By: AMRAAM
Based on Characters and Situations developed by Mr. Armageddon in "Drastic Measures."
Jak was a natural in every sense of the word. He was a naturally gifted athlete, scholar and pilot, the standard-bearer for his class … but he was also naturally born, the son of a father and a mother.
In school, everyone had been a natural, but the day he reported for duty with his new squadron, he began to get an idea what the rest of the world might think of a naturally-born field soldier. The captain looked him up and down as if he expected to find evidence of a hideous mutation, or at least some visible mark that would set Jak apart from a clone.
"You had a mother."
"Yes, sir."
"A real son of a mother."
Jak didn't flinch at what he was aware the other considered a deadly insult. At least Lancer didn't know he was also the son of the commander most known for losing Thoriuh; Jak's genetic father was a Yren commander, and that was all Lancer needed to know--if he needed to know that much. "Yes, sir."
"No track record, no history." Lancer loomed belligerently over him. "How am I going to know if you'll stand when the shooting starts? How do I know you won't go crying for your mama the first time you see a Core plasma flash?"
Jak had wondered the same things, and there were times he thought he was more afraid of fear than of anything else. He didn't think being shot at would cause him to buckle, but he couldn't be sure he could handle it if--when--someone he knew got blown to bloody shreds. And what would it be like to face a massed attack, knowing it was real, and then getting that BEEP, BEEP warning of a missile lock-on? Would he panic then?
Lancer didn't seem to expect a reply, so Jak waited at attention as the bigger man circled him, still apparently looking for a defect but--with any luck--finding none.
"I guess you'd better suit up," he said at last, coming to rest facing Jak. "We're going out for a little sortie against a handful of mixed ground units--you can think of it as a training mission with live ammo. And if you screw up, I'm sending you back to the nursery … assuming there's anything left to send."
Once Jak had settled into the shiny new Zipper he had been assigned, he felt much more at home. Displays didn't waste a lot of bandwidth on aesthetics, and what he could see from his pickups was the same essential information he would see anywhere. This bleak, airless world didn't appear much different from Empyrrean from the control pod, which was itself a comforting cocoon.
There had been a time when Jak bitterly resented being chosen for light infantry instead of flight, but his dad had taken him aside and explained that most of the original commanders had come from the ground rather than the air. The whole idea behind raising and training a crop of natural-borns was to bring some new blood into the officer corps, but Cdr. Hax, not unnaturally, wanted to see his son excel, and to him that meant command of planetary forces.
"Zipper Jak A1, sir," he announced as he took the place his display told him was his, directly behind a Flash and almost elbow-to-cannon with a Fido.
"A-One?" His fellow turned a pickup eye in Jak's direction and very obviously gave him a looking over. "A-bleeding-One? Hey, guys--we got us a mama's boy!"
"Knock it off, 90210." This was Lancer, whose Bulldog was just now lumbering into position. "Move out."
Jak knew enough to wait, and how much to wait, but he hadn't once, and the experience had been bought at some cost to his pride. It hadn't really been all that long ago, but it seemed an entire existence in the past, his training at school.
They'd had Peewees to start, and learning to control the basic infantry 'bot had not been as easy as he would have expected. Still, it wasn't too long before he could put his suit through its paces with the best of the others, and he pretty consistently won races, both on the level and through obstacles. No, the embarrassment had come the first time the training commander told him to put together a simple formation with mixed units and get them through a gate.
That was all he had to do--get a dozen each Peewees, Jeffys and Flashes past a gate that three Bulldogs could have gone through abreast--and it had been a disaster. In the first place, all the pilots were also trainees, and in the second place, they had been told to leave their own judgment behind and follow his every order EXACTLY. Which they did.
He had Jeffys bouncing off Flashes, and Peewees finding out they couldn't simply walk over the resulting traffic jam. In less than two minutes, Jak had managed to completely block the gate, sending a single Jeffy and two Peewees out by themselves to get picked off by a pair of pseudo-Instigators. If he hadn't jammed every single one of his Flashes in the gate, Jak could have won the exercise handily, but as it was, he thought they were still laughing about it back at school.
Because of his own experience, Jak could appreciate the orderly way Lancer guided his units through the narrow opening in the defense wall, and he took an occasional glance at his rear-view to watch the captain himself negotiate the corridor with his tank.
Once he was outside, however, Jak had little thought to spare for the niceties of Lancer's maneuvering. The Core were out there, and they would be using real ammo. He hoped he was ready.
[Top]
Lancer had been assigning units all the way through the corridor, and Jak noticed the Fido next to him was given "the usual," which seemed to consist of about equal numbers of light cavalry and mixed infantry. Fido didn't even pause before she angled her units off to the right to begin their patrol, and Jak hoped someday he would have that level of confidence and skill.
Jak followed the original mobilization order he had been given, but he began to wonder if Lancer had forgotten his newest officer when he heard his name.
"Zipper Jak, you're with me."
"Aye!" The big Bulldog was easy to find, and Jak took up a position to its rear; no point in exposing himself needlessly, and unless Lancer ordered him to go forward and scout, he planned to use the armored vehicle as a shield.
Suddenly he heard a chuckle from the captain, and Jak knew he was meant to hear it or it never would have been transmitted. "Jak the Zipper," said Lancer, and he chuckled again.
Jak had no idea what was so funny about this, but Lancer was his commanding officer, so he couldn't very well demand to be told. Instead, he focused on getting used to both the Zipper's long legs and the light gravity on this airless dustball of a planet. The terrain was almost entirely flat here, so it wasn't difficult, but Jak could see sheer, rocky rills snaking around and, to all appearances, blocking their path further on. His map didn't go that far, so he had to assume Lancer knew more than he did, and they wouldn't get boxed into a dead-end.
In false-color images that had made even Empyrrean seem alien, this planet seemed more alien yet, drab and nearly colorless. And, he'd have thought, worthless.
Delta Beta 4 seemed to have nothing anybody would want, much less justify a permanent Arm garrison; all water and oxygen had to be processed, and supplies of metal were barely adequate to maintain the existing infrastructure and combat units. The only thing there was plenty of was sunlight, so it was solar energy that made everything else possible. Nobody had told Jak why Delbay 4 was so important, but given the planet's total lack of any inherent value, he could only conclude it held a galactic gate relay.
It was likely the Core had figured this out, as well, or perhaps they suspected subsurface deposits of valuable minerals, but whatever their motivation, they had started building a fort of their own just about harassing distance from the main Arm facility. Today's patrol was designed to lure some of the Core forces out and inflict some damage, taxing their newly established resources and setting their development back a few weeks. The Core fortifications themselves were a little too sturdy for light cavalry and infantry, and although Jak supposed the Arm was busy turning out more heavy units, that battle would have to wait.
"D'ya see anything yet, Zipper Jak?" asked Lancer. He'd certainly already queried the mobile radar, and he probably already knew what there was for the young officer to see. Which was nothing.
"No, s…" Wait a sec. "Mixed cav and foot, sir. Light, I think."
"Details?" Again, Lancer probably had all that information already, but based on what Jak could see as they got a little closer, the captain could afford to waste a little time in testing him.
"Sir--four or five A.K.'s--" They were moving, so he couldn't be certain of the count. "--One Thud, a Weasel and two each Instigators and Raiders."
"Good eyes, kid." Lancer increased his speed, and the others formed up according to a sketchy diagram he sent them. As the most heavily armored, Lancer himself took the point, while he positioned his one Stumpy on his right flank. He made up the rest of his front with Flashes, while he kept his Jeffys, infantry, artillery and support units in more covered rear positions.
It was possible the Arm front line would steamroll the Core patrol, and Jak would be lucky to get off a single shot. While he didn't want any of his comrades to get hurt, he hoped the skirmish wouldn't be quite so one-sided as it was shaping up to be. Wouldn't it be something to register a kill his first time out?
A plasma blast splashed on the Bulldog's turret, and then one of the Flashes took a glancing hit. So far, the damage was superficial, but Jak swallowed. Either one of those fireballs would have been sufficient to take him out, and he was glad of the mobile fortress the armored vehicles were providing.
After the first couple of shots, there was a pause that seemed quite long to Jak, and then the Arm opened up. Lancer kept up a steady rhythm with his plasma cannon, while the Stumpy and Flashes played counterpoint with their guns. Jak couldn't hear any of it, but every time the Bulldog let loose, he could feel the reverberation in the soles of his feet.
The Thud kept firing as fast as it could, and it seemed the Core pilot knew he--it?--had been sent out on a forlorn hope, since he directed his fire at one of the Flashes instead of the Bulldog. He had little chance of taking out the bigger tank, but a Thud could waste a Flash in fairly short order. Jak could see it was going badly for the Flash, and he took a couple of shots at the Thud for what little damage his laser might inflict.
Lancer went after the Thud as well, but by the time the Core vehicle went up in a satisfying fireball, the Flash was almost a total wreck. Lancer sent the kbot that had been repairing his Bulldog to assess the damage to the Flash, but before Jak could find out anything about how bad it was, he had orders of his own.
"Jak--take your peepers up to that ridge…" A spot of color appeared on Jak's map where Lancer marked it to show him which ridge. "And see if there's anything going on we should know about."
"Yes, sir." Jak hoped this was just a precautionary measure on the captain's part, but he wasted no time in loping toward what seemed to be the most promising way up. He noticed a couple of Peewees heading out on similar tasks, but he didn't have much attention for them.
Once he was away from the mobile armor units, the best protection he had was his speed and an erratic course. Most of the Core units were too occupied to even notice a lone Zipper making his way among the broken rocks at the foot of the ridge, but one short burst of plasma blasted the ground uncomfortably close to him, showering him with sand. He broke pace and changed direction, and the next blast missed, but it still caught a boulder altogether too close to him, throwing him several meters and slamming him into another rock. He slid, moderately stunned, down its rough face as rock fragments pelted him, and he soon discovered he was helpless to move anything. His suit had locked up.
He lay frozen at the foot of the rock, dreadfully exposed, and Jak calculated the next shot would be the end of him. He tensed against the expected fireball, but after three or four ragged breaths, he concluded the Core unit that had fired on him didn't intend to make sure of the job. For the moment, all was quiet. But he still couldn't move. He swore mightily and struggled.
RESET. This single word in the center of his displays startled Jak, and his first thought was that the Core had figured out some way to take control of his suit. He reviewed the self-destruct procedure, but he wanted to wait until he was sure…
"Relax, kid." This was Lancer's voice. How could he remain so calm in the middle of a battle? "You'll be back up in a second. Sorry I didn't have time to explain, but I thought it'd be better if you played dead for a few minutes."
It cost him some effort to keep his reply civil. "Yes, sir," he said. Lancer chuckled as if he knew exactly what Jak thought of him at the moment, and then he was gone again.
Jak checked his suit readouts as they came back up, and they informed him he had suffered only minimal damage, leaving him, as far as they were concerned, completely fit for action. He slowly pulled himself up, and he quickly concluded he was fine except for a bruise or two. He began his ascent.
[Top]
Zippers were not designed for climbing, but Lancer certainly knew this, so Jak figured there must be a way up he could use, or the captain never would have sent him here. He picked his way among large boulders, trying to keep them between himself and the Core units just in case one of them noticed him and tried to stop him again.
He was beginning to wonder if he should turn around and try the other direction when he found the narrow entrance to a path someone had to have cut into the cliff face. The Arm had been here awhile, so there had been plenty of time to send out a few construction kbots to subtly modify the natural features of the landscape. The floor of the way rose smoothly and steadily upward, and although it was almost completely enclosed, the channel was wide enough that Jak could just touch the walls on either side with the Zipper's arms fully extended. There were places where it became a tunnel, but much of the way was at least partly open at about eye-level, enabling Jak to look out and see the action below.
He only took an occasional glance, since he could not afford the time away from his assigned mission, but he could see that only one A.K. was still moving among the Core units, which now consisted entirely of one of the original pair of Raiders, a badly-damaged Weasel and several undifferentiated piles of wreckage. The Thud, Instigators and the other Raider had been reduced to slag.
The Arm had taken some heavy hits, as well. At least one Flash was down, the mobile radar was completely gone, and every survivor showed signs of hits. There were also no Peewees, and Jak hoped most of them were following termite trails, as he was, although he didn't really suppose more than the original two would be.
When he came to a chamber hollowed out of the rock, he paused and took a good look out, periscoping one wide-range sensor to get a better view toward the Core base. At first all seemed clear, but as he swept his scan across the landscape, one of the sandy bottoms seemed a little more blurry than any of the others, so he tweaked his frequency range until he was sure there was *something* there, although he had no way to know just what or how many.
"Sir..." There was no response, and Jak checked to make sure the Bulldog was still there. The heavy tank showed some blackened scoring where it had taken a few hits, but it still seemed pretty much intact. "Lancer."
"Yeah, kid."
"We've got a Core ground force of unknown size coming at 72 degrees, sir." Jak wanted to sound as cool as the captain did, but he had to work to keep his voice from shaking. "ETA ..." It was hard to estimate velocity when he could hardly see what he was looking at. "Ten minutes, plus or minus five."
"Seven-two degrees, five to fifteen minutes, copy." Would nothing get Lancer excited?
Jak returned his attention to the blur, which had advanced a fair amount while he had been checking on his own outfit. There was no way reinforcements could get from base in time to save Lancer and the others, and Jak wished there was something he could do--some brilliant and inspired plan, or some new technological wonder to surprise the advancing Core with--but all he could do was follow orders, stand and watch.
He was beginning to see some variation in the blur, such that he thought he might be able to guess at the number and size of units, even if he still wouldn't be able to identify them, when there was a sudden flash and sparkle near them. Anti-matter. Nobody in Lancer's group had an anti-matter weapon.
Jak turned his main sensors back toward the base and, much closer than he would have expected, he saw large numbers of vehicles and kbots rolling and running toward the action. Of course! Lancer must have given the alarm at about the time Jak was cowering, de-activated, at the base of the cliff. It hadn't occurred to Jak, but Lancer had correctly assumed there must be a reason for the Core to waste plasma on a Zipper and acted immediately.
Even if they were closer than he would have expected, however, the Arm reinforcements still weren't in range to have lobbed that anti-matter, so Jak shortened his focus. There. About midway between the approaching Arm dust cloud and Lancer's position raced a single Luger.
"Don't look at me, Zipper." Her voice was stern, but Jak thought he'd never heard anything so beautiful. "Get your pick-ups back on that Core advance."
"Yes, ma'am."
He found them easily, and almost as soon as he did, another round of the Luger's anti-slivers peppered them. It still wasn't a solid hit, but it must have done some damage to the radar jammer, because now Jak could see individual units, even if they were still a little indistinct.
There were more A.K.'s than he could count, a Pyro and a couple of Thuds, as well as numerous Raiders, Instigators and Weasels--still all pretty basic stuff, but in considerable quantity. And yes, there was the Spectre responsible for messing up his electromagnetic sensors. It still lurched along, but the Luger's fire certainly hadn't done it any good.
"Sir..."
"Yeah, I see 'em, kid."
Lancer probably had the picture Jak was providing him on one of his command windows, same as the Luger and who knew who else. He kept his primary eye on the approaching Core, but Jak snaked a secondary pick-up around to get an update on how the battle was progressing for Lancer. The original Core patrol had been obliterated, but rather than take the time to salvage the materials that were all that was left of the enemy, Lancer was withdrawing from his position. A couple of construction 'bots were working over the Stumpy, but as soon as they got it fixed up enough to roll, it started maneuvering to join the others.
But the Core would still reach the small group before the Arm did, and there was nothing Jak or anybody else could do about it.
[Top]
The first plasma blasts from the Core offensive fell short of the main mass of the retreat, but Jak watched in horror as a missile zeroed in on the badly-crippled Stumpy. The pilot had plenty of time to know he was done for, and Jak was angry at how the missile seemed to be toying with the tank. He raised his laser to take a shot … and held his fire. His chances of hitting the missile were vanishingly small, but firing his laser would almost certainly give his position away, and he guessed he was the only Arm unit that could see the Core force that still relentlessly approached. At the moment, he was more important than the Stumpy.
He bit his lip when the missile impacted and the Stumpy erupted in a ball of fire. The conflagration subsided quickly for lack of oxygen, and the construction kbots near the Stumpy didn't even slow down as they passed the misshapen wreckage.
Lancer had drawn up to wait for his slower units, and Jak was glad that both 'bots were able to plod to comparative safety among the remaining vehicles. The Core kept lobbing plasma, and while their shots weren't even as accurate as the rounds the Luger kept lobbing at them, they were almost in range to see their targets.
"They're almost in range, sir," he said. If Lancer was otherwise occupied, he might not have noticed, although Jak was willing to bet he had.
"Yes." Finally Lancer sounded grim, and with good reason. Of his original patrol, he still had most of his Flashes and Jeffies, but except for the two construction units, none of the kbots that had started with Lancer were still with him.
"Zipper Jak A1." This was a voice he'd never heard before, but his display told him it belonged to a Rocko, number 12780. At least one of Lancer's Kbots had survived, then, although Jak wondered where she was. "Sir, Hammer Pike and I will be joining you in a minute. I don't want to startle you."
He hadn't noticed it before, but he could feel a faint rumble in his feet that could very well be footfalls from a couple of heavy units. "Very well, 12780."
"Please, sir, Sue." She announced her name just before her massive shoulders scraped through the opening from the corridor, and Jak's feelings were mixed when he saw the Rocko.
"Zipper Jak …" It was the Luger again. "Please watch the enemy."
He jumped back to his place and found the Core in his main pickup again. They were about to erupt into the valley where Lancer waited, and Jak was somewhat heartened to see a rocket hit them along with the anti-matter. Apparently a Merl had joined the Luger, which meant reinforcements were getting closer.
The Rocko and the Hammer took up positions in loopholes that must have been designed for exactly this purpose, but they didn't start firing until Lancer gave them the order. He waited until the first Instigator bumped over the low ridge into his valley and he could probably see it with his own visuals, and then he assigned them targets.
Jak fired at A.K.'s as fast as he could, while the Rocko went after Instigators and the Hammer lobbed rounds of plasma into the rear ranks. This activity rather effectively gave away their cliffside position, however, and a couple of Thuds started working on getting their elevation. The rock shook with the force of the plasma, and stone rattled down, but so far the rock chamber remained intact.
Jak didn't notice until one of the Thuds went up in a satisfying orange puff, but the cliff opposite had opened fire on the Core, as well. Not only would that mean more firepower directed at the enemy, it also meant they had yet another target; Jak found this somewhat reassuring. He could also see Fido 90210 and her units coming around on the Core's flank and just now opening fire.
She made no attempt to maneuver or to keep her units together--she loped onward, firing her dorsal cannon and letting her cavalry and infantry find their own targets. She knew the odds against her, so perhaps she just hoped to cost the Core what she could before she went down. Jak was too occupied on his own account to keep score, but every time he spared a glance for 90210's assault, he saw the carnage in her wake.
"Oh, sh…"
Blood spattered Jak's visual pickups, and startled, he turned toward his companions. The Hammer had a small, blackened hole in the center of its torso, and the pilot's blood sprayed copiously and hideously from it as the suit crumpled slowly to the ground.
"He's dead, sir," reported the Rocko in flat tones, not even looking away from her own work. "Damn, all that plasma, and he eats a laser."
Jak took a deep breath, activated his wipers for a quick clean of his pickups, and then went back to potting A.K.'s, which seemed to be all over everywhere. The berserking Fido was gone now, he noticed, and her whole unit with her. Below, the battered Bulldog squatted defiantly next to a badly damaged Flash that blew up even as Jak's scan swept past. He hardly cared. Now if he could just get that A.K., and then that one.
He had grown so accustomed to the intermittent pound, pound, pound of high-energy detonations against the cliff that he hardly noticed the vibration anymore. Such a small target at such a high elevation was giving the Core fits, which must have been the Arm's intention when their construction crews hollowed out these fortifications.
"Oh…" This time it was an exclamation from the Rocko, very faint. A large section of the stone fortification had been blown inward, and Rocko Sue lay sprawled against the back wall, half-buried in rubble.
Jak's first impulse was to help, and he sprang to start moving rocks off the trapped Kbot.
She moved one manipulator to help him with a particularly large chunk, but once she was free of that, she waved him away. "I can take care of it from here, sir."
He supposed she probably could, in spite of being severely dented, but he well knew her rockets were of more use than his puny laser, so he kept lifting rocks and tossing them aside. "I want to get you back into operation as quickly as possible," he explained.
"Yes. I suppose that makes sense."
Once the rubble was sufficiently cleared, Sue hobbled toward the loophole the Hammer had been using, and Jak helped her drag the dead unit out of the way so she could take her position there. Jak resumed his own favored place and quickly checked to see how things were going.
He couldn't find Lancer.
"Sir…? Lancer?" His voice caught in a sob. There was no answer.
Waves of Arm cavalry, infantry and mobile artillery poured down into the valley, and the Core met the first shock almost exactly where the brave Bulldog had made his stand.
[Top]
The mass of Arm tanks waded purposefully into the enemy, guns blazing, and there was never any doubt about the outcome in terms of numbers. Unfortunately, Jak no longer had the comfortable luxury of thinking only in numbers. He was too aware of a particular crumpled, gray monument to a hero, a pile of wreckage that meant nothing but an obstacle to be avoided to those on the battlefield. There were other such monuments, perhaps smaller, but they, too had once been more than battle machines.
But most of all, Jak felt guilty because he was glad it had been them, and not him.
For the first time, he checked his energy reserves, and he didn't know whether to be relieved or dismayed to find they were very low. If he wanted to continue breathing, much less moving, he'd better conserve his laser and let his supply build up again. He turned his faceplate toward his companion.
"Sue, how's your inventory?" he asked. As far as he knew, the two of them were the only survivors of Lancer's outfit, and if that was the case, he was in charge. It was up to him to look out for his units.
"Two rockets left." He heard an unspoken reservation in her tone.
"But...?" He prompted.
"My launchers are damaged. If I fire 'em, I could get ripped to pieces, maybe even blow up."
"Better save them, then."
The Rocko gave a rich chuckle. "My thoughts exactly, sir."
The battle below lasted barely twenty minutes more, and Jak made himself watch it play out to its inevitable close. Even if nobody seemed to need his reconnaissance information anymore, it was his job to provide it in case somebody did. Only when the construction kbots started their work, stumping over the battlefield to reclaim the wreckage did he move back from the edge.
"Zipper Jak A1." The call sign told him this was Maverick 86, command. "If you are fit, you may join the withdrawal."
"Yes, sir, but can I get a construction 'bot up here, sir? I've got a Rocko in need of repair and a Hammer ..." He glanced at the fallen unit and wished he hadn't, because he found he couldn't continue what he had been saying. A suit rupture in hard vacuum was not pretty.
"There's a 'bot on the way." With this assurance, the Maverick went on to some other detail of tidying up the aftermath of battle.
Remembering the narrowness of the corridor in some places, Jack could envision trying to get past the construction kbot that was coming up, and he decided to wait where he was. Besides, he could do with a little repair on his own account, and he was glad of the rest.
-*-
The survivors of Lancer's team met in small briefing room that was nearly bare but for some utilitarian chairs. Jak didn't know any of them, but as soon as he walked in, a short and muscularly stocky woman stood and smiled at him.
"You must be Zipper Jak," she said, and he recognized her voice.
He grinned. "Rocko Sue." She looked almost like a Rocko herself, in miniature.
"And I'm Luger Jenni." The other woman in the room, a slender, but by no means frail, brunette nodded her head at him, but she didn't smile. She would probably be pretty if she smiled, Jak decided, but he could understand why she was not so inclined. His grin faded as he returned her nod.
Then Sue introduced the rest of the survivors--a couple of Peewees, a Hammer and a single construction specialist. It was really a pretty pitiful remnant, and Jak wondered if there would be any more pilots joining them. It was still a couple of minutes before the hour.
It was a little past the hour before the door opened again, and Jak leaped to his feet in pure, unthinking joy.
"Lancer!"
The tall man gave him a mildly affronted stare as he came into the room. "Yeah, kid, but who the hell are you?"
It wasn't a joke. Lancer honestly didn't remember him, because this wasn't the real Lancer, only a clone. Then again, the /real/ Lancer had been only a clone. Jak's head spun dizzily as he sat down.
"Zipper Jak A1, sir," he replied faintly.
"Yes, of course." Lancer struggled against it for a moment, but then he snickered. "Jak the Zipper."
Jak still didn't know what was so funny, but he grinned. This might not be the same man who had gone down so bravely in an unnamed ravine, but he was still Lancer.
Note from AMRAAM: I did not set out to have my character be Jak the Zipper. I named him Jak before I decided what unit to put him in, and I chose the unit from Ian's rank list as the one suited to the least senior officer. Having seen how Zippers perform in the game, I can very well understand why Ian assigned them the rank of ensign. They are expensive to build and d@mn near useless in a fight. They run fast, though.
[Top]
Note from Andy: According to AMRAAM, Mr Armageddon (her son, in fact) managed to persuade her to write more New Blood (thank goodness!). So, here it is...
Lancer returned to his quarters after the debriefing to find a woman in his bed. He recognized her as a Sentinel operator, but he couldn't for the life of him recall her name … or that they had ever exchanged more than a word or two in passing. He supposed he could have started something with her in the last couple of weeks, but he doubted it. After that business with Jenni, he had resolved to avoid the brainy types.
Only the memory of the wounded and appalled look his new Zipper had given him not much more than an hour before kept Lancer from demanding to know what the hell this woman was doing in his bed.
"Look, I'm flattered, but …"
She smiled, a little nervously, perhaps, and sat up in bed. "I know you don't remember, L…love." Maybe she hoped the sight of certain admittedly eye-catching attributes would make him forget his reservations, but that stumble when she had started to call him Lancer was enough to convince him. Had she been on the kind of terms with him she wanted him to believe, she would have known his personal name.
"All right, Sentinel, I don't know why you're doing this, but I'm going to assume your motives are pure …"
She blushed furiously and pulled the blanket up to her chin. Lancer saw tears glisten in her eyes.
"You never even noticed me before," she said.
Lancer was a master of battle tactics, and he considered himself better than most at reading people, but he was seriously out of his depth here. He wondered if anybody understood women, even other women.
"Well, I've noticed you now. But I'm going to go away for a while, and when I come back …"
He didn't finish, but he figured she was bright enough to figure out what he meant. He turned on his heel, and as he went back out through his door, he heard her call softly, so softly she probably didn't expect him to hear her. Had his ears been through even one battle, he probably wouldn't have.
"I'm sorry, Lancer."
And probably embarrassed as hell, he realized, but he pretended he hadn't heard and closed the door behind him.
He put the strange little episode out of his mind and went down to the level 2 vehicle assembly bay to check out the new Bulldogs. They were supposed to be all the same, but they never were, quite, and he wanted to try a few before he slapped his crest on one.
"Lancer, you son of a mother! Trying to get the jump on me, I see."
He couldn't see her, but he recognized the voice; apparently today was his day for woman trouble, although this was of an entirely different kind. Cyclone was a bulldog pilot, one of the best. And she had seniority. Maybe he'd get lucky, and they wouldn't be assigned to the same brigade.
"Cyclone. They're really scraping the bottom of the cell line barrel if they've gotten to you already."
"Yeah, it looks like a major buildup," she replied as she climbed from the cockpit of a nearby Bulldog. "I guess you let things get so out of hand here that now they've got to call up us veterans to save your meat." She jumped and would have landed on top of him if he hadn't moved out of her way.
"As sweet and dainty as ever, I see." He probably should have waited until he was a little farther from her before making this remark, because she hauled off and belted him in the arm. His first bruise in the new body. He ignored it.
He was tempted to start with the Bulldog Cyclone had been sitting in, but he knew, and she knew, that she'd have first pick, so there was no point. There were half a dozen of the heavy tanks as yet unclaimed, and no way to tell if one was better or worse than the others. Even sitting in one was good for only so much.
"You try that one yet?" It was the farthest up the line, so she might not have unless she had been here longer than he would have thought.
"No, I just got started." She scrambled up the flank of the next Bulldog and was still talking as she dropped into the pilot's couch. "I hear your whole outfit got wiped out yesterday. Everybody but a Zipper and a couple of Peewees. Lancer, how do you toast a Bulldog and save a Zipper?"
"Sent him on recon." He'd already been commended for managing to save a Commander's natural-born son, but it hadn't been part of his plan. A Zipper was a scout, and he'd sent Jak scouting. The rest was luck.
He ran his hand along the slightly rough flank of the last Bulldog. He hadn't had an entirely new vehicle in years, and there was something about the feel and the smell of a brand new tank that quickened the pulse. He swung his way into place with the ease of long practice and spent a few minutes absorbing the aura of the new battle wagon.
Lancer had never told anyone how he chose a tank, because it was terribly unscientific, but until someone came up with a scientific way, his method worked for him. The Bulldog seemed to whisper to him on a subconscious level … a pup, eager to please, a little clumsy…
He always felt a little guilty when he rejected a tank, and he patted the turret reassuringly before he descended. There was a master somewhere for this one, it just wasn't him. Sorry, big guy.
The next Bulldog was a lady. A thoroughbred. He started the customization procedure and was just adjusting his tank's voice to a a multiplayer online sessiony contralto when there was a thump on the hatch.
"Hey, what if I like that one?"
It was Cyclone. If she preferred his Sweet Lady Bulldog, she could probably have it. Lancer muttered something filthy before he popped the hatch and invited her to try. He climbed out and stood glowering while she lowered herself into place.
[Top]
"So you sent the Zipper on reconnaissance."
What was Cyclone talking about? Oh, that Zipper.
"Yeah. We've got outlooks in most of the ridges around here, so I sent him up for a sightseeing tour."
"You did." Her emphasis was such that he understood she did not doubt such a thing had taken place so much as she questioned his part in the affair.
Lancer had been as thoroughly briefed on the last action as it was possible to be, and he could pretend he had merely lost his memory of the event, but the fact remained he himself had not been there. His prior self had, and had been killed, and his current self was a replacement. He even had a fairly recent memory deposit on file, but it was still a couple of weeks out of date. Maybe he had been trying to protect the Commander's kid. But he doubted it.
"All right. I didn't. Now will you get out of my tank?"
"When I'm ready." She knew she was annoying him, and she took her time readjusting everything to fit her smaller frame. He hoped she was just doing it to bother him, anyway.
"Honestly, Lancer, I don't know what you look for," she said at last, and he could breathe again, although he maintained his scowl for form's sake.
"Why don't you try that last one," he said. She was climbing out of his chosen vehicle, so he could afford to be magnanimous. "It wasn't right for me, so maybe it'll be the one for you."
Lancer didn't wait to see if she took him up on his suggestion; he had a sweet lady Bulldog to get to know.
He had been a Bulldog pilot for a long time, and controlling it came as easily as walking to him. He spun a couple of tight circles, and then he guided his new lady between the row of Bulldogs on one side and the radar jammers and mobile artillery on the other until he came to the hangar door. There was barely enough room, but Lancer knew to the last millimeter where the corners of his tank were, and he lined it up to go through the airlock.
He'd go out, tool around a little to get the controls better calibrated to his touch, and then bring the new tank to the tank barn.
"Hey, race you to the northwest HLT."
Damn, Cyclone was right behind him. She must have taken to the clumsy pup, although by the way she was handling the new Bulldog, there was no hint of clumsiness about it. And now she wanted to race him to the heavy laser tower on the opposite side of the fort, which was a brazenly reckless thing to do. There could be all kinds of units between here and there, and some of them wouldn't be able to get out of the way fast enough to escape getting flattened.
"That kind of idea is why you don't get cloned more often," he said, saying exactly what he thought for a change. "And I don't see any point in racing you anyway. You always used to beat me, and I don't expect today would be any different."
"You're getting to be an old man, Lancer."
"I am an old man, Cyclone." It was true. The body might be young, but the brain could no longer hold the memories of twenty lifetimes. He could remember practically nothing but war, where he and his Bulldog had prevailed in thousands of battles, hardly one of which stood out much from the others. Maybe it was a good thing the scientists had never perfected a mobile memory deposit system, or he would also remember his last minutes before being crushed, incinerated, eviscerated …
Lancer turned his Bulldog and went sedately to the tank barn. Cyclone could play with her puppy, but he wasn't in the mood anymore. He gave instructions about markings to a construction Kbot and then went back to his quarters.
He was almost disappointed to find his bed empty.
Lancer was in a more cheerful frame of mind the next morning when he met with an abbreviated patrol at the simulation lab, although he suffered a brief relapse when he saw the Zipper. Lancer honestly could not remember being as young as Jak.
Not all of his personnel had been restored yet, but they would be. And Fido 90210 was here. No, make that 90211, but gorgeous as ever. He could tell Jak was trying not to look at her too hard, and he wondered if he ought to warn the kid … nah, Jak was an adult, if barely. He'd find out on his own that one was no man's fodder.
"Listen up, troops." He always felt a little gawky and foolish addressing such an ill-assorted lot of people; not only did they not look especially warlike without their units, he was well aware his own lanky frame was not one to inspire awe. "We've got an exercise designed by the head Maverick, who is also going to play Core Command against us. Chances are excellent we will be demolished and humiliated, but our object here is to work as a team, and for those of you … us … who have only been recently restored, it is an opportunity to reacquaint ourselves with our units' controls and capabilities. May the best soldier last longest!"
This was the signal to suit up, although there were no actual suits or vehicles in the sim lab. Instead there were rows and rows of control pods, and it really didn't matter too much which one any individual chose, since the basic pod was pretty much the same for most units. Customization in form and function took place once the pilot was in place.
Lancer usually took the same pod, however, and he did so today. The automatic calibration didn't take long, and he relaxed as a subtle whisper he couldn't really hear came in the voice of a familiar drill sergeant, promising a challenging lesson. Once the basic configuration was set, Lancer adjusted a few parameters to his own taste before he signaled his own readiness. He watched for the ready lights of his other units, and most of them were set as quickly as he was, but there were a couple… He checked their readouts and discovered his sluggards were a couple of AIs filling in for personnel who had not yet been restored. There was no use in wasting tact on an AI.
"What's your problem?" he asked both at once. One put on its ready light immediately, but the other didn't seem to have heard him. He switched communication channels. "Hammer AI72, what's your problem?"
"Gmmrl…" That one was obviously suffering some kind of failure. He briefly considered cutting the Hammer, but he knew he'd need every unit he had and then some, so he gave an order to his one living construction Kbot to repair the defective unit.
It was almost surreal how realistic the simulation was. Lancer could actually see the units in formation, and now he watched as the C-bot made his purposeful way toward the Hammer. He could see the bright green streams of nanobots better than he usually could in real life, though, because even if there wasn't atmosphere to dull the effect, there was dust or something. But he didn't have a lot of time to spare for admiring the C-bot's work, and he looked over his briefing materials again.
It was his job to attack and destroy (yeah, sure, he muttered to himself) a Core aircraft manufacturing center. Intelligence reports indicated there were at least two big guns and probably two dozen vehicles as well as unknown numbers of Kbots guarding it. The terrain where it stood was fairly well mapped, but the exact placement of the center and the number of support structures were known only generally.
Lancer rubbed his hands together in anticipation. This was going to be fun.
[Top]
Lancer started posting orders to move out in a sequence that would give the lightly armored units the protection of the more heavily armored units. This close to base, it didn’t really matter, but it was a lot easier to start in a loose battle formation and tighten it later than it was to put one together on the fly.
As he watched the waves move out, both in virtual and mapped formats, it occurred to him that what he was doing was really quite difficult, or would be for most people. He had just been doing it so long he took it for granted.
“Close up there a bit, Jethro AI16.” One of the units was straying a little, but it responded to the verbal prompt and got back on course.
Lancer hadn’t had a Jethro in his command since coming to Delbay 4, and he hoped the two anti-aircraft ‘bots Command had assigned him were just a precautionary measure. True, he was supposed to be taking out an aircraft manufacturing facility, but he fervently hoped it was still under construction. If the Core had air support, two miserable Jethros wouldn’t be able to do a whole lot to counter the threat. They were all goners, anyway, but Lancer thought he would like to at least inflict damage on the plant before going down himself.
He had several Samsons, most with AI pilots, and he had a couple of them lead the way into a narrow ravine. His choice of route was a compromise--for a purely ground action, he’d have preferred a wider one, but he had to consider a threat from the air. Core aircraft would find it very difficult to attack the Arm force here.
He sent out a couple of scouts, who reported nothing, and all kept on alert as they rumbled on toward their objective, but so far there was no enemy activity. There was a little time compression in the simulator, and it didn’t take as long to get to the branch Lancer was looking for as it would have in real life. Even so, he had already outlined his plan, and two of his Fidos took about a third of the force and started down a channel to the left, while Lancer took his main force down the wider right-hand branch.
He sent scouts out again, this time hugging the sides of the ravine, since there were no lookout posts here so far from base. The Zipper could see the farthest, so Lancer tapped into his multimode radar. Nothing so far...
“Look out, kid!” Even before Lancer shouted, Jak jumped behind a boulder and let fly with his laser.
The blasts Lancer could see ripping into the terrain around the Zipper indicated there were more than the single A.K. originally caught in Jak’s radar.
“Jenni...” He said her name but no more, and his orders went up on the Luger’s display even as he checked on his Peewees. He could rely on Jenni to do her job properly and give Jak artillery support, although he had little hope she’d actually be able to give him enough cover so he could escape.
The Peewees were under fire, too, and Lancer got a couple of Hammers to help them out while he considered the pattern of incoming fire. Even if you couldn’t see a Core unit, you could get a pretty fair idea what it was by the type, size and frequency of the blasts.
Lancer made a rude noise. One of his AI Hammers had just demolished a Peewee. At first he considered shutting the stupid unit down, but he reconsidered and merely changed its orders. Maybe if they got lucky, the Hammer would get far enough that its self-destruction would take a few Core units, too. No such luck. Even an AI had instincts of self-preservation, and it refused to start the sequence.
Lancer performed a command override and hesitated before he simply deactivated the Hammer’s motor function. He’d never trigger a self-destruct on a unit against its will, so there was no point in doing so in a simulation.
By the time the Arm main force came within range of the Core strike team, Lancer had analyzed the fire and had a pretty fair idea what he was up against. A.K.’s, Thuds and a Storm. No tanks at all, which could mean this was simply a scouting party, or it could mean there were Dragon’s Teeth farther up the ravine. In any event, the element of surprise was gone. Not that Lancer had ever had much hope he would surprise the enemy.
The Stumpys and Rockos, once they were in range, were able to reduce the outnumbered Core units to wreckage in short order, and then Lancer sent a couple of C-bots to do what they could for the wounded. The Peewee hit by the Hammer was beyond repair, but miraculously, the Zipper wasn’t even badly damaged. The C-bot fixed him up, and he was jogging into his place behind the Bulldog in no time.
Lancer slowed his progress a little so the others could catch up when they were ready, but he never stopped. He wasn’t quite sure what to expect, but it seemed best to be ready for anything, especially since the ravine was about to widen.
If there were dragon’s teeth, they would be just inside the mouth of the narrower section. Even if there were no dragon’s teeth, there would certainly be something unpleasant waiting for him outside. Raiders, Pillagers, Reapers, maybe even ...
There, beyond a glistening row of dragon’s teeth, the expected tanks and mobile artillery ranged around an immense battle tank that moved ponderously into position.
“Prepare to die, Lancer.” The tag on the message read Goliath CY980, but in spite of the pattern-like flatness, he recognized Cyclone’s voice.
“Damn,” he said.
[Top]
Cyclone in a Goliath was like something from Lancer’s worst nightmare, but he hardly paused to think about it. He quickly assigned targets as he brought his cannon to bear. One good thing about a Goliath was that it was a large target. The only good thing.
The simulated Bulldog rocked back very realistically at the discharge of the plasma gun, and then almost immediately shuddered as it took an impact. Lancer’s displays were briefly washed in fire. Cyclone was shooting back.
He keyed the return for her ears only. “This isn’t fair,” he said. He even got a little suggestion of a whine into his voice. “I don’t have a chance.”
“The Core don’t play fair.” She fired her cannon again, and the Bulldog shook with the blow, although the simulator didn’t give him the full force of it.
He sent another shot her way, but at the same time he ran through a check of all of his units. He had a Stumpy and a Flash working on the dragon’s teeth, but the rest of the units with Lancer were throwing everything they had at Cyclone’s force. He had even a variety of his Kbots past the dragon’s teeth to pour rockets, plasma and laser fire into the massed Core army. So far, the numbers of casualties were about even for both sides if he counted the Core losses earlier.
When the Flash at the dragon’s teeth went up in a ball of flame, Lancer sent another one to work on the task. His Peewees were almost all gone, and even as he watched, the Zipper went down under a ball of plasma, from a Thud, it looked like. Lancer had expected Cyclone to take that one herself, but he had misjudged her. He hoped he had her pegged right otherwise, though. He kept lobbing plasma at her, in a steady rhythm that didn’t require much thought. The regular rocking of his Bulldog was almost relaxing, or it would have been if not for the uneven pounding from the Core guns.
There went the Stumpy at the dragon’s teeth, weakened by an Instigator and finished off by a single shot from a Raider. But two of the dragon’s teeth were gone now, opening a path wide enough for the Flashes and Jeffys, and Lancer sent all of those he had left on a course around to the right of Cyclone’s main body.
Lancer noticed numerous infantry units now joining Cyclone; if he hadn’t been outgunned and outnumbered before, he was seriously outclassed now. The fresh A.K.’s, Thuds and even a couple of Pyros waded into the battle, and they went after the Arm infantry. He lost a Hammer, a couple of Rockos and several Peewees in rapid succession; the numbers were starting to tip in Cyclone’s favor.
He noticed his own damage bar was getting close to the end, so it was time. He hadn’t wanted to give the orders before in case Cyclone could tap in and listen, but it would be too late for him in less than a minute. He hoped it would already be too late for Cyclone even if she did intercept his communication.
“Fido 90211. Throw everything you’ve got at it. We...” He was cut off suddenly, and everything went white for an instant as the Bulldog heeled over and then settled slowly down. The absolute stillness afterward felt almost like motion it was so unaccustomed, and the silence made Lancer’s ears strain after the noise of battle. He was dead, his tank was dead, and Cyclone was out there wreaking destruction on what remained of the units with him.
Lancer could only watch now. Cyclone still concentrated on the pitiful remnants of the Arm force that was making an attempt to flank her, but he paid only scant attention to that. He was more interested in the action some distance off to his left.
He could see what 90211 saw: a nearly-finished aircraft plant guarded by four laser towers, one at each corner. The nearest was an LLT, but both HLT’s could bring their fire to bear as well. Nothing moved there but the construction crew and the barrels of the laser guns as they lined up with their targets.
The Fidos, their attendant cavalry, mobile artillery and infantry charged, firing as rapidly as they could. Lancer might have assigned targets differently, but the first HLT crumpled before more than a couple of Peewees went down. The second heavy laser and the single light laser that had the range kept up a murderous fire as the Arm units blasted their way into the perimeter of the manufacturing facility.
The Fidos’ heavy gauss guns were ideal for this kind of work, and they poured shell after shell into the building even as the lasers blasted them.
Lancer couldn’t be sure when Cyclone realized her base was under attack, but he saw her turning now. There were still a couple of Flashes that had not yet been completely reduced to scrap, but the Core units seemed to forget about them. Cyclone’s entire movable force dashed back toward their base as fast as they could go, scattering all over as their different speeds dictated. The Goliath lumbered along, falling farther and farther behind the bulk of her tanks. But it didn’t really matter at this point. Presently all of the Core units came to a stop where they were. He heard a shriek of outrage.
“Defeat! What the hell do you mean, defeat?”
Lancer grinned.
[Top]
Purely on the basis of numbers, Cyclone had inflicted far more damage on Lancer than he had on her. But that wasn’t the object of the exercise. The aircraft plant was gone, and it didn’t matter that Lancer and most of his company had fallen first.
Cyclone had calmed down quite a bit by the time she came to offer her victorious opponent the customary handshake, although her grip was almost painfully firm. “You always were the better tactician,” she said, “even if I’m the better pilot.”
“True.” This matched his assessment, and although he believed he was a better pilot than she was a tactician, he wasn’t about to say so. For one thing, she’d try to make him prove it, and how could he?
“Join me for dinner?”
Lancer hadn’t realized it was so late, but now that he thought about it, he was hungry. Dinner with Cyclone wasn’t his idea of fun, however. “No, thanks. I have other plans.”
Cyclone snorted, but she didn’t press him. She probably didn’t enjoy his company much more than he did hers. “Maybe your Zipper will be interested,” she said, smiling wickedly. “He’s kind of cute.”
“Maybe.” Lancer hoped Jak had better sense, but he wouldn’t bet on it. Cyclone was an attractive woman. He didn’t think she’d hurt the kid, though, even if she was likely to give him an education, one way or another. “Good luck.”
It took him a little while to get out of the sim lab, because he had to commend his units, particularly his Fidos, and accept their congratulations in return. Only one person had anything approaching criticism for him.
“It was a guess, wasn’t it, sir?” asked Zipper Jak. “Which way to send the secondary force, I mean.”
Lancer toyed with claiming superior powers of deduction, but that wouldn’t be fair to the young officer. “You’re a sharp kid,” he said.
He hoped his luck was still with him when he went to B mess. This was not his usual mess, but he had done a little research and hoped to find someone there. At first he thought he’d used up his luck for the day, but then he saw her.
She had her hair dragged back into a clip, and the severe style did not particularly become her angular features. There were shadows under her eyes, as if she had not slept the night before. Lancer suspected if he had seen her no other way, he would not have looked at her again.
At first he thought she hadn’t noticed him. She had a reader before her on the table, and she was intent on its display while she ate, but a faint tremble as she lifted her spoon to her lips made him think she had seen him after all.
He grabbed the first tray as he passed the dispenser, not even checking to see what was in it. He didn’t want to let her out of his sight for fear she would bolt when he wasn’t looking. Sure enough, she showed signs of packing up to leave, even though it was obvious she wasn’t finished with her meal.
“Sentinel.” More than one person turned to look at him, but the one he wanted didn’t. “Tera.”
She couldn’t very well ignore him now, but she glanced up only briefly before she lowered her eyes again. It really wasn’t fair that he could find out her personal name while she couldn’t discover his, but rank did have its privileges. He plunked his tray down directly across from her, and he was glad to see she was no longer making the motions of leaving.
Now that he had captured her, though, he wasn’t quite sure what to do with her. He cracked open his tray and started to stir his soup as he considered the situation. He had hoped she would start the conversation, perhaps demanding to know why he was bothering her, but she was obviously not so inclined. She sat primly, her eyes fixed firmly on her own soup, her hands folded in her lap.
She did not seem at all like the kind of woman who would do what she had done.
“Had you been drinking?” he asked, starting in the middle of a thought, but she knew immediately what he meant. She could probably hardly think of anything else.
“No, sir.” Such a meek little reply.
“Then ...” He hardly knew what question to ask. Why had she done it? Where had she gotten the idea? How had she ever found the nerve to go through with it? “I don’t understand.”
“I hardly understand, myself.” For a minute he was afraid this was all the explanation she was going to offer, but presently she continued. “I’d been on duty, and I was tired, which is probably why I was insane enough to try it. I figured it out a while ago, that if you ... if someone ... were restored, he would be missing enough of his recent memory that he would assume, I mean, if I--“
“Yes, I’d gotten that far.”
“But I didn’t think I’d ever really do it.”
Lancer nodded and made what he hoped was an encouraging noise.
“It was just... You’ll think I’m crazy.”
“I don’t already?” He knew it was the wrong thing to say even as the words left his mouth, so he was relieved that she merely gave him a hurt little frown and then went on.
“Sometimes, when I’m all alone with the Sentinel, sometimes I imagine it’s talking to me. Sort of a whisper inside my head--“
Lancer dropped his spoon, splashing soup all over, but he didn’t care. “A whisper inside your head?”
“Just imagination, not really.”
Since that was what he had always thought, he could understand what she meant. But if she heard it too, then maybe it wasn’t just his imagination.
“She--I mean it--seemed to tell me I should try, and I already told you I was tired, but I really don’t know what got into me, since it isn’t like me at all.”
“My new Bulldog’s a she,” said Lancer, picking up his spoon again. “And my last one...” He felt a pang of grief as he remembered the old fellow. “The last one was a crusty curmudgeon. Like me.”
“You’re not a...” Her protest petered out as she realized what he had just told her. Her eyes grew wide. “You, too? Then--it’s real?”
“That, or we’re both crazy.” Lancer briefly considered this possibility. “And I can live with that.”
[Top]
Jak was in charge of his first patrol. He had four Peewees and a couple of Jeffies who didn’t seem too happy about being left in his charge, and Rocko Sue. He was glad Lancer had given him Sue even if she slowed them all down, because he knew he could count on her if something unexpected happened.
His orders were to take his units along a narrow declivity, too narrow for anything wider than a Jeffy, and look for enemy activity. Whether he saw anything or not, he was to turn back at a certain point and return to base. Lancer had briefed him pretty thoroughly about the terrain and known Core troop movements, but Jak couldn’t help but remember his first patrol with the Bulldog pilot. That one had been supposed to be routine and had turned into anything but.
Jak didn’t want that kind of action, but he hoped *something* would happen. Maybe encounter a couple of A.K.’s out for a look-see. He could handle that easily. Even a Weasel or two. Just a nice, small patrol, about half the size of his. He’d have Sue stand back; the Peewees and Jeffies could take care of it handily.
He did not expect to find a bewildered Peewee standing in the middle of the narrow channel. Jak set his communication to a general but localized setting.
“Identify,” he said. The Peewee’s faceplate turned toward him slightly, but there was no answer. Jak sent a brief message back to base. That was one advantage of an airless world: it was difficult for personnel to slip out of the base unnoticed. Chances were good someone would know who this Peewee was and what he was doing here.
Or rather, not doing. After swiveling his upper section that once, the Peewee had not moved again, rather effectively blocking the way.
“Move, Peewee.” The unit took a single, halting step. Jak decided there had to be something wrong. Maybe the oxygen processor wasn’t working properly, or the motor controls were out. Any of a number of things could have malfunctioned ... but why was this unit out here by himself?
No Peewees are unaccounted for, came the message from Base. Can you get its number?
If there were none missing, then this Peewee could be a Core booby trap of some kind. Jak didn’t relish the thought of sending one of his units around it to find the number, particularly when he realized he was the only one who *could* get by it. He took a couple of deep breaths and sidled past; the Peewee’s faceplate followed him as he went.
Once past, Jak started to look for the number...and stumbled backward in revulsion. He had seen this kind of thing before, when Hammer Pike had been killed by a laser. There was a small hole in the suit, right about kidney level, with stringy, dry globs of reddish-brown meat dangling from it. There was no way the person who had worn that Peewee suit could still be alive.
***
Jak was glad to see that Lancer was already back by the time he marched the orphan suit into the base under override command. The Bulldog pilot simply stood by while Jak handed over his charge to the waiting cluster of scientists and dismissed his troops. But as soon as Jak had finished his duties, Lancer beckoned to him.
“When you get out of your suit,” he said, “come to my quarters.”
Not his office, his quarters. That meant it wasn’t official business, even if Jak was certain it had something to do with the Peewee suit he’d found. He wasted no time in shedding his Zipper chassis and finding Lancer’s quarters.
There was a woman with the captain, and Jak had no idea what their relationship was. She introduced herself as Tera, of the northeast Sentinel, which didn’t tell him much, although he wouldn’t expect a Bulldog pilot to have much professional contact with a Sentinel. Tera was probably Lancer’s friend then, maybe more.
Once Jak was settled in, a beer in his hand, Lancer wanted to know more about the Peewee.
“You said it moved on its own.”
“Yes, sir. It...looked at me, sort of, and when I ordered it to move--just a verbal order--it took a step.” As Jak recalled these movements of a suit with a dead pilot, he shuddered and took a gulp of beer. Units didn’t move on their own, not in the Arm. Only the Core had thinking machines, and that only because they contained the patterns of previously living beings.
“Did it try to talk to you?” asked Tera. Jak was faintly amazed when he realized she was serious.
“No, ma’am.”
“Probably need a neural link connection for that.” Even though it had been millennia since there had been an external connection for the neural link, Lancer rubbed the back of his head as he thought of this. Being a clone, Lancer’s link had been grown in place, and there never had been any opening there. “I wonder if they’ll let me get into the suit.”
Tera said what Jak only thought. “You’re crazy, Lancer.”
Lancer gave them a lopsided grin. “I almost wish I were,” he said. “Of all possible explanations, that’s the simplest of the lot.”
Jak wasn’t quite sure what was going on, but what he thought he understood seemed insane. “You expect the suit to talk to you? Through your neural link?”
“That’s right, kid.” Lancer caught Tera’s eye for a moment, and the two of them exchanged glances before Lancer turned to Jak again. “I guess your Zipper suit never...I don’t know...communicates with you?”
Jak had never heard of such a thing. A suit talking to its pilot. But Lancer seemed quite serious. “What kind of communication?”
Tera was the one to respond to his question. “Does it have a personality?” she asked. “Or seem to have a gender?”
Jak thought about this. He felt tall and powerful when he was suited up, and he liked the sleek Zipper chassis, but it was solidly an it, neither male nor female. A machine. “No.”
Now Tera looked at Lancer. “Our control?”
“I guess so.” Lancer set down his beer carton and stood up. “All right, kid, how do you feel about joining us in a little experiment?”
Jak wasn’t at all sure how he felt about it, but he didn’t hesitate. “I’m game,” he said.
[Top]
Lancer bitterly regretted his orders to Jak. Light Kbots like Zippers and Peewees had no business in the pounding match that was shaping up, but he hadn’t wanted to wound the young officer’s manly pride by sending him back into the base. The east wall had seemed just as safe, and not much farther than the entry ramp...
Damn, now he was going to have to break in the kid all over again. *Damn.* He emphasized each angry syllable with a round from his cannon, and every shot told on its target.
The Arm had augmented the natural defenses of the terrain with treble rows of dragon’s teeth, so the Core tanks had to make their way through a narrow opening where the Arm artillery could pick them off one at a time. The lighter Core tanks didn’t have the range to hit the main Arm fortifications, but an occasional shot from one of the Reapers came close.
Lancer wasn’t sure what the Core hoped to prove with this attack, although if it was their intention to do damage to the mobile units, they were succeeding there. Lancer’s outfit had been wiped out recently, so he had been assigned to the periphery, but Cyclone was near the center and bearing the brunt of the attack. Her less well-armored units had been cut up pretty badly even if her eager Bulldog pup seemed to be holding its own.
Lancer watched with interest as one of the Reapers began to maneuver its way through the wreckage in the dragon’s tooth corridor, and he held his fire. He was waiting for the right...moment... Now. He fired twice in rapid succession; his first round splashed on the Reaper’s side, rocking the vehicle over slightly, and the second hit the ground directly under it, rolling it onto almost onto its back. Lancer would have left the tank helpless like that, but others kept pouring fire into it until it erupted into flame as its fuel and oxidizer mixed all at once. And the slag that remained just as effectively closed the entrance as the turtled tank would have.
The Core spent a couple more Raiders before they finally decided today wasn’t their day and began to withdraw. Lancer left Cyclone and some of the others to harry their retreat. He needed to take care of some administrative detail and then he planned to hit the sack.
He’d only lost a couple of units; one Jeffy who’d thought he was a Flash, or something, and one Zipper. Lancer started down his roster to make sure everybody who needed repair or medical attention was getting it. So far, it looked good, except for one badly-damaged Zipper. Jak? What the...?
Lancer called up his spotting map, and if he hadn’t remembered where the LLT had stood, he never would have seen the faint blip in the wreckage that had to be Zipper Jak.
"Casualty support--I’ve got a hot one." Somebody would have found Jak anyway when the LLT was reclaimed, but with a damaged suit, and who knew what injuries, the kid might not make it that long. "Yeah, and it’s probably urgent."
***
Jak opened his eyes once the noise and confusion of the falling tower had subsided and realized he was still alive. He checked his visual sensors and found that they still worked--there was just nothing to see. After all, there was a laser tower on top of him, wasn’t there? At least, he hoped that was the case. He’d never been a cloned restoration, so he had no idea what that was like...but his last memories wouldn’t be of getting crushed, would they?
He tried moving the Zipper’s limbs and found he couldn’t. The left leg felt numb below the knee, and he wondered if it had been severely damaged there...
What was that? Jak heard a faint whimper. One of his Peewees? And the sound was being transmitted by the metal of the tower? Except Jak couldn’t see any of his troops making that kind of noise, and besides, it didn’t sound like an adult. As he thought about it, it didn’t really even sound like a *sound.* But it was a whimper, as if a scared child had wandered into the battle somehow.
An icy realization coursed through him. It was the Zipper. Jak felt a stab of fear at being trapped inside a suit that was not simply a machine. *This* was what Lancer and Tera had been talking about, except it hadn’t seemed to frighten them the way it did him.
Now the Zipper began sobbing in earnest. Its feelings were hurt, besides being scared. It was, after all, a very young being. Jak was still a little nervous, but now he felt contrite, as well. He hastened to reassure the suit.
"It’s okay," he said aloud. "Someone will come get us. Then a construction Kbot will fix you up as good as new, and I’ll take you back to the nice, warm suit locker where you can hang out with all of your friends."
The Zipper suit cheered up immediately. The sobs ceased and were replaced by a happy little childish hum. Jak didn’t recognize the melody, if it could even be called that, but it was strangely soothing. Having nothing better to do, he went to sleep.
[Top]
When the hastily repaired Zipper suit carried Jak in, he was unconscious from all the painkillers the suit’s medpack had pumped into him. His left leg was so badly mangled the specialists opted for reconstruction over repair.
Lancer knew it would take a while, so he went back to his quarters and dozed, but he was up in an instant when he got the call from medical that they were finished. He would have been hard put to explain why, but he wanted to be there when Jak woke up. Maybe he still felt guilty about exposing the Zipper unnecessarily, or maybe he just remembered how he always felt when he woke up in a reconstruction bay. And this would be the kid’s first time.
Jak was just starting to come around by the time he got there, but Lancer was puzzled when the young officer, even before his eyes were open, pulled his arms under the covers and started feeling his midsection. Lancer would have expected him to flex his new leg, or possibly even reach down to it, but as far as he knew there had been no internal damage. So what was the kid doing?
Jak smiled, and then chuckled softly in some kind of private delight.
Lancer could contain his curiosity no longer. "*What* are you doing?"
Jak’s eyes flashed open in surprise. "Oh...sir...I didn’t know anyone was here." He blushed visibly. "I was just checking to make sure I still have a navel."
Lancer hadn’t even thought about that. He himself had no way of knowing if he had just undergone extensive repair or a complete restoration when he woke up in the reconstruction bay. Usually he banked his memories after a pleasant experience he wanted to recall, so when he woke up without any memory of a recent battle, it usually meant he had been cloned and restored. But not always. Sometimes a traumatic injury could wipe all recent memory, too.
"You just needed a new leg." Lancer walked around the cot so Jak wouldn’t need to twist his neck to look at him. "Your suit was pretty badly crushed--it’s amazing that’s all the damage you got."
"But it’s okay?" Jak sat up in his bed. "The suit, I mean? I promised it the c-bots would fix it, and I’d take it back to the suit locker."
"It’s fine." This was interesting. "I gather the Zipper spoke to you?" If it had, that took care of one theory, that only a clone could communicate with a chassis, and that only after centuries of contact. It hadn’t been Lancer’s favorite anyway. "Then I have a job for you."
So far Lancer had pursued a hit and miss investigation on his own, somewhat limited, authority, but it was only a matter of days until the Arm forces would be ready for the campaign designed to reduce the Core base to rubble. He knew the colonel was busy, but Lancer was beginning to think this was important enough to bring to his attention.
The colonel was at the airbase, and he seemed harassed when he finally returned Lancer’s call, but he became very attentive when he listened to the Bulldog pilot’s proposal.
"I’d heard about the Peewee," he said, "and I was about to order the destruction of the suit, but you say you’ve got others?" The colonel frowned grimly, and Lancer held his tongue and merely nodded in the affirmative. He could understand why the other man was inclined not to take chances with a machine that seemed to have developed self-determination but believed he would hesitate before writing off other, more valuable units.
"Very well," the colonel decided after brief deliberation. "You have my authority to investigate."
The first step in Lancer’s plan was to try to discover which units were affected, so he, Jak and Tera tried on suit after suit and more vehicles than any of them were aware existed on Delbay 4. A surprising number of units could communicate with them, and a fair number of pilots admitted to carrying on private conversations with their chassis. Jak was keeping the records of all of their findings, and it was going to be his job to tabulate the results to present to the colonel.
Before the formal results were in, however, the probable source of machine self-will became fairly apparent. No level 1 vehicles were affected, but every K-bot, whether level 1 or level 2, and every level 2 vehicle they tried had at least some ability to think for itself.
This base had not been established by a Commander. Instead, a Maverick--the colonel--had brought a single construction K-bot to get started. Lancer had Jak check the records, and he discovered that after building solar arrays and metal makers, the C-bot had next built a vehicle facility. Then, while the Maverick oversaw the production of level 1 vehicles, the construction K-bot went on to erect a K-bot lab.
Building the lab while churning out vehicles exceeded the existing metal production capabilities, and the two projects had labored in nanostall for some time. Perhaps that slow-down was responsible for the glitch that made every unit produced by the K-bot facility and all subsequent units built by its construction ‘bots have self-awareness. Or maybe it was a fluke that would have happened anyway. Lancer didn’t have the scientific background to even begin to speculate why and how the blueprint for the K-bot lab had been subtly altered. He only knew that was where the evidence led.
Interestingly enough, the original C-bot had then gone on to build defenses and fortifications, none of which were any different from usual. Only those built by the ancestral C-bot’s "grandchildren" showed signs of a personality.
Lancer still hadn’t been able to persuade the scientists who were studying the Peewee suit to let him examine it. Other suits could communicate, but this was the only one ever known to move on its own, and Lancer wondered why this one was different...or if it really was. All he wanted to do was talk to it.
He finally called the colonel to ask for specific authorization, and he had to go into considerable detail not only about his reason for wanting to talk to the Peewee but about his findings so far. The colonel was not pleased.
"You mean that, besides my Maverick, the only units I can count on are my level 1 vehicles and a handful of LLT’s and Defenders?"
"I think they’re trustworthy, sir." As trustworthy as people, at any rate, maybe more so. "And very loyal to their pilots."
The colonel muttered a filthy epithet. "All right. I’ll authorize it. But I want to be there, so wait for me."
The colonel’s transport was not long in coming, and Lancer, Jak and Tera were by to greet him. He brushed off their courtesies impatiently; he was a busy man who could ill-afford the time, and he wanted to get started.
At first Lancer was surprised that the colonel remained suited up, but as the three investigators scurried to follow the striding K-bot, he realized the colonel saw self-aware units as a threat. A Maverick could make quick work of a Peewee should the need arise. And of a certain Bulldog pilot, too, if he should happen to be in the suit at the time. Oh, well, he was used to taking risks.
The scientists were considerably taken aback by the colonel’s looming presence, but they hastened to assure him there was plenty of room for a Maverick in their lab. Lancer grinned triumphantly as he entered behind the colonel.
"We’re here to talk to the Peewee suit," he said.
The scientist glanced pointedly toward the rather belligerent-looking Maverick that dominated the room. "It’s your skin."
The Peewee suit, completely repaired and cleaned of its grisly contents, walked out under external control and stopped directly in front of Lancer. He twisted the lock, and the pod opened for him.
"Lancer..." he heard Tera call softly. Her eyes were unusually shiny, and he was afraid she was going to go all weepy on him, but she managed a smile. "Good luck," she said.
Everybody seemed afraid of what the suit was going to do to him, or more probably what the Maverick might, and Lancer had to admit he was a little concerned himself. It wouldn’t do to let them see that he was, though.
"It’ll be fine," he said, and stepped backward into the pod. He felt a few qualms when it drew closed around him, but he’d had a chance to try on a few Peewee suits in the last few days, and he quickly got used to the restricted space.
The Peewee’s words came clearly, all in a rush, faintly annoyed and very concerned. *Who are you? Where’s my pilot? I want my pilot...*
[Top]
"She wants her pilot," Lancer said aloud, his neural link opening a voice connection to the others in the room.
*Who are you?* That was one thing he’d already observed about all of the units. They said what they thought without any concern--or perhaps even knowledge--of social conventions.
"I’m Lancer." This Peewee had never been in his company, but she might have heard of him anyway.
*Lancer?* She had. Her tone was a degree more respectful. *Why are you here?*
"You were moving all by yourself," he said. "We didn’t think a suit could."
*My pilot was hurt.* She grew angry. *Everybody went away. He was asleep and couldn’t say stop. So I had to take care of him.*
Her pilot had probably died almost instantly, considering his wound, but the poor Peewee hadn’t known. He’d still been there, and his neural link had still been within her detection field.
"She was trying to help her pilot," said Lancer. "Surely he’s been restored by now...?"
"Is it wise?" This was the first scientist, who probably wasn’t aware that he stood between the Peewee and the Maverick.
"Remember the story of the dog who stood over her master’s grave for years?" Lancer hoped the Peewee wouldn’t know what a grave was, or if she did that she wasn’t quite bright enough to figure out what he meant.
"Send for him." The Maverick’s voice was thunderous in the room, and Lancer could sense the Peewee’s mingled fear and awe.
At least, the awe had to be hers, although as he thought about it, the fear was just as likely to be his own. What would she do when her pilot arrived? Could she take over? And would the Maverick blast first and inquire after?
It was several minutes before a young man in off-duty clothes was brought in. He seemed rather bewildered by the unlikely assembly until he saw the Peewee suit.
His face became almost radiant. "Maggie! Oh, Maggie!" He ran toward the Peewee and threw his arms as far around her as he could manage.
Until he touched her, the suit was unaware of her pilot’s presence, but as soon as his face came into contact with her faceplate, she began to tremble, ever so slightly.
"It’s all right," said Lancer quickly. He didn’t want the Maverick to be too hasty if he happened to notice the movement.
The pilot, surprised to hear a voice issue from his suit, jumped back. "You gave my suit to someone else?" he asked, appalled. "You can’t do that."
"Private." The Maverick’s voice again filled the room, and the Peewee pilot went white when he realized the colonel was present. Lancer hadn’t thought it possible to overlook a Kbot that took up some 20% of a room, but apparently the man had been so excited to see his beloved Maggie he hadn’t noticed the Maverick.
Lancer popped open the pod and stepped out, but as the pilot would have gotten in, he stopped the man. If it were up to him, he’d have no hesitation, but the colonel might feel differently. "Sir?"
"Go ahead."
The pilot eagerly entered the suit, while Lancer stepped back. He didn’t want to be in the way if the colonel happened to get a little excited about something. They had no way of knowing what the Peewee suit was saying to her pilot, nor of what he said to her, but the Peewee simply stood where it was, and everyone could relax.
***
The colonel told Lancer bluntly he still wasn’t entirely convinced of the harmlessness of machine intelligence. If it had been only the one Peewee, he’d have scrapped her without a qualm, but if most of his best units were affected, he didn’t have much choice. He’d have either the ancestral construction Kbot or a construction vehicle build a new Kbot lab, and all new units would be descended from them.
"Sir, I understand your decision, but may I make a suggestion?" Lancer was sticking his neck out on this, which was not something he normally liked to do. "Keep the current manufacturing facilities, even if you leave them idle, just in case we decide we like the thinking units better."
The Maverick was just about to step into the airlock, but he turned. "You like having a tank that talks to you?"
Lancer knew that what he liked would carry very little weight with the colonel. "Yes, sir. But more than that...I mean, think if your Maverick had a personality." Actually, even standard units developed a personality of sorts after a while. "If it cared what happened to you. If it sometimes called your attention to something you hadn’t noticed, maybe. Something the AI wouldn’t know you might be interested in."
The Maverick made a slight gesture of resignation. "Very well, we’ll keep the facilities, but idle."
Lancer honestly felt the colonel would think differently if his Maverick suit wasn’t just a carefully crafted hunk of inanimate material. But it was something.
He had sent both Jak and Tera to his quarters to wait for him, and it didn’t occur to him until he was on his way there that it might not have been the most intelligent thing he had ever done. He had been very careful not to give Tera any reason to think he was interested in her as a woman, and Jak was a good-looking and personable young man. What if she...or he...
Without realizing it, Lancer walked a little faster.
He needn’t have worried. They were sitting about as far apart as the small compartment allowed and talking about what they had seen between the Peewee and her pilot, and both of them were almost pitifully glad to see him.
"What did he say?" Tera asked.
"He’s going to build a new Kbot lab." Lancer gave a sigh as he sat down on the bed, which was the only place available. "But he’s going to leave the old facilities alone, for now, at least."
"That’s good," said Jak. "So I guess that means our units are safe, too?"
"Probably." For now. "Why don’t you go give your Zipper the good news, kid?"
Jak blinked a couple of times at this very obvious ploy to get rid of him, and Lancer was a little concerned he might ask why, but suddenly the young man grinned and got up from his chair.
"Or maybe I’ll see what Cyclone is doing," he said.
Lancer stared at the closed door for a few seconds after Jak had gone. He had thought she was kidding, but maybe she hadn’t been...
"Lancer?" Tera’s voice was breathless with nerves. "Should I go, too?"
"No." He reached out and pulled her up to sit on the bed next to him. "And my name is Ben."
[Top]
XAC-273 didn’t just see the banged-up and gutless Arm Kbot the others did. He knew that Hammer could be his ticket out of here.
"Is the interface ready?" he asked, and a couple of construction Kbots scurried out of the way when they heard his voice. They probably didn’t want to answer his questions, which could tax the intellect of the average C-bot. Only one of the ‘bots held her ground.
"Of course." CKB-1051 finished a last twist of the thick cable that looped around inside the pilot’s pod and then closed the hatch. XAC-273 didn’t consider himself squeamish, but he had to admit he felt more comfortable if he didn’t have to look at that gaping emptiness.
He extended his datalink to CKB-1051, and she met it with her own less sophisticated version. There was a pleasant jolt when she gave him the code he needed, and he found himself thinking it was too bad she was such an inferior model, or he might enjoy further exchanges of information with her. Still, even if she had been of the proper quality, there were more important things than personal gratification at the moment. Survival, for instance. And this Peewee just might have the information he needed, and XAC-273 might just have to carry it personally to the Commander...
Nobody at Core Prime knew why Delta Beta 4 was so important to the Arm, but finding out hadn’t been a priority until recently, when the Central Consciousness had wanted to get rid of a certain famous and influential scientist. This was XAC-273’s theory, anyway. Core Prime still didn’t care greatly about Delta Beta 4, but it had been a graceful way to keep his radical ideas from spreading.
XAC had gotten away with his Stagnation Theory: When the same minds go over the same territory with the same enemy, they stagnate after four thousand years. He had diagrammed battles from hundreds of years apart that played out in a nearly identical fashion, and this evidence was compelling enough that the Central Consciousness took note.
The warning he was issued on that occasion had been sufficiently vague that XAC had gone on to further research that suggested that not merely stagnation but even degradation had taken place. After years of storing and copying intelligences, it would be hardly surprising if the copies might become degraded or even corrupted after multiple generations, and there was certainly ample evidence in the battle records to support this theory.
Central Consciousness had not been amused, and XAC was cut out of the Social Exchange. Had that been all, just the social part, it wouldn’t have bothered him particularly, but it meant the loss of important intellectual contacts, as well. He was imprisoned in his ungainly experimental shell, condemned to interact only with those who came close enough to hear his voice or touch his datalink. It had rapidly become apparent that he was surrounded by the most commonplace fools, individuals it was a penance to spend time with. That was when he made his next mistake. He put in for a transfer.
There were several research projects current that might have made use of someone of his unquestioned ability, but the Central Consciousness (he hesitated before he even thought such blasphemy) was known for its tendency to squander talent. Instead of getting to work with TRO on a signal enhancement grant, or EGA-KL on combinative technologies, XAC had been given a CR-100 Consciousness Repository, a level 1 set of blueprints and a one-way trip to Delta Beta 4. His assignment: find out what was so important about Delta Beta 4 that the Arm had situated a permanent base here.
Surely somewhere in the captured Hammer suit’s records was something that could give him the clue he needed to solve the puzzle and go home. He damped his external sensors and concentrated on the new code the C-bot had given him, one for an Arm neural link emulator. He felt it engage--
"You’re bad. I hate you."
XAC opened his sensors in surprise. Where had that communication come from? The construction Kbots stood around stupidly, and it was pretty obvious they hadn’t received that very angry pair of phrases.
"You hurt my pilot. If I could move by myself, I’d kill you all, you evil Core machines."
The Hammer? XAC had never even been in the same room with an Arm Kbot before, but he had never thought them to possess even the rudiments of self-awareness. Was the Arm patterning some of its less able individuals, then, and using them to augment their units’ AI? If so, what a bunch of hypocrites!
"I am not a pattern." The Hammer declared this with great conviction, even pride. "I am myself. I am Arm!"
Capturing an Arm unit had been XAC’s idea. Most places, the mechanical parts would be useless before the pilot was dead, but XAC wasn’t a scientist for nothing. He had noticed that an Arm Kbot, once its armor was sufficiently worn down, could be holed by either a laser or EMG, killing the pilot but leaving the suit largely intact. Such a suit could be tapped for whatever information it contained, and then it could potentially be used to infiltrate the Arm base.
But suppose the suit itself was the secret? What if the Arm was pursuing the development of machine intellect here, where resources were so slim no one would ever expect to find such a project? Or what if there was some mineral found only here that was essential to the construction of thinking machines?
XAC refused to allow his speculations to distract him from his primary purpose, however. The emulated neural link interface was unbelievably slow and ungainly, and the Hammer fought him as he drew the information out of the rather puny storage leaves, but XAC was as superior mentally as the Hammer was physically, so it was never much of a contest. It wasn’t long before the Core scientist had downloaded everything available, including a map set that he would want to study later.
He didn’t find anything marked "Top Secret," though, and although he realized he had never been likely to get what he needed so easily, he was still a little disappointed.
[Top]
Jak could not believe Lancer did not intend to take him on the assault on the Core base. He could only sit in frozen mortification as the Bulldog pilot assigned him to garrison duty and then went unfeelingly on to give the senior non-coms their orders. How could Lancer do this to him?
Almost everybody else would be joining the colonel in a massive raid on the Core facilities, and every bit of intelligence data predicted a rout. Jak wanted to be in on that. Why couldn’t Lancer leave somebody else to babysit the static defenses? Maybe the other Zipper... Her brains seemed to have gotten a little scrambled in the last restoration, Jak had even heard Lancer say so once when he hadn’t realized his newest officer was within hearing distance. Why not leave her behind instead of him?
He tried to leave the briefing as unobtrusively as possible when it was over. He could guess what the others must be thinking, and Fido 90211 confirmed it. She bumped against him rather roughly.
"Oops," she said. "Gotta take better care of the Mother’s son." She was just begging for him to take a swing at her, daring him with a scornful smirk, and Jak’s hands started to curl into fists without his willing them to.
"Jak..." Rocko Sue stood by his shoulder, to all appearances innocent of what was going on, but Jak knew she couldn’t be. "May I speak with you, sir, if you have a minute?"
90211 grinned evilly and looked Sue up and down; Jak thought he could swallow an insult to himself, but if the Fido pilot started in on Rocko Sue, he’d risk a few days in the stockade on her behalf. Not that Sue probably wasn’t better able to take care of herself than he was. 90211 didn’t say anything further, however; she just briefly clasped Sue’s shoulder and then walked away.
"I wish she wouldn’t do that," muttered Sue almost to herself, and Jak wasn’t quite sure what she meant. It had been a friendly gesture, one woman to another...hadn’t it? Sue gave Jak a tight smile. "Anyway, why don’t you come down to the NCO club with me? Give Cyclone something to think about."
Jak had never even thought of Sue in that way. Yes, she was a woman, but she was also mature, like a teacher, or even a mother... although he didn’t suppose she was as old as Cyclone. And maybe it would be good to remind Cyclone he wasn’t her exclusive property. He returned Sue’s smile.
"Sure," he said.
Cyclone and Lancer had their own private quarters, but anybody without a command or below the rank of captain rated only a bunk. As an officer, Jak had a one meter square, two meter-long space to himself, and he supposed Rocko Sue did, too, but the lowest ranks had been put on a hot-bunk system. At the Peewee grade, three people shared a single bunk; as soon as one rolled out, another climbed in. This arrangement was not ideal for certain types of socializing, so there were private compartments available for rent. Since a commissioned officer couldn’t publicly socialize with a non-com, Sue took Jak to one of these compartments.
They had to go through the NCO club to get there, and although no one spoke directly to him, more than one of the non-coms teased Rocko Sue about her conquest. Why did people always assume *that* was the only use men and women had for each other? Jak was annoyed and a little embarrassed, but Sue ignored the ribald remarks, so Jak did, too, even if it was difficult.
The room she led him to was a lot like a captain’s quarters, although the bed was folded up into a couch. Jak thought Lancer’s or Cyclone’s would do that, even if their beds always seemed to be beds when he was there. Maybe Lancer was too lazy, while Cyclone...
"Beer?" asked Sue, and Jak saw she had a small cupboard open. There were a variety of things available, but issue beer was about the best of a sorry lot. She tossed him one, got one for herself and then sat unceremoniously on the couch. She certainly was wasting no feminine wiles on him, and Jak was reassured. He relaxed in a chair and opened his drink.
"You had something particular to say to me?" Something private, or she’d have told him in the briefing room. Jak had to admit to some curiosity about whatever it was.
Sue took a leisurely swig, as if to demonstrate she would not be rushed into anything, before she spoke. "Yeah." She sounded almost like Lancer. "More than one thing, actually, now that I’ve made such a big deal of it. I figure nobody else is going to, and I don’t want you to have to learn the hard way."
"It’s about Cyclone, isn’t it?"
"No, I think you’ve got her pretty well figured out. It’s about..." Sue paused for a long time, but as Jak was about to make some kind of encouraging remark, she went on. "You’re a natural born, the only one on Delbay, I think. Even the colonel’s a clone, and you know I am, but I don’t think you really understand about clones."
He felt perversely defensive about being naturally born, as if it were somehow inferior. "My dad’s a clone," he said.
"And a Commander, yes. I know. But were you raised to think that clones and natural borns are equal?"
This was a sore point. Yes, Jak had been taught that clones were just as human as naturally conceived, fully gestated and infant-born people, but he was well aware that plenty of his friends thought differently. For too long, clones had been relegated to second-class status for such thinking to change quickly.
"*I* was, yes."
"Well, we’re not." Sue stated this in a very matter-of-fact way, and for a moment, Jak was stunned. Then he realized she wasn’t claiming not to be the equal of a human born; she must be referring to the unequal treatment clones got. This, unfortunately, was true.
"But that’s changing," he said.
"Jak, I don’t mean that. I mean that clones are not the same as natural born." She grinned fleetingly. "Even besides not having a navel."
Jak blushed. Had everybody heard about that? Sue went on.
"Most of us here are mature clones. The clone lab can make another Lancer that’s pretty much identical to the last several, except for the recent memories. Cyclone is exactly like she was last time, and so’s 90211, more’s the pity. But the first time..." Sue shook her head, and Jak thought her eyes might be damp. "It’s different. I don’t remember how, but I do remember it’s different...and that’s another thing. Memory. The human brain can only hold so much. It was never designed to remember more than a hundred years or so, much less thousands.
"Jak, I don’t remember my mother, or my father, except as I know they did this or that. I could have just read about them, and I’d know as much. All I really remember, truly, is Rocko Sue, and being annoyed at Hammer Pike for dying and spewing blood all over. *Annoyed*, Jak. But you were upset, and you grieved when Lancer got killed. You *are* more human than we are."
Jak understood what she meant, but he couldn’t accept her conclusion. "No, I’m not," he protested. "I’m just young, and inexperienced, so maybe that’s why I feel things more."
"Maybe." Sue didn’t seem convinced. "But anyway, whatever the reason, you should know that Lancer would be in big trouble if he let anything happen to you."
Son of a mother. Captain’s pet. Jak said something very rude, and Sue laughed.
"I thought you’d feel that way. But you’re still stuck here."
Jak forced a smile. "Maybe I’ll get lucky and something will happen while the rest of you are gone," he said.
-----------------------------------------------------
The next part may be a while, and the subsequent parts may not follow too quickly, either. I've got to take my mother-in-law to a bunch of doctors. Anybody who smokes or is thinking about smoking, take heed. You know about the lung cancer, the athsma and death, but did you know about macular degeneration? My mother-in-law used to love to read, but now she is legally blind and sits plugged in to her TV all day because she can't read anymore. Smoking significantly increases your odds of getting macular degeneration, and before she got adult onset asthma a few years ago, she smoked two packs a day.
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The hundred patterns in the Consciousness Repository were well known to him, but he ran them all by in review yet again before he was forced to conclude what he had instinctively known all along. All he had was rejects, barely fit for level 1 duty, much less for the mission he had in hand. There was really only one option open to him: he must replicate his own pattern to imprint on the spy unit, since even an inferior copy of himself would be preferable to any other intelligence available to him.
Copying his pattern to the pilot module was not difficult, although he supposed the newly furbished Kbot would have some trouble accepting his status. XAC could imagine how he would feel if he discovered he had been trapped in a level 1 chassis, especially an Arm heavy infantry one, and he came closer to empathy than he ever had before in his existence. At this moment, what he knew, the XAC-Hammer knew, and that was: should the Hammer version survive his mission--and they both estimated the probability of that was a meager 20%???? --the original XAC had every intention of debriefing and then erasing the copy. There could be multiple versions of any other pattern on Delta Beta 4, but there could not be two of the one in command.
XAC said nothing to his counterpart before he left. The Hammer XAC knew what it was supposed to do, as XAC knew what he needed to do, and any communication was totally unnecessary.
*** Jak was already walking his patrol when the first waves of cavalry issued from the several large doors of the base, and he tried not to watch as they filed through the openings in the dragon’s teeth barriers. He was supposed to be looking for enemy activity (although he didn’t think anybody expected him to find any), not gawking at the masses of tanks and armored vehicles. He hadn’t realized there were so many!
He’d already seen some of the slower units off-- construction Kbots, radar jammers, Lugers and Zeuses--but he hadn’t had any particular difficulty ignoring them. He didn’t have any friends there.
Lancer’s Bulldog was one of the first of the big tanks, and immediately behind him was Cyclone. She hadn’t been particularly sympathetic when Jak had told her about being stuck with base perimeter patrol duty, although he supposed he should be flattered she had seemed honestly concerned about his safety. And she *had* helped him forget his grievance for a few hours. But now she was going off to what promised to be a glorious battle, and he was stuck here watching the factory. He deliberately turned his back on the departing forces and resumed his patrol.
It was nearly an hour before the last of the units cleared the perimeter, and the steady rumble in Jak’s feet gradually subsided as they continued to their rendezvous. All was quiet, and nothing moved except for the scanning radar, Jak and a few other unlucky units that had been left minding the fort.
They crossed each others’ paths periodically, and it was a matter of protocol to exchange identification symbols whenever they met, although most of the units became somewhat lax after a few circuits. Jak felt it behooved him as an officer to set an example, though, and soon the others realized that it didn’t matter if he’d seen and i.d.’ed them five minutes before, he expected a ping every time. It didn’t do anything to relieve the tedium, but at least he could take pride in doing everything properly.
It was going to be a long watch.
***
XAC-Hammer had needed to practice controlling his new body for a few minutes before beginning the plod toward the Arm base, but even before he had quite mastered its function he realized he had made a mistake. Or rather, XAC-273 had made the mistake. It probably wouldn’t make any difference, but XAC-Hammer kept it in mind as he followed the route he, when he was still one with 273, had planned. It was far enough out of the way and sufficiently narrow he didn’t expect the Arm to take it, but if they did...well, that contributed 25% to the failure analysis.
Not for nothing had XAC studied historical battles. He had calculated there was an 85% probability of a major assault by the Arm within this particular 4 hour window, which would leave their base very thinly manned. His quarry would almost certainly be there, although, to the best of his understanding, there was only a 75% probability she would be where he wanted her. Still, that was one of the better numbers in the equation.
His new body could go nearly twice as fast as the old one, or rather, he reminded himself, as 273’s, but it still took him nearly two hours to pick his way to the Arm base. He studied the bristling clusters of dragon’s teeth and picked one of the narrower gaps. It didn’t seem wise to wait for a challenge, and he sent an identification ping. There was a 25% chance of discovery at this point, so he was gratified to get a routine return signal. He had concocted a reason for being where he was, but no one asked him for it, which improved his odds of success even further. A quick calculation told him he was up to 55% over all. Slightly better than half.
There was the northeast sentinel, almost exactly where he expected to find it. The original Hammer suit didn’t have the same perceptions or the same ideas about what was important, but there was one clear memory in its collection that XAC-Hammer reviewed as he approached his objective.
It was a feminine consciousness, a Sentinel operator. She had exchanged information, not with the Hammer pilot but with the suit itself; she sought details that would enable her to better study its mechanical intellect and in the process had told it something about herself. This had been an incredible stroke of luck: an Arm scientist, one who might be expected to be in a relatively unprotected location.
While he expected the laser tower had a subterranean entrance for the convenience of the clones who worked there, he also understood the nature of alterations to standard blueprints. There was a 99% probability the usual above-ground entry hatch was present, if sealed. Yes, there it was. He pinged a small scout vehicle that sped by, and after it was gone, he scanned the area and decided he had a good chance of being unobserved for the short time he needed. He started his work.
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He sprayed nanobots in a thin stream along the outline of the hatch. His first couple of instructions had no effect, but he had thought of multiple possibilities, and the third set of nanobots made it through the barrier seal. XAC-Hammer could feel and hear the rush of air, and the diaphragm he had built bellied out around him. Once he was satisfied his construct held, he began streaming codes at the hatch, and presently it slid quietly aside.
There were three people in the control chamber, as he had predicted, and all of them semi-reclined in chairs, staring off into nothingness. He noted that two of them were women. He could not identify his quarry from visual sensors, but he had her neural pattern deeply imprinted on his memory, and he needed only to get a little closer to get a reading.
He took a step, and suddenly all three of the Sentinel operators looked away from their work and toward him. One of the women gasped.
“Hammer, what are you doing here?” asked the man.
XAC briefly considered shooting him--after all, a man was of no interest to him, and he was a little curious to see what would happen--but he decided he had probably better not. “I want Tera,” he said.
One of the women turned in her chair to face him squarely. “I’m Tera.” He couldn’t tell if she was merely puzzled or if she was frightened, but it didn’t matter either way. She was here, and that was what was important.
“You will come with me.” He popped the Hammer’s cockpit open. He had designed the space so there was still room for a human passenger, although it would be tight. The woman who was not Tera screamed faintly, but Tera stood and approached.
“Why?” she asked. “Why do you want me?”
“I’ll explain on the way.” XAC waited. It would be much better if she came on her own, but he was ready with several things he thought might persuade her. He swiveled his body slightly to bring his cannon to bear on the man, and the woman Tera looked from one to the other, perhaps imagining what a gauss gun could do to unprotected flesh. There was also a possibility the shot would punch through the wall of the Sentinel, too, and that would be the end of all of the operators. She wouldn’t know that he was unwilling to risk this after coming all this way to abduct her.
“I’ll come.” The woman’s feet found the steps on the Hammer, and she mounted to sit in the narrow space he had left for her. Even before she was settled, he made contact with her neural link, and now he knew for certain she was his quarry. He could also tell she was extremely frightened. It was strange to make such a very intimate contact with an intellect he didn’t know, and he felt vaguely ... embarrassed, perhaps.
He did not let his discomfort interfere with his task, however. He closed the Hammer’s access port and started the life support functions. He was aware of his captive’s rapid heartbeat and surging epinephrine, but he had expected this and used the Hammer’s feedback to tweak her neural link, calming her somewhat.
“What do you want with me, Hammer?”
She still thought him a Hammer. If the Arm had developed sentient suits, perhaps they had made some capable of self-motivation, and that was the source of her error. He didn’t answer her right away, however, since he was still busy.
He had not closed the hatch behind him as he entered, but he did so when he left. Then he dismantled the diaphragm and stumped away in a veritable sandstorm raised by the air escaping from the Sentinel where his nanobots had eaten away the seal. He wasn’t sure, but he didn’t think the Sentinel operators would survive the rapid decompression.
“Where are you taking me, Hammer?”
The woman couldn’t see without his allowing her access to the suit’s sensors, and XAC debated a moment before granting her that much comfort, if she found the route he took any comfort at all. She did seem to be a degree less tense once she could see, even if all there was before them were the sharp ridges of Delta Beta 4.
“I’m taking you to the Core base,” he said at last. “I am XAC-274. I, as XAC-273, captured this Hammer suit and adapted it for this purpose.”
“You’re...Core?” She seemed merely bewildered at this, although he supposed his delicate tampering with her neurochemicals might have reduced whatever horror she might have felt to simple puzzlement. “Then what do you want with *me*?”
He had originally planned to tell her nothing until he returned to base, but that was when he had thought of his captive only in terms of an Arm clone. An animal. But where her mind touched his through the link, it was undeniably human, and with a depth and color he found intriguing. She was, after all, a scientist, wasn’t she?
“I want to know about the self-aware suit project,” he said.
“Project?” She laughed suddenly, harshly. “There’s no project. Just an accident. Something like a genetic mutation in the level 1 Kbot lab. They hardly let us even study it, and they don’t plan to make any more units.”
XAC plodded on, but his mind reeled. He could understand the woman’s scorn. If the Core missed opportunities for advancing their knowledge, then how much more likely was the Arm to squander them? Apparently the Arm had developed something by accident, and they didn’t realize how important it could be. Naturally that would be upsetting to a scientist. And that probably explained why she had been relegated to operating a laser tower.
“And even Lancer doesn’t care, just so long as they leave his precious tank alone.”
“Lancer?”
“A man I ... admire. I used to think I was in love, but we’re too different.”
These confidences were a little more than XAC wanted, but it was his own fault for meddling with her neurochemistry. An Arm unit was limited in what it could do to affect the pilot's mind, but the mechanisms were there, and XAC had simply altered their capabilities slightly. Whatever he asked, she would answer without inhibition. He brought her back to the subject of most interest to him.
“The self-aware suits aren’t the reason the Arm is here, then?” Obviously not.
She laughed again. “No. I don’t know why Arm put even as much as this second-rate little outpost here.”
“Oh, fatal exception,” swore XAC. After all that, and he was back where he started, except now he had a captive he couldn’t dispose of quite so casually as he had planned.
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He quickened his pace and was in time to witness the C-bots begin the reclamation of what had once been people. The Rocko didn’t question him as he entered, but the senior C-bot wanted to know what he was doing there.
Jak tried not to pay attention to what the ‘bot was doing, but there was no safe place to look. He altered the colors in his view sensors to unfamiliar ones, and that helped. “I have a friend who’s stationed here,” he said.
“If it’s Dee or Arvin, you don’t anymore.”
Jak resented the medic’s flippant answer, even if he was relieved. Still, he seemed to recall Tera was supposed to be on duty, and if so, where was she? He didn’t know if it would work when he was still in his Zipper, but Jak moved so that he thought he might be in the upper operator’s neural link zone.
“Sentinel?” Not yet. He moved a little closer, leaning on the elevated chair until it creaked. He was almost overwhelmed by a wordless, soundless wail of anguish. “Sentinel?”
*Hurt, hurt, hurt...*
“Sentinel, I want to help you.”
*Jak...* This was his Zipper, upset by the pain in the Sentinel’s cries. Jak thought he was going to get a headache in a minute, but the young Zipper got through to the Sentinel where he hadn’t.
*Zipper?*
Jak answered. “Sentinel. I’m Tera’s friend. I want to help.”
At first the Sentinel was almost incoherent, but eventually Jak understood. The operators had all been on full alert when a Hammer somehow entered through the side hatch and demanded that Tera come with him. She did what he wanted, but after he left with her, something terrible happened to Dee and Arvin.
A Hammer? What would a Hammer want with Tera? And why would he kill the other two operators? The Sentinel had no idea, particularly after Jak inadvertently mentioned the fate of Dee and Arvin. Apparently, a pilot’s death was the ultimate failure for a unit, and the Sentinel became completely incoherent with grief and self-loathing.
There wasn’t much left to see inside the tower, but Jak examined the hatch on the way out. He wasn’t sure what he should be looking for, and he didn’t see anything--no evidence of a blast or laser-drilled hole. There was a distinctive alluvial shape in the sand beyond where the escaping air had moved it, and beyond this, Jak could see a set of Hammer tracks. The sand near the perimeter of the base was pretty churned up, so it wasn’t always easy to pick out the tracks he was following, but the deeply-ridged squares were always on top. The Hammer had set out in a perfectly straight line for the nearest gap in the Dragon’s Teeth barrier.
Had nobody seen him go? Jak contacted the officer of the watch as he went and found out practically nothing. Nobody had reported anything to her at all out of the way until the life support indicators on the northeast sentinel went red, and that had looked like a simple seal failure.
“That kind of thing happens occasionally,” she said, and Jak could clearly hear the patronizing tone in her voice. “And if your friend wasn’t there, I don’t see you have any problem.” She thought he was making an issue over nothing. A single Hammer with the correct identity codes still apparently raised nobody’s suspicions in spite of some rather unusual behavior, and it seemed a missing clone wasn’t very important, either. She wouldn’t even check.
Thinking a few things about the watch officer his mother would have called him down for if she ever heard him say them, Jak passed the barrier and set out to follow the Hammer’s tracks. He wasn’t authorized for it, but if he didn’t try to find Tera, who knew what might happen?
Another set of Hammer prints confused him briefly, but when he saw the trail he was following disappear under a Flash tread, he knew this couldn’t be his Hammer. He dashed back to the perimeter at top speed to check the first set to see if there were any distinguishing characteristics. Yes, there were several distinctive chips in the tread of both feet. He recorded this in the Zipper’s memory in case he needed it, and then he went back past the Dragon’s Teeth.
This time he found the place where his quarry’s route diverged from the rest, and once this happened, the trail became quite easy to follow. Even among the ridges, there were enough sandy patches that Jak never lost the way for long. But he still couldn’t imagine why the Hammer was taking Tera this way.
***
Lancer knew what the intelligence reports had to say about the weakness of the Core forces on Delbay 4, but Lnacer had a distrust of intelligence reports, particularly after that episode a couple of weeks ago. He kept expecting a squad of stealth bombers to suddenly decloak above him and rain death on the Arm advance, but it never happened. On the way to the Core base, the only sign of an enemy presence was Fink scout planes that flashed overhead occasionally. The Jethros used the Finks for target practice, but almost everybody else ignored them, looking for a threat that didn’t materialize.
Only when the base was coming into mobile radar view did any ground units appear, and that was a rush of Storms backed up by Thuds. In the relatively close confines of the canyon, the tactic played havoc with the lead Arm units, and by the time the overwhelming Arm firepower had cleaned out the Core ambush, piles of wreckage blocked the way. This was a known hazard of warfare on Delbay 4, and a couple of specially adapted bulldozers jockeyed their way to the front and cleared a path just wide enough for a Bulldog to scrape by. The construction Kbots started tidying up, but they were careful to stay out of the way of the advancing vehicles.
The Core colonel could have followed up and taken advantage of the awkward situation, but after the initial rush, there was nothing until the light laser towers on the base’s perimeter started stinging the massed Arm units. Lancer didn’t think he had ever seen so many LLT’s in one place before, and he couldn’t understand why there was no heavier artillery. He couldn’t quite tell, but it looked like there were Thuds, Storms and Crashers stationed at intervals between the LLT’s, and presently they opened fire as well, although only an occasional, carefully lobbed shot had the necessary range.
Squads of Arm aircraft were still softening up the base, and several of the stationary Kbots and LLT’s were blasted into flying shards as the Arm ground units spread out for the attack. Lancer felt a pang of regret when he saw a stray missile take out the only Zipper he had brought with him--not so much because he cared about her, but because he knew Jak would be upset. Damn, that kid could be annoying. He stirred up emotions that had been deadened by years, *centuries* of pain and loss. You couldn’t afford grief in this business, or guilt, or even caring, and then Jak came and felt all of those things for everybody.
Lancer came back to the battle to realize he had already started shooting. He had been fighting so long it was reflexive to find a target and commence firing as soon as he had the range, and presently a metal maker crumpled under his accurate shelling. That was his squad’s job, take out infrastructure. Eradication of mobile units and artillery were assigned to other companies, although he had detailed a few of his units to fire if fired upon. A Rocko--Sue, he realized--was trading rockets with her Core counterpart, but she had the advantage of the cover of a Bulldog, and she took out the Storm without taking any hits of her own. And Lancer’s tank could survive quite a lot of damage.
Lancer took stock of his units as he began pounding yet another solar collector. He’d lost some, but so far he was still strong, and the metal and energy producing capabilities of the Core were almost gone, at least in this locality. He took a quick look at the colonel’s master map, and things seemed to be going pretty much the same everywhere. Twenty minutes more, and all that would be left was mop-up.
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XAC-Hammer had sent only one, very short burst communication after leaving the Arm base, and that was a simple assurance the mission had been a success. His level 1 units might be even now getting reduced to slag, but his primary objective was within his grasp, and 273 felt a deep sense of satisfaction.
Knowing that everything else was likely to get destroyed, 273 had put the best one of his construction Kbots to work building and outfitting this subterranean chamber near the Galactic Gate and safely away from the base. CKB-1051 had hollowed out a good-size space and outfitted it with both energy storage and metal storage structures, but now, with her assistance, it was up to him to construct the final thing. It was not something in level 1 or even level 2 blueprints, nor was it something XAC-273 had ever expected to be able to use; he had even considered purging it from his memory more than once, but having gone to a great deal of trouble to get it, he never had.
The pressure chamber, complete with airlock, went up quickly, and then he sent CKB-1051 to establish a communications link with the area Commander while he began work on the cradle. The walls of the inner room were transparent, so he saw the Hammer return while he was finishing the receptacle. The timing was excellent, and he instructed the Hammer to join him in the room, although it was barely big enough for both himself and the blocky Arm unit.
As soon as the Hammer was safely inside, 273 began pressurizing the chamber, and once that was complete, he had the Hammer open his access port to reveal his prisoner. It had been a long time since XAC-273 had seen a biological human, and he felt vaguely repulsed by this soft, moist specimen.
“Come out,” he said, but she cowered back into the Hammer chassis. Surprisingly, the Hammer took a half-step back, as well, so that it pressed against the wall of the chamber.
“You’re scaring her.”
How dare 274 speak to him that way? He was the master, and 274 was only a copy, one so degenerate it seemed he was concerned for his prisoner.
“She’s an animal.” XAC-273 tried to be reasonable. “Of course she’s scared. But you know the plan.”
“She’s a human being.” 274 made no move to evict his captive, although she no longer cringed against the back of the pilot’s couch.
273 was annoyed at how things were going, but 274 would be erased in a few minutes, so there was no point in wasting any social finesse on him. “Well, then, maybe you can explain this to her. She can get out and cooperate, or I’ll open the airlock. I’d rather not have the mess, but...”
There was a moment of silence, and 273 hoped 274 was explaining the prisoner’s alternatives to her via neural link. In any event, her face got even moister as her eyes leaked, and then she slowly climbed down. She hadn’t quite reached the floor when she darted back up again, but only to put her hand briefly on 274’s pattern processor. How disgusting! Then she descended all the way to the floor.
274 had apparently given her complete directions, because she immediately got into the cradle and lay down.
“My life was getting pretty boring anyway,” she said, and then the patterning collector began its work.
XAC-273 watched the indicators in fascination. He had never before seen a life-form patterned, and it was little short of amazing to see the intricate flux of the colored traces as the levels increased. This intellect was truly of a better order than any of those he had in his pattern repository, and he briefly considered copying her pattern. Except even if she weren’t loyal to Arm, he had no intention of remaining on Delta Beta 4 and therefore had no need of better patterns.
Once it was done, XAC-273 disconnected the receptacle and started toward the door. As it turned out, he hadn’t needed to go to all of the trouble to build an airlock, but when he reached for the simple push plate on the outer door, the Hammer’s voice stopped him.
“You ought to close the inner door first, or you’ll have a mess in here.”
And all over him, too. 273 closed the door and then let the pressure bleed down before he opened the outer hatch. Then it was the Hammer’s turn, and although the Arm unit barely fit, XAC-273 took some pride in the fact he had gotten the measurements so perfect.
Things were going very well. All that was left now was to debrief 274 and then contact the area Commander. He and his captive would be on Core Prime within hours, for certain.
“I’ll take that.” The Hammer extended the construction manipulator XAC had added to the suit and plucked the consciousness receptacle from 273 before he quite knew what was happening.
273 turned indignantly on his creation, but he forgot what he was going to say when he realized the Hammer had leveled its cannon at him. He had sacrificed some of the weapon’s power in order to add other features, but it would still fire plasma, enough to do considerable damage at this distance.
“We made a mistake.” The Hammer chuckled evilly. “We never realized we could not put our pattern into such a powerful unit as this and then expect it to willingly undergo debriefing.”
There was a tremendous flash, and then everything went black.
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Tera had not taken to the military life, but at the time she had first died--she couldn’t even remember how--and was resurrected as a clone, she’d had no choice. And by the time the Arm decided clones were human beings and could not therefore be property, it was too late. All of her experience was in artillery, which severely limited her options when applying for civilian positions.
She had thought she would be willing to do anything to get away from war, but being patterned and taken to Core Prime was a more extreme measure than she had intended. Sometimes she wished she had made the ugly XAC-273 kill her instead; a truly dedicated and loyal Arm soldier would have. Lancer certainly would have.
Tera didn’t want to think about Lancer. Her memories of him were precious, and even if he had turned out not to be quite what she had thought him, he was still a hero, and she didn’t want to share their very private times together with the Core Interrogator. She tried to think about Jak instead--there was nothing she needed to keep to herself when it came to him--but she could feel the Interrogator guiding her gently but inexorably back to Lancer.
She had no defenses against this skilful probing of her mind--her pattern--and she found herself recalling in vivid detail almost every sardonic word, every loving caress. She recalled the feel, the smell...and the Core voyeur absorbed every lascivious detail with a lack of passion Tera found disturbing.
She had been taught the Core were soulless machines, and she had believed it until she linked with 274 inside the Hammer. It was that contact that made her think being patterned might not be so bad, but she hadn’t had any communication with 274 since she had stepped from his Hammer. Only with stereotypically soulless Core Interrogators. Even this spiteful thought got no response, but now Tera found herself examining the nature of her relationship with her captor.
She ought to hate 274, but she didn’t. It was irrational, and she knew it, but the one she hated was 273, even though it had been 274 who had actually kidnapped her, and even if she knew 274 was simply 273 with a slightly different set of experiences. 274 cared about her. 273 didn’t. And that was difference enough.
274 had promised to help her get used to life as a pattern, something he had assured her she would like once she experienced it, and she had trusted him. She still trusted him, and even though logic made her question his sincerity, he did not seem like a person who would lie easily. Yes, a person. The Core Interrogator was not a person to her, not this one, not the one earlier, or the one before that, but 274 was.
*Do you want to enter into an exchange with him?*
This was the first direct question Tera had received since being patterned, and it caught her off guard. Besides, she wasn’t quite sure what the Interrogator meant.
*Do you wish to communicate directly with Devek 2.274?*
Did she want to talk to 274? Of course she did.
*Tera.* She would recognize that mind anywhere, and she felt a rush of pleasure to encounter someone familiar.
*274!*
*I’ve been waiting and waiting until you were cleared for exchange,* he told her. *It’s beautiful, almost as beautiful as you are.*
Never in her life had Tera been beautiful, or even especially pretty. Intelligent, perhaps, but not...
*One in a million million,* insisted 274. His consciousness reached out to hers and made gentle contact, then spread to envelop her. Had it been one of the Interrogators, this mastery would have frightened her, but because it was 274, she found it comforting, and even enjoyable.
She began to absorb random thoughts, colors, scents, even physical sensations, until their intensity threatened to overwhelm her. It was confusing, but pleasant. *Very* pleasant, almost like...
*Stop!*
274 withdrew his consciousness from hers, so abruptly she was afraid she had done something dreadful, but he stayed near, holding her as she clung to him. His words came softly, soothingly, but with a slight color of hurt.
*I thought you liked it.*
Yes, she had, too much. *Is that something you normally do with someone you don’t know very well?*
He pulled back a little farther. *No.*
Tera could feel the warmth of his embarrassment, and she understood its source altogether too well. She had tried something like that once, with Lancer... And it had worked, too, after a fashion.
She didn’t know a pattern could laugh, but she laughed, and it came out in a sparkle of electrical pulses.
*You were right,* she said. *I think I can get used to being a pattern.*
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Note from Sterling: According to AMRAAM, this is something she planned to include in New Blood, but didn't quite fit in.
Arm junior officers on Delbay 4 enjoyed few luxuries, but one of these was the communal shower on level two. Enlisted soldiers followed a regular schedule, getting only three showers a week, while an officer could shower whenever there was time.
Jak had taken only one shower since getting to Delbay, and he had had the room to himself then, but today after the battle, the echoing and steamy chamber was filled with men and women cleansing themselves. Jak had never seen a naked woman in the flesh before, and he tried not to stare at any of them, but he soon noticed one staring at him--and not at his face.
"It's so *small*," she said, and she nudged her companion, who turned, looked, and giggled.
Jak fought down an urge to cover himself. Better to pretend he didn't notice, but he was sure he was blushing bright red.
"You're right," he heard someone else whisper. "It's tiny."
He didn't think he was any smaller than anybody else. He glanced at the man next to him. No. Clones were no better endowed than he was, except ...
Jak laughed suddenly. A clone had no navel. They were making fun of his *belly button!*
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HTML conversion done in 4/1999 by Sterling, CamTarn and Chris Elgin.
Story originally written by AMRAAM.