by Drew Avera
Anton turned to Namestnikov, nodding.
“Tell Mischa to set the charges on his side,” he instructed. “Then begin setting ours. Everyone get into your mech. You’ll be safer there in case of roof collapse.” Not safe, of course, but still safer.
“We’re really going to fly these all the way to DC?” Giorgi wondered, tossing his sledgehammer to the floor. He probably thought they’d be leaving the sledgehammers behind, but Anton planned to toss them into the truck along with the ammo. Waste not, want not.
“Fly and walk,” Anton replied, most of his attention on Namestnikov as he pulled C4 charges out of his backpack. Placing them correctly to bring down the wall but not the ceiling was going to be tricky. “Unless you have an uncle in the shipping business you haven’t told us about.”
“Won’t that take hours?” The hint of a whine in Giorgi’s voice grated at Anton’s nerves and he clenched his teeth to keep from biting the man’s head off.
“The better part of a day,” he corrected. “Which is why we shouldn’t waste time talking about it. Help Sgt. Namestnikov while the rest of us prepare the mechs.” He shot Giorgi a tight grin, wondering if the man could even see it in the uneven glare of their flashlights. “If the thought of the journey disturbs you, perhaps you’ll feel more comfortable riding in the truck and missing the battle.”
“No, sir!” Giorgi begged, eyes going wide, the whites bright enough to see even in the gloom. “Please, Major, I want to be in on the raid!”
Anton regarded him evenly, trying not to let his momentary anger sway his judgement. He debated for just a moment whether he’d be better off leaving the man behind where he wouldn’t have to worry about him screwing up, or bringing him along where he’d have a better chance of getting himself killed. In the end, waste-not, want-not won again.
“Very well, Giorgi. If you want to fight that badly, get those charges set and then get inside one of the Tagans. But I don’t expect to hear any complaining from you during the trip. If these machines are good enough to take us into battle, they are worth the trouble to transport.”
“Yes, sir, thank you, sir. I promise, no complaints.”
Anton snorted his skepticism but said nothing. A soldier who didn’t complain was harder to find than an honest politician.
Nate flexed his leg experimentally, wondering at the simple pleasure of being able to move it again without pain. The medics had come in, along with their armed guards, and changed the bandage, replacing the high-tech healing stimulator with a simple gauze and tape model now that the electronic work was done and his wound had mostly closed. He wished they’d let him put his pants back on. Hospital gowns were universally embarrassing and unnecessary, sort of like politicians, and all the decades all the versions of Nate Stout had seen and still remembered, nothing had changed that.
He also wished he’d been able to bring his own books. Svetlana had brought him a tablet, not connected to any external networks, with a collection of e-books, but her taste in literature—or, to be fair, the tastes of whoever had filled the tablet’s library—were far different from his. There was nothing but old-school science fiction and fantasy in the list, stuff from a hundred years ago by writers he’d never even heard of: Poul Anderson, David Eddings, Andre Norton, Ray Bradbury. Something about the name Bradbury nagged at the edges of his memory, something his Prime might have read but hadn’t been passed down, but the other names were cyphers to him.
He sighed and settled into reading a book called Something Wicked This Way Comes, but the whole setup of the society in it made no sense to him. It was an America that hadn’t existed for a century, if it ever had, and he couldn’t relate to the kids wanting to be older. He couldn’t remember much about Nate Stout’s childhood, but he couldn’t imagine anyone wanting to be older, wanting less life.
He set the book down and closed his eyes, frustration welling up in his gut. Now that the pain was mostly gone, he was getting some serious cabin fever. The room’s walls had gotten smaller and he kept having to remind himself it was better than the dank, underground cell he’d been stuck in for the first few days.
He looked up at the door latch turning and felt a strange catch in his breath when Svetlana Grigoryeva stepped through. She seemed to be wearing different clothes every time she came in the room. Not just fresh clothes, which would come as no surprise, but a different style, as if she were a different person with each visit. This time, she wore a dress, which was a look he hadn’t seen from her before. It was old-fashioned, something his Prime would have seen back when this building had housed presidents instead of crime bosses. Well, not that there was much difference if I’m being honest.
It was yellow and knee-length, sleeveless, cut low just above her breasts. Her hair was loose and clean, freshly-washed, and he thought he smelled a hint of perfume. Something stirred inside him he hadn’t felt in quite a while. If he was being honest, it was something he hadn’t felt since the Prime. He and the various other incarnations of Nate Stout had occasionally frequented the working girls in the Fry or the equivalent thereof in the rest of the ruins of the eastern seaboard, but those had been the scratching of an itch, nothing more.
“Good morning, Nathan,” she said, pushing the door shut and punching in a lock code. It was interesting, he thought, that there was a lock plate on both sides of the door.
“Is it morning?” he wondered. “It’s kind of hard to keep track.” He waved around the windowless room. “The old cell had a few cracks, but this one is pretty airtight.”
“Sorry,” she said, stepping over to him, a hand resting on his arm. “If it were up to me, you wouldn’t be kept in here, but Robert has his own priorities.” She shrugged. “He is not a cruel man, and one might even say he is noble. But he is burdened with purpose, and sometimes he forgets the suffering of those who swept along in his wake.”
She hesitated, licking her lips with an uncertainty he hadn’t seen before in her face. She pulled a small electronic key card from a pocket he hadn’t noticed.
“If I take off your handcuff,” she said, nodding at his left hand, still restrained to the side bar of the bed, “do I have your word you won’t try to escape?” The corner of her mouth quirked up. “You will have to take my word that you would not be able to overpower me, particularly since you’ve been spending the last few days lying in bed.”
“In that case,” Nate said with a rueful chuckle, “you have my word.” The truth was, he didn’t doubt she could take him. She was beautiful, but also undeniably deadly, a leopard at rest.
She seemed to read his thoughts and her grin widened. She touched the card to the center of the handcuffs and both loops parted with a soft click. He pulled his hand free and rubbed at the raw, red line on his wrist for a moment before he pulled his arm across his chest, popping his shoulder joint and relieving a constant pressure he’d felt for most of the last few days.
“Thank you.”
She leaned over him to retrieve the handcuffs and her hair teased at his face, her breasts just barely brushing against his chest. He held his breath, not wanting to give her the impression he was trying to cop a feel. She took the cuffs and tossed them into a chair across the room, the same chair she’d sat in as they’d talked these last few days, safely away, separate. Not today.
“You had a shower last night,” she said, then made a show of sniffing the air. “I can tell.”
“I did,” he acknowledged, sitting up in bed, making sure the sheet was covering the lower half of the robe, because it didn’t conceal much. “Though it was as short as the showers we were allowed in Officer’s Candidate School.”
“You never went to OCS,” she reminded him, drawing closer still. He felt the warmth of her skin radiating between the centimeters between them and his eyes locked in on hers so he wouldn’t get caught staring at the flesh visible above her dress. “You were never married. You’ve never been in love.” She cocked her head to the side. “Have you?”
“No.” The admi
ssion was easy, but the words wrestled their way out of his chest. “I suppose I haven’t had the time.” He worked moisture into his mouth. “What about you?”
“My job has made it difficult for me to trust anyone enough to let them close. I am required to lie, and if you lie so much…” She trailed off and for once since he’d met her, she seemed unsure of herself. “If you lie so much, you begin to forget what it’s like to be honest with yourself.”
“And are you being honest now?”
By way of answer, she leaned in and kissed him. He hadn’t exactly been expecting it, but it didn’t shock him. Her lips were warm and tasted of strawberries and cigarettes and her body was taut and toned and yet somehow soft as well. His heart was pounding its way out of his chest and he felt as light-headed as a teenager about to lose his virginity…until he realized he’d never been a teenager. Her fingers pulled away the sheet, pulled away his hospital gown, and the chill of the room seemed a welcome relief from the intense heat of her skin against his.
Her legs were impossibly smooth, like silk beneath his palms as he slid the dress up over her head. She wore nothing beneath it and blood surged away from his brain at the thought she had come here intending to do this.
This is a mistake. It’s some sort of mind game. She just told you she lies for a living.
And yet he couldn’t think of a single good reason why he shouldn’t do it. The old saying was life was too short, and it was truer for him than it had ever been for anyone else who’d ever uttered the words. He gave in to the desire, coupling with her urgently, not caring about the why, only feeling a paranoid certainty they’d be interrupted, that he’d be punished by the guards or by Franklin, or perhaps, by God. God seemed to have been punishing him and all the other versions of him for the whole of their stutter-step existence, punishing the Prime for his hubris in having tried to live life one second longer than fate had dealt him.
Yet nothing interrupted, no one burst in to stop them, no brutal punishment awaited; and, when the inevitable end occurred, Svetlana collapsed atop him, crushed against his chest, her breath quick and yet somehow still controlled. She smiled at him, kissing at the side of his mouth teasingly.
“This is how I feel, Nathan,” she told him, her breath a puff against his cheek. “This is me being honest with myself. I want you to be part of what we’re doing, not because it serves Robert’s purpose, but because I want you to stay with me.”
“What if I do?” he wondered. “You know me, maybe better than anyone. Can I live with what Bob is doing?”
She rested her cheek on his chest, fingers pulling gently at his hair, silent. Was she considering her answer or simply considering how to phrase it? Or just pausing for effect to make the reply more believable?
“I know how much you love the idea of the United States, of what it was,” she finally said. “It may hurt you to have to fight the government that considers itself a continuation of the United States, but if you can understand, as I have, how corrupted the governments of your country and mine have become, you will come to understand the need to overthrow them.”
“Overthrowing the government always sounds like an easy solution,” he said softly. “But if there’s anything I remember from the history the Prime studied, it’s how badly things can go when you topple a government without having a plan to replace it.”
“Maybe the problem is everyone keeps trying to replace one government with another,” she suggested, “rather than simply letting people live their lives.”
“Someone always tries to take control if there’s a power vacuum. That never changes.”
It seemed a strange conversation to be having lying naked beside a beautiful woman, still with a sheen of sweat from lovemaking, yet what else would they talk about?
“What if there was a force to keep anyone else from taking control? A force in control of one man who has no wish to rule, himself, but merely to prevent others from trying? A force of duplicates loyal to him, their lives too short for any of them to be interested in trying to seize power?”
And suddenly, it all fell into place. Not simply why he was here, but why she had come to him. He sat up, eyes going wide.
“That’s why he’s taking the stem cells from me. Because he wants dupes with shorter lives. And he wants my memories to be positive, so they’ll associate him with all the good things left after they excise the bad.” He shook his head, withdrawing from her, feeling the chill of the room’s air conditioning again as the warmth left him. “You’d really do this just for him? Just to make his plan work?”
He expected her to gloat, hoped against hope she might show shame or regret. Instead, she simply met his eyes and smiled with perhaps a little sadness.
“There was a time when I would have done anything Robert Franklin asked me,” she told him. “I owed him everything. But now I do what I do for myself, for what I believe in. Robert Franklin is a man, and sometimes not a particularly good man. He has told you he means to share his secrets with you, to extend your life along with his own. He’s lied to you. He doesn’t trust you, the you this version of Nathan Stout has become.”
She climbed out of the bed with the agility of a gymnast, retrieving her dress and pulling it over her head. He watched with fascination, as if the clothes going on were as fascinating as they’d been coming off.
“Why are you telling me this?” he asked, scooting across the bed, pulling the sheet over himself, more for warmth than from any sense of modesty. “Why now?”
“Because I think you’re worth saving. I think I can convince him to give you more life, but only if you’re with us, only if you’ve proven yourself loyal.”
She leaned over and caressed his cheek with her hand, then kissed him. He didn’t pull away. The kiss, he thought, felt honest. She grabbed the handcuff off the chair and tapped a code into the door lock, pulling it open a few centimeters but pausing before she exited.
“Think about it, Nathan. But do not take too long. We are leaving here soon, and if you don’t come with us…well, Robert Franklin is not a man who leaves loose ends.”
Chapter Thirteen
“I am so very fucking certain I did not agree to this!” Jenny’s plaintive whine was a static-filled blast in Roach’s helmet headphones, competing with the roar of her Hellfire’s turbines for dominance.
Below the four Hellfires, what was left of Interstate 64 passed by, baking in the mid-day sun, the pavement cracking and overrun by vegetation. Green had crept in from the roadside, oak and pine and kudzu growing over the corpses of abandoned cars. Cargo shipments still wound their way over the roads, but only the daring would risk the interstates, with its collapsed overpasses and roving bands of looters. It worked fine for a flight of mechs, though, walking only as far as they needed to in order to cool down their jets.
“As I recall, darlin’,” Fuller said with a tone of tolerant amusement, “you all but threatened to shoot me if we didn’t let you come along.”
“Do you two always talk so much during a tactical movement to contact?” Ramirez wondered.
“Oh, look at Junior using big military words like he understands them,” Jenny cracked.
Roach grinned involuntarily. US Army Captain Jennifer Armstrong, the woman she’d come to know as Jenny, had a sense of humor she could appreciate. And the truth of the argument was somewhere in between. By the time they’d all arrived back at the old Coast Guard base, Jenny had finally resigned herself to the idea she was going to be a target until and unless they took out the people who’d come after them. When she’d seen the Hellfires, she’d practically demanded to be allowed to pilot the spare and Roach had acquiesced after Fuller had assured her the woman was well qualified to do so.
When she’d found out they were leaving in the morning for an all-day flight/walk to DC to confront Robert Franklin or Prizrak or whoever he was, and all the mercenaries and hired thugs he had in his pay, she hadn’t been quite as enthusiastic. But here she was, anyway, joining in on what w
as surely the stupidest decision Rachel Mata had made in her short tenure as acting commander of Broken Arrow Mercenary Force. They were heading for the old capital, a place overrun by crime and anarchy, to fight a force of unknown size led by some criminal mastermind, while they were armed with just the load of weapons and ammo they could carry in their mechs, with no backup and no extraction plan.
It was absurd, crazy, but she was driven on by one undeniable fact.
Nate would do it for me.
“You given any thought to what we’re going to do when we get there, boss-lady?” Fuller asked her. She checked the readout and saw he’d transmitted on a private channel between them, probably not wanting to alarm Ramirez or give Jenny another reason to complain.
“We’ll arrive after nightfall,” she told him, talking it through as much to get it straight in her own head as to explain it to him. “I figure we’ll hold up as close as we can and still find cover, do a bit of scouting on foot to decide on the best avenue of approach, then hit them sometime in the early morning, 0200, maybe 0300. There’ll still be people on watch, but it’ll take their backup longer to get there, maybe give us an edge.”
“And don’t sleep beyond dawn,” Fuller commented in a dry tone. “Dawn’s when the French and Indians attack.”
“What?” she asked, looking over at his Hellfire and frowning, as if he could see her. “The French and the who?”
“Sorry, it’s an old Army thing. Really old, like back to the French and Indian Wars old. Your plan seems a bit on the basic side, was my point.”
“Nate always said the simplest plans were the best,” she said, hoping the defensiveness she felt at the comment didn’t make it all the way through to her tone. “Without getting some more intelligence data on this base at the White House, this is the best I can do.”