Tin Men

by Christopher Golden

  “Open channel,” Danny snapped. “Lieutenant, check your six.”

  Trang stood beside Morello, the two of them talking fast. Hawkins and Mavrides were off in the southeast corner of the square taking potshots at shadows. Two charred robots were picking themselves up off the ground near the burning wreckage of the helicopter, damaged but in motion. Travaglini and Kate were racing up to the building her shooter had used for a perch, giving chase.

  Nobody seemed to have heard him.

  “Bot Killers, goddammit!” Danny screamed. “Open channel! Open fucking channel!”

  The rocket hissed as it launched.

  Danny saw Birnbaum pounding her skull with the palm of her hand like his grandfather had done to the old TV when Danny was very small.

  Sergeant Morello must have heard the rocket screaming through the air. He turned and shoved Trang out of the way. Later, Danny would wonder if Morello regretted it at the last second, if he knew what he was sacrificing.

  The rocket hit Morello dead on. It should have damaged the robot shell, cracked it, blown off limbs at best. Instead, the explosion turned him to shrapnel. Goodbye, Sarge.

  This wasn’t any ordinary rocket launcher. This was something new.

  “No,” Danny said. Nobody heard him; nobody was close enough. “No, no, no, no!”

  As he ran across the square toward the door Kate and Travaglini had just entered, he could hear the rest of the platoon shouting questions. Lieutenant Trang barked orders as he sprinted past, but he couldn’t hear them through the commlink.

  Alexa Day had been fresh out of the shower, ruminating about the friends she wouldn’t see for months, when she’d heard the helicopter taking off. Wrapped in a purple towel, she had rushed to the window of the little bedroom her father had provided and craned her neck to look skyward. The window overlooked a courtyard in the center of the ambassador’s residence, complete with gravel pathways and benches half-shaded by sprawling date trees but zero view of the city.

  Curious, she had dressed hurriedly in denim shorts, a burgundy Harvard University t-shirt and black hi-tops, run a brush through her hair, and then padded down the hall. She found a corner window that gave her a view of the grounds but also allowed her to see down into the street on the other side of the wall. Once, her father had explained, the ambassador’s residence had been the entirety of the embassy, but now it was only one corner of an entire city block, with a wall around it and a metal fence around that, topped with barbed wire. It had become more military base than embassy. In the courtyard, Marines hurried about on various errands. Several were surrounding a second helicopter and she wondered if it, too, would take flight.

  No, she thought. Stay here, just in case we need you.

  She furrowed her brow, studying the two guards on the wall just below the window. They were in motion, pacing quickly, scanning the horizon and peering down into the road. One of the Marines used the scope on his rifle to examine the windows of a structure across the street, a sharpness to his movements that created a flutter in her chest.

  Breathe, she told herself. They’re probably on high alert twenty-four hours a day.

  She heard a creak behind her and turned to see Baz Nissim coming up the steps. Alexa thought she might have detected a hint of disapproval in his eyes when he caught sight of her bare legs, and a flash of anger went through her. She was prepared to dress modestly when out in public in Damascus, but this was her father’s house. Surely, she ought to be able to do as she pleased inside these walls.

  “Miss Day,” Baz said. “If you’ll join me in the dining room, a small meal has been prepared.”

  Alexa thanked him and let him lead her down the stairs and through into the dining room. There were pears and figs and berries, dried meats, bread and cheese, and a bowl of red grapes that made her mouth water. She made a beeline toward a pitcher of water on the left side of the table, beads of moisture sweating on the glass, but she paused when she saw the single place setting.

  “Mr. Nissim?” she said, turning toward him. “My father said he would join me.”

  He nodded only once, and his expression did not change. “He’ll be along.”

  “Has something come up?” she asked, thinking of all of the times in her life when her father had been absent because something had come up. Then she pushed away her childhood resentment—here, of all places, she could forgive him his distractions if they meant keeping the people at the embassy safe.

  “The telephone,” Baz replied. “Just a quick briefing from the base commander.”

  Alexa nodded and began to pour herself a glass of water, eyeing the fat, ripe grapes. Her father was the ambassador to Syria; he must have to receive briefings all the time. She had waited this long to spend time with him—what was another few minutes?

  Breaking off a small bunch of grapes, she slid into a chair and popped one into her mouth. She’d expected it to be sweet, but the grape had the sour flavor of rot and she turned from Baz to spit it into her hand. Great, she thought. He already disapproves of how I dress—now he’s going to think I’m a total pig.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, and she felt herself blush as she turned toward him. “Just my luck to pick the one bad grape in the—“

  Shouts came from elsewhere in the house and she heard heavy footfalls pounding down the hall toward the dining room. The polite smile Baz had been wearing slipped and he glanced nervously around as a tall, dark-eyed Marine swept into the room with Arthur Day following right behind him.

  “Dad, what’s going on?” Alexa asked.

  Her father held out a hand to her. “Let’s go, honey. Right now.”

  “Ambassador?” Baz said.

  “Something’s happening,” he said. “The power just—“

  A boom sounded, muffled by the building around them but still audible. Alexa froze, and in the silence that enveloped them all they could hear the rattle of distant gunfire followed by another muffled boom. She turned to stare at her father, feeling suddenly very small and very young. Part of her wanted to shout at him—he had promised her she would be safe—but the other part wanted him to scoop her up in his arms the way he had done when she was a girl.

  “Let’s go,” he said.

  Alexa rushed to her father, took his outstretched hand, and began to run. A strange numbness enveloped her, like nothing she had ever felt before. It was as if she existed in a bubble and the rest of the world passed around her, unable to touch her. Like a fishbowl, she thought. She knew that fear had taken her over, that a little bit of lunacy had crept into her brain, but she did not try to fight it. Lunacy felt safer than reality.

  “Where are we going?” she heard herself asking.

  Two Marines waited ahead, guarding an open door beyond which a darkened stairwell led downward. Several people—embassy workers, she thought—were moving through the door and down the steps. A Marine passed a flashlight to a heavyset woman in a pantsuit and she moved faster than Alexa would have expected. The scarred man who had been Alexa’s bodyguard on the drive from the airport ran toward them from the area at the front of the house.

  “Ambassador, it’s not just the power,” he said. “The phones are out. My radio’s not working. Robeson says the cars just died in the street, like the engines are fragged.”

  “Shit,” one of the Marines said. “EMP. It’s got to be. Whatever’s happening, it’s big.”

  Alexa did not like the way their faces all paled at this pronouncement.

  “Dad?” she said, her voice far away.

  “Just keep moving, honey. We’ll be all right.”

  He went first through the door and started down the stairs, still clutching her hand as he guided her after him.

  “Where are we going?” she asked, grabbing a handrail to keep from falling. Something thundered in her ears and she thought it must be more gunfire, more explosions, but then she recognized the rhythm of her own heart.

  Don’t die, she told herself. I don’t want to die.

 
; “In a crisis, protocol requires the residence be sealed off from the rest of the embassy. There are only two passages from this building into the rest of the Marine installation, a side exit on the first floor and a basement tunnel. The first floor will have been sealed already—steel doors—but that’s okay. Don’t be afraid. The tunnel is part of the evacuation we’ve always planned in case of emergency.”

  Suddenly she felt angry, and ashamed of her fear. “It’s got to be Al Qaeda, right? Who else would go this far?”

  Her heart pounded as they reach the bottom of the stairs, but she felt more able to breathe. A massive metal door hung open at the far end of the basement and a single Marine stood beside it, ushering and prodding them all into the tunnel beyond.

  “It’s never as simple as one label,” her father said. “It could even just be some local jihadist group. The list of people who’d like the U.S. out of Syria is a mile long.”

  Alexa glanced at him, frowning as they entered the tunnel. Voices echoed around them, coming from the employees hurrying ahead and the handful of people bringing up the rear. Somehow she regained her clarity.

  “That’s not what this is, Dad.”

  Her father gripped her hand more tightly. “Don’t worry, Alexa. I promise, this will all be over—“

  “Dad, stop,” she said. Blinking, she reached up to swipe at an irritation in her eyes and realized she had been crying. The knowledge made her angrier, which helped. Anger didn’t eliminate her fear, but it helped compartmentalize her terror. “You can’t hide what this means from me, or protect me from it. I’m not twelve years old. My father is a foreign diplomat. I know enough to know that local jihadists don’t set off an electromagnetic pulse. They’ve burned out every circuit and engine in the city.”

  In the shuffling darkness, she saw the ambassador blink. “Alexa—“

  “Nothing will work until it’s replaced,” she went on. “Millions of dollars in damages, maybe billions. People don’t do that to their own city. It’s not jihad. It’s anarchy.”

  Her father looked at her as if he were seeing her—the seventeen-year-old her—for the first time. “You always were wise beyond your years. But no matter how smart you are, I’m your father. I’m still going to try to protect you.”

  “Fine,” she said, “but don’t keep me in the dark.”

  The ambassador nodded.

  They hurried along the corridor, following the footfalls ahead and the bobbing flashlight beams. People jostled each other. There were probably emergency lights run by a backup generator, but none of that would work now.

  They reached a bottleneck, where people had clustered around to pass through the metal doorway at the end of the hall. Two Marines barked at them. One had an assault rifle pointing at the floor and the other waved a flashlight back and forth as if he were signaling a plane to land. They were grim young men with determined faces and eyes alight with purpose, and immediately she felt a little bit safer.

  “You amaze me, you know,” her father said when they were on the other side of that door, the residence sealed off from the Marine base portion of the embassy. They were all shuffling into a large dining hall that would apparently be their holding area for the moment.

  Her father edged closer to her. His skin had flushed pink and his eyes darted around as if in search of someone who could give him answers. Alexa could see his anxiousness and confusion. He was the highest-ranking American government official on hand and had grown used to being the decision-maker, but all politics and diplomacy had evaporated with the EMP. Whatever happened now, the decisions would be military.

  “I’m serious,” he said quietly, bending to speak into her ear so that no one else could hear him. “Why didn’t you panic? Everyone around you is panicking—me included—but you’re—“

  “I’m scared out of my frickin’ mind,” she said, and the admission made her voice quaver, tears welling in her eyes.

  “Scared, yes,” he said, nodding. “But you’ve got it under control.”

  Industrial flashlights had been set at intervals throughout the windowless room and they cast eerie shadows. How they were still working mystified her, but it wasn’t like she was an expert on EMPs. Alexa glanced around at the embassy workers and the Marines who were gathered in the cafeteria, wondering what was going on upstairs. They were all terrified, but none of them knew just what it was they were supposed to fear.

  “Kids I know,” she said, turning toward her father and keeping her voice low. “We grew up thinking the world could blow up any time.”

  Alexa wiped her eyes and then took her father’s hand again, holding on tightly.

  “I just never expected it to be so soon.”

  ~7~

  No commlink.

  No private channels. No open channels. No Uncle recording every thing they said. No satellite uplink back to the Hump. The data in Danny’s onboard display still showed ghost numbers scattered across his vision, but they were frozen. Onboard systems were still functional, but external feeds were down.

  Gunfire echoed through the square. Another rocket screamed and he turned in time to see it blow apart its targets—two recent additions to Platoon A. Danny spotted the asshole with the launcher and took aim, but before he could even pull the trigger the guy staggered backward, jerking violently as bullets riddled his body. The other Tin Men had taken their vengeance. Another figure appeared on a nearby rooftop with a rocket launcher and bullets tore through him before he’d even fired. He pulled the trigger as he went down but the rocket fired wild, blowing a hole in the face of the Khan As’ad Pasha.

  Danny raced toward the building that had been the original sniper’s roost. He’d made it to within twenty feet of the door when Kate emerged, devil horns and all, Travaglini behind her. They had gone after the original sniper.

  “Did you get him?” Danny asked.

  Then he saw Kate’s expression: somehow human, full of panic and confusion.

  “Comms are cut off,” she said.

  “Completely,” he agreed.

  “But how?” she said, her rage tinged with fear.

  “Did you see the way the chopper just cut out and fell? Somebody hit us with an EMP. Took out everything in the city. Hard EMP kill means nothing will work now. Anything electronic, anything wired…it’s all fucked.”

  He rattled it off fast, trying to put the puzzle together in his head. Did a bunch of Bot Killers with guns and rocket launchers really think they could take a whole platoon of Tin Men? Even without any kind of commlink, they were trained soldiers piloting robot frames that were damned hard to destroy. These new rocket launchers might do a hell of a lot of damage, but the pricks wielding them were still human, still slow.

  “Danny,” Kate said, robot eyes widening in epiphany.

  “We’re fully shielded from an EMP,” he continued, on a roll. He glanced at Travaglini. “Maybe they didn’t know we were shielded. Maybe they figured the Pulse would frag our power cores—which is stupid, right? We’re talking nuclear—“

  “Danny!” she snapped, and whacked him in the head.

  “What the hell?” he said, just about as frayed at the edges as he’d ever been.

  Other voices were calling out, shouting for them to form up on the lieutenant, but Danny kept his gaze locked on Kate.

  “What?” he said quietly, turning to Travaglini and then back to her again.

  “Why are we still here?”

  He flinched. Took a step back.

  “Well…the satellites…”

  “If the satellites were transmitting signals, we’d have communications. That means the satellites are fragged, too, which means this is a hell of a lot bigger than just Damascus.”

  “No, no, listen,” Travaglini said, his voice an unwelcome intrusion into the space between Danny and Kate. “Something’s gotta be transmitting or we wouldn’t still be here. Bots are just puppets, right? If the EMP fragged whatever satellite was nearest—something in low orbit or whatever—that must’ve b
een our comms. But the signal array that lets us pilot the bots must be diverted through another…”

  Trav glanced down at his hands, frowning as he flexed his fingers. “Anyone getting any lag time?”

  Danny studied him. It could be true. Comms might operate through a different system. “So, what, we just have to wait for the planet to spin a bit so a different satellite rotates into orbit and we get comms back?”

  “In theory,” Travaglini said.

  “I don’t know,” Kate muttered, shaking her head. “Why would the piloting systems and comms be separate?”

  Slow horror crept into Danny’s metal alloy gut, slid along his circuits, whispered inside his robot brain. The ground shook as another rocket struck off to the north end of the square. In the back of his mind a terrible suspicion began to take root, but they didn’t have time to sort it out now.

  “Fuck it,” he said, “let’s go kill these assholes and worry about it later.”

  Kate laid down suppressing fire as they moved out from their sheltered position, but the fight seemed nearly over. No more rocket launchers, just a handful of snipers trying to keep them pinned. Hawkins and Mavrides had formed up around Lieutenant Trang, the three of them firing at a gap in the third floor wall of a nearby building—a gap that had once been a window. Birnbaum used the smoking wreckage of the chopper for cover and took pot shots at two persistent snipers who kept popping up on the roof of a sun-bleached hotel across the square.

  Kate lifted her weapon, sighted, and shot one of the hotel roof snipers. His head snapped back as the bullet punched through his skull and he flailed backward in a tangle of limbs and was lost from sight. The other one turned tail to run. Danny let off a couple of rounds but didn’t have Kate’s focus. His thoughts were clicking into place and he found it hard to focus on anything at all.

  “Birnbaum!” he called. “Form on us.”

  In moments they were all gathering around Lieutenant Trang, and Danny did a head count. Corcoran and half a dozen others were out of commission, including the Sarge. Twenty-nine left out of a platoon of thirty-six. And it would be days before they could put new bots in the field.