As she stood in line with the other cyborgs, OD12’s head cocked a bit more. She recalled many years of combat training. She had been to a hundred planets in a thousand varied situations. At least, the combat simulations inside the Web-Mind had seemed like real years.
Her nearly lifeless eyes tightened—that tightening was close to being an anomaly. It triggered the programming in her internal computer.
The computer warning caused her to blink. Her self-awareness might have curled and died the death of inertia and terror. This deep part was the “I” of OD12… of Osadar Di, her true name.
Osadar Di understood perfectly. She was screwed. She’d never had a chance, really. It wasn’t fair. But then life was a crapshoot where all the odds were stacked against you. It was the norm for her. She’d always known it. Look at her. She was a monster, a mechanical thing with a slave driver to control not only her actions, but also her thoughts. If that wasn’t the ultimate screw-job, she didn’t know what was.
Osadar was faintly aware she heard more from her computer than she should. It was choosing from certain drugs to inject into her bloodstream. Yes, as the drugs began to work, the grim horror gripping her began to fade. Unfortunately, the memory also began to recede with the lessening terror.
Osadar—no, she was OD12. She belonged to the Web-Mind. She was a component of the grand scheme of Solar System conquest. This was part of Step Nine, whatever that meant.
A tiny twitch of her cyborg lips escaped the notice of the computer’s censor program.
She was screwed. She knew it. She had always known this was going to happen. She hadn’t known she’d become a cyborg or a part of Web-Mind, but she had known that eventually she’d become immersed into something vile and irresistible.
Yet that was the thing, her quirk. Despite the odds, she’d always resisted. Did that make her foolish? Sometimes she had thought so. The deep “I” of OD12 decided to play along for now. She believed she could have resisted enough to enter shutdown and maybe even gotten herself personality scrubbed. But she didn’t want to be scrubbed. She wanted to survive. She wanted to screw the thing that had screwed her. It was part of who OD12 was, just as it was part of her to know she couldn’t win ultimately.
Maybe the hardened understanding of the futility of life gave her the needed mental resources to kick against the perfected cyborg reconditioning. Maybe it was just a quirk of fate. Maybe even the Web-Mind and precise, cyborg superiority failed sometimes. It was possible and might even have a probability that Web-Mind had given an exact score. Maybe the score was 0.001 percent. All the maybes could have been the answer.
The reality was that OD12 stepped toward the chemical shower with the rest of the line of cyborgs. She entered the cubicle in turn and felt the chemical spray sear her skin and make her scalp prickle as if sprayed with jets of flame. She was enslaved like all the other cyborgs. She would perform her tasks. But she would also plot in the deepness of her half-mechanical heart to throw a laser calibrator into Step Nine of the Web-Mind’s plan of conquest.
After the preparatory shower, OD12 entered another shutdown sequence. So did the many cyborgs of her battle pod. After her delivery to an SU ship and under Toll Seven’s guidance, SU military personnel lifted her stiff form and inserted it into a battlesuit. The personnel used lifters and inserted her and the suit into an attack pod loaded with weapons. Other lifters set the pod into an ice machine. The ice machine sprayed water around the pod, hardened the water into ice and sprayed more water. In a layered onion manner, the ice machine built a large ice chunk to a precise size. Once done, the ice machine secreted the frozen chunk onto another lifter.
A SU sergeant drove the blackened ice chunk to an encasing processor. There, a thin steel coat encased the ice with the frozen cyborg in its exact center. The steel-jacketed ice-chunk was shipped to a select vessel that possessed a single cannon.
The cannon was a mass driver. It used magnetic coils to accelerate metal to high speeds. Normally, this was a mine-laying warship, or a mine-spewing warship. It shot mines. Those mines possessed radar capability, electronic counter measure devices and a nuclear explosive. When an enemy vessel approached the decided limit, the mine exploded. The nuclear bomb pumped X-rays through rods, directing the deadly radiation at the computer-selected target.
Instead of normal mines, however, the mass driver would use its magnetic coils to accelerate the steel- jacketed, precisely sized ice-chunks.
As the crew readied its mass driver, Commodore Blackstone stood with Toll Seven in the command center of the
The aerosol screen was a precaution. Ever since the Doom Star had vacated the Mars System and as the SU warships began to congregate, the Rebel sensor probes and satellites aimed on this side of Mars had been destroyed. That left the radar stations on the two moons and on the space platforms in near-Mars orbit. Those sites possessed teleoptic equipment. The Martians and the SU Battlefleet closely watched each other through powerful telescopes. The aerosols spewing from the squat convoy vessels now put a temporary screen between those teleoptic systems and Social Unity’s painfully gathered warships.
The aerosol screen wouldn’t last long. But then, it didn’t have too. Already, SU warships and cyborg battle pods began to change positions into a cleverer formation. The aerosol screen was not meant to mask this change. Instead, once the aerosols drifted apart and the fleet moved beyond the screen, the Martians would no doubt redouble their efforts studying the Battlefleet. The new formation would hopefully satisfy their curiosity. The Martians would hopefully debate for several days what it meant. By that time, the true reason for the aerosol screen would have made itself known.
“The aerosol screen is up, sir,” the communications officer told Blackstone.
The Commodore took a deep breath and glanced at Toll Seven. The cyborg impassively watched the holograph.
Blackstone adjusted the module. It now showed the mine-spewing warship, the
Blackstone heard himself ask, “You’re certain we’re not sending your cyborgs to a futile death?”
It was difficult to tell, but Toll Seven seemed amused. “Supreme Commander Hawthorne approved the tactic. He must understand as I do that it will work flawlessly.”
Could cyborgs know pride? “Very well,” Blackstone muttered. He spoke to the communications officer. “Order the initiation of Operation Icebreaker.”
Aboard the
“The cyborgs seem to think so, sir,” the First Gunner answered.
“This will never work,” the captain said. She was a tall woman, known as a perfectionist. “Begin.”
“Fire one,” the First Gunner said.
The fusion engines kicked in as power flowed through the mass driver’s magnetic coils. The first steel- jacketed ice-chunk shot out of the cannon at almost two kilometers per second. It headed for a precise location at something near three times the speed of a fired bullet. After a mere two seconds or after traveling a little less than four kilometers, the steel jacket exploded off the ice like a saboted gyroc round. That accelerated the ice- coated pod, pushing it even closer to two kilometers per second.
One after another, the
