by Dale Brown
The man stopped dead. He stared up at the huge combat robot in horror. “Mater’ Bozh’ya! Mother of God!”
Apologetically, Brad shook his head. “Sorry, pal. That’s not me.” Then he grabbed the Russian with one big metal hand and tossed him off the wall. Shrieking, the soldier vanished into the darkness. His despairing wail ended in a dull, wet-sounding thud.
Brad winced. That had to hurt.
He blurred back into motion and dropped over the other side, coming down on his CID’s hands and knees inside the Kremlin compound itself. He was in a small courtyard close to the armory.
Without further thought, Brad stood back up and pulled out his rail gun. It powered up with a shrill, high-pitched whine. The autocannon dropped into his other hand.
He looked around for a way out of the courtyard and spotted a big, solid-looking wooden door into the nearest building. One quick kick smashed it open, revealing a short, well-lit corridor.
Bending low, Brad trotted down the corridor. He ignored a gaggle of panicked clerks and officials scrambling out of his path. They were no threat. None of them were armed.
He smashed through another door and came out onto Dvortsovaya Boulevard. The State Kremlin Palace, a massive and horrifically ugly Soviet-era glass-and-concrete edifice, loomed straight ahead. Blowing the snot out of that monstrosity would probably be doing the Russians a favor, Brad decided.
Instead, he swung away and sprinted north toward the Troitskaya Tower gate. His CID burst out into the open, right on the flank of the Russian infantry and armored units deployed to block the gate. Targets crowded his vision.
Brad opened fire with both the rail gun and autocannon, often shooting almost simultaneously at different targets. Tracked BMP infantry fighting vehicles and T-72 tanks shuddered and exploded—ripped open by rail-gun rounds. Infantrymen and antitank missile crews scattered in panic. A few, braver or more foolish, turned to fight. Autocannon bursts knocked them dead or dying to the cobblestone pavement.
He stalked on through a nightmarish tangle of burning vehicles and bleeding soldiers, slowing only now and again to destroy new targets identified by his CID computer. Through the thickening smoke, he could make out the wooded confines of the Kremlin’s Senate Square . . . and beyond that, a large, triangular-shaped building, the Kremlin Senate itself. Its yellow walls were studded with tall white columns.
Brad’s mouth tightened. Signals intercepts and other intelligence confirmed that building was where Russia’s vicious president, Gennadiy Gryzlov, was holed up, along with his closest advisers. He raised his rail gun, aiming at the upper floors. Three or four slugs ripping through those walls at supersonic speeds ought to kick things off with a nice bang.
Suddenly Nadia Rozek broke in over the radio. “Unidentified movement from the west detected. Moving to engage!” She sounded startled. “I cannot get a lock. Repeat, I cannot get a—”
Her voice vanished, replaced only by crackling static. In that same moment, the icon representing her robot abruptly flared orange and then red. It winked out.
Brad swallowed hard against the taste of bile. Somehow, some Russian son of a bitch had just knocked out Nadia’s CID. He spun around, looking for the fastest way to her last known position.
“Drop it, McLanahan!” Whack Macomber growled. He sounded like death itself. “Continue the mission. I’m on this.” The icon showing the colonel’s own CID was already in motion, rushing north.
“Understood, Wolf Six,” Brad said through gritted teeth. He turned back toward Gryzlov’s lair. It was time to finish this.
More hostiles approaching, his computer reported calmly, reclaiming his attention. Threat axis at three o’clock.
Swearing under his breath, Brad glanced to his right. Three more T-72s had just appeared around the far corner of the mammoth State Kremlin Palace. Whirring, their turrets spun in his direction, bringing their main guns to bear.
“Ah, crap,” Brad muttered. He slid to the side and snapped off a quick rail-gun shot at the lead tank. Hit squarely beneath its long 125mm cannon, it blew apart. Twisted fragments of the turret flew skyward on a pillar of fire.
One of the other T-72s fired back at him. The armor-piercing shell screamed low over his head, missing by less than a meter. Rocked by the shock wave, his CID staggered slightly and then recovered its balance. A coaxial machine gun chattered. 7.62mm rounds spattered off his composite armor.
Camouflage systems seriously degraded. Minor hydraulic damage to left arm, the computer told him.
Brad stayed on the move, veering unpredictably to make it harder for the Russian gunners to draw a bead on him. His targeting reticle centered on another T-72. He squeezed the trigger. Hit broadside, it burst into flame.
Two down. One to go.
“I see Major Rozek’s CID,” Macomber said starkly over their secure channel. “It’s a total write-off. No life signs. And there’s no sign of whatever killed her.”
Brad nodded bleakly. Successfully bailing out of a damaged robot under fire was virtually impossible. “Understood, Six.” He fired again, smashing the last Russian tank. His threat displays were clear, empty of any new enemies. “I’m going after Gryzlov now. Watch my back.”
“Affirmative, Wolf One,” Macomber replied. Then his voice tightened. “Holy shit! What the fuck is that thing? Am engag—” Abruptly, his CID beacon flared bright red and disappeared.
For what seemed an eternity but couldn’t have been more than a second or two, Brad stared at his tactical display in complete consternation. What the hell was happening here? This was a nightmare, a total damned disaster.
Angrily, he shook himself back to full alertness. Disaster or not, he could still kill Gryzlov and accomplish the mission. He owed Nadia and Whack Macomber that much. He turned back toward the Russian president’s headquarters.
And then a stream of 30mm cannon rounds hammered the side of his CID with horrific force. Brad crashed into the edge of the cockpit as his robot tumbled off its feet and smacked headlong into the pavement.
Warning. Warning. Sensors severely damaged. Hydraulic system function down to thirty percent. Ammunition and weapons packs off-line, the computer told him. Camouflage systems inoperative. Armor breaches in multiple locations.
Groggily, Brad shook his head, an action emulated by the robot. He forced himself upright. Damaged servos and actuators whined. More failure and damage warnings flowed through his dazed mind.
Moving slower now, he spun around, toward the soaring glass-and-concrete façade of the State Kremlin Palace. That was where the Russian bastards who’d just ambushed him had to be lurking. Fragments and bits of glass were still falling from one of the enormous second-floor windows.
A tall, humanlike machine leaped out through the opening and landed only meters away. Its spindly arms held an array of weaponry.
Brad’s eyes opened wide in shock. Oh my God . . . .
Before he could react, the other combat robot opened fire again, this time at point-blank range. Multiple armor-piercing rounds tore into his CID, hurling it backward across the cobblestones in a shower of sparks and torn bits of wiring and metal. Sensors were ripped away. Whole segments of his vision grayed out and shut down. Red failure warnings cascaded through his bleary consciousness, each telling a dizzying tale of catastrophe.
Stunned, Brad fought to regain some measure of control over his dying CID. Nothing worked. His computer systems were damaged beyond repair. Through his one working visual sensor, he saw the other robot leaning over him. Slowly, almost gleefully, it took aim with its autocannon . . . and then it started shooting.
Everything went black.
“Battle simulation complete,” a smooth, computer-generated voice said in satisfaction. “Total mission failure. Assault force casualties: One hundred percent.”
Two
CID SIMULATOR COMPLEX, IRON WOLF SQUADRON HEADQUARTERS, POWIDZ, POLAND
THAT SAME TIME
The lights came back on.
“Senior exercise personnel s
hould report to the main conference room,” the computer said. “Simulation debriefing is scheduled in ten minutes.”
Blinking in the sudden brightness, Brad McLanahan squirmed out of the simulator’s haptic interface module. Now that he wasn’t connected through it to the computers and virtual reality setup, the touch of the gray, gelatinous membrane made his skin crawl. Strapping in or disconnecting always felt a lot like wriggling through a narrow tube full of body-temperature, oozy mud. At the bottom of the cockpit, he tapped a glowing green button.
A metal hatch slid open. Carefully, he squeezed through the small opening, slid down a short ladder, and then, keeping his head low, crab-walked out from under the egg-shaped Cybernetic Infantry Device simulator. Set in the middle of a large opaque dome, the cockpit nested inside a bewildering array of hydraulic jacks.
Once clear of the complicated, Rube Goldberg–looking assembly, Brad straightened up to his full height. For several seconds, he twisted and stretched his neck and shoulders and hips, working out the kinks in muscles that felt cramped and sore. Most of the time he didn’t mind being tall and broad-shouldered, but there were a few places where his build was a definite disadvantage.
Yeah, like cramped, instrument-filled aircraft and CID cockpits, he thought with a wry grin. Which just happened to be where he spent a huge portion of his working hours. Smooth career move, McLanahan, he told himself, heading for the door out of the dome. He could have been anything from an aerospace engineer to a bartender, but no, he’d wanted to be a combat pilot, just like his old man.
He emerged into a cavernous hangar. Two more of the big domes crowded the vast space. Each looked very much like one of those inflatable planetariums used for traveling astronomy shows. Color-coded fiber-optic and power cables snaked across the bare concrete floor, linking the domes to banks of big-screen monitors and powerful computers.
Ordinarily, the simulators gave rookie CID pilots a taste of what it was really like to command one of the big fighting machines. Once you were strapped inside, the combination of haptic interfaces, full-motion capability, and three-dimensional virtual reality projectors provided an experience that sounded, looked, and even felt real. It was a relatively fast, cheap, and easy way to weed out newbies who couldn’t hack the job.
Today, though, the simulator domes had been repurposed to run veteran Iron Wolf pilots through a series of immersive combat scenarios. Fighting virtual battles avoided wear and tear on their expensive robots . . . and on the Polish countryside. Live-fire exercises with CIDs might be exciting, but they were hell on equipment, buildings, and the landscape.
Even worse, open field maneuvers risked exposing key intelligence about the lethal machines and their advanced capabilities to Moscow’s spies. Warsaw’s Military Counterintelligence Service was top-notch, but Poland was a free and democratic country. There was no way to build an iron curtain of secrecy around its armed forces—or those of its high-tech allies, the Iron Wolf Squadron and its corporate parent Scion, a private military company.
And Brad knew only too well that Russia and its ruthless, belligerent leader, Gennadiy Gryzlov, had every reason to pry deeply into their secrets. He felt his mood darken.
For three difficult and dangerous years, the foreign-born pilots, commandos, and intelligence specialists who formed the nucleus of Iron Wolf had helped the Poles and other Eastern Europeans defend their freedoms against Russian aggression. Together they’d stopped Gryzlov’s forces cold—in the air, on the ground, and even in the strange digital battlegrounds of cyberspace. But the cost had been high. Too many of his fellow pilots and soldiers were dead.
Right now Poland and its allies were not openly at war with Russia. But neither were they really at peace. Sure, maybe nobody was actively shooting, slipping malware into power grids and banking systems, or lobbing bombs and missiles into cities, but that didn’t mean the two sides were ready to beat their swords into plowshares.
This current lull had lasted for more than a year. No one with any common sense believed it would last much longer. Like the leopard who could not change his spots, Gennadiy Gryzlov wasn’t going to abandon his ambition of making Russia the most powerful nation on the planet. The only open question was when he would make his next aggressive move . . . and what form it would take.
Warily, Brad poked his head in through the conference room’s open door.
Waiting for the hammer to fall was starting to wear on a lot of nerves around the squadron. This morning’s fiasco wasn’t going to make anyone feel really warm and fuzzy.
Whack Macomber and Nadia Rozek were already seated at the big, oval table. No surprise there, he thought. They both got “killed” in the sim before he did. Neither looked especially happy about what had just happened. Like most dedicated soldiers, both were intensely competitive and fiercely determined. Losing gracefully was for the other guys.
Nadia glanced over her shoulder when he came in. A fleeting smile briefly brightened her blue-gray eyes. She patted the empty chair beside her. “Come and join the ranks of the dishonored dead, fellow ghost.”
Ruefully, Brad did as she suggested. “Yeah, I guess that’s us,” he said. “So do they give virtual wraiths government-issued chains to clank around in? Or do we have to buy our own?”
Macomber snorted and looked away. The big man’s arms were folded across his chest. From the set of his jaw, he was just about mad enough to go off and bust a few heads in a bar somewhere, preferably one full of the meanest, nastiest sons of bitches around.
Oh, boy, Brad thought worriedly. He knew that look. So would a lot of MPs and civilian cops around the world who’d ever made the mistake of trying to stop Whack from blowing off some steam. There were a lot of stories about the colonel from his younger days in the U.S. Air Force’s Special Operations Command. Some of the wilder ones were even true.
Nadia’s warm hand slipped into his. Almost against his will, he felt himself relax a little. They’d first met almost three years ago, when she was assigned as Polish president Piotr Wilk’s military liaison to Scion and the newly formed Iron Wolf Squadron. If he’d been asked way back then, he would have bet good money this was going to be one of those short-lived “stunning local girl takes pity on lonely foreigner” kind of flings. Instead, whenever duty allowed, they were still spending almost every waking and sleeping moment together. So much, in fact, that Brad was taking a lot of flak from friends who wondered when they were getting married.
He thought about that. If he ever got up the guts to propose to her, would she say yes? Or would she just laugh, tell him not to be an idiot, and then drag him away to their bed to take his mind off the impossible?
Suddenly Nadia shot him an amused, sidelong glance from under her eyelashes. Brad felt himself reddening. Christ, was she reading his mind now?
Fortunately, before he could dig himself in any deeper, another man entered the conference room. Shorter than either Brad or Macomber, the newcomer was in his midsixties, with longish gray hair and a neatly trimmed gray beard. Moving fast, he crossed to the opposite side of the table and dropped heavily into a chair. From there, he surveyed the three Iron Wolf officers with a coldly displeased expression.
Kevin Martindale, once president of the United States, now ran Scion. He was also a close adviser to Piotr Wilk and the other leaders of the fledgling Alliance of Free Nations. They all knew that the high-tech weaponry, innovative tactics, and intelligence expertise Martindale and his people provided were the margin between their continued survival as free nations and renewed Russian domination.
“Well, that was a mess,” Martindale said at last, breaking an uncomfortable silence. “Three CIDs wrecked beyond repair. Three top-notch pilots who would certainly have been killed if they were lucky, and captured if they were not. And all for nothing.”
“Yeah, no kidding,” Macomber said through gritted teeth. He stabbed a finger back at Martindale. “What the hell was that little bolt-out-of-the-blue bushwhack supposed to prove? That we can get k
illed in these tin cans? Tell me something I don’t already fucking know!”
Brad felt Nadia stiffen beside him. Fifteen months ago, during the last round of fighting with Russia, Whack Macomber had led a raid on Perun’s Aerie, a secret Russian cyberwar complex buried deep in the icy, snow-cloaked Ural Mountains. They’d walked into a cleverly planned ambush. Charlie Turlock, one of their best friends, had been killed—unable to bail out of her damaged CID before it self-destructed. Whack himself had been captured by the Russians when his own robot was knocked out. He’d been rescued, but climbing into one of the Iron Wolf war machines still put him on edge.
“Adding those simulated Russian war robots was my idea,” someone said calmly from the doorway behind them, coming to Martindale’s defense. “Consider it a warning shot.”
Brad hid a grin. His father, retired U.S. Air Force Lieutenant General Patrick McLanahan, always did know how to make a dramatic entrance.
Heads turned as the older McLanahan came into the conference room and moved to join Martindale. A motor-driven, carbon-fiber-and-metal exoskeleton supported his torso, arms, and legs, whirring softly as he moved. The exoskeleton, a bulky life-support backpack, and the clear helmet enclosing his head gave the impression he was wearing an eccentrically designed space suit.
In a very real sense, Brad knew, that was exactly what the LEAF, or Life Enhancing Assistive Facility, was . . . a piece of advanced hardware designed to keep his father alive in a hostile environment. Only the hostile environment wasn’t just the cold vacuum of space, it was the whole wide world itself.
Years before, Patrick McLanahan had been critically wounded during an unauthorized retaliatory strike against the People’s Republic of China. Most people thought he’d been killed. They hadn’t been far off. His injuries were beyond the power of modern medicine to heal. Only a CID’s automated life-support systems had kept him alive. And so for year after long year, he’d been forced to exist inside a machine designed solely for war, robbed of all normal human contact—able to interact only through the CID’s sensors and computers.