Merchants of War

by Rick Partlow

  Glimpses of the carnage around him like film frames between the flashes of pain and stars in his vision. Patty and Ramirez were locked in, powered up, their Hellfires pulling away from their maintenance racks, Patty knocking half of his over with reckless speed. Roach was pulling herself into her seat, her legs kicking as she struggled upward through the cockpit hatch.

  And a Tagan was hovering outside the open loading bay, its chain gun tracking toward them.

  “Dix, get down!” he tried to yell at his friend, but by then it was far too late, the words swallowed up in the full-throated roar of the 25mm firing.

  Blood splashed across Nate’s face, a sticky, metallic taste in his mouth and a wash of red stinging his eyes, blinding him. He spat and wiped at his eyes, wondering if he’d get the chance to see the round that killed him. What he saw instead was Patty rocketing across the warehouse, jets screaming, Vulcan spitting fire. The Tagan vectored its thrusters forward, braking frantically against its forward momentum as the 20mm rounds punched through its chest armor.

  Patty roared off after it with Ramirez rushing unto the breach just behind him, high-tech knights charging into battle.

  Dix. Where’s Dix? Jesus, there’s blood all over me…

  There wasn’t much left of Lieutenant Bryan Richardson, and what was there was nearly unrecognizable as having once been a living, breathing human. There were bits of him, like a raccoon in the highway, hit by a truck and scattered over the road until you couldn’t tell one part from another. Nate wanted to throw up, wanted to bury his head in his hands and surrender to the inevitable, but somehow Roach was there.

  She’d climbed out of her mech and she was yelling something at him, but his ears were too battered to understand for a moment.

  “Nate!” she was saying. “You have to mount up! We have to help them!”

  His guys. He had to help his guys. He nodded furtively and clambered up into the cockpit of his mech, his motions mechanical, brain turned onto autopilot. He shut out the visions he knew he’d see when he tried to sleep, the smells and the taste, the feeling of the blood soaking his flight suit to his skin. He shut out the feelings, the disgust and the fear and the shock and concentrated on the job, on the duty.

  Take the fight to the enemy. Get them before they get us. The thoughts were his, but he heard them in Dix’s voice. We’re BAMF, Nate, he’d always say, Bad Ass Mother Fuckers. Let’s show them.

  Seven

  Thrust pushed Nathan Stout back into his seat, the pressure seeming to grind Dix’s blood into his skin, a tribal tattoo from some savage ritual. Dix had tried to talk the whole team into getting matching tattoos once, the unit patch on their right forearms, but Patty hadn’t wanted to let some unlicensed back-room artist give him Hepatitis with unsterilized needles and Roach had, surprisingly enough, said it was against her religion, though she wouldn’t specify which religion that was.

  Apparently, her religion doesn’t have any problem with killing, he thought, watching her Hellfire jet past his on shimmering columns of heat distortion, Mark-Ex missiles streaking away from her launch pod.

  It was just the four of them against the four Tagans…there hadn’t been time to link up with the U-mechs they had left after the battle. He didn’t know for sure if any of the Tagans were unpiloted, but something about the way they were moving said no. They were too independent of each other, none of them mirroring the others, each taking on their Hellfires individually.

  Well, except two of them were coming after Patty, from separate angles, trying to take him out before Nate and Roach could get into the fight. Nate started to target one of them with a Mark-Ex until he remembered his launch pod was empty, drained in the fight earlier. None of them had re-armed with missiles---it was standard procedure not to leave them loaded while in the base---and he couldn’t remember if everyone had even topped off the hoppers of their Vulcans.

  He hadn’t. His 20mm was dry.

  They caught us napping, flat-footed. It’s my fault, but my people are going to pay for it.

  He switched to his twin 40mm cannons, but that was a forlorn hope, designed for use against vehicles and dismounted infantry, not nearly enough to penetrate the heavy armor on a Tagan.

  Maybe enough to distract them, though.

  He boosted towards Patty, angling in behind one of the pair of enemy mechs firing at the Kentucky pilot. The chain gun’s tracers were a science fiction movie laser gun cutting red slashes across the muddy sky, most of the slow, heavy slugs missing but one smacking into Patty’s shoulder in a shower of sparks. Patty spun away from the fire, still trying to keep the other Tagan in his sights, firing off bursts from his Vulcan.

  Nate set his targeting reticle over the Russian mech directly ahead of him, toggled the weapons control to the forties and squeezed the trigger. The thud-thud-thud of their reports were the hollow footsteps of a giant on a wooden floor, infuriatingly slow and useless, but it was all he had. The rounds themselves were so slow he could see them in flight, black dots against the haze, but the splashes of roiling fire they produced when they struck the Tagan’s rear armor were visually satisfying.

  And a light show was all they produced. That and a distraction. The Tagan spun in mid-air and came after Nate, as if it were a bull and he’d just waved a red cape.

  Be careful what you wish for.

  Nate was already turning when the Tagan launched his missile. He couldn’t outrun it, not in a mech with a top speed of just over a hundred miles an hour, so he dove straight down. There was nothing beneath them but the Chesapeake Bay…and the bare bones of an old Navy destroyer. He didn’t know her name, though he supposed he could have looked it up if he’d been of a mind. It hadn’t seemed important, just one of those details from the past the technicians had decided to omit from his memory.

  It was important to him now, whatever its name had been. He was low over the water now, spraying sheets of it in his wake as he curved around the bow of the rusted and charred hulk, dragging the missile behind him. He felt its detonation more than he heard it, a gong thundering through the superstructure of the destroyer on the port side while he rounded the starboard. He fed power to the thrusters, mindful of the heat readings flashing yellow at him in the display, telling him he was pushing the stress limits of the turbines to the bitter edge. He took them just high enough to get him over the prow of the ship, then he set down on the deck and waited for the enemy to catch up.

  The Tagan didn’t bother with another missile, maybe because he figured Nate’s anti-missile machine guns would have too good a chance of intercepting it with him standing on solid ground, or maybe because his own jets were beginning to overheat. It was the natural limitation of a mech—lifting something so heavy and unaerodynamic required a lot of power, which the isotope reactors could produce, but also a lot of thrust, which overtaxed the best turbines anyone knew how to make.

  Mechs could fly, but they couldn’t fly very far, or very fast, or for very long. The main advantage they had was versatility. They combined the firepower and maneuverability of an attack helicopter with the armor of a tank and they only took one pilot to fly, plus they could serve as a control center for U-mechs, which had the same advantages as well as serving as armed drones.

  Sometimes, though, Nate wondered if the military had just adapted them because they looked so damned cool. He cut loose again with the forties and the Tagan dodged, even though no individual round would have hurt him, an instinctive sort of move. Nate took advantage of his distraction and ran, footpads digging into the rusted deck of the old ship as he tried to put the fore superstructure of the old, pre-stealth design between him and the enemy. Chain gun rounds chased him, blowing fist-sized holes through the ancient steel in even rows but not quite penetrating far enough to come out the other side when he ducked down for cover.

  This is the damnedest game of tag I’ve ever played.

  The Tagan chased, staying grounded for now. Nate could have taken off again—the heat sensors had sunken down i
nto the green range again—but he wasn’t trying to lose the enemy mech. He wanted to keep it interested in him, keep it off Patty’s ass, give the others a chance at a one-on-one fight.

  The Hellfire’s footsteps on the deck were Lambeg drums sounding in some ancient battle in the Scottish Highlands, dramatic and thundering, but all Nate could do was whisper a half-hearted prayer that the thin metal would hold under his weight. Falling through to a lower deck probably wouldn’t be fatal in and of itself, not inside the Hellfire, but it would let the Tagan get back into the fight with the others. He passed the smoke funnel and the broken, jagged remains of the aft mass, but before he could reach the aft superstructure, a double-tap of 25mm rounds blew his 40mm cannons off their mount.

  The rending screech of ripping metal set his teeth on edge and the mech yawed to the right with the loss of the weight. Even if he hadn’t known his mech as well as his own body, even if he hadn’t been able to read the damage indicators in his HUD, the damn guns went spinning right across the front of his canopy, taunting him with the loss of his last meaningful weapon.

  Got to keep moving, he chided himself, shoving the mech forward, regaining balance through brute force, pounding the machine’s footpads into the deck so hard he felt it buckle slightly beneath them.

  The aft superstructure was a crumbling ruin, but it was still tall enough to give him cover from the guns of the Tagan…and, more importantly, block the enemy’s thermal scans. He clomped to a halt so abruptly his restraints bit into his chest and the breath wheezed out of him. He pivoted in place and stomped down on the controls for the thrusters. The jets lifted the Hellfire ten meters into the air, still just beneath the upper edge of the aft superstructure, and beneath him, the Tagan rushed around the corner.

  Nate cut power to the jets and left his stomach somewhere near the top of the superstructure while the rest of him plunged downward, directly onto the back of the hunched-over Tagan. He’d bit down on his mouthpiece at the last second and without it, he would have bitten clean through his tongue or broken every tooth out of his head when the impact came. The jolt through the hips and into the torso of the Hellfire felt as if it wanted to drive his spine up through his skull but the mech’s knees gave, bending as the footpad pistoned into the Tagan’s turbine housings, smashing them inward, crumpling them like cardboard. And driving the enemy mech right over the side of the destroyer.

  Nate hit his thrusters at the very last second, hovering just over the side of the destroyer for a moment before he set the Hellfire back down on the deck and watched the Tagan hit the water.

  If the Tagan’s jets had been operational, he could have gone a hundred meters down and still made it back up again---the isotope reactor could heat up anything and pump it through the jets, including water. Hell, he’d even heard they’d taken Hellfires up into space early in the war, before everything had gone to shit, and ran the jets off external tanks of reaction mass.

  Without the jets, the Tagan was several tons of dead weight heading on a one-way trip to the bottom of the bay. Nate winced. It was a bad way to go. His expression flattened out when he thought of Dix. There were no good ways to go in this business.

  He hurt everywhere twice over, felt like someone had worked him over with a baseball bat and then run him over with a car to finish the job, but there was still work to do. He hit the thrusters and lifted back into the fight, trying to get a fix on where the rest of the team was. Their IFF transponders flashed blue in his HUD as he lifted above the interference of all the metal in the old destroyer and spun his mech slowly around, painting a picture of the battle.

  Roach was on the ground, back at the pier and still in motion, her damage control reports still nominal. The woman was one hell of a pilot, especially for someone without real military experience. The Tagan she’d been dogfighting wasn’t in nearly as good a shape, if the thermal readings were to believed, and she didn’t seem as if she needed any help.

  Patty was nearly three kilometers away from the warehouse, running hot at just over a hundred meters over the water, launching what the readings said was his last Mark-Ex missile at an enemy machine trying to hug the waves below him. The strategy didn’t work and the Tagan disappeared in a devouring gout of white flame and black smoke.

  Ramirez was closest to Nate’s position over the destroyer and not doing nearly as well. Mule was on the run, arcing around the perimeter of the bay, his jets nearing the redline and damage indicators flashing a solid yellow almost everywhere. He was Winchester on missiles and Vulcan ammo and he’d started with a full combat load.

  Damn it, that’s what happens when you send a Mule into a fight without someone holding his hand.

  “Patty, help me out,” he called to the tall Kentuckian. “Mule’s in trouble!”

  Nate didn’t wait to see if the man obeyed, just kicked his Hellfire in the pants and set up an intercept course. What he was going to do once he got there he hadn’t quite figured out, since he was pretty much unarmed.

  Details, he heard Dix’s voice in his head snorting a laugh. We figure that shit out on the fly, Nate.

  Pain clutched at his chest and he wasn’t sure if it was grief or incipient cracked ribs. Either way, he was going to pay for it later.

  He tried to come up with a plan, estimating where the Tagan would be at his intercept point, where Patty would be, where Ramirez would be, and suddenly the math and the physics just clicked inside his head and he knew what to do.

  “Ramirez,” he called. “Set your ass down and get to cover, right now!”

  Mule didn’t answer, but he feathered his port jet and descended in a tight spiral, touching down with his mech’s legs already working like some cartoon character. The Tagan adjusted course to follow, putting itself right where Nate wanted it.

  “I’m out of missiles, Boss,” Patty warned him. “And I’m damned close to Winchester on twenty mike-mike, too.”

  “You got a fist, don’t you?” Nate demanded, sounding a bit shorter with the man than he’d intended just because of the aching in his chest. And knees. And shoulders. “You aren’t out of those, right?”

  “I got you. Roger that, Boss.”

  The Tagan was lining up on Ramirez, bobbing back and forth in its flight and firing off short bursts of 25mm as it tried to get a bead on him. Mule was scrambling across the soft sand of the beach beside the pier, limping badly on his mech’s left leg, trying to find something to hide behind and not having much success. It probably wouldn’t matter.

  The Tagan pilot noticed him when he was about three hundred meters away and spun in mid-air, braking to face him. The enemy mech fired wildly but Nate cut power and sank below the red streaks of the incoming tracers, below the firing arc of the chain gun, reaching up with his mech’s articulated left hand just as he was about to pass below the feet of the Tagan. The claws of the hand caught the gun mount of the enemy mech’s and Nate cut power to the jets completely, yanking down on the chain gun with the full weight of the Hellfire. The weapon tore away from the mech’s right arm, the feed drums ripping away and spilling glittering brass cartridges out of the sky.

  Nate was falling and he goosed the turbines desperately, pushed down into his seat by a gush of power from the jets. He didn’t look at the ground rushing up at him, kept his eyes upward where Patty was cruising in at seventy miles an hour. He nearly missed off to the right, swinging his left claw in a wide, arcing strike. It hammered into the cockpit of the Tagan, shattering polymer and crushing metal and terminating against something solid enough to send him coasting backward before he corrected with his thrusters.

  The Tagan drifted away as well, but made no move to change its course because its pilot upper torso was a red smear splattered over what was left of the cockpit. The mech’s jets sputtered as pressure came off the throttle and it began to drop, gradually at first but with gathering speed. The sickening crunch of metal reached Nate even through the cockpit. Ramirez stopped trying to hide behind an inadequate garbage dumpster and peeke
d out around it.

  Nate touched down near the wreckage, finally letting himself relax…and immediately started to shake. He grabbed at the steering yokes, clenched them tightly until he’d regained control of himself. For the moment.

  Patty had landed beside him and his Hellfire stood motionless, arms held away from the torso like a bodybuilder who couldn’t completely relax because of the size of his pecs. He said nothing and Nate couldn’t see his face from the reflection of the noonday sun on his canopy. He wanted to ask if the man was okay, but he had to check on Mata first.

  “Roach, you okay?” He could see her icon on the IFF and she was moving along the shoreline just down from the warehouse pier. He didn’t see any sign of the Tagan she’d been fighting on his radar, lidar or thermal.

  “I’m good.” The reply came immediately, but her voice was flat, listless and he worried she’d been injured.

  “Mata, report,” he snapped the order crisply, trying to shock her into a complete reply.

  “I destroyed the enemy mech, sir,” she said, an edge of anger in her tone. “No damage to my Hellfire. I am currently on foot to allow my turbines to cool down.”

  “Roger,” he acknowledged. “Meet us back at the warehouse.” He switched to the general net to include Patty and Ramirez. “Everybody needs to head to base right now. We need to get out shit on a barge and get the hell out of here. They know where we are and God knows when they’ll be back.”

  No one replied and he fought back irritation. He understood the lethargy, the unwillingness to accept the reality. He felt it himself. But they needed to move while they still had time.

  “Technician Ramirez, Sergeant Patterson,” he said, an edge to the words, “I am going to need a voice response.”

  “Yes, sir,” Ramirez said instantly with the tone of embarrassment the new guy always had when he thought he’d screwed up.

  Patty waited a beat, almost challenging, but finally he murmured, “I hear you,” and hit his jets.