Chapter 134: Too Green

-Kzzzt-

"Longbow, Command... Second call. Say status on the Nine-Zero, and confirm you still have eyes on the airframe, over."

The radio lay on its back in the dirt between two men I had stripped ten minutes ago, and the voice coming out of it had not changed by one degree since the first call, bored and warm and patient.

I crouched and picked it up and turned it over once in my glove, while the snow kept coming down on the fourteen bodies around us, refusing to settle on any of them.

Nia came up beside me with the SR-25 across her chest and Tikki’s ears showing over the zipper of her jacket, and she said nothing, because she was listening to the same thing I was.

-Kzzzt-

"Longbow, Command... Harlan Actual is asking for the operator directly. Do you have the operator, over."

[...Harlan.]

I knew that name from a literal lifetime ago.

In this life, my only business with a fort had been twenty of its people on the floor of a nuclear plant two hundred kilometers east.

But last time, every trader who came down out of the north into the west carried that same name with him, Fort Harlan, the biggest fence left standing up there, with corridors running out of it for a while and helicopters lifting people off roofs while there was still fuel to lift them with, and drones over every city within reach reading SOS made of bedsheets and buckets.

And then, by spring, the same thing happened to Harlan that happened to every big camp in the country, and the corridors stopped, and the gate closed, and Harlan became a wire with a king inside it, the same as every other fence in the country. None of them were bad men. It was simply the only way left, once the world was gone.

I never set foot inside that wire, and I never needed to. I knew it by its radio voice and by its rumors and by what it turned into, and I knew what a fort like that looks like two weeks in, standing on maybe a tenth of the people it was built for, every one of that tenth flying or fixing or guarding or feeding somebody, the whole machine running one shift short of falling over.

[I’ve killed thirty-four of theirs now... Twenty at the plant, fourteen here, three airframes... They’ve known it was a man since the plant.]

And I knew exactly what a fort does about a man like that, because I had watched forts do it.

Nia put her hand out for the radio without a word.

I gave it to her, and she keyed it, and dropped her voice flat and bored and half a step lower than her own.

"Command, Longbow. Nine-Zero’s a brick, no start, no power to the panel... Working it. Site’s clear, no operator. Continuing the sweep, out."

She let go of the key, and the channel hissed for one second, then two.

"Copy, Longbow. Report on the hour."

Nia clipped the radio to the strap of her pack, right up by her collarbone where she could hear it breathe, and looked at me.

"Buys us maybe an hour..."

"That was good."

"That was two deployments of saying nothing interesting on a net," she gave me a sly smile. "Now... you’ve got that look, and I’d like it on the record that I don’t like that look."

I was looking north, past the unfinished towers, toward a fort I had never seen with my own eyes in either life.

"They’re not going to stop," I said. "Whoever’s running Harlan lost twenty people and an aircraft last week, and as of ten minutes ago he’s lost fourteen more and two more airframes, and he still doesn’t have a single answer... By tonight, whatever they’ve got on the Ghostbird goes out on every channel they own, to every camp they trade with from here to the coast. They’re going to hunt me..."

"And we’re going west."

"Seventy kilometers," I said. "A helicopter does that in twenty minutes... that distance only matters if the people looking for us have to drive to us on four wheels."

Her eyes narrowed, her mind already arriving where I was going.

"...So wanna strike first?"

"Yeah... we take their birds," I agreed, nodding at the grey sky. "Tonight... we got there... In and out."

"No." She said it flat and immediately, and her whole body squared to me, which is how she argues when she means it. "That’s an armed military base, Nikki. Hundreds of people, a wire, towers with thermal on them, watch rotations, and every single one of them holding a rifle that works just fine on people like us, even what we are now... You are not bulletproof. Neither am I, and I’m the better shot and the stronger one, so listen when I say this... One lucky kid on a tower with insomnia, and you’re dead."

"I’m not planning to fight anybody."

"Then what are you planning?" She looked at me, an eyebrow raised. Tikki too.

While a grin I couldn’t stop slowly stretched across my face.

"How about..." I said, " We walk into their motor pool and... touch things."

Her mouth stayed open around the next word for a second, and then it closed.

[There it is~]

"Look, we don’t need to shoot anyone or breach anything," I said, striking while the iron was still hot. "... The Inventory doesn’t make noise, doesn’t flash, doesn’t take time. I put a hand flat on an airframe, and it stops existing where they left it. So I go over the wire at three in the morning, I walk the flight line, I walk the vehicle park, and I leave. Nobody hears even a single shot... And in the morning they wake up to a lot of empty space where their airframes’ armor wheels were supposed to be."

"But you don’t have Awareness anymore," she said, and her voice never rose at all. "You’d be going over that wire as blind as any man they’ve got standing on it... Just you and your eyes and whatever’s waiting on the other side."

"I’ll have you," I shot right back. "That suppressor gives you a shot every five seconds that nobody hears, from wherever you feel like lying down. Tikki hears rotors a full second before we do, and he’d hear boots sooner than that... And it’s three in the morning on a fort that just lost fourteen men and two helicopters in one afternoon. Tonight every man on that wire is short on everything, sleep included... All I need are forty minutes... no shots included. That’s the whole job."

"And when a sentry walks past a hangar that’s suddenly empty?"

"Then I’m already two rows over, and I keep going, or I leave," I said. "Nothing about this requires me to win a fight. It requires me to not be seen for about forty minutes."

She chewed on that with her eyes gone still and busy at once, running the same numbers I had already run.

"You’re not taking all of it..." She wasn’t asking the question; she was telling me.

"Of course not... Sixty or seventy percent stays exactly where it is." I turned to face her properly, because this was the part that had to make sense to more people than her. "... A fort that size, two weeks in, has maybe a dozen airframes still turning, and every single one of them already has a corridor’s name painted on it... They just spent two of those birds and fourteen men on one helicopter, which tells you exactly how thin they are and exactly what a helicopter is worth to them... So we don’t take the ones lifting families off roofs. We’re taking the spares, the escorts, the gunships like Apaches... And now, for their colonel to put one bird on one man for one afternoon, he has to close a corridor to do it, and tell a few hundred people on rooftops that the schedule slipped... He won’t, and he’d know it before he finished asking... Same with the motor pool. I take a slice of the armor and the trucks and leave the rest, because a fort with no trucks stops feeding itself, and a fort that stops feeding itself stops being a fort inside a month and starts being a problem for everybody within a hundred kilometers of it... so we leave just enough shit to keep them functional, but not enough to chase a vendetta."

"You leave them able to save people," Nia said slowly, "... and unable to come after us even if they know where we are.."

"That’s the whole plan."

"That’s very tidy..." Her head tilted. "And very moral. And very tactical... But, in a week, big guy, we’re four hundred kilometers past anything that fort would ever burn fuel on, and you know that better than anyone alive, because you spent a whole life out there past the edge of their map... So say the other part."

"What other part?"

"Nikki." Her green eyes went bright, mean, and delighted. "You’ve been standing in the snow for four minutes building me a very reasonable case for robbing a military base, and not once have you mentioned that you want the toys."

[...Busted.]

"I want the toys," I said, and nodded, and kept nodding.

"There it is~"

"I mean, look! Picture an Apache with a System Integration Token in it!" I said, and I could hear my own voice speeding up on me. "No pilot, no crew, no fatigue, a thirty-millimeter chain gun and a rack of Hellfires flying itself, permanently on station over whatever I point it at... Picture a second bird built for nothing on this earth but dropping fire on hordes. Picture an actual main battle tank parked between a horde and our people! Picture six armored trucks and a fuel bowser and every spare part that goes with them, all of it four hundred kilometers past the edge of a map where nobody ever gets to ask for any of it back."

"You’ve been designing this for about ninety seconds."

"I’ve been designing this since the radio said Harlan."

Nia laughed at that, one short bark of it, and then she shrugged and reached for the radio on her strap.

"Fine... Let’s call west and put it to the-"

"Wait-!" My hand grabbed her before I could stop myself. "They won’t agree."

And the rest of the words practically tumbled out like a waterfall.

"Leo will call it robbing rescuers. Kara will call it inviting a war we’re supposed to be walking away from. The kid sides with Leo, Mr. Norton votes with whoever’s saving lives... So... how about we make up some excuse. We tell them there’s an aircraft threat we have to neutralize before we can fly west safely, which is even true, and we-"

Nia rolled her eyes at me, slow and all the way around.

"Why even bother with that?" she said. "You’re out on the field, Nikki... Nobody can call democracy on you out here, and every one of them back at that camp knows it... You could basically just go do it and tell them after."

I opened my mouth and found nothing waiting in it.

Because she was right, and because I had already thought about it, and because thinking and hearing it out loud in somebody else’s mouth are two entirely different things.

She watched me not answer, and then she snorted.

"Do you know what made Angelica the kind of person that, even across a lifetime, we’re doing everything we can to rush straight to her so that she can lead us again?"

I looked at her and said nothing.

She looked right back, with her lips curling into a small smile.

"She never pulled shit like, ’let’s make up an excuse’..."

The wind came through the rebar behind us, and for a few seconds nothing else in the world moved except the snow, while I stood there with fourteen dead men around my feet and a plan in my head that I had already started dressing up for company, and I let all of it land on me without ducking.

Then I took a long breath and nodded, slowly.

"...You’re right," I said. "I’m still too green for this shit..."

Nia chuckled, low and warm, and bumped my shoulder with hers on her way past.

"Baby steps, big guy~ We pitch it straight, and if they vote it down, we’ll be very mature about it and complain for a week... Now go fix your bird."

So, with shoulders practically sagging off my shoulders, I walked out across the flattest stretch of the site to the Ghostbird, laid my palm against its cold grey flank, and pulled it out of the world, wind arriving in the space where it had been standing.

"System... Crafting..."