Aurora Rising: The Complete Collection (179 page)

“Sir!”

As the new code flowed into the circuit through her finger, she idly wondered if it was the violence committed upon the board or the head-to-toe scarlet glyphs blazing along her exposed skin which elicited the reaction.

Jenner leaned in close to her ear. “Ms. Requelme?”

“You’ve never seen anybody hotwire a control board before?”

“Yes, I have. They generally use tools.”

“Right, well.”
We’re done.

Satisfied the ware had been reprogrammed to meet her needs, she returned the board to its slot with exaggerated care and closed the panel over it. “We’ll need another SAL, because this one isn’t going to shoot worth shit now. Once we have it, let’s go find ourselves a swarmer.”

They clung to the façade of an office building and the meager protection the shadow of its profile provided. Jenner peeked around the corner and summoned the soldier he had entrusted with the additional shoulder-fired weapon up beside him.

Mia strained to see past him, but Jenner was tall and well-muscled and she was neither. She settled for aiming a stage whisper at his ear. “Remember, paint the target as you normally would—the signal’s embedded in the targeting ware.”

He indicated he heard her and counted down using his fingers, then he and the other soldier stepped into the open. She gave it a second’s consideration then crept out behind them. She had to
see
.

The swarmer accelerated above the broad promenade toward their location. The targeting laser was invisible, but the beam from the active SAL streaked through the air to impact the core of the strange ship.

The explosion rocked the buildings on either side as metal shot in every direction to lance through windows and ricochet off the road. An instant later the engine erupted into a hot plasma fireball that sent them all rushing back around the corner lest they be melted by the expanding flames.

She laughed and sank against the wall. “It worked.”

Of course it worked, Mia. I told you it would work.

Yes, you did, Meno.

“Maybe we caught it when its shield was down. I mean, it was getting ready to fire on us, right?”

Jenner shook his head at the skeptical Marine. “Nope. I’ve seen our fighters blow those things up, and it requires at least four seconds using a far stronger laser even when the shield is down at the oculus. This was instantaneous and total.”

He gave Mia a respectful smile. “Let’s get this code of yours replicated and out to the fleets. Then we’ll talk to the governor about reprogramming the defense arrays.”

“Already handled.”

“Ma’am? I mean, I expected you and Alex were communicating with each other—and I guess with another of—another person—at EASC. But don’t we still have to distribute the code for the signal through channels to the various ships?”

Mia shrugged mildly. “Like I said, already handled. The signal and instructions for using it are being pushed out to the ships here as we speak, as well as to both militaries’ contingents at Seneca. Though I’m not sure they really need it there, as Alex performed her own magic on the Metigen vessels.”

The corners of Jenner’s eyes creased as he stared at her. Great, she’d frightened another one…. “And the arrays?”

“Meno managed to hack the encryption on the arrays shortly after we left the bunker—it would have been rude to do it while we were standing in the room with the governor and the defense chief. We have to make a couple of adjustments to the control ware, but the nodes should begin broadcasting the signal in the next few minutes.” She pursed her lips in mild irritation. “The defense turrets are on a closed system, though, so I can only access them from the bunker.”

He squinted oddly at her, then gazed around at his men. “All right, let’s move back to the bunker. We’ll take out any swarmers we come across on the way.”

As they reversed course to return to the command center, he glanced at her again. “Is there anything….” His voice drifted off as he frowned, then frowned more deeply.

“Problem?”

“Sorry. Information from Command.” He scanned the group. “Why hasn’t Beta Squad shown up yet?”

“Said they got held up rescuing some injured, sir. They’re on their way now.”

She’d known him for literally minutes, but Mia thought Jenner had a strange look in his eyes as he nodded ponderously. “I’m sure they’ll catch up to us.”

We are down to eight nodes remaining operational on the defense arrays.

Once they get that beam working on the warships, it won’t matter.

True enough. I am ashamed it took me so long to devise the proper signal propagation. In retrospect it appears a quite simple solution.

They usually do. And don’t be ashamed—we merely needed to work together on the problem is all.

Your fresh perspective was most helpful, Mia.

The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

You’re suggesting we are both more intelligent and more clever as a unit than either of us were apart?

I am. Don’t you agree?

Very much so. Not knowing how you felt, I didn’t want to mention it.

You only need look to learn how I feel about, well, everything.

I know. I am trying to respect your privacy, but I confess it is proving difficult.

It’s okay, Meno. My thoughts are your thoughts. You’re part of me now.

I am.

51

SPACE, NORTH-CENTRAL QUADRANT

S
ENECA
S
TELLAR
S
YSTEM

T
HE TWO SUPERDREADNOUGHTS
were accelerating when they smashed into one another twenty degrees off head-on. The force of untold kilotonnes of hyper-strong metal colliding burst outward in a conflagration of material and energy for half a megameter to wreck every vessel in its path, Metigen and human alike.

Most of the United Fleet ships managed to get clear of the blast, but two frigates and perhaps a dozen fighters were not so lucky. Still, the aftermath of the collision damaged an additional three SDs and a host of swarmers, so the incident came out markedly in their favor.

In the upper right sector of Quadrant Two—within visual range from the bridge of the
Leonidas
—an SD fired wildly, intending to hit an Alliance cruiser but catching the undercarriage of one of its brethren instead.

That settled the question.

Field Marshal Gianno allocated half her attention to the semi-circle of holos to her left. “We’re starting to see evidence of Ms. Solovy’s corruption of the SD programming. It’s sporadic and unpredictable, but it is overtly manifesting.”

After receiving concurrence from the others she activated the fleet-wide channel. “All pilots be on alert for unusual behavior by Metigen vessels. Scan for new opportunities and act on them, but don’t get caught unawares. Expect anything.”

Next she turned to Admiral Cavaste. She was on the
Leonidas
as commander of the Federation military, not as captain of the flagship. Some friction was unavoidable, but there had been plenty of duties to keep them both busy thus far. “Thoughts?”

Cavaste checked the viewport. “We’re got this new signal coming in that’s supposed to strip their shields, right? I think we find an SD acting squirrelly in Quadrant Two, paint it with the signal and shoot it. Then we find another.”

Her terse nod sufficed as permission, and he refocused on the tactical map. The considerable range of the dreadnought’s weapons meant they need not advance too far into the chaotic fray in order to find targets, and she was confident Cavaste would warn the other ships in the vicinity to stay out of their weapons’ trajectory.

Rear Admiral Lushenko (SFS Isonzo):  Marshal Gianno, I’ve lost control of the 22
^nd
Brigade’s entire fighter complement to the Artificial.

The officers were edgy about Artificials playing a role in the battle—if they knew the true nature of the intelligence many would be inclined to revolt—and she had not discouraged the sentiment. They served as her unwitting early warning signals of possible trouble.

Field Marshal Gianno:  Understood.

She moved directly in front of the holo feed from the sim room on Deck 5.

Morgan stood in the center of the empty, dark room, her profile carving a shadow against a backdrop of virtual stars. The young woman would be seeing much more, of course, flying through the battlefield with her thoughts. Her hands jerked in erratic cadences at her sides, the residual byproduct of the actions of her mind and the Artificial joined with it.

“Commander Lekkas, what are you doing?”

The response came through gritted teeth. “Busy.”

“You’re controlling eighty-six fighters. Now ninety. This exceeds your operating parameters by a significant margin.” The phrasing made it sound like Morgan was a machine…but she was, wasn’t she? At the very least the line between man and machine had been blurred into indistinctness.

As if on cue, a thin line of blood trickled out of Lekkas’ nose to remind Eleni of the human component of the equation.

They had no idea the long-term effects of such a taxing two-way connection on the human mind or body. The Prevos didn’t reside on the bleeding edge of science—they were over the cliff, halfway to the ground below and trying to fly on capricious wings.

“Commander, ease up.”

“Just watch. I’ve got this.”

The indefinable entity that was the Lekkas-STAN unit had performed exceptionally well thus far. All the Prevos had. And the simple truth was no one had any idea where their limits resided, or even if they existed at all. But this was the weapon they had crafted to win the war, so they may as well use it. Gianno turned her back on the holo to zoom her map in and track the fighter groups now under Lekkas’ control.

They were fleeing. Rather than seeking targets, the fighters sped toward the fringes of the conflict zone, strafing and diving in evasive maneuvers which individually appeared random but en masse became a rhythmic, almost hypnotic dance.

An increasing number of swarmers pursued them. The deceptively panicked behavior of the fighters drew more and more of the alien vessels into their wake as they passed through the turbulent combat, like hounds catching the scent of blood. Every so often a fighter would lob a sideways potshot with an arcalaser to lure another one onto their trail. Where were they going?

“She’s leading them to here.”                                                

She looked over as Admiral Rychen drew a circle on their shared map around a point beneath the heaviest fighting in Quadrant Six. “EA Recon #2 has dropped six negative energy bombs there.”

“Ah.” The events occurring across Senecan space were orders of magnitude beyond what any single person could track, so it didn’t concern her that she’d been unaware of the placement of the bombs. Some division of responsibility was the only way they had managed to control the engagement thus far…assuming they were in fact the ones controlling it and not their Faustian creations.

Debris from a splintering SD washed over the grouping, taking out four fighters and three swarmers. She checked Lekkas’ holo to see a second trickle of blood seep out the other nostril.

“Get a medic on standby outside the sim room, but tell them not to enter yet.”

The cavalcade reached the region Rychen had indicated with several hundred swarmers in tow. The lead fighters continued on straight through it. Then the rearmost fighters suddenly accelerated—well past any safe speed—to close ranks as the swarmers entered the zone.

As one every fighter flipped ninety degrees in one of four directions and spread out in perfect synchronicity in a starburst pattern away from the mined space.

A second later the bombs detonated in a menacing obsidian conflagration which seemed to roil space itself, shredding more than four hundred swarmers in a single act.

The fighters drifted out of formation and adopted haphazard trajectories, a sign control had been released to their pilots.

Gianno immediately returned her attention to Lekkas. The woman wiped the back of her hand across the base of her nose as she opened her eyes and blinked at the cam sending her feed to the bridge. “I’m good.”

“Yes, you are. Well done, Commander.”

52

ROMANE

I
NDEPENDENT
C
OLONY

T
HE SKIES AND THE STREETS WERE
full of enemy ships as they made their way back across the eight blocks they’d managed to traverse during the hunt for a target on which to test the disruptor beam.

The tentacled ships were now in rather plentiful supply, a sign the invaders were moving into the heart of the city. They took out two swarmers in three blocks, and it was tremendously satisfying both times. Having seen the destruction the alien vessels had wrought in only hours, Malcolm took great satisfaction in blowing them up. As did his companion, it appeared.