by Faith Hunter
Amos said, “I just brained a guy taking a piss. There’s a handcuffed woman in his tent.”
“We have to assume that every tent and RV has prisoners in them,” I said. “We’ll have to clear each one. No quarter given to anyone who”—I took a slow breath to control my anger—“hurt prisoners.”
“Roger that,” Jagger murmured.
Amos said, “I hope these suits kill bedbugs and lice. ’Cause dayum this place stinks.”
“I have visual on the campsite,” Cupcake said.
“I see two speakers,” I said. “When the diesel is close, kill the speakers so they can hear the engine. When they come running out, everyone with a weapon dies. Everyone else will be treated humanely until we discover who decided not to be human and not to act human. When we leave here, there will be no more bad guys.”
“Roger that,” Jagger repeated, his voice the battlefield ice of the warrior who survived the Battle of Mobile. “Targeting speakers.”
“What he said,” Amos said.
I stretched out along the branch and pulled the ancient ARGO. It could accept extra-large-capacity mags, holding fifteen rounds each, and I had four more mags in my butt bag. I dragged the bag forward and positioned it for easy retrieval. I located each of my fellow warriors in the face-shield sensors and checked their firing positions. So far, so good. Shooting each other by accident should be difficult.
The diesel cab bumped over ruts. Cupcake shifted gears. “Now,” she said.
Shots rang out. The music died. The engine roared. The truck bounced into the main camp area, the horn blowing like the coming of the Angel Gabriel. I initiated my ear protectors. Men stumbled out of RVs, out of tents, rubbing eyes, drunk, all armed. They started firing at the cab. I took down the one nearest me. Then another. And another. From the sides, Jagger and Amos took down two more.
The armed men scattered like ants, each positioned in my sensor screens. Each obviously thinking that the shooting came from the diesel, they took cover from it, leaving themselves fully exposed to us. I shot two in the back. OMW rules of engagement meant killing people, not etiquette.
With our armor shielding and the glaring lights from the big rig, they couldn’t see us. I emptied my magazine one careful shot at a time, changed mags, and scanned the battleground. I went around again, putting a second shot into each of the downed men. Just in case. It was like shooting rats in a bucket.
When the last one was down and the shooting stopped, I said, “Kill the engine, Cupcake.” The diesel died with a slow coughing rumble. The ear protectors that had covered my ears during the barrage allowed ambient sounds in again. People were screaming and weeping.
I shoved back my faceplate and swung down, landing in front of the cage. A woman stared at me with wide blank eyes. The cage wire had pressed diamond patterns into her face and abdomen where she had been asleep standing up. I swung the ARGO shotgun back, and the suit grabbed it, holding it secure. Soundless, the woman watched as I inspected the cage’s lock. It was an old steel padlock, operated with a key. The lock was well built, but the hasp latch was cheap metal.
“Dick has the key,” she whispered, her voice a rasp.
I wrapped my armored hand around the padlock and pulled, twisting. The metal groaned. I placed one foot on the cage wall and activated the recoil-reverse feature of the armor. I pulled harder. The suit adjusted and hardened to provide maximum force and torque. My glove went harder than steel. I twisted my hand slightly.
The latch snapped off. I yanked the door open. People spilled from the cage into a pile on the ground, too exhausted to catch their balance or stand upright. The stench was appalling.
Gunshots rang out.
I didn’t even bother to turn around. My screens showed that Amos and Jagger had both fired, taking down someone. “Secure the area,” I said over comms. “Call in Medic.”
“Hand of the Law and Medic are busy in town with Marconi’s diversion,” Jagger said.
“Bloody hell. So we’re on our own.” I leaned down and helped people up until I found the woman who had spoken to me earlier. I offered her my hand.
Her breath caught when she moved. “Broken ribs,” she said, matter-of-fact, as she stood.
“Do you know where the medical supplies are stored?” I asked. “Water? Food?”
“Yes.” She lifted a hand as if to point, but her fingers were swollen and twisted, broken and left to heal out of shape. They looked as if she had tried to set the bones herself. “In that RV.”
“Do they have a med-bay?”
“Yes. Rudimentary. A first-generation MBB. For battle triage and stabilization only.” That was medical and soldier jargon. When I looked at her, she said, “I was a nurse. My name’s Gretchen.”
“No. You are a nurse. Those men? They did not take away who you are.”
Her eyes passed through a series of changes as the words settled into some wounded place inside her. Tears gathered at the corners of her eyes and instantly dried. She looked away.
I carefully didn’t touch her. “Hey. See that woman?” I pointed to Cupcake who was striding through the carnage with a tread that radiated rage. She passed a downed man, and when he twitched, she pulled a weapon, shot him in the head, and reholstered so fast the motion was nearly invisible. I was so proud of her. She stopped and picked up something from the ground near her target. I tapped my comms to include her. “Her name is Cupcake. She can do anything, anything, that needs doing. You two get things organized—med-bay, water, and food. Make sure the children are cared for.”
Cupcake stopped in front of me. “Gretchen is a nurse,” I said to her. “She knows where everything is.”
Cupcake and Gretchen exchanged nods. Cupcake held open a long jacket she had picked up from the ground, standing back like a servant or a gentleman in an old film. Gretchen eased her broken hands into the sleeves and pulled the front together. Cupcake leaned forward slowly and offered flex ties. “I can secure the front,” she said gently.
“Thank you,” Gretchen whispered.
“Jagger,” I said into comms, pointing. “Clear that RV. There’s water and medical supplies in it.”
“Roger that.” He bounded up the steps. Shots rang out. Jagger returned fire once. Twice. Two bodies flew through the air and landed in a heap, moaning.
“Those men?” I nodded to the injured bad guys. “You can have them. Your kidnappers and abusers are yours to do with what you want.”
Gretchen looked up at me and something fierce crossed her face. “Good. But it will never be enough.”
“Get your people organized,” I repeated. “Get them help. We can call in the sheriff in the morning.”
“Make sure it isn’t Deputy Darson. He’s a regular.”
“Is he now? I wonder how that will go over with the officer whose wife died out here.”
Gretchen’s voice was emotionless when she said, “Who do you think killed her?”
I cursed and walked away, leaving her and Cupcake in charge. They began issuing orders, taking over medical care, and apportioning food and water. I shut down the chatter. I tried not to look at the former prisoners, but an idea sprang up and wriggled in the back of my brain like a worm on a hook. I looked at the dead men. Three were wearing washed-out night camo.
I told my suit to soften. It didn’t. I tried a couple different words, and it was still battle hard.
Jagger was chuckling into my earbuds. “Try ‘Pliable Mode.’”
I did, and the suit went back to pajama soft.
“Tents and RVs are cleared,” he said. “Bringing three bad guys. Where do you want them?”
“Truss them to the big tree near the fire pit. Add any who are wounded but still alive. They belong to the women and children they hurt.”
I felt Jagger’s reaction roil through the nanobots that connected us. “Roger that,” he said softly.
With security in place, Jagger and Amos disappeared into the brush, carrying equipment that would ping and locate the Simb
a—assuming that the information we had on the main battle tank’s location had been accurate. Assuming the Simba was anything more than a bit of imagination, battle legend, and wishful thinking.
Twenty minutes later Jagger said, “I got a ping.”
I found his location on my screen and hardened my suit. “Cupcake?”
“We got this,” she said. “Three hours to dawn. Go.”
∆∆∆
Carrying the AI Interface Portal—the uplink for the Simba—carefully in both hands, I trudged through the trees and found the men in an open area on the far side of a creek. Amos was hip-deep in mud, Jagger chest-deep, pulling himself out of the wetland muck, his suit on full battle power, the anti-recoil mechs doing the work.
To me, Amos said, “I’m standing on something flat, made of metal, with metal protrusions.”
Jagger said, “The dimensions are perfect. It has to be the Simba, but it’s in total lockdown. Amos and I think we can dig out the mud and get close enough to the top of the Simba to find the access hatch. Then we can sandbag around the hatch, clean it out, and open the uplink access.”
“There has to be four feet of mud,” I said quietly. “It’ll take days.”
“Evelyn doesn’t have days,” Mateo said over the comms.
Amos moved through the mud toward me. Tripped. Fell forward, landed face-first in unsealed armor in the mud. He came out of the mud with a bound of recoil and almost flew up into the air. When he landed on his feet, he was standing in only two feet of mud, and his face shield was sealed. Over comms, he said, “I fucking love this suit! Does the hatch stick up from the tank’s main body? ’Cause I just scratched my new armor on something.”
Jagger waded to him and sealed his faceplate. He disappeared beneath the mud, moving here and there, creating a wake in a four-meter square. He stood upright, slinging and dripping mud. “Hatch is right here.”
“I’m your good-luck charm,” Amos said, wading around as if searching for something else to trip over. He looked like a two-meter pinecone in the Dragon Scale armor.
“Time frame for Simba extraction?” I asked.
“Dawn,” Jagger said.
“That puts us driving the Simba out of here in daylight, instead of under the cover of darkness.” I shook my head. “We need to be twenty miles away by dawn.”
“Got another hatch,” Amos said. He was standing right in front of me, this time only buried to his ankles. “Can I keep this suit?”
Jagger dove into the mud again and came up fast. He pushed back his helmet and mud went flying. “No,” he said to Amos, “but you can drive the earthmover.”
“I’ll make this mud my bitch,” the man said.
∆∆∆
In forty minutes, the rear hatch of the Simba had been sandbagged, pumped free of mud, washed out, repumped, and dried. Jagger was inflating a massive bladder that would divert the creek when they were finished uncovering the Simba. Amos was moving muck, chortling like a happy four-year-old as he ran the earthmover.
I slid into the muck, stepped over and into the ring of sandbags that protected the hatch—which looked a lot like the airlock hatches on the skin of the SunStar. I was hoping that the seals had held and the Simba wasn’t full of mud and water. That would suck.
The night was blacker than the devil’s heart, as Pops used to say, but in my armor’s face shield, I could see clear as day. I ran my fingers all around the hatch, finding it smooth, solid, perfectly machined. I sat on one side of the hatch and shifted the Interface Portal uplink on my lap. Gingerly, I inserted the hard probe on the uplink into the matching slot at the hatch of the Simba. It fit on the first try. “Okay,” I said to Mateo back at the scrapyard. “It’s up to you and Jolene.”
“We got this, sugah,” Jolene said.
I was glad someone had something. Suddenly all I had was the shakes. Bad ones. In the darkness all around me, I could see Marty’s face as he died, and Gretchen’s eyes when she began to come back to life—her horror, her pain. I shoved back my face shield again. I sipped water. I waited. I told myself I didn’t have to pee. Over the comms I heard whirrs and snaps and clicks and a steady hum of electronic chatter.
I stared at the stars overhead. Millions of stars in the dry air of the night sky. From beneath my butt on the hatch, I felt something vibrate.
I jumped away, landing hip-deep in mud, the surface beneath my battle boots slanted. Arms flailing, I caught my balance. Whipped around to the hatch. A deeper blackness cracked in the center of the ring of sandbags. “Mateo?” I whispered. “The hatch? It’s opening.”
“Once it’s fully open, drop in and re-plug the uplink inside. The socket will be to the right of the hatch rings, glowing yellow. Once the hatch is completely open, you have twenty seconds before the hatch closes again and you’ll be stuck until I can get there.”
“What?!” I said. “I’ll be stuck until you rescue me?”
“Twenty seconds is a lot of time. As soon as you complete the process, I’ll take over and operate it from the junkyard.”
There was something odd in his voice, a nervous pacing of words, something not normal. “Mateo—”
“Power levels are low, Shining. Three seconds before the hatch is fully open.”
“I don’t like it.” But I followed instructions to the letter. I unplugged the IP and dropped inside the utter blackness. My body hung, seemingly weightless as I fell for over two meters. I landed, a hard jolt absorbed by the suit’s anti-recoil. “Bloody hell,” I grunted. Around me was nothing. Not a thing. It was that dark. My mind conjured skulls and Bug-aliens. My heart raced. Twenty seconds. I had twenty seconds. There was no glowing yellow ring.
I didn’t know which buttons to initiate on the glove, so I whispered “Flashlight, external” to the suit, and a beam came on, small and focused forward, from my chest. Directly into a wall of dead electronics. My left glove buzzed, a faint vibration, and I looked down to see indicator lights. The oxygen levels around me were acceptable, my heart rate was too fast, and I was below ground. Good to know. Beside the altimeter was a flashlight icon. I pressed the increase button and more beams came on. I turned in a circle. The hatch I had dropped into was the one for the warbot suit. It was huge.
“You okay?” Jagger asked, the faceplate and armor sensors allowing me to maintain contact with the others.
“No,” I griped, spotting the socket. I jammed the IP plug into it. A keyboard lit up. Too slow, too faint. I manually keyed Mateo’s code, saying, “Mateo, four, eight, one, six, alpha tango delta.” Beside it was the faint outline of a five-fingered human hand. I gripped my right glove in my teeth and ripped it off. The pain was out the roof as the needles released, but I placed my bare palm on the hand plate.
As I did, the hatch closed. What now? Had Mateo lied to me about me having a safety net of twenty seconds? Had he stuck me here? Why?
A shudder ran across my body and tripped my racing heart. “Bloodyhellbloodyhellbloodyhell,” I chanted under my breath over and over. Seconds passed. I was still chanting when a faint vibration juddered up through the soles of my feet.
The Simba came alive, saying, “Suit Initiated Main Battle Armored Tank is active. Batteries are at redline five percent. This battle tank requires a minimum of twelve percent battery capacity to initiate sensors, and twenty-seven percent to be considered battle-worthy.”
“We’re out of power,” I said into my comms. I put my glove back on, which hurt, and looked around for something wet to decontam the hand plate.
“I got this.” Vibrations from outside told me Jagger was doing something. I had no idea what. But he could hear me. The discoverers of Entangled Dark Neutrinos were my new bestest friends. Clanks and thuds reached me through the skin of the super-armored tank. A heavy thump sounded through the hatch.
“Simba requires basic WIMP power or three days of solar gain power to extricate from current location,” the tank said, talking to someone. Not me.
“That sucks,” I murmured. And I’m
stuck. But I didn’t say that. Yet. I found a cloth in a tight little pocket on my suit and added water from the suit’s water supply. I scrubbed the hand-plate clean of my sweat and nanobots.
“Okay. Got it. Shining, attempt to activate the airlock and get out of there,” Jagger said.
Thinking that nothing in life was ever that easy, I unlocked my face shield and slid it out of the way. It telescoped closed at the back of my neck. I was in love with this suit.
The Simba’s air was machine-sour and dank but bearable. I directed the suit lights above and grabbed a lever. Twisted it around. A brighter slit of darkness appeared around the edge of the hatch as it began to slowly open. Bloody thing worked! I engaged the reverse-recoil feature of my armor and leaped from the floor. Toward the opening hatch.
I banged the back of my head on the hatch rim as I jumped. Passed the sandbags and flew into the air.
I landed beside the hatch in a four-limb crouch, the anti-recoil feature of this suit too good to be true. Behind me, the hatch began to close.
And then I felt the pain. Bad. I yanked off my glove again and reached a hand to the back of my head. Something wet met my fingers. I held them to the suit lights.
I was bleeding.
I had left my nanobots inside the closed hatch.
“Mateo?” I whispered. “We got problems.”
“Talk to your boyfriend somewhere else,” Jagger said. “I’m transferring power and I need this space.”
Mateo said, “Specify problems.”
“I said, move,” Jagger snarled.
I had kissed him. Right. Things were happening inside him. In the lights of the suit, I stepped on top of the sandbags and jumped to the shore, stepping over hardwires that came from somewhere ahead in the dark.
“I banged my head on the hatch. I left blood behind.”
Mateo cursed. It was fairly inventive for a cyborg with half a brain.
“Wash your head,” Mateo said, after a too-long pause. “Jagger, the tank was infested with PRC mech-nanos. Clean that wound with strong antiseptic, now, and seal up the bloody cloths until you can get them under an AG.”
