BAMF- Broken Arrow Mercenary Force Omnibus

by Drew Avera

  When will there ever be more pleasant circumstances?

  He supposed he should have been grateful just to see it, period. His wasn’t a life with a great deal of beauty, and this place was sheer beauty. The morning sun shone golden light on the Canadian Rockies, the dead calm that came just after dawn turning the lake beside the highway into a flawless mirror, reflecting the bare granite of the mountain peaks.

  I wish there was snow on them. I wish it were the Spring.

  He remembered watching an old video about this highway, taken before the war, when hundreds of thousands of tourists would drive the road in the late spring into the summer in their recreational vehicles and pickups pulling camper trailers. They would stop with their children and their dogs and play and snap photos of these mountains. No longer. No one had the fuel to waste on vacations and very few had the luxury of living in isolation, too far from anyone else for trade or mutual support. The roads had been nearly deserted all the way from the tundra into the mountains, though they’d once passed by a group of aboriginals herding reindeer from sleds, as if it were a thousand years ago.

  Looking at the maps, neither he nor Sverdlov expected to see any sign of habitation until they reached Jasper. The plan was to bypass the city, though they weren’t too concerned about the people there warning the Americans. Canada was shattered into a thousand pieces, self-governing city-states disconnected from any central government and clusters of small towns getting by on small-scale trade. The city-states each had their own military forces, but nothing on a par with Russia or the remains of the US or even the mercenary units the Americans used in the east.

  Which was why he couldn’t be blamed for not expecting the M1A Abrams main battle tank parked in the center of the road around the next curve. It was sitting in the shadow of a stand of trees, their boughs a canopy cradling it in shadow, and he might not have noticed it for a few more seconds if the computerized targeting system in the Tagan hadn’t flashed a warning that it had detected enemy armor.

  The tank didn’t fire immediately, probably waiting for them to get closer so it could have more targets of opportunity, which was the only reason Anton had the chance to yell a barely-coherent warning and launch his Tagan into the air.

  Then the shot came, a 120mm round trailing a gout of smoke and flame, but it passed through the space where Anton’s mech had been a moment before, and on his tactical display, he saw it barely missing the mech behind him before Sgt. Arkady Petrovna jetted upward on desperate jets of fire.

  Anton assessed the situation from twenty meters up, drifting south behind the tree cover to try to keep the tank from targeting him. His thermal sensors told him there was only the one tank, though he spotted three cargo trucks parked on the roadside behind it, and at least three dozen warm human bodies scattered around them. This was either an ambush or a roadblock and neither one was a good sign.

  “Colonel!” he transmitted, hoping the officer wasn’t too far back for the signal to reach him. Reception wasn’t good in these mountains. “We have one American main battle tank and thirty-six dismounts in the open. They have fired upon us and I am about to engage.”

  “Roger that, Varlamov.” Sverdlov’s voice was calm, as if this was all par for the course, a minor annoyance. “Take out the tank, but see if you can get me a prisoner to interrogate.”

  “Will do.” He switched frequencies. “Sgt. Petrovna, circle around behind the dismounts and herd them toward me. Sgt. Renko, you’re with me.” Ivan Renko was the third in the file formation, just rounding the curve behind Petrovna.

  “Roger that, Major.”

  That damned gun fired again, blowing a hole through the branches above it, and Anton saw the black dot of the 120mm round whizzing by only thirty meters away. The M1A began to rumble forward on massive treads, tearing up the road beneath it.

  “I’m going to take this damned thing out.”

  He didn’t want to waste an anti-armor missile on the thing, definitely didn’t want to waste the chain gun ammo it would take to cut through that thing’s armor. He grinned in the privacy of his cockpit, an idea striking him.

  “Renko, distract it with your machine guns, but don’t let it shoot you down.”

  “I’d rather distract it with a missile, sir,” Renko protested.

  “Do as you’re told, soldier.” Anton’s tone was gently reproving, which he figured would be more effective than yelling at the man, given that he was an unknown quantity to these people.

  “Yes, sir,” Renko said, though still with obvious reluctance.

  Renko swung his Tagan back toward the lake, descending low enough to make himself a target for the tank’s main gun, while Anton came over the top of the tree canopy above it. The thing was well-armored on the front and sides and back, but there was a reason the old anti-tank missiles had been designed to attack from the top.

  “Fuck me!” Renko swore, apparently forgetting his mic was still hot, though Anton couldn’t exactly blame him. The 120mm round had come damn close to his cockpit.

  The tank crept farther up the road, its commander encouraged by the near-miss. Anton dropped. The Tagan struck the outer branches of the lodgepole pine bent over the road, its roots shifted along with the earth beneath by decades of frost heaves, and pine needles exploded away from the bulk of the mech. The raw mass of the mech crushed the gun turret beneath it, and Anton gasped with the impact, teeth clamping down on the mouthpiece attached to his helmet.

  He couldn’t keep balance on top of the tank, felt himself beginning to slide off the turret almost immediately, but blasted a short burst from his thrusters to jump backwards instead. His mech’s footpads cracked the pavement beneath them and he reared back, raising the Tagan’s articulated left fist like a hammer over his head and bringing it down onto the M1A’s left tread.

  The jolt from the blow rang the metal of the mech’s torso like a bell, but it had done its job. The tread separated at the spot of the strike, flopping backwards off the rear rollers, rendering the tank immobile. He was fairly certain he’d demolished the loading mechanism when he crushed the turret, but he wasn’t willing to leave it to chance. He grabbed the barrel of the main gun and pushed the entire weight of his Tagan against it, depressing it past its stops until he felt the base give way. The barrel sagged, yanked free of its moorings, giving the tank a forlorn, hopeless look, like the ruins of so many battlefields he’d seen in eastern Europe.

  He’d barely noticed the pinging of small-arms fire off his armor, but now it seemed louder and more frequent, and he realized the foot soldiers were running from Petrovna’s mech. Three of them fell to the sergeant’s machine-guns as he watched, and he knew if he wanted intelligence from this, he had to act now before it turned into a massacre.

  “Cease fire, Petrovna,” he barked into his helmet mic.

  In seeming disregard for his own order, he swept a long burst just in front of the oncoming gaggle of camouflage-clad men and women. His shot missed on purpose, though, causing the oncoming troops to scramble to a halt, heads wagging back and forth as they looked for a place to run, for any cover at all. He touched the control for the Tagan’s external speakers.

  “Throw down your weapons and surrender now and I swear you will not be harmed.”

  He’d spoken in English, of course. Hopefully, they could all speak it. He knew there were parts of the Quebec city-state where the children were raised to speak only French and speaking English in public was a crime. He could see their hesitation, see the doubt on their faces. These men and women were not military, despite the tank, despite the old M4 carbines they carried. Their hair was long and tangled, the men all sporting bushy beards, and their clothing was more military surplus from fifty years ago than it was a uniform.

  “We are not here to fight you,” Anton assured them. “If I wanted you dead, we could kill you all in seconds, and there’s not a damned thing you could do about it. We just want to find out what’s ahead on the road and then we’ll let you go.”
r />   One of them seemed older than the others, at least if the shock of grey hair in his beard was any indication. He slowly and deliberately placed his carbine on the pavement, then motioned for the others to do the same. A few looked reluctant to obey and he had to shout at them in obvious anger, though Anton couldn’t make out what he said. Whatever it was, it was effective. The others complied, setting their rifles and not a few handguns as well on the road and raising their hands.

  “Sgt. Petrovna,” he transmitted, “Sgt. Venko, cover me and if a one of them makes a move for their guns, shoot the whole lot of them down.” He switched back to the PA system. “I’m coming out. If one of you as much as steps toward their weapon, my friends will cut you all down in a heartbeat. I merely wish to talk.”

  He didn’t wait for a reply, simply shut down the controls of his Tagan and unstrapped from his seat, lowering himself down to the exit hatch between the mech’s legs. It was startlingly warm outside for this altitude, though nowhere near as humid and muggy as coastal Virginia or Maryland in the heat of the summer. He saw sweat on the foreheads of the men and women below as he descended into their midst, keeping a hand settled on his holstered sidearm but not drawing it.

  Anton ignored the others, stepping straight up to the greybeard. The man was taller than him by several centimeters, broad through the shoulders and broadening in the gut with age. He had a look to him of wisdom gained through hard knocks, the air of a man who might have happily attacked a mech while armed only with a rifle had he been twenty years younger. If he were in anyone’s military, he would have been an NCO, but with this lot…

  “Who are you people?” Anton demanded.

  “Jasper city militia,” the older man answered just a bit too easily.

  “Bullshit.” The word was the flat crack of a slap across the face, but it didn’t seem to faze the greybeard. He even grinned slightly. Anton went on. “Jasper is thirty-five kilometers from here and that fucking tank…” He pointed back at the crushed M1A. “…goes through fuel faster than a Moscow hooker goes through a kilo of cocaine. No city militia would send their most dangerous weapon this far away unless they knew we were coming, and you didn’t. If you’d known we were heading this way, you would have dug in somewhere with cover. So I repeat, who the hell are you people?”

  The greybeard shrugged.

  “Just came across the tank and the trucks and the guns in an armory a couple years ago,” he said. “Decided they was going to waste there and we should put ‘em to good use protecting this area from trouble.”

  Anton barked a laugh.

  “You mean you killed the poor saps in whatever armory this tank was stored at and decided to turn bandit.” He waved it away. “I don’t give a shit. I want to know where we can expect to encounter organized resistance between here and Colorado. I’m sure you don’t let some notional borders stop your activities, so you should know where to go to avoid the military. Anyone’s military.”

  Greybeard nodded slowly, shrugging his acceptance of Anton’s assurances.

  “There’s no organized military units between here and Red Lodge,” he said. “Past that, I don’t know. I ain’t tried going up the Beartooth and I didn’t want to chance running into any of them fuckers from Cody. Those fuckers are crazy. Don’t go that way if you can avoid it.”

  His eyes danced to the side at the scream of mech thrusters and widened at what he saw behind Anton. Anton chanced a glanced back and grinned at the sight of the main body of the battalion coming up the road, burning down on thrusters to rumble to a walking landing and taking up a defensive formation.

  “Or maybe it don’t matter,” the greybeard admitted, voice just above a whisper. “That’s a shitload of mechs. I don’t believe I’ve ever seen that many in one place.”

  “And you’re unlikely to again,” Anton assured him. “All right, you’ve done your part, now we’ll do ours. Don’t even try to touch your guns or go for your vehicles until we’re out of sight. Am I clear?”

  “We ain’t suicidal. We ain’t planning on doing a damned thing.”

  Anton grunted, backing away toward his mech. He clambered up the ladder into the cockpit and yanked the hatch up behind him, dogging it shut. He’d barely gotten into his control seat when he heard the machine guns firing, looked up to see Petrovna and Renko strafing the bandits with their anti-personnel guns, bodies falling torn to the pavement before they could run a step. Adrenalin surging through him, he grabbed his helmet with one hand and began powering up the mech with the other, clumsily pushing the helmet down far enough to key the mic.

  “What the hell’s going on?” he demanded. “Did they go for their weapons?”

  “No.” It was Sverdlov’s voice answering in his helmet speakers. “I ordered them to open fire.”

  “Why, Colonel?” Anton demanded. “They were no threat.”

  “They’d seen us,” Sverdlov told him, not seeming to take offense at his tone, but showing not a bit of regret, either. “They were money-hungry brigands who would likely try to sell us out to the Americans the first chance they got. And maybe we’d get to Cheyenne Mountain before they could contact anyone significant who would believe them, and maybe we wouldn’t. It’s not my job to take those sorts of risks with operational security, Major Varlamov, and I’d think someone with your background would agree, no?”

  Anton didn’t answer, just watched the Tagans stomping after the last of the bandits, torsos swiveling as their machine guns raked back and forth, reminding him of sailors swabbing a deck. Or perhaps old-time hunters clubbing baby seals. Blood painted the pavement and nothing moved, but still the two mechs fired, peppering the cargo trucks with bullets in case anyone was hiding beneath the canvas covers. Slugs punctured the tires and the chassis sank downward as if the vehicles had been killed along with their drivers.

  Finally, after what seemed like hours to Anton but was probably less than thirty seconds, the guns went silent and smoke curled away as they cooled, Colt sixshooters in the hands of movie gunfighters.

  Except this wasn’t a fight, it was a massacre.

  Why did it bother him? These weren’t innocent civilians, they were scum. They’d probably murdered travelers for their supplies and vehicles.

  And yet it did. When had that happened? When had he grown a conscience?

  “Get your mech moving, Major Varlamov,” Sverdlov told him. “You’re still walking point.”

  He bit back the response he wanted to give, swallowed the insults and invective he wanted to hurl at the man. It would accomplish nothing. The colonel was right. He said the only thing he could.

  “Yes, sir. Moving out.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  “Holy shit,” Nate muttered, shaking his head. “I never thought they’d all actually come.”

  It was quite a sight flying in over the old railyard, skirting just above the trees to avoid detection. Nathan Stout hadn’t seen this many mechs in one place since…

  Since my memories belonged to someone else.

  The Prime, the original Nathan Stout, had remembered the Hellfires and Cobras lined up like terracotta soldiers in some Chinese emperor’s tomb in the production facilities out west, back in the old days. Maybe they still had rank upon rank of them somewhere in Colorado or Kansas, though he didn’t think so. Back then, there’d been the resources of the global economy to draw upon, the oil flowing through pipelines, the rare-earth elements still coming in from Africa, the superconductors shipping in from Japan.

  Japan didn’t exist as a cohesive country anymore, the pipelines were broken and shut down and Africa was even more of a war-torn hellhole now than it had been back in the mid-20th century. Supplies could still be had, but their production was costly and every mech they built meant something else didn’t get built. Every isotope reactor put into a Hellfire was one less used to power a city block. He had no hard evidence, but he believed most of the mechs the US government produced went to mercenary units like BAMF.

  Or the other thre
e private military companies gathered down by the train tracks next to what was surely the biggest civilian train Nate had seen…since his memories also belonged to someone else.

  He landed beside the largest cluster of Hellfire mechs, the ones he recognized from the camo pattern of their paint as belonging to LV-426. The pilots were already out of the machines, milling around in their own cluster of identical uniform flight suits, staying away from the others in an innate tribal instinct.

  Have to change that before the real bullets start flying.

  They all covered their eyes and mouths as his Hellfire threw up a cloud of dust around them, and kept them covered at the approach of the other four mechs following on his six. By the time Nate had his restraints unfastened and his helmet off, the other mechs in Broken Arrow Mercenary Force were down and the cargo truck was rumbling up the road behind them, ready to pull into the dirt field that had used to be a parking lot for semi tractors back when the trainyard had been a minor shipping depot.

  There were already two other trucks pulled up there, one ancient deuce-and-a-half of similar provenance to their own and a HEMTT, what his Prime had known as a “Hemet,” almost as old. There was also, absurdly, a hover barge and he knew it had to belong to LV-426 and that it was probably stolen.

  Nate worked the hatch between the legs of the Hellfire open and dropped down, catching three rungs on the way to the dirt and gravel beneath the mech’s feet. He felt the familiar twinge in his knees, winced less at the pain and more at the knowledge it would only get worse.

  Look at the bright side. You’ll probably be dead in a few days, anyway.

  “Good afternoon, Conrad,” he said, throwing an offhanded salute to the taller man.

  Conrad Barron looked disgusted, but whether he was disgusted with Nate for landing so close, with the broken-down old trainyard where they were meeting or with himself for buying into the mission, Nate wasn’t sure.