Armored-ARC Read online

  “I’m awfully busy, Commander,” Warner’s nasal voice shot back. “Can it wait?”

  “No sir, but it’s short. I need your authorization to go weapons-live.”

  “That will not be necessary, Commander.”

  “Excuse me, sir, but I feel it is. A large crowd is gathering outside, and it sounds like they’re working themselves into attack mode.”

  “They’ve never attacked us before. We don’t know what ‘attack mode’ for them would be.”

  “All I’m asking for, sir, is authorization to lock and load. Just in case.”

  There was a long hesitation on the other end, and then Warner’s voice said, “Come on, then.”

  The office of the embassy’s Regional Security Officer, the RSO, was Spartan but high-tech. Surveillance monitors covered the walls from deck to overhead, and Reginald Warner was ensconced within a desk that had more in common with the cockpit of a V/A-90 Demonwraith than a piece of office furniture.

  Several screens showed different views of the mob at the front gate. The main viewall, however, was dominated by the startlingly deep-purple, cyclopean eye of Ng’g’!grelchk, the senior administrator to the ek-Cha’a Hierarchy’s chief—call it the king’s prime minister. Its name and title were displayed in English at the top of the screen.

  “This,” Warner said to the being, speaking into a microphone on his desk, “is the leader of our security guard here at the embassy. Commander Schaeffer.”

  Schaeffer heard in the background the computer-rendered blend of warbling, hooting, and glottal-stopped consonants that was the translation of what the RSO had just said. When they stopped, the being on the screen replied with some warblings of its own.

  “I respect you and what you represent.” The consecutive translation scrolled up the right-hand side of the viewall, accompanied by the flat voice of the embassy AI as it spoke. “May long you hold fast to your females. May long you be known to be prosperous.”

  “Say ‘thank you,’” Warner said in a harsh whisper when Schaeffer didn’t immediately respond.

  “Thank you,” he told the image. He knew better than to add “sir.” Hierarchy administrators were drones, sexless and landless, and sex-based honorifics could be misunderstood.

  But not powerless. The Heirarchy’s ruler, Ng’g’ch’gra!ooh was also a drone. Having drones in charge was the only way the ek-Cha’a could have anything like a government without bull-male legislators slaughtering one another on the floor of the Executive Congress over minor legal disagreements.

  “Commander Schaeffer,” Warner added, “seems to feel that the situation outside the gate is extremely serious. He’s concerned about…territorial incidents.”

  “The Eldest Drone has issued the firmest suggestions,” the AI both said and printed on the screen, translating the string of hoots, pops, and consonants. “There will be no encroachment of territory. Your females will be safe.”

  Humans had been studying the ek-Cha’a language for perhaps thirty years, now. Vocabulary, grammar, and inflection all were now well understood, and translation in either direction was not a problem. Understanding the psychology behind the words, however, most definitely was.

  “There, Commander, you see?” Warner spoke loudly now, so that his words were picked up for translation. “The Eldest Drone has assured us of our safety.”

  “Sir,” Schaeffer said, “I still think it would be a good idea to—”

  “No!” He shouted the word, cutting Schaeffer off. Then he continued in a calmer voice. “No, Commander. What you suggest would not be a good idea. Not now. The ek-Cha’a set great store in a martial appearance. But we do not want any…unfortunate incidents. Do we?”

  Meaning, Schaeffer thought, we can carry laser rifles, but not the batteries to charge them. He doesn’t trust us.

  “I’m not talking about incidents, sir. I’m talking about what happens if that mob decides to come through the front gate.”

  “We have the assurance of the Eldest Drone that they will not. Am I right, Ng’g’!grelchk?” He made a pretty good approximation of the alien syllables, at least for a human limited to lips, tongue, and larynx, as opposed to paired air bladders and diaphragms.

  “My counterpart speaks precision and truth.”

  “You are dismissed, Commander.”

  “Counterpart,” meaning that the ek-Cha’a on the screen was in charge of the local army, as Warner was in charge of the security group. Schaeffer almost said something more, but the warning glare in Warner’s eyes told him he would get nowhere with an argument, especially with the native looking on.

  “Aye-aye, sir.” He came to attention, turned on his heel, and walked out of the office.

  Damn the man! And damn all red-tape bureaucrats, all self-serving politicians, and all sanctimonious REMFs, military and civilian, who thought conciliation and peace were synonyms.

  He headed back toward the security unit squad bay. He needed to think.…

  For almost ten years, now, humans had been on Cernunnos. The human compound wasn’t precisely an embassy, at least not as humans understood the word, but a contact/liaison facility housing the lab and research staffs for the xenosophontological mission. This world was of great interest to the planetologists; the Pi3 Orionis system was young—only about 1.4 billion years old, not nearly enough time, according to the standard evolutionary model, for sapient life to appear. Either the standard model was wrong, or the ek-Cha’a, together with the local biosphere, were themselves relative newcomers to the world. The C/L team was here to learn as much as possible about the Cernunnans—their biology, their sociology, their culture, and their myths.

  After several years of contact, the Eldest Drone had agreed to receive an Earth embassy in the principal city the humans called Karnon. It turned out that the concept of extraterritoriality—of a plot of land within the city that technically was Earth rather than Cha’a—was easy enough for the ek-Cha’a to understand. Much of ek-Cha’a culture was centered on the idea that bull-males claimed areas of land for themselves and their harems, and fought to defend them. The Eldest had ceded a walled-in block of buildings to the C/L mission, an area of land a little more than one hectare in size, and the Earth facility had been built there.

  The Hesperus had arrived with Ambassador Gonzales two years ago, a blatant attempt by Geneva to force the ek-Cha’a to accept diplomatic contact with Earth. The first Marine security contingent had come with her. Schaeffer and his Marines had arrived six weeks ago on the Bohr, relieving the original security team, while Ambassador Tarleton had replaced Gonzales. The replacements had arrived in the middle of what amounted to all-out civil war.

  The locals didn’t see it that way, not as war. The drones ran things in ek-Cha’a society, but they had no real power save what they were granted day to day by the local dominant-bull males. Those males had initially agreed to cede the compound to the offworlders, but in recent months, more and more, the native population—both dominant and submissive males, the females, and even some of the drones—had been insisting that the aliens needed to abide by ek-Cha’a traditions.

  And that meant fighting for their land.

  The ambassadors—both Gonzales and Tarleton—had refused the repeated formal challenges, of course. An embassy was an instrument of peace, after all, of diplomacy…ideas the ek-Cha’a had difficulty understanding. Fractious and belligerent, especially over territorial matters, ek-Cha’a history appeared to be a very long saga of land grabs, territorial squabbles, alliances, betrayals, and bloodshed—not wars, as such, but as the niceties of day-to-day life.

  And it was beginning to look as though the humans were about to be drawn into the latest round of not-quite-war confrontations.

  The drone council that served as this world’s government had so far resisted demands that the offworlders play along, claiming that humans were not true males, that they didn’t understand how ek-Cha’a thought, and so were exempt from the need to claim and fight for land. While a large par
t of the population was still willing to go along with this, a number of the dominant males had begun organizing gangs with the goal of forcing the Earthers to fight. They’d broken into a local armory, seized military weapons, and begun a campaign of demonstrations, arson, and rioting that had paralyzed Karnon for weeks.

  From their point of view, it wasn’t as though it was war.…

  Schaeffer didn’t trust the drones. Ostensibly a third ek-Cha’a sex, they were in fact sexless, originally male or female ek-Cha’a who’d metamorphosed out of their sexual phase. In primitive ek-Cha’a society, they’d been specialized caregivers, the nurturers, child-raisers, teachers, and feeders; now they ran the planet, trying to maintain at least a semblance of peace between the hormone-drunken clans and gangs of bull-males. They couldn’t give orders to the bulls—no one could do that except for a bigger, stronger bull—but they could make suggestions…and by long-standing tradition those suggestions generally were honored.

  And the Marines understood tradition very well indeed.

  “Commander Schaeffer!” The voice was Passerotti’s, her call sounding from the tiny speakers implanted behind and below his ears. “We’ve got trouble! Looks like the mob’s coming through the gate!”

  “I’m in the squad bay. Send me a link.”

  His cerebral implant, nanochelated within his brain, gave him electronic control over devices nearby. He thoughtclicked the big viewall display to life, tuning in on the image feed from the camera mounted on Passerotti’s helmet. Outside, the sun was setting, an intensely bright, hot, pinpoint glare casting long shadows through the streets of Karnon. He could see the high wall surrounding the embassy compound, and the six-meter-wide iron-bar gate across the entrance.

  The mob filled the plaza beyond the compound wall, gesticulating, whooping, surging, a wild cacophony of angry xenophobia.

  They did not, in fact, look much at all like crabs, though they had evolved from arboreal pseudocrustaceans. Each was twice as massive as a human, standing two and a half to three meters tall, with four jointed legs around a powerfully muscular tail kept tightly curled up underneath, like a huge, nervous lobster. Possessing both internal and external skeletons, they were sheathed in armor like overlapping strips of hardened leather. Four thick-muscled arms grew evenly spaced around what generously might be called the head—a recessed bowl on the upper end of the highly flexible torso protecting a single small and armor-enclosed eye, deeply buried to protect it from the hot local sun. The feeding pouch was located somewhere beneath the thorax; four slits further down the body allowed it to breathe as well as speak. Ek-Cha’a speech sounded like the discordant hoots and warblings from the brass section of an orchestra just getting tuned up—especially when they were worked up about something, which lately seemed to be most of the time.

  The arms were their most distinctive feature—massive, bare of external armor, three-fingered, and bright blue, branching out from the recessed single eye like the petals of a flower. The ek-Cha’a closest to the gate were gripping the bars with all-fours, rattling them furiously.

  None of the natives Schaeffer could see was carrying a weapon, thank God, but those powerful arms could do serious damage to an unprotected human. The worst part of the situation was Warner’s order that the Marine guard not carry charged lasers. The battery packs all were in the basement armory, sealed and locked, and only Warner had the keypad code.

  He tried another call to Warner, but got the “busy” graphic on his in-head display. He might have been able to kick the RSO’s door in and pound on his desk, and to hell with what the crab on the wallscreen thought about it, but, damn it, there wasn’t time.

  Sergeant Broder stood beside Schaeffer, looking at the mob. “What do you, think, Commander?” he asked. “Looks like the Boxer Rebellion all over again!”

  “I was just thinking that.”

  Schaeffer had long been a student of military history—especially the history and tradition of the Corps, and that included the so-called Boxer Rebellion of some three hundred years ago. The Dowager Empress in her palace in Beijing had claimed she was trying to protect the foreign legations attacked by the fanatic, rampaging Boxers. In fact, secretly, she’d been behind much of the anti-foreign rioting culminating in the 55-day siege of the legation compound that was still a heroic footnote in the Marine Corps’ history.

  The ek-Cha’a Eldest Drone, Schaeffer was convinced, was playing a similar game.

  The Marines called the asexual drone the king crab.

  Schaeffer turned and walked to the rear of the squad bay, where the Security Group’s armor lockers were kept. Schaeffer was wearing his Class As, which should deflect anything the locals had in the way of small arms.

  Although it was always difficult to compare mutually alien technologies, the ek-Cha’a were generally thought to be a couple of centuries behind the Human Confederation—no spaceflight, as yet, no lasers, no nano, no heavy EM or plasma weapons.

  Small comfort. Chemically propelled slugs could still be lethal. And the ek-Cha’a certainly had the advantage of numbers. The city plaza outside the gates was packed with them; the embassy’s AI estimate put their numbers at between ten and twelve thousand.

  “What the hell are you doing, Gunny?” Broder asked.

  “I’m going out there,” he replied. “Maybe I can talk them down.”

  “‘One mob, one ranger,’ huh?”

  “The Texas rangers aren’t here. One mob, one Marine. But that sounds about equal to me.”

  “I’ll come with you.”

  “No,” Schaeffer said. He was already wearing dress armor, and the heavy, combat stuff was locked away with the laser power packs. He would have to content himself with a fresh armor power unit and a meta jump pack, both of which nestled into the curve at the small of his back, the nano-active surfaces melding with his armor and interfacing with it. As he donned his white, visorless helmet, he felt the suit systems snapping on, and the icons on his in-head display came up green.

  “Damn it, Gunny, you can’t go out there alone!”

  “Maybe one man won’t be as provocative as two. Besides, I want you to go up to Warner’s office, okay?” He drew his 12mm pistol and checked the magazine and safeties, before putting it back in his external holster.

  “And do what?”

  Schaeffer turned to face Broder, the sergeant’s image clear in his IHD.

  “Get him to see you. Knock the door down, if you have to. Tell him we need the armory open and battery packs for the lasers and plasma weapons distributed, and tell him we need them now!”

  “You’re going out there with your fucking service pistol?”

  “We use what we have,” Schaeffer told him. He grinned, suddenly, though Broder couldn’t see his face. “The Johnson Maneuver, right?”

  Broder shook his head. “That mob ain’t gonna back down, Gunny.”

  “Then I’ll keep them busy until you can pass out the charge-packs. And break out the heavy armor, too. I’m sick of diplomacy with crabs who don’t even know the meaning of the word.”

  “Aye-aye, Gunnery Sergeant. But I don’t like this.…”

  “We work with what we have, Sergeant. Improvise! Adapt! Overcome!”

  “Ooh-rah,” Broder said, but the old battle cry was delivered flat, without emotion, and without enthusiasm.

  By the time Schaeffer made it out the front door of the embassy, fifteen meters from the front gate, the mob had acquired reinforcements. Thompson and Rodriguez were on guard at the door, looking decidedly nervous. “God, Gunny!” Thompson said, pointing, “the crabs’ve got armored back-up!”

  A saurian towered above the crowd, ponderously approaching the gate. It could not, Schaeffer thought, get a whole lot worse.

  The alien armor was an ek-Cha’a military vehicle, somewhere in size and deadliness between a tank and a personal suit of military power armor. Dubbed “saurian” by Marine intelligence, it combined a tracked base with an erect, armored tower that mimicked the upper torso
of a bull-male ek-Cha’a. Almost seven meters tall, the armored, segmented torso could twist and turn through more than ninety degrees vertically, and rotate a full two-seventy side-to-side. At the top, four jointed, chromium-alloy steel arms ended in massive, three-clawed pinchers; two small ball turrets to either side of the upper torso mounted 27mm rapid-fire cannons. The vehicle’s sole occupant rode inside the thing’s upper torso, organic arms operating controls inside mechanical arms, like waldoes, while his legs worked the torso articulation controls and the tracks. The technology was primitive by Confederation standards; the thing was fission-powered, slow, and awkward, its armor no match for Marine lasers and plasma weapons—but the Marines didn’t have lasers at the moment, none that worked, and from the way the vehicle waded up through the crowd and grasped the bars of the gate with all four arms, it looked like the vehicle was about to come into the embassy compound.

  “Jesus, Gunny!” Rodriguez said. “What are we gonna do?”

  “Get inside,” Schaeffer told the guards. “Go tell Warner if he doesn’t distribute power packs and armor, he won’t have an embassy left to guard. Move it!”

  Though awkward and a bit slow, the servomotors behind the saurian’s arms were strong. The upper torso of the armored vehicle strained, twisted from side to side, then lurched back a step, pulling the locked gate with it in a shower of powdered stone from the walls to either side. The mob crowding around the vehicle’s tracks started forward.…

  Schaeffer stepped in front of them, drew his service pistol, and aimed it at the closest ek-Cha’a. He thoughtclicked the translate icon on his in-head. “Halt!” he shouted, and an amplified voice boomed across the compound. “!Ah’ih!”