Armored-ARC

by John Joseph Adams

  We had just a little further to scramble, over another tread-rutted rise, before we saw what it was.

  A small camp had been set up: a fire, over which a pot hung from a tripod, containing boiling water. A canvas lean-to was propped on a set of rickety branches that must have been picked up from the side of the road. A bearded Spaniard in worn army fatigues sat by the fire, stirring whatever was in the pot. In the shadows outside the reach of the fire, another Spaniard worked at what looked like an armored-encased engine block mounted on a scaffold. The engine glowed, spat sparks, and spewed a shroud of smoke into the air. Atop the engine block was a steel chassis; below it were the treads that had cut the road from the battlefield.

  It was a tank, but not really. Rather, some Frankenstein’s monster of tank parts. The war machine had been cobbled together and greatly expanded, drawing on the initial tank design for inspiration then taking it to an extreme. Wide treads on a hinged base performed the same motion as an ankle joint, bending as it climbed over obstacles, keeping the chassis level. The cannon stood in for arms, firing 6-inch shells if I had my guess. A squadron’s worth of bombing in a single go. Armored, mobile, crushing everything in its path. As if 10,000 years of warfare had led to this.

  The glowing engine seemed like nothing so much as a beating heart, pounding in anger, atop a muscled body and stout legs. The red, yellow, and purple stripe of the Republican flag were painted on its side.

  Joe and I just stared, until the first Spaniard drew a pistol from a pouch on his belt and shouted at us in Spanish.

  Joe put his arms up and yelled back, “Somos Americanos! Americanos!”

  For a frozen moment, I thought that wouldn’t matter, and we’d both get shot. I prepared to run. But the Spaniard lowered his pistol and laughed. “I don’t believe it!” he said in accented English. “We thought you all left!”

  He invited us to sit by the fire. The mechanic climbed off the machine and joined us. The man at the fire was Pedro; the mechanic, Enrique. Pedro was a nondescript soldier in worn fatigues, hat pressed over shaggy hair. Enrique was otherworldly: his eyes were invisible behind tinted goggles, his head was bare—his hair appeared to have been singed off by the heat of the engine where he worked.

  After exchanging names, we told our stories. But Joe and I couldn’t stop looking at the modified tank. Pedro saw this and smiled. “What do you think?”

  “It’s—” I started, then shook my head. “I don’t know what to think.”

  “We call it the Don Quixote.”

  “Because you’re tilting at windmills?”

  Pedro laughed and said to Enrique, “I told you people would understand!”

  Enrique didn’t say a word. He sat on the ground, arms around his knees. The firelight reflected off his goggles, so he could have been looking anywhere.

  “But what is it?” Joe asked.

  “It’s a personal tank,” Pedro said. “Enrique built it, but it was my idea. It’s better than a tank—faster, more agile, simpler to operate. It only needs one man instead of a whole crew. You’ve seen what one person is able to do with a machine like this?”

  “That battalion back there—you destroyed it?” I said. “It’s amazing.”

  “Yes, it is,” Pedro said.

  “If you’d had this a year ago you might have made a difference,” Joe said.

  Pedro’s smile fell, and he and his partner both looked at us, cold and searching. “Never too late,” Pedro said, shoving another stick into the fire. “It took us years to build this one. But now that it’s finished, we can build more, many more. An army of them. The Great War didn’t end war—but this might. No one would dare stand against an army of Don Quixotes.”

  This gave me the image of a hundred wizened old men sitting astride broken horses, making a stand against Franco. I almost laughed. But then I glanced at the shadow of the war machine. This conversation should have taken place in a bar, over a third pitcher of beer. Then, I would have been able to laugh. But here, in the dark and cold, an hour’s walk from a scene of slaughter, the firelight turning the faces into shadowed skulls, I thought I was looking at a new kind of warfare, and was terrified.

  The Spaniards let Joe and I stay at their camp. They didn’t have extra blankets, but the fire was warm and they shared the thin stew they’d cooked. Enrique slept in the machine, by the engine, which although it was shut down now, never stopped its subtle clicking, cooling noises. Like the beat of a heart.

  “This is going to make a hell of a story,” Joe said, whispering at me in the dark. “I can’t wait to get pictures in the morning.”

  A hell of a story, yeah. “This isn’t going to turn the war around for them, you know,” I said.

  “Of course not, with just the two of them. Even if they do have that monster. And I think they’re a little crazy to boot. But that’s not the point, is it? This thing—folks back home’ll go gonzo for it. It’d be like King Kong. If we could get them to bring it to the states we could sell tickets.”

  There was an idea—if the two men would ever agree to it. More likely they’d prefer to stay and smash as much of Franco as they could before going down in flames. They wouldn’t have a chance to build their army of personal tanks.

  “What do you think, Hank? Can we talk them into giving up the fight and bringing that thing to New York? Get it climb the Empire State Building?”

  The fire was embers. Enrique’s machine clicked like crickets, and Pedro seemed to be asleep. I shook my head. “I’m thinking about what the Germans would do with that thing. Scratch that—with a hundred of them.” Pedro and Enrique couldn’t build an army of them, but an industrialized war machine like Germany?

  “What?”

  “That armor might be able to stomp out a few battalions, but it can’t win the war. They’ve got no allies, no outside support, while Franco’s got Germany and Italy supplying him. As soon as the fascists cross the river, they’ve got Spain—and if they capture those two, they’ve got that thing, too. Then the Germans get a hold of it—”

  “And what are the Germans going to do with it?”

  “Boggles the mind, doesn’t it?” I said.

  Dawn came slowly, filtered through the haze of smoke and a sense of dread. Like the sky was a predator waiting to pounce.

  In daylight, the tank looked even more anthropomorphic. The engine heart burned, the cannons could be raised and lowered like arms. The articulated treads had bolts above them that looked very much like knees. A single, slotted viewport in the chassis stared like a cyclopean eye. The machine even carried a bandolier of spare shells across its chest, just to drive the point home.

  Pedro was stoking the fire back to life when an unmistakable, mechanical rumble shook in the distance—the sound of an army on the move. Enrique entered the personal tank through a hatch in the back of the chassis. The engine coughed back to life.

  Joe knelt at the rise sheltering the camp and stared through the binoculars. “It’s one of Franco’s patrols, coming this way.”

  Following the path of destruction from the crushed battalion, looking for the enemy that had done such a thing.

  Pedro laughed, as he seemed to in reaction to everything. “Now you can see first hand what Don Quixote can do!”

  I had a thought. “Let me come along. Let me ride with that thing.”

  Pedro looked taken aback. Even Enrique poked his head out of the hatch to look, though his expression was blank.

  “There’s barely enough room for Enrique—you can’t do anything there,” Pedro said.

  I talked fast. “I can write about it. Get you publicity back home—in American newspapers. Imagine if some big investor decided to make you an offer. You’d be famous—inventors of the most amazing war machine in history. Famous—and rich. But only if I’m able to write about it. Really write about it. First-hand testimony.”

  Pedro and Enrique regarded each other, and whatever secret signal passed between them, I didn’t catch it.

  “You can
ride with Enrique,” Pedro said finally. “But only if you write about it. Get us those investors, yes? The money?”

  So much for the socialist ideals of the loyalists.

  I shrugged on my jacket, checking for my pencil and notebook. Joe came over and grabbed my sleeve. “You know what you’re doing?”

  “Sure I do. Just remember to tell everyone how brave I was if I don’t make it back.”

  “Brave? Is that what you’re calling it?”

  I grinned. “We can call it anything we want, we’re the ones writing about it.”

  I knew exactly what I was doing. I climbed up to the back of the machine, where Enrique held out his hand to assist me through the hatch in the chassis.

  Don Quixote had enough room for two—barely. Enrique settled onto a board that had been bolted in front of a control panel. There wasn’t a seat for me, so I perched behind the driver in a narrow indentation left by the hatch. My knees were jammed up to my chest, and I had to reach up to hold on to a bar welded above my head. The air inside was thick, close, and full of the stink of burned oil. The thing didn’t seem to have any ventilation—the armor was sealed up tight. The slit above the controls offered the driver the narrowest of views. I couldn’t see a thing, only the metal interior, scarred with hammer blows and smeared with soot. Sweat broke out all over me, and I had trouble catching my breath.

  Enrique didn’t seem to notice the burning air. He pulled on several of a dozen levers and turned a handful of toggles. The vibrations rattling through the machine changed, growing more severe. The engine throbbed beneath my feet, a burning furnace ready to explode.

  Then, the machine began to move. The chassis lurched straight up, like an elevator jerking hard to the next floor. Gears and drive belts squealed, treads rumbled, and the tank rolled forward. The motion was rough, jarring, like driving too fast over gravel, swaying this way and that as we passed over some rut or chunk of vegetation. Incredibly, we were moving. My teeth rattled in my jaw. Enrique sat calmly, his hands steady on the controls, moving levers in what seemed to be a random sequence. He was driver, gunner, mechanic, engineer, and commander all in one. Any normal tank would have needed six men to do all those jobs. He turned another set of toggles, and new set of gears engaged; the chassis tipped back, as if the machine was now looking skyward.

  I opened the hatch a crack to steal a look. The side-mounted gun turrets had ratcheted into place, aiming toward the approaching enemy. I shut the hatch again.

  By lifting myself up, I could see around Enrique’s head and catch a glimpse of the outside through the slit in the metal. The view was like flashing on individual frames of film without seeing the whole picture: a tank motoring toward us, artillery guns lined up, trucks circling, troops moving into position, and among them all the red and gold of the fascist flag.

  Enrique jumped up, throwing me against the back wall of the chassis. The driver pulled on a lever jutting above him, and an explosion burst, enveloping Don Quixote in a storm of thunder, the cannons firing. He pulled on a second lever, and a second shell launched. I ducked to try and glimpse what was happening through the slit, but I saw only smoke. I heard distant detonations, and screams.

  The Spaniard kept pulling on the overhead levers, and shells kept firing. He must have had an automatic mechanism loading ammunition. And if the Germans got ahold of that bit of technology…

  I tore a piece of paper out of my notebook, wadded up two small bits, and shoved them in my ears. That only cut out the sound a little; I could still feel every vibration in my bones. I was growing dizzy from it.

  The cannon acted like Gatling guns. Firing 6-inch explosive shells, over and over. Enrique’s tank churned along the edge of the battlefield, swiveling the chassis to move the gun, raking the enemy with cannon fire. This second battalion didn’t last long.

  An occasional bullet pinged off Don Quixote’s armored chassis, but did no damage. The vulnerable bits of the mechanism were too well protected. Enemy artillery launched a few shells before Don Quixote’s cannon destroyed them, but the explosives detonated dozens of feet away. The personal tank’s small size and mobility made it difficult to target.

  This thing just kept getting more dangerous.

  Then it was over. The tank stopped rolling and settled on its treads. Enrique powered down the engine, which softened to a low growl.

  I opened the back hatch and tumbled out into the fresh air. Relatively fresh—the stink of gunpowder and blood rose around me. But at least there was a breeze. My ears kept rattling, seemed as if they would rattle for ages.

  Pedro and Joe ran toward us. They must have seen the whole thing—they’d have had a better view than I’d had. Joe had probably gotten some splendid photos.

  “Ha! You did it again, Enrique! Bueno!” Pedro called. Enrique was climbing down from the chassis more gracefully. “And you, Hank—did you get a good story?”

  I hadn’t written a word. But I had a good story.

  “Guys, both of you, get over here. Let me get a picture of you in front of the battlefield,” Joe said, gesturing the Spaniards together and pointing his camera.

  I leaned against the tank, Don Quixote. I had a story, but I didn’t know how to tell it. Or if I even could. Instead, I made a plan.

  Finding footholds on leg joints, gripping bolts, gears, and the window slot on the front of the chassis, I climbed to the front of the tank. Balancing there, I reached to the bandolier of artillery shells and pulled out two left over from the battle, tucking them in the pockets of my jacket.

  By following exhaust pipes, I found my way to the engine, and the fuel tank hidden behind armor plating under the chassis. A simple sliding door gave access to it for refueling. Enrique obviously wasn’t expecting sabotage.

  I jammed one of the shells between a set of pistons operating the tank’s legs, and dropped the second in the fuel tank. I twisted up a handkerchief into a makeshift fuse and lodged it in the fuel tank door. Then I lit a match.

  Wouldn’t give me much time, but I didn’t need much.

  I tried not to look too nervous, to draw suspicions, when I marched over to Joe and grabbed his arm. “We have to get out of here.”

  Joe had been directing Pedro and Enrique toward a photograph against the backdrop of destruction, and dozens of shattered bodies. The two men were grinning like hunters who’d bagged an eight-point buck.

  The photographer looked at me, confused.

  “We really have to get out of here,” I said.

  “Hey!” Pedro said. “You’re going write about Don Quixote, yes? You write about us? Tell everyone—we can win the war. They’ll see that we’re finally winning and send help!”

  “That’s right,” I said, patting my notebook in my jacket pocket even as I dragged Joe away, back up the rise. “I’ve got it all down, you don’t need to worry! In fact, we need to get back and phone this story to our editor right now. Can’t waste any time!”

  Pedro seemed to accept this explanation and waved us on our way, calling out blessings in Spanish. Enrique just watched us go, through glassy, goggled eyes; he’d never taken them off.

  “Hank, what the hell are you doing?”

  “Just keep walking.”

  The explosion came as we passed into the next bowl of a valley. Good timing, there. We missed the brunt of the shockwave. But the force of it still knocked us both to the ground.

  “Christ, what was that?” Joe scrambled to look behind us. A dome of black smoke was rising into the air.

  Maybe the two Spaniards had had a chance to get away. Maybe they’d been knocked clear by the initial blast. But probably not.

  We watched as the cloud expanded and dissipated. “Maybe that thing wasn’t as well built as they thought,” I observed.

  Joe looked at me. “Then we were lucky to get out of there,” he said, deadpan.

  “Yes, we were, I imagine.”

  We kept walking.

  A winter breeze was blowing, and my jacket didn’t seem able to hold of
f the chill. I wasn’t sure we were walking toward the truck. For all I knew, that second battalion had confiscated or smashed it. It didn’t matter. We just needed to dodge Franco’s troops, get across the river, and then get out of Spain. I listened for the sound of tank treads, truck motors, of a thousand marching bodies, but the world was silent. Wind rustling through dried brush, that was all.

  “I think they could have done it,” Joe said after a half an hour of walking. The Ebro River had appeared, a shining strip of water in the distance. “I think they could have beaten back Franco with that machine, if they’d had enough time.”

  “Then what? They build more, or sell the design to a real manufacturer, and then what? You really want to see those things stomping all over Europe in the next war?”

  “What next war? There isn’t going to be a next war, not after the Munich treaty.”

  I stared at him. Everyone kept telling themselves that. As if this whole debacle in Spain wasn’t the opening salvo. “Let me see your camera a minute.”

  Joe, bless him, handed it right over. I popped the cover and yanked out the yard of film he’d shot, exposing the film, destroying the pictures.

  “Hey!” Joe said, but that was all. I closed the cover and handed the camera back. Somehow, deep down, the photographer must have understood.

  That was why we were all here, wasn’t it? Doing our part to make the world a better place?

  Carrie Vaughn is the bestselling author of the Kitty Norville series. Kitty’s Big Trouble, the ninth book, was released in Summer 2011, and the tenth will be released in Summer 2012. She has also written novels for young adults (Voices of Dragons and Steel) and two standalone fantasy novels, Discord’s Apple and After the Golden Age. Her short fiction has appeared in many magazines—such as Lightspeed, Fantasy Magazine, Weird Tales, and Realms of Fantasy—and anthologies, such as Brave New Worlds, Songs of Love and Death, Warriors, and The Thackery T. Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities. All of her Kitty Norville short fiction was recently collected in Kitty’s Greatest Hits. Carrie’s story, “Amaryllis,” was nominated for a Hugo Award in 2011. She lives in Colorado with a fluffy attack dog. Learn more at carrievaughn.com.