Merchants of War

by Rick Partlow

  Splash one, but unfortunately, that meant the guy behind me had no reason not to launch his own missiles now. There was no way I was going to be able to get him under my guns in time, and I sure as hell wasn’t going to trust my life to Rivers, so I dove. We were only about sixty meters up, I had to cool down my thrusters pretty soon, and damned if there was much land around directly beneath me. I could see the shallows, could tell by radar and lidar pings how deep they were and I knew this thing was watertight.

  All I needed was something to put between me and the missiles the threat display assured me were dogging my tail, and I found it in an old, abandoned boathouse at the end of a partially-collapsed dock. Corroded sheet metal covered the dock and served as a roof for the boathouse, discolored and stained with decades of bird shit. It looked like a good, stiff breeze could knock it over, but it had lasted here on the Atlantic coast for this long without falling to hurricane winds and I had to bet it was sturdy enough to set off a missile warhead.

  I dropped into the water on the other side of the boathouse, steam hissing up in a roiling cloud above me as red-hot thruster cowlings hit the winter-cool seawater of the inlet. My Hellfire was still sinking chest-deep when the missiles slammed into the other side of the boathouse. It was close—way too close, close enough I could feel the heat through the water and through the cockpit, close enough the sound battered me like a physical blow and the flash blinded me even through the polarized canopy.

  The concussion sent my mech drifting sideways and I could hear the metal hailstorm of fragments from the boathouse pinging off the machine’s right shoulder just before it sank beneath the surface. Heat levels were dropping down into the green, but I didn’t just sit there and watch them; there was still work to do. I dug one foot, then the other into the sand at the bottom of the inlet, pushing the mech up and out of the water in three long steps.

  I stomped the throttle pedals and shot up into the air again, an explosion of steam and spraying saltwater marking my launch from the shallows at the edge of the inlet. The boathouse was gone, just a jumble of smoldering wooden pilings, and the dock had collapsed the rest of the way into the water, just one more piece of the past sinking into the waves of time.

  I half-expected to see Rivers heading the same way, but I was surprised to find his mech only half a kilometer from mine, running slowly and awkwardly down the strand beside the inlet. When I hit the jets, so did he, pulling up into a trailing echelon beside me.

  “Where’s the Tagan that launched on me?” I asked him, scanning radar. I hoped I hadn’t let him get past me toward the base. It would be a bitch trying to catch up with him.

  “He’s toast,” Rivers told me. “I splashed him right after he launched.”

  “I take back everything I was thinking about you, Rivers,” I told him, grinning. “Come on, let’s see what damage we can do.”

  Reynolds and Washburn were still in one piece, at least according to their transponders, and so were five of the Tagans. Three down already. Not bad.

  Our guys were on the ground and so were two of the Russians, sniping at each other from opposite sides of a strand across the pothole-pocked remnant of an old road. The other three Tagans were in a tight formation, three kilometers west of us, heading in a steep descent toward solid ground.

  “They’re about to hit the forest and try to lose us,” I said. “Second Squadron, where the hell are you?”

  “Patience, newbie,” the woman, Captain Lindquist by her transponder signal, told me. “Check your screens, we’re heading right for the bogies.”

  And they were. I reddened a bit at the “newbie” crack, but now wasn’t the time. Second was less than a kilometer north of the Russian formation, and I could see radar blips as they launched a spread of missiles on the way in.

  “We got this,” Lindquist assured me. “Go help your people.”

  “Roger that, Second.” I switched frequencies. “Follow me in, Rivers.”

  I couldn’t get a target lock for a missile through the trees, and there was a damned good chance the warheads wouldn’t keep it anyway with our own guys so close down there. Time for a good old-fashioned knife fight.

  “Washburn, Reynolds, we’re coming in,” I told them. “Don’t fucking shoot us.”

  “No promises,” Reynolds said, her voice taut with the stress of the fight but still playful. “I don’t know you that well yet.”

  Yet? Newbie? What were they talking about? Hadn’t I been assigned here for months now?

  The Tagans had noticed us coming in and one of them tried to launch a missile, but he didn’t get a clean lock through the thick tree branches overhead and the Russian junk went soaring past us both, destined for the open water. I ignored it and fed him a long burst of 20mm, which wouldn’t discriminate between tree and mech, just speared through one on the way to the other. Wood fragments exploded downward and limbs fell, and so did the Russian.

  The last one tried to run, tried to blast away on thrusters, but he was too slow, or maybe Rivers was too fast. My wingman launched a missile the second the Tagan cleared the trees and at this range, there was no avoiding the Xyston. It blew the Russian mech into scrap metal, the burning, smoking bits of what remained splashing into the shallows beside the road.

  I touched down in the middle of the old road, Rivers landing only meters away to my right and just behind me. He was a decent wingman for all his griping earlier.

  “Everyone okay?” I asked the others. “Any damage?”

  “Only to my pride,” Washburn said, sounding miffed she hadn’t nailed one of the Tagans without our help. “Thanks, Stout. That was a damn good job for a dupe right out of the tanks.”

  “Your migraine even go away yet?” Rivers wondered.

  Ice crept down the veins of my arms and up the arteries to my brain and a veil of unreality fell across my perceptions. Suddenly, I knew. I knew what I was and I knew when was and the bottom seemed to fall right out of the world.

  But Charlie…Charlie had known me. He’d treated me like he knew me.

  He knew the last one. The one before you. The one that got itself killed.

  “First Squadron,” Combat Control said and I barely heard the words. “We are detecting an incoming signal, intermittent and coming in low just three kilometers north of your current position. We think it’s a stealth helicopter coming in from the coast. It has to be the Russians. Intercept immediately.”

  “Shit.” Helicopter. Hadn’t control said something about the Russians smuggling a nuke in with a helicopter in Jacksonville? “Come on!”

  I hit thrusters, pushing the redline to get there in time, not even checking the screen to see if they were following me. My eyes were only on the radar blip of the chopper, just the slightest shadow. I would have thought it was a false reading if Combat Control hadn’t already put a red enemy icon over it on my threat display. It was moving, but not fast. It was carrying a heavy load. Counting on the Tagans to distract us.

  Did it even have a crew or was it remotely piloted? Would the Russians trust something like this to the vagaries of a remote control signal or a pre-programmed autopilot? I’d find out soon, when it detected us coming in on it. I got missile lock, but I’d have to wait until it was in range. Maybe another minute at our relative speeds.

  If it was a nuke, would my missile set it off? I wasn’t a fucking physicist and I had no idea. Should I ask Control? What the hell would they tell me, don’t shoot it, just let it come on in and blow us up?

  “Status, First Squadron?” Her voice was nagging and I wanted to snap back until I realized she would be just as scared and uncertain as I was.

  “Forty seconds till intercept,” I told her. “I have missile lock, waiting for range.”

  “Roger that. Good luck.”

  Good luck, she says. If I had good luck, I wouldn’t be the latest in a long line of dupes popped out of a tank in a lab.

  The other pilots, they’d all be the same as me. We were knock-offs, cheap copies like
those fake Gucci purses they used to sell on the streets of New York, and we’d last just as long. It wouldn’t matter that the radiation leaking from the mech reactors would kill us in twenty years from cancer because we’d be dead in twelve anyway.

  Why did we do it? Why did we keep fighting without being given a choice?

  Because they made sure to only duplicate believers, patriots. And they only included memories to reinforce that, not the ones where we were doubting it all. Bastards.

  And I knew the other versions of me had thought all this, too, and still did their duty. And so would I.

  Bastards.

  The targeting reticle flashed green.

  “Launching,” I announced, squeezing the trigger before I spoke the word.

  I could see the helicopter now, sleek and black and curved like a dragonfly. It had a feral beauty to it and I almost hated I was going to destroy it. I guess the Russians hated that too, the damned spoilsports, or else they figured this was close enough to the base.

  The exploding heart of a star erupted less than a kilometer away and everything went white.

  Better luck next time.

  Five

  Nate Stout couldn’t sleep. He’d been told insomnia was a symptom of genetic degradation, a byproduct of his abbreviated lifespan, but he thought of it as a desperate attempt to cram more experience into fewer years. Usually he thought that. Tonight, he would really just like to have gotten some rest. Stubborn, he tried to keep his eyes closed, but the light leaking in under the window shade was a magnet, drawing his attention even through eyelids squeezed shut. It navigated the tiny bunkroom with the thoroughness of a lidar scan, probing the folds of the shower-curtain dividers they’d hung to divide the space into thirds and the tarps that served as a roof to keep out the moisture and bat shit from the high ceiling of the old warehouse.

  He wondered if maybe he’d nodded off and hadn’t realized it, but a check of his watch told him it was wishful thinking. It was 0230 and the last time he’d looked, it had been 0158. Two meters away, Dix snored peacefully, as if he hadn’t nearly died a few hours ago. No sweating night terrors for that man.

  Well, the vodka probably helped.

  There’d been a fifth originally, but what remained in the bottle sitting on Dix’s nightstand was about a third of a fifth, which was…

  Shit. Can’t do that in my head.

  Nate sighed, sitting up and swinging his legs over the side of the bed. He reached over and grabbed the bottle, sloshing the clear liquid around the bottom third of it. He unscrewed the cap and took a small swig, grimacing as it burned its way down his throat and settled like smoldering lump of coal into his stomach, heavy and uncomfortable. He could finish it off. He’d sleep then, sure as shit, and regret the hell out of it in the morning.

  He’d worked hung over before, in his own memory not his Prime’s. Sometimes it was harder to deal with the facts of his life than others and alcohol was easier to acquire than other drugs. But the facts would still be there in the morning, when the buzz was long gone and the misery remained.

  He’d worked without sleep before, too, and while it was still miserable at least it involved less physical pain. He set the bottle back down and pushed off the cot. It squeaked in protest, only settling down once his weight was off it and back onto his damned knees. He picked through the collection of odds and ends on the nightstand and found a bottle of ibuprofen, popping the cap and pouring out eight of them, then downing them with another swallow of vodka.

  That shit would be bad for his liver in the long run, if he had one.

  He was dressed in shorts and a t-shirt and he considered just slipping into some flip-flops, but shit always happened when you were least prepared, so he pulled on fatigue pants and combat boots instead and grabbed the gun belt hanging off the end of the cot. It was an old Glock, the slide’s finish worn and faded from decades of use, but it still functioned and the ammo was cheap to fabricate. You could get 9mm from any street-corner vendor.

  He buckled the Glock around his waist and pushed through the shower curtain into the main floor of the warehouse. The Hellfires brooded in the shadows, ever watchful, their isotope reactors pouring out heat twenty-four-seven, whether they were using it or not. The man-made isotopes were expensive as hell, each fuel cell costing more than the mech it powered, and the radioactivity they generated would kill you just as sure as a missile, which was why the shielding was even more expensive than the fuel cell. It had only been developed in the last ten years, only widespread in the last six or seven.

  The deadliness of the radiation was the reason for his existence. Even with the war, the government hadn’t been able to justify sticking soldiers in a weapon that would give them terminal cancer with even the best shielding available at the time. Then someone had come up with the brilliant idea to make the dupes, disposable soldiers for a vital weapon in the war against the Russians. It had probably seemed like an acceptable solution in a world where nukes were taking out US cities, delivered not by ICBMs the missile defense system could have brought down but smuggled in by terrorists, mercenaries hired by the Russians.

  He probably could have lived with that, could have accepted his fate as a vital cog in the war effort, a last-ditch attempt to save what was left of the United States…but then, around the same time he emerged from the gestation tank, the new shielding had been developed and anyone could fly a mech without worrying about frying their nads off. He was cut loose, given a payout and told to fend for himself.

  What the hell does it say about me that I used the money to start BAMF?

  He felt the mechs staring at him when he turned his back on them and paced through the grease and dust to the back door. It required an access code to open from either side because he wasn’t the most trusting soul even when the gear was subsidized by the Department of Defense, and all the entrances were monitored by infrared and thermal cameras hooked up to a sophisticated security system keyed with each of their biometric data. If anyone not in the databanks tried to enter, with or without the access code, it would set off an alarm.

  It wasn’t enough. They really needed round-the-clock guards, but that would have meant hiring more people and then trusting those people, which was an even harder commodity to part with than the money. So they made do with what they had. He punched in his code and pulled the door open.

  The storm had passed in a paroxysm of violent, wind-blown rain and thunder hours ago, leaving the pier with a rare, washed-clean smell. It would all go to hell again when the sun came up, would go back to smelling like days-old shit and rotten eggs, but for now he could almost bear it. The clouds had blown inland and the moon was out, glowing fiercely against the waters of the bay. The city was dark in the distance, and he could see the stars. He didn’t used to be able to see them at night, not with the light pollution. It had only taken nuclear devastation to solve the problem.

  “What are you doing up, Boss?”

  He hadn’t realized he’d moved until he found himself in a crouch behind a rusted-out dumpster, his Glock in his hand. Roach Mata watched him with amusement in her dark eyes, not even blinking at the gun being pointed at her.

  “Damn it, Roach,” he sighed, reholstering the pistol. “That’s a good way to get yourself shot.”

  “It was worth it to watch you jump,” she told him.

  “I can’t sleep and I didn’t feel like drinking myself into a stupor,” he answered her question honestly, then arched an eyebrow. “What’s your excuse?”

  “Too much shit on my mind,” she said, shrugging, turning away from him to look out over the bay. “Plus, it’s pretty out tonight. It’s usually so fucking ugly here.”

  “Night like this,” he said, “you can almost forget what’s happened. It almost looks normal.”

  She turned and eyed him sidelong, a confused, troubled look.

  “You say shit like that, sometimes,” she told him, “and I don’t know what you mean. You can’t be old enough to remember what it
was like before, can you?”

  He considered telling her the truth. He’d thought about it before. Roach he could almost trust. But how would she react? Would she stay if he told her what he was, or would she look at him like the freak he was? Was it worth the risk?

  “My parents told me,” he lied instead. “And I’ve seen movies, series from back then, same as you. This isn’t normal.” He waved a hand around them, at the shadowy husks of once-proud warships, at the blackened remains of buildings. “You don’t have to be an old man to tell that. The way we live isn’t the way things should be.”

  “It’s how they are.” Her tone wasn’t so much argumentative as it was dejected. He was surprised. He’d never heard her like this. “It’s how my parents grew up. My brothers and sisters, all my friends, this is how we live now, and all the shit you and Dix talk about, none of that seems real.”

  “You don’t think we can get it back?” He realized he almost sounded hurt. He hadn’t meant to, but he was afraid he was coming off as disappointed in her. “Do you not believe in what we’re doing anymore?”

  “What we’re doing is fighting a holding action against an enemy who doesn’t even know why they’re here anymore, Boss.” She shook her head. “It’s worth doing, worth it to reduce the suffering they cause when they try to knock over what’s left. But I don’t think we’re ever going to have what your parents or my grandparents had. Neither one of us is going to live long enough to see the United States they remember.”

  He glanced at her sharply, struck by the sudden, paranoid suspicion that she knew about him, but then he relaxed, realizing what she meant. She must have taken it as a sign he was upset about what she’d said, because she put a hand on his arm, apologetic.