“I get it, sir. It’s not a problem.” Fraternization amongst SCEV crews was forbidden, at least out in the field. And while Mulligan knew of at least three instances in which SCEV crews were hot-racking it in the sleeping compartments of their vehicles, he understood that the command sergeant major couldn’t come under that kind of scrutiny and retain any semblance of command presence. Keeping Mulligan and Eklund on different work and sleep schedules would help ameliorate the circumstances.
“Okay. I just wanted to make sure you were cool with it.”
Mulligan smiled slightly. “Captain? You really don’t have to explain the duty roster to me, sir. I still get it. We split you and Rachel up last time out, remember?”
“Ah.” Andrews nodded sheepishly. “Right.”
“So. Departure checklist?”
Andrews smiled. “Yeah. Let’s get the wheels turning.”
***
The departure was as standard as any Andrews had ever made, despite the nominal importance of their mission. No gathering of well-wishers waved farewell to the SCEV as it made its way to the elevator. The transit to the surface of the planet was as unremarkable as always—the lift worked, and after a few minutes, the SCEV was admitted onto the plains of Kansas. As the rig pulled out of the elevator and trundled across the pancake-flat terrain surrounding the lift, Mulligan handled the departure communications while fine-tuning the navigation. The ground outside the lift was rutted from multiple vehicle departures and arrivals, and the cold weather had hardened the torn soil into something approaching solid rock. The SCEV jounced as its big tires rolled over the distressed soil. Andrews listened for any sounds of shifting items on the other side of the padded bulkhead that separated the cockpit from the second compartment but heard none aside from the usual creaks and groans of a multiton vehicle swaying over a rough passage. The SCEV wasn’t impaired by anything so minor as some broken ground. Andrews pushed the rig onto their course and slowly accelerated to forty-five miles per hour once the ground became more uniform. The terrain surrounding Harmony Base was as familiar to him as the curve of his wife’s hips, so he knew exactly how fast he could run and not thrash the crew to death. Crew comfort was important, especially over long-range recons. If the crew wasn’t getting enough rest, then they would not only get cranky but also start making mistakes. Despite the technological marvel that cocooned them, mistakes in the post–nuclear holocaust world could be fatal for the SCEV’s occupants.
Plus, he didn’t want any of them getting even with him later in the trip. The last thing he wanted was to be hurled headlong out of his rack. Though the rig’s interior was wrapped in impact-absorbing padding, he wouldn’t put it past Laird to come up with a nice get-even plan—all in good-natured fun.
Initially, the route—or plot, as it was called—paralleled that of the one Andrews had set out upon when heading to San Jose, California. The rig would retrace what was becoming one of the busiest courses Harmony had run over the past year. Several SCEVs had rolled out to San Jose while conducting support and sustainment operations for the survivors of Law’s family. The route was well mapped, and where Andrews and his crew had initially needed to invent the track while picking their way across the Sierra Nevadas, the follow-on crews had further refined the route and marked each and every obstacle. Now, the rig’s onboard nav system could pilot the course without fear of fault. Andrews was hardly acting the part of pioneer at that point in the mission. His role was more of an airline pilot—just fly the course and manage to wake up if something went wrong along the way.
But once they hit the navigational phase line known as Delta Two Seven, which would be after the rig descended from the Sierra Nevadas, they would turn right instead of continuing straight on. Picking their way across the Dearth Valley basin, they would track westerly past Mount Whitney until they made it to Interstate 5. If the interstate was still serviceable after a decade of neglect, they would use it as a high-speed approach up to an area east of Sacramento. There, they would navigate to a hardened bunker that had been established before the Sixty-Minute War and held pre-positioned supplies to ensure Harmony could sustain its missions even hundreds or thousands of miles from the base. The cache contained suspended fuel supplies that had been treated to prevent the substance from degrading, along with stabilized food, clothing, maintenance spares, medical supplies, and anything that would be of importance during a long-term mission. The contents of the bunker—and several were scattered all across the nation—were only for Harmony’s initial use. Their true design was to serve as forward-located supply points where SCEV crews would load up and surge aid outward to whatever human establishments they had previously contacted. A smaller cache had been tapped in the vicinity of Las Vegas, and its contents had been slowly pushed out to the survivors Andrews and the others had found in San Jose. While Andrews hadn’t seen the supply point himself, he had read the reports, and virtually everything in the bunker there was fully mission capable.
The supply point outside of Sacramento was a larger presence, however. It had not only the requisite disaster aid but also something that only four other sites in the nation had: four fully assembled Self-Contained Exploration Vehicles. It was from this site that Laird, Jordello, Cobar, and Slattery would revive one of these vehicles and move it into active service. Once the rig was inspected and certified, it would be redesignated as SCEV Five. Jim Laird would finally have a command again. Using the newly restored SCEV Five, he and the others would follow SCEV Four’s path to the north and link up with Andrews and the others outside of Eugene, Oregon. The journey wouldn’t be terribly taxing, and for the return trip, SCEV Four would be on hand to take on the crew if the new rig suddenly shit the bed. No one was counting on that happening, but after lying dormant for a little more than a decade, anything was possible.
Once Laird and the others had been delivered to the site, Andrews would take Four up north. There, at the southern end of the Willamette Valley and near the confluence of the McKenzie and Willamette Rivers, they hoped the environmental conditions would be more amenable to supporting life without the need for millions of dollars’ worth of filtration gear, pre-positioned food supplies, and hardened subterranean bunkers. If so, Andrews and the crew of SCEV Four would observe and collect intel until the newly restored Five linked up with them a month or so later.
Once that happened, they would make contact.
Andrews couldn’t wait.
CHAPTER FOUR
Though the route had been travelled a dozen times and navigational refinements had been made by the follow-on teams, it still took several days for the rig to wend its way across the mighty Rockies then the smaller but no less hazardous Sierra Nevada Mountain ranges. Andrews and the rest of the crew had enough to do, and while the newly rebuilt SCEV Four handled the voyage like a champ, an undercurrent of stress about being so far away from home in a vehicle that was only now facing its true first endurance test ran through them. All the earlier shakeout jaunts hadn’t been nearly as punishing. After all, the plains of Kansas and eastern Colorado didn’t offer much in the way of extreme elevation changes. Just the same, the rig handled the climbs and descents as normally as it had before it had been pretty much destroyed by Law.
“Look at it this way, Captain,” Mulligan had told him as they picked their way down from the Sierra Nevadas when Andrews gave voice to the fear of a mechanical failure stranding them. “We’re on a cardinal route to the west, so we’re only a few weeks from being rescued. SCEV Three is scheduled for a run to San Jose, so they’d come across us.”
“Good to know. Thanks, Sarmajor.”
“Hey, won’t do shit if the CO2 scrubbers quit—we’ll be long dead, even with emergency reserves. But that probably won’t happen. Right?”
Andrews snorted. “Bright beam of sunshine you are, Sarmajor. Thanks for the pep talk. Now shut the hell up.”
Mulligan laughed. His right hand was on the instrument-panel visor, the left resting comfortably on the seat’s left armrest. They all r
ode that way when they were right-seating it. It was a straight drop from the instrument-panel sun visor to reach the second control column, whereas moving one’s arm from the armrest actually took fractions of a second longer—one of the little things one learned from practical experience that even talented design engineers had never taken into account.
Andrews scanned the instruments as the SCEV continued its route on autopilot. Everything was good to go. Mulligan kept eyes out, regarding the terrain ahead of the rig. If there was something out of place, he would point it out before the SCEV blundered into a sticky situation. The copilot’s job was normally to monitor the instruments while the rig commander kept an eye on the external environment. Andrews had long since broken with that tactic, as anyone could get bored doing only one thing for hours on end. Boredom was a breeding ground for mistakes, where accidents waited to happen. Mulligan agreed with this approach and had modified the operational standards to include it. It was now the preferred method of SCEV pilotage.
“Hey, Scott. I want to talk to you like a brother, man,” Andrews said suddenly. “Like two guys, not as an officer to a subordinate.”
Mulligan didn’t look away from the diamond-matrix viewport in front of him. The windscreen was so hard that it could deflect fifty-caliber bullets without failing. “As if I’m your subordinate. Go for broke, sonny.”
“What?”
Mulligan rolled his eyes and sighed. “Jesus, you kids make me feel a million years old. Go ahead, Mike. Say what you wanna say. I’m a captive audience, as you might have noticed.”
“I want to know why you took Benchley with you into the house,” Andrews said. “I thought I was going to have that job. I mean—I’m not pissed or anything. I just assumed it would be me. Junior man and all that.”
“If you recall correctly, Benchley invited himself along.”
“And that was pretty crazy. The CG going EVA? Holy crap, if there were still a US Army in existence, I’d be up shit’s creek, right? A mission commander allowing a general officer to step off into the shit?”
“Don’t worry about that, kid. Plenty of people were pissed about it, most notably our DCG, but she had advance word from the man himself. Benchley doesn’t do anything spur of the moment. It was a planned attack.”
“So why him?”
Mulligan paused for a moment. “It wasn’t something I was in control of, you know. I mean, yes, I could have cold-cocked the guy and tied him up in the sleeping compartment, but he had his mind set on helping me out. He’s from my era. He’s Old Guard. Not to sound elitist or anything, but we’re all connected in a way you kids don’t get. Like the way you and the others are just automatically in sync, and the rest of us dinosaurs are standing around and scratching our heads, wondering what the hell you guys are up to. This is generically referred to as ‘the generation gap,’ in case you were wondering.”
“Yeah, well, you’re not exactly answering my question.”
Mulligan looked over at him then, a small smile on his lips. Andrews admitted it took some getting used to, seeing Mulligan actually smile. “Pushy little bastard, aren’t you?”
Andrews smiled back. “Hey, I’m just trying to understand. Were you more comfortable with him than me?”
“You had to stay with the rig,” Mulligan said. “And you had to keep Leona in check. Leaving Benchley and her behind with only young KC to stand watch wouldn’t have made a ton of sense. And the fact of the matter is, the Old Man needed to do it. By helping me straighten out my past, he helped lay his own family to rest—in a way, anyhow.” Mulligan fell silent for a moment as he scanned the terrain ahead. “It’s complicated. Most of us have a history that leads us to make the decisions we do. What Benchley did was reckless and against regulations, but it was the only thing a decent man could do. And no matter how much smack I might talk about old Martin, he is very much a decent man.”
“I never thought otherwise. It was the right thing to do.”
“Then you won’t mind taking a couple of hours to deviate from our planned course to return the favor,” Mulligan said.
“Sorry?”
Mulligan reached into a pocket and pulled out a piece of paper than had been neatly folded then inserted into a plastic carrier. He handed it over to Andrews without taking his eyes off the landscape ahead.
Andrews accepted it and turned the carrier over in his hands. “What’s this?”
“You could always open it up and find out.”
“Or you could just tell me.”
“It’s an address in San Francisco, along with GPS coordinates—2358 Jones Street, in the neighborhood of Russian Hill. It was the Old Man’s son’s place.”
Andrews looked at the plastic-ensconced paper once again. At first, he didn’t know what to say. Is it an order? It couldn’t be—it wasn’t commemorated in the mission essentials task list. Is it a request? If so, why did it go to Mulligan and not me? Andrews had been brought up to adopt a regimented existence of discipline and forbearance. While things didn’t always go that way, he had never expected Harmony Base’s commanding general to make such a request and, if so, to the post command sergeant major as opposed to the mission commander.
“I don’t really know what to make of this,” he said finally.
“It’s not set in stone. San Francisco was severely nuked with direct strikes that the missile interceptors failed to splash. Benchley knows what happened to his son and daughter-in-law and grandkid, but he’s a human being, and he still wants to be sure. He’s not asking us to go EVA and bury the bodies—basically because there won’t be any. But if we can, I’d like to send the scout out, collect some video, and take it back to him.” Mulligan took his eyes away from the vista beyond the viewport and looked at Andrews. “It would mean a lot to an old man who’s going to spend his last days underground while trying to faithfully architect America’s renewal. He and I both realize it’s a big ask, given the nature of our current mission ... but it’s a request I both understand and actually want to try to accommodate. But it’s always your call, Andrews. You make the decision. If the mission can take the diversion, then you’re free to order it done. If the risks are too high, then don’t. Sacrificing the living for memories of the dead is never wise. Take it from me.”
“I’m not against it. I just, uh, don’t like this stuff being sprung on me like this,” Andrews said.
“For what it’s worth, it’s not a huge reach. We’ll have to track a hundred fifty miles west to get to the point where we can launch the drone and do a surveillance mission. It’ll take about fifty minutes to complete. And the intel might be useful in and of itself. Gives Harmony a better idea of what the bigger picture is, once they get to review the footage. But for sure, the general would be all over it, one way or the other.”
“I get that,” Andrews said. “Like I said, I’m not against it.”
Mulligan nodded and went back to scanning the terrain. “You have to learn to be flexible, Andrews,” he said. “Adaptability is key. And I’m not talking about something like this—this isn’t a mission essential. But out in the field, you’ll have to respond to things going sideways in an instant. There could be a thousand Laws out there, all of them willing to do whatever they feel they have to for their people. Some of them we can rationalize with and get to stand down. Others, we won’t. Most of them won’t give us the opportunity—they’ll just attack. The rig, that’s what they’ll want up front, then maybe us, for intelligence purposes—or maybe just to eat us, like Law and his family wanted. But that’s why I’ve been busting your butts over the small-unit training lately. Just in case, you know.”
“And how are we doing?” Andrews asked, happy to change the subject.
“Mostly pretty well,” Mulligan said. “Laird has the muscle and the reflexes for a firefight, which I found to be surprising. He’s quick, and he can read things very well. You, on the other hand, like to stop and think. Thinking is always good, but you should stop to think before and after a fight, not i
n the middle of it. You have the beast in you. I can see it. You certainly showed that in San Jose. You might need to uncage it more often. This isn’t criticism, by the way. Officers need to be thoughtful in how they apply force, but there comes a time when you can’t just consider it—you have to commit to it. On the plus side, unlike Laird, you’re not likely to lead people into a circumstance where they can get sacked. Laird doesn’t think as much as you do, but he is faster to respond to a challenge. That can be both good and bad.”
“Which do you prefer, if I can ask?”
Mulligan grunted and appeared to mull it over. “Tough question. San Jose changed a lot of things. Before, I would have rated both of you exactly the opposite. Seems like hard contact in the field made Jimmy want to be friendlier with the weapons on a rig. It looks like it might have had the opposite effect on you. From my perspective, I’d rather have a commanding officer who wasn’t ready to grab a rifle and go weapons free right off the bat. On the other hand, when the chips are down, that’s exactly what I would want.”
Andrews suddenly became perturbed. “You think I wouldn’t fight again, Sarmajor?”
“Not at all. I know you would. You’d just get the second shot off instead of the first.” Mulligan smiled again. “But like I said, I’m not sandbagging you here. Your approach is fine, up to a point. Laird’s approach is fine, up to a point. What we need to discover here is that happy medium where the two intersect, and that’s something we’ll refine as we go along.”
Andrews sighed. “Okay. What about the rest of the team?”
“On board now? Jordello is a special snowflake. Very reluctant to fight. A good junior officer, willing to learn, and can be reasoned with. When things got hot, she did what she had to do. Leona is better at it, but she’s detached—she’s not very good at the whole people-management thing, and that’s actually really, really important in our line of work. Young KC would do whatever she had to do to protect her rig—a lot like Spencer, actually. But she’s very much unlike Spencer in that Spencer was a man of the people, who would go out and do anything for anyone and do anything to anyone if he had to. Once you got past all the gab, he was a pretty solid soldier, and he knew how to get along with other people. That’s not young KC—she’s a total gear head. I suspect she has a heart that’s a mile long and a mile wide, but she’s just not as user-friendly as Spencer was. She likes machines, but she also likes people. Machines, she understands right away—people, not so much. Counterpoint to that: Jordello. She’s the opposite, only she has an idea of what people are, and she’s not really positioned to deal with the reality that anyone we meet out here ten years after a global nuclear war probably isn’t going to be very nice. How’s my psychology adding up here?”
Earthfall (Book 2): Earthfall 2 [The Mission Continues] Page 3
