Death Machines - Ghost Book II

by Mike Stackpole

  Everybody looked at him.

  He shrugged. "I like maps."

  Well, who was going to argue with him?

  I handed him the map, then started my preflight as the others went back to guard the door.

  I was shaking like a leaf. All the things I had wanted to do calmly and methodically suddenly I had to do at a sprint, my palms slick with cold panic sweat. I pushed the button to open the overhead door, then climbed up into the chopper's cockpit as the roof started folding back on itself. I unlocked the pilot's seat and set the training manual on the copilot's seat so I could read it as I worked, then hit the ignition switch and fired her up.

  The noise, even with the roof open, was deafening, and the others huddled by the door, hats in their hands and the wind from my rotors whipping their hair around as they watched me run through all the controls, making sure they moved what they were supposed to move. Finally I was ready to get her off the ground and gave them all nervous thumbs up.

  They gave me the "hurry it up" rolling hand sign in return, so I turned back to the controls and took a deep breath. Concentration time.

  I pulled up on the collective control and increased the engine speed. For a second the chopper just shivered and shimmied, but then I felt it leave the ground and weave around a little in the air. It was a sphincter-tightening sensation, but also a thrilling one, completely different from the simulation. I was floating!

  Unfortunately I was also edging sideways toward the wall. Panicking, I tugged at the cyclic control and veered the other way, but too far and too fast. The chain-link fence zoomed up at me on my right. I corrected left again and the rotor blades nearly chopped into the stone wall.

  "Shit! Shit! Shit! Calm the fuck down, boy!"

  It took a conscious effort of will to move the stick gently, but I managed it and the chopper eased away from the wall instead of zigging. My heart was beating so fast I could hardly breathe. I depressed the collective and throttled down on the engine until the runners touched the ground again, then sat there and sucked in some deep breaths. Who knew that simulation and reality would be so different?

  Before I could get my heart under control again, Angie jogged over and shouted up at me.

  "So, are you ready?"

  "Are you kidding? Didn't you see? I nearly smashed into the wall!"

  "Well, the Guardians are pounding on the door now, and that lock isn't gonna last two minutes, so..."

  "Christ, now who's the one with a broken danger meter? Until I get this thing under control, flying with me is suicide!"

  "It's suicide either way, Ghost. At least with you, there's a chance."

  I groaned. Talk about performance anxiety. "Okay. Fine. Poison gas. Ball of fire. Who cares. If you're ready, I'm ready."

  "Great," said Angie, then turned and waved to the others.

  They backed away from the door, then ran over and clambered into the chopper, Thrasher taking the co-pilot's seat and the others heading for the back.

  Vargas clapped me on the shoulder as he passed me. "Make it good, brother."

  "Just strap in and shut up," I said. "I need to concentrate."

  Not a chance. Just as I got the runners off the ground, I saw the hangar door fly off its hinges. A gang of guardians in gas masks and pseudo-chitin armor poured through the door in a cloud of green fog.

  Chapter Eight

  I flinched as the Guardians ran toward us, firing their lasers. The helicopter zigged wildly in the air.

  "Shit shit shit!"

  "Hold it steady!" shouted Vargas.

  "Faster!" shouted Angie.

  Very helpful.

  Thrasher leaned forward and looked at the controls. "How do you operate the guns?"

  I couldn't look away from the walls, which were way too close for comfort. "Red buttons are machine guns. Yellow are missile launchers. Green is flares and chaff."

  "Do they work?"

  "How the fuck should I know?"

  He grunted and pushed the red button. The guns spun to life, unloading a stream of bullets that tore giant holes in the chain-link fence and the walls beyond it. The fire hit nowhere near the Guardians, but it seemed to impress them nonetheless. They scattered and ran for cover as we rose.

  "Can you swing it around?" shouted Vargas from behind me.

  "What? No! I can barely go up and down!"

  "Fine. Hell Razor! Ace! Take position at the door!"

  A quick glance behind showed me Razor and Ace tearing out of their harnesses and hurrying to crouch by the door, laser rifles raised.

  I couldn't watch. I just concentrated on holding steady as she rose toward the sky, but I saw the flashing blue and purple of lasers in the corners of my eyes. The trickiest moment was going through the hole in the roof. The clearance for my rotors was less than ten feet on all sides. I eyeballed it, made a sweaty little correction, and lifted as fast as I dared.

  Finally the walls dropped below me on all sides and I was outside. The others cheered.

  "Good work, amigo!" shouted Vargas. "Now get us the hell out of here!"

  "Absolutely."

  I took us higher, then banked north and put Guardian Citadel behind me - and not a moment too soon.

  The others looked back.

  "Damn shame we couldn't finish 'em off like we wanted to," said Hell Razor.

  "We'll come back," said Vargas. "And when we do we'll bring a few more ranger teams with us. Do the job right."

  Ace still didn't look comfortable with that sentiment.

  Angie, on the other hand was just enjoying the view. "Place would make one hell of an HQ, wouldn't it?"

  Vargas nodded, thoughtful. "Yeah," he said. "Could be. Could be."

  "Speaking of," said Hell Razor. "Been a while since we called in."

  "Been a while since their receiver was working," said Vargas. "But I guess it's worth a shot. This thing have a radio?"

  "Right there," I said, pointing.

  Vargas leaned over me and grabbed the mic, then tuned to the ranger frequency. "Captain Vargas calling Ranger Center, come in?"

  For a few seconds there was nothing but hissing static, but then a voice blurted out from the speakers. "There you are, Vargas. Thought you were dead."

  The voice sounded drunk. And, if my spotty secondhand memories were accurate, that was probably true. General Surgrue was a good man, but he tended to fight off the aches from his old war wounds with hundred-proof painkiller.

  "No sir, sir," said Vargas. "Just haven't been able to reach you."

  "Yeah, tower went down. Robots. Just got it back up last night. Anything to report?"

  "Yes sir," said Vargas. "We have acquired the means to destroy Base Cochise and the computer that keeps pumping out all these death machines, and we're on our way to shut it down. Hundred and sixty miles northwest of Vegas."

  "Good work," said Surgrue. "Best news I've heard for a month."

  "Well, we still gotta finish the job," said Vargas. "Don't suppose you could give us some backup?"

  "That far north?" said Surgrue. "Sure, if you got two weeks for 'em to get there."

  Vargas sighed. "I figured as much. Thanks anyway."

  "No problem." The radio crackled, and then Surgrue was back. "Oh, almost forgot. Sounds like yer doin' good work out there. Everybody on your team gets a promotion. Yer all now Brigadier Generals, First Class."

  "Uh, yes sir," said Vargas. "Thank you, sir. Vargas out, sir."

  Ace raised an eyebrow. "Brigadier Generals? All of you?"

  "That's nothing," said Angie. "Last month, after the old bear finished his third bottle of the morning, he promoted me to Imperial Scarscalp."

  "That's a rank?" asked Ace. "What does it mean?"

  "Only the general knows," said Vargas. "The rest of us don't have a clue."

  ***

  The flight to Cochise was breathtaking, but it took me a while to see it that way.

  For a while, remembering that earlier flight I'd had in the simulator with all the green fields a
nd the blue lakes, all the people in the parks and on the streets or driving in their cars, all I could do was mourn the world we'd lost, the busy cities, the quiet little towns, the supermarkets and drive-ins and ice cream parlors and smooth highways that everyone back then had taken for granted, that they'd thought would go on forever and ever. I kept looking at the desolation below me, the charred cities, the abandoned towns, the roads that looked like rivers of shattered floor tiles half-buried in the dust, and tried to map that beautiful, prosperous past on top of it. What had that rusted factory looked like when it was shiny and new? What had the crowd been cheering in that stadium? Who had lived in that big old house that now was just a blasted foundation? Had that blackened field been a park, once?

  I wanted that lost world so badly I started to hate the ruins that had replaced it. I hated the people living in the ruins too, for making wrecks of what was once perfect and pristine, for using the technological marvels of that lost paradise as washtubs and fire pits and blunt instruments. I wanted to take all that beauty away from the fools who didn't know how to appreciate it and keep it safe from the bad new world until I found a way to bring the good old world back. I—

  Wow.

  Damn.

  I'd fallen into the mind-trap of the Guardians in about ten seconds flat. It was damned seductive, dreaming of the good old days, but it suddenly occurred to me that wishing to bring back the lost world was exactly the same as me wishing I could somehow become the original version of myself. It wasn't going to happen. There was no going back, and thinking there was - denying the reality of the present you actually lived in - was a sickness that would only ruin any chance you had of making a better future. You had to work with what you had, and you had to see what you had for what it was, too, instead of endlessly comparing it to things that didn't exist anymore and never would again.

  And that's when I began to see the beauty unfurled below me for the first time. All the time I had been slogging through the canyons and the hills on foot, all I'd seen was the dust I'd kicked up with my boots as I'd marched along. Up here, I saw the striations in the rocks - layer upon layer of reds, golds, and purples exposed by eons of rivers and rains. From below I'd seen stout towers of rock that meant nothing to me but another obstacle in my way. From above they were fragile fingers of stone thrust up through the earth, reaching for the sky. Gorgeous.

  Even the ruins I'd been cursing only moments before had their own kind of beauty, faded and forlorn and etched by the wind, but beautiful nonetheless, like the bones of dinosaurs in the light of a dying sun.

  As I started to see the glory of it all, I brought the chopper down closer to the ground, working my way around hills rather than just sailing over them, so I could see all the details. I watched our approach scatter herds of green elk and tri-horns. I saw a pack of waste wolves freeze on a hillside, then start howling as we passed. And the more I saw, the less I wanted it to end. Just like when I had flown in the simulator, all I wanted to do was fly around forever, looking down at the wonders below, soaking them in, but way sooner than I wanted, Thrasher tapped me on the shoulder and pointed to some approaching mountains, then the map.

  "The Stonewall Mountains," he said. "Bear left."

  I angled around the mountains and as I cleared the last crag I saw a concrete dome peeking up amid a forest of stunted evergreens on a hilly plateau to the west. We'd found Base Cochise.

  Vargas came up and hung over the back of my seat. "Let's circle it once, at a distance. See what we're up against."

  I nodded and banked south, then started making a circuit at a distance of about three miles. The steep sides of the plateau made any approach from the east difficult at best, but as we came around we saw that the ground dipped down into a pass to the southwest wherethe dark ribbon of a road wound north through it. We also saw sunlight glinting off moving metal all along that road - some kind of robot ambush waiting for the unwary.

  We continued the circle west and north, but as far away and low as we were, the trees and hills remained in the way, and we couldn't get a good look at our target.

  "I'm getting closer," I said, and dropped the chopper down to treetop level. I turned in for a straight shot from the east, keeping the hills between us and the dome. As the plateau rose before me I rose with it, and a few seconds later came up over the trees for our first full-on look at the base.

  I had thought the dome was the top part of some taller structure, but it was the whole thing, a giant convex concrete roof that sloped all the way down to the ground on all sides, except where massive metal doors notched its circumference. A jumble of sensor arrays and missile batteries were perched at the top of the dome like the last few hairs on a bald man's head. I didn't like the look of them at all.

  I also didn't like the look of the welcoming committee that was waiting for us on the grounds of the base. The road through the pass led to a wide bowl in the center of the plateau. Base Cochise sat in the center of the bowl - and an army of robots patrolled the perimeter. There had to be more than seventy of the metal motherfuckers!

  "Time to see what this bird can do," said Vargas, looking over my shoulder. "Beto, let 'er rip."

  I swooped low as Thrasher leaned on the trigger and the two 50-cal guns ratcheted to life, spewing death whichever way I turned. It was magnificent. The big bullets turned even the scariest bots into scrap in seconds and sent shrapnel flying in every direction.

  For the first minute or so the robots were confused and spun around like headless chickens as we slaughtered them in droves, but then they started to figure out who was attacking them. Theystarted to converge, firing up at us as they came.

  "That's it," said Thrasher. "Stay in a group."

  He stabbed a yellow button and a missile fishtailed from our left wing-mount then beelined right for the cluster. A two-story ball of fire obscured the view for a second and the blast wave shook the chopper, but when the fire cleared there was nothing but blackened wreckage where the bots had been.

  I hooted and raised my hand to give Thrasher a high five, but suddenly Angie was screaming from the back.

  "Incoming!"

  I spun the bird around in time to see fire blossoming near the apex of the concrete dome. I knew I hadn't liked the look of those batteries!

  "Shit!"

  I slapped at a green button pulsing above my head and two of my chaff launchers chugged flares out behind the chopper as I swerved away.

  The way the missiles veered toward the flares was a joy to behold. It all worked just like the instruction manual had said it would. The missiles detonated harmlessly far behind us and we were free and clear.

  "Gonna have to deal with those fuckers," said Vargas.

  "Angling around now," I said.

  But then the cockpit shook and it sounded like somebody was playing drums on the underside of the chopper.

  Angie leaned in from the back. "You're too low! The rest of the robots are shooting at us! Take us up! Take us up!"

  I spiraled up as fast as I dared. Hell Razor and Ace returned the robots' fire from the door, then I banked around to get a line on the dome again, but it beat me to the draw. Two more missiles were screaming toward us. I slapped the second chaff button, sending another two flares spinning away, and the two missiles obligingly followed just like last time, but unfortunately I'd been a few seconds slower and they exploded closer to us, knocking us sideways in the air and battering us with shrapnel.

  Shafts of sunlight pierced the shadowed interior and something pinged off my helmet. Smoke began to billow from the controls and the back rotor wasn't responding to the pedals. We were spinning in dizzy circles.

  Vargas clung to the back of my seat for dear life.

  "Uh... are we going down?"

  I checked the altimeter, though the view out the window had already told me the same thing. "Yes, we're going down."

  "Well, don't drop us in with the robots!"

  The cyclic squirmed like a snake in my hand as I tried to angl
e us out of the bowl and into the trees, then it jerked savagely. I lost my grip and the chopper spun toward the dome.

  "You're going to tree us instead?" shouted Angie.

  I grabbed the cyclic again, but this time it didn't respond. A connection had broken somewhere. I had no control at all. "Looks like we've got no choice."

  Vargas turned to Hell Razor and Ace in the back. "When we hit, get clear as fast as you can. It might blow."

  "And you go fucking buckle in!" I shouted over my shoulder. "All of you! Now!"

  They all staggered back to their seats and grabbed at their straps as I sat there helplessly, watching the dome spin closer and closer.

  Then we hit.

  Judging by the criteria old-time pilots used to use — that any landing you can walk away from was a good one — it was a good landing, but only just. We clipped the sensor arrays at the very top of the dome as we came down, then swerved down and hit the roof tail-first, snapping the tail off and sending the rear rotor whirling away down the slope, striking sparks as it went. Our belly hit next and momentum started to tip us over, but then the top rotor hit the concrete and knocked us back the other way as it shattered, bisecting a huge, silvery, spiderlike robot that had been scurrying towards us, ready to slice and dice, and scattering its twitching legs in all directions.

  We came to a rocking, skidding stop and I cleared my straps and dove out my door in a split second, then dropped to my hands and knees as post-shock adrenaline turned my arms and legs to jelly. All around me the others were doing the same, choking on the smoke from the crash and cursing me, the chopper, and life in general. All except Hell Razor, who was laughing like a five-year-old.

  "I made it," he said. "I'm back on solid ground!"

  Two humanoid death machines popped up out of cylindrical openings in the dome and started toward us, Gatling guns spinning up to speed. They made Finster look infantile by comparison.

  "Yeah," drawled Vargas as we all scrambled for cover. "This is much better."

  A torrent of bullets poured our way, chewing down the edges of our hiding places, and things got very noisy very fast.

  "Ghost!" Shouted Angie. "Dissolve those fuckers!"