Last Refuge

by Allen Kuzara

  Nick was puzzled for a half-second. “Six,” he said. To his surprise, the drone that had come in late turned his head toward Nick. It gave Nick a creepy feeling, the way he couldn’t see past the mirrored sunglasses they all wore. It wasn’t so bad when they looked off in another direction, but now that Six was looking right at him, Nick was unnerved by the apparent soulless man.

  “Six,” he repeated, “where were you?”

  “Using the bathroom, sir.”

  Nick was both surprised by the fact that Six responded and by his answer. So, they respond to their names, Nick realized. Nick chuckled when he noticed Six had several feet of toilet paper streaming from his pants.

  “Six, go clean yourself up and come back.” As soon as Nick had said it, he wondered if his instructions were clear enough, if the drones could reason and deduce from the situation or if they had to be spoon-fed crystal-clear instructions. But Six stepped away, and as he did, he pulled up the ten or so feet of paper that dragged behind him. “There you go,” Nick said to no one.

  “Two,” he said, picking a drone at random. He got the same creepy head turn that reminded him of the bird-like head twist of velociraptors in dinosaur movies he’d watched with his father when he was little. “Who’s in charge here?”

  “You are, sir” Two answered.

  “Do you answer to anyone else?” Nick asked.

  “Dr. Craig,” came his response. That was as Nick expected.

  “And that’s all?”

  “Yes,” Two said.

  “Very well. What’s our objective?”

  “We have none, sir.”

  Either they don’t pay attention when Vaughn talks to us, or they are programmed not to think along these lines. None of that mattered, Nick decided. All that mattered at this moment was whether he could use these drones to accomplish his mission.

  “Two, how do I speak to the whole group? What name do I use?”

  “We are programmed to respond to our team insignia.”

  Nick didn’t understand at first, but then he noticed on each of their shoulders were star shaped emblems. Beneath the star were the words:

  “Delta Three,” Nick mouthed as he read it. He was startled when the entire team thrust out their chests in response to being addressed. Seconds later, Six came running and assumed the same responsive posture.

  “Delta Three, get on the ground and give me twenty.”

  Instantly, the crew dropped to their hands and feet and pounded pushups. “Okay, stop,” Nick said ten pushups later.

  They didn’t.

  “Delta Three, stop.”

  That worked. Apparently, they had to be addressed before given an order. Nick figured there was a set amount of time that the drones would continue taking commands before they needed to be readdressed. Quickly, hoping he wouldn’t have to repeat Delta Three every time, Nick said, “On your feet.”

  They complied and stood at the ready. Nick’s mind wandered, and soon childish instincts surfaced. “Three, slap Four.”

  Without hesitation, Three turned and slapped Four harder than Nick could have imagined. “Eww,” Nick flinched, “that’s going to leave a mark.”

  “Delta Three, stand on one leg.”

  They did.

  “Jump up and down.”

  In synchronous precision, the six-man team jumped at one-second intervals, and Nick wondered what kind of programming could possibly produce results with that level of consistency.

  “Delta Three, ballroom dance with each other.”

  Two spoke up, “Unclear instructions, sir.”

  “I want you to waltz with a partner.”

  “Unclear instructions, sir,” came Two’s response. Nick began to get frustrated by their unwillingness to obey, but then nobler thoughts prevailed: they weren’t here for his amusement.

  “Alright, let’s see what else they can do,” Nick said to himself. He scanned options on his command display. Many commands seemed self-explanatory while others he was afraid to touch, not knowing what they’d cause the drones to do.

  He found one that looked useful. He pressed ‘defensive position.’

  The crew quickly moved around Nick, forming a circle with their backs toward him. Each dropped to a knee and pulled their rifles from around their shoulder sling and began scanning their surroundings for threats.

  Mental note, Nick thought: remember ‘defensive position.’

  He found another command and decided to try it. He pressed ‘target.’

  “Select target,” said an electronic voice over his headset. Suddenly, objects before him started to glow red, and he realized whatever he stared at was being selected by his command display via his glasses. He looked up toward a solitary tree that stood some fifty paces away.

  It glowed red, and he waited. Nothing happened. Finally, he asked, “Two, how do I select a target?”

  He saw Two’s head turn sideways, though he didn’t break formation and turn around to face Nick. “Sir, when the correct object is highlighted, say ‘target.’”

  That was easy enough, Nick thought. The tree continued to glow red as he stared at it. “Target,” he said.

  Swiftly, the team rearranged themselves into a forward attack formation. Each member spread out equidistant from his neighbor, and Nick saw leaves and branches fall from the tree as the entire team began unloading their weapons at the target. He watched, amazed at their willingness to attack an obviously unthreatening object with such aggression. It was then he knew he could trust this team to follow orders. They would kill anything and anyone.

  The team crawled forward, and before Nick could stop them, two drones pulled grenades from their belts and launched them in tandem at the old tree. Nick hit the deck, looked up and saw the grenades each bounce once, then an unbelievably loud explosion sent Nick grabbing for his ears in pain.

  “Delta Three, cease fire,” Nick ordered. The gunshots stopped. He scanned his command display, but he couldn’t find or remember what he was looking for. Finally, he shouted, “Delta Three, at attention!”

  Nick’s ringing ears heard faint footsteps grow louder as the team ran back to his position. Nick, still on the ground, looked up and saw the six men standing before him, chests out, and totally unfazed by the fog of war that he was experiencing.

  Nick dusted himself off and stood up slowly, testing his back and joints for new soreness. Nothing now, but he suspected he’d feel it in the morning.

  If he’d been before regular soldiers, he would have felt self-conscious, embarrassed at recovering more slowly than they did. But he was quickly getting used to thinking of these troops as tools, not men.

  “Two,” he said, “what’s the status of the target?”

  “Complete destruction, sir,” came his response.

  Nick looked over Two’s shoulder and saw the smoldering spot where the hundred-year-old tree used to stand. “I’d say you’re about right,” Nick said.

  He walked before them, inspecting them like he’d seen drill sergeants do in movies. The team wasn’t just in shape and in uniform; besides the irregularities of body size—they were all within a couple of inches of each other in height—they were identical: six hard-wired killers that would do anything he told them to.

  Nick felt a rush of new adrenaline, not from the excitement of gunfire and explosions but from the newfound power he sensed flowing through him.

  He glanced back at the truck stuffed full of gear. It wasn’t all antennas, electronics, food, and water. There were plenty of additional arms and ammunition too, some of which Nick didn’t even know how they operated—they weren’t just rifles and magazines. He thought he even spotted a rocket launcher, and he knew there were claymores and assorted explosives. No, he didn’t know how to use them, but he knew six men who did. Six men who would take a bullet for him, swallow a grenade, or anything else beyond heroic in the name of following orders.

  A slow smile spread across Nick’s face. “Delta Three, let’s hit the road.”

&nbs
p; CHAPTER 16

  THE NEXT COUPLE of days passed as Nick had expected. It was a lot of walking and a little bit of fighting. Though they had the truck to carry the supplies, it was so jam-packed with dipoles and other gear that the crew had to travel on foot. Nick took turns driving the truck, never getting it out of first gear.

  There had been a few crazies along the way. These were like drifters, transients that just appeared no matter how many times you cleared a given area. Nick and Jimmy, for example, had wiped Deadhorse itself clean as a whistle. But just getting out of town, Nick and the crew had had to put a couple of crazies down. The best was when he saw them coming from far off; it gave Nick time to thumb through his command display and try out a new tactical approach. So far, the preset commands had all worked fairly well, but so did simply telling Delta Three to ‘attack that crazy.’

  The first pump station at Deadhorse was already secured; Vaughn had done that before Nick and Lusa had even gotten back to the vault. Nick reached the second station by the end of their first day of traveling. After a few crazies had been dispatched, Nick started getting nervous, thinking that there would be masses of them at or near the station. But soon enough—and after only a handful of unmemorable killings—the pump station was clear. They spent the rest of the day’s good light shuttling gear from the truck to the pump station.

  This part of the job required some thinking. So did managing the team, but that was mostly instinctual for Nick. He was adjusting quickly to his newfound killing tool.

  Vaughn had gone over and over how to erect the transmission relay. Nick had felt like he was back in school again where the teachers’ jobs had been at stake if kids didn’t score high enough on standardized tests. They used to preach the test answers ad nauseam. It was so bad that sometimes he could hear their voices in his head repeating the answers as he took the exams.

  Now was no different—he heard Vaughn’s words: “Attach the generator to the refining port. Engage generator. Set up tower base. Attach dipole to antenna. Attach antenna to top of tower base. Attach transceiver box to antenna and generator. Engage transceiver box.”

  That was it. A bunch of small, simple steps that amounted to little more than hooking two things together or throwing a switch. Vaughn, like his teachers in high school, had done all the thinking for him.

  The hardest part of setting up the relay tower was dragging the gear to the station, which was some seventy-five yards or so away from the truck on the road. At first, Nick had joined the crew in sharing the load, his sense of communal self-sacrifice on full display. But then it occurred to him all at once: he didn’t have to be a team player. Not out here. Not for these drones.

  He checked the sky, and after deciding there was plenty of evening sun left to get the job done, he instructed his crew to finish bringing the gear to the station while he waited. He probably could have taken a nap, but instead he passed the time sitting in the grass imagining what life might be like when this was all over.

  After he and the crew finished setting up the transmission relay—he saw the green blinking lights and tested with his radio to be sure he was getting through back to Prudhoe Bay—Nick had the hard choice of pressing on toward pump station three or making camp for the night. Then the thought struck him: when was the last time Delta had taken a break? Their bladders would surely burst any minute.

  “Delta Three, at ease,” Nick said. Had they been regular human beings, even well-trained elite soldiers, they would have made murmurings and sounds of rejoicing and relief like the steam blowing off from a pressure valve. Instead, all Nick heard were the sounds of quick footsteps either toward the edge of the station to pee or even more quickly back to the truck. He figured the latter was either to get food, water, or toilet paper.

  The longer Nick waited as he watered his horses, the more tired he became, and he knew that he would sleep well tonight.

  “Delta Three, set up camp. We’re spending the night here.” No words of confirmation came back, but Nick knew they had heard him and would swiftly carry out his orders. He was tired, and he knew his men had to be too, even if they would never complain about it.

  After eating and finding his tent and bedding, Nick tried to radio Lusa one last time. He’d gotten through to her once along the way. As always, shortwave is problematic: both parties have to be listening for each other. There was always someone back at Prudhoe Bay monitoring channels, so Nick could always get through there. But Lusa was another story. Tonight, he wished he could hear from her, know that everything had gone alright, but she didn’t pick up. Had he been less tired, it would have worried him more, but those thousands of steps down the pipeline had beaten his anxious mind into submission, and sleep came easily.

  The next morning after breakfast—the Navy MREs weren’t half bad—Nick and Delta Three broke camp and headed on toward the third pump station. The time taken to load supplies back into the truck felt like wasted day, but soon they were back on the road again.

  Most of the time, Nick kept five drones with him as they walked underneath the pipeline. The sixth drone drove the truck. Although they encountered more bogies on the Dalton, Nick remembered Vaughn’s insistence about visually checking the pipeline’s integrity. No oil moving south, no refining, no energy to run the transmission relay. No relay, no point to all this.

  After lunch, they reached the third pump station. For whatever reason, this station was more substantial than the last one had been, and Nick got that spine-tingling feeling again, his spidey sense telling him there were crazies nearby.

  Not only that, but this pump station was further away from the Dalton, which would make dragging gear from the truck even more tedious and time-consuming, even if Nick didn’t have to lift a finger.

  “Four, leave the truck and come to our position.”

  A couple of minutes later, Four joined up with them. “Delta Three, follow me to the perimeter of the pump station. Only engage crazies if they are actively attacking us. Everyone, keep your eyes peeled and report back if you see anything.”

  Nick checked his weapon. He wasn’t as confident with it as he had been with the Springfield, but its greater magazine capacity and its ability to hit targets past a hundred yards as well as Nick could aim made it vastly superior. He threw the selector to burst, which was the midway between single shots and fully automatic. It was a luxury to know he could afford to waste ammo, that there was a nearly infinite supply back on the destroyer and that Vaughn probably knew where to get even more.

  This station, besides having a larger footprint than the last one, had more buildings and infrastructure. It was in these aluminum sided buildings and old, worn-out wood-framed shanties that Nick expected to find crazies who had hibernated here through the winter.

  Nick led the team toward a small building at one corner of the camp. He felt the odd sensation of the perfectly synchronized movement of Delta; each step he took moved them a step closer, and each time he paused, they paused. He felt like the world’s greatest puppet master, except the puppets could sling lead at over two-thousand feet per second.

  Behind the small shack, Nick rested for a second. He could imagine a crazy only inches away on the other side of the building’s thin aluminum skin. If they made noise, too much noise, it would begin its rampage, he believed.

  Nick whispered, covering his headset microphone with his hand. “Two, crawl around this building and take a look.” There was no use putting himself in danger with six drones at his disposal.

  After Two made it, Nick waited for some kind of report or for Two to retreat. Nothing happened.

  “Two,” he whispered, “what do you see?”

  Just then, Nick’s vision flickered, and he realized his glasses could do more than just select targets and waypoints for the team; in one eye, he saw imagery that had to come from Two’s glasses. Now he knew why they all had those shades; it wasn’t just to intimidate people. They must have tiny cameras onboard, Nick understood.

  Nick took in the
view. It all looked clear, but there were so many places for a crazy to hide—not that they actually did that. They seemed to have no fear or concept of death. Just like these drones, Nick thought.

  “Vision off,” Nick whispered, guessing correctly at how to switch off Two’s camera feed. “Alright,” he said to himself. “I can’t put this off forever.”

  He stood, and the five men next to him did likewise. “Delta Three, Defensive positions. Keep me safe.”

  Quickly, the six-man team formed the circle around him as they had back in Deadhorse. He moved them around the front of the building they had been at and instructed One to kick the door in. Just like in every cop movie Nick had ever watched, One unflinchingly busted the door in. And like Nick had expected, a lone crazy screamed its wheezy screech and attempted to egress the shack.

  One pulled his knife that was attached and hanging upside down from his tactical vest and slung the blade expertly toward the mad man. The blade hinged into the crazy, between its chin and Adam’s apple.

  The screaming stopped, and there was a surreal moment of quiet before the silence was broken by the loud thud of the crazy falling to the floor. One retrieved his knife and re-sheathed it, blood dripping down his vest.

  Nick was impressed by Delta’s ability to kill quietly and the fact that One had elected to do so voluntarily; Nick hadn’t told him not to shoot. But the silence didn’t last. Apparently, the dying crazy’s landing plus the door being kicked in—Nick wondered why he hadn’t checked to see if it was unlocked—was enough to arouse more crazies.

  Nick heard doors swing open and feet pound the ground. He turned quickly and saw multiple bogies come into view. “Delta Three, spread out and attack those targets,” he commanded.

  The team fanned out and began engaging crazies. Repeatedly, Nick raised his rifle, found a crazy at the end of his front sight, but was unable to fire on it before one of his team took it out. After three failed attempts to find a target, Nick relaxed a bit and simply watched in amazement as Delta swept the station area clean of crazies.