“This is unbelievable.” Denu shook his head. “They’re just trying to kill people.”
“It’s war, Denu,” Gina replied. “It’s not what we wanted, but apparently it’s what the Council finds preferable to losing. Although I don’t think they expected it to go this far, either. Most of their recent moves look more like ad libs than strategies.” She looked at me. “Three Council members still outstanding. This could be orders from any or all of them.”
“My money’s on Brennan, though.” Kal glanced at each of us. “Some of the others at least seemed to be misguided but well-intentioned. He was all about the power.”
“Maybe. Let’s get this done, then we can worry about assigning blame.” I looked up as my heads-up display showed the busters coming up on the fields of battle. I ordered them to take out the attackers—if possible, by taking out critical systems, but otherwise by whatever worked.
In seconds, the reports came back. Four ships downed by clean reactor strikes, three more totally destroyed. The two remaining ships turned tail and fled.
I took a moment to mourn the people I’d just killed. Very probably they were just following orders. But those orders had meant knocking a city containing several hundred civilians out of the sky. There was a point where following orders didn’t cut it.
I put a couple of cloaked drones on the tail of the escaping ships, and recalled my surviving busters. If there had been any doubt in the Council’s teeny minds that the cursed replicant was still extant, this engagement had removed it. The Council forces would be moving much more cautiously in the future.
“Tell the city defenders not to shoot down the surviving ships,” I said to Gina. “They might lead us back to the leadership.”
Gina nodded, and we settled back onto the grass. It was an odd juxtaposition—revolutionary leaders, in the middle of a shooting war, directing operations while lounging on a manicured lawn.
*
I tracked the fleeing ships to a relatively small mat in the northern current, earmarked as an automated farming platform. Video images from the drones showed it to be anything but. A small but well-stocked airbase was probably the home of the Council fleet.
“Well, that’s not good.” Kal shook his head. “We’ll have to check absolutely every mat on inventory, now.”
I grinned at him. “Seems the Council has been planning for this for a long time.”
“Or at least, planning for something,” he replied. “I can’t see how they could have predicted your flying cities.”
I nodded at that. “This doesn’t really look military, though. Security forces, maybe. Let’s send in the roamers and a mop-up squad.”
Kal nodded. He and Gina started typing furiously, while I worked on loading up the roamer squad into cargo drones.
*
It took longer than expected to prepare for our assault. I was surprised to discover that, with all the buzzing around and knocking out enemy ships and missiles, I was down to the dregs with busters and roamers. And without the system printers under my command, I couldn’t immediately print more. In the end, Gina rounded up a squad of security people, and we stormed the defenders the old-fashioned way.
Sort of. I was still far happier with sacrificing an AMI than a human.
Gina led the charge herself. The busters couldn’t smash the buildings at speed—I didn’t want to kill anyone—but they could smack gun emplacements hard enough to force defenders back.
“Concentrate on all defenders on the west walls,” Gina’s voice ordered over the comm system. Our security people set up a blistering fire which kept the defenders down.
“Marcus, there’s a weak spot on the wall at the southwest side. Can you get an explosive into there?”
“Uh, no, no explosives, Gina. Still too dangerous to print. But…”
A weak spot was easy to target. A ship buster came in at about a hundred klicks and rammed the corner of the wall. Five hundred kilograms of steel completely did a number on it. Maybe a little too well. As usual, I seemed to be a little more enthusiastic with the ramming than was really required.
“Thanks, Captain Crash. All units, enter with caution.”
I sent in some roamers as well, although all I had left were the little guys. The video feed showed a stunned, dust-covered group with no fight left in them.
“I think they’re done, Gina. It’s all mop-up.”
*
Gina, normally a somewhat dour, brooding person, was grinning unabashedly. “We got Brennan. No question that he ordered the attacks. We’ll be debriefing the security people we captured, but I’ll bet none of the other Council members were involved in this.”
“Still, they’ll all have to be dealt with. There will be trials. There will likely be convictions. Then there will be the question of what to do with them.” Kal shrugged. “My money’s on menial labor.”
Gina blew out a noisy breath. “Yeah, let’s not count our chickens just yet. We don’t know if there are any more loci of resistance. We may get individuals who keep fighting back, but hopefully we can contain the damage from that. As long as there are no more Council members in the wind, though, I think that’s it for anything organized.”
“The biggest thing will be accounting for all the remaining Council members, then.” Kal looked at me.
“Sorry buddy, I don’t have any special tricks for finding individuals on an entire planet.” I gave him a crooked smile. “Or off-planet, which is also a possibility.”
“Oy.” Kal rubbed the bridge of his nose with two fingers. “This really came down to the wire. If we’d had to fight just one more battle, we probably would have run out of assets. Do you have the printers back?”
I nodded. “And I’ve already started replacement construction, but it’ll be a few days before anything pops out the other end. If we do find ourselves another fight—” I looked pointedly at Gina. “—we’d probably better go for containment rather than a punch-up.”
Kal nodded. “Meanwhile, we also have a whole society to put back together. I hope you guys are okay with overtime.”
We all grinned back at him.
Found
Bill
September 2227
Epsilon Eridani
I stared at the readings, frankly disbelieving. I glanced over at Garfield—his wide eyes and slack jaw said it all.
We’d slapped together a quick prototype, based on the power-core scans from the alien hulk. A small prototype. According to our measurements, this kludged-together rig was outperforming our fusion reactors five to one.
“Well, this explains a lot,” Garfield finally said.
“Mmm. Of course, we’re not just going to rip out all our reactors and replace them with this stuff.”
“Well, no.” Garfield grinned at me. “But a pilot project…”
At that moment, Will popped in.