by J. F. Holmes
“So what happened?” asked the teen, enthralled.
“We lost, and the Invy got into position to start their orbital bombardment.”
“And what happened to the Lexington? Was that Kira, the woman you mentioned in your dream?”
His uncle said nothing. “She’s dead, isn’t she?” asked Jeremy.
“They were holed by a rail gun fighting a rear-guard action. We took a hit on our coms gear and lost the ansible connection at the same time. The whole fleet was lost.”
“I’m … sorry, Uncle.”
“So yes, all this, the way the world is now, the Invy, six billion or more dead, it’s all my fault.”
A voice spoke from the corner of the room. “I’m surprised you haven’t put a bullet through your head. It would have been the honorable thing to do.”
Victoria and Jeremy both jumped, startled, but the former General just answered the voice. “Are you here to do it for me? Make it quick, and let them go.”
There was a distortion of light along the wall, and two heavily armed figures were revealed, the strangers from the road. “No, General, we’re just here to talk,” said the woman.
“Jeremy, Victoria, go upstairs,” said David Warren, mind searching for the name of the woman whose face materialized in front of him. The implant provided an answer, long out of date. 2LT Rachel Singh, Virginia Army National Guard, Logistics Branch. The Army photo he saw showed a young, fresh faced woman, barely out of her teens, smiling. The woman in front of him had wisps of gray hair showing, and lines around her eyes that only come from hard combat, though she couldn’t be more than her early thirties.
The other person was listed as Master Sergeant Nicholas Agostine, 11Z, skill identifiers B2, B4, F7, J3, P5, S6, S7, W3, W7, W8, 2B, 5W, 6B, E, G, H,V… Operation Enduring Freedom, Spratly War, POW Medal, two Silver Stars, Distinguished Service Cross, …Jesus Christ, the Congressional Medal of Honor...The Special Forces soldier was his nightmare come true, come to kill him.
“But…” his nephew started to object.
“NOW.” His uncle’s answer was final, and Victoria hustled him up the stairs. Then she came back down and sat at the table. David looked at her, but she returned his gaze until he looked away.
“So, who are you really?” he asked.
“Colonel Rachel Singh, Commander, CEF Scouts Regiment, Ground Forces. This is Master Sergeant Nicholas Agostine.”
“And what have you been doing for the past eleven years, Colonel?” he answered, putting heavy sarcasm into her rank. “Wandering the roads like some bandit outlaw? Like the rest of the military after we lost?”
Singh stepped forward, gesturing to a chair. “May I, Ma’am?” she asked of Victoria, then sat before she could give a yes or no. “Sorry, we’ve been walking a lot.”
The other soldier remained standing, his carbine neither pointed directly at them nor away, watching them intently, but with an ear cocked to listen for noises outside.
“So what is it?” asked the former General. “Here to get revenge for our defeat? Go ahead. I think sometimes Victoria wishes it too.”
“Why didn’t you? Eat a bullet? Hang yourself?” Singh sat with her chin in her fist, staring at him intently.
“Because … I don’t know. Mostly because I don’t want to give them the satisfaction.”
Agostine spoke for the first time, saying “The Invy? You know that they don’t know who you are. The last thing Hal did was destroy the internet and all electronic records.”
David winced at the name of the Artificial Intelligence that he had spent so much time with. The name ‘Hal’ had been a bad joke that someone had made when the AI became self-aware, but the computer life form had taken it to heart, and insisted that they use it as his name. They had, in effect, grown up together through the length of Brightstar, Hal becoming sentient the day that David had been inducted. A sudden painful memory surfaced of his friend wishing him good luck and goodbye, before burning out the world’s electronic databases, and himself.
His thoughts were interrupted as a large black man, almost a giant, stepped into the room and said, “Reynolds flashed on the laser that there’s an Invy patrol moving south on 81, fifteen clicks out. Looks like they’re setting up a patrol base for the night. No threat, currently.”
Agostine thanked him, and it hit David like a sudden blow. They were real, no shit.
“My God,” he said, and felt faint. “You’re … you weren’t lying. You are who you say you are. There was no Ground Forces, only in contingency planning in case we lost… But, but, what … what have you been doing for eleven years?”
“Watching. Waiting. Gathering intel. Gathering strength. Training. Learning. When the war happened, I was a newly commissioned logistics Lieutenant in the Virginia National Guard. Now, I’m Commander, Scouts Regiment, like I said. There were other things going on, groundside, that you weren’t cleared to know about. In case you failed.”
She leaned forward, her deep hazel eyes boring into him. “We need your brains, General Warren. You let more than nine billion men, women and children die. You owe your life to them.” Then she sat back, interlacing her fingers in front of her, and waited for his answer.
Chapter 6
Outside, Jeremy slid down the beam that supported the porch, something he did on a regular basis without his mother knowing. His feet had barely touched the railing when a powerful arm grabbed his legs and slammed him down onto the porch floor. He struggled until a knee pressed into his back and he felt the metal of a gun barrel touch the side of his head.
“Stop moving, or you’re dead,” said a deep voice, and Jeremy went completely still. “That’s right. I’m not sure your mom would appreciate me blowin your brains all over the place.”
“Let him up, Jonesy. Kid ain’t going nowhere.”
The pressure on his back disappeared, and Jeremy rolled over to see, well, nothing, except the barrel of a gun that seemed to appear out of thin air.
“Sit down, kid. Where were you going?” said an unseen voice from the other side of the porch.
Figuring that he had nothing to lose, and having been raised to be honest, Jeremy answered plainly, “I wanted to listen in on the conversation. Are you guys really soldiers? How come I can’t see you?”
“Yes, we’re really soldiers. Sergeant First Class Rob Hamilton, Sergeant Isiah Jones, CEF Scout Regiment, Team One. And you can’t see us because we’re wearing chameleon suits.” At that, the man’s head appeared. He flashed a quick smile, and then disappeared again.
“So, like, you’re fighting the Invy? Can I sign up?”
Jones’ voice rumbled in a laugh. “Fight? Now, we don’t fight. Are you crazy, boy?”
Jeremy grew indignant at being called boy, and said angrily, “Why the hell don’t you?”
“To subdue the enemy without fighting is the acme of skill,” said Hamilton.
The boy was confused, saying, “Wait, aren’t you supposed to fight? Isn’t that what soldiers do?”
“Ever seen a Wolverine, boy?” said Jones.
“Of course I have! They came by last week, doing their registry. I’ve seen them, and a Dragon too.”
“Then you know that tangling with them is a quick way to die, and momma Jones’ boy ain’t in any rush to die.”
“So you’re cowards, then!” he exclaimed.
“Why don’t you ask your uncle what a coward is?”
“That’s enough, Jonesy,” said Hamilton, but without any real passion in his voice.
There was silence for a moment, and then Jones appeared, and held up a set of binoculars to his face. “Message coming in from Reynolds, Invy 15 clicks I-81 condition yellow.”
“Go tell the Colonel,” said Hamilton.
“What does condition yellow mean? Are you going to fight them?” asked Jeremy.
“Kid, get it through your thick head. We lost. There isn’t any fighting anymore. Maybe someday, but not right now.”
Jones reappeared, and then disapp
eared again. “Colonel’s waiting on his answer. I don’t think he’s going to come along.”
“That’s his choice,” answered the disembodied voice of Hamilton. “Get yourself back upstairs before your mother finds you out, kid.”
“Just tell me one thing, first. How do I join you guys?” The pleading in the teen’s voice was obvious.
“Well, first you have to kill a Wolverine in battle, barehanded,” answered the deep disembodied voice.
“JONES! That IS enough,” said the higher-ranking NCO. “You can’t join us, kid. Not for a long while yet. The CEF is pretty damn selective. Now git.”
With a dramatic sigh, Jeremy climbed back up onto the roof and then slid into his bedroom through the open window. Then he leaned up against his slightly open door, trying to hear further conversation, perking up when he heard the screen door slam again.
“He’s not going,” said the voice of a woman, the one with the strange accent.
“Damned coward,” said Jonesy, and Jeremy burned with shame. He felt the anger rise within him, and his face flushed red, fighting back tears.
Downstairs, his mother started arguing with his uncle, muted words that he couldn’t make out. Turning up his oil lamp, he got up and started rummaging through his closet, stuffing dark clothes into his knapsack.
He waited until the windup clock next to his bed said midnight, and slipped down the stairs. Jeremy crept past his uncle, who was sitting at his desk, lamp turned low, with his head buried in his hands, and moved slowly into the mudroom. Muscles tense with the effort to move silently, he lifted the AK-74 up off the pegs on the wall, stuffed two magazines into his pockets, and moved ever so slowly, opening the screen door. Gently closing it, he headed towards his only friend’s place, three miles down the road.
Chapter 7
People who lived outside the Invy permitted towns did so in small households of no more than three. Regular patrols came and searched homesteads, and when there were more than three, the youngest person found was slaughtered for food. It might be two or even three years between searches, but eventually they would come. Jeremy hadn’t seen it happen, but his uncle and mother had, and his friend Tommy Gates had had his little sister fed to the Wolverines. It was, his uncle had said, a way to keep the population under control.
“It’s better,” he had said, “than what happened between 30 degrees north and south. They wiped out every single human being with some kind of virus.” They had gotten that news a few years ago, from a refugee moving north.
Jeremy knew that Tommy would be on-board with his plan. His friend hated them, and had often talked about fighting, though neither teen had clue one about how to go about it. If there actually WAS a resistance, then maybe the CEF would take them both if they had done some damage.
He jogged the three miles in little more than half an hour, used to walking everywhere, and tapped on Tommy’s ground floor window. It took a minute of whispered conversation, but in the end, his friend joined him with his .22 rifle and a dozen rounds of ammo.
“Do you think that will be enough?” asked Jeremy.
His friend, who was a year younger and bulky from hard work on his family’s small farm, answered with confidence. “I can kill a squirrel three hundred yards away. If we get close enough, I’ll put one through a Wolverine’s eye. That’ll take ’em down.”
They moved silently across the dark land, knowing it intimately, cutting across the hills that ran north south, using dusty, cracked, two lane side roads. The countryside around was empty except for small farms every couple of miles, centered on older houses that had been able to fall back on nineteenth century tech.
“How do you know there’ll be a patrol there?” asked Tommy.
“I saw one heading down Route 20 today, just before dark. You know they’ll probably cut up 81 to get to Syracuse, and maybe they’ll stop for the night.” He felt bad lying to his friend, but he wanted to keep the knowledge of the scouts to himself until they had something to show for it.
They crested the last rise, and, sure enough, there were lights showing around two vehicles parked among the rusted-out wrecks on the highway. Both of them were experts in the woods, and they slowly made their way down to where an on-ramp formed a berm that shielded them from view, moving from cover to cover.
“How are we going to do this?” asked Tommy, who was beginning to have doubts about what they were doing, once the excitement had worn off a bit. Things had been quiet for years, and neither really had any experience with the aliens, other than occasional trips to an Invy controlled town and the occasional registration patrols. The memory of his baby sister had faded over time, and though his hatred burned, it was getting doused with cold reality.
“I’ll move over about a hundred yards and empty the AK at the vehicles,” answered Jeremy. “Then while they’re looking for me, you shoot one of them. We can use the berm for cover and get back over the hill. They’ll never know what hit them.”
“Got it!” said Tommy enthusiastically, now that there was an actual plan.
Jeremy disappeared into the darkness with a whispered, “Wait for it!”
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“Ziv, we got movement,” whispered Reynolds. In her rifle scope, she watched as the heat signature of two individuals crept within a hundred meters of the Invy patrol base, using the berm for cover. She wished like hell she could use the laser range finder on her optics, but the Invy would flip their shit just from the backscatter. Their sensors were great, on a tactical level, supported by their armor.
The Serb crawled over and turned on his own spotting scope, bigger than the rifles, with a greater field of view. The passive IR system quickly showed the two human figures, the active range card overlay he had programed in earlier giving a rough approximation of their distance.
“Can you identify?” They had been on overwatch for the last three days, cataloguing the people who had come and gone up the main highway. The Invy patrol had passed south earlier that night, around dusk, and the information had been sent by com light to the rest of the team while they were at Warren’s house. It was bounced off a light scatterer mounted on an old cell phone tower, and Jones had picked up the weak light on his NVGs. The Invy sensors were good on their vehicles, but oriented to detect threats aimed at them.
“No,” she answered, “but they look smaller than an adult. Kids maybe?”
Zivcovic dialed up the magnification to confirm, though it didn’t have the resolution of the rifle scope. He watched as they separated, and one moved to their left, using abandoned cars to hide his movements from the Invy.
“Be ready to engage,” he said. “It looks like those idiots are planning to start some trouble. There are six wolverines and one Dragon, correct?”
“Correct, though the Dragon is buttoned up in the front vehicle,” she answered. “You know our orders. No interference with any locals.”
“Fuck our orders. If someone is going to kill wolverines, I am going to help them. We can snipe from here, use them as a distraction. Who knows, maybe they’ll actually do some damage, and we can bag a few.”
“They’ll have dazzlers on the vehicles.”
He snorted dismissively, and said, “We’re over fifteen hundred meters away, and uphill. It will not matter to us.”
She knew how much he hated them, and felt the same. The redhead grimly settled down in her perch as her sergeant switched over to his own rifle. Normally they acted as shooter / spotter, but if things went to shit, then it was targets of opportunity. She settled the crosshairs on the Wolverine wearing the silver badge of Hashut, or Senior Sergeant, as it slept curled up near a track, and she waited, slowly inhaling and exhaling, trying to keep her heart rate slow.
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His heart racing wildly, Jeremy crouched behind a wrecked station wagon, and checked the chamber of the rifle for the hundredth time. He had hunted plenty of animals, and tried hard to think of the Invy that way. As
he sat and tried to find courage, he thought about the world that had been denied him, and a fierce anger rose up.
The rifle felt good and solid in his hands, and he flicked the selector lever up one click, to AUTO. Another notch up would have made it single shot, and more accurate, but he wanted to strike hard, get their attention, and get away, leaving a shot to Tommy. Slowly rising and laying the barrel across the ruined hood, the teenager sighted on the camp, almost two hundred yards away, and pulled the trigger. All eleven rounds fired off, the barrel climbing skyward and then thumping down, back onto the hood. Jeremy screamed in exaltation, and yelled, “That’s for Earth, you bastards!”
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Reynolds fired as soon as she saw the flicker of the discharges washing over the target, before the burst even finished. In her IR scope, when her Barret 50 settled down, she saw that the big bullet had left a bright glow splattered on the ground, and the Wolverine NCO had disappeared.
She was up and moving, not risking a second shot, but Zivcovic was even faster, grabbing his ruck and heading towards the two horses that were tethered downhill and behind them. Insanely bright lights erupted behind them, bathing the valley in brilliance, and they heard the hiss crack of plasma weapons discharging.
Chapter 8
“I want to go back and do some Battle Damage Assessment,” said Zivcovic. The Serb always liked to see what he hit, and it drove his partner crazy.
Reynolds shook her head in disagreement, saying, “You know those two are deader than shit, and we need to get back to the barn and report to the Team. Aren’t you worried about the Invy swarming this place?”
“Cache the weapons, we will go see what the effects are before it is light. You know what will happen, what they will do, within a day.”