Ironclads

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  Nonetheless, this is beyond dispute: better than the regulars, better than the best-equipped corporate guard, better than mechs and drones and biotech is the armor and the weaponry of the battlefield Scions.

  Which brings us back to Cousin Jerome, because all that top flight tech had just fucked off and deserted him, and now he was either dead or caught. Rich Ted was pretty sure he was caught; Jerome would be a big old bargaining chip for the Nords, after all, except that apparently nobody was even asking for a ransom.

  That made it our job to go get him. Or to find his body or records of his demise. At no point did he say anything about finding out how the hell they screwed over his shell to winkle him out of it, but that was kind of hanging in the air in a ‘bonus payment’ sort of way. I reckon they wouldn’t honestly have trusted us with that one as a mission objective, but if it fell into our laps we surely would be bringing it to Rich Ted’s rich attention.

  “Why us, sir?” I asked, and he explained that we would be going in as a small, covert team. He talked about the fact that we three had come through some of the nastier global knife-fights of the last few years without a scratch, and with commendations – he didn’t mention all those times Sturgeon got put on a charge for opening his big, big mouth, or when Franken almost got court martialed for punching a captain. He said a lot of things, but I was used to Sturgeon, and so I could cut through the crap. “You want this done, why not send a few unstoppable Scions?” I could have asked, and the answer he would never have given me was: “Because we’re scared they’ll do it to us.”

  Two hours later we were on a plane heading seaward toward the fighting, detached from 203rd’s Recon company and leaving the rest of the lads behind. You’d think one of the officers might have made a fuss, but everyone knew that when the Corporates said “jump,” you basically didn’t come down without orders in triplicate. We were there to fight the war their way, and if their way was sending the three of us off on a rescue mission then that was what was going to happen.

  There was gear for us in the plane – and it was brand new, not the hand-me-down crap we normally had to work with. Franken complained, of course. Franken liked his own stuff, worn by long use until it was a comfortable fit in his big hands and smelling mostly of Franken. For me, I appreciated the downpayment. This was Rich Ted investing in Poor Ted, at least a little.

  We slept on the plane; live this life long enough and you sleep when you can. The plane’s descent woke us and when we looked out, we saw Nord country.

  CHAPTER TWO

  STURGEON SAID, ONE time, about how the barriers broke in New York when he was a kid and suddenly the whole city was fighting a desperate rearguard action against the sea; when the Hudson burst its banks and swallowed Bloomfield and half of Newark, and made an island out of Newark Liberty Airport. It was the same on both coasts, the defining images of the decade as all that denial came home to roost. But not for Nordland, apparently. Sturgeon said that it was geology, basically; that all this mountainous, fjord-cut land was still riding high even as the sea clawed at it, keeping just ahead of the tide while Thailand and New Orleans and the Netherlands went the way of Atlantis.

  The beachhead was a place called Gotham-berg – or that’s what everyone called it. The place was thoroughly home-away-from-home. We came in to a chorus of accents from Texas and New England and everywhere in between, and the first thing that met our eyes when we got off the plane was a Mickey-D’s. The fighting was way north and east of there. Gotham was thoroughly pacified and brought round to our way of thinking. Of the rest of the country…

  Sturgeon got really obsessive about it, when we talked about fighting the Nords. Then he got hit, mostly, but basically there are a lot of Nords, and we’re not fighting all of them. The bit just over the sea west of Gotham hasn’t weighed in yet, and there’s another lot up in a long strip on the west coast who are apparently still mulling it over, with a buttload of Marines waiting just offshore in case they come to the wrong decision any time soon. All the middle of Nordland is the bit we’ve got problems with, basically: Sweden and Finland, say the maps. Sweden is where the fighting is, and the other place… Finland is weird. Finland is different. Nobody I met in Nordland was looking forward to when Sweden had given it over, and we were left looking at the Finnish border and all the ungodly shit that was waiting on the other side.

  We got orders pretty much as soon as we hit tarmac: we had to meet the rest of our team. What rest of our team, you might ask? Apparently Rich Ted didn’t want to rely on us quite that much, so we cooled our heels in the vast expanse of Gotham that had been given over as a staging post, waiting for the pair of them to pitch up. We got to watch our boys and the armor and the gleaming god-statues of the Scions march off to stick it to the Nords, and we got to watch a fair number of our boys come back bloodied, though we reckoned we were giving far more than we got.

  What it was – this is Sturgeon again – after all the levees broke, after the big economic crunch that hit when half our coastal cities turned into swimming pools, everyone needed to pull together. Pulling together, here, meant buying American, supporting the big corporations that were our only hope of rebuilding. The problem was that, over the pond, there were a whole load of governments who’d taken the same knocks and gone the other way, taken their god-given democracy and abused it to vote in the socialists. A whole bunch chucked out all those promises they made under the Transatlantic Free Trade Agreement. Corporate assets were seized. There were bombs, too – full-on terrorist attacks on the property of multinationals. They were fixing to take all that good stuff our corps had built up and grab it for themselves, just hand it over free to every Bjorn and Benny. It was, everyone says, an assault on our freedoms, on our very way of life. Everyone except Sturgeon, anyway, and I guess probably the Nords.

  We kicked our heels for two days, which was fine – if there was anyone who knew how to have a good time on a US military base it was us poor bastards. Then Lawes and Cormoran turned up, and we were a team and ready to go.

  Lawes and Cormoran had obviously been given the chance to get to know each other before they reached us, and there was a distance between them that told me neither of them had much enjoyed it. Lawes was a little guy, smaller than Sturgeon even, and there was nothing neat about him. I never saw him clean-shaved and his uniform was darned and filthy, dotted with old stains he hadn’t been able to get out, and his shoes scuffed. He had brown teeth, huge in his thin face, like he’d been designed to gnaw through cables we’d find we needed later. He was a corporal in the English expeditionary force that got sent over when our boys first landed; he’d been here since the start, which made him our best shot at local knowledge. When I saw his gear, there was some serious snake-eater covert ops stuff there – gear that would make him room temperature to thermals and screw with motion sensors. He was someone who knew all the holes and the gaps in the fences; there was more than a touch of the rodent about Corporal Lawes.

  Cormoran was a different beast altogether: some kind of predator, a panther maybe. She came with a metal suitcase that looked like it weighed a ton, and she had a lean, lanky body that could lug it around like it didn’t weigh anything. Her fatigues were grey and expensive, and there was a shimmer about them that said they could do all sorts of things, just like her headset and the gadgets in that case. Cormoran was a woman, and black, but the truth was that Cormoran was corporate, and that set her apart from the rest of us far more. She got paid more, and she got better gear, and most of all she would surely have some personal mission to fulfil, or why would she even be here? I reckoned that going on a mission with Cormoran would be like travelling with a time bomb. We’d always be waiting for her to suddenly decide her objectives were more important than ours.

  Not that we had a choice about taking her. We’d need her anyway: she was a drone specialist. Whilst mostly that should have meant she got to fight the war from a hundred miles behind the lines, these days the Nords had some good electronic countermeas
ures, which meant that a lot of fancy drone work was best done from inside the range of a gun. Lucky Cormoran; lucky all of us.

  They shipped us out to the front. The 96th Armored and its friends were pushing east just then, taking ground from a Nord army which was mostly just backpedalling and letting them have it. Convoys would get us as far as the troops got, and after that we’d be on our own as we broke the line and headed into enemy territory. All we’d need to do would be to keep our heads down and stay clear of anything that had a Swedish flag while we closed in on Cousin Jerome’s last known position.

  “Except,” Lawes told us on the way out, “it ain’t as simple as that, is it? I mean sure, Swedish national army, easy enough. There ain’t exactly that many of them, and the way I hear, your lot’ve got ’em on the back foot anyhow – if it was just them. But this bloody country – who’d’ve thought they’d got so much fight in ’em, eh?” He spat, smoked, twisting together horrible roll-ups with stringy tobacco from a yellow tin. “Stockholm’s lost control, is the problem. There’s Nord corporations fighting on both bloody sides – I got shelled by the 1st fighting corps of fucking Ikea last year! – and there’s all sorts of wankers coming in from mainland Europe to fight for the Swedes – men and mechs and White Walkers. And the locals. Wherever you end up there are partisans, just civvies who’ve grabbed up whatever gear they can. And when the Nord army gets its orders to pull back, you think the partisans go with them? Don’t you believe it. Every fjord and stream and hill and rock’ll have some Sven or Olga with a gun. And then there are the Finns, always the bastard Finns.”

  “I heard about them,” I told him.

  Lawes fixed me with his rodent stare. “You ain’t heard nothing. They ain’t human any more, what they send over the border.”

  After that he tried to interest people in a card game, and Franken took him up on it and lost a few dollars – meant less to him than the win did to Lawes, but that’s the English economy for you.

  I tried to get Cormoran talking, picking a question just too flat-out rude to be ignored. “So how come someone like you lands a job like that?”

  She gave me a look that said it wasn’t the first time she’d heard that. “Summa cum laude out of MIT,” and then, because she saw something in my face, “Yeah, before they changed admissions policy. Last class of Alpha Kappa Alpha, me.” I didn’t know what she meant, but I looked it up later.

  I tried to push a little more, but she was having none of it, her dark, bony face closed off. There was something I saw there – the look of a woman who doesn’t think it’s worth getting to know you, in the short time you’ve got.

  After that it got interesting. I was woken up when something exploded outside the plane and for a moment I didn’t know where I was or which war I was fighting, just crunched and taut and bracing myself against everything, because it was all dipping and diving around me. Franken was swearing, but that didn’t narrow it down because we’d been serving together a while and that was kind of his baseline.

  Cormoran was the center of attention. She had her briefcase open on her lap, and there were two screens lit up on the inside, along with a handful of control tabs. She was running her drones, I realised – more with headware than fingers, from the way her eyes went in and out of focus.

  Sturgeon brought me up to date. “Half a dozen attack drones latched onto us five minutes ago,” he said, eyes fixed on Cormoran’s screens. “One of the engines took a hit but it’s still going.”

  “I can tell that,” I said without much patience. There was another cracking report from the blind space outside the hull. From Cormoran’s twitchy smile it was one of theirs, not one of ours. “This a hunter pack?”

  “Just flak,” Sturgeon said, meaning raiders set on autopilot and released in the general direction of our side, rather than tracking us down in particular. Just bad luck then, but Cormoran was more than equal to the challenge. Human-led is better than automatic still, in most fields. Her drones would have their own hair-trigger decision-making software, but she was feeding them a strategy moment to moment, keeping them unpredictable and managing the hacking war that must be going on between the little flying machines. It took her ten more minutes to strike out all of the enemy, using just two of her own. I guess that meant we could rely on her right up until the moment she sold us out.

  A COUPLE HOURS after, we were being offloaded right where the 96th had its mobile command post. Orders had outstripped us, so that while there were all sorts of prickly officer types just dying to know who the hell we were, our corporate credentials meant they didn’t get to ask, and there was an unmarked M1000 Trojan with my name on it, a nice compact ride with reinforced tyres and armor plate, and a minigun up top that Franken was instantly all over.

  “Lovely, reliable rides, the Trojans,” Franken said, letting it hang there.

  “Their only drawback is that, when you’re inside one, you feel like a dick,” Sturgeon came back, right ahead of Lawes’s. “It’s what soldiers get into just before they get fucked.” It’s a testament to how some people just don’t think it through before they name stuff.

  The Onboard was loaded with our maps already, showing us where the Scion’s signal had given out.

  “This won’t take us far,” Lawes warned us. “Once we’re out on our own any vehicle just draws attention. You can never mask the heat signature of something like this, and the partisans will have rockets and drones all over us the moment they guess who we are. And the terrain is a bloody bastard. You’re a sitting duck on the road, and off the road, most of it’s still forest, can you believe that? Like it’s the bloody Middle Ages out here.”

  “Worse,” Cormoran put in. She had her briefcase open again, and for a long moment I couldn’t even work out what was on her screens. Then it started animating, frame by stilted frame, and I worked out that some parts of what I was seeing were a satellite view. The vast majority of what should have been contested Swedish soil was smeared with roiling dark clouds that obscured any sight we might have had of what the enemy was doing.

  “Seriously,” Sturgeon hissed, “what is that?”

  “Is that the flies?” Lawes asked gloomily.

  “Yeah.” Cormoran gave us a bright look. “Gentlemen, this is a gift from the Finns. They breed these little bugs, midges, they chip ’em and ship ’em, and every so often the Nords release a batch. There are millions of the little critters each time, and they basically just block the view of our satellites – and we can’t see a thing – no one can. So every time our forces advance, we’re going in blind. Makes for all kinds of fun.”

  “They bite?” Franken asked uneasily. We were all thinking it: mosquitos, disease, some kind of Finnish lab-grown plague that zeroed in on the stars and stripes.

  “Not yet,” Lawes told us. “Jolly thought though, ain’t it?”

  The 96th were moving out that day, so we synced our helmet HUDs, got in our Trojan and tagged along. Scuttlebutt said light resistance – drone intel put the national Nord forces pulling back, but everyone reckoned they’d have left mines or mechanicals or something for us to have fun with. I had Franken drive and we found a place toward the back of the convoy. Sturgeon patched into the 96th’s comms and we listened to what seemed like every individual soldier pinging us to try and work out who the hell we were and why they were letting us come to the party. Our corporate credentials were obviously suitably imposing. Nobody pinged us twice.

  The 96th had their own drone wing out scouring the land ahead, and Cormoran was keeping her toys in their box. A squad of jets went screaming over once, but the fly-screen up above, which blocked the satellites and dulled the sun, had a trick of fouling jet intakes and abrading rotors; air support would be patchy at best.

  There was an attack. Of course there was an attack.

  I remember in Canada it was civilized warfare. There were skirmishes and shoot-outs; we took towns and villages, and we froze our asses off. We went head to head with the Canuck troops and the French tr
oops and some severely tough Russians that nobody told us were there, and our Scions and theirs stomped about and played their own games with each other, and we tried to stay out of the way. That’s war, and when we’d pacified a region, they knew it, and stayed pacified. It’s not exactly the worst fate in the world, to have a few corporations putting drilling rigs and mines and sawmills on your land. It brings in money and jobs and solid libertarian values, and if you work hard, like they say, then you’ll get paid. But the Nords didn’t see it that way.

  So, the attack. First off, everything stopped, because the lead scout vehicles had got bogged down. This was nothing natural – the retreating Nords had gone in for some serious improvised irrigation and suddenly we were looking at a crapton of swampland that hadn’t been there a couple of days ago, and hadn’t looked like anything to write home about when the drones overflew it. This wasn’t the first time for this trick, and so the advance scouts were already converting their vehicles for amphibious work. What it did mean, though, was that everyone stopped. No prizes for guessing what came next.

  Cormoran’s briefcase lit up like the Fourth of July, all these alarms and lights, and then there were rockets coming at us. The Nords – probably Lawes’s partisan irregulars – were in the trees and upslope to the south. They were a mile off at least, but they had a whole mess of handheld anti-armor kit, the cheap disposable stuff you could get for a song these days. You couldn’t aim them for crap, and I reckon at least half must have gone wide of the entire convoy, but someone had gone on a serious shopping spree to kit out this bunch because everywhere was exploding at random. We had a front seat view of it from inside the Trojan – every camera was just showing us flash-bang and the air full of sprays of dirt, clods of earth being chucked around. Cormoran was trying to get her drones clear for a better picture of what was going on, but from her face I guess she didn’t fancy her chances – there was just too much crap being thrown about for clear flying.