Authors: Mark Kalina
Call
laughed. "Sure."
"Right,"
Dave said. "So that's how I figure it. We're the purest embodiment of
Arcadia. And even though everyone thinks we're the dregs, they all need us,
man. I mean, what we do matters. All the other Corps are all getting ready for
some day when the UEN comes back... even though we control the gate and they
can't come back unless we let 'em. Or maybe waiting for space aliens to attack,
or some shit like that. And let me tell you, if space aliens ever attack, we're
going to be fucking glad to have those guys and gals. But in the meantime,
we're the ones who do things. They just train and wait.
"Anyway,
that's my pep talk, Cal. If you want to tell me it's bullshit and just settle
in and be miserable for a couple of years, I'll understand. But I'm not
bullshitting you, and if you want to step up and help the mission, me and the
other guys and gals will be happy to have you."
"Wow,"
Cal said, shaking his head. "That's not... I mean, that's not bad. For a
pep-talk, I mean. Well, I'm here, so I might as well step up, like you
said."
"OK,
then" Dave said, holding out a hand. "Welcome aboard."
"Right,"
Dave told him, as they finished the "tour" of the station. The
barracks weren't actually that bad, Cal had realized. They were full of
scrounged and improvised amenities... including, almost unbelievably, a working
swimming pool made out of the bottom half of an ancient UN patrol boat that
must have been as old as the colony... or older.
"So
one thing to remember, Cal. We're only twenty kilometers from the nearest
refugee camp, and once in a while, some of those fellows hike all the way up
here. Sometimes they're OK, you know? Just want some help that we can give
them. But if they were really OK, they'd just move out of the camps and stop
being refugees, right? And sometimes, it's some local gang-lord's boys; the
sort of hard-core gangsters that really run the camps. So we never, and I mean
never, go anywhere unarmed.
"Here,"
he added, pressing his palm to the lock plate of a cabinet and taking out a
compact H&K G60 rifle.
Cal
had seen rifles like it in vids before, and some of the MP guards at other
Defense Force installations had carried them. They were meant for
anti-personnel use at close ranges and weren't too much use past five or six
hundred meters, or against any serious armor. Infantry frames had made them
more or less obsolete.
"Carry
it with you, man. Keep it with you. The G60 is a sweet gun. Germans build the
best guns, man. 6.7mm, light-weight, accurate, reliable. No smart-sight crap or
anything, but there's not much recoil and it shoots straight. Feeds from a 45
round magazine. Two or three taps from this'll take down a gangster gun-boy,
even if he's high as a kite on some home-brew chems.
"Right,"
Cal said, taking the weapon nervously.
"Come
on, we'll get you checked out on it. We've got a firing range out back. It's
not going to take out a framer, but man, we don't ever have to deal with
framers. It does just fine against some refugee gang-lord's gun-boys.
"Or,
if you'd rather, I can issue you a zipper. You know, close-in room-clearing
gun."
A
"zipper," Cal knew, was a weapon for close-quarters combat, heavy
caliber with an ultra-high rate of fire and extensive recoil-absorbing gear. It
was compact but heavy and short-ranged. It was meant to be carried as a back-up
weapon by framers; in really close-in combat, it was sometimes more useful than
a big anti-frame rifle like the M39. Cal wasn't sure he'd want to carry one all
day with only his own muscles, though.
"Yeah,"
Cal said. "We checked out on zippers in the Infantry Corp... before I
got... you know."
"Right,"
Dave said. "Well, the thing with a zipper is it's damn heavy to lug and
useless past a couple hundred meters. Close in, I'd rather have a zipper
myself. But we're in open territory here, and the gun-boys do have some real
rifles. Lots of hand-made stuff. And smuggling from Earth, too. Not to mention
sometimes any guns they can steal when the raid. And anything they can trade
for. So they got a few decent rifles. Lots of crude, old-fashioned zippers,
too; 20th century-style submachine-guns, basically. They've even got some
AK-fucking-47s, if you'll believe it. They got guys in the camps who can build
'em by hand."
"I've
heard of that," Cal said.
"I
know. Unbelievable," Dave said. "I mean, if some guy is that good
with metal and tools why the fuck is he still squatting in the camps,
right?"
"Man,
but I hate convoy duty," Tara said into her helmet comm pickup.
"And
I love it?" came a reply from Younger on the tactical push.
"OK,
got it, Younger. The lieutenant-colonel is not allowed to bitch," Tara
replied.
The
fact was, sending an entire battalion, even an under-strength one of thirty-one
tanks, was massive overkill. A company of twelve would have been overkill. A
single platoon of four tanks would have been more than enough. But convoy duty
gave her battalion a chance to train on the move, to maneuver and operate
together, and shake some of the peacetime dust off. That made it worth it, more
or less.
Besides
which, riding a seventy-five ton War-Hammer at speed across the rolling terrain
of the Highlands was fun.
The
driver, a stocky private named Darryl Hanneman, was driving with his head out
of the hatch, blasting Nihonjin Idol-Pop though his helmet speakers, loud
enough for the rest of the crew to catch rhythmic snippets of music.
Tara
had her own head out of the turret as well. Her screens probably gave her a
better view than her unaided eyes did, but riding inside felt detached and
isolated, not to mention cramped, and many —most— tank commanders
kept their heads out of their turrets when it was safe to do so.
She
watched as the convoy trucks maneuvered along the route, flanked and followed
by loose columns of her tanks, and frowned.
"Driver,"
Tara said, switching to her intra-tank communications push, "you'd better
turn that down. Sensor Operator, link me with the convoy leader, please."
"You're
linked, ma'am," replied the sensors operator, a fresh-faced young corporal
named Piet Malan.
"Convoy
Azure-1, this is escort commander," she said.
"This
is, er, this is the convoy," came a woman's voice.
"Convoy,
you have some of your trucks pulling ahead of hill 57-A. That's the hill up
ahead of us on the west side. My people have not cleared that hill yet. Please
pull back your trucks and give my drone operators time to work."
"Look,
Commander... I mean Colonel," came the woman's voice, "I've run
convoys here before. We know the route. We don't need you to hold our hands out
here."
"She
sounds like an opt-out," murmured Corporal Shalik, her gunner.
"Not
nice," Tara told him, grinning, before keying the communications to reply
to the convoy.
"Look,
convoy leader," she said, trying to keep her tone reasonable, "you
people lobbied the Defense Force to have this convoy escorted. If you get in
trouble out here, we risk our asses to save you. So the other side of the coin
is, you listen to us when we try to keep you safe.
"There've
been improvised mines out here before. And ambushes. Your convoy represents a
lot of wealth to the refugee gangs. Not just the goods you're planning to hand
out anyway; your vehicles, your personal weapons, and your people as hostages
for ransom.
"So
you will pull those damned trucks back when I tell you to. Now," Tara
said, putting a snap of command into her voice. "Clear?"
"Clear,"
came the woman's voice, sounding sullen enough that Tara thought that she could
perfectly imagine its owner's expression.
"I
don't even understand why they keep sending these convoys," her gunner
griped quietly.
Tara
said nothing, but she was inclined to agree.
This
convoy, like many of them, was organized by the United Christian Alliance, a
powerful political block on Arcadia. The UCA had a lot of support for their
humanitarian missions. Not many people liked the refugees, but most of people
didn't want to see them starve or die of thirst, and lots of people were
willing to donate money, and pledge votes, to see that the refugees got
humanitarian support. And UCA, as the focus of much of that support, was a
powerful organization, in terms of wealth, influence, and politically.
Arcadian
politics was minimal, but that didn't make it simple. Government had very few
roles, but what it did do was run by a unicameral Assembly. Anyone who had
served in the Defense Force could vote for a list of Assembly Members, and any
voter who wasn't in active military service could run for election. Any
candidate who got enough votes was in. If a vote was excess to the required
percentage, it went to the next candidate on that voter's list.
In
turn, the Assembly selected one of their own as President, to chair the
Assembly. On those matters that fell within the narrow scope of government, a
majority vote of the Assembly carried the day. And that was it, unless one
counted local town politics.
But
though there were no formal political parties, there was no shortage of voting
blocks, horse-trading and political bargains. And the Defense Force was one of
the things the government emphatically did run.
So
that put Tara and her battalion here, in the southern wastes, escorting a
humanitarian convoy to the refugee camps. The UCA pushed hard to have the
Defense Force "earn its keep" by escorting their convoys, and the
Assembly, eager for the votes that the UCA could influence, tended to agree.
Somehow
the UCA never seemed to notice the irony of the fact that they were feeding the
same people who the Defense Force spent most of its time protecting them from.
The
fact was, the so-called refugees were dangerous. The camps were improvised
fortresses, and the leadership of the refugees, if it could be called such, was
nothing more or less than bandit-lords, brutal and ruthless. And it was all,
Tara thought with some justice, all, the UEN's fault.
***
Lord
Wang Li Hu watched the convoy come closer with a mixture of fear, greed and
hate. Even from a kilometer away, he could see that there were dozens of DF
tanks escorting it. Dozens. And he had no illusions about what even one of
those sand-colored monsters could do to him and his men.
At
the same time the dozen trucks of the convoy represented wealth, life and
power. Sure, the stupid fuckers were going to be giving out food, new clothes
and new, clean water purification filters. But they weren't going to be giving
it to him. They'd be passing it all out to the scrubs. His boys would collect a
lot of it later, but never as much as if he get if he could have taken it all
at the source. Besides which, there was power in giving things out.
That
was a lesson that a lot of would-be lords never figured out. They figured that
if you were strong, you took... anything you wanted, everything you could. But
giving made you stronger. If he was the one to give food and water to his
scrubs, then they would be his. When the Arcky charity pussies did the giving,
then the scrubs looked to them, and not to him.
A
lot of his gun-boys didn't get that. A few were just happy to see the convoy.
Food wasn't too short, right now. And not at all short for him and his boys.
But supplies could be better. Fresh food would be good, and fresh water filters
were life itself. The fucked up water of this world —sea water and
well-water both— wasn't drinkable without being filtered. But the filters
didn't last; they wore out, or got mucked up by the shit they filtered out of
the water. The water in the camp was beginning to taste pretty funky already,
and even he didn't have anything better than what the scrubs got.
"Man,
all we got to do is grab the charity pussies when they come in close to hand
the shit out! I'm telling ya!" said the man to his left.
Jakey
had been going on about this bullshit plan for days now. It wasn't, Wang
thought, much of a plan. Kidnap the staff giving out the goods and use them to
grab a big ransom. Jakey had his eyes set on grabbing a machinegun from one of
the tanks. As far as Wang could tell, nothing about the plan had any cunning,
or smarts, or any ghost of a chance of success. But Jakey would not fucking
shut up about it.
Jakey
had arrived a few months ago from another camp, a little turd of a place that
had been supplied by the UEN instead of by the Arckies. For some reason, the
UEN had stopped sending the goods, and the camp had broken up in faction and
fighting. Jakey had made it out of his old camp, and he'd had been tough and
resourceful enough to make it to Wang's camp. And Jakey was a fucking vicious
fighter. All of which made Wang figure the man was worth a place among his
gun-boys.
Right
now, though, Wang was beginning to think he'd made a mistake with Jakey. From
what Jakey had let slip, his old outfit had tried a move like that with a UEN
convoy, and gotten a lot of good loot from the soldiers in charge of its
security. But those had been UEN soldiers, not the stone-cold motherfucking
Arcky DF killers that were riding those tanks. Maybe Jakey didn't know the
difference, but Wang sure as shit did.
"Shit,
man, all we got to do is cut one charity pussy up a little bit, and those
soldiers will fucking give it up to us. They got to keep the charity pussies
safe, man. It's their fucking job. If the charity pussies get hurt, the
soldiers get fucked up when they get back to their boss, man."
"Shut
up, Jakey," Wang said, not taking his eyes off the oncoming tanks.
"That shit won't work with these DF motherfuckers. They're not the same as
those UEN fuckers."
"Fuck,"
Jakey said, "soldier-boys is soldier-boys. They all the same. They all
follow
orders
, man. And they got
orders to keep the charity pussies in once piece. It's fucking simple,
man."
"You
fucking follow orders, Jakey!" Wang growled, turning to face the other
man. "My orders!"
Jakey
was a lot bigger than Wang. The man was dark from the fucked up red sun that
this fucked up place had, and hard as stone... and well armed with blades and a
good, camp-made, 9mm zipper.
"I
follow a fucking
lord
, Wang. If you
ain't got the balls to..."
The
gunshot cracked out across the desert and the sand behind Jakey was suddenly
spattered with fragments of bone and splashed with blood and brains. Jakey's
body crumpled at Wang's feet.
"Tanks
have stopped, Lord Wang," said one of his gun-boys, in a tone of proper
respect that Jakey had never learned.
"Wave
to them," Wang said, holstering his pistol. "If they ask, we can tell
them the truth. This shit wanted to attack them, and we stopped him."
One
of his gun-boys waved broadly, arms over his head. The others made a point of
slinging or holstering any weapons they were holding.
"That
was well done, Lord Wang," said the new man. He called himself Ren, but
Wang knew that just meant "man" in Mainland Chinese.
Whoever
he was, he was Han-Chinese, like Wang, and he talked like a pussy. But his eyes
were as hard and sharp as a good steel fighting knife and Wang was fairly sure
the man was a lethal fighter. It showed in the way the new man looked at
things, and the way he moved.
"That
was nothing," Wang said. "My gun-boys do what I say, is all."
"Discipline,"
the man, Ren, agreed. "Real discipline, not play-soldier nonsense.
Yes."
"How
long," Wang asked, without looking at the new man, "till those crates
you brought start making us new guns?"
"Soon,
Lord Wang. It's all a matter of power. Your camp's solar power array is in bad
repair. My men and I have done what we can, but with so little power,
production will be slower than we had hoped. Still, you'll have the first rifle
tomorrow. And the first rockets in a week."
"It's
still fucking crazy," Wang said, "that you can make rockets from food
and human shit."
"Chemistry,
Lord Wang. Just chemistry. The real question is, when the rifles and rockets
are ready, will your men be ready too?"
"My
men..." Wang said. "Yeah, my men will be ready. You get me the
firepower, and I'll provide the men."
Wang
was looking at the convoy and the tanks. They were moving again, slowly, their
machineguns tracking his boys as they rolled closer. But Wang barely saw the
tanks. In his mind he could see his gun-boys... changed. Changed into his men;
into trained soldiers with military grade rifles and anti-tank rockets; changed
from his gang into his army. And all the new man wanted for it was some help
killing the DFs and the Arckies. That made it better than free.