Matthew Reilly - Scarecrow Returns

Scarecrow had a soft spot for the Kid. While not academically gifted—he failed most written exams—what he lacked in smarts, he made up for in a desire to be smarter. He was also good-natured, a crack shot and a whiz at field-stripping and rebuilding almost any kind of weapon.

Mario, on the other hand, was less easy to like.

He was a surly and dour guy from the Engineering Corps who kept largely to himself when they weren’t working. A highly skilled mechanic, he was responsible for maintaining the various vehicles they were testing.

Like Schofield, however, both the Kid and Mario were in the Arctic doing field testing for a reason.

They were also broken.

The Kid had lost the hearing in one ear in a training accident, so he couldn’t go on active deployment. And a little digging on Schofield’s part had revealed that Mario had been implicated in the disappearance of some sidearms and over $20,000 worth of vehicle parts from a Marine lock-up; he hadn’t been formally charged, but a cloud had lingered over him and this assignment was seen by some as an unofficial punishment.

As for the four civilian members of the team, as far as Schofield was concerned, two of them were great and two less so.

Zack Weinberg was from DARPA and he was your typical geek genius: he was 29, gangly and thin, and he wore huge glasses that seemed three sizes too big for his head.

A physicist by training, he was at DARPA because of his work in robotics. Hopelessly devoted to Call of Duty video games and all things Star Wars and Star Trek , he was in the Arctic testing several new DARPA inventions, the main one being a small bomb-disposal robot called the BRTE-500, or, as Zack called it, “Bertie.”

Bertie was DARPA’s answer to existing battlefield robots like the Pack-Bot, the TALON and the weapons-mounted variant of the TALON called SWORDS.

“Except Bertie comes with a few extra features,” Zack said the day he pulled the little robot from its crate. “Unlike other bots that require human operators to control them remotely, Bertie is able to operate completely independently. Thanks to an artificial intelligence chip developed by my team at DARPA, he can follow spoken orders, learn, and even assess a situation and make tactical decisions.”

“He can make tactical decisions?” Schofield said. To him, the little robot—with its two spindly bomb-disposal arms and its curiously emotive single-lens “eye” mounted on a stalk—looked like a cute toy. It scurried around on four rugged little tires and, when necessary, extended a set of triangular treads that enabled it to climb up steps and over obstacles.

“He’s a smart little bot,” Zack said, “and for a weedy little fella, he packs a punch. He was initially designed for bomb disposal, but I removed his IED water blaster and lightened his armor plating—replaced all the steel with ultralight titanium. Then I augmented him with some offensive capabilities.”

As he said this, Zack attached a gun-barrel to Bertie’s weapons mount . . . and suddenly the little robot took on a wholly different appearance: he looked like WALL-E with a great big gun.

“Those capabilities include,” Zack explained, “four internal rotator-fed ammunition clips which load a custom-modified lightweight short-barreled internal-recoil-compensated 5.56mm M249 machine gun; a blowtorch for cutting through fences and razor wire; full digital satcoms; a high-res camera that can send video images back to base; a first-aid pack, including a diagnostic scanner and defibrillator paddles, both of which Bertie can apply himself; oh, and four of our new MRE ration packs in case the human beings working with him get hungry. And all this in a package that weighs about sixty pounds, so you can even pick him up and carry him if you really need to get out of Dodge in a hurry.”

Schofield couldn’t help but like Bertie: the little robot followed Zack around the camp like a devoted puppy, albeit a puppy with a machine gun on its back.

Mother, however, was doubtful. “I don’t know. How can we know he won’t short-circuit and open fire on us with that cannon?”

“Bertie can distinguish between friend and foe,” Zack said. “I’ve scanned in all our team’s faces onto his memory bank with instructions that we are never to be fired upon.”

“Hello? Didn’t you see the ED-209 in RoboCop ?”

“This is the big question about robotic weapons,” Zack said. “But Bertie’s operated for three hundred hours without hurting anybody he wasn’t supposed to hurt. We have to trust him sometime. Hey, speaking of which, Bertie, scan Captain Schofield. Facial and infra-red, please.”

The robot scanned Schofield’s face, then beeped.

Its robotic voice said, “ Scan complete. Individual identified as Captain Shane M. Schofield, United States Marine Corps. Service identification number 256-3569. ”

Zack said, “Store as secondary buddy, please.”

“ Captain Shane M. Schofield stored as secondary buddy .”

“What does that mean?” Schofield asked.

“Bertie needs someone to follow. I’m his primary buddy, which is why he follows me, but if something were to happen to me, he needs a secondary buddy, which I think should be you.”

“I’m honored.”

Schofield liked Zack. On quiet evenings, they played chess, and during those matches Zack would happily explain things like space-time, the speed of light and the Big Bang Theory—the TV show and the universe-creating event.

On a few occasions, Schofield even played chess against Bertie, with the little robot moving the pieces with its long spindly arm.

Bertie won every time.

The second civilian Schofield got along well with was Emma Dawson, a young meteorologist from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

In her late twenties, Emma was pretty, articulate and tremendously hardworking—she was almost always reading a chart or working away on her laptop. She was in the Arctic measuring the rate at which the sea ice was melting.

Her beauty had not gone unnoticed by all the young males in the team. Schofield had seen the Kid and Mario—and young Zack—staring absently at Emma on various occasions. But she rarely looked up from her work, and Schofield wondered if it was the practiced skill of an attractive young woman: bury yourself in your work so you don’t have to fend off unwanted advances.

The final two civilian members of the field team kept mainly to themselves.

Jeff Hartigan was a senior executive for ArmaCorp Systems, a weapons maker that produced assault and sniper rifles. ArmaCorp was trying to convince the Marines to buy its latest assault rifle, the MX-18 carbine, but the Corps had insisted on cold-weather testing before they committed.

At 48, Hartigan was the oldest member of the group. He was also perhaps the only one who occupied a position of status back in the real world. As such, he was haughty and aloof and didn’t care about anyone he deemed beneath him, which was pretty much everyone else in the camp—so long as they recorded the results of the carbine’s tests, he didn’t seem to care what they thought of him. Except during testing, he mostly stayed in his tent, well apart from the others, even going so far as to send his personal assistant—an equally aloof junior executive named Chad—to collect his food for him at mealtimes.

Their testing had generally gone well.

The ArmaCorp rifle had performed flawlessly in the ice-cold conditions—making Hartigan even more unbearable—and Bertie whizzed about impervious to all kinds of frost and snow, variously disarming explosives and blowing blocks of ice to pieces with his small but very powerful M249 machine gun.