by Peter Clines
“And what did he determine?”
“I couldn’t say, ma’am. I’m a soldier, not a doctor.”
“This is everything, right?” interrupted Smith. He’d wandered back and was looking over the cart. “Nine crates altogether. Looks like we didn’t lose one between Los Angeles and here.”
No one returned his broad smile.
Danielle checked the boxes and gave a nod. “Everything looks good.”
“And here’s the colonel,” said Smith. He waved to a quartet of men. Freedom’s back went stiff and he delivered a sharp salute, as did the soldiers around him.
“As you were,” said the officer. He held out his hand. “Colonel Russell Shelly, commander of Project Krypton. On behalf of the United States Army, I’m honored to welcome you both to the Yuma Proving Ground.”
Danielle shook his hand. Stealth ignored it.
“You just missed your companion, Zzzap,” said Shelly. “He left about fifteen minutes ago. Did you get his messages?”
“If he had a full stomach he probably forgot to send them,” scoffed Danielle.
“Well,” said Shelly, “why don’t we get out of the sun? We could have lunch if you like. Or we’ve got a shop set up for you, Dr. Morris. Want to take a look and see if it meets with your approval?”
Smith cleared his throat. “Sir, there’s a matter of some weapons and ammunition. Miss … Stealth had her guns confiscated when we arrived.”
The colonel looked at her and his eyes dropped to her empty holsters. “Very sorry about that, ma’am. Standard procedure for wartime, you understand. My people are just as antsy about armed strangers as yours are.”
“Since she is a guest,” said Smith, “in the interest of diplomacy, I told her we’d get them back to her. Would that be okay, sir?”
He nodded. “Of course. Sergeant, find the officer on duty,” he said to one of his staff. “As soon as those weapons are processed at the armory, have them unprocessed and returned to our guest.”
“Yes, sir.” The soldier saluted and headed off.
“Why don’t we go look at the workshop,” said Danielle. “That’ll let me open the crates and check on the armor.”
“If you like,” said the colonel. He gestured them down a dusty concrete road. “It’s about a ten-minute walk if you don’t mind conserving some gasoline. Mr. Smith gave us a list of what he thought you’d need. We got the last of it set up this morning.”
The cart with the crates caught on a rock and jammed to a stop. The two soldiers wrestled with it for a moment. Danielle stepped back to make sure none of the boxes had shifted.
“Not all of your soldiers have enhanced abilities,” said Stealth.
“That’s correct, ma’am,” Shelly said. “The ex-virus caught us in the middle of the program. When the president declared a national state of emergency, we barely had fifty soldiers through the process, plus Captain Freedom. We had a hundred and fifty or so washouts, plus another hundred and eight who were serving as our control group. In the time since, we’ve lost about half of those numbers.”
“Yet it would appear you have more than that serving here on base.”
“Some of them are survivors from other sub-bases, like Lieutenant Gibbs here.” He gestured at a man walking with them in digital camos with a tiger-stripe pattern. “There’re just over thirteen thousand square miles to get lost on here at Yuma. When things got bad, everyone locked down where they could. A lot of them couldn’t. We were lucky Krypton had been built to be secure and self-contained. Once the situation stabilized, we started to expand, secure other areas, and find other units that had holed up. At the moment, I seem to be the senior officer left alive, so people from all branches are under my command.”
“And civilians?”
“There aren’t many civilians left, ma’am,” said the colonel. “We saved about eleven hundred people from Yuma.”
Danielle coughed. “That’s it?”
“Unfortunately, yes. There were a lot of folks who felt they were safer in their homes with a shotgun and a few pistols than putting themselves under military control. With our own limited manpower, it came down to picking our battles. We could rescue three or four willing families in the time it took to get one irrational resister out of their home. So we did what we had to do, even if it meant some people got left behind.”
Stealth moved her head left to right. “Where are these civilians now?”
“Right here, ma’am.” Shelly nodded at the soldiers pushing the cart. “It was around New Year’s last year that we realized the solution to both of our problems. We were short on manpower. We had over a thousand civilians who needed organization and a way to contribute. Two birds with one stone.” Danielle blinked and looked at the soldiers. “You drafted them all?”
Shelly shook his head. “No one was drafted. We had Smith explain the situation so no one would feel coerced. He made the offer and seven hundred of them signed up. We ran four separate boot camps.”
“I would think the majority of the civilians would not have been viable candidates,” said Stealth.
“Not normally, no, but these aren’t normal times. We took anyone over sixteen and under forty-five.” He coughed. “Between you and me, more than a few of them did it just to get in shape. Here we are.”
The building was an oversized garage, first in a row of near-identical structures. Smith stepped forward and tapped a code on the keypad next to the main door and it began to roll open. “I used all your old codes,” he said to Danielle. “Do you still remember them?”
“Some,” she said. “It’s been a while since I needed to use a confirmation code for anything not related to the suit.”
He nodded. “Do you still have all the same passwords?”
She tried to look at Stealth out of the corner of her eye. “No,” said Danielle. “I changed a lot of them a year or so back.”
Shelly’s gaze shifted between the two women. “Why was that?”
Danielle shrugged. “I was bored. I was defragging the system one day and just switched the passwords for the heck of it.”
“For now,” said Stealth, “perhaps it is best if those passwords remain secret.”
Smith’s smile wrinkled and the colonel gave her a hard look. “Ma’am,” said Shelly, “I understand the past twenty-two months have not been easy for anyone, and they’ve forced us all into patterns of behavior we wouldn’t have in a peacetime situation. But I can’t help feeling like you’re one of those civilians who feel they’re a lot safer at home with their shotgun and pistols.”
“If that were the case, colonel,” said Stealth, “would I run the risk of being left behind?”
There was a brief silence. Then the door clanged open.
The space was large, as big as the scenery shop Danielle had turned into a workspace back at the Mount. The ceiling was dotted with half a dozen sunroofs, filling the area with natural light. A trio of large, rolling toolboxes stood in the center of the room near a few work platforms. Along the wall were some larger tools and tanks of gas for a welding setup. “Very nice,” she said.
“If you need anything else, we can try to get it for you. Any special tables or racks for the armor can be constructed to your specifications.”
“Well, this is a good start,” she said. “I can use the foam molds in the crates for now.” She found a pry bar in one of the toolboxes and opened the smallest crate. It was the helmet. Her shoulders loosened at the sight of it.
Colonel Shelly looked down at the armored head and met its gaze. “Would you be up for a demonstration, Dr. Morris? Mr. Smith has been singing the praises of your armor for a few years now. I’ve seen some videos, but I’d love to see it in action.”
She looked at Stealth. The cloaked woman gave a slight nod from within her hood. “I’d need some help,” Danielle said. “Maybe half a dozen people with some electronics experience. Or at least some brute muscle that can follow orders.”
Shelly looked at Freedom and the huge
officer gave a wry smile. “I believe specialists Wilson and Garfield fit that description,” he said. “I’ll put in a call. We should have a team for you in ten minutes, ma’am,” he told the redhead.
“Do you want a place to change into the undersuit?” asked Smith. “There’s an office and bathrooms over there.”
“No need,” said Danielle. Her fingers danced down the buttons of her shirt and pulled it open. Underneath was the skintight black Lycra mesh, studded with gleaming microcontacts. She tossed the shirt aside.
Freedom smiled. “You wear your costume under your civilian clothes, ma’am?”
“It’s more convenient,” she said. “And it’s kind of a security blanket.”
They had half the crates open by the time the group of soldiers arrived. Four of them set up the legs while Danielle worked with Lieutenant Gibbs to assemble the codpiece. She found a ladder, lowered herself into the legs, and Freedom’s two super-soldiers got the torso locked together around her. The left arm went on without a problem, but there was some trouble with the right. By this point there was too much armor around Danielle for her to see the problem, so she tried calling out instructions.
“Wow,” said Smith. He ran his fingers across the twisted metal on the battlesuit’s forearm. “What happened here?”
“A few months ago I got in a fight with another superhuman called Peasy,” said Danielle. “He ripped that M2 off and used it to club me in the head a couple of times. Wrecked the gun and the mounting, almost broke some of the optics, too.”
Stealth examined the damaged assembly. “What about this made it impossible to repair at the Mount?”
“Not much,” said Danielle. She tried to shrug, but buried in the inactive armor her tiny head just seemed to twitch. “Nothing. It just seemed like a waste of time to rebuild it after Peasy ripped off the old one. The barrel was bent, we didn’t have any more ammo for the guns, and …”
Smith looked up at her. “And …?”
She shrugged. “It felt like giving up,” she said. “If I was going to build things under half-assed conditions with iffy material, it meant I was accepting things were going to stay like this.”
The arm locked into place and they tightened down the bolts. One of the super-soldiers, Hancock, got the helmet balanced on a ladder while Gibbs made the final connections. He met Danielle’s eyes. “Is that all of it?”
She nodded. “Get the collar bolts done and stand back.”
The armored skull settled over her and the soldiers spun their Allen wrenches. Hancock hopped off the ladder and pulled it away. The titan hummed with power and dozens of small hatches snapped shut across the armor, concealing the bolts. The collar slid together and the battlesuit’s eyes flared to life.
Cerberus flexed her fingers. “Much better,” she said. She made a point of looking down at Freedom. Then she stomped out into the sunlight. Colonel Shelly followed the battlesuit outside. All the soldiers marched behind him except for Freedom. The oversized captain stood like a statue across from the cloaked woman.
“After you, ma’am,” he said.
Her cloak swirled around her as she strode out of the workshop.
Cerberus was holding a jeep in front of her at arm’s length. She set it down on the ground. “I’ve made a few adjustments, but at the last recorded test the suit could dead-lift 19.4 tons. The armor can deflect sustained fifty-caliber fire and can survive a direct RPG hit with minimal damage to the suit or the pilot.”
“Amazing,” said Colonel Shelly. He ran his eyes over the battlesuit’s armored plates. “Imagine if this suit had gone into production. Do you know what a company of these things could’ve done in Iraq or Afghanistan?”
“And this is still the Mark One system,” said the titan. “We’d planned out a few improvements for the Mark Two that we—”
“What is stored in that building?”
They all looked at Stealth. Her arm was pointing at the third structure in line after the workshop.
Smith’s smile appeared. “I’m not sure what you’re talking—”
“You have exchanged three glances with Colonel Shelly at times when Cerberus has turned toward that building. The first time you both looked at the building afterward. At least one of you has looked at it each time since. What is stored there you are worried we will discover?”
“Ma’am, we’re less than an hour into this visit,” said Shelly. “You can’t expect us to be open—”
“Cerberus,” snapped Stealth.
Inside the suit Danielle shifted though her lenses. “It’s cooled to the point that I can’t make out any heat signatures inside,” said the titan. “I can hear some movement, though.”
“Open it,” ordered the cloaked woman.
The battlesuit took two steps forward and Freedom was in front of it. He set his huge hand against the armored chest. “Ma’am, I suggest you stand down.”
“Suggestion noted,” said Cerberus, brushing him away. Freedom tensed to fight but Shelly waved him down.
When the keypad didn’t respond to her codes the armored titan grabbed the edge of the door in her football-sized hands. The huge panels slid open with a groan of metal. Cold air washed out of the dark warehouse.
Over a hundred figures shuffled and turned toward the door. None of them blinked at the brilliant afternoon sun as it spilled over their dead eyes. They swayed for a brief moment and then the exes stumbled toward Cerberus.
PLEASE CONSIDER THIS as an addendum to my original report, and I ask now for anyone reviewing this to excuse my informal language. I cite extenuating circumstances.
I think this mission was the one that finally made me wonder if Captain Freedom really was a death-magnet. I was aware of his record when he was recruited for the project and I became his First. It’s a bullcrap superstition. But with the way things turned out, you have to wonder.
Yuma was overrun. We’d gotten word of different groups of survivors holed up throughout the city. There was a big group down on the south side. Colonel Shelly had run the numbers and was sending us to get them. We’d expected to find a few dozen exes at a time. Maybe as many as two hundred. It would be a good mission for the Unbreakables, a chance to flex our collective muscles and burn off some restlessness.
We moved out of the Proving Grounds in one long convoy as planned. Three sections from the Unbreakables were in the front carriers, backed up by equal numbers of norms. Behind us were a dozen Humvees. Captain Freedom was in the lead with Section Eleven. I was with him. He likes to be in the front, setting an example and sharing in the threat with his soldiers. More than a few people think he has a death wish.
To be clear, Freedom’s a good man for an officer. Like most people, brass tend to be fifty-fifty. Half of them think they’re superior to any enlisted man, no matter how many years of experience you’ve got over what they learned in a classroom. Freedom’s in the other half. He’s decisive and confident, but he’s not so chock-full of ego it makes him stupid. He listens to his intel. He listens to his First. He listens to his gut. And he makes great calls because of it. He’d seen Colonel Shelly’s warning order and heard the S2 directives culled from intel coming in from all over the country. No body shots. No grenades. No intimidation. Just head shots.
If I may make an observation, though, there’s a point where this becomes useless. That’s what the brass never gets. You can’t spend years training a soldier to do A and then expect him to switch to B in a day just because some intel told him to. Oh, he’ll get it right during that week of drills, but once he’s on mission those years of training are going to kick back in and override that week.
I know training. I was a drill sergeant for seven years before I joined Project Krypton. There’s something special when a fuzzy hears he’s been assigned to Sergeant Paine. You can see the dread on their faces before you even start talking. So I knew—I know now—we were overconfident and our brains were filled with the wrong kind of training. We went into Yuma and all that training kicked back
in.
Yeah, even for me, too. I was a former drill sergeant who could throw a refrigerator fifteen feet. Damn straight I was well trained and overconfident.
The convoy went forward down Freeway 95, the long stretch when the road runs east–west but before the locals start calling it County. The first exes were sighted at approximately oh-nine-forty-five hours. They crawled out from behind cars or staggered out of ditches. You could hear their teeth clicking before you saw them. They were put down.
All the Unbreakables were carrying M240 Bravos. One of those will put a trio of rounds through a skull with no problem. The downside to the Bravo is it’s damn loud. We knew sound attracted the exes. Rather than four or five targets at a time, we’d have a dozen or so staggering at us at one mile an hour. We didn’t think it’d be a big deal. Even if one got close, all the Unbreakables were wearing the newest ACUs. They still had pockets for knee and elbow pads, but were also triple layered at the shoulder, forearms, and calves—all the major bite points.
We found our first large cluster of about ten exes close to ten-fifteen hours. They were heading our way, stumbling down 95, bouncing off abandoned cars and trucks. Freedom already had Sections Eleven and Thirty-one flanking them when he saw the movement. I think I saw it at the same time, but I’m not sure.
There was another cluster just a few yards behind the first one, maybe as many as fifteen of them. They were almost close enough to be one big group. And there were two or three lone exes stumbling along either side of the street. Freedom pulled in Twelve and also brought up two sections from Charlie Platoon for support. Charlie’s most of the washouts from the program, and Delta’s the only control platoon left at Krypton. They’ve started calling themselves the Real Men. It’s probably going to stick.
Section Twelve and the Real Men started at the back and worked in. It took about two minutes to put down all the exes with head shots. I remember I saw a few rounds punch through chests and barked an order down the line to confirm targets. Looking back, I should’ve seen where it was going right then.