The Rise of the Speaker

by Pete Driscoll

  Alice’s core – which was quickly connected to a new power core – was picked up by an Artisan who promptly stepped back into the tunnel, Alice’s body was stood next to me, the both of us watching it disappear into the darkness. I had still not quite gotten used to seeing Alice on her screen, Alice in her body and Alice in her core, all at the same time.

  “It’s time for us to go, the Artisans have to sanitize the area.” Alice shouted, her voice still needing to carry over the sounds of battle

  “Sanitize?”

  “There are still lots of pieces of technology dotted around. We need to have every shred of carbonite out of here before we abandon the cabin. Anything we leave behind can be used to reverse engineer our tech. My screen, the cabin’s wiring, the power feeds from the original forge, the hologram control units, all of them contain – or are completely constructed of - carbonite or other pieces of technology and everything needs to be gone when the National Guard get in here.”

  “Ok... What can I do to help?”

  “Nothing. The artisans will handle the clean-up and the Spartans will hold the line until they are finished, then everyone will fall back into the tunnel. You are the only thing of irreplaceable value left on the surface. You need to leave… now!”

  “What is stopping the soldiers from simply following us into the tunnel? Surely it will take time for everyone and everything to be transported into the hanger.”

  “The tunnel entrance will be refilled as soon as the last Spartan is through, then there are a series of blast doors along the tunnel length in case that doesn’t work. We will only need about half an hour to load everyone onto the aircraft and launch. They will still be looking for us on the surface long after we have left.”

  “Right… Well, I guess it’s time to leave then.” Suddenly I was hit by a pang of nostalgia as I looked around the cabin that had always been meant for two. Maria had never lived long enough to see the home that we had hoped to share, the home that had hidden me from her killers for over a year and the home where some of our most revolutionary ideas had become a reality. This cabin had seen the very best parts of me, and the very worst; the hardest months of my life had been witnesses by these walls, but despite that, I was sad to leave them behind.

  One last look around and I dropped into the tunnel.

  Chapter 22

  The great escape.

  “What the fuck happened!” David Turnbull Jr barked at the four senior members of the US Security committee from his place being the Resolute desk. Gerald Meisner – National Security Advisor – shifted awkwardly in his seat as the President’s eye drew down on him. “you made some pretty solid guarantees, Gerald,” the President said predatorially, “something about nobody being able to stand up to that kind of firepower, something about him surrendering, something about his tech being reverse engineered… Am I missing anything!?!”

  Meisner shook his head weakly, unable to bring himself to look the President in the eye. Admiral Garfield coughed behind a fist before speaking up. “Mr President, there is no way we could have known the combat capabilities of those robotic soldiers before we initiated the operation. They were far more effective than even our wildest estimations – there were also a lot more of them.”

  “That sounds less like an explanation and more like an excuse, Admiral. And a pretty fucking bad one at that!”

  “With all due respect sir, it is not an excuse.” Garfield answered firmly, “we designed this operation based on all the information that was available to us at the time. They used 6 soldiers to take out 50 CIA agents when they attacked Montana, standard military doctrine would suggest that they used 6 soldiers because they needed 6 soldiers to do the job. In reality, it was overkill. One of those things could have wiped out a thousand agents without taking a scratch, but that information simply wasn’t available to us. We sent in over 2200 soldiers, backed up with armour and air support – that’s more soldiers than we used to take Baghdad.”

  “And 2200 soldiers couldn’t do the job?!?” Turnbull yelled incredulously, raising to his feet behind his desk.

  “No, sir!” the Admiral almost shouted back in defiance. “2200 soldiers, 10 tanks, 12 gunships, 4 attack aircraft, 9 Bradleys, 5 artillery pieces and 35 Humvees couldn’t do the job! There are more than 1400 dead soldiers and a few hundred billion dollars of wreckage on that hill and that’s not including the wounded... We have the strongest military force in all of human history and we just had our asses handed to us!... sir!”

  Hearing a decorated war veteran and the head of his armed forces lay it out in such plain terms seemed to take the fire out of Turnbull’s interrogation. He slumped back down into his chair with a sigh, resting his elbow on the plush leather armrest and rubbing the bridge of his nose as he digested this new reality. “Ok… take me through it… from the beginning.”

  “Yes, Mr President,” Meisner said, finally finding the courage to speak. “as we discussed, an FBI and ATF taskforce was sent in as soon as ‘Marcus’ was located. 2 predator drones were loaned to the FBI to assist in the search but both were shot down. The taskforce moved in for an assault but the enemy detected them and initiated a dialogue – the feds settled down for a siege. Pursuant to your orders, our CIA assets sabotages the negotiations and the taskforce renewed their assault.

  “What happened next is a bit… unclear. It would seem that the entire assault team was repelled using some kind of ‘stun’ weaponry, rendering the entire taskforce unconscious. Reports from the field indicate that the enemy pushed the taskforce back and even attacked the command post, every single agent was knocked out. When they woke up, they were all laid out in the field at the command post…”

  “Wait,” Turnbull interrupted, “they were knocked out one at a time? Or do they have a weapon that hit them all at once?”

  “erm… we’re not sure; either they hit them all at once or they hit them individually very quickly. We simply don’t know at this point.”

  “Ok, carry on.”

  “6 fatalities, a handful of injuries, a few of them serious, but - for the most part – the taskforce was left unharmed at the command post.”

  “But he massacred our soldiers,” Amanda Hollifield - Secretary of State - said, “why would he leave the federal agents unharmed?”

  “Again, we don’t know,” Meisner conceded nervously, “we are working with the theory that the taskforce didn’t pose enough of a threat, or maybe that rendering the taskforce unconscious was a warning that the military didn’t heed. Our information is very limited here, I’m afraid.”

  “Then, I’m assuming, they called in the National Guard” Turnbull continued.

  “Yes… eventually.” Meisner confirmed, “Whatever weaponry was used against the agents seemed to cause a great deal of confusion in the taskforce personnel, it took a while for the call to me made and then another few hours were lost transferring command and handing over the mission details. It was so messy that the colonel in command of the National Guard suspected a conspiracy between the taskforce and Marcus… but I think we can safely discount that theory, there are simply too many conflicting accounts to suspect anything more than a confusing side effect of Marcus’s weaponry.”

  “then what?” The President asked impatiently.

  “I think I’d better take it from here, Mr President,” Conrad Fields interrupted, Turnbull nodded for the Secretary of Defence to continue. “We sent 6 waves up that hill over a period of about 13 hours, as the Admiral has already said, casualties were… extremely high. However, most of the dead were military contractors that had been hired by the CIA…”

  “Mercenaries?!?” Hollifield questioned in shock

  “Yes Ma’am, there were a few Special forces units and some National Guard regulars but the bulk of the men that were sent in were CIA assets. The law simply doesn’t allow for large scale military deployment of US ground forces on US soil, unfortunately, even our most supportive military commanders know that and we couldn’t develop a leg
al exception in the time we had. The order to kill on sight is a blatantly illegal one so regular National Guardsmen would be unlikely to follow it, the best way to ensure that Marcus never made it off that mountain was to use assets that weren’t – strictly speaking – American military personnel.”

  “But surely the failure of the mission is partly due to the inferior standards of mercenary assets?” Hollifield argued.

  “Quite the opposite, actually.” Admiral Garfield answered before Fields could reply, “Private Military Contractors are exceptionally well trained, usually being made up entirely of ex-special forces members. I personally know a number of former Navy Seals who have gone private and I wouldn’t question the training or standards of any of them. The benefit of using PMCs is that they aren’t as… restrained by the rules of engagement as enlisted personnel are. As far as standards go, I would say that this freedom of combat is the only standard that is different, and in this case, that was a differentiation we needed.”

  “Thank you, Admiral,” Conrad Fields continued when it became clear that Hollifield’s concerns had been addressed to her satisfaction. “Sir, I have watched the recordings of countless military actions, this was the only one where the fight was so obviously one sided against us. Those machines are… well, sir… they are terrifying! Our men were like lambs to the slaughter – they were butchered! It took a little over a minute for them to destroy and entire armoured detachment – six tanks gone in seconds – to put that into perspective, we only lost one when we took Baghdad during Enduring Freedom and that one was recoverable. These are not!

  “They swatted our aircraft from the sky like they were insects. In every single individual encounter between our forces and one of those robots – no matter how stacked the numbers were in our favour – we lost. One on one; we lost, thirty on one; we lost. Not a single unit that stood its ground and fought those robots head-on made it off that mountain alive. I have spent hours watching those damned machines tear our men to pieces. I have never seen anything like it!” Fields paused for a second, looking directly at the President so his meaning wasn’t lost, “Sir, I am not exaggerating when I say that a few hundred of these robots would reduce our entire military to ashes! And that scares the shit out of me!”

  “How many of them were there?” The President asked, the colour draining from his face. Conrad Fields was not a man to sensationalise the facts.

  “No more than 40, sir”

  “Jesus…” Hollifield muttered.

  Turnbull sat in a state of shock. The full weight of this information was now settling down on his shoulders. “Is there anything we can use? Anything at all?” he finally asked.

  Meisner shook his head solemnly. “No sir, our analysts have been over the footage one frame at a time. They know that the ‘robotic soldiers’ are drones, but how they are controlled or powered is still unknown. They also can’t tell us anything about their armour, at least nothing more than it is made out of some sort of unknown alloy, an alloy which is several orders of magnitude stronger than anything we have.”

  “what about their weapons?” Turnbull asked, sinking deeper into his seat.

  “Not much sir,” Meisner answered, knowing full well that his responses were not what anybody wanted to hear. “They all agree that they are using some kind of plasma weaponry, but how that plasma is generated, contained or weaponized is simply beyond their understanding.”

  “What about Marcus?” Hollifield asked, the President’s silence giving her the opportunity to ask the obvious question. “Do we at least know where he is?”

  Meisner grimaced and shook his head. “He managed to escape, along with every single one of his soldiers and every shred of usable technology. 4 unidentified aircraft were detected leaving the compound shortly after daybreak, the air force gave chase, but they lost 3 F-22s in the attempt. Their signals dropped on and off radar as they hugged the valleys of the Appalachian Mountains and the air force lost them, we detected them again a few times as they crossed from West Virginia into North Carolina but by the time fighters could be scrambled... The last we saw of them; they were heading out over the Atlantic. They’re gone.”

  “Gone?!? Gone where!” Hollifield almost screaming in frustration.

  “We don’t know,” Meisner sighed. “Our CIA station chiefs in South America, Europe and Africa are on alert, but given their obvious technological superiority… they could be anywhere.”

  “Their aircraft?” Hollifield asked weakly, already knowing what the answer would be.

  “Yes, 1 smaller aircraft and 3 larger ones, but they are like nothing we have ever seen; they withstood 8 direct missile hits without taking any damage whatsoever. Turrets on each… errr… ‘wing’ were responsible for shooting down the F-22s. Our analysists are still working on the footage, but the fuselage seems to be made of the same material as the drones, the engines, however, are another technology that is far beyond our level of comprehension. Unbelievably fast and agile, they flew through the mountains at an altitude of less than 30 feet until they cleared the West Virginia border. Our pilots simply couldn’t keep up – let alone match that kind of flying.”

  Hollifield slumped back into her seat, mirroring the exacerbated and defeated expression of her President. Fields and Garfield sat in silence, none of this information being new to them, Meisner sat back with a sigh, just grateful not be asked anymore questions. Silence filled the Oval Office.

  “We’ve got to cover this up” the President finally said, “bury it forever… the whole fucking thing!”

  “I’m afraid that won’t be possible, sir.” Hollifield replied, her turn to give the bad news arriving faster than she would have liked. “The military fought a pitched battle in the middle of rural Kentucky. The press is already all over it. CNN were reporting live from there this morning when I left my office. We might be able to spin it if we get ahead of this quickly, but…”

  Another long silence descended on the meeting.

  “This a cluster fuck of epic proportions!” Admiral Garfield muttered, even he wasn’t sure who he was muttering to.

  “Ok…” the Present said, breaking the silence, the confidence in his tone surprising everyone in the room, “get me the numbers, I want to know how many serving military personnel were killed and wounded and what branches they served in – we can discount all the contractors off the bat, officially they were never there anyway. Maybe we can orchestrate a few fictional accidents to account for some of the losses; a plane crash here, a fuel explosion there, get the official number who died on that mountain down to a more acceptable level, then make ‘Marcus’ the new Bin Laden – responsible for all the official deaths on that mountain - public enemy number one! Come on people, we have work to do!”

  “And we can now return – live – to Harlan, Kentucky and this special report.”

  Alice’s screen flashed to a sombre looking brown-haired man in an equally sombre looking grey suit. In the background, was the smoking remains of the mountain that I had – until recently – called home.

  “Thank you, Diane. Not since 1865 and the final battles of the Civil War has the United States military fought a pitched battle on American soil. But over the course of the past two days, the steady cacophony of combat has filled the air of this normally quiet corner of rural Kentucky.

  Military sources have told CNN that a terrorist cell – possibly made up of American citizens – with links to both Russia and Iran were engaged by a joint federal task force late on Tuesday evening, a gun battle between federal agents and the terrorists broke out resulting in the tragic loss of 6 FBI agents and injuries to dozens more. In the early hours of Wednesday morning, the Governor of Kentucky – with the full support of the White House – declared a state of emergency, understandably concerned about this militant and well-armed threat to public safety. The National Guard were called up and arrived on scene by late Wednesday afternoon and – after countless failed attempts to negotiate with the terrorist compound - the decisio
n was made to attack.

  A spokesman for the National guard made this statement earlier today….”

  The screen changed again, this time showing an aged and balding colonel in military fatigues as he read from a few sheets of paper in his hand.

  “At approximately 2100 hours on Wednesday, the 238th regiment of the Kentucky National guard, supported by 138th Artillery brigade and 63rd Aviation division, attacked a compound in the hills outside Harlan. The enemy was well dug in, well-armed and well equipped but due to combination of professionalism, exceptional training, military discipline and sheer determination, the National Guard were successful in neutralising the threat to the public. Unfortunately, 87 guardsmen were killed in the operation. I would like to take this opportunity to extend my heartfelt condolences to the families of the men we lost and to express my deep respect and admiration to the fighting men and women of the Kentucky militia.”

  A sea of hands shot up from the reporters in the crowd below the podium. The colonel gestured to a woman in the crowd.

  “Colonel, this is a truly appalling casualty rate! How can you possibly justify calling this a success?”

  “There is no denying – or hiding from – the high numbers of fatalities during this mission. The simple truth is that the nature of the terrain forced our men into a very narrow avenue of attack, the enemy – having had months to plan for this attack – filled that area with improvised explosive devises, fortified emplacements and heavy weaponry. The overwhelming majority of our losses were sustained in the first 15 minutes of combat, once we had ascertained the enemy’s strength and location, we were able to call in air support and close quarters artillery suppression.” He gestured to another hand in the crowd.

  “Colonel, locals have reported seeing armoured vehicles – including tanks – entering the battle, with none returning. Can you comment on that?”