by Rick Partlow
“Off,” McKay sighed with great reluctance.
The starfield surrounding him flickered away and suddenly he was back in the holochamber of the Patton’s recreation center, its bare walls staring balefully back at him. Standing in the chamber’s open door was Lieutenant, Junior Grade Ifeanyi, one of Patel’s junior staff officers, fidgeting like a four-year-old with a full bladder.
“What is it?” McKay asked impatiently.
“Sir, we’ve got a reply… from Earth, sir.”
“Well, Goddamnit,” Jason snarled, exploding out of the room past the stunned Fleet officer, “why didn’t you say so?”
McKay flew through the ship’s corridors at breakneck speed, nearly colliding with at least a dozen startled crewmembers on his way to the bridge. He’d delivered his message from the remote commo platform over twenty hours ago, and had almost given up hope of a reply. He’d retreated to the holochamber to relieve some stress after he realized he’d spent nearly two hours staring at the same page of a status report.
“Where is it?” he blurted as he zipped onto the bridge, braking his zero-g momentum against Captain Patel’s chair, earning a raised eyebrow from the ship’s master.
“Bring it up,” Patel ordered the communications officer.
The main viewscreen lit up, somewhat incongruously, with the seal of the Republic HoloNet, which faded into a face.
“Holy shit!” Jason’s breath caught in his throat and he rocked back, floating against the padded restraint bar behind the captain’s chair.
“Hi, Jason.” Shannon smiled at him from the screen. “Surprised to see me? For those of you who came in late”—she put on a serious expression—“I’m Lieutenant Shannon Stark of Fleet Intelligence, acting commander of the surviving Earth forces,” she sniffed derisively, “which consists, at the moment, of a few scattered platoons of RSC troops, a couple precincts worth of local police officers, and one slightly-beat up Presidential Security agent. The acting head of the Republic government is the sole surviving member of the Senate, as far as we know, Senator Daniel O’Keefe.” She glanced down with an almost imperceptible discomfort, then glanced back up. “Valerie’s safe, Jason, and so is Glen. Nathan’s dead.” She shook her head. “Anyway, we’ve got access to heavy weapons, and we’re ready to try to carry out the attack on the orbital weapons control center. We may not be a Marine special-ops team, but we’re all you’ve got. What we need now is a time. We can be ready within two weeks. We have a base of operations, but we’re still gathering our forces, plus we’ll need a few days for recon and training.
“Send us another broadcast, widebeam, with just the time—shift it exactly forty hours and ten minutes ahead, just in case they figure it out, and maybe camouflage it with another one of your commanding-general type speeches.”
Jason barely heard the snickers that remark elicited from a couple of the bridge officers.
On the screen, Shannon’s expression softened.
“Now, I hate to embarrass the acting commander of the Republic forces in front of all his loyal minions,” she went on, a glint in her sparkling green eyes, “but there’s one more thing I forgot to tell you last time we talked, and I want to make sure I pass this bit of information along, just in case.” She gazed into the screen, and Jason felt as if he could reach out and touch her, like she was only meters away instead of millions of kilometers.
“I love you,” she said, blinking at something in her eye. Shaking her head, she looked behind her and then back to the camera. “Well, got to go. Stark out.” The screen blackened, and, for a moment, all Jason heard was the sound of his own breathing.
Only when his face began to ache did he realize that he was wearing a huge, blithering-idiot grin.
Chapter Twenty
“Darkling they went under the lonely night.”
—Virgil, the Aeneid
Shannon tried not to hold her breath as she watched the Protectorate patrol roll by, the independent axles of their personnel carriers bouncing rhythmically with the ruts of the road. She lay sprawled over the frame of her battery-powered cycle, her heavy backpack—laden with ammo and a pair of missile launchers—in the brush beside her, where it had fallen when she’d ditched the bike.
Finally, the last vehicle passed by, its transceiver dish spinning slowly, and Shannon scrambled to a crouch, unslinging her rifle as she listened for any other threats. The night was silent, but for the gentle whisper of the north wind and the distant, mournful hooting of an owl. Satisfied that the Protectorates had gone, she stood and whistled softly. From the brush further along the side of the old Interstate, another figure emerged, walking a motorcycle back toward her.
“That was pretty close, ma’am,” Corporal Lee commented, reshouldering his pack.
“Get used to it,” she said, kickstanding her bike. “We’ll be seeing a lot more of them the closer we get to Capital City.” She waded into a stand of tall grass to grab her backpack.
“That was a good idea you had,” Lee went on, reminding her of a puppy dog with its tongue hanging out. “I mean, about all of us heading out separately and meeting outside the city. If we’d all been together, that patrol would have spotted us for sure.”
She grunted, not wanting to encourage the youth. He apparently had the idea that being paired with her meant he was the “teacher’s pet,” and he’d been talking nonstop ever since they’d left the base, excepting the two times they’d run across Protectorate patrols—one airborne and this one on the road. Of civilians and police, they had seen not a soul in the last fifteen hours. She hadn’t realized till lately just how few people lived outside the megalopolises anymore.
Things had moved quickly since they’d received Jason’s reply. They’d gathered together a hundred police officers and RSC troopers in the woodlands surrounding the base and used the few days they had for intensive training. It seemed only hours ago that she was briefing the assembled RSC and police officers in the base’s tactical center, using interactive video maps drawn off the central computer system.
“Since we’re dealing with such a diverse and inexperienced force,” she’d told them, “I’m going to keep this as simple as possible. I don’t want any of this information disseminated until we all reach the rally point outside Capital City—if any of your men are captured and interrogated, I don’t want them to know enough to kill the operation.” She’d looked each of them in the eye in turn. “Because this operation has to go on, ladies and gentlemen, no matter what.”
She’d used a laser pointer to indicate the map on the room’s main screen. “This is Capital City, which is built on what used to be called Long Island, and over to the west are the Ruins,” she’d told them, using the slang term for the huge stretch of abandoned buildings that had been New York City, Jersey City and Newark. “In-between is No Man’s Land—the security zone around the defense satellite control base and the civil communications center. It’s a full kilometer of thermal and sonic sensors, motion detectors and nonlethal traps. Thanks to Agent Klesko,” she said with a nod toward the big man, who was now able to walk with a cane, “we know the override codes to disable the traps, but once we use them, they’re going to know we’re coming. What we have to do is send in a small group on foot along the one path where the sensors don’t overlap—along the inlet between the coast and Fire Island—to sneak in and secure the President during the attack on the control center. I’ll be leading that team, which will consist of ten troopers hand-picked by Lieutenant Kristopolis, while the Lieutenant will lead the main strike force.”
“How’re you going to find the President?” Cleveland P.D. Lieutenant Melissa Sanchez had asked her. Sanchez was a powerfully-built woman with the body of a weightlifter but a surprisingly gentle face. Kristy had brought her in, along with twenty of her officers and almost the entire Cleveland ’plex Emergency Reaction Team. “After all, he could be anywhere in there.”
“We have to try,” Shannon had answered with a pensive shrug. “Kristy, you give us
half an hour to get into place, then go ahead with the attack—we have to take out the satellite controls, no matter what. You’ll have to use the missiles we mounted on the police riot vehicles to take out the Protectorate hoppers and APC’s first, then hit the transmission antennae. After that, we’ll try to extricate the President. It may be necessary to abandon the vehicles and retreat on foot if they use orbital bombardment.” She’d paused thoughtfully. “Of course, if they use orbital bombardment, it means the attack on their ships has failed and we’re all dead anyway, so I guess retreat isn’t that big a priority.”
“Was that why we did it this way, ma’am?” Lee asked, still rambling on, apparently not getting the idea. “’Cause it’d be harder for them to find us?”
“That’s one reason,” she said, swinging a leg over her cycle. A flick of her wrist brought the motor humming to life, the vibrations travelling through her utility fatigues and into her legs.
“What’s the other reason, ma’am?” he asked, starting his own bike.
“Someone’s got to get through. If we go in small groups,” she explained with a cold smile, “then they can’t kill us all before we get there.”
With that, she pushed off from the aged, cracked pavement and accelerated down the road. Lee followed somewhat hesitantly, the perpetual grin on his face blanching into something less confident.
* * *
“Tell me how this is supposed to work again,” Tom Crossman said, staring at the less-than-imposing bulk of Colonel Podbyrin’s courier—or rather, what had been his courier.
The little spacecraft had been pulled into Pallas’ pressurized drydock several days ago, and three teams of technicians had been working on it nonstop since then. The ship still retained its outward appearance, but an ungainly antiproton-drive booster pod had been grafted to its ass-end, meant to make up for the loss of two of its four fuel tanks. The bulbous hydrogen containers had been replaced with Marine boarding pods—heavily-armored capsules meant to be launched through the skin of a spaceship and insert troops. Rounded shells camouflaged the true nature of the pods, but any close examination would pierce that disguise—just as a thorough scan would reveal that the two-passenger control capsule that was formerly mounted on the nose of the modular craft had been replaced by a jury-rigged lookalike three times the size of the original and designed to shelter twenty people.
“Stop complaining,” Vinnie admonished Crossman, cinching the man’s armored chestplate tighter, jerking him backwards. “It’s simple—we get close enough to the Russian flagship, then we take the boarding pods right through the hull. After that, all we gotta do is reach the weapons control center and take it over until the Bradley and the Patton can come in behind us and wipe out the rest of them.” He spun the man around to face him and shoved a rifle into his hands. “What’s not to understand?”
“Actually,” Crossman muttered with a grimace, “I was only hoping I’d misunderstood something.”
Before either of them could comment further, Jason McKay and Jock Mahoney came through the drydock’s safety lock with Ari Shamir, Gunny Lambert and the rest of the Marine Reaction Force in tow, decked in full body armor and bristling with weapons.
“Everybody on board,” McKay said. “We got four days ahead in that piece of shit, and I’d like to get it over with as soon as possible.”
“You really think this is going to work, sir?” Crossman asked him. “I mean, there’s only us against that whole ship—and if Lieutenant Stark doesn’t take out the ground control center…”
“Think positive, Tom,” McKay urged with mock enthusiasm. He reached out to pat the chevrons on the man’s shoulder. “You’re a sergeant now—you have to be an example for the men.” He turned to Clarke, one of the autogunners. “Doesn’t Sergeant Crossman inspire you, Clarke?”
“He’s my fuckin’ hero, sir,” the big man grunted.
“There you go, Tom,” Jason said. “Now get your ass on board.”
Crossman followed the others down the skeleton-frame stairway to the access hatch in the side of the courier, leaving Jason on the platform with Ari Shamir and Gunny Lambert.
“Lieutenant Stark’s a good soldier, sir,” Lambert told him, hesitating at the top of the stairs. “We can count on her.”
“I know we can, Gunny,” Jason assured him. The Gunnery Sergeant eyed him closely for a moment, head cocked strangely, as if he saw something different, then turned and headed after his men.
“What was that all about?” Jason wondered, glancing at Ari.
“He was saying to me a couple minutes ago,” Shamir replied, “that there was something different about you the last couple days—good different. But he couldn’t put his finger on it.”
“I think I know what it is.” Jason pulled his helmet out from under his arm and put it on, sliding back the faceplate. “I feel like a Marine again, Ari,” he said thoughtfully. “And the weird thing is,” he went on with a wistful smile, taking a step down the stairs toward the ship, “it feels good.”
* * *
Valerie shivered, hugging her arms to her as she paced out into the chill of the night air, letting the fake door to the fake barracks building swing shut behind her. A single bulb mounted above the doorway lit the path out a few meters, but beyond that everything was swallowed in the darkness of the moonless night. At the edge of the cone of feeble light was Glen Mulrooney, hands stuffed in the pockets of his jacket, gazing out at the sky.
“Glen,” she said, stepping up to him—actually, waddling was more accurate, she thought ruefully.
He turned, frowning at the sight of her in a too-small RSC field jacket over the dress she’d worn to the President’s speech. “Val, you shouldn’t be out here,” he admonished her. “You’ll get sick.”
“I just woke up and saw you weren’t in bed,” she explained. “I was worried.” She put a hand on his shoulder. “You wanted to go with them, didn’t you?”
“I didn’t ask,” he admitted dejectedly. “I knew Lieutenant Stark would’ve said no. But I feel so impotent just sitting around here, not knowing what’s happening.”
“Daddy feels the same way,” she told him. “He’s always been in control—and now, when he has the responsibility for the whole government, suddenly everything’s out of his hands.”
“Life’s that way sometimes,” he said, stepping away from her, letting her hand slide off his back. “You think you know where your life is going, you think that everything’s under control, and then you realize it was all an illusion, and you don’t know anything.” His eyes fixed on her. “Or anybody.”
“I know things have been a bit rough between us, Glen,” Valerie said. “And I’m sorry. It’s just that things have seemed so different since Aphrodite…” She trailed off into a cough, winced as it sent a sudden pain through her distended abdomen.
“Are you all right?” he asked dully, more from rote than from any real concern.
“I’m a lot of things, Glen,” she replied with a sigh, shoulders sagging, “but ‘all right’ is not one of them.”
Glen didn’t feel any urge to be sympathetic—didn’t feel anything but an almost uncontrollable impulse to tell her that he knew, to scream that she’d betrayed him. But that was something the old Glen Mulrooney would have done, so he just said, “Maybe you should go back inside.”
“Maybe I should, maybe I should,” she murmured, her words slurring as she seemed to rock back and forth unsteadily.
“Val?” Glen took a step toward her, finally feeling real concern.
“Oh, God…” she moaned, clutching at her stomach, and then she collapsed forward into his arms.
“Val!” Glen staggered with her unconscious weight, but managed to lower her gently to the ground, one hand behind her back, the other at her right thigh. It was then that he felt the moistness soaking the lower half of her dress. “Jesus!” he exclaimed, suddenly realizing that his hand had come away from her thigh slick with blood.
His head wagged back and fort
h between Valerie’s motionless form and the door to the barracks, frantically debating in that split second whether to go for help or try to lift her and take her inside himself. He realized with a piercing ray of perception that there was no way he could handle her weight and that the attempt might just injure her further.
“Help!” he shouted as he threw open the door to the barracks, sprinting down the stairs. “We need help out here!”
Chapter Twenty-One
“God is on the side not of the biggest battalions but of the best shots.”
—Voltaire
The metallic bulk of a Protectorate hopper paced jerkily from one side of the fenced-in compound to the other, its groin-mounted cannon scanning from side to side, throwing an elongated shadow over the sterile, sandy soil. Most of the control center was underground: only the black wedge of the cargo entrance scarred the surface, its huge double-doors yawning invitingly open. The massive, skeletal dish antennae surrounded the entrance, each protected by the same sonic stun fences that guarded the base’s perimeter, and each patrolled by half-squads of biomechs. At the gap in the sonic fences that formed the security entrance, a pair of trollish figures in powered armor squatted motionless, shoulder-mounted weapons trained outward.
Shannon lowered her binoculars, hissing a sigh through her teeth as she stared westward at the setting sun.
“It’s about what we expected,” Kristopolis said with a shrug, still staring across the kilometer of open, grassy plain.
“As long as they don’t spot us,” Shannon whispered hopefully.
The makeshift assault force was spread out through the trees of Powell Federal Preserve, peering through the old security fence that marked the border of No-Man’s Land. Their dozen or so vehicles were parked further back under cover from orbital surveillance. Shannon was amazed so many had made it through—she credited it to the fact that the Protectorate had spread their forces so thin. They’d only lost two of the two-to-four-person groups they’d sent out, leaving them with nearly sixty troops. They’d linked up only three hours before, on the outskirts of the Ruins, and held a final mission brief before taking up their positions here, at the edge of the forest. Now, there was nothing to do but wait for sunset.