"Isn't it risky to install your test apparatus in this area?" Ryland asked as the group ascended the mountain, traveling up a narrow pass that ran between two high cliff walls.
"The last time we came here," Sena said, "we only had Kane as our escort. I'd have thought the four of you were capable of doing this job without particular nervousness."
"Just to verify," Naomi said, "she wasn't actually shooting at you last time, Lyon, but at your partner?"
"He's a slow learner," Lyon replied.
"Cute," Ryland murmured. "And while frankly caution is always a good idea here on Ragol, I wasn't referring to the danger."
"What, then?" Almonte asked. The two Lab technicians wore their high-collared, bell-sleeved tunics and snug trousers, white with blue piping, as they had before, but had added to the outfit with the defensive fields of standard-issue Photon frames and Varista handguns, standard equipment for Lab personnel on dangerous field missions. Ryland would just as soon have done without Sena, but there were good reasons for her to be there, so her unpredictable nature and open hostility just became part of what they had to put up with.
And after all, every hunter knows that the biggest operational hazard on any escort mission is the person being escorted.
They were interrupted by an example of the local wildlife as they emerged into a clearing: seven- and eight-foot-tall gibbons, with tough, wiry body and savagely long arms leaping from the rocks and underbrush, breathing fire and ice. Naomi and Lyon rushed forward into battle, tying up the monsters well away from the Lab techs, while Ryland stuck close to Almonte and Gowan to Sena even while adding fire support. Their combined efforts swiftly dispatched the apes, and then a swarm of wasp-like Gees that buzzed in, disturbed by the noise and commotion to protect their nests.
"Like I said, no, I didn't mean the threat from these indigenous creatures when I talked about risk. Yes, there's safer areas on Ragol than Gal Da Val Island, but dealing with monsters is part of the normal routine of operating anywhere on the planet. No, I was talking about the Gibbles."
"Gibbles?" Almonte asked, looking genuinely curious.
"Alphas, pack leaders for the Ul and Zol Gibbons like the ones we just fought. They're exceptionally aggressive, not just against people but anything strange that enters their territory. The Lab lost a handful of its initial unmanned probes that they sent to this island to them. If one noticed your equipment and got ornery…" He shrugged.
"Mission failed. I see what you mean. Unfortunately, we didn't always have those kind of options."
"Is this the experimental area Dr. Severin's team was assigned for its projects? Or is it some aspect of the ambient Photon energy that's the issue?"
"The latter. We're already starting to work on ways to extract Photon from different types of environments as well as analyzing what kinds of effects might be caused on the local ecosystem to avoid harming anything inadvertently, but this seemed to be the one environment that we were compatible with."
"Waterborne Photon, especially, seems to be difficult to extract without a toxicity effect, and that's something we'd never implement in a real-life test model," Sena added. "The initial plan, in fact, was to set up in a Photon-rich cave in the Jungle Area, but we had to rule it out because of the simulation results."
"Thankfully, Dr. Severin was able to work an exchange with Dr. Guls's team to get access to a viable test site…although we've gone outside our strictly assigned test area."
"That makes sense, or else your opposition could just send down hunters to destroy everything in sight."
"I'm surprised that no one tried that already," Lyon said. "I mean, they obviously had reliable intel or they couldn't have sent us after Kane."
"The primary objective probably wasn't destruction," Ryland speculated. "Our first goal was to retrieve the test data, after all. I think they wanted to know if Dr. Severin's idea worked, so that they could move to control the technology if they wanted, or just save time and resources if it proved to be a failure. It's always more useful to a smart planner to keep their options open."
"You're calling most of the plans we run into smart?" she shot back dryly.
"Greedy, selfish, and shortsighted, perhaps, but functional enough. Also, there's the additional fact that every field mission is one more chance to be exposed and caught. This goes double when the mission is potentially loud and messy."
"Okay, I'll buy that one. On a one-or-the-other basis, it adds up to reason enough for someone to play this cagily."
"Of course, now is a different matter. I agree that whomever is going to come after us will do it in full force before we're through. I wish we didn't have to clear the path for them," he added, glancing at the remains of the battle. "It would be nice if our enemies had to spend their time, energy, and resources on these monsters instead of us."
"Timing: unfortunate," Gowan summed up.
"You can say that again."
His sense of humor didn't run to the awful pun, though, so he didn't.
"Which way from here?" Ryland asked Almonte. The technician checked a map on his PDL and pointed.
"West, then south and west again."
They proceeded towards their goal, dealing with more gibbons on the way, seasoned with a couple of those weird mobile flowers that would uproot themselves and chase encroachers.
"Damn, I don't think I'm ever going to get used to those things," Naomi muttered, ripping her Victor Axe loose from the rapidly decaying remains of the last Meriltas. The way the fallen vegetation rotted and dissolved to green sludge was a sure sign, Ryland had once pointed out, that the creatures had been infected with the D-Factor. "Every time I get back to the ship after a job where I have to fight them, I keep expecting the decorative shrubbery to jump out of the flowerbeds and start chasing me."
"If it's any consolation, I think that you only have to worry about that in the Lab. These things were transformed by the D-Factor, and we don't have that on Pioneer 2."
"You hope," Naomi said darkly.
"This is why I'm glad that Chief Milarose is only an evil schemer and not a complete nut. She's liable to get us in all sorts of trouble with her plotting, but meddling with uncontrolled science or things that could be described as evil deities aren't among the kinds of trouble she's liable to create."
"Yeah, we're definitely better off than Pioneer 1 was, but who knows what kind of other nonsense they created that we're going to need to deal with? I've heard the rumors about Olga Flow in that seabed facility, that it's another regenerating monster like Dark Falz. How much of this crap can we find a way to beat before we have to face facts and admit Ragol is a total loss, especially with all of that political crap going on behind the scenes and getting in the way of us being able to just do our job as hunters?"
"I never realized that you were such an idealist."
"Well, geez, I'm not, but the more that I have to put up with as a hunter, the more that I just get sick of all the crap. At least this guy Severin we're working for now, he's trying to do something that'll fix some of the problems. Maybe it's for the right reasons and maybe it's just for his ego or scientific curiosity or all that, but at least he's doing something, trying something in the right direction. Actually makes me feel kinda bad, being on the other side last time out."
"Yeah, I feel the—camouflage!" Lyon yelped, cutting herself off and pointing. It had just been a tiny thing, a slight shimmer at the corner of her field of vision, like a heat haze where there shouldn't be one, but she'd yelled and pointed anyway, since like all four of the hunters she knew damned well what that meant.
Even then, she was almost too late. Her shout went up in the same instant that the blur moved, hurtling from its position on top of one of the rock walls bordering the clearing down towards the heart of the hunters' formation. If Gowan hadn't been an android, too, it might have been too late, but the RAcast was slightly better at tracking the motion of the Photon-camouflaged attacker's path than their organic companions and roughly thrust Sena away with one big hand.
"Hey! What the—" she began as she was flung several feet away and hit the ground with bruising force, but she fell silent, cut off by the grating squeal of metal on metal, sparks flying as Gowan's right arm and side ground hard against the camouflaged enemy. The field flickered and died, revealing a bulky humanoid robot, bigger even than Gowan, with a tanklike structure on its back and painted in green and white colors.
There was neither the time nor the opportunity for Gowan to get free of it to line up a rifle shot; instead he used the laser like a club, swinging it around to crash the butt into the Sinow Berril's shoulder structure. The impact jolted the robot, knocking it back slightly so that the swinging punch it was trying to deliver only grazed Gowan's midsection instead of hitting him dead on.
Lyon and Naomi charged towards the battle at once, but the others were already in action. Knowing the Berril model was insulated against electrical attack, Ryland speared it with Barta instead, while Almonte fired his Varista into the thing and Sena did the same from her seated position. The consistent pounding did its job, and the rogue security robot was already starting to fall apart by the time Lyon thrust the blade of her gungnir into its back.
"I-if you hadn't shoved me aside," Sena stammered while Ryland was treating the damage Gowan had incurred.
"Obligation: security."
"Translated, it's the job," Naomi said, offering the woman a hand up. "Getting you two safely to the test site is what we're here for."
"Even so…"
Lyon supposed it wasn't surprising, Sena's sudden…she wouldn't call it friendliness, but at least a lack of hostility. More than likely, this was the first time the woman had come face-to-face with something that was actually trying to kill her and had the capacity to do so. Before now, she'd likely only have had standard firearms training on the VR field or otherwise; for all her bloody-minded nonsense and willingness to try to shoot Ryland, she didn't seem like the kind of person who'd actually confronted the reality of possible death. There was a big difference between sitting around planning how the "bad guys" of any ideology ought to be destroyed, and facing off against the violence going the other way.
More than that, the things she was facing now, the monsters of Ragol, they didn't have any ideology. Oh, they could be traced back to Pioneer 1's bioweapon experiments, but even those didn't cross over into explaining Dark Falz. For Sena, this wasn't just new, but completely outside the context by which she defined her life. She had no functional way of looking at a threat like this, but had to build the mental architecture from scratch.
Ryland loved conspiracies and mysteries, and one of the things he maintained about fanatics of any stripe is that they ascribed evil, the threats that people faced, to overly simplified causes: "the military" or "science" or "foreigners" or whatever was labeled the problem, the root cause to be hated. Along those lines, Lyon figured that Sena had just been punched in the teeth with an example of things not being so simple.
She hoped the lesson took. The soul-searching Sena would go through over how much of an idiot she'd been would be a much more satisfying revenge for her idiotic attempt to shoot Ryland than anything Lyon might actually do to her.
"Let's get going," Ryland said. "We're wasting time."
"Wasting time?" Almonte asked. "What do you mean? There's no deadline for completing this mission that I know about. According to Arin, there's no threat of data decay…"
"Or is it because night will fall?" Sena asked. "Do the monsters become more active or stronger ones emerge after dark?" It wasn't hard to divine the nature of her thoughts.
"Monsters, no, but you can bet that we'll be looking at a different kind of opposition."
"Hunters, most likely, unless someone gets really creative in their operations."
Both technicians looked at him in surprise.
"Your project has been compromised, remember?" he spelled it out for them. "When we came down here before to intercept Kane, it wasn't on a hunch. Our client knew Kane would be here to retrieve data. They knew what he was up to and when he'd been up to it. I see no reason to think they don't know what we're doing now."
"And if they wanted to stop it the first time, they'll want to stop it again," Naomi put in.
"So let's not waste what time we have. Why did you think I was complaining earlier about having to clear the way for someone else? Someone's going to be after us. It's just a matter of whom and how soon."
Almonte and Sena glanced at each other. Both swallowed nervously.
"Okay, let's move."
"Good call."
There was one more monster encounter on the way, but thankfully, there weren't any of the Sinow robots involved and the hunters were able to bring down several of the gibbons at long range before the creatures could get close enough to harm the group. They went around a corner and into a kind of nook. It was surrounded by rock walls on two sides, and half of it was shadowed by an overhang, but in the part of the area open to the sky sat what was obviously their quarry. The machine was large, about the size of an aerocar, and had a slight resemblance to the cylindrical weather observation devices found in the former residential area near the Central Dome. The major difference was two large computer terminals on either end, and an elevated windmill, eight feet in diameter inside a heavy, ringlike frame, each blade glistening oddly in the light from a coating laid on to it in hexagon-shaped panels.
"The collection device could be static," Almonte explained, "but we found that a mobile one works better for absorbing atmospheric Photon, flowing with the wind." Lyon and Naomi glanced at each other and the Newman rolled her eyes. Neither one of them had any interest, just then, in the esoterica of Photon energy technology.
"Let's just get to work."
While Sena and Almonte started setting up, Lyon went to the mouth of the nook and took up an overwatch position, drawing her Varista, while Gowan joined her. Between the two of them, they would be able to keep all of the potential approach routes within their field of vision. At the nearest chokepoint, they laid down a pattern of hovering traps, so that an enemy charging in blindly would soon be frozen, confused, and fireblasted.
"Do you think one of us should advance and take up a picket position?" she asked.
"Retreat: difficult."
"Yeah, you have a point. And I'd be the one to advance, since your rifle's the better weapon for overwatch. I'd be exposed almost the entire time while fleeing back from that outcropping up there if they approach from the north. And if they approach from the east, I wouldn't see them any sooner because of the slope." Remaining in her present position was probably the best option, then. "Keep an eye on your navigational unit's radar, though. That'll give us a little range to the north around the rock wall where we can't see. Of course, the same goes for us. They'll be able to spot our position and be ready to face an ambush…but there's still a lot of open ground that way. They'd be out of range for Zonde or Grants from back there except at the highest power levels, and if they've got a Force that strong…"
She broke off, realizing that Gowan had almost certainly considered the same tactical factors and come to the same conclusions.
"Sorry."
"Apology: unnecessary."
"Well, the babbling was unnecessary, too."
"Babble: accurate."
"Do you mean I was accurate in what I was saying or accurate in calling it babble?"
"Acknowledgement: both."
"…You're smirking at me right now, I can tell."
"Mouth: absent."
"You're older than I am and I know you've spent more than enough time around organics to know that a smirk isn't a facial expression but a state of mind."
Reflecting on the oddity of an emotional algorithm that increased the priority of solidifying relationships with others—even another android—through conversation and banter when a highly dangerous situation was anticipated, Lyon settled in to wait.
~X X X~
"Are you finished?" Colonel Zanov asked, his voice harsh.
It was as he'd reported in the meeting of senior officers. The fact that Dr. Severin and his team had further pursued their research was not a surprise. A dedicated person in any field did not choose to abandon their work because of one setback. A death, yes, was an extremely serious setback, but even the Lab types were not lacking in courage. Whether driven by private obsession, personal glory, or political ambition, the scientists of Pioneer 2 were not weak fools to be disregarded.
There was a reason, after all, that the military was in the state that it was, losing influence, hemmed in on all sides by its rivals. Like Leo Grahart before them, Valgarde and Zanov had been driven to desperate actions to keep from losing everything,
It was not a comforting thought, given that 32nd WORKS had been destroyed despite its decades of history, Leo barely able to escape with his life only by the grace of the hunters that had preserved him, the legacy he'd hoped to leave for his daughter destroyed, Karen left to forge her own way with a stain on her family name, half or more of her network of contacts shunning her and anything else than bore a hint of the Grahart name.
Zanov would not allow that to happen to Pioneer 2's army. Not while he still had breath in his body. It was them, the military, who had fought in the wars on Coral, who had shed blood, killed and watched friends die. Ragol was theirs by right, the hope a new planet offered their reward for the price they'd paid, the Avalon waiting at the end of their journey. Not the fat, smiling worms of the Administration who sat at their desks and sent good men and women to die. Not the scientists squirreled away in their laboratories, spewing out new horrors to kill with like rats swarming from a plague-pit. Theirs!
"The calibrations are almost complete," the technician said, her head and arms still half-buried in the teleporter console. "We'd had to make a lot of adjustments as it was to allow us to use this teleporter to access restricted areas."
The strike force was currently waiting in No Man's Mines, the excavation route dug by Pioneer 1 to reach for the ruins where Dark Falz had been sealed. Here, too, had been the initial Lab facilities from that expedition, before they'd moved to Gal Da Val, and the stench of misspent science was everywhere. This was where the Beta 772 experiments had taken place, the bioweapon analysis that had led to the plague of mutated monsters roaming the cave complex.
These thoughts were just a reminder to Zanov of how the Lab needed to be kept under control, limits imposed on what it was doing for the good of all.
This area of the mine had been designated for military use, and they'd taken advantage of it. The teleporter that Sergeant Marks was working on had been repurposed to give them access to the Seabed facility off Gal Da Val, the core of the Pioneer 1 Lab's most secret research, access that the Administration had ruled that they weren't supposed to have.
"There!" Marks said. "I've reset it with the new coordinates, and I've reconfigured the signal jamming so our arrival won't be traced to this location." She crawled out from under, and began replacing the access panel.
"Why all the work?" one of the other soldiers asked. "Why not just input the coordinates and go?"
"Seriously? You're asking that now, Corbett? Sure, we could do that, but the jamming signal is only designed to cover transmittal from here to the seabed. It's like if you wore gray and black night-ops camouflage to sneak around a desert at high noon. You'd stick out like a sore thumb. And that's why I've got a sore back from spending the last hour stuck in this machine, so the Lab doesn't have all our butts in a sling for going where we're not supposed to."
"But we're clear now, correct?" Zanov interjected.
"Yes, sir. No one will know that a teleport from here to the island occurred. We'll need to return to Pioneer 2 by telepipe or Ryuker, however, since the teleporter on the other end wouldn't be jammed."
"Understood. That leaves only the actual scientists and hunters to report a military presence, but that won't matter because your orders are to eliminate them all."