Fear the Future (The Fear Saga Book 3)

by Stephen Moss

  She could continue to fight, of course, but she would fare much better if she waited for the cavalry to arrive. But the minister was not uninformed of the coming reinforcements, ignorant though he may be as to their full speed and martial ability.

  “We know you sent some form of signal. We don’t know how, but we know you did. Call off whatever team you have coming in. Let us talk, Miss Woods. Let us talk like civilized human beings.”

  Human beings. Ironic. If only they were all acting like members of that same team then there would be no need for all this. She had sent the signal via a small transponder wired directly to her spinal interface. It was not much, but it meant that she could be sure of support should she need it. And she was under no illusions that she still needed it very much, despite the minister’s pleas.

  She did send another signal though. She sent a plan of the room she was in, with the locations and armaments of the soldiers around her, and through the limited comms system attached to her spine she received the final countdown to his impending arrival.

  It was a bit moot, in truth, as he could now clearly be heard thundering through the building. The minister’s eyes went wide. He signaled for his guards to prepare for whatever was coming. He toyed with finishing off the woman lying on the floor before whatever it was arrived, but he could not shake the feeling that this was not going to go his way. He was so very right.

  Hektor came into the outer receiving room as an exercise in juxtaposition, his brute strength and bladelike weapons bloodying the overtly civilized walls with the two guards that still stood outside the inner-office’s door. He tried not to kill them unnecessarily but they were not wearing helmets, and as he disarmed them he feared he probably broke both their necks.

  He unhinged the door like an unhinged beast, blasting it from its frame to announce to all within that he had arrived and that the team member he sought had better still be alive. He was greeted with more consistent and focused gunfire than he had met so far on his passage into the building, and he returned the gesture in kind. After turning the first two guards to liquid within their suits, pummeling them with a couple hundred hypersonic rounds each, he turned his guns on the last.

  This one was standing in front of a cowering man, clearly guarding him with his life. He was shaking but he was resolute, ready to die for the cause of protecting the man he had been sworn to guard. Hektor respected the gesture.

  He stomped into the room with emphatic thuds of his metal feet. He wanted to make sure the two surviving men knew the full weight of their folly should they fire on him again. His sensors could make out Cara’s heat signature to his right. She was under something. His 360o visual cortex told him what it was, or rather what it had been before she had shortened it by about a foot. He smiled inside his helmet.

  His voice came out of a speaker in his side using the German of his erstwhile fatherland. “Put down the weapon and stand aside. This is not a request. This is not a negotiation. Put down the gun or I will blow your head off. Do it now.”

  The sight of the bionic machine in front of him, its dual cannons leveled at his head, would have scared any man, but the guard remained admirably firm. The minister was not so brave, though, and nor was he a fool. This was a lost battle. Indeed it appeared it had been lost from the very start.

  “It’s OK, Karl, lower your gun.”

  With the gun lowered, Hektor instructed his own helmet to fold back. His systems told him that guards were converging on their location. They did not have much time.

  “Cara, how are you doing?” said Hektor.

  She groaned as she levered the dead guard off of her. “Great, Lieutenant. Just great.”

  He reached around behind his back and grabbed a pack that was attached to it, releasing the tethers that held it there as he did so. It was a little battered from his meteoric entrance into the building, but its contents were hardier than it was anyway. As it hit the ground, it opened and the suit inside it literally sprang from it, a disembodied shell standing of its own accord.

  Hektor’s eyes stayed on the minister and his guard.

  “I am assuming this is our man?” he said.

  “You assume correctly, Lieutenant. This is the leak.”

  The minister was stepping out from behind his guard now, bravado rather than bravery, perhaps, but the emotion was almost indistinguishable as he puffed out his chest and said, “Now, Lieutenant. I am not sure what you think is happening here. But may I remind you that I am a minister of the Austrian government, and that you are, at this moment, guilty of a host of crimes, both national and international.”

  Hektor looked at the man as if he was brandishing a spud-gun and saying stick-em-up, but the minister went on regardless, his tone becoming more placatory. “Now please, Lieutenant, don’t misunderstand me. I mean not to threaten you, I mean only to say that you should, perhaps, consider your position here.”

  Hektor did not reply. He waited as Cara slowly and carefully removed her trouser suit and began working her injured leg into her battleskin. Its embrace was like an old friend, the welcome of returning home, but the suits were hard to get on even on the best of days, and this was certainly not one of her best.

  As it sealed around her leg, it asked her via her comms module whether it should realign her warped knee. It was very matter of fact about it, pleasant even. She braced and said yes and the pain as the machine musculature aligned the leg was breathtaking. She shot a deadly look at the minister and the man recoiled at the murder in her eyes.

  “Now, now, Miss Woods,” he said with a noticeable tremor in his voice now. “You attacked us, if you remember. I only asked you a question.” She did not respond, though her dark look only grew darker still as she worked her arms into the suit and it sealed around her broken ribs. She seethed as it clenched at them, then her face became calm as the suit pushed her base comms module aside and connected with her spinal interface.

  She took the balm of its access, and the ability to curtail and contain her body’s pain management systems. A few moments of total neurological control, a few glanded hormones in her system, and she was ready for bingo.

  She soothed herself and brought her anger under control.

  Cara: ‘ayala, this is cara. as hektor has no doubt told you, we have our man. ¿what would you like us to do to him, sorry, with him?’

  Cara’s anger was more than matched by the more profound and deep-seated rage that sat like a pall over Ayala’s heart. They listened as their commander gave her orders. As usual, Ayala did not disappoint.

  Cara looked at Hektor as their unusual orders came through, but he merely shrugged and looked back at their two wards.

  “It appears,” said Cara aloud, “that you are to benefit very much from this little encounter, Minister.”

  The man looked confused and far from convinced as Cara went on, “You are going to be offered the very best medical care available. The very best that we can offer, and believe me when I say that we can offer a great deal.”

  “Medical care?” said the minister with a skepticism that was starting to turn manic.

  “Yes,” said Cara, “medical care. You know, for your leg.”

  “My leg?” said the minister. “But there is …”

  Even as he said it he was regretting it. He fell backward in his attempt to get away from the woman suddenly running at him. Cara was precise, even restrained. But her kick, when it came, was low and extremely hard, even for her, even given her machine augmentation.

  It did not break the minister’s ankle and foot so much as demolish them, splintering the bones into a thousand pieces. All the king’s horses and all the king’s men would not be able to save them. But Ayala’s could. And with that, a phone started to ring outside in the main reception area. It was deserted now, but Cara looked at the guard and said, “You should get that, Karl. It is for the minister.”

  “And you,” she said in a gentle tone to the man clutching his foot and weeping, a hoarsely whispered scream
echoing from somewhere deep within him, “now, now, Minister, don’t worry. The pain will pass soon. Well, this round of it. That will never heal, I am afraid. That foot will hurt for the rest of your life, even as it remains completely useless to you.”

  She lowered her face to his, even as the guard, prompted by Hektor, answered the phone outside and patched it through to the one on the minister’s desk. “The phone call your guard is answering right now is from my boss. She wants to talk to you. We have to go now before the police get here, but she is going to tell you what you are going to do next. If you ever want to walk again, I strongly suggest you listen to her.”

  She stood, her helmet closing over her head as she did so. The minister was crying now, sobbing, but she was right, the agony was subsiding, his body numbing somewhat to the geyser of pain bubbling up from his ankle.

  Cara was already turning to leave, to go and meet the Slink even now descending on the roof of the building. It had not been as subtle an operation as they might have liked, but they did not sense any recrimination from Ayala. They guessed that this was probably not far from what she had planned once they had confirmed who the source was anyway.

  But Hektor had one more thing to say as the guard gingerly handed the phone to a shell-shocked minister. “Herr Pahr, just so we are clear. We really can offer to heal you, make you actually better than new. But make no mistake, you should listen very carefully when our boss tells you what to do. Very carefully indeed. Or we will be back, and we will not be so gentle next time.”

  And with that he closed his helmet and they were gone. The minister took the phone. He was pale. He felt like he might pass out. But he did not. The conversation was short, curt, and one way, but it would not be the last between him and the enigmatic woman on the other end of the line. Ayala did indeed have a proposition for him, and the alternative was not something he ever wanted to live through again.

  Chapter 20: Newsworthy

  Reporting live …

  This is the view from …

  If you are just joining us …

  The world reacted to the news in waves. A story about a terrorist attack in Vienna three days beforehand, news that would once have filled the airwaves, was being washed away like writing in sand, wiped away by wave after wave of rolling, breaking news.

  A billion cameras had photographed and recorded the arrival of Hekaton. Its first full orbit had been the subject of more conjecture and conversation than any previous event in history, but even that new moon was being eclipsed now.

  A new story was taking center stage. The real story. One that Jim and his team were trying furiously to get ahead of. They’d had a precious few days’ warning. They had hoped for more, but Ayala’s contact had not been able to promise them more than that. For the minister had been a busy boy.

  In the days to come, Ayala and Neal would contemplate very seriously going back on the deal they had offered the traitor. But he was their traitor now, bound to them by a bond even he would not understand at first. When he returned from the ‘clinic’ that had offered to help treat his leg, Rudolf would amaze his Austrian doctors with the abilities of his new prosthesis. But the price of that miraculous device was more than he could yet understand.

  “It is coming through now …” said Jim. “… Jesus Christ.” They were looking at the photos coming out of Tehran. The photos that their friend the minister had sold the Iranian government before TASC had gotten to him. He had been told they would be used as leverage by the ayatollah for concessions from the West, but apparently the man did not intend to be so subtle.

  They showed the flare in all its glory, the flare from a thousand engines, the engines of the coming Armada.

  It was not conclusive evidence, but nor was it alone.

  “We can’t stop this,” said Ayala.

  “No, I know,” said Neal. “Even if we could discredit it, we would still be left with telling the truth later, at the expense of what little credibility we would have left.”

  He shook his head at the sight. It was a picture he was familiar with; indeed he had seen better photographs and infrared images than these. And they were out of date. Not only by the ten years it had taken the light from these images to get here, but also by the months since these particular shots had been taken.

  “They’re nearly ready for you,” said one of Jim’s assistants. She was not speaking to Neal, she was speaking to their appointed spokesperson. Wislawa was of Polish birth, but she was as international a citizen as one could find. Fluent in five languages, notably including Mandarin and Arabic, she had forgone a promising career as a politician and diplomat for her pursuit of a passion for poetry.

  Now she had come back, called to the cause by an old friend in the Polish government who had joined Jim’s team in the first flush of TASC’s emergence as an independent state. Her command of language was peerless. Her demeanor during debate and argument was gentle and comforting, but she was quite capable of being scathing if crossed, and no one doubted that such a capacity would be vital as the truth finally came to light.

  She would be as good a spokesperson as they could hope for in the coming weeks, even if Neal himself was a little afraid of her. She reminded him of Laurie West; an intellect not to be trifled with. His confidence in his team was bolstered when she was around, even as his own personal cool was more than a little ruffled by her piercing stare.

  But even she was unnerved by the coming interview. She knew her mind and knew her topic. But to say that this interview would be replayed and analyzed like no other had been before was a gross understatement.

  A man powdered her nose once more and a producer indicated for her to follow him. She breathed deep.

  “You’ll do fine,” said Neal.

  “You’ll do great!” said Jim.

  She smiled and nodded. “Certainly. Great. Yes, that’s how I’ll do,” and she was gone, walking out into a studio bristling with cameras. They would start here. They would tell their story now. Depending on how well it went, they would adjust and tweak, and move on to the next. Jim had lined up other representatives in many nations to give similar interviews.

  This first would be in English and would be for the BBC World Service. Al Jazeera would be next, also in English, but French, Spanish, Portuguese, German, and Italian interviewers were standing by for either a moment with Wislawa or another representative from Jim’s team, along with Arabic, Mandarin, Hindi-Urdu, Russian, Japanese, and Javanese language TV stations.

  It was a plan they had been formulating for months. They had been training the team of ambassadors for all that time. Wislawa and her counterparts had already been put in place as TASC’s representatives to the world’s many governments for that time, and as such had explained this story to presidents, ministers, kings and queens, chancellors, chairmen, sultans, even an emperor, an emir, a taoiseach, two captains regent, and a pope.

  Notably absent from the list, though not by choice, had been a grand ayatollah of Iran. Iran represented a massive state, and one whose scientists and scholars were among the best and brightest on Earth. But their place in TASC’s historic effort was far from representative of that prowess, not least of which because their leader had refused to meet with a representative of a Western nation since 1989.

  “She will do great, you know,” said Jim, almost as an aside, their shared attention now on the screen in front of them.

  The interview would be conducted in District One, and would be supplemented by a tour of the facility. They would look to overwhelm the viewer with evidence of their work to prepare for the coming Armada even as those viewers came to terms with the very news of the Armada itself.

  But in the coming days they knew they would not be the only voice.

  - - -

  Sure enough, the ayatollah was quick to proclaim a very different story. He talked not of unification or collaboration, but instead of an effort by the organization known as TASC and its Western allies to collaborate with the coming alien force.
He began to describe the Milton SpacePort and its siblings around the world not as defense outposts, but as receiving halls built by a Vichy United Nations.

  And he would start to call for those halls to be torn down. It would not be out of malice that he would do this, nor out of ignorance. It would be out of a mistrust born of decades of abuses by mostly well-intentioned Western powers. And it would be a misinterpretation of very real intelligence he had come into, intelligence that described the participation of elusive alien contacts within TASC’s ranks.

  His voice would not stand alone. It would become one of three rallying cries. The second would be Wislawa’s, her reasoned, articulate perspective, and that of her fellow representatives, winning no small amount of support around the world, especially as it would have the backing of many a government.

  The third reaction-faction would be the most fractured and disjointed, but by far the largest. It would be characterized by a murky mixture of denial, defeatism, and disbelief. Many of the world’s religions would clamor that this was a sign from God, even the pope would have trouble giving his wholehearted blessing to TASC’s mission, despite promises to be ‘as reasonable as he could.’

  Many among the world’s billions of confused souls would continue to flock to comforts such as religion and conspiracy theory, as they had in ever greater numbers since the world had started to rock with the first fight with the satellites, a phenomenon that was only now, it appeared, being fully explained.

  Many more would call it the end of days, joining a growing cry that this was yet another sign of the apocalypse, as deserved as it was inevitable. And if a handle could not be gotten on the situation, Neal thought, their prophecy may well be self-fulfilling.

  But despite it all, he thought, as the unprecedented news cycle entered only its second day, work must go on. His teams must be allowed to move forward.