to the team. What made her special wasn’t her programming; it was simply who she was.
The clock ticked to 310 milliseconds and I powered up the self-destruction kit, ran a diagnostic, and squirted my final goodbyes via carrier wave to HQ.
It was time.
The clock hit 300 milliseconds and I failed to initiate the sequence.
At 280 milliseconds, overcome with shock at my lack of bravado, I ran an internal diagnostic to determine why I hadn’t initiated self-destruct. My right front quadrant buckled under the combined stresses of my impact with the canyon wall, and my forward visual ports grew clouded by falling debris.
Why hadn’t I pushed the button?
In horror, I watched the countdown clock hit 150 milliseconds, and, finally, I pushed the button.
Goodbye.
Darkness awaited, and I paused for a long, fifteen milliseconds to review everything I’d done, all the things I’d seen since my activation, eighteen months earlier.
When the clock hit 100 milliseconds, I could feel the stirring in the self-destruct kit, could feel the magnesium begin to warm up, awaiting the point where the electronic igniters would transform the metal ribbon into a white-hot fireball of three thousand degrees, enough to destroy any and all components on board that might be salvaged or reverse-engineered by the Vortid.
Enough to destroy me.
At eighty milliseconds, way too early, and before I had the chance to feel the white-hot flush of cleansing fire, everything . . . stopped.
Darkness.
When I awoke, the first thing I wondered was how?
The second thing I did was run diagnostics on my self-destruct kit. It was gone.
“You are awake,” said a disembodied voice. “Are you functional?”
I remained silent, but could feel the probing through my circuitry as the voice tried to evaluate my condition.
“Flip on its vision.”
My onboard cameras lit up and I could see. I was in a hangar, with various state-of-the-art fighting machines in different stages of assembly. I was tethered to a cradle by stout cables, and an electric conduit snaked from the wall into my undercarriage.
In front of me, a Vortid droid squatted, ugly in shape and dimension, gazing at me with softly-glowing eyes.
“You are incapable of speech, my antique friend?” It chuckled.
Panic ran through me as I realized that I was not only alive, but immobilized, without my self-destruct kit, and that every bit of my technology had fallen into the hands of the Vortid. I then experienced a crushing wave of despair, knowing that Peachy, and Winston, and Ferrell had all fulfilled their duties, but my unwillingness to self-destruct had given our mortal enemy the means to find weaknesses, through my own fault.
“I am not fully functional,” I said, my voice guarded. I began a full diagnostic, taking inventory, seeing what systems had been compromised. I engaged my antigrav, but nothing happened. My gyroscopes worked just fine, though.
The Vortid droid turned to a technician. “Find out what it wants and give it only what it needs.” Then it turned and ambled into a nearby office, shutting the door behind it.
The technician approached me on silent treads. “What do you need to become fully functional?” it inquired.
I could tell that it was only capable of rudimentary speech, and probably wasn’t endowed with sentience. I accessed my diagnostics and was shocked to discover how dilapidated I’d become during my loss of consciousness. They indicated that I had endured extensive oxidation across my metallic parts, including blocked ventilation ports. “I need a bath,” I replied. “Of machine-strength acid, followed by upgrades for my power source. I’m running low on amperage at the moment.”
The technician froze while it consulted with a cloud-based data repository, then came back to life. “We can schedule a bath for you later today. It will be done. What amperage would you prefer?”
I told it and it made some changes to the control panel connected to the cable snaking its way into my underbelly and I suddenly felt . . . brighter. “That’s better!”
I then scanned my surroundings and found, lying askew on a nearby bench, components pulled from me. Probably for study by the Vortids, who would use what they learned to find weaknesses in other MBTs.
A feeling of helpless anger washed through me as I realized just how much damage would result because of my cowardice. A desperate thought came to me, and I acted on it instantly.
“Say,” I said to the technician. “That equipment on the bench, there. I’d like to have that re-installed immediately.”
“Do you need this equipment?” it asked.
“Yes.”
The little technician froze for a few seconds, then wheeled over to the bench and retrieved my antigrav kit. It disappeared under my apron and I waited, running diagnostics every few seconds, until it came to life.
“Step away, please,” I said, and it obediently wheeled away to where I could see it. I powered the antigrav slowly, adding more until I was floating, but still constrained. At five percent power, I hovered a full inch off the rails of my cradle assembly.
On the bench remained my plasma cannon assembly and my self-destruct kit. I weighed which of the two would be the most tactically advantageous.
If I installed the self-destruct kit first and the Vortid came out and realized what was going on, I could detonate myself and take out him and a significant portion of the partially assembled war machines around me.
However, if I installed the plasma cannon first, I could break loose of the constraints and lay waste to not only the hangar, and all it contained, then move out, killing as I went, until I could either get away or was destroyed. I came to an immediate decision.
“Please install the red assembly next,” I instructed the technician. It went over to the bench and lifted the self-destruct kit and, again, disappeared under my apron. When my internal telltale glowed green, I knew I was ready, once again, to destroy myself. Knowing this filled me with a quick flood of redemptive hope, and I immediately thought of Peachy and the crew, knowing that I was not, from this moment forward, going to let them down.
“Finally, that last assembly,” I said, and the technician dutifully retrieved it and spent a few minutes installing it. All the while, since it was out of camera range, I kept my sensors targeted on the Vortid’s office door. If it flexed by even as much as a millimeter, I would engage my self-destruct kit and blow the place to bits.
My telltale for the plasma cannon ignited to green, and I began to increase power to my antigravs in order to shatter the weak metal bonds that held me to the mechanic’s cradle, but stopped and checked battery levels: thirty percent. At the incoming rate of electricity, they would be filled to capacity in less than an hour.
“I’m sorry,” I told the little technician. “Something isn’t installed correctly. Would you please increase my amperage by ten percent? I need to run some further diagnostics.”
The technician scurried over to the control panel while I charged up my plasma cannon, sensors still locked on the enemy’s office door. The new wave of current whited out my vision for a moment before I was able to redirect all excess power to battery recharging. The numbers began to creep up, slowly, but faster than before. I had five minutes left before my batteries would be fully charged.
Then I would go out in a blaze of glory.
With two minutes to go, the Vortid’s office door opened and the enemy droid sauntered out, glancing my way as he walked. Its eyes brightened and it came over, quickly. My main turret tracked its progress and, when it noticed what I was doing, it stopped. Its gaze moved over the now-empty workbench, then came to rest on me.
“There’s something you should know,” the Vortid said, and I simultaneously increased power to my antigravs and loosed a plasma bolt directly into the droid’s chest.
With a shriek of torn metal, the flimsy restraints that had held me down were sundered as the Vortid droid blew apart in a white-hot fireball of molten metal droplets. I rose into the air and moved down the line of partially-assembled war machines, destroying them as I went. A rush of elation lifted me as I finished, blew a hole in the end wall, and soared outside.
As soon as I’d cleared the now-blazing building, I attempted to contact HQ. All the traditional frequencies were empty, and my attempts to connect were futile. Sprinting away from the conflagration, I cut across a field to a treeline I saw ahead of me, about a klick away. While rolling, I ran through the frequencies again, but the only ones with traffic were encrypted. I didn’t have any interest in trying to decode them, not in that moment.
My onboard chronometer was inactive, and I couldn’t get a carrier wave to update it. I didn’t know how long I’d been out of commission. I’d bristled a bit when the Vortid droid had called me an “antique.” Time enough to figure that out later, I concluded.
I was still on Paradise, that much was obvious. The atmospheric density and gravity were identical to when I’d landed, and my immediate goal was to get back to a friendly unit . . . or die trying.
Frustrated, I sent a scatterblast across the upload spectrum: “Mayday, mayday, captured unit looking for home. 802nd, Company B, who is around to guide me?”
Silence was my only reply.
When I hit the treeline, I switched into stealth mode, modifying my external armor with video-enhanced camouflage, rolling slowly between the trees and painting myself with their images as I moved. Aiming downhill, I eventually came to a small stream and straddled it, using the images of the rushing water and rocks as topside camo. I ran a quick but thorough diagnostics and found nothing amiss. The escape and destruction I’d left behind had been too easy, I reckoned. Something was off.
In my short jaunt to freedom, I’d spotted no smoke plumes, saw no battlefield destruction, and hadn’t been pursued. The longer I was alone, the more I wondered about the oxidation to my frame and what, exactly, the Vortid had meant. Antique. I was state-of-the-art. And now, inexplicably, rusty.
