The Orphaned Worlds (35 page)
The Clarified Teshak’s outstretched hand pointed unwaveringly at the prisoner couch. It took Kuros no time at all to come up with the correct response.
‘I fully understand the gravity of the crisis, your Clarity,’ he said. ‘Our forces shall go forth – the treacherous indigenes shall not escape punishment.’
‘Excellent decision, Kuros. You will be able to rely on reinforcements from the
Purifier
but they’ll take several hours to arrive – you need to give the mobilisation orders now.’
Kuros nodded and beckoned to one of the Ezgara guards with the intention of using his communicator. As he did so, Teshak made a small gesture and the shuttle’s flank hatch closed up, whole and seamless.
‘Hegemony historians will look back at this moment and identify your actions as crucial to the success and glory of future generations,’ Teshak said. ‘Perhaps you will earn a noteworthy byname – Kuros of Darien, or the like, or something yet more impressive.’
‘That would be … most gratifying,’ Kuros said, emotions mixed as the Ezgara handed him a detachable suit communicator. ‘Yet such experiences are the true reward; after all, I live to serve, your Clarity.’
Or am I serving in order to live?
‘Technical station three – request that you restate orders for production schedule and target list.’
‘Fabricator 238 – your orders are clear. In the next thirty-hour period you will construct two type-D mechs, two type-E mechs, and four of the new type-R mechs. Send a D-mech and two Es against the Humans in the mountain fortress, two Ds to raid the rebel camps along the western valleys, and the four type-Rs to the northern marches of the Forest of Arawn to hunt down other rebel groups.’
‘Orders received but do not satisfy tactical reasoning. Human fortress requires concentrated attack. Two type-Ds inadequate for subduing more than one or two armed camps since Human acquisition of Brolturan weaponry. Type-R failure rate in the field strongly indicates fundamental design flaws – recommend recall and upgrade. One recovered unit already undergoing reconditioning …’
‘Fabricator 238, you assume that you are in possession of all relevant battlefield data with respect to our deployments. You are not. The orders given to you are part of a wider strategy devised to secure the hinterland region; also, your concerns about the type-Rs have been noted.’
‘Acknowledged. Orders will be carried out.’
As the link was cut, the Knight of the Legion felt relief mixed with irritation – clearly, the codification of the autofactory’s machine mind had included a bias towards nit-picking oversight.
The audio-visual simulation of the
Kasimir
’s captain and crew had been straightforward in comparison, the important difference being that the simulation had been running on semi-autonomous scripts. It was ten days since his remotes, with painstaking stealth, took control of the autofactory’s transceiver systems, but such control was a two-edged sword. Not only was he pretending to be a Hegemony military technician giving the autofactory its orders, he also had to pretend to be the autofac-tory receiving orders from the technician when those channels were opened. Both dialogue streams demanded realtime responses that were authentic while serving the Knight’s own purpose.
That purpose had seemed a forlorn hope soon after the plunge into the lake, cradled in the camouflaging barge, and the subsequent entrapment under the rockfall. It had tested him, provoking depths of panic and despair, yet he had regained his wits and set the remaining work drones to shoring up the barge hull with rocks pried from the nearby mud. With the threat of being crushed to death negated, he then had the drones cut him free of the wrecked barge, a timely escape since Brolturan units had started to arrive in the area.
Erasing what evidence he could, he took the work drones and moved to a far-off and deep part of the lake. After dark he had swam up a river for several miles, turned off at a tributary and eventually surfaced in a steep-sided gully, in a remote northeastern corner of a large, dense forest. A dispassionate assessment of his cyborg status revealed that the repairs completed at the Bargalil moon facility had not been equal to a combat situation. It was a weakness of the materials available rather than the refurbishment methods. Although internal power and control systems were stable, some carapace and substructure repairs had failed. Also, the prosthetic extensions on two of his three remaining greater tentacles were showing serious wear.
And he had realised, belatedly, that his two Scions had told the truth – the forces of the Hegemony occupiers were indeed formidable, at least for one aged, crippled Knight of the Legion of Avatars. Perhaps he would have to remain in the background after all, a spectator of the glorious unfolding strategy of his Scions. Naturally, a little of their triumphant radiance would reflect upon himself, as their Progenitor, but that would be a lesser accolade, the merest gleam of prestige, a bitter sip of splendour.
Much later, in the middle of the night as the Knight rested under a low canopy stippled with the glow of light-emitting insects, a large dark silhouette had passed overhead with scarcely a murmur. Alerted, he set his refurbished sensor arrays to track it across the treetops, a low stealth approach that took it in a long southward curve that ended in a high, densely wooded valley. Swiftly, he dispatched one of his remotes to find out more, and a few hours later a stream of gathered visuals and intercepted transmissions reached him, revealing the truth – and the outlines of a strategy. By sending in their autofactory, the Hegemony had unwittingly provided the means by which he would seize control of the fortified promontory and thus the warpwell. With an army of heavy war mechs he could smash his way past any defences – the problem was getting the autofactory to build them with the minimum of argument.
At least he had seen one of the type-Rs in a live field test against some Humans at the western end of the mountain a few days ago. Throughout this region his remotes had picked up echoes of old Forerunner places, buried deep yet still emanating faint trickles of that terrifying power. The Humans had gone to ground at the heart of one of those ancient nodes, one of that world-strangling weed’s anchors, a pillar tree, truncated but still alive, ten thousand years on, and protecting itself with layers of interwoven foliage. The mech had gone after the Humans with an appropriate degree of brutality and would have obliterated them had it not been neutralised by a Brolturan overpulse cannon, captured by some other Humans. The Knight was not overly dismayed since the live test had proved correct his suspicions about the upper-body armour fields.
Now that dawn was pushing back the night-time shadows, it would not be long before the Hegemony technicians opened a channel for their regular status check dialogue. He already maintained a steady telemetry feed abstracted from the autofactory’s actual output but substantially modified. The curious thing was that he found it easier to imitate the sentience of Fabricator 238, with its finicky reiterations, than a Sendrukan technician.
Several moments later his receptor picked up a new feed from the autofactory’s secluded valley, but rather than a satellite relay from the Sendrukan tech station, it was from the autofactory sentience again. Uneasy, he opened the channel:
‘Fabricator 238 – this is an unscheduled …’
‘Technical Station Three, this unit is unable to carry out your orders.’
‘Explain.’
‘Extensive analysis of the schedules of production and deployment show that they have failed to suppress or curtail significant insurgent activity in any way. This level of incompetence would not normally be tolerated in the prosecution of such a vital mission yet you have been feeding deficient instructions to this unit for eight days without interruption. Conclusions are inevitable.’
‘And they are?’
‘Either your facility has been subverted by enemy elements or this unit’s communications equipment has. Regardless, this dialogue is at an end.’
The channel went dead. The Legion Knight immediately switched to the encrypted channel linking him with the remotes and monitor points embedded in the autofactory’s hull. Live visuals came through, along with various datastreams to confirm that the autofactory, Fabricator 238, was recalling its picket sentry drones, retracting its extraction borers, and starting the seal and lockdown procedures in preparation for take-off. Which would be disastrous – the moment it cleared the treetops, the Brolturans’ orbital scanners would identify it and know that something was seriously wrong. And that would be the end of any plan to seize control of the warpwell.
Options were limited – the type-R mechs, whose redesigned comm systems gave him complete control, were divided between guarding his own place of hiding and a staging point over a hundred miles to the east. He had no direct control over the Ds and Es, and his onsite remotes and spymechs were incapable of penetrating the autofactory … but there was a type-R inside, being repaired …
The Legion Knight ordered the hull remotes to tap into the inner status logs, to find out the type-R’s location and what condition it was in. The response came seconds later – the mech was being held in workshop storage, its left leg assembly was twisted junk, and it was currently powered down on standby.
Meanwhile, most of the sentry drones had returned and were hutched while the navigationals ran system checks on the suspensors and the atmospheric thrusters. There were only moments left.
Based on the autofactory’s layout and functionalities, the Legion Knight compiled a task order for the mech, pointing out multiple paths to the objectives, knowing that he would have to rely on the machine’s semi-sentient judgement to get it done. He sent it to the hull remotes, who then flensed through the datashields and fed the task order to the type-R as a burst transmission. At once, data-breach systems came online, cutting off all exterior sensors. But the type-R was powering up and providing the Legion Knight with patchy, unsteady visuals as it dragged itself out of a storage recess and descended into maintenance ducts beneath the main deck. That was the quickest route to the power junctions.
And time was running out. From a nearby ground remote, he had seen the last sentry drone glide on board and was now watching the ramp withdrawing and the bow sections closing up. With its curved, blunt prow, wide midsection and tapered aft, an auto-factory was not a high-mobility unit and therefore its minimal propulsion systems left it slow and ungainly. But they would be sufficient to send it out from concealment and bring the Brolturans in numbers to this corner of the forest.
Inside, the crippled mech had encountered a barricade comprising several deactivated auxiliary drones welded into a solid mass across the duct. The mech clearly reckoned that it would take too long to break through since it swiftly reversed course, headed back to an intersection, tore aside the grille-decking above and clambered up into a narrow passageway. The visual feed was jerky and almost in monochrome, showing metal walls that looked scored and battered in the light from the mech’s shoulder lamps.
Suddenly there was motion along the passage. The visual gave the impression of something with a vertical row of jutting pintles rushing towards the mech. Then there was a burst of distortion and the link went dead. Aghast, the Legion Knight switched to the ground-POV remote and watched as the autofactory stirred from its landing position. Dust, leaves and fragments of bark and twig flew up. The air rippled as suspensor fields lifted the vessel slowly into the air and the stubby landing legs retracted. The high valley was hemmed in by steep mountainsides so the autofactory could either follow the valley to a river canyon that led east, or ascend straight through the canopy to the open air above, which seemed most likely.
Resigned to this defeat, angry at himself for not having foreseen such an outcome, the Knight began preparing for his own egress. In keeping with the principles of stealth, he had already scouted out other fallback hiding places, the most useful being an underwater cave in a lake in the mountains north of Trond. The route was already mapped and he had stationed a type-R mech there, watching for intruders.
Then he realised that something was happening to the auto-factory. Its ascent had slowed and now it was descending on a path leading along the downward-sloping valley. All of a sudden it lurched to the right, crashed through several large trees, smashing them apart or pushing them over, roots ripping free of the ground. The Legion Knight felt a surge of exhilaration – the auto-factory had six suspensors, three on either flank, and if one ceased functioning that would explain this list in the trajectory. The auto-factory seemed to correct its attitude for a moment or two, then it veered to the right, nose dipping as it ploughed into the side of the valley. Soil and shredded vegetation spouted in a long dark wave but the craft’s momentum carried it onwards, gouging.
Then a new development – one of his remotes, now airborne, saw a shape burst out of the dense foliage further back and begin racing after the ailing vessel. It was a type-D mech. Had the auto-factory managed to bypass the transceiver lockouts and signal its original, base-design models to come to its aid? This raised the grim possibility that the autofactory had also established communication with the Brolturans.
Another type-D came plunging down the valley side, and a type-E appeared at the valley’s far end. And the autofactory slowed, its aft slewing round against the undergrowth, causing another cascade of pulverised greenery. The vessel tilted over on one side as it ground on down the valley floor, at last slowing to stop at the end of a great dark trench of ripped-up soil. Its bow doors split, starting to open. The Legion Knight knew that its type-R was inside, fighting its way to the AI core. A moment later the first type-D reached the gaping access ramp and leaped up onto it, got a couple of paces, then jolted to a halt before keeling over. The next two, and a fourth appearing from the southern slope, followed the same doomed approach, clearly driven by an overriding imperative from the autofactory sentience.