Merchants of War

by Rick Partlow

  There were only so many places you could hide a ten-meter-tall anthropomorphic tank and the only one nearby was in the Germany pavilion, behind what had once, many decades ago, been the Curse of DarKastle ride. He was only aware of it from a stray memory from his Prime of a visit squeezed in between training sessions, of his disappointment that the ride wasn’t open. It had been closed once before in 2018, then reopened many years later, larger and revamped and had revitalized the place for a while, until things fell apart.

  It remained the largest structure in the park, a crumbling, rotting façade of a medieval castle. Crenellations had been smoothed out by the ravages of time and weather and at least one fire, and what had once been the central tower had fallen years ago, but the exterior walls still stood…and behind them, he was fairly certain, were three Tagans.

  They were going to do just what he’d suggested to Patty, but he was going to be the bait while Roach and Mule sprung the trap. Two-to-one were long odds, but all they had to do was take out the manned mechs and the drones would go inactive. Unless they had a satellite back-up, but even then, it would take time for the control to switch and they could take the U-Mechs out during the delay.

  That’s the plan, anyway.

  He swooped down around the front of the Royal Theater, staying low, just above where the plastic seats had waited for the next kitschy act to come on stage. The seats were mostly gone as well, either stolen or broken or melted, and the floor of the amphitheater was littered with garbage and debris almost a meter thick. His jets kicked up roiling sprays of dried grass, paper, plastic and the accumulated filth of decades of neglect as he passed low over the floor, pretending to be stealthy.

  Something darted away, hot and fast on thermal, but he was fairly sure it was a coyote. He reached the end of the stage and swung around it and there they were, glowing hot, their isotope reactors North Stars in the depth of the night. They were bunched together far too close, moving far too slow to be anything but a trap, but he had to make this look good.

  He cut loose with the twin 40mms on his left shoulder, the cannons pounding like jackhammers beside his cockpit, strafing across the three Tagans as he flew past them and touched down just behind the stage. The rounds were signal flares in the darkness, streaks of fire terminating in glowing spheres of destruction; and by their light, he could see the Tagans rocking back under the impacts. He’d switched his load out from the standard frag to vehicle interdiction rounds, still probably not enough to penetrate the heavy armor on the vitals of the Tagans, but better than harsh language.

  The U-mechs reacted slowly, ponderously, like men who’d been punched in the face and had to shake it off before fighting back. Nate thought it might be a result of the operators’ indecision on whether to spring the ambush on just one Hellfire when they’d expected three, but he wasn’t going to write a letter of complaint about it. He touched down lightly, lithely on the cracked and stained concrete of the stage, breaking into a sprint the second the mech’s footpads gained purchase.

  The Tagans were spinning, lifting slowly away on screaming jets of fire, but he was inside their direction of turn, one step ahead of the firing arc for their cannons and too close for them to use missiles. He kept pounding them with the 40mms, one round after another from almost point-blank range, just hoping he’d get lucky and hit something vulnerable and, for once in his short life, he got lucky.

  The Tagan furthest from him was simultaneously trying to turn and ascend on its thrusters in an awkward movement, like a great blue heron startled from its perch taking flight. The motion exposed its back to Nate and it was too sweet a target to pass up. He’d been saving his primary weapons for the real enemy, but he toggled over to his Vulcan with instincts too deeply ingrained to fight and put a two-second burst into the U-mech’s thruster cowling.

  The vectored thrust nozzle ruptured with a shower of sparks and flame and the jet exhaust burst through the thin veneer of what was left, sending the U-mech careening off to Nates left and smashing into the auditorium floor with a thunderous crunch of metal Nate could hear even through the cockpit fuselage. Smoke billowed up around the wrecked machine glowing with the flames pouring out of its thrusters and that, he thought with grim satisfaction, was strike one.

  He couldn’t let the others get him in their firing arc, couldn’t afford to allow the controllers in the Pi-mechs to have an instant to strategize. He hit his thrusters and grabbed the closest of the drones by the arm, using his leverage and the power of his thrusters to yank the Tagan between his Hellfire and the last of the drones, using it as a shield just as the third machine finally opened fire with its chain gun.

  25mm rounds pummeled the Tagan, pushing it against his Hellfire and knocking them both backward, just a short burst before the pilot remotely controlling the U-mech let his finger off the trigger, but it was enough to disable the drone he’d grabbed hold of.

  Strike two.

  He kept hold of the smoldering wreckage of the drone and leapt forward, the thrust of his mech’s jets carrying him and fifteen tons of limp metal just far enough to slam it into the chest of the remaining Tagan. Nate let the dead husk of the drone go and his thrusters carried him upward, directly over the top of the last enemy U-mech. He swiveled his 40mm’s downward and emptied what was left of the cannon’s twin magazines straight into the vulnerable cockpit canopy of the drone. There was no human inside for the rounds to kill, but enough of the blast made its way through the narrow polymer canopy to disable the communications gear and the drone immediately settled back to a gentle landing and froze in place, waiting patiently for someone to come repair it.

  “Strike three, fuckers,” he said aloud, transmitted on an open frequency. “Who’s next up to bat?”

  “You are a very good pilot, Captain Stout.”

  He blinked. He hadn’t been expecting an answer. The voice was smooth and deep and intoxicating, like fine, aged whiskey, not sounding very much like a Russian mech pilot.

  “But as a good pilot,” she went on, “you should know when the odds are against you.”

  There they were, three Tagans, naked and glowing on radar and thermal, jetting out from behind the remains of the make-believe castle and spreading out with the smooth precision of real, human pilots, men and women who wore the mech like a suit, felt its limbs move as if they were their own.

  “As a good pilot,” Nate responded, bringing his Hellfire slowly up on its thrusters to meet them. “I know never to take on heavy odds without backup.”

  There was a warbling, ululating shout, what he guessed was Roach’s best imitation of a rebel yell, and the two Hellfires shot out on glowing jets of fire, rising above the remains of the old train station and splitting up to each take one of the Tagans. Nate bared his teeth in an unseen challenge and headed for the Russian mech at the center of the three-pronged formation, firing off two Mark-Ex missiles, one after another. The twin launches rocked his Hellfire back in its flight, pushing roughly, violently with the force of their solid fuel rockets igniting.

  This was why he’d saved the weapons, why he’d used the forties against the U-mechs. This was the real fight. He followed the missiles in, trailing behind their twenty-gravity acceleration with something more sedate, toggling his joystick trigger to the 20mm cannon.

  The Tagan tried evasive maneuvers, breaking low and skirting back around the walls of the castle, dogged by the Mark-Ex missiles, and all of them disappeared from view behind the huge building. Nate arced over the roof, noticing the heat warning on his thrusters and knowing he’d have to put down soon. Before he’d made it across the sagging, cracked surface of the roof, twin blasts echoed through the night, lighting up the other side of the castle with the crackling, popping flashes of several kilograms of high-explosive warheads igniting.

  Nate hoped the missiles had taken the Russian out, but he wasn’t going to count on it. He dropped down into the midst of the rising clouds of smoke and dust from the explosions, cutting his jets early to avoid ha
nging in mid-air and making too big of a target. His Hellfire landed hard, the knees and hips bending to absorb the impact, but the force of it still enough to clack his teeth together inside his helmet.

  His jaw was going to be sore, but it could have been worse—two rounds of 25mm passed just half a meter over the top of his mech and blew a man-sized hole through the exterior wall of the castle, clouds of plaster dust and smoke joining the mist from the missile blasts. Nate was moving immediately, instinctively, before the location of the Tagan even registered with his conscious mind, before he could interpret the data from the thermal sensors and lidar in his threat display.

  The Tagan was only fifteen meters away, kneeling in the splintered wreckage of a scrawny tree planted for landscaping decades ago yet still undersized from lack of water and sunlight. The Russian mech had put it out of its misery, smashing into it in his quest to avoid the missiles, and he was halfway back to his feet, crouching like a Revolutionary War soldier reloading his musket while the next line took their shot.

  Nate knew what he would do, and he had to assume the Tagan’s pilot was at least as well-trained and disciplined, whether it was true or not. He came out of the landing with a powerful spring of the Hellfire’s legs boosted by a brief firing of the thrusters and lunged forward and to the right of the Tagan just as the Russian mech launched its own missile. At point-blank range, there would have been no time for evasion or anti-missile machine gun fire; he would have been dead instantly.

  Instead, the Russian version of the Mark-Ex, the MJK-38F, soared off into the night blindly, too close and fired too quickly for a laser-lock, destined to spend itself kilometers away, hopefully not into the house of some poor squatter. Nate wasn’t as worried about collateral damage from the first enemy missile as he was about where the next one might go.

  He circled the Tagan, galloping the Hellfire in a tight curl away from the arc of fire of the Russian’s chain gun. The 25mm chattered spitefully, the rounds passing just behind him as they raced for the tipping point, the spot where one or the other would be forced to take to the air and would, in that instant, give the other a shot. The Tagan pilot was good, but he was also human and just as given to the fears of any soldier. He’d seen Nate take down three U-mechs by himself and some small, nagging voice inside his head had to be telling him he was in trouble.

  The Russian blinked. It didn’t take much to hit the thrusters, just a stomp of a foot pedal, but the motion arrested his spin, stopped the arc of his main gun and the threat it presented. Nate skidded to a halt, his 20mm tracking upward, his finger tightening on the trigger. There was just a space of second where the Tagan was vulnerable, but a second was ten rounds of tungsten-core 20mm. The burst caught the Tagan just under its right arm, spearing through the torso and through the pilot inside.

  The jets cut off abruptly with the loss of a pressure on the throttle, and the massive Tagan collapsed like a felled tree, crashing into the pavement with a traffic-accident cacophony of rending metal. The Tagan wasn’t dead, wasn’t disabled, but it lay motionless, waiting for commands from its master.

  Nate risked a flash of the floodlight on his Hellfire’s chest and saw a red mist against the clear polymer of the Tagan’s canopy, all that was left of the pilot. Should he have felt bad for the man? Should he have felt guilty for ending another human life? The man might have been a draftee, with as little choice in coming here as Nate had been given for his very existence.

  Fuck it. If he didn’t want me to kill him, he should have been a better pilot.

  Nate hit the jets and climbed up to the mech’s hundred-meter ceiling, spinning in place, trying to get a reading on where the others had gone. IFF signals beeped data at him, showing him Roach two kilometers to his north, on the ground but moving, the thermal signature of a Tagan running just ahead of her. She was always the hunter, never the hunted. Dix had told Nate he thought she’d wind up a better pilot than either of them with enough experience.

  Ramirez, on the other hand…the boy was flying, and from the heat readings off his mech, he’d been flying too long, was close to heat shutdown, but he was dodging erratically, running scared. The Russian mech on his tail was three hundred meters back, wasting a burst from his 25mm every few seconds to try to nudge Ramirez’s course into his missile targeting reticle. It was working—Ramirez’s dodges and weaves were narrowing and he didn’t have much time left before one of those unimaginatively-named Russian air-to-air birds went right up his ass.

  Lucky for him I saved a couple missiles of my own.

  It took about three seconds to get a targeting lock on the Tagan, enough time for Ramirez to take a grazing hit from a 25mm round—Nate could see the sparks from hundreds of meters away, felt a stab of urgency and considered jetting in to distract the Russian, but the thought was interrupted by a good tone and a green reticle. He hit the launch control twice, felt the Hellfire lurch in mid-air as the missiles streaked away from it.

  “Mule!” he called to Ramirez. “Break right and get to the ground!”

  Before your turbines overheat and you crash, he didn’t say because there was no point in panicking the kid any more than he already was.

  The missiles curled in to track the Tagan and he’d seen them coming because he climbed sharply and headed for the nearest cover, a roller coaster track. The Russian just made it over the tracks before the missiles hit, both of them slamming into a looped section and wasting their warheads on twisted, rusted metal.

  “Shit,” Nate said mildly. Mark-Ex missiles weren’t cheap and he’d just blown two of them on public vandalism.

  The looped section of coaster track shuddered and swayed and finally, broke off and tumbled to the pavement below. The Tagan shot out from beneath it just before it hit, and a cloud of dirt and dust climbed up to join the smoke from the missile explosions. Ramirez had landed near the river running through the center of the park and ducked beneath the trees; Nate could still see his thermal signature, but it would be hard for the Tagan to get missile lock on him with so much foliage in the way.

  Targeting Nate wouldn’t be nearly as difficult. The Russian mech fired on him the second it was clear of the roller coaster tracks, two of the MJK-38F missiles flaring away from the launch tubes affixed to the Tagan’s right shoulder.

  That missile needs a nickname. Back in the old days, we used to give Russian weapons systems and fighter planes stupid-sounding nicknames like Flogger and Foxbat. This one should be called the Fruit-fly, maybe, or the Brickbat. Yeah, Brickbat, I like that.

  Nate didn’t try to outrun the newly-christened Brickbats, they were too close for him to make it more than a hundred meters and there was no convenient cover he could reach in time. Instead, he set down on the pavement and let the Hellfire’s anti-missile defense have a go at them, standing still to make it easier for the radar to track them.

  It was hard, standing in the open instead of bolting, but that was part of being an experienced pilot, knowing when to run and knowing when to stand. The 6.5mm machine guns on either side of the Hellfire’s torso chattered rhythmically, guided by computer targeting, by a series of 1’s and 0’s programmed somewhere down the line by a human typing them into an input terminal probably a decade ago.

  Whoever that was, they just saved my life.

  The warheads flamed out within a half-second of each other, what was left of the rocket motors tumbling out of control in fireworks-show sprays of flaming propellant, but Nate didn’t bother watching them fall. He was already moving, knowing the Tagan would be using the time to close in on him. The pilot had struck him as older, patient, perhaps a bit too patient. He could have taken Ramirez out by taking more of a chance, but instead, he’d sat back and tried to nudge him into an easy kill.

  Older pilot, been at this a while, not eager to get himself killed. Have to use that.

  Nate hit the thrusters and flew straight at the Tagan, not trying to get fancy with some elaborate flanking maneuver. The Russian wouldn’t want a head-on confrontati
on, Nate could feel it in his gut, so it was no surprise when the Tagan jetted off in a wide parabola away from the Hellfire, heading for the old parking lots.

  He’s been up for over three minutes now, closer to four. He’ll be near the redline, have to set that thing down or risk a shutdown. And he doesn’t like risk.

  He went down right on schedule, not into the middle of the parking lot because that would have put him too far into the open. Instead, he touched ground behind a stand of trees and brush, once well-tended and decorative but now gone wild and overgrown.

  Trying to throw off my missile targeting. Not that I have any missiles left, but he doesn’t know that. He’s going to sit back there and wait for me to come around either side of the trees, where he can get a clean shot at me.

  But the Russian didn’t know his trees. These were silver maples. Nate wasn’t sure why the Prime had known this, or why the techs who’d programmed his brain with selected portions of the Prime’s memory had considered it important data to pass on, but he recognized the trees for what they were. It was fast-growing, landscape ready, favored by the sort of businesses who would have planted decorative trees in the park.

  It was also weak and brittle.

  Nate came in low, only a meter off the ground, and plowed his Hellfire right through the trunk of the center tree, blasting it to splinters and sending an explosion of bark and leaves and moss flying out the other side. He came out nearly on top of the enemy mech, much too close for the Russian pilot to react in time.

  He’d already had his 20mm lined up with the Tagan and all it took was a squeeze on the trigger. 20mm tungsten slugs chewed through the Russian mech’s cockpit, impossible to miss at this range. The Tagan had been in the middle of a step and without the guidance of its pilot, it toppled backward, cracking the pavement where it hit.

  Nate pulled in a deep breath, starting to feel the adrenalin shakes now that the deed was done.