by Rick Partlow
“No use,” she shook her head, finally responding to the Senator. “By now, if any military forces are organizing a resistance, they’ll be staying off the public or civil channels. Once we get to the base, we might find something out.”
“What difference does it make?” Valerie muttered. “We can’t get away from them. They killed Nathan. They’ll kill all of us.”
“Honey,” Senator O’Keefe said, pulling her to him, stroking her hair, “you can’t think like that. Lieutenant Stark will keep us safe. Everything’s going to be all right.”
Shannon stifled the mocking laugh she felt coming up her throat. Everything, she thought to herself, was definitely not going to be all right. If everything was all right, then one of the most noble and courageous men she’d ever met wouldn’t be lying dead on the ground with a chestful of scrap metal. She’d tried not to think about Nathan, knowing that she didn’t have the luxury of dealing with that grief until she’d gotten them all to safety, but she couldn’t help but feel the hollow inside her—and she couldn’t banish from her mind the image of his face, peaceful and untouched, satisfied in death as he was in life that he’d discharged his duty.
“What’s that?” Glen lunged forward in his seat, pointing at a spot below them, at a string of lights that stretched out over a kilometer from east to west.
“That,” Shannon announced, checking the distance they’d travelled on the flitter’s computer readout, “is the base.”
She took the aircraft down to twenty meters, skirting the edge of the woodline, finding herself travelling along an old secondary road, unused since the Crisis and the Reclamation Laws. Bordering the rutted road was an old-fashioned chain-link fence, with three strands of razor-wire along the top, interrupted at evenly-spaced intervals by wooden light poles. She would have thought the fence the relic of some old farm or factory shut down fifty years ago… but the lights were still burning.
She slowed the flitter as they approached the center of the fence—and a gate.
“Couldn’t we just fly over it?” Glen wondered as she brought the craft down.
“Not… not a good idea,” Klesko spoke unexpectedly. Apparently, his last brush with unconsciousness had been precipitated by sleep rather than blood loss. He hauled himself up by the back of Glen’s seat, sticking his head into the cockpit. “Automatic security systems would knock us down with a maser. There’s a keypad on the gate. I know the code.”
The gate swung open with a hum of well-maintained motors that belied the out-of-date look of the place, and Shannon brought the flitter through, staying low and close to the road. The running lights of the ducted-fan hovercraft didn’t penetrate far into the inky blackness, but Shannon caught sight of the ruby flash of eyes just at the edge of her vision. She knew it was just the reflection of their headlamps off of a herd of deer or wild hogs, but she had a sudden, disquieting image of them riding the hovercraft into the netherworld like the Stygian boatman, with a host of red-eyed demons surrounding them in the blackness.
The dirt track, rather than leading to Hades, brought them to a group of squat, wooden structures which Shannon assumed to be military barracks. They seemed to be relics of at least a century ago, their doors and windows boarded up, the decades-old paint nearly stripped from their rotting flanks. She brought the flitter to a hover in the center of the collection of huts, looked back to Klesko.
“You’re the tour guide,” she told him without the humor the words might have contained. “Where to now?”
“The big one.” He gestured at the largest—by a slim margin—of the barracks buildings, only a dozen meters from where they sat.
Shannon cut power to the fans, and let the flitter settle gently on its landing skids, hitting the controls to pop the hatches. A rush of chill air into the cabin reminded them forcefully that Ohio was not sharing the gently warm fall they’d left in New York and set them all shivering fitfully. Glen and Senator O’Keefe helped lift Agent Klesko out of the passenger compartment and the five of them hobbled wearily over to the front door of the hut. Incongruously, set in the face of the rotting wood door was a keypad identical to the one they had seen in the front gate. Klesko leaned heavily against Glen’s shoulder as he tapped in an alphanumeric code and was rewarded with a satisfied beep.
The door powered open with a pneumatic hiss, revealing ten centimeters of duralloy backing the rotted facade, and a staircase leading downward.
“Well,” Glen murmured, remembering the Governor’s shelter back on Aphrodite, “talk about deja vu.”
“I’ll go first,” Shannon said, drawing her pistol. Glen had kept the empty rifle—he still carried it slung over his shoulder like a totem.
Shannon led them down the stairway. Each step was lit by a chemical striplight, but the end of the passage was swallowed in darkness. She descended slowly, dragging one hand against a wall for balance, feeling Mulrooney’s breath on her neck as he nearly crawled up her back. She spared him an annoyed glance and he backed off a step with a sheepish look.
At the foot of the stairs was another door, this one without the camouflage or the keypad—a simple lever was mounted instead, and Shannon whispered a prayer that it wasn’t locked from the inside as she reached for it. The lever moved hesitantly, with a creak of rust, but it did move and the heavy door swung open. Behind it was the gaping maw of a shotgun and the wide, frightened eyes of a young man.
“Shit!” Glen exclaimed, nearly letting Klesko drop as he fumbled with the rifle slung over his shoulder.
“Don’t shoot,” Shannon said firmly, hands raised to the ceiling. “We’re friends!”
“Who are you people?” the boy stammered—he couldn’t have been older than nineteen and looked even younger, despite his uniform. “What are you doing here?”
“I’m Lieutenant Stark, Fleet Intelligence.” Shannon spoke quickly, trying to relax the boy’s trigger finger. She fished her I.D. from her hip pocket and held it in the light from the other side of the door. “We’ve just come from the Capital—have you heard what’s going on?”
“Have I heard?” the young soldier snorted, lowering his weapon, running a hand through his close-cut black hair. “Jesus Christ, ma’am, what else have I heard?” He looked past her at the bedraggled band, at Klesko’s burned face and Valerie leaning wearily against the wall, wincing at the pain in her back. “Come on inside.”
They followed him into a well-lit chamber taken up mostly by communications equipment. A plain, plastic-upholstered couch had been dragged into the room and set in front of the room’s main viewscreen, and Glen and Senator O’Keefe lowered Klesko onto it carefully. Val sat on the edge of the couch and worked at the agent’s bandage—she seemed to have absorbed herself in caring for the man since Tanaka’s death.
“I’m Corporal Lee, ma’am,” the teenager told Shannon, setting his flechette gun on one of the control boards. His plain, brown uniform, she noticed with something of a start, was that of the Republic Service Corps—the Janitor Corps, Marine troops called them. Those who were unsuited for space travel for one reason or another served their mandatory two years in the Service Corps, providing unskilled labor for one or another construction or reclamation project, security for government facilities and cleanup crews for natural disasters. Their reputation in military circles was somewhere on a par with the Colonial Guard—only not as ruthless nor as well-trained.
“How did you end up here, Corporal?” Shannon asked casually, trying to keep her preconceived opinion of the Corps out of her tone.
“We were assigned to keep the place up,” the Corporal told her, leaning back against the console. “Me’n Raj… PFC Vingh, I mean. We’re part of a maintenance platoon quartered over by Cleveland ’plex. We were over here doing preventative maintenance on the machinery when we caught the news—just a flash before everything went dead. We didn’t know what to do. We couldn’t get the Lieutenant over the radio because of all the traffic and the static.” There was real fear in the boy’s dark eyes as
he related the story to Shannon—she tried to imagine a pair of lower-income draftees stuck out in the middle of nowhere, cut off from any leadership while the world fell apart around them.
“We were going to take our truck back to the ’plex,” Lee went on, “but then, about an hour ago, we got the first play of the message.” He shrugged. “After that, we decided it would be better if Raj went back and I stayed here and monitored things.”
“What message?” Shannon wanted to know. “We stopped listening three hours ago, when everything went off the air.”
“So did we,” Corporal Lee said. “But this shit”—he jerked a thumb at the commo gear behind him—“picks up any wide-band communication automatically. And ma’am,” he went on, grinning despite himself, “this sucker was wide, wide band.” He leaned over and punched a series of controls and the main screen—an old-fashioned, LCD flatscreen—flickered to life. “I taped the first one,” Lee explained, sliding off the desk to give them all a clear view.
An image formed slowly on the meter-wide screen, coalescing from a hazy darkness into the figure of a man. Everything about him spoke of strength. He was powerfully-built, his broad shoulders and thick neck straining the seams of his old-fashioned grey suit, his clenching hands large and thick-fingered. Grey was sprinkled liberally through his bushy mustache and the hair at his temple, but it seemed more to signify the wisdom of experience than the weakness of old age. Behind him hung a flag: red and white vertical bars, centered by a circle of stars.
Even before he spoke, Shannon knew who he was. There was no mistaking the jut of that cleft jaw or the set of his beady brown eyes; they had jumped out at her from a thousand old videos in history classes and political science lectures. But though she knew it for a certainty, every fiber of her being screamed, No, it can’t be.
“I am,” the man spoke, his voice a boulder crashing on a field of gravel, “General Sergei Pavlovich Antonov.” The corners of his mouth turned up slightly. “You may have heard of me.”
“Holy God,” Klesko muttered from the couch. Beside him, Valerie’s eyes were the size of pie-plates. Her father’s mouth had dropped open, and he backed up, falling awkwardly to a seat on an arm of the couch. Glen was watching silently, expression neutral.
“Feel free to doubt whether I am truly the man I claim to be,” Antonov continued, a hint of a Slavic accent evident in his voice. “I shall not go into how I have survived over a century without appearing to have aged, since your belief or disbelief in no way affects my actions. What you must believe, however, is that the fist of the Protectorate has returned to reclaim what is ours. Once before, we offered to lead the oppressed masses of this world to liberation, but the forces of the reactionaries resorted to the ultimate in aggression to thwart us, and we were left with no choice but to withdraw and regroup.
“Regroup we have.” A vibrant light burned in Antonov’s eyes. “Our strength is renewed and we have come to unseat the pretenders who have stolen our revolution and used it to enrich the upper class exploiters. They have claimed to defend your freedom, yet they have enslaved you and imprisoned you in their gulag cities and kept you docile with their bread and circuses. No more. Our soldiers have crushed the defenses of the corporate masters, and you will soon be free.
“To those remnants of the oppressor military which may hold out hope of opposing us, this warning is for you,” the big man said harshly, the affectionate tone melting into fiery rancor. “You may think your spacecraft and weaponry superior to ours, but you may wish to reconsider.”
The image of Antonov disappeared, replaced by a shot of Gregory Jameson. The Republic president seemed disheveled but unharmed, sitting on an office chair with a biomech’s weapon pointed at his head.
“This is the corporate puppet who arrogates himself as your leader,” said the Russian’s voice-over. “He is being held in the ground control center for your network of defense satellites. We have destroyed your military space station and have assumed total control of these orbital weapons.” Shannon flinched, stomach twisting as she realized that Colonel Mellanby was likely dead—along with a thousand other Fleet personnel. “Any attack on our space vessels will be met by the fire of your own ground-based laser weapons and will provoke us to use the fusion missiles in your military satellites on your population centers. Any attack on the satellite control center will result in the immediate execution of the pretender Jameson and a terrible retribution by our ships in orbit on one of your cities.”
The image on the screen switched back to Antonov, his eyes afire with the same glare they’d possessed when he’d declared war on China.
“Our demands are simple: complete and unconditional surrender by all military forces. Your ships will immediately assume a high-earth orbit, deactivate all drives and weapons systems and prepare for boarding. Your ground forces will lay down their arms and report to Capital City within the next forty-eight hours. Anyone caught wearing a military uniform after that deadline will be shot on sight. Anyone attempting to interfere with Protectorate troops will be shot on sight. Be assured that any action against us is futile, and will not only result in the deaths of the aggressors but in the deaths of civilians. I am not a monster, and I do not wish this to happen, so do not force my hand.”
Antonov’s expression transformed once more, from the ruthless warrior to the revolutionary ideologue. “When last I left this world, I was consumed, obsessed only with winning back the glory of my Slavic brethren and, one day, making whole the Motherland. Since then, my travels and experiences have helped me to grow—and my dreams have grown as well. Now, I seek not just the liberation of my own people, but all people. All those among you who love liberty, rejoice! Your time has come at long last.”
Lee hit a button and the screen faded to black.
“There was some other shit about penalties and curfews,” the corporal said, “but you get the gist of it.”
“It must be some kind of trick,” Senator O’Keefe said, hands visibly trembling. “Antonov—even if he survived the war, he’d be dead long ago. It’s got to be a trick.”
“I don’t know,” Shannon admitted, still staring at the screen. “The reason I’m—I was back here was to report our findings on the investigation at Aphrodite.” She turned and looked the Senator in the eye. “Those ‘alien’ Invaders, Senator, were actually biomechanical constructs, assembled from cloned tissue—cloned human tissue.” She saw Daniel O’Keefe’s eyes narrow and nodded. “We managed to piece together a theory, and it looks like we were right.”
“What kind of theory?” Glen asked. He seemed, incredibly, unfazed by the series of revelations. Maybe, she thought, he’d finally reached the point where he couldn’t be shocked anymore.
“According to rumors among the Russian scientific community,” she told them, “the first Protectorate ships that were sent to the asteroid belt discovered some kind of gateway—a hole in space that led to another solar system, somewhere. They reported their discovery, but before Antonov could do anything about it, the war with China broke out. Sometime during or after the nuclear exchange, the stories say, Antonov and his staff and personal guard took a shuttle to the ships that were waiting in orbit for their planned Mars mission.
“Our theory was that Antonov took the ships through the gateway and that somewhere on the other side, someone or something found them and used them for their genetic material to create the army of biomechs that invaded Aphrodite.”
“You said that was your theory,” Senator O’Keefe interrupted.
“Yes, sir,” she explained. “If that is Antonov, then the Russians that escaped through that gateway weren’t just the victims—they are and have been collaborators.”
“But what can we do about it?”
“That’s your decision, sir,” she told him. She couldn’t help but want to laugh. Jason would love this. “With the President in enemy hands and his staff and the other members of the Senate dead, you are the acting head of the Republic.”
; Chapter Eighteen
“The whole art of war consists of guessing at what is on the other side of the hill.”
—The Duke of Wellington
Jason woke from a fever-dream of shark-eyed blue monsters to a rush of frigid air and the bitter aftertaste of biotic fluid. He choked out a hacking cough and forced his eyes open. For a long moment, he was convinced the face looming over him was a creature come to life from his nightmares, but then it coalesced into the severe bangs and perpetually disapproving gaze of Commander Hellene D’Annique, First Officer of the Patton.
“Captain wants to see you on the bridge,” she told him curtly, “soonest.”
“Yes’m,” he croaked, but she was gone.
“What the fuck, over?” Jason heard Vinnie’s voice beside him and tried to sit up—and quickly discovered what the NCO was bitching about. His head felt like it weighed ten kilos. And it probably did.
“We’re still at three gee’s,” Vinnie said, steadying himself against the side of his chamber.
“Emergency deceleration,” McKay guessed, prying himself painfully out of his g-sleep chamber. “Something’s wrong.” From everywhere around him, he could hear the groans and complaints of the Marines and the scientific staff—apparently, the Fleet personnel had been revived earlier.
“Orders, sir?” Vinnie asked him.
McKay glanced around, saw that Jock and Tom’s eyes were on him as well.
“Collect Lieutenant Shamir and Gunny Lambert,” Jason instructed him, “and meet me in Situation Room Three in an hour.”
* * *
Jason watched the image of Antonov fade from the main bridge viewscreen, his heart pounding. He jerked his head toward Captain Arvid Patel, saw the man watching him with a somber expression.
“The ship’s computer picked it up out around the orbit of Saturn,” the spare, thin-faced Fleet officer told him, “and brought me out of g-sleep.” He grimaced. “We were still braking at five-gees, and believe me, it wasn’t half as pleasant as it is now.”