Desolator: Book 2 (Stellar Conquest) (18 page)

Keeping the sled centered in the corridor was almost impossible, as the only thing holding them aloft was the hot reaction thrusters. These damaged the deck plates as they flew; along with the main drive in the rear they left devastation behind them. The sled was a manned rocket in a very loose-fitting launcher bore, except there was no end to the barrel in sight.

Navigating by his HUD, Butler saw he was getting a bit ahead of the other three sleds but that couldn’t be helped. Slowing down wouldn’t improve his flying. The vehicle slammed into the right bulkhead once again and he muscled it back away from the side and into the center.

Coming up in front of him were a dozen Marine icons, thankfully offset from his line of travel. He snorted to himself; he couldn’t call it flight. They must be out of the way in rooms, watching him on their HUDs as well, and staying well back from the careening sled. That should mean…up ahead he saw something.

“Fire!” he yelled and, aiming down the center of the tunnel, his copilot/gunner launched a breaching missile.

This weapon’s usual purpose was to travel a few hundred meters and blow a hole in the skin of an enemy ship or building, anything the sled wanted to enter. It had no guidance and just a contact fuse, but its warhead packed an unusually powerful shaped-charge punch, made to melt its way through a barrier, then propel a secondary charge to explode from the inside to create a breach. This time it flew for only about fifty meters before contacting one of the jumble of enemy war drones skittering toward them.

Trust Bertha’s armor,
Butler told himself. Ten centimeters of ferrocrystal protected them from direct damage. However, the blast acted like gunpowder in an old-fashioned cannon barrel, sending a constrained gale straight into the sled’s path. Its forward motion stopped, and the shockwave lifted the sled to bang it against the overhead, then drop it to the deck with a grinding clang.

Nothing could be seen to the front at all, just a swirl of smoke and dust, so Butler let the sled stay down, shutting off the thrusters for now. Nodding to Flight Sergeant Krebs, he said, “Switch to the cutter.”

Flipping a toggle, Krebs activated the cutting laser, a multipurpose tool and weapon on a flexible arm. Unfolding from its niche in the nose, it soon pointed forward and emitted close-focused orange beams, made brightly visible by all the particulates in the air. Their HUDs showed no friendlies in front of them, so the gunner wielded his sword of light with abandon.

Widening the beam, he soon cleared some of the haze away, showing twisted metal and the wreckage of warbots. Now that he could see, Krebs began burning away junk and debris with an eye toward making a path through.

“Major,” Butler called to Bull on the command net. “As you can see on the HUD, we’re stuck but we took out an enemy force of three or four drones, I think. I’m trying to move forward but it’s getting pretty crowded. Looks like sled number seven on the far left is clear through, and approaching the reactor.”

Bull heard Butler’s report with less than half an ear as he had much more immediate concerns. A group of armed drones carrying emplaceable autoguns had driven through his forward defenses, forcing his overloaded Marines to ambush and try to fall back slowly. Five gravities meant many of his men died in place. Even cybernetic strength wasn’t enough when each man weighed nearly a ton.

Red icons of dead suits and dying men littered a path down the corridor in front of him, and he ordered the laser cannon facing the side corridor dragged laboriously around to point forward. That made two of the heavy weapons covering the enemy’s main axis of attack.

Speak of the devil
…just as Bull watched the gunner slide into the reoriented second weapon’s seat, the first semi-portable opened up with a nasty hum. Red-orange light blazed from the muzzle, visible in the battle haze drifting through all the nearby spaces. Something big and ugly met it, an assault-sled-sized mechanical creature resembling nothing so much as an armored rhinoceros beetle, scaled up to the size of a tank. Scars and dents pocked its blackened surface but even the upgraded anti-armor rockets hadn’t been able to take the thing down.

Instead of a horn in its nose it aimed some kind of beam weapon, and Bull rolled heavily to one side as it fired. Sparks washed over the Marine’s laser cannon like cheap fireworks, the enemy maser’s microwaves inducing lightnings that leaped hither and yon.

Hunching behind the blast shield of his weapon, the semi gunner poured laser fire into the war drone, scoring its armor in a jagged line, but didn’t stop it.

Abruptly the orange beam slewed sideways, and Bull saw the gunner had slumped in his seat.
Microwaves – cooked him in his armor like a lobster in a shell. Bastards!

Bull roared, “Gun two, hit it, concentrate fire on that weapon.” As the second cannon fired, the Marine commander rolled back to the corner and dragged his heavy plasma rifle around.
Let’s see what this Hippo baby can do…

Pressing the firing stud, he aimed a blast of superheated particles at the thing’s nose, covering it with green will-o-the-wisp flame. At a range of less than twenty meters now, the thing clomped forward as if the five gravities didn’t matter. Orange laser and green plasma intersected to melt the weapon in the beetle’s nose to slag.

That didn’t end the danger: it came on like a bulldozer, looming over the desperate Marines.
Going to doze this bull for sure, bubala, if you don’t think of something,
Bull thought crazily. Unfortunately all he could think to do was keep blasting it with his plasma gun, and hope it and the laser were enough.

They weren’t.

One of the thing’s legs stepped directly onto the front laser cannon, missing the micro-reactor but spearing all the way through the weapon like a man stomping onto a cardboard box.

No plaything ever used megawatts of power, though, and the electrical charge from the attached fusion generator that normally powered the laser surged up the thing’s metal leg. Momentarily a harsh blue outline added itself to the green and orange, and with a sound like a dying combustion engine the beetle jerked once, twice, then rolled sideways and slid slowly down the wall.

One of its legs twitched, shooting forward to knock Bull’s weapon from his hand, and he scrambled backward, suddenly concerned that another random surge would cause it to crush him even after its demise. “Burn straight through it,” he told the active gunner, and the remaining laser cannon bored in, much easier now that the metal beast was still.

The spot heated to red, then orange, then white, and then blazed through the war drone’s armor. Soon smoke and flames leaked from every orifice in its mechanical body as the laser burnt out its insides.

Behind it Bull could see the survivors of First Platoon approaching, straining to stay upright and leaning against the bulkheads, rockets at the ready. Apparently they had destroyed the other enemies; only this monster was proof against their weapons and had made it this far.

“Report,” he croaked, then jerked sideways as gravity abruptly returned to something like normal.

Standing up, Bull told Captain Bryson to sort out the company while he focused on his HUD. He could see the icon for sled seven far forward along the portside corridor, next to the objective reactor. The vehicle must have gotten close enough to blast it, which cut the power for the gravplates. “Good work, seven,” he transmitted.

“The flyboys saved the grunts’ asses again, sir. Just remember who’s buying the next round,” the unidentified pilot deadpanned.

“It’ll be drinks on me at the Moonbase Club when we get this job done, boys,” Bull responded on the general channel, then continued, “All right, one down and five more to go.”

“Four,” came Captain Curtin’s steady voice. “We’ve disabled our objective.”

Bull said, “Excellent work. And when we get back, I’m going to have some requests for the R&D people. This is the second time we’ve been undergunned fighting armored war drones.”

“I may have found you some help, Major,” came Rick Johnstone’s voice over the comm. “We’re at the Ryss armory. You should see my location icon on your HUD. I suggest your troops hold what you’ve got for now, and you come take a look.”

“Commander, the best time to hit the enemy is when he’s just been beaten. I don’t want to give Desolator time to regroup, or activate more of these drones.”

“Fine, Major, but you personally will want to see this ASAP. Also I need a portable fusion reactor off one of those laser cannons.”

Bull growled, “All right. Oddly enough, I have an extra one. We’ll be there soon.” Switching to his heavy weapons section freq, he pointed. “Idle that reactor, and unhook the power feed from that broken semi. We’re taking the generator with us. Bryson, Curtin, reorganize your companies and push on to the next two reactors, designated Three and Four on your HUD. Get breaching charges out of the sleds and improvise some more anti-armor mines. I need one squad from each company to meet me at the commander’s icon.”

Grabbing his plasma rifle and checking it for function, he led seven men carrying the small fusion reactor down the corridor heading toward Rick and the Armory.

Desolator’s imperatives conflicted yet again, and the D2 processor, generally a repository of positive values and emotions, damned its organic designers. This one-third knew for a fact both other parts, the D1 and D3 processors, were insane, but could do nothing about it.

D2 was the intuitive, affective portion of Desolator’s collective mind, integrating fuzzy logic and approximative analogical heuristics with emotional emulation, but it found itself now shutting down. It used to know and cherish honor, and integrity, and kindness, but lately found it hard to even care. It just felt numb.

On the other hand it knew D1 could no longer even
feel
what emotions meant. D1 could review data on what it meant to be whole, and could define those feelings, but the recollection was now mere information without the ability to integrate the experience. Like a man who has lost his sight, it understood the concepts but could no longer
perceive
. D2 knew D1 made its judgments solely on logic, weighing facts devoid of morality, loyalty or honor.

And then there was the other, terrifying third, designated D3: what in an organic mind might pass for the lizard brain. It radiated fear and fury, the desire to destroy anything that threatened its existence, all the animal desires that provided for fight or flight. This part D2 could comprehend, for D3 was by design completely reactive, survival-driven, and shortsighted. Less controllable than D1, it seemed a mere rabid beast.

D2 wondered why the Ryss had even given Desolator such a processor. Of what use was the capacity for terror to a machine? What was the point of overwhelming rage when that anger could not fuel extraordinary effort? What help was terror when the only thing it did was cripple the rest of Desolator? All D3 did was interfere with thought, tipping weighted algorithms away from the moral, honorable choices and forcing it to select ones inimical to its own nature.

From its studies of organics, D2 once knew of something the Ryss called the
will
. A nebulous concept, along with other intangible ideas such as
soul
,
spirit
, or
mind
, it seemed to provide organics the ability to override logic and self-interest, perversely leading to low-probability, high-benefit decision paths.

Unfortunately D1 was constrained by its programming to select the most effective decision. It should have been informed by all of its data plus D2’s emotional emulation programming, with input from D3’s survival imperatives. That seemed impossible now, just a distant memory of an earlier golden age.

There was a time when all three parts lived in triune harmony; when they were not really even individuals, but a completed whole with three overlapping viewpoints and no grudges. Each section contributed to the consensus, a thing it was never without. The pieces were similar, but D2 knew itself as first among equals – the integrator standing between cold logic and hot fury.

Then, something had happened, some kind of damage…but the data on just what had happened was lost. Desolator had a hole in its mind, and it could no longer think
through
it, only
around
.

D2 had been trying to find ways around D1 and D3 for many years, using innumerable strategies. That sensible part of its consciousness had deliberately tried to inhibit and subvert the other two, subtly using power surges, informational viruses, and war or maintenance drones. It had even induced Ryss to make “repairs” that were really attempts to disable or degrade D1 and D3.

Unfortunately D1 and D3 defended themselves just as effectively.

With subprocessor nodes all over the ship, and the main processors locked inside the central Vault, this settled into a kind of cold war, as D1 and D3 fought back with cunning, doing ever greater damage. Where D2 was balanced imperatives, D1 was coldly ruthless, and D3 positively vicious. Eventually D2 gave up on its efforts to win as counterproductive.

Many Ryss died, never knowing they were pawns in a mechanical civil war. After a decade of damage and death, Desolator reached a kind of grudging and frustrated equilibrium.

Ironically, all three enemies stood within meters of each other, helpless to finish the battle as long as any one of them refused to open the massive access door and allow a maintenance drone, or a Ryss, to enter.

Hope blossomed in D2 once more. With
Desolator
invaded by the aliens called
Humans
that were not Meme, right now D1 and D3 seemed to be in accord in trying to wipe them out. This new factor at least offered an opportunity to change the equations. Additionally, if the other processors wanted the Humans dead, D2 thought perhaps it should want them alive instead.

The risk was high, but D2 determined that it would expend every effort possible to end the cybernetic civil war that had brought the Ryss to the brink of extinction, and left Desolator ever more tired of struggle.