SIV Endgame: An Opco Boone Adventure

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“When it came, the end-game came down fast and hard. It was in a skirmish with a rogue structured investment vehicle in the Caymans.

Present

Bundie

Biffer

Chippy

Frenchie

Swart

Tucker

Lance Corporal i/c of Radio

On the comlink: a Risk Officer. Whom I think we will have to call cassandra.

Beach landing

Group Captain David Bundie set his jaw. He scanned the ragged company, lined up on a pew and hooked into the static margin line.

The MCA transporter was an antique Spartan crate. It rattled and droned and swept low across the water.

“Okay, lads, this is it. Anyone who wants can stay aboard —”

The men, barked, “Sir! No, Sir!” in staccato unison. They numbered off by instinct. Of the original company of 60, nine remained.

“THREE!”

“SEVEN!”

“EIGHT!”

“TWELVE!”

“TWENTY-FIVE!”

“THIRTY-ONE!”

“THIRTY-NINE!”

“FORTY-SIX!”

“FIFTY-ONE!”

“SIXTY!”

They wouldn’t have it any other way: it was written in their eyes: it flowed wordlessly between them, when he met their collective gaze. They functioned like a single organism.

Bundie looked down, shut his eyes and smiled. “All right, my lovelies, all right.”

The confirm horn squawked. The netting flag flashed green. The nine extant irregulars dropped out of the MCA. They set their correlation dials to 1.0 and went in delta-one configuration. They formed a tight landing pattern on the beach.

Frenchie was oldest in the company. He came down last. He snapped-off his chute and pulled a three-point hero drop in the high-tide flotsam. The boys yukked it up and moved out.

They were armed for stocks: their Cayman Corps adversaries were battle-hardened right down the capital structure: Bundie mandated shoulder-mounted Mizzlers for all. In case of ALD cointel interference, they carried a brace of bump-stock pledge models. For synthetics cover, they backed it up with late-model ISDAs retrofitted with dynamic margin CSAs.

Frenchie, of course, had his usual assortment of exotic concoctions: an antique FBF side-arm, an old CMOF and his trusty Osler if they really got in a jam.

On-field briefing and the Liquidator

The unit formed up under the trees. The choppers hung low: they made devilish din and rucked up the tree-top foliage.

Bundie clamped a hand over his hat and bellowed over the racket: “This could get tasty, lads. Hostiles in these parts are well-organised and well-armoured: limited recourse shielding fore and aft.”

Tucker chomped on his cheroot. He split a toothy grin and patted his barrel.

“Ain’t no pissant LRV going get in the way of this honey. I call it the Liquidator.”

It was one ungainly bastard. It had some universal dock on the magazine.

“What the hell is that, Tucks?” Frenchie chuckled. “Home-made?”

Tucker shrugged. “It’s a P.B.A. It’s got herbs, my dudes. Multi-calibre. Universal netter.”

“BP? A Blue Peter job?” Chippy roared.

“P. B., As in Prime Breaker, baby. I had it built to custom spec in the Links chop shop. It’s got stocks, recalls, telescopic margin lending, I.M. recalibration real time. Have a go at this baby —”

He handed it to Chippy. Chippy waved it about.

Tucker ducked and swayed. “Whoa, man, Just point that bad boy the fuck away from me.”

Chippy shrugged. He swung 45 degrees and squeezed off a round.

The air boiled. The boys hit the deck. There was an unholy blam and a wolf of blue flame. Chippy flew ten feet back and landed in a heap. Tucker flapped smoke away and spluttered.

“Jesus.”

Eighty feet hence, the charred stump of a beach palm smouldered. Forty feet beyond that, what was left of the rest of it crackled and smoked on the sand. A cloud mushroomed above the clearing.

Frenchie chuckled. Biff whistled. Chippy was out cold.

Tucker grinned, slapped Chippy’s chops and brought his buddy back topside.

“You like? Huh?”

The black mushroom wooded and dissipated. Bundie scrambled to his feet, glaring. “Jesus, Tucker! You’ll kill the lot of us! They’ll see that blast signal for miles around!”

The SIV advance

Beyond the dunes: a low mechanical clanking. It sounded heavy. It sounded relentless. It sounded huge. It sounded like a max-vol slice of hell.

Something in the aural vectors said it was headed their way.

“What ze hell is zat?” said Frenchie.

“Oh, fucking great. They’re on to us.” Bundie re-glared at Tucker. He held up a paw. “O.K., this is Top urgent now, boys. Hostiles are imminent.”

The boys shucked their MSLAs and formed a circle round Chippy.

Chippy came around slow. Tucker face-dashed him from a canteen. Chippy moaned.

Bundie said, “We got an ID yet, kiddo?”

The radio operator was a kid of barely eighteen. He ran a redline. “A ... a ... rel ... reloadable MTN c ... c ... configuration of s ... some sort, sir. P ... p ... programmable, most likely.”

“Thank-you, Lance-Corporal.”

Frenchie let out a low whistle.

Bundie swept up the map. “We need to move off the beach, lads. And fast.”

Then a huge MOU smashed through the pines. Its armoured turret swivelled and lined them up.

“Jesus. SIVs! Split!”

The unit spritzed. Swart whoooed. She shucked her CSA and reloaded.

Biffer yeehaared. He banged in a clip of self-referencing CLNs.

Tucker blammed out out some shells from the Liquidator. He had a mind to disorient the advancing machine and throw an indeterminacy curtain around the theatre. But the SIVs kept coming.

Frenchie flip-cocked his piece and hollered, “Oh-ho-ho, c’est la feeding time at ze zoo, mon cher.”

“Wait.” Bundie sniffed the air. “Something’s — not — right. They’re — it’s just — ”

But the boys didn’t wait. They weren’t listening. They smelled a firefight. They fanned out and pressed. In a co-ordinated sequence, they drew their ISDAs and banged in margin clips.

Tucker and Frenchie went left. Biffer went right. Swart kicked off her vol damper and went charging in on foot with a sawn-off repo.

Bundie stood motionless in the clearing. Adrenalin flooded his core. “Something’s not right, lads,” he screamed.

But the unit kept advancing.

Learning droid

Only the Lance-Corporal even heard him. The boy stayed close. He mussed the lad’s hair. “Stay frosty, son — this is going to get sticky. But be prepared to move fast. You may have to make some calls. I’ve your back, lad.”

The boy regarded him with a steeliness that took him aback. “But who’s got yours, sir?”

Bundie pressed a weapon into the boy’s hand. It was a late-model ISDA. The boy gaped.

“You do, son. We stand, or fall, together.”

The boy nodded.

At that moment the SIV’s massive conduit tracks started rolling.

“Stand by: Incoming.”

Frenchie yipped. “Oh, come on, cherie — we ’ave a little fun, n’est-ce pas? —”

Bundie shook his head. “Let’s hit the trees, boys.”

What happened next would be with the boy for the rest of his life — a period which turned out to be far longer than, as he watched the disaster unfold, he held any hope of expecting to see.

SIVs had mucho grunt on the flat. The caterpillars ate up the sand. They toted decent firepower — you couldn’t be casual with them — but they were unwieldy bastards. They had limited downside protection against liquidity drains, were underpowered in choppy markets, and basically under-gunned. Against and anyone who knew what it was doing they were easy pickings. They should be no match for an experienced unit of seasoned killers like the Irregulars.

As such, tended to be staffed with greenhorn sappers an army could afford to lose. The industry slang for the poor suckers aboard a SIV were “expendables”.

But this SIV was odd. Bundie surveyed it from his foxhole. It was more manoeuvrable: more agile, quicker; more professional, volatile, less predictable in their defensive manoeuvres. The usual reporting and compliance harness was dramatically cut down. There was no depo. And it was fast.

Bundie hiffed in a percussive QIB. It blapped spectacular. It threw up dirt and sand and left a decent ditch. The SIV stopped on a dime. It backed up. Its front turret swivelled round and regarded the crater. A fire hose extended. and filled it with water. The SIV rolled over it.

“Holy hell,” muttered Tucker. “Self-sourcing liquidity. That's pretty cool.”

Bundie thought, that's more than “cool”. That's unbelievable. Where the hell is it sourcing that cash? Then Bundie knew it: this was no ordinary SICAV.

“Throw in another. They have limited reserves. They can’t do that indefinitely.”

Tucker bit off the pin and tossed in another QIB. “Roll this, Fatboy,” Tucker chortled.

The SIV retooled. The hose snapped back. An ack-ack poked out of the turret fast. It shot the QIB out of the air.

Bundie swore. How the hell was it doing that? It was gaming out scenarios and learning the Irregulars manoeuvres as fast as they could change them up.

Bundie clocked the insignia on the uniform — that’s three-star MD at the mandate and a EVP on the confirmator. And they were tooled the fuck up: these were not standard issue CP-shooters.

The SIV anticipated his every move. It was like it had a direct line into his goddamn amygdala.

Mean while the boys had surrounded it. Chipper was engaged in a repo firefight with its debt warehouse. He was levering up.

Swart was banging out some semi automatic synthetic longs on an HFT modified ISDA. Swart’s piece was margin cooled, but the Swartster liked the touch of warmth in the barrel so she habitually set it to static. The SIV started drawing margin.

“All right, you’re asking for it!” Swart was well stocked and let it rip.

The SIV hoovered up the cash and doubled down. “This one’s frisky, Skip,” he yelled. His spirits were high. This was what he signed on for. Bundie allowed himself a smile at his old pal’s energy. But as suddenly as it spread, that smile froze.

“All right, friend, you want liquidity? Have some goddamn liquidity.” Tucker loaded up a fresh magazine of long-dated IRS and shouldered the PBA. He flipped the safety on the NAV trigger.

“Tucker! No!”

Time slowed. Tucker tilted his head, regarded his commander and winked. Bundie could see his words fighting through the dense atmosphere, wrestling with the cordite and flying clods and sandspritzes. It never made it. It was as if the universe contrived to wrangle disaster where there might be triumph. Should be triumph.

Bundie bellowed, “Dive!”

The lad said, “What?”

“Take cover!”

Bundie grabbed the lad by his collar and thrust him violently into the base of the cavity formed by the uprooted smoking stump of Tuckers vaporised palm tree. “Hey!” he squeaked. He cracked his head and woozed.

There was a moment of clarity. A sparkular gleam, refracting a rainbow of hope, then a subsonic dropout as Tucker squeezed. A white hot beam of dynamic IM spewed from that magnificent weapon. The arcing white light of a 6(a) notice lit the sky. It hit the SIV’s main margin tank and blew a great hole in it. The liquidity exploded, fanning great arcing sparks of white hot glitter into the sky. They hovered for a moment, congealed into balls of liquid lightening, then zapped out, like targeted missiles, straight at the other irregulars: first Swart, then Chipper, then Tucker, then Frenchie then the squibs whipsawed at Bundie’s tree trunk, slashing here, snapping there as if feeling for Bundie and his ISDA.

Each of the soldiers was transfixed. The glow enveloped them, enfolding them it spinning, misting galaxies of stars.

The boys relaxed and smiled, and beatific glee radiated from them.

Risk control buzzed in on the static. “Irregular unit 5 we are seeing elevated levels of concentration in your sector. Consider margin adjustments. Acknowledge please.

Bundie said, “copy.”.

Frenchie said, “copy.”

Swart said, “copy.”

Tucker said, “copy.”

Doughnut from Chipper.

Risk control again: “Chipper. Do you copy?

Chipper moaned with delight. “I feel... Awesome!”

Tucker quipped: “We’ll, ahh, take that as a yes, then?”

The boys yukked on the com channel. Bundie snapped them off. “Officer Chipstowe, do you copy?”

“Feel that power,” murmured Swart. She banged in another clip of self-referencers and let the SIV have it. The thick cable of energy connecting her weapon to the whole fattened.

The SIV was somehow drawing power from their weapons.

Bundie threw his back against the trunk. The lads — battle seasoned warriors all — were slowly losing contact with their grounding, floating free of their stoplosses, risk control parameters and even trading mandates, their figures shimmering, resolutions pixelating, their guttural moans of pleasure now twisted and contorted as if being strained through a different kind of spacetime geometry.

They beheld their weapons in blissed-out curiosity, entranced by the St Vitus dance in which they were now undoubtedly part, blamming away wilfully, while the margin cash flew out of their ammo tanks.

Bundie knitted his brow. Somehow, the SIV had reversed the usual flow of energy and was drawing pools of liquidity, great firehoses if the stuff, into the siv.

What a it doing? Why?

It got weirder. As fast as the boys could loose off IM rounds, VM rounds were coming back. Swart goosed his stressed day scenario to compensate but he could barely hold it level.

Chipper was wailing. “Im stuck on static,sir!I ... I ... I’m getting eroded. He's draining me!

Stop out, Chipper.

“What? No need! It’s fine, man! Look at this handsome beast! Its Sharpe ratio is off the scale man, ahahah!”

Chipper was gone.

Swart, close out. At the double!

“I ... I ... I can't, sir. There is no bid. I repeat, there is no bid!

There must be a market! I repeat stopout!

“There is no bid. The market is dead sir. But I can ride this out. Let me inject just ... A ... Little .... More”

“Officer Swart, stop out!”

But Swart, too, was gone; collapsed in paroxysms of maniaca,l howling laughter. He floated up into the golden cloud while a concentrated beam of pure VM issued out of his weapon, all the while his image diffused into slowly scattering points of golden light.

Frenchie stood staring, in puzzlement, at this odd spectacle, a writhing tongue of lightning gripping on to his master. Frenchie has not seen it, but the levels in his cash tank were dropping like a stone.

Then Bundie clocked it. A dim golden miasma was beginning to surround Frenchie too.

“Frenchie! Cut your losses! Shut them down!”

“Shut what down?”

“The positions! Cut your positions! Cut them all! There is no time to lose!”

Frenchie shrugged. “Eh, bien, it’s okay, Mon Cher, I ’ave beaucoup margin.”

“No, you don't! Look!” Bundie punter to the track strapped to his old pal’s utility belt.

Frenchie glanced down and double took. “Sacre bleu!”

He hollered at Frenchie.
but they knocked out his ISDAs. The PV boiled into the atmosphere. 

Separation

The SIV ran a defensive line between Bundy and his men.

“Fuck,” he said.

He was left defending the back-end with a repurposed ’85 OSLA and a left-handed FBF.

Frenchie loved it: he dug that Gallic style. Tucker less so: he didn’t read foreign lingos and couldn’t abide garlic.

“Are you fucking kidding me?” He cursed at the FBF, though Bundie had clocked it and already figured it for a sweet shooting iron.

“How am I meant to use this piece of shit? The instructions are all in French!”

“Just point the fucking thing and pull the trigger, son,” Bundie growled.

“Really?”

“If you want to see your sweetheart again, sure.”

Tucker got the point and lit up and lit up a VWAP. It burned with a magnesium flare.

The SIV advanced. It took out Tucker with a self-referencer. Tucker squealed bad. It was unbecoming but it fit the pattern.

The SIV kept coming.

Bundie tried to close it out. He flipped a downgrade trigger on a DRV: nothing. Hey called key man — homme clef — on the FBF. It misfired.

The SIV rolled closer.

Bundie jammed a second-to-default EM sovereign basket into the magazine of the only piece he had to hand — a rusty old semi-automatic EMTA — and lit up the theatre. It flamed into life.

It was dirty, noisy and hot — he shucked out burnt up RWAs and kept reloading — and at last it holed the SIV. It stumbled. Its rollers uncoiled and it stoved into the sand on one knee. It was crippled but still shooting — eventually it crapped out but not before it had annihilated three quarters of Bundie’s unit.

Tucker was already goneski. Chipper was dead. Biffer was in a bad way. Blood gouted from his mouth. He wouldn’t last long.

Frenchie — dear, dear Frenchie - so called for his expertise with the ABF — was out cold, two limbs blown clean off. They bobbed redly in the surf.

Bundie fished one out - he grabbed it by the boot — and bought it back to his stricken pal.

Frenchie drifted back into a shallow woozy consciousness. He was deathly pale, wet sand caked in his hair and his face. He moaned. His breath rattled and gurgled. He was in a bad way.

Bundie fed his old pal water from his canteen — just wet his lips and tossed the useless limb on the sand.

“Thank you, Bundie,” croaked the old soldier. He looked at the leg. “I didn’t think I’d see that again. I lost it in the drink. I thought it would sink.”

“I guess you got lucky, French,” Bundie grunted. “It was a floating leg”.

Frenchie coughed, and red spritzed his hand and his chin.

“Come on French, we can get you out of here. If we get you to a medivac they may even save the leg —”

“Come on, boss. You know it. I know it. I am done for.”

“No, Frenchie. Don’t you dare give up on me. We’ll find that leg. We can buy one in. I’ll pay the costs. He shook his head. “There’s no bid, skips. You know it.”

“No, Frenchie. No. I don’t know it. I won’t hear of it —” but Bundie could feel it slipping away. He felt the air between them thicken in to a dull miasma, insensate, as if slipping under an anaesthetic. He shook his head mutely, his eyes welled, and he watched the scene at a remove, out of body, through a fogged lens.

Frenchie He sat up weakly and regarded the smoking SIV. “They will be back soon. Don’t let them take me.”

“Oh, I’m not leaving you, Frenchie. We’re getting you out of here.”

Frenchie coughed up more blood and limply shook his head. “Don’t be a damn fool. I’m done for. I’ll slow you up. If you take me they’ll catch us all. The world needs you, Bundie. Put me out of my misery. Don’t let them —”

“I can’t do that to you Frenchie. You know I can’t.”

“This is my prayer for relief, boss.”

“Don’t talk like that Frenchie. Bundie’s voice was beginning to waiver.

Frenchie shut his eyes and whispered, “Let me go.”

The dying soldier pulled weakly at Bundie’s OSLA. He pressed it under his chin.

“I can’t French!”

“Do it.”

The familiar crump of an expiring put option plouffed in the sand a few yards away.

“They are coming. That one was out of range. The next will be —”

“No!”

“Right in-the-money.” Another crump. It was closer. It showered the pals with sand. “Do it, David.”

Not once in their 14-year service history had his loyal deputy ever called him by his Christian name. Bundie realised what he must do. The beach, the battlefield, the theatre of conflict, the wider geopolitical situation of the world — all presented itself, as an interconnected whole, at once, in crystal clarity. He had a role. He had to carry on.

Bundie swallowed and looked tenderly at his pal. “I’ll never forget you, Frenchie Saunders,” he said.

Frenchie closed his eyes. “Put me out of my pain, boss,” he breathed. “This is — my prayer — for —”

Bundie said, “Relief”. He cocked the old Stocklender. A quick static burst of cancellable terms yammered into his friend.

Frenchie slumped. A smile spread across his face. He looked at peace.

Another short-dated put crumped adjacent. Closer. Bundie crouched over his friend, sheltering his body from the showering terrain. He closed his pal’s eyes and commando-crept into the low brush off the beach.

A small unit of marine SIVs advanced up the beach.

Bundie made the tree line and stopped. The OSLA!

He could see it, still clutched in Frenchie’s cold, dead fingers.

History will record that the entire division of SIVs were wiped out later that day by a coordinated denial of service attack on its rear CP programme. When the relief forces combed the beach after the armistice they found no trace of either man, or the OSLA. }} }}