The lead soldier holds his rifle at the low ready. The silhouette of his face is outlined starkly against the gray metal foreleg of the spider tank. He is looking forward intently and seems unaware that he’s standing inches away from several tons of foot-crushing steel. Like all of his fellow soldiers, he wears a sloped turtle helmet, welder’s goggles on his forehead, a scarf around his neck, a dull gray mesh army jacket, a heavy backpack slung low, a waist belt filled with rifle ammunition and sticklike grenades, a canteen dangling on the back of his right thigh, and dirty gray fatigues stuffed into even dirtier black boots.
The leader will be the first to spot what is around the corner. His heightened alertness and response time will save the lives of the majority of his squad. Right now, his intuition is telling him that something terrible is going to happen; this is visible in the tensing of his brow and the tendons that stand out on the back of his hand where he grips his rifle.
All but one of the soldiers are right-handed, holding their rifles with their right hand around the wooden stock and left hand cupped under the forestock. All of the soldiers are walking, staying close to the spider tank. None of the soldiers is talking. All of them squint into the bright sunlight. Only the leader looks ahead. The rest look varying degrees to the right, toward the camera.
Nobody looks back.
Six of the soldiers are men. The other two are women, including the left-handed soldier. Weary, she leans the side of her head against the swinging mesh belly of the walking tank, clutching her rifle to her chest. The barrel casts a dark shadow across her face, leaving only one eye visible. It is closed.
In the fleeting instant between the leader’s warning shout and the hell storm that follows, the spider tank named Houdini will follow standard operating procedure and squat to provide cover for its human soldiers. When it does, a metal bolt used to secure the mesh net will slice open the left-handed woman’s cheek, leaving a scar she will bear for the rest of her life.
I will one day tell her that the scar only makes her look prettier, and I will mean it.
The third man from the front is taller than the rest. His helmet is cocked on his head at a funny angle and his Adam’s apple protrudes awkwardly from his neck. He is the engineer for the group, and his helmet is different from the others, sprouting an array of lenses, antennae, and more esoteric sensors. Extra tools hang from his belt: thick pliers, a rugged multimeter, and a portable plasma torch.
Nine minutes from now, the engineer will use this torch to cauterize a grievous wound inflicted on his best friend in the world. He is clumsy and too tall, but it is this man’s responsibility to sneak forward during firefights, then direct the six-ton semiautonomous tank to destroy occluded targets. His best friend will die because it takes the engineer too long to scramble back to Houdini from his forward scouting position.
After the war is over, the engineer will run five miles a day as long as he is able for the rest of his life. During this run, he will visualize the face of his friend and he will pump his legs again and again until the pain is nearly unbearable.
Then he will push harder.
In the background is a cinder block house. Its gutter hangs cockeyed from the edge of the roof, overgrown with foliage. Small pockmarks crater the corrugated metal surface of the building. One dust-covered window is visible. A black triangle is broken out of it.
Behind the house is a forest made up of indistinct trees, tossing in a strong wind. The trees seem to be waving maniacally, trying to get the soldiers’ attention. Though the trees are only being pushed by natural forces, it appears as if they are trying to warn the soldiers that death lies around the next corner.
All of the soldiers are walking, staying close to the spider tank. None of the soldiers are talking. All of them squint into the bright sunlight. Only the leader looks ahead. The rest look varying degrees to the right, toward the camera.
Nobody looks back.
Our squad lost two soldiers during the march to Alaska. By the time the ground became frozen and our enemy within striking distance, we were down to six.
—CORMAC WALLACE, MIL#GHA217
PART FIVE
RETALIATION
I like to think
(it has to be!)
of a cybernetic ecology
where we are free of our labors
and joined back to nature,
returned to our mammal
brothers and sisters,
and all watched over
by machines of loving grace.
RICHARD BRAUTIGAN, 1967
1. THE FATE OF TIBERIUS
Leaving Tiberius to suffer will cost something.
Our humanity.
JACK WALLACE
NEW WAR + 2 YEARS, 7 MONTHS
Almost three years after Zero Hour, Gray Horse Army reached within striking distance of our enemy—the Ragnorak Intelligence Fields. The challenges we found there were far different from any we had ever encountered. It is safe to say that we were in no way prepared for what was to come.
The following scenes were recorded in great detail by a multitude of robotic weapons and spies deployed to protect the central AI known as Archos. Additionally, these data are bolstered with my own recollections.
—CORMAC WALLACE, MIL#GHA217
Tiberius is heaving, muscles spasming, kicking up clumps of bloodstained snow. Mist pours off his sweating 250-pound frame as the East African thrashes violently, flat on his back. He’s the biggest, most fearless grunt in the squad, but none of that matters when a glinting nightmare flashes out of the swirling snow and begins eating him alive.
“My god!” he bellows. “Oh my god!”
Ten seconds ago, there was a sharp crack and Ty went down. The rest of the squad took immediate cover. Now there’s a sniper hidden somewhere in the snowstorm, leaving Tiberius in no-man’s-land. From our position behind a snowy hill, we can hear the panic in his cries.
Jack straps on his helmet.
“Sarge?” asks Carl, the engineer.
Jack doesn’t respond, just rubs his hands together, then starts climbing the hill. Before he can get out of reach, I grab my big brother by the arm.
“What are you doing, Jack?”
“Saving Tiberius,” he says.
I shake my head. “It’s a trap, man. You know it is. It’s how they work. They fuck with our emotions. There’s only one logical choice here.”
Jack says nothing. Tiberius is just over the hill, screaming like he’s going through a meat grinder feetfirst, and that’s probably not too far from the truth. Even so, we don’t have time to fuck around here, so I’m going to have to just say it.
“We have to leave him,” I whisper. “We have to move on.”
Jack shoves my hand away. He can’t believe that I just said it out loud. In a way, neither can I. War does that.
But it’s the truth and it had to be said and I’m the only one in the squad who could say it to Jack.
Tiberius abruptly stops screaming.
Jack looks up the hill, then back at me. “Fuck you, little brother,” he says. “When did you start thinking like them? I’m going to help Tiberius. It’s the human thing to do.”
I reply without much conviction, “I understand them. It doesn’t mean I’m like them.”
But deep down, I know the truth. I have become like the robots. My reality has been reduced to a series of life-or-death decisions. Optimal decisions lead to more decisions; suboptimal decisions lead to the bad dream that’s happening just over the hill. Emotions are just cobwebs in my gears. Under my skin, I have become a war machine. My flesh may be weak, but my mind is sharp and hard and clear as ice.
Jack still behaves as if we live in a human’s world, as if his heart is more than just a blood pump. That kind of thinking leads to death. There’s no room for it. Not if we’re going to live long enough to kill Archos.
“I’m hit bad,” moans Tiberius. “Help. Oh my god. Help me.”
Each member of the squad is watching us
argue, poised to run on command, ready to continue our mission.
Jack makes one last effort to explain. “It’s a risk, but leaving Tiberius to suffer will cost something. Our humanity.”
And here is the difference between Jack and me.
“Fuck our humanity,” I say. “I want to live. Don’t you get it? If you go out there, they’re gonna kill you, Jackie!”
Tiberius’s moan floats in on the breeze like a ghost. The sound of his voice is strange, low and raspy.
“Jackie,” he wheezes. “Help me. Jackie! Come out here and dance.”
“The hell?” I say. “Nobody calls you Jackie but me.”
I briefly wonder whether the robots can hear us. Jack shrugs it off. “If we leave him,” he says, “they win.”
“No. Every second we spend here bullshitting they win. Because they’re on the fucking move, man. Rob’ll be here any second.”
“Roger that,” says Cherrah. She’s walked over from where the rest of the squad stands, staring at us impatiently. “Ty has been down a minute forty-five. Estimated time of arrival four minutes. We gotta GTFO.”
Jack wheels on Cherrah and the whole squad, and flings his helmet to the ground. “Is that what you all want? To leave Ty behind? To run away like fucking cowards?”
We’re all silent for a solid ten seconds. I can almost feel the tons of metal speeding through the blizzard toward our position. Huge legs swinging, clawing up the permafrost in exploding gouges, the mantis leaning their frostbitten visor plates into the wind to reach us that much faster.
“Survive to fight,” I whisper to Jack.
The others nod.
“Well fuck that,” mutters Jack. “You all may be a bunch of robots, but I’m not. My man is calling me. He’s calling for me. Move on if you have to, but I’m getting Tiberius.”
Jack climbs the hill without hesitation. The squad looks to me, so I act.
“Cherrah, Leo, unpack a lower-limb exo for Ty. He isn’t gonna be able to walk. Carl, get to the top of the hill and put your senses out there. Call out anything you see and keep your head down. We move out soon as they’re back over the top.”
I snatch Jack’s helmet off the ground. “Jack!” I shout. From halfway up the hill, he turns. I toss his helmet up to him and he catches it neatly.
“Don’t get killed!” I call.
He grins at me, wide, just like when we were kids. I’ve seen that dumb grin so many times: when he was jumping off our garage into a kiddy pool, drag racing down dark country roads, using a fake ID to buy shitty beer. That grin always gave me a good feeling. It let me know that my big brother had it under control.
Now, the grin makes me afraid. Cobwebs in my gears.
Jack finally disappears over the top of the hill. I scramble up with Carl. From behind the cover of the snowbank we watch my brother crawling toward Tiberius. The ground is muddy and wet, churned up by our dash over the hill for cover. Jack belly-crawls mechanically, elbows jutting out left and right, filthy boots shoving at the snowy dirt for purchase.
In a blink he’s there.
“Status?” I ask Carl. The engineer has his visor down over his eyes and his head cocked, helmet-mounted antennae carefully oriented. He looks like a space-age Helen Keller, but he’s seeing the world the way a robot does and that’s my best chance at keeping my brother alive.
“Nominal,” he says. “Nothing showing up.”
“Could be over the horizon,” I say.
“Wait. Something’s coming.”
“Get down!” I bark, and Jack drops to the ground, frantically wrapping a rope around Ty’s unmoving foot.
I’m sure that some kind of horrible trap has sprung. A geyser of rock and snow kicks up a few meters away. Then I hear a crack rip through the swirling snow and, what with the speed of sound being a crawl, I know that whatever has happened is pretty much already over.
Why did I let him do this?
A golden sphere pops like a firecracker and bounces five meters into the air. Spinning there for a split second, the sphere sprays the area with dull red light before bouncing back to the ground, dead. For an instant, each dancing snowflake is paused in the air, outlined in red. It’s just a disco sensor.
“Eyes!” shouts Carl. “They’ve got eyes on us!”
I exhale. Jack is still alive and scrapping. He has looped a rope around Tiberius’s foot and is up on two legs dragging him back toward us. Jack’s face is twisted into a snarl from the effort of hauling all that dead weight. Tiberius isn’t moving.
The frozen landscape is quiet except for Jack’s grunting and the howling wind, but in my gut I can feel the crosshairs trained on my brother. The part of my brain that tells me I’m in danger has gone delirious.
“Move it!” I scream to Jack. He’s halfway back, but, depending on what’s coming for us out of the whiteout, the hill might not matter anymore. I shout down to the squad, “Get on the high ready and lock and load! Rob’s coming.”
Like they didn’t already know.
“Inbound from the south,” says Carl. “Pluggers.” The lanky Southerner is already scrambling down the hillside, Adam’s apple bobbing. His visor is up and he pants audibly. He joins the team at the bottom of the hill, each member pulling out weapons and finding cover.
Just then, a half-dozen more cracks detonate in staccato. Whale-spray plumes of ice and mud erupt all around Jack, cratering the permafrost. He keeps staggering forward, unhurt. His eyes, wide and round and blue, connect with mine. A plugger swarm is now buried in the snow all around him.
It’s a death sentence and we both know it.
I don’t think; I react. My action is divorced from all emotion and logic. It isn’t human or inhuman—it just is. I believe that choices like these, made in absolute crisis, come from our True Selves, bypassing all experience and thought. These kinds of choices are the closest thing to fate that human beings will ever experience.
I dive over the hill to help my brother, grabbing the frozen rope with one hand and drawing my sidearm with the other.
The pluggers—fist-sized chunks of metal—are already clawing their way to the surface of their impact craters. One by one, they blossom behind us, blasting leg anchors into the ground and aiming plugs at our backs. We almost make it to the hill when the first plugger launches and buries itself into Jack’s left calf. When he makes that terrible croaking scream I know it’s over.
I aim the gun behind me without looking and blast the snow. By sheer dumb luck, I hit a plugger and this starts a chain reaction. The pluggers self-detonate the instant their hulls are compromised. A hail of icy shrapnel embeds itself in my armor and the back of my helmet. I can feel a warm wetness on the backs of my thighs and neck as Jack and I drag Ty’s limp body over the snowbank and to safety.
Jack falls against the hillside, moaning hoarsely, and clutches his calf. Inside him, the plugger is chewing up the meat of his leg and orienting itself with his blood flow. With a drill-like proboscis, the plugger will follow Jack’s femoral artery to his heart. This process requires forty-five seconds on average.
I grab Jack by the shoulders and savagely throw him down the hill.
“Calf!” I shout down to the squad. “Left calf!”
The instant Jack lands in a sprawling heap at the bottom of the hill, Leo crushes my brother’s left leg just above the knee with one steel exoskeleton boot. I hear the femur crack from up the hill. Leo mashes his boot down as Cherrah saws back and forth across the top of Jack’s knee with a serrated bayonet.
They are amputating my brother’s leg and hopefully the plugger with it.
Jack is beyond screaming now. The cords of his neck stand out and his face is pale with blood loss. Hurt and anger and disbelief flash over his face. I think that the human face was never designed to convey the amount of pain that my brother is in right now.
I reach Jack a second later, dropping to my knees by his side. My body is stinging from a thousand tiny wounds, but I don’t have to check to know that I?
??m basically okay. Being hit by a plugger is like having a flat tire. If you’re wondering whether you’ve got one, then you don’t.
But Jack isn’t okay.
“Oh you dumb stupid asshole,” I tell him. He grins up at me. Cherrah and Leo do horrible things just out of sight. From the corner of my eye, I see Cherrah’s arm flickering back and forth, repetitively and with purpose, like she is sawing a two-by-four.
“I’m sorry, Mac,” he says. I notice there is blood in his mouth, a bad sign.
“Oh no, man,” I say. “The plugger is—”
“No,” he says. “Too late. Just listen. You’re the one, man. I knew it. You’re the one. Keep my bayonet, okay? No pawnshops.”
“No pawnshops,” I whisper. “Just be still, Jack.”
My throat is closing up and making it hard to breathe. Something tickles my cheek and I rub it and my hand comes away wet. I can’t quite think of why that is. I glance over my shoulder to Cherrah. “Help him,” I say. “How can we?”
She holds up the bloody bayonet, flecked with bits of bone and muscle, and shakes her head. Standing above me, big Leo sadly exhales a cloud of frosty breath. The rest of my squad is waiting, aware even now of the terrible monsters that will soon roar out of the blizzard.
Jack grabs my hand. “You’re going to save us, Cormac.”
“Okay, Jack. Okay,” I say.
My brother is dying in my arms and I am trying to memorize his face because I know that this is really important but I can’t stop wondering if any of the pluggers on the hill are burrowing toward my squad right now.
Jack squeezes his eyes closed tight, then they fly open. A hollow thud rocks his body as the plugger reaches his heart and detonates. Jack’s body bounces off the ground in a massive convulsion. His blue eyes are suddenly injected with dark red blood. The blast is trapped inside his body armor. Now, it’s the only thing holding his body together. But his face. He looks the same as the kid I grew up with. I smooth the hair off his forehead and close his blood-filled eyes with my palm.