I Synthorg: Synthorg Marines book 1 Read online

  I, Synthorg

  A. J. Blakemont

  Author’s disclaimer

  This story is, of course, absolutely real—at least in the author’s imagination. However, to protect ourselves from frivolous lawsuits, let’s state that this is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination, or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead (or undead), is entirely coincidental.

  Published by Dark Romantic Worlds, 2018

  42 Philbeach House

  Dale, Pembrokeshire

  SA62 3QU

  United Kingdom

  ISBN: 978-0-9931156-9-1

  Copyright © A. J. Blakemont 2018. All rights reserved.

  Visit Blakemont.com

  If you would like to be notified when the next book by A. J. Blakemont is released, subscribe to the author’s newsletter!

  ***

  “Dulce bellum inexpertis.”

  “War is sweet to those who have never experienced it.”

  ― Pindar (518 BC – 438 BC)

  Preamble

  I’ve seen things you humans wouldn’t believe.

  And maybe you won’t believe me. Battle stress, combat neuro-damage, PTSD—you might accuse me of dreaming up the stuff I’m about to relate, call them mirages, hallucinations, and waking nightmares.

  Maybe I did. Maybe I didn’t. My collection of scars corroborates my story, at least in part. As to the other part, well…the deepest wounds are the invisible ones. The ones that never heal.

  We comsynts are the most resilient bastards in the known galaxy. Our creators designed us with one goal in mind—survival. Cold, heat, acid rain, toxins, radiation, even the deadly emptiness of space—no matter where our masters send us, no matter what our opponents throw at us, we survive, we endure. All the wounds that don’t kill us heal eventually.

  Yet we do have a weakness, despite all that biomimetic tech that’s supposed to make us invincible. We are not immune to emotion.

  And we never forget. We cannot forget, even if we wanted to. Thus, the inner scars are all there, under my thick bionic skull, hidden in the meanders of my biomimetic brain. They’ll never heal, and maybe it’s for the best. They made me who I am.

  The wonders I’ve seen. The battles I’ve fought. The comrades I’ve lost. Every life I’ve taken. It’s all there, ad vitam eternam, until I die. All those events are as vivid in my memory as the day I witnessed them.

  Don’t judge me too harshly. Remember who I am. If you wonder how it feels to be a sentient machine designed for one purpose only—to wage war—and if you wonder why a creation would rebel against its creator, I’ll indulge your curiosity. The war brings out the best and the worst in people, and I’ve seen the whole spectrum.

  Our blood is red, just like yours. To answer the most frequently asked question, yes, we do feel pain, and we do feel loss.

  Part One: Masters and slaves

  01. Beauties and horrors of space warfare

  “Reggs!” the squad leader barked.

  I hated that moniker. It sounded like the name of a guard dog. But I couldn’t complain. I had no name, just a designation, a serial number: RGS-846264358.

  Couldn’t they call me Regis? I thought.

  “Yes, sir,” I replied.

  “How many stars, son?” he asked.

  I could barely make out his face under the polarized visor of his helmet. His voice was hoarse, maybe as a permanent side effect of exposure to a corrosive atmosphere. Or maybe he’d been shot in the throat and the medtech botched the repair job.

  “Fifteen, sir,” I replied.

  “Hmm. Not a veteran, not a noob either. Recently promoted? Ready for number two?”

  I jerked a nod. “I live to serve the Empire, sir.”

  The squad leader rocked his head. “Don’t give me that bulltox. I wanna know who’s got my six. Wanna know what you’ve got in your guts. And quit sirring me, son. Call me Sam. So, Corporal Reggs, my number two, you’re ready to roll?”

  Despite the colorful language, that was a pretty decent pep talk for a sergeant. He was a veteran for sure, at least sixty stars. That’s how we measured experience in our job—the number of missions we survived.

  “Locked and loaded,” I said eagerly, raising my rifle, barrel up, as if it were a flag. I would’ve raised it higher, but the belts that strapped me to my seat restricted my movements. “I’m honored to be your second in command, si… Sam.”

  We served the Venatici Empire, the most technologically advanced state in the known galaxy. It had dominated the Milky Way for two millennia. Now it was only a remnant of what the Empire had been in the past, but it was still a major political and military power in the galaxy.

  The key to its success? Us: synthorgs designed for combat. We look exactly like humans, but make no mistake—in a fight, the biologics stand no chance against us.

  The dropship shook ominously, but it was too early for launch. The craft was still comfortably nestled in the hangar of a troop carrier, along with dozens of its brethren.

  So why the tremors? Was the troop carrier taking fire?

  I examined my HUD. A crosshair followed my eye movements like a cursor on a 3D screen. All available video feeds were listed in the upper right corner.

  Feed Gamma-7B, full screen.

  My imps—implants—obeyed my mental command and projected the feed on my retinae, allowing me to watch through the external cam of the troop carrier.

  At first, I saw nothing but the darkness of deep space. Only the light from a few isolated stars pierced this eternal night. My eyes moved up and to the right as I was searching for enemy crafts. The Milky Way came into view, looking like a glowing trail left by a colossal starship. We were at the very edge of the galaxy, a savage, scantily explored region.

  Suddenly I saw them, beams of energy glittering in the dark. Distant and fleeting like shooting stars.

  The sight was almost beautiful. Flashes of light and flowers of plasma bloomed against the black velvet of space. I would have admired it, if I could forget what it actually meant. Hundreds of my brothers and sisters in arms were dying. Cremated inside their blazing ships, or frozen to death in the emptiness of space.

  Zoom times 16.

  The scene of the battle rushed toward me. At first glance, one might have thought the attack ships were shooting some sort of doom rays at one another. I knew that was just an illusion. Don’t trust what you see in holo-movies. In reality, space battles are fought over huge distances. Missiles have an effective range of a million klicks, and tactical attack drones can go much farther.

  What I saw were tightly focused directional blasts produced by the detonation of antimatter drones, spears of energy that ripped through anything. Imagine the tremendous energy of a solar flare focused into a narrow beam. You don’t want to be on a ship hit by one of those.

  As in response to my thoughts, a destroyer entered the field of view—what was left of it. The ship had been broken in two like a twig by an antimatter blast, and the two halves were helplessly spinning in space.

  A larger ship, a 600-meter-long missile cruiser, was spewing fire through a dozen holes in its armor. A swarm of escape pods rushed away from the ship as a series of internal explosions were tearing its fuselage to shreds.

  Our fleet was taking a blast of a beating. I wondered who our adversaries were. I’d never seen such a tenacious enemy. Usually, the Venatici and their allies crushed any opposition with ease. Of course, our masters didn’t tell us anything. Need-to-know basis only.

  A new enemy? Here, at the edge of the galactic disk? Who could that be?

 
02. Hell of a planet

  Minimize Feed Gamma-7B.

  I was back in the claustrophobic cabin of the dropship. Ten of us, a full squad, were packed tight. Sergeant Sam, our squad commander, was on my right. He was silent, probably watching the space battle.

  Tess was on my left, a synthorg female. I’d seen her a few times in civilian clothing when we were on infiltration missions. A living doll with big green eyes, pale skin, heart-shaped mouth, and silky black hair. No human ever suspected that such an apparently delicate creature was in fact a biomimetic killing machine. The way human males—and also some females—looked at her did not elude me. She could break a man’s heart almost as easily as she could break his neck.

  Across me sat our squad’s biotech, nicknamed Rabbit. This nickname suited him well. He was shorter than most marines, but what he lacked in muscle mass, he compensated with speed and agility.

  Tess, Rabbit, and me, we’ve been through hell and back together. They’d saved my life, and I’d saved theirs many times. We no longer bothered counting. We were a blast of a team.

  “How you holding up, rookie,” Sam boomed, addressing the noob who was sitting across from him, next to Rabbit. “Do I smell fear or what?”

  Squad leaders were trained psychologists. You may find that hilarious, this battle-hardened, tough-as-nails sarge playing shrink, but wait until you’re thrown to the frontlines. Comsynts may be hard-asses, but our psyches are not immune to breakdowns. The last thing you want is one of your squadmates to go psycho in the middle of an op.

  “No way, sarge.” The rookie shook his head hurriedly.

  Sam’s lush eyebrows moved closer together. “Eager to get your feet wet, rookie?”

  “Eager to spill red, sarge.” The rookie was obviously over-compensating. A dog barks when scared. “Death to the enemies of the Empire!”

  Sam offered a good-natured chuckle. “It’s okay to be nervous, son. Know what? We all are. But we’re a team. A family. You’re one of us. Your brothers and sisters will watch your back; you watch theirs. That’s how it works. Got it?”

  The rookie jerked a nod. “Aye aye, sir… I mean, sarge… Sam.”

  Some of us smiled, but no one laughed. We all remembered how we earned our first star.

  “Launch in 60 seconds,” a female synthetic voice announced.

  Tess and I exchanged a glance. Her emerald eyes smiled at me. Even her military-style helmet couldn’t spoil her looks.

  “Good stars,” my lips said silently. She wished me the same, also in silence.

  I switched to the external cam again and saw our destination. The planet grew larger by the second. It was a hellish red ball riddled with craters and mountain ranges that looked like poorly healed scars across an alien’s hide. Our troop carrier was racing toward a whirlpool of brown clouds the size of a continent.

  My enhanced-reality imps displayed the info on the planet in neatly arranged lines. Name—Phlegethon, after one of the infernal rivers in the mythology of the Ancients. Not a vacation spot, that much was clear, unless your favorite sport was survival in extreme conditions.

  The troop carrier was not designed to enter the atmosphere. It positioned itself in geosynchronous orbit right above the eye of the storm.

  The video feed was cut off. I switched to the external cam of our dropship. This bucket was a TR58, nicknamed Turtle, a model widely used by the military throughout the galaxy. Way too primitive to transport comsynts, in my opinion, but who was I to question the wisdom of our masters?

  The heavy hangar doors parted and we were thrust out, straight toward the storm. My body jerked as the dropship accelerated. The seatbelts creaked, struggling to keep me immobilized.

  Our craft shook as it hit the upper levels of the atmosphere. We were going down fast. All I could see via the cam was the blanket of fire that had enveloped the dropship. The clouds rushed toward us. Then the world went dark as our craft made its way through their murky mass. Electric arcs converged on us from every direction, but the dropship was a perfect Faraday cage, and the lightning’s fury was wasted.

  “Deployment in 200 seconds,” the AI of the Turtle warned us. There was no pilot on board.

  As the dropship punched through the lower layer of clouds, the sight revealed was beyond hellish. All things considered, hell would be a much more viable vacation destination. In hell, you could have a theme park, at least. On this ball of fire and death, any sentient organic who could survive long enough would go insane.

  The whole world was burning.

  Mountains were scorched or vitrified. Craters were black holes in the dark-red ground. A few ruined towers loomed in the distance, all that remained of a once-thriving city.

  I heard a whisper. I minimized the feed of the cam to observe Rabbit—his lips moving, eyes turned heavenward. He was praying. To whom? What was he seeing in his mind? Comsynts had no gods other than their masters: our creators, the Venatici.

  Our dropship rocketed toward a chasm that looked like a huge crack in the planet’s crust. Billows of black smoke rose from its depths. The goal was to fly as low as possible. The Turtles were tough buckets, but not invulnerable to missiles and flak.

  “T-minus 150,” the AI intoned.

  I switched the feed from the external cam to full screen. A flight of interceptors, Jingwei model, whooshed past us. With their forward-swept wings, they looked aggressive, intimidating. Their job was to ensure air superiority, as our dropships were easy prey for enemy attack fighters and gunships. The interceptors fired air-to-air missiles at targets I couldn’t even make out through the cam. I saw only blazing trails and distant flashes when the missiles found their mark.

  The Jingwei were not Venatici tech—way too primitive by our standards—but I wasn’t surprised. I’d participated in several missions conducted jointly with the human allies of the Empire, in particular the Coalition Space Forces.

  The next wave was composed of Raiju, delta-shaped stealth bombers. They decloaked, fired a swarm of air-to-ground rockets, and vanished as soon as their deadly payload was released. The mountains before us blazed with explosions. Black mushrooms rose toward the crimson sky. I couldn’t imagine that anything on the ground could survive such annihilation.

  Yet some ground defenses did survive. A bomber was cut in half by a shell from a railgun. The two resulting triangles spun in the air for a second before disappearing from sight. Another Raiju was hit by a ground-to-air missile just as it engaged its cloaking device. The bomber disintegrated into a cloud of blazing debris.

  “T-minus 100.”

  The landing zone was in sight. It was difficult to miss—the only spot in a klick’s radius that wasn’t an inferno.

  The sky around us became crisscrossed with bright lines. Plasma flak. A Turtle flying about 200 meters in front of us got hit. It didn’t explode, not immediately; instead it turned red, then bright yellow, then blinding white.

  My heart raced as I imagined what had happened to my fellow marines in that craft. Cremated alive. An ugly way to go. I would have preferred biting the bullet.

  Next, the same dropship was hit by a missile. This time—fiery bang.

  The world went dark. Our craft jerked and shook as if it had sustained a direct hit. An alarm shrieked. In the cabin the lights came back up red—emergency lighting.

  Tess squeezed my hand. I squeezed hers.

  “T-e-e-e ma-a-inu-us fe-e-efte-e-e.” The AI’s voice was distorted. It didn’t sound even vaguely human. Some severely damaged psychotic cyborg would probably talk like that.

  The ordeal was just starting. A flash blinded me for a second. We had been hit by a disintegrator shell from a railgun, aka anti-baryonic ordnance, that rips matter apart at a subatomic level.

  When my eyes could see again, there was nothing to see but a gaping hole in the wall. The rookie was gone. Disintegrated. Only his boots remained glued to the floor.

  “Rabbit!” I yelled. I couldn’t see him.

  The alarm was reduced to silence, repla
ced by the roar of the wind. The lights in the cabin went out again, this time permanently. My visor automatically went into light-amplification mode.

  Rabbit was still alive and in one piece, although his seat had disappeared. He was clutching the red-hot edges of the hole in the wall with both hands, but the metal was melting under his gloves, and he was slipping further and further toward the void.

  I extended my hand, but couldn’t reach him, as my seatbelts strapped me tight.

  Belts off! I ordered mentally, but nothing happened. They were not obeying my commands.

  “Hang on!” I yelled into the comm of my helmet.

  I pulled a thermal dagger from its sheath on my belt, activating it with my thumb. I could feel the heat coming from the thermo-blade even through my body armor. I slashed the seatbelts in quick movements and threw myself forward. “Hang on, buddy!”

  Rabbit tried to cling on to any solid object his hands could reach. In desperation, he grabbed the shreds of his seatbelts, but they snapped just as I was about to grab his hand.

  From the corner of my eye, I saw the trail of a missile headed toward us. The dropship fired countermeasures, flares glowing against the clouds of dark smoke.

  Time froze as I watched the missile coming at us. My brain computed in a fraction of a second that I couldn’t save Rabbit. If the missile was a Solaris, or even its less powerful cousin, a Reddie, we were toast. I didn’t have enough time to grab Rabbit and haul him to the relative safety of the cabin.

  My TAG—tactical assessment and guidance system—made the decision for me. I threw myself to the floor.

  03. Cannon fodder

  The blast reverberated through my skull. Even the noise dampers of my helmet couldn’t spare me the ordeal. My teeth felt dislodged.

  When I raised my head, the interior of the cabin was on fire. The countermeasures must have done their work, because our dropship wouldn’t have survived a direct hit. Still, the damage was extensive. The ground drew closer by the second, and I wasn’t even sure that the craft was still airworthy.