It still didn't quite seem real to Durandal. Outside the streets were a party. A party where work was being done perhaps, but still a party. Food was being given out, barricades and control points and ATGM positions erected for the inevitable enemy counterattack. People cheering and parading around. Statues pulled down, posters and murals put up. Exuberance, chaos, anarchy.
She had never expected this. Not through the entire long war. Had never expected to survive, and when she had survived, never expected to do anything else.
She sat in a small office, in front of a desk covered in paper maps of the bay area, looking at her guest: "We need you to go to Los Angeles. You'll need to mobilise your whole force."
Durandal looked over at the other Voltairine de Cleyre Brigade operative. Muramasa was not part of the official brigade structure. Her sword name not quite a sword, but a maker of swords, and of curses if you believed the legend. She always tried to look the part too, her combat armour almost dead black, jet black with vanta black trim and hair framing her doll white face and a splash of red at her collar.
The pair were in the basement of an old coffee shop owned by a sympathetic owner. Around them, San Francisco was now falling into anarchy. The remains of the police were barricaded inside fortified stations being steadily reduced by missiles and motor fire. Durandal expected to accept those surrenders within hours. Those enemy units with intact mobility assets had pulled back into the richer exurbs at the city's perimeter. Still, Durandal wanted more time. Wanted to stay here and make sure of her gains. Wanted to nip the incipient black terror that was building in the bud. "What's in Los Angeles?"
"Not an effective and organised revolutionary military committee yet." Muramasa sipped at an ancient plastic effect container of iced coffee. The liquid was so adulterated with soy milk carmel and the like that it barely even counted.
"How can you even drink that stuff?"
"This is a revival Starbucks. The black coffee here is absolute garbage." The Special Operative leaned forward. "There's an Omoikane Brigade Combat Team, Human Error Processor moving down from their cantonment near Morro Bay. They're moving slowly, but if they arrive they'll take the transit station that could cut the whole West Coast."
"Human Error Processor?" Durandal frowned. "What do I have to stop them?"
"Your force, the local militia when they get organised."
"That's not enough!" Durandal glared at her. "Human Error Processor are good. They have armour and air support, and their augmentations are better than ours."
"Not anymore. Your troops have been implementing the upgrade cycle haven't they?"
"Yes, but–"
"Kusanagi needs you to do this Durandal. You're the only battalion not engaged."
"We've been doing this for a hundred and eighty-three years. We've never committed to a face to face engagement like this."
"Times change," Muramasa said. "This is
it."
"After a hundred and eighty-three years? After staying down in eighty-seven. In all the fighting since. Never committing to it even if it got good people killed. And now you're just telling me this is it? You really think the broadcast can kill the Compact?"
Muramasa slurped up her coffee. "I think it already did."
"I hope you're right. Cause if not you're asking me to fall on my sword."
"I'm asking more than that. You don't really think I'm not coming with you do you?"
*****
The Pacific City Mass Transit System had been one of the wonders of the world when it was built in the twenty sixties, one part of the massive efforts at infrastructure and civil defence during the silver sixties. A vastly redundant series of low-pressure tunnels, dug deep beneath the west coast. Honeycombed and massive it had no single point of failure, nowhere where a PGM or a terrorist bomb could take it out. Before the murder of the Democratic Federation, plans had been in place to turn it into a bomb shelter. You could flatten Pacific city with nuclear strikes, and the people in the deep tunnels would still live.
Some of that redundancy is gone now. Privatisation, the desire to sell off 'underutilised' stations, had meant that there were now central nodes, stations where changeovers took place. LA central station was one such point, a massive, mostly buried building filled with food stalls and shopping arcades through which tens of millions of commuters passed on a daily basis.
Twice, the security forces had tried to destroy the place with PGMs. Twice, cleverly emplaced direct energy weapons and the labyrinthine democratic federation construction had stopped them. Now they were moving to try on the ground, and there were only a few in place to stop them. There were a grab bag of student militia from the city's colleges, a crew of anarchist air defence hobbyists out of one of the more realistic military simulation games who'd stopped the airstrikes, and there was VdCB's Durandal Combat Group.
It was not going to be enough. It was absolutely not going to be enough and Durandal knew it. The enemy were advancing on two axises, a battalion of mechanised infantry coming straight in, and a second force, including an armoured battalion and another infantry hanging back on the flank. The infantry battalion would seek to fix them, find their positions, and then they'd bring the tanks and infantry in to finish it.
If they needed to. First, they would try with firepower.
In turn she'd arrayed her own forces in an arc to meet them, evacuated nearby civilians, fortifying buildings and creating a series of nests and fortifications, firing and observation points, protected routes of advance and retreat.
She had done everything she could. Set up her positions with all the cleverness and skill at management she'd gained over more than two centuries of combat against the enemies of the Democratic Federation.
It wasn't going to be enough.
There were other militia units in Los Angeles, groups based around small political groups, tenents unions, protests and gangs. They were hanging back, watching. Waiting for VdCB to get themselves killed trying to hold a fixed point. Some were coming in, a dribble. Most didn't fancy it. They'd heard about the prison break but they still didn't want to come out. Not and fight so storied a unit as Human Error Processor.
"Give me swarm density." She told her tactical VI.
"Enemy 90%, friendly 10%"
That was good. That was what she wanted for now. Let the sky fill up. Let them feel secure in their swarm density and put their assets on the table. The UAVs and the aerostats and the missile carriers.
"Swarm Density: Enemy 95%, friendly 5% New contacts. Bandits 5 through 24."
A UAV moving in at high altitude, more surveillance coming in lower, and larger missile carriers following.
Durandal thought she was going to lose. Thought that she was finally going to see extinction after two centuries of war. But for now–
"Master Arm. Air Defence on. Track targets for autonomous fire."
Targeting radar spiked, enemy aircraft began to evade, releasing countermeasures. Too late.
"Fire."
Across hundreds of disguised positions air defence pods opened up, each one spitting out a swarm of light ground to air munitions. Heavier munitions, new Ares Gusisnautar and VdBC's entire stock of old Slash-Lance air to air loiter munitions rippled down from above on heavier assets.
The main enemy search UAV vanished. Missile carriers and medium-altitude surveillance birds followed suit. Lasers around the stations snapped on a moment later, hammering the reeling enemy swarm. With almost nothing friendly in the air across the entire medium-altitude band, they could fire freely.
"Launch combat swarm in one minute. Give me the count."
"Enemy 20, Friendly, 80."
The remaining Omoikane drones were pulling back, circling around the Human Error Processor armoured vehicles.
There had been times in Durandal's long war when this would have been enough. When an enemy having lost air support and had its eyes poked out would give the whole thing up as a bad job.
Not this time.
The Omoikane infantry were launching fresh drones and moving in, armoured carriers worming down the street like alien caterpillars.
"All units, prepare for ground assault."
*****
The Omoikane Scout gave a mechanical squeal like an old-style modem as Kusanagi-519 nailed her to the street. The cordless industrial rivet gun made a satisfying chunk noise as it punched through combat armour and cyborg and fastened her to the street. The Omoikane trooper's arm flailed up and 519 jerked her head aside as the weapon was discharged, sending a round past her head. She stepped forward, kicked the arm down and put a rivet through it.
"Obsolete– anarchist– vermin." The Omoikane trooper spat at her. "Just kill me and be done with it!"
"We don't have that kind of time." 519 slung the rivet gun and pulled up her carbine, leaving the enemy cyborg to add her voice to those of her three companions, equally blown up and nailed down as she rejoined her companions in their hardened position at the end of the street.
Human Error Processor had neutralized the first belt of IEDs very effectively. They had new stuff, swarms that found and targetted the vehicular bombs that the brigade had set up to stop them. Now they were advancing into the teeth of the brigade's defences. Soon it would be a new kind of war, close work. The recon team that 519 and her companions had ambushed would only be the first.
The wall blew inwards, masonry and synthetic board falling free as the first Omoi assault drone tore through it. The breaching remote died at once, addressed by disciplined bursts from the machine gun positioned in a hardened position in a basement across the street, but size more followed, pouring forth in a tumbling wave of metal battle lust, trying to flank the position Kusanagi-519's and her two sword sisters Excalibur-91 and Garm-628 were occupying.
There had been a time, at the start, when the units of Voltairine de Cleyre Brigade had been strictly divided, swords with swords. Over two hundred years of brutal guerrilla warfare the companies had become mixed up, throwing companions of every name and patch together in companies of circumstance. 519 had been with 91 and 628 since the fall of the Democratic Federation and had come through the great black summer of '87 with them. Was with them here. This ordinary street of ordinary single-family investor homes, never occupied, easy to avoid civilian casualties but a pain to prep due to the number of security systems. The drones had blown through the side of one of the houses facing the road to the south, trying to flank the three Brigade swords set up in a sandbag reinforced shelter in one of the ugly properties' garages.
None of the three needed orders to do what needed to be done. They made a flash assessment: that the bots were a fixing force meant to hold them in position while the second part of the ambush caught them and reacted aggressively. 628 detonated the directional mines laid across their position left flank and then the three stormed out into the swarming drones, their own combat remotes loping at their sides like metal hounds.
The VI running the combat remotes didn't quite know what to make of its prey erupting into a sudden offensive, its automated brain just as subject to unprogrammed decision perimeters as a human would be, and 519 and her companions closed a geometry of fire around them, trapping them in an L shape with the gun position across the street, destroying each with a grenade or a rapid burst of flechettes and gunfire.
The enemy infantry, meant as the jaws of the trap, found themselves suddenly without a distraction and began to drop back, getting into cover as the Swords reorientated on them.
This was not like fighting the police. The average VdCB team could kill anything up to fifty hogs in less than five minutes. Human Error Processor were a whole different ball game. Still, there were ways to win. Blades they might be, but newly forged and immature compared to their opponents.
<<They should have come themselves.>> 98 Mused in a side channel. Each sword was wired with two sets of comm gear, a primary, always loaded through a deluge of tactical traffic, and a side channel, through which thoughts could be sent.
<<They still worry too much for their own lives.>> 628 said as the first round of enemy artillery blew up the house they'd recently occupied.
The force that would fix the enemy must fight them, so unless it planned to stay very unengaged, to merely make noise, it must be the most powerful. The enemy infantry poured into several houses, firing out across the street at them. 519 was inspired to roll back into the crater that the artillery shell had dug behind her and begin to pour fire back.
More artillery was falling, and on the tac-map, 628 could see enemy vehicles moving in behind the infantry. A machine gun began to bark out rounds. Things were starting to get a bit hairy. Then the house where the enemy sheltered blew apart and collapsed. The third element of the VdCB squad, the weapons team, had got into position.
In a normal engagement, the three swords would now be disengaging. Here and against Omoikane.
None of the enemy combatants in that house, or few, were dead. They got up and sprinted across the street towards the ruin. Bullets licked out, scoring across 628 and knocking her down, but the other two ran on and skidded to a stop near the still standing front wall pillars.
"628?"
"I'm still alive. Mobility compromised." <<I just got these legs>>
"Cover us."
628 began to pour fire into the top of the building as 98 and 519 followed a grenade in. Smoke billowed everywhere, and the enemy ECM was turning the thermal environment into a hash of impossible fire vectors. Microbots warred with one another in the burning walls, revealing brief wireframe images of internal rooms then snapping off as they died to the jaws of enemy hunter-killers.
Members of a second VdCB squad were moving up on the other wall, their weapons teams repositioning to fire delaying rounds at the enemy vehicles and heavy combat robots moving in behind the infantry engagement.
519 went right, 98 left, sweeping the room to points of domination like they'd done tens of thousands of times before across two centuries of conflict. You had bots now, had to worry about positioning them as well as yourself, but the basic patterns of a ground engagement were as fresh as when 519 had been a young, flesh and blood soldier in the twenty-first century.
There had been more brigades back then. Emma Goldman. Helen Keller. Mother Jones. Units of vengeful spectres (never call them werewolves) for the murdered Democratic Federation.
Most of them had died in '87. Except for Voltairine de Cleyre. The ghosts. The smartest. The ones who understood that there was no honor, no peace, no good person among the living. The ones who would never stop.
No one in the hall. Firing from upstairs. 98 indicated that way, pausing to aim her rifle up. 519 followed, stepping up to the stairs and slung her rifle in favor of the blocky shape of the rivet gun.
"628, hold fire on the front of the house."
The top floor was mostly gutted and on fire, cheap display furniture burning brightly. Neither of the two cyborgs cared much about the heat and smoke, nor did the three Human Error Processor troopers in black and grey digital camo still firing out of the top floor. The weird light conditions of the smoke had obviously messed up their stealth cloaks cause they had them off. One covered the stairs while the others fed a machine gun, exchanging fire with the friendly machine gun position across the street.
Unfortunately for the covering trooper, 98 knew where she was already. There was a sensor mounted up on the roof of a building opposite that could see in through the front window. 98 fired up at her through the floor, scoring multiple hits. The Omoikane cyborg swung around towards her, firing back, but the vital first second was gone, hits sparking off her armour.
519 erupted out of the stairway, swinging on the shooter and fired a rivet into her. The metal slammed the human error processor operative back off her feet and into one of the walls of the house, but it was a bad shot. 519 had missed the beam that the cyborg would have fixed too. The Omoikane trooper pulled free of the wall, gun coming up, and then collapsed as a blurred form outside the wall swung a breaching hammer into the back of her head with enough force to deform it.
"Die puppet." Muramasa purred, and swung the hammer again.
519 had already turned her attention to the other two. They'd been sheltering behind one of the house's carbon pillars, one of the few parts of it that was really bulletproof, and that made it far easier to nail them both, fixing them in position with a dozen rapid bolts. She stepped forward, pulled the machinegun away from one of the two fixed cyborgs and tossed it out the window.
"I thank you." <<You saved my ass.>>
"It is of no moment." Muramasa turned. "We should go. More are coming."
The Brigade Operatives followed the machine gun out the window, leaving the house as cover behind them. It wouldn't stop tank shells but with the distress beacons of enemy infantry inside, the enemy would be unwilling to destroy it to get to them either. 519 hoisted 628 up onto her back and fixed her there like a pack, the other cyborg bracing her carbine to aim backwards as 519 ran.
It had been a successful engagement.
They'd lost another street.
*****
Muramasa could feel it coming apart. Durandal had been correct. They were going to die here. Enemy tanks were advancing now, moving fast down the gridwork of cross streets, infantry and bots moving with them.
They'd neturalized several forward teams and the enemy recon screen, but now the main force was on them, two enemy battalions moving fast, blasting through each ambush with coordinated artillery and direct fire.
Muramasa and her team had joined up with a bunch of Durandal's regulars, dropping back from one position to another, harassing the enemy and hurting them, but not fast enough. They were in a basement now, hardened with sandbags and carbon pannels, shooting out at the flickering shapes of enemy APCs and heavy combat robots outside.
The position on the other side of the cross street blew apart, hit by tank fire. Loss beacons burned in the tactical network. Fighter in distress. Fighter in distress. No way to help them. More artillery walked across them, dust pouring down.
An Omoikane tank rolled down the street. It was a spiderlike beast, armour swung forward, missiles flipping up one after another from a back compartment, whipping down the streets. It kept wanting to blur out in Muramasa's vision. "ATGM! Hit the tank!"
One of the operatives with her lifted a ATGM and fired, the super-Hofund leaping out towards the tank, then blowing apart short as the vehicle's point defence laser caught it. The turret turned, a wide mouthed direct fire gun swinging around towards the source of the ATGMs.
Muramasa realized suddenly she was going to die. It was a real surprise. She hadn't thought she ever would. Not until the stars went out and the universe was old at any rate. She'd wanted to see what Blue Dwarfs looked like.
She should say some last words. It was a fashion in the brigade, to come up with some cool thing to say when you were about to go out. All she could think of was the new chaos space marines she'd recently acquired and would never get to paint.
Muramasa closed her eyes.
The tank exploded.
Another armoured vehicle had blown straight through the burning investor property on the other side of the street. A heavier Ares model sprayed in bright neon. Rock music poured from its speakers.
A dozen more followed, with combat drones and infantry in armoured suits following them.
The first tank was hit already, struck by fire from down the street, but there were so many of the neon things. The Omoikane forces began to give ground. Not yet in danger, just in shock.
Durandal's voice came over the network.
"All Units. Rally and attack. Attack now."
Murmasa laughed to herself and did just that.
******
"Enemy Strength, 30. Friendly Strength, 70."
"Enemy Strength, 20. Friendly, 80."
"Enemy 5, Friendly 95."
Durandal felt like a fool. She hadn't understood. Hadn't thought anyone would come. Hadn't realized how long it would take people to realize, to sort themselves out. Hadn't, really, understood what Fabricators did to warfare.
There were tanks out there. Friendly tanks. Scores of them moving in careless clumps. The Omoikane gunners had a field day. They killed dozens of enemy automata and vehicles. It didn't matter. There were always more of them. The whole city had woken up around them and was fighting.
I did this at Alcatraz. Durandal thought. Why didn't I realize?
Zombies, they always called us. Special infected. Maybe they were in a way, the dangerous thing about Zombies was they made more of themselves. And right now, the entire city was swarming. HEP could beat the VdCB with no trouble. But the city? That was another thing.
Human Error Processor were good. Omoikane's elite, and no cowards. They tried to hold, to form a defensive line, to kill the city as it came for them. Durandal sent her battalion this way and that, assisting, concentrating, hitting the enemy wherever they could go. Enemy artillery fired a last volley then switched off abruptly as a swarm of drones found them. Remaining tubes switched over to final protective fire, laying down a hailstorm of steel as the remaining Omoikane operatives fell back, boarding their vehicles and hurtling off down the streets as the city tried to eat them.
We're going to win. Durandal thought to herself.
After all this time, we're actually going to win.
