“Oh it’s way more than that,” said Ringo as targeting reticles appeared in his vision. A head’s up display popped into luminous green around the limits of his viewpoint with flashing triangles indicating the direction of the attacking drones. He whirled around, his new perspective flashing forward with an acceleration that made him whoop with joy.
Ringo banked around until he saw the first drone. The targeting reticle drifted across his viewpoint until it locked onto the attacking craft. The drone immediately sensed the target lock and darted upwards, drawing a white contrail up the face of the sky, trying to break out of Ringo’s field of view with a sudden burst of speed, but Ringo was ready for it. He urged his own craft upwards, following the drone as it accelerated skyward and then pitched back down in a powered dive that would have been suicidal in any other type of aircraft.
Ringo matched every desperate evasive manoeuver of his prey, keeping the reticle nailed on his target. He searched for some kind of trigger, some way of shooting at the target he had acquired, but none presented itself. His earlier elation evaporated like the thin contrail behind his speeding drone. He was unarmed.
“I can’t shoot!” he cried. “Nothing's happening.”
"Oh yes it fucking is,” replied Custard. Suddenly the drone ahead of Ringo exploded into a spinning cloud of exotic alloy fragments as cannon fire from the tank below tore through it.
“Your drone is linked to our guns,” Custard said. “You light ‘em up and we’ll knock ‘em down.”
The adrenaline came back in a flood. The tank was a true next-generation weapon; its real-time situational awareness was just as powerful as its armament. It was a fully integrated tactical platform and it was his to command.
Ringo searched for his next target, banking and spinning and counting on whatever new equations governed the design of his remotely-controlled steed to meet his inputs with an impossibly intricate dance of controlled turbulence.
He could feel his hands on the controls back inside the tank and felt a momentary dislocation. How could he do what he was doing? Flying the drone was not just a matter of willing his craft forward through the neural interface. It required physical control inputs too. He had never flown so much as a remote control plane and yet piloting a next-generation Chinese drone in combat seemed like second nature.
He didn’t have time to dwell on those thoughts. The second drone appeared in his sights and it was coming straight at him. He was the target now. The ring of the drone glittered as it fired and tracer rounds fizzed past him but he kept his reticle fixed on his opponent as they closed the distance between them in a supersonic game of chicken.
Just as Ringo was about to bank away, a shell from the tank shattered one of the attacking drone's inner rings and it spun apart like a broken flywheel, drawing crazy whirls of condensation across the sky until the whole thing disintegrated, leaving nothing behind but an oddly shaped spike of cloud and a rain of metal fragments falling across the landscape below. Ringo punched through the blossoming debris cloud as Custard’s cheers echoed in his ears.
“Any other surprises on the way, Sarge?” asked Norris.
Ringo scanned the landscape around the tank. It looked clear for kilometres in every direction. The mysterious impulse to head south-east tugged at him again and he scanned the landscape in that direction, but could see nothing between them and the river but rolling countryside and scattered rural villages.
“Looks clear, but we need to get moving and find somewhere to swap the tank for something less conspicuous."
The idea of abandoning the tank almost made Ringo physically ill. It was the right thing to do. Their best option now was to disappear and use their training to survive, escape, and evade until they reached the border.
He tried to understand from where the strange compulsion came. It wasn’t fear, they were all long past that and anyway, the big machine was just a liability at this point. First the desire to head south-east and now the strange compulsion to keep the tank. Something wasn’t right. He hoped it was just some side effect of his experiences in virtual reality but again he felt a vague feeling of dislocation. As if he was driving a shell called Ringo the same way he was piloting the drone.
He couldn’t wait for this all to be over, to get back home to…
To what exactly?
Ringo tried to remember. He could remember the mission. He could remember his training back in Hereford, but beyond that were only vague sensations. He caught a fleeting impression of a young girl in a replica Liverpool jersey. Her long, black hair was pulled back in a ponytail and her smile was missing a couple of milk teeth but was no less brilliant for that. He tried to remember her name… nothing.
No, not nothing. He remembered something. Something important. Unlike the faded memory of the girl, this something was vivid and yet at the same time indefinable. It was alien, as if part of his memory had been re-written in a foreign language.
He set the drone to hold station above the tank and pushed the bulky virtual-reality helmet up. He took a second to settle back into his own body and then unstrapped from the overwatch station and made his way forward to where Norris sat with his head enclosed inside his own bulky, VR helmet.
Ringo had been in his share of armoured vehicles before, but the spider tank was unlike anything he had ever seen. He watched while Norris drove, watching the man’s hands on the controls and remembering how his own hands had felt so at home piloting the drone.
“Norris, hold up for a second,” Ringo said.
"Not the best time, Sarge.”
“This is important. We need to talk. Take that helmet off.”
Norris brought the tank to a halt and removed the tank’s neural interface.
“Switch on the internal lights, will you?” Ringo asked and Norris punched a control. The cabin of the tank was filled with a red-tinged glow. Ringo looked at the control Norris had activated. It was one switch on a panel of dozens just like it and it was labelled with Chinese characters.
“How did you do that?” Ringo asked.
Norris looked at him strangely. “I just…” Norris’s voice faltered. “Well that’s the light switch isn’t it?”
“But how do you know? Look at this bloody thing? Half of these controls are not even labelled and those that are, are in Chinese. How did you know which one was the light switch?”
Norris frowned. “I just… know,” he said eventually. “Must be the neural interface. I just kind of remembered.”
“But you had to start this thing up before the neural interface even came on line. Hell, you were using Chinese computers back in the lab. Since when can you read Chinese?”
Norris looked scared now. Even Custard was looking quizzically at the gunnery controls he had been using just minutes earlier.
“I… I don’t know,” the big man replied. His brow was furrowed in confusion.
“Do you have a wife? Kids?”
The blank look on Norris’s face was rapidly turning to something like panic as he searched his memories and came up empty.
Custard shook his head. “This is fucked up!” he exclaimed. “It’s the fucking meadow. We’ve been brain damaged.”
“I don’t think so,” Ringo replied.
“What do you mean?”
“Let’s try something. Everyone close your eyes and then point in the direction you think we should be heading. Don’t think about it too much; just pick a direction that feels right.” Everyone did as they were told. “Now open your eyes.” They were all pointing in exactly the same direction — south-east.”
“I don’t think we’ve been damaged,” Ringo said. “More like re-programmed. We’ve been given the knowledge we needed to escape. But that’s come at the cost of our memories.”