Ascendance

by John Birmingham

  ‘It was pretty sporty coming in,’ Zach offered, not looking at Dave. ‘A lot of people tried to get out on the bird we flew in on. That sucked.’

  Colonel Gries continued, ‘Is there anything your people can do to help with that? I only have the one battalion here, and a quarter of them are still outside the gates, trying to get through with their families.’

  ‘All those guys in the auditorium?’ Dave asked.

  ‘My acting command is a collection of National Guard soldiers who are part-time by nature, plus whatever other units from the other services I am in contact with. I told my guard counterparts they could bring their families in here when we mobilised. It meant three-quarters of them turned up on time, rather than half, and more than a few of the dependants are veterans who were willing to help. Who was I to turn them back? I need every trigger puller I can find.’

  ‘Just asking, not judging,’ said Dave.

  ‘Michael, we’d better fill him in on Compton,’ Emmeline said. Like Igor, she wasn’t looking at Dave either.

  Heath nodded agreement and Emmeline picked up the remote and pointed it at the flat-screen TV on the wall. But she didn’t restart the recording.

  ‘What do you know, Dave? About Compton?’

  He exchanged a glance with Karen.

  ‘I haven’t had time to catch up on my TiVo.’

  ‘All right,’ said Emmeline. ‘You’ve been busy. Just watch this.’

  She hit play and the video rolled. Something that looked like Monty Python’s giant hell toad with a buzz saw in its mouth and maybe two dozen eyestalks swaying above it started to talk.

  ‘People of Earth!’ it barked. ‘I am Compt’n ur Threshrend, dar Superiorae dar Threshrendum ur Grymm. I speak for Lord Commander Guyuk ur Grymm, and through him for our Dread Majesty, She of the Horde.’

  *

  ‘Damn. It didn’t sound much like Compton. Did it?’

  ‘We haven’t had time to run linguistic software over it,’ Emmeline said. ‘But no, apart from the little bugger calling itself Compton, er. . .’

  ‘Compt’n,’ Dave and Karen both said at once, correcting her pronunciation.

  ‘Okay,’ she said. ‘Apart from that, this is the Compton playbook.’

  Emmeline pointed at the screen. ‘Everything that’s happened in the last six hours, the massively distributed attacks on soft targets by militia-style irregulars, the initial non-targeting of comm networks to allow them to spread confusion and terror, the avoidance of contact with counter-force units . . .’

  Dave looked quickly over to Karen. She’d used just that phrase. She was concentrating on Ashbury, however.

  ‘Compton war-gamed all of these tactics years ago,’ the exobiologist explained. ‘Before he’d even done the Human Terrain studies. It was what brought him to DoD’s attention.’

  ‘I don’t get it,’ Dave said.

  Karen answered before Heath or Emmeline could.

  ‘Professor Compton built scenarios,’ she said, her impatience with having to explain it to him clear in her voice. ‘Worst case scenarios. For instance, if bin Laden wasn’t a dumbshit goat fucker who fell ass backwards into a puddle of oil money, if he got smart and really zeroed in on all the points of critical failure in a modern post-industrial society, what would he hit? He wasn’t even partway there on 9/11. Your friend Compt’n worked out the blueprint for going all the way.’

  Dave saw from Heath’s nod that she was right.

  ‘But how would you know . . .’

  She brushed off the question.

  ‘Everyone tries to get inside the heads of their enemies. For you it’s Islamists. For us, too. But also Chechens, Georgians, Ukrainians and whoever stands in the way of the born-again Russian Empire.’

  Everyone was staring at her now. Coming from Karen in that cultured north-eastern accent, which sounded as though it should be doing radio spots for organic yoghurt, it was just one hit too many from the crazy bong.

  ‘Okay. So, say it’s Compton,’ he conceded. He didn’t want to, because that path led back to Omaha and his decision to rescue Emmeline instead of going after the neckbeard from Hell like he’d been told. ‘You must have, like, counter plans or something?’

  ‘There’s always plans, Mr Hooper,’ said Colonel Gries. ‘But they rarely survive contact with the enemy. If you look out a window you’ll see why.’

  ‘There’s more,’ Heath said. ‘You’re missing a fairly obvious point.’

  ‘I am?’

  ‘Of course, you are,’ Emmeline put in. ‘The video. Who shot it? Cut it together. Released it? The Horde haven’t got around to hiring a PR company yet.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Dave. ‘Right.’

  She restarted the playback again, fast-forwarding a minute or so until it came to vision of a young woman. Emmeline paused the image.

  ‘This is Polly Farrell. A post grad media and communications student interning at WYNY. She says she was part of a group ambushed and captured by the Grymm. She interviewed a demon that spoke English in an uneducated American dialect. She described the creature as sounding like a “mall rat”.’

  ‘Like the one I spoke to on the plane?’ Dave said.

  ‘Yes. It was strangely well versed in media management, however,’ Emmeline went on. ‘It demanded the news people shoot a press statement for it, and promised to release all the captives if its demands were met.’

  ‘And did it? Release everyone?’ Dave asked, assuming the answer was no; it ate everybody.

  ‘Yes,’ Emmeline said. ‘It did. And now the survivors are all doing their own interviews, supporting this . . .’ she struggled to find the right words, ‘. . . this Compt’n creature’s claims to only want to negotiate a ceasefire in good faith. If we don’t negotiate, the attacks will escalate, and not just from the Horde.’

  ‘But it can’t talk for the sects,’ Dave said.

  ‘No. It’s talking about them,’ Emmeline replied.

  ‘It’s a class-A clusterfuck for sure,’ said Colonel Gries. ‘The president is en route to a secure location. The vice-president is already buttoned up somewhere. Congress is supposed to be debating a declaration of war against the Horde. The debate is more than a little demented, and is being held up by a move to impeach the president for letting these things loose in the world. President Obama’s recalled all US forces from overseas. All of them. The world is losing its shit because of course these damned things are coming up all over. And now, just as they’re hitting us in the nuts, the usual idiots and peacemongers are bleating about the need to negotiate and compromise with an enemy that is literally eating us alive.’

  ‘Here in the city,’ Heath said, ‘the terror has worked. We’re gridlocked. The attack on that apartment you suppressed? It was being live tweeted and Facebooked as it happened.’

  ‘Who the fuck bothers tweeting when there’s a monster at the door?’ Emmeline said. ‘Honestly. There’s natural selection at work, right there.’

  ‘And now they’re hitting the value targets,’ Heath said. ‘Collapsing the infrastructure. It’s following Compton’s blueprint almost point by point. In his original war game he didn’t have infantry formations or heavy lift assets to play with . . . Big planes to move people around,’ Heath explained when he saw Dave’s confused expression. ‘If this really is his plan in operation, he has those assets now. Or something just as good. As everything has fallen apart, making it difficult to deploy our own forces in any sort of order, the Horde have been putting company-sized formations directly into critical nodes.’

  ‘We saw that at Grand Central,’ Dave said. ‘We stomped them pretty hard.’

  ‘Yes,’ Karen added. ‘That attack vector has been closed down.’

  She seemed more at home with all this than Dave, and for their part Heath and his guys seemed cool with that. Had everyone forgotten she was a Russian spy?

  ‘I had a squad down there,’ Colonel Gries said. ‘They reported that back to me. Said it was like the entire enemy force blew apa
rt like magic.’

  ‘Only the magic of American steel,’ Dave said, holding up Lucille, but getting no booyahs in return.

  ‘The squad leader was very grateful,’ the colonel went on. ‘Asked me to pass on his thanks. He said he didn’t get a chance to say thank you properly before you left.’

  ‘Tell him dasvidaniya,’ Karen said.

  ‘So what are we gonna do?’ Dave asked. ‘There’s hours until dawn. And the Horde aren’t the only sect here. We found some Savat arrows on the way over.’

  Heath closed his eyes.

  ‘Savat? You’ve never told us about them.’

  Dave’s patience threatened to fail him.

  ‘You know how that works, Heath. Until I saw them, I didn’t know. Now I do and so do you. Savat are like Sliveen. They’re just part of a different sect. The Qwm.’

  Igor snorted.

  ‘The Qwm Sect,’ Dave rounded on him. ‘Not the Cum Sect.’

  Igor came off the wall where he’d been leaning, bringing his sniper rifle up like a crude club.

  ‘The fuck you . . .’

  ‘Chief!’ barked Heath. ‘Outside if you can’t keep it together.’

  ‘Sorry,’ Dave said. Holding his hands up. ‘Let’s just get to the fucking bit where Dave’s sorry and we all agree he’s an asshole and then we move on.’

  Karen’s smile curled up one corner of her mouth ‘I don’t think we need to get there, Hooper. You,’ she said to Igor. ‘You’re the pedik he’s been obsessing about, right?’

  ‘What the hell do you mean obsessing?’ Dave snapped.

  Igor moved toward Karen and Hooper with deadly intent.

  ‘The fuck you just call me?

  ‘Stand down,’ Heath barked. But it was too late, the anarchy they’d fought through to get here was loosed upon the room, with angry voices climbing on top of each other. Zach tried to hold Igor back. Emmeline buried her head in shaking hands, and actually seemed more scared than despairing, which only served to fan the heat of Dave’s shame spiral.

  ‘Shut up. All of you,’ shouted Karen and she pushed. Hard. Everyone gasped, even Dave. It was as though she’d slapped them all into silence.

  ‘Because of his brother, this one,’ she said pointing at Dave when she finally had the floor, ‘is a festering mess of guilt and remorse. He could make a Dostoyevsky character seem like the world’s happiest Lululemon shop girl.’

  ‘No, Karen,’ Dave said, his heart seeming to lurch to a halt, but he could no more stop her speaking than he could quell the nausea which suddenly roiled in his lower gut. It left him feeling hot and cold all at once, his skin tingling with a low-grade electric shock, and dizziness threatening to tip him off his feet. She’d been inside his head. She knew what he was thinking, even when he tried to hide it from himself. He dropped Lucille, the steel head hitting the floor with a bang.

  Igor had fallen back to the wall, the sniper rifle scraping against the hard stone surface. Zach looked shocked, as though Karen had reached inside him and squeezed, which she had. Even Heath, who’d appeared sanguine about her presence and her true status, was staring at the Russian woman like she was a land mine he’d just stepped on.

  ‘You haven’t told them, Hooper, because you’re ashamed. You think you’re ashamed of your brother, but you’re ashamed of yourself.’

  She didn’t lash him with the words. She sounded almost as though she felt his pain and gave something approaching a fuck. It eased the pain not at all.

  Dave said ‘No,’ again, but it was only a small sound, lost under the background buzz of a thousand voices and the thudding of a helicopter hovering nearby.

  ‘Sit down,’ she said, putting a hand on his shoulder. The will to stand up to her, to stand up at all, left him in a rush and his butt crashed down onto the table. The room swirled around him, lost all cohesion and he blinked away the first tears as they came. It was as though she had stripped him of a lifetime’s emotional armour, exposing the raw and seeping wounds beneath.

  ‘Don’t . . .’ he said. The dull thud of the chopper blades faded away, but if she heard him, it meant nothing to her.

  ‘No,’ Karen said in a quiet voice. ‘I’ve been putting up with this since we met. You’ve been putting up with it most of your life. It’s time we both unburdened ourselves of it.’

  Everybody was watching him. Emmeline through her fingers, her hands still shaking. Colonel Gries, with one raised eyebrow at the insult done to his antique desk. Heath was Sphinx-like, measuring and almost certainly judging, but giving none of it away. Zach, true to his nature, looked almost as though he felt sorry for Dave. Igor did not, but he was no longer restraining his need to let fly. Hooper wiped the tears from his eyes with the back of one hand. It was crusty with blood and served only to smear the mess over his face.

  ‘Dave hasn’t told you about his brother,’ said Karen, ‘or not the whole story anyway.’

  ‘Don’t. Please.’

  ‘He’s even used him as an excuse for why he has such an aversion to all things military. Did you ever wonder about that, Captain?’ she asked Heath. ‘Why someone like Hooper seemed to regard the glorious armed forces of your proud republic as little better than a war machine devoted to enriching the board of Halliburton and, say, the petrol company which pays his rent? It seems a little out of character, don’t you think? For such a good old boy?’

  ‘His brother gave up his life,’ Heath started to say, his voice leaden with disapproval.

  ‘Yes, his brother. The fallen hero.’

  ‘Colonel Varatchevsky,’ Heath said, and there was no missing the warning tone in his voice. ‘If you’re going somewhere, best get there now.’

  She laid a hand on Dave’s shoulder again and he flinched away.

  ‘It’s better this way, Dave,’ she said. ‘Trust me. Vot gde sobáka zarýta. This is where the dog is buried.’

  She addressed everyone then, but concentrated on Igor.

  ‘Corporal Andrew Galloway, nee Hooper, was gay. Just like you, sweetheart,’ she smiled at the SEAL. ‘Super Dave here, when he was just plain Dave, couldn’t handle that. It’s not all his fault. If you’d ever met his father, there was a bigot for the ages. So unmanned by his son the cocksucker that he walks out. Dave, now the man of the house, blamed Andy for breaking up the family. Ma, bless her apple pie, loves both her boys and just wants everyone to get along. She was a saint, that woman. But Dave here gives his gay brother hell. “You’ll never be a real man, why can’t you just man the fuck up, bro.” That sort of thing. Andy, who loved his brother, proves him wrong by signing up for the most manly job there is. Pulling a trigger. Four years later this family tragedy reaches its dramatic high point when Corporal Andrew Galloway, nee Hooper, is shot to pieces and blown to Hell by Sunni insurgents in beautiful downtown Baghdad.’

  She playfully ruffled Dave’s hair while he wept silently into his hands.

  ‘So, Igor, don’t be hating on your redneck friend here. He doesn’t hate you because you are petookh opooscheny. He hates that he found out you’re gay before he could pack up all of his nasty feelings and jam them away in the corner of his tiny tortured mind where he keeps his dead brother.’

  22

  Dave didn’t know he had retreated into numb stillness until Karen spoke up and he realised her voice, her breathing, was all he could hear. That and the background rumble of a world caught on the cusp of some inexplicable quantum shift between what was and what might be.

  He’d warped.

  ‘What?’ she said. ‘Too harsh?’

  Dave let his hands fall and blinked away the blurriness that cut him off from the world. A world he had stilled without even noticing. He sat on the conference table in the cramped briefing room, deep inside the armoury. Karin stood over him, her arms crossed, head tilted a little to one side, considering him. The others were all looking at him, frozen, their expressions a mix of concern and even sympathy. Igor’s face was unreadable.

  Dave sniffed and wiped at his nose. He cough
ed, not trusting himself to speak yet.

  A deep, shuddering breath leaked out slowly.

  ‘You’re a bitch,’ he said, without feeling. He was all out of feelings. Like he’d just made a bonfire of them all and the only thing he felt now was burned.

  ‘Yeah, but I’m the bitch who’ll get you through this. And you’re the bitch who will help all of these good people through, and as many as we can save outside the walls of this place.’

  ‘All of the things you just said. They were all . . .’

  ‘They were all true, Hooper. You can’t hide that from me. I wish you could. You’re a lousy date.’

  He stared at her, too wrung out to be appalled. One of the things he always detested about Annie was her ability to see through his bullshit. She didn’t need to be a mind-reader, all she had to do was spend enough time around him to read his patterns and that had been bad enough. Karen did it in a second.

  ‘You know it all? Everything?’

  ‘I’m afraid I do, and I wish I didn’t. Being inside of your head? It’s like getting jammed into a bag full of unwashed shorts. With great power comes skidmarks. If it makes you feel any better about the mind fucking, I was trained to read people on first contact long before I unlocked my new achievements. I’m just quicker at it now, and a little more accurate.’

  He snorted the briefest of laughs at that, the sad little chuckle sounding wet and throaty. Another shuddering breath; slowly sucked in, this time.

  ‘Shit,’ he said. ‘He followed me around, like all little brothers do. I drove him off because . . . well . . . I was an asshole. I couldn’t help it.’

  He had to shut up, before he fell apart again.

  ‘Yes, you were,’ Karen said, not letting him escape responsibility. ‘And you’ve been an asshole ever since. You’ve forced a lot of people to pay for your mistakes, Hooper. It has to stop.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, and for one of the few times in his life he managed to say it without sounding resentful or sullen. She wasn’t nearly as impressed with that as she should have been.