He’s ordering a flight to Melas Two, but for recon, not relief. He’s telling them to get eyes on, keep their distance, and be ready to fire, on their own if need-be.
“What’s happening?” I blurt out. He spins on me for a second, his one eye glaring at me like the thought of me being here is a personal insult, then ignores me and turns back to trying to manage what he can.
“General… Report!”
“We’ve sealed ourselves in as best we could, but I have personnel in the compromised sections, not to mention a few hundred civilians. We can’t get to them—the drones are too fast, too small… And we’re getting alarms: They’re trying to cut through the hatch seals. We’re going to need to weld over the gaskets, but that means we can’t get out. And we can’t get to anyone outside. We can’t even open a bay to launch a flight.”
“Stay put. We have a flight headed your way,” Jackson isn’t remotely reassuring.
“What hit you, General?” I need to know.
“Drones…” He feeds me magnified video. The Shinkyo were swatting at bugs: mechanical ones. Micro machines. Armed with stingers. “Probably loaded with Harvester tech. Or something worse. They cut right through the shelters, spread out fast. We didn’t even see them coming. They got in through the airlocks before we could seal. We had to lock down, lock people outside with them…”
“Can I get playback?” I ask Kastl. “Feed on the courtyard?”
On his own screens, he spins the nightmare in reverse. I see civilians tearing their shelters open, see them thrashing inside… It seems to start from one outlying shelter, but then a second in another quadrant comes under attack. I don’t see anything outside. The drones only start piercing shelter skins once they’ve broken out of the original sections.
“It looks like it came from inside,” he confirms what I think I’m seeing.
“The Shinkyo may have been compromised,” I decide heavily. “By their own. It wouldn’t be the first time.”
“But this… If it’s Harvester, they’re all dead,” he protests.
“Then somebody must have decided the price of whatever they’re hoping to get out of this is worth paying,” I grumble, knowing that somebody is likely Hatsumi Sakura herself, and that she must have made a devil’s bargain with Asmodeus. I can only imagine what he promised her, and try not to grin thinking about the fucking she’s going to get for doing business with the sick piece of shit. But right now, innocent people are dying so that…
“He’s trying to isolate the base,” I decide, confronting Jackson. “He doesn’t need to take it, he just needs to trap us inside.”
“His bugs are cutting their way in,” Jackson argues.
“Do you have another EMP onsite?”
“Orbit,” he confirms. “We could drop it, but it will take time to position.” He goes ahead and makes the call uplink. Then he turns and faces me. “That will only kill the drones. Once the buggers are inside meat, they don’t fry so easily.” He sounds like he’s accusing me.
“You think this is another ploy to get you to let us infect you?”
“Convenient timing, don’t you think: waiting until the General was onsite?”
“I was thinking about the hundreds of civilians and personnel exposed.” But he’s right: Asmodeus could have hit the camp at any time. I can’t believe this just happened to be his earliest opportunity to unleash his newest delivery system.
All we can do is watch helplessly from six hundred and sixty klicks away. It will take over two hours for our aircraft to get there, and they won’t have much fuel left by the time they do—they’ll almost immediately have to divert to the Wellspring fueling station if it still isn’t safe to land. Orbit will have the EMP in place and ready to drop in an hour and twenty, but at three hundred klicks up, it’ll take nearly half an hour to fall.
In the horrible meantime, a mix of our own security personnel who were guarding and monitoring the refugees and quite a few of their own get their heads back, get organized, and get breathing gear and cold suits to as many people as they can. A lot of them have to share, huddling together, until the shelters can get patched and re-pressurized. The only good news is that once a target has been “stung,” the micro-drones stop attacking. Apparently they’ve stung everyone outside, over three hundred people.
But there at still twelve hundred people sealed inside the bunkers. Richards has ordered everyone non-essential to the lower decks, deep underground, putting as many heavy hatches between them and the breached outer sections as he can. So far, the emergency patches they’ve welded haven’t let anything further in.
“What’s that?” Jackson barks, pointing at one of the screens. “Zoom! Zoom in…”
The Melas personnel oblige, tracking their topside cameras as directed, up onto the main bunker roof, up on the Command Tower, and in on the main uplink. The tower doesn’t look right. It looks like it’s vibrating.
It’s covered in bug drones, like a beehive.
“They’re swarming it,” Kastl confirms what we’re seeing, makes sure Melas Ops is seeing it too.
“They’re doing something to the uplink!” Jackson starts to panic. “General Richards! You need to blow it! You need to take down the tower now!”
I expect him to protest. But he knows Asmodeus has him—all of them—in a trap. If he does nothing, Asmodeus may be able to commandeer an antenna strong enough to punch a signal back to Earth, or at least disrupt all of our communications. If we destroy the tower, the base goes silent. No more calls in or out, no status reports, no sentry feed. The only way we’ll have to talk to them then is if we get a ship close enough to hear their personal link gear, and if they’ve sealed themselves down in the lower levels…
I see views of base turrets turning, aiming at the tower.
“You’re in command, Alain,” Richards gives Jackson reluctantly. “This is Melas Two, signing off.”
The screens all go black an instant after the guns start firing.
We wait, blind and pacing, for our flights to get eyes-on. We get decent visual when they’re still twenty klicks out, and Jackson calls for them to hold and hover, even though it will burn precious fuel. But what we can see…
The base looks like a flood has broken over it—a flood of black. Pure black. Flowing. Undulating. Swirling. The bunker structures still seem intact, in terms of their shapes, but we have no way of telling if they’ve been breached. As for the shelter camp, we can’t see it at all. It’s like the flood swallowed it.
“What in His Holy Name is that?” I hear one of the techs below gasp.
I look close, zooming in on Kastl’s screen. The liquid living black is completely non-reflective.
“It’s Chang,” I mutter, not really believing it myself. He’s become massive…
Jackson’s hands crush and twist the rail in front of him.
“All flights: Lock target. Weapons free. Fire everything you’ve got on my mark.”
“No!” I protest. “Nothing those fighters are carrying will hurt him at all, but they will kill our own.”
“You’re assuming they’re still alive in that!” he hisses back.
“He didn’t kill your recon team at Industry,” I put together in a hurry. “For all we know, he’s there to help.”
“Help who?” he spins on me. “Asmodeus? Chang’s the enemy, Colonel. How many times has he attacked us? Odds are he’s there to finish what the bug drones started.”
“And you’re killing our own if you’re wrong!” I confront, not backing down, even though I’m sure he’s sure I’m in on whatever this is. I’m the enemy he’s been ordered to treat like a friend. (I’m also painfully aware that the one who gave that order is now locked down and cut off, possibly even dead.)
“Better quick than the alternative,” he growls.
“You’ve already bought enough bad press to bring down the government you think you’re serving,” I decide to play the infowar game with him. “If it is hopeless, wait until you’re sure. Dr
op a quarantine zone around the base. Watch and wait.”
“I’m going to do more than wait,” he defies. He reminds me of an angry, self-righteous teenager, refusing to accept the earned wisdom of his elders (though I do look ten years younger than he does now). I decide to hold my tongue while he updates Orbit using the laser-link, and orders another “Lights Out” dropped. I don’t bother to remind him: That won’t hurt Chang either, not really. But when it doesn’t, I expect he’ll try to drop a nuke next.
I take a step back, breathe myself down; remind myself what I told Michael: I may have to take command. I may have to take it by force. Though when I said it, I thought it was an extreme option, and absolute last resort. Now I find I need to start planning for it. It may be happening any time now.
Chapter 3: And Once You’re Gone…
From the Memory Files of Mike Ram:
We’ve been grinding and crunching slowly onward for a few hours when I feel us come to a stop. The crew back in the bay with us all look confused, so this may be unplanned. After a few minutes of just sitting, Corso comes back into the bay, glances at me with barely-veiled disdain, and turns to Lyra.
“Specialist Jameson, since we have you on board, we could use your skills.”
Horst, who had been in the Comm Section, comes back and starts to unpack what I recognize as detection gear—plug-ins designed to fit standard link and HUD gear—the same kind they were using at the Keep.
“Jenovec,” Horst calls, pulling his own H-A shell.
“Take Scheffe,” Corso corrects him before Jenovec can get up. Scheffe snaps-to nervously and goes to get her shell. I’m not sure of Corso wants her to get field time or wants a loyal new-drop to watch over him.
“I don’t have an H-A, sir,” Lyra points out.
“You shouldn’t need one,” Corso downplays poorly. “We haven’t seen any enemy activity in this area.” I immediately suspect Corso may be in on the plan to get Lyra killed, and I hope the look I give her the next time she locks my eyes make that clear. She shakes it off and turns to head back forward.
“And ‘this area’ is where?” I prod. She ignores me, but Horst nods to me to come forward as he’s sealing up his shell. He reaches up into the access for the smaller portside forward gun turret and pulls down a periscope.
I take a pan around. I can barely see anything through the canopy, which reaches up a few meters above our roof, but I can see one familiar landmark over the top of it: The peak of the lone mountain that sits about twelve klicks east of the end of the Spine Range, east of Katar. Asmodeus hid his Stormcloud in a small box canyon on the northeast slope. It’s also where we pushed it so that UNMAC could shoot it down, blow it apart from orbit. And where they supposedly found remains of the clone he used to decoy us.
To better access the site, we’ve passed the mountain on its south side, then turned north around its eastern slopes. It’s a small diversion if we’re heading toward Liberty—only a few klicks off course—but then we’ve only managed to come about forty-five klicks since we got aboard. The growth must be a major deterrent to something this large. I could have run here in significantly less time.
On the slopes above the tree-line, I can see some of the wreckage of the second Stormcloud, sections of twisted frame blown clear, giant trash sculptures scattered over the mountainside. Much of it is wedged in the little side canyon, especially in the narrow cut between the eastern tail of the main crest and an almost needle-like butte—a monolith—sticking up like a fishtail.
Horst checks Scheffe’s shell and Lyra’s surface gear, then has Lyra (not Scheffe) check his own seals. He unlocks one of the armory cabinets and checks out a belt-fed SAW, and hands Scheffe an ICW. Lyra already has her own rifle and side arm. Horst signals Corso that they’re ready.
“I’m going along,” I tell Corso. “If the mission is signal detection, I’m better at it than your new equipment.”
“You can also interfere with our equipment,” Corso accuses.
“Whether you intend to or not,” Lyra diffuses. “You emit the same signatures we’d be looking for.”
“You can stay topside, keep eyes on us,” Horst offers. Corso looks like she’s about to countermand that, but stays quiet.
We have to cycle out through the rear lock in twos. I go out with Scheffe after Horst and Lyra are already through. Scheffe is visibly nervous to be stuck in a small space with me, even inside her pressurized Heavy Armor shell. I try to make it easier by ignoring her, staring at the hatch. Thankfully, the atmospheric pressure here is nearly twenty percent higher than it is in Melas, which, in addition to the more obvious benefits, also makes for quicker lock cycling.
To have a decent eye-line on where they’re headed, Horst suggests I sit up on the flank catwalk, or better: on the roof up against the main turret. Then he shoots me a quick salute before he leads his team out. Lyra gives me a nod and follows him, with Scheffe and the rover-bot bringing up the rear, providing even more firepower should they need it. But the possibility that they will need it makes me hate agreeing to stay behind. I suppose they’ll only be a short run if they need me, but even a short run will take precious minutes.
Within a handful of steps, they disappear into the adapted jungle, though I can still hear them rustle and crush on. My enhancements manufacture tracking graphics in my vision built from heat, sound and motion so I can track their progress. Thankfully, they’re the only things lit up that I can see.
I climb up on the vehicle’s flank. I wind up finding a good seat, ironically enough on top of the launch tube for the upper portside torpedo. It lets me see up over the top of the skirt armor, without being in an easy position for any of the turrets to impulsively turn on me. It also reminds me of my priorities: No matter how much I want to keep Lyra and Horst safe, I need to stay with this slow, clunky vehicle and its load of warheads. I can’t let Asmodeus get his twisted hands on them, and I also can’t let Earthside or any of their terrified on-planet agents use them catastrophically.
The heat/sound/motion blips have faded to faint foggy impressions within less than fifty meters—there’s too much growth between us. Thankfully, I get visual-spectrum eyes on them again when they get above the thicker, taller growth about seventy-five meters from where they stepped into the green. Lyra turns to wave back. They keep their links down to avoid detection, but I know they still may become targets because Asmodeus’ monsters see roughly the same way my enhancements do. As long as they’re warmer than the background and/or moving, they’re lit up.
As I sit up on the side of the Warhorse and watch them hike up into the slopes, I take the time and relative privacy to check the progress of my pistol loads. I used a handy shortcut, shoving caseless ICW ammo I’d appropriated from the base down into my mags, letting their nanotech reshape them into the rounds I need. Thanks to that, I’m nearly full again. I figure I can repeat the trick with what’s on the vehicle if needs must. Without that resource, I’d have to extract the necessary building blocks from myself and the soil, which is conveniently high in perchlorates if you know where to look, but that could take days rather than hours.
The idle also time lets my mind spin in pointless directions again. This brooding break, I find myself stuck on an idea that’s been bothering me since the Big Reveal: I really don’t know how this technology works. Maybe it doesn’t work at all. Maybe everything I think my Mods can do is really Yod. Inside the magazines, making bullets for me. Inside me…
But the theory doesn’t hold up—it’s just my existential paranoia. If my memories of that other reality are real, then I know the technology did work, and it worked before there was a Yod. And if those memories are false, then we didn’t have the tech, so why did we need to make a Yod?
And that makes me worry that maybe something even worse than that hell world happened, something that also got erased from all of our memories.
I shut it out. It’s pointless. It doesn’t matter. In any case, things are what they are, they work the way Yo
d’s decided they do, and I can only do what I can do, in this here, in this now. Losing myself in these flights of catastrophic what-ifs is only impeding me, exhausting me, sapping my will along with my confidence. If I believe that these lives in this now are real, I have to be able to act to save them. I can’t keep paralyzing myself. I can’t.
Inventory done, I settle into keeping a close eye on the forest, and the mountain above it. I reach over the skirt plating and grab a thick seed-cluster from the Graingrass we’re up over our roof in, and idly start shucking and nibbling on the seeds. It reminds me of eating wild oats back home, only heartier. It also makes me miss the grainy bread the Nomads used to give us, and that makes me think of Abbas. And Jon. I wonder how he’s dealing with his adoptive father’s death. I wonder how he’s adjusting to what he’s become, to being one of us now. I wonder how he’s dealing with knowing that Yod did it to him, or at least set it up to happen. Jon isn’t from that world—he made no pact with Yod. Nor was he an immortal in that reality if Yod is telling the truth about those born since he changed everything. He’s an innocent, dragged into this game, remade as a playing piece. Like Jak Straker. Like the Brothers Carter. Like Thompson Bly. Good people. Robbed of their humanity, as the saying goes, “by hook or by crook.”
Does Lyra have to be next?
Snapping me out of my addictive despair, I hear jets in the distance, west of us around the south side of the mountain, probably coming from the base, coming closer. Within about a minute, I see them fly by to the south of us, passing three klicks away: a pair of new-gen AAVs. They seem to be flying low and slow, lower and slower than the flight I saw preceded the Warhorse that I assumed was an advanced scout. And they’re flying in a wide formation, as if searching the valley floor. I wonder if something came up on satellite, or if they’d picked up signals worth checking out. Or maybe something else has happened, something Asmodeus has done.
The God Mars Book Six: Valhalla I Am Coming Page 24
