Seed

by Michael Edelson

  “Fine,” Alex agreed. “I’ll go with you, as long as you don’t expect me to disarm.” If Tom believed that these men were trustworthy, then odds are they were trustworthy—or very good liars. Tom should be able to spot the difference, considering what he used to do for a living.

  “Not at all. You’ll need your weapons.” That last bit could have been construed as a threat, except that Takahashi’s tone suggested nothing of the kind.

  It took the better part of an hour to find a good place to anchor, secure the boat and transfer his gear to the other vessel, but less than five minutes at full throttle to get the three of them to their destination, a tiny beach around the tip of a narrow peninsula. It was a very secluded area. Stark stone cliffs towered over the sand on all sides, standing thirty, forty feet high. Several tents were haphazardly pitched just above the tide line, and there were four power boats beached nearby. A steep trail rose to a narrow plateau on the east side, providing a quick escape from what was either a sheltered hideaway or a bottlenecked death trap.

  “We’ve been here for several days waiting for you,” Takahashi explained.

  “Waiting for me?” Alex asked. “Why?” As the boat approached, several men and women in various fatigue patterns—army, marines, navy and air force—emerged from the tents and approached the beach. A group of them gathered there and stood ready to greet the boat. They were all armed, but they wore their weapons casually, and none seemed hostile.

  “I’ll let the major explain,” Takahashi said. “He was a captain before all this, so we all agreed to promote him and put him in charge.”

  “In charge of what?” Alex asked.

  “You’ll know soon enough.”

  Takahashi jumped off as soon as the boat touched the sand, and offered Alex a hand. He shrugged it off and jumped down. It felt strange to be on land again after so long at sea. Everything was moving, swaying, as though he were still on a boat. He knew it wasn’t real, but sure felt like it was. His legs were wobbly and he was slightly nauseous, as though his sea sickness would return now that he was back on dry land.

  “Captain Meyer,” one of the gathered servicemen said. “Pleased to finally meet you.” He had tiny slit eyes above a hawkish nose. That was about as much of a distinction as Alex was capable of noticing from among a crowd dressed in pattern disrupting combat uniforms.

  Alex looked at the man, then down at his rank insignia. “Captain,” he said, nodding a greeting, then looked at the next man, the woman after him, and the man after her. “Captain, captain, captain…I’d keep saying captain but you guys might think water bears got into my brain.”

  A few of them laughed. No one tried to take his weapon, or seemed the least bit concerned with it, which put Alex at ease.

  “Winters is a lieutenant,” one of the men said, indicating a man with blond stubble around a reddening bald spot. “But he’s Navy.”

  “Right,” Alex said. “O-3, same as captain.”

  “And Bundy is a woman,” Winters said. “In case you couldn’t tell.” More laughs. Alex turned to look where Winters pointed. He could tell quite easily, despite her tight bun, lack of makeup and form disguising fatigues.

  “This woman is about to knock you on your ass, Squid,” she said, grinning at Winters like a wolf sizing up its prey.

  “We’re all like you,” Takahashi explained. “From the nearby colonies. The farthest one after yours is about six hundred miles away, near Seattle. That’s Linnard’s facility. No one’s come from quite as far away as Hawaii, though.”

  “I think I’d better see this major of yours,” Alex said. “I need to know what’s going on here.”

  “I’m Major Terkeurst,” one of the men in the crowd said, stepping forward. He was wearing captain’s bars, just like the others. “Not much opportunity to get new insignia,” he explained. “Come, we’ll take a walk, stretch those legs, and talk.” Terkeurst was an unassuming man with an easy smile and friendly eyes. His hair was cropped too short to be sure of its color, but much of it looked gray. He carried his cover in his right hand and switched it to his left temporarily to shake Alex’s hand.

  “After you, sir,” Alex said, feeling strange to be in the presence of a real officer, as though he were an impostor playing dress up. The major led him up the trail and onto the flat area above, which was covered in a thick blanket of green grass. It was beautiful, so much open space, no trees or mountains to limit visibility. The peninsula curved around to the northeast before fading into the slowly receding mist, and Alex could see more sheltered beaches across the water, similar to the one they had come from. Dark shapes moved on the sand.

  “Seals,” Terkeurst explained. “The real ones, I mean, not the Navy kind. A lot more of them here now, as though they know that man isn’t around to bother them anymore.”

  “So what’s going on here?” Alex said. “Why are you guys camping out on a beach, away from your colonies? Why are you waiting for me?”

  “Last question first. For one, we need all the men we can get. Also, you’re the one responsible for all this, so it wouldn’t feel right to go without you.”

  “I am? Because I…” He was about to say that he killed his governor, but he held back. It felt wrong, somehow, as though he would get into trouble. Of course these men had to know what he did, if they had spoken to Tom. Unless he had lied.

  “Some of us suspected,” the major explained. “That what the president was telling us wasn’t kosher, but all we could do was grudgingly accept it and move on, working for our bright new tomorrows.” He said the last bit with obvious scorn. “But when your man Tom sent us all that data, and then stuck around to verify it and how he got it, well, that changed everything.”

  “I can imagine,” Alex said, looking back across the water from whence he came. “I wish I never found out.”

  “A part of me does too,” the major said. “But the rest of me wants to kill the bastards that killed my family. They murdered them, Meyer. Plain and simple. My mother, my sister, my aunt, my brother, all of them. Murdered. And that can’t stand.”

  “No,” he said. “It can’t.”

  “Every man and woman here feels the same way. They’re not all prior-military, some of us are ex-civilians like your guy Tom.”

  “Hackers?” Alex asked dubiously.

  The major chuckled. “That’s a big negative. No hackers. You’re the only one so blessed. I mean people like your team back home, that you recruited to help you, people with prior service, people that knew their way around weapons, whatever. People that can fight. We’re not much on labels here.”

  “So what are you guys planning? An attack on the facility?” Asking the question thrilled him. He wouldn’t be alone. All these soldiers, on his side!

  The major nodded. “Not just an attack. We plan to take it over.”

  “Take it over? Is that even possible? Tom told me there are over fifty soldiers stationed there, if the personnel records can be trusted. I was just planning to do some recon, figure out what I was dealing with. If I could peg the president from a mile out, that would be nice, but I wasn’t betting on it. How many men do you have?”

  The major smiled. “That’s a lot of questions. Yes, yes and twenty two, including you. Not all of them are here. We have two recon parties watching the facility. It’s about twenty miles northeast of here.”

  “Those aren’t good odds…twenty two against fifty. The personnel records, did Tom tell you about them? Most of those guys are Green Berets, SEALs, Delta Force, you name it. They didn’t exactly pick guys like me to guard them, they picked the best.”

  “As I said,” the major explained. “We’re not much for labels. I was with Delta, before I injured out. I’d rather have a guy like you on my team, a known quantity, than someone with a fancy patch on their arm that I don’t know from Adam.”

  “Me?” Alex asked incredulously. “I’m just a regular grunt!”

  “That’s a label, Alex,” the major chastised. “What you are is a
man who survived for half an hour in the barrier—”

  “At only seventy one percent!” he protested.

  “The normal operating parameters for lethal defense call for seventy to ninety five percent. Tom didn’t tell you that part, did he?”

  “No,” Alex admitted, a little shaken. “But still…”

  “Then you took on four armed hostiles, alone, before even giving yourself a chance to recover.”

  “But they were just buffoons, they didn’t even know how to use their weapons properly! Besides, you Delta guys deal with more bad guys than that, don’t you?”

  “We try not to,” Terkeurst said. “If we can help it. But yes, we did, as a team. You did this solo. I’m not saying there’s not ten guys in our group that couldn’t have done the same. There probably are, but what I am saying is that I bet there’s guys in that complex, special ops guys, that couldn’t do what you did. The point is, labels are just labels. Special Forces means you train more, get better gear and spend more time learning how to use it. You did just fine on your own.”

  “Are you trying to butter me up, sir?”

  The major grinned. “Yes son, I am. It won’t do for any of us to fear our enemy. They are nothing more than men with guns, just like us. We have a difficult task ahead of us, and most of us are probably going to die, though I’ll do everything in my power to make sure that doesn’t happen.”

  “I came here knowing I’d probably die,” Alex said morosely, turning away to stare over the southwestern horizon. “You don’t need to motivate me, I’m good to go. I don’t care what patches those guys are wearing on their shoulders, they’re going down. They chose the wrong side.” He hesitated. “Unless they’re dupes like us?”

  “They could be,” the major said. “But it doesn’t matter. We don’t have the luxury of asking them. We have a mission, and they’re in the way. At the very least, they’re not asking themselves too many questions. In their situation, they have access to a lot more information than we did.”

  “True. So does everyone get a pep talk like this, or am I special somehow?”

  The major chuckled. “Yes, everyone gets a pep talk. There’s not that many of us, and we have lots of time. But you’re also special, because I have a particular task in mind for you.”

  “Me?” Alex asked. “I mean sure, I’ll help any way I can, but what can I do?”

  “Let’s talk about your governor first.”

  Alex was suddenly very nervous. “What about him?”

  “Tell me why you killed him.” Terkeurst’s expression and tone were difficult to read, but didn’t seem to be accusatory or reproachful.

  Alex looked away. “He had one of his goons put a gun to my girl’s head.”

  “That’s it?”

  “That’s it. I tried to take him down peacefully, but he didn’t go for it. Once he threatened her life, he was dead. It’s that simple. I also thought…” He hesitated, fighting back pain. She was so far away, out of his reach, it was almost as though he did lose her that day after all. “I thought that they’d killed her. Turned out she was just hurt, not dead.”

  “You didn’t find it difficult,” Terkeurst asked. “To depose your lawful governor? And later to kill him, even though he was surrendering?”

  Alex felt a little exposed. Tom must have really trusted these people to give them so many details.

  “No,” he admitted. “I didn’t. Deposing him was a no brainer. He was a giant douche bag and he had to go. He was trying to run the colony like a chain gang. I regret it took me as long as it did to see that, but what’s done is done. Killing him…I regret that, sometimes. He could have been a normal person, if they hadn’t put him in charge. He had some good ideas, and he was taking us in the right direction, just in the wrong way. But he did what he did, and I did what I did, and that’s that. Are we going to have a problem because of it?”

  “No,” the major said, shaking his head. “I agree with your decision to depose him, given the facts, and I can understand why you killed him, even if I don’t think I would have done the same.”

  Alex nodded, relieved, though he was still curious why Terkeurst was so interested.

  “So am I the only one?” Alex asked. “That had a problem with his governor?”

  “No,” the major admitted. “A few of the others did also, but they removed them peacefully, or semi peacefully. Like you did originally, but without the ensuing complications. Most of us, though, have had a lot of luck with our governors. Mine, for instance, was very gung ho about this mission, and she had people working night and day to fix up one of those boats you saw on the beach to get me and two of my men here. None of us were unfortunate enough to land the type of despot that your facility got stuck with.”

  “Aren’t you worried that your governor was just playing along and that he—sorry, she—would warn the government as soon as you left?”

  “No, she’s a good woman and I trust her. But even if I didn’t, Tom made that impossible.”

  “He’s handy that way,” Alex said. Tom was more than a stroke of good fortune, he was probably the single most important human being alive. If not for him, none of this would be possible.

  “Yes he is.”

  “Major,” Alex said, growing impatient. “I appreciate the pep talk, but what’s really going on here? You asked a lot of questions, yet you seemed to already have formed an opinion about what I did. What gives?”

  The major nodded. “Fair enough. It’s like this. We’re going in there to exact vengeance, justice, whatever you want to call it. That means we have to stand face to face with the president of the United States, the commander-in-Chief, and blow his brains out. And the others responsible also…senators, and so on. I’m in command, so that’s my job, but I’m not sure I have what it takes.”

  “Sir?” Alex said, confused. Terkeurst was former Delta. If he didn’t have what it was going to take to accomplish the mission, who did?

  “I picture it in my head, how badly I want him dead, and then I see him saying ‘stand down, soldier, that’s an order,’ and like some brain washed Manchurian candidate asshole, I’m fucking scared to death that I’ll lower my weapon and stand at attention. I’m an officer in the United States Army…the old one. Before that, I was enlisted, for many years. I follow orders. It’s what I do, and if the president gives an order, I’m not sure I am capable of ignoring it.”

  Alex blanched, piecing it together. “You want me to kill the president?”

  “Not exactly,” Terkeurst said quickly. “It’s my responsibility. I just need someone behind me that I can trust to give me a shove if I falter. And only failing that, someone who can do the job if I can’t. I know how fucked up it sounds, but you’re my best bet because of what you did. We’re all soldiers, conditioned to obey orders, to respond to authority. You’re different. You didn’t face a moral crisis when you deposed your lawful commander as I would have, you only wondered why it took you so long. I’m betting my life, all of our lives, that if the President of the United States of America, such as they are, gives you a lawful order, you will tell him to die on a dick and shoot him in the face. Can I count on you, son?”

  Alex thought about it before answering. Could he kill the president? Not too long ago he had been a college student, hitting on girls and studying for exams, and then a soldier, following orders, just like every other soldier. When had he become such a killer that a former Delta operator needed him to do his dirty work?

  “Yeah, you can count on me.” If there was no one else, then it fell on him. It was just that simple. His parents deserved no less than the death of their executioners.

  “Thank you, son.”

  “Can I have a few minutes up here?” Alex asked. “It was a long trip.”

  “Certainly, take your time.”

  When he was alone on the plateau, Alex started walking along the northern edge and eventually spotted his sailboat, anchored in the crook of the peninsula. For the first time since Tom had told
him the truth, he knew there was a real chance that he would make it home, make it back to her. It filled him with hope, and with fear. If there was a good chance of making it back, then he had a lot more to lose than he’d thought he would. Terkeurst was right, he was capable of killing the president. But was he capable of making it that far against such formidable odds?

  Walking slowly to the other side of the narrow rise, he saw the soldiers milling about, talking, preparing equipment. Those people were giving up comfortable lives, risking it all for the sake of justice. He knew that many of them would pay for it with their lives. He was suddenly so choked with pride that it was almost hard to breathe. He had joined the army looking for honor, the warrior spirit, and had found mostly fools, thugs and gangsters. Yet down there, on the beach, there was honor. There was valor. For the first time in his life, he was proud of his uniform. Not just of how he looked in it, or of how much attention he got wearing it, but for what it stood for. What it stood for now.

  Chapter 34

  They had drilled for days, spent hours looking over sketches and listening to reports from the recon teams, but when Alex saw the complex for the first time, he was afraid. He realized, once he understood the nature of the facility, how completely ridiculous his original plan had been.

  The facility was underground, with an entrance carved into the side of a mountain and protected by massive titanium doors. At first he wondered how such a thing could have been constructed without drawing a lot of attention. Perhaps the same things that had dissolved the cities of the world had hollowed out a vast complex in a manner of days or even hours. Simpler explanations abounded—covert funding, re-tasking of an existing facility and so on—but Alex preferred the more elaborate answer. It seemed more fitting.

  The most he could have hoped for on his own with the 50 cal sniper rifle was to take out one or two of the four sentries that manned two M134 electric mini guns and two XM307 belt fed grenade launchers. The six thousand round per minute mechanized Gatling guns could shred their entire assault team in seconds if they were caught out in the open, but those weapons paled in comparison to the grenade launchers.