Burnt Ice (6 page)

They could see an immediate
improvement on their screens as the survey drones, augmenting the radar and
detection gear, started to show the depth and gravitational mass of everything.

‘Jan, start feeding the base AI
everything we’re seeing please.’

‘OK. The relay satellite will be
over the horizon in sixty minutes so we are currently out of comms.’

‘OK, thanks. Tell me when you
have comms.’

‘Metals detected, ceramics — and
a dump!’ Fritz said. ‘Wow! Looks like they may have left some tech after all!
Nice. Looking deeper. Um, looks like this place was smacked really hard. I can’t
see a single structure that doesn’t have serious damage.’

‘Meteorites maybe, Fritz?’

‘No, not bloody likely, Marko.
Can you see any craters in the open areas?’

‘Play nice, Fritz. There’ll be
meteorite craters anyway — almost impossible for there not to be. Keep looking
at everything, people,’ the captain commanded. ‘I’ve broken the area into
quadrants and assigned you each one to overview. Let’s find something
worthwhile to report.’

~ * ~

When
the communications satellite came over the horizon an hour later, Jan
announced: ‘Captain, base is seriously preoccupied. There’s something
unexpected happening down there. Base AI has put me on standby! That’s unusual considering
their power. Those Augmented Intelligences never put people on standby — at
least, it’s never happened to me.’

‘No doubt we will learn more soon
enough, Jan. OK, let’s get closer. Ten kilometres, Fritz?’

‘Yeah thanks, boss. Fact is, just
keep going down until I say hold. OK?’

‘Will do, Fritz.’ said Jan.

As they descended, more detail
became apparent.

‘There is no small wreckage.
Everything’s been stripped clean. Bloody tidy bastards, these aliens. Even the
dump looks like it has been picked over. Plenty of metal bits and pieces but I
can’t see any intact tech — certainly not from our current database anyway. Are
we authorised to land and go EVA?’

‘Yes. Give me a spot and we’ll
put this down. Leave the survey drones at one kilometre.’

‘Captain, we may have a problem.’

‘What’s that, Jan?’

‘Here are the feeds.’

‘Shit! Hold here, Harry!’

A chill went through them as they
monitored the numerous feeds from the R & R Base on Nova Hawaii. It
was a mess. As they watched, Orbital-to-surface fighters were screaming through
the atmosphere, firing their ordnance into the sea around the islands. The huge
Orbitals were firing rail-gun projectiles into the sea and into what appeared
to be masses of squid-like creatures. There were at least five large transports
above the base deploying ground troops, vehicles and walkers.

‘Abort the mission, people!
Gather the drones on the way out. Harry, take us up. Engineering Orbital Base,
this is Longbow. Orders please.’

‘Return as quickly as possible.
RV with the
Gamma
Orbital. You’re formally under their orders now.’

‘Acknowledged.’

From their vantage point the
situation appeared to be getting worse, and they were at least twenty hours’
flight time away from assisting anyway. The three-metre-long creatures were
coming out of the sea, walking upright on some of their tentacles, attacking
anything and everything they could. Being soft-fleshed, the high-speed slugs
the ground forces were firing at them did not seem to slow them down much. The
Orbitals changed tactics and started dropping fragmentation bombs, which
decimated whole groups of the aliens. But more were appearing from the sea
behind them.

The ground forces were getting
coordinated — sections of walkers tore the aliens apart whenever they got close
enough — but there were not enough of them to make an impact. The crew saw a
few walkers swamped by waves of the creatures, leaving the machines torn apart.
The pilots were nowhere to be seen. To the observers’ horror, it soon became
apparent that any human caught by the creatures was being eaten by them.

Games Board monitors were zipping
everywhere across the scene.

‘I’ve jumped back into the Games
Board news feeds since we left.’ Fritz summed up the range of data he was
processing: ‘They’ve been a bit slow, so this might be an unauthorised
Conflict. I’ve found that reports of disappearances started to come in within
hours of the dropship tests being carried out. Someone has royally screwed up;
they’ve disturbed those creatures. Mobs of cattle on one of the easternmost
islands disappeared some six planet hours ago, which prompted the base AI to
send a team to investigate. The only thing heard from that section was a
terrified message that the sea was alive with monsters — then nothing.’

No one bothered trying to get any
real sleep. Instead they catnapped, watching as things steadily became more
serious. The commander of the orbiting fleet directed one unit to capture a
group of the creatures alive and for the rest to get into orbit by whatever
means they could. Two of the enormous combat carrier lifters descended through
the atmosphere, with every fighting craft available in support.

Over the next twelve hours the
lifters gathered everyone left alive on the string of inhabited islands. The
whole Base Command building, which held the AI, the records and command staff,
lifted through the atmosphere under its own power, the last unit to go. There
was a series of overflights, checking for any other survivors, and a few last
desperate engagements, fighting off the aliens to enable final evacuations.
Large numbers of the Games Boards monitors could be seen being dropped into the
atmosphere by their compact, powerful and very fast lifters, whose design was
based on an Old Earth hornet insect. The monitors, with their squat AG propulsion
units and a human torso and head sprouting cameras and audio gear, were
everywhere.

‘Bet those shits are excited.’

‘How so, Harry?’ Jan asked.

‘Non-sanctioned Conflict of epic
proportions and the Games Board didn’t have to pay a cent for any of it, Jan.
Oh, they’ll pay bonuses for heroics and such, but the insurers for the
Administration will be spewing over this lot. Hey, Marko! Mate, that your girl?
Looks like the image you showed us.’

Marko quickly switched his
engineering read-out screen across to the feed Harry was watching and caught
the end of an interview with Helena as she told a monitor how she had
electrocuted six of the aliens as they tried to break through the glass doors
of the schoolroom she had been defending. She had torn a plug off the end of an
extension cord, attaching the bare wires to the metal safety push bars. Marko
punched his fist in the air, grinning from ear to ear.

‘Got talent, that one. You should
keep her, Marko.’

‘Fully intend to, boss.’

They hard-docked with the
Gamma
Combat Orbital, Harry and the captain quickly disappearing. Before Harry did,
though, he yelled over his shoulder for them to square everything away and be
prepared to move at any minute. They did as requested, still watching events in
their visors, witnessing the demise of the alien threat. The fleet fired a
series of missiles with neutron-enhanced bombs, detonating above the surface
and dropping a species-killing toxin into the ocean.

‘Command must have concocted the
toxin after grabbing one of the aliens early in the fight,’ Fritz said. ‘Bits
of shits ourselves, eh? Go into battle and, rather than calling a truce, slowly
sorting it out, we just kill every fucker who stands in our way.’

‘That’s pretty much how we
operate, Fritz,’ Harry said.

‘Fuck, I hope we aren’t being
watched. There will be some even nastier, faster and harder-hitting bastards
out there waiting for us.’

‘Isn’t that why you were made,
Fritz? To give us an edge?’

‘Fat chance, Marko. I’m the only
one not certified insane, and sometimes I wonder if it would not be easier to
just let myself slip over that edge as well.’

The crew could see that the toxin’s
effect was immediate — and devastating. In the sea around the islands the
aliens were all dead. Marko reflected on some of the other nasties he had seen
the Administration use in the past, when the steady stream of money was
interrupted for any reason.

Everyone’s comms chimed.

‘Get some rest, guys. Will be a
while before we get back,’ Harry said. ‘In six hours we are going down to the
planet to have a look at where all these critters came from. A combat engineer
section is already heading back to the base to check over a Sunfish for us. As
we know a fraction more than anyone else, we’re it, I’m afraid. Although we are
getting an escort of the finest. I’m just annoyed that we aren’t able to use
our comms yet, so we have no idea how our friends fared.’

At the appointed time they
gathered their combat equipment and made their way across the Orbital and
through to the combat dropship waiting for them. Their armour, which had been
on their engineering Orbital, had been ferried across. Quietly, they stripped
naked, stored their clothes in the lockers and opened the transport containers.
Marko applied a spot of lube to his penis and anus — recommended when you are
about to be violated by a machine, he thought.

He lay down in the container and
touched the panel control. The suit confirmed by blood sample that it was him,
then formed itself around him. He held very still as the catheters were
inserted into the permanent shunts in his arms, neck, over his stomach and
above his heart. While the suit started its diagnostics of his current state of
health, a flexible tube was inserted into his anus and, once in position,
slightly expanded, forming a processor inside his colon. The interior surfaces
of the tube would take any remaining nutrient and water from the faeces into
storage and then hard-compress what was left into tiny pellets. Whenever they
visited an actual toilet after time in a combat suit, the shit was
shotgun-like, rattling when it hit the bowl, always a source of amusement among
the military. Another attachment folded over the end of his penis and inserted
a catheter into his urethra. Never a pleasant experience — but then again, he
mused, the suits were designed to keep soldiers alive and functioning, no
matter what. The same actions were happening to his crewmates in the other
coffin-like containers around him.

As the situation facing them was
not a Conflict sanctioned by the Games Board, the suits had all the safeguards
and limiters, which made for good AV, switched off. Marko’s blood was then
flooded with additional combat nanobots, to stop any bleeding quickly, or seal
off what in another age would have been a non-survivable wound — the nanotech
could even take over the function of a badly damaged organ. The suits made
combatants very tough to kill outright. They could also assist the tissue in
high-acceleration phases of combat. Trouble was, as soon as they were in the
system, respiration slowed down to one breath every few moments, making
speaking a strange task. They would have to remember to breathe in and out
consciously — sign language was the preferred way to communicate.

The suit finished folding around
him and sealed itself, with the exception of the faceplate, as he climbed out
of the container. He checked the full movement parameters of the suit and then
gave the captain, who was already out of his container and waiting, the thumbs
up.

The captain looked at his four crew
members and then gestured to the drop pods. They climbed in and locked
themselves down. The sleek micro-aircraft were not a great deal bigger than an
average human in full combat equipment.

The dropship howled down through
the atmosphere. As soon as they were close to the base, they were ejected out
of launch tubes with the wings of the torpedo-like aircraft deploying and the
little computers targeting them to land wherever their commanders wanted them.
They flew quickly down to the vehicle dispersal area where they could see the
Sunfish sub waiting for them. The tiny aircraft swooped over the arrival point,
then shot up, an air-brake arresting their momentum as a small solid-fuel
rocket fired to drop them neatly on the ground. As the vehicles stopped they
split vertically and folded in half, allowing the crew to jump the metre down
to the ground. There were combat units everywhere, gathering human and alien
remains.