Task Force

by Brian Falkner

  One part of the plan hadn’t changed. Finding transport.

  Fairbrother had dropped them a mile away from the produce market. They tabbed across farmland that was thick and choking with a strange Bzadian herb. The air was heady with the scent of the flowers that grew at the top of long stalks and from the pungent aroma of the thick leaves.

  “Stinks like Monster’s farts,” Wilton said at one point.

  Chisnall was almost ready to vomit when they finally reached a lane between two fields. Although the path was narrow and winding, enough clear air fell into the gap to relieve the nausea. They made good time along the lane, for all its winding bends, and only slowed down when they reached the Warrego Highway.

  Chisnall eased aside two stalks of the plant and fixed his eyes on the buildings on the other side of the highway. At one end, a small petrol station looked clean, and well used. Nobody was visible either inside or outside the small office to the rear. To the left of the office was a fruit and vegetable shop, but the sign had fallen into disrepair so that it said “Fruit & V.” The windows of the shop were broken. It appeared deserted. More produce shops and a couple of sheds completed the road-stop produce stand, but if anybody still lived or worked here, there was no sign of them.

  “Anything on the scope?” he asked.

  “Some rotorcraft activity out to the east, seems to be heading our way,” the Tsar said. “If we’re going to scoot across the highway, we’d better do it soon.”

  “Attack craft?” Chisnall asked.

  “I don’t think so,” the Tsar said. “There’s only three of them. I’d guess reconnaissance.”

  “Okay, let’s do it,” Chisnall said. “Be casual. We’re a bunch of Puke soldiers out to buy some lunch.”

  “If this is what they sell,” Price said, pushing a stalk away from her face, “I’ll go hungry.”

  Chisnall broke cover and trotted across the highway, the others behind him, weapons holstered, their body language nonthreatening. As he ran, he was suddenly conscious of the C4 pack on his back. It wasn’t a nice feeling to be attached to a few kilos of high explosive. Especially after what happened to the Demons. He pushed the thought out of his mind.

  It was pretty obvious as soon as they reached the buildings that appearances were not deceptive. The buildings were empty and unused. A driveway led between the buildings to a large old house, which also seemed deserted.

  In a parking area were four vehicles: two cars, a four-wheel drive, and a station wagon, clearly the transportation that Fairbrother had told them about.

  “Check them out,” Chisnall said.

  Monster nodded and moved to the four-wheel drive. Wilton went with him.

  “Scout around,” Chisnall said to the others. The strangeness was upon him. That indefinable feeling he got when something wasn’t right. “Make sure there’s nobody hiding anywhere.”

  He walked up to the front door and pushed it open, drawing his pistol as he did so.

  The entranceway was empty, dusty. The house had not been lived in for many years. It led to a family room, then to a dining room, also empty.

  He found them in the kitchen, seated at a table as if they were about to start lunch. But lunch was never coming. They had been dead so long that they were no more than skeletons, with a few remaining scraps of flesh waiting for the insects and microbes to eat and rot them away.

  A human family. Two adults and four young children. The bullet holes in their skulls mute evidence to what had happened.

  The why would probably never be known. They were not soldiers, just a farming family running a produce stand. Why hadn’t they left? Maybe they were not given the chance. Maybe something had happened here that the Bzadian soldiers who committed the atrocity had not wanted the world to know about.

  Chisnall left the way he had come and pulled the front door shut behind him.

  “Anything in there?” Price asked, arriving around the corner of the house.

  “Nothing,” Chisnall said. And it was nothing. Just one more senseless slaughter in a war that was nothing but senseless slaughter. “Where are those rotorcraft?” he asked.

  “Bypassed us to the south,” the Tsar said. “All clear.”

  “Okay, good,” Chisnall said. “How’re the cars?” This to Monster, who was shutting the hood of the station wagon.

  “Lump-solid rusted.” He shook his head and pointed at both of the cars. “She and her.”

  “Jeez, Monster, learn to speak bloody English,” Price said.

  “The Monster’s English is goodly spoken,” Monster said.

  “Well, mine must be awful, then, because I can’t understand a word you’re saying,” Price said.

  “My English still better than your Hungarian,” Monster said with a smile.

  “Can’t argue with that,” the Tsar said.

  “Who needs to speak Hungarian?” Price said. “No …”

  She stopped herself, but Chisnall knew what she had been going to say next. “Nobody speaks that anymore.” Not since the invasion. Hungary, as a country, had ceased to exist. He saw Monster’s shoulders tense.

  “Come on, kids,” Chisnall said. “Play nice.” The bickering seemed especially petty, considering what he had found in the kitchen. “So the cars are kaput?”

  “The cars are kaput,” Monster said, enunciating each word carefully.

  “Damn,” the Tsar said. “It’s a long walk to Splityard Creek.”

  “Maybe not,” Wilton said on the comm. “Barn—just left of the house.”

  The barn was intact, and weatherproof, which may have had something to do with the state of the motorcycles and quad bikes inside. There were two quads and three motorcycles, each dirty, dusty, and rusted. Surface rust only, Chisnall thought, and Monster quickly confirmed it. A few minutes’ fiddling with some wires and one of the dirt bikes coughed, choked, then spluttered into life.

  “We’ll need gas,” Chisnall said. He nodded at Wilton. “See what you can find at that gas station back on the road.”

  Wilton disappeared.

  Monster went over all the bikes. He was happy with two of the quad bikes and one of the dirt bikes. The second dirt bike he made a face at and kicked off its stand. It lay on the floor, its back wheel rusted. The last dirt bike would not start, but Monster found a can of oil on a shelf at the back of the barn and finally coaxed it to life, just as Wilton arrived back with two jerry cans and a strong smell of petrol.

  “You been drinking the stuff?” Price asked.

  “It’s been a while since I learned how to siphon,” Wilton said, and spat onto the floor of the barn.

  “What, you couldn’t find any cars to steal at Fort Carson?” Price asked.

  “What can I say? I was young and stupid,” Wilton said.

  “Wow, you’ve really changed,” Barnard said.

  “How did you know?” Wilton asked, turning to Price. “Those court records were supposed to be sealed, because I was a juvenile.”

  “I just guessed,” Price said.

  While Wilton filled the petrol tanks, Chisnall motioned Monster to follow him and stepped outside the barn. The niggling between him and Price had been going on for too long, and he needed them focused on the mission.

  “What’s with you and Price?” he asked, off comm.

  “Is nothing, LT.”

  “Seriously?”

  Monster shrugged. “Back at Carson, after Uluru, we kind of, you know, got together.”

  “You and Price?”

  Chisnall wasn’t sure whether to be surprised, happy for them, or miffed that Monster had kept this a secret from him.

  “Like beast and the beauty.” Monster laughed. “Maybe she just need someone for leaning on.”

  “We all did,” Chisnall said. “But you kept it quiet.”

  “Against regulations. You know this.”

  Chisnall almost smiled. His own disastrous “against regulations” romance with Holly Brogan was not a secret in the Angel Team. “What happened?” he
asked.

  “One minute she warm like summer, next minute she cold like winter.”

  “No reason?”

  “Maybe the Monster say something wrong, I don’t know.”

  “You okay about it?” Chisnall asked. There was a pause.

  “Everything is the way it is meant to be,” Monster said finally.

  “Okay, make an effort, big guy. I don’t need the stress.”

  Monster nodded and moved off.

  “Like beast and the beauty,” Chisnall murmured to himself.

  He had known Monster for more than three years but had never guessed at this side of him. Beneath the coarse, jovial exterior, behind the mystic mutterings, there was a heart that, if not exactly broken, was cracked and bleeding.

  A few moments later, petrol tanks filled, they were on their way. Price drove one of the quad bikes, with Wilton grinning cheerfully on the back. The Tsar and Monster took the dirt bikes, while Barnard waited for Chisnall to get onto the second quad before flinging a leg over behind him.

  “Want to drive?” Chisnall asked. “My ribs are still giving me hell.”

  “Up to you,” Barnard said. “But I need to do some research on those generators if we’re going to do this right.”

  “I’ll handle it,” Chisnall said. “How’s the uplink?” The wrist computers were connected to a comms satellite high above them.

  Barnard was tapping buttons. “Slow, but a steady signal,” she said.

  They took the highway east until they could swing north onto the Brisbane Valley Highway, which would take them most of the way to the dam.

  A rotorcraft overflew them as they approached the halfway mark, near the old Borallon Correctional Facility. Chisnall avoided looking up as it hovered low over them. Just a squad of soldiers on a patrol, he said to himself. The quads and dirt bikes were not a problem. Bzadians used left-behind human equipment and vehicles all the time.

  The rotorcraft took off to the west, in the direction of Lowood.

  Chisnall turned his attention back to the road, and another couple of miles slipped by.

  The calm of the countryside was finally broken by the sound of fighting to their west. The far-off boom of explosions rumbled over the scrub and hills. The initial exchange was followed by a constant patter of gunfire, and it was clear that the task force was getting into a major battle. In the distance, plumes of smoke rose into the air.

  “We have a problem,” Barnard said.

  Even with the comm it was hard to hear her over the buzz-saw growling of the quad bike. Chisnall glanced back at her. She had been silent, working on her wrist computer the entire way.

  “What is it?” he asked.

  “There’s a second generator,” Barnard said.

  “What do you mean a second generator?” Price asked.

  “Exactly that,” Barnard said. “The hydroelectric generators we’re going to destroy are at the base of Splityard Creek. They’re the main power generators for the dam, but they’re not the only ones. A second generator plant was installed in 2003 beneath one of the spillways.”

  “So we destroy that too,” Wilton said, pulling up alongside them and grinning.

  “We’d never get near it,” Barnard said. “Weren’t you listening? It’s beneath one of the spillways. We’d have to rappel down the face of the dam to get to it, and that’s not possible.”

  “Not with the Pukes keeping watch,” Chisnall agreed. “So why have they even sent us on this mission? Why send the Demons in the first place?”

  “It’s just another cluster muck-up. Like always,” Barnard said. “Bad planning, bad decisions.”

  “Let me check it out,” Chisnall said.

  If Barnard was right, then this whole part of the mission was a waste of time, and a needless risk. And Barnard, so far, had been right about everything.

  He switched to the command channel.

  “Angel One to Task Force Actual. How copy?”

  “Solid copy, Angel One, but we’re a little busy here.”

  An explosion boomed over the radio, and a second later Chisnall heard the same blast vibrating across the farm fields to his left.

  “Urgent interrogational, Task Force Actual. We are showing a second generator at Wivenhoe. Taking out the main plant may not be enough. How do you want us to proceed? Over.”

  There was a moment’s silence; then Fairbrother’s voice came on the channel. He had to shout to be heard over the gunfire in the background.

  “Angel One, we are aware of the second generator, but it has no significance. Its power output is too low. Proceed with the attack as planned, and don’t use this channel unless it’s an emergency. How copy, Angel One?”

  “Solid copy, Task Force Actual.”

  Chisnall clicked off the channel. “They knew about the second generator,” he said, “but it’s not important. It’s not big enough to power Lowood.”

  “Turnoff to Splityard Creek coming up in one klick,” Price said.

  “He’s wrong,” Barnard said.

  “A bunch of experts have studied that dam,” Chisnall said. “He’s not wrong.”

  “Yes, he is,” Barnard said. “You have to understand Bzadian psychology.”

  “And how do you know so much about that subject?” the Tsar asked.

  “I studied it at Stanford University,” she said.

  “You’re talking out of your butt,” the Tsar said. “You’ve been in Angel training since you were thirteen. You never had time to go to Stanford. You think you’re real smart, but you’re just a grunt like the rest of us.”

  “I passed my SATs at twelve,” Barnard said, without false modesty. “I applied for psych at Stanford and got accepted. I’d be there now if they hadn’t recruited me. That’s the truth, whether you believe it or not.”

  “You know what I think?” the Tsar said. “I think you dispense bull like you invented it and own the rights.”

  “I don’t give a fat rat what you think,” Barnard said. “But if I did, trust me, you’d be the first person I’d give it to.”

  “What aren’t you telling us?” Chisnall asked. “Who recruited you from Stanford? Recon Team Angel?”

  Barnard shook her head. “It doesn’t matter.”

  Chisnall stared at her. It did matter. It mattered a lot. But it was clear that she had no intention of saying.

  “So what are you doing here?” Price asked.

  “Firsthand experience,” Barnard said. “They want us to get inside the Pukes’ minds, to help figure out how to win this war. Couldn’t do that sitting in an office in the Pentagon, so here I am.”

  “You had an office at the Pentagon?” Wilton said. “Cool!”

  “And how does this apply to the generators?” Chisnall asked.

  “The psychology of social structures,” Barnard said.

  “We think of ourselves as individuals; then we form groups like this team, or a community, or a country. But Pukes think the opposite way around.”

  “What the heck are you talking about?” the Tsar asked.

  “About Azoh,” Barnard said.

  “Their god?” Wilton asked.

  “Azoh’s not a god. It’s a collective intelligence that the Pukes believe in. They see themselves as tiny parts of one whole.”

  “Like ants,” Chisnall said.

  “Like ants,” Barnard agreed.

  “Don’t ants have a queen?” Wilton asked.

  “Yes, and so do the Pukes,” Barnard said.

  “Azoh,” Chisnall said.

  “The ‘brain’ of this collective intelligence is one individual, and they worship him or her as we worship our gods. This individual is known as Azoh, even though Azoh actually refers to all living Bzadians.”

  “Do Pukes really have a common mind?” Price asked. “Like ants. Is that true?”

  “It’s true that they believe it. It’s like a religion,” Barnard said. “There’s no proof. But that doesn’t stop them believing.”

  “What has this got to
do with the generators?” Chisnall asked.

  “Okay. The generators at Wivenhoe power half of Brisbane,” Barnard said. “Much of it essential services. Keeping hospitals running. Keeping patients alive. If this were a human country, they’d have to keep those facilities operating. Pukes don’t think like that. The needs of the collective intelligence come first. Everything else comes second. Azoh is more important than the individual. Funny thing is, some Puke soldier, dying on a hospital bed for a lack of electricity, would totally get that. They would understand their place in the overall scheme of things. And if their place is to die, then they will die.”

  “Even if that’s all true, it doesn’t change anything,” Chisnall said. “The secondary generator produces less than half the electricity the fuel plant needs.”

  “So they’ll produce less than half their normal output of fuel cells,” Barnard said. “That might slow down the invasion of the Free Territories, but it won’t stop it.”

  “Do you have a better idea?” Chisnall asked.

  “No,” Barnard said. “But I’m working on it.”

  21. YOZI

  [1000 hours Local time]

  [Warrego Highway, New Bzadia]

  THE HUM OF THE MASSIVE ROTOR BLADES BENEATH them was a comforting and familiar sound. There were no windows, but the central video screens showed the world outside. The lines of rotorcraft streaking low above the ground in a tight formation, trying to stay below enemy radar.

  The squad members, particularly the new recruits, some of them just out of the military academy, were excitable and chattering.

  Yozi shared a glance with Alizza, who gave him a crooked-toothed grin. New images were appearing on the screens now. Footage from the reconnaissance craft that were approaching the invaders, staying out of reach of the sting in the tail of their javelin missiles.

  The younger soldiers stopped talking and watched the screens. White flashes of explosions were like pinpricks in the high-altitude shots, and parts of the picture were obscured by wreaths of smoke. Other screens showed closer angles of the battle, and as they watched, a spiraling trail of smoke streaked down from a hillside, scoring a direct hit on a human tank, which erupted in flames. A fierce firefight was taking place on the riverbank, younger soldiers cheering at the bravery of the defenders, until two amphibious human craft rose up from the water, chewing up the defensive position with heavy machine-gun fire.