Ironclads

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  Our captor rapped sharply on its chest. In truth the armor was too thick for it to sound hollow, but I got the point. Our man was long gone to some Nord gulag or interrogation suite. Not exactly a huge surprise – my dreams of finding Jerome in the flesh and spiriting him away had always been mostly wishful thinking – but right then the Nord banging on his shell sounded like someone hammering nails into my coffin.

  “So where is he?” Maybe I thought it was one of those movie moments, where the bad guys explain all their plans. If so, the Nord officer hadn’t seen that kind of movie.

  “I don’t believe that’s information you require, Sergeant.”

  “What happens to us?”

  His smile wasn’t unpleasant, in its own way. “Sent for debrief. Prisoners of war. What’s the line? For you, the war is over.”

  I nodded, impassive, almost as if I hadn’t heard him. Mostly this was because something had flashed on my HUD. It was showing me a handful of status bars: my biosigns and other data it could get from me. Everything else was blocked, though, in or out. Except something had flashed in the corner of the corner of my eye just then, a rapid sequence of characters.

  Franken grunted. To anyone else it would have sounded like nothing so much as brute resentment about our position. To me, who’d known him for so long, it told me he’d had the same.

  “We’d ship you out by air,” the LMK officer was saying as his men ushered us out of the prefab, “but you wouldn’t thank me for it. That damned muck the Finns let out into the air gets into the engines. So it’ll be by road, but it won’t be so bad.”

  And I was nodding along, but the signal came and came again. The characters blurred past very fast. ‘I’ was first, G last. Was it a code? Was it just a word?

  We were clearing the castle walls, crossing toward the road, toward the main camp. I was concentrating so hard I tripped and almost faceplanted the path.

  I-N-?????-N-G

  The officer had asked me a question. I tried to reconstruct it, but I’d missed it entirely.

  Franken came to my rescue. “He’s just tired. We’ve been on the move for weeks.” So the officer probably thought I was drunk, and I couldn’t blame him.

  “Give me a moment.” Shaking my head as if to clear it.

  “Get him up,” the officer directed, and I was hauled to my feet. I could see he was suspicious as hell. “What’s wrong with him.”

  It came again. I saw it – I must have been really obvious because he grabbed my helmet and yanked it, twisted it off my head and nearly cut my throat with the chinstrap doing so. It didn’t matter. I’d seen the signal. I’d seen what it said.

  Incoming.

  Cormoran had got in. They were coming to rescue us.

  This failed to fill me with cheer, because it sounded like the best possible way to get the rest of my squad captured or killed.

  The officer had a pistol out and he jammed it under my chin while his men held me. “Vad ärdu gör?” he snarled, too angry for English and of course the translator was in my helmet. I could play dumb with real conviction.

  Then he was gone. It was so sudden I thought he’d shot me. I could still feel the steel finger of the pistol at my throat even though it had been torn away. Then the killing started.

  I saw the officer lying dead at my feet with his head mostly ripped from the rest of him. One of his men was twisting my arm behind my back – as if I could have had anything to do with it. The other had let go, was bringing his gun up. I heard shouting in Swedish.

  I saw Viina. Just for a moment in the darkness, I saw her. She slammed into the LMK soldiers and cut two of them open, body armor and all, then turned and loosed a spray of bullets from her long-barrelled gun. Franken was free, grabbing up a rifle from the ground. I rammed my head back into the face of the man that had me, glancing painfully off his chin. It was enough to loosen his grip and I tumbled forward out of it.

  My helmet was there on the ground in front of me. I could see the HUD lighting up like Christmas.

  Franken was down on one knee at my side, crouched low and not lifting the gun, because right now he wasn’t anyone’s target and he wanted to keep it that way. “Got an escape plan,” he snapped out, eyes on his own display.

  “Lead,” I told him, snagged my helmet, and then we were both running. We were both running back toward the main camp. “Wait, this can’t be right!” I hollered at Franken but he didn’t hear. A moment later I had my own helmet on, wrestling with the strap, seeing the path overlaid in front of me – right into the heart of the enemy.

  Franken turned, let me get past him and then opened up full auto back toward the castle, not trying to kill people so much as trying to make them keep their heads down. There was all sorts of commotion in the camp, of that you can be sure.

  They had Ruuds. One of them leapt up from its collapsed-stick resting pose right ahead of us, its minigun already whining. The camp lights gleamed – no, they swirled, the air dancing about them like smoke. Then I was stumbling, waiting for the gunfire. I saw soldiers ahead of me, some of them in full battledress, most of them not. They looked as terrified and confused as I felt.

  The Ruud shuddered and something screamed inside its body. It did a mad jig on its three stilting legs and then just starting shooting and loosing off shells – at random? No: there was one place it wasn’t shooting and that was at me and Franken.

  Men were running, falling, shouting, shooting back. The Ruud rocked with a dozen impacts, but the fit was on it like it was possessed. Around its body the flies danced like stars in the searing light, blocking any attempt by the LMK techs to reassert control.

  Still, there was just one of it, and plenty of them. Abruptly bullets were tearing up the ground at my feet, and me without so much as a pea shooter. Franken returned fire, which is to say he was pissing into the hurricane. I didn’t even know where we were running to.

  Then I did. One of the enemy vehicles was suddenly outlined in blue, the universal color of the good guys. It was starting to move out, jerky at first but then rolling forward, an armored scout car that could have left our Trojan in the dirt.

  I went for it, but then threw myself aside as the suppressive fire came in. One shot struck my body armor at an angle, not enough to floor me but enough to remind me how many parts of my body didn’t have the benefit. The Ruud lurched into them then, spraying shot madly, dancing like a marionette. Some of the camp was on fire from the incendiaries. Another Ruud was active, but just standing and sparking.

  Viina came past us like the north wind, now on two legs, now all fours. I saw her snatch up a dropped rifle and roll, emptying it at the enemy as she came up to her knees, and then she was running – she seemed almost fast enough to overtake her own bullets. When she struck the knot of LMK men I lost sight of her. I could only track her by the bodies she left behind.

  Then I bounced off the side of the armored car, and the string of text on my HUD was saying GETINGETINGETIN.

  “Viina!” I yelled. No human could have heard me, but who knew how good her ears were?

  She broke from them – again, it was only by the reactions of the enemy I could tell. She was coming, dancing through the firefight, even as Franken tried to cover her.

  The possessed Ruud exploded, and then the other one, the one that had just stood there, scything shards of metal every which way. One of them spanged off the vehicle over my head, and when I’d got through ducking, Viina was down. Shot? Caught by the blast? I couldn’t say, but I was running already, pelting into the killing ground because somehow, in my head, she’d become one of my people, and I was damned if I was leaving her behind.

  I was almost at her when someone shot me high in the chest. I went down, feeling the colossal impact through my vest, like the punch of a giant. I was ten feet short of Viina, who was twisting, flapping, clawing at the ground towards me. She couldn’t help me. I couldn’t help me. I could barely breathe.

  Then a knee came down on my chest, right where the shot
had gone, and I screamed. It was Lawes, the little fucker. He had a pistol pretty much up my nose and his eyes were wide and mad. Probably he was saying something clever and English. He could have been quoting Shakespeare for all I heard him, even though he was crouching real low to deny Franken a shot.

  I was willing Viina to get up and do something, but she’d been shot bad, far worse than me, though that balance was about to be redressed. If Lawes had just pulled the trigger I’d not be telling this, but I had so thoroughly screwed his plans that he had to tell me, had to explain just how much he hated me.

  Then something flashed between us and basically rammed him in the face. I recognized Cormoran’s drone in the moment before it drew back, the sheer fact of it dragging Lawes’ gun barrel up to follow it.

  I threw him off me. I had my breath back by then and he was a little guy. He staggered, tried to get me in his sights again, and then someone shot him through the groin. It might have been Franken; it might have been one of the Swedes – they weren’t to know he was on their side, after all. Like Lawes always said, it was a complicated war.

  I gathered up Viina, hugging her to my chest – she seemed to weigh ridiculously little, like a child or a doll. She was bleeding badly, shaking, thrashing feebly. I was hurting her more just by trying to save her. I should have left her. She wasn’t even human, after all. Would I have done it for a dog? A cat?

  I did it for her. I lurched and staggered and gasped my way back to the vehicle, even as the camp went mad behind me. Cormoran had coopted another Ruud and it was driving the LMK boys back, just as mad and spasmodic as the first one. I saw her drone zip like a mad wasp through the open hatch ahead of me, while Franken blew all the ammo he had to try and cover me.

  Then I was dumping Viina inside and clambering in after her. In the car, Sturgeon was at the wheel and Cormoran was sitting calmly at her open briefcase like she was doing nothing more taxing than updating her relationship status.

  I turned, yelling for him, and Franken came in backward through the hatch. His armor vest was all ripped up and he had lost the gun. For a moment I was telling myself it was Viina’s blood on him, but it was his; it was his own.

  I dragged his trailing leg in and got the hatch closed, feeling the impact of more bullets against it. Sturgeon was moving out, looking back at all the mess we’d made when he should have been looking where he was going. Cormoran scrabbled for a medical kit.

  Franken was clenched, every muscle pulling against the rest. He met my eyes, teeth gritted and his face twisted so much by the pain that I wouldn’t have known him. I could hear Sturgeon’s panicky swearing, and I gripped Franken’s hand and told him to hang in there, even as Cormoran slapped painkiller tabs on the inside of his wrists and on his neck.

  And Sturgeon just drove. At first he took the road, because it was simply the best way to put distance between us and the LMK base. After that he went back into the woods, guiding the Nord vehicle between the trees until we were surely past the point where Cousin Jerome had been snatched, past where we’d fought the White Walker or met the buried partisans.

  I had to hope that the fly-screen above us would screw any attempts to track us, because otherwise distance just wouldn’t be enough.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  AT LAST WE stopped. Franken was under, and we’d patched him as best we could, but he’d lost a lot of blood and we hadn’t exactly stolen a field hospital. I’d seen him shot before, but I’d never seen him so pale, like his own ghost. The moment we came to rest, Sturgeon was bolting back out of the pilot’s seat to look at him, his hands wringing at each other.

  “Stupid bastard,” he muttered. “What was he thinking?”

  Viina, we hadn’t given meds to. She was still with us, just about, gut-shot and trembling, curled about her wound and keening at a pitch that was only just inaudible, like electronics feedback. When we went close she snarled and spat, but it was weak. We could have forced some tabs onto her, but Cormoran was against it. We didn’t know what they’d do to her. They’d been made for humans, after all.

  “Your drone good to go?” I asked her, looking up from Franken’s corpse-like form. When she nodded, I told her to get it out and scouting. If LMK were on our trail, we needed to know. If we’d got ourselves on anyone else’s radar, we needed to know.

  “What now, Sarge?” Sturgeon asked in a whisper. “What do we do now?”

  Fuck knows. I just shook my head. We were down two and out of leads. Time to head home and admit defeat, surely. Even my stubbornness has limits.

  Except heading home would rely on the world leaving us alone, and it didn’t sound as though we’d be granted that indulgence. Cormoran’s sudden intake of breath brought me straight over to her screens.

  “What?” I couldn’t see anything there, no thermal, no visual, nothing. She was frantically adjusting parameters, swinging the drone in wide circles, casting for the scent.

  For a moment, no more than a second, we saw them on her screens, loping grey through the night toward us. Then they were gone like specters.

  “The Finns.” My throat was abruptly dry.

  “They’ve come for her,” Cormoran confirmed.

  “How can they even know?” I demanded. This whole war front was a fog of misdirection and interference, except for them. They just cut through it all and they didn’t even carry radios.

  “I think...” Sturgeon was still crouching over Franken. “I read about some stuff – what our people think the Finns were working on, what, ten, fifteen years back? Before Operation Frankenstein went down in Bolivia and all the rest of the biolab havens stopped taking visitors. Comms through quantum entanglement, they said.”

  “Bullshit,” I replied promptly.

  “Speculation,” was his mild correction. “But what they said was, nobody had got it to work, not in a man-made system, but some guy at Harvard reckoned biological systems would be better at it. Only that was about when all the funding got yanked and the Congressional Science Committee basically said it was all the work of the Devil. So we never found out. But maybe the Finns did.”

  “I second bullshit,” Cormoran put in. “So how are we playing this? They coming to kick our asses for letting their warrior princess get killed, you reckon?”

  I thought about how the White Walker had been taken down. This tinpot little Nord scout car was a cardboard box by comparison, and I had the distinct feeling we wouldn’t be able to outrun them either.

  “Nobody point a gun. Keep the hatch open. We come in peace, right?”

  The other two nodded unhappily. Out past the hatch the night contained a thousand ghosts. Every moon-shadow, every moving branch was a Finnish werewolf.

  I glanced at Cormoran. “By the way, that was good work with the Ruuds back there. I didn’t realize you could even hack them that way.”

  She smiled slightly. “Normally? No. But I was in their system, thanks to you, and one of their techs had left the codes lying around. Strong as the weakest link, right?” She shook her head. “Even then they’re no pushovers. If it hadn’t been for the fly-screen blocking the LMK from getting back in, I’d never have done it. You saw that, right?”

  “I did.”

  “I wonder if you’ve had a chance to think about it, because that was just something that happened, to back me up. Because it’s real easy to think of these Finn creations as if they’re animals, something less than human, but they saw what I was doing instantly, long before the LMK techs cottoned on.” Her eyes were haunted in the vehicle lights. “They’re smart. Computer smart, human smart, who knows? Maybe smart like nothing anyone saw before.”

  She stopped speaking then. They’d arrived.

  They slunk out of the darkness: solemn, slender, alien. Some had human eyes, and some had cats’, and some the dark, featureless orbs of deer.

  One of them put out a hand with claw nails, misted with wiry grey hair. The words he spoke were foreign, but I got the gist without needing a translation. Give her to us.

&
nbsp; “She’s all yours. She’s right here, you come and take her.” Slipping outside the car, giving him space to get in, it was a hard thing to do.

  Two of them bore her out and laid her on the cold, root-ribbed ground, and then another was bending over her, slipping things from pockets in his fatigues. I wouldn’t have been surprised to see fetishes and voodoo dolls, but they were pipettes and vials, some modern alchemy, dashed on her skin, jabbed into her veins, dropped into her forced-open mouth.

  While that was going on, one of them came back to us, one of the females. She was tall, stoop-shouldered; her eyes were huge, an owl’s merciless orbs, and I swear I saw the black darts of horns jutting from her fringe of tawny hair. She came and stared at Franken, and I’d seen people less dispassionate looking at road kill. But then that hunter’s face wasn’t made for expression. Maybe I’m doing her a disservice.

  “It’s not just you, you see,” I told her. “It’s us. We suffer too. We’ve got losses too.” I didn’t care whether she could understand me. I didn’t know if Franken was still breathing.

  She said something. The words were lost, but the rhythms of her speech, a little like Swedish, a little like some language spoken by prehuman elves of a thousand years ago, they washed over me. But she sounded sad. She sounded sympathetic. The bioengineered killing machine could spare a moment to come down to our level, to taste the grief of yesterday’s men.

  And then she was asking me a question, and I stared into that face and could not guess what. Sturgeon got it, though. He twitched and his eyes went wide.

  “She says – Sarge, she says, she says they will save him – will try to save him, Sarge!”

  I looked into those predator’s eyes. There was nothing written there that I could read. “Save him how?”

  “I don’t know, sir, but – it’s yes, right? Come on, Sarge, he’s almost…” Sturgeon’s voice shook. I guess he was a better friend than me, in the end.