He set his coffee tube on a rock and jogged to the top of the ridge. He turned back when he heard the clatter and cursed softly. Whatever was making the ground shake had vibrated the tube, roughly stenciled with ‘Best Captain Ever,’ off the top of the rock. The clatter it made rolling downhill was quickly drowned out by the thrumming roar on the other side.

The view from the summit was gorgeous. The day was clear and cool, the Tiamatan sky just a slightly more turquoise shade of blue than Earth’s. Endless rows of corn lifted their leaves to the yellow sun. The pastoral scene could have been a Dutch Master’s painting…only with a savage gash ripped down the canvas by the tanks trampling the corn. He guessed there were about forty of them.

How was this possible? Where did they get the resources, how did they build them out of sight, what…

The Captain kicked himself, just for a second. There would be time for self-recrimination later. A couple rapid half-winks of his left eye brought up a display on his contact lens. He stared at a green dot to open a channel to the whole squad.

“Weapons, we need mechanicals downshaft, now. Comms, why didn’t I see this coming? And yes, since I’m Intel, I’m kicking myself, too.”

“No excuse, sir,” Comms said automatically. “But it looks like a Class 1 Felony to me.” That it did – Interfering with Military Systems was the only way the colonists could conceal the creation of a tank army. How stupid did they have to be, to think this would succeed?

“Engineering, what have you got for me?”

“I can have Woodpeckers for you in five minutes. Waiting for acknowledgement from the JIT-fac on the mechanicals.”

The Captain twitched his right eyelid, zooming his contacts in tight on the lead tank. Another twitch flipped his vision to infrared. “Medical, the tanks are human-driven, I repeat, human-driven. We are looking at a lot of casualties in about six minutes. Weapons, I need those mechanicals.”

“Bad news, Captain. We’ve lost contact with the JIT-fac. With the whole moonbase, in fact. And the stroidfarm ship.”

“Comms?”

“Station tech confirms that ship just fell for moonbase, hard. We won’t be getting any support from upstairs.”

“Shit.” This wasn’t just a crazed riot. This had been a well planned and, so far, well executed military action.

“Their target appears to be the mine, sir,” Comms says.

“Understood.” The colonists had been, well, vocal would be the diplomatic word, about their burning need for more Kubrium. They couldn’t expand without more energy. The controls on growth were usually the first restrictions that new colonies tried to break. But growth had to be controlled on alien-occupied planets. Mistakes could not be repeated.

It was simple. If a planet’s new residents succumbed to Kochism and just took what they wanted, the whole colonial effort could fail. This wasn’t the first time a colony had attempted a bit of overreach, but it was definitely the most dramatic.

“Engineering, I need defense multiplication around that mine, pronto.”

“Roger, unfolding now.”

The Captain thought about his options. Normally he could have the just-in-time factory on the moon build him some military hardware, and get it dropped planetside – “calling in The Wrath,” in military parlance. All-terrain warbots, armed drones, and enough firepower to at least put down a small insurrection.

The loss of the factory wouldn’t have been the worst thing, by itself. The stroidfarm ship could have expended large amounts of energy to quickly create a new, smaller JIT-fac. But that was gone, too.

Scarcity, always the Law of Scarcity, governing everything, including how big a robot army you could create “just in case.” Which was almost no robot army at all. Everything was precious and limited – metal, energy, firepower. Robot armies were to be built only when the need arose, and recycled when the need was over. It was just not cost-effective to create them where they’d never be used. All he had at his disposal were the planetside emergency systems.

“Woodpeckers launched, sir. I got three hundred fabbed before the system overheated.”

A flock of silver birds flew just over the Captain’s head, the gust of air they created sucking at his field cap. They banked as one, then split into smaller flocks, each flock taking one of the lead tanks. That is, the ones that didn’t drop dead, their circuits fried by the min-EMP guns. The survivors landed, ten to a tank, and started pecking at the metal plating with their diamond-sharp beaks.

“Data coming in,” Engineering reported as the woodpeckers analyzed what they were destroying. “Composition is local, repeat local. Felony Class 1 Biosphere Interference, Illegal Mining and Manufacture, confirmed.”

“Comm, send a pouch to 6C and notify, impending transports to Eden One, number TBD.” Whoever the leaders of this action were, the verdict was already in – transportation for life to the ill-named Eden One.

“Roger that. Dinosaur lunch order transmitted.”

“Hope they like giant spiders,” Engineering added. “And man-eating snakes.”

The Captain grinned. “That’s enough,” he said, resetting his demeanor. “Focus, please.”

His contacts dilated to zoom in on the action. He watched one tank as the woodpeckers detected the engine’s heat source and began pecking en masse in one spot. They transmitted the intel to the other flocks, who immediately shifted to the same spot on their targets.

“Those tanks’ autoguns can’t reach that spot,” Engineering noted. “Piss poor planning on someone’s part.”

“Weapons, what do you have for me?”

“Comms and I are in position with small arms, sir.”

“You are authorized to engage with bomblets,” he said. They all knew what had to happen next.

Sure enough, the tank crews started to open their hatches, sticking their arms out to fire their hand weapons at the woodpeckers. Some of them quickly lost those arms to woodpeckers who broke off from the main attack. Those who didn’t close their hatches quickly enough after that faced a worse fate, as Weapons and Comms sighted their weapons and fired self-guided “bomb bullets” down into the crew compartments of every other tank.

The woodpeckers flew off these tanks just as the bullets were fired, most of them reaching safety before the explosive rounds turned their targets into giant grenades.

Scarcity, always scarcity. Blow up every other tank with bomblets, and let the explosions take out the tanks in the middle.

“That’s some of them, Cap, but there’s another two dozen tanks that veered off towards the mines.”

“Cyberaptors,” Comms warned. “Coming at you, Captain. And us. And Engineering. And Medical, the stupid fucks. Class 1 Felony recorded, Military Repurposing of Civilian Equipment. Oh yeah. And now that we’re under attack, add to the pile Class 1 Felony, Use of Force against Legitimate Forces.”

As it was, or had been, a normal day, the Captain was unarmored. Men in armor in a nation’s streets were the enemy, the conqueror. The whole point of FJ’s alien interaction mission was to make humans look, well, human to the natives. To be seen as neighbors, not as invaders. His uni had some defenses built in, but none that would be much use against a screaming band of metal predators.

“Armor is thirty seconds out, Captain,” Weapons said, anticipating his next question. The box that held his armor would be sprinting towards him on its mechanical legs.

Thirty seconds was enough time for the birds of prey to take him out. The cyberaptors were built for agricultural use. They were supposed to hunt food for the colony, maintain imported animal population levels (the history of rabbits in Australia was hammered into every colonist’s brain during indoc), and scare scavengers away from crops.

Some genius had reprogrammed them, obviously. And there was some tech genius involved in all this, clearly. Scarcity, always scarcity – military and agritech systems had to be similar, with many interchangeable parts, because all tech had to be repurposable.

He’d get no fire support from his sergeants. They’d be busy doing the same thing he was. Hand guns wouldn’t help. Bullets could attack but not defend, and there were too many of them.

He drew his carbobsid knife, the latest and greatest Fairbairn-Sykes model. He flicked it down sharply, snapping its short blade out to sword length. He hunched down on one knee, making himself a low, small target, but still in a stance in which he could pivot.

“All units, fall back,” he ordered. “Engineering, let them have the mine, but leave the defenses running. See if you can set them to attract these birds.” His hope was that they’d have time to regroup and defend the city. If the colonists’ goal was just the mine, they could have it…for now.

“Roger that,” Engineering said breathlessly, clearly running for cover from his own raptor attack.

The Captain smiled. There was something about moments like this, when the cerebral part of the battle was done, when the exhilaration of a warrior in combat took over – where, finally, he could revert to the kind of soldier he’d revered all his life.

Fallschirmjäger
was the official title of the FJ forces, the legacy of Germany’s prominent membership in the surviving nations after the Collapse. But at moments like this, it was the English language nickname they’d given themselves that was more apt – “Fuckin’ Jedi.”

The birds attacked. Their advantage was numbers and speed; his advantage was a blade that could slice through their component materials like butter. If he kept low, and kept swinging his weapon over his head fast enough, they would have as much chance as a flock of geese had against a jet engine.

They were fast, though, and some evil genius in the colony had programmed them to adapt. He couldn’t parry them all, and he felt the sharp stings as their titanium talons raked his back and shoulders through his uniform. The uni was proof against most ordinary penetration, but not against this. He couldn’t get low enough to keep them all from getting under his swing radius, and they started pecking at his legs. Tiny constellations of blood started to appear on the tan fabric where it clung to his thighs.

He could feel the cool breeze that the cyberaptors stirred up, and smelled the faint scent of roasting corn from the burning fields. He could hear the motors whirring in his attackers, the crackling sound of electronics sparking as his blade cut through them. If these were the last moments of his life, he’d never felt so alive as he did right now.

Going down fighting,
he thought with irrational exuberance. He looked about 35 years old, a conscious decision on his part not to look too young and inexperienced. He’d had seven Lazarex treatments now, and at the age of 88, death wasn’t scary anymore. Boredom was scary, inactivity was scary…and retirement, well, the very idea filled him with horror.

Then a truly searing pain hit him in the head. A cyberaptor had made it past his blade, had dug its talons into his scalp. He collapsed, darkness taking him, and his last thought was,
it was a hell of a good run.

BOOK: Scarcity (Special Forces: FJ One Book 1)

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