Excerpt

Sturgeon says that, way back when, the sons of the rich used to go to war as a first choice of career. He says that, back then, the regular grunts were basically just poor bastards with a knife and a leather jacket – only he's got that annoying-as-crap patronising look that says he's dumbing stuff down for me – and no training, and no clue, save what lies they got told.

But the rich guys: Sturgeon says they had all the time in the world to learn stuff, and all the money in the world, and they bought the best armor that no poor bastard was going to stick a knife through, and they would just wade in and make a game of how many poor bastards they could cut up on the way. And even if things went really bad for them, they didn't die, Sturgeon says. He says they just let themselves get captured and ransomed, and had a fine old time telling jokes to the rich guys who grabbed them about all the poor bastards they killed.

What Sturgeon says is that things swung round – the science of killing a man sort of galloped ahead of the science of stopping him being killed. Guns, mostly. And suddenly the sons of the rich didn't like the idea of being soldiers, not once it was them getting shot up with the rest of the poor bastards. The clever ones went to war with a crapton of gold braid on their sleeves and a crapton of space between them and the front lines. The rest went into stock-brokering and lawyering and running companies, where the money was better and the chance of getting shot was less, and you still basically got to say how the war went, if you were in the right industry.

But they missed it, when it was gone, Sturgeon says. There's something you get from shooting a guy, from ripping his head off, from just wading in and showing the poor bastards how much better you are than them in the most simple, physical way. He reckons it's a kick you just don't get with raiding the company pension pot or evicting tenants or throwing a prostitute out of a window and getting away with it cos your uncle's a police chief and your grandfather's a judge.

Sturgeon says things have gone full circle. Sturgeon says a lot of stuff, though. Usually he doesn't get this far into his spiel before Franken slugs him. Sturgeon, as far as I'm concerned, is full of shit.

We touched down in England February 9th with about two thousand other tough guys out of the 203rd to rapturous applause. 'Rapturous applause' is Sturgeon again, but he was right: the limeys loved us. Mostly, they loved the fact we had money, which wasn't something the old country had much of. Everyone knew that a GI on shore leave anywhere in the English Territories had struck lucky. Women and booze were dirt cheap there, and if you got into a scrap and broke a window or an arm then the cops knew to look the other way. But that didn't happen often, or not on my watch. Weird thing how fond most of the guys were about England. Now it was part of the Union everyone was all 'the old country' and feeling mighty protective of the place, like all our ancestors had come over on the Mayflower.

My ancestors had come over from the greenish island next door, far as I know, and I reckoned I was let off feeling sentimental about the English on that count. Still, it was going to be a solid two weeks R&R before the 203rd got shipped off again to take the war to the Nords.

We got dumped off at the big base near Reading, leave shifts downloaded to our hub and the first mob of us already fixing to hit London and stuff some good solid dollars down some kinky dancers' panties. For the rest, it looked like half of England had come to us. There was a regular shanty town outside the base – they had a whole load of girls come here because it meant they could earn some cash to send home, and a bunch of older folks who had sad little stalls and carts and tents, selling everything from beer to little tin statues of Big Ben, from the wisdom of the druids to the family silver. They looked… they looked thin and dirty and tired. That was what England looked like to me. Thin and dirty and tired, and with those bad teeth you hear about – that Sturgeon says was never a thing back then, but sure as hell is now. And smoking. Everyone smoked there, the cheapest, nastiest cigarettes you ever ended up stinking of. Which they called fags, which was good for a laugh at least.

Sturgeon has a bundle to say about that, as well. Of course he does, the mouthy bastard. Sturgeon says that it wasn't much more than twenty years after they voted in their Independence crowd and cut themselves right off from Europe, before those same politicos sold the whole shebang to us. Turned out England couldn't stand on its little Union Jack-gartered legs the way it once had, but that was fine: its new leaders had already got themselves a place on the board at a dozen US corporations, so they were all right. Anyway, England became a territory of the Union, and the media said everyone was happy about that.

Later, it became our stepping stone for taking the good fight into Europe, when it turned out that we had what Sturgeon calls irreconcilable ideological differences with some of the governments there.

The base was busy – they already had the 12th Mountaineers and some armor there, and a whole load of the 170th were just being flown out. We were all getting billeted – and more than ready to get down to other things too, the moment we had the chance – when I remember Franken punching me in the shoulder, which is how he gets your attention.

"Sarge, lookit," says Franken.

I lookited, and I saw what he was talking about, and it's a hell of a sight: no fewer than three Scions striding through the press of the base like it was nothing, and everyone else getting the hell out of their way.

The English call them 'the Brass,' but to us they're just Scions. This is who Sturgeon was bitching about, with his dumb history lesson. I squinted at them as they strode past, looking for the logos; looked like a pair from the pharma giant Sayline and one – the biggest one – from the agricorp Buenosol, who are pushing so much of the action over in Nordland. They were eight feet tall, give or take, and you couldn't have gotten the edge of a razor anywhere into the joints of their armored shells. One of the Sayline boys was like an egg on spider legs but the other two were built like men, two arms, two legs on a big armored box where the actual lucky guy would be sitting with all home comforts. They had more guns each than a whole squad, and there was nothing the 203rd was equipped with that would have got through that plating of theirs, either. It felt like a privilege to be this close to them and everyone had gone quiet when they came through. Some, like Franken, pushed close to get a touch, a hand on that expensive metal, because if you were into that stuff the Church of Christ Libertarian went on about, these guys were the Deserving. These guys were rich because it was God's plan, just like if any of us got rich, that would be God's plan too. Just like any one of us might get rich, somehow. We could be the president too. Everyone said so. We just had to work hard and wait our turn.

Anyway, the three Scions just shoved their way through us all, not giving us a glance, and Franken was practically drooling, no doubt imagining how it would be to fight a war from inside a metal shell like that, with a comfy seat and porn on demand and a machine to wipe your ass for you. And I heard Sturgeon do one of those 'tsk' noises he does, because, like I've probably made clear, Sturgeon's an asshole with Ideas and Opinions, and neither of those things is much use for an infantryman these days.

Ninety minutes after touching down at Reading, me, Sturgeon and Franken got our orders to get on a heli for London, and none of us had the faintest idea why. My best guess was that Sturgeon's mouth had got him into trouble, and that Franken and I had been luckless enough to be within earshot. Nobody told us what was going on, we just got passed hand to hand, airport to car, car to city center, along the Embankment road with those bigass barriers to stop the river coming in all their posh lobbies, and then we ended up at the top of a glass-steel tower in whatever they called Wall Street over in London, waiting in a boardroom where the chairs probably cost more than any of us would earn in ten years.

Franken was looking knives at Sturgeon. To be honest, so was I. Sturgeon was a tall, narrow-shouldered New Yorker with a nose like an elbow, and when he wasn't about you'd have said he had glasses on – even though nobody in the army wore glasses – just because he was like so many speccy nerd guys in old TV shows. He wasn't a computer geek or a business wiz or any of those useful sorts of nerds, though, or he wouldn't have been slogging about with a gun like the rest of us. Sturgeon was just a guy who'd had way too much education and then found he had way too little money, like all of us had way too little money. These days the army was often the best, sometimes the only, way of digging yourself out of that hole.

Franken was blonde and from Kentucky and the size of three Sturgeons mashed together, which was a fact he'd had cause to impress on Sturgeon more than once in the time I'd known them. I'd been with them both in Uruguay and then in Canada, and I'd always reckoned that we'd end up going our separate ways after one tour or another. And yet, whenever I got back off leave, it was their ugly faces I was showing the family photos to. The three of us had been on 203rd HQ's Recon platoon through more clusterfucks than I cared to remember.

Sturgeon opened his mouth and I could see he was going to say something clever, meaning something that would get us into trouble. "They're listening," I told his open mouth, and he shut it quickly. No sense getting us into worse than we already were.

"What, then?" Franken demanded.

"We might not even be in the shit," I remember saying, without much enthusiasm. "Maybe they just need security or something. Maybe this is it: easy street for the rest of the war."

"Us?" Franken pointed out. "The three of us get a soft security detail? Because, stop me if I'm wrong, don't they have their own people for that? You know, the real corporate guys, rather than army?"

"Yeah, well," I started, and then the Man came in.

I called them to attention, but I didn't have to, we were already on the way there: me, Franken, Sturgeon, one after the other. You always stand to attention when a Scion's there. A Scion always outranks a regular soldier.

He was seven foot tall and must have weighed six hundred pounds in his suit; not all the lightweight alloys in the world could bring that down. These days, every boardroom in the west had reinforced floors and extra-wide doors. His suit shone like it had just been polished. There was a head on top – it wouldn't have had the guy's head in it, it was just for show – that was square-jawed and good-looking as a film star, and the whole chassis was moulded like the muscles of a weightlifter. I'd run into a few Scions by then, and his was by far the nicest piece of kit I'd seen: fancy enough that I reckoned it was his peacetime civvies, and that he probably had a spikier suit for wartime. A lot of the Scions didn't get out of their shells unless they were inside their compounds, behind a dozen walls and a hundred guards. After all, there was still the occasional bomber out there, home-grown or foreign national. Sons and nephews of the corporate board members were too valuable to take risks with, even here in London City Central.

On his shoulder, like I had my stripes, there was a little logo, but I didn't know it. Scions from companies you hadn't heard of were Big Business. If a company was too small for you to have heard of it, it couldn't afford Scion shells for its gallant warrior sons. If a Scion came from somewhere that wasn't a household name, that meant it was one of the big, hidden companies; the companies that owned the companies that you knew.

When he spoke, a face came up over the cold steel of the mask. Probably it was his face; what would have been the point else? It was a good looking, well-groomed regular guy sort of face, just like they all had when they were rich enough. It wasn't the sort of face anyone was born with, but one that had been measured and tweaked and shaved until it said: I Am Right; and You Can Trust Me. You liked that face, just looking at it; you trusted it; you wanted it to like you.

"At ease, Gentlemen. Thanks for coming," said the projected face. His voice was just as well crafted, elocuted and touched up. You'd have done a lot, if that voice asked you. "You would be Theodore Regan, I take it?"

"Yes sir, Sergeant Ted Regan, sir."

He smiled at me, one of those magic smiles where all the condescension is invisible. "I'm a Ted too. Ted Speling, looking after the family interests over here while the war's on." He didn't offer to shake hands. With Scions, it was a habit that had fallen out of use. "Sergeant Regan, you're in a position to do my family a favor."

He said that, and I already wanted to help him any way I could. Plus, of course, that sounded like there was money in it. And then he said: "My cousin Jerome has gone missing, Sergeant. Something happened to him three days ago, out on the front. Nobody knows where he is. You men come highly recommended. I need you to find him, or find what happened to him. Will you do that for me?"

Of course I would. I was already agreeing to it. I didn't choke over that 'highly recommended' bit (because, really? Us?). I didn't even see the Big Thing in what he'd said until Sturgeon finally burned through his ability to keep his mouth shut and said, "Your cousin was on the front, sir?"

"That's correct, soldier," said Rich Ted.

Even as I – Poor Ted – was shooting a glare at him, Sturgeon's mouth went right on motoring. "Was he out of his shell, sir?"

And I stopped, because he was right: any cousin Jerome that Ted Speling might lay claim to wouldn't have been within a hundred miles of the front without a shell.

"Well," Rich Ted said philosophically. "It so happens you've hit on the very heart of the problem."

Even then I thought that Cousin Jerome must have decided to get out of his shell, take the breeze or something; maybe there was some pretty little Nord girl tricked him into it. It's pretty much the only need that those suits only fulfil halfway, after all. But no; Cousin Jerome hadn't been pressing his dwat de sey-nyer, as Sturgeon called it. The enemy had done something, and his shell had just cut out and shut down and stopped telling anyone where it was.

You see, that never happened. There was a lot of tech in the world, and while we poor grunts got just enough to do our jobs, the Scions got everything money could buy. They had all the money, after all. Sturgeon says – here I go again with what Sturgeon says, but – he says that back when soldiers were soldiers, there was a whole lot of money put into making sure we had all we needed to let us return in one piece – it was lost votes and bad PR if all your brave boys didn't make it back to the Land of the Free. Of course we've had the means-tested voting reforms since then – what the newspapers when I was a kid called the 'Elephant in the Room', on account of how so many people had just become something nobody talked about. Now, on account of regular soldiering being a good job for people with no other options, Sturgeon says, when we get cut up, it doesn't impact on the election so much. This is when he starts saying how the government doesn't look after us any more, and this is usually where Franken starts hitting him.

But sure, it's no secret that your regular grunt does not get the dollars spent on him that the corporate squads do, in terms of gear and support, and it's true we get the crap jobs that they don't, because if things do get hot for us, it's the government footing the bill, not the corporations. And I might have some thoughts and feelings about that, but because I'm not so damn smart as Sturgeon, I keep my mouth shut.

And Scions – Scions have no limits, or certainly the models made in the US of A don't. Those shells are the battledress of the sons of corporations. No man of means is going to send his heir or his spare out with anything less than the best – just like they wouldn't be seen dead in anything less than the biggest car, or perfect teeth, or what golf club you belonged to. When I was in Canada, I saw… well, when our shining boys came through, you should have seen the Canuck infantry run like rabbits. And when their maple-leaf ironclads came stomping the other way, we couldn't hold, even though everyone said they weren't as good. We couldn't dent them.

Sturgeon says that we could have done, only they didn't give us the tools for it. He says that all the corporate types go to the same clubs, and that it's not in their interests to kill each other off when there might be a merger the week after. Like I say, Sturgeon says a lot of things.

Nonetheless, this is beyond dispute: better than the regulars, better than the best-equipped corporate guard, better than mechs and drones and biotech is the armor and the weaponry of the battlefield Scions.

Which brings us back to Cousin Jerome, because all that top flight tech had just fucked off and deserted him, and now he was either dead or caught. Rich Ted was pretty sure he was caught; Jerome would be a big old bargaining chip for the Nords, after all, except that apparently nobody was even asking for a ransom.

That made it our job to go get him. Or to find his body or records of his demise. At no point did he say anything about finding out how the hell they screwed over his shell to winkle him out of it, but that was kind of hanging in the air in a 'bonus payment' sort of way. I reckon they wouldn't honestly have trusted us with that one as a mission objective, but if it fell into our laps we surely would be bringing it to Rich Ted's rich attention.

"Why us, sir?" I asked, and he explained that we would be going in as a small, covert team. He talked about the fact that we three had come through some of the nastier global knife-fights of the last few years without a scratch, and with commendations – he didn't mention all those times Sturgeon got put on a charge for opening his big, big mouth, or when Franken almost got court martialed for punching a captain. He said a lot of things, but I was used to Sturgeon, and so I could cut through the crap. "You want this done, why not send a few unstoppable Scions?" I could have asked, and the answer he would never have given me was: "Because we're scared they'll do it to us."

Two hours later we were on a plane heading seaward toward the fighting, detached from 203rd's Recon company and leaving the rest of the lads behind. You'd think one of the officers might have made a fuss, but everyone knew that when the Corporates said "jump," you basically didn't come down without orders in triplicate. We were there to fight the war their way, and if their way was sending the three of us off on a rescue mission then that was what was going to happen.

There was gear for us in the plane – and it was brand new, not the hand-me-down crap we normally had to work with. Franken complained, of course. Franken liked his own stuff, worn by long use until it was a comfortable fit in his big hands and smelling mostly of Franken. For me, I appreciated the downpayment. This was Rich Ted investing in Poor Ted, at least a little.

We slept on the plane; live this life long enough and you sleep when you can. The plane's descent woke us and when we looked out, we saw Nord country.