Kaitlyn O’Connor
Chapter One
There was no question about the precise moment the drop ship entered the planet’s atmosphere. The troop carrier began to shimmy. The vibrations increased exponentially as they dropped lower until it reached a point where it felt like it would liquefy flesh, bones, and teeth, and everything around them would disintegrate. Then the transport began to buck wildly. Abruptly, an explosion ripped a hole in the hull wide enough to suck three troopers and their seats out of it.
Something strange happened when it did. Seth CO1543 felt his motor functions slow in a most peculiar way. Logically, he knew that the hull breach, the flying shrapnel that peppered every troop close enough to catch a projectile, the screams, the flying bits of flesh, blood, and metal that resulted from the impact of the projectiles, and the abrupt extraction of one entire row of seats and their occupants created by the opposing forces of interior and exterior pressure occurred almost simultaneously. He also knew that his processor was fast enough to record all of those nearly instantaneous occurrences.
Time seemed to slow, however. He blinked, heard a strange roaring sound that did not seem to be related to the hull breach—because it occurred milliseconds prior to that—and then he saw everything that happened in a series of stills. As if he was experiencing a complete system failure due to faulty, failing power supply, he saw the hole simply appear, the darkness beyond as profound as deep space, although he knew it was simply the dark side of the world below them. He saw the stunned expressions on the faces of the three troops that were sucked out as they flew backwards in their safety harnesses and vanished in the black abyss.
Panning right, he saw the troops who had been seated beside them turn their heads very slowly toward the hole and the strange, disjointed dance several others performed as holes appeared in their bodies and chunks of flesh, blood, and pieces of metal slowly jetted from them.
It was more than a slowing of his visual perception, however. He could not seem to process what he had recorded. He felt oddly blank, which became even more bizarre when he realized he had not simply shut down.
This was a very strange system failure indeed.
Particularly when he felt a rush of something completely incomprehensible fill the odd void.
Abruptly, his heart rate shot upward and he felt his body tingle with cold as if an electric current had sizzled along his exterior, penetrating all the way to his biological organs nestled in the armor of his chassis. And then time, his motor functions, seemed to abruptly right themselves and everything was happening simultaneously around him, too quickly to process.
A sense of alarm abruptly penetrated the peculiar and opposing hyperawareness/dulling-slowing of his perceptions and he strained against his safety harness to twist his head around enough to assess his team leader, Corporal Danika Hart—his human handler. She was staring at the hole, her blue eyes wide, her face as pale as death, her lips parted slightly. The frozen look on her face sent a shaft of … something through Seth, making his heart jar in his chest, as if it had lost its rhythm.
“Danika! Are you alright? Were you hit?”
She sent him a startled look, which sent another inexplicable tide of something unidentifiable twisting through Seth. She had not ceased to function—was not dead, he corrected himself.
She blinked a couple of times and then looked down at herself as if she could not assess her condition without a visual—and her hands. She patted her torso and then looked at him again. “Damage report,” she demanded abruptly.
It was at that point that it occurred to Seth that he had not executed a damage report despite the fact that he had noted that his systems were performing in a very erratic way. He frowned and looked down at himself as she had. When he looked at her again, he saw that she was studying him strangely. He felt the temperature of the flesh of his face heat inexplicably and a strange flutter in his belly, as if he had swallowed something alive that was still moving. “All systems fully operational. No damage.”
She studied him several moments more and Seth felt a fluctuation of heat and cold that seemed to be a reaction to her close scrutiny—uneasiness and a sense of guilt. Finally, she dismissed him and flicked a glance at the other two squad members. “Dane—Niles—damage report.”
“All systems fully functional. Minor anterior damage to torso,” Niles responded. “The shrapnel did not penetrate beyond biological sheathing. Nanos performing repair. Estimated repair time … one hour to complete.”
“Mobility impaired,” Dane replied. “Extensive damage to pneumatic knee joint. Nanos affecting repairs. Estimated repair time six hours. Minor damage to biological sheathing in three locations—right knee, right calf, right arm—estimated repair time 45 minutes, 13 seconds.”
“Fuck!” Danika exclaimed. “Patch the suits! We’re on the dark side and looking at well below zero temperatures. Can you make the jump, Dane?”
“Affirmative—disregarding more damage prior to reaching the jump altitude.”
Since several more missiles had exploded in close proximity to the drop ship during the course of the systems checks, making it necessary for them to bellow at one another only to be heard, Seth thought the probability of more damage was high. He considered pointing that out until it occurred to him that not only had Danika not requested the information, but it was purely speculation on his part when he had not run statistic probabilities and could not when he had no idea what the strength of the force was that was launching the missiles. That realization sent him into even more confusion. He had not been programmed to simply ‘guess’ or to add to confusion under attack by voicing an opinion without real substance. Unable to dismiss the suspicion that he had sustained some sort of damage, he ran another systems check. Again, his systems report was negative. Unconvinced despite that, he lifted one hand and examined his head, wondering if a microscopic fragment had penetrated his skull and damaged his CPU.
His squad leader noticed the movement and the examination. “Is there a problem, Seth?”
The odd fluctuation of hot and cold flooded him again, the inexplicable sense of ‘wrong’. “Negative.” The realization that he had just lied struck Seth forcefully. He had informed his squad leader that he was fully functional and could detect no damage when in fact he suspected that his entire system was malfunctioning.
He was no longer recording internal and external events, he realized after considering the problem for some moments. He was … feeling.
That discovery … unnerved him. He could not think of another way to describe the strange hot/cold fluctuation, the tightening sensation in his gut, or the erratic rhythm of his heart. He dismissed that possibility and examined the events he had noted since the drop and determined that he could track the anomaly back to the precise instant the exploding missile had ruptured the hull of their drop ship—or rather an instant prior to that. There had been a roaring sound, like the rush of air, almost as if he had anticipated the rupture of the hull.
He had not heard the sound with his ears, though. It had been inside his brain—the biological part—not the CPU.
Anger swept through him—not the perception of an event that might cause anger or the reaction he had been programmed to exhibit upon such an occurrence. Hefeltit.
The biological brain he had been given was defective, he thought angrily, and there could be no worse time to make that discovery than in the midst of battle!
“Bail out! Bail! Bail! Bail!” the co-pilot, a human, abruptly roared over the com-unit.
Niles and even Dane had thrown off their safety harnesses and were on their feet before the human had issued the order the second time. Brought abruptly from his internal examination, Seth was a few seconds behind them due his preoccupation.
