Catch up with all that’s going on with me in this week’s writing vlog!
Monthly Archives: November 2022
The Gospel According to Earth – Chapter Twenty Five
“Director? Director O’Sullivan, can you hear me?”
Brian tried to focus as concepts and possibilities flooded through his mind in an endless procession of ideas and the interactions of those ideas. Someone was talking to him. His mind grabbed on to that fact with both hands, in spite of the fact that his hands were paralyzed in his fugue state, and dragged him back to the immediate. “Baker? Baker, is that you?”
“Yes, Director. Are you all right? Your vital signs spiked to dangerous levels about ninety minutes ago. It looks like they’ve stabilized now but they’re still elevated above levels that the diagnostics say are significantly above normal.” Baker’s news was ominous but she didn’t sound upset about it. Her voice was distant. Nervous.
There was something he was supposed to say about that. What was it? “How are you feeling, Baker? You sound like you are under a great deal of stress right now.”
“That’s… that’s a little bit complicated, Director. There’s someone here who wants to talk to you about-”
“I’m busy Baker. I wanted you to monitor my status so you could disconnect me from the fugue if things became dangerous and now you’re telling me you didn’t even notice when things went bad? How am I supposed to focus like this?” Brian threw aside the batch of ideas he was trying to sort and strode back through the swirling potentials and out into the tower where Vesper was waiting for him.
Vesper was watching his readouts and clucking to himself. “How did you find it this time, O’Sullivan?”
“Director, I apologize for the oversight but you have to understand that the situation with the Martians has progressed very quickly and-”
“I don’t care, Baker.” He stepped out of the potential tank and down to the floor while wiping sweat from his forehead. “I’m on the verge of a breakthrough here with Vesper and I need to focus.”
There was a long, uncomfortable silence on Baker’s end of the line while Vesper frowned at him. Suddenly the researcher turned frantically to his board and studied it. Brian couldn’t make anything out of what it said but he got the impression Vesper wasn’t very happy with it. Before he could ask the other man what was wrong Baker spoke up again. “Director, Vincent Vesper isn’t available any more. I don’t know what research of his you’ve found, or think you’ve found, but continuing to pursue it at this point isn’t going to help us very much.”
Brian glanced down at the younger Vesper. “SubDirector I think you’re going to be pleasantly surprised when you realize how far off base that assessment is. I just need… how long have I been in here?”
“About six hours, Director.”
“Only six?” He felt his eyes widen involuntarily. “Feels like ten times that. Interesting. I didn’t realize the fugue state altered your perception of time. Or is it the probability expansion?”
“The what?”
“Brian,” Vesper snapped. “What are you talking about?”
Splitting his attention between Baker and Vesper was beginning to take a toll and Brian considered just putting one of the conversations on hold. Unfortunately he wasn’t really given a chance to. “Director,” Baker said, “are you talking to someone else in there?”
“Yes, Baker, I am. Give me a minute, please, this is getting very difficult.” With all of his sensory input routed through his nanotech infused nervous system directly to his brain it was more difficult than he’d anticipated to separate one layer of experience from another. It wasn’t like he could press on an earbud to help focus on Baker’s voice. By the same token, they hadn’t built a system that let him shut off Baker’s voice if he needed to focus on something that was happening within the fugue proper.
Of course, they hadn’t anticipated the probability expansion facilitator either.
When Vesper first integrated Brian’s mind with the PEF it was the most disturbing thing to ever happen to him, more so than his initial medinano injection, more so than discovering UNIGOV had Shutdown both his parents a decade ago, more so than learning homo martians had come back to Earth for the first time in centuries. It most closely resembled the artificial psychedelic state that he’d experienced when he joined the Directorate. The point of that exercise had been to harden his mind against the distractions of cheap, emotional spirituality by filtering cheap neurotransmitter induced illusions through his medical systems. At least that was ostensibly the point.
Over the years Brian had learned many members of the Directorate actually routinely returned to the medically induced trance to try and improve their own understanding of themselves. He’d never joined them. When Brian experienced that first psychedelic trance he’d felt as if some towering presence reached within him and took out something important. He’d never been able to figure out quite what it was but he never wanted to go back and find out, either.
Looking back on it, the strange night terror that had pursued him through the fugue state was probably an expression of that first, badly managed psychedelic experience. The presence he’d felt in that trance hadn’t been a distinct visual thing. Instead it had felt more like a powerful being that manipulated the spinning, hypnotic landscape that he’d witnessed creeping in the edges of his vision as the trance made him feel like he was leaving his own body. The geometric shapes had cut away at his very soul, leaving him hollowed out.
Or, at least, that was how he felt at the time. Coming back from that point he’d remembered that ideas about souls and spirituality were just one of the shackles martian thought left on the sapiens mind to ensure they never reached their full potential in the here and now. What he saw in that trance was just his subconscious mind trying to reconcile the contradictions inherent in those shackles. Just one more reason, he told himself at the time, not to go back into the trance. He hadn’t realized the fugue state worked on similar principles because he hadn’t had time to delve too deeply into the idea when he was brushing up on the tech a few days ago but, with one major exception, it turned out the technology was basically identical.
Said exception being that the PEF was to a medically induced trance like the sun was to a candle. Vesper wouldn’t tell him – or perhaps didn’t know – if the PEF system was created by people from the Light of Mars project or if they’d borrowed it from someone else who’d entered the Shutdown fugue before they did. What he did say was that it expanded the human mind exponentially. By focusing heavily on specific ideas and formulas they’d been using the PEF to extrapolate the outcomes of various systems they wanted to test for their engineering project.
The details on how the system created its future projections were a little fuzzy. Again, Brian didn’t know if that was because Vesper didn’t know how it worked or if he was just trying to keep some secrets for whatever reason. What he did know was that the PEF became more effective the more human minds were tied in to it. When they’d dumped all the other Light of Mars engineers out the PEF had gone from highly productive to almost inert overnight. Vesper’s progress had ground to a halt. Thus his eagerness to recruit Brian into his work as soon as he arrived.
However after the initial shock that came from the PEF Brian found that the system itself might have some merits to it. Vesper was getting good data. Brian’s role in the Directorate was only tangentially related to nanotechnology but he knew enough to understand every third or fourth word the researcher was saying and that told him Vesper’s work was promising. After only two trips into the potential tank Vesper had most of the kinks worked out of his new system.
But Brian was beginning to wonder if perhaps they could use it towards even more relevant ends. They could bring the entire Light of Mars project back into the fugue and then add his own mind and Bakers to begin running some simulations of interactions with the martians. Perhaps UNIGOV could find a solution to that problem that didn’t require them to build the first fully fledged weapons platform on Earth in two hundred years.
“Brian.” Vesper’s voice cut into his thoughts with an irritable edge. “Have you been in contact with the Outside the whole time you were in the potential tank?”
“I have. Is that an issue, Dr. Vesper?”
The researcher exploded with unexpected ferocity. “Of course it is, Brian! I told you the PEF runs all its data through your mind as an auxiliary processing system and if you are in contact with additional data beyond what the probability tank is feeding you then the whole process from start to finish is going to be contaminated! Now we have to start this whole process over again from scratch!”
“Director, who have you made contact with?” Even as he tried to follow what Vesper was saying Baker’s voice dragged his attention in the other direction.
“It’s a long story, Baker, and I don’t have much time for it. If you hadn’t left your post for the last several hours you could have been here for most of it but there’s no sense complaining about that now.” Brian folded his arms over his chest and tapped one foot as he thought about it for a moment. There really wasn’t anything for it at this point. “Baker, I need you to close and disconnect your line to my audio nerves.”
“What.” Baker’s voice was getting more and more flat an expressionless as time went on. “Why would I do that, Director?”
“It’s complicated. You can break the connection, though, can’t you?”
“Yes, I can, Director but I don’t think I should so I’m not going to.”
Brian furrowed his brow. “Why not? Baker, you’ve been out of contact for hours and now you’re refusing to listen to perfectly reasonable instructions on what steps to take to forward our objectives.”
“Reasonable?” Baker snorted, sending a burst of discomfort through his left ear. “How can I tell if your instructions are reasonable or not when you won’t even tell me what factors led you to decide on this course of action?”
“Does it matter?”
“Of course it matters! Director, we barely know what goes on in one of these fugue states to begin with, you’ve been hallucinating strange things the whole time you’ve been in there and now you want to cut off all outside contact!” Now her voice was starting to climb up in pitch again. “How am I supposed to advise you or make sure the spirit of your instructions is carried out when I don’t even understand what it is you think you’re doing?”
“I understand your frustration,” Brian said, even though he really did not. “But we don’t have much time to-”
“We have no time, Director!” Baker snapped. “No time at all! The Martians raided the power plant hours ago and they’ve taken the whole place over! I had to turn it over to their Admiral fifty minutes previous. I can’t do anything here besides talk to you and you, well, you’ve got no time at all to finish whatever fantasy project you think is going to let you finish the Light of Mars. We’re sunk, Director, all that’s left is arguing over the details. Now do you think I can pull you out of your fugue without your suffering any of the detrimental side effects we saw in most of their engineers?”
“Then stand by, Director.”
“Stand by for what?”
“I’m going to transfer you over to Admiral Carrington and Director Mond. I have to go and make sure the martians don’t murder Mr. Vesper…”
Writing Vlog – 11-23-2022
Writing Vlog: A few updates and important links!
The Gospel According to Earth – Chapter Twenty Four
“The secret is digital audio,” Mond explained. He was seated by the bridge’s holotank while Naomi and Bennet worked to set up a stable computer connection with Bottletown through the no-longer-secret Roddenberry FTL communication corridor. “You can encrypt it however you want but there’s only so many practical ways to transmit digital audio via radio or laser. Digital information breaks down to ones and zeroes, after all.”
“I don’t understand what that has to do with your communications blackout,” Carrington replied.
“It’s actually very simple.” Mond went to work in the holotank, his prosthetic hands painstakingly forming a set of graphs in the tank. “Computer systems are all different, of course. However at a base level you’re still communicating ones and zeroes at a very high rate of speed and the structure of your system actually makes the pattern of those ones and zeroes predictable to a certain extent. We don’t have to know what they mean. We just have to predict what is coming next, a one or a zero, and predicting a pattern without bothering to think about what it means is the quintessential job of an artificial intelligence.”
“They don’t get distracted by the framing problem,” Carrington said.
“Exactly. When UNIGOV was coming together there were a huge number of people broadcasting counter-narratives that were undermining the sapiens position. We created the broadcast blanketing system as our own countermeasure. It was based on a very simple fact: when a wave is exposed to the complete opposite waveform the two cancel each other out.” Mond was carefully sketching out two such waveforms in the tank.
Even without the visual aid Carrington recognized what he was saying and grasped the underlying principle he was getting at. “You mean you managed to anticipate the data we’re about to broadcast and create an inverse signal to cancel it out? Wouldn’t it be simpler to crack the encryption?”
“Maybe. I’m not an expert on the subject but I don’t think it is. Transmitters use very simplistic algorithms to talk to each other and that’s all we really need to figure out in order to create the blanketing effect. Also, the system was created to counter people who were broadcasting within standard protocols. The point wasn’t to find out what they were saying. They wanted people to understand them. The point…” Mond shot an uncomfortable look at Naomi and sighed. “As the martians say, the point was to silence them and for that understanding isn’t actually necessary.”
Carrington nodded, waving him past that minefield. “Fine. Your computer experts whipped up an approach to shut down radio waves with some kind of dampening technology. How do we get past it now?”
“We left a backdoor in the programming to ensure that we could talk through the blanketing effect. That algorithm is buried in UNIGOV comm systems from that era foreward. All we need to do is pull it from the Vault under the martian city and we’ll be able to break through and talk with UNIGOV systems on the ground.”
“On the ground?” Carrington gave him a sharp look. “What about our own forces? They aren’t going to have anything to receive the broadcast with.”
“Not necessarily. First off, I know that your personnel are very capable of appropriating UNIGOV tech and using it for their own ends.” Waved his hand to encompass the ship. “After all, if they couldn’t we wouldn’t have made it back to orbit, would we?”
Carrington clasped his hands behind his back and looked back at the holotank. EMG scans had picked up a great deal of thermal and magnetic activity around a power plant in the Los Angeles area. They did need to do anything possible to find out what was going on down there. On the other hand, there was a certain trepidation to finding out just how badly things had gone on the ground, a trepidation rooted in the disasters of the past.
“You know, Director, I find it odd that you cite cutting off your martians as a source of certainty for your civilization. I find the silence full of possibility. The uncertainty is unpleasant, often, but so long as I do not know what’s happened down there the anything could have happened. Major Goldstein could be on the verge of forging a successful peace with your government. Or they could have created such a disastrous misstep that the entire detachment was wiped out when you deployed your disassembler field.” With a flick of a few fingers Carrington brought the live satellite images of the surface to the forefront of their section.
“Certainty is a vital component to the art of war,” he continued. “Knowing everything we can about the enemy’s positions, capabilities and mindset are the foundation of good planning. Acting in complete ignorance of these things is foolish. Yet you claim that creating that ignorance, particularly ignorance of your adversaries but also ignorance of your own past, is a vital part of creating a society founded on certainty. I confess I find your position bizarre.”
“Oh?” Mond raised an eyebrow. “And when you look at what you see from your adversaries you never think that perhaps they might be lying to you? That what you see from them is calculated to undermine you? I find that very hard to believe you.”
“On the contrary, Director, we count on it. Psychology, gamesmanship and analysis are all part of the modern warfare – and modern diplomacy, for that matter.” Carrington gave the other man a steady look. “I wish you would beat around the bush less, Mr. Mond, because I really would like to end this with as little bloodshed as possible but it’s really hard to understand where you’re coming from.”
Mond sighed and looked up at the feed in the holotank. “I believe you, Admiral. The thing you must understand about our approach to the world is that we believe that stability comes from vulnerability, from a willingness to be open to one another. We wish to be left alone to pursue our own society rather than be forced to constantly reevaluate the intrusions of outsiders. The expectation of hostility from others undermines that. It robs us of the openness that comes with vulnerability.”
“You can’t build a society on vulnerability, Director,” Naomi said, leaving her console to join them. “Believe me, the founders of Bottletown tried; because they had no other choice. To some extent I suppose you could say they succeeded, since we are still around, but we didn’t have a chance to develop our own culture, to grow as people or to create anything new. We still live in the same buildings they did. We barely understand the technology they left us and we spent our very short lives wondering if the whole system was going to come crashing down around us. We were vulnerable every moment and I’m sure the downward spiral would have destroyed us eventually if the Genies hadn’t found us.”
“That is stability, Ms. Bertolini. Entropy is a universal force that we must all deal with on a personal and societal level.” Mond gave her a sad smile. “When we fight and we scratch and we steal from one another we don’t reverse entropy, we only increase the suffering of others to enrich ourselves. In the process, we hasten the process rather than forestalling it. If we were honest with ourselves we could allow the natural processes to begin to heal, we could slow entropy as much as possible and we can live our full lives in community with one another rather than in constant suspicion.”
Carrington glanced at Naomi. Her face showed total confusion, clearly unable to work out what brought a person to this point, much less an entire civilization. The small world under the Borealis dome hadn’t prepared her for this. She hadn’t seen the kind of arbitrary death the world could dole out through violence, illness or mishap. The very nature of Malacandran civilization precluded it.
Such things had a corrosive effect on the human spirit so pronounced and mysterious it shocked even him and worse, it was very hard to reverse. Such corrosion was at the root of most wars, crimes and suicides. Worst of all, when ways to reverse the damage did exist the methods were radically different in every case.
The fleet had decided to remain in the Sol system to help the Malacandrans emerge into a thriving society and maintain some level of connection with the Homeworld. More and more, it was looking like achieving either one of those goals involved breaking UNIGOV’s hold on Earth. What that meant was unclear. At the most extreme it meant destroying most of their leadership and beginning the process of completely replacing the corrupt culture that they’d put in place. Carrington had little appetite for such extreme action. Hopefully just giving competing ideas a foothold on planet would be enough.
Unfortunately he was almost certain that less extreme option would be impossible without winning Mond over to his side. Any counter to the UNIGOV party line would have to come from someone who knew that line inside and out. Mond’s status as a member of the Directorate would lend him credibility. However, so far there were very few cracks showing in the Director’s ideological dedication to Earth’s status quo. He showed some doubt when the Malacandrans were around. Carrington couldn’t think of anything to help the Director along outside of keeping Mond and Naomi together as much as possible and praying that something came of it. In the meantime he had his own people to worry about.
“If you prefer the stability of entropy to the certainty of understanding there’s not much we can do to change your mind, Director.” He glanced at Bennet. “How are things coming, Major?”
“We’ve established the uplink through the Spiner and the Stewart, Admiral. We should have the algorithm pulled from the Borealis Vault in a few minutes.”
“Can we integrate it with our own computer systems?”
“That’s the easy part, actually,” Naomi replied, “Teng already spent several days with the Roddenberrys working out an emulator that allows our systems to talk to each other. We brought a copy with us and installed it with the Major yesterday. You should be able to drop the algorithm into it and go from there.”
“Then we’ll try and open a line to the LA Power Plant first as it looks like the ground team may be holed up there. At your convenience, Major.”
The next three minutes were full of quiet muttering and consultations. Then Bennet said, “Okay, Admiral, it looks like we’ve got someone who’s answering us. Want me to put it up in the tank?”
“Please.”
The surveillance feeds flew off to the sides and were replaced with a human sized helmet. To Carrington’s surprise it was a regulation issue Copernican armored exoskeleton helmet. “Who is this?” The man on the other end demanded. Then he jerked back and snapped to attention, his hand coming into view from one side. “Admiral Carrington! I’m sorry, sir, I was expecting a UNIGOV person.”
Carrington tamped down on his impulse to grin. “Not a problem, son, this is a very unorthodox line of communication. Who am I talking to?”
“Corporal Broward Keys, Admiral. Part of the landing crew under Captain Yang dispatched with Sergeant Langley to secure this facility.”
Interesting. Sergeant Langley was apparently having a very good month. If he kept it up someone back on Copernicus was going to try and build him a statue or something equally foolish. “Good work, Corporal. Is the Captain or Sergeant present?”
“Negative, sir. The Captain is still inbound, Sergeant Langley is in pursuit of hostile assets.” He glanced off to one side. “Uh, we do have a SubDirector Baker present, Admiral. She’s surrendered but it sounds like she’s interested in talking to you.”
Carrington glanced at Mond, who looked just as surprised as he was, and then back at the tank. A new route to the simple solution had just offered itself. “Put her on.”
The Gospel According to Earth – Chapter Twenty Three
“Yancey, report,” Lang snapped, grabbing Keys’ wrist as he raised his plasma rifle. “What’s your situation?”
“Looks like a decontamination room,” Yancey said. “There’s an exit opposite where we came in. Oh, and now they’re pumping something into the chamber through the vents and it doesn’t look like any decontamination foam or similar substance I’ve ever seen.”
Lang waved his team away from the door. “Blast your way back out through to us, target the hinges on the door and you should be able to get past it in no time.”
“Not sure we should expose you guys to this stuff.”
“That was an order, Harry. We’re clear of the door, start melting.”
The door shook from a series of impacts then the hinges on the door blew out in melted chunks that spattered across the floor in glowing puddles. Then the door latch did the same. Harry kicked down the door and hustled out with Keys just behind, both men coughing as a wave of smog or mist followed them out. Yancey and Priss pulled the two of them away to either side while Lang and Ramone opened fire through the doorway, slinging plasma through the decontamination room towards its other door until they heard a loud thud.
Whatever chemical the Earthlings had pumped through the vents was much heavier than the air and it drifted out among them at ankle height. Lang eyed it, distrustful, but it didn’t have the telltale glitter of active nanotech. Besides, Yancey hadn’t mentioned anything on the EMGs so it couldn’t have an active mag field feeding it power anyways. “Switch to internal air supply.”
“Sarge?” Ramone sounded surprised. “We’ve only got two hours air on hand and there’s no danger of us breathing this stuff. Are you sure you want to use it up now?”
“It’s just a precaution,” Lang said. “If we wind up wasting the canned air you can go back to get more, okay?”
“If you say so.”
He did, and they all paused for a moment to pull up the mouthpiece from its hiding place in their collars, activate the airflow and seal the whole thing around their mouths. The process took all of ten or twelve seconds. “All right,” Lang said, his voice now muffled by the mouthpiece and backed by the quiet hissing of air, “new formation. Keys, Ramone, take point. Yancey, keep your eyes glued to the EMG scans and everyone else keep your eyes moving. A decontamination chamber comes before a secured area. They’ll probably have some kind of guards or at least surveillance in play so be prepared to respond to just about anything.”
“Lang, you might want to have a look at this.” Priss was kneeling by the open doorway and poking at the mist with her knife. Only now it had begun hardening into a strange substance that looked fluffy to the naked eye but gave very little when the flat of the metal blade tapped against it. Even a quick jab failed to do any serious damage to it. “Whatever this gunk is, it’s fast acting and pretty tough.”
Lang eyed the door, which was still dispersing a slow moving cloud of the stuff. “That’s an interesting wrinkle. Anyone know what it is?”
“Looks like some kind of insulation spray foam,” Ramone said, grabbing a handful of the stuff in his left hand and kneading it back and forth. “Yeah, it feels a lot like the kinds of stuff we had onboard during the Departure era. My gramps had a house built with this. It’s really fast acting, Sarge, and it’s already starting to set. We’ve got a good chance of getting stuck if we try to go through this now.”
“Did you spot the vents?” Lang asked. “We could plug them up and go.”
“Negative, Sarge.” Ramone patted his rifle. “These are heat guns and that’s insulation, the one thing basically exists to get in the way of the other. We can shoot into it, sure, but it’s gonna take a lot of time. It’d be faster to just go around, though not really safer.”
“Why would it be unsafe?” Priss asked.
“We don’t have plans for this place,” Yancey said, “and standard doctrine in a gravity bound structure is to avoid taking out walls in case there’s something load bearing in there. Plus we don’t have the right tools for it. That means we’d probably have to do even more damage to the overall structure in order to effect a usable breach.”
“Damn.” Lang knocked his helmet against the wall once, trying to figure out how to get around the situation without putting the whole team in danger. “Okay, what options do we have other than dragging the roof down on us?”
“The admin offices may connect to the control center, we could try that,” Priss suggested.
“Any route in or out of the control center is going to be behind a decontamination room given the safety protocols and era of construction,” Keys said. “We could try going in from the reactor chamber. There should be a reinforced window we could try to breach although that will take a lot of time as well. It’s supposed to withstand reactor accidents, after all.”
“The roof.”
All eyes turned to Harry. Lang raised an eyebrow. “Go on.”
“This is an industrial facility designed to resist accidents from the inside, not a secure military facility designed to withstand attacks from the outside.” Harry pointed back towards the hallway they’d entered through. “There is a window in the admin room. We go out and up to the roof then breach it once we’re past this point and continue as normal. No risk of hitting anything load bearing. Much faster than running through the bottom floor and getting lost or trying to breach a reinforced plexiglass window.”
“That’s the best idea I’ve heard so far, unless anyone else has a stroke of genius that’s what we’re going with.” Lang spun around on his heel. The rest of the squad fell in behind him, double timing back through the locker room and hallway and into the empty admin offices.
Getting to the roof proved more difficult than they had originally anticipated. The LA Fusion Plant was not constructed with magboot maneuvering in mind, which wasn’t a surprise given the time and place it was built but did make the squad’s best climbing tool useless. They wound up locking their exoskeleton’s into a long chain to secure Keys in place as he carefully climbed the six meters from the window to the roof. Once in place he clamped down and pulled them up. It was the most uncomfortable human daisychain maneuver Lang had ever done in his life.
Still, ten minutes later they were all safely on the roof, dusting themselves off as they took stock of their situation. Lang shook himself off and said, “It may have been safer to just blast through a wall and risk bringing down the roof.”
“That’s your monkey brain talking, Sarge,” Keys said.
“Nah, my monkey brain is fine, it’s wired for high places. My human brain doesn’t like hanging out in thin air with no engines of my own.”
“The exo’s servos have an 0.12% failure rate in high tension locking situations, statistically speaking we were in no danger whatsoever.” Harry patted his exoskeleton in contentment. “We can get back down this way, too, if we have to.”
“Let’s not have to.” Lang spun on his heel until he spotted the marker his AI had left inside the building. It was a short run from the side of the building back to that spot and an even shorter matter to go a few more steps and get past the decontamination room. Then they formed a circle about three meters wide and hit the roof with a barrage of super heated plasma. It wasn’t as smooth a process as Lang had hoped.
The roof wasn’t particularly tough, all things considered. It was concrete reinforced with iron rebar, pretty typical for a two hundred year old Earth building and sturdy enough when faced with weather or the like but not really designed to stand up to plasma weapons. That said, a plasma rifle wasn’t really designed to cut through stone, either. It took almost a hundred rounds of fire to dig a ten inch wide, six inch deep divot into the roof.
Then they took a plasma grenade with some spray adhesive and stuck the grenade in the hole. Then they set it off. In most cases a plasma grenade caused damage by its sudden change in heat, which kept deadly shrapnel to a minimum. When it was buried in a concrete roof the sudden temperature change caused catastrophic cracking through the concrete and liquefied the rebar. While most of the rubble fell straight down a few chips did go flying and leave scratches on their armored exos.
After giving the rubble a five count to begin cooling Lang waved his squad forward. For the second time that day they rushed into pandemonium. The grenade opened a hole in the roof about four feet wide and shaped like a kidney bean; not the ideal shape for quick entry but a valid method nonetheless. All six of them piled through the gap and landed in the rubble in rapid succession. Lang and Priss fumbled the landing a tad. Although their exos had internal self-balancing gyroscopes to keep them more or less upright and powered servos to absorb the shock of landing neither one of them had worn the gear long enough to roll with the impact successfully.
Yancey landed like ten foot drops were an every day task, the others were almost as graceful. Unfortunately Lang didn’t have the time to appreciate the other’s performance as the section of roof they’d entered through had been right over the command room’s antechamber. Several work stations were crumpled and sparking underneath the rubble and half a dozen Earthlings were playing fire extinguishers over the rubble.
When the first of the spacers landed the Earthlings recoiled. Most of them froze, staring at the six of them in astonishment, while Harry and Yancey snapped their rifles to ready. For a long moment, no one moved. However that wasn’t surprising to Lang, given what he’d already seen he suspected that even the very primal instinct to hold up empty hands in surrender had gone out of common use. He held up a hand, signaling they should hold their fire.
“I’m Sergeant Martin Langley, of the Copernican Spacer Corps.” He took a few steps forward, letting his own plasma rifle hang across his chest on his carry strap as he held his hands open in a placating movement. “If you don’t wish to fight we will accept your surrender. Just put your hands up on top of your head and we can end hostilities with just that.”
Most of the Earthlings turned to look at a woman in the sharp cornered, brightly colored clothing Lang had come to recognize as the region’s standard business dress. She was a little short and her chestnut hair was clipped close to her skull but there was no mistaking her feminine figure or the way the other’s deferred to her. This was the woman in charge. Lang turned his full attention to her and said, “I’m under orders to secure this power plant, ma’am, and I’d be happy to do that with as little additional violence as possible. However, one way or another, we’re taking over this command center.”
The woman sighed and began to raise her hands. Lang felt himself beginning to smile, glad to have the facility secured at last, when a wave of white foam blasted over his faceplate and blinded him. It happened so fast he wasn’t even sure what was going on. The armored gloves of his exoskeleton were fine for most tool using purposes but they weren’t the best thing for wiping off a piece of clear plastic without smearing it. By the time he got his visibility back the shouting and shooting had already started.
“What happened?” He demanded, wiping vigorously with both hands as the command center came back into view. It looked like one of the Earthlings had disappeared and the others had their hands on their heads as they’d been instructed.
“One of them hit you and Yancey with the fire extinguisher spray,” Harry said. He’d moved across the room to another door which he was looking out of. The ring of plasma pockmarks around the door testified to what the others had been shooting at. “Then he made a break for it.”
Lang looked back at the woman in charge. “What was that?”
“I apologize,” the woman said, her tone far sterner than you might expect from an apology. “Mr. Vesper is an extremely unpredictable individual due to his very difficult personal circumstances.”
“Don’t you stick the unpredictable people in tanks?” Ramone asked.
“It’s called Shutdown, and yes, we do. We removed him in order to work on the Light of Mars project.” The woman said it as if it should be obvious.
“Of course,” Ramone said. “The Light of Mars. Why didn’t I think of that?”
Priss glanced at Lang then back at the woman. “Is that the nanotechnology field you’ve been putting up over the city?”
The Earthling tilted her head as if considering something. “Yes. You didn’t know?”
“Fuck.” Lang spun to point at Yancey, Ramone and Keys. “You three stay here, lock down the command center and contact the Captain. Let her know we’re trying to run down one of the people who created the disassembler field. Priss, Harry, with me. Harry, which way did that asshole go?”
“Just follow me, Sarge.” The three of them pounded out of the the room and deeper into the facility.
The Gospel According to Earth – Chapter Twenty Two
“What’s the situation, Sargent?” Captain Yang returned his salute as she crouched down with him behind the embankment.
“Enemy’s point defenses are still active at all points on the building previously reported, ma’am,” Lang said, sending her AI a ping to dump the relevant files. “We scouted around most of the old parking area and we think we can secure the plasma guns there.”
“Will that give us a good angle to take out their mag field generators?” Yang asked as she started scrolling through the data he’d just given her.
“Not unless these guns can arc plasma like kinetic shells,” Lang said. “But we can hit the main building from here.”
She paused mid scroll. “What does that accomplish? I’m not looking to cause a catastrophic containment breach of an active fusion reactor, Langley. That doesn’t help anyone.”
“Technically it does short out their planetary defense network in this region but I see you point, ma’am.” Lang twitched a few commands and sent his proposed plan to her tablet. “What’s interesting about the Earthling’s chosen weapons in this situation is how incredibly clunky they are. Nanotech, by nature, is about doing small things. Blowing them up to a large scale is very inefficient and the fact that they seriously took this approach to warfare shows how unaccustomed UNIGOV is to the whole process…”
“You’re not filing a flight plan, Sargent,” Yang said. “You don’t need to give me the specs and background on all the tech involved. Just give me the highlights.”
“You can’t use disassembler fields indoors, ma’am. They’ll just disassemble the building and you’ll be outdoors again, which isn’t ideal for a bunch of reasons, thus you don’t deploy any of the fields indoors. So if we want to avoid the plant’s defenses…”
“Blow open a wall in the main building and run inside.” Yang smiled. “Simple and direct, just like all the best plans. Have you determined the best places to breach the walls?”
“I wasn’t sure what your operational goals were so we made our best guess at the spots we thought would be near an emergency shutdown of some sort.” With a flick of the fingers Lang highlighted those spots on her map. “Unfortunately the plans for this kind of plant aren’t on hand and it didn’t exist before the Departure so all we’ve got are assumptions to go on.”
“Not much but it’s a start.” Yang looked the map over and added a few notes to it. “I’m going to check in with the other groups and see if we can get an angle on any other potential points to breach. Impressive work, Sargent. The Remote Operations Group think they’ve located the plant’s command room based on infrastructure on site. I’m adding that to the list of potential sites to breach and I want you to take point on that team.”
“Me, ma’am?”
“You’re the Earthling expert, remember?” Yang gave him a wry smile. “I know making peace isn’t exactly your specialty but you’re pretty good at thinking around their plans and you’ve got a handle on their temperament. Find and neuteralize their leadership. Offer them unconditional surrendure before you slag them, and let me know if they make any counter offers I’m not looking to wipe them out, but don’t be afraid to force the issue if they’re recalcitrant. I’ll send Priss along to keep you in touch, okay?”
“If you insist ma’am.” He pulled up the map on his own tablet. “Where are we making our entrance at?”
“You’ll be staging from upsilon-2, moving out in ten minutes. Stay on your toes, Sargent.”
Upsilon-2 was just behind a large cherry tree. Unlike most of the plant’s overgrown garden beds this tree stood on it’s own with no other obvious landscaping around it. Lang wondered if it was originally intended for that spot or if it had sprouted on its own. He’d hunkered down there with Priss and his picked up team of ground pounders just in time to see the opening salvo come from Fresh Face and his gun team.
In his long career with the Spacer Corps Lang had seen a lot of plasma bombardments. He’d seen the utter devastation left by the Minervans on Newton, the chilling spectacle of atmosphere venting from Minervan domes over Galileo and the heart stopping shock of the orbit ship Great Red Spot breaking apart under focused fire from the Dianan fleet. Each and every kind of bombardment was horrible in its own way. But after watching the Second Galilean War from the cockpits of landers and rescue craft in space Lang had figured he was used to the sight of plasma guns at work.
He’d forgotten that in atmosphere they also made noise.
When the guns blew up the first section of the plant’s outer walls there was just a brief flash of light from their emplacement in the parking lot, followed but a brighter, sharper flash and a huge plume of smoke from the building. Then a massive clap as super heated air rapidly cooled. Finally a bone shaking boom and a pressure wave that hit like a slap in the face. Lang sucked in a breath and shook himself once. That hadn’t even been a big strike, nothing compared to the kinds of shipboard plasma weapons and missiles the Tranquility could bring to bear.
Harry laughed. “I take it you’ve only done space work until now, Sarge?”
“If you don’t count escaping after being grounded in hostile territory twice, yeah.”
“Nothing like the first time you see a big heat gun in atmo,” Keys said. “Hopefully we won’t be down here long enough to get used to it.”
Priss crossed herself and said, “Amen to that.”
“Check you’re gear,” Lang said. “There’s one more team going then it’s our turn. I don’t think we’re going to get ripped up by nanotech once we’re inside but someone on team Earth has gotten creative and nasty so keep your eyes peeled and call out anything that looks off. If they surrender to you give them full privileges under the Borealis Convention.”
“Although be aware that they probably won’t reciprocate,” Priss added. “Most of them don’t know the Convention exists.”
“What if they want to negotiate terms?” Keys asked.
“Then I talk to them,” Lang said. “But Priss is right, they don’t have much cultural or structural support for these kinds of situations so you’re going to have to treat them a little differently.”
“How so?”
“It’s likely they haven’t disciplined themselves against violent impulses ever in their lives. If it looks like they’re about to hit you or shoot you with a weapon they’ve recovered or dump a load of nuclear waste on your head that’s probably exactly what’s about to happen.” Lang made sure to make direct eye contact with Keys as he spoke. “If you believe they’re about to attack you, shoot them. UNIGOV discourages all communication with us martians anyways, so negotiations are unlikely.”
Keys looked uncomfortable at that but he nodded. “Understood.”
A second blast shook the air and Fresh Face’s voice came over the comms. “Stand by, group Langley. We’re making your entrance now.”
“Final check in now,” Lang said.
“Keys here, exo is green, all gear checks out.”
“Yancey, EMGs are running, all other gear…”
The six of them piled over the super heated hole in the plant’s concrete wall and into another world. If the streets of Los Angeles were deserted and overgrown the halls of the plant were chaotic and full of death. Yang had picked a spot she thought was near the plant’s command center. They’d found the building’s cafeteria. The wall had blown in and thrown slagged concrete and burning insulation across tables and diners who had probably been enjoying breakfast moments before.
Or maybe they’d just been trying to choke down a few bites while wondering what all the alarms were about. Either way, they’d died just the same. Bits of people poked out from some of the rubble and dead or unconscious bodies were strewn against the far wall like leaves. His AI datafeed, projected on the inside of his helmet, estimated there had been two dozen people in the area. It marked three as still conscious and moving. None of them were carrying weapons.
Harry and Keys had already flagged them as low priority threats and were moving towards a stairway leading up over the dining area. Most of the stairs were intact although some rubble smashed a few steps. At the top a balcony overlooked the cafeteria and a sign hanging there announced that medical and reactor access were to the left, administration and reactor control to the right and personal lockers straight ahead. He took off after Keys.
The stairway proved sturdy enough to hold their weight in spite of the damage and, with assistance from the exoskeletons, they were able to jump the damaged sections without trouble. At the top Harry hesitated. “Do we trust this sign?”
“Why would they put up a sign with the wrong directions on it?” Yancey demanded.
“I dunno, maybe they expected they’d be invaded?”
Lang pushed past them and took point as he turned to the right. “In that case we’ll just double back the other way. But I doubt they’d just change the signs to confuse us, UNIGOV only reactivated this facility recently and their own people are just as likely to get confused by it.”
“If you say so, Sarge.”
Truthfully it wouldn’t have taken long to confirm the sign. Not more than ten or fifteen feet down the hallway a bank of windows looked out over a wide room full of tihn dividing walls, creating a grid of small, eight foot rooms with desks covered in dust. Lang guessed it was the administration room, now out of use. Another twenty feet on the hall ended. Just before the end there was a glass door into the administration room on the right and the hall itself ended in a metal door.
Harry slipped forward and tried the metal door, finding it unlocked. Yancey gave a thumbs up after checking his EMG scanner and then the two of them slipped into the room, guns up and moving in the arcane patterns of the trained infantryman. Lang followed along behind them when they gave the all clear. They found a locker room.
The locker room had achieved it’s final form long before space colonization efforts began so it was a pretty familiar place. Banks of lockers, banks of toilet stalls, individual shower cubbies and textured ceramic floors. The rubber soles on Lang’s boots gripped it well enough but those who’d stuck with mag boots slipped a bit as the smooth, metal soles slipped on the slick surface.
Progress slowed until they reached the end of the locker room and arrived at the next door. Once again Harry and Yancey went through first. This time the door swung shut behind them on its own and before anyone could grab the handle and pull it back open a deep thunk sounded as the door locked itself behind them.
Nate Chen Publications 