“Nothing’s happening,” Doctor Olson said.
“Look,” I said. “Up there.”
Claws of light slashed the sky as the plasma contrails of hundreds of dropships lit the night. A minute later came the thunder of multiple sonic booms, as if the gods of war bellowed angry challenges in the darkness.
“What’s happening?” Doctor Olson asked.
“The end of your world,” I said.
Chapter Eleven
Enormous drop spheres stood in impact craters the size of houses. One by one the sides collapsed and gigantic Goliath warmechs clambered out, metallic humanoids whose arms ended in enormous weapon systems. They stretched like giants waking. Metallic clicks filled the night as they tested systems and then the earth shook under their enormous stride.
The long manta-like shapes of Warbird attack drones filled the air, their glittering sides sheathed in silver reflective force fields. Weapons blisters scanned the ground.
Armored personnel craft skidded to a halt in the open parking lot. Their sides opened, disgorging hundreds of man-sized robogrunt battle drones, moving in perfect lockstep in lines that reminded me of great metal centipedes. All of them wore stormtrooper armor. As they closed with me, my flaming skull insignia hologram came up on their faceplates. The number thirteen flickered into being on their shoulder pads, showing they were part of my command group.
The robogrunts streamed out onto the ground and I felt them patching into my armor systems one by one. Lights blinked in my HUD. Holographic symbols swirled around me, projected into my mind like flakes of burning snow. The robogrunts were directly under my control now, would only take orders from someone with my exact genetic patterns.
This was a human world. The robogrunts needed to be under direct human control. Folks were always scared they would go crazy by themselves and start eliminating organics, like they had during the Machine Wars. It was a deep rooted instinctual fear among most of the population.
It meant I would need to be constantly within command radius so my direct orders could not be jammed. In law, I was now responsible for their actions. And let’s face it, that was the real reason to have a human in charge. There would be somebody to blame if things went wrong.
A massive war golem, larger than the standard battle drone, stomped over to me. His head was held low and its shoulders hunched high.
“Good evening, Dave,” I said.
“Evening, Stormtrooper 13,” Evil Dave said. “Where is the trouble?”
He was only making conversation. He already knew. My armor had sent everything it had recorded in a squeal of panicked data the minute I invoked the Armageddon Protocol. Robogrunts were already moving toward the office. Scores and scores of them would be going down into the tunnels now. Others were setting up a perimeter around the parking lot.
We had no idea the extent of the infestation. They were simply establishing a beachhead. Soon fortresses would spout at this point and we’d move out from here and seize more territory as needed. The Federal Government was making its presence known on Faith.
Doctor Olson watched with a mixture of horror and awe. She probably hadn’t realized exactly what StarForce could deploy if called upon to do so. The presence of a few stormtroopers and a dozen bureaucrats had given the locals no indication of the real strength of Orbital. No doubt they had seen technical schematics and orders of battle but there’s a difference between reading these things and seeing them with your own eyes.
This was only the beginning. Upstairs, factory printers would be churning out main battle tanks and robotic artillery and more battle mechs. Components were being assembled into thousands of death machines. Wave upon wave of survey ships were heading out to the moons to mine raw materials. Soon we be building our own weapons complexes on the surface.
I only hoped we could be quick enough. It was a race against time. Against the Assimilators, that was a race we’d lost too often in the past.
Doctor Olson looked at me and said, “You were waiting for this, weren’t you?”
There was a note of suspicion in her voice.
“We always travel this way,” I said. “There was an army up there, and a factory system, just waiting to come online.”
She paused for a moment to digest this.
“The Assimilators are not like an infestation of cockroaches,” I said. “Well, actually, they are. Big cockroaches that’ll eat everybody on the planet unless they are stopped. And then they’ll move off the planet and onto other systems until they become one huge rolling snowball of destruction. They need to be stopped here and they need to be stopped fast. Or they won’t be stopped at all.”
“I know what the Assimilators are,” she snapped. She sounded like a woman talking about her worst nightmare. I suppose if you are a member of the Aryan Jihad they probably were. It was either that or Federal stormtroopers taking away all your guns. “What do we do now?”
“You go to decontamination.”
She nodded. “How long do I have? Before the virus starts to take effect.”
“It’s not as simple as that. You might not be infected at all. It’s not like on Grid where you get infected if an Assimilator even looks at you. You boys got some pretty powerful defense mechanisms, most of the health shots you give a kid will slow down any infection. We’ve got retrovirals that will reverse an infection if we get to it quick enough. You will be okay,” I said. I hoped she would be okay. Telling her anything different did not seem a particular kindly option.
“And what about you?”
Evil Dave lifted a massive blaster arm. “We’ve got a score to settle with Raximander.”
The Colonel ambled over. I could tell it was her because her helmet hologram showed her face. At the moment that face looked a little worried, but then, when did it ever look anything else? “Is it bad?”
“Bad enough.” The burning skull of my helmet reflected in the mirror shield of her armor. It looked a little distorted as it nodded. I turned and looked at Doctor Olson. Two white medical drones were already moving toward her. Just in case she decided not to be cooperative, they were escorted by large wargolem.
A silver lightning flash icon flickered on my HUD. As the officer with most experience with the Brood I had been field promoted to second in command automatically. If anything happened to the Colonel, I would be in charge. Technically I suppose I was qualified.
“Thanks,” I said. “For nothing.”
“I saw you and Raximander,” the Colonel said. “You two are going to have to stop flirting and get yourselves a room.”
“Hey, Raximander wants your body too, and everybody else’s on the planet.”
“Whatever you say,” she said. Her intonation was flat and because there was no trace of malice or humor in the way she spoke did not mean that those things were not there. It just meant that she was good at not showing. You wouldn’t want to play poker with the Colonel. That’s something I’ve discovered over the years.
“The first wave of drones is already below,” she said. “They’re going to scour the tunnels.”
“It’s a warren down there,” I said. “Those tunnels extend right under the city and no doubt they are divided into multiple small fortresses. You know what the militias are like.”
“This is going to be a nightmare,” she said. I watched the small figure of Doctor Olson walk off into the distance flanked by two medical drones. She turned before she entered the medical dropship and gave me a wave. I raised an arm back.
“She’s taking this well,” the Colonel said.
“She’s probably in shock,” I said. “Not every day you get so close to an Assimilator Warlord and live to tell the tale.”
“We don’t know if she will live to tell the tale. Not until she’s had a full scan.”
“You are in a cheerful mood,” I said.
“This place was bad enough before the Assimilators,” the Colonel said. “Just imagine what it’s going to be like now.”
She tilted h
er head to one side. A second later, glittering green beams flashed through the night and multiple explosions splintered across the sky like exploding stars.
“The militias think this is an invasion,” the Colonel said. “They just fired anti-aircraft missiles at the second wave of drop ships.”
“It is an invasion,” I said.
“Yes. An invasion attempting to save their dumbass lives. And the lives of their children.”
“Want to bet that they don’t see it that way?”
“You and I both know what’s going to happen here. Why would I take that bet?”
“Charity. To let me have something back after the last poker game on Phoenix.”
“You’re not still smarting about that, are you?”
“Me? No.”
We stood there watching explosions rip the night as the militias depleted their stock of anti-aircraft missiles. “They should be keeping those,” I said. “For when Raximander decides to show his ugly face.”
“We’re trying to tell them that right now,” the Colonel said. “Covert’s making contact with all the heads of the militias. We’re going to have a tough time convincing them, at least for the first few hours.”
After those first few hours infections would start to spread. Zombies would become visible in the street. Monsters would start to accumulate. There would be running battles between those infected and those who were not. Pretty soon they wouldn’t need any convincing that the Assimilators were here. We just had to wait.
Of course, by then it would be too late. And every minute we waited meant that more people would die.
“You going into the tunnels?” the Colonel asked.
“You mean go in and look for Raximander?” I said.
“I would have thought you would have already been there.”
“He will be long gone by the time our drones get to the vault. Probably booby-trapped the place.”
I looked at the ruined buildings all around me. They were a monument to human stupidity and the human capacity to make war with itself. But at least they were the product of human beings.
“How did Raximander get here?” the Colonel asked.
That was a good question. Somehow an Assimilator had got to the surface of this world. We had not detected any traces of a hive fleet when we entered the system. Warmind Ares was supposed to have eliminated every particle of the Assimilators within human space.
Now they were back. Or maybe they had never gone away.
I was imagining the huge black double spear of a Weapon Ship plowing through space, its hold full of Assimilator bio weapons. I wouldn’t put it past the Ishtar Corporation to do something like that. They were always looking for new product to shift.
“The right to bear arms is the right to be free,” I said. The slogan tripped off my lips. I looked directly at the black spire of the Weapon Ship looming above the spaceport. It was emblazoned on the ship’s side along with its number, eighty-five.
The Colonel followed the direction of my thoughts without missing a beat.
“Assimilators converted to bio weapons,” she said. “Really?”
“A weapon is a weapon is a weapon.”
“I have a lot of trouble thinking about Raximander simply as a weapon.”
“I thought I’d seen the last of Raximander. I thought I’d seen the last of his little brood.”
“Well, apparently you hadn’t, boo-hoo,” the Colonel said. I could tell from her distracted air that she was studying tactical readouts. No doubt she was getting the latest update from the drones in the tunnels. I toyed with plugging myself into that particular information grid but didn’t. There would be time enough for that soon.
“The last time we fought the Assimilators,” I said, “I ended up strapping on a tac nuke and walking down the throat of a progenitor hive ship. I’m not keen to repeat the experience.”
“You always have to remind us of that, don’t you?”
“Too right,” I said. “I was decorated for it, you know.”
“Some good news,” the Colonel said. “Or maybe some bad news.”
“First infection has showed up?”
“Yet. Looks like a few cases of spore plague amongst the Radical Orthodox.”
“According to the briefing they are among the more reasonable of the militias,” I said. “Of course that’s not saying much.”
“There’s no need to be so cynical,” the Colonel said. “We’re going to have to cut deals with these people. I might even assign you to handle that.”
“Over my dead body,” I said.
“There’s a lot of people who would like to see that,” the Colonel said with surprising cheerfulness. “Think of all the politicians I could make happy.”
“I don’t care to contemplate your love life,” I said. “What are we going to do now?”
“We can set up the first decontamination center here,” she said.
“I’ll make a sign: Federal Torture Camp.”
“You probably will, won’t you?”
“It won’t matter what I write on it,” I said. “That’s how they’ll read it.”
“I saw the vid of your discussions in the hospital,” the Colonel said. “Diplomatic as ever.”
“Hey, I didn’t shoot anybody,” I said.
“A remarkably restrained performance by your standards,” she said. We kept talking, about trivialities, avoiding the subject at hand while all around cybertanks went hull down and overhead warbirds thundered. Neither of us wanted to think about what would happen if the Assimilator outbreak really got out of hand. We both seen enough of that during the last Brood.
It was going to be bad. Really bad.
“Permission to go down to take a look,” I said, when the silence grew too long to bear.
“Granted,” the Colonel said.
Chapter Twelve
The tunnels did not look any more inviting than when I went down them this time. Scout drones picked up Brood biomatter. The traces were all over the place. Raximander might have been trying to confuse our sensors or it may just have had something to do with the pheromone clouds that are part of the Brood’s local communication net.
It did not matter much. We rolled down the tunnels, sterilizing them as we went. Med drones sprayed every surface as we passed. Antiseptic nanites misted the air. They frosted the scouts as they returned from their probes. We had all been inoculated against Brood micro-organisms but there was no sense in taking any chances. Assimilators developing a resistance to conventional countermeasures had been a doomsday scenario for a long time now.
I looked over my shoulder at Evil Dave. He was up ahead of me too. His intelligence was in charge of multiple robogrunts. I could see them in my HUD, moving down parallel corridors, mapping as they went. They all looked just like me, same flaming skull, same ident numbers on their shoulder pads, same heat signature. Nothing to identify me as the organic leader who by Federal law needed to be in charge of killer drones.
A heatmap showed the highest density of pheromone clusters, all in a nasty shade of blood red. The assumption was the higher the density, the closer we were getting to the bulk of the Brood forces. In my experience, that’s usually a pretty good assumption.
We came across the golem I had unchained earlier. It was smashed to bits, marked by acid, bitten by razor sharp teeth, bludgeoned by bullets and metal. Piles of ripped flesh and puddles of decomposing biomass surrounded it. We flamed it as we went. Sometimes those pools reconfigured into amoeba-like slime monsters. You don’t want something like that finding its way into a breach in your armor.
“You did good work here, Dave,” I said.
“Always do,” he said.
“Modest as ever.”
“They say a drone mirrors his partner, Stormtrooper 13. What do I tell you about yourself?”
“That I ask a lot of stupid questions.”
“If only,” Evil Dave said. “Your problem is that you always know the answer—even when you don’t.??
?
“The Colonel been showing me you my psych tests, has she?”
“I don’t need to see them to know what you’re like.”
“You think I am borderline psychotic?”
“I think you’re a killer, plain and simple. And I mean that in a good way.”
“Well, thank God for that. If I thought you were insulting me I would have to kill you.”
“You can’t kill me, Stormtrooper 13. I am a grade four artificial intelligence lodged in multiple inorganic shells.”
“It was a joke.”
“I was just playing along.”
More bodies sprawled on the ground. They had the look of Brood-infected corpse warriors. The war golems had chopped them down as they passed this way. They were already moving deeper into the bunker complex.
I felt oddly reassured, knowing so many grunts moved around me. I wondered if we had enough. The Brood assimilate entire worlds with frightening speed. Unless contained, the rate of infection increases geometrically, as one victim leads to two which leads to four and so on. Vermin, insects, people can all be vectors. All biomass is a potential tool for the Brood. Once tipping point is reached, the only solution is to sterilize the planet with nukes or nanoweapons and even those are far from certain. This whole system might have to be quarantined.
“You don’t sound too happy,” Dave said.
“The Brood,” I said. “I spent half my life fighting them and now they are back.”
“You always knew this day was coming, admit it!”
Dave knew me only too well. Of course, the Brood were coming back. We had most likely only wiped out one small unit of them. The Galaxy was a big place; who knew how many wyrmholes opened up onto worlds controlled by the Assimilation.
“You know the worst thing,” said Dave.
“There’s something worse.”
“Once you’ve had time to think about it, you’ll be happy.”
“Kiss my donkey.” I glanced down the corridor. Cobwebs of black organic material hung from the corners where wall met ceiling. Things scuttled in them briefly before the plasma flames from the golems weapon systems burned them away. Those things had probably been spiders once. Now Raximander was reprogramming their DNA for his own purposes.