The one exception to this wise policy are people like me: in loco soldiers, or “locos” for short. Locos are needed for something like half a dozen obscure reasons, chief among which is the logistics of the link between drone and pilot: the warriors in their cocoons may be a continent away, and such distance implies a split–second delay between input and output, seeing the menace and reacting to it, seeing the enemy surrender and stopping firing. And in the war business, split seconds might mean lives.
We, the locos, work as an emergency feedback loop: our mental states are broadcast to the drones, stabilizing them. They have algorithms that use this information, plus every individual droid’s sensory input, to fill in the minuscule voids of command. Crucially, if some boundaries are surpassed, the drones start responding to our emotional states—fear, relief, whatever—before responding to their pilots’ commands. If I feel panicked and duck, everybody ducks; if I just duck to avoid a spiderweb or something, everybody keeps following the pilots, with the algorithms kicking in now and then. It usually works.
If you ask around in one of those civilized democracies, they’ll tell you that the in loco soldiers are all selfless people, humanitarians, heroic volunteers. As for myself, I can say I was rightfully convicted for the murder in the first degree of my now ex–wife’s lover. Every two years of in loco military service erases a decade from my hundred–year–plus prison sentence. You may say that I’m a volunteer, I guess, but you may also say that the circumstances that led me to sign in were somewhat exceptional. And I have never met an in loco who wasn’t a convicted felon, a fugitive, or both. Some thought of the service as a kind of atonement. For me, it is a job—the lesser of two evils.
With everybody paralyzed, the guerrillas come down from the hills and start plundering. The medical stuff is their first priority, of course, but they also take some time to strip a few of the drones from their armor plating and take some ammo. They don’t steal weapons. They know the hardware is locked to the drone’s equivalent of a biometric signature: the pressure level of its simulated muscles, the invisible marks etched in its gauntlet.
And then they are gone.
Nobody touched me. I’d been just one more body among many, the blood oozing from my body covered by a thin layer of bright ice. They hadn’t noticed that I was breathing. Lucky me.
Once they are gone, I get to my feet. First I run to the captain’s drone and open its body—not a hard thing to do when the damn thing is still and you know where to push and where to pull. The hydraulic locks hiss and puff, the servos work, the panels slide. The drone still has some power reserves left, and its systems weren’t completely fried. An electromagnet pulse is not an explanation for what just happened.
The captain’s drone contains the mission log and the main comm link to Stockholm. The link is dead and, while there’s nothing wrong with it physically, I can’t get it to work. The platoon collapsed like so many puppets with their strings cut. Something has jammed the communication with home base or destroyed their receptors at a level so deep I cannot identify—in the software, perhaps.
I try my own link with Stockholm and base, with the same results. Nothing. As a unit, we are like a body with a broken spinal cord. Alive, but unconscious, unknowing.
The blizzard has since abated, and the cloud cover opens up. There are a few stars and I think I see one or two planets among the ice–covered gnarled tree branches. I inhale deep, pretending that the processed air that I get through the mask is the real thing.
I am alone. Totally alone. I can walk away, wipe my slate clean, start a new life, and perhaps even become a warlord myself. All the shackles that tied me to the military were severed by the same mysterious power that cut the platoon from home. It isn’t as if I lost friends here. A few of the other soldiers were nice to me even knowing that, as the platoon’s loco, I probably was a convicted felon. But none of them are really dead. They are just having some kind of RV–induced hangover thousands of miles away. Away from the cold, the bullets, the real death.
I am not bound by honor, nor by friendship or by revenge. So I just start walking away. I feel elated. At this point, I have no plans: every option seems equally good, equally free—finding a village and going native, becoming a bandit on the hills, going south and stealing a boat to take me to France or perhaps Morocco, going east and then across Russia…
But there are those medical supplies. The people of the village really need them. I know what a shortage of frost blockers can do to a child in a climate like this. It isn’t beautiful.
Damn.
I start to follow the guerrilla tracks.
§
Tracking the guerrillas isn’t a hard thing to do. The blizzard has blown itself out, and they aren’t trying to cover their tracks. Why would they? But the going is slow due to the terrain and because I have to see to my wounds.
At the beginning, the tracks cover a large area—just what you would expect of a group of men moving in the same general direction in a haphazard manner—but after a while they converge, the whole terrain tapering between some basalt rocks on the sides into a quasi–tunnel covered by a canopy of crisscrossing black branches. It’s like the entrance of a fortress designed by nature. It would be a surprise if there were no guards, so I stop some fifty meters away from it, using some of the lower rocks for cover, and wait.
My systems still don’t get any uplink to Stockholm or any other remotely civilized place. Not even a satellite signal. But now there’s a lot less ice floating in the air—the mask sensors start to be somewhat useful. As the readings start to improve, I use the time to take a better look at my wound. It’s nothing serious, and the body armor has begun to work on it already, dousing it with antibiotics, anesthetics, and plaster. Feels numb, but nothing else. I can move with little discomfort.
I’m there, thinking about discomfort and wondering for how long the punctured–but–still–functional armor will be able to keep the cold outside, when the sensors show me a source of heat shinning bright somewhere to the left of the tunnel entrance, moving slowly between rocks and trees. My first impulse is to aim and shoot, but I am reminded that there’s possibly a real human being lurking there, not a drone. One gets quite trigger–happy around drones.
Despite my history, I dislike killing people. And I don’t even know if the heat signal is a man. It might be some kind of animal. Small reindeer? Wolf? If I kill a reindeer I’ll feel obliged to eat it. If I kill a wolf, I’ll feel guilty as hell. The directional mike doesn’t help. I have to get closer.
There is a semicircle of low rocks that I can use as cover to go in there. Not a very good cover, but I’m all in white, there’s snow everywhere, and the sensors will let me know if someone gets too close. This outfit can even detect if a rifle’s LiDAR sight is pointing my direction. And so I start moving and, of course, I’m screwed.
I take two steps and then everything goes dark. Really dark. My mask’s visuals just die out and I begin to suffocate: there’s no more air circulating inside my helmet. I fall down, thrashing, my arms and legs suddenly heavy, too heavy. The servomotors of the armor are inactive. I feel dizzy. It’s an effort just to raise my hands and to claw the mask out of my face to let the fresh air in. It’s night, but the sudden shock of light still blinds me for a second. I think I’ll heave but I don’t.
The weight of the armor forces me down onto my knees; it’s painful in my awkward position. My legs are paralyzed. Frantically, I work to remove my gloves, the helmet, open the collar, bend again to take off the boots, trying to crawl out of the armor as an aborted butterfly coming out of the cocoon.
It’s cold and I begin to shiver, naked but by for my undersuit in the snow. Then someone says, in crystal–clear Spanish:
“Welcome to the doorway to Eanmund’s Hall. Now, now, don’t you fret. Come here.”
The man has a skin as dark as mine, which marks him as a foreigner in these parts, not one of the white barbarians. But his hair is bleached blond—perhaps he
was trying to fit in, going native? He’s wearing a more colorful version of the Scandinavian savages’ dress, all furs and cannibalized plate armor, but with lots of collars and bracelets of bright stones and animals’ teeth.
He throws a stinking blanket over my shoulders and pushes me toward the rock–and–tree tunnel. There’s a small lean–to just hidden on the outside and to the left, close to the place where I’d seen the heat signal. When I’m sitting down there, my mouth trembling and my lips blue, he starts a fire.
“I am glad you came,” the stranger says. “I knew a platoon like that would certainly have to have an in loco. If you did not come, I would’ve gone down there after you. Nasty place to spend the night alone, these parts.”
“And you are…?”
“I am Pascual de Andagoya. I am the UN ambassador to His Highness Eanmund’s court. Call me Pascual.”
A UN representative. Then it hits me.
“You have a peacemaker.”
“Had.”
§
A peacemaker is a specialized tool used by UN representatives on peacekeeping missions. The device neutralizes all drones nearby when activated, a last–resort measure to stop atrocities against civilians and the like by drone pilots. They’re rarely used—only in special circumstances, such as like what happened during the Rape of Berlin, when a few of the guys went killer–crazy after finding a glitch that created drone–induced orgasmic highs. A peacemaker in the hands of a guerrilla group would be disastrous indeed.
“How did you lose yours?”
“Eanmund’s sister, Freawru, is quite a persuasive young lady.”
“Were you seduced?”
“It’s complicated… she’s not like the rest of them. She studied engineering in the south. She even made some improvements on the device.” I recall my blindness, the shutdown of my air supply, of the armor servomotors. The communications blackout. These things are not part of the peacemaker’s normal function, and were activated only when I got close to their lair.
“Freawru was a brilliant engineer once, with a great career before her despite the racism and the bigotry of our people,” he added. “She gave up a life in civilization to be by the side of her barbarian brother when he sent for her.”
He gave me a sad smile before continuing: “I did not know any of this when I first met her, of course. And, well, I was here as an official envoy, trying to get this guy Eanmund to stop brawling with everybody else and be part of the alliance we are trying to establish, uniting the warlords, shaping them into a semblance of government… given their culture, it would’ve been impolite to refuse the overtures of the warlord’s sister.”
“Impolite?”
He waves his hands at the cynicism of my voice. “It was a trap. Once she got me naked in her room, and got me distracted…”
“Distracted.”
His eyes flash with anger, but he keeps his voice level. A diplomat, indeed. “I woke up in fetters. She’d disabled my passive surveillance devices and personal safety alarms and made it quite clear that no help would come.”
“And you gave them the peacemaker.”
My tone has gone from cynical to contemptuous. He doesn’t like it.
“You are an in loco. What’ve you done? Robbed a bank? No, you don’t look like a professional criminal. Killed someone, then? Not professionally? Not in cold blood? In a fit of rage, perhaps? Was it a woman?”
Now the contempt is in his voice. He might be an incompetent fool and a coward, but I am a murderer.
“Not a woman,” I say, defensively, without thinking. It comes back to me: I remember the man’s face, the face of my victim, as I punched the life out of him. I was big and strong; he was small and weak. If she’d preferred him, why hadn’t she just left me and been done with it? Why…? “What is it to you?” I ask.
“I need a murderer. Someone to get the peacemaker back.”
“I was going to retrieve the medical supplies,” I say. “With the armor, I stood a good chance. But you can’t expect me to get a whole bunch of barbarians single–handedly and unarmed…”
“There is another way,” he pauses, looking for a tactful phrase. “Because of how they’re organized.”
“And because I am a murderer?”
“A man who can kill another man, face to face, is a rare thing nowadays. It’s an uncommon skill in our civilization. I, for instance, cannot, will not. As I said, if you did not come, I would’ve gone down there after you. I needed to get us a murderer.”
He urges me to pretend to go along with her plans, to use the opportunity to get the peacemaker out of the barbarian’s hands, to use it to send a distress signal.
“There can be a full pardon for you, if you can manage to do that,” he says. “You could go back home with a clean slate.”
After committing a second crime, I think but do not say.
He takes me to her, to the woman who seduced and betrayed him.
She’s waiting for us a little further down the tunnel in an improvised tent. She has the washed–out blond hair and blue eyes of the Scandinavians, a perky nose, fuller lips than I am used to seeing at these latitudes. The fur coat encases her body so I can’t see anything of her curves or absence thereof. Not really my type, anyway.
“You talked to him?” she asks Pascual, ignoring me.
“Yes.”
“Will he do this for us?”
“I may, if I know what ‘this’ is,” I say abruptly, to make it impossible for her to keep pretending I am some kind of dumb animal. Pascual had already made it quite clear what they want from me, but I have to get her to acknowledge my presence.
“You are to go before Eanmund and call him a thief in his face. It will be a challenge for trial by combat, and if you win…”
“I get the peacemaker?”
Pascual nods. “He made the thing his badge of office. The winner will be the new ruler and thus the rightful owner. With no further dispute.”
“Why is his sister helping us?” I ask Pascual, pointedly ignoring her.
The answer, however, comes from her:
“Because I should rule by his side, as his equal, his sister, not a servant. Because he used me and then placed me along this… this…”
She looks at Pascual with contempt. He shrugs, but there is a new hardness around his eyes. “I seem to have evolved from valued prisoner into court’s jester,” he says, flatly.
§
Well, I am big and I have an enviable set of muscles. I have to, being a loco who follows a platoon of tireless, almost superhumanly–strong drones. Even before that, I had killed a man with my bare hands in a fit of rage. I am quite confident I could take on this Eanmund, whoever he might be, and regain my freedom. Get home. Home.
They lead me into a small natural amphitheater scooped from the rock wall by centuries of ice and covered by an artificial ceiling made of rags of parachute silk, sailcloth, and the like, interspersed with straw and sustained on wooden poles and beams. There are lots of men—the ones who attacked the platoon earlier, probably. Some of them are dozing, strong–scented beer spilled all over, but others are checking equipment, fixing the plates they’ve managed to remove from the drones to their armor. If I had a few drones with me, or even my own suit, I could have easily rounded them all up. Even the sentries Frewaru waves away as we proceed would’ve been nothing more than a joke. As it is, I enter half–naked, half–frozen, packed in a stinking blanket of wolf hide. Unarmed and escorted by the boss’s sister and by the new shaman–clown of the tribe. This will be a challenge.
Eanmund is seated in the center of the room on a dais, a huge guy with an ugly, broken version of Freawru’s perky nose. The box of medical supplies is ensconced in a big niche behind his crude throne. The peacemaker—a green–golden band of circuitry that the diplomat in charge ought to keep somewhere on his body during combat operations and safely hidden away every other time—is above it, like a laurel wreath laid over the spoils of war. He’s bigger than I am,
muscles straining at his shirt. Despite my condition, I’m a close match.
“Brother!” she cries, clinging with her body to me for all she is worth. “Here is a surviving warrior from those I massacred for you, a strong man who calls you a weakling, a coward, and a thief!” She is using a local variant of the common Scandinavian pidgin. I feel tempted to raise my hand and retract the “coward” and “weakling” charges, but then I think it would be useless.
And then everybody is suddenly quite awake: they might have been guzzling beer for hours before my arrival, but they sleep lightly and recover fast from the hangover.
I see steel gleaming under the almost psychedelic mixture of steady, cold LED light and hot, flickering torchlight—guns and rifles and machetes, axes, the greasy black of small artillery pieces glinting side by side with a few makeshift swords. There’s a loud click when someone shifts a machine gun.
“So you finally found yourself a champion, eh, my ingenious sister?” Eanmund smirks. He’s way bigger than me, I can see it now. This stuff about electing leaders by combat has a Darwinian effect: only the biggest and meanest survive long in office.
Eanmund comes down off the dais, cudgel in hand. It is a large piece of bone, the femur of some big animal reinforced with metal. Someone removes the stinking blanket from my shoulders and replaces it with something made of fur. A challenger’s cloak, probably.
“I just want the medicine to be delivered to the people of the village,” I tell him. “And the peacemaker returned to its rightful owner. I am not here to challenge your right to rule your men.”
“If you challenge my decision about the medicine and want to take the crown away, you challenge my right to rule,” he coldly replies. And then he smiles: “I think maybe my sister has tricked you. Leave now, and you may live.”
War Stories Page 25