The Expendable Few: A Spinward Fringe Novel (8 page)

“Wait, something’s happening,” says Lieutenant Urik. I look to the small window on my heads-up display that shows Urik’s point of view. Their technician pauses at the lift interface a moment. “Go, go! Break through that panel so we can get to the interface!” Urik orders.

I miss a step and nearly collide with the marine to my right when I see all the lights in Alpha Unit’s area come on. The doors seal them in, and the walls around the Lieutenant and his men start to move like a metal skin.

“Oh crap,” says Remmy.

Screams fill the channel as Lieutenant Urik looks to his right and sees heavy metal membranes come together like silver-blue waves and roll towards them. The space between the upper and lower parts are only a couple of centimetres high, and I find myself silently praying that their reinforced vacsuits can handle the crushing attack. They do, but not well enough to prevent injury.

The chorus of screams are so agonised that they seem inhuman. The ripples of organic metal mangle the team and I can hear armour and bones breaking. The lieutenant isn’t dead. The medical system reports extreme systemic distress - broken femurs, pelvis, collarbone, four broken ribs, and a punctured lung along with other organ damage - but pain management kicks in right away. “Good luck, Commander,” says Lieutenant Urik as the pair of crushing membranes come around for another pass.

Remmy stops and falls to one knee, forcing everyone around to halt. The sounds of the ship crushing the already broken bodies of our comrades are too much. His breakfast comes up in a surge before his command unit can dose him with anti-nausea medication. The hood of his vacsuit suctions up his sick. Compressed water sprays his face clean.

“The lieutenant?” asks Mary.

“Aye,” I confirm, offering Remmy a hand up. “Was anyone else watching that?”

“No. My tactical system just updated, crossing Urik’s team off,” Mary says.

“And I thought comms officer would be a cushy job,” Remmy says. “Sometimes I hate being the all-seeing eye.”

“EMP,” I tell Mary. “I want to shock the walls ahead so we don’t run into the same thing at the forward link.”

“Yes, Sir,” she agrees. “We’re coming up to a terminal at the end of the hall, we’ll do it there.”

“Won’t that kill the terminal?” asks a technician.

“Someone didn’t do the reading,” answers Isabel from behind him. “Main terminals are hardened against EMP, egghead.”

“Oh,” the technician offers lamely. “Getting the Faraday sheets out.”

“Good,” I say, noting the technician’s serial number so I can demote him as soon as we finish taking the ship.

The cost of taking the Sunspire should start to take its toll on me. Maybe they changed something during my grief therapy, something important, because I feel the loss as though from a great distance, like I’d never met Urik. I had, though briefly. The deaths of Urik and his unit should evoke more feeling. Instead, putting the emotional impact of what happened aside is effortless. It’s as if someone went through my emotional inventory and filed down the edges so I wouldn’t cut myself on anything sharp. I’m not so subdued that the cost of taking the Sunspire isn’t making me angry, however.

We start running again, down another stretch of hallway. “Picking up a sudden surge in wireless activity,” announces Remmy.

“Does it match anything we’ve seen?” I ask.

“Yes, but it’s from Third Era archives,” he replies. “Thoss machine code.”

“What? That hasn’t been seen for centuries.” I bring the available information on Thoss code up on my display. The Freeground Intelligence database tells me the same thing: Thoss code. “What did you find out here, Sunspire?” I say to myself.

We make our way to the end of the hallway and find a darkened circular space. The temperature is twenty one degrees centigrade, spot on for life support. Then Mary shouts, “Movement!”

“Get under the Faraday sheets,” I order.

Red and blue lights illuminate the space ahead. My visor adjusts to reveal larger, walking robots with particle beam emitters mounted across triangular heads that make them look like they are staring at us with angry red eyes. Gripper hands with nano saw fingers rotate at the ends of four long triple-reinforced arms. Six collapsing legs extend beneath as they power up and begin sidestepping around the room. One of the nearest bots lowers its body and head so its sharply pointed chin touches the deck. It is as though its perfectly round, glowing red eyes are looking directly into mine. The thing’s mouth - a round blue pulse beam emitter - opens and closes as its protective aperture seals and unseals.

“Fire,” I order quietly. “Fire! Fire!” I shout as the one staring at me springs forward.

The marines at the head of the column open fire and spread out. The charging bot lands in their midst, taking several heavy rounds but surviving long enough to yank Mary off the deck and fling her into the open space behind it. As it is reduced to a twitching pile of ergranian metal struts and broken armour, its brothers descend on Mary like a school of piranha.

The marines panic, opening fire on her attackers, ignoring the technicians behind who are trying to get the Faraday sheets over them. The robot’s particle beams break through Mary’s energy shields in seconds. Grippers with nano saw fingers cut through her armour, flesh and bone.

“Get under the sheet, now!” I grab the EMP charge from one of the marine’s backs, set it, and then toss it into the next room. It is Mary’s only hope. If the grenade doesn’t disable the machines trying to hack her to bits, there won’t be anything worth saving. I barely have time to get under the Faraday sheet myself before it seals. A handful of marines, the technicians, and my bridge officers make it with me. The charge goes off.

I whip the sheet aside and check Mary’s medical status. She’s still alive. The medical component of her command and control unit is inoperable, however. I rush to her side. A half functional bot turns so it can take a shot at me and I fire my rifle on the run, strafing it and the bot beside it. I knock one of the five marines who were caught outside of the faraday blanket to the ground along the way. He’ll be at least half useless for the rest of the engagement. His rifle, personal energy shield, and most of his gear are fried.

A few of the other guardian bots begin to move. Little parts close to their armoured bodies at first, but enough for me to see that they are recovering too quickly. My clip is half empty by the time I reach Mary. “We’re coming, Commander!” says Remmy from behind. My tactical display verifies it: he picks up a rifle and begins leading my unit forward.

Part of Mary’s jaw is missing, she’s lost both legs and an arm. Her vacsuit hood has been peeled away and she stares at me - an expression of fear and pain. She struggles to breathe through profuse bleeding, and I do my best to remain detached. “I’ll get you fixed up, hold on.” I load an emergency stasis dose into my command and control unit and press the nozzle to the side of her head. “See you soon.” To my relief, she closes her eyes and the bleeding stops. A quick medical scan verifies that she’s stable, in emergency stasis.

I turn my attention to the ongoing fight. It still isn’t much of a battle. The bots are still just starting to recover, only a couple of them having reached full mobility. There are several hallways leading to the chamber, however, and I expect more company at any moment. I focus on a pair that come around the transportation hub in the centre of the large, circular space and watch with satisfaction as my heavy explosive rounds shred their metal bodies. My bridge officers fire their sidearms at their highest setting, and it helps, but only just enough to keep the machines at bay.

“Technicians! Move up and interface with that terminal!” I order. “Time to shut this party down!”

The technicians Remmy left behind look warily out from where they’re hiding in the hallway across from me, but they don’t move.

“Now, Mister!” I reinforce harshly.

“Get your ass up here or throw me your brute force interface kit so I can do it myself,” Remmy shouts at them.

The pair of technicians starts to run from the hallway to the terminal behind me. Three bots spring at them, but we cut them down within a metre of the cringing non-combatants. They start cutting into the glassy terminal interface as soon as they arrive. “Transparent ergranian, Sir,” Remmy says as he gets his comm kit ready. “It’ll take a few.”

“Sir, how long do you think the other internal incursion countermeasures will be disabled for?” asks Isabel. She didn’t see the carnage at the main aft terminal, but knows some major defensive system took out Urik’s team in seconds.

“Two minutes,” I lie. I want to believe an EMP will disable the Sunspire’s more elegant defence systems, but there’s no way to be sure. The lie is to reassure my people, without removing a sense of very real urgency.

My tactical system alerts me to a new threat. There is a wave of small crawling attack drones, exactly the same as the ones we encountered when we boarded, on their way from the starboard side. “Fire team! Head’s up! Incoming at nine o’clock.”

“Don’t worry, Commander,” interjects the voice of Lieutenant Davi on my command comm. A point on my tactical map pings and a timer counting down from fifteen minutes appears. “We’re on our way.”

A marine hands me a clip and shoves two more into my belt. If the scan is accurate, and there really are hundreds of drones coming, I will need them. I add my rifle fire to the fray, laying into the last of the walking bots until it collapses to the deck. I reload as quickly as I can - two point nine seconds from ejection to firing my first round, according to my performance tracker. Glancing at a small performance display on my heads-up display is an old academy habit I haven’t bothered breaking. I set my sights on the first of the crawlers and mulch it in three shots.

The fight goes on. Everyone who isn’t cutting into the central data port is burning through ammunition, blasting at the wave of small bots. These ones aren’t cloaked, but even so, a haze of detection dust lingers in the air just in case something tries to sneak up on us. I’m on my last cartridge when we start losing ground.

Our reinforcements arrive, and if these machines had a pulse I might feel bad for them. A hail of white hot rounds cuts through the moving mass of small, deadly machines as fresh marines fan out into the open space from the starboard hall.

“We’re through!” announces the cutting crew.

Remmy hurriedly plugs in and begins uploading. “The Holocaust Virus fix is installing. Here’s hoping it works.”

“Tell me as soon as you see a command screen,” I tell him.

“It’s up,” Remmy says seconds later, moving aside.

I hand my rifle to a nearby marine who was caught in the EMP. Turning my attention to the main terminal’s command interface, I jack my command and control unit in. The Sunspire recognises me as a commander with command codes. “Disarm internal defences,” I order as I enter the instructions manually using my comm unit just in case the voice command doesn’t take.

“Command authority recognised. Standing down, Commander Patterson,” says the computer in a pleasant female voice. I recognise that voice immediately. It’s Alice, as she was when Captain Jonas Valent first took command of the Sunspire during her short turn as a shadow ship. Her code was also the basis for the Holocaust Virus, the program responsible for turning the Sunspire into an automated killing machine. The question is, which version of Alice am I speaking to? The helpful artificial intelligence that accompanied Captain Jonas Valent? Or a blood thirsty virus hell-bent on cleansing the galaxy of all humans not allied with the Order of Eden?

I glance at the rest of the large room, where marines are still battling wave after wave of crawler droids. “It doesn’t look like they’re reverting to repair and maintenance mode, Remmy,” I tell him, moving aside.

“It should have worked! They shouldn’t want to rip our faces off by now,” he complains as he takes a look through his own portable control pad. “They should have reverted to the friendly little-” he stops for a moment, his eyes widening. “What the...”

“What is it?”

“It’s an emulator,” Remmy says. “The Sunspire tricked the antivirus into thinking it cleared the Holocaust Virus out of the computer by letting it cure a fake operating system.”

“How long will it take you to go around it?” I ask, drawing my sidearm.

He shakes his head. “It’s not gonna happen. I can only see one part of the real Sunspire’s computing system, and it’s locked behind serious firewalls.”

“How serious?”

“Do you have a century or two?” he replies.

“All right, then we resort to secondary measures,” I say.

“What? But that would-” one of the technicians objects.

Before he can finish his sentence I silence his communicator. “Don’t you dare tip this machine off,” I warn. I select the software package Special Projects developed just in case an incursion unit ever tried to retake an infected ship, and enter my initiation code. It only takes half a second for it to upload to the Sunspire. I yank my comm unit free of the cable connecting me to the panel. “This is happening. I don’t care how bad you techs want to study the Sunspire. I don’t think this thing will do tricks once it’s in your glass jar anyway.”

The emulator interface freezes then disappears. Lighting flickers overhead for a few seconds before going out.

“So much for getting a copy of the AI before the ship’s computer dies,” mutters Remmy.

“Just make sure there’s nothing left,” I tell him over my shoulder as I begin firing at the nearest silver-skinned crawler. “While the rest of us do the heavy lifting.”

“We’re setting our platoon’s EMP up,” warns Lieutenant Davi. “This section should be clear of crawlers and anything else that’s looking to rip us up in a few seconds.”

“Give us ten seconds to get under Faraday sheets.”

I blast a crawler right off a marine’s back and shoot it six more times before I hear the lieutenant say, “Now’s a good time, get under cover. Fifteen seconds.”

My people learned their lesson. They all make it under the Faraday sheets in time and none are caught in the massive electromagnetic pulse that disables most of the crawlers.