The Great Destroyer (23 page)

He crept forward silently, looking down to ensure that he stepped well away from any dead leaves or dry twigs that could reveal his position.  Six yards away.

As the final two seconds ticked down on Art’s internal clock, he sprang forward, covering the short distance to the Ushah scout, who whipped his head around just in time to see Ascalon coming to take his life away.  He opened his mouth to scream, but never got the noise out as Art smashed the diamond-tipped spear through his shorter enemy’s brain, killing the reptile-like Ushah with ease.

He glanced over ten yards to the west and saw Simon pulling his own Ascalon back through the mangled remains of the other scout’s head.  “The way forward is clear,” Art radioed to George and the other Charlies.

* * *

The Charlies pushed forward without rest or hesitation, closing on Colony 4.  Joan now assumed control of the operation.  Art understood humans well enough to know that this seamless transition of authority could never happen among the ego-driven beings that had created him.  But Art knew that George didn’t care about the prestige of the operation. 

All the Charlies recognized that Joan was the only one of their number who had actually been inside of an Ushah colony.  She had meticulously studied the defenses, and she was the Charlie IV most likely to get them into the colony without raising an alarm.

“Wait for my signal,” Joan messaged as the Charlies fanned out to encircle Colony 4.

Art watched the video feed streaming in from Joan’s optical sensor.  She ran quickly from tree to tree until she was at the edge of the clearing, a few dozen yards from the pressure bubble surrounding the Ushah colony.  Art knew that she had cut a hole in that bubble the last time she had infiltrated the installation, but the Ushah would have figured out that trick and taken precautions to make sure it could not be repeated.  Joan was using the back-up strategy Yazov and she had devised in case the bubble idea could not be implemented for that first raid.

There were video sensors all along the periphery of the colony now, trying to find the devilish robots that had killed so many Ushah.  The Project Charlie team had devised a weapon to deal with the sensors, however.

Joan got low to the ground, her chest scraping the dirt, and crawled forward until her sensors told her there was a 5 percent chance that the Ushah video sensors would be able to discern her figure on the ground.  Then she slowly but smoothly retrieved a short rifle from a holster at her back.

The rifle was a far smaller caliber than the standard .50 caliber Gram that the Charlies carried into battle.  It was actually a .22 caliber rifle, almost absurdly small for use as a weapon.  Its small caliber made it naturally quiet, however, and the large silencer at the end of the barrel rendered it quieter still.

Joan took aim at the optical sensor just to the left of one of Colony 4’s four main airlocks.  Without the heartbeat and need to breathe that bedeviled human snipers, Joan fired with near-perfect accuracy. 

The optical sensor did not shatter from the impact, but the front glass was cracked, and the bullet had destroyed its internal electronics.  The loudest noise from the whole exchange was the soft crack of the small glass panel breaking.

Joan immediately ran forward into the now blind area immediately to the left of the clear airlock door.  She slung the rifle back over her back, then pulled out two Ascalons, and waited.

George watched, lying on his chest, from one hundred yards straight ahead of the airlock.  Within a minute, the airlock began to open as several Ushah soldiers came to see what the problem was.

The guards were just about to exit the outer airlock when George radioed Joan.  “Now.”

The warning wasn’t strictly necessary.  Unlike a human, Joan could stay totally focused and not let her guard down.  The moment she saw the airlock door begin to open, she turned the corner and jammed the spear through the first Ushah’s chest with one hand.  With the other, she wielded her second Ascalon, smashing through the second guard’s skull.

Three Charlies had stood ready to cover Joan in case more than two guards had come through the airlock, but they proved unnecessary.  Having penetrated the airlock, Joan put one of the Ascalons back into a sheath at her waist and examined the airlock control panel.  Project Charlie computer scientists had long since mastered the Ushah systems, and she quickly and fluidly triggered the airlock sequence to enter the colony. 

She entered the colony proper, and saw a long main street bordered by massive buildings.  In the distance, she could see a green area, a park where Ushah could lounge in comfort.  The temperature was high, perhaps 140 degrees Fahrenheit, though it didn’t matter much to Joan, whose processor was well cooled.

Joan consulted her map.  It had been one of the most important documents uncovered by Joan’s bugs, and George had quickly recognized the Ushah colony’s vulnerability. 

While the main security station was buried deep underground—the colony had six sublevels, each roughly the size of the surface structures—environmental control was just fifty yards inside the complex, on the surface.  It was a standalone structure, and the Ushah apparently hadn’t had enough experience with defensive strategy to learn that putting
anything
vital out in the open was a fatal mistake.

It was mid-day, and the nocturnal Ushah would mostly be asleep.  Still, someone would probably be radioing the dead guards soon and wondering why they weren’t responding.

Joan ran quickly over to the environmental control building.  Ushah doors were often left unlocked, a byproduct of the intense socialization of the species.  The doors were quite small, though.  Joan crouched down and pushed in the door, her Ascalon at the ready in case she ran into more armed guards.

There were none.  She found herself in an empty room, a reception area of some kind. 

Ushah architecture was predicated on a much more social design than human architecture.  Where human buildings were a hive of small chambers and offices, the Ushah had a few large rooms. Joan read a chart next to the entrance showing the titles of the various rooms.

Some rooms in Ushah buildings reflected functions that could also be found in human dwellings.  There were bathrooms, stairs, and storage closets which differed significantly in design but not in purpose from those used by humans.

Finally, she saw the room marked “Control” on the third floor.  She strode to the nearest staircase and activated the electronic door, crouching to enter.  The stairs were very short, and she took them three at a time.

As she passed the second floor, she heard a door swish open behind her and heard a cry of alarm.  She kept vaulting up the stairs, but swiveled her head to see one of the engineer caste of Ushah staring at her dumbly, frozen in terror.

She decided against stopping to kill this Ushah.  The alarm was surely being raised already in the security center of the colony, and the unarmed four-foot tall engineer was no threat to the seven foot Charlie.

She reached the third floor and crouched down to push in the door.  Inside, she found a low-ceiling room, about six feet tall, crammed with workstations.  There were also three Ushah scientists or engineers, apparently a skeleton crew working the time of day when most Ushah were sleeping. 

The skeleton crew immediately ran for the exit, and Joan once again decided to let the Ushah live.  Time was of the essence, and the scientists and engineers would be powerless to stop her.

She inserted a data card into a slot in one of the workstations.  Project Charlie, mostly Dmitry Peskov, had an intimate knowledge of Ushah programming from years of study.  Peskov had written this program for use in the bug-planting operation, but it would probably work just as well now.

The program was very simple.  The environmental control software was designed to take in data from sensors all around the bubble so that it could detect any breaches immediately.  Instead of getting that data from the sensors, however, the control software would now retrieve data directly from the data card.  That data would be completely normal regardless of whatever breaches might actually occur.

“Initiate breach,” Joan radioed back simply to her comrades.

The seventeen Charlies outside the bubble took the message.  They closed on the bubble and used their Ascalons to tear entry holes.  They sealed the holes after they were through.  After all, Art thought, they’d almost certainly be taking prisoners today, and there was no reason to risk valuable prisoners because of a loss in heat or oxygen density. 

Once inside the colony, the Charlies split up into five groups.  Four groups of two Charlies each headed to each of the four exits.  There were a few guards in close proximity to each exit, and about ten on their way to the northern entrance to see what had happened to the guards sent to investigate the broken camera outside the airlock.  Joan had killed those guards, of course, and the Ushah soldiers had just enough time to discover that fact before Sun (Tzu) and Indira (Gandhi) ambushed the group and dispatched them with grenades and .50 caliber rifle fire.

The remaining eight Charlies converged on the security center from eight different directions.  Even if the Charlies had not had a map, stairs were easy to find.  The Ushah had very logically put in dozens of wide staircases throughout the colony, making vertical movement as efficient as possible in the event of an emergency. 

The consequence of this design decision was that there was no one chokepoint where Ushah defenders could mount an organized defense.  Any particularly well-defended staircase could be easily bypassed by using a different staircase.

George had explained the plan to Art, who had appreciated the cleverness.  It also showed Art just how far George had come in his understanding of biological psychology.

To the biological mind of the Ushah, attack meant concentration on a single point because that was how a biological mind evolved.  Organized war had from the very beginning required coordination and discipline.  For biological beings with limited communication methods and the tendency to panic, the various soldiers needed to stick together to receive commands aurally and encourage each other. 

As communications and training improved and history progressed, mobs of men became columns of men, which became lines of men, which became dispersed clusters of men, which became even more dispersed clusters.  George assumed that the Ushah had gone through a similar evolution, and Art considered that any biological being would have to do likewise.

The Charlies had essentially perfected communications and training.  They could instantly transmit and process information to perfectly complement each other’s actions, even if they were hundreds of miles apart.  And so they attacked the security center from all directions, making coherent defense impossible.

The plan was to engage only Ushah soldiers, though that plan was complicated by the fact that the soldiers wouldn’t be wearing their distinctive thermal suits and pressure masks inside of the colony.  The Ushah soldiers were on average ten inches taller than, say, a scientist/engineer, but it could be difficult to estimate height perfectly on the run.

A number of Ushah had come out of their group dwellings to see what was happening, and the sound of gunfire and grenade explosions had now alerted everyone in the colony that an attack was underway.  Some innocent Ushah had already been cut down by the Charlies because of mistaken identification.  Those losses did trouble the Charlies, but only because their mission was to secure as many prisoners as possible, and dead Ushah could tell no tales.

Art was proceeding down past the third sublevel toward the security center when two Ushah guards emerged from a large room into the hallway 124 meters in front of him.  They were followed by an Ushah taller than a scientist/engineer and too short to be a soldier.  Art identified a classic escort pattern as they turned to run toward a staircase

The deductive part of Art’s processor went to work.  There were a few Ushah castes that fit the height range: maintenance personnel, artists, and diplomat/leaders.  The only one of those castes likely to warrant an escort was the last.

Art judged that a diplomat/leader would be important enough to divert temporarily from his course for.  The Ushah, missing their pressure suits, showed up easily on infrared scanners, and in the chaos, the enemy soldiers had not noticed Art down the street.