Fear the Survivors

by Stephen Moss

  Minnie listened and responded. She did not rip Banu out of the simulation immediately, but gradually lowered the speed and complexity, removing the cloud cover, brightening the sky, and reining in on the Skalm’s power. Amadeu and Quavoce stepped back into the calmer but still on-rushing simulation.

  Sensing her engines cooling, Banu got in a final surge of speed, rocketing down into a deep gorge, she focused on a waterfall coming up fast, waiting till the last instant, then span her ship’s body onto the horizontal and fired all her engines as one.

  The Skalm leapt up out of the canyon with a thunderous clap, scarring the ground beneath as the hot blades of its mighty engines powered it suddenly skyward. Thick contrails formed in her wake as she ripped through the air, Banu’s mind singing with joy. It was ecstasy. Pure freedom. She spiraled the Skalm as she rose skyward, still firing all five of her engines, and departed the virtual atmosphere in a matter of seconds, her exodus resounding outward across the cybernetic world in an echo of New Moon One’s thunderous departure months before.

  They all shared in her final moment of happiness, the sky filled with stars, a place of seeming peace and tranquility, the Skalm even more at home here in the vacuum as it was in air, untethered as it was here by the drag of the thick atmosphere below. Above Mach 2, air became like a soup, a solid thing to be forced through, a moving wall of liquid resistance. But not up here. Once it was true, once the Skalm was made reality, the Skalm’s speed in space would be limited only by how much time its pilot had to accelerate, and the reach of the subspace tweeters that pilot needed to control the mighty beast.

  From this blissful silence and vastness, Minnie slowed and ended the simulation at last, and released Banu back to her body.

  The girl was crying with joy. She was ecstatic. It was the latest and greatest of a series of ever more wonderful experiences she’d had since being introduced to Minnie’s world, and since meeting Quavoce, and she stood, shaky at first, and went to hug her adopted father.

  They stood there, Amadeu almost as emotional as Banu, and Quavoce nodded, filled with pride, but also with trepidation. Even this ten-minute test had stretched her young mind to its very limits. Who knew what prolonged flight would do to her young psyche.

  But he knew what must inevitably happen next. Neal had never said it directly, but Quavoce was no fool. He knew the six-year-old Banu Mantil would have a role to play in the coming conflict.

  Chapter 40: The Budapest Gambit

  Yuri Svidrigaïlov looked out of the tall window that reached up to the vaulted ceiling above. He did not spare much time for the broad, grey sky. He did not notice the ancient, polished stone sill that his hands rested on. He did not contemplate the many men, great and terrible, who had stood here in the past, nor did he think of his place among them.

  He stared out over his capital city, at the wide square below with its bustling life, grey figures hunched against the autumn chill, threading the square and the quilt of the city around it.

  His capital.

  His people.

  “Field Commandant Beria is on the line, Premier,” said a hushed Peter Uncovsky from the door to the great office.

  Peter no longer waited around to be invited to such calls. Since Field Commandant Nikolai Beria had so neatly emasculated the premier at their meeting a week ago he was careful to take calls with his top general in private. Peter did not complain. Nikolai was the only person who dared stand up to the premier, and, like any bully, the premier had a tendency to take out his impotence on the next unfortunate to cross his path, and Peter wanted no part of it.

  “Nikolai, how are you? And how goes the eastern shore?” The premier liked to think of his expanding empire like that, like a wave washing outward from his self.

  “Good, Premier Svidrigaïlov, very good. We have secured the Crimean peninsula with minimal resistance, as we expected, along with the coastal road from Rostov and a good deal of the surrounding land. With your permission, we are ready to move onto the next phase.”

  “You feel confident that you have a good handle on the political topography in Kiev, Nikolai? This is not Ashgabat, we cannot afford to give the Europeans and Americans fuel for their propaganda machines.”

  Mikhail ignored the irony of the statement, given the premier’s own throttling grasp on the information flow within his burgeoning empire. Vast swathes of the Russian political propaganda machine, long dormant since the fall of the USSR, had been reawakened. Not under the same names, of course. Now they had such innocuous sounding titles as Ministry for Equitable Data Access and State Voluntary Ratings Board.

  “Of course, Premier. They represent a threat, that is for sure, but not one you cannot handle, I think. And after their embarrassment at Rostov and Belgorod, I think they will think twice before engaging us.”

  “Yes, Nikolai,” said the premier, but a bitter taste came to his mouth as he thought of the reports that had come back from those encounters.

  He had thought his teams were nigh on invincible. But they had paid a dear price for engaging the troops of the allied taskforce. “We did, of course, win out on those occasions, Commandant, but I remain fearful of what might happen if we find ourselves facing the larger force those recon teams represented.”

  The Agent moved to quell the man’s fears, he needed the premier to be the brash and ambitious man he had helped take power. He needed the premier to provoke the Europeans. To provoke them to the point that they would commit their full capability. It was, as far as Pei and he were concerned, the only way they would be able to achieve their true objective.

  “Yuri, my friend, the fact is you engaged and destroyed the recon teams. Teams that represented the very best the allies have to send. And it was only the covert nature of their incursion that prevented us from sending a more focused attack by our superior air forces. On the open battlefield, it is the Ubitsyas, not the ground troops, that will be the decisive factor.”

  “Yes, yes, Nikolai,” replied the premier, “so you keep saying. But what of the allied air force? I have seen footage from around their space elevator, Nikolai. We know they have next generation fighters as well, larger ones than ours, I might add.”

  The Agent bristled at the mention of the SpacePort, a sign of just how fast the work of their nemesis Neal Danielson’s team was progressing.

  “Indeed,” the Agent replied aloud, “indeed. But that size is because of their mostly civilian function, not any increased power or militant capability. These are transports with only a secondary attack capability, not dedicated killers, like our Ubitsyas.”

  It was partially true. The Ubitsyas carried no cabin, had no room for cargo, like the bulkier StratoJets. A single pilot lay horizontally in the torpedo-shaped hull, cradled against the G-forces of the nimble fighter, facing a multiscreen control panel he manipulated with two joysticks and his feet. A spinal interface it was not, and the Agent suspected the allies had some version of that on their StratoJets, which would improve their piloting ability significantly.

  He also knew that even though the StratoJets had a small passenger compartment they were probably still armed with serious weaponry, and were no doubt being upgraded as they spoke since he had been forced to show some of his hand in the fight with the Recon Teams.

  But he downplayed this here, building his leader’s confidence, “No, no, Premier. While the allied fighters would make short work of current generation planes, they will have bitten off more than they can chew if they go up against your ever-growing Ubitsya fleet.”

  “So you say, Nikolai, so you say,” the premier replied with feigned modesty, but in fact the compliments to his fleet did not fall on deaf ears, and he brimmed with pride at the thought of his incredible fighting machines.

  “Indeed I do, Yuri. Which is why I say we should press forward, into Belarus. Into the Baltic states.”

  “Whoa, Nikolai, you get ahead of yourself. The Europeans can only be pushed so far. If we breech any more borders too soon after Ukraine, we wil
l incite riot. Talk all you want about the capability of our fighting force, we are still talking about going against nuclear powers, let us not forget that.”

  The Agent was all too aware of that; it was, in fact, the basis of his entire mission here, a mission that had gone spectacularly awry. He thought back, now, to their preparations back on Mobiliei. He contemplated the Nomadi groups that had nominated and supported the Agent Shtat Palpatum, the Mobiliei who, in the guise of John Hunt, had betrayed them all. He wondered whether it had been their intention all along, remembering that they had actively supported the concept of an advanced team from the start. He was right, of course. When the idea had been raised, they had seen a singular opportunity to stymie the effort and leapt at it.

  But that was all speculation now, mooted by the passing of time. Setting it aside, the Agent focused on the task at hand.

  “Yes, Premier. I assure you, as always, that avoiding such an attack remains my highest priority.”

  Yes, thought the Agent, but provoking an attack of another kind, that is a different story. The conversation wound on, but Mikhail was already engaged elsewhere. He was close now. Even as he exchanged final platitudes with the premier, he was raising his forces. Driving them forward. Brashly now, pushing on to Kiev, and past that, to the borders with Belarus, Poland, and Romania. Not to mention Hungary and Slovakia. He needed a response, not a nuclear one, that remained unlikely, but it was vital he did not even tease at such a thing. No, he needed a specific response.

  He needed to bring out Neal so he could face his forces on the battlefield. He reviewed his options carefully. He would not wait for further approval from his puppet premier, that man had almost exhausted his usefulness anyway. No, he would push on. But where? He looked at his options, and there, in the center, at the heart of the once-mighty Hapsburg Empire, he chose his target.

  - - -

  Hours later, while his great army mobilized and hundreds of miles away his seventh division began to rumble up through the big Ukrainian cities of Uman and Ternopil toward the Hungarian border, Agent Mikhail Kovalenko stepped from his mobile command center and stepped into a waiting helicopter.

  He was heading south, to the Black Sea. To rendezvous with a waiting force there. To take command of a very special aircraft fresh from the Novosibirsk Plant.

  - - -

  Minnie: <¿neal, would you mind if i woke you up?>

  It was a strange request, to ask a sleeping person if they would mind being woken up. But in theory he could actually say no, and, by the nature of the machine-induced slumber he now enjoyed, Minnie could let him carry on sleeping, as though she had never disturbed him.

  Neal: ‘¿is it urgent?’

  That part of Neal that Minnie had reached out to was subsumed under a simulacrum of REM sleep, a dream state during which Neal reviewed reports from the various departments, sub-departments, projects and mission specialists under his vast team’s auspices, while his body slept away the night. He did not waste even his sleeping hours anymore, using the five hours enforced upon him by an AI Minnie had dedicated to monitoring his biological processes to catch up on logistical and quality assurance reviews. More to keep apprized of the progress of non-critical path items than to micromanage them.

  Minnie:

  He cursed violently. Why must they keep needling him? He willed himself awake, opening his eyes like he was initializing a system.

  As his pupils struggled to focus and adjust to the dim light in his Rolas apartment, he willed his curtains open and his lights on. They remained inanimate. And why wouldn’t they, he thought, grumpily. Reality: such an unresponsive place. Neal frowned and closed his eyes again as he sat up.

  Neal: ‘minnie, give me a status report, please.’

  Minnie:

  Neal: ‘¿they are?’

  It didn’t make any sense. They as good as had Ukraine, and he doubted the Europeans would make too much more noise even if Belarus was subsumed, as callous as that seemed, but why move farther before you have even consolidated the massive Ukrainian state? Why wouldn’t they wait? What was the goddamned rush?

  Neal: ‘show me.’

  His mind filled with a satellite view over Western Ukraine, and as he wondered where the picture was coming from, he was informed it was real-time, enhanced to account for cloud cover over some parts of the north and the Romanian border to the south. Minnie then overlaid a series of arrows, some moving outward from Kiev, some passing to the south and north of the main city, bypassing it altogether.

  Neal’s attention veered naturally to Poland. And indeed there were two large forces moving toward that border in the northwest. This was madness. Europe would not only respond to an invasion of Poland, they would, Neal feared, violently overreact to it, such were the depth of the scars from the last time someone invaded Poland. Minnie sensed his focus.

  Minnie:

  Neal could see it too. They were creating a perimeter a hundred miles long, as they had done in the Stannic Bloc after rolling over their defenses months before. But they were not doing it subtly. In the past they had attempted to conceal their troop movements under the cover of night. But now, it was like they were displaying it.

  And that was not the only part of the display. To the south, moving along the border with Romania, seemingly ignoring the sizeable but ill-equipped Romanian army attempting to erect a defensive network there, was the largest single body of troops of all.

  They were not fanning out. Not dispersing. They were moving fast along two parallel main roads a hundred miles apart; two great columns of tanks, troop carriers, and supply vehicles, filling both lanes of each road, brushing the local traffic aside without regard, into side roads, onto margins, into ditches. They were clearly moving with purpose.

  But where? Not Slovakia. Though a beautiful country, Slovakia was not a rich one, and would not provide much in the way of reward for the trouble it would bring defending it from Poland to the north and Hungary to the south.

  Hungary to the south.

  Even as he thought of it, he knew this was it. Monetarily struggling, but symbolically strong, Hungary was historically one of the powerhouse nations of Central Europe. Its capital was the stuff of song, its reach at one time from the Black Sea to the Baltic.

  The two columns, trundling at forty miles per hour through the Ukrainian countryside, they could only be heading to Budapest.

  As Minnie began respond to his line of reasoning, modeling the track and progress of the large force, another part of her synthetic psyche was also receiving and routing a call. Then another. By the time she notified Neal, there were three foreign heads of state trying to reach him.

  Whether he wanted it or not, his force was about to be co-opted.

  Chapter 41: Bubble Burst

  Major Toranssen: ‘ladies and gentlemen, we are officially outbound from rolas. this is a comms check. can i get a status ping and return from each of you, please.’

  Minnie felt the flow of the data coming from the flotilla as they sent data packets to her, and through her, to the major. She was maintaining a running track of all the components of the fleet as it set off from Rolas airspace, maintaining multiple redundant subspace data paths through the four StratoJets and three heavy lifters in the fleet that were enabled with long-range subspace tweeters.

  The ping was more of a bandwidth test than anything else, but as the data packets came through, rich with telemetry, the fleet seemed to pulse with freshness, with a vibrant currency, like a coat of wet paint gleaming on their vir
tual black hulls.

  The sensation reflected back out to all the pilots almost as soon as Minnie had processed it, the reciprocal data check filling every pilot, team leader, and spezialist with a knowledge of their entirety.

  That entirety was something to behold.

  The fleet was flying out and up, rising through the atmosphere as it departed the sanctity of SpacePort One’s airspace, a great arrowhead filling the sky.

  Spread out along the cutting edge of the arrow were Neal’s all important StratoJets. Thirty jet-black needles slicing through the sky, each armed with a bank of flechette guns and laden with wing loads of Brimstone and Maverick anti-tank missiles. With the extra weight, they might not be able to reach their top speeds, but they were limited now anyway, waiting for the three huge, lumbering, and fully laden C-17 Globemasters that formed the heart of the great arrow.

  Each of the big planes massed more than the entire StratoJet fleet. Each carried ten six-man teams, grouped into the same fire-team configuration as the Recon Teams, and equally armed to the teeth, ready to be deployed by parachute by the big planes.

  Along with the troops, each C-17 also carried a burly command vehicle, a new addition to TASC’s ground-based armory. It was a modified GTK Boxer armored fighting vehicle, a big, eight-wheeled all-terrain vehicle, thick with armor plating and bristling with weaponry.

  Its massive wheels and multiple gun mounts already made it a very capable machine. But Madeline had replaced its ceramic shielding slabs with black SC armor-plating, and then replaced its machine-gun mounts with two quad-barreled flechette cannons, controlled from within the safety of the cab.

  She had also coated its massive tires with a new, woven shielding fabric and installed eight copper-coiled electric motors, allowing each wheel to be controlled individually. The whole was given ample power and unlimited range by the replacement of its combustion engine with a football-sized fusion cell that also powered the hub subspace transponder it carried and the deadly quad cannons.