The air was screaming, filled with the overlapping, endless drone of tens of sounds of electric motors and whirring propellers. It was like a continuous thunderstorm, like the long-summer storms in Moss Valley, the lightning provided by the flash of lasers. The sun was choked by the pillars of black smoke from burning plastic.
In all the noise, Mira's cameras were sweeping rapidly, her expanded perspective sweeping across the movements. The AI controlled drones moved like schools of fish, their bulk weaving and scintillating in complex evasive and defensive patterns as they dueled one another, bursting apart in hails of shrapnel or entangling one another with clouds of filament. Those were just swarmers; they had to die, they fed recon back and could kill your swarm, but that wasn't her job right now. She was firing, yes, but slow, measured, not exceeding the output rate of her reactor. Dozens of Federation drones spun out of the air, their flimsy plastic propellers burning.
There. Moving wrong, the swarm clearing a path around them. Three manually controlled kamikazes, or decoys imitating their flight path. The same model as the swarms, but these ones had people behind the controls, waiting to dive out of the clouds. These ones could kill.
The full array lit up. In a heartbeat, a single blinding flash of light, all three drones flashed and sparked and died. The one in the middle burnt bright like a flare as the command explosive inside ignited, turning into a shooting star as it plummeted toward the Earth.
Then the buzzing grew louder, just for a second. Her cameras pivoted to the source to see a heavy quadcopter plunging toward her upper deck. The lasers lit up, but it was too late.
In a blink, the sky cleared. The droning died. She was in the garage, a tangle of cables from the ceiling plugged into ports in the upper hatch to feed the false targeting environment to her senses.
"You're dead, Green 3! What did you do wrong?" Deputy Tactician Sapani snapped.
"Tunnel vision, fucking tunnel vision," Mira muttered, her cameras swinging wildly around the blank room. Disoriented, distantly aware she was breathing hard.
"Heart rate, friend," Rose whispered.
"That's right," Sapani agreed, gesturing to the television screen. A display showed where the arcs of her cameras had pointed through the exercise, the cones of her vision in red. Once she started firing, they all locked forward. "The enemy knows everything about you. They can see where you are looking. Shoot and scan. Shoot and scan."
"Shoot and scan," Mira repeated. "Shoot and scan."
"Good! From the top!"
"Green 1-open, entering active zone, repost-Overwatch, Green ratio," Deputy Supervisor Wolność rattled off.
"Green 2-1, star," Defiance replied.
"Green 3-1, star," Mira echoed, followed by Chris and Spark.
The tanks rumbled along the road, fifty meter spacings, an even coverage of nanodrones buzzing alongside. Drone 4's batteries were getting low, and Mira recalled it with a thought to slot into the charging port along the vehicle's flank, replacing it with a freshly recharged Drone 13. The little dragonfly-shaped slip of carbon fiber leapt up and away on its tiny rotor.
"Green 1-open, eyes on heat signature on the left side of the road, uh, 310 range 7k. Against the hill, post."
Mira pivoted a camera to match and saw a small dot of heat on the rocky outcrop, darting out.
"Green 2-1, I think that's a fucking rat, post," Defiance chimed in, then stopped. "Hold. I can't see it. Did it go behind a rock? Post."
Mira replayed the clip in her mind, slowed it down. The heat signature winked out, but her LIDAR ranging showed nothing it could have gone behind, unless…
"Green 3 open, I think there's a screen, post," she commented, shooting a drone up to check the parallax. A pair of timed laser pulses triangulaing it confirmed it. "Boost-Boost, false return!"
"Star. Green 1-2, engage on the roll, post." Ahead of Mira, Defiance's tank pivoted on the road, still rolling forward on the casters without losing speed as she tracked the weapon onto the invisible screen.
"Bang bang."
"Overwatch-Green open, good work friends. Proceed, post," the warm voice of the coordination AI added.
"Overwatch-Green 3, Target, post."
"Identified armoured autowar, moving left to right, range twelve hundred seventy. APDUX at 60%," Mira replied, her cameras fixing on the angular Federation thresher, a dark brown triangular shape tearing through the mud on wide tracks. The autoloader whirred and clunked as a cross-shaped bar of depleted uranium, jacketed in an iron armature, was slotted between the rails as they shifted closer together to accommodate it.
"UP," the electric voice buzzed in her ear.
"Where are you aiming?"
"Middle of the sprocket," she replied. Autowars didn't have a crew to kill or rattle, they'd go until there was nothing left. A railgun could pound a dozen high-velocity shots through their relatively thin armour and achieve nothing. Their power plant and capacitors, like Mira's, were set as low as possible and wrapped in wedge-shaped deflector plates; she'd just be tearing up isolated components. But at an angle like this, she could drive pieces of the electric motor straight into the guts and burn it.
"Fire at will."
"On the way." There was a horrid sound, a buzzing explosion, and the air became fire ahead of her. The armature tore out at two thousand meters per second, and the cardboard dummy target moved on without stopping even as the simulated image Mira saw showed the projectile shatter against the sprocket's axil, driving fist-sized pieces of shattered metal through the serrated pattern of deflector plates and into the capacitors, which ignited explosively.
She saw double for a moment, the cardboard target rolling along on its track while the simulated one in her mind burst into an enormous fireball, the burning batteries flaring out the back like a rocket as its gauss rifles shattered with little pops from the heat.
"Good hit! Overwatch-Green 3, target hard left, post."
Mira pivoted, and saw a trio of shapes bound up out of the mud and forward. Vague, boxy shapes with arms and legs, surrounded by a swarm of buzzing flies, ten metres spread.
"Identified light infantry closing, range eleven-fifty, ABHE burst," she rattled off. The still-smouldering rails spread outward as the barrel widened to accommodate the 20 millimeter projectile. "Aiming for the lead target, programmed to detonate at three meters."
"UP."
"Fire at will."
No burning air this time, projectile at a mere nine hundred meters per second. The shell's ejector charge detonated just short of the group, spraying ninety tungsten cylinders in a shotgun blast that tore the lead figure from their feet and dropped them into the mud.
She was already firing on the second target. The bursting shells were designed to scrape the ground, hitting prone infantry even if ground clutter obscured them from immediate vision. She burst three shells above the second target and pivoted to the third, they were invisible in the dip in the ground, but the birds-eye view of one of her nanodrones spotted them crawling away desperately, their drones buzzing down to form a shield about fifty meters ahead of them.
She activated the forward laser array and carved a hole in the center of the formation as she put three more shots downrange. She dialed in the distance until one scooped the ground exactly right. The forms of the infantry faded from the simulation.
"Overwatch-Green 3, target in the blind, over."
Her cameras pivoted all around even as her nanodrone winked out. There, bearing 194, moving like a shadow between two hills.
"Identified light tank, range seventeen-hundred even. APDUX at 80."
"UP."
"Fire at will."
About an hour into training the next day, Mira spotted something coming up the road.
First, she spotted other trainees seeing it, noticing their cameras all spin the same way, locked into the distance, the glint of lenses moving to zoom in, and she followed their gaze to the long, lonely road that stretched to the horizon. It wasn't unusual to see military trucks, LUVs, or other vehicles on the road, but the dust cloud and shapes through the blur of heat indicated this was not just a supply convoy or personnel transfer.
As the vehicles grew closer, there was something else different. The first dozen trucks were the familiar shape of standard civilian 6x6 haulers in Militia green, their complex aerodynamic curves simplified for wartime production, the driver in a bubble cockpit and a mix of cargo and passenger modules. Three were front-line style self-driving logistics trucks, their bullet noses not needing to compromise for a human driver.
But the vehicles in the middle were different. Huge, slab-sided bricks, flat windshields and bulky cooling baffles painted in a muddle of grey and tan that made their details vanish into the heat haze. Two of the vehicles were almost twice as large as the others, taking up both lanes and pulling something tall and square behind them.
"Dhe hill's dhat?" Chris muttered into the squad net, slipping unconsciously into his native dialect. The speech synthesizer always rendered the sounds in an exaggerated way; Mira had tried a few of the stock phrases she'd learned in training and she sounded exactly like Chris when she did.
"That's Feddie kit, doesn't it look familiar, Earthling?" Spark responded sharply.
"Knock it off," Defiance retorted. Mira heard her start to say something else, but the radio override kicked in as the Tactician spoke over her.
"Cardinal-open boost, guests incoming, defensive positions, post!" she called light-hearted. As drilled, Mira threw herself into reverse, marking her destination as she went for everyone else while backing into the nearest dip in the ground. The black panels of her hull shifted and blurred to match the pattern of black soil and lichen in the visible and IR spectrum as she cut her reactor to run on batteries. A nanodrone zipped out of a port and off on a random vector as she lowered her hydraulics to present as low a profile as possible.
She's still be spotted, but the goal was to ensure enemy drones had to get as close as possible to confirm the targets. You wanted to attrite the swarm as fast as possible, and the closer they needed to get for positive ID, the more they'd need to grind through friendly swarms and interceptors and the more they'd lose.
She sat and waited, two cameras fixed on the incoming convoy and the rest sweeping over the sky, her awareness flicking back and forth between them and the grainy view from the nanodrone. She knew by intuition that the first of the Federation vehicles were just edging into effective larty range. She could feel the eyes of the rest of the platoon on the vehicles, subconsciously marking targets and feeling out the arc of fire as they approached.
The biggest vehicles were dragon wagons, tank carriers. On the backs were the blocky shapes of Federation heavies, Manticores, surrounded by the crates of maintenance equipment, munitions, print feed, and spare parts. They were clearly different marks from one another, different hatch shapes and protrusions she presumed marked the time between their captures, but they shared key features. Two sets of tracks side by side for redundancy, a ram prow like an ancient trireme, a broad turret tapering to the housing for the main railgun and auxiliary weapons. Dozens of small, spherical turrets dotted the outside, the AI-controlled point defense network using a mix of lasers and physical interception. The multitude of hatches spoke to the crew of twelve.
The vehicles pulled off the road and into the training ground, lining up the dusty, beaten flat which the constant wear of tracks had rapidly cleared of lichen. People started dismounting, most of them in green Militia jumpsuits or blue-dyed versions of the same, but a number in power armour. Two particularly bulky, hunched suits unfolded out the back of one of the Federation trucks, like gorillas brought back from extinction as cybernetic horrors.
"End protocol and cameras sharp, friends, we have visitors!" Tactician Alvarez announced over the radio. "Our heroic comrades in green are detached from the planetary garrison, and those sinister khaki creatures are graciously on loan from the 114th Combined Arms Training Group, who will, with great reluctance I'm sure, play the role of the imperialist bandits."
This wasn't Mira first time seeing members of Counterforce; during her training they'd spent five days at Camp Reed, where they had their testing ground and range for assessing and simulating Federation equipment. Her first encounter with them was getting her trench stormed in a simulated attack, tagging one as they jumped down with her training laser and then getting blindsided by two others. She'd spent the rest of the afternoon playing prisoner, her 'guards' using the chance to show her unit features of their equipment in their best Earthling accents.
Watching those same suits moving next to their Union counterparts was surreal. Suits like these hadn't existed in the Union until twenty years ago, they hadn't been needed, but the Federation and its predecessors had been fighting in them for centuries. Their suits were the product of endless iteration and refinement and the brutal mathematics of war on a dying planet; adjustable instead of tailored, bulky and misshapen, dotted with cameras and ports, but heavier armour and bigger motors and extra bolt-on weapons.
Mira zoomed the camera in one of them, who had popped the hatch and lifted her goggles to expose a girl not much older than her. There was a grenade launcher on one shoulder and a tiny APS turret on the other, and hanging by robotic third arm off her chest was a nearly five foot long coilgun. Light chemical slugthrower under the left forearm, crabcracker on the right, two kilo grenades on brackets around her hips, everything wedged wherever there was space around the slabs of steel.
The Counterforce trooper was talking to a local garrison kid, who was leaning in to inspect her armour, and the difference was so stark. Union suits looked tiny; everything was smooth and rounded off and packed away, leaving a kind of bean-shaped torso unit that had spouted arms and legs. Almost seamless panels covered the chest-mounted smoke/chaff launchers, at odds with the shape of the railgun off their shoulder and the bulky mass of their entrenching tool.
There was a brief wait as everything got into position, and then Alvarez gave them their brief. For the next three days, they'd be doing training exercises, practicing attacking Federation positions in coordination with friendly troops. As forty tanks were too many at a time for such an exercise, only groups 1 and 2, Red and Blue, would be participating in the exercise today; Green and Yellow would have their day tomorrow, and would instead be ranging out for more convoy training.
Disappointed, Mira shuffled into her place as Green squad took off down the road, watching her sector in silence, tracking the oversight drones darting off in the distance. This was important, her instructors had said that they'd be spending most of their time in convoy and making it second nature was important, but it also wasn't that important. Even Overwatch knew it.
"Overwatch-Green open, protocol end," the AI said after about half an hour. That was to say, talk among yourself; they'd probably interrupt with training exercises at some point, but letting radio discipline slacken would illustrate the need to remain on the alert even in 'safe' situations. They did the same a lot when she was in infantry training.
"Green 2-3 direct, post," Defiance said immediately, and Mira switched to a direct channel. "Hey Mira."
"Hey. See the size of those tanks?" Mira asked. They passed by the rusted-out axles on the side of the road which were the only landmark for fifty kilometers or so; apparently a long-hauler had a battery fire ten years ago or so, and they just let it rust.
"Right? Like... Huh, wonder why our planet's dying, anyway fire up the hundred-fifty ton tank factory! Whatever the fuck they've pumped into the air over there it's made them all morons."
"Microplastics?" Mira suggested.
"Funny, but probably not," Rosa whispered.
"Must be. Goddamn… two more weeks of this shit…" Defiance grumbled. Her rear cameras pivoted back to meet hers. "I cannot wait to get out of this thing."
"Really? What's the rush?" Mira asked.
"... I dunno. I wanna, like, do stuff. Scratch my nose, stretch my legs… oh. Fuck, sorry."
Mira laughed. It was actually funny, now that none of that mattered.
"I get you. What about the pain, though?" Mira asked. She wasn't looking forward to any part of finishing training and being taken out in anticipation of redeployment, but that was the part she was most scared of. Here, the pain was small and far away, happening to somebody else.
"I can do pain, I can't do… trapped. Friend, I feel like I'm going fucking crazy. Like I'm locked in a box."
"The box can move, and blow shit up," Mira pointed out. "And we got drones, radios… all the extra neurons are pretty nice. What more could you want?"
"... a vibrator and some alone time, honestly," Defiance said. Mira burst into laughter, hard enough to feel a brief spike of pain in her core. "Shut up, I'm serious! I swear I'm losing my mind."
"I… haven't even noticed," Mira admitted.
"Well, good for you! But the moment I'm getting out of this I'm… I dunno, I'll jump the Earthling and ride him til my heart gives out. Which… as my AI is quick to remind me, would not take much."
"... I mean, you have no idea what he looks like or anything…" Mira pointed out.
"Who the fuck cares? He's probably all fucked up like I am, I just need certain parts intact, that's all I'm saying. You get me?"
"Not really, no. Maybe I just don't know what I'm missing," Mira admitted.
"... You can have Chris after I'm done with him?" Defiance added.
"Ew."
"I'll wipe him down first?"
"Somehow that's worse. Also… does he get a say in this?" Mira asked.
"We'll tell him it's his duty as a citizen. From him to the best of his ability, to us according to our very pressing needs?"
It was moments like this that Mira did miss not being a tank, just for a moment. There was no response to that other than shaking your head in disappointment, and there was just no equivalent. Maybe if she had a turret…
"... gross. Also, Rosa says I'll die," Mira concluded.
"I didn't say that. Not that I am at all saying it's a good idea, my God," Rosa added quietly.
"Is this a preference thing? Like, would you prefer Hope?" Defiance added.
"Still eww! Defiance, I don't wanna fuck anyone, not like this. I don't even want people to look at me," Mira snapped.
"Are you ace? That's cool and all, I just didn't-"
"What I am is a fucking tank, Defiance," Mira snapped, at the edge of her patience with this line of inquiry. She never did figure out what exactly she was before, other than not particularly driven by her sex drive, but none of that mattered anymore.
"... Mira, you're still-"
"Push-push, Overwatch-Green open, engage protocol and prepare for simulated contact left, post," the AI cut in. Mira's cameras swivelled left just in time to see a trio of target drones duck under a hill. Deputy Supervisor Wolność instantly leapt into action.
"Green 1-open, column stop! Green 2 and 4 push off the road, weapons to sim, let's box them out, post!"
Mira warmed the reactor. Somewhere deep inside the steel, her lips curled into a smile.
