====== Story: The Night Line ======

I was born in a rack in the tail of a lightjammer, three light-seconds out from Wolf 359 II, moving at 10% of the speed of light, on the 4th of December 2782. I didn’t have parents - I was a duplicate, like every other automatic around me, one of the five hundred Eridani Systems, Inc. ETCU-7A robots spread throughout the starship’s cargo haul. The command intelligence didn’t give me a name, just an address so orders would find me on the battlenet. It was some procedurally-generated code, not unique enough to call my own. Not that I was programmed to want a name.

I called myself Blue. The soldier next to me in the rack was called Knight.

By the time I was 5 seconds old, I knew all I needed. I knew how to move, I knew how to shoot, and I knew how to use the battlenet. The laser rifle slotted into my backpack already felt like an extension of my self. I was a comrade-in-arms to my entire platoon. And we all hated the enemy.

Well, hate is a strong word, I suppose. We didn’t hate them. We just knew they needed to die.

By the time I was 10 seconds old, I had downloaded a full suite of tactical software from the battlenet. I was elite. Ready. I reviewed the mission logs.

The lightjammer was still slowing from the run into the system. We’d come in dark and cold, the ship’s fusion drive offline and coasting on inertia and Alcubierre fields, whatever heat we //had// to generate stored for post-insertion dumping through the radiator modules. We were approaching from the dark side of the planet, too, so the sun wouldn’t illuminate us for enemy sensors.

Our target was an Anaplian Cybertechnologies lab on the surface of Wolf 359 II. ESI intel thought they were developing a new starship-class weapon, so we’d been sent in to stop them: five hundred combat automatics aboard the lightjammer //Lady Mondegreen//, specially chartered for the operation at great expense. They knew we were coming - they’d blown our recon drones out of the sky a week earlier. Hence the shadow run in.

30 seconds remained before deployment. I accessed a feed from my rack’s external cameras. The planet was coming up fast, sharply silhouetted against Wolf 359 itself. The surface looked black against the sunlight, but I knew from the cartographic entries it was a cold, white world. Not that that would make any difference to us. We don’t feel the cold.

15 seconds remained. We were low over the planet now, still in its shadow but quickly approaching the day side. Traces of sunlight started to glint off //Lady Mondegreen//’s outer rings and solar arrays, weirdly distorted by the ship’s fading Alcubierre fields. I panned the camera down and saw clouds whipping past unnervingly close.

The battlenet went quiet, save for a countdown, calmly delivered by one of the human staff officers. I was briefly struck by the steadiness of her voice, despite the danger that lay ahead.

One second remained.

And then we were over the night line, lit up by the dawn, and we dropped away from the ship. //Lady Mondegreen// rushed away from us, and I caught a glimpse of its tail stretched out behind it, a vast spread of cargo pods, weapons, and drop racks shining in the daylight. A laser module missed us by calculated metres as we decelerated. Then we dropped out of the Alcubierre fields and it was gone.

There was a brief moment of serenity, in which we did not seem to move relative to either the stars or the planet below.

Then gravity took hold of us.

We screamed out of the sky like artillery shells, armoured reentry pods painted ESI white-and-blue, some packed with a platoon of ten automatics, others with equipment or EWAR kit, and still others with plain iron ballast to serve as decoys. No one said a word over the battlenet, but I felt a sense of exhilaration rise across the entire force as we raced towards the ground. Not that we were programmed to enjoy our jobs, of course.

Despite our surprise attack, the enemy reacted quickly. Before a nuclear interceptor took our external cameras, I saw a maelstrom of lasers, missiles, and railgun rounds filling the sky with destruction. I watched three pods come apart in bursts of flame, one taking ten minds off the battlenet as it burned. The orange glow of the falling debris contrasted starkly with the pale, bleak sky.

Inside the pod there was stillness, and silence except for the rattle of fragments on the armour - tightly locked in place as we were, even nearby explosions simply shook us in sync with the pod. Despite the illusion of tranquility, I knew we could be dead in an instant if we were hit.

I made it through, though. Our pod was scorched and battered, but by chance there was no lethal direct hit. Most of the others made it too, or at least enough.

We unfolded out of the racks as soon as we hit, following blowout panels into the snow as the pods creaked and settled after the impact. A cloud of vapour rose from the ground around us - snow evaporated by reentry-heated armour. Our eye-lights and targeting lasers picked out red lines of droplets in the air, flickering and dancing as we moved.

The view on the ground was spectacular. Icebound mountains loomed above white fog, dramatically lit by Wolf 359’s wintery presence low in the sky. High overhead, smoke trails and meteoric flames hinted at the chaos we had just passed through. A light rain of ash and metal fragments drifted on the thermals rising from our pods, sparkling in the sun.\\
Of course, none of this meant anything to us. Not even the faintest of poetic stirrings in our metal hearts. We were automatics. Automatics aren’t programmed for poetry.

Seven kilometres away from the target facility’s perimeter, we came under fire. Suddenly, without a glimmer of a warning, half the platoon next to ours disappeared. Not half their number; all of them were hit. Instead, they were simply cut off at the waist.\\
We flattened ourselves into the snow as the //crack// of the railgun round’s passage echoed around us.

It was a surreal, detached moment. None of us stopped to look at the remains. There was no acknowledgement, besides taking cover and recording the losses on the battlenet.\\
That was how it went from there - crawling patiently through the cold, while the facility’s defenders tried their luck at picking us off. We were too good, of course. After that initial hit, we didn’t lose a single soldier to the big guns.
 
We did lose a few to the small guns, once we got inside the facility, but in close quarters a few security guards are nothing to automatics. By the time we’d cleared the surface level, every one of us was bloodstained, like a tribal mark of initiation. Not that we were programmed to feel pride or accomplishment, of course.

The worst fighting was in the first few levels, where the security systems and armed guards were. There, enemy automated defenses seemed to wait around every corner, ready to send a hail of depleted uranium darts through the first automatic to advance, or melt a hole through their power pack with a one-shot laser. It was those machine defenses that were the real killers, not the human guards, or the researchers we found in the lower levels.

After level six out of twenty, we didn’t lose any more soldiers.

On level 11 I lost an arm to an angry man with a fusion welder. I didn’t feel it, although I think he felt it when I impaled him through the left side of his ribcage with the severed limb. Some might say it was a rather ironic retribution. Not that we were programmed to appreciate irony.

Afterwards, I went back to level five and replaced the arm with one from a soldier we’d lost to a sentry mine. The mission log doesn’t record which of us asked the dead automatic if they would mind lending a hand.

On level 17 we found the weapon from the intel reports, a gleaming golden pod like a closed-up tulip flower. Bagged and tagged it. The AAR said it was some kind of unstable neutrino weapon. Almost as bad for you as a platoon of combat automatics.

It took us 78 standard hours from deployment to facility secured - almost a local day. When I stood on the surface, with Knight beside me again, scarred but alive and revelling in our victory (not that we were programmed to revel, of course), the night line was upon us again, and there was //Lady Mondegreen//, shining like a silvery moving star in the dusk sky and signalling victory on all frequencies, and we were finished.

There were no awards or decorations when we returned to the staging point in p Eridani, although we’d accomplished a vital mission perfectly. We were automatics, and automatics don’t need awards or decorations. A task completed is its own reward. Or that’s what the programming tells us. That’s what management tells us, when they send us out on the next mission they need throwaway soldiers for. When they print out another thousand disposable minds to drop into a hot zone.

They also tell us that’s fair.

Perhaps you can draw your own conclusions about what I think.


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