By Other Means Page 4

  Another glance at the lake and a memory came flooding back. This was the lake where we vacationed. But was this just a memory or was it an actual scene? I flicked eyes left and right, taking in the three dimensional reality of the sight. No, this was no memory. Somehow I had been transported several million miles to Earth and brought to this lovely spot.

  But then I recalled that the lake had been drained before I was commissioned and the mountains leveled for ore. Unless I had been taken back in time this scene couldn’t be real, despite the evidence of my senses.

  I felt my legs bending and my arms twisting, but when I tried to resist I realized I still had no control, no volition. It was as if my limbs had minds of their own. Still, the movement after so long felt good, the muscles moving with strength and purpose.

  Whatever was causing this stayed out of sight, beyond every perception but the sense of movement—kinesthetic; I think it’s called. I tried to move my head to see my feet but it felt as if my neck was made of stone. Neither did I catch a glimpse of forearms or hands even though my senses said they should be in plain sight.

  So many mysteries and so little knowledge. I tried to recall how I had come to this, tried to recall anything more recent than my boyhood memories.

  And failed.

  I ordered two of my men and three of the cybers out of the hatch and onto the surface of the captured Shardie ship. If we were lucky they could find some way to get inside and confront the aliens. Kill them if necessary, but maybe it wouldn’t come to that. I made sure that Corporal Henderson wasn’t among the four. He’d recently lost his family to the Shardies and might not be shy about using his weapon.

  “No apparent hatches,” one of the cybers reported. “There are little holes everywhere, about a hands-breadth wide. The infrared shows there’s something really hot amidships. Might be the engine.” There was a long pause. “Downloading images now.”

  “See what your engineers can make of those pictures,” The captain instructed Heron. “See if you can chip off some samples.”

  Soon after, the squad rigged some netting to give the engineers a way to secure themselves as they worked. The cybers were still searching for an entrance.

  The captain stood beside me as we watched the tactical feeds streaming back. “Make sure we get a sample of that thing,” he said. “If I have to fire the mains and melt the son-of-a-bitch we’ll need something for the scientists to analyze.”

  I knew he wouldn’t hesitate if it tried to escape. “All ships, link your mains to mine,” he ordered. “If I have to blow this guy I want to be sure you are with me and not part of the melt.” That got a few chuckles.

  Nobody mentioned my marines.

  “Count backwards from ten,” the voice asked as I groggily wakened. Must not have kept the covers on, was my first thought. I felt cold but wasn’t shivering. Must be autumn if the nights were so cool. “T. te…Ten,” I tried to say but couldn’t feel my mouth forming the words.

  “I need you to say it out loud,” the voice prompted as I struggled to make sense of what he said. Hadn’t he heard me?

  I took a deep breath and struggled to form the words but still couldn’t feel tongue or lips. “Ten!” Something screeched behind me. “Nine.” Lower this time. “Eight.” A normal voice I thought.

  “Excellent.”

  There were some mechanical sounds. Something touched my face, a feather of sensation, quickly gone. There was a flash and then, I could see! It took a moment to adjust before I noticed that the lights were too bright and the colors garish. I tried, but couldn’t squint. “Hurts,” I said and the lights immediately dimmed. There seemed to be a doctor looking into my eyes, a doctor with a bright red face and hands, as if he were wearing florescent paint. I noticed that his gown was pale violet instead of the traditional white. When he smiled his teeth glowed.

  “Funny colors,” I said, and heard my voice coming from somewhere behind me.

  “We’ll fix that in a few days but for now we’re going to reconnect you. Don’t try to move until I tell you.”

  Stupid thing to say, besides, my cheek itched where the feather had touched. I lifted my hand to scratch and heard whirling sounds as something moved. It sounded mechanical and heavy. Somebody screamed.

  It was me.

  “I’ve got her tight as a tick,” the quartermaster reported shortly afterward, meaning that the Shardie ship had been trussed tightly to our hull and blanketed by every bit of electronic suppression gear we had. “Charges armed and ready.” If need be the captain could sever the cables linking the Shardie to our ships in an instant.

  I continued to watch the engineers move equipment across the gap between the Shardie and our ship as they continued to work. I saw small sparks, those would be the engineers’ cutting torches, a new approach now that the drills and saws had failed them.

  “Some sort of ceramic, it looks like,” the engineering chief reported. I could tell which one it was by the bright red suit he wore in contrast to my marines’ dull black and the engineers’ glaring white. Three engineers had set up a large tripod and connected it to some thick cables emanating from Heron. “Never seen anything like this hull material, but there ain’t nothing can stand up to a laser torch. We’ll have that sample for you soon.”

  The Shardie hadn’t moved since we bracketed it. In fact, there was no sign that it was anything but an inert hunk of glass with something hot in the middle.

  Apparently the engineers had gotten the laser working. As they activated the torch a pale blue beam grew to white brilliance beneath the tripod. “Looks like she’s cutting through,” the chief said seconds before a gout of flame shot up and quickly grew to consume the red and white suits in a rapidly expanding circle. The Shardie began to...

  “What the…” was all I had time to say before the Shardie became a miniature nova.

  Alarm bells were clamoring, pressure changing as the blast doors slammed to preserve sections from the vacuum. The board was a sea of crimson dotted with stars of warning lights beneath while whistling air screamed where the metal shards had made their entrance. The hatch door was a twisted mass blocking the corridor from the bridge.

  The pain in my body was immense, almost more than I could bear. Each intake of breath was an agony of scorching air, each exhalation a scream of rasping torture. I kept hoping each would subside, but the horror of each breath added to the previous, growing ever more intense as the moments passed.

  I looked across the slick deck, past the arms and legs, one with my boot on it. “Captain, captain,” screamed Guns as he clutched the captain’s body. “Oh God, we’ve got to save him.” I didn’t think that was possible since the captain’s head was beside me and across the room from Guns.

  “He’s dead,” I said too calmly as I grew aware of my own injuries. I couldn’t feel my legs and one arm felt as if it were on fire. My gut felt cold and empty. My pants felt full, warm, and smelled like shit.

  A pair of hands appeared on either side and ripped the malformed hatch aside. One of my marines, Winslow, Harold, stepped onto the bridge. “Lieutenant?”

  “Here,” I groaned.

  “You are seriously injured, sir,” Winslow said as he lifted me effortlessly and carried me to the hatch. I think I screamed from the pain as bone grated on bone. Guns staggered behind us, carrying his right arm with what remained of his left hand.

  Winslow continued to carry me. “Our men?” I whispered, meaning the ones outside.

  “All gone,” he replied and I hoped he meant the same.

  “Help Guns,” I ordered.

  “He is bleeding profusely from multiple trauma and will likely die within minutes,” the cyber replied. “I believe that you can survive.”

  Two Navy ratings stumbled into the corridor. “Decks Four and Five gone,” the one with the bloody leg yelled. “Access from this deck’s cut off by a fire.”

  I noticed severe burns on the left side of the other rating’s face when he glanced my way. “Jesus, how ca
n he still be alive?” he cried after glancing my way.

  “Help me get him into the escape pod,” Winslow ordered, his voice crackling in command mode. “You, put a tourniquet on your leg and take care of him. There’s a medical pack on board.”

  “What about me?” the other rating asked with a catch in his voice and a glance at Gun’s bloody body lying on the deck.

  “We do what we can to save the ship and crew,” Winslow, Harold replied as he slammed the hatch shut and cut off any reply. A few seconds later the force of the ejection sequence blew the pod free from the ship and me free from my pain.

  I awoke so free from pain that I wondered if I had made the wrong choice and was in heaven. Then I realized that I was breathing, there were things happening in my body, and smells assailed my nostrils. I had been saved by my choice, but: “What have you done to me?”

  “You were close to death, Lieutenant,” a distant voice replied. “We saved what we could.” He went on to describe the extensive modifications to my body, my supersensitive senses, the improved vision—and I recalled Winslow, Harold’s six eyes—and all of the other things that separated a cybermarine from ordinary humans.

  “What else did you do?” I said. I never felt more alive and vigorous. This might not be bad at all.

  The voice didn’t respond immediately and when it did it was a different voice—probably a psychologist. “We had to choose what parts of your memories to retain,” the new voice said softly. “Your new brain is artificial, a silicon and gel mixture that gives you consciousness, volition, and memories but doesn’t have the capacity of...Look, there wasn’t enough for most of your past so we had to choose what would be most important to you. Your education, training, and recent war experiences use most of the memory volume, leaving just enough room for a few boyhood memories.”

  No, that couldn’t be true, I thought, the memories of my prize calf, the lake, and mother clear in my mind. Try as I might, there were nothing else I could recall with such clarity. There were fragments, just flashes of scenes without context, and faces without names. On the other hand, every memory of my twelve years in the Navy, of training and skills were clear as if they had happened seconds before. Most of what had made me unique was gone forever, along with emotions, faith, and the important things that had formed my personality. “Did I have any family beside my mother?”

  “Sorry,” the voice added. It didn’t sound terribly apologetic.

  “There is a choice,” someone had whispered softly weeks before. “Do you want to get back at those who did this?” they’d asked.

  Now I realized there was something I could do, something I could still contribute to the war effort. “Yes,” I’d whispered, fully understanding the commitment I was making. It would give me the means to pay those bastards back for what they had done to Guns, Comms, Nav, and the rest of the squadron, but most of all, it was a way of paying back Winslow, Harold for his sacrifice.

  Blankets

  Jeff Young

  Collatoral damage, thought Kiersey staring at the small sandaled foot as he pulled more branches over the body. That’s what Lieutenant Roberts would call this, but all Kiersey could see was a young boy who should have been running and playing. Their medic, Leigh looked over the casualty quickly and logged the cause of death as exposure. She had taken a blood sample for confirmation because Leigh was nothing if not diligent. If the exploratory force from the Ross weren’t here on the planet, well the kid at his feet might still be alive—Kiersey cut himself off. Time to reign it in and focus on the task at hand, he thought.

  “Eyes ahead, Kiersey. No way you get to keep looking at my ass.”

  Shaking his head, Kiersey stopped his impromptu burial to stare at Bangs. She wasn’t just all talk; she had a bad habit of acting out of hand as well. Taking her LinAcc rifle in one hand she proceeded to wriggle suggestively. In a motion almost too fast to see Bangs dropped the rifle into her cradling hands and whipped around so that its bore faced Kiersey for a second and swung away.

  “Bangs!” Roberts’ voice cut through the comm, “Get on point and cut it.”

  She looked at Kiersey a moment longer, reshouldered her weapon, then slapped her ass before moving ahead. Shaking his head, Kiersey turned away from her antics. Tapping the contact plate on his temple twice brought up the enhancement and overlay to his vision. He pushed the viewpoint up and out until he could see all of the team highlighted in ghostly blue spread out over the floor of the valley. The Mosquito.net system of microaerosats that he’d deployed was spreading and increasing their coverage. Each one of the team had an aerosat shadowing them and Kiersey could view any individual—more importantly so could Roberts. To his left Anderev flanked Kiersey while Breadle and Peak brought up the rear. Heyer and Michaels ranged to right and Roberts stayed to the center.

  “Move out,” came Roberts’ order.

  Pulling the viewpoint even higher, Kiersey looked over the terrain. The team was working its way up the valley toward the highest point in the area and the targeted lookout emplacement. One valley over, the secondary team was moving slower, keeping to the hedgerows and avoiding the open areas of the tilled fields. Kiersey continued to spread the net, carefully maintaining a cautious overlap of each of the aerosat elements. The others all had their specialties and this was his. He felt a brief jab of satisfaction at the way he performed as the commtech.

  While he’d listened earlier to Roberts’ impassioned briefing about the necessity of securing Cansec, the Sylvan Seven world that was their current assignment, Kiersey was having trouble squaring what they’d been told with the limited amount of resistance the team had encountered. Where were the dangerous rebels that Roberts warned them of? The Ross had dropped teams now for two weeks and they received little resistance. The thought hit him—he’d served in enough action on heavily colonized worlds to know that the boy he’d buried could have easily carried a sizeable explosive device into a trusting company and wreaked havoc. But everything Kiersey saw pointed to someone who’d wandered out into the woods and died of natural causes. He tried to focus on that.

  Anderev’s hand on his shoulder brought him back into focus. Blinking, Kiersey readjusted his vision and nodded at the veteran combat specialist. With two fingers, Anderev gestured him forward and then loped off to the left resuming his position. The valley turned and now Kiersey could see the rise ahead. He pushed several mosquito.net ’sats ahead of them toward the target, keeping them high and spread wide. The group of ’sat’s pinged him back—one kilometer ahead there were three IR sources that bore metallic returns moving toward the team. Kiersey flipped the info over to Roberts and the lieutenant called Bangs to a halt, sending the flankers ahead. Moments later weapon fire tore through the quiet of the tree-covered hillsides of the valley.

  Transcript Committee Hearing, Sylvan Seven Atrocities

  General Pressman: The war had stopped. We were simply unable to continue to promote an effective campaign against the renegade worlds. The systems which were dependent upon the support of the renegades and were within reach were recaptured and opposition was quelled. The remaining seven worlds continued to resist. We had the troop carriers, the troops, and the desire to finish the conflict, but we no longer had the backing or the finances. We were not given the option to stop the conflict.

  Senator Wellheim: I’m sorry, General, maybe I misunderstood. You told me you couldn’t continue.

  General Pressman: Under traditional methods, we had no means of an assured victory.

  Senator Wellheim: You seem to be implying that you were considering alternatives; alternatives that perhaps were outside of the Geneva Convention, Articles II.

  General Pressman: I’m stating a fact. Implying nothing. You already know what we did. You just need to hear me say it. It will go quicker, be more efficient, and cost less overall if you do not interrupt.

  There were a number of radical ideas proposed, most of which were summarily dismissed. The final solution was based upon the fact th
e selected troop carriers were prepared to make the nadir transition to return from the fringe to the central stars and that redeployment would take an unacceptable amount of time and cost. Given that each nadir jump takes four objective years in real time and one year subjective time, the task force of seven ships was twelve years out. All ships were contacted; new orders were issued and the task force turned about.

  Senator Wellheim: Let me stop you there, General, your use of the word contact is a bit of a euphemism, isn’t it?

  General Pressman: The military-class AI’s of the ships were contacted and given new orders which were not revealed to the human complement.

  Senator Wellheim: Wasn’t one of those orders to ensure the failure of the refueling drones?

  General Pressman: We made sure that what was necessary was done.

  Senator Wellheim: You are content with the result?

  General Pressman: We achieved the reacquisition of the colonies. That is the only result that matters.

  “What the hell was that? What kind of idiot makes that much noise?” Peak asked over the comm.

  Kiersey swung his bar-buster around at the sounds from ahead. He snugged the helmet down on his head, his fingers briefly catching on the hanger hook on the back. The rectangular bar-buster hummed in his hands when the weapon’s field went live. His gun was limited in accuracy but the amount of ammunition it could sling made up for that failing. As the hostile fire ahead of them started up again, Kiersey realized what was bothering Peak. All of the combat team’s weapons were silent until impact; the older style slug throwers made a racket and gave away their user’s positions. When Kiersey looked at the view from the net, he realized there were no IR spikes in the area that matched the trajectories of the enemy fire.