Nightmare Factory, page 5
The system was smart, and through some trial and error, I found I could actually see the records she often pulled up. The image simply appeared in my field of view, like a floating window.
One I had her search for was the obituary for Hinge. He and I were closer than brothers; I should have been there to say goodbye. The fire at the terrorist lab was so intense they hadn’t even been able to tell his remains from any others. The obit post was disappointing, as there were less than a dozen comments on it. Such was the fate of Tier-1 operators, it seemed. No one cares for us; we are nameless and meaningless other than for the brutal tasks we are called to perform.
“Ada, do you know what else they’re going to do to me?”
“Yes, Sergeant, I am fully briefed on your enhancement schedule. Would you like me to summarize?”
“I would,” I began, then amended, “just let me know what’s next.” I found out early on her summaries could sometimes take hours.
“You are entering the final stage. Next, you will be transported to a combat simulation center for advanced war-fighting, tactic, weapons, and hand-to-hand. You will also undergo a rigorous PT regimen, all designed to get your enhanced musculature, skeletal, and mental facilities working together at an optimum level. After that, you will undergo RDT requals.”
“Shit, requalification.” I hadn’t even considered that. No way Space Force would let me back on a Tier-1 team without it, though. The thought of going through hell week again nearly made me cry.
Ada’s itinerary had seemed very clean and orderly. The reality turned out to be anything but. The next twelve weeks were spent in a muddy section of what I thought was North Carolina designed to make Army and SF Rangers puke their guts out. I spent four hours running drills with the more advanced special operations teams, then another five or more working with an individual specialist. Each of these guys focused on a separate area of my retraining. As a former ground-pounding Ranger, I had gotten all the basics down at Fort Benning. Advanced navigation, fast rope, lifesaving, defensive driving, demolition, jump training, and, of course, marksmanship. Mostly what I learned down there was how to do all that when I was suffering from blind exhaustion, extreme hunger, and the certainty that the commanders were trying to see which soldier they could kill first.
The training I was in now made 61 days and the final hell week of my first Ranger tab look like kindergarten playground shit in comparison. My personal demon from the underworld was Captain Lacy Johnson from Arlington, Texas. She was not enhanced, yet she routinely made me look like a fucking cripple when she showed me the ‘proper’ way to do whatever it was I was struggling with. From field stripping a Glisson 442, to setting up snares, to catching small game, she was better, faster, quieter, and unquestionably the better soldier. That was disappointing to me as I still had the same rating as I did back on Banshee. She knew I was technically Tier-1; she made sure I knew she had zero fucks to give on that point. I was a miserable disappointment to the Army, the Alliance, and probably the entire human race. I had been a massive waste of money, and she would be thrilled if she never laid eyes on me again.
“I think she’s getting a crush on me,” I confessed to Ada at one point.
“Oh, and why is that, Sergeant?”
“When I fell out of that tree earlier, she didn’t make me get up before she made me do the push-ups.”
“Yes, her concern is… touching,” Ada said with very artificial sarcasm.
I’ve had martial arts training since I was a kid. None of the entertainment style stuff. My dad wouldn’t hear of that shit. “Training you on how to punch without making contact is fucking useless,” he’d said. “Might as well be learning to dance the ballet.” Not that he had anything against ballet. I also had three years of dance. Don’t ask, it was a weird time.
No matter where we were stationed, he’d find someone to ‘train me,’ a.k.a. beat the shit out of me for money several hours a week. Usually, it was an old drill instructor who would know some tactical karate or kickboxing. I’d spent two years on a base in Thailand getting the shit beat out of me in an underground Muay Thai gym by a man who was barely four feet tall. That angry little ball of human misery made my teen years miserable. What I was going through now put all that to shame. More on the Dragon Lady in a second.
I get it. Much of the training was simply to improve reflexes, muscle memory, and hand-eye coordination. “Get that super brain working in harmony with those super new muscles. The battle is won or lost in your head first.”
I’d been in a lot of battles and that was rarely true, but these new instructors were all good. Combat martial arts bear little resemblance to the artistic styles in movies or sporting tournaments. It is ugly, brutal, and efficient. There is no basis of sportsmanship; its sole mission is to use the human body and anything within reach to kill or disable your opponents. To graduate the course, all I had to do was render my instructor for that level unconscious. Easy peasy—right? I was a bad ass drop soldier before, and now I was an augmented and enhanced super soldier version of the original.
It took me three weeks to even land a punch on my first instructor. She was a young, Asian girl probably barely in her twenties. Dragon Lady, as I called her, was on permanent reassignment from hell. I’m not sure which level… had to be six… maybe seven. Wherever the senior demons like to hang out. The Dragon Lady seemed to know every way to attack me that I could not defend. She made me look like a helpless feeb.
There are points in a man’s life, correction—a soldier’s life, where you just want to chuck it all. Take your DD214 and ring the bell or shit, just hit the road. Of course, a dishonorable discharge can follow you around worse than a listing on the sexual predator website. Still, Ms. Quan, aka Dragon Lady, taught me suffering, humility, and pain on exquisite levels of agony that even the late Stephen King would have been challenged to describe. At the end of one unusually humiliating session, I begged for the paperwork. “Just let me sign.”
“This is only day two. Not even breakfast yet,” she so rudely pointed out. Then she proceeded to kick my ass for five more hours.
So, leaving wasn’t an option. Apparently, the investment in an Enhanced War Fighter was on par with that of a small hypersonic fighter jet. I’d now been out of the game for thirteen months and was beginning to wonder if I had any real value to anyone. Then my dad called.
No, not through my phone. He dialed straight through to my surgically implanted comms headset.
“Greetings, Cowboy!”
“Pops? How did you…”
He cut me off, as usual. My father had two default settings: pissed-off or asleep. Today he was awake, so I braced myself.
“You enjoying yourself over there at summer camp?”
I knew better than to even ask how he knew something as classified as this had to be.
“It’s not…” I started, then thought better of it.
“Remedial Ranger School, right? Do they put mints on your pillow every night or just when you request the turn-down service?”
I looked at my battered arms and hands; scrapes covered almost every inch of skin. Blood mixed with mud filled every cut. Dark bruises ran up both arms like a human Rorschach drawing. “Yeah, Pops, having a blast. Heading to the sauna next, so can we make this fast?”
“Ha! Sauna!” It sounded like he covered the phone while he said it.
“Who else is there?” I asked.
“Huh? Oh, no one. Just thought I would check in on you. Things are kind of circling the toilet out here. Not sure you are getting any news and all, but world’s getting a damn site bleaker these days. Terrorist attacks, hackers targeting… well, everything. It’s nuts.”
I could sense another one of the ‘Back in my days’ speeches coming on.
“So, how are you doing?” I asked, tactically cutting him off from the diatribe he was undoubtedly gearing up for.
“Oh. Well, shit, Son, we are doing great. Me and your mom found Jesus and the dog is shitting gold bars. Seriously, couldn’t be better.”
I’m sure my face was screwed into a complete mask of unadulterated confusion. Listening to my old man inside my head wondering again what in the hell he was getting at.
“I did follow your treatment; you know… best I could. They wouldn’t let us call until now, but anyway, sounded like you were going to be okay. I saw the after action and all. They threw you guys into the shit, Master Sergeant.”
He always used my rank when he wanted to talk to me more as a soldier instead of as his son… which, if I am being honest… was most of the time. “We could have done better, I… I could have done better, sir.” I didn’t want to get into disobeying a direct order, not with this man. Colonel Bones Kovach lived for the rules. No one broke the rules—not fucking ever.
“I’m sure you could, and maybe you could have avoided all this if you had. That ship has sailed, though. Probably best to pay attention this go round.”
“We did our best, Dad.”
“Your best? Losers always whine about their best. Winners go home and fuck the prom queen.”
Oh, shit… he was quoting movie lines again. I didn’t remember that one but could see the old Scottish guy saying it.
“Gotta go, Pops.”
“Hang on… Joe, I have something. Got you something,” he corrected. “It might help with your mental health.” He said mental health like it was a venereal disease.
My father hadn’t given me anything personally in twenty years. I… I was stunned. When I went to thank him, the connection was dead.
“Ada, did my father hang up?”
* * *
“I show no incoming calls,” she said in her sexy-ass voice. That didn’t surprise me either. He would have the override codes for making encrypted calls now straight into my brain, it seemed.
I heard barking and saw a corporal heading my way, leading a gray, black, and white dog. The younger man handed me the leash wordlessly, then walked away. My pops had gotten me a puppy?
“Not exactly, Joe,” Ada said internally. “He is an augmented subject, too, also worked on by one of the good doctor’s teams. He is a combat dog with several minor enhancements.”
I rubbed the dog’s ears, something I don’t think you’re supposed to do with K-9 soldiers. The dog tilted his head and obviously loved it. “Does he have a name?”
“He has a designator, so you may name him much as you did me. However, the handlers have been referring to him as Sumo.”
“Sumo?”
“Yes, I am unsure why,” Ada offered.
“I like it. Seems to fit, even if he’s not an extra-large Japanese wrestler.”
Ada helpfully informed me that the word itself meant ‘to mutually rush at, or to complete.’
“Sumo it is.” The dog leaned in and licked my outstretched hand.
“You ready to go to work, boy?”
CHAPTER
TEN
Seeing my war buddy and friend, Hinge, go down on my last mission had undone me in ways that would take years to reach a level of peace with. Soon, though, I had to admit Sumo also proved much more than just a great partner in battle. He seemed to prefer the solitary lifestyle as much as I did, no doubt for many of the same reasons. Ada gave me a partial rundown on what had been done to him as a puppy. Carbon composite reinforcement of his skeletal structure. Titanium, diamond tooth shields with total replacement of several teeth to improve… well, the stuff dog’s teeth normally did, but with increased effectiveness and a bite force that now rivaled that of a small gator. He had an implanted comms unit as well, but no built-in AI, at least not one anybody admitted to.
As we were finishing up retraining and requals, I had the Ranger school armorer work up a custom set for Sumo as well. They routinely did light armor for the standard K9 units, but as part of a Drop Team he would need more. Our body armor had to not only be bullet proof up to and including protection from fragment grenades, it also had to seal itself to outside atmosphere and be rated for space—sometimes, no atmosphere. Toxic gases were a routine occurrence, it seemed. It took several weeks to get Sumo a helmet that worked, and by worked I mean one that covered his head and didn’t irritate him so much that he chewed it to small pieces when I wasn’t looking.
Ultimately, the armorer, who’d taken a special interest in the husky, created something miraculous; in fact, I wanted one myself. He used an expandable alloy that folded down almost invisibly onto the dog’s back armor plating when not needed. The workmanship was incredible.
“It’s nothing, Kovach. Just some spare Hammer tech we’ve been experimenting with.”
I thanked him with a bottle of Scotch I managed to get smuggled in, thanks to Ada.
I got my new orders a week after the 14-day requalifications, which were worse than I remembered and less than much of the rest I’d already been through. Still, by the end of hell week part two, I was wheezing, wiping tear gas from my eyes, and rinsing the vomit from the inside of my tactical helmet.
I stared at my data tablet, curious as to where Space Force would send their brand new, high-dollar, experimental drop soldier.
‘Remote ops.’ Remote fucking ops… which was Space Force lingo for desk duty.
It was work, but not like what I had expected. I didn’t go back into regular rotation with Banshee, although I was still nominally in charge of the squad. Instead, I got to help plan, direct, and debrief Riggs and the crew after each mission. Her missions. I shouldn’t have complained, but, well… shit. I had a body that was an investment of several million Alliance credits and almost a year of advanced warfare training, and I was filling out spreadsheets and updating budget reports.
Anyone who ever used the term Military Intelligence in a sentence without it being a joke was an idiot.
“Military Intelligence is an essential part of every operation, Son.”
“Pops, please.” The untraced call had come in during a routine field op that had just gotten dicier. One in which I was about to break ranks and assign myself to the mission.
“I’m serious, it’s useful to think of in the context.”
“Like jumbo shrimp?”
“It’s not just an oxymoron, moron,” he said. “Okay, well, it kind of is, but you have to understand, Joe. You are a proof of concept.”
I knew there was a joke lying in wait for me, but I bit anyway. “And what concept might that be, Dad? They figured out how to build a super accountant for under two million credits?”
“Don’t knock the accounting, kid, the soldiering sure as shit wasn’t working out for you.”
“Wow, thanks, Dad. Kind of like when you decided to be a farmer and used a claymore to blow up a fox trying to get into the chicken coop.”
“Hey, you little bastard, that was no ordinary fox.”
“No, it certainly was not, Dad. Pretty sure it was a communist agent from Red China kind of fox.”
He got decidedly more distant. “It was red.”
“Dad, I’m a weapon, and I am going to help my team. If you can make that happen, great. If not, I’ll probably be warming a bed in prison. I appreciate your help.”
“You’re no weapon, you’re a tool.”
“Goodbye, Pops!”
Twelve hours later, Sumo and I were dropping toward Banshee team. Not in a ballistic pod, just a traditional glider-chute. The husky swung in a modified harness between my legs. I’d done tons of test jumps with him by now to get used to maneuvering with him aboard. War dogs jumping into combat like this were actually nothing new. Paradogs went back as far as WWII, and Sumo tended to sleep most of the way down. That was how he dealt with stress and geared himself up for battle.
Minutes later, we were on the ground working our way through the sparse forest to Banshee’s locator beacon. I felt a surge of adrenaline combined with an eerie confidence that frankly scared me. Something on missions always went wrong; it was why we trained so damned hard not only to get it right but to know what to do when it went sideways.
Banshee had come down here to Belize to liberate a group of hostages from a would-be terrorist. The bastard had then wired them with explosives, demanding the release of a former coalition higher-up who, I knew for a fact, was already dead. Don’t ask me how I know this, just accept it as fact.
I moved up into the compound and saw no sign of Banshee. That was excellent because I would have pulled them out immediately if I had. They acknowledged my arrival with a single mic click. I could see each of my team's positions in my HUD anyway.
Ada located the combatants and showed me the structural layout of the surrounding building.
“Multiple enemy combatants, Prowler.”
The schematic of the school building updated, and enemy positions were indicated in red. Two red figures were outside in the small village. “Send those to Bayou.”
I checked my armor, stood, and began walking purposefully toward the front door of the building.
“Master Sergeant, do you have a plan?” Bayou yelled, breaking radio silence and protocol in the process. I then realized she’d been there negotiating with these assholes for the better part of two days. Her voice was decidedly not in the ‘happy to see me’ sort of tone. Something had changed in me over the last year, something I felt I was only partially in control of. An aggression, a ‘kill them first’ attitude toward the enemy… any enemy. Negotiations were bullshit and best left up to the cops and politicians. We were warfighters. “Fuck ‘em.”
“Sumo, hunt.” I pointed my rifle at a wall where I launched a small explosive-tipped round just big enough for him to launch himself through.
“Active jamming is on,”
Ada’s words assured me, but I’d already figured out the scam. This was a shakedown. Some of the supposed hostages were more terrorists. That meant the leader would be less likely, or maybe even unable, to blow them all up. Ada and Sumo were now jamming all RF bands they might want to use as a trigger for the bomb.
