by Ian Whates
Ahead he could see the cratered side of another mountainous asteroid. He burned hard for the closest cave, firing a missile from the launcher on the mech’s back. The missile shot ahead of him into the cavern and delivered a payload of tens of thousands of micro drones. They immediately began mapping the cavern and the rest of the cave structure, sending the information back to the mech, which in turn uploaded the details into his neunonics.
The rock above the cavern exploded into a fountain of lava, spattering the mech as it flew into the asteroids dark interior, the molten rock eating through newly grown armour. He knew he had a moment’s respite and nothing more. He repurposed some of the micro drone network for electronic warfare to help mask his sensor footprint and spent a moment reviewing the 3D representation of the cave network. It wasn’t good. The network was too extensive. The Rakshasa had a number of ways in. It wasn’t going to be as simple as powering the mech down, engaging the stealth systems and camping within view of the cave entrance, waiting for the Rakshasa mech to show itself.
“Hello, my friend.” The voice that came over the comms link was almost a growl.
1893, Spitalfields, London
6. Cain had given the order but had not wielded the weapon. They weren’t even officially at war. They were firing on their own people, subjects of the latest empire. He had hoped that this empire at least could bring order, make sense of things, but the warriors were all on the other side and a spear was no match for a bullet.
There had been something in the air, something almost tangible. Cain suspected that it emanated from Christchurch. He had heard whispers about the architect Hawksmoor, as though he were still alive. These experiments in the ‘Geometry of Violence’, the utilisation of technology far in advance of what was thought possible (and, he now suspected, somehow connected to his own curse) may have been the catalyst but Cain recognised a war when he saw one. The rich want to use the poor for their own ends. The poor want their lives to be better. Often these two things were mutually exclusive. This was the reason he was here in command of a platoon equipped with the latest weapon. This was why he was watching the two Maxim machine guns fire round after round into the Whitechapel Anarchist Committee and the rest of the rioters, all of whom were armed with little more than cudgels and torches. The poor needed to understand that they became the enemy when they stood in the way of what the powerful wanted. The gutters ran red. They may as well have been marching into a mincing machine. Cain could taste bile in the back of his throat. He had never felt further away from what he wanted to be. Disgusted, he ordered the gunners to stop firing before walking away from his command.
After the Loss, Ubaste System
He gave some thought as to whether or not he should answer. The carrier signal contained a number of discrete electronic warfare attacks, most designed to find him rather than disable his mech. He approved of this, the Rakshasa pilot of the other mech was just looking for a stand up fight. He would have liked to oblige but he really didn’t fancy his chances. As he cut the thrusters and tried to bleed off heat to lower his signature, he decided that stealth was still his best option.
The mech was just drifting now as he took in his surroundings. The cavern was roughly oval in shape, the walls formed of a series of pressure ridges that made him think of the serrated maws of some titanic ocean going predator. There were a number of natural passages leading away from the main cavern, which gave him pause. So far the other mech had the advantage, the element of surprise. Mechs were coming to the end of their use as a weapon. They were being superseded by increasingly more sophisticated, powerful and much smaller combat exoskeletons. He had heard extraordinary claims made about combat exoskeletons that made extensive use of Seeder Tech. Judging by the Rakshasa’s ability to get the jump on him, he assumed that the other mech had better stealth and sensor systems than his own. This was bad news in the game that they were playing at the moment.
“You know we will die out here, don’t you?” the Rakshasa asked again. “Our carrier ships are gone. Neither of us have comms powerful enough to reach in-system. There’s no relief coming, it’s neither cost effective nor strategically important enough to send a search party. Are you prepared to die for what you believe salary-man?”
His mouth felt dry but his voice didn’t crack when he replied: “I can’t die.”
1944 CE, Arnhem, The Netherlands
7. The bridge was on fire as the Tiger II heavy tank belonging to SS 10 Panzer rolled across it. The British paratroopers had attacked the pillbox on the southern end with a flamethrower and hit the ammunition store. The subsequent explosion set fire to the fresh paint on the metal superstructure. The red flickering light was reflected in the waters of the Lower Rhine and illuminated the surrounding area.
“Target!” Jorgen, Cain’s gunner shouted. Cain opened his mouth to give the order to fire but something that sounded like a shell from a Piat gun hit the tank’s armoured skirt causing the hollow charge to detonate before it penetrated the Tiger II’s armour. Cain felt the tank shift slightly, the ringing sound made him go deaf just for a moment. Once it would have made him feel trapped but after the Ukraine and the fighting retreat through Normandy he felt very little, except tired.
“Fire!” he finally shouted, but Jorgen had blood coming out of his ears. Cain tapped him on the shoulder in the cramped tank cabin and gestured for him to fire. Jorgen nodded numbly, looking at his commander with dead eyes. Turning his attention back to the viewport, Cain could see the muzzle flashes of small arms fire from every window of the five-storey house on the banks of the river. The incoming fire from the British paratroopers sparked off the tank’s armour. It felt as though the Tiger II had been knocked back when Jorgen fired the 88mm main gun. The five-storey house seemed to jump into the air and was then replaced by a rising cloud of dust.
After the massacre at Spitalfields and the subsequent cover up, Cain had become more and more disheartened with the increasing mechanisation, industrialisation and one-sidedness of war. What Odo had told him was true, there were no more warriors. He had known that but the older you were the more difficult rationalising change became.
He hadn’t fought in the Great War. The poison gas and machine guns were so very far away from what he saw as his vocation. But out of a war that had managed to horrify a soldier as seasoned as Cain came something new, or rather the return of something old. The men-at-arms, the knight, the cavalryman had returned, or so he had thought. Instead of horses, they rode in tanks or flew through the sky in biplanes.
He fought in the air in Spain, fighting for order against those he saw as the successors to the barbarian hordes that had challenged Rome. Then he had joined those seeking to form a new, pure, warrior elite. It hadn’t taken him long to realise that it was nonsense. Perhaps he had known all along. The warrior ethos they preached was mere lies, used to bolster weak and frightened men looking for something, someone to blame. By purity they meant bigotry. They confused the joy of war with their own tawdry invented mythologies. They were more delusional than the samurai and now the rest of the world was coming for them.
Then Cain started to wonder about it all. Had each and every brotherhood he ever fought with been nothing more than a death cult? He had wondered whom he was fighting, who he was raging at.
His disgust for the Nazis came to the fore when he found out about the camps. As the tank turned off the bridge and into the rubble-strewn streets of Arnhem, he realised he had been here before. This time, however, he had come with those from Magna Germania and they were far more barbaric than any of the tribes that had risen with the Batavian auxiliaries. Cain triggered the machine gun, sending tracers arcing out towards the surviving paratroopers staggering from the ruins of the destroyed house. He wondered why, despite choosing the wrong side, despite the disgust, he was still fighting.
After the Loss, Ubaste System
“Clone insurance? Impressive for a lowly military contractor, salary man.” Some of the Rakshasa’s words sounded a little slurred
. He assumed it was because the feline warrior had a mouthful of implanted fangs, low-tech grafts designed to replicate those of their felinus erectus ancestors. A traditionalist. “I’m fighting for my home, salary man.”
He wanted to tell the Rakshasa that it was a lie, an excuse. You might fight for your home, but you don’t embrace technological devolution for it. That wasn’t why people became warriors. He knew that now.
“Is this what you want, salary man? To hide until your systems fail, until you have drunk all your own piss, eaten your own scat and there is no more air to breathe?” The Rakshasa’s voice was little more than a whisper, a low growl of menace and promise.
“What do you want?” he asked over the comms link.
“You know what I want.”
“Then show yourself.”
There! The Rakshasa’s mech drifted in shadow out of the mouths of one of the adjoining passages, a passage that he’d thought too small for the other war machine.
With a thought he triggered the boosters, a hard burn straight at the enemy mech. The fusion lance stabbed out, illuminating the cavern. The vacuum was filled with thousands of electromagnetically driven rounds but he did not launch missiles. Even now he could feel exhilaration surging through vastly altered neurochemistry. If this were just a trap on the part of the Rakshasa, a cheap ruse, then he would be disappointed.
1968 CE, Somewhere Over Laos
8. The Huey was on loan from the Air Cavalry. The rocket pods and miniguns mounted on either side of the helicopter drastically cut down on the amount of cargo the Huey could carry and made it handle like a wardrobe. The runs into the Hmong-held highlands were becoming more and more perilous. The Mekong River snaked away into the distance below them. The land surrounding the river was a mix of dense jungle and a desolation of bomb craters where there had once been more jungle. Many of the craters were at least partially flooded from the river’s overspill. Even at night, even in the air, Cain found it impossible to get away from the humidity, from the corrupt, sweet stench of the jungle below. Right now his eyes were locked on the horizon, however. It was a wall of fire as a B-52 Arc Light mission dropped enough ordinance to make even the most fervent communist believe in hell. Watching it through the bulky night vision goggles they had been issued with for the night flights, the fire burned green. It only added to the alien feel of the place.
He had been in Indochina since 1946. For a while he served in the French Foreign Legion with other ex-members of the Waffen SS. After one-too-many close calls with Mossad agents and his erstwhile comrades starting to comment about how he wasn’t aging, he had gone to work with the CIA. The intelligence agency had arranged for a new identity. He had been here for more than twenty years now and still hadn’t got used to the place.
“What’s that?” ‘John’ asked loudly over the clatter of the rotors. Cain’s co-pilot’s real name wasn’t John. It wasn’t even some covert alias. He just wasn’t important enough for Cain to remember his real name, so he called him John instead. Cain turned to follow his co-pilot’s gaze. The night vision goggles caused tunnel vision. Cain was about to ask him what he’d seen when he saw the flickering ghost light of muzzle flashes illuminating the jungle canopy from within. He reckoned it was a small patrol, maybe four-to-six men. The answering fire lit up a much larger part of the jungle.
“Someone’s really catching it down there,” John shouted. “What are you doing?” Cain had banked the chopper towards the gunfight. “We don’t have any room!” His co-pilot glanced back at the bales stacked high in the cargo area.
Cain knew that it would all depend on whether or not whomever was engaged in the firefight heard their rotors over the gunfire. Then the sky lit up as a parachute flare illuminated the whole area. John screamed and yanked his NVGs off his head. Cain didn’t scream, somehow his eyes had compensated for the flash. He removed the goggles however. He had always seen very well at night. It took him a moment to find the soldier who had fired the flare. He was standing on the borderline between the jungle and the desert of bomb craters, staring straight at them. Three figures ran by him, stopped, turned and fired back into the jungle. Cain guessed they were a Long Range Reconnaissance Patrol, Lurps. The flare was a ballsy move. Yes it had got Cain’s attention but it also made it easier for the Pathet Lao soldiers to see where they were.
“Fucking idiot!” John snapped from the co-pilot’s seat. Tracer fire was arcing up out of the jungle towards the Huey now. Cain was holding the helicopter steady, hovering in the air, searching the ground, ignoring the sound of bullets hitting the helicopter’s fuselage. “What are you doing? Get us out of here! They’re on the wrong side of the border!”
Cain ignored his over-excited co-pilot as he looked for a place to land. He glanced back at the Lurps. They were moving away from the jungle, two of them provided covering fire whilst the other two ran. They were laying down a lot of bullets, burning through ammunition. The Pathet Lao were pouring out of the jungle behind the Lurps and off to the patrol’s right.
“Fuck this!” John snapped and reached for the joystick of the helicopter’s duel controls.
“Touch that stick and I will kill you,” Cain said simply. Something in his voice made John hesitate.
“Goddamned psycho!” the co-pilot snapped but he moved his hand from the stick. Cain triggered two rockets from each pod mounted on the sides of the helicopter. It was beautiful. The four rockets drew a line of fire from the chopper to the treeline. Against the reds and oranges of blossoming explosions he saw the silhouettes of broken bodies flung into the air. Cain was smiling as he shifted the chopper to the right and fired another two rockets from each of the pods.
“Okay, you’ve done your good deed for the day, let’s get the fuck out of here!” John shouted.
Cain took the helicopter down to land on the precarious piece of ground between three craters that he’d spotted earlier.
“What the fuck are you doing?” John screamed.
Cain felt spittle fleck his cheek. The Pathet Lao had beaten them to it. Cain had to circle around the landing zone so he didn’t fire into the Lurps team as they made their way from crater to crater under heavy fire. He triggered the miniguns. The six rotating barrels on each weapon fired rounds so quickly that the individual reports merged into one long buzzsaw ripping noise. Cain used the tracers as a guide to walk the rounds into the largest concentration of Pathet Lao as the communist soldiers scattered, diving for cover in craters. Those not quick enough were torn apart. He brought the Huey into hover above the LZ. He turned the chopper, firing the minigun over the head of the patrol and hopefully into the pursuing Pathet Lao, cartridge cases raining down on the craters. John was screaming something about drawing as much attention as possible to a covert operation. John didn’t seem to ‘get’ South East Asia. Cain was finding the screaming very, very annoying.
The Lurps team had almost reached the LZ. The Huey was taking an awful lot of fire. Holes were appearing in the cockpit’s windscreen, bullets penetrating the fuselage and burying themselves in the contents of the bales behind them as Cain brought the helicopter into land. Moments before he touched down on the muddy ground he looked down to see a wounded Pathet Lao soldier pushing herself along the ground, the bottom part of her leg missing. She was still clutching her rifle. Cain locked eyes with her as he brought the Huey down, landing on her.
“We can’t fucking carry them!” John broke his reverie. Made him look away from her. Cain drew his sidearm and shot ‘John’ in the face. Then he climbed out of the chopper.
Outside the false safety of the helicopter, away from the godlike destructive power of the miniguns and the rocket pods, the humidity, the sweating corruption of the place suffused him. He was drunk on it, addicted and laughing at all the lies he’d had to tell himself in the past about why. He fired his sidearm in the general direction of the Pathet Lao, or British Paratroopers, or vigilantes, or warrior monks, hellaquins, Germanian tribesfolk, Persians, it didn’t matter. Nor did it matte
r that in Normandy he had fought the fathers of the men who were sprinting towards him.
The Lurps were in one of the craters just below the LZ now. Involved in a vicious hand-to-hand fight too confusing for Cain to intervene in. Cain heard a moan of pain. He turned back to the Pathet Lao soldier he’d landed on. Somehow, despite most of the lower part of her body having been crushed, she was still alive. Bullets were flying into the Huey, impacting into the mud all around him, even tugging at his flight suit, creasing his helmet but Cain found himself looking down at her again, staring as she tried to bring her rifle to bear. It hadn’t been his intention to land on her. He wanted to kill her because she was this year’s enemy, not torture her. He knew he should put her out of her misery but he wanted to remember the beauty of this moment, the purity. Then he knelt down, drew his ehrendolch, his so-called honour dagger, and slit her throat. He sheathed the dagger and took her AK-47. He stood up and started firing into the still-closing dark shapes of the Pathet Lao as the Lurps team leader reached him.
“We’re here, man! Get back in the Slick!” the team leader shouted. Cain sighted on a figure trying to run from one crater to another. He squeezed the AK-47’s trigger, leaning into the kick. The figure slumped to the ground.
“You need to empty the chopper first,” Cain said as he looked for another target, catching the look of dismay on the camo-painted face. The team leader was shouting instructions to the rest of his team as Cain fired again. The Lurps machine gunner joined Cain, firing his weapon from the shoulder as though the M-60 was an overgrown rifle, the phosphorous light of the tracers disappearing into the dark masses of the approaching figures. The other three members were cutting the straps on the bales filled with Laotian heroin and dumping the fortune in drugs out into the mud.
The machine gunner collapsed. He’d been too good at his job, attracted too much attention. Cain was vaguely aware of getting shot himself. He staggered, tried to bring the AK-47 back to his shoulder but the stock was gone. He heard first one and then the other door gun on the Huey start up.