Doctor Who_ Transit - Ben Aaronovitch [58]
Blondie nodded.
'What are you doing here?'
'We came to rescue you.'
'Why?'
'Because he threatened to rip my head off if I didn't come.'
'That's as good a reason as any,' said the Doctor. 'Has he found my friend yet?'
'Sam. Find anything?'
'No targets so far.'
'Not yet.'
'Some friend,' said Kadiatu.
'She hasn't been feeling herself recently.'
'Hey, boy, you got your visor down?'
'No.'
'Get it down ...'
'What's the matter?' asked the Doctor.
There was a distant concussion, Blondie felt the floor shake under his boots.
'Multiple targets - engaging now,' said Old Sam in Blondie's earphones. It was followed by a drawn-out ripping sound from the mouth of the bolthole.
'Pulse rifle,' said the Doctor.
Blondie was caught by surprise when his visor snapped down without his mental command. He unlimbered his own rifle and set the helmet on target search. The ECM warning was still flashing but there were no target indications. He noticed that the Doctor and Kadiatu were edging around to put him in between them and the bolthole.
Blondie tried to raise Old Sam on the radio but the signal was dead. He mentally rumbled with the helmet to get an opsit but he was unused to the protocols used by the military software. When the opsit finally came up it gave him a top-down graphic of the operations zone when he tried squinting down his nose. It showed the cavern, two fuzzy dots that he assumed represented Kadiatu and the Doctor. The tunnel leading off from the bolthole extended a hundred metres before breaking off into a grey 'no data' area.
There was another ripping sound from the bolthole and the tunnel section of the graphic extended another fifty metres. Blondie realized that the helmet CPU was making guesstimates based on its analysis of the echoes.
'Blondie!' Kadiatu's voice, low, urgent.
He looked up and saw nothing alarming.
'Can't you see them?'
'See what?'
'They're coming out of the walls!"
There was no mistaking the real fear in Kadiatu's voice.
Blondie cycled through his vision options but nothing changed. The opsit graphic was clear too.
'I think it might be a good idea,' said the Doctor mildly, 'if you raised your visor.'
There were at least six of them, the same things that had attacked the Fat Mama at Rhea, covering the distance between them with the same unhealthy vitality they had exhibited then. Blondie could see the alcoves where they must have been hiding in the far wall.
He put the rifle on full auto and cut the failsafe.
Nothing happened.
An error tone sounded in his earphones.
The rifle was interfaced with the helmet fire control through the touch pad on the gloves. The CPU functions were spread between three shielded Motorola transputers imbedded in impact-resistant plastic at strategic points. Vickers were confident that even if two of the transputers were lost the target acquisition function would be degraded by only as little as fifteen per cent, tops. They were pretty certain they had licked the software problems that had led to unfortunate friendly-fire incidents in the early stages of the war.
Even so most grunts spent the war with their weapons locked on manual.
The Melbourne Protocols were the peacetime rules of engagement for use by the military in police actions. Target acquisition was keyed to weapons.
What was charging towards Blondie carried nothing that the helmet recognized as a weapon.
Blondie figured it out in just enough time to reverse his grip on the rifle and use it as a club.
The Ice Maiden
Brigadier Yembe Lethbridge-Stewart, Commanding Officer United Nations Third Tactical Response Brigade, the Blue Berets, the Zen Brigade, jumped first into the complex caldera that surmounted Olympus Mons. Jumped first because of tradition and because his family were crazy and always had been. First in, the legend said, last out with not a scratch on him, at least nothing visible. Retired at the end of the war to a hick town in the West African forest, stopped taking his medication and waited patiently for premature implant arthritis