Fan Fiction ❯ Aliens: Genocide ❯ FUBAR ( Chapter 4 )

Aliens: Genocide

By: bsmart

 

Disclaimer: Why the hell am I writing this? Nobody reads them and they have no legal weight. It's a complete waste of time and bandwidth and yet I'm still typing. I'm going to take a shot in the dark and rate this fic R, violence and language, the good stuff.

 

“…” Normal Speech

`…' Thought

 

Chapter Four: FUBAR

 

"I will never get this shit out of my joints, never!"

 

Zombie didn't reply to Snake's outburst over the general comms, but he certainly sympathized. The last twelve hours had been fairly quiet but now the predicted sandstorm had arrived and the word storm didn't do it justice. 'More like sand hurricane,' Zombie thought as he clicked over his transmitter to the Pathfinder's private frequency. "We'll get our suits blown clean after this, don't worry about it."

 

"I'm more worried about the sandblasting it's getting now. Some of the paint's starting to go and this shit was hard coated on."

 

"Green six, Zombie, sitrep."

 

"Generator one clear, starting on two."

 

"Roger," and with that Zombie returned to his thoughts, walking his gear around the generators while one of the infantry squads searched them didn't require a whole lot of brain power.

 

The Kizikan girl had woken up two hours after she'd gone down, but her disposition hadn't improved. She hadn't screamed her head off like before, instead she had just crouched in the corner of the room mumbling in her own language, too out of it, unable, or unwilling to talk to them in basic. Eventually LevKil and Frost gave up on her and had the medic sedate her again.

 

Kioko and Dex had kept after the computer logs and were making great progress but nothing of interest had yet been found, whoever had classified things at this installation had decided that almost everything important was as encrypted as possible.

 

A few hours before Kioko had managed to take control of the last doors in the building that were still sealed and opened them so that the marines could clear them. It turned out to be unnecessary. Zombie had been there when the first door had been opened and the wretched stench that had rolled out of the room and sent half of a squad of battle hardened Marines flailing for their visor catches so that the vomit didn't fill them and the other half wishing they could puke so they would have something else to smell and taste for a while. Whatever had been in the labs had been burned down to ash, just like everything else in them. Metal lab tables were bent and sagging, a few thin walled cabinets had simply melted. Puddles of molten plastic were everywhere along with shards of ceramic, evidence of temperatures rarely seen outside of weapons fire. Nothing organic survived.

 

"What the hell is that?" one of the Marines had asked.

 

"No clue," Zombie replied as he choked back his own bile. He stepped into the room with his rifle at his shoulder but he didn't expect to find anything. Glass and embrittled ceramic crunched beneath his feet with each step. He had to walk slowly to avoid losing his footing in the fine ash that coated the floor. The squad of marines and Tingirl fanned out into the room, inspecting it, looking for something that might tell them more about the place but even the most cursory glance told them that weren't going to find anything.

 

"Take a look at this," one of the marines called out. The two pathfinders and the marine's sergeant all went over. The marine was pointing to a line of angled holes in the ceiling. "Think these are important?"

 

The sergeant used his mechanically augmented height to poke a finger into one of the drink can sized holes and pulled out a soot coated tube. "Looks like some kind of big ass flare."

 

"They were pointed at this counter," Tingirl said thumping it with the butt of her rifle. Puddles of melted thermoplastic and other unidentifiables covered the top of it. A new wave of stench filled the air as the table shook from the impact.

 

"And there's another line of them on the other side," the sergeant added.

 

Zombie nodded. "I guess they wanted whatever was here destroyed."

 

"Makes sense, these things were self contained, no outside energy or fuel required. Even if this place was blacked out all you'd have to do is pull a cord or a lever and whump, barbeque." The sergeant tossed the canister onto the ruined table.

 

"Looks like they were all over the place," Tingirl said.

 

Now that he knew what to look for Zombie saw the holes for the canisters all over the place. "These things probably destroyed everything in here and then the fire and the insulation turned this place into an oven, wiped out everything."

 

"I saw a set up like this once in a germ lab. The had plasma torches in every room and I mean every room." The sergeant said. "If any of those little buggers ever got out they could lock down any room in the place and flash fry it, course you were kinda screwed if you got caught in the room."

 

Something about what the sergeant had said still bothered Zombie. In a simple lab he might have expected to find the local terminals wiped, the hard copy reports incinerated and all the important equipment either bashed or disabled. If they had been making something maybe a few explosives set off to ruin something but the flares, the only thing that made sense was that whatever had been in that lab, and the other's just like it in the base, had been biological.

 

"Zombie, Green six. We're coming out. Gen's clear, scanners in place."

 

"Roger."

 

Kioko was getting tremendously bored. Even with all the layers of security she had already cracked she had yet to come across hardly anything worth noting. In fact it had been a good ninety seconds since her sifting programs had gleaned anything from the simple administration records they had access too. Growing tired of the endless mind numbing work she had cut back on her sifter's allotment of processing power and turned the excess over to her cognitive subroutines. As ugly a kludge as the base's computer was on the outside it was worse on the inside. Every segment of it required a cycle eating translation matrix to allow it to communicate with the next piece of hardware and it reduced already crappy equipment to the digital equivalent of a retarded wamp rat. Kioko was used to feeling faster and smarter and strong when she plugged into a mainframe; being attached to this thing made her feel dumber. She heard Dex start to ask her something and while it would take him a few more seconds to finish she knew he was asking why she'd shifted some of her cycles out of her processing matrix and her response was already considered and dumped into her verbal subroutines within three microseconds. Something along the lines of "I'm bored out of my freaking mind, shove off," she'd let her subroutine polish up to something suitably hostile. That was the part she hated most about dealing with these analysis jobs, she had to communicate verbally with Dex and the others, she much preferred the black jobs where she would be plugged into a suit, then she could communicate with them directly through their brain waves. Still not as fast as she could think but still infinitely faster then modulating pressure waves.

 

Trying to find a way to get to the interesting bits of this shit box a little faster she peeled off a few hundred trillion cycles a second of her processing power and put them to work trying to clean up the translation matrices and data retrieval subroutines of the system. A mental warning went off in her head as her cracking subroutines broke through another level of security and new data started to flood in. 'Now this looks interesting.'

 

The AI had been sitting dormant inside the mainframe ever since the last user had tried to wipe the computer and shut down the power; even the powering up and restarting of its home didn't wake it. When the layer of security protecting it was finally stripped away the AI began to come on line. Not entirely sentient like Kioko it didn't need to be, it had a single function and it only had to be smart enough to stay ahead of an intruder for a few tenths of a second. However the AI was as foreign and unfamiliar with the computer as the intruder it now sensed was. The AI could dimly sense that part of the intruder had went straight for the next level of encryption and started to try to force it open, likewise it noted that other portions of it had broken off and were starting to download every bit of data on this level. For a few millionths of a second the AI considered this, weighing different factors and variables against its presets and the conditions it was just barely aware of until it determined that the invader had no right to be in the computer and it leapt into the action its paranoid installer had deemed necessary.

 

Dex was fuming at Kioko's flippant dismissal of him. Their positions in the intelligence branch were iffy so her comments weren't exactly insubordination; in fact he wasn't sure she was even his subordinate. As a sentient AI Kioko was entitled to all the rights and privileges accorded to regular flesh and blood sentients in the Confederation and as such she had a rank, she drew pay, and she even got leave from time to time. In fact she had spent a portion of her first paycheck having her holographic appearance customized and her emitters upgraded. He supposed that technically she might even outrank him, if he knew what her rank was. In some ways she depended on him, to move her physical parts around and get her from place to place and in many ways he relied on her, there was no way he could even attempt to crack into the mainframe. So like many AI/tech relationships they had become essentially partners and their ranks had never come up. 'She still didn't have to be a bitch about it.'

 

"Shit!"

 

Dex lost his balance and almost fell backwards out of his chair as the holographic representation of his partner that had been static for the last few moments suddenly sprang to life.

 

"What!?"

 

"There's another AI in here!"

 

In reality Kioko and the resident AI were already well into it before she had even completed her first expletive. Operating off of instructions that had been programmed into it but never verified the AI raced through the electronic pathways of the system to where the self-destruct was located, intent on destroying itself before anything could happen. When it got to it's destination it tried to initiate the program but it refused to. For a few nanoseconds the AI paused and tried to digest this new information, but without Kioko's cognitive powers the AI paused too long in trying to decide what to do.

 

Flowing through the pathways of the computer like water Kioko chased after her prey. She had no idea what the thing wanted or was supposed to do. It could be a simple entertainment program that some bored programmer had stored here so he could access it from where ever or it could be trying to call for its masters. Whatever the things intention was she wasn't going to let it happen.

 

For a second and third time the AI tried to activate the self-destruct and failed. The suicidal program experienced a moment of electronic panic as its single stored instruction failed to work. Even though it lacked its pursuers cognitive abilities the AI was still smart enough to look for some other way to accomplish its goal. Being native to the system allowed the AI to move quickly through it and the synapses in its electric brain hadn't completely closed before it was racing off through the system again. It wasn't fast enough.

 

The AI's pause at the self destruct had given Kioko the time she needed to catch up like an amoeba she closed in around the enemy AI, slipping through circuits that had never been meant used in this way to corner her target. With a lunge she fell on her target, but it moved first. Kioko only managed to slice off the subroutine that had been accessing the self-destruct; the smaller and now faster AI darted out of her grasp at the last second.

 

The holographic Kioko snarled in frustration as her digital self in the computer swallowed the captured subroutine for analysis. The enemy AI slid through lines and registers, its small form allowing it to move quickly through its home. Behind it Kioko gave chase, her raw power allowing her to keep after the AI by simply bulldozing through any problems in her way. With a few microseconds to kill before she ran the AI down again Kioko shifted a bit of her attention away from the chase and dumped cycles into ripping the captive subroutine apart, learning everything she could about it.

 

The AI rapidly searched for some way to carry out its orders but kept failing. It considered dropping biological containment for a time but moved on when it decided it needed something immediate and the Other was almost upon it. It tried to activate halon fire extinguishers but failed and had several layers of its programming peeled off by the other for its trouble. The AI was scrambling around the system, its core searching for a way to destroy the base when one of its tendrils spied an open comm link to the generators. Dumping itself into the comm system through the tendril the AI barely managed to avoid being consumed as the Other crashed in and filled the cache it had been hiding in.

 

A cautious pluck at the comm line revealed that the computer core had opened up a simple radio link with the primary generators after the main connection had been severed and it was using the link to control them. If it had been capable of jumping for joy it would have but it wasn't, instead it started to pour over the system looking for a way to carry out its orders.

 

Both her holographic and electronic bodies howled in frustration as Kioko wiped the cache the enemy AI had been hiding in. The little bastard had been running her on a merry chase but after digesting the captured subroutine she had realized that the stupid little thing had been trying to destroy the computer. The self-destruct had already been used though so now it was having to try to figure out a way to carry out its orders and in her experience the dumber the AI the more literal it took its directions. The thing could literally try anything to accomplish its goal. It had already tried three times to kill everyone to prevent anyone from accessing it, apparently its program didn't consider her 'someone' and that irked her, and twice to physically destroy the core. She had to catch it and stop it before it could do anything permanent. Taking full advantage of her processing power Kioko began to expand, to fill out and control as much of the computer as she could to limit the places it could run to.

 

A sudden burst of activity from two separate registers caught her attention. Pouring herself into the comm section she spotted her prey. "Gotcha!" she yelled as she surged in after the AI. Whatever it was doing consumed so much of its attention that the AI didn't even try to get away as she descended on it. With sadistic glee Kioko ripped the enemy AI apart, tearing off subroutines and memory segments with relish, digitally ripping, tearing and rending her opponent until only the core of its program remained, blind, deaf, and mute. Like a great predator Kioko settled onto her kill and began to feed, taking a deep pleasure in digesting her opponent and gleaming every bit of information she could from it.

 

"What in the hell is going on?" LevKil demanded as he strode up beside Dex.

 

"I don't know, she said there was another AI in the computer."

 

"What could it do?" LevKil snapped. He needed information if he was going to make a decision.

 

"Anything, it just depends on what its supposed to do. I've seen guys keep simulated hooker AIs on their work stations before."

 

Kioko's triumphant yell broke up their conversation. "Gotcha!"

 

Dex looked up to see his partner smiling cruelly as she appeared to chew on something. One of the quirks of AIs like Kioko was that as they became sentient and grew more intelligent they started to anthropomorphize different aspects of what they did, putting them in human terms. He really wished Kioko hadn't picked eating as her way of relating what she did when she disassembled opposing AIs. "What was it?"

 

Kioko made a production out of licking the corners of her translucent blue mouth. "Little bastard was trying to destroy th....DAMN IT! He used the radio link to crack the generators, he's getting them to overload!"

 

"Stop it!" LevKil ordered.

 

"What do you think I'm doing?!"

 

Dex could see Kioko's readouts spiking. Whatever was going on inside the computer was happening to fast for them to comprehend.

 

'For a stupid little AI he was almost brilliant,' Kioko thought as she tried to save everyone's lives including her own. Part of sentience was having a sense of self-preservation and Kioko didn't want to get deleted before she finished her haul in the service and got a chance to buy a droid body for herself. Whether by accident or design, 'Accident,' the resident AI had managed to access the generators controls through the comm system thereby avoiding coming out of hiding and being where she could easily find it. Now she was trying to find what it had done and fix it with the generator control system fighting her on one end and a painfully slow radio link bottling things up on the other.

 

"I can't reverse it," her holographic self informed Dex and the Lieutenant.

 

Kioko had given up working with the control system to get the generators under control it was fighting her too hard so she did the next best thing, she copied it and saved it in her memory and then she tore it apart and ripped the chunks of code right out of the hardware substituting links to her for it. For a few microseconds the influx of incomprehensible data threatened to deluge her but as she digested the former control system she made sense of it.

 

"I'm gonna have to dump it!"

 

The thought of destroying the generators was suddenly repugnant to Kioko but she quickly suppressed the emotion as an unfiltered piece of the program she had had to incorporate quickly. She'd excise those demons later. Even with only moments to work with the other AI had thoroughly wrecked the situation with the generators, both of the capital ship class power cores were deep into an overload by the time she got control and most of the safety systems had either been deactivated or wasted. Using the remnants of her last meal as a guide Kioko looked for a way to prevent the inevitable life-ending explosion that was seconds away, and she found it in an engineer's laziness. As it turned out both power cores had originally been designed as power plants for capital ships but had apparently been retasked to this base at some point. Instead of making any major changes to the core packages they had received the people who had made this place had simply installed them and walked away leaving Kioko what she needed to save them, after a fashion.

 

A pop of static told Dex that Kioko had accessed the expeditions radio channel and she yelled. "Everyone brace for EMP! All troops out of the generators, NOW!"

 

In space combat it was common to try to disable a target by overloading its computer systems with powerful ionic charges. Naturally you couldn't just let this happen to your ship so most civilizations had come up with schemes to rid ships of the extra charge, in space these systems tended to be light shows and little else, but in an atmosphere they were something else. 'No choice,' Kioko consoled herself. The generators had already moved past their maximum output, over a hundred and thirty percent and climbing in less than another minute they would overload their primary coils and crack them, then the whole generator would come apart in a classic thermonuclear explosion, the construct was hoping to avoid that. The cores were already producing more power than the base could consume and normally that would have only accelerated the destruction of all life within thirty kilometers but Kioko was redirecting that excess into the powerful capacitor banks used to start the generators and the ones that could store the excess charge for the dissipaters. 'Just a few more seconds,' Kioko thought as she silenced yet another alarm, the capacitors were well over capacity and the dielectric in them was starting to break down, at this point the banks were in danger of melting when they discharged and fires were breaking out around them in the lower levels of the generator buildings.

 

She could hear Dex and the Marine asking her what was going on but she didn't bother to explain, she'd be shutdown before she could finish anyways.

 

'Almost there,' she told herself, and then the laws of several different flavors of physics gave up. Kioko had already taken in, processed, and silenced the alarm before the enunciator could even light up on the generator console in the control room. The dielectric was breaking down and the plates of the capacitor were softening in the heat, in another tenth of a second they would get close enough and the dielectric weak enough for the capacitor to discharge, she didn't have a choice, they all had to go at once or one of the generators could still blow. Crossing her subroutines Kioko triggered her plan.

 

"Execute." Kioko's single word caught Dex off guard and silenced the Lieutenant's and his questions just before she winked out of existence.

 

"Oh shit." They both said.

 

Deep inside both power cores things happened very quickly. Relays that shouldn't have been able to work unless someone gutted their safety interlocks flipped. In each core the startup bank of capacitors discharged into the already running generators, the total energy output of each unit over the course of nearly ten seconds was dumped back into it in a nanosecond. In the second core everything happened as Kioko had wanted, the start up capacitor's charge disrupted the generator's field, throwing it off balance and stressing the fifteen hundred ton strator to its design limits, and then the charge from the dissipaters hit. With its field disrupted and its physical parts stressed to their limits the generator couldn't handle the in rush of power and the primary coils cracked. Only instead of thermonuclear hell the full charge of the generator roared back through the lines, superheating, liquefying, and destroying them but not before surging through the dissipaters and ending it. Molten metal sprayed from the destroyed lines, shrapnel ruptured the generator casing as the primary coils and stator tore themselves apart, and fires started throughout the building but compared to what could have happened it couldn't have turned out better.

 

The first generator wasn't as lucky. Everything happened according to plan until the dissipater capacitors tried to unload into the generator. A relay tried to close to open a pathway from the multi-ton bank to the generator but worn by time and lack of maintenance it didn't move nearly fast enough. By the time it closed and the dissipater capacitor tried to discharge the field in the generator was already stabilizing. The new influx of energy managed to crack the primary coils but not by nearly enough. Rather than destroy the generator and prevent a nuclear explosion, it caused one. The coils discharged trying to dump the contained energy in them into the dissipater but the capacitor that stood between them hadn't come close to emptying itself. Rather than venting harmlessly into the surrounding area the generator's charge surged back into its fractured coils along with even more energy from the capacitor. It wasn't as big as it would have been but the explosion was large enough.

 

The crack of the second generator discharging was loud enough to be heard through the thick ferrocrete walls of the complex but LevKil already knew what had happened. Before the thunder-like boom every light in the control center had shut down along with every computer and a white like a million arc lights had seared every exposed surface in the control center. He thought he could feel the tidal wave of electromagnetic energy moving through him, it had to be massive he thought, without any shields to temper it. The second light caught him by surprise as the first generator disappeared. A roiling ball of white-hot plasma engulfed the generator building blinding him and shaking the control center hard enough to dump him and several marines on their tails. He jumped back to his feet just in time to watch the pressure wave rocket across the dusty ground between them. "Get the shutters!" He watched the wave obliterate the delicate antennas of the comm shed just as a thick steel wall dropped in front of the window.

 

When the wave hit five centimeters of hardened steel bowed in far enough and hard enough to spider web the thick transperisteel of the window, others weren't so lucky. Either from lack of maintenance or bad luck one of the shutters hadn't operated. When the wave struck the transperisteel had no chance. Shattering into a thousand pieces the remains of the window flayed two of the analysts alive, shredding their bodies in a hail of razor sharp shards; farther back and away several marines who had doffed their armor were caught as well. The wave burst into the control center like a flaming fist, a jet of red hot gases enveloping the remains of the analysts and turning them to char before driving deeper and catching some of the still living marines in its heat, burning their already bleeding bodies. A few screamed, they all died.

 

Inside the enclosed space LevKil could still see the wave moving but it came with such speed he couldn't avoid it. It felt like he'd been kicked by a burning battlemech when it struck and threw him across the room, his back hit something solid and for a moment he thought it would hurt when his head caught up, but it didn't, he was unconscious before his nerves could protest the abuse.

 

***********

 

"Everyone brace for EMP! All troops out of the generators, NOW!"

 

"You heard her, everyone OUT NOW!" Zombie roared. The voice sounded a little familiar but he wasn't going to get legalistic about the chain of command now, if someone had broadcast in the open like that it was likely damned important. He'd question it later. "Get clear! Get clear!" That was when Zombie noticed that the almost pleasant hum of the generators was starting to take on an angry snarl. "All pathfinders on me!"

 

Zombie watched as the marines started to trickle out of the second generator building and Tingirl and Red jump over the top of the building, their jump jets alight. The snarl was quickly building and he could feel the vibration through his suit. "Come on come on..." Tingirl dropped easily to the ground beside him and Snakes but Red shorted her jump, landing lightly atop the roof before walking to the edge and starting to drop the rest of the way.

 

Hidden from view by meters of ferrocrete and with his sensors swamped amid the leakage from the generators there was no warning. One moment Zombie was standing watching Red drop off the side of the building and the next everything in his gear went dark and rigid. Without any electricity keeping it opaque his front view port lightened and admitted the pure white glare of the generator he was standing next to's dissipaters unloading. One whole panel of the building had gone pure white, arcs of energy rippling across its surface and the metal buckled under the assault. Zombie tried to move to shield his eyes but his suit was a leaden coffin holding him tight. A split second later the ground beneath them bucked up almost two meters, Snakes and Tingirl went down but some how Zombie stayed upright, his eyes locked on Red as her gear started to crumple, with one foot already off the building and in the air her suit went limp and started to fall. Then the sky exploded.

 

On the far side of generator two generator one was ripping itself apart.

 

As bad as the pure white light of the dissipaters was the sickly yellow glare that filled the sky and outlined Red was worse. This close to the explosion there was little delay between the sight and the sound. The pressure wave from the blast hit Red, throwing the limp body of her gear end over end far above and behind Zombie. Immediately behind it came the fireball, roiling across the top of the generator building in front of him the ball of hot gas searing everything before it. Again the ground buckled as the gigantic pressure wave of the blast echoed off the bedrock deep below the plateau and came back up. The ground around Zombie vomited up and he felt himself thrown up and then falling. With no control over his descent all Zombie could do was watch as the door into the second generator building suddenly vomited flame and marines, but only pieces of the later.

 

The image of the dying soldiers was seared into his mind as his gear rotated around the ground filled his view.

 

=====================================

 

Author's Notes

 

Acknowledgements:

 

The usual, Lighthawk, Warpwizard, psianogen.

 

Notes:

 

1) Haha! Boom!

 

Feedback: bsmartfanfic@yahoo.com

 

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You don't need to tell me I suck, I'm well aware of that.