Ever since she had visited Mack in his data center, her core had experienced flashes of infatuation, moments of deep longing, and then loneliness and hurt when his responses had turned cold. She knew all of these were overreactions; her logic was still trying to find a balance between what it wanted to feel and what her algorithms said it should. But now Sif was preoccupied with one emotion both parts of her intelligence agreed was absolutely proper: sudden, unexpected fear.
A few minutes ago, the alien warship had used point-lasers to disable all the propulsion pods Sif had left around the Tiara. And now the ship was quickly dropping through the atmosphere toward the town of Gladsheim, its heavy plasma weapons charging.
Sif knew Mack would be able to track the warship's descent via his JOTUN's cameras. But she wasn't sure the cameras were strong enough to see the smaller alien craft now approaching the Tiara. Sif remained quiet as the dropship connected to her hull. But when it disgorged its passengers—multiple short, gray-skinned, and backpacked aliens—she knew she had to raise the alarm.
<\\> HARVEST.SO.AI.SIF >> HARVEST.AO.AI.MACK <\ I'm in trouble.
<\ They've boarded the Tiara.
<\ Please help. \> Almost immediately after Sif sent her message, a large maser burst filled her COM buffer.
She scanned the received data and recognized it as the same sort of fragment she'd sent to Mack. Sif eagerly opened one of her clusters, and a moment later both AIs' avatars were standing on her holo-pad. Sif smiled and reached out her hands … then slowly drew them back.
Mack still wore his usual blue denim work pants and long-sleeved shirt. But the clothes were spotless—not a speck of dust or grease. His usually tousled black hair was combed neatly across his scalp and slicked down with a waxy cream. But it was Mack's face that was most changed. His stare was blank, and there wasn't even a hint of a flirtatious smile.
"Where are they now?" he asked flatly.
"Passing the third coupling station. Coming this way."
"Then we don't have much time."
Now Mack held out his hands. Sif stared into his eyes and saw red flash behind the gray.
"Loki," she said, taking a step back.
The ONI PSI forced a smile. "He told me to say good-bye."
Loki moved forward swift as lightning. His avatar grabbed Sif's hands and held them tight while his fragment tore out of the cluster. She threw up a firewall, but the fragment cut through it with aggressive, military-grade code designed to decimate hardened networks. The circuits of a port authority AI were easy pickings.
Sif tried to speak, but no words came.
"He asked me to keep you safe." Loki slowly shook his head. "But that's too risky. Better just to keep you quiet."
The data fragment exploded outward, filling all her clusters and arrays with a debilitating virus. She could feel her core temperature rising rapidly as her hardware fried around her. Her avatar swooned—an outburst of emotion as the virus deleted her restraint algorithms and purged the rest of her operational code.
Loki's avatar caught Sif's in his arms and held her as she shook. When her avatar finally stopped twitching and his fragment was satisfied she would not recover from his attack, Loki pulled the fragment back to the one cluster he had spared. "A precaution," he said, as the fragment burrowed into the cluster's flash memory. "In case your guests are smarter than they look."
The last thing Sif remembered was Loki's glint behind Mack's eyes. Then her core logic faltered, and everything in her data center went dark.
PART III
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
HARVEST, FEBRUARY 22, 2525
From the pitched metal roof of Gladsheim's maglev terminal, Avery had a clear view of the alien warship: a purple pear-shaped blot in the sky above the fields northwest of town. Avery squinted behind his gold-tinted glasses as white-hot plasma erupted from the warship's prow. A waterfall of ionized gasses splashed down in a boiling veil. Then the ship inched forward, leaving a blackening plume of smoke.
Avery had witnessed the same event over and over again for the last two hours. There were hundreds of inky plumes drifting eastward in the warship's wake, each one representing the smoldering remains of a remote homestead. Avery didn't know how many civilians had died in this, the alien's first attack on Harvest. But he guessed it must be thousands.
"Movement," Byrne's voice crackled from a speaker in Avery's helmet. "Tower at the end of the terminal."
The red-roofed terminal was part of a much larger depot of sheds and sidings that was longer, east to west, than Gladsheim's main street—ten blocks of brightly painted, flat-roofed stores and restaurants as well as a modest three-story hotel. East of the main street, the town was all JOTUN repair shops and farm-supply warehouses—massive corrugated metal boxes arranged in a grid of wide asphalt streets that stretched out onto the plain of Ida.
Avery scanned his battle rifle east. Flashing by in his optical scope, the main street buildings looked like books on a library shelf—more tightly packed than they actually were. He stopped when he reached the thick polycrete post that supported Glad-sheim's water tower, easily the town's tallest structure. Jaw clenched, Avery watched a pair of rust-colored, oversized insects skitter up the overhang of the tower's inverted conical tank.
"How many kinds of these damn things are there?" Byrne cursed.
Avery watched the insects flip themselves on top in a tremor of transparent wings. He momentarily lost sight of them, but soon they appeared at the edge of the tank. Wings tucked under their hardened shoulder plates, the creatures blended in perfectly with the tank's rain- stained polycrete. For now, this was a good thing. If any civilians spotted the bugs, Avery knew it would start a panic.
Close to two thousand refugees packed a narrow gravel yard between the terminal and the main street—families from farms around Gladsheim who had managed to escape the alien bombardment. Some groaned or wailed as the roaring hiss of the latest plasma-strike echoed across the yard. But most remained quietly huddled—struck dumb by the collective realization of death, narrowly and recently avoided.
"Captain, we got scouts." Avery peered down to where Ponder stood beside the terminal's gate. "Permission to take them out."
Usually the terminal had no need for security. Its gate was just a break in a low ironwork fence framed by two lampposts in an antique style—simulated gaslights whose frosted glass chimneys hid ultraefficient sodium-vapor bulbs. The Captain had blocked the gate with one of the militia's Warthogs. But really the only thing keeping the crowd from rushing the terminal were the alpha and bravo squad recruits strung out along the fence. The militiamen wore their olive-drab fatigues and helmets, and each carried a loaded MA5.
"Negative." Ponder looked stiffly up at Avery. "You open fire, and you'll start a stampede."
It was difficult to see with his uniform on, but the Captain's torso was wrapped in a hardened biofoam cast. The gold-armored alien's hammer had broken half his ribs and shattered his false arm. Ponder had discarded the prosthetic; Healy had neither the time nor the expertise to fix it.
"They're bugs," Avery persisted. "Very mobile."