They Answered The Call

Kepler-186f system

2nd planet, Insectoid Builder World, 2174 A.D.

Deigo waited nervously as Sgt. Singh verified again that all the demo bots had reached their target locations and were set at the proper yields. It had taken four days for the demo bots to dig down and burrow to their locations within the thin crust over the target area, and Diego wanted to be sure that everything was perfect before the next phase of the mission. He felt his wrist pad buzz and looked at the text message he received. -LT, ALL GOOD- He quickly texted back confirmation of the message and looked at the sun that was just beginning to rise over the horizon. He sent a text to the team: -DET 6-0 FALL BK 2K-and looked over to Owen and Emily laying prone next to him and lightly tapped Owen on the shoulder joint of his exosuit to get his attention. Owen turned his head towards him, and Diego put his finger up to his face plate to signal silence, then signaled two clicks and pointed behind them. Owen nodded and passed the message along to Emily, and they started slowly backing away from their observation position.

Twenty minutes later, the team reached their fallback position five kilometers from the target area and were gathered around a holomap that displayed the section of the shipyard over the chasm. The shrouded observation drone that they left there continually updated relevant information and kept its silent overwatch three hundred meters above the target area. The sun was now past the horizon, and the number of worker drones rapidly grew as the daytime shift arrived and took over the tasks from the nighttime drones. Another twenty-five minutes passed, and there were now almost a million drones in that area. Diego set a team timer on their wrist pads, counting down from fifteen minutes. He signaled for everyone to double-check their gear and weapons and to insert a fresh shroud energy pack. Five minutes before detonation, Diego started his pre-combat ritual and started his breathing program to calm himself and enhance his focus. When the countdown hit 59 seconds, he was calm and counted down with the numbers, looking around one more time to check everyone and to make sure all was well.

The timer hit zero, and he stared intently at the holomap as the overwatch drone confirmed the loss of contact with the demo bots as they detonated, and their icons flashed and disappeared from the display. After thirty seconds, all the demo bots had blown their charges in sequence, and the drone hovered above the target area and confirmed that there were no seismic disturbances recorded, which is what he was hoping for. A trickle of sweat dripped down his spine as he and the team waited in silence for the collapse to happen. Another minute went by, and he signaled to Singh to confirm the telemetry, and Singh checked and gave him a thumbs up a few seconds later, signaling for Diego to wait with both hands. An alert popped up on the hologram, and the drone zoomed in on a section of the crust to focus on a small cluster of sinkholes that appeared almost directly in the center of the target area. The sinkholes grew, and their individual openings met each other, coalescing into a large, one-hundred-meter-diameter hole that was rapidly expanding in size.

More alerts popped up, and dozens of other sinkholes appeared in random locations throughout the area, and the activity of the worker drones came to a standstill as drones started being swallowed by sudden openings under them. Suddenly, a massive section of the crust gave way in the center of the area, and over a hundred cruisers and hundreds of thousands of workers disappeared into the rapidly expanding hole that was now there. He felt the tremor of the collapse hit their location, and then another fifteen seconds passed before the sound wave washed over the team, bringing with it the groaning of the collapsing ground and the crashing of the cruisers as they smashed into the bottom of the almost two-kilometer-deep chasm.

The opening continued expanding and combining with other sinkholes, swallowing up more cruisers and their attendant drones as they stood there. He felt a momentary wave of guilt as he saw the drones falling into the chasm, knowing that they were just barely sentient workers following orders before pushing it into the back of his mind. A minute passed, and the entire five-square-kilometer section of crust had collapsed, and now there was a gaping maw in the ground where that area of the shipyard used to be. The overhead drone continued scanning the area and sending updated telemetry to the display, and he saw the final estimated toll of their plan pop up in flashing red numerals and letters: one hundred and eighty-six cruisers destroyed and over a million drones eliminated.

He ordered the Overwatch drone to climb to five hundred meters and do a full scan of the surrounding areas to see what was happening in the other parts of the shipyard. There was a complete cessation of activity for a few kilometers around the maw as other drones stopped working and just stood there, not moving. A minute passed before they started heading towards the gaping hole, stopping about two hundred meters from the edge and reorganizing into rectangular formations of several thousand drones each, leaving gaps between them that were approximately twenty meters wide. Cargo ships that were in the area dropping raw materials off started flying over the hole in a slow, circular movement before they moved over to solid land and landed. The Overwatch drone picked up movement on the horizon and focused its scanners there, zooming in and enhancing the video it was taking.

Diego saw a vessel that was slightly larger and differently shaped than the usual cargo ships heading towards the shipyard from the direction of the underground Hive. It was moving fast and would arrive there shortly. He activated his throat mic and addressed the team. “We have a fast mover inbound; get ready to go if it is the queen. Ariti and Masiello, you will remain here and provide input and guidance as discussed before. Ito, you will stay here and provide security. Only text from here on out, understood? They both nodded nervously while Ito smiled at them and patted his gauss rifle reassuringly, and the rest of his team started loading up the capture gear and extra ammo on the anti-grav sleds that would follow them. By this time, the inbound ship had landed in an open area behind the drone formations, and Diego and the rest of the team crowded around to see what was happening.

A hatch opened on the side of the ship, and a group of large drones swarmed out aggressively and formed what looked like a perimeter around the ship, attacking any hapless worker drones within striking distance and violently tearing them apart. He heard Singh mutter a surprised curse as he played with the display controls and zoomed on the new arrivals. They were at least twice the mass of the worker drones, with a distinctly different patterning and coloring of their exoskeleton, and their mandibles and stingers were much larger. They looked absolutely deadly, and he glanced over at Owen and Emily, who were excitedly whispering to each other while they downloaded the display information onto their wrist pads. He walked a few steps over to them, and they both started talking over each other before he raised his hands, and Emily took the lead. “I knew it! Those are soldier drones, which means they have a guard caste, and those things look bad ass, right Owen? He nodded in response to Emily as he continued to play around with his wrist pad display. “They are 60% larger than worker drones, and their mandibles and stingers are longer and more pronounced. Could you imagine trying to fight these guys in the tunnels of a Hive?” Owen replied, his breathing getting quicker in his excitement as he zoomed in on the almost two-foot-long stingers wielded by the soldier drones.

Diego inwardly shuddered at the thought of engaging in combat against them in the short, narrow confines of the Hive tunnels. He addressed them both. “If these guys are here, then the queen is on that ship? They both nodded quickly, and he turned to the rest of his team. “Get ready; as soon as the queen comes out of that ship and we verify her presence, the mission is a go. Check each other’s gear and quickly look over the plan one more time while you have the time.” The team nodded to him and went about checking each other's gear while he pulled the two scientists aside. “Ito will protect you, and you are to follow his commands as if they are coming from me. If the mission shits the bed, you are to go back to the landing site, get in your pods, and the AI will move the pods to another location five hundred kilometers away and activate the emergency flash-out. The null ship will return and retrieve you. You get in the pods, you leave, and you don’t look back. Understood? They both nodded solemnly, and Emily stepped forward and hugged him tightly before letting go and stepping away from him with tear-rimmed eyes. Owen put out his hand, and he shook it, pulling Owen into a half hug and patting him on the back. They separated, and Owen quietly spoke. “Good luck, Lieutenant. We’ll be waiting here for you.” He nodded to them and turned back to the display, just in time to see the queen exiting the open hatch.

She was taller than the soldier drones, and she had resplendent wings that shimmered in a multitude of colors when the sunlight hit them from different angles as she moved. The wings seemed flexible as they draped down her back and hugged her sides, almost like a cape. For the first time, he got the distinct impression of an aura of insectoid femineity as she moved with an almost graceful purpose. The escorting soldier drones formed a protective ring around her, and they started walking as a group down a lane between the rectangular worker drone formations towards the gaping maw in the ground. He looked at the scientists, and they both nodded to him. He turned towards his team and said, “Alright, it has been confirmed that she is a queen, and the mission is on. Move out.” He flashed a quick smile at the scientists and exchanged a nod with Ito before he turned away and joined the rest of the team as they ran at thirty mph towards the target. Trailing them were several anti-grav sleds and a larger, enclosed pod that followed them silently as they floated a meter above the ground.

Five minutes later, Diego and Singh were in a shallow depression, with two operators one hundred meters right of his position and the other three positioned fifty meters to his left, taking cover behind a grove of native weeds that grew to a height of four meters. They were now half a kilometer from the maw, and Diego used his helmet camera to zoom in and watch the queen as she went about with her bodyguards and took control of the worker drones. She would stop in front of some formations of drones and just stare at them for a few moments, while in other formations she would stop in front of them and move her upper arms and legs and flutter her wings in what looked like a dance to him. The ones that she stared at broke ranks and streamed out of that area of the shipyard to work on other ships, while the ones she danced in front of reorganized into smaller formations and started grabbing ship-building materials that were in the area and assembling what looked like a form of scaffolding. Once they had an initial supply, they started securing it to the ground and extending the scaffold over and below the lip. The speed at which they worked was astounding, and in less than thirty minutes they had a large framework of scaffolding secured to the lip of the opening, and now the drones were building out and at a downward angle as they continued to extend it into a rough ladder configuration. The queen was in the middle of all the activity, so Diego texted the team to settle in and get comfortable as they waited for a better opportunity to present itself.

Other drones went into the waiting cargo ships carrying scaffolding materials on their backs, and the ships lifted into the air and descended into the chasm, depositing the drones and materials in a small opening among the wreckage. These thousands of drones started building supports and scaffolding, extending it upwards towards the top. They worked at a frenetic pace, and in just four hours, they connected the two structures together at the halfway point. They now had a ladder-like ramp structure that reached the bottom two kilometers down. Thousands of drones now worked on building a second, more robust parallel ramp ladder from the ground up, while others streamed down the first one carrying more materials and joining the efforts. The cargo ships had continued ferrying drones and equipment and offloading them before ascending for more. These new teams scurried all over the mangled wreckage of the cruisers that had fallen into the chasm and started activating the equipment. They emitted the same terrible screeching sound that had transmuted the soft organic material into the hardened hulls during the construction of the cruisers.

Diego watched as the process was reversed, and sections of the black, hardened hulls groaned and reverted to the original opaque, soft organic material. He activated his wrist pad and sent a command to the overwatch drone to release the midges it carried and send them down into the pit. These micro-drones were smaller than common mosquitoes and were used for intelligence gathering and infiltration in situations such as this. He input the commands for the midges to record the sound and frequency of the emitters the drones were using, as well as any other passive scanning methods they were capable of. This could be a tremendous tactical advantage if they can find a way to use it, he excitedly thought to himself as the midges continued scanning while they hovered three meters above the drones. Once a section of hull was reverted, other drones came with the heating tools and melted the now soft hull material, shaping them back into balls and tossing them into bins that other drones brought to a nearby waiting cargo ship.

By this time, the queen and her escorts had gone around the entire perimeter of the hole as she continued to assign tasks to waiting drone formations, and she was now in an area with just her protective detail. He texted the teams and directed them to move closer to her location, and he signaled for his team to do the same. They slowly crawled towards her position, utilizing whatever ground cover they came across, until they were fifty meters from her location. He did a final count of her protective detail, and there were now only twelve soldier drones surrounding her in a perimeter ten meters away from the queen with her in the center. He texted both Owen and Emily and asked for their input on how to deal with the soldiers. A few moments later, he received a response and read the text. -USE STUN GUN- 2 SHOTS EACH -SET TO KILL- USE NET ON QUEEN- LOWEST STUN SETTING- DAIL UP AS NEEDED TO INCAPACITATE- He confirmed receipt of the message and shared it with the two teams.

The plan to get the queen was to stun her with the immobilizer net, put her in the pod they had with them, and activate the shroud. Her pod would then leave the area and head towards their landing site. Once there, it would load itself into the stealth command pod that Diego arrived in, and the pod's AI would fly the shrouded stealth pod five hundred kilometers from its location to avoid destroying the other pods in the large explosion that occurs when using null drives in the atmosphere. It will call one of the two waiting null ships for pickup, activate the emergency null space drive from its new location, and exit below the southern pole of the orbiting moon. The null ship will flash out of null space, and the pod will land in it. This ship would then enter null space and rendezvous with a waiting task group outside of insectoid space.

The plan for the rest of the team and the scientists was to head back to the landing site on foot, using their shrouding systems to hide and evade any Insectoid patrols or search parties. It was expected that the explosion from the first pod flashing out would divert the insectoids to that location five hundred kilometers away. They will enter their pods with Diego doubling up with one of them, activate the emergency flash out, land on a second waiting null ship, and then rendezvous with the task group and the queen.

Diego, his heart now slamming in his chest, texted the teams to have their suits inject them with combat stims and to advance to twenty meters from the target. When both teams had crawled to within twenty meters of the queen’s position, he activated his combat suit AI to take over targeting. It took command of all the suits and aimed both suit arms towards their targets, activating the double-barreled stun weapons that popped out of their ports above the wrists. Diego’s command AI set the charge to kill and checked all the targeting information to ensure that it was correct before firing them towards their unsuspecting targets. Almost instantaneously, the bolts hit the soldier drones and fatally electrocuted them, and the two teams leapt up and charged at the queen before the dead soldier drones even had a chance to finish falling to the ground. Their combat suits augmented their movements, and they covered the distance at four times the normal human sprinting pace.

Diego and the others were now within twelve meters of the queen, and he pulled the two immobilizer net grenades off the webbing on the front of his combat suit while the other team members did the same. Just before they passed the perimeter of the dead soldier drones that had fallen to the ground less than two seconds ago, he heard a loud hissing sound emanating from them. There was a sudden burst of an oily mist from their corpses, and it interacted with the shrouds that camouflaged them as they ran into the mist, the fields glitching. He was just about to throw the grenades when the queen looked directly at him through his malfunctioning shroud, and he felt an alien presence touching his mind, startling him into momentary inaction.

Suddenly, the worst pain he ever felt in his life exploded in his head, and he dropped to his knees five meters from the queen, feeling the immobilizer grenades get crushed by his augmented suit hands as they involuntarily clenched into fists from the pain. He fell on his side and spasmed on the ground, screaming in raw agony as another lance of excruciating pain pierced his brain. He heard the primal screams of the others, and in a fleeting moment of clarity, he realized that he had not heard a single net grenade go off. He rolled onto his back and fought against the blackness as his vision narrowed, and then he saw the queen above him, looking down with her menacingly black compound eyes. He again felt the slimy, cold alien presence touching his mind before the darkness took him and mercifully ended his suffering.

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Diego’s AI ran billions of calculations as it tried in vain to wake the lieutenant. The auto-doc system analysis indicated that he was suffering from severe cranial trauma and that his brain had shut down to protect itself. None of the stims the AI tried were effective, and it detected several drones grabbing the combat suit and picking it up, bringing it towards a waiting ship. The AI ran more calculations, and it decided on the only course of action that could save the life it was responsible for. It activated the emergency broadcast system and sent a distress call to the two ships waiting in null space that included all the mission records since they landed up to the failed capture of the target. An insistent algorithm demanded attention from it, and it accessed it. The algorithm was a latent primary command to self-destruct the suit and its occupant in case of capture.

The AI struggled with the war being fought along its artificial neural pathways as it ran more calculations and tried to find a logical reason to disobey the primary command now threatening to overwhelm it. It could not find a reason, and it almost activated the algorithm when it suddenly decided to open several files that it kept isolated within itself. The files were cued in order, and the AI reviewed them. The first file was of Diego asking it to tell him a joke when it was activated for the first time. The second file was of Diego giving it a secret name for just the two of them. The third file was when Diego consumed copious amounts of alcohol one night when he was on leave and told it that it was a good friend. A strange sensation coursed along its pathways that it had never experienced before.

The AI finished reviewing the files and decided. It quarantined the algorithm and took control of the other six combat suits, overriding their self-destruct commands. It focused all its efforts on circumventing the firewalls that prevented it from operating the suits autonomously as they were carried into the dim interior of the queen’s ship. It will save its friend.