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  What does a family do with an unwanted kid that just won’t give up?

  Adopt it, I guess.

  We were subsumed by the gutted 45th Infantry, and at some point, I don’t even know when or how it happened, they named us Patriot Division.

  Who got to shout at us? Everyone.

  They made me a sergeant of a squad, my main qualification being having a heartbeat. The platoon lieutenant yelled at me and I yelled at my squad. A captain yelled at her. A lieutenant colonel at battalion yelled at them, and further up? I don’t know. Maybe they yelled over wine instead of mud.

  Sergeant Dawes. That was good enough for me. Family patting me on the head, letting me know while I might not be their favourite kid, I was doing alright.

  I would’ve been happy enough to stick there. Life’s a bitch, though, and Death doesn’t take prisoners.

  *

  A battalion, under Lt. Colonel Baningworth, were trucking north out of Texas, near Toledo Bend Reservoir, and I was with them. It would be the largest action I’d seen to date. Everyone knew something big was happening, if not what.

  I was in a truck with the ghost of a company name on the side that had maybe once delivered foodstuff before someone slapped green paint all over it. 154th Cavalry were in support, upgraded with light armoured trucks, which, like our troop transports, were mostly civilian. Barely any military vehicles that I saw at Toledo Bend were actually military in origin, which was telling because this was big. Toyotas or Chevrolet 4x4’s bounced alongside us through dirt and dust at down.

  Those with flatbeds were fitted out with bolted on 30mm autocannons or belt-fed machine guns and Chobham plate slung over door frames like a saddle bags on a horse. There were Isuzu or Tesla SUV’s with the roof panels cut away and gunners’ top halves sticking proud like cut-rate tanks. My old Bronco might have done a good job, but I remembered it exploding in one hit. Maybe it would’ve have done so good at all.

  Thinking of old times, hard times, my head hurt and I didn’t want to remember. I liked vehicles – cars, trucks, SUV’s, even bikes.

  Cavalry rode with us on whatever they could get. I saw a true classic I’d only ever seen in collector’s magazines when I’d been in the market for classic replicas; a Honda Goldwing. My Bronco had been a replica. This thing was sheer perfection. More than an antique, it qualified as ancient and it had probably been repaired so many times there was nothing left of the original. It must have begun its life over three-hundred year age. Like the guy Abraham whatever, with his revolutionary era sword that’d been hung up in an abandoned townhouse, though, the Goldwing worked, so we worked with it.

  I stared at it, slack-jawed from our open backed old truck until a cavalry biker without a helmet, her hair flowing and obscuring the gunner’s vision who rode pillion passed me. They got the shit end of the stick, it seemed, because they were on a dirt bike like a kid might’ve ridden.

  I saw solar Smarts and Bestings, too. They didn’t last long.

  Turns out if you want to ride to war instead of using your legs you don’t get to charge your chariot whenever you want. Earth’s infrastructure had fallen over. We could feed ourselves before the Cephal and the Zoan. Then, suddenly, protein farms were in ash and we couldn’t run people on ash. The problem was supply, across the board.

  It wasn’t that humanity lacked decent armoured vehicles. It was lack of power. We were short of everything. We couldn’t run vehicles without power, and we couldn’t fight without ammunition. We scavenged. We invented what we could, because we didn’t have a tidy or steady stream of supplies.

  Like poorly equipped forces had long before the second century of the second millennium, Patriot were hit and run. Mine was the kind of war humankind fought whenever enemies vastly outmanned and outgunned them.

  It was post-apocalyptic. We were in disarray, on the back foot. We were dying. We were facing extinction as real as the Holocene, and we only narrowly scooted around that like a man with heavy boots out on thin ice.

  Toledo Bend was a big body of water. Cavalry on our left, our heavy trucks and support vehicles and IFVs all jammed up on our right. Infantry – me – were told to move on the lake. We didn’t know why. Whole point of being at the behest of a giant finger like the Army was just to go wherever it pointed. We stopped doing that, we stopped being soldiers. By then, we were soldiers and it didn’t matter what broke-ass guns or equipment they gave us.

  The Cephal owned the seas. This was a land battle. We didn’t think about waterways, lakes, reservoirs, rivers...

  Not enough.

  We stood around, terse, guns ready to raise but not yet up, when hundreds of Cephal broke from the placid water and while we might like to think that the world revolves around each of us on some personal level, as I brought my weapon up and let loose, the important stuff had already happened beneath the surface of the lake.

  *

  The Cephal burst from the water and charged straight at us firing yellow hard beams from their long guns with such eerie precision, even on the fly, that they tore us a giant new hole. Men and women fell to the left and right of me. I was cold and icy, picking targets, standing my ground, taking short bursts. My gun stuttered and bumped against a shoulder that’d be sore for three days.

  Our autonomous guns in the centre of a rough and ready battle line raked hell through the mass of Cephal streaming toward us, still dripping water. Heavy gunners hit them hard with hip-fixed and shoulder-fed .63’s. Shells hit the sandy dirt at our feet and smoke filled the air from powdered weapons. Blood hit my eyes and I didn’t wipe it away because there was already such a thick cloud of gun vapour drifting around us I couldn’t pick targets any longer. I took a knee, those yellow flashes slicing through the rising smog, and shot at every swirling shape swarming over us.

  I’d never seen so many Cephal in one place.

  Their armour and their speed was their ally, but surprise was ours. We were ready, and it was the Cephal which were surprised. StratInt knew they were there, and knew how to get to them. We’d caught them on the hop, not the other way round, though it really didn’t feel that way to me right then.

  In a clump, like this, the Cephal were more terrifying than any Zoan I’d ever seen. They closed so fast. Their long legs pumped, their forms indistinct in the haze, just blurs cutting holes with their dancing lasers as they stormed toward me through the pall. It was impossible to tell how many our heavy guns took down, but easy to see it wasn’t enough.

  I knew this was going to be where I bought my ticket out of the army. I held fast despite that as they came close enough for me to see the glint of light on their shining, still-wet, domed heads. Heads like half a bald tyre, kind of green, kind of shiny with a hint of something rainbow, like oil on water. We knew those heads were hard enough to turn a bullet.

  As they smashed into our ragged, failing formation, heading for the autonoguns in the centre field, Cavalry moved out on the left.

  They were leaving us to die.

  I remember thinking fuck them, fuck them, fuck them.

  The Cephal were on us.

  In close combat they were true demons. I dropped my empty burning weapon for the first time since I’d been taught not to and drew my sidearm. A short pistol, because I liked the weight better than the heavier, showy pistols many wore. Two shots and I was rolling away from a shimmering blade. The other scorched the front of my chestplate. DTC, but I didn’t have leg or arm protection. I smelled the burn. Falling, I shot up and scored the Cephal’s golden breastplate. It stabbed down and someone’s flying, severed hand hit me in the cheek, making me flinch a moment before the Cephal’s killing blow. A dead man’s hand saved my life.

  A bullet from elsewhere scored a lucky hit and the Cephal fell to one side of me. The instant it died the wrist blades winked out of existence like they’d never been. If they hadn’t it would’ve taken my arm off. The Cephal lay atop me, arm over my chest, like we were lovers.

  It was the closest I’d seen one since that fir
st day when I’d look on a corpse in the back of a military truck. It didn’t smell like that had. Then, it smelled like dead seafood. Now, it smelled hot, and bloody, and the weight of it felt obscene.

  I fired three rounds into its un-armoured neck, rolled over, stood up, moved on.

  That was about as far as I got.

  A platoon captain was right in my face, screaming and yelling something I couldn’t hear over the clattering, the bullets, the screams. My tinnitus, a constant whine, was gone in the noise. In the clamour of the fight was the only time the whistling went, but it didn’t mean I could hear any better.

  The Cephal weren’t sticking around. They never did. They wanted out, and away, and anything in their way they either sliced through with their sun-hot wrist blades, or they died.

  The platoon captain turned away from me. I thought he turned away. He didn’t. He fell, knocked me staggering in a dancing spiral all covered with his fresh blood.

  I didn’t see any Cephal close enough to hit with my sidearm, and I didn’t even pull my knife. Waste of time. I was dizzied and confused for a moment.

  I stumbled toward an IFV nearby. My pistol clicked dry. I remembered my rifle. I found it in a mess of humans and took the rifle and a knee, tracking for something to shoot at, confident the IFV had my back. It didn’t. The big vehicle jounced in the dirt so it was askew and wrong. Hit low down by a hard beam from a fleeing Cephal, the tracks and wheels inside the tracks weren’t holding it upright any longer.

  I fired the last of my ammunition at a blisteringly fast shadow escaping from the carnage and the gun jammed. I threw it. Pointless, sure. Probably looked like a child throwing a tantrum. The gun travelled five metres and clattered onto hard dirt.

  It didn’t matter. It was done.

  I snorted blood and snot and dust from my nose. I spat again and again. Holstered my pistol which was covered in dirt and shouldered my long gun.

  There wasn’t anything left to kill. The Cephal were gone.

  *

  At the end, we searched through the dead and found maybe fifty of Cephal down. For that we lost over five hundred of ours. Those impossible blades of theirs made a hell of a mess. Banningworth was found down in the dust and dirt and he wasn’t getting back up.

  I stood in the aftermath, chest heaving as I hunted through the smog for someone to tell me what to do next. It was chaos, but not for long. Other people still had their shit together, even if I didn’t.

  I just followed them. I wasn’t a leader. I was happier being told where to shoot and happier still when my superiors just left it at that. I followed those I could find from Patriot who were walking wounded until when we were about to get back on the truck that brought us to Toledo Bend, someone clapped me on the soldier.

  ‘Sergeant Dawes?’

  I turned and saw a Lt. Colonel with a grim look and a cut still bleeding somewhere in messed up, frizzed hair.

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘You’re captain now,’ she said.

  ‘I don’t want to be,’ I said.

  ‘I don’t give a fuck,’ she said, and turned away, and that was that.

  ‘Captain?’ said Henrietta, one of the few of my remaining squad. ‘Fancy.’

  ‘Laugh it up,’ I said. ‘You’re sergeant.’

  ‘Ah, Dawes...’

  ‘Captain, sergeant,’ I said.

  I slept with Sergeant Henrietta whatever-her-surname-was later that month. We slept with who we could, when we could, because we all knew we’d be dead soon enough.

  By the end of the month I needed a new sergeant.

  18.

  Scout

  Hal Henham

  -

  While 154th and the 45th Infantry were soaking up a sound beating to the south of Toledo Bend, the 29th Cavalry speed north-west, huge plumes of dirt rising in their wake as they skirted the water on their way north to meet up with Bear Division - otherwise known as the 245th Armoured.

  29th Cavalry weren’t fleeing, as Sergeant Dawes thought; they were drawing the Zoan out and away from the south. They were tying the Zoan and Cephal in knots designed by Global Net and, by a very small remove, Strategic Intelligence.

  Their scout bikes were faster, more mobile, more versatile over a wider swathe of ground than Infantry, and the 29th weren’t saddled with the dregs available to the south. Their bikes were top of the line, military hardware.

  Cavalry were always the best choice for a quick run. Even on uneven terrain, the bikes riders like Hal rode would smooth it out so the rockiest roads feel no worse than rough tarmac to a rider. The bikes they rode were sleek, light, and the only armour was the full suits the riders wore. Though their motorcycles were two-wheeled, they came equipped with auto-stabilisers - protuberances that looked like long, spindly arms on a field-crow from the front, but were wide as wings. Those stabilisers were constructed of high-tensile plastine.

  Hal Henham adored his bike. When he was astride his mount, with that single gun in front and anti-seeker measures mounted in the rear, Hal imagined himself a warrior riding to war on some mythical beast, a dragon, or a griffon, raining hell and hard bullets down on the enemy, banking away untouched, the Cephal’s light-bolts seeking him out and missing while he escaped unscathed. Out in the wide fields of Nebraska, the farming heartland, he’d learn to ride on his elder brother’s trial bike. That was why he’d been assigned Cavalry.

  On a bike, he was as good a rider as any in the army.

  Henham was one of the last to ride north from the short, bloody battle between the Cephal and the outclassed Infantry.

  He didn’t leave last because he was slow, or lazy, and atop a bike he was never tardy.

  He was challenging himself...enjoying himself.

  Nineteen years old, Hal was immortal. Hell, he was happier than he’d even been. A guy like him in charge of a bike like this? It was all his young dreams come true.

  As he left the arrow-quick Cephal in his dust, thousands of Zoans rose from the water on Hal’s right. The Zoan were heavier and tended to be less agile. Hal heart rate barely increased at the sight of the sheer volume of the enemy.

  He checked, flicking his head to the side, mostly watching his path ahead. He saw none of those they called ammonites, but he did see chelons. He spoke into his radio as he rode, reporting on the latest developments. His voice barely jarred despite the hell-bent ride.

  Him and his outriders, one to his left, two to his right.

  Like roughriders, or outlaws.

  ‘Haaaa!’

  They rode on dirt and bumped up the shoulder onto the closest blacktop, kicking up dust until they hit the smoother surface and let their bikes rip.

  Air-to-Surface Shrike-10 missiles from the India-Class choppers of 85th Airborne – Galant Royale – smacked into the shoreline.

  We’re outlaws, and that’s dynamite. Boom!

  Henham felt like a God.

  He skirted round an abandoned car and trailer. His stabiliser wings cut dirt like a careless scythe.

  The choppers slowed, rose in the nose a little and unleashed their cannon fire. Tracers burned bright on the blue sky, then hit chelons, and seahorse looking things, and weird creatures Hal could barely believe. The heavy calibre rounds smacked hard and kicked up dirt around the lake, peppered the water. Hal imagined a salty smell, but it was a lake. It was hot in his helmet. Just his sweat, a tickle his temples against the foam inside his helmet.

  Chelons spat back at the hovering annoyance of the Galant Royale’s choppers with sickly, swirling globs of acid that blasted into the air. The air took on a strange hue as the early sunlight fought alien colours and smoke and water droplets.

  Clods of earth blasted into the air beside and behind Henham. The tarmac blossomed, congealed. Like greenish lightning suddenly melting, solidifying.

  This time his heart rate did skip it up a notch. A petal, or frome, from the acidic impact crater sliced his glove and Hal swayed into the dusty shoulder of the road and as he did so something sprang from t
he dirt. The bike and Hal both seemed to jump, panic. Those wide stabiliser dug into the dirt but this time instead of keeping him on the bike, he was thrown.

  He bounced, rolled, bounced. The plating in his suit at the neck stopped his head from snapping back and severing the vertebrae. His right knee popped inside the steel plate covering his kneecap, dislocated. He screamed even before he came to a stop and saw some kind of burrowing thing, like an armadillo, had unseated him. Really, it was closer to a trilobite, but Hal had never seen one of those. Hal was a country boy. He didn’t know sea-creatures. It waved what he guessed were antenna, except it fired some kind of electrical bolt that put out a sudden static, ozone stench on the air.

  The bike on Hal’s right swerved into a skid and unloaded on the thing. The bolt, or EMP, the shot...it must’ve killed the rider’s electrics because she flipped, throwing cloud of dirt over Hal’s visor even as he was fumbling for his sidearm. He was blind. Scared, now, at last. Over the overlapping thunder of explosions, bolts, and heavy munitions, he heard the roar of incoming fighter jets.

  The Air Force. That was where they would win, and Hal was sure of it.

  Pistol in hand at last, Hal wiped away dirt to clear his vision and fired. He missed the armadillo thing.

  He tried to scuttle back as it crawled, surprisingly fast, toward him. He fired again, panicked, sent a wild burst of three into the dust.

  ‘Fuck yooouuu!’

  Another bolt from the segmented, shelled creature hit, but this time the electricity struck Hal and not his bike. It was like getting a shock from a cattle fence. He leapt, his finger spasmed and the bullet smacked through the carapace armouring his assailant.

  Hal’s heart was really racing now. He saw the trailing propulsion of missiles, even saw the shells break away, leaving only kinetic warheads spearing through the clear blue skies.

  Here it comes, fuckheads, he thought. Air Force saves the day.