Tool of War

  The shudder of an explosion penetrated the hull noise of the attack boat.

  Ears pricked up. Mastiff-like muzzles sniffed the air, questioning. Perhaps a near miss. Perhaps a missile hit. Perhaps out in the ocean, all around them, their packmates were dying, fragments of blood and bone mixed indiscriminately with the shards of a sister boat’s hull in their wake.

  Another explosion rumbled.

  Perhaps all the others were dead already, and they were the last.

  Perhaps they would never make the shore.

  Their attack boat rushed on, slamming over the waves, a reckless torpedo bearing its payload to the coast.

  An explosion hit close. The boat slewed and shuddered. Some of the Claw fell. The iron spike of fresh-spilled blood misted the air, but no one complained. The boat accelerated again and the hammering of ocean waves resumed. Growls of approval rose from the Claw. They would not die on the water. They would reach the shore. They would battle.

  A light went on. Red, flashing.

  Red. Red. Red.

  The Claw readied themselves, struggling to move, packed together as they all were. They checked weapons and one another’s gear. Front buckles. Equipment straps. Back slaps of confirmation. Thumbs up. Fangs bared.

  Red. Red. Red.

  Green.

  The rear of the drop boat opened. A whirlwind of tropic sea air seized them.

  Go go go go go go.

  They piled out. Five seconds, all out, hitting water at eighty knots. Tumbling, sinking, orienting. Now swimming strong for the shore while all around artillery hammered at the surface and did little to stop their swimming advance.

  They came surging out of the surf, running hard, foam and waves tearing around their legs. Bullets shrieked past their ears. Attack boats flamed on the beach where they had blasted up onto land and exploded by remote control against shore fortifications, ripping hellholes for Tool and his Claw to pour through.

  Tool roared and charged up the black muddy shore. Claw brothers and sisters by his side, all of them baying with killing lust.

  Humans awaited. Soft, slow, inadequate humans.

  Tool had a machete in one hand, a gun in the other. Explosive rounds spat from his gun’s muzzle and humans died screaming, blown to pieces. Tool dropped into the defensive trenches, smelling and hearing his Claw all around him, not needing to see them, not needing to speak, he knew them all so well. His machete hewed through the trench, a scythe, harvesting. People collapsed before his advance, bloody stalks of wheat.

  A howl of triumph burst from him, joining the symphonic roar of Claw and Fist and Pack. Platoon and Company. All of them baying triumph and offering sacrifice to their leaders.

  The God of War had children.

  And yet now, dreaming, Tool knew what he had not known then. It had been too easy. The true slaughter was only beginning, and counterattack was imminent. As he joined his fellows in blood-drenched celebration of dream and memory, Tool simultaneously grieved his Claw, so many of whom would have their hearts ripped out to feed the Tiger Guard of Kolkata.

  And yet even this grief was not as painful as knowing that eventually his own gods would rain fire down upon him.

  8

  MAHLIA CROUCHED BESIDE Tool, trying to staunch blood flow from dozens of shrapnel wounds. The augment’s back was a mass of blisters and sticky char.

  “Damn, our boy’s a mess,” Ocho said.

  “Straight-up carnage,” Van agreed. “You sure you’re actually doctoring him?”

  “He’s better than when I started,” Mahlia retorted as she examined another blackened hole where white-hot shrapnel had burrowed deep.

  “I’m just saying he’s carnage is all.” Van hopped over a runnel of blood that was trickling across the deck. “I didn’t even know dog-faces had this much blood in them.”

  Tool’s hulking form glistened red in the sun. Even now, after all the stitching and staunching that she’d done, new blood was still pooling around him. Bright ruby jewels. There were dozens of pocks and wounds, still unstitched. Some of his flesh was so seared it was impossible to find the shrapnel wounds that hid beneath the mass of char and peeling meat. Flies buzzed close, feasting, getting caught in sticky clots where Tool’s nearly supernatural blood was trying to heal itself.

  The Raker was anchored in a small cove, bobbing easy on bright blue seas while Captain Almadi assessed storm damage in exhaustive detail. After the fiasco with the auto-sails, Almadi was adamant that they wouldn’t put to sea again until she was satisfied, and Mahlia, despite a desperate urge to get Tool to real medical facilities, was inclined to agree. Their near sinking had robbed her of her appetite for risk.

  Mahlia wiped her brow with her forearm and straightened. A hornet circled, buzzing, bright yellow-black and vicious, attracted by the feast of meat that Tool proffered. Another buzzed her ear.

  “Get these away,” she said, waving ineffectually at the insects. “We don’t need them clotting in his wounds.”

  “Not sure how we can stop them,” Ocho said.

  “Is he even alive?” Van asked. “He smells like bacon.”

  “He’s alive. Trust me,” Mahlia said. “He’s been hurt worse than this before.”

  “You think?”

  “Just get me more of the StimGrowth packs.”

  “We’re out. You used them already,” Van said.

  Mahlia whirled. “All of them?”

  “Don’t blame me!” Van raised his hands defensively. “You were sticking needles in him like he was a pincushion. Don’t take much for a monster like that to drain us dry. A hundred cc’s is like a drop in the bucket for him. I had to sneak past Almadi, like, five times, just to get you all that.”

  “What do we still have?”

  “Maybe four more liters of cell knitters, then we’re out of those, too. That beast sucks up medicine like a sponge.”

  “Go get the cell knitters.”

  “You sure? He might die anyway. Then it’s a waste of good medicine.”

  “He’s not going to die,” Mahlia snapped.

  “He smells like bacon.”

  “Just go get the cell knitters,” Ocho intervened. “We wouldn’t have survived the storm if it wasn’t for him.”

  “We wouldn’t have had to run in the first place if he hadn’t gotten his ass bombed.”

  “Van…”

  “I’m just sayin’.”

  Ocho gave him a warning look.

  Van held up his hands. “I’m going. I’m going.”

  The soldier boy ducked down the hatch, but his voice floated back up. “Just sayin’ someone wanted his ass dead, and we almost got killed, too. Not sure how we owe him anything, after that.”

  Mahlia shook her head tiredly. “‘Just sayin’.’”

  “Don’t hate the messenger,” Ocho said. “Most of the crew agrees. We wouldn’t have been in that storm at all if someone hadn’t dropped those missiles.” He squatted beside her and lowered his voice. “And we might still need some meds, too, you know? We got other people hurt in that storm. Chum and Shoebox, we just got them splinted. And there’s no telling what else we’ll run into before we get to port. Almadi ain’t going to like us using every bit of her medicine.”

  “It’s my medicine.” Mahlia glared at him. “I’m the owner. Not Almadi.”

  “I’m—”

  “‘Just sayin’’?”

  “Come on, Mahlia. It ain’t like that.”

  Mahlia scowled, wishing she could actually be mad at Ocho, but he was only voicing worries that she, too, was fighting to keep at bay. That was the truly infuriating thing about Ocho: The former soldier boy was so damn grounded. He saw things, and called them like they were, and never backed down from what he saw as true. Given that he’d lived amongst sociopathic killers for a good part of his life, that pretty much made him a saint. For sure, it was why the other soldier boys followed him. They all trusted him to see the big picture, and keep them alive, not to lie to them, or himself.

&nbsp
; Ocho didn’t have any illusions.

  But right now she didn’t need someone who was grounded. She needed someone who was crazy enough to believe anything was possible.

  “Just help me, all right?” She gestured with her prosthetic hand. “I can’t stitch with this.”

  Ocho held her gaze a moment longer, then nodded and took the thread from her metallic fingers. He examined the half-man’s ruined flesh, flicked off a flake of black crackling skin.

  “He’s cooked.”

  “Would you cut it out with that? He’s wounded,” Mahlia said. “He’ll heal. He always heals.” Her voice cracked. “You can’t kill him. Trust me. He’s been worse off than this. I’ve seen it.”

  “Hey. I seen him heal, too,” Ocho said. “But this is a whole different kind of hurt. Some kind of crazy swank high-tech missiles. I ain’t never seen something like that before. Even the Chinese peacekeepers didn’t use this tech when they were in the Drowned Cities.”

  “That’s because they were actually trying to fix things, not burn everything down.”

  “And these people just wanted to burn things down. That don’t worry you?”

  “It’s the kind of war he was designed for,” Mahlia said tightly. “He’ll survive.”

  “Maybe. But we’re definitely not designed for it. That’s what I’m saying.”

  Mahlia wanted to retort, but if she was honest, she was frightened, too. She’d never seen war done that way.

  Blink, and the world burned.

  “Just help me sew,” she said, avoiding Ocho’s gaze. “I got the shrapnel out. My prosthetic is crap for delicate work.”

  “If those people track him or us…”

  Mahlia glared but Ocho didn’t flinch. Gold-flecked green eyes regarded her, unblinking, unafraid. “Sometimes dying’s okay,” he said. “Sometimes keeping something alive just means you’re making it hurt more.”

  She wished she could fire him.

  You need him, a voice in her head reminded her. She needed him to lead the soldier boys. To provide the muscle. The guns. The defense.

  You need him to keep you steady, the unwelcome voice murmured. He’s steady, when you just want to burn everything down.

  But that was the problem. Ocho was steady, because he’d seen too much. He’d seen his soldier boys shot and stabbed and strangled. Seen them blown to pieces. Seen them smashed to jelly by falling buildings. He’d seen people’s insides on their outsides. Torn up, ripped out, shattered…

  Death wasn’t a tragedy to Ocho; it was just something that happened.

  Sometimes keeping something alive isn’t kindness.

  Tool’s one good eye cracked open. One yellow bestial eye, filled with rage.

  “I. Am. Not. Meat,” he growled.

  “Tool!” Mahlia threw her arms around him, overwhelmed with relief. “I knew you’d make it!”

  But the effort of speaking seemed to have exhausted him. His mastiff-like head settled again, and then his whole huge body seemed to collapse in on itself. Breath rushed out. For a second Mahlia thought he really was dead, but then Tool breathed again. A slow, steady, deep rhythm of breathing. A monster, slumbering. Resting at last.

  “You see?” Mahlia jostled Ocho. “I told you he’d make it!”

  Before Ocho could reply, Van returned, crashing down beside them with an armload of medical bags. They sloshed as they landed on the blood-wet deck, jiggling and gleaming in the sun like just-caught jellyfish.

  “What? What’d I miss?”

  “He talked!” Mahlia grabbed one of the bags and started stringing up IV tubing. “He’s going to make it.”

  “Not being meat and actually being alive.” Ocho shook his head. “That’s still a ways apart.”

  But despite the doubts he voiced, he took the cell-knitter sac from Mahlia’s fumbling prosthetic hand and expertly pricked it with IV tubing, then strung the growth fluid high.

  Helping her.

  Giving her the hand she didn’t have.

  9

  JONES PUSHED AWAY from her workstation, rubbing bleary eyes. She’d been hunting for days and still had no clue where the ship was bound. She’d been over the Raptor footage again and again, but none of it had given her a glimpse of the ship’s name or registration. Wrong angles, too dark. The harbor hadn’t been her focus when she’d been running the oversight drone, and so now she just had a few fragmentary images of the ship and its contingent of sailors.

  To top it off, she was exhausted. Ever since the Raptor strike, she hadn’t been sleeping well. She kept seeing the moments before her missiles had hit. The people, all walking around, not knowing they were about to die.

  When she’d first persuaded Tory to let her take the Raptor back to look again at her handiwork, it had felt like a game. She’d run plenty of sims. But then she’d gotten all the live footage of the aftermath. The bodies outside the main strike zone, twisting and burning. Others, running to their aid, trying to get to dying friends…

  It’s not my job to worry about collateral damage. My job is to drop Havoc where the general wants it.

  But a lot of the people on the infrared cameras had been small. Children, probably. Child soldiers, recruited early. By all accounts, vicious, feral, violent creatures—and yet, she could still see their heat signatures when she closed her eyes. She could still see how their footprints had warmed marble floors, and left ghostly afterimages as they moved through the shattered capitol building.

  And then she’d erased them.

  One white-hot wave of Havoc, and they were all gone.

  How many had she burned to ash, with the push of a button?

  She’d never killed anyone before. She’d been schooled in the use of Mercier’s standard-issue Mez Cannon pistols and rifles when she’d gone through basic combat training, but she’d never been in with the ground troops. Never shot anyone for real. And now, with the push of a button, she’d wiped out more people than some Fast Attack platoons killed in a year—

  “Old man got you working late?”

  Jones startled. Tory had come up behind her.

  Jones rubbed her eyes. “I need coffee.”

  “Pretty sure you need sleep.”

  “Well, the old man doesn’t sleep, so I don’t, either.” And I don’t want to dream about the Raptor strike anymore.

  “Yeah, but he’s the old man,” Tory said. “You’re just a baby. Babies need their sleep.”

  Jones gave him a dirty look. “I’m not much younger than you.” She climbed stiffly out of her chair and headed for coffee. Tory trailed after her.

  “You kidding? First time you came on watch, I wondered if they’d started stocking diapers in the commissary. How many years ahead were you when you took the merit exam?”

  Jones ignored him. She selected espresso from the machine, three shots, then poured it into a cup of coffee.

  “That’ll stunt your growth,” Tory said. Jones shot him another dark look. Tory grinned, undeterred. “Still can’t find your ship, huh?” He pulled his own coffee from the machine and leaned against the counter beside her.

  “Caroa’s going to kill me if I don’t find it,” Jones said.

  “What’s this all about, anyway? I’ve got half the drones in the North Atlantic out on a wild-goose chase because your ship search is getting a priority tag. What’s so important?”

  “I could tell you, but then I’d have to kill you.”

  “Clichés, Jones? I would’ve expected an analyst who got perfect thousands on the MX to have something interesting to say. New, at least.”

  “How’d you get my test scores?”

  Tory smirked. Jones hunted for sugar. Didn’t find any. “You have no idea, do you?” Tory goaded. “The general’s got our baby analyst on a wild-goose chase and she doesn’t even know why.”

  “It makes no sense!” Jones exploded. “And it’s not just all the Raptor time. You know how many missiles we dropped on that augment? That was a hell of a lot of Havoc.”

  “Well,
since it survived, guess we needed more.”

  “But why?”

  “Look, Jones. You work here long enough, you get used to not knowing certain things. Just follow orders, keep your diaper clean, and you’ll keep on rising. It’s that simple.” He smirked again. “Well, as long as you find that augment.”

  “Thanks for the pep talk, Strike Officer Jackass.”

  “It’s what I do. Because I care.” He checked the time. “Oops. Gotta run. There’s a bunch of Houston swamp fighters got a meeting of their own with a Havoc drop. Suckers keep trying to board our floating refineries.”

  He clapped her on the back and headed off.

  “Tory?” She snagged his arm. He paused and returned, and she lowered her voice. “Do the Havoc drops ever bother you?”

  “Bother me?” His brows knitted. “Why? You worried about the cost? It’s way more efficient to hit these guys with a couple Havocs than get down on the ground with them.”

  “I was more thinking about the collateral damage.”

  “Well, it’s not like anyone down there is a shareholder.” He was studying her with an expression that Jones would have taken for concern, if she wasn’t so certain that he was about to make fun of her naïveté again.

  But to her surprise, he didn’t crack a joke. Instead, he spoke almost kindly. “Do yourself a favor, Jones. Get some sleep. Collateral isn’t on you. Caroa authorized it. He wanted a six-pack, you gave him a six-pack. You were textbook. Got it?”

  Jones nodded slowly. “Got it.”

  “Good!” He punched her shoulder, smiling again. “Now, if I were you, I’d spend less time worrying about what’s on the ground when you drop Havoc, and more time worrying about where that augment went—if you want to keep your career, that is.”

  “It would help if I knew why he wanted it dead.”

  “Not your pay grade, Jones. Just get the job done, and quit whining about what’s not your business.”

  Jones scowled and sipped her bitter coffee as Tory sauntered off, whistling. He wasn’t bothered. He was off to drop more Havoc. He’d burn the world down, and sleep like a baby.