Outcasts, page 19
“I’m sorry. I still don’t see how you know—”
“What’s more likely? That my scouts just got lost down there? Or that someone ambushed them?”
Either was possible, as was an accident or cave-in. And Petrov probably had her own agenda here, given her hatred of the Sangheili castaways, who had been living comfortably inside the tel while her soldiers starved outside. While her children starved, Vale reminded herself. At least some of Petrov’s subordinates were likely her own offspring and then their offspring, and she had been sending them to war for over thirty years. That had to fan the flames of hatred, and pretty ferociously.
But that didn’t make her wrong. An ambush was as likely as any of the other possibilities, and with ‘Vadam already inside the tel, Vale was desperate to find a quick way into the depths of the citadel.
She turned to Gunnery Sergeant Grim Bear. “Let’s get a line ready. If we move fast, maybe we can recover the weapon while the Arbiter is still holding their attention.”
Grim Bear turned and began to issue orders. Golly arrived on his Mongoose, and Vale had him attack the platform with his entrenching tool. Little puffs of dust rose each time the shovel came down, but the tip never sank into the ground. Finally, he gave up and began to scrape at the surface, trying to expose whatever lay beneath. He found only more dust.
“What is this stuff?” Golly locked grips with Vale, then stepped onto the platform and stomped. The surface rippled like a fluid, but showed no sign of collapse. “It feels like some sort of membrane.”
Vale turned to Petrov. “You said a soldier fell through this stuff.”
“She did.”
Vale waved toward Golly. “Did she weigh more than him?”
“I doubt four of her would have weighed more than him.”
“Then why isn’t he falling through?”
Petrov looked perplexed for a moment, then raised her brow in surprise… or sudden comprehension. “Because we returned and sent down a scouting team… who never came back.”
“You’re saying the inhabitants killed them. Then sealed the shaft?”
“What would you do if someone found a way to infiltrate your stronghold? You’d close the breach.”
“I would.” Vale pulled Golly off the platform, then turned to Grim Bear. “Break out another brick of C-12.”
“Bad idea,” Petrov said. “The enemy will feel the blast.”
“So they do.” Vale would have preferred to refer to ‘Vadam and the tel inhabitants as adversaries rather than enemies, but she didn’t have time to reinforce such subtle distinctions. “This operation depends on speed.”
“Speed and stealth. If the inhabitants feel us using explosives, they’ll realize what we’re doing and fill the shaft… with us in it.”
“We’ll be on the bottom in thirty seconds, and somewhere else thirty seconds after that. Nobody reacts that fast.”
“You don’t understand.” Petrov grabbed Golly’s entrenching tool and heaped a few shovelfuls of dust onto the platform. The pile slowly spread outward as though it were syrup, then melted into the surface and disappeared. She dragged the side of the blade across the spot and recovered only a few grains. “This isn’t normal stuff… and the tel’s inhabitants can control it.”
Vale recalled the long passage that had suddenly appeared beneath Fuertes and Iyuska, and how part of the tunnel floor had simply dissolved during the battle that followed. Vale could not imagine how the Sangheili castaways could have done those things… but she didn’t doubt what Petrov was claiming, either.
“How is that possible?”
“I wish I knew.” Petrov returned the entrenching tool to Golly. “But they must have control. Whatever this stuff is, it always seems to blind, bury, or suffocate us just when we get the drop on them. That’s no coincidence.”
Iyuska joined them and knelt at the narrow end of the platform. Using a knife, she scraped a few dust particles into a clear sample pouch, then held it to the light and raised her brow. Realizing that she was reacting to something Petrov had said, Vale waited for an explanation.
When it did not come, she finally asked, “Well?”
“Commander Petrov is right. You shouldn’t use the C-12.”
“You’re just saying that because you’re worried about damaging artifacts.”
“I am worried about damaging artifacts,” Iyuska admitted. “But the C-12 is still a bad idea.”
Iyuska handed the sample pouch to Vale, who held it up to the light so she could study the contents.
“What am I looking at?”
“What do you see? Your eyes are better than mine… at least they should be.”
“They are… as long as I’m trying to shoot you in the dark or at long range.” During her augmentation procedures, Vale had received corneal implants that enhanced her night and distance vision. “But all I see here are a few grains of dust. Make that flecks—they look kind of flat.”
“Doesn’t that fancy armor have some sort of magnification utility? I know what I think I see, but we need verification.”
“This isn’t a research project.” But Vale moved her faceplate targeting reticle over to the sample pouch and opened a magnification window. “We don’t have time to confirm our findings at every stage.”
“Just tell me what you see. If that stuff is tailings powder, then I’m the new head of ONI.”
Vale studied the pouch for a moment. “Well… you’re not head of ONI. That much is clear.”
At magnification, Vale could see that the grains were actually interlaced stacks of translucent flakes, stuck together to create thicker, opaque flakes. Whether thin or thick, all the flakes were hexagonal, with open spaces between layers that allowed more flakes to slot in and create ever larger, three-dimensional hexagons—which they were doing before Vale’s very eyes.
She blinked the magnification window closed, then looked to Iyuska. “Nanotech?”
“Or maybe just microtech. There’s no way to be sure… unless you happen to have a scanning electron microscope function in that thing?”
“Uh… no.” And even if Vale had, she wouldn’t have bothered to activate it. The difference between nanotech and microtech was fairly arbitrary, a matter of the size of the molecules being engineered. “But either way… does it make sense? As far as we can tell, the species that lived on Netherop wasn’t this advanced. We haven’t even seen indications of powered flight.”
“Not relevant. Powered flight isn’t a prerequisite for microtech. As long as you can build integrated circuits, it’s possible to get there.”
“Possible being the key word.” Vale waved toward the castaways’ running machines. “Those spider walkers are powered by coal. That’s Industrial Age technology. Ancient technology.”
“They’re powered by batteries. Which are charged by coal boilers.”
“Which is still Industrial Age technology. Microtech is a bit more advanced than that.”
Iyuska fell silent, considering Vale’s point, then finally shook her head. “You know what you saw when you magnified those dust grains, Pia. Are you telling me they didn’t look like microtech?”
Vale couldn’t argue with that logic—those uniform shapes slotted together to create larger uniform shapes. “Just because something looks like microtech doesn’t mean it is.”
“And just because we don’t understand what we’re observing doesn’t mean it isn’t.” Iyuska waved a hand around them. “Whatever this tel was once made of, I’m pretty sure it’s been converted into a giant hill of self-directing molecular machines.”
“What?!” Vale exclaimed. “That’s a real stretch, from coal-fired boilers to molecular machines.”
“True. But so are interdimensional weapons—or perhaps you have an Industrial Age explanation for whatever it was that knocked us down?”
Vale didn’t, of course. Had she been looking into an interdimensional rift just before the mysterious weapon destroyed her entire insertion force? She wasn’t sure. But she was sure that no Industrial Age technology could have done what she had witnessed. The energy requirements were just too massive. Like a million times too much.
“Okay… molecular machines.” Vale sighed. “How do we turn them off?”
“We don’t. Have you lost your mind?”
“No, but I have lost my corporal and our consultant. And I want them back alive. Along with that weapon.”
“We can’t turn those machines off. Even if I knew how, we’d never be able to turn them back on again—and then we’d never figure out how they work.”
“I don’t see why not,” Vale said. “Molecular machines aren’t that advanced. Humanity has been fabricating them for five centuries.”
“Not self-directing molecular machines. And I’m not talking about template-guided or magnetic self-assembly. I’m talking about machines that find their own raw material, tear it apart molecule by molecule, then reassemble it into something useful.”
“You mean this stuff controls itself?” Petrov said, incredulous.
Iyuska considered her answer—no doubt trying to formulate one that would force Vale to be more careful about protecting the tel’s artifacts. “At this point, all I have is a hypothesis. But yes, to an extent.” Iyuska turned to Vale. “We saw the same phenomena Commander Petrov described. Tunnels that open spontaneously in front of the tel inhabitants, ground that turns permeable beneath the feet of their enemies. It’s possible the machines are sensing what the inhabitants need, then providing it.”
“That sounds like magic, not nanotech.”
“At this level, I doubt we could tell the difference. Remember, we’re here to investigate a culture older and more advanced than the Forerunners. That means Tier Zero technology. Nanotech is probably just a parlor trick to them.”
Vale couldn’t argue with that logic. How a species using coal power to charge their batteries could develop this kind of technology was a mystery, but she had visited enough of the galaxy to know it held plenty of secrets beyond human understanding. Everything she had seen at the tel so far suggested it contained another one.
“Okay, Keely, let’s assume you’re right,” Vale said. “Then we need to disrupt the lines of communication. How do the machines sense what the inhabitants need?”
“The easiest way would be by reading minds.”
“Seriously?” Petrov said.
“It really wouldn’t be difficult,” Vale said. “Not with technology this advanced.”
“Exactly,” Iyuska said. “A population of molecular machines configure themselves into electrodes, then adhere to a subject’s head and start monitoring brain activity. It might take some time to build a database and calibrate, but eventually the tel would be able to correlate brain-wave activity with action and emotion. The subject turns left, and the tel senses a desire to go in that direction and opens a tunnel. The subject grows frightened, and the tel senses a threat and buries it.”
“The tel senses, and not the machines?” Vale asked. “You’re not suggesting it’s sentient?”
“Not by the standard definition. I’m just saying that it appears to be a massive unitary nanotech system—and that makes it very, very powerful. If my hypothesis is correct, of course.”
“Let’s operate under the assumption it is.” Vale turned to Petrov. “Unless you know of a reason to believe otherwise?”
“I don’t. It’s a little out there, but the professor’s theory does explain just about everything about this place—except how we’re going to disrupt the communication between the enemy and the tel. It’s pretty hard to jam telepathy.”
“But not impossible. We just have to go in quietly.” Vale turned to Golly and pointed to the ground at the end of the platform. “Start digging. Maybe we can come in from the side.”
Vale borrowed an entrenching tool from an ODST on First Squad and joined him. Three minutes later they stood in a waist-deep hole, scraping nanodust off the exterior of the shaft’s yellow-gray liner. She tapped the surface with the edge of her shovel blade. The sound was deep, muffled, and woody.
“Doesn’t sound like that nanotech stuff,” Golly said. “And more like resin than metal or concrete. Shouldn’t take more than a big pinch of C-12 to knock a hole in it.”
“Doesn’t matter,” Vale said. “If the shaft is still clear on the other side, that liner will act like a big soundboard. Even a small blast would boom like an artillery shell.”
Vale drew her combat knife from its leg sheath and flipped it into an ice-pick grip, then launched herself toward the shaft and drove the blade toward the liner. The resin had turned so brittle with age that she ended up driving her entire fist and forearm through up to the elbow.
“Or, we could do it your way,” Golly said.
He drew his own combat knife and began to drive it through the liner at the edges of the pit they had excavated. Vale heard faint splashes as the loose debris fell into the shaft and reached the bottom. It was the first sign of water that she had noticed since arriving on Netherop—at least liquid water. There was plenty of vapor in the planet’s low brown clouds.
The sound of splashing wasn’t great, but it was subtler than a blast. Hoping it wouldn’t be loud enough to draw the attention of the tel inhabitants, she sheathed her combat knife and told Golly to carry on, then waved Gunnery Sergeant Grim Bear over.
“Let’s have that line ready to drop when Golly is finished,” Vale said. “I’ll lead First Squad into the interior. I want you to take Second Squad to the far end and create a diversion. Try not to engage, and retreat if they engage you. But I want you to make it sound like we’re trying to breach as far from here as reasonable. A big sound.”
“Will do, Spartan.” Grim Bear nodded toward Iyuska and Petrov. “What about them?”
“I’m going with Pia.” Iyuska’s gaze shifted to Vale. “Don’t even think about leaving me behind during the initial survey.”
“No worries, you’re coming with us. That’s what you get for calling me Pia.”
“I’m glad we”—Iyuska’s expression grew uneasy as she realized that Vale viewed her acquiescence as a dangerous assignment rather than an accommodation—“agree.”
“Me too.” Vale turned to Petrov. “Commander, I’d appreciate the benefit of your experience.”
“And you’ll have it.” Petrov glanced toward her subordinates, and a soft look came over her. Vale shouldn’t have been surprised by it, but she was. In the short time they had known each other, Vale had grown so accustomed to Petrov’s commander persona that she’d almost forgotten the woman was also a mother to her forces. “But I’d like the rest of my unit to assist your Second Squad. They’ve been fighting this war long enough, and compared to your ODSTs… well, I don’t see any reason my soldiers need to be down there with us.”
Vale looked to Grim Bear. “Gunny, that okay with you?”
“Happy to have them. They’ll prove helpful.”
“Good. Use them wisely.” Vale held Grim Bear’s gaze until the gunnery sergeant gave a little nod indicating she understood that meant keeping the young castaways as safe as possible. “I doubt we’ll have comms for long, so you’ll be on your own initiative. Are you clear on your assignment?”
“Yes, ma’am. Hold their attention while you steal the cheese.”
“That’s the assignment. Good luck.”
“You too, ma’am,” Grim Bear said. “And if there’s any chance of finding Legs—”
“Count on it, Sergeant. We’ll do everything we can for her and Fuertes.”
Grim Bear had the two Mongooses brought to the edge of the pit and secured a utility line to their bullbars. Vale helped Golly finish perforating a square outline in the resin liner, then pushed her hands into a pair of knife holes and tore out a section large enough to fit through. She found herself looking into yawning darkness, even when she activated her helmet lamp and shone it toward the bottom of the rectangular shaft.
“Oh, man,” Golly said. “I hope the rope is long enough.”
“Only one way to find out.”
Vale motioned for the utility line. She tied a figure-eight knot into the free end so she would know when she ran out of line, then knelt at the edge of the opening and tossed the coil into the darkness.
No splash came.
“I’ll get the other line,” Grim Bear said.
“Negative,” Vale said. Each squad carried only a single hundred-meter coil of utility line, so Second Squad would be without any rope at all if Vale took a spare down. “Let me have a look first. You can send it down on a carabiner if we need it.”
Vale straddled the line, then pulled it around her hip and lifted it over her opposite shoulder for a body rappel. Beginning the descent was a bit of a challenge since she was too large to squeeze through the hole while standing. Instead, she dangled her feet over the edge and wormed into the shaft backward, until her head was clear and she was using her guide hand to hang from the line. Then she pressed her toes against the wall and leaned back, her soles flat against it. After that, it was easy to descend, walking down the shaft backward and using her brake hand to control her speed through the amount of friction the line created against her armor.
Once she had descended five meters, she released the line with her guide hand and drew her plasma pistol. If she had to use it, she would be firing left-handed… but it wouldn’t compromise her accuracy. Like most Spartans, she had trained with her off-hand until she could fire as precisely with it as with the primary.
Over her comm, she said, “Golly, come ahead.”
“On my way.”
Golly’s boots appeared in the opening above and began to inch back. Having two people on the same rope was a bit risky, since the person on bottom would be hit if the one on top lost his grip and fell—after being shot, for instance. But the line itself would hold. It had a braided nanofiber core strong enough to support the entire squad, and probably both Mongooses in addition.
A moment later, Golly was five meters above Vale with his legs wrapped around the line. In his right hand, he held his MA40, with the line running diagonally across his body and then up around his left arm. It was not a body rappel, as Vale was using, but a fast-rope technique modified for thin nanofiber lines.
