Murderbot Collaboration, Chapter Two
(For those who are not part of the Murderbot Discord server collaboration and are wondering what the heck this is, it's a chapter in a Murderbot story collaboration! Ha. No, seriously, just reply with whatever questions you have and I'll answer.)
"Why do people keep studying ancient civilizations?" Field Manager Kayla squinted at the grid layout on the satellite footage. "If they were all that cool, they wouldn't have died out! There are no secrets there worth knowing. What's that saying?" Kayla looked around in question but no one on the bridge crew knew what she was asking. "'This is not a place of honor, nothing valued is here', right? That's it, isn't it?" She shook her head in exasperation. "People should not be here!"
"Well," Operator Desper said with his usual drawl, "we're gonna take care of that." He carefully eased the ship into orbit, full stealth protocols active. The rest of the bridge crew were quiet, focused on their stations.
Kayla told Desper, "We at least have to see if there's a possibility of just extracting them."
"Killing 'em's easier."
"For you." She liked Desper. She hadn't decided if Desper didn't care about human life or just acted like he didn't, but either way, he made it easier to normalize what they were doing. "The paperwork is endless! Do you know how much ass-covering I have to do after these actions? No, you don't. Probably for the best."
"Less paperwork if we don't get caught. Make it look like raiders or something."
"Pff," Kayla said disapprovingly as she read through the message they'd intercepted. Someone would have to be monumentally stupid or gullible to believe raiders were capable of the scorched earth treatment they tended to leave behind. When unsanctioned alien remnants were discovered, they were the group called in to sterilize the site. If they were lucky, it was just a place, but more often there were people and equipment there, often in the process of 'discovery'. That was when it got messy.
And it looked like this one was going to be messy. She pinched the bridge of her nose and shut her eyes. It was a good thing they'd blocked the message from reaching the departing transport.
Desper looked over his shoulder to say, "That bad, huh?"
"Yes. They're infected." She leaned back. "How long until the transport's out? We don't want any witnesses."
"Twelve hours. Plenty of time for a good sleep, a hearty breakfast, and atmospheric entry. We can have this wrapped up by lunch."
"Maybe your part," Kayla grumbled. "Okay, we're doing this by the book."
'By the book' meant it took them more than twelve hours. The preparations themselves didn't take very long, but they had to wait for the stars to align (literally, they wanted to approach in the dark of night). Kayla was uneasy the whole period. Why people persisted in knowing what was not meant to be known was a mystery to her and true to form, she wasn't going to delve into that mystery - she was just going to eliminate it, for the good of all human life everywhere. She knew herself enough to know she'd remain uneasy until the matter was settled. Until then, not even the expert ministrations of the ship's new ComfortUnit could bring her peace. Although it did try.
Kayla watched the altitude countdown as they finally descended through the thickening air. They were still running full stealth, using only passive scanning. According to specs, for a planet of this gravity and air density, a prepared and undistracted combat unit could be dropped at any altitude and would land with low chance of injury. The humans in powered armor behind them, though, had limits, hence the wait. She wasn't to the target height yet when the comm activated.
A stressed voice said, "Unknown ship! This is a research station, but we are armed. State your purpose!"
So, they'd been seen. Disappointing, but she adapted. Before the voice had finished, she'd moved the units to launch ready and by the end of the transmission, all units had confirmed. Because you couldn't just chuck them out of a moving ship (well, you could if you didn't care how they performed afterward) - them being prepared actually mattered. But they were ready, so she dropped them. She shot another glance at their altitude and then at Desper who was holding on navigation, and Raen on weapons. They, too, were ready. She activated the comm.
"Research station," she said, forcing herself to speak slowly and affect a calmness she didn't feel. "Stand down. We've heard you're having some problems. We're here to help." She'd eaten up enough time. The altitude countdown at the corner of her screen turned green. She met Raen's eyes and nodded. He fired.
Two beams of light lanced out, burning into the engine compartments of the shuttle and some other craft on the landing pad. There was no flashy explosion, but the ship-to-ship lasers were hot and bright enough that anyone looking outside would see them like lightning. It was a good distraction from the landing of the combat units.
She dropped the assault troops even though they were at the top end of the band of acceptable drop height. They were within the band and that was good enough. Operator Agemen brought up active scanning, feeding the troops' trajectory to Raen's station so he wouldn't shoot them. Desper was repositioning the ship at the same time that Raen was retargeting the lasers, making for a faster targeting solution than if only one method had been used, but it took careful coordination to manage it.
"Lights out," Raen said with satisfaction as the power supply and backup for the habitat were incinerated.
Desper chuckled darkly and said, "I still say we should have nuked them from orbit."
Kayla grimaced. "We can't risk aerosolizing the remnants."
"That's what you said earlier," Desper said in a bored tone that didn't match how intently he was watching his screen. Agemen had sent him and Raen views showing people fleeing the habitat so they could decide if it was worth a third salvo. The assault troops had landed and it was difficult to get a shot that didn't risk their people. "It would be so much easier than this, though."
"We're not here to do easy," she said bitterly. "We're here to do right."
Desper drifted the ship to the side so the scanners would register a trio of targets who'd been hiding around the solid corner of some ancient structure. Raen picked them off with a brief pulse of one laser. It was grossly overpowered (and a war crime, not that they cared; this was regulatory action, not war) to shoot people with ship-to-ship weaponry. But, well, three fewer targets.
"Got 'em," Raen murmured. Desper continued sliding the ship laterally, circling the site and looking for good angles. It was hard to tell which of the pair was more cold-hearted, but that was why they had the jobs they had. She needed people at the controls who wouldn't flinch.
Finding people willing to kill people on command was hard. That was why they made constructs. For example, her human troops below were forming up and making a perimeter, while the constructs were going through the habitat to clear it. (Which could be read as: the humans were standing around while the constructs did all the wet work.) The combat units didn't transmit constantly, so it was hard to tell exactly what they were doing or where they were at any given time, but she was certain they'd deliver. They always did.
Speaking of the constructs, there was a quick blip on her screen and one of the units went dark. That signal was only released when the unit was killed, a bleat of telemetry and data marking the loss. "Shit," she said quietly.
"Lost one?" Desper guessed. She nodded. Combat units were costly, which was why she only had a few of them and rounded out the rest of the complement with standard SecUnits. But she hadn't dropped any of those. They weren't as rugged and couldn't take the fall. There was another blip.
"Fuck!"
"They did say they were armed, darlin."
"Armed fucking people can't take out combat units!" Kayla ranted at Desper's back. "That's those SecUnits we saw on the dossier. They must have both of them down there!" But even if they had two, she hadn't expected them to be more than an inconvenience. Were they combat-rated? Miscategorization was common (and illegal, though hardly an offense compared with exhuming and potentially trafficking in alien remnants without proper licensing or certification). She waited tensely to see if her last units blipped out, but instead one of them transmitted a short burst to the assault troops that the habitat was clear. "They shouldn't even have been awake!"
"Constructs are awake nearly all the time," Agemen offered, as though they weren't all well aware of this. Kayla barely kept herself from snapping at her, but she managed it.
"There's a lot of them got clear." Desper was prowling the ship in a slowly-widening spiral.
Agemen said, "We're getting more static than I'd expect from the canopy and structures."
Kayla grimaced again. That was likely the effect of the remnants. She was still smarting at the expense of losing two combat units. "We've taken down their ships, their hab, their power supply, and run them out into the wild in their night-clothes, without any supplies. Mop-up shouldn't take long."
Desper said, "I think most of them were out in those tents instead of living inside the hab."
Kayla responded, "What were they doing in tents when they have a perfectly good habitat right there?"
"Dunno."
She leaned forward again, looking over Desper's shoulder at his screen. He was tallying the escapees from the various views Agemen had sent him. There were enough to be troublesome if she was missing the combat units. The terrain provided a lot of cover and there might be subterranean structures as well. This was definitely going to be messy.
Desper looked over at her. "Don't you wish we actually had nukes about now?"
"Pff," she said. "Stuff it. I need to raise the leader of the assault troops and figure out if I'll have to deploy the SecUnits or if they think they can handle this with what they've got."
Desper chuckled. "Send down that new ComfortUnit while you're at it. Might motivate everyone a little more than usual if they think that thing's going to get dinged up on the front lines."
She rolled her eyes and didn't dignify that one with a response. Besides, she had Hill on the comm now and turned her full attention to the sitrep they were giving.
The comm signal died in static, mid-order from Field Manager Kayla. Supervisor Hill tilted their head up sharply to look at the dark shape of the ship against the stars. They sucked in breath as it violently veered to the side. What the hell was going on? Was it about to crash? They didn't have time to adjust the helmet settings before the ship dipped dangerously toward the ground, over-corrected, then re-corrected and stabilized. That antisocial weirdo Desper had to be at the controls, which was likely the only reason the thing was still in the air. Hill didn't think much of Desper's personality, but he had to admit the man was a damn good pilot.
Hill had just let out their breath when the ship blasted away from the site, engines roaring in a way well outside stealth protocols. Had they been abandoned? Without the ship, they didn't have reinforcements or an escape route. They hadn't brought down supplies for an extended campaign. Without the ship, they would be stranded, possibly forever. They turned to the combat unit next to them. "What happened?"
"I do not have that information."
These fucking constructs! It made no sense at all that they were so wildly intelligent but couldn't (or wouldn't, Hill suspected darkly) understand basic questions. Whoever had programmed them was an idiot. "What do you think happened?" he ground out.
"I think the ship was hacked by a SecUnit or Combat SecUnit on the surface, in the service of our targets, and the base ship has diverted to escape effective range of the hacking attempt."
Okay, so that was useful to know! Why hadn't it said that to start with? "Do you mean we're stuck here? And don't tell me you don't have that information."
"My strategic planning module indicates the base ship will return when we have eliminated the hostiles."
So, kind of stuck here, kind of not. They needed to get rid of those stragglers, which wasn't surprising. They especially needed to get rid of the SecUnits. Hill just hadn't expected them to be able to effect the ship without ships of their own or surface-to-air weaponry. Then again, maybe a SecUnit counted as a surface-to-air weapon. "Can you hack them, the hostiles?"
"No."
"Can they hack you?"
"No."
Okay, good, but a suspicious lack of additional information. Hill narrowed their eyes at the unit, but was interrupted in their thoughts by the sound of weapon fire from the direction of the dig site. They moved that way. The combat unit followed on guard protocol. On comm, Hill said, "Trace, report."
"Just a straggler," she said. "Dead now."
"That's not much of a report," Hill grumbled. Maybe Trace had been taking lessons from the fucking constructs.
They'd said it aloud, which might have been why the combat unit spontaneously offered, "The other unit is with her. It has a report available."
"Yeah, what's that?" Hill was at the edge of the dig site where their helmet's dark filters allowed them to see the small detachment of troops gathered around the downed target.
"The unit eliminated the hostile and was damaged in process by shots fired into it by Trooper Trace."
Hill raised a brow. "Trace shot the unit?" They could see the unit. It was walking fine.
"Yes. It was engaged with the hostile at the time."
Hill grunted. The dig site was hot with remnants as well as (apparently) dangerous, so Hill recalled the group from there. They were all snugged up in protective gear inside their powered armor, but the hard landing through vegetative cover had ripped both layers of fabric on the back of Trace's knee and dislodged the helmet on another. The latter had been Hill's own, replaced before anyone noticed, but the seal wasn't working now. Unfiltered outside air kept slipping in, cool and dusty.
Theoretically, they would both need decontamination and a lengthy quarantine period. 'Theoretically', because Hill knew if proof of contamination was found, they'd be terminated and not in the 'you're fired' way. It strongly disincentified accurate reporting. They'd already included the knee penetration in the sitrep to Kayla. But not the bit about the helmet.
When Trace was close enough, Hill told her, "Stop putting holes in the equipment. It might be all we've got for a while."
"Why? What happened?" Trace asked.
Hill pointed skyward. "Base ship had to bail. We have to find whatever SecUnits the stragglers have and destroy them. And of course eliminate the stragglers."
"We're on it," Trace said enthusiastically.
Hill's lids fluttered but they managed not to roll their eyes. Of course the one who couldn't shoot shit would be gung-ho about charging into the unknown, where maybe she'd end up shooting one of theirs instead of a unit. "No. Pick out three troops. You, them, and Limpy," they gestured at the non-limping-but-supposedly-damaged combat unit, "are staying here to hold the location. If you can get a power pack on the hub, download everything you can and follow the unit's advice for security. The rest of us are on the bug hunt."
The bug hunt meant deploying in the night through the vegetation and uneven terrain, trying to find and eliminate the escapees. Which was fine, really. Hill could deal with that. They were well-trained. It was a regular operation, right? There were probably less than a dozen of them left. No big deal. It would be the first time Hill had personally led an elimination team and it would also be the first time Hill had a significant likelihood of directly engaging with stragglers. Always before, the combat units had dealt with them without the troopers needing to do more than prevent them from getting away.
Speaking of which, Hill led the combat unit to the edge of the hab area and asked it on a private channel, "Okay. What's the best strategy for killing these stragglers without losing any of us?"
"Take all troops in immediate pursuit of the largest number of targets. Prevent them from organizing or consolidating. Make maximal use of the advantages of your forces, such as night vision, armor, and weaponry. Stay together. Do not divide your forces."
Hill thought about that for a few long moments. "Nah, that's not going to work. I've already told Trace to hold the hab with Limpy." The combat unit did not propose an alternate plan. It just stood there. "Limpy is the combat unit she shot in the leg." It still stood there. There was something judgmental in its silence, but constructs weren't supposed to have attitude or sentience, so Hill assumed they were just imagining it. Annoying. Hill sighed at themselves and went on, "And anyway, wouldn't they just circle back and loot the camp? Don't we need to leave people here for when the ship comes back?"
It said nothing, as though now was the time it decided to interpret the questions as rhetorical or some shit. Hill said, "Answer me, damnit."
It twitched. "There is nothing in the camp more valuable than the opportunity to strike them now and reduce their numbers. Were they to circle back, they would be returning to open ground where they will be easy to eliminate. When the ship comes back, if we are not at this camp site, it will conduct a standard search pattern and we can signal it. There is no advantage to leaving a contingent here."
"Yeah, well, I'm still going to do it anyway because I already ordered it. I'm not going to walk over there and tell them I changed my mind because you said something. So give me another plan."
There was just a hair too much of a pause, then the combat unit said, "Move immediately with as much of the group as you are willing to commit to the field. Will you consider reallocating the Combat SecUnit designated as 'Limpy' from the hab guard to the attack force?"
"No. What about a pincer movement? We could flank them from both sides."
"The targets have a SecUnit or Combat SecUnit among their number. If you elect for a pincer formation that involves only one Combat SecUnit of your own, you will be unable to safeguard the troops in the detachment that does not contain the Combat SecUnit."
"Oh, good point. Yeah, okay, I guess you're right. Let's get everyone together."
"Including the hab guard?" It sounded faintly hopeful.
"No." Hill gave it an exasperated look. "Leave them. Just the rest of us."
The Combat SecUnit formed up with the rest. Hill sent out three forward scouts, then the CSU, then the main group with two designated for rear guard. (The formation was the unit's advice.) Their original mission had been to eliminate all inhabitants and scour the location of all alien contamination. Hill hefted their weapon uneasily. They could do this. They just had to keep repeating that to themselves. They had their team on their side, all the tactical advantages, and the moral high ground. Soon enough, they'd be back on the ship, laughing about how things had gone and enjoying the good life. Soon, they told themselves. Soon.
I have no ownership of these OCs; do as you will with them. I will share what I had in mind, though:
- These guys are space-OSHA. Alien Remnant Regulation and Containment was a suggested name for the group: ARRC. (It gives me cool Ark of the Covenant Indiana Jones vibes.)
- Desper is short for Desperado, but people can write him however they want. 'Cowboy' was my first instinct. A young Sam Elliott. Not so much sociopathic as very, very callous.
- Field Manager Kayla - Rashida Jones (the MSNBC president, not the actress)
- This group thinks they blocked the various transmissions to ART. Whether they succeeded is up to someone else to decide.
- Field Manager = person in charge of supervisors
- Supervisor = person in charge of direct laborers, or in this case, assault troopers
- Operator = person with a skilled technical job, operating equipment
- Kayla (she/her) = Person in charge of entire operation, field manager
- Desper (he/him) = Navigation/pilot
- Raen (he/him) = Ship weapons
- Agemen (she/her) = Scanners and comms
- Hill (they/them) = leader of ground assault, supervisor
- Trace (she/her) = a squad leader, trooper, left to guard the habitat with a couple other troopers and Limpy the slightly-damaged-CSU
- Why don't they have a bot pilot handling all the functions? Well, to start, for exactly the reason seen when SecUnit and/or Three hack the ship's systems and the timely interference of human agents prevents disaster.
- A 'Hill' to die on. Ha! I think I'm hilarious.
- CSU #1 is tattling on Trace.
- CSU #1 is resigned to having its good advice ignored. Limpy wishes it good luck.
- How many people are dead in the hab, tents, etc? You decide!
- How were the two CSUs killed? Up to you!
- Is Three there? I dunno!
- Are Hill and Trace contaminated? Sure, why not! (but really: up to you!)
- Is Hill going to keep following CSU #1's advice and keep the group together? I can't see why they would …