Jejomar sat on the floor and wrestled with the children. They were just months old, all born after the moon-base had been destroyed. But they were growing fast and had already learned the value of teamwork. Two of them on each arm tried to pin him down, four more sat on his legs while two sat on his chest and tried to poke him in the ribs. The children were smart, they already understood many basic words. They shouted instructions at each other as they tried to keep him on the floor. Jejomar wasn’t wearing his suit or his helmet. One of the children stared at his craggy face, running her tiny fingers over the wrinkles and healed scars. She was fascinated by the aug patches attached to his skull which had now become out-dated tech. He wanted to spend time with the children. It was important, even during a war. At the same time, he was communicating with Dakila.
“So far, we have been reactive, waiting for the humans to make the first move. Perhaps it is time to go on the offensive,” sent Dakila.
“I would rather wait and see what they are capable of. We have many more drones and more resources. We are protected here under Montes Haemus. Let them come to us.”
“I don’t share your patience Jejomar; these humans are offending me. Their presence in our space should not be tolerated. We should launch a kamikaze swarm and destroy them all.”
He swung both arms and sent the children rolling across the floor, laughing, they picked themselves up and jumped on him again. They reminded him of his loss, it was torturous but also healing. They were happy children, curious about everything, so innocent and pure. And at the same time, when Jejomar looked deep into their eyes, he could see an ancient wisdom reflected there. His daughter Bulan had been the Moon goddess, his heart ached when he thought of her. A deep sadness that easily twisted into cold anger and determination.
“They don’t have enough resources to fight for long. They will run out of printer substrate then there will be no more ammunition, no more weapons. We can pick them off at our leisure. And I would capture one of these effector weapons to study. It could be useful.”
“Destroy them and be done with it. These are greedy, wasteful, decadent humans that spent their lives exploiting others. These are the ones responsible for the degeneration of their planet. It sickens me that they happily defecated all over Earth, they shit on their own planet and their own people, they abandon their home and come here to try to evict us. We should annihilate them.”
Jejomar knew that Dakila still had scars from working for BPI years ago, both mental and physical. And his attitude had hardened since the suicidal shuttle attack that had left him with no legs and few functioning organs. He turned his attention back to the children who had retreated to confer together, scheming a new plan of attack. Their eyes flickered brightly as they communicated with their neural nets. The nets had been introduced while they were still in the womb, anchored to their soft growing skulls and permeating into their brains. Nanoscale conductive fibres grew as the young brains grew, eventually allowing them to link with any database, operating system, AI or other Masama. It was an upgrade on the telepathic implant and primitive augments and they were already using it to good effect. They stealthily circled him, then suddenly they all leaped on him at once.
As he gently fended the children off, Jejomar wondered briefly how many humans were inside those shuttles. How many would die in Lago’s employ. Their effector weapons had disabled many drones, they were still intact, but their systems were scrambled. That had been an unpleasant surprise. The drones and all the debris would be gathered and recycled eventually. “We can annihilate them whenever we choose Dakila. They pose no threat.”
“We should destroy them now. Maybe you feel some sense of responsibility for their desperate predicament, but the Replica are an inevitable consequence of progress. Machine intelligence was always going to manifest in such a way. The sentient Replica are pure and relentless.”
In a sense the Replica were their children too, but their cold machine intelligence had evolved into something much more formidable. These children would grow to be more than Masama, more sophisticated than Jejomar’s generation. Masama was an old Filipino word, it meant dark and devilish, given to them by BPI. It was not appropriate any more.
Jejomar was balancing the opinions of everyone. At one extreme there was Dakila who hated humans and wanted them destroyed as soon as possible. He also understood Ojerime’s more empathetic view. The Masama community was democratic, but often the final decision was left up to Jejomar as he weighed up both arguments. The compromise was somewhere in the middle. He held one of the smallest children in the palm of his hand, she giggled as she tried to grab his fingers. “If it would satisfy your bloodlust then launch another two hundred drones, destroy two more shuttles and see how they react.”
He reluctantly said goodbye. The children were the first priority for all the Masama, but Jejomar had a war to manage. His exo-suit came alive as he backed into it, recognising his biological signature. The suit wrapped itself around him like a familiar lover, encasing his head and body. Jejomar wore it so often he was incomplete without it. He walked out into the tunnel and stepped onto a transporter that took him up to the cavern inside the summit of the mountain.
The projection showed the seven remaining shuttles. They stayed stationary, five of them positioned around the fifty-kilometre limit. The other two had stopped advancing towards Montes Haemus. The debris from the first exchanges drifted in the space between, slowly being pulled down by the Moon’s weak gravity. There was not much left of the two destroyed shuttles, just pieces of scorched, twisted metal and clouds of vapour floating in space.
Jejomar watched Dakila’s multiple limbs working the operating system as he activated the drones. They went flying through the lava tube and up towards the crater opening. The drones swept through the tunnel in silence, causing some air displacement as they passed through the cavern. They raced into the space above Montes Haemus, aiming for two shuttles that had encroached beyond the fifty-kilometre perimeter. Dakila magnified the two targets, both with Russian markings. Jejomar could hear his thoughts. “These ugly shuttles symbolise everything wrong with humanity. Built for billionaires. Flying around the solar system looking for more resources to exploit. Spreading their vile emissions throughout our space.”
“Not for much longer,” sent Jejomar as the drones started separating into two equal groups. He was anticipating a typical response from the shuttles, more drones or weapon platforms but the projection displayed something Jejomar did not expect. A glistening cloud dispersed from one of the shuttles stationed above the others and moved to intercept the Masama drones. Thousands of miniscule machines were highlighted by the projection, pinpoints of orange light blurred together into a moving cloud. “Magnify,” he sent.
Dakila manipulated the controls and focused on the mass of machines. They were tiny surveillance drones, a camera with a pair of small wings and a set of metal legs. Bigger than the Replica, with cameras for eyes and a gas cannister for a torso. The wings buzzed too fast to see but provided no direction as there was no air to fly in. The weak lunar atmosphere offered very slight resistance, just enough for the mini drones to find purchase in. They darted about like fireflies, propelled by bursts of gas. The cloud gathered momentum, moving ahead of the shuttles toward the Masama drones with greater speed.
“Hornets,” sent Dakila. “They must be desperate if they are using these unarmed surveillance drones to defend themselves.”
Once the Masama drones were within range they opened fire with their particle beams, cutting great lines of destruction through the cloud of hornets. The particle beam carried a powerful pulse of kinetic energy, instantly creating catastrophic overheating, burning through, and destroying its target. The proton particles were an accidental by-product of the helium3 fusion reaction. The Masama had turned the stray protons into a weapon. The drones surrounded the hornets, and burned through them. Jejomar watched the glowing debris rain down on the regolith. Already thinking about recycling all the debris created by this battle.
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Thousands of the little machines kept emerging from the shuttle. The swarm advanced closer and engaged with the cloud. The Masama drones were faster, but the hornets burnt more gas to manoeuvre around the bigger drones. Little legs unfolded from the beneath their bodies and clamped onto the titanium hulls. They swarmed all over the bigger drones, finding entrances and crawling into the sensitive internals. They penetrated the casings of the particle beam weapons causing the charged protons to explode. They aimed for the boosters, most of them blown away and fried by bursts of exhaust, but enough kept their footing and crept into the reactor causing it to detonate in a brief ball of fiery destruction.
“Keep accelerating, incinerate the hornets with exhaust,” sent Jejomar.
The drones kept firing particle beams that lit up the sky with streaks of red, burning through the clouds of hornets, gas, and debris. The lines cut through the dense hazy darkness, segmenting the space into angular chunks but they couldn’t kill them all, there were too many small targets at close range. They couldn’t just ram them as the agile little machines avoided collisions. The accelerating drones burnt more hornets with their exhaust but each one soon had twenty or thirty hornets crawling all over their shells, and it only took one hornet to find a way inside and cause destruction. Jejomar cursed as he watched his drones exploding. The hornets looked insubstantial, but the cloud was lit up by flashes of exploding drone reactors.
“Pakshet!” exclaimed Jejomar out loud. The cloud of hornets had destroyed an entire complement of two hundred drones. More of the little machines had joined the cloud which was now moving towards the summit of Montes Haemus.
“Launch the shuttles,” sent Dakila. “Burn through them.”
***
Ojerime and Kurzawa stood at the bridge of the Hard Vacuum. She focused on the cloud ahead, plotting the best trajectory to burn through the hornets. She directed the Hard Vacuum to sweep slowly as possible through the cloud with enough thrust to burn through the hornets. The first turn destroyed hundreds of the little drones, like a harvester ploughing through the regolith. Ojerime could hear them pinging off the hull then tumbling into the exhaust to be incinerated. But the second turn was not so successful. The hornets scattered as the shuttles approached, like little fish avoiding a large predator. They raced to catch up and went straight for their hulls, clamping on with their tiny legs and crawling across the surface.
Ojerime conferred with her shuttle, the hornets were incapable of inflicting any damage to the hull, but they could not destroy them at such close range. The shuttles reconfigured to protect any exposed instruments on the outside, shrugging off the hornets in the process but they quickly re-attached themselves. Ojerime directed the shuttles to sweep through the cloud again from a different trajectory, they incinerated hundreds more, but the majority of the cloud remained attached. She could see the Mutually Assured Destruction, hornets crawling across its surface like ticks on the back of a bull. They could not shake them off.
“Two enemy shuttles are advancing,” sent Ojerime. “Russian markings, they will be within range in a few seconds.”
“Activating particle beam,” sent Kurzawa as the needle lens extended further from the underside.
Ojerime noticed another squadron of Masama drones launching from the mountain, but they were immediately occupied with thousands of hornets. She manoeuvred the Hard Vacuum around to face the advancing Russian shuttles. As soon as the particle beam needle appeared the hornets swarmed all over it, picking at any opening and doing as much damage as they were capable of. Ojerime ordered the weapons on both shuttles to fire. Dead hornets and clouds of vapour ignited the path of the invisible beams, but they missed their targets and the Russian shuttles continued moving closer. Again, the particle beams fired and this time they were both wildly off target, Kurzawa cursed as he wrestled with the controls.
“The hornets must have damaged the lens housing. I can’t get an accurate fix.”
“Keep trying, one hit will be enough.”
The Hard Vacuum shuddered, and the operating system was suddenly overwhelmed with static. There was an electronic screaming in Ojerime’s brain, it was the shuttle. Through her link she was experiencing the ionized waves of charged particles flowing through the shuttle as if they were flowing through her body. It was not physically painful, but Ojerime felt the electric anguish as the operating system of Hard Vacuum was torn apart. The orderly, logical, digitized mind of the shuttle was not an artificial intelligence, but in the last micro-second before the ion cannon hit, Ojerime detected a minute burst of emotion. Anger, fear, and regret all wrapped up in a tiny surge of electric self-awareness before certain death.
“Fuck!” Kurzawa swore aloud as the shuttle was again hit with the Russian ion cannon. Sparks flew as the circuitry exploded, and the Hard Vacuum started tilting as they lost control of the thrust. Through the window Ojerime could see the Mutually Assured Destruction also listing, still intact but floating helplessly, out of control. Its particle beam fired wildly into space; hornets crawled all over it before the weapon housing exploded. Seconds later it was struck with twin missiles.
The missiles slammed into the underbelly of the Mutually Assured Destruction. Ojerime watched helplessly as their sister shuttle detonated in a blazing nuclear fireball. Her compound eyes were momentarily blinded by the brilliant flash, but they compensated in time to see the explosive eruption as the liquid hydrogen tanks ignited. The expanding blaze raced towards them, then disappeared completely as the propellant burnt away and there was nothing left to vaporize. Ojerime sensed the fleeting pain of the shuttle pilots. The distance should have been too great for telepathic communication but in the instant before the shuttle’s detonation she could feel the fear from the Masama pilots. It was a short burst of extreme emotion that travelled across space, faster than the nuclear destruction that followed it.
Ojerime realised they would have to abandon ship as the Russian shuttles bore down on them. They had seconds to escape. Their shuttle was disabled, unable to reconfigure an exit for them. There was no need for any communication between them and there was no time to plan their escape. Kurzawa’s metal fist smashed into the hardened glass silicate window. There was no practical use for windows in the shuttles, only to provide a sense of perspective for the pilots, but Ojerime was glad they had allowed for this whim as it was their only means of escape. Kurzawa slammed both fists into the window which caused tiny cracks to appear. His suit worked faster than his body, metal fists like sledgehammer pistons pounded relentlessly on the window. Ojerime joined him, her metal talons shaped into a tapering spear to pierce the fracturing glass. Within seconds they had shattered the window, and they both pushed out into space.
They flew quietly out into the void as the Hard Vacuum exploded behind them. Caught in the expanding blaze, it propelled them out into the darkness and blew them head over heels. The fuel tanks ignited, blasting them with a burst of extreme heat. Their suits offered some protection, but Ojerime’s blood was boiling and her skin frying as the blast dissipated around them. Thankfully, there was no air to burn and no atmosphere to carry the nuclear discharge, but Ojerime only barely survived the wave of destruction. She lifted her knees up and regained some control of her suit to steady the spinning motion while looking out for Kurzawa. She could not quite believe she was alive, but she realised she probably would not survive the surges of radiation sweeping through her. Then the pain kicked in.
Ojerime’s skin was burning beneath her suit. She was cooking inside. The suit conducted the heat and although it was cooling quickly, the damage had been done. The suit had saved her life, but it offered no protection to the intense waves of radiation that were sweeping through her. Ojerime managed to gain some control over her pain receptors and tried to block out the excruciating burning sensation. She almost blacked out several times and she lost control of her momentum again, tumbling helplessly, over, and over. The surface of the Moon flashing beneath her. She gave up. Submitting to the overwhelming pain and in doing so felt a calm acceptance of her fate. She would die. Even if she survived the burns, her body had been totally irradiated. Every cell corrupted. The sickness washed through her like a hot foul wind. She wanted to sleep, she craved unconsciousness, but the stinging pain of her burns would not let her surrender. She could feel blisters erupting all over her skin. Then another collision. Her body was buffeted by the impact, and she thrashed about helplessly. It was Kurzawa that had crashed into her.
He had some control of his suit. Kurzawa had small cutting tools attached which emitted tiny bursts of gas. Enough to provide a little bit of directed propulsion. He wrapped his arms around her and steadied their tumbling momentum. They connected telepathically but they were beyond conversation. Ojerime could sense his mind, it was wracked with burning pain like herself. Every last bit of his energy was focused on containing the overwhelming agony and staying conscious long enough to control the cutting tools as he tried to arrest the nauseating spin. They flew through the cloud of burnt hornets, hundreds of them drifting, scorched, and melted. Reduced to tiny metal husks. Ojerime could feel them bouncing off her suit as she slowly lost consciousness. Then everything went black as they descended to the surface of the Moon.