by Rick Partlow
The stunner was a fairly simple weapon that fired a tiny capacitor attached to a metallic dart. If it hit a human target anywhere not protected by armor or very thick clothing, the capacitor would dump an electric charge for just as long as the shooter kept the trigger pressed down, until it completely discharged. Manning had aimed it for the exposed skin on the woman’s throat, and had it connected, she would have been able to incapacitate the woman silently before the civilian could have made a sound.
Manning’s aim was true, but Murphy’s Law being in effect here as it was in every combat situation, the old woman had already begun to raise the basket of fish in her arms in an instinctive attempt to toss it away and run. The dart stuck home in the tough polymer of the basket and before Manning could fire again, the scream was past the old woman’s lips, high pitched and unintelligible.
“Go!” Manning snarled, breaking into a sprint, leaving the woman to scream in nearly-incoherent Vietnamese.
She didn’t wait to see if Franks or the others were following her: there wasn’t time. Instead, she ran straight for Podbyrin’s cabin---or what she hoped was Podbyrin’s cabin---trying to reach it before the alert could be raised. Doors were opening and people were sticking their heads out, but she ignored them: they weren’t the threat that concerned her. She heard automatic weapons fire from the woods behind her---not suppressed, so she knew it wasn’t from her people---but she still didn’t turn. She had to trust her people to hold the biomechs back.
Manning had experienced nightmares where she was running down a never-ending hallway towards a door that always seemed to be getting further away, and she wondered as she plodded through the soft dirt if she was living that nightmare. The cabin couldn’t have been more than 50 meters away, but it felt as if it were a kilometer and she were running in slow motion. And like visions from a nightmare, two more of the biomech guards were coming towards her from her left front, running with the awkwardly childlike gate that she had first noticed four years ago, fighting their like in upstate New York.
She brought her carbine to her shoulder as she ran and fired two quick bursts at the lead of the two guards; she saw the thing jerk and stumble as the rounds hit home high on its chest, but it kept coming, oblivious to the damage. She was about to shift her aim when two more streams of gunfire from behind her sliced through the biomech’s neck and smashed into its helmet and it pitched forward and buried its shoulder into the dirt. She wasn’t sure which of the three others with her had fired the rounds and she didn’t have time to ask.
Manning shifted her aim to the remaining guard, but before she could pull the trigger, a streak of lightning flashed through the sky with an accompanying thunderclap, connecting sky to ground for just a fraction of a second. A tremendous blast obliterated the biomech barracks with the force of a hundred kilos of hyperexplosives, the liberated kinetic energy of a two meter tungsten rod falling from orbit and smashing into the earth at mach 10. The ground shook with the explosion and bits of wood, buildfoam and plastic climbed a cloud of black smoke into the sky as a shockwave threw all of them to the ground.
That was not two minutes, Manning grumbled to herself, trying to shake off the concussion from the shockwave. Her head was swimming and she was having a hard time telling the falling debris from the floaters in her vision and she knew that the biomech was still there and she was suddenly facing the wrong direction…
She twisted around, trying to find the thing, but she was a half second too slow: the biomech was already in a crouch and had its rifle aimed at her head. Before she could bring her carbine around, a hail of 8mm ceramic-jacketed tungsten slugs impacted the biomech’s neck and face and it slumped forward with half of its head gone.
Manning glanced backwards and saw Captain Franks on the ground just behind her: he’d landed in a controlled sprawl that spoke of a lot of martial arts training, and was stretched out on his belly, his carbine still tucked against his shoulder.
“Everyone okay?” she asked over the general frequency as she pushed herself to her feet using her carbine’s buttstock.
“Roger, Master Sergeant,” Pattenson answered, echoed quickly by Geittner and Franks.
“Cover unit is intact,” Sgt. Miller answered, “no casualties.”
Manning saw people stepping out of their cabins, stumbling around in stunned confusion, more than one of them bleeding from minor wounds where the walls had splintered from the blast. The door to Podbyrin’s cabin remained closed, however, his windows still shuttered. That was not unexpected: it was just what he’d said he would do. She broke into a quick jog and reached the cabin in a few seconds, Franks close on her heels. Their boots on the building’s porch made the loose wood planks creak and shift as they took up positions to either side of the door.
“Colonel Podbyrin!” Franks called over his helmet’s external speakers. “This is Captain Franks, Fleet Intelligence! Please open the door and step out slowly with your hands visible!”
Manning kept her attention on their surroundings, trusting Franks to handle any possible surprises from within the cabin; but she couldn’t help glancing around when the cabin door creaked open a crack and a dark eye appeared in the narrow gap, darting back and forth between her and Franks. The door slowly opened wider and a pair of hands stuck out, followed by a genuinely old man, fear and elation warring for dominance on his weathered face.
“I am D’mitry Podbyrin,” he said, a bit shaky.
Manning couldn’t hear the exchange when it happened, but she knew that Franks would be relaying the image and the voice to Fleet Headquarters for a biometric and voice scan, and also directly to General McKay in Houston ‘Plex---he, after all, knew the man better than any of them. It was only a moment before she heard Captain Franks’ voice in her helmet headphones.
“It’s him,” the young officer told her. “We’re good to go.” Then over his external speakers again: “Colonel, we’re here to get you out, but we have to hurry. Is there anything you need to bring with you?”
The Colonel looked at Franks as if the officer had said something ridiculous, and laughed with a bit of a maniacal edge.
“There’s nothing here that can’t be made in a broken-down fabricator,” Podbyrin said. “Just get me the hell out of this place.”
“India Niner Niner this is India One,” Manning broadcast to their lander, “we have the package and are good for pickup at primary LZ in ten, over.”
“Roger, India One,” came the reply in her ear from the lander’s pilot. “Niner niner is good for pickup. See you in ten mikes, out.”
“All India units,” Manning called over the team frequency, “we have the package and we’re moving out to primary LZ…”
Her announcement was interrupted by the barking of unsuppressed rifle fire, a deep-throated, harsh sound that echoed throughout the clearing. Manning had barely registered the bullets chewing into the wood of the cabin wall beside her before Captain Franks had yanked Podbyrin to the ground and covered the older man with his body. Manning dropped to her belly, feeling the half-rotted boards of the porch yielding beneath the weight of her armor, and began hunting for the source of the gunfire.
She had just caught sight of the flare of muzzle blast only thirty meters away and was bringing her carbine’s barrel around towards the shooter when the slight figure went down, jerking spastically from the impacts of multiple bursts of 8mm.
“Check fire, check fire!” she heard Sgt. Miller yelling on the team freq. “Threat is down! Check fire and maintain security.”
Manning stood and from the corner of her eye she could see Franks pulling Podbyrin to his feet behind her. She stepped cautiously off the porch, walking over to the body. Pattenson was already there, kicking the rifle---an old Russian-pattern bullpup, identical to the ones with which the biomechs had been armed---away from the outstretched hands of the fragile old woman. It was the same ancient yet ageless Asian woman who had discovered them just a couple minutes before, and she clung tenaciously to life, fi
ngers grasping futilely for the rifle.
Podbyrin stepped up to her, eyes wide with disbelief as he saw her blood soaking the ground from half a dozen gaping wounds.
“Tai sao?” Podbyrin asked, his voice hoarse as if he were on the verge of tears. Manning’s helmet computer translated the word from Vietnamese. “Why?”
The old woman turned her head slowly and painfully, her eyes focusing and unfocusing as the life ran out of her body. Her mouth twisted into a snarl.
“It is,” she said in heavily accented English, “my job.”
Podbyrin gasped, seemingly amazed that she spoke English. Before he could question her further, she began coughing with spasms that wracked her little body, and blood gushed from her mouth with each shudder. Then she was gone, her eyes permanently focused on something that only the dead could see.
“I want to leave here,” Podbyrin said softly, and she could see a tear falling down his cheek. “Please, I just want to leave here.”
“Come on, sir,” Franks said, gently taking the man by his shoulder and leading him away. “We’ll have you on the lander in a few minutes and everything will be fine.”
Manning backed out of the compound behind them, watching the vacant eyes of the people there, seeing the rage and pain on the faces of the Vietnamese woman’s sons as they gathered around her, wailing their grief. Behind her, she could barely hear Podbyrin’s quiet muttering. “Fine…nothing’s ever fine. It only gets worse.”
Chapter Four
Caitlyn Carr stepped out of the flitter and smoothed down the front of her tan suit. It was the latest in nanoweave technology and was supposedly able to keep the wearer cool in temperatures as high as 45 degrees, but the instant the blast furnace heat of the Texas summer hit her, she felt beads of sweat on her forehead that stuck strands of her brown hair to her tanned skin. The heat shimmered off the pavement in illusory waves that made the temporary Emergency Services buildings seem like a mirage in the desert.
She grimaced at the stale smell of dust in the air, wishing that the still-smoking wreckage beyond the temporary headquarters were just as illusory as the heat mirages. But no amount of wishing would make any of this go away. She shook the thought away and hurried into the biggest of the buildings, sighing with relief as the air conditioning hit her.
Beyond the narrow and unadorned entrance hallway, the first room she came to was an office crammed with half a dozen workstations. The people at them were a mixture of Emergency Services, Houston Police and Fleet Intelligence personnel, each surrounded by a holographic control projection and each appearing to be insanely busy.
She considered for a moment trying to get the attention of one of them, then rejected that idea and considered using her ‘link to let someone know she was there. She rejected that as well, believing that it signaled a sort of helpless neediness that she didn’t want to project as a first impression. Better to be thought a pushy bitch than a helpless child. So instead she marched right past the preoccupied crowd and through the outer offices, right through a doorway marked “Authorized Personnel Only.”
She’d worried for a moment that it might be locked, which would have made her look incompetent as well as pushy, but instead it opened with a touch of her hand to the palm plate and she passed through into an antechamber that looked through a transplas barrier into a conference room. Seated at the table of the conference room were an old, weathered bald man and a group of the most decorated military men and women in the history of the Republic.
She recognized them from her briefing, but she would have recognized them anyway from the NewsNet reports or the movies. Anyone would recognize them.
The open, everyman face with the grey eyes and short brown hair; the compact, yet powerful build and the iconic Intelligence black uniform…that was General Jason McKay, the youngest Colonel and then the youngest General in the history of the Republic military, the man who had led the boarding of General Antonov’s flagship during the first invasion and led the expedition that had found the secret of the wormhole jumpgates.
Next to him was his second in command and domestic partner, Colonel Shannon Stark. Caitlyn recognized her almost before McKay: the red-gold hair, cut to shoulder length and framing that just-a-centimeter-too-long-to-be-perfect face, the green eyes that glittered cold like the gems set in an ancient idol, the look of sleek and barely restrained violent energy in her athlete’s build. She had led the ground troops that had retaken the Orbital Defense Control Center and rescued President Jameson during the first invasion, and been part of the force that had held off the biomech army set to overrun Capital City during the second war with the Protectorate.
Seated across from the two senior Intelligence officers were two men in the grey utility fatigues of the storied First Special Operations Command. They were as different from each other as they were from McKay and Stark, but she knew they’d been close friends since Fleet Marine Basic Training nearly fifteen years ago. The shorter, pale one with the buzzcut and a sprinkle of freckles across his knife-sharp face was Lt. Colonel Vincent Mahoney, the commander of the 1st SOC; and the big, brawny blond next to him was Sgt. Major James “Jock” Gregory, the unit’s NCOIC. Both men gave off the unmistakable air of consummate professionals who had a plan to kill anyone they met and would do so at the word from either McKay or Stark.
Caitlyn paused for a moment, feeling genuinely intimidated for the first time since she’d been given this assignment. These were living legends---people who had, without exaggeration, saved the world---and she was supposed to try to keep them in line? She considered for a second turning around and heading back to the outer offices, but just then the door opened behind her and she turned quickly to find yet another familiar face…although one not quite as intimidating.
“Who are you?” Captain Drew Franks demanded, frowning. “And what are you doing here?” He was dressed in rumpled utility fatigues and had the look---and the smell---of someone who’d been sweating a lot recently and hadn’t had time to shower. He also didn’t seem to be in the best of moods. The severe frown, she thought, didn’t seem to go with his handsome, boyish face.
“I’m Special Agent Carr, CIS,” she said, trying her best to sound unapologetic, as if she belonged there. She stuck out a hand. “I’ve been assigned as the liaison for this investigation by Director Ayrock.”
Franks stared at her for a moment, ignoring her hand. Then he said, “Wait here,” and opened the door to the conference room.
Caitlyn saw him stepping over to McKay and Stark, leaning over the table to speak to them quietly. The two of them glanced her way, and then so did Mahoney and Gregory and she suddenly wished she could hide behind something. She forced her shoulders square and stared back at them. McKay seemed to shrug and looked to Stark, who said something to Franks, who didn’t look happy to hear it. The junior officer nodded sharply and then returned briskly to the anteroom.
“Colonel Stark says you should come in,” Franks told her, his expression looking as if he believed that decision was a mistake. “Just grab a chair and listen. We’re in the middle of a debriefing.”
Caitlyn nodded and followed Franks into the conference room, taking a deep breath and trying to slow down her heart rate.
“Agent Carr,” Shannon Stark greeted her cordially, coming to her feet. “Please, have a seat,” she waved at a chair beside hers.
“Thank you, Colonel Stark, General McKay,” Caitlyn said gratefully, pulling the chair out and sitting down. This close to Stark, Caitlyn inanely found herself admiring the woman’s hair: it was understated and professional but it had just a subtle hint of femininity that offset her hard-edged military bearing…and the utilitarian lines of the service pistol holstered at her waist.
“This is Colonel D’mitry Grigor’yevich Podbyrin,” Stark said by way of introduction. “He was…”
“The Protectorate officer whose ship was captured during the first war?” Carr interrupted, her eyes going wide. “But I thought he’d been killed when
the Sheridan was destroyed four years ago!”
“That’s what we thought, too,” McKay said, a bit of impatience evident in his tone. He took a deep breath and she thought she could see him mentally counting to ten. “We received a broadcast from D’mitry yesterday saying he was being held captive in central Alaska by elements of the Russian mafia there.” He turned back to Podbyrin. “We were just getting around to hearing the rest of that story. D’mitry?”
The old man eyed her suspiciously for a moment, then sighed and rubbed a hand over his face, looking close to exhaustion. His knuckles were gnarled and swollen, she saw, wincing with sympathy.
“When I ejected from the Sheridan,” he began in heavily accented English, “the lifepod landed in the Alaskan tundra. The people who found me were Russian immigrants---the children and grandchildren and so on of those who fled the Protectorate after the nuclear war with China, and some who had come before. They called a man named Yuri and he took me to Fairbanks.” Podbyrin shrugged, looking a bit uncomfortable. “Understand, I did not resent you, but neither did I want to go back to exile on some colony world, alone with strangers. So when Yuri offered me the chance to live among my own people again, I jumped at the chance.
“He told me that his people dumped the lifepod in the ocean, that they disabled its tracker to make sure you would never find it. He took me to meet his people. He was of the bratva, the brotherhood. They were, as you say, the Russian crime families from before the war. Many of them became very powerful in General Antonov’s government---there were rumors that he, himself, was one of their number before he joined the military. They told me that they needed information from me---things they said that I did not even know I knew.” He scowled. “From there, they took me in a…flitter, you call them, one of the ducted-fan helicopters, to a small village, where they took me into a room with a hypnoprobe. They strapped me into the machine, and they drugged me. I don’t know what they asked me. After that, I remembered nothing until I woke up in the collection of cabins where you found me.”