For the seventh time, I watched as the American president, brown hair half-gray and looking as tired as I felt, explained the need for a swift and indirect intervention in regards to Isla Mariposa. He lambasted me as a murderer who was holding an entire nation hostage to terror, and the scene was interspersed with images of my smoke-spewing factories, me smashing up rebel barricades, and a really good shot of me shooting Ricio in the leg with that pain laser a few days back.
Heh. Good times.
The screen cut to political pundits screaming at each other, and I knew I had at least another day or two, barring idiocy. The political parties of the United States were like a two-headed giant. They spent most of their time quarreling with each other and trying to sabotage the other head. Regardless of the damage they caused to the body itself.
The problem was that body was freakishly strong. Right now I was in a sweet spot... due to the election year they couldn’t quite ignore me, but also due to the election year, neither side was willing to commit all-out to my destruction, because the other side would come down on them for either wasting resources, or exposing American lives to risk. The fact is I had gone out of my way to avoid giving the US casus belli, and unless I did, a full commitment would cost political capital.
I flipped the channel, watched the video cut to a photo of ships at sea, and a few shots of rafts landing on the beaches of Putnam’s Providence. This was the real meat of it, and the publicity stills gave me some small relief. I hadn’t merited a carrier group. They’d peeled off a destroyer group, a couple of cruisers, and some frigates. Still enough guns and material and troops on those ships to settle my poor nation’s hash ten times over, but an aircraft carrier would have been game over. It would have also been a big, billions-dollar target. No telling when the crazy supervillain might go on a suicide run, after all. I’d already proven my willingness to destroy entire city blocks. Couldn’t risk a ship that cost more than my nation’s GDP.
“Politics. Man, that’s depressing stuff,” Alpha sat on the table, as far away from the warhead as he could get.
“True, but only fools ignore it. Learn to read between the lines and follow the money, and the world suddenly starts making a lot of sense.”
“Get anything useful from this? Besides the forces we’re up against?”
“Very much so. They’re not putting boots on the ground. Well, technically they are putting troops on Mariposa soil, but they’re there as ‘advisors’. Here to offer the rebels ‘training’ and ‘support’ and all that.”
“Pretty sure I heard quotation marks around some of that.”
“You did. Basically they’re giving the rebels a safe spot to operate from. So long as the troops are in Putnam’s Providence, any attack against the area would be considered an attack on the troops. Which is a strike to the body of the two-headed giant, and the two heads stop fighting long enough to club us down. Game over. It gets worse, too.”
“How so?”
“The support Dire mentioned, they’ll be providing arms and vehicles and bullets and supplies to the rebels. Not high-quality stuff, of course, but better than Ricio’s got, even with the pain lasers.” I sighed. “Which just became a little more useless. With a safe base at their back, the rebels can drag back their people who are incapacitated from pain, and the loyalists can’t pursue. Pain wears off, the victims will be back in the field again.” I frowned. “And that’s not even counting their reliance on the broadcast node robots. See, the US doesn’t regard electronic warfare or hacking as acts of war. Most other industrialized powers do. The US doesn’t. Which lets them hack, disrupt, and target Dire’s drones in the field with impunity, so long as civilian targets aren’t at risk.”
“This is sounding pretty bleak.”
“Yep. The war’s probably lost. All they have to do is gear up the rebels, send them South, and keep moving their base of operations up as the rebels gain territory.”
“How probable is that probably?”
“Too many variables.” I turned to the console, spooled through the various constructor bots, checking on them one by one. With the speed-reading aspect of my power, it took only seconds. I punched in commands, ordered four loose bots to come and pick up the warhead, prepare it for transport. “Going to put this nuke in the lair for now.”
“Is that a wise idea? Lots of sensitive gear in there. Like Suru. Hate to lose her to stray radiation.”
“Can’t keep it here. Maestro would just send someone to take it back. No, the lair’s secure enough. Gonna park it in one of the lower tunnels, where it can annoy the bats. Hell, it’s Eastman-Laird radiation, might get a few mutants out of the deal.”
I was kidding, of course. Making mutants randomly was a sure way to get heroes. I’d put it away from anything living.
“You sure that’s not his goal? Getting you to take it to your secret lair and all?”
“Checked it over for tracking devices, secondary triggers, and damn near everything else. Barring dimensionally-phased magical entities, we’re good. And if he’s got those we’re fucked anyhow.” I left the room, stripping off my lead suit as I went.
Back in the office, I got Suru to turn on my remote voice modulation, and radioed up Ricio. “General Ricio, respond.”
The signal fuzzed, and skipped. Yeah, the US forces were listening in. That was fine. I didn’t care if they knew my orders.
After a few repetitions, he got on the horn. “Empress. What is your bidding?”
“By now you’ve assessed the situation, fallen back to Malo Verde, and fortified the city for siege.”
“This is so.”
“You will hold, Ricio. Reinforcements are coming.”
“Will you come, Empress? Will you fight beside us?”
Was there something in his tone, or was it merely paranoia on my part? “Of course,” I lied. “So long as you hold.”
“We shall, Empress. To the last.”
“Signing off.” I turned the radio off, and leaned back in the chair.
Alpha phased in. “Moment of truth, time, huh?”
“Prisoner’s dilemma. Heard of it?”
“No. And someone locked me out of the gridnet so I can’t look it up.”
I picked up two pads of paper, drew a smiley face on the first page of each. Drew a frowny face on the second page of each. “You have two prisoners. They are interrogated separately. If neither of them rats the other out, they both go free.” I tapped the smiley face on both pads. “If one of them sells out the other...” I flipped the second pad to its frown face. “Then the traitor goes free. The loyal one remains imprisoned.” I tapped the smiley face.
“What happens if they both sell each other out?”
“Then neither goes free. Either they both win, only one wins, or they both lose. No other outcomes. And neither prisoner knows how the other’s going to jump until they do.”
“Sounds like the way to beat the test is to smile all the time.”
“Right. Except that humans aren’t wired that way. How do you know the other guy isn’t frowning?”
“You think Ricio’s gonna frown?”
“What has Dire done for him to smile? She showed up out of nowhere, usurped the throne, threw him immediately into the field, and brought the US down on his country.”
“And shot him in the leg with a pain laser.”
“Well yes, that too. Just a low-intensity shot.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Whatever. At the very least, this is a chance for him to solve two problems with one stone.”
“So you’re not going, then?”
I grinned. “Never said that.”
“So you do think he’ll smile.”
“Fuck no.” I straightened up, feeling weariness leave me as I contemplated a lot of fun work ahead. “Dire’s going, but she’s going to be smart about it.”
Three days, it took. Three days to expand the factories, build new ones, and get the production lines going. In the meantime I put Alpha in c
harge of working with the police, loaning out some of the palace guard-bots as patrol boosters. They were roughly humanoid, metal skeletons with glowing red eyes. Sturdy, solid, and built for extra toughness. James Cameron would have hit me with a lawsuit if he’d seen them, but again, it’s a villain perk not to have to care about that sort of thing.
I took the opportunity to check in on the rebels in the factories. Once you got past the scary, spiky décor, they were actually pretty safe spots. The living quarters below were clean and air-conditioned, and the food deliveries I’d arranged with local grocers were arriving on time and in full. That said, none of the rebels looked happy to be there, much less slaving away on assembly lines for six-hour daily shifts.
I’d originally set this up so that if Damiano assaulted the city I could have a “malfunction” and suddenly a huge batch of rebels armed with pain lasers would show up to help seal his victory. But the dumbass had gone and managed to hook up with the same Americans who looked the other way when Corazon was running the show.
After that, I took stock of the city, sending housefly-sized spybots into every residence and business, watching and sampling conversations.
People were scared, and that was sensible. There was a lot to be scared about.
Weirdly, though, they were more scared of the US than me.
They didn’t exactly like me, but I was the devil they knew. And I’d proven myself strong.
A number of them were praying for me. I didn’t know how to take that.
I set the spy-bugs to propagate and spread, and monitor for word usage. It’d take them a few more days to range the breadth of the city. So long as the wrong words didn’t come up, I could fire and forget them, and move on to more pressing matters.
Like my army.
And on the third day, as the fifth hovertank rolled off the line, I felt it was time.
Loading up the vehicles with guard-bots, equipped with basic particle blasters, I slaved the ground forces to my beacon and flew northwest.
By now the way was familiar to me. I kept pace with my forces, as they followed the road. IED’s would have been a concern, but vectored thrust meant that explosives that could core cars or trucks wouldn’t do a thing to my hovertanks.
The trip took two hours to make, but I didn’t mind. I used the time to map out my power grid, maneuver the broadcasting nodes through the jungle to set up overlapping fields. The US-assisted forces would be deploying BCM, Broadcast Countermeasures, to strike at their foes’ power grid and hinder any portable devices. Wouldn’t matter much to my loyalists, who were used to functioning without one, but it would affect my bots. I’d put in batteries for emergency use, but they didn’t have enough for more than a few minutes per unit. Enough to fall back to another broadcast node, if one got destroyed or compromised.
Also enough to power the self-destruct fail-safes. Nothing huge, just some thermite in sensitive spots. I didn’t want any technology that was worth anything falling into enemy hands. The stuff I could make was light-years ahead of conventional engineering, and I planned to keep it that way. At least until I could guarantee maximum benefit to the world without some greedy superpower hogging it all.
Five minutes out from Malo Verde, I deployed the See-gulls.
Bird shaped, each about the size of a housecat, they were programmed to go up to cloud level and watch from above. Each one would fill in a part of the tactical map, and provide me with literal eyes in the sky. They peeled off from the hovertanks in droves, boosting upward, not much more than a hand-sized gravitic engine, a camera, and some sophisticated broadcasting equipment. And yes, of course, scaled-down batteries and thermite charges.
It was all coordinated through a military-grade Voxcaster, built into my suit. Impossible to hack... but not impossible to jam. Damned difficult, but not impossible. I had workarounds if it came to that. I hoped it wouldn’t.
And then there was no more time. Malo Verde loomed under me, little changed from my last trip, at first glance. Then my gaze strayed north, and I winced. The roads had been obliterated, some choked with rubble by triggered avalanches. Charred hulks of construction vehicles choked others, and sandbag barricades filled the spaces between. My audio sensors picked up the sounds of distant fire, and the thump of artillery. Judging by the puffs of dust, someone was trying to get some shells into the city proper.
Judging by the rubble heaps that had once been buildings on the north end of town, they’d succeeded. More than once.
I realized I was actually feeling angry. Before this, property damage meant little to me. Things could break, but lives were what mattered. All else could be replaced. But this... well, this was my responsibility now, at least while I was here. To have it so cavalierly torn apart, for the sake of an unnecessary war was annoying at best.
Something to think about for the future. For now, I had a war to fight.
I landed at the courthouse, and my hovertanks rolled up behind me, cannons gleaming, missile packs and point-defense systems swiveling, tracking potential threats. Each one the size of two SUVs glued together, each one packed with enough ordnance to level a small town. I needed a name for them, I recognized, as guard-bots dropped off to either side of each tank.
Devastators. Yes, that about summed them up.
General Ricio emerged, once more. He looked even more haggard than the last time, though he perked up a bit when he saw the reinforcements I’d brought.
“Good, good. There will be more?”
“NO.”
“This is it?” Disbelief warred with resignation on his face. “Are you—”
“LET US DISCUSS THIS INSIDE.”
He got a hold of himself. “Yes. That would be best.” I dialed my volume down.
I followed him, heedless of the damage I was doing to the old tile floor. It was simple and somber inside, a stone-lined chamber with barred windows, a high judge’s stand, and some old, dusty benches. The walls were lined with charts and maps, and old chalkboards had been dug up for use in battle plans. I surveyed the hastily-drawn arrows and numbers, mapped them to my forces, and winced. The three days I’d taken had cost them.
But they were still within tolerances and predicted losses.
Ricio might just be able to pull this off, with my help.
“Alpha, you there?” I muttered through my vox.
“Oh yeah. You’re faint, but I’m here. No trouble in town.” I’d expected Maestro to cause trouble in my absence, maybe set up another trap for my return. Alpha had been the best choice to ward that off.
The only choice, to tell the truth. My track record with human assets wasn’t good, thus far. Spetta had been turned, El Hombre Último had never truly been on my side, my Minister of the Interior was dead from snakebite, and Señor Acertijo played his own game. When all was said and done, I was alone here. All save for Ricio, and I didn’t know if he was going to smile or frown.
Right now he was literally scowling. “You bring me five tanks? Five?”
“MORE TANKS THAN YOU HAVE EVER COMMANDED BEFORE, GENERAL.” It was true. Mariposa’s terrain didn’t lend itself well to tracked vehicles. Their motorized forces were mainly jeeps and technicals, basically converted pickup trucks with weapons mounted on the back.
“This is true, but this is not enough to win. And how many of those metal skeleton things you bring? I saw maybe two hundred.”
“TWO HUNDRED AND TWENTY FIVE. MORE WILL ARRIVE TOMORROW.” I was out of the rare earths required to make more Devastators, but the guard-bots were simple enough we could continue mass production.
“There may not be a tomorrow.”
“EXPLAIN.”
“It isn’t terrain. We’ve got the edge there. It isn’t weapons. We’ve got more experience with ours, even if the Americans gave them better shit and all the bullets in the world. It isn’t even artillery, though I could really use those rockets you blew up right about now.”
“THAT’S WHAT THE DEVASTATORS ARE FOR.”
“The wha
t now?”
“THE HOVERTANKS.”
“Who pilots those?”
“NOBODY. THEY ARE SLAVED TO YOUR VOICE.” I slid over a spare voxcaster. Limited channels on this one, of course. “THIS ALLOWS YOU TO CONTROL THE DRONES AND TANKS. SAY WHAT YOU WANT THEM TO DO, AND THEY’LL DO IT.”
He accepted it, but his expression stayed sour. “Whatever. It isn’t any of those things I mentioned that’s killing us. It’s morale. Every day, we get more deserting. We haven’t won a victory since we took Malo Verde, and that was good, but it wasn’t enough.”
“IT’S MORE THAN THAT, ISN’T IT? THE UNITED STATES IS BEHIND THE REBELS NOW.”
He exhaled a large breath, went to the table and scooped up a half-full bottle. “You know why Corazon kept his power, all these years? Why none of my more ambitious peers ever decided they’d had enough, and stormed the palace? Los Estados Unidos.”
“THAT’S THE ONLY THING THAT KEPT YOU IN CHECK?”
He took a slug from the bottle, and wheezed laughter. “Not the only thing, no. But the only thing that really mattered, in the end. He used to make sure we knew he was connected. That he had something that made the States back him no matter what. It wasn’t just that he was their lap dog, because sometimes he wasn’t. But he got away with shit that normally gets CIA kill squads on your ass.”
“WHY?”
“Nobody knows. Some blackmail, some embarrassing secret from the cold war, something stupid. But we knew anyone tried to take the throne, we’d have to deal with the US. And my men, they aren’t dumb. They know we’re up against my nightmare, right over those hills, wearing a rebel mask. So yeah, two-fifths of my men are gone and they ain’t coming back.”
“UNLESS WE WIN.”
“Maybe not even then. Corazon was harsh to those who betrayed their oath.” He studied me, carefully.
“DIRE IS NOT CORAZON.”
“No. No you are not.” He took another slug, put the bottle down. “You really think we can win this?”
“DON’T KNOW YET. NEED YOUR STATUS REPORT FIRST.”
“Your honesty is appreciated.” He pulled over a chair, sat in it. Started to wave his hand at another chair, turned it into a stretch, looking sheepish. None of these chairs would hold my weight, of course. “We’ve got enough bullets to hold. We’ve got short-range mortars to drop on their heads from the hills, above. That’s not a problem. Basically they have to come at us through the pass, or not at all. The problem is they have the artillery. The US gave them some old field guns. Their aim is shit, but they still cause casualties. And recently they’ve come up with a new trick. They take heavy vehicles from Putnam’s Providence, armor them up, fill them with explosives, and run them at the barricades.”
Dire : Wars (The Dire Saga Book 4) Page 23