The rest of the day was more of the same. One fight after another, always with some new problem I had to figure out how to handle, and nine times out of ten something went unexpectedly wrong halfway through the mission. My extraction team lost a drop ship on the way down. My intel on the enemy turned out to be totally wrong. My commander changed the mission halfway through, or something critical about the situation changed.
It was frustrating. Really, really frustrating. It felt like Chief West was cheating, changing the rules on me whenever it looked like I might win. But my instincts told me that real fights were always like that. The other guy never just stands there and lets you beat him. He fights back, and he doesn’t fight fair if he has a choice about it. Things go wrong, sometimes horribly wrong, and complaining about it doesn’t help. You adapt, and find a way to get the mission done anyway. Or you die, and your civilians pay the price for your failure. That’s the nature of war.
It was exhilarating.
All my life, the matrons had told me to be a good girl. Be nice to everyone. Cooperate, and be a meek little herd animal. Violence was unthinkable in their fragile little world.
My third mission of the day started out with the enemy nuking the Square Deal while we were grounded at their spaceport. The bots I commanded were loaded up with tactical nukes and Californium rounds, and my mission was to fight my way across the city to capture the command bunker for the enemy’s ground-based space defenses so we could take off without getting blown out of the sky. By the time the battle was done half a million simulated civilians were dead, and their city was a smoking ruin. But I captured the darned bunker, and as I watched the ship lift I looked out over the devastation and realized I felt good about it.
They’d sprung a completely unwarranted ambush on us, and I’d made them pay for it. That was the kind of accomplishment I could be proud of. At the orphanage I’d struggled to make myself care about gardening methods and the habits of obscure animal species. But here, on the battlefield, I felt at home.
It counted as a failure, of course. I was supposed to get myself back on board before the ship lifted, and there was no way that was happening with half an armored brigade between me and the spaceport. But I’d do better next time.
The next day’s assignments weren’t any easier. But slowly, one step at a time, I was learning how to do this. How to command a force of bots by giving them orders and knowing what they’d do to carry them out, instead of trying to watch their every move. How to surf through the torrent of sensor data they provided and pick out the observations that mattered. How to guess what the enemy was up to, and turn the tables on him.
My development manager was also cheating mercilessly, of course. By the third day of training I’d somehow grown a whole new software module, that let me integrate all my sensor feeds into a coherent model of the combat zone. It was like having a giant 3D model in my head, that showed the whole battlefield in perfect detail. Enemies were in focus when I could see them, and blurred into an uncertain cloud of possible locations when I couldn’t. The smallest clue was enough to tell me where an enemy bot had gone, and even when there weren’t any clues I always knew how far they could have gotten since I’d last seen them.
In the cat-and-mouse game of urban warfare that was an incredible advantage, and it got me my first real victory. I was supposed to be taking out the reactors on a station we were docked with, when twenty minutes into the fight I realized that the squad that had just popped up to block my advance had to be the one that had been guarding the enemy control room earlier. So I threw my reserves into the opening, and five minutes later my bots were blowing the enemy commander’s brains out all over his console.
“Now that’s how you do it,” Chief West said gruffly. “Take out the mind, and the bodies don’t matter.”
Naturally, he just gave me harder scenarios after that.
First I got to pick out powered armor for myself, which would have been great except it meant that I wasn’t just an abstract target anymore. I had to actually move to keep up with my bots when we were fighting, while giving orders at the same time. I guess that was why the virtual UI had a voice-driven mode, but even so I couldn’t imagine running a squad competently without my multitasking ability.
It was terribly tempting to pop up and take a shot with my own weapons now and then, instead of having my bots do everything. But I knew Chief West was just waiting for me to make a rookie mistake like that, so I resisted the temptation. Good thing, since that was when he started adding more bot types to the mix.
I got assassin bots with stealth suites almost as good as my own, and little bomb bots that were equally hard to spot. Specialized sensor bots were the counter to those, and once they were enabled I finally convinced the VR to give me a better view as well. There were engineering bots that could repair battle damage and do demolition. There were electronic warfare swarms that could fan out and listen for enemy radio traffic, so I could target them from a distance. There were bots with rapid-fire grenade launchers, artillery bots that could loft shells high over a battlefield, and a million options for exotic ammunition.
On the fourth day of training I had enough of a handle on it all that the chief started letting me pick my own troops again. Just my escort team at first, then a few more in each scenario, until finally I was picking my whole team. Of course, the jerk couldn’t let me do that after he told me the mission. No, I had to decide on my core team before I found out what I was supposed to do next. Then I could switch out one squad for something different, but I only had two minutes to decide what to take.
I’d barely gotten used to that when he started throwing the crazy stuff at me.
First it was an enemy that had bots made of liquid metal. Their performance kind of sucked compared to normal warbots, but shooting holes in them didn’t do anything. I had to roast them with flamers or defocused lasers to destroy the nanotech that made them work, and that was a mission where I’d gone heavy on gunbots. Ugh.
Then there was an enemy that used swarms of bioweapons instead of bots. The little gnat things that covered lenses with paint and excreted glue into the joints of my bots were annoying as heck.
It kept getting weirder after that. Animated smoke clouds. Transforming bots. Suicide bots full of gray goo. Swarms of microbots that could assemble to make bigger bots. Funky weapons, from particle beams to sound cannons. Bots that surrounded themselves with holographic decoys. Bots that looked like scary movie monsters, or innocent little kids.
The chief just laughed when I complained about that one.
“You think no one in the galaxy uses psychological warfare?” He said. “There are colonies that specialize in it, kid. The enemy’s mind is the real target, and shit like this lets you hit him through his own sensor feeds. You’re rattled now, right? No amount of tanks would have done that.”
I hated to admit it, but he was right. Out in the real world I ran my hands through my hair, and tried to get my emotions under control.