But Sturgeon answered her tentatively, fumbling for words. He was a smart guy for languages, Sturgeon. When the 203rd had been given its marching orders, he’d been cramming like there would be a test and everyone had laughed at him. How glad was I that he was a goddamn intellectual right then? Damn glad, I can tell you.
She stepped forward, and the partisans gave her plenty of room. That would have been the time to shoot them, I reckon, but I was too startled by what I was looking at.
She was as slight as Sturgeon, and shorter, and her hair was swept back wetly like it had been gelled. She didn’t have a gun trained on us, although there was a long-barreled pistol-looking weapon stuck through her belt. She had some sort of uniform on, pouches and clips and pockets but no rank or insignia. It ended at her elbows and knees, but I didn’t see that at first, because the skin of her limbs was fuzzy with sleek hair. Her eyes were cat’s eyes glinting in the electric light. Her feet were bare. I was being slow, right then; only the bare feet joined the dots for me. I remembered those footprints near where our man Jerome had been nabbed.
It was a fine time to discover my Californian translator didn’t know Finnish.
She looked into our guns without any apparent fear, but I had a sense of a coiled spring in her, as if she could go faster than bullets.
“She wants to know why the Russian is after us,” Sturgeon explained.
“You get the impression she and the Russian are best buds?” I asked him.
“Sarge, I don’t know.”
I looked at the woman and she looked back at me – she was real uncanny valley territory. She was beautiful – that’s how they’d made her. She was beautiful and she wasn’t human. She scared the bejesus out of me.
“Tell her we don’t know, but he and his Ruudboys have been after us for a while.”
“I thought these guys were on the same side as the Whites,” Cormoran murmured, but I’d put my words into Sturgeon’s mouth and he was saying them. I was playing to my gut, letting something inside me that was all instinct and no thought decode that near-kin body language of hers.
The Finn woman nodded sharply and said something to the partisans, which a couple of the more learned had to translate to the rest.
“She said we’re all friends then,” Sturgeon translated. “Although the rest don’t seem to see it that way.”
“Can’t think why.” I leant in close. “All right, you’re always claiming you’re such a smart guy, find a nice polite way of asking her why they’re not shooting us dead.”
The rest of us settled on the stairs, with our guns not quite pointed at the partisans, and the partisans settled at their end of the room with their guns not quite pointed at us. The Finn girl stood apart from them – and I watched them as their eyes tracked her, and at least one of them crossed himself when he thought she wasn’t looking. When Sturgeon spoke to her, his hands were constantly in motion, gesturing and clutching to reach past the gaps in his Finnish. She stood absolutely still, a cat watching a mouse hole. Jesus, but she scared me.
Franken got out some ration bars, something to chew on while we had the chance. His robot brain had shut up – some time during the fight it had apparently suicided, perhaps clicking that we were using it as an early warning system.
I saw when Sturgeon got the big news – he almost jumped in the air with it, and then spent some painful minutes getting the woman to repeat whatever she’d said before hotfooting it over to us.
“What’s the deal?” I was watching the partisans, who were looking more and more twitchy now that the Finn was talking to us.
“She knows we’re after the Scion,” Sturgeon got out.
“Fuck.” Abruptly we were also tense as hell, which did nothing for the anxiety attack the locals were having. “And how? You let that slip?”
“No, Sarge. She saw him. She said she couldn’t think who else we’d be out here after.”
“Saw him –”
“She knows where they took him. Or her people do, anyway. I, er…” He grimaced. “From what she said, there’s not much goes on around here they don’t see.”
I glanced at Cormoran. “Those flies of theirs, they spy stuff out?”
She looked uncertain for about the first time since we’d met. “I really want to say no, Sarge, but…” She shrugged.
“So…?” I prompted Sturgeon.
“She’s ready to go. She’s ready to take us.”
“Why?” Franken broke in. “Why would she? Got to be a trap, Sarge.”
“Yeah.” I nodded, thoughtfully. The Finn woman was watching me – not us, but me – and I wondered if she could hear us, and if she could understand.
Sturgeon looked stubborn. “More of a trap than being stuck in a small room with a bunch of Nord irregulars, Sarge?”
“Yeah, I can think of lots worse traps than that – shit!” Because in that eyeblink between looking over at her and looking back at Sturgeon, she’d come up right close to us, close enough for me to jab her with my rifle barrel. She said something in her jabber – it was weird, that language, sounded half Nord and half music – and then she almost flowed up the stairs, aided by everyone’s very strong desire not to be touched by her.
“She said to come on,” Sturgeon said, and then, not that I’d asked, “Her name’s Viina.”
Everyone was waiting for my order, and what decided me was the thought that, with Bioweapon Viina out of the room, the forbearance of the partisans was unlikely to last very long. Swearing, I got to my feet and led the charge after her.
She took us past where we’d entered the tunnels, moving into the dark without a flashlight and letting us blunder after her. Cramped spaces and poor light make for a very tense Sergeant Ted Regan, and I swear I nearly shot her three times just from pure nerves. We broke out into the forest at last, to find that dusk had snuck up on us. I didn’t reckon that Viina was one to just set up camp and wait for the morning, though, so we were all on night ops until further notice. I wondered if she needed to sleep at all, or whether half her brain napped at a time, like dolphins.
Cormoran was doing what she could with her drones; all she could tell me was that we were veering back toward the lake, but that we were probably going parallel to the vehicle tracks we’d found before the Walker and its mechs stumbled on us.
“So why’s she helping, Sturgeon?” I pressed, punching him in the shoulder. “Or are we just trusting your magic girlfriend?”
He threw me a hurt look. “What I heard, the whole thing’s gone to crap on their side. The Walker’s been hunting the partisans down, and they reckon they’ve been sold out by the government – or maybe just by the corporations. They say they’re the only true patriots left in Sweden, that they don’t trust anyone. They want to make their own state, basically, run the place themselves.”
“And so nobody can control them.” I was thinking ahead, because some time in the future everyone would be in a place where we could sign a piece of paper and agree just how much of Nordland could be picked clean by the corporations – ours and theirs – and if there were a load of armed natives still determined to be at war, well, that’d be real awkward for all concerned.
“Yeah, so they’ve been fighting just about everybody, except the Finns.”
“Why not the Finns?”
“Because whatever the crap the Finns want, it’s not Swedish land,” Sturgeon explained.
“How about you give me your best guess as to what they do want.”
“Sarge, I have not the first idea. Unless they don’t want anything, and them being here is a test.”
“A test of what? Of them?” Because Viina was a weapon, and weapons needed testing. “So why is Little Miss Loaded Gun there leading us to Cousin Jerome?”
“I think she’s curious,” Sturgeon told me. “I think she wants to know what he was doing here, too.”
And that was when the White Walker, which had been sitting very quietly amongst the trees, running its systems cold as the night air,
suddenly rammed everything up to high gear and turned its lights on. We were caught like rabbits in the headlamps as the night was split with a thunderous screaming sound.
The Russian was coming to get us, and he was playing some serious thrash metal from his suit’s speakers. Everyone’s a comedian.
We legged it through the trees, with the major disadvantage that we didn’t have many trees left because Viina had brought us out closer to the water than before. Behind us, the Walker rose to its full height and took its first stomping step.
We tried to keep to the forest, but there were Ruuds out there too – spindly shapes suddenly flashing hot in our sight, the Russian’s hunting dogs stilting along and herding us toward the open ground. Franken lit one up with a scatter of grenades and incendiaries and left it burning, but by then we were basically out of woods, and we were a lot closer to the water than I’d reckoned on.
I remember turning, on that strip of ravaged farmland we found ourselves on, with the great darkness of the Vنttern at our backs. One of the Ruuds plowed out of the treeline with Cormoran’s remotes circling and buzzing it like hawks. It fixed on us, minigun swinging, and then one of the drones rammed it right in its camera-lens face and exploded, rocking the thing back with its chassis suddenly torn open and on fire. And all of this in silent mime because the thunder and bass of the White Walker’s music was the only thing our ears had room for.
When Sturgeon’s voice came, though, it came in my earphone, cutting through the row. “Sir! She’s –!”
He was already halfway to the water – I caught him gesturing, but the signs made no sense, and then the Walker came out of the trees and I had other priorities. I was about to get set on fire by some oligarch’s favored son.
We shot at it; of course we shot at it. We peppered it with grenades and AP rounds and incendiaries and whatever little peashooter the remaining drone had. It stood there and let us, our shot lighting it up with constellations of doomed little impacts that did no damage at all.
The music went dead. The night seemed very, very quiet after that; my ears were buzzing with the silence. The White Walker actually leant toward us a little, as though choosing who it was going to kill first. Then one of its shoulder pods spoke, and a shell spiraled madly overhead before arcing back and plowing into the forest with a flare that left jittery after-images across my HUD. Another two followed – one soaring far off over the Vنttern before extinguishing itself, and another seeming to go straight up, detonating like a firework and spattering the water’s edge with shreds of burning phosphorus, sending us all running. Right then I still thought he was playing with us, until I glanced up. In the Walker’s lights, the air danced and glittered and seethed
It wasn’t just my ears that were buzzing. Over my head, the air was thick with flies. The flares and echo-shapes on my HUD were just the edge of the vast cloud of ECM interference that were sending the Walker’s targeting haywire.
“Where’s the Finn?”I yelled, because she was doing this somehow; she had to be.
“Bloody hell!” Lawes’ voice, far too loud in my earpiece, and then the Brit was throwing himself aside from something. I saw the shadow of it with my eyes, but my HUD told me it wasn’t there, just a piece of cool night sprinting toward the Walker on all fours.
It got to within ten feet of the Walker and leapt, finding a perch up there amongst all that obsolete heraldry. I glimpsed something humanoid but not human, long-limbed and ragged with hair. Then I saw another, springing up to the Walker’s shoulders. There were more; they had come out of the water behind us, silent and sleek: Viina had not been operating alone.
We stood very still, we humans, save when the Walker stomped forward and we made room for it. This had suddenly become a fight in which human beings were entirely optional. It was a battle of competing technologies.
And still I wondered how the Finns could actually achieve anything. Let them be swift and strong as bears and tigers, it wouldn’t mean jack against all that armor. The flies were still coming, though, swarming through the air to settle on the Walker’s hull like we were watching some piece of film run in reverse. It was like the Scion was drawing them out of the air. They were coating his weapons, his vents, every part of him that promised access to the meat below.
My HUD began to tell me a story then. The White Walker was starting to live up to its name on the thermal imaging: from red to orange, growing hotter and hotter as the thickening carpet of engineered insects blocked its heat sinks. And all the while the Finns danced across its surface, prying and wrenching.
Its shoulder pod exploded. I caught a brief afterimage of a torn near-human shape being flung away, but then all the ammunition was going up, each shell setting off the next, and the whole area became a very unhealthy place to be. We continued our escape along the water’s edge, leaving the battle to forces entirely beyond us in power and sophistication.
Sturgeon says... Well, hell, by the time I stopped running and turned around, it was mostly over. I saw the Walker on the ground and on fire, and then something fundamental went off and there were pieces of armor and favored son raining down all over.
Sturgeon says that a crab the size of a Buick came out of the Vنttern and scissored one of the Walker’s legs off at the knee, but I’m not falling for that. Even in this world of ours, such things just don’t happen.
I did a head count; we’d all made it, bar the drone that had given its artificial life to take out the Ruud. For a moment I thought – hoped – that we’d seen the last of Viina and her compatriots. But no, here they came, a full dozen of them ghosting without warning from the shadow and the pitch. Two legs, but they didn’t walk like us; human features but animal expressions. We had our guns up, all of us, and they didn’t show any fear at all. I know that the movies lie. I know that if I’ve got my finger on the trigger and my sights on a target, there’s no way they can rush me before I punch a hole in them. That’s been a point of faith for me all my professional life. Facing the dogs, then, I lost that faith. They came from the darkness like wolves from old stories, the killers that taught us to fear the night. When Viina grinned, I saw fangs. They looked at us with the arrogance of top predators. The arrogance of youth, too: how old could they have been, how quickly had they been force-grown in their labs? Or were there breeding populations of these things over the border? Had they already broken away from their creators?
Sturgeon says it was going for decades before the war: the US was tightening up on whole areas of science that the Christ Lib crowd and the other fundamentalists were crying blasphemy on. A lot of Europe was going the same way for secular or religious reasons, and there had been that outbreak in China that had suddenly made them way less keen on biosciences as the future of military superiority. The funding dried up and the laws came in, and a great many scientists just found a different area to work in, preferably for one of the agriscience multinationals, because that was where the money was.
Except there were some researchers who didn’t care about breeding a new strain of wheat that would outperform its competitors and then conveniently die off so you had to buy more. There were some who had been playing with the blasphemy label since before the Christ Lib people got hold of it. Those men and women who were long on genius and short on ethics needed somewhere to go.
I have no idea what was going on in Finnish politics or academia which led to that place becoming a covert haven for mad scientists. Sure as hell it wasn’t the only one, but they were maybe the most subtle. Five years before I signed up there was what the media called Operation Frankenstein in Bolivia, when the boffins over there got a bit too open about what they were making. There was never an Operation Moreau kicking in doors in Helsinki, though, and we were face to face with the results of that oversight.
“So, what now?” I asked. I was going for defiant, but Sturgeon’s shaky translation sounded pitiful.
One of the males muttered something that sounded hungry, and a couple of them laughed, cruel and male
volent as hyenas. Then Viina spoke, in that voice that sounded almost like singing. Her eyes glowed in the moonlight.
“She says, let’s find your…” Sturgeon grimaced. “Perillinen. Which is probably Scion.” He paused, listened to the next words. “She says she’ll show us. She says it’s not even far.”
“Where are they off to?” Lawes hissed. Even as Sturgeon had been speaking, some of the Finns had just walked off into the water, as if it was the most natural thing in the world. One by one they dived and were lost in the cold lake, hidden behind the moon’s reflection, and I thought, Not wolves; otters.
“She says…” Sturgeon was listening intently. “She says that she has… ah, siunaaminen something… She’s…”
Viina walked forward, slipping between our guns, cutting between me and Sturgeon, close enough to brush us both with her fingers before we jumped aside. She was going for Cormoran, who backed off hurriedly as the Finn reached out a hand.
“No, it’s your drone, she says she’s – blessed? – your drone. She… Again please?”
Viina looked back at him with amusement and made fluttering motions with her hands.
Sturgeon nodded hurriedly. “Your drone can fly now. Your drone can follow the track. You’ll see. Follow her, but send the drone ahead.”
I nodded permission, and Cormoran sent her last remaining remote ahead. Viina said one word, and it was obviously, “Follow,” or something close.
“What about the rest of them?” Franken demanded. “Why aren’t they coming?”
What Viina had to say about that, after Sturgeon translated, well… She said there were a lot of men where we were going. Did we really want all of them dead?
CHAPTER SIX
HOWEVER SHE DID it, Viina blessed that drone good. Cormoran flew it through that fly-spattered air and never lost signal once.
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