Argonauts 1: Bug Hunt Read online

He ended the connection and stood. He edged past his desk in the tight office and entered the bridge. Everyone had already vacated the compartment save for Shaw. She looked up at him from her station.

  “You should let me come down with you,” Shaw said. “Someone else can conn the ship. Harlequin.”

  “No,” Rade said. “I want you to provide space support.” He pointed at the station. “Astrogator is the position you held while you were in the navy. The position you were trained for.”

  “You know I can pilot a mech just as well as anyone else,” Shaw said. “I can fight in a jumpsuit, too.”

  “I know that, but I want you here. This is the kind of mission where we need you on the ship.”

  She sighed. “You’re the boss. But are you sure you’re not just treating me like some delicate piece of porcelain again?”

  “Not at all,” Rade said. Though if he was honest with himself, he didn’t want to put Shaw in danger again. The potency of his lovemaking was one thing, but actually putting her in harm’s way was something else entirely.

  “Just remember,” Shaw said. “I’m a partner in this business, like everybody else.”

  “We all know that,” Rade said. “We wouldn’t have this ship if it wasn’t for your contribution.”

  “I’m glad you remember,” she said.

  “That’s another reason I’m leaving you up here.” Rade flashed a sly grin. “So you can guard your investment.”

  She didn’t return his smile. “And what about my investment in you? How can I guard that?”

  Rade had to laugh, though it was forced slightly. “Trust me, I don’t need any sort of guarding. Whatever we face down there is going to need to be protected from me, if anything.”

  “Sometimes you’re a bit overconfident, you know that don’t you?” Shaw said.

  “So? It scares the shit out of my opponents.”

  “Not always,” Shaw said. “In fact, usually all it does is scare the shit out of me.”

  He squeezed past the stations to join her side, and then knelt in front of her. He held her hand. “Shaw. I’ll be fine.”

  “All right,” she said. “Just be careful down there.”

  She pecked him on the forehead.

  Rade stood up, drawing her to her feet by pulling on the hand he still held. “Stand up so I can say good-bye to you properly.”

  He fiercely pressed his lips against hers. His breathing increased. Hers came in frantic gulps.

  And then he released her. She kissed at the empty air in front of him, apparently yearning for his lips to touch hers once more, and when they did not, she opened her eyes.

  Rade reluctantly extricated himself from her entirely and departed the bridge. He turned around to watch her while the hatch closed.

  When the metal shut with a resounding thud, sealing her from view, he felt a sudden premonition of doom. He wanted to go back in there and scoop her up in his arms and never let go.

  He shook the feeling off.

  Nothing’s going to happen to either of us. It’s just pre-mission jitters.

  He got them all the time, back when he was on the Teams. It was an unpleasant side effect of losing men you considered brothers on the field of battle. The jitters became so bad that at one point, before every mission, Rade was convinced either he would die or one of his brothers would. Every time. He had slowly recovered from that brink, but even now that he was officially retired from the military, the feeling still came back to bite him in the ass every now and again.

  We’re security consultants now. The missions are supposed to be a breeze here on out.

  He recalled how narrowly he and his men had survived their last mission. And he also thought of that chewed up robot on the surface below.

  A breeze. Right.

  ten

  He hurried down to the hangar deck. He paused at the airlock to the mech bay, and stared longingly through the glass portal at the six Hoplites inside. Their camouflage features were inactive, leaving their hulls a polished black luster that reflected everything else in the hangar. At two and a half meters tall, they were some of the smallest battle suits in their class. The mechs appeared humanoid in shape, with two arms and legs, and the heads melded to the upper chests.

  On each Hoplite a long red visor composed the eye section, the only feature in an otherwise nondescript face. The thickened torso area accommodated a single pilot and AI core. Inner actuators inside that cockpit wrapped the pilot in a cocoon of sorts, allowing him or her to maneuver the mech with body movements; in a pinch the actuators could be retracted, allowing two humans to be carried inside the cockpit, but the local AI would have to assume operational control of the Hoplite in such a scenario.

  Because of the reduced weight class of the units, Hoplites were extremely fast and nimble. Their jumpjets had twice the range of their more distant ATLAS cousins, and the propellant lasted three times as long. Swivel mounts in the left and right arms allowed the units to rotate between cobra lasers and grenade launchers; the latter contained multiple grenade types, and with a selector the pilot could alternate between frag, electromagnetic, smoke and flashbang.

  Defense-wise, the units were equipped with Trench Coats, the nozzles of the three-hundred-sixty degree anti-missile countermeasures rimming the waist areas. A retractable ballistic/laser shield was available to the left arms, rounding out the defenses.

  Those Hoplites had been damn expensive to acquire. While they were older models, similar to the variants he had used during the Second Alien War, the units were costly nonetheless, and had also been covered by the bank loan. In theory, civilians couldn’t own battle suits, but because he ran a security consulting business, he was able to apply for an exemption and secure the necessary permits, again at great cost. Unfortunately, he had to pay a yearly fee to keep the permit active. He had factored in all those costs before starting the business, of course, but he had never expected demand for his team’s particular set of skills to be so... well, weak. The supply of mercenaries apparently far outstripped the demand. Then again, he was sure the clients were out there. It was just a matter of finding them.

  I haven’t even completed the work for my existing client, and I’m already thinking about where I’m going to find the next one.

  Well, such was the life of a security consultant. He always had to be thinking and planning ahead if he wanted to eat.

  Lui, Tahoe, Manic, Fret, Bender, and TJ were donning their jumpsuits inside the bay. Harlequin would be waiting in the adjacent hangar with the shuttles, as Rade never allowed the Artificial to pilot a mech. Once Rade secured a couple more Hoplites, he might think about giving Harlequin one during missions.

  “Are we drawing straws, boss?” Bender asked over the comm, apparently noticing Rade peeking in through the portal.

  Rade shook his head. Normally he would have picked virtual “straws” to determine the odd man out, but not this time. “I’m operating from the ground on this one.”

  “Staying back, huh?” Manic said. “Commanding us from the shadows?”

  “Something like that,” Rade said. “I’ll see you on the surface.”

  With that Rade departed. He made his way to the adjacent hangar bay, where the two shuttles resided. He entered the airlock and after emerging from the inner hatch he went directly to the storage closet and began putting on the liquid cooling and ventilation undergarments.

  He gazed at the seven craft in the hangar. The two shuttles and the Raptor took up the most space, the repeaters and telemetry drones the least. The latter two craft types appeared similar: spherical, metallic things that could deploy rotors to function as quadcopters in an atmosphere. Repeaters and telemetry drones were basically comm nodes with wings. Shuttles, mechs and jumpsuits also contained comm nodes, but they were weaker, with shuttles on the stronger end of the spectrum, and mechs and jumpsuits the weaker.

  Their communicator, Fret, had a special pack that added a more powerful comm node to his jumpsuit, at the cost of extra we
ight and reduced maneuverability. That pack fit in the storage area of his mech, where he would leave it while aboard his Hoplite. Rade imagined Fret was stuffing the pack into the chamber even now.

  As he dressed, Rade’s gaze drifted to the Model 2 Dragonflies; the shuttles looked somewhat similar to their namesakes. Each one had a relatively long, slender fuselage, with two pairs of wings near the nose portion as wide as the fuselage was long. Embedded in each wing were rotors that activated during atmospheric operation: two per wing, for a total of eight, making it an octocopter. The underside of each craft was coated in heat tiles blackened from years of atmospheric entries. The top was a silverish gray.

  Beside the two shuttles was the MQ-91 Raptor, used for reconnaissance and air support. The main wings were on the aft portion of the fuselage, with smaller wings near the nose area. Its six rotors made it a hexacopter, and when operating in full stealth mode those blades made almost no sound. With a high-zoom camera capable of pinpointing a target the size of an insect, and sporting a cobra slightly more powerful than that aboard the Hoplites, and a payload of four Hellfire X89 precision strike missiles, it wasn’t a craft to mess with.

  Rade cringed when he thought how much each of those missiles had cost him. When he was in the military, he never had to worry about the price of all that insanely expensive ordnance. Now that he was a private contractor, he found himself reluctant to deploy the more costly weapons he had under his command.

  Harlequin was standing there, supervising the combat robots, who were also suiting up. Like the mechs, the permits for those reprogrammed Centurions had also cost Rade a great deal, and the parsimonious side of him didn’t want to bring them along at all. While it wasn’t necessary for Harlequin and the other robots to wear jumpsuits, Rade wanted them all geared up to make it impossible for enemies to differentiate between man and machine. If everyone looked alike, it would be especially difficult for the enemy to target the commanding officer: him. It was a trick he had learned from his military days.

  As Harlequin and the other robots completed donning their suits, holographic imagers in the faceplates activated, replacing the featureless robot faces with those of humans.

  Rade accessed their public profiles and displayed them on his HUD in a list. Using a hack provided by TJ, Harlequin had modified the IDs so that they all appeared as Army. Rade’s own public profile listed him as an Army private first class.

  Good enough.

  He finished switching into the undergarments and then began donning the jumpsuit assembly components, attaching his hardpoints to the slots of the strength-enhancing exoskeleton inside. Hardpoints were optional, and not everyone on the team had them; they provided an extra boost to the mind-machine interface of the exoskeletons, allowing one to eke out every last measure of performance from the suits.

  When he attached the final piece—the helmet—the internal oxygen and pressurization system activated, and the suit injected an accelerant to quickly acclimate his body to the new environment. Without that accelerant, he would have had to wait an hour before performing any physical activity.

  The wonders of modern medicine.

  Rade scaled the down ramp of the designated shuttle with the suited-up robots and took a seat. Clamps telescoped from either side, securing him. The down ramp closed, sealing the cabin.

  “The mechs are away,” Shaw transmitted.

  Usually, the Raptor was next to launch at that point. However, because of the dome, he had decided not to employ the war machine.

  He recalled the argument he had had with Tahoe earlier.

  “What’s the point of bringing the Raptor when you won’t be able to fire it?” Tahoe said. “Not without breaching the habitation dome.”

  “If my team is in danger,” Rade said. “I don’t care if I pierce the dome.”

  “There could be survivors holed up in those buildings,” Tahoe said. “You really want to risk killing them?”

  “We don’t know that,” Rade said.

  “And that’s my point,” Tahoe said.

  “The dome’s repair swarms should fix any tiny bore holes caused by the lasers,” Rade said.

  “Well sure,” Tahoe said. “So you’ve admitted that you’re only going to fire the lasers. Because you certainly can’t use the Hellfires, unless you want to cause a major breach. We already have the Argonaut in orbit ready to fire its own Vipers, which are far more powerful. So we don’t need the Raptor.”

  Rade allowed Tahoe to convince him not to deploy the drone mostly because Rade didn’t want to risk losing the machine or any of its expensive ammunition. He considered deploying it in a support role instead, simply to cover their entry and exit into the dome, but the fuel cost of the Raptor was a deterrent in and of itself. Finally he elected not to send the drone at all.

  He hadn’t yet decided on the remaining repeaters. As he stared at them through the portal on the opposite bulkhead, he began to run a quick cost calculation in his head, but stopped himself.

  The safety of my team is paramount, and far more important than any costs. What was the point of buying all that expensive equipment if I don’t use it?

  Rade tapped in Shaw again.

  “You might as well deploy the rest of the repeaters,” he said. “Let’s ensure we have the best connection with you possible.”

  “You got it.”

  He waited for Shaw to give the all clear, then he ordered Harlequin to take the shuttle out.

  eleven

  Rade switched to the external forward camera as the shuttle approached the habitat dome. Set amid the red dunes, it was basically a glass hemisphere situated atop a thick metal base; it reminded him a little of those snow bubble toys, the ones filled with water that you could shake and have the snow distributed throughout the inside.

  The Dragonfly flew low above the red sands of the Lang desert, approaching the dome underneath the crimson sky. The orbiting reflective balloon arrays formed multiple points of light in the sky, their intensity rivaling that of the suns. The giant cone of light they created formed an obvious circle of brighter land around the dome where the beams intersected the surface.

  The shuttle passed over the booster rockets that the mechs would use to return into orbit. Rade didn’t want to think about the financials of deploying those units. The fuel cost alone for the booster rockets was equivalent to the yearly wages of two of his men. He planned to bill the client for it. If she didn’t pay, there was always the courts.

  The craft steered toward a set of hangar doors embedded in the metal base of the dome, a few meters above the dunes. The six Hoplites waited below those doors.

  “I’m receiving an automated response to my entry request,” Harlequin said. “We’re clear to enter.”

  “Are you talking to an actual AI this time?” Rade said.

  “No,” Harlequin said. “At least, not one with the sophistication you’d normally expect. As far as I can tell, the city’s main AI is still offline. The city ecosystem is relying on autonomous subsystems.”

  “Too bad,” Rade said.

  “Yes,” Harlequin replied. “According to the grid report I’m receiving from these subsystems, power is out to roughly half the city, including the pedway corridors. All hangar bays and entry terminals are still active, however.”

  “Lucky us,” Fret said.

  The hangar doors opened and the Dragonfly hovered in place while the mechs activated their jumpjets to leap inside.

  “It’s clear,” Tahoe sent.

  “Take us in, Harlequin,” Rade said.

  The Dragonfly landed in the middle of the hangar, beside the shuttle Ms. Bounty had used for her away team. When the bay doors closed, Rade tested his connection with the Argonaut.

  “Shaw, do you read?” Rade sent. The repeaters had deployed in a long line behind them, in theory ensuring a well-boosted signal to the ship.

  “Loud and clear,” Shaw replied. There wasn’t even a hint of digital distortion in her voice.

  Rade
glanced at the overhead map on his HUD. In their mechs, Tahoe, Lui, Fret and Bender had assumed positions at the four corners of the Dragonfly. Meanwhile, TJ and Manic stood guard on the far side of the hangar, beside the exit hatch.

  “The hangar has finished pressurizing,” Harlequin said. “The bay has a stable atmosphere.”

  “Take an air sample, Lui,” Rade said. “I want a read on any potential contagions.”

  A moment later Lui said: “Atmosphere is completely breathable, and appears free of contagions.”

  Even so, Rade had no intention of abandoning the suits. Contagion levels could change at any moment, especially if some sort of mist weapon was utilized by a hidden attacker.

  “What about radiation levels?” Rade asked.

  “The same as reported by the autonomous units in charge of the ecosystem,” Lui said. “Well within human tolerances. You could walk out there without your jumpsuit if you wanted to. As for us mech people, the radiation armor in our battle suits is overkill.”

  “Harlequin, ramp down,” Rade ordered. When the ramp lowered, he continued: “Centurions, Cigar formation. Reinforce the mechs.”

  He waited for the cabin to empty. When all the combat robots were in place, Tahoe said: “Still quiet out here.” There was an edge of impatience in his voice.

  Let him be impatient, Rade thought. My team, my safety protocols.

  “All right,” Rade said. “Harlequin? With me.”

  The Artificial left its position in the cockpit and joined Rade on the ramp. Together they emerged into the hangar.

  “TJ, can you access the door to the main terminal?” Rade asked.

  “I have access,” TJ said. “The remote connection observes standard protocols. I don’t even have to authenticate. The residents of Lang are one big welcoming family.”

  “Tahoe, Bender, Lui, join TJ and Manic.” Rade glanced at the nearby combat robots. “Units C and D, go with them.”

  The designated combat robots and mechs reached TJ and Manic.

  “Tahoe, take over and clear the terminal corridor just outside,” Rade said.