Ironclads

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  “Is this it?” I asked. “This can’t be it,” because it was all sound and fury out there, but the rockets weren’t making much headway against the armor of the transports; we got bounced around, but hell if they were actually getting through to us.

  Then we saw a vehicle ahead of us – it was a big Powell Defender transport, a score of men inside and it just leapt sideways with a flash so bright the cameras cut out for a second. Sturgeon was listening intently to the comms chatter. “Limpets,” he reported, eyes wide.

  “How the fuck are they getting drones through this shit?” Franken demanded.

  “Because they’re slow and they only need to drop them on us,” from Cormoran.

  “Disembark,” Sturgeon relayed.

  “Fuck that,” was Franken’s thought. I was in two minds. The rocket barrage, horribly inaccurate as it was, was slackening as the Nords burned through their toys. If a Limpet found the Trojan and latched on, it would burn us up quicker than the Powell had gone. And Limpet drones wouldn’t be targeting men.

  I went up into the little shell turret of the Trojan and got behind the gun, cameras giving me a 360 view of the field around us. The bigger armor was already retaliating, sending salvos off toward the partisans’ positions. The transports were mostly yakking out their troops, men sprinting for cover or scanning the skies. I saw a Limpet coming it, like a bumblebee the size of my head, and picked it from the air with a quick burst of fire. A couple of our cars were gone – the air now getting thick with smoke as well as the last of the pattering dirt thrown up by the rockets, but we were taking back the initiative. Overhead, someone was risking a gunship, hovering and tilting above with its guns spitting sporadically. I hoped they were watching out for the fly-swarm if it suddenly dropped on our heads.

  I heard Sturgeon shout out something from below. I didn’t know it, but we’d had another gunship out there, and it had just set fire to a mile-long strip of forest to the south to try and dislodge the rocket-men. Then something had got it – it caused the same sort of devastation crashing down as it had when it was up and spraying phosphorus – and that something was coming for us.

  “Oi, Sergeant!” from Lawes. “I reckon this is where we make our move.”

  “We’re in the middle of a fight,” I yelled back to him.

  “Not our fight, remember? Higher calling, eh?” I swear sometimes Lawes just sounded like Dick Van Dyke to spite me.

  Then company arrived, filling a big part of the sky. Because the fly-swarm didn’t stop the Nords putting stuff in the air.

  “That’s something you don’t see every day,” Cormoran said, sounding more impressed than I’d like.

  “Move us out,” I told Franken, sending a best-fit course to the driver’s panel.

  Cruising in at treetop height was probably the biggest gunship anyone had ever managed to get in the air. In Canada they’d had three of them across the whole front, and they were called something like Jodorowskys. Of course just being big didn’t actually count for a whole deal, but they were built with that modern Slavic approach to engineering, all redundancy and hard-wearing components and no regard whatsoever for looking pretty. They took a lot of pounding before gravity took offence and yanked them down to earth.

  This one was coming in all guns blazing – a blistering wall of counter-munitions fire to lock down the crap we were launching at it, and then its own ordnance bursting free of that firestorm to lance in at the transports. The incoming fire was focusing on the infantry transports, not the armor; they knew that armor took towns but men held them. That was today’s war all over, though. These days, men were the cheapest part of any national army, the bit that was most easily replaced, least easily repurposed by the enemy, most easily forgiven when everyone shook hands over the treaty table.

  Everyone was scattering now – the transports were nothing more than targets for the firepower the gunship was turning out. Those who were out and free to run around were getting cut up too, but it was incidental – they simply didn’t rank highly enough as targets.

  Franken was guiding us out from between a couple of tanks, both of which were incandescent as they threw all they had at the Jodorowsky. If we’d had a corporate detachment with us we’d probably already have won, but these days the main line army just doesn’t get the best toys.

  “You never said there were so many Russians here, Lawes!” I yelled.

  “You ever know a fight in the last ten years that wasn’t bloody crawling with White Russians?” he hollered back, and that was true enough.

  Our own remaining gunship had pulled out, or at least I couldn’t see it and I hadn’t seen it go down. I was torn. Orders were that this wasn’t our business. But these were our people. It didn’t feel right just to skip out on them, for all we couldn’t do much to help.

  That was when the cavalry arrived. I hadn’t realized we even had Scions with the 96th until three of them came vaulting through the smoke. Something I’d seen a hundred times before, sure, but you never get used to it. You always catch your breath, if you’ve got even a sliver of soul left in you. They were like gods: human figures head and shoulders over the soldiers around them, made of gleaming silver and gold and darkly menacing black steel. And they were gods, in a way. This was what human ingenuity could achieve, when price was no object. The corporations wouldn’t shell out to give us common grunts that sort of protection, but it was only the best when their sons wanted to play soldier.

  They were unleashing a barrage of firepower at the Jodorowsky, and suddenly the tables had – not just turned, but been completely flipped over. The weapons built into those beautiful shiny shells cut through all the counter-ordnance the gunship could muster, striking strings of explosions off the enemy hull. When the Jodorowsky replied in kind, the Scions were briefly enveloped in fire and shrapnel, but when the flare cleared, two of them still stood, and the third was getting back to his feet. I almost expected him to brush his metal chassis down like he was dusting off a tuxedo.

  The soldiers around them hadn’t been so lucky, of course. Bitter thought.

  We were pulling out by then, heading off and ignoring the pings and queries of the column officers who wanted to know what the hell our business was. Behind us, I saw the Jodorowsky falter in the sky for a moment – as if physics had suddenly served it with a cease-and-desist, but then it was backing away, ponderously thundering upward, driven away by three boys who had shinier suits and richer folks than its pilots did.

  And then we were clear of it all. Sturgeon had filleted the scout intel about the impromptu swampland the Nords had thrown up, and luckily it looked as though we could bee-line it for Cousin Jerome’s last known whereabouts without getting ourselves bogged down.

  “Got one question, though,” because of course Sturgeon always had questions. “What the hell was our guy doing so far in front of the fighting?”

  Somehow none of us had thought to ask that before. I came down from the turret and saw looks passing between them that spoke eloquently of just how none of them really trusted each other. Oh, Franken and me and Sturgeon were a team, but the other two were loners. I’d pegged Lawes as someone who very greatly valued his own skinny little hide, and Cormoran… Why did I think that if only one of us got out of this alive, it would be Cormoran?

  “Spying, maybe?” Franken suggested, making me realize that the long pause on his part had actually been because he was thinking. It was a good call – Scions did a lot of espionage work, mostly industrial. Cousin Jerome could have been off stealing Nord secrets when they zapped him with this new anti-Scion thing of theirs. Maybe that was the actual secret he’d been after.

  “Just get us there,” I told Franken. “Cormoran, you’re our eyes. Lawes… what do we need you for exactly?”

  The Englishman gave me his rat’s grin. “I don’t know about your Scion, Sarge, but I’ve been kicking about in this bloody country since before the war. Think of me as your multi-tool, to get you out of whatever you get into.”
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br />   “A tool for every occasion, right,” I agreed, which was wasted on him.

  We had a jolting and uncomfortable time of it for the next hour or so, which was fine by me. I’ll take ‘not being shot at’ over ‘dead in comfort’ any time. “So do the Nords know we’re here?” I asked Lawes, partway in.

  “Someone will know we’re here,” he confirmed, in a sour mood. He had tried to light up inside the Trojan three times, by then, and after the stench of his uniquely horrible tobacco had brought the rest of us close to vomiting, I’d ended up taking his tin off him. “Thing is,” he went on, “it’s not like they’re all talking to each other, over there. Between the initial bombing runs and the ECM slap-fight last year, most of the comms infrastructure’s buggered, so they’re basically down to carrier pigeons over half the country. So maybe some partisan cell or a corporate scouting detachment’s seen this one US scout car lost in the woods, but who’re they going to tell? We’ll only know about it if they come and give us a kick. Which they will, soon enough.”

  “Gentlemen,” Cormoran told us abruptly. “I see them.”

  She was flying her drones high, hanging them just below the fly swarm’s lower reaches, spying out the trees ahead. Pure visual showed nothing, and they had set camp with a mess of heat-baffling tarps above them, but there was still just enough signature leaking out to show us someone was there. Mind you, Cormoran was corporate; she had superior gear.

  “They’ve seen us?”

  “Probably.” Cormoran shrugged. “They’re not moving on us with anything mechanical, but they might send men out.” Sending men out was like trying to map out a minefield with a long stick: nobody cared what happened to the stick and you could always get another one.

  “Go round?” Sturgeon suggested. If they were going to show an interest in us, that was unlikely to help. Franken had throttled down our own heat, running as cold as possible, but the Trojan was still going to stand out.

  Lawes was peering at the images. “They got drones out?”

  Cormoran skimmed back through images on one screen and pulled up a shot of a silvery disc-looking flier glimpsed between trees. At Lawes’ behest she zoomed in and then more until it filled the screen – fuzzy and blurred but still visible for all that.

  Lawes gave a thoughtful grunt and settled back. “Shanks’s pony,” he suggested, which apparently meant go on foot if you were English.

  But we weren’t ready for that yet, or I wasn’t. I had Franken take a detour, and Cormoran keep a long-distance eye on what the enemy were doing, whoever the enemy were. We crept on at a snail’s pace, cool and quiet as possible, and nobody stirred from the camp under our drones’ watchful gaze.

  I took a nap for a while and – as happens far too often in this line of work – the fighting woke me. Not an attack from outside, but the entirety of my team trying to kill each other right there in front of me.

  CHAPTER THREE

  I AM ASHAMED to admit that I thought Mind-control gas! first off, even though the Trojan’s filters would have kept anything like that out, and nobody had used gas weapons against military targets since the Luobu debacle. Weapons that can be screwed over by a change in the weather are never worth the bother.

  It wasn’t mind-control gas – if there even was such a thing – it was just my dumbass squad being fuckwits.

  Sturgeon was already on his ass with his hand pressed to his temple. He hadn’t actually been in the fight, I discovered later. Franken had been going for Lawes, and had elbowed Sturgeon in the head by accident as he lunged as if his body was so conditioned to slapping his comrade around that it had suffered a targeting error. Lawes had a knife out, and was backed right into the back corner of the Trojan, half-hiding behind our gear. Cormoran was nursing a cut hand, which suggested she and Franken had become unlikely allies.

  I asked them all to tell me what was going on, which sounds a damn sight more polite than it came out at the time.

  “That little fucker’s sold us out!” Franken yelled, tensed to spring for Lawes.

  “Oi, listen –” the Englishman started, but I shouted him down.

  “Cormoran, report.”

  The corporate gave me a somewhat mutinous look but complied. “Your man there caught an outgoing signal. Lawes was talking with the enemy.”

  “Just hear me out –” Lawes tried again, but I snapped, “How long for?”

  “No idea,” Sturgeon got out, grimacing. “He was encrypted on some weirdass short range frequency.” There was a beauty of a bruise coming up about his eye. “I was just messing with comms. I was bored.”

  I had my pistol out and at Lawes without really thinking about it. A shot inside the Trojan could do a lot of damage if it starting bouncing around, but I reckon it wouldn’t do half as much if Lawes ate it first.

  “Jesus Christ, will you just listen?” the Englishman demanded, and then flinched back when Franken half went for him.

  “Don’t blaspheme,” I warned. “He doesn’t like it.”

  Lawes’ eyes bugged out a bit. “Seriously?”

  “First Church of Christ Libertarian is very serious about taking His name in vain,” I confirmed. It was odd to see that rattle Lawes more than the gun, but they were weird about religion where he came from. “Now how about you start talking?”

  “That lot out there, I know them,” Lawes got out quickly. “They’re Nord corporates, not the nationals. That means they’re not fighting us.”

  “Plenty of Nord corps are fighting us,” Sturgeon snapped.

  “Not them – look, seriously, when you lot first weighed in here it was only ’cos you were asked in by a bunch of Euro-based multinationals who were getting their stuff nicked, right? Now, I agree that once the real fighting started, a lot of the Eurocorps had to at least pretend they were fighting for the national interest, but most of them are just clockwatching. After all, when the war’s done, they’ll all be best friends again, right? This lot are Skaalmed special forces, and what they’re mostly about is watching over their corporate holdings until it’s safe to go back to business as usual.”

  “So?”

  “So they won’t fight us, for starters,” Lawes pressed. “So they can take us right where we want to go, escort us there – the partisans and whatever other fuckery they have, they won’t go for us if we’re with ‘their’ people,” and he did that thing with his fingers for the ‘their’.

  “And why would they do this?” I asked him.

  He gave me a sickly smile. “I know them; they know me. We’ve done business together before. There are plenty Skaalmed boys owe me a favor.”

  For a moment the situation balanced on Lawes’ knife edge. “Cormoran,” I said. “Get yourself patched up.”

  “Already on it.” And of course she had some crap in her that let her heal fast. Somebody had invested in Cormoran.

  “Okay,” and I lowered the gun. “Last question, Lawes. Why not just tell us?”

  I caught his face naked then; there was no subterfuge in it, none of that ratty cunning, just complete surprise. He’d never thought to; it just wasn’t in his nature. I guessed he’d been playing his own games out here for so long that he’d run out of people to confide in years ago.

  “If you want to go off-script some time, you clear it with me,” I told him, “or I will serve you to Franken. You got that?”

  He nodded, servile as you like, but I wondered. I wondered what sort of business he did with Nord corps, and just how much that was going to bite us in the ass. If we were going to go eat breakfast with the Nords at Lawes’s invitation, I was sure as hell going to keep close enough to snap his scrawny neck if things went bad.

  I had him put me in touch with the Nord commander, and she and I – it threw me a little that she was a she and maybe it shouldn’t have – had a little chat. It was the first test of our translation software, too, so I let the woman’s Swedish wash over me, with all its improbable vowels and weirdass inflections, while a pleasantly urbane male voice spoke ove
r it, giving me the Nord’s deal with a Californian accent. This was Överste Rurisksdottir of Skaalmed AB’s Asset Protection Division. Skaalmed were big business, and so Rurusksdottir probably had serious hardware at her disposal, and sufficient Swede cred to warn off the locals. If Lawes could be trusted, then his deal sounded good.

  I wanted to ask for orders right then, but trying to hail the 96th’s column might give us away to other enemies, and might not go down well with Skaalmed either. Besides, unless Rich Ted Speling was anywhere within earshot, there wasn’t exactly anyone who could give me orders.

  So I trusted Lawes, in the end. I promised myself not to make a habit of it. We went to break bread with the Nords.

  ÖVERSTE RURISKSDOTTIR WAS one of those women who drew your eye whenever she walked into the room. It might have been the enormous chrome exoskeleton. She was a Skaalmed Scion, but whatever else she might have been, she was sure as hell trying to connect with her inner Viking. There were spiky runes edging the plates of her shell, and she had an actual hammer – something it would have taken four men to lift – magnet-locked to her back. There were horns on her headpiece, and I leant over to Sturgeon and told him that if he was going to pass some comment about Vikings and history and horned helmets – he’d done it three times since we set foot in Nord country – then no power on earth would save him from the consequences. And for once he kept his mouth shut.

  Most Scions are built well enough to put over body language when they want to, and Ruriskdottir’s suggested strongly that she wasn’t impressed with us. The Skaalmed detachment numbered about a hundred, but they were toting some serious gear: not just the disc-shaped drones we’d seen, but some miniature armor that could switch from tracks to legs for the rough terrain, and packed considerably more punch than our Trojan. They had mechs, too – that stilty Netherlands type that look like Martian war machines and were such a pain in the ass in Mexico. One of them was active and patrolling, and every time it passed it stopped and stared at us with the cluster of camera eyes clumped in the center of its round body. A Skaalmed logo flanked them on the left, and the red arrows of Ruud, the manufacturer, on the right. And a nasty pair of gun barrels below, which kind of dominated my attention.