Theirs Not to Reason Why 4: Hardship Read Free Page B

vacuum of space or the thin atmospheres outside those self-contained biospheres wouldn’t slow them down for long. But robots, however cleverly programmed, had three weaknesses.
    One, they were mechanical, so they were vulnerable to water, weather, and the sucking muds of the wilderness, however well sealed they might be made. Two, destroying them outright or turning them off was far less of an ethical problem for troops than slaying living sentients; colonists rarely hesitated to shoot robots when the two forces were even vaguely close to being equal. And three, they were reprogrammable, either to shut them off
en masse
, or turn them against their masters.
    Humans didn’t use artificially intelligent robots anymore. Not after the mistakes of the AI War . . . and the Salik were beginning to relearn the cost of those mistakes thanks to the Alliance’s counterprogramming efforts. But that was on other worlds. This fight was on Dabin.
    For this world, the Salik had bred organic weapons. They liked the thrill of the hunt—needed to hunt, psychologically—and had maintained many of their wilderness areas on their Motherworld with a near-fanatic zeal. The Salik had brought in fast-growing carnivorous vines, hunting beasts that would herd the colonists into easily contained zones . . . even nuisance pests. Those were supposed to inject a narcotic into their victim’s blood to make each colonist and planetary defender sleepy.
    They hadn’t worked all that well once the bugs had been released into the field. Apparently, the local leathery-winged avians were thoroughly enjoying them as a special snack, snapping them up faster than they could infect and breed. It was a modest break for the colonists. Ia smiled to herself as she checked a report on that fact in the life-stream of a local xenobiologist. She only skimmed the waters of the man’s life, though, before moving on to the next key checkpoint.
    The colonists knew the terrain and were used to dealing with potentially dangerous wildlife. They had various weapons, plenty of ingenuity, and a certain tough, survivalist mind-set on their side. They even had almost four hundred thousand soldiers from the Space Force Army on their side, culled either from Dabin’s own recruits or from colonists from similar heavyworlds. Those troops had been dropped off to protect the planet before the blockade had gone up, preventing the Space Force from bringing in any more.
    Unfortunately, four hundred thousand wasn’t nearly enough since those forces were scattered across a colonyworld one and a half times the size of Earth. The Salik had more than twice as many troops, top-quality arms and armaments for all their soldiers, and ships in orbit blockading most sources of outside help. Beyond their systematic pogrom of destroying anything mechanical that took to the skies above a thousand meters, the frogtopus-like aliens had plenty of psychological horror on their side, too. They ate their captives, after all, preferably while still kicking and screaming.
    The Humans and handful of other races who had settled on this world for more than a century and a half had the superior numbers, true. Before the war started, Dabin had boasted a population of over 300 million Humans. But this was a Joint Colonyworld, neither fully Terran nor fully V’Dan, one that was still a few decades away from true independence. They were still trying to build up their local military and defense forces, which meant relying upon whatever the Terrans and the V’Dan could spare . . . which wasn’t much, at the moment. The Salik had the superior force multipliers, and were slowly winning the war on this world.
    That was why the Damned were here. Something which Ia and her Company would do in the next two months would tip the scales in the Alliance’s favor, but Ia didn’t know what, yet. She had battle plans that would work, but it was something else, something more. Something that required her to personally