For a moment I didn’t think it had helped, but then Jerome was tilting stiffly backward, like a dictator’s statue hauled down by an angry mob. I saw his arms reach for balance as he took one teetering step back and then another, but there was nothing there for that second step, and he dropped, falling away past the mangled girders and shattered concrete and the million shards of glass.
And then the Jodorowsky unrolled a metal ladder at us with a clatter, and it was time for us to make our getaway. The three of us. Just the three of us.
THERE WAS A very awkward meeting, two days after that. Present were: me, Sturgeon and Cormoran, Political Officer Freya, Viina the Finn and a Russian named Genaddy Osipov. Our lack of tech finally became a positive because they had to conduct the whole business in English, and I listened to Freya’s translator speak clipped sentences into her ear with all the verve of a tax accountant, while Genaddy’s murmured in a breathy female voice that seemed to be constantly on the point of orgasm.
Of the lot of us, only Genaddy was happy. A common soldier in the White Russians’ mercenary companies, he had suddenly become richer to the tune of several million dollars thanks to Cormoran’s hurried negotiation. He grinned at everyone and drank from a hip flask, and it wasn’t entirely clear why he was there except that he was hard to shake off.
The subject of our discussion was mostly extradition. Nordgov would happily have vanished us away to an interrogation camp somewhere, I knew, but it had become fairly well known that we’d thwarted a corporate coup, however unwittingly, so we were somehow heroes of the exact nation we had come over to make war on. The one upside was that we weren’t easily vanishable.
There were a lot of calls for us to go back home, some of which wanted to put us on trial, while others wanted to pin medals on us. I’d found a TV giving CNN with Swedish subtitles, and discovered that things were busy back Stateside. The revelations about how the war was being fought – about who was pulling the strings – had led to enough popular uproar that suddenly Congress and Senate were both trying to look shocked. There would be enquiries, and people were already talking about wars past: Canada, Mexico, Somalia, the intervention in Chile. Suddenly a lot of recent military history was looking fishy. The Swedish campaign was already being rolled back, our boys heading home early and in one piece. The TV was full of politicians trying to out-do each other in crusading against the very scourge of the American people that had probably put them in office. There was talk of a New New Deal, of expanded regulation, anti-trust stuff. Who knew whether it would come to anything? Meanwhile the markets were in free fall. I thought about all those expensive Scion suits and wondered how much would have to get struck from the portfolios of the wealthy before they couldn’t afford them anymore.
In the end, Sturgeon accepted political asylum in Sweden. He always was a socialist at heart, and he had no faith in the reception we might receive back home. Cormoran negotiated a service tour with the Russians, because their money was good, and she likewise didn’t fancy her chances in a country that had become an unwelcoming place for an educated black woman over the last few decades.
For me, I could see only one choice. The US was where I came from, and it was where I was going to. I wanted to see this through. I wanted to rejoin the 203rd. I wanted to testify to what little I knew. Most of all, I didn’t want to turn my back on what Franken had believed in. I said so, to the lot of them. I said it to Sturgeon’s face, after he’d done moralizing. I said it to Freya. I said it to Viina: that I would honor his memory; that Franken had always been a good American boy.
And she looked at me then, with an expression on her face – but with those Finns it was hard to read anything they let show. I tried to ask questions, through Sturgeon, but she just pretended she couldn’t understand him. And yet her eyes never left me, and that look never left her. I know something you don’t.
I chewed over that look all the way until I was waiting for the diplomatic helicopter to come repatriate me. I got to wondering just what might have happened to Jerome and to Franken when they fell. There was a lot of broken building they might have bounced off on the way. Could Franken have lived? Was that what Viina’s ambiguous expression had been trying to tell me?
But by then I was already in the air, and whatever secrets Viina had, she’d taken them back to the dark, science-haunted no-fly zone that was Finland.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Adrian Tchaikovsky was born in Woodhall Spa, Lincolnshire, before heading off to Reading to study psychology and zoology. He subsequently ended up in law and has worked as a legal executive in both Reading and Leeds, where he now lives. Married, he is a keen live role-player and has trained in stage-fighting and historical combat. He maintains an interest in history and the biological sciences, especially entomology.
Adrian is the author of the acclaimed 10-book Shadows of the Apt series starting with Empire in Black and Gold published by Tor UK. His other works for Tor UK include standalone novels Guns of the Dawn and Children of Time and the new series Echoes of the Fall starting with The Tiger and the Wolf. Other major works include short story collection Feast and Famine for Newcon Press and novellas The Bloody Deluge (in Journal of the Plague Year) and Even in the Cannon’s Mouth (in Monstrous Little Voices) for Abaddon. He has also written numerous short stories. In 2016 he won the Arthur C Clarke Award, and he has been shortlisted for the David Gemmell Legend Award and the British Fantasy Award.
THE INVASION IS OVER. THEY ARE ALREADY AMONGST US.
Benjamin Carter Mason died last night. Maybe he threw himself off a bridge into Los Angeles Harbor, or maybe he burned to death in a house fire in San Pedro; it doesn’t really matter. Today, Mason’s starting a new life. He’s back in boot camp, training for the only war left that matters a damn.
For years, their spies have been coming to Earth, learning our weaknesses. Our governments knew, but they did nothing—the prospect was too awful, the costs too high—and now, the horrifying and utterly inhuman Cray are laying waste to our cities. The human race is a heartbeat away from extinction. That is, unless Mason, and the other men and women of Task Force OMBRA, can do anything about it.
This is a time for heroes. For killers. For Grunts.
‘Weston Ochse writes hard-nosed fiction with more grit and imagination than most authors could ever hope to muster. When he turns his skills to tales of the military, the words sing with the truth of personal experience.’
Christopher Golden, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Snowblind
‘SEAL Team 666 is like X-Files and Torchwood written by Tom Clancy: ingenious, creepy, and entertaining.’
Kevin J. Anderson on Seal Team 666
www.solarisbooks.com
The Olympians appeared a decade ago, living incarnations of the Ancient Greek gods, offering order and stability at the cost of placing humanity under the jackboot of divine oppression. Until former London police officer Sam Akehurst receives an invitation to join the Titans, the small band of battlesuited high-tech guerillas squaring off against the Olympians and their mythological monsters in a war they cannot all survive...
"The kind of complex, action-oriented SF Dan Brown would write if Dan Brown could write."
The Guardian on The Age of Zeus
www.solarisbooks.com
WHEN THE WORLD ENDED...
The Cull swept the world in the early years of the twenty-first century, killing billions and ending civilisation. Only a fortunate few, blessed with the right blood type, were spared. In the chaos of the Afterblight, scientists, priests—even armed robbers—may become leaders, or heroes. Three incredible writers, including the bestselling author of the Shadows of the Apt series Adrian Tchaikovsky, lead us into the apocalypse.
In Malcolm Cross’s Orbital Decay, the team in the International Space Station watch helplessly as the world is all but wiped out. Exiled from Earth by his blood-type, astronaut Alvin Burrows must solve the mystery of the “Pandora” experiment, even as someone on the station tak
es to murdering the crew one by one...
In C. B. Harvey’s Dead Kelly, fugitive and convict “Dead” Kelly McGuire returns from hiding out in the Bush to the lawless city of Melbourne. McGuire has three jobs to do: to be revenged on his old gangmates, to confront some uncomfortable truths about his past, and—ultimately—to discover his own terrible destiny...
In Adrian Tchaikovsky’s The Bloody Deluge, Katy Lewkowitz and her friend and old tutor Dr. Emil Weber, fleeing the depredations of the so-called New Teutonic Order, take refuge among the strangely anachronistic survivors at the monastery of Jasna Góra in Western Poland. A battle of faith ensues, that could decide the future of humankind...
www.abaddonbooks.com
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