Insidious (38 page)

The machines fanned out into a semicircle scanning for Reds. Their intelligence on Synchronicity indicated they faced not one, but two Reds, and this time the station would see them coming. What would the two aliens come up with to stop them? Or had they fled into their ship and gone back to … wherever they came from?

The heavy ASSAIL units strode farther from the breach point taking up positions in the hangar. Bren took a deep breath and resigned himself to the familiar agony of waiting and watching. Smaller robots and a handful of marine scouts entered the station searching for danger.

“The hangar is ours. No sign of resistance. Marines, prepare to enter the breach,” came Henley’s orders.

“Armed humans are approaching,” said the synthetic voice of Meridian. Bren noted it had been transmitted across the marine’s channel as well as the ASSAIL team’s channel.

“Get in there!” Henley ordered. “Get in there behind those machines!”

Bren couldn’t see the marines coming in from Meridian’s camera. His view was focused on an airlock next to a metal walkway on the level above. The portal opened.

Boom. Brrrooom.

Bren heard the ASSAIL guns start to fire. A form in black gear staggered through the opening and then fell flat. Blood splattered at the far wall. After a couple of seconds, the reports of small arms fire started up.

“Fractures in Pythagoras,” Bren heard in the Guts.

No one else spoke up.

“Pythagoras is being hit from two angles,” said the handler. “Both of the Reds must be in there somewhere!”

Bren tensed and waited. There was nothing he could do to help. He watched Meridian swing its head about rapidly, firing at targets that Bren couldn’t catch in the view. He couldn’t make out any Reds, either.

Bren heard an explosion and then smoke and debris filled the view. Then there was another explosion. He nervously watched the ASSAIL data. None of the machines went down. Bren realized he had stopped breathing, so he drew in a deep breath.

The shooting continued for long seconds while smoke billowed by the camera. It looked as though Meridian moved rapidly. Bren confirmed the movement through the tactical pane of his PV. Navigating through the smoke was easy for the AI core.

“Pythagoras is down,” someone announced aloud in the Guts.

The smoke had cleared a little. Bren saw a walkway littered with the bulky prone forms of the attackers. Meridian arrived at the airlock Bren had seen earlier and looked through it.

More dead bodies. Or dying ones, at least. The corridor was blackened. Bren caught sight of a silvery bug rolling on the floor. A grenade. The grenade rolled away ahead of Meridian, so Bren decided it must belong to the marines.

“We were lucky. The locals weren’t firing their weapons very well,” Henley noted. “But we ate two fragmentation grenades. We have men down.”

Fragmentation grenades
, Bren echoed in his mind. The UNSF seldom used weapons like that. He’d feared such tactics. The spinners had little interest in limiting themselves to humane weapons. Even the marine’s rifles could accommodate a wide range of nonlethal rounds.

“The operative crippled some of their firearms,” Meridian transmitted.

“Niachi? Really?” Bren found himself saying. “Is she nearby?”

“Her current whereabouts are unknown.”

Bren took stock of their losses. Pythagoras sat still at the edge of the hangar. The machine had crumpled forward onto its folded front legs. Smoke and sparks flickered out from three small holes in its chest. Six marines shared its fate, bleeding out on the hangar floor. Bren forced himself to look at the mess of blood that illustrated the vulnerability of human bodies. Medics were working on clearing away the first group of dead and wounded.

Bren checked the mission chronometer in his tactical pane. They’d been in Synchronicity for less than an hour.

“How did the Reds get in there? I didn’t see one come in,” Bren said. He began searching through the visual feeds of other machines trying to spot one.

“There are holes in the hangar that weren’t there when we first got in,” Henley said. “I think they may have used the molecule cutters to create murder holes in the walls.”

Bren hadn’t heard of a murder hole before, but the name spoke for itself. The Reds must have cut openings in the metal wall so they could attack from cover.

Bren watched a fresh team of engineers open a simple plastic crate on the bloodied deck. It held dozens of round metal spheres. More grenades, Bren thought. They dumped the weapons onto the floor. Bren guessed there were a hundred or more of the devices.

“This is a surprise some of our guys whipped up since we’re low on mines,” Henley said. “We’ve targeted these grenades for a spinner. All we have to do is give the order and those things will roll out looking for a spinner to glue down. We have five incendiary grenades, as well.”

“Why didn’t we do that when we arrived?” Bren asked.

“Those things can’t go far, and we didn’t know if the Reds would be waiting. They’re mostly payload, without much battery power. I think they could travel maybe three or four hundred meters to a target. We’ll use them to secure the bridgehead.”

“Unless they get hacked by a Red and reprogrammed,” Bren said.

“All our weapons are hackable, but it would be hard. They each have their own set of one-use codes.”

“I hope so. These creatures are advanced. We have to store and deploy those codes without tampering.”

Bren browsed through data in his PV for fifteen minutes while the marines tried to clean up the bay and secure it. He thought the job could easily take half an hour, but no one wanted to wait around and give the enemy any longer to figure out how to counter the UNSF incursion.

He found a camera feed from a small reconnaissance robot that Henley sent out toward the main concourse. The concourse served as a transportation artery that ran the circumference of Synchronicity. The tracked vehicle stood lower than an average human, with several visual sensors and a pair of thin graspers that each had four fingers and a thumb. Bren was struck by how humanlike the movements of its hands were as it manually actuated a door handle. The robot pushed the door open and went inside.

The camera view peeked around a corner. Bren got the feeling that the robot could look around corners without moving its body into the open. It crept through an empty machine shop and a locker room before coming to an exit out onto the main station concourse. Bren hadn’t seen any people or machines. He hoped all the people had gone to hide in their quarters as the UNSF broadcast order had instructed, but he doubted they all had, since they seemed controlled by the Reds.

Bren watched as the scout rolled out onto an open walkway in front of a Pho restaurant. All the food must be takeout under the new station rules, he thought. The machine panned its camera to peer inside, but no one was visible through the front windows.

The scout rounded the edge of the store entrance and looked farther down the concourse. Bren spotted a round robot with two short arms bearing weapons. Bren recognized it as a Circle Four. The security machine rolled closer on wide treads, traveling straight down the main walkway. He didn’t have a good enough view to tell exactly how it was armed.

The feed went dead. Apparently, the Circle Four didn’t take kindly to visitors.

“Stop! We’re not ready to move on!” Henley transmitted. Bren shifted his attention back to the ASSAILs. He saw from a tactical viewpane in his PV that the assault machines headed toward the concourse.

“We should engage now before the enemy reaches full concentration on the concourse,” Meridian said. Bren didn’t object. It made sense that the Reds had organized a response using the concourse, since it was the quickest way around the circumference of the station.

“If you have information about the enemy disposition, then why haven’t you shared it with us?” Henley demanded.

“The situation is fluid and complex,” Meridian said on the marine and ASSAIL channels. The machines were still moving as it talked. “We have data that would appear fragmented and unrelated under a shallow analysis, but we can act with some degree of confidence. I suggest you remain here and prepare your defenses in case we have to fall back.”

Bren sighed. The ASSAILs were less than a minute from the concourse.

“I guess we’ve lost control of them,” Henley said to Bren on a private channel.

“Probably not. At least not yet. But I didn’t bother trying to stop them because if I did, it would cost us … I think it would solidify an impression of human weakness to the AI cores. Let’s let them do their job. We may yet be able to issue a couple of orders if it becomes critical.”

“Have you ever thought about it the other way? If we keep them on a tight leash, they may think we know better. Now I complained to them, they explained themselves, and we accepted it. Showing them that we aren’t on top of what’s going on.”

“I think the tight leash would work a short time,” Bren said. “But then it could get worse fast when we forced them into a snafu. Then they’d see how bad we are at warfare without them.”

Bren watched Meridian approach the concourse entrance. A couple of humans in gear sniped at the machines from the opening. They scrambled when a glue grenade shot out past them onto the rubberized roadway beyond.

Bren lost sight of the people. The ASSAILs charged out into the concourse and immediately started to fire.

Boom. Boom. Boom.

Bren couldn’t see the targets from the camera feed. A tactical view of the machines indicated that three machines were facing in each direction and firing.

“Circle Fours coming in from both sides,” Bren noted.

Boom. Boom.

Meridian fired and dodged behind a support column. A person in gear darted out from the other side of the column and shot Meridian with a projectile rifle then rolled back behind the cover. Meridian responded by launching another glue grenade, banking it off the wall so it went hurtling around the column.

“Plato is heating up,” said its handler. “Some of its optics went out.”

Bren accessed the base schematics looking for the nearest laser emplacement. Sure enough, there was a security hardpoint sixty meters down the concourse equipped with a heavy laser.

The tactical showed Plato had retreated into a travel store to remove itself from the line of fire. Bren assumed that one of the ASSAILs would knock out the laser any moment with their 12mm cannons.

“Fractures,” two handlers said in unison.

“Patton,” one continued.

“Pandora,” said the other.

Bren heard the
kah-wump
of glue grenades going off. Glue tendrils whipped past the view on Meridian, but he couldn’t tell who tried to glue whom.

Boom. Boom.

Bren sighed and watched the tactical. He’d lost track of the sniper that had engaged Meridian, but he assumed the person wasn’t a major threat to the ASSAILs.

Nothing I can do but watch, he told himself again.

“Pandora’s down,” a handler said. “I’m putting in for a transfer.”

Bren wasn’t too concerned. The handlers could screw up and cause trouble for a mission, but trouble in a mission didn’t mean they had screwed up. Still, the handlers were serious about their jobs and often took it personally when their machine was killed. Much as Hoffman exhibited the opposite reaction—pride—when Meridian survived time and again.

Boom.

The firing slowed. The tactical display updated to show more dead security machines out on the concourse. Bren swept the view around in the virtual pane trying to find a symbol indicating a Red kill. There was none.

“That was close. I think we could have easily lost more machines there,” Bren said aloud.

“Lucky Meridian,” Hoffman said, smiling.

Bren smiled.
Hoffman must be very unpopular among the handlers
.

“Well, I hope he makes it again,” Bren said. “You know a lot of people wanted us to keep Meridian down. I had a hard time explaining he’s the same as the others except for the name and handler.”

But as Bren spoke the words, he wondered whether Meridian was the same now. Why did he still have the doubt?

Marines hustled out onto the concourse, sticking to the storefronts and hauling away the glue-covered figures in gear. One or two more shots rang out as they discovered another sniper hiding in a service corridor that joined the concourse from the other side. Bren saw their skinsuits lighten to blend in with the pale walls and bright concourse lights.

Bren watched the camera view move back and forth across the concourse as marines set up their positions. A team of engineers began widening the pathway from the hangar to the concourse, creating an access road from the
Vigilant
to the main concourse. Bren monitored the radio traffic on the marine channel as they set up a laser-armed hardpoint in the hanger to guard the umbilical entrance.

“Time to play leapfrog again,” Henley announced a half hour after the firefight on the concourse.

The ASSAIL machines took his cue and strode away.