Close Micah Prime Orbit - Robot Federation Territory
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[Lieutenant Commander Cameron! Lieutenant Commander Cameron!]
Something popped behind Kaya’s ear—a warble and buzz—and then stopped. She held her hand up to the Memory Recovery Unit. Probably standard post-mission stuff. I’ll ask a veteran about it later.
“Not now, system,” She hurried off the Pericles Light Dropship and into The Champion of Democratic Intent’s hangar. The ship’s stale air was a welcome relief after the reeking surface of Micah Prime, and Kaya felt a moment of pity for the regulars who’d be staying there for weeks or months.
[(o_0) But you have new corvette upgrades available!!! (0_o)]
“I really can’t talk,” Kaya said. She side-stepped a woman in a flight suit who was talking with a handful of mechanics next to a Kingfisher, then kept going. “General Gorsuch wants to debrief me.”
[They say he once killed a man with a paper straw—twice.]
[Same man twice, not two men once. Better hurry! Going into standby mode]
“Thanks for your understanding,” Kaya said acidly. She weaved through the crowded, tiny hangar—the Pericles took up almost half the space, and one Kingfisher had to be stored mid-air above the other—and past the corvette’s gunnery stations. The vessel hadn’t felt like home for the first few days she’d commanded it. Reality and training were different, and the ship’s bridge crew had to be the most casual soldiers she’d met since basic training.
Meanwhile, she wanted things done the way her training said they should be.
It had come to a head on the third day out of Ceres, when the saluting had gotten so slow and sarcastic that she’d realized it was on purpose. It wasn’t that the crew was poorly trained; they were a perfectly tuned fighting machine, just like the Champ herself. It was that they didn’t see the need to waste time. Either that or they didn’t respect her yet. She could fix that with a simple order if it was the first. If it was the second, she’d have to prove herself a competent commander. And if it was a mix?
Honestly, Kaya hoped it was a mix.
Eventually, after enduring one too many sloppy salutes that somehow never got replicated when General Gorsuch was on the bridge, she’d canceled all salutes outside of the entrance airlock. After that, the crew had warmed up to her, even if they still snapped to attention wherever the general went.
A lift carried her up to the bridge, where she noticed a conspicuous lack of baseball caps; with the exception of one crumpled hat perched defiantly on the pilot’s head, the rest seemed to have disappeared. The crew looked as hard at work at the semi-holographic screens and ship’s controls as ever, and Kaya shrugged the missing hats off. Maybe they were becoming more professional. She nodded. “Keep up the good work.”
She kept moving toward the crew’s quarters. Somewhere inside, General Gorsuch lurked. He’d taken one of the petty officers’ berths, sparing her from losing her cramped—but spacious by comparison—commander’s room. When she tracked him down and squeezed into the tiny room, he gestured for her to sit in the empty chair. His armored form took up most of the bed, and since she hadn’t changed from her oil-splattered armor, their steel-plated knees meshed in the tiny room’s center.
She shrugged it off. No personal space on board a corvette.
The room smelled like cigars and oil—the kind for polishing armor, not the machine oil the Robot Federation ran on—and its steel walls pressed in uncomfortably as Gorsuch loomed over her even in her battle armor. “Lieutenant Commander Cameron, when I first saw you, I knew you were special! But now? Now, I think you have what it takes! I’m going to brief you in on our real mission here!”
“We’re not hunting for the bastards who nuked Lost Earth, sir?” Kaya asked, disappointment on her face.
“Ditch the sir for now, Lieutenant Commander. But no, Operation Revived Thunder isn’t about victory on the battlefield, at least not immediately. Don’t get me wrong, soldier. I’m a firm believer that the EAF shouldn’t lose battles, much less wars. But let’s discuss Hill Thirty-Nine and the secondary research station first. Do you know what your casualty rate was?”
“We lost seventeen Droppers out of the four who deployed,” Kaya said promptly. “A highly successful mission.”
“By EAF’s modern standards, yes. A disaster by pre-MRC clone system standards. My team and I routinely completed suicide missions with under fifty percent casualties. You took over four hundred percent. And that’s a problem.”
“May I speak freely?”
“Yes,” General Gorsuch rumbled. The sound was like boulders shifting in a flooding river.
“Why is that a problem? The MRC system allows the AEF to win hopeless battles. When every battle was twenty bots against four Droppers, victory came down to skill, grit, and the ability to pull off superhuman feats of heroism, but even all three of those weren’t always enough. Now, we can combine the things that made us successful on the battlefield before cloning with the certainty of numbers. It’s a winning combination.”
General Gorsuch stared at her, vein popping on his forehead until he reached up to push on it. Then, after a moment, his voice dropped dangerously. “It’s not. And I’ll tell you why it’s not. Because inevitability leads to complacency. We’ve lost our heroes. Do you know who the youngest living Hero of the Republic is?”
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“You?”
“Damn right, it’s me!” Gorsuch thundered. “Now, who’s the youngest, living or dead?”
“I have no idea.” Kaya stood stunned by the sudden changes in the general’s voice.
“Me again! And that’s a problem. I’m almost seventy god damned years old, and they won’t let me keep dropping ever since the incident on Blackwater III. I’m too old to be the hero the EAF—no, the bastards in the Republic Senate—need to see. They need someone to show them that there’s a better way to wage war and protect the Republic, one that’s efficient, glorious, and inevitable.”
“And how am I supposed to help you with this?” Kaya asked.
“I need an immortal Hero of the Republic,” the general said. “And you’re going to be that Hero. Together, you and I are going to change the galaxy. But before we go any further, what I’m about to tell you is so confidential the motherfuckers at the Bureau of Information don’t know what to classify it as. It’s the kind of need to know where, if you spill it, they delete your clone info and then kill you. No trial, no tribunal. You just disappear. So I need to know. Are you in?”
◄▼►
When she was a girl, Kaya had heard about the Heroes of the Republic.
Gorsuch, the Unfailing Dropper, was the most famous. A hundred, hundred drops, and he’d never been killed; that alone was a feat worthy of remembrance. But there were others—those who’d given their lives before the Memory Recovery Capsules had rendered that sacrifice nonexistent.
Staff Sergeant Charlie Tanner, who’d stormed the beachhead on Reveloth and helped bring down the Orion’s Belters and their superdreadnought, ending space-to-space combat as a meaningful theater of war. The dozen pilots of Eagleheart 453, a mech that outlived its pilots despite their seeming best efforts to get the machine killed. It had fought on a dozen planets and performed so admirably that when its class was retired, it found itself still on the battlefield and still killing pilots—all of whom had received the Hero of the Republic for their sacrifices.
But the Republic hadn’t crowned a new Hero in the last forty years. Not since two years after the MRC clone system became commonplace. Gorsuch had been the greatest and the last.
She’d grown up playing ‘Kill the Cows,’ ‘Beat the Bot,’ and other games on the playground, and she'd loved it every time she had the chance to be the Hero who swept in and single-handedly saved a planet. And now, the last Hero of the Republic was offering her the opportunity to become the next? She had to accept it.
“I understand. Read me in.”
“Understood. System, give her the fast briefing.”
[At once, General senpai! Operation Revived Thunder is a two-part mission. One involves a multi-pronged assault against our enemies in the Orion sector, Galactic South, and the Robot Federation. This publicly-followed assault will bring attention to the way the Republic wages war and will also draw eyes to the visible portion of the second—and more critical—part of the mission]
“And what’s that?” Kaya asked.
[Part Two requires a soldier to voluntarily submit to tampering with their Memory Recovery Capsule. Instead of deploying your memory to a new clone body on death, this modification will send it backward to a predetermined point up to three hours in the past. We believe this will allow the appearance of an unkillable soldier with a one hundred percent success rate]
“The big thing here is the appearance. There’s a better way to wage war, where we burn through fewer clones, less equipment, and fewer troopers. I survived hundreds of drops. The soldiers in my time averaged twenty drops between when they enlisted and when they retired or died. Today, troops lose their edge between eighty and one hundred drops. And yet, the Republic’s liberation of the galaxy has slowed to a crawl. It’s not right. And the reason it happens is tactics.” General Gorsuch sucked in a breath so big it felt like the room was being drained of oxygen.
“We use Droppers too much when we should use bombardments because droppers are cheap once they’re plugged in. We need to prove that that’s wrong.
“So, here’s my proposal. Your squad will continue respawning normally. You’ll be outfitted with the MRC Mark Two. When you die, you’ll reset to the first drop on a mission with all the knowledge you need to proceed past your point of death. Your squad won’t know anything but that you’re an exceptionally brilliant commander, and as far as the other generals will know, that’s all you’ll be to them, too. However, over time, your success rate and low casualties will be noticed.
“You and I will sit down daily and discuss tactics that worked when I was in the service, and kept our death rates down. And the ship’s system will keep it to itself, or I will disassemble it and have the technicians put it back together so it only speaks in binary. Do you understand?”
[Yes, understood, General-senpai. owo]
“And you, Lieutenant Commander. Do you understand what we’re trying to do? What’s at stake?”
“Yes, sir,” Kaya said. “And I’m in.”
“Outstanding. Absolutely outstanding. I knew you were the one for this mission all the way back at Ceres Command. Above average, but not perfect. An everywoman the soldiers could believe in.” General Gorsuch showed her a device. “Time for your install. Stay still.”
His massive hands closed around her head, holding it in place like an enemy in an ambush. For a moment, she struggled, but then she forced herself to relax and breathe. Pressure forced itself against her temple, and in just a moment, the MRC behind her ear started heating up until the red-hot metal was unbearable. She twitched in the general’s grasp. “Breathe through it, trooper! Don’t let it push you down!” The general shouted in her ear.
Something was wrong. Why weren’t they being secretive anymore? She realized she was screaming, and the general was shouting. Then, all at once, the pain stopped.
“System, what’s her status?” Gorsuch snapped. “Is she good?”
[Dropper Conscious but Dying. You have suffered major brain trauma (╥﹏╥) ]
Her body moved through the air and onto the bed. “Trooper, can you hear me? Blink twice.”
She blinked twice. She could barely hear the general’s shouts over the blood pulsing in her head, and the world wouldn’t stop spinning from her place on Gorsuch’s bed. Her eyes closed. A moment later, the general slapped her—shockingly lightly, considering his armor—and her eyes sprang open again.
“You’re doing a great thing for the Republic. I’ll reset you soon. When you wake up, head to your room. The system will inform you about the latest ship upgrades from the Neptune yards. And, Lieutenant Commander?” The general tapped his ear, and she noticed the skin-tone MRC on his temple for the first time. “I’ll remember this conversation, too. Welcome to Operation Revived Thunder. Welcome to immortality. Welcome to glory.”
His massive, steel-clad fingers wrapped around Kaya’s neck again. Kaya tried to curse, to struggle—anything—but couldn’t. The pressure spiked, and a moment later, the System’s message popped up as she slipped into the void. Contrary to her orders, the message wasn’t abbreviated.
[Dropper Lost. You have suffered major cranial and spine trauma (╥﹏╥) ]
[Installing Retrograde Backup]
That’s not a clone message.