‘If they were in this close, you’d see them sticking out of the water,’ I said, taking the co-pilot’s seat. ‘Smart mine’s not much smaller than a marauder bomb. Basically an automated mini-sub. You got the set online?’
‘Sure. Just mask up. Weapon systems on the right arm.’
I slid the elasticated gunner’s eyemask down over my face and touched the activate pads at the temples. A seascape in bright primaries wrapped around my field of vision, pale blue shaded deeper grey with the landscape of the seabed beneath. Hardware came through in shades of red, depending on how much it corresponded to the parameters I’d programmed in earlier. Most of it was light pink in colour, inanimate alloy wreckage devoid of electronic activity. I let myself slide forward into the virtual representation of what the shuttle’s sensors were seeing, forced myself to stop actively looking for anything and relaxed the last mental millimetres into the Zen state.
Minesweeping was not something the Envoy Corps taught as such, but the total poise that only comes, paradoxically, with an utter lack of expectation was vital to the core training. A Protectorate Envoy, deployed as digital human freight via hyperspatial needlecast, can expect to wake up to literally anything. At the very least, you habitually find yourself in unfamiliar bodies on unfamiliar worlds where people are shooting at you. Even on a good day, no amount of briefing can prepare you for a total change of environment like that, and in the invariably unstable to lethally dangerous sets of circumstances the Envoys have been created to deal with, there just isn’t any point.
Virginia Vidaura, Corps trainer, hands in the pockets of her coveralls, looking us over with calm speculation. Day one induction.
Since it is logistically impossible to expect everything, she told us evenly, we will teach you not to expect anything. That way, you will be ready for it.
I didn’t even consciously see the first smart mine. There was a red flare in the corner of one eye, and my hands had already matched coordinates and loosed the shuttle’s hunter-killer micros. The little missiles ran green traces across the virtual seascape, plunged beneath the surface like sharp knives in flesh and pricked the squatting mine before it could either move or respond. Flash blast of detonation and the surface of the sea heaved upward like a body on an interrogation table.
Once upon a time men had to run their weapons systems all by themselves. They went up in the air in flyers not much bigger or better equipped than bathtubs with wings, and fired off whatever clumsy hardware they could squeeze into the cockpit with them. Later, they designed machines that could do the job faster and more accurately than humanly possible and for a while it was a machine’s world up there. Then the emerging biosciences began to catch up and suddenly the same speed and precision capacity was available as a human option again. Since then it’s been a race of sorts between technologies to see which can be upgraded faster, the external machines or the human factor. In that particular race, Envoy psychodynamics were a sharp surprise sprint up the inside lane.
There are war machines that are faster than me, but we weren’t lucky enough to have one aboard. The shuttle was a hospital auxiliary, and its strictly defensive weaponry ran to the micro turret in the nose and a decoy-and-evade package that I wouldn’t have trusted to fly a kite. We were going to have to do this ourselves.
‘One down. The rest of the pack won’t be far away. Kill your speed. Get us down on the deck and arm the tinsel.’
They came from the west, scuttling across the seabed like fat-bodied cylindrical spiders, drawn to the violent death of their brother. I felt the shuttle tip forward as Schneider brought us down to barely ten metres altitude and the solid thump as the tinsel bomb racks deployed. My eyes flickered across the mines. Seven of them, converging. They usually ran five to a pack so this had to be the remnants of two groups, though who’d thinned their numbers out so much was a mystery to me. From what I’d read in the reports, there’d been nothing in these waters but fishing boats since the war began. The seabed was littered with them.
I acquired the lead mine and killed it almost casually. As I watched, the first torpedoes erupted from the other six and rose through the water towards us.
‘They’re on us.’
‘Seen them,’ said Schneider laconically, and the shuttle flinched into an evasive curve. I peppered the sea with micros on autoseek.
Smart mine is a misnomer. They’re actually pretty stupid. It stands to reason, they’re built for such a narrow range of activity it isn’t advisable to programme in much intellect. They attach themselves to the seabed with a claw for launch stability, and they wait for something to pass overhead. Some can dig themselves deep enough to hide from spectroscanners, some camouflage themselves as seabed wreckage. Essentially, they’re a static weapon. On the move, they can still fight but their accuracy suffers.
Better yet, their minds have a dogmatic either/or target acquisition system that tags everything surface or airborne before it fires on it. Against air traffic it uses surface-to-air micros, against shipping the torpedoes. The torpedoes can convert to missile mode at a pinch, shedding their propulsion systems at surface level and using crude thrusters to get aloft, but they’re slow.
At nearly surface level and throttled back almost to hovering, we’d been made as a ship. The torpedoes came up for air in our shadow, found nothing and the autoseek micros destroyed them while they were still trying to shrug off their underwater drives. Meanwhile, the spread of micros I’d launched sought and destroyed two, no, wait, three of the mines. At this rate—
Malfunction.
Malfunction.
Malfunction.
The fail light pulsed in the upper left field of my vision, detail scrolling down. I had no time to read it. The fire controls were dead in my hands, jammed solid, the next two micros unarmed in their launch cradles. Fucking mothballed UN surplus flashing through my mind like a falling meteor. I slammed the emergency autorepair option. The shuttle’s rudimentary troubleshooter brain leapt down into the jammed circuits. No time. It could take whole minutes to fix. The remaining three mines launched surface to air at us.
‘Sch—’
Schneider, whatever his other failings, was a good flyer. He flung the shuttle on its tail before the syllable was out of my mouth. My head snapped back against the seat as we leapt into the sky, trailing a swarm of surface-to-air missiles.
‘I’m jammed.’
‘I know,’ he said tautly.
‘Tinsel them,’ I yelled, competing with the proximity alerts that screamed in my ears. The altitude numerals flashed over the kilometre mark.
‘On it.’
The shuttle boomed with the tinsel bombs’ launch. They detonated two seconds in our wake, sowing the sky with tiny electronic appetisers. The surface-to-air fire spent itself amongst the decoys. On the weapons board at the side of my vision, a cleared light flashed green, and as if to prove the point the launcher executed its last jammed command and launched the two waiting micros into the targetless space ahead of us. Beside me, Schneider whooped and spun the shuttle about. With the high-manoeuvre fields belatedly compensating, I felt the turn slop through my guts like choppy water and had time to hope that Tanya Wardani hadn’t eaten recently.
We hung for an instant on the wings of the shuttle’s AG fields, then Schneider killed the lift and we plunged a steep line back towards the surface of the sea. From the water, a second wave of missiles rose to meet us.