Target Rich Environment

  We swung around the bushes and every warning ping we had went off at once. Sure enough, the combat car was above us, tilting across the blasted rocks. By the time I shouted, “Fire!” Blanchard had already launched the first burst right into their fighting compartment. The rounds that hit the iridium armor left orange glowing dents, but the ones that entered fragmented inside and caused the vehicle to puke fire. Blanchard kept the triggers mashed, raking 60mm AP into that pig. A severed arm sailed through the air. An empty helmet bounced down the hill.

  The combat car began to skew sideways. One of the tribarrels was cranking our way, but the edge of its skirts ground on the rocks, and the blast of air pressure suddenly drove one side of the pig into the dirt. The tribarrel fired wildly. Cyan flashes ripped burning holes into the grass towards us. “Pull back,” I ordered. Cainho calmly reversed as Blanchard kept shooting. The helmet crunched beneath our treads. The gunner was so focused on killing that pig that his last few rounds hit nothing but the earthen berm we were now hiding behind.

  We’d only been in the open for a moment, but already other things were vectoring in to kill us. The compartment was filled with powder smoke. Fans were blowing and the respirator in my helmet had kicked in. I tagged another route, keeping our head down, using the streambed and drainage culverts, and before I was even done, Cainho had us tearing across the park, quickly accelerating to sixty KPH. Considering the state of the ground, it was stupidly fast, but if we slowed down, we were dead.

  There was an explosion from the top of the hill. Something had cooked off. We’d killed a Slammers’ combat car. We’d actually done it. I had nobody to call that in to, and by the time I checked the screens, the twenty Puma tanks of 3rd Armored were all dead.

  I had never seen my father like this. Even though we’d fought hard, built an army, hell, built a whole government, overthrown a king, and beat the wretched royalists, it was like he already knew we’d been defeated.

  “Our only hope is to wear them down. Attrition. The people are on our side. The king will get what he paid for, but not a peso more. Hit and run, bleed them as they bleed us. To Alois Hammer this planet is just an entry on a profit and loss statement, but it is our fucking home.”

  He didn’t sound convinced.

  “I’m sorry, Captain Vaerst. Your father is dead.”

  I’d been plugged into the Lynx’s systems continually for so many days that actual face-to-face human communication took a while to sink in. I stared at the major for a really long time, not understanding the words coming out of his mouth. There were no symbols, flashes, lines of movement and terrain paths, AI estimates, pings for threats, or stress load-outs. All I could communicate now were tanks, how to keep mine alive, and how to make theirs dead, fast. It was like I was stuck in high gear and couldn’t downshift.

  “He was murdered by royalists during peace talks at the palace.” The major rested one gentle hand on my armored shoulder, taking my dimwitted exhaustion for shock. He patted me. “There, there.” And it raised a cloud of dust. “We can take you off the line until we know what’s going to happen in the capitol.”

  That was meant to be comforting, but I didn’t . . . couldn’t get comfort. For the last three weeks, I’d fought in my tank, slept in my tank, shit through a chute in the bottom of my tank, drank from a tube in my tank, and ate ration bars that were occasionally dropped through the open cupola of my tank whenever we stopped to resupply. So I just stared at the major, unblinking, until he took his hand away.

  “Or not . . . That’s fine, Captain. The battalion is falling back toward the river today. Carry on.” He unconsciously wiped the dirt on his hand on his fatigue pants as he walked away.

  I went back to my tank.

  Cainho was asleep in the shade between the treads. Blanchard was painting another marking on the Lynx’s battered turret. The sixteen red vehicles were royalists. The four black ones were Slammers. According to the screens—and the screens were my whole world now—nobody else had pulled off anything close to that. Sadly, every Slammers vehicle could paint a board like this . . . If they even bothered to count us.

  But I didn’t care. I just wanted to sleep.

  “You know what they’re saying about our little Lynx around camp? Too cute to die, too deadly to live. We’re one tank, but they’re calling us Task Force Phantom, all by ourselves . . . Good girl,” Blanchard said, touching the turret with more actual love and kindness than the major had just shown me. “Word is they saw a heavy in the forest fifteen minutes ago, Cap.”

  I wasn’t plugged in. I’d missed that ping. Weird.

  “Before this is over, I really want to paint a heavy kill on here,” Blanchard said wistfully as he put away the stencil and spray can. We’d replaced the 60mm autocannon with a 3cm power gun we’d looted off a Palace Guard wreck a week ago. It was a hell of a lot of gun for such a little tank. The main differences were that we killed things better now, but the compartment always smelled like melting plastic instead of burning carbon. I kind of missed the carbon smoke. “Did I tell you they blew up my town, Cap?”

  Blanchard had taken that hard.

  “Yeah, man. I know.” He didn’t need to tell me. I’d been there with him when it had happened.

  “Whole damned town . . . Sniper fires from a window, they blow up the whole town. You don’t need to blow up a whole town. That’s overreaction. That’s just plain rude. I really want to paint a black heavy on here.”

  “Let’s go find one for you then.” I thumped Cainho’s leg with my boot.

  He snorted and woke right up. “Any news?” our driver asked immediately.

  “Something about the capitol . . . My dad . . .” Neither of those things was near this camp or this forest, so it was out of my hands. I popped a couple of Stay Awake pills. “I don’t know . . . Let’s go.”

  Once I got my helmet on the AI booted up, I could see clearly again. Fox company was in the north of Glad Wood, and they’d tagged a heavy. It only took a few seconds of running probabilities to see the mercs intended to seize the bridges at Constantine. I flagged it, but our chain of command had fallen apart, and our orders were a mismatched bunch of panicked gibberish. They sounded like squawking chickens over the net. They were sure upset about something.

  It didn’t matter. We’d just do what we always did. Harass the shit out of the other side, murder them when given the opportunity, and then run away to do it again later.

  I checked the grids, the tank stats—the chameleon projector needed to be replaced soon—the tactical maps, expanding out further and further until I could see the whole war. It wasn’t until I watched the news footage of the mob beating and kicking my father, and then clumsily hacking at him with a golden sword, that it finally registered.

  This was what it felt like to lose a war.

  My father knew that night why we wouldn’t win.

  I didn’t understand until later. When my little tank was broken and full of holes, and I was bleeding, wading through the mud, dragging my burned gunner away, and that giant fucking monster tank came over the rise, riding on a dozen tornadoes, and it aimed that giant space gun right down at us, and blinded us with a spotlight, like some wrathful ancient war god . . . and as we stood there blind, battered by the wind, being weighed and measured and found wanting, then I knew too.

  I spent the next few years in prison, mulling over the reasons we lost.

  My father wasn’t a real general. He was a businessman who got rich designing and exporting sensor packages for military vehicles, who could give a rousing speech, and who had the balls to stand up against a tyrannical lunatic. But he never wanted to make war.

  Alois Hammer was born to make war.

  I was a soldier. Everyone here knows my service record, but I was nobody. I knew heroes. Real heroes. I saw our best and brightest fight for what they believed in . . . and I watched them die.

  Because Hammer’s Slammers exist only to make war.

  We were fathers and mothers, brothers and
sisters, students, teachers, workers, merchants, and slaves . . . turned soldiers. And once the war was over, they all went back to being whatever we were before.

  Hammer’s Slammers were soldiers. Then, now, forever. Period.

  So here we are, years later, and another Vaerst is standing before this council. You’re beating the war drum again, calling for another rebellion, and you need yourselves a general, and who better to be your figurehead than a war hero?

  I will heed your call. I will accept this commission, and I will help the people throw off the yoke of tyranny . . . on one condition.

  We hire Hammer’s Slammers.

  This time I want to be on the winning side.

  THE GREAT SEA BEAST

  This story originally appeared in Kaiju Rising: Age of Monsters, edited by Tim Marquitz and Nickolas Sharps, published by Ragnarok Publications.

  THE GREAT SEA BEAST revealed itself.

  First, spines of bone, each one as big around as a tree, broke the ocean’s surface. Next came the great bulbous head, its skin a deep red except for where it was covered in barnacles and black growths from the depths. Then the eyes appeared, two great white oozing blobs, and beneath those was a mass of writhing tentacles, longer than anything found on even the largest of the giant squid. There were still freshly drowned corpses of Minamoto clan sailors trapped in those tentacles.

  As Munetaka watched, the tentacles moved the bodies into the vast wet hole that served as the creature’s mouth, to be ground into a red paste between teeth like millstones. The head alone was larger than his ship, and when the shoulders broke the surface, it was larger than a castle. It was so large, so inconceivably vast, that it was like watching the sea birth a new island, only this island was heading straight for them at a seemingly impossible rate of speed.

  It was incredible. It was a god made flesh.

  The ocean crashed around the creature as if it were a rock cliff. Waves created by the monster lifted the Friendly Traveler and sent them hurtling back down. His tiny wooden ship was nothing before the Great Sea Beast. Several other Minamoto clan vessels had already been smashed into splinters by the thing’s wrath. Their lord’s warship was broken and sinking. They were on their own.

  He spied the jagged cliffs. “Hold this course!” Nasu Munetaka bellowed at his panicking crew. He looked toward the opposite horizon. The sun was just beginning to rise. “Hold this exact course.”

  It would close with them in a matter of minutes. They would all die, crushed, drowned, or devoured. The brave sailors adjusted their sails and kept them on the wind. Lesser men leapt overboard or cowered in fear. The other samurai were struggling in vain to figure out the magical horn they’d taken from the gaijin, while their priest begged the water dragon to rise from his coral palace beneath the sea to protect them.

  But Captain Nasu Munetaka did not ask the heavens for aid nor did he resort to foreign magic. He simply stood at the stern of the Friendly Traveler, calmly stringing his bow, watching the demon that had haunted his dreams come for them.

  He had been waiting half his life for this moment.

  His hands did not tremble.

  Twelve years before, he had woken up screaming.

  Someone was carrying him, cradled in their arms like he was a baby. They were trying to be gentle, but every touch was made of agony. The half of his body which had been out of the water had been burned crispy by the sun, and the half that had been submerged had been eaten away by salt water. His skin was peeling off in black or blue strips.

  Munetaka was the son and grandson of warriors, so he tried not to scream. His throat was so dry it was more of a soundless hiss anyway and his body was so wrung out that there was no indignity of tears. And then he remembered through the haze of sun drenched pain how he’d come to be here. The village had to be warned. Frantic, Munetaka clutched at his rescuer’s shirt and tried to tell him of the crimson demon rising from the sea, but he couldn’t form the words.

  “Bozu! Help us. The fishermen found this boy washed up on a reef.”

  With eyelids dried partially open, he could barely see, but Munetaka knew they were inside. He could feel absence of the angry sun. The rescuer laid him on a mat. Thousands of hot needles stabbed through Munetaka’s back. He’d never before realized that his skin served the same purpose as his father’s armor.

  Someone knelt next to the mat. Cold hands touched the sides of his face and tilted his head for examination. “A shipwreck?”

  “Yes. They said he still had a death grip on a broken board.”

  “He must have been in the water for several days . . . Ama! Get my medicine pouch. I’ll need some water boiled. These wounds must be cleaned.”

  “We forced some drink down his throat when we found him. He didn’t vomit most of it back up.”

  “Good, then he may still live . . . Can you hear me, boy?”

  The crimson demon comes from the sea. Run. You have to run. You have to get away.

  The memories came back, breaking through the walls of his mind. He was too young for a voyage up the coast, but he had tagged along on his father’s patrol, sneaking in to hide amongst the piles of rope. By the time he was discovered, they would be too far from home to turn back. His father was a stern man, as was required of a Minamoto clan ship captain, but Munetaka knew that he secretly enjoyed having his son onboard his ship. Someday Munetaka would be a captain too, and he’d be the one to keep the seas around Kamakura free of pirates and Tairu clan scum, just like his father, and his father before him. Once found, he’d not even received too much of a beating. He suspected his father had been more than a little proud of his daring. The captain had even told his men that Munetaka was their good luck charm. It was the happiest day of young Munetaka’s life, until the luck ran out and he had watched helplessly as the ocean turned red and the Great Sea Beast slaughtered everyone.

  He snapped back to the world of sunburned pain. His flesh was so softened by days spent soaking in salt water that even the tatami mat was cutting through him and the monk was fretting as Munetaka bled all over the polished wooden floor of the monastery. The monk was asking him another question.

  “What happened?”

  Death had happened, only somehow it had forgotten to take him too.

  Ten years before, his lord had condemned him.

  “You waste my time with this?” Lord Minamoto Yorimasa raised his voice. “I should have you killed for your impudence, boy.”

  Munetaka kept his eyes on the floor. He could feel the angry gaze of the court on him.

  “Your request is denied. There will be no expedition. The Great Sea Beast is a lie. You are the only witness. A child who drank too much salt water and cooked his brains in the sun imagined a demon to blame for his father’s carelessness. Your father died in a storm like a fool. Knowing your family he was probably drunk and drove my ship onto the rocks. A stupid man, always wasteful and drunk.”

  The shame was unbearable. His father had been the best captain in the clan, but the truth was whatever the lord commanded it to be.

  “My advisor said you display a constant tremor in your hands. You are too young to already be a drunk like your father. You are an embarrassment, and yet you dare to come before your lord and ask that I grant you an expedition to hunt for an imaginary monster? Especially now while the Tairu clan encroaches on our lands. What do you have to say for yourself, Munetaka?”

  It was said that the exposure had stunted his growth. His voice was as small as his body. “Should it come again, we are all in danger. If we cannot hunt it down and kill it, we must be ready for when it returns.”

  The lord laughed. “Now you are telling jokes for my amusement. You must wish to be the new court fool. Even if such a thing was real, then it must be a spirit of the ocean. It could not be defeated with arrows or spears.”

  “No, my lord, I saw it clearly. It was no ghost or spirit. It was shaped like a man and walked upon the seabed. Its skin was like a whale and its face was like many squid,
but it was still a creature of flesh and bone.”

  “And you alone are the only one who has ever seen such a magnificent sight.”

  “There are other witnesses,” Munetaka said softly. “Only last year, three fishermen near the lighthouse at—”

  “Peasants!” the lord snapped. “Their word means nothing. Their minds are soft, and your drunken tales have filled their hearts with fear. My fisherman are scared now because of you. Production suffers as they imagine a big red shadow beneath them, piss themselves, and flee back to shore. Even some of my samurai have been dumb enough to listen and believe your fanciful tales.” He turned to glare at one of his retainers.

  The young scribe Saburo lowered his head and backed out of the line, shamed by the attention.

  “My lord. forgive me, but I remember clearly what I saw. The crimson demon was far bigger than your castle.” He dared to raise his voice. The retainers began to mutter at his bold words. “It lifted my father’s ship in one hand as it licked the sailors from the deck and then dropped us when it was done.”

  “Silence!” The whispering stopped. The lord would have no scandal in his court. “Listen to me very carefully, young Munetaka. Go back to your village. There will be no more mention of this sea monster. You will not speak of it again. It never happened. I have declared that it does not exist. Your father, despite his weakness, served me well, and that is the only reason I am being so lenient with you now. Return to your studies. I’ve been told that you show no talent with the sword and you are a disaster upon a horse, but the clan will find some use for your life eventually. Dismissed.”