Machines of Eden

a
green military techno-thriller by

Shad
Callister

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2012 Shad Callister

This ebook is licensed for an individual purchaser’s
enjoyment. Please respect the author’s copyright by directing
others online to purchase their own copy, or by purchasing
additional copies as a gift for others.

Chapters:

1

2

3

3.5

4

5

5.5

6

7

7.5

8

8.5

9

9.5

10

10.5

11

11.5

12

12.5

13

13.5

14

15

16

17

18

18.5

19

20

21

21.5

22

23

23.5

24

25

26

27

The discharge clerk looked
up, tired and sweaty. The soldier standing before her looked like
all the others, and the lines still stretched across the dusty
staging ground behind him. The clerk wondered how bad it would be
if she just didn’t show up the next day. Certainly no one would go
after her. Would any of her remaining superiors care enough to
record it somewhere that might bite her later?

The soldier cleared his
throat politely. “Here for my two-fourteen, private.”

“
You and the other six
thousand
,
”
she yawned.
The
man’s
uniform said he was a staff
sergeant, but the clerk didn’t care much anymore. Nobody did.
“Card, please.”

The soldier handed over the
small datacard that hung around his neck, and the clerk touched it
to her terminal. Data popped up on the display and she eyeballed it
wearily, poking at the controls to start processing him. When she
saw the name at the top of the screen, however, she
stiffened.

She raised her
eyes,
awe
lighting them up. “Staff Sergeant
John
Fletcher? You fought at Buenos
Aires?”

The soldier
nodded.

“
I heard about you.
Y
ou shut down the entire Green bot
advance
i
n the
middle of an EMP blackout
! Saved your
whole battalion, right?
”

The sergeant
shrugged
.

The clerk made a
half-movement, as if to rise and offer a handshake, then thought
better of it. She turned to her terminal and began spinning it
through a hundred rapid-fire functions, fingertips
dancing.

It was an effort,
John
knew, to impress
him. He wasn’t impressed by the show of efficiency, but he was
grateful. It was nice to have a fifteen-minute outprocessing done
in five.

The clerk finished
and
held out the card.
“A real privilege to meet you,
sir
. If anybody around here deserves
an Honorable, it’s you. Good luck
,
sir
.”

“
Not a sir, honey,” John
said, nodding his thanks. He plucked the card from her hand.
“Especially not now.” He
moved away from
the stares and murmurs collecting behind him.
He enjoyed his notoriety, but wasn’t in the mood to regale
them all with war stories just now. Not today.

Newly discharged soldiers
flooded the tarmac, some loading into troop carriers, others
migrating toward the rail terminal where rumor had it a train would
arrive sometime later that afternoon, city-bound.
John
wanted no part of
that. He’d had enough of cities.

A corporal wandered past,
pay voucher crumpled in one fist. A warm breeze gusted past and
snatched the paper out of his hand, but he didn’t look back, just
kept walking.
John
watched the paper, at least two years worth of pay, skip and
flutter across the asphalt until it disappeared in the weeds on the
far edge.

That’s what it was worth.
Nowhere left to spend
Green money,
outside of the now empty commissary.

He
spotted
a warmed-up troop
transport
a few meters away and ambled
over, duffel over one shoulder. The woman in the driver’s seat was
big and mohawked, chewing gum. She gave him a wary glance as he
approached.

“
Help you,
Sergeant?”

He shook his head. “No more
‘sergeant’. Where you headed?”

“
Portland.” She cackled.
“What’s left of it.
Word is, Restoration
isn’t even close.
”

Cities. He shook his head.
“Thanks anyway.”

It was the same story with
the other vehicles. Most were headed north, up the coast. A few
were going inland; Vegas, Denver. The three-hour-late train, he
learned from a crowd of young ex-tankers, was
Mexico-bound.

More cities.

He moved on.

The air shimmered at the
far end of the tarmac as
John
approached the hangars. This was one of the few
operational airfields left on the West Coast, and security
was
tight
.
Several anti-aircraft batteries were placed to cover the hangars
and runway, and a checkpoint was the only way through the fence
surrounding the control tower. The top of the tower still bristled
with heavy guns, this long after the cease-fire.

The duty sergeant looked
up from his datapad as
John
walked over. His eyes were calm, but his hand
rested lightly on his sidearm. “What can I do for you,
Sergeant?

John
nodded in the direction of the hangars. “Any transport
flights?”

The sergeant shook his
head. “Last one left yesterday.”

“
Anything else flying?
Anywhere?”

“
Let’s see.” The
duty
sergeant consulted
his datapad. “Got a cargo plane going west to the islands. Refuels
in Hawaii, then on to the Philippines. But I doubt he’ll take a
passenger.
Our
remaining
freight jocks don’t like
live baggage.”

“
I’ll give it a try,
anyway. Thanks, Sergeant.”

In the nearest hangar he
found the cargo plane. It was an older model, still using liquid
fuel. The fuselage was battered and scarred from more than a few
close calls, and
John
noticed a fifty-caliber bullet hole in the rear tail section.
He approached slowly, sizing it up. If it was going to carry him
over the open ocean, he wanted to be sure of its
sturdiness.

An Asian man, mid-forties,
walked out of the rear cargo door and down the ramp, putting away a
pocket comm unit. When he saw
John
, he shook his head.

“
No
passengers.”

“
I’m pretty quiet,”
John
said. “Won’t be any
trouble.”

“
Sorry.” The man looked
him up and down. “There’s not a square inch in there for you, and
I’d be summarily shot for allowing it. Nothing
personal.”

John
drew a long, slow breath, reached into his breast pocket, and
drew out his pay voucher. His showed over three years of officer
pay piled up, but he had no use for it. Not where he wanted to go.
A pilot might, though, with connections
at
Green bases a
ll over the
world
. He held it
out.

The pilot looked it over,
glanced around, then rolled it up and stuffed it in his
coveralls.

“
Leaving in ten. This all
your gear?” he asked, nodding at the duffel.

“
Not much for five years,
is it?”

“
52nd,
huh?
” the pilot grunted, eyeing John’s
shoulder patch. “
What unit?”

“
Hackers.”

The pilot eyed him
dubiously. “Heard the 52nd got chewed up bad.”

John
nodded. “We sure did.”

“
What did you say your
name was?”

“
John
Fletcher.”

The pilot’s eyes widened
slightly. “Battle of Buenos Aires?”

John
shrugged. “That’s what they called it. Felt more like a
massacre.”

The pilot grinned.
“They
were
all
massacres
, one way or the
other
. But you made Buenos Aires a
two-sided one. The name’s Mochizuki. Welcome aboard,
S
arge
.”

Ten minutes later to the
second, the engines rotated and kicked on in vertical position,
building quickly to the steady drone
John
had heard so many times before.
The pilot, Mochizuki, had installed him in the cargo area with a
pile of ratty blankets and netting and a canteen of stale
water.
John
settled back against the cargo and slipped in his last pair
of earplugs. The roar of the engines dimmed to a low drone. He
closed his eyes, and was asleep before the plane lifted up off the
ground.

An hour after take-off
Mochizuki turned the plane over to
his
co-pilot,
Lucky
,
and reclined his chair for some
sleep. He’d slept for only an hour
,
however,
when he was awakened by
the
sky-
bot’s
voice, rapidly escalating in decibels to get him up quickly without
shock.

“
Captain. Captain. Captain
Mochizuki.”

“
Yeah, what is it?”
Mochizuki yawned. “Please no storm warnings.”

“
Priority transmission,
Captain, from Pacific Command.”

Mochizuki sat up. That
sounded interesting. He glanced over at
the
portable sky-bot. Lucky was
fairly primitive, little more than a heavy cylindrical box with
cabling that reached into the instrument panel. He was quick,
though, and he seldom questioned Mochizuki’s judgment. Unlike most
pilots who relied on their sky-bots for ninety percent of the
flying, Mochizuki still liked to do his own pre-flight checks as a
matter of form. If there ever was an error, though, Lucky would
catch it.

“
Put it
through.”

“
It’s coded to Level
Three, Captain. Excuse the delay.”

The delay wasn’t much
longer than the time it took Lucky to say the words “excuse the
delay”, but it betrayed Lucky’s age, which other pilots poked fun
at. Current sky-bot models could decode several incoming and
outgoing lines in milliseconds. It might take Lucky a little
longer, Mochizuki liked to say, but he always did the job right the
first time.