by Kyle Noe
“What the hell is this about stealing a time ship?” Hayden asked, scratching his head.
“It’s all true. Who’s up for another whacky, madcap adventure?” Quinn asked.
Murmurs and nervous looks were shared by the others. Quinn shot a look at Cody who held up his hands. “Don’t shoot the messenger. I’m not the one who came up with the laws of physics. I wasn’t the one who created a time ship that may actually be a death trap.”
“You had me at death trap,” Milo said, holding up a hand.
“I’m not going to go into that,” Cody said, waving a hand. “I don’t want to confuse you with the details.”
Quinn’s face screwed up in anger. “Why are you being such a dick?”
“Because I’ve spent most of my life surrounded by idiots, that’s why.”
A few seconds of silence ensued. Cody smiled sheepishly. “Not you idiots, by the way. I meant an entirely different group of idiots.”
“Can I punch him now?” Renner asked. “I’m really feeling like he could use a good punching.”
Quinn shook her head, standing to face the others. “We don’t know exactly what this time ship is, or how it operates, but it’s something. “If the message is true, it may be our only hope. A pathway back into the past.”
“To the days before they came?” Hayden asked.
Cody offered a half nod. “Possibly,”
Hayden smiled. “So what you’re saying is we’ve got a chance.”
“Spoken like a true Marine,” Cody said. “But we’re talking about science here. Bravery alone will not win this war.”
“Going back before it starts might, though,” Quinn said.
“Do you even have a plan for if we do make it back to before the invasion?” Cody asked.
“We’ve got their weapons,” Quinn said. “We’ll reverse engineer everything. We’d be able to convince the military to channel funds into duplicating Syndicate tech before they ever got to Earth. We’d be ready and waiting for them, millions of people armed to the friggin’ teeth.”
Cody took this in, a smile slowly blossoming on his face as he considered the possibilities. “The Syndicate would never know what hit them.”
Quinn smiled. “Now all we have to do is find a way to steal the time ship.”
20
No Good Options
Samantha, Luke, Calee, and two other resistance fighters from Vegas were led into a munitions room at the bottom of Shiloh and imprisoned. They were given food, water, and a few books, and then a two-foot thick blast door was slammed shut. Samantha grabbed at the books, picking one up. She read the back cover. It was some horror novel from back in the day. Something about a young girl who was able to start fires. Lovely! She tossed it aside and spun on her heels to see Luke and the others were looking at her differently. They were scared.
“So how ‘bout telling us what’s going on,” Luke said.
“Well, the other guys have totally turned against us and locked us all up down here.”
Luke frowned. “We know that, Samantha.”
“Oh, you meant the other part?”
He nodded.
“Well, we were ambushed back out on the highway. A pack of bandits. They killed the driver and some of the others and I ran. Xan and the others totally bailed and I hid out in this grocery store. Then something happened.”
“What kind of thing happened?”
She looked up. “The extraterrestrial kind of thing.”
The eye contact that passed between Luke and Calee and did not go unnoticed by Samantha. “You think I’m nuts, don’t you?”
Luke shook his head. “No and it’s obvious that neither did the others.”
Samantha kicked at the ground. “So, there was somebody else back in that store. I don’t know what he, it was, but he just appeared out of nowhere and showed me things.”
“Like what?”
“Um…. the end of the world.”
Luked barked out a laugh that quickly melted away when he saw that Samantha was serious. “The aliens, the Syndicate, whatever they call themselves are not the bad guys.”
“Okay, see, you had me up until that point,” Luke said.
Samantha kept her eyes downcast. “There’s something else out there,” she whispered. “I’m pretty sure it’s coming, or was here once before in the past.”
“What is it?”
She looked up. “I don’t know exactly, but it’s going to destroy everything. I mean every living thing in the universe is going to die.”
She saw Luke and the other resistance fighters struggle with this. Samantha paced up and down the room, trying to recall all that she’d seen back in the grocery store. She ran the conversation over the next few minutes, detailing everything that Hadrian had showed her. The others stood, listening, absolutely rapt. She had no idea whether they believed her and frankly it didn’t matter. They were trapped down in the bottom of a hole with no good way out.
“And after all of that,” Samantha concluded. “He made me do things. He made me trigger something that was inside all of these … things. He made me blow them up.” At this, she looked down and pulled her shirt back, exposing the red marks on her arms. She held her arms up and the others stared at the marks. “I think he’ll come again,” Samantha said softly. “I think he wants to show me more.”
“Why?”
She sat down on the ground and shook her head. “I think he wants to help us. I know this sounds nuts, but I got the feeling that he came to help.” She wrung her hands together until they turned white. “I mean, if I could do that to those things, there’s no telling what I could do to the bad guys, right?”
She looked up to see the others befuddled, whispering to themselves. Samantha raised a hand and tried focusing so hard her temples began to throb. She tried to will the same energy she’d felt before through her body, to give Luke and the others a display of what she was capable of. She had visions of setting off a series of impressive, controlled blasts involving the food and water and maybe even the books. The others would recoil in horror initially, then look on in wonderment before finally falling on their knees before her, overcome with anticipation of what she was capable of. None of that happened. Samantha peered down at her limp wrists and her face sagged. Disappointed at her inability to conjure up something special, she turned back to them.
“What are they going to do to us?” Samantha asked.
“Probably nothing,” Luke replied. “Until they figure out what’s happened to your mother and the others.”
“And then?”
“I don’t think we want to wait around for that.”
21
The Coup
Now that Shiloh and everything around it for miles was secured and protected by the nuclear weapons housed down in the silo, the only way for the arc glider to make it back was to enter the atmosphere at the North Pole and slide down under heavy cloud cover. The good news was that all electronic signals would likely be impacted because of an electrical storm. The bad news was they had to run on impulse and couldn’t signal home yet.
Although relatively safe, the path home took longer than expected and delayed further action toward the cause. Once the glider was back over land, they had to fly low to the ground to avoid detection from above. If the Syndicate were to spot them, they’d likely engage with multiple ships. Quinn and the others were not hopeful about their odds of surviving if that happened.
The most frustrating part of flying so low to the ground wasn’t the farmers and civilians shooting at them with shotguns and deer rifles. Quinn stared at the civvies, admiring the fact that they still had refused to surrender. The real trouble was that Quinn couldn’t wait to get back to Samantha. She was eager to know what was happening and kept pestering Cody to go faster, but he couldn’t. She even tried getting him to rejigger the glider’s engines, to essentially place them on over-drive, but he refused. He also wouldn’t send out any communications, paranoid that he’d give their position away.
But once they were close enough, Cody flipped on the communications gear and sent out a coded message to Shiloh. For a few moments, there was no response, until a cackle over the comms. And then–
“Identify yourself,” Shiloh’s Command Center said over the link.
“Really?” Cody said, trading looks with Quinn. “We’re an alien space ship coming in through the designated route at a slow pace and not firing. Who else could it be?”
“Just do it,” came back the response.
“Fine, Sierra, Kilo, Alpha, Romeo, Alpha, Niner, Sixer, Three, Two, Forty-two,” Cody said. “Over.”
“Verified,” came the response from Shiloh. “You may enter Shiloh’s airspace.”
“Gee thanks,” Cody replied as Quinn grinned. “Get the champagne ready.”
“Strap in,” Quinn said to the others once they were within eyesight of Shiloh. It was beautiful from above, the High Plains rugged, yet breathtaking.
From Quinn on down, the Marines and the other warriors strapped themselves to the walls in case of turbulence. It took a few more moments for Cody to angle the ship just right and adjust the landing gear. It was only in this moment that he realized he’d never actually landed the thing before, not even when he exfiltrated the Marines from the asteroid’s surface. He’d stopped short of the ground. This time, though, he’d need to get the landing right. The glider was one advantage they didn’t want to lose when the war was just getting started. And they needed a means to get to the temporal ship.
Once they were in close, Cody lowered the landing gear and flipped on the reverse thrusters just enough to let them coast down to the ground like a helicopter. At least he had that experience in his favor right now. There was a jolt, and everyone was rocked a little, but no injuries, as the ship went through a little turbulence.
Battered and weary, the glider hovered right outside Shiloh with the temporal totem in tow. Hayden played backseat driver as Cody guided them in nice and slow.
Now that they were directly outside the base, Quinn and the others wanted to make sure the base was secure and there hadn’t been a Syndicate attack or any other shenanigans. She stood over Cody’s shoulder as he cued the communications link a final time before descending and moving in for the final stretch.
“Shiloh, this is the arc glider, over,” Cody said.
“Welcome home,” Comerford said over the link. “Glad to see you made it back in one piece.”
“Mostly,” Cody said. “Everything solid here?”
“Roger that,” Comerford said. “You’re approved for landing. Over.”
With that, Cody let loose on the reverse thrusters and guided the ship in the rest of the way, stopping just above the landing strip. He took his time making sure all the landing gear was in unison. After surviving the battle on Hygiea, the last thing they needed was a damaged ship from a shitty landing. After another brief pause, he brought the glider down. A solid jolt that rocked the bodies of the Marines and resistance fighters.
“Thank you for riding with Devil Dog Airlines,” Cody said. “It’s been a pleasure to have you aboard, and we hope you’ll be visiting us again soon.”
While Cody and the others prepared to offload the temporal totem and their gear, Quinn was readying to unlatch the rear landing ramp. She was eager to drop down onto solid ground and see Samantha.
Milo, Hayden, Giovanni, and Renner followed and caught up to her as the back bay opened and the ramp dropped down. Quinn was the first one outside. She hadn’t given much thought to what she’d expected, but assumed that everyone in the silo, or most of them, would be standing between the outbuildings to greet them. There was nobody around. Not a soul. She wondered whether they’d gotten the message the glider was returning.
Then came the sound of engines and the squeal of tires and a bevy of machines appeared from around the side of the outbuildings. Trucks, SUVs, and a few cars. Dozens of armed resistance fighters emerged from the vehicles. Comerford was there. So too was Xan and a whole host of other fighters that Quinn had never seen before.
“We did it!” Quinn shouted.
She turned as Cody, Giovanni, and the others descended from the glider. Cody held the totem up in the air like a trophy. Comerford and the other resistance fighters appeared unmoved.
“Helluva greeting,” Hayden said.
Quinn turned back. She noticed that the resistance fighters had begun fanning out, almost as if they intended to encircle the glider. Quinn was pissed that they’d forgotten to bring any weapons upon exiting the glider.
“If this is some kind of joke, it ain’t funny!” Hayden shouted.
“Set that item on the ground please,” Comerford said, gesturing to the totem.
“Not until you tell us what’s going on,” Giovanni said.
“Where the hell is my daughter?” Quinn asked.
“She’s safe,” Comerford replied. “We’ve got her secure down in the silo.”
Xan strode forward. “And she’ll continue to be safe as long as you all do the right thing.”
“Freakin’ knew it,” Renner said under his breath. “I knew we couldn’t trust these broke-ass weekend warriors. No way we were going to keep getting along.”
“Calm down,” Hawkins said. “No one has to die.”
“Fuck that,” Quinn said, moving to Comerford. Xan stepped in front of her and Quinn shoved Xan back. Xan brought her rifle up, aimed at Quinn’s face.
“Back the fuck down,” Xan said. “Or your little girl loses her mother.”
Milo and Giovanni grabbed Quinn and pulled her back. Renner whispered to the others, “We can take them.”
“We don’t have any weapons,” Hayden responded.
Renner cracked his head side to side, eager for a fight. “We can still fucking take them!”
Giovanni shot a glance at Comerford. “I thought we had an understanding.”
Comerford nodded. “We did, but there have been some developments since you left.”
“Care to share?”
“Not here,” Comerford replied. “Consider yourselves under arrest until we can work this out.”
“What the hell for?”
“Sedition.”
“You’re all fucking traitors,” Xan said as the other resistance fighters moved forward. They quickly bound the arms of Quinn and the others behind their backs. Quinn wanted desperately to head-butt the man who’d bound her, but Milo shook his head and mouthed the words “Now is not the time.”
Quinn set her jaw in a look of grim determination and began marching single file back toward the hatch that led down into the silo. Xan beamed with victory in her eyes. She’d gotten what she wanted. Now, Quinn knew, she’d try to find a way to have them killed without causing any loss of support within the resistance.
As they were hauled off, Quinn looked over her shoulder and noticed regret in Comerford’s eyes. It was obvious that he’d reluctantly agreed to imprison everyone on the glider. She imaged he likely had little choice. Still, as she and the others trudged forward, all Quinn could think about were the terrible things she was going to do to Xan and the others who turned on her. It wasn’t a question of if, but when.
The Marines and the resistance prisoners were led down into the bottom of the silo, their arms still behind their backs. Quinn could see Xan and Comerford up ahead and she glanced back to see at least four heavily armed resistance fighters bringing up the rear.
“Mind telling me where my kid is?” Quinn shouted at Xan.
“She’s safe,” Xan replied without looking back.
Quinn’s nostrils flared. “You better hope she is, bitch.”
Xan turned in a flourish and aimed a pistol at Quinn. “You’re lucky, Quinn.”
“How’s that?”
Xan peered at her over the gun. “I’ve been working to soften some of my sharp edges. I even signed up for this class that Comerford teaches on anger management.”
“Yeah? How’s it going?”
WHAM!
Xa
n pistol-whipped Quinn, knocking her to the ground. “It ain’t started yet,” Xan replied. Cackling with delight. Quinn hoisted herself back up as the resistance guards ushered her and the others into a storage room that was quickly slammed shut behind them. Everyone slumped to the ground, their backs against the walls.
“Well, this is a very interesting little development,” Cody said.
“You see it coming, genius?” Renner asked.
Cody shook his head.
“What ‘d they mean about us being traitors?” Hawkins asked.
“It’s because they fought for the Syndicate,” Mira said. “Xan and the others are still pissed.”
“They went back on the fucking deal,” added Mackie.
“It’s gotta be something more than that,” Giovanni offered.
“Doesn’t matter,” Quinn said, shaking her head, blood streaming from the cut near her ear where Xan pistol-whipped her. “All that matters is that we’re in here and they’re out there.”
Quinn let this sink in, and then she cast a look at Milo. “When have you heard those words before?’
Milo perked up. “I recall you saying the same goddamn thing during the shake and bake op in Al Hudayda.”
Mackie looked over. “What?”
“Al Hudayda’s a seaside town in Yemen,” Hayden said. “Prettiest little beaches you’ve ever seen.”
“We were establishing a beachhead during the fourth Houthi uprising and got trapped and taken prisoner by some bad hombres.”
“What the hell did you do?” Mira asked.
Quinn listened to this, a smile slowly tugging at the corner of her mouth. “We made them sorry that they ever decided to fuck with us.”
“You got a plan, little lady?” Hayden asked.
Quinn’s eyes scanned the room, realizing it was cluttered with several objects. Several items that the captors should never have left behind. The wheels started turning, a plan slowly coalescing.
Quinn looked back at Hayden and grinned. “Don’t I always?”
She leaned her head back, deep in contemplation, considering all of the various ways that Xan and the others were going to pay for what they’d done.