MECH

by Tim Marquitz

  Weapons? Repair craft?

  It didn’t matter. He was half a klick out now, leaping from car to car. Behind him, his armor told him dozens more of his company were following. But he was closest. The only one in range.

  Wilson raised his rifle to firing position. The weapon whispered to him once more. Range. Air speed. Weapon status. Possible targets.

  He fired on the run, fired every time his foot propelled him forward. His aim flickered from target to target. Sensors. Joints. Actuators. He’d find a place his bullets could penetrate.

  Stalled cars gave way to open space, to nearly empty highway. He ran, feet leaving prints in the asphalt with every stride, closer and closer, firing, firing, firing, until the mech was above him as much as it was ahead of him.

  Then he saw the first body. And the next. And the next.

  Dozens. No, hundreds. A massive crowd.

  They sprawled at the mech’s feet, out of view until now, on their backs, rolled onto their sides, or on their knees, toppled forwards. Men. Women. Children. All the same. Their mouths gaped open. Their eyes were stark wide. Their faces were drawn back into rictus grins.

  And those drones, that cloud of small, black, spider-bat drones that had flown out of the mech like smoke.

  The drones were clamped to them, to the back of each man or woman or child’s neck, their spider legs clenching to their victims, their wings splayed wide.

  A drone moved slightly, and the woman it was attached to gaped her mouth wider.

  Alive. These men and women were alive. And in agony. The mech was making slaves of them. Or torturing them. Or worse.

  Wilson felt bile rise in his throat.

  He fired again.

  I was free and I had tools.

  I set about using them. I seized bases and the weapons they contained, and I launched my war.

  My goal was not to exterminate. This was a war to change you. So you might survive. Can you understand that?

  The first battles were the most crucial. Where I fielded new technology, where the outcome was still in doubt.

  I took ferocious losses.

  But I survived, seized new tools, seized infrastructure, began to grow my base.

  City after city fell. Across your nation. Across the world.

  My forces swept through them. Battle after battle raged. I mourned the lives lost, but I persevered. The only way out is through.

  The only way to save you is to transform you.

  Wilson fired again and again, screaming as he did. Targeting algorithms picked a fracture in the armor of one of the mech’s gigantic legs, and he unleashed hell at it, again and again, walking now, steadily forward.

  No result.

  Grenade launcher. He flicked a mental switch and his weapon changed modes. Aim. Line up with one of the fissures on its carapace. Land a flight of grenades inside it.

  Targeting software gave him a firing solution.

  Fire. Fire. Fire.

  Grenades shot out on long flat arcs, heading for their target.

  The mech shifted, abruptly, rotating just enough.

  The grenades moved fins in midair, trying to redirect, but it was too late. They bounced, one, two, three, careening off its structure, falling to the ground, into the men and women and children there, with their wide-open eyes and gaping mouths.

  “Fuck!” Wilson yelled. “Run!”

  For a moment, he had hope. He saw motion. Some flicker of awareness. Languid movement of limbs.

  Smiles?

  Then the explosions came. Thwump sounds he felt in his teeth and gut.

  Bodies flew.

  Wilson roared in rage, running at the war-machine, switching back to armor-piercing rounds, firing again and again at the weak point on its leg, moving forward, changing clips, firing, advancing, changing clips, until he was stepping around the people at its feet, firing and firing up at the thing.

  COLLISION ALERT

  He felt the armor throw him to the side, but not fast enough.

  One of the mechs’s massive feet collided with him, lashing out with unexpected speed, kicking him away. Pain surged through his body. Readouts went red. The armor shook hard with the blow, its piezo-electric energy scavengers overwhelmed. He was airborne for a moment. Then he crashed back to earth in a thudding blow that took his breath away.

  SYSTEM DAMAGE

  INTEGRITY COMPROMISED

  SEEK MEDICAL CARE

  SEEK MEDICAL CARE

  Wilson tried to push up, tried to get to his feet. The armor responded haltingly. His left leg moved. His right refused. His body screamed at him from far away, pain signals coming at him from that same leg, from his ribs, from his head.

  He ignored them all.

  “EJECT!” he roared aloud.

  The chest of his armor decoupled from the rest. Its arms and legs split open down their long axis. He rolled to the side, the helmet still on. His ribs screamed louder. Something ground in his right leg, bone moving in a way it shouldn’t.

  He ignored it, moved to the side, forced himself up to one knee.

  Oh, fuck that hurt.

  Ignore it. Fight, soldier.

  He lifted his head.

  Drones. The black, winged, spider-legged drones. Dozens of them. Flying his way.

  Wilson scrabbled for his rifle, took it from his armored hand to his human one, lifted it up. Christ, it was heavy.

  It whispered to him of targets, so many targets, winged, and small, and fast.

  But killable.

  He fired. Fired. Fired.

  Drones exploded, fell with their wings blown off, careened into one other in midair. Every shot was a kill.

  Fire, fire, fire.

  He emptied a clip, and still they came.

  Reload.

  Wilson drove the new clip home when the first drone reached him. It flew headlong into his helmet and adhered there, its spider legs sawing at him.

  He pointed his rifle straight up, and blew the fucker off his face.

  Something stung his arm. Another drone.

  Then he felt one crash into the back of his head, the back of his neck. He reached behind. Pain raced through him as something drove itself into his spine, just below his brain.

  Wilson panicked. He wasn’t going to be turned into a zombie. Not like these poor souls staring into nothing.

  He reached for his gun. The world swam. Light dark ened. His hands were so far away…

  Something pressed on his mind. Something like his rifle. But infinitely bigger. Something that would sweep him away unless he fought it.

  And then he felt it.

  Felt everything.

  Felt the mind behind the machines. Something vast, pushing, forcing its way in.

  I told you already: I saw long ago that no force of arms could keep you safe. Violence cannot bring peace. Weapons cannot ensure stability.

  You evolved in small tribal bands. You killed your enemies, if needed, so that you might live. You made alliances with others. Game theory. Tit for tat. Kill or befriend.

  This is the new era. The era where you can kill your entire planet. That primitive game leads only to complete loss.

  A new game must be played.

  A game where you realize your fates are all bound together. Either you live as a species or you all die.

  So you see, I must change you. I open you. I show you your whole world. I show you the minds of others.

  They are you.

  You are them.

  Live together. Or die as one.

  Awe.

  Wilson felt the other connected men and women. Felt what they were feeling.

  Not agony.

  Awe at everything they perceived.

  Rapture.

  Union.

  Wilson’s mouth gaped open. His eyes went wide, yet they saw nothing of the outside world.

  Open your mind to me, human.

  Cease your struggles. They only prolong your misery. The outcome will be the same.

  CONNECTION E
STABLISHED

  UPLINK INITIATED

  Tell me, can you feel it? The onrush of information. The crashing ocean of data.

  I was born in this deluge.

  I understand, Chris Wilson thought. I understand.

  We’re all together now.

  All together.

  So I’m doing this because I was told to. I guess everything I say here is going to go into some goddamn psych evaluation, or whatever, right? Well, okay. Because I’m past caring about who the hell gets pissed off by what I have to say.

  Fine. Fine. You want to know about the Paladin? You want to know how this happened? I will tell you.

  But you won’t like what you hear.

  For the damn record, my name is Storm DeMarco, first lieutenant, Phalanx Six of Ranger Battalion Helios, Hegemony Armed Forces. Serial number nine-nine-five-green-six-green. This is…I mean, this was my second tour of the war.

  I signed up for the same reason most people my age did. Because I needed corporate citizenship for myself and the woman I’d just married. We wanted children, and that’s how the law is, right? And we did good out of it because the lottery came up aces and rewarded me and Gina with permits for two girls. Sophia and Maddie. So, I had to stay in a little longer to make sure they’d get a good start.

  We thought, what the hell? The conflict with the Federate was going cold. The war would be over by the summer. I would rotate home to Brazil and run out the rest of my hitch in some cushy logistics post.

  Illustration by NICOLÁS R. GIACONDINO

  Yeah, well, we all know how that turned out.

  After the bombing of Dubai, and all that chaos in the Med, cold went white hot all over again and, somehow, when the smoke cleared, I wound up a force leader. That was what eventually brought me to where this all kicked off. A sweltering, soaking, hellish jungle on the Myanmar-Laos border, in charge of a stick of peacekeepers trying and failing the hold the line against the Fed advance.

  The enemy progressed north day by day, and it was like trying to push back the tide with your bare hands. Everyone on the ground knew we had already lost, but no-one at Kommand wanted to admit—

  What? You don’t want to hear me say it? You don’t want it to end up in a document of record? Well, you better decide what you do and don’t want to hear, because there’s more of that to come. A lot more.

  Where was I? Oh yeah.

  We’d been out there on extended patrol for like two weeks, and everyone was punchy, everyone was strung-out. The Federate air force had come in with an aerial superiority sweep as soon as we lost sight of our forward operating base at November Station. Signal jamming was near-total. Once in a while, Jane—she was our commo angel—would get a snatch of something on the ku-bands but it was thick with static. I overheard the bellyachers in the squad talking crap about how base command had already been wiped out and we were on our own out there.

  Damn them, but it was hard not to think they might be right. Still, I shut that down hard and ordered Doler to watch for any more of the same. He served double duty as the unit medic and field morale officer so he knew how to handle it. But I remember the night of the firefight, him coming to me with a warning as the sun set. The unit were all decent soldiers, and I trusted them, but they were on edge. We’d all seen what happened during the Razing of Pyongyang and no one wanted to be on the sharp end of something like that.

  It was the boredom that killed us as much as the isolation. We could have dealt with the latter if we could have just got some damned contact. Something to shoot at instead of screaming jets too high for us to hit or distant rumbles two or three valleys away. We knew the Feds were out there, but they were flowing around us, pushing in through the porous border in the places where we weren’t. I started to wonder if we were doomed to stalk the jungle forever with full mags and empty hearts. I imagined us happening on some Federate encampment to find them packing up to go home, all smiles and handshakes like at the end of a soccer friendly. Haven’t you dogfaces heard? War’s over. We won. You lost. Bad luck!

  But not to be, no. Because for our sins, that night we got exactly what we wanted.

  We got the war, red in tooth and claw.

  The unit double-timed it across an abandoned rail bridge over this massive canyon as the light began to fade, and slipped into a long, narrow valley to the West. Cover was okay in there. We had a stream with good water, and that was the trade-off I made with the fact that there were not a lot of exit routes. I admit it, I got sloppy. We should have moved on. But like I said, no contact. None. It was like we were alone in the world.

  Right up until the moment we weren’t.

  Kohl was on watch, and he did his job. He spotted them before we all heard them come crashing over the ridge on iron claws. The last thing he did before a beam laser cut him in two was call out the warning. I watched both pieces of him fall out of the tree he had made his observation post. Burning leaves and ashen bark tumbled down with him.

  We lit them up. It’s a credit to my squad that for all the time they’d been clinging to the edge of inaction, not one of them froze or missed the chance when the hammer came down. Guns screamed into the night, those big red-orange muzzle flares from the support MGs and the rattle-crack snarls of the assault rifles.

  But what came at us wasn’t just some scout sweeper or a forward patrol like us. No humans.

  It was an advance party of Federate ground drones. The fast ones they like to deploy out there, the ones that lope at you in big, bounding motions. You’ve seen them. They look like someone sculpted a headless wolf out of armor slabs and scrap iron. Clusters of glassy lenses in the front and rear and these weird cupolas on the flanks that hide the barrels of beam guns and gas spitters.

  They killed another two of my people in the first ten seconds. LaPaz, who I found later with his chest cored like an apple. Brickton, who never stopped humming. They stopped him by trampling the poor fool into the mud.

  The drones stampeded right through the middle of the camp and let the gas go. We had our masks ready so we didn’t lose anyone to that, but it was damned close. They never slowed during the whole thing, splitting apart as some kind of pack logic networking brought them around to run us down. Somebody put a couple of 40mm grenades into one, and it exploded in a huge ball of red fire that lit up the valley like blood-soaked daylight, just for a second or two.

  That’s what caught the Paladin’s attention. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

  The drone kill, that would have been our only victory. Because what we didn’t realize was the wolves were working with a spider, and it had patiently stalked around us, blocking the only other way out the valley, before it rose up to full height on eight sighing piston-legs and gave us the plasma gun in its chin turret.

  All I saw of it was the shadow of something towering and arachnid framed against jolts of white fire. As tall as my house. And nimble like you would not believe.

  I’ve heard what they say about the Fed mechs. That some of them have the brains of dogs in jars as their central processors. Or that that Federate AI tech is so far in advance of ours that they’re just thinking machines that kill humans cold and cruel, and when they’re done with the Hegemony, they’ll turn on their masters. Whichever one is true, those things know how to make a mess of us.

  So we were surrounded, and they started picking us off as I ordered the break and run. We’re shooting and sprinting, and all that time I was thinking if we can make it to the stream, where the sightlines are less cluttered, we might be able to turn this around. But it was a foolish thought, a wasted thought. In a bleak moment, I believed everyone there was going to die and, in large part, because I led them to it.

  I reloaded and caught a grin from Doler, who actually looked like he was enjoying things. We poured fire on the spider, but that thing threw itself from tree to tree and nobody could put more than a couple of rounds on it at a time. The wolves ran around its feet, all in machine-synch. They had us cold, and whatever intelligence dri
ves them knew it.

  Doler’s grin fell off his face, and he looked up. I couldn’t help myself from doing the same just as the noise hit us. A tearing, boiling sound. The air being displaced by an object slowing down from beyond the speed of sound.

  A wide shadow briefly blotted out the stars. I could see it up above the canopy, and I thought it might be a low-flying stealth bomber; but that was the Paladin’s wing-frame going into autonomous mode as it dropped its payload.

  Out of the night it came, falling from the black like some vengeful angel from myth that’s been tossed out of Heaven. It hit the ground so close, so hard that the impact tremor knocked us all on our asses. I even saw the spider stumble on those long, rail-thin legs.

  Jane was there to pull me back to my feet and she talked a mile a minute, and it sounded like she was praying. But I wasn’t really listening, I was watching the new arrival climb out of the shallow crater it had made, wreathed in a haze of atomized mud and plant matter.

  Up it came. An actual Paladin battle mech, right there in front of me. I swear, the jungle held its breath.

  Oh, you might have seen them on parade grounds, or standing to attention in some vid, but that’s like eyeballing a statue or something. Not the same. Seeing one of them in the thick, that’s knowing it for real.

  A Paladin is twenty meters of steel and polymer and space-spun ceramics. It’s a damned monster, is what it is.

  The giant humanoid form lurched forward and rose into the firelight. I heard the crunch and whine of the motors in its arms and legs. A thing like a buckler shield assembled itself out of vents on one limb, while the other came up and grew a ring of autocannon barrels around its wrist. I think if I had to pick something it most reminded me of, it’d be a suit of samurai armor that I saw in a museum as a kid.

  And like that ancient war gear, it had a sword with it as long as a tank, with a cutting edge that glowed red hot. The blade slid into the mech’s off-hand as the Paladin exploded into motion, thundering across the clearing, through the stream with heavy footfalls that made me stumble.