Grantville Gazette 37

colonies will think twice before issuing us an ultimatum.'

'Won't I kill a lot of innocents in strikes on hospitals and houses?'

She was quiet for a moment, as if she had forgotten there were people on the planet and not just rebels. Then she waved it away. 'We didn't start this. It's unfortunate that the populace pays for the hubris of the government, but they brought this upon themselves.'

'I don't know. It seems to me that I'm the one bringing it on them.'

'Deal with your conscience later. You've been paid and you'll do your duty. Understood?'

He laid back in the chair and let it mold itself to him. 'Understood, ma'am.' Peter stared up at the ceiling of steel braces and bare conduits, high above him. With a tap of his finger, the cortical relay settled over his head like a skullcap. Its gentle fields engaged the microscopic filaments that had been nano-deposited within his brain and spinal cord. He began to feel a familiar pressure from within, as if his body was too small to contain his soul. The pressure rose until it was at the threshold of pain, and then he was through the interface.

His mind stretched out over nineteen light years in a fleeting moment of null time. Peter doubted that anyone had ever done this before, because he had no idea how they would have kept themselves quiet about it. He almost shouted out in delight. Engaging AI's as a REMO always felt strange, but this seemed downright bizarre!

Peter noted a moment of discontinuity, and then he found himself embedded within thirty-eight war machines, hungry for battle. The connection through the wormholes was stronger and faster than any he had ever experienced before. Even during the war, when all the Rippers and he were in the same general area, there had still been a slight delay between thought and sensation, action and reaction. Here there was nothing but the powerful, immediate sensation of being wrapped up in a twenty-ton, c-fractional spaceship, Armageddon at his fingertips, multiplied thirty-eight times over. It was a godlike sensation. Peter feared that he would lose all he had gained in his transition from the Sweeper to plain old factory worker.

He waited until the dangerous euphoria began to abate and then he took stock of his situation. Five of the Hornets had failed to come online. He tried a wake up call to the thirty-eight he did have. 'Hello?'

HELOOOO hELLO hello hElLo Hola Hi Yo HOWDY Hello-Their eager voices camein a reverberating cacophony throughout the entire group. Then they began to greet one another, and then to greet him again.

He made an adjustment or two and tried again. 'Hello?'

Hello, Peter. Thirty-eight voices in complete harmony. Better. Many new, inexperienced REMO's made the mistake of anthropomorphizing their AIs. Individuality required creativity, and the AI's lack of creativity and advanced judgment skills was why they needed REMO's in the first place. An AI was a very clever operating system and interface, which took away the need to worry about the small stuff, but it did not live. Peter had no need for individuals. He wanted soldiers who did what he told them to.

'Are you mission ready?'

A chorus of Yes, Peter followed by two slow, disappointed No, Peter's. He delved deeper into those two Hornets and data swam in his vision before him, mingling with his view of the ceiling. Peter closed his eyes and gave a quick scan of the info. They were two of the older model units to which he only had a slow, tenuous connection. Time had not been kind to the Hornets, stuck far out in the Kuiper Belt of the New Poland system. Numerous hits by micrometeorites and cometary dust over the years had rendered them unusable. He guessed that was what had happened to the five units that had failed to check in, but he had neither the time nor the need to find out for certain. Peter dismissed the damaged units and then spent a few minutes discussing the target list with the Hornets, adjusting his plans as the AIs informed him of the differences in their individual capabilities.

Soon enough, he had completed all the planning and prep work. Their drives and weapons were all warmed up from decades of dormancy, and the eager Hornets seemed to chafe against their orbits like attack dogs held at bay on a leash. He gave one final instruction. 'Your highest priority is accuracy. When you are done, I want the colonists to have no doubts about what the empire is capable of.'

No problem, boss. You point us and we'll hit it. No problem. Their voices were in exact sync, and had even been modulated to sound more like him. They were Peter-and he was on the prowl.

The unsuspecting colonists of New Poland never stood a chance. Hornets streaked inward from points all around the solar system, using their DMT drives to trade momentum with any convenient body along their line of flight, accelerating at the equivalent of hundreds of gravities in order to all reach the planet at the same time. The New Polish colony floated in Peter's mind's eye, a blue and green sphere for which peace was about to become a memory.

Before the first wave of Hornets hit the atmosphere, they launched their kinetic missiles. Self-guided spikes of ceramic and tungsten pierced the skies around the globe and struck the locations of every single wormhole transceiver on record, plus a few that had been secreted away in a futile attempt to fool imperial sensors. The first indication the colonists had that they were not in fact beyond the reach of Mother Earth, that they were not safe from harm, was the fiery destruction of their comm centers, as the spikes converted their orbital speed to massive plumes of heat and explosive force. With that, the immediate threat the colonists posed had been removed, but his work was not done.

The second wave of Hornets made short work of the satellites in orbit, and then joined their brethren to shriek across the skies of the terrified planet, raining down destruction and ruin upon every city and community the New Polish had carved out of the alien forests. The kinetic missiles ran out long before he was through half the target list, but it mattered little. The lasers and particle beams would suffice for what remained to be done.

He had his mission, his responsibilities. Peter made continual minute adjustments to the Hornets' attacks, holding back where one seemed overzealous and wasteful, admonishing and redirecting when one missed a target of opportunity. As the platoon sergeant was to his grunts and the commander to his squadron, he was to his Hornets. It was the very essence of being a combat REMO, but this was far more complex, far more difficult than any op he'd ever engaged in before. It was hard work being everywhere at once, but it all came together for him.

Soon, the images of key homesteads, hospitals, warehouses, and factories on their screens were replaced by the stark video of fire, smoke, and settling dust. Ironically, after rejecting his past for so long in search of solace, for the first time in many years he was totally at peace. He realized, while making the Hornets dance around the planet, that perhaps being the Sweeper was not such a bad thing.

Peter felt almost serene, at least until the battle damage assessments started rolling in.

Moments after the smoke and dust cleared from the target areas, he felt someone strike him, pummeling his chest and arms while he lay in the connection chair. Dimly, he could hear Sylvia's cries of outrage and he knew his time was up. He gave final instructions to all of the Hornets. All but one flew out of the atmosphere and then made a suicidal reentry straight into the ocean, their shattered power cells and violent kinetic energy combining to produce a giant mushroom cloud and shockwave. He hoped it would dissipate before it reached shore.

The last remaining Hornet flew to Warsaw, the colony's capitol, and landed upon the steps, just in front of the shattered remains of the government house, ready for the next step.

With a tap of his hand, the cortical interface lifted off his head and he was free. Peter caught Sylvia's striking hands and gave her a spin that sent her sprawling on the floor. She rose to her knees and appeared ready to charge at him again, but a look of defeat began to supplant the apoplectic rage that had turned her face into a mask. She stayed on the floor and leaned against the supervisor's console as she tried to regain both her breath and her composure. He was glad for it. He had been in the chair for too many hours and could barely move to stop her.

She looked to the large display at the frozen images of the secondary target areas. The sites for the wormhole transceivers were completely destroyed, as were the main government buildings on the night side of the colony planet. However, on the daylight side, when they would still have been manned, the buildings stood completely undamaged. Instead, around those buildings and around every single imperial warehouse, factory, hospital, and leadership home, he had used the Hornets' weapons to excavate a deep trench surrounding each structure. It was a degree of precision for which he felt a certain pride, for himself and the Hornet AI's.

She turned away from the unexpected lack of destruction and toward Peter, her face twisted in both confusion and disgust. 'Why?'

'You said it yourself. I've never been very obedient, but I always do my duty.'

'You call that doing your duty? You've wasted our one best opportunity to regain control!'

Shaking his head, he began to extricate himself from the chair. 'I've given you the opportunity to do the right