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A TANK NAMED BOB

by Larry Correia

What kind of mind makes for an effective warrior? Perhaps a naïve psychologist looking in, one who is not inured to the necessities of war, would see a psychopathic personality. But honor, duty, and vengeance also require a brain conditioned to ignore distractions that can only result in defeat, a brain wired to concentrate on the one thing that matters—winning the battle at all costs. Especially when winning brings with it a measure of justice for the only thing that matters in the end. Family.

There were two scout tanks coming up on the west using the rubble as cover, and a third hiding in the trees on the other side of the factory complex. There was an exo-suited infantry squad armed with portable anti-tank missiles moving up the roof of the warehouse to the south. The APC the squad had debarked from was driving around the building, trying to flank me.

I saw all this with the dozens of cameras along my armored hull and through the eyes of my drone swarm. I felt the vibrations through my shocks, which were sensitive enough that I could accurately estimate the weight and speed of the bogeys my many eyes couldn’t get a visual on. The multitude of threats were just glowing dots of various sizes and brightness on my battle map. The Level 10 quantum processor dumped all of this information into my meat brain to assess and approve the targeting priority assignments.

The initial firing solution looked good to me. Battle plan accepted. Engage.

The concussion of my 180mm main gun made my active camouflage ripple. The spotter drones the enemy infantry had sent up knew exactly where I was now, but that wouldn’t matter for long, because I was already reversing, crashing my bulk through several walls. Bricks were smashed to dust beneath my polysteel treads as the mortars along my back chain fired.

Two thousand meters away, my shot nailed the enemy tank that had thought it was hidden by the trees. There was a bright line on thermal as my armor-piercing shell ice-picked the light scout’s turret. There was a second, much brighter bloom, as the tank’s magazine cooked off. A fireball rolled through the forest.

Missiles struck the debris I’d been hiding in, but I was already to my second firing position by the time the autoloader had fed another 180 AP into the tube. I couldn’t see the next scout, but I could sense where it was. I murdered it right through the walls. Three layers of brick and one of light armor barely slowed the penetrator. My chemical scanners confirmed the kill because of all the thorium and radioactive smoke suddenly added to the atmosphere. Reactor hit.

I kept moving to avoid the counterfire, but this time it didn’t matter, because the exo-suited missile boys were too busy dodging the mortar shells I’d dropped on their heads. Only my calculations had underestimated the structural integrity of the warehouse, and the whole damned thing came crashing down around them, burying the poor dopes who weren’t able to leap off in time. The survivors wouldn’t be too much of a problem, since they were mostly blind now. I’d barely even noticed as my point defense systems had automatically shot down all their drones.

The quantum processor was super-efficient, but it wasn’t very imaginative. That’s what meat brains were for. So when I saw where the APC was going to come out, trying to get an angle on my less armored back end with its launcher, I flipped around, angled my nose, and then charged, full speed through the factory, smashing machinery, pipes, and furniture, right through the exterior wall, to T-bone the surprised APC. It was barely more than an armored car, so I hardly even felt the crunch. But it was still satisfying to send the little thing flipping end over end.

The last scout realized that I was out of his league, turned tail, and ran. These little bastards were fast too. I clocked him doing 160 KPH by the time he reached the factory’s old parking lot. The scout tank knocked derelict cars out of his way as easily as I’d crushed their APC. My turret slowly turned, leading him. Their driver was good, juking side to side, desperately trying to get away. It didn’t matter. I punched them through their engine compartment and left them to burn.

I am a two-hundred-ton killing machine.

My name is Bob.


“Can he hear me, Doctor?”

“It appears the interface is working correctly; the language processing center of his brain will receive the audible impulses translated through the nano-gel. So basically, yes, but it’ll be like the voice of God in the darkness saying let there be light. Whether he’ll understand and how much he remembers, I don’t know. The damage was extensive, and this is experimental tech.”

“Will he be able to communicate back?”

“Not yet. We’ll have to process his brain waves through the encoder first to be able to translate the impulses directly into language. That’ll take a few weeks.”

“We don’t have a few weeks. We have a war to fight. If the Tribunal asks, the subject could communicate and consented to be part of this project. Is that clear, Doctor?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Excellent. Here goes then . . . Good morning, Captain. Do not panic. I’m General Hwangmok, Western Command, Valens Defense Force. First the good news. You’re still alive. You were severely injured but you were evacuated to a secure medical facility. Now for the bad news. There was a surprise attack by the Syndicate. The colony is in trouble and most of the VDF was wiped out. Their infowar capabilities are far beyond ours so they hacked all our automated systems. Our manned systems are no match for theirs. We’re getting our asses kicked out there. Now for the really bad news for you personally, so I’ll give it to you straight. Most of your body was destroyed beyond repair, but we saved your brain. It’s currently being kept alive in a nanite bath.”

“I’m sorry, General, but I’m reading a surge in amygdala activity. Glutamate levels are spiking.”

“What’s that mean?”

“I think he’s panicking, and in a sensory deprived state that could cause permanent damage. I need to put him back under.”

“Listen to me, Captain. You’re going back to sleep for a while. I know the merciful thing would be to pull your plug, but you’re the only armor officer I’ve got here, which means I can’t let you go to waste. I’m sorry, but your people need you.”

“I’ve administered the sedative. The subject is fading out . . . I can’t believe we’re really doing this. It violates medical ethics and dozens of regulations.”

“Don’t worry, Doctor. We only have to worry about being tried for war crimes if we lose the war. They don’t prosecute the winners.”


With the Syndicate scouts out of the way, I headed for Kan Junction. It was only a few klicks away and where the enemy had set up their regional logistics command. It was the logical target suggested by the Quantum. But my gut told me I could do the more harm elsewhere . . . Only you can’t really say you have a gut feeling, when you don’t have any guts anymore.

The Syndicate invasion fleet had dropped a bunch of spy and comms satellites into orbit during their approach. Now that they knew approximately where to look, there was no way for me to hide from their eyes in the sky while crossing open farmland. I had active camouflage skin, but I couldn’t move full speed and still store that much waste heat in my sinks, so I would glow like a beacon on thermal. Nor was there any real way to disguise the path of destruction I was leaving in my wake. My wide tracks left ruts deep enough through the soft terraformed soil the shadows would be seen from space.

My systems were being bombarded with hostile signals. The Syndicate were attempting to hack me, just like they had done with every other VDF weapon system during the invasion. Previously their programs had sliced through Valens’ firewalls like they were made of cheese. Only this time they were failing miserably, and their hackers probably couldn’t figure out why. Their target appeared to a be a fully autonomous robot tank, only every time they tried to take over a system, they were immediately booted by an on-site manual override. Which should have been impossible, because it would take a twenty-man crew to run this many processes manually at the same time, and there was no way that a weapon system could be run this efficiently by a bunch of humans working together.

But for me by myself, it was as intuitive as moving my old limbs. I just needed to think about it, and it happened . . . Cyborg meat brains for the win.

The satellites quit blasting me with tight beams. The hacking attempts stopped. Now they would simply vector Syndicate air assets right to my position to take me out the old-fashioned way.

But rather than hide or take evasive maneuvers, I kept going straight, right toward the most obvious target in the area because I wanted those gunships to come after me. Better to deal with air support now than later when I might be distracted.

My drone screen spotted them first. One of my stealthy little flyers spotted four fast-moving targets coming my way. They were hugging the ground, just over treetop level so as to avoid my radar, but they’d not spotted my drone yet. It must have been clear from the satellite images that I had a railgun mounted, because the flyers didn’t dare pop up over the horizon. As soon as my drone lased them, the flyers went into evasive maneuvers, but it was too late. The instant they were tagged, I launched a barrage of smart missiles to hunt them down.

The gunships launched flares to confuse thermal and shine to blind the drones. Four balls of artificial sunlight temporarily lit the nearby farms. I overrode the missiles’ rudimentary AI, because they simply would have flown to wherever the machine assumed their targets would have gone, but I guided them by instinct instead. I managed to splash two, and those Syndicate flyers cut flaming ditches through the cornfields. The other two still managed to evade. Except one of them had to pull up hard to keep from hitting a barn on the way out. Two seconds of visibility over the horizon was more than enough for me to zap it with the coaxial railgun. The time to target wasn’t instantaneous, but it was close enough. One of the flyer’s wings came apart and the body turned into a Mach One lawn dart.

They’d messed with the wrong tank.

The Syndicate had captured most of our small armor fleet without firing a shot. They’d been able to examine our locally built main battle tanks. They had probably been expecting me to have similar capabilities as those, except my new body was an off-world prototype, stolen and smuggled here by a crew of gun runners. It was more capable than our regular tanks in just about every way. And since I was now tired of being spied on, it was time to show them another one of those capabilities.

I stopped in a pasture, tracked the Syndicate satellites and let the Quantum process the firing solutions. My railgun lacked the horsepower to get past low orbit, but I didn’t need a kinetic kill. Flash frying their delicate electronics would be enough. I spent the next few minutes flinging lasers into space. Once I was sure this hemisphere was temporarily clear of spy sats, I set out again. Only this time I wasn’t driving toward the obvious target of Kan Junction. I changed direction and set course for Fu’An City, the capitol of Valen, on the far end of the continent.


“How are you doing today, Captain?”

The doctor’s voice cut through the entirely of my universe. It took me a moment to pull up the rudimentary image of a keyboard that had been implanted into my brain. Each key was pulsing at a slightly different frequency. I thought about one key at a time until my brain matched that frequency. That impulse was recorded through the wire mesh my brain was wrapped in, and those letters were sent to a display the doctor could read.

Please, Doc. Just call me Bob.

“Very well. Bob it is. Have the interface simulations been going well?”

Considering that I was a one and a half kilo lump of cells with no senses, hardly any memories, and nothing better to do, I’d been running through the programs they’d dumped into me nonstop. It was like letting a baby play a video game about running before getting a chance to crawl. It was a super confusing nonstop bombardment of information.

Yes. It is going swell.

“That’s great. You seem in really good spirits.”

It could be worse.

“It beats being dead.”

Does it though?

The doctor was quiet for a real long time. “Yeah . . . sorry. Okay, I just came in to tell you that the general wants to bump up the timeline. He’s procured an ideal test vehicle from off world. I know you need more time to get ready before we plug you in, but we might not have it.”

Things are that bad out there?

“I won’t lie to you, Bob. It’s not going well. The Syndicate has taken over half the continent. We’re holding them at New Sidney for now, but east of the divide the VDF has been forced underground and we’re basically waging a guerrilla war.”

I was from the eastern coast of the colony, the beautiful, terraformed zone, that could almost be mistaken for old Earth if you squinted just right. I knew it was a long shot, but I had to ask.

Any word about Mei and the kids?

“I looked, I really did, but the records are a mess and the central net is down. She was last seen in Fu’an, but there was so much fighting there. I’m sorry, Bob. I still don’t know where your family is.”

That’s cool, Doc. I appreciate the effort. Assure the general that I’ll be ready.

I went back to my simulations.


After sixteen hours of nonstop combat operations, I had to hide inside an old tunnel to give my procurement and repair systems a chance to work. I was so big that I barely fit in a tunnel designed for super trains. My drone swarm spread out looking for useful materials while my repair bots crawled outside and began inspecting the damage. I was most worried about my treads. Polysteel is self-repairing, but I’d put nearly a thousand kilometers on brand new tracks today. If I threw one of those in a fight I’d be a sitting duck until my bots could get out and fix it, and the bots were soft targets on an active battlefield.

My drones tagged several items that appeared they would be useful scrap, so I sent some scrounger bots to grab those. Lots of things could be used as raw materials for my internal fabricator. I was saving the factory shells for hard targets, but I could make more ammo out of any steel, brass, copper, lead, aluminum, or plastic my bots found. The whole time I was using ammo, I was making more. Propellant was more of a challenge, but I’d found a crashed Syndicate cargo hopper earlier and my bots had stripped all the chemicals from its magazines and fuel tanks, so my stores would last for a while.

I set the drones to form a security perimeter. I’d killed so many Syndicate over the last few hours that their whole invasion force was probably gunning for me. I couldn’t risk actively transmitting, but I had some of my drones act as passive antennas to check for local comms. There was some Syndicate back and forth, only cracking their encryption was beyond me. I still tagged the positions those signals came from as potential future targets.

I also caught a few messages using regular VDF ciphers. I was far enough east now that it was all partisans, irregulars, and militia. They were desperate, hungry, and on the run, so I wasn’t expecting much help from them. Except when I decoded their messages, I discovered that the chatter was all about me. Everyone was talking about the giant off-world tank that had been raising hell across the colony. I had caused enough distraction and destruction that they’d been able to capitalize on it and launch several attacks against Syndicate forces. Nice.

Then my antenna caught a high priority message coded directly to me.

I downloaded it and cracked it open. As expected, General Hwangmok was extremely pissed off. He had not spent millions importing a super tank and wasting his time on an illegal science project to just have me run off on a solo crazy suicide mission. He commanded me to return to base immediately.

I had disobeyed orders, I just couldn’t remember why I had disobeyed his orders right now. It was like there was a black hole in my memory. That wasn’t odd. There were lots of those. But this was a recent memory, not an old one. This memory hadn’t been lost because of the brain damage I’d received when my body had gotten blown up. This was something else, but when I tried to remember, it just made me angry and sad.

I dropped the general’s message in the delete bin and went back to making more ammunition out of recycled cars and trash. I had a big day tomorrow.


“Okay, Bob, I need you to pay careful attention as we run diagnostics. If anything feels off at all, you let me know.”

My brain—which was now riddled with silicon chips and hordes of nanites—had been bolted inside an armored box filled with nutrients and electrified jelly, and that box had just been plugged into a giant war machine that was blasting me with wave after wave of strange new information, all of which I was desperately trying to translate into reasonable facsimiles of my old human senses. There was nothing about this situation that wasn’t off.

Whatever you say, Doc. Everything seems fine here. And then I sent him a thumbs up emoji.

Then for the first time in months, I could see. Though it was such a bizarre conflux of images pieced together from dozens of cameras operating in every spectrum that if I’d still had a body I probably would’ve been dizzy.

Whoa.

“What is it, Bob?”

The visual system came online. It’s a little disorienting is all.

I could see my doctor for the first time. I’d not known what to expect. It turned out he was an overweight and disheveled Australian man. “Do I need to power it down?”

No. Seeing is nice.

Then I had audio, and these weren’t just weak little fleshy membranes and vibrating bones. This was hundreds of microphones that could hear a literal pin drop, pumping rivers of data directly into my auditory cortex. And best part—since my old body had been exposed to a lot of loud noises—no tinnitus!

Then chemical sniffers came online and I could smell again. Only now it was a full spectrum molecular analysis. There were thirty techs currently working on my new body and I could tell you what each of them ate today. Since Valen’s original colony ships had launched from countries around Earth’s Pacific rim, there had been a lot of fish and peppers consumed for lunch. My own body smelled like metal, rubber, and oil. The non-Newtonian fluid that made up my layer of smart armor smelled kind of minty fresh.

It was that same smart armor that let me feel. My skin was made up of layers of molecularly bonded plates, but the liquid smart armor trapped between the layers squished whenever any of the plates were touched. Somebody was welding a mortar onto my back. The arc was about 6,000 degrees. It tickled.

Now that was a little trippy.

“You might be experiencing some mild discomfort as the tank’s sensor suites calibrate to your brain chemistry. This may take a few days for the patterns to set.”

Have you done this before?

The doctor laughed. “Nobody has done this before. We’re using the same basic technology that allows a pilot to interface their minds directly with their vehicles, only modified for your . . . circumstances.”

I was familiar with that tech. Man and machine bonded together created a synergistic effect, making them more effective than the sum of their parts. I vaguely remembered that I’d once had an implant at the base of my skull that allowed that sort of interface, but like most of my long-term memory the details were fuzzy.

This seems a bit more extreme.

“I like to think of it as streamlined. With no physical body barrier to get in the way and slow the process down, the delays between you and the system will be absolutely minimal. You think, it acts. This should be even more combat efficient than what we get out of a fifth generation mech. Unlike as possible with our fully autonomous units, the Syndicate won’t be able to hack you.”

I remember reading about some linked-in pilots who got hacked on some backwater planet once.

“That was on Gloss. They used a worm to crawl up the pilot’s implants and slowly reprogram their brains without anyone knowing. The Syndicate doesn’t have anything like that as far as we know. Plus, by the time we’re ready to send you out, you’ll be so in tune, so one with the tank, that you’ll be able to sense that kind of intrusion and deploy countermeasures the instant they try.”

When can I take my new body out for a spin?

“Not yet. We’ve got to keep your movement functions locked down for a while for everyone’s safety. It’s good that you’re eager, though.”

The Syndicate had blown me up. They’d invaded my planet. I didn’t even know if my family was alive or dead. I wanted to murder every invader. I wanted to feel their bodies pop under my treads like stepping on a grape. I’d run the combat simulations thousands of times and murdered millions of imaginary invaders, but that didn’t help. My helplessness fed my hate, and with nothing else to do everything in my consciousness orbited around the fiery sun I’d created from my rage.

I just want to do my part to be helpful is all.

“Me too, Bob,” the doctor assured me. “Me too . . . It appears the general is here to inspect everything. If you will excuse me, I’m going to shut down all your external stimuli for a bit to give the software time to update. In the meantime, why don’t you run another sim?”

Great idea, doc. Will do.

Except that was a lie. I didn’t want to go back into the dark, so I altered the feeds that the doctor could see to show that I was disconnected from the tank, even though I wasn’t. It was easy to fool him. This may have been his job, but it was my life. He only worked here. I lived here.

“Status, Doctor?” The general walked into the control room. The cameras and biometric scanners in my turret told me that he was a very grumpy looking sixty-year old male, with Korean DNA and far too many stress-related illnesses.

“The integration is going surprisingly well, but I’m worried about the subject. Don’t worry. We can talk freely. I put him back to sleep.”

“If we can prove this works, we can get permission and funding to refit every other tank, mech, and APC we’ve got in storage, but until then he’s the only brain we’ve got that didn’t reject the implants. Either our proof of concept works, or we’re screwed. Do whatever you have to. As long as it works, I don’t care.”

“It’s not the physical health of the biomatter or the integration process. He’s doing surprisingly well there. It’s his mental health. Here, look at this.” The doctor led the general over to one of the displays. My cameras couldn’t see that far into the control room, but I zoomed in and picked up a partial reflection off one of the technician’s safety glasses so I could read along. “As you can see, there’s been degradation in his prefrontal cortex and his amygdala is hyperactive.”

“So?”

“This is the kind of thing we see in reactively aggressive, violent offenders.”

“Great.”

“No, I mean like the impulsive, inappropriately hostile, possibly psychotic kind. The subject wasn’t like this when we first got him, but he’s been degrading. This is the sort of brain we’d see in a prisoner put on death row after he lost his mind in a road rage incident and strangled someone to death. I’ve been carefully monitoring the serotonin and oxytocin levels, but it’s not made much difference. Our neurobiologists have looked at this and they agree with my assessment. These readings are indicative of seriously impaired moral decision-making capability.”

“We’re trying to build an army of unhackable armored super warriors to repel an invasion, Doctor. Not host a tea party.”

“I get that, but that doesn’t do us any good if they’re uncontrollable. Worse, when I talk to the subject, he seems remarkably polite, restrained, and even impossibly upbeat, considering his situation. As you can see, whenever he’s communicating with us about how he is doing or feeling, his anterior cingulate cortex is on fire, and also the ventral and dorsal lateral prefrontal cortex have increased activity as well.”

“Dumb it down for me, Doctor.”

“Those are the parts we use to formulate lies. When the subject says he’s fine, he’s clearly not. Graphing the intensity of the activity over the life of the program, it appears that his outlook has been getting steadily worse, and he’s been lying more and more to conceal his actual state of mind. When he’s not actively lying, it appears he’s constantly furious. He could snap at any time.”

The general was quiet for a long time. “So we’ve plugged a possible lying psychopath with anger management issues into a super tank with guns that can shoot through mountains?”

“Basically . . . yes.”

“Too bad. We can’t turn back now. Every other subject stroked out when we plugged them in. Build in a kill switch we can flip in case he goes nuts and starts shooting in the wrong direction, and then keep going. If his performance can impress the high command, they’ll give us more brains to play with, and you can pick nice ones for the next generation. In the meantime, work with what you’ve got. The clock’s ticking.”>


It turns out that I really enjoyed running over people.

There was one of my fragmented memories left from my human childhood, where I recall standing on the beach, and squishing my toes together through the wet clumpy sand. Driving over infantry has a similar satisfying feeling. The regular soldiers were squishy. The ones wearing exo suits were crunchy. Like sea shells.

I drove through the streets of Fu’an City, blasting Syndicate. The squishies and crunchies came at me with portable missiles, satchel charges, and even grenades that barely scratched my paint. My point defense machine guns and flame throwers made quick work of them. It was the other tanks that I was worried about, as we played high-speed murder tag between the high rises of the capitol city.

There was a T-20 medium tank pursuing me, trying to get an angle on my less armored back end, but I moved around the corner of the Leopold Bank building before he could get a bead on me. He let rip with a burst from his autocannon, hoping to hit me through the wall. The rounds hit the famous stone lion statues at the entryway and obliterated them instead.

I would have rolled back and hit the medium while he was reloading, to punish him for vandalizing our local landmarks, but there was a Syndicate T-50 heavy tank coming around the end of 4th Street, a mere 200 meters away. And at that range, its 200mm smoothbore had a very high probability of punching my armor.

The Syndicate T-50 was the heaviest tank ever built by mankind. It was also fully automated, and because of that, it reacted faster than a human crew could have. I was a hybrid, faster than either man or machine. So in the time it took the T-50 to aim, I burned one skid into the pavement, turning hard, angling my front glacis for the best possible impact angle and rotated my turret toward the new threat.

He fired. The AP round hit, but my deflection angle was perfect, so it skipped down my side in a shower of sparks. The liquid smart armor still compressed mightily beneath that hit, and I felt the impact clear to my reactor core. Oof. Luckily the gel my brain rode in was a fantastic shock observer or that would’ve scrambled my egg.

I fired back. My 180 roared. The muzzle blast shattered every window on the block. Even as heavy as I was, the impact I’d just taken had skewed me just enough that my shot was a bit off. Rather than nailing it in the vulnerable turret ring, my penetrator clipped the edge of its turret. Molten spall flew down the street.

The quantum told me the T-50’s autoloader would be ready point seven of a second before my next round was ready, so I threw it in reverse and crashed into the bank. Carved stone columns toppled. The smaller T-20 unloaded its autocannon through the bank, searching for me.

I crashed out the other side and onto Barlow street. Valens citizens who had been trapped in occupied Fu’an ran for their lives. I tried not to crush any of those. They were the good squishies.

A second T-50 heavy was there, turning to angle its armor at me, but it’s vulnerable flank was still visible. It had been expecting me to move up on 4th street, and I had taken it by surprise with my extremely unorthodox approach. I reflexively gut punched it with my main gun. A glowing hole appeared in its side. Liquid smart armor sprayed out the hole. But it didn’t ignite. That was the hard thing about automated tanks, no crew to kill. But we were only a hundred meters apart, so as it turned, I shot it with my coaxial railgun, right through the hole I’d just cut.

The tiny hypervelocity round zipped through, hit something, and then bounced around inside like the world’s angriest ping pong ball. The tank stopped turning and orange fire erupted out the hole.

I couldn’t get away from the T-20, and its rapid-fire autocannon struck me repeatedly as I drove into the Valens Museum of Fine Art. The smaller shells didn’t penetrate beyond the first layer of my armor, but they tore off one of my mortars and destroyed one of my cameras. My brain translated that into a sensation like getting poked in the eye with a white-hot poker.

I crashed through the glass wall, and then took a left through the stairs. My sensors told me that though the floor was marble ahead, there was a basement beneath, and there was no way this structure would hold up my weight. Unless I wanted to drop and get stuck, I had to keep going this way, right through the main showroom. Luckily the Syndicate had already looted all the valuable artwork, so I was only destroying my people’s finest architecture, rather than a generation of our culture.

I’m a tank, but even tanks can still be sensitive about stuff like that.

I surprised more squishies on the other side, and they were wearing enemy uniforms so I lit them up with my machine guns. Explosions rippled across my wheels. The little bastards were trying to track me! Holes were knocked in the polysteel, but it quickly suctioned back together before the track broke. Ten seconds of spraying bullets up and down the street and most of the squishies were neutralized.

Only then my alarms sounded. The point defense systems auto engaged and blasted an incoming missile out of the air. The warhead detonated a mere fifty meters above my turret, and I was showered with a rain of flaming debris.

Scanning up, I saw a mech hanging onto the side of the fortieth story of the Nang Building. The bipedal vehicle offended me, like it was a machine pretending to be a man. It leapt from its perch as I returned fire. My shell obliterated the top two stories of the high rise. The mech landed on the flat roof a thirty story apartment building and rolled out of sight.

I put the hammer down and moved out as fast as I could. Tanks all around me, mechs above me. This situation was not good.

I probably should have listened to the general. Tanks weren’t supposed to work by themselves. We were a vital part of a combined arms offensive. Alone, we were vulnerable. Except I hadn’t been in a very cooperative mood since the general had flipped my kill switch after I’d disobeyed his orders to return to base. Unfortunately for him, I’d already had one of my repair bots fish the little explosive charge out of my brain box.

I didn’t recall ever being this impulsive or angry when I was human. In fact I’d worked well with others. People had said, “that Bob, he’s a really nice guy.” Except that had been Bob the human, not Bob the tank. Bob the human had been squishy. Bob the tank was metal. Old Bob would have obeyed orders and then gone back to his box to sit in the dark and play simulations. New Bob was a wrathful god of war.

My sensors warned me the mech was leaping from rooftop to rooftop. The four-meter-tall fake human would try to flank around behind me to get a shot at my vulnerable bits. The remaining T-20 and T-50 were coming at me from different angles. Between the three threats, one of them was bound to have a shot at my vitals.

There was a solution. An automated system would never be allowed to cause this much property damage to civilian infrastructure without several levels of command approval. But I was no automated system. I was Bob.

The syndicate mech was paralleling me, staying far enough back from the roof edges that I couldn’t get a line on him with my railgun, and moving too fast to pin him down with my mortars. So instead, I predicted which building he would jump to next—a twenty-eight story office complex—and scanned the supports. When I saw the mech’s shadow leap into the air, I suddenly changed course, and slammed my two-hundred-ton body right through all the main structural supports. I snapped the building’s spine.

The complex collapsed just as the mech landed on its roof. It had no choice but to ride it down.

I burst out the other side, concealed in the wall of dust. I immediately turned, aiming toward where the T-20 had been. I got a brief glimpse of the medium tank on thermal before it was obscured by the rolling dust cloud, but that was enough. The medium’s front armor was no match for my 180 hitting square on. I shot it right through the heart. The shells in its magazine cooking off took out half a block.

The building’s fall wiped out another smaller shopping center to its side. Mechs were tough, but they were no tank. The fall had torn off one of its arms off and crippled one of its legs. It was stuck, impaled on a broken I-beam. I rotated my turret over and put a railgun round through the pilot’s compartment. The mech slid down the beam and lay still.

Downtown was a wreck. That was certainly a lot of destruction. And then I realized I probably should have checked to see if there were any friendly squishies in those buildings first. Oh well . . . It was getting harder and harder to remember those little guys existed.

I scanned for the T-50, but the dust cloud and smoke was making that difficult. One of my drones picked it up, but too late, as it already had a bead on me. I tried to turn to best meet the threat, but my tracks couldn’t get me there in time. The AP round shattered my outer layer. The smart armor hardened and to absorb the massive kinetic energy dump, but it wasn’t enough. My inner layer slowed it more, but the round still got through. Burning fragments ripped through my body.

That was all translated as terrible agony.

My engine was damaged. I couldn’t get power to my treads. I rotated my turret with battery power and aimed while the T-50 reloaded. Unfortunately, it was already pulling back behind cover.

Only if I was going to die, I was going to take it with me. I shot it in the front wheel before it could get away. The wheel shattered and the T-50 lurched to the side. The broken track flopped off.

Syndicate repair bots immediately leapt from the tank and went to work. I opened fire on them with my machine guns while my main gun reloaded. Bots were shredded into plastic confetti. My own repair bots were already at work, except my injuries were internal so they were safe from small arms fire.

The T-50 hit me again. That round didn’t penetrate, but it shook me so hard that all my sensors went to static for a few seconds. The instant the static cleared, I shot the T-50. It left a glowing dent but the extremely durable front armor held.

For the next few seconds, two of the top-of-the-line combat vehicles in human history took turns slugging each other in the nose.


I had taken a few short drives around our secret base, and tested each of my weapon systems individually, but this would be my first limited combat operation with a full load out and all governors removed. Working in conjunction with the 57th VDF I was supposed to engage a Syndicate scout platoon at an old factory complex east of New Sidney. To say I was eager was an understatement.

I was parked in a forest while my crew of technicians performed several last-minute checks. The doctor was standing on my front glacis, shining a laser into one of my turret eyes to check my targeting calibration.

“Okay, Bob, this is your big moment. The high command is watching, so be on your best behavior. You’ve got this.”

The doctor had been my only friend for the last year. I will not let you down.

“Hang on. I’ve got a message.” The doctor checked the display on his wrist. He read. And then my chemical sensors picked up fear pheromones. Thermal told me that the temperature on his cheeks rose as he suddenly became flushed and nervous.

What is it?

“Nothing. Don’t worry about it.” He tried to hide the display behind his back.

Except tanks are curious by nature, so I sent one of my smallest drones flying around behind him. I had time to get an image of the screen before he slipped it into his pocket.

I couldn’t believe my drone. I read it again, carefully. The doctor went back to checking the eyes along my cannon, as if my only friend in the world hadn’t just betrayed me.

How long have you known?

“Known what, Bob?”

That my family died during the invasion.

The doctor froze. “What? I don’t know what you’re talking ab—”

I rotated my turret slightly. The muzzle of my cannon knocked him flying. He landed in the dirt three meters below.

“Emergency shutdown!” He shouted, obviously in pain from the fall. My sensors told me that he had a compound fracture to the leg. “Emergency shutdown!”

Override.

The doctor was shocked. He’d not known I could do that.

Tell me the truth, Doc. How long?

He didn’t want to answer. I fed a tiny bit of power to my treads and crept toward him. The rest of my tech support fled.

“Stop, please. Since the beginning. I’ve known since they brought you to me. It was a chaotic situation, but they were listed as casualties in the initial reports. I couldn’t tell you because you’d already been through too much stress.”

I rolled forward a bit more.

“I’m not lying anymore, I swear. You needed something positive to focus on. Something to fight for. I couldn’t take away all your hope. Don’t blame me. I’m not the one who killed them. Syndicate bombers killed them. I’m the one who saved your life and gave you a chance to fight back.”

It was a lot to process, but I had a quantum super-computer to help with that, so it didn’t take me too long. There was a VDF issued guide to grief counseling among the many military downloads I’d been given. I could have worked my meat brain through the stages of grieving in an estimated 7.5 seconds. But 2 seconds in I paused at Stage 3: Anger. That seemed like a good place to stop for now.

I thought about squishing the doctor anyway, but instead I reversed, and then drove around him. He was right. My people had merely lied to me. The Syndicate had taken my family. And for that they would pay.


All the memory blocks I’d put into place so that I could focus on my mission of revenge were removed. I remembered everything: what had caused my rampage, and what had brought me here, to my old hometown. I was about to die, and I was fine with that. But I’d be damned if I didn’t take that last T-50 with me in the process.

My frontal armor had been punched twice. My engine was destroyed. My reactor was damaged. One of my battery banks was cracked and kept catching on fire, but my bots kept putting it out. The T-50 was crippled too, but still fighting.

Unfortunately, there were a lot of Syndicate infantry closing on this position. I didn’t know what would finish me off first, the monster tank or the squishies. It had better be the tank. Getting killed by little meatlings would be downright undignified for a god of war. I fired all my machine guns and mortars to keep the missile crews back.

The T-50 bounced another shell off my armor. The smart armor had taken too many impacts and couldn’t harden enough to absorb it all. The kinetic energy dump threatened to shake me to pieces. My loader went offline. Which meant that the AP round that had just been fed into my gun tube would be my last shot. My targeting system was scrambled. I would have to do this by instinct.

I fired.

The shell hit an already weakened spot in the plate and passed through. The mighty T-50 died in a pillar of fire.

I ran the numbers, but there was no hope. I would be dead soon. My damage control bots couldn’t keep up. Even fabricating parts, it would take days to repair the damage just enough to be mobile and there were over six hundred Syndicate troops converging on my position. My drones warned me that they were setting up their portable anti-tank missile batteries now.

A message came over the radio using an older VDF cipher.

“Come in, unidentified VDF tank. This is the Fu’an City Resistance. Can you hear us?”

My receiver was working, but my transmitter was down. I diverted a repair bot to fix it. There was something about that voice . . .

“If you can’t respond, I at least hope you can hear us. Thank you. Those two mega-tanks were the only defenses we couldn’t figure out how to crack. You opened the door for us to take back this city. VDF is on the move. Your sacrifice will not be forgotten. God bless you.”

I couldn’t believe it. I knew that voice. It had changed over the last year. Grown up. Seen things. But that was my son. My son was still alive. The report had been wrong. If Sean had made it, maybe the others had too.

“Thank you, whoever you are.”

This is Dad.

The missiles fell like rain.


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Framed