Ghosts of Tomorrow

by Michael R. Fletcher

  “Where’s Kim?” He spotted Captain Kim huddled nearby. “Captain, there’s something—”

  Too slow. Nadia barked into her radio. “Team Two, there’s a combat chassis six feet north of your LAV.”

  Something exploded in the back of the two-ton truck and the armored door, now little more than twisted wreckage, sailed off into the corn field.

  ***

  Wandering Spider pounced to the top of the LAV. Her Chameleoflage couldn’t keep up with the sudden movement and she became visible but that hardly mattered now. The Strike Team looked up, their eyes round with surprise. Comic, beautiful even. She opened up, spraying 5.56mm at the rate of ten rounds per second. The weight of her chassis negated the recoil and her aim was perfect. She gunned all seven to so much bloody meat in less than three seconds before ripping open the LAV’s top hatch. A few small arms rounds bounced off her armor. From a cavity in her body she ejected two grenades, one thermate, one fragmentation, into the LAV before slamming the hatch closed.

  ***

  Captain Kim rolled out from behind the LAV, sighted along his XM29 and hit the chassis astride the other vehicle with six 20mm High Explosive rounds. It shuddered and collapsed onto the roof of the LAV. Griffin, staring at the monitor on Nadia’s belt, saw the chassis was still semi-functional. The head moved and one arm twitched as if trying to acquire a target.

  Kim ejected the spent clip, ready to slam another into its place.

  “Got the fucker,” said Kim, glancing at Griffin. “Call in—”

  Kim’s head exploded like someone detonated a kilo of C4 in it. He twitched as half a dozen .338 rounds punched through his armor and body and dug holes in the earth below him. Kim’s fingers drummed against the dirt before slowing to a stop.

  Something landed with a heavy crunch on the roof of the LAV Griffin cowered behind and his intestines felt like they’d filled with gurgling water. He looked up, expecting to see death, in time to see Abdul leap from the roof toward the barn. He had no idea Abdul could move so fast.

  “Abdul,” he screamed at Nadia, as if she could have missed that.

  She nodded, trying to follow the NATU chassis with her recording equipment.

  ***

  Crap! I’m hit hard. Didn’t even see what got me. Wandering Spider sounded pissed.

  Who’s the dumbass now? SwampJack asked. I did him for you. You owe me one. Still perched up in the silo, SwampJack saw the NATU chassis first. They’ve got a combat chassis. Fuck it’s fast.

  He recognized the model and called up stats. They scrolled past at a speed no meat brain could follow. This chassis was designed years after SwampJack’s was built. Not fair. He and Spider ran thousands of combat simulations, many against superior firepower, but they’d never seen anything this cutting edge. Roiling liquid oil skin, it wasn’t even trying to chameleoflage. It lay down a weltering cover fire pinning SwampJack in his cubby-hole as it bounced past where Spider lay sprawled atop the burning LAV. He saw it maneuver for a clear shot with its rocket tubes, for some reason unwilling to lay waste to the barn and silo.

  Spider, he noticed, had managed to wedge an arm underneath the wreckage of her body. She must have been counting on the Urban Combat Chassis thinking her dead or disabled. This looked to be close enough to the truth. SwampJack watched as she rolled onto her back, bringing her one working weapon—a 5.56mm machine gun—to bear.

  I’ll distract it, Spider said. You get the kill.

  ***

  Abdul wasn’t human. His mind contained no gray meat of human brain. He perceived in three hundred and sixty degrees at all times. He didn’t want to, he couldn’t stop it. He watched the LAV Griffin and Nadia hid behind, hoping they were smart enough to keep their heads down. He knew where each of the surviving Strike Team members were. By tracing the trajectory of their rounds he knew they had no idea where the second chassis hid. He saw the first chassis, a damaged Mitsu-Brense, roll onto its back and he spun two HEAA rockets into it as an afterthought. He couldn’t afford to let the unit in the silo free and it held most of his attention. He’d almost run out of 2mm DPU flechettes. Even cutting his rate of fire down to twenty rounds a second would chew through his remaining cache fast. It didn’t matter. He was in position.

  ***

  Swamp, I’m— and Wandering Spider went quiet like she’d never been before. Not like when she got killed during a simulation and SwampJack could still hear her bitching about how such and such wasn’t fair, but quiet like she wasn’t there anymore. Gone. SwampJack moved fast, hoping to take advantage of his opponent’s distraction.

  ***

  The detonation of the HEAA rounds rolled like echoing thunder that seemed to go on forever. Abdul watched the silo, the devastated wreck of the Mitsu-Brense chassis, the LAV with the surviving SRT folks, the farmhouse and the barn. He saw a man with a sniper rifle in a barn window and, before the sniper managed to get a shot off, dumped a few HEDM rounds in that direction. He put one through the sniper’s window, one punching through the main doors, and finally he popped one in a gentle arc over the barn into the backyard. He couldn’t see what was going on back there—if anything—and figured at the least it’d keep people’s heads down.

  The second combat chassis, this one a Light Infantry Jungle Assault Textron-Cadillac, made its move. In a jet assisted leap it powered from the silo cubby hole, twisting and firing at the same time. Hyper Velocity rounds might be deadly to human targets, but they were hardly an annoyance to Abdul. Three rounds slammed into his head, one of them shattering a thermal-imager. Pointless. Abdul’s brains weren’t located in his head, and his entire body was covered in sensors of every kind. Still, that the Scan in the LIJAC managed to hit him at all in mid-jump, while he was moving, spoke of considerable skill. It seemed like the kind of crazy stunt move a kid would practice.

  Abdul tracked the chassis for a fraction of a second, calculating the arc of its jump, landing place, and probable next moves. Using the last of his flechettes, he disabled its Jump-Assist jets and then hammered it with HEAA rockets.

  ***

  SwampJack was screwed and he knew it.

  The Urban Assault Chassis seemed to know his every move before he did. He was about to fire his Jump-Assist jets in midflight to alter his trajectory and surprise the fucker, when it shredded them with Depleted Uranium flechettes with stunning precision. He’d applaud if he wasn’t so busy being totally fucked.

  Bullshit. Total bullshit.

  SwampJack knew exactly where he’d land, and now he knew that it knew too. Desperate, he sent round after round slamming into its head, praying for that killing blow. The UAC didn’t seem to notice.

  Fucker! He couldn’t even hurt the damn thing! He was definitely going to complain to Uncle Riina.

  The Urban Assault Chassis came at SwampJack like an unstoppable force, a tornado of violence and ill will. He found himself doubting he was ever going to get the chance to complain.

  ***

  The Textron-Cadillac hit the ground in an uncontrolled tumble. It’d suffered so much trauma it was barely capable of movement. Abdul, however, knew how dangerous these things were. He hammered it with rockets. He couldn’t stop. His thoughts, molten with violence, pulsed two commands. Protect Griffin and Nadia. Protect the Strike Team. There wasn’t room for anything else.

  This wasn’t him. He’d been caught in a single firefight during his brief time in Old Montreal and spent the entire time cowering behind an overturned minivan.

  At this point the HEDM round he dumped behind the barn landed on the storage tank holding fuel for the farm vehicles that were part of the crèche’s cover. The twenty-five hundred liter tank exploded like a bomb, taking out an entire barn wall and setting the whole place ablaze. The building, over one hundred years old, was dry like corn in late fall.

  Abdul, disconnected, watched it happen in exquisite microsecond-by-microsecond detail.

  Oh God. No. The barn. The kids.

  One of the Strike Team fell over, a gaping ho
le in his chest, and the rest of them poured ammo at the farmhouse. The shutters in the windows, thick with flaking white paint, came apart like they’d been tossed in a wood-chipper.

  Abdul looked for heat sources. One under the porch. One crouched under a second story window. One in the corn, moving to flank the Strike Team. All three throbbed, screamed, target! Threat Levels through the roof.

  He hit the one in the corn first, cutting it in half with the last of his small caliber ammo.

  Something inside the barn exploded with enough concussive force to send chunks of wood flying hundreds of yards. Part of Abdul’s mind tracked the arcs, measured the velocities, and noted where each chunk would land. He couldn’t help it—he had no choice. The roof sagged as its central supports gave way. He tasted military-grade explosives on the air and ignored the detailed chemical breakdown he received.

  The heat source on the second floor, the next most dangerous target, was lying down. Most likely it’d been hit by the Strike Team’s return fire, but Abdul couldn’t take the chance. He slammed several HEDM rounds into the structure around the window and most of that wall came apart in the resulting explosions.

  To Abdul’s machine-heightened senses the rear wall of the barn collapsed in slow motion, dragging the roof down into the inferno.

  A low velocity, heavy caliber round hissed by, missing by several yardss. The target under the porch had seen him and shot wild.

  The kids. Nothing could save the barn. His fault. Too late.

  Abdul pulverized the front half of the farmhouse with HEDM rounds. Then he jumped to the rear of the building and did the same there with cold precision born of pent fury he had no other means of expressing. Nothing escaped. Nothing.

  He scanned the corn. Nothing larger than a field mouse alive out there.

  The barn was an inferno, the farmhouse in ruins.

  All clear, he tight-linked to the Strike Team.

  Abdul stood guard as Griffin and the four remaining members of the Strike Team searched the devastated house and smoldering wreckage of the barn. They found only small burnt bodies and the twisted, melted remains of cots in cramped cells. Abdul counted a half dozen adult bodies and the corpses of sixty children. None of them could have been over six. He measured the air, the parts per million of human flesh burnt to ash still dancing in the gentle breeze.

  Abdul watched Griffin watching Nadia who in turn watched Abdul. He saw the growing stack of blackened husks. He didn’t move. He didn’t shake with grief. He couldn’t.

  Meat death. Machine death. Was there a difference? Wasn’t dead just dead?

  The drive to protect deflated like an old man wheezing his last breath. All it missed was the death rattle. Nothing screamed target! All purpose leaked away, leaving him empty. He wasn’t even sure what he felt. And if he did feel something—satisfaction, self-hatred, whatever—was it real? Or did They want him to feel this?

  “Can’t trust anything,” he said.

  Now that he had time to think his modeled thoughts he knew the two Jungle Combat chassis he killed housed the scanned minds of children from a crèche like this one.

  Today he murdered children. The two in the chassis he killed intentionally. Self-defense, some part of him argued weakly. Maybe the ones in the barn were an accident, but his carelessly placed round turned their cells into ovens. Could he have done it differently?

  Nadia approached Abdul from behind, removing her helmet and dropping it in the dust. He watched without turning.

  She’ll ask if I’m okay. He saw it in her face, read it in her tentative steps.

  “Are you okay?” Nadia asked.

  He turned to face her. People didn’t like talking to backs, even if he saw her perfectly well. “Yes. Fine.” Fine. He was anything but fine.

  “It wasn’t your fault.” She placed a hand on his side.

  What she was she thinking? Would placing a hand on the side of a battle-tank make it feel better? Was he supposed to feel comforted by the human contact? It was all numbers, not real warmth. There was a difference and it mattered.

  People were terrified of Scans going nuts, and rightly so. He was dangerous. Deadly. Just ask the kids in the combat chassis. Ask the people in the farmhouse or the one in the corn.

  Just ask the children in the barn.

  “Not my fault?” His chassis incapable of facial expression, he couldn’t snarl or bear his teeth. “Not my fucking fault?” he said again, louder. He towered over her. “You have a Threat Level, you know? Not my choice. It’s just assigned to you. Maybe They do it. Maybe it’s programmed. Everything has a Threat Level. That sniper I shot. The guy in the corn I blew in half. The combat chassis I destroyed. Even that fucking gnat I crushed. Your Threat Level keeps going up. Why is that? Is it because I’m afraid of you? Am I the problem? What happens when it gets high enough?” His fists clenched with the sound of grinding metal and Nadia shied away, hands raised defensively. He felt like he’d been kicked in the guts, the anger soured and curled up in shame. It wasn’t gone, just waiting. “Sorry,” he said quietly. “You probably didn’t even see what happened.”

  She shook her head and said, “Too fast.”

  “They built me for this. Designed.” He said it like it was a bad word, distasteful. “That took forever for me. I watch bullets. I know where they’re going before they do.”

  “You did what you had to.” Her hand was back on his side and she stared up at where his eyes should have been if he were human. “You’ve been shot. A lot.”

  “I’m fine.” God she’s brave. He would never have the courage to touch something so obviously dangerous and angry, never mind try to comfort it. He tried to explain but had trouble finding the words. “They didn’t get everything right. They can’t. Even a stupid seventeen-year-old kid is a billion times too complex. Hormones. Emotions. Numbers aren’t warmth. Nothing I have is real. Nothing is mine.” He stopped, gathering his jumbled thoughts. She had to understand the truth. He needed this. Abdul pointed at the piled bodies and she flinched. “They burned because of my carelessness.” He leaned down putting his armored head level with hers. She must understand. “I killed them. Murdered. My decisions burned them.”

  She blinked and tears cut tracks through the dust on her cheeks. “Seventeen?” When he didn’t answer she banged a fist against his armor plating. Just numbers. He continued to crouch in front of her and she glared straight into one of his visual receptors. The set of her mouth, her narrowed eyes, she looked more angry than sad. Was she angry at him? “You’re seventeen. They did this to you? We did this to you.” She looked past him, taking in the desolation. Her gaze settled on the stacked corpses. “Have you done this before?” she asked without looking at him. “Have you been on one of these raids?”

  “Thousands, none real.” He tried to explain the chaos of jumbled memories, most of them not real. “They crammed three years of training into a couple of hours by slamming high-speed simulations straight into my brain.”

  “But you were already in the military, back before....” She gestured, unable or unwilling to say the words.

  Back before I was dead. Back before I was a brain in a box. “Marines. It was gonna pay for college,” he said, remembering the advertisements. “I never hurt anyone before. Not for real.” He leaned in closer and she didn’t back away. “This isn’t me, not the me I remember. Some emotions come easier than others. Why do you think that is? Some emotions They want me to feel, but maybe some are less useful.” His soul was trapped in this metal box forever. Something like spiritual claustrophobia crushed his thoughts. He shouldn’t say any of this. He should take it all back. No. That’s what They would want. “They fucked with my thoughts,” he said, straightening to loom above her. “They’re not all mine anymore. I can’t tell what is.” He gestured at the destruction around them. “Is this who I am now? I can’t tell. But it was easy. Very easy.”

  “I’m sorry,” Nadia said, little more than a whisper. She struggled with this, uncertain how to r
eact. He saw it in her red-rimmed eyes, the way they looked at him, looked to the bodies, and then flinched away to stare out at the endless corn. “This crèche won’t be stealing and killing any more children. You did that.”

  Looking for the bright side? He wanted to laugh. Couldn’t. “Great, thanks. Did you get any good video?” The question came out before he could stop it.

  Nadia stared up at him in shock. “Good video?” she asked in disbelief. “I’m not here to provide people with vicarious entertainment.”

  “Sorry.” Why the hell am I apologizing? “I was trying to change the subject.” He tapped his head as if that’s where his brain was. “I’m all fine in here. Lights are green, and we’re cleared for takeoff.” She gave him a confused look, uncertain. “Sorry,” he repeated.

  Nadia turned away, looked toward the remaining LAV. The other still burned. “I spent most of the time cowering back there. It’s a blur of noise and lights. And blood.”

  “Adrenalin,” Abdul said. “It can screw with your memories and perceptions.”

  “But now?”

  It took him a moment to realize what she was asking. “No adrenalin. They didn’t see fit to model that kind of biological reaction. I guess I make a better...a better machine...if I can think clearly at all times.” He almost said a better killing machine.

  “A better machine.” She looked away, shaking her head as if in disgust. “I don’t think you’re a machine.” She left without waiting for a reply.

  Abdul watched her leave. He couldn’t forget. No chemical reactions took the edge off. He’d remember this perfectly, those burnt little bodies, until he ceased to exist. Not die, ceased to exist. He was already dead.

  Surprised, he realized he missed tears and the ability to cry. Denied release, he wondered at his mental state. What happened now? Did it build and fester? If he could find no way to release the pain, eventually he’d crack.