“Luke, get the fuck back!”
He only had a second to react, then BOOM! The door blew open, leaving behind smoke and the silhouettes of Giovanni and two others.
Luke didn’t have time to think about who the others were, and he didn’t care. Instead, he ran forward, leaped over the door, and wrapped Giovanni in his arms. Their scrubby cheeks pressed together and then they were kissing, long and passionate.
“The fuck, you two,” Calee said, stepping past them. “Get a damn room. I don’t need to be seeing this.”
“What, two guys doesn’t float your boat?” Giovanni asked.
Calee laughed. “Honey, my boat’s always floating, but honestly…I’d rather have those two guys on me then on each other. Watching you two doesn’t offend me, just reminds me of all the boody-boody I’m missing out on.”
Giovanni nodded to the others with him. “I’m sure we could find some friends to help you out there.”
They all laughed, then moved out of the room, giving Luke and Giovanni a moment’s privacy.
“We’ve gotta get back out there, finish this,” Giovanni said, even as he pulled Luke close. “But I think they’ll forgive us if we take an extra couple seconds before killing ‘em.”
“Dude, your face is a sight for sore eyes,” Luke offered.
“When this is all over, just know that I’m getting us the best vacation money can buy.”
Luke laughed. “Deal. I mean, if there’re any vacation spots left.”
“Hell, if the Syndicate isn’t there and you’re at my side, that sounds like a vacation to me.” Giovanni glanced over his shoulder to see how it was looking, then held Luke tight again, just wanting to enjoy the moment.
“What would we do?” Luke asked, the question almost a whisper in his ear.
“Huh?”
“We’ve only known in each other like this, during this shit. So I mean, would we have to roleplay a wartime environment to keep it hot, or do you think pulling out an old game of risk would be enough?”
“Naked risk, maybe?” Giovanni pulled back and gave Luke the once over. “Yeah, I could see that working real well.”
“What, like you take off some clothing every time you lose an area?”
“Maybe we could make it dirtier than that,” Goivanni said with a chuckle. “But seriously, I could care less about where we are or what we’re doing. Listen to me, okay? I have no doubts about my feelings for you, and they have nothing to do with all the B.S. we find ourselves in.”
“Can we get a dog?”
Giovanni frowned. “What?”
“Just, you know. Everything you just said made up my mind. I’m planning our future together, and think we should get a dog. Or maybe you’re a cat person?”
“You wouldn’t dump me if I was, would you?”
Luke hit him playfully. “Shut up, of course not.”
“You want a dog, I’ll get us a dog…somehow.”
“Wait a minute,” Luke tilted his head, eyes narrowed. “You avoided the question, are you a dog person or a cat person?”
“Point is, we’ll get a dog. And you’ll never know.”
“Boys, any day now!” Calee hissed from the hallway.
Luke shook his head, chuckling. “Thanks for the save.”
“Let’s hope it never needs to happen again,” Giovanni said with a wink, then turned to lead them out of there.
As anxious as he was about the fighting to come, his mind was one-hundred percent on the idea of him and Luke in a grass-covered backyard, playing with a large golden retriever while the scent of barbeque filled the air.
Damn, he couldn’t wait for that day.
QUINN MANHANDLED Comerford down through the silo. Comerford had his hands up, waving at approaching resistance fighters, telling them to lower their weapons. Quinn and the others didn’t want a bloodbath, especially in light of the close quarters, but they wouldn’t shy from engaging in violence if that’s what it took to succeed. God help them if they open fire, Quinn thought to herself. If they harmed even one hair on Samantha’s head, she would kill them all.
“There!” Comerford shouted. “She’s down there!”
Quinn looked down a dusty hallway and saw a room whose door had been blown to pieces. Hayden grabbed Comerford, holding him as Quinn sprinted forward. Weapon out, Quinn nosed into the room where Samantha had been kept. She saw the pieces of the door, the young resistance fighter on the floor, slowly waking.
Then she saw it on the ground.
The loop of string.
The one that had once been around Samantha’s wrist.
It was lying several feet away from a broken shotgun. For a moment, Quinn believed that the young resistance fighter had done something to Samantha.
Quinn literally saw red.
The walls, the floor, the asshole resistance fighter lying before her, all were crimson splashed. She pulled her gun up and her lips pulled back from her teeth. She crossed the room in several strides and jammed her pistol against the resistance fighter’s forehead.
“WHERE IS SHE?!” Quinn screamed.
“I – I don’t know,” the fighter said, throwing up his hands. “She was here and then everything went black. I swear to God I didn’t do anything!”
“What the hell’s your name?!” Quinn shouted.
“D-Daniel–just–Dan.”
Quinn grabbed Dan and pulled him to his feet. She had thoughts of putting a round through his temple and then thought better of it. She tossed him back to Renner who grabbed him in a bear hug as automatic weapons fire rang out followed by a CRACKBOOM!
The explosion sounded from somewhere overhead.
There was more gunfire and some additional screams and a look of recognition gripped Comerford’s face.
“The blast doors,” Comerford said. “She’s going out the main blast doors.”
“Grab the shields!” Hayden shouted, pointing at Comerford and Dan.
Quinn and Renner grabbed both men and marched them like human shields down toward the sound of the gunfire. The others stayed low and behind them, weapons at the ready, preparing to give and receive if somebody was stupid enough to fire on them.
The procession moved slowly down the hallway that opened to a larger, central meeting area. Smoke hovered in the air and Quinn could see a group of resistance fighters giving aid and comfort to several more fighters lying wounded on the ground. The fighters looked back to see Comerford and the others.
“What the hell happened?!” Comerford asked.
One of the wounded fighters looked up. “It was Xan. Her and Quarrels and some of the others, they said they were going out. I told ‘em that we were sheltering in place and then they started shooting. They fired at us and stormed out of here with that girl.”
Quinn’s heart leaped. “Girl?! What girl?!”
The wounded fighter elbowed himself up. “The one that Xan said was working with the scuds.”
Quinn turned, her face flushed, her eyes as clear as winter ice. Her gaze smoked into Comerford’s. She pointed her gun at him and Dan. “We’re going after them right now. And you’re leading the way.”
7
Q uinn led the others on a mad dash up over the ramp that led toward the silo’s primary exit door. She knew before she reached the door, however, that they were screwed. The air was laced with the funk of cordite and burned plastic, the result of the explosion they’d heard only moments earlier. Xan or somebody working at her behest had set off a small charge on the other side of the door that had warped the door’s hinges, doing just enough damage to prevent anyone from opening them. Quinn and Hayden wedged their shoulders under the heavy metal of the door and pushed up, but it wouldn’t budge. Renner appeared alongside them and inspected everything.
“I’m a little antsy,” Renner said. “I haven’t blown up anything in a while.”
Comerford shook his head. “You blast that door again and you’re likely to bring the whole thing down on everyone.”
Quinn looked back at him, searching his face in the murkiness. He was standing alongside Dan, guarded by Milo and Giovanni who were clutching assault rifles. Eli, Mackie, Hawkins and the others were standing behind them. Quinn stabbed a finger in Comerford’s direction. “Maybe we should bring this whole place down. Might teach you and the others a lesson.”
“I didn’t take your daughter, Sergeant,” Comerford said.
“No, but you enabled the asshole who did.”
“I specifically ordered her and the others to stand down. I wanted to properly investigate the allegations against your daughter.”
“What the hell would ever justify imprisoning a twelve-year old girl?!” Quinn asked.
“I saw her with something … with one of them.”
“What the fuck are you talking about, Comerford?”
“For Crissakes, I saw her … blow things up!”
Quinn cut her eyes away and with growing dread considered the explosion that had set them free. In all the confusion she’d failed to ask the obvious question of what the hell had happened. Who set the blast off that allowed them to escape from the room? Who blew the door from the hinges in the room where Samantha had obviously been kept?
As if reading her mind, Comerford whispered, “I don’t think you realize just how special your little girl is.”
Without fully processing this, Quinn headed back down the ramp. She jabbed a finger in the air at Comerford. “Where’s the back door?”
“What?!”
“There can’t be just one way into and out of this place.”
Comerford gulped and then nodded. “There’s another way – it’s a bitch and it’ll take longer to access, but there’s a hatch down past the recirculation tanks.”
Quinn processed this, her eyes blacker than sinkholes. She waved her gun at Comerford. “Get some people up here to open that door,” she said, gesturing up at the warped blast doors.
“And while they’re doing that?” Comerford asked.
Quinn aimed the gun at him. “You’re gonna show us the way out of here.”
8
Back in the Syndicate command ship, the Potentate poured over footage of the events taking place on Earth. Unbeknownst to the planet’s inhabitants, he’d surreptitiously scattered tracking and listening devices all over the planet in the weeks before the invasion. The devices, which were no larger than a kernel of rice, sucked up images and sounds and conversations and beamed them back to the central Syndicate hive. The information, which the Potentate liked to call “The Divine Skein,” was then sifted and sorted and pixilated into immense, three-dimensional scenes, giving the viewer the ability to listen and experience the events as if he or she were a witness to them on the ground. The amount of data contained in The Divine Skein had increased markedly since the initial invasion, allowing the Syndicate to essentially eavesdrop on any corner of the globe at any moment.
The emerald light from the images swirled about the Potentate’s tall frame, as he watched Xan and Quarrels and several other resistance fighters fleeing the underground base that they called Shiloh. The Potentate paid special attention to Samantha who was bound, being spirited off against her will. By virtue of his technology, it was as if the Potentate was down at the base, standing between the outbuildings, watching Samantha being dragged toward a cluster of armored SUVs. He watched Xan and the others place weapons and gear into the machines before destroying any other vehicle that somebody might use to pursue them with. They tried to do the same to the glider, the one Quinn and the Marines had stolen from him, but they were unable to damage it. Frustrated, the rogue resistance fighters boarded the SUVs and drove off.
“She survived this time,” a voice whispered.
The Potentate peered back through the emerald light to see Hadrian drifting toward him. He nodded, remembering how Samantha had resisted, or tried to fight back, in prior loops and died at the hands of one or more resistance fighters with itchy trigger fingers.
“Her mother will go for her,” Hadrian said.
“As she must,” the Potentate replied. “And then, at the right moment, you will intervene.”
“The mother will try to destroy me.”
“Do you blame her?” the Potentate replied.
“She needs to know what is at stake soon. She needs to make a choice.”
“She will,” the Potentate said, his voice dropping. “But it must be of her own volition.”
Hadrian stared at him. “Do you understand that the continued existence of the universe revolves around that woman and her child?”
The Potentate’s head sagged. “Human beings are one of the oldest instruments of warfare … and also its weakest link.”
Hadrian’s face was unreadable in the emerald light. “You can’t escape the past, but you don’t have to build the present in its image.”
The Potentate nodded. “The General is already on his way down,” the Potentate said. “The die is cast. Make ready for what is to come.”
GENERAL AAMES SAT at the back of a large transport glider that circled above the ocean the Syndicate had formed by damming a variety of rivers, including the Snake River. Similar operations had been conducted in at least twelve other key countries, the flooding of flatlands to create great bodies of water upon which the Syndicate had placed what amounted to forward operating bases. The General stared out of a window at the water below, observing the various alien bases. It was medieval, he chuckled to himself. The Syndicate, for all its power and technology, had taken a page from the past. They’d created the world’s biggest moat.
The glider shuddered and dropped low, cruising over the water until it neared the largest base, the one circled by eleven other, smaller bases.
The forward thrust on the glider ceased and the machine hovered out over the water like a Harrier jump jet. General Aames stood up and moved toward the rear ramp which lowered. He peered out across the open water at the alien base as a bridge, an immense length of pewter-colored alien alloy, extended from the base to the lip of the glider’s ramp.
Face shimmering with perspiration, the General dropped down from the glider and marched across the bridge. He’d been in the alien command ship for so long he’d forgotten what real humidity felt like. The air was heavy and stale, not unlike a late-summer day back at Fort Meade. The water below him was as still as a pane of glass. He raised a hand in the Syndicate salute to a number of alien guards and then stopped and looked back over the ocean. He smiled. It was good to be back on Earth.
ONCE INSIDE THE ALIEN BASE, General Aames rode a corkscrew lift up to its summit where a command and control station was located. The walls showed real-time images of alien operations at disparate locations across the globe. The General watched limited search and destroy operations outside of Moscow; snatch and grab undertakings in London, Cairo, and across South America; and the building of sprawling bases in Asia, Eastern Europe and Africa. It was all very impressive but completely wrong, he thought to himself, the exact opposite of how the war should be fought.
A student of military history, General Aames recognized that there were three principal stages to an effective insurgency. The first was political, a phase where the insurgents (and the so-called resistance was no longer a resistance, but an insurgency now) established their right to speak for a country or a world. The resistance had already supplanted most nations’ professional fighting forces, thereby effectively accomplishing this and becoming Earth’s de-facto army. The second stage involved destroying the ability of the enemy to govern wide swaths of land. The Syndicate had never really tried to govern any of the land it seized, so the pressure on the resistance to destroy its ability to govern was nonexistent. The third stage involved actual combat and it was here that the aliens, with their overwhelming firepower, excelled. But history, whether it was the French and Americans in Vietnam, or the British in Kenya, or the struggle in Algeria, taught that the last stage, the one that favored the Syndicate, was usually the least important. What that meant
was that the aliens were winning the battles, but might lose the war. In point of fact, military operations had essentially shifted into a phase some called “after war,” which is where many of history’s greatest empires met their demise.
The General waffled a bit on this last point, one day believing the Earth would soon be pacified and on another fretting that combat operations might theoretically be without end. He knew that the Potentate had tried to vanquish the resistance through “soft power,” trying to reach accords with certain resistance groups, before turning to unconventional warfare, the weaponization of confusion and paranoia exemplified by the creation and use of the explosive “copies,” the synthetic humans the aliens had utilized with varying degrees of success. Little of that had proven effective and so, of late, he’d become increasingly vocal, voicing his frustrations and opinions to Marin and the Potentate, but had been rebuffed. He wondered whether his increasingly pointed questions were the cause of his being reassigned back to Earth. Whatever the reason, he would make the best of the situation and with whatever autonomy he was given, take the fight to the resistance. He realized now that the only way to crush an insurgency was to continue to hit them hard while simultaneously avoiding the kind of defeat that would provide a psychological boost. And when it was all over, he alone would remain. He would be appointed something like a viceroy over the Earth and ascend to sit at the right hand of the Potentate. Emboldened, he looked out over the faux ocean, thinking up all the ways that he would make the resistance pay for taking up arms.
9
Comerford led the way, down the ramp and over several catwalks. They stopped at the room that held the Marines’ armor and gear, but were unable to open the door because of what Xan had done. Even after firing at the door with their weapons, it wouldn’t budge. They could have waited and tried to breach the door with explosives, but that was dangerous and would’ve taken time, and time was something they didn’t have a lot of. Quinn’s greatest fear was that Xan was going to take Samantha off into the desert where she’d do something terrible to her. She had to track the bitch down before she had the chance to hurt her. She still had the issue of assaulting the Syndicate’s time ship, but that would have to wait. She wasn’t going anywhere without her daughter.
Syndicate Wars: False Dawn (Seppukarian Book 4) Page 5
