Source code, p.9
Source Code, page 9
“Those abiota just eclosed, like, two weeks ago,” Daelia said. “Raijinn’s put them through preliminary training sims but—”
“No field exercises?” the intel major asked more sharply now.
Rover sighed and slammed the binder closed with a flick of his hand. “It says they’re fully certified. Fuckers down there must have been pencil-whipping the paperwork.”
“I have no idea how those things are going to behave out there,” she said. “But you know how canid-class abiota are. They’re pack animals. Who the fuck is out there to alpha this? You can’t guarantee they aren’t going to go nuts.”
The enlisted guy at the sensor station turned around. “Would they listen to Emily?”
“Unlikely,” JP said. “You’ll need something that can get up close and personal.”
“What kind of ground assets do we have?” Rover asked, speaking to everybody.
“Nothing, sir,” the enlisted controller replied. “And everything else the 290th has is currently over in the Philippines.”
“I’ve got something,” Daelia said.
“Something they’ll listen to?” Tin Man asked.
“More than Emily.”
“Are you talking about Dingo?” Rover asked. Daelia nodded. “Fine. Go. JP, get somebody to go with her and have them take a goddamn radio. Last thing I want is a compatibility problem tonight.” And he gave her a look. “Make it damn clear to your dad for me that you’re volunteering to do this. I don’t want an invoice from him later over this, okay?”
It was right about then that Daelia realized what she’d actually done. Shit.
“I get it,” she said.
“Good. Go.”
The somebody Daelia was stuck with happened to be Argo.
Argo, waiting for her on the squadron’s back patio.
His eyes were slightly unfocused, his hair still somehow tousled despite its short length. He looked like he had just been startled out of bed.
“Don’t you ever go home?” she asked.
“Not this weekend,” he said, and yawned. He brandished the radio. “What are we doing here?”
“We’re going to take my dad’s truck,” she replied. “Out to—” And then it hit her. “What’s going on, anyway?”
“Yeah, about that.” Argo yawned again. “I’ll tell you on the way.”
11
“When you said truck, I thought you were talking about something you’d buy at a dealership,” Argo said as they passed through the runway gate, out into the out-facing side of the Scrap House. “What is this thing?”
Daelia brandished the keys. Dad kept them hidden in his desk, which had cost her a painful three minutes in search time. “This is a real, bonafide, modded-by-terrorists 2007 Toyota Hilux.”
“Looks older than that.”
“Dingo had the shit kicked out of him when he was a puppy, but Dad takes good care of him now,” she said. “Mom bought him off some Northern Alliance guys after he eclosed.”
“Isn’t it kind of weird, abiota buying each other?”
“Humans buy animals all the time, right? It’s the same kind of thing. There’s a reason we call it a domain and not a species, you know?”
The pilot was still eying the vehicle. “What happened?”
“What do you mean?”
“How did it, uhh, eclose?”
Daelia jerked the driver’s side door open, trying to send him a clear message. Get in. “Does it matter?”
Argo gave Dingo one more cautious glance but climbed in himself. “It seems like it should matter,” he told her, reaching for the seat belt. It was clearly not original. “Like this. Shouldn’t changing out the interior cause issues?”
“Are you not you if you cut your hair?”
Argo gave her a look. “I’ve heard all the metaphors out there, same as everyone else.”
Fine. He wanted a real answer? “Abiota manifest within certain components of their machine bodies. You’ve heard about that, right? The rudiment core?” She tapped the dash. “In this case, Dingo woke up in the starter computer in the engine. He doesn’t extend into the circuitry that controls the radio or the seats or the .50 cal sponson they welded on the back.”
“Why’s it happen, though?”
“Official line’s that it’s the eventual endpoint of all predictives.” She turned the engine over. Good old gas guzzler. Dingo rumbled into life. Her AR feed showed a wolf’s body, coming alive around them. “But personally, I think it has something to do with the hardware.”
“So you don’t know either?”
That stung. “It’s unpredictable,” she said, defensive.
“There has to be some kind of common denominator,” he mused. “Something changed, for it to start happening like it did.”
“Maybe it’s always happened, but it’s only recently that machines got complicated enough for us to recognize it.” Daelia said it without thinking, then cringed. That had been Mom’s theory. One that a lot of abiota espoused. It was one of those things they didn’t share with humans very often. She sighed. “Let’s just get the pack back.”
Dingo growled as Daelia steered him out onto the spaceport’s wide roads, making for the south gate.
“You know, you’re not supposed to drive with your monocle on,” Argo said as they neared the intersection that would take them out on Highway 3.
She ignored him. “North or south, which way do I go? Where are we headed?”
“Oh, right. Some place called Armand Bayou,” he told her, glancing at a handheld phone unit. He had an app pulled up she didn’t recognize. It had a big sticker on the back. PROPERTY OF THE TxANG. “Need me to navigate?”
She’d been to the park before, but never in the dark. And never with a hangover this fresh. “Might as well.”
Ellington sat southeast of Houston proper, close to the coast. There were no hills here; the land was punishingly flat. Once, there had been endless suburbs, with more on the way, but the Five Days War had cleared out a lot of that. Both NASA and Ellington had been targets of interest. Fortunately, the efficacy of the PLA’s hypersonic missiles had been massively overhyped.
Most of the road network had been repaired, and developments were creeping back in, like grass spreading onto bare dirt. But there was still quite a bit of land that had been allowed to return to its natural state. Salt marsh prairie. Low, scrubby forests.
If something was going to fall out of the sky, this was a good place for it to happen.
As they drove, Argo filled her in on what had happened.
“So what are they thinking? That it’s some kind of missile?” Daelia asked.
Argo had a chat feed pulled up on his cell phone. “If Space Command knows where it came from, and they probably do, they apparently aren’t telling us.” He grunted. “Is it always like this between the active duty and the Guard?”
“You’re former active duty, right?”
“Is it that obvious?”
You’re intense. She didn’t say it. Seemed like a weird thing to tell a guy you just met. “Even I know better than to let Emily drag me fully into her virch.”
He grunted again and poked at his phone. “Okay, you need to take the east gate to the parking lot. Next left. We’ll have to pick up the bitzers from there.”
She patted the dashboard again. “You hear that, Dingo? Time to put some puppies in their place.”
Through her monocle, the truck snarled.
The parking lot was locked. Or at least, it had been. One of those single-bar metal gates had been swung open, lock chain dangling. In the wide parking lot beyond, half a dozen sheriff’s department cars and a fire engine were already stationed there, cops and a local search-and-rescue team getting suited up.
One of them came over as Dingo pulled in a parking space. “You from Ellington?”
“That’s us,” Argo said, hopping out. Daelia turned the abiota’s engine off. Scooted across the seat to the screen on the center of the dash. Pulled up the command view, so she could monitor the TGLP along with the AR feed. “Captain Irvington, from the 121st. What’s going on?”
“We were getting suited up to go in when the bitzers showed up. Damn things rampaged through here, fucked up one of my patrol vehicles, then disappeared out into the prairie.” His flashlight swept over the hood of a late-model Dodge Charger. The front suspension had collapsed, and big dents in the hood looked deep enough to sink a basketball into. At least one of the bitzers had taken a running leap and jumped onto the thing. “I’m not sending any of my guys out there until these fucking things are under control.”
“Totally understand, Sergeant,” Argo replied.
Daelia fiddled with a few more settings. Dad had done this a lot with Dingo, and the abiota helpfully offered what were annotated as the most effective messages. “Time to set yourself up as pack master, Dingo,” she told him, and set the messages for repeating broadcast, maximum gain.
In her AR feed, she heard a howl. And another, and another.
The Army’s small ground drones all seemed to manifest canid-class abiota. To the point where bitzer had just been applied to the entire lot of them. There were a dozen different models, varying in size from maybe two feet at the top of their backwards-bent legs to larger than a horse. They were originally built for portage duties over rough terrain, but the chassis could be used for anything from surveillance to mobile artillery.
The ones out tonight belonged to the 290th, Advanced Tactical Cavalry. Search and rescue, deployed mostly during weather events. But just like with any meatspace dog, bitzers required quite a bit of training on their specialty, and these were newly eclosed. Young.
Wild.
Through the feed, she could hear them baying. It was an interpretation, of course. Below that, they were broadcasting back and forth with Dingo, trying to work out whether or not he was qualified to assume authority over them, direct their functions.
With a top speed of thirty miles an hour, they couldn’t have gone horribly far, but they were significantly lighter than Dingo, more nimble. Chasing them through the park wasn’t really an option. But Dad had made quite a few modifications to Dingo over the years, in large part to assist Bellona Robotics with the high volume of bitzers that the Army went through.
They never lasted very long in the Southeast Asian jungles.
Dingo knew how to handle them.
After about five minutes of broadcasting, something odd happened. Daelia had to double-check it in the code.
The bitzers checked in, agreed to Dingo’s command authority, but refused to come back.
They refused to leave what they had found.
“Argo!” she called, sticking her head out the passenger side window.
The pilot turned away from where he was still chatting away with the sheriff’s deputy and came back over. “What?”
“The bitzers found something, said they won’t leave it. Want us to come to them.”
Argo tapped at his cell phone. “Splatto has heat signatures, about a mile that way. But apparently, the guys can’t see what’s down there with either camera.” He looked at the truck, then back over to the deputy. “Sergeant, are we going to piss somebody off if we drive this thing through this park?”
The deputy made a little grunting noise, deep in his throat. “Any other options?” he asked.
“Dad’s got a kugu unit for Dingo,” Daelia replied. “I can get that out.”
“Then we hike,” Argo said.
Sergeant O’Malley looked relieved.
Ever prepared, Dad had the kugu, a small pack with extra water and food in it, and a few different sizes of snakebite leg guards in the back of the truck. Argo asked what those last things were for, but O’Malley just gave him a look and told him they were probably a good idea to put on.
“Water moccasins are touchy bastards, especially at night.”
Daelia got the kugu out of its storage box and booted it up, before pulling a set of guards on herself. They were heavy, Kevlar, and her legs started to sweat immediately. Argo took the pack.
The kugu clicked on, warmed up. It was a tiny version of the Humvee, coming up to about Daelia’s knee. Like an overgrown RC toy. But as Dingo connected into it, his wolf-like form wrapped around it, obscuring the vehicle shape almost entirely.
Everyone was rallied. Everyone ready to go.
“Show us where these things are,” Daelia asked.
And away into the night they went.
It was never truly dark in Houston. The city lights washed the night sky with various shades of gold and blue, depending on how much cloud cover there was. Even on a clear night like that night, there was an unnatural glow to the sky. It offered no illumination down on the ground level, though, not like a full moon would have, and so the small search team was forced to rely on flashlights and direction from Splatto to find their way to the bitzers.
That task became harder once the trail led into the forest.
Under the trees, in the still air and thick underbrush, the darkness seemed absolute.
Daelia fought down her nerves. She didn’t do outdoor anything. The forests of South Texas smelled of rot, decay. Swampy. Full of mosquitos. She’d always hated it. Tonight, it seemed downright oppressive.
Her boots squelched in ankle-deep mud.
The kugu’s wheels whined and burred in protest. More than once, somebody had to push it out of a particularly bad spot.
But another smell soon began to dominate. Smoke. Wet smoke. It swirled through their flashlight beams. It ghosted over bare skin.
“Thermal readings are just ahead,” Argo reported.
And then, the trees were gone.
There was no underbrush. The scrubby growth that always seemed to cling to the outer rim of wooded areas had been blasted away. Here and there, little fires still smoldered.
Then Daelia saw what the bitzers were so damn upset about.
In the meadow, a shallow crater had been kicked up. Dirt and grass, heaped up in a perfect circle. The grass around it had been blasted flat, the collapsed stems all pointing back to the center of the crater.
Something there was smoking.
Something there was…
Huh.
It was singing.
In her monocle, Daelia could see it. What it was exactly, she didn’t know. The device was struggling to interpret it. But it was definitely broadcasting some kind of AR presence, making it hard to determine exactly what the object looked like.
“Hall!” Argo snapped.
She realized she had taken a few steps forward and looked back at him. “It’s fine,” she said. “It’s not a bomb.”
“How the fuck do you know that?”
“It’s transmitting,” she said, tapping her monocle, and walked toward it, sure of herself this time.
The ground rose sharply at the edge of the crater, deceptively high. She tripped, almost falling. The act of catching herself with her bad arm jarred her somewhat. But Daelia pulled herself up and in she went.
For a moment or two, the AR image warred with the physical reality, blurring, smearing. Daelia finally tore off the monocle and held up the flashlight instead.
It was definitely not a crashed plane.
A boulder sat in the crater.
A big rock.
She’d seen meteor impacts in movies, but never in real life. Daelia didn’t think this was that, though. The shape was too deliberate, the surface too composed. Like a teardrop, top end blunted. Like a streamlined version of the old Mercury spacecraft. The underside of this thing was still cherry red, still radiating an enormous amount of heat. She was sweating hard in front of it.
It was an intentional thing, she realized. It had been crafted. And likely from something harder or more tempered than raw meteor, because from what she remembered from high school science, those had a tendency to break up in the atmosphere.
She glanced down at the monocle in her hand. The light on the side was flashing. The thing was broadcasting, something the TGLP couldn’t make sense of.
“What are you?” she asked, lifting the monocle back up to her face, but not putting it on.
Instantly, the light blinked out.
The broadcast, the song, had stopped.
“Ma’am!” somebody yelled a little way behind her. “I’m going to have to ask you to step back!”
It was one of the firefighters, she saw. Daelia blinked, suddenly unsteady on her feet, and Argo grabbed her arm.
“Come on,” he said, and pulled her away from the crater.
“But we need to figure out what the hell this thing is!” Daelia protested.
“We need to make sure it’s not going to kill everybody in a two mile radius of here first,” Argo said grimly, and hit a speed dial number on his squadron-issue cell phone.
Feeling suddenly very out of place, Daelia muttered something about going to check on the bitzers and pulled her monocle back on.
The thing had definitely gone silent.
In her earpiece, she could hear the closest bitzer whimpering. Like it was in pain. A strange, sad noise.
There was nothing else she could do about the contents of that crater. The abiota, on the other hand, she could help. “Come here,” she sighed, and went to check its camera settings.
Another team arrived from Ellington about an hour and a half later. Daelia met them in the parking lot. She didn’t recognize anybody in particular, but she knew the patches. It was the Army.
“So the 290th finally decided to show up?” she asked their lieutenant, the highest-ranking individual she could see.
“I’m sorry, who are you?”
“I’m Daelia Hall, and you should fucking know better than to deploy a bitzer pack that’s hooked up to our goddamn training sandbox,” she replied.
It had taken her and Dingo, through the kugu, almost twenty minutes to pull the bitzers away from the crater, and twice as long to get them back to the parking lot. Dingo was still broadcasting a command override just to keep those things from heading back out into the dark; she’d taken her monocle off, tired of the ceaseless howling.
