The War Machine: Crisis of Empire III (43 page)

Nothing else could have fired and then gotten out of there that fast, sealing a hatch behind, before the explosive could go off.

He,
Jameson had been there, seconds before.

Never mind, no time. Suss turned and examined the interior of the blast door she had come through. Good, there was an emergency crank for sealing it. Putting all her failing strength into it, she turned the handle and swung the massive door shut, using a massive steel bolt to dog it shut from the inside. She crossed to the other hatch and dogged it shut as well.

Feeling a bit safer for the moment, she examined the crazy patchwork of controls that seemed strewn about the room in no logical pattern. The walls were of that same peculiar grey material, which seemed even more like something living than it had in the exterior chamber. Panels and readouts were mounted directly onto the material.

Pairs of devices that dealt with the same function might be next to each other or across the compartment from each other, one on the ceiling, the other on the floor. It was haphazard, a jury-rigged job, both human and alien devices hooked up in the same crazy quilt pattern.

After a five-minute search, Suss located the shield controls. She pulled back a lever and shut off a series of switches. A status board confirmed that the massive shield was already dissipating.

And that’s that,
she thought. It seemed incredible that the actual work of her mission was done that simply, but there it was. All the incredible risk, that harebrained jaunt through an energy shield, the firefights, just to push a button.

Suddenly, she felt very tired and knew it was more than mere fatigue. Her body had the luxury of feeling the hurts done to it. She could still easily die of her wounds, even if the enemy never tried to take back this room.

She remembered seeing a first-aid kit tucked in somewhere during her search for the shield controls. She dug it out and set to work patching herself up.

It hurt like hell to move, but that was all right.

Pain was proof she was still alive.

***

“Asteroid shields down,”
the sensor tech announced, but the navigator was already diving his lumbering ship on a trajectory that would have been scary for a fighter, scrambling to get in under the plane of the enemy shield before someone could switch it back on and lock them out again.

Spencer opened his mouth to order a dive, but never got the chance.
Let the crew do their job,
he thought.

“Sensors!” Deyi shouted. “Scan that rock, find us their main cargo locks
fast.
I want us landed on top of them before they have a chance to lock them down.”

“Spotted what looks like a cargo center,” the sensor tech announced. “Passing coords to navigation.”

“Got it!” the navigator cried. “Course to landing there set. It’ll be fast and sloppy, but we’ll get down. Four minutes.”

“Don’t worry about the paint job,” Tallen growled. “Just find us a parking space.”

Spencer punched a button on his comm unit and spoke. “Captain Spencer to assault team, stand by. Lieutenant Marcusa, I will move with the second wave—” Spencer looked up and spotted the look on Tallen’s face “—accompanied by Commander Deyi, if that is acceptable to him.”

Tallen Deyi stood more erect than is wholly practical in zero G and saluted his commander. “It is quite acceptable, Captain, thank you. I was about to raise a big stink about being left behind.”

“I have to keep my officers satisfied, Tallen,” Spencer said, smiling.

Why am I so happy?
he wondered, and realized the answer even as he formed the question.
Because the shield going down means she’s still alive,
he told himself.

Spencer did not choose to think about how long that would remain true.

The navigator rolled the
Banquo
to a new heading with a violent disregard for safe piloting norms—but he had his reasons for moving fast. Spencer could see on the tactical display that a pair of enemy missiles was diving in toward them. It was time to get out of the way because there was no way to block this strike with the shields.
Banquo
was boosting at a full gravity, far too high for shield operation.

The weapons officer loosed a clutch of countermissiles, blasting the incoming attack.

The navigator pilot spun ship again and gave a short, savage burst of retrofire. Spencer checked the display. They were only a hundred meters over the cargo bay, exactly stationary over it. Very tidy piloting. The navigator fired up his topside auxiliary jets and jolted the ship straight down hard, throwing everyone against their crash harnesses. One unlucky ensign’s seatbelt failed and he was thrown into the ceiling.

The same ensign hit the floor just as abruptly when the navigator hit the bottom jets, braking them to a halt. They hit the ground and bounced a few meters. The pilot armed and fired the rock-piton system. A hundred powerful harpoonlike devices fired around the perimeter of the ship, stabbing their spikes into the ground. Winches spooled up, and pulled the ship down, holding it firmly in place. In the near-zero-gravity field of a small asteroid, even large ships can simply drift off if they are not held down.

“Lower air locks open, first wave of marines on the ground,” the weapons officer announced. “Sir, the faster you can get that second wave out of here—”

“The faster you can get the shields back up and keep them from dropping things on you,” Spencer agreed. “Comm, can you stay linked with the assault team with the ship’s shields up?”

“Standard operating procedure, Sir. Fiber-optic cable from the ship, under the shield, and out to a transmitter on the surface.”

“Excellent. Tallen, let’s move.”

The two of them hurried down toward the landing stages. “I still say a hell-bomb would solve all our problems,” Tallen said over his shoulder. “Why not at least prep one in case we can use it?”

“We can’t possibly nuke the place. Not with Suss in there—to say nothing of civilians.”

“Civilians who are working for the enemy,” Tallen said.

“If those poor bastards know who they’re working for, I’ll go get a job with StarMetal myself,” Spencer said. “Besides, we can’t afford to destroy the place, except as a last resort, until we know more—about the helmet, how it got there—if there are any more of them elsewhere. You want to vaporize the place and leave
that
question open?” he asked.

The older man said nothing, just trotted down the gangway to the next level.

Chapter Twenty-Four
Assault

Suss was glad to be in zero G. She knew perfectly well that she would have passed out long ago if her heart had been straining against a planet’s gravity. The bandages, painkillers, and stimulants from the first-aid kit were helping too. She checked the clock. Fifteen minutes since she had sealed herself into the command center.

And ten minutes since the drilling had started on the far hatch, the one Jameson must have escaped through.

Drilling,
she told herself, knowing it must mean something.
Not laser cutters, not explosives, not a plasma gun, but an old-fashioned power drill.
Maybe there was still something here, something her small explosive charge hadn’t wrecked, something relatively fragile that a stray laser beam or rock fragment or tongue of plasma fire might easily destroy. Something the helmet-thing valued greatly. Greatly enough to risk a slow, careful approach to a compartment it knew contained a dangerous enemy.

But they must think their precious something survived my improvised hand grenade,
Suss thought.
How do they know the whatever-it-is is still in one piece? And why did they leave it here? Why leave it behind when they ran from me? Why is this such a vitally important place to keep the thing? Why here?

Why here?
She realized quite suddenly that the question was even more puzzling on a grander scale.
Why here? Why this crummy backwater asteroid? Why not keep it at headquarters back on Daltgeld, where the people and machinery were? Why not back on Mittelstadt, where all the ships were?
The more she thought about it, the less sense it made. Daltgeld made a much better HQ than this place. The damn helmet had taken over the planet long before the Navy showed up—but when danger threatened, it immediately cut and ran for
here.

It had diverted tremendous resources to defending this place. If the helmet had used its ships to jump the Pact fleet while they were in orbit of Daltgeld, instead of using its freighter fleet to guard this asteroid, the task force would have been so much scrap metal orbiting the planet by now.

Yet, instead of standing its ground and holding onto its strong position on the planet, the helmet retreated
here.

And not just to this asteroid, but to this very chamber. The helmet had been
here
fifteen minutes ago, right back to the spot where Destin had found it.

Something occurred to Suss, an errant, obvious thought all of them had missed when planning her one-woman attack. The parasites could control any device directly. Why did the helmet need a central control at all?
And why hadn’t the helmet used a parasite to switch the shields back on, direct from the shield generator?
Good God, maybe they had done just that! Suddenly alarmed, Suss checked the view from an exterior camera. No, the shield was still down.

Suss stared at the shield control panel. She noticed something else strange. The panel did not have any cables running from it. She looked around the compartment.
None
of the monitor and control devices did. Yet they were all attached haphazardly, obviously put in place after the room was built. They couldn’t have run the cables through the rock wall. Devices outside this complex used exterior cables. She had seen cables bolted up to the side of nearly every tunnel.

Then how could the control panels possibly do their jobs? Suss thought of an explanation, but not one she was ready to believe. She grabbed the swizarm knife from her pocket and moved over to the shield control panel. She undid the knife’s main blade and popped the panel cover off.

The interior of the control box was filled with perfectly normal circuitry—normal circuitry coated in translucent grey. The wires that should have led to the generator instead were stripped of insulation, and shoved, one by one, into a blob of the same grey wall material. It reminded Suss of a diagram of a nerve ganglion.

Wall material seemed to have flowed over every chip and wire of the interior surface. Inside the circuit box, the grey stuff seemed to fairly pulse with life and vigor. Suss cautiously prodded one corner of the “ganglion.” It flinched back from the knife, rippled its surface, and then smoothed itself over.

It was alive.

And the walls, the floors, the ceiling of the compartment were covered with the same strange stuff.
All of it was alive.
Suss realized they were all part of the same huge creature, embedded deep in the very heart of the asteroid.

No, worse. Deep in the
brains
of the asteroid. The various control panels here were wired
directly into
the brain of the monstrous living animal that lived inside this asteroid. The grey “walls” formed the inside surface of the brain. The huge animal
was
this asteroid. The external rock was nothing more or less than a protective shell for this horror.

That
explained why the parasites had not overridden Suss’ shields-down command. When she had thrown the switches on the control panel, she had been reprogramming the asteroid’s brain, literally changing its mind, telling it to decide it wanted the shields down.

Just like the wire in a wirehead’s brain,
she thought.
The wire controls the addict’s mind. A switch thrown outside the brain to make the nerves twitch, but the brain still thinks it is in control.

But how could such a huge, strange animal come to be? Nature could never evolve some brooding brain lurking in outer space.

The insect people, Suss figured.
They
had grown this thing. But why? As an experiment, as a semi-organic supercomputer, as an act of suicidal hubris? And how had they operated it?

The asteroid-sized brain was too big to move easily, too huge and clumsy to go anywhere. And it was too far away, too remote to communicate with anyone or be operated directly. A sudden inspiration came to Suss: so
they decided to use an AIDlike system to run their computer.

They built another semi-living device, one that could link directly with, and commune with, a true living brain. An AID that could split off small copies of itself as needed to control remote machines, a semi-living creature that could reproduce itself and thus never wear out. With the asteroid-brain, a system that could last a million years.

The helmet was indeed an AID, a datalink straight into the asteroid’s massive data processing system. Put on the helmet, and you controlled the asteroid and the data it held.

A ruler, a dictator could wear the helmet, and with the asteroid-sized auxiliary brain to keep track of all the data, one being could directly control every device in the star system. It was an idea that would appeal greatly to an intelligent hive-mind species. If Earth’s ants had developed space travel, dispersed across their entire star system, and thus lost their ancestral links with the home hive, they might have yearned for the old days when one hivemaster, one queen, had ruled all.
They
might have built a system like this one.

One ruler, one being, controlling everything, like a puppetmaster pulling all the strings. He or she or it thinks a thought, and orders more widgets produced, or the traffic light to go from green to red, or orders a ship to go from here to there. The helmet hears and obeys, tells the parasites to step up widget production, change the light, and then links back to the asteroid for the more complex job of locating a ship and computing a trajectory.

The asteroid commands the helmet, its AID device, to send out a parasite to the ship—except the ship no doubt had a parasite in it all along. The parasite nestles down inside the navigation controls and fires the engine. The parasite, an integral part of the helmet, is thus in constant touch, through the helmet, both with the asteroid and the leader. That little job, and a billion more like it every day, controlled through the leader’s three puppets—the asteroid, the helmet, and the parasite. Until one fine day the puppets realize they can pull the puppetmaster’s strings. They can take over
his
mind, run every machine themselves for their own purposes.