So It Begins (22 page)

  There was nothing there or in the rest of the surrounding buildings. Nothing recent, anyway. Plenty of signs of neutralized ordinance, along with one or two that had clearly been triggered, but by the levels of accumulated dust, signs of animal habitation, the weathering . . . all indications were that the outpost had been abandoned by all parties.

  “Echo sector has been cleared for occupation, sir,” Coop reported over the comm to his squad leader.

  “Our ETA is 0700,” was the response. “Have your men set up base operations and then stand down until we arrive.”

  Trey wanted to protest as the ‘bot’s systems were again powered down and the unit was returned to Coop’s MOLLE pack. She noticed that once the rest of the system was shut off and beyond her reach, her own power source was likewise reduced until she was operating under what felt like brown-out conditions. Apparently, she was in her own version of stand-by.

  Part of her railed against the restrictions; she was just getting the feel of her new situation, the freedom and capabilities she had never dreamed would be open to her. But then, the squad leader had no clue she was anything more than a complex data dump. Having to admit that made her seethe. Not that she had a right to. She’d signed on for this tour, after all.

  As the outside world went away, she perversely wondered if this was how her laptop had felt each time she’d shut it down. And had it likewise amused itself in the darkness plotting theoretical rebellion?

  Was it days or weeks or even longer that her existence went on this way? Trey had no clue. Well . . . she knew the chronological time and date stamp that queued up each time her systems were powered back up, but you know . . . when you spend an eternity in isolation in between those fraught, tedious moments of recon, the relative time bore no connection with a clock or a calendar. Trey, in short, felt ancient. And kind of like she was suspended in purgatory, or maybe limbo.

  Before her was another crumbling structure, another potential hotbed of insurgents. It was time to earn her one step further from hell.

  As she went about her duties—she no longer thought of herself separate from Boombot, though her identity of Trey was still very real to her—her processors filtered out the background chatter of the waiting squad. There was increasingly too much of it. The men were getting too relaxed the longer they went without encountering opposition. It was making them sloppy.

  Already several had to be patched up by the medic after tripping over the remnants of a misfired hydra mine. The plungers had been obscured by the overgrown ground cover, but that was no excuse for the soldiers’ blunder. Trey would have torn them a new one for being that sloppy on her watch. Demerits would have been the least of their problems. Fortunate for them, if not the whole squad, the payload had long ago been triggered. Trapped in the can at detonation when the lid malfunctioned, the mine apparently had geysered, rather than blowing out in a radial pattern; otherwise there would have been nothing but a crater as testament to where it used to be. Of course, as cold as the thought was, perhaps it wasn’t a good thing the mine had been spent. If the men had gotten more than a gash for their inattention they would have learned their lesson better. Sloppy soldiers often got more than just themselves killed.

  Speaking of which, Trey chastised herself for dwelling on the folly of others when she had her own duties to execute.

  Nightmares were the worst part of standby mode. Yeah, even that plague of every soldier hadn’t been left behind. Kind of hard to wake up from a recurring hell when you had no body, no icy sweat to whisk away, no rapid breath to ramp down to a normal speed, nothing physical to distract you from the images you could never forget, or to remind you they weren’t happening in real-time.

  Trey wished she had enough control to power herself back up. Of course, it wasn’t like she could drop and do push-ups until she tumbled into a deep, dreamless sleep, as she would have done in her other life, so what was the point? Though she could imagine how Coop would freak if he’d caught her trying it.

  Trey settled for reviewing the data she’d so far gathered in their recon of the sector. Something about the zone was making her uneasy. She caught glimpses in her nightmares, hints of whatever had her “nerves” buzzing, but just as in her flesh-bound dreams, everything was shadowy, more impressions than anything else. Well, except for the blood. And the screams. Shrugging it off, she went back to analyzing the data. Had she been here before? It was so hard to tell, after all, as she already noted, the world was a heck of a lot different through the camera-eye of a ’bot. Whether or not she was covering familiar ground, she was getting a bad feeling the closer they drew to the next sector.

  There had to be something in the data and damn if she wouldn’t find it. She wasn’t about to lead another squad straight into the guns of the enemy.

  Hours later she finally recognized what she was looking for. It was 0Dark00 and the squad had been on the move for two hours. They were entering unsecured territory. This was the sector her unit had been heading for that fateful day. The one where good men died retrieving her.

  Up until now Coop had reserved her for establishing the all-clear of structures in zones their side had already pacified, cleaning up any parting gifts left by the insurgents. This time when she was powered up she discovered he’d reconfigured her chassis with the explosive ordinance detection kit, increasing her speed and adding more muscle to her manipulator arm. Now she was running point for the squad across uncleared terrain, looking for more aggressive threats along their path. Already, together she and Coop had discovered and disabled half a dozen hydras and discreetly marked and redirected the squad’s route around countless claymores. Those that came behind them would have more leisure to decommission the munitions. Their squad wouldn’t risk it now. To do so would slow them down at best, and give away their position at worst, should even one mine be mishandled.

  “Sarge, copy,” Coop subvocalized.

  “Acknowledged, report,” came the response.

  Coop kept it short, as even comm signals could be intercepted, if the enemy cracked the frequency. “Cleared to perimeter, sector Tango; squad heading in. Going comm dark.”

  “Roger.”

  The rest of the unit would now follow via the cleared corridor.

  Trey was so on edge her lip would be twitching, if she’d still had one. She was surprised she wasn’t shooting sparks as it was. She felt charged enough for a full fireworks display. Earlier, while exploring the internal pathway of the packbot, she discovered the protocol that would initiate self-destruct should the unit be compromised. If she could figure out how to trigger that at will, it could come in handy. If nothing else, she’d feel better knowing that, at least in a way, she was armed. She set a portion of her . . . mind to the puzzle as she continued rolling along.

  Eventually, she came upon a civilian compound. It had been hit hard, as had many she had seen before. Coop ran her up to the first of the buildings with infrared sensors activated. There were some thermal, but nothing larger than the planet’s equivalent of a rat.

  She saw no traces of munitions rigged to blow, though there were signs of recent habitation. Local wildlife, perhaps, or squatters displaced by the recent conflict. There was nothing to imply occupation by a military force, though. Trey assessed the risk factor of the building at a level three, and fed the cautionary note to her handler. After careful inspection sent up no additional red flags, she was directed to the next building. Inspection continued in a similar manner through most the compound, bringing her about to the main structure.

  By now Trey was twitching like anything, if only on the inside. There was still nothing registering on infrared, but her mics were picking up trace sounds that might be stealth movement . . . or might just be a branch in the wind. She was running all four cameras, though only data from the primary was feeding to the control monitor. It was odd being able to scan forward and still watch over her own shoulder; not as reassuring as it should be, though. After all, it only served to remind her she was out here solo.

  As she entered the final building her instincts started grumbling. Flashbacks of her nightmares sprang to the forefront, demanding she back out of the structure, double-time.

  With sheer determination and her virtual jaw set, Trey ignored the impulse and powered through to do her duty.

   The lower level was clear. More signs of habitation, less clear as to the source. Her unit had rudimentary olfactory sensors Coop never seemed to activate. Chances were he didn’t even know they were there. It was a new feature Trey herself had never seen before this model, only recently discovered. She made an executive decision and brought them on-line. Traces of human sweat. Food. Some particles of ordinance components.

  Shit.

  There were times she definitely hated being right. Her self-preservation instincts were all but standing on her non-existent head screaming. She ignored them once more, rolling up the stairs and turning down the upper corridor in the direction from which the odors were strongest. Trey could feel an internal tug as her actions diverged from those dictated by Coop and the controller, but this was a case where instinct (the combat kind, rather than the self-preservation kind) demanded a different course of action. Her primary camera had a fiber-optic extension for situations where the bulkier unit would not serve. She extended it now as she approached the first doorway. At the same time, she readied the self-destruct protocol. Just in case.

  There was time for her to identify a crude munitions lab and roughly fifteen operatives clothed in thermal-dampening suits positioned around the room before a hand shot out and grabbed the extension.

  Crap! She tried to backpedal, but as he drew her within range, his other hand brought up a silenced pistol and fired on the camera assembly, shattering the lens.

  Before he could do more damage, she aimed a probe at his leg and zapped him with enough current to fry his brain. Her olfactory sensors overloaded on burnt flesh as her manipulator arm came around to drag the corpse out of her way.

  The enemy forces were not idle. She transferred optical to her backup camera and assessed the situation. Weapons had been brought to bear and the soldiers were converging. She couldn’t handle them all, and the lab and its contingent were a serious threat to her unit and the offensive. Without a second thought, she initiated the self-destruct protocol, ready to die a warrior’s death.

  There was yelling and a sudden sizzle of sound as Coop lost visual. He breathed a curse and his hands clutching the controller tighter, though it had gone nonfunctional. He was still receiving data from the ’bot. In fact, impossible as it was, the unit somehow seemed to be moving independently. Before he could settle on a plan of action, an image reappeared on his monitor, the angle skewed as it came from a secondary camera. He watched in stunned silence as more than a dozen Dominion soldiers rushed the Boombot.

  “We have hostile contact,” he called to his men, who scrambled to defensive positions on all sides. Coop turned his attention back to the monitor. He tried once more to pull the ’bot back, but it was no use; the unit still didn’t respond to the controls. He watched with a mixture of awe and frustration as it revved forward, grabbing the foremost enemy’s rifle hand in what oddly looked like a judo move, snapping it. The soldier dropped his weapon. The corresponding scream echoed oddly, coming both through the ’bot’s comlink and more faintly from the building a half a klick away.

  “What the . . .” he murmured, startling the unit’s sniper, who crouched beside him. Coop stared hard at the words that appeared on his monitor.

<>

  The words triggered a memory of many a past mission.

  It couldn’t be. There was no way. But he’d been assigned to this unit a long time, most of that time in this squad. Under the command of Lieutenant Tremaine . . . His left hand moved away from the ’bot controller to the keyboard, rapidly tapping just four keys . . .

<>