Chapter 47
"To succeed, planning alone is insufficient. One must improvise as well."
— Salvor Hardin, Foundation
Day 5
"So last time, it was just Commander Ducard and the doctors. This time, it's the other Commanders, but no doctors and no Ducard." Came the thickly accented voice of George S2-66, as he, clad in full armor, sat down at the stainless steel table in the med-station's mess hall. Given his, and all of the II's tremendous weight in-armor, the legs and back of his his muscle suit locked up and became rigid just as his rear touched the bench, ensuring he could sit comfortably without destroying the chair.
In front of him was Craig S2-82, who had already sat down and was currently mechanically shovelling food into his mouth, his gas mask/helmet inches to the right of his tray, eyes out, as if the soulless red plates were staring straight ahead at whomever sat in front of him. The child soldier nodded once, chewing as he did so. "Perhaps they took notice. We weren't happy when the other Commanders didn't show." He said slowly, his even, light tone in stark contrast to George's deep, accented voice.
George nodded in affirmation, as he reached to the crook of his neck and pressed with two fingers. His helmet quickly expanded, allowing the big man to remove it from his head and place it in a similar position to his squadmate's. He picked up his fork and began mechanically eating the tasteless food, "How long have you been up?" He asked.
"Three days." Said Craig, as he picked up a pea and haphazardly tossed it up into the air. Without looking up from his food, George's free hand shot up and he caught it in between his thumb and forefinger, but inadvertently crushed it. "Just woke up?"
George nodded, "six hours ago." He confirmed, wiping the crushed pea from his fingers. "The air smells different. Recycled." He said lowly, as he took a quick gaze around him, at the few hundred other II's eating their food and making quiet conversation. To them, it was a dull white noise similar to that of any regular mess hall, but to anyone else walking by, it was barely louder than a diner at midnight - the II's enhanced hearing meaning they could speak quieter than usual and still be clearly heard by their brothers.
"Only a few dozen more until we're all up. Coming faster now." Said Craig, as he itched at his tan face. "I noticed John was missing."
"Armor said he got deployed. Emergency mission." George responded, as he swallowed the last of his food, and for a moment thought he could actually hear the clump of chewed matter make its way through his intestines. "They found Manheim."
"I know. I read the same." Craig pushed his plate back, and leaned into his rigidified armor.
The two fell into silence after that, though it was fleeting. After two minutes, almost simultaneously, each of their heads snapped to their helmets, and then to eachother. They needn't have said a word, an entire conversation went by simply by making eye contact - something had just uploaded information to their Positronic Brain Implants, a simple message - put on the helmet. Wordlessly, though cautiously, the two did so, and the moment their HUDs booted up, a dull, stony gray message appeared in the center of their fields of vision.
John S2-15's life is in danger and he needs backup.
There is a warp capable shuttle about to dock with your station - arm yourselves and deploy post-haste. He is located on Arcturus Station, in the Ermey Memorial Hospital.
Do not let anyone stop you.
Do not trust the I's.
The second line hadn't even finished typing itself out before George and Craig were on their feet and out of the cafeteria. They didn't need the readouts on their Heads Up Displays to guide them to the armory, they both remembered the route from four years ago.
There was one advantage to a military lockdown: Arcturus' protocols dictated that in the event of any terrorist attack, foreign military action, or state of emergency, a minimum of twenty four hours had to pass before the roads would be opened back up to the public, the only exception was in the case of evacuation orders, when the station was under siege and the military police needed to turn it from a city to a combat zone. This meant that, aside from military police and AI drones, no one was on the road.
With John S2-15's armor mostly being nonfunctional, that meant what few pieces he did wear didn't have bio-comm capabilities. So as Joseph Ducard raced across the emptied roads in his jeep, the only information he had on the child soldier was that his AI had taken control of every surgical mech in Ermey memorial and rushed him into intensive care. It was using its SIGMAuthority to override anything the hospital's AI or the station's superintendent did that conflicted with its all-consuming goal of keeping its host alive, to the point that it had locked the Hospital's AI out of its gene therapy wings, so it could make full and complete use of its tissue cloning facilities.
This revelation made Ducard scowl, as the wind beat at his gold-visored gas mask/helmet, and his engine roared. The II was all but dead, but his AI wouldn't stand for that, given that its only goal in life was to keep him, and by proxy, itself, alive. In any other situation, Ducard would have used override codes and killed it, but the damned thing was blocking any and all communications in and out of the hospital, and its SIGMAuthority allowed it to. Despite his best efforts, John may survive Ducard's assassination attempt; but that was where Ducard came in.
He knew that the drell was still on the hunt, and that it wouldn't stop until it confirmed the kill. This gave Ducard a feasible reason to be burning rubber as he was: If he made it in time, he could claim to be fighting the assassin, and then John would just be caught in the crossfire. If he didn't, John was unfortunately finished off by an assassin looking to cash in on the Hegemony's long-standing SIGMA bounty. Even the AI couldn't argue that one, not without looking paranoid to the AATF, who would not take that chance, not since Nikola.
Unfortunately, Ducard was in a battle against a machine that was, for all intents and purposes, omnipresent, driving a vehicle that had been able to be automatically driven since the early twenty first century. Before he even made it a quarter of the way to Ermey, his steering wheel suddenly jerked hard to the left. Just as the vehicle listed to the left, Ducard slammed on the brakes, but they held firm as the accelerator pushed itself harder to the floor.
With a scowl, Ducard grabbed at the jeep's cage and, just as the vehicle began to tumble, launched himself out of it. With the sound of tumbling metal, shattering glass, and a whining, rumbling engine following him, Ducard arced through the air, before landing on the ground with a grunt, and the sound of metal grinding against metal. He abandoned the vehicle as easily as he would abandon a spent magazine, and just as he recovered and pushed off with his front foot, the gravity keeping him locked to the ground reoriented, now actively trying to tear him from the ground and send him tumbling towards the ceiling.
As the jeep, and many other empty vehicles in the surrounding area, now obeyed the new call of gravity and started falling towards the sky, Ducard silently commanded his suit to lock its magnetic boots to the road. Now with his head pointed to the new gravitic 'down', Ducard had to slow his pace such that he always had one foot on the gravitic 'up' at all times. This slowed him down significantly, but he still managed to keep a speed of thirty kilometers per hour.
He crossed another few hundred meters on the one major highway, before gravity flipped around again, and he heard the roaring, damaged engine come hurtling back towards him. The super soldier didn't need to look back, he dived to his left and soared right over the edge of the highway, just a few seconds before the vehicle slammed into the highway. Metal ground against metal, glass shattered, and the engine's roar died down upon impact, and Ducard fell for a few seconds before he hit the ground with a roll. The armored SIGMA rolled to his feet and looked up to the sky panels. In between two buildings he was just barely able to see the dark, broken, gray panel in a sea of sky blue.
Surrounded by a nearly dead-silent space station, Ducard frowned; the AI had to know that it wouldn't be able to kill him. Some tricks with gravity were all well and good, but even that and all of the station's combat mechs wouldn't be able to bring him down. He knew that, it knew that, so what was its real goal aside from stalling him?
Ducard felt his heart slow down, his frown deepening as he connected the dots. Stalling was exactly what it was trying to do. It was either trying to resuscitate John and bring him to a state where he could feasibly fight against Ducard, or - more likely - buy time for something far worse. Anti-SIGMA warfare: Though John, it had that training, and through his battles on Manheim, it had experience with it. Ducard widened his thoughts, considering all options, until he landed on the most likely: How could she kill, or even just stall him long enough to heal and wake up John? More SIGMAs. John had crossed hundreds of lightyears in an hour with just a shuttle and the Relay network, and Arcturus was less than fifty from Earth, and Titan Med.
At Warp Speed, one could travel just over one light year every sixty seconds. It had taken Ducard ten minutes to convince the Directors to let him go, and four minutes to get to where he was now. That meant whoever Cassidy had called in could very well be here in the next half hour, and Ducard and the assassin had to cover the not insignificant distance between them and Ermey Memorial, get through whatever defenses Cassidy had set up, and eliminate John, in less than that time.
Four minutes to get a quarter of the way… Twelve minutes to arrive at same speed. Fifteen to account for travel hazards. Twenty to take a way less seen by cameras. Leaves fifteen minutes to breech hospital, locate Two-Fifteen, and eliminate. It would be a close shave.
Especially, as the entire station was cast into a pitch black darkness with one thunderous 'clank', if Cassidy shut off the lights. Ducard's HUD instantly adapted to the situation, laying out the outlines of building in pale blue, graph-like lines, his own vision quickly adapting. It was as if the lights hadn't even been shut off, for him. Of course, now he couldn't locate the hospital by visual, but he still had Arcturus' maps displayed on his HUD.
With the sound of heavy metal boots thudding against the ground, Ducard took off running.
The feeling of acceleration left their stomachs as the two lone occupants of the interstellar shuttle dropped out of Warp. Two of the only three SIGMA II's outside of the Sol System felt a lurch underneath their feet, and just as they raised the inner and outer shutters, they each heard a female voice patch into their helmets.
"You're here, good!" It said, rushedly. "My name is -"
"Where is John?" Craig rumbled.
"Why is the station sealed down?" George added, as he leaned over the pilot's console; outside, the station's window plates, only ever drawn in the event of an invasion or an attack, were all firmly shut. The city in the stars somehow managed to look quieter than the silent void of space it floated in.
The speaker responded, "there's a lot you do not know and we don't have any time right now to explain it!" She said angrily, "Ducard's almost here and the drell is already in the building! I've been delaying them for as long as I can but Ducard is in power armor and the drell is already cutting through the lockdown!"
The two SIGMA II's exchanged glances, the soulless red plates of glass making eye contact briefly, before they turned their masked gazes back towards the Alliance Capitol. Their small shuttle lurched lightly, performing brief burns to bleed off much of their momentum, orient them straight towards the station, and then burning towards it.
"You say that as if Ducard getting to Two-Fifteen isn't a good thing." Craig surmised.
"Either of them make it here and John will die - they both want his head, and he's unconscious and heavily wounded, he -"
"You talk too much." Came George's deep voice, as his HUD overlaid a small blue diamond over on the station's relative east, indicating John's position. Another blue dot denoted Ducard's, and they were less than a kilometer apart. "Why would Ducard try to kill Two-Fifteen?" He paused, eyes narrowing behind his gas mask/helmet; he turned to Craig, "this is John's AI implant."
"Why didn't she just say that?" Said the sniper.
"You didn't let me -"
"And you answered the wrong question." Craig added, without missing a beat. "John S-Two Fifteen. Facts. Now."
"He was deployed on a mission and learned something Ducard didn't want him to, John confronted him on it, now Ducard wants him dead. He thinks it's easier -"
"Stop." George turned to Craig, as the station outside grew so close that it filled the entire window. "Ducard's armor will locate us. He knows we're here." He lifted up his wrist and with a few button presses, used John's location on the station to locate his hospital, and pull up its blueprints. "Put yourself up on the building opposite. If I go loud, no one but a Two enters that hospital."
"If you go loud, I'll take down Ducard and the assassin, and then move to the engineering catwalks."
"Copy." George indicated John's position in the hospital. "AI, I'll breach from the roof. If I go loud, you get every SIGMA Two on their way."
The AI was silent for a moment, "you don't even know what's going on and you're willing -"
"We don't need to." George said, waving away the hologram in a brief gust of dust-tech. "If we can't trust one One, we can't trust any. If he wants to kill John, we'll kill him. This drell is inconsequential, it won't even try with three SIGMAs in the room."
The station was now mere kilometers away, the shuttle reoriented itself and was burning straight towards the closest docking platforms to the Ermey Memorial. It took them forty five seconds to dock and pressurize the airlock, and the moment they could pass through, the two sprinted through and into the station. From their dock to John' hospital, they were nearly two and a half kilometers, and with Ducard now so close that whatever the AI was doing to stall him would be too little, too late, they ran the risk of being late, themselves. Fortunately for them, they both had been trained since childhood to find the quickest, most direct routes to their goals, and in this case, the most direct route wouldn't be to charge through the buildings, around the roads, or over the highway, but to go up.
"Use your EVA thrusters!" George called out over the radio, as his and Craig's metal boots clanged loudly on the station's ground, their cradled rifles swinging back and forth in time with each step. "Go!"
The way their EVA thrusters worked, they were rated to create thrust comparable to nine tenths of a G, meaning that in a standard gravitic environment, these thrusters weren't capable of giving them full-on flight, but were capable of cancelling out all but a tenth of the local gravity. The jump jets, combined with their augmentations and their power armor, allowed the two super soldiers could verily leap tall buildings in a single bound, and it was exactly that which they did. A powerful jet of heated air blasted out of the thrusters on their harnesses, and the two launched themselves into the 'sky'.
The two hurtled through the air in large, wide arcs, climbing dozens of meters before hitting their apex. As they hit the height of their arcs, they briefly blasted their thrusters again, providing just enough counter-thrust to keep them in the air and flying forward and delaying their descent until they had crossed two hundred meters in a single leap. Weighing one ton each, the two left sizable dents, cracks, and fissures in the stone of the roofs upon which they landed, aside from the sounds of metal thudding against concrete and the concrete cracking apart, there was no sound from the two soldiers. They leapt building after building, traversing hundreds of meters with every bound, and crossing the multiple kilometers between the docking platforms and the hospital in less than two minutes.
"Moving up." Craig calmly declared, as he leapt off of a small office building to the hospital's relative south, crossing hundreds of meters with a pulse of his jump jets.
"He's already inside and he's breaking through the walls!" Cassidy's voice declared. "I can't find the Drell, these surgical -"
"Two-Eighty Two, how many of these walls can your rounds pierce?" George inquired, as he hopped over the edge of his building and sailed straight for the ground.
George gave Craig a brief glance as the ground grew closer to him, he saw Craig's EVA thrusters flaring brightly, allowing him to briefly run alongside the outer wall of a towering building, identified by his HUD as a layered shopping center. When he reached a corner of the building, Craig pushed off of the north-facing wall and sailed for a low-built building with an open roof, and not just a clear view of the surrounding area, but also a perfect jumping-off point should he find the opportunity to leap up to the engineering catwalks. As George landed on the ground and rolled into his momentum, Craig landed legs-first on the roof and skidded to a halt, mere inches from his intended position.
"Seven to kill. Ten to injure. Eleven to stun. Variables included." In George's HUD, he saw a small data-packet the second Two sent him, showing him that while Craig had high-penetration rounds, he didn't have his preferred anti-material rifle, or even a sniper rifle of a high caliber.
"Cassidy, number of walls between Craig and John." George ordered, before he, with a running start, leapt towards the hospital's third floor and crashed through its thin plaster and wood walls with a loud crash and a bright white explosion of synthetic wood.
Before the room's occupant had even registered the enormous mass of a supersoldier crashing through his wall, George's enhanced reflexes had already noticed him, labeled him as a non-combatant, and concluded that, due to him missing one limb, having what looked like a non-combat replacement, and possessing no weapons of any variety, he wasn't likely to be a threat. In case he was a biotic plant, however, George had deduced thirty six ways to kill him before his armored feet even touched the ground, none of those ways having a thing to do with the massive machine gun cradled in his arms.
"Nine walls, but they're made -"
"Mute." George hadn't even broken stride, landing in the amputee's room and immediately breaking out into a sprint.
The big SIGMA smashed through the weak metal door with a loud crash, and didn't slow down. His HUD showed him the location of John relative to him, and the quickest routes to the injured Two, and no route was quicker than the one going straight for him. He also noticed the blue dot on his motion tracker, on the same floor as him and closing in fast, and one red dot, half of a floor above him, but closer to John than both of the approaching SIGMA's.
Smashing through another wall with a sound of obliterating synthetic wood and rock, George barked out a quick order. "Cassidy check John's room for an airvent and seal it off." Through two more walls he smashed, scaring the bejeezus out of a pair of nurses who had gotten stuck in a broom closet due to the lockdown.
"Done - we've got company he's right outside!"
"So AM I!" And with those three words, George tackled his way through two more walls and, in an explosion of wires, plaster, wood and stone, intercepted Joseph Ducard mere inches from John's operating room. "Two-Eighty Two, fire one half meter above my position!"
If Ducard had been surprised by the SIGMA's stunt, he didn't show it. With his own enhanced reflexes he was able to pivot on his front foot and jam his raised foot behind him, anchoring himself to the ground so as to catch the charging II. Unfortunately for the I, even without their armor, and even without their augmentations, at just eighteen years of age George had a build that made him outshine an olympic athlete, and the strength and mass to match. With his augmentations, and so too with his armor, all of the variables were stacked wholly against the senior SIGMA, and with a grunt, Ducard was tackled by George and sent crashing through two more walls before the two dug into the ground, barely an instant before a bullet whizzed through nine walls and, on an upward incline, dug a small trench through the ceiling before it penetrated the airvents situated right above the comatose II.
Ducard latched one hand onto George's meaty throat and the other on his armored gas mask, but George slammed both of his fists onto Ducard's chest like an ape, destroying the I's assault rifle and sending them crashing through the linoleum floors. The two SIGMAs each weighed in at a ton, and with the debris from the first destroyed floor, their weight was great enough to cause them to fall through the second floor even faster than the first, and with another grunt they landed on the ground floor. The sounds of stone, rubber, and thick plate metal smashing onto the ground filled the air, preceding the sounds of sparks and electricity as the wires they tore through began swinging freely, nearly touching the floor of the main lobby they found themselves in.
The patrons and guests that had found themselves trapped in the hospital scattered with shrieks and screams as the ceiling exploded and revealed the two SIGMAs. George hardly even registered them as he beat his fist on Ducard's face three times, each with a sound of a hammer striking an anvil. Ducard pushed George off of him and scrambled to his feet, but George didn't even try to get back to a standing position as he slid a few inches on his back, and brought his heavy machine gun to bear, right on Ducard's head.
"I have a clear line." He heard Craig's monotone come in.
"Two-Sixty Six, Two-Fifteen's AI implant is going senile!" Ducard said, both hands held up placatively, "McGraw warned us -" George didn't let him finish, instead blasting him with dozens of thunderous machine gun rounds, and with but a thought, he sent a green check-flag to Craig, whose armor-piercing round shot through the main doors, splintering them, and shattering Ducard's shields.
"Need a shot on this airvent!" Cassidy proclaimed, as Ducard leapt to the side and rolled to cover. "I can't tell what it's doing, but these mechs aren't rated for combat!"
George stayed on his back, keeping the fire up and keeping Ducard pinned as he tore apart the hospital's lobby. The civilians surrounding them fled in terror, trying to stay out of the line of fire, but finding few places to run due to the security lockdown; more than a few already had injuries due to the fight. George wasn't even bothering with suppressive fire, and if he knew about the petrified receptionist scrambling away from the gunfire, he didn't act as if he cared. Instead, he aimed directly at where his armor had pinned Ducard's last known position, and as a result, all of his rounds were blasting straight through the flimsy wood as if it wasn't even there.
Ducard only needed a dozen bullets slamming into his armor to know how horrible of a position he was in, his armor's computers letting him know that its integrity had already dropped to ninety five percent were just icing on the bloodied cake. He ripped his side-arm from his hip and, with a grunt, leapt high into the air, his back almost dragging against the ceiling as he arced forwards, straight for the supine SIGMA.
With his superior reflexes, George and his computers were able to deduce where Ducard was aiming just as the muzzle-flash leapt out of the pistol. In a flurry of movement so fast that none of the civilians morbidly curious enough to watch the fight could even properly perceive it, George let go of his trigger and wrenched his machine gun to the left. Right where his barrel had been, but now his pauldron was, three bullets slammed into, rebounding off of his shields as Ducard arced downwards and crashed, shoulder first, into George. The II's shields shattered on impact, but he instantly reversed his swing and slammed the stock of his machine gun into the side of Ducard's head, and to further press his advantage, another sniper round tore through the building. The main entrance doors exploded in a shower of glass and Ducard's head snapped to the side, the paint missing from a large dent in his helmet.
Ducard tumbled to the ground, but thanks to his suit, George knew he wasn't dead, and thanks to his attack, his gun was already heading in the direction Ducard had landed. It took but a twist of his arms to orient it properly and have it aimed at Ducard's chest, but a declaration from the AI was what caused everyone present, save the civilians who were running screaming through the now destroyed entrance doors, to pause for an instant.
"It's inside it's right here it overpowered the mech omni-tool weapon!" Barely a second later, the gravity in the hospital reversed entirely, and everyone still inside - soldier, patient, and assassin alike - not strapped down, was pulled towards the ceiling.
George hadn't even needed a centisecond to adapt, and just as his back left the ground, he slammed his feet into the new gravitic ceiling and, with a burst of his EVA thrusters, slammed into Ducard shoulder-first. The two were sent flying back deeper into the hospital just as, on the outside, Craig's rifle snapped back up to John and the cracks of thunder became much quicker. George and Ducard tore through the hospital like cannonballs, their collective two-tons of mass ripping apart the linoleum floors and carelessly demolishing walls in a shower of debris. The gravity realigned again and sent them falling back down to the station floor, and while Ducard crashed again through the floors of the hospital, George flared his jump jets, lessening the force of impact enough such that he didn't crash through the third floor and follow his Commander.
"Visual through thermal. Target getting up."
"I can't do that gravity trick again, John's fastenings -"
George muted the talkative AI with another vocal command, and clenched his chest as he smashed through two more walls. "Craig, update variables!"
"Killshots!"
With a loud bellow and a lowered shoulder, George crashed through the final wall separating him and his brother, charging through it like a linebacker, throwing each arm back and forth in wide arcs. In those precious few milliseconds he had to take everything in, he saw John - a fist-sized bloody hole in his chest, and his torso bare of its fatigues and muscle suit - in a bed against the wall, two heavily damaged mechs keeping him in the bed and the bed on the floor. With a snap of his eyes, he saw a drell standing in the back of the room, his left hand wreathed in an omni-blade, and his right -
Right hand! George dropped to his knees and threw his head back just as the mass effect slug was magnetically torn off of its ammo block and accelerated through the barrel of the gun the drell had leveled and pointed right where George's head had been.
The bullet just scratched the surface of George's head, but as it skipped off of the metal of George's gas mask/helmet, an armor-piercing round fired from outside of the hospital and traveling in the opposite direction, bled through the air, crashed into and shattered the minuscule slug, and soared straight towards the green-skinned humanoid. Due to the force it had bled off from slamming through the drell's slug, when the round hit the drell's chest it did little more than break his barrier, shatter all of his ribs, and cause him to fall against the wall with a pained grunt.
Now battling George in a duel of reaction times, the drell moved at a rate of centiseconds, enveloping itself in a biotic cloak as George reacted in milliseconds, raising his machine gun. The drell had had the right idea, however, as George was tackled from behind just before Craig could warn him of the approaching contact. George was dug into the ground, his head buried in the floor by the hand of the only other supersoldier in the hospital, as the drell biotically dashed straight towards John, his arm already sailing downwards.
George elbowed Ducard and his head snapped upwards, just in time to see the drell's omni-blade reach John's gaping chest wound. He saw the next few moments in an agonizing slow motion, as the blade sank deeper and deeper, and nothing he did would be fast enough to stop it. Fortunately for the II, there was one entity whose reaction time was even faster than his, and it used every attosecond of it to formulate a plan.
The gravity in the hospital was played with for the dozenth time in less than an hour, but instead of switching up to down and down to up, it made the gravitic down, the north-facing wall, and the gravitic up, back towards the entrance of the hospital, towards Craig. Everyone and everything in the room was now falling towards the back wall under the gravitic force of one and a half G's.
In a flurry of motion, the drell's head snapped to the side its dark blue eyes and pain-induced adrenaline rush allowing him to see the II's hand going for its sidearm, the I's fist going for the II's head, and the wall gleefully coming up to meet them all. Just as George's gun cleared leather, the Drell again was wreathed in a biotic cloak, and as the II's head was smashed to the former gravitic 'down', the drell began to glow. George had to judge the drell's position from memory and his suit's telemetry, and the moment he felt his gun hand snap into position, his finger squeezed the trigger. Before the bullets could even leave the barrel of the gun, however, the drell, first to hit the wall, suddenly vanished in a bright blue wall of biotic energy, and phased completely through the wall, whereas George and Ducard collided into it wholesale, and smashed straight through.
The gravity corrected itself once the drell and the fighting SIGMAs were out of John's hospital room, the effect being that Ducard and George skidded across the floor and into the room adjacent to John's.
"Stand down, Two-Six -" Ducard was silenced when an armor-piercing round slipped between two plates of his armor and slammed into his ribcage; unable to penetrate his unbreakable ribs, the bullet instead bounced around, in between his armor, skin suit, and skin, tearing up his back and causing it to bleed freely.
George used this distraction to again elbow Ducard in the side of the head, allowing him to raise his own just in time to see the blue ball of biotic energy phase through another wall, indicating to him that the drell was retreating. With a grunt, George twisted around and kicked Ducard in the chest, sending him flying back into John's room as George skidded to a halt and brought his pistol to bear. Just as Ducard landed and scrambled back to his feet, another armor piercing round scraped alongside the right temple of his helmet.
Now with two guns pointed at him, one mere feet away and the other hundreds of meters outside of the hospital, Ducard was in no position to attack. "Two-Sixty Six, Two-Eighty Two, you do not have the full situation!" He called out.
"You're killing Two-Fifteen! You tried to kill me!" George returned.
"Two-Fifteen is compromised! Something happened with the AI we implanted, it went senile -"
"I'm not senile!" The AI in question pleaded over all of their communications units.
"- if you don't let me carry out my orders it will bring Two-Fifteen back to fighting strength and use his body to go on a rampage!" Ducard bellowed, one hand held out in front of him, towards George, the other held aloft behind him, towards Craig, leaving his chest pointed towards the comatose II. "It already killed two SIGMAs!"
"That's a lie!"
"It's feeding you false intelligence and jamming outbound communications!"
"I'm not doing that first thing!"
"We traced its communications, it is in current communications beyond the Persius Veil!"
"I am not! Please!" The AI begged, its gray form materializing in George and Craig's HUDs, on its knees and physically pleading for its and John's lives.
"You kill me, it kills you, and takes Alliance tech to the Geth and kills everyone!"
"ENOUGH!" George bellowed, his deep, accented voice clearing the air and managing to shake the dust from the walls. "Commander Ducard, give up your weapons and ammunition until -" But George already knew that Ducard, whatever his reasons may be, had been tasked with something beyond his understanding, and between his story and Cassidy's, that something involved John's death, meaning nothing - especially not the word of the child soldier he had had a hand in training - would stop the veteran SIGMA.
Ducard's back hand snapped down to the pistol on his hip, and barely a second later, his head snapped back from the bullet from George's pistol, forth from the round from Craig's distant rifle, and then again to the side.
There were now three guns pointed at Joseph Ducard.
John S2-15 was awake.
His breathing was rapid, raspy, and hollow, sweat was streaming off of his red face, and his arm shook as it kept the gun aloft, and pointed at Ducard's head.
John swallowed thickly, through his dry throat. "Commander…" He grunted. "I believe… You are operating… On bad intelligence." He rasped towards the sprawled out, still surviving SIGMA.
Ducard, with three guns pointed at him, lay sprawled out on his back, leaning up against the wall. His cracked, golden visor was locked onto John's red, throbbing face, and it was only the heavily injured child soldier and the bruised veteran that knew the entire story behind the battles in the hospital. Only John and Ducard had a read on the situation, were able to gauge the entirety of the others' thoughts; Craig, George, and even Cassidy had not the history, facts, or experience respectively to so silently play this game of verbal chess.
In the end, after a second's worth of silence, it was Ducard who buckled. "What am I missing?"
"Cassidy." Rasped John, sweat pouring down his shaven head and blood seeping out from the nanites plugging up gaping wound on his chest. "She is not senile. McGraw's briefing -" He bit down and suppressed a cough, "- said… That… She's different. Made different. No human brain scans. Complete machine, immune to AI-DS."
"He also said that this procedure was experimental, and that we could see unexpected side effects. Rapid onset senility due to connection to a human brain and the constant datastream therein was a predicted outcome, AI generation notwithstanding."
"Cassidy knew your mission was to protect the Board, and therefor didn't expect you to be able to cover me while she patched my wounds. So, wary of other saltorians or enemy combatants on the station, she called Titan Med." John rasped, his normally deep voice weak from his injuries and the physical strain of staying conscious. "My squad answered that call."
"It hindered my attempts to get to you."
"Comms were jammed as per station lockdown. She had no access to the capitol's security feeds. It could have been another Wraith, with you in pursuit. She had to -" He couldn't hold this cough back, and a dollop of blood shot out of his mouth, landing on the floor in front of his bed. "- play it safe."
It was flimsy, and everyone knew it, but what mattered wasn't the strength of the lie, but the fact that it was so weak, strictly speaking it couldn't possibly be a lie. A SIGMA, especially a II, was smarter than that, and John could have come up with a better one. Ducard knew what he was doing: He was challenging Ducard, to challenge him. If Ducard did so, he risked revealing how he knew it was a lie, and in so doing would anger the two fresh-faced, well rested, and ready to fight SIGMA IIs. His life would be ended, and it wouldn't take more than an hour for every other SIGMA II to transport themselves to Arcturus and dig in at Ermey Memorial. When John would be fully healed, they would go on a slaughter spree, the only thing - the only collective group - even remotely capable of resisting them too scattered about Alliance territory to do a thing about it.
These few moments, Ducard knew, weren't just John buying time for himself to recover, or for his fellow II's to awaken and arm themselves, but they were the opening salvo. In his failure to kill John S2-15, he had started war, and the only thing he could do about it was to give John this victory. Give him the time he needed, the time he wanted, to prepare himself and his brothers for the storm that was soon to come; and wouldn't you know it? There was a war, ready-made and pre-packaged, waiting on John and the II's, waiting for them, to give them an opportunity to create battle strategies and get battle experience. Worse, because of Saltor's native, high-gravity environment, the only damn forces even remotely capable of fighting in it were SIGMAs, meaning that if either side - I's or II's - refused to fight, the Alliance would turn on them.
Ducard was in a no-win scenario: Challenging John accelerated the war's timeframe and risked destroying the Alliance. Bowing to him meant John and the II's would have time to build experience and strategies to use against the I's. The best option here was to give John that time, to allow him to rally his forces and train them in the fires of war; because even though John got time to prepare, so too did Ducard, the I's, and, perhaps most damningly of all, John Doe. If he bowed to John, Ducard would have the time to report in to General Howe, Howe would then get the time to rally the numerically superior I's and send them all to Saltor, as likely would be the Alliance's wishes. Ostensibly the SIGMA Program would be united, but under the surface they would be fighting against eachother as much as they fought alongside their fellow augmented elite; but after Saltor would be when things dissolved. All of the forces would be rallied, and when they returned to Sparta, they all would be in one place. The damage could be contained, the I's and II's could slaughter eachother to their hearts' content, and the violence wouldn't spill out into the Alliance proper.
Ducard's eyes narrowed behind his damaged visor. A part of him wondered if John had come up with all of this in that split second after he'd fired his pistol, but the rest of him knew better. He had trained John all of his life, he knew the way the child soldier thought, and had personally taught him to think faster than he could consciously be aware - to merge instinct and conscious thought into one nearly instantaneous stream of information processing. There was no John hadn't come up with all of this after he'd shot Ducard.
He'd come up with it the moment he'd opened his eyes.
Worse, was that no matter what Ducard did, he was doing what John wanted. Challenge him? He gets to kill Ducard, bring the SIGMA II program to Arcturus, recover, repair his armor, slaughter his way to the Board of Directors, destroy the station, and spark a civil war, likely even prompting the Citadel to attack while the Alliance was shredding itself from the inside. Bow to him? He gets to personally lead the campaign against the SIGMAs, on the very planet they had been forged upon, the SIGMAs' fortress world; he gets to have his war, and wage it too.
"Is that true?"
"Yes!" Proclaimed the AI.
"Yes." The child soldier rasped. "Now… I need an ambulance to transport me to a new hospital. I would like to be under the guard of my squad as I recover." His right eye twitched as a fresh wave of blood seeped through his nanites. "I believe you have…" He swallowed thickly through his dry throat, "Directors to debrief."
Two minutes later, John was loaded inside a decontamination unit meant for quarians, and he, Craig, George, and two surgeon mechs were in the back of an ambulance, tearing across Arcturus, headed towards a less destroyed hospital. The surgeon mechs, even as the ambulance jerked this way and that, were hard at work, scraping off infected tissue and keeping John alive and healthy until Cassidy finished cloning all of the tissue he was missing, and they could reattach it. Fortunately, thanks to the miracles of modern medicine, Cassidy taking over any and all available tissue cloning facilities, and the tens of billions of dollars of augmentations seeped inside the child soldier's body, the entire process wouldn't take more than forty eight hours. The trick was keeping John alive that long.
And, of course, Cassidy resisting the urge to scream as the child soldier refused painkillers, anesthetics, or generally anything that would put him under. She understood why, of course - he had to explain to his squad exactly what had transpired over the last month he had been conscious and operating - but it didn't make it any easier on the newborn SynthHuman.
"- and they created it as a means of enforcing to the Board the fact that they weren't under their control." John rasped from inside his decon unit, his visible lungs steadily deflating as they pushed air through his throat.
"So the SIGMAs aren't part of the Alliance, period." Said George.
"Correct."
"They're allies. A military city-state within Alliance borders." Came Craig, who sat in a corner of the ambulance, the butt of his rifle resting against the ground, and his hands folded over the end of the barrel, giving it the appearance of a spear, or a sword, sticking up out of the ground.
"Yes."
"They could have said no." No one had to ask to what George was referring.
"Correct."
"Why didn't they?" Craig rumbled, his tone as dull and dead as George's, as the two of them processed everything John was giving them.
John didn't even flinch as one of the surgical mechs scraped their scalpel along his carbon nanotube-lined ribs, scraping the ash and burns off of them. "They thought that maybe they were right."
The three were silent for several moments after this, as John's wounds were cleaned and disinfected. They remained silent as the surgical mechs placed a clear glass plate over the fist-sized hole in John's chest. The plate immediately collapsed onto his wound, staunching the bloodflow and sealing it off from any potential bacterial infections, until his nanites and cloned tissue could heal the wound properly.
"So what are we going to do?" The lean sniper finally asked, slightly raising his gas mask/helmet, such that the soulless red plates of glass could be seen by the supine SIGMA, in an expression that, to anyone else, would have been intimidating, but to 2-15, was reassuring, as Craig was still willing to make eye contact with him, in his own way.
"More than likely, the Alliance will intervene in the Batarian-Saltorian War. But due to the high gravity environment on Saltor, the only ground forces that can be deployed would be SIGMA assets." Rasped John, "their moons and their Mars-analogue will be fine for non-augmented, but only SIGMAs can survive the gravity and atmospheric pressures on Saltor. So this is our chance to get everyone experienced to fighting with their new augments, in a strenuous environment to boot."
George nodded once, "they won't hesitate."
Craig nodded, "when do we go?"
"The Director for Affairs is set to return to the station tonight. They'll deliberate until the morning. Announce it tomorrow afternoon. Quick Reaction Fleets and the closest naval fleets will be able to deploy as soon as two days from now." John rumbled from within the pale blue decon unit. "Cassidy."
"Yes, John?"
"Record every biotic stunt I performed during the Wraith fight, in great detail." He ordered, his mind briefly snapping back to those hours he had spent, so many years ago, in Miranda's mansion. "Specifically label the file on the plasma detonation the Goku Protocol." He said, before turning his attention back to his squadmates.
"What protocol?" George asked, with a subtly inclined head.
"It doesn't matter." John responded, "we need new tactics if we want to win against the Ones."
Craig now raised his head fully, "Anti-SIGMA Warfare. They'll be prepared for it even if we make it up right then and there."
John grunted in the negative, "I killed the two SIGMAs on Manheim by engaging them in hand to hand. I have a theory as to how I did it." He paused to swallow through his dry throat, as the ambulance made a hard right, and Cassidy informed them they were less than two minutes out. "Everyone in the modern age - every single person - is taught to fight with a gun. Ranged warfare. Everyone left behind melee warfare centuries ago… But even with modern weapons technology, guns have an effective range. Anything beyond that, they can't kill, but anything inside it, and they're too close to be shot." He noticed in his peripherals both of his brothers in arms straightening up, their minds instantly syncing up with his own. "Modern technology, our augmentations, and our armor all would allow us to close the distance between us and our enemy, too fast for them to do any damage, and if they did, our shields and armor would blunt the attack. We would go from being within their effective range to being inside of it, too close for them to use their weapons effectively."
George nodded and picked up where John trailed off. "We close in and use our superior strength and reflexes to engage our enemies in a melee. They have CQB training, but only as a last resort, and it relies on getting back to their weapons, not physically fighting and killing their enemies."
Craig leaned against the corner of the ambulance. "We close in on the enemies, rip them apart in a melee. They can't defend against a form of combat they're not trained for. But those few seconds it will take to get to them, it puts us at risk." He warned.
John grunted again in the negative, and let out a light cough. "Our reflexes give us enough time to predict their lines of fire and weave in and out. Our augmentations give us the speed to close in fast enough for it to be viable, and our EVA thrusters can accelerate us fast enough that we'll be inside their defenses before they can react." Even if 1-61's modified thrusters had been for a completely different purpose, John still learned from them.
Now Craig nodded as well, "it would work." He said, "but we only have knives and hardlight as melee instruments."
"We also have McGraw." Rasped John, "we need only ask him."
"But he lied to us too." George pointed out.
"He also tried." John countered. "If anything that gives him a chance to show us where his loyalties lie." Had he had use of his hands, he would have waved the topic aside. "But I digress. We need to use Saltor as a chance to get experience with…" He paused, "Force Contact, as a tactic and not a contingency."
"While we do that, the Ones will be preparing themselves as well." Craig intoned, warningly.
John scowled, "the ones will expect us to play by their rules. But above all else, they taught us to win. To do that, we don't have to play fair."
As the ambulance rolled to a halt, and both George and Craig got to their feet, their rifles readied, John had time enough to say one last thing before Cassidy forcibly put him under. "Cassidy, when I wake up, have ready for me the name of the Captain of the Theodore Logan at the time of my operations against the Turian Spartecs, and wherever she is now." Simmering underneath everything were still the memories the AI had jarred loose, and the feeling that there was one more piece to this puzzle that John didn't have.
If he was to go to war with the SIGMAs, he would be damn sure he would have that final piece.
"Please tell me you're joking, Joseph." Came the Russian-accented voice of the one and only SIGMA with the rank of General. "I cannot fathom anything else."
"He's not." Came the deep, rumbly baritone of the SIGMA Program's most legendary operator, John Doe himself. "He doesn't joke like this." He said, after a deep sigh.
Seated on top of the Arcturus Capitol building, his back leaned up against one of the pillars lining its main tower. One leg hung over the edge of the roof, a new rifle was lying inches to his right, and his head was leaned heavily against the pillar his back was pressed up against. In Ducard's HUD were two small pictures, one labeled S1-9, the other, S1-1, each flashed a small white outline with every spoken syllable.
"John made contact with his squad." Ducard sighed, "now we're past any point of return. While he's under for emergency surgery, Two-Eighty Two and Two-Sixty Six will get a more detailed debriefing from Cassidy, and they'll send that data to their brothers on Titan Med. If we're lucky, we'll have six hours. If not, they'll be done and angry in less than one." He pressed a hand against his armored SCBA mask, dragging his fingers along the deep groove and briefly poking at the pock-marks where bullets had failed to penetrate, wondering if any of them had actually been trying to kill him, or if they had been toying with him. Who now was the master, and who, the student?
"What about Item Forty Two?" Howe barked. "Do we not have a squad already there? Just use the fucking thing and we'll deal with the brass pissing and moaning."
Doe responded for his old friend, "the squad Ducard sent to retrieve it when he discovered the Sixty Sixers on Manheim was deployed elsewhere when it was decided it wasn't needed. There is no squad close enough to get to it in the time we have."
"And I'm not an option." Ducard added, "if John decides to pre-empt it, I've got to be here to ensure the Board gets evacuated." He lolled his armored head to the right, looking out over the silent, still station, just barely able to see Ermey Memorial in the distance, part of it had caught fire, and smoke was still billowing outwards. "General Howe, there's nothing we can do. Once they're off Saltor, they'll be ready, and we can't fight them there without provoking war with the saltorians. Sir, it's not possible anymore. It's not even inevitable. It's happening. We failed. The absolute best we can do now is hope we can contain the damage, and still have enough of us left over to make more before our enemies figure out we're so low on manpower…" He sighed. "And that's if we win in the first place. Because as of this moment… The worst has come to pass.
"SIGMA. Civil. War."
"God help us." Sighed Howe, before his HUD marker went dark.
Doe and Ducard remained silent, their multiple parsec distance being no obstacle as they were able to read eachothers' thoughts. They each had known it was possible, and they each had known it was, in some way, inevitable. They had prepared for it as much as possible, but nothing could have prepared them for the weight settling in their chests, and weighing down their shoulders. One SIGMA II, almost literally just awoken from augmentation surgery, with no time to recover, had killed two SIGMA I's. Then, his wounds having barely healed over, he had gone on to demolish a soldier from a 5G world, survived those wounds, and had performed a clean headshot on Ducard, who had more than reason enough to believe that said II had missed his kill shot on purpose. And he had gone and pissed off six hundred more, just like him.
"We'll win." Doe assured him.
Ducard shook his head, "no we won't." Was all he could manage to say.
"Yes we will." Doe repeated, with conviction.
Ducard sighed deeply, "no." He repeated, "we won't." Even if the I's won their 'little' war, one could be damn sure that at the absolute bare minimum least, half of their two thousand and change numbers would be dead to show for it, but it was likely to be closer to three quarters of their number, dead and done. If the I's won, they wouldn't have but five hundred left - less than they'd had after the Second Contact War. It would take them seven years just to double that back to one thousand, and another seven after that to build back to two thousand, and twenty one years to get to four thousand, and that was hoping and praying none of them died, assuming there wouldn't be any major wars, and ignoring what would happen if they lost.
"Ducard, we've been through -"
"John. You and I both know why we won't. We took the selection requirements for SIGMAs and applied them to children!" He felt the foreign feeling of fear crawl up his spine, as reality fully, finally, began to dawn on him. "And let's ignore McGraw's genetic outline, which automatically gave them a leg up. Let's ignore Two-Fifteen.
"The selection requirements for SIGMAs - adults, John! - aren't the best of the best. They aren't people whose killcounts are multiple orders of magnitude higher than their age, and it's not their loyalty to their species. It's soldiers who display a capacity for sociopathy. McGraw Senior needed people who can show that they can literally kill anything without remorse. Who can turn their conscience on and off at will, and who display a combat effectiveness to match it. We need to be ready willing and able to slaughter anywhere from hundreds to thousands of people on any given day, humans, aliens, machines, whathaveyou, and go right back to bed and sleep like a baby… But they needed too to have the good sense and clear enough morality to know when and where to stop. To be able to differentiate the good from the bad - to know not to call Sixty Six just so they can go on a killing spree! John, you and I know we're just high functioning serial killers on government payroll." Ducard said, exhaustedly. "And those kids…
"They're the same thing." His voice shook as it truly began to dawn on him, the daunting task ahead. "Just like us, every one of them were checked over and tested for sociopathic tendencies and any predispositions for psychopathy; and just like us, they were chosen because they were that perfect balance between amoral and moral. They were chosen because they displayed the sort of mental detachedness that indicated they could go through and personally kill thousands of people, and not bat an eye… And because they could differentiate between good and bad. That means they - like we - understand that those are people! With families, dreams, hopes, fears, goals. They live, breathe, feel pain and love, misery and desire… And they know this, and will kill them anyways without a second's hesitation.
"But it's worse than that. We never taught them how to fight, we taught them how to win. Us, we walk that fine line. We can cross one side or the other, but we always find that sweet spot. We always go back to the status quo, because we have that shred of humanity, those memories and those lessons imparted upon us by our parents and experiences. But them? We are their parents, battle is their experience. They're pragmatic to a terrifying degree - there are things we would avoid doing if we could, even if it meant a harder mission on us. But them? They wouldn't make that call, they'd just barrel straight on through…There are things we won't do that they will, because they're able to toe that line so much more precisely than us. Because we taught them to win.
"And then we fucking went and showed them everything we knew. Centuries - millennia - of warfare and combat theory. All of our own personal experiences and wisdom, imparted onto them. Fourteen years straight of training and honing their instincts, of mastering all warfare from conventional to Anti-SIGMA. We took six hundred sociopathic children, taught them how best to kill, wired them all into a set of power armor… And pissed them off." He sighed again, "they're just like us. Killers of the highest possible function, with government funding… And unless they want to - unless they god damn want to - they will not stop fighting us. And that's ignoring how we trained them, the strict genetic requirements laid out by McGraw to make them more effective in combat, the more advanced augmentations to make them so irresistible to the enemy. Ignoring their pragmatism, their ability to turn that line between good and evil, into a garrote wire. Even if we defeat them, we will not win." He lowered the gaze of his battered armor, briefly looking over the decades old suit of power armor, and clenching his fist, wondering how horribly mangled it would become by the end of this all.
"We stared into the abyss, One-One. And now the abyss is staring right back. Pissed."