The pilot of the tiltrotor cut into the conversation. “I got just so much fuel, and other people to pull out,” he said. His voice was flat as gunmetal, with a total absence of emotion that was a statement in itself.
“Can you get me a landing envelope?” he said.
“Look, we’ll cover—” Martins began.
A four-barreled heavy lashed out toward Firebase Villa with streams of green tracer. Yellow-white ~answered it; neither gun was going to kill the other, at extreme ranges and with both firing from narrow slits. The Glorio gun was using an improvised bunker, thrown up over the last hour, but it was good enough for this. Parts of the perimeter minefield still smoldered where rockets had dragged explosive cord over it in a net to detonate the mines. Some of the bodies of the sappers that had tried to exploit that hole in the mines and razor wire still smoldered as well. Many of the short-range guns around the perimeter were AI-driven automatics, 4mm gatlings with no nerves and very quick reaction times.
“Hell you will, Martins,” McNaught wheezed. “There’s a battalion of them out there. I think—” he coughed “—I think Comrade Chavez has walked the walk with us so long he just can’t bear the thought of us leaving at all.” The captain’s voice changed timber. “Flyboy, get lost. You try bringing that bird down here, you’ll get a second job as a colander.”
“Hell,” the pilot muttered. Then: “Goodbye.”
Martins and McNaught waited in silence, except for the racket of the firefight. The Glorios crunched closer, men crawling forward from cover to cover. Many of them died, but not enough, and the bombardment rockets kept dragging their loads of explosive across the sky.
It’s not often you’re condemned to death, Martins thought. Her mind was hunting through alternatives, plans, tactics—the same process as always. Only there wasn’t anything you could do with seventy effectives to attack a battalion of guerrillas who were hauling out all the stuff they’d saved up. Even if it was insane, insane even in terms of the Glorios’ own demented worldview.
“Bug out,” McNaught said, in a breathless rasp. “Nothing you can do here. They’re all here, bug out and make it back to the coast, you can get some transport there. That’s an order, Lieutenant.”
If there was anything left to go back north for. The latest reports were even more crazy-confused than the first.
“Save your breath, sir,” she said.
The Company had been together down here for a long time. They were all going home together. One way or another.
“Movement,” someone said. She recognized the voice of the communications specialist back in Villa. Like everyone else, she doubled in two other jobs; in this case, monitoring the remote sensors. “I got movement . . . vehicle movement. Hey, big vehicle.”
Nobody said anything for a minute or two, in the draw where the two UATVs waited.
“That’s impossible,” Martins whispered.
The technician’s voice was shaky with unshed tears. “Unless the Glorios have a 150-ton tank, it’s happening anyway,” she said.
They were a kilometer beyond the Glorio outposts in the draw. The river ran to their left, circling in a wide arch around Firebase Villa. Water jetted in smooth arcs to either bank as the Mark III climbed through the rapids. In the shallow pools beyond the wave from the treads was more like a pulsing. Then the tank stopped, not a hundred meters from the UATVs’ position.
“Vinatelli,” Martins breathed. “You beautiful little geek!”
The tank remained silent. Another rocket sailed in, a globe of reddish fire trough the sky.
“What are you waiting for?” Martins cursed.
“I have no orders, Lieutenant,” the newbie’s voice said. “Last mission parameters accomplished.”
Something dead and cold trailed fingers up Martin’s spine. He’s gone over the edge, she thought. Aloud, she snapped: “Fight, Vinatelli, for Christ’s sake. Fight!”
“Fight whom, Lieutenant?”
“The Glorios. The people who’re attacking the firebase, for fuck’s sake. Open fire.”
“Acknowledged, Lieutenant.”
The night came apart in a dazzle of fire.
* * *
“I think I know—I think I know what happened,” Martins whispered.
Nothing moved on the fissured plain around Firebase Villa, except what the wind stirred, and the troopers out collecting the weapons. It had taken the Mark III only about an hour to end it, and the last half of that had been hunting down fugitives. The final group included Comrade Chavez, in a well-shielded hillside cave only three klicks away, which explained a great deal when the tank blew most of the hillside away to get at it. He’d been hiding under their noses all along.
She slung her M-35 down her back and worked her fingers, taking a deep breath before she started climbing the rungs built into the side armor of the Mark III. Some of them were missing, but that was no problem, no problem . . . The hatch opened easily.
Vinatelli must have had his crash harness up when the bridge blew. From the look of the body, he’d been reaching for a cola can. His head must have been at just the right angle to crack his spine against the forward control surfaces.
“So that’s why Vinatelli didn’t want to come out,” she said.
McNaught was watching through the remotes of her helmet. “So it is alive,” he said.
Martin shook her head, then spoke: “No.” Her tone shifted. “Markee. Why didn’t you go back to the coast?”
“Mission parameters did not require retracing route,” the tank said, in the incongruously sultry voice. “Last established mission parameters indicated transit to point Firebase Villa.”
“What are your mission parameters. Correction, what were your mission parameters.”
“Lieutenant Bethany Martins is to go home,” the machine said.
Martins slumped, sitting on the combing. The smell inside wouldn’t be too bad, not after only six hours in air conditioning.
“It was Vinatelli,” she said. “He was the dreamy sort. He had it programmed to do a clever Hans routine if an officer started making requests when he was asleep, and reply in his own voice.”
“Clever Hans?” the captain asked.
“A horse somebody trained to ‘answer’ questions. It sensed subliminal clues and behaved accordingly, so it looked like it understood what the audience was saying. You can get a good AI system to do the same thing, word-association according to what you say. You’d swear it was talking to you, when it’s really got no more real comprehension than a toaster.”
“Why did it come here?”
“That was the last order. Go to Firebase Villa; it’s got enough discretion to pick another route out of its data banks. And to shoot back if attacked in a combat zone. But that’s all, that’s all it did. Like ants; all they’ve got is a few feedback loops but they get a damned lot done.”
She rose, shaking her head.
“Which leaves the question of what we do now,” the Captain said.
“Oh, I don’t think there’s much question on that one,” Martins said.
She pulled off her helmet and rubbed her face. Despite everything, a grin broke through. Poor ignorant bastard, she thought, looking down at Vinatelli. The tank was everything you said it was. She’d been right too, though: a newbie was still cold meat unless he wised up fast.
“We’re all going home. With Markee to lead the way.”
CAMELOT
S.N. Lewitt
They shouldn’t have named this place Camelot. Even I know that, in the end, the dream didn’t hold, that entropy and chaos and the end of law overcame all the massed forces of chivalry of the age. And in this age there never was any chivalry to begin with.
But then I came here too, to forget the wars and the dead and the stink of battlefields. Ten years ago this was a wonderful place, a bustling town surrounded by rich green fields. There was plenty for everyone and plenty left over to trade for the technology we couldn’t produce ourselves. We had to buy the small psychotronics that cleaned the streets and kept the walls repaired, the weather planner and the genetics scope that we mostly bought to use on the sheep for breeding purposes, but sometimes was used by married couples who had trouble conceiving or by the medical center to diagnose some rare genetic anomaly.
I was not the only immigrant to Camelot. Even with strict restrictions on citizenship, at least a quarter of the population were refugees. We had run from the wars, from the Empire, from the restrictions of the technoverse, from the normal life that normal people lead near the center of the universe. Not everyone likes the bug life of the techno-urbs. Some of us waited for years for our permission to emigrate was granted, and years more to pass all the psych probes required for permission to enter Camelot.
It had been worth it. After the death and power I had seen, the gentle green hills and gossip in the town square were better than anything a medvac healing team had even devised. I had enough in saved wages to buy a small pear orchard in the valley with a stone house and a cow.