by Drew Avera
With his helmet off, the chill air slapped him in the face with the full force of the wind off the ocean and he shivered. And this is summer. What the hell is this place like in mid-winter?
“Don’t move,” one of them ordered, his tone far too uncertain and hesitant to be the intimidating command he’d been trying for. “Who the hell are you?”
“Major Varlamov,” he said. He stripped the sleeve off of his left wrist and offered it up. “Alpha Group.”
The non-com who’d challenged him blinked and lowered his weapon, as if the thought of using a chip reader on the intruder hadn’t occurred to him.
“I…umm, I’ll have to send for…”
“Never mind, Sergeant,” a booming, jovial voice came from behind the armed soldiers, followed by a barrel-chested, middle-aged man in a stained and faded flight suit and a fur-fringed leather jacket. He looked like a man who should have a bushy beard and a wild mane of hair to go with his flushed face and wild eyes, but instead he was clean-shaven and wore a regulation haircut. “You must be our stowaway from the spooks.”
“Major Anton Varlamov.” He began to salute, thinking perhaps the man would expect it, but the big man waved it off and shook his hand warmly instead.
“Colonel Piotr Sverdlov,” he said. “First Battalion, Third Armored Corps.” A broad smile split his broad face. “Tell me something, Major, why does one of you Alpha Group snake-eaters want to stick himself inside one of my Tagans? Or did you piss off the wrong person, get sent on this mission as a punishment?”
“I volunteered,” he said. “I’m qualified in a Tagan and have actual combat experience in one and I was told you could use the help.”
“God knows we do,” Sverdlov admitted, waving around them as if what he could see was proof enough.
The armed men had lowered their weapons and begun to filter away, going back to whatever preparatory task they’d been assigned to before someone had spotted his parachute. For the first time, he noticed the men had all been wearing flight suits. They were pilots, not security personnel or infantry. This was a shoestring operation, that much was clear. They had no support troops, no mechanics, no infantry, just Tagans, crewed and remotely piloted models, and their pilots. He wondered if they even had drivers for the hover barges or if they were just going to abandon them off the coast of Canada.
“We are short two pilots we were scheduled to have on the mission.” Sverdlov shrugged. “Illness, I was told, but it might have been a frailty of the testicles, if you take my meaning. This is not a suicide mission, but the getting out afterward will be a trial, a run through enemy lines all the way across the Mississippi River.”
“I was surprised General Antonov decided on a polar insertion rather than simply trying to smuggle our forces across the river,” Anton admitted. “It seems…drastic.”
“We are about to decapitate the US government,” Sverdlov reminded him, his tone clearly amused. “What is that if not drastic? Besides, bringing our forces in from the east, there would be too much of a chance of discovery. If just one drone catches one Tagan crossing the river, it could give the Americans the warning they need to cancel everything, and then we’re fucked.” He barked a laugh. “I have to warn you, though, Varlamov, it’s going to be a long fucking trip.”
“I’ve waited my whole life for this, sir,” Anton told him. “I would fly a Tagan across the world itself to get to the end of the journey.”
“Oh, it won’t be across the world, my friend,” Sverdlov said, clapping Anton on the shoulder and urging him to follow down to the barges. “It will just feel like it.”
Chapter Five
“What did this place used to be called?” Roach wondered, gawking like a tourist.
Nate couldn’t blame her. Empty tarmac stretched out as far as they could see, the runway lines long faded but the rusted and ruined remains of runway edge lights still left a trace of where the jets had once taken off. The last of the fighters had been shot down or picked clean for salvage years ago, leaving nothing behind except persistent weeds breaking through the pavement here and there. A lump of vegetation covered something in what had been a green belt, and Nate thought it might have been the remains of an airplane or a maintenance vehicle buried under vines and weeds.
“Naval Air Station Oceana,” he told her. “But that was a lifetime ago.”
Someone else’s lifetime.
Nate had never been here before, but Nathan Stout had, back when F18s and F35s had screamed off these runways and taxied back through an escort of maintenance and emergency vehicles and there was never an hour when something wasn’t taking off or landing. It had been a place with purpose, with life, but now the broken pavement and the overgrown vegetation seemed to mock him with the memories of a dead world.
What they were looking for wasn’t out on the runways or taxiways but in the old hangars, still standing and still in fairly good repair. Someone had been maintaining them, Nate knew. The paint was fresh, the vegetation cut back and cleared, and he noted the cargo trucks parked outside, backed up to a closed door. They weren’t rusted, weren’t ripped apart by looters and looked as if they’d been recently used.
There were no human security guards because that would have been too obvious, attracted too much attention from the wrong sort of people, but he’d noticed the remote cameras attached to old light posts as they were driving in. Pains had been taken to conceal them inside vacant bulb housings, but in the long light of the dusk, the tale-tell gleam of reflections gave them away. Someone was watching. Someone already knew they were coming.
“Are they just going to let us come up and knock on the door?” Roach wondered, her voice breaking in the middle of the words as the truck’s front tires thumped over a nasty crack in the road.
“They know me,” he said, shrugging. “Sort of. We’ve attended DoD briefing sessions together. Conrad recognizes the truck.”
He chuckled as he shifted the truck into park and switched off the engine.
“That doesn’t mean he won’t have someone covering us with a rifle when we come through the door, just in case. Conrad Barron is a professional and he doesn’t take chances.”
Roach snorted, pushing open the passenger door and clambering out.
“Let’s hope he’ll take at least one.”
As it turned out, they weren’t allowed to simply walk up and knock on the door. Instead, the door opened before they reached it and a woman stepped out, an M37 carbine slung over her shoulder, held low across her body. She was tall, dwarfing both of them, and her broad shoulders strained at her flight suit. The unit patch was a red triangle with LV-426 embroidered across the base and a stylized, insect-like monster coiled above it into the tip.
“What do you want?” the woman asked, her face neutral, showing neither anger nor curiosity. Her hair was long and dyed red, tied back into a braid that ran down to the center of her back, giving her the air of some Viking shield-maid transported forward through time to an age even less hospitable than her own.
“Nice seeing you again, too, Carla,” Nate said, smiling thinly. “Carla McNiven, this is Rachel Mata.”
“You can call me Roach.” Roach was trying very hard to not be impressed with the tall woman, Nate thought, though he wasn’t sure how successful she was at it.
“Stout,” Carla said, ignoring both the greeting and the introduction, “what do you want here?”
“I need to talk to Conrad. It’s important.”
“He’s busy.” Carla’s blue-gray eyes were hard, dismissive, trying to make him feel unimportant.
Tough shit, lady. I’ve had much better people than you make me feel unimportant.
“Just go tell him I want to talk, Carla.” The corner of his mouth turned up. “Unless you’d rather I make a call to the DoD and see if they’d like to discuss that shipment of Mark-Ex missiles that went missing last year.”
Carla tried her best not to react to the remark. He could see the tension in her jaw as she clamped it shut a
gainst her instinctive reply, but she couldn’t disguise the flare of her nostrils, the instinctive narrowing of her eyes.
“Come on in,” she said, the fingers of her right hand tightening around the pistol grip of her rifle as if she would have liked to shoot them both down rather than inviting them inside.
The interior of the hangar was surprisingly and delightfully air conditioned, and Nate took in a long, cool breath and let the sweat evaporate off of his face before he even bothered to take a look around.
A dozen Hellfire mechs stood tall against the far wall of the hangar, each in a maintenance harness with techs crawling over three of them, doing what he wasn’t sure because all of the mechs looked spotless. Crate after crate, pallet after pallet of ammo lined the adjoining wall, stacked up halfway to the ceiling and Nate felt a surge of avarice, wishing he had half the mechs and supplies LV-426 boasted. The secret to the air conditioning was a huge generator resting on the back of a flatbed trailer, still hooked up to a semi-tractor and still painted Army olive drab with a US Army star on the side.
“How the hell did they get that thing?” Roach blurted, staring at the isotope generator, a giant-sized version of the power source in each of the mechs.
“The same place they got the truck,” Nate told her, walking deeper into the hangar. “The same place they got all the extra mechs and ammo. They stole them.”
“Acquisitioned, my friend, acquisitioned. ‘Stole’ is such an ugly word.”
The man coming out of the door of an office to greet them was tall and slender, with the feathery, brown hair and delicate features of an artist, and fingers as long and graceful as a concert pianist. His voice was gentle, as if he would have been more at home teaching pre-school children than in a flight suit. He seemed singularly unsuited for the life of a mercenary mech pilot, and yet Nate knew him to be one of the best when the bullets started flying.
“Conrad Barron,” Nate said, nodding to the man. “This is Roach Mata, my second in command.”
Barron took Roach’s offered hand and rather than shaking it, couched it as if he were some 19th-century French aristocrat, bowing his head slightly. Nate thought for a moment he was going to kiss her hand and worried Roach might slug him. Then he worried she might not, though he wasn’t sure why that would worry him. Either way, Roach simply watched in obvious amusement.
“A unique pleasure, Ms. Mata,” Barron said, slowly letting loose of her hand, as if it were a delicate treasure he didn’t wish to see shattered from rough handling. “Though I wonder how someone so young and impressionable wound up with such an old sourpuss.”
“He’s younger than you think,” Roach said, the dry humor aimed directly at Nate.
“As incredible as it is to meet you, Roach,” Barron went on, “I have to believe you didn’t come all this way just to make my acquaintance. What’s so important that you felt the need to track me down and tempt Carla’s wrath?” He nodded toward the redheaded Viking goddess, who rolled her eyes in response, slinging her rifle and walking back to a cluster of couches and chairs arranged around a coffee table. Three more of Barron’s pilots sat arrayed around the table, playing some sort of game with miniature figures, which seemed anachronistic to Nate.
Then again, who am I to call anyone else anachronistic?
“There’s something big going on, Conrad.” Nate nodded toward the office, just a small, sheet-metal enclosure near the far wall, its roof a rough-looking patchwork of sound-proof tiles. “Can we talk alone?”
“Certainly,” Barron acquiesced, as if it were of no consequence to him. “As long as Ms. Mata doesn’t mind passing the time with my crew?”
“That’s them over there?” Roach asked, waving at the cluster around the table. “Playing with themselves?”
Barron laughed smoothly, the way he did everything.
“Oh, I like her already.”
The office was something of a letdown for Nate, and he didn’t conceal his disappointment at the fairly unadorned room, its only furniture a plain, metal desk that probably predated the war and a pair of heavy, straight-legged office chairs.
“What’s up with this, Conrad?” Nate asked him as the other man pushed the flimsy, pressed-wood door shut behind them. “Given your reputation, not to mention all that high-end shit you have out there in the hangar, I’d expect something a bit more opulent.”
“Oh, this?” Barron waved around at the office. “This is just for video calls with the DoD reps. Can’t have those anal-retentive dickheads thinking I’m living large out here or they’ll start cutting our bonuses. I don’t live in this box!” He laughed, falling into the chair and waving Nate toward the other one. “You want a drink or something? I got a bottle of Macallan in the bottom drawer.”
“Maybe later.” Nate winced as he sat, still feeling a lingering soreness in his thigh. Not to mention the knees, which I’ve almost gotten used to over the last year or so.
“Then lay it out for me, Nate,” Barron invited, hands spread invitingly. “What’s the deal? What could make you come all the way out here to see a guy you’ve always despised?”
Nate blinked.
“What? I don’t despise you…”
“Oh, please.” Barron dismissed the denial with a negligent wave. “You’ve never come out and said it, but you didn’t have to. You have a terrible poker face, Stout. You wear your heart on your fucking sleeve more than anyone I know.”
“We’re different kinds of soldier,” Nate equivocated, “but that doesn’t mean I think I’m better than you.”
“Of course it does! You’re a patriot, a true believer, you always have been. You’re the prototypical good soldier and I think if you thought you could fight the Russians better in the regular Army out west, you’d be out there in a uniform, saluting the flag every morning.”
Barron leaned back, hands resting on his chest, fingers drumming a rhythm on his pecs.
“I’m in this for the money and I don’t make any bones about it. In the United States you and I live in, the only ways to get rich are working the war or smuggling shit in to sell to people who got rich working the war. I wouldn’t mind getting into the smuggling game, but that requires a pretty big initial cash investment and some muscle behind it, so I do this instead.” He shrugged. “And because I’m good at it and you have to play to your strengths.”
“I have had, you might say, my attitude adjusted lately,” Nate told him. “It’s made me kind of question all the things I thought I knew. Let’s just say I’m not in any position to question anyone else’s motivations. None of that is important right now, though. Tell me something: have you ever heard of Robert Franklin?”
“Is he the guy who invented electricity?”
Nate frowned, never quite sure when Barron was being intentionally obtuse or genuinely ignorant.
“He developed the first mechs for the military, the original Cobra and later on, the Hellfire. Mechanical and electrical engineering genius. And a raving paranoid, but even paranoids have enemies.”
“Okay, what’s so important about him?” Barron demanded, obviously starting to lose patience with the history lesson. “He’s gotta be dead for twenty years at least, by now.”
“He is dead,” Nate confirmed. “That is, his Prime is dead.”
Barron’s eyes went wide, and he didn’t even pretend not to understand what Nate was talking about this time. Project Artemis was a bit more recent than the discovery of electricity, and even though it hadn’t been publicized, anyone who’d been in the military and involved with mechs had heard of the dupes.
“You’re not telling me this guy had himself…”
“He did. Over and over, and each time he got a little more pissed off at the US government because he blamed them for killing his Prime. He started out working for the Russians, contracting himself out to the FSB as a local agent, then he started working for himself for the highest bidder. Smugglers, Russian mafia, eventually even the CIA and Army Intelligence once he decided their money sp
ent as well as anyone else’s. He’s been reinventing himself with each new life, getting closer to the center each time, closer to the real power.”
“This sounds like a great plot for a spy thriller,” Barron offered, “but how’s it relevant to me?”
“Because he’s close enough now to do what he’s always intended to do. He wants to bring it all down. Everything. Us, the Russians, all of it. There’s a peace summit going on within a few days out at Cheyenne Mountain, Colorado, and he intends to crash it with a few squadrons of Hellfire mechs, all of them piloted by dupes of the best mech driver he knows.”
“Yeah?” Barron asked, his tone and his expression showing clear skepticism. “And who might that be?”
“Me.”
“What? How the hell would he have your genetic material and your memories?” He barked a laugh. “Assuming I buy into any of this bullshit.”
“He grabbed me a few weeks ago, tapped my stem cells. Had me for a while before my team broke me out, but by then, he’d taken what he needed and headed west.” Nate patted his thigh carefully. “I can show you the spot on my leg where he drilled in. Still hurts like a motherfucker.”
“If all this shit is true, why don’t you just call the Department of Defense and let them know what this crazy son of a bitch has planned?”
“He’s far enough inside the military and government infrastructure to infiltrate a peace conference between the US and Russia,” Nate pointed out. “But even if he doesn’t have connections in the DoD that could quash any report of this, how long do you think it’s going to take for me to get someone to believe me? And then, once they do believe me, to pass it up the chain all the way to the Joint Chiefs in Cheyenne? There isn’t time. This is going down soon and someone needs to do something about it.”