Merchants of War

by Rick Partlow

  “Place looks completely deserted,” the former Naval officer said, tracking back and forth across the ruins with the upper torso of his machine.

  “It does,” Nate admitted reluctantly. “I thought it would make a good transfer point for cargo, though. The tracks in and out are still basically intact.” He used his Vulcan to point out at the railroad tracks running from the base of the crane. “And the roads are fairly clear.”

  “That’s the thing about this damned place,” Dix said, snorting a humorless laugh, “there are more ports here than anywhere on the Eastern Seaboard. I was stationed here back when, you know?”

  “You mentioned it once or twice,” Nate replied dryly. Only every few minutes since we arrived. “I’ve been here before myself. Sort of.”

  “That’s gotta be weird, isn’t it?” Dix wondered. “Carrying around the memories from your…what do you call it, the original Nathan Stout?”

  “The prime,” Nate told him, his mouth suddenly going dry. “They called him the prime.”

  Cold talons gripped his spine and he wanted to hit the thrusters and take off again, run away from Dix and the conversation. Dix was the only one who knew, the only one he’d trusted, and then only because the man had run into a previous version of Nate. He wasn’t sure if the others would care, but there was too much riding on keeping BAMF together for him to take the chance.

  He shook off the panic, stuffed the fear away into a locked room inside his head the way he always did, and cleared his throat.

  “No, it’s not weird. Not any weirder than your memories are to you. They just feel like me. The frustrating part is when you know there are things you should remember, but you don’t, because some asshole in a DARPA research lab decided you didn’t need your childhood to pilot a Hellfire. That you don’t need to remember who your wife was…” He trailed off, wincing. “Who your prime’s wife was,” he corrected himself, “when you’re only going to live twelve or fifteen years. That’s what’s weird.”

  “Shit,” Dix murmured. “Sorry, man. Didn’t mean to…”

  “It’s okay. Look, there’s something over there.” He pointed with the mech’s articulated left hand. “I’m not sure if it’s part of this shipyard or not, but I see piers and maybe a drydock. Let’s check it out.”

  Thrusters pushed him back into his seat, the pressure and discomfort in his knees and shoulders a welcome distraction. The physical pain reminded him of his mortality, which was easier to deal with than the spiritual pain, the sort that reminded him of his origins, of the fact he was a cheap, disposable copy. Breaking down. Falling apart. Like Norfolk.

  Closer to the Jordan River Bridge now, soaring just above it with the U-mechs mirroring their flight a few hundred meters behind. This close, the bridge didn’t seem so sturdy, so unchanged. The pilings were intact, but the road surface had eroded away, huge sections cracked and crumbled and just missing, fallen into the river years ago and carried away.

  How long? he wondered. How long before the bridge was washed away on the tides of time, like everything else he’d been fighting to preserve? Jesus, stop being so damned maudlin.

  He caught sight of a sign above where the traffic lanes used to be, announcing the toll for the bridge was $12. He laughed bitterly, remembering paying that shit every single day. Then the laugh died and the bitterness remained. It wasn’t him who’d paid the toll, wasn’t him who’d served in Norfolk.

  He concentrated on checking the other side of the river for threats or signs of activity, running his eyes and the thermal scanners over a ragged line of old cargo containers, dropped off a decade ago and never opened. They lined the shore by the hundreds, rusting away.

  “Nothing on the scanners still,” Dix reported. “You?”

  “Negative.” He didn’t shake his head…that was something you learned, controlling your motions in the cockpit, because the targeting reticle on the missile was slaved to his eyes and the launcher followed the movements of his head. “There’s…” He trailed off, spotting something, then touching a control to force the cockpit optics to zoom in on it. “Over there. I’ll hit it with a laser designator.”

  He blinked and the targeting system projected the laser to follow his eyes down to a cluster of seven containers just behind the pier, right at the edge of the railroad tracks.

  “See those? The damned paint’s not even flaking on them. Someone dropped them off very recently.”

  “Probably used the rail lines,” Dix agreed. “Let’s take a closer look.”

  “No, you stay up here,” Nate decided. “I don’t want us getting caught with our pants down. I’ll take a U-mech down with me.”

  “You’re the boss,” he said, though Nate could tell it wasn’t an acknowledgement as much as it was a gentle reproof. He was the boss and he shouldn’t be taking risks while his subordinates sat back and watched, in other words.

  Tough shit. I was literally built to be expendable. Well, grown, not built, but still…

  “Everything is clear over here, Boss,” Roach said, her voice tinny and distant in his ear. “You want me and Ramirez to head over that way and assist?”

  “Negative,” he told her, grunting at the jolt up through his the small of his back as the Hellfire touched down again. Behind him, the U-mech landed like a shadow, the cloud of dust from its thrusters merging with the billows from his own. “Maintain position and keep scanning that end of the shipyards. Keep this channel open, though,” he added, “and if you hear the sound of shit hitting the fan, you get your asses over here.”

  She was affirming his orders, but the words were a mosquito-buzz in his ear, shut out by his total focus on what the visual scans of the cargo containers and the railway behind them was showing him. The tracks showed signs of recent braking, the oxidation scraped away in streaks. Someone had used it recently, and…

  “Dix, you seeing what I’m seeing?” He used the optical guidance system in his helmet to read where his eyes were focused and sent a laser designator out for his second-in-command.

  “Is that…,” Dix trailed off and Nate could imagine him squinting at the magnified optics. “Cigarette butts?”

  “Bet your ass it is.”

  They were scattered on the gravel and sand beside the railroad tracks, beside one of the cargo containers near the center. Its right-hand door hung open about a dozen centimeters, tantalizing, and Nate took a step closer, the whine of the hip servos deafening in the sudden silence. Darkness concealed the interior from him and he sidestepped, lining up the spotlight on his shoulder and flicking the switch to activate it.

  The angled slice of view he was allowed through the small opening revealed nothing, just bare metal and he muttered a curse.

  “I’m going to pull open the left-side door,” he warned his cover man. “Don’t let the monsters get me, Daddy.”

  “Roger that,” Dix drawled. “And I’ll read you a bedtime story and leave the hall light on.”

  The Hellfire’s articulated left hand was more useful than Nate had imagined it would be the first time Bob had showed him the design. He’d argued with the man, wondering why he’d waste the space on the human hand analog when he could have just put in a second rotary cannon, but situations like this showed why Franklin was a filthy-rich weapons designer and Nate Stout was a divorced Army test pilot…

  Damn. He’d done it again, got lost in the Prime’s memories. He had never met Robert Franklin, much less been close enough friends to call him “Bob.” Franklin had been dead years before he was “born.”

  Get your head in the fucking game, Nathan.

  He wished he could hold the Vulcan in front of him, but there wasn’t room and it would have been overkill for a few dismounts inside a cargo container, so he switched to the 6.5mm machine guns mounted in the mech’s chest, kept his finger held straight beside the trigger on the steering yolk and used the waldo controls to rip the left-hand door aside. It opened with the metallic shriek of a lost soul, whipping around to slam against the sid
e of the container, a hollow, booming thud. Under the glare of the spotlight, he could see…

  “Nothing,” he said. “Empty.”

  “This could be a dry hole, Nate,” Dix warned. “Those butts could have been from days ago. There ain’t been no rain and these containers could have been dropped off weeks ago for all we know…”

  “You weren’t a Captain, were you, Dix?” Nate interrupted him. “In the Navy, I mean?”

  “You know I was a Lieutenant, Nate.”

  “Then stop trying to be Captain Obvious and watch my damn six,” he snapped. “I’m opening the next one.”

  Footpads scraped across the gravel in an awkward sidestep and behind him, the U-mech mirrored his motions in what could have been the world’s most expensive and ridiculous dance routine. The damn things would be so much more useful if they had an autonomous AI system, but no one had managed to work the bugs out before everything had gone to shit.

  Not that they’d worked the bugs out of genetic duplication either, but that hadn’t stopped them from making him and the other dupes. Dupe was a damned good word for it, too. They’d been duped, all right.

  The clawed fingers of the Hellfire’s hand closed around the latch of the right-hand door on the next cargo container over and Nate shifted the mech’s stance, ready to rip the lock apart.

  The railcar exploded. In retrospect, Nate would realize only the one end of the container had been rigged with breaching charges, but at the time it sure as hell felt as if the whole damned thing had exploded. The concussion knocked his Hellfire backwards, off-balance, stumbling in stunned concert with its pilot. For once, the U-mech didn’t mimic his moves, safety interlocks assuring it would stand its ground when its master unit was attacked.

  Nate was yelling incoherently, his stomach doing backflips as he felt the mech collapsing, and only the railcar directly behind it kept him from landing flat on his back and being stuck there like an upturned tortoise, baking in the sun. The U-mech stood watching like that one worthless friend who’d take videos of you falling and post it online before helping you up.

  Which put it directly in the line of fire when the Russian Tagan burst out of the remains of the railcar and opened fire with every weapon it had. The machine had a gaunt, stretched-out frame that had always reminded Nate of some sort of creepy, mechanized zombie, more ridiculous than intimidating; but the blinding glare of cannons and missiles launchers discharging in a ceaseless fusillade of yellow and red fire were suddenly damned intimidating. One second, Nate’s U-mech was standing there, waiting for input Nate was too stunned to give it, and the next, it was the center of an expanding fireball and pieces of it were pinwheeling into the river on trails of black smoke.

  Nate couldn’t see a damned thing, not even on thermal; everything was burning metal and thick, dark, roiling clouds of smoke and his targeting systems couldn’t get a fix through it. Desperate, he fired a Mark-Ex anti-armor missile blindly and stomped on the thruster controls, blasting backwards into the container behind him. He’d been trying to bounce off the metal railcar, trying to get airborne, but the angle was wrong and instead, he tipped the thing over backwards and himself with it.

  The Marx-Ex hit something, though God knew what. He felt the detonation in his sinuses, heard the ricochets off his chest plastron just before he flipped backwards, his helmet smacking hard enough against the interior cockpit wall to send stars floating across his vision. Then he was on his left side, or the Hellfire was on its left side, or both; and the roaring was still filling his ears and flashes of light blanked out his view and a hailstorm of dirt and gravel and burning, ragged bits of metal were falling all around him.

  Did I get it? I must have gotten it…

  Then he heard a long burst of static on his helmet earphones, nearly drowned out by the chorus of alarms and warnings and alerts sounding in the cockpit. It took him a half-second to focus on the sound, another fraction of a second to pick it out from the feedback as a man’s voice, yelling in shock and surprise and maybe pain.

  It was Brian Richardson, and he was screaming.

  Three

  “Taking fire!” Richards was screaming. “I’ve got damage to my port turbine!”

  “Hold on!” Nate told him, jamming his left arm forward against the control gimbal, wedging his Hellfire’s hand into the gravel and trying to push the mech over onto its stomach, trying to get its legs underneath him. “Roach! Ramirez! Patty! Get your asses over here!”

  “On our way, boss!” Roach Mata called. “But we’re two mikes out now.”

  “Well, shit,” he murmured, kicking the mech’s feet out and trying to roll it back to its feet. “That might be just a bit longer than we have to live.”

  The haptic resistance of the controls made it almost feel as if Nate were physically lifting the multi-ton Pi-Mech to its feet, and he nearly screamed himself at the white-hot knife of pain in his left AC joint, the chronic bursitis in his shoulder just one of the effects of the gradual degeneration dupes went through as they passed mid-life. But then he was upright, squatting behind the overturned railcar, and he could finally see what was going on.

  Brian Richardson’s U-mech was crashing into the river in what seemed like slow motion, bits of it tumbling away from the slowly spinning, fiery mass of the torso, fountains of steam hissing off the surface of the water as the burning wreckage hit piecemeal. It had taken a missile; nothing else would have knocked it down so quickly, and Dix was heading down as well. His Hellfire trailed smoke from its portside turbine and the starboard was feathering, either from damage or on purpose, to get him on the ground before he crashed.

  But where’s the damned Tagan?

  Something that big, how the hell could he lose it?

  In the smoke, naturally.

  Clouds of it were flowing across the dock, over the pier, a smudge across the river, pulled over his vision like an impenetrable veil. The thermal sensors picked up fountains of glaring white everywhere he looked, the lidar useless in the haze of particulates, the radar…

  Shit.

  The radar showed something big and medal and only ten meters to his right. He planted his mech’s left foot and spun toward the threat, trying to bring anything he had to bear on it, but just a fraction of a second too slow. 25mm armor-piercing rounds speared through the smoke, chased by the low chop-chop-chop stutter of the Tagan’s chain gun. They weren’t as big or as fast or as immediately lethal as the 20mm cannon rounds of his Vulcan, but they were on target and he wasn’t.

  Armor cracked and splintered along his mech’s left shoulder and the concussive vibration shook him like a bone in a dog’s mouth. Fighting to keep focus, he switched his weapons control to his missile launcher, trying to get a lock-on with the radar. Warning lights flashed red and the trigger locked hard against his finger—the missile launcher had been hit and now there were several hundred thousand dollars’ worth of useless high-explosive ordnance trapped only meters away from him and someone was shooting at it.

  He cursed and fire wildly with his 40mm cannons, not expecting to hit anything, but wanting to at least take his shot before the Russian bastard took him out. Amazingly, one of the rounds slammed home somewhere on the Tagan’s right torso and it recoiled to the side at the detonation of the explosive round, giving Nate time to move. He lunged against the waldos, throwing his Hellfire to the right, the footpads throwing up sprays of gravel as the long-legged strides ate up ground. Behind him, 25mm shells tore up the ground, each its own miniature mushroom cloud.

  “Patty!” he yelled into his audio pickup. “Roach! Ramirez! Goddammit, is anyone in range yet?”

  He wanted to take off, try to fly, get some distance between him and the Tagan, but he couldn’t do that. Dix was back there, his mech damaged, and he couldn’t abandon him. He had to keep the thing engaged, which meant he had to stay on the ground. He ducked behind another of the cargo containers, weaving in and out of the rusted and time-worn metal railcars as 25mm rounds chopped a trail of sparks
and dust and smoke behind him.

  Servo motors whined in protest at the strain, joints grinding at each hard turn, data and images scrolling across his sensor screens and his HUD faster than he could follow. He abandoned hope of trying to follow the lidar and radar and thermal readings and just concentrated on his Mk-I eyeballs

  What they showed him, just past the line of railcars, just over the rise of the railroad track, was a drydock. Basically a huge pit dug into the ground and lined with concrete, the front end abutted the river and could be flooded to let ships float in, then drained to allow work on the lower hull. It was dozens of meters down and even a mech wouldn’t survive a fall to the bottom of it. Maybe if he could draw the Tagan after him, get it on the other side of the drydock, Dix would have time to get out.

  He was still debating the idea one second later when a missile from the Russian mech speared through the end of the cargo container he’d just ducked behind, the force of the blast from the warhead ripping half the railcar into metal shrapnel and sending the rest spinning into the air, trailing a halo of black smoke. The concussion slammed into the Hellfire and sent it and him flying and ending the debate. He jammed his thruster control pedals to the floor, trying to keep his mech upright, and shot over the top of the cargo container, taking off at a sharp angle just a few meters off the ground.

  The railroad tracks flashed by just beneath his canopy and he came within a meter of colliding with an old power pole. The Tagan didn’t miss it, didn’t seem to care it was there. The pole shattered in creosote-coated wood splinters at the impact with the Russian mech’s shoulder and then Nate was facing forward, lining his mech’s body up with the thrusters, aiming for the far side of the drydock.

  A missile flashed by him, narrowly missing as he dodged, began to curve back toward him. This time, though, his Hellfire’s automated anti-missile systems had time to detect it and the 6.5mm machine guns in his chest swiveled to open fire on the warhead as it corrected its course. The missile went out of control, its guidance system damaged, heading off straight into the sky and self-destructing over a kilometer away.