So It Begins Read online

  Well. Okay. So was she, apparently. Not that she hadn’t figured that out already. Still, she’d been tempted to say no, just for the piss-poor way he handled the proposal. The idea itself intrigued her, though. The way he explained it, if she agreed, her thought processes would be imprinted on the newest generation of packbot to augment the technical data already hard-wired in, with the intent of mating that automated programming with her learned reflexes and evaluative capabilities. She didn’t get all the technical bits; after all, her training was in demolitions, not computers. But really, the only thing she needed to understand was that a part of her would live on to fight those that had taken her out.

  Ultimately (clearly), she’d agreed. The clincher, in the end: the mech in question had been requisitioned by the 428th. The guy should have mentioned that to begin with. That was her only real enticement. What did she care about revenge? She’d believed in why they were fighting. That and protecting her men mattered to her more than any petty revenge.

  “Will they know it’s me?” she managed to ask. The answer was no. “Will I know it’s me?” Again, no.

  “Though urban legends persist to the contrary,” the egg-head assured her, “there is no evidence to substantiate the rumors that personality is transferable with this process.”

  She’d taken his word for it. She’d wanted to believe some part of her would go on, would continue to serve. That didn’t mean she wanted to be conscious of it.

  Her body had failed just as the final neural pathways were scanned. Trey knew this, because even that the process had captured. Now, she was the next level in advanced warfare. And contrary to all assurances, she was still self-aware.

  Trey took stock of her current situation. Besides overall being FUBARed, sensors indicated she was currently being jostled, but the motion spoke more of stealth than open assault. Something close to excitement, leavened by a bit of apprehension went through her. It wasn’t supposed to work this way. But what the hell; too late now, right?

  There were murmurs going back and forth across her transceiver. Just bits and pieces, mostly sub-vocal sounds rather than words. She understood this, though. Most of the communicating going on between the deployed team was done through gestures and glances. They’d been a team a long time. Who needed words?

  Of course, that meant Trey was in the dark. The packbot that housed her was in standby mode. The transceiver was active and ready to receive input, but the cameras that would be her eyes were powered down and she had no access to the subroutines that would power them up. It was like she was tied up and blindfolded.

  Not something she was into.

  She was used to being in charge, or at least an active participant. The deal she’d made was not quite looking so good at the moment. The waiting, the not knowing, was doing a number on whatever part of her personality had glommed onto the scan.

  Finally the forward motion stopped.

  Trey felt a jolt as power flooded her system. Data was keyed in, leaving her disoriented. She was, after all, merely a passenger within the robotic interface, a data source that allowed the CPU to interpret scenarios for the handler based on her collective experience. She was a resource with not one whit of control over anything.

  Yeah, maybe her deathbed wasn’t such a good place to make life-altering decisions. She may have been a demo specialist, and understood the mechanical workings of the packbot, but from the inside she couldn’t follow impulse one of the directives being fed into the unit for the pending incursion. This passive-observer mode definitely had the potential of evolving into her own personal hell. At least as a part of the military she’d had the freedom to act within the structure of command. In combat she was used to taking charge, even. Trey was not a passive creature.

  She felt better once the internal gyros registered a change in the robotic unit’s orientation as its handler drew it from his pack and lobbed it into the crumbling shell of a building.

  “Boombot deployed, Sarge,” Trey’s handler subvocalized into his bonejack. “Unit transmission at . . . 85 percent optimal.” Nothing sounded like it used to, but from the irreverent terminology, Trey figured Coop was the soldier reassigned her demo duties. She hadn’t known him so well, beyond an officer’s familiarity with those she led, but he’d always been the one to add some hint of humor to every mission. By her reckoning, wisecracks were one more part of his armor, right along with his ballistic mesh. She was finding it comforting, herself.

  “Damn . . . we need better than that, soldier,” responded whoever had taken over as team leader—Trey couldn’t help feeling a bit smug that it had taken two men to replace her . . . at least, until she recalled her new role was “Boombot, ” and why.

  “Adjust your frequency; no one goes in until that ’bot is transmitting at 95 percent minimum. I’m not loosing any men to sloppiness.”

  The implication wasn’t lost on Trey. For the briefest instant she had the overwhelming impulse to go “buggy” on the colossal shit. Let him see how “optimal” he could be when things were out of his control and there was pressure from the higher ups to achieve the mission directives now.

  Hell, he was the one nice and cozy at the fall-back position, while here she was completely over the front line. Of course, it was so easy to forget she was only a passenger. Right up until Coop started fiddling with the controller.

  Talk about weird. Trey could “feel” as he adjusted the packbot’s settings, maneuvering the unit around the crumbled remains of the building, manipulating the camera angles. She heard him murmur about the darkness. It should have served as a warning, but she totally didn’t pick up on it. When he triggered the variable-intensity LEDs she would have flinched, if she could have. The sudden light had the intensity of a bomb blast without the fade away. She could visualize her eyes snapping closed. And suddenly, they did. Or at least, there was an abrupt return to total darkness. It was a coincidence, of course, but a welcome one. Well. For her.

  Coop swore like a cross between a marine and a twenty-dollar whore.

  A flood of data transmitted to the ’bot. Then once again, supernova. Trey reflexively “flinched” and was returned to total darkness. She was in awe as the revelation dawned. Maybe passive observer wasn’t her lot after all.

  “Military-issue piece of crap! We don’t have time for this!”

  There was that guilt again. What was relief for her was just a dangerous complication for the squad. But it did demonstrate that perhaps she had some control over her fate. To test the theory, she triggered the circuits that brought the lights up again independent of Coop’s efforts, only gradually. Okay, enough experimentation. She had some amount of control. That alone made her just a bit more comfortable in her titanium skin.

  Enough.

  She didn’t want Coop scrapping the mission because ‘Boombot’ was malfunctioning. She “stepped back,” releasing control to the handler.

  It was odd not having to go to any effort to do her job. She had finally reached the state seasoned soldiers both dreamed of and dreaded: where a combat zone didn’t require active thought to evaluate. Of course, she’d had to die to achieve it.

  Always a down side, wasn’t there?

  Between her knowledge and the packbot’s superfast processors, analysis of the building interior was instantaneous. The moment the cameras panned across a zone all the potential hot points were identified and assessed, simultaneously scrolling across the unit’s micro-display and the handler’s monitor.

  All threats on the first floor were old activity, already neutralized. As the last lower-level quadrant scan completed, Trey and the packbot approached the staircase. A sensor extended from the ’bot until it connected with the first riser. Next the unit emitted a supersonic peal, followed by a probe shooting out from the front facing, forcefully punching up against the structure. Again, data analysis was instantaneous. The sonic blast revealed nothing but the standard staircase infrastructure. The impact test confirmed the architecture was sound and was not
rigged to blow or collapse. With the all-clear given, the handler activated the ’bot’s front flipper assembly. Trey was fascinated as the flipper extended up and forward until the belted track grabbed the next tread. She found the sensation odd as the servos engaged and the front of the unit was raised up, followed the flippers up the steps. The monitors continually tracked the stability of the structure as the process repeated, until the ’bot rested soundly on the upper level.

  There was nothing there or in the rest of the surrounding buildings. Nothing recent, anyway. Plenty of signs of neutralized ordinance, along with one or two that had clearly been triggered, but by the levels of accumulated dust, signs of animal habitation, the weathering . . . all indications were that the outpost had been abandoned by all parties.

  “Echo sector has been cleared for occupation, sir,” Coop reported over the comm to his squad leader.

  “Our ETA is 0700,” was the response. “Have your men set up base operations and then stand down until we arrive.”

  Trey wanted to protest as the ‘bot’s systems were again powered down and the unit was returned to Coop’s MOLLE pack. She noticed that once the rest of the system was shut off and beyond her reach, her own power source was likewise reduced until she was operating under what felt like brown-out conditions. Apparently, she was in her own version of stand-by.

  Part of her railed against the restrictions; she was just getting the feel of her new situation, the freedom and capabilities she had never dreamed would be open to her. But then, the squad leader had no clue she was anything more than a complex data dump. Having to admit that made her seethe. Not that she had a right to. She’d signed on for this tour, after all.

  As the outside world went away, she perversely wondered if this was how her laptop had felt each time she’d shut it down. And had it likewise amused itself in the darkness plotting theoretical rebellion?

  Was it days or weeks or even longer that her existence went on this way? Trey had no clue. Well . . . she knew the chronological time and date stamp that queued up each time her systems were powered back up, but you know . . . when you spend an eternity in isolation in between those fraught, tedious moments of recon, the relative time bore no connection with a clock or a calendar. Trey, in short, felt ancient. And kind of like she was suspended in purgatory, or maybe limbo.

  Before her was another crumbling structure, another potential hotbed of insurgents. It was time to earn her one step further from hell.

  As she went about her duties—she no longer thought of herself separate from Boombot, though her identity of Trey was still very real to her—her processors filtered out the background chatter of the waiting squad. There was increasingly too much of it. The men were getting too relaxed the longer they went without encountering opposition. It was making them sloppy.

  Already several had to be patched up by the medic after tripping over the remnants of a misfired hydra mine. The plungers had been obscured by the overgrown ground cover, but that was no excuse for the soldiers’ blunder. Trey would have torn them a new one for being that sloppy on her watch. Demerits would have been the least of their problems. Fortunate for them, if not the whole squad, the payload had long ago been triggered. Trapped in the can at detonation when the lid malfunctioned, the mine apparently had geysered, rather than blowing out in a radial pattern; otherwise there would have been nothing but a crater as testament to where it used to be. Of course, as cold as the thought was, perhaps it wasn’t a good thing the mine had been spent. If the men had gotten more than a gash for their inattention they would have learned their lesson better. Sloppy soldiers often got more than just themselves killed.

  Speaking of which, Trey chastised herself for dwelling on the folly of others when she had her own duties to execute.

  Nightmares were the worst part of standby mode. Yeah, even that plague of every soldier hadn’t been left behind. Kind of hard to wake up from a recurring hell when you had no body, no icy sweat to whisk away, no rapid breath to ramp down to a normal speed, nothing physical to distract you from the images you could never forget, or to remind you they weren’t happening in real-time.

  Trey wished she had enough control to power herself back up. Of course, it wasn’t like she could drop and do push-ups until she tumbled into a deep, dreamless sleep, as she would have done in her other life, so what was the point? Though she could imagine how Coop would freak if he’d caught her trying it.

  Trey settled for reviewing the data she’d so far gathered in their recon of the sector. Something about the zone was making her uneasy. She caught glimpses in her nightmares, hints of whatever had her “nerves” buzzing, but just as in her flesh-bound dreams, everything was shadowy, more impressions than anything else. Well, except for the blood. And the screams. Shrugging it off, she went back to analyzing the data. Had she been here before? It was so hard to tell, after all, as she already noted, the world was a heck of a lot different through the camera-eye of a ’bot. Whether or not she was covering familiar ground, she was getting a bad feeling the closer they drew to the next sector.

  There had to be something in the data and damn if she wouldn’t find it. She wasn’t about to lead another squad straight into the guns of the enemy.

  Hours later she finally recognized what she was looking for. It was 0Dark00 and the squad had been on the move for two hours. They were entering unsecured territory. This was the sector her unit had been heading for that fateful day. The one where good men died retrieving her.

  Up until now Coop had reserved her for establishing the all-clear of structures in zones their side had already pacified, cleaning up any parting gifts left by the insurgents. This time when she was powered up she discovered he’d reconfigured her chassis with the explosive ordinance detection kit, increasing her speed and adding more muscle to her manipulator arm. Now she was running point for the squad across uncleared terrain, looking for more aggressive threats along their path. Already, together she and Coop had discovered and disabled half a dozen hydras and discreetly marked and redirected the squad’s route around countless claymores. Those that came behind them would have more leisure to decommission the munitions. Their squad wouldn’t risk it now. To do so would slow them down at best, and give away their position at worst, should even one mine be mishandled.

  “Sarge, copy,” Coop subvocalized.

  “Acknowledged, report,” came the response.

  Coop kept it short, as even comm signals could be intercepted, if the enemy cracked the frequency. “Cleared to perimeter, sector Tango; squad heading in. Going comm dark.”

  “Roger.”

  The rest of the unit would now follow via the cleared corridor.

  Trey was so on edge her lip would be twitching, if she’d still had one. She was surprised she wasn’t shooting sparks as it was. She felt charged enough for a full fireworks display. Earlier, while exploring the internal pathway of the packbot, she discovered the protocol that would initiate self-destruct should the unit be compromised. If she could figure out how to trigger that at will, it could come in handy. If nothing else, she’d feel better knowing that, at least in a way, she was armed. She set a portion of her . . . mind to the puzzle as she continued rolling along.

  Eventually, she came upon a civilian compound. It had been hit hard, as had many she had seen before. Coop ran her up to the first of the buildings with infrared sensors activated. There were some thermal, but nothing larger than the planet’s equivalent of a rat.

  She saw no traces of munitions rigged to blow, though there were signs of recent habitation. Local wildlife, perhaps, or squatters displaced by the recent conflict. There was nothing to imply occupation by a military force, though. Trey assessed the risk factor of the building at a level three, and fed the cautionary note to her handler. After careful inspection sent up no additional red flags, she was directed to the next building. Inspection continued in a similar manner through most the compound, bringing her about to the main structure.

  By now Trey was
twitching like anything, if only on the inside. There was still nothing registering on infrared, but her mics were picking up trace sounds that might be stealth movement . . . or might just be a branch in the wind. She was running all four cameras, though only data from the primary was feeding to the control monitor. It was odd being able to scan forward and still watch over her own shoulder; not as reassuring as it should be, though. After all, it only served to remind her she was out here solo.

  As she entered the final building her instincts started grumbling. Flashbacks of her nightmares sprang to the forefront, demanding she back out of the structure, double-time.

  With sheer determination and her virtual jaw set, Trey ignored the impulse and powered through to do her duty.

  The lower level was clear. More signs of habitation, less clear as to the source. Her unit had rudimentary olfactory sensors Coop never seemed to activate. Chances were he didn’t even know they were there. It was a new feature Trey herself had never seen before this model, only recently discovered. She made an executive decision and brought them on-line. Traces of human sweat. Food. Some particles of ordinance components.

  Shit.

  There were times she definitely hated being right. Her self-preservation instincts were all but standing on her non-existent head screaming. She ignored them once more, rolling up the stairs and turning down the upper corridor in the direction from which the odors were strongest. Trey could feel an internal tug as her actions diverged from those dictated by Coop and the controller, but this was a case where instinct (the combat kind, rather than the self-preservation kind) demanded a different course of action. Her primary camera had a fiber-optic extension for situations where the bulkier unit would not serve. She extended it now as she approached the first doorway. At the same time, she readied the self-destruct protocol. Just in case.

  There was time for her to identify a crude munitions lab and roughly fifteen operatives clothed in thermal-dampening suits positioned around the room before a hand shot out and grabbed the extension.