The Autumn War

by Ani Fox

  They shot Eddie right off, putting a massive hole through his right skull. I had already hit the deck and was moving out of the line of fire having felt the bow wake rather than saw the kill team. Maybe they’d used a sub, maybe a hovercraft. They’d been incredibly silent. Or someone had turned off the sensors. They were within shooting range and whoever they had sniping had done a pretty damned good job on the fly. Five of the cadre were dead by the time I was behind a few feet of computers and steel. They started scrambling away like fleeing crabs.

  I heard screams and some kind of pop accompanied by a thermite reek. They meant to sink the BBW, not take her. Interesting. I sat there, bullets chewing through the commo suite and its cadre, thinking through my best option. Did I want to be dead or alive? Dead to everyone for a day or so made the best sense. Did I want the BBW floating or sunk? Pina and my own people, turncoat thugs that they were, were still ultimately my people. I should keep them alive. That meant grabbing some gear and sinking our attackers on their own vessel.

  While Eddie and I had played on the deck, I had reckoned our position using the stars. We were close to the Canadian shoreline—dangerously close. Perhaps fifteen klicks. I could swim it if I had to, but hypothermia was a real risk. I knew where the zodiac was and some other rafts like it. The sniper made that journey into the hull improbable. I needed a ship. I grabbed a shard of mirror blown apart from some expensive array and some night vision goggles that had been knocked close to me in the panic. A few seconds later, I had a good peek around the aft of the ship.

  Someone had brought three USMC Amtraks to bear on our portside screw and disgorged what looked like SEALs or maybe Delta Force. Great. They’d brought in the Americans. Don’t get me wrong. American Special Forces get a bad rap in the world community and unfairly so. They do the best job possible for the job they are given. But they are destroyers pure and simple. Nobody sends the SEALs to scout something. Search and destroy, search and rescue with optional destroy, or just plain destroy—Amerikanski Kommandos (as the Russians like to call them) can wipe out a ship of namby pamby play soldiers like the BBW in minutes. Because this is what makes America the sleeping giant. Terrorists are not military. In some sense, they are the antithesis of the military. Guys like Eddie can kill easily with a button, with a virus, with a bomb, or even a sniper rifle. But they cannot fight and they are not team players. Five minutes from now the Americans would be doing a sweep and kill of the ship before sinking her.

  That meant they were hunting someone specific. Someone started the classic duck walk of a two main kill team on the starboard side. I waited until I had both him and partner sighted. Then I killed them using my PSS. I had modified it with small plastic suppressor that limits the friction upon firing, so it was almost invisible on infrared and light amplification as well as silent. The two commandos dropped in place. The nearest one was perhaps two meters from my position.

  The sniper lit up a stanchion a few meters further amidships. Made sense. He saw his men drop and it was consistent with the angle of the attack. It also gave away his position. I took a breath, aimed and fired at his chest. In my light amplification I saw what looked like grenades on a bandolier and I aimed for those. The sniper and several commandos near him blew back in an impressive display of American firepower. I don’t know if he was carrying something experimental, or his grenade detonated an actual bomb on the Amtrak, but the whole vehicle blew apart, shaking the BBW, capsizing the central Amtrak and blowing the last one back into the water. Special operations men scrambled to save drowning comrades, many of whom were also on fire. Then Harv’s people returned fire and I saw the practiced violence that a pair of disciplined shooters can visit upon an enemy force. The disengaged Amtrak’s commander wisely put her full starboard and out of the line of fire. He also left two thirds of his team swimming in a kill zone. Team Karthago put them down with extreme prejudice.

  I grabbed some guns and some commo gear. Then I slinked out onto the deck below Harv’s line of sight and looted the dead commandos. On them was a printed picture of Ace. Right. This was war by proxy. They didn’t know Pina was here. Time to make my move. I looked at my beloved PSS and almost wished there was a better way. Harv would look after it, I was certain. Still, I loathed to leave it behind again. But no one would believe me dead unless it was among the ruins, it being a religious certainty that the gun and I are never apart when working. Then I realized I had just made a thirty meter snapshot, at night, under fire, on a rolling ship, against a heavily concealed professional with a PSS, notoriously inaccurate past ten meters. I was back. All the way back and bloodthirsty at that.

  I smeared the gun with the commando’s blood, scattered a bunch of my ammo on the deck, then tossed a grenade into my go bag (after removing some key gear into my pockets) and blew up Eddie’s command center. Using the fire and smoke as a cover, I scrambled down to the waterline and surveyed the damage. The women had left no one alive. Neither amphibious vehicle was seaworthy. I did see some zodiacs spilled out and floating behind the flotsam. Two of them listed with obvious leaks. On the starboard side, snap, snap, snaps of assault rifles rang out as the remaining commandos tried to stay on mission. I committed to a zodiac and dove into the freezing waters. At this latitude, I had three minutes before shock took me. I stayed under the water until I was on the furthermost side of the zodiac, then I hoisted myself onto the raft and started the engine. It came to life with a hum. Wow. They had used electric motors. It was utterly silent as I sped away from the battle.

  Once I was far enough away to make detection unlikely, I killed the engine and found some blankets. Then I took the phone I’d pickpocketed from one of the cadre during dinner and activated the Arnapkapfaaluk’s defenses. This is why they’d hit the commo suite first. Someone on the ship had ratted on the defensive structure. Eddie had slaved the guns to his team’s control, and with Eddie went ship defense. Until someone turned it on. That meant most or all of his team had been casualties. Never underestimate the SEALs. The Fast Forty system depressed to the water line and there were a withering series of shattering thuds, which sounded like firecrackers from where I floated. Then silence. At ten rounds a second, the DARDO is a very slow close in weapons system. It makes up for it by using explosive rounds. The Americans took fifteen or more at point blank range. There’d be nothing left of the Amtrak or its crew.

  I activated a few more programs on the phone, including a stealth protocol that made me invisible to the BBW’s net. Eddie liked to ensure he could hack his own comrades and, unless one of the cadre went looking for this specific phone in their sub-net, I was now a ghost in Pina’s machine. I flipped through the onboard security cameras until I got a proper count of the surviving crew. La Flambé, Harv, and one of the shooters were alive. The taller woman, I never got her name, lay prone, her body flaccid as only the dead could be. A small hole above her heart spoke to the SEALs accuracy under fire. Ace was alive, much of her crew injured. The Nords had made it through the night, although one had some gashes along his left side. It took some time to find Drogo. His body floated among the Americans near the aft. Wearing a commando uniform. They’d likely find him soon and unravel how they’d been sold out.

  It meant that the ship’s attack had been part of the wider business of establishing new management in The Web and not a direct move against Pina. Likely, whoever set up the assault would feel the BBW was sufficiently degraded as to be outside the fight and leave her alone. If Pina had any sense, she’d encourage that perception and bide her time. I was fairly certain Drogo had not known who Ace had taken aboard. Certainly it had not been transmitted in time to change this attack and I’d been on ship over sixteen hours. It followed logically that Pina and I were officially dead and out of the Great Game. Lovely.

  I set up some automatic feed instructions; arranged for the BBW to send me data packets on the super high frequency bands every fifteen minutes, compressed and encrypted. The phone would passively accept and hold the bundle. I rummaged and
found a rugged laptop, did some quick brute force password overrides, and was on the US Special Forces network within a few more minutes. I reengaged the motor, using the phone’s GPS and compass to set a course for a remote Canadian shoreline roughly fifty klicks from our location. I took stock. I had a few basic computer components, a working laptop, and a hacker’s phone with full cracking suite loaded. I had lots of guns, ammo and military grade body armor that fit, which was a lucky find. Some kind soul had packed rations, flares, and all that jazz. So this was likely a repurposed raft outfitted for something more generic like jungle survival.

  Under the blankets, I shivered as the dawn light started warming the air. In an hour, I’d gotten hot enough to sweat and started shedding blankets slowly. My wet clothes were as dangerous as a bullet if I got careless. It was early Autumn and the nip of winter had invaded Canada this last week. If it was 3 Celsius I’d be impressed. With wind chill, I was daring pneumonia to come calling. Even my little bugs can’t fight off everything. The one thing I’d not acquired, and could not find, were dry clothes. So I rotated the blankets, sucking the dampness out of me slowly and with a certain casual misery. It made the time go by. I kept her floating along at under fifteen knots, silent and barely visible but fast enough to be an unlikely random discovery. I could open her up to fifty knots if I needed to. I doubted she’d be quiet at that point and with only one man to weight her down, flipping was a serious threat.

  Many folks in my trade instinctively believe that superior firepower solves most anything. It’s been my experience that two things trump any amount of destructive capability: people skills and preparation. Making friends has to be the hardest thing possible in a world ruled by betrayal, paranoia, and tribal loyalties. The Syndicate handles everything trustworthy relationships would normally provide including prep, gear, support, intelligence, and safe houses. All things I could use. But some few of us have invested heavily in an entirely different way of managing affairs in The Web. To make an incredibly convoluted story short, I was once a sickeningly wealthy man with few vices and no lover. I had little upon which to spend my ill-gotten gains and Arkady wouldn’t have touched a cent of my blood money. I funneled some to him through several neutral parties. The man made a very good living working a fun job with great benefits and family friendly hours. That’s all I could give them without arousing suspicion. That left me a lot of excess cash.

  Some people invest in art, some toys and women (or men or sheep for that matter). Crazies like Hans and Cassandra fold every drop of lucre back into their eugenics project or space laser or underground compound. There’s some crazy stuff in this world, bunkers and space stations you’ve never heard of and hopefully never will. I once spent seven months with Siberian Kutzk people. Few have ever heard of them because, for the most part, they have survived entirely off the grid and are famously uncooperative with outsiders, especially their Russian conquerors.

  The Kutzk are a fascinating people. I’ve done a lot of clandestine research on them and suspect they provided us with the Sarmatians, Scyths, and a certain proto-Viking clan, the Sirgir, which proliferated into Ireland and Scandinavia. The Kutzk are entirely a hunting people and hold the Tungus, Evenks, and Sami in contempt. In their words, “The poor bastards have no Way.” For the Kutzk, The Way is all; it’s technology, religion, martial art, love poem, and survival manual, all rolled into one. And of course, you have to speak Kutzkan to understand the Way.

  I made the mistake of killing a mercenary called Black Seal and was promptly abducted from a maximum security facility by his clan. A life for a life, they wanted me to replace him since I’d killed him in a fair fight. Given the choice of that or slow torture, I went with it and learned The Way. I discovered a great deal about how vulnerable modern people really are and how reliant on our machines and comforts to preserve us. More than that, how fixed modern society has become, static and brittle. We have gender roles, we have genders, we have rules for everything, from sewer waste to electronic copyrighting to how to woo a lover to which way the paper towels hang in the house.

  The Kutzk laugh at those. If you want to be a man, be a man. It’s an activity, like bowling or swimming. Only few people are so obsessed as to be Bowlers or Swimmers. The same with the Hunters, as they call themselves. Women and men play whichever role they prefer with a few simple common sense ideas to guide them. They believe in nothing extraneous, nothing more than what is needed for any task, relationship, or place. So they extract the minimum needed from one another, themselves, the land and animals, the situation. They waste nothing and go to extraordinary lengths to perfect each simple skill they deem valuable.

  They also expect nothing of one another except what they’ve individually bargained for and paid in advance. Their entire economy is pay it forward. If one could call it an economy. They are without money and deem possessions limited to what you can carry and have made, taken or earned by yourself. They do not give gifts and fear those who offer them. And they have only one punishment for any crime: death. Long ago, it is said, the Hunters preferred exile but those lesser peoples populated the earth and brought disease, famine, deforestation, and ruin to the forests of Siberia. So now they dare not let a failed Hunter escape and pollute the world. Harsh and utterly effective. Infanticide is commonplace. Arguments end with one person dead and wars never start because very few clans feel strongly enough about any outside issue to risk lives to argue an idea.

  In Kutzkan, there are no words for soul, truth, or being alive. Instead they say, “The hunter does,” and infer from the action taken life, truth, decency, and so on. They judge one another entirely by behavior and feel words are meant like tools to hunt things. They get you what you want, they convey hunger and need, they also deceive prey and disable enemies. Words are like gifts to the Kutzk, dangerous things loaded with expectations.

  They also have mastered people skills and preparation. Every Spring, they begin anew their preparations for the long winter ahead. They seed the forests with hundreds of small bundles with tools, firemaking gear, components of hunting weapons, and hides for clothing. They put them in places other Kutzk will find and provide exactly and only what another Hunter would need to survive for a period of days if stranded, hurt, or cornered by predators, their main competitors being wolves, bears, and the rare tiger as well as Old Woman Winter. Like the Innuit, the Kutzk see the most dangerous forces in the universe as more often female than male. The Kutzk call these “Villages in a Bag,” which tells much about The Way. If you use one, you owe the clan who made it. In their long history, the few hunters who did not pay back double what they took have been found gutted like deer and left for the scavengers.

  For seven months, I became a living tool: a compass, a spear thrower and hammer, a map, a snare and fishing line. Instead of using my tools in place of my own expertise, the Kutzk gave me a piece of bone or a stick, a shaved rock or length of rope to transform me into the weapon or tool. To say it was instructive after years of complex special operations training would be trivializing the transformation that took place. I became human with the Kutzk, owning everything I made or took, and earning my place among them freely and fully. Then a group of Russian miners abducted a young woman foolish enough to go to a local town. She’d been curious and wanted to try candy. Pravda!

  The Kutzk do not read or write much; none do it well. They do not much understand how technology works other than having a keen sense of cause and effect. But they cannot finesse our machines. It took me minutes to locate her and realize the breadth of the predicament. There are few things that matter to the Hunters, certainly not possessions and in many cases, not even territory. They regularly cede turf to wolves and tigers with great respect. But their children are the whole of their wealth. Their entire life is in the future, in next season, in the next favor owed and paid. The miners were idiots, but well-connected idiots having holed up in some local oligarch’s compound with the girl.

  The Hunters wanted to storm the place and
take her back. But the Oligarch, having had prior problems with bandit and rivals, had put a series of ugly defenses in place including a walled complex with an outer fence separated by a genuine mine field and gun towers. He also ran a small plutonium smuggling business out of the place, which explained the soldiers guarding the compound. We could have gotten her back, at the cost of half the tribe. I went to the hetman, Tiger Hand, a ferocious creature we’d think of as a woman and asked permission to retrieve the girl myself. Tiger Hand listened then gave me a three hour head start.

  I met them at the edge of the forest two hours later with Steals Candy (the girl’s new name), a bag of heads, and some valuables that had meaning to the Kutzk, mostly knives, razor blades, rebar, and wire. They have little facility to make metal and prefer to acquire it. In fact, I delivered roughly ten men’s lives worth of metal and Tiger Hand canceled my debt on the spot.

  After that, I sold the plutonium and captive oligarch for a handy price, resold the intelligence on the plutonium buyers to a rogue American agency who wanted to build nukes, and then delivered the formal report on their activities along with a tracking signal to a NATO officer with ties to the Corsicans. That netted me quite a bit of money. More than I had use for at the time so I paid back the Kutzk in the best way possible. The money sits in an encrypted black blank trust fund and pays for a very special kind of delivery service. Every spring, helicopters drop bundles of metal, tool pieces, magnesium blocks for firemaking, salt for preserving, and satellite photos of the region with circles around where Russian populations touch their territory. Each bundle marked with my Kutzk name glyph: Knife That Does.

  After that adventure, I’d been regularly seeding the planet with my own version of Villages in a Bag and giving trusted associates the locations. Every vault has a GPS node activated when the seal is broken, a global grid of all opened and closed vaults can be accessed by most cell phones using a deep net address. I’d been paying it forward for a decade when it became necessary to retire and a large portion of my wealth has been sitting in various laundered trusts, building various levels of hunting villages for me and mine. From a simple buried bag with clothes and cash to a fully operable data center with encryption technology and satellite access, I’ve invested in a global infrastructure.