Ghost War Read online

  Hector, our foreman, looked over at me and shook his head. “I wish you hadn’t done that, Sam.”

  “He’ll be fine by morning, Hector. You won’t lose him for work.”

  “I don’t care about that.” Hector jerked his head toward Pep. “He had next game. His paycheck was gonna be mine.”

  “Glad to know you have our best interests at heart, Hector.”

  “He does, Sam, unlike you.” Keira-san shifted in his chair and gave me a venomous glance. “You just messed up someone from PADSU. The GGF is working the area. You just issued them an open invite to make our lives miserable.”

  “I hadn’t thought of that, Keira-san.” I smiled. “Oh, well, working beats unemployment. Leary, another beer, for tomorrow I may die.”

  2

  When you cannot clothe yourself in a lion’s skin, put on that of the fox.

  —Spanish proverb

  ARU Lot 47-6

  Joppa, Helen

  Prefecture III, Republic of the Sphere

  14 November 3132

  I didn’t wake up dead, which was all to the good, nor did I feel that bad. I had a couple of swollen knuckles on my right hand, and a bump on the back of my head, but I wasn’t in jail and didn’t need stitches, so I figured I was way ahead of other mornings. I crawled out of my rack and pulled myself into crusty jeans and my work boots, then stumbled to the head to divest myself of my beer inventory and, to use the literary term, attend to my other ablutions.

  I found a mug, knocked dirt out of it, and poured myself a cup of something hot, black and strong. Since I found no metal parts I decided I’d gotten coffee this time, not solvent, though it would have been easy to be wrong. Still, it burned down into my belly and opened my eyes. Being as how it was still before dawn, that was only a marginal benefit.

  When we’d gotten back from Leary’s, Hector had gotten a notice that said the judge had given us a twenty-four-hour extension before the restraining order went into effect. I’m sure PADSU would say he’d been bought off, but I doubted it. The lumber company did everything on the cheap, and if he couldn’t be bought off for a metric ton of sawdust mulch, they weren’t going to pay. Closer to the mark was the fact that the Mottled Lemur wasn’t actually native to Helen and, for centuries, had been the object of summer festivals devoted to killing the little things before they could descend like locusts on a farmer’s fields. And they were stupid, too—cleaning their mortal remains out of the guts of an AgroMech after harvest is seriously bothersome, I’ve been assured.

  So we thought of the lemurs as varmints and PADSU thought of them as “cute.” Cute becomes something of a trump card, but I guess the judge wasn’t of a mind to be trumped, giving us another day to decorate the forest with sawdust. Not the greatest of jobs, but it had me driving a ’Mech, so I was not of a mind to complain.

  I wandered out to the hangar and mounted the ladder to the cockpit of the ForestryMech I’d been assigned. It still had that ugly, factory shade of yellow paint on it, but had been scraped down to bare metal in a number of places. Aside from Alpine Resources Unlimited decals on it, the only decoration was a finely scripted name, “Maria,” above the cockpit. The story goes that one of the other pilots named it after his wife. That sounds romantic until you learn that it was the shrieking of the chainsaw that most reminded him of her.

  I secured the hatch behind me and settled into the command couch. My coffee mug went into the holder beside the right joystick, freeing my hands to pull on and snap closed the cooling vest. It was bulkier than others I’ve worn—“Cost cutting begins with YOU,” being one of ARU’s more endearing motivational mottoes—but it did the job when I plugged it in. It had a ballistic cloth cover that wouldn’t stop a bullet, but might soak off a few splinters.

  Reaching up and back, I pulled down the neurohelmet and settled it on my head. It, too, was bulky and heavy, but the extra padding in the cooling vest helped there. I made sure the brainwave pickups were seated in the right places and snug, since the last thing I wanted was having the machine lose track of my sense of balance when things got rough.

  Punching a few buttons, I brought the secondary systems on-line, then waited to initiate the engine start. The computer flashed me a check code, which I replied to, then a mechanical voice asked for my personal activation code. I always opt for a voiceprint check as opposed to something keyed in, so I said, “There once was a fair lady Knight, whose smile was so very tight . . .”

  I won’t continue because I suppose you’ve heard it before. So had the computer, so the huge engines began their popping, gasping and smoky journey to life. Maria shook like a house on a fault line, but no coffee sloshed from my mug. Across the command console all the systems came live and were green.

  Up against a real BattleMech, a ForestryMech like Maria wouldn’t seem to be much of a threat. The left arm ends in a grabbing claw, which could crush light armor or snap off some small weapons. The chainsaw that is the right hand can do some serious grinding, and the pruning laser mounted above it might melt some ferro-ceramics, but it was a jury-rigged laser rifle and so would probably only bubble paint. I’m not saying Maria could put a BattleMech down, but anything that came to tangle with her would have scars to show it had been in a fight.

  And if you don’t believe me, there are plenty of tree stumps in the forest that would say otherwise.

  I stepped on up and out, guiding Maria past Black Betty, the ConstructionMech Boris drove. I keyed my radio and greeted him, but it looked like he wasn’t talking to me. Or, it could have been that his broken nose was making him talk funny enough he couldn’t get his ’Mech started. I laughed at that idea, then began the trudge up to the worksite.

  Pep raced by in her hovercar, hauling a butt-cart full of trimmers. They are the folks who swarm over the trees we fell, trimming off branches and affixing the chains we use to lift the logs into another cart for Pep to drag back to the loading station. They’re actually the ones who are in the most danger from GGF attacks. Hitting an iron spike driven into the trunk of a tree won’t even nick Maria’s chainsaw, but it will destroy one of the handhelds these folks use. That leaves a lot of chain shrapnel flying about which could, as moms everywhere warn, poke an eye out.

  The base of our work area was about three kilometers up the mountain, though taking the road we’d carved out made the trip a bit longer than that, what with all the switchbacks and everything. The road was actually looking pretty beaten up, with ’Mech tracks frozen in mud like fossilized dinosaur footprints. The piled mud squished down pretty easily under Maria’s heavy tread, but it was as difficult for her to make headway as it would have been for me to go mucking about through a swamp. Maria was using my sense of balance to control the gyros and keep her upright, and I was fighting the controls with every step, sloshing coffee all the way.

  I finally reached the clearing and saw Hector over at the trailer he used for his command post. I keyed the radio. “The road sucks, Hector. If Rusty told you he graded it, he’s lying something serious.”

  “Good morning to you, too, Sam.” Hector’s tone was a bit testy, but I could see a smile on his face, so I just listened. “Rusty’s driving Black Betty today. Boris is down in Kokushima getting his nose set.”

  “He should have them make it smaller. That way the next time he sneezes his brain won’t fall out.”

  “What brain?”

  “Good point. So, where is it you want me waging war on trees this fine morning?”

  He punched a couple of buttons on a datapad and beamed the coordinates to me. “Gonna have you plunge in, cut a swath due west, then down to the south, isolating a patch for us to clean up later.”

  “Great. Trailblazing. Thanks.”

  He shrugged. “Orders come from above my pay grade.”

  “What did our masters say about the chances of GGF taking out their own restraining order?”

  “Same as always: no damage to personnel or equipment.” Hector scratched at his cheek. “You thinking on wh
at Keira-san said last night about GGF doing some pay-back for you decking that girl?”

  “Maybe. Keira-san isn’t right often, but when he is . . .” I shrugged. Maria didn’t. I raised the chainsaw up and then brought it down again. “Those of us about to die salute you.”

  “Go and die if you want to, Sam, just don’t dent the metal.”

  “You’re all heart, Hector.”

  “You know better than that: I’m management.”

  I laughed and started Maria trudging off to the place where we were supposed to start working. As the sun came up I was figuring it was going to be a pretty uneventful day. Despite PADSU’s rhetoric, the forest we were cutting in had been harvested fifty years earlier, so this wasn’t old-growth forest in any true sense. ARU might well have been cheap in terms of the equipment they bought, but Pep spent as much time hauling reseeders and seedlings up the mountain as she did dragging logs back down, and nary a splinter went unused. Unlike most corporations, ARU did better than abide by The Republic’s rather stringent land-use regulations.

  I got to where I was meant to be and sized up the job. It was pretty much notch and cut. When looking at a ForestryMech a lot of folks think we hold on to the tree with the grabber and cut it, sort of the way one might trim a sunflower. The problem is that the trees can mass more than my ’Mech, and even when that’s not the case, a falling tree will rip the claw right off. The claw’s useful for lifting and shifting or leverage, but not much more than that.

  The chainsaw does make pretty quick work of harvesting trees, however. I notched on the east side, then cut from the west, which dropped the trees to the east as pretty as you please. Kind of mindless work, but you get into a rhythm and pretty soon you’ve cut a swath twenty-five meters wide and a hundred meters deep, with a river of trees pointing back the way you came.

  Pretty soon, in this case, meant nine in the morning. My stomach, having once more survived ARU coffee, was rumbling. I turned the ’Mech back around toward the base camp and radioed in. “Hector, you sending me out some trimmers, or do I have to come back there and get my own breakfast?”

  “Sam, just hang there. The mud is slowing everything down. Rusty couldn’t get Betty rolling, so he’s grading the road now. Pep’s stuck behind him. Be about an hour.”

  I frowned on behalf of my stomach, which couldn’t. “Geez, Hector, I thought our mid-morning repasts truly meant something to you.”

  “You only love me for the sweet rolls. I’ll have Pep bring you extra.”

  “Deal. I’m so easy.” I turned Maria back around to continue my cutting, and that’s when I caught the glimpse of the guy. He had just flitted behind a tree and had been coming at my six. Someone had been reading old Gray Death Legion adventures, because he was hauling one huge old satchel charge and I was pretty sure he’d planned to sneak up on me and tag Maria’s heel as I trudged off to breakfast.

  I pointed the chainsaw toward the tree he’d used for shelter, then flicked on the external sound gear. Before I could say anything to him, voices boomed, this time coming from the north. Men in black combat fatigues, carrying sub-machine guns and looking very lethal, moved forward toward my quarry.

  “Halt! This is Commander Reis of the Overton Constabulary’s Civil Defense Reaction Force! Don’t make us do something we don’t want to do.”

  I really do require another digression here. Commander Reis thinks he’s the next coming of Morgan Hasek-Davion and might be, save that he’s too short, too fat, too arrogant, too ignorant and, despite his girth, utterly gutless. The people in his CDRF were dedicated, but were trained on a shoestring budget while being given all sorts of gadgets and other stuff they never really learned how to use. The CDRF were all heart and brave, but in combat that means you don’t really know when you are outgunned and need to retreat.

  The situation was pretty simple. The GGF had come to blow up a ’Mech. They knew that the ’Mech might not be crippled by their attack and that the pilot, being me, might take it poorly that I had been attacked. For that reason they’d brought their commando troops up on a couple of hovertrucks that were mounted with heavy machine guns. Reis’ warning alerted the gunners. Had he said nothing, his people might have been able to take the bomber quietly.

  The GGF gunners opened up. I could only see little flickers of light deeper in the woods, then watched bullets track up and through one CDRF trooper. She spun down into rusty pine needles that stuck to her bloody uniform. The other CDRF folks dove to dirt, but one more got tagged before the whole of the squad took cover in a bowl-shaped depression.

  The machine guns let up and the CDRF thought that was their chance to counterattack. They didn’t realize why the gunners had stopped shooting, but I did. As the bomber came out from behind the tree to loft his satchel charge into their haven, I crisped him with the laser. The charge still flew, but not very far. When it hit the ground it exploded, killing the first of the CDRF guys who had come up over the berm, and stunning the rest of them.

  I charged Maria forward and the gunners started shooting at me. Unless they were going to keep a constant stream up against the cockpit, I didn’t really think they could stop me. I knew they’d figure that out after a moment’s reflection, and they’d also realize that I couldn’t get to them without a lot of time-consuming cutting.

  They weren’t wrong, but neither were they completely right. I got to the tree that had sheltered their smoking friend, notched and dropped it, but this time sent it crashing west.

  There’s a reason logging is a dangerous operation. Trees are big and heavy, and even though a branch seems pretty light, when it’s falling fast and connected to a tree, getting hit with it is like being swatted by a broom driven by a hurricane. In addition, when trees are dropped hastily, they tend to collide with other trees in a chain reaction that can make a terrible tangle of things. Cracking trees, splinters flying everywhere, needles, dust, dirt; it can be an unholy mess.

  One you’d not want to be caught in, especially if your only shelter is a hovertruck. The tree I chopped caromed into another one and another, dropping even more heavy lumber. One tree smashed a hovertruck flat. The other hovertruck backed out of a lot of branches and jolted away without even checking on survivors.

  The whole thing took a minute, maybe two, and would have been over save for one little detail. When his people had been pinned down, Reis ordered his command vehicle into the fray. His driver was coming on hard, so when a tree dropped across his path, he juiced the hover-louvers to get maximum lift. That turned out to be about two centimeters short, so the hovercar skipped off the log like a rock on a lake, then drilled the rootball of another tumbled giant. Reis catapulted from the back seat and somersaulted unceremoniously into a lot of tigerberry bushes—which, contrary to common opinion, are not named for the striped berries, but for the two-inch thorns on the branches.

  Hector’s voice boomed in my ears. “Sam, you okay? Heard an explosion. What’s going on?”

  I pinched my right thigh. It hurt. “I thought it was a nightmare, Hector, but I don’t seem to be waking up. Tell Rusty to hurry on grading the road and send Pep back for the evac cart. And forget the sweet rolls. I’m not hungry anymore.”

  3

  Don’t make yourself a mouse, or the cat will eat you.

  —Federated Suns proverb

  ARU Lot 47-6

  Joppa, Helen

  Prefecture III, Republic of the Sphere

  14 November 3132

  I set about, as quickly as I could, trying to clear away as much brush and material as possible so rescue teams could get to the CDRF folks and the GGF terrorists. Off the latter they’d only be getting DNA samples, since the tree mushed the hovertruck into half-pipe and made the occupants rather oozy. The guy with the satchel charge had been reduced to vapor and scattered limbs.

  Reis picked his way out of the bushes and pretty much looked as if he’d been through a wood-chipper. He was livid, of course, and started yelling at me about destroying evidence. I ju
st flicked the external pick-ups off and kept clearing stuff so that when Pep got there with some medtechs, they were able to pull the wounded out.

  Alas, they didn’t take Reis with them. When Hector got there, Reis gave him two ears-full, and was looking for a bucket for when that ran out. Hector listened and calmed him—or so I guessed from the body language—but glared at me hot enough to melt armor. I was getting the impression it would be a long time before I ever got sweet rolls again.

  It was mid-afternoon before I got called off the line. Hector had me park Maria at the command center and Pep gave me a ride down to our housing. She gave me a sidelong glance with those blue eyes. “You are in serious trouble, Sam. Reis says you’re one of them and that you dropped trees to stop his pursuit.”

  “You think that’s true, Pep?” I let my anger flow full force into my voice.

  “Hey, Sam, I’m a friend of yours, remember?”

  “Then mind your own damned business.”

  She gave me a harder look. “You telling me it’s true?”

  “Leave it.”

  Pep stopped the hovercar and punched my shoulder. “You know, I used to think you were different. I thought this tough-guy act was just that, an act. I know it is. You didn’t need to do anything there, but you did, and now you won’t tell me about it? What’s going on?”

  My nostrils flared. “What’s going on is that you don’t know me, Pep. I’ve been here, what, ten weeks? Sure, we’ve palled around, had some good times, but what you’re seeing as an act isn’t. I really just want to be left alone, and I thought I had that here, and now this. It’s a disaster.”

  She hesitated. “What’s going on, Sam? You can tell me. Are you in trouble with the law and think Reis will find out or something?”

  “Just leave it at ‘or something,’ okay?” I softened my voice a bit. “What I did last night got this going and people got hurt. Just walk away.”