“You might as well. After all, it’s the only marriage we’ve got. Right?”
Andrews smiled at her. “Right.”
A chime sounded over the apartment’s speaker system, followed by a neutral male voice. “The time is zero six fifty.” Rachel sagged into his arms when she heard the announcement.
“Duty calls. I’ll see you tonight, okay?” Andrews gave her a big hug.
“You sure will. What’ll you do today?”
“Spend some time in the Commons, then head for the SCEV bay and check on the teardown of the rig. That’s Spencer’s job, but I want to keep my hand in, make sure everything’s going as well as it can.”
Rachel nodded slowly, her face impassive. She kissed his neck, then broke their embrace. “Well, enjoy it, I guess. I’ll catch you at seventeen hundred.”
“Okay. I love you, baby.”
Rachel headed for the door. “I know you do.” She pulled open the heavy door and stepped into the brightly lit corridor. When she turned to pull it closed, she looked at Andrews and smiled. “Get some more rest. I have plans for you later.”
“Oh, goody!” Rachel laughed and closed the door. Andrews fairly collapsed into his chair and regarded the cold remnants of coffee in his mug. He put it back on the table and leaned back.
“Welcome home, you stupid jerk,” he said to himself.
***
The Core was a huge, three-story chamber in the bottom of the base. The center of the floor was dominated by a wide platform, atop of which sat three wailing turbines contained inside soundproofed compartments that only served to dull the roar. If the personnel inside the base formed its soul, then the turbines were absolutely Harmony’s heart. Without the life-giving power they generated, the base’s inhabitants would have perished long, long ago. As such, the turbines and their associated systems were supported by dozens of technicians, and more were trained on their operations and maintenance every year. It was essential that the turbines remain operational twenty-four hours a day, 365 days a year. Without them, Harmony Base would cease to exist.
At noontime, Rachel walked across the floor to where Jeremy Andrews stood, talking to another engineer. She stood off to one side and waited to catch her father-in-law’s eye, not wanting to interrupt the conversation. Jeremy looked and scanned the floor, his brow furrowing when he saw Rachel.
Jeremy finished his conversation, then headed toward Rachel. He looked at her with concern written all over his face. “You look like you’ve been put through the wringer. You all right?” Jeremy asked. “All of these shifts are doing you in. Don’t think I haven’t noticed.”
“I’m fine,” Rachel said. Jeremy Andrews was the base’s engineering officer, one of the most senior civilian personnel in the base. Because of that, she had to be perhaps even more diligent in her duties. Despite the fact he was her husband’s father, it wouldn’t do for her coworkers to think she might be using family status to her unfair advantage. Keeping this in mind, she still asked, “Do you have a second? I, um, want to talk to you about something.”
Jeremy smiled, the skin around his eyes crinkling. “Sure—anything to avoid work. You’re on your break, right? Your station’s manned?”
“Full up,” Rachel said.
“Cool. Let’s hit the lounge.”
Jeremy led Rachel to a gangway, and she followed him up its narrow length to the next level. While he was about the same height as his son, Jeremy Andrews was about thirty pounds heavier, and the metal steps creaked slightly beneath his weight as he vaulted up the gangway. Despite his age and the expanding paunch that encircled his belly, he still moved fast, and Rachel had to hurry to keep up with him.
The lounge was located on the Core’s second level. It was a bright room, and the tables and chairs were positioned before the thick windows that overlooked the Core. Rachel was happy to see the room was unoccupied. Jeremy immediately headed for the small refreshment area in one corner and grabbed a mug from a rack on the wall.
“Want a cuppa?” he asked, pointing at the coffee station.
“Sure, that’d be great.” She really was tired from working so many double shifts, and the coffee would help her get through the rest of the day.
“Are you scheduled tomorrow?” Jeremy filled two mugs with dark coffee as he spoke.
“No, I’m off. Why?”
“Good. I was going to insist you take the day off. Listen, getting those beers for Mike was great and all, but they’re just not worth two weeks of double shifts. Don’t do that again. I’ll talk to Dominick about it as well—he’s a jerk for pushing you into that sort of an agreement. It’s great that he can trade for a couple of days off so he can brew more beer, but when he starts pushing people into corners and performance suffers, I’m calling him on it.”
“I’m fine, Jeremy. Really.”
Jeremy handed her a mug of coffee, and she accepted it gratefully. He raised his own mug to his lips and looked at her for a moment as he sipped it. “You’re fine? That’s horse crap. You’re dead on your feet.” Before she could respond, he waved the matter away with one hand. “Anyhow. Most young married people would be doing handstands after their dear mates returned to the fold. Why aren’t you?”
“Am I that transparent?”
Jeremy laughed and walked toward the windows. “Not at all, but I’ve been there. Before Meg died, that is.”
He put his hands in his uniform’s pockets, and Rachel could see his reflection in the glass. At the mention of his wife—her mother-in-law—who had died from cancer almost three years ago, a vaguely haunted expression flashed across his face. He hadn’t wanted her to see it, she knew, but he had been foiled by the glass before him. He turned back to her and smiled easily, all traces of loss and loneliness gone from his face. “And I have an inkling as to what makes my son tick. So …?”
Rachel sighed and shrugged. “I guess I’m acting like the little wife, as disgusting as it sounds.”
“I don’t know what that means. I know you probably go through a little or a lot of hell every time Mike takes off in that rig of his. Hell, I get queasy myself. But you know that his work is vital, right? That it’s part of the core reasons for this base’s existence?”
“Yeah, I’m up on all that. It’s still a tough thing for me to deal with, and it screws up every homecoming. I just can’t stop myself from trying to convince him to try his hand at something else. Even I realize what a nag I’ve turned into, so it must be ten times worse on the receiving end.”
“The answer’s easy—stop.”
“I can’t.”
He sipped more coffee as she joined him at the window. “Then you’re going to have a hell of a fight on your hands. I know Mike. He acts loose and easy all the time, but the fact of the matter is, he has one stiff neck. You try and bend it, he’s going to stand up and give it back to you one day, and that won’t be pretty.” He paused. “But your position is absolutely understandable, given what you’ve gone through.”
“Thanks. He thinks so, too. But he’s convinced himself the rigs are the safest things around—”
“They are,” a deep, rough voice said. Rachel’s heart seemed to freeze in her chest, and if she hadn’t been caught by surprise, she would have kept her gaze rooted on the turbine platform below. Unfortunately, she turned.
A tall, imposing man stood in the break room’s corridor doorway, his pale eyes fixed on hers like he was tracking a target. He had a hard-edged, handsome face, bordering on old movie-star looks, but it seemed lived-in, a facade covering up decades of Rachel didn’t know what. Command Sergeant Major Scott Mulligan was the base’s senior enlisted man and a contemporary of the Old Guard—a relic.
Jeremy jumped in quickly. “Mulligan! What brings you to our cherished inner sanctum?”
Mulligan turned his inscrutable gaze toward the burly engineer. “My feet, of course.” He raised the notepad he held in one hand. “It’s time to go through the quarterly physical security review, which is on your calendar, Maj
or.”
“I thought that was tomorrow,” Jeremy said.
“I guarantee you it’s today, sir. And it’ll be as routine as always—I’ll ask you the same boring questions, you give me the same boring answers, we’ll review the same boring data, and finally, we’ll both sign the same boring attestation forms.”
“Doesn’t get any more exciting than that, does it?” Jeremy ran a hand over his face, then nodded to the tall sergeant major. “All right, then. Let’s get to it.” He put a hand on Rachel’s shoulder. “Can we continue this later?”
“Sure,” Rachel said, and she put her coffee mug in the sink. She couldn’t get out of there fast enough.
“If it makes you feel any easier, Andrews, I can confirm for you that what Captain Andrews says is completely true—the SCEVs are about as bulletproof as any mobile system can be,” Mulligan said to her as she turned for the door.
Rachel broke stride. It was rare for Mulligan to address her; the big enlisted man was usually too aloof to interact in a meaningful way with the New Guard, the people like herself and her husband who’d been brought to the base as children before the war. Now he had done so twice in rapid succession, and it provided Rachel with a sudden opportunity.
“Is that so, Sergeant Major? What’s it like to kill people in them?” The sudden snarl in her voice surprised her. Like so many others, on some level she feared Mulligan. He was too different; he embodied too much legacy. He was an example of what had gone wrong in the world before the Sixty Minute War, a complete anachronism whose uniform still sported the patches of Army Special Forces. Everyone was on their toes around Mulligan, even members of the command staff, so when Rachel suddenly faced him down, she was perhaps the most shocked of all.
There was no backing down now. She stared at Mulligan, who stared back at her without any display of emotion. The moment dragged on, and Mulligan kept quiet until Jeremy opened his mouth to speak.
“It’s not as easy as you might think,” Mulligan said finally.
The bland response unnerved her and, for a moment, Rachel was afraid she might burst into tears. Instead, she managed to hold them back long enough to fix the tall soldier with a withering glare. If he recognized the hatred she felt for him, Mulligan gave no indication. His only response was to look back at her with his usual flat, disinterested gaze.
Finally, he turned back to Jeremy. “We should get to work, Major.”
Rachel stormed out of the break room and back into the never-ending din of the Core. She bolted down the narrow gangway, shoving past a burly electrician plodding up the metal stairs. The man had to flatten himself against the bulkhead so she could get past, and Rachel jostled him mightily. She would apologize to the electrician later. Right now, she needed to get to the restroom on the main floor and hide in a stall, so no one could see her tears.
4
After having breakfast in the Commons Area, Andrews rode one of the elevators to the SCEV Maintenance Area. Virtually as wide as the entire base below it, “the bay,” as it was called, was the single largest room in the installation, housing Harmony’s remaining nine Self-Contained Exploration Vehicles. The tenth rig had been lost in the immediate aftermath of the Sixty Minute War under circumstances that remained unclear, though Andrews had of course heard the rumors that placed the blame squarely on Scott Mulligan’s shoulders. The fact that Rachel’s parents had perished in the same incident was not lost upon him, but Andrews wasn’t about the past. He let Mulligan and Benchley and even his own father dance with that. Andrews was all about the future.
One portion of the bay was dedicated to assembly and repair, and SCEVs Four and Five were already there. Andrews made a beeline for his vehicle just as a ceiling-mounted crane lifted the bulky Mission Equipment Pack from the vehicle’s back. The MEP was what made the SCEVs tick; loaded with all manner of sensors, a low-slung radome that housed a millimeter-wave radar, and a retractable pod that held six AGM-114R Hellfire missiles, the MEP had been designed to be modular. That way, a pack could be taken from one vehicle and attached to another should the rig’s original pack have a systems failure. Removal of the pack after decontamination was also the first step in performing rig maintenance, and Andrews was not surprised to see Todd Spencer overseeing the operation. Standing with his feet spread and hands on his hips, Spencer struck a pose that was almost dictatorial. He shouted at the crane operator and the technicians who mounted the MEP to the crane, reminding them that they were handling millions of dollars of equipment—which would probably be worth billions now, if currency still had any value.
“Sergeant Spencer! Don’t you crew chiefs ever sleep?” Andrews asked as he stopped beside the engineer and looked up at the MEP dangling from its truss.
Spencer only glanced at him. “Buenos dias, Capitan. Yeah, I caught a straight eight after we rolled in. I wanted to get cracking on that engine you guys blew. ’Scuse me for a second …” Spencer hurried over to where another maintenance technician was prying open an access panel on the SCEV’s fuselage. “Hey, McCready! What’re you doing? Since when do you just pry open an access point like that? You’re going to bend the plate!”
Andrews watched as Spencer harangued the tech about the proper procedure required to open access plates, pointing out that said procedure was even written on the surface of the plate itself. Andrews shook his head. Spencer could be a little too much at times.
“Hey, Mike! Welcome back!”
Andrews took a slap to the back that was hard enough to make him take a step forward. He whirled around, startled. Jim Laird, the commander of SCEV Five, clapped his hands together as he snickered.
“Man, you should see the look on your face!”
“Kiss my ass, Jimmy. You scared the shit out of me.”
“Sorry, sorry. How’s it going?” Laird stuck out his hand, and Andrews shook it. Laird was about an inch taller than Andrews, and while Andrews could be described as broad-shouldered, Jim Laird was built like an old-time linebacker. And where Andrews was definitely Caucasian, Laird was anything but. “Philly black,” he’d said about his ethnicity when they were kids.
“Tried to catch up to you yesterday, but you’d already made it back to quarters,” Laird continued. “I figured I’d wait. Didn’t want to interrupt anything important and have Rachel boot me in the nuts.”
“Probably a good choice,” Andrews agreed. “How’re you doing, man?”
“Fair to middlin’. Getting ready to head up to Minnesota and see what we can see.” Laird nodded to SCEV Five. The rig Laird commanded was an identical twin to Andrews’s, the only difference being a black number 5 painted on its white fuselage. “Should be a couple of weeks of wall-to-wall excitement.”
“There’s lots of storm activity all across the Midwest,” Andrews said. “Get ready for it. How far up do you think you’ll go?”
“All the way to the Canadian border, if we can make it.”
“Damn, guy. You go!”
Laird smiled. “As far and as fast as I can, pal.” He paused. “So, scuttlebutt is you guys rolled snake eyes.”
“Why, Captain Laird, I’m surprised at that statement. You know the command group will release the findings of my last mission in due time,” Andrews said, tongue firmly in cheek.
“Come on, guy, throw me a bone here.”
Andrews chuckled. It was true, he was technically not allowed to discuss his mission’s findings with other personnel, but that regulation was regularly ignored every time an SCEV crew returned to the fold. That Laird already knew the mission was a wash less than a day after SCEV Four’s return certainly indicated someone was chattering. Andrews took Laird by the elbow and led him several yards away from the two rigs.
“We found jack shit,” Andrews said, turning back to watch the two SCEVs, one being torn down after a mission, the other being readied to jump into the field. “We found a couple of strongholds, but they’d been abandoned years ago. Even the best prepared survivalist couldn’t hold out for a decade.”
> “You find bodies at those sites?”
Andrews nodded. “At some, yeah.”
“But not at all of them?”
“We only found three, Jim. Two were full of bodies, the last one was empty … but it had been occupied. Plenty of signs of habitation. They must’ve taken off for greener pastures, but no idea where they went. Or if they survived.”
Laird was silent for a moment. “Well, maybe they made it. Maybe they headed northwest.”
Andrews shrugged. “No evidence to show that, but yeah, maybe they did. The only way to crack that nut is to actually go there. I brought it up to Benchley again yesterday, but it doesn’t seem like he’s going to go for it. At least, not yet.”
“Keep at it, man. You’re the guy with the inside—”
The floor lurched beneath their feet, and Andrews staggered slightly. Laird reached out and grabbed his arm, but whether to steady Andrews or himself, he didn’t know. Overhead, the chamber’s ceiling creaked ominously, and SCEV Four’s MEP swung from the crane like a pendulum. Andrews stumbled again as another jolt ran through the bay; the emergency lights flickered on and off, even though the main lights remained steady. Spencer started yelling at the crane operator, shouting for him to drop the MEP back on the SCEV. The technicians holding the MEP’s guidelines looked amongst themselves as the base seemed to sway beneath their feet, the movements growing more forceful by the second.
What the fuck is going on?
“It’s an earthquake,” Laird said, as if reading his mind. “Oh, man, we’re going through an earthquake in Kansas!”
Andrews looked around the prep area, listening to the creaks and groans of stressed superstructure that only grew louder. The vehicle elevator doors warped and flexed in their frame; a moment later, the frame itself seemed to undulate, twisting right to left amid the cacophonous rending of metal.
Oh, man …
***
The Core exploded into chaos. Alarms blared as the base rocked on its shock-absorbing system, a series of gigantic fluid-filled cylinders designed to aid the base in surviving a near-miss from a nuclear ground strike. The absorption system was very much on Jeremy Andrews’s mind as he slogged to his workstation. Could they survive an actual earthquake, one that continued on for more than just a handful of seconds? He suspected he was about to find out.
Earthfall Page 4
