Raven's Song

by Launnie Roush

  “This doesn’t help me,” Michael remarked with a trace of sarcasm.

  “Don’t be fooled by the unassuming surroundings. We’re currently being targeted by a multitude of deadly automated security measures. You need to stand still while we’re scanned,” Frederic warned him.

  Michael was troubled by the thought of being surrounded by unseen lethal devices, but he stood stoic alongside his father-in-law. A synthetic voice signaled an all clear, and Fredric led him to the metal door. Michael prepared to lay his palms on its surface when Frederic seized him by the wrist.

  “Don’t touch that! It’ll kill you!” he cried.

  Michael cautiously turned away from the door and regarded his father-in-law with a quizzical look, “What is this place?”

  “It’s the Box, a vault containing the greatest treasure of the state of Raven, and perhaps my most valuable personal asset,” Frederic revealed.

  “Your most valuable asset?”

  Frederic nodded, “So far, our engagements with the Fulsoms have been small affairs carried out by a handful of VSF troopers. Now, however, we’ll be entering into full scale war with the Fulsoms in the coming weeks.”

  “That’s a terrible idea! The Spiders’ll kill Del if we move against the Fulsoms, not to mention the deeper trouble we’ll get into with the president!” Michael blurted.

  “It won’t be a war in the textbook sense. It’ll be a war of shadows. We’ll fight, that much is true, but we’ll do so in such a way that we’ll never be implicated by the House of Spiders, the Fulsoms, or the president,” Frederic elaborated.

  “How’s that possible? Are you gonna have thousands of VSF troopers dress up in disguises when they take the field of battle?”

  “Close!”

  Michael shook his head, “I’m still confused.”

  “It’s no secret Alexander Fulsom’s been treating the employees of Liberty Enterprises quite cruelly as of late, practically eliminating their luxury pay and forcing uncompensated overtime on them. I don’t think it’d be a farfetched notion to say that they’re on the verge of striking. So, instead of a strike, what if it appeared as if a radical group of Liberty employees stole a shipment of SIRs, programmed and outfitted them for battle, and released them on Liberty holdings? If we cripple Liberty, we cripple the Fulsoms and the economy of Snake, forcing the Fulsoms and the Snake government to act in our favor. SIRs would be perfect black-op soldiers, too; they wouldn’t leak information or turn traitor, and only Maximilian, Caitlyn, and Ronald would have to step foot on the field of battle with them, mainly as a safety measure. They’d be the troopers in disguise you mentioned earlier.”

  “A SIR in battle?! That’s sacrilege, pops, and moral and ethical implications aside, all SIRs are connected to the Hub, a connection which cannot be severed, and any attempt to illegally program one would be caught and traced in seconds!”

  “I’m well aware of that, and I have ways around all that,” Frederic insisted.

  “Bullshit!”

  A look of sadness appeared on Frederic’s face, “If any other course of action was as effective, I’d gladly take it.”

  “And you’ve brought me to this Box, this vault, to show me these supposed SIRs?” Michael asked.

  “That and something equally as important. As my daughter’s husband and most senior General of the VSF, you must know of this.”

  “What’s in this vault, exactly, besides these illegal SIRs?”

  “Let me answer your question with one of my own. What do you know about guns?” Frederic countered.

  Horror etched itself into every facet of Michael’s face, “Guns are the left hand of evil! The Truth forever banned their existence from the Federation! Merely knowing the location of one is an offense punishable by death!”

  “Correct, but before we continue, there are some things which you should be made aware of.”

  All his life, Michael had been taught that the Truth was the highest of laws, and every good person obeyed it unquestioningly, lessons he firmly believed. Now, his father-in-law was talking of firearms, an act explicitly forbidden by the Truth, as casually as one might discuss dinner plans.

  Frederic took his son-in-law’s silence as expectancy, so he proceeded with his speech, “When the Truth was written, it did say that firearms were to be removed from the Federation so that their evil could never again do no harm. It was also understood that the rest of the world did not share the feelings of the Federation’s founders, so precautions were taken. The founding of the Federation’s state armies and the construction of the Ban are the most obvious of these precautions, but not the only ones. If you read the Truth carefully, you’ll find a passage that gives each state the right to form arsenals in order to help their armies defend the Federation from its enemies, both foreign and domestic.”

  “And they have melee weapons, as it should be! You’re not sayin’ that every state has an underground vault full of guns, are you?!”

  “Guns, explosives, missiles, bombs, warplanes, tanks, and all other manner of militaria, except for nuclear ordinance. The progenitor of my family line was tasked with the safe keeping of the Raven arsenal, and here it’s sat, unused for centuries, in a facility known as the Box,” Frederic replied as he went to the metal door and laid a hand on its center.

  “Our ancestors stored these things here, hoping they’d never again see the light of day. For now, we’ll simply use some of the more mild explosives and our SIRs on the Fulsom family's industrial installations, but if we’re ever faced with enemies carrying combat rifles, then we’ll have no choice but to retaliate in kind,” Frederic finished coldly.

  A loud buzzing sounded, and Frederic stepped back from the door. A rattling sound echoed from within the massive door, and with an almost human groan of protest it began to grind upwards. No words passed between the men as the door finished its ponderous rise into the ceiling and settled in its track with a loud metallic clang. Beyond the door was a massive room crammed full of computer consoles of all shape and function. These devices flickered to life on their own accord, screen-clouds materializing above them and spewing out various figures and images, none of which made the slightest sense to Michael. Frederic motioned Michael into the room, so he entered with cautious steps.

  The far end of the room remained concealed in gloom, and when it was finally illuminated, Michael learned it featured a long series of floor-to-ceiling windows. When he moved close enough to see what lay beyond these windows, he let out a wordless sound of utter astonishment. The room he stood in was in actuality a control booth perched high above a cavernous space that was so massive he could not see its far end. Stark gray reinforced concrete covered its functional surfaces, giving it the appearance of a grim, manmade cave.

  The one thing that amazed Michael more than the room itself was the unfathomable collection of weapons stored within. Row upon row of racks holding thousands of firearms stretched away from the control booth as far as the eye could see. A flicker on one of the screen-clouds attracted his attention, and he watched wide-eyed as images of tanks, military aircraft, and missiles flashed before him. Just as disturbing were the images which followed these, images of an entire corps of SIRs with slate gray skin standing at rigid attention.

  “As I said before,” Frederic said almost reverently, “we’ll only use these heretical devices if they’re used against us first.”

  Despite his desire to hurt the Fulsoms, avenge his niece’s mutilation and his mother-in-law’s murder, and rescue his nephew from their clutches, Michael desperately hoped they would never have to use the forbidden weaponry within the Box do so.

  NINETEEN

  Caitlyn sat silently among the twenty-five gray-skinned SIRs filling the passenger hold of a large APC. In her lap was a falchion, a short, curved sword which Michael had chosen to arm the VSF SIRs with. The SIRs, none of which had ever been linked to the Hub to begin with, had instead been linked to the Box’s central computer intelligence, which provided them with
almost limitless combat knowledge. To prevent the SIRs from acting outside acceptable mission parameters, they would always be sent into battle with a single disguised human handler, hence her presence among the ominous machines. She, like all the handlers, carried a remote kill switch device which could be used to instantly shut down the machines at any point.

  She recalled with some distaste the intensive, crash-course training regimen she had to complete upon joining the VSF. Six months of classes on military theory and corporate military law were condensed into an exhausting six-week schedule. These were accompanied by rigorous combat training sessions which augmented her already impressive martial skills. After completing the training, she had been sent on her first assignment in the VSF, a raid on a large Liberty Enterprises warehouse. The raid had been wildly successful, and Caitlyn had proven herself a truly formidable warrior, racking up a staggering kill count. Nearly two dozen raids followed in quick succession, and she performed with equal skill in each one.

  Three days ago, Michael had called a meeting. He had announced that he had decided that she would be the perfect trooper to oversee the first SIR deployment, an assault targeting a guarded convoy of Liberty Enterprises chemical trucks. Ronald had argued that sending her on such an important mission without more combat experience was a dangerous error. He and Michael and gone back and forth, and Ronald had eventually looked to Max for help.

  “You’d better ask her what she thinks,” he suggested as he looked to her.

  Caitlyn had answered without hesitation, “Lemme at ‘em!”

  And she still felt that way as she and the SIRs neared their destination. She reached up and slipped a gray nanite-reinforced polyester balaclava over her head. Over this she fitted a pair of tactical combat goggles, rendering her face completely covered. She still hated how this headgear and the accompanying gray fatigues and combat armor made her look strikingly similar to a Spider genin, but she also understood the need for the anonymity they provided. Her mind turned to Del, as it often did nowadays, and as always it killed her to think that her baby boy was all alone in some terrifying place with no one to care for him.

  Though the thought brought the sting of tears to her eyes, it also helped to steel her for what she knew was about to come. She could feel the APC coasting to a halt, and her pulse increased to a gallop. The APC, an ancient vehicle outfitted with modern hover jets, was supposed to block the road, stopping a Liberty Enterprises chemical truck convoy. Before the enemy could react, Caitlyn would spring from the APC’s rear alongside the SIRs and rain chaos down upon them.

  The next two minutes dragged by like two complete eons, then suddenly the transport’s hold was bathed in a dull yellow light. The SIRs all stood and came to attention, their falchions held at ready. Caitlyn gained her feet as well and seconds later the large rear panel of the passenger hold fell forward, letting in a wash of early morning sunlight. Caitlyn and the SIRs stormed out of the transport, their relative silence rendering them all the more menacing. Their objective, a convoy of fourteen Mustang-owned hovering tanker trucks, was less than fifty yards from them. The trucks sat idling in the left lane of the highway. The ambush location had been chosen because the hilly landscape the highway ran through would prevent the trucks from turning about or fleeing cross-country easily.

  The LSA troopers, who had been riding two to a truck, were now arrayed around the convoy in a loose circle. One of them had been approaching the VSF transport, which had barreled down a nearby hill and come to a sudden halt with its bulk blocking both lanes of the highway. When Caitlyn and the SIRs had burst from the transport, this trooper’s face had registered almost idiotic surprise. He had just started to turn on his heel when the first SIR streaked past, the machine ferociously lashing out with its falchion in passing. The result of the blow was horrendous, the man’s body being cleaved nearly in two. Blood and viscera were just starting to spew from the wound when the remaining SIRs stormed past, Caitlyn among them.

  The other LSA troopers had been spurred to panicked action and were moving to engage the SIRs. Caitlyn had come within combat range of one of the troopers and they began battle. The man was quite skilled and used his rapier and dagger as if they were natural extensions of his arms. He and Caitlyn moved about in a warrior’s dance in which she dodged and deflected her adversary’s various lightning-quick attacks. She waited with a cool, calculating patience and when she saw a fleeting gap in her adversary’s defenses, she struck. She lunged forward and with a cross-body slash sank her blade deep into his unprotected flank.

  There was a heavy thud as the blade’s edge bit into flesh and a wet squelching when she yanked it free. The man let out a deafening shriek as a spray of hot blood coated her forearm, but before she could fully process all this sensory input, a blur of motion in her periphery snatched her attention back to the battle. She pivoted on her heel just in time to deflect a rapier thrust from a new opponent. After that, her existence was nothing but battle. She moved constantly in order to keep from being wounded and to position herself for strikes of her own. As she logged more and more hours in true combat, she was surprised to learn how often she had to use unarmed combat techniques, frequently finding that a punch, kick, or throwing technique was all that stood between her and catastrophe.

  As the battle raged she managed to catch momentarily glimpses of the SIRs in action and was left wholly astounded. SIRs were typically more skilled and precise than humans at most tasks, and battle was apparently no exception. The machines, being more physically able than their organic opposition, fought with an irreproachable prowess. They moved faster, hit harder and more accurately, and took greater amounts of damage than any human ever could. They were even capable of superhuman feats; twisting their joints well beyond natural functioning angles and moving with astounding bursts of speed. Making all this more unsettling was the fact that they remained completely silent throughout the engagement.

  Though the battle seemed to drag on for hours, it was over in roughly fifteen minutes. Caitlyn, unaware of this fact, was whipping about wildly, her senses on high alert as she sought out another opponent. A large silhouette stepped in front of her, and she had already struck when it registered that she was attacking a SIR. No amount of reflex action could halt the blow she had unleashed, and with a dull thud her blade cut deeply into the side of the machine’s neck.

  “Blessed Creator, I’m so sorry!” she gasped as she wrenched the weapon from the SIRs gray skin.

  The SIR seemed completely unconcerned and unaffected by its wound, as evidenced by the polite smile he favored her with. “Victory has been achieved, commander. All LSA troopers have been eliminated, and the demolition charges are being prepared,” it informed her with the voice of a refined gentleman.

  Caitlyn nodded slowly as she took in the aftermath of the battle. The ground around the tanker trucks was fouled with corpses, disembodied entrails and limbs, blood, and excrement. The smell, a mixture of metallic blood and human waste, was starting to permeate the area and would become unbearable as the day warmed. The SIRs stood among the slain bodies like contented reapers with their harvest. Her body was still jazzed with adrenaline, her limbs and breath, which she was still trying to catch, rattling with trembles. Pain started to nag the far right side of her abdomen, and she looked down to find a clean hole punched through a chink in her body armor halfway up her midsection. Blood was issuing from the hole and somehow the discovery of the wound seemed to aggravate it, the pain beginning to intensify.

  Damned adrenaline must’ve deadened the pain, she reasoned silently.

  She pressed her hands to the wound and turned to the SIR which had just spoken. “Have the others continue the operation as planned, but you help me tend this wound,” she ordered.

  She and the SIR returned to the APC, and after removing her armor and tunic she lay sipping cool water from a canteen while the SIR administered aid. The wound to her midriff was her most grievous, a deep puncture most likely caused by a main gauche,
but she could feel others beginning to come alive as her system continued to purge the now unneeded adrenaline. The SIR confirmed this fact, informing her of various lacerations and contusions as he worked. She barely heard anything he was saying. Her mind was awhirl as she tried to come to terms with the fact she had just added six troopers to her growing kill count, an act which was proving to be an increasingly difficult thing to accomplish. Thoughts of her son quickly quashed any softening of her resolve, and though she deeply regretted taking their lives, she would still cut down any LSA troopers willing to fight for Alexander Fulsom.

  Anything for Del, she swore to herself.

  Her gaze suddenly fell upon an object towards the rear of the cargo hold. It was a steel storage container with the words “SPRAY PAINT-RED” stenciled on its side. It had most likely been left by the maintenance crew that had serviced the transport before it had been deployed. An idea came to her then, and the nature of it brought a small, mildly optimistic smile to her face.

  #

  Though Anna was saddened by the separation from her husband, she found solace in the children under her care. She, her son James, and her niece Angelina had been taken in by Caitlyn’s sister Megan, who lived in the Bull capital of Windy City. On this particular day, she had decided to treat the children to a trip to one of the city’s shopping malls. Though once in danger of becoming extinct in ancient times, “brick-and-mortar” retail locations were resuscitated due to their overall positive impact on the Federation’s economy and the social health of the its citizens. Their wanderings through the sizable establishment eventually brought them to World Clothing Manufacturers, a holding of Mundi Incepta, the largest and wealthiest corporation in the Federation. As Angelina conversed with a Helper, the pale-skinned employees of Mundi Incepta, James began to grow restless, so Anna decided to usher him out of the store.

  World Clothing was situated on the edge of the fair-sized atrium that formed the central hub of the mall. It was a cheery place of fountains and mosaic floors lit by sunlight that streamed warmly from ample skylights set into the building’s ceiling. Situated around the atrium were four large screen-clouds which broadcast advertisements for the mall’s various establishments and hourly news broadcasts. Best of all, it featured a small recreation area for children which boasted a jungle gym. James, in typical five-year-old boy fashion, squealed with delight and begged his mother to be allowed to play, a request Anna was more than happy to accommodate.