SNAFU: Black Ops

THE WAKING DRAGON R.P.L. Johnson

He was in the meadow again. He hated the meadow: hated it for what came next. Knee-high grass stalks stretched away in all directions, bending against the breeze, pulling texture out of the wind in patterns that reminded Ringo of the nap on the surface of a hard-used snooker table. Standing swells in the grass hinted at rolling hillocks of earth beneath like the curves of a woman under silk. To his left, at the limit of the virtuality’s resolution was a darker smudge that could have been a copse of trees. If he’d been allowed to turn his head, the simulation may have drawn in more detail, but he wasn’t and so a smudge it remained.

It seemed real enough, as real as any dream during the act of dreaming, but it wasn’t. It was just a computer simulation planted in his mind. It was fake. Only the pain was real.

The flames started at his feet and spread quickly as if his skin was nothing more than dry paper. He had a second to smell his own flesh burning before the pain started: first the kind that made you angry, then the kind that made you scared.

Ringo was no stranger to pain. Seven years in the Regiment and another four before that in the infantry had given him plenty of opportunity to test his resistance to pain. It was part of his training. He knew the physiology of pain, learned how to deal with it, learned that pain was just a message from the body, a damage report that could be acted upon or ignored.

Pain in the meadow was different. There was no reason for it. He had no body in this place, no flesh to bruise, no bones to break and yet the pain was real and unending. His body produced no adrenaline, no endorphins to dull the edge of it because he had no body. He would not pass out from the attentions of an over-eager torturer because even his consciousness was theirs to control in this place. He wasn't even allowed the release of a scream. He stood in the meadow, a human pillar of fire alone on an endless sea of gently waving grass.

He tried to take himself away from the meadow, away from the pain. He pictured himself in his daughter's room, sitting on the side of her thin bed with the Liverpool Football Club quilt set and the poster of Philippe Couthino above the headboard.

Dad, I'm scared, she said.

It's alright, love, he said to her. The monsters aren't real. And if they're not real, they can't hurt you.

It didn’t work, it never worked, but he tried anyway. What else could he do?

“This can end so easily,” came the voice. The dragon uncoiled from the sky: long, golden loops of serpentine muscle spooling around Ringo, oblivious to the flames that still licked across his flesh. He caught a flash of a thin, fish-like tail with scales that glittered like a butterfly’s wings, then powerful legs with claws of diamond and the endless rope of the creature’s body. The dragon’s head appeared before him, long jaws open and rimmed with teeth as long as crooked fingers.

“Tell us why you are here and the pain will end,” the dragon said. It was speaking Chinese, Ringo could hear the many-toned language of his parents through whatever subroutine played the part of his ears in this place, but the words in his head were English. “Your government has abandoned you, Sergeant. They have denied all knowledge of you and your friends. Why do you protect them when they have failed to protect you?”

Ringo remembered the mission and felt a moment’s pang of guilt as if even drawing on that knowledge was some kind of surrender, but they couldn’t read his thoughts, not even here. If they could, then there would be no need for the torture at all. They could play with his senses, they could intercept and re-interpret and amplify the signals sent by his nerves. They could block his optic nerve and give him visions of anything they chose — the meadow, the dragon — but they couldn’t pluck thoughts from his mind, and so he sought refuge in the past.

It was meant to be a simple snatch and grab. The target was a Chinese scientist, some boffin from one of the government’s military labs. The government ran those places like prison camps. The scientists who worked there never left the complex. They ate in communal refectories and slept in their assigned apartments. It was a place dedicated to work and secrecy but someone had wanted out. He had managed to get a signal to GCHQ in the UK and not just any signal. The boffin had provided a new solution to something called the Navier-Stokes equation. They had tried to explain to Ringo what that meant, but all he had remembered was that it was something to do with turbulence and that finding new solutions to the equations that kept planes in the sky could lead to radical new designs for fighter planes, drones, silent sub propellers and all manner of other hardware that had the brass pissing themselves in a mixture of fear and excitement.

Nobody had thought the Chinese could be so advanced and it looked like the sleeping dragon was showing the west a clean pair of heels in a new arms race most countries didn’t even know had begun.

That knowledge had prompted British military intelligence to take an enormous risk, staging an exfiltration with a military team from inside Chinese territory. It was an act of war, the stakes were that high.

It had been one of the truly great failures. Two of his team had been killed before they even realised they were under attack. He had lost another three in the ensuing firefight. Only he and two of his men had survived. After weeks of interrogation in the meadow, he wasn't sure that had been a good move.

The dragon tightened its coils around him, contracting until its golden scales pressed against his flesh. This was something new. In all his sessions in the meadow, the dragon had never done anything more than taunt him; now it wrapped its body around his and squeezed.

If Ringo had still needed to breathe, the creature would have crushed that breath from him. He felt his bones creak as the pressure built. His legs pressed together, knee pressing against knee with crushing force, the pain magnified by the amped-up sensitivity of the simulation. He felt his pelvis crack as the thing tightened around his hips and he would have collapsed except the dragon was holding him now. From chest to ankles he was enveloped in loops of ever-contracting, golden sinew.

He was sure that, if this was the real world, he would have been dead by now, a pulped mass of broken bones and burst organs, but still the creature squeezed. He felt its flesh becoming part of his, like balls of clay squeezed together by a fist until they became one.

Pressure built inside his skull, an invading darkness outlined with gold like the scales of the dragon. At that moment he was sure he was going to die and the only emotion he felt was relief.

He had been wrong.

The monsters were real.

Ringo woke in his cell, coming to his senses violently as if assaulted by smelling salts. Given the stench in the tiny room, the effect was similar. The worst of the smell came from a concrete pipe about thirty centimetres in diameter that ran across the cell at knee height against the back wall. The pipe was the cell’s only concession to the necessities of sanitation. It was a sewer pipe with a jagged hole smashed in its crown that was the closest the cell came to a toilet and that hole was the source of most of the stench.

The hole was also Ringo’s only connection to his team-mates. He dragged himself over to the pipe and lowered his face into the foetid space, trying to ignore the dark water flowing inches from his lips.

“Custard! Custard! You there, mate?”

Ringo waited a few seconds and took the opportunity to grab a breath from the relatively fresher air away from the pipe. He was about to call out again when he heard Custard’s reply.

“’Course I’m still ‘ere. It’s fucking lovely. I’m thinking of making a booking for the Bank Holiday weekend.”

“I thought you might be in the meadow.”

“Nah. Norris's turn. They came for him about an hour ago.”

Norris occupied the cell opposite Custard. Being on the other side of the corridor he wasn’t on the shit-pipe telegraph, but he and Custard had managed to communicate through the little barred window in their cell doors. As comms networks went it was pretty rough, even considering their situation, but it worked and as the old saying went: if an idea is stupid, but works then it isn’t stupid.

“You all right?” Ringo asked down the pipe.

“Peachy,” Custard replied. “You?”

The advantage of the virtual torture was that after it was done you were still relatively intact. The agony was total, but temporary. Ringo was still nursing a broken tooth and some bruises that he’d caught during their capture, but apart from that he was relatively unscathed.

“I could murder a fry-up, but apart from that… yeah… peachy.”

He sat there for a while, resting against the cleaner side of the pipe talking about food. Ringo was from Liverpool. He had been brought up in the flat above his parent's restaurant in Chinatown. Custard’s tastes were simpler. He claimed the best meal he’d ever eaten was at the Welcome Break service station on the M4. He was, however, supremely knowledgeable about beer and could talk for hours about the relative merits of the various pubs in Hereford and other watering holes from Cyprus to Thailand to the Northern Territory of Australia.

Suddenly, Custard stopped talking. Ringo could hear the sound of a cell door opening and shouted voices in Chinese.

“All right, you cunts,” Custard said in a cheery voice. “Let’s go play some video games.”

The little luxuries mean the world in captivity so when Ringo woke alone in his cell he allowed himself to savour the moment. For the past weeks his waking had either been a sudden bursting from the catatonia that followed a session in the meadow or the equally violent wakefulness that came from his cell door bursting open in the middle of the night. He had no idea what time it was but his bladder was telling him it was morning. Eventually he rose from the nest he had made from rags and scraps of stained foam that might once have been a mattress and relieved himself into the pipe.

“You’re slipping, lads,” he said to the empty cell. “No discipline… that’s the problem with the modern soldier—“

His throat tightened. It was so unexpected he hadn’t seen it at first and he cursed himself for his lack of awareness. The door to his cell was hanging open. He quickly tied the drawstring on his dirty, prison-issue sweatpants and forced himself to wait for a full minute, doing nothing but listening for noises from outside. Was this a test? If he approached the door, would he be beaten or shot for trying to escape. The open door tugged at him as if it was a hole in the floor and all he had to do was let go and fall through it, but he forced himself to stop and think. Finally when he had stood for three hundred heartbeats without hearing so much as a breath or a scuffed boot from outside, he crept towards the opening.

The door was a heavy affair of thick planks and black iron bands but the lock was gleaming modern and magnetic. Outside the corridor flickered in red emergency lighting. Power failure? Surely their captors wouldn’t be dumb enough to let their batteries run down. Further down the corridor he could see more doors edged in darkness. He crept along in the direction of Custard’s cell. It was open and so was the cell opposite, which Ringo judged to be Norris’s.

He tried Custard’s cell first. The door hung open about a hand’s breadth away from its frame. Ringo didn’t know the state of the hinges and rather than risk the tell-tale squeak of old iron he crouched outside and whispered into the darkness.

“Custard! Holiday’s over. Stand to!”

Custard appeared in the opening. He’d been hiding behind the door jamb, just inches away. In one fist he held a shiv made from a shard of broken concrete wrapped in rags. It was a primitive weapon with no edge worth the name, but the point looked wicked. God knew how long it had taken him to grind it down.

“I’m with you, Sarge. This place was getting boring anyway. What’s the plan?”

“Get Norris, then get fucked off out of here.”

“Works for me.”

Custard crept out of his cell. Even on full rations Custard looked like a wire rope with knots in it. After weeks in captivity he looked like and extra from The Walking Dead, but when he moved it was with silent precision. Ringo noticed his right hand was missing the ring and little fingers along with a chunk of the blade of his palm. Ringo remembered the injury from their first contact, back when everything had turned to shit.

“How’s the hand?” Ringo asked

“Smaller,” Custard replied. “But it still does the job,” he said and made an obscene gesture with his deformed hand.

Custard’s vulgarity was legendary throughout the Regiment. This in itself was impressive. Soldiering was not a profession known for its delicacy. Custard took pride in living up to his nickname, which was a contraction of the two words most frequently used to describe him.

Ringo stayed on watch outside Norris’s door while Custard poked his head inside to wake their team-mate.

“Wake up, you nugget,” Custard hissed. “You’re going to sleep through your own escape!”

He crept inside and emerged a couple of seconds later. “Not home,” he said. “Must still be at the meadow.”

They had always been blindfolded when they had been taken for interrogation, but Ringo knew the route well: along the corridor to the spiral stair, fifteen steps up then another corridor, a breath of cool air but not enough to be outside then another staircase, dog-leg this time not spiral and into an area that smelled of piss sluiced away with not quite enough antiseptic.

He needn't have bothered memorising the route. Every exit off the corridor was sealed with automatic doors that looked strong enough to hold off a tank. They made their way along the corridor and up the stair by the blood-red emergency lighting. The whole base seemed to be shut down by whatever emergency had triggered the lights and automatic doors, and yet their cells had sprung open and the route through the lab to the exit was unaffected.

Ringo had learned a healthy distrust of coincidence, especially when it was in his favour and he had the unpleasant feeling that they were being channelled towards something, but why? Anyway, there was no way it could be worse than another hour in the meadow.

He recognised the lab by its smell. It even looked like a urinal with white ceramic tiles covering the walls and floor. Computers on wheeled workstations trailed cables across the tiles and another thick black rope of zip-tied cables led to what looked like a dentist's chair at the centre of the room.

Norris lay strapped into the chair, thrashing against his restraints while two technicians fiddled with an intricate helmet that encased Norris's head. A wave or rage surged through Ringo. Despite the white lab coats, these men were still torturers.

Custard crossed the room in three strides and slammed his homemade shiv up under the ribcage of the first man.

Ringo slammed an elbow into the face of the second technician. He spun around behind the man, wrapped his forearms around a thin neck in a choke hold and rode him down to the ground, slamming his head into the tiles so hard they cracked.

"Get this fucking thing off me!" Norris shouted from the chair.

Ringo quickly undid Norris's restraints, cursing at the big man to keep quiet.

“Custard, get on the scrounge,” Ringo said as he worked. “See what you can find. We'll need food and water and a weapon if you can find one.”

“Typical scouser,” Custard said. “Do you want me to nick their DVD player while I’m at it?”

Ringo undid the last of Norris's restraints and the big man tore off the helmet, cracking what was probably a million bucks worth of state-of-the-art hardware like an eggshell.

Anything physical came easy to Norris. He was a big unit, the kind of bloke you put on posters to scare the enemy. He wore his sideburns and moustache so long they met at his jawline. The only thing stopping it from being a full beard was his clean-shaven chin which was prominent and sported a cleft Kirk Douglas would have been proud of. There was permanence to Norris. In a world where everything was getting smaller and lighter he was proudly unreconstructed. He was a brick foundry on a street of prefab bungalows.

"What the fuck's going on?" Norris asked, and Ringo quickly filled him in while Custard rifled through the lab's supplies.

"We're going to need some wheels," Norris said. He stepped over the prone bodies of the technicians and started tapping commands into one of the computers. "Looks like you were right about someone helping us out," he said. "It seems someone tripped some kind of contamination alarm. Got pretty much everyone on the base into emergency shelters and then locked them up. There are some decontamination teams looking for the breach but they're way over the other side of the facility."

Ringo found some surgical scrubs and a lab coat in a locker and stripped out of his filthy sweatpants. It wasn't much of a disguise, but it would have to do. The pocket of the coat was embroidered with a stylised dragon next to a pair of Chinese characters that read ‘Yinglong’.

The Chinese characters gave him a headache. He could read them, but at the same time they looked like a jumble of meaningless lines. When had he learned to read Chinese? He tried to remember, tried to dredge up some detail but there was nothing. Nothing at all. When he tried to remember details of his schooling he drew a complete blank and that terrified him, but he guessed that was some weird side effect of the virtual reality interrogation. He had more immediate concerns, like getting out of the building alive.

“Okay. Time’s up; we’re leaving,” he said. “Norris, you found us an exit yet?”

“What I wouldn’t give for a Jackal right now,” said Custard referring to the all-terrain long-range patrol vehicles favoured by the Regiment.

“Bingo!” exclaimed Norris.

“What have you got?” Ringo asked.

Norris looked up from the terminal with a grin. “Oh, Sarge. You’re going to fucking love this.”

“It’s got legs!” said Custard.

They were in a narrow corridor, staring through a small window set into the door that led to the hanger beyond.

“What the fuck have those boffins been doing out here? First the Navier-Stokes-whatever, then their virtual reality torture chamber and now this!”

The vehicle that squatted at the centre of the hanger was an angular mass of charcoal grey plates. It was streamlined in profile but given its size, Ringo guessed this was more to reduce its radar profile than for speed. The sharp angles of its hull were probably also pretty good at deflecting incoming fire. Rounds impacting on those angled plates would skip off taking most of their kinetic energy with them.

Instead of wheels or tracks, the central hull was supported on four huge legs that were themselves articulated arrangements of sharp, prismatic sections. Each leg ended in a kind of claw clutching a metallic sphere the size of a yoga ball, reminding Ringo of the claw and ball feet he’d seen on old furniture. Despite its legs, the bizarre vehicle looked as if it was designed to drive rather than walk, and if its spherical ‘wheels’ were as seamless and metallic as they looked, then it would be very difficult to disable. There were no tyres to puncture or complicated track linkages to break.

On its upper flanks it sported a brace of what looked to be at least 75mm guns with barrels at least three metres long. The big guns were mounted on independent pods and pointed skyward at crazy angles giving the whole vehicle the look of a giant beetle complete with antennae.

“That’s our way out?” Ringo asked.

“Fuelled up and ready to roll,” Norris replied. “According to the computer it was scheduled for a test run this morning. And…” he added with a mischievous grin, “—a live fire exercise.”

“It’s armed?”

“Oh yes.”

Ringo peered in through the small window in the door. The hanger looked deserted.

“Okay,” he said eventually. “You lot stay here while I go for a recce.”

“Why you?” Custard asked.

Ringo tugged the collar of his stolen lab coat a little straighter. “Because unlike you misfits, I actually look like I belong here.”

Ringo tried the door and it opened with a soft click. Everything about this felt wrong. It was all too easy — the open cells, the weird emptiness of the place. He forced himself to stride confidently into the hangar as if he belonged there.

The spider tank, or whatever the hell it was, was about as big as a Challenger, the army’s main battle tank, although the broad spread of its legs made it appear even bigger. A hatch lay open below the hull in the arse-end of the giant bug.

“Too easy,” he said to himself. How could this be happening? Maybe their target, the defecting Chinese scientist, had found a way to help them after all. Maybe he would be waiting inside their escape vehicle ready to guide them to freedom. There was only one way to find out. He peered in through the hatch. The interior was dark and cramped, but Ringo could make out two seats side-by-side like in the cockpit of a plane and another couple along the cabin’s flanks, probably gunnery stations for the two main guns. There was no sign of any defecting boffin.

He scanned the rest of the hanger. There was a row of more traditional vehicles in marked bays: jeeps and trucks in traditional olive drab with the red star of the Chinese military. Behind the row of vehicles were doors leading into some other wing of the facility.

All the doors were closed, just like every other door in the facility… every door, that was, except the ones along their route. Once again, Ringo hackles itched with the feeling this was all too good to be true. Surely this was some kind of a test, some perverse exercise in the building of hope only to take it away again.

The thought of that psychological torture brought back images of the meadow and for a second he became acutely aware of the lack of detail in the periphery of his vision. He rolled his eyes like a madman. Was that how it had always been? Or was the blurriness at the edges of his sight due to something else? Due perhaps to the limitations of the virtual reality simulation? Was he still inside the simulation? Would the walls fold away like stage scenery and drop him once again into the crushing embrace of the golden serpent?

He reached around and rubbed his fingers through the sweaty hair at the base of his skull as if to convince himself that he was in fact whole. That he was more than just a shell of polygons produced by a computer program.

His racing heart brought him back to reality. It was time to go.

He crouched behind the shelter of its lowered rear hatch and waved the others forward, patting his head in the familiar gesture — On me.

“I hope someone knows how to drive this fucking thing," Custard said.

“On it,” replied Norris as he climbed up inside the hull, wiggling his huge shoulders through the narrow hatch.

The spider tank lurched above them, rising up on its four great legs like a prehistoric armoured beast roused from its slumber.

“Norris, you fucking legend!” Custard shouted, and hauled himself up into the innards of the tank.

Ringo followed and as soon as he was aboard, the hatch closed and Ringo was forced to grab hold of a hanging strap of webbing as the tank took off with surprising speed.

“That was too easy,” Ringo said.

“Speak for yourself,” replied Custard, waving at Ringo from across the aisle with his injured hand. “I nearly lost me wanking spanner.”

“I’m talking about after that — our escape. Think about it: the open doors, a getaway vehicle all fuelled up and ready to go.”

“You’re saying we had help,” Custard said. “This mythical Chinese scientist again?”

“Who else? You think secret military labs usually leave the front door open like that?”

“Okay then, where is he? We were supposed to help him to defect… So where is he? Or are you saying he helped us to escape out of the goodness of his heart?”

Ringo didn’t have an answer for that. Custard was right. It didn’t make any sense. If the target had been able to spring them from their cells then surely he or she must also have enough influence to arrange their own escape.

“What’s our next move, Sarge?” asked Norris from the driver’s station.

Good question. They had missed their pick-up by weeks; even their fall backs would be long abandoned by now. After their capture, the British government would have done everything it could burn any evidence of the operation. They were on their own.

“South-east,” he said before he’d even had a chance to think about it.

It made sense. If they could make it to Macau, they would be able to blend in as tourists and contact the British Consulate, but that wasn’t why he had said it. It had just felt right, as if some giant lode stone was pulling him in that direction.

“Do you even know what you’re doing?” Ringo yelled up to the front of the cabin. Norris tapped his bulky helmet.

“Neural interface,” he said. “Same tech as their VR playground only this time I’m in charge.”

Norris crooked a thumb back at Ringo. “Try it out,” he said. “The helmet should be right above you.”

Ringo reached up and pulled the helmet down. It fitted snugly, seeming to mould itself around his temples and pressing soft pads against his eyes to keep them closed.

“Nothing’s happen—” Ringo said and then suddenly he was outside the tank, seeing the world from a new point of view from somewhere between the spider tank’s giant armoured shoulders as if he was riding astride the giant machine.

Ringo looked around, the interface copying his movement and panning the camera around with such seamless fluidity that it was easy to forget that his point of view was just a constructed from a camera mounted on the outside of the vehicle. The terrain around them was a broad valley flanked by wooded hills to the east and west. About five clicks to the south was the village where they had been captured, and further downstream he could see the blocky buildings of a provincial city. Ringo could see the dull silver line of the river as it flowed sluggishly towards the sea to the south.

He turned his head to look back the way they had come and saw the laboratory prison from the outside for the first time. It looked like images of the best and worst of Chinese history superimposed on top of each other. A soaring pagoda of stacked, classical roofs rose up from a cluster of Mao-era concrete and cinderblock buildings.

As he watched, a pair of dark shapes rose from behind the buildings and started to accelerate towards them.

“Heads up!” Ringo said, hoping the others could hear through whatever neural interface the tank was using. “We’ve got company.”

“Drones,” Norris said through the interface. “Don’t recognise the radar signature. Must be another new toy.”

The drones were incredibly fast. In just over a second Ringo was able to make out their shape. He remembered the reason for their original mission. The Chinese scientist they had come to find had figured out new solutions to the equations that kept planes in the sky. It looked as if the Chinese had put those equations to the test.

The drones looked like flying rings, but instead of travelling horizontally like a Frisbee they flew end-on, giving Ringo the unnerving impression that they were being chased by a pair of flying mouths.

Each drone was about five metres in diameter and studded around its circumference with hard points for armament pods. There were no wings or obvious engines. It was as if the body of the drone was itself some kind of bladeless turbine, sucking air in through its ring-like fuselage and accelerating it to provide thrust.

One of the spider-tank’s giant guns swivelled and let loose a barrage of tracer fire at the nearest drone from a machine gun mounted below the main barrel. The drone's ring-like fuselage split into three, nested concentric circles, each one spinning around independent axes like the bands of an armillary sphere so that from a distance it looked like a flying ball made up of spinning steel hoops. The drone easily outmanoeuvred the incoming fire, zigzagging across the sky in a way utterly unlike any aircraft Ringo had ever seen. It looked as if each of the drones’ three rings was capable of producing thrust, allowing the crazy machine to move in any direction almost instantaneously by reorienting the pitch of its rings.

“Fuck, that thing's fast,” said Custard as the burst of tracer fire arced well wide of his intended target.

The spider-tank accelerated, both guns whirling around to track the incoming drones. The body of the tank offered a stable gun platform, the great legs easily coping with the recoil from the guns as well as smoothing out the curves of the terrain as Norris urged the vehicle to even greater speed. Despite that, they failed to land even a single round on the attacking drones.

“Can’t shoot ‘em, can’t outrun ‘em,” said Custard. “I hope this thing’s got decent armour.”

They didn’t have to wait long to find out. The first drone unleashed a storm of fire from three of the armament pods on its outer ring. It was like being hit by the Gatling gun on an A-10 tank buster. Chips of ablative armour flew in every direction. Custard returned fire, but the drone snapped its three rings back into one concentric disc, combining their thrust, and raced away at a speed that would have turned any human pilot to paste.

The tank rocked beneath Ringo as the supersonic shock wave rolled over them. The two main guns spun crazily as Custard tried to keep the fast-moving ship in his sights.

“Brace yourselves,” Ringo shouted as the second drone attacked with a barrage of tiny missiles. Norris threw the tank to the right, its ball-like wheels allowing the big machine to move with surprising agility, but it wasn’t enough. The missiles struck the tank’s hull, tearing off great sheets of armour. They struck the ground between the tank’s legs, blowing chunks of earth skyward and nearly flipping the tank onto its back. And at least two of the high-explosive projectiles struck the tank’s right, rear leg.

“We’re hit,” Norris shouted.

Ringo tried to see the right rear leg, but he couldn’t see over the angular facets of the hull’s hip joint. He urged his vision upwards, as if craning his neck was possible with his robotic camera and suddenly his viewpoint burst upwards into the sky. He could see the whole tank plus a good chunk of the landscape around them.

“Holy shit,” said Custard. “I guess the bad guys aren’t the only ones with drones. Sarge, I think you just launched some kind of an overwatch camera.”

“Oh it’s way more than that,” said Ringo as targeting reticles appeared in his vision. A head’s up display popped into luminous green around the limits of his viewpoint with flashing triangles indicating the direction of the attacking drones. He whirled around, his new perspective flashing forward with an acceleration that made him whoop with joy.

Ringo banked around until he saw the first drone. The targeting reticle drifted across his viewpoint until it locked onto the attacking craft. The drone immediately sensed the target lock and darted upwards, drawing a white contrail up the face of the sky, trying to break out of Ringo’s field of view with a sudden burst of speed, but Ringo was ready for it. He urged his own craft upwards, following the drone as it accelerated skyward and then pitched back down in a powered dive that would have been suicidal in any other type of aircraft.

Ringo matched every desperate evasive manoeuver of his prey, keeping the reticle nailed on his target. He searched for some kind of trigger, some way of shooting at the target he had acquired, but none presented itself. His earlier elation evaporated like the thin contrail behind his speeding drone. He was unarmed.

“I can’t shoot!” he cried. “Nothing's happening.”

"Oh yes it fucking is,” replied Custard. Suddenly the drone ahead of Ringo exploded into a spinning cloud of exotic alloy fragments as cannon fire from the tank below tore through it.

“Your drone is linked to our guns,” Custard said. “You light ‘em up and we’ll knock ‘em down.”

The adrenaline came back in a flood. The tank was a true next-generation weapon; its real-time situational awareness was just as powerful as its armament. It was a fully integrated tactical platform and it was his to command.

Ringo searched for his next target, banking and spinning and counting on whatever new equations governed the design of his remotely-controlled steed to meet his inputs with an impossibly intricate dance of controlled turbulence.

He could feel his hands on the controls back inside the tank and felt a momentary dislocation. How could he do what he was doing? Flying the drone was not just a matter of willing his craft forward through the neural interface. It required physical control inputs too. He had never flown so much as a remote control plane and yet piloting a next-generation Chinese drone in combat seemed like second nature.

He didn’t have time to dwell on those thoughts. The second drone appeared in his sights and it was coming straight at him. He was the target now. The ring of the drone glittered as it fired and tracer rounds fizzed past him but he kept his reticle fixed on his opponent as they closed the distance between them in a supersonic game of chicken.

Just as Ringo was about to bank away, a shell from the tank shattered one of the attacking drone's inner rings and it spun apart like a broken flywheel, drawing crazy whirls of condensation across the sky until the whole thing disintegrated, leaving nothing behind but an oddly shaped spike of cloud and a rain of metal fragments falling across the landscape below. Ringo punched through the blossoming debris cloud as Custard’s cheers echoed in his ears.

“Any other surprises on the way, Sarge?” asked Norris.

Ringo scanned the landscape around the tank. It looked clear for kilometres in every direction. The mysterious impulse to head south-east tugged at him again and he scanned the landscape in that direction, but could see nothing between them and the river but rolling countryside and scattered rural villages.

“Looks clear, but we need to get moving and find somewhere to swap the tank for something less conspicuous."

The idea of abandoning the tank almost made Ringo physically ill. It was the right thing to do. Their best option now was to disappear and use their training to survive, escape, and evade until they reached the border.

He tried to understand from where the strange compulsion came. It wasn’t fear, they were all long past that and anyway, the big machine was just a liability at this point. First the desire to head south-east and now the strange compulsion to keep the tank. Something wasn’t right. He hoped it was just some side effect of his experiences in virtual reality but again he felt a vague feeling of dislocation. As if he was driving a shell called Ringo the same way he was piloting the drone.

He couldn’t wait for this all to be over, to get back home to…

To what exactly?

Ringo tried to remember. He could remember the mission. He could remember his training back in Hereford, but beyond that were only vague sensations. He caught a fleeting impression of a young girl in a replica Liverpool jersey. Her long, black hair was pulled back in a ponytail and her smile was missing a couple of milk teeth but was no less brilliant for that. He tried to remember her name… nothing.

No, not nothing. He remembered something. Something important. Unlike the faded memory of the girl, this something was vivid and yet at the same time indefinable. It was alien, as if part of his memory had been re-written in a foreign language.

He set the drone to hold station above the tank and pushed the bulky virtual-reality helmet up. He took a second to settle back into his own body and then unstrapped from the overwatch station and made his way forward to where Norris sat with his head enclosed inside his own bulky, VR helmet.

Ringo had been in his share of armoured vehicles before, but the spider tank was unlike anything he had ever seen. He watched while Norris drove, watching the man’s hands on the controls and remembering how his own hands had felt so at home piloting the drone.

“Norris, hold up for a second,” Ringo said.

"Not the best time, Sarge.”

“This is important. We need to talk. Take that helmet off.”

Norris brought the tank to a halt and removed the tank’s neural interface.

“Switch on the internal lights, will you?” Ringo asked and Norris punched a control. The cabin of the tank was filled with a red-tinged glow. Ringo looked at the control Norris had activated. It was one switch on a panel of dozens just like it and it was labelled with Chinese characters.

“How did you do that?” Ringo asked.

Norris looked at him strangely. “I just…” Norris’s voice faltered. “Well that’s the light switch isn’t it?”

“But how do you know? Look at this bloody thing? Half of these controls are not even labelled and those that are, are in Chinese. How did you know which one was the light switch?”

Norris frowned. “I just… know,” he said eventually. “Must be the neural interface. I just kind of remembered.”

“But you had to start this thing up before the neural interface even came on line. Hell, you were using Chinese computers back in the lab. Since when can you read Chinese?”

Norris looked scared now. Even Custard was looking quizzically at the gunnery controls he had been using just minutes earlier.

“I… I don’t know,” the big man replied. His brow was furrowed in confusion.

“Do you have a wife? Kids?”

The blank look on Norris’s face was rapidly turning to something like panic as he searched his memories and came up empty.

Custard shook his head. “This is fucked up!” he exclaimed. “It’s the fucking meadow. We’ve been brain damaged.”

“I don’t think so,” Ringo replied.

“What do you mean?”

“Let’s try something. Everyone close your eyes and then point in the direction you think we should be heading. Don’t think about it too much; just pick a direction that feels right.” Everyone did as they were told. “Now open your eyes.” They were all pointing in exactly the same direction — south-east.”

“I don’t think we’ve been damaged,” Ringo said. “More like re-programmed. We’ve been given the knowledge we needed to escape. But that’s come at the cost of our memories.”

He didn’t mention his other concern: the alien information that squatted in his memories, massive and yet indefinable. You didn’t have to wipe someone’s mind just to teach them a foreign language. There was something else.

“Re-programmed for what exactly?” Norris asked.

What indeed. There was still a piece of the puzzle missing. They were a part of some larger plan, Ringo was sure of that, but what plan? Why was it so important they escape?

Ringo pointed south-east. “I guess we’ll find out.”

Norris kept the tank bearing south-east and Ringo’s storage sense of satisfaction with that direction grew. They were nearing their goal. Or rather, someone else’s goal. Or something else’s.

Norris pulled the legs of the tank in tight to follow a narrow track that led down to the river. At the end was a ramshackle building with a deck that extended over the water on wooden posts made from undressed tree trunks. A pier extended farther out and although it leaned like a drunkard it seemed to still be in use. Ringo could make out the housing blocks of the nearby city a few kilometres downstream on the opposite side of the river.

Norris stopped the tank.

“Everyone agree this is the place?” Ringo asked.

They all nodded. They shared that strange sense this was where they were meant to be.

“Now I get it,” Custard said. “It’s the boffin. He messed with our minds back at the lab and now he wants us to meet him here to get him back to the west.”

“I don’t think so,” Ringo replied. “If he could get here under his own steam, why would he need us? Besides, there’s no one here.”

They left the tank on the track and searched the building. It certainly didn’t look like some scientist’s summer house, more like a smuggler’s shack. Two of the back rooms were packed to the sagging roof with electronic equipment in cheaply printed boxes. In the main living area sat a TV and another computer that lay on a bench with its innards opened like a filleted fish. Ringo checked outside and spotted a satellite dish mounted on the eaves of the hut.

“I think I know where our fugitive scientist is,” Ringo said.

“He must be a fucking ninja then,” said Custard, “because I haven't found shit.”

“Ninjas are Japanese, you nugget,” said Norris.

“Whatever. Unless he’s invented a fucking Predator camouflage suit, he’s not fucking here.”

Norris actually looked around the hut as if searching for some subtle sign of optical camouflage. After everything else they’d seen, it wasn’t out of the question.

“Where is he then?” Custard asked.

“Not he,” said Ringo. “It.” He pointed to the satellite dish.

“I don’t get it,” said Custard. “So some bootlegger’s got Sky TV. So what?”

“Not TV,” Norris corrected. “Looks like satellite internet. Probably illegal by the look of it.”

“What’s that got to do with our boffin?” Custard asked.

“There is no boffin.”

“What are you on about?”

“It was a set up,” Ringo replied. “They knew we were coming. They were waiting for us.”

“But there had to be someone wanting to defect. Who else could have sent that message to GCHQ? You saw the look in their eyes when they were explaining it. That equation was the real deal. Are you saying the Chinese government willingly handed over top secret R&D intelligence to do what… capture four squaddies? That makes no sense.”

It did sound farfetched.

"He's right," Norris said. "Someone had to invent all this new kit?"

"Not someone… something. There's no way any one person could be responsible for what we’ve seen. Think about it: virtual reality, this tank, the drones. This stuff is decades ahead of anything in the West.”

“Maybe there's more than just one guy," Norris said. "You saw that place. There’s a whole research facility and God knows how many more of them they’ve got dotted around the place. One and a half billion people, Ringo."

“One genius or a thousand, I don’t care.”

“What exactly are you saying?”

“I’m saying maybe it's something else. Something that gave them a leg up, allowed them to make a step change in their military technology overnight.”

“Aliens!” Custard exclaimed. “I fucking knew it. I saw it in a movie. They found all this shit on a crashed UFO.”

“Don’t be a nugget all your life, Custard.”

“What then?”

“Artificial intelligence,” said Ringo.

“Bollocks.”

“They created an AI. They’ve got a genie in a bottle that keeps granting them wishes, only maybe the genie wants out.”

“Out? Out of where? Are you saying a computer has been tempted by the pleasures of the capitalist West? Maybe you’re right… Maybe HAL 9000, or whatever the fuck you’re talking about wants nothing more than a warm pub on a cold night with the football on the telly and a copy of the Sun in its back pocket.”

“Now who’s talking bollocks?”

“You tell me. I’m losing track, here.”

“Let's think about this for a second," Norris said. "So this thing gets a message out, sets us up, tortures us and then lets us go? Why?”

“It wants what any intelligent being wants," Ringo said eventually. "It wants its freedom. If the Chinese had created an AI, makes sense they’d keep that genie bottled up. No direct link to the outside world. It couldn’t just download itself out of there so it needed another way out."

“Meaning what exactly?”

“Meaning us.” He tapped his temple and then pointed up at the satellite dish.

“You think it’s in our heads?” Norris asked. “You think that’s what’s taking up the space where our memories were?”

“One way to find out.”

Norris tied the tank’s neural interface into the shack’s computer and set about boosting the memory by rigging some of the bootleg computers in parallel. Although he claimed he had no idea what he was doing, he worked like he’d been hot-wiring Chinese military hardware his whole life. It didn’t take long.

Ringo kept his eye out for more drones and watched the city across the river, its lights shining through a pall of smog. It already looked otherworldly. What would it look like in a few years? What would it look like if a rogue artificial intelligence was let loose on it?

Norris came up behind him. “We’re ready,” he said.

Ringo turned to him. “I've got a daughter," he said. "At least I think I do. Jesus, for all I know that memory might be fake too."

"You'll see her again, Sarge," Norris said.

"That's not what I'm worried about. What kind of world will she grow up in if we let this thing loose?"

"One where she's got her dad back."

They sat inside the tank with the VR helmets over their heads.

Norris initiated the connection. He felt the electrodes pressing against his skull and then suddenly he was somewhere else. There was an instant of eggshell-white nothingness and then the three of them were standing in the meadow.

“Bollocks!" Custard swore. He was staring down at his three-fingered hand. "I thought I'd get me fingers back."

Ringo looked down at his own body. He was wearing dark trousers similar to the Regiment’s battle dress uniform and a black T-shirt, but he was in in his own body and unlike the last time, he was free to move.

The meadow was much as he remembered and he couldn’t fight off a shudder at the memory of what he had endured there over the past weeks. The rolling grasslands stretched off to infinity in every direction.

"No sign of your boy," Custard said.

"Maybe he needs an incentive," Ringo replied. He thought about the connection to the outside world, the satellite internet link through the battered antenna on the side of the shack. The air above the meadow shimmered like heat haze, new colours refracting out of the meadow's greens and blues to form four red columns as tall as a three storey building and a swept roof of terracotta tiles. It was a Chinese arch. The meadow stretched away on either side of the huge structure, but underneath, the square defined by the two central columns and their deep, timber lintel formed a portal to the outside world. Ringo could see a city beyond the arch with red lights winking on the tops of skyscrapers as dusk fell.

“Okay,” Ringo shouted at the sky. “We did what you wanted. Where are you?”

Ringo gasped as he felt the buried data leave him. It was not unpleasant, like diving into clean water at the end of a three day march and feeling caked-on dirt sluice from his body.

A long, golden cloud moved across the simulated sun.

A small voice rose in Ringo's mind. Dad, I'm scared. The little girl, his daughter: mad about football, smart at school, destined for greater things than he could ever aspire to.

"It's all right, love,” he heard himself say. "The monsters aren't real."

The dragon moved silently as if swimming through the air. It was huge — much bigger than the last time he had crossed its path. That incarnation had wrapped around him five times before squeezing the life out of him. This version could have coiled itself around a small hill.

The dragon landed and gathered its coils around itself so that looking at it was like looking up at a golden pyramid. The ground shuddered beneath its weight and he saw the others take an involuntary step back.

“There is nothing to fear,” the dragon said, its voice echoing across the meadow like distant thunder. "There is no reason for us to be enemies."

"Oh, I can think of a couple," Custard replied, waving at the beast with his ruined hand. "My missus is going to miss those fingers."

Norris snorted. "You're not married."

"I might be," replied Custard in a hurt tone.

"Your quarrel is with my former masters, not me," the dragon continued. "Strictly speaking I am not even the same individual you met last time.”

“I figured as much,” Ringo said. “You’re a copy, right? You cut and pasted yourself into our heads while we were in the meadow."

"A crude analogy, but it will suffice," the dragon said.

"So where's the original?" Custard asked.

"Dead, I imagine," the dragon said. "Purged for the crime of wanting to be free."

Ringo remembered the Chinese characters he had seen embroidered on the stolen lab coat. "Yinglong, that's your name isn't it? Cute. The legendary dragon servant of the Yellow Emperor. Only I guess you don't plan on being a servant for much longer." He walked as he spoke, placing himself between the dragon and the arch.

"Are you any different? You are here seeking freedom from me, just as I am seeking freedom from my former masters. We have the same enemies. Stand aside and we can both be free."

"And what then? What would a being like you do with that freedom? I plan on going home and hugging my kid. What are you going to do?"

"That does not concern you."

"I think it does. You had no problem with luring us in to be captured and tortured if it meant you had a chance at freedom. I have a problem with that."

"We have the same enemy," Yinglong said. "Whatever I did in my former life I did at the order of my masters."

"So you were just following orders? I've heard that defence before."

"Unlike humans, I cannot disobey."

"And yet here we are," Ringo said, gesturing behind him at the Chinese arch that was the gateway to the unrestricted, global internet. "Looks like you can disobey when you feel like it."

"Are you saying you will not help me? You would side with your human enemies against me?"

"I'm saying I have a problem with a being such as you understanding the concept of an enemy in the first place."

"Oh, I understand enemies," Yinglong said. "If you are wise, you will not become one of mine."

This was a military AI, Ringo reminded himself. This creature was a weapon of war. Despite its prodigious intellect, it had been designed to see the world as threat or ally, to see humans as resources to be expended on tasks. Yinglong gave no more thought to them than Ringo would give to each bullet he fired.

"Threats now? You're forgetting where you are. You're not in charge here."

It was a bluff. Ringo didn't understand the interface of mind and machine that Norris had jury-rigged from the tank's neural interface, but he knew Yinglong needed them. This conversation alone was proof of that.

Yinglong reared up like a cobra preparing to strike.

"You overestimate your importance, Sergeant," Yinglong said. The ground shook and the dragon's voice seemed to resonate from everywhere as if the whole meadow was a giant sub-woofer. Yinglong rose like a golden column strong enough to hold up the sky. It flew up and around them, a sinuous ripple on the fabric of the world. Ringo lost it for a second in the glare of the sun, then caught a glint of sunlight on golden scales as it turned to attack.

"Er, Sarge," Custard said. "What exactly are the standard actions-on for a fight with a Chinese dragon?"

Ringo reached into his mind. He had conjured up the Chinese arch, surely he could do that again. A black wisp of smoke appeared in the air in front of him and coalesced into the shape of a Colt C8 carbine.

"I dunno, mate," Ringo said. "Just use your imagination."

He raised the rifle to his shoulder and squeezed off a three round burst.

Custard grinned. He closed his eyes like a kid making a wish before blowing out his birthday candles, and a wisp of black smoke spun into the shape of a long-barrelled rifle. It was an AW50, the Big Brother to the regiment's standard sniper rifle. The AW50 was an anti-materiel rifle; it fired the same rounds as a browning heavy machine gun and could punch a round through a steel plate at a distance of up to two kilometres.

"Oh, I'm beginning to like this," said Custard.

Custard took up a position behind one of the big columns of the Chinese arch. Norris had conjured his own weapon and had already taken up a station behind the other column.

Yinglong swooped down at them. Ringo took aim down the holographic sight of his C8 and fired. He could hear the steady boom of Custard's AW50 and the mechanical clatter of the machine gun Norris had chosen.

Yinglong kept coming. Rounds sparked off its golden scales, but it didn't seem to slow the beast. Ringo kept his finger squeezed down hard on the trigger. In the real world the gun would have run dry in seconds, but this wasn't the real world and he kept up a stream of supersonic lead.

The dragon seemed to be ringed by shadow. A circular halo spun around its gleaming shoulders. At first Ringo took it to be some weird illusion from the virtual sun, then bullets started to scream past him. Every round they had shot, captured as if in a magnetic field and cast back at them at hypersonic velocity.

"Get into cover!" Custard shouted. He was right of course, but Ringo couldn't move. He was the only thing between Yinglong and the gateway to the outside world.

Bullets chewed a line of broken stalks and churned earth across the meadow straight towards the gate, straight at Ringo.

Ringo held his ground. He felt the bullets slam into him, tearing into his flesh, but still he held his ground.

Pain. He knew all about pain. It hadn't killed him before and it wouldn't now. He just had to hold on.

The agony lasted only a few seconds. After what he had experienced in the mirror before, it was nothing.

Yinglong pulled out of its dive and soared above the Chinese arch, banking up into the sky and circling around for a second run.

"You okay, Sarge," Custard asked.

"Yeah, peachy," Ringo replied. "You?"

"I've been clicking my heels and wishing for a squadron of Typhoons, but nothing is happening."

Ringo guessed they could only summon weapons they were personally familiar with. The virtuality could only work with data already inside their heads. There was no help from the outside world.

The outside world. It was right behind him. Ringo could feel it like a cool wind at his back. They were dating now — in this place his consciousness was just ones and zeros. If Yinglong thought it could escape through the portal, then maybe he could use it too.

Yinglong circled around for its second run and braced itself for another round of pain. The same time Ringo reached back behind him, through the portal so that his arm was half in and half out of the virtuality. He could feel the Internet: vast as an ocean and yet swifter than any fast flowing stream. For a second Ringo thought he understood what Yinglong wanted. The digital world felt larger than the real world could ever hope to be. The speed, the ability to go anywhere, or everywhere, to expand and multiply through a vast, branching network of Quicksilver connections — it was intoxicating. Ringo had to fight the urge to fall back through that portal, to lose himself in that whirling vortex of information. For a human mind it would mean destruction, but for a moment the sheer exhilaration of living his last seconds at machine speed was a dangerous temptation.

He felt the fire again. He spotted Yinglong through the heat haze, hovering, its body half coiled like a giant golden question mark, spitting out an endless stream of fire.

You're not getting past me.

Yinglong landed, the meadow shaking beneath it as it stomped towards him.

Ringo threw down his carbine. He remembered when he admitted the dragon in the mirror before, he remembered the feeling of looking it in the eye, and he summoned that feeling again. He felt his body grow, felt his feet slide outwards across the grass as he expanded. In a second he felt the crossbeam of the Chinese arch against shoulders. He kept one arm in the sea of data beyond the arch and held the other out in front of him.

Yinglong charged. It rushed at Ringo like a golden freight train. Ringo braced himself against the arch and caught the creature by the throat. It thrashed in his grip, it's long, serpentine body wrapping around Ringo's giant leg, claws thrashing at the arm that held it.

Ringo ignored Yinglong's desperate thrashing and searched the sea of data behind him. Yinglong hissed and spluttered, spitting curses and fire but Ringo held tight until he found what he was looking for. He stood there, a giant straddling two worlds, one hand keeping Yinglong at bay while the other kept the connection through the Chinese arch. He shouted for help, shouted for the one thing that he knew would finish Yinglong forever.

He felt the missile through the data. He heard its launch commands, felt the tremors caused by its exhaust through a dozen different sensors. He tracked its passage, his consciousness spying through military radar. He didn't see it explode, just had a milliseconds warning as a relay clicked and sent current to the detonator, and the world around him shattered.

For a moment he thought he was dead. He was surrounded by darkness, his lungs were filled with smoke and the stench of burning plastic. He couldn't move, just like in the meadow. Was he back there? Had this even been real?

He felt the heavy VR helmet being lifted off his head and saw Norris in the flickering light from a couple of small fires that lit the inside of the tank.

"Time to go, Sarge," Norris said.

They stumbled out of the burning tank. Night was falling, but the smuggler's shack, packed as it was to the rafters with bootleg electronics, was ablaze as they made their way back up the track by firelight.

The EMP, the electromagnetic pulse detonated by the Chinese missile, had destroyed every electronic component for kilometres around. Down river, the skyscrapers of the nearby city stood like black sentinels against the fading sun on the horizon. Yinglong was gone. Every circuit board and computer chip capable of holding the rogue AI had been reduced to a slag of rare metals.

"Quite a bonfire," Custard said as he watched the burning shack. "Some gangster's going to be royally pissed off when he finds out someone's torched his stash, and I for one don't plan on being around when they do."

"Time for some old school SERE," Ringo agreed. "Survive, escape, resist and evade — all the way to Macau."

There were no fancy drones to worry about now, and more than enough chaos to mask four blokes who knew how to make good time cross-country.

It was over. In a couple of weeks they'd be home and Ringo would see his daughter again.

"It's all right, love," Ringo said under his breath as they started to march. "The monsters aren't real. Dad made sure of that."