The War Dogs Trilogy

Sentient machines work, fight, and die in interstellar exploration and conflict for the benefit of their owners—the competing mining corporations of Earth. But sent over hundreds of light-years, commands are late to arrive and often hard to enforce. The machines must make their own decisions, and make them stick.

With this new found autonomy come new questions about their masters. The robots want answers. The companies would rather see them dead.

They’ve died for the companies more times than they can remember. Now they must fight to live for themselves.

CHAPTER ONE Back in the Day

Carlos the Terrorist did not expect to die that day. The bombing was heavy now, and close, but he thought his location safe. Leaky pipework dripping with obscure post-industrial feedstock products riddled the ruined nanofacturing plant at Tilbury. Watchdog machines roved its basement corridors, pouncing on anything that moved—a fallen polystyrene tile, a draught-blown paper cone from a dried-out water-cooler—with the mindless malice of kittens chasing flies. Ten metres of rock, steel and concrete lay between the ceiling above his head and the sunlight where the rubble bounced.

He lolled on a reclining chair and with closed eyes watched the battle. His viewpoint was a thousand metres above where he lay. With empty hands he marshalled his forces and struck his blows.

Incoming—

Something he glimpsed as a black stone hurtled towards him. With a fist-clench faster than reflex he hurled a handful of smart munitions at it.

The tiny missiles missed.

Carlos twisted, and threw again. On target this time. The black incoming object became a flare of white that faded as his camera drones stepped down their inputs, correcting for the flash like irises contracting. The small missiles that had missed a moment earlier now showered mid-air sparks and puffs of smoke a kilometre away.

From his virtual vantage Carlos felt and saw like a monster in a Japanese disaster movie, straddling the Thames and punching out. Smoke rose from a score of points on the London skyline. Drone swarms darkened the day. Carlos’s combat drones engaged the enemy’s in buzzing dogfights. Ionised air crackled around his imagined monstrous body in sudden searing beams along which, milliseconds later, lightning bolts fizzed and struck. Tactical updates flickered across his sight.

Higher above, the heavy hardware—helicopters, fighter jets and hovering aerial drone platforms—loitered on station and now and then called down their ordnance with casual precision. Higher still, in low Earth orbit, fleets of tumbling battle-sats jockeyed and jousted, spearing with laser bursts that left their batteries drained and their signals dead.

Swarms of camera drones blipped fragmented views to millimetre-scale camouflaged receiver beads littered in thousands across the contested ground. From these, through proxies, firewalls, relays and feints the images and messages flashed, converging to an onsite router whose radio waves tickled the spike, a metal stud in the back of Carlos’s skull. That occipital implant’s tip feathered to a fractal array of neural interfaces that worked their molecular magic to integrate the view straight to his visual cortex, and to process and transmit the motor impulses that flickered from fingers sheathed in skin-soft plastic gloves veined with feedback sensors to the fighter drones and malware servers. It was the new way of war, back in the day.

The closest hot skirmish was down on Carlos’s right. In Dagenham, tank units of the London Metropolitan Police battled robotic land-crawlers suborned by one or more of the enemy’s basement warriors. Like a thundercloud on the horizon tensing the air, an awareness of the strategic situation loomed at the back of Carlos’s mind.

Executive summary: looking good for his side, bad for the enemy.

But only for the moment.

The enemy—the Reaction, the Rack, the Rax—had at last provoked a response from the serious players. Government forces on three continents were now smacking down hard. Carlos’s side—the Acceleration, the Axle, the Ax—had taken this turn of circumstance as an oblique invitation to collaborate with these governments against the common foe. Certain state forces had reciprocated. The arrangement was less an alliance than a mutual offer with a known expiry date. There were no illusions. Everyone who mattered had studied the same insurgency and counter-insurgency textbooks.

In today’s fight Carlos had a designated handler, a deep-state operative who called him-, her- or itself Innovator, and who (to personalise it, as Carlos did, for politeness and the sake of argument) now and then murmured suggestions that made their way to Carlos’s hearing via a warily accepted hack in the spike that someday soon he really would have to do something about.

Carlos stood above Greenhithe. He sighted along a virtual outstretched arm and upraised thumb at a Rax hellfire drone above Purfleet, and made his throw. An air-to-air missile streaked from behind his POV towards the enemy fighter. It left a corkscrew trail of evasive manoeuvres and delivered a viscerally satisfying flash and a shower of blazing debris when it hit.

“Nice one,” said Innovator, in an admiring tone and feminine voice.

Somebody in GCHQ had been fine-tuning the psychology, Carlos reckoned.

“Uh-huh,” he grunted, looking around in a frenzy of target acquisition and not needing the distraction. He sighted again, this time at a tracked vehicle clambering from the river into the Rainham marshes, and threw again. Flash and splash.

“Very neat,” said Innovator, still admiring but with a grudging undertone. “But… we have a bigger job for you. Urgent. Upriver.”

“Oh yes?”

“Jaunt your POV ten klicks forward, now!”

The sudden sharper tone jolted Carlos into compliance. With a convulsive twitch of the cheek and a kick of his right leg he shifted his viewpoint to a camera drone array, 9.7 kilometres to the west. What felt like a single stride of his gigantic body image took him to the stubby runways of London City Airport, face-to-face with Docklands. A gleaming cluster of spires of glass. From emergency exits, office workers streamed like black and white ants. Anyone left in the towers would be hardcore Rax. The place was notorious.

“What now?” Carlos asked.

“That plane on approach,” said Innovator. It flagged up a dot above central London. “Take it down.”

Carlos read off the flight number. “Shanghai Airlines Cargo? That’s civilian!”

“It’s chartered to the Kong, bringing in aid to the Rax. We’ve cleared the hit with Beijing through back-channels, they’re cheering us on. Take it down.”

Carlos had one high-value asset not yet in play, a stealthed drone platform with a heavy-duty air-to-air missile. A quick survey showed him three others like it in the sky, all RAF.

“Do it yourselves,” he said.

“No time. Nothing available.”

This was a lie. Carlos suspected Innovator knew he knew.

It was all about diplomacy and deniability: shooting down a Chinese civilian jet, even a cargo one and suborned to China’s version of the Rax, was unlikely to sit well in Beijing. The Chinese government might have given a covert go-ahead, but in public their response would have to be stern. How convenient for the crime to be committed by a non-state actor! Especially as the Axle was the next on every government’s list to suppress…

The plane’s descent continued, fast and steep. Carlos ran calculations.

“The only way I can take the shot is right over Docklands. The collateral will be fucking atrocious.”

“That,” said Innovator grimly, “is the general idea.”

Carlos prepped the platform, then balked again. “No.”

“You must!” Innovator’s voice became a shrill gabble in his head. “This is ethically acceptable on all parameters utilitarian consequential deontological just war theoretical and…”

So Innovator was an AI after all. That figured.

Shells were falling directly above him now, blasting the ruined refinery yet further and sending shockwaves through its underground levels. Carlos could feel the thuds of the incoming fire through his own real body, in that buried basement miles back behind his POV. He could vividly imagine some pasty-faced banker running military code through a screen of financials, directing the artillery from one of the towers right in front of him. The aircraft was now more than a dot. Flaps dug in to screaming air. The undercarriage lowered. If he’d zoomed, Carlos could have seen the faces in the cockpit.

“No,” he said.

“You must,” Innovator insisted.

“Do your own dirty work.”

“Like yours hasn’t been?” The machine’s voice was now sardonic. “Well, not to worry. We can do our own dirty work if we have to.”

From behind Carlos’s virtual shoulder a rocket streaked. His gaze followed it all the way to the jet.

It was as if Docklands had blown up in his face. Carlos reeled back, jaunting his POV sharply to the east. The aircraft hadn’t just been blown up. Its cargo had blown up too. One tower was already down. A dozen others were on fire. The smoke blocked his view of the rest of London. He’d expected collateral damage, reckoned it in the balance, but this weight of destruction was off the scale. If there was any glass or skin unbroken in Docklands, Carlos hadn’t the time or the heart to look for it.

“You didn’t tell me the aid was ordnance!” His protest sounded feeble even to himself.

“We took your understanding of that for granted,” said Innovator. “You have permission to stand down now.”

“I’ll stand down when I want,” said Carlos. “I’m not one of your soldiers.”

“Damn right you’re not one of our soldiers. You’re a terrorist under investigation for a war crime. I would advise you to surrender to the nearest available—”

“What!”

“Sorry,” said Innovator, sounding genuinely regretful. “We’re pulling the plug on you now. Bye, and all that.”

“You can’t fucking do that.”

Carlos didn’t mean he thought them incapable of such perfidy. He meant he didn’t think they had the software capability to pull it off.

They did.

The next thing he knew his POV was right back behind his eyes, back in the refinery basement. He blinked hard. The spike was still active, but no longer pulling down remote data. He clenched a fist. The spike wasn’t sending anything either. He was out of the battle and hors de combat.

Oh well. He sighed, opened his eyes with some difficulty—his long-closed eyelids were sticky—and sat up. His mouth was parched. He reached for the can of cola on the floor beside the recliner, and gulped. His hand shook as he put the drained can down on the frayed sisal matting. A shell exploded on the ground directly above him, the closest yet. Carlos guessed the army or police artillery were adding their more precise targeting to the ongoing bombardment from the Rax. Another deep breath brought a faint trace of his own sour stink on the stuffy air. He’d been in this small room for days—how many he couldn’t be sure without checking, but he guessed almost a week. Not all the invisible toil of his clothes’ molecular machinery could keep unwashed skin clean that long.

Another thump overhead. The whole room shook. Sinister cracking noises followed, then a hiss. Carlos began to think of fleeing to a deeper level. He reached for his emergency backpack of kit and supplies. The ceiling fell on him. Carlos struggled under an I-beam and a shower of fractured concrete. He couldn’t move any of it. The hiss became a torrential roar. White vapour filled the room, freezing all it touched. Carlos’s eyes frosted over. His last breath was so unbearably cold it cracked his throat. He choked on frothing blood. After a few seconds of convulsive reflex thrashing, he lost consciousness. Brain death followed within minutes.

The soldiers of the Simulant Operations Programme are mankind’s elite warriors. Veterans of a thousand battles across a hundred worlds, they undertake suicidal missions to protect humanity from the insidious Krell Empire and the mysterious machine race known as the Shard.

Lieutenant Keira Jenkins is an experienced simulant operative and leader of the Jackals, a team of raw recruits keen to taste battle. They soon get their chance when the Black Spiral terrorist network seizes control of a space station.

Yet no amount of training could have prepared the Jackals for the deadly conspiracy they soon find themselves drawn into—a conspiracy that is set to spark a furious new war across the galaxy.

^{CHAPTER ONE} JACKALS AT BAY

I collapsed into the cot, panting hard, trying to catch my breath. A sheen of hot, musky sweat – already cooling – had formed across my skin.

“Third time’s a charm, eh?” Riggs said.

“You’re getting better at it, is all I’ll say.”

Riggs tried to hug me from behind as though we were actual lovers. His body was warm and muscled, but I shrugged him off. We were just letting off steam before a drop, doing what needed to be done. There was no point in dressing it up

“Watch yourself,” I said. “You need to be out of here in ten minutes.”

“How do you handle this?” Riggs asked. He spoke Standard with an accented twang, being from Tau Ceti V, a descendant of North American colonists who had, generations back, claimed the planet as their own. “The waiting feels worse than the mission.”

“It’s your first combat operation,” I said. “You’re bound to feel a little nervous.”

“Do you remember your first mission?”

“Yeah,” I said, “but only just. It was a long time ago.”

He paused, as though thinking this through, then asked, “Does it get any easier?”

“The hours before the drop are always the worst,” I said. “It’s best just not to think about it.”

The waiting was well recognised as the worst part of any mission. I didn’t want to go into it with Riggs, but believe me when I say that I’ve tried almost every technique in the book.

It basically boils down to two options.

Option One: Find a dark corner somewhere and sit it out. Even the smaller strikeships that the Alliance relies upon have private areas, away from prying eyes, away from the rest of your squad or the ship’s crew. If you’re determined, you’ll find somewhere private enough and quiet enough to sit it out alone. But few troopers that I’ve known take this approach, because it rarely works. The Gaia-lovers seem to prefer this method; but then again, they’re often fond of self-introspection, and that isn’t me. Option One leads to anxiety, depression and mental breakdown. There aren’t many soldiers who want to fill the hours before death – even if it is only simulated – with soul-searching. Time slows to a trickle. Psychological time-dilation, or something like it. There’s no drug that can touch that anxiety.

Riggs was a Gaia Cultist, for his sins, but I didn’t think that explaining Option One was going to help him. No, Riggs wasn’t an Option One sort of guy.

Option Two: Find something to fill the time. Exactly what you do is your choice; pretty much anything that’ll take your mind off the job will suffice. This is what most troopers do. My personal preference – and I accept that it isn’t for everyone – is hard physical labour. Anything that really gets the blood flowing is rigorous enough to shut down the neural pathways.

Which led to my current circumstances. An old friend once taught me that the best exercise in the universe is that which you get between the sheets. So, in the hours before we made the drop to Daktar Outpost, I screwed Corporal Daneb Riggs’ brains out. Not literally, you understand, because we were in our own bodies. I’m screwed up, or so the psychtechs tell me, but I’m not that twisted.

“Where’d you get that?” Riggs asked me, probing the flesh of my left flank. His voice was still dopey as a result of post-coital hormones. “The scar, I mean.”

I laid on my back, beside Riggs, and looked down at the white welt to the left of my stomach. Although the flesh-graft had taken well enough, the injury was still obvious: unless I paid a skintech for a patch, it always would. There seemed little point in bothering with cosmetics while I was still a line trooper. Well-healed scars lined my stomach and chest; nothing to complain about, but reminders nonetheless. My body was a roadmap of my military service.

“Never you mind,” I said. “It happened a long time ago.” I pushed Riggs’ hand away, irritated. “And I thought I made it clear that there would be no talking afterwards. That term of the arrangement is non-negotiable.”

Riggs got like this after a session. He got chatty, and he got annoying. But as far as I was concerned, his job was done, and I was already feeling detachment from him. Almost as soon as the act was over, I started to feel jumpy again; felt my eyes unconsciously darting to my wrist-comp. The tiny cabin – stinking of sweat and sex – had started to press in around me.

I untangled myself from the bedsheets that were pooled at the foot of the cot. Pulled on a tanktop and walked to the view-port in the bulkhead. There was nothing to see out there except another anonymous sector of deep-space. We were in what had once been known as the Quarantine Zone; that vast ranch of deep-space that was the divide between us and the Krell Empire. A holo-display above the port read 1:57:03 UNTIL DROP. Less than two hours until we reached the assault point. Right now, the UAS Bainbridge was slowing down – her enormous sublight engines ensuring that when we reached the appointed coordinates, we would be travelling at just the right velocity. The starship’s inertial damper field meant that I would never be able to physically feel the deceleration, but the mental weight was another matter.

“Get dressed,” I said, matter-of-factly. “We’ve got work to do.”

I tugged on the rest of my duty fatigues, pressed down the various holo-tabs on my uniform tunic. The identifier there read “210”. Those numbers made me a long-termer of the Simulant Operations Programme – sufferer of an effective two hundred and ten simulated deaths.

“I want you down on the prep deck, overseeing simulant loading,” I said, dropping into command-mode.

“The Jackals are primed and ready to drop,” Riggs said. “The lifer is marking the suits, and I ordered Private Feng to check on the ammunition loads –”

“Feng’s no good at that,” I said. “You know that he can’t be trusted.”

“‘Trusted’?”

“I didn’t mean it like that,” I corrected. “Just get dressed.”

Riggs detected the change in my voice; he’d be an idiot not to. While he wasn’t exactly the sharpest tool in the box, neither was he a fool.

“Affirmative,” he said.

I watched as he put on his uniform. Riggs was tall and well-built; his chest a wall of muscle, neck almost as wide as my waist. Hair dark and short, nicely messy in a way that skirted military protocol. The tattoo of a winged planet on his left bicep indicated that he was a former Off-World Marine aviator, while the blue-and-green globe on his right marked him as a paid-up Gaia Cultist. The data-ports on his chest, shoulders and neck stood out against his tanned skin, the flesh around them still raised. He looked new, and he looked young. Riggs hadn’t yet been spat out by the war machine.

“So we’re being deployed against the Black Spiral?” he asked, velcroing his tunic in place. The holo-identifier on his chest flashed “10”; and sickeningly enough, Riggs was the most experienced trooper on my team. “That’s the scuttlebutt.”

“Maybe,” I said. “That’s likely.” I knew very little about the next operation, because that was how Captain Heinrich – the Bainbridge’s senior officer – liked to keep things. “It’s need to know.”

“And you don’t need to know,” Riggs said, nodding to himself. “Heinrich is such an asshole.”

“Talk like that’ll get you reprimanded, Corporal.” I snapped my wrist-computer into place, the vambrace closing around my left wrist. “Same arrangement as before. Don’t let the rest of the team know.”

Riggs grinned. “So long as you don’t either –”

The cabin lights dipped. Something clunked inside the ship. At about the same time, my wrist-comp chimed with an incoming priority communication: an officers-only alert.

EARLY DROP, it said.

The wrist-comp’s small screen activated, and a head-and-shoulders image appeared there. A young woman with ginger hair pulled back from a heavily freckled face. Early twenties, with anxiety-filled eyes. She leaned close into the camera at her end of the connection. Sergeant Zoe Campbell, more commonly known as Zero.

“Lieutenant, ma’am,” she babbled. “Do you copy?”

“I copy,” I said.

“Where have you been? I’ve been trying to reach you for the last thirty minutes. Your communicator was off. I tried your cube, but that was set to private. I guess that I could’ve sent someone down there, but I know how you get before a drop and –”

“Whoa, whoa. Calm down, Zero. What’s happening?”

Zero grimaced. “Captain Heinrich has authorised immediate military action on Daktar Outpost.”

Zero was the squad’s handler. She was already in the Sim Ops bay, and the image behind her showed a bank of operational simulator-tanks, assorted science officers tending them. It looked like the op was well underway rather than just commencing.

“Is Heinrich calling a briefing?” I asked, hustling Riggs to finish getting dressed, trying to keep him out of view of the wrist-comp’s cam. I needed him gone from the room, pronto.

Zero shook her head. “Captain Heinrich says there isn’t time. He’s distributed a mission plan instead. I really should’ve sent someone down to fetch you…”

“Never mind about that now,” I said. Talking over her was often the only way to deal with Zero’s constant state of anxiety. “What’s our tactical situation? Why the early drop?”

At that moment, a nasal siren sounded throughout the Bainbridge’s decks. Somewhere in the bowels of the ship, the engines were cutting, the gravity field fluctuating just a little to compensate.

The ship’s AI began a looped message: “This is a general alert. All operators must immediately report to the Simulant Operations Centre. This is a general alert…”

I could already hear boots on deck around me, as the sixty qualified operators made haste to the Science Deck. My data-ports – those bio-mechanical connections that would allow me to make transition into my simulant – were beginning to throb.

“You’d better get down here and skin up,” Zero said, nodding at the simulator behind her. “Don’t want to be late.” Added: “Again…”

“I’m on it,” I said, planting my feet in my boots. “Hold the fort.”

Zero started to say something else, but before she could question me any further I terminated the communication.

“Game time, Corporal,” I said to Riggs. “Look alive.”

Dressed now, Riggs nodded and made for the hatch. We had this down to a T: if we left my quarters separately, it minimised the prospect of anyone realising what was happening between us.

“You’re beautiful,” he said. “You do know that, right?”

“You know that was the last time,” I said, firmly.

“You said that last time…”

“Well this time I mean it, kemo sabe.”

Riggs nodded, but that idiot grin remained plastered across his face. “See you down there, Jenkins,” he said.

Here we go again, I thought. New team. New threat. Same shit.