by John Mierau
She wore a full-face mask and breather with an overlay tied to a basic sensor pack racked to her shoulder. She lost count of the red squares trundling towards her through the smoke.
Comms still didn’t work, and she figured stepping in front of a mech suit in full retreat was pretty stupid, so she let them go. She had something else in mind, anyway.
The radio in her mask screamed, and the invisible vise squeezing her head crushed harder, despite the battalion’s worth of Go-pills she’d downed. “Captain Carson!” She looked back. The mech that trailing fire was back. The fire was out, but smoke still curled off its armor. It crouched behind a burning building diagonally across from her. “Captain, on me! I’ll cover your retreat!”
“Negative. Hold your position!” She stabbed at the air. “The convoy is coming down. We need to slow the Fleas down, give them time to shore us up before—”
Smokey the mech's pilot lost his nerve, turned and ran. Noelle stared, then laughed, then sagged against the side of the AV. Everything she was keeping inside her threatened to escape. The tears wouldn’t help, so she didn’t admit they existed. The terror did help, so she let it tap-dance on her spine just a little. The exhaustion… well, she hoped the pills would make her forget about that soon enough.
She let the world go blurry for a minute. She didn’t let it go on for long. Whenever she tried to ignore the world, her mind punished her with bodies of friends. Commander Winter, on the floor of his office. Sergeant Kenny from her old unit, six feet off the ground, impaled on a crysteel boobytrap outside of barracks. Corporal Kilgalon, slumped on the dashboard of a patrol truck outside an agriculture dome in the middle of nowhere.
“No,” she growled through the pain. “They have to mean something.” She slung a rocket launcher over her shoulder and slammed the compartment shut, triggering the lock with the side of her fist.
She limped up a long flight of stairs toward the door of the building to her left. It was a good six or eight stories. If she didn’t pass out on the way up, she’d hide out in a West-facing room and wait for her new friends to roll in. If the sensor screen sewn into the sling she wore held out, she could wait there for days, collecting intel.
It was her turn to play insurgent. She’d wait. Watch. Take notes. Send whatever she could find out up the ladder when Gov got the networks back up.
If she was real lucky, maybe she could ID someone lofty in the Reacher command structure, and give them the full-on Dan Winter treatment.
“Heh,” Noelle chuckled, clearing the top step. “Full-on Dan—” Her mask speaker emitted a very distinctive whining tone. Someone had painted a target lock on her.
Two whines competed for which could piss her off more.
Three whines.
She threw her hands in the air and turned around. “So do it! Kill me already!”
Spaced across the street, close to cover, were two soldiers. The mech stared up at Noelle from the base of the stairs.
A lifetime swirled inside her, as brilliant and varied as the aurora surrounding Reach, but the totality of her experience did not flash before her eyes like the meme promised. The memories were choked off by primal emotions, just as the cloud of smoke and war obscured the beautiful mosaic painted in the atmosphere.
Fear. Anger. Annoyance at her continued survival. Shame at her failure to notch a single kill, when all the Row was burning.
Shame that all she wanted in the face of devastation was to add more bodies to the pile.
But Noelle was a soldier, and death was all she had left to give to her planet.
She tore the sensor pack off her shoulder and tossed it down the stairs. The whines in her ear cut off as the sensors disconnected and she sighed with relief.
She yanked the mask off her face. Tossed it down the stairs. She didn't need ox anymore. It would all be over soon.
She narrowed her eyes at two soldiers tagging across the street. “Can we just get on with—?”
Air sprayed from the back of the mech. Automatically, Noelle’s hand gripped the butt of her pistol.
“Don’t!” The mech’s amplified voice echoed between the buildings. “Please.”
Noelle’s head tilted. What kind of Reacher talked first, shot later? Especially on the eve of the apocalypse.
She kept the gun in her holster out of pure curiosity.
The back of the mech split apart. Two hands appeared. A black-haired man struggled out of the cockpit, leaning heavily on the top. Perched like that, his ashen face was almost at eye level with her.
Her eyes widened in disbelief. A mangled bark of laughter went AWOL past her lips.
It was the assassin.
The silence between them stretched. Intrigued despite herself, Noelle was suddenly oblivious to the thundering battle slowly drawing nearer.
“Why are we talking?” She let her real confusion color her words.
“Good question, lady!” screamed the woman.
“Stand down, Ghost,” the mech pilot rasped.
The man and the woman both froze.
“Say again, Captain?”
The other soldier, a muscular man with a buzzed scalp, sounded as confused as Noelle felt herself.
“Yeah, say again?” she repeated.
The Reacher captain gently slapped both palms on the top of his mech, beating out a slow tattoo.
“Can you give me a minute to talk?” he asked. “I’m…kind of winging this.”
Noelle itched to draw the weapon. She’d be dead before the barrel cleared its holster and she wouldn’t have to listen to any more deep thoughts from the pile of shit who killed her commander.
Still. The whole ‘dying’ thing.
“I should have… killed you when I had the chance,” she gasped, instead of drawing. Her vision was beginning to go. Damn, she thought. Should have held onto the mask.
The Reacher captain sighed. Nodded. “Right. I kill your boss. You kill me. They kill you.” He waved his hands at the man and the woman. “Again, why?”
Noelle answered without thinking. “For Winter!” She paused and breathed again. “For Kenny! For Kilgalon!”
A four-rotor troop helicopter exploded from the wall of smoke ahead. Fire raged from its engine compartment. The crew hung dead in their seats.
Noelle let go of her pistol and flung herself to the ground. The helo plowed into the street and raced a hundred metres away. It screeched to a stop, its rotors still chuffing in slow circles. No explosion. Its dead crew still strapped to their chairs.
The world spun, and she closed her eyes. Her head sagged to the cool stone of the steps.
“Lee!” screamed the man and the woman, in stereo. Noelle forced her eyes back open.
‘Lee’ was standing over her. She grabbed his wrist and pulled him down. His team was screaming his name again, scuttling forward, demanding she Let! Him! Go!
She didn’t. Noelle had one arm across Lee’s chest. Her other held her pistol against his temple.
Strangely, the guy was still waving the other two away. “Stand down!” Lee screamed. A fresh chain of explosions erupted, strobing red light and a wave of heat over the strange little party on the steps. “Let me talk to her, dammit!”
“Yeah…sure…talk,” Noelle panted. She wouldn’t be able to hold the gun against his head much longer. She had to give him the full-on Dan Winter treatment while she could still squeeze the trigger.
Why the hell was she telling him to talk?
“You want to kill me for…” Lee stopped and thought. “Winter, Kenny, and Kilgalon. I want to kill you for, let’s see…” He laughed. “You don’t need the names, you know I've got names.”
“You wan’ talk me…to death? That it?” She dug the muzzle into his temple. “You people just take…and take.”
“We can stop taking,” Lee rasped.
She scoffed. “You think…soldiers get to… stop?”
Lee put his hand on the steel of her pistol, gently. He turned to face her, gasping in pain. She let
him turn, but brought the hand around his chest around to grab his collar. She should shoot him before he struggled another inch!… but she didn’t.
“I don’t know,” he whispered. His face wasn’t grey anymore, it was white. “Let’s try.”
Noelle’s tunnel vision was back. “So…what…instead?” Uh oh. Words weren’t coming out right either.
And the world had gone eerily quiet, as if the shelling had stopped, but that couldn’t be right.
“Drop the gun. Surrender. I give you my word you’ll be—be treated fairly,” his breath hitched.
Noelle was sure now: Captain Lee, the honourable Reacher, had some broken ribs, probably bleeding internally, too. Noelle’s grip was the only thing keeping him from falling over, and she hadn’t felt her fingers in the better part of an hour. “You need…ox,” she told him, and pointed her chin over his shoulder to where her face mask lay a few steps below.
His face was turning blue now. Oh god, Noelle thought, he was going to die in her arms! He grinned a weak, lopsided grin at her. “Surrender first.”
She dropped the gun and nudged it over the edge of the step. “Sure! S’render!”
They fell over each other down the steps, each trying to ease the other’s passage. Lee reached the mask first and fumbled it over her face. The line from the ox tank on Noelle’s waist was back in the mask by the time the man and the woman climbed the stairs, guns slung behind their backs.
“She’s our prisoner, Grunt,” Lee gasped, eyes having trouble focusing. “Our respo—responsibility.”
“Yes, sir,” the big man, Grunt, acknowledged. He set an air canister on the steps beside Lee, and gently moved him sideways on the deep step. “Might be the only prisoner of war all day,” he said, guiding plastic tubing over Lee’s face before lifting his shirt and examining his chest.
“Let me help you,” the woman told Noelle in flat, bored voice. She flashed lights in her eye and gently examined her for injuries. “Try anything and I’ll shoot you in the spine.”
A drone flitted out of the sky to buzz hover over the man's shoulder. He waved a meaty hand at it, and it hovered backwards out of reach. “Did somebody run out of bullets?” he asked it.
“Command ordered hold-fire!” an incredulous voice screamed from tinny speakers. “They’re talking with the convoy.”
Noelle laughed, fogging up the mask. Peace talks? she wondered. Or had someone surrendered? Her eyes roamed from tense face to tense face, trying to catch the words, understand them. She strained to hear the bitching from the god of thunder. The quiet was real? The shelling had stopped?
She fought to keep conscious. She wanted to see how this ended.
The world brightened, flooded with bizarre colors again. She couldn’t see too well, but there was a ship above her. She’d never seen anything like it before. Massive. It hovered without jets or rotors. In the sky. Without falling.
Okay.
It reminded her of seagoing vessels the general used to tell her stories about before she felt sleep. She decided she was dying.
Love you, Daddy. See you soon.
She bit her lip, chasing a thought. Wasn’t that almost what Lee had said?
“What the…?” shouted the big man, jumping to his feet and tugging the rifle off his back.
“Dead already… if they want us that way,” gasped Lee.
The man started to raise the rifle, stopped, and placed the rifle down on the ground. He sat on the steps beside Lee and stared, awestruck. “Guess so.”
Noelle’s chest hurt. She looked down. A needle stabbed through her ribs. The woman had just finished emptying its contents inside her. “That stung, huh? Carbonic anhydrase inhibitor, with an adrenaline sidecar,” she said, her lips quirking upwards. “Don’t want you to die before we find you a cell to curl up in.”
Noelle’s heart pounded in her chest, and more awareness flooded back. Of course the agony in her arms and legs flooded back, too. She sucked in air, and the plastic mask caved in almost to her nose.
The woman pulled her fingers away from Noelle’s neck, nodding. “That’s better, Captain…” She pulled the webbing back to read Noelle’s name tag. “Carson. You’ll live. I’m Lieutenant Tenjin, but you can call me warden.”
“Sameen!” Grunt shouted urgently
Sameen looked up. Stood up. And stared. “Okay. That’s cool.”
The ship was stories tall. Whatever was holding it up made Noelle’s insides vibrate. It didn’t look military: no gun ports in sight. It looked shiny and new. The sides of the rectangular craft were rounded, and lit up with images and words. Noelle was reminded of movies set in Times Square in New York City back on Earth.
All four stared up as the words and pictures told a story.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Huh, Lee thought. Flying saucer.
Flying rectangle he amended, dumbstruck. Beyond that, Lee’s imagination was tapped out. When he volunteered for this mission, he hadn’t planned this far ahead. Oh, he’d planned contingencies, set up countermeasures to give him a fighting chance to get off that roof alive, but he never thought he’d actually make it.
It made for a nice change after years of disappointment.
The entire side construction of the ship lit up. WE COME IN PEACE flashed on the active panels. PLEASE RESTORE COMMS.
Grunt snorted. “Turn off our scramblers? Like that’s gonna happen.”
GOV UNCONDITIONALLY SURRENDERS.
“That ain’t real!” Jake said, stunned.
A four-rotor helo dropped out of the ship. ‘WE SURRENDER’ scrolled across active panels, stark white against its dark-coloured fuselage. The ship slowly approached the battle line to the West.
The glowing, morphing sky remained clear all around the craft. The smoke was pushed back by whatever held them up. Not a single shot was fired.
“Huh,” Lee whispered his shock aloud this time. Definitely not how today was supposed to play out.
Maybe tomorrow, Maggie.
The words on the side of the mothership migrated to the top and bottom of the craft’s massive sides. Pictures appeared in between: Earth, and the Moon beyond it. A bright blue line arcing up the terminator between the curve of the world and the black of space.
“We know where you’re from, assholes,” Sameen sighed.
The Moon and Earth disappeared, the image swinging to the left. Stars careened by, and then a collection of ships swung into frame. Wisps of blue, green, and violet light surrounded them.
A convoy.
REACH CONVOY: 2347 flashed onto the screen, above numbers flashing by on a countdown clock: T-Minus three hours, twenty-two minutes.
Lee had watched the same scene play out eleven times his life. The sped-up visuals showed ships clustering together—far enough apart that they likely wouldn’t crash into each other when the Fold happened and the churn of gravity and magnetism surged around them, far enough from the edges of the Fold to prevent ships being left behind, outside the bubble of spacetime, or crushed on the periphery.
Was this some kind of propaganda tool? Lee was suspicious of any Earther messaging, but this video was minimalistic, the images neutral. He couldn’t fathom the point of it. They’d already surrendered. If it wasn’t a ploy, then what more was there to say?
Lee got his answer quickly: the video record of the Fold turned from documentary to nightmare at T-Minus one hour, forty-one minutes.
The camera reversed its grand pan back to Earth and the Moon. Something else different now. Lee stared hard at the image for a moment before he caught it: there were blues, violets, and reds streaking across the sky.
One Fold Event incoming, one on the cusp of one leaving? Lee wondered what the odds of that were. Long, that was for sure.
Dark spots raced across the blue backdrop of Earth, as minutes of real time raced by for every second displayed.
“What kind of ships are…?” Jake’s voice faded away as the dark spots spread out over the earth. Some shrunk and disappea
red beneath the clouds. Others continued on to surround the moon.
The camera’s eye careened through space. The Moon hurtled into view. Explosions appeared on its surface, before the camera zoomed closer to one of the strange orbiting spots.
“What are they? What the fuck are they?” Jake gasped.
“Shut up, shut up!” Sameen hissed.
Lee tried to look away, but he couldn’t. He needed to know.
Not a ship. A thing. An enormous thing. Whipping tentacles writhed beneath a segmented body wrapped in shining black shell. Topping the horror was a head—or seed pod, or something. Spiky, waving hairs or cilia, or Lee-didn’t-know-what wafted in the vacuum of space. The horror was shot through with putrid, glowing veins of yellow and green.
Smaller versions of itself crawled along its entire length.
“First contact?” Captain Carson slurred though her face mask. Lee didn’t respond.
The camera whirled back to Earth.
“Oh, fuck,” Jake moaned, pain and horror bleeding through his words.
White flashes burst through the clouds over the East Coast of North America. Over the UK. Over Asia. Over Africa. Small holes appeared in the cloud cover, rippling wider and wider.
White arcs of electricity and explosions danced across the face of the world.
The camera whipped through space to capture something much closer than the burning Earth. Lee screamed in shock. Everyone flinched, or cried out. Jake fell backwards, tumbling to the ground when another of the things appeared.
The tentacle end of one of those things raced towards the camera. In the middle of the whipping black appendages. Fangs? Lee wondered. Or barbs. Or stingers. In the center of the quivering mass was a mouth, or other orifice. Orange-white heat radiated from the spasming hole. The segmented body above the tentacle-fringed mouth compressed tighter, accordion fashion, and then exploded forward. An unconscious sound of disgust escaped Sameen’s mouth.