Metal Monsters

by G. D. Stark

  “You know better than me how many of these targets can be confirmed to be related to the supply and keeping of your order. I will leave the data with you.”

  “Well,” the Lord General said after a silence. “It seems you may have learned something useful to us after all.”

  “Yes, Lord General,” Captain Yost said. “Although you may recall that Corporal Falkland’s hypothesis concerning nanotech-based weapons was correct.”

  “I need recall no such thing,” the Lord General said. “We have not finished the analysis of Sir Enright’s armor.”

  “Come now, Landros, there is no reason to delay the obvious,” the knight who had spoken up earlier said. I wondered if he might be a rival for the Lord General’s position. “There’s a time for honor and there’s a time to face up to the facts. Sir Enright’s death was not natural.”

  “His death?” I blurted, taken by surprise.

  “Yes,” the knight answered calmly. “His augment overloaded his brain as a result of the disruption the nanite attack caused his mech. His body was unharmed, but all higher functions were lost.”

  “We need to protect the remaining knights,” Yost said. “Tommy’s report has me convinced—you guys are in a net, as he said. That net closes, you may very well lose this war.”

  “The knights have lasted for a thousand years,” the second knight said. “We will last a thousand more.”

  “I hope that’s the case,” I said. “You kick ass and everyone recognizes that. You’re freaking 20-foot tall metal monsters with laser swords. But the bad guys have found your Achilles heel now, and they’re hitting you on the field and they’re taking away your supply lines and killing the little people that keep you running. You’ve already lost an unprecedented number of your order.”

  “So what would you have us do, corporal?” the Lord General said. “We will not leave the field of battle in the hands of commoners.”

  “With that in mind—if you are convinced you must keep fielding the knights—then they will need escorts,” I replied, flipping to my suggestions list at the end of the report. I’d sketched out a digital picture of a knight accompanied by an entourage of little guys with rifles. It was all stick figures, but it made the point. “Put some guys with EMP rifles around them and have them hit the enemy first, plus don’t let anyone close enough to launch a nano attack. The knight should be viewed as a mobile artillery platform, with an infantry screen. As far as we can tell, the enemy’s nano-weapons have an effective range of about 100 meters. Maybe their projectiles don’t fly well or maybe there is some sort of com connection required. I don’t know, but it’s clear that leaving your heavies exposed isn’t viable anymore.”

  The Lord General snorted. “Let me guess. Now this is where you pitch your services. 24 mercenaries in pretty white armor supporting each and every knight at some ungodly sum per day, am I right?”

  “No, Lord General,” I said. “I suggest you utilize your own militia. Buy a few crates of L-24 fusion assisted EMP rifles, we’ll train them up in platoons, after which they’ll go out with the knights and keep the enemy nanites from neutralizing them.

  “Impossible,” the first knight said. “The militia cannot keep up with us. And to hide behind the commoners, to permit them to serve as our shields, that would be dishonorable!”

  “We’d probably step on them,” the second knight said. “It might even be accidental. You soldiers-for-hire cannot be expected to understand, but for us, the highest honor is for a knight to take the field with the burden of the state’s defense resting upon his shoulders. This is not a concern of commoners nor is it their duty. We are the incarnate shield of state—we fight so they may live! What you propose is the reverse of that.”

  “I understand these combined arms tactics would be new to you,” I said. “But you’re putting yourselves into a damned stupid position-”

  “That is enough,” the Lord General interrupted loftily. “We thank you for your report, Corporal Falkland. The data will be analyzed. We will be in touch if we require more from you. You are dismissed.”

  I stalked out of the chamber with Yost, still limping a little on my burned leg, and fuming at the knights’ complete lack of strategic sense. They might as well throw themselves naked at machine gun nests armed with nothing but primitive metal swords.

  “Damned stupid?” Yost said after the doors slammed shut behind us.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Sorry about that. I got a little carried away.”

  “No skin off my nose,” he said. “That outburst would have gotten you fired from the sales department, but the fact is, you’re right on this one. Their tactics need tweaking at the very least, and maybe it’s better to keep the knights off the field altogether, but these guys are so caught up in their honor that they don’t realize the battlefield has moved beyond them. The Theodosian walls stood for a thousand years. Then some stupid damned Kraut made a cannon for the Sultan and their utility ended practically overnight.”

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about,” I said truthfully.

  “Never mind,” he said. “You did fine. Just watch your mouth next time.”

  We headed back to base in a borrowed Toymo jeep, winding down the long road from the huge plateau where the hall was situated and down through the city beneath. I drove in silence, thinking through our futile audience with the Lord General.

  So, that knight in red and brown had died on the field—that I did not expect. For all his haughtiness, I have to admit I kind of liked the guy. And he obviously had picked me out to taunt, so maybe he felt the same in his weird aristocratic way. We might have been friends at some point. At the very least, I felt like he was an ally. When someone saves your ass in battle, then you save theirs, it changes everything. I don’t care if the biggest SOB in the world is in the trench next to me. When shit gets real, you watch each other’s backs. Then sometimes you find that you not only can tolerate the SOB, you love him like a brother. Or some crap like that.

  But thinking about Sir Enright, I had a pretty good idea what had happened and how he must have died. The nanites had begun burrowing through his armor once the projectile struck. First they wrecked the suit’s sensors, then its servo-mechanicals, and then its digital systems. Only when the mech was entirely disabled did they turn their attention to the man inside it. I’m not an expert on the tech side of things, but I knew this was a bad business. And it occurred to me that this might just be some early beta testing of the nanite weapon. What if instead of shutting everything down, the Unity could grab control of a mech’s systems live on the field and turn them into a remote weapon to use against their own side? I imagined one of the robotic monsters turning on my squad. Even Wardogs wouldn’t stand a chance.

  I found myself wondering if we could get approval for micro-nuclear ammunition.

  “Yost,” the captain suddenly spoke out loud, taking a call. “What? I see. No, no idea on our end. Just spoke with the Lord General. Yeah, good idea. No. I can’t spare you. Right. Keep trying.”

  The call ended and we continued to drive on in silence. I suppressed the urge to ask him what had happened. Yost chewed on his thumbnail and looked out at the scattered lights across the desert, obviously contemplating something.

  “Falkland,” he said at long last.

  “Yes sir,” I said.

  “That was Pitt. He’s got a bit of an inside track with a local official who told him something just went down back at the capital tonight.”

  “We were just there,” I said. “I didn’t notice anything. What’s the deal?”

  Yost shrugged. “The guy said he wouldn’t talk except in person. Pitt’s guess is that their coms are compromised somehow. Pitt wants to go see, but we can’t risk our logistics at this point, so I’m sending you back to assess the situation.”

  “Yessir,” I said. I was tempted to say something sarcastic about being more expendable than Pitt, except the captain was right. If everything was going to hell in a hurry, then the w
hole unit’s survival might well come down to his ability to get us the stuff we needed.

  We pulled in to base as he finished his sentence. I could hear the shouts and hits of a pick-up slingball game taking place on the other side of the hangar. Some of the shouts were in the local dialect so I was guessing some of our guys had roped in some of their militia trainees.

  “Take someone smart with you, Falkland, but don’t take your whole team,” Yost said. “I would suggest Ward. The others should keep working with the militia, and start training them on that screen tactic for the knights. You get to Pitt’s guy and see if he’ll spill his guts in person. We’ll get you an aircab, it’ll be faster. Pitt will send the location to your system.”

  “Copy that, Captain!” I hopped out of the vehicle and threw him a salute he didn’t bother to return as he sped off towards the building that served as his command post.

  I walked through the hangar just in time to see Zelag sling a strike past a hulking militia member. “Not fair at all,” one of the militia guys argued, shaking his head. “He’s got a robot arm. It’s like boxing with a robot!”

  Zelag nodded. “If my machine-assisted superiority is more than you can handle, one of my brothers-in-arms must take my place,” he offered piously, holding out his glove to Jones.

  “Not so fast,” Jones said, shirtless and glistening with sweat beneath the lights. He put his hand on Zelag’s shoulder. “There is discrimination taking place, based on this man’s infirmity.”

  The more the militia jeered and laughed, the more sanctimonious his voice became. “My brothers, let he who casts judgment, first consider if that judgment might also fall upon themselves. Consider my superbly muscled buttocks, for example.”

  I didn’t wait for the punchline. Ward wasn’t there. If it had been left up to me, I would have taken Zelag, but I had my orders.

  I found Ward beating the living daylights out of a punching bag in the gym we’d rigged up.

  “Ward, we have to go to the capital,” I said.

  “What?” he replied, tapping the side of his head to turn down the music he must have been listening to. “When?”

  “You and I are going to the capital. Now. Something’s going down and the captain doesn’t like it. We have to talk to Pitt first, though.”

  He nodded, stopped the bag from swinging, then swung around and sucker punched it one more time before picking up his bag and heading to our quarters.

  “Where’s Pitt?” I asked, grabbing a passing logistics flunky in the hall.

  “Down at the end, sir,” the kid said, pointing to the storeroom at the end of the hall.

  Pitt was poring over a complicated series of spreadsheets on a screen when we poked our heads into the room. He didn’t even look up when I knocked on the open door to announce our presence.

  “Mm hmm,” he said.

  “Pitt, it’s Falkland and Ward. What’s up at the capital?”

  He tapped a few times on the screen, grunted in dissatisfaction, and spun around. “Hey Tommy. Hey Jack. What can I do for you guys?”

  “We got tagged to go check out your guy. What’s the lowdown?”

  “All right. So, Potchi is this asset I’ve cultivated in the city. He’s a low-level distribution guy, but his connections up and down the supply chain are pretty good. He called and told me something bad was going on but he wouldn’t talk about it. He sounded upset, though.”

  “Captain said you thought the coms were compromised.”

  “Yeah, the way he said he couldn’t talk made me think someone was listening in, maybe on the line, maybe in person.”

  “You think you know this guy well enough to take it seriously?”

  “He’s not the panicking type. He’s a merchant. Cold-blooded. Sell his grandmother if you offered the right price. But he’s a numbers guy, not some sort of drama queen prone to hyperbole. He made it sound like the sky was falling. Trust me, otherwise I wouldn’t have called Yost at all. It was totally out of character, so I thought maybe we’d better check it out.”

  Ward and I looked at each other. Ward shrugged.

  “Pretty thin,” he said.

  “We got our orders,” I pointed out. He shrugged again. “All right, thanks, Pitt,” I said, but the logistics officer was already back at his screen again, wrestling with his numbers.

  Pitt’s asset lived in a modest home at the edge of a huge field of some sort of green-tipped grain. Next door was a much larger house surrounded by high walls. We approached the estate from the air and I noticed the cab didn’t pass over the edge of the field before we landed at Potchi’s place, though it would have been faster. The vehicle was driverless so I mentioned it to Ward as we touched down.

  “Might be some sort of airspace laws,” he said. “I’ll bet that’s a knight’s residence. Maybe this guy is some sort of squire who lives close to his boss.”

  “Makes sense,” I said as we stepped out into the cool evening air. A child’s scooter lay alongside the driveway and a neat garden with a stone image of a saint or a god or something was just outside the front door. Outside the edge of the green yard was the same dead scrub we’d seen on the rest of this campaign. The estate behind the house was much the same, green fields bordered by arid ground. My guess was that one of the perks of working for the knights was a little extra water for the yard. Before we reached the door, the lights came on over the porch and a kid came outside and saw us in our battle suits. His eyes widened and he tore back in through the front door. A moment later, a middle-aged guy came out.

  “Wardogs?” he said, peering at us. “Is one of you Pitt?”

  “No sir,” I replied. “We came at his request. Can you provide us the information you were unable to provide him earlier?”

  The guy looked around at the road and at our taxi, satisfying himself that no one else was present. He nodded. “Come on in,” he said. “Please excuse the disarray.”

  We stepped inside and I entirely failed to notice anything out of order, let alone in disarray. Everything was neat and tidy, austere in its simplicity, except for the occasional child’s toy. The boy watched us walk in and I waved to him. I heard him say “sojers” in an awed tone as he stared at our armor. At least someone was awed.

  “We’ll talk in my office,” Potchi said. “Donalla, I have visitors, would you mind watching Morrelos?”

  A woman with grief-reddened eyes and unkempt hair stepped into the room, bowed to us, then went to where the kid sat. We followed Potchi to his office and he carefully shut the door, then adjusted something inside an alcove to the side of the door. “So we can’t be heard,” he said, then turned to us. “Do you always wear your suits?” he said.

  “Most of the time,” I replied. “We’re interchangeable units, presenting a single face to the world or something like that.”

  “I see,” he said, sitting down. “Please, sit.”

  Ward and I demurred, not wanting to shatter his furniture with the weight of our armor.

  Potchi took a breath. “I called Pitt because there has been a murder. Several murders.”

  “Murders?” I said. “Why did you call us, then?”

  “Because the men murdered were knights of the Blood.”

  “More than one knight was murdered? How many? When did this happen.”

  “Just today. Five were killed. They were murdered in their homes,” he said, shaking his head. “No, I take that back. Four of them died in their homes. One died in his skycar.”

  “Does anyone know this yet?” I said.

  “Not about all five,” he said. “I have been in contact with other squires as the evening has progressed. We have our own communication network.”

  “But you couldn’t simply tell the knights?” I said.

  “No,” he said. “Because of the way they died. I didn’t know what I could do, or to whom I could turn. Then I thought of Pitt and your organization.”

  “Back up,” Ward said. “We’ve got shielded communications. Hell, the average cons
umer line is hard for anything short of a military AI to hack, and I’m sure you’ve got better encryption than that if you’re working right with the Stratocracy’s leaders on a daily basis. You think whoever is doing this can listen?”

  “Yes,” he said. “Because that’s how they’re killing them.”

  “The knights?” I asked. “They’re killing them through their communication system?”

  “The first one victim was apparently Sir Hiktessi. While his manservant was trimming his beard, the sonic razor overloaded and tore half the knight’s face off, destroying his brain. Before committing suicide, the manservant called Sir Hiktessi’s squire and told him what happened. The servant blamed himself, though the safety features on a sonic shouldn’t have let the poor commoner kill someone with the thing unless he perhaps pounded it into a man’s head with a hammer. Squire Kollomi informed the council of knights of the death, then of course conferred with the Circle of Squires over our private net. Even as we mourned, another report came in that Sir Polyporus’ skycar had been lost in the Makkens, and then, just after that, Sir Waldreno was found face-down on the steps of the library. His cochlear implant was smoking when they found him. Even as we started to realize something horrible was taking place, there was another death.”

  The man stopped and took a deep breath, folding his hands in his lap. To my surprise, I noted a tear rolling down his face.

  “Spill it,” Ward said, having no time for the man’s grief.

  “My master was the fourth victim,” he said after a moment. “I called his private line after the third death. He picked up and acknowledged my concern but told me not to be overly worried. He was a great man. A true warrior.”

  “And?” I said.

  “And while we were talking, I heard a strange sound that crept into the line. Almost like static. But that was unusual, since the line runs directly between my house and his, so the connection is always crystal clear. It’s shielded and quite secure, so I assumed it was a wiring problem or something, but as Sir Warris spoke, his voice just vanished into the static. I closed the line and called again but got nothing, so I punched in the codes that let me into his field and simply ran straight to his house. When I got there, he was standing on the porch, hands on the back of a therapeutic chair he sometimes uses to strengthen his spine after a day in the field. ‘Sir Warris,’ I said, but he said nothing. So I stepped closer, then I saw his eyes were open—he was staring off into the distance. I dared to finally put my hand on his arm and I received an electric shock that almost threw me to the ground Then he just fell to the ground himself… dead.”