by Dan Davis
The mayor held up his hand for silence. “I know some of you are angry I hid this from you and that’s alright. You can be angry. But right now, we have to get our guests moving. Please, return to your homes. I would ask that you ensure your batteries are charged, that your food and water stocks are topped up, and that your weapons and ammunition are ready. If possible, we might all want to sleep in our shelters tonight. And if the Hex come, I want everyone able to hold a gun on the walls, alright? Okay, thank you for your time. God bless you all.”
“Where’s the entrance?” Ram asked him as they stepped down.
“Follow me.”
7.
“This is it,” Fraser said, pointing at the stone floor.
They were on the ground floor of the northeast tower. Around the walls were rows of steel lockers and boxes and not much else. Cooper was inside with him while Stirling and the rest of the team were outside.
“Right here?” Ram asked, pointing to the center of the room.
“It’s been years but yeah, I remember.” Fraser nodded once with certainty. “The floor here is slabs of stone, the gaps filled with concrete. Get through the slabs and then there’s the rubble underneath down to the hatch. My guys are bringing pneumatic hammers and then we’ll have to clear the rubble out. Think you guys can lend a hand? You look like you could shift a lot of rock, sir.”
Ram smiled. “I’m sure I could. Cooper, get to work.”
“Sir.” Cooper crouched in the center of the floor and tapped away on a handheld communication device that scanned for the corresponding signal from the steel hatch. If it was there, Cooper would detect it.
Ram turned to Fraser. “What’s the story with this tower?”
“One of the public armories. If there’s an attack without warning and you don’t have your weapon to hand, you can come here and rapidly arm yourself.”
“The Hex attack you often?”
Fraser stared for a moment. “The Hex? No, never the whole time we’ve been here. You know they say there’s not that many of the aliens on the planet and they’re clustered around the equator. There’s hardly any at all up here, which is one of the main reasons we came this far north.”
“So who attacks you? Other people?”
“Of course, other people,” Fraser looked at him with a mixture of confusion and contempt. “Where the hell have you been?”
“I haven’t been around for a while.”
“Right, right. You really came here from space? For real? How did you get in through the defenses? Is there going to be a UNOP invasion? Is this the start of the reconquest?”
“No, no. It’s not like that. You understand, I can’t tell you anything?”
“Sure, of course. But if this is the start of the reconquest, it would help if I could plan. We could prepare. We could do something, maybe. My people are heavily armed and well-trained.”
“The reconquest isn’t starting now, that’s for certain. One day it will, I’m sure, but not yet. Cooper, is it there?”
“It’s there.”
Fraser pointed at Cooper’s device. “What is it detecting? The steel?”
Cooper looked at Ram who nodded. “There is a short-range beacon on a specific frequency.”
“We didn’t detect anything like that when we surveyed the site.”
“You wouldn’t have, sir. I pinged it with a coded signal and it replied. That’s all.”
“So, is that how—”
Ram spoke over Fraser. “Thanks, Cooper. Let’s get those hammers in here, shall we, Mayor?”
He nodded. “Alright.”
Fraser called his guys in who immediately carried in jackhammers and sledgehammers and pushed in wheelbarrows and compressors. They would break up the floor of the tower and the stones below it and also remove the rocks to a pile outside the tower. It would mean breaking and removing tons of rock but there were two dozen workers there and they looked like men who could get the job done.
Fraser tapped Ram on his armored forearm. “Maybe we could have a talk outside while they get to work?”
“That’s actually a good idea, Mayor Fraser. It would help, tactically speaking, to get a feel for the layout of the town. Just in case. And I have a few questions I’d like to ask.” While the mayor stepped outside, Ram broadcast to his team. “Guys, while the work is underway I’m going to try to get some intel. If you hit any snags in the work, Cooper, let me know. Stirling, if there’s any movement on the perimeter—”
“Believe me, sir,” Stirling said. “If I see the Hex coming, I’m going to want you up on these walls with us.”
“Alright. I’ll leave my comms open so you can hear what I talk about with Mayor Fraser. I’m just going to let him talk but if you want to know anything that will help tactically, just ask me.”
“Sir,” they chorused.
Ram followed Fraser out into the cold. Low cloud overhead dropped flurries of small icy snowflakes that swirled around in vortices along the inside of the wall. The blocks of stone that made the walls and the towers were large, each was surely at least a ton, and there were thousands of them.
“So you want me to show you around?” Fraser said. “Shall we follow the perimeter first of all?”
They walked with the wall rising on one side and on the other they passed by a series of tilled gardens. Some still had produce in, despite the season, while others were bare, dark earth. Beyond the gardens were rows of neat little houses, framed in timber and clad with weatherboard and painted either white, black or brown. “It’s incredible to me that you built all this out here in the middle of nowhere. How did you manage it?”
Fraser nodded as they walked and spoke conversationally but with evident pride in his voice. “Our last town was attacked six times in four months. The final two assaults got in through our defenses and we lost hundreds of our people. We had fences, trenches, towers. But they weren’t enough. A group of us wanted to build the place up, you know, build the walls bigger and better but the leadership was starting to break down. Some people left in small groups, joining other settlements or reckoning they were better off in the woods, keeping mobile, keeping small and hoping to be unnoticed. But it was increasingly obvious that the writing was on the wall and there were endless struggles for leadership of the town. My people wanted me to take over but there were just too many bad eggs that we’d have to get rid of, by force, and I reckoned we were better off striking out on our own. Making a fresh start but together. Some of the people saw things like I did. Over a thousand of us pooled our resources. A few of us found this place. Further north than we intended but we were blessed by this great rock of ours. So our advanced teams brought up plant machinery on flatbeds, excavators, bulldozers, got to work quarrying, setting out foundations, built the walls up. We brought everyone up in groups and that first winter was hard, yes it was. Hardest thing I ever did. We were in tents and shacks within these walls while the winter tried hard to kill us. We didn’t prepare enough wood for fuel, not nearly and our power systems failed and food ran low. Anyway, with God’s help, we made it. That first year, we raised this town up out of the earth. Been holding tight ever since.”
Ram looked around at what they built. It was remarkably civilized. “What about these attacks? Who’s attacking you, exactly?”
Fraser sighed and walked along by the base of the wall. Ram kept pace with him. “How much do you know about the invasion?”
“I was unconscious for the whole thing and every year since. They gave me a briefing on the invasion since I woke up but as you can imagine it wasn’t exactly comprehensive.”
The mayor shook his head. “Unconscious for all those years? How is that possible?”
“I was badly injured and they placed me and my sergeant in what they called a coma. We were hooked up to life support, slowly healed and then kept in storage while the world fell apart. We were forgotten, passed around as an afterthought in the outer system, until this mission was put together. Even then, we wouldn’t hav
e been chosen but for an accident. The lieutenant and sergeant selected for this team were killed in an orbital rendezvous and they needed replacements, quick. So we were put on board, brought back to consciousness and told to get in fighting shape real fast. I’ve focused on physical and tactical preparations for this mission and I am so far out of the loop on the Hex invasion that it’s like some bad dream. I honestly can barely believe it happened at all. The casualties, the chaos. It must have been… I’m sorry to even bring it up.”
“No, it’s alright. I get it. It was sixteen years ago but it feels like another era, like another epoch. We were all just ordinary people. I mean, I was like, twenty, twenty-two maybe when the news about the Orb Station was released and they showed that footage. It was insane but it was kind of thrilling. Aliens, new star systems. It was like suddenly we were living in the future. I mean, there were those wheelhunters coming down to negotiate a treaty with us and everything. I’m not saying there weren’t big changes. Of course there were. Some groups freaked out, they couldn’t deal with the facts and they said it was a conspiracy theory to keep us enslaved and others couldn’t understand why God hadn’t included the Orbs and aliens in the Bible. Others said that it was all in there if only we’d read it correctly. But that was all just stuff we saw online or that we walked past on the way to work.”
“Oh yeah? And what did you do for work back then?”
He was caught off guard by the change in subject and then gave a little laugh. “Ah, I worked in biorobotics at a research center attached to the University of Oregon and I was building a company to develop implantable neural interfaces for a variety of medical applications, particularly in mental health. Seems crazy to even talk about it. I was a different man back then. Two young kids I didn’t see. My wife worked in a building less than a mile away but I didn’t see her much more. The news about the new Orb Station Alpha and a new combat with a new alien species, it just seemed so far away and not much to worry about. Even when we lost.” Fraser laughed at himself, shaking his head. “I just carried on working. I thought, if I can just finish this project, we’ll get these licensing contracts and my family will be set, financially, you know? Vague notions of using my new wealth to invest in a bunker in the back yard, maybe.”
“You knew the invasion was coming?”
“We knew about the arena combat, of course, then when the news came that the Hex had won, had been awarded the rights to our system and were probably going to take Earth, people went crazy. Immediate looting, everywhere. People making for the hills, for the woods. A lot going north, into Canada. A lot heading east, meaning to hide in Montana and North Dakota. I kept telling my family that everything was going to be okay but I didn’t do anything until it was too late. Everything fell apart even before the Hex landed. I’d never had to think about food my entire life and suddenly every day was nothing but a quest to find enough food for my wife and kids.”
“People starved,” Ram said.
Fraser looked away. “Yes they did.”
“I’m sorry.”
“We didn’t even see an alien until the fighting was over. The military was basically destroyed but we didn’t see much of that. Law enforcement kept order as best they could but those guys all had families of their own and they couldn’t keep order with masses of people roaming the country anyway so a lot left. Politicians were long gone, of course, though you had people from local government at various levels doing their best to lead. But all the structures that they were used to relying on simply weren’t there and those people couldn’t lead properly without all the systems in place. Most ordinary folk wanted to get out of cities but they had nowhere else to go and nothing to eat. After a while, people were dropping dead all over from starvation but also from diseases picked up from bad water and there was no antibiotics or anything to save us from conditions hardly anyone had died from in hundreds of years. The cities were left to people who didn’t want to get out or couldn’t but also that’s where a lot of the food was.”
“In my briefing I read about gangs taking over cities.”
“Gangs, right. I guess you could call them that.” Fraser turned and spat on the frozen ground. “They did rule the cities, for years. Most of them were driven out by hunger eventually and then they preyed on rural places that kept growing food. Imagine you got a big farm and you’re growing acres of corn and wheat and keeping cattle. How you going to defend it from fifty or a hundred men with guns? And once those guys picked it clean, it’s no good anymore. Right away there’s less food in the world. And on and on it went. Less and less productive land, fewer and fewer farmers.”
“How did you survive?”
“It was like humanity descended into the jungle again, you know? The East African savanna, half a million years ago, and only the strongest made it. And that includes ideas as well as people.”
“What do you mean?”
“We’d been so pampered by our material abundance that we had grown incredibly soft. Weak, really. And we were filled with weak ideas. Ideas that can’t survive on the savanna.”
“Ideas like what?”
Fraser sighed. “Justice, when it was to be had at all, was swift, and it was brutal. Transgressions were punished. Theft was punished by banishment or even by mutilation, which was effectively a death sentence. Assaults, rapes, murder, were all capital crimes. And you understand, I saw these changes in whatever group I was with, under a number of different leaders. No one sat and drew up a law code, not back then, but everyone understood what was fair. Sympathy for criminals was in short supply. But at the same time, groups grew to be incredibly close. Children became incredibly precious, it was as though everyone understood for the first time just how precious they were. And men became the protectors and leaders, mostly, while women organized and ran the camps and looked after everyone.”
In his ear, Ram heard Flores curse. “Tell that backward son of a bitch this woman right here is going to organize her fist right up his—”
Ram cut off her audio and screwed up his face. “Women can fight just as well as men. I have two women on my team that have been fighting and killing for thirty years or more and they’re as good as they come.”
“Yeah?” The mayor seemed unimpressed. “I assume they have genetic alterations and bioaugmentations that enhance their combat ability?”
“Well, so do the men in my team.”
“Most of us civilians don’t have anything like that. And anyway, I never said there were no women leaders. Just that our lives became focused on violence and in the real world men understand violence better than women, wouldn’t you agree?
“The real world? I don’t know much about the real world.”
Fraser nodded. “Don’t sweat it. I didn’t either.” He smiled and looked up at the falling snow. “You know what else? I found myself believing in God. My parents were atheists, my grandparents. Almost everyone I knew. And I also know that religiousness is a trait that gets amplified in high-stress environments and yet I found myself being drawn to people praying and I started listening to sermons. All the while I was thinking, I’m just listening because religiousness is a trait amplified by stress. Belief in God correlates with unstable environments. And yet, here I am, standing before you a believer in the Almighty. We have a church here and a priest and we pack it out every Sunday. In fact, more than seventy percent of the people here are Catholic now, like me, and I don’t believe many of them were believers before the invasion.”
“Well, that’s great.” Ram didn’t want to offend the man. “I just don’t understand how you can know the biological cause of something and believe in the divine at the same time.”
Fraser nodded. “God works in mysterious ways.” He grinned. “I’m just teasing you but I can just feel this feeling now, inside me and all around me, and even if it is purely an emergent property of some areas of my brain, I feel it all the same. The words and the rituals and the prayer give me strength and guidance. Without my faith, I wouldn’t
have made it this far and I wouldn’t be looking to the future with anything like the hope and joy I now feel. And I thank God for that.”
Ram thought the guy sounded like a lunatic but he wasn’t about to say anything that might insult him. “That’s great, really great. So, you made it work here, that’s obvious. But these gangs still attack you?”
“We’ve been here a while now but they’ve had a go every year. You see, the best time to raid a neighboring settlement is after harvest and before winter, okay? All your stores are in. Animals slaughtered and preserved, all the year’s work ready to be carried off. Some people don’t think they’re coming this year. A lot of my friends and neighbors think our enemies have become frightened of our walls and our firepower and they know enough to stay away from now on.”
“And what do you think?”
“One of the reasons people follow me is that I hope for the best and I plan for the worst. You want to know what I think? What I dread? They’re taking so long because they’re bringing up some heavy ordinance.”
“Like artillery?”
He nodded. “We all heard stories about towns getting taken out by army tanks and stuff like that. A lot of guys think it’s just rumor but I spoke to three different people over the years who were in towns that were attacked by armored vehicles.”
“How is that possible?”
“Lots of military hardware around the States and even in Canada. You know how many people fantasize about finding and raiding old military bases? I can understand the people that say the Hex wouldn’t allow tanks to go driving around but we’ve moved big tracked vehicles around for hundreds of miles, which must look like battle tanks from the air or from orbit and they’ve never shown an interest in our excavators and backhoes. Sometimes I wonder if they’re even watching any more. I mean, you guys made it to the surface and all they send is one hopper and a Wayfinder. It’s like they lost all interest.”
“The Wayfinders, that’s what you call the guy in the robes? He’s a human collaborator, right? What’s the deal with those guys? It seems like you were familiar with him in some way, is that correct?”
