Sneak Peek – Something New
As I still can’t offer a proper update on the Boiling Seas, I thought I’d share a snippet of the thing I’ve just started working on.
At work I was reading about the massive salvage and cleanup operation that went on in France after the 1918 Armistice… and I had an idea. Here’s the first bit of it.
There was a trick to disarming the old T-27 ambush drones, a way to circumvent their multiply redundant processors and get straight into their deeper logic centres, without waking the damn thing up and getting eviscerated by its many-bladed, multi-jointed hands. Gideon just wished he could remember what it was.
The circuit probe sparked, and he cursed as the connection fused, his eyes flickering nervously to the drone’s arm, a slender thing festooned with short, sharp blades. He’d seen blades like that tear unsuspecting infantrymen apart when the spherical drones dropped their cloaks and exploded into buzzing life. This one lay limp in the ooze of mud and blood that was the battlefield – and thankfully stayed limp, despite his slip. Gideon withdrew the probe, wiped its grip and his hand on the only clean patch on his filthy fatigues, then bent over the drone’s open casing again. He’d pried it open with his shim – nothing so convenient as screws or bolts on a machine like this – above the spot where the thing’s brain ought to be, and had struck lucky, the circuits laid bare before him. That had only been the start of his troubles.
Slowly, carefully, he went in again, trying to remember a diagram he’d seen once, matching the blurry board in his brain with the ones before him. Don’t touch the capacitors, and don’t connect the base state backup. Whoever had designed the T-27 had invested far too much time, in Gideon’s opinion, on making the things impossible to hack or subvert with electronic means. The armour was lined with lead against wireless hacks, and if you somehow got close enough to try a manual reset or subversion then there were a dozen different false paths to lead you astray, most of which, if triggered, would wake the drone up from its dormant or damaged state and turn its many weapons on the hapless hacker. He tried very hard not to think about Corporal Atwell, the woman who’d told him all of this. She’d been halfway through explaining which board did what when she’d made a connection that she very much shouldn’t have. Gideon tried very hard not to remember her screaming, the impotent roar of his shotgun, the sound of blades in flesh. The drone hadn’t stayed awake long, its power cells failing – but it did enough to force Gideon to aim his next shot at Atwell. What was left of her face had smiled, at the end.
There had never been time or opportunity for anyone else to finish Gideon’s lesson. Now, two battlefields later, he wished he’d at least looked it up on the Net – not that he’d have been able to practice what he’d learned. When you were in Salvage, you weren’t exactly first in line for the simulators.
Something sparked in the drone’s brain, and one of its remaining arms twitched. Gideon froze, but there was no more movement. The drone had looked pretty thoroughly disabled when Gideon had first seen it, picking his way through the hungry mud, already soaked through by the constant, thin drizzle; a plasma burst had carved half of its spindly limbs away and partly melted the inner carapace. It had been enough to keep the drone down for the rest of the battle, maybe for good – but ‘maybe’ wasn’t good enough for Gideon, for any decent man or woman of Salvage. Unlike the grunts whose cooling bodies littered the muddy field, they never left a job half-done.
“Gid, sitrep.” His earpiece crackled; water damage. Part of the tiny fraction of his mind not concentrating on the job at hand made a note to pop his vox open and give it a good clean, as he heard the rest of said fraction reply, “Little busy, boss.” Finally he managed to disconnect the first board, gingerly lifting it free as the voice in his ear spoke again with an irritating static hiss.
“Got something nasty, have you?”
“T-27,” Gideon managed to mutter. The revealed circuit-board was twice as complex as the first, a dozen different intersecting patterns picked out in copper and silver filigree. At least half of those paths, he knew, led to bloody agony.
“Shit.” To her credit – meagre as that might be in Gideon’s book – the sergeant did sound genuinely concerned. “Just you?”
“Just me,” Gideon confirmed. Me and what’s left of the poor bastards who found this thing first. He traced one of the circuit’s paths, not yet touching it, the tip of the circuit probe hovering an inch above the conductive metal.
“Want backup?”
“No.” This was a lie, and both speakers knew it. There was only one thing Gideon wanted more than for one of the others to come rushing over; for a pair of steadier hands to take the probe, to be relieved of responsibility and absolved of whatever failure he was about to make; and that was to down his tools and get the hell off the battlefield altogether. Hellfire, off the planet. He wanted to have never been a soldier, to have settled down with a nice girl and led an ordinary, boring life, to have never seen blood or murder or even heard of a T-27 combat drone.
But he didn’t put his tools down. He didn’t run away. Because for better or, mostly, for worse, he was a salvageman, and this was his job, and he’d be damned if he let Tricia Donoghue, sergeant or no, watch him crack under the pressure. Or I might just be damned anyway, he thought, as he traced another circuit-path to an ominous little black device with a blinking red diode. He cut it free with a portable breaker, set it aside.
“Well, if you do,” said Sergeant Donoghue, “Yaxley’s only a few hundred away.”
“Mines?”
“Yeah, clusters.”
“I’ll head over to help him,” Gideon said with conviction he didn’t feel, “when I’m done.”
He turned off his radio before Donoghue could reply, took a deep breath, wiped his sweaty hands again. He thought he had the right path, was perhaps eighty percent sure that severing that flex connector would short out the thermal regulator in the compact fusion battery and fry the whole brain. That twenty percent of his brain that remained doubtful, however, was screaming about auxiliary capacitors and reverting to highly lethal factory settings, flashing memories of Corporal Atwell’s lack of face.
Fuck it. Sooner or later, there was always a leap of faith to make. He tried to comfort himself with the thought of a quick death at the drone’s razor-sharp hands, but the lie wouldn’t take. He breathed deeply, reassembling Atwell’s face in his mind.
He cut the wire. The T-27’s scarlet eye flared into life, its spindly arms snapping up and into violent life – and then the tidal wave of power from the unregulated battery melted the complex control circuits into a coppery soup, and the serrated blade that had been half an inch from Gideon’s eyeball fell back into the mud with a wet splash.
Gideon let out a shaky breath, long and slow, closing his eyes and concentrating on the sound of rain drumming on his helmet. He thought he might have pissed himself, but he was already soaked to the skin and couldn’t tell. The hand that holstered the circuit probe was shaking like a leaf. He clenched his fist, breathed in, once, and out again. Still alive. He pushed the fear into the back of his mind, into a little tin box that was already bursting at the seams with trauma.
When he opened his hand his fingers were perfectly steady. He turned on his radio.
“Seven-Four to Seven-Actual. T-27 made safe. Flagging for pickup.”
He wiped mud from his PDA screen and tagged the drone’s coordinates. Then he freed himself from the sucking mud, stepped over a severed hand, and went to help Yaxley with his minefield.
Let me know what you think – there’s not much more yet, but there will be soon…
