No Man's Land Page 2

  Why so close to us? Why one?

  Instinct finally kicked in, in spite of Louis’s words. I dove sideways into Kris, tumbling her. Her eyes went wide but she said nothing, catching enough balance to scramble on all fours. Simon and Jillie reflexed after us.

  Mario turned, mouth open, his eyes so dark I was sure he was about to bark at us for being scared little girls.

  He never got any words out. Mario’s hand flew up to his skull and came away slick and red and I could feel the heat of little machines racing through his body, the fear of them turning me soft and small inside.

  He writhed and fell.

  The four of us, me, and Kris and Rob and Jill, raced away like one. My dog, Hunter, slowed to stay beside me. I ran with a hand on Hunter’s broad, full back, wishing there was power and time to mount and race away. The big dog’s metal skin felt hot to the touch. But then everything was hot, the sand, the dog, the air, my anger.

  I didn’t want to glance back toward Mario’s body, but I did. Most of the line was down, the dogs on their sides, faces scarred with soot. Someone had managed to knock the silver copter out of the sky. My quick glance didn’t say how many people from the front of the line had made it. If any.

  The fear of things too small to see drove us a long way in spite of the sapping heat and the surreal burned and wetted and baked ground.

  We re-grouped behind a stand of rocks. Small cover, the rocks hot enough to burn hands where we touched them, tinged with silicates so they shimmered, big enough to throw shade if the sun weren’t directly above us.

  Jillie looked over at me, her face shocked. I checked the rest of the group. Eight had made it to the rocks. Eight people and eight bots, so sixteen. I checked what I’d been left with. Two new recruits, the speed of death thrumming through them so deeply fear seemed to leak from their sweaty, dirty pores. Jillie and a thin boy from Seattle who leaned over, puking. The scientist. The two trainers, busy already, checking the metal dogs for damage, probably glad as hell to have something to do. Kris, the ever optimistic and bitchy. Simon, who was only happy when he was actually fighting, who got an orgasmic look on his face in hand-to-hand, and yet wouldn’t kill a spider if it landed on his mouth in the middle of the night. Thank god for Kris and Simon and the trainers. Maybe between us we could protect the two newbies.

  Simon had already managed to climb up the rock pile in spite of the heat, peel his binoculars out of his pack, and look toward the carnage. I caught the shift in his uniform from ash gray to the tan of the rocks. He grunted softly from about five feet above me.

  “What do you see?” I asked him.

  He shook his head. “Stupidity.”

  “No shit. See any more copters?”

  “Damn things are fast.”

  I pulled the handheld out of my pocket and swiped up the tracking chip info. Close-together green dots for us, dark for humans and light for robot dogs. Three more humans on the far side, two with fading vital signs. I whispered an apology to them since we couldn’t even try and get there yet. Red death dots made a ragged line across the open spaces. I called for overhead pictures. I got back two-inch pixels, which was enough to see that everyone had died in place, and even the dogs had made no more than a few steps. They’d been targeted. The poison that killed people didn’t kill robots. So whoever sent the UAV knew who and what was coming for them.

  Illegal nano for sure, scattered by an illegal UAV. NorAM would tell— I breathed in deep, re-thinking who was left —NorAM would tell me more once they analyzed the info.

  Shit.

  I did want command. But not now, and not here.

  NorAM would have the same information I had, except maybe our condition. We’d lost two of the scientist embeds, but we still had one left. Alissa Frietag, a small woman with twice the strength she appeared to have, and a fierce determination to get into the labs. I stared at her for a moment, assessing. Small, so thin I would be able to wrap my hands around her waist with only a little effort. She looked pissed-off instead of scared.

  Good. So all we had to do was protect Alissa, get into the well-defended lab, and give her some time to assess it before we destroyed it. Yep, that should be easy.

  I typed my message to NorAM. We’re okay. Sci1 looks fierce. We need cover.

  Or to withdraw, but I didn’t have to tell them that. They knew. If we withdrew, GenGreen would simply destroy everything and smile and invite us and a bunch of media in the front door just in time to see a lab devoted to feeding the starving. We didn’t want to leave them time for that. Other NorAM forces had blocked the roads out. Of course, we could just get them from the air. But people up the chain wanted the lab intact. Apparently there was some experiment or knowledge so valuable that we weren’t willing to just blow it up and move on.

  I half expected to be recalled within a day of starting out. The goal had been to come in unnoticed, but the UAV screamed that GenGreen and its private armies had noticed us. The fact that our code was compromised suggested they’d also paid off someone. With luck, that would be a dead rat from our group, but more likely it would be NorAM.

  I scanned the horizon again. Listened. No wind. No rotor blades. Puking boy had stopped hacking and spitting.

  Damnit. Time to lead.

  “Everybody gather up.”

  Simon started to clamber down the rock, but I gestured for him to stay. He’d be able to hear me from up there. The dog handlers got the big bots to stand and look at me, too, cocking their not doglike heads sideways at me in a dog-like motion. Good. At least someone had a sense of humor.

  I glanced down at my handheld. The screen was still blank.

  “You all okay?”

  I looked them each in the eye. At least they all looked back at me. Five women including me, three guys. The men were Simon, Scott of the weak stomach, and one of the two dog trainers, John. Then me, Kris the steady and bright, Jillie, Alissa Frietag the scientist, and the other dog trainer, a woman named Paulette.

  The communit buzzed in my hand. I glanced down and saw what I expected. I looked back at the group. “Orders are to keep going, move more evasively, get to the lab. They’ll send in some cover and some help after we get it secure.”

  “Ma’am.”

  “Scott?”

  “Just us. To take the whole place?”

  I nodded. “What supplies do we have?”

  John spoke a litany he’d pretty clearly memorized. “Water. Food. Handhelds. First Aid. Light. Blankets.”

  Crap. I glanced at Paulette, who stood with one hand on her robot’s head as if it were flesh and blood. She swallowed. “The same.”

  So we were eight for eight on supplies and zero for zero on big weapons? We wouldn’t starve while we were destroying an enemy lab with our bare hands. Good thing.

  John must have seen the look on my face. “We do have some rockets and launchers, and a few mines.”

  “Our handguns,” I added. “And the knives on our belts. Any useful solar?”

  Paulette shifted on her feet, swaying. “Not enough for the dogs.” Her face had gone white. “Enough for us.”

  Jillie’s eyes widened and she looked like she was about ten and desperate for a friend. I knew what she was thinking. That we’d need to raid the supplies on the other dogs. I didn’t look directly at her, but I made sure I could see her relax when I said, “We’re not going out there.” Stray microbots could kill us as easily as they’d killed everyone else. It might be slower without a direct hit, but three of the damned things in your soft tissue guaranteed death. There would be no recovery of the other dogs or their packs, or anything else. Not until NorAM could send containment suits out. Not today.

  I updated NorAM with our status, and requested a storm.

  They suggested quite formally that we do without.

  I counter-suggested quite formally that without power we would die before we got the job done instead of while we were doing the job.

  I stood still, staring at the screen, waiting for them t
o discuss amongst themselves and then get back to me. I was half-hoping they’d say no and decide we could go back or wait for more people and stuff or something.

  Instead, they answered way too fast. They promised lightning.

  Whatever was in that lab mattered to them. I swallowed. I’d been trained. I’d even succeeded in a live exercise. And out of our group, I was the only one still alive and rated for it. I glanced at the dog handlers. “We do have the laser?”

  John nodded, his eyes gleaming a bit.

  I surveyed the group. “We are going to crack the sky and bring home some power.”

  Allisa’s tongue darted out between her full lips, and she looked like she was about to be seated at a banquet table. Jillie’s eyes widened again, and the trainers glanced at the dogs. Kris and Simon, who knew the calculus, nodded.

  We had orders to go forward, so no turning tail. Probably wouldn’t work anyway, since GenGreen would follow us and keep whatever they were protecting at the level of rumor. We could go forward. Would. We carried the worst weapons on us—some as small as the ones GenGreen just killed most of us with. We would need power to eat and drink and scatter signal around, power to feed the tiny weapons, power to control the lab. Stored power, available on demand.

  In addition to the power to get there.

  That had been on the other dogs, along with the more power-hungry of the weapons. We’d run them a long way to get here. The robotic dogs were stronger than us by far, faster, fleeter if less graceful. But when we ran out of juice, we just reached into our will and found more. When robots ran dry, they stopped.

  So be it.

  Death or a miracle.

  “Rest. Simon and I will take a watch.”

  They nodded, the old hands falling almost immediately to the ground, accepting rest. Jillie and Scott followed. Alissa Frietag leaned back against the stones, closing her eyes and whispering under her breath.

  I clambered up beside Simon and sat looking out over our distant dead and toward the buried lab. The very idea of it made me feel small and fragile even if I was one-sixty with my boots on and no real fat. Bulky for a girl. We were all fragile when it came to nano and biologicals and whatever else GenGreen and its partners were dreaming up to protect their solution for the world from the combined North American Government, which had a different one. The NorAM populace had voted almost as one from the wet northern reaches of Canada to the sweltering, hurricane-slapped coasts of the Yucatan. They’d said to stop intervening, preferring to take their chances with nature than to trust the multinationals.

  There was no money in letting nature balance itself. Hence the science wars, and this small battle.

  The dead between us and the next hill attested to the seriousness of this small battle. Our own corporations, or at least multis born here, killing us. Assholes. I swore I’d do my best. Both to kill the big scary lab and to stay alive.

  I was gonna miss Mario, even if he was a loudmouthed idiot.

  Simon opened the conversation. “This sucks.”

  “Yep.” And that closed the conversation.

  We sat close to each other, taking comfort in the silence of long friendship. We’d been on three attacks like this before, and come back from all of them. I wasn’t so sure this time, but no soldier says those things to another. Instead, we watched the empty blue sky and baked quietly on the rock, the sun glinting on the great field of ash that surrounded us.

  NorAM interrupted to tell me the others had all died. No one left on the far ridge. I imagined it. One of the dots had been healthy. They’d watched the others die, gotten too close. Prayed to be safe. Maybe they’d even donned their protective suit, the crappy one that came in all our belts. But something too small to see and big enough to kill them had gotten in anyway. It made me feel cold even in the punishing heat.

  The rocks started throwing longer shadows. Simon and I traded with Kris and Scott. I wiped the sweat from my face and felt sure the heat would keep me fitful and maybe even awake.

  A fat warm glob of rain struck me on the cheek and I shook awake, swinging my head like an animal. Wind cooled the air. Dark, roiling cumulonimbus clouds towered overhead, the front edge of them splitting the sky like angry foam above my head, blue, then gray, white above, tinged gold by the setting sun.

  Kris looked down at me. “Almost ready?”

  “Are they?”

  I had given her my comm. She shaded the screen with her hand and said “Forty minutes.”

  I took five minutes to perform routine body maintenance functions, and five more to verify that everyone else did the same. I gathered the humans all into formation, packs at their side and ready, each with a weapon in hand.

  The dog handlers had already chosen John’s dog for the first receptacle in line. I didn’t ask how he’d drawn the risky straw. Just thanked him for being ready.

  At least there was so much wind I didn’t need a posted UAV spotter any more. Anything over about twenty miles an hour tended to slam them off course, into the ground, or both. I was willing to bet the occasional gust was past the twenty mile an hour mark. In fact, there was a serious whine in the part of the wind that passed up above us. Damn NorAM physics jocks.

  John handed me the launcher.

  “Did you name your dog?” I asked.

  He swallowed. “Max, sir. Ma’am.”

  His confusion felt almost touching. John passed Max’s hand controls to me, and me and the metal dog walked away from the group, as far out into the open as we could get. Wind tore at my shirt.

  All the blue had been blown out of the sky.

  Max came to my waist, with four legs that had two joints each, and a hollow tail. His belly was big, and right now all that it held was empty space and some magic built from Tesla’s dreams and our materials. Too classified for me to get the details, and too new to be completely sure it would work.

  Lightning slammed upward from the ridge we had been going to, would go to again. Rain sheeted down, sharpening the smell of the charred soil.

  John and Paulette called out the other dogs, lining them up one after the other, tails in mouths, a long string of conductivity. Hunter was last. John said something to Max, and the big robot tilted its ugly black head back and opened its jaws. Someone had painted sharp teeth like a shark’s onto the dull gripping surfaces.

  John handed me dark goggles. I slid them on, the world almost black, John now a silhouette. He handed me a long slender rod with a firing pin on the outside. The laser gun felt heavier than I remembered, harder to manage. I pointed it up at the roiling clouds, ignoring the rain that nearly blinded me.

  The two trainers raced to the rocks to join Simon and the others.

  I pulled the trigger and nothing happened.

  I checked. The gun worked. The laser beams shot fast as lightning itself into the clouds, but invisible. The clouds had simply ignored my call, my act, the light.

  They had to be ready, to be almost pregnant with charge.

  I giggled, absurdly, soaking wet and wondering if the storm were a lover I’d just tried to drive to premature ejaculation.

  The laser had enough power for three charges. I’d wasted one. I took a deep breath and stared up into the rain and the dark clouds and smelled the damp, charred air.

  Another lightning bolt flashed down near the rocks and thunder made me cringe and cover my head.

  My timing was still off.

  Practice for this had been controlled. The storms had been smaller.

  I closed my eyes, let the water fall on the goggles. Braced. Waited.

  Fired.

  I opened my eyes.

  Thunder smacked again.

  White light surrounded me, the world turned to day in spite of the lenses between my eyes and the bolt. Max stood unmoved but full, and I had the briefest glimpse of the dog with light pouring out of every hole in its body, out through its tail into the other dogs, a line of lightning eaters.

  Then I couldn’t see, and all I felt was a deep thrum
ming in my body, and a sharp pain behind the eyes. I shook, relieved and scared and pissed off as well, mad at NorAM and GenGreen and the whole difficult, warring world. The thunder kept rolling away from me, hiding any other noises.

  John’s voice, a whoop. “We did it! You did it!”

  Someone took the laser gun from my hands. Simon spoke. “I’m taking off the goggles. Keep your eyes closed.”

  I felt them slide away.

  “Look at me.”

  His face existed. Thank God. I could see, and what I saw was Simon grinning, ear to ear. “Now what, Chief?”

  I swallowed and stood up, my legs shaky, the back of my head still mushy and pain-wracked. Nothing good was easy. Unless we called it again, the lightning would move on. We had what we needed from it, and all that was left was danger. We could wait it out. “Is everyone here?”

  Simon nodded. I verified he was right. They looked shocked and bewildered. Some soldiers. But at least everyone had their packs. “You’re a damn good second,” I whispered to him, and then I stood up and addressed everyone else. “By the time I finish this briefing, the worst of the storm will have moved on, and we’ll go take the lab. We’re going to ride in there.”

  Scott’s eyes widened. “On the dogs?”

  “No. On each other.” Dingbat. But then he was in as much danger as the rest of us. Maybe more for being wet behind the ears. Whatever was in the lab had better be good. “We’re moving light and fast, following the storm, hoping to take them by surprise. We’ll have enough power to get there on the bots. I don’t know if we’ll get back that way or if we’ll walk.” Which meant I didn’t know how much power we’d have on the way back. Once we succeeded—if we succeeded—NorAM wasn’t going to burn more climate credits on getting back the easy way, not unless we had something they wanted fast. That was an idea. I looked back at them. “The extra supplies are still here. We meet back here. Has everyone marked this on their maps?”