Drysine Legacy (The Spiral Wars Book 2) (45 page)

Sard defenders now fell back past a series of dark bands encircling the Tartarus interior. Trace had supposed those bands constituted a manufacturing layer, but now they seemed more complex — enclosed factory complexes interlocking with the open frameworks that hacksaws seemed to prefer as living space. Tacnet highlighted defensive positions the sard had hastily set up, hundreds of drones feeding data into what was undoubtedly the largest and most stable tacnet setup Trace had ever seen. Her marines put missiles on those locations, primed for airburst, and drones rushed them before sard could recover their aim.

“Get in and find cover!” Trace commanded, above the background flurry of small chatter, noncoms keeping formations tight, buddies warning of debris or exposure to incoming fire. “I want good forward fire positions, we are the base of fire for the drysines!”

Her eye flicked to the countdown as she approached — it was T-minus-twenty-six minutes until
Makimakala
’s arrival. Ahead was a latticework of steel frames, deep and complex like honeycomb with drones scrambling through the gaps. She decelerated hard at fifty meters and followed Kono though an opening.

The interior was black, alien and harsh… yet strangely beautiful. Central structures were like ornamental stars, with exploding points fanning in all directions, twenty meters wide and spreading like fingers. Even now several drones backed onto those fingers with an almost sensuous wiggle, and made a connection. Power recharge? A hive-mind uplink for hardline data transfer? There were dozens of star-structures in irregular rows amidst the interconnecting hexagons of overlapping spheres, everything both predictable and utterly unpredictable at the same time.

“Some kind of goddamn living room,”
Kono guessed, jetting quickly past the stars to the far side, and cover with a view of the Tartarus interior.

“Guess they’re not much on scrabble, huh?”
said Rael. Drones jetted past, suddenly close-up and scary again, evading humans and each other with grace and pushing off steel structures with nimble limbs. Trace grabbed a star arm to halt her momentum, and paused to study tacnet — always hard with so much going on around her, and particularly so here.

Drysines were pouring in behind, but in straggling formation. Most of the armouries were nearer the perimeter, closer to where drones would deploy to meet external threats. Arming there, then getting here, took a while, particularly as some of the armouries in other parts of Tartarus were still engulfed in heavy fighting. It looked to Trace as though four armouries had been thoroughly captured, producing these successful thrusts of armed drones toward the central hub. Another three armouries were much less successful, with far heavier sard resistance than they’d seen here, and unarmed drones destroyed in large numbers. If they couldn’t shoot back, even drones were vulnerable.

“Styx?” she asked. “Our numbers here are good but our positioning is patchy, we’ve got massive gaps on our flanks. We can’t spread out because we lose fire volume intensity, I’d rather they tried to flank us through those gaps and get caught in our crossfire.”

“Yes,”
Styx agreed.

“Do we have enough? Can you tell what we’re up against?” Random fire snapped off nearby steel, close enough to feel the vibration through her gloved grip on cover.

“Uncertain as yet. Jamming is strong, and I have no eyes on the hub to inform tacnet further. There should be no advancing beyond this position until our numbers grow.”

“I copy that.” It gnawed at her, though. She was hardly eager to take her marines across open space into the kind of defences that could be waiting… but somewhere up ahead was a deepynine queen, and quite probably an alo presence of some sort. And
that
connection, if they could see it, prove it and understand it, could tell them just how much danger the human race was actually in. Without that knowledge, they were blind.

“Hey buddy, you okay?”
That was Terez, talking to a drone of all things. One-and-a-half times his size in the body, far wider across the legs… only several of those legs were missing from gunfire, and it now struggled to remove a dangling remnant with its cutting-tool. A slash and it was gone, and the drone departed.

“Leo, you fucking nuts?”
Rolonde asked Terez.

“Just making conversation,”
said Terez.
“Guess they’re not big on conversation.”

Trace’s feed began fracturing with static, and her suit tactical warned her that local coms traffic had reached such intense volumes that it was interfering with her marines’ communications. “Styx, tell your drones to turn it down a bit, they’re breaking up our coms.”

“I will tell them Major. They are excited and angry, and unaccustomed to coordinating with humans.”

Trace found it easier to pretend she hadn’t heard that, rather than trying to process it. Styx was translating into concepts humans might understand, surely, and she couldn’t take it literally. A drone grappled onto the star-arm she was using for cover, and Trace saw the little portal open in the gap between armoured thorax and abdomen, and the arm inserted. Definitely some kind of data-uplink… Rael had made a joke about scrabble, but electronic brains had no need for physical pastimes when they could experience an electronic, VR reality far more intensely than humans. Was this really their communal space, where they came to plug into a larger, singular reality?

She pushed out from within the star-frame, and was confronted by a drone stopping immediately before her with a burst of white thrust. Dual eyes, one big, one small and off-set within a central mobile head, a big cutting tool held in small arms below, twin rotary cannon on the main abdomen, recently added from the armoury. Amidst added thrusters, half its arms were occupied, while a middle pair gestured at her aggressively.

“Whoa whoa whoa!”
Kono said in alarm, swinging his rifle about to the drone confronting his major.

“It’s okay Giddy,” she told him. “Just cool it.” Red laser light flashed on her visor from the drone’s carapace… lasercom? Her suit received and decoded it reflexively.

“This unit is A1,”
announced a very synthetic voice in her ear. Definitely a vocal program, something dumb and automatic employed by a machine that was neither, to translate its familiar numerical communications into speech.
“A1 has local command. A1 will coordinate with humans.”

“Yes A1,” Trace replied, with deliberate calm. “How many levels of local command do you have?”

“Multiple. A1 is sufficient for humans. Integrate tactical analysis, proceed go five nine alpha.”
As the vocal processor got carried away, or A1 forgot to limit its instructions to things useful to humans… but suddenly Trace’s tacnet flashed and expanded, as though infused with many multiples of incoming data. Individual markers now glowed blue, marking drone positions beside her marines. Amazingly, those markers were not alone, but were joined by a spaghetti of multi-coloured lines. Binding those drones together in distinct formations, Trace realised. Like squads and sections, though here the numbers were irregular and she’d never make sense of it in this limited time…

“Thank you A1,” she told the drone. “We will coordinate and kill deepynines.” It seemed safest to repeat that common cause, at this range.

“Yes,”
said A1, and jetted about and away.

“What the hell was that?”
Kono wondered.

“Damn thing took control of my suit commands by lasercom and fed me some kind of hacksaw tacnet,” Trace told him. That was pretty scary — that they really
could
just assume control of human tech by remote. Or maybe these drones only knew how because Styx had shown them. “That’s an individual, their regional commander. Called himself A1.”

“No shit,”
muttered Rolonde, unimpressed.

“They’re individuals?”
Arime asked.
“Not just numbers?”
It was impossible to know, Trace thought. Like it was impossible to know what Styx actually thought of anything, given all of her vocal cues were just simulations that fooled human brains into thinking they’d heard human emotion where none existed. A1 identified himself as an individual because that was what humans understood. What kind of individual consciousness could just be reprogrammed by an enemy queen, and deprived of the free will to resist?

“Major Thakur this is Phoenix,
” came Lieutenant Shilu’s voice.
“Picket vessels are returning, most of the firebases appear to have been destroyed. Phoenix has cover on the far side of Tartarus, current trajectories suggest picket vessels are not threatening us but returning to Tartarus.”

Trace flipped tacnet displays to see
Phoenix
’s feed — sure enough, multiple warships were racing in on pulse-V, and not spreading wide to open an angle on
Phoenix
, tucked tight behind Tartarus.

“They’re going to flank us, probably with sard warriors, they’ll be dropped right in our rear. I’m expecting a major deepynine counterattack any moment, they’ll catch us between them.” Ahead, the shooting had died down considerably. Far off to one side, her apparent ‘right’ on this orientation, some major fireworks were flaring near the Tartarus rim. “The sard are putting most of their fight back into recapturing the warships the drysines took, we’ve only got two fully on our side, another three are heavily contested and I can’t get any reading on the rest… my viewpoint here is a lot more limited than I’d like and I don’t know how much of this tacnet feed is reliable.”

Her visor countdown showed twenty-three minutes to
Makimakala
’s arrival. If the tavalai was late, or had somehow decided to screw them over, then there’d be no getting out of this for humans or drysines.

“Major,”
came Erik’s voice,
“if you can’t get to the core, withdraw on AT-7.”

“I’m getting what I came for,” Trace said grimly. Ahead, tacnet erupted with massive movement. “Here we go, counter-attack commencing… Charlie Platoon, full defensive, I want clean kills and watch your ammo.”

She jetted to where the outer framework gave her cover and a rifle brace, activating the mild forearm magnetism that stopped her from drifting out of cover. The habitation complex, if that was what it was, spread in a wide layer across this part of the inner Tartarus sphere. Ahead of her were more nodules, blocking a clear field of fire but impractical for defence because of their exposure. It hadn’t stopped many of the drysines from occupying them, nor the surrounding superstructure, creating a multi-layered defence. Trace bit back an objection — surely drysines knew better how they’d best defend against a zero-G massed deepynine assault than she did.

Tacnet lit up with motion as those forward positions saw the enemy, and moments later Trace could see them too — hundreds of approaching dots amidst the structures, weaving to avoid obstructions. Bigger than drysines, she reckoned even from this range, and recalling AT-7’s brief escort on the way in. A hundred flashes across that front as missile fire erupted, then accelerated… and Trace thought of TK55, and the deepynine commander’s rain of missiles.

On one flank, tacnet showed her an entire formation of drysine defenders suddenly moving. Styx had some kind of clever plan, she thought, and glanced that way past her obstructing cover. Perhaps seventy or eighty drones were pulling off that side, darting away on hard thrust, leaving the flank exposed. But they weren’t curling about to make a flanking run on the incoming assault. They were just leaving.

“Styx!” Trace snapped, as deepynine missiles tracked and dodged, engaged by defensive fire from drones and marines alike. Explosions darkened her visor, long strings of brilliant light. “You’re leaving our flank exposed.” No reply. The forward line engaged, a brilliance of chain guns and proximity detonations, drysines falling back with zigzagging bursts of thrust while firing. “Styx!”

“It is a superior priority,”
said Styx, with no more emotion than she ever said anything.
“Focus on this defence.”

“Follow superior instruction,”
A1 added.

Trace could have wasted time exclaiming that she didn’t take orders from a disembodied head in a human shuttle. “Corporal Penn,” she said instead. He was the only one of Charlie Platoon not in formation, having stayed behind in AT-7 with Styx and Romki for vehicle protection… and one other purpose too. “Point your weapon at Styx. If she’s deliberately getting us killed, she’ll go first.”

“I copy Major,”
said Penn.

Immediately one of the nearby drones abandoned cover to face them, dual cannons humming in pre-fire warmup, legs withdrawn and body braced for recoil. Exclamations across Trace’s coms told her that all across her formation, other drones were doing the same.

“If I wanted you dead, Major,”
said Styx,
“there is a far more simple method. You are an organic who appreciates a fact. This is rare. My fact is that you are not in command. You know this. Stop pretending and fight like a drysine, with purpose and method.”

T
if had never concentrated so hard
in her life. All hopes of keeping her relative V to sane levels had evaporated once it became clear that the drysine uprising in this part of Tartarus had not been very successful. Fighting was ongoing, chaotic and scattered, random groups of drones and sard jetting back and forth, exchanging fire and killing each other. In this flying environment, too much speed was lethal, but too little speed was worse.

Tif flew like a crazy teenager with a death wish, sliding, skidding and rolling through Tartarus’s impossible maze, burning hard for V and trajectory when she could, then braking harder and relying on her visor display to show what lay ‘ahead’ as she approached it tail-first and skidding. Jersey stayed with her, and it became increasingly difficult to remain in second spot like she was supposed to, as every time she hit thrust PH-4 was a little faster than her lead. The drysine escort kept up with some difficulty, their thrusters barely large enough for the 5-G burns a combat shuttle could pull. Frequently one or several would deviate from the shuttles’ course to swivel and shoot at something Tif was too busy to notice. Just as frequently, fire would snap back, and tracer would flash and bounce off steel structure. Jersey reported one hit so far but no real damage — if PH-4 had taken a hit, Tif was not aware of it. Coming out of one sliding burn her armscomp flashed red with visible enemy — several small armoured figures, sard warriors, caught in mid-dash between cover. Tif locked with her visor-target and fired, but they were passing too fast and no doubt even more startled to be nearly struck by a couple of suicidal human shuttles, as no return fire chased them.

Then finally ahead some big structures, solid and enclosed within the maze like prey trapped in the grasp of an alien organism. A series of connected cylinders and spheres, surrounded by the web-like tangle of hacksaw habitation and smaller shipping docks. Solid structures meant organics habitation, Tif reckoned, as they looked to contain atmosphere. Hacksaws didn’t need it, and were quite happy in this kids’ climbing gym gone mad.

Now Jersey was announcing something, and Lee was highlighting red targets on Tif’s visor as fire whipped past the canopy. Tif kicked the nose up, slammed thrust for evasion, then rotated back onto target, sighting a ship at the docks and firing. It was a small sublight transport, maybe three times the size of a shuttle, and pieces flew off as it flashed by. Larger explosions as Jersey’s missiles did more significant damage, and Tif hammered thrust again to push PH-4 through a narrow gap in the habitation tangle, then spun the nose before more thrust and a wide, skidding burn to circle around the cluster and back again.

“Target Tif, target!”
Lee was shouting from the backseat, and Tif noted her visor’s red highlight upon docking tubes and fuel canisters. She caught a brief glimpse of sard, and weapons firing, then more target highlights — on this orbital burn she was going to fly straight into their field of fire. She locked guns and jammed the trigger, saw one emplacement ripped to bits as steel framework disintegrated, then shifted to another as Lee fired missiles… her own guns blew a pressurised docking tank just before the missiles hit beside a habitat, multiple explosions blinding all forward view.

More fire shredded sard defences further left — that was Jersey, now properly behind and following Tif’s lead. Tif repressed nervous tension — she wasn’t a trained military pilot and taking the lead in a shooting fight hadn’t been in the plan. She continued the burn, nose in toward the habitat cluster as she passed scattering wreckage from the explosion… and shouted a warning before even Lee did, seeing new movement on scan, at least ten marks incoming from further out.

Even as she hit thrust, two disintegrated and the others broke off amidst heavy fire as the drysine escort hit them — sard powered armour, spinning and returning fire with precise coordination. Tif dove for the cover of a heavy power regulator wrapped around a cross-brace, thrusting with vision-blurring force to come to a complete halt, then let a pair of sard zip into her line-of-sight. She fired as both saw her and evaded, one was hit and spun like a top, the other fired back and Tif felt the jolt even as she let the autos guide her guns to target, and the second suit’s ammo blew with a brief flash.

Scan showed her the drysines pulverising the rest, as Lee fired more missiles into another docked transport. It blew, as peripheral vision showed a drone running down an injured sard warrior, a flash from its saw-blade and the sard came apart at the waist.

“We lost an escort,”
Singh observed from PH-3’s rear seat.
“Another’s damaged, better make this fast.”

“PH-4, continue fire suppression,”
said Jersey, pulling around for an approach run.
“Sard know we’re here now, stay sharp. Delta Platoon, stand by for combat deploy.”

“Delta copies,”
came Lieutenant Crozier’s voice. All of
Phoenix
knew Crozier had been rattled by events on Joma Station. Tif hoped she didn’t play the dumb cub to restore her honour.

Damage lights blinked at her as she recommenced her circular trajectory about the complex, warning of a nose thruster malfunction even as she noticed the controls responding awkwardly on that side.
“They took out an attitude thruster, we’re leaking a little air but the sealant’s plugging it,”
Lee told her.
“Are we flying okay?”

“Fry fine,” said Tif, mentally figuring what she’d have to do differently to yaw. Scan showed her PH-3’s position breaking into multiple blips on track to the complex — that was Delta Platoon deploying out the rear. A big relief for her personally, because marines outside the shuttle were a lot more use than marines locked inside, and this area of the Tartarus just got a whole lot safer.

“Delta is clear,”
said Crozier, followed by a lot of marine-chatter as the units agreed on which parts of the complex they were going to hit, based on where they thought the prisoners were. They’d have to be fast, Tif thought, or the sard would just kill the prisoners to stop them from being rescued. Big risk though that was, she was certain that if
she
were held captive by sard, she’d prefer
Phoenix
marines to take the chance. Being held captive by the chah’nas had been bad enough. She was certain the sard would make the chah’nas seem gentle.

“
T
hey are flanking
!” Trace announced as all holy hell broke loose across the marine-and-drysine defensive front. “Charlie Platoon, displace and manoeuvre! Too long in one spot makes you a sitting duck!”

She took her own advice, broke cover and moved with a burst of thrust as missiles flashed in, her visor blanking dark from multiple explosions and a rain of shrapnel. Luckily for her the deepynines were more intent on killing drysines than humans, and now divided in dark-silver streams to flow about the defensive positions and through neighbouring gaps. The volume of fire between them and the drysine forward defences was insane, chain guns pouring like rain, autocannon bursts detonating like strings of firecrackers, drysines ducking back and manoeuvring to counter the aggressive thrusts and sweeps, like flocks of angry silver birds.

Trace hit new cover and braced her Koshaim in search of a target, but more interested in tacnet than shooting. Command Squad repositioned with her, less restrained with precise shots at deepynines still rarely closer than five hundred meters. Fire sparked and snapped off Kono’s side and he swore — probably random fire, every bullet had to go somewhere. Incoming and outgoing missiles were less effective as jamming took its toll, but random high explosive could still get lucky.

First Squad was now deploying outward along one flank, through the drysine ‘living quarters’ toward a factory complex as the deepynines looked to swarm around that side, sadly not stupid enough to charge head-on into strong defensive positions. Trace put fire onto several flashing deepynines, saw a hit, then a fast move-and-fire that shredded a drysine before a burst of hard thrust saw them escape amidst pursuing and covering fire. The deepynines were certainly getting the better of it. The drysines were worker drones, multi-purposed as all drones were, and well capable of effective combat, but not to the same standard as these deepynine specialists. Already there were many floating, spinning metal corpses, and for every one that was deepynine, two were drysine.

“Major,”
Lieutenant Shilu spoke in the chaos.
“We count four of the picket vessels closing to dock directly behind your location, ETA four minutes. If they’ve got combat shuttles you can expect assault at your rear in barely ten, maybe twelve minutes.”

A nearby explosion sent Arime tumbling. Chain gun rounds hosed across them, Trace ducking back as a shot clubbed her arm with a teeth-jarring rattle. Marine armour could take one of those per segment, maybe. Multiple hits and everything fell apart, including the occupant.

“Makimakala’s coming in hot, no word on her intentions yet,”
Shilu continued.
“She won’t get there in time to save you from those sard in your rear.”

“I copy
Phoenix
. It’s gonna be tight.” Truth was, if she couldn’t get past these deepynines, they were all going to be trapped here.

“I’m okay,”
Arime answered queries from his comrades.
“Visuals off, systems wobbly… dammit, lifesupport’s out.”

“Irfy, get your ass back to AT-7,”
Kono told him between shooting.

“It’s okay, I think I can…”

“That’s an order Private! Now!”

Arime hit thrust and went, muttering at his now-twenty-minutes of emergency air supply.

“Breakthrough at 230,” said Trace as she watched it happen, tacnet showing a weakpoint in drysine defences suddenly fold and a deepynine thrust cut through. “That’s us Command Squad, follow me!”

Staying inside the open-frame habitats was going to slow them down, so she accelerated through a gap, reoriented to keep most of the structure between herself and the fighting, then kept burning. The big structures extended relative ‘north’ of their forward facing, and Trace wove past supports, pipes and machinery as drysine fire converged on the apex of the deepynine thrust.

Drones on neighbouring structures were hit by return fire, Trace saw one blasted sideways as its thruster pod exploded, another was shredded by chain guns… and then unarmed drones were zooming past, flying straight at the attackers. Those who had not managed to find weapons at the armoury had been holding back, and now committed themselves as a final, suicidal reserve, burning to full V.

“It’s a suicide charge!” Trace told her squad. “Get open and find targets!” As she peeled sideways, away from the covering structures and into open space, still at considerable velocity as she selected full missile spread and fired, then lined up her rifle as the rest of Command did the same. Charging drysines were torn apart by oncoming deepynines, struggling to retain control and aim straight for their enemies even as they lost limbs, pods and lives. Explosions tore through them, but then the marines’ missiles were hitting, relatively unjammed amidst the drysine lines… and in the carnage Trace got a good sight on a spinning deepynine and hammered a ten round burst at ninety meters.

Nine hit and the deepynine’s ammo blew, as her squad found similar preoccupied targets for similar results. Survivors ignored them, firing instead on drysines, killing several then smashing through a habitat structure ahead. Trace decelerated hard, pumped multiple grenades into the habitat, then plunged through a gap as other grenades followed, and drysine fire tore free-form steel to so much confetti.

Inside was a whirlwind of explosive residue and debris, within which many-legged nightmare figures clashed, spun and fired. Armscomp IDed several as deepynine and Trace fired without question, blazing full auto and only hoping she didn’t hit drysines by mistake. More explosions, armoured limbs shattering. A deepynine decapitated a drysine and blasted through partitions to swing both chain guns onto Trace, and was hit by autocannon even as Trace dodged, then struck physically by a charging drysine that rammed a humming blade through its midsection in a flurry of scrabbling legs.

Other shooting stopped, and the only thing in the habitat was humans, a few drysines, and dead, twitching drones. Trace checked her displays, and could barely believe that all her squad were still alive. Deepynines hated drysines so much, the homicidal bastards were flat out
ignoring
the humans, even as it killed them.

The drone that had killed Trace’s attacker nimbly swatted some debris, checked a dead comrade with a fast probe, then fixed a red lasercom at Trace’s visor.
“Human guns effective. Koshaim model, armour piercing. Good deepynine killer.”

Trace frowned. The synthetic voice was familiar. “A1? Is that you?”

“Yes. More breakthroughs at grid-114. Fight on, parren-successor.”
A1 turned and jetted off. ‘Parren-successor’? The drysine’s parren alliance had ended twenty five thousand years ago. And now this drysine thought that
Phoenix
was their replacement?

“
I
ncoming mark
!” Geish announced from Scan One. “Right on the money, that looks like
Makimakala
.”

“Transponder identification,
Makimakala
confirmed!” said Shilu at Coms. “She’s broadcasting wide and loud!”

“Welcome to the party, froggies,” someone muttered. That was a ‘get out of my way’ signal, Erik thought. Anyone who didn’t would be identified as hostile and targeted for destruction.

“Outer pickets are evasive!” said Jiri at Scan Two. “No change of course from the others.”

Phoenix
now hid on the far side of Tartarus, just ten klicks off its surface. The picket vessels seemed content to leave her there, knowing that the first one to poke its nose into view around Tartarus’s curving horizon would get it shot off. Four ships were now approaching Tartarus’s far side instead, presumably to drop off combat soldiers — deepynine drones or sard warriors, it wasn’t possible to tell what the picket ships were carrying. Only now they had
Makimakala
charging down on them from behind, high-V and hostile.