“We could get zapped by these things?”
She really wanted to dismiss that one, but then she gave another of her shrugs. “Fuck knows, Sergeant,” was her frank appraisal of the situation.
Lawes got us to the edge of the Vنttern after that, where all the fighting had been. Intel was patchy, so I had Sturgeon pop out all the warning tech we could get – Geiger counter, chem-hazard, everything. We were getting toward dusk then, just when we’d found some country that was no use whatsoever for hiding in. We were exposed out at the water’s edge, with the dark bulk of the island hunching up the horizon across the water. There had been a lab or something there, Rurisksdottir had said. I decided that I didn’t want to go find out, and looking back I’m glad that was one command decision I got to stand by.
After a brief conference with our expat Englishman, we pressed on alongside the water, more and more jumpy, picking up pace as the daylight left us, the BigBug labouring patiently in our wake.
We found some little town that had been a harbour before everything kicked off. It looked as though it would have been a nice little tourist retreat or retirement place, stuck on a little strip of low ground between the water and the trees. They’d fought over it for weeks, Lawes said. All those nice suburban homes and gardens trampled by men and mechs and Scions, torn up by shells and the treads of tanks. And for what? Nobody was there now, not our guys, not their guys. Whatever strategic objective had been served by dropping men and machines onto the shore of the Vنttern had long since become obsolete. Or else everyone’s guys had been driven off. Like Lawes said, like Rurisksdottir had said, there were more than two sides to this war.
We pitched camp in the broken shell of a big, ruined quad – might have been a school once, or some government office or just a really fancy house. It gave us cover and plenty of ways out if we had to bug out, which was what mattered. We got attacked in the night, too. There was a hectic twenty minutes of gunfire enlivened by one really badly aimed Molotov cocktail, followed by about two hours of occasional potshots at us. This broken place, this wrecked gravel shadow of a town, still had its residents. It’s one thing you learn in this job: some people won’t ever leave home. Some people will cling on no matter what; they’ve got nowhere else to go.
We all had night-sights, and we had Cormoran’s drones. From the images she captured, I don’t think the locals had anything other than a handful of scavenged assault rifles and a grab-bag of hunting weapons. I gave orders to scare them off, but there’s no accounting for bad luck, and there must have been at least a couple who ducked late or took the wrong left. They weren’t soldiers; they weren’t even the partisans we’d been warned of. I don’t exactly count it as a grand victory over the Nords. I think they might have been after our rations as much as our blood.
Come first light, we were all eager to get going, because the alternative would be to stay and see if parts of the rubble-jagged landscape would suddenly resolve themselves into dead faces and outflung limbs.
We took to the treeline, moving parallel to the water’s edge, as the interference drew Cormoran’s drones closer and closer to us, until they were always a constant hovering presence or just perching on her shoulders. The robot brain kept up its muttering, which seemed to buck up Franken’s spirits, if nobody else’s.
There was a wrecked ship we saw, half-beached in the shallows. Like Rurisksdottir had said, there’d been a bit of a boat war on the Vنttern. The wreck had been a compact gunship, and one of the turrets was still sticking one finger up at the sky. The grey armored hull had been shredded below the waterline, the damage revealed when it heeled over in final defeat. I’d never seen the like: the metal just snipped up and pulled open like someone had taken a pair of sharp pliers to a toy.
“There’s probably some still alive in there,” Lawes said glumly, nodding at the inky water.
“Some what?” I asked him.
“You didn’t hear what the Finns brought, to clear everyone out? Crabs.” Everyone was looking at him like he was mad, and he shook his head mournfully. “They just seeded the lake with them – little ones, when they did it – and the bloody things grew and grew – big as cars, someone told me. They just tore open anything that put out on the water – and anyone.” He chuckled, in that miserable English way of his. “Funny thing is, there was always supposed to be a monster in the Vنttern – like Nessie, you know? – and now it’s got more monsters than anyone knows what to do with.”
“You made that up,” Franken growled at him, but Lawes met his gaze without a flinch.
It was within an hour that we hit our coordinates. There were no giant crab attacks that I’m admitting to.
HALF AN HOUR later and we still didn’t know much more. There had been a camp there – our man hadn’t just been got strolling down the lovely crab-infested lakeshore. Lawes tried to piece the tracks together, but there was little enough to find given the time that had passed. The drones picked up more. Cormoran had some kind of scene-of-crime software she set up, and I got to peer at models of how things might have been based on the marks and prints and scars that had been left behind. A tent, she thought, and thermal baffling sheets – she’d pinpointed the attachment points on the trees nearby. Soil analysis showed where a heater had been sat, and by that time Lawes had turned up a couple of empty Nord ration packets, just scrappy films of foil, but they told a story. A small team had been parked here, waiting, and then our man had come along. And then he’d vanished off the map, somehow.
Cormoran set the drones on a spiral pattern, looking for a trail we could follow, but by then Lawes had found fresher prints. They should have been none of our business – they were clearly far more recent then whatever had happened to Cousin Jerome. What got us worried was that they came out of the lake.
None of us were happy with the idea, but once Lawes had shown them to us we couldn’t doubt his conclusions. They must have been fresh that morning, and they were… How to describe them? They were almost human. Think about that: I’m not sure there’s anything more frightening. Not mech tracks, not monsters. We could plainly see the imprint of toes, of fingers, but longer than they should have been. They put me in mind of werewolf movies.
“We need to move,” Lawes decided. He looked at me with his big teeth bared, like a dog anxious to be let off the leash. “This is Finnish SpecOps. They could be here right now.” And what was worse was, he was looking toward the water as though they might just be hanging there like drowned men, beneath the surface.
“Have we got anywhere to move to?” I demanded.
“Yes.” Cormoran looked up from her open case. “I have a trail. Tracked vehicle, probably a converted PBV 5-series or similar.” I had my helmet HUD call it up: a heavily armored car not a million miles from our Trojan. “It’s faint,” Cormoran went on. “We’ll have to take it slow or we might just lose it altogether, but we’ve got something to follow. Heading inland, looks like.”
All this time, Franken’s stolen brain had kept up its mutinous grumbling – you just tuned it out after a while. Right then, though, even as Cormoran was calling her drones back, the translator’s flawless Californian snapped out, “Oh you bastards are in for it now!”
Even though it couldn’t reach out to them, the brain had felt the first electronic touch of its friends.
For a moment we just crouched there, weapons at the ready and listening, hearing nothing. Then Sturgeon and one of the drones caught the first heat signature through the trees at about the same time.
We got moving sharpish, skipping over terrain that was lumpy with rock and root and pocked by gaping craters that nature hadn’t been able to mend. Behind us, the Ruuds would be striding forward, stilting over the terrain with their long legs. I’d seen them in action often enough to track their progress in my mind’s eye. They looked awkward and teetering, but they could put in a hell of a turn of speed over rough ground.
Our heading was away from the water, because if we got caught in the open betwee
n the trees and the lake then we’d be dead meat on legs. Franken, bringing up the rear, turned to launch an incendiary in the general direction of the enemy every half minute or so, keeping them busy and screwing with their heat imaging.
“Can we sacrifice the Bug?” Cormoran asked, doggedly keeping pace with her case swinging in one hand.
I had a frantic going-on-holiday moment of trying to remember what we’d stowed where, what of the Bug’s load we could reasonably carry. “Is this going to slow them or stop them?”
“Just slow.”
“Free the gear and it’s yours.”
She was already in the Bug’s systems, and it jettisoned its clasps and straps explosively, spilling duffle bags and tins and the tents over the forest floor. Everyone grabbed what they could – we’d be leaving a lot of hot meals behind us, and our next sleeping arrangements would be newly intimate. We ran on, and behind us the Bug wheeled nimbly on its six feet and then lumbered off into battle.
I didn’t see what it did at the time, but Cormoran had drone footage she showed me later: the little carrier robot charging like a doomed knight toward the great stalking strides of the Ruuds. Something – one of Cormoran’s somethings – meant they didn’t flag it as a target until it was quite close, or perhaps they were just too fixated on us. It must have been within ten yards when the nearest of the trio of mechs stopped and started shooting at it. The valiant Bug lost two legs in that burst, but it could still hop about on the remaining four, and it closed the distance in a sudden mad rush. In my mind, it was screaming a battle cry.
It blew – the drone’s cameras were just flat white for a second, and in the aftermath one of the Ruuds was down, and another was staggering and limping, one leg damaged and trailing. A half-dozen trees had been torn into as well – there was a matchwood-strewn crater where the Bug had been, with odds and pieces still pattering down.
I swear, if I knew that was a thing the Bugs could do, I’d not have gotten within twenty feet of one of them.
The last Ruud was still coming, in the drone’s footage, and Cormoran was yelling that same news to me right then and there as we ran. I was weighing up the odds: probably we could turn and ambush it now, the five of us against a machine. Certainly we couldn’t just keep running.
Then the forest ahead of us whomped into flames – abruptly the trees were a wall of fire, all that damp wood and earth seething and spitting and cracking in the instant inferno heat.
“That wasn’t from the Ruud!” Sturgeon shouted.
We were already changing course, now running parallel to the trees’ edge instead of away from it. Another incendiary shell exploded past us, lighting up a hundred yards of beach with flames that could burn underwater.
Lawes was swearing to himself. The rest of us were saving our energy for running. Except Cormoran, whose drones were obediently feeding her images of just what had run into us.
“White Walker!” she cried, and that’s when our day got a whole lot worse.
Like Lawes said, if there’s fighting, there’s Russians. These days they’re the premier mercenaries the world over: they don’t quit and they’re backed by enough money to make even a few of them a serious problem. This isn’t the government, what they’re calling the Red Russians now. This is what happened when that government finally went all out on those rich oligarchs and their families, took their property and drove them out to make them everybody else’s problem. Some of them were legitimate businessmen and some were criminal families and some were former government types who had picked the wrong side. What they became, though, was a well-monied class of global exiles: the White Russians.
And of course, most of them just found gainful employment around the world, but you know what? In my trade I never got to meet that type. I got to meet representatives of the mercenary clans who had got out of Russia with their fortunes intact, enough to equip a private army well enough to go head-to-head with corporate special forces.
And of course the favored sons of these military exiles went to war, just like the sons of our great corporate clans. And, just as with them, they spared no expense. Except that while Rich Ted Speling or Överste Rurisksdottir had shells that could get through a decent-sized doorway, fit for a hostile takeover in the boardroom as well as a battlefield, the White Russians thought big. What came striding toward us through its own wall of fire was as tall as the trees, which it shouldered aside without difficulty. The White Walker was a brutalist, headless humanoid shape, with two arms low at the front for grabbing and crushing, and two more off its shoulders that were basically just enormous toyboxes of weapons. Its front was painted with a vastly complex coat of arms full of saints and horsemen and five different colors of eagle.
For a moment, the fire was messing with its instruments and it just stood there, receding behind us as we ran. Then it got intel from the Ruud and began following us, moving at a leisurely stomp that sent shockwaves through the ground to us and shivered the branches of the trees.
It was a Scion. We could fight men and we could fight mechs, but we had nothing that would touch it. Nobody had bought us that sort of firepower.
Sturgeon says – and I appreciate this is an odd time to be talking about what Sturgeon says, but it’s crazy what goes through your head when you’re running for your life – Sturgeon says that it’s not even just that they’re cheap. He says that they could give us common soldiers Scion-killer weapons if they wanted, but that would be putting the power in our hands. Scions fight Scions, like chess players play against chess players. We pawns are just here to get taken.
That’s what Sturgeon says. Right then, with the White Walker rattling our teeth with each step, it was hard to argue with.
Another couple of incendiaries went over our heads and exploded five square yards of forest ahead and to the left; we were fleeing like rabbits with a dog after us, and I had the idea that the Ruud was running interference off to the right, closing the trap. The Walker was still some way behind us, and there was a lot of tree cover, but I was still thinking, Why hasn’t he crisped us?
Was it the flies? Because the air was thick with them by then, and maybe they were screwing with the Walker’s targeting. Or maybe the son of a bitch was just enjoying himself, the lordly Boyar out hunting peasants.
Sturgeon was in the lead, and without warning he disappeared, so completely that it was like a magic trick. More woodland real estate was going up in smoke, so any shout he gave was utterly lost. A moment later, Lawes was gone too, and then I was skidding to a halt at the edge of a big square hole, that had been covered over with branches and leaf litter before my comrades had crashed into it.
I imagined spikes. I imagined… well, to be honest my imagination was going nuts about then because I think I imagined crocodiles or something, but then Sturgeon was calling, telling us to get down there. With the Walker thundering closer, we didn’t need much encouragement. Franken popped an incendiary in an adjacent tree as he brought up the rear, so that our exit would be just one more hotspot for the Walker to pass over.
CHAPTER FIVE
WHAT WE’D FOUND was a tunnel, too cramped to stand up in, which my HUD compass claimed ran north-east/south-west. We took the arm that led away from the water and put as much distance between us and the hole as we could. The crazy skimming of my gun’s flashlight showed the tunnel was walled with concrete slabs, many of them defaced. My HUD translator kept picking up graffiti as we went, so that we made our escape through a cloud of overlaid Swedish obscenities.
I say, escape. That makes it sound happier than it was. What actually happened was that we came suddenly out into a big chamber lit by a couple of flickering electric lamps. The floor was some way below, and we stumbled and skidded down a rough flight of breezeblock stairs and into the muzzles of at least a dozen guns.
Sturgeon was already on hands and knees at the foot of the stairs – not shot, but the clumsy bastard had tripped over his own feet, his own gun skidding conveniently out of reach. Lawes w
as after him, aiming back at our new hosts, grimacing enough to show every one of his brown teeth.
There were at least fifteen of them there, men and women wearing a grab-bag of civvies and military cast-offs; armor vests and Barbour jackets and Vintersorg reunion tour T-shirts. Their guns – by far their most attention-grabbing feature given where they were pointed – were mostly surplus, assault rifles of the model before the model the current national army were toting, but there were a couple of ours there as well.
“I think we found the partisans,” Cormoran said softly from behind me. “You want a flash-bang?”
She could blind them with her drones but I imagined the enclosed space with that many guns going off. If someone pulled a trigger right now, just about everyone was going to die from terminal ricochets.
“Easy now, let’s not make this worse,” I said, and saw that none of them understood me. They weren’t Rurisksdottir’s well-equipped lot; they didn’t have translators, and they’d have to crowd inconveniently close to hear mine.
“Sarge?” Sturgeon asked. He had slowly tipped himself back until he was sitting on the bottom step.
“Go for it,” I invited, and he tried something in Swedish that was good enough for my translator to recognize it.
There followed the expected give and take where they told us to put our guns down, and we politely declined. At the same time I was making plain that we weren’t there to shoot anyone, and that we were just a peaceful little search and rescue team. It was really, really hard to phrase all of this, partly because I didn’t want to tax Sturgeon’s vocabulary, and partly because we were Americans, and Americans were very definitely fighting the Nord army right about then, and so it was kind of hard to put the innocent face on.
They didn’t seem to be buying it, and I was keenly aware of just how twitchy people get when this sort of stand-off goes on for any length of time. Then a new voice broke in, and a lot changed as soon as it did. It was a woman’s high, light voice, and the partisans shuddered when she spoke. Moreover, she was speaking some jabber that didn’t sound at all like Swedish, and that my translator gave up on from the get-go.
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