Gunwitch: Rebirth

by Niall Teasdale

  Hobbs ignored him. ‘Basic training and evaluation is three weeks. You will not get weekends off. Some of you will almost certainly wash out of the programme. It’s a tough course. It’s tough because the people you are going up against out there are tougher and, unlike our instructors, they will be trying to kill you. You will be fully familiarised with the factions you are likely to meet. To fill in time, I’ll give you a basic overview now.’

  A screen lit up behind the sergeant showing a rag-tag bunch of people in street clothes, some of them fitted with cybernetics. ‘The Insurgency are our prime concern. These people have, for whatever reason, rejected the utopia Doctor White has built for us. They hide out in the Below and on farms outside the city. Their main pastime is attempting to disrupt city infrastructure, something they are very bad at, but their repeated attempts are an annoyance. They are armed with whatever cybernetics they can scrape together and pre-war caseless projectile weapons. Do not let this fool you: they can be dangerous, especially in the confined spaces you’ll find in the Below. They know those tunnels as well as the service robots and you do not. They will set traps and they may outnumber you in any given encounter. Policy is to capture for re-education where possible, terminate where not.’

  The image changed to show another group of people in street clothes. The clothes tended to darker colours and more of a distressed style, and there seemed to be no cybernetics, but otherwise there was little difference. ‘This lot are called Zeroes, though not all these madmen are actually followers of Zero Sum. He’s the even madder man who gave them their name. If the insurgents want to disrupt, the Zeroes are all about destruction. All they want to do is destroy. There have been attempts to re-educate them, all resulting in failure. There is something fundamentally wrong with their brains. Orders are to terminate on sight.’

  Another image, now of a mixture of civilians in street and business clothes. ‘Lastly, we have a group we have taken to calling the Cabal. We don’t know what they call themselves. We aren’t even sure how organised they are. They represent the truly criminal element in Utopia City. The Insurgency and the Zeroes mostly keep to the Below, but the Cabal hide in plain sight. They operate through legitimate businesses and private homes. They will steal anything worth stealing. Medical supplies and food shipments are a particular favourite. Again, capture if possible, but don’t be too sorry if you have to put them down. These people give scum a bad name. Questions?’

  ‘How do we find them to take them out?’ the big man in front of Annette asked.

  ‘Intelligence as received by the UDF will be passed to SAU operatives when available. Otherwise, use whatever sources you may have. Patrol the tunnels, grab an insurgent, and beat more information out of him. You look as though you would do well at that, Mister Cranfield.’ Cranfield gave another rumbling chuckle and Hobbs waited a beat to see whether anyone else would ask anything. ‘All right then. Finish up those forms and– You’ve finished yours, Miss Barrington?’

  ‘There wasn’t anything especially difficult on it,’ Annette replied, ‘and I write fast.’

  Cranfield turned around to look at her. ‘Well, can you help me with mine then? I’m stuck on question two.’

  Annette raised one of her already arched eyebrows. ‘That’s date of birth.’

  ‘Yeah, well, me and numbers have never really got on…’

  Camp Brinnon.

  Annette walked into her room, located her bunk, and collapsed face first onto the thin mattress. Kenya followed her in, made a grumbling noise, and then hoisted herself onto the upper bunk to do more or less the same. Kenya was the only other girl in their induction group so they had been given a room together.

  ‘I am right, aren’t I?’ Annette said. ‘That was incredibly boring.’

  ‘You are right,’ Kenya replied. Kenya was an odd sort of girl. Certainly one who limited herself to the minimum of words.

  Annette rolled onto her back, the better to expound her frustration. ‘I mean, I’m going to go over my notes, but I think they told us more or less exactly what Sergeant Hobbs did, over and over again, adding “as far as we know” periodically. You’d think after all the time they’ve spent fighting these people, they would know more about them.’

  ‘You would.’

  ‘They didn’t mention the sheep or anything.’

  Kenya’s sharply angular face appeared over the side of the bunk. ‘Sheep?’

  ‘They have this sort of logo thing. A sheep, and then they paint a slogan under it. I got the impression that they think we’re the sheep.’

  ‘Perhaps you should be giving the lectures.’

  ‘Huh. I don’t think so. Well… I’m not so sure about the “cobbled together cybernetics” thing either. The ones I saw–’

  ‘You have actually seen insurgents?’

  ‘Well, mostly heard, but I saw two and there was another with them. One of the two I saw had legs like a Speeder, and from the way they were talking, one of the others had the chameleon skin you’ve got. That’s two out of three with fairly advanced components.’

  Kenya frowned. ‘Odd. Infiltrator cyberskin is supposed to be only used in SAU operatives. I think the same is true of Speeder legs.’

  ‘Well, I can think of one pretty gruesome solution for the legs. They could’ve taken them from a dead Speeder. Though it wouldn’t take much to build those legs just from observation. I think I could do it. The skin would be harder…’

  ‘Oh, so you actually designed your own cybernetics?’

  ‘Uh-huh. I had some help from a friend with the AI interface to the computer, but I did almost all the work. Designed it, built it. I didn’t actually install it, obviously. Then I designed my guns and the robot that reloads them for me. All the ammo is mine too.’

  ‘Then, what are you doing here?’

  Annette grinned. ‘You mean I should be getting paid a lot by the UDF or something to design stuff for them? I hope they’ll adopt this system for the SAU. I wanted to serve. My brother’s in the UDF. He’s been out fighting to keep the enclave safe for… a while now.’ Nate had been gone for a long time. There were security considerations, but they had never heard from him. Not once. They would have been notified if he had been killed…

  ‘I also want to serve,’ Kenya said. ‘Tomorrow should be different.’

  ‘Oh yeah, fitness assessment. That should be a barrel of laughs.’

  Olympic Mountains, 7/11/83.

  ‘I wonder when they’re going to teach us something,’ Annette mused as she picked her way through the forest.

  ‘Isn’t this teaching us something?’ Cranfield asked.

  ‘No, this is airdropping us in the middle of nowhere with a map and a compass and expecting us to get back to camp.’

  ‘I’m not so sure,’ Baltry said. ‘I think it’s team building. We’re learning valuable things here. Like Cran makes a great pack mule.’

  ‘Oh, ha ha,’ Cranfield grumbled, but he had volunteered to carry most of the gear they had been supplied with and he was showing no sign of the load bothering him.

  ‘If this was supposed to teach us teamwork,’ Annette countered, ‘I think losing three of our party right at the start was a bit of a fail.’

  Cranfield gave a shrug, which was particularly impressive in a man his size. ‘They wanted to go the direct route–’

  ‘Over two mountains,’ Baltry put in.

  ‘–and we agreed with Annette that the lowland route was better. We’ll have water down here. We can maybe catch something to eat so we don’t have to deal with the rations. Camping should be easy.’

  ‘Speak for yourself, Cran.’ Baltry grumbled. ‘I’m a city boy.’

  ‘Fresh air and all this walking, you’ll sleep.’

  ‘Okay, so how do we catch some of this wildlife that probably wants to eat us.’

  ‘Says the man with built-in electrolaser weapons. We’ve all got guns.’

  ‘Well,’ Annette said, ‘whatever, we’re going to be out here for one night
and we should make as much distance as we can today. The forecast for tomorrow is for rain and that’ll slow us down as much as the terrain.’

  ‘Best foot forward then,’ Cranfield said, grinning. ‘Assuming you’ve got a best foot, Baltry.’

  ‘Both of my feet are best, Cran,’ Baltry replied. ‘All of me is awesome.’

  ~~~

  Two of Annette’s rocket-propelled bullets hissed through the air and found their target, reducing the skull of a mountain goat to a bloody mess. ‘Those things have been looking at us funny all the way across the hill,’ she said.

  ‘It’s a goat,’ Baltry said. ‘All they can do is look at you funny. It’s the eyes. What do we do with it now?’

  ‘I go get us some useful meat,’ Cranfield said, taking his pack off. ‘We’ll leave the rest. We’re only going to be out here one night and the cougars will probably clean up the rest.’

  Baltry’s eyes widened. ‘There are cougars?’

  Kenya smirked at him and slapped one of his metallic arms. ‘They would not want you. Too crunchy.’

  ‘Most of me is chewy and delicious.’

  ‘A fact I have no plans to check.’

  ‘At least we’ve got something fresh to eat tonight,’ Annette said. She watched Cranfield setting off with a large knife. The corpse was a good sixty metres away and, since the goats had been watching them with what she considered malign intent, she kept her pistols at the ready just in case.

  ‘Why headshots?’ Baltry asked. ‘I mean, it’s a fairly long shot for a pistol. Why not go for the body?’

  ‘Two reasons. First, range is not an issue with these because I command-guide the bullets. They steer to the target. Second, expanding slugs make a horrible mess of whatever they hit and we wanted something to eat.’

  ‘You use hollow points?’ Kenya asked.

  Annette shook her head. ‘Programmable penetrator. I can select for three densities mimicking everything from hollow-point to armour-piercing rounds, selected just prior to firing.’

  ‘You’ve got all the bases covered,’ Baltry said.

  ‘Well, I’m not entirely happy with the penetration on the armour-piercing setting.’

  Baltry smirked. ‘I never have problems with penetration.’

  Kenya rolled her eyes at Annette. ‘He means well.’

  ~~~

  ‘Best estimate,’ Annette said, examining the topographical map she had stored away in her computer before leaving camp, ‘we have around fifteen kilometres to go.’

  ‘We could make that,’ Baltry said. He sounded rather eager about it, actually.

  Cranfield looked up at the sky, sniffed once, and then shook his head. ‘No, we’ll camp here. We’ve got the river just below us for water and we can make a fire here no trouble. We’d be walking the last part in the dark and we don’t know the terrain. Annette and Kenya may be able to see in the dark, but we’d be struggling.’

  Baltry let out a grumbling noise. ‘I guess there’s some fairly soft ground here…’

  Despite his complaints, Baltry got on with making camp as well as everyone else, at least until the light beneath the trees was getting too dim to see effectively. Even then, the laser weapons in his arms proved highly effective at lighting the fire he had helped gather the wood for.

  Annette had no trouble with the light and continued gathering wood along with a few of the berries Cranfield had indicated were edible for half an hour or so after dark. Kenya’s cybernetic eyes gave her infrared vision, which was not so much use under the conditions, but she kept watch while Annette searched.

  ‘Should we set a watch or something?’ Annette asked when they returned to their small camp. ‘You said there were cougars.’

  ‘Cougars,’ Cranfield agreed, ‘coyotes, and maybe some grey wolves. Some people say they’ve seen wolves in the area, some say they never made it in here before the wall went up. I doubt any of them would attack a healthy human, but it might be an idea to keep a watch. Means there’s someone keeping the fire alight too.’

  ‘How come you know this stuff, Cran?’ Baltry asked.

  ‘I grew up on a farm down near Salem. It’s all farmland around there, open plains, but we’d go out for hunting trips and stuff like that from time to time. You pick stuff up, you know?’

  ‘So that’s why you’re a reasonable shot?’

  ‘With a rifle, yeah. Maybe could’ve bagged us a deer around here, but it’d have meant taking time to stalk one.’ He flashed Annette a grin. ‘And we got free goat meat without any trouble.’

  ‘I would not have let you shoot a deer,’ Annette replied. ‘If we were relying on it to eat, maybe. Deer are too cute to kill without good reason. Those goats had it coming.’

  ‘Well, if we cook the meat up with one of the ration packs and those berries, we might get something vaguely edible in the way of a stew.’

  ‘Sounds great.’ Baltry was poking at the edge of the fire with a stick. ‘I wonder if the others got back before dark.’

  ‘I’m going to guess at no,’ Cranfield replied. ‘I don’t think they realised how hard it would be going over the mountains.’

  ‘Hey, Kenya, are you in radio range? You could call up and ask whether they beat us.’

  Kenya looked around and then shook her head. ‘In these hills, I doubt it.’ Kenya had a built-in radio transceiver, a little like Annette, but Kenya’s was meant for longer-range voice communications rather than networking.

  ‘I think they’d mark us down for doing it anyway,’ Annette said.

  ‘You think we’re being… What? Graded?’ Baltry asked.

  ‘Like I said earlier, it’s not like they’re teaching us anything. I think we’re here to make sure they haven’t wasted their expensive cybernetics on people who’ll get killed in the Below where the parts will be hard to retrieve.’

  ‘Kind of cynical.’

  ‘Yeah… Maybe camping does that to me.’

  ‘Anyway, if that’s right, you wouldn’t need to be here. They didn’t pay for your implants.’

  Annette grinned. ‘No, but if I can’t make the grade, it’ll be an excuse for Poppa to get me out of here and into some cushy R and D job. Make no mistake, they’ll be trying extra hard to fail me out of this course.’

  8/11/83.

  Annette took the last shift on guard duty because her eyes were the most adaptable. They had decided that they would get up as soon as the sun was up, heat up the leftover stew for breakfast, and make a start as soon as the air was warming up a little. Right now, Annette was huddled in a blanket because the temperature was only getting cooler. The fire was still going and giving some comfort, but the night air was beginning to bite.

  The conditions made for introspection. Her comment earlier about the reasons for the course had been cynical, but she suspected that she was not wrong. The thing that troubled her was that a thought like that would occur to her at all. She had always been so sure of her path: get her system working and fight the enemies of Utopia City, Doctor White’s enemies. She had always been quite sure that what Doctor White and his people told her, and everyone else, was the truth. In the past two weeks – had it really been less than two weeks since her failed field trial? – things had changed.

  There had been the insurgents she overheard. Thinking about it, that had started it all. They had made claims about a downed power plant and the official version had been at odds with what they had said. And the thing was that she would have discounted that, but there was the simple fact of the existence of the Insurgency. Would there still be insurgents if nothing they ever did succeeded? And the UDF claimed that the Insurgency was poorly equipped, badly organised, but that was not what Annette had seen…

  The anonymous emails were another thing. She had had a couple more and, now she thought about it, the right thing to do would have been to report them. Anonymous, untraceable messages were supposed to be impossible. Except that, now she thought about it, they were not. She could imagine how it was done. Why had she never t
hought about it before? Why had she not reported them? Well, that at least she knew: if she had reported them, someone would have wanted to know why someone was sending her anonymous emails.

  Something moving among the trees pulled her out of her reverie. There was a shape, unidentified but there, and she focused in on it. Her vision field narrowed and zoomed in. She could only guess that it was a cougar: it was large and more or less cat-shaped, but she was only seeing it in the infrared. Annette’s hand closed around the grip of one of her pistols and her combat HUD lit up showing approximate range to target and potential threat. If she was forced to fire, her system was quite sure she could shred the animal before it got close… And Annette was pleased when the big cat appeared to decide that the humans and their fire should be given a wide berth. She watched it until she could no longer make out its heat signature and then set her pistol down.

  Camp Brinnon.

  The rain had come soon after sunrise, turning the rest of the journey from a casual walk into a slog. It took almost five hours to make it to the training facility and they rolled in just after midday, hoping for a shower and some food, but that turned out to be wishful thinking.

  Annette sat in a dingy interview room answering questions from one of the instructors, Sergeant Barnes. Barnes did not seem to like her much, and Annette had tried hard to believe that he was just doing his job, but she had finally decided that she did not like him at all. The debriefing seemed to be a lengthy process where Annette gave her account of the hike and Barnes questioned every decision she had made. Particularly irksome was that Barnes disapproved of the break-up of the team and seemed determined to blame Annette for it. There were a lot of implications that the choice had been dangerous and that it had resulted in her party arriving late, except that the analysis software Annette perpetually ran was indicating that Barnes was lying about something.

  She finally figured out what was going on when a man in UDF uniform came in and handed Barnes a note which Barnes read before saying, ‘It seems that your buddy Baltry is saying that you badgered them into going with you and then did nothing useful the entire time you were out there. He thinks you were only useful as eye candy.’