“I don’t mean to interrupt, but ALPHA UNIT 2 just racked up like 5 points,” Satellite said, sitting beside him in the matching lawn chair, and counting heads below him.
“Oh, yeah, thanks.” Crumley added five coconuts to ALPHA UNIT 2’s pile. “What are they using for a goal at the other end of the field?”
Satellite showed him on his PDA, giving RevoCorp satellite surveillance of the area, zooming with his finger. “It’s another open pit mine, sir. I think they were extracting copper from that one.”
“Copper! Is that even a precious metal? Just drag a freakin’ asteroid into orbit. One of those puppies has more precious metals than you can find in a hundred continents of rainforests. What’s with the complete lack of vision?”
“I don’t think the problem is so much the holes they leave in the ground, sir.”
Crumley gave him a dirty look, missing the latest ball scored entirely.
“What I mean, sir, is the miners spread diseases to the local Indians, who’ve never been exposed to Chicken Pox and the like. And the runoff from mining the precious metals screws with the aquatic life in the rivers even more than it messes with the land dwellers. They use cyanide to separate the gold from sediment and rock. Mercury is just another toxic byproduct of precious-metal mining. This stuff washes downriver, accumulates in the food chain. Anything that preys on the fish builds up a toxic load even faster, leading to mutations, mass die offs, animals and humans alike.”
Crumley stared at him dumbfounded. “Well, you’re a barrel of laughs. Why so dark? Try to get in the spirit of the soccer match, will you?”
***
DeWitt kicked the Goliath-Bot head towards the goal post, banking it off the head of one of the opponent’s team’s Goliath-Bots, before landing it in the open pit mine. The opponent in this case being ALPHA UNIT TEAM 2, temporarily split off from ALPHA UNIT TEAM 1. Somehow he’d gotten drafted onto TEAM 1 because OMEGA FORCE didn’t have enough soldiers to field its own team. “A bank shot! Nice,” his copilot said. “Heard you were famous for those.”
“Really? Like how famous? What did you hear?”
“Nothing really, you know?”
“What do you mean, ‘nothing really’?”
***
The Ubuku native was incensed at the disrespect shown his fellow warriors. Far less their gods. The Goliath-Bot heads severed, and then kicked down the field as part of some game. He would have justice for the natives trapped inside the pilots’ cabins as well as for the totems of the Goliath-Bots themselves that had been so crassly violated. Bad enough the enemy enacted this torment in the dead of night, but the cabin lights kept the Goliath-Bots’ heads glowing to mark the field, as did the radiating inner lights of the other Goliath-Bots on both sides of the game, as the players fought for control of the ball. The Ubuku natives had been pressed into the match for no better reason than to reclaim the prize of the heads for the purpose of undoing the sacrilege.
Since it was his honor to be riding a fire god, Oko visited the full wrath of his fire god on the enemy. First, he sent a small cluster of the fireflies that swarmed his body and kept him all but invisible in the dark, even across the illuminated field, more of a fleeting shadow than an incarnate being, at one of the Goliath-Bots in the enemy’s hands. The individual fireflies bored tiny holes through the cabin, using their heat to melt a path for them. Once inside the cabin they employed the same technique to bore into the pilot’s brain. It wasn’t long before the soldier had been reduced to a vegetable. He staggered drunkenly across the field until he stumbled into one of the giant pits. Score one for his team! “Sadaka!” Oko shouted. It was their term for shit-eater.
Oko turned his attention to his next mark.
It was important to him to never kill the same way twice, thereby disrespecting the creativity of his fire god. So, when he sent another cluster of fireflies, he had them bore through the head plate of his mark as before. Only, this time, the fireflies flew about the cabin playing with the warrior’s field of vision. Forcing him to lose his depth of field by pulling focus. Or flying at the edges of his vision to blur and narrow his peripheral vision. In this way, the soldier, blinded without knowing, was herded directly into the line of fire of one of his own team mates. Sadly, he did not have the decency to fall into the pit when dead. Oko had to help him by grabbing him at the ankles and hurtling him into the pit.
***
Babado held one truth above all others: never was an Ubuku warrior to be disrespected in this manner. Always he was to be assured a warrior’s death. Even when demonstrating only mediocre ability in battle, his spirit of courage was to be revered, and therefore honored. To see the Ubuku pilots trapped in the severed heads of the Goliath-Bots and kicked down field, never to be given a chance to display their prowess with riding the gods, for which the Goliath-Bots were but totems, was simply unforgivable.
Babado’s rage was so complete, he feared he would lose the ability to hold on to trance state. To ensure he did not, he opened communications between the three snakes coiled about one another that formed his consciousness, long since discovered in meditation. The innermost snake, which took control of him now, secreted the chemical markers to the larger snake coiled about it. Once the bigger snake received the message, he in turn secreted substances meant for the largest of the snakes which held the other two in its embrace. Its job would be to up its secretion of the sacred substances only it was capable of producing to ensure Babado did not lose his trance even when driven by pure rage. And so it did. He knew he was fortunate because the larger snakes did not always listen to the smallest one at the center of his being.
And so it was that Babado charged with all the might and fury of his Earth Element totem, Ramanako. Hard as a rock was his will. Immovable was his intent. Just by visualizing what he wanted, the lesser gods within his Goliath-Bot that answered to the giant, but smaller robots themselves, worked their magic for him. They sucked up the soft earth through the Goliath-Bot’s feet, turning it into a slurry of mud, introduced to the mud binding elements produced by the invisible creatures living in the mud, altered by his Earth God, that would make plates harder than diamond for him to add to his exterior armor. They secreted these plates and slid them into position making Ramanako heavier, sturdier, with each step. More unstoppable as he gained momentum. The nuclear furnace that powered Ramanako’s Goliath-Bot fired up to propel the heavier weight across the game field.
The enemy tried to stop his advance, for he was shattering the Goliath-Bots he ran over, by piling on top of him. Babado just laughed, delighted to have them play into his hands in this manner. Without slowing until the last second, where he came to a resounding halt before the pit, he drove the entire throng of his tacklers into the abyss. They were hurtled forward by his own forward momentum that had migrated to them, riding them like so many ghosts. He’d come to a stop in a crouch, back leaned forward to help with the transfer of force. The few who remained stuck to him he peeled off with his hands like a jaguar nibbling at ticks with its teeth. He flung these assailants into the pit too.
Ah, it was good to be an Earth god! Especially when justice required nothing less.
***
“How are the kids making out?” Leon asked as Patent stepped up to him. They both looked like a pair of Lilliputians coaching a soccer team of giants from the sidelines. From a distance, anyone trying to tell Leon and Patent apart would have to be doing so by Patent’s bushy moustache. That and possibly his lighter complexion. He didn’t get as much sun as Leon did, spending more time in the simulators with the next generation on line.
“Oh, they love this shit. It’s getting them to do regular soldiering that’s a pain in the ass.”
“It’s not like the Ubuku are sitting out the match. They’re trying to kill our guys same as always. The objective isn’t just to kick the ball across the field; it’s to dodge incoming arsenal while thinning the ranks of the opponent with your own.”
“Apparently, I am told, in v
ideo games, this kind of nonsense happens all the time. So, given the context, it still doesn’t feel like they’re in a real war. Just really good VR.”
Leon smiled wryly.
One of the kids raced by in his Goliath-Bot, stepping on a log that shot a splinter at Leon. Leon’s catlike reflexes alone spared his eye, allowing him to turn his face in time. He pulled the sliver out of his cheek.
Patent was beside himself. He shouted at the kid through the earpiece, “You little rat! You have any idea who that is you just flashed? That’s the Lion of Sparta!”
“Sorry, sir,” the kid’s voice returned through the mike.
Leon chuckled. “You’re one of the few who gets the name.”
Patent sighed and lowered his eyes in shame. “This generation. I can’t stop making apologies.”
Leon shook his head. “We’re getting old.”
“Tell me about it. One of the kids started speaking about my joy stick, I nearly took his head off.”
Leon reciprocated with a soundless laugh that was part snort, part sigh.
“Figured I’d just call the plays from down here,” he said, staring up at the Goliath-Bots, his one-sided headphone clipped on to his bald dome and his speaker phone rotated down by his mouth, like one of those customer service reps taking tech-calls over a switchboard. “Speaking of, better get to it.”
He spoke into his headset as he lumbered off. “Any of you remember Pelé?”
“The Brazilian footballer forward, famous for doing a reverse somersault to kick the ball back the other direction on the field?” replied a voice on his party line.
“That’s the one. Now, here’s what I want you to do.”
Leon smiled at Patent as he wandered off. God bless him, the guy took his work seriously, and he was the only one who seemed to have a high tolerance for the newbies.
One of the kids piloting one of the Goliath-Bots ran right over Patent, feet falling just yards to either side, splattering mud on him. “Hey, watch it! I get mud in my eye from one of you galloping goofs, and there’s going to be hell to pay.”
***
Just when Leon thought, “If the field gets any more trampled, they’ll be able to handle more than one soccer ball on the field at a time,” he witnessed the latest beheading of a dozen or so enemy Goliath-Bots. So did DeWitt, standing beside him, apparently taking a break from showing off with his own Goliath-Bot. “What’s with the garroting?” DeWitt said. “Ajax is always cutting the heads off the enemy. You’d think he’s a serial killer with his own trademark.”
“He is a serial killer with his own trademark, who happens to work for us. Don’t ask me to explain it. Might be a past life thing. Read somewhere that people carry over traumas from prior lifetimes into this one if it’s severe enough. Maybe he had his head cutoff from speaking out of turn back in the age of guillotining. And he’s just working it out in this lifetime.”
“Since when did you turn all New Age?”
“It’s not New Age! I might be borrowing from Hinduism a bit. And how I got a more open mind was seeing natives ridden by gods, firsthand. Clearly the spirit world exists and a gateway can be opened to it. Just because the Ubuku can remember their past lives and we can’t, doesn’t mean we aren’t affected by personal history from times long since passed.” Leon realized he was speaking more forcefully than necessary, and needed to marshal his tone, but couldn’t stop himself. “These ‘primitive’ tribes with their mystical beliefs are not to be so easily dismissed. Imagine if you could draw on 70,000 years of shamanic learning. No wonder they’re transforming the forest right under our feet faster than the invasive miners, poachers, drug dealers and big corporations are.”
“Don’t mean to poke a finger, boss, but you sound a bit defensive there.”
“Sorry, I haven’t killed anything in a while. Must be all the pent-up energy.” He wiped his perspiring brow with the back of his hand. “That or it’s the damn drug Cassandra gave me. Should have realized with my big body, I needed to eat more than one if I wanted it to kick in faster. Now that it has, does seem to be a shame to waste it standing around on the sidelines. I tell you, though, my abilities to take in the subtleties of what’s transpiring on a soccer field have never been this good.”
“Don’t you think the more seminal point is not the bird men’s ability to draw on past lives but how the Ubuku came to marry all this high-technology with their native customs?”
Leon returned his eyes to the Goliath-Bots making war in “ceremonial Indian garb, replete with head gear, arm and leg tassels.” The garb, of course, being the detachable droids. “Yeah, you may be right about staying on point. Then again we may be fooling ourselves thinking the natives would be hard pressed to embrace the hi-tech world of Westerners. Their world is no less high-tech. They were playing around with science for thousands of years with their study of herbs and trees and fruiting plants and insects and animal husbundry before it occurred to us to do so. So why shouldn’t they embrace fresh options that allow them to enhance their roles as guardians of the Amazon rainforest?”
“I can’t believe Truman is much interested in helping them do that,” DeWitt said.
Leon snorted. “Neither can I. I imagine they allow their interests to converge as much as it suits both parties. But the triple threat, you can bet, have their own agenda.”
“I better get back in my Goliath-Bot before I get charged for parking this thing in a red zone,” DeWitt said, looking up at his Goliath-Bot emblazoned with the insignia of a red fan parrot.
His partner, up in the head of the monster was gesturing to him. Speaking into his headpiece. “In case you haven’t noticed there’s a game on, and we’re down by twelve.”
“Yeah, yeah, I’m coming. Give me a hand up?”
The operator reached with the Goliath-Bot’s hand and brought him up to the cockpit. Once DeWitt was loaded up and strapped in, he lowered the faceplate and they were back in action.
***
It wasn’t too long before DeWitt was reminded there was more to do on the field besides kick the “ball” around. There was the small matter of dodging missiles, and whatever other toys the enemy Goliath-Bots had in their arsenal in keeping with their “ceremonial costuming.”
“You know, I think someone invented sports so people would be less inclined to go to war. You know, work out their frustrations more amicably,” his ALPHA UNIT partner said.
“Makes sense,” DeWitt replied, kicking the “ball.” “Considering I’m a paid soldier and I’m suddenly more interested in winning the ball game than blowing things up. A sin for a former SEAL like myself. Maybe we should contemplate recruiting a priest for the next outing, so we can confess our sins to someone more qualified to do something about them.”
“There’s an idea.”
Leon had paired up the OMEGA FORCE members who were willing, as DeWitt was, with the ALPHA UNIT Goliath-Bot pilots. With the skull caps on, the Goliath-Bots hardly needed two pilots anymore, but the idea was for OMEGA FORCE’s take-no-prisoners tactics to rub off on ALPHA UNIT. DeWitt suspected the real reason was to confine the banter to the partnered parties so they wouldn’t clog up the party line. DeWitt had to admit, if he achieved anything on the battlefield that wasn’t immediately commemorated by applause and adoration he was usually beside himself. And God forbid he didn’t share it over the party line.
To deal with the harassing rockets coming their way like a flock of deranged pigeons, DeWitt and his partner together ducked their Goliath-Bot and ejected the fan blades of the “red fan parrot.” The blades slapped the rockets off target and sent them at the enemy instead. Meanwhile the blades themselves continued until they lodged in the heads of the Ubuku pilots in the cabins of their Goliath-Bots.
With a press of a dashboard button, the fan blades returned to sender. “Take that!” his excited ALPHA UNIT partner said with a double fist pump. “We call that Red Fan Parrot magic!”
DeWitt smiled; this guy wasn’t half bad.
&
nbsp; ***
Alatea flagged down the foreman, waving his hand and shouting.
Agu, looking annoyed, finally stopped chatting up the guy in the suit and footed it over to him. Up close, his pockmarked coffee complexion seemed to document every one of his explosive moods across a lifetime. Some from this morning, going off on his employees.
“You better take a look at this,” Alatea shouted over the water cannons in the distance being used to chew through shoreline and the sloping incline facing the river. It was the wrong equipment for this region, in his estimation. Better off used further inland, away from the water, where entire hills and mountains needed to be erased. But using the water cannons here was no less dangerous. A couple miners screamed on cue to prove his point, falling into one of the holes opened by the water cannon and, in all likelihood, succumbing to the cave in.
Alatea pointed at the dead fish washed up on the Amazon River bank where they had their rather large-scale gold mining operation set up. The carcasses extended for nearly a mile into the forest along the flood plain, and for several miles downriver along the bank. More bodies were joining the menagerie as the tide continued to push them ashore even as they talked. The corpses included river dolphin, and the predators that came to feed on the bonanza of fish. Deceased Black Cayman, bloated to the point of bursting, lay attracting hordes of flies.
Vultures swooping down to join the feeding frenzy were not flying off again. They were either falling over dead, or making pained sounds, limping about disoriented. Still other King Vultures landing to join the feast had cysts and tumors growing out of their mouths or along their necks or bulging out their sides, right through their feathers.
Mind of a Child: Sentient Serpents (OMEGA FORCE and ALPHA UNIT Book 1) Page 31