Earthfall (Book 2): Earthfall 2 [The Mission Continues]

by Knight, Stephen

  “Here’s hoping the folks who are still alive are a little friendlier.” Andrews held up a hand as Mulligan started to respond. “I know, I know—they’ve all been living through times so hard we can’t even imagine, and they’re not going to be very welcoming. But let’s hope they’re still sane.”

  “What passes for sanity in the postapocalyptic environment, Captain?” Mulligan asked. “What’s sound and reasonable to us is probably going to be like a fantasy to anyone who’s managed to survive a decade plus in the aftermath. These folks, if there are any, are going to be as hard as hell.”

  “Enough to make you look like a wimp?” Leona teased.

  “I am not a wimp,” Mulligan intoned. “I’m a wussy. Half wimp, half pussy. Please get that straight.”

  Andrews laughed. The image of Mulligan portrayed as anything other than a hard-bitten Special Forces NCO was hilarious. His lethality was legendary, and Andrews had seen it in action with his own eyes. If anyone was a wimp—or a wussy—it sure wasn’t Command Sergeant Major Scott Mulligan.

  “I agree with that assessment, Sam,” Leona said. “Only a wussy would slink off in the middle of the night and eat a burrito.”

  “Well, if you guys had posted security around the dining area like you should have, given the potential for a biohazard to be released, that wouldn’t have happened. But I can only work with what I have, and what I have are very slow students.”

  “Why did you call him Sam just now?” Andrews asked Leona.

  “It’s an old family nickname,” Mulligan said. “My initials. Middle name is Alexander, so my fam shortened it to Sam. The lieutenant here was quick to figure that out. I haven’t heard it since the last time I talked to my father, before the war.”

  “I guess ‘Scott’ was too much of a mouthful,” Leona said.

  “My father was always economically minded. Sam has two fewer letters. What he did with all the Ts he saved, I have no idea.”

  Andrews laughed again. He saw the sergeant major in an entirely new light. While he’d heard tales from some of the Old Guard that Mulligan had an irreverent and sometimes-offbeat sense of humor, he’d never experienced it aside from caustic one-liners that fluctuated between cutting to outright devastating. The discovery that he was a fully functional human being beneath the decades of pain and loss and heritage of service was uniquely exciting to Andrews. He imagined that he was actually watching someone being reborn.

  So maybe our mission’s already successful.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  “Sir?” Slattery asked.

  Laird lay on his back underneath the SCEV in Bay One with Cobar as they inspected the rig’s transmission seals with handheld thermographic devices that gave them an idea of the material density prior to activating the system for its initial test. It was real grunt work, but Laird insisted on taking part in it. Kelly sat in the rig’s cockpit, going over the electrical systems and ensuring none of the miles of wiring inside the instrument panels had degraded over the years. Slattery had been assigned inventory of the SCEV’s spares, located in one of the storage areas off the vehicle prep area.

  “What’s up, Slattery?” he asked.

  “Can’t be his IQ,” Cobar threw in.

  “Funny, man.” Slattery dropped to his knees and looked under the rig, where the two men lay on wheeled creepers. “Sir, I think we’ve got a problem here.”

  “Can you be more specific?” Laird continued to stare at the thermographic reader’s display as he panned it across a seal.

  “We’re short twelve Hellfires.”

  Laird glanced over at him. “Really,” he said, completely uninterested in the conversation. “Maybe they were miscounted. We’ve already seen evidence that Master Sergeant What’s-His-Name couldn’t count worth shit.”

  “It’s not that. They were removed, sir. And not all that long ago.”

  That got Laird’s attention. “What?”

  “Yes, sir. We’re also short minigun ammunition, and personal weapons have been removed from weapons supply, along with ammunition for them.”

  Cobar’s creeper squeaked a bit as he moved on it. “You said rifles were taken? How many?”

  “All of them,” Slattery said.

  What the fuck—Laird switched off his scanner and kicked the creeper toward Slattery, who stood as Laird shot out from beneath the SCEV. He rolled off the creeper and got to his feet.

  “I thought we checked all this shit yesterday,” he said.

  “No, sir. We checked the food and maintenance stock, not the tactical gear. You had me start the vehicle spares inventory today, remember? I just got to the ordnance section of the list.”

  “You gotta be kidding me.” Laird hustled out of the bay and headed to the larger vehicle prep area.

  Before he ran across the room, he turned back toward the SCEV. Cobar was emerging from beneath it. Through the rig’s viewports, he saw Kelly look up from her work. He waved for her to follow then sprinted across the prep area. His footfalls echoed in the cavernous chamber. Slattery followed, trotting along behind him as Laird ran to the weapons supply area. The fire-blocked vault door was already open, and the light inside the small room was on. Laird pushed inside. On either side of the room were racks for rifles, and overhead, cabinets for sidearms. At the rear of the room was the ammunition storage area.

  It was empty, occupied by nothing other than empty wooden storage crates that had been torn apart. The rifle racks stood bare. Laird looked in one of the metal cabinets, which should have contained semiautomatic pistols in boxes as well as grenade launchers, and saw it was vacant as well.

  “What the fuck.”

  “Exactly,” Slattery said.

  Kelly ran to the room and stopped in the doorway then peered in and saw the empty rifle racks. “Uh ... what’s going on?”

  “We’ve been robbed, LT,” Slattery said.

  “Jesus ... everything? Everything is missing?”

  “Seems like it.” Laird looked at the cement floor, which was flat and expressionless, a slab of concrete that revealed no clues. Then something at the base of one of the rifle racks caught his attention. He knelt and examined it.

  Dirt—or, more likely, mud that had dried.

  “Yeah,” he said, rising to his feet. “Someone’s been here, all right. Slattery, you said missiles are missing?”

  “Come with me, sir.”

  Slattery headed for the door, and Kelly fell back as Cobar walked up. They all filed in behind him as he led them to another room, that one secured behind another larger and thicker vault door that likewise stood open. The room inside was larger, at least forty feet by forty feet. Tough metal racks stood throughout the room, and lying on them were olive-drab metal containers. Each contained one AGM-114 Hellfire missile. Sixty containers were supposed to be in the room.

  Laird did a quick count and came back with fifty-four. “Thought you said there were twelve missing.”

  “What—six isn’t bad enough?” Kelly said.

  Slattery walked toward one of the containers and opened it—empty. He pointed to several others nearby. “All of these are empty, sir. And these ...” He pointed at others in the next rack then walked over and opened one to reveal a missile. “These are still full. Whoever was here took twelve total, six in their shipping containers, and the other six ... well, I guess they loaded them up and brought the empty containers back here.”

  “What the hell would they need twelve Hellfires for?” Cobar asked. “I mean, you need a launching system, and all the rigs are ...” He trailed off as his eyes widened.

  “Bay four,” Kelly said. “We can’t get in it, right?”

  “Goddamn!” Laird headed for the open vault door. “Goddamn, goddamn, goddamn! We have to get in there!”

  As a group, they ran to the closed bay. Laird tried to open the bi-fold door once again. The electric motors tried to respond, but the door remained jammed. He looked up, trying to determine what the hell was keeping the door from opening.


  “We should have paid more attention to this,” he said. “It’s my fault. I should’ve been on this.”

  “The site’s been here for over a decade, Jim—I was just happy to find it,” Kelly said.

  Cobar snapped his fingers. “Here!” He knelt at the left side of the door. The area was dark, but he pointed at the seam where the door came flush with the wall. “You see it? Someone welded a tang right here, not very big but enough to prevent the door from opening. Once the motor feels the resistance, it shuts down. Safety feature.”

  Laird hurried over and bent down to look. Sure enough, a small piece of metal was welded to the wall, already cracking a bit from the door’s momentary shifts as it tried to open. “Slattery, find something for us to break this weld with.”

  “I have that.” Cobar wore a tool belt, and he pulled a screwdriver and a mallet from it. Using the screwdriver as a wedge, he pounded away at it with the mallet, driving the flathead screwdriver into the weld. It took a minute, but the weld eventually cracked and broke away.

  “All right, stand back.” Laird moved to the bay’s keypad and hit the opening button, and this time, the big door rumbled up in its track and folded into the overhead as it was supposed to. The lights inside the long bay snapped on.

  Aside from dozens of empty boxes, ammunition cans, food wrappers, and assorted trash, the bay was empty. The vehicle that had sat in the chamber was gone.

  “Oh my God,” Kelly said.

  Laird stood staring at the garbage inside the bay. Things were adding up quickly now. The lost water, the missing uniforms, the rifles, the munitions, the missing crates of food—someone had been in the site, and not only had they had taken an SCEV, they had tried to cover up their tracks.

  “They plan to come back,” he said. “They made it look like nothing was taken as well as they could, but they knew they’d have to come back eventually ... for more food, fuel, and whatever’s in here that they couldn’t take the first time. They’re going to come back for the rest of it.”

  “They knew the access codes,” Kelly said.

  “Yeah. They’re us, or they used to be, and they hit the place because they knew where it was and how to get in.” Laird turned to her. “Change the entry codes now. Then let’s go through the security event logs. We need to figure out who did this.”

  “Hell, yeah ...” Kelly turned and ran back to the living area, where the site’s functional controls and security systems were located.

  Laird pointed at Bay One. “Gentlemen, we need that rig operational as soon as possible. You guys go to town on the mechanical systems while Jordello and I look into this situation here. As soon as we can, we’ll come back and help out, but right now we need to secure this site as well as we can and figure out what the hell happened.”

  “What’s the rush, sir?” Slattery asked. “I mean, yeah, change the codes so they can’t get in again. But they’ve already taken some shit and lit out. Maybe they won’t come back. What’s the rush? I mean, even if they do, they’re not going to be able to blast their way in, right?”

  Laird frowned. “You really are a special kind of stupid, aren’t you?”

  Slattery sighed and spread his hands. “Look, just trying to understand the urgency here. They’re gone. They won’t be able to get back in.”

  “Slattery, they took an SCEV and two load-outs of munitions. They didn’t do that just for the hell of it. They’re out there now, probably raiding settlements and taking everything they can get their hands on. And our people are out there, too, and they have no idea that there’s a rogue unit running around, one that we should consider hostile.”

  “Oh.” Slattery nodded. “Yeah, okay. I get it now.”

  “Get to work, guys,” Laird said before turning on his heel and hurrying to join Kelly.

  ***

  Unraveling the circumstances behind the break-in took some time. Whoever had done it absolutely knew their way around the replenishment site’s systems and had gone so far as to delete all the security event logs. The last ones prior to the team’s arrival were when the site was secured before the Sixty-Minute War, and Laird didn’t buy a ten-plus year gap in the data. Kelly was able to dig further and found that the system backups had been overlooked. There, everything was fully revealed.

  A team of nine people had literally walked up to the site one day four months earlier. It had been raining, and their approach was dutifully recorded by the security system’s cameras located around the site’s perimeter. They were a scruffy bunch, bearded, and wearing mismatched clothes that had been repaired by hand several times. They carried a menagerie of weapons and wore packs on their backs. Some were in multicam military uniforms. Others were in civilian attire. They wore hoods or ski masks over their heads, not to avoid being recognized but for personal comfort and protection—the air was chilly on the day of their arrival.

  One of them had known the entry code, and they were all admitted into the facility. The cameras chronicled their decontamination and the change into fresh uniforms. Even after decontaminating themselves and showering, they still looked filthy to Laird—long beards and hair, sagging skin, spindly limbs and bodies made thin from what could only have been long intervals between eating. They bagged their old clothes and gear and left them in the airlock. What had wound up happening to them wouldn’t be revealed until later, but Laird wasn’t particularly interested.

  He watched as the team ate and rested after manually bringing the site online. Heat, light, and air flowed, along with the water they used to shower and drink. After a few days, they set about securing the rig. The tall man who had entered the installation code inspected all the vehicles and selected the one from bay four. He obviously knew his way around the SCEVs, or vehicles like them—he went all over the rig, starting his inspection with the underside and moving to the top. His movements were all military, down to the knife hands he used as he instructed the men and women who were with him. Slowly and with some clumsiness, the team set about bringing the selected vehicle to life. Their movements had no urgency. That puzzled Laird. They had everything they needed to sustain them, perhaps for the rest of their lives ... but they were intent on getting an SCEV operational. Why? Why leave the bounty they had? They couldn’t take it all with them, but whatever they were planning to do with the rig wasn’t apparently an immediate concern. They worked on the rig for eight hours every day, occasionally more, conducting inspections, filling it with POL, and finally conducting the engine startups. They rolled it out of the bay and to the prep area, where they loaded the missile pod with Hellfires and the miniguns with belts of ammunition. They opened the tailgate and loaded the compartment with six spare missiles still in their shipping containers, more minigun ammunition, spare crates of food, clothing, medical supplies, and surprisingly, a five-hundred-gallon blivet of fuel. A fuel cross-feed was in the rig’s third compartment, so he surmised the team intended to use the blivet as supplementary fuel that the pumps could pull on as needed. The extra capacity could give them as much as another month of field time. Laird wondered about that as well—the fuel was heavy and would take up a hell of a lot of room. He considered the possibilities. Maybe the team of intruders was afraid they wouldn’t survive whatever lay in store for them, or that they wouldn’t be able to return to refuel without the longer legs the blivet provided. Or maybe their final destination was so distant that they needed the additional range. Using internal fuel alone, the rig’s hyper-efficient engines could provide almost twelve hundred miles of range, and with a little oversight, sixteen hundred was absolutely achievable. The team could travel all the way to Minnesota with that much fuel alone. The extra five hundred gallons would easily give them another eight hundred miles of range.

  “Well, no one’s going to be racking out in back. That’s for sure,” Laird said. “Hell, just to get to the latrine, they’ll have to crawl over that freaking blivet.”

  “They’re definitely prepping for battle,” Kelly muttered as she watched the footage w
ith Laird. “There have to be more of them out there somewhere ... they took enough supplies for a hundred people. And what are they going to do with forty rifles, grenade launchers, and pistols? They cleaned us out on the personal weapons.”

  “Maybe they’re stocking a community. That’s good news, if it’s what it is.”

  “Or maybe they’re taking one down,” Kelly countered, “and that’s why they need all the munitions.”

  “Yeah. I’d thought of that too.” Laird sighed as he watched the video. Deep down, he knew the ragged band of men and women was preparing for a fight but wasn’t sure if it was one of defense, revenge, or outright conquest. After a decade of continuous deterioration, he had no doubt that when the nine intruders had left the facility, they were the best-equipped force in the area.

  He remembered then that the weapons lockers in each of the SCEVs still in the storage bays were fully stocked: eight rifles, eight pistols, and a total of eight thousand rounds of ammunition per vehicle. Each rig also had four grenade launchers with a total load-out of forty rounds of forty-millimeter high-explosive rounds. All that remaining firepower had been left behind. Why?

  He sped through the rest of the video. The team continued prepping the rig for transit. Finally, they had one last meal before the interior sections of the site were closed, separating the prep area from the rest of the site, then filed aboard the SCEV, wearing clean uniforms and carrying rucksacks full of consumables. As the airlock’s clamshell doors closed, beacons near the large door that led to the outside world flashed yellow. The rig’s LED lights came on as its engines spooled up. It sat there for a moment, and Laird checked the monitoring data that scrawled across another display. The atmosphere scrubbers were working overtime, cleaning the air of exhaust as the rig went through a run-up. He checked for vehicle telemetry, but it had been shut off. The rig’s commander had ensured the SCEV didn’t contact the site’s network.