by Weston Ochse
Keying in on the drop zone and careful of my enhanced EXO strength, I pulled my left risers, well aware of my need to tack into the wind. It gusted, pushing me off course, and I went with it, circling back around. The drop zone was a wide green space beside what might have once been a school. Trucks were aligned alongside one end of the DZ. It looked like several hundred people were arrayed around the area in what only could be an ambush.
Suddenly smoke flared from a grenade, marking the center of the DZ. I noted the way the wind took the dark gray smoke, adjusted, then came in for a landing, wanting it to be like baby feet on cotton with the weapon of mass destruction attached to my back. The landing was both lighter than I expected and harder than I wanted. I felt the impact in my bones as the momentum of the EXO abruptly stopped. My mouth began to bleed a little. I think I might have bit my lip. But that hardly mattered.
I ripped my chutes free, then got on one knee and brought my weapons to bear. The Hydra aimed at one edge of the ambush while my minigun tracked back and forth on the other edge.
“All Tarantulas, deploy in defense formation upon landing. Interlocking fields of fire.”
“Belay that order,” Dewhurst said, grunting as he hit the ground. His wasn’t a standup; he want sprawling several feet, taking grass with him.
“Bullshit. Tarantulas, defend!”
Sula, Mal, and Ohirra hit the ground standing. They took up formation beside me.
Stranz came in last, skidding to a stop while ripping free his chute. I noted that he’d painted sergeant’s chevrons on the arms of his EXO. He glanced at Dewhurst, hesitated for a moment, then joined us.
Which left Dewhurst standing in the middle like a private who didn’t know what to do.
“Mason, stand down,” he yelled through the coms.
“Explain yourself, Dewhurst. My grunts aren’t doing anything until I tell them.” I wasn’t sure what deal he’d made with the devil, but I wasn’t about to let my grunts get hurt.
“I said, stand down.”
I could hear the fury in his voice, but didn’t give a shit. “Never!” I kept my gaze focused on the forces arrayed before us. My HUD counted one hundred and forty-seven targets. Three groups held RPGs trained on us. A group at each end of the ambush had heavy machine guns—M2 50-calibers. I created aiming points over each spot and shared them with my grunts. “Lock Hydras on locations and prepare to fire.”
“Jesus Christ, Mason. Do you want to start World War III?” Dehurst demanded.
“I’m not going to let you get my grunts killed.” To the team, I said, “Prepare to fire on my mark.”
“Mason, get your head out of your fourth point of contact. We have a change of mission.”
I was tired of the bullshit. “Here’s what I know. We were briefed to link up with Mother but here we are in the heart of GNA territory with one hundred and forty-seven targets pointing their weapons at us. This isn’t exactly a friendly welcome, Dewhurst. And it makes me wonder why you haven’t joined us yet.”
I keyed a secure line back to headquarters at Fort Irwin, hoping I was close enough to a retransmission site to get my coms leapfrogged in, but got nothing but static. Then I keyed a secure line to Ohirra. “Do you know what’s going on?”
“I don’t, and I don’t like it.” I could hear her breathing. “Wait, who’s that?”
A figure separated from the center of the ambush and began walking towards us. Only one celebrity asshole would wear a white suit at the end of the world during an armed confrontation—Sebring. I zoomed onto him. He was unarmed other than his smarm and smile.
“Keep steady,” I said over the team net. “Fire only on my command.”
I stood, but kept my weapons trained on the GNA.
“Okay, Dewhurst, explain.”
“Nothing to explain. I got a message to change mission to link up with GNA. It could be anything. Mother is closer to the 605. Perhaps the fungees overran her. Goddamn it, Mason, I’m just following orders. Same thing you should be doing.”
Was I being over careful? Was I letting my prejudices against GNA color my leadership?
“Then tell Sebring to have his people stand down. If I so much as detect a laser designator on our position I’ll have my grunts open fire. So unless they want to see how much violence and lead we can throw at them, they stand down.”
“Got it,” Dewhurst said.
On a secure channel, Ohirra said, “You know we don’t have lead rounds, right?”
“It sounds better than saying depleted uranium. Be on alert, Ohirra. Something’s rotten in Denmark. And yes, I know we aren’t in Denmark.”
“Just trying to keep you straight, Mason.”
“Right. Thanks.”
Sebring walked right by us, smiling beatifically like he’d done so often on his show, when the telephone audience voted a singer off. He was always so sorry, but I just knew there were different thoughts behind that professional smile. So sorry you sucked. So sorry they didn’t like you, but thank you very much for the ratings, my slick new car, my house in Malibu and the sweet ass of this model I’ve been banging. Now if you would shuffle back to your Walmart job, knowing that you’ve just burned through your fifteen minutes of fame, wondering why it couldn’t have been you, sliding into that dark place where you know you suck and you can’t stop sucking except to shoot yourself to end your hopeless existence, I’d sincerely appreciate it.
Yeah, that was the real Sebring.
“Major Dewhurst, I got the message from OMBRA and brought together as many of God’s New Army as I could in such short time,” Sebring said.
As he passed me, he actually winked at me.
Asshole.
“The GNA is pleased to be at OMBRA’s disposal,” he continued. “What is it we can do for you?”
“You can start by telling your men to lower their weapons. My team leader here has a hair-trigger and says that if any of them even points a laser designator, he’ll have the team open fire.”
Sebring looked at me. Instead of worry, he showed disappointment, as if I was a bad child. “Why would he do that?”
“Better to ask why I wouldn’t,” I said.
And there it was. A flash of worry. Just a hint of it, but enough for me to feel a moment of elation.
Sebring pulled a walkie-talkie from the small of his back and spoke into it. “Everyone lower your weapons. No laser designators. These are our friends and we should treat them that way.” He turned to us, his smile wide once more. “I always thought the golden rule was one of God’s best rules.”
I watched the GNA lower their weapons and power down their equipment, my HUD zooming in and out on different locations.
On the team net, Sula asked, “What’s the golden rule?”
“Do unto others as you would have them do unto you,” said Stranz. “My mother said it all the time.”
“It was Jesus who said it,” Mal said. “Actually, in the New Testament it says, Do to others as you would have them to do to you.”
“That’s just a translation difference,” Stranz said. “Its roots are really in the Old Testament. Leviticus 19:18. Forget about the wrong things people do to you, and do not try to get even. Love your neighbor as you love yourself.”
“Let’s keep God out of it for now,” I snapped. “If He wants to be a part of this, He can come down and kick the shit out of the Hypercrealiacs.” Then I added, “How about the Tarantula rule. Be prepared to fuck up thy neighbor before he fucks you up.”
Ohirra chuckled uncharacteristically.
Sula and Mal gave an aye-aye.
Stranz and Dewhurst remained silent, which gave me a start. I checked their coms and noted that they were both in a secure conversation. What was Dewhurst up to now?
Trust is hard to come by. That’s why my circle is small and tight. I’m kind of funny about making new friends.
Eminem
CHAPTER FORTY
WE’D LANDED AT Cameron Elementary School. Instead of heading towards G
NA headquarters at West Covina Mall, we headed southwest. Sebring sat in the passenger seat of a convertible Cadillac with three of his men, all heavily armored and armed with automatic rifles. We followed behind. Ohirra had the rear and Stranz had the front. The rest of us marched two abreast, with me and Dewhurst side by side and Sula and Mal right behind us. I had everyone on high alert. Not that we were worried about any fungees, but we didn’t want GNA to have any surprises for us.
It did surprise me, however, that we’d left the one hundred and forty-seven GNA members behind and that Sebring apparently trusted us with his life.
I was also worried about the lack of contact I had with Thompson. He should be able to communicate with me as easily as Michelle or Salinas had, but there was nothing. I tried several times to blast out a call, but again... nothing. I decided to try something different.
“Olivares, this is Mason, can you hear me?”
Nothing but static. I tried twice more and was about to give up when I heard a thin voice on the edge of hearing. “Mason, this is Olivares. What’s wrong?”
That was my friend. Always assuming I’d fucked up. “Nothing’s wrong. Permission to speak to Ethridge.” While I could have called Ethridge myself, etiquette demanded that I do it through his mission leader. Something that Dewhurst didn’t seem to understand.
There was a pause long enough for me to wonder if I’d lost coms, then, “Permission granted.”
I sent a secure ping to Ethridge and waited. After about ten seconds, he pinged back and we went secure. “Ethridge, this is Mason. Are you in contact with HMIDs?”
“Affirmative,” he said, his voice even thinner and laced with more static than Olivares’s. “HMID Thompson has been assisting.”
“Please tell Thompson that I am with Sebring and ask him why he hasn’t contacted me.”
“Affir—ve.”
Damn it. He was breaking up. We kept walking. I continually cycled through everyone’s status and my HUD’s active movement tracker, out of habit rather than necessity.
A few seconds later I heard, “HMID—tethered to—can’t—Sandi—” Then nothing. I tried several more times to reconnect, but we must’ve been too far apart and I had no luck.
What had he meant? Why was he talking about Sandi? Assuming, of course, that it was the same Sandi I knew?
We suddenly changed direction and turned west down East Vine. I wasn’t familiar with the area. I used our pre-loaded digitized map and found the cross streets; we were heading towards South Glendora Avenue. I scanned my map for any hint at our destination, but couldn’t find anything obvious.
We were seven miles from the 605 and twenty-five miles to the hive, and had used less than one percent of our power. The batteries were truly a miracle. If I’d been wearing a Generation I suit, we’d have spent at least twenty-five percent power by now, if not more.
We left a subdivision and found an empty strip mall to our right. I picked out several major chain stores. Two men wrestled over a shopping cart beneath the sign for a paint store. Could there really be huffers in this day and age? I also saw a man with a rifle standing on top of a building across Glendora. My HUD tracked four more soldiers on adjacent buildings.
“Dewhurst, are you seeing this?”
“I see. They belong to GNA; just providing overwatch for the civilians in the area in the event of a fungee sighting.”
“Mmm-hmm. Still, Tarantulas, be on alert.”
We rounded the corner and headed into a U-shaped plaza. A sign read Hong Kong Plaza. All the cars had been removed, revealing a large flat surface.
Sebring had his car parked on the far side, and Stranz was the first of us in the lot.
“Stranz, what do you see?”
“It’s empty down here. I’m tracking five men on the roof, but no other movement.” Then he said, “Strange.”
My spider sense tickled at the back of my neck. “What’s strange?”
“Well, everywhere we’ve been windows have been busted out and doors bashed in. But this place is different. All the mirrored windows look like new. All the doors look new, too.”
“Did you say mirrored?”
We kept moving into the lot and I saw what he meant. Every window had been replaced with mirrored glass. Why would someone put in new mirrored windows? Then it hit me. “Tarantulas, form on me!” Mirrored windows are for hiding behind.
I opened fire at the windows, aiming high, near the roofline; I didn’t necessarily want to kill anyone, I just wanted to see behind the glass. Sula, Ohirra, and Mal saw what I was doing and did the same. I noted that Dewhurst and Stranz had drifted over towards Sebring. What was going on?
As the glass fell and the dust settled, I saw.
Each store held a two-man squad standing behind armor plates, with an M134 tripod-mounted minigun. The center store, a big-box toy store that had once sold Power Rangers and Barbies, now held a no-shit M60A3 Vietnam-era tank with a 105mm main gun. Only one store front held something other than a weapons system, and that was the one nearest Sebring, who’d been protected from stray bullets from our miniguns by Dewhurst and Stranz standing in front of him. A long black HMID box rested in this one.
“LT, see the mines beneath all the windows?” Mal whispered.
I’d missed them. Sure enough, attached to the wall and painted the same color as the rest of the building were claymores. I counted seventy-two of them. I didn’t see any wires, so someone must have hardwired them into the building, probably so they could be activated from a single main switch. Each one could fire seven hundred one-eighth-inch steel balls out to fifty meters in a sixty degree arc, killing anyone in their wake. Minimal damage would occur behind them. Probably blow out some of the bricks and cement.
I turned to Dewhurst. “What’s in this for you?”
“Your government wants an HMID, Mason. OMBRA refuses to sell us one, but Sebring has one to sell me.”
“Why not just trade a state for one, Utah, maybe.”
“Let me rephrase that. OMBRA’s price is too high and we can get a better deal with GNA.”
“What’s in it for Sebring?” I asked, jerking my head towards the guy.
“He wants an EXO so he can reverse engineer it.”
“So you’re going to trade your EXO for an HMID?”
“Not mine; Sergeant Stranz’s. Your government wants a copy as well.”
I stared at him for a moment, equal parts pleased that the shoe had dropped, and pissed that I hadn’t seen it coming. “You keep saying my government, but I don’t really have a government. America’s democracy was murdered by the Cray.”
“Republic,” said Stranz. “We had a republic, a representational democracy. In the end, people didn’t have very much say.”
“And you, Stranz? What the hell are you doing?”
Dewhurst spoke first. “Let’s be civil about this. He wants to rejoin his country. Don’t you think everyone has that right? Like Mal and Sula; they have that right, too. Do you want to rejoin your country? We need some help rebuilding and could use your expertise.”
I could have said something. I could have argued against it, but I kept my mouth shut. Dewhurst was right. If they wanted to go, then fine, let them.
“I’m with the LT,” Mal said.
“So am I,” Sula said.
“And you knew better than to ask me,” Ohirra finished.
“You heard them,” I said, pleased with my grunts. Now it was my turn. “Stranz, you can always change your mind. I don’t know what he’s promised you, but I’ve always been above board. I’ve always treated you with respect and honor. Where’s the honor in this? Why all the trickery? The thievery? One of the principles of our founding fathers was that the only reliable basis for sound government and just human relations is Natural Law. Weren’t we just talking about the Golden Rule? Do you want to be treated the way he’s treating us? It’s only a matter of time, Sergeant Stranz.”
Dewhurst laughed. “All right, all right. You had your say. Le
t me conclude this transaction and I’ll be on my way.”
“Wait a moment,” I said, eyeing the weaponry arrayed against us. “What’s going to happen to us?”
“Mr. Sebring assures me that he’ll let you continue your mission. It’s your government’s assertion that your mission is critical and he understands that.”
“Stop calling it my government. Any government I’ll have doesn’t lie, cheat, and steal.”
He laughed again. “If you’re naïve enough to believe that, then you’ll never have a government. Then of course, OMBRA is your de facto government now, isn’t it? How have they treated you lately? Locked you up any?” He turned to Sebring. “Let’s conclude this. My transportation is inbound in six minutes and I want to be out of here before there are any snags.”
I decided that I didn’t want to waste any more time arguing. I toggled Dewhurst’s status in my HUD and gave the command for his suit to shut down, but nothing happened. I went through the sequence again, thinking maybe I’d done something wrong, but still nothing happened. Damn!
Sebring nodded, then looked at me. “Lieutenant Mason, if you and your men would please just stand aside, I’d appreciate it. We’ll get you on your way in no time at all. Of course, to ensure your cooperation, I’ve prepared several things that should dissuade you from interfering, as I’m sure you’ve noticed.”
Dewhurst had been one step ahead of me all along. Had he ever intended to do the mission?
“Did you hear me, Lieutenant Mason?” Sebring pressed.
“I heard you. Yes, I’ve noticed.”
“Excellent.” He turned back to Dewhurst. “Now, the suit, please.”
Dewhurst turned to Stranz and ordered him to give Sebring the suit.
I noted that Stranz and Ohirra were on a secure private line. I watched as Stranz looked down at the sergeant’s chevrons painted on the arms of his EXO. I could almost hear his thoughts. I hurriedly contacted Sula and gave her a set of orders, which she immediately followed. I felt her slide in behind me, but kept my attention on Stranz instead of alerting anyone to her movement.