Veteran

2

I made my way through the tangle of metal and shanty town back to the stacked plastic cubes where I lived. I clambered up the stairs sending the code to open the door to the porta-cube. Entering, I looked around trying to remember where I’d left the army-issue strongbox. Finally, in a pile of dirty washing and antique, actual paper books I found the supposedly unbreakable composite super-dense plastic box. Touching the lock button it clicked open.

The two matt-black guns lay in their moulded foam surround. I picked up the Tyler Optics 5 first. I slid a battery into the handgrip, checking it manually and then running a diagnostic on the laser pistol. I placed the compact weapon into a moulded holster and attaching the holster just behind my right hip. I clipped a battery holder to my belt, and placed a flat recharging cell into a slimline compartment in the raincoat.

Next I took the Sterling.454 Mastodon revolver out of the box. The enormous, solid, old-fashioned revolver felt like a toy in my prosthetic right arm. It was this trusty large-calibre weapon which I’d rely on to put one of Them down, if one of Them had made it Earth side. I stripped the revolver down and cleaned the already-clean weapon. Then I checked the revolver’s action. Satisfied, the Mastodon became a familiar and welcome weight beneath my left arm in its shoulder holster. I clipped speed loaders with different loads to various easy-to-reach places.

I practised drawing both weapons through the conveniently placed slits in the armoured raincoat, checking the smartgun link, ensuring it was calibrated properly; the crosshairs appeared in my line of sight -in theory, where the bullet or beam would hit. First with one gun, then the other, then both, and finally with both weapons and the independently targeting shoulder-mounted laser. Eventually I was satisfied that all was as it should be.

Holstering the weapons I headed for the secure storage cube I rented to get my bike. After all, the government was going to be paying for fuel for the duration so there was no sense in walking. On my way down to the storage cube I split-screened my visual display and began to read through the information that that piece of shit Rolleston had sent me.

I rattled down the scaffolding steps past various plastic sheeting and cardboard lean-tos. Grubby, scrawny, suspicious faces, illuminated by the flickering flames of foul-smelling trash burners, glared at me. To them I looked well fed and wealthy. I ignored them as I enjoyed the buzz of having wired reactions again. I read through the Major’s report, it was like an old-style UFO sighting. It was full of ifs and speculation.

The crux of it was one of the strategic orbital platforms, part of Earth’s supposedly unbeatable ring of defences, had detected a faint echo in some rarely used spectrum. The echo was regular enough and moving towards the Earth with sufficient speed for the commander to order speculative firing on this ghost. The result of this firing may or may not have been a hit on something that may or may not have been space junk. The sensor system that had cost the taxpayer millions of euros was inconclusive. AI analysis of the ghost’s trajectory suggested that if it had been something and indeed had been shot down it might have landed on the outskirts of Dundee. Orbital imaging of the area had again proved to be inconclusive but had found what it termed a ‘disturbance’ and a ‘possible trench’.

I shot down the Kingsway, my enhanced central nervous system and reactions jacked into the control system of my Triumph Argo. No longer sure where I ended and the bike began. I wished I’d had access to my boosted nerves when I raced in the schemes. It would have saved me from a number of nasty wipeouts. I raced past row after row of identical fenced-in corporate wage-slave habitations. The guards at the gate watched me go by. I was travelling fast enough that all they would see was just a fractal line of light as I shot past.

By the time I’d finished reading what amounted to one of the vaguest briefings I’d ever been given, in a lifetime of vague briefings, I was pretty sure it was just another wild goose chase, an overzealous air force officer shooting at dust. I was overjoyed at the idea of investigating a possible trench. I checked the coordinates of said trench. It was outside the city in the National Park that made up the vast majority of Scotland and some of northern England.

Only a few people had access to the park, to the rest of us it was off limits. Those people who did have access were either key to the running of the park in some way, like my father had been, or very rich and powerful. The park was off limits supposedly for the countryside to recover from the nuclear exchange two hundred and fifty years ago and the pollution that had gone on before and after. I, on the other hand, had always thought that they wanted all the troublesome people in the cities where they could keep an eye on them.

I passed Camperdown, the maintained parkland for the mid-level salary types who lived on the Kingsway and were not quite wealthy enough for entrance to the National Park proper. In a lay-by at the side of the road I saw the salary men and women’s offspring. They were middle-class street tribes standing by alcohol-burning custom cars older than them. Wearing designer clothes, doing designer drugs and toting designer handguns. They studiously ignored me as I roared by. I wasn’t enough of a victim to get their attention.

Ahead of me was the checkpoint that would take me out into the National Park, away from the grime, closeness and proximity of the city. I’d spent the first thirteen years of my life in the park. My father, retired from the military, had worked as a hunting guide; my mother ran a business repairing fishing boats. Dad had taught me all about the country, how to survive, how to track, navigate, what the different fauna and flora were.

After a disgruntled client had killed him my mother didn’t have the money to stay in the park and we had to move to the Fintry Schemes in Dundee. She couldn’t quite scrape together enough money doing odd mechanical and electrical repair jobs to pay the rent and keep us fed. That was when I’d first gone to the pits. I was thirteen at the time. My mum had been a hand-to-hand combat instructor in the Paras and part of her family was Thai. Using the Muay Thai skills she’d taught me growing up, two hours a day every day, I was pretty good. I began putting more food on the table, paying my way competing in the clean unaugmented fights. Eventually I’d actually volunteered for the army, 5 Para Pathfinders like my dad. I thought the money I could send back would improve things for my mum but it was to no avail. She died shortly afterwards from a tainted dose of her favourite drug. Thinking back I don’t think I’ve ever known anyone who’s died a natural death.

The air was already beginning to smell better, more like air. I approached the checkpoint. Dundee was just a glow in the distance behind me. The barriers were up and police officers had already taken aim at me with their electromagnetic pulse rifles. I didn’t slow down. Instead I transmitted the priority security clearance that had been pan of the information that the Major had sent me. There was frantic activity as the barriers sank into the ground and the police moved out of the way and I raced past their wheeled APC.

I was out. I sucked in the cool night air, free of the city. The Triumph screamed down narrow roads, fields on either side, ahead of me in the distance the dark outlines of hills. It may as well have been another world. Dundee could have been a bad dream.

The ‘possible trench’ was about three miles off the Coupar Angus road, across a ploughed field. I put the Triumph into stealth mode, quietening the engine as much as possible. Using dirt and farm tracks, I approached as close as I could get to the coordinates I’d been given. Eventually I had to park up. I secured the bike and stood for a while acclimatising myself to the noise of the countryside before I set off on foot. I considered drawing one of my pistols but decided it would be a little melodramatic. The stillness of the night was calming.

I moved carefully but not as stealthily as I was capable. I enhanced my hearing and sight, regularly sweeping the area with thermographics. The rest of the time my cybernetic eyes were on low light, amplifying the ambient light of the moon and stars. Occasionally I would just stop and wait, let the nightlife become used to me before moving off again.

The coordinates of the possible trench were just off the summit of a low hill. As I approached the hill I stopped and had a look around. My father had taught me to track and 5 Para had improved on what I’d been taught. Even at night I could see the tracks of what looked to be a four-wheel drive. The tracks were fresh, someone had been there not that long ago.

Thermographics showed cooling chunks of heat surrounded the top of the hill. It was about this time that I wished I’d brought a motion detector. I drew the TO 5 secure in the knowledge that there was nobody around to ridicule my possibly overcautious action. If there was anyone around, they would probably be who I needed to shoot anyway. Tactically the situation was not great as it was all open ground up to the heat signatures. Just because I couldn’t see anyone around didn’t mean there wasn’t anyone there.

They used various castes of soldier. Each one appeared, according to the scant intelligence we had ever managed to get on Them, to be genetically created for a specific purpose. Their front-line soldiers, nicknamed Berserks, were bad enough. They were capable of going toe to toe with the most cybernetically enhanced trooper and even light power-armoured troops.

The Berserks weren’t the worst. The worst were Their much rarer silent killers. The ones that I’d lost the most friends to, the ones that had been predictably nicknamed Ninjas. Though I’d always thought of them as pieces of night that killed. They were genetically created or modified bioborgs, full of internal weapons and designed for stealth. They could control their body temperature and if They were going to send an infiltrator it would make sense to send a Ninja or an iteration thereof. It was fear of these things that kept me standing stock still in a field just outside Dundee.

‘Oh, this is bullshit,’ I muttered to myself. Keeping low, I held my laser pistol in a two-handed grip, the weapon extended in front of me as I headed up the hill.

I confirmed that the possible trench was in fact an actual trench, a deep one. Parts of the earth glittered, reflecting moonlight where it had turned to glass. Scattered around the site were bits of some kind of dark composite material difficult to focus on. I wouldn’t have found them had it not been for how much heat they gave off – though they were rapidly cooling. The material was the contradiction of a solid liquid that I had hoped to never see on Earth.

At the end of the trench was a needle-shaped craft roughly the size of a very large coffin. I’d seen them before. My shoulder-mounted laser pushed its way through the break-open panel of my coat and began to pan around behind me. I was more than a little nervous now. This was one of Their infiltration craft. An unpowered craft that was shot from a mass driver, designed to penetrate planetary defences and glide in. This one showed blast scoring, presumably from the orbital lasers, a result of the speculative fire. It looked like it had come in pretty hard but it was open and empty.

Suddenly I was aware of just how sensitive my boosted senses were and just how much noise there was out on that field. I mentally dialled the contact line that the Major had given me. I swung around behind me, bringing the laser up as I heard a sound, then again to my right at another rustle in the undergrowth. You’re rattled, I told myself. Calm down.

‘Yes, Sergeant?’ Major Rolleston was smiling as his representation appeared in a small corner of my internal visual display. The familiar surge of anger was muted by my current fear.

‘You have a problem,’ I said. ‘You’ve got a Needle here. It’s been damaged and come in hard but it’s empty.’

‘Assessment?’ Annoyingly, the Major was playing army. I swung around again at another sound.

‘You have a Ninja down here. Possibly injured, but their self-repair systems will have it up to full capacity in no time.’

‘A Ninja? Are you sure?’ Rolleston asked.

‘No, I’m not sure; maybe they’ve sent one of their caterers. What else would they send!’

‘Can you handle the situation?’ I was a little taken aback by this question. Could I handle it? What was he talking about?

‘Of course I can’t fucking handle it; it’s a Ninja. One of these things killed two of my squad, did God knows what to MacDonald and nearly took the rest of us out before we managed to get it, and that was with mil-spec gear.’

‘Calm down, Sergeant. Are there any signs of where it is?’

‘Can you actually hear me?’ I asked as I spun around again. ‘It’s a Ninja, would you like me to spell it? They don’t leave tracks. Oh!’ On the ground by the trench there were tracks. I put my paranoia aside for a moment and crouched down to examine them.

‘Sergeant?’

‘Shut up.’ Rolleston seemed to ignore the insubordination. The tracks showed hiking boots going up the hill, possibly from the four-by-four I had seen the tracks from earlier. They left the hill dragging something, something with two legs and two arms. I relayed what I had found to Rolleston.

‘It would seem that your Ninja was more badly damaged than you thought,’ Rolleston said.

‘They heal quickly.’

‘Well then, you had best find it quickly and destroy it, yes?’

‘What are we dealing with here?’ I asked, but the Major had gone.

I tried to figure this. Who had taken the Ninja and why? Had Rolleston already sent XIs up here? Collaborators? Was there a fifth column on Earth? That didn’t make sense.

There were xenophile individuals and cults on Earth and in the colonies. Many of them were just the young rejecting everything about the total war that gripped humanity. Most of these cults were pure fantasy and few of them were about Them; after all, all They wanted to do was kill and destroy every human they found.

Humanity had first come across Them in the Sirius system, though that was not where They came from. Initially called Sirians until the Syrians in the Islamic Protectorate had complained. Then they were called Doggies for a while, after the Dog Star, but that did not seem to do Them justice. It was still squaddie parlance for Them however. Nothing was known about Them. They had just come across humans in the Sirius system and started killing and never stopped. Their goal seemed to be to annihilate humanity and They had done so right across the four colonial systems. Collaboration with Them was species suicide so a fifth column made no sense.