by Rick Partlow
Then the side hatch of the armored personnel carrier crashed open and a long burst of rifle-fire erased the Invader's eerily alien visage, bursting its skull and sending a spray of cranial matter over Shannon and Tanaka. For a horrifying second, the thing stood there in macabre headless equilibrium, but finally it swayed and toppled like some base-cut redwood, crashing with a metallic sound to the charred surface of the porch.
"Jesus H. Christ," a voice boomed in the hatchway of the APC. "What in the hell was that?"
From out of the shadowy innards of the personnel carrier emerged a tall, broad-chested figure, clad in full Marine combat armor but for the lack of a helmet. His skin was charcoal black, his head shaven and nearly polished in its gleam---still close to emotional shock, Shannon wondered if she’d be able to see her reflection on his head if he leaned forward. His face had the strong, hard-jawed, tight-lipped look nearly universal in Reaction Force sergeants, and something whispered through the confused haze of her thoughts that he was exactly that.
"You're Sergeant Lambert," she said, coming back to some sense of reality.
"That'd be the case, ma'am," he rumbled, his voice like a gentle earthquake, stepping out of the vehicle with an assault rifle grasped like a pistol in his big right fist. From behind him, half-a-dozen armored Marines scrambled out of the APC and spread out to form a defensive perimeter around the car, while the Gunnery Sergeant walked up to them as casually as if he hadn't just blown off the head of possibly the first alien being mankind had ever laid eyes on. "Where's Lieutenant McKay?"
"We don't know," Shannon told her. "I'm Lieutenant Stark, his second-in-command," she told him, absently wiping blood and brains off her arm. She winced as the splinters in her shoulder began to sting anew from the grip the Invader had exerted.
"Then I guess you'd be in charge, ma'am," the sergeant said. "But it'd be my professional advice that we get the hell out of here. Those bastards, whatever they are, are all over the city and they were right behind us when we pulled out. I tried to convince Captain Bitch---I mean Deng---to leave, but she was convinced that the armory could hold. Last I saw of it, it was a crater."
"But we can't leave without Valerie!" Glen insisted.
"Wherever Ms. O'Keefe is," Tanaka spoke for the first time since his opportune reappearance, "she is not on the grounds." From the tone of the comment, Shannon had the distinct impression he'd been over most of the mansion area himself, no doubt at great personal risk.
"Lieutenant McKay might be with her," Shannon deduced suddenly. "She went for a walk earlier, and he wasn't in his room. They might have been forced away from the mansion."
Gunny Lambert shrugged his massive shoulders. "We can take a swing around the place in the cars, but we'd better hurry. There should be room for y'all in the APC, if a few of my kids ride in the scout car."
"Can I stay in here with the naked lady officer, Sarge?" The APC's driver, a tow-headed young corporal with a pronounced southern drawl, twisted around in his seat, smiling broadly.
"Shaddup, Bobby," the Gunny snarled good-naturedly, "or I'll make you get out and push." He turned back to the troops still crouched in a perimeter around the APC. "Frenchie, Tinker, Clarke, get in the scout car. The rest of you into the tin can, double-time!"
Three of the Marines sprinted over to the still-watchful scout vehicle while the others waited for Shannon to get her people into the APC before piling in behind them. One of the troopers elbowed the hatch control and the heavy plastrons swung shut with an ear-ringing clash of metal, leaving them in total darkness until the interior lights flickered on.
"So," Bobby, the driver, twisted around to ask, "where're we goin' in this heap, anyways?"
"Once around the park, James," Lambert drawled. "After that..." He looked to Shannon. "Ma'am?"
"Lieutenant," Captain Trang called from the rear of the vehicle. "After the Arm of Allah riots, the Governor had the foresight to have a special shelter built. It might be wise to take refuge there for the time being."
"Is that true, Your Honor?" Stark asked the big man.
"Why, of course." Sigurdsen shot Trang an annoyed glance---whether because he resented the man for thinking of the idea first or because he hoped he had kept the shelter a secret, she wasn't certain---before turning back to her. "We need to head up the old dirt road northwest, into the mountains."
"You heard His Honor, Bobby." Gunny Lambert thumped the driver on the shoulder. "Get us out of here."
The APC jerked abruptly into motion, and Shannon bit back a curse as her wounded shoulder bounced against the bare metal of the bulkhead.
"Why don't you put this on, ma'am," Sergeant Lambert shouted above the whine of the APC's turbines, pulling a spare armored vest from a rack above her and handing it down. She nodded gratefully, carefully slipping into the heavy, padded garment. It rubbed uncomfortably against the imbedded splinters, but it was better than the alternative, which was the bare metal of the APC’s hull. The Sergeant fished around for a set of headphones, slipped one pair on himself and handed Stark another.
"You see anything, Peplowski?" Lambert used his headset to ask the Marine who was standing in the APC's bubble turret as the vehicle, trailed by the scout car, curved around to the back of the mansion.
"Just dead bodies," the petite female reported. "A few live Gomers over by the back of the garden." She traversed the turret toward the garden wall and cut loose with a short burst of 25mm. "Sorry, my mistake," she corrected. "Make that dead Gomers."
"All right," Lambert decided. "Wherever they are, they aren't around here. Bobby, steer this crate for the mountains."
"Roger that, Sarge."
Shannon felt the vehicle turn sharply and angle out across the grassy fields behind the mansion. Looking at the headset Lambert had given her, trying to untangle its cord so she could talk to him, she saw a monocular reticle that could be flipped down in front of her left eye. Stark slipped the set on, lowering the eyepiece. Suddenly, she found her left eye filled with the view from the bubble turret's gunsight, still pointed back at the mansion. It was an infrared sight, lit with a hazy green, but she could see that the building was totally consumed by flames now, a column of smoke rising above it far into the night sky.
"Maybe there is a God," she muttered to herself, not realizing that the headset's mike was voice activated.
"What?" she heard Sergeant Lambert ask, turning toward her with confusion in his eyes.
"Oh," she said with a shrug, a bit surprised at being overheard. "I just meant, that eyesore has burned down twice now."
Lambert's broad face cracked in a wide smile and she heard his full-throated laugh over her earphones.
"You're not bad, ma'am," he told her. "For an officer."
"Contact!" Bobby called from the driver's seat. "Radar says we got company at three hundred meters, coming in from the road to the city. And it's big, boys and girls."
Peplowski traversed the turret with a whine of servomotors and Shannon's left-eye view turned to their left, to the road they were about to cross. She tried to bring the image into clearer focus, and finally caught sight of the...thing.
"What the hell?" she could hear Peplowski exclaim, echoing her own thoughts.
What the hell, indeed. The machine was...Jesus, it was hard to even know how to describe it. The image it initially brought to her mind was that of an industrial exoskeleton, but much, much larger---fifteen meters tall, she estimated. It walked with a curious, bounding gait on a pair of articulated, digitigrade legs---bent backwards, like an ostrich. Slung between the legs was an armored cabin, bristling with missile pods and machine guns, with a heavier cannon hanging beneath it like some kind of absurdly exaggerated penis. Twin turbines rode on the thing's shoulders and a pair of radar dishes turned slowly atop the main cabin, searching, obviously, for them.
The thing's main gun swung around and flared as it fired a slow-cycling three-round burst. Metal fragments pinged off the side of their vehicle and dirt kicked up around the APC a
s the exploding rounds hit only meters from them, the clap of the explosion reverberating through the personnel carrier like a drumbeat.
"Jimenez," Lambert radioed to the driver of the scout car, "I don't know what that thing is, but take it out now!"
"That's a big roger," came the laconic reply.
The APC's turret powered around to view the wicked lines of the other vehicle just as the scout car's boxy missile launcher flared with a blast of exhaust and a heatseeker flashed out at Mach 5, reaching the Invader machine before Peplowski could turn to look at it. By the time the Hopper---Shannon had already tagged it with that name in her mind---came back into her field of view, it was staggering backwards with the top half of its cabin missing, an incandescent cloud surrounded the rended and twisted metal. Only a heartbeat after it came into her sight, the fire reached the thing's missile pods. An explosion she could feel from over a kilometer away shook the APC as the Hopper was blown into scrap metal in a fireball that lit up the night and nearly burned out the turret camera's infrared filters.
"Evasive course!" Lambert snapped. "Bobby, Jimenez, give us some smoke. I don't know if these boys have air support or space weapons, and I don't want to find out."
There was a crackle of chemical combustion as clouds of electrostatically charged smoke enveloped both Marine vehicles, obscuring even the IR viewers. Shannon flipped up the ocular and looked back over to Sergeant Lambert.
"Well, Gunny," she said with only a trace of the weariness and isolation she felt, "I guess this is the enemy we've been expecting."
"Sure looks that way, ma'am," he agreed, pulling a small can of chewing tobacco out of a vest pocket. He tapped the can to shake loose the contents before opening it, a thoughtful expression on his sculpted face. "I'd like to know how they got by the Mac, though."
She agreed that was a good question. The MacArthur should have been able to detect an incoming attack and give them some warning. How had the Invaders managed to get the jump on her? Shannon covered the microphone of her headset and turned to the back of the cabin.
"Governor Sigurdsen," she yelled over the whine of the engines. "Is there a radio at your shelter that can reach orbit?"
"Yes, Lieutenant," the big man told her. "Do you think we'll be able to call for help?"
"Maybe. If," she said softly, half to herself and half to Lambert, "there's any help left to call."
* * *
The mountains that ran like a dividing line between most of Aphrodite's temperate southern hemisphere and the Wastes of the north were as young and harsh as the rest of the world. Created during an extended volcanic period, they were all sharp edges and steep drops, only lightly weathered by the last million years of water and wind. All of which made the ride up the barely-existent dirt trail pretty bumpy.
"Couldn't you have built a Goddamned road up to this place?" Crossman complained to the governor as the APC was jostled by one rut after another.
"It was supposed to be a secret," Sigurdsen replied, with more verbosity than he had shown since the start of their journey, his only other declarations being "right" and "left" when asked for directions.
"Well, here's another secret," Bobby called from the front, able to hear them now that the APC was running in stealth mode, on batteries, the turbines shut down to lose their heat signature. "We've hit a dead end."
"Then stop the car," Sigurdsen told him, breathing a sigh of obvious relief. "We're here."
"We're getting out,” Lambert radioed to the crew of the scout car. Watch our backs."
Hefting his rifle, the Gunnery Sergeant hit the hatch control and stepped out, followed closely by Shannon, Governor Sigurdsen and Captain Trang. The rest of the Marines as well as the Intelligence team members fanned out around the vehicle, half to establish a perimeter and half because of an age-old conviction among footsoldiers that a halted vehicle was nothing but a nice, fat target.
The path had terminated in a bare rock face, sloping sharply upward for at least a hundred meters before it levelled off. Looking at it in the blue stealthlights of the APC, Shannon could find no seam in the cliff face, but Sigurdsen strode directly over to the center of it and slapped his bare palm against the stone, then quickly stepped back. With a hermetic hiss and a hum of servos, a ten-meter wide section of the rock wall separated inward and began to slide slowly aside.
"My God." Shannon shook her head as a subdued, red-tinted light flickered on inside the shelter's entry chamber. "This must have taken months."
"And a ton of money," Sigurdsen confirmed. "Unfortunately, it was worth it."
"Bring the baby home, Bobby," Lambert transmitted. "Clear the way, you damned jarheads."
The dismounted passengers stepped aside to allow the APC and the scout car inside, then moved carefully in behind them as Sigurdsen found the inner door control.
"Stay where you are till the lights come on," the governor warned, palming the ID plate.
It seemed to Shannon, standing in the dimly-lit, uncertain space of the chamber that it took hours for the false rock face to slide back into place, but it finally sealed into the side of the mountain, triggering the circuit for the overhead lighting.
The place was, if anything, bigger than it appeared from the outside. The entry chamber was as large as an industrial garage---which, indeed, it was. Beside the newly-arrived military vehicles, the garage chamber was already occupied by a heavy-duty, all-terrain utility rover; a light, skeleton-framed dune buggy; and a pair of battery-powered dirt bikes. Spare parts, maintenance equipment, charging stands and fuel tanks took up what little spare room there was along the side walls.
Shannon heard quite a few relieved groans and sighs as the crews of both vehicles dismounted and stretched out the kinks of several hours "in the saddle." Then, quite suddenly, she realized that everyone in the garage was looking at her, waiting for a decision.
Oh well, she chuckled inwardly, you're the one who wanted a command.
"Sergeant Lambert," she said, "you and your men should get some rest, but before you stand down, I'd like you and Sergeant Mahoney to do a security check of this installation---Captain Trang can help you as well. I'd also like a full inventory of all weapons and ammunition within the hour."
"Right away, ma'am," Lambert acknowledged.
"Tom, Jock," Shannon went on, turning to the men, "you're to help with the inventory. Governor Sigurdsen, I'd like to see your communications setup."
"First things first, Lieutenant," Nathan Tanaka interrupted. "You are wounded. Governor," he addressed the big man, "do you have any medical supplies?"
"Right this way," Sigurdsen said.
"It's nothing," Shannon protested as she was led through the passage out of the garage into a central control area.
"Now, it's nothing," Tanaka insisted. "Tomorrow, it will be infected. You are the commander now; you cannot afford weakness."
She gave up and let the bodyguard lead her to a couch in one corner of the large chamber, gently pulling off the armored vest she'd been loaned. Governor Sigurdsen pulled a briefcase-sized medical kit from one of the supply cabinets that lined the wall and set it on the table in front of the couch, popping its latches.
Tanaka sorted through the various packages in the case's compartment and came up with a spray can of local anesthetic. Coating Shannon's shoulder with a generous dose of the liquid, the bodyguard secured a large pair of forceps and a sterile swab and latched onto the largest of the jagged splinters.
"Ready?" he asked with a look of genuine concern that surprised her.
She nodded, turning her head away, and he carefully pulled the barb out of her shoulder, tossing it aside and mopping up the flow of blood with the swab. The other splinters came out easier, and soon he was spreading disinfectant over the area in preparation for bandaging it.
"You should have been a doctor," she told him seriously.
"I should have been many things," he replied softly, half to himself, as he taped the bandage in place. "But we do not always hold
our fate in our own hands. There," he fastened the last strip of cloth. "Try not to move this arm for the next day or so."
"Happy birthday," Sergeant Lambert deadpanned, stepping up to them and tossing Shannon a Marine-issue T-shirt. "A donation from your adoring fans."
"Thanks," she said, gingerly slipping into the garment.
Vinnie, Jock and Captain Trang had entered the room behind Lambert, and the three of them formed a semicircle around the couch, while Lambert flopped down on the couch beside Stark and Tanaka, casually propping his feet up on the table.
"Well, we're sitting pretty here, Lieutenant," he informed her. "There's two main entrances, two emergency exits, three different sources of ventilation, about three meters of rock on all sides and complete 360 degree fiber-optic observation. If those ugly bastards ever found this place, they'd have a hell of a time prying us out of here. I'm not even sure this thing couldn't survive a nuclear strike."
"My contractors assured me it would," Sigurdsen commented with something of a sense of proprietary pride.
"What about food and water?" Shannon asked the governor. "And power?"
"There's enough food to last a year," the big man informed her. "As for water and power, we're sitting on top of an underground river: it's what dug out most of these tunnels. I had a pair of hydroelectric generators put in; we'll have power until they wear out...maybe two or three hundred years."
"I wasn't planning on hanging around quite that long," she muttered. "All right, Jock, tell me about the weapons."
"Ten M-70 Marine Individual Weapons," the Australian reported, reading off from a display on his pocket computer, "with about 3,000 rounds of rifle ammo and fifty rifle-launched grenades. Two SR-8 autoguns with 2,000 rounds apiece. Four submachine guns with around a hundred rounds each. Three shoulder-launchers with ten reloads. Me'n Vinnie still have our grenade launchers, but we're down to about two mags for each gun, and that rifle you picked up has five mags left, forty rounds in each. As for the vehicles, the chain guns are a bit low---about three hundred shots per. Grenade cannons are topped off, and they've still got ten missiles for the scout car's launcher." He shrugged, looking back up at her from the compact machine. "Plus three or four handguns with twenty rounds each and various knives, and that's about it."