by Alan Baxter
Ringo had learned a healthy distrust of coincidence, especially when it was in his favour and he had the unpleasant feeling that they were being channelled towards something, but why? Anyway, there was no way it could be worse than another hour in the meadow.
He recognised the lab by its smell. It even looked like a urinal with white ceramic tiles covering the walls and floor. Computers on wheeled workstations trailed cables across the tiles and another thick black rope of zip-tied cables led to what looked like a dentist's chair at the centre of the room.
Norris lay strapped into the chair, thrashing against his restraints while two technicians fiddled with an intricate helmet that encased Norris's head. A wave or rage surged through Ringo. Despite the white lab coats, these men were still torturers.
Custard crossed the room in three strides and slammed his homemade shiv up under the ribcage of the first man.
Ringo slammed an elbow into the face of the second technician. He spun around behind the man, wrapped his forearms around a thin neck in a choke hold and rode him down to the ground, slamming his head into the tiles so hard they cracked.
"Get this fucking thing off me!" Norris shouted from the chair.
Ringo quickly undid Norris's restraints, cursing at the big man to keep quiet.
“Custard, get on the scrounge,” Ringo said as he worked. “See what you can find. We'll need food and water and a weapon if you can find one.”
“Typical scouser,” Custard said. “Do you want me to nick their DVD player while I’m at it?”
Ringo undid the last of Norris's restraints and the big man tore off the helmet, cracking what was probably a million bucks worth of state-of-the-art hardware like an eggshell.
Anything physical came easy to Norris. He was a big unit, the kind of bloke you put on posters to scare the enemy. He wore his sideburns and moustache so long they met at his jawline. The only thing stopping it from being a full beard was his clean-shaven chin which was prominent and sported a cleft Kirk Douglas would have been proud of. There was permanence to Norris. In a world where everything was getting smaller and lighter he was proudly unreconstructed. He was a brick foundry on a street of prefab bungalows.
"What the fuck's going on?" Norris asked, and Ringo quickly filled him in while Custard rifled through the lab's supplies.
"We're going to need some wheels," Norris said. He stepped over the prone bodies of the technicians and started tapping commands into one of the computers. "Looks like you were right about someone helping us out," he said. "It seems someone tripped some kind of contamination alarm. Got pretty much everyone on the base into emergency shelters and then locked them up. There are some decontamination teams looking for the breach but they're way over the other side of the facility."
Ringo found some surgical scrubs and a lab coat in a locker and stripped out of his filthy sweatpants. It wasn't much of a disguise, but it would have to do. The pocket of the coat was embroidered with a stylised dragon next to a pair of Chinese characters that read ‘Yinglong’.
The Chinese characters gave him a headache. He could read them, but at the same time they looked like a jumble of meaningless lines. When had he learned to read Chinese? He tried to remember, tried to dredge up some detail but there was nothing. Nothing at all. When he tried to remember details of his schooling he drew a complete blank and that terrified him, but he guessed that was some weird side effect of the virtual reality interrogation. He had more immediate concerns, like getting out of the building alive.
“Okay. Time’s up; we’re leaving,” he said. “Norris, you found us an exit yet?”
“What I wouldn’t give for a Jackal right now,” said Custard referring to the all-terrain long-range patrol vehicles favoured by the Regiment.
“Bingo!” exclaimed Norris.
“What have you got?” Ringo asked.
Norris looked up from the terminal with a grin. “Oh, Sarge. You’re going to fucking love this.”
* * *
“It’s got legs!” said Custard.
They were in a narrow corridor, staring through a small window set into the door that led to the hanger beyond.
“What the fuck have those boffins been doing out here? First the Navier-Stokes-whatever, then their virtual reality torture chamber and now this!”
The vehicle that squatted at the centre of the hanger was an angular mass of charcoal grey plates. It was streamlined in profile but given its size, Ringo guessed this was more to reduce its radar profile than for speed. The sharp angles of its hull were probably also pretty good at deflecting incoming fire. Rounds impacting on those angled plates would skip off taking most of their kinetic energy with them.
Instead of wheels or tracks, the central hull was supported on four huge legs that were themselves articulated arrangements of sharp, prismatic sections. Each leg ended in a kind of claw clutching a metallic sphere the size of a yoga ball, reminding Ringo of the claw and ball feet he’d seen on old furniture. Despite its legs, the bizarre vehicle looked as if it was designed to drive rather than walk, and if its spherical ‘wheels’ were as seamless and metallic as they looked, then it would be very difficult to disable. There were no tyres to puncture or complicated track linkages to break.
On its upper flanks it sported a brace of what looked to be at least 75mm guns with barrels at least three metres long. The big guns were mounted on independent pods and pointed skyward at crazy angles giving the whole vehicle the look of a giant beetle complete with antennae.
“That’s our way out?” Ringo asked.
“Fuelled up and ready to roll,” Norris replied. “According to the computer it was scheduled for a test run this morning. And…” he added with a mischievous grin, “—a live fire exercise.”
“It’s armed?”
“Oh yes.”
Ringo peered in through the small window in the door. The hanger looked deserted.
“Okay,” he said eventually. “You lot stay here while I go for a recce.”
“Why you?” Custard asked.
Ringo tugged the collar of his stolen lab coat a little straighter. “Because unlike you misfits, I actually look like I belong here.”
Ringo tried the door and it opened with a soft click. Everything about this felt wrong. It was all too easy – the open cells, the weird emptiness of the place. He forced himself to stride confidently into the hangar as if he belonged there.
The spider tank, or whatever the hell it was, was about as big as a Challenger, the army’s main battle tank, although the broad spread of its legs made it appear even bigger. A hatch lay open below the hull in the arse-end of the giant bug.
“Too easy,” he said to himself. How could this be happening? Maybe their target, the defecting Chinese scientist, had found a way to help them after all. Maybe he would be waiting inside their escape vehicle ready to guide them to freedom. There was only one way to find out. He peered in through the hatch. The interior was dark and cramped, but Ringo could make out two seats side-by-side like in the cockpit of a plane and another couple along the cabin’s flanks, probably gunnery stations for the two main guns. There was no sign of any defecting boffin.
He scanned the rest of the hanger. There was a row of more traditional vehicles in marked bays: jeeps and trucks in traditional olive drab with the red star of the Chinese military. Behind the row of vehicles were doors leading into some other wing of the facility.
All the doors were closed, just like every other door in the facility… every door, that was, except the ones along their route. Once again, Ringo hackles itched with the feeling this was all too good to be true. Surely this was some kind of a test, some perverse exercise in the building of hope only to take it away again.
The thought of that psychological torture brought back images of the meadow and for a second he became acutely aware of the lack of detail in the periphery of his vision. He rol
led his eyes like a madman. Was that how it had always been? Or was the blurriness at the edges of his sight due to something else? Due perhaps to the limitations of the virtual reality simulation? Was he still inside the simulation? Would the walls fold away like stage scenery and drop him once again into the crushing embrace of the golden serpent?
He reached around and rubbed his fingers through the sweaty hair at the base of his skull as if to convince himself that he was in fact whole. That he was more than just a shell of polygons produced by a computer program.
His racing heart brought him back to reality. It was time to go.
He crouched behind the shelter of its lowered rear hatch and waved the others forward, patting his head in the familiar gesture – On me.
“I hope someone knows how to drive this fucking thing," Custard said.
“On it,” replied Norris as he climbed up inside the hull, wiggling his huge shoulders through the narrow hatch.
The spider tank lurched above them, rising up on its four great legs like a prehistoric armoured beast roused from its slumber.
“Norris, you fucking legend!” Custard shouted, and hauled himself up into the innards of the tank.
Ringo followed and as soon as he was aboard, the hatch closed and Ringo was forced to grab hold of a hanging strap of webbing as the tank took off with surprising speed.
“That was too easy,” Ringo said.
“Speak for yourself,” replied Custard, waving at Ringo from across the aisle with his injured hand. “I nearly lost me wanking spanner.”
“I’m talking about after that – our escape. Think about it: the open doors, a getaway vehicle all fuelled up and ready to go.”
“You’re saying we had help,” Custard said. “This mythical Chinese scientist again?”
“Who else? You think secret military labs usually leave the front door open like that?”
“Okay then, where is he? We were supposed to help him to defect… So where is he? Or are you saying he helped us to escape out of the goodness of his heart?”
Ringo didn’t have an answer for that. Custard was right. It didn’t make any sense. If the target had been able to spring them from their cells then surely he or she must also have enough influence to arrange their own escape.
“What’s our next move, Sarge?” asked Norris from the driver’s station.
Good question. They had missed their pick-up by weeks; even their fall backs would be long abandoned by now. After their capture, the British government would have done everything it could burn any evidence of the operation. They were on their own.
“South-east,” he said before he’d even had a chance to think about it.
It made sense. If they could make it to Macau, they would be able to blend in as tourists and contact the British Consulate, but that wasn’t why he had said it. It had just felt right, as if some giant lode stone was pulling him in that direction.
“Do you even know what you’re doing?” Ringo yelled up to the front of the cabin. Norris tapped his bulky helmet.
“Neural interface,” he said. “Same tech as their VR playground only this time I’m in charge.”
Norris crooked a thumb back at Ringo. “Try it out,” he said. “The helmet should be right above you.”
Ringo reached up and pulled the helmet down. It fitted snugly, seeming to mould itself around his temples and pressing soft pads against his eyes to keep them closed.
“Nothing’s happen—” Ringo said and then suddenly he was outside the tank, seeing the world from a new point of view from somewhere between the spider tank’s giant armoured shoulders as if he was riding astride the giant machine.
Ringo looked around, the interface copying his movement and panning the camera around with such seamless fluidity that it was easy to forget that his point of view was just a constructed from a camera mounted on the outside of the vehicle. The terrain around them was a broad valley flanked by wooded hills to the east and west. About five clicks to the south was the village where they had been captured, and further downstream he could see the blocky buildings of a provincial city. Ringo could see the dull silver line of the river as it flowed sluggishly towards the sea to the south.
He turned his head to look back the way they had come and saw the laboratory prison from the outside for the first time. It looked like images of the best and worst of Chinese history superimposed on top of each other. A soaring pagoda of stacked, classical roofs rose up from a cluster of Mao-era concrete and cinderblock buildings.
As he watched, a pair of dark shapes rose from behind the buildings and started to accelerate towards them.
“Heads up!” Ringo said, hoping the others could hear through whatever neural interface the tank was using. “We’ve got company.”
“Drones,” Norris said through the interface. “Don’t recognise the radar signature. Must be another new toy.”
The drones were incredibly fast. In just over a second Ringo was able to make out their shape. He remembered the reason for their original mission. The Chinese scientist they had come to find had figured out new solutions to the equations that kept planes in the sky. It looked as if the Chinese had put those equations to the test.
The drones looked like flying rings, but instead of travelling horizontally like a Frisbee they flew end-on, giving Ringo the unnerving impression that they were being chased by a pair of flying mouths.
Each drone was about five metres in diameter and studded around its circumference with hard points for armament pods. There were no wings or obvious engines. It was as if the body of the drone was itself some kind of bladeless turbine, sucking air in through its ring-like fuselage and accelerating it to provide thrust.
One of the spider-tank’s giant guns swivelled and let loose a barrage of tracer fire at the nearest drone from a machine gun mounted below the main barrel. The drone's ring-like fuselage split into three, nested concentric circles, each one spinning around independent axes like the bands of an armillary sphere so that from a distance it looked like a flying ball made up of spinning steel hoops. The drone easily outmanoeuvred the incoming fire, zigzagging across the sky in a way utterly unlike any aircraft Ringo had ever seen. It looked as if each of the drones’ three rings was capable of producing thrust, allowing the crazy machine to move in any direction almost instantaneously by reorienting the pitch of its rings.
“Fuck, that thing's fast,” said Custard as the burst of tracer fire arced well wide of his intended target.
The spider-tank accelerated, both guns whirling around to track the incoming drones. The body of the tank offered a stable gun platform, the great legs easily coping with the recoil from the guns as well as smoothing out the curves of the terrain as Norris urged the vehicle to even greater speed. Despite that, they failed to land even a single round on the attacking drones.
“Can’t shoot ‘em, can’t outrun ‘em,” said Custard. “I hope this thing’s got decent armour.”
They didn’t have to wait long to find out. The first drone unleashed a storm of fire from three of the armament pods on its outer ring. It was like being hit by the Gatling gun on an A-10 tank buster. Chips of ablative armour flew in every direction. Custard returned fire, but the drone snapped its three rings back into one concentric disc, combining their thrust, and raced away at a speed that would have turned any human pilot to paste.
The tank rocked beneath Ringo as the supersonic shock wave rolled over them. The two main guns spun crazily as Custard tried to keep the fast-moving ship in his sights.
“Brace yourselves,” Ringo shouted as the second drone attacked with a barrage of tiny missiles. Norris threw the tank to the right, its ball-like wheels allowing the big machine to move with surprising agility, but it wasn’t enough. The missiles struck the tank’s hull, tearing off great sheets of armour. They struck the ground between the tank’s legs, blowing chunks of earth skyward an
d nearly flipping the tank onto its back. And at least two of the high-explosive projectiles struck the tank’s right, rear leg.
“We’re hit,” Norris shouted.
Ringo tried to see the right rear leg, but he couldn’t see over the angular facets of the hull’s hip joint. He urged his vision upwards, as if craning his neck was possible with his robotic camera and suddenly his viewpoint burst upwards into the sky. He could see the whole tank plus a good chunk of the landscape around them.
“Holy shit,” said Custard. “I guess the bad guys aren’t the only ones with drones. Sarge, I think you just launched some kind of an overwatch camera.”
“Oh it’s way more than that,” said Ringo as targeting reticles appeared in his vision. A head’s up display popped into luminous green around the limits of his viewpoint with flashing triangles indicating the direction of the attacking drones. He whirled around, his new perspective flashing forward with an acceleration that made him whoop with joy.
Ringo banked around until he saw the first drone. The targeting reticle drifted across his viewpoint until it locked onto the attacking craft. The drone immediately sensed the target lock and darted upwards, drawing a white contrail up the face of the sky, trying to break out of Ringo’s field of view with a sudden burst of speed, but Ringo was ready for it. He urged his own craft upwards, following the drone as it accelerated skyward and then pitched back down in a powered dive that would have been suicidal in any other type of aircraft.
Ringo matched every desperate evasive manoeuver of his prey, keeping the reticle nailed on his target. He searched for some kind of trigger, some way of shooting at the target he had acquired, but none presented itself. His earlier elation evaporated like the thin contrail behind his speeding drone. He was unarmed.
“I can’t shoot!” he cried. “Nothing's happening.”
"Oh yes it fucking is,” replied Custard. Suddenly the drone ahead of Ringo exploded into a spinning cloud of exotic alloy fragments as cannon fire from the tank below tore through it.