Chapter Two
Sienele found himself staring at the floor for a long moment before he straightened and looked over at the Administrator again.
“How many floors did you say the facility descended?”
“Ten, but I am familiar with every floor. I assure you, there is nothing amiss below us.”
“Mmm,” Sienele nodded slowly, “And how far down is ten floors?”
“I would have to check the records to be precise, but roughly I would say a hundred to one hundred and thirty Lithomets.”
Sorilla blinked at the term she wasn’t familiar with, but based on the height of the floor they were in, she guessed it was somewhere on the order of a hundred meters, give or take a fair percentage. She frowned, “If a… lithomet is roughly what I am thinking, the signal is considerably deeper.”
“Impossible, this planet was thoroughly surveyed before the facility was built. We would have discovered anything of that nature, and they certainly didn’t install anything after the construction was complete.”
She turned to give the Administrator a baleful glare. “Who conducted the survey?”
“Enough,” Sienele cut in, casting a reproachful look in Sorilla’s direction. “Remember you are a guest here.”
Sorilla dipped her head, taking a step back and falling quiet, allowing Sienele to play the good guy role as he worked on the Administrator.
“My… friend is perhaps overly enthusiastic,” He said charmingly. “But she does have a point, I’m afraid. Are you aware of who did conduct the survey?”
“No,” The Administrator admitted. “It will be in the records, of course, but it was finished before I was brought into the project. I assume it was completed by the Development Corporation assigned to this sector.”
Those words meant little to Sorilla, but she couldn’t have missed the sudden exchange of looks between Sienele and Kriss if she were blind.
That meant a lot to them, but what?
“Of course,” Sienele said smoothly. “I will investigate of course, but no doubt you are correct. For the moment, could you perhaps show us the way to the bottom floor.”
The Administrator looked confused, and more than a little put out, but he acquiesced quickly enough, not that he had many other options of course.
“This way.”
*****
The lifts were large, industrial constructions, Sorilla noted as she stepped into the machinery along with the Sentinels. They’d waited for the Administrator to step in first, exchanging mutually amused glances with one another as they recognized the unspoken decision for exactly what it was.
Still, the alien seemed to have no malicious intent despite being a paper pusher, and in moments they were all in the large lift and it began to descend.
Sorilla didn’t feel the acceleration directly, but her sense of the Ross technology gave her an idea of just how quickly they were moving, and she was shocked by the speed. Only seconds after they had begun, the doors to the large lift opened on the tenth sub-floor and they stepped out.
The floor was an expanse of space, littered with what appeared to be fabrication facilities from what Sorilla could tell. She couldn’t be entirely sure, of course. They bore no resemblance to her own little army of MOFABS back on Hayden, but the products being turned out by each did seem to make their application obvious.
She didn’t see anywhere that raw materials were being put into the system, however.
“Fabrication tools?” She asked casually, glancing over to Kriss.
The Sentinel grunted. “Standard commercial fabricators, I believe you would call them.”
“What do they use for raw materials?”
He looked over at her, an eyebone rising, “Energy. What else would they use?”
“Ah,” Sorilla nodded.
Matter energy conversion?
Technically she knew it was possible. SOLCOM ships used the rather high level of power in their reactors to do the same thing, albeit on a very different scale. Slamming a few electrons, protons, and neutrons together into a hydrogen molecule, or an oxygen one, was a good emergency capacity for a ship to have, even if it was far more cost effective to just mine water ice from comets on your way into, or out of, a system.
Using nothing but energy to just turn out completed products like this, however? That was pure science fiction.
The power requirements alone must be insane.
Power was, in many ways, the most basic hallmark of a civilization. The most rudimentary meter by which any culture could be measured was through its power use. Cavemen, barely able to harness fire, were on the first rung of civilization. Harnessing the natural forces of nature, cracking the atom, production of anti-matter… these were what academics would rank a culture by.
Earth had done all of that, to varying degrees, and were considered to be effectively a Type One civilization by the most common scale in popular use, the Kardeshev Scale. But Sorilla was far too aware that nothing she knew of on Earth could possibly have provided the power to do what she was seeing in just this one, albeit massive, room.
How did we not lose the war instantly?
Now, more than ever, Sorilla desperately wanted to know more about what happened to Task Force Valkyrie. That they had been able to somehow stop an Alliance Fleet as they had, however they had, could be considered nothing short of miraculous.
The Alliance personnel around her didn’t seem to notice her thoughts, thankfully, and she followed them out into the large manufacturing floor, eyes alighting on the various bits of gear as they passed, her implants taking notes as she did.
“Colonel,” Sienele said carefully, looking over at her. “Do you have a… location on the Ross signals?”
Sorilla nodded, taking a moment to get her bearing as she slowly parsed the conflicting information she was receiving from her implants.
Her prototype implant suite had included micro-accelerometers as part of SOLCOM’s attempt to give soldiers early warning of Ross attacks. Those largely had failed, primarily because by the time the onboard computer could parse the tiny differential between an accelerometer implanted in her ankle and one in her skull, it was far too late to do anything about it.
What they had not accounted for in her prototype suite was the use of the human nervous system to transmit the information. Standard issue suites used Near Field Communication, a very low powered radio broadcast system that was effective enough but occasionally vulnerable to jamming or to interception if the enemy had sensitive enough gear close enough to the soldier. Her suite had been part of an experimental system that used nerve induction, sending signals along the nervous system using frequencies that wouldn’t interfere with her own reflexive motor control.
It had functioned perfectly, even been set to become the new standard, when Sorilla herself had identified an issue that others in the test group had encountered but been unable to recognize for what it was. The signals may have been on a frequency that didn’t interfere with the human body, but the human brain had no problem recognizing that it was there… and, as it turned out, the brain’s pattern recognition capacity was more than capable of breaching military grade quantum encryption, if only on a subconscious level.
The result was that she could not only feel shifts in acceleration through each of her implants, effective simultaneously, but she could also parse and triangulate general directions with an instinctive ease that put super computers to shame, in terms of speed at least. A good shipboard supercomputer could still pinpoint a target with far greater precision that Sorilla, but by the time it had done so, would already be moving in the right direction.
So she parsed the feeling she had, noting that the Ross technology now felt considerably closer as she focused on it.
“That way,” She said, pointing down and off in the distance slightly. “It’s one of their portal ships, no question.”
“You’re that certain?” Sienele asked, interested.
“Oh yes, I’m intimately familiar with that feeling,” Sorilla admitted. “Been aboard a couple now.”
The Lucians exchanged glances and feral grins that would have made almost anyone else nervous, but Sorilla was familiar enough with them to know that they weren’t hostile. Of course, she was also quite certain that the Lucian Sentinels could cause nearly as much damage to allies as to enemies. Just because they weren’t hostile didn’t mean they weren’t deadly.
“Fascinating, how deep?”
That took her a moment. She had to try and parse both her own instinctive measurement of distance and the unfamiliar system the Alliance made use of.
Her dad had brought her up on feet and inches, while the military had trained her in meters and kilometers, which had given her an occasionally troublesome amalgam of the two. Adding the alien measurement system to the mix without truly understanding what it amounted to was an actual headache in the making.
“I… think…” She said slowly, pointing, “Perhaps another hundred lithomets down and several hundred in that direction.”
Sienele humms slightly, appearing thoughtful, “Troublesome. We will not be able to get close to it without being detected in that case. The Ross will certainly have trigger detection systems all over the subsurface area here.”
Sorilla nodded, agreeing easily. What she knew of the Ross was enough to confirm that without even thinking about it, however…
“If they’re here to control operations within this facility…” She said slowly. “They would need access, wouldn’t they?”
Kriss grunted, “Truth there. The Ross are cowardly filth, however they will have hidden it well.”
Sorilla didn’t say anything to that, as she both agreed and disagreed with the Lucian. Certainly, they would have hidden their access point, however the Ross were not cowards by her definition of the word. They did not engage in personal combat easily, but if forced they could certainly handle themselves… but, more importantly, they didn’t shy from taking great risks if the situation warranted it.
She was hesitant to ascribe either cowardice or courage as descriptors for the species, not without a great deal more information on them than she currently held access too.
“If it is here,” Sienele said firmly. “We can find it.”
“Envoy!” The Administrator objected, “Searching this facility will…”
“Be a small price to ensure its security against all threats.” Sienele cut him off firmly. “Sentinels… you have your orders.”
Sorilla had to exert an iron control over herself to keep from flinching or outright jumping at the enthusiastic roar from the squat, powerful, alien soldiers when they heard that.
“Come!” Kriss bellowed, clearly enthused as he slapped her on the back, “It is time to hunt.”
*****
SOLCOM Central HQ, SOL System
“You let her go?”
The voice was incredulous, completely unable to comprehend the words that had just been said despite them having come from the owner’s own throat.
“Let is a strong word, Admiral,” Brigadier Mattan said stiffly. “She had already been discharged and elected to…”
“Let me stop you right there, General.” Flag Admiral Jeb Islander growled, his gaze passing over to where Admiral Ruger was standing and including him in the statement quite clearly. “That woman is carrying a classified prototype implant suite, more classified intelligence than anyone in SOLCOM under a four-star rank, and she’s a goddamned planetary hero on two planets!”
Islander closed his eyes, taking a deep breath. “I do not need to inform either of you of the sheer magnitude of the shitstorm that will come down on every single one of us if she doesn’t return from Alliance territory, do I?”
The pair winced, but shook their heads in unison as a response.
“At least neither of you are complete idiots,” Island sighed. “Alright, consider yourself properly upbraided and pass along the excess shit to the Colonel, if you would? I’d do it myself, but I might be tempted to shoot him, and I have no doubt he’d beat me to the draw if I tried.”
“I’ll… inform the colonel, Admiral.” Mattan nodded.
“Good. Ok, fine. Aida is officially, well unofficially really,” Islander corrected himself. “Over the wall. That means damage control on our side of things, just in case things hit the fan in the worst way. Her codes?”
“Revoked.” Mattan said automatically. “Done on the Sol the instant the Colonel reported her actions, and in every system the Sol has since visited the moment we came into contact with a SOLCOM buoy.”
“Well thank God for small favors. Orders to personnel?”
“She’s officially listed as discharged with an honorable,” Ruger spoke up, “Her security clearance hasn’t been revoked. However, it has been suspended pending a mustering out psyche review that, obviously, can’t happen until she’s returned to SOLCOM space.”
“That will do for now,” Islander grumbled, setting aside a couple stacks of documents before tapping the remaining one. “Now, talk to me about her implant suite.”
“The hardware is not our latest generation,” Ruger responded. “However, it is quite advanced. Still, there’s nothing in the hardware itself that will tell the Alliance anything they don’t already know.”
“Software then?”
“Not particularly,” Ruger shook his head. “I suspect that Colonel Aida has written some advanced interface and subroutines that are decidedly not standard but may, in fact, be better than standard issue… but, overall, she’s running the same basic OS as any of our soldiers that they may have already examined.”
“Then why is hell’s name am I looking at a huge red stamp that reads classified all across her jacket and nothing but black bars in the implant descriptions?”
“Largely because we don’t want anyone trying to replicate what Aida managed to do with her implants, Admiral,” Ruger replied. “The Colonel’s suite isn’t spectacular, aside from being very expensive and having some particularly high-end accelerometers that cost more than the rest of her gear combined… how she interfaced with it, however, is.”
“Explain, please.”
“You’re aware of the neural induction implants, of course?”
“Yes, I was due to have them installed myself before they were pulled. Instability in the design?” Islander asked.
“No, very stable design. Instability in the users,” Ruger countered. “Almost all of the original implant subjects were rendered uselessly vulnerable to any sort of shift in local gravity or motion, making them violently motion sick and unable, at the very least, to endure space travel.”
Islander grimaced.
“That sounds… unpleasant.”
“Projectile vomiting in a power armor helmet is a little more than unpleasant, Admiral,” Mattan interjected distastefully.
“Indeed,” Ruger sighed. “We underestimated the adaptability of the human brain, General. In effect, the new implants provided the brain with an entirely new sense, the ability to sense gravity… It didn’t occur to us that the subjects’ own brains would be able to, in effect, completely ignore military grade quantum encryption, but they did. Instead of being fed the data through the implanted processing units, the subjects began to sense gravity directly through their own nervous system. Most were completely unable to cope with the new sensory feed, provoking extreme motion sickness and essentially disabling the subject.”
“But not Aida?”
“Something about her mind was different,” Ruger admitted sourly. “We still haven’t determined what despite countless man hours dedicated to finding out just that. Somehow, she was able to adapt.”
Mattan snorted.
“Have something to add, General?” Islander asked dryly.
“Adapt might be a strong word,” Mattan said. “Little Sister managed to remain operational, yes, but she was afflicted by the motion sickness as well. I trained her, she never got sick on a boat, a plane, whatever you want to name. We put her through them all, from all the way up to the Vomit Comet and beyond. After the new implants? She lost her lunch every single jump. The woman is just so single minded that she kept on working through it, I suspect until her brain got used to dealing with it. Maybe.”
“I’d rather have more than a maybe, General,” Islander sighed. “But for now I suppose it will do. So, there is a minimal risk of the Alliance gaining any sort of technical advantage from her gear?”
“Less than minimal, Admiral,” Ruger responded. “Nothing she’s carrying is any different than our standard issue for special operations during the war. They’ve already seen it all.”
“Assuming she doesn’t fill them in herself,” Islander said with a roll of his eyes.
“Little Sister is loyal, Sir.”
Islander turned to give Mattan the gimlet eye. “If she were as loyal as all that she’d have obeyed the order to return to the Sol, General. When she gets back, assuming she gets back, Sorilla Aida is to be taken into protective custody and thoroughly interrogated. Am I very clear?”
“Yes sir!”
*****