Spinward Fringe Broadcast 7: Framework (66 page)

“You’ll pay me back,” Captain Berkovitz
said. “Here are the codes, good luck.”

“Thank you, Captain,” Jacob Valent said.

Oz flinched as another ship glanced off the
energy shield above and crashed into the landing pad to his left.
Fires raged to the west, and everywhere else there were collisions
and chaos as thousands of vessels tried to travel without Navnet to
guide them. The pods were still dropping, making matters much
worse.

From their stationary positions, their
fighters fired particle weapons and solid round cannons at the pods
whenever they could get a clear shot, but only a few pilots could
claim credit for blowing any of them apart in the air. Alaka’s son
fired from the top of the hangar, sending beams of deadly light
into the sky.

“We have it,” announced Ayan through Oz’s
command and control system. “We’re broadcasting our own Navnet
signal, and we’ll be covering the whole port.”

He checked and saw that Skyguard Navnet, the
name someone in the bunker decided on, was up and running. “Now
that’s a public service,” he said. The difference wasn’t apparent
overhead yet, and he guessed it wouldn’t be for several seconds,
perhaps longer.

He looked down into the crater where several
technicians inspected the two storey tall pod. “This is one of the
small ones, it looks like,” one of them reported, tapping the three
metre wide drop ship.

“I can see that,” Oz replied. “Any life
signs?”

“Power systems seem to be running, but
that’s all. No life signs. It almost looks like a grave buoy.”

“What? Why?”

“There are bones inside. Metallic, loaded
with dormant nanobots and some kind of materializer tech.”

“Get out of there! Move it!” Oz said. He
looked to Alaka. “Frameworks. Regenerating soldiers.”

The technicians were halfway up the incline
when the sides of the drop pod fell open, revealing ten black boxes
per side. “Spread out around the edges of the crater and open
fire!” Oz ordered.

“On what?” asked one of the soldiers.

The boxes were flung onto the ground around
the drop pod, their lids splitting open to reveal silver coloured
bones within. “Get moving! Start shooting at those boxes, now!”

Most of the unit moved as they were ordered,
but some stood dumbly trying to figure out the situation. He’d
tried to train them, but some of the mercenaries had been on their
own for too long, and weren’t used to following orders without
questioning every detail.

Oz adjusted the power of his rifle to the
highest pulse setting and activated his slug clip before opening
fire on the nearest box. There was enough room in each of the black
containers for a pile of bones, not for a man or woman. The
framework soldiers began forming moments later, surprising and
disgusting the soldiers gathering around the pit. Many of them
stopped firing.

“Shoot at them until they stop forming!” Oz
said. His target was flying to pieces as flesh rose from silver
bones. The bones themselves were what he was going for, and it took
several shots to blast them apart. He didn’t see progress until he
managed to reduce the skull to splinters, then it stopped
regenerating. It took half the energy in his rifle, and an entire
slug clip.

“Grenade!” he shouted as he tossed three
grenades down into the centre of the pit. The few soldiers who were
still fighting at close range made a run for the edge of the
crater. They had plenty of time to get out of the way. The
explosions bought them some time. The frameworks’ progress was
slower with their bones cast apart. If they were separated from the
bulk of their bodies, the skulls started regenerating the bone
structure, which seemed to slow them down a great deal. The pod was
barely damaged.

Alaka cut two fully-formed, muscled male
soldiers in half as they tried to climb to the edge. One of Oz’s
soldiers was dragged into the crater. The attacking framework was
disabled, taking several shots to the head. Another picked up the
soldier and threw him into the middle of the drop pod, where a
matter-to-energy recycler in the centre worked to eat through his
armour, flashing brightly and humming loudly. Metal arms clasped
him to the centre of the open pod, industrial cutters working on
opening his armour. As Oz fought to disable the frameworks standing
in the way, the soldier was torn to pieces by the converter.

The pod began to use materializers to create
weaponry where the framework boxes had been, and the mobile
frameworks reached for armaments instead of charging for Oz’s
soldiers on the edge of the crater. He looked to Alaka, who was
busy grabbing a framework soldier by the face, breaking his neck
and throwing him over his shoulder where the second line of
soldiers opened fire on him. Fourteen Triton warriors shot the
regenerating framework to pieces but it still took nearly a minute
for them to reduce their enemy to the point that it could
regenerate no more.

“We’re going to lose this,” Oz told Alaka.
“Explosives, we have to re-crater this crater.”

The nafalli nodded. “Cover me.”

Oz slapped his last solid round clip into
his rifle and took aim at a framework soldier who was claiming a
fresh handgun from the pod. He shot the gun first, then started
pouring rounds into the thing’s head. It took eleven hits to reduce
the thing’s cranium to bits, and the body began regenerating right
away. Oz had to move on to the next target.

“Cover Alaka!” he cried, firing one burst
after another at the emerging frameworks. They were over a hundred
versus less than fifty, and the barrels of some of Oz’s soldiers
weapons were beginning to glow red thanks to their ceaseless rate
of fire. Alaka batted frameworks aside, and threw two over
everyone’s heads so they landed in the open in front of the second
line.

When he arrived at the base of the drop pod,
he shoved a three kilogram explosive pack into the weapon rack,
setting the shape of the charge so it focused the damage on the pod
while he dodged the grasping metal arms attached to the matter
recycler. “Fire in the hole!” Alaka shouted as he leapt free of the
crater.

Oz shouted, “Everyone back!” as he turned
and ran.

He managed to make it less than a dozen
steps before he was struck by the force of the explosion and thrown
off his feet. His shields and inertial dampers protected him from
the blast. His headgear blacked out, protecting him from going
blind from the accompanying flash.

One of his soldiers, Private Lani Serra, was
in stasis after losing a leg and her arm up to the elbow. She was
halfway up the creater when the bomb went off. Medics were already
checking in as he looked at her status. She would be all right.

The people who stood near the edge of the
crater but weren’t in heavy armour were being treated by their
suits for minor injuries ranging from broken fingers and ribs to
legs and arms. Soldiers in heavy armour were spared. He wished they
had enough extreme environment or heavy combat armour to go around,
but that wasn’t the situation. They were desperately short.

Alaka helped Oz to his feet and they looked
back at the crater. A white and red glow emanated from within, and
when he got close enough, he could see that there was nothing left
of the pod or the frameworks. The explosion left a crater within
the crater where several metres of earth had been either vaporised
or melted. “I think we got ‘em,” Alaka said.

“How many of those charges do we have?” Oz
asked.

“Three.”

Oz queried their new Navnet system, checking
on how many pods made it to the ground and his heart sank when he
saw the result. Forty-two made it to Port Rush city and the shanty
port without taking fire. They were all open and powered up. “We’re
going to need a few more if we want to win this.”

Navnet squawked an alert and Oz looked into
the sky where it pointed. A massive fireball streaked across the
sky, leaving a thick white trail behind. He couldn’t make out the
shape well, but Navnet told him it was a half-kilometer long
destroyer named The Jonestown. “Someone forgot to hit the destruct
switch when their ship was headed into the atmosphere. That’s going
to hit with its hull intact.”

“Will our shield hold?” asked Alaka
calmly.

“It won’t come down close enough to do
damage here, but Chomro, the continent across the sea to the west
is in trouble,” Oz brought Ayan up on the comm. “You see this?”

“I do. It’ll send a shockwave across Chomro.
We’ll see waves reaching a hundred fifty or so metres high, far
from us, but Ruby is happy she moved her ship. Other ships are in
failing orbits. I’m watching.”

“What is our Carthan friend saying about his
fleet?” Oz asked.

“We’re on our own,” Ayan replied.

* * *

After rifling through the lockers, bins, and
upper compartments of the Freeground faster than light craft, Alice
decided on the best equipment. A pair of admiral-level command
units were slapped onto each of her arms. A high durability
infantry command and control unit was slapped onto her left arm
with the optional extended suite.

The wormhole reaching the outer Rega Gain
system was compressed enough so she could start watching news about
Jacob, Ayan, Oz, and everyone else from Freeground. “What a find!”
she exclaimed when the long list of stories about Ayan Rice and the
few stories about Jacob came up. There were hours of footage, and
she watched it all while rummaging through the craft.

She used another comm unit to spray a fresh
vacsuit onto herself, and when she was prompted for the colour she
thought for a moment. “I think powder blue is my favourite colour
now, interesting.” A regular infantry vacsuit was put on overtop,
and over that she slipped into a H.A.M.E.S., a Heavy Armour
Mechanized Encounter Suit. When it engaged, it felt like it clamped
onto her firmly - worryingly so at first - and then it learned to
move with her.

The whole suit was a centimeter thick at the
largest parts, but it weighed two hundred forty kilograms because
of its density and the equipment built into it. After it finished
powering on, she spun in place. “Moves like I’m naked, and doesn’t
look like much more than a really old Freeground safety suit.
They’ve come a long way.” The shield systems, antigravity pulse
barrier, and strength components were all ready to go. Instructions
played in the head’s up display on how to use its features. She
watched them in high speed.

Alice looked at the optional shell, with its
metal plates and knight-like helmet and shook her head. “Too
tacky.” The weapons were a whole other thing.

Hours passed as she travelled to the Rega
Gain system, examining all the literature that went with the
weapons, the ammunition, and laughed at the military demonstration
recordings. It was a new thing, explosions made her giggle.

At long last, she settled on an XO-99, the
most powerful rifle Freeground ever made. There was only one in the
shuttle. It asked for an access code the moment she picked it up,
and she impatiently connected with it using her framework
interface.

“Well, I still understand this stuff, that’s
nice,” she said as she hurriedly cracked the code and added herself
to the database of authorized users, deleting everyone else. The
weapon powered on, drawing a base charge from her vacsuit’s excess
energy storage.

The weapon was light, but one point four
metres long. It could fire energy rounds and had two barrels for
other types of projectiles. “I don’t know if I’ll need this stuff,
but I’d rather have it than not,” she said as she strapped on two
sidearms, one energy-based and another that fired tiny blades that
were intended to cut into flesh then burst. The rounds could also
explode against a harder object.

A large armoured equipment pack came next.
She shoved all the explosive ammunition she could find for her new
rifle, including combo explosive and EMP rounds made to kill Eden
Fleet robots. A tube the size of her forearm contained a portable
shelter for four, another contained a high-grade medical system
that looked like a body bag, and she hacked the explosives closet
for a selection of grenades and portable shields.

When she was finished she’d packed the
metre-tall armoured pack with all the gear, food and ammunition
that would fit. She didn’t neglect the sellables, either. Small
comm units that could spray a vacsuit or two filled a pocket,
something she knew she could get good credits for. A couple of
sidearms were packed in for good measure; weapons were always a
great hit with the traders. She strapped two Freeground Marine D9
rifles to the outside of the pack just in case the new and improved
one she’d adopted turned out to be cheap and junky.

The news feeds came to an end, and she
checked her comm to make sure there weren’t any more. To her
surprise, there was a sudden stop to all news entries. Alice looked
for more details and found a final broadcast from one of the better
Stellarnet news outlets. “The Order of Eden are here in force, with
the largest colony, combat, and cultivation ship we’ve seen since
the end of the Third Era. Is this the end of freedom in this solar
system? This newscaster isn’t waiting to find out. Evacuate, find
your way to one of the core worlds, where you can still find
democracy, or a gathering of organized souls. This is Marc Bowman,
wishing you luck.”

That was the end of the broadcast, there was
nothing else in the stream from that outlet. “At least he left in
style. A wimpy, gutless style, but he’s a newscaster. He’d probably
wet himself if I put a gun in his hand.”

Alice checked the cockpit displays to ensure
that everything was set for a good wormhole exit. The ship’s energy
reserves were at full, and everything was functioning well. She lay
a hand on a data port built into the console and connected to the
ship. In seconds, she programmed a script that would bring shields
up, scan for Navnet, listen for distress signals, and begin
plotting a course to Tamber with the help of any friendly
navigational systems in range. None of the ship’s weapons could be
automatically fired; they all had to be operated manually, so she
left them alone. “Wouldn’t do much good, anyway,” she said to
herself as she finished programming the computer.