Ironclads

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  The trail took us inland at the start like Cormoran had said, then it broke out of the trees and shadowed the course of a road that the fighting had left shattered like a long strip of jigsaw pieces. All this time we were following on foot, while Cormoran had one eye on the terrain in front of her and one on the drone’s camera feed. We’d reached the road ourselves when she called a halt. “All right, this you’ve got to see.”

  What it was, was a castle. This was Europe, and suddenly it had become the Europe we Americans were always promised, because the bad guys were holed up inside an honest-to-God ruined castle. And in the bombed-out restaurant and parking lot across the road from it, but that doesn’t sound half as impressive.

  My HUD map called it Brahehus and it was obvious that the end had come for it a long time before anyone thought of airstrikes. It had a few intact walls, though, and the drone showed that there was a prefab cabin pitched in there, and a bigger camp outside the walls around a space that had been cleared and flattened as a landing pad. This wasn’t just some temporary camp. There were plenty of men there; a handful of vehicles. They had been there a while.

  “Come on,” I said, and Viina was pacing back and forth like she was about to just take off without us. Cormoran was still messing with the images, though, panning and searching until at last she said, “There!”

  They’d roofed off the castle with heat baffles, but the drone had snuck in under them, neat as you like, creeping into that covered space through the gaping eyesocket space where a window had once been. It took a single image before retreating, and even then the enemy security grid had started to wonder if something was wrong. Cormoran did a lot of finagling to stay undetected that long.

  We got a good look at that single image of the cabin, as Cormoran zoomed and let her software’s pattern recognizers do their work.

  There was a shape through the window there. We couldn’t exactly buzz the drone down to head level to be certain, but it sure as hell looked like an American-made Scion shell to me. We’d found our man. Or we’d found his metal clothes, but either way it was the best lead in a field of one.

  IT TOOK US a day’s walk to catch up with the drone, keeping under cover wherever we could and hoping that nobody else’s remote eyes had been ‘blessed’ by the Finns. Viina kept going in and out – now loping alongside us, then just gone for an hour or more on her own business. She made it painfully clear that we were slowing her down. She looked at us as though we were… Jesus, I don’t know: pets; barely tolerated cripples; last year’s models.

  We let the dark gather before we got too close to the castle. I mean, sure, we’d all show up on thermals – except Viina – but no sense in making things easy for them.

  By that time, Cormoran had built up a picture of how security worked there and got a few clues as to who these clowns were.

  “Corporate,” she told us. “Not Skaalmed, and their insignia isn’t flagging up as known, but their gear is good. If they were just sitting tight, I think we’d be screwed, but they’re packing up.”

  Lawes was staring close at her screens, eyes narrowed. “’Cos the front’s moving this way,” he suggested. “They want to scram before our side get here.”

  “They’re moving our man out then?” Franken put in, “Reckon we can grab him on the road?”

  “They’ll be traveling faster than we can, now we’ve lost the Trojan,” I pointed out. “We’re not equipped to strike a convoy.”

  Lawes looked up at me. “You’re going to suggest we walk in there, aren’t you.”

  “They’re not friends of yours, then? I thought you knew all the Nord corporate types.”

  “Even the ones I know, they wouldn’t exactly want me walking in on some Scion-kidnapping operation.”

  He wasn’t quite looking me in the eyes, which I guess was normal for him, but my gut said to press him. “Who are they, Lawes?”

  He bared his teeth again, that tic of his that made him look like he was trying to use bad dentistry like a threat display. “There, that badge there. That’s the field operations division of LMK. The big agri boys: Lantgهrd Mass Kemisk.”

  “They’re on our side, aren’t they?” Franken asked slowly.

  “No, no they’re not,” Lawes told him. “I mean, yes, there’s a US subsidiary, just like there’s a Nord one and an Indian one and, you know, anywhere there’s money. They’re one of the big players here, though.”

  “They asked us in,” Cormoran recalled. “Or they were one of the corps requesting US help when the Nord govs turned socialist.”

  “And they’ve been pitching into the fight ever since, whenever it looked like the US corp forces were getting too much of an upper hand.” Lawes glowered at the lot of us, then jabbed a finger at Sturgeon. “Ask him, he knows. If you think this is a fight between US and Nord govs then you’re bloody morons. This is corps versus corps using poor bastards like us as the meat in the grinder.”

  “Because it’s cheaper for them to have the army die in their place,” Sturgeon agreed softly.

  “Enough of that,” I snapped. “What this is, is a rescue operation. Those are our orders. Let Capitol Hill and Stockholm sort out the big picture between them. We’re going to go in, grab our man and get out.”

  Lawes stared at me. Well, they all stared at me, but I remember Lawes most.

  “You’re cracked,” he spat out. “Sarge, sod me but you’re mad. LSK are serious business from South Africa to the sodding Arctic Circle. We do not want to go poke them with a stick.”

  “No, soldier, I don’t want to, but it looks like they’re leaving me no choice,” I told him.

  “It’s suicide.”

  “No, it’s just us doing our jobs.”

  “It’s suicide, just to go drag out some over-privileged nancy boy who’s stupid enough to get himself caught. You think they won’t just ransom him back when they’re done? You think anybody’s going to ransom us?”

  “That’s our mission,” I told them.

  “They’ve got a couple hundred men in there,” Lawes snapped. “They’ve got better gear than us.”

  “And most of them aren’t at that castle, they’re over the road in the main camp,” I pointed out patiently. “I reckon whoever’s in charge just couldn’t resist pitching his command in an actual castle, and so he’s ended up separate to most of his force. Now, I’m not suggesting we take the place by storm. We’re going to exploit their officer’s dumbass ideas about living history and do this sneaky. I thought sneaky was what you did, Lawes.”

  “You think LSK have such toss security that I can walk straight in? We’re not exactly corporate industrial espionage over here.”

  “Well, actually,” said Cormoran, which diverted all that aggrieved disbelief from me. She shrugged. “The ECM from the fly-screen is screwing with their systems a lot. Now it’s not touching mine, I can start messing with them.”

  “Can you cut us a gap in the fence?” I was thinking about thermal and motion sensors and just plain cameras, the sort of security even a mobile base like this would have.

  She was looking at the screens of her case again. “Their systems are shielded against casual intrusion,” she said, eyes narrowed. “Gonna need to go hammer some spikes in. That means someone getting there on foot and not tripping the alarm.” She looked up at us brightly. “And it’s not going to be me. It’ll take all my concentration to open a gap, and twice that to keep it open.”

  “So once we’ve got a gap?”

  She grinned, a brief flash of white teeth. “Then your handpicked elite go and see if our man’s still there. Take the drone with you and get it close to their data systems. They’re not open to access from outside queries, but with a bit of proximity you never know. I’ll see what I can read while you’re over there.”

  “Because you won’t be one of my elite, right?”

  “Sure as hell no.” Unapologetic as you please.

  “Fine then: spike their defenses; team go in; spring our guy; GTFO.” Pe
rhaps not one of my most sophisticated plans.

  “Who gets to go spike?” Sturgeon asked. Nobody was falling over themselves to volunteer. Cormoran’s spikes were little data relays someone would have to splice into the corps system. Once in, they would act as open terminals for her signals, letting her turn whole sections of their grid on and off, hopefully without being noticed.

  My eyes had turned to Lawes. I’d seen the tech he was carting about with him. He squinted back at the drone image, obviously turning the odds over in his mind. “Your Mr bloody Speling better be good for the bonus,” he muttered grudgingly

  He upended his pack and brought out his sneak-suit, which would mask his heat signature – and fry him if he wore it for too long. It was patterned with slow-shifting shadows that broke up his silhouette and muddied his movements, all the cues that electronic or human security would be attuned to. With his skinny frame got up in that, his face hidden by goggles and a bandit-style bandana, it was hard to focus on him even standing there in front of us. There would be electronics in the cloth to screw with motion sensors, too, and even then he would have to be damn careful.

  We went over the details again, the signal, the timing – he had thirty minutes to get somewhere before he’d need to pull out, or we’d assume that he’d been compromised. It was a pain in the ass that we couldn’t send a drone in with him, but Cormoran would be busy redirecting their systems, and she didn’t have a second drone to spare any more. Besides, if the enemy’s security was any good, then they’d be keyed up to detect drone infiltration rather than human. After all, why would they expect that anyone would be stupid enough to just walk into their base?

  We lost track of Lawes once he’d left us, which meant he was doing something right. Cormoran was working, and the rest of us got to just sit around. I’d already decided that I’d go in myself, if Lawes could cut us a big enough hole, and I’d take Franken with me because if Cousin Jerome really was there, and not able to just walk on his own feet, we’d need someone big to carry him. Sturgeon and Cormoran would be our cover, if we came out hot.

  I’d half expected Viina to volunteer her services when it came to going in, but she was just sitting back with her knees gathered up to her chin and watching us with that cool, alien amusement. If she actually understood what we were about, there was no indication of it.

  Just short of twenty minutes into our time and Cormoran said, “He’s doing it. I’m getting access. First spike is online. Yeah, that’s good.” Headware feeding her the data, she nodded blindly at her own mind’s eye. “I’m in. No alarms tripped. I see the security grid… trying to isolate the cabin from the main camp.” Abruptly she grimaced. “No, no…” Her hands twitched, old keyboard reflexes surfacing briefly. “No, got it. Come on Lawes, don’t make me cover for you. It thinks it’s seen him… rerouting queries… The security’s… well, it’s OK, I guess. Always the problem with field ops like theirs, you never quite get the…” She went on, little scraps of sentences, half to us, half talking to a Lawes whose existence and actions she was having to infer from what she saw going on in the LMK system, and who couldn’t hear her in any event. And then at last, “Yeah, we’re good, we’re good. That looks stable, at least until they do a sweep… and there’s the signal. Over to you, Sergeant.” My HUD sprang up with a ground overlay showing me the corridor she’d cut through their security.

  I nodded to her and to Sturgeon, with one last glance at Viina in case she had decided we required her services. She hadn’t moved: apparently we were doing the next bit monster-free.

  We got half the way there before Lawes popped up in front of us, almost in arm’s reach before we saw him. A moment later he was desperately stripping away the camouflage. Inside, he was the color of well-done lobster.

  “Christ, I hate those bloody things,” he hissed, and just stared down Franken when the man growled at him. “Fuck me, don’t make me do that again.”

  “Stop complaining and let’s move before all your hard work gets overwritten,” I told him.

  The three of us followed Cormoran’s invisible road, briefly skirting the edge of the main camp before heading up to the castle. I could already see that Bahehus hadn’t exactly been Fort Knox even back in the day. The windows weren’t little slits that a man could get arrow-shot through, but were great big open holes in the walls – enough that it seemed more hole than wall in parts. Most of these had been screened over, but the whole place was still little more than period decoration for whatever was inside. They were relying on their system spotting any intruder, which was their bad luck.

  Lawes pulled us down, and we watched a trio of men pass along the foot of the castle wall before heading toward the main camp. They didn’t seem overly alert, and they were talking amongst themselves – my translator didn’t catch more than a few words, but I recognised the tone. These were soldiers at the end of their duty, eager to get back to their buddies. In the army, we said that corp forces had the best gear and the best pay, but they knew fuck all about proper discipline half the time. Apparently it was no different amongst the Nords.

  Then we were creeping further in, right up to the wall, and I’ll bet Franken was praying to Christ Lib that Cormoran had done her job properly or this was going to break all known records for going FUBAR. No klaxons and no red lights, though; more to the point no bullets coming our way.

  There was a front way into the castle courtyard where the cabin was, but none of us felt quite that confident. Instead, Lawes took one of the screened windows, isolated a trip-switch that would have started yelling, and then cut a slit in the plastic. He sized up Franken, widened the slit a bit, then made ‘after you’ gestures.

  “We’ll need more than that,” I murmured. “We might be coming out of here with a body.”

  For a moment Lawes stared at me blankly, but then he nodded and turned the slit into a flap, securing it with a clip to stop it flapping once we’d all clambered through.

  There were lights on in the cabin, and I did wonder whether we’d end up bagging some LMK director as a hostage. If our guy wasn’t there, and Cormoran couldn’t trawl it from their system, then we’d need someone to point us in the right direction, after all.

  It’s amazing how far ahead of yourself you can get, if you’re not keeping your mind on the here-and-now.

  So we crept up to that cabin. The front was all lit up, but the side where we were was shadowy, and still within the footprint of Cormoran’s attentions.

  Lawes signaled: did I want to try the front door? I didn’t, because no amount of electronic wizardry would keep us from just physically being seen.

  “I’ll go round the back,” he said, just a whisper in my helmet receiver. “Hold here.”

  When he was gone, I took the chance to examine the cabling running from the cabin. Most of it was clamped to the wall with staples, and some of it would be power, but maybe some was data. I got Cormoran’s drone out and moved it from one to another until it gave me a green light, like she’d said it would. Clamped there, it would try to read the LMK dataflow, and maybe it would turn up something useful if we found nothing more than an empty shell inside.

  “Come round the back, Sarge, I’ve got it sorted,” buzzed Lawes in my ear, and so we did, and we found Lawes there with a good dozen LMK soldiers, all waiting quiet as you please with their guns on us. We didn’t even get the chance to return the favor like we did with the partisans.

  Franken growled, deep in his chest, and I put a hand on his shoulder. Inside, I felt exactly the same, and when Lawes grinned at us I wanted to shove every one of those big teeth down his throat.

  “When?” I asked him flatly.

  He spread his hands. “Look, you’re new in this neck of the woods, right? You think you know how it works, us, them, all that shit. Only I told you it ain’t like that. Friends today are enemies tomorrow and the other way round. I’ve been here since the start. I’ve made bloody sure I kept on the good side of the big players, whichever side they were play
ing. You think I want to be on LMK’s shit list? You think I want to get myself killed on some bloody stupid suicide mission just because some rich Yank moron’s got himself caught?”

  “It wasn’t a suicide mission,” I ground out between my teeth.

  “Not until you sold us out, you little shit,” Franken added, with considerable restraint. “How the fuck did you even have time?”

  The Nord officer there laughed at that. “Oh, your friend here came right to us,” he explained in almost accentless English. “He was telling us his whole story while my men were splicing in your spikes. He wanted us to just send men to secure your team, but that sounded too much like a trap to me. Now we have you, we’ll go pick up your friends. Hopefully they won’t resist.”

  I said nothing. There didn’t seem to be much point lying about our numbers or capabilities, not when Lawes was being so obliging for them.

  They took our guns, disarmed us smartly of anything more dangerous than a spoon. I’d lost comms on the instant, all channels cut. I couldn’t send a warning to Sturgeon and Cormoran, but I hoped to hell that they’d notice I was suddenly off the grid.

  The LMK officer cocked his head. “Do you want to see your target, Sergeant Regan, isn’t it?” He must have taken my sullen grunt for confirmation, because he had the pair of us taken round the front of the cabin and escorted into the front door. The place looked like every prefab admin hut I ever saw: desk, terminal, furniture, and a couple of bunks at the back. There was paper, too, because nobody out in the field ever relies 100% on the electronics. Every soldier knows that things always go wrong. Of course, for us they’d gone wrong all at once and without warning.

  The Scion was there, too. It was seated, although the legs must have been taking a lot of the weight because the metal frame chair didn’t look that sturdy. The shine of its chassis had taken more than a few knocks – it needed a polish before it was fit for the parade ground, certainly. The sculpted face, between and above its broad shoulderplates, was a good enough approximation of Cousin Jerome’s to give me positive ID.