World of Hurt

by George S. Mahaffey Jr.

  “Which means?” Jezzy asked.

  “That you people have four hours to prepare for the link-up.”

  “Link-up with what?” Sato asked.

  Fincher smiled. “The other mech team.”

  * * *

  Vidmark, Richter, Fincher, and a variety of lesser personnel brought us into a debriefing room in The Tomb (Dexter was conspicuously absent). The lights were lowered and holographic images appeared in the air, disparate views of the glacier, the surrounding tundra, sinkholes in the ice, glacial streams, you name it. The images flashed and rotated so that all of us could get a good look and over the next hour and a half, the three men ran most of the conversation, discussing the latest intelligence reports and the specifics of our next mission.

  Richter had a black laser pointer in hand, gesturing at various points to the holographic images. The quick and dirty was that we would parachute down onto the glacier (yippie, more parachuting!) and move east toward a colossal, frozen lake formed by the convergence of various meltwater streams.

  Based upon intel and information extracted from Carpe Kenyatta, it appeared that the aliens had a small outpost of some sort lodged in the ice. At or around the time we’d be moving toward the outpost, the other team comprised of the foreign mech operators would be moving in from the west. Both teams would attack simultaneously from opposite directions and then link-up thereafter to finish off the aliens, before being transported by the foreign operators to a new international forward operating base at the site of the old Thule Air Base.

  “No offense, but we prefer to operate on our own,” Simeon said.

  “I am max-attentive to your concerns, but you don’t have a choice,” Richter replied. “The orders have come down from on high.”

  “So who are these foreign operators anyway?” Billy asked.

  “Funny you should ask,” Richter said.

  Images popped up on one of the walls, photos of the four foreign operators, three men and one woman.

  Richter pointed to the first man, a granite-jawed bruiser in his early-thirties with a mop of unruly, black hair. “Mister Vadim is from the Russian Protectorate.”

  Dru’s nostrils flared. “C’mon, man, everyone knows that there are two things in life that can’t be trusted: men with ponytails and Russians.”

  “Dude looks like a ‘Bender’ anyway,” Simeon added, using resistance slang for mentally deficient fighters whose highest and best use was blowing up stuff (thereby using explosives to bend and break things, hence the nickname).

  Richter pointed at another image of Vadim standing between numerous destroyed alien gliders. “Bender or not, he single-handedly destroyed nine alien gliders during the Second Battle of Moscow. Bastard brought them down in the middle of Red Square with two hafnium launchers.”

  The photo changed to an Asian man in his mid-twenties with a shaved head. “Mister Wang Wei is from China.”

  “That sucker’s name is … Wang?” Dru asked, giggling.

  Richter nodded. “Laugh all you want, but he’s been certified as an ace. He has personally destroyed forty-eight enemy mechs.”

  “One less than me!” Dru shouted.

  Richter was not amused. The photo changed to a brunette woman in her twenties with spiked hair and a silver stud dangling from her lip. “The nineteen-nineties called,” Baila said. “They want their lip stud back.”

  “Be sure to tell her that in person, Baila,” Richter replied.

  “I will,” Baila said. “Just need her name.”

  “She goes by Charlene Strummer and she’s part of the U.K.’s talented and gifted mech program.”

  “What’s her report card look like?” Simeon asked.

  “Four-hundred and seventy-nine confirmed scud kills,” Richter answered.

  Simeon smirked. “Teacher’s pet.”

  The final photo showed a move-star handsome man with stubbled skin the color of buffed wood. Jezzy and Baila hooted at his photo. Richter held up a hand to silence them. “Mister Amir Hosseini is a Persian—”

  “Iranian,” Simeon said.

  “Iranian operator who—”

  “Doesn’t matter who he is or where he’s from,” Jezzy said, miming holding up a fan to fan herself. “Mister McSexy is on the team, no questions asked.”

  Richter grumbled and the photos vanished.

  “I got a question,” Billy said, raising a hand. “Is it me or are most of these other operators from countries that we don’t like? I mean, we got Russia, Iran, China, and I’m pretty sure England’s done something to piss us off.”

  “Yeah, starting with that whole not liking the American Revolution thing,” I said.

  Richter frowned. “Aliens make strange bedfellows.”

  “What the hell does that mean?” Billy asked.

  “It means the enemy of my enemy is my friend … at least for the time being.”

  Richter turned to Fincher who detailed the status of the repair work on the mechs. The machines had been completely refurbished. A color night-vision application had been added, the cockpit and exterior had been thoroughly coated in an alien-derived waterproofing compound (tanks holding six minutes of oxygen had also been installed in the cockpit), the batteries recharged, and modifications had been made to the engine and liquid systems (winterization modifications) to allow them to fight in the extreme, Arctic temperatures. “Our people are running some final systems checks and your fighting machines will be ready to rock and roll within the hour,” Fincher said.

  The images changed to an intricately detailed, 3-D schematic of the glacier. Using his laser pointer, Richter was able to guide us down under the glacier and through it so that we could see its strong and weak spots. Remarkably, most of the glacier resembled a wedge of Swiss cheese, with liquid blue glacial streams carving channels through the ice. We were able to review the weather conditions on the glacier, the ice thickness, the anticipated flow of the streams so that we could map out the fastest (and safest) route across the glacier. This was especially important given the weight of our mechs. As we could see from the 3-D images, there was only one viable path across the ice, and it was a tight one that would likely be vanishing because of melting ice.

  “What that means is that you’ve got a very narrow window within which to operate,” Richter said. “An atmospheric blocking pattern is moving over the target area, bringing higher temperatures, wind and probable precipitation.”

  “Ice?” Sato asked.

  Richter shook his head. “Blizzard conditions are anticipated four hours after your metal feet hit the ice at twenty-three hundred hours.”

  “Winter in the Arctic,” Billy said, shaking his head. “Gonna be darker than the Devil’s asshole at midnight.”

  “Polar darkness has unique properties,” Richter said. “I flew into Thule Air Base on a layover once. There’s so much white that it creates the perfect mirror for the moon and the northern lights. Might not be any sun, but there will be some light, at least for a while. Bottom line is you need to get in and get out before that blizzard hits. This is a straight-up shake and bake operation. Any questions?”

  “How many scuds can we expect?” Simeon asked.

  “Whatever they’ve got left,” Richter answered. “More than ten and less than a thousand. Enough to get their vessel up and running. Plus, as we know from the desert, they have a history of leaving things behind to guard their facilities.”

  I raised a hand. “What vessel are you talking about, sir?”

  “The assumption was originally that the aliens had buried an LDV in the ice near the outpost.”

  “What does ‘LDV’ mean?

  “Last Ditch Vehicle. Basically, the one machine they left behind to blast back up into the great beyond. The getaway car for lack of a better term.”

  “But our view of the situation has evolved,” Vidmark said stepping forward. “We’ve received some updated intelligence that appears to show that the aliens have a much larger purpose in heading to the glacier.”
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  “What’s that?” I asked.

  “It appears that they may have something else stored in the ice. Something besides the vehicle.”

  “What kind of something?” I asked.

  “A bomb,” Richter replied.

  A sour tasted filled my mouth. I flashed back to the errors in intel during our last mission in the desert (the failure to recognize the size of the alien’s vault) and those that generally had almost always occurred during wars in the past (here’s looking at you, weapons of mass destruction). “Are we sure about that?” I asked. “I mean, last time in the desert intel didn’t even know that they had a friggin’ city buried under the sand.”

  The other operators nodded.

  “The intel isn’t always perfect,” Vidmark said, some heat in his voice. “Occasionally you have to trust yourself and your comrades and take that first step into the darkness.”

  Sure, yeah, as long as that first step isn’t onto a bomb.

  “What kind of bomb is it?” Jezzy asked.

  Vidmark sighed ferociously. “One that may be powerful enough to alter the rotation axis of the Earth. As we all know, the scuds had technological capabilities that far surpassed our own, including seismic and tsunami munitions. I know it’s hard to swallow, but if the aliens are able to trigger whatever they’ve got hidden in the ice, it could be cataclysmic. It is likely that they would be able to bring about certain conditions, earthquakes and winds, thousands of miles per hour, that would sweep across the entirety of the planet. Anything that wasn’t anchored in bedrock would be ripped up and tossed into the air. The world would be cloaked in a swirling mass of debris for decades.”

  “So the bottom line is, we’re fucked if they detonate that bomb,” Billy said.

  Vidmark nodded. “If the aliens succeed on that glacier, they will likely be able to bring about the complete and total destruction of our planet.”

  24

  All of the operators were amped up and talking at once as we left the debriefing room, plodding down a tunnel-like corridor.

  “Does anyone else think we’re rushing things here?” I asked, wanting like anything to tell the operators about the flight-recorder and the huge mech I’d seen.

  Simeon shook his head. “Doesn’t matter. You heard the man. The fate of the world hangs in the balance.”

  “But we’re still bloody and bruised,” Jezzy said. She pointed to the splints on Billy’s and Baila’s fingers, then gestured to Dru. “How the hell can he even fight? He had a concussion.”

  Dru waved a hand. “I’m good now. I went through the protocol.”

  I held up three fingers. “How many?”

  “You can’t fool me, Danny,” Dru said. “You’re not holding any up.”

  Jezzy groaned and waved a hand in front of Dru’s face. “Look at him. Everyone knows that one of the symptoms of a concussion is a blank or vacant look.”

  “Nah, that’s just his usual look,” Billy said with a smile. “Besides, who wants to sit around anyway? It’s been what? Less than twenty-four hours since we last almost died?”

  “Time to go in with the dog tags and come out with the toe tags,” Dru said, trying to smack palms with his brother, but missing terribly.

  Footfalls echoed and we turned to see Richter who appeared to have overheard our discussion. “We all recognize that our operating conditions are suboptimal. In a perfect world you’d have plenty of time for R&R, but unfortunately, this ain’t a perfect world. We need everyone ready to roll in fifteen minutes. Do you copy that?”

  Everyone nodded and continued down the corridor, leaving me and Richter alone. “Can I ask you a question?”

  “Absolutely not,” Richter said.

  “Where did you get the new intelligence from?”

  “From the place where such things are gotten.”

  “You got the information from Kenyatta didn’t you?”

  Richter slowly nodded. “With his dying breaths, he revealed the truth to us.”

  “He – he’s dead?” I asked.

  “Affirmative. Fincher said he had a heart attack.”

  “Do you believe that?”

  “Doesn’t matter what I believe, Deus. It is what it is.”

  Richter moved past me and I called out: “What if there weren’t any hafnium batteries back at The Hermitage?”

  The big man stopped, mid-step, and looked back. The gold key, still dangling from that chain around his neck, flashed in the semi-darkness. His expression hardened, but he didn’t say anything. “Did you hear me?” I asked.

  “My ears work just fine,” Richter replied.

  “So what do you think, Jack?”

  “It’s ‘Mister Richter’ and what are you getting at, Danny?”

  “I’m still trying to figure out why the aliens attacked us.”

  “Why does the scorpion sting? ‘Cause that’s what it does. If you’re trying to discern motives in everything the aliens do, kid, you’re gonna drive yourself nuts. They’ve always done lots of shit that doesn’t necessarily make sense.”

  “There was a recorder on that glider that I helped bring down. A black box.”

  The same unreadable expression was plastered on Richter’s face, but behind the mask I discerned the faintest hint of surprise. I could tell this was news to him. “And how did you come to all this knowledge?”

  “A friend told me.”

  “What’s your friend’s name?”

  I remembered something Vidmark had said to me and smirked. “That’s on a strictly need to know basis, Mister Richter. And right now, you don’t need to know.”

  Richter snorted. “I don’t have time for games. I don’t have time to cluck my tongue about the reasons for things I can’t change. You’ve got exactly twelve minutes to get yourself hyped, you copy that?”

  I nodded and he spun around and struck off down the corridor.

  I waited for him to vanish from sight and then I pulled out my neural glasses and saw that Dexter had messaged several minutes earlier: “We need to talk.”

  “Where are u?” I replied.

  Nothing for several seconds, then a message with an embedded map. I took the map to be the location where Dexter was.

  “Can’t meet up now,” I added.

  “Why?”

  “We’re headed out. Aren’t u coming?”

  “Negative. Holding down the fort. Talk when get back. Good luck,” Dexter typed in reply.

  We’ll need it, I thought. I powered down my glasses and moved quickly down the corridor, realizing I had less than ten minutes before we headed out.

  * * *

  Grabbing my compression gear, I caught up with the others inside the room where the

  mechs were being readied for operations. I found that all of the clothing was tighter than I remember it being. My shirt nearly cut off my circulation and my leggings were coming up an inch or two more than they should be. Everything was washed you idiot, I thought to myself. Stuff shrinks when you wash it. This was all true of course, but then I turned and walked past Billy and I swear he’d been an inch or two taller just the day before. I was standing eye-to-eye with him. How the hell was that possible? Then I remembered the exchange with Jezzy back in the mech after we’d destroyed the alien’s desert vault. I remember peering down at the empty Lazarus syringe and asking “So what do you think’s in it?” and Jezzy replying, “Whatever it is, it’s in you now.”

  People shouted and I turned to see some of the facility’s personnel loading ammunition into the Spence mech’s rocket pods and cannons, while several technicians fine-tuned the machine’s suspension and engine.

  The rear doors to the room powered up as the same kind of oversized forklifts we’d seen back at Dulles, picked the mechs up and maneuvered them down a ramp that led to the outside world. We grabbed our gear and marched down the ramp which led to a tunnel that had been carved into the earth under the Capitol building.

  The tunnel curled up and around and soon we were moving outside and
across an immense apron of cement that appeared to have been recently refurbished. Aerial cranes were circling overhead in the late-afternoon light, the rotor wash kicking up dust spouts that twirled in the air.

  A young, bespectacled soldier with a strawberry birthmark on his right cheek motioned for us to duck and we did.

  “They’re coming in low, sir!” the young soldier shouted over the roar of the cranes.

  “Wouldn’t want to lose my head!” I shouted back and the young soldier smiled.

  “You two are operators aren’t you?”

  Me and Jezzy nodded and the young soldier shook our hands. “We’re all following what you’re doing,” the soldier said. “We’ve got mad respect for you guys laying your lives on the line for the rest of us.”

  “We’re not doing any more than what you’re doing,” I replied. “Without you, we wouldn’t be able to function.”

  The young soldier beamed and I covered my head and watched dozens of other military personnel scurrying in all directions, preparing the mechs to be lifted up.

  Straps and lifting apparatuses descended from the bellies of the aerial cranes as the military personnel secured and wrapped our machines. The coordination between the pilots in the cranes and the personnel on the ground was a sight to behold. In seconds, the personnel had finished lashing down our mighty fighting machines that were being lifted up into the air. I moved over next to Jezzy as the wind whipped our air.

  “Take a good look,” I said. “Might be the last time you see that.”

  “You planning on not coming back from the mission?”

  “No, I’m planning on it being our last mission. Once we take down Alpha Timbo and the rest of the scuds, it’ll all be over.”

  “Awesome. Then you and Baila can get that little white house in the suburbs with the white picket fence that you’ve always wanted.”

  “Shut up, Jezzy.”

  “Not like I care, but why her? Why Baila?” Jezzy asked.

  “I was drunk.”