BAMF- Broken Arrow Mercenary Force Omnibus

by Drew Avera

  Priority Outcomes, The Art of the Possible, Armored Core…she’d heard of them, though never come across them in the field. Norfolk was rife with mercenaries. The whole eastern seaboard was their stomping ground, an intermittent battlefield between the hired guns of a distant United States and the janissaries of a distant Russia. The men and women of the other mercenary companies were a rough lot, more ragged at the edges than the business types, and quicker to throw their money around.

  Maybe because they don’t expect to live long enough to save for the future. Well, hell, who thinks about the future much anyway, the way things are going?

  “Why didn’t we sit at the bar?” Ramirez whispered as they sat in a booth upholstered with stained and cracked plastic.

  “You know a whisper carries further than just speaking in a normal, low voice,” she told him, trying to keep the scorn out of her tone. Hector Ramirez hadn’t served in the military and hadn’t had the benefit of a Marine father as she had. “We’re not sitting at the bar because I want to be able to check out the other people sitting at the bar without making it obvious.”

  The waitress sauntered up to her table, young and attractive for someone in this town and wearing far too little clothing.

  She’s pushing more than overpriced food and drink.

  It was common here, the servers pushing drugs or sex just to stay alive. The only difference between Chartreuse and the lesser venues was the quality of both. And she was hot, though Roach’s interest was only clinical. She liked men, though none recently.

  “What can I get you to drink?” she asked. “There’s a two-drink minimum unless you order food.”

  “I want a steak,” she said. She didn’t bother to specify what cut because they gave you what they had. “Medium. Baked potato, greens and a beer.” Which would cost her most of a month’s pay, but did it really matter? She could probably get away with drawing the money from BAMF’s expense account since she was the one controlling it. She wasn’t about to tell Ramirez that, or he’d order the damned lobster.

  “Can I have the chicken sandwich?” he asked, still ogling the woman’s legs. “And do you have milk?”

  “Milk?” Roach repeated, cocking an eyebrow skeptically.

  “I like milk,” he protested, raising his hands up defensively. “Not like we ever get it out here.”

  “Yes, we do have fresh milk,” the blond told him, smiling and leaning over the table to show a bit more of her cleavage. “Very fresh.”

  “Oh, sweet Jesus, lady,” Roach moaned, covering her face with her hand. “You’re wasting your time unless you give a military discount.”

  The woman shrugged, favoring Ramirez with a smile as she walked away. She didn’t write the order down, but presumably she had a good memory in her line of work.

  “You don’t need to be rude,” Ramirez hissed at her.

  “Business, Hector,” she reminded him, nodding toward the bar. “Do you see the guy here or not?”

  Ramirez looked down the line of mercs at the bar, men and women in their prime, wearing their colors proudly, and shook his head.

  “I don’t see him. But it’s kind of early.”

  “We got plenty of time,” she judged, “given how long it’s going to take them to bake a potato.”

  “That patch supposed to be some kind of joke?”

  Roach had been so busy watching the bar, she hadn’t noticed the older man approaching from one of the other tables, and she made an instinctive move toward her gun.

  “Whoa there, missy!” he said, raising his hands palms-up in surrender. “Just askin’ a question is all.”

  He had one of those weathered, cracked faces that could have been anywhere between forty and sixty, with skin the color of old, faded teak and hair cut short into tight, black curls with a fringe of grey near his ears. His mustache was a wire brush across his upper lip, wild and bristling. His smile was charming in an oily sort of way, but she saw something deeper behind his dark brown eyes, something analytical. He wasn’t wearing any sort of uniform, his clothes simple and workmanlike but well made, giving no clue as to what he did for a living.

  “What the hell kind of question is that?” she demanded, her right hand moving back out of her jacket. “Why would it be a joke?”

  “BAMF,” the older man explained, gesturing at the patch on her arm. He had one of those voices that made you want to clear your throat just listening to it, like he’d been interrupted in the middle of hacking up a lung. “Back when I was in the Marines, that used to mean Bad Ass Mother Fucker.”

  She shrugged acknowledgement.

  “Maybe it’s a play on words,” she admitted. “But it’s an acronym for Broken Arrow Mercenary Force.”

  He snorted a laugh, clearly amused.

  “Well, your head honcho has quite the imagination then, doesn’t he?”

  “What makes you think I’m not the boss?” she asked, arching an eyebrow at him.

  “Because you’re young enough there wasn’t even any Army in these parts when you were old enough to sign up,” he deduced. “And DoD may be desperate, but they ain’t so desperate they’re going to turn over millions of dollars’ worth of military equipment to a twenty-something chica who ain’t even been in the Army.”

  She tried to get angry at the slight, but found she couldn’t. The damned old man was just too likable to snap at. Still, they were here on business.

  “Why the curiosity…,” she trailed off. “Sorry, didn’t catch your name.”

  “The name is James Fuller,” he tipped an imaginary hat to her. “And I’m curious because times being what they are, and the job market being so sparse, I might be up for a gig back in the saddle of a mech.”

  “Back in the saddle?” she repeated. “So, you’re saying you have experience driving a mech?”

  “Oh, you might say that, Sgt. Mata.” That disarming grin again. So distracting she almost hadn’t noticed…

  “How do you know my name?” she demanded, her eyes narrowing. Neither her rank nor her name was on the jacket or her flight suit. You didn’t give the Russians any information they didn’t need to have, in case you got captured.

  “Let’s just say I didn’t wander into the Fry by accident,” he explained. “Y’see, I got this priority call from the Department of Defense ‘bout a week ago telling me they needed someone with experience in the cockpit of a Hellfire. I was down about South Carolina ways, picking up some interesting information and I hightailed it up here as quick as I could.” He gestured at her patch again. “They may have mentioned you’d have that pretentious-ass name on your arm, but they told me to look for an older dude by the name Nathan Stout. Is he around?”

  Roach shared a look with Ramirez and his face screamed at her wordlessly “don’t tell him.” She shrugged.

  “We have a problem,” she admitted. “And we need help.”

  “I figured that by the whole priority call from the DoD thing, miss. Can you be more specific?”

  “Come sit down,” she said, scooting over into the booth and motioning for him to join them. “I’ll buy you a beer and try to explain.”

  “I’d never turn down a beer from a pretty young lady,” Fuller allowed, lowering himself in gingerly. “Though I’d just about kill for a good hamburger, Sgt. Mata.”

  “Roach,” she told him. “Call me Roach.” She nodded to Ramirez. “This is Specialist Hector Ramirez, but we call him Mule.”

  “Roach and Mule, huh?” Fuller snorted. “You guys need to work on your callsign game.”

  “Why?” Ramirez demanded, his tone defensive. “What do they call you, Fucking Old Guy?”

  “No, but that’s still better than Mule.”

  “Order yourself a burger, Fucking Old Guy,” Roach invited, motioning for the waitress. “This is going to take a while.”

  Chapter Six

  Robert Franklin was a kid in a candy store, as effusive about the equipment being hauled out of the Hemmet as Svetlana had seen him in their entire ass
ociation.

  “This is excellent,” he enthused. He’d pried the lid off the first of the crates as it was offloaded and was sifting through the components packed into cut-outs of foam cushion. “First rate.” He turned back to her, grinning, the expression pulling against the scars on his neck he’d never bothered to explain to her. “You can never be sure, dealing with cutouts and middlemen whether they can actually deliver the goods.”

  “This is the duplication gear?” she asked, nodding at the containers. The men hauling them off the truck might as well have been automatons for all the talking they did. She wasn’t even sure if they were American hired help or Russians. Their stares were focused, as if they were determined not to notice anything they saw. Healthy attitude in these times.

  “It is,” he confirmed. “But not the sort I’ve worked with before. What I had stored away was for small-scale, individual replication. This is mass production, much more involved.”

  “Do you have the manpower to run that sort of operation?” She’d seen a grand total of maybe four technicians since they’d arrived, which didn’t seem enough for such a grand enterprise.

  “Not yet,” he admitted. “Those are on the way as well.” His eyebrow arched in her direction. “I trust you’ve made our guest more comfortable.”

  “I still do not understand how you expect this to work,” she said, sitting down on the edge of one of the crates. “Why would you use him? Why try to brainwash him into loyalty instead of finding someone who’s already loyal to you?”

  “Nathan Stout knows more about the Hellfire weapons system than anyone in the world, perhaps including me, and I invented the damned thing. He’s also fearless in battle and loyal as all hell to his friends. If I can get an army of him, nothing the United States military can throw at me would be able to defeat it.”

  “Loyal to his friends,” she repeated. “You certainly haven’t been treating him as a friend. The man has lost everything that has ever been important to him. How do you expect to convince him you’re on the side of the angels when he’s always been a patriot and you’ll be asking him to betray his country?”

  “Sometimes you have to strip away the old before you can build the new.” He shrugged. “You’ll have to trust me, Ms. Grigoryeva, I know what I’m doing. We can transfer selected memories from one dupe to another, but the memories have to exist first; I can’t manufacture them. Were I to hire mercenaries or even find one well trained mercenary and clone an army of him or her, what would I have? Someone who fought only for money. Would they die at my word? Would they trust me over their own government?”

  “And Nate Stout will?” She couldn’t keep the skepticism out of her voice.

  “He will when I am done with him.”

  His words were cold, ruthless, which she should have been used to.

  “Didn’t you tell me you considered this man your friend? Is this how you’d treat your friend? How will this win him to your side?”

  Now he seemed annoyed and she worried she’d pushed too far. Franklin often said he appreciated her as a devil’s advocate, but perhaps even the devil becomes tiresome after long enough.

  “I don’t need him to be on my side,” he said, his tone tightly controlled, as if he’d been about to snap at her and barely restrained himself. “I simply need him to be desperate enough that I am his only source of hope.”

  He placed the lid back on the crate and waved a couple of the workers over to take it inside.

  “And yes, he was my friend. Perhaps somewhere inside there, inside all the hurt and pain and confusion, he still is. But if this is to be a revolution, then sacrifices have to be made.” He sniffed. “The Nate I once knew would understand. Perhaps this one will, also, before it is all over.”

  Sacrifices have to be made, she thought but didn’t say, not wishing to push her luck. Other people’s sacrifices. Never you.

  Robert Franklin, she thought, should have been born a Russian.

  “Well,” Fuller said, eyes scanning back and forth across the row of Hellfire mechs stored in the old Coast Guard base garage, “this is quite the setup you have here.”

  “If you like cockroaches and mold,” Ramirez muttered.

  “I can see why you wouldn’t want to just throw in the towel on it,” the older man went on, ignoring the snarky comment. “You got a sweet, defensible headquarters, still got most of your armory here, except for the U-mechs.” He leaned toward Roach and whispered conspiratorially. “I never thought much of the whole U-mech idea anyway. The damn things are way too easy to shoot down for what they cost.”

  “At least they gave the Russians something else to shoot at,” Ramirez said.

  Fuller glanced back at him, eyes narrowing.

  “What’d they call you again, boy? The jackass? Something like that?”

  “The Mule,” Ramirez corrected him, making a sour face.

  “The thing is,” Fuller went on, “even though I understand wanting to hang onto what you got, this whole business about going after your old boss and rescuing him from the damn Russians with just the three of us seems a lot like suicide.”

  “I’d take more people if I had them,” Roach said flatly, regarding him with a look she reserved for newbies and tax collectors. “He wasn’t your friend, so I understand if you don’t want to be part of it, but we’ll go with just the two of us if we have to.”

  She saw Ramirez blanche behind Fuller and amended the sentiment in her head. I’ll do it myself if I have to.

  “I said it sounded like suicide,” he corrected her, grinning broadly, “not that I wasn’t interested.” He shrugged. “I’m an old man, honey. Why else would I be in Norfolk fighting Russians if I weren’t looking for a good way to die?”

  She blinked at the unexpected answer, her mouth left half-open, unsure how to reply.

  “Close your mouth, honey, before something flies into it.” He made a shooing motion. “Come on, let’s go. Show me this video you were talking about.” He frowned and glanced around them. “Actually, first, Mule, where’s the bathroom?” He patted his stomach. “That burger was a bit greasy. Can’t get away with that like I used to.”

  Nate wished he had a chair. Now that he wasn’t being drugged, the damned floor was getting way too uncomfortable. His back and shoulders and hips seemed to ache constantly from the cold, hard floor and he was sleeping even less than usual despite the pushups and sit-ups and even an attempt to remember the Tae Kwon Do poomse of his youth. That hadn’t gone so well because the floor was slick and he’d wound up flat on his back more than once.

  It also reminded him that his Prime had never been that agile or fast on his feet, and he surely hadn’t gotten any better at it as a dupe.

  I’ve been thinking more and more of myself that way lately. I never used to.

  Maybe because he’d tried every way he knew how to keep himself from thinking of the fact he was the cheap copy of a real person. It was hard not to contemplate it now, not since he’d found out about Bob. Bob had duped himself. He didn’t know why it shocked him. He’d never heard of anyone doing it to themselves before, and he was sure it was all kinds of illegal, but who thought about the law in the middle of an invasion?

  Still, in order to keep his memories backed up, keep a copy of his genetic material around, arrange for someone to dupe him, Bob must have had some idea he was going to die.

  We’re all going to die. He knew someone was going to kill him.

  How the hell was that possible? Bob had died in a Russian attack, hadn’t he? It was so far back, he couldn’t remember if he remembered it or he’d simply read it in a file and conflated it with his own implanted memories.

  Or did someone just decide to leave that memory out?

  He tried not to think about that, about some Department of Defense functionary sitting down with the collected memories of the original Nathan Stout and whichever of the clones they’d bothered to record the brain patterns from and deciding which parts were important and which could just
get tossed in the trash. It pissed him off when he thought about it, about being treated like a disposable machine.

  It’s a war though, he reminded himself. Haven’t people always been treated as disposable in war?

  He’d been at war longer than the original Nathan Stout had been alive. He didn’t often sit back and count up the years, because the result was too depressing. The nation had been at war for decades, fighting over this same ground. Sometimes he imagined that the US and Russia had both ceased to exist and their proxies fought on, without purpose, without end.

  Would this end at some point? Would someone give up? Would someone back down? Was that possible anymore? He wasn’t even sure if he was still fighting the Russian government. The country had always been more of a giant organized crime family than a nation-state. Did a kleptocracy have a foreign policy?

  If they’re a mob family, what does that make us?

  The United States hadn’t had an election east of the Mississippi in thirty years. He’d heard news reports of voting in the plains states and the mountain west, but they were landslides for the sitting president.

  What was her name again? Tilde? Tyler? Something with a T.

  If he couldn’t even remember who the president was, what the hell was he fighting for?

  Maybe just a purpose. A reason to keep living.

  The main bolt of the cell door scraped aside and it swung open, letting in more light than he’d seen in days. He blinked and covered his eyes. He could make out dim shapes past the explosion of light, hear boot soles tapping on the concrete, and behind them the sharper clack of high heels. Hands grabbed at his arms and held him tight, the faces behind them rough and bearded and ready to do violence.