Prisoners of War

by Rick Partlow

  “We all are, but it has been a while.” The man’s face brightened. “We will get to pilot mechs again. I always enjoyed fighting in a mech.”

  “Well, good news then, you will get your chance.” He nodded back toward the rally point he’d designated for the recon, a stand of trees in Lafayette Square. “Come on, we need to get out of here before we’re detected. And when we come back, it will be with enough force to take down this treacherous dog for good.”

  9

  “Well, this is just fucking impossible,” James Fuller murmured.

  “Problem with the connection to the DoD network?” Roach asked, hearing his grumble from where she worked on her Hellfire, performing the weekly maintenance on the mech. They might be desperate and hopeless, but PCMS wouldn’t wait for the end of the world.

  Fuller was sprawled out in an appropriated office chair, one leg propped on the folding table where they’d set up the data terminal. Cables ran from the mainframe over to a window they’d propped open, with a satellite uplink antenna clamped to the window sill.

  “It can get spotty when the weather’s bad,” she added, then scowled at the scattered raindrops on the floor under the open window. “And it’s usually bad here.”

  “No, it’s working fine,” Fuller assured her. “The problem is what it’s telling me.”

  Roach set down the wire brush she’d been working into the mech’s knee joint and stepped over behind him.

  “You still trying to figure out who our John Doe is?” she asked him. “I thought you had given up.”

  “I’ll give up when I’m dead, missy,” he said with a disdainful sniff. “I started running through some random history files, trying to jog my memory.” He tilted his head in a self-deprecating motion. “Nowadays, it’s more like a slow walk.”

  “Any luck?”

  “Not at first. I figured he was no older than fifty, from his looks, so I went back thirty years, just to be safe. Figured maybe I came across the man early in my career, when he was younger. But nothing. Then I got bored…”

  “You get bored, I got some work you could do,” she offered, cocking an eyebrow at the older man.

  He smirked at her with the sort of look only an old soldier could get away with.

  “I got bored,” he went on, emphasizing the words as he repeated them, “so I went back a little longer. Fifty years, before the war, before the terrorist attacks, before the pullout from the east coast, right to the beginning.”

  “And…” she prompted.

  “That’s the part that’s fucking impossible. I found him, all right.”

  He gestured at the screen and she moved around behind him to look. It was the same man, though if he’d told her it was his son or his younger brother, she would have believed it. He had the same face, but it was slightly plumper, slightly softer, the hair long and loose and black instead of slicked back and greying. Rather than a tailored suit, he wore stained work coveralls and a tool belt and other than the looks it could have been a totally different person. The eyes, especially, struck her as kinder, more full of life than the man in the video.

  “Yeah, I guess. Who the hell is he?”

  Fuller scowled at her.

  “You told me your daddy was a Marine and you drive a mech for a living, and you don’t know who this is, girl?”

  He put a finger on the screen and scrolled down to the caption, and her eyes widened as she read it.

  “That’s fucking impossible,” she echoed his words with more gusto and conviction.

  “It is, but the pictures don’t lie. I saw this man in the history books when I was learning how to pilot one of these big metal suits. This here gentleman is Robert C. Franklin, the inventor of the Hellfire mech system. And may he rest in peace,” Fuller added, hand raised to the heavens, “because the poor motherfucker was killed in an attack on a military base in Nevada fifty-one years ago.”

  He grinned crookedly, with the sort of humor only a veteran of decades of war could muster in the face of mind-twisting reality.

  “You wanted to know who your enemy is, missy. Well, this is him. We’re fighting a ghost.”

  “Talk to me, Kovalev,” Robert Franklin ordered, pushing through the door into what had become the computer room.

  It had once been the White House kitchens, but the stoves had been looted decades ago. Victor Kovalev had been bent over a workstation, comparing the readout on his tablet to a screen built into the case of the mainframe. The frail, balding little man straightened at Franklin’s approach, sucking in a startled breath.

  “I am not sure we have what we need,” Dr. Kovalev admitted, fingers tapping compulsively on the display of his tablet.

  “Elaborate.”

  Kovalev’s jaw worked and he licked his lips, showing fear of a reputation Franklin wasn’t certain he’d earned, but had certainly cultivated. Franklin was tired and he felt like leaning against the bank of quantum computers, but weariness was weakness, and he couldn’t afford to show either in front of his subordinates. Too many of them would like as not kill him if they thought he might fail them.

  “The DNA extraction has gone perfectly,” Kovalev qualified his statement. “It’s not that. It’s the memory transfer.”

  Franklin allowed himself a sigh. The memory transfer equipment had always been the most problematic part of the duplication process, the technology nowhere near as mature as the biological end of the equation.

  “Are we going to have to do another deep scan?” he asked, the weariness starting to drag at his shoulders. The scans took hours, and required not just sedatives but a deep hypnosis state, absolute quiet and a soundproof isolation tank. It was a huge pain in the ass.

  “I’m not sure it would help,” Kovalev told him. “The problem isn’t the quality of the scans, it’s the content.”

  Weariness was chased away by a twisting in his gut, a cold pit opening up as his worst fears began to coalesce in reality.

  “I am loath to repeat myself, Dr. Kovalev.”

  “We’ve run every possible memory recombination,” the man said, his voice tripping over itself in its haste, “and the probability is upwards of seventy percent the matrix will not result in an optimal outcome.”

  “My specialty is mechanical engineering, Doctor. Be unambiguous.”

  “The dupes will not be loyal to you. At least there’s a very good chance of it. You need to adjust the operational….” Kovalev stopped himself and chewed his lip, visibly forcing himself to dumb the explanation down. “You have to make sure the man Stout has more positive, loyal feelings about you and your cause. I would suggest you spend more time with him, try to convince him of the rightness of your position, your cause. Maybe…” He trailed off, as if he were screwing up his courage to say the words. “Maybe that you are the same man he remembers.”

  His first instinct was to bite the doctor’s head off and warn him to mind his own damned business, but he clamped down on it. You wanted subordinates who weren’t afraid to tell you ideas they thought might piss you off. And the fact was, the man was probably right.

  “I have spent my efforts trying to break down his loyalty to the idea of the United States,” he conceded. “I may have counted too heavily on the Prime’s memories of me being included in his programming. There may not have been enough left.”

  “How will you do it, sir?” Kovalev seemed emboldened by the fact Franklin hadn’t slapped him down, but there was that image to maintain.

  “Just get things ready to re-scan, doctor,” he instructed with frosty disdain. “Leave the rest to me.”

  The hospital might be a cell in the middle of the old White House, but there was one universal truth neither time nor place could alter: hospital food sucked. He shoveled the instant mashed potatoes and cardboard meatloaf down mechanically, knowing he needed the calories, but the food was just a delivery vehicle for salt and ketchup. At least it was hot. Well, warm at least.

  Which was more than he could say for the orderly who’d deli
vered it. The man was more of a guard than a nurse, and he was big enough and mean-looking enough that Nate hadn’t even thought about trying to overpower him and escape. Besides, he’d been hungry. He mopped up the last of the potatoes with a roll the consistency of chalk and sat back, staring at the ceiling.

  He’d been in the new room for two days, as near as he could figure, and only been allowed out of the bed once to use the facilities. Other than that, it had been a bedpan. The handcuffs were beginning to chafe at his risk, but at least his leg didn’t hurt as badly anymore. He’d slept. He wasn’t sure for how long, but he knew he’d slept.

  He didn’t look up when the door opened, expecting the big, ugly orderly again to take away his tray, but then he smelled the perfume. It was her. She seemed different somehow, her hair worn looser, softer, her clothes more casual, a flannel shirt with the sleeves rolled up, tied at the waste over blue jeans. Her makeup was muted, natural, less intimidating. He wondered if it was intentional, then realized who he was talking about. Of course it was intentional.

  “Good evening, Captain Stout,” she said, pushing the door shut behind her and pulling the tray away from his bed.

  “Hello again,” he said, nodding. “I’m afraid I didn’t get your name the last time we met.”

  “Svetlana,” she supplied. “Svetlana Grigoryeva.”

  “That’s a pretty name,” Nate told her. “Lyrical even.” He chuckled. “Russians always have the best names. Nothing boring like English. John Smith, Steve Jones. Nate Stout.” He cocked his head at her curiously. “To what do I owe the pleasure of your company, Ms. Grigoryeva? More invasive surgery in my future?”

  “No.” She shook her head, reaching out a hand to touch his leg through the covers, gently, carefully. “Does it still hurt?”

  “Not as bad.” Her fingers felt warm even through the thin blankets, felt good, and that made him uncomfortable. “I’ve had worse.”

  That was a lie. He’d never had a major injury, though wear and tear was taking its toll on his knees and back. But it had sounded tough.

  “Maybe not this version of you,” she said, seeing through his pretense. “But yes, the many Nathan Stouts who have lived and died have been through much worse. The Prime, as you call him, lost everything. His wife, his daughter, his health, his career…and finally, his life.”

  “You seem to know more about him than I do.” He hadn’t meant for the bitterness to creep into his voice, but there it was, naked and visible.

  “I do, thanks to Robert. He knows you, all the versions of you.” She reached into her shirt pocket and pulled out a small flash drive, tossing it to him. He tried to catch it with his right hand, but his wrist came up short against the handcuff and it landed in his lap. He picked it up with his left hand and frowned at her in confusion.

  She unfolded a tablet and handed it over to him.

  “It’s not connected to any external network,” she warned him. “But it’ll read that card.”

  He inserted the drive into a slot on the side of the tablet and the screen popped to life. It was a military personnel file, straight from the Department of Defense. Stolen, of course, but old enough for that to not be too much of a shock. Very old. Fifty years.

  It was him. Nathan Stout. His Prime, rather. It painted a picture, a portrait of Dorian Gray, aging in front of him while he stayed relatively young. Parts of the story were familiar, retained in his fragmented memories in bits and bites of training and combat, the rest not so much.

  Nathan Everett Stout, born September 1 to Charles and Gloria Stout in Meridian, Mississippi. He had vague flashes of heat, humidity and kudzu, but nothing concrete. His parents’ photos seemed familiar, bringing memories of proud tears at his graduation from college, from flight school, but nothing personal, nothing from his childhood. One sister, Catherine. In the picture, she was in her teens and there was nothing more recent. He read through the family history and found out she’d died in one of the earliest nuclear terror attacks. His parents had passed when they were both in their seventies, of natural causes. It seemed young to him, but maybe the increasing background radiation and pollution had been responsible.

  Nate had flown Comanches for three years before being recruited to the Hellfire testbed program. Somewhere in those three years, he’d met Camilla Peters and they’d been married at Ft. Campbell, Kentucky before she moved with him out to Nevada for the initial tests of the new mech systems. It was there he’d met Robert Franklin, there they had found out together just how dangerous the isotope power plants were. He’d been a patriot, committed to his country, to the Army, and to the Hellfire program. He’d kept going despite the risks.

  It had cost him. First, his wife. The divorce had been finalized while Stout was right in the middle of the testing and she’d moved back to Kentucky with their daughter, Victoria. He had no memory of her whatsoever. Her picture, as a toddler in her mother’s arms, moved no emotions in his heart, no recollections in his head. She’d been erased, not just from his memory but from history. She’d been born, it turned out, with a genetic defect that had manifested itself as a heart valve abnormality. Camilla had blamed it on his exposure to radiation and never forgiven him. Victoria had died at age eight, back in Kentucky, of heart failure. There was no record of what had become of Camilla.

  He felt a deep sadness, not from the loss of a daughter he didn’t remember or even of a marriage he barely recalled, but of a life he hadn’t had the chance to lead. As depressing as the Prime’s file was, somehow not being allowed to remember it was more devastating.

  And after, there were more memories he’d been allowed to retain, memories of training, of tearing down the machines over and over, of flying over the desert with a sense of freedom he’d never experienced even in helicopters. And of combat, his first in a mech, leading a squadron out against an incursion of Russian armor up through Texas. He remembered it clearly, as if the images and sounds and feelings were jumping off the screen in streaming clips of video and dry text. The stuttering of the chain gun, the jolt of missiles separating from their launchers, the shouted commands and status reports over the radio. The first feelings of the machine being an extension of his body, of the godlike power it imbued.

  And then, the inevitable. Pancreatic cancer, inoperable. But one last chance to serve, one he took to at the urging of Robert Franklin. Donating his genes and his memories to Project Artemis for the creation of a new generation of mech pilots must have seemed like a way to keep fighting, keep serving. He’d lived another two months after the donation, but he hadn’t waited for the cancer to claim him. He’d committed suicide out in the Nevada desert, and while Nate didn’t expect to remember that, he was shocked he had no recollection at all of the Artemis Project, of cancer, of the decision to allow himself to be genetically duplicated.

  Shocked and deeply, deeply angry. Not simply at the DoD research scientists who’d selected his memories but at the Prime himself. He’d been the one to condemn him and a line of dupes before him to short and brutal lives, with no choice in their own fate. It was strange. He had the man’s DNA, some of his memories. He would have expected to agree with his decisions or at least to understand them, yet he didn’t.

  “Why did you give me this?” he asked Svetlana, handing back the tablet. He still felt angry, though he tried not to take it out on her. “Did he tell you to? Does he think this will make me turn?”

  “He was against it.” She made the tablet disappear into jeans so tight he hadn’t thought there’d be room for it in the pockets. “He thought it would be too painful.” She shrugged. “I thought you deserved to know the truth.”

  “Why?” Nate repeated. “Why would you care what I deserve?”

  “Because you’re like him,” she explained with what seemed like very deliberate care, as if she’d thought about the question and how she might answer for some time. “You’re like Robert, and yet you’re not. He chose his fate, chose to become what he is to avoid the certainty of death, partly, but
also to keep from giving those who killed him what they wanted, to be rid of him. But you were handed your lot in life, given little choice on how you would spend it.”

  She touched him again, this time on his arm, the one handcuffed to the railing, on bare skin. Her fingers seemed blazing hot against his flesh and Nate’s breath quickened against his will.

  “Yet you stepped into your role as a soldier, continued the fight for your homeland as best you could, never ceasing to believe in your cause. Robert sees the existence of nation-states as part of what is wrong with this world, but you continue to fight for yours, despite what they’ve done to you. Part of me, the part that has grown cynical toward my own country, toward our motivation for being in this country, wants to think you a fool, wants to feel superior. But I can’t make myself believe that. So, I wonder how you can still have faith, how you can be so sure you’re doing the right thing.”

  “I’m not sure of anything,” he admitted. His eyes burned from the light and he squeezed them shut, letting his head lay back again. “I’ve been living the last seven years on autopilot, flying a thousand miles an hour because I was afraid to waste a day, bouncing from one mission to another and thinking I was shirking when I took a day off to go to town. Maybe I just didn’t want too much time to think.”

  “If you could go back,” she asked him, “would you do anything differently?”

  He opened his eyes and looked into hers, ice blue and yet not so ice cold any more. Did she mean it? Was she honestly interested or was this just more mind games? And did it matter either way?

  “I don’t know there’s anything else I could have done. I wasn’t given any good choices. I guess the only thing I would change is never hiring Patty. Maybe then Dix wouldn’t have been killed.”