Authors: Christopher McKitterick
Jonathan Sombrio sucks in a damp breath and stares ahead through a tumble of masonry and wreckage of vehicles. Water runs off what remains of the sidewalks, into what had once been charming iron gratings, carrying with it the city’s flotsam. Bits of cloth and product wrappers clot in the rusty metal, shining wet and grey by the diffused light of day. Jonathan trips a few times as the internal wave warps his vision; he feels as if he’s a dolphin leaping through the border between ocean and sky, only to crash back down into an ocean of human filth, all the time wishing he could just stay under a little longer, a little longer yet, forever. Soon enough.
He shivers, but isn’t sure whether it’s the weather or something insubstantial—something more dangerous. “Just not too soon,” he says.
My meat’s gotta breathe a little longer
.
A basso rumble shudders loose sheets of plastic from a walled up four-story storefront beside him. Jonathan grins at the thought that it might be another of NKK’s missiles and not just natural thunder. He feels no fear, yet every molecule of his being trembles with a coil of emotion, love and betrayal, freedom and hate, giddy excitement and terror.
The aircar hums down out of the deluge, distracting Jonathan from the inside of his blurry head. “Blackjack, Lucas, get ready for a visitor.”
Hardman Nadir watched through his whirlyjet’s forward pov camera as his army closed in on EarthCo Feedcontrol Central. Aircraft of all types swarmed through the sky and settled on the surrounding plowed fields like stormclouds heavy with rain. He sensed the latent energy, the chain-reaction about to go off, within the feed silence. Adrenaline dumped into his veins. None of his soldiers commed one another, except in brief tactical bursts.
Within their noose, hundreds of acres glistened from a recent rain—but not like the fields he knew around Wolf Point, rather, in the hues of wet metal. Never trained in technical disciplines, Nadir had no idea what the shimmering plates did that matted the ground as far as the pov let him look. Triangular structures the size of grain elevators rose from the metal sea; spiky antennae sparkled with their fresh coat of rain, white domes, silent rectangles that could have been office buildings or towers hiding arsenals of rockets. . . .
Hundreds of robotic vehicles rolled or hovered from place to place on the electronic blanket, repairing damage or upgrading the equipment.
Nadir couldn’t see a single human being, not even a window. He wondered if this place was as abandoned as the Pentagon—
What will I do then?
The fury within him couldn’t be contained much longer. He studied the corners of his splice: faithful Paolo to his right, the Sotoi Guntai Commander and all he represented two men to his left. They seemed untroubled. The reek of old sweat filled the air.
At the rear of his mind, subdued, Nadir’s audio program transformed the jet’s muffled roar into the sustained drone of a bagpipe. He closed his eyes and saw only the splice rushing at him, looming larger and spiked steel, glistening cables lashing in the wind.
At last he recognized something. Auto-cannon, megawatt laser, R-type. He’d learned how to run those in feedtraining, which basically consisted of making sure the system’s AI stayed within operating boundaries. Watch a readout, let the computer knock out three armored targets per second. Nadir sucked a deep breath and held it.
By the time his craft had flown to Feedcontrol’s outer perimeter—marked on ground by fences and pits, in the air by floating spheres that wove an electromag dome around the place like a spider’s web—he had counted 15 auto-cannon cupolas. He ordered the pilot to swing around to avoid the trip-lines.
“
All air units,” he 3-verded across the allband, “set down outside the perimeter and wait for infantry units to unship.”
He opened a line to his net tech. “Tilden, find out if this place is feeding us.” She popped into view only to nod; her eyes gleamed with excitement.
He’d watched that same expression flash before him countless times in the past twenty hours: Soldier after soldier had revealed a mounting enthusiasm—the men were going nuts with the desire to kill, to fuck with those who’d fucked them over, and the only opportunity they’d had was in Tripoli and a handful of times off America’s East Coast.
Outside, surrounding the rolling hills of metal, his army gathered. Once upon a time, armies needed days or even months to cross an ocean and assemble like this; now they rocketed to the Moon, bashed Farbase, and built a lunar outpost in the same amount of time.
“
Boss,” Tilden said, out of breath, “we’re completely black. EarthCo Airborne 7 even tripped a sensor, but it didn’t transmit.” Her eyes sparkled. “What kind of crypto shit are you running?” Hurriedly, she added, “Sir?”
Nadir smiled to hide how he felt.
He could come up with only three answers: Either Herrschaft was using Nadir’s army in some kind of game; War Command had instigated a coup and was using them as shock troops; or ECoNet had become conscious and was using them to kill off the human parasites seething across its face.
His fist slammed down against the armrest of his seat. He cut camera feed and the splice snapped shut. The interior of the craft—his physical surroundings—fell into place. Six men, the Sotoi Guntai Commander, Paolo. The Commander finally turned his gaze to Nadir, but the black eyes were unreadable. The audio program became dynamic for a while as the whirlyjet landed and the engine whined down.
One by one, infantry units commed to let Nadir know their heavy airships had landed and they had disembarked. Within five minutes, most of the army was in place.
Nadir glanced at the Commander; his blue-uniformed counterpart nodded. Nadir opened the allband and began barking orders. Two Sotoi Guntai leaped across the legs of their comrades and threw open the whirlyjet’s door.
Paolo tightened his fist and face and said, “Live today, subbs, for today we may die.” A rictus grin crossed the young man’s face.
Nadir smiled back, then dashed out of the aircraft with the others. Once everyone disembarked, the jets whined back up the scale and the craft alighted to join the others circling their objective. The rancid odor of poorly burned methane burned Nadir’s nasal passages, so he inhaled deeper. At his command, the EarthCo Warriors of his old command pulled up near him in their rickety groundcars. Paolo found their car and ordered it to them, but Nadir shook his head; he wanted to go on foot.
The whole world seemed to shudder and hum deep in Nadir’s psyche as he climbed aboard the plastic car, staring up at Feedcontrol Central—now, from ground-level, standing before him like Oz, intricate and impregnable. Had he come all this way just to destroy his men and himself?
Shut up
, he thought.
No thoughts
. He cranked up the volume of the audio-enhancement program so it picked out sounds as small as boots plashing through mud.
“
Move out,” he said. They knew what to do.
The segment of the noose Nadir could see tightened. He walked at the forefront. His heart pounded in his throat while the bootfalls of his impromptu army created a cacophony of music, enough to drown his doubts. No one doubted him, least of all Paolo, who still wore that grin. Nadir began to feel like his old self, confident in the surety of life’s transience and determined to do his bit for EarthCo and humanity.
And then he watched his boot tip light as he stepped on a yellow laser beam. His head shot up and his heartbeat increased so much he thought it would burst in his chest. But the big R-types didn’t swivel toward him on their massive mushroom-shaped mounts. Without breaking step, he marched on. Soon his boots began to clack against a paved walkway. A glance to both sides showed him hundreds of cars, dozens of light armor pieces, thousands of men trooping past pillars and towers, beneath crisscrossing gangways and dangling elevators. Bringing up the rear of the army’s tightening ring were the pyrotechs, placing packets on the gun turrets and anything else that looked critical. Nadir felt as if he were violating some ancient, holy place, so he remained quiet, not quite sure what he was seeking. Tilden had told him she would know when she saw it.
Nadir’s commcard began to buzz and rumble as with distant EM weapon explosions. He turned down the gain, assuming this was static from a space battle show. A few steps later, it returned, doubly loud.
“
Hardman Nadir,” a disembodied voice spoke within his head, “I must apologize. No longer can I shield you from Herrschaft, though I will do what I can. Too many warning systems have been set off by your presence here. You are on your own.”
“
Wait!” Nadir shouted, voice and 3VRD. “Who are you? What’s happened?”
But he couldn’t wait for an answer. Thirty meters overhead, motors whined and gears meshed, metal creaked and hicarb groaned. One of the mushrooms—an R-type emplacement—was rotating, sighting behind him toward where the heavy hovercraft lay.
And then, suddenly, all the gun cupolas were in motion, filling Nadir’s audio program with tympani rumble and horn section whine. He heard the crackle of a single NKK plasma rifle.
“
Cover and defend, CA-11!” he 3-verded on the allband.
Shit,
he thought,
the Niks don’t know our codes
. “Hit their guns first, like we planned,” he added.
The air sprang to life with luminous bands of green and red, laser stripes and twanging projectiles. Thousands of soldiers scurried into firing position. But who could they target? One of the pyrotechs set off a charge, and Nadir turned in a crouch to watch a mushroom’s base crumple. It toppled slow-motion, as if underwater, ripping out walkways as it fell, colliding with a framework tower in a shower of sparks, finally crashing into the shimmering steel ground with a subsonic rumble. Yellow smoke curled upward in the wind, dispersing a few meters above the wreckage. A hole gaped where the cupola-turret had been rooted, and electricity danced across a tangle of naked wires.
Overhead, EarthCo aircraft swooped down on their electric rotors and their NKK counterparts upon gushes of burned hydrocarbon, pounding the inhuman city with heavy energy weapons. Molten metal oozed from the wounds they inflicted; Nadir spliced in to a gunship’s pov and surveyed the damage. Of the 15 mushrooms, one had fallen, three were badly punctured, four were just beginning to fire—
The pov flashed and went dead.
Rrrrip-rrrip-rrrip
, the R types tore the air three bolts per second in the voice of maniac tubas. Their far-ultraviolet beams only gleamed through clouds as they atomized matter which stood in their way. Aircraft shattered and exploded; one EarthCo Singlet completely vaporized in a puff of gaseous plastics.
“
Infantry!” Nadir commed. “Where the crash is our support fire?”
“
Online, sir!” an Asian face 3-verded. The sky sizzled with discharges, but Nadir couldn’t tell which belonged to his army and which to the robotic city.
He began to feel disoriented. He hadn’t trained for this kind of combat, and all his experience amounted to nothing—all that had been fake, lies, bullshit. To release the mounting violence within him, Nadir sighted his EMMA on a nearby R-type autocannon’s seam.
The battle’s pitch rose to a crescendo that made Nadir wince, so he shut down his audio program. Now he heard the distinct
snap
of NKK weapons, the familiar
crack-thup
of EMMAs, the reassuring scream of whirlyjet weapons. . . .
But through all this, Feedcontrol’s autocannons
rrrrip-rrrrip-rrrriped
the air. Near Nadir, a beam passed along the ground, bursting three men’s chests like rocket exhaust blasting through red clay, bits of bone and organs shattered to minute fragments that sprayed the gleaming metal wall behind them.
Nadir’s eye began to twitch, his jaw tightened so hard he thought he’d crack a tooth. Tiny ants bearing microscopic needles tried to puncture the hicarb shells of atomic megawatt lasers.
Hopeless!
“
Tilden!” he roared on the dedicated line to his net tech. “We’ve got to get inside! Where?”
Her 3VRD appeared before him, calm and upright; she’d reverted to a preprogrammed image—Not a good sign, Nadir realized.
“
I
. . .
I don’t know,” she said.
Nadir’s attention was torn away from the conversation as one of the fueling vessels, parked more than a kilometer away, exploded into a wall of fire that stretched along the contours of the rolling land and rose toward the cloudy sky. A smaller craft he couldn’t identify at this distance streaked, flaming, from the explosion toward Feedcontrol’s clutter of towers. It didn’t reach a hundred meters beyond the outer perimeter before two R-types converged fire and scorched it into a dispersing smear of soot.