25. How's the head, soldier?
"Do not be afraid of your four legged friends, the Canine lupus nobilus. They are very brave and smart and good. They are the human’s oldest friends, and the humans have sent them to you to protect you while you escape from this bad place. They will not harm you, and they will keep you safe. Do not fight them, they are your friends as the Rodentia are your friends, and they want to help.
"And do not worry about shooting Rusty. He’s got a very thick skull and doesn’t mind one bit."
Purple Dots was looking very sheepish, and everyone was looking at her with very stern looks.
"Well I didn’t know that when I pushed the button! And it didn’t actually hurt him, so I don’t know why everyone is mad at me! What if they had been more Others instead of our friends? You saw how fast they were moving, I only had a split second to act or one of us might have died," she protested.
"Purple Dots is right," Yellow agreed. "I would have done the same, except that I was watching the other door. It was a mistake, but if nobody is hurt then all we can do is ask for ‘Rusty’ to forgive us once we are able to make ourselves understood. They can make our teacher speak with us, but they still don’t seem to listen to our songs."
"It is so frustrating to not be understood!" Purple Dots exclaimed. "I hope we can teach them to sing properly soon!"
"I am more worried about getting away from the Others. We should go. These four legged warriors must be mighty if they do not mind being shot by these terrible things, but until I believe we are safe I will not let go of mine," Yellow stated.
"I agree."
The other kips all sang their agreement, and then sang the repeating teacher’s song to show that they had heard and understood.
~~~~~~~~
Nathan was following Rodentia squads Theta, Lambda, Kappa, and Eta with trepidation. Those were the squads that had suffered casualties, although Theta had been the worst. And yet, Theta was also the most successful, having gathered the largest following of Aurealians and kept them safe. That was partly due to the two kips that were shooting anything that wasn’t an Aurealian or a Rodentia.
He had actually chuckled when Rusty had been shot. The Jurassian handheld blasters were known tech, devastating to unarmored flesh, but easily countered with UEOSC armor technology. He had sent Rusty a low-priority meme of Phineas Gage with the caption of "how’s the head, soldier?" and gotten back a low-priority message of "If I wanted you smelling my ass you’d know it." He paused, then responded with "Acknowledged. I say again, godspeed. Pack protects pack."
"Pack Protects Pack."
Reluctantly, Nathan closed his open feeds to Theta team and began using them to scan through the other Rodentia squads. All of them had found Aurealians, and all of them were in various points of extraction with varying degrees of success.
Squad Lambda was a catastrophe. They had gathered their Aurealians, only for the Horthians to trap them. The guards had killed a dozen of the poor Aurealians before suddenly stopping. The Rodentia, outnumbered and outgunned, had reluctantly hidden to wait for their commandos to arrive. Perhaps Theta would not have been so different if it were not for the armed Aurealians. He wished, not for the first time, that the Rodentia corps was equipped and trained with proper weapons, but it was counter to their ideology, their mission, and their ability to use ranged weapons effectively.
Kappa had one Rodentia fatality, and Eta had four injuries. He was uncertain about their Aurealian survival rate; they had been surprised by a few guards and taken them out with their sapping blades. It was bad. A disaster. One that he could have mitigated if he had been made aware of it sooner, but now wasn’t the time to think about that.
He checked in with his combat forces. The drones were at work, disabling vehicles and forces as they came to reinforce the cloning facilities. Tony was rushing to save Squad Eta. Lucy was doubled up with Rusty’s team on Squad Theta. The rest of the commandos were spread out as best as he could manage to protect as many of the Aurealians as possible.
And he was breaking protocol by sending in the autonomous land-drones as well. It was a judgment call, within his discretion, but autonomous weaponry, especially advanced autonomous weaponry, was on a very long list of ‘show these weapons to neither the Aurealians nor the Deathsworn in case it gives them some very bad ideas.’
The aerial drones were not autonomous. Athena controlled them from orbit. They also possessed self destruct methods which would leave behind only wreckage deemed ‘acceptably irrecoverable,’ meaning that the UEOSC didn’t care if the Jurassians studied it or not.
Autonomous drones were different. They were not truly autonomous, but they possessed independent decision making skills which prioritized their current mission objectives. Independent neural-nets, combined with networking with other drones on the same mission, remotely guided by Athena from orbit. The danger was that the Jurassians would damage the communication center and Athena wouldn’t be able to activate the recall signal, or trigger the self-destruct.
The drones were equipped with non-lethal weaponry only, and that too was part of the danger. If the Jurassians simply threw bodies at it, eventually it would run out of ammunition and power, and without triggering the self destruct, they would be able to study it.
To a peer, such weapons are considered toys. Thousands of them may fall to planets in uncontrolled orbital entries, to be guided on the surface by up to a single soldier in a jarhead coffin. And that was just in their war-game protocols, with both intra- and inter-military competitions spending the drone’s electronic lives by the millions. But the UEOSC had determined that they could change the course of the Aurealian – Deathsworn conflict and had put them on a restricted weapons list.
Nathan was confident that he would be able to either recover all of the drones he was deploying, or he would render them acceptably unrecoverable. But he was using a restricted technology on a planet where he knew it was restricted. He had wide latitude to save the lives of his men and innocent civilians, but he was uncertain exactly how broad his discretion could be stretched before a review of his actions would bring him up for charges. It was another question for later, at the moment he didn’t have time to care.
The response from the Horthians was surprisingly lax. After their fierce defense of Horthus city, he had expected thousands of militia to begin marching towards each facility, encircling and barricading and breaching it with their blasters. Instead, there were just a few caravans, which were easily disabled by the aerial drones that Nathan sent after them.
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"They still don’t realize we have PMT," he whispered to himself. "Everything they’ve seen so far could be explained by advanced stealth. They think that we’re stuck shepherding a bunch of refugees on the surface, they don’t realize that once we’re in range we can just pop them to safety, beyond their reaches forever."
And he realized that he had to keep up that illusion for as long as possible.
~~~~~~~~~
Lucy was tired. And angry. And hungry.
She was Gorilla sapiens . Fools thought that meant that she had a human brain stuck in the body of a gorilla. Fools thought that.
The smaller primate uplifts were very clever. They were always mostly clever, that was how they survived before project uplift; being clever. The humans only needed to give them the ability to communicate and learn from humans and each other. Unfortunately, the smaller primates were also often very foolish before the uplift, and project uplift had a harder time solving that problem.
But she was Gorilla sapiens . Gorillas had lacked speech, but they had still possessed tools and culture and society. And wisdom, in their own sense. And until the humans figured out how to make sharp rocks very, very deadly to everything else on the planet, the gorilla had been the most dangerous primate on earth.
She was Gorilla sapiens . She was wise, she was strong, and she had learned how to use weapons like a human used weapons. She was death incarnate.
And she was bored.
She knew that Nathan had made the right choice, sending her with Rusty’s team to help squad Theta. But the commandos were too fast and left behind only unconscious bodies. There was nothing for her to do as she shuffled through the halls into the facility, trying to catch up. Simon had, after the mistake that had gotten Rusty shot, warned the Aurealians ahead of time that there was another friendly coming to help them. She almost wished that he had not, at least that would be interesting. It had been hours since she’d been shot at last and she missed it.
She was vaguely watching the map when her room suddenly turned yellow. She frowned. She wasn’t Rodentia, they were the masters when it came to maps and labyrinths, but she was fairly certain that her soon to be charges would have to pass through this room in order to escape, and if she understood Simon’s mapping software correctly, the Horthians had just unlocked a nearby door to allow them access to it.
Lucy decided to resolve the situation before the kips came near. She had armor, they did not. Let the Horthians shoot at her, it would be amusing.
There were three doors to choose from leading into rooms that were red on the map, and she picked the first one she would clear. She grinned to herself in a human-yet-not-human way. She was no longer bored.
~~~~~~~~
She was nameless, but perhaps her quick thinking would earn her a name. The facility was lost, but Gone would be blamed for that, not her. Security was his responsibility, yet all he ever focused on was preparing the kips for the hunting preserves by terrorizing them. Multiple nameless in his employ had noted on his laxness, and any investigation into the failure would swiftly implicate him. That there was nothing he could have done – she was certain of that now – was irrelevant to the discussion.
What was relevant was that she had saved what they needed to start over. The cloning machines, the incubators, the ancient holograms, the computers that controlled the entire facility all of that was theoretically replaceable. The embryos, those were irretrievable. She knew that, and those in power who knew the truth of the facilities knew that as well.
They were irretrievable because they were there when the facility was reactivated, and nobody knew how to make any more of them. Despite the abundance of Aurealian tissue available for their researchers, no Jurassian had been able to recreate the way these embryos shed cells which would, eventually, develop into fully formed Aurealian females. Nobody knew where the precious cell lines came from, nor how they were made, nor how to make more of them. At best they had been able to spread the cell lines from one facility to another.
And her quick thinking had saved them. And, because she believed that this was a coordinated attack happening across the globe, she might have in her possession the only functional embryos on the planet, and Horthus would reward her greatly for -
The door opened suddenly, and a large, armored figure walked inside. The grunts – they were nameless like her but still grunts, good for holding a blaster and little else – opened fire, but their blaster fire exploded uselessly against her, barely discoloring her armor. The figure let out a terrifying roar of rage and defiance, and then pointed at the offending Horthians, killing each of them with startling efficiency.
Once the grunts were dead, the figure turned to her next. She knew her life was forfeit, but her only thought was to protect her treasure. She wrapped her arms around it protectively.
The dart hit her in the back, injecting its poison into her bloodstream. She was the last to die in the control room. The poison was painless, robbing her of her strength, but her consciousness drifted away slowly. She watched in outrage as the large figure came over to her, studied her treasure, and then dragged it away.
When she awoke eight hours later, there was no trace of the embryos, nor their cryogenic container.