Broken Arrow: Navigator Book Four

by SD Tanner

  Hesitating, he eyed the beam suspiciously. “Really, hon, can’t you just be happy with a tall man?”

  Standing on the platform at the other end of the beam, Lexie placed her hands on her hips. “Don’t be such a baby.” When he didn’t move, she tried another tactic. “If you make it over here I might give you something nice.”

  Remembering just how nice her gift had been the night before motivated him to take a step. Such an immediate reaction to her flirtatious offer made her giggle. “Oh, so that’s how it is? You just needed the right incentive.”

  Taking another tentative step forward, he felt the hydraulics whirring against the stumps on his legs. Unlike the other Navigators, his gear incorporated lower legs that were made of solid rubber limbs taken from critter remains. They’d run wires down the center of the legs to drive the hydraulics in the knees and ankles, giving him limbs that were virtually indestructible. According to the recording he’d listened to, Cassie had said the aliens were here to harvest humans, so there was a certain irony in using the critters to fashion new legs for him. Otherwise, not much of what she’d said on the recording had made any sense. The most they’d learned was that the thing at the bottom of the nest wasn’t their ultimate enemy. It seemed something else was coming, but they had no idea what it was or when it might arrive.

  The idea that the planet had been seeded wasn’t hard to believe and the most interesting thing Cassie had said was that they might be a mistake. If they were something that shouldn’t exist then it was an edge they could use. The real question was what kind of mistake had the aliens made? What was it about the human race that they hadn’t meant to create? No one had an answer to these questions, so after a lot of pointless discussion, they’d agreed it was better to be prepared than not. To that end, Sally was conducting basic aptitude tests and Donna was training anyone she cleared. Over the past six weeks, they’d created over four hundred Navigators and although not one of them was well skilled, they could walk and shoot, which was good enough for now.

  Below him, another batch of Navigators were being put through their paces, falling and cursing while Donna and the other trainers shouted at them. With so many Navigators, their power requirements had become a major issue so they’d scavenged more portable and large generators. Fuel trucks had been stolen from various depots and every day they refilled them. After the attack, CaliTech had transformed into an even busier beehive, with Navigators going outside of the wire every day scavenging for whatever they needed. Their constant movement had attracted a growing number of survivors to Sequoia National Park, and now they were raiding food depots to keep them fed. Much like the nest in Pueblo Pintado, a city was quickly growing outside of the walls of CaliTech.

  Despite their desperate situation, getting back on his feet had restored a confidence he hadn’t realized he’d lost, and he was the happiest he’d been since being wounded. After the attack and once Lexie had returned from the nest, she’d collared him by climbing into his bed that night. Given they shared a floor with everyone else nothing had happened, but curled around his torso and speaking softly, she’d made clear that he was wasting time that neither of them had. If anyone had ever asked him whether he’d been in love before he would have said yes, but those women paled in comparison to how he felt about Lexie. She inspired him to stretch himself and he took another tentative step forward. Losing his tenuous balance, he wobbled and his foot slipped against the edge of the walkway. Knowing he was going to fall he straightened, allowing his body to drop like an arrow to the ground. As his feet hit the mats below, he bent his knees to absorb the impact. One of the advantages of having critter knees was that they could take massive weight and he couldn’t feel a thing. His hydraulics compensated for the opposing energy and he straightened his legs without falling backwards.

  Dropping from the platform, Lexie gracefully landed next to him and grinned. “Landed like a pro. Even Leon can’t do that. He always falls on his ass.”

  “I don’t get your one-on-one attention like Ark does,” Leon said as he walked across the training floor to meet them. “Bill says it’s time we hit the road.”

  Bill had taken over the training and running of the shadow Navigators and Amber managed their day-to-day shifts. It sort of made sense in that Bill also managed the weapons team with Dunk. In effect, between Bill, Jo and Dunk, they ran the back of the house. He was responsible for managing the workload of their most experienced Navigator team and deciding on field strategy. Providing Bill could supply him with trained Navigators, it was up to him to decide how they would fight the critters. All he’d really handed over were his responsibilities as a shadow Navigator, but he couldn’t be inside and outside of the wire at the same time. Once he’d set up the new shadow Navigator consoles inside of the training hangar, he’d left the management of the team to Bill and Amber.

  Since his decision to blow the baby bots early, he’d become something of a hero to the people relying on CaliTech to survive and fight. Hood had simply told his troops that he was their battle commander, so now they did whatever he asked. Stax had told the preppers that he was the man and none of them had ever questioned his borrowed authority. It wasn’t a role he’d ever aspired to and he was still surprised when people looked to him for answers. Even Leon expected him to lead whenever they were outside of the wire, but Lexie and Ally were always sure to let him know that he still put his pants on one leg at a time.

  The engineers had downloaded new software to the last remaining baby bot, giving it the brains to climb to the bottom of the nest and back again. With no repeaters, they hadn’t been able to see what it had managed to film, and their current mission was to retrieve the tiny bot. Once it had made it back to the surface, they’d managed to track it until it was about half of a mile from the pyramid, and then they assumed it had run out of power. With it being so close to the pyramid, it would be surrounded by critter mounds and pretty much inaccessible, but the engineers had a cunning plan.

  Taking Lexie’s armored hand he followed Leon to walk across the training floor. Sitting at one end, next to the new shadow Navigators’ area, were two suits hanging on frames. They were designed to cover a person from head to toe in skin fashioned from critter parts. Like Frankenstein, pieces of critter skin had been stitched together, only the engineers hadn’t used thread. With carefully calibrated lasers, they’d heated the thick hides to cut thinner slices from the torsos of critter corpses, and then sealed them together until they had a fabric of sorts. After that, they’d shaped them until they could be worn over the Navigator gear like a suit. One was designed to fit Lexie and the other belonged to Tank. As their most experienced Navigator and best able to use the hydraulics, Lexie had been an obvious choice. He’d argued to go with her, but Tank had insisted it was his role to have her back, plus his new skills with the hydraulics were limited. In the end, the usually easygoing Tank had given him a hard stare saying, if he wanted her to live then he should stand down.

  It took them less than an hour to be ready to leave. After loading the trucks with weapons and supplies, including the new critter suits, they were driving along the road outside of CaliTech that would lead them to the I-40. The area had changed considerably in the past six weeks. With so many more trained Navigators, they were establishing a safe zone, and every day they extended their control over the region. Any critters stupid enough to stick their noses anywhere near them were used to teach the new Navigators how to hunt and destroy. Blowing up the nest seemed to have deterred the alien from making any further attacks and everyone agreed, even though they’d failed to destroy it, they’d left it with a bloodied nose.

  Bill’s voice came through his headset. “How’s it looking out there?”

  They were leaving the known safe zone around CaliTech and he stared across the desert stretching ahead of him. He was familiar with reading the visor screens as a shadow Navigator, but being the operator meant that he had to interpret them faster. Lexie was still the best at reading the s
creens and she replied, “Usual shit. The safe zone is good, but outside of it not so much. They’re tunneling more.”

  All of the Navigator squads were reporting an increasing number of tunnels crisscrossing their country. These tunnels presented no issues for the Navigators, but he suspected they were allowing the critters to sweep up the last of the survivors outside of their prisons. As each Navigator team found their feet, they were assigned missions to gather supplies or to extend the control of the region around them, meaning they were tearing into the tunnels by blowing them up using gas or bombs. The bulk of their efforts were focused on the California side of the park where there were more people and supplies. Eventually the Navigators would extend their control to include the nearest prisons, and by then he hoped they would have the experience needed to take back a more heavily defended area. If he had an unlimited amount of time to play with then his battle plan would work, but he didn’t think he did. Cassie had said the master had a master and that something was coming. He didn’t know what it was, but he was pretty sure it would make a mockery of all of their planning.

  While he listened to Lexie describing to Bill what she was seeing, he regretted not making his feelings about her known earlier. He’d wasted valuable time and now he wasn’t sure how much they had left. Cassie’s warning was still waking him up at night and Lexie would always ask him what was wrong. Not wanting to worry her, he would wrap her in his arms and assure her everything was fine, even though he knew it wasn’t.

  Something was coming. Something they weren’t prepared for. Although when the time came he’d sworn to go all in, late at night and warmed by Lexie’s presence, he regretted that his newly found happiness was only a moment in time and not his future.

  CHAPTER THREE: Born again (Stax)

  Fallon was a town in Nevada and it should have had close to ten thousand people living in it. Now an untidy critter fence ringed the houses and he suspected the people behind it were struggling to survive. The town wouldn’t have had much in the way of food and he doubted they’d had time to grow any either. With no interest in their captive’s welfare, he didn’t think the critters would have bothered to check whether any of their prisons were adequately supplied with anything. This town probably didn’t even have enough water much less food.

  Where the military were motivated to take back regions to extend their scope of control, he wanted to rescue the people. That seemingly minor difference in their objectives was enough to change where Ark sent the Navigators. He supposed Ark was making tough choices. They had a growing population around CaliTech that needed to be fed, plus they had to keep the forest safe from the critters. Added to that were the growing demands for raw materials and the manpower needed by the weapons division. Ark was focusing all of their efforts to create a fighting force to take back the critter prisons. Anything he did today would be a smaller achievement in the bigger scheme of their plans, but knowing there was a master plan in play didn’t stop him from wanting to use their training time productively.

  Through his headset, he said, “Amber, I’m seeing a larger cluster of people to the north of the fenced area. What say you?”

  Amber’s voice came through his headset. “Same here, but they’re not moving around.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “I don’t know, but usually the people behind the fences are pretty active. You know, they’re on the streets and living in smaller groups, but there’s at least twenty people in that one building and they’re grouped together on the same floor.”

  Copying Jonesy’s tactic, Sean was with the three buses they’d brought with them to transport the survivors to CaliTech. He was sorry that the man he called the Knight hadn’t joined them for this mission, but the military had absorbed him into their ranks and he was now working with Ark. The Navigators were supposed to be operating as a single team, but the military guys had their own way of running things and he had his. They weren’t diametrically opposed, and there was considerable respect between them, but his people needed to be convinced whereas the other side simply followed their orders. It called for a different management style and that was enough to keep them segregated.

  “If we blow the fence do you think they’ll come running?”

  His plan relied on the survivors taking the initiative to run towards them. If they didn’t then having only two squads of five people, he didn’t have enough Navigators to fight with the critters and carry the people to the buses. Even if he did rescue them, they wouldn’t survive if they weren’t on their feet. CaliTech didn’t have much of a hospital and everyone was living rough in the forest. Either way, his mission might turn out to be a pointless one and he wavered about what to do next.

  It was Bill who answered for Amber. “This is a change in situation. We’ve never seen the prisoners grouped this way before. I think we need to find out what’s going on in that town.”

  Monitoring their mission while he traveled to the nest in Pueblo Pintado, Ark said, “I agree with Bill. I want to know what’s going on in there. How many squads do you have with you?”

  “Two with five navs in each.”

  “If the survivors aren’t on their feet then you don’t have enough navs to mount a rescue mission. You need to blow the fence and get in and out pretty fast. If the survivors can’t come with you under their own steam then you’ll have to leave them.”

  Abandoning the people wasn’t something he’d considered. “I don’t wanna leave people who need us.”

  “And I don’t want you to get your navs killed. We can always go back later,” Ark replied firmly. “If you don’t know how to walk away then you should leave now.”

  If the people couldn’t move on their own then he would have to leave them, which wouldn’t rest well with his squads. It was yet another difference between his preppers and the military. The army had a practical take on when to fight and when not to. His own people were more likely to take on a pointless battle and die, whereas Hood’s squads looked at every engagement in more practical terms. They were willing to go ‘all in’, but that was reserved for only the most desperate of circumstances, otherwise they targeted battles they could win. When the military fought, every engagement served a strategy, whereas his people were prepared to move from one fight to the next without a master plan.

  While he tried to decide, the Knight’s voice came through his headset. “Stax, we can’t afford to lose skilled navs, so you will need to walk away if you can’t get them out. We don’t have enough troops to take back the critter prisons as it is, and we’re not in a position to sacrifice any for a fight that doesn’t further the war.”

  “Okay. We’ll blow the fence and if no one shows up, a squad will go into that building to find out why. If we can’t move the people then we’ll extract immediately.” Knowing he had to sell the mission to his squads, he added, “But whatever the problem is you have to promise me that we’ll come back in force.”

  “Good enough,” Bill replied.

  With the decision made, Sean moved the buses to the north of the fence line and he lined up the squads. One was targeted to blow the fence using the propane tanks they’d brought with them, while the other would run to the target building where the people were. They would be deep inside of enemy territory, and wanting to lead from the front, he would run with them. Like Bill and Ark, he really wanted to know what was happening inside of that building.

  Whenever they blew a fence, critters would erupt from the tunnels and surrounding areas like an infestation of angry ants. One squad would be kept busy holding the perimeter and he didn’t expect it to last. They would only have enough time to run into the building and out again, before they would lose what little control they had. Critters would rarely bother to chase them far, so they would usually escape every engagement by outrunning them. He couldn’t understand why they gave up so easily and could only assume the big cheese controlling them had a limited attention span.

  After running behind the squad with the
propane tanks, his team waited while they blew the fence and the critters began sprinting to their position.

  “Go! Go! Go!”

  The building was five hundred yards from the fence line and they ran towards it, side-by-side and only ten feet apart. Between the five of them, they formed a wall of metal firing on any critters that got in their way. This formation had the advantage of clearing a wide section of road ahead of them, plus he always put his weakest Navigators into the middle of the line. When they came across buildings and houses closely packed together, they would take different routes to keep moving forward, and thanks to their advanced viewing, there was never any chance they’d lose track of one another.

  Firing at any critters nearing his position, he maintained his pace, catching up and losing his squad as they split apart to run between the houses and buildings in their path. With the attack on the fence, most of the critters were too focused on the breach to bother with them, moving out of their way as if they weren’t their enemy. When they reached the building, he ordered his visor to reality viewing and it turned out to be a two-story school that must have been used by at least five hundred students. A large quadrangle separated the main building from smaller outlying ones and the people were inside of the bigger site. Now closer, through his visor he saw that the situation was even stranger. The people weren’t side-by-side, but appeared to be piled on top of one another.

  Addressing anyone who was observing the mission, he asked, “What do you make of this?”