Fear the Survivors

by Stephen Moss

  And deep down, Peter also knew that at this point Neal was as important as most world leaders, even this one, and it was this thought that led him to now wave to the far door, opposite the one the president’s men had just used, and urge Neal toward it.

  Following his meaning, Neal followed Peter, and Jim Hacker was not far behind. Sounds of fighting could be heard in the building. A loud burst of gunshot would suddenly shout out across the night, only to be silenced a moment later. Running now, Neal and Jim followed Peter down a deserted corridor.

  After a couple of turns, Peter flagged the other two to a halt. He tried a door handle, cursed quietly, and then stepped back. The blow his foot delivered to the door just left of its handle carried all the weight of his field training as a junior operative more than three decades before. Still, the heavy door took two hard kicks to rip the lock through the framing, the loud cracks tearing at Jim’s and Neal’s cool as they glanced warily this way and that.

  Pushing through the crippled bolt, Peter led them through the now open door into one of the building’s hundred offices. It was very late, and even the dedicated White House staff had mostly retired for the night. But a secretary whimpered as the three men burst in.

  “Georgina,” said Peter in a quiet voice, “come with us.” She hesitated, “Now, Georgina! I don’t have time to talk about it.” Sobered by his harsh words, she climbed to her feet and followed them all into one of the inner offices branching off this one. Slamming the door shut behind them, Peter pulled a slew of jackets from the hooks on the inside of the door to reveal a thick steel shank. The shank turned as he grabbed it, clicking into two unobtrusive-looking notches either side of the door with resounding thuds, sealing it shut.

  “Welcome to my office, gentlemen. A room that doubles as one of the White House’s safe rooms,” said Peter to Jim’s surprised look.

  But Neal was shaking his head, “I’m afraid that won’t stop her,” Neal said. But Peter knew this. He had attended the same briefings Ayala had given the Secret Service. The door and frame were lined with the same reinforced steel that gave the shank its strength, but Peter was already jumping behind the desk, and busily retrieving some potent firepower from the coded lockbox that was its bottom drawer. If they were going to go down, they would go down fighting, thought Peter. And hopefully the highly trained agents helping the president escape would be able to keep the bitch busy till the cavalry got here.

  His thoughts of the president and his guards fleeing away through the building’s halls were crystallized when a prolonged firefight started ringing out in some other part of the West Wing. They had to assume she had found them.

  - - -

  She came at them like a lightning bolt. Five men fell in the first swathe of her sonic punch. But they were only downed, not out, their suits having absorbed the power of the blow before it could crush any bones. They responded fast. Part of the throng pushed the president onward at a run, and the bulk turned to face her, ten well-aimed Glocks meeting her headlong attack with twenty bullets a second.

  The hail slowed her, but did not stop her. They were harder to kill, these ones. They wore the superconductive armor John had given humanity, and it made them infinitely tougher. But inside their protective shells, they were still soft, like candy, thought Lana. She just needed to crack the coating to get to the sweetness beneath. So she leapt into their bullets, shielding the weapons system protruding from her eye from the flying lead until she was at point-blank range. As she barreled into their wall, she began firing at each face in turn. Felling them as she pounded through their formation. She registered damage from the hundred or so bullets that had hit her, but nothing major was affected. These were just handguns. She had faced a squad of assault rifles, machine guns, and sniper rifles, and she had survived, albeit barely. By comparison to that, these were mere gnats.

  As she bloodied the hallway with the ten brave men, she heard the faint whir of approaching copters and recognized them instantly. She could hear their telltale signatures and knew it was the same team of gunships that she had left not long ago. They had come with disturbing alacrity, and she grimly set to finishing off the ten men in her way so she could get on with the job at hand. She assumed Neal would be with the president and his men, so as she broke the last of the guards blocking her path, she set off at speed after the rest of the group.

  As she rounded the corner, she encountered better-armed resistance. Blocking the way was a six-man team, armed with close-quarters assault rifles of the kind used by SWAT teams. Completing their armor were black helmets of the same material as their battleskin. They laid down a fire with fabulous accuracy, and she felt the hot sting of incendiary rounds exploding against her. In a confined space, firing these would normally be suicidal, but protected by the suits they were able to employ this far more destructive ammunition. Her machine mind whined at the searing magnesium eating at her armor. In a flash she dropped, twisted, and leapt back the way she had come.

  A second later, the six men were ready as she came swinging around the corner again. They laid fire across her once more, but as their target slumped to the ground they realized it was not her at all. They quickly stopped firing at the dead body of one of their compatriots. Then another came, then a third. They were wasting fire on each, not daring to confirm that it was Lana before beginning to shoot.

  The next body came around with more speed, and as they pounded it with the last of their magazines’ bullets, she followed it around, brandishing the fifth limp soul in front of her like a shield and driving forward. The last of their ammunition petered out, and with no hope of reloading in time, so went their hope of surviving. She set about the six men with efficient brutality.

  - - -

  Crouching behind the desk with Jim and Peter, Neal could also hear the choppers coming and hoped it was Ayala. He knew they had gone out on a mission that night to try to track down another errant friend from Madeline’s past, but they should be back in DC by now, he thought.

  They were, and they had been barely out of their battleskins when the call had come in. They had resealed their armor while they flew out over the city once more, priority clearance granted as Air Traffic Control cleared the skies. Landing in front of and behind the auspicious house, they spread out. Ayala joined them, heading into the fray as well to help save the president and the friend she knew was also in there. Reports were coming in from the surviving Secret Service detail that they were holed in the heavily guarded SitRoom, under the West Wing. The teams converged on the firefight.

  - - -

  The sound of the bionic teams pounding through the House was very different from the sound of the Secret Service detail, and Lana knew instantly that she was about to face her first real challenge since King’s Bay. But she wasn’t going to run yet. She could tell she was close. She could tell there was not much fight left in the agents protecting the building. Surging onward, she found the last line of defense around the president as he cowered in the SitRoom and drove herself into the pack of guards, her weaponry exploding on them like a grenade.

  - - -

  The shouts and screams of the guards coming through the comms ended after ten long, gruesome seconds, and the band went quiet. Ayala knew she must assume Lana now had the president. Her teams continued to close in, until a new voice over the Secret Service radio band halted them.

  “Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. It’s been a long night, hasn’t it? I am speaking to you, Ayala, I know you must be here by now.”

  They all paused, and Ayala went to reply, but Lana went on, “What with the bonfire in West Virginia and now this fun little hunting party here, you have been quite the busy girl, haven’t you!” Her voice was sultry. Her accent so American, so normal, so human. But her next words silenced any doubts as to her purpose, “Now here is the situation. I have your president. I want Neal Danielson. I know he’s here somewhere. A simple exchange. What do you say?”

  So Neal was still alive. That was something
. Ayala opened her link before anyone else could, speaking with an equally incongruous pleasantness, “Ah, yes, Lana. A great offer, indeed. We hand you yet another victim so you can torture and kill him, in return for a promise of mercy from a brutal and cold-blooded mass murderer. You know that isn’t how this is going to work, Lana.”

  Ben turned to her as she said it, his face saying: surely we have to negotiate for the president’s release? But they all knew from hard experience that there was no reasoning with this woman. When you are dealing with a self-confessed genocidal maniac, all the standard negotiating tactics are simply moot.

  Lana had committed too many atrocities. She knew that she was speaking with a team whose sole purpose was to hunt her and kill her. And Lana knew that there was nothing she could offer them that would deter them from that goal. Just as Ayala knew that to discuss terms with Lana would be like negotiating with Hitler to exchange half the world’s innocents for the other half; an exercise in futility that could only lead to more bloodshed. If Lana had the president then the man was dead. It was as simple as that.

  Opening a closed channel to her teams, Ayala spoke crisply and firmly, “All teams move in on her position. I want her penned. If you see her and she has the president, you are to hold fire unless she attacks. But if she does attack, then you are to open fire. I repeat, if attacked you are to return fire, whether she has the president or not. We cannot let her use him as a shield. If we can stall her we may be able get into a position that allows a firing solution without going through the president, but we can only do that if we are willing to fight her despite her hostage.” She doubted it could be done without hurting the President, knew it really, but to leave no avenue in her orders that ended with the president surviving would have been both callous and difficult to defend later.

  - - -

  But even as Ayala gave her orders events were accelerating ahead of her. Lana knew that her situation could only get worse as time went by, so she had decided to act even as she spoke over the radio. She did not carry the president ahead of her, that seemed pointless in the face of Ayala’s defiance, and she had other plans for him. As she came on one of the teams penning her in, she threw the president’s unconscious body up and over the three-man team and then came at them, running straight into their blistering fire as they tried to compute the suddenness of her onslaught.

  The fight was short but potent. These men had trained specifically to the goal of taking her down, and their shots came hard and fast in the seconds before she closed the gap. The hot rounds drove her back and she was forced to use all of her limbs to dig into carpet, wall, and ceiling to propel herself through the wall of fire. But her powerful limbs were relentless, and though the three men emptied ninety magnesium-hot rounds into her, denting and ripping at her armor, she was eventually on them.

  They used every ounce of their strength to fight her, but their bionically enhanced muscles were no match for the pure machine power of the hellcat in their midst. The strength of their fight only escalated her brutality, and inside their battleskins they were slowly battered to death. The first blacked out from the rending force of being slammed into the floor with all Lana’s massive might. Though his armor absorbed the bulk of the energy and dissipated it across his body, the momentum of his brain inside his skull crushed it against the inside of his cranium, and he went limp. And through attrition of snapped legs, shattered hands and crushed vertebrae, the other two were soon quiet, alive on some level, perhaps, but not for long.

  Though she longed to properly finish them off, Lana could hear the pounding of more power-assisted feet as their colleagues converged on her, and she fled. She could not face many more of them. She had surprised these three and still they had exacted a steep toll on her systems. The next time it might be six or nine, each with another sea of white-hot metal to tear at her armor, each with a fresh, angry, bionic soldier willing to throw his life at the task of ending hers.

  She knew she needed to escape this madness. And so she left these soldiers writhing on the floor and ran, scooping up the limp president as she went and sprinting out onto the White House lawn.

  She wasn’t sure if the man was still alive, he had definitely suffered in the taking, and she knew that shrapnel from her altercation with Ayala’s commandoes had hit him at least twice, but she didn’t care. They had denied her the true prize she sought, and she was going to make them pay for it. As she stepped into the night, Lana gripped the president by the calves and started to swing him around herself like a discus, spinning him once, twice, three times, building up a tremendous speed, and then flinging the man’s body with all her might, out over the Mall, watching for just a moment to see if her aim was true.

  Seeing that it was, she went running after one of the Apaches circling the House. Mimicking Quavoce’s maneuver in Iran she leapt up onto it as it turned on her. A moment too late the pilot sighted his cannon on her, but it could not angle upward fast enough to meet her as she connected with the side of the chopper and both pilots knew they were all but dead.

  They managed to kill the weapons systems before they were thrown from their mount, and a hail of bullets hit the helicopter’s armored sides as it banked away. The other gunship fled in pursuit, but Lana’s machine reflexes were simply better than the pilot pursuing her, and she soon pulled away, ducking and diving between the city’s low-slung office buildings.

  She knew that she could not fly in these skies for long. Sure enough, within moments of her shaking the pursuing Apache, three F-18 hornets just scrambled from nearby Langley Air Force Base came in hard and fast, acquiring the rogue as it flew west out of the city. They did not wait for further confirmation. They had all the clearance they needed. For the first time in US history the US Air Force fired in aggression over the nation’s capital.

  But by the time three hypersonic missiles blanketed space around the chopper, enveloping it in volcanic fire, its cockpit was empty. In the moments between the second Apache losing sight of her and the jet fighters coming in on her tail, Lana had switched to autopilot and leapt into the Potomac River as it rushed by beneath her.

  Her systems damaged again, her real target still alive, she swam away in shame and fury.

  Chapter 20: Lockdown

  Quavoce stood on a lower tier of the fortress that Rolas Island had become. He looked north over the channel that separated the island from the mainland, visible some quarter of a mile away.

  The massive platform was a quarter of a mile along each side, and its bulk utterly dominated the small island. It towered up some two hundred feet from the rocky shore, its steep walls touching the water at several points. Some part of Quavoce was sad at the obscuring of the equatorial paradise, but necessity must sometimes mandate callousness, as it had so many other times since he had landed on Earth.

  The SpacePort was built like a fortress of old, surrounded on all sides by fortifications and weaponry. The building itself was a steep, blunted pyramid made of two vast blocks. The lower block, accounting for more than half of the base’s volume, was solid, a massive, heavy mass of concrete and crushed stone held together by a lattice of steel girders, reinforced with fibers of carbon nanotubing. The whole was woven into the bedrock of the island through deep piles that gripped the earth. On top of this stupendous foundation, the SpacePort proper rose. Slightly smaller across than the solid base, the building that housed the machinery of the SpacePort was without window. Built into the twenty-foot-thick walls were a series of guard posts and maintenance ports that were accessed by a network of tunnels that ran through the wall, but only opened onto the central space at four broad gateways, each sealable behind a series of thick blast doors. The central space itself was an open plan, allowing the movement of the huge cable riders on to and off the main dock.

  In the center of the cavern’s roof, a wide square was laid open to the sky. Guarded by the interlaced fire of twenty autocannons mounted on the building’s roof that left the nearby sky clear of anything larger th
an a mosquito, this wide skylight was where the space elevator came to ground. Coming down from the Terminus station in geosynchronous orbit thousands of miles above, through the square hole in the ceiling, to the central quad of the SpacePort.

  Finishing a quick tour of the armament on the lower tier of the SpacePort, Quavoce came to one of the four gatehouses and started heading through its extensive security procedures. Five minutes later, he was walking down one of the ‘avenues’ that led to the central square. The area was a hive of activity. Once the skilled three-helicopter team had brought the cable’s end to ground, they had been working round the clock.

  They were getting ready to attach the first rider, itself another wonder coming out of the Research Group. Powered by another of Birgit Hauptman’s fusion reactors, it would drive upward along the tether using a long string of thick rubber tires clamping the cable from either side. This first pod would carry the end of the next tether, pulling the second cable up to allow two-way traffic to pass into and out of the SpacePort.

  Birgit had travelled with the elevator machinery from the Research Team’s base, along with Amadeu and several other members of the pod’s design team.

  “Major Garrincha,” said Dr. Hauptman in greeting as Quavoce walked up to the table where she was working. She was looking intently at the machine and Quavoce was happy to see it was working diligently away under her gaze. A strap around her neck secured a primitive prototype of an interface to her spine. It was not intrusive, relying only on information it could glean through her skin. As such, it could not send information back to the brain, only take instruction from it. But Amadeu had done well, and it was surprisingly efficient at acting out her whims on the computer in front of her.