As for the troops themselves, they were neat and disciplined and ready, and edgier than I was expecting. Corporate elites, with all their fancy gear, you don’t imagine them being jumpy, but this lot kept their eyes on the forest and cast a broad net with their drones. About one in three were women, which was an odd thing to see these days. I’d served with plenty of women in my time, but back home the creed of Christ Libertarian had very strong views about a woman’s place, and it wasn’t on the battlefield. Congress hadn’t made it illegal for women to sign up, but current regs didn’t make it easy for them.
The Överste and I had a carefully phrased conversation through our respective translation software.
“You won’t tell me what you’re coming out here for,” she told me. Like all Scions, her mech body could stand still forever while she reclined inside. That meant I had to stand too, if I wanted her take me seriously. We were at one edge of the camp, and I took in the darkening treescape, listening to the faint hums of the drones, the whine of insects and the staccato chatter of birds.
“We’ve got somewhere we need to be,” I explained. “If you’re sharing, any intel would be appreciated. If we’re allies.”
She made a grating sound that I recognized a moment later as a sigh. “I’ve not known what we are from day to day for about a year, Sergeant Regan. Back when we kicked all this off, they told me it would be over within three months of your lot being invited in. The socialists would fold under popular pressure, they said. Nobody thought the people would back them to the hilt – until way after they would have preferred to surrender, in fact. The Swedish army is still in the field because it’s become a point of national pride, of national identity even, that we fight. And nobody thought the Finns would back us. And nobody thought it would be such a god-damned cause celebre in the Euro-union either.” And I have no idea whether she actually said that bit in French or whether my translator was getting above itself.
“That must make it awkward for you,” I said diplomatically.
She whacked one immense fist into the armored palm of the other hand, making me jump back, and drawing the startled attention of my fellows. It was just that, though, just the one motion, and the danger ebbed after a moment.
“If it were me, just me, Ada Rurisksdottir of Sandviken, then I would take up a gun and fight for my country,” she told me in the male Californian tones of my software. “But my family fought long and hard to get on the board and I have a duty to our shareholders. Our shareholders are not even majority Swedish. So we sit out here and wait to see how the arguments go, over in Stockholm. If the socialists continue to be stubborn, then we are halfway your allies. If things go another way, perhaps tomorrow we are your enemies.”
“But for now?” I pressed.
“For now? I have spoken to your pet English. We help you get where you need, and don’t ask questions. I will give you Intel and a clear route to your coordinates, and a best guess at what’s in the way.”
“Who controls the country between here and there?”
“Nobody controls anything,” she told me bitterly. “You’re on the shores of the Vنttern by then. There was some serious fighting there – your advance forces, the nationals and the partisans. This was before the lines crystallised, when you were still just dropping men and mechs wherever you liked. For a month there was even a boat war up there on the lake. There was a big factory at Tunnerstad on the island there, someone’s research facility. I never did find out what they were doing there, but someone bombed it and then everything went straight to hell. Now you’ve got freelance Euro marauders that way, and cells of locals fighting everyone and everything, and… worse.”
I knew precisely who ‘worse’ meant: the same faction that had gifted the satellite view with its pest problem, and half the Nord war veterans with their nightmares, to hear people talk about it. “They’re active up there, are they?”
“That was where they first showed people what they’d been cooking up in their labs over the border,” Rurisksdottir confirmed grimly. “Look up how the Vنttern boat war ended, if you don’t believe me. Nobody had any idea, before that.”
We spent a night on Skaalmed’s hospitality, while Sturgeon and Cormoran looked over their intel and planned our next move. Why had Cousin Jerome been out on the banks of the Vنttern? Probably not for his health. Had there been industrial secrets hidden in the ruined research facility? Had he just been some privileged kid who got lost?
Did the Finns have a weapon that killed Scions?
WE GOT TO within a day’s easy walk of the coordinates before we lost the Trojan. To be honest I don’t think any of us had expected it to last so long.
Cormoran had her drones flying wide, which gave us a little advance warning when the enemy tried to bring one of them down with a barrage of rockets. While she was wrestling with that, Franken was taking us away, but the drone flying ahead of us reported more heat signatures – mechanicals suddenly powering up as we got close. We’d driven into a trap.
Even then we might have got out of the net: Cormoran had given us a chance, and Franken took it with both hands. We were off-road, though, and the country out that way was riddled with little lakes and streams that suddenly opened up from between the trees like mouths. The ground was unpredictably soft between them – something the drones just couldn’t know beforehand. One moment we were looking good to get clean away, the next we were slewing sideways toward a dark expanse of water of unknown depth, half our wheels churning mud. Franken wrestled us clear the first time with judicious jockeying of the gas, but there just wasn’t a straight path of dry ground to be had anywhere we turned. I don’t know whether the locals had been damming and flooding or whether it was just the land itself we were fighting, but the enemy caught up to us just as we plowed into another mire and began to flay the armor from our right side.
Trojans are, as they say, designed for deep insertion. This meant they were designed to last long enough under fire to give the occupants a chance to get out. Lawes took the turret this time, swinging the minigun about to give an answer to all those urgent questions the enemy were asking us. I hunched by Cormoran to get a drone’s eye view of who was after us. As I’d half-guessed, they were Ruuds, that same model of tripod mech that Rurisksdottir had been packing. Probably she hadn’t betrayed us – you saw machines like these wherever the fighting went; they were reliable and none too expensive.
This lot were tooled up with the squat box of a rocket battery, and a minigun that wasn’t much inferior to ours. I saw two of them stalking forward, broad, padded feet managing the treacherous ground better than our wheels had. They were concentrating on emptying rockets into the flank of the Trojan – the wheels there had already been shredded, but the armor was holding.
One of them was abruptly cut down, a leg scythed away and then a jagged line of holes chewed across its compact body by our gun. Then our chassis shuddered, and Lawes dropped down out of the turret, cursing. That marked the end of the Trojan’s ability to defend itself.
We were ready to go by then. Sturgeon popped the side-hatch away from the Ruuds, and we crashed out into shin-deep muddy water. Lawes had the opportunity to utter a cry of despair as another of the Ruuds rose from the black lake ahead of us, close enough to poke with a flagstaff. I looked into its lenses as water ran from it and the barrel of its minigun spun up. I swear the bastard was gloating.
A bright flash lit it up, and pieces of mangled weapon pod were flying overhead to rattle from the Trojan’s abused hull. Then another, so the machine staggered sideways, trying to get its launcher in line as we lurched and stumbled along our doomed transport’s side. Then Franken pumped a grenade into it, right where one of its legs met the body. His aim was spot-on textbook perfect, shattering the vulnerable joint and pitching the entire machine backward to be lost in the water.
One of Cormoran’s drones spun and hovered where it had been – the source of the initial hit. It was like a dragonfly as long as your arm, but it
must have been packing some serious weaponry somewhere.
“There’s still one out there!” Sturgeon yelled, and even as he did, something gave on the Trojan’s far side and the vehicle shuddered a foot further toward the lake with the impact. We lurched out from its shadow shooting, guided by the eyes of Cormoran’s drones. The last remaining Ruud was already chattering at us with its gun, and I swear Franken never came closer to being killed in his life. The Ruud was already reeling from a pair of drone strikes, though, oily smoke issuing from somewhere inside its cracked carapace. I finished it off myself, three rounds into its lenses, and then another three and another, pushing deeper and deeper until I hit something vital.
When it was down, we crouched in the mud, behind the trees, and we waited. Cormoran had her briefcase before her, spiraling her drones out further and further, looking for any more teeth of the trap that were coming late to the party. When let loose without human operators, Ruuds use a net mind – trigger one and you trigger them all. At the same time, they’re not programmed for suicide. We’d just trashed three of them, so the rest of the pack might write us off as too tough to take on. Probably they’d already reported us to whoever set them out here, if they even had a live human contact any more. Autonomous mechs without a handler to shut them down were as dangerous as forgotten minefields after the fighting had finished. That was one reason we didn’t tend to use them, but nobody else seemed to see it that way.
We let Cormoran do her thing for an hour before anyone was willing to call the all clear. After that, while Sturgeon and I kept an eye out, Franken set about scalping. It was a habit of his, and occasionally a useful one. With surprising deftness he took his tools to the Ruud I’d downed, and dug until he had isolated and removed its brain.
“You have got to be kidding me.” Lawes watched in fascinated horror as Doctor Franken performed his surgery. “Is he going to wear it about his neck like a trophy or something?”
I nodded to Sturgeon, who never needed an excuse to show people he knew stuff they didn’t.
“Best defense against mechs like this,” he explained smugly. “Their net mind is always reaching out to reincorporate missing elements, so we’ll kill this one’s transmitter, but leave it receiving. When its buddies turn up looking for it, we’ll know. Also, Franken likes to play with them.”
“Is that right?” Lawes was torn between being disturbed and impressed. It felt good to know a trick the Englishman didn’t.
“They talk,” Franken grunted, finishing off. “I’m gonna hook Freddo here to a translator and see what’s going on in his little mind.” He held up the mech’s brain, ragged with severed wiring.
Sturgeon kept his eyes on Lawes’ face. “The AI’s pretty complex, with the Ruud models,” he explained with relish. “Sometimes they beg.”
Lawes’ eyes flicked between the two of them. “That’s cobblers,” he decided.
Sturgeon and Franken grinned in unison, best friends now they had someone else to annoy.
“We should move,” Cormoran said quietly at my shoulder. Being who she was, she could have tried to pull corporate rank on me, I guess, so I appreciated her discretion. Of course, whether Franken or the rest would have followed her orders is another question.
It didn’t take any time at all for us to declare the Trojan out of the fight. It would take more than a puncture repair kit to get it moving again. That done, I set my three subordinates to clear out everything we could use while I took Cormoran aside. From the way she was standing about, I could see she had something to say that was just for me.
“You strike me as a smart man, Sergeant,” she told me.
I regarded her doubtfully. “You’ve got low standards.”
“Well I came in with Lawes, so what do you expect?”
I couldn’t stop a smile at that one. “So what is it I’m missing, is that what you’re going to tell me?”
“I’ve seen your records, Sergeant: long service, but it’s not exactly all medals and commendations.”
“So?” Of course she’d seen all our records. The army didn’t say no when the big corporations came asking.
“So haven’t you wondered why it’s you here, and not a corp team?”
“They don’t like to get their hands dirty?” I shrugged. Inside, I felt a stab of unease. It was a good question, and I didn’t like to think I’d bought into that Rich Ted/Poor Ted thing so much that it had gone under the radar.
“We’re trying to get back one of their own: a son of the corporate families,” she pointed out, keeping her voice low. “What expense would they spare, exactly?”
“You tell me,” I shot back, harder than I’d intended. “You’re one of theirs, after all. You’re no grunt. So whatever we’re actually being sent to do, you’ll be all right.”
“Is that what you think?” Her face had closed up again, putting distance between us, even though she didn’t move a step. I was going to deny it, just a knee-jerk, but then I didn’t, and she nodded. “That is what you think, then? I’m going to sell you.”
“And cheap.” I shrugged. “Nothing we haven’t seen before. The army gets the crap jobs. The army gets sent in whenever the corps need meat for the grinder. That’s what Sturgeon says.” It was pretty much just the tip of the iceberg of what Sturgeon said, but it was about as far as I would follow him.
“Yeah, well.” I didn’t see the tension across her shoulders until she let them sag. “Happens that way sometimes. Not this time. I’m as fucked as the rest of you, believe me.”
We stared at each other for a moment, and I heard a clatter and a whine of fans from inside the Trojan, and Sturgeon chattering happily about whatever they’d just woken up.
“If it helps, I figured they were sending us because they didn’t know what the hell ate the Speling boy.” I guessed she wouldn’t think of him as Cousin Jerome. “They aren’t going to risk another Scion, or maybe anything expensive. So I did think of it that much.” Not as much as I should have done.
She shrugged again. “Keep on thinking that. Maybe it’ll turn out to be true.”
Then our three brave salvagers turned up, and they had a pet. It was one of the BigBug load-carriers that we so seldom got to play with, a headless, squat, six-legged robot that would obligingly cart all our gear around for us. We loaded it up with rations and ammo and tents and all the rest of the salvageable gear from the Trojan. Then we set off on foot because, while I can’t speak for the other two, we of the 203rd can be stubborn to a bloody-minded fault when we set out minds to it.
CHAPTER FOUR
CORMORAN HAD HER drones out as our long-range eyes, and Lawes turned out to be a surprisingly good pathfinder who kept us from getting our new boots too wet (the spares we’d all changed into after we got dumped on the lakeshore). The soundtrack for that trek was a constant muttering complaint coming from Franken’s direction, though not actually from Franken. This was the brain he’d taken from the Ruud, which he’d patched through his translator into a little earphone speaker. If you leant in close, you could hear the bastard thing trying to report in that easy Californian accent, calling out for its absent siblings and then – I swear this is true – cussing out Franken like you wouldn’t believe, threatening him with physical violence and Euro-law prosecution for what he’d done to it. I don’t know much about battlefield AI, but I reckoned those Ruudboys had been out there a long while to get that glitchy and personality-filled.
We were due more than our share of shit, that journey, but it was the flies that started the next round. It wasn’t as if our journey had been insect-free, but after four hours or so we started to realize that the air was getting busy with them, the dark beneath the trees flurrying like static with the blur of little wings. Sturgeon was casting anxious looks upward, as if that whole satellite-blocking fly-screen was just going to descend on us like weather. What tipped me off more was Cormoran: she had her briefcase on her back, and was flying her drones with a little handheld console and her headware, but fr
om the look of it, it wasn’t doing the trick.
“Give me five, Sergeant?” she asked.
I nodded, signalled Sturgeon to keep watch, and Cormoran opened up her case and tried to sort her toys out.
“What’s up?” I asked her.
“I’m losing contact,” she told me. “The distance at which I can actually link to them is shrinking as we travel.”
“It’s a power problem?”
“I charged up all the batteries from the Trojan; they should be good for days yet. It’s some sort of interference…”
I swatted at the low whine of a fly, then examined my palm critically. If I’d be expecting to see tiny spilled microcircuitry for guts, I was disappointed. “Is it these bastards?”
I wanted her to laugh that off, but she just frowned.
“Is it the satellite screen come to take a look at us?” I pressed.
“I don’t think so, but something from the same labs. Look.”
She showed me some readings on her case screen. Suffice to say they were too technical for me to make much of them, which must have shown on my face.
“They carry a charge – the flies. Each on its own is nothing, but enough of them together and they just… cause interference, screw with our comms and my drones. I’m not going to be able to keep a proper watch – right now I can’t send anything more than about a hundred yards before I lose the link, and I don’t want to trust them on automatic, that’s too easy to fool. If it gets worse…”
Ironclads Page 4
