Gunwitch: Rebirth

by Niall Teasdale

  Annette watched the analysis unfold in front of her, her eyes fixed on Barnes. ‘Well, if he did say that, he would by lying.’ She waited a beat to allow Barnes to open his mouth and then said, ‘But he didn’t say any of that, did he?’

  Barnes faltered and then said, ‘Are you calling a superior officer a liar?’

  Attempted intimidation, faked affront. Calling himself a superior officer was pushing it just a little bit too. ‘I am suggesting that this exercise is attempting to get a negative reaction from me. You want anger, or perhaps you expect me to burst into tears. The other three aren’t back yet, are they? I selected the right route given the operational parameters and you want me to think I’m a massive failure.’

  ‘You allowed your team to break up–’

  ‘They aren’t my team. No one was assigned a leadership role. There was no requirement for anyone to take the lead in the mission briefing, what little briefing there was. Everyone used the talents they had to get us through the mission. There was no need for a leader. Sergeant, my father got the same software the Inquisitors use for me to install on my implant. I know when you’re lying so your mind games aren’t going to work on me. Can we cut it out now so I can take a shower?’

  Barnes glowered at her for a second, but it was hard to get much purchase on a good glare when you were looking into blank, white eyes. ‘You’re dismissed.’

  ~~~

  The others were all in the mess when Annette got out of the shower. Cranfield looked as though a rather large, black cloud was hanging over him and no one looked happy.

  ‘You took a while,’ Baltry said. ‘We all got here fifteen minutes ago.’

  ‘I think Barnes wanted to have an especially valiant try at making me think I was a failure,’ Annette replied.

  ‘Just to be clear,’ Cranfield said, ‘you didn’t bad-mouth me to Barnes?’

  ‘No, that was one of their tactics. They told me that Baltry said I was worthless eye candy.’

  ‘Good. That means I didn’t threaten to punch out a superior officer without a good reason.’

  Annette grinned. ‘There was really no need to defend my honour quite so enthusiastically, Cran, but thank you anyway.’

  ‘Perhaps there was,’ Kenya said. ‘They told all of us that you said bad things about us.’

  ‘Of course,’ Baltry said, ‘when we compared notes, we realised this was part of what you said about trying hard to fail you. They want to break up the gang.’

  ‘It’s just done the opposite,’ Cranfield growled.

  ‘Well…’ Annette was not sure what to say to that so she went for, ‘Thanks, guys. Um, the other three aren’t back yet, are they?’

  Kenya shook her head. ‘They should be, but they aren’t.’

  ‘Do you think something happened to them?’

  Baltry shrugged. ‘They were trying to march over a place called Mount Mystery.’

  11/11/83.

  The mystery had been solved when the last three of the group had limped into camp just before dark. Mount Deception had proved their undoing, not Mount Mystery. They had found the going too tough and doubled back into the valley below, which had meant they ended up travelling further than Annette’s little team. Then they had pushed ahead into the night to try to make up ground and their Gunner had taken a fall, badly twisting his ankle. The Tank had had to carry him out of the hills in the morning.

  The Gunner had been taken away from the camp by ambulance. His career in the SAU looked doubtful. The other two refused to even speak to Annette. This Annette could cope with, because it seemed to push Cranfield, Baltry, and Kenya closer, as though they were gathering around a victimised friend. The instructors, Barnes in particular, were not letting up, however.

  The camp’s firing range was a fairly advanced one. Each firing position had a computer terminal beside it and the range itself was fitted out with a battery of sensors. For every shot, your personal computer would give you ballistic statistics and target statistics, and generally anything you might want to know. Annette rather wished she had known about this place when she had been doing her testing. She had, to Barnes’s annoyance, aced the indoor target range the day before: it was basically the same as the one in the city. The outdoor range was proving more difficult, but then she was being handicapped.

  Lying on her stomach with a braced semi-automatic rifle, Annette was firing at a man-shaped target one hundred and twenty metres away. She aimed, her eyes zooming in to cut down the effective sighting range, and fired.

  ‘Hit,’ the computer announced. ‘Torso, four centimetres high of centre. Range is one hundred and twenty metres.’

  ‘You’re going to have to do better than that, Barrington.’ Barnes’s voice came from behind her. She was not sure how long he had been standing there, but that had been her second-worst score on this clip and she had not missed a single shot.

  ‘A kill shot every time isn’t good enough, Sergeant?’ she asked. ‘At twice the range you’re asking anyone else to shoot at?’

  ‘You need to do better.’

  Annette cleared her rifle and got to her feet, turning to face Barnes. ‘Do you have a problem with me, Sergeant?’

  ‘Are you implying some form of reverse favouritism, Barrington?’

  ‘Well, you’re riding me for shooting perfectly well with a weapon I’ve never trained on. You have everyone else shooting at closer targets and I’m doing as well or better than anyone. It seems that you want me to fail.’

  ‘You’re a weapons specialist. You need to be competent firing at range.’

  ‘Which I am, however…’ Annette reached behind her back with her left hand and her arming pod slapped one of her pistols into her palm. She raised it, sighted down the range and fired.

  ‘Hit,’ said the computer. ‘Head shot, centre. Range is one hundred and twenty metres.’

  Annette turned slightly and fired off more rounds, putting each one through the head target area of her colleagues’ targets. Then she aimed at her own target again and fired off three more rounds which curled out, quickly passing her target.

  Barnes’s lips curled into a malicious grin. ‘You missed.’

  ‘Three hits,’ the computer announced. ‘Two centimetre grouping around centre of head. Range is five hundred metres.’

  ‘Did I?’ Annette asked.

  Barnes made a rumbling sound somewhere in his throat. ‘You have an attitude problem, Barrington.’

  ‘Yes, sir! I want to be the best SAU operative I can possibly be and, by any objective measure I can come up with, I seem to be doing just fine at the moment. I am motivated. I am determined. You seem to have a problem with that attitude, sir.’

  There was another rumbling noise. ‘Continue shooting, Barrington,’ Barnes said, and then he turned on his heel and started down the line of shooting bays. His voice rose. ‘Why am I not hearing weapons firing?!’

  ~~~

  Annette knocked once and then opened the door of the camp commandant’s office. Lieutenant Colonel Bridger was greying at the temples and his nose tended to the bulbous. His right arm was artificial, the plastic skin fairly obvious. He was a hero, having lost that arm fighting a large skirmish against the bandits which infested the wasteland outside the enclave. Annette was not sure why she had been summoned to his office, but she did not like it.

  ‘Recruit Barrington,’ Bridger said on looking up. ‘Come in. Take a seat.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’ Closing the door behind her, Annette crossed to one of two straight-backed chairs and sat down. And waited.

  After a second or two of silence, Bridger said, ‘I assume you’re wondering why I asked you to see me?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’ Bridger frowned and Annette decided to relent a little. ‘I could hazard a guess, sir. I may have spoken out of turn to Sergeant Barnes this morning.’

  ‘Yes… and no. SAU operatives are given… let’s call it “some latitude” in their dealings with regular UDF officers. We recruit for a certain personality type. It�
��s needed to function under the conditions such agents regularly encounter. Good ones can become heroes of the city, but a lot of them fall. A relatively poor attitude is to be expected.’

  ‘Still, I may have overstepped the mark, sir.’

  ‘Barnes would agree,’ Bridger said, and Annette’s heart sank. ‘However, he came to me along with a couple of other instructors because he feels you may have been justified.’

  ‘Uh…’

  ‘As you rightly stated, Miss Barrington, they have been especially hard on you. They have been looking for ways to fail you out of this course. You have given them nothing to work with and you refuse to take their “hints.” Your outburst may have been out of line, but it was also insightful.’

  Annette considered for a second. ‘May I speak freely, sir?’

  ‘Please do.’

  ‘My father is in charge of media control for the UDF through DoPI. He has connections. He got me onto this course, yes, but I’m sure he had a few words to a few people to make it as difficult as possible for…’ She trailed off because Bridger was shaking his head.

  ‘Your father did not ask anyone to fail you out of the course. However, it is common knowledge that he pulled strings to get you onto the course.’

  Light dawned and Annette’s eyes widened. ‘Oh! Oh… damn. They all think I’m some rich princess playing soldier.’ Her father was in information management and advertising: influencing people was what he did, often in ways they were not even aware of.

  ‘Quite. However, your rather eloquent defence to Sergeant Barnes and your quite impressive test scores don’t seem to fit with that picture. This leaves the sergeant and his colleagues with an issue since apologising is obviously out of the question. Essentially then, nothing will be said by anyone and you will get a clean slate. Is that agreeable?’

  ‘All I really want is a fair trial, sir.’

  Bridger gave a nod. ‘Very well. Dismissed and good luck with the rest of the course.’

  Utopia City Below, 23/11/83.

  ‘How did your father take you passing basic training?’ Baltry asked.

  ‘About as well as I expected,’ Annette replied, picking her way through the detritus which covered the floor of the storm sewer they were negotiating. ‘Outwardly happy and inwardly stewing, and he tried a couple of times over the weekend to suggest it was too dangerous and I should back out before the first mission.’

  ‘Obviously,’ Kenya said, ‘you did not.’

  Annette grinned. ‘I did not. Though if I’d known they were going to send us down here straight away, I might have reconsidered.’

  The Below was a maze of tunnels under the city, most of them left over from the construction work Doctor White had initiated when he took control of the area and saved it from the chaos. Under Old Seattle, where the university and government centres were located, the Below linked into the old subway system. The huge, vaulted stations had been used as marshalling yards for Doctor White’s robots. They had tunnelled all over the region, making the city’s services and the machines which maintained them invisible to the citizens. Some people said that the tunnels went down, layer upon layer, for a mile or more. Some said that there were shafts with lifting mechanisms which connected Mercer Island to the network and that there were tunnels beneath Lake Washington.

  No one knew for sure the extent of the Below, except maybe for Doctor White and the robots which had built the place. Up near the surface, where the various entrances were located and there was some overhead lighting, the tunnels had good, solid concrete lining them. They were, almost, good enough to be called streets and the workmanship almost matched the glory of the buildings above. The dry tunnels were kept pristine by the service robots, but the same could not be said of the storm sewers. At least they were not running with sewage.

  ‘At least my boots are waterproof,’ Annette said. ‘Do we have any real clue about where these insurgents are supposed to be?’

  ‘No,’ Baltry replied, ‘that’s why we’re searching for them.’

  ‘Have you any idea how many kilometres of tunnels there are down here?’

  ‘No. As far as I’m aware, there isn’t anyone who does.’

  ‘So, it would be a great idea to have some way of, you know, narrowing the search.’

  Baltry shrugged. ‘No more information in the briefing. But they won’t be too far down.’

  Cranfield frowned at that. ‘Why wouldn’t they be? They can’t be too close to the surface, can they? Someone would’ve found them already. The service robots if no one else.’

  ‘Get too deep in the Below,’ Baltry said with a slight grin on his face, ‘and you run into… Well, no one’s quite sure what it is down there. Only the service robots ever come back up.’

  ‘Those are fairy stories,’ Kenya stated flatly.

  ‘I’ve never heard them,’ Annette said.

  ‘Oh well,’ Baltry began, warming to his subject, ‘there have been rumours for a while. Some of the maintenance workers for the service robots have seen damage to machines they can’t explain. Big dents that look like impacts from fists. Limbs broken, bent, or ripped off. Bite marks! No one knows what’s doing it, but it would have to be big, strong.’

  ‘Or insurgents with cybernetics,’ Cranfield said. ‘I could leave a dent in a service robot.’

  ‘You wouldn’t eat people.’

  ‘Well, no, but–’

  ‘They find… parts in some of the sewer gratings sometimes after a big storm. Human body parts. Not much, usually. A hand, a foot. One time, someone found a head, but the skull had been cracked open like something was trying to get at the brains.’

  ‘The brains?’ Annette asked. ‘Like in those terrible pre-war horror videos? You’re saying there are zombies down there?’

  ‘No one knows,’ Baltry said, grinning.

  ‘Well…’ Cranfield said, rather as though he did not want to agree with Baltry. ‘If there was something down there that could take on a human, there’s plenty of meaty soft tissue in a skull. Most animals don’t go there because it’s hard to get out. Uh, and… um.’

  ‘Out with it, Cran,’ Annette said.

  ‘There are a few rumours of cannibal monsters out in the enclave. It’s all “a friend of my cousin’s second cousin” stuff. You can never find anyone who’s claimed to see one themselves. The bodies are probably animal kills.’

  ‘But?’

  ‘But opinion is split between them somehow getting in from outside the enclave and them escaping to the surface through some of the service tunnels that come out beyond the wall.’

  ‘See?’ Baltry said. ‘It’s not even just city rumour. Then there’s the lost battalion.’

  Annette peered through the dim light at him. ‘The lost battalion?’

  ‘Yeah. They say that Doctor White became concerned about some of the damage to the robots and wanted to get to the bottom of it, so he ordered a UDF deployment to end the problem. They sent a battalion of troops down there… And they vanished.’

  ‘Uh-huh… Right.’

  ‘Then, about two years later, this guy crawled into one of the robot maintenance areas dressed in the remains of a UDF uniform. Gibbering mad, totally off his little red wagon. All he could talk about was “the monsters in the dark.” They took him to hospital and more or less fixed him up, but his mind was never the same. Thing is, they managed to identify him as one of the men from the lost battalion. He’d been down in the deep tunnels two years… and he wasn’t malnourished.’

  There was silence for a second. Annette’s eyes were picking up more small warm bodies than she wished to think about scurrying around in the debris. Maybe not quite as many as she would have expected… ‘It’s not like there isn’t anything to eat down here,’ she said. ‘If you’re desperate enough.’

  ‘Fairy stories,’ Kenya said. ‘The only things down here are rats, robots, and unlucky SAU agents.’

  ‘Hopefully there are some insurgents too,’ Cranfield said. ‘Otherwise the unl
ucky SAU agents are really wasting their time.’

  ~~~

  ‘Another heat signature,’ Annette reported as her vision system highlighted a warm body in the tunnel ahead.

  After a couple of hours, they had discovered that they were not the only humans in the tunnels, but that there did not seem to be any cannibal-zombie-mutants either. And the humans they were finding showed little sign of being insurgents.

  When the first of them had appeared in Annette’s infrared view, the team had slowed down and taken a cautious approach. Kenya had stripped down so that her chameleon skin could work to its full effect and snuck up on the figure. Then she had radioed through to the team saying that they should come up and not to worry.

  The man they had found seemed almost catatonic. He was curled up on the floor of the tunnel, dressed in the remains of ordinary street clothes, and he whimpered when Cranfield turned a light on him. The only person he was a danger to was himself and they were close enough to the surface that Kenya’s radio could reach the telephone network. She had reported the find and suggested that service robots be sent to retrieve the man, and then the party had moved on.

  The latest target was the fifth and they were getting less cautious. They were also starting to categorise them. When Cranfield and Baltry shone their flashlights down the tunnel, and Annette saw the figure startle and bolt, she said, ‘Looks like it’s a paranoid one.’

  ‘Can’t see him,’ Baltry said.

  ‘Okay, I got him.’ Annette took a pistol from behind her back, pointed the weapon down the tunnel, and fired. ‘Got him.’ In her vision field, the infrared image began to cool.

  ‘Do you ever miss?’

  ‘No system is perfect. He’s still making progress, but he’s slowing.’

  When they found the fallen man, he was huddled on the floor of the tunnel, unconscious and shivering. A shallow puddle of water he had fallen into had a sheen of ice over it and, at first sight, so did his exposed skin. However, he was alive.

  ‘Better see if you can get some robots down for this one too,’ Annette suggested.