Beyond enemies, p.1
Beyond Enemies, page 1
Table of Contents
Dedication
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
CHAPTER 19
CHAPTER 20
CHAPTER 21
CHAPTER 22
CHAPTER 23
CHAPTER 24
CHAPTER 25
CHAPTER 26
CHAPTER 27
CHAPTER 28
CHAPTER 29
CHAPTER 30
CHAPTER 31
CHAPTER 32
CHAPTER 33
CHAPTER 34
CHAPTER 35
CHAPTER 36
CHAPTER 37
CHAPTER 38
CHAPTER 39
CHAPTER 40
CHAPTER 41
CHAPTER 42
CHAPTER 43
CHAPTER 44
CHAPTER 45
CHAPTER 46
CHAPTER 47
CHAPTER 48
CHAPTER 49
CHAPTER 50
Acknowledgements
BEYOND
ENEMIES
MARISA WOLF
Baen
Beyond Enemies
Marisa Wolf
An assignment on a backwater world turns deadly for a combat vet and her AI tank. Military SF with heart and humor from up-and-coming author Marisa Wolf.
Sometimes the only way forward is to burn it all down.
Talinn Reaze and Bee serve as “Breezy,” part of the United Colonial Force’s elite Artificial Intelligence Troops. Trained for full integration since before Talinn’s birth, they exceeded expectations and became one of the premier heavy tanks, leading assaults on several fronts of the long war against the Interstellar Defense Corps.
When they’re thrown to a backwater base without cause, boredom becomes their main enemy—until the world falls out from under their treads and they begin to question everything they’ve ever known.
As they orient to their new reality, they have a decision to make: Uphold the status quo, or risk burning civilization to the ground?
Talinn and Bee always did have a fondness for fire.
BAEN BOOKS
by MARISA WOLF
Beyond Enemies
BEYOND
ENEMIES
MARISA WOLF
Beyond Enemies
This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.
Copyright © 2024 by Marisa Wolf
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form.
A Baen Books Original
Baen Publishing Enterprises
P.O. Box 1403
Riverdale, NY 10471
www.baen.com
ISBN: 978-1-9821-9321-8
EISBN: 978-1-62579-949-4
Cover art by Sam R. Kennedy
First printing, February 2024
Distributed by Simon & Schuster
1230 Avenue of the Americas
New York, NY 10020
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Wolf, Marisa, 1979- author.
Title: Beyond enemies / Marisa Wolf.
Description: Riverdale, NY : Baen Publishing Enterprises, 2024.
Identifiers: LCCN 2023043264 (print) | LCCN 2023043265 (ebook) | ISBN
9781982193218 (trade paperback) | ISBN 9781625799494 (ebook)
Subjects: LCGFT: Space operas (Fiction) | Military fiction. | Novels.
Classification: LCC PS3623.O5516 B49 2024 (print) | LCC PS3623.O5516
(ebook) | DDC 813/.6—dc23/eng/20231027
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023043264
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023043265
Printed in the United States of America
Electronic version by Baen Books
www.baen.com
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Dedication
For all those who’ve gone on ahead. Wish you were here.
and
To all the librarians and booksellers
who make sure little nerds get to read all the best books
and grow up to be big nerds.
CHAPTER 1
Talinn Reaze had not been built for mutiny, but three weeks staring at an empty wasteland threatened to tip her over the edge.
We definitely won’t get a bonus if you do that, Bee said, flipping one of her many screens to a satellite view of the uninhabited scrubland around them.
“Do what?” Talinn reclined her chair and spun it, eyes fixed on the smooth metal above her rather than the endless scraggly trees and pit-blasted dirt on display.
Start pitching ordinance into the field. Glare a hole through my very valuable tech. Call in to submit our resignation.
“I wasn’t going to do any of that.” Talinn heard the petulance in her own voice and groaned. What was the point of running a state-of-the-art weapon of mass destruction if there was nothing to mass destruct? “Tell me you have a better idea?”
I can fake a heat reading and call it in so we have to mobilize and check it out.
“And . . . that’s a less bonus-risking choice, is what you’re telling me?” Talinn did not glare in the general direction of her partner—given the artificial intelligence that had grown with her since near infancy encompassed the whole of their tank, that was quite a feat—but she made sure her sigh was fully audible.
They are much less likely to discover my sneakiness than yours.
“Rude.” Talinn straightened her chair and kicked her legs over the pristine floor of the tank. The wall of screens in front of her—currently displaying six iterations of absolutely nothing of interest—flickered in a pattern that had become Bee’s version of sticking out her tongue.
And correct. Bee’s voice should not have contained smugness, much like Bee’s screens should not have been able to convey someone sticking out their tongue, given she was a long-perfected AI program with neither tongue nor voice of her own. Despite—or because of—nearly thirty cycles of training, however, Talinn had an endless list of things that Bee shouldn’t be, and yet was.
Talinn supposed she should take some blame, as the bulk of Bee’s learning had been alongside Talinn’s own as part of the United Colonial Force’s Artificial Intelligence Troops elite service. The AITs were the premier fighting force of the UCF, so they were told, genetically engineered for the AI partially embedded throughout their neural pathways.
It felt far less than elite out in the field, and out of training strings. Before long, the top-tier AITs had started referring to themselves as the Eights, out on what might as well be the eighth front of a never-ending war.
Which was perhaps why no one in command had noted Bee’s oddities, and Talinn would never report anything that risked putting them on even more boring duty. She trusted Bee immeasurably more than the nitty techs and distant command structure of UCF, and as their pairing continued to pass inspections and reviews, nobody was likely to take exception.
“Unless that’s why we’re out here.” Talinn frowned at nothing and shoved herself upright out of the chair.
Use your words. Bee laughed, a curious sound of tortured metal twisting and scraping against itself. You don’t like it when I assume.
“Like it stops you,” Talinn muttered, smiling despite herself. “But is that why we’re out here, on the back edge of nowhere’s nethers? They figured out we’re out of spec?”
Talinn. Bee paused, and her screens shifted with methodic intent, the pictures zooming out from their immediate view to infrared, then to a near-satellite reading and finally to a mid-planetary-system black-and-white rendering. Talinn expected a correspondingly bulleted list, but Bee made her single point with great patience. If they thought we were off, why would they leave us in a tank?
“They don’t have to be scared of a tank—even a tank as fancy-built as ours. They do have bigger weapons than us.” Her argument was rote, and her shoulders eased even as she spoke.
But not better.
Talinn laughed, and swung her arms into a halfhearted stretch as the last of her paranoia seeped away. The AIT program had existed for some eighty cycles, without any spectacular failures. No one in command looked sideways at their science projects anymore. Gene selecting and brain mapping had led to the sort of human who could provide a welcome host environment to an AI; programming and code editing led to an AI who didn’t overwrite said host. The AITs worked because their combination resulted in threat assessment, threat addressment, and overall adaptability five times better than a standard human could handle, and double what an unsupported AI could do.
It wasn’t like the old days. Training an AI to value some life and disrupt others with targeted malice had been a process fraught with errors civilians wouldn’t stand for, and had resulted in failure far more often than celebrated victories. Until some genius had decided to embed those AIs in humans, trained the resultant pairing extensively, and put both through a rigorous, allegedly well-researched process.
Despite their idiosyncrasies, she and Bee had exc
Until, for no reason either of their advanced computing power had been able to decipher, they and several of their fellows had been summarily sent off to the uninhabited side of a dusty planet well away from the active front against the Interstellar Defense Corps. Patrolling nothing. Protecting nothing. The planet they’d been exiled to contained no settlements, no valuable resources, only brushland studded by long, ruined stretches of pinkish desert.
You’re dwelling. No one likes a dweller.
“How long do you think they’ll leave us out here?” She paced the handful of steps between the screens and the bench in the back that served such glamorous purposes as uncomfortable bunk, cover for storage, and cubby separating waste disposal, trailing her hands along the comms bank on each pass.
Are you asking me to poke into secured channels and eavesdrop?
“Conjecture will do.” Talinn paused, ran her fingers over her bare scalp, and grinned at the screens. “Besides, I know you’re always listening.”
No telling when they’re going to say the interesting stuff, Bee replied, a hint of shearing metal in her tone. Given nothing is happening—and nothing has been happening—I estimate they will leave us here for somewhere between another week and forever.
“Very precise, Bee. Well done.” Talinn stretched her neck to one shoulder, then the other, until something clicked satisfyingly at the top of her spine. “Let’s walk our chain one more time.”
Hold on.
She froze for a solid second before leaping the handful of paces back to her chair. Her hands hovered over the cross belt, not wanting to jinx anything by fastening the restraint for action that was so very unlikely to come.
Her patience had frayed exactly enough for her to poke at Bee for an update when their comms buzzed.
“Ziggy to Breezy. You on?”
“Where else would we be?” Talinn muttered, spinning the chair to tap the channel open on her end. Caytil Tagana and her AI partner Ziti had been in Talinn and Bee’s training class, and it was a small comfort to have reunited on this endless posting. “Breezy here, Ziggy. You got a hit?”
“Ziti just pinged . . . something. Vibrations with no corresponding data. Sending coordinates. You read?”
We read, Bee said, her voice distant, and Talinn confirmed aloud to Caytil. UCF had poured a great deal of money into ensuring AIs couldn’t communicate directly with each other. The money had not been well spent, but that was something the Eights had silently agreed to keep from the general command structure since sometime around puberty. Which meant in times of potential action, when a commanding officer might want to review comms leading up to an event, they were very careful about who said what to whom.
“Did something hit the other side of the planet?” Talinn asked, running through the various possibilities.
We have eyes everywhere, Bee said, flipping screens to various satellite views like someone fanning the pages of a book. There’s nothing . . .
“Someone’s digging really, really far down or someone’s—”
Gotten really, really good at hiding from us.
Talinn clicked her cross belt and swung her chair fully forward. “Turrets on and weapons loaded. Confirm, Ziggy.”
“Confirm. Weapons and turrets, good to go.”
“You take east, we’ll scan west.”
They’d both scan in all directions—no sense in not using the most of their quintupled processing power—but clarity in line of fire was key. If an attack came from one direction, Caytil and Ziti would counter, while Talinn and Bee would take lead from the other.
Twisted trees wavered in the unrelenting wind, grasses stretched and waved, and nothing new pinged the sensors. As nothing had happened for months. The vibrations ebbed and peaked for twenty minutes, and revealed no further indication of their purpose or cause.
Talinn’s hand lifted from the control panel in front of her and hovered over her belt. Fastening it had jinxed them, that much was clear, but she wasn’t ready to take their weapons back to energy-saving mode.
“Do you think—”
Incom—
The long stretch of prairie between their tank and Ziggy’s exploded.
CHAPTER 2
“Systems functional for Breezy. Ziggy, status?”
No answer signal from Ziti.
“EMP?”
Negative.
“Fire in the hole?” Talinn flipped through all the information Bee displayed, then groaned and slammed her hand on the corner of the console. “They’re jamming us.”
I’m not reading anything that—oh. Bee’s discordant sound of disgust lasted a fraction of a second. Fire in the hole. Shifting payload to ballistic.
Ballistic wasn’t necessarily safer than incendiary, given they didn’t know what they were shooting at and everything could go even further sideways either way. Still, they had a better chance to penetrate whatever was in the ground between them and their fellow tank than they did setting it on fire.
Ziggy still in action, their turret is tracking along with ours.
“That’s why they train us.” Talinn didn’t bother to recheck Bee’s aim, scanning for more disturbances underneath them as the thwoom vibrated through her.
Nothing registered at all before the ground bare yards in front of them erupted. The tank rolled backward without comment from Bee, and Talinn toggled controls to pull up menus of less-used commands.
“Didn’t anyone ever bury seismic sensors out here?”
You’re thinking Tivus—there are no earthquakes of measure on P-8.
“For thoroughness’s sake, you’d think they’d standard op it everywhere. But if they couldn’t be bothered to give this dust ball a real name . . .” When a third explosion blew the ground to their left, Talinn stopped grumbling and they slid into their combat habits—rusty, but drilled enough to snap into place.
Half words and inaudible signals sent them firing reactive fusillades into new holes, but without a true target or discernable pattern, the offensive was frustratingly ineffective. Caytil and Ziti remained out of contact, and the portion of processing Talinn attributed to that issue couldn’t untangle how they were being jammed.
Ballistic rounds made as little difference as incendiary—whatever was causing the explosions underground was either too deep for them to get to or too fast for even their reaction time. Five random explosions into the one-sided engagement, the tank rocked underneath her.
“Reroute left treads.” It was either her or Bee who spoke, but her fingers completed the circuit that reoriented the particles from storage to repair the treads.
Over the trough.
“Away from Ziggy.”
There was no discernible gain in getting closer to their fellow tank—without a convoy to form a line, they’d only make a more concentrated target area for whatever was attacking them.
Bee pivoted them as best the tank could pivot, a fraction of a moment before the ground to their right erupted in a shower of chunky dirt. Running out of rebuild.
“Side turret nonresponsive.”
Talinn glanced at the screen showing Ziggy’s position and barked a short laugh. “They’re making speed out of here. Let’s do the same—north-west-north.”
On it. Speed is relative.
“Always is.”
With nothing registering on sensors, they were fleeing blind, but repetitive shooting wasn’t making an impact and they’d eventually run out of material to cannibalize for repairs.
“Still no comms—we’re sure it wasn’t an EMP?”
Given all my systems read as go, it can’t be. Didn’t even feel a little bite at the edges. EMP’s off the table.
