So It Begins (21 page)

  Pippa stooped, picked up the wooden box. “But we got the Nano-Bomb equipment.”

  “Yeah. At least we got something.”

  “We didn’t kill her, him . . .
it
, did we?” said Pippa.

  “We hurt it,” said Keenan. “Whatever the hell it was. And we bought QGM some time.”

  “So we’ll be back?”

  Keenan, programming the rejuvenated PAD to bring in the SLAM, nodded. “Yeah Pippa. The war ain’t over. We’ll be back. For people like us, this kind of shit never ends. The suffering never stops.”

  Pippa gave a nod, and clutching the small wooden box, waited for exit.

First Line

An Alliance Archives Adventure

Danielle Ackley-McPhail

Go! Go! GO!” the squad leader barked into the comm.

  The order pinged her transceiver, a sharp reminder of many missions past. Quieter than the barest whisper, hard, taut, and intense, it triggered automatic responses in a battle-honed soldier: a flood of adrenaline, combat awareness drilled in by special ops training and countless field missions, a fierce impulse to bring a weapon to bear.

  In one instant, she went from drifting through oblivion, to combat-ready.

  She was no longer capable of adrenaline rushes, but the rest of her reflexes were still on the mark. It wasn’t supposed to work that way. By all rights, there shouldn’t be anything left of Lieutenant Sheila “Trey” Tremaine. Well, nothing capable of such a knee-jerk reaction to the issued order. Now who the hell’s cock-up was that?

  There were large gaps in her memory, or at least she presumed there were, seeing as the last thing she could recall was dying. She used to be an officer assigned to the 428
^th
Special Ops unit, MOS: demolitions specialist, but when an enemy round took her down, on its way to taking her out, she’d been offered a chance. She remembered that too (before the dying part). The head of the tech division had shown up beside her hospital cot once it was clear she was well on her way to succumbing to her injuries.

  Horrible way for a soldier to die, by the way: slowly, in a hospital bed, a burden to the very society you were meant to serve. Feeling worse than useless. It just wasn’t right. You either kicked ass and survived to fight another day, or you took a shitload of them down on your way out. That was the way it was supposed to be. For a soldier. Anything else just felt wrong. They’d lost two men saving her should-have-been-dead ass. The only thing worse than waiting to die was staring that guilt in the face the entire time.

  “How serious do you take your oath to serve, Lieutenant?” the bureaucrat had solemnly asked.

  She’d allowed her gaze to sweep across her broken body before giving him a look as sharp as a knife’s edge. Her lip had curled up in a bare approximation of the warning sneer her unit would have recognized before she tore into someone particularly dense. Of course, her clear status of “non-threat” made him oblivious to her reaction at the insult he’d issued. If she’d had any energy left for anything except guilt and dying, she would have shown him how wrong his assessment was.

  “Very,” she responded, if faintly.

  That was when he offered her an approximation of immortality. Okay. Maybe not. But definitely a way to make up for dying the wrong way, and an opportunity to protect her unit in a way she’d never imagined.

  “We’d like to neuro-scan your brain,” he went on, very matter-of-fact, as if he were discussing the watch schedule, or what was being served in the Mess. “To preserve your expertise and instincts.” He went on to explain the great advancements in this process and how they would then be able to imprint the scan-capture onto a neural matrix so that her training and experience would not be lost at her demise, but could be utilized in this time of conflict to ensure others did not fall as she had . . .
blah, blah, blah.

  Manipulative prick.

  “Why wait . . . till now?” she managed. After all, she’d been there in that cot quite a while.

  There was an uncomfortable silence on the egg-head’s part. “The process is terminal.”

  Well. Okay. So was she, apparently. Not that she hadn’t figured that out already. Still, she’d been tempted to say no, just for the piss-poor way he handled the proposal. The idea itself intrigued her, though. The way he explained it, if she agreed, her thought processes would be imprinted on the newest generation of packbot to augment the technical data already hard-wired in, with the intent of mating that automated programming with her learned reflexes and evaluative capabilities. She didn’t get all the technical bits; after all, her training was in demolitions, not computers. But really, the only thing she needed to understand was that a part of her would live on to fight those that had taken her out.

  Ultimately (clearly), she’d agreed. The clincher, in the end: the mech in question had been requisitioned by the 428
^th
. The guy should have mentioned that to begin with. That was her only real enticement. What did she care about revenge? She’d believed in why they were fighting. That and protecting her men mattered to her more than any petty revenge.

  “Will they know it’s me?” she managed to ask. The answer was no. “Will I know it’s me?” Again, no.

  “Though urban legends persist to the contrary,” the egg-head assured her, “there is no evidence to substantiate the rumors that personality is transferable with this process.”

  She’d taken his word for it. She’d wanted to believe some part of her would go on, would continue to serve. That didn’t mean she wanted to be conscious of it.

  Her body had failed just as the final neural pathways were scanned. Trey knew this, because even that the process had captured. Now, she was the next level in advanced warfare. And contrary to all assurances, she was still self-aware.

  Trey took stock of her current situation. Besides overall being FUBARed, sensors indicated she was currently being jostled, but the motion spoke more of stealth than open assault. Something close to excitement, leavened by a bit of apprehension went through her. It wasn’t supposed to work this way. But what the hell; too late now, right?

  There were murmurs going back and forth across her transceiver. Just bits and pieces, mostly sub-vocal sounds rather than words. She understood this, though. Most of the communicating going on between the deployed team was done through gestures and glances. They’d been a team a long time. Who needed words?

  Of course, that meant Trey was in the dark. The packbot that housed her was in standby mode. The transceiver was active and ready to receive input, but the cameras that would be her eyes were powered down and she had no access to the subroutines that would power them up. It was like she was tied up and blindfolded.

  Not something she was into.

  She was used to being in charge, or at least an active participant. The deal she’d made was not quite looking so good at the moment. The waiting, the not knowing, was doing a number on whatever part of her personality had glommed onto the scan.

  Finally the forward motion stopped.

  Trey felt a jolt as power flooded her system. Data was keyed in, leaving her disoriented. She was, after all, merely a passenger within the robotic interface, a data source that allowed the CPU to interpret scenarios for the handler based on her collective experience. She was a resource with not one whit of control over anything.

  Yeah, maybe her deathbed wasn’t such a good place to make life-altering decisions. She may have been a demo specialist, and understood the mechanical workings of the packbot, but from the inside she couldn’t follow impulse one of the directives being fed into the unit for the pending incursion. This passive-observer mode definitely had the potential of evolving into her own personal hell. At least as a part of the military she’d had the freedom to act within the structure of command. In combat she was used to taking charge, even. Trey was not a passive creature.

  She felt better once the internal gyros registered a change in the robotic unit’s orientation as its handler drew it from his pack and lobbed it into the crumbling shell of a building.

  “Boombot deployed, Sarge,” Trey’s handler subvocalized into his bonejack. “Unit transmission at . . . 85 percent optimal.” Nothing sounded like it used to, but from the irreverent terminology, Trey figured Coop was the soldier reassigned her demo duties. She hadn’t known him so well, beyond an officer’s familiarity with those she led, but he’d always been the one to add some hint of humor to every mission. By her reckoning, wisecracks were one more part of his armor, right along with his ballistic mesh. She was finding it comforting, herself.

  “Damn . . . we need better than that, soldier,” responded whoever had taken over as team leader—Trey couldn’t help feeling a bit smug that it had taken two men to replace her . . . at least, until she recalled her new role was “Boombot, ” and why.

  “Adjust your frequency; no one goes in until that ’bot is transmitting at 95 percent minimum. I’m not loosing any men to sloppiness.”

  The implication wasn’t lost on Trey. For the briefest instant she had the overwhelming impulse to go “buggy” on the colossal shit. Let him see how “optimal” he could be when things were out of his control and there was pressure from the higher ups to achieve the mission directives now.

  Hell, he was the one nice and cozy at the fall-back position, while here she was completely over the front line. Of course, it was so easy to forget she was only a passenger. Right up until Coop started fiddling with the controller.

  Talk about weird. Trey could “feel” as he adjusted the packbot’s settings, maneuvering the unit around the crumbled remains of the building, manipulating the camera angles. She heard him murmur about the darkness. It should have served as a warning, but she totally didn’t pick up on it. When he triggered the variable-intensity LEDs she would have flinched, if she could have. The sudden light had the intensity of a bomb blast without the fade away. She could visualize her eyes snapping closed. And suddenly, they did. Or at least, there was an abrupt return to total darkness. It was a coincidence, of course, but a welcome one. Well. For her.

  Coop swore like a cross between a marine and a twenty-dollar whore.

  A flood of data transmitted to the ’bot. Then once again, supernova. Trey reflexively “flinched” and was returned to total darkness. She was in awe as the revelation dawned. Maybe passive observer wasn’t her lot after all.

  “Military-issue piece of crap! We don’t have time for this!”

  There was that guilt again. What was relief for her was just a dangerous complication for the squad. But it did demonstrate that perhaps she had some control over her fate. To test the theory, she triggered the circuits that brought the lights up again independent of Coop’s efforts, only gradually. Okay, enough experimentation. She had some amount of control. That alone made her just a bit more comfortable in her titanium skin.

  Enough.

  She didn’t want Coop scrapping the mission because ‘Boombot’ was malfunctioning. She “stepped back,” releasing control to the handler.

  It was odd not having to go to any effort to do her job. She had finally reached the state seasoned soldiers both dreamed of and dreaded: where a combat zone didn’t require active thought to evaluate. Of course, she’d had to die to achieve it.

  Always a down side, wasn’t there?

  Between her knowledge and the packbot’s superfast processors, analysis of the building interior was instantaneous. The moment the cameras panned across a zone all the potential hot points were identified and assessed, simultaneously scrolling across the unit’s micro-display and the handler’s monitor.

  All threats on the first floor were old activity, already neutralized. As the last lower-level quadrant scan completed, Trey and the packbot approached the staircase. A sensor extended from the ’bot until it connected with the first riser. Next the unit emitted a supersonic peal, followed by a probe shooting out from the front facing, forcefully punching up against the structure. Again, data analysis was instantaneous. The sonic blast revealed nothing but the standard staircase infrastructure. The impact test confirmed the architecture was sound and was not rigged to blow or collapse. With the all-clear given, the handler activated the ’bot’s front flipper assembly. Trey was fascinated as the flipper extended up and forward until the belted track grabbed the next tread. She found the sensation odd as the servos engaged and the front of the unit was raised up, followed the flippers up the steps. The monitors continually tracked the stability of the structure as the process repeated, until the ’bot rested soundly on the upper level.