More flash fiction from Terrible
Minds with one from each of 3 lists of required elements. I chose
dieselpunk, a lover's quarrel and flying monkeys. Kinda politically incorrect,
but this is war.
Twister
“Robotnik, you’re such
an ass!”
Lieutenant Gale
slapped the steel of the mech’s turret just above the white star stenciled a
little aft of the Whirlwind 44’s starboard coaxial machinegun. Sergeant
Robotnik looked up at her furious face; uncomprehendingly as usual.
“What did I do
wrong?” Kodak Golem irises spiraled wide to let the
maximum visual information pour into a puzzled positronic brain that could
generate no useful Decision Program. Also as usual. She glared down at him for
a bitter moment and then disappeared into Auntie
Dot to mutter barely within
the android’s hearing range but outside the comprehension spectrum of his aural
membranes. ‘Toks can’t sigh; not having breathing apparatus, but as he
tightened off the starboard hip’s feedback assembly his frame paused as if resetting
after combat or maintenance down-time. Or lovemaking.
He scrambled up
onto the mech’s top deck. He recharged a moment, staring out across the
countryside. Fertile and formerly prosperous, the last untouched continent showed too many signs of newfound war. Smoke rose in five separate places north of the city where Jap night
bombing had been going on for a week. On each side of Route Yoke Baker the scarecrow, skeletal water tower
shapes of burned-out mechs loomed over the blood-soaked land of America ’s
newest ally. A pair of Zeros lay blackened and ripped apart after attracting
the attention of a squadron of US Marine Hellcats.
Robotnik
calculated briefly; oblivious to the fuselage decoration of a farm girl
wielding an ax hand-painted on Auntie
Dot’s hatch. What had he done
to offend her so? Why was a human being’s commissioning date such an important
datum? What utility could its anniversary have at any time; let alone during a
break for frantic repairs in this campaign across a tortured land in the spring
of 1947? Was the Lieutenant’s commissioning date an occasion for a regular
maintenance procedure that he should have initiated himself?
His ruminations
were interrupted by the approach along the buttery paving stones of a
single-seater Chrysler Roadrunner reconnaissance bipod.
“Ahoy there,”
called the Navy Captain to Robotnik. Who are you guys and where are you bound?”
After checking
the beep-beep-jeep’s markings with his Service Identity Registry and confirming
the sailor to be of the eggplant hue unavailable to Japanese recruiters,
Robotnik’s probability matrix decided that it was 89% likely to be correct
action to provide limited truthful data to the human. “Sir, we’re the Second
Platoon, B Company of the 1st Battalion, 161st Mechanized Artillery Regiment,
Kansas National Guard. We just flew here from Germany via the Philippines and
this vehicle is down for repairs. The rest of the guys are heading north to
support the Marines at the edge of the desert. You want I should call the
Lieutenant to give you any more intel, Navy?” The manufacturers of Service
model ‘toks’ had been ordered by the Pentagon to provide human-seeming voices
to soften the experience for human soldiers obliged to serve alongside
‘soulless machines’ in the long, grinding war against a resurgent Japan .
Robotnik’s programmer was from Kansas
City .
“That’s okay,
‘tok Sergeant. I guess the goddammned yellow monkeys’ airforce snafu’d your
radio with jamming like all the others.”
“We ain’t been
able to contact higher command for three hours now, since the Battalion headed
out, sir.”
“Well you just turn it around, soldier boy, an’ hightail it back to the city ‘cause the Japs have just landed airship infantry outside the gates an’ are closin’ in on the jewel mines in the outskirts. It’s gonna be a pick an’ shovel war in the tunnels to get the gems back under Allied control. Shag it, Sergeant. There’s a counter-attack to mount.” The Roadrunner strode off towards the north.
“Well you just turn it around, soldier boy, an’ hightail it back to the city ‘cause the Japs have just landed airship infantry outside the gates an’ are closin’ in on the jewel mines in the outskirts. It’s gonna be a pick an’ shovel war in the tunnels to get the gems back under Allied control. Shag it, Sergeant. There’s a counter-attack to mount.” The Roadrunner strode off towards the north.
A meteor shower
in 1945 had destroyed the city of Los Alamos ,
incinerated its environs and spread something like bubonic plague into the
atmosphere; killing a third of the US population
between Southern California and the Gulf Coast until a
vaccine was discovered in 1946. Since then the Allies had been obliged to struggle
on against a revitalized Japan in a war that Washington had expected
to finish off by Christmas 1945. Means of reducing casualties included
constructing mechanical walkers to overleap Japanese armor and using android
servicemen as bunker-busters against entrenchments where fanatical Imperial
soldiers would fight on until they died of thirst rather than surrender. The
electronic brains of the ’toks and the walkers’ complex feedback systems were
reliant on gemstones. When the Imperial forces attacked this country, the US was obliged to leave its
British allies to fight alongside French troops in Western Asia and sent the bulk of the
fleet southward to defend a country ignorant of mechanized warfare but that was the Free
World’s foremost supplier of diamonds, rubies and - most crucially - emeralds.
If the mines were not recovered, the Pacific Fleet might have to abandon island
hopping and revert to hellish foot-by-foot human-led blockbusting engagements
and a butcher’s bill inspiring almost irresistible calls in Congress for peace
negotiations amounting to surrender.
“Dori, I’m sorry
I forgot your birthday,” Robotnik called down to the turret’s undercabin, “but
we have new orders to relieve the city.”
The Lieutenant’s
beautiful face smiled wryly up at her mechanical lover. “I wish you meant that,
‘Nik, I really do. But the ruby and emerald thing controlling your hydraulics
can’t truly be called a heart. Back home, a gentleman would have made it a
point of honour to remember his lady’s birthday.”
“But, said the
‘tok, climbing into Auntie Dot’s control harness
and steering it towards the City of Emeralds ,
“as your Auntie discovered back in that WW1 thing, we ain’t in Kansas no more.”
Picture from here.