So It Begins Read online

  Crap! She tried to backpedal, but as he drew her within range, his other hand brought up a silenced pistol and fired on the camera assembly, shattering the lens.

  Before he could do more damage, she aimed a probe at his leg and zapped him with enough current to fry his brain. Her olfactory sensors overloaded on burnt flesh as her manipulator arm came around to drag the corpse out of her way.

  The enemy forces were not idle. She transferred optical to her backup camera and assessed the situation. Weapons had been brought to bear and the soldiers were converging. She couldn’t handle them all, and the lab and its contingent were a serious threat to her unit and the offensive. Without a second thought, she initiated the self-destruct protocol, ready to die a warrior’s death.

  There was yelling and a sudden sizzle of sound as Coop lost visual. He breathed a curse and his hands clutching the controller tighter, though it had gone nonfunctional. He was still receiving data from the ’bot. In fact, impossible as it was, the unit somehow seemed to be moving independently. Before he could settle on a plan of action, an image reappeared on his monitor, the angle skewed as it came from a secondary camera. He watched in stunned silence as more than a dozen Dominion soldiers rushed the Boombot.

  “We have hostile contact,” he called to his men, who scrambled to defensive positions on all sides. Coop turned his attention back to the monitor. He tried once more to pull the ’bot back, but it was no use; the unit still didn’t respond to the controls. He watched with a mixture of awe and frustration as it revved forward, grabbing the foremost enemy’s rifle hand in what oddly looked like a judo move, snapping it. The soldier dropped his weapon. The corresponding scream echoed oddly, coming both through the ’bot’s comlink and more faintly from the building a half a klick away.

  “What the . . .” he murmured, startling the unit’s sniper, who crouched beside him. Coop stared hard at the words that appeared on his monitor.

  <>

  The words triggered a memory of many a past mission.

  It couldn’t be. There was no way. But he’d been assigned to this unit a long time, most of that time in this squad. Under the command of Lieutenant Tremaine . . . His left hand moved away from the ’bot controller to the keyboard, rapidly tapping just four keys . . .

  <>

  On the last stroke there was a pop, and a fireball engulfed the structure under surveillance.

  “No!” Coop yelled, silence no longer an issue. On the monitor, in the camera-view window there was nothing but snow as the comlink with the packbot was severed. He gulped at the final entry in the log window:

  <>

  His fingers flew over the keyboard, frantically trying to call up the final transmission made by the ’bot, which was programmed to back up its system data prior to self-destruct. As he did so he couldn’t help wondering, was he imagining things, or had he just lost his lieutenant . . . for the second time?

  “Go! Go! GO!” the squad leader barked into the comm.

  The order pinged her transceiver, a sharp reminder of many missions past.

  She jerked to awareness with a start, her nerves tighter than a well-set tripline. In one instant she went from drifting through oblivion to combat-ready.

  There were large gaps in her memory, or at least she presumed there were, seeing as the last thing she could recall was deciding blow up a room full of Demons… and preparing to die…again. So who the hell’s cock-up was this? she thought, as the ’bot was powered up and tossed through a nearby gapping hole that used to hold a window.

  “Treybot deployed, Sarge,” Coop subvocalized into his bonejack. “She’s transmitting at . . . 100 percent optimal.”

  To Spec

  Charles E. Gannon

  Mendez, the newest guy in the squad, had been jumpy ever since the worsening weather updates started coming in. The most recent message—that Priestley’s replacement wouldn’t show up for at least another three hours—just made him more anxious. As Eureka command post signed off, Grim saw Mendez hold his new rifle—a flimsy piece of experimental junk known as the Cochrane XM 1—a bit too tightly. So, in an effort to take the newbie’s mind off his anxiety, Grim asked him, “So, what’s on the ‘other’ radio today?”

  A tentative grin twitched at the right corner of Mendez’s mouth. “It’s against regs to listen to—”

  “I’m not a snitch, Mendez.”

  Mendez needed no further encouragement: broad, short, and compact in his pint-sized vacc suit, he made a fast, flat zero-gee hop over to the control panel. Steadying himself on a handhold, he pushed a preset button, jumping the radio over to the Commonwealth Armed Forces frequency.

  But instead of plaintively wailing guitars, they heard a painfully jocular deejay working his way through the end of the news. First, Mendez looked like the kid who got coal for Christmas—but then he went rigid as the announcer segued into the weather:

  “Hey, here’s a CWAF flash from our siblings-in-arms guarding the Big Secret out at Eureka. “Quaff” this one, grunts: they tell us that it’s another beautiful February day out at the Mars L-5 point, with the mercury peaking at minus 215 Celsius. There’s good visibility despite average dust densities and a continued surge of downstream trash sent by some unknown admirers near Mars. But for everyone out here in the fourth orbit, remember: that huge solar storm-front we’ve been watching will move on through in just an hour or so. So come on inside before the weather turns and send a shout out to the folks back home. Don’t let those 2.1 AU stop you.”

  Great: now Mendez looked more anxious than ever. Grim reached out a brown, blunt-fingered hand to shut off the radio, reflecting that this might be the right moment to employ some of the conversational and psychological subtlety for which sergeants have always been famous.

  Grim looked directly into Mendez’s eyes. “What the hell is wrong with you, Mendez?”

  Mendez looked gratifyingly startled, then abashed. “Well, sir—”

  Grim sighed. “Mendez, don’t offend me with that ‘sir’ crap: I’m not an officer. I work for a living.”

  “Yes, si—Master Sergeant Grimsby.”

  Eldridge Grimsby—who was never called anything other than Grim—grunted at the narrow margin by which Mendez had avoided a repetition of the original slur, and nodded for him to continue.

  “I don’t know, Sarge; it just makes me nervous—guarding the Big Secret they’re building on Eureka.”

  “Why?”

  “Well—because it’s a secret, I guess. And if it’s as important as all the security precautions seem to indicate, that means that someone out there”—he swung an arm at the space beyond the bulkhead—“could have us in their crosshairs now, this very second.” When Grim failed to respond in any way, Mendez added, “Sarge, we could die without warning—and without ever knowing what it was we were guarding.”

  Grim stared at him. “And your point is?”

  “Well—that’s an awful lot of risk without an awful lot of information.”

  “Mendez, if the spacesuit you’re wearing hasn’t tipped you off just yet, you’re in the ExoAtmospheric Corps, and we don’t get information; we get orders. And bad food and worse pay. What part of this have you failed to understand?”

  But Grim could see, from the way that Mendez’s gaze wandered away, that his fear wasn’t as general as he had made it sound: there was something more specific behind it. And Grim had a pretty good idea what that might be. “Okay, Mendez, spill it. What have you learned about the Big Secret? Why are we more at risk now?”

  Mendez folded his hands and stared at them. “Sarge, I was floating watch outside the comcenter yesterday and heard the staff officers getting briefed by a pair of civvies.”

  “Okay, Mendez, I’ll bite: who was briefing the staffers?”

  “I heard two names, Sarge. One was some kind of spook, I think: a Mr. Wilder. Darryl Wilder. Mean anything to you?”

  Grim felt his stomach contr
act. “Yeah; security specialist. Ex-Air Force. Then ex-FBI.”

  “Who’s he with now?”

  “Wish I knew.”

  “Private contractor?”

  Grim emitted a rumbling set of amused grunts; he was secretly proud of having a laugh that sounded like an irritated crocodile. “Mendez, guys like Wilder don’t retire. Ever.”

  “So—”

  “So he’s interagency, or an errand boy for the Joint Chiefs, or carrying out an Executive Order.”

  “How do you know about him?”

  “Right after we started setting up shop out here, he was on-station for about a month: always sniffing around, like a security inspector or engineer. Didn’t talk much, never gave an order, but always looking, examining, watching. I think he was the one who suggested building the Big Secret out here on Eureka.”

  “Well, he sure as hell picked a crappy place.”

  “Which was his intention, I’m sure: easy enough to get to Mars from here, and vice versa, but not really on anyone’s flight path, so you see intruders well in advance. Now, you said you heard a second name?”

  Mendez looked sideways at Grim. “This guy was not military or security; sounded like he was involved with building the Big Secret itself.”

  “I ain’t playing twenty questions with you, Mendez: who is he?”

  “You know that guy Wasserman, the professor who—”

  Grim leaned forward before he could stop himself. “Robert Wasserman? The physicist?”

  “High-energy physicist—and engineer. Nobel nominations last two years in a row.”

  “You think they’re really—?”

  “Could be a starship, Sarge—just like the minority scuttlebutt says.”

  Grim leaned back so energetically that he almost floated into a backwards somersault out of his “seat.” Robert Wasserman. And Darryl Wilder. Both out here in the Martian L-5 wasteland. What besides a secret FTL project could explain their presence? And it would also explain why the other blocs were having trash-heaving hissy fits about being kept at arm’s length. If they knew that the Commonwealth was getting close to achieving faster than light travel—

  But Mendez wasn’t done. “And everyone at the debrief was worried, Sarge. Real worried.”

  Hearing Mendez’s tone and words, Grim suddenly felt the first creeping fingers of contagious anxiety. “They were worried? About what?”

  “About this solar storm.”

  Grim tried not to scowl, failed. “Jee-zus; what the hell is it with this storm? With these hourly updates on expected EMP and rad levels, you’d think we’d never seen a flare before.”

  “Sarge, if you check the text of those updates, you’ll find that HQ has never used the word ‘flare’.”

  Grim blinked: that was strangely, and unsettlingly, true. “Then what the hell aren’t they telling us?”

  “Sarge, this is a CME. A big one.”

  When transferring to the ExoAtmo Corps six years ago, Grim had managed—blissfully—to sleep through all the space science crap served up by the rear-echelon weenies, so he was compelled to ask: “What’s a CME?”

  “A coronal mass ejection.”

  “And that means?”

  Grim immediately regretted asking the question, because Mendez—otherwise a good kid—sat a little straighter, and readied himself to deliver A Recitation of The Facts, as was his wont: he was bucking for OCS so hard that Grim wondered if he sometimes got whiplash from the effort. “A coronal mass ejection occurs when the sun actually heaves out a jet of plasma. Much worse than a flare: lots of EMP, hard radiation, and—” Mendez actually shivered “—a big increase in cosmic rays.”

  Now, finally, Grim understood Mendez’s anxiety. In the flippant vernacular of the Service, radioactive emissions—and particularly those of the most energetic, non-particle variety—were collectively known as ‘zoomies.’ Cosmic rays, however, had their own special category: they were ‘ultra-zoomies.’ Unless you were safe inside a (fantastically expensive) electromagnetically-shielded hull or habitat, you just prayed that one of those little nano-scale laser beams didn’t hit a chromosome and clip one of your telomeres too short, thereby kicking off runaway replication. Or, as was the more prosaic diagnosis of a cell gone stupid, cancer. Fortunately, that kind of damage was beyond prediction or control and was, therefore, just part of the random nonsense of the job. So Grim—a hardened veteran—wasn’t disposed to worry about it. Much.

  However, it meant they might have to wait out the storm and hunker down for a very extended watch in their one-room rad shack: a small, pressurized hab module that got its name from what its occupants really cared about: its multi-layered radiation shielding. Designed to house—barely—a three-man team for extended watches, its interior was an inhumanly cramped collection of long-range guidance and tracking computers, sensor and drone control consoles, and a single bunk. Its head was a constant source of black humor and savage derision: by comparison, the fresher of a commuter jet seemed positively palatial. On extended watches in its claustrophobic interior, even Grim had found himself beginning to reconsider the hazards of a spacewalk in exchange for a little extra room to stretch, and a change of scenery. Not that Grim was a fan of EVA ops: he had come late—and unwillingly—to zero-gee maneuver, tactics, and training. And now, to his even greater delight, he was about to find himself the middle of the biggest solar storm on record. He sighed, and found a way to conceal the rest of his ignorance: “So, Mendez, let’s see how much of your training you remember: what are the special protocols for a CME?”

  “Well, we’ll have to pull the sensor and comm array in all the way: if we don’t, we’re sure to fry something. Maybe everything. Not much reason to leave ’em out, anyway: anything but laser-based comm and nav is going to be static-soup.”

  “Not like we have much to scan except the Mars trash.” In response, Mendez frowned again. Grim snorted. “What? Now you’re worried about the Mars trash, too?”

  “Well, the brass is, Sarge. Seems like the other blocs are not dumping the trash anymore—at least not the way they were right after we posted Eureka as a no-fly zone.”

  “So who’s doing it now—and how?”

  “Well, that’s what’s got the brass upset. Word is that Earth HQ got on the horn with Admiral Riggen and tore him a new one. Threatened him with additional proctological procedures if he didn’t find where the trash was coming from and pronto.”

  “God almighty, Mendez: it’s space. How hard can it be to find where it’s coming from? You track back and—”

  But Mendez was shaking his head. “It’s not that kind of trash anymore, Sarge. No metals, nothing too big. Now it’s all composites, plastics: just a bunch of black bodies by the time it reaches us. And a lot of it is so small that—”

  Grim put up a bearish hand. “Okay, professor: that’s enough. I’m not on the review board for your OCS app.”

  Mendez’s eyes bulged, blinked, bulged again. “But Sarge, I wouldn’t—I’m not—”

  “Save it: except for your fear of cosmic rays, you’re too eager to die to be an enlisted man. Also, if the rumors are true, you have more brain cells than an amoeba, so obviously you’re on OCS’s radar.”

  As if on cue, the command circuit toned twice: coded traffic from Base. After going through the tiresome two-sided authentication waltz, the inevitable Junior Grade Lieutenant on the other end got down to business: “Shack Four, we are updating you on your replacement for Priestley: we’ve got a clearance snafu on our end. Probably won’t get it resolved before the end of your watch.”

  As Grim heard the first indignant words come out of his mouth, he realized that he was now shouting at an officer— as had happened too often throughout his career. It did not matter that the officer was a J.G. and therefore the human equivalent of pond scum: this pond scum still ranked him and could pull a seniority marking—a “rocker”—off the bottom of his stack of sergeant’s chevrons. Grim’s realization of this trailed a crucial second behind his sho
ut of: “We’re a man down because of a ‘clearance snafu?’ What the hell kind of bullshit is that . . . sir?” Grim could hear the insincerity in the lagging honorific; knew the J.G. had heard the same. Oh well, Grim hadn’t really liked being a Master Sergeant anyway: too much paperwork.

  “Sergeant Grimsby,”—the voice was markedly colder than the outside temperature—“Priestley can only be replaced by someone who’s cleared for the same special duty.”

  “Special duty? What special duty?”

  Mendez tapped his junk-rifle, muttered: “Sarge, he means the Cochrane. Carrying a field prototype is special duty: along with Priestley, they only cleared five of us for—”

  Grim rolled his eyes. “Jesus Christ. Sir, are you telling me you won’t send out a replacement because you don’t have anyone else who’s permitted to carry around another of these dumb-ass guns?”

  “Sergeant, I’m telling you I can’t send anyone who’s not a part of the field trial: the protocols are quite explicit—and are a top priority, as per Earth HQ.”

  “Great: so we’re down to two men for the rest of the watch.”

  Grim was surprised when the affirmation lagged, and then did not come. Instead, the J.G. said, “No; you’re down to one.”

  Grim looked at Mendez, who was already looking at him. Eyes narrowed, Grim asked the console coolly. “Say again, sir. Sounded to me like you said the duty watch in this shack is to be reduced to one.”

  “That is correct, Sergeant.”

  “That is a violation of our standing orders, sir. One man can’t oversee all the critical systems in the event of an attack. So—with all due respect—I am not going to leave Private Mendez out here on his own. He’s only been on station for—”

  “Sergeant: you’re not leaving Private Mendez. He’s leaving you.”