Last Refuge

by Allen Kuzara

  “That’s good news,” Lusa agreed.

  “You bet it is. Now, the chain of towers is complete and even if one goes down, Vaughn said the towers can still make the connection. Every other one could go black and the network would still work.”

  They both heard a sound over their headsets that was brand new. They looked at each other questioningly as if the other one had done something to create the soft electronic birdcall they both heard. Finally, Nick saw the INCOMING CALL message light up on his display.

  Hoping it was his brother, he hurried to smash the button and open up the shortwave channel.

  “Hello,” Nick said.

  “Nick, you did it.” It was Vaughn’s voice, and Nick was a little disappointed. Still, the congratulatory tone made the moment a positive one.

  “Yeah, I guess so,” he replied.

  “And Lusa’s there with you?”

  Nick knew that Vaughn already had the answer, that his network triangulated their positions. “Yeah, she’s here.”

  “Hi, Vaughn,” Lusa chimed in.

  “Great,” Vaughn said, “It’s wonderful to know you’re both alright. As I’m sure you can see, the transmission relay network is complete, which means we should be able to patch Jimmy in if he’s got his ears on.”

  Nick snickered. That was the kind of expression his brother liked to use, old trucker CB jargon, and here was Dr. Craig saying it. But Nick knew the real reason he laughed was because of positive anticipation of hearing his brother’s voice again.

  Seconds later, Nick and Lusa heard a pop and crackle followed by the tail end of a transmission: “…little late, don’t you think? What took you guys so long?” It was Jimmy’s voice.

  “Little brother,” Nick said, “we hit a few snags, but we’re good now. Lusa and I are both here at the fourth station.” Nick had eyed Lusa knowingly when he had said snags. He hoped the army base didn’t come up, though he knew Vaughn might have noticed their detour if he had been monitoring them closely.

  “Better late than never,” Vaughn said. “Tell me, you three, how is everyone? Are you ready to proceed with the plan?”

  There was a slight pause over the airwaves, and Nick and Lusa looked at each other, taking stock of their resolve.

  “I’m ready,” said Jimmy. “These drones are awesome. Nothing could touch us down here. Let’s do this.”

  Jimmy’s exuberance was both refreshing and made Nick cringe. It was the wrong attitude to have; what they were up against shouldn’t ever be taken on lightly. For what it was worth, Nick knew that Jimmy’s part probably would be easier or, at least, would involve less direct conflict with crazies. But Nick and Lusa would have their hands full.

  “Yeah, I think we’re good,” Lusa said. Nick looked at her, surprised by her grabbing the reins.

  “Alright. That’s good to hear,” Vaughn said. “From now on, our communications should remain crystal clear. So, if you get in over your head, you need to let me know. I’ll do what I can to assist you from my end.”

  Nick interpreted Vaughn’s message: it really meant, you’re on your own, because Vaughn was several hundred miles away on his ship in the Prudhoe Bay. Or at least, that’s where he’d said he would be after dropping Jimmy off in Valdez. For some strange reason, Nick noticed he couldn’t get a ping on Vaughn’s position on the map. He understood it was almost certainly by design. Nothing about Vaughn or his plans were left up to chance.

  “Wish us luck,” Nick said ironically. “We’re going to need it.”

  “Just keep to the script,” Vaughn admonished. “You should be fine if you follow the plan exactly.”

  Nick took Vaughn’s words to mean that he knew about their movements to the army base. It was a wink and nod indicating Vaughn was the one in charge, the all-seeing eye of Horus who meted out justice and mercy as he saw fit.

  Nick wanted to push back, to argue that it was easy for Vaughn to say that, out of harm’s way on his floating castle. But he bit his tongue.

  “Moving on to Fairbanks,” Lusa said, again taking charge when Nick waited too long. He didn’t like it.

  “Moving on to Eielson Air Force Base,” Jimmy announced. “Nick, I’ll radio you from there before you pull the trigger.”

  Now it was Nick’s turn to send some childish trucker talk his brother’s way, something he knew would make him smile. “Roger that, good buddy. I’ll catch you on the flip side. Delta Three, out.”

  “Charlie Five, out,” came Jimmy’s cheerful response.

  “Bravo Squad, out,” Lusa spoke, joining in the pretense.

  Surprisingly, Vaughn didn’t speak. Nick imagined that the always serious scientist was puking his guts out over the ship’s bow, repulsed by their childishness and the fact that he had entrusted this operation to three kids who hadn’t been old enough to buy alcohol or rent a car before the update. Yet here they were, handling drones, using state-of-the-art technology, and saving the world.

  Lusa, taking the lead once more, touched Nick’s hand. As before, the electric shock rose up his arm. She leaned over to repeat the ritual, but Nick turned his head at the last second and kissed her on the mouth. She pulled back, surprised but with a grin.

  “For luck,” Nick said. “We’re going to need all we can get.” Then he leaned in and kissed her again, knowing it might be the last chance he’d ever get.

  CHAPTER 26

  “HEY, KEEP IT on the road, Bubba,” Jimmy said from the back of the Volkswagen bus he’d commandeered a few miles back. The original truck they’d been using since Valdez had overheated, and Jimmy couldn’t think of a better replacement vehicle than this one. The drone he’d renamed Bubba looked up in the rear-view mirror and quickly back down at the road.

  “I saw that, Bubba,” Jimmy growled. “You keep up those dirty looks, and you’ll be walking the rest of the way.”

  All that was missing was a real audience to enjoy his chicanery. Another bump in the road, and the flower-power bus with giant peace signs hand painted on each side panel shuddered like its wheels would come off their axels. One nearby drone nearly fell out of his seat.

  “Keep it together, Bubba,” Jimmy said. “Ten and two. Head on a swivel. Defensive driving. Steve here almost got hurt. You wouldn’t want that, would ya?”

  As much fun as Jimmy had had messing with his team, he’d learned quickly that they didn’t reply to questions that weren’t painfully simple. Yeah, they knew how to think through a combat scenario just fine, but sarcasm was totally lost on them. And asking them to tell you about their life aspirations or whether they got enough hugs as children was pointless. He knew; he’d tried.

  Stretched out on the back seat, what had been some hippy’s bed once, Jimmy took small comfort in the irony that he was transporting a pack of terminator-esque killers in a make-love-not-war emblazoned vehicle. If only Nick were here to see this, he thought. But soon enough they’d be together again.

  The van slowed, and Jimmy sat up. “What’s happening, Bubba?”

  “Approaching Eielson, Supreme Chancellor and Viceroy to the Galactic High Command,” said Bubba.

  Jimmy’s new title was another little tweak he’d made with the drones. “Charlie Five, titles off,” he instructed. There wouldn’t be time for games if they got into a fight. And he was expecting just that. He glanced over at the pile of supplies on the bed and ran over in his mind the sequence of steps he was supposed to take with them.

  He saw the base up ahead. It was understated, like the small one his stepdad had gone to one weekend a month when he was part of the National Guard. And for a second, Jimmy questioned whether this was the same place. He couldn’t remember.

  The bus slowed down on the highway, and Jimmy saw the fenced-in base with its training obstacle courses, parked vehicles, hangars, and a runway. Sure enough, there were a couple of cargo planes parked at one end, and Jimmy’s heart skipped a beat as he knew Vaughn’s plan would work.

  “Pull in, Bubba. Charlie Five, look alive,” he said. The tea
m of drones, minus Bubba, racked their rifles and began scanning their positions. “Silencers on,” Jimmy instructed. They were getting too close to civilization to make unnecessary noise. If he got bogged down here with too many crazies, he wouldn’t be able to complete the mission.

  The bus pulled into the open gate, and Jimmy had the team roll down the windows. It increased their vulnerability, but it also gave them more fighting power. Jimmy eyed an oversized Hummer and its bullhorn speaker mounted on top as they passed by it. Then he heard the Volkswagen’s squeaky wheel pipe back up. He’d noticed it before when they’d first taken the bus, but as they’d sped up the squeak had stopped. Now, at the worst possible moment, it had returned.

  “Move toward that plane, Bubba,” he said pointing. “Say, Raoul,” he said to another drone, “do you know what kind of plane that is?”

  “It appears to be a C-28,” Raoul said.

  “Shut up, Raoul,” Jimmy said. “Darn know-it-all.” If there was one thing, one piece of trivia these chip driven humans knew, it was models and specs of military equipment. Jimmy imagined that Vaughn had somehow uploaded every military field manual into these chips. He wondered if the knowledge was still inside the chips or if the drones possessed it internally.

  “Bogeys,” announced Bubba.

  “Charlie Five, engage,” Jimmy said after he spotted the aggressors: a couple of crazies from a nearby warehouse charged their position.

  Bubba kept the bus moving, and the team expertly put down the crazies. These kinds of killings had become commonplace, and Jimmy wondered if this was what it was like a hundred years ago, to be on the last few days of an African Safari when the killing had gotten uninteresting, even boring. A flash of stupidity made him laugh as he imagined mounting the heads of crazies he’d slain on the wall of his future abode.

  “Okay, Bubba. Stop here,” Jimmy instructed. The bus creaked to a stop, and Charlie Five and its leader scanned their surroundings. No movement.

  “Shut off the engine,” Jimmy said.

  Nothing.

  “Aw, crap. I forgot, Simon didn’t say. Bubba, shut off the engine.”

  The statuesque drone complied, and Jimmy listened carefully. A far off click clack sound caught his attention. He tried to zero in on the source, twisting his neck and body around. Finally, he spotted a sign hanging on the distant fence that read: AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY. Missing a tie-down, it flapped in the wind.

  “Alright Charlie Five, everybody out.”

  The crew moved swiftly as if this command was just as important as killing a crazy or defending their leader. Indeed, Jimmy figured, the drones cared equally about every command. That’s why they were so effective at killing; they didn’t care more or less about it. It was just one more thing they had to do, one more emotionless job.

  Jimmy counted the planes. There was some embedded variability built into Vaughn’s masterful plan. Just as had been predicted, there were three planes that looked like they could do the trick. The problem really was that the runway was so tiny, there would be a considerable lag in between takeoffs.

  “Bubba, Steve. Do you think you can fly that?” Jimmy pointed at the twin-propeller C-28 airplane already parked on the runway.

  “Affirmative, sir,” Bubba said.

  Jimmy stood with his hands on his hips enjoying the thought. “Well then, you know what to do. Get to work.”

  CHAPTER 27

  A PAPER BLEW across the street, scraping loudly as it went, and Nick felt resentment toward the inanimate object. They didn’t need more sound right now. Any false move, any sudden noise could blow their entire plan sky high.

  He looked across the street and caught Lusa’s gaze. She gave him a smile that he gave back with cloaked insincerity. This wasn’t a game, he thought. Sure, their drones were a measure of protection, an insulative buffer from the would-be attackers, but four or five drones each was no match for the twenty or thirty thousand crazies that may be here in Fairbanks.

  They were still north of downtown, north of the Chena River and its bridge that led to the Golden Heart Plaza and Griffin Park to the east. This section of town hadn’t presented them with many bogeys: a couple strays here and there that the drones put down with their less-than-lethal dart guns. But of course, this section of town hadn’t been the most congested area before the world went broke either.

  The tranquilizers were a feature of Vaughn’s plan that Nick had always questioned. Even elephant tranquilizers took time to have an effect, Nick had thought. But Vaughn had promised the poison in these loads acted via a neuro-chemical pathway rather than the bloodstream itself. It was comparable to cyanide except for its nonlethality.

  Fortunately, Vaughn had been right, and the darts had put down crazies with only about a two second delay. It had seemed odd to see a running crazy wheeze and whine, then suddenly fall on its face. Nick thought it seemed unnatural to take down a crazy without spilling blood or guts first.

  The thing that most troubled Nick was the fact that the tranquilized crazies weren’t really dead. Vaughn had promised the effects were long lasting, but what if the neurotoxin wore off faster than anticipated? What if all the crazies woke up?

  Nick saw the old Immaculate Conception Church on the east side of the street where Lusa’s team walked. It had been an icon of Fairbanks. He wondered if it still possessed clergy inside, if they too had taken the DataMind bait. He guessed many people had stopped attending church altogether after they’d experienced the downloadable nirvana.

  “Is that it?” Lusa whispered over the headset.

  Nick looked over and saw her pointing up ahead. He topped the small hill she stood on and spotted the bridge over the Chena River.

  “Yeah, that’s it,” he said. Nick thought he’d be excited as he had been earlier that day when he’d first laid eyes on the Polaris Building, but now he felt disillusioned by it all. Things were going to go bad; he just knew it.

  They reached the end of the city block and hugged the sides of the buildings, scanning their surroundings for threats. This was where things could get hairy, Nick knew. They had to get out on the bridge without being noticed by too many crazies. The coast seemed clear, but that was usually the case until it wasn’t.

  “Let’s get this over with,” Nick said. And the two teams went to work. Nick sent Delta Three to the far end of the bridge, the end they would need to take to proceed into downtown Fairbanks, and Lusa stationed her drones on the north side to cover their rear.

  Nick tried to take the heavy PA speaker from Lusa’s hands.

  “I’ve got it,” she said. “You’ve got your own to carry.” She gestured with her head toward his backpack.

  He relented. All he was trying to do was help, protect her, and keep his promise to her father, but all he seemed to get for it was grief.

  When they reached the center of the bridge, they knew they had to hurry. They couldn’t stay out here in the open forever.

  “Now what?” Lusa asked.

  Nick bent down on one knee, and as he did, he had the insane thought of this is what it’s like to propose to someone and then does anyone in the world still do that? Then he said, “Climb up.”

  Lusa seemed to understand immediately and carefully stepped first on his back, then onto his shoulders. Nick then lifted up the heavy speaker, and for a brief moment they nearly lost their collective balance.

  “Ready?” he asked, grasping her ankles with his hands.

  She said she was, and soon the two were moving skyward. It reminded Nick of playing chicken in the pool. And then it occurred to him, that was exactly what they were doing. Except instead of pushing against another two-person column with the loser falling into water, they were pushing against a multi-thousand column of blood thirsty maniacs. And the consequences…

  “How do I—” Lusa stopped, answering her own question.

  Nick strained his eyes and head to look upward and watched as she held the speaker with one hand—he could tell it was a strain by the muscula
r tremors, and he feared she would drop it and ruin the whole plan. She looped the oversized plastic tie-off over the bridge bracing. Once she had completed the loop, she cinched it tight and released her grasp.

  The PA speaker swung precariously for a moment, then the two of them swung in a similar fashion before Nick dropped down again on one knee and let Lusa off.

  “We did it,” she said.

  He stood to examine their work, and a twinge of pain caught him before he could straighten his back. “Yeah,” he said, reaching a hand behind him to rub the soreness. “I guess so.” The speaker was now motionless despite the gusts of wind that recurred, and Nick believed it would last long enough to get the job done.

  He looked around and marveled that they hadn’t been accosted by crazies yet. “Come on,” Nick said, “we gotta move.”

  They went south over the bridge and brought their drones with them. As Nick stepped left onto green grass, he felt a sense of exhilaration, the same feeling he used to experience playing football when he would narrowly dodge a tackle. This might just work, he thought.

  Holding Lusa’s hand, Nick led the teams east to Griffin Park. When they’d reached a shady spot under a large oak tree, they stopped. Nick looked back toward the bridge. He could barely make out the white plastic encased PA speaker hanging at its center.

  He then retrieved a case from one of the drones and took out the only weapon they still had that shot live rounds. He began assembling the rifle, locking the barrel into the receiver.

  “You sure you can do this?” Nick asked. He could tell she didn’t like the question.

  “Yes, and I don’t need that,” she said eyeing the rifle. “Vaughn said to leave those behind.”

  “This is just a little insurance,” Nick insisted. “If things go badly, you may need to fight your way out of here.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” she said. “One of these days, you’ll trust me.”

  Nick bit his tongue. He didn’t want to get into an argument. Not here. Not now.

  After handing her the assembled weapon and putting two extra magazines in her pack, Nick pulled up his command display. He was glad to see that the radio relay was still fully functional.