Merkiaari Wars: 03 - Operation Oracle Read online

  Merki fire sought her life and debris kicked up around her feet. She was moving too fast to dodge sharply, but she did what she could by swerving left and right. An explosion to her right peppered her with shrapnel. It hurt, she thought it must have, but it was a distant thing. Something clanged off her helmet and the visor starred. The helmet display started flickering. She didn’t need it anyway. Helmet comm and HUD were just a backup for a viper. She kept it on, damaged as it was, for the minimal protection it lent her.

  Explosions chased her, and finally caused a reaction from Alliance forces. Colonel Jung wouldn’t know why the Merki were worked up yet, but she had to wonder if this was a prelude to a new offensive. Artillery began zeroing in, and Gina cursed. Friendly fire might still nail her. She ducked and jinked as buildings came apart around her. Stone and glass flew outward, and buildings roared as they toppled or imploded. More fire and smoke added itself to the chaos.

  “Friendly fire my arse!” Gina screamed into the night. “Alpha-one-one, Alpha-leader. I’m heading your way with many new acquaintances hot on my heels. Cragg is in hibernation. I’m bringing him in!”

  “Alpha-leader, Alpha-one-one. A few friends dropped by for a visit. Lucky break, eh? Bring your buddies right through the middle of us.”

  “Affirmative, ETA three minutes!” she yelled over the noise of buildings falling. “Shit, Ian. Jung’s trying to kill me again. Tell her the enemy is behind me, not in front!”

  Ian snorted. “Like she’ll listen. Alpha-one-one out.”

  “Alpha-leader clear.”

  Gina had Hiller’s blue icon on her display, and more viper icons had arrayed themselves near him and along a particular street. She couldn’t know without checking satellite feeds, but she guessed they were undercover in the buildings. If she could lead the Merki up that street, they should be slaughtered.

  That was the plan then, she decided. She kept running while she plotted a least time course to lead the Merkiaari through Hiller’s gauntlet. She didn’t slow as she sped by the first blue icons on her sensors. Those vipers were well hidden. She saw no sign of them. She was just approaching Hiller’s hiding place when her people opened fire all at once. She dove for cover in amongst a bombed out building’s remains. She stashed Cragg behind a wall, and found a good firing position. Hiller didn’t acknowledge her presence; he was busy about a hundred metres away targeting the Merki with a bipod mounted AAR. They were usually mounted on a unit’s armour with a stedimount to stabilise it, they were heavy, but the bipod was better here. It allowed Hiller to fire while lying down for better cover. He was making good use of it too. He was piling Merki bodies up in the street.

  Jung’s artillery had finally stopped lobbing shells in, maybe realising the danger of blue on blue. Plasma and rocket fire rained down upon the Merki from the buildings and rooftops, and they scattered looking for cover. There wasn’t much in the street itself, and the buildings were already occupied by Merkiaari killers. They tried to fight back. That’s what Merki did, pretty much their default setting for every situation, but they were completely over matched. The vipers had good cover and elevation. The Merki were utterly slaughtered.

  Gina watched the last Merki troop die, and turned away to check on Cragg. He was still dead, but he would wake up fine. She shook her head at the thought. Two years ago, such a thought would have been macabre and ridiculous, but now it was just a part of life.

  “We are such freaks,” she muttered.

  “Yeah,” Hiller said looking down at their sleeping friend. “But handy freaks, and I’m still cute.”

  Gina rolled her eyes. “Cute freaks—”

  Hiller nodded. “Useful, but dangerously cute freaks.” He grinned. “I don’t envy your next fight.”

  She cocked her head. “Huh?”

  “The General is going to have a few questions, Gina. I wouldn’t try to bullshit him were I you. He isn’t Jung.”

  She nodded glumly. Joking aside, she wouldn’t dare try any of her excuses on Burgton. Not really. It was fun imagining excuses, but she wouldn’t dare try anything but the truth in reality. Besides, the truth was serious enough in scope that she didn’t fear being chewed out.

  “Better get to that I guess,” she said. “Gold-one, Alpha-leader...”

  * * *

  2 ~ Masks

  Aboard Flagship ASN Lincoln, Shan System

  General Burgton CO 501st Infantry Regiment watched the faces in the room, not the presentation in the huge holotank. His processor was faithfully recording everything and hoarding it in his database like some demented squirrel with a cache of nuts as it always did. Vipers never forgot anything, nothing at all. They were physically incapable of it. If he needed to recall anything of this meeting, it would be there. Not that he would. The presentation was based upon the download obtained from Cragg before he was stored in stasis aboard Grafton. Burgton had already seen what it contained. Along with his officers, he had uploaded it to experience the fear, and the pain, and the exultation of Cragg’s last combat in Shoshon, far more intensely than any holotank presentation could possibly provide the unenhanced.

  Burgton was far more interested in the people watching than the data he already knew so well. He was always interested in people. Their reaction to things often gave him an advantage in his dealings with them. He hadn’t always been so analytical, but two hundred years of trying to predict events had turned him into an obsessive people watcher and statistician. Luckily, he was well equipped for it. Vipers had the built in computational power to do some really heavy math, and he was always running an analysis or simulation in the back of his brain; political, military, economic... all kinds of things fed into him from his sources all over the Alliance. His past accuracy could be called miraculous; his officers certainly thought so, but secretly he was worried. He had noticed a distressing number of errors creeping into his predictions. The worst failure to date had been this campaign. He had predicted another five years of relative peace before needing to confront Merkiaari in combat again. As for the Shan, they weren’t even on his horizon before this, and he feared they might be the straw that broke the camel’s back as far as his predictions were concerned.

  Combining simulations and programs based upon chaos theory with unmatched information gathering over centuries, and then allowing them to run without pause for all that time, had allowed him to guide events in the Alliance, but the complexity of the simulations was outstripping his ability to monitor and control. Billions of calculations per second, trillions? No matter the actual figure, it was too high for any normal computer to perform and maintain accuracy.

  He had begun by running the early incarnations of his chaos simulations internally while he slept. During those hours, his personal computing power was mostly idle. He had just wanted to see what would happen, and compare his predictions with actual events. The result had been startling. Not only had his predictions come true, the follow up events leading from them were also close to those predicted. Those predictions had allowed him to steer the Alliance away from a few disasters, and were how he had managed to do it with only a hundred vipers when the Council of the day betrayed him by mothballing the regiment.

  The introduction of the Shan into the Alliance would throw his calculations off, maybe way off, because they were literally alien. How could he possibly predict what they would do when everything they thought or did was so alien? It was something very much on his mind since arriving in the Shan system. He had to find a way to slot them into his calculations.

  He had drafted some ideas, but hadn’t yet tried to test them. A simulation on such a scale would take time and resources only found on Snakeholme under the mountain. The regiment’s archive was more than a data depository. Its hugely powerful computers were constantly running his Alliance simulation. It had long since outgrown his aging viper brain and processor. He feared the day when it outgrew its current home because the hardware was cutting edge and further upgrades were impossible. There was nothing better an
ywhere in the Alliance, except perhaps for the handful of surviving A.Is quarantined and protected. No one but their caretakers and the Council ever had access to those immensely powerful minds.

  Burgton frowned as the familiar frustration swamped his brain. An A.I would solve his problem; they were orders of magnitude more powerful than any current computer despite being built centuries ago. Modern computers were designed with built in limitations to prevent a recurrence of the Hacker Rebellion. Neural interfaces were banned for the same reason. Burgton always suspected that was one of the reasons the Council betrayed him back then. Vipers had neural interfaces, and the old A.Is predated the ban.

  “General?” Admiral Kuzov said and Burgton made his frown disappear. “You disagree?”

  Burgton quickly scanned his log. Kuzov was asking if he disagreed with Colonel Jung’s proposal regarding Cragg’s troop ship. The presentation was over.

  “No, Admiral. I was considering my men’s part in Colonel Jung’s ops plan. Unless you decide to go against all custom and standing orders to bombard the troop ship from orbit—something I doubt but would applaud you for, sir—you will need my men to recon ahead of the advance.”

  Admiral Kuzov nodded. “That is the usual procedure against Merki I believe.”

  Burgton smiled. Kuzov was a spacer through and through. Give him a ship and a battle in space—even against Merkiaari—and he was in his element. Here though, he was out of his comfort zone and drawing upon historical ground battles against the Merki for his inspiration. His personal experience of fighting Merkiaari extended only to the battles he had observed on Harmony these past months. Admiral Meyers had commanded the only action in space here in Shan space.

  Colonel Jung stirred. “If I may, Admiral?”

  Kuzov nodded.

  “I think General Burgton’s men should be held in reserve this time around. His force is much diminished, and to be blunt, I feel they’ve bled enough.”

  Burgton allowed a small smile onto his lips. What Jung said was true. He had brought six hundred and forty units with him, and less than two hundred remained operational. Two hundred vipers could take out most Merki targets, but he wasn’t averse to resting his men. It was good that the other forces gained experience against the Merkiaari. This incursion wouldn’t be the last and he couldn’t be everywhere. Jung wasn’t thinking of his men though, Burgton was sure. She was worried that her chance at a resounding victory and the promotion attached to it was slipping from her grasp. If vipers went in, even as an advance force, people wouldn’t remember that Jung had commanded or that the 2nd Faragut Strike Force had provided the firepower to win the battle. As soon as vipers were mentioned, all attention would be on them. Burgton understood Jung’s position and sympathised to a degree, but he didn’t like what it said about her that she was willing to put her men at greater risk. Then again, this was war and risk was endemic.

  “General, your opinion?” Kuzov said.

  Burgton glanced at the Shan representatives. The two males watched everything and let nothing slip. He thought they were here not to discuss the coming fight but rather to study the Humans in a non-combat setting. He had caught other Shan doing it in various places and situations. It was a wise thing they were doing, and was something he needed to emulate if he was going to successfully predict how the Shan would impact the Alliance. He had to wonder if these two males were even warriors. They looked and acted the part, but the way they observed everything reminded him of the way Marion Hymas worked. She was a shrink. Shan didn’t have recognisable psychologists, but they did have mind healers as part of the greater healer caste. They specialised in what the Shan called the harmonies of the mind. Burgton had no proof, but his instincts were telling him that one or both was healer caste not warrior. He liked sneaky thinking like that, and he was glad the Shan were already taking necessary steps. They needed to learn that not every Human they met had their best interests at heart or altruistic motivations for what they did.

  “I and my men are ready to do our part as always,” Burgton began and Jung scowled. “But a respite would be much appreciated. To be blunt, I have less than two hundred effectives left at my command. If I can preserve that force without compromising the mission, I am prepared to retire from the field early.”

  Kuzov nodded thoughtfully. “I would prefer it if your men remained on planet, General, but by all means pull back and consolidate as our reserve.”

  Burgton indicated agreement with a crisp nod. Kuzov was no fool, he knew what Jung wanted and was willing to oblige, but he obviously wasn’t willing to risk the mission. Cold blooded it might be, but Kuzov knew that if Jung screwed up, two hundred vipers in reserve should rectify the situation in short order. Burgton didn’t expect Jung would need his men though. She wanted that star very badly, and would most likely flood the battlefield with men to make sure there were no screw-ups. There was no such thing as overkill when fighting Merkiaari. Vipers were based upon the idea of victory through superior firepower after all. Jung would simply apply that truism with her own manpower.

  Colonel Jung looked pleased. She nodded to Burgton in thanks and started detailing her plan of attack.

  Burgton caught Admiral Meyers’ eye, and she cocked her head in question. He flicked a look at the Shan and signalled with a gesture that he would like a word after the meeting. Meyers had been watching the Shan just as he had through the presentation, and he wanted her take. He was wondering if she had gotten the same vibe from the aliens as he had.

  “...useful to capture the ship.” Colonel Jung was saying and Burgton brought his attention back to business. “The Merki have managed to surprise us a number of times on this campaign. The jamming and their ability to track our transmissions needs investigation. Of course, they’ve always been adept at the second, and that spawned a raft of new tech from our side to offset the disadvantage last time around. I have a feeling our R&D people will need to pull the proverbial rabbit out of their hats again. We need to strip that ship of every molecule of intelligence it contains.”

  Burgton nodded along with the others. A new war always caused advances in tech. The trick was staying ahead of the opposition. It was an arms race with survival as the prize. At least this time they knew the Merkiaari had advanced in three key areas before being attacked by them. The jamming was more pervasive and far reaching than the Alliance could do, and no one had yet figured out how they were tracking and decrypting transmissions, but it was the Merki troopers themselves that worried Burgton the most. Professor Wilder had first brought it to his attention that the Merki had evolved the ability to regenerate serious wounds. They were tougher to kill than ever before, and they had always been tough bastards. Worse to his way of thinking was the way they had modified their war fighting techniques and doctrine to emulate Human small group tactics. Killing their officers no longer reaped the same rewards as it had in the last war. The Merkiaari had modified their breeding programs to increase intelligence in their line troops while keeping them as physically strong as ever.

  At least the Shan incursion had given the Alliance advanced warning. That could not be underestimated. He had already taken some basic steps to lessen the threat by ordering samples of Merkiaari tech, weapons, armour, and even dead troopers brought up to Grafton for examination. A more thorough analysis would be undertaken on Snakeholme. He was sure Shan scientists and engineers were already hard at work, and Admiral Kuzov would secure examples of everything for the navy, but Burgton had learned his lesson about relying on others when the Council betrayed his men two hundred years ago. He had striven since then to make his regiment as self-sufficient as possible, and keeping that status secret.

  Burgton listened as Jung detailed her plans, and evaluated her subordinates as they added suggestions. Although the navy was represented at the table, they had nothing to add. Admiral Kuzov had probably invited them out of courtesy. Their true mission had yet to begin really. Once the Merki were finished off, it was Fifth Fleet’s mission to secure the
system against further incursions, and at the same time set the Shan firmly back on the road to recovery. A big part of that were the factory ships he had brought along as part of Fifth Fleet’s auxiliary. When those monsters got started munching on the asteroids, the Shan would have the genesis of its new orbital infrastructure. They needed to rebuild their industrial capacity quickly, and replace their high orbitals. Without stations, they couldn’t move personnel efficiently. So there was a step by step procedure to follow. Machines replicating themselves at first, and then turning toward building factories and smelters in orbit and in the asteroid fields. Those factories would then produce the stations and ship yards. And finally, a year or two down the road, the Shan fleet would be reborn better than ever.

  How long that would take depended entirely upon how much the Shan were willing to sink into it. The planets needed massive reconstruction. The cities and everything needed to support them had to be replaced, and that meant diverting capacity away from war making material. Burgton had a feeling the Shan would surprise them though. They were very focused upon the military aspects of their treaty with the Alliance. When they became members, Burgton had the feeling they planned to be in the forefront of any action against the Merkiaari. Hard to blame them considering what had happened to them here, but it was very ambitious for any single system government to think they could take a leading role amongst over two hundred member worlds. Most of them had been members a long time, and were already politically and economically well connected.

  “Very well, gentlemen,” Kuzov said. “I think that’s everything.”

  Everyone murmured agreement and the meeting broke up. A few people took a last sip of their coffee before standing. Burgton thought that a good plan, and drained his cup. He ignored the warning flashing on his display. Caffeine wouldn’t kill him.