Fear the Survivors

by Stephen Moss

  He watched them fly out into the darkness. He did not say goodbye, he did not even let Jennifer know he was watching.

  - - -

  That had been four hours ago. With Romania and Moldova behind them, and the Ukraine flying by beneath them at just over a thousand miles per hour, they were now fast approaching the zero hour, and Jennifer notified her passengers.

  Captain Falster: ‘hektor, spezialists, we are seven minutes from the border. if you can begin your preparations. the sensor feed is available, should you want to track our progress, and I have marked our destination and made the flight data available should you want to accept that input. I’ll initiate the drop timer once we’re within range.’

  The team started their checks. It was a relatively moot exercise, partially because they had checked and double-checked their systems before takeoff, and partially because they were about to attempt something never before even imagined. There was only so much you could do to prepare for something that was essentially only theoretically possible. But prepared they had, and now they went over their plans once more as the disc flew onward through the night, its long magnetic drive tube parallel to the ground now, though invisible, so that the hollow disc, with its stubby wings, looked like crosshairs slicing through the air.

  As they had accelerated upward from Sao Tome, Jennifer had begun to angle them toward the northeast, the ship’s stubby wings giving her the lift she needed as she angled the ship’s magnetic thrusters bodily toward their destination. Then they had accelerated up to over a thousand miles an hour as they streaked across Northern Africa, out over Cypress toward southern Greece, and onward toward Eastern Europe.

  But now they were nearing their destination, and as they breached the Russian border, the Slink’s passive sensor suite felt the wash of radar coming from Russia’s dense border controls. Though it was a tense few minutes, the craft did indeed pass unnoticed, the ground radar blissfully ignorant of the Slink’s silent puncturing of Russian airspace. As they cleared the initial border defenses, Jennifer tilted the ship slightly earthward and began their brief descent, the countdown timer starting as she did so.

  The team felt the timer begin, and they sensed the plane start to descend. It was a minute, drawn out by the speed of their unified spinal links, as they watched every second tick by in minute detail. But the time did pass, and soon their drop zone was approaching. As they drew close, the ship began to transition control of their bodily functions back to their battleskins, and thus to them, and their universes shrank back into the black cocoon-like compartments they were interned in for the flight.

  At twenty seconds, the slink was plummeting at nearly a thousand miles per hour toward the ground, the blanketed deciduous forest south of Bryansk rushing up to meet them. They were still in the sweep of the border radar and would need to get below that radar’s horizon before opening their capsules and deploying. The farther they got from the border’s radar cordon, the higher they would be able to deploy in secret, but if they went too far, they would enter the even denser radar of Bryansk air traffic control, and the ever-strengthening Russian air and ground forces that called it home.

  As they approached the optimal distance between both radar points, Jennifer turned her wings to face the ground, using them as brakes, and allowing her to reverse her engines and decelerate hard. Jennifer and the team were driven into their harnesses, G-forces surpassing seven and eight gravities as their suits worked to absorb the force. Even pushing such hard limits, it took five more seconds of hard deceleration to slow the Slink to their target speed. As the ship dropped to a relatively slow speed of two hundred fifty miles per hour, they hit their drop height.

  At one second prior to the drop, they were nestled in their cocoons, a protective layer of black wing plating between them and the fall ahead, gravity wrenching them forward in their suits. A quarter of a second prior to drop, the doors ahead of each soldier began to swing open, the momentum of the Slink’s deceleration throwing them forward. As they opened, the harnesses holding the six members of Hektor Gruler’s team released, and they were instantly catapulted out of the wing at two hundred fifty miles per hour, straight at the ground below. They were two thousand feet above ground when they were released. At their deploy speed that ground was only four seconds away.

  Six black-suited men plummeting toward the soil in the dead of night, even as the ship they had come on banked hard and accelerated back up into the night sky, carrying Jennifer Falster with it. After two seconds of blistering freefall, packs bound to the team’s shoulders released the leads on six vast parachutes. The chutes followed almost instantaneously, ripped from their casings by the whirlwind of air flowing over each Spezialist. The chutes were black as the moonless night, and they went some way to halting the six men’s ballistic plummet.

  With only moments to go, their suits tensed in preprogrammed spear-like positions. Their toes pointed toward the ground, their arms clamped at their side, their heads back, every spar and bionic muscle tensed against the coming impact as they came at the ground at just under a hundred twenty miles per hour. At the last second, a series of tiny engines along the carbon nanotubing by which they were attached to their parachutes wrenched on the drawstrings, dragging the chutes down with violent force, and taking a final dose out of their speed, before they slammed into the ground.

  The team hit the soil with six deep, dull thuds, like shells impacting the soft ground. Unarmored bodies would have pancaked by such an impact, not only breaking but shattering bones and leaving them as gruesome burst sacks of flesh, a host of red splats on the damp earth. But the suits held true, and the six men lanced into the ground like javelins, sinking waist deep in the soil.

  The dust began to settle and Hektor wrestled his emotions under control, using his systems to bring his heart rate and breathing back down to acceptable levels. He surveyed his systems, and sent queries to his team’s suits to confirm all had survived the fall unharmed. Somehow they had, and the team commander resisted the urge to laugh at the ridiculous, giddy madness of what they had just done.

  CO Gruler: ‘all right, enough lounging, let’s move. tomas, frederik, get these chutes buried. Bohdan, I want comms set up, and status confirmed with SP1 asap, then get the monitors up, and tell me what is going on out there. niels, cara, we’re on perimeter. get those weapons hot.’

  Verbal replies were not required, as debate of such crucial and immediate orders would be moot. Pips back at Hektor confirmed his orders and they reacted as one, their suits releasing the vice-like grip on their bodies, their machine muscles becoming amplifiers rather than constrictors once more.

  Hektor flexed his reinforced muscles, and drew up his left leg, the powerful engines augmenting him, and wrenching his leg through the compacted soil his fall had driven him into. The suction was large, and the earth held strong, giving only after a long, rending tug. With one leg free, he pushed with both arms and his free leg, pulling his right leg out of the soil as well, and then set off. Pings from his team told him that Cara and Niels were already fanning out, and he filled the gap in their pattern, making the tripod perimeter that would allow them to protect the core of their team from all sides while they got situated.

  Tomas and Frederik, the most junior members of the team, carried the main supply packs, though these were supplemented by personal rations and survival equipment in the armored packs on the backs of every Spezialist.

  Bohdan, the team’s communications and systems expert, carried the team’s bulky subspace tweeter, along with a host of other electronic hacking equipment given to him by Madeline and her team. They were mostly derivatives of the dangerous tools given to the eight Agents who had landed on Earth not three years beforehand in even more spectacular fashion than Hektor’s team had landed tonight. Tomas, Frederik, and Bohdan all also carried the barium lasers and the sonic pulse weapons that were now the standard, forearm-mounted armament of the battleskins, and were each very potent killing machines.

 
But it was Hektor, Niels and Cara that represented the real offensive arm of the team. Each carried large tri-barrel flechette guns mounted onto their left arms. The guns were essentially three, inch-wide black barrels that ran the length of their forearms, with three tiny holes on their ends a millimeter wide. At their elbows the barrels were attached to a bulbous box, which in turn was attached by two thick cables to the packs on the men’s backs.

  With such tiny apertures in their barrels, the guns may have seemed harmless, and indeed they only fired tiny copper pellets a hundredth the size of an ordinary bullet. But the flechette guns relied not on scale, but on speed, as these were kinetic killers. Each barrel was a magnetic accelerator that turned the tiny pellets the gun fired into meteorically fast projectiles. When unleashed, the gun pulsed out the copper darts at over twenty thousand miles per hour. At that speed they went through flesh like a hot knife through butter, if said knife was fired out of a cannon.

  One well-placed kinetic pellet could kill a man at over a mile, silently and thoroughly. When fired at harder targets, like vehicles or armor, the kinetic energy made the impact point instantaneously superheated, reducing even the most robust tank’s armor to slag in moments. And because the ammunition was so small, and because the gun propelled the bullet magnetically rather than via some brute combustive explosion, they could carry vastly more ammunition, and fire it faster and farther than any gun imagined before.

  With tri-barrels trained on the night around them, the three warriors guarded the team as they worked through their post-jump procedures. Within a minute of landing Bohdan had established contact with SP1, and Quavoce had begun mapping their surroundings. Satellite images had been improving steadily since Madeline had started getting TASC’s upgraded satellite hardware into space and online. The most recent intelligence told them that there were at least three armed battalions operating in and around Bryansk. They were fifty miles from the nearest, and that would be their first objective.

  Hektor: ‘ladies and gentlemen, we have two hours of darkness left. let’s use them. I want to be twenty miles from here before dawn. cara, you have point. coordinates as posted, route alpha five. Quarter-mile lead, then I want the rest of us to stay tight. cara, we leave on your mark.’

  Cara: ‘copy, sir. setting off now.’

  The sergeant left at a brisk jog, which translated to about twelve miles per hour with the suit’s augmentation, and soon she had her quarter-mile lead. Without further ado, the rest of the team set off in tow, more closely knit, with twenty meters between each team member. And so Hektor’s team began their cross-country trek toward Bryansk, and the mysterious Russian Federation forces gathering around it.

  Chapter 31: Drop Zone – Part Two

  Captain Samuel Harkness felt ebullient. Adrenalin seemed to outweigh blood in his veins as he stared, wide-eyed, at the console in front of him. His pilots and crew were wired into the ship already, cables flowing from the back of their necks into the many ports that dotted the crew module’s interior. The ship’s technicians were studying its systems from within, enjoying access and real-time data exchange they could only have dreamed of in the past. Minds darted like cats around the ship as the final countdown approached, but Samuel Harkness, captain of New Moon One, the first ship of its kind, took a moment to review the instruments by eye, a tribute, perhaps, to the captains of old, as they completed a visual inspection prior to departing on a great voyage.

  He paged through screens of data in front of him, and felt a combination of pride and awe at the scale of the ship that had been entrusted to him. But as he stared at the screens, he also felt a pang of need for the true access his spinal port gave him. Looking at this two-dimensional screen, these figures presented in tables and charts, numbers that needed so much interpretation and visualization. It seemed so primitive to him now. With his desire to give the ship an old-fashioned walk-through sated, Captain Samuel Harkness plucked his port cable from the mount on his chair, flipped back the protective cover that sheltered the gel-like connection point, and reached back to check his own port in the back of his neck.

  He shivered a little, as he always did before plugging in, then shook his head slightly and smiled at his foolishness. He had done this a thousand times during the construction and testing of the ship. He took a moment to tuck his legs under their straps in the soft, cradle-like captain’s chair he sat in, and checked the straps across his torso. He then brought the cable’s tip up to the back of his neck, feeling the gelports reach out to each other as they sensed each other’s presence.

  He waited while the system synced with the spinal interface buried in his neck.

 

  Three, two,

  Falling. The ship sunk backward and exploded outward at once, his view distorting and moving out of focus even as his mind told him he was seeing everything more clearly than before. Everything suddenly went blue with a blink. Icewall.

  Captain Harkness felt his identity being validated as his preset limits and time checks came online; his anchors to the real world. He checked them as they scrolled across his brain and then, authority confirmed, he moved on, not by action but by will, simply stepping through the blue wall that enveloped him, popping it as he did so, and entering the vacuum.

  His universe expanded outwards exponentially, no walls, he felt the vacuum of space on his skin as the ship became him, his arms and ears and eyes, his fingers and toes. He felt it. Flexing his muscles delicately, he felt his systems respond. He sensed the other crew as they embodied their respective systems, and by thinking of them he brought them to him, their minds providing him with system status in magnificent color and glory, the smell of green light pervading him as he absorbed the ship’s readiness in his bones.

  In the nearby space station, Birgit hung suspended in a cradle of her own, her link also active, her body limp as she connected with the system. She linked with Captain Samuel as he joined her, and greeted him in the strange communing that was seeing someone’s personality in cyberspace. Over the course of several generations on Mobilius, the Agents’ ancestors had created complex graphic interfaces to ease their populations’ acceptance of the concept of direct interface with a computer, but this was no public system, no game, this was pure, and the primal rush of power it gave you was not for the faint of heart.

  After careful consideration, checking and rechecking, the captain told her it was time. At the captain’s request, she turned her attention to the eight great engines that made up the bulk of the ship’s mass. She was here to guide the final preparatory step the ship would make before it left Earth forever. She was here to switch on the preposterously powerful engines that would propel New Moon One farther and faster than any man-made ship had ever dreamed of going. She prepared herself. Once ignited, the engines would drum with an energy it was not possible to contain. It would need to be spent, and spent it would be. This was the last chance to stop it. They had cycled the engines in testing. Teasing them with the promise of ignition, but they had not let them reach critical mass. Each one of these mighty beasts was capable of generating enough power to supply Mexico City with electricity indefinitely. They were potent enough to move two million tons of asteroid, to tame it, and drive it into orbit.

  They were specifically designed to run at two different capacities, the first being only a tenth of the power they would use once they were leashed to the asteroid they intended to bring home. Any more, and they would crush the ship’s crew to pulp in an instant with the sheer force of acceleration. As it was, the crew was strapped into cradles in their various compartments. Muscle relaxants already pumped through their veins, oxygen rich blood supplementing their own via tubes passing to and from veins in their arms. Their breathing was slowing, their bodies preparing for the coming surge. It would only be for a few minutes at first. Enough to start them on their journey before the accelosphere engaged and they vanished into Earth’s gravity well, for the first powerful leap toward their goal. But that was all t
o come. First was ignition.

  Steeling herself, Birgit turned her mind to the engines. As she did so, the rest of the crew faded, replaced by the cold hearts of the eight massive generators. Her thoughts went coursing through their systems like fingers, feeling them, bracing them. They were cold now. Hollow. Shells of potential. She started by engaging the fuel systems. They worked only on demand. Giving only when their contents were wanted, and even then withholding their full potential.

  They responded begrudgingly, their safeguards querying her request in a hesitant loop that would help harness the roar of the engines once started. Next she needed pressure. Massive pressure. Wave generators began to warp the space inside the cores, forcing inward, pushing the vacuum, focusing nothingness into an intense magnetic and gravitic pressure centering on the engines’ very hearts.

  A spine like needle reached from one side of the engines’ cores into their centers. It could retract as needed, coming close to, but never touching, that center of force at the heart of the engine. Through it, a tiny amount of liquid oxygen, hydrogen and nitrogen coursed, harvested over the past weeks from the upper atmosphere by the Climbers as they rose toward Terminus. It was the engine’s fuel, and it would be injected into the fusion core. As it ejected from the end of the needle, it was caught instantaneously by the wave field, and became hyper-weighted, swarming into a ball of ever-greater pressure as it gathered to critical mass.

  This was the most delicate phase. Birgit managed it delicately, with literally her whole being focused on the process. Too much, and the reaction would surge out from the fields and overwhelm them. It would still be contained, at least theoretically. Sensors would control the supply of fuel and the ship would survive. But the engine wouldn’t, and the whole project would be set back precious weeks as another generator was fabricated and sent up. Too little, and the pressure would overwhelm the core and smite the reaction. Not deadly in and of itself, but beyond a point, she would not be able to stop the other engines powering up, and the ship would be torn apart as seven of eight engines fired and sent the ship off in a warping spin that would certainly kill everyone aboard.