Sekret Machines Book 1: Chasing Shadows

by Tom DeLonge

  Another rattle of gunfire. I mashed myself hard against the stone. When I looked out, I saw the shooter running towards me, machine pistol slung low and gripped in both hands. He was a big man, shirtless and muscled, hair cut short, chiseled features set in grim determination. He saw me and pulled the trigger even as he came on, peppering the gatehouse like he was playing a hose over a fire.

  I sank deliberately to one knee, aimed, waited—hearing the zing and pop of his bullets in the air around me—and fired. I knew I had hit him before his weapon slipped forgotten from his hands. Blood ran down his chest as he crumpled to the ground.

  For a long moment, I aimed at the spot where the man had been, breathing in the smell of oil and gun smoke, feeling my heart race. I was so focused on him that I did not sense Hartsfeld moving until he had gathered up his pistol and gotten to his feet behind me.

  I turned in time to see his face beyond the muzzle of the pistol, the bitter anger written across his features.

  “You think people like you can stop us, Jew?” he said.

  And then came the bang of the gun, and I rocked back, amazed that I was not dead. Only as Hartsfeld slumped heavily to the ground did I see Belasco on his belly, his face smeared with blood, his pack open and both hands wrapped around the grip of his .45. Our eyes met briefly, and then he slumped down again, and whether he was still breathing or not, I could not say, because I heard the sounds of footsteps behind me and had no time for my shipmate.

  I WONDERED IF THE MEN IN THE COMPOUND REALIZED that Belasco’s shot had come from a different place, that there were more than one of us. It probably wouldn’t matter either way. They had nowhere to go. They would fight to the last man to make sure we couldn’t confirm their presence here to our superiors, and come after us if we tried to withdraw.

  I took a long, steadying breath, stooped to Hartsfeld’s body, and shoved his compact automatic into my belt. I would need every round I could find.

  The courtyard was still lit, and I could hear voices calling to each other in German. I still had no sense of how many there were, but it seemed clear that I could not take them on alone.

  I was thinking this through when the stone inches from my head exploded. I winced away, ears ringing and face stinging from the stone shards, spotting the rifleman inching down the left side of the courtyard. I fired wildly, missing, and pulled back into the shaded cover of the arch. This couldn’t go on much longer.

  More voices. They were coordinating now. Another door opened, this time on the right. Probably the machine gunner from the front window. Then another from the foot of the tower, where I saw a man with a pistol.

  I fired a warning shot, but he ducked away. The effort nearly got me killed. I shrank deeper into the arch as another flurry of machine pistol rounds sang past me, and my eyes fell on Belasco. He was probably already dead. Would be soon. And Ignacio. And me. I just couldn’t stop them. I risked another shot at the rifleman, then one more at the machine gunner, and then the gun was empty.

  I dropped it, hands trembling as I snatched out Hartsfeld’s little Walther. After the .45, it felt light, ineffectual, and I reminded myself that I had no idea how many rounds were still inside.

  I took a step back towards the main entrance.

  I could run, I thought. They will come after me, but I might get away.

  They’d get Belasco though.

  He’s probably already dead. And you hated him.

  Not relevant, I thought. Wouldn’t be even if he hadn’t just saved my life, but he had, and that meant I couldn’t leave him. And there was Ignacio. It occurred to me that Hartsfeld had only brought the boy along to make sure there were no witnesses, and I felt a surge of anger.

  I dropped back further. I could hear the Germans talking to each other on either side of the archway, picking their moment to round the corner shooting. I edged clumsily back through the door Hartsfeld had unlocked, eyes on the courtyard, pistol raised, so that I didn’t see Belasco until I stumbled into him. I dropped to him, my left hand feeling for his throat as my right kept the gun up. I felt Belasco’s blood slick on his neck, but I also felt the faint throb of a pulse. In the same instant, one of the Germans leaned around the corner. I fired twice before he could get a shot off, and he ducked back, but my third shot clicked on nothing. Another gun empty.

  I had only seconds left.

  I looked down, momentarily blind in the dark, trying to find Belasco’s .45, but before I could locate it, the world went white.

  It happened in silence, I think, though I could not be sure, because it affected me like sound, something powerful and shrill that only dogs could hear, perhaps, which shut down my brain entirely. One moment, I was there, waiting to die, and then the sky was aflame with a white light, hard and flat and intense, like the very heart of a flare, so that the jungle leapt into brilliant, impossible, day-lit green.

  And then it was gone.

  It was nothing and—after the briefest of pauses—it was somehow morning.

  The birds were singing and I was alive.

  So was Belasco—just—and Ignacio. I waited a good twenty or thirty minutes to be sure, then returned to the compound to investigate. The Nazis were gone, even their corpses. The compound was empty. There was furniture, bookcases with volumes of Schiller and Göethe and Hitler’s Mein Kampf in German, even stacks of German newspapers and magazines, some of them only a few weeks old. There were crates of abandoned equipment, food and supplies, including boxes of Third Reich money marked with swastikas, but of the men, there was no sign, nor any trace of how they’d left the area. A half-eaten meal still spread on a table, unmade beds, and an open book marked with family photographs suggested that they had left very quickly and with little preparation.

  Belasco had lost a lot of blood from a shoulder wound. He’d also been hit in his right forearm, but Ignacio bandaged him tight with strips of fabric torn from sheets in one of the compound’s bedrooms. The shot that should have killed him had hit the useless Thompson he had been carrying. He could barely move, but he was conscious and, barring infection, would probably make it. The next forty-eight hours would be key, and I wished we were anywhere but where we were.

  We scoured the compound for anything we might use to keep him comfortable while I tried to decide if we should go back to the car and begin the long drive back to Buenos Aires or wait until he was more stable. Ignacio found a sophisticated med kit containing iodine and used it to clean Belasco’s wounds. The bullet injuring his forearm had passed right through, but the second bullet was still in his shoulder. I didn’t dare try to retrieve it, so we closed the hole as best we could and bound it with sterile bandages.

  I couldn’t communicate with Ignacio with anything more than rudimentary sign language and Belasco was too weak to talk, so I had said nothing about what had actually happened the night before, not that I knew what to say. There had been a dazzling light over the compound. It came without warning and had, somehow, filled the sky. It had also overwhelmed my senses and pushed me into unconsciousness. That was all I knew. Did I connect it to the strange lights I had seen in the sky the night before? Not at first, but then I remembered the way Hartsfeld had tried to dismiss what I had seen as merely a kind of waking dream. My heart told me that the two strange incidents were connected, possibly even the same phenomenon. I still had doubts, of course. Ignacio had a strained, haunted look that had nothing to do with Belasco’s wounds or the horror of the firefight. If we needed further evidence that something very strange had happened to us the night before, we only needed to look at each other. We were, after all, still alive.

  The place felt abandoned, as if our arrival had merely accelerated something that had been about to happen anyway. Perhaps that was why Hartsfeld had been so keen to get here: so he could go with them when they left.

  As to where they might have gone, we found one tantalizing clue. In the room below the tower, we found a series of crates packed with fur-lined jackets with hoods and goggles, snow boots
and face masks for serious, cold weather conditions. We also found a chart pinned to one of the walls, on which a carefully drawn land mass had been marked with red pencil.

  “Antartida,” said Ignacio.

  Antarctica.

  It was the first word he had said that I understood, but it left me, ironically, with only a deeper sense of confusion and dread.

  43

  ALAN

  US airspace

  “I AM UNDER FIRE AND TAKING DAMAGE,” SAID ALAN into the radio. He had lost the Locust’s cloaking capability, but since that had not made him invisible to his enemy, that didn’t much matter, and now at least he could talk to Dreamland. “Repeat. I am under fire. A single ultra-high-tech bogey matching my capabilities and velocity.”

  “Roger that, Phoenix,” came the voice from ground control. “Arranging welcoming party. Make for home. Do not engage. Repeat, do not engage.”

  Alan had continued to drive the battered Locust into low earth orbit, but the unidentified arrowhead craft had kept pace with him every step of the way. He’d pushed the Locust to the limits of its remarkable performance, but the arrowhead stayed with him.

  A fine machine. And a finer pilot, Alan thought ruefully.

  He wasn’t used to being unable to outfly his opponent and, under other circumstances, would have resented the idea that he had to be rescued by the rest of the squadron.

  Not today.

  His face still stung from the electrical fire triggered by the enemy’s lasers, but the Locust’s hull was intact and the fire was out. The arrowhead hadn’t used its lasers since leaving the lower atmosphere, but as Alan banked hard, racing through a sea of space junk, his controls lit up with warnings, and he saw the other craft coming right at him. Something pulsed yellow in its wing roots and the Locust shuddered in response, his console shrieking and flashing as automated emergency systems initiated counter measures. His vision through the port side had shimmered when the craft fired. Alan watched with horror as one of the Locust’s corners seemed to shrink and buckle, like plastic exposed to massive heat.

  In space, where there was no friction and aerodynamics didn’t matter, the distortion to what Alan persisted in thinking of as the ship’s wing wouldn’t affect its flight characteristics, but once he reentered the atmosphere, he wasn’t sure. He couldn’t guess how much internal damage had been done by whatever weapon the arrowhead had used, but the damage to the shape of the flight surface alone would send any conventional aircraft corkscrewing into the ground. What it would do to a ship like this … ?

  Guess I’m about to find out.

  He made for Dreamland, noting that several systems were already off line, and that he had lost a good deal of power, so it was a good thing that his pursuer seemed to have opted to break off the chase. Where the Locust usually felt like the literal manifestation of what the old spitfire pilots used to say—the aircraft becoming inseparable from your own body, reacting to your every movement and desire without effort, so that you forgot you were in a machine—the craft was now very clearly a device around him, one he was fighting. It was subtle at first, sounds it didn’t usually make, listing with an unusual mechanical heaviness that tried to tug the ship out of his control, but as they re-entered the atmosphere—heat flashing from every surface—the extent of the damage to the Locust was clear.

  It slewed out of its flight path, tipping, spinning, and while Alan usually felt no movement at all in the pilot’s seat, he felt like he was being tossed and shaken like a rat snapped up by a dog. The force would surely tear the thing apart.

  He had only one option. He killed all forward movement and put the ship into a sustained hover, relying on the peculiar lift the Locust generated to keep it aloft. The downside—and it was considerable—was that sitting motionless in the sky made him a sitting target for the arrowhead, should it follow him.

  He just had to hope that his enemy would not dare to pursue him this far.

  Alan rotated the Locust so he could look back the way he had come.

  “Stay up there,” he muttered to the unseen pilot. “You don’t want to come down here into hostile airspace. You’ve chased me back to Dreamland. Job well done. Now go report back to whoever the hell sent you and leave me be.”

  His voice was soft and low, little more than a whisper. His eyes raked the pale blue high above the clouds.

  Nothing happened.

  Alan breathed: a slow, unsteady intake, a hold, and then a long relieved sigh as he blew it out. He smiled and breathed again.

  And then he saw it.

  Slicing through the sky, zeroed in on his position and still trailing the smoke of reentry, the arrowhead closed on him.

  Alan cursed. He had seconds left, maybe less.

  The old cliché, that your life flashes before your eyes in the moment of death, turned out to be true. Alan saw his missions. Flying. Aerial landscapes and heart-in-mouth strike sorties. Even a dogfight or two. No friends or lovers. No family. No great moments that didn’t involve being zipped into a flight suit.

  Even with the dread of certain death upon him, it struck him as sad.

  And then his field of vision was alive with craft streaking in from below, Locusts like his own, at least six of them, several flashing weapons fire toward the lone arrowhead, which was already pivoting into a retreat.

  “Go home, Phoenix,” came the voice of flight control over the radio. “We’ll take it from here.”

  THE LOCUST HAD HELD TOGETHER, DESPITE LOSING A HOST of operational systems, slewing out of its automated highspeed cruise home only minutes short of Groom Lake. Alan, peering through fire extinguisher smoke, his face smarting, took it the rest of the way manually. The night was dark by the time he made it back to base, the landing strip lit up with emergency vehicles. The craft had broadcast its condition as soon as it had reached friendly airspace.

  Despite his protests, Alan was stretchered out, and the ground crew swarmed around the ship in protective gear, fire hoses snaking back to various tankers parked at the base of the cliff. Medical staff—whether from the base or flown in from elsewhere, Alan had no idea—poked and examined him, the ambulance racing him to a hospital in a wing of the base he’d never seen before. There were five beds. It looked like the room had never been used. Alan lay surrounded by white-coated men and women who checked his pulse and blood pressure while his minor burns were dressed. The laser had stabbed at one corner of the ship, doing minimal damage and not touching the cockpit, but causing an electrical overload, which had led to the cabin fire. He would, he was assured, make a full recovery with minimal scarring.

  So that was good.

  So why couldn’t he shake off the fear he’d felt? He’d engaged three hostile aircraft, at least one of which had the same technological prowess as the Locust, and he’d come away with only minor cuts and second degree burns. He should be ecstatic. He should be chugging champagne and singing “Born to Run” at the top of his lungs.

  But he wasn’t. He was rattled. He’d gotten so used to the impossible Locust’s extraordinary abilities that the prospect of being shot down by another craft had not seriously occurred to him. A pretty nurse—Latina, perhaps, or Native American—lifted his arm to check the dressing on his hand, and he was conscious of the way his fingers trembled in hers. She shot him a quick look and he clenched his fist, gritting his teeth against the pain.

  “Relax your hand,” she said. “You don’t want to crack the skin. Let me put some more ointment on that burn. Does it hurt?”

  Alan hesitated. Yes, it hurt. It hurt like hell, if she wanted to know the truth, like the worst sunburn he’d ever had, times a thousand, but he didn’t want to say so. He felt more than wounded. He felt ashamed.

  “A little,” he said.

  “That’s actually good,” said the nurse, smiling sympathetically. The smile was genuine but slightly crooked. It reminded him of Lacey. “Pain at this stage is good. Means there’s no nerve damage.”

  “Okay,” he said. “Great.�
��

  She gave him another look, apparently unsure if he was being sarcastic, so he thanked her and smiled.

  “Get some rest,” she said. “Your body needs to recover.”

  “Right,” said Sgt. Barry Regis, who stood at the door. “This guy will do anything for attention. I hope you didn’t promise him a sponge bath.”

  “Jackass,” said Alan, giving an understanding nod to the nurse.

  “Loser,” said Regis, pulling up a chair beside his bed and grinning. “How you doing, Major?”

  “Fine,” said Alan. “A lot of fuss over nothing.”

  “Not exactly nothing,” said another man in the doorway.

  Hatcher.

  He looked dour.

  “Getting pretty crowded in here,” said the nurse critically.

  “We’ll only keep him a few minutes,” said Hatcher.

  The nurse shot a last, rueful smile at Alan and left. Regis got up to follow her out, but Hatcher waved him back into his chair.

  “No,” he said. “Stay, Officer Regis.”

  Alan shifted. Something in the man’s manner worried him.

  Hatcher scanned his bandage as if he were a doctor.

  “Quite the trip, Major,” he said simply, sitting. He looked unlike his normal unflappable, privately-amused self. There was a heaviness to Hatcher that bothered Alan, alarmed him. He shot Regis a look and saw the same concern in the big man’s face.

  Alan slid his burned hand under the thin coverlet and tried to sit up.

  “I didn’t get the data uploaded,” he said.

  “Not all of it, no,” said Hatcher. “But it wasn’t an all or nothing deal. It’s incomplete, but there’s stuff we can use.”

  Alan nodded. It didn’t make him feel better. A crushing weight was evident in Hatcher’s aspect, his expression, the droop of his shoulders. A possibility occurred to Alan: there was more to this than his own wounded return.

  Something had happened.

  “I owe you an apology, Major,” said Hatcher.