Weaponized

by David Wellington

  WEAPONIZED

  A NOVELLA

  BY DAVID WELLINGTON

  ST. MARTIN’S GRIFFIN

  NEW YORK

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title

  Weaponized

  Copyright

  For a while it looked like the robots were going to win our wars for us.

  I believed it. After what I saw in Syria, back in 2012, sure. I was embedded with a Stryker group tasked with locking down the Blue Zone there. We were rolling in a lead vehicle that was six kilometers outside Damascus when its brakes locked up. The driver looked as surprised as I was. A canned voice from the dashboard told us the vehicle had been halted automatically because an IED had been detected. I’ve been doing this long enough that those three little letters made my flesh crawl. Up ahead in the road an old man with a long white beard and a skullcap was driving a flock of overheated sheep across the dusty road, urging them on, out of the way of the hundred tons of olive-drab depleted-uranium armor bearing down on them. He had been carrying a plastic carrier bag, and he’d dropped it in the middle of the road, as if he was too distracted by the sheep to worry about his lunch.

  They still get you like that, sometimes. If you’re not paying attention.

  “Don’t worry, Ms. Flores. We’re all good.” The driver gave me the grin that soldiers always give to journalists, that practiced, cockeyed smile they think is going to get them five seconds on the evening news.

  “What do you do now?” I asked the driver. “Call in a sweeper team?” I sighed, having been through this routine before. It could be an hour before the IED was disabled and the road cleared for travel again, and I had a deadline to meet.

  “Naw,” he said, lacing his fingers behind his head. He was a kid, like all the soldiers I met that summer, barely out of high school. He had bad acne on his cheeks, and his first tattoo, on the back of his hand, was still bright enough to look like a cartoon. “The Silverhawk’ll get it.”

  The Silverhawk Unmanned Aerial-Weapon Platform was a sort of mini-zeppelin with solar-panel wings and an MTHEL slung under its gondola. It was designed to operate above the cloud layer, loitering for months at a time, soaking up sunlight and not doing much of anything. When an alarm went off in some distant monitoring station, the Silverhawk slowly came to life, picking out its target some three hundred meters below using satellite imagery to find traces of plastic explosive in the plastic bag we were all watching so intently. I never saw the Silverhawk, nor the officer who confirmed the strike, nor even the pencil-thin beam of the MTHEL, a deuterium fluoride laser weapon that heated up the plastic bag to a couple of thousand degrees for a split second—long enough to make the IED inside go pop. There was a fizzing noise I could hear through the Stryker’s up-armored windows, and then a bright plume of smoke jumped into the air.

  “Jesus,” I said. “That’s it? That was so easy.”

  “Hold on,” the driver told me. “Silverhawk’s a two-shot platform.” He nodded at the old shepherd, who was staring at us with a look of dawning realization. The old man tried to run. He made it maybe a dozen meters before his head burst open in a cloud of superheated blood. I tried not to react. I’d seen people die before, after all.

  Eventually the suddenly unsupervised sheep started heading one by one for a line of distant hills.

  “Our CO tells us,” the driver let me know, “if we could get about a hundred and twenty of ’em airborne over Damascus, we could have another Green Zone here before the year’s out. Then we can get rotated out, go home.” Building on the success of the famous Predator drone, the Pentagon had staked the future of warfare on the robots, and for good reason. They were inhumanly good at their job. They didn’t have to be fed or killed, and their operators could run them from safe observation bases half a world away. They could be sent into places no human being should ever have to go. If they did get killed, nobody shed a tear. My driver loved them. “This is good for everybody, right? Except you, maybe. No more body bags for you to take pictures of.”

  But of course there was another market adjustment that year. A bad one. The robots that were supposed to win our wars were too expensive. Only three Silverhawk UAWPs were built before the project ran out of money.

  We didn’t come close to running out of wars we needed to fight. The Damascus Blue Zone started turning red again, even though back-home approval ratings were dropping and the protests were getting bigger every time a plane full of human remains came back from the Middle East. So another way had to be found. A cheaper way—and when it comes to killing people, there’s always a cheaper way.

  As long as you have a strong-enough stomach.

  The first time I saw the new breed of soldiers, I thought they were engineers in hazmat suits. They were at the far side of a Forward Operating Base in backcountry Muzhikistan, far enough away I didn’t notice anything strange about their bright yellow outfits. They were off-loading a cargo helicopter, stacking crates in a warehouse and then going back for more. They moved with almost painful slowness and methodical care, which I assumed meant that the cargo was dangerous or unstable.

  It was the kind of thing I would file away for later, something to build a hunch on. If there was a story there, though, I figured it could wait. I was done with my time at that particular FOB. I’d already worked up the story I’d come for: The field medical kits issued to our soldiers in Muzhikistan were full of expired medicines. It was the kind of thing that was happening with depressing regularity in 2019, when the new Green Party Congress was slashing every part of the defense budget they could get their hands on. I was sitting at an outdoor officers’ mess, waiting for one last interview with the colonel who had approved shipping out the substandard kits. I was ready to file, but I figured I’d give him one last chance to rebut before I fired my copy off to New York. After all, as soon as this came out, it was going to be his head on the chopping block.

  He was twenty minutes late. I was beginning to think I’d been stood up. I’d long since finished off my last bottle of purified water, and I was getting overheated, even in the shade of a picnic umbrella. I could have spent the time tightening up my copy, but instead my eyes kept drifting back to the men dressed all in yellow over by the helipads. They moved so strangely, at first I’d thought they were just being careful with their cargo, but it wasn’t just that. There was a certain sameness to their movements. Each of them bent exactly so from the knees before they lifted a crate, and they all lifted at exactly the same moment, as if they’d been choreographed. As if they weren’t individual people at all, but some kind of machine—

  “Ms. Flores. I apologize but I was held up in a briefing.” The colonel loomed over me, blocking out some of the central Asian sun. I blinked a couple of times and smiled up at him. “I’m afraid I’ll need to make this quick.”

  “No problem,” I said. “I just wanted to know if you had anything else to say.”

  He grunted. “Anything more to damn myself with, you mean.” He knew about my story, of course. You can’t keep anything secret for long in an environment as prone to gossip and boredom as a military base. He knew I had the goods on him. He was looking at a court-martial if not a full congressional hearing. As soon as my story went in, his career was over. He’d be lucky if he avoided jail time. “I’m not sure why you’ve decided to destroy me,” he said, chewing on each word, “when everything I’ve done was well in line with the orders I received from—”

  There was a rattling crash from over by the helipads. I darted my head around to see what had happened. The yellow-suited men there were all frozen, standing around one of the crates that had fallen on the tarmac and broken open. The men in yellow didn’t seem to know what to do next. They just stood in place, not even looking at the mess.r />
  Then I had a glimpse of what was inside the crate.

  “Ms. Flores, please, I must insist you stay back,” the colonel shouted at me.

  Too late. I was halfway across the parade ground already. I was trying to fasten my video camera to the epaulet on my left shoulder at the same time as I pressed my bone-conduction microphone to the bottom of my chin. He came up fast behind me and grabbed my arm, but I yanked it free again.

  “This is a restricted area, Ms. Flores.”

  I didn’t care.

  A human arm had slid out of the cracked-open side of the fallen crate. An arm wrapped in bright yellow plastic, exactly the same shade as the hazmat suits the handlers wore. As I took another step closer, the crate sagged and one end popped open, and three bodies in yellow suits slid out onto the blazing concrete of the helipad.

  The handlers, the ones standing around, didn’t look surprised to learn they’d been carrying coffins. They didn’t make any move to put the bodies back in the crate, either.

  I reached up to my shoulder to switch on the camera. Before I could reach it the colonel ripped it off my shirt and smashed it on the ground.

  “Sorry. Vital national-security interests at stake.”

  I gave him my best hard-boiled journalist stare, but it didn’t faze him one bit.

  “Jesus, get back. Get these fuckers back, will you?” someone called.

  Turning again toward the scene of the accident, I saw a soldier in sergeant’s stripes pushing his way through the crowd of yellow suits. He wasn’t wearing so much as a gas mask. In his hands he was carrying what looked like the controller for a very elaborate video-game console. He tapped out a simple command on the buttons and stared at the yellow suits around him.

  Three of them stepped forward and grabbed the bodies under their shoulders. They dragged them fully out of the crate and laid them out on the concrete in a row. The sergeant tapped some more buttons, and the yellow suits stepped back and away.

  Then the bodies started to twitch. A hand lifted here. A leg kicked out there. One by one they sat up, slowly, stiffly. One by one they got carefully up on their feet.

  Then the three of them—three men who I had been certain were just corpses a minute before—bent and picked up the pieces of the crate they’d been shipped in. Without a word or any kind of spoken order, they carried the pieces into the warehouse, then went back to the helicopter to get another, unbroken crate.

  The sergeant headed back into the warehouse as if nothing strange had happened at all. The yellow suits went back to work without a word.

  It was about that time I really took a hard look at those hazmat suits, and realized they weren’t what I thought. For one thing there were no hoses sticking out of the hoods, no air supplies hanging off of belts, no Velcro flaps up the back for easy access. Most startlingly, there were no faceplates. The yellow suits covered the workers from head to foot, every inch of them, without a seam. The yellow plastic covered their faces without a break. Not even any eyeholes. There was no way the people inside the suits could see out. No way they could see what they were doing.

  I turned to look at the colonel.

  “You going to tell me what I just saw?” I asked.

  The army trains its officers very well to keep their secrets.

  But then again, I was trained to figure them out anyway.

  “Come on,” I said. “You know I’ll find out eventually.” We had retired to the icy darkness of his office, a modular unit built into a shipping container. It had a table that folded down from one wall, a bunch of folding chairs, and a very noisy air-conditioning unit that I wanted to sit on all day. “My agency will file a Freedom of Information Act suit. My editor will call the senator he plays golf with every Saturday. If none of that works, I’ll just flood the blogs with rumors until every UFO nut and survivalist from Oklahoma to Ohio demands to know what’s going on.”

  The colonel poured himself a glass of mineral water that fizzed noisily, and then he sipped at it. He didn’t offer me a drink.

  “I don’t know what you think you saw, Ms. Flores,” he told me. “That was just a very minor accident during the off-loading of a helicopter. No one was hurt, and no equipment was damaged. That hardly seems like the kind of thing you would bother putting your byline over. What could you possibly want with this?”

  I folded my arms across my chest. “Someone,” I said, “is going to get this story. It might as well be me. You’ve got some kind of secret weapon here. Something brand new. I want a full explanation. You go ahead and clear it with the Pentagon, whatever you need to do. But I want facts, I want figures and names and dates. And if those . . . those things are going out in the field, I want to go with them. I want to see what you’re doing with them. I don’t believe for a second that you’ve invented some new kind of human-shaped robot just to unload cargo.”

  “I suppose you’re right,” he admitted finally, sitting back in his chair. “Someone will get to tell this story. Eventually. But it won’t be you.”

  “Uh-huh.” I knew what that meant.

  And then I knew what it was going to take to change his mind.

  “The story I’ve been working on,” I said, “the one I spent six weeks here for—it’s going to go badly for certain people when it gets out. I can’t just bury it, of course: I have my journalist ethics to consider.”

  He gave me a chilly smile. There was no doubt in my mind what he thought my professional sensibilities were worth.

  “But it doesn’t have to go out right away. I could call my editor, tell him that some of my facts didn’t line up. That I needed more time to get them straight.”

  The smile on his face was frozen solid.

  “He’d be willing to wait a while. Maybe even thirty days. Which would give certain people a little more time to cover their asses.”

  The smile cracked. You didn’t get to his rank in the army without knowing how to make decisions in a hurry, and he didn’t waste time arguing with me. He knew I had him over a barrel. “I’m personally taking out a detail to run counterinsurgency operations tomorrow. You can go with us. Under certain conditions.”

  “Like?”

  “No cameras.”

  “You already destroyed mine.”

  He sneered at my ruse. “I mean no cameras at all. Not even the one in your cell phone. I won’t interfere with what you write. But there will be no pictures of what you see. Furthermore, I’ll accompany you at all times. If I decide that your . . . safety is in jeopardy at any time, I’ll put you on the first transport back to base.”

  “You expect me to agree to this? What’s to keep you from sending me back as soon as I start finding out something interesting?”

  “The fact that no matter what you see or don’t see, you’ll be getting access to the biggest story of your career,” he said. I noticed for the first time that his eyes were a deep, glacial blue. “Just the briefing I give you before we leave will probably net you a Pulitzer.”

  I laughed. “Come on. Just because you’re field-testing a new kind of robot—”

  “Those aren’t robots, Ms. Flores. Those are American citizens. Or rather, they were. Before they died.”

  It was eighty degrees out when I woke up the next morning, just before dawn. It would creep over a hundred by lunchtime. I dressed, packed a few things, and slipped down to the motor pool, where I found the colonel waiting for me. He had an MP frisk me for illicit cameras, but I was clean. I had only brought along a couple bottles of water, a notebook, a pen, and a tube of sunblock. I wasn’t about to blow this scoop by failing to meet his conditions.

  Once he was sure I was properly defanged, he started loading up a troop transport—an unarmored truck with an open flatbed, not even a canopy to protect the soldiers onboard from the sun.

  They didn’t need that kind of protection. They didn’t feel the heat, I knew now. They didn’t feel anything.

  The yellow suits they wore had their own acronym, of course, like everything the
army owns—IPWs, Insect-Proof Wrappers. They were made of very tough Mylar and designed to keep bugs from getting at the troops inside. The army couldn’t stop their animated corpses from rotting away, but they could slow the process down a little. The colonel estimated that the average member of his new battalion would last six months before its performance was degraded by decomposition.

  The wrappers served another purpose, of course, which was to keep me—and the Muzhiki population—from seeing what our new soldiers looked like.

  The new soldiers were dead. I still had a hard time accepting it, but the colonel wasn’t just pulling my leg. They were dead bodies, most of them the bodies of soldiers who died in other conflicts. The army had approached their families, very quietly, and gotten their permission to use the bodies for any purpose required. The families, in exchange, got enough money to send the decedent’s children to community college, or maybe enough for a down payment on a house, if they could afford the mortgage. They had not been told what the bodies would be used for but had signed waivers saying they didn’t require further information.

  Considering how bad the economy was back home, I didn’t imagine they had a lot of trouble getting those waivers.

  The army picked up the bodies in unmarked trucks and took them to a special facility in Baghdad. Within a week they were up and moving about again, new soldiers for a new era of warfare.

  “The current nomenclature for them is PMCs. As in PostMortem Combatants,” the colonel told me.

  “So they’re . . . undead,” I said, staring into the back of the truck. Fifty blank yellow faces looked back at me. “Zombies.”

  The colonel winced at the word. “They’re not going to eat your brains, if that’s what you mean. They don’t eat. They don’t think or feel any pain. Their brains are completely shut down. We control them by sequential electrical stimulation of nerve fibers.”

  In high school biology class I’d seen that at work. The teacher had a pair of severed frog’s legs attached to a dry-cell battery. When she flipped a switch, the legs kicked. This was the same principle. Just a little more advanced.