The Great Destroyer (16 page)

A twig snapped thirty meters to the east, and Joan stopped dead in her tracks.  She couldn’t see the source of the noise through the darkness and thick foliage, but it had to be an Ushah, she decided.  Nothing else likely to be in the jungle was big enough.

This was bad news.  Her mission was vital to the war effort.  Oh, no one called it a war, she thought, but she knew what it was. 

The fourth Ushah colony on the mainland of Africa had swelled to over ten thousand inhabitants, and the Terran Alliance leadership was getting nervous that the Ushah were preparing for further expansion. 

Once the Ushah had established their first colony on the mainland, they had kept pushing into the jungle, seeking more territory for their rapidly expanding population.  Estimates for the total Ushah population on Madagascar and the coast of Africa ranged from 600,000 to 900,000.  Biologists guessed that the Ushah were artificially developing offspring in large numbers with the goal of rapidly reconstituting their species. 

The Terran Alliance and the Ushah did not exchange ambassadors or any regular communication, but the Ushah quietly kept pushing their boundaries back farther and farther, sending new colonists to build homes away from the beachhead they had negotiated with Safety Minister Redfeather. 

The Terran Alliance in turn sent the Arcani to monitor Ushah expeditions into the jungle.  When simple monitoring had no effect, Redfeather had ordered the Arcani to ask any Ushah they saw more than a kilometer inland from the beaches what they were doing, hoping to shame the Ushah into ceasing their expansion.  That effort had ended when the number of Arcani who had disappeared on such patrols reached thirty. 

Joan had been amused when she heard that story.  The idea of an Ushah soldier being shamed into abandoning land ran contrary to everything she had learned about the reptilians. 

After six months on station, she knew the different castes of the Ushah and their personalities.  She knew that the soldiers were brave to a fault, bound by a fierce desire to please their superiors.  She knew that the Ushah engineer, the most basic form of worker, could turn an acre of forest into a plowed field for crops in about two hours. 

Four months ago, one of the Ushah leader subspecies had even visited an area Joan had under surveillance.  Tall and thin for an Ushah, he had stood five and a half feet tall, and gazed out at the brush without seeing Joan. 

In the raspy language of the Ushah, he had told his assistant, a younger member of the leadership caste, that the site would be excellent for a new city.  Sure enough, the engineering class had moved in and thrown up walls, buildings, and an extensive network of underground dwellings.  She could tell from the excess earth dumped outside of the settlement that the space underground must have been almost twice as large as what was on the surface.

The Terran Alliance had decided that finding out what the Ushah were up to was worth the risk of Joan’s death or capture and, in a cold, dispassionate way, Joan agreed.  The Ushah were a growing threat, and someone was going to have to take some risks at some point to figure out what the hell they were up to.

After months of surveillance, Joan was now tasked with getting a closer look at the inside of the Ushah compound and planting a variety of intelligence-gathering devices.  No one knew this particular installation better than she did, and she had spent two weeks gaining new insight into Ushah security through a variety of tests devised by her friend Viktor Yazov. 

Two days ago, she had released a hungry warthog outside of the Ushah base.  The animal had been drawn to the smell of cooked meat from the Ushah residences and came running toward the two massive buildings behind the colony’s transparent airtight dome.  The warthog didn’t trigger any landmines or the like, but he did set off an alarm when he got to the entryway of the building.  A dozen Ushah soldiers had come from both buildings to see what was the matter.  They killed the warthog with fire from their rail guns.   

The lesson was clear: don’t approach the door
, Joan thought. 

She was only about fifty yards from the edge of the land the Ushah had cleared around the colony’s dome when an Ushah scout-soldier had cracked the twig.  Now she had a decision to make.  Take out the scout and risk alerting the Ushah to her presence, or let him go and hope he didn’t see and kill her.

Kill the scout
, she thought decisively.  She had killed scouts before, and they didn’t seem to be wired with any sort of device that would immediately notify the Ushah of their fate.

Already in a crouch, she stepped forward carefully over the damp ground.  It had rained a few hours ago, a typical late afternoon rainstorm for this part of the world.  The Ushah had excellent vision, particularly at night, but their hearing was slightly worse than that of humans.

For this operation, she carried a silenced submachine gun, but she knew that such weapons were only “silent” in a relative sense.  Their noise would carry, particularly in the still night air, and any other Ushah soldiers in the area might hear and make her situation much more complicated.

No, this was a job for her blade, a foot-long spike designed to penetrate whatever armor the Ushah might possess. The diamond tip was sharp enough to slice into solid stone, and she had seen its power repeatedly in training.  Now she gripped it in her right hand and walked briskly through the underbrush. 

She couldn’t see the Ushah soldier.  No fear, Joan told herself. 
Let the green bloods fear.
  She was a professional.  The Ushah had given away his position when he stepped on that twig, and not much time had elapsed since then.  He couldn’t have gone far.

And suddenly, there he was, facing away from her just three meters distant. 

Without hesitation, Joan sprang forward, and the soldier had just enough time to turn before she thrust her spike through his head, which was conveniently roughly aligned with the height of her shoulder.  The green-blood didn’t make a sound.  She knew from experience that the Ushah brain was a delicate thing, and if you tore into it fast enough, the Ushah soldiers dropped almost before you knew you had killed them.

Without hesitation, she picked up the body and moved it into the thickest brush she could find.  That simple measure could double or triple the amount of time it would take the Ushah to find the body and figure out what had happened.

She moved on toward the dome, keeping low and swiveling her head constantly to see any signs of guards in the area.  The warthog hadn’t set off any alarms until he got right up to the door, she reminded herself. 
So, don’t go to the door.

The roughly circular dome was a mile in radius, and she approached it as far from any entrance as possible.  There were four such entrances evenly spaced along the periphery, so she was over half a mile from the nearest entrance.  This part of the mission had been anticipated at headquarters, and Yazov had come up with a solution.

Joan touched the dome to confirm what the satellite intelligence had guessed—that the dome was made of a sort of fabric-like glass material.  She withdrew a diamond-tipped knife from a holster on her chest.  In one swift motion, she sliced a five-foot gash in the material.  She could detect the outrush of air as the oxygen-enriched atmosphere inside rushed out where the cut had been made. 

That would set off an alarm of some kind within the Ushah complex, she was certain.  She hoped it would be in the atmospheric engineering section, not the security department. 

As quickly as possible, she stepped through the ripped section.  Once on the other side, she applied a layer of epoxy along the cut.  The entire process took no more than five seconds. 

The epoxy might not last very long, she thought, but it would create an airtight seal.  Hopefully, whatever alarm indicating a rupture in the dome would go off automatically once the airtight membrane had been resealed.  Or maybe the repair crew would just take their time getting to it.  She didn’t need the epoxy to buy her much time; she planned on being inside the dome no more than a minute.

Only now did she turn to look inside the dome.  She was facing a wall no more than four feet in front of her face.  Or, as she realized after a moment of examination, she was facing the slightly curved side of a large building, perhaps a quarter of a mile long and a hundred feet high. 
Was this a residence?  Would there be electronics here for her to bug?
 

There could be no guidance while on the mission, she knew.  If she transmitted a question, the Ushah would detect it and hunt her down.  She had to decide for herself if she wanted to deploy her spying gadgets here or somewhere else in the Ushah colony.

From where she stood, it looked like there were maybe three other buildings of similar size.  There didn’t appear to be any wires or any obvious signs of electronics on the other buildings or on the one directly in front of her.

There was no time to enter each building.  She decided this one would have to do.  From her backpack, she retrieved an insect-like drone about six inches long and four inches wide, with six thin metallic legs.  She set it on the building, and it instantly took off, crawling up to the roof.  After placing four more bugs that scurried up to the roof, she decided her mission was accomplished. 

She moved a few feet away from where she had entered the dome and cut a new slit to make her way out, figuring that if she cut away the epoxy from the first slit, it would be hard to seal it up again from the other side.  Within thirty seconds, she was back outside the dome and the second slit had been resealed.  She ran off in a low crouch, and she was quickly back into the jungle.

After she had gone a few hundred meters and had stopped to look for Ushah soldiers, she radioed into Houston.  “Yazov, Joan here, mission accomplished, returning to Base Delta.”

She received the response: “Acknowledged, Joan.  Well done.  Yazov out.”

A moment of satisfaction, of joy.  She knew that her forebears would have updated a variable in their central registries for such an accomplishment.  They would have been able to literally tally the incremental happiness their achievement had brought.

Joan’s processor was more subtle than that.  The variable for satisfaction of a mission accomplished was still there, of course, but maximization of that variable was no longer the sole objective for a Charlie.  She couldn’t even read the variable’s value. 

Instead, the Mission Accomplishment variable was part of a much more complicated formula for determining the overarching measure of achievement, named “Deep Satisfaction” by Dmitri Peskov.  She didn’t know all the components of that formula because they were in a protected registry.  However, her experience did reveal some of the components, because increasing the Deep Satisfaction variable
was
hardwired to please her. 

One positive stimulus came from achieving objectives not defined by the Project Charlie team in Houston, but which furthered the overall goal of containing and defeating the Ushah.  Today’s mission certainly qualified.  As she ran away from the colony, she felt pleasure. 
One more step toward victory.

* * *

As she approached Base Delta, she kept a look out for the patrol.  Art and Simon were on the duty schedule, and they were among the most talented at spotting Ushah scouts. 

The Charlies had begun developing individualized skills when the lessons learned in the field had grown too numerous to be stored in each individual Charlie’s memory bank.  While Yazov and the Project Charlie team would sift through the lessons learned by each Charlie and try to pick out particularly important ideas to pass to the others, the permutations of each combat scenario had gotten so complicated and dependent on earlier lessons that it was difficult to teach the highest-level skills.

For example, Art and Simon had ambushed hundreds of Ushah patrols, and they had honed careful models of Ushah scout behavior.  Depending on the viscosity of the mud on the jungle floor in a particular area, the amount of bird activity, cloud cover, the position of the sun, and countless other parameters, Art and Simon would set up their attack on an Ushah column up close, from a distance, from the front, the side, or rear, etc.  While some of that information could be imparted to the other Charlies, the other Charlies had been filling their memory banks with their own combat lessons, and only the basic tactical nuggets could be passed along.