BAMF- Broken Arrow Mercenary Force Omnibus

by Drew Avera

  Which was more than he could say for the orderly who’d delivered it. The man was more of a guard than a nurse, and he was big enough and mean-looking enough that Nate hadn’t even thought about trying to overpower him and escape. Besides, he’d been hungry. He mopped up the last of the potatoes with a roll the consistency of chalk and sat back, staring at the ceiling.

  He’d been in the new room for two days, as near as he could figure, and only been allowed out of the bed once to use the facilities. Other than that, it had been a bedpan. The handcuffs were beginning to chafe at his risk, but at least his leg didn’t hurt as badly anymore. He’d slept. He wasn’t sure for how long, but he knew he’d slept.

  He didn’t look up when the door opened, expecting the big, ugly orderly again to take away his tray, but then he smelled the perfume. It was her. She seemed different somehow, her hair worn looser, softer, her clothes more casual, a flannel shirt with the sleeves rolled up, tied at the waste over blue jeans. Her makeup was muted, natural, less intimidating. He wondered if it was intentional, then realized who he was talking about. Of course it was intentional.

  “Good evening, Captain Stout,” she said, pushing the door shut behind her and pulling the tray away from his bed.

  “Hello again,” he said, nodding. “I’m afraid I didn’t get your name the last time we met.”

  “Svetlana,” she supplied. “Svetlana Grigoryeva.”

  “That’s a pretty name,” Nate told her. “Lyrical even.” He chuckled. “Russians always have the best names. Nothing boring like English. John Smith, Steve Jones. Nate Stout.” He cocked his head at her curiously. “To what do I owe the pleasure of your company, Ms. Grigoryeva? More invasive surgery in my future?”

  “No.” She shook her head, reaching out a hand to touch his leg through the covers, gently, carefully. “Does it still hurt?”

  “Not as bad.” Her fingers felt warm even through the thin blankets, felt good, and that made him uncomfortable. “I’ve had worse.”

  That was a lie. He’d never had a major injury, though wear and tear was taking its toll on his knees and back. But it had sounded tough.

  “Maybe not this version of you,” she said, seeing through his pretense. “But yes, the many Nathan Stouts who have lived and died have been through much worse. The Prime, as you call him, lost everything. His wife, his daughter, his health, his career…and finally, his life.”

  “You seem to know more about him than I do.” He hadn’t meant for the bitterness to creep into his voice, but there it was, naked and visible.

  “I do, thanks to Robert. He knows you, all the versions of you.” She reached into her shirt pocket and pulled out a small flash drive, tossing it to him. He tried to catch it with his right hand, but his wrist came up short against the handcuff and it landed in his lap. He picked it up with his left hand and frowned at her in confusion.

  She unfolded a tablet and handed it over to him.

  “It’s not connected to any external network,” she warned him. “But it’ll read that card.”

  He inserted the drive into a slot on the side of the tablet and the screen popped to life. It was a military personnel file, straight from the Department of Defense. Stolen, of course, but old enough for that to not be too much of a shock. Very old. Fifty years.

  It was him. Nathan Stout. His Prime, rather. It painted a picture, a portrait of Dorian Gray, aging in front of him while he stayed relatively young. Parts of the story were familiar, retained in his fragmented memories in bits and bites of training and combat, the rest not so much.

  Nathan Everett Stout, born September 1 to Charles and Gloria Stout in Meridian, Mississippi. He had vague flashes of heat, humidity and kudzu, but nothing concrete. His parents’ photos seemed familiar, bringing memories of proud tears at his graduation from college, from flight school, but nothing personal, nothing from his childhood. One sister, Catherine. In the picture, she was in her teens and there was nothing more recent. He read through the family history and found out she’d died in one of the earliest nuclear terror attacks. His parents had passed when they were both in their seventies, of natural causes. It seemed young to him, but maybe the increasing background radiation and pollution had been responsible.

  Nate had flown Comanches for three years before being recruited to the Hellfire testbed program. Somewhere in those three years, he’d met Camilla Peters and they’d been married at Ft. Campbell, Kentucky before she moved with him out to Nevada for the initial tests of the new mech systems. It was there he’d met Robert Franklin, there they had found out together just how dangerous the isotope power plants were. He’d been a patriot, committed to his country, to the Army, and to the Hellfire program. He’d kept going despite the risks.

  It had cost him. First, his wife. The divorce had been finalized while Stout was right in the middle of the testing and she’d moved back to Kentucky with their daughter, Victoria. He had no memory of her whatsoever. Her picture, as a toddler in her mother’s arms, moved no emotions in his heart, no recollections in his head. She’d been erased, not just from his memory but from history. She’d been born, it turned out, with a genetic defect that had manifested itself as a heart valve abnormality. Camilla had blamed it on his exposure to radiation and never forgiven him. Victoria had died at age eight, back in Kentucky, of heart failure. There was no record of what had become of Camilla.

  He felt a deep sadness, not from the loss of a daughter he didn’t remember or even of a marriage he barely recalled, but of a life he hadn’t had the chance to lead. As depressing as the Prime’s file was, somehow not being allowed to remember it was more devastating.

  And after, there were more memories he’d been allowed to retain, memories of training, of tearing down the machines over and over, of flying over the desert with a sense of freedom he’d never experienced even in helicopters. And of combat, his first in a mech, leading a squadron out against an incursion of Russian armor up through Texas. He remembered it clearly, as if the images and sounds and feelings were jumping off the screen in streaming clips of video and dry text. The stuttering of the chain gun, the jolt of missiles separating from their launchers, the shouted commands and status reports over the radio. The first feelings of the machine being an extension of his body, of the godlike power it imbued.

  And then, the inevitable. Pancreatic cancer, inoperable. But one last chance to serve, one he took to at the urging of Robert Franklin. Donating his genes and his memories to Project Artemis for the creation of a new generation of mech pilots must have seemed like a way to keep fighting, keep serving. He’d lived another two months after the donation, but he hadn’t waited for the cancer to claim him. He’d committed suicide out in the Nevada desert, and while Nate didn’t expect to remember that, he was shocked he had no recollection at all of the Artemis Project, of cancer, of the decision to allow himself to be genetically duplicated.

  Shocked and deeply, deeply angry. Not simply at the DoD research scientists who’d selected his memories but at the Prime himself. He’d been the one to condemn him and a line of dupes before him to short and brutal lives, with no choice in their own fate. It was strange. He had the man’s DNA, some of his memories. He would have expected to agree with his decisions or at least to understand them, yet he didn’t.

  “Why did you give me this?” he asked Svetlana, handing back the tablet. He still felt angry, though he tried not to take it out on her. “Did he tell you to? Does he think this will make me turn?”

  “He was against it.” She made the tablet disappear into jeans so tight he hadn’t thought there’d be room for it in the pockets. “He thought it would be too painful.” She shrugged. “I thought you deserved to know the truth.”

  “Why?” Nate repeated. “Why would you care what I deserve?”

  “Because you’re like him,” she explained with what seemed like very deliberate care, as if she’d thought about the question and how she might answer for some time. “You’re like Robert, and yet you’re not. He chose
his fate, chose to become what he is to avoid the certainty of death, partly, but also to keep from giving those who killed him what they wanted, to be rid of him. But you were handed your lot in life, given little choice on how you would spend it.”

  She touched him again, this time on his arm, the one handcuffed to the railing, on bare skin. Her fingers seemed blazing hot against his flesh and Nate’s breath quickened against his will.

  “Yet you stepped into your role as a soldier, continued the fight for your homeland as best you could, never ceasing to believe in your cause. Robert sees the existence of nation-states as part of what is wrong with this world, but you continue to fight for yours, despite what they’ve done to you. Part of me, the part that has grown cynical toward my own country, toward our motivation for being in this country, wants to think you a fool, wants to feel superior. But I can’t make myself believe that. So, I wonder how you can still have faith, how you can be so sure you’re doing the right thing.”

  “I’m not sure of anything,” he admitted. His eyes burned from the light and he squeezed them shut, letting his head lay back again. “I’ve been living the last seven years on autopilot, flying a thousand miles an hour because I was afraid to waste a day, bouncing from one mission to another and thinking I was shirking when I took a day off to go to town. Maybe I just didn’t want too much time to think.”

  “If you could go back,” she asked him, “would you do anything differently?”

  He opened his eyes and looked into hers, ice blue and yet not so ice cold any more. Did she mean it? Was she honestly interested or was this just more mind games? And did it matter either way?

  “I don’t know there’s anything else I could have done. I wasn’t given any good choices. I guess the only thing I would change is never hiring Patty. Maybe then Dix wouldn’t have been killed.”

  Memories, the smell of burned flesh, the taste of blood splattered into his face, the sound of Dix’s lifeless body smacking against the hard floor. Memories that were his and not his Prime’s and yet he would gladly have allowed a roomful of DoD technicians to have their go at cutting it out of his head.

  “That is my fault. Robert wanted you, but he wanted you intact, which he couldn’t be sure of if we’d simply attacked. That’s why I was tasked with infiltrating your team.” She looked as if she wanted to spit. “Patterson was an idiot. We kept trying to convince him to get you alone where we could take you, but he dragged his feet, as if it would be too much of a betrayal. The attack on your base in Norfolk was supposed to simply force you out into the open so we could take you without harming you. But Patterson wouldn’t provide us with the codes to get close enough to use a more precise weapons targeting.”

  She ran a hand across her eyes as if she honestly regretted the incident.

  “Make no mistake, Nathan, I have killed men before, for no better reason than that I was ordered to do it. But always with intent, always on purpose. I am a scalpel, and I let Patterson’s blundering turn me into a sledgehammer. I had no reason to want any of your people dead. We only wanted you.”

  He was about to snap an angry response, something uncontrolled from deep in his gut, but she held up a hand.

  “I know this doesn’t excuse what I did, and I wouldn’t expect your forgiveness. Yet we are both soldiers in a war, and death is something that happens to soldiers.” She eyed him with piercing thoughtfulness. “Do not tell me you and Dix and many of the men and women you’ve served with have not come to the life of a mercenary seeking a meaningful death.”

  That hit him right between the eyes and he found himself nodding.

  “When you’ve only got twelve or thirteen years to live,” he said, “thinking about how you’re going to die just seems like good planning.”

  “I understand. And yet this is part of what Robert wanted you for.”

  “I thought he wanted to dupe me,” Nate ground out, motioning to his bandaged thigh. “Though to what end, I’m still not sure.”

  “Part,” she repeated. “Because he has himself thought much about the quickly progressing specter of death, and how it might be avoided.”

  “By duping himself over and over?”

  “This has been a stop-gap. The goal has always been to live forever.” She smiled at him, not beneficent nor could he describe it as evil. Instead, it seemed the smile a dragon might give when it looked out over its vast hoard of gold. “And the goal, Nathan Stout, is in sight.”

  Chapter Ten

  “This seems like a really odd place to meet a friend,” Roach said, clutching at the grip of her pistol.

  “He’s a really odd friend,” Fuller admitted.

  She’d offered him one of their M20s, but Fuller had begged off. Instead, he was carrying an antique even more vintage than Nate’s Glock on his hip, something she’d never seen outside a museum, a Colt 1911 he called it. It was big and heavy and metal and only held eight rounds, but he swore it would be enough.

  “Man, I thought the Fry was sketchy,” Ramirez murmured from just to her right and way too close behind her.

  She eyed him balefully and gently pushed him away a step.

  “Let’s remember our interval,” she said. “And our personal space.”

  She didn’t blame him for wanting to stick close, though, not here. If the Fry was where the winners, the survivors, the stubborn of post-war Norfolk came to congregate, then the Barrens was the habitat of the losers, the desperate, the slowly dying. Tent cities had popped up between collapsing buildings, using the dilapidated and crumbling walls as wind breaks, the parks and back yards and road medians as makeshift vegetable gardens.

  Sullen and envious eyes stared out from the shadows, hiding from the light like the rats they caught for food. Here and there, a child would be standing out in the open, painfully skinny, salvaged clothing hanging off their emaciated frames in rags. Her stomach lurched and she wished she’d brought food…but knew it was better she hadn’t. If any of them had looked like they had anything worth stealing, they would have been mobbed in an instant. As it was, they were visibly armed and had nothing but their weapons and the clothes on their back.

  We should be fine. Yeah, I should just keep telling myself that.

  They’d driven into the Barrens in the old, salvaged pickup truck, leaving it behind when the roads had become impassable. By design. Someone had dragged debris, dumpsters, old tractor tires, refrigerators out into the middle of the street, blocking it off from vehicle traffic. She wondered at first if it was a setup for an ambush, but the level of debris and detritus layered on the roadblocks showed it had been there for years.

  Maybe someone else’s ambush. Wonder how it turned out for them?

  From the roadblock, they’d walked. She and Ramirez hadn’t been crazy about the idea, but Fuller had insisted. It hadn’t been far, barely a kilometer, but she’d felt the stares, seen the skeleton forms fading back into the shadows, and it seemed as if the watchers were closing in behind them. She’d been about to tell Fuller she wasn’t going any further when he’d stopped abruptly next to the ruins of an old fast food place. Nothing she recognized by the design, and the signs had worn down from the years and the weather and probably random vandalism as well, but she made out the word “fried chicken,” though it was missing a few letters.

  “We meeting him for lunch?” Roach wondered, trying to sound casual even as her eyes darted around, scanning her surroundings like a prairie dog watching for red tail hawks.

  “Maybe we are lunch,” Ramirez suggested, a bit of a quaver in his voice. He had his pistol out, held down by his side, though he’d at least kept his trigger finger out of the guard, trailing along the slide.

  “Just give it a minute,” Fuller advised, arms crossed over his chest, his dark eyes searching the end of the street. All Roach could see was an old woman pushing a shopping cart loaded down with plastic tubs of water. The wheels of the basket squeaked in protest and water sloshed out the top of one of the tubs.

  The wind whi
stled through the suburban streets, taking with it ancient scraps of plastic and leaves still littering the ground from last fall and Roach could smell rain in the air, feel it in grey clouds closing in, full of malevolent promise. She didn’t want to be caught out here in a storm, not even in the pickup. Water could fill potholes large enough to take out an axle.

  “All right,” she said after another few minutes had passed. “We have to get out of here.”

  “Just give them….” She assumed Fuller was about to ask for more time and she was about to turn him down flat when she sensed motion behind her.

  Roach threw herself forward, twisting in mid-air and pulling her pistol from its holster, her forefinger just ounces away from pulling the trigger when she saw the upraised hands, the casual stance and the crooked smile. She was panting from the exertion, the adrenalin and the impact of the pavement on her shoulder, and the sights of her pistol were dancing around wildly, and she was suddenly reminded she’d never actually shot anyone with a handgun.

  “Hold your fire,” Fuller drawled, hands held up in a restraining motion.

  Ramirez had his handgun stretched out, gripped in both hands so hard Roach thought he might crack the polymer, but he hadn’t pulled the trigger. Probably for the same reason Roach hadn’t: the subtle but undeniable difference between firing a missile or a Vulcan round at a faceless mech and pulling the trigger at a face.

  In this case, the face of a middle-aged woman, lined with care and time and a life lived on the ragged edge of civilization. Her hair was grey-streaked blond, her clothes rough enough to fit in on the streets of Norfolk but well made enough to set her apart. She had a military-issue sidearm at her hip and what looked like a drum-fed shotgun slung across her chest, but she was deliberately not touching either of them.

  “That’s all nice and dramatic,” the older woman told Roach, nodding toward her lying on her side with handgun extended, “but you need to work on your situational awareness, girl.” She smirked. “Ain’t no radar out here.”