The Bat

Anyway, I was stationed on the outskirts, far from the population centers but square on the site of this big old pre-March fort. We all were- sent to the margins where fighting was strike-and-fade through the forests and the line between civilians and combatants was drawn with a stick in the dirt and about as permanent. Where it was easy to write off mistakes as mistakes and massacres as blind shots in the dark. Can't trust the Broken Legion around people, not harnessed. We had to participate, in the name of our contracts and our families, but we weren't the ones needed in this war. Not yet.
I can only imagine how the locals saw us. Like the knights of their history, perhaps, eyeless giants clad in black and painted with laughing foreign symbols of teeth, of talons, of blood. An ancestral memory of the armies which swarmed across their frontiers, bearing dragon-banners which metamorphosed over the centuries into dragon-arms, powerful segmented tongues of metal that spit fire and death. A Quilin under harness is war personified, the ultimate sacrifice of self in pursuit of restraint: the terrible force of the Dragon directed and controlled, unleashed only when all other options fail. The very best are our generals, our negotiators, our poets.
A harnessed Quilin of the Broken Legion is a weapon of terror. Nothing less, nothing more. We're the ones who fight too well.
I'm on watch. The forest is dark and quiet, scarred by generations of logging and petty conflict. The animals we haven't shot are keeping their heads down and their mouths shut. The hissing background chatter of status and targeting brushes through my mind as it has for the last three years: -clear clear ready spun at ninety-two percent clear ready-
The dragon-arms swivel this way and that, probing for any foolish Genoans stumbling through the trees who might have an interest in occupying what is theirs. The fort is a historical site, after all. We're here to protect it from the fighting. For their own good.
Radar and heat detection reveals nothing. Only the upper two arms out of six possess this function, along with an array of nonlethal instruments designed to hold, to slow, to incapacitate. It follows a pattern: vigilance and prevention is the height of civilized conflict, so these tools naturally go above the heat rays, the grenade launchers, the antipersonnel shredders, the slashing blades and crushing claws and facemelting acids. The next two tiers, of course, are decisiveness and precision followed by shock and horror, which in turn rotates back to prevention. No one wants to fight a foe armed with so many nasty ways to maim and kill large groups of people.
I've furnished each civilized arm with a pair of bloodshot eyes. The others have teeth. It isn't regulation, but the Broken Legion is entitled its eccentricities.
-ready clear ready noted target target acquired traversing target engage?-
A bat wings its way just above the canopy, utterly absorbed in catching and killing mosquitos for the good of all mankind.
-target- clamors the harness, -target target target-
It zooms and tracks and calculates, bombarding the space behind my eyeballs with projections and trajectories and estimates of power required and power expended.
-engage? engage? target target-
Bats are good luck. In the old days, they were mediators between heaven and earth. I, however, am tired and annoyed and bored out of my mind, and the system seems even more persuasive than usual. It could be a suicide-bat, belly filled with explosive chemicals. Or even a machine cleverly disguised as a bat. Maybe it belongs to one faction or another and is fitted with cameras hoping to steal state secrets. Either way it's not transmitting the "friendly" signal and that means, bat or not, it's an enemy combatant like rebels or squirrels or anything else moving with a pulse that lacks the signal.
I shrug. The cooling vents of dragon-arm number four, already tracking, flare red.
A tiny comet ignites in the distance, and falls.
-target eliminated-
I grin. Just a little. Where else but in malfunction, in procedural error, in a scalpel just off the mark, would society find its killers? We're the ones who went wrong. Skirted too close. Took to it too well. We're the necessary unwanted cousins of the noble warriors, acknowledged as a problem yet never corrected. If anyone needs a city razed without remorse, we're there.
Too bad about the bat, but there are others. Smarter ones who stayed down. Just consider it a service to the species.
C for crazy.
I will never be a poet.
-ready clear ready clear ready spun at ninety two percent-
Watch resumes, and there's no more fire till morning.