Chapter Fifty-Four - It's fun to play with the P.M.C.

"As a soldier you need to be aware that you are NOT a mercenary. You are a part of a greater fighting force whose goals are to defend the people and integrity of your nation. You are a fighter for justice, not mere credits."

--US3 Army Propaganda, 2042

***

I hugged my bike close, the rumble of its engine sending a bassy vibration through me, which was nice. I was still feeling fresh and tingly from my shower, but the flight was giving me time to recentre myself.

What was coming up was probably not going to be fun and games.

I got a warning from the city's automated driving systems as I shot past the exterior wall of the city. Myalis calmed them down for me, probably told whatever automated AA they had to chill out as well.

Flying past the security of the wall wasn't safe, but I figured it wasn't all that dangerous either. Not as long as I was moving quick and staying far off the ground. Anything that could attack me would have to come from the air, and so close to the city it would have been gunned down a while ago.

I just wanted to see things with my own eye and I figured it was worth the risk.

The northern wall stretched across the city. There was a river here, entering from the west and leaving out of the east. The main part of it was buried under the megastructure of the city proper, but some parts of the lake to the west were visible from my altitude.

The wall circled around the entire northern part of the city. A flat grey of concrete and metal, with evenly spaced towers along its length.

It would have been impossibly imposing from the ground, but from up here, it wasn't quite that impressive.

For one thing, the wall wasn't that straight. It didn't just curve out to encompass the swell of the city, but it had small sections that pushed further out, or that were uneven to account for crooked terrain.

The suburbs around this part of New Montreal were still lived in, even those beyond the wall. Probably because the wall wasn't the only wall in the area.

There was a second, much less impressive set of fortifications some ways out from the main wall. "How far is that second wall from the big one?" I asked.

The spacing isn't even, but the furthest section is four kilometres away.

That was a fair bit of space, especially since the inner section followed almost the entirety of the northern wall. "Why was this section left here?" I asked with a gesture to the space.

I believe because some four million people live here. There are several small cities growing out from New Montreal. To the west is Deux Montangnes, then Saint Coke of Cola, Nimbleland, Rosemere. You're currently above Nimbleland. The secondary wall meets the main wall not too far from where we are. But there's another secondary wall installation around Mascouche and the city of Amazon Prime. There are an additional twelve million living in the other walls' suburbs.

"And these walls keep them safe enough?" I asked.

That's unlikely. The quality of the walls varies significantly from city to city. From what I can find with a cursory look, the walls are paid for by either corporate entities, or the cities themselves.

Which meant lowest bidder shit all the way, at a time when no one could afford anything. "Right, I can see how this'll go already," I said.

Gomorrah had sent me a ping with a location to meet at. It was just outside of the main wall, next to one of the big openings designed to let traffic in. I noticed the spot, but flew on anyways, making a quick circuit along the outer wall. There were some defensive installations out here, and a few of them looked like gated camps and muster grounds on the outer edge of the suburbs.

At a guess, the local PMCs had discovered that buying lots of high-risk land was suddenly worth it for them. Or they were being given the right to use the land. Or... well, it didn't matter. The outer-outer walls were mostly mesh and barbed wire, with the occasional cement wall that wasn't much more than three metres tall and already crooked.

Some sections of the walls were new. Others had probably been around for a few decades. It was easy to tell the old apart from the new. The new didn't have graffiti covering their every surface.

I turned back towards the big city and flew over to where Gomorrah's signal called for me. I found her Fury parked in the middle of a wide open exterior parking lot in front of what looked like a recently-converted grocery store.

There were two rows of thirty main battle tanks. Then four land fortresses parked nearby. Men and women were swarming around, though it didn't look like they were moving with any real hurry.

I noticed a couple of squads of three-legged mechs parked nearby too, along with some APCs and smaller wheeled tanks.

I couldn't exactly see where Gomorrah was, but I imagined it wasn't too far from her car, so I came down and parked nearby, then slipped off my bike and tried not to make it too obvious that I was stretching the kinks out of my back. There was something of a crowd here, after all.

A row of cheap mobile homes and trailers was parked to one side, all of them so close together that I imagined they couldn't open their doors fully. Each had a sign painted on their front, and it looked like it was serving as barracks for the soldiers.

And there were soldiers.

I was used to working with PMCs. Well, moderately used to it. There were a few styles that they tended to fall into. The gruff, tacticool ones with a big budget, the ones that sold safety for cheap and kept things cheap by being cheap, then the really low-end PMC outfits that were little more than gangs with some administrators. Burlington's militia stood out too, as a sort of middleground between the super cheap mall-cop PMCs and the high-end corpo outfits.

This wasn't any of that. This was the army.

Men and women in fatigues, with minimal cybernetics. Lots of very standardised shit, but not so cheap that it was worthless.

That, and the kind of armoured force that even a corp might have a hard time justifying.

Tanks were expensive. I knew this because while Lucy liked watching cute videos of baby animals, the algorithm tended to push pseudo-military content my way. Stuff about tanks and cool army tech shit. It wavered, and it would only come up every so often... but I still had a soft spot in my heart for large lumbering vehicles of war.

So I knew that they were expensive as fuck, not just to buy, but to maintain. Actually, I really knew that lately. And my mech wasn't a fifty-ton tank built by humans. It was probably a lot easier to repair and maintain than any of the tanks parked out here.

A soldier ran up to me and saluted. "Stray Cat. Samurai Gomorrah is waiting in the command unit. Follow me, please."

No nonsense there. And not much grovelling either.

Then again, it was late, and things looked like they were winding down for everyone here. I didn't comment as I followed the soldier towards a mobile base near the centre of the lot.

It was one of those typical eight-wheeled behemoths, with multiple gun emplacements bristling out of every corner and more turrets on the roof, along with a bridge that jutted out of the front a little.

I found Gomorrah within, leaning over a table whose surface was a screen, along with two officers ahead of her. "Hello," she said. "You're twenty minutes past our meeting time."

"Huh... more punctual than I'd have guessed," I said. "So, what's going on?"

"Long version or short?" she asked.

I could tell from the glance the officers shared that they were caught a little flatfooted at the moment. "Short?"

"Short version it is. Maybe that'll make up for you being late." She tapped the screen, which was currently displaying a map of the area I'd just flown over, though zoomed out and in daylight colours. "The convoy tomorrow will be heading along this road, northbound, until they reach here." She tapped a point some fifteen kilometres past the shitty wall.

"Alright," I said.

"The problem tonight is this." She pointed to a red circle a bit to the west. "There's a hive somewhere in this area, and it'll be the perfect spot to ambush the convoy. Assuming that the antithesis are smarter than usual, then there's a good chance this hive will be trouble. Our mission is to burn it down."

"Easy enough," I said.

Maybe this wouldn't take all night after all.

***