Originally written for Bob Schoeck's "Changed" universe after 911, on the Tramsformation Story Archive mailing list.
Ed.
Mechs are a pain in the ass.
Sorry to be so blunt, but it's the truth. Have YOU ever tried painting a ten meter tall, fusion powered, anthropomophic killing machine?
I didn't think so.
And don't EVEN get me started about the dust filters. Afganistan is just one huge dustbowl. Uhg.
I still remember waking up that morning, flipping on the TV, and staring, stunned, at the two smoking holes in the World Trade Center towers. Watching them collapse. I stumbled around the room for a bit,
then headed to the kitchen for a drink.
Along the way, I tripped over the helmet.
For a moment, I thought it was my old motorcycle helmet, a relic of days when I was young, stupid, and loved to risk my life trying to balance on a pair of seriously over-powered wheels. But that was still hanging on a peg in the living room, covered in the dust of years of disuse.
Picking the helmet up I realized the weight of it. HEAVY. Then I spotted the bulky suit, neatly folded, that had been lying beneath it.
Had to be a practical joke, I told myself. Neuro-helmets were a part of my role-playing game, NOT the real world.
Of course, an hour later, my sense of reality got a swift kick in the gonads when the dwarves showed up on live TV, digging into the rubble of the collapsed towers.
Being the idiot that I was, I just HAD to step outside and look around.
When you live on the Great Plains of the American West, a ten meter tall man-shaped robotic combat machine tends to stand out just a little bit.
It took a while to walk to New York, even at 100 kilometers per hour, and I'm afraid I attracted a little attention. Fortunately, a few other giant robots had already showed up in Manhatten, and someone with more than just half a brain had ordered the combat air patrols to avoid attacking anything that "looks like it comes from a cartoon."
THAT officer deserves a Silver Star for quick thinking in a crisis situation.
The newsies, however, were actually helpful. Because about halfway into Ohio, someone hacked into my external comm lines and said "Hi!"
Turns out a LOT of people had Changed. And not all of them were suitable for rescue operations. But they made perfect combat types.
And they were extending me an invite.
Didn't take long for them to find a place for me to stash the mech. As outraged as the nation was, there were still people so utterly self-centered, they looked upon the Changed as their personal ticket to whatever.. world rule, lots of cash, you name it. And of course the occasional goverment idiot who wanted to confiscate things in the name of "National Security". (ie, What's mine is mine, and what's yours is mine, chummer.. we're the goverment, we're ABOVE the law.)
Didn't take long for things to pull together, either. The internet was very useful for that. The date was set, a time agreed upon.
Some argued that we were taking the law into our own hands. One fellow in a particularly nasty looking powered suit pointed out that while the US military could _invade_ Afganistan, the Al Queda could just go to ground and vanish like the vermin they were. But we had mages, we had psis, and we had people who could ride the 'net like it was their own brain. It would be a hell of a lot harder to hide from us, he insisted.
And so we went.
"War... it's fan-tastic!"
- Miguel Ferrer, "Hot Shots, Part Deux"
The GI Joe fans were first in. They'd been changed into the best of the best, and it showed. The magic-users and the psychics pinpointed the locations, and the Joes ghosted in so quietly, the Delta Force would have broken down into tears of sheer envy.
The street samurai followed, just as quietly. They infiltrated the few cities Afganistan had, looking no different from any other piece of the human flotsam that drifted in and around Southeast Asia.
And the shapeshifters. THAT was a hoot, right there. At the moment of the attack one member of the Taliban was busy petting a friendly cat that had taken up residence outside his headquarters the day before. A heartbeat later, the cat had transformed and a female were-tiger was ripping out his throat with her teeth.
Unfortunately for the Taliban, their AK-47's weren't loaded with silver bullets.
Live and learn. Or die and don't learn, in his case.
Finally, with a roar, came those of us with truly HEAVY firepower.
The giant robots. The occasional Autobot. The mechas. And the superhero types.
One guy had a brilliant idea. He'd found himself with a spiffy set of spandex leotards and a pair of tank-fed super-soakers. Not particularly useful on the battlefield, you might think. But he was able to summon up almost ANYTHING that qualified as a liquid. So some wag with a twisted sense of humor suggested pig urine.
We'd all broken up laughing. Then, almost as one, thoughtful looks appeared...
Islamic fundamentalists were fanatical fighters. They had the advantage of knowing for 'certain' that, should they die in battle with the infidel, they'd immediately ascend to Paradise, Warriors for Allah Himself, to be praised and rewarded by him.
But only if they remained pure. If they happened to die while ritually unclean, they were screwed. The Q'uran _said_ so.
And wouldn't you know, drenching a follower of Islam in pig urine and pig blood qualified as making them unclean. If they died before they could cleanse themselves, they'd never get to Paradise.
Once we spread the word of what happened to be in those pressurized tanks, you wouldn't BELIEVE how fast some of them ran when they saw Mr. Super Soaker take to the field.
Others, of course, merely fought all the harder. Until they were soaked, that is. Then they BEGGED to be spared for just long enough to clean themselves according to the laws of the Q'uran.
Some people accused us of mental cruelty. That what we were doing qualified as "cruel and unusual punishment", forbidden by the Eighth Amendment to the American Constituion.
Last time I checked, the Al Queda weren't American citizens.
It wasn't all beer and skittles. War never is. People who've never seen it never seem to understand that.
They think it's like the movies.
They're fools.
Two companies of Taliban infantry that had gone to ground were trying to make it to the Pakistani border, in hopes of vanishing into the general population, thinking that they'd fight again another day.
They thought they had a chance because they'd grabbed some Western reporters, holding them hostage for our 'good behavior'. Threatening to mutilate the hostages if we were so much as even spotted, and to kill them if we tried to attack.
I was the only one in position. Just me, and my mech. I felt cold inside. If any of the mages or psychics had been nearby, we might have been able to pull off a rescue with no casualties. As it was, if I tried to stop them, people would die.
I didn't have a choice.
I positioned myself, made certain all weapons were up and ready.
Then, I remembered something, from another war and another time.
I couldn't give myself away, that would make what I was about to do worse than useless. But perhaps I could send a message to the hostages and hope they'd understand and forgive me.
I brought up the tactical display, highlighted a point on the map where they'd be within range of my weapons, and tied the blip into the external speakers. Then I waited.
I could see them approaching on the ranged sensors, a rag-tag collection of battered trucks and autos stolen from everywhere, with the hostages tied and gagged in a pickup in the middle of the pathetic little convoy.
As the last vehicle passed the deadline I'd marked, the speakers began to wail, and I opened fire.
And I prayed for the sake of my soul that the hostages would understand.
All our times have come Here but now they're gone Seasons don't fear the reaper Nor do the wind, the sun or the rain we can be like they are Come on baby don't fear the reaper...
Eight hostages.
Three survived.
Four were intact enough to be raised once a priest of some sort reached them. A priestess of Hestia who'd been a nurse in her previous life was on the ground and going through the needed ceremonies.
One wasn't coming back. Turns out the Taliban could be just as hypocritical as any Westerner. One of them suffered from loose lips and had bragged to the hostages that he'd had been watching televison on the sly from a satellite dish. (He'd excused it to his superiors as "gathering information on the enemy.") He'd seen the resurrections in New York, and decided on his own to do something about it. His vest had been packed with a mixture of white phosphorus, magnesium,
C-4, and roofing nails.
When I attacked the convoy, he'd grabbed one of the hostages,
screamed "Allah is great!", and pulled the cord.
The fireball hadn't left enough of either of them to bury, let alone resurrect.
Their leader had survived. One of a very few, as a laser with a beam diameter of 40 cm tended to vaporize most of whatever it hit. He'd been ejected from his stolen Japanese 4WD when it had struck another vehicle and flipped over. His arm was shattered, and blood dripped through the rag tied around it as a sling. The priestess wanted to heal him too, but I stopped her.
I didn't... no, I _couldn't_ recognize my own voice when I ordered her to tend to the hostages.
I took a captured AK-47 and several unfired magazines, placing them in the hand of my mech before climbing back aboard and turning in the leader's direction. Putting myself between him and the hostages I dropped the AK at his feet.
"Run. Now. Or I'll simply step on you."
He shook his head gingerly, wincing from the pain.
"Run. Or die. You have five minutes headstart."
Then I hunted him down like a rabid dog. He could actually see the Pakistani border and thought he'd escaped. That's when I appeared behind him.
When I was done, the Pakistani border guards were bent over their rifles, vomiting. And I made damn certain that, like the hostage he'd taken, there wasn't enough left of him for any priest to resurrect.
Then I pissed on the ashes.
The backup team that had arrived with the priestess didn't say a word when I returned.
After that I found I'd began a legend. One of the mages told me that a story was spreading by word of mouth among the Afghans, a story of a bloody machine that sang of fire and darkness as it avenged the innocent dead.
The mage was a decent person at heart. I couldn't blame him for looking at me with some disgust when I smiled grimly. He didn't understand.
Fear is a weapon.
Frank Castle understood that. As did Bruce Wayne and Lamont Cranston. John Reid knew it by heart.
So I used it as the weapon it was. The terrorists sought to rule with terror. They chose to live superstitious cowardly lives. I merely turned their terror back upon them.
I asked one of the Changed with a load of chrome in his head to link my mech to the net. I downloaded the appropriate songs, then I went hunting.
You're seeing now a veteran of a thousand psychic wars:
I've been living on the edge so long,
where the winds of Limbo roar.
And I'm young enough to look at,
And far too old to see-all the scars are on the inside.
I'm not sure that there's anything left of me.
"Injustice is relatively easy to bear; what stings is justice."
- H. L. Mencken.
It worked. I'm not proud of what I did. I'll never be proud of it. But looking at young Afghani children playing football in the streets, seeing women going to school unafraid, watching men walking to work without an AK-47 over one shoulder and a grim, haunted look on their faces...
That made it worthwhile.
Some prices are worth paying.
And it wasn't all grim, either. Sometimes it was beautiful, and other times funny to the point of tears of laughter.
One case happened when a priest, a mage and a shaman all got together, trying to relax over a few beers. One thing lead to another, and nearly seventy-two hours later they stumbled out of the bar with a killer hang-over and an idea that changed everything.
The author H. Beam Piper, in describing a character in one of his novels, said of him that "the law is my religion, and my catechism is to apply it with fairness and impartiality." Turns out the mage was a fan of Piper's works, and in his rather buzzed state, related portions of the novel to the priest and the shaman.
The conclusion the three mildly drunken friends came to was: "Why not?"
The spell they cast combined everything they knew from three differing fields of magic, and they tied it to the very soul of the land itself.
And when they were done, they'd managed to manifest Justice.
Not a statue. Not a concept. Justice herself.
And ANY Afghan who accepted the position of a judge would have to answer to her, personally.
That's when the three got VERY sober.
In the short run it was pretty damned scary. In the long run?
Even scarier. But perhaps the best thing that could ever have happened.
I'd never met a goddess, and I really didn't want to. But there she was, and the law was her religion, the courts her temples, and every judge in Afghanistan her priests. I still recall the first time someone actually tried to lie under oath after she came into existance.
Ouch. Nasty. (I never did learn if they found all the pieces of that poor, sorry bastard. Seems the sword Justice carried wasn't _entirely_ symbolic.)
But it worked. And did more than anything else to turn what had been a collection of fragmented tribes into a nation. They no longer had to worry if a judge was going to make his rulings on the basis of tribal loyalty rather than true justice.
Of course, not everyone was HAPPY about getting true, impartial and even-handed justice. Most of us don't REALLY want justice, we want what we THINK is justice.. namely, whatever gives us a leg up and throws a stumbling block into the paths of our rivals/enemies. We just don't want to admit that to ourselves.
And those who wanted to see the Sharia reimposed were furious at the thought that an entirely secular form of justice could do what they'd done, and do it better, with more honesty. Though that's what _really_ stung them.. the honesty bit.
Served them right.
Someone with a nasty sense of humor carved a quote from Abe Lincoln over the first courthouse rebuilt in Kabul, translated into all the languages of Afghanistan.
"Let reverence for the laws be breathed by every American mother to the lisping babe that prattles on her lap. Let it be taught in schools, in seminaries, and in colleges. Let it be written in primers, spelling books, and in almanacs. Let it be preached from the pulpit, proclaimed in legislative halls, and enforced in the courts of justice. And, in short, let it become the political religion of the nation."
It was... amusing... to watch the more fanatically religious types read that, then stalk off, their faces livid, their necks rigid with rage.
Every summer when it rains, I smell the jungle, I hear the planes. I can't tell no one I feel ashamed. Afraid someday I'll go insane.
"Dreamers may die, but the Dream is eternal..."