Temple of S.A.R.A.H. 5: Debug Mode (12 page)

“I’ll tell you what. You have my permission to do this. However, try to limit the impact on other projects as much as possible,” Vance replied. “There are a few thousand new people on their way here from the core worlds and we are getting hundreds of new people every week from Earth.  Which reminds me Eric, Coryn has asked me to speak to you on behalf of the education unit here on the base. It seems there is a rather large number of potential software engineers taking shape in our school system and she was wondering if you could spare a few hours to lecture to them about AI programming. There seems to be a lot of interest in the biocytes as well. Coryn asked me to discover if Doctor Christy Cowan could speak as well.”

“I’ll do everything I can to make the time Sir. Do I contact Coryn?” I asked.

“That would be fine. I think she has a crush on you anyway,” Vance said smiling sadly.

“I’ll make time for this. Education is just as important as research,” Christy added.

Both Ced and Christy thanked Vance for his time and left his office. I kissed Christy softly as she left, but remained to speak to Vance.

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“Was there something else, Eric?” Vance asked me.

“Vance, you look like hell, you’ve aged twenty years over night. I know damn good and well you haven’t slept and I’m certain Coryn is beside herself with worry. You need an outlet. Keeping secrets like this can and will kill you,” I said. “I know you really don’t want to talk to me about it and normally I would respect that. I get the feeling this is actually more personal than it is professional, even though I know I have the clearance. It’s my duty as your friend to help you bear the heavy emotional burdens. That is what friends are for. So, start talking.”

Vance stood and got us both something to drink from the replicator. “It’s a bit too early for anything stronger than your coffee, but I’m afraid you’ll wish it wasn’t,” he said. “We’ve taken losses.”

“Some losses were expected, but I take it they have been worse than projected. I can also tell that something happened to either Captain He’rsree or Sergeant Tul-sa,” I said, hoping to prompt him to start talking. The ploy worked and he told me that He’rsree had serious injuries but was at the aide station. He didn’t have the exact figures and names, but there had been other losses as well. Even Colonel Cren’lith had been injured.

“It’s still pretty early down there. The fighting seems to have lessened but we don’t know if it’s because the Queen has run out of soldiers or because the sun is coming up and the Aracs have a hard time seeing in bright sunlight. The actual assault on the hive hasn’t even started yet because night fell over the area before we located the entrances. We also greatly underestimated the maturity of the hive. From what we have been able to put together, this hive was much more mature than even the conservatives guessed. We have yet to discover an explanation for this since there simply hasn’t been enough time since the pod came down.

“If the other hive is as far along as this one is, we may have to make a ground assault on it as well. Orbital bombardment simply can’t penetrate deep enough to kill the entire hive. Initial investigations into the Canadian hive are telling us it goes hundreds of feet down. If the Saharan hive is that mature, nothing we can use on it from orbit will do the job.”

“Will we be able to make another assault after the one in Canada?” I asked.

Vance shook his head. “When I said we’ve suffered casualties, I meant we’ve taken serious casualties. We’re close to the point where I’m going to abort the mission. If it weren’t for the fact that Yellowknife and a few other population centers are in striking distance of the hive, I probably would. I’ve already spoken to High Command. They are dispatching the entire Tenth Heavy Infantry Division to us. We just have to figure out a way to keep the hives from expanding until they get here.”

“Sir, I mean no disrespect to our troops, you know that, but how did an unarmed hive managed to do this much damage to our people?” I asked.

“They weren’t unarmed. But that really didn’t matter all that much. The fighting was so close that most of our weapons were useless. The Aracs were on our people before most of them could even fire a shot,” Vance replied. “How did they get weapons?” He added in frustration.

“It sounds like it wasn’t the weapons that hurt us the worst. The Aracs fought mostly hand to hand?” I asked.

He nodded. “They are a lot stronger than our people are, even augmented by the armor. That’s why I seemed so excited when you proposed a new design.”

“I don’t know how much more of a strength boost the new stuff will give. What we really need is a method of beating these fuckers in close quarters,” I said. “We know they don’t like extreme heat and they need an atmosphere close to ours to breath. We can’t use pesticides because that would poison the atmosphere for us as well.”

Vance narrowed his eyes at me. “I think you’ve been hanging around Ced too much. You’re turning into a weapons designer. What are you thinking?”

“Well, I think it might work for the hives but nowhere else. Why can’t we flood the tunnel complex with an explosive gas then ignite it. We’d need to seal all the entrances we could find, but still supply oxygen for the fire.” I shook my head. “It’s just an idea. The main problem with that one is that if we don’t know where all the tunnels are, we could end up doing far more damage than planned. Then again, we could always just use flame throwers when clearing the tunnels, if we could find a fuel that would burn hot enough and fast enough,” I said still thinking out loud.

“Elerium Nitroxide is used as a fuel in de-orbiting thrusters salvage companies use. It’s easy to handle as long as it’s not mixed, extremely volatile when mixed and burns very hot and very cleanly. It leaves a nitrogen heavy water as a byproduct,” Vance suggested. “I wouldn’t want to be caught in a blast from it, even in armor.”

“That might be the ticket, then. We just need to create better heat shielding in the armor,” I said. “I don’t see that as a major issue, but again it needs the new armor when we need it now.” I sighed. “I’m sorry for thinking out loud and babbling on about weapons when you were telling me about our losses. It’s just one of the ways I deal with worry, I try to occupy my mind with something so I don’t dwell on a worst case scenario.”

“I wish I could do that, but it’s my job to worry and plan for those worst case scenarios. I know when I get the news from the attack, it’s going to be bad. There are a lot of families I will have to notify, and that is something I’ve never been able to accept easily,” Vance replied.

“I don’t think anyone accepts that duty easily,” I said. “I know it’s one of the many things about being in the military I don’t envy you.”

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M
arine Embarkation Bay

Alliance Apollo Base

Selene, Earth’s Moon

Sol System

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V
ance’s idea for a flamethrower was passed along to the remaining ground troops and several portable devices were constructed to assist in the cleaning out of the hive. Teams were assembled and sent into the hive led by flamethrower crews. They worked pretty well except they tended to drive most of the remaining Aracs deeper and deeper underground.

Several final confrontations resulted in which flame again played a large part. However, the Aracs had placed several booby traps and mines in an attempt to kill the Marines chasing them and create a hole in the lines the Aracs could slip past. It didn’t work. The drones would detect the small devices and warn the team approaching, which quickly deactivated it or detonated it safely.

A literal mountain of new information about the hive was obtained during that assault. The tunnels of the hive were coated in a substance excreted by the scout type of Arac. The stuff was classified as a resin although it was almost as strong as plas-crete and served the same function in the tunnels of the hive. Any wiring or electrical cabling was done while the resin was being applied. If a change was needed afterward, a new coating of resin as applied over the new cable run. Whether by design or simply as a byproduct of its creation, the resin had an innate subspace scattering effect. It didn’t just block subspace signals, it absorbed them. Later it was learned that the resin also acted as a conductor of the signals, so all the Marines needed to do was simply to connect a subspace receiver to the resin and the signal was crystal clear - provided the resin was attached throughout the hive complex.

The seeding pod had several small devices in it for the Aracs to use in quickly setting up and establishing a base. One of these devices hyper-accelerated the Arac growth cycle. The hive had several queens; three were found to be still quite young and were aging at a slower more ‘normal’ rate. That is, a rate closer to what the biologists believed to be normal.

Three other queens were very old and appeared to be nearing the end of their life cycle. While six others where mature and were still laying eggs when the teams found them, deep underground. The queens were not the only Aracs to have their life accelerated. There were several different types of Aracs found as well as lots of bodies that had died naturally. There was a separate, secured part where the ‘normal’ queens did their thing and worked on creating a long-term colony. That area had been heavily protected by the largest Arac soldiers so far recorded.

How they got their weapons so quickly was solved by the discovery of an Alliance designed replicator that had been built with parts from a smaller replicator that had been included in the pod. However, while utility equipment, ventilation systems and drinkable water systems had been located; only a few smallish computers and no communication equipment at all had been located. None of the devices one would expect from a modern, star-spanning civilization were discovered. So the question became how did the hives communicate with one another? How did they communicate with the main hive? The only answers offered so far were some form of metaphysical link in the species, but as yet there was no proof either way to validate that theory.

As for the dissemination of knowledge, that remained as much a mystery as how they communicated and currently had a similar explanation. Either the spiders were telepathic, or they had somehow passed knowledge down to their offspring in a type of instinctual or genetic knowledge transfer.

The Marines tried to capture a few of the immature Aracs, but they would simply die as soon as they were captured. The immature queens were killed as they tried to escape. What was strange was that none of them had tried to run for an escape tunnel, but instead had been heading for the room holding the small, strange computers the Aracs used.

One of the more important, at least to me it was important, discoveries in the hive had been the rescue and recovery of Sergeant Tul-sa, two of her Marines and one of the Terran Marines that they had managed to save before he was to be killed and fed to the immature queens. They had been found, blocked in a room by a pile of dead Arac bodies. All of them had been wounded badly enough to be taken straight to the medical ward aboard the Honor of Vengeance.

I was there to meet them when they finally arrived at the moon base hospital for treatment. The Terran Marine was still with them and I learned later that he had decided to join the Alliance Marines. He had spoken to his commanders who had been receiving treatment on the command ship as well and it had been agreed that it would be reported that Private Collins had survived the battle, but had asked for asylum with the Alliance forces due to the amount and type of treatment needed to heal him. It wasn’t actually a lie and the Alliance had gained a few other Marines in this manner as well. Several Terran Marines had lost limbs, or had suffered severe internal damage that required cybernetic implants.

Although full recovery and restoration was not possible due to the need to use biocytes, it was believed that the Terran soldiers would be subjected to very unethical and inhumane examinations and experimentation upon their return to Earth. Of course, there were some that scoffed at the very idea of the United States Government doing such a thing - especially to its own soldiers. They learned a very important life lesson very shortly when the United States Government reported the loss of command integrity of the Seventh Marines. What that meant was that so many of the seventh had been killed that the unit no longer existed as a viable unit.

However, the truth was that over half the unit had indeed survived. However, they had all been wounded and needed treatment. The fact that the government had already reported those soldiers as killed in action did not bode well for the men and women being treated. Vance had made certain that the commanders of the Terran Marines remained in contact with their leaders. Those Commanders gathered their people together, and based on the information they had gotten from their own Chain of Command as well as the media, decided to ask to remain with the Alliance and work to protect the planet. High Command agreed, but stipulated that they would have to undergo some additional training to get used to Alliance equipment and procedures.

In the Marine embarkation bay, a magnetic launcher had been installed for a very specific use. Today, it would get used quite a bit; today we would say good-bye to our friends, husbands, wives and protectors that had fallen during the action on Earth.

Vance spoke of their bravery and sacrifice, of social contributions to the Alliance and of those they were leaving behind. Colonel Cren’lith, with the assistance of a medical exo-suit, spoke of their heroism and bravery under fire. Finally, he spoke of their deaths. It was part of the Simonian grieving process to tell of how the being passed. Although the Marines had been Human as well as Simonian, no one protested his tribute to the fallen.

I had been surprised when Colonel Cren’lith asked me to take part in the ceremony, since several of the fallen soldiers had been my friends. I agreed immediately. The Naming was a very important part of the ceremony in the Alliance. It served to give one last individual tribute to each person, as well as being the formal listing of death for the fallen. As each name was called, Sarah would officially record them as deceased in the Alliance census.