by Chris James
The forest curved around the village so he skirted it. The day wore on. He found another broad stream and drank. The late winter sun warmed him and he dozed by this stream until the first distant explosion woke him with a start.
He saw more plumes of smoke close to the horizon. He followed an overgrown walking path by the stream until he re-entered the forest. Towards dusk, with the sky littered with orange and red contrails, Berat heard a thump from nearby, the sound he knew all too well to be a Spider exploding. He hurried through the trees and saw smoke rising from the village he’d approached earlier that day.
He spent a fitful night in the cold forest that dragged interminably. But at the first light of the next day, he hurried across the field and easily passed the now unmanned barricade. Among the smoking rubble, he stumbled over bodies in the masonry. He found a number of sources of food. He ate. He sorted and packed more food with care into his rucksack.
When he left the village ninety minutes later, the pain had relocated inside him. From his shrunken stomach, which gargled and bubbled in expanding satisfaction, the pain had now moved to his head, which ached with a sense of unjustified—and unjustifiable—good fortune. Berat Kartal felt as though he were nothing more than some kind of rogue parasite, feeding off the decaying corpse of humanity.
Chapter 36
07.09 Tuesday 7 March 2062
AS TIME PASSED, Geoff Morrow’s luck worsened. After they had dug the dead Spanish teen out of the wreckage at the monorail station, more senior rescue workers had tagged him and sent him north out of the danger zone and the country. While on the way, he had managed to contact Alan in London and sent him everything he had. Alan had promised to write some decent copy before using the material, and then insisted Geoff return south and get as close to the fleeing refugees and defending forces as possible.
Geoff arrived back in Toulouse in the dead of night, and throughout Monday, he battled his way through the endless, crushing crowds to hitch himself on a NATO supply transport going over ground to Montpellier and then to Avignon. But on Tuesday night, a Spider blew the front three units to smithereens and Geoff once again found himself assisting the search for and recovery of victims. On Wednesday afternoon, a fleet of Boeing 828 NATO air transports landed troops outside Montpellier and a French colour sergeant insisted Geoff had to return on the transports to northern France. Geoff got through to Alan, and his editor managed to have the instruction blocked.
Geoff had known when he took the assignment that freelancers like him had more problems than the embeds who went with the troops and who were, in truth, only mouthpieces for the military. Thus, every soldier with whom he came into contact gave him just enough courtesy and no more. Geoff did not mind: embeds seldom got the good stories.
With Alan using every contact his outlet had, Geoff managed to join a company of French troops and get on one of a fleet of air transports going across the Italian border to Turin. Reports from northern Italy painted a desperate picture with a high risk of extremely heavy casualties if the Swiss kept their borders closed. The Alps presented a barrier far more challenging to the hoards of starving, unarmed civilians than to the Caliphate’s machines intent on hunting them down and eliminating them.
As the transport crossed the border with Italy, flying at lower than five hundred metres to minimise the chances of detection, an abrupt connection opened and Geoff could talk to Lisa in London, putting one hand over his mouth to give him a modicum of privacy as the troops in the fuselage stared at him. The thirty-three-second duration of the communication allowed Geoff to find out that the pregnancy was proceeding without complications, and allowed Lisa to tell him she missed him, and that he was still a bastard. The balance of eighteen seconds were filled with the awkward silence usual when he was on a job.
The transport landed at dawn on Thursday in a hastily constructed NATO airbase in a park in the southern suburbs of Turin. The company of troops disembarked and then Geoff alighted, his senses alive to his new surroundings. When his feet landed on the soft grass, he felt a horrible, bitter anticipation hanging in the air, like an early morning mist that the weak winter sun would not be strong enough to burn off. The tree branches hung bare and low, as though agreeing with the pervading sense of resignation.
More transports arrived. They emptied their military cargo of troops and equipment, and then lifted off to remove civilian evacuees. Geoff located the quartermaster and requested to go with the troops, closer to the action, despite his common sense suggesting that he was already quite close enough. He fought the urge simply to return to one of the transports and go with it to the evacuees. A voice inside impelled him to get closer to the action, for there he would find the best stories. An argument ensued because the quartermaster insisted that Geoff would have to embed or he wouldn’t go a step further. Geoff tried to decline; the quartermaster made it clear there could be no alternative. Geoff thanked the man for NATO’s assistance thus far and walked out of the airbase.
Three hours later, his mood had lifted: Turin remained unscathed, its historical and cultural treasures unmolested. Geoff’s nerves tingled and he felt close to an alternate reality where he was merely one of a million tourists trying to visit as many of the city’s attractions as he could. He pictured Lisa staring in wonder at the baroque architecture; arched frontages along roads that seemed to stretch to the horizon even though they were in the centre of the city. The absence of any crowds, however, acted as an anchor pulling him back to this reality—
A sudden flashing icon in his lens caught his attention: a civilian evacuation transport would shortly arrive from Genoa. It would unload its cargo of human suffering and return to the port city for more refugees. At once, Geoff broke into a sprint. His lens overlaid a map in his field of view to show him where to go. His breath left him before he was halfway and, gasping for air, he made a mental note to visit the gym when he got back. Then, the ludicrousness of that thought struck him like a hammer blow: all Europe was in the midst of being consumed in fire and violence, and the entire continent likely had a few weeks before it was all over. He felt certain he would not see the inside of a gym ever again.
He turned into the destination street, slowed to a trot, and reached the monorail station. Hundreds of people filed out of the exits, defeated, dishevelled, dismayed. The fear and pain he saw in their eyes concerned him more than their appearance. He tried to engage a few in conversation, but obtained only fractured responses in the most heavily accented, broken English. After easing his way through the throng and into the station, he intimidated a frightened-looking young guard into letting him on the return journey to Genoa.
The monorail did not leave for another four hours, after the sun had set and a latent fear evolved and thickened with the darkness. Without comms, Geoff was left to pass the time in the empty monorail, wondering what the holdup could be. At one point, a middle-aged woman wearing the uniform of Italy’s intercity public transport operator came down the aisle. He tried to find out what the delay could be, but her irritation and lack of English only allowed him to establish that he still had a wait of several hours. He began to think it would be more beneficial to alight now and seek interviews with those who had arrived earlier.
Five minutes after the woman left, the monorail moved with an uncharacteristic jolt. It accelerated out of Turin South and reached its maximum speed in seconds. Geoff’s lens told him how fast he was travelling, and his concern rose as the monorail’s speed crept over the approved maximum and kept going up. His mind sought out the potential reasons. Outside, the dark night gave scant clues to his velocity, only the occasional trees flashed past close to the window in an instant.
Suddenly, the super AI controlling the monorail applied the brakes, throwing Geoff into the cushioned seats opposite him. The deceleration pushed him with greater force into the seats. In shock, he found he could not breathe. He clenched his eyes shut and tensed his jaw, praying for the incredible force to yield. Time dragged. His chest began to
ache with the need for air. He fought to concentrate so as not to pass out. After interminable seconds, the brakes released and the immense pressure pinning him to the seats vanished. He gulped in a lungful of air, anger flaring at the monorail’s dangerous behaviour. He saw nothing outside in the darkness, but his lens told him the monorail had stopped moving.
He elected to move forward and find out what had happened. Despite a furious twitching of his eye muscles, his lens offered no assistance. The lights in the carriages dimmed and flickered, and then shone normally again. Geoff trod along the central aisle noting the few other passengers as they stood awkwardly out of their seats, concerned expressions on their faces.
An urgent voice erupted from the sound system: “Evacure la monorotaia!”
“Shit,” Geoff said, not requiring a translation given the panicked reactions he saw on the other faces.
“Evacure ora la monorotaia!” the sound system urged. “Esci ora!”
The double doors on both sides of the carriages slid apart and Geoff froze. The few other figures hurled themselves out and into the darkness. Geoff looked ahead to the front of the monorail and a sudden flash stabbed his eyes, as bright as the sun. It vanished at once and the front carriage, around a hundred metres in front of him, lifted into the air.
His instinct for self-preservation took over and guided his limbs to the open doors. He flung himself out of the carriage hoping for the best but fearing the worst. He landed badly at the top of a steep escarpment. The sound wave from the explosion whooshed behind him as he tumbled headlong over chilly, damp grass, a new pain cutting through the adrenalin in his blood to inform him he had incurred another injury that would require professional medical attention. The angle of the escarpment lessened and he managed to stop rolling, assured his clothes were now as battered and damaged as the rest of him.
He lay on his back and stared at the sky. A deep and painful throbbing rose up from his left leg. His breathing slowed and he noticed lines of white light zipping overhead, from south to north. The ground shook under the impact of another explosion. He tried to lift his head. When he did so, the pain in his leg became somehow electrified and shot through the rest of his body, touching the tips of each finger and tingling each hair on his head. In its wake, he felt nothing below his neck, as though he had been decapitated. More Caliphate Spiders, which must have been dispatched from the vast fleet passing overhead, proceeded to destroy the rest of the monorail, while Geoffrey Kenneth Morrow lay immobile at the bottom of the escarpment, paralysed from the neck down.
Chapter 37
22.11 Friday 10 March 2062
“WITH RESPECT, GENERAL, I think you should retire to your home now.”
Sir Terry Tidbury looked up at his adjutant, John Simms, smiled and said: “You’re being too polite, Simms. ‘Should’ instead of ‘can’? I’m not the only one working hard in this place.”
Terry watched the adjutant’s angular face freeze in a moment’s consideration before his bushy eyebrows came together and he observed: “Quite. Sir Terry, the retreat across the European mainland is being managed as effectively as possible, this week has been, shall we say, a little trying, and as you have had to make over five hundred deployment decisions since Mon—”
Terry raised a hand and broke in: “I haven’t made any decisions, merely okayed what Squonk suggested and SACEUR approved in the vast majority of cases. Let’s be honest, Simms, we have been reduced to the role of machine operators now. It’s our computers versus their computers, and we’re desperately trying to stave off what appears to be inevitable.”
There came a rare pause between the two men. Terry was the superior officer and more experienced soldier; Simms was the better educated of the two. Terry occasionally wondered if his adjutant might harbour resentments that this entire fiasco could have been avoided if only those remnants of the British upper classes had been allowed a greater decision-making role over the preceding decades.
Simms said: “Nevertheless, a good commander still requires rest, Sir Terry. If I am speaking out of turn, please—”
“Don’t be ridiculous, Simms,” Terry dismissed. The General stood and paced around the War Rooms, looking at the screens as they relayed the current dispersals of NATO forces and the range of enemy formations facing them, both actual and estimated. To Terry, the analogy of the liquid egg yolk as blood came back to him. The enemy had been relentlessly gaining territory, spreading over the European landmass with an inevitability that—
“General?” asked a young female operator from the station responsible for Home Countries comms.
“What is it?” Terry asked as he strode over, Simms following.
“Air Chief Marshall Thomas requesting, Sir,” she answered without looking up.
“Very well,” Terry said.
The small, round face of the head of the RAF appeared on the screen above the station. “Thank you, Sir Terry,” Thomas said at once. “I appreciate the hour is late, but I believe we have made a small breakthrough up here.”
Terry let out a short chuckle and replied: “Good news is welcome at any hour. What is it, Ray?”
The Air Chief Marshall’s face frowned as he asked: “TT, can we be completely sure our comms are still secure? The way things are going…”
“Squonk?” Terry called. “Potential for compromise?”
The super AI replied: “The enemy has made no apparent effort to break NATO’s quantum encryption. The probability of it having been breached remains at less than three thousandths of one percent.”
Terry looked up at Thomas and asked: “What’s happened?”
“Very well,” Thomas replied. “I have a young captain here, by the name of Evans. He’s mucked about with a PeaceMaker training ACA and has brought the Pulsar cannon on it up to almost the same power as its fully-armed battlefield counterpart.”
Terry frowned and said: “No, that’s not possible. The training PeaceMakers are fitted with an inferior power unit which shouldn’t—”
“The power unit is essentially the same, TT,” Thomas interrupted with an edgy voice. “Captain Evans recalibrated the junctures, adding almost zero weight but ramping up its destructive ability. It’s rather good, when you think about it,” he concluded, beaming with pride.
Terry nodded in consideration and said: “Good work. Thank you, Air Chief Marshall. Oversee deployment plans for them. Oh, and pass on my thanks to your Captain.”
Thomas’s face smiled and then vanished from the screen, to be replaced with a map of the Home Countries and their available forces.
Terry barked: “Squonk?”
“Yes, Sir Terry?” came the instant response.
“Why didn’t you think of that?”
“Think of what, Sir Terry?”
Terry quelled his rising anger and said: “Why did you not consider upgrading the training PeaceMakers to battlefield capability as an option in the defence of the European mainland?”
“I did, Sir Terry, although I did not flag it as having the potential to effect a material change on the course of the invasion. It will not substantially hinder the speed of the enemy’s advance. Even with the most effective battlefield deployment of the upgraded two-hundred-and-seventy-three serviceable training PeaceMaker ACAs, in the most probable scenario, the enemy’s advance will be delayed by three hours and twenty-one minutes. In the second most probable scenario, the enemy’s advance will be delayed by four hours and—”
“Enough,” Terry snapped. “Deploy the upgraded PeaceMakers to their maximum effectiveness.” He turned to Simms and ordered: “Instruct all corps commanders to review this bloody computer’s suggestions and other advice to see what else might have a bearing.”
Simms nodded and left the War Room.
Terry turned back to the screens and analysed the latest NATO losses. He folded his arms and wondered when and how many times in history a weaker force had been so expertly crushed by its enemy. The Mongol Hordes? Attila the Hun? Alexander the Great? As he st
ared at the screens watching the enemy’s inexorable advance continue over the maps of Europe increment by tiny, relentless increment, his imagination wandered to those innumerable wars in human history when the victors had written the vanquished out of the record altogether. He silently asked himself if there could come a time, millennia hence, when everything around him had turned to dust, forgotten and lost, trodden into un-knowledge by the victor, by this new caliphate that might well go on to even greater things, to a point where today’s swift and untroubled destruction of Europe warranted not a single mention in its history books.
Simms appeared at Terry’s side and said with a note of apology: “Sir Terry, I took the liberty of fetching you a cup of tea. Your order has been carried out.”
Terry took the proffered mug and clamped both of his hands around it as steam wafted up from the brown liquid. It was too hot, but Terry preferred to absorb the pain through his hands. “Thank you, Simms. You can go now.”
Simms returned the thanks and left. Terry glanced once more at the range of data displayed for his dismay. He retired to his personal office close to the entrance of the War Room. Once inside, he put the tea down on the desk, sat down, and said: “Squonk, open comms to Lieutenant General Studs Stevens, USAF.”
His friend’s clean-shaven face appeared on the screen in his desk and he responded: “Hey, Earl. I saw the situation report this morning. How you doing?”
Terry said: “If you saw the report, I’m sure an intelligent lieutenant general like you can tell how I’m doing. What news on the convoy, Suds?”
Stevens took a pull on a bottle of clear liquid and then said: “All looking good so far, but they’re ready and expecting that the enemy won’t just allow them free passage.”