Quill was to be the last base before our rest and recovery period. We’d done hard work for nearly three weeks, and at least we humans felt the upcoming break was well deserved.
At Quill a new style of bot showed up—a smart, talkative, helpful little repair bot designed to query and search an area, and incidentally find things interesting to raiders. A mental alarm went off in every human. We kept the CL152 away from sensitive areas and sensitive discussions while we waited for feedback from Central Coordination. Sure enough, about a quarter of the other raid groups had a suspiciously helpful bot, and like us were keeping it in low sensitivity areas.
“Dissect it and move on,” was our Sghalup liaison’s advice when we got the news.
“I’d agree,” said Breitenbach, “except I’d like to find out more about the tech that shut down consciousness in three separate species that day, and I’d really, really like to get our people back. I can’t help thinking we could somehow use this bot for that.”
“Finding out how their mind disrupter works would be very good. Very good indeed. But how will getting your people back help the loot stream?” the Sghalup asked. That reflected a raider-race trait we humans didn’t like but had to put up with, their total lack of emotional response to casualties, ours or theirs.
We humans had formulated a good answer, and Breitenbach gave it. “HXSec wants humans, live humans, for a reason. Some reason that’s not good for the loot stream.”
“A good guess, but just a guess. Many things affect the loot stream. It might have been worth the risk to prevent the capture in the first place, as the RR team thought, but the calculation looks less favorable now,” said the Sghalup rep.
“The more we know, the less risk there is in having humans on the team.”
“You have interesting logic, Captain, but not compelling. Unless you come up with an acceptable plan to use this bot, or any of the other infiltrators, the Sghalupa must insist they be inactivated and studied.”
We all brainstormed on that, and came up with a plan.
Our first idea was to have a Ready Reaction group become bait for a bot out of the next wave of infiltrator bots and follow up with a massive raid to free humans … if there were any to be freed. For all we knew, Secbots had developed an appetite for humanburger and all we’d find would be a restaurant. After so many hundred years, there was still so much we didn’t know!
But we couldn’t be sure that the RR team would attract a bot, or even that there would be a next wave. The human tendency to try something three times before giving up wasn’t ironclad law even for humans, let alone for HXSec. So we needed to turn a raider team that already had a bot—Task Force Omicron, for choice—into an RR team.
There was a lot of heated discussion at Central Coordination. Most of the brass were unenthusiastic. People died all the time on raids anyway. Why risk more—a lot more—on such an unconventional mission? But a strong minority supported our extraction idea, especially among those who’d spent time in the field. And when over 50 human raiders volunteered, that tipped the balance the other way. It was a go if our aliens approved. They did, with an option to withdraw if the prospective loot was too inadequate.
So for Raid Base Omicron-Regina and the designated support group Epsilon-Magnus nearby, we rotated in some better fighters (the Drill, Sghalupa, and humans), trackers, and scouts (the Fornkarns and humans)—even in a cloned race, training and experience affect skill. And little Ratfink the Repairbot came too, to unwittingly help us get a fix on his masters.
The Fornkarns set up a special monitoring section and spliced some tappers into the local Hexmal communication lines to see if we humans could hear the captives being talked about. The Fornkarns also scouted deep to see if they could find exactly where they were being held.
Both worked, though three fatal scout casualties were incurred. Active HX–Land can be deadly even for the superbly sneaky Fornkarns.
The captive humans were in a large hospital-like facility, apparently with Earth-similar atmosphere, and there was a lot being said about them on the area com lines, including a feed with frequent reports on their health.
The monitoring stream showed 46 captives, out of the nearly one hundred abducted, in a single building. Most were in a normal resting state and, we thought, occasionally being examined, but three were critical, comatose, and just being maintained. We’d have to leave those behind in the “hospital”. We didn’t have gurneys, evac boards, or even body bags; in HX raiding you didn’t need them. If a situation went bad enough to produce bodies, it was also too bad for body recovery. HXSec was never known to call a truce.
“As expected, what we’re talking about is a military-size assault,” said Breitenbach at our first and, as it turned out, only planning meeting. “The target is deep in Active HX–Land, it’s clearly of interest to HXSec, and we’re hauling out up to 43 humans. Speaking of hauling people out … can we find out if they still have their suits with them? Are we going to have to bring suits?”
“What’s the loot stream?” asked the Drill.
“A lot of HX medicine and medtech,” I said, beginning with the weakest answer. That’s a strong pull for vulnerable humans, not so strong for races whose robust health is mostly tailored into their genes. Though to put them at their peak and ready for their next run, most raiders do have sessile doctor people at their home bases whom they can merge with in various ways. Our scientists say it’s a lot like a days-long nap or a short hibernation. Theirs deny any real similarity to weak Earthlings’ foolish sleep habit. “The mechanisms are about as much alike as football and soccer-sorry-I-mean-football were,” a distinguished mother-species Drill expert once declared, in an unusual sort of sports metaphor. “And the raider activity is optional.”
So in short we needed another pull. And as I expected the Drill said politely, “Good for humans, we felicitate you. Now what for us?”
“Several new styles of communications links and sensors for all sorts of phenomena. Some are quite small, so easily carried and hidden, and thus good for spying,” Breitenbach said.
And the Sghalup came to our aid with the other answer. “We hope their medtech will include the consciousness-shutdown device that hit most of us while the captives were taken.”
There was a pause as the Drill considered. Finally she said, “The Shutdown Device. With everything else, it is good enough. We are in.”
“How do we deal with the BBs?” asked the male Fornkarn.
The Sghalup said, “The usual way: We give them something else to worry about so they move off.”
“That won’t work. The BBs didn’t abandon their captives before,” said the female Fornkarn.
“And what if they use the Shutdown Device on us?” asked Capt. Jamahiriya from Task Force Epsilon. “Maybe you Fornkarn are immune, and maybe because you were outside the warehouse you just weren’t targeted.”
“Good point,” said Breitenbach.
Another interesting thing about speaking with raider aliens occurs to me. When there’s more than one together, if one says something, almost always their brother or sister clones will automatically agree and make a gesture or noise to that effect. But we humans don’t have identical genes and naturally fast communication. For unaccustomed raiders, the usual human jabbering that we call exchanging ideas is disconcerting and confusing. But our alien partners in this case had seen it before and tolerated it, so we didn’t constrain ourselves with a leader-only protocol. And for this project we’d also dropped the shift-on shift-off practice, so we humans were all awake at once.
“We deal with it by finding it and taking it,” answered the Sghalup. “Finding that piece is our main interest in this raid. We are sworn to learn how to neutralize it.”
“You and us both,” said Breitenbach, looking as surprised as I felt at Sghalup enthusiasm on the point. “But getting back to the BBs. To lure them away with a diversion we need to know what they’ll protect at higher priority than the captives. Do you Fornkarns think you can identify at least one such sensitive target in the area?”
“We’ll start now,” they answered in chorus. And as the female flew off to give the order, the male added, “Possibly soon enough so we can get this thing started in the morning.”
The planning went on for another two hours, leaving just about six hours for us humans to get some rest before the marshaling of forces began. Meanwhile the Fornkarns had found a crucial climate control station near the hospital.
Things can happen fast when raiders are involved, human and otherwise.
* * *
For its size, the raid went like clockwork, with the advantage of surprise. Our diversion force didn’t even need to actually go in, just get close enough to be noticed by the Secbots there, who called in the BBs—climate control is something every space creature is touchy about. When the BBs started moving we scampered away, with thankfully minimal casualties.
Meanwhile the Drill overwhelmed the Secbot hospital defenders. Like I always say, “You don’t want to face Drill in a dark alley, or a well lighted arena, or anywhere else.” Meanwhile, we human rescuers moved through the building acting more like zombies than medics; we performed, but we didn’t allow ourselves to think much about what we were seeing.
The building was being kept to human comfortable, so all the humans were out of suits, but more than half were bodies, not people. They’d been experimented on. We’d planned to just ignore those we couldn’t help, but Breitenbach and I agreed we had to kill them instead. We couldn’t leave them for what amounted to more torture, and we wanted to deny HXSec any further benefit from their experiments. As planned, we suited up the rest. And when we had everybody out we all gathered around Sgt. Tschütscher, who’s a Wiccan priest, as he sang a prayer for the dead. When we got back to base, a few of us destroyed little Ratfink with hammers and knives; the scientists wouldn’t miss one more copy of the model, and it made us feel a bit better.
One little hitch came up before we left: The Sghalupa had found the Shutdown Device as they’d sworn, but it was huge, taking up half the space of a Raid Base camp. So some of us humans and Drill spent twenty minutes helping them unbolt pieces from that monster machine so we could haul those back, too.
* * *
By raider standards, we’d had an off-the-charts success: We invaded deep into Active HX–Land, we took over a medium-size hospital even though it was protected by three BBs, we made off with roughly a ton of prime medical loot—something that had never, ever been done before. We got chunks of the new, mysterious Shutdown Device. And we rescued 35 human prisoners, which we’d never, ever needed to do before.
At the next meeting, the Drill and the Fornkarn, whose people had got good hauls of loot, were happy, happy, happy. Most of us humans made it to at least one happy, weighing the rescued captives against the unrescued. But the Sghalup was positively gloomy.
“We won this time,” he said, “but what we found means there’s big change coming, and it’s not good. That hospital being set up specifically for humans, the development of those treacherous little helpers, it means that the HXSec is now hunting and collecting you humans. We won a battle but we’ve started a war.”
“And we still don’t know why HXSec is hunting humans,” I added. “Our scientists say that analyzing our recordings of the experimental subjects will keep you awake at night, but it doesn’t tell you what the point is.”
“We don’t know either,” said the Sghalup. “Presumably time will tell.”
“Say, what have you Sghalupa learned about the Shutdown Device?” asked Jamahiriya.
“Some of its function involves dark matter, which is why it’s so big. For the rest, I haven’t studied the science I’d need to understand what we’ve learned, and I doubt anyone else here has either.
“Oh, something that’s in our next report. We checked out that warehouse where we first encountered the Device and discovered it was built into the closed-off ceiling. It’s gone now, of course, but you can see exactly where it was. HXSec spent a lot of resources designing that place and a score of others as human traps.
“They badly want to catch lots of you … very badly.”