by E. R. Torre
Prologue
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER TWENTY ONE
CHAPTER TWENTY TWO
CHAPTER TWENTY THREE
CHAPTER TWENTY FOUR
CHAPTER TWENTY FIVE
CHAPTER TWENTY SIX
CHAPTER TWENTY SEVEN
CHAPTER TWENTY EIGHT
CHAPTER TWENTY NINE
CHAPTER THIRTY
CHAPTER THIRTY ONE
CHAPTER THIRTY TWO
CHAPTER THIRTY THREE
CHAPTER THIRTY FOUR
CHAPTER THIRTY FIVE
MECHANIC
By
E. R. Torre
The novel contained within this volume is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, events, or locals is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2011 E. R. Torre
All Rights Reserved
Please visit my website: www.ertorre.com
Comments or questions? Email me at: [email protected]
Special thanks to Ray Villarosa for coming up with the name of Yoshiwara’s favorite band, “Virgin Slayer,” as well as the lyrics to their song.
ISBN: 978-0-9729115-4-2
Library of Congress Control Number:
2009924680
Prologue
First came the flashes. They were bright like lightning but low to the ground and continuous. They were followed by roars far louder than thunder. When it was finally over all was dark and you couldn’t escape the smell. It was acrid; a mix of burning rot and seared flesh.
If you survived long enough, you heard the screams.
If you survived just a little longer, you heard the cries.
The exhaust panel snaking out from under the Betty Lou 5032 Reconnaissance Tank’s grav track belched a thick gray plume of smoke. Gears hidden deep behind fortified plating shifted down. The tank’s engine howled like a caged beast. The vehicle’s massive bulk slowed to a crawl before stopping.
“See anything?”
Sara Desola, the tank’s pilot, wiped the sticky sweat from her forehead. Her eyes locked on the monitor before her and the hazy black and white shapes that flickered to life on them.
“Nothing, yet,” she replied. Her eyes scanned each image as it appeared on the screen. “What was the estimated population?”
Ellis Howard, the navigator, reached for a sheet of paper.
“Intelligence estimated a couple thousand,” he said. “I think it was like six, seven.”
“Can you give me a little more accuracy?”
“Like it really matters now?” he said, pointing to the devastation presented before them. Regardless, Ellis scanned the paper. “Ok, here we go. Seven thousand eight hundred. Give or take a hundred.”
“Fuck me,” Sara muttered.
Ellis smirked and opened his mouth to reply.
“Keep the snide comments to yourself,” Sara said. “That’s the largest population estimate yet. You sure?”
“Feel free to take a look,” Ellis handed Sara the paper. “E-mailed straight from the top.”
“What’s the time frame on this estimate?”
“It came in yesterday with the other Intel.”
“Which means all these numbers aren’t even a week old,” Sara muttered. The ghostly images flickered before her, each zone as devastated as the last. Two hours before, the two man crew of the Betty Lou released a dozen robotic drones into the air. They were pre-programmed to circle specific sections of the village until recalled. The tank’s occupants knew the images would be grim. Now they wondered how long these images would haunt them.
“This ain’t war,” Ellis sing-songed. “This is genocide.”
Sara cleared her throat and looked away from the monitor.
“Better them than us,” she said. She tried to sound neutral, but couldn’t quite manage the feat. “At least we don’t get our hands dirty.”
“Agreed. It’s so much better to sit outside the slaughterhouse and wait until the shit settles.”
“I’d rather count the dead than join them. The quicker we kill these fuckers, the quicker we get home.”
“As long as we’re in the right,” Ellis mumbled.
“Don’t give me that crap. We’re not the monsters. They are.”
“What’s left of them.”
Sara rubbed her chin and took a moment to examine her navigator’s face. There were deep black circles under his eyes. Though she couldn’t be sure, she suspected Ellis was hooked on Quick. The illegal drug was the military underground’s favorite. And why not? It made people feel happy, even euphoric. Such feelings were in great demand in these parts. If Ellis was using, he wouldn’t be the first. Nor the last.
“You know what the worst thing about all this?” Ellis asked.
“What?”
“After all these years, I’ve forgotten just what the hell we’re fighting for.”
Sara opened her mouth to say something. Don’t you remember? We’re here because…
The answer didn’t come.
All she knew was that the Union’s Armed Forces were in their twenty sixth year of the occupation of the Arabian Deserts. The war was one of the old Democracy’s last major actions before going under. The monetary and humanitarian impact proved a fatal blow to that old political system. As it withered and died, the Big Business Conservative stood ready to rush into the power vacuum left behind and assume control.
To those who cared, there was great irony here: It was the BBCons, in their infancy, who were the loudest to push the old Democracy into the war. Afterwards, it was BBCons who promised to end the whole mess. Few realized, or even cared about, the profits to be made from a long, drawn out conflict. Few but the BBCons.
“I see something,” Sara said, changing the subject. She reached for the controls and pushed a joystick forward. The image on this monitor zoomed in until it was a distinct form, a shadowy figure of a person. According to the readout, the figure was a little over a mile away.
“By the Gods. It’s one of them.”
“A villager?”
“No. Them.”
Ellis leaned in for a closer look. The figure sat on a shattered concrete pillar in the middle of a field of rubble. He –she? – was dressed in black and carried an impressively bulky Shock Rifle. The figure’s eyes were hidden behind reflective goggles. The sophisticated eye ware was red hued and thick enough to resist the impact of shrapnel. Over the figure’s head was a thin alloy helmet. It was scratched and dirty and carried more than a few dark stains. On its side was a drawing of a crude skull’s head. To its side were three light blue vertical lines, each one thinner than the one before it. It was a logo, complete with a trademark symbol.
“One of ours,” Ellis whispered, as if fearful the figure so far away might hear his words. “I see call letters. BB 1003.”
“Blue Brigade. What’s he doing?”
“Absolutely nothing.”
“Is that unusual?”
“Very much so. They don’t just sit back and do nothing.”
“Maybe he’s injured?�
��
Ellis shook his head.
“Not possible. If injured, they’re programmed to—”
“Programmed?”
Ellis eyed the tank’s driver. Sara pointed to the figure.
“That’s not a machine,”
“They may be flesh and blood,” Ellis admitted. “But they’re far from human.”
A chill passed through Sara. Though it was the first time she actually saw a member of the Blue Brigade, she recalled vague rumors people at home base told about these soldiers: They were tough and unimaginably cruel. They were bloodthirsty and damn near unstoppable.
“What were they trained to do?” Sara asked.
Ellis grinned.
“Trained, right,” he said. “If they’re immobile, they’re trained to self-destruct and take as many hostiles with them as possible.”
Sara grimaced. It was an irony of this war that those who so harshly condemned the techniques of our enemies discovered advantages in emulating them and fighting at that level. The enemy used torture, so the allies sanctioned and mastered its use. The enemy used suicide bombers strapped to improvised explosives, so the Blue Brigade equipped their people with low level nukes.
“Maybe wiping out an entire village wore him down,” Sara said. “Maybe he just needed to catch his breath.”
Ellis shook his head.
“Dammit, they don’t rest. They move on until they’re ordered to stop or until they can’t move anymore. This man clearly isn’t dead and I can’t see any other members of his squad in the area.”
“Maybe he was abandoned.”
“No way. They’d take him out before that.”
Ellis licked his lips. The figure on the screen remained frozen in place.
“How about we go in, get a closer look?” Sara asked.
“Are you crazy? Do you see the weaponry he’s carrying? If he’s malfunctioning and thinks we’re the enemy, he’ll peel this crate open like a paper bag.”
“He might need medical attention.”
“Do you remember what management said about interacting with these guys?”
“Management says a lot of shit. They told us we’d win this war back in ’55.”
“You want to get close to a God-damned killing machine, be my guest. I’ll wait behind.”
Sara considered this.
“All right, what if he is malfunctioning? What if his…his internal programming locked up? He stays right where he is, a nice little target for the enemy. Now suppose they find and capture him. The bastards are crafty. They get hold of one of our super soldiers and the next thing you know, we’re facing their version of a super soldier.”
“Sara, I really wish you didn’t talk so much damn sense.”
“I’ll call headquarters, see what they—”
Her words were cut off in mid-sentence. The figure on the screen rose to his feet.
“He’s moving!”
The figure scanned his surroundings as if seeing them for the first time. When the figure was done, it looked up, directly at the drone’s camera.
“He sees us?”
Sara shook her head.
“The drone is a foot long and hovers over a mile in the air. No way he sees us.”
The figure on the screen, however, continued staring at the camera. After a while, it turned away.
“Now what?”
The figure’s face, the part that was visible, darkened. The figure turned back, directly at the drone…
…and waved!
“No way,” Ellis muttered.
Sara eased back in her seat.
“Do you think he…do you think he knows where we are?”
“Could be,” Ellis said. “Let’s see what—”
Ellis’ words died. The figure on the monitor made an urgent motion and pointed to the west.
“What’s he doing?”
“Trying to tell us something. There might be something going on to the west. What do the drones see?”
Sara hit a series of buttons on the computer before her. Images of destruction transmitted from the other drones appeared on the side monitors.
“Nothing.”
“At all?”
“Village rubble ends in roughly five miles. After that we’ve got desert. Scanners aren’t picking up any hostiles or enemy machinery.”
Ellis thought for a few seconds.
“Maybe he doesn’t mean the immediate vicinity. What’s the nearest city to our west?”
“There’s only one city to the west. You know that.”
Ellis felt like he had been punched in the gut. Sada-bir. One of the last five major cities in all of Arabia. A city designated a neutral zone years before by the Corporate Guard. It boasted a population of several million, most of which were refugees: Children, women, the elderly. There were small elements of the enemy’s military staff hidden within the city too, just as there surely were in the other four major cities. But Sada-bir was a safe haven, the place where the idea of an eventual peace between the cultures was planted.
The figure on the monitor once again looked up and waved wildly.
“What is he saying?”
“I don’t—”
The figure broke into a run.
“He’s coming our way!”
“He’s gone crazy!”
Ellis and Sara furiously pressed the buttons before them. It would take several minutes for the tank to initiate its defensive measures. The grav tank’s engine roared and Sara forced it to make a sharp turn. In the middle of that chaos, an internal speaker with the cabin came to life, sending static throughout the cramped compartment.
“What the hell?” Sara yelled. “Did you turn that on?”
“No,” Ellis responded.
“Sada-bir is going hot,” a deep, calm voice said. It was a female voice. “Lock the vehicle down. Now.”
Ellis and Sara looked at each other, then at the figure on the monitor.
“It’s…it’s the Blue Brigade soldier. She’s a woman,” Ellis said.
“How did she get on this channel?”
“How the hell should I know?”
“What should we do?”
Ellis bit his upper lip. The figure on the monitor ran toward them at full speed. A lone woman, yet one armed to the teeth. A lone woman capable of single-handedly destroying the Corporation’s finest recon tank.
“If we lock down, she catches up to us.”
“She’s one of ours.”
“That’s not enough reason—”
“She’s one of ours,” Sara insisted. “Lock it down.”
“But—”
“Lock it down. It might be too late already.”
Sara stared into Ellis’ eyes.
“I hope you’re right.”
“You’re not the only one.”
Sara shut the grav tank’s engine. Ellis hit a series of keys and the tank touched the ground. Heavy spikes shot from the tank body and embedded themselves ten feet deep into the rock below. Inside, the tank vibrated wildly before all was still. On the monitor, the lone figure approached fast. She was only a couple of hundred feet away.
“I’ll aim the guns at her,” Ellis said. “Just in case.”
“You’ll get no argument from me,” Sara said.
Ellis reached for the weapon control. Before he could push a single button, however, a brilliant flash and a bone crushing tremor rumbled throughout the area. The Betty Lou’s monitors abruptly blinked off, leaving the cabin immersed in total darkness. A second later hurricane force winds and a wall of debris smashed against the tank’s side, threatening to rip her from the ground and send her flying.
“Son of a bitch,” Sara yelled. “Nukes detonated.”
“Sada-bir is dust,” Ellis whispered.
“We don’t know that,” Sara said. “Get the sensors online. Try the emergency generators.”
In the darkness, Ellis fumbled with a series of buttons. The computer monitors winked on and off. It took several seconds before th
ey were fully engaged. Afterwards Ellis read each display, cycling through the various scanner readouts. Sara did the same. After a while, she lowered her head.
“You were right. Sada-bir is gone.”
“H...how many?”
“We’ll…we’ll never know.”
“What about…what about the four other major cities?”
For now, there was no answer to that question.
It took the winds a few minutes to die down. When they did, the tank’s monitors winked on and remained on.
“Engine is at forty percent,” Sara said. She pressed a series of buttons. “Defensive weaponry is shot. All but two drones are down.”
“She saved our lives,” Ellis said. “If she hadn’t warned us…”
Sara nodded.
“Is she…is she still alive?”
Ellis stared at the ghostly images before him. The previously devastated terrain before them now looked wiped clean.
“No one could survive that.”
Sara sent the remaining drones into circular patterns. It took only a few seconds to lock on to the last spot they had seen the figure.
“She’s not there.”
“Radiation levels are spiking,” Ellis said. “Can we move?”
Sara re-routed the drones and focused on releasing the spikes from the ground. The tank vibrated and a bone rattling squeal filled the cabin.
“Damn!”
Ellis anxiously eyed his pilot. The tank wasn’t moving. Not at all.
“Fuck,” Sara yelled. She slammed the palms of her hand against the computer. “We’re stuck.”
“How long?”
Sara pressed several more buttons.
“I’m activating the repair droids. They’ll cut the spikes and free us.”
“How long?” Ellis repeated.
“The outer spikes should be easy enough to cut. No more than a day. The inner spikes…that could take a couple of days.”
Ellis leaned forward. The monitor before him was giving off a series of warning lights and readouts.
“Radiation levels continue rising.”
“Our shields can handle it.”
“For a while. Three days. Any more than that…”
“Call in for help.”
Ellis hit a button, then another. He bit his upper lip and tried to contain the rising panic.