by Allen Kuzara
“Six, take out this bogey in front of me,” Nick pleaded more than commanded.
He stomped the brakes and turned the wheel hard to the left, trying to retreat and give Six room to bring forward his tank. But Nick forgot to downshift in the turn, and the truck’s engine died. The truck stopped at a ninety-degree angle, its entire length exposed to the oncoming enemy tank.
“Get out!” he shouted. He might be panicking. It might all be premature. But he was acting on instinct, the same kind he’d used playing ball, the same instinct that defied logic and reason and told him to run out of the pocket and avoid the unseen blitz.
“Delta, get off my truck. Take cover,” he said as his foot first touched the ground. He and Lusa ran to a nearby building and crouched down.
They watched as the rest of Delta Three, minus Six and Two who were driving the tanks, spilled out the back of the truck and retreated.
Six’s tank plowed by right as the enemy tank fired upon Nick’s truck. The explosion caused Nick and Lusa to jolt, covering their eyes with their hands and arms as the massive troop carrier rolled over onto its side, forever broken.
Right then, Six’s tank fired upon the enemy. A bullseye blow, but apparently, the charge wasn’t strong enough or, as Nick’s fog-of-war mind reasoned, it wasn’t armor piercing.
Nick watched in surprise as Six’s tank revved its tractor-like engine higher and in mere seconds reached the enemy tank, ramming it hard. It made the loudest metal-on-metal impact Nick had ever heard.
Six’s tank somehow ended up partially on top of the other tank, and Nick realized both armored giants were still alive, still trying to move but were seized up in eternal gridlock. Their treads undoubtedly were warped and at opposing angles to each other.
“That’ll hold them back a while longer,” Nick hoped.
“But what about them?” Lusa said, pointing toward the oncoming onslaught of troops from the center of the base.
“Two,” he said over the headset, “punch a hole in this fence, then turn around and buy us time.” He wondered for a split second if he’d need to explain his orders, but then the blast of cannon fire and the resulting breech in the fence proved otherwise.
“Bravo Squad,” Lusa commanded, “pick us up.”
As the remaining troop carrier stopped, Nick yelled, “the rest of Delta, come with us.”
He, Lusa, and the rest piled into the truck. Nick watched as Two’s tank accelerated past them toward the center of the base. The men with rifles were no match for it, and Two’s machinegun fire laid waste to any who were dumb or brave enough to forego cover.
Still, Nick knew it wouldn’t last. Soon someone would counter Two and would use the right tool for the job.
“Let’s get out of here,” Nick pleaded. He needed Lusa to make the command.
“What about them?” Lusa asked, pointing back at Two’s tanks.
“They’re not people anymore,” he yelled over gunfire. “They’re machines. And I want to live.”
He could tell she didn’t like it, but he also knew they didn’t have much choice. This was the only way to escape. If Two’s tank tried to retreat with them, they’d be followed by the mass of men in vehicles and would get run down somewhere out on the plains. This way, they had a chance.
“Bravo Squad,” Lusa said, pounding the rear wall of the truck cab, “let’s go.”
The truck lurched forward, and they grabbed onto each other to keep from falling. As they approached the hole in the fence, Nick said, “Get him to slow down.”
Lusa complied, the truck slowing.
Then Nick spoke over the headset, “Six, are you there?”
Nick jumped out the back of the truck and turned to the mashed up, mangling of two tanks. From atop one, the lid opened, and out came Six.
Nick looked at the tanks’ treads; both tanks were still running, still digging with their rolling feet, and he knew at some point soon one tank would give out and the other would break free. “Come on, Six,” he waved.
Six climbed down, and Nick heard footsteps behind him as Lusa joined him. She gave orders to her drones aboard the tank to get in the back of their truck.
Nick turned to her and half-smiled. They were going to make it, he knew. But she wasn’t celebrating. She didn’t like losing drones, didn’t like sacrificing their lives, he knew.
Suddenly the look on her face changed from discontent to panic. “Look out behind you!” she shouted.
Nick twisted around and saw men exiting from the enemy tank. He grabbed for his rifle and realized he’d made the stupid mistake of leaving it in the truck.
“Six, defend me.”
Nick hugged the dirt as the first man out of the enemy tank raised a pistol and fired at him. He felt white-hot pings on his legs, and he knew he’d been shot.
Then he heard Six return fire, swiftly dispatching the enemy crew before coming to Nick’s position, crouching, then scanning for additional bogeys.
Nick looked around for Lusa and saw her lying on the ground beside him. He tried to roll over, fearing his legs wouldn’t work, but to his surprise they did and he didn’t feel any pain. That’s how it works, he told himself. You don’t feel a gunshot wound, not at first anyway.
He grabbed Lusa who was lying face down and shook her. He feared the worst, but she came alive with a gasp like she’d been swimming under water too long. When she turned over to meet him, a bead of blood rolled down her face, and Nick saw that she’d hit her head on the ground.
“Are you okay?” he asked.
“Yeah, I think so,” she said woozily as she raised a hand to her head.
“We’ve gotta go.”
“I know,” she said, slowly getting to her feet.
Only then did Nick look down and see his legs; he wasn’t bleeding and there weren’t any bullet holes. He had received blowback—non-penetrating shrapnel—from the nearby gunshots, he decided. And with great relief, he jumped to his feet, grabbed Lusa’s hand, and ran toward the back of the truck.
As they climbed aboard, they turned and watched Two’s tank continue to engage the soldiers. The tank wasn’t sitting still but instead seemed to have a definite waypoint in mind as it moved toward the barracks and armory.
Nick had a sneaking suspicion, a guess, at where Two was headed and what he was planning to do. As much as they sometimes were painfully dependent on orders—having to tell Six to defend him was an example—the drones had repeatedly demonstrated more intelligence than mere machines could possess.
Sure enough, as Two’s tank neared the armory, Nick watched its canon fire on the large holding tank, the one Nick had seen the refueling truck empty its fuel into when he’d first arrived at the base. A massive fireball erupted into the sky as all the liquid fuel ignited at once, and immediately the bright lights throughout the base went dark.
“They knocked out the power,” Lusa said.
“Not only that,” Nick whispered. “Listen.”
Like someone had lit a never-ending string of firecrackers, they heard continuous rumbles and pops of man-made thunder and lightning.
“What is it?” Lusa asked.
“The armory is on fire. All their ammo’s going off,” Nick answered.
The drones aboard the tank had done them all a great service. Not only had they given their lives fighting off the enemy, they’d made their sacrifice maximally effective. With the lights out, escape was assured. Whoever was still alive in the base had bigger problems now.
“Let’s go,” Nick said finally.
CHAPTER 24
THE REMAINING TEAMS fled into the night, the drones packed in the back of the truck like sardines while Nick and Lusa rode up front. Their speed was limited, both because they were off-road and because Nick had decided not to use headlights at first, just in case. It made their travel over the snow-free tundra an adventurous one, to put it lightly. Bumps and potholes came out of nowhere, and Nick feared he’d put the truck in an unseen ditch at any moment.
W
hen the burning base was only a distant glow on the horizon, Nick turned on his headlights. He’d hoped it would make a considerable difference, but all it really did was ruin his night vision. These fields simply weren’t meant to be traversed by anything other than feet or hooves, he thought.
Finally, Nick and Lusa found a familiar landmark, the pipeline, it’s grey-black color camouflaging it in the dark. “How do we get across that?” Nick asked.
“What do you mean?” Lusa answered.
“I mean, we walked under it last time, remember?”
Lusa said something in her native tongue that Nick guessed was a swear word. “It’s okay,” he realized. “We don’t have to use the Dalton; at least, we don’t have to drive on it. It still helps us navigate even if we have to stay on this side of the pipeline. It’ll be okay.”
Lusa didn’t respond, but he sensed her calm a bit. They were both rattled, exhausted, and any little problem now seemed like an insurmountable challenge.
“We need sleep,” he said.
“But they’ll catch up with us,” she replied.
“I don’t think anyone’s coming,” he said. He pulled the truck over parallel with the pipeline so that they could both see the base’s red glow out the driver’s side window. “They’d be crazy to follow us tonight,” he added.
“But they’re convicts,” she insisted.
“They’re cons, not crazies. Their moral compasses may be broken, but they still have the instinct of self-preservation. Whoever’s still alive there has their hands full putting out that fire.”
“I guess,” she said, sounding unconvinced. “What now?”
“Now, we get some rest.”
“No, I mean what are we going to do tomorrow?”
Nick had thought the answer was obvious. “What choice do we have? We have to finish the mission.”
She nodded silently. “Just wasn’t sure if you were still on board,” she said.
With each sentence she spoke, Nick could hear the sandman knocking louder on her door, sleep beckoning. “Look,” he said. “I was wrong.”
She stiffened, his words seeming to catch her attention.
“I thought Ayers was the real deal,” he continued. “It seemed like an answered prayer, one that had seemed so impossible I wouldn’t have even thought to pray it.”
“It’s not your fault,” she said sympathetically. “How could you have known?”
She might have been right, but it didn’t make much difference to Nick. He’d screwed up, and he knew it. “But look what happened to you,” he said.
Lusa slid next to him and wrapped her arm under his. She laid her head on his shoulder and whispered, “But look who rescued me.”
He hadn’t been fishing for those words, but Nick was glad to hear them. They weren’t even true, not literally. It had been the drones that had yet again saved them. But it was how Lusa felt, what she believed, that mattered to him. Her words, her touch made the knot in his stomach untie and a flood of warmness come over him. For this very moment, gone was all the insanity of this broken world: all the crazies, emergents, cons. For an instant, all was right as rain.
CHAPTER 25
NICK AWOKE IN a flash of panic. A single, searing thought resounded in his mind: Did they still have the transmission relay equipment?
He knew that it had been in the back of one of the trucks, the same truck he and his drones had ridden into the base on, but he couldn’t remember if that was the one they had now or the one he’d had to ditch during their escape.
He swung open the truck cab door—it squeaked the way only old, metal-on-metal doors could. Slumped over in the passenger seat, Lusa bolted awake and said, “What’s wrong?”
“I just gotta check something,” Nick said. His heart pounded from fright, but he didn’t want to worry her for nothing. It was a coin toss, he told himself. A fifty-fifty chance.
When he got to the back of the truck, he threw open the draping canvas and squinted into the shadows of the bed. He climbed up the rear bumper, and once he’d stuck his head inside, he made out the antenna and transceiver piled up in a forward corner.
He wiped real sweat from his brow as he exhaled in relief.
“Still got it?” Lusa asked from behind him.
He turned and saw her grinning in the morning sunlight. He jumped down. “How’d you know what—”
“You’re not the only one with a brain around here,” she teased. “I checked it last night when I…when I was getting ready for bed.”
He suppressed a chuckle, amused at her for not wanting to say that she had gone out to pee. On the one hand, she wanted to be seen as a warrior, an equal in this life or death struggle. But she also wanted to retain her modesty. It was endearing to Nick.
His warm fuzzy feeling shifted into dread as he turned and looked south. They were heading into danger, and he hoped they were both left standing when it was all said and done. He couldn’t afford warm and fuzzy feelings right now.
“Guess we better get a move on,” he said.
“I guess so,” came her response. “Right after breakfast.”
He smiled, then added, “And coffee.”
It was only then that Nick realized how much they would have been up a creek had they been driving the wrong truck. Not only would they not have the transceiver and antenna, they also would be without food and water and would have been forced to radio back to Vaughn for help.
After breakfast, the convoy drove south alongside the pipeline. Fortunately, during this stretch the pipeline closely paralleled the Dalton. It was unlike the more mountainous portions of the pipeline further north. Nick was grateful they didn’t have to choose between scaling mountains to stay with the pipeline or abandoning their vehicles and walking the highway on foot.
When it was close to lunchtime, Nick spotted a structure in the distance. It was hazy, the late summer sun making waves in the air, but he recognized it none the less. It was Fairbanks’s tallest building, the Polaris building. Nick remembered it having a red blinking light on it before the update, much like the one that was still working back at the vault in Deadhorse.
He thought the first sign of Fairbanks would fill his heart with dread—he surely hadn’t been looking forward to this part of the mission. But it didn’t. He felt a subtle boost, a release of dopamine and hope as he considered that they were almost there and that if they could pull this off, things could be different. The life he wished he had with Lusa could be his. Plus, this meant they were getting close to the fourth pump station, and that meant one more thing: they should be close enough to make radio contact with Jimmy.
Moments later, Nick and Lusa realized they were nearing the fourth station. Up ahead, a deeply recessed gravel road cut underneath the pipeline. And they knew that the pump station lay out of view, west between the pipeline and the Dalton.
Nick stomped the gas pedal and charged the truck toward their penultimate hurdle.
“Shouldn’t we…um, think about how we’re going to do this?” Lusa questioned.
Had it been the first or second station—heck, if they hadn’t gone through what they had at the base, Nick would have agreed. But he was over this, and he had complete confidence in Delta Three to handle the situation.
“Watch this,” he said, before turning right under the pipeline and driving into the pump station. As soon as they’d stopped, he saw the first door from one of the nearby shacks fly open. They know we’re here, he thought.
“Delta Three, clear this station of crazies. Go!”
Immediately, four of Nick’s drones jumped out the back of his truck and began engaging hostiles.
“Let’s see if our boys can play nice together,” Lusa said. “Bravo Squad, engage crazies. Assist Delta Three.”
Then her team joined the fray. The combined forces worked together seamlessly. If Nick hadn’t spent a few days with his drones, he wouldn’t have been able to tell the two teams apart. He noticed one new distinction: the drone named Three had pic
ked up new armament. Nick didn’t know when it had happened or why Three had decided on it, but the new gun that he carried was oversized and heavy. It was an M249 magazine fed squad automatic weapon (SAW).
Nick laughed when he saw a single crazy—apparently the last one—charge Three’s position. Three started up the machine gun, and Nick saw the tip of the barrel lift from the recoil. The heavy machine gun chut chut chutted, first ripping up dirt and gravel before finding its target and turning the approaching beast into hole-riddled dead meat.
Nick and Lusa watched the camp for signs of life. Delta and Bravo continued searching buildings, checking behind structures, but gone was the gunfire. And when several of the drones returned to the truck, Nick knew the sweep was complete.
“That was easy,” he said.
“Yeah,” Lusa agreed. “I hope Fairbanks goes this smoothly.”
Nick knew better than to hope for that. A smooth time wasn’t an option. Survival—that would be a good goal. The two of them still possessing life and limbs—that would be something to hope for. But wishing for more was counterproductive, he believed. It was like a heavyweight champ hoping he doesn’t have to get punched in a title fight. Getting banged up was part of the deal, and they were about to enter a war zone. No, correction—they were about to create a war zone. And war meant casualties. Plain and simple.
They coordinated their efforts, instructing their teams on how to set up the transceiver relay and hook up the generator to the existing micro-refinery. Nick thought about filling up their vehicle’s fuel tanks—the truck was about half full—but he knew they were close enough to Fairbanks that it wouldn’t matter.
After the blinking light on the tower came on, they both looked down to their command displays. Soon their screens showed the new connection link up with the existing relay. And then, much to Nick’s satisfaction, a new series of connections appeared, showing the rest of the pump stations south of Fairbanks all the way to Valdez.
“Jimmy did it,” Nick pronounced. “He got the rest of the relays up.”