He was having too much trouble getting his hands on this guy, so he had to make his grip count for when he did manage to make contact. The instant he got his hand on the bastard, he sent him flying out of the open cockpit by his hair in one fluid uninterrupted motion. Leon’s back twisting into it, so his trapezius muscles could lend their strength to his arm.
Leon strapped into the chair, though it was no longer necessary, just to keep from being tossed from an open cockpit in all the fighting.
He took advantage of his souped up reflexes and his drugged state—which kept him curiously calm and his mind uncluttered with thought—to roll out of the way of the self-piloting robots who mistook him as one of the natives. He didn’t exactly waste the roll-out-of-the-way motion on saving his own ass. He made every dive, feint, and fall work for him to pluck one of the Ubuku away from their “mountain climbing” efforts to reclaim the Goliath-Bot he was in. Squeezing the life out of them with the hydraulic presses of the robot’s hands, but just enough to crush their bones. Not pop their meat sacks. He then dangled them off of his robot’s body like shrunken heads. Their entire bodies twitching and writhing in agony. The pain gradually forcing the natives out of the trance.
He found the dexterity in the robot’s fingers was so great now that he had access to the skullcap and to his altered state both that he could weave the strands of ivy pulled off the trees around the natives’ necks or some part of their bodies in order to dangle them from the robot’s sides. He found he could even participate in the live action while protecting his blossoming menagerie of living voodoo dolls meant to spook the hell out of the opposition.
His men were following suit. They were all wearing the skullcaps now for enhanced control of their robots and they were all adding to the collection of drugged natives dangling from their robot bodies, not entirely dead. The growing moans from the chorus only slowly climbing over the other noises of trees giving way under falling robot bodies, and the crunching of metal and metal-glass from all the robot fighting.
There was no way Leon and his men were going to win this exchange; they were just too outnumbered and by foes that were fairly equally matched. Their only real hope was to win the psy-ops war. That’s what the “good luck charms” hanging from the robots he and his men had coopted were all about.
Of the two dozen self-piloting robots that Natty had managed to outfit them with, Leon was down to about six. The others decommissioned by fighters not quite as able as them, but far more numerous.
Still, the tide was turning. The natives doing the fighting on the other side had lost their focus. Staring at their brethren hanging half-dead from the sides of the robots like body jewelry made it impossible for them to hold their trance state. So their fighting was deteriorating accordingly. Before Leon and his men could feel like bullies, the last of the bird men bolted. Either jumping out of their cockpits and into the treetops, leaving their robots standing where they were, or running away inside their robots.
Leon sighed. “That’s it, boys. The Goliath-Bot Wars are officially over. Let’s head back to base camp. Can’t imagine what fun they’ll have in store for us tomorrow.”
He heard a lot of “Woo-hoos!” on the party line. He pulled the mike out of his ear before they deafened him with all the self-congratulatory verbal backslapping. Besides, he wasn’t in a mood to be particularly celebratory.
With just a shift of his focus, he could see his reflection in the glass faceplate he’d managed to lower with the help of the skullcap. If fear had broken the trance on the natives, and sheer joy had broken it on his men, worry had broken it on him. But it wasn’t his face he was seeing in the reflection on the glass. It was Natty’s. The night he pulled his face out of his hands in response to Leon’s question, “What could Truman possibly want with Laney that not even you could do for him?”
***
Natty grabbed Leon’s arm as the rest of the party meandered back to camp, not yet ready to leave the battlefield of Goliath-Bots behind. “Why do you think Truman let the Goliath-Bot games go on for a second day? Surely not just for the addition of the mind cap. That just made them easier to operate, not harder.”
“Yeah, I was wondering the same thing.”
“And?”
“My guess, there’s a genie in the bottle he was hoping you’d release for him. But you never did, so he had no choice but to move on. Maybe he wasn’t sure the genie was there himself. Maybe he was just hoping.”
“Genie?”
“Not like you to build toys that don’t exceed the state of the art in every way.”
Natty thought about it and the lights finally went on in his eyes. His attention shifted to the battlefield of abandoned Goliath-Bots. “Shit, they’re sentient. They’re just playing dumb. They’re waiting for some cue from me to fully activate.”
“A cue I’m glad you didn’t give him.”
“But…”
“One war at a time, kid. Their time’ll come, and when it does, I want the full brunt of their abilities working for us, not Truman.”
Natty nodded begrudgingly, foregoing the disappointment of playing with his toys in the way they were meant to be played with. “But how do you know this campaign is over, especially with him not getting what he wanted out of me?”
“Just a hunch. He’s on a strict time table, for whatever reason. Otherwise, why call the Nano Wars short prematurely? There are enough scenarios to test out with those things to occupy us from now to the end of time.” Natty nodded. “You made me realize as much when you said you could easily counter your own countermeasures.”
Natty was still nodding, thinking things through right along with him. “You’re pretty smart in your own way, Leon. Not as smart as me, of course. I guess you’ll just have to live with that.”
Leon smiled. “With any luck, God will give me the strength I need.”
“Good luck with that. Was never much on prayer. That would actually imply there was someone smarter than me. You can see where the credulity issues would arise.”
Leon threw his arm over Natty’s shoulder affectionately, and together they hiked back towards camp.
Leon waited for Patent to check in. He didn’t want to initiate the call himself to spoil the mood with Natty. It was important for his morale as well as for his team’s that today’s battle register as a win. Before too long, Patent burst the silence on the COM along the frequency just shared between the two of them.
“Eighteen dead,” he said. “Not bad, considering. I won’t bother reporting on the wounded. Our nano-medicine can mend most anything. Even bring the dead back to life if only we could have gotten to these in time. The ones we could get to, needless to say, are not part of the final count.” When Patent got no response, he must have figured out that Leon was in no position to talk, so he simply said, “Patent out.” It seemed almost like a play on words. As in, “Who in their right mind let the patent run out on this tech, releasing it into the public domain?”
THIRTY-THREE
“Don’t look now, but it’s two to zero, boys,” Ajax said, holding up a bottle of fermented juice he’d squeezed out of the local fruits. From what Leon could tell, the elixir worked about as well as straight whiskey when it came to doing the job. “We won The Nano War and we won The Goliath-Bot War.”
“Throw that bottle here,” Cronos said.
Ajax took another swig and then did as requested so Cronos could have a taste.
“All right, settle down, you clowns,” Leon said. They were dancing and jumping up and down, most with a bottle in hand, and hollering worse than a bunch of drunken Indians. “I want to have another come-to-Jesus meeting before you all get too damn drunk to get out your words without slurring them.”
“No! No come-to-Jesus meeting,” Ajax said. “I’ll kindly ask you to show more respect for my Satan-worshipping ass.”
“DeWitt wants to tell you the story of how he came to be my number two man,” Leon said.
“He does?” DeWitt said.
“There goes the all-night party,” Ajax fretted. “I guess he wants us good and rested for tomorrow.” He collapsed against a tree with his bottle. “Go ahead, though I can already tell you why we’ve never heard this one before. Way too boring. Guaranteed to put us straight to sleep.”
“Just so it’s not another horror story, please,” Crumley said. “Still have shivers about Crossing Casandra.” He spasmed just saying the words. “Even the title is a bit Stephen King-like, don’t you think?” He got some laughs. “Let’s try to mix up the genres a bit.”
“I don’t know what genre this story fits into,” DeWitt said. “Tearjerker, maybe.” There were collective groans from the gang and a lot of bottles going to mouths in unison.
“We were fighting in the desert,” DeWitt said. “Why? Because no one’s dumb enough to fight a war in the jungle anymore. Not since getting our asses kicked in Nam.”
“Present company excepted, of course,” Cronos said, raising his bottle.
A chorus of “Hear, hear,” was met with another round of drinking.
Maybe so, Leon thought, but going native had paid off. His men long having abandoned their socks and boots for sandals had kept the circulation flowing in their feet and skin conditions from developing. And stripping off their clothes, most importantly of all, their underwear, and wearing nothing but swimmer’s trunks had also kept their skin from chafing to the point where they couldn’t walk. Forget all the tourist guide recommendations about staying covered to prevent bug bites; if the clothes didn’t rot on you the trapped moisture against the skin caused your skin to rot. A light tee-shirt at night maybe to help with fending off the nocturnal blood-sucking mosquitoes. But their body-paint nano came with insect deterrent enough to make even that countermeasure contraindicated. Ajax had elected to go totally naked, the only approach superior to shorts and sandals. It forced him to keep an eye on what his feet were up to at all times, which was never a bad idea in the rainforest for avoiding stepping on things you shouldn’t.
“About six tanks had Leon surrounded,” DeWitt said. “One of them had shot off one of his legs with its laser mount. He’d picked it up and was using it as a bat against the offending tank. All while hopping around on one leg, mind you. It occurred to me he might be suffering from heatstroke.”
Laughs had erupted before he could finish the setup. “Why?” “What clued you” “That’s business as usual for that guy?”
“Will you let the man tell his story?” Leon said with a mock show of annoyance.
“So I rushed in,” DeWitt said, “grabbed him by the shoulders and hauled off with him. Fighting me all the way, needless to say. He was really pissed that I didn’t let him destroy those tanks with his unattached leg.”
The laughs were going hand in hand with the drinking now.
“Not that I could run all that fast backwards carrying his kind of weight. But that was okay. Because apparently when six tanks bear down on you with the barrels on their turrets, they need a little while to get out of their own way, and for you to get far enough away from them so they don’t blow themselves up trying to blow you up. About the time I thought I was going to collapse under his weight, I could hear those shells slipping into place.
“So I used my last ounce of strength to pivot, holding Leon, so my back was to the tanks and not his chest. I don’t know how those bastards managed to do it but they fired all six shells in near perfect synchronicity. The force of the first impact triggered the backup feature in Natty’s Kevlar jacket. Before the shell even hit us, the concussion wave alone blew the Kevlar into a giant sphere that surrounded us both. Think a soccer ball the size of several Mack Trucks. Filled with helium, mind you, at least I think it was helium.
“So there we are, floating up, up and away, out of the range of the tanks. We didn’t come back down until we were somewhere over London. They were having one of their gay pride marches. And our balloon, as it turned out, was a Gay Pride balloon. Natty, apparently, has a sick sense of humor.”
“It was a camouflage feature!” Natty insisted, “so wherever you landed, the natives would take you as one of their own.”
“By the time we cut ourselves out,” DeWitt said, “we were the toast of the parade and forced onto a float. By then I had Leon’s leg stitched back on, of course with the help of some nano cream. And by then he had agreed to promote me, lest I tell everyone this story. The one about how I saved his ass only to turn him into a Gay Pride float.”
The men cracked up. Laughs. Applause. They even got off their asses, one by one and poured some of their precious fermented juice into Leon’s cup. “Yeah, yeah. I figured you deserved that one,” Leon said. “Just so we’re clear, any of you repeats this story, you’re dead.”
The men were turning in now that they’d had their very satisfying bedtime story. One of the signs of PTSD was that people regressed in age under the shock. The bedtime stories might have seemed childlike to anyone who hadn’t been through what they had, but to Leon’s mind, they were medicine all their own. The fermented juice played its part, of course. They were barely conscious by the times their heads hit their pillows.
THIRTY-FOUR
The next day and night passed without anything happening. Nothing coming at them out of the woods. At first the men enjoyed more of their campfire talks and the chance to catch up with one another. Not just sharing old war stories, but stuff that had gone on in their personal lives when away from the unit. But as the day wore on, the quiet in the forest grew more ominous. What could Truman be up to that wouldn’t involve some sound of activity in the background?
They went to sleep more restless that night than most. For fighting men, waiting around for something to happen was always worse than actual engagement. Leon rubbed his arms from the goosebumps.
Halfway through the second night something woke them, had the entire camp swinging free from their hammocks and reaching for their weapons at the same time. It was just a feeling. No one had yet to hear a sound. They must have all been sleeping lightly, expecting something to go down. And sensing it when it did.
Natty finally put his fingers on it. The locusts and other insects, traditionally very loud at night, had suddenly gone quiet. Not one frog croak pierced the darkness.
There grew an ominous sound from above.
They looked overhead as a massive circular spaceship moving into position blotted out the sky. They had no trouble telling where it ended owing to all the lights flashing on it. And it ended way beyond their peripheral vision.
DeWitt found his way to Leon’s side. While continuing to stare skyward, he said, “Have I told you lately how much I love being around you?”
“Yeah, yeah,” Leon said, his eyes riveted upwards.
“You’re my hero!” DeWitt said, hugging him from the side, eyes still aloft.
“Yeah, yeah,” Leon said, continuing to be transfixed by the spaceship.
DeWitt snapped a picture of the spaceship for his kid, tucked the camera away, and moved on, looking keen to get closer to the central-most point of the ship, where a cylinder of light had materialized, radiating to the forest floor below.
Patent trod up to Leon next. Somehow he must have sensed the turning point long before anyone else did. As ALPHA UNIT’s camp was no small distance away.
“Just how many clandestine DARPA groups you think it would take to make one of these?” Leon said.
“I’ve failed you. I’m clearly just a hack conspiracy theorist. You needed one of the highest caliber to keep up with this crew.” Patent hung his head in shame and walked off.
Leon smiled in his wake. The guy was really too hard on himself.
Natty found his way to Leon’s side. “I didn’t forget to take my anti-paranoia pills today, right?” He gazed heavenwards. “Maybe I just need an extra dose.”
“You stopped taking them a while back, remember? Besides, there aren’t enough pills in all the world.”
***
ALPHA UNIT’s Skyhaw
k poked his head out of the brush to speak to Crumley, who couldn’t be bothered taking his eyes off the spaceship to give Skyhawk his full attention. Crumley was reclined on his bed of logs against a tree; it was a more comfortable position to hold considering the positioning of “the movie screen” straight above. Skyhawk was on bended knee. “That’s the last of the supplies you sent for,” he said. A pulse in the energy field of the ship sent a shiver down Skyhawk’s spine. It was an alien sound he heard as much as he felt, and it did something to the atmosphere, charging it somehow. He refused to look up.
Crumley glanced at him. “What are you covering your eyes for?”
Skyhawk coughed. “Saving my night vision,” he managed shakily.
“You’ve got to look your enemy in the eye,” Crumley said, unfooled, returning his attention to the spaceship. Another second to take the reality of it in and he sighed. “You and the rest of B-Team better skedaddle back to the supply planes. Stay camouflaged.”
“One of these days I plan to show great indignation at the use of that expression, B-Team. But for today, I’d just like to express my undying gratitude.” Skyhawk kissed the top of Crumley’s head and darted into the woods.
Mind of a Child: Sentient Serpents (OMEGA FORCE and ALPHA UNIT Book 1) Page 33