by Greg Keyes
He heard DeLao groan. Amar knew why—he didn’t feel like taking another step, either.
“Arthritis acting up, old fellow?” Amar said, trying to lighten the mood, as he usually did. But it came out weird and flat, and he wished he hadn’t said anything.
* * *
As they moved up to the battered structure, they encountered a few more dead jabbers. Amar prodded one of them and rolled it over, making certain it was dead.
Even in the oppressive heat, he felt frost on his spine.
The trooper’s mask had come off—whether she had pulled it off while dying or the force of the explosion that killed her had loosened its fastenings, he couldn’t tell. But he could see her face.
The lower part of her face looked human—her lips and cheekbones were familiar enough. Her nose was broad, with very little separation from her forehead, but was still within the realm of human variation. But her ears were oddly flattened against her hairless skull, and there was nothing at all human about her large, silvery eyes. They were set too far apart, almost on the sides of her head, and contained no orbs or pupils.
He felt like he was going to vomit.
For twenty years the aliens had been playing with human DNA. This was one result. Had she begun life as fully human and then been altered?
No one could be sure about that.
* * *
When they reached the ruin and entered the only passable hall, they started finding equally dead humans.
They’d made a stand here, obviously, and given their numbers and those of the enemy dead, they had fought well.
To his relief, Amar didn’t recognize any of them. They were armed and armored in the same ragtag fashion as his bunch, at least at first glance, wearing whatever ancient bits of body armor they could find and filling the gaps in their gear with patches of Kevlar, cold hammered sheet metal—whatever was at hand. Most of their weapons were decades old.
But upon closer inspection, these guys looked as if they had new gear. New as in months old instead of twenty years.
Still, it hadn’t saved them.
“This one’s alive!” DeLao said, kneeling and reversing the Mexico City Red Devils cap that held his frizzy brown hair in check.
The man was sitting, propped against a wall just past a turn in the corridor. He was alive, but only barely so. DeLao already had his medical kit out, but Amar doubted they could do much for the fellow beyond easing his pain.
Thomas knelt next to DeLao.
“What happened here, son?” she asked the soldier. “What’s your name?”
He looked up at her with pale gray eyes. His lips moved, but nothing came out.
“Here’s another live one,” Chitto said. Her voice was quiet—she was always quiet. She had moved farther down the hall—too far, actually. She had a frown on her round face, and her wide lips were pressed tight. To Amar, she looked as if she might lose it at any moment.
They had picked Chitto up in an illegal settlement in a contagion zone just a few days before. The squad had been on another mission but ran across her people being rounded up by ADVENT troopers. After they finished off the jabbers, Chitto had asked if she could volunteer. Thomas said yes, and the plan was to take her to a haven for training. Instead, like a bad dream, trouble kept finding them, drawing them farther and farther from their intended goal.
“Wait for the rest of us, Chitto,” Amar said, cautiously moving up to her position. “We have to watch each other’s backs. You can’t just wander off when I think you’re in place.”
“Yeah, okay,” she said.
Amar looked down at the man she’d found.
The fellow was young and wiry, with narrow, pleasant features, and he was unconscious. He wasn’t wearing any armor, and he didn’t seem to actually be wounded. The cause of his insensible state was likely the dead ADVENT soldier a few feet away who had been armed with a stun lance, the weapon used to break up crowds and protesters—and to take live prisoners. It looked something like a sabre or a long billy club with a knuckle guard and could deliver a powerful neurological shock.
“Hey, buddy,” Amar said, kneeling and patting his cheek.
The man stirred and, with a little more encouragement, opened his eyes, which were pale blue.
“What’s … what’s going on?” he asked. He had a slight accent that Amar guessed was probably Scottish.
“That’s what we’re wondering,” Thomas said, as she arrived. Dux lumbered back to the rear, while Nishimura padded lithely to the end of the corridor. Even in her armor Nishimura seemed tiny, almost birdlike, but she was as deadly as anyone Amar had ever known—and far more dangerous than most.
“Sergei?” the man said, suddenly trying to sit up.
“If you mean the man down there, he didn’t make it,” Thomas told him, nodding at the young man DeLao had been working on.
The man closed his eyes and sighed.
“That’s unfortunate,” he said. “Did anyone else …” He looked around at them. Thomas shook her head.
“They’re all dead,” she said.
He seemed to absorb that for a moment, his lips pressed together hard enough to turn white. His Adam’s apple bobbed.
“Who are you guys?” he finally asked.
“We picked up an SOS,” Thomas said, instead of answering his question. Her blue-eyed gaze stayed steady on the fellow.
“Yeah, that was me,” he told her. “I managed to rig up a spark-gap generator and use the steel beams in the compound as an antenna. It didn’t have much range, but more than our short-range units at least. You must have been close.” His eyes shifted. “You broke the encryption. You’re Natives.”
“Holly Thomas,” the Chief said. “We’re out of Felix, at least for the moment.”
Felix was the code name for their base. She waited to see what his reaction would be.
“Felix,” Sam said. “Outside of Gulf City. I’ve heard of you guys. Hacked their propaganda system, right?”
“Well, that was our tinkers,” Thomas said. “We’re more on the shoot-and-loot end of the business.”
“Lucky for me,” he said. “You can call me Sam. But I can’t tell you my cell. It’s classified.”
“What are you doing here, Sam?” She gestured at the dead trooper. “What were they doing here?”
“I’m an analyst,” he said, as if that explained everything. He slowly stood up. “This is an old XCOM facility. Not one of the larger ones. I came here looking for data.”
“Data,” Thomas repeated, dubiously.
“The central facility was destroyed,” he said. “Utterly. Pulverized into dust and then blasted again for good measure. But XCOM wasn’t stupid enough to keep all of their eggs in one basket. Or, in this case, data in one mainframe. They had backup servers in a closed network. A private mini-cloud. One of the servers was here. Or rather, beneath here. We had just discovered the way down when the ADVENT attack began.”
“How did they find you?” Thomas asked.
“I wish I knew,” he said. “Colonel Dixon and the rest—they killed the first bunch, but when it was over, Dixon was dead, and there were only five of us left. By the time I found what we came for, reinforcements had shown up and penned us in. I rigged the radio, and we tried to hold them off for as long as we could. Then it got down to just Sergei and me. The cuss there with the stun lance did me.” He nodded at the dead trooper. “Did you guys get him?”
“He was dead when we got here,” Thomas said.
“Must have been Sergei, then,” Sam said. “You must have shown up in the nick of time.” His face fell, and he glanced down the hall at his fallen comrades. “For me, anyway.”
“We were ambushed,” Amar said, starting to feel angry at Sam without knowing exactly why. “We lost someone.”
“I’m sorry about that,” Sam said. “But believe me, he didn’t die in vain. None of them did.”
“She,” Amar corrected.
Nobody said anything for a moment. Sam stood
there, looking uncomfortable.
“So you found something,” Thomas said, breaking the silence.
“Yes,” Sam said. “Something amazing. Something that will change everything.”
“And what’s that?” Thomas asked.
“I can’t tell you,” he said. “It’s classified.”
“Classified? Classified by who?” Thomas demanded.
“I can’t—”
“Tell me that,” she snapped. “Right.” She turned away from Sam. “We need to roll, now. More reinforcements are probably on the way. Sam, you’re coming with us. We’ll drop you off at the closest refuge.”
“No,” Sam said, suddenly more animated. “No! You have to come with me! I have to show them what I found, or this really will have all been for nothing. I’ll never survive on my own.”
“No kidding,” DeLao grunted.
Nishimura chuckled at that and pushed a few long, fine strands of black hair back up under the camouflage bandana she wore.
“We already have an assignment,” Thomas explained, a bit impatiently.
“This is more important,” Sam insisted.
“I have no way of judging that,” Thomas shot back.
Sam pursed his lips and nodded.
“Fair enough,” he said. “May I have a word with you in private, Captain?”
Thomas paused a minute, then gestured toward the outside of the building. Amar watched them walk out of earshot. They stood there for a moment and then came back.
“We’re taking him,” Thomas said.
“Why?” DeLao demanded. “What did he say?”
“A name,” she replied. “Just a name.”
CHAPTER 2
THE SQUAD HAD arrived on the scene in a battered Humvee and an ancient pickup truck. Both vehicles were now smoking wrecks, the first casualties of their encounter with the ADVENT.
The ADVENT soldiers had arrived in a flying transport, but as tempting as it seemed, experience had proven it was a bad idea to try and commandeer one. Their controls did not respond to human hands. On a few occasions, some very clever Natives had gotten around that using sophisticated hacking gear, at which point the vehicles had begun broadcasting a silent alarm and tracking signal, which on one occasion had led to the discovery and destruction of an entire resistance cell. The one instance Amar had ever heard of in which the tracking mechanism was disabled, the vehicle had instantly flared white-hot, vaporizing everyone inside and within ten meters of it. ADVENT weapons and armor were equally useless once separated from their bearers.
So they left the transport alone and double-timed it out of there on foot. Amar tried not to think of Rider lying in the kudzu, cold and alone, but if they stayed long enough to bury her, they would likely need burying themselves. In any case, the ADVENT would return her and the other dead humans to their next of kin using DNA analysis, along with a heaping dose of propaganda concerning what had happened to them. The aliens liked things tidy.
* * *
They alternated between a fast walk and a slow run, following the cracked asphalt of an old state road through what had once been pasture and fields but were now twenty years along toward becoming forest. The aliens had returned much of the world to wilderness, luring most of the population into the New Cities they built on the ruins of the ones they had razed in the conquest.
Vast areas between the population centers were closed to human traffic, and entry into them was forbidden due to something the aliens rather loosely called the contagion. Whether it was a disease or some sort of bioagent or nothing of the kind wasn’t known to the resistance. Yet, whatever it was, the aliens were scared of it. The road they were on was just inside one of the forbidden areas, and as night fell, Amar felt the presence of the unknown lurking somewhere in the darkness.
When it was finally full night, they slowed to an easier pace. The moon rose, a little more than half full, so they didn’t need to use their torches. Night birds called in the distance as frogs and insects provided a chorus.
“KB, right?”
Amar had seen Sam coming up from the corner of his eye, so he wasn’t surprised. But he wasn’t pleased, either.
“Amar,” he corrected. “I’m KB to my friends.”
Sam’s cheerful expression didn’t falter.
“Okay, Amar,” he said. “Look, I really am sorry about Rider.”
So he had asked someone who had died. That was something at least. But Amar still had a bitter taste in his mouth.
“Yeah,” Amar said. “But it was totally worth it, right?”
“I didn’t mean to be glib,” Sam said. “Dixon, Sergei, those guys with me—they knew what we were doing. They understood the risks and the possible gains. You guys didn’t. You were just trying to help someone you didn’t know. That was noble. I’m sorry any of you suffered for it.”
“Yet you’ve drafted us to go along with you and still won’t tell us why.”
“I wish I had the authority,” he said. “Thomas understands.”
“Yeah,” Amar replied.
He hoped Sam would go away, then, but he continued to walk beside him.
“So help me out,” Sam said, after a moment. “I didn’t know Rider, but I’d like to know who I’m with now. Thomas isn’t all that talkative. I was hoping you could fill me in.”
“I’m not all that talkative, either,” Amar said. “And I’m not a social director.” He instantly regretted it—the fellow seemed sincere enough. And he knew what Rider would have done.
But Sam was finally getting the message and dropping back.
Damn it, Amar thought.
“Well,” he said, lifting his chin toward Chitto, only a few meters away. “That’s Kathy Chitto, some fresh meat we picked up in—what’s that place called, Chitto?”
Chitto turned her broad face toward him. She had what his mother would call a moon-face, with dark, expressive eyes. Her jet black hair was cut short, with bangs in the front. She was on the short side, with broad shoulders.
“Conehatta,” she replied.
Sam nodded as he caught back up.
“Right,” Amar said. “Just a few days from here. We were headed up to—” He stopped abruptly. They hadn’t discussed how much to tell this guy about their own operations.
Sam was studying Chitto’s moonlit features.
“Are you a Native American?” he asked.
“I’m a Native,” Chitto said. “Like you.”
“Sure,” Sam said. “But—”
“Choctaw,” she said with a sigh. “Okay?”
“Noted,” Sam said.
Amar wondered if he had misjudged Chitto. Her reply to Sam was the nearest thing to grit he had seen from her.
Amar pointed ahead. “Tomas DeLao, the guy with the baseball hat and crooked nose—he’s from Acapulco. Trained as a physician before he fell in with the resistance. The tall, very dark guy that looks like he has a bowl on his head is Toby Ayele. Born in Israel but grew up mostly in North American shantytowns. Sharpshooter. Stay on his good side, or you’ll never hear the bullet. The red-headed ogre next to DeLao is Blake Duckworth, but we just call him Dux, which he likes because it’s apparently the Latin word for ‘duke.’ He won’t say where he’s from, for some reason. He sounds American, though, maybe Midwestern. The woman on point is Alejandra Nishimura, from one of the settlements outside of New Lima.”
“And there’s you.”
“There’s me,” Amar allowed. “Mama Tan’s little boy.”
“So why do they call you KB? What’s that?”
“Kampung boy,” he replied.
Sam stared at him blankly.
“Kampung is what we call the settlements in Malaysia,” Amar explained. “A kampung boy is someone who grew up in a kampung. It can mean salt of the earth—or something like a redneck or a hick, depending on who’s saying it.”
“Got it,” Sam said.
“There was this famous cartoon, years ago—”
He broke off as Nishimura raised her
hand to signal a halt, then pointed to cover. Amar ducked into the thorny scrub on the side of the road, double-checking his weapon.
For a long, still moment, Amar didn’t hear anything but an owl in the distance and the steady whir of crickets. But then, as the quiet settled, he made out the very faint tinny sound of amplified speech, punctuated by a sort of rushing noise.
After a moment he saw Toby stand, raise his rifle, and put his eye to the scope. Then Thomas and Nishimura appeared beside him. They all gazed off in the same direction as Toby. Thomas gestured for the rest to move up.
The landscape was almost uniformly flat, but here and there small slopes developed, the remnants of natural levees formed by the river’s flooding. From that slight elevation, looking beyond the still water of an oxbow lake, Amar saw a line of orange flame. As he watched, a jet of fire appeared and set more trees to burning. A second spume of liquid fire jetted at the other end of the line, and another.
“It’s ADVENT,” Toby said. “I can make their silhouettes out through my scope.”
“Yeah,” Dux said. “But what the hell are they burning? And why in the middle of the night?”
“Maybe it’s something that only comes out at night,” Chitto murmured, more to herself than to the rest of them.
“The contagion?” DeLao whispered.
“Doesn’t matter,” Thomas said. “That’s not our mission. Come on, let’s move out.”
They continued on, and soon the flames were no longer visible. But the wind shifted and brought with it the scent of burning wood.
And something else. Amar didn’t know what it was, but it wasn’t like anything he’d ever smelled before.
The night was good cover, but he was glad when the sun came back up.
* * *
Around midday Thomas called a halt next to the remains of a country store that had probably been abandoned twenty years before the invasion. From any distance—and, importantly, from above—it looked like a mound of kudzu vines. Nishimura chopped through the creeping tendrils with the long, wickedly sharp blade that served as both her machete and sword, and they finally had a chance to rest.
