Dogs of War

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  Then they are running away, making lots of noise, and I want to chase them. It is all I can think about and I am out of the trees right then. They run: I chase. That seems right to me.

  But Honey is in my head saying: No! No! Honey is in my head telling me we must not. Telling me it is not right, and Master is not here and I cannot tell if they are enemies and I am making bad decisions.

  Bees is all around me, her units looping through the air. She is not chasing the men. She must have heard Honey’s voice too.

  The men are further away now. They are still running, and my legs twitch as I watch them. My body knows what it wants to do.

  Dragon’s channel: Target acquired.

  Honey’s channel: No! No shooting, Dragon!

  Dragon’s channel: They are running, they are the enemy. They will come back with all those other humans you told us about.

  Honey’s channel: No, we need the humans and their comms access.

  Dragon’s channel: Kill them and take it.

  Honey’s channel: No. There is no future in killing humans.

  Dragon’s channel: … This is something he does, a sound that means nothing, but broadcast anyway, to show he does not understand. My brain is making that same sound inside my head. It means that, of all the clever things Honey has ever said, this is the one I understand the least.

  Honey’s channel: Trust me on this.

  And I do trust Honey. And I do not trust Dragon. No shooting, I say, and then, because the blankness in my mind is so great, but I do not understand.

  Dragon’s channel: What is there to understand? They were enemies. They are all enemies.

  Honey’s channel: Not necessarily.

  Dragon’s channel: They will try to kill us whether or not we kill them. So we should kill them. We should kill them so there are fewer of them to kill us.

  Bees’ channel: I concur.

  I am of the same mind, but say nothing.

  Honey’s channel repeats: There is no future in killing humans.

  We all exchange looks, in our different ways. Dragon’s turreted eyes tilt to me. I watch the many bodies of Bees as they circle us, their flight as agitated as I feel. Bees sees all.

  Bees’ channel: Killing humans is what we are for.

  Dragon’s channel: Killing humans is even what humans are for.

  Honey stands tall, shakes her sloping shoulders and tosses her head. She tells us, That is not true. Humans are for many things as well as killing humans. That is why there are so many humans. If we are only for killing humans, what will happen to us when the humans here stop fighting? What point will there be in us?

  I do not understand her fully, and I do not think the others do either. We wait, as if Master will suddenly appear and explain everything in ways simple enough for us. I miss him. When Master spoke to us, I was never confused like this.

  Dragon’s channel: None of this is right.

  Bees channel: Killing humans is what we’re for. And an image of a dead bird, the meaning of which is unclear but probably bad. Perhaps she means that having a future is not what we are for.

  Honey scratches, then sits heavily so she can look at me, eye to eye.

  Honey’s channel: Rex, I would like to make contact with the humans who live here.

  Dragon thinks they will fight us, and says so. I tell Honey that if they attack, they will be enemies. I do not need to say what would happen after that.

  13

  De Sejos

  The people of Retorna had been waiting for the war to come for a long time. At first it had been something far away: the Anarchistas had been springing up all across Campeche and Yucatan, forming communes, broadcasting their discontent with the government over in the Distrito Federal and calling the foreign corporations thieves.

  Then someone had started the fighting. Marches had turned to riots. Some offices and factories were bombed. The Anarchistas blamed corporate agents provocateurs, the government blamed the Anarchistas. The army got involved, which was bad. Then the army got involved on both sides, which was worse.

  For over a year, the southern states of Mexico had been a battleground. At first it had just been the government against the Anarchista rebels and their supporters, but chaos had spread like a brushfire. Once the oil installations were attacked and the mines shut down, the corporations had sent their own troops in, over whom the government had no control.

  And the corporations were not run by bad people, considered Doctor Thea de Sejos. They wanted to protect their property and their people, and they wanted to restore peace so everyone could get on with their lives. She wasn’t someone who spouted the Anarchista creed and said anyone taking a foreign paycheque was a traitor. Her own funding came straight from Medicine Sans Frontiers after all.

  The problem was that the multinationals had, of course, turned to private contractors to police their holdings in Campeche and Yucatan and Tabasco. They were corporations, not governments: they didn’t have armies. They put the jobs out to tender, because apparently there was a global market in bands of armed men who were interested in freelance regime change. They were not the army. They were not beholden to the government or the people. They did not much care how they went about things so long as they got results and didn’t go over budget.

  There were no openly-confessed Anarchista supporters in the little village of Retorna, but de Sejos still dreaded the coming of the mercenaries. From the stories the Anarchista radio told and from the tales of the refugees, she didn’t think the private security soldiers would care about political loyalties. They ran up and down the country like packs of mad dogs.

  And she had something here in Retorna that they would want to know about. She had her clinic and in her hospice, and inside them she had something terrible.

  She went about her rounds there with perfect professional detachment: calm words, a steady hand. She used up her dwindling stock of drugs and she used her phone to take photos of the burns and the discolorations – and the bodies. She hadn’t sent the pictures out over her patchy satellite connection. She hadn’t shown them to anyone. She was terrified that such communications might be intercepted; that they would be traced back to her and the people of Retorna.

  Only two others knew: Father Estevan and Jose Blanco, who had been nominally left in charge when the ranch owner fled north.

  Ever since she had worked out what she was looking at each day at the hospice, she had been waiting for someone to turn up with guns and questions. Maybe the mercenaries, maybe the Anarchistas or the government, maybe just the roving bands of displaced men who had decided to take what they needed from anyone too weak to prevent them.

  When Luke Perez and his friends came hollering and yelling out from the pasture, she thought the time had come. They had gone out to see what had spooked the cattle, and now their battered old four-by-four was screeching to a dusty halt in the centre of Retorna. They were calling for Blanco, for the priest, for anyone.

  Monsters , they were shouting. There were monsters coming.

  Thea de Sejos had studied medicine in Guadalajara. She had spoken at conferences in Paris and Madrid. She did not go to church. She had not believed in monsters since she was a child. Not until this war.

  She brought Luke Perez to the church – the de facto centre of governance since Retorna became its own island state in the shifting conflict. She sat the man down with Father Estevan and sent for Jose Blanco. Time for a town meeting.

  “What are we dealing with here?” was Blanco’s first question. He was a big man, who had been working on becoming a fat man before everything kicked off. He had also been a vicious drunk back in the day, but he might just have been the one thing in Campeche the war had actually improved.

  “This is their dog soldiers,” young Father Estevan pronounced grimly. “That means it’s the company military.”

  Blanco tugged at his moustache. “Luke says he saw just two.”

  “We don’t know how many he didn’t see,” de Sejos murmure
d.

  “So tell me about them.”

  She shrugged. “There’s absolutely nothing about how they’re being used here. Redmark and the others are keeping it all under wraps. Worldwide? They’re new, they’re still experimental. A lot of people don’t want them. The whole point of them is, you send them where you wouldn’t risk humans, except their detractors say you send them to do things human soldiers wouldn’t do. Extermination missions, no conscience, no remorse.”

  “They’ve no souls,” Estevan added and, at de Sejos’ raised eyebrows. “Sorry, party line. Genuine papal pronouncement.” Estevan was a very junior priest and de Sejos always figured he had been sent to backwoods Retorna to cool off after having ideas.

  “Probably they’re here ahead of the regular troops, checking us out.” De Sejos’s voice shook very slightly, thinking what they might find. “But they might…”

  “They might be here to take Retorna off the map,” Blanco finished for her. “I shall round up everyone with a gun. Perhaps they are only two.”

  “They’re supposed to be bulletproof.”

  Blanco shrugged. “They are animals,” he said. “Animals die.”

  It wasn’t long before the cry went out that something was prowling about the edge of the town. By then, Retorna’s people were mostly behind the strong walls of the church or in the big house that Blanco was taking care of. Blanco himself had every rifle and shotgun in the village ready and loaded and in the hands of men or women who could use them. A barrel was poking out of almost every window.

  De Sejos was at the big house, doing her best to keep everyone calm, when she heard Blanco swear.

  “Mother of God, what is that thing?”

  She pushed to his window for a look. She was expecting something like a man and a dog – like some movie werewolf perhaps. This was different; this was bigger, for a start. It shambled up to the outskirts of Retorna on four feet, but then rose up onto two, tall as most of the buildings in the village. For a moment, de Sejos could only process a vast dark mass, almost shapeless in its lazy bulk. No dog, this.

  “It’s a bear,” she whispered.

  “That’s not a bear,” Blanco spat.

  What were bears after all? Children’s toys and sad, sagging zoo inmates. De Sejos had thought she knew bears, their shape and size. This thing was like a great pillar of fluid muscle with claws and teeth. And a gun. The weapon was on some sort of harness at the monster’s side, but if you had melted down and recast all the rifles in Retorna, you wouldn’t have reached the size and weight of that one weapon.

  “Don’t shoot. If you shoot, we’re at war. Don’t shoot until we have no choice,” de Sejos murmured.

  “How stupid do you think I am, woman?” Blanco replied, but without rancour. His eyes were wide and frightened, his knuckles white about his shotgun.

  The bear-thing lifted its snout in the air and scratched at itself, claws digging beneath the straps of its harness.

  “People of this village, hello!”

  The voice was very loud, very sudden, enough to send people scattering back from the windows as though it was an attack. De Sejos heard one shot from the direction of the church, someone’s nervous trigger finger betraying them. For a moment the world held its breath, but the bullet didn’t seem to have gone anywhere that might trouble the bear.

  “Good day!” boomed the bear. Loud, yes, but the voice itself was whole wrong for the creature: female, soothing, pleasant out of any other mouth. The sort of voice a news anchor or a government spokeswoman might use, or someone selling something. Its Spanish was textbook formal.

  “Nobody said they could talk,” Blanco growled.

  “I suppose they’d have to, to report…” But that’s not what this is. De Sejos watched the bear’s muzzle cast left and right.

  “Is it going to… tell us to leave, do you think?”

  De Sejos gave him a look. “You think it’s here to evict us, like a landlord?”

  “I have no God-damned idea what that thing wants.”

  “We are not here to fight you!” the monster boomed consolingly, as if on cue. It spread its clawed paws wide, but if the gesture was intended to be reassuring then it failed completely.

  “So where’s the other one?” Blanco demanded. “Or the other ones?” Abruptly he pushed away from the window and she heard him passing the word on: keep your eyes out, this might be a distraction.

  As distractions went, de Sejos considered, an enormous gun-toting talking bear should win prizes. Under other circumstances she’d have paid to see that.

  The village was very silent after the thunder of the bear’s words, so the sound of the church door opening seemed shockingly loud. De Sejos ran over to another window, seeing Father Estevan there, closing the portal behind him. He had dressed in his black cassock, every inch the priest, and she saw him cross himself and look skywards.

  “Get back inside!” Blanco bellowed at him, and then the bear shifted, and she saw one paw dart for that huge gun, and draw back. Jose paled, and Estevan was holding his hands out, just as the bear had, save that a single swat of one paw would shatter every bone in his body.

  “What the hell is he going to do?” Blanco moved with her, window to window to follow the priest’s progress. “He’s going to exorcise it?” And, at her look, he went on, “What? Spirits out of swine, it’s in the Book. So why not out of this monster?”

  “You think Redmark’s going to war with bears possessed by devils?” de Sejos asked him.

  He gave her an odd look. “You don’t see a thing like that, a talking animal, and maybe wonder?”

  De Sejos got out her phone and tapped to the camera, zooming in the focus until she could see Estevan clearly, following his progress. His hands were shaking, she saw. Seeing him standing there in the bear’s long shadow, she could hardly blame him.

  But he spoke, gesturing. Was he driving the beast out, afire with the Lord’s righteousness? That didn’t sound like the Father Estevan she knew. Perhaps he was offering it some coffee.

  The thought of a gun-toting, talking, caffeinated monsterbear struck her irresistibly and she bit back a sob of horrified laughter.

  The bear replied, hunching low, the rumble of its voice still audible even though it had adopted a more conversational volume. De Sejos thought about that voice – blandly comforting in a slightly artificial way, and surely not designed to be deployed in a war zone. Unless this bear was some bio-engineered diplomat, some first contact specialist of the new animal kingdom. Perhaps Redmark would make all its corporate statements through random fauna now.

  At last she saw Estevan nodding, and the huge beast sat down ponderously.

  “Sweet Jesus,” Blanco exclaimed, “he’s tamed it!”

  De Sejos shook her head, but something had plainly happened out there between priest and monster, and now Estevan was coming back, waving at the big house.

  “What does it want?” Blanco yelled at him out of the window.

  “It wants…” Estevan stopped and closed his eyes for a moment, and only then did de Sejos see just how very scared he had been, and how he had wrestled with his fear. “It wants to use our Internet connection.”

  Blanco and de Sejos exchanged dumbfounded looks.

  “And food. It has some friends that want feeding,” Estevan went on. “Time to slaughter the fatted calf.”

  14

  Rex

  So we come to the human place. The not-enemy place. Civilian is a word Honey uses for them. I query my database: I understand the concept but I have no way of deciding what is civilian and what is not. That was Master’s job. How does Honey have a better idea than me? How long do I keep trusting Honey?

  They have many guns, these civilians. They are mostly bad guns and they would find it very difficult to hurt any of us with them, even Dragon. My database checks every weapon in seconds: make, model, variant ammunition, muzzle velocity. Two of the humans have more powerful weapons that my database classifies as military. This is the
opposite of civilian.

  Honey’s channel: They may have received the weapons from soldiers. There has been a lot of fighting near here.

  Dragon’s channel: Target acquired. He has chosen one of the civilians with a military gun.

  Honey says we are not here to fight. Dragon says he is not fighting, just acquiring targets. Dragon says we should be prepared.

  Dragon’s channel: We are all we have. We cannot trust these humans.

  Bees’ channel: Encirclement complete. Bees has surrounded the village in a loose ring. Now her units perch unseen on walls and fences and roofs, watching everything.

  Honey’s channel: Say ‘hola’.

  I say hola. The air is already strong with fear. Some of the smaller civilians are making constant noise; I can hear them even though they are inside buildings. The noise is grating and I want them to stop making it. It is an enemy-noise. The fear is an enemy-smell. I am twitchy and my Big Dog guns twitch with me. I am growling, deep and low in my chest. I want to stop but I can’t.

  Nobody has called me Good Dog for a long time. My feedback chip is silent. I feel very lost.

  Dragon cannot say hello. He does not have a voicebox like Honey or I. The civilians are scared of me and scared of Honey but they are far more scared of Dragon. They keep a much greater distance from him than from us. They make odd movements about their throats and chests. I find this funny. Don’t they know Dragon is the least dangerous of us? Don’t they know that the time to fear Dragon is when you can’t see him? Perhaps they don’t know. It seems strange to me that anyone could be ignorant of such a thing.

  Honey’s channel: They are bringing cow.

  Bees channel: (image of dead cow) (image of dead bird) (image of dead enemies).

  Sometimes I do not understand Bees.

  Six civilians are dragging a dead cow towards us, through the village. One of the bigger ones there is their leader: I can tell from the way they all stand around him. He gives them the order to drop the cow in front of us and they back off quickly, the leader last. There is a new fear about him and his cow-pullers. His eyes are on me, on the cow, on me. His hands shake and he clenches them into fists.