Fire, Ruin, and Fury (Embers Saga)

by Matthew Taylor

  “If you have creative solutions, from now on bring them to me or Rashid after the meetings. …Or before the meetings, if you can peel yourself away from the all-night carousing.”

  There it is, Patrick thought.

  “Yes, Sir,” Alias submitted again. “Sorry, Sir.”

  “You have a lot of promise, Alias,” Thomas volunteered. “And we have need of promising young people. But get your head screwed on. …And get Patrick’s head on straight while you’re at it.”

  “Yes Sir,” Alias answered, visibly taken by surprise by Thomas’ comments. “I – I will Sir.”

  “Good,” Thomas muttered, gruff but satisfied. “Now go call your father and make sure you can make good on this promise you made—and that he understands what’s at stake. Then you boys go get some sleep and be ready to function next time I see you.”

  Patrick felt his father pat him on the shoulder as he passed, bidding Patrick to lead Alias to a nearby V-plat room, but he didn’t say another word. Part of Patrick’s punishment.

  The call to Alias’ father was mercifully quick, and Patrick rushed to follow his orders to rest. He woke up some hours later to the sound of Bully calling again on his wrist-plat. He felt better, but he was disoriented by the hours that had passed, the summer gloaming casting his room lavender as he rose. The putrid cotton balls had returned to his mouth, but at least this time the room was clean, and the air smelled fresh. He rubbed his face and made his way to the restroom to rinse his mouth.

  “Well, well,” Bully mocked as Patrick emerged downstairs. “Prince Caligula has risen!” Patrick rolled his eyes disdainfully, though he felt the sting of the half-joke. “Your father’s in the main conference room. If you’re feeling well enough, you might consider joinin’ him.”

  Patrick, still feeling rough, fought his desire to punch Bully is his giant, red face. His father would never tolerate it, and Bully could take the shot and break him into pieces. This meant carte blanche for Bully to say pretty-much whatever he pleased to Patrick, with no real concern for consequence. But Patrick understood that Bully didn’t cajole him out of malice.

  Frustration, maybe, Patrick figured. Disappointment.

  Patrick knew, even when Bully was being a jackass, that the man wanted Patrick to demonstrate that he was ready—or at least becoming ready—to lead the family empire. Bully loved Thomas like kin, and he had loved his mother the same way before she died. And Bully loved Patrick and his little brother Joey, making his disappointed reactions to Patrick’s shenanigans hard to swallow.

  Why am I such a fuck-up? Patrick felt his bloodlust against Bully turning inward.

  “Is Alias awake?” Patrick asked.

  “Awake and gone,” Bully answered, matter-of-factly. “Only slept a couple hours. Then got up and took a shuttle back to Park City to sort out this shit-show he invented.”

  Despite Bully’s scoffing tone, Patrick recognized that Bully partly admired Alias’ grit. It was a characteristic Bully hoped Patrick would one day develop, but in response, Patrick shrugged nonchalantly and started down the hall to the base’s watch center to find his father.

  Sitting now in his assigned seat at the end of the conference table, Patrick kneaded his temples, hoping for some relief as Bully made his way to the front of the room for the evening briefing. His father sat in his usual dignified posture at the head of the massive oval wooden table, flanked by his advisors. Bully began his march across the Province, then expanded to the Commonwealth, and on to areas of interest abroad.

  Weather across the Mid-Atlantic Province always came first, as weather seemed to drive almost everything else. Then disease outbreaks. Locations of criminals and suspected insurrectionists. Outbreaks of violence, mostly in the shanties. The positions of the Mid-Atlantic Provincial Militia, the security units of Baumgarten Enterprises, the federal Domestic Security Service. Reports of immigrant incursions. Activity along the sea-mine barrier.

  They skipped most of the happenings in the rest of the country, having just covered it with the Gang of Seven and turned instead to the disposition of Mid-At units deployed with the Commonwealth Expeditionary Force. Naval units patrolling the coast. An air guard unit in Africa. An attack team in Iceland. And to Patrick’s surprise, a joint unit in far-away Indonesia—which struck him as odd, since Mid-At units were invariably deployed eastwards across the Atlantic. The conversation had moved on before he could ask, so he let it go rather than interrupt.

  Next, Bully covered Baumgarten Industries and its subsidiaries and affiliates. Facilities and shipping lines. Agricultural production. Electronics, pharmaceuticals, and heavy equipment. Profits and losses for their holdings in banking, legal services, construction, public utilities, hospitals. Their stakes in the international consortiums.

  Then their Defensive Products Division, from small arms and ammunition to field artillery. The more sensitive, off-the-books business of advanced lethal aid—drones, tactical EMPs, spare parts for banned military hardware, lethal and debilitative gas bombs.

  His father’s small group then deliberated about the business opportunities presented by the latest fraying of the social order. Payments to marauders, mercenaries, rebels, and coyotes—and the sale of weapons, equipment, and matériel by Baumgarten Industries. Accounts payable. Accounts receivable. Some transactions profitable in their own right, and others beneficial only in weakening his family’s enemies.

  Patrick recalled the first briefing he had ever endured, when his father decided he was old enough to learn the family business—and the words his father spoke when the shock and horror descended on his face.

  “It’s the way of the world,” his father told him. “We are not to blame for the world we inherited. We do what we can to alleviate suffering. As important, we maintain order. Most of all, we ensure that our family doesn’t get sucked into the vortex. Don’t ever pretend you’re something you are not, and rest assured that many, many people would happily force poverty and deprivation on you, if they got the chance. And not just the Templetons. I mean the people you consider your friends, and others you’ve never even met. Only our wits, our steel resolve—and yes, when necessary, our savagery—stops them.”

  That was the first time Patrick could recall feeling the gravity of the world. It was a wordless blend of remorse, anguish, fear, anxiety, and anger. A profound sense that he was somehow on the wrong side of history—the wrong side of some universal order. Only the death of his mother was a more somber moment in his young life.

  There was no denying the realities around him. He already sensed that the other families in the aristocracy would raze the Baumgarten family without hesitation. He could feel it with every interaction, no matter how social, celebratory, or intimate.

  His father even referred to the families and workers closest to them as “partners”—never “friends.” He cited the long history of fickle alliances to pound mistrust into Patrick’s mindset. The 19th Century alliance between the United States and France, ignored as soon as France went to war with Great Britain. The Hitler-Stalin Non-Aggression Pact, betrayed suddenly with the fury of Operation Barbarossa. The Ogallala Agreement that degenerated into the water wars—delivering and undoing the sovereignty of the southwestern states.

  Patrick wouldn’t wish the life of a commoner on anyone, much less himself or his partners. His natural, sunnier disposition, which had made him the object of his mother’s doting attention before she died, shielded him from the overwhelming implications of having no real friends in a dangerous and unforgiving world. So, feelings of optimism and pessimism, philanthropy and misanthropy, went back and forth in his mind, like the angry tides of the Atlantic.

  Bully was the only exception his father allowed. However, Patrick was starting to see a future after his father—and even after Bully—and he suspected Alias might be his Bully after a time.

  As Bully’s words blended together, Patrick swallowed hard and tried to focus on the last words his mother had said to him. A whisper over her death
rattle as she lay in bed anaesthetized beyond consciousness.

  “Do what your father asks and learn what he teaches you. But don’t become him.”

  Chapter 25: Arrested on the Coit

  (Paul Lancaster)

  Paul Lancaster emerged from his tent and surveyed the hot and dusty hillside, the golden-orange rays of the morning sun splintering through the horizon’s ragged tree line. Transport trucks would soon lumber on the elevated berm that split the camp down the middle, kicking up plumes of fine red dust from the road as they went. A hazy smoke drifted through the camp, mingling with the dust to cover almost everything with a thin layer of greasy, pink residue. He gazed out upon the still, dreamlike morning, row after row of camouflage tents, umbrellas, canopies, and sun-sails dotting the hillside he now called home. Under the thicket of scrawny, withered trees—the gasping remnants of a jungle—the guards on duty stared glassy-eyed, unmoving from their tree-house perches to the meadow of brown grass—"the Minge”—which stood stiff and silent in the still air.

  Paul reflected on the last time he had stopped to take in the vista, though he had awoken then to find the camp already alive with motion. Squinting to focus, he watched the workers, each moving at his own slow, methodical pace, conserving energy in anticipation of the afternoon sun’s murderous heat. Fatigue and sleepiness hung on the air with the smoke and dust, as the gaunt and dirty soldiers readied themselves for the day. Some sat in pockets of shade, spooning their breakfasts from tin plates, while others clutched their dented metal mugs, sipping Cafecito, the nearly ubiquitous drink of the Agricultural Consortium, which advertised that it tasted “just like the coffee of the Ellies.” Few had really slept as the last of the night-sentries staggered in from their rounds, pathetically eager to make their own futile attempts at sleep. The zwip-vwap of zippers blended with the sound of shuffling boots on dry dirt and the faint clattering of guns being holstered, cleaned, or loaded.

  Woozy from the muggy heat and dust that greeted him as he left his tent, Paul bent over, hands on his knees, to catch his breath. He wiped the greasy pink film from the screen of his wrist-plat. 06:00. He sat down on the collapsible canvas stool just outside his tent, put his head between his knees for a moment, and took several deep breaths. He put on his double-mesh shirt, which smelled like a wet towel that had been left in a hot car for too long. He’d slept in his dirty cargo shorts again the night before, and he willed himself to pull on clean knee socks and fresh mesh leggings, buttoning them to the cuffs of his shorts and the tops of his boots.

  His tent mate, Chris Parmooch, appeared at the entrance of their tent and stepped out to join Paul on the tarp they affectionately called “the patio.”

  “Morning,” croaked Chris, donning his bucket hat, its insect mesh rolled up around the brim.

  “‘Mornin’,” Paul answered, unable to muster, “good morning,” as every day here started the same crappy way. Trudge up the hill to a breakfast of bacteria-generated biotein, fashioned to resemble eggs, cheese, meat, etc. Bitter, black Cafecito.

  The Ellies must like the taste of shit, he often thought.

  Then, assignments check. Any combination of vehicle repairs, supply loading, and weapons checks. Sentry duty and perimeter patrol. Filling old foxholes. Digging new ones. Spilling sandbags. Filling sandbags. Always more digging. Some days, usually unexpectedly, he was summoned to fly. Recon missions, show-of-force sorties, or search and rescue excursions.

  Chris dipped his hands into his up-side-down helmet, half-full of murky water and splashed his face. It had taken only a day in the hooch for Paul to appreciate the varied uses of the combat helmet, though only the night patrols and air crews ever put them on for their intended purpose. The rest wagered that they’d more likely die from heat exhaustion, dysentery, or dehydration than from a head shot. Its most popular use was Chris’, a receptacle for a cooling splash of water (mixed with disinfectant, insect repellant, and sunscreen). But it was also a useful shovel, seat, basket, and rain catcher.

  “Ready to head up?” asked Chris. “I’m fucking starving. I’ll eat your goddamned leg off if we miss morning chow. Might do that anyways. …better’n soupy biotein eggs.”

  “Well, my leg does come with two juevos and a hot salchicha,” joked Paul, standing up and adjusting his package. “If your good, I’ll shoot you some warm mayo too.” Satisfied with his comeback, and grateful for Chris’ indefatigable humor, Paul slung his rifle over his shoulder, and greeted Mauricio Gonzales and Phil Kim, comrades in a next-door tent, before turning to schlepp up the hill.

  “‘Sup Cracker,” Mauricio chimed. Mauricio was an equal-opportunity shit talker, with biting caricatures at the ready for anyone who took their “memberships” too seriously. He carried a special pouch of bile for the Chinese, though that was pretty common in the Expeds. More amusing to Paul were his unrestrained barbs against blacks, Anglos, Nordics, Asians of all varieties, Jews, Slavs, Arabs, and mezclados (of which he was one).

  Mauricio noted that he “lent” everyone in the unit respect—on account—to start, but no one was exempt from hearing his sweeping stereotypes and ruthless diatribes against the “members,” his own double entendre for factions and dick-heads. He more than once revoked respect privileges for those who clung too tightly to their memberships or bound their loyalties too narrowly, as people are wont to do, by ethnicity, race, linguistic group, religion, country, or province—or whatever.

  “Whaddaya think?” he once asked Phil Kim, his own tent mate, who had waxed too patriotic one evening over dinner. “You think the Ellies feel any special bond with you? Yer just low-class filth now. …You got more in common with cracker-caster over there.” Paul ignored the unprovoked improvisation on his name. “Ignorant fuck-tard, man. I give you a week to spend with dot-head Gajah over there,” he added, gesturing to Gajah Mada, the embed from the Indian Army. “After that, respect privileges are revoked.”

  Phil Kim, for his part, had become immune to his tent-mate’s jokes and insults. Phil came from a fallen Ellie family, who’d lost everything for reasons he never discussed. Despite his family’s meager resources, Phil had been on his way to becoming a doctor at Commonwealth Federal University. But his education was cut short when his home town of Charleston fell to a mega-storm, and much of his family went missing. Almost immediately upon his return home, he was conscripted by the provincial militia. The officers who press-ganged him were smart enough to give him a respectable title and officer rank—just in case his family turned up alive. When that never happened, his family’s remaining assets were seized by the Senator of the Mid-Atlantic Province, and he was reduced in rank and became a de facto slave to the military. Still he was the best educated and smartest of the lot, and that bought him both ridicule and respect.

  Phil was the first to explain to Paul in any logical way how they all ended up in what they collectively called the Coit—the place where “they send boys to get properly fucked.” Unknown to Paul as his family made their harrowing trek from Cali-Sur to Ozark’s Province, the far-off Pacific archipelago was unraveling from its own waves of mega-storms, ethnic and class resentments, oligarchic feuds. Following a major storm, which destroyed much of the harvest, locusts swarmed, destroying the rest. Mosquitoes bred in the warm standing water, and sickness swept through both the countryside and the teeming urban slums. Pandemic and starvation gripped the country, followed soon by violence.

  The country’s ethnic Chinese launched a rebellion—ostensibly to protest the slow disaster-relief efforts—but just as likely to foment secession and bring parts of the country into the orbit of the United Provinces of China. The oligarchy cracked-down hard, triggering Chinese intervention—to protect the minority population. The subsequent Chinese tactic of “pacification” took shape in a dozen atrocities, mostly against Muslims, drawing in the Pan-Islamic Caliphate. The fighting worsened the torrent of misery, and the Chief Regent decided to deploy a relief mission, if only to prevent another mass exodus of Asians to the Commonwealth
’s west coast.

  Paul also learned through Phil that most of the soldiers in the company were from the Great Lakes, Ozarks, and Mid-Atlantic provincial militias. Although Paul had had no luck in finding soldiers from Cali-Sur in the unit, he wouldn’t have noticed, and even if he had noticed, he wouldn’t have thought it odd the way Phil did. Paul just noticed that he often felt left out when his comrades talked of home, and he wished he thought as fondly of his own origins.

  Gajah Mada joined up with Paul’s gang on the way to breakfast. He too was an outsider like Paul. Gajah was on loan from the Indian Army to the Mid-Atlantic Provincial militia and was mistakenly swept up in the Commonwealth Security Lottery. The Senator from the Mid-Atlantic Province had been trying to extricate Gajah ever since, an irony that wasn’t lost on Phil or any of the others from Senator Thomas Baumgarten’s fiefdom.

  Up to the point of his deployment, the worsening situation in the Indonesian archipelago hadn’t even entered Gajah’s consciousness, just as it hadn’t for Paul. Gajah had requested the assignment to the Mid-At militia, if only to be nearer to his childhood playmate and school-age sweetheart, Saanvi Raman, who had been recruited for a job in the Commonwealth by the International Energy Consortium. She was forever "the one that got away,” and his heart had anguished for her since she boarded the Consortium jet the day after Senior Secondary School and left him for a lucrative career.

  Paul liked and lamented the stories of his new comrades, if only because their dizzying twists reminded him of his own fate. After his punishing upbringing in California-Sur and the harrowing trek to reunite with his family in Denver, he had only just achieved a modicum of good luck in Troy Township. But reaching for the brass ring, he’d fallen from his horse, and now they were all stuck in the same shitty spot.