Merchants of War

by Rick Partlow

  “I know it means a lot to you, and to Dix, too. You were both in the military and the rest of us never were. But we have to understand what we’re really doing here. We’re trying to put out a forest fire with a plastic beach shovel.”

  “You’ve been thinking about this a lot,” he realized. “Is that why you were so close to the edge today with Patty?”

  She let her fingers slip off his forearm and there was a curious warmth left behind on his skin, a longing for human contact he hadn’t realized he still possessed.

  “Patty is an asshole.” She shrugged diffidently. “That’s probably all he is, but I don’t trust him to have my back, not the way I trust the rest of you. He’s only in this for the money, and once someone proves they can be bought, it’s just a question of who’s paying the most.” She rolled her shoulders, tilting her head back and working the kinks out of her neck. “But yeah, it’s been bugging me.”

  “We still have to work with him,” Nate pointed out. “Is there any way you could make peace with him? It could just be he feels isolated out here.” He snorted. “I mean, don’t we all?”

  She rolled her eyes, not hiding the disgust she felt, but finally she nodded, throwing her hands up in surrender.

  “Fine. I’ll talk to him tomorrow morning while Dix is working on the Tagan. But I can’t promise I won’t put my damned fist through that stupid dog-in-a-manger face of his if he starts smarting off at me again.”

  Nate grinned. It was a shame Roach was so much younger than him… No, dumbass, she’s fifteen years older than you are.

  “Well, I would order you to be nice to him,” he said, “but a good officer never gives an order he knows won’t be followed.”

  Geoff Patterson winced when he saw Rachel Mata walking toward him and turned back to the innards of his mech, trying to ignore her. The mech was simple, its demands understandable and easily met. It had grit and sand in the left hip actuator and all he had to do was clean it out. People were so much harder to figure.

  He brushed vigorously at the joint with the stiff-bristled cleaner, focusing on his work and studiously ignoring everything else, until his arm was sore and the metal of the actuator housing was polished a bright silver. He paused to wipe the mid-morning sweat out of his eyes and finally saw Roach standing, watching him with crossed arms.

  “Don’t you got your own maintenance to do?” he asked her, setting the brush down on the tray beside the step-ladder.

  “I’m surprised there’s so much to clean up,” she said archly. “I mean, it’s not like you got into a fight or anything. Where’d you get all the damn sand from?”

  “Jesus, Roach, can we not do this again?” he moaned, grabbing a rag to wipe the grease from his hands. “Don’t we all got enough work to do?”

  “I’m sorry,” she said, surprising him. “I didn’t mean to…” She waved a hand as if erasing the conversation. “Look, what I came over to say was, if there’s something going on and you need help, I want to help. I know I can come on a little strong, but people shooting at you gets your blood pumping.”

  “No, I’m the one who’s sorry,” he told her, stepping down the ladder, still a head taller than her but at least closer to eye-to-eye. “I screwed up and I nearly let you all get killed. I wasn’t where I was supposed to be yesterday.” He sucked in a breath, wanting to tell her all of it but knowing he couldn’t. He needed to tell someone but he also wasn’t suicidal. “We’ve had so many dry holes, so many false alarms, I didn’t think anything would happen. I just thought I’d end up sitting in my mech, sweating my ass off for hours while you guys knocked over garbage dumpsters looking for imaginary Russians.”

  “So you flaked off?” she asked. It wasn’t a chiding tone, instead almost…understanding?

  “I found a nice beach somewhere and touched down,” he admitted. “Somewhere with sand and not too much garbage, and no sewage in the water, and I got out and took off my boots and walked around in it.”

  “Jesus, where the hell is that?” she asked, eyes wide. “If there’s no sewage, I want to go there!”

  He chuckled. Roach was actually human, sometimes.

  “Yorktown. Nobody goes there ‘cause the bridge is out on one side and the roads are fucked up on the other. You can only reach it from the air, or by boat.” He shrugged. “Or on foot, I guess.”

  “Shit, that’s kind of close to the Quarantine Zone,” she said, making a face like she’d bit into something sour. “You plan on having kids or do you just not care if they’re born with webbed feet?”

  “I didn’t stay that long. Like I said, I wanted someplace with sand, even if it’s radioactive.” He closed his eyes, sighed. “It was just a few minutes, but it put me out of position when the call came in and I knew if I answered, you’d be able to figure out where I was. I did try to fly in, but it was all over before I was anywhere close.”

  “Tell me something, Patty, why are you out here? Is there really no other way to make money in Kentucky?”

  “My family has bills,” he told her, honestly this time. “Medical bills. I needed money fast or they were going to lose their home. I ain’t really qualified for anything, but there was a government training program for the mechs…” He blinked at something in his eye, rubbed it away. “I miss my mom and my sisters sometimes. Ain’t no way to call them, ‘cause the connection out there isn’t any good for anything but text.”

  “All right.” There was a cast to her eyes as if he’d finally said something she could grab onto, some sort of common ground. “I tell you what, I know some people through my dad, and they have access to the government satellite communications net. If you want to set something up with your family, I can try to get them some screen time with you. Or if they’re too far out, you can record some video here and I’ll stream it to the government net and see if they can mirror it over to your family.”

  He smiled, and was shocked when he meant it.

  “I’d like that. Thanks, Roach.”

  “No problem, man. Just keep me in the loop, okay?”

  “Hey guys!” Ramirez called from the other side of the warehouse bay. Patty looked up and saw the man waving them toward the other end near the cargo doors, where they’d laid out the remains of the Tagan. “Dix has got into the CPU. Come check this shit out!”

  Patterson deflated like a stuck balloon, as if the announcement had yanked him out of the good place he’d just been and back into the reality of the situation.

  “Come on,” Roach urged him. “You can help me explain to Mule why I’m not a ‘guy.’ Assuming you know the difference.”

  Six

  “What’s that Russian piece of shit got to tell us, Dix?” Nate asked between bites of his sandwich. It wasn’t much, just pita bread, canned tuna and cheese. Regular bread went bad quick near the bay and you couldn’t keep fresh meat around long, nor could you get it very often. The cheese was a treat, but it wouldn’t last long, especially around Dix.

  Dix didn’t look up from the worktable where he had the Tagan’s CPU cracked open, adaptor plugs jammed into its ports and back into his own tablet. He chewed on his lip, fingers holding open the alligator clips of a portable power supply, hovering over the motherboard as he tried to decide where to attach it.

  “Don’t know that I’d call it a piece of shit,” Dix murmured, “since it was good enough to almost kill me.”

  Nate snorted, waving dismissively and taking a sip of energy drink, his fourth of the day. Massive doses of caffeine and sugar weren’t any better for him than the ibuprofen or the cigarettes, but it kept him going.

  “The thing surprised us,” he said. “And that breaching charge nearly took my Hellfire out before I even knew it was there. Not a fair fight.”

  “Jesus, Nate,” Dix sighed. “You, more than anyone else here, should know that fair fights are for suckers.”

  “Preach it, Dix,” Roach said, leaning back against the stand-up tool chest. “Hey, Ramirez, grab me a can of Rocket Juice, will you?”


  “Your damn legs broken, Roach?” he griped, but did it anyway, walking over to the small refrigerator plugged into their generator and grabbing two cans of the energy drink, then shooting a questioning glance at Patty. “You want one while I’m over here?” he asked the tall man.

  “Sure, thanks, Mule.”

  Ramirez scowled at the unwelcome nickname but picked out a third can anyway and carried them over to the other pilots.

  “So whatcha got, Dix?” Roach asked the Navy pilot, popping open the can and taking a long swig, then belching with impressive volume and duration. Nate and Patty applauded with golf-claps and the woman took a small bow. “I’m missing my afternoon nap for this shit,” she reminded him, going on as if there hadn’t been an interruption.

  “This shit ain’t like hammering loose a stuck actuator chica,” he told her archly over the top of the gimbal-mounted ring light/magnifying glass setup hanging between his eyes and the motherboard. “I fuck this up, we get nothing but a bunch of gibberish.”

  “Oh, don’t give that shit,” Roach teased him. “The damn computer software’s doing all the heavy lifting, you’re just plugging it in.”

  “So plug it in already, viejito,” Ramirez urged him, laughing.

  “Watch your mouth, Junior,” Dix shot him a glare. “You’re still the Mule so I ain’t gotta take your lip.”

  Nate struggled to keep a straight face as Ramirez paled, mouth dropping open. In the end, he couldn’t do it and busted out in giggles just ahead of Dix and, amazingly, Patty.

  “I’m just fucking with you, Mule,” Dix said between guffaws, trying to hold onto the alligator clips even though his shoulders were shaking with laughter. “Now for real, all of you guys shut up for a second and let me concentrate.”

  He bit his lip again and attached the clips to a wire going into the Motherboard. The computer screen flashed to life with an hourglass symbol spinning in a three-dimensional starfield for a good ten seconds. Then folders and files began scrolling down the screen in Cyrillic, filling it up and scrolling downward faster than Nate could follow.

  “Looks like you uncovered a shitload of Russian porn, Dix,” Nate told him, wiping crumbs off his flight suit. The sandwich had been bland, but he’d still polished it off quickly. “If you find any redheads in there, you save those for me, all right?”

  He felt as if the load on his shoulders had lightened a bit with Roach and Dix no longer at Patty’s throat. Keeping everyone in a good mood was a challenge, especially in Norfolk…or hell, anywhere on the Eastern Seaboard.

  Maybe we can finish this mission and get the fuck out of here soon, someplace not quite as scuzzy.

  “I’m getting the program to translate,” Dix told him, switching off the ring light and turning his attention to the display. “It’ll do a keyword search, too, which should get us the GPS data and the communications log.”

  “And what’s that gonna tell us?” Patty asked him. The Kentuckian seemed a bit subdued, quiet, and he wondered if Roach had talked to him.

  “At the bare minimum, where the control rig for the Tagan was sitting, and where the mech flew in from.” Dix shrugged. “Maybe where it’s travelled for however long it’s been since they reset the GPS recorder.”

  “That could be valuable if they smuggled it in,” Roach said, nodding. “We might find out where they’re using as a port.”

  “Ah, here we go.” Dix slapped a palm on the table in triumph as information began to scroll across the screen in English. “There’s the communications log, and the GPS data. Huh.” He looked up and met Nate’s eyes. “The fuckers were controlling it from a satellite this time.”

  “Do the Russians have any satellites up, still?” Ramirez wondered. “I thought I read somewhere we took their birds down early in the war.”

  “You read?” Roach asked him, eyes wide with disbelief.

  “Oh, fuck you,” Ramirez snapped, waving a hand at her impatiently.

  “Maybe they did, maybe they didn’t,” Dix allowed, “but this is one of our birds. The control signal bounced off it, but it left an address.”

  “Well, don’t keep us in suspense, Dix,” Nate said, leaning forward on his elbows on the worktable.

  Langley.” He nodded out the open rear freight doors where the water was visible. “Right across the damned bay from us.”

  “The fuck?” Nate blurted. He paced over to the open bay doors, leaning with his hand against the edge of the doorway to look out over the Chesapeake as if he could see their enemies with the naked eye. “How the hell did they manage that? You got an Air Force base over there, along with what’s left of the CIA headquarters, and even if some of the buildings got toasted, I know for a fact they can still do some serious signal intercept. How could they not detect a bunch of Russians in a van with a satellite transmission antenna in broad daylight?”

  “Who says they were in a van?” Roach asked. Her lip curled in a sneer. “I’ve never trusted the spooks. You always read about them being arrested for selling out to the Russians or the Chinese. How much you wanna bet the Russians had someone in SatComs operate this thing for them?” She nodded towards the charred husk of the Tagan hanging from a cargo hook in a corner.

  “Well, that ain’t in here,” Dix admitted. “But I’ll tell you what is: we got the GPS data for where this Russian hunk of junk has been for the last three weeks.”

  Nate stalked back over to the worktable, leaning over Dix’s shoulder to read the display. A map of Virginia and her adjoining states was laid out over the GPS readings, their track a red line ending at the pier where they’d destroyed the Tagan, trailing up a railroad line north up the coast and ending up in Maryland.

  “Fucking Baltimore,” Nate muttered. “No surprise there.”

  Baltimore was a nightmare, even before the nukes. You could smuggle just about anything in there as long as you were willing to risk getting killed for it.

  “Where does that all leave us?” Roach demanded. “What do we know now we didn’t before?”

  Nate wanted to chide Roach for being too negative, but it was a damned good question. The CPU hadn’t yielded anything useful except…

  “Maybe that’s how they found us,” he speculated quietly. “If someone in Langley, either at the Air Base or the CIA, sold out to the Russians, they could have told them where we were operating.”

  Dix’s eyes went wide and Roach began glancing around at the walls as if she expected them to close in on her.

  “If that’s so,” Dix said, “then they might know where we…”

  The alarm was one Nate had never expected to hear, the warbling staccato of the threat radar alerting them of incoming aircraft. For a moment, all of them were frozen, as if this were some shared nightmare they expected to wake up from at any second. Dix broke the paralysis, kicking away from his folding chair and lunging for the radar screen set up on a rolling table beside the bay doors. Nate was right on his heels, shamed into motion, knowing he should have been the first to act.

  “What is it?” he asked, squinting at the mid-day haze. Even if there hadn’t been a semi-permanent layer of pollution hanging over Norfolk, it would have been hard to make out anything in the harsh light.

  “I’m seeing four bogies here,” Dix reported, sounding much calmer than Nate. “Maybe…five klicks out, coming from the northeast. Moving slow, maybe a hundred knots.”

  “Translation for those of us who were never swabbies?” Roach asked.

  “195 klicks an hour,” Dix told her. “About 120 miles an hour for our undereducated Kentucky types,” he added to Patty. He shrugged. “I mean, I ain’t exactly air traffic control here, it could be helicopters.”

  “Everyone to their mechs,” Nate decided, motioning towards the machines resting in their berth along the far wall. “If it’s a false alarm, we’ll all just be uncomfortable for a while, but I don’t want to get caught with our thumbs up our ass.”

  Ramirez was closest and he was already halfway into his Hellfire before Pa
tty and Roach even had their canopies open. Nate hung back for too long, eyes glued to the radar screen, barely noticing Dix running past him. From the four slow-moving aircraft there emerged four smaller blips, much faster and coming straight for them.

  “Missiles!” he yelled, lunging across the room, knowing in his gut he had to get into his mech and knowing just as certainly he wasn’t going to make it.

  There was a distant hiss of rockets and a feeling at the back of his neck, static electricity raising the hackles, and some small part of his brain that was thinking rationally and not blanking out with fear remembered the ECM shield. It activated automatically when the radar detected incoming missile fire, nothing as fancy as a real military base would have had back in the day, no counter-missile batteries, no CWIS turrets. It was as basic as a pair of sounding rockets, launched in tandem and trailing a superconductive net into a protective arc, then triggering a charge through it when it reached a certain altitude.

  He kept running, knowing what would happen when the missiles hit the net and their warheads detonated a couple hundred meters away. The magnetic field of the net would stop the fragmentation, but nothing was going to stop the…

  Concussion!

  The hand of God touched him and not in a loving way. Computers, repair equipment, the generator, the refrigerator and the wrecked Tagan spun and tumbled and fell and so did he. Concrete thumped him in the middle of the back, driving the breath out of his lungs, and the back of his head glanced against the floor despite an instinctive tuck of his chin, learned by his Prime in another life’s jujitsu lessons. Flashes of light swam across his eyes and a moment’s lethargy kept him from moving even though he knew he had to get up or die.

  Hands were yanking him to his feet and pushing him towards his mech and he knew it was Dix. He wanted to tell the man to leave him, to get to his own machine because there wasn’t enough time. The enemy would be here in seconds and it was taking too long, but talking would take even longer and it would be a waste of time because he wouldn’t listen anyway.