by J. F. Halpin
And there was something about her expression that worried him.
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Asle rubbed at a bruise that was quickly forming on her shoulder.
“You two okay?” Nowak leaned out from the driver’s seat of the APC.
Asle only nodded in response. She and Synel had been strapped in pretty tightly during the impact, so they’d avoided being seriously hurt. The only thing amiss was the large, strangely square hole left beside her, where Summers used to be. Also, her hair was a little shorter on one side now, but that wasn’t much of a concern. Hair grew back, after all.
“Managed to talk them into letting us handle the problem. They got that asshole outside, and Summers isn’t in any shape to explain. You gonna be all right on your own?”
“We’ll be fine,” Synel answered for them.
Asle agreed, even if she had been inches away from death a few moments before. At this point, that was becoming normal for her.
Synel unbuckled from her seat, then started helping Asle with hers.
“Come along. We should make ourselves useful.”
Asle eyed the upended APC skeptically.
“I don’t think we can fix this.”
“I’ve taught you better than this,” Synel started. “What we just saw was not an accident. That man out there offered us a deal earlier, didn’t he?”
“Yes?”
“And he said he’d made the offer to others? Soldiers, like our friends?”
“I . . .” Asle trailed off before realizing what her teacher was getting at.
“Exactly. He never said the deal was with the men he was controlling. Which leaves two possibilities: either the medication wasn’t enough—which I doubt, since it’s quite clear these people have prior experience with this prisoner of ours—or . . .” Synel gave Asle a meaningful look. “It was sabotage. And if I’m right, then we need to find the one responsible.”
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Men had come from the base to help Summers’ group the rest of the way. He'd lost track of his friends during the shuffle, though given his current state, that wasn’t surprising. He couldn’t do much more than lay on the stretcher they’d brought him.
The inside of the base was, unfortunately, just as bad as the outside. Buildings were demolished, tents set up—all in all, it looked as though the few soldiers they’d met were lucky to be alive.
As for the thin man, he’d come along for the ride. He, however, was in view of every soldier there. They’d taken the tarp off one of the two trucks that was following the convoy, allowing everyone to see the twisted man strapped in the back. That was both reassuring and worrying at the same time. Summers was tired, but he still remembered what the man had looked like before they’d put him to sleep. He’d broken his arms, his spine, and probably quite a few other things, but he’d still managed to escape his restraints, which were shredded beyond recognition, and nearly overpower Summers.
Then again, that might have been the point. From what he’d seen in the city, the hamr could take and leave whatever parts it needed at will. If his goal had been to take what he needed from Summers, then he was very, very lucky.
As he was carried, Summers suddenly became aware of something. He turned to a small cement building at the center of the base. It was odd. The building looked completely unremarkable, but Summers could feel some odd sensation goading him toward it.
“Corporal Summers?”
Summers heard the man beside him speak up—Jacobs, by the torn tag on his uniform. Summers only vaguely recalled the man had worked on him for a handful of minutes when the army first arrived. A medic then, or maybe a doctor. It was hard to tell, given the state of things. He must have been talking, but Summers was too exhausted to notice.
“Sorry, what?”
“I asked if you had any pain. Colonel Rivers wanted you looked at, so we’re going to be taking you to the medical tent, all right?”
Apparently, the colonel saw fit to actually help him. That was nice, at least. Maybe that last near-death experience had a silver lining.
“Yeah. Sure. Fine.” Summers lay back in the stretcher. He could feel the strain of the last few days finally setting in, with the danger past.
Hopefully now ,he could finally get some sleep.
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“Gah! Damn it!” Summers flinched away from the knife that had just stabbed into his back. One of the guards outside gave a worried look in his direction before he managed to quiet himself.
“Corporal, I’ve given you enough morphine to kill a man twice your weight. I don’t know what to tell you.” Jacobs gave Summers a worried look. He was still in a rubber suit, one that was now splattered with blood Summers assumed was his own.
He looked down at the IV in his arm. Summers could only guess that what Cortez had got him back in the city was to blame. The monster she’d taken it from was supposed to filter out poison, and therefore the hamr. Instead, it must have ensured he’d feel every cut while he was under the knife.
Summers was reminded that, as many benefits as he’d as gotten from his “condition,” it always found a way to bite him in the ass.
Jacobs moved toward the fluid bag at his side.
“There’s not much left in there, but I can up the dosage—”
“No . . . just do your thing.” Summers grit his teeth. Much as he wasn’t a fan of pain, he was less fond of the idea that a piece of metal could shoot up an artery and into his brain at any moment.
Jacobs hesitated only a few seconds before continuing.
And Summers immediately regretted his decision.
“Okay, that doesn’t feel like a scalpel!”
“I broke all my scalpels on this skin of yours.”
“Then what are you using?”
“I think you’d be happier if you didn’t know.”
“Shouldn’t . . . there be more than one person doing this?”
“If we had them, yes, and if it weren’t against orders. Colonel Rivers wanted to make sure you were taken care of, but we have priorities. And unfortunately for you, Sergeant Wendel’s high on that list.”
“Wendel?”
Summers only vaguely remembered the name they’d called out when they’d found the thin man.
“Right . . . you wouldn’t know.” Jacobs paused. “The Sergeant, the guy who nearly killed you back there, he’s what you’d call Patient Zero. He’s the whole reason we’re out here. And the reason we’re stuck here.”
“He’s the reason the walls are like that?”
“The walls are the least of it. I’m guessing you realized Wendel’s different from those other things?”
“Yeah . . .” Summers suppressed the urge to scream as Jacobs made another cut. “I sort of caught on to that.”
“See, the army found something back on Earth, something big, alien. We called it the Anchor. No one was sure what it was, but then this sergeant, he gets the genius idea to touch it. Next thing we know, he’s trying to kill us. They find something in his brain, take it out, and suddenly, that same idiot is a genius. You see the gate in Alaska, back when it was working?”
He wasn’t about to mention he was the reason it stopped working.
“Yeah, it looked like a satellite to me.”
“Wendel’s the one who made building that thing possible. That Anchor, it’s the core of the machine. That one was just a small piece of it. According to Wendel, it was supposed to act as a gate on its own. Where to, we didn’t know. But the army used Wendel to make a workaround. Then, one day, after one of his surgeries, he flips. Touches the Anchor, and next thing we know, there are these . . . things everywhere. His ‘people.’ Because he’s not Wendel anymore.”
“Right . . .”
Summers knew the hamr changed memories slowly. In his case, he’d only “remembered” what was different after he’d removed the mass from his brain. It was a sort of fail safe. Even if you managed to save s
omeone before they were changed, they might not be entirely the same person.
“Anyway, after he turned traitor, another genius—and I mean with a capital G—does something to the gate. Slams the door right in Wendel’s smug face. All hell broke loose. Things appearing and disappearing . . . that’s what happened to the walls. We found men and pieces of those . . . things spread out for miles.”
“We saw a tank about a week and a half out. It looked like it had been embedded in a hill . . .”
“There’s more shit like that out there. But yeah, even after that, both of our gates were still working. We still had contact with Earth. Problem was, we’d just had a major containment breach, Wendel and most of his people were in the wind, and the brass couldn’t risk those things spreading to the rest of this world. Before you ask, we tracked one to Alaska.”
“And their job was to kill whatever had gotten out . . . ?”
“They figured out the way these things spread from body to body. If we let them have a foothold in this world, it’d only be a matter of time before they overwhelmed us. What we didn’t count on was that Wendel would do the same to us. Some time ago, he attacked the base, and the Anchor stopped working, along with our gate. He shut out our supply line, and he’s been waiting for us to die out ever since.”
“They still have the gate in Alaska . . .”
“If they could have fixed it, we’d have been saved by now. And if those things he let out are still spreading . . . well, if I were on Earth, I’d cut my losses, make sure that what’s out here never gets back home.”
Much as he hated to admit it, Summers saw the logic in that.
“Right.” Summers repressed a sigh. “Fan-fucking-tastic.”
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After about an hour of surgery, Summers was drained both mentally and physically.
“I’m about done here. Might need another X-ray to see—”
Jacobs was cut off as the flap to the tent opened. A guard stepped inside, and Summers saw Colonel Rivers directly behind him.
“Colonel—” Jacobs moved to put down his tools.
“You need to come with us.”
Summers noticed the Colonel’s hand was hovering dangerously close to the holster at her side.
He really did sigh this time.
“What the hell did I do now?”
“Not you.” Rivers held a hand up to Summers, her gaze fixed directly on Jacobs.
Jacobs stopped at that, and Summers felt a definite shift in the room—not a good one.
“Mind if I ask what this is about, ma’am?”
“I believe I gave you an order, Captain.” The colonel took another step forward. “I’m going to need to you to drop that now.”
Summers glanced down at the still bloody utility knife in Jacobs’s hand.
He didn’t move for a long moment.
“Tom . . .” the colonel cautioned.
Summers lunged just as Jacobs charged the colonel with the knife. The blade sank into Summers’ hand, but thankfully, the pain didn’t even register as Summers twisted the man’s arm, driving him to the ground.
By the time he looked up, both the colonel and the guard beside her had drawn down on him.
For what it was worth, the colonel looked as surprised as she should have been. And Jacobs was still trying to struggle beneath him. All Summers could do was keep the man pinned.
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Less than an hour later, Summers’ friends had found him sitting on a fence outside the medical tent that was now a hive of activity. They were watching as the colonel barked out orders to the guards. Jacobs had to be treated with kid gloves, as he was, technically, a biohazard, since he was still covered in Summers’ blood. The colonel was thankfully not taking any chances.
In that time, they’d filled him in on why a man who’d seemed friendly only moments before had just tried to kill his commanding officer.
“He . . . sabotaged us?”
“More like he set us up,” Nowak explained.
“Run it by me again. How the hell did you figure out he made a deal with that asshole?”
Apparently, while Summers had been busy bleeding, the others had learned that something was odd with the fluid bags that were hooked up to the thin man’s IV.
Namely, Nowak had concluded that the last bag they’d given him was pure saline, no anesthetic whatsoever.
Asle held up the bag in question as if it were the proverbial smoking gun.
“This one tasted different.”
“And this Jacobs was the man who gave it to us. It’s not complicated,” Synel finished.
“Okay . . .” Summers started. “All right. But Asle, in the future, don’t taste test anything that isn’t food.”
If he was being honest with himself, he was impressed with the two. Though he preferred not to think of what might have happened if he were sedated, as Jacobs had intended.
Still, it hadn’t even crossed Summers’ mind to chalk up the thin man’s awakening to anything other than “weird alien powers” not unlike his own. He’d have guessed the colonel would have come to that same conclusion before suspecting her own men of treason.
“..Why not? It worked.” Asle looked genuinely confused.
“Because . . . Sarge, you want to help me out here?”
“At those doses, it honestly wouldn’t hurt her,” Nowak responded.
“And it did work,” Cortez added.
“Still—”
Summers stopped as he noticed Colonel Rivers walking toward their group. Her expression was decidedly not a happy one.
“Are you all right, ma’am?” Nowak sounded concerned.
Even Summers was surprised by how affected she seemed.
“I’ve known that man fifteen years . . .” The colonel eyed the tent in the distance. Jacobs was being hauled out by a few of the now suited guards.
“Stress . . . has a way of breaking people, ma’am.”
“I’m more than aware of that, Sergeant. I just didn’t expect . . . it doesn’t matter.” The Colonel composed herself before turning to Summers. “Corporal, I wanted to speak with you on another matter.”
“What is it you need?”
“When you caught us out there, you were interrupting an operation. We intended to capture either Wendel or one of his lieutenants.” She hesitated. “Most of my officers are aware at this point, but I’m planning on making a deal with Sergeant Wendel.”
This was not the conversation he was expecting to have.
“You want to . . . ? Why in the hell would you think you could negotiate with that thing? You know what it’s trying to do?”
“Is she talking about who I think she is?” Nowak looked shocked, more than anything.
“We’re aware of his motives. He and whatever entity he works for need bodies. But we need to face the facts, if what you’re telling me is true, then we’ve failed. With or without him, those things will keep spreading through this world, and we don’t have the manpower to stop it.”
“Summers could—”
“I’m aware of Corporal Summers’ talents, Sergeant. I’ve seen his work twice now. That’s why I’m speaking to you.” The colonel looked back to Summers. “I’m going to be negotiating for our return home. If Wendel wants this world, there’s not a whole lot we can do about it. Near as I can tell, he has his own agency and therefore, we can mediate with him, with his life as our bargaining chip. You bought us this opportunity.”
“Ma’am . . .” Summers began. “I can say without a doubt that that is a terrible idea.”
“I have a duty to my men, Corporal. And to you. You didn’t sign up with my unit, so I’m giving you the choice. If we go home, I have my doubts you’ll ever see the sun again. You would be an active danger to our world. With Wendel’s cooperation, we can reactivate the gate, and destroy it on our way out without harming his precious Anchor. The few experts we still have with us are confident he won’t be able to fol
low. He gets what he wants, and so do we.”
“And what about the world we’re on? We’re the ones who brought this thing here.”
Summers glanced back to the group at his side. Asle had lost everyone she knew because of what the army had done. So had the twins, Orvar.
“Is that true?” Synel looked to the colonel. “You’re the reason for . . . this?”
“Yes.”
“Why?” Cortez looked puzzled. “Why bring this here?”
“We thought it was the safest way to contain a threat we only thought was a possibility. As it turns out, it was the right move.” The colonel hesitated. “As I said, even if we were to destroy the gate and that . . . thing . . . we couldn’t stop what’s happening.”
“You want to leave.” Asle’s words dripped with anger.
“I was sworn to protect the United States—my people, not yours. I’m sorry, but—”
“Sorry?” Asle shouted. “Your people are the reason everyone I loved died! You punish that man for making a deal when you’re planning to do the same thing!”
Summers was taken aback by the sheer emotion in her voice.
The colonel didn’t respond. Instead, she regarded Asle.
“Jacobs’s actions just confirmed what I knew. We can’t last like this. I don’t make any excuses for what I’ve done, but I can promise you that you and your friends would have a home on Earth. That’s all I can do.”
Distantly, Summers realized that anything that applied to him would concern Asle, as well. She might not be as far along as Summers, but a single drop of her blood could mean the end of their world, just like his.
It was almost a relief when he realized Nowak hadn’t mentioned it to the colonel. But that was a bridge they’d have to cross, eventually.
“We’ve made strides in understanding the organism inside you, Corporal. From what your sergeant told me, I’m certain we can produce a more sophisticated method of control. And I can assure you that we’ll be doing everything in our power to find a cure.”
It didn’t escape Summers that Asle was now glaring openly at the colonel.
