Tin Men

by Christopher Golden

  “Morning, Aimee,” North said, smiling, hands clasped behind him as if he stood at a sluggish kind of attention. “Been a while since we had some time to ourselves.”

  “You say that like it’s been accidental,” she replied.

  “Ohhh,” North said. “That’s how it’s gonna be?”

  Aimee kept her focus on the grid of viewscreens to the left of her monitoring station. There were more than twenty monitoring stations arrayed along the outer curve of the circular chamber, each tracking the movements, video capture, and vital signs of squads of Tin Men currently in the field. Each of the screens on Aimee’s grid showed a small square of live imagery from Damascus, and bore the constantly changing vital signs of one member of Platoon A. The Command Core was at the center of the room, an elevated, enclosed platform connected to a raised, round metal catwalk with half a dozen staircases descending to the monitoring chamber’s floor. From the Command Core, duty officers oversaw the techs who controlled communications with all members of the battalion currently in the field.

  “You can address me as Warrant Officer Bell,” Aimee said.

  North laughed. There was something so genuine in the sound, a kind of rueful, weary amusement, that she turned to face him. He was studying her with an expression not unlike the one she imagined must be on her own face whenever she tried to puzzle over the mindcasting program used to engage the Remote Infantry soldiers with their robot avatars. Like she was a riddle to be solved.

  “Ice cold,” North said.

  It was possible that she permitted herself just a hint of a smile.

  “What’s going on?” North asked, gesturing toward the grid of viewscreens. “Looks like they’re all on the move. Crisis?”

  The sarcastic barb was on the tip of her tongue. After all, if he hadn’t shown up hung over and thrown up in his canister, he’d have been in Damascus with them, sharing whatever danger they might be in. But when she glanced at him and saw the worry that furrowed his brow, she found herself softening toward him.

  “Something’s up,” she said. “They’re regrouping at the A.Z. But if there’s a threat, nobody over there has any idea what it is.”

  North nodded, then glanced up at the Command Core. “What about them? They’re listening to the whole thing, tracking satellite images of Damascus right now, I’m sure. Do they have a clue?”

  Aimee looked at North, but he barely noticed her now, his focus locked on the Command Core as if he could see through its walls. Something about the way he had asked the question troubled her—a sharp edge to his tone.

  “I wouldn’t know,” she said, the frost returning to her voice. “As you can see, I’m down here watching life signs, not up there with an array of sat-links and Uncle listening to their every word.”

  “Come on, Aimee. We both know if you felt like it, you could hack into whatever’s going on in the core in three seconds flat.”

  She shot him a hard look. “If you’d wanted to be a part of the action today, maybe you shouldn’t have—“

  North laughed again, but this time all the gentle self-amusement had given way to what she’d always thought of as barroom arrogance. Like he was spoiling for a fight.

  “Some people drink for courage,” he drawled. “Others drink to forget what a crappy day they’ve had. But sometimes you gotta drink enough to step out of the world for a while. Sometimes it’s either that or check out forever. Trust me, you don’t wanna know why I got so shitfaced last night.”

  He grunted and dropped his gaze. In that moment, looking at the stubble on his chin, his furrowed brow, and the way his shoulders sank with some invisible weight, she wanted a drink herself.

  Aimee exhaled, wishing he’d go away. She looked up at the viewscreen grid, watching the flickering lights that showed the heartbeats of Platoon A quickening with something that wasn’t quite fear. The view through the robots’ eyes painted a frantic picture, glimpses of rooftops and alleys as the Tin Men hurried back to the Arrival Zone.

  “Looks like it might get ugly there,” North said, nodding toward the grid.

  Khan left his Dragonov on the roof, wondering if he’d be alive to claim it later. He crashed through the door that led down to the street, risking a call on his phone. A plan had been put in place from the outset to deal with the possibility that the Tin Men might figure out that they were in danger and withdraw, but Khan had never imagined he would need that plan. The Americans were arrogant enough in the flesh, but the robot soldiers had nothing to fear so they never retreated or surrendered.

  Has there been some leak? he wondered. Do they know what’s to come?

  It could not be. If they knew, the robots would be scouring the city for enemies, trying to stop it before zero hour.

  The only possibility was one that Khan had never fully taken into account: instinct. The abandonment of Damascus had alarmed them, he’d known it would, but he had expected them to redouble their efforts instead of withdrawing. Would they abandon the robots? Would they leave their techno-avatars empty, hollow shells?

  No, no, he thought as he pounded down the stairs toward the street. They’d never…Especially now, thinking some conspiracy is unfolding, they’d never leave the robots untended.

  Then what?

  He reached the street door, opened it and glanced out, then slipped through and into an alley, faded laundry hanging from clotheslines overheard. Khan bolted to the right, hustling along the alley. He doubted the white traditional hatta he wore on his head made him any less visible on satellite imagery, but it couldn’t hurt. As long as he reached his other roost—his Plan B—before anyone laid hands on him, all would be well. A second rifle awaited him there.

  They’re not withdrawing, he thought. They’re regrouping.

  The robots didn’t know what they were up against, so the lieutenant would not want his people spread out across Damascus. He’d want them together, fighting as a unit. That made sense. Khan was glad of the number thirteen that Private Kelso had used to mark his robot shell. It would make it far easier to find him amongst the other Tin Men. And whoever had painted the target on the robot chassis yesterday—he’d thank them for the gift if he could.

  Forcing himself not to exceed a quick walk, he hurried through a maze of alleys, avoiding the main concourse of the souq as much as possible. A pair of old women saw him and turned away. At last Khan crossed through the souq and pushed through the door of an antique shop. Old mirrors showed dusty, warped reflections of him as he hurried past.

  Through a side door in the antique shop, he found a narrow stairwell and ascended the steps at a run. At the top he came to an equally narrow door and paused to fish the keys out of his pocket. He slid the key into the lock and then left it jutting there while he took out his phone and dialed.

  Drazen answered halfway into the first ring. “You’ve seen them leaving?”

  “I’m at the other place, now,” Khan carefully replied, knowing that every cellular call would be caught by satellite and filtered for words or phrases that the Americans might find troubling. “Make sure everyone makes it to the party.”

  Khan ended the call. Drazen was a professional; he wouldn’t need more instruction than that.

  Folded on a shelf by the door was a canvas that had been carefully selected due to its gray hue matching the roof of the building next to the antique shop. Khan unfolded it and draped it over his head and shoulders like a cloak, unlocked the door and stepped onto the roof, pushing the door closed behind him—not bothering with the key. He strode steadily across the roof to its edge, then dropped the three feet to the roof of the building next door, where his canvas would be a better match. Always, always, the danger of satellite surveillance was a problem. But the time was near—he had just a few minutes, at most—and he could not allow himself to hesitate if he wanted to be sure to destroy Private Kelso—and Corporal Wade as well, if he could manage it.

  Khan lay down at the edge of the roof, spreading the canvas around him. Beneath the ledge wa
s a long, rectangular bit of strange architecture that did not belong, though it was the same color as the roof. He pulled it up, feeling the texture of the wood he had painted just for this purpose, and dragged out the rifle he had hidden there the night before. Closing the hidden compartment he laid the rifle on the edge of the roof, only the front of the weapon peeking out from beneath the canvas, and peered through the scope.

  More than half of the platoon had already returned to the street in front of the ruins of the Khan As’ad Pasha. Their movements were strangely human, a constant kind of nervous energy making them twitch and shift their weight. Only in those brief moments when they were uninhabited—when one soldier extricated himself from the controls back at their German base and the other had not yet taken the reins—did they become inert, as if they were merely strange sculptures instead of army. As long as there were pilots controlling them through the ether, the robots seemed alive.

  Scanning the Tin Men, he frowned. None of their foreheads bore the number thirteen; Kelso was not among them. Corporal Wade was there with her devil’s horns. Dissatisfied, he took aim at the vulnerable spot on her upper torso and settled down to wait, his finger on the trigger.

  Praying the call would not come until he had Kelso in his sights.

  ~6~

  “Chopper!” Kate shouted.

  “Wade, don’t yell on comms,” Naomi Birnbaum snapped. “This your first day?”

  Somewhere back in Germany, in the canister where her body was being fed through a tube, Kate figured her cheeks must be blushing. Unless they were under fire, there was no excuse to be shouting through a commlink. The rest of the platoon could hear her fine. Not only that, their onboard data displays would show the same thing hers did—that a helicopter was en route from the Blue Zone base. But knowing it was on the way and actually hearing it approach were two different things.

  “Enough of that shit,” Sergeant Morello said, moving to the center of the gathered bots. “Corcoran, Prosky, Lahiri, Eliopoulos, I want you in the chopper. Fly a search pattern, rooftops and alleys. Sing out if you see anything.”

  “And till then?” Hawkins asked, glancing around at the others as if to include them in his question. “We’re just gonna sit here in the open and wait to get hit? Cause that’s what this is, right? The rags have figured out a way to take us out and they’re going for it. Hell, maybe they’re just gonna nuke the place.”

  “No one’s nuking Damascus, Hawkins,” Lieutenant Trang said, his tone full of warning. “That kind of talk does nothing for us.”

  Kate shifted slightly closer to Trang. Hawkins glared at the lieutenant with his inhuman eyes and Kate knew if their bodies came equipped with laser vision, Trang would have been melted to slag.

  A wind kicked up that had nothing to do with the incoming chopper. Road dust swirled around them, little tornados of grit that scoured the Tin Men. Kate wondered if Hawkins would push his luck with the lieutenant, but apparently he recognized that he was outnumbered because he didn’t say another word. Mavrides had no such wisdom.

  “This is bullshit, Lieutenant,” Mavrides said. “We oughta corral some of the civilians who are still here and make them talk.”

  Trang stepped up to him. “And if they know nothing?”

  Sergeant Morello used a metal finger to tap Mavrides’ robot skull several times, hard enough to echo through comms in all their heads.

  “Don’t be a dumbass, kid,” Morello said. “You’re not really here. Nothing to be afraid of.”

  “I’m not—“ Mavrides began to protest.

  “Shut up,” Hawkins snapped. He could have done it on a private channel, but he said it open comm for them all to hear.

  Mavrides didn’t say another word. Hawkins and the kid were on edge, amped up. They knew they were in somebody’s kill zone and wanted to lash out, break bones, draw blood. Kate understood the urge; she felt it herself. But they were fools if they believed Trang had called them back to the A.Z. as some kind of retreat. The lieutenant was putting eyes in the air, not relying just on satellite imagery. He’d regrouped the platoon in order to be ready to attack in force.

  The noise of the chopper grew louder.

  “Here we go,” Sergeant Morello said. “Corcoran—“

  “We’re on it, Sarge,” Corcoran said, gesturing to the other three who would be boarding the chopper with him.

  “And the rest of us, sir?” Birnbaum asked.

  “The situation is being analyzed back at the Hump,” Lieutenant Trang said. “We await orders.”

  A crackle of static came over Kate’s comm, a private channel being opened.

  “Fantastic,” Danny Kelso’s voice muttered sarcastically in her ear.

  Then the chopper came over the top of a row of buildings to the east and Kate looked up into the sun, her vision automatically adjusting to the scorching brightness. The rotors drowned out everything for a second as comms adapted to the noise differential.

  “Where the hell are you?” Kate asked, glancing around to look for Danny as the chopper started to descend toward the street.

  “A block away,” he replied. “We were just taking a closer look at a couple of closed up shops.”

  She found his voice in her ear comforting. Searching the square for him, head full of the whap of the chopper’s rotors, she caught a glimpse of something out of place. Just a couple of inches of white piping that could have been a lot of things but which her gut told her was not any of those things.

  This time, she did not shout.

  “Gun,” she said.

  Danny heard that single word in his head, spoken barely above a whisper—thanks to sound modulation it slipped in amidst the roar of the chopper—and he began to run.

  “What’re you doing?” Torres called after him.

  “It’s happening now,” Danny said.

  Torres raced along thirty feet behind him but Danny didn’t wait for her. He bounded into the square and took in the scene: Hartschorn climbing into the chopper after a couple of other bots, the bird already starting to rise. Trang and Morello in the middle of the square with maybe twenty-four other robots standing around, most of them with their weapons out. Mavrides leaned against a lamppost. Hawkins stood watching the chopper take off, maybe thinking he ought to have been on it. But Danny wasn’t scanning for Hawkins. He was looking for a bot with devil horns painted at her temples.

  Travaglini moved aside, revealing Kate behind him. In his head Danny could hear Morello and Trang asking for clarification even as Travaglini drew his gun, shouting the same word that Kate had whispered. Side by side, now, Kate and Travaglini raised their weapons with inhuman speed and took aim at a rooftop to the west.

  The first of the sniper’s bullets struck Kate along her side and staggered her to the left. The second bullet hit the same spot and then Danny understood what they were dealing with—what kind of skill. This fucker knew the sweet spot. The seam had been reinforced half a dozen times but the weakness there was a design flaw; it wasn’t going to be cured by a patch.

  The shooter couldn’t kill her, of course. She was a robot. She’d wake up in Germany with a headache. But still he shouted her name and broke into a sprint, shoving a couple new guys out of the way. Inhuman speed, yeah, but not fast enough to beat a bullet.

  Travaglini did it for him, grabbed Kate and shielded her, turning his back to the shooter. Then a dozen weapons were trained on the sniper, returning fire, turning the edge of the roof into a shower of rubble but with no sign of the guy. The shooter was rabbiting.

  Danny heard Lieutenant Trang in his head. “Corcoran, do you see him?” Calling out to the bots on the chopper.

  “Not yet,” Corcoran replied.

  They all heard it. The whole platoon listening but not waiting, scanning every damn rooftop, rushing over to investigate every strange outcropping, because where there was one there might well be another.

  “Wait,” Corcoran said. “I think—“

  None of them would ever hear what Pri
vate Corcoran said next.

  The burst of static made Danny scream, but he had no ears to protect—the sound came from inside his head. He spun around as if to find its source and saw the air ripple like the surface of the lake in front of his grandfather’s cabin when the wind would kick up.

  All of the Tin Men were bent or crouched, trying to escape the screeching that could not be escaped.

  Until it simply stopped, leaving only the thump of the chopper’s rotors.

  Slowing.

  Stopping.

  Fucking falling.

  Danny stood with the other bots and watched the chopper hit the ground, cleaving off the top story of a decrepit hotel before it struck the ground. He flinched, waiting for the gas tank to go, but the chopper just crumpled. Screams rose into the air, the pilot or one of the other flesh and blood members of the flight crew. With the shriek of tearing metal, the door that ought to have been on the starboard side of the helicopter but was now on top shot upward and landed a dozen feet away. Robot hands grasped the door frame and Prosky and the others started to climb out like spiders who’d been tipped on their backs a moment.

  Damaged, for sure, but they could be fixed.

  The rocket whistled as it passed overhead. It hit the chopper, which exploded with enough force to knock the nearest bots off their feet, blacken their frames. Danny staggered back and caught Torres with his free hand, stayed upright and found that his weapon was in his hand. He spun, saw Kate was okay, then scouted for the son of a bitch who’d fired the rocket.

  He spotted the guy standing on a market roof, out in the open with his launcher as if he didn’t have a care in the world. Turned out he only had one—firing off another rocket.